Silent Features: The Development of Silent Feature Films 1914-1934

Much has been made of the importance of silent films in cinematic history, but until now there has been no truly international analysis of these films. In Silent Features, editor Steve Neale brings together a diverse group of internationally known scholars to reflect on  silent films and their diverse stylistic, generic, and structural characteristics, as well as the national, historical, and industrial contexts from which they emerged.

The essays here focus on fifteen feature-length silent films and two silent serial features. Arranged chronologically and illustrated throughout with frame stills, the collection provides detailed accounts of a wide array of films produced in a number of different countries between the early 1910s and the early 1930s, and it focuses principally on films that while well-known, have rarely been discussed in detail. Silent Features will not only appeal to scholars and students of film history, but also to lay readers around the world.

Steve Neale is professor emeritus of film studies at the University of Exeter and academic director of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.