Silent Films

I was just wondering if anyone here was into silent films. I've only seen a couple of silent films ("nosferatu" and the "cabinet of caligari"). but man I'm hooked! I have fritz lang's "destiny" to watch and A LOT of others on my list to get.

I've still only seen one so far, and that was The General, which was pretty good. I have City Lights waiting for me to watch sometime in the next few days.

I watched Sunrise: A Song of two Humans last night, it was decent. It didn't really blow my skirt up, but it was interesting.

I've been trying to get to The General and several other tramp flicks. I just have a ton of movies to watch...

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I'm quite fond of The General myself. I've seen two other Buster Keaton movies, Our Hospitality and Sherlock Jr. They were both worth a look see. I enjoyed them and have other Keatons in my queue.

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YES. You seem interested in the Germanic side, so be sure to watch Metropolis. I love silent films. They are the most purely cinematic films there are. I made a link at another thread... Here it is.

P.S. I think that Powdered Water needs to wear less-weighty skirts.

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I hope to watch City Lights soon (I believe that's silent) and/or The Gold Rush. The probably being that my local rental store don't have them for availability.

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Yeah I like the german films. I'm gonna get "the golem" "faust" and "the street" next, though "city lights", "the general" and several d.w. griffith movies are also on my list. I've got a lot of movies I want to see, it's just finding the time.

Love them both to death, particularly The General. I think comedic silent films have better staying power than others; so much of comedy is in facial expressions and reactions, anyway, and there's something about the running around and all the comedic commotion, unaccompanied by sound, that makes it funnier. Maybe because it makes each joke seem more straightforward. Whatever the reason, I think they hold up quite well.

Another reason may be that even the best of silent films is a bit more difficult to watch compared to modern films; it's always going to feel odd to see a character mouth a few sentences and then find out what they said, while the text lingers on screen longer than you need it to. But with silent comedies, the comedy is such that it's almost all seen, and very little is said, so it moves at a pace that most of us are more used to, anyway, by having fewer title cards to bog things down.

Gotta start with the 10-minute long, 14-scene The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first narrative Western film with a storyline, one of the earliest films to be shot out of chronological sequence, using revolutionary parallel cross-cutting (or parallel action) between two simultaneous events or scenes; it did not use fades or dissolves between scenes or shots; it effectively used rear projection in an early scene (the image of a train seen through a window), and two impressive panning shots. It had exterior scenes, chases on horseback, actors that moved toward (and away from) the camera, a camera pan with the escaping bandits, and a camera mounted on a moving train. It was the first 'true' western. More important, it was the first real motion picture smash hit, establishing the concept that film could be a commercially-viable medium.

For intense emotional drama, see Greed (1924) with Zazu Pitts back before her costarring with Gail Storm on TV.

Another great drama, Way Down East, which shows Lillian Gish struggling through a real blizzard and fleeing across real ice floes in a real river. When she falls on one chunk of ice and her hand and hair trail in the water, it’s really frosty. There's also a shot of the leading man rescuing her and jumping from ice floe to ice floe carrying her to safety before they both go over a waterfall. Exciting!

Douglas Fairbanks was famous for doing his own stunts and all of his films are extremely active. But my special favorite is Mark of Zorro: there’s an extended scene in that film where the bad guys are chasing Fairbanks all over the rancho, and the chase goes on for many minutes with him jumping in and out of windows, over and under fences, climbing walls, leaping off roofs, you name it. It is one of the most strenuous chase scenes ever filmed. Don’t know if it was actually shot in one long take, but there are extended periods of him just running, jumping, and swinging from ropes that it would have exhausted most athletes.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) is one of the greatest films ever made. Check out how many scenes have been repeated in other movies.

The Big Parade (1925) and Wings (1927) are two of the best war movies ever filmed. The aerial stunts in Wings are probably the best ever filmed, and it won the first Academy Award for best picture.

Lang’s futuristic Metropolis (1927) (Wasn’t M also shot first as a silent? I seem to remember seeing a silent version of it once.)

Any of Lon Chaney’s films are good, but don’t miss Tell It to the Marines, in which he played a Marine sergeant who would have kicked John Wayne’s butt on the Sands of Iwo Jima. It was his biggest box office success and so good that the Marine Corps. made him an honorary Marine. Everyone remembers Phantom, but probably his most far-out horror film is The Unknown (1927).

Several have mentioned The General (1927), a great film, but I think the stunts were both more spectacular and maybe even funnier in Steamboat Bill Jr. and The Cameraman (both in 1928).

Everything by Chaplin is good, but I’m especially fond of The Gold Rush (1925). Back in the 1960s, I was poor-boying through cottage in a cheap garage appointment, no car, no money, no girls. All I did was work and study. So one evening, I see the Student Union is having a free showing of The Gold Rush. Went to see it for the first time and laughed so hard that my ribs hurt for days after. Maybe I was just starved for entertainment, but it still makes me laugh when I see it.

Anything by Harold Lloyd—he was nearly as funny as Chaplin and did stunts almost as well as Buster Keaton.

I respecfully disagree. It's been my observation that the really great silent actors convey so much with their eyes, their body language, and their facial expressions that you can tell essentially what they must be saying even before the title card is shown. (Remember "Mona Desmond's" last close-up?) I suspect you could watch one of the better silents without title cards and not miss very much. Remember, there was a high rate of illiteracy back in the first 2-3 decades of the 20th century, plus some films were shown around the world. No doubt title cards were provided in the major language--English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, etc., but some of 'em must have played in Eastern Europe, Africa, India, Indonesia, etc. I'm sure most viewers got the gist of the story, even if they couldn't read the title cards.

I do agree that physical comedy moves fast on the silent screen but then so do many of the adventure films with Fairbanks, Rin Tin Tin, and the Perils of Pauline series. Plus Rudolph Valentino's love scenes may not have moved very fast, but they still manage to hold the interest of many.

One of my favorites is The Birth of a Nation. It's actually pretty disturbing in that it portrays the KKK as being the "good guys." I think one of the reasons I like it so much is because it's true. It shows you how twisted things were during the civil war.

Yes, I know that Yoda dissed The Birth of a Nation earlier (and there's nothing wrong with that because it's obviously hateful on multiple levels and it's also very long), but it does tell a strong story and contains some awesome battle scenes which stand up to this very day. Even in the image you showed above, that's a white man in black-face-and-chest, but those were the times. I hope that people don't get mad at me for mentioning that Buster Keaton used several whites (both male and female) in blackface in his wonderful films. Why did he do it? I don't know. Do they make me think ill of him or his films? Call me a racist if you must, but no.

Not just in the Civil War but more than 100 years afterward. The Klan was a product of the reconstruction period after the war when white Southerners wanted to maintain control over the newly freed and franchised blacks. The government funded Freeman's Bureau tried to help blacks find work and get an economic start, while the Republican party counted on their votes since most white Southerners turned their backs on Lincoln's party and were recruited by the Democratic party, which was virtually a minority party in the North with army veterans joining the Republicans. The battle for votes and political power was nasty and a lot of people died in the process. The struggle couldn't go on forever, so eventually the Republicans lost interest in helping the blacks and came to an "understanding" that the Southern states could "handle" the "race problem" in their own way, which was a hard, segregated way for the blacks. Being from the South himself, Griffith grew up with all the "Lost Cause" BS of moonlight and julips and that's what he put in his film. Think that film was rough, you should have been down here in the 1940s-1960s when segregation was still the law of the land. Not a pretty sight.

I've yet to see a single silent film , I really do prefer the blessing of audio

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It was quite common to have whites portraying blacks on both screen and stage back then. One aspect grew out of the old Minstrel Shows that were popular both North and South in the late 1800s up through the early 1900s. Started with whites appearing in blackface singing and dancing in their interpretation of blacks. Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor and others came out of that aspect of the theater. But then there were also minstrel shows in which blacks performed in blackface. See, proper white folks wouldn't go watch a black performance, but put 'em in blackface and they could pretend they were watching "whites" acting like blacks. One of the most popular radio programs in the 1940s was Amos and Andy, a comedy about blacks which was played by white men. It later made the jump to TV in the 1950s with a black cast, but still doing what the white script writers and producers considered to be black comedy. Show was popular for years among whites, but not among blacks. Through this whole period, there were "white" actors portraying blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, Japanese, and Native Americans because people just didn't hire people of other ethnic backgrounds. Spencer Tracey, who looked as Irish as a potato, played a Mexican-American in Tortilla Flats. Paul Muni played several Hispanic roles, including Mexican President Benito Juarez. Katherine Hepburn portrayed a Chinese woman. And there were all sorts of racist remarks sprinkled through movies especially in the 1930s-1940s, with "whites" calling blacks "boy" or Lightning. In The Miracle of Morgan's Creek filmed in the 1940s, there's a scene where one guy does a favor for another fellow and the second guy thanks him by saying, "That's mighty white of you."

Of the few I've seen, these are my top 5 fave:


5. Nosferatu -







4. Metropolis -








3. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame -








2. The Phantom Of The Opera -








1. Modern Times -

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Some other silent films that I like that haven't been mentioned yet:


The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Dreyer)


Intolerance (1916, Griffith)


The Last Laugh (1924, Murnau)

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Mel brooks...Silent Movie...the one where the only word spoken during the whole movie is spoken by Marcel Marceau...genius!

A few more that I don't think have been mentioned.



The Wind


The Flesh And The Devil


The Lodger