Essays, interviews, archives, and video resources on early cinema — curated reading on films, directors, and movements across the silent and early sound eras.
This talk took place on April 7, 2025, as part of Type@Cooper's Lubalin Lecture Series. The series archive is made possible by the generous support of TypeCulture. Until the advent of talking pictures in the early 1930s, cinema had been referred to as silent. To compensate for the absence of sound, films were punctuated by numerous ‘intertitles’ or ‘cards’ containing a fixed text, interspersed among the sequences of moving images. These intertitles transcribed the dialogue or provided written information deemed necessary for the action to unfold or for a narrative situation to be properly understood.