The Last Warning: Uncertainty, Exploitation, and Horror

This chapter considers Universal’s relationship with its audiences at the end of the silent period of Hollywood cinema. Specifically, it presents The Last Warning as a case study and focuses on the ways that Universal promoted this film—a “partial-talkie”—to exhibitors and advertised it to the public. This analysis suggests how Universal imagined the audience for this film and explores the studio’s strategies for connecting the film’s narrative to this imagined audience during the transitional period to synchronised sound. For example, Universal tried to entice exhibitors to book the film by providing survey cards that audience members could fill out during a break in the film’s narrative. The cards would allow them to guess “whodunnit” before the film resumed. Universal therefore engaged in a creative and playful approach to making the film experience more interactive, albeit in a decidedly low-tech way. The studio imagined a specific, rather sophisticated type of audience engagement with a stylistically creative but narratively banal genre film at the end of the silent era.

ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni

Silent-era film scholarship has all too often focused on a handful of German directors, including Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch, but little attention has been paid to arguably one of the most influential filmmakers of the period: Paul Leni. This collection – the first comprehensive English-language study of Leni’s life and career – offers new insights into his national and international films, his bold forays into scenic design and his transition from German to Hollywood filmmaking. The contributors give fresh insights into Leni’s most influential films, including Waxworks (1924), The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), and explores such lesser-known productions as The Diary of Dr. Hart (1918), Backstairs (1921) and the Rebus film series (1925–7). Engaging with new historical, analytical, and theoretical perspectives on Leni’s work, this book is a groundbreaking exploration of a cinematic pioneer.

Introduction: foot notes

This chapter, written by the book’s editors, provides an introduction to the role of shoes in cinema, discussing the significance of shoes in terms of gender identity, sexuality, race, ethnicity and social class, through the lens of a range of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and historical approaches. It also presents an overview of the chapters in the book, which cover films in a variety of genres from around the world, and from the silent era to the present. The wearing of shoes, it is argued, tells us a great deal both about the wearer and about the time and place in which the shoes are worn—and there is no better medium than film in which to convey the myriad qualities of shoes, which have the capacity to be both very special and very ordinary.

Musical moments and numbers in Austrian silent cinema

Although the film musical as a genre came into its own with the sound film technologies of the late 1920s and early 1930s, several characteristic features did not originate solely with the sound film. The ‘musical number’ as the epitome of the genre, can already be found in different forms and shapes in silent films. This article looks at two Austrian silent films, Sonnige Träume (1921) and Seine Hoheit, der Eintänzer (1926), as case studies for how music is represented without a fixed sound source, highlighting the differences and similarities of musical numbers in silent and sound films. The chosen films are analysed in the contexts of their historical exhibition and accompaniment practices, Austria’s film industry as well as the country’s cultural-political situation after the end of the monarchy. These two examples demonstrate that several characteristics of the film musical are based on the creative endeavours made by filmmakers during the silent era, who struggled, failed and succeeded in ‘visualizing’ music and musical performances in the so-called ‘silent’ films. In reconstructing their problems and analysing their solutions, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of musical numbers during the silent era and on a more general level.