New Silent Cinema

With the success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanavicius’sThe Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical field of visual repetitions and affective currents that wind their way through 20th and 21st century visual cultures. Contributors bring together several fields of research, including early and silent cinema studies, experimental and new media, historiography and archive theory, and studies of media ontology and epistemology. Chapters link the methods, concerns, and concepts of early and silent film studies as they have flourished over the last quarter century to the most recent developments in digital culture—from YouTube to 3D—recasting this contemporary phenomenon in popular culture and new media against key debates and concepts in silent film scholarship. An interview with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin closes out the collection.

Paul Flaig is Lecturer of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. His articles have appeared inCinema Journal, Screen, a: the journal of culture and the unconscious,The Brecht Year Book as well as several edited collections.

Katherine Groo is Lecturer of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen and Co-Director of the George Washington Wilson Centre for Visual Culture. Her articles have appeared inCinema Journal, Framework, and Frames.