My dissertation examines the contemporary presentation of silent films made between approximately the late 1890s and the late 1920s. I assert this public-facing curatorial practice as a singular subfield of archival film exhibition that warrants more sustained critical attention as such. To help delineate its boundaries and embedded issues, I ask: What exactly are we doing when we present early and silent cinema today? What are the explicit and implicit conditions of curatorial engagement? What relations, structures, processes, strategies, constraints, matters, challenges, considerations, and possibilities come into play when we show early and silent films to contemporary audiences and engage with them at a curatorial level? I ultimately argue that contemporary silent film curating can be understood as the act of managing both presences and absences, and that these absences can take a variety of “negative” forms, including temporal distance (Chapter 1), sonic absence (Chapter 2), material loss (Chapter 3), and interpretive mutability (Chapter 4). Grounded in critical feminist thinking and employing a range of methods—including practice-based research, case study analysis, and exploratory interviews—I treat these negative categories as crucial elements of contemporary silent film curating today as well as generative starting points for vital transformative conceptual and practical engagement moving forward.