silent films

Offers an illustrated history of silent movies from the 1890s to the 1920s, profiling key actors, directors, and films that defined the genre and influenced the future of the film industry and exploring how the technologies, marketing ideas, and visual styles that originated with silent films are still used in Hollywood today.

Discusses silent screen comedy and the great comic artists such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon.

In the early years of the twentieth century, a Swedish family encounters separation and other hardships upon immigrating to New York City until the son is cast in a silent movie, in a picture book that evokes an actual silent movie.