This text offers readers a look at the time when sound was a vexing challenge for filmmakers and the source of contentious debate for audiences and critics. The

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing th

From the Preface: Few if any events have had greater impact on the history of film than the coming of the talkies, film historians have paid relatively little a

Cinema's Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema - or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and m

Representational technologies including photography, phonography, and the cinema have helped define modernity itself. Since the nineteenth century, these techno