About Me

The Realm of Silence

The title of this blog comes from something said by French filmmaker Abel Gance. On set in 1923, a journalist observed Gance instructing onlookers to be quiet: “Chut! Silence!—nous sommes ici dans le royaume du Silence, ô Cinéma!”

It was a screening of Gance’s Napoléon (1927) that ignited my passion for silent cinema. Watching this film projected on 35mm, accompanied by a live performance of Carl Davis’s orchestral score, was an emotional and aesthetic experience that changed the course of my life. Since that day in December 2004, I have spent much of my time immersed in “the realm of silence”.

This blog is an attempt to make my writing more regular and more accessible. Each entry will be on a specific silent film, cinematic theme, or related book; it will be written quickly, contain unfinished thoughts, and act as an approach to its subject. Though I hope to entertain and inform, my motives are also selfish. I want more make critical writing more enjoyable for myself, and to have recurring impetus to dip into the immense horde of discs, data, and discourse about silent film that fills my shelves.

Please read, enjoy, share, and (if you feel moved so to do) let me know what you think.

Publications

  • ‘Interpretation and restoration: Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922)’, Film History, 23.2 (2011): 223-41.
  • ‘Abel Gance: Cinema and the religion of art’, La Furia Umana 15 (2013) [online].
  • Entries on Panorama du Grand Canal, vu d’un bateau (Lumière, 1896), Casanova (Volkoff, 1927), Death in Venice (Visconti, 1971), and Don Giovanni (Losey, 1979). In Michael Pigott (ed.), World Film Locations: Venice (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 12-5, 44-5, 64-5.
  • ‘Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (1927): The case for enthusiasm’, Studies in French Cinema 13.2 (2013): 95-109.
  • ‘Experiential art: musical performance, live cinema, and Abel Gance’s Napoléon’, Alternate Takes, 2014 [online].
  • A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s ‘Napoléon’ (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2015).
  • ‘“The reawakening of French cinema”: Expression and innovation in Abel Gance’s J’accuse! (1919)’. In Olaf Brill and Gary D. Rhodes (eds), Expressionism in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016), 145-68.
  • ‘Silent cinema: Material histories and the digital present’, Screen 57.3 (2016): 277-301.
  • Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema: Sounding out Utopia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
  • ‘The Man of Destiny’, Sight & Sound 26.12 (2016): 24-30.
  • ‘Presenting the past: Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), from live projection to digital reproduction’, Kinétraces Editions 2 (2017): 120-42. [Online version.]
  • ‘Abel Gance.’ Oxford Bibliographies in ‘Cinema and Media Studies’, ed. Krin Gabbard (New York: Oxford UP), April 2017 [online].
  • ‘The Cinema as Time Machine: Temporality and Duration in the Films of Abel Gance’, Aniki 4.2 (2017): 353-74. [Online version.]
  • ‘Reframing History: Erich von Stroheim’s Europe’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 35.2 (2018): 171-97.
  • ‘Encountering Sound: The Musical Dimensions of Silent Cinema’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 10.1 (2018) [online].
  • ‘Words Radiating Images: Visualizing Text in Abel Gance’s La Roue’, Literature/Film Quarterly 46.3 (2018) [online].
  • ‘Exceeding Modernism: Romantic Artists in the Twentieth Century’, Modernism/modernity 27.2 (2020): 243-72.
  • ‘Style over substance? The case of Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2023) [online].
  • ‘“A brilliant meteor across the filmic heavens”: Brigitte Helm in British film culture, 1926-33’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2024) [online].
  • ‘The Silent World Viewed’, The Shanghai Literary Review 9 (2025) [forthcoming].

Conference papers and presentations

  • ‘The beginning of sound and the end of the world: Abel Gance and La Fin du Monde’. Paper given at ‘Beginnings and Endings in Film, Films, and Film Studies’ conference, University of Warwick, UK, 13 June 2008.
  • ‘On the frontier of Romanticism and Modernism: Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance.’ Paper given at ‘The Nu-Romantic’, Journeys Across Media (JAM) postgraduate conference, University of Reading, UK, 17 April 2009.
  • With Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Kelly, and Paul McGann, ‘Abel Gance: The Music of Light’. Round-table discussion at the annual Bristol Silents Festival, UK, 23 May 2009.
  • ‘In the shadow of great men: Myth and biography in Abel Gance’s Napoléon’. Paper given at ‘Writing Lives’ symposium, University of Warwick, UK, 25 May 2012.
  • With Michael Pigott and Nic Pillai, ‘A Study in Sherlock’. Presentation at Warwick Words literary festival, UK, 8 December 2012.
  • With Michael Pigott and Nic Pillai, ‘The Death and Life of Sherlock Holmes’. Presentation and screening at Warwick Arts Centre, UK, 26 January 2013.
  • ‘Buster and Spike, Film and Radio’. Paper given at ‘Buster Keaton and the Logic of Objects’ conference, Warwick Arts Centre, UK, 30 November 2013.
  • ‘Abel Gance’s Napoléon and the restoration of live cinema’. Paper given at ‘La morts des films’ colloquium, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3), France, 6-7 May 2015.
  • With Mike McCahill, Michael Pigott, and Nic Pillai, ‘Unlock Sherlock’. Round-table discussion at the Leamington Underground Cinema Festival, UK, 7 November 2015.
  • With Nicolas Pillai, ‘Jazz on film in 1920s and 1930s Britain’. Presentation at the London Jazz Festival, Royal Festival Hall, UK, 11 November 2017.
  • ‘Parallel Universes: Hancock and Milligan, from Radio to Television’. Presentation at Tony Hancock: A Celebration, Bradfield College, UK, 25 June 2018.

Reviews

  • ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010)’, Alternate Takes, April 2011 [online].
  • ‘Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011)’, Alternate Takes, November 2011 [online].
  • ‘The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)’, Alternate Takes, February 2012 [online].
  •  ‘Die Nibelungen: DVD/Blu-ray review’, Viewfinder,90 (2013), p. 20.

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