Flaig Paul - New Silent Cinema

With the success of Martin Scorseses Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanaviciuss The Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical field of visual repetitions and affective currents that wind their way through twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual cultures. Contributors bring together several fields of research, including early and silent cinema studies, experimental and new media, historical and archive theories, and studies of media ontology and epistemology. Chapters link the methods, concerns, and concepts of early and silent film studies as they have flourished over the last quarter century to the most recent developments in digital culture, recasting this contemporary phenomenon against key debates and concepts in silent film scholarship. An interview with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin closes the collection.

Paul Flaig is Lecturer of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. His articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Screen, a: the journal of culture and the unconscious, The Brecht Year Book as well as several edited collections.

Katherine Groo is Lecturer of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen and Co-Director of the George Washington Wilson Centre for Visual Culture. Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Framework, and Frames.

Previously published in the AFI Film Readers series

Edited by Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe

Psychoanalysis and Cinema

E. Ann Kaplan

Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body

Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog

Sound Theory/Sound Practice

Rick Altman

Film Theory Goes to the Movies

Jim Collins, Ava Preacher Collins, and Hilary Radner

Theorizing Documentary

Michael Renov

Black American Cinema

Manthia Diawara

Disney Discourse

Eric Smoodin

Classical Hollywood Comedy

Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunovska Karnick

The Persistence of History

Vivian Sobchack

The Revolution Wasnt Televised

Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin

Black Women Film and Video Artists

Jacqueline Bobo

Home, Exile, Homeland

Hamid Naficy

Violence and American Cinema

J. David Slocum

Masculinity

Peter Lehman

Westerns

Janet Walker

Authorship and Film

David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger

New Media

Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell

East European Cinemas

Anik Imre

Landscape and Film

Martin Lefebvre

European Film Theory

Trifonova Temenuga

Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies

Warren Buckland

World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives

Nataa uroviov and Kathleen Newman

Documentary Testimonies

Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker

Slapstick Comedy

Rob King and Tom Paulus

The Epic Film in World Culture

Robert Burgoyne

Arnheim for Film and Media Studies

Scott Higgins

Color and the Moving Image

Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins

Ecocinema Theory and Practice

Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt

Media Authorship

Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner

Pervasive Animation

Suzanne Buchan

The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture

Tom Brown and Beln Vidal

Cognitive Media Theory

Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham

Hollywood Puzzle Films

Warren Buckland

Endangering Science Fiction Film

Sean Redmond and Leon Marvell

EDITED BY

PAUL FLAIG AND KATHERINE GROO

First published 2016

by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

New silent cinema / edited by Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo.
pages cm (AFI film readers)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Motion picturesHistory and criticism.2.Silent filmsHistory and criticism.3.Motion picture filmPreservation.4.Experimental filmsHistory and cricism.5.Motion picture industryTechnological innovations.6.Mass mediaTechnological innovations.7.Digital mediaHistory21st century.8.Motion picture producers and directorsInterviews.I.Flaig, Paul, editor. II.Groo, Katherine, editor.
PN1995.N389 2015
791.4309dc23
2015010356

ISBN: 978-0-415-73525-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-73527-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-81929-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Spectrum

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

paul flaig and katherine groo

katherine groo

brian price

an interview with paolo cherchi usai

catherine russell

jonah corne

yiman wang, university of california

an interview with professor rick altman

constance balides

joshua yumibe

paul flaig

jennifer lynn peterson

brianne cohen

brian r. jacobson

james leo cahill

rob king

a conversation with guy maddin about sances

paul flaig and katherine groo

At the 2012 Academy Awards, two films dominated the competition, both of which summoned the specters of silent cinema. Martin Scorseses Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanaviciuss The Artist (2011) won four Oscars each, with the latter congratulated in Hollywoods trade press as the first silent movie in 83 years to claim [best picture]. Beyond their box office and industry successes, both works offer their own allegories for how we might remember films of the silent past amid the ascendancy of digital forms of production, exhibition, and restoration. Hugo illustrates the importance of early film preservation by turning to the figure of an elderly Georges Mlis, haunted by his prior cinematic achievements; The Artists title character, former movie idol George Valentin, embraces the future of sound film through the redeeming love of a talkies starlet. While Scorsese looks longingly to cinemas past through 3D glasses, Hazanavicius tells his Hollywood tale through the anachronistic conventions of 1920s American melodrama. Both films further share a cinephilic fondness for citing the genres, icons, and attractions of other moving-image eras.