Silent film

Scene from the 1921 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, one of the highest-grossing silent films.

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially spoken dialogue. In entertainment silent films the acting and dialogue is commuted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s with the perfection of the audion amplifier tube and the introduction of the Vitaphone system. After The Jazz Singer in 1927, "talkies" became more and more commonplace and within a decade silent films essentially disappeared.

Elements 1894-1929

Roundhay Garden Scene 1888, the first known celluloid film recorded.

The first film was created by Louis Le Prince in 1888. It was a two second film of people walking around in Oakwood Grange garden, titled Roundhay Garden Scene.^[1] The art of motion pictures grew into full maturity in the "silent era" before silent films were replaced by "talking pictures" in the late 20s. Many film scholars and buffs argue that the aesthetic quality of cinema decreased for several years until directors, actors, and production staff adapted to the new "talkies".^[2]

The visual quality of silent movies—especially those produced in the 1920s—was often high. However, there is a widely held misconception that these films were primitive and barely watchable by modern standards.^[3] This misconception comes from films being played back at wrong speed and due to the deteriorated condition of many silent films. Many silent films exist only in second- or third-generation copies, often copied from already damaged and neglected film stock.^[2]

Intertitles

Because silent films had no synchronized sound for dialogue, onscreen intertitles were used to narrate story points, present key dialogue and sometimes even comment on the action for the cinema audience. The title writer became a key professional in silent film and was often separate from the scenario writer who created the story. Intertitles (or titles as they were generally called at the time) often became graphic elements themselves, featuring illustrations or abstract decoration that commented on the action.

Live music and sound

Showings of silent films almost always featured live music, starting with the pianist at the first public projection of movies by the Lumière Brothers on December 28, 1895 in Paris.^[4] From the beginning, music was recognized as essential, contributing to the atmosphere and giving the audience vital emotional cues (musicians sometimes played on film sets during shooting for similar reasons). Small town and neighborhood movie theaters usually had a pianist. Beginning in the mid 1910s, large city theaters tended to have organists or ensembles of musicians. Massive theater organs were designed to fill a gap between a simple piano soloist and a larger orchestra. Theater organs had a wide range of special effects; theatrical organs such as the famous "Mighty Wurlitzer" could simulate some orchestral sounds along with a number of percussion effects such as bass drums and cymbals and sound effects ranging from galloping horses to rolling thunder.

The scores for early silent films were either improvised or compiled of classical or theatrical repertory music. Once full features became commonplace, however, music was compiled from photoplay music by the pianist, organist, orchestra conductor or the movie studio itself, which included a cue sheet with the film. These sheets were often lengthy, with detailed notes about effects and moods to watch for. Starting with mostly original score composed by Joseph Carl Breil for D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking epic The Birth of a Nation (USA, 1915) it became relatively common for the biggest-budgeted films to arrive at the exhibiting theater with original, specially composed scores.^[5]

When an organist or pianist used sheet music, they still might add in improvisatory flourishes to heighten the drama onscreen. As well, even if special effects were not indicated in the score, if an organist was playing a theater organ with an unusual sound effect, such as a "galloping horses" effect, they used it for dramatic horseback chases.

By the height of the silent era, movies were the single largest source of employment for instrumental musicians (at least in America). But the introduction of talkies, which happened simultaneously with the onset of the Great Depression, was devastating to many musicians.

Some countries devised other ways of bringing sound to silent films. The early cinema of Brazil featured fitas cantatas: filmed operettas with singers performing behind the screen.^[6] In Japan, films had not only live music but also the benshi, a live narrator who provided commentary and character voices. The benshi became a central element in Japanese film form, as well as providing translation for foreign (mostly American) movies.^[7] Their popularity was one reason why silent films persisted well into the 1930s in Japan.

Few film scores survive intact from this period, and musicologists are still confronted by questions when they attempt to precisely reconstruct those that remain. Scores can be distinguished as complete reconstructions of composed scores, newly composed for the occasion, assembled from already existing music libraries, or even improvised. Interest in the scoring of silent films fell somewhat out of fashion during the 1960s and 1970s. There was a belief current in many college film programs and repertory cinemas that audiences should experience silent film as a pure visual medium, undistracted by music. This belief may have been encouraged by the poor quality of the music tracks found on many silent film reprints of the time. More recently, there has been a revival of interest in presenting silent films with quality musical scores, either reworkings of period scores or cue sheets, or composition of appropriate original scores. A watershed event in this context was Kevin Brownlow's 1980 restoration of Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) featuring a score by Carl Davis. Brownlow's restoration was later distributed re-edited in America by Francis Ford Coppola with a live orchestral score composed by his father Carmine Coppola.

Notable current specialists in the art of arranging and performing silent film scores include organists and pianists such as Dennis James, Chris Elliott, Clark Wilson and Jim Riggs. Orchestral conductors such as Carl Davis and Robert Israel have written and compiled scores for numerous silent films. In addition to composing original film scores Timothy Brock has restored many of Charlie Chaplin's scores.

Acting techniques

Lillian Gish was a major star of the silent era with one of the longest careers, working from 1912-1987

Silent film actors emphasized body language and facial expression so that the audience could better understand what an actor was feeling and portraying on screen. Much silent film acting is apt to strike modern-day audiences as simplistic or campy. For this reason, silent comedies tend to be more popular in the modern era than drama, partly because overacting is more natural in comedy. The melodramatic acting style was in some cases a habit actors transferred from their former stage experience. The pervading presence of stage actors in film was the cause of this outburst from director Marshall Neilan in 1917: "The sooner the stage people who have come into pictures get out, the better for the pictures."^[8] In other cases, directors such as John Griffith Wray required their actors to deliver larger-than-life expressions for emphasis. As early as 1914, American viewers had begun to make known their preference for greater naturalness on screen. ^[8]

In any case, the large image size and unprecedented intimacy the actor enjoyed with the audience began to affect acting style, making for more subtlety of expression. Actresses such as Mary Pickford in all her films, Eleanora Duse in the Italian film Cenere (1916), Janet Gaynor in Sunrise, Priscilla Dean in Outside the Law and The Dice Woman and Lillian Gish in most of her performances made restraint and easy naturalism in acting a virtue.^[8] Directors such as Albert Capellani (a French director who also did work in America directing Alla Nazimova films) and Maurice Tourneur insisted on naturalism in their films; Tourneur had been just such a minimalist in his prior stage productions. By the mid-20s many American silent films had adopted a more naturalistic acting style, though not all actors and directors accepted naturalistic, low key acting straight away, as late as 1927 films featuring expressionistic acting styles such as Metropolis were still being released. Some viewers liked the flamboyant acting for its escape value, and some countries were later than the United States in embracing naturalistic style in their films. In fact today the level of naturalism in acting varies from film to film and our favourites may not be the most naturalistic. Just like today, a film's success depended upon the setting, the mood, the script, the skills of the director, and the overall talent of the cast.^[8]

Projection speed

Until the standardization of the projection speed of 24 frames per second (FPS) for sound films in 1926, silent films were shot at variable speeds (or "frame rates"), typically anywhere from 16 to 23 frames per second or faster, depending on the year and studio. Unless carefully shown at their original speeds they can appear unnaturally fast and jerky, which reinforces their alien appearance to modern viewers. At the same time, some scenes were intentionally undercranked during shooting to accelerate the action, particularly in the case of slapstick comedies. The intended frame rate of a silent film can be ambiguous and since they were usually hand cranked there can even be variation within one film. Film speed is often a vexed issue among scholars and film buffs in the presentation of silents today, especially when it comes to DVD releases of "restored" films; the 2002 restoration of Metropolis (Germany, 1927) may be the most fiercely debated example.

Projectionists frequently ran silent films slightly faster than the number of frames per second they were shot at. Most films seem to have been shown at 18 FPS or higher - some even faster than what became sound film speed (24 FPS, or 90 feet per minute). Even if shot at 16 FPS (often cited as "silent speed"), the projection of a cellulose nitrate base film at such a slow speed carried a considerable risk of fire. Often projectionists received general instructions from the distributors as to how fast particular reels or scenes should be projected on the musical director's cue sheet. In rare instances, usually for larger productions, detailed cue sheets specifically for the projectionist provided a detailed guide to presenting the film. Theaters also—to maximize profit—sometimes varied projection speeds depending on the time of day or popularity of a film.^[9]

Tinting

Scene from Broken Blossoms starring Lilian Gish, an example of sepia-tinted print.

With the lack of natural color processing available, films of the silent era were frequently dipped in dyestuffs and dyed various shades and hues to signal a mood or represent a time of day. Blue represented night scenes, yellow or amber meant day. Red represented fire and green represented a mysterious mood. Similarly, toning of film (such as the common silent film generalization of sepia-toning) with special solutions replaced the silver particles in the film stock with salts or dyes of various colors. A combination of tinting and toning could be used as an effect that could be striking.

Some films were hand-tinted, such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1894), from Edison Studios. In it, Annabelle Moore, a young dancer from Broadway, is dressed in white veils that appear to change colors as she dances. Hand coloring was often used in the early "trick" and fantasy films of Europe, especially those by Georges Méliès.

Scene from The Birth of a Nation

By the beginning of the 1910s, with the onset of feature-length films, tinting was expanded upon as another mood setter, just as commonplace as music. The director D.W. Griffith displayed a constant interest and concern about color, and used tinting to a unique effect in many of his films. His 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation, utilized a number of colors, including amber, blue, lavender, and a striking red tint for scenes such as the "burning of Atlanta" and the ride of the Ku Klux Klan at the climax of the picture. Griffith later invented a color system in which colored lights flashed on areas of the screen to achieve a color effect.

Top grossing silent films in the United States

The following are the films that earned the highest ever gross income in film history, as calculated by Variety magazine in 1932. The dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation.^[10]

1. The Birth of a Nation (1915) - $10,000,000
2. The Big Parade (1925) - $6,400,000
3. Ben-Hur (1925) - $5,500,000
4. Way Down East (1920) - $5,000,000
5. The Gold Rush (1925) - $4,250,000
6. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) - $4,000,000
7. The Circus (1928) - $3,800,000
8. The Covered Wagon (1923) - $3,800,000
9. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) - $3,500,000
10. The Ten Commandments (1923) - $3,400,000
11. Orphans of the Storm (1921) - $3,000,000
12. For Heaven's Sake (1926) - $2,600,000
13. Seventh Heaven (1926) - $2,400,000
14. Abie's Irish Rose (1928) - $1,500,000

During the sound era

Transition

Although attempts to create sync-sound motion pictures go back to the Edison lab in 1896, the technology became well-developed only in the early 1920s. The next few years saw a race to design, implement, and market several rival sound-on-disc and sound-on-film sound formats. Although The Jazz Singer's release in 1927 marked the first commercially successful sound film, silent films formed the majority of features produced in both 1927 and 1928. Thus the modern sound film era may be regarded as coming to dominance beginning in 1929.

For a listing of notable silent era films, see list of years in film for the years between the beginning of film and 1928. The following list includes only films produced in the sound era with the specific artistic intention of being silent.

• Un Chien Andalou, Salvador Dali/Luis Buñuel, 1929
• City Girl, F.W. Murnau, 1930
• Borderline, Kenneth MacPherson, 1930
• Earth, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930
• City Lights, Charlie Chaplin, 1931
• Tabu, F. W. Murnau, Robert Flaherty, 1931
• I Was Born, But..., Yasujiro Ozu, 1932
• A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujiro Ozu, 1934
• The Goddess , Wu Yonggang, 1934
• Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin, 1936

Later homages

Several filmmakers have paid homage to the comedies of the silent era, including Jacques Tati with his Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953) and Mel Brooks with Silent Movie (1976). Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's acclaimed drama Three Times (2005) is silent during its middle third, complete with intertitles; Stanley Tucci's The Impostors has an opening silent sequence in the style of early silent comedies. Writer / Director Michael Pleckaitis puts his own twist on the genre with Silent (2007). While not silent, the Mr. Bean TV show and movies have used Mr. Bean's non-talkative nature to create a similar style of humor.

The 1999 German film Tuvalu is mostly silent; the small amount of dialog is an odd mix of European languages, increasing the film's universality. Guy Maddin won awards for his homage to Soviet era silent films with his short The Heart of the World after which he made a feature-length silent, Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), incorporating live Foley artists, narration and orchestra at select showings. Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is a highly fictionalized depiction of the filming of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's classic silent vampire movie Nosferatu (1922). Werner Herzog honored the same film in his own version, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979).

Some films draw a direct contrast between the silent film era and the era of talkies. Sunset Boulevard shows the disconnect between the two eras in the character of Norma Desmond, played by silent film star Gloria Swanson, and Singin' In The Rain deals with the period where the people of Hollywood had to face changing from making silents to talkies. Peter Bogdanovich's affectionate 1976 film Nickelodeon deals with the turmoil of silent filmmaking in Hollywood during the early 1910s, leading up to the release of D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation.

In 1999, the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki produced Juha, which captures the style of a silent film, using intertitles in place of spoken dialogue.^[11] In India, the 1988 film Pushpak,^[12] starring Kamal Hassan, was a black comedy entirely devoid of dialog. The 2007 Australian film Dr Plonk, was a silent comedy directed by Rolf de Heer. Stage plays have drawn upon silent film styles and sources. Actor/writers Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore staged their Off-Broadway slapstick comedy Silent Laughter as a live action tribute to the silent screen era.^[13] Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford created and starred in All Wear Bowlers (2004), which started as an homage to Laurel and Hardy then evolved to incorporate life-sized silent film sequences of Sobelle and Lyford who jump back and forth between live action and the silver screen.^[14] The 1940 animated film Fantasia, which is eight different animation sequences set to music, can be considered a silent film, with only one short scene involving dialogue.

In 2005, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society made a silent film version of Lovecraft's story The Call of Cthulhu. This film maintained a period-accurate filming style, and was received as both "the best HPL adaptation to date" and, referring to the decision to make it as a silent movie, "a brilliant conceit." ^[15]

Preservation and lost films

Many early motion pictures are lost because the nitrate film used in that era was extremely unstable and flammable. Additionally, many films, like the series of Pinochle Boys films, were deliberately destroyed because they had little value in the era before home video. It has often been claimed that around 75% of silent films have been lost, though these estimates may be inaccurate due to a lack of numerical data.^[16] Major silent films presumed lost include Saved from the Titanic (1912);^[17] The Apostle, the world's first animated feature film (1917); Cleopatra (1917);^[18] Arirang (1926); Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1927);^[19] The Great Gatsby (1926); and London After Midnight (1927). Though most lost silent films will never be recovered, some have been discovered in film archives or private collections.

In 1978 in Dawson City, Yukon, a bulldozer uncovered buried reels of nitrate film during excavation of a landfill. Dawson City was once the end of the distribution line for many films. The retired titles were stored at the local library until 1929 when the flammable nitrate was used as landfill in a condemned swimming pool. Stored for 50 years under the permafrost of the Yukon, the films turned out to be extremely well preserved. Included in this treasure trove were films by Pearl White, Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, and Lon Chaney. These films are now housed at the Library of Congress.^[20] The degradation of old film stock can be slowed through proper archiving, or films can be transferred to CD-ROM or other digital media for preservation. Silent film preservation has been a high priority among film historians.^[21]

See also

References

Further reading

Davis, Lon. Silent Lives. BearManor Media, Albany, 2008. ISBN 1-59393-124-7.

External links

• Jeffrey Dym, Associate Professor of History, California State University, Sacramento. A Brief History of Benshi (Silent Film Narrators)