About ECFO

About the Project | Objectives | About Us | Publications


ABOUT THE PROJECT

Early Cinema Filmography of Ontario (ECFO) is an ongoing research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The project’s chief researchers are Marta Braun of Ryerson University and Charlie Keil of University of Toronto. ECFO provides data on all films made in Ontario between 1896 and 1930. As such, it functions as a parallel to the catalogue of early Quebec films compiled by the GRAFICS research group, headed by Professor André Gaudreault of Université de Montréal. Braun and Keil began their research on early Ontario cinema in 1995, with a SSHRC-funded project on the reception of early cinema in Toronto. The current filmography is an outgrowth and development of that initial research project.

Extensive examination of local Ontario newspapers, the American trade press, and international manufacturers’ catalogues is the source for the information contained in the ECFO database. Users can obtain information about films shot in Ontario during this time period by searching the Filmography.

• to provide for the first time a comprehensive listing of all films made in Ontario between 1896 and 1930;
  
• to provide supplementary information about the listed films, including descriptions of the films, creative personnel, shooting locations, etc.;
  
• to supply a context for the films, with information gleaned from exhaustive research in contemporary newspapers and catalogues

ABOUT US

Directors

Marta Braun (Co-Director), Ryerson University
Email: mbraun@ryerson.ca
Marta Braun’s research area is chronophotography and particularly the work of E.J.Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. In 1994, her book Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne Jules Marey, was short listed for Britain’s Kraszna-Krausz award, given bi-annually for the best internationally published book in photography. She went on to win this award in 1999, along with four other authors, for the collection of essays Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science. In 1996 Marta was made a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms by the Government of France in recognition of her contribution to the cause of French knowledge, culture, scientific progress and education. For the fall term of 2008-09, she has been made a fellow of the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie in Weimar Germany. In 2010, Marta's exhibition on Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and her book Eadward Muybridge was published.

Charlie Keil (Co-Director), University of Toronto
Email: charlie.keil@utoronto.ca
Charlie Keil is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His main area of research has been American cinema during the period of the single-reel film, what he has termed the ‘transitional era.’ He has published two books on this topic: Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001) and American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (University of California Press, 2004), co-edited with Shelley Stamp. Another collection, American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers University Press, 2009), an entry in the Screen Decades series co-edited with Ben Singer, extends that research into the later 1910s. Professor Keil has contributed to both the Griffith Project and the Women and Silent Film Project, and has also published on documentary, film and theatre, and contemporary cinema, among other subjects. His most recent project is an anthology of new essays on the topic of animation and humour in American studio-era filmmaking, co-edited with Daniel Goldmark, and forthcoming from University of California Press. He is currently engaged in researching the origins of Hollywood.


Collaborators

Paul S. Moore, Ryerson University
Email: psmoore@ryerson.ca

Paul Moore studies the history of the mass market and urban modernity in North America. Overall, his work argues that amusement and leisure help constitute modern publics by providing spaces, rhetorics and logics for collective gathering. His previous project, Now Playing: Early Movie going and the Regulation of Fun (SUNY 2008), was a social history of the first decade of movie-going in Toronto and the mid-west USA, tracing how the novelty of film became a mass practice through showmanship, regulation, and promotion. A new project, collaborating with Sandra Gabriele, examines the development of the weekend newspaper in the 1890s as a cultural technology animating modernity, central to the institutionalization of mass society. He is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Communication and Culture at Ryerson University.


Staff/Personnel

Director
Mark Jewusiak

Project Manager
Roxanne Chee

Project Manager
Mark Jewusiak

Senior Project Research Assistants
Jennifer Campbell


With special thanks to SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) for supporting this project, as well as the researchers and staff at GRAFICS (Groupe de recherche sur l'avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique) especially André Gaudreault, Louis Pelletier and Pierre Véronneau.