Category: Language of Silent Film

I hope this series of posts that I began in January 2021 has been useful, educational, thought-provoking or food for thought. In providing answers to questions about silent movies that I’m asking in interviews, I have tried over and over for years to come up with a simple and concise and accessible answer to why…

Like the other points I’ve made about the culture and styles of the era of the 1910s and 1920s being unessential for Silent Film, the same should be held for storylines and story tropes. As ubiquitous as many typical plots and character archetypes may have been in the silent movies we know, some core aspects…

I’ve covered what I’ve observed in titles cards in silent movies from the ‘teens and ‘twenties in a handful of posts earlier on in this series. I’d like to go over a few points about intertitles again to clarify which aspects of what we’ve all seen are of the silent era and which are not.…

Making a silent movie sounds like a fun idea, no? Lots of people with movie cameras — 16mm, 8mm, super 8, and probably also 9.5mm — have done it. Either as a novelty, or as die-hard fans in tribute to the medium they love. As home movie enthusiasts or as film students or professionals, and…

There have been a handful of silent movies made over the past several decades that were released commercially. These pictures received good reviews and did well at the box office. Reviewers and fans wondered, each time, if this mightn’t be signaling a resurgence of interest in silent movies and the making of silents. It didn’t.…

It came from France. Ironically similar to the way Sennett was influenced by the physical comedy shorts released by Gaumont and Eclipse, and by Ambrosio in Italy, a sea change in long-form comedy film made its way to American shores in the 1950s. Perhaps because the history and tradition of physical comedy performance ran deeper…

The top starring comedians of silent movies were the last to give up the ghost when talking pictures brought the Silent Film universe back down to Earth. I can’t say I blame them. Physical and visual comedy was what they were known for, and they weren’t joke comics really. Stars of dramatic films pivoted right…

Filmmakers’ love for silent cinema has held on throughout the post-Vitaphone decades, and the form has popped up from time to time. I say “form” and not “medium” as the definitions of Silent Film I’ve been discussing are not always followed. Sometimes this is deliberate, sometimes through inadvertent following of a conflated (mis)understanding of the…

What makes Silent Film its own medium, and not merely a genre of film, is its unique and specific messing with our expectations of reality. This was never planned or intended, but from the early 1910s onward the silence, the monochrome photography, and the speed-up we now refer to as “undercranking” were the backbone of…