Brian R. Jacobson

Books

• The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and their Forms (Columbia University Press, Film & Culture Series, 2025)
• Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (New York: Columbia University Press, Film & Culture Series, 2015)
• Art in an Age of Oil (manuscript in preparation)

Edited Books and Special Journal Issues

• "Media Climates," Representations 157 (Winter 2022) (co-edited with Weihong Bao and James Leo Cahill)
• In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020)

Articles

• "Electric Light: Medium, Materiality, Conservation" (w/ Maggie Bell), Leonardo 59, no. 3 (June 2026), 221-225.
• "Le cinéma électrique et l'industrie de la nature-culture à Hollywood," 1895 : Revue de l'association française de recherche sur l'histoire du cinéma 108 (forthcoming, 2026)
• "Evil Does Not Exist: Downstream Environmental Form," Film Quarterly 78, no. 2 (Winter 2024), 18-23.
• "French Cinema vs. The Bomb: Atomic Science and a War of Images circa 1950," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 42 (2), 191-218 (2022)
• "Media Climates, an Introduction" (w/ James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao), Representations 157 (Winter 2022), 1-16.
• "Crude Designs for an Oil-Built World," Post45 (5 March 2021)
• "The Shadow of Progress and the Cultural Markers of the Anthropocene," Environmental History 24, no. 1 (January 2019), 158-172.
• "Fire and Failure: Studio Technology, Environmental Control, and the Politics of Progress," Cinema Journal 57.2 (Winter 2018), 22-43.
• "Toward a History of French Ecocinema: Nature in Dimitri Kirsanoff's Modernity," Framework 58, no. 1-2 (Spring/Fall 2017), 52-66.
• "Midcentury Rural Modern: French Agricultural Cinema and the Art of Persuasion," Screen 58(2) (Summer 2017), 141-162.
• "Ex Machina in the Garden," Film Quarterly 69, no. 4 (Summer 2016), 23-34.
• "Infrastructural Affinity: Film Technology and the Built Environment in New York circa 1900," Framework 57, No. 1 (Spring 2016), 7-31.
• "Fantastic Functionality: Studio Architecture and the Visual Rhetoric of Early Hollywood," Film
• History 26, no. 2 (2014), 52-81.
• "Infrastructure and Intermediality: Network Archaeology at Gaumont's Cité Elgé," Amodern: A Journal on Media, Culture, and Poetics 2 (2013)
• "The Black Maria: Film Studio, Film Technology (Cinema and the History of Technology)," History and
• Technology 27.2 (2011), 233-241.
• "The ‘imponderable fluidity' of modernity: Georges Méliès and the architectural origins of cinema,"
• Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (May 2010), 189-207.

Book Chapters

• "‘Dickson Greeting,' Edison Test Film (1891)," in Companion to Silent Cinema, eds. Liz Clarke and Martin Johnson (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming)
• "Filming Atomic Energy in 1950s France," Routledge Handbook of Energy Humanities, eds. Janet Stewart and Graeme MacDonald (Routledge, forthcoming, 2026)
• "On the Red Carpet in Rouen: Industrial Film Festivals and a World Community of Filmmakers," in Films that Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Cinema, eds. Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, and Yvonne Zimmerman (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), 317-338.
• "Corporate Authorship: French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry," in A Companion to Documentary Film History, ed. Joshua Malitsky (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), 147-164.
• "Industrial Film and the Politics of Visibility in the Early Years of North Sea Oil," in Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry, eds. Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau (London: Bloomsbury, 2021)
• "Prospecting: Cinema and the Exploration of Extraction," in Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, eds. James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati (London: AFI/Routledge, 2021), 280-294.
• "The Boss's Film: Expert Amateurs and Industrial Culture," in Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960, eds. Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 198-218.
• "Found Memories of Film History: Industry in a Post-Industrial World; Cinema in a Post-Filmic Age," in New Silent Cinema, eds. Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo (New York: AFI/Routledge, 2015), 243-262.

Catalog Essays

• "Petro/Cinema," in Black Gold Museum (Skira, 2026)
• "Golden Event Science in the Golden Age of Television," in Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920-2020, eds. Peter S. Collopy and Claudia Bohn-Spector (Caltech/Getty PST, 2024)
• "Every World in One: Georges Méliès and the Film Studio," in City of Cinema, eds. Britt Salveson, Leah Lehmbeck, Vanessa R. Schwartz (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022), 154-167.
• "Le studio : toute l'image du monde," in Enfin le Cinéma! Exposition au Musée d'Orsay, eds. Dominique Paini, Paul Perrin, and Marie Robert (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2021), 262-267.

Book and Film Reviews

• "Bifocal Historicity" [on Dearest Fiona (Fiona Tan, 2023)], Berlinale Forum (Berlin International Film Festival, 2023)
• "Lousy Listing: On Sight & Sound and Taste," Los Angeles Review of Books (December 2022)
• Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media. Noam M. Elcott. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59.1 (Fall 2019), 171-178.
• "Hollywood in Flames," Los Angeles Review of Books (June 2019)
• "Workers of the World Cup," Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2018)
• "The Oil Stays in the Picture: The tar sands, and a war of images," Literary Review of Canada vol 26, no. 5 (June 2018)
• "How the Oil Barrel Became an Economic Concept: An Object Lesson," The Atlantic (September 2017)
• "Big Oil's High-Risk Love Affair with Film," Los Angeles Review of Books (April 2017)
• The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age. André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion. Columbia University Press, 2015. Screen 57:4 (Winter 2016), 506-509.
• Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies. Ariel Rogers. Columbia University Press, 2013. Technology and Culture 56, no. 2 (April 2015), 558-560.
• The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. Nadia Bozak. Rutgers University Press,
• 2011. Technology and Culture 54, no. 2 (April 2013), 424-426.
• Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color. Richard Misek. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Technology and
• Culture 53, no. 3 (July 2012), 715-717.
• "Film Analysis After Film," Review of Framed Time: Towards a Postfilmic Cinema. Garrett Stewart.
• University of Chicago Press, 2007. Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and
• Culture 32.2 (2010).