Product Description: This absorbing study of early 20th Century American Culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags expressing the unconscious wishes and fears of the modern age, in a way that foreshadows the concerns of our own celebrity-obsessed consumer culture...read more

Product Description: This exploration of fashion in American silent film offers fresh perspectives on the era preceding the studio system, and the evolution of Hollywood's distinctive brand of glamour. By the 1910s, the moving image was an integral part of everyday life and communicated fascinating, but as yet un-investigated, ideas and ideals about fashionable dress...read more

Product Description: Eighty good-sized biographies of significant silent-era players hard to find in other reference works, and almost nowhere at this length: The villains and sidekicks of two-reelers (Jim Corey, Nelson McDowell), cowboy action stars (Jack Hoxie, Art Acord, Hoot Gibson, et al...read more

The silent film era is brought to life in this collection of interviews with 23 stars of the silent era: Lew Ayres, Madge Bellamy, Junior Coghlan, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Dorothy Gulliver, Maxine Elliott Hicks and 17 others.

Product Description: Marion Shilling began her career as a silent film ingenue for MGM and went on to play heroines in Westerns of the 1930s. Stage actress Esther Muir made the transition from Broadway to Hollywood just as talkies became popular. Hugh Allan was a leading man in the last years of the silents only to leave the film business in 1930 because of the uncertainty surrounding his transition to sound films and his disgust with studio politics...read more

Product Description: In 1927, The Jazz Singer heralded a revolution in the moviemaking industry with the advent of synchronized sound in full-length motion pictures. While movie studios adapted their production facilities to accommodate the new technology and movie theatres converted to sound, filmmakers continued to produce silents, albeit in dwindling numbers...read more

Product Description: This work identifies 436 American silent films released between 1909 and 1929 that engaged the issues of militant labor and revolutionary radicalism. It begins with an extended introduction and analytical chapters that investigate the ways in which the American motion picture industry portrayed the interrelationships between labor radicals, exploitative capitalists, socialist idealists and Bolsheviks during this critical twenty-year period...read more

Product Description: The captivating lives and groundbreaking accomplishments of fourteen men who dared to gamble their reputations by appearing in the first motion pictures are explored in a richly researched new book, The First Male Stars: Men of the Silent Era...read more

Product Description: The silent cinema was America's first modern entertainment industry, a complex social, cultural, and technological phenomenon that swept the country in the early years of the twentieth century. Richard Koszarski examines the underlying structures that made the silent-movie era work, from the operations of eastern bankers to the problems of neighborhood theater musicians...read more

Product Description: Ernst Lubitsch, the German filmmaker who left Berlin for Hollywood in the 1920s, is best remembered today for the famous "Lubitsch touch" in such masterpieces as Ninotchka, which featured Greta Garbo's first-ever screen smile, and Heaven Can Wait...read more

'This book examines the relationship between the established operatic stars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the newly developing motion picture industry. It concentrates primarily on developments between 1895 and 1926, from the invention ofthe commercially exploitable motion picture to the coming of viable sound on film'--Provided by publisher.

(view table of contents)

Traces the history of western films from their silent-picture origins in the 1890s to the talking pictures of the 1920s, citing the impact of western film on the overall development of the movie industry while exploring the productions of such companies as Selig Polyscope, New York Motion Picture, and Essanay. (Performing Arts)

Product Description: Arguing for a sweeping new consideration of the shift from print to cinema as a governing system for organizing modern American social relations, this book uncovers an intimate connection between Hollywood romances of the silent era and the empowerment of a managerial class...read more

Product Description: In early-twentieth-century motion picture houses, offensive stereotypes of African Americans were as predictable as they were prevalent. Watermelon eating, chicken thievery, savages with uncontrollable appetites, Sambo and Zip Coon were all representations associated with African American people...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Gregg Bachman and Thomas J. Slater present an array of essays that reveal the incredible complexity of silent films and the era in which they were produced. Essentially, silent films conjure the names of Mary Pickford and a few white men, including Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. These eleven essays, however, demonstrate that minorities and women other than Pickford also responded to the times through film. The contributors deal with changing American society at a crucial time, examining our hopes and fears as a nation during the silent film era. Opening new vistas, this book introduces us to people, films, issues, and concepts that few of us have encountered. One example is screenwriter June Mathis, who wrote more than one hundred scripts, brought Rudolph Valentino to stardom, and supervised all productions at the Goldwyn Studios in 1923. Equally intriguing is Nita Naldi, whose career and tragic life speak volumes about America’s combined fascination with and fear of ethnic minorities. Other key players in the drama of silent films include John Randolph Bray (animated cartoons), Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and female producer, writer, and director Nell Shipman. Contributors are Kay Armatage, Jean Chateauvert, Maureen Furniss, Mark Langer, Anne Morey, Diane Negra, George Potamianos, Joanna Rapf, Thomas J. Slater, Sam Stoloff, and Judith Thissen.  Seventeen illustrations enliven this study of silent film. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This greatly expanded (over 18,500 entries versus 9,000 in the earlier edition) and updated edition includes everyone from John Aasen, an 8-foot, 9-inch circus star who appeared in silent film comedies, to Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, who invented the iconoscope and kinescope that together constituted the first all-electronic television system...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth is a broad cultural study that connects the rise of film to the rise of America as a cultural center and world power in the twentieth century. Cohen argues that through the medium of silent film, America was able to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe, assert its cultural independence, and forge a unique form of cultural expression...read more