Essay

When I was working on the Hollywood TV series in the 1970s, I had a challenge from the outset; how to persuade an audience which had contempt for silent films not to switch off. I took a risk: first I showed a rescue from a burning building, made at the beginning of cinema and symbolic of what … [Read more...] about The Fire Brigade

Skinner’s Dress Suit was a well-known commodity by the time Universal Pictures reimagined it for comedian Reginald Denny. The character of Skinner was the brainchild of American author Henry Irving Dodge, whose “Skinner’s Dress Suit” was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post before it was … [Read more...] about Skinner’s Dress Suit

Space travel was truly a visionary concept when Jules Verne first introduced it in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and it continued to attract readers when H.G. Wells explored the idea further a few years later in 1901’s First Men in the Moon. Although both authors were fascinated with … [Read more...] about A Trip to Mars

German cinema between the wars—in the wake of the Versailles Treaty and the crippling debt that came with it, the impending spike in inflation, and the trauma of military defeat—was often populated with fallen men, particularly vulnerable to the forces of modernity and inadequately equipped to … [Read more...] about Sylvester

It's yet another under-explored, under-restored arm of silent film history—Soviet Ukrainian cinema, at least the years before Oleksandr Dovzhenko began making his distinctly regional films in the late 1920s. Soviet film was, even into the 1980s, always unwittingly conflicted about its provincial … [Read more...] about Arrest Warrant

In March 1926, while India was still under colonial rule, an Indian silent feature achieved a rare feat: it screened for nine months at London’s Philharmonic Hall, with the run extended for three more days at the last minute because of overwhelming demand. The film was Prem Sanyas, or The Light of … [Read more...] about Prem Sanyas

Penrod and Sam is a series of vignettes about a typical white American boy, his best pal, and the neighborhood kids who join him in playing Army games and exercising their vivid imaginations. There’s a mean next-door neighbor with an equally nasty father, a cute girl who lives across the street, and … [Read more...] about Penrod and Sam

The image of Salomé as a Biblical temptress with John the Baptist’s head on a platter has stirred artists’ imaginations for centuries, from Titian and Caravaggio to Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss, and from Gloria Swanson descending the stairs in Sunset Blvd. to Rita Hayworth’s fiery dance of … [Read more...] about Salomé