Much as I love spending the summer falling asleep to the symbol-clanging of Christopher Nolan, I’ve decided to be more productive this year. It’s time to learn about silent cinema. I’ve been putting this project off since 2012 began, but for good reasons: In between things I get paid to watch, I’ve been trying to beef up my studio-era credentials with an emphasis on Sarris’ Pantheon (and a smattering of other favorites). In essence, I’ve spent the year filling in my foundations—moving past Nanook, venturing into late Ford and Hawks, driving all the way from The Salvation Hunters to Jet Pilot. My biggest gap now, purposely, is the silent era.
I still remember how excited I was that day at the end of my sophomore year of college when I discovered TCM showed silent films on Sunday nights. I was just getting into film, and I realized I had never seen a silent before. In fact, I had no conception that they were in circulation at all. Hearing the news about TCM knocked down some wall in my mind and opened up this whole new wing for me to explore. I excitedly told my friends over lunch and we made plans to watch that weekend's midnight feature on my 14-inch dorm-room TV. The film was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, not the Rouben Mamoulian classic but John S. Robertson's 1920 forerunner. I couldn't tell you much about it seven years and thousands of films later, but I vividly recall—can feel it now—how goofily content I was for the running time of the film. I was watching a silent movie. Will wonders never cease?
By now I’ve seen my fair share of silents. Last October TCM aired most of Buster Keaton’s shorts and almost all of his features. (In the same month they aired every Nicholas Ray film but two.) I’ve seen the five or six big Chaplin films, the two epic Griffiths, as much Lubitsch as I could get my hands on. I’ve dipped my toes into German expressionism and French impressionism. I saw the textbook Murnau and Lang pictures early. I’ve seen a handful of city symphonies. I stayed up late to watch A Page of Madness, even though I could have recorded it, because it seemed like the perfect 4 AM movie. It was. But I never approached the silent era with the rigor with which I tackled Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman. Time to correct that oversight.
After sifting through silent film polls and essays on national movements, and subtracting the ones I'm familiar with, I've come up with a list of 30 filmmakers that I'm excited to explore in as much depth as I can. The emphasis is on what sounds most appealing to me (i.e. Hell's Hinges), but I am trying to get a good general foundation too. They're all western; I'm saving fertile Japan for later. They're not all silent; I came up with this project before the title, and I want to see more Borzage, dammit! Besides, there's almost no way I'll be done by the end of summer. In rough chronological order (not by debut but by the bulk of the films I'll be watching):
1. Alice Guy
2. Léonce Perret
3. Louis Feuillade
4. Benjamin Christensen
5. Yevgeni Bauer
6. William S. Hart
7. Maurice Tourneur
8. DW Griffith
9. Victor Sjöström
10. Charles Chaplin
11. Mauritz Stiller
12. Carl Theodor Dreyer
13. Abel Gance
14. Marcel L’Herbier
15. Erich von Stroheim
16. Fritz Lang
17. FW Murnau
18. Jacques Feyder
19. Jean Epstein
20. Sergei Eisenstein
21. King Vidor
22. Vsevolod Pudovkin
23. Alfred Hitchcock
24. Paul Fejös
25. Joe May
26. GW Pabst
27. Frank Borzage
28. Aleksandr Dovzhenko
29. Anthony Asquith
30. Aleksandr Medvedkin
This is a wish list, really, but I have several resources at my disposal (co-op Netflix and Hulu accounts, TCM and a DVR, various libraries), and I've already tracked down a lot of these pictures just to confirm that this is feasible. It doesn't look like I'll be able to find any more Christensen films, having already seen Häxan. I'd love to find The Mysterious X, though, if anyone has any ideas. But I can always replace him with Newmeyer & Taylor's Harold Lloyd films, and if another director gets sealed up in a vault, I can opt for Fatty Arbuckle. (In fact, even as I post this, Christensen looks like such a dead-end that I'm probably going to do Méliès after Guy; I'd say before, but I'm almost done with my Guy post and they were largely contemporaneous.)
The goal isn't just to watch the films but to write a post about each director's work so that, by the end, I will have a full month's worth of pieces about the early years of cinema. I promise I won't be insightful, but at the very least I can generously illustrate my babblings about Jean Epstein's architectural brilliance with screencaps like the one above. It speaks for itself, really. But that's not going to stop me from sharing with the class what I learned from my summer of silents.
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