Category: Language of Silent Film

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 time quotation marks are…

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 media. With the exception of…

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 throughout the silent era. Ask…

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 that still included the occasional…

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, and we’d like to get…

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 late ‘teens and early ‘twenties.…

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 shift in dramatic action. Sometimes…

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 Rashomon (1950) we’re presented with…

The tag-line above first appeared in 1929, the final year of the silent film era. The idea encouraged busy Americans to pause and enjoy a carbonated beverage. Today we may substitute the act of taking a cleansing breath. In a restaurant…perhaps some sorbet before moving on. Intertitle cards in silent films also serve this function.…

If there’s one other ubiquitous stereotype people have about silent movies besides heightened or exaggerated gesturing it’s the use of title cards. It’s more true and prevalent than the face-pulling and gesticulating people assume is part of the medium, and rightfully so. The title cards bearing text that appear in Silent Film were originally referred…