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Journal articles on the topic 'Silent film'
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Peng, Alicia Inge. "Social Changes in America: The Silent Cinema Frontier and Women Pioneers." Humanities 13, no. 1 (2023): 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h13010003.
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Silent cinema acted as a bridge between early motion pictures and today’s film industry, playing a transformative role in shaping feminist film history and American society. This article explores pioneering American women in the silent film industry who ventured into technology, film culture, marginalized communities, and social movements. Despite the prevalence of racist and sexist propaganda, American silent films were a frontier for innovation, filmmaking, and exploring the New Women concept. This study examines 23 American silent films that have often been overlooked and rarely studied, whereby film analysis generally aligns with established feminist silent film theories. By shedding light on a previously overlooked film directed by May Tully, this study challenges the widespread belief that there existed “no women directors in 1925”. The examination of databases reaffirms American women directors’ contributions to silent films, especially during the early years of the silent film era. The results modify the previous scholarly notion that “influential women directors’ involvement was over by 1925”. Following an initial surge in their active leadership during the early years, influential women directors’ participation was over after 1922, rather than 1925.
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Bellano, Marco. "Silent Strategies: Audiovisual Functions of the Music for Silent Cinema." Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung 9 (July 8, 2023): 46–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.59056/kbzf.2012.9.p46-76.
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Studies on film music have often overlooked the difference between the audiovisual strategies of sound cinema and the ones of silent cinema. However, there are at least two audiovisual strategies which are peculiar to silent cinema: a ›bridge‹ function born from the improvisational nature of silent film music practice, and a ›interdiegetic‹ function, which takes advantage of the impossibility to hear the sounds of the world seemingly positioned beyond the silver screen. This paper comments upon these two strategies. A succinct review of the literature that already acknowledged the existence of these strategies, mostly in an indirect way (from Ricciotto Canudo to Sebastiano Arturo Luciani, Edith Lang and George West) leads to the discussion of examples from historical musical illustrations of silents (e.g. one by Hugo Riesenfeld for Cecil B. DeMille’s CARMEN, USA 1915) as well as from contemporary ones (e. g. Neil Brand’s 2004 music for THE CAT AND THE CANARY, USA 1927, Paul Leni). The change in reception conditions of silent films between the early 20th century and the present days is certainly relevant; however, this paper does not aim to offer an insight into cultural-historical context and reception, but to point out how the silent film language invited composers in different periods to develop a set of audiovisual strategies that are identical on a theoretical level.
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Tieber, Claus, and Anna K. Windisch. "Musical moments and numbers in Austrian silent cinema." Soundtrack 12, no. 1 (2020): 7–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ts_00009_1.
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Although the film musical as a genre came into its own with the sound film technologies of the late 1920s and early 1930s, several characteristic features did not originate solely with the sound film. The ‘musical number’ as the epitome of the genre, can already be found in different forms and shapes in silent films. This article looks at two Austrian silent films, Sonnige Träume (1921) and Seine Hoheit, der Eintänzer (1926), as case studies for how music is represented without a fixed sound source, highlighting the differences and similarities of musical numbers in silent and sound films. The chosen films are analysed in the contexts of their historical exhibition and accompaniment practices, Austria’s film industry as well as the country’s cultural-political situation after the end of the monarchy. These two examples demonstrate that several characteristics of the film musical are based on the creative endeavours made by filmmakers during the silent era, who struggled, failed and succeeded in ‘visualizing’ music and musical performances in the so-called ‘silent’ films. In reconstructing their problems and analysing their solutions, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of musical numbers during the silent era and on a more general level.
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Nugroho, Agustinus Dwi. "The Artist: Silent Technique in Film Form." International Journal of Creative and Arts Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.24821/ijcas.v3i1.1831.
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The Artist is a film that uses the silent era techniques to visualize the film. This study sought to uncover what the motivation behind the use of techniques to the silent era films with his observation of the text of both aspects of the narrative as well as aspects of the technique. The findings of the observation process could be the basis of analysis. The Artist makes this silent era technology into a cinematic technique to visualize the film. This has become a strong motivation and able to demonstrate the strength of the story as a whole that tells about the silent era transition process from the perspective of the player. The silent era techniques were used to make this technique as a force in the film. This study focuses on how the technique of the silent era emerged as a new technique in the world of film and brings new perspective in film studies. This new technique emerged because it was never used fully in the present.
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Brown, Geoff. "‘Dead as the wooden battleship’: The Fate of Silent British Features in the Transition to Sound." Journal of British Cinema and Television 17, no. 2 (2020): 151–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2020.0517.
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Dead as the wooden battleship, dead as the magic lantern: such were the similes used in 1929 by some in the British film industry to describe the fate of silent cinema in the new talkie era. Other voices predicted a lingering half-life. Either way, most film companies faced a common problem: what to do in 1929 with their stock of silent films which were completed but unreleased. Foregrounding the activities of British International Pictures, Gainsborough Pictures and the distributors Equity British, this article explores the aesthetic, practical and technical problems in exhibiting and sonically titivating silent product as the industry adjusted to sound technology. Topics include the problems generated by the Cinematograph Films Act 1927; the damage caused by awkwardly dubbed voices; the perils of management divisions; the re-release of older silent films; audience and critical dissatisfaction; and the output of young film-makers such as John F. Argyle, who made his last silent feature, The Final Reckoning, in September 1931. British silent cinema's death, it turns out, was neither quick nor painless.
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DeCesare, Julie A. "Silent Film Online." Charleston Advisor 15, no. 4 (2014): 39–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.5260/chara.15.4.39.
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Haina, Jin. "Intertitle translation of Chinese silent films." APTIF 9 - Reality vs. Illusion 66, no. 4-5 (2020): 719–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/babel.00183.jin.
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Abstract There is a misconception that film translation did not exist in China before 1949. The paper argues that the translation of Chinese silent films was vibrant in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Most of the extant copies of Chinese films from that period have bilingual intertitles. Chinese film companies have two purposes in translating their productions: the potential profit obtained from international audiences, and the desire to change the negative image of Chinese people portrayed in Hollywood films and project a positive image of China. Driven by these two objectives, Chinese film companies placed considerable emphasis on translation quality and hired both Chinese translators and foreign translators to translate their productions.
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Plewa, Elżbieta. "Polskie tłumaczenie napisowe w 1930 roku." Między Oryginałem a Przekładem 25, no. 44 (2019): 59–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.12797/moap.25.2019.44.03.
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Polish Subtitling in 1930
 Film subtitle translation, contrary to frequently quoted opinions, did not start with the introduction of sound in films, which occurred in Poland in the 1929/30 cinema season. Prior to that, in the silent cinema period, captions were a tried and tested way of delivering content to the viewer. And these silent movie captions were translated. Copies of various foreign films with Polish subtitles have even been preserved instead of the ones with the original wording. Imitating subtitles for silent films, another form of film translation began to appear in films with sound and dialogue. These were the so-called intertitles. The next way of presenting foreign content was a subtitle, which began modern film subtitling. This article concerns film subtitle translation typical of films in Poland in 1930. It endeavours to show the development of Polish film subtitle translation in its initial phase. The article contains previously unpublished pictures of film subtitles from the discussed period, which come from original archival research.
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STANCIU, CRISTINA. "Making Americans: Spectacular Nationalism, Americanization, and Silent Film." Journal of American Studies 56, no. 1 (2022): 1–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875821000542.
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Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the 1910s and 1920s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels. Specifically, it argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns. Joining the recent work of film and immigration historians, it argues that just as Americanization did not produce compliant citizens overnight, silent film as a new and powerful medium of persuasion could influence the new American viewers’ transformation only in part. Of particular interest is the use of film in industrial and educational contexts – which sometimes overlapped – purporting to both “educate” and Americanize the new immigrants to the US. It asks, what cultural work did silent film do for Americanization, the active and sometimes coercive campaign aiming to make new immigrants into good Americans? The films I read as case studies later in this essay – industrial, educational, and nontheatrical films such as An American in the Making (1913), The Making of an American (1920), and others – illustrate the potential of silent film both as mimesis (or representation of ideology) and as ideology.
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Kasper, Loretta F., and Robert Singer. "Unspoken Content: Silent Film in the ESL Classroom." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 29, no. 1 (2001): 16–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.58680/tetyc20011982.
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Research has shown that contemporary popular films are a valuable resource in the ESL classroom. However, the short, silent film has been overlooked. Using D.W. Griffith’s The Painted Lady, Kaspar and Singer demonstrate how to use silent films to facilitate the development of ESL students’ critical thinking and writing skills.
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Schuchman, John S. "The Silent Film Era: Silent Films, NAD Films, and the Deaf Community's Response." Sign Language Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 231–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sls.2004.0013.
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Tieber, Claus, and Anna K. Windisch. "A highly creative endeavour: Interview with musicologist and silent film pianist Martin Marks." Soundtrack 12, no. 1 (2020): 61–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ts_00012_7.
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Martin Marks holds an almost unique position to talk about silent film music: he is a scholarly musician and musical scholar. Besides his canonical book on the history of silent film music (1997), he has been playing piano accompaniments for silent films regularly for nearly four decades. In this interview we asked Martin about the challenges and complexities of choosing and creating music to accompany musical numbers in silent cinema. Martin relates how he detects musical numbers and he expounds his decision-making process on how to treat them. His explanations are interspersed with engaging examples from his practical work and based on both his scholarly knowledge and on his musical intelligence. He talks about the use of pre-existing music as well as about anachronisms in choosing music written many decades after a film was first released. In sum, this interview delivers detailed and informed insights into the difficulties and pleasures of accompanying musical numbers or other types of diegetic music in silent cinema.
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Adriaensens, Vito. "Cultivating the Early Canons: The Pordenone Silent Film Festival." Film Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2016): 91–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2016.69.3.91.
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Festival Report: For passionate lovers of silent cinema, the first weekend of October is permanently highlighted in the calendar: it is then that a small city in the north of Italy serves up more than just excellent antipasti and chilled Aperol Spritz. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, or “the days of silent cinema,” commonly known as the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, has been the mecca for film historians and amateurs of “mute flickers” since its founding in 1982. The festival is the largest silent film festival in the world, offering a nine-day bombardment of rediscoveries, restorations, retrospectives, and special events from dusk until well past dawn, projected at the proper speeds and accompanied by such leading early cinema musicians as Neil Brand, John Sweeney, and Günter Buchwald. Film history comes alive. Films reviewed include: Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931), Chuji tabinikki (A Diary of Chuji's Travels, Daisuke Ito, 1927), and Henri Fescourt's 1925–26 rendition of Les Misérables.
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Mahajan-Sutha, Jaya, Nandita Singh, and Kuldeep Singh. "Film Title: Silent Screams." Indian Journal of Burns 22, no. 1 (2014): 114. http://dx.doi.org/10.4103/0971-653x.147030.
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Sibanda, Nyasha. "The Silent Film Shortage." Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 12, no. 2 (2018): 197–216. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2018.11.
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Rockett, Kevin. "Film: Silent No More." Circa, no. 66 (1993): 28. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/25557855.
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Plewa, Elżbieta. "Napisy na ekranach kin II Rzeczypospolitej." Przekładaniec, no. 41 (2020): 214–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/16891864pc.21.012.13594.
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Polish Subtitling in the 1930s This article presents the results of an archival study on Polish subtitling of pre-WWII films (until 1939). The main focus will be on the technical aspects of subtitling in Poland in the 1930s, such as the number of lines, number of characters per line, and subtitle display times. We will show the development of Polish film translation in its initial phase. In our article, we will present previously unpublished pictures of early film subtitles, which come from original archival research. Contrary to some previous claims, film translation did not start with the introduction of sound in films – which occurred in Poland in the 1929/30 cinema season. Prior to that, in the silent cinema period, intertitles were a tested way of delivering content to the viewer. And these silent movies’ intertitles were translated. Copies of various foreign films have even been preserved with Polish intertitle translation rather than the original intertitles. Imitating intertitles in silent films, subtitles began to appear in films with sound and dialogue. These were “inserted subtitles” – between scene edits. Only later were subtitles burnt into the image, which began modern film subtitling.
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Zhang, Minglei. "Gone with the sound: critical perspectives on studying imaginability of American cinematic experience in the “sound” era, 1927-1935." Arts & Humanities Open Access Journal 5, no. 1 (2023): 75–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.15406/ahoaj.2023.05.00190.
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This article explores the human-technology relationship during the transition from silent films to sound films in American history and analyzes how this specific technology has influenced film audiences’ experiences. The author revisits the importance of human-centered technology and uses the term “imaginability” to describe the likelihood for both spontaneous bodily responses and technologically cultivated thinking activities inspired by cinematic engagement. The article challenges the discourse of technology as progress while focusing on the audiences’ experience during their cinematic engagement. The author's hypothesis is that sound film provides a linear channel of synchronization and hence produces restrictions on the audience’s imagination by limiting their temporal and spatial sensibilities. This synchronized sound technology offers a streamlined audiovisual reality through matching sounds and images in real-time, leading to a shortened processing of images, sounds, and their interconnections. The transitions between filmmaking and cinematic presenting have also revolutionized theater design, leading to the liminality that describes the state of transitioning under this circumstance led by sound technology, which generates metrics, measuring how fast and how thoroughly technology conquers an outdated society by enforcing innovations. The article focuses on the interplay between the spectatorship that addresses the condition of viewing films and the sound consciousness led by the synchronized sound system as applied to filmmaking. The analysis of imaginability becomes measurable, descriptive, and referential. The author suggests that the preservation and scrutiny of silent films are urgent and necessary to recognize the values of silent film production and the audience’s cinematic experience during the silent film era.
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Cieślak-Krupa, Agnieszka. "A Kiss for Cinderella (1925) The Importance of Historical Accuracy in Reconstructing Scores to Silent Films Based on the Mirskey Collection." Musicology Today 19, no. 1 (2022): 73–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/muso-2022-0005.
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Abstract Collections of silent film music constitute valuable sources for historical research on the musical practice in the silent film era. The musical prints preserved in the Mirskey Collection were previously used by the author to reconstruct a score for the movie A Kiss for Cinderella (1925, dir. Herbert Brenon). This article describes the historical context considered during the reconstruction and discusses the workflow applied by Nek Mirskey (Bronisław Mirski) as a musical director of movie theatres. A comparative analysis of sheet music from the Mirskey Collection accompanied by handwritten notes, original cue sheet compiled by James Bradford for the Paramount Pictures, and a digitised copy of the film, have led to conclusions that are applicable not only to Mirskey's methods of compiling scores, but also to the more general rules for the development of musical accompaniments to silent films in the 1920s.
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Marcondes, Ciro Inácio. "Paul Leni’s Waxworks: Writing Images from Silence, through Media and Philosophy." Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2016): 55–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2016-0014.
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Abstract The so-called German Weimar Cinema encompasses a profusion of films that used frame narratives. In the case of Paul Leni’s Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924), as the framing stems from a literary act (the stories are framed by the act of narration), the film proposes the mise-en-abyme technique as a sort of immersion into the intermedial when it deals with notions like speaking, writing, silence, image and cinema. In the case of silent cinema, and especially in Waxworks, the presence of a perverse relation with the medium of writing becomes noticeable (producing a fantasy of writing), since every effort to represent the literary act on film results in an infinite production of silent images, creating a parody effect and even postulating an act of aggression against writing. This confrontational relation between the writing code and the code of the mute image in silent cinema allows us to suggest that there is an inherent inflexibility in the language of silent cinema which does not allow the coexistence of written and spoken word as complementary codes. On the contrary, in silent cinema, the image and the silence of the film seem to work against the word, the spoken word being set forth against silence, and the written word against images.
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Boillat, Alain. "Rick Altman, Silent Film Sounds." 1895, no. 49 (June 1, 2006): 165–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/1895.480.
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Grover-Friedlander, Michal. "‘The phantom of the Opera’: the lost voice of opera in silent film." Cambridge Opera Journal 11, no. 2 (1999): 179–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700005000.
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Film's attraction to opera began not with the technical possibility of synchronising the operatic voice with the image, but earlier, in the silent era. In the New York Times of 27 August 1910 Thomas Edison declared: ‘We'll be ready for the moving picture shows in a couple of months, but I'm not satisfied with that. I want to give grand opera.’ What did silent film seek in opera? Would a silent film of or about opera have any meaning? What are the possibilities for silent opera? How would a mute operatic voice appear in film?
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Henkel, Dennis, Eelco M. Wijdicks, and Axel Karenberg. "Nicht nur Slapstick: Stummfilme als unterschätzte Zeugen der Medizingeschichte." DMW - Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 145, no. 25 (2020): 1818–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1055/a-1160-1493.
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AbstractMedicine in silent film has a long history. Although the silent era in cinema was dominated by burlesques (using escaped “lunatics”) a number of themes emerged after systematic review. The cinematic representation of medicine coincided with the discovery of X-rays. During this “roentgenomania”, short films were produced showing groundbreaking X-ray images, which fitted perfectly into needs of dramatic cinema. But soon the “cinema of narration” evolved: Starting just after the turn of the century, the short film “The Country Doctor” was able to address complex interplay between duties and limitations of the medical profession. This was followed by numerous feature films on infectious diseases, which often used tuberculosis as a centerpiece of its story. Directors often took advantage of the well-known stereotype of the omnipotent physician. But in certain medical fields, such as psychiatry or surgery, a more ambivalent figure of the doctor was portrayed, f. e. in “Hands of Orlac” (1924). Silent cinema also offered interesting ideas on the healing powers of the medium itself: in “The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs” (1912) a film screening could cure the patient of fears after reenactment. Finally, a closer look at the early era of film echoes how social conflicts where dramatized, especially in the case of nationwide birth control. How illegal abortion kept the society on its edge, was most clearly shown in the adaption of the scandalous play “Cyankali” (1930).In addition to discussing various topics in the cinematic representation of medicine, this brief overview shows that silent movies were a new and true art form, representing an exceptional resource for historians of film and medicine.
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Hefner, Brooks E. "“Any Chance to Be Unrefined”: Film Narrative Modes in Anita Loos's Fiction." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 125, no. 1 (2010): 107–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.1.107.
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This essay examines the underappreciated work of the Hollywood scenarist and humor writer Anita Loos. In general, Loos is known separately to film scholars, as a prominent writer of silent films, and to historians of American culture, as an important twentieth‐century humorist. However, her film‐writing career and her work in the theory of film writing influenced the narrative structure and assumptions of her fiction. Through readings of Loos's three early novels, the essay demonstrates how the humor and complex cinematic structure of these texts depend on a stark text‐image divide that stems directly from her ideas about writing for silent film. Looking at Loos's fiction in the light of her intimate familiarity with the film industry provides new insight into dialogues about high and popular culture and into the engagement of modernism with cinema. (BEH)
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Turczyn, Katarzyna. "Educational Activities of the National Film Archive in Warsaw Connected with Pre-World War II Films." Panoptikum, no. 18 (December 29, 2017): 178–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.26881/pan.2017.18.11.
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This article describes the educational actions (including the use of them in education) related to pre-war films conducted by the National Film Archive in Warsaw. First to exemplify this phenomenon, I focused on the works of three silent films: Mania. The history of a cigarette factory worker (Mania. Die Geschichte einer Zigarettenarbeiterin, 1918, directed by Eugen Illés), Pan Tadeusz ([Sir Thaddeus, 1928, directed by Ryszard Ordyński) and Zew morza ([The call of the sea], 1927, directed by Henryk Szaro), which have undergone a complete digital reconstruction during the Nitrofilm project (2008–2014) in the National Film Archive. The aim is to show how knowledge about silent film is communicated to the audience, and how these movies can be used to achieve educational goals/targets. The theoretical framework of this essay is examining the changing function of film archives, where technological change, the possibilities of restoration and digitization of films contributes to increasing popularisation of audiovisual heritage by film archivists and museums. An essential category in this essay is the authenticity both for the reconstructed film and its presentation. The perception of authenticity often determinates strategies for presentation of this heritage. The article is based on qualitative research (interviews with the audience and workers at the film archive;participant observation, press materials and websites).
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Bulavina, Maria O. "Nikolai Gogol in silent films." Vestnik of Kostroma State University 27, no. 1 (2021): 179–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.34216/1998-0817-2021-27-1-179-184.
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The article is devoted to the problem of Nikolai Gogol's interpretation on Russian screen. The problem of interaction between literature and cinematography is considered in a concrete historical plan, that is connected with the features of the time in which Gogol`s film adaptations were created. At the same time, the level of technical equipment of cinematography and other inherent qualities of it, that are largely determined the approach of the first directors to specific Gogol material, were taken into account. Cinema interpretations like «Dead Souls» by Pyotr Chardynin, «Taras Bulba» by Alexander Drankov, «Christmas Eve» and «The Portrait» by Ladislas Starevich, «The Overcoat» by Georgi Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg are in the centre of the article. Each of the listed film adaptations has its own specifics determined by close connection with other types of art, fragmentariness, melodramatic, an abundance of phantasmagorias, etc. «The Overcoat» stands out in the list of silent interpretations, since presents a new look at the process of Gogol's translation from the language of literature into the cinema language. Compared to previous films, the creators of the 1926 cinematic version of «The Overcoat» took into account Gogol's style, the mood of his work, recreated through the picture of the ghostly expressionist Petersburg.
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Troiani, Igea. "Sci-fi Eco-Architecture: science fiction, sustainability and design studio." Architectural Research Quarterly 16, no. 4 (2012): 313–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1359135513000201.
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In the summer of 2009, while on vacation in Italy, I lay on a deck chair on a beach under the scorching sun reading Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. I had taken Mike Davis's book as holiday reading after becoming interested in attitudes to sustainability as represented in films through supervising the unpublished dissertation ‘The Science and Fiction of Sustainable Living’. The dissertation analysed approaches to the green movement of the 1970s versus those held today. It did this through the study of ecological science fiction movies made during the two periods. As someone grounded in humanities research, using film studies research methods rather than conventional building science methods seemed to me an engaging, original approach to sustainability. The dissertation compared the 1972 American environmental science fiction film Silent Running to the 2007 British science fiction film Sunshine. During this supervision, the student gave me a copy of the films. Because Silent Running resonated with me, I took it on that same Italian holiday and watched it again. I recall thinking that Silent Running offered a departure point for an alternative kind of sustainable design studio. Then and there, I selected a film clip that I screened – in the background and without volume – at studio presentations to students held in September 2009.
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Hennefeld, Maggie, Laura Horak, and Rachel Loewen. "Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women." Feminist Media Histories 10, no. 2-3 (2024): 114–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.2-3.114.
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Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, composers Renée C. Baker and Gonca Feride Varol, Indigenous film historian and booklet contributor Liza Black, and film scholar Kaveh Askari. The other included cocurator and film historian Maggie Hennefeld, silent film festival organizer Enrique Moreno Ceballos, film scholars and commentary contributors Yiman Wang, Aurore Spiers, and Kate Saccone, and film scholar Neta Alexander. Rachel Loewen transcribed the roundtables and Hennefeld and Horak condensed and cut together the conversations to highlight the key themes that emerged.
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Tieber, Claus. "Walter Reisch: The musical writer." Journal of Screenwriting 10, no. 3 (2019): 295–306. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/josc_00005_1.
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Academy Award-winning Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch’s (1903‐83) career started in Austrian silent cinema and ended in Hollywood. Reisch wrote the screenplays for silent films, many of them based on musical topics (operetta films, biopics of musicians, etc.). He created the so-called Viennese film, a musical subgenre, set in an almost mythological Vienna. In my article I am analysing the characteristics of his writing in which music plays a crucial part. The article details the use of musical devices in his screenplays (his use of music, the influence of musical melodrama, instructions and use of songs and leitmotifs). The article closes with a reading of the final number in the last film he was able to make in Austria: Silhouetten (1936).
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Wyke, Maria. "Mobilizing Pompeii for Italian Silent Cinema." Classical Receptions Journal 11, no. 4 (2019): 453–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/crj/clz015.
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Abstract A documentary film about the eruption of Vesuvius in 1906 juxtaposes scenes of the damage and deaths it caused in neighbouring communities with shots of Pompeii — the ancient city of the long-since dead. The documentary suggests that Pompeii is a picturesque site where the privileged tourist experiences aesthetic detachment from the excavators’ labour or the locals’ suffering. Despite this critique, four Italian fiction films about the last days of Pompeii were made between 1908 and 1926. This article explores those films and argues that they mobilize Pompeii both for modern Italians and for cinema. They situate viewers immersively within the reconstructed city and substitute for a detached tourist gaze an impassioned, participatory one.
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Cieślak, Agnieszka. "Bronisław Mirski - Polish Music Director of the Silent Film Era1." Musicology Today 17, no. 1 (2020): 72–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/muso-2020-0006.
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Abstract Bronisław Mirski (b. 1887 as Moszkowicz in Żyrardów near Warsaw, Poland – d. 1927 in El Paso, Texas) belongs to the substantial group of Polish émigré artists of Jewish origin. A violinist and conductor educated in Europe, he permanently settled in the United States at the end of 1914 under the name of Nek Mirskey and soon began working as a music director in movie theatres. He was in charge of the musical settings for elaborate artistic programmes composed of silent films as well as music and stage attractions. His first widely acclaimed shows were presented at the Metropolitan Theatre of Harry M. Crandall's chain in Washington, D.C. Based primarily on the American press of 1921–23, this article discusses Mirski's work methods and his involvement in improving the quality of live musical accompaniment for silent films. The work that he continued till the end of his life places him among the foremost musicians of the silent film era.
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Johnson, William. "Between Daylight and Darkness: Forever and Silent Light." Film Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2008): 18–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2008.61.3.18.
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Abstract This comparative essay deals with two films, Forever (a documentary about the Pèère Lachaise cemetery in Paris directed by Heddy Honigman), and Silent Light (a fiction film set among Mexican Mennonites, and featuring a non-professional cast directed by Carlos Reygadas), both of which focus on love and death.
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Buslowska, Elzbieta. "Silent (un)becoming song." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 21 (August 5, 2021): 55–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.21.03.
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Song of Granite (Pat Collins, 2017) and Papusza (Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze, 2013) could be described as unconventional film ‘biographies’ (of the Irish folk singer Joe Heaney and Polish-Roma poet Bronislawa Wajs). In these films, poetry and philosophy come together in what I call the silent (un)becoming undoing the stabilities of (hi)story, identity, and memory. Crossing different aesthetic and geographical territories between fiction and documentary, they speak through the power of a song/poetry, telling a story of fragmentary encounters where histories are invented in the gaps of memories (personal and cultural) and identities disappear in other (be)longings. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the refrain as both the question of the native (home) and the “other” (the unknown homeland), and Maurice Blanchot’s notion of a disaster, the article will attempt to think with the films’ poetic “remembering” that is not narrated through the linearity of a story-telling but sounds silently in the vastness and motionlessness of the landscape, the creative treatment of the archive footage, materiality that remembers past from the outside of remembering and in the emotion of the song repeated in the black and white poetic expression of the refrain. The films’ cinematic force of (un)becoming will be considered as a question of the disastrous longing (for silence) which cannot be known or named but which sends life and thinking towards other memories-potentialities.
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Ratchford, Moira, and Yuri Tsivian. "Silent Witnesses: Russian Film, 1908-1919." Russian Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 116. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/131258.
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Weinstein, Anna. "Forgotten Women Comediennes in Silent Film." Film International 19, no. 4 (2021): 104–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fint_00143_7.
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Tsopurashvili, Salome. "A history of Georgian silent film." Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 8, no. 3 (2014): 255–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2014.969959.
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Leonard, Kendra Preston. "Using Resources for Silent Film Music." Fontes Artis Musicae 63, no. 4 (2016): 259–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fam.2016.0033.
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D’haeyere, Hilde. "Silent Film Comedy and American Culture." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 34, no. 2 (2014): 287–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2014.912522.
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Schouten, Fiona. "Turning Photographs into a Silent Film." Neophilologus 90, no. 2 (2006): 271–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11061-005-4252-z.
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Sieweke, Lara Rodríguez. "F. Scott Fitzgerald on Silent Film." F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 20 (October 2022): 219–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.20.0219.
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USTYUGOVA, VERA V. "Silent Film as Media Archaeology: On Designing a Master’s Degree Course." Art and Science of Television 19, no. 2 (2023): 217–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.30628/1994-9529-2023-19.2-217-241.
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The article presents a methodological elaboration of a syllabus for a university course. The purpose of the course and this presentation is to offer a new focus for teaching the theory and history of silent film within the framework of New Film History concepts. The article is addressed to the expert community of historians, film critics, media researchers, archivists and future specialists in these fields. As a consequence of its rediscovery, early cinema is today an important construct of historical and film studies knowledge. And early cinema itself, with its non-linear development, forgotten histories of color and “talking” films, and huge screens, requires new historiographical models. The dossier of early cinema pushes to investigate the filming schemes, screen technologies, and aspects of music, noise, and verbal accompaniment, as well as draws attention to the potential of film tape restoration. In addition to the traditional teaching methods including lectures and seminars with discussion of theoretical and historiographical texts, the course engages students in doing research using little-studied written sources and technical artifacts available in archives and museum collections. In the cases of Perm, these include materials deposited at the Perm Museum of Local Lore, the Perm State Archive, and the Perm Cinematheque. Students get acquainted with the latest methods of attribution of film archival documents, celluloid, samples of film equipment and film carriers, the vocabulary of archivists and film historians. As a result, students are introduced to current research practices, new horizons of studying the history of cinema through the prism of technical advances and technological experiments. The course attunes the future specialists to the values of the obsolete, the forgotten, and, thanks to new cultural histories, sets a precedent for a conceptual and practical exercise in identifying the facets of contemporary media.
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Leonard, Kendra Preston. "Imagining Women’s Archives of Silent Film Music." Feminist Media Histories 10, no. 2-3 (2024): 61–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2024.10.2-3.61.
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Although women comprised the majority of American cinema accompanists during the silent film period (c. 1895–1927), few of their music libraries or compositions have survived, whereas collections created by male cinema musicians dominate the silent film music archives. Women musicians suggested, shaped, and helped define the musical tastes of the time; educated listeners; and showed how music could serve as a creative, narrative, and interpretative force in the cinema. I offer an accounting of extant collections by women accompanists and read their contents and contexts from a feminist perspective. Using hints and fragments found in letters, period trade journals, and catalogs, I then speculate on an imaginary archive, one that collects music composed or played by female silent film musicians whose work has been lost to us, but whose influence in the development of film music is unmistakable.
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Tybjerg, Casper. "The spy who loved me: Benjamin Christensen and the Danish silent spy melodrama." Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 9, no. 3 (2019): 253–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jsca_00003_1.
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This article examines the spy melodrama films produced in Denmark from 1909 to 1918, 21 in all. The best-known (and one of only two to survive) is Benjamin Christensen’s Det hemmelighedsfulde X (Sealed Orders) (1914). A coda will briefly discuss the only pre-1945 spy talking film, Damen med de lyse Handsker (The Lady with the Light Gloves) (1942), also directed by Christensen. The article employs an approach similar to James Chapman’s contextual film history, examining the Danish silent spy melodramas in the context of political climate and genre, but with an emphasis on the concerns of film producers and practitioners. Surviving plot summaries, which exist for all 21 films, reveal a considerable degree of consistency in the storylines. The article argues that the melodramatic elements found in nearly all the films suggest a more female-oriented audience appeal than that of many later spy fictions.
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Adams, Christy Thomas. "Staging the Cinematic: Puccini, Fanciulla, and Early Silent Film." Journal of the American Musicological Society 76, no. 1 (2023): 1–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2023.76.1.1.
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Abstract Giacomo Puccini’s operas have a long history of being hailed as “cinematic.” Such descriptions began to appear during his lifetime and persisted in the years following his death, and more recent scholarship has continued to echo them. Associations between Puccini and film also extend to the cinematic screen: there are numerous filmed versions and adaptations of his operas, and his music has been featured in film soundtracks since the 1930s. Nevertheless, even though Puccini’s career roughly coincided with the first three decades of film history, surprisingly little is known about his attitude toward film or how it may have influenced his oeuvre. Taking La fanciulla del West as a case study, I investigate the complex historical relationship between early cinema, Puccini, and his operas, focusing particularly on the connections between Fanciulla and three American silent film genres that were popular in the years leading up to the opera’s premiere: early or “Eastern” Westerns, chase films, and lynching or execution films. I begin by investigating the filmic world to which Puccini and his creative team were exposed, tracing the evolution of cinema to 1910. I then turn specifically to the chase scene and attempted lynching in act 3 of Fanciulla, which I analyze in relation to the aforementioned genres, as well as to Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West, on which the libretto is based. Finally, I offer new perspectives on what it means—and meant—to understand Puccini’s operas as cinematic. In so doing, I demonstrate that the meaning of the adjective “cinematic” is historically contingent, not determined by immutable characteristics or qualities.
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Fossati, Giovanna. "Obsolescence and film restoration : the case of colored silent films." Technè, no. 37 (October 1, 2013): 102–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/techne.15771.
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Porter, Laraine. "Women Musicians in British Silent Cinema Prior to 1930." Journal of British Cinema and Television 10, no. 3 (2013): 563–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2013.0158.
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Referencing a range of sources from personal testimonies, diaries, trade union reports and local cinema studies, this chapter unearths the history of women musicians who played to silent film. It traces the pre-history of their entry into the cinema business through the cultures of Edwardian female musicianship that had created a sizeable number of women piano and violin teachers who were able to fill the rapid demand created by newly built cinemas around 1910. This demand was further increased during the First World War as male musicians were called to the Front and the chapter documents the backlash from within the industry against women who stepped in to fill vacant roles. The chapter argues that women were central to creating the emerging art-form of cinema musicianship and shaping the repertoire of cinema music during the first three decades of the twentieth century. With the coming of sound, those women who had learned the cinema organ, in the face of considerable snobbery, were also well placed to continue musical careers in Cine-Variety during the 1930s and beyond. This article looks particularly at the careers of Ena Baga and Florence de Jong who went on to play for silent films until the 1980s.
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SIMONSON, MARY. "Visualizing Music in the Silent Era: The Collaborative Experiments of Visual Symphony Productions." Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 1 (2018): 2–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196317000505.
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AbstractIn July 1922, the New York Times reported that the “encouraging little film” Danse Macabre was screening at the Rialto Theater in New York City. Directed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy, it starred dancers Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page in a visual interpretation of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre that synchronized perfectly with live performances of the composition. While film scholars have occasionally cited Danse Macabre and Murphy's other shorts from this period as examples of early avant-garde filmmaking in the United States, discussions of the films are mired in misunderstanding. In this article, I use advertisements, reviews, and other archival materials to trace the production, exhibition, and reception of Murphy's Visual Symphony project. These films, I argue, were not Murphy's alone: rather, they were a collaborative endeavor guided as heavily by musician and film exhibitor Hugo Riesenfeld as by Murphy himself. Recast in this way, the Visual Symphony project highlights evolving approaches to sound–image synchronization in the 1920s, the centrality of theater conductors and musicians to filmmaking in this period, and the various ways in which filmmakers, performers, and exhibitors conceptualized the relationship between music and film, and the live and the mediated, in the final decade of the silent era.
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Enyedi, Delia. "Voiceless Screams: Pictorialism as Narrative Strategy in Horror Silent Cinema." Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 19, no. 1 (2021): 66–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2021-0005.
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Abstract As a complementary condition to narrative, the notion of pictorialism in film is rooted in the first decades of the medium. In their quest to demonstrate the capturing and restoring of images with various devices, early filmmakers selected views with pictorial qualities in the long-standing tradition of painting, transferring them on film in the form of non-narrative shots. The evolution of fictional narratives in silent cinema displaced the source of inspiration in theatre, assimilating its nineteenth-century tradition of pictorialism. Thus, the film audiences’ appeal for visual pleasure was elevated with balanced elements of composition, framing and acting that resulted in pictorially represented moments actively engaged in the narrative system. The paper explores the notion of “pictorial spirit” (Valkola 2016) in relation to that of “monstration” (Gaudreault 2009) aiming to describe the narrative mechanism of provoking fear by means of pictorially constructed cinematic images in a selection of short-length horror silent films belonging to the transitional era, consisting in The Haunted House/The Witch House (La Maison ensorcelée/La casa encantada, Segundo de Chomón, 1908), Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910) and the surviving fragments of The Portrait (Портрет, Vladislav Starevich, 1915).1
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Peplinski, Maciej. "Gatunek na usługach doktryny. Ideologia w polsko-enerdowskiej koprodukcji Milcząca gwiazda." Images. The International Journal of European Film, Performing Arts and Audiovisual Communication 28, no. 37 (2021): 77–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/i.2020.37.05.
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 The East German-Polish co-production The Silent Star (1960, Kurt Maetzig) belongs to the group of early postwar Eastern European science fiction films which still remain barely examined by film and genre historians. The article summarizes the existing research on the film and investigates not only the specific formal character of Maetzig’s unprecedented project, but also the numerous ideological and political motivations which stood behind it.
 
 
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Pinar, Alex. "Russian Literature in Japanese Film: Cross-cultural Adaptations in the Silent Era." Nuevas Poligrafías. Revista de Teoría Literaria y Literatura Comparada, no. 8 (September 20, 2023): 59–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.22201/ffyl.29544076.2023.8.1893.
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Since the beginning of the film industry in Japan, many short films and movies based on Western literary works were made, especially during the 1910s and 1920s. Several of those films were based on fashionable Russian literary works that had been staged in Shingeki (new drama) theaters. This study examines the adaptations of Russian literature produced from the early 1910s until the end of the silent-film era in the 1930s, focusing specifically on films based on Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection, the drama The Living Corpse, and Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. It is shown that the early adaptations, filmed in the 1910s, aimed to closely adhere to the original literary works by maintaining key plot events and recreating the cultural milieu through sets, costumes, and staging. However, starting from the 1920s, adaptations followed intercultural and intertextual processes, freely modifying the works to suit the Japanese cultural context. This shift in the approach to adapting Western literary works was influenced by the social, political, and cultural changes experienced by the country during those decades.