Film in the Silent Era

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Abel, Richard, ed.  Silent Film.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Abel, Richard.  The Red- Rooster Scare: Making American Cinema, 1900-1910.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Abel, Richard.  Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.   

Abel, Richard.  “‘Zip!-Zam!-Zowie!’: A New Take on Institutional American Cinema’s History before 1915.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (Abingdon) 29 (December 2009): 421–432.

Addison, Heather. “”Actor Denied Straight Nose”: Louis Wolheim and the Gendered Practice of Plastic Surgery in Silent-Era Hollywood.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 4 (2019): 1-20.

Allen, Robert C.  Vaudeville and Film, 1895-1915: A Study in Media Interaction.  New York: Arno Press, 1980.

Anderson Wagner, Kristen. Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 

Andree, Courtney. “Broncho Billy and the Problem of the Male Movie Fan.” Film History: An International Journal 26, no. 3 (2014): 57-83.

Ankerich, Michael G.  Broken Silence: Conversations with Twenty-three Silent Film Stars.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992.

Askari, Kaveh.  “Moving Pictures before Motion Pictures: The Pictorial Tradition and American Media Aesthetics, 1890-1920.”  PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2005.  

Auerbach, Jonathan.  Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations.  Berkley: University of California Press, 2007.

Azlant, Edward. “Screenwriting for the Early Silent Film: Forgotten Pioneers, 1897-1911.” Film History 9, no. 3 (1997): 228–256.

Basinger, Jeanine.  Silent Story.  Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999.

Bean, Jennifer. “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body.”  Camera Obscura 16, no. 3 (2001): 8–57. 

Bean, Jennifer M., Anupampa Kapse, and Laura Horak, eds. Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014.

Bean, Shawn C.  The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.

Bilton, Alan. Silent Film Comedy and American Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Bowser, Eileen.  The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915.  History of the American Cinema, Volume 2.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Bowser, Pearl, and Louise Spence.  Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Brownlow, Kevin.  Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime- Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era.  New York: Knopf, 1990.

Butler, Ivan.  Silent Magic: Rediscovering the Silent Film Era.  New York: Ungar, 1988.

Card, James.  Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film.  New York: Knopf, 1994. 

Chávez, Ernesto. “”Ramon is not one of these”: Race and Sexuality in the Construction of Silent Film Actor Ramón Novarro’s Star Image.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011): 520-544. 

Cohen, Paula M. Silent Film & the Triumph of the American Myth. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2001.

Curtis, Scott, et. al., eds.  The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018.

Drew, William M.  The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s.  New York: Scarecrow Press, 2010.

Enstad, Nan. “Dressed for Adventure: Working Women and Silent Movie Serials in the 1910s.” Feminist Studies 21, no. 1 (1995): 67–90.

Everson, William K.  American Silent Film.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Finamore, Michelle Tolini. Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Friedman, Ryan Jay.   The Movies as a World Force: American Silent Cinema and the Utopian Imagination.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019.

Frykholm, Joel.  George Kleine and American Cinema: The Movie Business and Film Culture in the Silent Era.  New York: Palgrave, 2015.

Frymus, Agata.  Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020.

Fusco, Katherine. “Squashing the Bookworm: Manly Attention and Male Reading in Silent Film.” Modernism/modernity 22, no. 4 (2015): 627-650.

Garcia, Desirée J. “Subversive Sounds: Ethnic Spectatorship and Boston’s Nickelodeon Theatres, 1907–1914.” Film History: An International Journal 19, no. 3 (2007): 213-227.

Glick, Josh. “Mixed Messages: D.W. Griffith and the Black Press, 1916-1931.” Film History: An International Journal 23, no. 2 (2011): 174-195.

Graff, Peter. “Lobbyology and the Role of Lobby Spectacles in Silent-Film Exhibition.” Film History: An International Journal 30, no. 4 (2018): 48-83.

Grant, Kevin.  Roots of Film Noir: Precursors from the Silent Era to the 1940s.  Jefferson: McFarland, 2022.

Green, Denise N. “Fashion and Fearlessness in the Wharton Studio’s Silent Film Serials, 1914–1918.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 60, no. 1 (2019): 83-115.

Grieveson, Lee and Peter Krämer, eds. The Silent Cinema Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Guiralt, Carmen. “Self-Censorship in Hollywood during the Silent Era: A Woman of Affairs (1928) by Clarence Brown.” Film History 28, no. 2 (2016): 81–113.

Gunckel, Colin. “Ambivalent Si(gh)tings: Stardom and Silent Film in Mexican America.” Film History: An International Journal 29, no. 1 (2017): 110-139.

Hansen, Miriam.  Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Hennefeld, Maggie. “Women’s Hats and Silent Film Spectatorship: Between Ostrich Plume and Moving Image.” Film History 28, no. 3 (2016): 24-53.

Hennefeld, Maggie. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Jancovich, Mark, and Shane Brown.  “Most Stories of this Type: Genre, Horror, and Mystery in the Silent Cinema.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 42:2 (2022): 168-190.

Keil, Charlie and Shelley Stamp, eds. Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

King, Rob. “‘Uproarious Inventions’: The Keystone Film Company, Modernity, and the Art of the Motor.” Film History: An International Journal 19, no. 3 (2007): 271-291. 

Kirby, Lynne. “Gender and Advertising in American Silent Film: From Early Cinema to the Crowd.” Discourse 13:2 (1991): 3–20.

Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

Koszarski, Richard.  An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1925-1928. New York: Scribner’s, 1990.

Louvish, Simon. Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett. New York: Faber & Faber, 2004.

Lupack, Barbara Tepa.  The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts.  Lanham: Lexington Books, 2024.

Maciak, Philip.  The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Massa, Steve. Slaptstick Divas: The Women of Silent Film Comedy. Bear Manor Media, 2017.

Maurice, Alice. “The Essence of Motion: Figure, Frame, and the Racial Body in Early Silent Cinema.” The Moving Image 1, no. 2 (2001): 124–145.

Musser, Charles. “Why Did Negroes Love Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer?: Melodrama, Blackface and Cosmopolitan Theatrical Culture.” Film History: An International Journal 23, no. 2 (2011): 196-222.

Olsson, Jan. “Pressing Matters: Media Crusades before the Nickelodeons.” Film History: An International Journal 27, no. 2 (2015): 105-139.

Petersen, Christina Gail. “Paradise for the Young: Youth Spectatorship in the American Silent Film Era, 1904–1933.” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2010. 

Pratt, George.  Spellbound in the Darkness: A History of the Silent Film.  Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973.

Prigge, Matthew J. “Dangers in the Dark: Motion Picture Reform in Progressive-Era Milwaukee.” Film History: An International Journal 24, no. 1 (2012): 74-81.

Read, Paul. “‘Unnatural Colours’: An Introduction to Colouring Techniques in Silent Era Movies.” Film History 21, no. 1 (2009): 9-46.

Ross, Steven. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Serna, Laura Isabel. “Atmosphere: Mexican Extras and the Production of Race in Silent Hollywood.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 63, no. 1 (2023): 100-123.

Shull, Michael Slade. Radicalism in American Silent Films, 1909-1929: A Filmography and History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. 

Slater, Thomas J.  June Mathis: The Rise and Fall of a Silent Film Visionary. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2025.

Slide, Anthony. The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors. Lanham, M.D: Scarecrow Press, 1996. 

Sloan, Kay.  The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Smith, Andrew B. Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003.

Stanciu, Cristina. “Making Americans: Spectacular Nationalism, Americanization, and Silent Film.” Journal of American Studies 56:1 (2022): 1-37.

Sullivan, Sara. “Child Audiences in America’s Nickelodeons, 1900-1915: The Keith/Albee Managers’ Reports.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 30:2 (2010): 155-168.

Wagner, Kristen Anderson. Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in American Silent Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 

Whissel, Kristen.  Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology and the Silent Cinema.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Wlaschin, Ken, and Stephen Bottomore. “Moving Picture Fiction of the Silent Era, 1895–1928.” Film History: An International Journal 20, no. 2 (2008): 217-260.

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