A Beginner's Guide to Silent Films

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

The last few years have been great for silent film. Despite being obsolete since the addition of sound to motion pictures in the mid-twenties, this period of cinema history continues to fascinate. It was the birth of an exciting new art form, its technology in a constant state of exciting and innovative evolution. The phenomenal success of The Artist saw a brief resurgence in silent cinema, followed last year by Blancanieves, the charming black and white, silent film heavily inspired by one of the era’s true auteurs, F.W. Murnau. Some of the biggest names from the silent era have been the subject of feature films in recent years. Richard Attenborough’s excellent Chaplin, the biopic of arguably the most famous name from the era, featured a remarkable Robert Downey Jr. performance in the nineties. More recently, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo heavily featured the life and work of silent film pioneer Georges Méliès. Both films offered a glimpse at the men behind the incredible body of work created during the era.

These works have helped put silent cinema into a context that helps dispel some of the barriers between it and the modern viewer. We have been so spoilt with technology, particularly in the last decade, that putting off ever visiting silent cinema can be easily done. With that in mind, here’s some of the greatest, and most easily accessible, silent films ever made to act as a gateway for those who are yet to see what silent cinema has to offer.

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) – Tucked away in a hidden corner of Paris’s Pere Lachaise cemetery is a small monument, topped with the bust of an unassuming, balding man beneath which the named Georges Méliès is carved. Anyone who has ever enjoyed Star Wars, Back to the Future or any other film featuring special effects owes a great deal to him, as it was his pioneering work in the field that first started to show what the medium was truly capable of. His seminal work, Le Voyage dans la Lune, a sixteen-minute Jules Verne inspired masterpiece, follows a group of astronauts on their journey to the moon in cannon-propelled capsules. As the first ever science-fiction film, it remains the best known of the hundreds of films Méliès made during his career, and was the first work ever to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage film in 2002.

Le Voyage dans la Lune

The Birth of a Nation (1915) ­­- His political and racial beliefs have long since made him a figure of derision in cinema history, but D.W Griffith’s work remains amongst the most ambitious and technically brilliant films of the era. The Birth of a Nation, which was originally titled The Clansman, chronicles the relationship of two families in Civil War America. It was most noted for its portrayal of African-American men as lazy, stupid and over-sexualized and its heroic praising of the Ku Klux Klan. The inevitable controversy that awaited the film’s release prompted Griffith’s next film, Intolerance. Regardless of the subject matter, the film is an astounding technical achievement for its time, and Griffith’s remains one of the greatest proponents of free speech from the silent film era.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) – Described by Roger Ebert as “the first true horror film”, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a one of the most influential films of the German Expressionist movement. The sets look like reflections in a house of mirrors. There are no straight lines or right angles; everything is off-key and ill-balanced, providing an incredible feeling of aesthetic unease. Director Robert Wiene is credited as producing both the first example of frame story, and the first ‘twist ending’ in cinema. The creepiness of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has only increased with age.

Battleship Potemkin (1925) – Any film student worth their beret will have seen this at least two dozen times. Sergei Eisenstein’s quintessential masterpiece is widely considered both one of the greatest and one of the most influential films ever made. The film presents a dramatized version of the 1905 mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin, in which the crew rebelled against the tsarist regime. Brutal scenes of mayhem and violence in the iconic Odessa steps scene, in which the Cossacks shoot defenseless men, women and children were groundbreaking at the time, and remain shocking now.  Children are butchered, their heads crushed underfoot, a mother loses grip on her pram, sending it and the baby it carries cascading down the steps; all as the robotic soldiers march forwards mercilessly.

Battleship Potemkin

The General (1926) – As one of the three comedic auteurs of the era, along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, there has been an upswing in both respect and appreciation of the work of Buster Keaton in the last decade or two. Any one of a number of his films remain as brilliant as they were ninety years ago, but it is his seminal work, The General, that is widely considered his greatest effort. It tells the story of Civil War-era train engineer Johnnie (Keaton), and the two greatest loves of his life, his fiancé Annabelle Lee and his train, The General. A perfect example of pacing, blending action, adventure and comedy as well as a remarkable final set-piece didn’t help the film on its release, with its disappointing box office takings ending Keaton’s independence as a filmmaker. Thankfully, it has since been reevaluated, and is rightly considered one of the greatest films ever made.

Metropolis (1927) – Although Le Voyage dans la Lune has the honour of being the first science-fiction film ever made, Fritz Lang’s wonderful Metropolis is the first feature length film of the genre.  Set in the futuristic urban dystopia, it follows the efforts of Freder, the rich son of a city’s ruler, and Maria, a poor worker, as they struggle to overcome the great divide between classes in the city. At the time of its release, it was the most expensive film ever produced, and is visually unlike anything else that came before it. Like most great films of the era, it was unappreciated at the box office, regaining less that 1.5% of its mammoth budget back.

Metropolis

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) - Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s astonishing lead performance as Joan of Arc in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film remains amongst the best in screen history. Consisting mostly of close-ups of the actress’s face as she responds to the accusations of her captors (actual transcripts of the real-life Joan of Arc’s trial), she is utterly breathtaking. Danish director Dreyer’s decision to shoot the film in this style was groundbreaking, and his true vision for the film was only seen in a re-edited version in 1981, following its release at the time being a butchered version at the behest of the Archbishop of Paris and government censors. A true landmark of cinema history, it remains one of the most emotive, brutally powerful films ever created.

City Lights (1931) – Out of all other directors from the era, only Charlie Chaplin can genuinely claim to have any one of his films make this list. When a personality becomes so well known and instantly recognizable, it is often easy to forget the phenomenal body of work they created to get that recognition.  The true master of the era, both behind and in front of the camera, Chaplin remains the greatest comedic actor and director to ever live. City Lights follows his iconic Tramp character as he falls in love with a blind flower seller girl, and develops a tempestuous friendship with a millionaire drunkard. Made three years after the introduction of sound, Chaplin was the last to start using the technology, but did create his own score for the film. It is an effortless joy to watch the very best work of a true genius whose influence is still readily seen on big screens today.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (with a live soundtrack by Nadir) will be shown at Broadway Cinema on Friday 19 September 2014. 

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