映画の初期には音声のない映像だけの時代がありました。たった数分の世界初の映画群から熟成期の名作、庶民が楽しんだニッケルオデオンの劇場から大映画館、どたばた喜劇から前衛作品…サイレント時代が誇る豊かな芸術性と多様性を一望します。黎明期を振りかえると見えてくるのは、新しい文化産業の原点のみならず、今日に脈々と受け継がれる想像力や革新の伝統です。主な作品や製作者にも言及しつつ、動画技術が開発された1890年代半ばからトーキー映画が登場する1920年代末期までを鮮やかに描き出します。
   

• Covers the entire span of the silent era, from the period of early cinema to Hollywood's classical age
• Takes a global approach, examining the development of cinema in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America
• Pays special attention to the pivotal contributions of women and minority filmmakers the world over, including figures long-forgotten by film history

  
Encompassing the thirty-five year span between the initial development of film technology in the mid-1890s and the adoption of synchronized sound in the late 1920s, the cinema's silent era is both one of the most important epochs of film history and one of the most misunderstood within the popular imagination. In this brief and readable account, these formative decades come vividly to life.
   
Covering the full scope of the silent era-from the invention of motion pictures to the rise of the Hollywood studios-and touching on films and filmmakers from every corner of the globe, Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction offers a window into film's first years as a worldwide entertainment phenomenon. From groundbreaking early shorts to the masterpieces of the cinema's classical era, from street-corner nickelodeons to grand movie palaces, from slapstick to the avant-garde, the silent era's artistic abundance and global variety are here put on full display. In the story of silent film, we see not just the origins of a new culture industry but also a legacy of imagination and innovation that continues to profoundly influence the cinema even to this day.