William Friese-Greene

08/10/2025

At this moment I am in Pordenone, Italy, for a couple of days of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, where the book I co-authored was being presented to its film geeky target audience for the first time. It was a lovely moment and led to many interesting conversations. If you're really interested, the live stream is here and I'm about 22 minutes in.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1219652966597504&id=1219652966597504

24/07/2025

Published today! Finding Birt Acres by Deac Rossell, Barry Anthony and Peter Domankiewicz 📽️

In this book, for the first time, we see a detailed and compelling portrait of Birt Acres, with substantial new research on his early work in moving pictures. Written by three specialists in early film history, this volume significantly revises the received story of Birt Acres, at the same time casting new light on the beginnings of cinema in Britain.

📖 Learn more and order your copy ➡️ https://loom.ly/7kFMyQw

25/04/2025

It's a "pinch me" moment. "Finding Birt Acres" is my collaboration with two veteran film historians (whose work I study for my PhD research!) about the first commercial filmmaker in Britain. What began as a transglobal lockdown email conversation with Deac Rossell and Barry Anthony is now a physical reality. All three of us feel very proud of what we've achieved. Our unconventional approach to collaboration and presentation has really paid dividends with a huge amount of new discoveries.
Details of how to purchase and a 30% discount below.

18/02/2025

The latest edition of Early Popular Visual Culture has been published, with film pioneer William Friese-Greene on the cover and my article about him inside! The article has clocked up 681 reads at the time of writing, which is wonderful. You can find it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17460654.2024.2428487

27/11/2024

I am beyond relieved and beyond delighted that after a five-year gestation period and many delays, this article is finally published. Along the way, I was bitten by the idea to undertake a PhD and am now in my final year, so it has undergone considerable evolution, but the core remains the same. Over the last century both the promoters and detractors of the moving picture pioneer William Friese-Greene have considered that inadequate research and twisting evidence to fit personal opinions was the way to go, so my aim was -and is- to start afresh, dig deeper and see where that leads me. I am genuinely interested to hear what people think.
Huge thanks to De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) for funding this article to be Open Access and to my supervisors for all their support and input.
(The edition it will appear in will have Friese-Greene on the cover, apparently, but that's still a way down the road...)

In the writing of histories of the beginnings of moving pictures, little attention has been paid to how the social status and personalities of key figures have influenced the received accounts of w...

11/07/2024

I was just interviewed for a podcast about (allegedly) my 5 best films of the 1800s – that is to say, the first few years of cinema. I chose five items as springboards to do some myth-busting and pull focus onto items that, despite being partially or entirely lost, may be just as important as the films that have survived, and sometimes more so. If you make it to the 50-minute mark you’ll get an exclusive on a truly extraordinary Friese-Greene discovery I made whilst in Paris recently.
Here it is – you don’t need an Apple or Spotify account to listen. Links to most things discussed are on the page with the episode.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7sNomnAlnVuHwP6EtALhIw?si=0d7ffc0186a84ab3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-1800s-e6-peter-domankiewicz/id1750539873?i=1000661748061

If you would like to submit your own top 5 of the 1800s, click here: https://www.the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list
https://www.the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever features experts and enthusiasts and, well, their favorite films of every year ever. Host Tristan Ettleman sits down with a new guest every week to dive into the history and beauty of some of the best movies to ever come out of the cinematic medium. ListenSpotifyA...

02/10/2023

Earlier this year, I spent several months at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, surveying their Early Cinema Collection as part of an AHRC-funded fellowship. I was invited to give a colloquium about some of the discoveries I had made, which can now be viewed online. In it, I focus on some of the alternative ideas that were in the air around the creation of moving pictures, including many examples never previously seen publicly. It's presented very much as as 'live' work in progress - indeed at one point I posit a theory, then later prove it wrong. I'm happy to say that we may now know what that mysterious and extremely rare film is.

In this work-in-progress talk I discuss some of the discoveries made whilst surveying the Smithsonian's Early Cinema Collection, considering what they tell u...

08/09/2023

It has been very sad to learn of the death of Stephen Herbert this week. There cannot be many people with a strong interest in early cinema, pre-cinema or magic lanterns who have not benefitted from his broad knowledge, unique insights and, above all, wealth of hands-on experience with a huge variety of visual media.
One photograph here shows him operating a replica of the original Zoopraxiscope of Eadweard Muybridge in May 2019, which he had lovingly restored for Kingston Museum. I was there that night to provide a little moral and practical support, as the next morning he was due in hospital for a series of tests which he knew were likely to bring bad news. They did. Nonetheless, he resolutely defied the predictions of the medics again and again and lived to be prodigiously productive for another four years.
I shall miss him both professionally and personally.

- Peter Domankiewicz