Silent Film Performance

Elisabetta Girelli is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She has published widely on performance, stardom, silent film, Queer Theory, and cinematic representation.

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Sign of the Uncanny: Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916, USA).- Chapter 3: Performing Loneliness: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Silent Soliloquy in Baryshnya i Khuligan / The Young Lady and the Hooligan (1918, USSR).- Chapter 4: Re-booting the Self: Ivan Mozzhukhin and Queer Failure in Feu Mathias Pascal / The Late Mathias Pascal (1926, France).- Chapter 5: ‘Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier’: Pola Negri, Wartime, and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial (1927, USA).- Chapter 6: Silent Performance Beyond Silent Film: Harald Kreutzberg in Paracelsus (1943, Germany).- Index.

“Elisabetta Girelli opens her book on silent film performance with the declaration that ‘performance lies at the core of cinematic art’ ... . She goes on to eloquently prove this through the five engaging and vastly different case studies contained within this compact volume covering the years 1916 to 1943. ... Painstakingly pieces together detailed analysis of seldom explored performers and performances during specific cinematic moments, thus helping to advance the understudied area of silent film performance.” (Gillian Kelly, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 44 (4), 2024) “The book is resoundingly successful. It is rich, passionate, meticulous, detailed, subjective in places, surprising and never less than fascinating and rewarding. If nothing else, for anyone trying to teach students the potential of detailed textual analysis or seeking to adopt such an approach for the first time in their own work, this is an absolute must-read.” (Simon Brown, Early Popular Visual Culture, February 21, 2024)