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The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema
Edited by Rob King and Charlie Keil
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Book Presentation:
With thirty-four original chapters from three dozen top scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema provides a thoughtful and provocative re-examination of a medium that would become the dominant form of mass entertainment by the second decade of the twentieth century. The volume is arranged around a series of broad topics: the "invention" of cinema as both technology and medium; the intermedial development of film aesthetics and genres; nontheatrical and non-commercial uses of cinema; the political economy of Hollywood mass culture; film and global modernities; and silent cinema's publics and counter-publics.
The historiographical essays in this collection engage with the question of how we might rethink silent film history, especially in the context of the developed media ecosystem that defined the early 1900s. Influenced by methodologies as diverse as media archaeology and industrial studies, and sensitive to both the textual contours of silent films and the cultural, economic, and ideological currents that helped shape them, the Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema invites its reader to envision its object in expansive terms that incorporate the propulsive energy of the first decades of the 1900s and deploy the analytical frameworks of the current day.
About the authors:
Charlie Keil is a professor in the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of History at the University of Toronto, where he also serves as Principal of Innis College. He has published seven books, the majority focusing on early and silent cinema, with an emphasis on the transitional era of American cinema. He is currently working on a study of the origins of Hollywood, both as a filmmaking center and a concept, co-authored with Denise McKenna.
Rob King is a professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He is the author of Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture and the award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture. He has also edited or coedited the volumes Cornell Woolrich and Transmedial Noir, Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema, Slapstick Comedy, and Early Cinema and the "National." King is currently working on a monograph on the adult filmmaker Radley Metzger.
Contributors:
Stefan Andriopoulos, Kaveh Askari, Anne Bachmann, Weihong Bao, Giorgio Bertellini, Scott Curtis, Allyson Nadia Field, Jane Gaines, Doron Galili, André Gaudreault, Oliver Gaycken, Lee Grieveson, Alison Griffiths, Tom Gunning, Sumiko Higashi, Laura Horak, Jennifer Horne, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Donna Kornhaber, Derek Long, Denise McKenna, Phillipe Marion, Luci Marzola, Ruth Mayer, Ross Melnick, Daisuke Miyao, Johannes von Moltke, Paul S. Moore, Tom Paulus, Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Miriam Siegel, Shelley Stamp, Breixo Viejo Vinas, Gregory A. Waller, Tami Williams
Press Reviews:
"The breadth of coverage in this anthology is remarkable in terms of both methodologies and subjects of study, resulting in a comprehensive and exhaustively researched engagement with the issues animating early film studies. This volume is required reading for film scholars and anyone seeking to understand early cinema's production, reception, and historical development." -- Choice
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> From the same authors:
Hokum! (2017)
The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture
by Rob King
Subject: Genre > Comedy/Humor
Editing and Special/Visual Effects (2016)
Dir. Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel
Subject: Technique > Special effects
American Cinema of the 1910s (2009)
Themes and Variations
Dir. Charlie Keil and Ben Singer
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Fun Factory (2008)
The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture
by Rob King
Subject: Genre > Comedy/Humor
Early Cinema and the National (2008)
Dir. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King
Subject: Silent Cinema
Early American Cinema in Transition (2001)
Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913
by Charlie Keil
Subject: Silent Cinema
> On a related topic:
Danish and German Silent Cinema (2025)
Towards a Common Film Culture
Dir. Lars-Martin Sørensen and Casper Tybjerg
Subject: Silent Cinema
Pass the Gravy (2024)
Serving Up the Lives, Careers and Recipes of 196 Silent Film Stars
Subject: Silent Cinema
Silent Film Adaptations of Novels by British and American Women Writers, 1903-1929 (2024)
Viewer, I Married Him
Subject: Silent Cinema
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