Explore the vast range of titles available.

Tracing the international consumption, distribution, and cultural importance of silent film serials in the 1910s and 1920s, Canjels provides an exciting new understanding of the cultural dimension and the cultural transformation and circulation of media forms. Specifically, he demonstrates that the serial film form goes far beyond the well-known American two-reel serial—the cliffhanger. Throughout the book, Canjels focuses on the biggest producers of serials, America, France, and Germany, while imported serials, such as those in the Netherlands, are also examined. This research offers new views on the serial work of well known directors as D.W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, and Fritz Lang, while foregrounding the importance of lesser known directors such as Louis Feuillade or Joe May. In the early twentieth-century, serial productions were constantly undergoing change and were not merely distributed in their original form upon import. As adjusted serials were present in large quantities or confronted different social spaces, nationalistic feelings and views stimulated by the unrest of World War I and the expanding American film industry could be incorporated and attached to the serial form. Serial productions were not only adaptable to local discourses, they could actively stimulate and interact as well, influencing reception and further film production. By examining the distribution, reception, and cultural contexts of American and European serials in various countries, this cross-cultural research makes both local and global observations. Canjels thus offers a highly relevant case study of transnational, transcultural and transmedia relations. Rudmer Canjels is a film scholar and lecturer interested in silent film, fan culture, transmedia storytelling, and documentary film. He has published on the international distribution and cultural transformations of silent film serials ( Distributing Silent Film Serials , Routledge, 2011) and industry sponsored films ( A History of Royal Dutch Shell and Films that Work ). Currently he is researching the use of industrial film in Nigeria as it became an independent country in 1960. I. Film Seriality and Its Serial Uses: Transition and Beyond 1. Seriality Unbound 2. Monopolizing Episodic Adventuress II. Localizing Serials: Translating Spectacle and Daily Life Beyond 3. American Mysteries in France 4. German Spectacle from Within 5. Adjusting Seriality in the Netherlands III. Confronting Seriality in Europe and America 6. Consuming New World Views: American Serials in Germany 7. Minds that Cannont Condense: European Serials in America 8. Overshooting inAmerica IV. Another Time 9. Adjusting Forms and Diminishing Uses Distributing Silent Film Serials makes a \"substantial contribution to new cinema histories,\" it is filled with \"potent points of comparison between different national traditions,\" giving \"fascinating insights,\" and leading \"to a rethinking of the significance of seriality in the broader context of film history.\"- Joe Kemper, Early Popular Visual Culture \"This book provides new insights ino the serial productions of both well-known [such as Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim or Fritz Lang] and more obscure directors. […] Distributing Silent Film Serials is supplemented by thorough notes, a well-chosen bibliography, and a useful appendix, listing serial films, chronologically arranged under importing country and by earliest known premier date. The text is complemented by many interesting photographs, posters and advertisements […]. It is packed […] with interesting anecdotes and solid information, and serves as a welcome addition to the burgeoning body of important literature elucidating the history of silent cinema.\"- Jeffrey Mifflin, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television \"Distributing Silent Film Serials is part of the \"important studies of exhibition [that] have recently emerged from what has been called the ‘new cinema history.’ \"- Jessica L. Whitehead, Early Popular Visual Culture

Much has been made of the importance of silent films in cinematic history, but until now there has been no truly international analysis of these films. In 'Silent Features', editor Steve Neale brings together a diverse group of internationally known scholars to reflect on silent films and their diverse stylistic, generic, and structural characteristics, as well as the national, historical, and industrial contexts from which they emerged. The essays here focus on fifteen feature-length silent films and two silent serial features. Arranged chronologically and illustrated throughout with frame stills, the collection provides detailed accounts of a wide array of films produced in a number of different countries between the early 1910s and the early 1930s, and it focuses principally on films that while well-known, have rarely been discussed in detail. 'Silent Features' will not only appeal to scholars and students of film history, but also to lay readers around the world.\"

Winner of the Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award for 2008 Sanctuary Cinema provides the first history of the origins of the Christian film industry. Focusing on the early days of film during the silent era, it traces the ways in which the Church came to adopt film making as a way of conveying the Christian message to adherents. Surprisingly, rather than separating themselves from Hollywood or the American entertainment culture, early Christian film makers embraced Hollywood cinematic techniques and often populated their films with attractive actors and actresses. But they communicated their sectarian message effectively to believers, and helped to shape subsequent understandings of the Gospel message, which had historically been almost exclusively verbal, not communicated through visual media. Despite early successes in attracting new adherents with the lure of the film, the early Christian film industry ultimately failed, in large part due to growing fears that film would corrupt the church by substituting an American “civil religion” in place of solid Christian values and amidst continuing Christian unease about the potential for the glorification of images to revert to idolatry. While radio eclipsed the motion picture as the Christian communication media of choice by the 1920, the early film makers had laid the foundations for the current re-emergence of Christian film and entertainment, from Veggie Tales to The Passion of the Christ .

\"Paolo Cherchi Usai provides a comprehensive introduction to the study, research and preservation of silent cinema from its heyday in the early 20th century to its present day flourishing. He traces the history of the moving image in its formative years, from Edison's and Lumière's first experiments to the dawn of 'talkies'; provides a clear guide to the basics of silent film technology; introduces the technical and creative roles involved in its production, and presents silent cinema as a performance event, rather than a passive viewing experience. This new, greatly expanded edition takes the reader on a new journey, exploring silent cinema in the broader context of technology, culture, and society, from the invention of celluloid film and its related machinery to film studios, laboratories, theatres and audiences. Among the people involved in the creation of a new art form were filmmakers, actors and writers, but also engineers, entrepreneurs, and projectionists. Their collective efforts, and the struggle to preserve their creative work by archives and museums, are interwoven in a compelling story covering three centuries of media history, from the magic lantern to the reinvention of silent cinema in digital form. The new edition also includes comprehensive resource information for the study, research, preservation and exhibition of silent cinema\"-- Provided by publisher.

In the first four decades of cinema, hundreds of films were made that drew their inspiration from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Bible. Few of these films have been studied, and even fewer have received the critical attention they deserve. The films in question, ranging from historical and mythological epics to adaptations of ancient drama, burlesques, cartoons and documentaries, suggest a fascination with the ancient world that competes in intensity and breadth with that of Hollywood's classical era. What contribution did antiquity make to the development of early cinema? How did early cinema's representations affect modern understanding of antiquity? Existing prints as well as ephemera scattered in film archives and libraries around the world constitute an enormous field of research. This extensively illustrated edited collection is a first systematic attempt to focus on the instrumental role of silent cinema in twentieth-century conceptions of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.

\"Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction covers the full span of the silent era, touching on films and filmmakers from every corner of the globe, and focusing on how the public experienced these films. Silent film evolved during three main periods; early, transitional, and classical. First seen as a technological attraction, it rapidly grew into a medium for telling longer stories. Silent film was genuinely global, with countries all around the world using cinema to tell stories and develop their own industries. Sound was introduced to cinema in the late 1920s, but with elements of silent film still around today, there is an argument for it never having ended\"-- Provided by publisher.

Unlike previous studies of the Soviet avant-garde during the silent era, which have regarded the works of the period as manifestations of directorial vision, this study emphasizes the collaborative principle at the heart of avant-garde filmmaking units and draws attention to the crucial role of camera operators in creating the visual style of the films, especially on the poetics of composition and lighting. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s, owing to the fetishization of the camera as an embodiment of modern technology, the cameraman was an iconic figure whose creative contribution was encouraged and respected. Drawing upon the film literature of the period, Philip Cavendish describes the culture of the camera operator, charts developments in the art of camera operation, and studies the mechanics of key director-cameraman partnerships. He offers detailed analysis of Soviet avant-garde films and draws comparisons between the visual aesthetics of these works and the modernist experiments taking place in the other spheres of the visual arts.

\"This book is the first study of the vampires in silent cinema, presenting a detailed academic yet accessible discussion of the films themselves and their sources. For the very first time, The Fire Elemental from the Wharton brothers' The Mysteries of Myra (1916) is identified as cinema's original vampire, his appearance initiating a rich and variegated period of film production that is currently missing from studies of horror cinema. Exciting and ground-breaking, Vampires on the Silent Screen also discusses Drakula Halála / Dracula's death (1920), the first ever filmic female vampire in Erich Kober's Lilith and Ly (1919),

The most famous stage actress of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt enjoyed a surprising renaissance when the 1912 multi-reel film Queen Elizabeth vaulted her to international acclaim. The triumph capped her already lengthy involvement with cinema while enabling the indefatigable actress to reinvent herself in an era of technological and generational change. Placing Bernhardt at the center of the industry's first two decades, Victoria Duckett challenges the perception of her as an anachronism unable to appreciate film's qualities. Instead, cinema's substitution of translated title cards for her melodic French deciphered Bernhardt for Anglo-American audiences. It also allowed the aging actress to appear in the kinds of longer dramas she could no longer physically sustain onstage. As Duckett shows, Bernhardt contributed far more than star quality. Her theatrical practice on film influenced how the young medium changed the visual and performing arts. Her promoting of experimentation, meanwhile, shaped the ways audiences looked at and understood early cinema. A leading-edge reappraisal of a watershed era, Seeing Sarah Bernhardt tells the story of an icon who bridged two centuries--and changed the very act of watching film.