Interview with David Robinson

Abstract

David Robinson (1930) is an inescapable character in the historiography of cinema, especially silent cinema. Besides being film critic and author of a vast bibliography – which includes books such as Hollywood in the Twenties (1968), The History of World Cinema (1973), and the official biography of Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin: His Life and Art (originally published in 1985) – Robinson also plays an active role in Giornate del Cinema Muto (or Pordenone Silent Film Festival), an annual event that takes place in October in the small town of Pordenone, in northern Italy. Throughout the interview, which took place in the last Giornate, Robinson discusses extensively about the filmic object, from the materiality of the film to the historical senses linked to the works, highlighting the fundamental importance of archival research, cataloging, preservation, restoration and diffusion of the audiovisual work produced during the vogue of silent cinema.