This is a guest blog for Silent London by Maria Wyke, professor of Latin at University College London.
Worn out from watching Paul Mescal battle with CGI baboons, rhinos and sharks in the Roman arena? Or trying to avoid the Marvel-style struggle for the future of the Roman empire playing out in a cinema near you? Then you might be interested in these two screenings coming up at the end of November of very different antiquity films from 100 years ago or more. Gladiator II explicitly presents itself as a sequel to Gladiator (2000). That hugely successful film drew on the Hollywood blockbusters of the Cold War era and they in turn built on the global success of antiquity films already established at the start of the 20th century. Those early films, however, often reconstructed the ancient world in ways never taken up by later cinema. These upcoming screenings bring back to us that otherwise lost innovation, vibrantly supported by the live accompaniment of professional musicians.
The Odyssey (1911, dirs. F. Bertolini, A. Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro)
Entering the Ancient World through Silent Cinema
Saturday 30 November 2024, 16:45-17:45 at the Morecambe Winter Gardens
As part of a Northern Silents event, this variety programme begins with a British travelogue, Visit to Pompeii (1901, dirs. George A. Smith and Charles Urban), that takes elegant tourists on a journey around the excavated city and up to the crater of Vesuvius. An Italian historical drama, Nero, or the Burning of Rome (1909, dirs. Luigi Maggi and Arturo Ambrosio)shows the emperor repudiating his wife and driving her to suicide at the command of his beautiful mistress. The people rebel, Rome burns, the emperor plays his lyre. Through cinematic superimposition, a terrified Nero sees a nightmare vision of the Christians suffering for his crimes. His own suicide soon follows.
Similarly, The Odyssey (1911, dirs. F. Bertolini, A. Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro) uses special effects imaginatively to present the daring escape of Odysseus and his crew from a monstrous giant, the apparition to him of his protective goddess, and his miraculous transformations to hide his true self from the suitors who hound his wife back at home. The climactic finale is an American animation, A Roman Scandal (1926, dirs. Charles R. Bowers and Bud Fisher), based on the newspaper comic strip adventures of Mutt and Jeff. Magically transported back to ancient Rome, little Jeff finds himself racing a chariot before the beady eyes of emperor Mutt. In a parody of the great race sequence in Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur (1925), cunning is the winner.
Quo vadis? (1924, dirs. Gabriellino D’Annunzio and George Jacoby)
Quo vadis? (1924, dirs. Gabriellino D’Annunzio and George Jacoby)
Sunday 1 December 2024, 14:15 at BFI Southbank NFT1, London
Magnificent and disturbing, this epic film revels in the debauchery often associated with ancient Rome. The emperor Nero is played as a satanic grotesque by the star Emil Jannings. At the opening of the film, we see him lie resplendent on a couch in the grounds of his ornate palace. He peers with sadistic amusement at a series of female victims being thrown into the fountain to fatten his fish.
The Latin title of the film or ‘Where are you going?’ refers to the question that the apostle Peter was supposed to have asked when he saw Christ coming to save the Christians in Rome. It also refers to a celebrated nineteenth-century novel that told the story of a fictional girl, Lygia, who turns the Roman soldier Vinicius toward God despite Nero’s attempts to stop her. The first half of the film ends with the camera focussing in on a hand gripping a cross. It is a sign that the soldier’s conversion is underway.
The second half of the film puts that story in the broader context of the burning of the city and the subsequent persecution of the Christian community. Here red tinting marks out the danger for Rome and the excitement for viewers. A cast of thousands charges the imperial palace. Christians are arrested and Christ himself makes two appearances. Eventually Nero commits suicide, and the Cross is declared victorious. But not before we are offered a range of extraordinary spectacles: extravagant banquets; beatings and murder; thwarted rapes; a city on fire; a strongman wrestling a bull, lurid martyrdoms and soldiers from the provinces riding to the rescue.
Both screenings are being run in association with the AHRC-funded research project Museum of Dream Worlds based at University College London and led by myself, Maria Wyke. The project (drawing on the surviving films in the BFI National Archive) asks how did early cinema design its Greek and Roman dreamworlds? What did cinema gain from recreating the distant past? What did that past gain from being recreated in moving images? The project also considers how these films were once used as instruments of education and what educative potential they might have today.
Ivo Blom is offering a free download of his recent book Quo vadis?, Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology (Kaplan, 2023) over on his site, as well as the link to buy a paper copy.
Stand outside Alexandra Palace on a clear evening with a full moon, as I did last night, and you can take in the whole city. London may be as silent as it gets from this vantage point, but the landscape is loud in its own way. The glittering towers that dominate the skyline were all built in the last 50, probably 20 years. The red lights dotted in among them are all cranes, standing by to change the shape of the city once again. Scan the horizon, and you’ll be reassured perhaps to see the dome of St Paul’s – a symbol of continuity, a connection between modern times and the age of Christopher Wren, going back to 1710.
Swivel on your heel, and pivot to 1873 or thereabouts, when Ally Pally itself, the “People’s Palace” first opened. I had a date to keep at the theatre, recently restored to what the owners call a state of “arrested decay” and reopened to the public. We were there to travel back to a fuzzy combination of the 1880s and the 1920s, to revel in the BFI London Film Festival’s latest archive presentation: Silent Sherlock.
Just a short note to share some information about a conference I am looking forward to, so that you can also save the dates, and so that I can pass on the call for papers.
The twelfth Women and the Silent Screen conference will take place in Brussels and Antwerp next June. It will be hosted by Université libre de Bruxelles, University of Antwerp, and Cinematek, and will take place 11-14 June 2025. As Anke Brouwers, one of the organisers, Anke Brouwers, pointed out at the Women and Film History International meeting in Pordenone last week, just think of the waffles! And the chocolate, the beer, the frites…
It’s supposed to be big mystery: what do women want from a romantic partner? But there is no mystery at all. GSOH every time. That’s good sense of humour, of course. So if you’re in anyway romantically inclined, you’ll already be asking yourself: what is the FUNNIEST way I can celebrate Valentine’s Day next year.
If you know you know that Slapstick Festival celebrates visual comedy in all its forms. But that include silent cinema and there are especially strong offerings on that score this year, including lashings of Buster Keaton (with expert Polly Rose on hand to guide you through his work), including the gala screening of Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), accompanied by the European Silent Screen Virtuosi, led by Günter A. Buchwald, on the Friday night at Bristol Beacon. Plus Harold Lloyd, Sarah Duhamel, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, WC Fields, and lots more.
A confession. I was conspiring over breakfast, and reader, this was a two-cappuccino problem. The upshot? I was a little late in getting started with the screenings today. But I certainly knew that I was going to be up late, with the gala… and the end-of-festival celebrations!
My sunny morning stroll to Cinemazero was rewarded with a simply terrific film from Uzbekistan. In Her Right (Grigorii Cherniak, 1930), a group of workers from the collective farm are sent to the factory to boost the workforce there, and to learn those valuable Soviet methods. One woman from the village defies her husband and sheds her burqa to join them. It’s a life-changing experience and not only does she gain independence through work, but she inspires others to do the same, through a filmed speech, that the workers clamour to watch, even after he enraged husband slashes the screen. Even with her “throat” cut, in a silent film, she continues to speak her truth. So you have noted already that this is once again pro-Soviet, anti-Islam propaganda in intent, but this is also a remarkable film in style and action. Our Hollywood friends would applaud the excellent, and indeed poignant, action sequence in which our heroine runs to jump on the train to the factory, is repeatedly shoved away by male guards and then, when it seems she has finally found a helping female hand, her husband leaps – for a second we think he has dragged her form the moving train, but no, he only has her coat in his hands. Nail-biting stuff. And the scene in which they watch the film is also very strong. Günter Buchwald at the keys for this one, keeping the energy at exactly the right pace.
Blood, sweat and tears on the screen today. And to cap it all off, prizes! That’s Friday in Pordenone, folks. Read all about it.
Your scribe is a little squeamish, I must confess, so this morning I had to resort to an old trick, and pop my glasses off during some of Arabi (Nadezhda Zubova, 1933), a drama about sheep farmers organising to form a collective and defeat the feudal powers that exploit their labour under the old system. That doesn’t make me squeamish, I’m all for it – it was the killing and skinning of lambs that turned my stomach. Still, I thought this was terrific, with some very sharp editing, especially in the opening sequence, and lovely low camerawork of the herd out in the field.
Wouldn’t you like to go Behind the Scenes with DW Griffith and Florence Lawrence? I sure would, that’s why I was bright and early at the Verdi this morning for the 1980 Biograph package. Behind the Scenes, per the catalogue is the “happy exception” among the 1908 output. Well it certainly had punch. A distraught mother must tear herself from her daughter’s sickbed to kick her heels and shake her hips on the vaudeville stage to earn a crust. But as the crowd roars out for an encore, her baby girl is slipping away from this life; Grandma rushes to the stage door… If “too late!” is the essence of the melodramatic narrative then this was a textbook case. We stayed to see Lawrence reappear as the titular character in The Red Girl, in which a collection of ethnic stereotypes conspire to rob a “girl miner” but Lawrence defies racist convention to lend a hand instead. Impressive to see Lawrence Harry Houdini her way free after being tied up and dangled over a precipice above the rushing river. Extra exciting with John Sweeney at the keys, of course.
Sometimes the old songs are the best, right? Familiarity can breed contentment. And nowhere will you find more consensus on that than here in Pordenone. So today I was happy to rewatch a couple of silent films I love, spend a little time with one of my all-time favourite silent stars. And then see something entirely new to me!
First, the old friends. This morning, we ventured back into the imaginations of Maurice Tourneur, and Ben Carré, with the 1918 adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. Such a strange and beautiful, terrifying and wholesome journey into the shadow world of dreams, where bread and sugar and water have souls, the dogs and cats can talk, lost grandparents always have the table set for supper and babies wait impatiently to be born. If you have not seen this, you possibly can’t imagine quite how weirdly pretty it is. Variety’s critic wrote: “It is quite safe to assert that nothing quite like Director Tourneur’s work has ever been shown on the screen.” So hats off to Tourneur and Carré, and doubly so to Neil Brand and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, who transported us to an enchanted realm with their music. I wrote about the film in more detail here, should you be interested.
And verily, on Tuesday, the fourth day of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the rains came down upon us. And things got quite soggy inside the theatre too, what with Mary Pickford nearly drowning in the hold of her own houseboat in Pride of the Clan, a parcel of wonderful underwater films in the early afternoon, and a wild ride to Neptune’s kingdom to close the day.
Before the rain began, I spent a couple of rapt hours in the Canon Revisited strand this morning. Carl Th Dreyer’s Leaves From Satan’s Book (1920) travels through the centuries with God’s Fallen Angel, who is doing his evil work among humans who prove reliably weak in the face of temptation. Surrendering one’s soul to sin is not to be advised, but surrendering oneself to cinematic greatness – that is a balm for the ills of the modern age. This is a film of deceptive subtlety, and slow-burning excitement. The camera stays still so long that when it moves, the moral universe tilts. The austerity of the first, biblical sequence gives way by degrees to a faster editing rhythm, and cutaways to sympathetic details, a flock of geese, a cat toying with a mouse, a baby in her crib. Soon we’re in action thriller territory as we finally wash up in Finland in 1918, via the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution. Dreyer, being Dreyer, the faces, not least of Helge Nissen as the shape-shifting Satanas, carry boundless weight. It’s a masterpiece, an early one, from a man who made much better films, even, but still. And yes I am smug about having watched it with John Sweeney’s soul-stirring accompaniment, which likewise knew when to hold back and when to rush forward through the ages.
I promise you, I really am in Pordenone, not in Paris. But honestly, the geography is becoming a little subjective. We seem unable to escape the Rive Gauche for long. This morning, a really quite exceptionally taut melodrama from Louiis Feuillade, with sets,of course, by Ben Carré, illustrated how the Latin Quarter exerts its own gravitational pull, morally, if not physically. In La Tare (1911), part of Feuillade’s “La Vie telle qu’elle est” (Life as It Is) series, Renée Carl gave a really beautiful performance as Anna, who works in the dance halls of the Latin Quarter, but given the chance, moves to the South of France and devotes herself to a new career caring for patients young and old in a nursing home. Ah, but cruel fate intervenes and a medical student who used to tap her for cash in the Paris days, takes it upon himself to inform the medical board that their “secular saint” is really a “girl of easy virtue”, sooner than you can say “Madonna-whore complex”. And so we are left with a tragic, yet ambiguous ending, following a rather harrowing scene in the unemployment office with a crowd of women, all of whom had remarkable faces (no, not Léontine, I don’t think, but maybe this is the kind of place where she might be found). A very special film, enhanced, naturally, by John Sweeney’s sensitive accompaniment.
“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” Proof, if proof were needed, that the American people saw through such anti-immigrant propaganda more than 100 years ago, comes in Dee-Dubya’s 1908 New York comedy Deceived Slumming Party – our first film of Sunday morning. Fraudulent tour guides promise show rich tourists the gritty realness of Chinatown and the Bowery, but the trick is, it’s all staged. Everyone in the opium den was upright and chatty before the tour group arrived, in fact, the barroom fights in the Bowery are choreographed by the bartender (DW Griffith himself) and the “meat grinder” in the Chinese restaurant kitchen, the one that the staff are “feeding” with cats and dogs and rats, is nothing but a sham.
Rich kids slumming it in Chinatown, you say? Hold that thought while we segue from comedy to melodrama, in the shape of Driven from Home (James Young, 1927), which yanked and yanked and yanked at the heartstrings with poor Virginia Lee Corbin disowned by her wealthy father after she married for love, although her devoted mother (Margaret Seddon) was on her deathbed and calling out to see her baby once more. Add to this a subway excavation accident, a scheming vamp housekeeper (Virginia Pearson), and you might not think there was room for an excursion to the Chinatown underworld but you would be wrong, as this film was playing in the Anna May Wong strand. So indeed here we witnessed a scant five minutes of Anna May Wong, as a Chinese restauranteur’s “legal wife and illegal accomplice” radiating more star power than the rest of the rest of the (perfectly good) cast could ever dream of. We understand this is a racist trope, yet it is quite nifty to think that on the evidence of this year’s Giornate, in any given situation, Anna May Wong can locate a secret door in seconds.
Grey skies clung to the Verdi this afternoon but you can’t put a dampener on a homecoming like this one. I’ve been to several festivals this year, but nothing really compares to the Giornate. And our hearts were warmed by festival director Jay Weissberg’s words of welcome, in which we pointed out how vital it is, these days more than ever, to cherish these events that bring people together in a shared endeavour.
Today was a day of varying shades and two colour schemes. We had a couple of stonking great classics. And also a slate of fragments, curios, oddities and ends – several of which had their merits, albeit in their own unconventional way. In fact, a certain aura of strangeness hung over the whole day, which you might attribute to the unseasonal weather, but I am partially putting down to the after-effects of watching Megalopolis last weekend.
Can YOU help put names to 14 unidentified films screening at this year’s Giornate del Cinema Muto? The festival is asking for your contribution to a very exciting project. Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi explains more.
The story goes that in the early days of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, a small group of film historians sat in a theatre, watched films arriving from different archives from around the world, and identified them by shouting out the names of the actors and actresses appearing on the screen. Whether true or somewhat apocryphal, this is still an appealing idea for film historians and archivists alike. Surely, there are still many unidentified films in the archives, and what better resource in the world than the combined brainpower of the Pordenone crowd would be able to identify them? Following on the trail of exciting, successful, and fun initiatives like the LostFilms.eu portal and various archival YouTube channels, a couple of try-out sessions held by Eye Filmmuseum, and hugely inspired by the “Mostly Lost” Workshops held at the Library of Congress Conservation Center in Virginia from 2012 to 2019, we are launching a film identification thread at this year’s Giornate.
This year 14 films, sourced from 6 archives, each individually numbered, will be screened as shorts before features scattered through the week. The catalogue notes about them have been written by the archivists concerned, providing as much information as possible about the material, its provenance, and any contextual information that might be helpful for identification. Still images are provided as memory aids where possible. We encourage you to make your suggestions in various ways; whether in discussions during lunch or dinner, but also on the white board at the festival hospitality office, here on this Silent London page, or the “Pordenone People” Facebook group. Please provide evidence when you can, whether to support your suggestions or to prove a theory wrong. Please explain why you think in a certain direction, or why you’d rule out some options. And don’t forget to share with us the sources you are using to support your theory.
As you should know by now, this blog does indeed play favourites. And Stephen Horne’s score for Hitchcock’s The Manxman (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928) is one of my all-time favourites. I loved it at the London Film Festival in 2012, and again with the orchestra in Pordenone inn 2022. Beautiful music, flavoured with folk and nourished by emotion. The film’s not bad, either.
However, for us physical-media fans, limited copies of the CD version are available now. Rumour has it that Horne may have a few of said CDs to sell in Pordenone next week. So if you’re lucky, you can stop him and buy one.
Also next week, the first digital single will be released. I listened to it while writing this post, which is probably why there are tears on my keyboard. I have no higher recommendation…
The Manxman will be screened with Stephen Horne’s orchestral score by the 2025 San Francisco Silent Film Festival on 11 January 2025 at Grace Cathedral. I think I wrote the screening notes for this – hope I did the film justice.
Julien Duvivier, the great French director of films including 1937’s Pépé Le Moko, was very clear which was his favourite out of his many beautiful silent films. “Poil de Carotte: without hesitation,” he said. “Of all the films I have made, this is closest to my heart.” Made, and remade. Duvivier directed this silent Poil de Carotte in 1925, and then remade it as a sound film in 1932. He later began work on a third, colour version, but this was never realised.
Poil de Carotte, or Carrot Top or Red Hair, is based on an 1894 novella by Jules Renard, the autobiographical tale of an abused, redheaded child, driven right to the edge. Duvivier had been hired to write the screenplay for a proposed adaptation of the book, to be shot by the director Jacques Feyder.
Back to school time! Here’s a roundup of the silent movie news I really want to share with you as summer turns into autumn. Just think how many of these forthcoming delights you could enjoy for less than the cost of a dynamically priced Oasis ticket.
Screenings and festivals
I missed StummFilmTage Bonn this year again – both in person and online. But Paul Joyce and Paul Cuff both kept us up to date with their fabulous blogs.
This is a guest post for Silent London by Sean Crose, author of Catholic Girl: The Life and Times of Mabel Normand, published by BearManor Media. To order this biography of the iconic silent comedienne, click here.
“My first parts were all in tragedies,” Mabel Normand told the Los Angeles Examiner in 1924. “Mr Griffith never could see me as a comedienne.” Sure enough, Mabel, the pioneering comedic icon of the silent era, got her start in film doing tragedies for director DW Griffith. Difficult though it may be to imagine, Mabel was more apt to be found on screen back then trying to steal the husband of Mary Pickford’s character than performing the groundbreaking, sometimes quite dangerous, slapstick she would become famous for. Over ninety years after Mabel’s death at the far-too-young age of 37, it’s worth asking how she made the transition from tragedy to comedy so masterfully.
The original music for the 1929 Moscow screening of the film has been recreated by the composer Leo Geyer and myself Richard Bossons.
Though a silent film, the visual rhythm of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera is often akin to a musical composition. Vertov’s biographer John MacKay suggested that he used the frames of the film and the intervals between them in a similar way to notes on a score. The film is structured so that its tempo gradually increases to reach an extraordinary climax at the end, a thrilling montage of chaotic images created by the film’s editor, Elizaveta Svilova. The Soviet film scholar Yuri Tsivian wrote that “Man with a Movie Camera invades the territory of sound cinema as far as a silent film can reach.”
This is an extended and adapted version of a contribution I made at the 2024 Domitor conference in Vienna. I spoke as part of a roundtable on Curating Early Cinema Today, chaired by Maggie Hennefeld. Full details of the roundtable are at the end of this post.
————-
Media history is doomed to repeat itself, first as travesty, then as art. I’m kidding, but only a little. Here are some thoughts on why early cinema is trending in the 21st century, why I am writing this blog, and perhaps, why you are reading it.
Since the digital transformation of the film industry at the turn of the 21st century brought with it a new surge of creativity and of anxiety, through the rise of audiovisual social media, from YouTube to TikTok and to the dawn of AI, we are living in an age of constant new-media excitement, and panic. These mew forms of communication belong to youth; to older eyes they appear baffling, and probably dangerous. In this state of anxiety and attraction, we have much in common with the spectators of early cinema in the years following the turn of the previous century. Our new platforms, expressly suited for exhibiting the “cinema of attractions”, have created their own stars, and genres. And just like our ancestors sharing in global astonishment at Charlie Chaplin, Asta Nielsen, or Max Linder, we experience anew the enhanced possibilities of mass communication, best expressed by the world-shrinking concept that is “going viral”.
Caroline Golum’s excellent article ‘Cinema Year Zero: Tik Tok and the Grammar of Silent Film’ (Mubi Notebook, 25 February 2021) aligns the fixed-camera, stop-and-start-editing and subject matter of TikTok with the mechanic and style of early cinema. I think her analysis is sharp, and I highly recommend the piece. It strikes me, though, that the best way to describe TikTok, or any new-media platform, from Medium to BlueSky, is to be alert to its specificities as much as to its similarities with other media.
Therefore we should say that while TikTok has much in common with early filmmaking, it is defined by its Chinese ownership, by the portrait-phone aspect-ratio, the placement of screen furniture, the captioning and comments functions, the use of memes and lip-sync comedy, the proliferation of shared music clips and the technique of stitching, an extension of the repost or quote function on other platforms. That it has become a natural home for both infuencers and brand promotion, so has a prominent place in the history of advertising media in particular. We can say that very much unlike early film it is tailored to a single spectator, handheld close to the eyes like a book, not aloft like a projection, and that the scrolling process, with its minimal interaction for maximum content, has more in common with the disaffected channel-hopping of the over-stimulated TV viewer than with cinema exhibition. That the algorithm that fuels the For You Page is similar to social feeds on eg Facebook, but has its own, sometimes, mysterious and ruthless methods[1]. That TikTok is TikTok, and also a collation of concepts from other media. Just as early film has its roots in optical toys, photography and the magic lantern, among other “pre-cinema” objects, and is also its own, glorious invention.
TikTok’s likeness to early film may not persist. Already it is facilitating longer videos, live streams and more complex editing. Time is ticking. And as is already apparent, these new-media platforms tend to drift from sanctuaries for short-form content to incentivising longer formats with advertising revenue. The most talked-about video on YouTube right now is a four-hour vlog about the ill-fated Star Wars hotel (currently on eight million views). At first populated by singular entrepreneurs and creative amateurs, the platforms tend to become colonised by companies who capitalise on the new media and align it with corporate structures. The new platform’s heyday is fleeting, the audience adjusts or moves on, and the cycle begins again.
Asta Nielsen in Hamlet (Svend Gade, Heinz Schall, 1921)
Which brings us here. In 2010, after the first social media revolution had taken place, I founded this website, a blog called Silent London. Its stated purpose was to collate listings for silent film screenings in London, its broader intent was to share the love of silent cinema, though this, it soon became apparent, was pushing at an open door. The modus operandi was not to copy out texts from history books, but to acknowledge that there is an audience for silent cinema right now, who may be new to the subject, whose reason for viewing is not research or scholarship, and may not be motivated by a film’s place within the canon, nor its relationship to canonical filmmakers. They enjoy early and silent cinema for its own sake. Silent cinema is, among many other things, an evening’s entertainment. Its importance does not only reside in its centrality to film studies textbooks.
The readers of Silent London, I have learned over the past decade and a half, encompass scholars, archivists, filmmakers and other practitioners in related fields. But primarily, this blog speaks to cinephiles: moving-image hedonists, who enjoy silent cinema as part of a varied filmic diet. Which is not to say that silent film screenings are not special. The collective frisson of silent cinema spectatorship, an audience’s imaginative leap towards the screen, the dynamic energy and emotional emphasis of live accompaniment – Silent London readers revel in these pleasures. While we respect the work of the archivists and scholars who facilitate these screenings, Silent London exists within the space of contemporary film culture. And so, increasingly, does silent cinema itself. More and more, we recognise the aesthetics and technique of early and silent film bleeding from the archive into freshly minted contemporary cinema. The connections between films of all eras crackle in our minds and in the imaginations of the filmmakers we love.
So I try to erase the time distance. I write about early films not because they are old, but because they are so young. I don’t talk about old movies, but young cinema, those films that were made when the medium was new and its possibilities had not been fully mapped out. Young films do not yet have histories, but are bursting with faith in the future of the medium[2]. They have this in common with the best of contemporary cinema.
I take this approach when writing elsewhere on early and silent film, and as a critic I am also witness to the prevalence of silent cinema aesthetics in new films. Increasingly this phenomenon is my pet subject, especially in my monthly column for Sight and Sound (The Long Take), and on the tab on this site labelled “At the Talkies”. Related but not quite the same: for a while, Pete Baran and I hosted The Sound Barrier, a podcast devoted to finding connections between new releases and the silent archive – it was vastly enjoyable to record.
Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)
Visual storytelling abounds in cinema, but sometimes the references are more specific, the commitment to ditching dialogue firmer. You can take any one of a number of examples, from the Oscar-winning faux-silent The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011) to dialogue-free animations The Red Turtle (Michaël Dudok de Wit, 2016) and Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger, 2023), the elevated pastiches of Guy Maddin and the hands-on archival adventures of Bill Morrison, who takes silent cinema’s materiality as his central subject, to the traces of silent cinema style in the arthouse films of say, Miguel Gomes (Tabu, 2012, Grand Tour, 2024) and Alice Rohrwacher (Le Chimera, especially). Next week at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Rohrwacher will be in dialogue with Juho Kuosmanen on the subject of The Future of Cinema (Silent) – and naturally, I have a ticket for that conversation. The best film of last year, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, was essentially a silent film and a sound film, playing at the same time. The director has said as much himself, and that he has harboured aspirations to make a full silent film. The Fall (2019), covered on this site, was one short-form venture into the form. Or something like it.
But is it really a silent film, quiz the sceptics? This question is mostly beside the point. The postmodern magpie impulse leads us away from purism and into remix culture. We recently welcomed the re-emergence of Musidora via the revival of Irma Vep on TV with Alicia Vikander, following Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film of the same name starring Maggie Cheung[3]. I would love to your draw your oversubscribed attention to the mischievous appearance of Louis Le Prince as a supporting character in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022, pictured above) – improbably wielding a reel of celluloid and giving the young Empress Sissi an opportunity to express herself in a medium of self-portraiture far removed from the formality of a court painting in oils. The mechanics of an early film apparatus in the service of the imperial selfie. Young cinema references live again in gleefully anachronistic contexts.
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)
As has been remarked before, this is happening alongside an explosion in the availability of early and silent film on DVD and Blu-ray, even on streaming platforms, and the growth in archive cinema festivals. These things are clearly related. We might trace this “silent film revival” back to the centenary of cinema celebrations in 1995, which reminded us all over again of cinema’s youth, the compelling beauty and strangeness of early film – the century looping back on itself like a reel.
So there are intellectual and practical reasons for the persistence of silent cinema style. But I would argue that there is also an emotional pull, drawing us back to the first decades of filmmaking. This is counter intuitive. When Billy Wilder made Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Stanley Donen made Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the memories of the silent era, and the fraught transition to sound, were still relatively fresh, barely a generation away. The filmmakers were excavating their own youth, their own back catalogues. Conversely, no one living today feels genuine nostalgia for the early film period. We don’t remember that far back.
However, I think there is a connection. We yearn for the new media excitement of ten or twenty years ago or more – the same sense of a moment captured in time emerges when we look at both. Whether the form in question is MySpace or Vine or YouTube vlogs, Facebook pokes, gifs, hashtags or Boomerangs. Ah, the days of landscape-oriented video. Or that particular format, the music video, corralled into an immersive exhibition practice called MTV and genuinely ubiquitous, now still as glamorous and sometimes expansively produced, but streamed singly online, or relegated to a “background screen” in a bar or hotel foyer. Who remembers renting a VHS, home-taping a movie off-air, or covertly watching a “video nasty”[4]? Laser discs, even. Or simply broadcast TV, in a choice of three or four channels. We have always been watching, and experiencing newness and loss.
Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002)
Remember how we discovered, studied and adapted to the new forms, found ways to use them for our own amusement, our own conversations? We have become adept at learning to love and then learning to move on, from new media. The Artist, just like Sunset Boulevard, takes the loneliness of standing still while the world turns to a new novelty, as its central theme. Decasia, with its once carefully crafted images engulfed by decay, expresses this bereavement without saying a word. Sometimes, rarely, we find a form and stick to it, in defiance of fashion. Why is this blog still a blog, and a WordPress-hosted blog at that, when my peers have migrated to Substack, or pivoted to video? I must be old-fashioned, I guess, or simply nostalgic. Hands up if you remember when this site began, perversely on Tumblr? Or when Twitter – a platform that persists even now, but under a new name, with dangerous new rules, and diminished engagement – was integral to its growth?
When we look at early film we recall the ephemerality of once-new media: so many young cinemas, and one powerful pang. The joy of novelty and movement, experimentation and awkwardness, of discovery and reorientation and then the inevitable shock of absence. We understand the connection between our modern screen culture, and the early film period – but more importantly we feel it too. New media forms demand and swallow our attention, but their content is easily lost, and their existences short. This emotional link, as well as the artistic expressions that it provokes, is a rebuke to the idea of linear history. This is fine, because cinema time is always instantaneous. And cinema will always find a way to stay young. For a multitude of reasons, we are living in the silent film revival, and I find myself racing to document it.
Early cinema is trending in the 21st century, but how are we going to make the most of it?
Why “early cinema” in the twenty-first century? Over the past several decades, there has been a global revival of silent film culture—from international festivals and archival research collectives to popular podcasts, blogs, and social media fandoms. Passionate communities of students, scholars, archivists, curators, artists, and musicians have rallied around the resurrection of movies made over a century ago. But what is the specific appeal of “early” cinema—as an aesthetic form, experimental impulse, and historiographic gambit—toward bringing silent film culture into contact with the possibilities and crises of the present? New media pose irresistible parallels with early film exhibition practices, epitomized by the recurrence of viral temporal loops and attraction-based spectacles. Yet there are logistical challenges to curating early films (which are often very short) as opposed to feature-length works. Beyond material considerations, how do the uneven politics of visibility and representation in early filmmaking (its radicality and racism, for example) speak to feminist, queer, decolonial, anti-racist, and other social justice movements today? Digitization has made the early film archive widely accessible—but unmanageably plentiful. Its contents encompass 4k nitrate scans, physical media collections, curated streaming databases, and the unmoderated recesses of YouTube and TikTok. How best to give method to early cinema’s madness by concocting playful, new conceptual categories for thematic and speculative curating? Most importantly, who are the audiences for early cinema today (beyond the usual suspects) and how can we (early film evangelists) work together to identify, curate, and contextualize an evocative range of programming and syllabi that will bring new publics into the fold?
Silent London will always be free to all readers. If you enjoy checking in with the site, including reports from silent film festivals, features and reviews, please consider shouting me a coffee on my Ko-Fi page.
[1] For a commentary on the capitalist realities behind the apparently hobbyist jollity of TikTok comedians, see Maggie Hennefeld, Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia UP, 2024)
[3] This excellent film was my gateway into a lifetime of silent film fascination
[4] Film such as Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor (2021) appeal to this nostalgic itch, just as clearly as The Artist appeals to those who admire the aesthetics of silent Hollywood.
Silent London 