100 Essential Silent Film Comedies

This book celebrates 100 significant silent film comedies from around the globe, including The Circus, The General, Safety Last, and Steamboat Bill Jr. Each entry contains information about the cast and crew, production details, DVD availability, and an explanation of why the film is essential viewing.

The silent film era featured some of the most revered names of on-screen comic performance, from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, and Laurel & Hardy. Besides these giants of cinema, however, there are other silent era performers—both leading actors and supporting players—who left an enduring legacy of laughter. In The 100 Greatest Silent Film Comedians, James Roots ranks the greatest performers based on a scorecard that measures each comic’s humor, timelessness, originality, and teamwork. Far more than just a listing, this is an idiosyncratic and entertaining review of the men and women who created the golden age of comedy. As a critic and deaf viewer, Roots brings a truly unique perspective to the evaluation of these performers and their work. He has viewed thousands of silent comedies and offers some assessments that run contrary to the standard list of performers. While many obvious names are placed in the top echelon, the author also champions performers who have been neglected, in part because their work has not been as visible. Each entry includes a filmography a scorecard an evaluation of the artist’s overall work an assessment of representative films DVD availability With the increased availability of films on DVD, as well as Internet access, more and more silent performers are being discovered by film fans. Supplemented by an appendix of comedians who missed the cut, as well as an annotated bibliography, The 100 Greatest Silent Film Comedians will be an invaluable resource to anyone wanting to know more about the brilliant entertainers of the silent era.

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.

An encyclopedic look at silent film comedy that covers all the greats, from the Keystone Kops to Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton, as well as myriad lesser-known figures. Readers will delight in reacquainting themselves with the movies that first made audiences laugh.

This illustrated compilation identifies people, studios, technical companies, and terms associated with silent film comedy from about 1890-1930. More than 300 entries are biographical, including actors, studio and other corporate executives, directors and other technical personnel, inventors, etc. These sketches usually include birth and death dates and a summary of the contributions of the person to the genre; some entries include a photograph, selected filmography, and movie-magazine excerpts. For the more than 100 entries on studios and companies there is a brief history, emphasizing the firm's contribution to the development of silent film comedy. The third category of entries is quite a miscellany, including Blacks in Silent Film Comedies, Edison Kinetogram (a bulletin announcing new Edison films), Keystone Kops, Nickelodeons.

This volume can rightfully be called "a film school in a single book." Investigating and analyzing the elements and concepts of motion picture creation, this book looks closely at 25 films that represent a wide range of styles and subjects. Although most motion picture viewers have seen numerous movies in their lifetime, few in the general public have a firm and deep understanding of how motion pictures are created, or a grasp of the intricacies of cinematic storytelling and content. By presenting 25 films, American and international, Hollywood and independent, this book educates and enlightens readers about the details of the motion picture creation process. Some readers will have viewed certain films in the volume, but many will be introduced to major cinematic works within the canon of great and essential films for the very first time. Topics explored include animation, period films, editing, directorial style, and non-linear cinematic structure. Readers will learn about the origin of the jump cut in Breathless, time and space in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and the editing in Orson Welles's essay film F is for Fake. The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures: 25 Movies to Make You Film Literate will educate the novice and avid moviegoer alike about the inner workings of this dynamic, popular, and culturally significant art form.

Harry Langdon was a silent screen comedian unlike any other. Slower in pace, more studied in movement, and quirkier in nature, Langdon challenged the comic norm by offering comedies that were frequently edgy and often surreal. After a successful run of short comedies with Mack Sennett, Langdon became his own producer at First National Pictures, making such features as Tramp Tramp Tramp, The Strong Man, and Long Pants before becoming his own director for Three's a Crowd, The Chaser, and Heart Trouble. In The Silent Films of Harry Langdon (1923-1928), film historian James Neibaur examines Langdon's strange, fascinating work during the silent era, when he made landmark films that were often ahead of their time. Extensively reviewing the comedian's silent screen work film by film, Neibaur makes the case that Langdon should be accorded the same lofty status as his contemporaries: Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. With fascinating insights into the work of an under-appreciated artist, this book will be of interest to both fans and scholars of silent cinema.