Between 1910 and 1921, the American Film Company was one of the fledgling movie industry’s most successful studios, with production facilities in Santa Barbara and business offices in Chicago. Nicknamed for its distinctive winged “A” logo, the “Flying A” produced nearly 1,200 films, starring such favorites of the day as Mary Miles Minter, J. Warren Kerrigan, Wallace Reid, and King Baggot. The company’s rather patriotic motto invited patrons to “See Americans first.” The studio’s films also documented the picturesque and developing Pacific seaside community of Santa Barbara and served as a training ground for some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, including Allan Dwan, Henry King, Victor Fleming, Frank Borzage, George Marshall, William Desmond Taylor, and Marshall Neilan.

Many movie genres developed during the silent era, but none was as lasting as comedies. Actors and actresses stood in front of crude, hand-cranked cameras and invented a style that made people laugh and forget their troubles. This is an encyclopedic work to persons, institutions and terms associated with silent film comedy. For people, there is a capsule biography and a summary of their contribution. For studios and companies, there is a brief history and for terms, a full definition is given.

In The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts, Barbara Tepa Lupackexplores the rampant racial and gender stereotyping depicted in early cinema, demonstrating how those stereotypes helped shape American attitudes and practices. Using social, cultural, literary, and cinema history as a focus, this book offers insights into issues of Othering, including discrimination, exclusion, and sexism, that are as timely today as they were a century ago. Lupack not only examines the ways that dominant cinema of the era imprinted indelible and pejorative images of women—including African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and New Women/Suffragists—but also reveals the ways in which a number of pioneering early filmmakers and performers attempted to counter those depictions by challenging the imagery, interrogating the stereotypes, and re-politicizing the familiar narratives. Scholars of film, gender, history, and race studies will find this book of particular interest.

Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane’s Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds—and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women’s flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.

The first major look at the renowned industrial designer and architect, who helped to shape the look of American modernism from the 1920s through the early 1950s For German-born Kem Weber (1889-1963), design was not about finding a new expression; it was about responding to "structural, economic, and social requirements . . . characteristic of our daily routine of living." He sought to ensure that each design he produced--whether a piece of furniture or a building or an interior--was an improvement that responded to modern needs and modern life. Weber was a leading figure of modernism on the West Coast from the 1920s through the early 1950s, and his work greatly influenced the California style of the time. His most iconic designs were his Bentlock line, the Air Line chair, the interiors for the Bixby House, and his tubular-steel furniture for Lloyd. This book, a result of significant new primary research in the Weber family's archives, represents the first major study of the life and career of this important designer. Christopher Long details the full range of Weber's contributions, focusing particularly on the part he played in the advancement of American modernism, and his role in heralding a new way of making and living.

In Magnificent Obsession: The Outrageous History of Film Buffs, Collectors, Scholars, and Fanatics, author Anthony Slide looks at the way film has dominated the minds and lives of film buffs, film collectors, film academics, and just plain fans of past movies. Based on the author's more than fifty years in the field and his personal, up-front knowledge of the subject, chapters provide unique documentation on film buffs who once created a livelihood from their hobby, including long-forgotten Chaw Mank and the vast array of film clubs that he headed and New York radio and television sensation Joe Franklin. The history of fans and their fan clubs are discussed, as well as the first and only periodical, Films in Review, which catered both to film scholars and film buffs. The histories of several legendary film collectors such as David Bradley and Herb Graff are featured, as is Hollywood's Silent Movie Theatre, where film buffs found a home from the 1940s onwards, sharing it with drug dealers, male prostitutes, fantasists, and hit men. Magnificent Obsession is vast in its approach, discussing the entire history of the phenomenon of the film buff from the early 1910s through the present and documenting the manner in which film buffs have changed--thanks to the internet--from relatively gentle and kind individuals to the obsessive, sometimes overbearing, and often self-important film buffs of today.

 The heyday of silent film soon became quaint with the arrival of "talkies." As early as 1929, critics and historians were writing of the period as though it were the distant past. Much of the literature on the silent era focuses on its filmic art--ambiance and psychological depth, the splendor of the sets and costumes--yet overlooks the inspiration behind these. This book explores the Middle Ages as the prevailing influence on costume and set design in silent film and a force in fashion and architecture of the era. In the wake of World War I, designers overthrew the artifice of prewar style and manners and drew upon what seemed a nobler, purer age to create an ambiance that reflected higher ideals.