Footnote #37 - Silent Cinema (with Lawrence Napper)
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Special guest Dr Lawrence Napper, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London and expert in early silent and British cinemas, joins Chris and Alex once again - this time to talk about silent cinema in this Footnote episode of the podcast. Topics include the role of piano accompaniments, string quartets, and full orchestras within early film culture; the locating of silent cinema as a Victorian leisure practice and connections to pantomime; aesthetic shifts in narrative, editing, and style during the 1920s that codify the language of cinema as it develops across the silent period; the ‘realism’ of silent cinema acting styles; and what it means to be a film historian and archivist today.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Grieveson, Lee and Peter Krämer. 2004. The Silent Cinema Reader. London and New York: Routledge.
Gunning, Tom. 1994. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Musser, Charles. 1994. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Napper, Lawrence. 2009. British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Napper, Lawrence. 2015. The Great War in Popular British Cinema of the 1920s: Before Journey’s End. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Napper, Lawrence. 2017. Silent Cinema: Before the Pictures Got Small. London: Wallflower.