Even those of us who love silent film recognize that it has a public profile akin to opera. A lot of people see it as an intimidating and obsolete art form enjoyed only by snobs and nostalgia cases. As someone who’s been introducing students to these movies for years now, I’ve seen the hesitance firsthand. I get it. If you’re not used to their style and storytelling mechanics, they can seem impenetrable, even boring. They’re not for everybody, and that’s okay. It took the Komische Oper Berlin’s mashup of Mozart and silent movie aesthetics to finally make me enjoy a night at the opera, so we’ve all got our preferences.
However, I’ve seen enough students surprised by their enthusiasm for the work of Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and Buster Keaton to convince me that there is a legion of potential silent film fans out there who never thought they’d be able to get past the title cards or the melodramatic acting. If you’re interested in testing the waters to see if you might be one such fan-in-the-making, I’ve pulled together some tips and recommendations to help you get in the right headspace. And if you’re already a Lillian Gish diehard, hopefully there’s something in there for you, too.
1) Hide your phone.
I don’t say this from a place of judgement. It’s literally my job to carefully watch movies, but whenever I have one on at home, I struggle to go ten minutes without checking my email. This compulsion is one reason why I’m so willing to fork over $16 to the Nitehawk or Film Forum on a near-weekly basis; I’ll happily pay money to put myself in a situation where looking at my phone is verboten.
Flitting from screen to screen is a bad way to watch any movie, but it absolutely ruins silent films. Without synchronized sound to help carry the narrative load, silents communicate their stories almost entirely through their visuals. You can’t hear the rage in a character’s voice, only see it on their face. When the hero finally reveals his true feelings to the heroine, his love is professed on a title card, not through dialogue. Contemporary movies generally provide audio cues when something important happens. You hear the escalating argument or the gunshots and shattered glass. A silent film only has its musical score, which may or may not break through your (or my) Twitter trance and alert you that the climax is coming. Choosing the wrong moment to glance at your phone, then, can leave you completely lost.
If you’ve managed to make it to 2023 with your attention span intact, well, congrats, freak. But if you share my generational affliction, then consider distancing yourself from temptation and storing your distraction machine in another room. I swear, there’ll still be good jokes to post about Elon’s dumbass tweet in 90 minutes.
2) Choose your own soundtrack.
Musical scores in the silent era were shockingly inconsistent. Back in the day, theaters hired live instrumentalists to improvise soundtracks or to work from the film distributor’s cue sheets, which offered suggestions and a general framework but needn’t be followed note-by-note. It was only the biggest releases—tentpole films like Metropolis or Battleship Potemkin—that got their own original scores, and even then, it wasn’t like Fritz Lang or Sergei Eisenstein had the resources to impose aural uniformity across theaters around the world.
This means that there’s nothing especially “authentic” about sticking with the music chosen by the Criterion Channel or Kino Lorber. Even these sentinels of the cinematic tradition don’t feel compelled wed themselves to any particular score. Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari gives you the option of an orchestral score or an electronic take from DJ Spooky. The version I give my students uses Rainer Viertblöck’s free jazz soundtrack. Such adaptations and reimaginings abound. In just the past year, I’ve attended screenings of Nosferatu, Waxworks, and Man with a Movie Camera that were all accompanied by live musicians playing their own original scores.
So if you’re streaming a silent film and find yourself distracted by the old-timey organ music, screw it. For films that are part of the silent canon, finding alternate soundtracks is as easy as a Google search. The NYC-based outfit Morricone Youth has rescored a bunch of classics, both silent and sound. Shed’s dark ambient take on Nosferatu is appropriately sinister. Try what’s out there and see what resonates with you. If all else fails, it can be fun to choose your own music and score the movie yourself. On a recent rewatch, I paired Metropolis with the metal band Woods of Desolation. It ruled.
3) Focus on vibes, not plot.
Searching for plot holes in silent movies is like searching for them in fairy tales. Yeah, they’re all over the place, but focusing on them sucks the fun out of the whole thing. Why don’t the steampunk tourists in A Trip to the Moon immediately suffocate when they step out on the lunar surface in naught but their coattails and top hats? I don’t know. Why did Jack sell his cow for some magic beans?
The absence of dialogue already shifts silent movies onto the plane of fantasy. The characters are going to move and emote in exaggerated ways to communicate what they can’t say verbally. They’ll refrain from explaining their choices to keep the film from getting bogged down in endless title cards. Narratives get boiled down to archetypes so that the audience can intuit the general arc of what’s happening, even if the details don’t quite add up. There are certainly exceptions, but the stories that silent movies tell tend to be closer to myths, fables, or even cartoons than to everyday reality. There’s a reason that the German cinema’s shift from the otherworldly fever dreams of Expressionism to the hard-edged social critique of the New Objectivity roughly coincides with the arrival of synchronized sound. Real people speak, and there’s a low ceiling on how realistic a movie can be when your characters can’t.
As someone who considers David Lynch and Guy Maddin our two greatest living filmmakers, I don’t have much trouble letting go of narrative reason. (Maybe my inclination toward dream logic and surrealism is part of why I gravitated toward silent film in the first place.) A lot of people prefer their movies to make sense, though, and that preference, well, makes sense. But to the degree you’re able, try to set this part of your brain aside when you’re watching, say, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Concentrate on the vibes. How do the images work with the story (thin as it may be) to channel emotion or tap into the Jungian archetypes that undergird the narrative? I’m not saying you should abandon all critical thought—I spent a big chunk of the last few years thinking about the relationship between silent film and Weimar political history—but maybe wait till after the movie’s over to apply those faculties. While you watch, just ride the wave and see where you end up.
4) Stick with it.
Don’t be discouraged if the first silent movie you try leaves you cold. The lack of spoken dialogue can take some getting used to, as can the often leisurely pacing and acting styles that veer toward the extravagant. These films use their own cinematic grammar, and like any language, consistent immersion is the best way to achieve fluency.
There is also a huge amount of variety in silent cinema. Nosferatu is as different from The General as Hereditary is from Everything Everywhere All at Once. Don’t let one boring movie deter you when there are plenty of others that might better suit your taste. Westerns, comedy, sci-fi, romance, horror, action-adventure—they’re all out there. Speaking from experience, I was pretty indifferent toward silent film until I taught a class that required me to bone up on German Expressionism, and the macabre, stylized aesthetics cracked open something in my brain. I plowed through Caligari, The Golem, Metropolis, and Nosferatu in the space of a month and my interest grew from there. Keep trying till you find your Expressionism.
Recommendations for fledgling silent film fans
Whether because of the craft, pacing, subject matter, or length, some silent movies are more accessible to neophytes than others. Here are a few particularly hospitable places to dip your toe in:
A Trip to the Moon (1902)
This is the visually stunning sci-fi adventure that inspired the Smashing Pumpkins’ video for “Tonight, Tonight.” (The band was so into silent movies that they named their debut album after an Old Hollywood icon.) It also has the benefit of being under 14 minutes long. [YouTube]The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
My all-time favorite film. Even today, it’s wild modernist sets still feel fresh and striking and Conrad Veidt’s weirdly balletic performance as a hypnotized assassin still unsettles. Plus, it’s another short one! Just 74 minutes! [YouTube]Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
Buster Keaton wasn’t only one of silent film’s greatest comic actors. He was also the best stuntman in the business. This short takes advantage of all his talents, and the sequence where his napping projectionist dreams his way into the movies he’s screening features some of the era’s best special effects. [YouTube]Metropolis (1927)
This one is long—two-and-a-half hours—but director Fritz Lang was provided with practically unlimited resources to realize his vision of an art deco dystopia. The film almost bankrupted the biggest studio in Europe, but given the spectacular retro-futurist style it packs into every frame, it was 100% worth it. [YouTube]The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Silent movies are known for their over-the-top acting. This is a major exception. With the camera tight on her face for practically the entire film, Renée Jeanne Falconetti gives one of cinema’s all-time performances without speaking a word. Affecting and emotionally authentic. [HBO Max, Prime]
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Postmodern before that was a thing, much of Man with a Movie Camera constitutes a documentary about the process of making Man with a Movie Camera. Dziga Vertov uses every editing trick in the playbook to create a dizzying collage of Soviet life. [Vudu, Prime]
Substack Notes
Twitter sucks now! In fact, it’s always sucked! Substack, however, recently rolled out a competitor with its Notes feature. I’m not sure how the forum will develop, but I’ve been testing it out. Join me there, if so inclined!
(If you don’t understand the second reference, it is just more evidence that Twitter does, in fact, suck.)