Silent Cinema, an Introduction (Distributed for the British Film Institute)

This revised guide to silent film studies contains two new chapters that present an analysis of colour technology and aesthetics and look at how silent films are saved, restored and made accessible via archives. Aided by new material, it is a survey of the first 30 years in the history of film.

Published for the first time in English in 1994 as "Burning Passions," Cherchi Usai's groundbreaking guide to silent film studies has become the indispensable textbook for scholars, researchers, and archivists. This much-awaited sequel to the first edition has been extensively rewritten and updated in order to reflect the spectacular development witnessed by the discipline in the past few years. In addition, two new chapters have been added for this edition. The first is an extensive analysis of color technology and aesthetics, from hand-coloring to the dawn of Technicolor. The second is a detailed account of how silent films are saved from destruction, restored, and made accessible by film archives. A number of new illustrations, tables, bibliographical references and historical sources add additional value to this fundamental survey of the first thirty years in the history of the moving image.