My love for silent films goes back to my childhood when films by Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and others were often shown on TV most Saturday afternoons. They were almost always poor copies with irrelevant music and shown in a sped-up version – which is still the way many people imagine these comics, that is, rather jerky and exaggerated. But even such compromised versions were enough to hook me. Who knows why? I was a rather solitary kid and Chaplin in particular delighted and fascinated me from the beginning.

Later, in my teens, my brother Gord and I would go to the library to borrow a projector along with some 8 or 16 mm films – mostly Chaplin, but also Laurel and Hardy and some lesser known comics (Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd films were not yet available) – and we’d watch them repeatedly in our living room, silently, but with fanatical concentration.

By the time I was in university I had become comfortable with improvising at the piano. In my third year I discovered a budding skill in improvising accompaniments to silent films. I was invited to play for some of them as part of a silent film summer course.  For the first time I saw so many great films, such as The Gold Rush, The General, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Intolerance, and many more. My passion for silent films was firmly cemented – and the joy of improvising accompaniments only added to this love affair.

Afterwards, for some time, I became quite snobbish about silent films – insisting that they were far superior to sound films. Fortunately I came to acknowledge that there are some excellent sound films as well. But my fascination with the silent period has remained, along with an unrelenting love of the challenge of improvising accompaniments to them.

The Silent Cinema

‘Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.’ (Mary Pickford)

It’s been estimated that 90 percent of silent films have been lost — either from decay, or else they were unceremoniously tossed out. Yet the films that remain from the brief and remarkable 20-year reign of the silent cinema — which ended without fanfare around the end of the 1920s — has left us a great many treasures. These were rapidly replaced by the so-called ‘talkies’, or sound films, but we can now recognize the silent cinema as one of the most extraordinary periods of moviemaking.  

This may seem surprising. After all, filming technology was still in its infancy. And afterwards, talking pictures were immediately embraced as superior in every way, rendering silent films as irrelevant as floppy disks are to computing today. The clumsy intertitles — those quaint-looking dialogue cards that interrupted the action — were no more. Instead, sound films offered not only dialogue, but the rattle of street cars, the ringing of telephones, the sinister mutterings of a mob, and much more. 

Yet today’s critics and directors consistently rank silent films among the finest movies of all time. And if you Google  ‘100 greatest films of all time’ — there are many such lists — you will find silent film titles on them all. “Sunrise”, “City Lights”, “The General”, “The Crowd” and many, many more, are routinely referred to as masterpieces.  

It was during the silent period that the language of film was essentially established. The close-up, the long shot, the pan — so much of what we now accept as the language of cinematography was developed. All before sound muscled in on the act.

The early motion picture cameras were relatively mobile — much more so than the early sound film cameras. A hand crank was used to roll film through the camera, which allowed for many subtle effects. Cranking the camera was considered an art unto itself — going slower than normal to capture fewer frames and create a quicker, more urgent effect, slightly faster to expose more footage for an effect that was slower, or more dream-like.

Furthermore, the relative simplicity of the camera meant that filming was quite inexpensive. A filmmaker could experiment with hours of filming, and then discard all but the best of it. A few extra days of filming would not break the bank. Charlie Chaplin, for example, routinely rejected more of what he shot than he kept. And if he wasn’t satisfied and felt at a dead end, he might take a month or more off, keeping the crew and actors at full pay. 

By comparison, sound filming is exorbitantly expensive, prohibiting such a profligate use of time.  Shooting schedules tend to be meticulously planned out in advance.  With multi-million-dollar costs, there is little or no room for the luxury of experimenting. And for many years after sound arrived, cameras were heavy and unwieldy, with careful set-ups demanded for each scene. 

Certainly, greater spontaneity is an advantage for silent films. But since they concentrated on the visual potential — that’s all there was to work with! — they achieved a pictorial inventiveness that took decades for sound films to approach. 

There were a great number of dramatic films made in the silent era, by such directors as D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Joseph von Sternberg, and Erich von Stroheim, to name a few. America in particular produced great comedy films, many of which are almost surreal in their rapid motion and dazzling comic invention. The films of the three genius director/comics — Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd — still seem surprisingly contemporary.  

Accompanying Silent Films

Silent films were never silent. Music was always played on the set to add rhythm and atmosphere. And there was always musical accompaniment in movie theatres.  Some blockbuster films even had orchestral scores. Of course, smaller communities wouldn’t have had orchestras handy; for these venues, simpler musical scores were distributed, cued to specific spots in the film. These could be performed by a small group or on piano or organ. Sadly, most of these scores, including the major orchestral one, have been lost. 

In the last few decades, many musicians have composed scores for these films. Some of these scores are good, some not.  Most of those available on YouTube are rather pedestrian — sometimes even shockingly so. The music too often seems to have been dropped in arbitrarily, taken without acknowledgment from recordings of old jazz or light classics, and thus offering no actual connection to the film. 

When I’m preparing to accompany one of these films, I begin by getting to know it intimately, scene by scene. I need to be ready to anticipate exactly what will happen and when. I like to have the film planned out in my mind — sometimes on paper if it’s a particularly long and complex film — making note of the scene changes. A film of any length has sections, like acts in a play, and the music must shape itself around each act. It’s important to know when to change the tone, the expression of the music, as a new ‘act’ or scene begins. 

In any film, there will be sudden dramatic moments — unexpected by the moviegoer — but they must not be a surprise to me, and I need to be ready to respond musically. 

Other preparation? I sometimes will think of a bit of melody and/or harmony to connect to a character or a scene—something to improvise around — but mostly I let the moment take me. 

The musical language I choose comes from the language of the period. Popular music, early jazz, light classics, parlour songs. And yet I try rarely to quote an existing song or melody. I’m not there to comment on the film, but to enhance it. I consider it the greatest of compliments when a viewer tells me that while watching the movie they forgot there was live accompaniment. Then I can reasonably hope I’ve made the music part of the experience, not an outside commentary. 

’ It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.’ (Mary Pickford)

“I remember seeing him (Alfred Hitchcock] sitting in his chair beside the set on the second day of shooting [of Strangers on a Train, 1951 film], and he looked very down. And I said, ‘Hitch, what’s the matter?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m just so bored… I’ve done it all. Now all I have to do is tell you where to go and tell the cameraman where to go.’” (Actor Farley Granger)

TITLES

Charlie Chaplin

Feature Film

1. The Gold Rush

Two-reelers (c. 25 minutes)

1. One AM (1916)

2. The Pawnshop (1916)

3. The Rink (1916)

4. Easy Street (1917)

5. The Cure (1917)

6. The Immigrant (1917)

7. The Adventurer (1917)1925)

Harold Lloyd

Feature Films

1. Why Worry? (1923)

2. Safety Last (1923)

3. The Kid Brother (1927)

Three-Reeler (28 minutes)

1. Never Weaken (1921)

Ernst Lubitsch

Feature Film

1. The Doll (1919)

Victor Sjöström

Feature Films

1. The Phantom Carriage (1921)

2. The Wind (1928)