Showing early and silent films today Curatorial challenges, considerations, and possibilities

This dissertation examines the contemporary presentation and exhibition of silent films made between approximately the late 1890s and the late 1920s. I assert this public-facing curatorial practice as a singular subfield of archival film exhibition that warrants more sustained and focused critical attention as such. Three overarching questions guide my research: What exactly are we doing when we present early and silent cinema today? What are the explicit and implicit conditions of curatorial engagement? What relations, structures, processes, strategies, constraints, matters, challenges, considerations, and possibilities come into play when we show early and silent films to contemporary audiences and engage with them at a curatorial level? I argue that contemporary silent film curating can be understood as the art of managing both presences and absences, and that these absences can take a variety of “negative” forms, including temporal distance, sonic absence, material loss, and interpretive mutability. Grounded in critical feminist thinking and employing a range of methods—including practice-based research, case study analysis, and exploratory interviews, among others—I show how these negative categories are crucial elements of contemporary silent film curating today and productive starting points for more focused theoretical and practical engagement. In Chapter 1 (temporal distance), I examine the curatorial challenges and considerations around showing silent films that contain outdated harmful and hateful images and ideologies, such as blackface, redface, and other racist and colonialist stereotypes; in Chapter 2 (sonic absences), I theorize the specific relations and processes that can, and often do, emerge when a curator chooses musical accompaniment; in Chapter 3 (material loss), I advance the premise of curating lost silent films as an expanded and inclusive practice that should stand alongside extant film programming; and in Chapter 4 (interpretive mutability), I experiment with the early attractional image’s lack of interpretive fixity and the flexibility of the film program format. Ultimately, in unbraiding and following (some of) its constitutive features, I not only reveal and sharpen the specificity of contemporary silent film curatorial practice as it stands today but also propose ways of understanding and enacting this truly dynamic and interdisciplinary endeavor moving forward.