About Flickers & Tintypes

Flickers & Tintypes takes moving pictures apart one still at a time. A film strip holds only still images, a comics page holds only fixed panels, and a zoetrope band holds only drawings in a row. This site looks at those stills one by one and asks how they were arranged to tell a story or to seem to move.

What the site covers

The name joins two old words. Flickers stands for early films and their flickering projected picture. A tintype is a nineteenth-century photograph made on a thin, darkened iron plate. Comics are not named in the title, yet they belong here too: the newspaper page faced some of the same storytelling problems as the screen and solved them with ink instead of light.

The pages fall into four sections.

• Early Cinema follows how silent-era pictures learned to carry a story: cuts, framing, title cards, tricks and color. Where a reliable copy of a film survives, the page walks through it frame by frame. Where none does, the page works from the maker's own catalog, original drawings and trade papers of the time, and says so.
• Comics Panels reads early newspaper comics on public-domain original art: how time passes from one panel to the next, how a page steers the eye, what a speech balloon is for.
• Animation Loops shows animation principles as short seamless loops whose frame counts and spacing are published, next to the optical toys and sequence photographs that were loops from the start.
• Photo Objects treats old photographs as things: stereo cards, hand-colored portraits, postcards that went through the mail, tintypes. Each is read front and back.

The pages are written for film fans who want to see how a silent picture tells its story, for comics readers who wonder why a page reads the way it does, and for family historians holding a stereo card, a tinted portrait or a postcard with writing on the back. Teachers and encyclopedia contributors who need a diagram they can cite and reuse are welcome too; the terms are on Reuse and credits.

Some things are left out on purpose. No page puts a price on a photograph, says whether to buy or sell one, or reviews cameras, scanners or restoration services. No page points to unofficial copies of films; each article ends by linking a copy that can be watched or viewed lawfully. No page shows frames or panels from films and comics still under copyright, and no page treats a film nobody can see as if its contents were known.

What the site holds to

The working idea is simple to state. Motion was never on the strip: the strip carries stills, and the movement comes from the projector, the page and the eye working together. That is a way of looking at pictures, not a finding of vision science; where a page discusses how the eye actually works, it cites named research.

Four positions follow from it, and they come back across the site.

"The first film to…" is a sentence the surviving record rarely supports. The surviving record supports date ranges and parallel inventions far more often than a single title and a single year, and it has gaps where films and papers were lost. Pages give date ranges, set rival claims side by side, and say how strong each piece of evidence is.

A short loop is an honest way to show an animation principle. A two-to-four-second loop plays again and again, so a spacing mistake or a jump at the seam shows on every pass. Not every principle suits a loop, though. Principles about how a drawing is made are shown as working steps, and principles about composition are shown as still comparisons.

The back of an old photograph often says more than the front. A studio stamp, a printed card back or a handwritten note can narrow a date, but each clue dates only itself: a printed back dates the card stock, and a handwritten date is the writer's own date for the note. Clues are checked against the collection record and against each other before they narrow anything.

Machine colorization and frame interpolation rewrite a copy; they do not restore it. Kodak's 1918 handbook on tinting and toning said that coloring film this way was “becoming more common,” so color on an old film is not damage. Whether the color on a particular copy is the historical color is a separate question, and until a collection record or a study of the versions settles it, a page speaks only of the color in this copy.

Three words used here

A few working terms recur, each defined in full on the page where it first appears.

• Verso evidence is the set of stamps, printed backs and notes on the back of a photograph, each tagged with what it can actually date.
• The splice scar is a physical join in a film copy, from editing, repair or added titles; it counts as an original editing choice only when version comparison or records support that reading.
• The held frame is the frame in a loop that deliberately does not move, because a motion often reads through the time it stays still.

How claims are checked

Every frame shown here comes from one named copy of a film and carries a timecode for that copy, along with where the copy came from and what is known about how it was transferred. Nothing seen in one copy is claimed for the film as a whole. Every loop comes with the frame count, frame rate and spacing it was built from, so the arithmetic can be redone. Every collection image links back to the institution's own record, and its license is checked one file at a time. Dates, survival claims, attributions and quotations all carry a source, and when two good sources disagree, both are shown. The full method, including the order in which sources are trusted, is on Held to the light.

Colors and pictures

The site's main color is a deep blue-violet and its accent an amber, chosen to recall the strong tints of silent release prints. Kodak's 1918 handbook on tinting kept strong tints for special cases such as fire scenes, sunset and moonlight effects. The page background is the warm off-white of photographic paper; in dark mode it becomes the dim violet-black of a theater after the lights go down.

Most pictures on the site are historical: frames from identified copies, original comics art, and photographs from museum and library collections, each with its own credit and license. Diagrams, filmstrip breakdowns and loops are made for this site from published numbers. The few illustrations are marked Illustration; they are not photographs, film frames or historical records, and they never stand in for one.

If something is wrong

Write to contact@flickersandtintypes.com with the page, the frame, timecode, panel or collection number in question, and the source that disagrees. There is no form. Corrections are dated on Corrections, and the corrected page carries a matching note at its foot. Other ways to get in touch are on Contact.

Every page is published under the name Flickers & Tintypes.