"[P]resents 30 essays on individual companies, stars and genres, the history of Italian film historiography, and the challenges of archival access.45.3 July-Sept. 2014"(COMMUNICATION BOOKNOTES Qtly) "This is a lavishly produced book, with a gorgeous cover, wonderful illustrations throughout, and excellent editing.... Including an extensive bibliography, this is an extremely rich, well-done volume.... Highly recommended."(Choice) "Giorgio Bertellini's Reader is an outstanding work, carefully envisioned and engaging at every page."(Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies) "Italian Silent Cinema is an invaluable first collection of leading scholarship on the period in the English language, with an impressive bank of resources... and a welcome eye to enabling future research.... Bertellini's enthusiasm, twinned with the essays on Italian film archives (Paolo Cherchi Usai), early cinema literature (John P. Welle) and where/how to research both silent films (Ivo Blom) and non-filmic materials (Luca Mazzei), will doubtless prove to be useful and influential to future scholars."(Italian Studies) "[T]he eagerly anticipated publication of Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader has finally arrived, and it does not disappoint. A veritable labor of love, Bertellini's lavishly illustrated and masterfully edited volume provides scholars with an essential resource for understanding and exploring Italy's film culture between 1905 and 1931."(Annali d'italianistica) "Italian Silent Cinema:A Reader is an incredibly rich text, a must-read for anybody interested in studying the beginnings of cinema in Italy and its multifaceted, interdisciplinary and complex history. In particular, the book is a valuable research tool for conducting work on the period of the so-called golden age of Italian history, 1908–15."(Journal of Modern Italian Studies)
