The story of cinema is a vast and varied, with the art form now extending over a century. With many new productions and releases still stalled due to COVID-19, now is the perfect time to reflect back on the history of movies.
It’s difficult enough getting audiences interested in black and white films, let alone ones without sound. Often these are viewed as historical homework rather than entertainment in their own right. And it’s true that silent films are different to current cinema; they are more primal and more expressive and do not operate under the standards which were developed as the medium matured. Yet once able to embrace their anachronisms and overcome the barrier of dialogue-free films, a whole new world of silent cinema will open up – especially since most of these movies are public domain and therefore freely available.
Silent cinema is far too expansive to be condensed into only a handful of entries. Titans of the era like Mary Pickford, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang and more could not be placed here. Instead these suggested films provide an entry-point into the key genres of the silent era, exemplifying the innovative power of movie-making that could still be achieved at the dawn of the medium. Taking the time to taste such works should, hopefully, open the doorway to previously disregarded sections of film history.
Usually comedy is the quickest genre to age, but silent comedies have proved some of the most enduring of the era. The meticulous and inventive visual gags seem to have an eternal lifespan, and Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin are still household names. City Lights is a fantastic entry-way into Chaplin’s oeuvre, playing his iconic poor ‘Tramp’ who falls in love with a blind flower-girl (Virginia Cherrill) and vows to find money for her rent and eye operation. It includes some of Chaplin’s most relentlessly funny sequences, including a drunken dinner party and an unbalanced boxing match, but also a sincere sentimental underpinning with the central romance. City Lights was actually made after the advent of ‘sound films’ (and includes a few sound-related gags) but Chaplin kept it dialogue-free, knowing the universal appeal of ‘the Tramp’ would be diminished with a voice. It’s a work whose legacy and own conclusion demonstrate lacking the senses does not diminish appeals to the heart, or to laughter.
See also: The General, Modern Times, Safety Last!, The Oyster Princess
The opening titles of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise declare it as “of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, anytime”. This classic capitalizes on the elemental nature of silent cinema, naming the main couple only as The Man (George O’Brien) and The Wife (Janet Gaynor). Without spoiling anything, Sunrise is a remarkably simple story that essentially shows the married pair on a grand day out rekindling their vows and romance, complete with dancing jigs and drunken pigs. It is a progenitor of Richard Linklater’s Sunset trilogy, down to the name. Such ‘simplicity’ does not do justice to the extraordinary lyrical feeling of Sunrise, which features enormous stylized sets and ground-breaking cinematography to house this pure and heartfelt romance. Over a hundred years later, Sunrise is an extraordinary depiction of love and forgiveness, that shines as brightly in this time as it did then.
See also: It (1927), My Best Girl, 7th Heaven, Eternal Love
Even without dialogue silent films were still able to achieve psychological complexity, often through strange and audacious plots that came to resemble Greek Tragedy. MGM’s first produced feature shows scientist Paul Beaumont (Lon Chaney) have his life ruined and be publicly humiliated. Broken from the experience, Beaumont reinvents himself as a circus clown who re-enacts such humiliation for comedy, making He Who Gets Slapped a thematically rich experience about schadenfreude, self-contempt and performance. Chaney was renowned for playing grotesque and tortured characters (such as The Phantom of the Opera or the Hunchback of Notre Dame), and he brings the same intense anguish here. Swedish director Victor Sjöström, one of the most innovative of the silent era, incorporates surreal imagery and overlays to enhance this captivating film that remains fascinating and tragic.
See also: The Wind, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Crowd
Silent cinema was a fantastic breeding ground for horror films, as the exaggerated gestures and dynamic shadows were able to tap into primal fears which remain creepy to this day. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is one of the most influential; its nightmarish set-design and harsh distorted shadows making it the apex of German Expressionism. It’s a style mainstream audiences recognize in the work of Tim Burton, but is apparent in most horror and even film noir. Here, Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) is a sinister circus showman who controls the sleep-walker Cesare (Conrad Veidt) for his murderous bidding. But the lines of reality and madness, dreams and reality, become as misshapen as the film’s iconic cubist backdrops. Whatever the true meaning of Dr Caligari (which has been debated by academics and critics since its release), its Expressionist aesthetics and twisted storytelling make it one of the most influential films of all time.
See also; The Lodger, Nosferatu, Häxan, The Fall of the House of Usher
It didn’t take long before film-makers overcompensated for the silent era’s limited technology with ambitious scope and gargantuan sets, determined to recreate history with an epic scale. Such epics were a hallmark of silent cinema, with thousands of extras and enormous runtimes. Works like Greed (1924) and Napoleon (1927) were meant to be about 9 hours each, although many of their reels have been lost. For a ‘complete’ experience many would turn to D. W. Griffith’s controversial and notoriously racist blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, but even more foundational was Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria. Credited as inventing the ‘Colossal Film’ before American imitators, it follows princess-turned-slave Cabiria from childhood (Carolina Catena) to maturity (Lidia Quaranta) throughout the Second Punic Wars of 218-202 BC. It includes the alpine trek of Hannibal, numerous huge army battles, and the eruption of Mount Etna. Cabiria is admittedly fairly bloated and cannot quite recapture the experience of seeing such large-scale films for the first time, but as a statement of spectacle and expense, Cabiria and other silent historical epics have cemented themselves within film history through their sheer extravagance and ambition.
See also; Intolerance, Metropolis, The Ten Commandments (1923), Earth, Ben-Hur (1925)
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