Silent Films

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2021

Going Silent on Modernity: Periodization, Geopolitics, and Public Opinion,” in Rob King and Charles Keil eds., Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, New York: Oxford University Press, 2024

Long-established narratives of early cinema's modernity, with their emphasis on instrumental rationality, have relied on the alleged similarity of the European and North American contexts and on a periodization opposing the pre-1914 period to the 1920s. In between these two time periods and regularly ignored by scholars is World War I and its aftermath.

Screening the Press (Online), No. 30, 2011

Book Review of The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s by Willliam M. Drew (Scarecrow Press, 2010)

Pordenone Film Festival, GCM catalogue, 2019

The subgenre of f ilms on f ilmmaking -"behind the scenes" movies focusing on some aspect of the production or afterlife of a given f ilm -will be intimately familiar to anyone browsing through the bonus features of a DVD or Blu-ray today. It has long f lourished as part of the non-theatrical distribution market even before the advent of video, with featurettes forming part of specially produced newsreels or promotional shorts that various Hollywood studios churned out -often with dedicated production units. Nor has this niche escaped the attention of f ilm historians like Anthony Slide, Christopher Ames, Rudy Behlmer, James Parrish, and others, who have written both scholarly and popular histories of how Hollywood views itself on screen and how the history of the industry mirrors that of the wider culture. Yet while A Star is Born, Singin' in the Rain, and other such backstage, putting-on-a-show, making-a-movie vehicles are among the most popular f ilms ever made, their non-f iction counterparts have been little viewed outside specialist circles. Long relegated to the "TCM Special" bin, documentaries dealing with aspects of f ilm history have a history and evolution of their own, one that draws on concerns like stardom, the representation of reality on screen, the socioeconomic aspects of the f ilm industry -to say nothing of their inherent modernism. Cinema is indeed unique among all art forms in that it was born at roughly the same time as attempts at the documentation of its own history and pre-history. Already during the silent era, Hollywood set out on a search FILM SUL CINEMA FILMS ON FILM 165 164 165 164 FILM SUL CINEMA FILMS ON FILM

2018

Over the last few years, sound and music practices during the silent film period have received an increasing attention from the academic community, both in film studies and musicology. The emergence of interdisciplinary networks, such as “The Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain” (Brown and Davison 2013) and the “Cabiria Research Project” in Italy (Colturato 2014), have contributed to widen the frame of this field, revealing the importance of national, regional and local specificities in the construction of early cinema as an auditory experience. In the context of the thematic issue on “Music, sound and cinema”, Aniki interviewed Claus Tieber and Anna K. Windish, researchers at the University of Salzburg and editors of The Sounds of Silent Films: New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice, the proceedings of an international conference held in 2013 at Kiel University. Tieber and Windish are, respectively, principal investigator and research assistant of the project “The Sound of ...

2013

There is a hierarchy of sound and image in films but that is not a natural one. There are moments in the history of cinema when a rupture occurs in the process and sound affects us more than visual. The lack of discussion on film sound is alarming with respect to that. This paper interrogates the conditions of such an absence and the complexities of such a denial, which in itself might be an unspeakable rule. In more ways than one, such denials create the absence of a theoretical framework and linguistic tools that would render the articulation of film sound possible. This paper argues that this is not merely a case of negligence or lack of research material, but there is a pattern to such denial.

There is much amiss in the storyworlds depicted in the silent film serials of the 1910s and 1920s: natural forces and machines and people keep running out of control and need to be reined in, order disintegrates and has to be reimplemented, plots are hatched and must be rooted out. But perhaps the most consistent problem is a problem of time. It is always almost too late, and still too early for it all to make sense. Film serials are immensely rushed and at the same time marked by delays and deferrals. Moreover, they abound with repetitions. While moving breathlessly from "incident to incident at breakneck speed," as Scott Higgins put it for the sound serial, 1 they do so with the ever-same cast of actors in the ever-same parts, facing the ever-same predicaments in serial after serial. Thrill and formulaic reiteration constitute the two pivotal features of the film serial, and they should not be seen as oppositional forces. 2

Yeonghwa Yeonku(Film Studies) 55, 2013

For a long time, Westerns have not only been a main genre among Hollywood popular films but also represented distinctive U.S. popular culture. In this paper, I will examine six Western films in the era of silent cinema - The Great Train Robbery (1903), White Fawn’s Devotion (1910), The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913), Hell’s Hinges (1916), Tumbleweeds (1925) and The Vanishing American (1925). I will trace how each film exposes its own features: The Great Train Robbery and the establishment of Western narrative strategy in early cinema, White Fawn’s Devotion, The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, and The Vanishing American with the representation of the Native Americans and implication of imperialism and racism in the early Western films, and Hell’s Hinges and Tumbleweeds within the establishment of the binary code of East and West. Through this analysis, it will be revealed that the convention or basic feature of Western genre had been constructed before the establishment of classical Western during the era of the Classical Hollywood Cinema. Keywords: Western, Binary code, Representation of Indigenous,The Great Train Robbery, White Fawn’s Devotion, The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, Hell’s Hinges, Tumbleweeds, The Vanishing American

The Moving Image, 2006

2019

The soundless films of the first generation of world'S cinematography, which left an indelible mark and survived to this day, precisely because it was an undisputed artistic value. The universal themes selected and handled by Artists of that time will find a special focus on my work, the playfulness of the act of that time, the possibilities of recording in the celluloid and the appearance of obstacles with the mechanical projectors. The discovery of that period, that is recording the tone, the difficulties, the problems and the main challenges in acting in front of the film camera, such an invention would certainly give another direction to the artistic film, contribute to its development but at the same time exhibited barricades of banal nature, in the simple sense would turn the role-play to the zero point, precisely in the moments of its advancement towards the extreme naturalness, would bump into the theater actors with those of the sketches or the noiseless films that had ...