Silent Movies Are Still Creating an Echo

With silent films more available than ever, now is the time to remember the era's most influential directors

by Bob Mastrangelo | Published July 31, 2007

October 2007 marked the 80th anniversary of Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer—and the beginning of the end of the silent era. Though Hollywood continued to release silents into 1929, and silent pictures lingered into the early 1930s internationally, in many ways 1927 was the death knell. Thanks to DVD, however, silent films are more readily available today than they have been for decades—and the visual quality is often infinitely better than the subpar VHS tapes film buffs suffered through for years. That makes now the best time to revisit the top directors of the era, the artists who, through their bodies of work, laid the foundation of modern moviemaking. Each of the directors profiled below are innovators who influenced the development of cinema in a critical way during its formative years, and all left behind legacies that extended far beyond their filmographies.

Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)
It’s appropriate that Chaplin’s name comes first. After all, with apologies to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, there was no bigger star in the silent era than Chaplin. For many, Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” remains the iconic image of the period and its most enduringly recognizable personality. For the half-century following his screen debut in 1914, Chaplin wrote, directed, edited and scored most of his 80-plus films, making him one of cinema’s first true auteurs. He also had the box office clout to have the final say on every aspect of his pictures, and to continue making silents long after the rest of Hollywood had converted to sound. The Gold Rush and City Lights are widely regarded as his best silent features, filled with moments that are now part of movie lore. Yes, he can be sappy, but so what? Chaplin is not for incurable cynics, but then, neither are the movies.

Recommended Viewing: The Kid (1921), A Woman of Paris (1923), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936)

Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959)
DeMille was Hollywood’s greatest showman and a master of the epic, so it’s no surprise that he started by making features—shorts were just too small for his ambitions. His debut film, The Squaw Man, which he co-directed with Oscar Apfel, is curious both as a highly accomplished and entertaining piece of moviemaking and for its historic value (it was the first feature shot in Hollywood). Another of his early efforts, The Cheat, shows DeMille at his most experimental, particularly in the film’s photographic beauty and its innovative use of editing and lighting. Perhaps more than any other moviemaker before or since, DeMille instinctively understood what American audiences wanted to see. While some of his films may seem creaky to today’s audiences, it’s important to remember that he established many of the storytelling templates that moviemakers follow to this day.

Recommended Viewing: The Squaw Man (1914), The Cheat (1915), Male and Female (1919), The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings (1927)

Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
“Fun” is not a word that comes to mind when describing Eisenstein, but that should not dissuade anyone from seeing his films. The “master of montage,” he was also the primary figure in the explosion of innovation in Soviet cinema in the 1920s. The much-studied “Odessa Steps” sequence in Battleship Potemkin alone would be sufficient to guarantee him a place on this list, but each of Eisenstein’s major silent features contains numerous other sequences of equal brilliance. Battleship Potemkin, of course, is his most important work, and for years it was practically the standard by which other films were judged. Even today, Eisenstein’s theories on editing continue to be discussed, but it is the power of his images that remains the most remarkable aspect of his work. Unlike most of his Soviet contemporaries, Eisenstein did not get bogged down in the propaganda of the times, nor were his movies cold exercises in cinematic experimentation. His films were first and foremost about emotion, and it is that element which remains undiminished.

Recommended Viewing: Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October (1928), Old and New/The General Line (1929)

Louis Feuillade (1873-1925)
Of all the moviemakers on this list, French director Feuillade was the earliest to emerge (2006 marked the centennial of his directorial debut), yet his films seem the most modern. Championed by the surrealists but dismissed by the establishment as merely a director of crime serials, Feuillade’s films need no contextualizing when viewed today. The cinema of Feuillade is one of action and adventure—a world of secret passageways, multiple aliases, clever disguises, double-crossings and shocking murders. The serial (and by extension, episodic television) owes a great deal to Feuillade, especially his sense of pacing, his visual flair, his taste for violence and his desire to surprise audiences with each unexpected twist of the plot.

Recommended Viewing: Fantomas (1913-1914), Les Vampires (1915-1916), Judex (1916), Tih Minh (1918), Barrabas (1919)

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Comment by Hindi movies online on 2/05/08 at 10:03 pm

charlie chaplin movies were damn hillarious
have to chk other guys in list

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