Steve Neale (ed.), Silent Features: The Development of Silent Feature Films 1914–1934

Abstract

In its basic outline, Silent Features: The Development of Silent Feature Films 1914–1934 is as its title suggests: a collection of essays on fifteen features and two serials from the global silent era, examining two decades of stylistic, generic and structural characteristics. Yet its exclusively silent focus has resulted in a unique and noteworthy volume. Rather than a conventional overview of early feature filmmaking, this is a work with a corrective impulse: to highlight underexamined, and in some cases little-known, examples of such films in all their diversity. As Steve Neale’s introductory remarks on the multivalent origins of the term ‘feature’ suggest, the emergence of longer films was a matter of extreme complexity, irreducible to the story of a single evolving entity. Accordingly the collected essays historicize multi-reel production with a pronounced emphasis on specific industrial moments, sociopolitical contexts and aesthetic traditions. Teleological explanations are eschewed, and variations, discontinuities and transnational exchanges are stressed – even though major American and European productions still predominate (perhaps because all but one of the contributors are based in the UK or USA).1