By the mid-1920s the cinema, denied speech, had developed a form of visual narration as subtle and as expressive as words. While written intertitles supplied dialogue, it was the images that truly carried the narrative and captured emotions. Unconstrained by the requirements of sound recording, the camera, which F. W. Murnau called ‘the director’s pencil’, attained flexibility that remains unsurpassed. Unable to talk, actors relied on gestures and facial expressions, achieving no less subtlety and depth of feeling than they would with the more naturalistic style that came with sound.
Silence, then, was not a limitation. For many aesthetes and film theorists, the uniqueness of cinema was precisely its ability to tell a story through images alone. Murnau’s ‘Der letzte’ Mann’ avoided intertitles, seeking to create a wholly visual narrative, and the quest for a pure cinema found disciples as far afield as Japan, where the expressionistic ‘Kurutta ippeji’ (A Page Of Madness), directed by Kinugasa Teinosuke, used only images to narrate its disorienting story of events inside a lunatic asylum.
Few films went to the lengths of eliminating intertitles, but the glory of late silent cinema was undoubtedly its visual artistry. Murnau’s ‘Faust’, despite its literary origins in the legend of the man who sells his soul to the Letzte, was most remarkable for its luminous recreation of medieval Europe. This was one of the extravagant productions by leading German studio UFA, which also made the pageant like ‘Die Nibelungen: Siegfried’ and ‘Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Rache’, by Fritz Lang, and his science-fiction epic ‘Metropolis’. Despite a decent plot, the latter remains one of cinema’s most visually impressive evocations of the future. French cinema also often aspired to an epic mode, never more so than in the work of Abel Gance, whose ‘Napoléon’ took the stylistic elaboration of silent cinema to an extreme. The emperor’s career is told in a series of set pieces, including the remarkable ‘storm in the convention’-Napoleon’s voyage on a stormy sea is juxtaposed with thunderous debates between French politicians. Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer dramatized French history in ‘La passion de Jeanne d’Arc’, but largely eschewed spectacle for a single-minded focus on the emotional registers conveyed by the human face.
Indeed, the remarkable thing about the late silent film was its ability to combine visual grandeur with emotional intimacy. This was true of Hollywood too, where some of the best masterpieces were directed by European émigrés. Murnau came from Germany to work for Fox, and in the romantic melodrama ‘Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans’ and ‘City Girl’ he combined stylistic beauty with delicate attention to human feelings. The Swede Victor Sjöström, known for his studies of Scandinavian rural life opted for a similarly remote setting in one of the last great US silents, ‘The Wind’ a powerful melodrama shot on location in the Mojave desert.
The excellence of silent film during the late 1920s helps to explain why many saw the coming of sound as a backward step. Most of ‘Lonesome’, another tale of US urban life by a European émigre, showed the flair of late silent cinema, but the mood was shattered by some common dialogue sequences.
The sound opened up new possibilities for film and by 1930 the new medium had won out in the United States and Western Europe, but it was years before filmmakers had the technology to combine sound with the visual fluency of the late silents. The point is confirmed by the outstanding work of the few mature film industries that made silent films after 1930. Until the mid-1930s, Soviet cinema produced fine silents, such as ‘Schastye’, by Alexander Medvedkin, with its blend of slapstick, satire, and folklore In Japan, where sound films were rare until 1935, directors such as Mikio Naruse and Hiroshi Shimizu fused local traditions with the flamboyant camera style learned from Western masters of late silent film, In films such as ‘Otona no miru ehon-Umarete wa mita keredo’, Yasujiro Ozu showed that silent cinema was capable of realism as authentic as hat achieved with sound in the Neo-Realist films of post-war Italy.
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