The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (d. Robert Wiene, 1920)
I was no more than seven years old when I saw my first silent movie: Buster Keaton's American Civil War comedy The General. Having watched few films up to that point, I had no way of knowing what to expect once the opening credits faded into the story. The fact there was no 'natural' sound puzzled me. I assumed there was something wrong with the TV and switched channels, only to discover everything else was in working order. Returning to the film I saw a gaunt-looking man in eye makeup. The sight of him filled me with a strange anxiety. I thought this was supposed to be a comedy? That's what my Dad told me when he suggested I give it a go. It wasn't until the pratfalls began I started to settle down and relax. As a typical lad hungry for adventure I thoroughly enjoyed the shoot-outs between Confederate and Unionist troops and the perils of halting a runaway train, but more than anything I found myself pondering the unusual style of the film itself. The sweeping orchestral score that seemed to express more emotion than words ever could, the curiously jerky picture quality, the sepia-tinted film stock and the intertitles that explained what was actually happening all gave the impression of watching something beamed in from another time and place.¹ When I consulted the Radio Times and discovered it was made in 1927 I remember being quite amazed. To this day I'm not sure why that was (presumably because I assumed movies didn't exist until some point after that date), but I knew I wanted to see more films like this. After pestering my parents to buy me a video of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921) for Christmas I watched and rewatched it obsessively until February the following year. I stayed with silent comedy at first. Keaton led to Chaplin, Chaplin led to Laurel and Hardy, who, in turn, led me to Harold Lloyd. When I finally saw a serious silent film, D. W. Griffifth's Broken Blossoms (1919), I was bored out of my immature skull - although I do remember falling hopelessly in love with lead actress Lillian Gish. It would be many years before I watched another silent movie.
Broken Blossoms (d. D. W. Griffith, 1919)
What revived my interest in silent cinema was nothing more than a horror movie marathon one drunken night at university. No sooner had Evil Dead II reached its brilliantly ludicrous climax, a friend staggered over to the video cabinet and selected Rupert Julian's The Phantom of the Opera (1925) as our next port of call. Despite the copious amount of Jack Daniels flowing through my system, the atmosphere of the production immediately gripped me, just as it had done eleven years earlier watching The General. As something of a cineaste by this time, it seemed only reasonable I should broaden my viewing habits to take in an era I still knew relatively little about. This article is the result of a 20-year fascination with the development of early cinema, the achievements of silent pictures and why the form remains rooted in our collective imagination. But first, if you'll forgive me, it's necessary to lay out some essential groundwork before we rediscover the curious magic of silent movies and appreciate their legacy in film production today.
Although the actual method of creating moving images originated with Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope peep show machine in 1889, it was not until Louis and Auguste Lumière premiered the Cinématographe, a combination camera, printer and projector, in Paris in 1895 that the art of motion pictures caught the world's attention. Their film, Train Entering the Station, caused panic amongst the audience, many of whom believed that the locomotive heading towards them would become derailed and crash into the auditorium. At first, people were unsure how to refer to the medium. For a time they were known variously as 'Tin-types', 'Life-motion'd Pictures' and 'Shadow-plays'. By 1899, however, the novelty of seeing 'living photographs' projected onto a silk screen had worn thin and the public quickly lost interest. This turn of events can be understood when we remember that early motion pictures consisted of documentary shorts about everyday life (Demolition of a Wall, Sea Waves, Beavers at Play, etc.) and re-enactments of biblical scenes. If the Lumières believed that the Cinématographe created "a window onto the world" in which the sole purpose was to inform and instruct they had sorely underestimated its potential. Had it not been for the release of George Méliès' Cinderella in 1900, motion pictures would have met their demise in the back rooms of penny arcades and peep shows.²
Consisting of 20 tableaux, or scenes, Cinderella was the first film to employ a basic three-act structure comprising a beginning, middle and end. Clocking in at just over eight minutes, it was the longest motion picture produced up to that point. As a celebrated magician, Méliès brought an illusionist's eye to the art of movie making. In adapting Charles Perrault's fairytale to the screen, Méliès introduced the first optical effects ever to be seen on film to an amazed and delighted audience. This was followed in 1902 by the even more ambitious A Trip to the Moon, the first science fiction film. Méliès' influence led many early filmmakers to focus predominantly on fantasy, one of the most notable being British director Cecil Hepworth's Alice in Wonderland (1903), which was shot with several distinct edit-points so smaller theatre houses who couldn't afford to buy films with extended running times could choose which sections to purchase and screen the excerpts as standalone subjects. The success of this commercial initiative led many filmmakers to allow the running order and continuity of their pictures to be placed at the discretion of theatre management, most notably the scene in Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), now considered the first 'proper' Western, where a gun is fired point blank at the screen. Sometimes this was shown at the start of the film, others at the end, but either way it gave the audience an iconic image to take home with them.
The Great Train Robbery (d. Edwin S. Porter, 1903)
Up until 1908, movies were funded either by filmmakers or photographic laboratories as a means of supporting their businesses. Within a year, a range of independent companies had sprung up who were solely committed to the production and distribution of motion pictures. In America, these early studios were spread as far and wide as Detroit, Pittsburgh and Arizona. In 1910, the Biograph Company was set up in California and turned the small town of Hollywood into arguably the filmmaking capital of the world. Among the directors contracted to Biograph was D. W. Griffith, who would become the most important filmmaker of the silent era. Between 1908 and 1913 he produced over 450 short films, including the first gangster film, The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912). What separated Griffith from his colleagues at Biograph was his inclination to experiment with camera placement, lighting and editing. He also believed that film running times could be expanded to allow for more complex plot development, leading to a dispute with Biograph that resulted in Griffith parting company with the studio and forming D. W. Griffith Corp., taking his stock company of actors and crew with him.³ The resulting film, The Birth of a Nation (also known as The Clansmen; 1915), was 190 minutes long and would ultimately prove that feature length pictures were commercially viable. Moreover, Griffith had single-handedly invented the blueprint for modern cinema.
The Birth of a Nation employs many of the techniques Griffith experimented with at Biograph, notably cross-cutting, close-ups, and panning and tracking shots, to tell the story of the Deep South in the built up to and aftermath of the American Civil War. At the centre of the film is a tender love story involving the clash of rival families. What brings them together by the end of the picture is not love conquering all but the necessity of joining forces against the enemy within eating away at American society following the abolition of slavery. This 'enemy', of course, is the blacks. Due to its unfortunate plot, Birth of a Nation maintains a paradoxical position as being simultaneously one of the most revered films of all time as well as the most reviled. Griffith described the film as a critique of the "Scalawags" and "Carpetbaggers" who rose to prominence after the death of Abraham Lincoln and set about dismantling the liberal reforms brought about by the War. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) saw it as a glorification of the Klu Klux Klan and campaigned for it to be withdrawn from distribution.⁴ No matter which interpretation one chooses to view it from, the film broke box office records and became the most highly regarded film of the silent era.⁵ Griffith, however, was vexed by the criticisms directed against the film from liberal organisations and devised his next picture, Intolerance (1916), as a response.
The Birth of a Nation (d. D. W. Griffith, 1915)
Intolerance explores persecution through the ages, cutting between four different scenarios ranging from ancient Babylonia to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. It was the most ambitious project Griffith had attempted, not to mention his most impassioned. He could not shake off his disappointment when the film became a box office flop. Although it's tempting to blame the film's epic length for this failure, being somewhere in the region of around 220 minutes, depending on the cut, it does not do the first audiences too much of a disservice to suggest that it was the film's complicated narrative structure that led to its poor performance in theatres. Watching it now, Intolerance appears very much ahead of its time, with intercutting and symmetrical scene changes strongly anticipating Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). As with The Birth of a Nation, a special orchestral score was composed for the film - another innovation for the medium - and the result created a form that aspires less towards traditional narrative than it does to music. Griffith switched focus for his next few films, concentrating on Victorian melodrama, with the noticeably more small-scale Broken Blossoms and Way Down East (1920) taking the art of cinematic lighting to a new level. Sven Nykvist, cinematographer for Ingmar Bergman and pioneer of the 'soft-bounce' lighting effect, once claimed that had it not been for Broken Blossoms, in which oil was smeared onto the camera lens and diaphonous gauze hung from the studio ceiling to accentuate the haunting, dream-like quality of the film, he would never have elected to go into pictures.
The achievements of silent film not not end with America, though. In Europe, a vital pockets of talent were starting to emerge that pushed the nascent form away from commercialism towards the pursuit of art itself. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), one of the key works in the canon of German Expressionism, took cinema back to the model formulated by Méliès in Cinderella and A Trip to the Moon, aiming to capture the illusory power of the form. As such, everything in the film is highly stylised and theatrical, from the sharply angular and deliberately artificial-looking sets to the make-up and costumes worn by the actors. On the surface, the picture appears to be about Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), a mesmerist charlatan and former asylum director who has succumbed to insanity, bringing murder and mayhem to the small town of Holstenwall. The story is related to us from the perspective of a young man called Cesare (Conrad Veidt), whose testimony we have no reason to doubt. In actual fact, our 'hero' is an asylum inmate and the people he describes in the story are characters from his daily life. Dr. Caligari himself, far from being a deranged lunatic, is revealed to be a kindly man who seeks to restore Cesare's sanity. In its meditation on the fine line separating fantasy and reality, Caligari became a crossover success between high-brow critics who regarded it as an art film and mass audiences who saw it as a horror movie. Similarly, Swedish director Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921), filmed in a series of double exposures to create the three-dimensional illusion of a ghostly netherworld, enjoyed both poular and critical acclaim while establishing itself as a forerunner of Magic Realism.
Perhaps the most unusual film to emerge in Europe during the silent era was Häxan (1922), made by Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen. Purporting to be a documentary about diabolism, the film is actually a re-enactment of Nordic folk tales with some highly disturbing visuals. A woman gives birth to demons in one sequence, while another features a witch unearthing a severed hand from a tinder-bundle. The stream-of-consciousness structure of the film was applauded by the Surrealists, with Salvador Dalí and Luis Bunuel later paying homage to Häxan in Un Chien Andalou (1928). In 1968, the film was re-released on the midnight movie circuit with appropriately sepulchral narration from William S. Burroughs, where it was enthusiastically received by the new counter-culture.
Häxan (d. Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
The 1920s was the golden age of silent cinema, heralding a number of films which have since passed into the popular imagination. F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad (1924), King Vidor's First World War drama The Big Parade (1925) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) all delighted cinema audiences while the biggest stars of the era (among them Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Lon Chaney and Buster Keaton) were enjoying their greatest successes. The release of Chaplin's The Gold Rush in 1925 caused uproar in cinemas when audiences demanded projectionsts rewind their favourite comedy routines - something virtually unimaginable today, and a dangerous thing to do in the days of highly flammable nitrate-based film stock.⁶ The tide would soon turn with the introduction of sound.
Although the synchronisation of sound and film dates back to the Edison Laboratory in 1896, the technology available for successful playback was crude. By the 1920s, improvements in sound recording, as exemplified by gramophone records, saw rival companies locked in a race to implement full sound on film capability. In October 1927, Warner Brothers released Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer, the world's first feature-length sound picture. The film contained only a handful of songs and a few snatches of dialogue - including Al Jolson's now famous "You ain't heard nuthin' yet, folks!" - but the novelty caught the imagination of the movie-going public and heralded a new dawn in motion picture entertainment. The film studios, on the other hand, remained cautious, and the majority of films produced between 1927 and 1928 remained silent.⁷ By 1929, however, sound had overtaken silence and cinema was changed forever.
Many silent filmmakers were unable to adapt to the new format.⁸ Mary Pickford chose retirement, while D. W. Griffith's only two sound pictures, D. W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930) and D. W. Griffith's The Struggle (1931), fell victim to the public's newfound hunger for musical comedies and floundered at the box office. German director G. W. Pabst's sole concession to popular trends was to cast American actress Louise Brooks as the lead in Pandora's Box (1929) to appeal to an international audience: needless to say, it remained a silent production.⁹ Perhaps the most defiant critic of sound cinema was Chaplin, whose City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) were box office successes despite remaining firmly rooted in silent film comedy. His son, Charles Chaplin Jnr., remembers that this decision made him a laughing stock in Hollywood: "Everyone thought he was crazy [...] People began to think of him as a has-been, unable to adjust himself to the new techniques. He was finished in pictures. You heard that all over town." In 1940, thirteen years after they hit the screen, Chaplin finally decided to make his first talkie with the wonderful anti-Nazi satire The Great Dictator.
Pandora's Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929)
But it was not just the people behind the camera who were to suffer. The emphasis on exaggerated body language and facial expressions prevalent in silent cinema was a result of both the audience's need to understand character and the stage experience many actors brought to the screen. Douglas Fairbanks, often described as the Errol Flynn of his day, and Gloria Swanson were especially noted for their 'large' performances and, consequently, all but vanished from motion pictures. The only actors to survive in the sound era were those whose acting style suited the intimacy of sound movies. Of all the silent era stars, Lillian Gish would last the longest in a career spanning her debut in 1912 to her swansong in 1987. Intstrumental musicians, who were required to provide live scores in theatre houses, perhaps suffered worst of all. Music was an integral part of silent cinema, propelling the narrative forwards and providing the appropriate emotional cues for the audience. By 1929, sound cinema was able to utilise recorded scores which rendered live performances unnecessary. The effect was devastating, especially as this coincided with the Stock Market Crash and the onset of the Great Depression. Many musicians found themselves seeking employment as private tutors in order to support themselves; others resorted to whatever work they could find.¹⁰
Hollywood would occasionally reminisce about the silent era, but it was usually a way of emphasising the glory of sound: Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain (1952) is a case in point. Others, like Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1957) and Mel Brooks' Silent Movie (1971), have tried to mimic the conventions of silent film comedy. The most fitting elegy, though, not to mention the most pointed, is Billy Wilder's marvellous Sunset Boulevard (1950). Starring Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a 'retired' silent movie star living in isolation in her crumbling mansion, dreaming of her big comeback, and filmmaker Erich von Stroheim as her butler and, as it turns out, first husband and former director, the picture is a barbed comment on how the film studios cared more about bankability than the cost of discarding talented people into the annals of history. The murder mystery at the heart of the story acts as a useful metaphor. Although Norma's monstrous, unhinged behaviour is brought to account at the end of the film, the picture business that made her this way manages to get off scot-free. During a meeting with Norma, D. W. Griffith's friend and protégé Cecil B. DeMille, playing himself, insists that the industry has changed - yet Wilder makes a point of concluding the scene by drawing attention to his riding boots and ridiculously outdated on-set strut. Swanson and von Stroheim understood all too well the message that screenwriters Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman were communicating and bring genuine pathos to a movie that recognises all too painfully what has been lost with the coming of sound.¹¹
Watching a silent movie now is at best like leafing through an elderly relative's photo album, and at worst a 1980s Freeman's Catalogue. But we forget all too easily - and conveniently - that what we refer to now as the art of motion pictures was built upon the work of pioneers who rose to the challenge of creating a whole new medium without having models to build upon themselves. If sound and vision had been successfully synchronised any earlier, not only would cinema as we know it disappear but we would not be able to enjoy this canon of films which prove that cinema is a truly universal language. Don't watch them with a nostalgic eye, watch them as they were meant to be seen: works that transcend barriers and boundaries to communicate something about what it means to be alive. I would not be surprised if you find they transport you to somewhere you've only ever dreamt of.
City Lights (d. Charles Chaplin, 1931)
Footnotes:
¹ Silent films were shot at slow speeds, usually between 16 to 23 frames per second, as opposed to the standard 24 fps rate introduced in 1927 and still standard practice today. Unless screened at their original running speeds they appear jerky and over-paced. Most silent films were shot on hand-cranked cameras, so even in a single film there can be considerable variation in the frame rate. Projectionists were dependent upon the musical cue sheets provided by the film distributors to check how fast particular scenes, or reels, should be shown. As it is almost impossible to exactly gage what their running speeds ought to be, silent films are often shown at erroneous frame rates.
² In his autobiography My Life in Pictures (1971), Charlie Chaplin recalled that one of the few escapes from the squalor of life on the poverty line in Victorian London was a visit to the penny arcades - not so much for the entertainments, but to take advantage of the cheap food on offer: "You could get a cup of coffee and a piece of cake and watch the crucifixion of Christ, all for a penny."
³ According to Lillian Gish, Biograph executives thought a long movie "would hurt the audience's eyes." Mack Sennett, whose Sennett Studios launched Chaplin's career, was equally as suspicious of the move towards feature length, believing that the average moviegoer had the intelligence of a ten-year-old and the attention span to match. Sennett believed there was only one rule to filmmaking and, according to producer Tom Ince, would remind his directors of it every morning: "Keep it fast - the faster the better. If anyone stops to question us we're sunk." Despite these reservations, he went on to direct the first feature length comedy film, Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914).
⁴ Oscar Micheaux challenged Griffith's depiction of blacks in Within Our Gates (1919), the earliest surviving feature by an African-American filmmaker. Its release coincided with the Chicago Race Riots, prompting distributors to edit out all scenes containing racial violence. The print was finally restored 70 years later.
⁵ In an interview with film historian Kevin Brownlow in 1985, Lillian Gish remarked "We lost track of the money we made." Among those to profit from the film was Louis B. Mayer, who bought the rights to distribute the film in New England. With this smart investment, Mayer was able to branch out into film production and in 1924 set up Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios with his business partner Samuel Goldwyn.
⁶ It was precisely because of these health and safety issues that by 1910 films were no longer licensed to be shown in fairgrounds, arcades and brothels, leading to the establishment of local authority-approved movie theatres.
⁷ Joseph Schenck, President of United Artists, effectively wrote his own obituary by declaring to The New York Globe, "[It's] a phase. A sham. Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? And, in any case, how are they gonna understand them in Peoria?"
⁸ Working for Gainsborough Films and mastering his craft, Alfred Hitchcock would later reveal that his directorial career would have ended abruptly had he not decided mid-way through production on Blackmail to reshoot the film as a sound picture. Gainsborough were incensed, but, as Britain's first talkie, it went on to become the highest grossing film of 1929. Of the few other directors to recognise they had to adapt to survive was John Ford, who came to the realisation that westerns would be enhanced if audiences could hear the gunshots.
⁹ Aleksandr Dovzhenko, alongside Sergei Eisenstein one of the USSR's chief exponents of Socialist Realism, was instructed to keep his masterpiece Earth (1930) silent for political reasons. A memo from Kiev Studios to the filmmaker states that this decision "maximises the universality" of the film's message as language would "alienate our Motherland from the misguided drones of Hollywood."
¹⁰ The knock-on effect of sound pictures had a major impact on the music industry. Singers who learned their craft through vaudeville and music hall were compelled to project their voices to reach the back of the stalls. Advances in sophisticated sound technology did little to curb this tendency. Of the new generation of popular musicians to emerge in the 1920s, it was Bing Crosby who recognised the intimacy afforded by the microphone and developed the smooth-style voice that would prove massively influential. Like the silent stars who could not adjust their acting styles to sound, the older generation of singers, among them Ethel Merman and, ironically, sound cinema's first true star Al Jolson, became yesterday's news.
¹¹ Lost in both a figurative and concrete sense. When films reached the end of their theatrical run they were considered to have no further commercial value and either destroyed by the studios in space-saving exercises or left to crumble into dust. Nitrate stock was highly unstable and no sooner had a picture been committed to print the negative would start to deteriorate. As a result, between 80 to 90 per cent of films made during the silent era no longer exist.
