Silent Films

Overview

Silent films are films without synchronized recorded sound, though they may be accompanied by sound when exhibited, as when films in the silent film era were shown with live music providing the score. Silent films preceded and stand in contrast to “talking pictures” or “talkies,” which displaced them in the 1930s. Though silent films can be made in any era, the term is often used as shorthand for the films produced in the first decades of motion picture history, which share a number of other characteristics as a result of the production standards and available technology of the time. The term itself was, naturally, not coined until after the fact, when it became necessary to distinguish between these early films and the talkies that had become the norm.

The history of motion pictures begins, in essence, with British physician Paul Roget’s 1824 discovery of “persistence of vision,” the optical illusion whereby a series of still images shown to the viewer within a specific range of speed results in the perception of a single moving image. Optical toys were soon produced making use of persistence of vision, like thaumatropes (discs with a different picture on each side, which blend together when the disc is spun) and flip books. The exact biological and psychological mechanisms responsible for persistence of vision, and for motion perception in motion pictures in general, are not well understood even in the twenty-first century, almost two hundred years after Roget’s discovery.

Early antecedents to motion pictures and animation developed concurrently with the development of photography, though the two streams of development would not intersect until the end of the nineteenth century. The phenakisticope (usually called a phenakistoscope), zoetrope, and praxinoscope used discs or strips of images to create the illusion of movement, and flip books were exceptionally popular in the late nineteenth century. Even the earliest forms of motion pictures were limited to cabinets in which they were displayed, rather than being projected onto a screen. Some of these early novelties were still maintained a century later in arcades and as attractions on boardwalks.

In the 1890s, the age of motion pictures began with short films exhibited as novelties or incorporated into vaudeville acts. The Lumière brothers (Auguste Marie Louis and Louis Jean) patented a cinematograph in 1892 that served as motion picture camera, printer, and projector, improving on the projector-less kinetograph invented by Thomas Edison. Further, it weighed only sixteen pounds and was operated by hand-crank, making it practical for a variety of shooting locations. The Edison Company produced the first movie with special effects, The Execution of Mary Stuart, directed by Alfred Clark, in 1895. It was eighteen seconds long, but featured trained actors and a substitution splice (later put to greater effect by Georges Méliès) to replace the actress playing Queen Mary with a mannequin at the moment of decapitation. Other basic special effects soon followed, like the double exposure, slow motion, the close-up, and various methods for portraying reverse motion.

Films made in the 1890s were largely short, and were all made from a single shot. There were no title cards or dialogue; the story was instead explained by the film presenter, and in many cases, there was no story to speak of. Even the first multi-shot films were very simple: George Albert Smith’s The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) consisted of a shot of a train entering a tunnel, a cut to the interior of one of the cars, a man stealing a kiss from a woman, and a cut to the train emerging from the tunnel. (The symbolic innuendo is not coincidental).

At the turn of the century, “chase films” became popular. One character (or more) chasing another was an easy way to create excitement and suspense with limited film technology, and without needing a lot of exposition to create the story: boy steals bread, boy runs from man trying to catch him. Even within these limited constraints, early filmmakers became adept at staging and the use of space, skills that would be put to fuller use as technology gave them more options and longer films. Many people point to 1903’s Great Train Robbery as “the first movie.” Directed by Edwin S. Porter, it was based on an 1896 play by the same name and was likely inspired by Butch Cassidy. The movie was twelve minutes long, shot on location, and featured an unprecedented degree of camera movement and cross-cutting, inspiring a number of imitators and remakes—until 1912, motion pictures were not explicitly protected by American copyright law. The film ends with one of the robbers pointing his gun at the camera and firing, which not only thrilled audiences at the time but has been referenced in a number of works since, notably Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and the opening credits of the James Bond franchise.

Around the same time, Méliès released A Trip to the Moon (1902), a fourteen minute science fiction adventure film with elaborate and beautiful sets, special effects, and a combination of live-action and animation. Loosely inspired by the works of Jules Verne, it was popular in both France and the United States, though rampant film piracy made it difficult for Méliès to earn money from it. Like the rest of Méliès’s work, A Trip to the Moon was fanciful and imaginative, though by the end of the decade, that would also mean it was out of fashion, as newly sophisticated film technology drove audiences to prefer something closer to realism. Many of Méliès’s films were shown as part of magic acts, a common way of exhibiting films at the turn of the century: the motion picture was, in effect, an especially elaborate magic trick.

In 1905, the first Nickelodeon—a venue specifically for exhibiting motion pictures, as opposed to a vaudeville hall or stage theater—opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. A weekly program of films was shown, roughly half an hour’s worth of short movies. By the end of the decade there were thousands of similar theaters throughout the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Musical accompaniment was usually offered by a pianist or organist, though as the theater industry became more robust, cinemas in large theaters offered orchestral accompaniment.

The major tropes of the film industry developed in the 1910s: actors being credited on screen and the cult of personality necessary for film stardom; multi-reel films telling a continuous narrative; and film production companies renting their films to cinemas rather than selling copies, which made it easier for a theater to afford to show a large number of different movies each year.

The American film industry originated in New Jersey, because the Edison Trust held a monopoly on the relevant film technologies. The first Hollywood filmmakers had relocated to what was then a small town adjacent to California farms and ranches, because by working on the other side of the country they were unlikely to be troubled by the Edison Trust enforcing its patents. When the Edison monopoly was broken by court order in 1912, Hollywood filmmakers were thus in a position to form the first Hollywood movie studios, and the motion picture industry quickly relocated accordingly. Interestingly, an attempt to develop a movie industry in Florida was largely unsuccessful due to conservative locals’ objections to simulated movie violence. A thriving African American film industry eschewed the racial stereotypes embraced and popularized by Hollywood and produced a large number of popular silent films at studios in Florida and elsewhere in the eastern and southern states.

Further Insights

The “silent era” is considered to have been from about 1894 to 1930, though talkies were introduced in 1927. Perhaps in part because all early filmmakers were by definition innovators, the early period of film was especially creative; Classical Hollywood was born in this time, as was German Expressionism, and the Soviet masters honed the craft in ways that would remain influential for decades. Many of the technical standards of film were established in the silent era, including conventions of filming and editing, use of various shots and cuts, and many of the basic special effects that remained in use until digital media replaced film. Furthermore, a greater percentage of silent films were in color than talkies until the end of the 1950s, though the color technology varied. While a small number of silent films used real color processing like Technicolor, most color silent films were colorized after filming: black and white film was tinted or stained. This process was impossible once sound-on-film technology was introduced, because it would interfere with sound playback, and so the adoption of sound actually meant a step back in color.

As Hollywood developed, movies became more sophisticated in story and characterization. As much of the story as possible was conveyed through action, which accounted for the popularity of slapstick comedy and moody horror. Without a language barrier, films could easily be exhibited internationally. Intertitles, or frames of text, were introduced, displaying simple expository sentences or lines of dialogue. New roles were created in the industry: the scenario writer wrote the film’s story (in what we might now call a treatment) while the title writer wrote the titles.

Silent film acting relied on broader body language and facial expressions, which has been credited to the stage and vaudeville experience of the first film actors. While this drew some criticism even at the time—motion pictures, while overwhelmingly popular, were often dismissed as “low culture” compared to the theater—the lack of spoken dialogue also encouraged a broader acting style than would be the norm in later eras. Lillian Gish is generally credited as the first actor to create a truly filmic style of acting, managing a sense of realism even with the limits imposed on her by the technology of the day. In the 1920s, silent film went through a period of naturalism. Greta Garbo is hailed as perhaps the greatest actor of the era. A Swedish star, her first appearance in a U.S. film was in Torrent (1926), which was an immediate hit. Many of the great stars of the day were known either for highly physical roles—the slapstick comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the swashbuckling action scenes of Douglas Fairbanks—or, like Rudolph Valentino, for grandly dramatic roles.

For a variety of reasons, when Hollywood transitioned to sound, most of the silent stars were left behind. In some cases, it was because the kinds of movies being made had changed: spoken dialogue does not add much to a Buster Keaton movie. In other cases, being an expressive and emotive actor did not mean having a voice to match one’s movie star image—many silent film actors had foreign or regional accents, for example. However, the impact of the transition to sound on actors has often been exaggerated. Many of the biggest stars of the talkies began as silent film stars: Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Joan Crawford, just to name a few. Garbo, for her part, continued to be one of the most respected actors in the sound era; 1930’s Anna Christie was advertised with the tagline “Garbo talks!”, garnering her an Oscar nomination, and the best performance of her career is generally considered 1936’s Camille.

Issues

The sound era arrived, in Hemingway’s words, “gradually and then suddenly.” Sound film consists of a motion picture with sound synchronized to the images, making spoken dialogue and other sound possible. Experiments with sound film technology were ongoing throughout the silent film era, and the first exhibition of sound films to the public was in 1900. The challenge was not so much how to do it, but how to afford it and make it reliable. In this sense, the growth and popularity of the film industry during the silent era made sound film inevitable, by making motion pictures so profitable; in other words, the very stars who made silent films popular found themselves eclipsed by technology they had made possible.

Movie theaters began showing sound film shorts in 1923, as part of programs with silent features. Despite this, the arrival of the first talkie feature, The Jazz Singer, four years later, took many by surprise. The sound in The Jazz Singer was limited by modern standards: the score was synchronized, but like silent films, it was light on dialogue, and so features only a handful of scenes with synchronous singing or speaking. The first vocal performance in the film is fifteen minutes into the eighty-nine minute feature, and the first spoken dialogue a few minutes after that.

The Jazz Singer’s sound was provided using Vitaphone’s sound-on-disc system, which used a record player to play sound accompanying the images on the screen. Like other early sound-on-disc systems, the synchronization was maintained mechanically, via an interlock with the film projector, so that both devices were playing the sound or image for the same moment at the same time. Warner Bros., which had produced The Jazz Singer, continued to use Vitaphone’s system to make sound shorts for the next four years; thereafter, the Vitaphone trademark was used in Warner’s animation division, which released the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts until the 1950s.

The first sound-on-film technology dates to patents filed in 1919 by Lee De Forest, by which the sound track of a film was photographically recorded onto a composite film print. This required careful recording, which meant more expensive productions, but was a more failsafe playback system than Vitaphone’s. Both systems had a significant drawback: it was difficult to edit them after production, which made movies hard to recut.

The rise of sound films also depended on adequate sound recording technology, which had been an early challenge. The 1920s saw major improvements in recording fidelity and microphone technology, which benefited both the music industry and motion pictures.

Following The Jazz Singer, Warner Bros. released a small number of similarly limited talkies, all of which turned a profit. In Tenderloin (1928), for instance, 15 minutes of the 88 minute feature consisted of spoken dialogue. An all-talking feature, Lights of New York, was released the same year, returning well over a million dollars on an investment of $23,000. The conversion of Hollywood to sound was now inevitable. By the end of the year, the first synchronized sound cartoons were released, including Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, which introduced Mickey Mouse. The name and plot of Steamboat Willie are references to the 1928 silent film Steamboat Bill, Jr., starring Buster Keaton.

Within sixteen months of the release of The Jazz Singer, every major Hollywood studio had released a sound film. The only thing holding Hollywood back at this point was the number of movie theaters equipped for sound—in 1929, only about 800 out of 23,000 movie theaters nationwide. This changed quickly, as directional microphones with reduced noise were introduced and the transition of all the studios to sound-on-film recording was completed, sound films became the default by the middle of the 1930s. Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) was the last major (mostly) silent film of the era.

In 2011, French directors Michel Hazanavicius paid tribute to Hollywood’s silent era with his film, The Artist. The Artist was filmed in black and white and was (mostly) silent. It was the first silent film to be nominated for an Academy Award since 1927. The film won five Oscars at the 2012 ceremony, including the award for best picture.

Bibliography

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The Artist at the Oscars – a triumph for silent film and relentless campaigning, (2012, January 24). France 24, www.france24.com/en/20120124-the-artist-oscars-triumph-silent-cinema-relentless-campaigning-dujardin

Binkowski, C. J. (2018). Pink-slipped: What happened to women in the silent film industries? Library Journal, 143(3), 65–66. Retrieved September 15, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=127946585&site=ehost-live

Drazin, D. (2016). African Americans who appear as jazz musicians in silent films. IAJRC Journal, 49(3), 26–27. Retrieved September 15, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=120099460&site=ehost-live

Frymus, A. (2023, May 15). Silent film era and marginalised spectatorship. Early Popular Visual Culture, 21(2), pp. 183–188. doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2023.2209938

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Morris, C. D. (1997). The allegory of seeing in Hitchcock’s silent films. Film Criticism, 22(2), 27–50. Retrieved September 15, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=31385482&site=ehost-live

Seijo-Richart, M. (2018). An exercise in archaeology: Researching the silent film transposition of Wuthering Heights. Bronte Studies, 43(3), 248–259. Retrieved September 15, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=130528193&site=ehost-live