Silent Cinema’s Finest

Illustration of “Maschinenmensch” (Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927) by Pooja Sreenivasan.

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.

Murnau with Henri Matisse in Tahiti in 1930.

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.

Fritz Lang’s ‘Metopolis’.

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s ‘La passion de Jeanne d’Arc’.

Abel Gance’s ‘Napoleon’.

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.

Promotional photos of Lillian Gish for ‘The Wind’.

DVD cover art for the ‘City Girl’.

Theatrical release poster for ‘Sunrise’.

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.

Hideo Sugawara, Seiichi Kato, Tomio Aoki from the film ‘Otona no miru ehon-Umarete wa mita keredo’ directed by Yasujiro Ozu.

A screenshot from the film ‘Schastye’.

The Silent Comedians

Buster Keaton getting his foot stuck in railroad tracks at Knott’s Berry Farm in 1956.

Silent comedy, although so often associated with the stars of its ‘golden era’ such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, was, in fact, one of cinema’s earliest and most popular genres. From cinema’s very beginning a handful of films, such as L’Arroseur arrosé directed by Louis Lumière, where a gardener has a series of mishaps with his garden hose. These early experiments were a great success, but many performers who were very popular in the silent era are now largely forgotten or exist in the shadow of both Chaplin and Keaton. Harold Lloyd’s daring performance in Safety Last! and Raymond Griffith’s in Hands Up! are typical examples of well-crafted comic routines and also reminders of the way in which iconic performers can fade from public view.

Pamphlet for the film “Hands Up!”.

The iconic shot of Lloyd hanging from the clock in “Safety Last!”.

The world’s first movie poster, “L’Arroseur Arrosé”.

In the early silent period, it was in Europe that comedy began to develop the logic and form that would take it well into the 1920s, with comic actors such as André Deed and most notably the hugely popular Max Linder making early headway in the field. However, it was Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios that developed the tropes that would come to define silent comedy and began to produce comic films on an industrial scale, with his ‘Keystone Kops’ proving a favourite with audiences after the founding of the studio in 1912. Kop’s films which were often made in a matter of days and which varied immensely in quality, usually consisted of manic chase sequences featuring a series of crazed physical stunts and a cast of people humorously mismatched in size. Sennett was crucial in developing a form of on-screen comedy that relied upon a series of sight gags, reality-defying scenarios and the use of unconventional-looking character actors. Keystone films were designed to be brief, with new shorts appearing on a weekly basis, often playing upon topical themes or mimicking famous films of the day. It was Sennett, too, who developed Hollywood’s first comedy stars, with performers such as Mack Swain, Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, Harry Langdon and Charlie Chaplin all rising to fame making Keystone films.

Mack Sennett with Buster Keaton on set.

Mack Sennett Studios.

Mack Swain photographed by Albert Witzel.

Ford Sterling with Marvel Rea and Alice Maison.

Portrait of Mable Normand in a trading card.

Ad for “The Hayseed” with Arbuckle holding his dog Luke.

Photo of Harry Langdon in 1923.

Chaplin satirising Adolf Hitler in “The Great Dictator”.

Chaplin went on to graduate from Keystone’s simple knockabout fare and become the pre-eminent comedy star of the era, eventually commanding a weekly salary in 1915 of US $1250. Crucial to Chaplin’s success was the control that his fame allowed him to exert over his material. As such he increasingly moved away from the broad brushstrokes and overtly slapstick comedies of Keystone and refined his comic alter ego, a down-at-heel but kind-hearted tramp with a bowler hat, walking cane and ill-fitting clothes. Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, was one of the top-grossing films of the silent era and like many of his films, such as The Kid, it explored themes that were close to his heart-not least the effects of poverty, something that resonated with Chaplin’s impoverished background. The film is best known, however, for the ‘roll dance where Chaplin’s tramp performs an artful dance with two forks stuck into two bread rolls. This was typical of Chaplin’s comedy, a canny mix of skillful, balletic physical comedy and thoughtful, situation-based gags.

Charlie Chaplin in his iconic outfit as the tramp.

Big Jim and the Lone Prospector in the wobbling cabin, a scene from “The Gold Rush”.

Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in a publicity photo for “The Kid”.

Keaton, a former acrobat and vaudeville child performer, differed from Chaplin in that his comedy tended to derive from the contrast between his perpetually deadpan face and the absurdly athletic acts his characters had to perform to avoid injury. With Keaton, physical comedy was almost poetic in the thoughtful and skillful performance of increasingly elaborate set pieces that were as dangerous as they were spectacular.

Keaton in costume with his signature pork pie hat.

The coming of sound radically changed the careers of many silent comedy performers. Chaplin resisted films with dialogue until as late as 1940 and The Great Dictator, preferring instead to use sound effects in films such as Modern Times. Keaton found it hard to adjust to dialogue-based comedy and performers such as Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon lost much of their comic Verve and appeal. W.C Fields, who had featured witty repartee as part of his stage career, was able to move from silent hits to a successful career in talkies. Similarly, Laurel and Hardy began working at the end of the silent period, and adapted to the changing medium and initiated the next generation of comic geniuses.

Laurel and Hardy in “The Flying Deuces”.