Pictures Without Sound, Silent Film Cinema

Silent films offer moviegoers special rewards. First, freed from the responsibility of paying attention to dialogue — and isn’t most movie dialogue banal anyway? — viewers can focus solely on the joys of human performance. For instance, in “City Lights” (1931), whenever Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp encounters the Blind Flower Girl (Virginia Cherrill) on the street, he stares at her with extraordinary desire and affection. At such moments, words could only detract.

During Read the rest of this entry »

Before Music, Before Sound Effects, Silent film

The History of Silent Film
Silent film was the most advanced technology of its time. Although there was no sound, moving images were an impressive and mesmerizing new feature for moviegoers. The director had to express emotion through mise en scene only. This means that the filmmaker had to strive to create emotional content without dialogue or music. Can you imagine a filmmaker trying to do this today? If someone were to create a silent movie today, it Read the rest of this entry »

A Silent Narrative: Top Silent Films

Many astonishing and deeply moving silent films were made in the first decades of cinema, and these are three of the greatest:

In “The General” (1926), starring and co-directed by comedian Buster Keaton, Johnnie Gray is a train engineer and aspiring Confederate soldier who must rescue Annabelle, his would-be girlfriend, from the Union soldiers keeping her prisoner. The stunts Keaton performs inside, around and on top of moving trains still induce gasps.

“Safety Last” (1923) stars bespectacled funnyman Harold Read the rest of this entry »

When we think about movies today, we generally think about special effects and loud explosions. Silent films take us back to a time when the entire country could be captivated by moving pictures that did not even need sound to get the story across!

The very first silent film that told a story was less than five seconds long and simply featured people walking in the park. The silent era in Hollywood is typically defined as lasting from 1894 until 1929, when the first talking pictures, Read the rest of this entry »

The earliest history of cinematic film spans from its origins in North America and Europe in the 1880s until a decade later when the Lumiere Brothers made their fortune on the first working movie projector. By 1900, Charles Pathe was successful in establishing a highly reputable film studio in Britain. Small picture machines called nickelodeons were introduce in Pittsburgh in 1905. The nickelodeon was merely a novelty that would fade, but cinematic films would last far into the twentieth century.

In 1908, the Motion Picture Patents Company along with Eastman/Kodak became the leader in cinematic film released Read the rest of this entry »

An era of films long forgotten, silent films have been criminally overlooked by today’s blockbuster, slam-bang, 3-D-everything, big budget movies. Does today’s generation even know who Charlie Chaplin is? Arguably the best triple-threat director/actor/writer of silent films, his productions beautifully brought soundless cinema to life.

Other notables and pioneers of the silent film era include D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton and Sergei Eisenstein, who also told their stories visually and paved the way for directors like Kubrick and Hitchcock. The list of notable silent films is lengthy, but there are 10 Read the rest of this entry »

Silent films didn’t need sound to deliver some of the best comedy, drama, horror and spectacle to ever grace the silver-screen. When it comes to the best of silent cinema, these are the movies that are most often mentioned

City Lights; This Charlie Chaplin film is considered his best and most heartwarming. In it, the lovable tramp comes to the city, falls in love with a blind flower girl, and pretends to be a millionaire Read the rest of this entry »

The silent film era remains one of the most interesting of all the eras of film history. Sadly, http://directtelevisionpackages.com/direct-tv/California/Direct-TV-Anaheim/, many silent films are lost and gone forever due to the destruction of thousands of prints to procure their silver nitrate component when WWII arrived. Other prints were simply lost or destroyed. Of the archives that do remain, there are some truly stunning silent films of from the early part of the 2oth century. The following is a short list of the top ones:

The Birth of a Nation: Read the rest of this entry »