Category: Language of Silent Film

There was something slightly unsettling about the employment office sequence I saw in the “The Chaplin Revue” (1959) of “A Dog’s Life”. It wasn’t just that it felt like it was running too slow. An easy call to make but difficult to explain. I wanted to know what the explanation was. Years after seeing this…

What struck me and stayed with me for years was the scene in A Dog’s Life (1918) where Charlie is in an employment office. As presented in The Chaplin Revue (1959), the film was step-printed so that it would be appear to be running at 16 frames per second even though the film was being…

At some point when I was in college or somewhere in my 20s, I saw “The Chaplin Revue” at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, also known as the Little Carnegie. Lee Erwin accompanied the film on the theater’s Wurlitzer organ, and that was the main reason I’d attended the show. Something about the film, one scene…

In the same way that silent film can be over-sped, with variable speed projection as an option there’s also the possibility of a film being run a bit slower than it ought to be. This can be pretty subjective. But — as with over-speeding — if there’s some knowledge about the film’s year of release…

Yes, sometimes silent films are run too fast, faster than they ought to be. Some of them, anyway. For a long time, there weren’t any options about this, and this either became something fans got accustomed to or became a stereotype about silent movies that could be off-putting. The projection rate at which sound film…

This fall will mark 40 years since I began accompanying silent films. I’ve played to hundreds and hundreds of them, in a wide variety of venues and in a number of formats. One thing I’ve noticed and that my colleagues have as well is that when a silent movie is being shown “too slow” it’s…

I remember seeing an interview several years ago with someone involved with Blake Edwards’ “Victor/Victoria“ who said that one of the challenges in moving the film to stage was that you couldn’t have those close-ups of different characters thinking “wait a second, is that person actually…?” Which is half of the whole concept of the…

Soviet cinema in the 1920s takes the Silent Film use of showing us something that represents a fuller picture for us to fill out to another level. Borrowing on some of the editing techniques seen in Griffith’s films to build tension or create an impression, filmmakers like Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Vertov and others used this visual…