I’ve been undertaking a reorganisation of my YouTube acount. I’ve not uploaded any videos of my own as yet, but I gather together favourites, and I’ve started to organise these into groups, or playlists – curating YouTube, if you will. One of these playlists is on the modern silent film, and you may have already noticed on the right-hand column that listd among ‘other Bioscope sites’ is now Urbanora’s modern silents. This brings together all the examples of modern silent films that I’ve mentioned or featured on the Bioscope (where they are available on YouTube, that is), including mashups and the like which take original silents and play with them by cutting them to modern music, and so on. You can still follow what the Bioscope has said about the genre of the modern silent by clicking on the category Modern Silents, but the YouTube playlist gathers all the clips together in one place. I hope it’s useful – and do suggest new examples. I’ll be adding to it on a regular basis from now on.

There are some videos there that I’ve not yet written about. One that’s new is the engaging Fine Dining, made by Dean Mermell, descibed as “A homeless waif stumbles upon a parallel hobo universe, an exagerated world that mirrors our own, with surrealistic accuracy” and shot on 35mm in colour with hand-cranked camera. For other examples of Dean Mermell’s creative and stylishly visual silent films, see the engaging romantic fantasy Modern Life (“a contemporary silent film that tells the story of a young couple whose now is slipping away, and some peculiar things that happen each night while they sleep”) and the playfully Expressionist Violin (“The town sweeper has a secret life, a new talent, and a very strange lover”), or visit his Storyfarm site, where he has the Storyfarm Silent Theatre.