Introductory essay: silent film historiography, digital technology and the archive

This collection is the result of a 2018 conference that was held at the University of Leeds and funded by White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH). As organizers, we were brought together by our broad interest in silent film and film heritage, more generally. Yet, it was clear to us that our respective work drew on vastly different approaches to the subjects. While Luca Antoniazzi (2018, 2020) deals with policy issues of digital preservation and curatorship, Agata Frymus’s (2020, 2021) primary research focus is on silent film audiences and stardom. Laurence Carr was, at the time, completing a PhD thesis on the visual representations of sound in Weimar cinema. Intrigued by the differences in our ways of thinking, and our subsequent methods, we became interested in the idea of crosspollination – and the potential overlaps – between these distinctive approaches and lines of enquiry. Therefore, we envisioned an event that would provide a space for dialogue between archivists and media scholars, who often work in isolation. Broadly speaking, the conference aimed to bridge the gap between various types of expertise that essentially exist on the same subject, across various sub-fields and institutions. The conference also aimed to explore how different disciplines viewed key debates on digital technology, curatorship, access and the visibility of silent cinema and archival collections in the public sphere.