The Public Domain Review

“An osculatory performance by May Irwin and John Rice”…. Scene from the New York stage comedy, The Widow Jones, in which Irwin and Rice starred. According to Edison film historian C. Musser, the actors staged their kiss for the camera at the request of the New York world newspaper, and the resulting film was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896. The first ever kiss to be caught on film.

Download from Internet Archive

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CLIPS	SHORT	FULL LENGTH SILENT	FULL LENGTH TALKIE
Princess Nicotine (1909) 6min	Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) 12min	Last of the Mohicans (1920) 1hr11min	Meet John Doe (1941) 2hr3min
The Unappreciated Joke (1903) 1min	Frankenstein (1910) 13min	The General (1926) 1hr19min	Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) 1hr19mins
The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) 21sec	The Great Train Robbery (1903) 10min	Wolf Blood (1925) 1hr7min	Reefer Madness (1938) 1hr8min
The Kiss (1896) 25 secs	Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940) 20min	Battleship Potemkin (1925) 1hr13min	The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) 1hr57min

A film documenting Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms, research which in the film appears to be successful. The experiments were conducted by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko in 1939 at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. The film includes an introduction by the renowned British scientist Professor J.B.S. Haldane. Read a Time Magazine account of the 1943 première shown to US scientists here.

Download from Internet Archive

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CLIPS	SHORT	FULL LENGTH SILENT	FULL LENGTH TALKIE
Princess Nicotine (1909) 6min	Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) 12min	Last of the Mohicans (1920) 1hr11min	Meet John Doe (1941) 2hr3min
The Unappreciated Joke (1903) 1min	Frankenstein (1910) 13min	The General (1926) 1hr19min	Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) 1hr19mins
The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) 21sec	The Great Train Robbery (1903) 10min	Wolf Blood (1925) 1hr7min	Reefer Madness (1938) 1hr8min
The Kiss (1896) 25 secs	Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940) 20min	Battleship Potemkin (1925) 1hr13min	The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) 1hr57min

Considered one of the most important films in the history of silent pictures, as well as possibly Eisenstein’s greatest work, Battleship Potemkin brought Eisenstein’s theories of cinema art to the world in a powerful showcase; his emphasis on montage, his stress of intellectual contact, and his treatment of the mass instead of the individual as the protagonist. The film tells the story of the mutiny on the Russian ship Prince Potemkin during the 1905 uprising.

Download from Internet Archive

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CLIPS	SHORT	FULL LENGTH SILENT	FULL LENGTH TALKIE
Princess Nicotine (1909) 6min	Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) 12min	Last of the Mohicans (1920) 1hr11min	Meet John Doe (1941) 2hr3min
The Unappreciated Joke (1903) 1min	Frankenstein (1910) 13min	The General (1926) 1hr19min	Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) 1hr19mins
The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) 21sec	The Great Train Robbery (1903) 10min	Wolf Blood (1925) 1hr7min	Reefer Madness (1938) 1hr8min
The Kiss (1896) 25 secs	Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940) 20min	Battleship Potemkin (1925) 1hr13min	The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) 1hr57min

From 1913, John Alfred Charlton Deas, a former curator at Sunderland Museum, organised several handling sessions for the blind, first offering an invitation to the children from the Sunderland Council Blind School, to handle a few of the collections. They were so successful that Deas went on to develop and arrange a course of regular handling sessions, extending the invitations to blind adults.
(Pictures courtesy of Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

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Operation Doorstep	The Spirit Photographs of William Hope	The Maps of Piri Reis	Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera
Art in Art	Huexotzinco Codex	Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum

The Huexotzinco Codex is an eight-sheet document on amatl, a pre- European paper made in Mesoamerica. It is part of the testimony in a legal case against representatives of the colonial government in Mexico, ten years after the Spanish conquest in 1521. Huexotzinco (Way-hoat-ZINC-o) is a town southeast of Mexico City, in the state of Puebla. In 1521, the Nahua Indian people of the town were the allies of the Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortés, and together they confronted their enemies to overcome Moctezuma, leader of the Aztec Empire. After the conquest, the Huexotzinco peoples became part of Cortés’estates. During 1529-1530 when Cortés was out of the country, Spanish colonial administrators intervened in the daily activities of the community and forced the Nahuas to pay excessive taxes in the form of goods and services. When Cortés returned, the Nahuas joined him in a legal case against the abuses of the Spanish administrators. The plaintiffs were successful in their suit in Mexico, and later when it was retried in Spain. The record shows [in a document uncovered in the collections of the Library of Congress] that in 1538, King Charles of Spain agreed with the judgement against the Spanish administrators and ruled that two-thirds of all tributes taken from the people of Huexotzinco be returned.
(excerpt and pictures from the Library of Congress)

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Operation Doorstep	The Spirit Photographs of William Hope	The Maps of Piri Reis	Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera
Art in Art	Huexotzinco Codex	Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772-78), by Johann Zoffany (1733-1810); Royal Collection, Windsor.
(annotated version here)



Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Gallery in Brussels (ca.1651), by David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.



Roman Ruins and Sculpture (ca.1755), by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1692–1765); Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.



Allegory of Sight and Smell (latter 16thC.), by Jan Brueghel (1568–1625); Prado Museum, Madrid



Art Room (1636), by Frans Francken II (1581–1642); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna



The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (1628), by Willem van Haecht (1593–1637); Rubenshuis, Antwerp

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Operation Doorstep	The Spirit Photographs of William Hope	The Maps of Piri Reis	Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera
Art in Art	Huexotzinco Codex	Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum

In 1903 Dr Julius Neubronner patented a miniature pigeon camera activated by a timing mechanism. The invention brought him international notability after he presented it at international expositions in Dresden, Frankfurt and Paris in 1909–1911. Spectators in Dresden could watch the arrival of the camera-equipped carrier pigeons, and the photos were immediately developed and turned into postcards which could be purchased.

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Operation Doorstep	The Spirit Photographs of William Hope	The Maps of Piri Reis	Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera
Art in Art	Huexotzinco Codex	Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum

Piri Reis was a 16th century Ottoman Admiral famous for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book which contains detailed information on navigation as well as extremely accurate charts describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1513 he produced his first world map, based on some 20 older maps and charts which he had collected, including charts personally designed by Christopher Columbus which his uncle Kemal Reis obtained in 1501 after capturing seven Spanish ships off the coast of Valencia in Spain with several of Columbus’ crewmen on board. See more here.


Alexandria


Ancona


Brindisi


Sardinia


Granada


Marseilles


Marmaris


Venice

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Operation Doorstep	The Spirit Photographs of William Hope	The Maps of Piri Reis	Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera
Art in Art	Huexotzinco Codex	Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum

These photographs of ‘spirits’ are taken from an album of photographs unearthed in a Lancashire second-hand and antiquarian bookshop by one of the Museum’s curators. They were taken by a controversial medium called William Hope (1863-1933). Born in 1863 in Crewe, Hope started his working life as a carpenter. In about 1905 he became interested in spirit photography after capturing the supposed image of a ghost while photographing a friend. He went on to found the Crewe Circle – a group of six spirit photographers led by Hope. When Archbishop Thomas Colley joined the group they began to publicise their work. Following World War I support for the Crewe Circle grew as the grieving relatives of those lost to the war sought a means of contacting their loved ones. By 1922 Hope had moved to London where he became a professional medium. The work of the Crew Circle was investigated on various occasions. The most famous of these took place in 1922, when the Society for Psychical Research sent Harry Price to investigate the group. Price collected evidence that Hope was substituting glass plates bearing ghostly images in order to produce his spirit photographs. Later the same year Price published his findings, exposing Hope as a fraudster. However, many of Hope’s most ardent supporters spoke out on his behalf, the most famous being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Hope continued to practice, despite his exposure. He died in London on 7 March 1933.

(Text and photos from the National Media Museum entry at Flickr)

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Operation Doorstep	The Spirit Photographs of William Hope	The Maps of Piri Reis	Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera
Art in Art	Huexotzinco Codex	Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum

Operation Doorstep was a Civil Defense test carried out in conjunction with the much larger March 17, 1953, 16-kiloton ANNIE test conducted at the Nevada Test Site, part of Operation Upshot-Knothole. In the smaller Operation Doorstep test, blast and thermal effects were evaluated on mannequins, automobiles, and wooden frame houses.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)

(before)





(after)







(video)

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Operation Doorstep	The Spirit Photographs of William Hope	The Maps of Piri Reis	Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera
Art in Art	Huexotzinco Codex	Sessions for the Blind at Sunderland Museum