A collection of essays which concentrate upon the most important aspects of the silent cinema, opening up parallels with the postmodern cinema of the present day. Subjects discussed include the colour processes of silent cinema, choreographic styles of acting, sound accompaniment and reception.

Part 1 The materiality of silent cinema: the color of nitrate - some factual observations on tinting and toning manuals for silent films, P. Cherchi Usai; the sound of silents, N. King; Kuleshov's experiments and the new anthropology of the actor, M. Yampolsky. Part 2 The periodicity and nationality of silent cinema: "now you see it, now you don't" - the temporality of the cinema of attractions, T. Gunning; pre-classical American cinema - its changing mode of film production, C. Musser; booming the business - the historical specificity of early French cinema, R. Abel; cinema as anti-theater - actresses and female audiences in Wilhelmian Germany, H. Schlupmann. Part 3 Theorizing a cultural history of silent cinema - Dickens, Griffith, and film theory today, R. Altman; female power in the serial-queen melodrama - the etiology of an anomaly, B. Singer; Russia, 1913 - cinema in the cultural landscape, Y. Tsivian. Part 4 Intertexuality and reception in silent cinema - Dante's "Inferno" and "Caesar's Ghost" - intertextuality and conditions of reception in early American cinema, W. Uricchio, R.E. Pearson; "the finest in the loop" - motion picture exhibition in Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1905-1928, M. Carbine; the perils of pleasure? - fan magazine discourse as women's commodified culture in the 1920s, G. Studlar.