Early American Silent Film, 1893–1917
Oral examination list
Examiner: Professor Charles Musser
Exam administered December 2005
Richard Abel. The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds. A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915. (History of the American Cinema, v. 2.) New York: Scribner, 1990.
Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs. Theater to Cinema; Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. New York: Oxford, 1997.
Lee Grieveson. “Fighting Films: Race, Morality, and the Governing of Cinema, 1912-1915.” Cinema Journal, vol. 38, no. 1 (Fall 1998).
Tom Gunning. ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions.’ The Velvet Light Trap 32 (1993).
Tom Gunning. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Tom Gunning. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” in Early Film, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (British Film Institute, 1989).
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Sumiko Higashi. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Richard Koszarski. An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928. (History of the American cinema v. 3.) New York: Scribner,1990.
Robert Lang. The Birth of a Nation: D.W. Griffith, Director. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Charles J. Maland. Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Charles Musser. “Divorce, Demille and the Comedy of Remarriage.” In Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins eds., Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Charles Musser. High-Class Moving Pictures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Charles Musser. The Emergence of Cinema: the American Screen to 1907. (History of the American Cinema, v. 1.) New York: Scribner, 1990.
Ben Singer. “Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors.” Cinema Journal, vol. 34, no. 3 (Spring 1995), 5-35.
Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon. New Jersey: Princeton, 2000).
Kristin Thompson. “Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production: Implications for Europe’s Avant-Garde.” Film History, vol. 5, no. 4 (December 1993).
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Screening List
Arrivée d’un train en gare a La Ciotat (Lumiere, 1895)
Sortie d’usine (Lumiere, 1895)
As Seen Through a Telescope (Smith, 1900)
A Trip to the Moon (Melies, 1902)
Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (Edison, 1902)
A Kiss in the Tunnel (Smith, 1903)
The Great Train Robbery (Edison, 1903)
Personal (Biograph, 1904)
The Black Hand (Biograph, 1906)
The Physician and the Castle (Pathé, 1907)
A Drunkard’s Reformation (Biograph, 1909)
The Lonely Villa (Biograph, 1909)
Pippa Passes (Biograph, 1909)
The Musketeers of Pig Alley (Biograph, 1912)
Traffic in Souls (Universal, 1913)
Perils of Pauline. Episode 1: Trial by Fire (Eclectic, 1914)
The Squaw Man (Lasky, 1914)
The Birth of a Nation (Mutual, 1915)
The Cheat (Lasky, 1915)
Where Are My Children? (Universal, 1916)
Fatty and Mabel Adrift (Keystone, 1916)
Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)
Behind the Screen (Mutual, 1916)
The Vagabond (Mutual, 1916)
The Immigrant (Mutual, 1917)
Edison: The Invention of the Movies, 1898–1918 (boxed set; Kino, 2004)
The Movies Begin (boxed set; Kino, 2002)