Scott Lord Silent Film: The Unbeliever (Alan Crosland, Edison Company, 1918)

The Edison Company released its last film as a studio, "The Unbeliever" (Alan Crosland, six reels) in 1918. The periodical Motion Picture News seems to have been kept in the dark that it would be the swan song of the studion, claiming that the Edison Company viewed the film as their "greatest contribution to the screen". "The Unbeliever" starred Margueritte Courot, Kate Lester and Eric von Stroheim.
Not incidentally, the term "one sheet" used to describe the standard size of movie posters began with the Edison photoplay; it was a size of approximately 27 inches by 41 inches often included a synopsis of the plotline of the film. Silent Film Edison Film

Scott Lord Silent Film: The Night Raiders (John Raymond, 1924)

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Praesidenten (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1919)

Although "The President" (Praesidenten, 1919), written and directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, photographed by Hans Vaage, and having starred Elith Pio and Olga Raphael-Linden, is not always distinguished as remarkable, it is one of the only two films that Carl Th. Dreyer made in Denmark, his later establishing a small body of work that would be indelible upon filmmaking, hi films, disparate stylistically, each differeing in their use of technique. Dreyer has been quoted as having remarked upon his having tried to find a style that would have value for only a single film. Casper Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen, highlights the use of "intricate flashback narrative structure" in Dreyer's directorial debut.

In his article "Forms of the Intangible: Carl Dreyer and the concept of Transcendental Style", Scholar Casper Tybjerg looks at Paul Schraeder's concept of there being an "aesthetic dimension of religious films" and accordingly a transcendental style to express spiritual experience by "stylizing" reality.

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Scott Lord Shakespeare in Silent Film: The Taming of the Shrew (D.W. Gri...

Robert Hamilton Ball, in his volume Shakespeare on Silent Films explains the increase of adaptations of Shakespeare's plays during 1908-1911. "By 1908, the story film had become general...Moreover, his variety of scenes fitted well with new conceptions of scenario structure, with cutting and editing." Ball notes that D.W. Griffith follows The Taming of the Shrew chronologically but only uses four or five scenes to explicate its central incidents. Ball points out that there are no explanatory intertitles used in the film, which could have been used in the exposition of plot, but that Shakespeare was also at liberty to use long passages of supplementary dialougue when writing plays. He offers a claim that there were ten Shakespearean films made in the United States alone during 1908 while noting that in regard to recent transnational studies of the recent historiography of silent film that "there were no doubt cross-influences from country to country." Only one of these adaptations were from the Kalem Studios, As You Like It and only one was produced by Biograph. The is scant information pertaining to the film Julius Caesar, produced that year by Lubin. The film adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew" filmed in Great Britain during 1911 by Frank R Benson starring Constance Benson is a lost film, of which there are no surviving copies. Actress Florence Lawrence had come to Biograph from Vitagraph, which had produced several adaptations of Shakespeare that year, and camerman Arthur Marvin was being trained by innovator Billy Bitzer. King Lear
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Scott Lord Silent Film: Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, Edison Manufactu...

Authors Dennis R Cuthcin and Dennis R. Perry in their work "The Frankenstein Complex, when the text is more than a text" view the silent film "Frankenstein" as having been inspired by several stage adaptations, specifically Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein, which, produced in 1823 by Richard Brinkley Peak, may have been remote to the Edison Studios in New Jersey, as may have been the other fifteen theatrical adaptations of "Frankenstein" produced before 1851. The University of Pennsylvania presently includes Henry M. Milner's The Demon of Switzerland (1823) and The Man and the Monster (1826) among them, but admits that several theatrical adaptations were burlesque or musical comedy.


That intertitles were at first often explanatory shows the beginning of a narrative cinema. During an early scene of the silent film "Frankenstein" (J. Searle Dawley, Edison, 1910, one-reel) there is, in between scenes, an expositiory intertitle that uses a close shot of a letter to develop plot and character within the narrative, a form of the epistolary form of the novel transferred on to the screen. A similar insert shot is used in the film "A Dash Through the Clouds" (1912).

J. Searle Dawley directed at Edison Film Manufacturing Company untill 1913, when he joined Edwin Porter at Famous Players Company, where he directed actress Marguerite Clark.

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