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In this book, readers can experience the tumultuous era of silent First World War propaganda films that helped shape U.S. opinion of the dreaded'Huns.'From pro-preparedness films pacifist films,'horrible Hun'films,'kill-the-kaiser'films, and outrageous comedies to thought-provoking war trauma films and patriotic documentaries, readers can survey America's cinematic view of'the war to end all wars.'Featured is comprehensive discussion of these films, including synopses, casts, back stories, and critical reviews and notes. Here are unusual tales and extraordinary plots with serpentine Germans (Erich von Stroheim throwing a baby out of a window in 1918's The Heart of Humanity), noble French girls sacrificing their honor for the allied cause (Clara Kimball Young in 1918's The Road Through the Dark), and singular Yanks (Bothwell Browne as a cross-dressing American flyer seducing the kaiser and his high command in 1919's Yankee Doodle in Berlin).

In The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts, Barbara Tepa Lupackexplores the rampant racial and gender stereotyping depicted in early cinema, demonstrating how those stereotypes helped shape American attitudes and practices. Using social, cultural, literary, and cinema history as a focus, this book offers insights into issues of Othering, including discrimination, exclusion, and sexism, that are as timely today as they were a century ago. Lupack not only examines the ways that dominant cinema of the era imprinted indelible and pejorative images of women—including African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and New Women/Suffragists—but also reveals the ways in which a number of pioneering early filmmakers and performers attempted to counter those depictions by challenging the imagery, interrogating the stereotypes, and re-politicizing the familiar narratives. Scholars of film, gender, history, and race studies will find this book of particular interest.

The concept of settler colonialism offers an invaluable lens to reframe early westerns and travel pictures as re-enactments of the United States'repressed past. Westerns in particular propose a remarkable vision of white settlers'westward expansion that reveals a transformation in what'American Progress'came to mean. Initially, these films tracked settlers moving westward across the Appalachians, Great Plains, and Rockies. Their seizure of'empty land'provoked continual resistance from Indigenous peoples and Mexicans;'pioneers'suffered extreme hardships, but heroic male figures usually scattered or wiped out those'aliens.'Some films indulged in nostalgic empathy for the Indian as a'Vanishing American.'In the early 1910s, westerns became increasingly popular. In Indian pictures, Native Americans ranged from devious savages, victims of white violence, and'Noble Savages'to'in-between'figures caught between cultures and'mixed-descent peoples'partnered for security or advantage. Mexicans took positions across a similar spectrum. In cowboy and cowgirl films,'ordinary'whites became heroes and heroines fighting outlaws; and bandits like Broncho Billy underwent transformation into'good badmen.'The mid to late 1910s saw a shift, as Indian pictures and cowgirl films faded and male figures, embodied by movie stars, dominated popular series. In different ways, William S. Hart and Harry Carey reinvented the'good badman'as a stoic, if troubled, figure of white masculinity. In cowboy films of comic romance, Tom Mix engaged in dangerous stunts and donned costumes that made him a fashionable icon. In parodies, Douglas Fairbanks subverted the myth of'American Progress,'sporting a nonchalant grin of effortless self-confidence. Nearly all of their films assumed firmly settled white communities, rarely threatened by Indians or Mexicans. Masked as'Manifest Destiny,'the expropriation of the West seemed settled once and for all. Our Country/Whose Country? offers a rich and expansive examination of the significance of early westerns and travel pictures in the ideological foundations of'our country.'

Although a major star in the 1910s, Theda Bara--known as'The Vamp'--was largely neglected until the 1990s, when her fame began to resurface. Since then, there have been biographies, documentaries and other works that have brought the silent film actress back into the spotlight, including a painstaking stills reconstruction of her lost epic Cleopatra. This is a complete examination of Bara's more than 40 films, as well as her theater and radio appearances, down to the smallest detail. With the vast majority of Bara's films considered lost, it is a particularly valuable resource for fans and scholars, and includes information about each film's genesis, director, plot, censorship problems, and critical and public reactions. Also included is a biographical overview, with many illuminating anecdotes.

This is a history and critical appreciation of an unusually fertile period for the production of great or near-great silent films: late 1927 through early 1929, in the midst of the tumult and upheaval of Hollywood's transition from silent to sound. The book offers in-depth looks at several of the best of these films and discusses the gifted artists such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Lillian Gish who helped bring them to life, even as the art they had taken to remarkable heights was about to be obliterated. It depicts some of the silent medium's most talented filmmakers and their efforts--in the face of inescapable technological change--to give their dying art a rousing last hurrah.

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and NPR In this genre-defying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton's unique creative genius in the context of his time. Born the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman. Even through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton's life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. He found success in three different mediums at their creative peak: first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett. In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton's life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton's breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist.

'Clothes make the man'(or woman). This is especially true in early Hollywood silent films where a character's appearance could show an immense number of different things about them. For example, Theda Bara's role in A Fool There Was (1915) was known for her revealing clothing, seductive appearance, and being the first'Vamp.'Wardrobe and costume design played a larger role in silent films than in modern movies. The character's clothes told the audience who they were and what their role was in the movie. In this in-depth analysis, the author provides examples and explanations about noteworthy characters who used their appearance to further their fame.

During the early era of cinema, moviegoers turned to women editors and writers for the latest on everyone's favorite stars, films, and filmmakers. Richard Abel returns these women to film history with an anthology of reviews, articles, and other works. Drawn from newspapers of the time, the selections show how columnists like Kitty Kelly, Mae Tinee, Louella Parsons, and Genevieve Harris wrote directly to female readers. They also profiled women working in jobs like scenario writer and film editor and noted the industry's willingness to hire women. Sharp wit and frank opinions entertained and informed a wide readership hungry for news about the movies but also about women on both sides of the camera. Abel supplements the texts with hard-to-find biographical information and provides context on the newspapers and silent-era movie industry as well as on the professionals and films highlighted by these writers. An invaluable collection of rare archival sources, Movie Mavens reveals women's essential contribution to the creation of American film culture.

Charlie Chaplin's A Woman of Paris (1923) was a groundbreaking film which was neither a simple recycling of Peggy Hopkins Joyce's story, nor quickly forgotten. Through heavily-documented'period research,'this book lands several bombshells, including Paris is deeply rooted in Chaplin's previous films and his relationship with Edna Purviance, Paris was not rejected by heartland America, Chaplin did'romantic research'(especially with Pola Negri), and Paris'many ongoing influences have never been fully appreciated. These are just a few of the mistakes about Paris.

2020 Best Early Career Research Monograph, Monash University Malaysia Damsels and Divas investigates the meanings of Europeanness in Hollywood during the 1920s by charting professional trajectories of three movie stars: Pola Negri, Vilma Bánky and Jetta Goudal. It combines the investigation of American fan magazines with the analysis of studio documents, and the examination of the narratives of their films, to develop a thorough understanding of the ways in which Negri, Bánky and Goudal were understood within the realm of their contemporary American culture. This discussion places their star personae in the context of whiteness, femininity and Americanization. Every age has its heroines, and they reveal a lot about prevailing attitudes towards women in their respective eras. In the United States, where the stories of rags-to-riches were especially potent, stars could offer models of successful cultural integration.

American silent film comedies were dominated by sight gags, stunts and comic violence. With the advent of sound, comedies in the 1930s were a riot of runaway heiresses and fast-talking screwballs. It was more than a technological pivot--the first feature-length sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927), changed Hollywood. Lost in the discussion of that transition is the overlap between the two genres. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd kept slapstick alive well into the sound era. Screwball directors like Leo McCarey, Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch got their starts in silent comedy. From Chaplin's tramp to the witty repartee of His Girl Friday (1940), this book chronicles the rise of silent comedy and its evolution into screwball--two flavors of the same genre--through the works of Mack Sennett, Roscoe Arbuckle, Harry Langdon and others.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1.0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Die vorliegende Bachelorarbeit arbeitet heraus, wie der Filmproduzent und Regisseur Oscar Micheaux in dem 1920 fertiggestellten Stummfilm Within Our Gates Bilder des'New Negro'zeichnete. Er entwarf eine Gegendarstellung zu der bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt vornehmlich negativen und stereotypen Darstellung von Afroamerikanern in den von Hollywood Studios produzierten Filmen. Aufbauend auf Forschungsergebnissen von Filmhistorikern wie Jane Gaines, Ronald Green, Pearl Bowser und anderen wird der Film in seinem geschichtlichen Kontext dargestellt. Die Story, die Hauptcharaktere sowie die von Micheaux eingesetzten Filmtechniken wurden untersucht. Für die Analyse wurden von der Autorin vier exemplarische Szenen des Films ausgewählt und aufbauend auf bereits vorhandenen Forschungsergebnissen mit den Kriterien der Filmanaylse betrachtet. Als zusammenfassendes Ergebnis ist festzustellen, dass es Oscar Micheaux gelungen ist, durch Nutzung verschiedenster Filmtechniken wie u.a. ein sorgfältiges Setdesign seine Vision auf der Kinoleinwand darzustellen und ein vielschichtiges Bild des “New Negro” zu zeichnen. In seinem Film Within Our Gates korrigiert er die Darstellung von Lynchmord und Vergewaltigung - die in Hollywood Filmen ausschließlich von Afroamerikanern begangen wurden - in dem er eindeutig die Weißen als Schuldige darstellt, welche sich an den ehemaligen Sklaven vergehen.

Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music. William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.

The silent film era featured some of the most revered names of on-screen comic performance, from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, and Laurel & Hardy. Besides these giants of cinema, however, there are other silent era performers—both leading actors and supporting players—who left an enduring legacy of laughter. In The 100 Greatest Silent Film Comedians, James Roots ranks the greatest performers based on a scorecard that measures each comic's humor, timelessness, originality, and teamwork. Far more than just a listing, this is an idiosyncratic and entertaining review of the men and women who created the golden age of comedy. As a critic and deaf viewer, Roots brings a truly unique perspective to the evaluation of these performers and their work. He has viewed thousands of silent comedies and offers some assessments that run contrary to the standard list of performers. While many obvious names are placed in the top echelon, the author also champions performers who have been neglected, in part because their work has not been as visible. Each entry includes a filmographya scorecardan evaluation of the artist's overall workan assessment of representative filmsDVD availabilityWith the increased availability of films on DVD, as well as Internet access, more and more silent performers are being discovered by film fans. Supplemented by an appendix of comedians who missed the cut, as well as an annotated bibliography, The 100 Greatest Silent Film Comedians will be an invaluable resource to anyone wanting to know more about the brilliant entertainers of the silent era.

This absorbing study of early 20th Century American Culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags expressing the unconscious wishes and fears of the modern age, in a way that foreshadows the concerns of our own celebrity-obsessed consumer culture.

First published in 1964. When A Million and One Nights was first published in 1926, it was hailed as'the first complete source book on the motion picture'and its author, Terry Ramsaye, as'the first authentic film historian.'The intervening years have established A Million and One Nights as a classic, standard work on the history of the motion picture from the beginning through 1925. The contents of this edition are identical with those of the original two-volume edition.

In 1927, The Jazz Singer heralded a revolution in the moviemaking industry with the advent of synchronized sound in full-length motion pictures. While movie studios adapted their production facilities to accommodate the new technology and movie theatres converted to sound, filmmakers continued to produce silents, albeit in dwindling numbers. And though talkies would overtake the industry and the public's demand soon enough, the silent motion picture did not disappear immediately.The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s looks at this cultural shift. Drawing primarily on contemporary records, this book details the fate of an entire art form—the silent cinema—in the United States during the 1930s and how it managed to survive the onslaught of sound. Through the most diverse venues, from tent shows to universities, political meetings to picture palaces, ghetto theaters to art houses, the silent film continued to play an important role in American culture in the Depression years, culminating in the first efforts to chronicle and preserve cinema history.Through the voices of the audiences, critics, editors, and artists, Drew relates the impact of various silent films, whether new releases, reissues, or foreign imports, on the public and culture of the 30s—how they affected both the popular and intellectual environment and how they were promoted for their audiences. Providing an in-depth examination of the transitional period, which led to the birth of modern film studies, The Last Silent Picture Show is aimed not only at academics but also the large number of film devotees who will discover new information on a relatively neglected chapter of film history.

'From his unique perspective of friendship with many of the actors and actresses about whom he writes, silent film historian Anthony Slide creates vivid portraits of the careers and often eccentric lives of 100 players from the American silent film industry. He profiles the era's shining stars such as Lillian Gish and Blanche Sweet; leading men including William Bakewell and Robert Harron; gifted leading ladies such as Laura La Plante and Alice Terry; ingénues like Mary Astor and Mary Brian; and even Hollywood's most famous extra, Bess Flowers. Although each original essay is accompanied by significant documentation and an extensive bibliography, Silent Players is not simply a reference book or encyclopedic recitation of facts culled from the pages of fan magazines and trade periodicals. It contains a series of insightful portraits of the characters who symbolize an original and pioneering era in motion history and explores their unique talents and extraordinary private lives. Slide offers a potentially revisionist view of many of the stars he profiles, repudiating the status of some and restoring to fame others who have slipped from view. He personally interviewed many of his subjects and knew several of them intimately, putting him in a distinctive position to tell their true stories.

Study of the relationship between modernity and cinema, with an emphasis on how early-20th-century films represented technology and urbanization.

Winner of the Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award for 2008Sanctuary 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.

The first study by an acclaimed American scholar of the artistic interdependencies between the German and the Hollywood cinema in the 1920s

This work identifies 436 American silent films released between 1909 and 1929 that engaged the issues of militant labor and revolutionary radicalism. It begins with an extended introduction and analytical chapters that investigate the ways in which the American motion picture industry portrayed the interrelationships between labor radicals, exploitative capitalists, socialist idealists and Bolsheviks during this critical twenty-year period. Each entry contains a detailed plot synopsis, citations to primary sources, coding indicating the presence or absence of 14 predominant discernible biases (including anti- and pro-capitalism, socialism, revolution and labor), and subject coding keyed to 64 related terms and concepts (including agitators, Bolshevism, bombs, female radicals, militias, mobs, political refugees, and strikes). These statistical data included in the filmography are presented in a series of charts and are fully integrated into the historical-critical text. Total number and percentage statistics for the instances of these coded biases and traits are given per year, per era, and overall.

From one of America's most renowned film scholars: a revelatory, perceptive, and highly readable look at the greatest silent film stars -- not those few who are fully appreciated and understood, like Chaplin, Keaton, Gish, and Garbo, but those who have been misperceived, unfairly dismissed, or forgotten. Here is Valentino,'the Sheik,'who was hardly the effeminate lounge lizard he's been branded as; Mary Pickford, who couldn't have been further from the adorable little creature with golden ringlets that was her film persona; Marion Davies, unfairly pilloried in Citizen Kane; the original'Phantom'and'Hunchback,'Lon Chaney; the beautiful Talmadge sisters, Norma and Constance. Here are the great divas, Pola Negri and Gloria Swanson; the great flappers, Colleen Moore and Clara Bow; the great cowboys, William S. Hart and Tom Mix; and the great lover, John Gilbert. Here, too, is the quintessential slapstick comedienne, Mabel Normand, with her Keystone Kops; the quintessential all-American hero, Douglas Fairbanks; and, of course, the quintessential all-American dog, Rin-Tin-Tin.This is the first book to anatomize the major silent players, reconstruct their careers, and give us a sense of what those films, those stars, and that Hollywood were all about. An absolutely essential text for anyone seriously interested in movies, and, with more than three hundred photographs, as much a treat to look at as it is to read.

The latest offering from the Reference Guides to the World's Cinema series, this critical survey of key films, actors, directors, and screenwriters during the silent era of the American cinema offers a broad-ranging portrait of the motion picture production of silent film. Detailed but concise alphabetical entries include over 100 film titles and 150 personnel. An introductory chapter explores the early growth of the new silent medium while the final chapter of this encyclopedic study examines the sophistication of the silent cinema. These two chapters outline film history from its beginnings until the perfection of synchronized sound, and reflect upon the themes and techniques established with the silent cinema that continued into the sound era through modern times.The annotated entries, alphabetically arranged by film title or personnel, include brief bibliographies and filmographies. An appendix lists secondary but important movies and their creators. Film and popular culture scholars will appreciate the vast amount of information that has been culled from various sources and that builds upon the increased studies and research of the past ten years.

Marion Shilling began her career as a silent film ingenue for MGM and went on to play heroines in Westerns of the 1930s. Stage actress Esther Muir made the transition from Broadway to Hollywood just as talkies became popular. Hugh Allan was a leading man in the last years of the silents only to leave the film business in 1930 because of the uncertainty surrounding his transition to sound films and his disgust with studio politics. These three performers and thirteen others (Barbara Barondess, Thomas Beck, Mary Brian, Pauline Curley, Billie Dove, Edith Fellows, Rose Hobart, William Janney, Marcia Mae Jones, Barbara Kent, Anita Page, Lupita Tovar, and Barbara Weeks) reminisce here about Hollywood and the movie business as it made the transition.

From Kevin Brownlow, cinema historian and discoverer of lost films, here is the first full-scale exploration of a vital and now almost forgotten chapter of American moviemaking: the response of early producers of the decades before World War I. All the issues that torment America today were rampant in the silent-film era: crime, poverty, alcohol, drugs, racial and ethnic prejudice, epidemics, and the controversies over birth control, abortion, and the death penalty. And there were others that persist today but were then even more explosive: sexual mores, government and police corruption, prison conditions, immigration, and strife between capital and labor. Although many early moviemakers ignored harsh realities, choosing to depict a society shielded by a “mask of innocence,” others went behind that façade, fighting the ever-present censors and producing films that made even the most sheltered moviegoer aware of deep rents in the country's social fabric. Some films were exploitative, some serious, but together they add up to a revelation of the dark side of American life—a revelation startling to us today because it was later, in the era of the Hays Office, so thoroughly ignored, indeed denied, by Hollywood. Broken Blossoms, The Crowd, Humoresque, Regeneration: these films that have survived and become classics are, in these pages, studied in their historical context. And although a tragic number of other films have vanished, nearly all are reclaimed from oblivion by Mr. Brownlow's brilliant feat of restoration and descriptive “reconstruction.” Here, never again to be forgotten, are The Fall of the Romanoffs, The Racket, Those Who Dance, and dozens of others. With this remarkable book, Kevin Brownlow completes the panoramic trilogy that began with The Parade's Gone By… and continued with The War, the West, and the Wilderness. Like its predecessors, Behind the Mask of Innocence is an essential work of silent-film history, certain to become a standard reference; but it is more—at once a surprising portrait of a time not unlike our own and a powerful demonstration of the way in which a popular art form can reveal a society to itself.

The entrepreneur of phonograph concerts and motion-picture programs Lyman H. Howe was the leading traveling exhibitor of his time and the exemplar of an important but until now little examined aspect of American popular culture. This work, with its numerous and lively illustrations, uses his career to explore the world of itinerant showmen, who exhibited all motion pictures seen outside large cities during the 1890s and early 1900s. They frequently built cultural alliances with genteel city dwellers or conservative churchgoers and in later years favored'high-class'topics appealing to audiences uncomfortable with the plebeian nickelodeons. Bridging the fields of American studies and film history, the book reveals the remarkable sophistication with which exhibitors created their elaborate, evening-length programs to convey powerful ideological messages. Whether depicting the Spanish-American War, the 1900 Paris Exposition, or British colonialism in action, Howe's'cinema of reassurance'had many parallels with the music of John Philip Sousa.Originally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Although cinema was invented in the mid-1890s, it was a decade more before the concept of a “film spectator” emerged. As the cinema began to separate itself from the commercial entertainments in whose context films initially had been shown—vaudeville, dime museums, fairgrounds—a particular concept of its spectator was developed on the level of film style, as a means of predicting the reception of films on a mass scale. In Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen offers an original perspective on American film by tying the emergence of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the public sphere.Hansen builds a critical framework for understanding the cultural formation of spectatorship, drawing on the Frankfurt School's debates on mass culture and the public sphere. Focusing on exemplary moments in the American silent era, she explains how the concept of the spectator evolved as a crucial part of the classical Hollywood paradigm—as one of the new industry's strategies to integrate ethnically, socially, and sexually differentiated audiences into a modern culture of consumption. In this process, Hansen argues, the cinema might also have provided the conditions of an alternative public sphere for particular social groups, such as recent immigrants and women, by furnishing an intersubjective context in which they could recognize fragments of their own experience.After tracing the emergence of spectatorship as an institution, Hansen pursues the question of reception through detailed readings of a single film, D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and of the cult surrounding a single star, Rudolph Valentino. In each case the classical construction of spectatorship is complicated by factors of gender and sexuality, crystallizing around the fear and desire of the female consumer.Babel and Babylon recasts the debate on early American cinema—and by implication on American film as a whole. It is a model study in the field of cinema studies, mediating the concerns of recent film theory with those of recent film history.

Here, from one of today's leading authorities on film history, is the story, told brilliantly and for the first time, of the pioneering movie makers who as early as 1905 traveled beyond the studio stages to make feature films on location—and in so doing recorded the real history and real life of their time. The War, the West, and the Wilderness is the result of more than a decade of passionate research by Kevin Brownlow, whose last book, The Parade's Gone By… (hailed by Charles Champlin as “the definitive work on the silent era”) is regarded as a classic history of early motion pictures. His new book is alive with the voices of the film-makers themselves, in their logbooks, in their letters and diaries, in their firsthand accounts of their adventurous journeys and cinematic innovations, and—even more immediate—in Brownlow's interviews with cameramen, director's, lighting technicians, and actors who relive those days, taking us with them to the Great War, to the West, ad into the Wilderness. It is the triumph of this book to reconstruct the dramatic moments when these men and women contrived, against ordinary odds, to bring to movie audiences for the first time, the look, the feel—the actuality—of large events and distant places, from the great battles of World War I to the South Seas with Jack London aboard the Shark, and the gold rush in Tonopah, Nevada.