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.
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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.
“Sixty years later I am still bringing people to see Napoléon, that’s quite true. And also bringing people back to the cinema because this is the age where they watch Lawrence of Arabia on their mobile phones, for God’s sake. The cinema was designed for sharing, and that is sharing the reactions to the film. It’s not just being in the same room as a lot of other people. It’s much more emotional than that.” Kevin Brownlow on restoring Napoléon
“Never forget, that this masterpiece is also a monsterpiece.” Georges Mourier on restoring Napoléon
The story of Napoléon will never end, I suspect. This mammoth film, made by Abel Gance at the height of the silent era, intended to be just the start of telling the emperor’s tale, has been through a lot already. This site has covered Kevin Brownlow’s exhaustive restoration of the film, and the late Carl Davis’s process of writing a new score. You may well have had the opportunity to see their lustrous five-and-a-half-hour version, either at one of the live screenings in London, California and elsewhere, or on the film’s release: in cinemas, on Blu-ray, and on BFI Player. It’s a phenomenal experience, even before the famous triptych finale, when the screen gets wider, and wider, and wider.
Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927)
Alongside this story, there has always been the shorter, Francis Ford Coppola restoration, scored by his father Carmine and screened at the Radio City Music Hall in New York, running at about four hours.
And now there is another Napoléon version, clocking in at seven hours and five minutes, the product of a 16-year digital restoration project at the Cinématheque Française, with the support of the CNC, which will make its debut this year. And you will surely get a chance to see this one.
How to break the silent-movie internet? Get Taylor Swift to write about one of the greatest stars of the cinematic jazz age. Better yet, get her to tease the track title ahead of time so that the web can be filled with clickbait speculation and “Everything you need to know” filler articles for weeks in advance of the album’s arrival.
But now, The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th studio album, has been released, and we can all brew ourselves a coffee, relax and listen to ‘Clara Bow’.
I was looking for Yoda when I bumped into Eadweard Muybridge. These are the circles film history moves in. This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the 27th, took place in the grandeur of the theatre of the Palace of Fine Arts, an elegant neo-classical folly of gigantic proportions, built as a temporary attraction for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and then rebuilt in more permanent form 50 years later. Here, time is a pretzel. Like the architecture, cinema becomes both ancient and the modern: live performances of century-old works.
Before the films began, I ventured just a few yards from the Palace for a guided tour of the LucasFilm building, home of some of the film industry’s most cutting-edge special effects and beloved animatronic characters. Case in point: our meeting point was at the Yoda Fountain, just in front of the of the offices, a thrilling rendez-vous for anyone’s inner child. That’s when my jet lag and a tendency to meander led me to take a wrong turn into the 19th century, and the statue of Muybridge, the photography pioneer who discovered the secrets of motion in a series of still frames – cinema in its simplest form. Born in Kingston, Surrey, Muybridge began his photography career in San Francisco, and the city is justifiably proud of his work and its legacy. Somehow, my sense of direction led me right back where I started from.
The fashionable set is always the first to name a trend. So if you know you know, but if you don’t know you need to know that 2024 is the year of Coquette Core, a prettified aesthetic that can be boiled down to: put a bow on it. That’s technically a beribboned bow with a lower-case b, not a Clara Capital-B-Bow, but the difference is only nominal. At this year’s Hippodrome Silent Film Festival we celebrated the age of the flapper, with all things frilly, feminine and flirtatious.
If you wanted to keep up with the new womenswear trends in the 1920s and 1930s, the cinemagazine Eve’s Film Review would have been your bible, and one of my favourite events at this year’s Hippfest was Jenny Hammerton’s presentation on these witty and inventive female-interest dispatches. Here, every cinemagoer could truly learn how to be “a modern”, and more specifically, how to save your stockings from mud-spatters, advice that all of us in Bo’ness could truly use.
If you truly love something, let he, she, they or it know. Now, in this instance, I am talking about silent film, and it is the season for wearing your heart on your sleeve, so here’s an opportunity to do just that. Coincidentally, if you are the sort of person who has considered giving up talkies for Lent this is also very much right up your avenue.
Cinema’s First Nasty Women: A DemographicSurvey is a research, curation, and outreach project led by Laura Horak (Carleton University), Maggie Hennefeld (University of Minnesota), and Russell Zych (UCLA Film & Television Archive). And this Valentine season, the Nasty Women want you to let them know how you really feel about silent movies. If you fill in this survey, you will be helping them to gain a deeper understanding of silent film audiences today – who’s watching, how frequently, in what spaces and formats, and toward what ends? What are people’s (mis)impressions of silent-era cinema?
The Nasty Women plan to use the data collected in this survey to develop a better understanding of present-day audiences for silent film programming and physical media releases. Insights from this study will help silent film organisations build their audiences and raise audience engagement. In other words, it is in your interests to let them know how you truly feel.
How deep is your love? Let the Nasty Women know by filling in this survey. And remember, just as with a Valentine, all responses to the survey are totally anonymous – plus, completing the form is voluntary and doesn’t commit you to anything.
I may be a humble blogger typing at my desk, but just imagine I am a glamorous celebrity cracking first-rate jokes while wearing a designer ballgown. I have counted the votes, and I am ready to announce the winners of the Silent London Poll of 2023!
Congratulations to all the people mentioned below – as ever, these categories were bursting with great nominations. Thank you for all your votes, and your comments, which remind us all of the passion for silent film out there.
Without further ado, let me open this giant stack of golden envelopes. Here are your winners.
1. Best orchestral silent film screening of 2023
Your winner: Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925), with a score composed by Stephen Horne, orchestrated by Ben Palmer and performed by Orchestra del Teatro Comunale directed by Timothy Brock, in the Piazza Maggiore Bologna, as part of Il Cinema Ritrovato
I said: “Before Monday night’s screening of the original 1925 adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty’s weepie, some people in Bologna were still dropping the names of Barbara Stanwyck and King Vidor. After Monday, the talk of the town was only Belle Bennett, Henry King and Stephen Horne, whose marvellous score, alongside Bennett’s impeccable performance, left the piazza awash with tears. Horne has long championed this film, as have I, and the new restoration from MOMA is a very welcome, and beautiful thing. I really hope more people get to see this wonderful film now. Silent melodrama really can be the very finest melodrama.”
Honourable mention:Lady Windermere’s Fan (Ernst Lubitsch, 1925), at the same festival, with Timothy Brock’s new orchestral score.
The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)
2. Best silent film screening with a solo musician or small ensemble of 2023
Next Friday evening, 26 January, I will be delivering a lecture called Frances Marion: Hollywood’s Favourite Storyteller, with clips accompanied by the brilliant Mike Nolan. Find out more about the Oscar-winning genius who wrote the best films for stars such as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Marie Dressler and more.You can book your ticket here (it’s free or just £3 if you can spare the change).
I am just about to sign off for the year, so I wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading, and supporting, this blog in 2023. This year has been another very challenging one, on the world stage, and in the arts, but I continue to be impressed by the resilience, energy and imagination of people in the silent film world. So much work going on, so many opportunities to share great films and music with each other.
Season’s greetings Silent Londoners. It’s that time of year when we like to look back at the year, and especially at all the great silent movies we watched.
2023 was a busy year. We had in-person and online film festivals, seasons, screenings and conferences, some fabulous new restorations, discs and some big anniversaries. We had new books and DVDs to enjoy. I was a little distracted, but the silent film scene was booming.
All too often over the years, the term “theatrical” has been thrown at films as an insult, as if showing an influence from the stage is something to be deplored. Such a notion stems, perhaps, from the idea that if cinema is to be considered a true art form, it must distinguish itself through uniqueness, shedding any influence from the other arts.
The notion of medium-specificity is discussed early on in Vito Adriaensens’ refreshing take on film history, which argues for a different tack: in this engaging study of early European film, Adriaensens seeks to show how heavily the roots of Euro cinema were, in fact, entangled in other art forms and how, by associating itself with the established arts, the fledgling medium sought to legitimise itself in the eyes of its audience.
At its simplest, the history of silent film in Denmark and Germany can be seen as a story of two halves, divided by World War I: first, there was the rise of the Danish Nordisk Film Company, a major player in production and distribution throughout Europe whose success was ultimately stymied by the war; and then there was Germany’s UFA, a government-funded consolidation of private film companies ready to capitalise on the creative boom born from the county’s post-war malaise.
This is an expanded version of an essay I wrote for Sight and Sound in 2020. The First Year (Frank Borzage, 1926) screens this week at MoMA on the opening night of the After Alice, Beyond Lois programme, curated by Kate Saccone and Dave Kehr to commemorate 10 years of the Women Film Pioneers Project.
Frank Borzage was one of the greatest Hollywood directors of young love. When we remember his silent work in particular, a very distinctive kind of romantic melodrama come to the fore: a passionate tale in which two youthful lovers confront unbearable adversity and yet are finally saved by the redemptive, mystical power of true love. Most famously, this path from darkness into light was trod by Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in a trio of celebrated Borzage films from the end of the silent era: 7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929).
Some news is too good not to share, even if the Atlantic Ocean makes this a little inconvenient for me, personally. If you can be in New York later this month and next, I urge you to attend a particularly excellent birthday party.
The Women Film Pioneers Project, an impeccable resource for early and silent film history, has reached its 10th birthday. The brainchild of Jane Gaines, and managed by Kate Saccone, the WFPP has been doing the good work of balancing the gender books of film history for 10 years now, and this calls for a celebration. One that takes the form of a film season, curated by Saccone with Dave Kehr at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Michael Powell made films in the south of France. Before that one. His first job in the film industry was working at the Victorine studios of Rex Ingram, just outside Nice, in the mid-1920s. He was 19 and he took on pretty much any job he could on set, trying to learn the business from the ground up. It worked, didn’t it? He even appeared in front of the camera a few times, often playing a sappy creation called Cicero Simp in the Riviera Revels comic shorts.
Silent London 