Introduction

‘We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!’

This defiant statement by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset

Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) strives to correct a key misunderstanding
about silent cinema that still prevails today – that it is characterised by
lack. The very category ‘silent cinema’ defines filmmaking before 1926 not
on its own terms, but against a later and apparently more complete ‘sound
cinema’. In its heyday, however, silent cinema was never understood to
‘lack’ sound. Silent films were typically accompanied by live music, of
course, but it was more than that. Before synchronised sound technology
was introduced, ‘silent cinema’ didn’t even exist as a category. It was
simply ‘cinema’, complete in itself – the most modern, most popular, most
eloquent, most glamorous mass-communication medium of its day.
Even before he meets her, Joe Gillis (William Holden) identifies Norma
as belonging to a lost age. Her house is a ‘white elephant’, the kind of
place he would expect to find a Miss Haversham-style figure, ‘taking it
out on the world, because she’d been given the go-by’. Norma, of course,
turns out to be exactly such a figure. Hopelessly stuck in the past, her
affiliation with silent cinema marks her out as both tragic and sinister, and
her refusal to admit the superiority of sound is a kind of mad delusion that
can only end in death. Typically for a film noir, this obsession is linked
to her sexuality. The film draws a parallel between Norma’s inappropriate
allegiance to a lost cinematic form and her ‘inappropriate’ desire for Joe.
Both are presented to the audience as taboo and disgusting because they
persist long after their time has past. Students are often reluctant to read

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the relationship between Joe and Norma as consummated, but despite its
misogyny, Sunset Boulevard hinges on this paradox. Norma is attractive
despite her antiquity. She is still – as she was in her heyday – charismatic,
potent, fascinating and sexy.
I have chosen to open with a discussion of Sunset Boulevard because,
unlike even the most famous examples of actual silent cinema, it is likely to
be familiar to most general readers. Indeed, many people’s understanding
of silent film is gleaned from a combination of this film and Singin’ in
the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952), another narrative that insists on silent
cinema as characterised by lack. Fending off the amorous advances of Don
Lockwood (Gene Kelly), Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) identifies silent
movies as ‘entertaining enough for the masses’, but draws an unflattering
analogy with the art of the theatre: ‘The personalities on the screen
just don’t impress me. I mean they don’t talk, they don’t act. They just
make a lot of dumb show. Well, you know … like that!’ In the ellipsis she
produces a remarkably economic pastiche of melodramatic acting, using
stock gestures to convey desire, horror and surprise in quick succession.
It is a brilliant moment, which deftly creates a particular idea of silent
cinema in the audience’s mind. The gestural acting imitated by Kathy is in
a tradition that early films inherited from the Victorian stage melodrama. It
survived into the cinema of the 1910s, but by the late 1920s (when Singin’
in the Rain is set) it had certainly been superseded by a more naturalistic
and restrained style of screen performance. Nevertheless, like Norma
Desmond’s artificial mannerisms, Kathy’s ‘dumb show’ emphasises the
un-naturalness of a medium apparently struggling to compensate for the
‘lack’ of sound.
Sunset Boulevard and Singin’ in the Rain are now over sixty years old,
and yet they still circulate widely in contemporary popular culture. They
are often cited in lists of favourite films compiled by people of all ages.
They are regularly re-shown on television, often scheduled as highlights
of holiday viewing. They have both been adapted into stage musicals,
and revivals of both have enjoyed successful London West End runs in
recent years. Despite their age, then, these films appear able to reach
across the years and ‘speak’ to modern viewers, who interpret their
aesthetic and generic codes with relative ease. By contrast, only twenty
years separates the release of these films and the decline of the silent
cinema that they dramatise. While both films celebrate that cinema, they

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also insist on its technological and aesthetic obsolescence in comparison

to sound cinema. Norma Desmond’s greatest cinematic successes are
presented purely as aesthetic curiosities, relics of a bygone age – like
their star. ‘The Duelling Cavalier’ is gently mocked as a crude and childish
entertainment, suggestive of more unsophisticated times. According
to these films an unbridgeable gulf seems to exist between silent and
sound cinema, one which renders all films made before the introduction
of sound ridiculous to modern audiences – their alien and antique style
a source of embarrassment and incomprehension, rather than pleasure
and enjoyment. Such ideas were nothing new. As early as 1937 when the
modern young heroine of the British film Gangway (Sonnie Hale, 1937) is
given the task of shadowing a film star suspected of a jewelry theft, she
complains that the star was ‘only good in silent pictures. Her bones creek!’
That sense of silent cinema as somehow separated from the rest of
film culture is one that still prevails today, despite a recent resurgence
of interest in the form. Screenings of silent films on television are still
relatively rare. Many university film studies courses either ignore silent
films altogether, or annex them in a single module designed to cover the
whole of cinema up to 1930. Aside from specialist festivals, silent films are
rarely programmed in repertory cinemas, or when they are, the titles are
selected from a relatively narrow range of known ‘classics’. The ubiquity of
titles such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Weine, 1920) and Battleship
Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) in such revivals, tend to reinforce the
idea that only iconic avant garde masterworks have the ability to transcend
the ‘handicap’ of silence, and speak directly to modern audiences.
It is the aim of this book to challenge that notion. By outlining the
historical contexts of their production, and suggesting some interpretative
frameworks through which they might be approached, I hope to enable
readers to experience these films not as technical or artistic curiosities,
but as emotionally fulfilling, pleasurable entertainments in their own right
– as audiences of the 1920s experienced them.
The focus will be on late silent cinema – roughly from the First World
War onwards.1
In Chapter One I shall consider the cinema of the 1920s from the point
of view of those who went to see it. What was it that attracted people to
the cinema, and what was their experience when they got there? How were
the images and ideas people encountered in the cinema incorporated into

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their daily lives? Here I will draw on the ways in which cinema-going was
actually represented within a range of films from the silent period, teasing
out what can be gleaned from the films themselves about the experiences
of their audiences.
The cinemas of Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia are often
acknowledged to be the most distinctive and influential in the Europe
of the 1920s. Indeed, ‘Soviet montage’ and ‘German expressionism’ are
perhaps the two phrases most closely associated with silent cinema.
Both countries experienced cataclysmic social and political upheavals
as a result of the First World War, and their distinctive cinematic styles
are often understood to emerge from those upheavals, offering politically
charged alternatives to the dominant Hollywood style, either consciously
(in the case of Soviet Russia) or somehow subconsciously (in the case of
Germany). Both styles were seized on by serious critics in the period as
evidence of cinema’s potential as great ‘Art’, and have remained central to
intellectual approaches to film culture ever since.
Chapters Two and Three respectively will examine these claims with
regard to German expressionist and Soviet montage films, considering
some of the most famous examples such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
and Battleship Potemkin. However, despite the impression given in many
accounts, the mass film-going publics of Germany and Russia didn’t
subsist on avant garde masterworks alone. Some of the more conventional
popular genres will be considered as well, and discussions of films such
as The Oyster Princess (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919) and The Girl With the Hatbox
(Boris Barnet, 1927) will demonstrate both the liveliness and variety of
popular film cultures of continental Europe. Here, I suggest, we will see
an interest in working through themes to do with modernity, consumerism
and gender relations within a framework of entertaining narrative, genre
and romance.
Chapter Four will consider the most important cinema of the age –
Hollywood. What were the factors that enabled American filmmakers
to establish such dominance in the world cinema market, and how did
their films represent this quintessentially modern nation to itself and the
world? It (Clarence Badger, 1927) offers an opportunity to consider the way
in which crucial questions of modernity, mass consumerism and shifting
gender relations were worked through within an overall cinematic system
that emphasised the pleasures of narrative, romance and genre.

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Chapter Five will consider perhaps the most derided European cinema of
the period: the British cinema. Caught between the populism of Hollywood
and the ‘Art’ of Europe, British cinema of the 1920s enjoyed a dolorous
reputation among both the film intellectuals of the period (who considered
it insignificant compared to the art cinemas of Europe), and commercial
commentators (who considered it amateurish compared to Hollywood).
Its most famous director, Alfred Hitchcock, made no effort to enhance its
reputation with posterity, preferring to create the impression that he was a
lone talent in a desert of mediocrity. However, recent scholars have looked
again at the films produced in Britain in the 1920s and discovered a rich and
varied collection of work, emerging from a vibrant and fascinating industry.

‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’

Before we move on though, it may be useful first to consider why it

was that the films of the silent era were so quickly forgotten after 1930.
Common sense might suggest that a fundamental shift in the aesthetics
of cinema might be the explanation. The introduction of sound, one might
imagine, represented such a ‘quantum leap’ in the ability of cinema to
represent reality that the artificiality of silent techniques were immediately
exposed and rendered laughable. In fact the truth is very different. While
the introduction of sound did involve some aesthetic shifts, it didn’t alter
the fundamentals of cinematic language, which had become standard by
around 1917. In fact, techniques of editing and framing remained remarkably
consistent across the transition to sound (see Crafton 1999: 5). A range of
other factors to do with technology, economics and cultural attitudes can
be understood as just as important to the creation of the ‘gulf’ between
silent and sound.
‘You’re Norma Desmond! You used to be in pictures. You used to be
big!’ exclaims Joe Gillis when he first recognises Norma. ‘I am big,’ is her
defiant response, ‘it’s the pictures that got small.’ Technically, Norma’s
claim that ‘the pictures got small’ is absolutely right. During the silent
period the space inside the sprocket holes of a standard 35mm strip of film
was entirely filled with the picture being projected. After the introduction of
sound, some of that picture space had to be given up to make way for the
soundtrack, which ran in a narrow strip down the side of the film between
the sprocket holes and the image. Furthermore, in order to maintain the

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standard proportions of the image as projected on the screen, the space

lost at the side of the image was matched by space at the top of the image.
Audiences watching a sound film wouldn’t be aware of these changes. A
metal plate was introduced into the projector to mask the soundtrack so
it wasn’t visible on the screen. But if a silent film was projected through a
sound projector, the side and the top of the image was obscured, giving the
impression that early filmmakers consistently chopped their characters’
heads off and failed to capture action occurring on the left of the screen.
This wasn’t the only humiliation silent films suffered in the age of sound.
While projection speeds in the silent era had varied between 16 and 24
frames per second (fps), sound technology demanded an absolutely
consistent projection speed of 24fps. Thus silent films projected on sound
technology were always speeded up. ‘Headless’ characters ran around the
screen at a chaotic and comedic pace, even in films that weren’t comedies
– a characteristic that we still associate with silent film even today.
Economic factors also militated against the continued reputation and
circulation of silent cinema. Sound film represented a massive investment
in research and development for those studios that had thrown their
weight behind it, and yet the inevitability of its triumph was not evident at
the time. Cinema managers were initially resistant – not surprisingly given
the expense that converting cinemas to sound involved, and the rather
inconsistent quality of the earliest sound films. The Jazz Singer (Alan
Crosland, 1927) is generally understood to be the big breakthrough for
sound. It was released as a sound film in the US in 1927, but UK audiences
and audiences away from the big cities in America only saw it in a silent
version. In fact it wasn’t until as late as 1931 that the transition to sound
film was complete in the US and the UK. In countries where Hollywood
films didn’t dominate the cinemas, the transition took even longer –
Japan did not turn to sound until the mid-1930s. This long and uncertain
period of transition suggests that sound wasn’t spontaneously adopted
by audiences as a self-evidently superior form of cinema. Instead it had to
be consistently promoted by the production companies who had invested
so much in it (much as 3D technology is promoted today). Part of that
promotion strategy involved deliberately creating the impression of a gulf
dividing the modern ‘talkies’ with the antiquated silent films. As Donald
Crafton suggests, ‘the promoters of sound represented their devices as a
total break with the past’ (1999: 4). In this project they were assisted by a

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further economic factor: film was both expensive to keep (being both bulky
and inflammable) and had a high scrap value (due to its silver content).
Many producers found it more economic to sell their old films for scrap
rather than spend money on warehousing and fire insurance costs in
anticipation of them being useful later. As a result, a large proportion of
silent film titles never actually survived into the sound period, and many
more were lost in the years after 1930. Many of the films that did survive,
did so only as a result of the amateur home movie market, where they
were re-released in cut-down versions – literally in versions which were
printed on physically smaller stock (on amateur gauges such as 16mm or
9.5mm), and had been edited into shorter running times to suit the needs
of home projection shows. When silent films were seen after 1930, then, it
was often only in diminished versions of themselves.
Finally, a range of cultural factors also weighed against the continuing
presence of silent films after 1930. Today we are surrounded by old films –
on television, on DVD, on YouTube and Netflix. We think nothing of settling
down to watch a film released last year, five years ago, or perhaps even
sixty years ago. This longevity of individual films has its origins in the
growth of television in the 1950s, which regularly scheduled older films
both as ‘event’ programming and as ‘filler’. Later, home entertainment
systems such as VHS and DVD made re-watching films even easier. Before
television, though, films had very little life after their initial cinematic
release. Some blockbusters such as The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse
(Rex Ingram, 1921), or Ben-Hur (Fred Niblo, 1925), or popular series such as
the Charlie Chaplin comedies might have enjoyed a cinematic re-release
after a few years. Some commercial cinemas in places like central London
regularly revived films deemed to be ‘classics’. Nevertheless, the vast
majority of films vanished after their initial cinematic run, and film fans
wouldn’t expect to see them again – ever. Films were understood, both
by fans and by the industry itself, to be essentially ephemeral objects. As
a result, audience taste moved more rapidly than we are used to today,
and films only a few years old were quickly thought to have dated. When
television did start to re-introduce audiences to older films from the 1950s
onwards, silent films were ‘given the go-by’ due to understandable cost
considerations – broadcasting a silent film involved the extra trouble and
expense of adding a musical score – it was easier to leave them alone and
concentrate on post-1930 productions.

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Sometimes, though, history is kind. More recent technological devel-

opments have worked in favour of, rather than against, silent cinema.
Digital restoration techniques have allowed many more films to become
visible than in previous years, and for those films to be presented more
sympathetically. Archivists and restorers have been able to ensure that
films which were previously too fragile to be shown, can now be presented
looking as pristine and perfect as they looked on their first release. The
internet has meant that many such restorations are now freely available to
download, or to watch, and the increased interest in screening events with
live musical performance mean that its more possible to see such films
on the big screen. There’s never been a better time to be a fan of silent
cinema. This book will help you get started.

Note

1 For an account of filmmaking up to 1914, see S. Popple and J. Kember

(2003) Early Cinema: From Factory Gate to Dream Palace. London:
Wallflower Press.

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