A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, mime (US: pantomime) and title cards. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the introduction of the Vitaphone system. After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, “talkies” became more and more commonplace. Within a decade, popular widespread production of silent films had ceased.
Short films:
1- the irresistable piano.(Alice Guy Blache)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGj5CnPJ3QA[/youtube]
2-<a href=”http://archive.org/details/LaGlu1907″ title=”The Glue”>The glue</a>.(Alice Guy Blache)
Who is <a href=”http://www.uhu.es/cine.educacion/cineyeducacion/figurasaliceguy.htm” title=”Alice Guy Blache”>Alice Guy Blache</a> ?
3- Barney Oldfield´s race for a life (Mack Sennett)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIlxyiolQn8[/youtube]
Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life (1913) is a silent comedy short, directed and produced by Mack Sennett and starring Sennett, Mabel Normand, and Barney Oldfield as himself. It is considered one of the earliest to create the common archetypal silent film plot of a villain tying a young damsel to the tracks of an oncoming locomotive.
[edit]Plot
Legend Barney Oldfield stars in this early Sennett comedy. He races a speeding locomotive to rescue Mabel Normand who plays a damsel in distress tied up on the tracks by evil villain Ford Sterling.
City Lights – review (7 minutes)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjHIWLuXHVM[/youtube]
City Lights (Charlie Chaplin)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_W1tOngo-w[/youtube]
To Know a bit more about the actor Charlie Chaplin, you can read this short page in Cashiers du Cinema (one of the best magazines about cinema)
And if you still want to know more about the beginning of the Cinema world, learn a bit more about this woman:
Lotte Reiniger
(June 2, 1899 – June 19, 1981) was a German silhouette animator and film director
An example of a very good Norwegean film is “Markens Grode” by Gunnar Sommerfeldt (La bendición de la tierra). “Markens Grode” was based on a very successful book written by the Norwegian Nobel Prize writer Herr Knut Hamsun