A Little Post About Silent Films

The history of the cinema, for me, is a passion, especially the beginning of it all, the exciting, the adventurous and the experimental days of silent films. Just about everything being done today in films had already been done in the 1920s; the silent version of The Lost Word, and later King Kong in 1933 were really the first (stop-motion animation) special effects extravaganzas. The big advancement in film making since then is the use of computer technology. If not for the Depression and WWII, we would have had wide screen in the 1930s, but the cost of camera, lenses, and converting film theaters from square to rectangular screens was quite prohibitive, as far as the movie studios were concerned. That circular "bullet effect" used in The Matrix, for example, was developed in the 1930s, but at the time no one could figure out how to use it in films. For me, the most interesting and exciting period in film making occurred in the 1920s, and for anyone interested in the history of silent films I highly recommend The Parade's Gone By, by Kevin Brownlow, and Hollywood: The Pioneers, by Kevin Brownlow and John Kobal. These books tell you how the whole art of film making was created, invented, and developed almost on the spot - from special effects and make-up techniques (thank you, Lon Chaney!), to miniatures, split screen, rear- and front-screen projection, from forced perspective and jumps cuts, to dissolves, wipes, fade-ins and fade-outs, cross-cuts, and other techniques that quickly became part of the unwritten manual for film makers during a time when there were no film schools and no computers . . . all they had was film, cameras, actors, scripts, sets and a whole lot of imagination.