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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.
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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.
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Outtakes from F.W. Murnau's 1927 classic, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. This comes with commentary from John Bailey.
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C-SPAN video on LoC paper prints and early cinema preservation.
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YouTube video from the BFI channel on early colour in silent cinema.
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Video feature on restoring Hitchcock’s silent films (The Pleasure Garden through Blackmail).
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Early cinema short preserved and shared by the BFI National Archive on YouTube.
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1998 documentary about the life of Louise Brooks, created by Hugh Munro Neely. Narrated by Shirley MacLaine and featuring numerous interviews with friends and relatives of the legendary star, it also contains excerpts from many of her films including her first on-screen appearance.
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Review by Kyle Westphal
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Archive
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Cara Marisa Deleon explores the tension between the film’s progressive ideals and its deeply patriarchal treatment of its female characters
Distributor
The film was restored by Blackhawk Films in 2024 from a first generation 35mm safety print and a 16mm dupe negative. It is presented with two different scores: an original piano composition by Antonio Coppola and an original orchestral score by Alloy Orchestra, recorded live in 2013.
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David Bordwell - Observations on Film Arr
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Bob knows what’s up
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By Mordaunt Hall. Sept. 24, 1927