SILENT MOVIES

Silent movies:

To enhance my knowledge on silent movies, my media class and I went to the BFI.
Here I was able to look and explore ways in which films from the 1920’s as well as the 70’s. The aim of this visit was see the ways in which silent filmmakers in those days told their stories. We sat on station with thousands of films to select from.

In films such as the first born 1929, I noticed that the use of subtitles was a very frequent and classic way of showing to the audience what is being said. In this same film I noticed something very interesting. They showed the audience that it was a different day or different setting by simply closing a door on a certain scene and reopening it showing something completely different it was a different way of just cutting away to a different scene this is one thing I took away from that film.

In other films such as Piccadilly 1929 by E.A Duport, other clever tactics were present. This film is about the streets of Piccadilly and the clubs of those days and set in London.
London is and was always very famous for its double Decker buses, in this film the director shows the titles and credits on the buses, as the go by, stop at a red light allowing the audience to read them and then goes by for another bus to the same thing. This inspired me, and it’s defiantly something which I will try o incorporate in my own film.
Silent movies can sometimes make it hard for an audience to understand locations, especially when indoors. In Piccadilly they over came this by showing signs such as toilet for example before entering inside , and lady’s make up room, before we are introduced to the characters inside the room. A similar thing is done in East is East by Henry Edwards. He described his characters on a black screen before showing them however only their feet are shown which has given me an idea for my silent movie.

The use of music in these films I found out is very important, as there is no dialogue music helps to tell the story. A Cottage on Dartmoor is a film which illustrated this as incidental music was present 95% of the time anytime something shocking as well as quiet normal happened such as putting thread through a needle.
Here I also saw that the music sometimes changed depending on sex of the characters, for example women in this film were usually accompanied by soft music, compared to the men who had quick loud music playing when they were o screen. This represented the typical representations of women and men.

A lot of the black and white silent films I watched especially horror one had candle lit rooms, I noticed this created shadows, giving the image a sense of mysteriousness. Although there is no diagetic onscreen sounds like howling wind or screams and creaking doors the music and lighting still helps give the film that sense of horror. I found this film particularly interesting as there were no subtitles at all only for sudden things like screams which happened rarely to them much more dramatic. The dark effect is also god for shadows. Shadows are also good for showing things however not actually showing them so your mind does the work. This made scary things scarier than they probably are.
Overall silent films make things clear thought the use of exaggerated movement and costume as well as facial expressions for us to be able to understand things without the use of dialogue.
The shots used in these films are usually wide shots and long shots, so actors can show their enhanced movement. I noticed this and compared this another film which wasn’t silent and quiet recent, however I put the volume down to see if I could still understand what was going on. Betcher 1971 by David Eady had many different shots, but I noticed a lot of them were close up, because they focused more on the speech of the actors and what they were saying rather than how they were saying it through their bodies. This I would say was my most interesting discovery of the day. From this I learnt that if am going to make a silent film my shots need to focus more on the body and way of the actors, so I a probably going to have a wide range of long, wide shots rather than close ups.