What did this aberration of the presence of sound mean to people making Silent Film? While it’s not known who or when this was figured out or came into regular use, it was clearly a known entity of the world of silent movies. I’ll bet that, if you weren’t aware…

One of my favorite natural laws of the universe of Silent Film involves, of all things, sound. That is, sound that happens in a scene, and whether or not it exists. The acceptance of the sound that should be heard is selective, regardless of whether or not we see what…

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…