Silent Film You Love?

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. I am too lazy to try and verbalize why, so will instead point to this review by Roger Ebert.

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler and maybe Destiny by Lang are probably my favorites though it’s been so long since I’ve seen Destiny that I can’t say for sure now. It’s sort of hard to believe that a silent film as long as Dr. Mabuse could be watchable (it’s something like 200 minutes) but it is- very captivating.

What Ginger Yellow said. Keaton is far better than Chaplin at the physical comedy. While I always felt I was missing something with Chaplin or it seemed too historically distant or strange, with Keaton it’s just instantly funny, and clever. I also have quite a bit of affection for Harold Lloyd’s ‘Safety Last!’.

Bar his earliest couple, Women in the Moon is probably the least of Lang’s silent films – so still check out his other silents. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is probably my favourite, but at 4 odd hours feel free to ignore me. Spies is probably a far better entry point, more exuberant than silly.

5 random silents:

Ozu’s I Was Born, But… – A pair of brothers (and leaders of the local gang) go on strike after discovering their father humiliates himself to get ahead at work. Worth it for the dead-eyed sociopathic lil’ rascals let alone seeing an Ozu film before he completely codified his approach.

Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat – Another social awareness film. If I taught silent film I’d scrap showing The Birth of a Nation and instead show three hours of his earlier shorts. A Corner alone provides ample justification. Archive.org has a copy.

Sternberg’s The Docks of New York – Glossy black falls in love with matte white; I’m stuck thinking of a more beautiful film.

Murnau’s City Girl – The key pastoral influence on Malick, but far less silly. Worth viewing just to see what a silent in perfect condition looks like (due to the film’s lack of success barely any prints were struck off the negative, careful storage did the rest). Track down the UK blu-ray release if possible (or at least have a look at it at DVD Beaver), you could take fingerprints off some of the shots.

Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora – Part of his loose Ukraine folklore trilogy, all of which are equally superb. Like his fellow USSR filmmakers, Dovzhenko is a director of montage, but here editing is used to supercharge the environment with an animist spirit – in Dovzhenko’s films horses are equally likely to backchat or sing as be ridden. I don’t think there has been a US release, but the UK release is nice and cheap.

Too many to list, really. Sunrise and The General and City Lights are very near the top of the list of all-time greats. Ozu made a half dozen silent masterpieces; Naruse at least two. Silence bothers me no more than black and white .

Flesh and the Devil, It, and Pandora’s Box astonished me.

But if you are talking about early silents, before 1920, I can’t help you as much.

I saw the title and said “I’ll go there and put in a work for Keaton.” But I’m way late for that. Nobody however seems to have mentioned Sherlock Jr., a fine example of post-modernism avant la lettre (and also funny).

Also: The Passion of Joan of Arc.

I’ve seen Greed just the once, but I thought it was great stuff.

Also: The Passion of Joan of Arc.

I had mixed feelings about this one. I can see the greatness of some of it, but also, the director should have been told that shots other than extreme close-ups on the actors’ faces were possible. (I read that, for the time, lavish amounts of money were spent on the sets, but that they mostly went to waste, as so many of the shots are close-ups on the faces. They are great, but get to be a bit too much after a while. Or so I thought.)

The seven chances, by Keaton. His chases are the fastest thing that have ever been filmed. No matter how fast starships go, they will never go faster than Keaton on the handle-bars of a motorcycle (in Sherlock Jr.) or Keaton running down a slope as boulders chase him. The pure thrill of speed.

There is a scene in Seven Chances where Keaton is running from a mob; by devices and divagations he loses them, and his pace slows to an easy loping run. Suddenly the mob appears from behind, and his burst of acceleration is not only breathtaking, but hilarious as well. He makes speed funny.

Agreed about Lloyd’s Safety Last, and his Speedy is good too.

— Keaton. Good, surprisingly honest and direct emotion. Entertaining and well structured stories and a good appreciation for the nature of the medium.
— Battleship Potemkin etc.
— I’m surprised that I have not seen any mention of Man with a Camera yet. It’s not narrative but has its own charm and beauty and is a reminder of how very varied silent films were.
— I think that Mark of Zorro might be worthwhile, but it has been while, and I suspect that I’m grading on curve.
— Completely wrong, of course, but I always remember Alexander Nevsky as a silent with a really good score.

Sunrise is breathtaking. I also like Dovzhenko’s Earth, which was not at all what I expected.

It’s impossible for me to imagine that you would not love either The General or Sherlock Jr, given all existing evidence of your tastes. When I was 20 or so I also remember really enjoying Eisenstein’s Strike (1925, apparently), but it’s possible that the intervening decade would change my assessment. For big dumb entertainment, Murnau’s Faust had its moments…but like an earlier commenter, I can’t help much with pre-1920 stuff. I am sure “Greed” is good (yes, yes), but my memory is of turning it off halfway through: that might have been one of those ill-advised attempts to start watching a film at midnight, though. Turns out you will not make it through Andrei Rublev that way.

I have been trying to express the impressions the great silent stars made on me. Clara Bow was “just folks,” but also her charisma seem more amplified to me than the stars of the 30s.

I wonder if this is because they’re silent – so you’re focussing much more on their faces and their expressions than you would if the plot were also being conveyed through the soundtrack. Also, camerawork is much simpler – fewer pans or zooms or crane shots – so there’s less movement except for people moving and facial expressions changing.

Les Vampires is about as true to the spirit of serials and French subversion as one can get.

For any Keaton fans who haven’t seen it: The Railrodder. Neither black and white nor silent, but a lot of fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiqqxyZeDXo

I first saw this when I was seven, shown on movie day, and it made a lasting impression on me concerning both visual comedy and my idea of Canada. I don’t suppose that 7 year olds get shown short films in class once a month anymore.

bob mcmanus, I take away a similar impression from the first fifteen years or so of recorded pop music. The Victrola era, I guess, when a lot of people were being recorded (on wax cylinders I don’t think they got much beyond established stage pros, but I could be wrong) but when everyone had learned music and formed their tastes in the pre-recording era.

I started to like that stuff because I wondered why I could read Modernist literature and find it comparatively contemporary and fresh, but find music from that era ancient-sounding. I started to change how I listened.

@10 I saw ‘Sunrise’ as a kid and it had this huge effect on me. I’d love to see it again. I remember it as sublimely beautiful and I now wonder if it is maudlin. But perhaps not.

Ivan the Terrible. Most of my silent movie watching happened as a child though so I’m not to be trusted on this.

To complete the classics quoted above, I’d like to add a few french silent movies.
The extraordinary NAPOLEON of Abel Gance, projected on three screens. Abel Gance was a Coppola before Coppola.
Zero de conduite, by Jean Vigo is the father of Truffaut “Les 400 coups” .
Fantomas and it’s 4 sequels by Louis Feuillade are still fun to watch, but can’t compete with the modern tempo and fx of present day action packed blockbusters.
I’d like also to mention the films of Pierre Etaix shot in the 60’s but mostly silent as most of Jacques Tati (Well not exactly silent, sounds play a great role, but not spech). Etaix was a great admirer of the slapstick artists, Buster Keaton of course but also the french director and actor Max Linder.
I’m waiting to see “The Artist” by Michel Hazanavicius a silent movie presented at the Cannes film festival in 2011 and much appraised, yet to be released in october.

I second Dovzhenko’s Earth, and let’s not forget Vertov and Pudovkin. And as everyone has noted, Keaton is fantastic. Like Chaplin he mixes slapstick and pathos, but in a different combination.

I prefer the Lubitsch silents to his talkies. Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Marriage Circle are fantastic. And so is Vidor’s The Crowd.

For experimental silents (surrealism and cubism mostly) see Kino’s “Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema.”

Ditto on the Kino Metropolis with the reconstructed original score.

I’ve had more than one silent movie completely ruined by inappropriate music on the DVD. (Note to DVD packagers: Great as Jelly Roll Morton is, he does not belong on a silent film soundtrack. Not at all. That goes double for films made before 1920.)

Is there no love on this thread for Lon Chaney? There’s a scene early in Phantom of the Opera where he first appears to Christine only as the shadow of his hands on the wall, and it’s one of the most astonishing performances I’ve ever seen.

I’m also fond of Barrymore’s Jekyll and Hyde.

I raved about Keaton’s speed and athleticism earlier, but forgot to mention his face. One of the silliest falsehoods in film history is the claim that Keaton was a stoneface. In fact, his face is infinitely expressive, endlessly varied.

One way of noting this is that he is the clear model for the contemporary film actor who best carries on the silent-film tradition, namely Gromit the dog. Pretty much Gromit’s entire repertoire of expressions comes from Keaton.

I second (or third) Keaton’s Seven Chances. Pretty nondescript for the first 3/4 and then a chase scene to end all chase scenes for the last 1/4. Just spectacular. Saw it with my son — Silent Sundays at the local rep cinema — and then had to see it again.

The Railrodder is National Film Board from the 1960s, when Keaton was old and largely forgotten. But Stoneface with wrinkles is the best Stoneface.

Second Les Vampires. Also A Page of Madness. Ménilmontant. Man with a Movie Camera. The Barrymore Don Juan. Underworld. The Unknown. Where to stop …

Seconding (or fifthing or something): Les Vampires — it’s really really amazing. Fast paced and fun to watch, visually stunning (great use of filters, among other things), really can’t say enough good things about it.

Sunrise and Pandora’s Box are also really brilliant (as several people have mentioned).

To mention one film no one else seems to have (surprisingly): Battleship Potemkin — thought this would be a relatively obvious one. Yes, maybe a few of the scenes don’t hold up as well, but the Odessa Steps sequence just by itself is worth most films ever made (also, for people who haven’t seen the film, it’s worth noting that the sequence is much longer than you might imagine it being — it was certainly much longer than I’d expected it to be).

cheers,
js.

I have to echo others with “Watch Buster Keaton fer chrissakes!” Also, Battleship Potemkin (saw it in a college history class) The ’80’s movie ‘The Untouchables” stole the “baby carriage rolling down the steps” scene almost frame for frame from Potemkin. Visually it was way ahead of its time.

How about a Tom Mix movie. I say this only because I am distantly related, 5th cousin 3 times removed I think.

Chess Fever

http://video.google.it/videoplay?docid=3727820471573567512&q=chess#

Douglas Fairbanks! His Thief of Baghdad is wonderful–thrilling, magical, and more than a little sexy.

Harold Lloyd is well worth watching also.

Well, it’s not an early film, but it is silent: I really like Dracula: Pages from the Virgin’s Diary.

Actually early silent films I esteem: Hamlet with Asta Nielsen; The Cottage on Dartmoor (a silent film in which the characters attend a talkie, which is depicted in the film itself!); He Who Gets Slapped (possibly simply owing to the circumstances in which I saw it, crouched on the floor of a restaurant in Chicago with music provided by Califone); The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and, like everyone else, Sunrise.

Not Nosferatu, though. I’ve seen it multiple times and each time I discovered anew what henceforth I hope to remember: it’s kind of boring.

I’ve only seen the beginning of Girl Shy but the scenes anticipating the seduction [initially written, incorrectly but somewhat happily, “sexuction”] techniques crowd are funny.

As opposed to “-unction” and “-auction”.

I have nothing against Harold Lloyd. But when his on-screen persona is put next to that of Keaton or Chaplin, he comes across as somehow lightweight.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Lloyd’s character was one of the models for Maxwell Smart. I’m not sure how that could be verified or disproven. But their method of eye-widening double-take is surely similar.

“Sir, thus it is,” said Dr. Johnson, “this is the proportion. As Maxwell Smart is to Gromit, so is the proportion of an Harold Lloyd to a Buster Keaton”.

Oh, The Unknown is that Lon Chaney film with [spoilers omitted]. I really like that one too. Although his one talkie where he plays a ventriloquist pretending to be an old woman who sells parrots is my favorite of the Chaney films I’ve seen (admittedly, not many).

Chaplin hated his movie “The Circus” – he doesn’t even mention it in his autobiography – but the hall of mirrors scene still send me into hysterics.

Jared’s comment about Lubitsch and Vidor reminded me of another favorite. King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” has an emotional directness and a great feeling of honesty that almost subvert the movie as entertainment. I suspect that subversion was intentional.

the silents and the talkies are two differant mediums. comparing them is pointless. i am a HUGE fan of silents and i love watching them. yes, the acting might be hammy but they are almost like moving paintings.

Erotikon‘s got some hot dance sequences in it.

Man With a Movie Camera as several people have mentioned.

Blue Angel as, surprisingly, no one has.

L’Atalante by Jean Vigo is NOT a silent movie ! It was Vigo’s last film and was released in 1934. But I agree it is a very good movie, one of Michel Simon’s best act.

Un chien andalou.

I’ll get me coat.

Buñuel’s L’ âge d’or, all the way.

I like Chaplin, but I love Buster Keaton. Chaplin has more sentiment, but Keaton’s gags take more ingenious advantage of camera and frame. This combines with his great acrobatic talent to make a new sort of character in a slightly different physical universe. He is funny, but I just find him to be dazzling. The effect is enhanced by watching the 16 frames per second at 24 fps, a sort of happy accident in the history of film projection. (By contrast, some of Chaplin’s emotional scenes, such as the end of City Lights, might work better at original speed.)

My favorites are Seven Chances, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and The General. There are some great shorts. There is an early short, I think it is called “One Week”, in which Keaton and his new bride are pushing their new house on rollers across train tracks, and a train just misses them. I won’t give you the end of the gag. Dazzling. I want to live in a Buster Keaton world!

Buñuel’s L’ âge d’or, all the way.

Technically, another talkie. Some scenes still use inter-titles, but there are nice dialogues too. (“What joy! What joy in having killed our children!”)

I’m a big fan of German expressionism, in film and other media.

So it’s not surprising that I’d recommend:

G. W. Pabst Pandora’s Box

F. W. Murnau Nosferatu

Fritz Lang Metropolis

.. all of which have already been mentioned.

Diary of a Lost Girl, the other G. W. Pabst/Louise Brooks collaboration, is pretty good too.

I’m not a big fan of silent movies, though I believe my indifference to them has more to do with unfamiliarity than anything else. I do know they can be extraordinarily powerful. After watching Napoleon by Abel Glance at the grand old Castro Theater in San Francisco many years ago, I was ready to invade Northern Italy.

I’m probably the exception, but contrary to Mr. Holbo’s last post I really do love silent movies and find almost anything made in the last twenty years with its slickness, quick cuts, and glorification of the rich and cool to be totally boring.

Thanks for the Keaton suggestions, all; we’re going to watch The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr. this evening.

Not only are there silents that were redone as talkies, but Hitchcock’s Blackmail was made as the first English talkie and then redone as a silent since most theatres weren’t equipped for talkies. The version I have seen is in fact a composite; weird effect when the talking starts one or two reels in. Plus the lead actress (Any Ondry, married to Max Schmeling if anyone is interested) couldn’t speak English without a thick accent, so someone else did the speaking. Shades of the Lillian Gish Scarlet Letter, where the costar and director were Swedish.

Maybe it was expensive and difficult, and people didn’t expect much talking yet.

Yes. The equipment was bulky and difficult to set up (cameras weren’t really soundproof yet, etc.) , so there was a big loss in the ability to move the camera expressively — what really stands out in the early talkies is how static they are visually compared to the late silents, which had developed a whole language of camera movements that had to be put on the shelf for years; so sometimes the dialog was still stinted in the interest of looking like something more than a filmed play. (Hint: if you’re finding a mid-20s film boring, watch the camerawork!)

Also, sound came late to Japan, so their late silent period (into the 30s) skipped that regression and kept developing otherwise … that stuff is amazing.* And more “modern” acting styles came much earlier to Japanese silents; pretty much anything from the 20s feels much more naturalistic than the US work of the time.

*For folks in the Bay Area: Ozu’s 1933 Dragnet Girl is at Pacific Film Archive at 7pm today (Friday 24th). GO!

Maybe it was expensive and difficult, and people didn’t expect much talking yet.

That certainly describes the very early semi-talkies like The Jazz Singer (in fact, Sunrise, which is of course a silent, was also one of the first films originally released with a synced musical soundtrack).

But it doesn’t describe the early Lang sound films. Lang was the last major German director to film with sound. M, his first sound film, came out four years into the sound era. And while in certain ways it’s very like a silent film (in that it doesn’t have a lot of dialogue) it is incredibly creative in its use of sound. In a sense, Lang waited to film with sound until he had come up with something interesting to do with this new technology.

It would be interesting to have a thread devoted to early sound films that we love. Though, at the end of the day, most of my favorite films are from the sound era, these early sound films are, on the whole, harder to like than the silent classics. The sound revolution happened very fast and filmmakers didn’ t really know what to do with sound or how to adapt to the often cumbersome equipment that went along with it. Early on in the sound era, cameras had to be encased in huge bubbles designed to insulate the microphone from the camera noise. While many of the great late silents we’ve been discussing featured incredibly mobile cameras (think of the Lady from the City’s night walk in Sunrise or the Coney Island sequence from The Crowd), early sound films were incredibly static.

And only a few filmmakers came up with really creative ways to use sound in these early years. Lang is one of them. Another one is René Clair, whose early musical comedies Sous le toits de Paris (1930), Le Million (1931) and À nous la liberté (1931) still hold up pretty well. (Here’s the opening sequence of Le Million)

The equipment was bulky and difficult to set up (cameras weren’t really soundproof yet, etc.) , so there was a big loss in the ability to move the camera expressively—what really stands out in the early talkies is how static they are visually compared to the late silents,

Part of it, as you say, was the lack of soundproofing. Part of it was also the poor microphone technology. A fun game with early talkies is “spot the hiding place for the mike”.

I landed in the middle of the comments, and before I got to the original post, I was thinking of Woman in the Moon as a silent movie ahead of its’ time with clever concepts. Like Metropolis, there are little theatrical touches throughout (a lot of corn, also). And it was visionary in the rocket launch sequence. The up-right rocket is carried on a giant tractor from the hanger to a launch site, there is a count down, and it is a multi-stage rocket. And when they are orbiting the moon they watch the craters roll below them, a lot like the Apollo movies – until you realize that it is a actual roll of painted crater images that is rotating beneath the camera.
Woman in the Moon does not touch the emotions, but it did not need sound to be a great film. I was fortune to see a beautiful loaned German print at the Castro Theater, with organ accompaniment.

Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last”- 1923 [only 7.5 min. ]

Keaton is essential but very, very overrated. For comedy, I prefer Harold Lloyd. “The Freshman” is a favorite. Chaplin is a god, but not of laughs, but melancholy beauty. He’s closer to, say, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment than conventional comedy. Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times are all superb. Monsieur Verdoux is an overlooked existentialist classic.

I think in silent films the official must-sees are usually inferior to other films by the same director. So watch not that, but this:
Not Keaton’s The General, but Sherlock Jr, Our Hospitality, or Steamboat Bill
Not Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, but Diary of a Lost Girl or Joyless Street
Not Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, but October or Strike

Exceptions:
Murnau, Sunrise: Song of Two humans, no question
Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera (absolutely astonishing, miles ahead of contemporary film)
Vigo’s l’Atalante (wonderful, wonderful)
King Vidor’s The Crowd

There are many wonderful, nearly forgotten Swedish silent films, especially by Sjostrom (including The Wind which stars Lillian Gish) and Mauritz Stiller (Gosta Berlings Saga, starring a young Greta Garbo).

For lighter stuff, with fun special effects:
Haxan: Witchcraft throughout the ages.
Thief of Bagdad.
Absolutely everything by Melies, including of course Voyage to the Moon.
Faust

As for the notion of being bored by silent films, this is misguided in so many ways. First, it makes as much senses as finding sound films non-boring *as a class*. It’s just too broad. Second, it’s a lot like great literature–there are boring bits that can be essential to the appreciation of the whole. Finally, it’s usually the viewer’s fault. We’ve been trained to look at movies as virtual theater, so we get bored because we’re looking for the wrong things (this is often true of graphic novels, too). Watch silent films with your eyes primarily, like you’d look at a painting or a photograph or a landscape. They’re boring like the Grand Canyon is boring.

Almost forgot, in the fun effects category: The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

An animated film based on Arabian nights and made from cut paper silhouettes, it’s surely to appeal to Holbo’s love of retro graphic illustration. I also suspect it’s the inspiration for the recent popular Sita Sings the Blues.

I should add that I hadn’t a clue who Artaud was when I saw the film; didn’t find out until my Seneca seminar six years later. But I remembered the face.

If this isn’t sublimely funny, then nothing is. Chaplin & Keaton together in Limelight: