About this blog

This blog is my foray into publishing a research blog dealing, mostly, with silent Hollywood films.

You will find here cartoons, news articles from the 1920s reproduced from the original, as I chance upon them in my research. Some items strike me as having more interest than the precise elements I’m looking for, so I offer them for your consideration, to use as you see fit.

But you’ll also find short (usually!) musings on issues dealing with silent film, usually around the notions of “truthfullness”, “authenticity”, “realistic” and the like. That’s part of my research, and this blog helps me develop some ideas and test them out.

Ideally, this would be a research blog, meaning that several collaborators would publish here both snippets discovered in archives around the world, and semi-developped thoughts, so others could jump in, comment, help them develop their ideas further.

The concept and the practice is commonplace in science. What’s up with the liberal arts ? Can we stop being so proprietary with our ideas ? Share, explain, discuss, argue, an open-source model for the 21st century scholar.

Silent film scholars of the world, unite…virtually, here on this space, and discuss ! UPDATE dec.8/2008: Screen Research has just launched. Brought to you by Luke McKernan, it promises to be just the kind of space I had in mind: social networks, meet research and the communication tools of today, the blog, the forum, the video posting.

Let’s see where it all takes us.

“The play is written by my son, Thomas, who is 16 years old. He is too delicate to go out to work and since he had a bad fall two years ago, has been very backward in school. The doctor things that in time he may outgrow his feeble mental condition, but in the meanwhile he has turned his attention to motion picture writing, and perhaps there may be a place for him there, so I send you this story which he wrote after supper last evening. Very respectively,” (a letter to Lonegarn of Thanhouser, 1910s)