Silent Film Discussion

It's on YouTube, too.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Yeah, but a 4 hour silent movie with a bunch of still filling? Boy do you make it sound even better.

If you truly love cinema, you are willing to watch 10 hours of just stills.

In before "isn't every piece of film technically just a bunch of stills?"!!!

I always encourage anyone that's trying to *get* into silent films to go back and check out really old shorts from Lumière, Méliès, Alice Guy, Segundo de Chomón, or really, any silent film you can get your hand on from 1900 to 1910, or even older. First, they're usually just a handful of minutes short so you can tackle a bunch in a while, and second, they help to give you a perspective of the evolution of the medium, how things were vs. how things are. Personally, I find it very rewarding.

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1 Way Down East (1920)
2 Wings (1927)
3 The Crowd (1928)
4 The Broadway Melody (1929)
5 It (1927)
6 Show People (1927)
7 7th Heaven (1927)
8 The Wind (1928)
9 Broken Blossoms (1919)
10 The Jazz Singer (1927)
11 The Big Parade (1925)
12 The Kid (1921)
13 Lucky Star (1929)
14 The Lost World (1925)
15 He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
16 The Gold Rush (1925)
17 A Trip to the Moon (1902)
18 The Doll (1919)
19 Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
20 Pandora's Box (1929)
21 The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
22 Metropolis (1927)
23 Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
24 Sherlock Jr (1924)
25 Mantrap (1926)

Yes---it's especially fun to watch some of the hand-colored ones too (like Méliès' fairy tale ones). It's really amazing what diversity of color techniques were developed so early on.

I may have mentioned before, but when I moved to Hollywood in the late '60s, I picked up a copy of Joe Franklin's rather landmark book, Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury (1959). It's a fascinating discussion of 50 of the greatest silent films. BTW I noticed on Amazon that you can buy the book for $5 bucks!

What made it nice was that at the time there was an actual silent movie theater in West Hollywood on Fairfax Ave, which showed a constantly changing roster of silents with the proper projector. There were only about 300 seats, but each night you could see a feature, a comedy, and usually something else like maybe a cartoon-- all for 75 cents!!

So I'd read up on the picture, then go see it live. I was lucky to be in that area at that time. Saw some great ones, but it's been so long ago, I've forgotten most of them. Some of the great talkie actors learned their craft in silents, so they could impart emotion and thought by facial expression. Some of the great directors too, like A. Hitchcock.

Speaking of Hitchcock, I think he deserves to be mentioned here. Even though his silent films are perhaps his roughest, there are still a couple of really good ones there, plus it's interesting to dive into them to see Hitchcock's evolution of similar themes and motifs.

And since I brought up Hitchcock, here's something I wrote several years ago about his silent films.

The Apprentice of Suspense: Alfred Hitchcock's early silent films

For what it's worth, my appreciation for The Lodger has gone way up since I wrote that. I think it's essential and probably his best silent, although I still have a soft spot for Easy Virtue.

Although my main go to silent films are The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Metropolis, The Phantom of the Opera and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, some other favorites include Nosferatu, and the great adventure films of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (the mark of Zoro, the 3 Musketters, the Adventures of Robin Hood and the Black Pirate).
For comedy, you can't go wrong with Chaplin, Keaton or Langdon...

I don't like them either. Silent movies are crap.

Anyone mentioned Nosferatu yet?

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I think that might have been the first silent movie that I saw all of the way through---and definitely the first that I sought out to watch. I think it's better than the book it was supposedly an illegal copy of!

Consider me a proud scatophile, then.

Birth of a Nation is really well done and totally cringe-worthy. I saw it in a film history series and, considering the level of racism in the movie (astonishing), I thought I'd need a long, hot soak in the shower after it was over. Any time you need a lesson in unflinching racism, "Klan boys to the rescue of soth'run womanhood", this is your movie. The idea that Griffith tried to claim some sort of guileless innocence about the content of the movie makes you wonder just how dumb he thought people were/are.

Nosferatu, along with the others in your list is supremely creepy. Again, it's one I've seen in a restored version on the big screen, in that case, accompanied by an on-stage chamber music ensemble, performing original music for the movie. That was quite an experience. That bony, dead-eyed, rat-like vampire, Orlock was/is may all time favorite blood sucker.

There's a much later version of the movie that starred Klaus Kinski as the bloodsucker. It was pretty good, but not as creepy and malignant as the Murnau version, which deserves its status as a classic. When it was being made Max Schreck, the vampyre, cultivated a rumor that he really was a vampire.

It's worth noting that, when the movie was released, the family of Bram Stoker (author of the book Dracula) sued the film makers, claiming that he owned the concept of a vampire. A German court ordered copies destroyed but some survived. The current version of the movie was a result of a long effort to patch together pieces of the best remaining prints and do some digital restoration. The version I saw with live music was the outcome of that project.

You have to put yourself in the mood for something completely different from "talkies", kinda like the first time you see an opera. Both silents and opera require suspension of disbelief and a willingness to go somewhere that's different from our usual world. That's a good thing to do now and again. It keeps your brain agile.

Unlike current actors who deliberately under-gesture, silent actors were like mimes and use big gestures and deliberately dramatic facial expressions. Body language and facial expression are the emotional content of the movie. Inter titles are just clues to what's going on. If you're willing to change your expectation of a movie, they can really be enjoyable, but if you can only think about a lack of color and sound, it's going to be a long night. I'm glad that we have sound and color now, but, now and again, it's fun to go back to 1920.

Good explanation. I would add that one has to be an 'active participant' when watching a silent movie. That's opposed to most modern movie where we can kickback disengage the mind and let the movie 'beam' it's narrative into our heads.

When I watch a silent I try to 'do the character's lines' or at least their responses in my own head so that I'm part of the story. I'd say silent films are more like reading a novel than watching a modern block buster action film. With all that said I have to be in the right mood for them and mentally up for a silent.