5.Classic Silent Films
The era of silent film generally refers to the time between the mid 1890s, when motion picture projectors were first invented, and the late 1920s, when talking pictures (or “talkies") started to come into vogue. That said, even when talkies became the predominant form of cinema in the 30s, certain filmmakers, reluctant or completely opposed to taking the leap, continued to make silent films. Here I’ve chosen 12 classic films spanning the entire silent era. Most are Hollywood productions, but a few are overseas films that changed the face of filmmaking.
●A Trip to the Moon (1902/France) Director: Georges Méliès
A Trip to the Moon, which is loosely based on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, is considered to be not only the first sci-fi film, but the first narrative masterpiece of the medium. During a time when most motion pictures were just a few minutes long and comprised of one shot, this film is 14 minutes long and made up of 30 scenes. Méliès makes use of a veritable bag of visual tricks, which would form the basis for special effects in Hollywood.
●The Great Train Robbery (1903/United States) Director: Edwin S. Porter
This 12-minute film produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company is often considered the first Western. It was the first American film to be driven by plot and is known for using a number of then-unconventional filming techniques, such as on-location shooting and panning. Critics and film historians often cite the final shot—a medium close-up of the leader of the bandits, who shoots his pistol directly into the camera—as a possible inspiration for the famous James Bond gun barrel sequence.
●The Birth of a Nation (1915/United States) Director: D. W. Griffith
Around 1914, the Biograph Company started to shift away from making feature length films when it began to doubt their commercial potential. Frustrated with the company’s resistance, D. W. Griffith left to found his own studio. The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, became a massive financial success, and one of the most important films of the silent era for its length, complex narrative, and many technical innovations. It has also been called “the most controversial film ever made in the United States" for its depiction of the KKK as heroes protecting the (white) social order and Blacks—portrayed by white actors in blackface—as simple-minded, sexually aggressive savages. The film attracted so much controversy even before its release that Blacks across the U.S. organized and participated in protests against the film, and attempted to have it banned on the basis that it inflamed racial tensions. For non-Americans, the film offers insight into the systemic racism that has taken root throughout the U.S. and is endemic in Hollywood. It is required viewing—or required reckoning—for understanding the Black Lives Matter protests that have rocked the U.S. and spread around the world.
●The Mark of Zorro (1920/United States) Director: Fred Niblo
This silent adventure film stars Douglas Fairbanks as a foppish Don who has taken the identity of the titular masked Robin Hood-like figure Señor Zorro. Fairbanks had been mostly known as a comedic actor up until this point, but this film firmly established him as a swashbuckling hero. It would serve as the basis for superheroes like Batman, and indeed, the entire superhero movie genre.
●Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922/Germany) Director: F. W. Murnau
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is a silent German expressionist horror film considered to be the first vampire movie. Director F. W. Murnau was interested in adapting Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, but when Stoker’s widow did not give approval, Murnau changed some of the names and details of the story in order to avoid copyright issues. Nonetheless, Stoker’s widow sued over the adaptation, and the court ruled that all copies of the film were to be destroyed. However, by that time a few prints had circulated around the world and it was kept alive by a cult following.
●Battleship Potemkin (1925/Soviet Union) Director: Sergei Eisenstein
This historical epic is a dramatization of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against its officers after being served borscht made from rotten meat. The mutiny is considered one of the important events that lead to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The film is most famous for the Odessa Steps sequence, where the Tsar’s soldiers march down the steps toward a crowd of unarmed civilians and open fire. Although the massacre is not historically accurate, the power of the scene comes from the director’s pioneering use of montage, where he edited together shots —wide shots, shots of fleeing civilians, marching soldiers, civilians being killed, and most famously, a baby carriage rolling down the steps—in such a way as to produce an emotional response.
●The General (1926/United States) Director: Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton
Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, this film is based on an actual military raid were Northern spies commandeered a train called the General in northern Georgia and attempted to do as much damage as possible to the vital Western and Atlantic Railroad as they headed north toward Tennessee. Lead actor and co-director Buster Keaton, known for physical comedy delivered with a deadpan expression, believed that audiences would not accept the Confederate Army being depicted as villains, and decided to change the story add comedic elements to liven it up. Keaton spent weeks and much of his budget preparing for elaborate pyrotechnical shots, and the climactic train wreck scene is considered to be the most expensive single shot in silent film history. The film was not well received by critics and audiences, but it has since been reevaluated, and is now considered one of the most important works of the silent era.
●Wings (1927/United States) Director: William A. Wellman
This silent war film set during the First World War was long considered the gold standard for aviation films for its technical prowess and realistic air-combat sequences. The director, the only filmmaker in Hollywood at the time who had combat pilot experience, developed techniques to film closeups of pilots in flight and capture the sense of speed and motion in the air. The film was a massive financial success, partly due to the public’s infatuation with aviation. It became the first film (and the only silent film) to win the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 1st Academy Awards in 1929.
●Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927/United States) Director: F. W. Murnau
This silent romantic drama is German expressionist director F. W. Murnau’s Hollywood film debut. Although it was not a box office success, the fairy tale-like atmosphere of the enormous sets, the striking use of light and shadow, and widely praised tracking shots make it one of the most important films of the era. The film won the Academy Award for “Unique and Artistic Picture" at the 1st Academy Awards in 1929. The award was intended to be as prestigious as the Best Picture award (then called “Outstanding Picture"), but the Academy would drop it the following year.
●Metropolis (1927/Germany) Director: Fritz Lang
If Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon was the first sci-fi short film, then Metropolis was the first feature length sci-fi masterpiece. The Austrian-born director Fritz Lang developed many complex special effects to bring his vision to life. Set in a dystopian futurescape where the rich ruling class lives atop massive skyscrapers and the poor working class toil away underground in order to keep the city running, Metropolis is the story of a young woman named Maria who attempts to bring the working and ruling classes together. In other words, the film is a critique of capitalism and technology. While its ultimate message, "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart", is considered naive, its apprehensive view of technology was more prescient. At one point in the film, the villain transfers Maria’s likeness to a robot, which he sends down to infiltrate and sabotage the working class uprising. It’s not unlike how deepfakes are being used today to deceive, manipulate, and ruin lives.
●The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928/France) Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
This silent historical film depicts the trial and execution of Joan of Arc. It is significant for the creative choice not to romanticize or glorify the character, and is based on the actual record of the trial of Joan of Arc. The film was considered highly unconventional for Dreyer’s emphasis on closeups of lead actress Renée Falconetti’s facial features; he also did not allow his actors to wear makeup in order to tell the story more effectively through their expressions. Dreyer initially wanted to make the film as a talkie, but European film studios at the time were averse to spending the money for studio facilities.
●City Lights (1931/United States) Director: Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin, the biggest star to come out of the early days of Hollywood, is best known for portraying The Tramp in films like The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). The Tramp, known for his ill-fitting clothes, small bowler hat, and toothbrush mustache, is a childlike, bumbling vagrant who endeavors to maintain the dignity and demeanor of a gentleman; he is a victim of circumstance but at the same time possesses a cunning that allows him to get one over on authority figures. In City Lights, considered Chaplin’s greatest masterpiece, The Tramp falls in love with a blind girl selling flowers on a street corner. This film was produced at a time when sound films had started to become the norm, but Chaplin was dismissive of talkies—not only because The Tramp was an icon of the silent era, but because he was supposed to be an American character (Chaplin himself had an English accent).
6.Epilogue
The films I’ve written about in this article are just some of the works from the silent era that are considered all-time classics of cinema, which continue to be analyzed, dissected, and pondered upon. Research suggests that less than 20% of the total creative output of the silent era still exists, as most of the films were either destroyed on purpose or lost to accidents such as fire. When talkies came into vogue, studios began to discard silent films in order to free up space in their storage spaces; they assumed that the works were no longer culturally relevant and of very little financial value. What’s more, it turned out that the nitrate film stock used to film and distribute silent films was highly flammable, and was prone to spontaneously combust when stored improperly.
Contemporary film scholars continue to search for old silent films. Many of the silent films we have—some of them considered classics—are incomplete, and whenever an old print or negative is discovered the footage is restored using the latest digital technology and an updated or “complete" edit of the film is released. In 2008, for example, negatives of the original cut of Metropolis were discovered at a film museum in Argentina. The cut included 25 minutes that had been presumed to be lost. The footage was combined with footage from other newly discovered copies and premiered in 2010 at a classic film festival in Mann’s Chinese Theater in L.A. A DVD and Blu-ray release followed shortly thereafter.
In 2018, a short film from 1898 capturing what is believed to be the earliest on-screen kiss involving African-Americans was discovered at an estate sale in Louisiana. At a time when practically all portrayals of Blacks in film were horribly racist caricatures, the 29-second clip is notable for showing the smiling pair sharing kisses, swinging each other’s arms, and laughing.
More than just the ongoing efforts of film scholars and archivists, Hollywood as an industry has long held nostalgia for the silent era. In 1976, the legendary comic and writer Mel Brooks directed Silent Movie, a satirical comedy produced in the style of a silent film that follows a movie producer in the 70s trying to get studio support to make a silent film. The same year the New Hollywood director Peter Bogdanovich released Nickelodeon, a comedy set in the first half of the 1910s when the Edison Trust was hell-bent on crushing its competitors. In 1992, Robert Downey Jr. starred in the biopic Chaplin, which was a box office bomb but garnered critical acclaim and accolades for Downey’s titular performance.
The obsession has continued into the 21st century. In 2000, John Malcovich and Willem Dafoe starred in Shadow of the Vampire, a fictionalized documentary account of the making F. W. Murnau’s classic horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. In 2011, Martin Scorsese released Hugo, his homage to Georges Méliès and the origins of cinema. The same year saw the release of The Artist, a silent film that follows the relationship between a seasoned actor and a young actress during the transition years between silent film and talking pictures. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor.
Hollywood’s obsession with the silent era speaks to the timelessness and universality of the classic films of the era. Because so many silent films have been poorly preserved, we tend to think of them as grainy, primitive cinematic works; in actuality, much of the language of cinema was forged in those early years. For Hollywood, it is a wellspring of inspiration.
We now live in times when everyone has a portable motion picture recorder and playback system that fits in the palm of their hand. The social media age has seen the rise of apps like TikTok that make it easy for just about anyone to shoot, edit, and publish short videos. The internet is awash with the work of amateur filmmakers. The COVID-19 pandemic has only made such platforms even more popular. Check out the videos that have gone viral, and it quickly becomes clear that much of them involve lip-syncing and editing techniques like looped video, slow motion, and reverse playback. For the TikTok generation the silent era is unfathomably ancient; yet, they are essentially doing the same thing filmmakers were doing a century ago.
In our second installment in this series, I will write about talkies and the Golden Age of Hollywood.
