OF FILM AND I, AND HOW THIS BOOK UN WITTINGLY GOT ITSELF STARTED
I remember once seeing a book described as the work of a good scholar on holiday. Whether I am a good scholar or not must be left for others to judge, but I have certainly written what are generally called scholarly books, and I have surely enjoyed a delightful holiday working on this one, especially during the period which I devoted to reviewing old films and coming about as close as possible to living my life over again. I do not of course mean that I have wrought carelessly. This book will appear in my literary chronology between a study of Washington Irving and a study of Edgar Allan Poe, and I think the confrontations involved quite delightful. Many of the same techniques which I applied in writing my histories of the English and American novel are used again here. Yet there is a difference between reading manuscripts at the Houghton and Morgan libraries and watching films at George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, and somehow one turns over the files of Photoplay Magazine and The Moving Picture World in a different spirit from that in which one searches out articles in PMLA and Modern Philology.
This volume is not a definitive history of the silent film. I once cherished the hope of writing such a history, and this book was conceived as a preliminary study for it. Now I do not quite see how anybody could ever produce such a history. Most of the requisite material is unavailable, and if it were here it would be quite too overwhelming to get through. By 1913, American producers alone were turning out two hundred reels of film a week. From the critical-aesthetic point of view, most of these films were of course not worth seeing. Yet fine things have a way of cropping up in unexpected places, and how can you judge that which you have not seen? ...
-Edward Wagenknecht