From a distinguished film historian - an exhilarating celebration of silent movies, a book that offers a new understanding of the art, the directors, the cinematographers and the stars of the great silent films.

In it James Card - pioneer collector of silents since the twenties, founder of the George Eastman film archive and the Telluride and Montreal film festivals - strips away the formulaic praise that has encrusted the reputations of such filmmakers as D. W. Griffith (who, he says, did not invent the close-up or film editing) and discusses their real achievements. He rescues the reputation of Cecil B. DeMille and enriches those of such long-underestimated pioneers as King Vidor and Josef von Sternberg.

Drawing on his close association with Gloria Swanson, Louise Brooks and Joan Crawford ("Crawford acted too soon; if only the movies in the twenties had been more respected, she might have been acknowledged as the formidable actor she was"), Card discusses the silent film's attitudes toward sex, the vamp and the good woman.

He describes overlooked silent movies of social concern, among them The Cry of the Children, directed by George Nicholls; such classic thrillers as Herbert Brenon's Beau Geste and such early avant-garde American masterpieces as J. Sibley Watson's The Fall of the House of Usher.

1. Seductive Cinema is a book that everyone seriously interested in moviemaking has been awaiting for years: the book on the silents by the man who knows more about them than anyone else.