Black And White Bioscope recovers a neglected chapter in the histories of world cinema and Africa. It tells the story of movie production in Africa that long predated francophone African films and Nollywood that are the focus of most histories of this industry.

At the same time as Hollywood was starting, a film industry in Southern Africa was surging ahead in integrating production, distribution, and exhibition. African Film Productions Limited made silent movies using technical and acting talent from Britain, the United States, and Australia, as well as from Africa. These included not only the original “long trek movie” and the prototype for the movies Zulu and Zulu Dawn but also the first King Solomon's Mines and the original Blue Lagoon, featuring African actors such as Goba, Tom Zulu, and Msoga Mwana, who starred as the black revolutionary in Prester John.

In this lavishly illustrated book, fifty movies are reconstructed with graphic photographs and plot synopses—plus quotations from reviews—so that readers can rediscover this long-lost treasure trove of silent cinema.

In recent years, technology has given films of the silent era and their creators a second life as new processes have eased their restoration and distribution. Among the films benefitting from these developments are the works of director Albert Capellani (1874--1931), whose oeuvre was instrumental in the development of cinema in the early 1900s and whose contributions rival those of D. W. Griffith. For the first time in English, Christine Leteux's essential biography of Capellani offers a detailed assessment of the groundbreaking director. Capellani began his career in France at what was, at the time, the biggest film company in the world: Pathe. There, he directed the first multireel version of Les Miserables in 1912 as well as his masterpiece, Germinal (1913). After immigrating to the United States, Capellani worked at a number of production houses, including Metro Pictures Corporation, where he produced his two best-known films, The House of Mirth (1918) and The Red Lantern (1919). He was well known for making stage actors into movie stars, and Mistinguett, Stacia Napierkowska, and Alla Nazimova all rose to prominence under his direction. The ups and downs of Capellani's career paralleled the evolution of the film industry and demonstrated the fickle nature of success. His technical and aesthetic achievements, however, paved the way for future filmmakers. Featuring a foreword by Academy Award--winning film historian Kevin Brownlow, Leteux's intimate biography paints a fascinating portrait of one of the leading pioneers of early cinema and provides a new window into the origins of the moving picture.

Greta Garbo proclaimed him as her favorite director. Actors, actresses, and even child stars were so at ease under his direction that they were able to deliver inspired and powerful performances. Academy–Award–nominated director Clarence Brown (1890–1987) worked with some of Hollywood's greatest stars, such as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy. Known as the "star maker," he helped guide the acting career of child sensation Elizabeth Taylor (of whom he once said, "she has a face that is an act of God") and discovered Academy–Award–winning child star Claude Jarman Jr. for The Yearling (1946). He directed more than fifty films, including Possessed (1931), Anna Karenina (1935), National Velvet (1944), and Intruder in the Dust (1949), winning his audiences over with glamorous star vehicles, tales of families, communities, and slices of Americana, as well as hard-hitting dramas. Although Brown was admired by peers like Jean Renoir, Frank Capra, and John Ford, his illuminating work and contributions to classic cinema are rarely mentioned in the same breath as those of Hollywood's great directors. In this first full-length account of the life and career of the pioneering filmmaker, Gwenda Young discusses Brown's background to show how his hardworking parents and resilient grandparents inspired his entrepreneurial spirit. She reveals how the one–time engineer and World War I aviator established a thriving car dealership, the Brown Motor Car Company, in Alabama - only to give it all up to follow his dream of making movies. He would not only become a brilliant director but also a craftsman who was known for his innovative use of lighting and composition. In a career spanning five decades, Brown was nominated for five Academy Awards and directed ten different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Despite his achievements and influence, however, Brown has been largely overlooked by film scholars. Clarence Brown: Hollywood's Forgotten Master explores the forces that shaped a complex man - part–dreamer, part–pragmatist - who left an indelible mark on cinema.

This book attempts to correct the distortions, for the silent era was the richest in the cinema's history. The author has tried to recapture the spirit of era through the words of those who created it. Linking chapters provide a context for the interviews has led to gaps, and I cannot claim that his book is definitive.

A meticulously accurate historical film set in 1649 in the poverty and unrest left in the wake of the English Civil War. A group of impoverished men and women, led by Gerrard Winstanley (a former soldier and cloth merchant ruined by the war), set up a commune on St George's Hill in Surrey, and the story follows their attempts to live in perfect peace and harmony. Directors Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo attempted to make a completely authentic film - the costumes were copied from originals in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the armour was borrowed from the Tower of London Armoury, and the script was altered when Winstanley's pamphlets were discovered in the British Museum. The film is accompanied by an award-winning documentary, 'It Happened Here Again', by Eric Mival, who had previously worked with Brownlow and Mollo on 'It Happened Here'.

The life of Karl Dane was a Cinderella story gone horribly wrong. The immigrant from Copenhagen was rapidly transformed from a machinist to a Hollywood star after his turn as the tobacco-chewing Slim in ""The Big Parade"" in 1925. After that, Dane appeared in more than 40 films with such luminaries as Lillian Gish, John Gilbert and William Haines until development of talkies virtually ruined his career. The most famous casualty of the transition from silent to sound film, Dane reportedly lost his career because of his accent, finding himself broke at the height of the Depression. He reportedly operated a hot dog stand outside the studio where he earned his fame, then committed suicide in 1934. This biography tells the tale of a daring yet tragic man who aimed for his wildest dreams and succeeded, if only for a short time.

On January 3, 1914 Pancho Villa became Hollywood's first Mexican superstar. In signing an exclusive movie contract, Villa agreed to keep other film companies from his battlefield, to fight in daylight wherever possible, and to reconstruct battles if the footage needed reshooting. Through memoir and newspaper reports, Margarita De Orellana looks at the documentary film-makers who went down to cover events in Mexico. Feature film-makers in Hollywood portrayed the border as the dividing line between order and chaos, in the process developing a series of lasting Mexican stereotypes-the greaser, the bandit, the beautiful senorita, the exotic Aztec. Filming Pancho reveals how Mexico was constructed in the American imagination and how movies reinforced and justified both American expansionism and racial and social prejudice.

Mae Murray (1885--1965), popularly known as "the girl with the bee-stung lips," was a fiery presence in silent-era Hollywood. Renowned for her classic beauty and charismatic presence, she rocketed to stardom as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, moving across the country to star in her first film, To Have and to Hold, in 1916. An instant hit with audiences, Murray soon became one of the most famous names in Tinseltown. However, Murray's moment in the spotlight was fleeting. The introduction of talkies, a string of failed marriages, a serious career blunder, and a number of bitter legal battles left the former star in a state of poverty and mental instability that she would never overcome. In this intriguing biography, Michael G. Ankerich traces Murray's career from the footlights of Broadway to the klieg lights of Hollywood, recounting her impressive body of work on the stage and screen and charting her rapid ascent to fame and decline into obscurity. Featuring exclusive interviews with Murray's only son, Daniel, and with actor George Hamilton, whom the actress closely befriended at the end of her life, Ankerich restores this important figure in early film to the limelight.

First appearing in 1976, American Classic Screen was the publishing arm of The National Film Society. Intended for scholars and general readers interested in films from the golden age of cinema and beyond, the magazine ran for a decade and included original interviews, profiles, and articles that delved deep into the rich history of Hollywood. Contributors to the magazine included noted academics in the area of film studies, as well as independent scholars and authors eager to expand the world of cinema. Since the periodical's demise, however, many of the essays and articles have been difficult to find at best and in some cases, entirely unavailable. In American Classic Screen Interviews, editors John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh have assembled some of the most significant and memorable interviews conducted for the magazine over its ten-year history. This collection contains rare conversations with some of the brightest stars of yesteryear, as well as gifted filmmakers, celebrated animators, and highly revered historians, including Fred Astaire, Kevin Brownlow, Frank Capra, Stanley Donen, Olivia DeHavilland, Irene Dunne, Joan Fontaine, Friz Freleng, Margaret Hamilton, Winton C. Hoch, Henry King, Mervyn Le Roy, Fred MacMurray, Glen MacWilliams, Rouben Mamoulian, Clarence "Ducky" Nash, Paul Newman, Hermes Pan, Robert Preston, and Jane Withers. This compendium of interviews recaptures the spirit and scholarship of that time and will appeal to both scholars and fans who have an abiding interest in the American motion picture industry.

Evelyn Brent's life and career were going quite well in 1928. She was happily living with writer Dorothy Herzog following her divorce from producer Bernard Fineman, and the tiny brunette had wowed fans and critics in the silent films ""The Underworld"" and ""The Last Command"". She'd also been a sensation in Paramount's first dialogue film, ""Interference"". But by the end of that year Brent was headed for a quick, downward spiral ending in bankruptcy and occasional work as an extra. What happened is a complicated story laced with bad luck, poor decisions, and treachery detailed in the first and only full-length biography.