A Guide to Silent Film

A Guide to Silent Film

To celebrate the exciting release of Lotte Reiniger: The Fairy Tale Films on DVD we present an introduction to the silent film genre from Graeme Hobbs.

It seems incredible now that a period of just over thirty years saw the birth, phenomenal growth and extinction of silent cinema as an art form. Beginning with early experiments in film from practitioners such as the Lumi�re Brothers, George M�li�s and Thomas Edison in the 1890s (the Lumi�res� first public screening of films at which admission was charged in December 1895 is generally held to be the birthdate of commercial cinema) through to 1927, when Al Jolson announced, in The Jazz Singer � the film which heralded the arrival of the "talkie" � "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet", there is no era comparable in its richness of stars, style and ceaseless experimentation.

A recognition of the debt that cinema in its present form owes to silent cinema comes when you realise that most of the visual language with which we are familiar � cuts, tracking shots, trick photography, double exposures etc, are not just products of the 20th century, but rather of the 19th! The star system and the studio system that are so familiar today had their birth a little later, in the 1920s.

People sometimes think that silent cinema was a mere phase in the evolution of film to something ever more advanced, but this is hopelessly misjudged(though it has to be said that Hollywood studios colluded with portraying the silent era as outdated and old-fashioned, mostly so they could promote the qualities of their new sound systems and stars). It was a universal art form in a universal language that matured quickly and scaled heights of comedy, drama and epic decadence that we now struggle to match.

And of course, silent film was never silent. Various forms of accompaniment � piano, accordion, organ, orchestral � complemented screenings, sometimes with a set score specially written for the film, sometimes improvised, and the mixture of live music and recorded images was, and still is, a great experience.

This was the era of the stars of the silver screen, and the term during this era was literal, as silver content was then embedded in the cinema screen's surface, which, complemented by the superb quality of film stocks then in use, gave an unimaginably fine quality to the image whose loss we can only lament. It may seem an obvious point but it has to be remembered too that with no television then there was no bombardment of moving imagery from every quarter. The rarity and the quality of the image would have been entrancing indeed. "We didn't need voices, we had faces then" says Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Even the most cursory list shows the truth of this statement: Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Lon Chaney, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton.

Alfred Hitchcock learned the basis of his themes and style in the silent era, having worked in Germany in 1925 and there been influenced by F W Murnau. Watch such films as Murnau's The Last Laugh, Gance's Napoloeon and La Roue, Siodmak and Ulmer's People on Sunday, Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse or Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and you might well think that to trade such sophisticated, moving and intelligent visual language just so that audiences could hear people talk was a pretty bad deal.

Most of the films from the silent era are now lost. There are many reasons for this � fire (nitrate stock is extremely flammable), decay, wars, tax avoidance by studios � sometimes it is amazing that anything has survived at all, let alone films in prints of incredible quality, such as Murnau�s The Last Laugh. Recently the director, author and film restorer Kevin Brownlow, a man who has done so much to promote and salvage what he can of the era, made the point that for the price of a typically middling, here-today-forgotten-tomorrow Hollywood blockbuster today, much of the silent film that is still somehow preserved in the archives could be saved from further depredations and given new life. The constant attraction of the new in cinema means this is unlikely to happen. One watch of some of the indisputable masterpieces from the era however � and films such as Sunrise and Napoleon are not just great films but great artworks, period � shows just how much we have already lost, and how much more we stand to lose by this attitude.

Visit our Silent Film section to see what's available on DVD!

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