Part 1 The materiality of silent cinema: the color of nitrate - some factual observations on tinting and toning manuals for silent films, P. Cherchi Usai; the sound of silents, N. King; Kuleshov's experiments and the new anthropology of the actor, M. Yampolsky. Part 2 The periodicity and nationality of silent cinema: "now you see it, now you don't" - the temporality of the cinema of attractions, T. Gunning; pre-classical American cinema - its changing mode of film production, C. Musser; booming the business - the historical specificity of early French cinema, R. Abel; cinema as anti-theater - actresses and female audiences in Wilhelmian Germany, H. Schlupmann. Part 3 Theorizing a cultural history of silent cinema - Dickens, Griffith, and film theory today, R. Altman; female power in the serial-queen melodrama - the etiology of an anomaly, B. Singer; Russia, 1913 - cinema in the cultural landscape, Y. Tsivian. Part 4 Intertexuality and reception in silent cinema - Dante's "Inferno" and "Caesar's Ghost" - intertextuality and conditions of reception in early American cinema, W. Uricchio, R.E. Pearson; "the finest in the loop" - motion picture exhibition in Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1905-1928, M. Carbine; the perils of pleasure? - fan magazine discourse as women's commodified culture in the 1920s, G. Studlar.