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Essays, interviews, programme notes and archives about early cinema, from the festivals, critics and archives that publish them. Every entry opens on the publisher's own site.
Essay
Essay
Released 100 years ago, Lon Chaney's grotesque yet sympathetic turn as The Phantom of the Opera marked a primordial moment in Hollywood history when melodrama morphed into horror and Universal noticed an appetite for monsters.
Video
This talk took place on April 7, 2025, as part of Type@Cooper's Lubalin Lecture Series. The series archive is made possible by the generous support of TypeCulture. Until the advent of talking pictures in the early 1930s, cinema had been referred to as silent. To compensate for the absence of sound, films were punctuated by numerous ‘intertitles’ or ‘cards’ containing a fixed text, interspersed among the sequences of moving images. These intertitles transcribed the dialogue or provided written information deemed necessary for the action to unfold or for a narrative situation to be properly understood.
Essay
Happy 100th anniversary to the class of '25, from The Gold Rush to Battleship Potemkin.
Essay
This is a guest post for Silent London by Sean Crose, author of Catholic Girl: The Life and Times of Mabel Normand, published by BearManor Media.