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This chapter discusses the opposition among modernist writers to the addition of sound to film, using as particular example the early film journal, Close Up, edited in part by the poet HD. It shows how the cosmopolitanism possible for silent film fostered the notion that film imagery constituted a universal language. Within this utopian hope there was a complex resistance to the foreign and even the international itself that appears particularly in portrayals of race.

This chapter explores the most modern medial intervention available to the prima donnas in this book: early film. It seems astonishing to learn that early twentieth-century opera singers such as Mary Garden and Geraldine Farrar involved themselves in the silent film industry of the 1910s. What was an opera singer doing devoting time and energy to a performance format that by definition ignored her principal attribute? Simonson critiques Garden’s and Farrar’s portrayals on the silver screen of a variety of roles from Joan of Arc to Carmen, and observes a foregrounding of their bodies and exulting in physicality. Not just their screen exploits, but risks they endured while filming were written up eagerly by the press, suggesting that the prima donna became an important iconic figure in the emergence of, and discourse around, new female identities at the beginning of the new century.

This chapter follows the evolution of the word and the image of “hillbilly” from its first appearance in print in 1900 to the end of World War One. Starting as a regional label with a specific localized significance, the term and persona were soon spread by jokebook writers, professional linguists and, above all, the new mass medium of motion pictures. In hundreds of action shorts, directors such as D. W. Griffith (himself a Kentuckian) depicted a violent and lawless people whose feuds and drunkenness posed a serious threat to the “proper” late-Victorian social order. By the mid 1910s, however, silent films and other popular culture media began to present a parallel but distinct interpretation of the mountaineer as a comical foil for bumbling urban naifs. Despite its evolving meaning, “hillbilly” remained a relatively uncommon and thoroughly ambiguous label throughout this era.

Women played many musical roles in the film industry. They accompanied silent films at the organ with existing repertoire, made new compositions of incidental music and songs, and improvised accompaniments at the keyboard; they constructed and disseminated cue sheets and educated their fellow musicians and the public in trade journals and newspapers; and they were inventors: Alice Smythe Jay created a mechanism to synchronize piano rolls with films, while Carrie Hetherington invented and promoted the Fotoplayer. In World War I, with men serving abroad, women were increasingly vital to the industry, advancing the cause of professional women throughout the music industry.

This chapter asks for a reappraisal of Shakespeare in his silent film appearances. Beginning with King John, it reports that the films of the period are distinctive for encouraging moments of communion and stimulating imaginative effort. It is suggested that a landmark juncture was the point at which practitioners abandoned the stage to embrace new-found confidence in the cinematic medium. Herbert Beerbohm Tree's own reflections on the production process suggest he was genuinely entranced with the American film industry. The approach of the King John film was in tune with the industry's filmmaking impulses in relation to adaptation more generally in the pioneering years. Shakespeare films had not previously tended to attract artistic plaudits specifically from cineastes. 1916/17 was a significant coming-of-age moment for silent Shakespearean cinema. For some Shakespearen, silent cinema showcased actors engaged in frantic and undignified gesturing and then had the gall to call that ‘Shakespeare’.

This chapter examines Baker’s two feature-length silent films, La Revue des revues and La Sirène des tropiques (both 1927). It shows how their staging of Baker’s dancing body plays into early-twentieth-century colonial and primitivist fantasies but simultaneously allows the star to showcase a self-referential performance style with origins in Black vaudeville. The chapter also juxtaposes Baker’s work with the regimented routines of white chorus girls and traces her film stardom’s impact on 1920s African American audiences. The coexistence of competing significations in these films underscores the fundamental ambiguity of Baker’s performances, which allow for readings of both subjugation and contestation.

This chapter explores the topics of silent film, censorship, and the development of cinematic technology. The roots of all the major film censorship systems lie in the silent era. As such, it helps one to understand the peculiarities of the British system by explaining how the system emerged, and in particular the odd role of local authorities, which produces idiosyncratic exceptions to this day. Equally, the US Hays Code, while its enforcement really dates from the sound era, was formed and moulded in the silent days. Many of the motifs and generic elements of film music also go back to silent roots. The chapter then examines the widespread variety and diversity of silent world cinema. It also considers the return to classical Hollywood for film plots and narratives in contemporary Hollywood.

When restoring a film, the aim is naturally always to provide the definitive version. However, many factors make this an impossible mission. This chapter draws on actual film archival practice and theory, exposing a minefield of obstacles facing any academic study trying to examine film history based on restored works. The focus is on silent cinema restoration, intertitles, and translation issues. Using Mark-Paul Meyer and Paul Read’s categories—from a one-to-one duplication to the creation of an altogether new work—the aim is to give an insight into the complexity of silent film restoration and the practical, and sometimes very unacademic, nature of the actual restoration work. The fact that most film restorations typically concentrate on image quality rather than titles, which are often merely supposed to support the visual action, adds to the complexity of transparency about the provenance of the filmic titles as an object of study.

The shift from titles on lantern slides to the practice of titling on the film itself dates to the turn of the 20th century. Early examples of preserved filmed titles are rare, but occasional advertisements can be found in the UK in catalogues of James Williamson (1899) and Robert William Paul (1901), and in France in a catalogue of the Parnaland film company (1901). Although evidence shows that Pathé was using this technique in 1901, catalogues from its British branch reveal that it advertised it from May 1903. The advertisements highlighted positive outcomes for producers and exhibitors, and promoted titles in a variety of languages. This early titling strategy allowed Pathé to get ahead of its competitors in terms of industrialisation, control over its product, and domestic and foreign market share. This chapter focuses on early filmed titling and intertitling practices, Pathé’s innovative offer in 1903, and its evolution until 1908.

Silent films were commonly adapted for foreign markets not simply by translation of intertitles but, when desired, by more radical change, both to the titles and to the whole structure and thrust of the narrative. The young Soviet Union systematically transformed films from the West in order to make them ideologically acceptable for its own public, as well as to train filmmakers in the craft of editing. The discovery in Moscow of the re-edited version of the 1922 Anglo-American production Three Live Ghosts—on which Alfred Hitchcock worked as title designer—enables an unprecedentedly full case study of this transformation process. Characters and their Great War context are ruthlessly reworked, in the service of a fresh anti-capitalist story. Finally, the same process is traced in reverse, in the sound period, through Hollywood’s own re-editing, for Cold War audiences, of its pro-Soviet wartime feature North Star into an anti-Soviet narrative.

This chapter assesses alternative cinemas. In the 1920s, there were a series of film movements that were motivated by very different interests than mainstream cinema, primarily political. The most important at the time and the one that has had an enduring influence in world cinema became known as Soviet Montage. Because of their influence, there is an extensive selection of Soviet Montage films available. The chapter then considers filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. It also looks at the avant-garde and the late silents. Meanwhile, documentary film and especially animation crossover with the mainstream cinema. The developments in the 1920s and John Grierson's founding of the British Documentary Film Movement initiates an important trend in documentary film that still influences film and television today. It also feeds into an idea of ‘British realism’ still apparent in British films.

Between the last years of the 1890s and roughly 1929 when full talkies arrived, films were generally a combination of picture and title cards, or intertitles, which began to be used in the early 1900s. As the film trade was international in nature from its earliest days, intertitles needed to be translated. This chapter offers a brief chronology of the intertitle in film, highlighting the difficulties of translating and adapting title cards with decorative backgrounds and sophisticated animated sequences, either at the time the films were made or today for restoration. It also provides three case studies based on restoration projects conducted at the British Film Institute, showing how language and translation issues play their part in the complex reconstruction process.

This epilogue describes how silent film was not only replaced by sound after 1930, it disappeared. Sadly, this was in many cases literally. The nitrate film stock used in the silent era contained valuable materials including silver. Old film stock was frequently pulped in order to extract these. At the same time as the old silent reels were being dumped and destroyed, however, people were also starting to save them. The two important groups in this process were collectors and professional archivists. The silent era has also figured as a setting and plot line in popular sound films. The most famous and successful would be Singin' in the Rain (1952), a humorous picture of a fictional Hollywood studio facing the disruption of the new sound technology. In addition, great silent cinema moments influence later film-makers, who frequently include homage to their predecessors.

This book analyzes the career of film exhibitor and radio broadcaster, Samuel Lionel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), between the years 1908 and 1935. It shows how Roxy did not merely project motion pictures to audiences but presented unitary texts that extended well beyond film exhibition and formed the theoretical basis of his work in broadcasting. This intervention in the nascent field of radio and its programmatic forms led to his development of the variety show format, which he pioneered and promoted over the air. The book also examines Roxy' unique role during World War I as both an exhibitor and a producer of pro-war films and stage shows; his position as one of America's most popular and influential interwar broadcasters; his national stardom and its implications for Jewish visibility and assimilation; and his work in converging film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording.

Most film sound is post-synchronized in one way or another, joined together in a studio rather than shot and recorded as a single event. On occasion, films can shoot to music that defines the staging and assemblage of a sequence (as in film musicals), and sometimes film can be cut to music added in post-production. This chapter considers pre- and post-production sound, addressing the various conventional forms and degrees of synchronization in circulation. This includes lip-synching (where screen actions are matched to preexisting sound and music) and dubbed dialogue (replacing an original voice with another). While preexisting sound matched by images tends to be highly integrated, as sound dominates and image movements are motivated by sonic activity, this chapter argues that it can contain a grain of the uncanny as a space exhibiting the persistence of silent film techniques within sound film.

Through a close analysis of the 1930 version of La aldea maldita, this chapter reflects on the influences ushered in by Spain’s embrace of modernity. Touted as ‘Spain’s last silent film’ as well as its most important one, La aldea maldita presents a harsh, minimalist beauty that has long been praised by audiences and critics. The chapter shows that the acting style is influenced not just by trends of the time but also by the film’s relationship to sound: after the disastrous experience with the sonorisation of a previous film, Rey decided to film La aldea maldita as if it were silent, when in fact the first showing of the film included sound. It also addresses the performance in the version of this film, questioning the sense of anachronism that now pervades them and reflecting on attitudes to aesthetics, acting and the cinematic medium itself.

In Britain, the silent cinema perishes in its moment of triumph. The five landmark films of the silent era came at the instant of transition to sound in 1929. They are John Grierson's Drifters, Anthony Asquith's A Cottage on Dartmoor, E. A. Dupont's Piccadilly and Alfred Hitchcock's The Manxman and his famous transition to sound, Blackmail, which exists in both silent and talkie versions. If we call these films ‘avant-garde’ because they are path-breaking, which they were, they are not part of a clearly unified British avant-garde movement. They are more accurately modernistic, experimenting with the possibilities of silent film narrative in an epoch of artistic modernism. These five silent films contain the seeds of the sensibility that dominates an earlier phase of UK cinema — romanticism. They are, we might argue, romantic and modern at the same time. If we add a sixth title, it would have to be Hitchcock's Number Seventeen, made in 1931 but released the following year.

This chapter focuses on stylistic choices that can be read as forerunners of wide film poetics. It examines experimentation in the silent era with widescreen aesthetics by auteurs deploying certain stylistic devices. What experiments did filmmakers attempt that may be considered precursors of the norms following widescreen's debut in the early 1950s? Through a textual analysis of aesthetic choices in Griffith's film Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm (1921), one can see that the directors of pre-widescreen films used widescreen poetics such as letterbox masking to create a wider image rather than a vertical composition. Keaton often used the long shot and resisted cutting to close-up to show his gags in full space. The discussion also looks at Gance's bravura use of his Polyvision triptych to close Napoleon.