Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This is a collection of essays which focus upon the most important aspects of the silent cinema, opening up parallels with the postmodern cinema of our own times. Subjects discussed include the colour processes, choreograhic styles of acting, sound accompaniment, reception, the development from cinema of attractions to narrative film, national cinemas and relations with other forms of mass culture.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. 1)
• The Materiality of Silent Cinema
• The Color of Nitrate: Some Factual Observations on Tinting and Toning Manuals for Silent Films (p. 21)
• The Sound of Silents (p. 31)
• Kuleshov's Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor (p. 45)
• The Periodicity and Nationality of Silent Cinema
• "Now You See It, Now You Don't": The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions (p. 71)
• Pre-Classical American Cinema: Its Changing Modes of Film Production (p. 85)
• Booming the Film Business: The Historical Specificity of Early French Cinema (p. 109)
• Cinema as Anti-Theater: Actresses and Female Audiences in Wilhelmianian Germany (p. 125)
• Theorizing a Cultural History of Silent Cinema
• Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today (p. 145)
• Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly (p. 163)
• Russia, 1913: Cinema in the Cultural Landscape (p. 194)
• Intertextuality and Reception in Silent Cinema
• Dante's Inferno and Caesar's Ghost: Intertextuality and Conditions of Reception in Early American Cinema (p. 217)
• "The Finest Outside the Loop": Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1905-1928 (p. 234)
• The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women's Commodified Culture in the 1920s (p. 263)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 299)
• Contributors (p. 307)
• Index (p. 309)