The unique combination of the delivering of reality and the elisions of it that we process in that quasi dream-state of experiencing Silent Film is what allows for an altered version of reality. There are several facets of what gets created in our minds through the leavings-out or disregard of…

I’d initially planned for this last series of posts about sub-titles (intertitles) to be about the use of art and drawings as well as the use of textured backgrounds. It has occurred to me that these usages may be more of one used in silent films as opposed to Silent…

Okay, some final words about the appearance of text in silent movie intertitles before I move on to what sometimes appears behind or around it. I’m not sure why or how the rule about quotation marks came to be for silent films, but in dialog cards, pretty much all of…

The typefaces and hand-lettering styles in films from the silent era do not have a wide variety, and for the most part they were already familiar to audiences. There are maybe five or six that one sees in a majority of silent movies, but they’re also visible elsewhere, in print…

Sub-titles in Silent Film are easy to read. They have to be. They interrupt the action, throw us a bone (or two), and hop back off the screen. Along with the economy of the text and the screen-time duration, the way the text is laid out was also pretty consistent…

I have no idea how this unwritten law of Silent Film sub-titling came to be, how it was determined or codified. And yet, the screen-time duration of any given “intertitle” appears to be pretty consistent from the late-‘aughts through the end of the silent era, and even into early’30s talkies…

There is an economy to the text in the sub-titles in Silent Film. Even in the wordy expositional titles, there’s a care and often a precision taken to expressing what needs to be gotten across in a sentence, or two. After all, the title card is something of an interruption,…

Sometimes the expositional sub-titles in Silent Film may have a little more personality or a persona to them. But not always consistently throughout the picture. This is not set up for us in any way, it merely happens. One somewhat prominent example is D.W. Griffith, in his features of the…

One type of sub-title in Silent Film is the one whose purpose is to feed us exposition. A disembodied narrator we never meet or are introduced to, appearing only sparingly, giving us just enough information so we know where we are now, or when, or so we know of a…

The universe of Silent Film allows for something that may be possible in sound film or in literature, and isn’t something we’re aware of as an audience. It’s a natural part of the narrative landscape and doesn’t come off as a clever device. In films like Citizen Kane (1941) or…