Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema
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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.
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.