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DVDs Available to buy online
The Essanay Films: Volumes 1 and 2
In December 1914, Charlie Chaplin began his one-year contract with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. During that one year he made fifteen films, earned an unprecedented salary and established himself as a firm box-office favourite.
Chaplin's Essanay films have only previously been available in poor or incomplete prints. The films in each of these 2-disc DVD editions contain the best vintage material gathered in a nine-year search and are the most complete editions available.
The Mutual Films: Volumes 1 and 2
In 1916 Charlie Chaplin became the highest paid entertainer in the world, when he signed a contract with the Mutual Film Corporation for a salary of $670,000. Mutual built Chaplin his very own studio and allowed him total freedom to make twelve two-reel films during this fruitful twelve-month period. Chaplin subsequently recognised this period of film-making as the most inventive and liberating of his career.
These two DVDs contains twelve of the Mutual Films.
Books available to buy online
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative
Edited by Thomas Elsaesser
The essays in this collection trace the fascinating history of how the cinema developed its forms of storytelling and representation and how it evolved into a complex industry with Hollywood rapidly acquiring a dominant role.
Silent Cinema: An Introduction
Paolo Cherchi Usai
This groundbreaking guide to silent film studies has become the indispensable textbook for scholars, researchers and archivists. This much-awaited sequel to the first edition has been extensively rewritten and updated in order to reflect the spectacular development witnessed by the discipline in the past few years.
Sight & Sound article - free to read online
Supertramp
Charlie Chaplin is 20th-century cinema's most enduring icon and most exacting auteur. And he's funny. S&S asked film-makers and critics including Woody Allen, Rowan Atkinson, Baz Luhrmann, Nick Park and Slavoj Zizek what Chaplin means to them.
