Knowing their dialogue cannot be heard, did the actors still actually adhere to the script or were they just moving their lips or just saying stuff? I have tried to “pick up” on some of the things being said, but until that placard shows on the screen, I have no clue.
That “placard” (or whatever it’s called). Because of the speed of the film, those things don’t stay up long enough to read unless you have the remote and can pause it.
The music: Is that the original soundtrack, or was it dubbed in after? (With the correct sheet music, of course).
My favorite, I suppose, is everyone’s: Metropolis. I have been meaning to get the Rick Wakeman “soundtrack”, but cannot seem to remember to look for it. I was hoping to find a used version on Amazon.
I like the melodramas, where, at end, the male or female lead dies.
Seems to me, they had to do so much with so little, that almost everything you see on screen was exagerrated.
The answers to most of these questions of course depend on which film we’re talking about! The speed, by the way, is sometimes wrong. I think that what you call placard may be known as intertitles or titles or simply dialogue, but I may be wrong.
Sometimes. If it was a silent adaptation of a show popular from the stage, then they probably were simply reciting all the dialogue. Some directors (Stroheim, for example) also insisted on having dialogue performed to enhance the realism of the scene. But it certainly wasn’t always the case.
This wasn’t always true–intertitles were often trimmed back to save film (or space, for later archival purposes) after a film’s run was complete, and sometimes the projectionist could even vary the frame rate on the projector to slow down the title sequence to make it last longer (though I won’t argue this was common). Essentially, the brief time you currently have is almost certainly not the experience someone had when originally viewing the film.
Very few scores were specifically written for a film’s release. Most theater’s organists just made it up as they went along and/or cribbed from popular music and motifs of the time (though the distributor might often recommend certain song selections). There were some major productions that had scores commissioned specifically for them, and those often get folded into a DVD restoration effort, but more often than not, the score you’re hearing is the invention of someone fairly recent and not original in the sense that you’re thinking.
Yeah, licensing rights for the songs made it difficult to re-release commercially.
I’ve always loved silent movies. I had a friend in grad school who was deaf and read lips, and he told me that what their lips were saying usually did NOT match the title cards.
Silent movies were filmed at 24 frames per second.* Later, the standard was changed to 32 frames per second, so silent films projected at “standard” speed appear to be moving too fast. That works OK for some comedies, but …
The music found on DVDs, it varies by DVD. Some silent movies came to the theatre with their own score, so that the pianist could play the same music in every theater. And some DVDshave been lovingly re-created with an authentic sound track based on that score. Others, however, are put together as cheaply as possible, with dreadful soundtracks. Or with some classical music (hence, no need to pay royalties) that just plays along and doesn’t fit the action at all. Then there are those in the middle, with newly created scores.
We were watching one the other month (I’ve forgot which one) that basically had about ten measures of some little ditty, repeated over and over and over and over and over… ad nauseam. We wound up turning off the soundtrack.
Actually, the earliest silent films were filmed/projected at various speeds. The standardized rate of 24 frames/second came in at some point in silent film development.
Oh, and of course, welcome to the fold! If I had to list my favorite silent films, I’d have to go with (in addition to Metropolis, which you already mentioned):
USA
*The General, Seven Chances, Sherlock Jr., Steamboat Bill Jr., * and Our Hospitality, all with (and by) Buster Keaton–plus One Week is my favorite silent comedy short, too. The Freshman and The Kid Brother with Harold Lloyd The Gold Rush by Chaplin (though I like the semi-talkie Modern Times better) The Wind - an amazing film, w/Lillian Gish Greed - the epic by Stroheim Sunrise - the masterpiece by Murnau
Foreign
Germany: Pandora’s Box w/the magnetic Louise Brooks
France: The hilarious The Italian Straw Hat, the stunning The Lighthouse Keepers, and the unforgettable The Passion of Joan of Arc by Dreyer–plus Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali.
Japan: The intertitle-free horror film A Page of Madness and the funny and touching I Was Born, But… by the incomparable Ozu
Russia: Potemkin still holds up remarkably well, but I like Strike (also by Eisenstein) and Earth better–plus, Man with a Movie Camera is still probably the best movie about movies ever made.
Nosferatu is probably my favorite silent film. My handicap with silent cinema is that it’s pre-Method acting, so I consider most of the performances to be far overdone and melodramatic. Nosferatu has hammy acting but it’s counterbalanced by a gripping performance by Schreck in the title role and an atmosphere of dread and unease it would be very difficult to replicate in a talky, let alone a color film.
I also absolutely love the Swedish film Häxan (The Witches), a fake documentary about witches and witchcraft that has some amazingly effective special effects. There is a version with narration by William S. Burroughs and an acid jazz soundtrack that I have only seen a small part of and I’m dying to see again.
And we cannot forget the surrealist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the father of a thousand music videos. The stunning visual style is an absolute joy.
Note well an advantage of silence: Translating films is a lot easier when all of the dialogue is on cards that can be on screen for as long as they need to be, as opposed to being spoken at a fixed rate judged to be effective for a given language and point in the film. Neither subtitles nor dubbing is as seamless as just translating the intertitles.
Both versions of Häxan are on the Criterion Collection DVD.
My favourite silent films include:
Murnau’s “Faust” – The first special effects extravaganza
Gance’s “Napoleon”, “La Roue”, and “J’Accuse” – My opinion is that Abel Gance was the most innovative filmmaker of his time
Kirsanoff’s “Ménilmontant” – Short but powerful
Epstein’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
The aforementioned “Strike”, “Sunrise”, and “The Passion of Joan of Arc”
I have been watching them on TCM (Turner Classic Movies), and today was Harold Lloyd day, but I wonder how many others of the ones y’all mentioned, they have the rights to show?
I think they have Nostradamus, but notMetropolis, and I believe I once read they have only the MGM catalogue?
A lot of silent comedies were undercranked, speeding up the action on screen. I wonder if some of the films you’ve seen had that done for modern release. That would make the titles short. (BTW, Keaton mentions in an interview that he did his own titling, so that’s probably what they’re called.)
Keaton never undercranked his films, so if you see a speeded up one, it’s been messed with.
When I watch silents, I usually turn the sound down and put on some ragtime music. That way I can control the tunes.
One thing that gets my goat with some DVD releases is when they put a sepia tone over the whole thing. I have to adjust my TV back to B&W to get rid of it.
There’s a DVD set on Amazon of most of Keaton’s pre- MGM films I’m lusting after. It’s about $150. Maybe for Xmas…
Laurel & Hardy silents are quite fun, too, if you can find them.
TCM owns the MGM catalog, but they play much, much more than that.
My favorite silents:
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Sunrise
The General
City Lights
The Crowd
I Was Born, But . . .
The Docks of New York
Nanook of the North
Seventh Heaven
The Wind
The General and The Freshman both had us laughing so hard we were gasping for breath - I wish I could see them in a theater with other people, because comedies are always funnier that way.
Keaton is my god. My kids are slowly coming to understand that. Lloyd sits at His right hand. Chaplin has been pushed down the banquet table for mawkishness, though I have long been amused that Mabel Normand always portrays a near-child of sylphlike, slender, grace and beauty when, if she weighed in at less than a valkyrielike Buck-Eighty* I’ll eat my shorts. And she makes it work. Fashion was different then.
For foreign nationals unfamiliar with American idioms, a buck=100 (just as in money a buck = 1 dollar = 100 cents) and, when measuring mass, pounds are assumed.
** - For our metric pals, 81.65kg
*** - For our unreconstructed Brit pals, 12.86 stone
**** - For our boxing pals, that makes her a “cruiserweight.”
I’ve never cared for Chaplin, really, when compared to the more subtle masters of silent comedy. He just isn’t that funny to me, while Lloyd and Keaton can make me howl with laughter with just a sidelong glance. Why does he get all the glory?
Because he was more than funny. He’s one of the, oh say 10 most important directors in the history of American film. He made some stunning masterpieces, as a director. Watch City Lights. widely acknowledged as one of the greatest films of all time, for an appreciation of Chaplin the director. Then Limelight. Then you’ll probably want to watch them all.
Actually, sound films were standardized at 24 FPS. Silent movie frame rates varied between 16 and 23 FPS. You can read about it here and here.
In 1999 I saw a showing of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush for the 150th anniversary of the California gold rush. Yes, the movie is about the Alaska gold rush, but they couldn’t find a decent movie about the 49ers. Anyway, I found the movie to be very funny, and it avoided the over-the-top sentimentality that Chaplin was prone to.
I dropped into the thread specifically to mention Häxan. I saw it for the first time last year and I loved it. This along with Nosferatu and Vampyr: Der Traum des Allen Grey now male up the Unholy Trinity of early horror for me.
The stunning visual style is an absolute joy.