Dixon Bryony

100 Silent Films provides an authoritative and accessible history of silent cinema through one hundred of its most interesting and significant films. As Bryony Dixon contends, silent cinema is not a genre; it is the first 35 years of film history, a complex negotiation between art and commerce and a union of creativity and technology. At its most grand -- on the big screen with a full orchestral accompaniment -- it is magnificent, permitting a depth of emotional engagement rarely found in other fields of cinema. Silent film was hugely popular in its day, and its success enabled the development of large-scale film production in the United States and Europe. It was the start of our fascination with the moving image as a disseminator of information and as mass entertainment with its consequent celebrity culture. The digital revolution in the last few years and the restoration and reissue of archival treasures have contributed to a huge resurgence of interest in silent cinema. Bryony Dixon's illuminating guide introduces a wide range of films of the silent period (1895--1930), including classics such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), The General (1926), Metropolis (1927), Sunrise (1927) and Pandora's Box (1928), alongside more unexpected choices, and represents major genres and directors of the period -- Griffith, Keaton, Chaplin, Murnau, Sjostrom, Dovzhenko and Eisenstein -- together with an introductory overview and useful filmographic and bibliographic information.

The British cinema has drawn extensively on our national landscapes. Filmmakers have explored the entrenched myth of an idyllic rural tradition, intimately bound up with a popular definition of national heritage. Conversely, within a documentary-realist framework, they have looked at the contemporary urban aesthetic, derived partly from a Victorian tradition of social investigation. The fifth in a series of volumes from the annual British Silent Cinema Festival held in Nottingham (and the first to be published by Exeter), this collective study offers an original treatment of the relationship between pre-1930 cinema and landscape. The Nottingham festival from which this collection derives brought together a group of leading specialists – practitioners, academics and individual researchers – who between them provide a detailed investigation into the national cinema before the sound era.