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Jump to: navigation, search "Silent movie" redirects here. For the Mel Brooks film, see Silent Movie. "Silent Film" redirects here. For the band A Silent Film, see A Silent Film.
Scene from the 1921 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, one of the highest-grossing silent films.
The iconic clock scene from Safety Last! (1923) A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted
gestures, mime (US: pantomime) and title cards. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the introduction of the Vitaphone system. After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, "talkies" became more and more commonplace. Within a decade, popular widespread production of silent films had ceased.
Contents
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1 Elements (1894 1929) o 1.1 Intertitles o 1.2 Live music and sound o 1.3 Acting techniques o 1.4 Projection speed o 1.5 Tinting 2 Top grossing silent films in the United States 3 During the sound era o 3.1 Transition o 3.2 Later homages 4 Early studios 5 Preservation and lost films 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading
Roundhay Garden Scene 1888, the first known celluloid film recorded. Main article: History of film
The first projected primary proto-movie was made by Eadweard Muybridge some time between 1877 and 1880. The first narrative film was created by Louis Le Prince in 1888. It was a two-second film of people walking in Oakwood streets garden, entitled Roundhay Garden Scene.[1] The art of motion pictures grew into full maturity in the "silent era"(1894-1929) before silent films were replaced by "talking pictures" in the late 1920s. Many film scholars and buffs argue that the aesthetic quality of cinema decreased for several years until directors, actors, and production staff adapted to the new "talkies".[2] The visual quality of silent moviesespecially those produced in the 1920swas often high. However, there is a widely held misconception that these films were primitive and barely watchable by modern standards.[3] This misconception comes as a result of silent films being played back at wrong speed and their deteriorated condition. Many silent films exist only in second- or third-generation copies, often copied from already damaged and neglected film stock.[2]
An early film, depicting a re-enactment of the Battle of Chemulpo Bay (Film produced in 1904 by Edison Studios) In addition, many prints may suffer from censorship cuts, resulting in what appears to be poor editing.
[edit] Intertitles
Main article: Intertitle As motion pictures eventually increased in length, a replacement was needed for the inhouse interpreter who would explain parts of the film. Because silent films had no synchronized sound for dialogue, onscreen intertitles were used to narrate story points, present key dialogue and sometimes even comment on the action for the cinema audience. The title writer became a key professional in silent film and was often separate from the
scenario writer who created the story. Intertitles (or titles as they were generally called at the time) often became graphic elements themselves, featuring illustrations or abstract decoration that commented on the action.
Few film scores survive intact from this period, and musicologists are still confronted by questions when they attempt to precisely reconstruct those that remain. Scores can be distinguished as complete reconstructions of composed scores, newly composed for the occasion, assembled from already existing music libraries, or even improvised. Interest in the scoring of silent films fell somewhat out of fashion during the 1960s and 1970s. There was a belief in many college film programs and repertory cinemas that audiences should experience silent film as a pure visual medium, undistracted by music.[citation needed] This belief may have been encouraged by the poor quality of the music tracks found on many silent film reprints of the time. More recently, there has been a revival of interest in presenting silent films with quality musical scores, either reworkings of period scores or cue sheets, or composition of appropriate original scores. A watershed event in this context[according to whom?] was Kevin Brownlow's 1980 restoration of Abel Gance's Napolon (1927), featuring a score by Carl Davis. Brownlow's restoration was later distributed in America re-edited and shortened by Francis Ford Coppola with a live orchestral score composed by his father Carmine Coppola. In 1984, a restoration of Metropolis (1927) with new score by producer-composer Giorgio Moroder was another turning point in modern-day interest in silent films. Although the contemporary score, which included pop songs by Freddy Mercury of Queen, Pat Benatar and Jon Anderson of Yes was controversial, the door had been opened for a new approach to presentation of classic "silent" films. One of the few actors of the silent era still active in the 21st century was Dutch-German movie star Johannes Heesters (19032011).[9] Music ensembles currently perform traditional and contemporary scores for silent films. Purveyors of the traditional approach include organists and pianists such as Dennis James, Rick Friend, Chris Elliott, Dennis Scott, Clark Wilson and Jim Riggs. Orchestral conductors such as Gillian B. Anderson, Carl Davis, Carl Daehler, and Robert Israel have written and compiled scores for numerous silent films. In addition to composing new film scores, Timothy Brock has restored many of Charlie Chaplin's scores. Contemporary music ensembles are helping to introduce classic silent films to a wider audience through a broad range of musical styles and approaches. Some performers create new compositions using traditional musical instruments while others add electronic sounds, modern harmonies, rhythms, improvisation and sound design elements to enhance the film watching experience. Among the contemporary ensembles in this category are Alloy Orchestra, Club Foot Orchestra, Silent Orchestra, Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and The Reel Music Ensemble. Alloy Orchestra, which began performing in 1990, is among the first of the new wave of silent film music ensembles.
Lillian Gish was a major star of the silent era with one of the longest careers, working from 1912-1987 Silent film actors emphasized body language and facial expression so that the audience could better understand what an actor was feeling and portraying on screen. Much silent film acting is apt to strike modern-day audiences as simplistic or campy. The melodramatic acting style was in some cases a habit actors transferred from their former stage experience. The pervading presence of stage actors in film was the cause of this outburst from director Marshall Neilan in 1917: "The sooner the stage people who have come into pictures get out, the better for the pictures."[10] In other cases, directors such as John Griffith Wray required their actors to deliver larger-than-life expressions for emphasis. As early as 1914, American viewers had begun to make known their preference for greater naturalness on screen.[10] In any case, the large image size and unprecedented intimacy the actor enjoyed with the audience began to affect acting style, making for more subtlety of expression. Actresses such as Mary Pickford in all her films, Eleonora Duse in the Italian film Cenere (1916), Janet Gaynor in Sunrise, Priscilla Dean in Outside the Law and White Tiger, and Lillian Gish and Greta Garbo in most of their performances made restraint and easy naturalism in acting a virtue.[10] Directors such as Albert Capellani (a French director who also did work in America directing Alla Nazimova films) and Maurice Tourneur insisted on naturalism in their films. Tourneur had been just such a minimalist in his prior stage productions. By the mid-1920s many American silent films had adopted a more naturalistic acting style, though not all actors and directors accepted naturalistic, low-key acting straight away; as late as 1927, films featuring expressionistic acting styles, such as Metropolis, were still being released. Some viewers liked the flamboyant acting for its escape value, and some countries were later than the United States in embracing naturalistic style in their films. Just as today, a film's success depended upon the setting, the mood, the script, the skills of the director, and the overall talent of the cast.[10]
[edit] Tinting
Main article: Film tinting
Scene from Broken Blossoms starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess, an example of sepia-tinted print. With the lack of natural color processing available, films of the silent era were frequently dipped in dyestuffs and dyed various shades and hues to signal a mood or represent a time of day. Blue represented night scenes, yellow or amber meant day. Red represented fire and green represented a mysterious atmosphere. Similarly, toning of film (such as the common silent film generalization of sepia-toning) with special solutions replaced the silver particles in the film stock with salts or dyes of various colors. A combination of tinting and toning could be used as an effect that could be striking. Some films were hand-tinted, such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1894), from Edison Studios. In it, Annabelle Whitford,[15] a young dancer from Broadway, is dressed in white veils that appear to change colors as she dances. This technique was designed to capture the effect of the live performances of Loie Fuller, beginning in 1891, in which stage lights with colored gels turned her white flowing dresses and sleeves into artistic movement.[16] Hand coloring was often used in the early "trick" and fantasy films of Europe, especially those by Georges Mlis. Mlis began hand-tinting his work as early as 1897 and the 1899 Cendrillion (Cinderella) and 1900 Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) provide early examples of hand-tinted films in which the color was a critical part of the scenography or mise an scene; such precise tinting used the workshop of Elisabeth Thuillier in Paris, with teams of female artists adding layers of color to each frame by hand rather than using a more common (and less expensive) process of stenciling.[17] A newly restored version of Mlis' A Trip to the Moon, originally released in 1902, shows an exhuberant use of color designed to add texture and interest to the image.[18]
Scene from The Birth of a Nation By the beginning of the 1910s, with the onset of feature-length films, tinting was used as another mood setter, just as commonplace as music. The director D. W. Griffith displayed a constant interest and concern about color, and used tinting as a special effect in many of his films. His 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation, used a number of colors, including amber, blue, lavender, and a striking red tint for scenes such as the "burning of Atlanta" and the ride of the Ku Klux Klan at the climax of the picture. Griffith later invented a color system in which colored lights flashed on areas of the screen to achieve a color effect.
For a listing of notable silent era films, see list of years in film for the years between the beginning of film and 1928. The following list includes only films produced in the sound era with the specific artistic intention of being silent.
People on Sunday, Robert Siodmak, 1930 City Girl, F. W. Murnau, 1930 Borderline, Kenneth MacPherson, 1930 Earth, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930 City Lights, Charlie Chaplin, 1931 Tabu, F. W. Murnau, Robert Flaherty, 1931 I Was Born, But..., Yasujir Ozu, 1932 A Story of Floating Weeds, Yasujir Ozu, 1934 The Goddess, Wu Yonggang, 1934 Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin, 1936
Bogdanovich's affectionate 1976 film Nickelodeon deals with the turmoil of silent filmmaking in Hollywood during the early 1910s, leading up to the release of D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. In 1999, the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismki produced Juha, which captures the style of a silent film, using intertitles in place of spoken dialogue.[20] In India, the 1988 film Pushpak,[21] starring Kamal Hassan, was a black comedy entirely devoid of dialog. The 2007 Australian film Dr Plonk, was a silent comedy directed by Rolf de Heer. Stage plays have drawn upon silent film styles and sources. Actor/writers Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore staged their Off-Broadway slapstick comedy Silent Laughter as a live action tribute to the silent screen era.[22] Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford created and starred in All Wear Bowlers (2004), which started as an homage to Laurel and Hardy then evolved to incorporate life-sized silent film sequences of Sobelle and Lyford who jump back and forth between live action and the silver screen.[23] The 1940 animated film Fantasia, which is eight different animation sequences set to music, can be considered a silent film, with only one short scene involving dialogue. The 1952 espionage film The Thief has music and sound effects, but no dialogue. In 2005, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society produced a silent film version of Lovecraft's story The Call of Cthulhu. This film maintained a period-accurate filming style, and was received as both "the best HPL adaptation to date" and, referring to the decision to make it as a silent movie, "a brilliant conceit." [24] The 2011 French film The Artist, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, plays as a silent film and is set in Hollywood during the silent era. It also includes segments of fictitious silent films starring its protagonists.[25] The American feature length silent film Silent life started in 2006, features performances by Isabella Rossellini and Galina Jovovich, mother of Milla Jovovich, will premiere in 2013. The film is based on the life of the silent screen icon Rudolph Valentino, known as the Hollywood's first "Great Lover". After the emergency surgery, Valentino loses his grip of reality and begins to see the recollection of his life in Hollywood from a perspective of a coma - as a silent film shown at a movie palace, the magical portal between life and eternity, between reality and illusion.[26][27]
with studios in St George Staten Island. Others films were shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The Thanhouser film studio was founded in New Rochelle, New York in 1909 by American theatrical impresario Edwin Thanhouser. The company produced and released 1,086 films between 1910 and 1917, including the first film serial ever, The Million Dollar Mystery, released in 1914. The first westerns were filmed at Scott's Movie Ranch. Cowboys and Indians galloped across Fred Scott's movie ranch in South Beach, Staten Island, which had a frontier main street, a wide selection of stagecoaches and a 56-foot stockade. The island provided a serviceable stand-in for locations as varied as the Sahara desert and a British cricket pitch. War scenes were shot on the plains of Grasmere, Staten Island. The Perils of Pauline and its even more popular sequel The Exploits of Elaine were filmed largely on the island. So was the 1906 blockbuster Life of a Cowboy, by Edwin S. Porter. Companies and filming moved to the west coast around 1911.
Category:Silent films Category:Silent film actors Classic Images Laurel and Hardy films List of film formats
German Expressionism