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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
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Today, Lubitsch is known for his comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, including Trouble in Paradise and To Be or Not to Be, but his silent films are equally noteworthy. Lubitsch initially tried his hand at a variety of genres, including historical dramas, but it was clear from the start that his true talent lay with comedy. His German comedies, such as The Oyster Princess and The Wildcat, are masterworks of absurdity and chaos, and reveal a bolder, more experimental Lubitsch than viewers are accustomed to seeing. Once in Hollywood, he further refined his approach and became one of the first directors to turn away from the slapstick style that monopolized American comedy. In that regard, The Marriage Circle is a seminal film. Its success launched a wave of imitations and established the upper-class comedy as a staple genre of the American screen—with Lubitsch as its ringleader.
Recommended Viewing: The Doll (1919), Madame DuBarry/Passion (1919), The Oyster Princess (1919), The Wildcat (1921), The Marriage Circle (1924), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927)
F.W. Murnau (1888-1931)
Murnau was only 42 when he was killed in an auto accident, and of the 21 films he directed in his short life, five are bona fide classics. What is striking is that the films in this quintet look and feel so dramatically different from each other, yet are unmistakably the product of the same creative mind. Murnau’s interest in the psychological and his knack for creating a visual tour de force are always present, as is his insatiable appetite to challenge himself from film to film. Thus we have Nosferatu, still one of the most chilling horror films ever made; The Last Laugh, a heartbreaking portrait of despair, humiliation and isolation; Faust, the Goethe legend refashioned as an example of almost unchecked cinematic imagining; Sunrise, his first American film and simultaneously the darkest and most romantic portrait of marriage ever filmed; and Tabu, an enchanting film on life in the South Seas that is both a tale of forbidden love and an early example of ethnographic cinema.
Recommended Viewing: Nosferatu (1922), Phantom (1922), The Last Laugh (1924), Tartuffe (1926), Faust (1926), Sunrise (1927), City Girl (1930), Tabu (1931)
Victor Sjöström (1879-1960)
Today, Sjöström is recognized for his wistful starring performance as the old professor in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. In the 1910s, however, he was the dominant figure in the first wave of Swedish cinema, and one of the first directors to gain a worldwide reputation. He was a master at using natural landscapes and his best work was often characterized by the struggles of men and women against forces beyond their control. But while his work frequently featured stunning photography, magnificent locations, complex lighting and vivid depictions of nature, he was equally capable of creating tender love scenes, such as those between Lillian Gish and Lars Hanson in The Scarlet Letter. Without abandoning melodrama, and indeed often embracing it, Sjöström used these potentially conflicting elements to point the cinema toward greater emotional maturity and complexity.
Recommended Viewing: Terje Vigen (1917), The Outlaw and His Wife (1918), The Phantom Carriage (1921), He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Scarlet Letter (1926), The Wind (1928)
Dziga Vertov (1896-1954)
Vertov was the documentary’s truest believer. It was his belief that film should only be used to pursue the truth, and that such elements as acting, sets and plot were best left to the theater. This admittedly dogmatic view was born from the years he spent as an editor of compilation films during World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. It also situated him as the forefather of cinéma vérité and other forms of documentary moviemaking that would emerge with the development of new, more liberating technologies in the 1950s and 1960s. His masterwork, The Man with a Movie Camera, is as much an experimental film as it is a documentary, an ode to both urban life and moviemaking itself. It may also very well be the purest example of cinema ever made, with its boastful rejection of actors, intertitles and even a scenario.
Recommended Viewing: Kino-Eye (1924), A Sixth of the World (1926), The Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- 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
This story was published in the Summer 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
An Echo from the Sound of Silents
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