Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

100 Silent Films provides an authoritative and accessible history of silent cinema through one hundred of its most interesting and significant films. As Bryony Dixon contends, silent cinema is not a genre; it is the first 35 years of film history, a complex negotiation between art and commerce and a union of creativity and technology. At its most grand - on the big screen with a full orchestral accompaniment - it is magnificent, permitting a depth of emotional engagement rarely found in other fields of cinema. Silent film was hugely popular in its day, and its success enabled the development of large-scale film production in the United States and Europe. It was the start of our fascination with the moving image as a disseminator of information and as mass entertainment with its consequent celebrity culture.

The digital revolution in the last few years and the restoration and reissue of archival treasures have contributed to a huge resurgence of interest in silent cinema. Bryony Dixon's illuminating guide introduces a wide range of films of the silent period (1895-1930), including classics such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), The General (1926), Metropolis (1927), Sunrise (1927) and Pandora's Box (1928), alongside more unexpected choices, and represents major genres and directors of the period - Griffith, Keaton, Chaplin, Murnau, Sjöström, Dovzhenko and Eisenstein - together with an introductory overview and useful filmographic and bibliographic information.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Dixon (silent film curator, BFI National Archive) does more than just collect and marshal material on "100 silent films." She details those wonderfully strange documents of a bygone era, in which an art form emerged out of the negotiation of technology and creativity. Taking on films in alphabetical order, this guide identifies a vast, diverse, and provocative set of silent films from around the world. The book's importance and value reside in the author's concise articulation of each film's historical and cultural context. Films vary widely--from Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin and Luis Bunuel's Un Chien andalou to the great comic works of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd--and fascinating oddities like Ladislas Starewicz's The Cameraman's Revenge, with its animated insects, and Abel Gance's epic Napoleon, with its triptych finale, open windows into the wide, wild world of silent film. This tidy, precise, impressively succinct guide features stills of many (but not all) of the films. Dixon acknowledges that some favorites may not appear here (where are Felix the Cat and the Fleischer brothers?), but she offers enough to whet the curiosity and to delight. Jolly good show! Summing Up: Highly recommended. All collections. T. Lindvall Virginia Wesleyan College