Does Silent Cinema Deserve Any Cultural Or Artistic Merit?

Silent cinema was created in France, by the famous Lumière brothers, who debuted the first ever cinema screening with their film La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1985) accompanied by a pianist, this film was taken world wide and was famous in all of the big cities. Soon the cinema was the talking point of the general public across the globe. Sound was not a part of the film until 1927, when the first talking movie The Jazz Singer (Crosland, 1927) was released and was a big hit due to its use of newer advanced technology, which led to this type of film becoming more popular. Silent films are really overlooked in our modern day society, as they aren’t technologically up to date, and are considered as boring films, and are therefore given little or no credit for their contribution to cinema as it is today. In this essay I will discuss how the birth of cinema as we know it was bred, and whether or not it is worth any artistic and cultural merit. Throughout it, I will explore how silent film was used artistically and cleverly by some of the greatest directors and practitioners of film the world has ever seen, including George Méliès, Luis Buñuel and D. W. Griffith to name a few.

The Lumière brothers effectively created cinema, by having one of their films screened to an audience. The types of films they made were documentaries, but not as we know them today, it would just be a camera filming something that happened in real life. For example, their films consisted of things such as, people leaving the work place at the end of the day (La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon) a baby eating its dinner (Repas de bébé (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895)), and a train coming towards the screen (Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat, L' (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896)), which scared audiences and made them think that the train was going to hit them. All of these are things that happen in everyday life, that people from all different cultures would most likely have experienced prior to watching the films, therefore be able to relate to them. The films made by the brothers encouraged and started a new fad of cinema going, an activity that would continue to grow and turn in to one of the biggest industries in the modern world that we live in today. Even though the films that the Lumière brothers created would not appeal to audiences of today, by showing films in a cinema environment they introduced a new phenomenon that is still a huge part of our culture in today’s world.

Even though watching films in a cinema environment was very successful, the films had no narratives. However films started to work towards having specific narratives. George Méliès’ work showed this development clearly, ‘his model for them was the narrative mode of the legitimate theatre’ (Cook, 1981: 13). His main trademark’s were tinting his frames, so that they were colour before colour film existed, and using camera tricks, one of which the being the double exposure shot. But more importantly he put stories that he performed on stage, on to the screen, to create more of a variation within films, rather than there just being documentaries. By doing this he created the types of film that we are most familiar with, as they had story lines. An example of the type of film he made is his Le Voyage dans la lune (Méliès, 1902), which has thirty scenes, but however uses no edits between them and no movement of the camera is used. In one scene he even, ‘moved the papier-mâché moon on to a dolly into the lens of the camera… even though, as a practical matter, moving the camera would have been far simpler’ (ibid: 17). Even though Méliès was blind to these particular things, his background of stage work helped him see more potential to cinema, and diverted it ‘toward becoming an essentially narrative rather than a documentary medium’ (ibid: 19). This shows that films were watched for the same reasons in the silent period. Méliès by using optical illusions and tinting frames shows a lot of artistic improvisation and deserves huge praise for doing so in his work. However, unlike the Lumière brothers, watching his films is very interesting as to see what certain directors were able to do in such a primitive period in cinema.

But still no editing was used within films, and the only way cuts were made was by overlapping two reels which sometimes resulted in the same thing happening twice, for example in Le Voyage dans la lune the rocket seems ‘to land twice’ (ibid: 24). Another director Edwin S. Porter, a big fan of George Méliès’ work, was influenced by him, and therefore used narratives within his films too. In spite of this, he still had his own visions, and ideas of advancements he could make with cinema, and in The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903), Porter used the first panning shot, dissolve cuts and straight cuts between scenes. Although this may not seem such a big thing, it had never been done before, and obviously made the film look a lot more professional than anything else audiences had seen before. Even though ‘audiences understood none of this… they loved the dramatic excitement generated by Porters editing’ (ibid: 28). This was the first sign of edit to be used in a film, and with this new innovation it made many more things in film possible. With these techniques being put in place, it led to ‘one million patrons per day’ (ibid: 29) by 1907 and convinced ‘investors that the cinema was a money making proposition’. By using editing and panning techniques, it set a new standard for films, which no longer appeared in one shot, and films were starting to come closer towards being made the way we see them in our culture today. However, very unlike films in this day and age, The Great Train Robbery was only twelve minutes long.


D.W Griffith ‘understood that for the cinema to achieve the status of an art it would have to evolve a form commensurate with that of other narrative arts… The idea of a serious novel, opera, or play which takes only ten or fifteen minutes to apprehend is ludicrous, and Griffith reasoned that the same was true of cinema.’ (ibid: 71) This director showed an initiative to take film up to the level of being art, by making it the type of film that is involved within our culture in this day and age. He done this with his film Birth Of A Nation (Griffith, 1915), which ran at 187 minutes, which is over three hours in length, compared to the ten to fifteen that the audiences were used to at the time. It was praised by the critics and grossed ‘forty eight million dollars, or more than any other film up to that time had made’ (ibid: 77). The film itself however, was deemed racist against black people, and had to have certain parts censored, such as a scene where black men are raping a white woman. Nevertheless, Griffith single handily changed the way films were made and watched. Also due to the huge money he made, it tempted investors into putting money into making more films that could potentially make a similar amount of profit. This led to a new artistic type of cinema being formed and hailed as the new way.

Film stars in early silent cinema were non-existent, as anybody who appeared in a film would have been too embarrassed to put their name on to it. The actors played archetype characters (such as ‘the criminal’) and were never thought of as stars by the public. This was mainly due to the fact that the attraction of the cinema was the magic of moving images on the screen and that audiences requested films, in relation to the company that made them e.g. Biograph. Surprisingly, actors in films were never written about up until 1907, and by 1909 fans were asking for films by actors even though they didn’t know their names, so they would refer to them as ‘The Biograph Girl’. By 1910 actor’s names were published, due to the public demand to know who people such as ‘The Biograph Girl’ (Florence Laurence) were. This made fans more interested in their favourite stars, and magazines such as Motion Picture Story changed their approach away from strictly featuring ‘novelized versions of motion picture plots’ (Barbas 2001: 24) to ‘a hybrid of short stories, star publicity, and technical information about filmmaking, mixed with advertisements for face creams and screen-writing schools’ (ibid: 24). Fans were obsessed with the stars and their personal lives, and the magazines were bombarded with demands to know more about them, such as their marital status. But the magazines would not reveal these confidential details, as they wanted to keep the stars private lives private, up until 1915. By this time Motion Picture Story was no more and split in to two magazines, Motion Picture, which ‘focused on novelised plots’ (ibid: 28) and Motion Picture Classic, which was ‘devoted almost entirely to articles about actors’ fashions, marriages, and off screen exploits’ (ibid: 28). This obsession with stars was built during the silent cinema era, and is still nowadays in place with in our modern culture, of wanting to be like the stars, and watching movies because our favourites such as Robert De Niro and Will Smith are starring in them. This period paved the way for our celebrity culture, and shows that the people’s interests in those days were similar to what they are at this point in time.

During the First World War, many pacifists, revolutionists and anti-war protestors from over Europe went to Switzerland for refuge. In 1916 writers and artists in Switzerland founded a group named Dada, led by Tristan Tzara. They believed that the war contradicted itself and rather than saving Europe’s culture and morality it was doing the opposite by killing millions of people. Man Ray was a Dada director, and his first film Retour à la raison (Ray, 1923) according to Kuenzli was ‘five minutes in length… partly made without a camera by sprinkling salt and pepper and throwing pins and thumb-tacks directly on the film celluloid, a technique that he used for his Rayographs. Other short sequences resemble films of sculptures. But instead of the camera turning around the object, sculptural objects such as an egg crate and his Lampshade (1919) rotate in front of the static camera. Retour à la raison, commissioned by Tzara, expresses through it anarchic arrangement the Dada spirit of spontaneity and chance which were the Dadaists’ strategies for disrupting logic and rational order.’ (Kuenzli 2004: 80) As you can tell the films produced by this group were very art provoked, expressionist and far from mainstream cinema. The Dada films are an important artist impression of feelings about the war and fighting the powers that were against them at the time, protesting for what they thought was right. This shows that silent cinema is worth our artistic merit as it was used as a big input to the work of one of the most well known group of artists, so that they could get their point across to the world.

In 1922, some members of the Dada didn’t like the direction the group was going in, as they felt it was meaningless, so they went off and followed a member of Dada André Breton, who created a new group called Surrealism. He believed that it would be a good idea to play on dreams, and the subconscious to provoke the viewers mind more. They done this by ‘juxtaposing two or three objects that ordinarily are not grouped together… they achieved them by recollecting bizarre and haunting nightmares and dreams’ (ibid: 79-80). An example of this is the most famous silent surrealist film Un chien andalou (Dalí and Buñuel, 1929), it uses a lot more graphic imagery to create shock than the Dada films. In one scene in the film a man with a razor slices open a woman’s eye, described by Kuenzli as ‘one of the most horrific sequences in all of cinema’ (ibid: 88). The film has a series of events that don’t coincide with each other in anyway, or follow the narrative modes constructed by predecessors such as George Méliès. However, it uses it own style of shock cinema and created a new medium for the art. Surrealism got a reaction from the audience to get across its point in an artistic way, and got one of the most famous painting artists (Salvador Dalí) to be able to express himself in another way (through cinema).


I feel that silent cinema although not being up to date with our culture in the modern day certainly highly contributed towards what it is today. Without directors like Méliès, Porter and Griffith we would not have the films that we have today as nobody would have innovated and put the new ideas to use with in cinema, and without it our culture would not be the same as it is. The public received films through the media as the silent cinema era developed in the same way they do now, as they were interested in a film because their favourite bankable star appeared in it. Artists used abstract styles when creating their films, with shock (Un chien andalou) and optical illusions (Le Voyage dans la lune). With art, the films saw a lot of innovation, creativity soar within the industry, and the culture it brought has lived on for the past century, which the era deserves a lot of merit for whether it is artistic or cultural.