The Sounds of the Silents in Britain
Edited by Julie Brown and Annette Davison
Author Information
Julie Brown is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her publications include Bartok and the Grotesque: Studies in Modernity, The Body and Contradiction in Music, and Western Music and Race, which was awarded the American Musicological Society's Ruth A. Solie Award.
Annette Davison is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s, Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire: A Film Score Guide, and, with Erica Sheen, American Dreams, Nightmare Visions: The Cinema of David Lynch.
Contributors:
Stephen Bottomore spent two decades directing documentaries in many countries worldwide while pursuing a parallel career as a film historian. He is an associate editor of the journal Film History, and the author of 'I want to see this Annie Mattygraph': A Cartoon History of the Coming of the Movies (1995) and The Titanic and Silent Cinema (2000) as well as many articles on silent and pre-cinema. He was awarded a PhD by Utrecht University in 2007 for his thesis on early cinema and warfare. He lives in Thailand and the UK.
Judith Buchanan is author of Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and of Shakespeare on Film (Longman-Pearson, 2005). She has worked extensively on biblical, Dickensian and artistic silent cinemas and on adaptation in the silent era. She is currently editing The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming). She is Professor of Film and Literature and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York.
James Buhler is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Along with David Neumeyer and Caryl Flinn, Professor Buhler edited Music and Cinema for Wesleyan University Press (2000). He is also author with David Neumeyer and Rob Deemer of Hearing the Movies, a textbook on music and sound in film for Oxford University Press (2009). He is currently working on a book concerning the auditory culture of early American cinema.
Jon Burrows is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick. He is the author of Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1913 (2003) and of numerous essays and articles on various aspects of British film culture in the silent era. He is currently working on a research project examining how cinema was transformed into a mass medium in Britain during the Edwardian era.
Ian Christie is a film historian, curator, broadcaster and consultant. He has written and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, Scorsese and Gilliam; and contributed to exhibitions ranging from Film as Film (Hayward, 1979) to Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006). A Fellow of the British Academy, he is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, director of the London Screen Study Collection and vice-president of Europa-Cinemas, of which he was a co-founder. Recent publications include: Stories We Tell Ourselves: The Cultural Impact of British Film 1946-2006 (co-author, for UK Film Council, 2009) and The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design (2009), and articles on Méliès and Patrick Keiller.
Malcolm Cook is a Doctoral candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is researching early British animated cartoons prior to the advent of sound cinema, with a particular focus on the relationship between the moving image and the graphic arts and other pre-cinematic entertainments, as well as the neurological processes involved in the perception of these forms. He holds a BA in Film and Literature from the University of Warwick and an MA in History of Art, Film and Visual Media from Birkbeck College.
Fiona Ford has recently completed her doctoral thesis on the film music of Edmund Meisel (1894-1930) at the University of Nottingham. Her main interests are original scores for silent films from the 1920s, early sound films (particularly those by Shostakovich), film musicals and animations.
Trevor Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Edinburgh. Having initially worked on the nature of working-class society in Britain in the early twentieth century, more recently he has turned to examine aspects of popular culture, especially in Scotland. He has co-edited and part-authored the third volume in the History of Everyday Life in Scotland series for Edinburgh University Press (2010) covering the nineteenth century, contributing a chapter on work and leisure patterns, and is currently engaged in writing a history of cinema-going in Scotland from 1896 to 1950.
Andrew Higson is Greg Dyke Professor of Film and Television and Head of the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York, UK. He has written widely on British cinema, from the silent period to the present-day, and on questions of national cinema. His books include Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (1995), English Heritage, English Cinema: The Costume Drama Since 1980 (2003), and Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s (2011). He is also editor of Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896-1930 (2002), British Cinema, Past and Present (with Justine Ashby, 2000) and 'Film Europe' and 'Film America': Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1939 (with Richard Maltby, 1999).
Joe Kember is Senior Lecturer in Film in the Department of English, University of Exeter. He has published widely concerning early cinema and nineteenth-century shows and his most recent book, Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009) focuses upon the social and institutional continuities that underpinned the market for popular entertainments across this period. He is co-investigator for the major AHRC project, "Moving and Projected Images in the South West, 1840-1914," and is currently co-authoring a substantial book on this topic with the project team.
John Riley is a writer, lecturer, curator and broadcaster. As well as Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film (Tauris) and Discover Film Music (Naxos), he has contributed book chapters to publications by Cambridge and Oxford University Presses, Routledge, BFI, Praeger and others. The South Bank Centre commissioned him to write and direct Shostakovich--My Life at the Movies, which, using film clips accompanied by live orchestra, follows the composer's cinema career. Premiered by Simon Russell Beale and the CBSO, it was then produced at the Komische Oper, Berlin. He has also curated various film seasons and produced a BBC Prom.
Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology and Head of the School of Music at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (1989, R/2001), From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (2003), Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). His edited volumes include Music, Culture, and Society: A Reader (2000), and the Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009).
