The American Film Institute Catalog volumes easily surpass all other film reference books for comprehensiveness, reliability, and utility. In a field bedevilled by quickly assembled and slipshod reference works, the Catalogs are the one essential purchase for every library. This set of volumes, on the teen years, covers a pivotal period in film history, encompassing the birth of the feature film and the development of the "film language" that still structures virtually all narrative films today. The decade saw the rise of stars, and of directors who left their creative mark on decades to come--Griffith, Ince, De Mille. Small firms gave way to consolidated studios. And film production relocated to the Southern California town whose name became synonymous with American films: Hollywood. Classics of the era such as De Mille's The Cheat and Griffith's Intolerance have reached popular audiences, and many others are being distributed on videocassette. New scholarly attention is focusing on the decade--especially on such questions as how stage melodrama elements were gradually incorporated into film narrative. But since film is also a record of folkways and national concerns, the rich materials catalogued here will be invaluable to social or cultural historians. As John Fell, author of Film and the Narrative Tradition , comments: "In a real sense, the AFI Catalog preserves and revitalizes old movies that will otherwise disappear . . . [it] will increasingly serve an audience far broader than motion picture history alone."
