The Silent Era Was Never Silent

The first thing to unlearn about silent film is the silence.

Almost nobody watched a silent film without sound. In a small cinema a pianist improvised along with the picture, reading the mood from the screen; in a picture palace an organ or a full orchestra played a compiled or specially written score; and in Japan the benshi stood beside the screen, explaining the story and performing every voice. The best of them were stars in their own right, and their popularity is one reason silent film hung on longer in Japan than elsewhere. What the era lacked was recorded, synchronised dialogue. It did not lack noise.

Without dialogue, the story had to travel through the body, and the people who understood that best were the comedians.

Charlie Chaplin's Tramp arrived in 1914, in his first year at the Keystone studio: bowler hat, cane, tight jacket, enormous shoes, and a walk that told you his whole social position before he did anything. Within a few years Chaplin was writing, directing and starring in his own films, and the control mattered. He could shoot a piece of business again and again until it looked as though it had just occurred to the Tramp, and his reputation for endless retakes is well earned. The sentimental streak that some viewers find hard to take was part of the design. He wanted the laugh and the lump in the throat in the same scene.

Buster Keaton went the other way. His face barely moved, which earned him the nickname the Great Stone Face, and the stillness was a technique: when the performer refuses to react, the audience reacts for him. Around that face Keaton built some of the most dangerous stunts in film. The best known is in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). During a cyclone the front wall of a house topples onto him, and he stands perfectly still while an open window in the attic passes around his body, with only a few inches of clearance. It was a real, heavy facade, the window was positioned to the inch, and there was no double. Figures for the weight and the margin vary between tellings, but the shot is there to be watched, and that is the best kind of evidence film history has.

The same years produced a film that is impossible to watch innocently. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) was long, expensive and technically commanding, with battle scenes on a huge scale, intimate close-ups and cross-cutting between parallel actions to build suspense. Much of what Hollywood came to think of as storytelling is visible in it. It is also a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, presents Black Americans through vicious caricature, often with white actors in blackface, and was protested by the NAACP when it opened. The Klan was refounded later that same year, and the new organisation made use of the film. Film schools still teach it, and the honest way to do that is to hold both facts at once: craft does not excuse content, and content does not erase influence.

Elsewhere, cinema was finding other voices. In Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) set its story of a murderous showman among painted sets with tilted walls and jagged shadows, and F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) turned Dracula, without permission, into a rat-like figure in a plague town. Bram Stoker's widow sued, and a court ordered the prints destroyed. Enough survived that it is now one of the most watched films of its decade. In the Soviet Union, Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein were arguing that the meaning of a film lay in the way its shots were joined, an argument the language book picks up.

So the silent era was not a primitive stage waiting for sound. It was a complete art with its own grammar, its own stars and its own failures. Its best actors were athletes and mimes, and much of what they knew was lost when the microphones arrived and everyone started standing near them.