silent movies
David Nice
How do you solve a problem like The Birth of a Nation? Do you admire the first part and turn away from the second (after all, the Germans screened The Sound of Music for years in a Nazi-free version ending with the marriage of Maria and Captain von Trapp)? Can you balance social, historical and aesthetic responses?My own were to admire every technique D W Griffith throws at the story-telling of the American Civil War as a fine, at times Tolstoyan interweaving of truth with the fiction of two families from north and south, only to throw in the towel at the flabbergasting rewritten history of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Blancanieves seems to come on the back of the world-conquering The Artist, it was actually conceived before the French tribute to silent-era cinema. Rather than being about silent cinema, Blancanieves is a silent Spanish take on Snow White which, through sheer panache, verve and eccentricity, can’t fail to seduce. But like The Artist, it has an unforgettable animal actor. It’s impossible to see a cockerel in the same way ever again.Blancanieves is also defined by Maribel Verdú’s Encarna, a character who is evil incarnate; Macarena Garcia’s passionate yet sensitive grown-up Carmen; Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
With its story of youthful love entrapped by fate, Tabu relishes the glorious primal energy of the South Seas, which was where German director FW Murnau, best known now for his expressionist Nosferatu, but then recently established in Hollywood and acclaimed for the likes of Sunrise, found himself in 1929. He came along with documentarist Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), but what had been planned as a joint project ended up as Murnau’s film; Flaherty shot the opening sequence (including the famous fisherman shot, below right), before handing over cinematography to Floyd Crosby, who Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Contemporary homages to the silent age are tuppence are dozen, but none are quite as eccentric as Miguel Gomes’s Tabu. One of last year’s oddball gems, it joins The Artist and Hugo in sending a love letter to cinema’s formative geniuses and yet sets its swooningly romantic silent section in a Portuguese colony of Africa in the turbulent early 1960s. Its starcrossed protagonists have a scene of frank lovemaking, and one of the silent stars is a baby crocodile.Tabu’s two segments – which take the names of Paradise Lost and Paradise – are the story’s effect and cause. The first is set in wintry Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Knowing Clara Bow brought you down socially”. Although one of the biggest and most bankable film stars of the Twenties, luminous fan-favourite Clara Bow wasn’t so treasured by the Hollywood elite. She didn’t hide her affairs. She turned up for dinner in a swimsuit. Her father was an alcoholic and banned from sets. She revealed her deprived background to the press, undermining the myth that stars sprang fully formed from the Elysian Fields. When it came to assessing the silent era in his seminal book The Parade's Gone By, film historian Kevin Brownlow didn’t mention her. For that slight, he Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it's impossible to place yourself in the shoes of audiences seeing these other-worldly short films at the dawn of the 20th century, the reaction they provoke now cannot be that different. Delight, surprise and then amazement. These films were meant to be magical, and remain so. Taking 19th century theatre in all its forms, capturing it on film and making it even more unreal with hand tinting and editing resulted in a unique strand of cinema.Fairy Tales collects 25, chronologically sequenced, films made by the Pathé Frères between 1901 and 1908. Most are feéries, or fairy films, but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How much suffering is it possible to take? Can suffering be depicted on film in a way which evokes its true depths? Is it possible to draw anything positive from a film that succeeds in capturing the essence of suffering? In short order: the human spirit can surprise; yes; yes. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc) is a film that still affects and has an ominous power, despite being silent, being made in 1928 and eschewing the overly demonstrative. It’s also strikingly timeless.Dreyer has been celebrated this year and the opportunity to assess the films Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The premiere of the newly restored version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 silent classic Blackmail, outdoors at the British Museum, will go down as one of the defining moments of the London 2012 cultural extravaganza. This was a thrilling, beguiling, resonant celebration of the city and its greatest film-maker.Of the four screenings of restored Hitchcock silents in marquee venues this summer, this will be the most singular, due to Blackmail’s climactic sequence – the director’s first major set piece – taking place at the museum itself. As the glowing building loomed over the forecourt screen Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
What, honestly, is left to say about The Artist? For better or worse, Michel Hazanavicius' warm, wry, subtly audacious love letter to silent cinema dominated conversation, headlines and awards ballots for a good three months, during which time everything from rapturous praise to derisory jibes were tossed at its unsuspecting, perfectly coiffed head.But the important point is this: to dismiss the film, as many did once the inevitable backlash began, as "a simple story, well told", or worse as "a simplistic and predictable story, competently told", is to ignore the wealth of wit, specificity Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Silent movies are currently the rage of Tinseltown, so what better moment to brush up on one of the treasures of the pre-talkie era? Top movie-ologists now contend that FW Murnau's 1926 film of Faust is a neglected all-time great ("one of the most beautifully crafted films ever made," according to Theodore Huff in Sight & Sound). It's an opinion shared by Greek composer Aphrodite Raickopoulou, whose painstakingly wrought new score for the film was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall last night.Performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra under conductor Benjamin Wallfisch, and featuring piano Read more ...
emma.simmonds
One of film’s most inspiring artists, Walt Disney, once said, “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.” With the seemingly anachronistic The Artist, French director Michel Hazanavicius proves this to be as true as ever - even in this technologically adventurous age with its all too frequent bombastic sound. Hazanavicius boldly strips cinema back to its wordless, monochrome days and, boy, does the end result sparkle.More than 50 years after the French New Wave both celebrated and defied the Hollywood filmic formula, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Many have dismissed 2011 as cinematically something of a disappointment, but while close inspection may have identified more cubic zirconia than bona fide diamonds, the year glittered nevertheless. The showstopping Mysteries of Lisbon was undoubtedly the real deal - what a teasing, sumptuous and gorgeously strange film that was (even with a running time in excess of four hours). Iranian domestic drama, A Separation, was similarly sublime - if less grand - and French silent (yes, silent) comedy The Artist (pictured below right) had hard-faced movie scribes grinning idiotically at the year’s Read more ...