FILMSCAPES

An Introduction to Silent Film

Richard Koszarski essay from movingimage.org

"It is generally said to have begun in 1894, as the first paying customers lined up at a Kinetoscope Parlor showing films made by Thomas Edison near the corner of Broadway and 27th Street in Manhattan, and was certainly over by 1931, when the last of Hollywood's silent features were released by Paramount and United Artists.

Only later would those years be thought of as "the silent film era," and sectioned off as a sort of prelude to the real movies that would follow. But the idea that their favorite new medium might be lacking in something essential had never occurred to audiences of the time. And the businessmen (and artists) who had created this industry were too busy enjoying their newfound fame and fortune to even dream of that sort of a change. As Harry Warner famously said, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"

That was Warner's response to AT&T's offer to go in with them on a talking picture system. An experienced showman, he knew the sorry history of this concept, which one inventor or another was always touting as the next new thing in motion pictures. He also knew the amount of money that had been wasted on such gadgets. And he was right: there was no demand to hear actors speaking from the screen. But Warner saw something else, and did agree to help develop sound films, whose canned musical accompaniments could save the theater-owning brothers a fortune in weekly musicians' salaries. As with many technological innovations— including the internet—the real benefits only became apparent after the system was already in place. And so the notion of a "silent film era" was born.

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The cinema is both an art and an industry, a curious mix of culture and technology that generations of critics and historians have puzzled over. The art part exists only on screen. By the 1930s a few museums and private collectors had already begun to collect prints of individual film titles, assessing their curatorial value through a range of ad hoc criteria. But the first museum to display its own collection of motion picture artifacts was the Smithsonian Institution, whose Graphic Arts Department began exhibiting film projectors and pre-cinema apparatus in 1897. A few others followed suit, sometimes putting their motion picture materials in the "useful arts" wing, sometimes the technology room, and occasionally even giving them a corner in the photography collection.

Henri Langlois, one of the first film archivists, began to collect motion picture prints in the early 1930s, when he realized that silent films, now economically obsolete, were doomed. Langlois devoted his life to saving silent films, but he soon found himself saving every other film, too. Unlike rival archivists in New York or London, Langlois's criteria were not merely aesthetic, but cultural. He realized that cinema was not simply the part of the show that came in a can, but a complex web of economic, cultural, and technological factors which necessarily involved commerce and industry as well as art. Langlois ultimately tried to have it all, operating both an archive of films (cinematheque) and, for interpretive context, a musée du cinema. A radical policy for any film archive, it meant diverting scarce resources away from film prints in order to collect costumes and posters, movie cameras and theater programs.

Although some supporters criticized this broad-based approach, few historians today would write a history of motion pictures without offering a clear understanding of their cultural and industrial context. Motion picture materials can now be found in dozens of collections all over the world, from theater libraries to science museums. Still, very few have the range of resources, from moviolas to fan magazines, to adequately document the complex role such materials have played in the development of moving image media.

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An earlier generation of historians, steeped in technological determinism, saw the coming of sound as a watershed, a step in the drive towards "realism" that would make everything that came before it suddenly irrelevant. Talkies did affect one corner of the marketplace, of course, as all those unemployed musicians could testify. But this was evolution, not revolution, and certainly no reason to banish the silent film to some cinematic dark age. As demonstrated by historians from André Bazin to David Bordwell, the introduction of sound was a speed bump, not an apocalypse. The grammar of film—how the camera addresses its subject, and how editors cut shots together—quickly returned to the classic style developed in the 1920s. No Hollywood studios went out of business. The same 35mm film went through the same film projectors (now with added sound heads), while audiences read the same film magazines and attended the same local theaters.

During those few "silent" decades, Edison's invention had developed from a mechanical curiosity to a major international industry, and became—as D. W. Griffith once boasted—the only new art form created since antiquity. No primitive backwater, the years from 1894 to 1931 must have impressed both filmmakers and audiences as an unending stream of innovation and experimentation. Later years may have been dominated by Technicolor and television, but audiences of the 1920s would have wondered just why improvements like these took so long to catch on—since both were already part of the creative mix long before The Jazz Singer (1927).

So while the advertising materials, home movie cameras, film costumes, and licensed merchandise shown here may differ in style from their modern equivalents, the important thing to remember is that their functions remain identical—even in a digital age undreamed of by Harry Warner."