User:Bleff/sandbox

Silent cinema is the form of motion picture lacking synchronized recorded spoken dialogue, or more broadly any recorded sound. It was the dominant mode of filmmaking from the medium's emergence in the mid-1890s until the advent of films with synchronized sound in the late 1920s, first through the "sound-on-disc" technique and later through "sound-on-film", in which the audio was recorded directly onto the photographic film. However, any end date for the silent era is somewhat arbitrary, since the transition to sound was not uniform worldwide, and silent films continued to be produced in some countries well into the 1930s.^[1] The term "silent film" is relatively misleading, since many screenings of the era were accompanied by music, sound effects, or live commentators (like the benshi in Japan).^[2] Contrary to what was widely accepted by historians in the late 20th century, however, motion picture shows without any sound or musical accompaniment were also common, particularly before 1910.^[3]

In the early days of silent cinema, film actors had very low social standing, and the first to appear on screen were non-professionals or vaudeville performers who reproduced their acts in front of the camera.^[4] For example, several Edison Kinetoscopes show the strongman Eugene Sandow flexing his muscles, or include Annabelle Whitford performing one of her fan dances.^[5] Film acting as a profession, with its own set of specific techniques, did not begin to emerge until after 1908, when the production of narrative films increased and major producers formed their own stock companies.^[6] The earliest professional actors to accept film work were those earning a modest living with traveling theater companies of little or no reputation.^[7] From 1908 onward, two parallel developments began to raise the status of screen acting: in France, the Film d'Art movement lent prestige to the medium by drawing established theater actors to the screen; while in the United States, the previously anonymous Florence Lawrence became widely known as the "Biograph Girl," demonstrating that film could generate its own stars independently of the stage.^[7] By 1910 the Danish actress Asta Nielsen had achieved international celebrity through her role in Urban Gad's The Abyss, and two years later Sarah Bernhardt, already a stage legend, appeared in Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaines's Queen Elizabeth.^[7] Film acting thus became a respectable and potentially lucrative profession, and the levels of fame it generated gave rise to the modern phenomenon of movie stardom.^[7]

The shift in public perception of screen actors was reflected in a proliferation of fan magazines and books on screen personality, film acting technique, and advice on breaking into the industry, published from the mid-1910s onward.^[8] As Doron Galili has observed, these instructional guides—largely aimed at young women hoping to break into the industry rather than at working practitioners—articulated in popular form the qualities the emerging industry associated with good screen performance, frequently invoking classical ideals of grace, poise, and restraint.^[9] Screen performers became a major draw for audiences worldwide, with notable examples including Max Linder and Musidora in France, Lyda Borelli in Italy, Asta Nielsen in Denmark, Henny Porten in Germany, Ruan Lingyu in China, and Theda Bara, Rudolph Valentino, Lillian Gish, and Buster Keaton in the United States, among many others; while some performers had careers that crossed national borders, like Greta Garbo, Ivan Mosjoukine, and Pola Negri.^[10] Some actors, especially women, became more powerful than their employers, or moved on to work as directors and producers.^[8] By the early 1920s the star system had taken on global proportions and turned cinema into a major force shaping public opinion.^[8] Stardom now encompassed male, female, child, and even animal performers, and would shape the film industry throughout the decade.^[8] The mass funerals of Vera Kholodnaya in Moscow (1919) and Rudolph Valentino in New York (1926) attest to the magnitude of a phenomenon without precedent in 20th-century cultural history.^[8]

Early film actors drew on a wide variety of 18th- and 19th-century acting styles from the theater, opera, and ballet.^[11] James Naremore traces this gestural vocabulary to the nineteenth-century pantomimic tradition and to the Delsarte system of codified expressive poses, which supplied performers with a standardized repertoire of attitudes and persisted in attenuated form well after players had begun to cultivate a more restrained manner.^[12] In the absence of spoken dialogue, film acting was initially characterized by broad, stylized gestures and relied heavily on pantomime, which used poses, sometimes called "attitudes", to control how the actor looked and moved on stage.^[11] These theatrical acting techniques—in which actors strike a pose to convey emotions or draw the audience's attention to actions or plot developments—were readily available and proved highly adaptable to the medium of film.^[11] As filmmakers began to incorporate different framings and new editing techniques, actors had to shorten their poses and change their interactions with the rest of the cast, moving away from the stage tradition of the tableau, in which the whole ensemble appeared together and posed as a group.^[11] While editing techniques developed rapidly in the United States, in Europe there was a greater preference for the "staging in depth" approach, which meant that the two traditions of film acting developed differently.^[11] In French Film d'Art, one of the earliest movements celebrated for its acting, prestigious actors with theater backgrounds posed and directed the viewer's attention in intricate group compositions in front of a static camera.^[11] The development of the multi-reel film had a significant impact on European film acting, and in Italy it gave rise to the "diva" style of acting.^[13] The diva film exemplifies the acting style of early European cinema and was characterized by its slow pace, ornate acting, highly expressive poses, and intricate ensemble performances.^[13]

In the United States, the early film industry was unable to attract the same caliber of actors with a prestigious theatrical background as in Europe, and as its first performers began to gain a following—such as Florence Turner and Maurice Costello at Vitagraph or Henry B. Walthall and Blanche Sweet at Biograph—new editing techniques altered the way they handled blocking and the portrayal of emotions.^[13] Scholar Roberta E. Pearson has distinguished between the early film acting style—which she called the "histrionic code", based on theatrical conventions and especially melodrama—and the "verisimilar code", which emerged with the rise of feature-length films and the refinement of framing and editing techniques, and was defined by its attempt to achieve a greater mimesis of real life.^[14] Doron Galili has cautioned against reading this development as a linear progression toward realism, noting that instructional writing on film acting throughout the 1910s and 1920s continued to invoke neoclassical ideals of grace and idealized nature—values often held to override lifelike spontaneity, since the magnifying scrutiny of the close-up was thought to punish exaggerated movement and reward economical gesture.^[9] The verisimilar code moved away from the conventional repertoire of isolated gestures; instead, the actor continually decided what was appropriate for the character in specific circumstances, relying on realistic details such as "byplay" or "bits of business", the use of props, and, above all, the face and the eyes.^[15] Rather than replacing the histrionic code outright, the verisimilar code coexisted with it for several years before becoming dominant around 1912, and both styles could appear even within the same film.^[16]

Pearson identified D. W. Griffith's work with Biograph as highly influential in this transition, as it was widely celebrated by contemporary critics and audiences alike for its less theatrical and more natural approach, and the unprecedented success of The Birth of a Nation (1915) further cemented his influence.^[17] A well-known example of the verisimilar code is the sequence from Griffith's The New York Hat (1912), in which Mary Pickford examines her old hat and decides to ask for a new one, combining key elements of the code such as gestures, expressions, glances, and props.^[18] Naremore situates this shift within a longer process by which the actor was progressively subordinated to the film apparatus: editing and camera placement had already fragmented the performer's body, and the coming of synchronized sound in the late 1920s furthered rather than reversed the tendency, fostering a subtle, "invisible" style of playing in which the soundtrack took on expressive functions once carried by gesture alone.^[19] He offers Lillian Gish's performance in Griffith's True Heart Susie (1919) as an early instance of this understated screen presence.^[20]

Intertitles, also known as .^[21]

Although the idea that silent films were never truly silent was once widely accepted—a view established by film historians in the late 20th century—more recent evidence shows that some motion picture exhibitions took place without any accompanying sound, whether live or recorded.^[2] The very notion of what "silence" means in these screenings is complex, since even without musical or other sound accompaniment, the experience would have been shaped acoustically by the audience's reactions and ambient noise.^[3] In an influential 2004 study, Rick Altman observed that, in the United States, live musical accompaniment for film did not become widespread until at least 1910.^[3]

The silent film era saw the emergence of experimental and avant-garde cinema, which often rejects the conventions of story, character, and plot—sometimes considered essential to the medium—or places these elements in new and critical contexts. This development was a response on the one hand to the emergence and consolidation of moving pictures and their visual culture and, more decisively, to the rise of modern art and its new conceptions of the artwork.^[22] Although they have occasionally achieved widespread recognition, avant-garde film movements have generally sought alternative audiences outside the mainstream film industry. According to A. L. Rees, the "avant-garde rejects and critiques both the mainstream entertainment cinema and the audience responses which flow from it. It has sought 'ways of seeing' outside the conventions of cinema's dominant tradition in the drama film and its industrial mode of production. (...) Whether they look to aesthetics or politics for their context, the films of the avant-garde challenge the major codes of dramatic realism which determine meaning and response in the commercial fiction film."^[23] Beyond the logic of cinema itself, filmmakers and entire avant-garde movements appropriated the medium as a tool for contemporary art, finding their place in clubs and art galleries rather than in conventional cinema venues.^[24]

Although avant-garde cinema have been associated since the mid-20th century with works that reaffirm film as a medium distinct from the other arts—a view shaped by Clement Greenberg's conceptions of modernism and medium specificity—the early avant-garde movements of the 1920s consisted, on the contrary, of artists who used cinema to supplement their work in painting, sculpture, or photography.^[25] Films made directly by artists were first discussed by Futurist, Constructivist, and Dadaist groups between 1909 and the mid-1920s.^[26] Although preceded by Cubism, which had revolutionized the visual arts in the early 20th century, the Italian Futurists were arguably the most important early avant-garde group.^[27] They had their own program and manifesto, and argued that art should leave the galleries and intervene in all aspects of the culture, as well as that the boundaries between high and low art and the distinctions between disciplines should be eliminated—a model that would shape subsequent avant-garde movements.^[27] The Futurists were the first modern artists to seek to make films themselves, outlining their intentions for the medium in their 1916 manifesto The Futurist Cinema.^[28] They were also among the first to design sets for early "avant-garde narrative" films, such as Anton Giulio Bragaglia's Thaïs (1917).^[28] Although the graphic designs created for such films expressed the more symbolist and expressionist aspects of Futurism, those most interested in its mechanical dimension—drawn from noise art and automatic art—pursued their own experiments.^[28]

Except for interesting films of travel, hunting, wars, and so on, the film-makers have done no more than inflict on us the most backward looking dramas, great and small. The same scenario whose brevity and variety may make it seem advanced is, in most cases, nothing but the most trite and pious analysis. Therefore all the immense artistic possibilities of the cinema still rest entirely in the future. The cinema is an autonomous art. The cinema must therefore never copy the stage. The cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become antigraceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free-wording. One must free the cinema as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art, immensely vaster and lighter than all the existing arts.

Although the first Italian Futurist films featured stories, whether conventional or unconventional—such as Arnaldo Ginna's Vita futurista (1916)—calls soon arose for a shift toward more abstract territory. Ginna and Bruno Corra were among the first artists to pursue this direction, hand-painting raw filmstrip as early as 1910 and describing their results in the essay Musica cromatica (1912). Systematic experimentation with abstract cinema, however, emerged after the First World War, particularly in Germany.

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/film/silent-films

The first moving pictures were shown in Denmark in 1896, and the first Danish-made films were shot the following year.^[30]

https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blog/silent-cinema-in-japan-interview-with-daisuke-miyao

In Latin America, the silent era coincided with the height of the region's export-import growth model and its political expression, oligarchic liberalism (1870–1930).^[31] This period was characterized by exponential economic growth and political stability, driven by the export of raw materials and the import of manufactured goods, generating great wealth for the Europeanized, ruling elites.^[31] According to Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez: "At a basic level, then, film in Latin America began as another imported manufactured good, for not only were the cameras and film stock produced in Europe and the United States, but the first to film and screen moving pictures in the region were representatives of the Lumière and Edison companies."^[31]

Boosted by the decline of European cinema following the outbreak of World War I, Argentine silent cinema emerged as one of the most important in Latin America and led film production in the Spanish-speaking world.^[32] Between 1915 and 1924 alone, more than 100 silent features were made in Argentina—as many as Mexico and Spain combined—^[32]and the total for the first three decades of the 20th century is estimated at over 200, alongside a large number of documentaries, newsreels, and shorter fiction films.^[33]

https://hamamarino.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/el-cine-mudo-en-mexico.pdf

Until the early 1920s, cinema in the Arab world existed primarily in Egypt, Palestine, al-Sham (Syria and Lebanon), and the Maghreb—notably in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.^[34] Their involvement in cinema, however, was limited to exhibition, since the films themselves were either foreign productions or made by foreign residents, and Egypt was the only Arab country where such activity gave rise to a native film industry during the colonial era.^[34] Film screenings in the Arab world began almost as early as in Europe: in November 1896, the Lumière cinematograph was used to show films to a select audience in Alexandria, then in Cairo, and later that year in Algiers and Oran.^[34] Similar events took place in Tunisia and Morocco in 1897, the same year the first permanent film theater opened in Alexandria, soon followed by others.^[34] The number of moving picture theaters in Egypt rose from 4 in 1906 to 11 in 1911, reaching about 50 by the early 1920s.^[34] In Palestine, Lumière screenings began in 1900 at the Hotel Europa in Jerusalem,^[34] and in 1908 Egyptian Jews opened a movie theater in the city called the Oracle.^[35] In Tunisia, the Omnia Pathé opened in 1907, while in Oran and other Algerian cities with a high concentration of Europeans, the first movie theaters opened in 1908.^[35] Unlike in Algeria, where few Arabs went to the movies, by 1917 European films were being screened in Egypt with titles translated into Arabic, often on a separate, smaller screen.^[35] This gave poor and less-educated urban populations access to cinema.^[35] Syria stands in stark contrast within the region: the first screening did not take place in Aleppo until 1908, and the first permanent movie theater was established in 1914.^[35]

As in other European colonies, film production in the Arab world was pioneered by foreign travelers, starting with the Lumière cameramen—beginning with Alexandre Promio, who shot the first film in Egypt in 1897, and Félix Mesguich, who shot several short films in Algeria for the company.^[35]

In Palestine, which remained under Ottoman rule until 1917, early cinema production consisted mainly of biblically-oriented travelogues shot by American and European cameramen, alongside the earliest work of several Zionist filmmakers.^[36] During cinema's first decade, both Lumière and Edison operators visited the territory, as did pioneers such as Henry Howse.^[36] The most significant biblical epic filmed on location in this period was From the Manger to the Cross (1912), directed by Sidney Olcott for the Kalem Company.^[36] Zionism—a Jewish nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century with the aim of establishing a Jewish homeland through the colonization of Palestine—adopted film as a new medium for propaganda, drawing on the earlier use of magic lantern shows that had accompanied lectures in support of the Zionist cause during the 1890s.^[36] Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, initiated a filming project in Palestine in 1900 based on a proposal by a student named Adolf Neufeld, though the effort was soon abandoned.^[36] Zionist filmmaking activity intensified in the years before World War I: English filmmaker Murray Rosenberg's The First Film of Palestine (1911)— the first film shot in Palestine beyond the actualities of preceding decades—promoted the Zionist slogan of "a land without a people for a people without a land," and was followed in 1913 by productions from Noah Sokolovsky's Odesa-based Mizrach Company.^[36] Zionist settler Akiva Aryeh Weiss, one of the founders of Tel Aviv, has been cited as the first Jewish filmmaker based in Palestine, though the claim remains poorly documented.^[36] The most active Jewish film pioneer in Palestine was the Russian-born Ya'acov Ben-Dov, whose film career began after the British capture of the country in 1917.^[36] Most of his films were propaganda pieces financed by official Zionist organizations and rarely featured actors or fictional elements.^[36] Feature film production was rarely undertaken until the earliest known scripts were authored by the Zionist official Joseph Gal-Ezer in 1920, and few of these went into production during the silent era, whose closing years saw the emergence of Ben-Dov's most prominent successors, Nathan Axelrod and Baruch Agadati.^[36] In contrast to Palestine's limited production activity, film-going was extremely popular.^[36] The territory's first permanent cinema, the Eden, opened in Tel Aviv in 1913.^[36] Its proprietors had been granted exclusive operating rights in the city for a 13-year period, which by 1926 had resulted in a proliferation of cinemas along the Tel Aviv–Jaffa municipal boundary.^[36]

Roberta E. Pearson, "Instead of dismissing the early silent films as primitive or preliminary, scholars now appreciate that their signifying practices constitute the road not taken and strive to understand the ideological determinants of their abandonment."^[37]

• Lists of silent films
• Precursors of film

• 
  A still from Louis Lumière's Repas de bébé (1895), one of the earliest films shot with the Lumière brothers' cinematograph.
• 
  1896
• 
  A still from Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon (1902).
• 
  1903
• 
  1905
• 
  1906

• 
  Charles Stanton Ogle as Frankenstein's monster in J. Searle Dawley's Frankenstein (1910).
• 
  Walter Long—in blackface—surrounded by a group of hooded Klansmen in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).
• 
  Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916).
• 
  Fattie Arbuckle in The Cook (1918), which he also directed.
• 
  Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919).
• 
  1920
• 
  The comedy duo Laurel and Hardy: Stan Laurel (left) and Oliver Hardy (right), 1920.
• 
  Advertisement for Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), featuring ZaSu Pitts.
• 
  1925
• 
  Advertisement for the United Artists production The General (1926), starring Buster Keaton, who also co-directed the film along with Clyde Bruckman.
• 
  George O'Brien and Margaret Livingston in F. W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).
• 
  A color lobby card for Clarence Badger's It (1927), starring Clara Bow.
• 
  Lillian Gish in Victor Sjöström's The Wind (1928).
• 
  James Murray standing in front of a group of people in King Vidor's The Crowd (1928).
• 
  1929
• 
  Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp and Virginia Cherrill in his own production City Lights (1931).

• 
  Musidora in Louis Feuillade's serial Les Vampires (1915–1916).
• 
  Poster design by Hans Poelzig for The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), directed by Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen.
• 
  Conrad Veidt holding Lil Dagover in Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).
• 
  Max Schreck as Count Orlok in F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922).
• 
  Gösta Ekman as the title character in F. W. Murnau's Faust (1926).
• 
  Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm as the Maschinenmensch, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).
• 
  Albert Dieudonné as the title character in Abel Gance's Napoleón (1927).
• 
  French theatrical release poster for The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer.
• 
  Louise Brooks in G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929).
• 
  The famous severed-eye scene from Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's An Andalusian Dog (1929).

• 
  A still from the Milano Films production L'Inferno (1911).
• 
  1913
• 
  1913
• 
  1914
• 
  1917
• 
  1929
• 
  1930

• 
  The famous Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925).
• 
  A still from Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
• 
  A still from Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930).

• 
  1919
• 
  1921
• 
  A publicity still for Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (1922).
• 
  1924
• 
  1925

• 
  A still of the Argentine film Nobleza gaucha (1915), which achieved unprecedented commercial success both locally and abroad.
• 
  A frame from the Mexican film Tepeyac (1917), depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe appearing to Juan Diego.
• 
  Film poster for the Mexican film El automóvil gris (1919), directed by Enrique Rosas.
• 
  María Turgenova and Ermete Meliante in the Argentine film Perdón, viejita (1927), one of José A. Ferreyra's influential tango-based melodramas.
• 
  A frame of the Brazilian film Limite (1930), directed by Mário Peixoto, which has been reevaluated for its experimental style and is now considered one of the best films in the country's history.
• 
  A frame of the Bolivian film Wara Wara (1930), directed by José María Velasco Maidana, the only surviving silent film from the country and one of the most important works in local cinema.