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I worry about silent films. I'd love to see one, but I know that I'm a little short on patience, and HATE to be bored (Kingdom of Heaven practically made me psychopathic). I've watched a couple of Chaplin things on TV, and found my hand straying to the channel-change button on the remote after 10 minutes.

So I've started to think that it's a communal thing, maybe even social, that makes silent cinema work. You can't appreciate it at home on your own, you HAVE to be in a crowd, with a battered upright piano in the corner, to keep the energy and spontaneity going. Maybe church halls should screen them, or scout huts, or school assembly halls. Just a thought.

I love watching silent films with live music. A great pianist or organist can add immensely to a film. Any chance of your scores being released, either on a DVD of the film or by itself so we can play it along with the film? Love to hear your take on these films over here in America.

Avatar would be somewhat odd as a series of lantern slides presented in the village hall by the Reverend James Cameron. With piano accompaniment from Mr. Horner.
On the other hand, Buster Keaton's The General is one of my favourite films of all time, and I'm planning to make a short silent film as part of my Media Studies degree.

Darling Louise!
As for silent cinema in general, it's the source of my love for film.
Méliès, Lang, Keaton, Sjöström and Murnau I count among my favourite filmmakers.
- Though no silent film has had quite the same effect on me as Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc".
Renée Falconetti's performance in the titular role is to me the finest acting ever projected or digitally transferred to a screen.

I wonder, what with the recent debate around 3d film being any more immersive than a more normal film presentation, leads me to also think about a films music and sound, and how that has an effect on our immersive experience. Often we are faced with various visual elements within film that seem unfitting the rules of believability within a given film, and often these can throw us out of immersion.
I know Mark talked about immersion in film being broken or challenged when using the real singers voice and not that of the actor or actresses. This leads me more, to wonder about how we understand sounds position to film, and whether if thinking of examples of sound breaking immersion, instead of the visuals, could lead us to think more about the immersive nature of film.

Dear Dr. K,

I'm gonna assume you have seen Abbas Kiarostami's 10 which refers to the whole argument of images being reliant on sound/does it suddenly not become cinema when we take away the sound etc etc.

The fact is that all silent movies played with some kind of soundtrack back in the days of the Nickelodeons (just like your live orchestra) etc.

The answer is YES Avatar would work as a silent movie but it would be a different experience to the one we know and love.

The visuals in Avatar are much more important than the soundtrack so much so that Cameron got away clean with the poor dialogue in the script. The film found a huge audience and topped the box office as a result.

I do think more musicians should be encouraged to play to silent movies. I dare say we should invite Aphex Twin, Metallica and The Prodigy to have a go!

Imagine The Prodigy playing to Stroheim's Greed! The old ways of putting a soundtrack to a film with today's musicians.

It would be like when rotoscoping was brought back to animation films - just as long people realise it's nothing new.

Hi Dr Mark,

Just one suggestion, they could have made 'Bride Wars' with no sound or pictures, and it would still have been bad.

And one question,how would some of the silent film classics seem with dubbed dialogue and little music?
Would they lose something by doing this or be more enhanced?

i agree in part with what is being said i think that people that make films should start their careers by making silent films as then they can learn what works and how to tell a story through the frame. They could then move on to the "big boy/girl" world of sound in films and they would probably find themselves making much better films visually and that the way the story is told through the frame would improve no end.

'I've watched a couple of Chaplin things on TV' Jo Mayers

Chaplin is a bad one to start with. Try as I might I've never found him funny.
He is only really significant because his films were made just after a massive wave of immigration into the USA, and the audience - mainly themselves poor and struggling to get a life established - closely identified with his little tramp character and his struggles with poverty, bullying authority figures and the like.

In his heyday Chaplin really was a huge, huge star (there was no or radio TV then, everyone - I mean everyone - went to the cinema regularly. It was cheap too then). I see him more as a cultural phenomenon than comedy genius, though the scene of him having to eat his own boots was quite good.

Buster Keaton is probably the best introduction to silent cinema, in The General, The Navigator & Steamboat Bill Jr.
After that Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! and Laurel & Hardy's Big Business and Tit for Tat.

For drama there's the highly influential The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Un chien Andalou (infamous for the eye slicing scene), Nosferatu, The Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis, Thief of Baghdad, Wings (for the WWI flying scenes) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
(Though I have to say the 1939 talkie version of Hunchback of Notre Dame is superior; dialogue and Charles Laughton's vocal performance really do add to the film.)

If you find you've enjoyed some of those then dig deeper.

Arguably, its probably best to approach these as film history rather than entertainment to be judged by today's standards. If you can, see one in a real cinema with a live musical accompaniment.

I can understand the resistance. I know people that point-blank refuse to watch b/w movies, movies with subtitles, movies that are all talk etc.
Tastes change and today's audiences are more sophisticated - or blasé.
Early cinema can seem - well, simplistic. Poor picture quality often doesn't help.

But then its a little like also expecting today's audiences to all like the music of the 1920s, 1930's etc. In 90 years time what we like today will be equally disregarded.

Mel Brooks (when on form) also did a 'Silent Movie' in the 70's with no dialogue, but with sound effects. I remember seeing it in a cinema and a guy in my row really did fall out of his seat laughing. (Comedies also may be best seen in a cinema with an audience.)

There are quite a few silent movies clips on YouTube. Search by actor or movie title.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is a truely brilliant film, one of the 10 best films ever made

I was interested to read your post. "Beggars of Life" is one of Louise Brooks great films. But where or when will The Dodge Brothers accompany the film? Or have you all ready done so? The world wants to know . . . .

As the Director of the Louise Brooks Society (www.pandorasbox.com), I would love to know more about your score/soundtrack. Will it be recorded?

And did you know that the LBS has its own online radio station, RadioLulu. There, you can even hear a couple of different vintage versions of the original theme song from "Beggars of Life" from 1928.

3D, Shaky-cam, ADD Editing - all of these things just detract from the joy of watching movies.

Even sound didn't really change film. Movies are still shot and edited the same way. It was just another tool to make story-telling easier.

Rather interesting that you should mention Avatar as a potential silent movie as I was defending it the other day in much the same way. For all its clunky dialogue, at its heart is a story, with themes, which translate all over the world - surely one of the reasons for its box office success. Silent cinema can also cross borders , no matter what language we speak, we understand them.

Strip the dialogue from Avatar, keep the Na'vi subtitles, add a Dodge Brothers score and i'd pay to see it again.

We should totally get The Exorcist, remove all of the sound, put in dialogue titles, and dallop a whole lot of sepia tone onto it. See what the good doctor would think of that!

Silent films with a live accompanist can be a great experience. I remember a showing of Metropolis at a packed-out Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds on a Saturday night a few years ago. Will remember it for a long time - a real sense of occasion and completely different to your average multiplex cinemagoing experience.

saw Sunrise for the first time last year, simply astounding
out of the 100 or so films id seen last year, it was definitely up there with the very best

Needs more cowbell.

Thanks SheffTim! Really helpful advice, I'm going to take you up on it.

Mark, are you trying to prove the metaphysical concept of Karma? All the school years that I spent shirking my responsibility to do my homework is now coming back at me to restore equilibrium. You are the envy of embittered teachers everywhere. :P

I thought at the time Avatar would play well as silent movie.
It would play well to it's visually-impressive-tech-demo strengths rather than it's ahem-story, or ahem-ahem-script.

#10

"I can understand the resistance. I know people that point-blank refuse to watch b/w movies, movies with subtitles, movies that are all talk etc."

I know people who think that reading a book is always intellectually superior to watching a film (regardless of which film or book) and yet some of these same people find they can not watch a film with subtitles.

I recently watched a screening of The General with live music accompaniment from a classic cinema organ. The delight of the audience, most of whom were seeing it for the first time was very apparent, adults and children alike. Obviously nobody had yet got to the kids to tell them that silent film was something they would not be able to enjoy.

Other notable Buster Keaton features are "Our Hospitality" and "Sherlock Jr." and some of the shorts are also brilliant.

I cant agree with you about Chaplin. The man *was* a genius. Kicking fat bearded blokes up the bum gets a bit tiresome at times but there was more to his films than the slapstick and the sentimentality. Try The Great Dictator which was filmed before the start of the war but shows that even at that time Chaplin seemed to know what was going on in the ghettos and knew about concentration camps although he said if he had known the extent of the crimes he could not have made the film. I contrast this with many people in Germany and in allied countries who even years afterward were still claiming they had no idea of what had been going on during the Third Reich.

As a sometime animator, when we were training to animate we were always pointed in the direction of silent movies, for one major reason. Animators have to learn to convey everything through body-language before they're set loose on dialogue. In both genres dialogue is usually a last resort. In silent films due to contemporary technical constraints and in animation usually because breaking down sound and adding lipsynch to it is expensive and time consuming.
We were told to look at Chaplain, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy and Keaton especially.
The generally accepted rule in animation training is if you can't convey emotion, mood and empathy without resorting to dialogue, you're not a proper animator yet.
Gromit is a classic example of a character who can convey everything without uttering a word.

DrK,

Couple of things ... music in films. I agree and dis-agree. What ever the music, it has to be balanced and supportive ... Not trying to suggest that your delightful skiffle would not be apt for said silent movie... But I feel today that the music sometimes overpowers the plot ... and the music often gives away what is going to happen next.

I think of Bullitt... the wonderful moments when there is just silence ... no orchestra swelling in the back ground ... no frantic techno pounding ... just silence and McQueen acting with his face. Also the opposite where its basically a string of music videos with actors mumbling in the background.

Also ... I always thought of you as a 50's throwback ... but now you seem to be regressing to the 20's.... soon you will be cave painting! Will your hair-style change to suit?

By the way, my cousins' friend, Martin, is a dead ringer for you.

Nothing wrong with that suggestion at all Dr K. Film's a great medium whenever the artistry of its creators connects with the audience. Doesn't matter if it's a 3D extravaganza or the most primitive moving images. As a lover of film, music and photography I'd gladly watch a montage of stills, as long at it was put together with integrity and had something to say

My favourite silent films moments: the first chapter of 2001 and seeing Man With A Movie Camera with a Cinematic Orchestra accompaniment.

I'm working through your blog posts in reverse order, Dr K. So, have you considered playing the stylophone to accompany a silent film? Perhaps Silent Running could be livened up with some 2001-style stylophone stylings?

I can't but help think that the music in Avatar (which I only noticed after was quite similar to Titanic) kept you awake from the long eye-candied anphetimine that the film seemed to be. Don't get me wrong its an amazingly good specatcle, but a lot of it is like, to quote Bill Bailey: "Dragging an old arthritic donkey, across the plains of norhtern Poland".

The loud, native-ish sounding music helped me focus on the bright greens and blues and twinkly faces, and stopped me from falling asleep in a midly comfotable chair at VUE.
Would The Godfather work as a silent film? Pulp Fiction? The Good, The Bad and The Ugly?
I'm not sure..

But it would be interesting to think if any director making films now would try and make a silent film. Who would be brave, and skilled enough to pull it off?
:)

I love silent films! I am in the (admittedly) small minority who feel that the wheels started falling off after the 'Jazz Singer' arrived.

The sheer emotion that can be expressed in a face and body is in many ways much more human and much more universal than simple talk. And I speak as a big Eric Rohmer fan (R.I.P) - whose films are often accused of having too much dialogue. It's a related, but in many ways quite a different art form. It certainly is much more radically different than the introduction of 3D.

I dare anyone not to watch 'Sunrise' by Murnau and not understand why silent film is such an amazing art form. Ironically Blu-ray has enabled many of us without film and projectors to now see silent films much more how they were intended to be seen. I've recently managed to get hold of 'The General' from the States and can't wait to see it restored, in High Definition, warts and all.

The movement starts here. Dr. K. leading us back to the early 20th century..