Five silent movie myths: from damsels in distress to Benny Hill chases

The first mistake

This incorporates several myths all at once. Silent films can be slippery creatures; silent film history more slippery still. So to avoid some smart aleck showing you up at the cinematheque, it is always best to avoid saying that a film is the first example of this, that or the other. You may have seen Metropolis (1927) described as the first science-fiction film, for example. It’s patent nonsense, as anyone who has seen Georges Méliès’s The Trip to the Moon (1902) can attest. So, was The Trip to the Moon the first science-fiction film? Possibly not. With around 80% of silent films currently missing, possibly lost for ever, even the most diligent archivist can’t guarantee that there isn’t an earlier example of anything.

Take DW Griffith. From his exquisitely crafted Biograph shorts to his epic dramas such as Intolerance (1916) and Orphans of the Storm (1921), he is responsible for some of the greatest films ever made. But he is miscredited with “firsts” by the truckload – from the first close-up to the first feature film. Just to take those two examples, close-ups turn up in early films by several different film-makers (here’s an example from a British film from 1902) – Griffith just finessed them into something really special. And the first feature film was not Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation (1915). It was most probably The Story of the Kelly Gang, an Australian outlaw epic running at 60 minutes in its complete state and shot way back in 1906. I can’t guarantee you’ll win any pub quizzes by being such a stickler for the facts, but with any luck your superiority will keep you warm at night.

Women are always being tied to train tracks

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The image of a wriggling woman on the railway line is a persistent misapprehension about silent films. In fact, the trope of a villain tying a damsel in distress to a railway line and a masculine hero racing to her rescue was old hat by the time the movies began. It sounds like it belongs in Victorian stage melodrama and that is mostly where it stayed. Although as in the popular 1867 play Under the Gaslight, the victim is more likely to be a man than a woman.

If you do see someone lashed to the train tracks in a silent film you can pretty much guarantee that it’s a comedy poking fun at this hoary old plot device, like Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life (1913). Another excellent example is Keystone’s Teddy at the Throttle (1917), starring Gloria Swanson: a larky spoof comedy in which the heroine is tied to the tracks, but engineers her own rescue with the help of her dog, and her boyfriend. It’s worth remembering that the derring-do of female-led serials such as The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine almost killed the idea of the damsel in distress. More supposed silent movie tropes that are actually rarely seen include custard pies and twirled moustaches.

The actors run around, making fast jerky motions

First things first, most silent films had more complicated plots than a chase. You may be confusing them with Benny Hill. Those jerky, super-fast movements you may have seen, however, are a result of technical incompetence or pure cheek. Sound films are recorded at a standard speed of 24 frames per second. Play them back any faster or slower and the soundtrack would distort, rendering them ridiculous. Silent films were shot (mostly) on hand-cranked cameras, at variable speeds. A newsreel or a cheaply made comedy might be shot at 17 frames per second, say (if you think about it, you save film that way) – and intended to be projected at that speed. Run that film back at today’s standard 24fps and the action is hilariously rapid and yes, very jerky and odd. Even a smaller difference, for example, a 20fps film projected at 22fps, can result in odd, unnatural motions. All very well if you think of silent movies as antiquated and quirky, but if you want to enjoy them, don’t settle for this.

Thankfully, most cinemas and DVD manufacturers no longer mishandle movies this way – so it is the people hanging on to this idea of super-sped-up silents who are out of date, not the films themselves.

The captions contain all the dialogue

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This is one of the biggest and most obvious mistakes that modern silent movies make, interrupting the flow of the film with unnecessary verbiage. The caption cards, called intertitles, have to earn their keep. There’s rarely any need to cut away from an actor’s face to a card that says “hello”, “yes” or “no”, for example, as the audience should be able to work that out from the performance. The intertitles are there for essential information, exposition and the occasional joke or editorial comment. So you won’t read pages and pages of dialogue in a silent film – just the edited highlights. And, of course, there are moments when silent films are all the stronger for what goes unsaid. This is the kind of confusion that leads to people thinking that silent films are just like sound ones, but with cards replacing the soundtrack. Watch a really special silent film and you will discover they had ways of telling stories without words.

Silent movies are primitive

The best way to understand early film is to realise that it’s not old, it’s really new. Films from the 1890s and 1900s represent the birth of a new medium, and as such, are characterised by experimentation and innovation. The earliest silents, those 60-second snippets of trains entering stations or waves crashing on to the beach, may seem simple, even crude to us now. But they only look that way if you compare them to a narrative feature film from the middle of the 20th century, say. Compare them to what came immediately before them – still photographs, magic lanterns and zoetropes – and they are revealed as miracles of animation and realism. And rapidly, early film-makers began to explore storytelling, trick photography, colour and special effects, thereby inventing an entire art form.

By the time the silent film had reached its apex in the mid-late 1920s, cinema was every bit as sophisticated as it is now. Art films from Europe and the Soviet Union experimented with montage, composition and design; Hollywood had mastered the highest production values, the smoothest narrative editing and sublime visual comedy. Technicolor, 3D, animation and sound had all been tried. It’s an old line but it’s true: the only thing silent cinema couldn’t do was a musical.