Why It’s So Hard to Understand What a Silent Movie Audience Saw and Felt

 

Last month I re-read Leonard Maltin’s Behind the Camera, interviews with five famous directors of photography, and it got me interested in re-reading Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By, a longtime favorite. Camera was published in 1970 when Maltin was only 21; Parade was published in 1968, based heavily on interviews that Brownlow did during a 1964 trip to America, when he was 26. Both men are to be commended for knowing about and seeking out some of the then-forgotten filmmakers of the silent and early sound eras, many of whom were still around and delighted to have a chance to tell their stories. Now it’s a half-century later.

Brownlow’s was the more influential, though both books were coming to attention at the historical moment when film scholarship was really taking off. Brownlow’s thesis is simply that modern people look down on silent films because they’ve never seen a good one, and never seen one properly shown. In fact, he claims they’re the height of cinema, better than sound films once you properly see and understand them. He builds a good case but oversells it some. Still, there are so many great anecdotes, interviews, and learned explanations. Chapters on the making of Ben Hur and Robin Hood would be classic articles all by themselves.

There’s a whole pre-cinema, proto-cinema world of forgotten history in the fairground and nickelodeon days, roughly 1896-1911. Brownlow gives a clear and interesting account of those pre-Hollywood days, but his real interest begins when the movies started to mean something, sometime between about 1912 and 1915, the year of The Birth of a Nation, pretty much the agreed-on beginning of film’s claim to being an art form. That window closes in 1928, though a lagging handful of silent films came out in ’29 (and of course City Lights was 1931, but Chaplin was a special case). So this vanished, maybe golden age of the silver screen lasted little more than 13 years.

Brownlow’s book was part of a revivalist movement that brought many remaining silent prints back into access, so although film history no longer commands as much attention as it did decades ago, conditions for getting to see them are greatly improved from the 1968 days. If an internet-equipped TV screen isn’t exactly the Loew’s Capitol Theater, that home screen is as large as the ones once used by film collectors to show 16mm prints.

The book is an eloquent, poignant testimony of a different Hollywood and a vastly different, more conservative Los Angeles than any that I encountered 50 years later. Silent-era Hollywood was based on instinct, hunches, and loosely managed compared to the more organized factory process established by the mid-’30s. Of course, it’s still Hollywood all right, eternally based on marketing dreams of youth and beauty to a worldwide audience. Stories about the on-set behavior of actors and directors may not be identical to today’s, but the basic idea hasn’t changed.

This being Kevin Brownlow, I wasn’t surprised that to him the zenith of silent moviemaking, indeed of all movie making, was Abel Gance’s Napoleon, the single cause he is most associated with. Since Gance was not American, he left the chapter for the near-end of a very long book. Kevin Brownlow later wrote an entire book on the making and the revival of Gance’s Napoleon. It’s a tale of frustration and eventual triumph as the finally restored film is played with a live orchestra in some of the key cities of the world. It’s a world I once knew well: of small-time film collectors, revival houses, institutions like the AFI and BFI, of Filmex, and the Chicago and San Francisco film festivals, roughly 1960 to 1985. The cultural establishment.

Yon Barna’s Eisenstein caps a bunch of reading about silent films in June. Griffith, Gance, and Sergei Eisenstein were grandiose egomaniacs, self-appointed national heroes of the USA, France, and the USSR who made their names with silent films. Eisenstein was the only one of the three who made at least one memorable sound film, just one (Alexander Nevsky). Little known fact: all three were Jewish, (as was Mack Sennett) and all three played it down or kept it hidden — Griffith and Gance because it sounded too foreign and “low-born” in the bloodline-obsessed worlds of the genteel South and of provincial France, Eisenstein ironically for the opposite reason; to play down his upper-middle-class, educated background as a Communist filmmaker.

Some expert specialties of The Parade’s Gone By are the things that are distinctive to silent film: tinting and toning the black-and-white film to reinforce a visual or emotional effect, intertitles, called subtitles here; and the existence of live music at all but the smallest film screenings. (“The Silents Were Never Silent”). I actually tried tinting and toning 16mm film as a student and it worked, though it was amateurish. Tinting colored the highlights and was often used for day-for-night scenes. Toning colored only the darkest parts of the image. As with cars, two toning became something of a fad in these largely pre-color days. A forest scene with blue skies and green trees, or a new dawn in shades of pink and light blue. Today it seems as strange, almost funny as the gauche idea of painting color on statues; but it turns out that the ancients did paint the statues. As in the novel Time and Again, the colors faded before they got to us.

Brownlow approaches silent film titles as an advocate who’s trying to make a reasonable case. Nearly every serious student innocently says, “Why not make a silent film without any titles at all?” Brownlow replies, “It could be done … it was done” but the results were slow, taking too much time to establish a few key points. Though he readily admits that badly written titles could kill suspense or invite derisive laughter, he makes a case that good, evocative titles helped set a mood and tell a story more efficiently.

The silent film orchestra is obviously distant from our experience, except for a few super-duper social events for Filmex or the AFI. But some of my favorite films could easily be imagined as silent movies with great visuals and a live orchestra: Fantasia. Vertigo. 2001: A Space Odyssey. There have been a handful of modern-era silent films but they’ve never been successful even as art films. A pity; Brownlow makes a good case that someone could do it again.

Before leaving The Parade’s Gone By, an excellent book, now a half-century old, let us note the waxing and waning of fame and later, of history. By the ’50s and early ’60s, silent movies were mostly a forgotten joke; “Fractured Flickers” TV comedy material when Kevin Brownlow and others, like critic Andrew Sarris, resurrected them. For decades, say 1965 to 2005, as the flame of serious film scholarship burned bright and archival budgets started to catch up with demand (“Nitrate Won’t Wait!”), we enjoyed the strange paradox that up to a point, we were privileged to be learning more and more about a period that was farther and farther in the past.

And then it all went into reverse. Mainstream film history seemed to fade in importance. People lost interest once again. Silent movies have always been a tough sell because of pacing and the lack of what made them once seem grand. The romanticized, exaggerated Victorian/Dickensian attitudes and melodramatic plots were an obstacle to our appreciation 50 years ago; they are even larger obstacles for today’s younger adults. Silent cinema sank from educated consciousness once again, as did early sound and most aspects of what we ’60-’90s filmgoers regarded as a basic required viewing list.

Not for the first time, new waves of technique and new kinds of technical expertise altered the content of media and audience expectations of it. I have one specific hunch about why the world of silents is particularly tough for today: when I was a student, at least home movies, which most of us were familiar with, had always been silent. Though little recognized as such, for 50 years they were the last holdout of silent cinema, if only in amateur form. Every film student in my day and even for a decade or two later began with silent 16mm film, worked our way up to silent films with synchronized music, and finally was allowed to shoot sync sound, only after we’d mastered telling a story visually. When film students learned their craft, from Sergei Eisenstein to Christopher Nolan, they were forced to personally recapitulate the history of film whether they liked it or not.

Only in Super 8’s final years, say 1976-1980, with home video just around the corner, were there mass-market sound cameras for home use. By contrast, video, whether TV, videotape, or mobile phone video, has always had sound. Since television left John Logie Baird’s laboratory, there’s never been such a thing as “silent television.” Today, hardly anyone under 45 remembers a time when moving images were ever silent. For most, trying to appreciate silent films as anything other than a momentary curiosity creates a gulf in understanding that can’t easily be bridged.

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  1. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Most home movies were of women who were trying to avoid the camera, but among the poeple who really wanted to be on camera, you get a lot of the same kind of exaggerated affect that you see in silent movies.

    • #1
  2. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    When done right, silent home movies could be beautiful, all the more timeless and poignant because your relatives in 1955 or 1974 could no longer speak for themselves. 

    • #2
  3. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Here’s one of those things that everyone “knows”, but maybe misleadingly: silent films started out hand-cranked, and slower than today’s smooth-looking sound films. That’s why they were nicknamed “flickers”–at 12 to 16 frames a second, preferred speeds of cheapskate photographers, movies really flickered. 

    So there’s a well-meaning, educated myth that silent movies ran at 16 frames a second (one 35mm foot per second) and from 1929 on, sound films ran at 24 frames a second, a foot and a half a second. (Did Eastman Kodak love that fact? Yes.) Simple. Even big time film festivals that show silent movies with live orchestras use special projector motors that run at 16 fps. 

    But Brownlow is one of the experts who have overturned that generalization. Silent era movie makers never did have an “official” film speed. They were well aware of the flickering effect, so by the mid-Twenties, they were filming at 20-24 frames a second, and big city projectionists (more of a hotshot tech job ninety years ago) had learned to adjust their machines at the right faster speed to make the action look lifelike and realistic. Early engineers settled on 24 fps for sound as a compromise on the high side, to allow for what would be the finest recorded sound that people would hear until the advent of home high fidelity in the late 1950s. 

    • #3
  4. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Extensive parts of sound films, even today’s, are made the same way silent films were–the sound isn’t even recorded, or is discarded as irrelevant. Think of car chases, or montages of magazine articles and calendar pages going by. There’s a scene where the villain feeds the car with the dupe’s corpse aboard into the junkyard crusher. None of those things requires “direct” sound at the moment of filming. That’s one reason why it’s useful for even today’s filmmakers to see pictures and hear sound as something that can be played with. 

    • #4
  5. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    Professor Amy Sue Bix, in her book ‘Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs?’ , describes the fear of technological unemployment as silent movies were replaced by the ‘talkies’. “Through the early 1920s…local theaters had employed live musicians to provide accompaniment for silent pictures.  Small houses featured only a pianist or violinist, but glamorous ‘movie places’ engaged full orchestras.”  All these jobs were threatened when Warner Brothers introduced its Vitaphone technology, with prerecorded disks synchronized to projectors.  “Unlike other big studios, Warner did not operate its own theater chains and so had to convince local owners to screen their productions. Theater managers would be eager to show sound movies, Harry Warner hoped, since they could save the expense of hiring musicians.”

    The American Federation of Musicians mounted a major PR campaign in an attempt to convince the public that ‘living music’ was better than ‘canned sound.’  A Music Defense League was established, with membership reaching 3 million…but the ‘talkies’ remained popular, and the AFM had to admit defeat.  A lot of musicians did lose their jobs.

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/54256.html

    • #5
  6. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Extensive parts of sound films, even today’s, are made the same way silent films were–the sound isn’t even recorded, or is discarded as irrelevant. Think of car chases, or montages of magazine articles and calendar pages going by. There’s a scene where the villain feeds the car with the dupe’s corpse aboard into the junkyard crusher. None of those things requires “direct” sound at the moment of filming. That’s one reason why it’s useful for even today’s filmmakers to see pictures and hear sound as something that can be played with.

    Everything not on a sound stage, right?

    • #6
  7. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Extensive parts of sound films, even today’s, are made the same way silent films were–the sound isn’t even recorded, or is discarded as irrelevant. Think of car chases, or montages of magazine articles and calendar pages going by. There’s a scene where the villain feeds the car with the dupe’s corpse aboard into the junkyard crusher. None of those things requires “direct” sound at the moment of filming. That’s one reason why it’s useful for even today’s filmmakers to see pictures and hear sound as something that can be played with.

    Everything not on a sound stage, right?

    Right. All of the insert shots: when Mission: Impossible shows the hand of the safecracker turning the knob to the safe, there’s no five man IATSE camera crew and 3 man sound crew. It’s just two guys with a noisy, but beautiful little German camera filming close ups of hands, door locks, and newspaper headlines.

    • #7
  8. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    David Foster (View Comment):

    Professor Amy Sue Bix, in her book ‘Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs?’ , describes the fear of technological unemployment as silent movies were replaced by the ‘talkies’. “Through the early 1920s…local theaters had employed live musicians to provide accompaniment for silent pictures. Small houses featured only a pianist or violinist, but glamorous ‘movie places’ engaged full orchestras.” All these jobs were threatened when Warner Brothers introduced its Vitaphone technology, with prerecorded disks synchronized to projectors. “Unlike other big studios, Warner did not operate its own theater chains and so had to convince local owners to screen their productions. Theater managers would be eager to show sound movies, Harry Warner hoped, since they could save the expense of hiring musicians.”

    The American Federation of Musicians mounted a major PR campaign in an attempt to convince the public that ‘living music’ was better than ‘canned sound.’ A Music Defense League was established, with membership reaching 3 million…but the ‘talkies’ remained popular, and the AFM had to admit defeat. A lot of musicians did lose their jobs.

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/54256.html

    Foster seems determined to lift this thread onto an intellectual level it hardly deserves, and I like it! Let’s see, it’s early afternoon in Romania; where is @titustechera?

    • #8
  9. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Judge Mental (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    Extensive parts of sound films, even today’s, are made the same way silent films were–the sound isn’t even recorded, or is discarded as irrelevant. Think of car chases, or montages of magazine articles and calendar pages going by. There’s a scene where the villain feeds the car with the dupe’s corpse aboard into the junkyard crusher. None of those things requires “direct” sound at the moment of filming. That’s one reason why it’s useful for even today’s filmmakers to see pictures and hear sound as something that can be played with.

    Everything not on a sound stage, right?

    Right. All of the insert shots: when Mission: Impossible shows the hand of the safevracker turning the knob to the safe, there’s no five man IATSE camera crew and 3 man sound crew. It’s just two guys with a noisy, but beautiful little German camera filming close ups of hands, door locks, and newspaper headlines.

    Bolex?

    • #9
  10. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Foster seems determined to lift this thread onto an intellectual level it hardly deserves, and I like it!

    For even more lifting, see the Assistant Village Idiot on color vs B&W photography:

    History becomes lost, but is found again by the Beatles

    • #10
  11. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    One of our places to go is the Redford Theatre, built at the end of the era for the silent movie palace, with an incredible organ that has other instruments within the organ chambers to create their sound from the keyboard. It has been beautifully restored by the Motor City Theatre Organ Society over several years, maybe decades by now. Occasionally, they will play silent films with the organist accompanying them, as it was meant to be.


    This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under July’s theme of Understanding. We still have six openings on the calendar if you would like to share something you understand or tell a tale about understanding in any meaning of the word. Our schedule and sign-up sheet is waiting for you.

    • #11
  12. OmegaPaladin Moderator
    OmegaPaladin
    @OmegaPaladin

    I honestly cannot see how silent films would be superior to films with sound.  There is so much meaning carried in vocal tones, with memorable dialogue.  You cannot replace that with title cards.  Even in a foreign film with subtitles, you can hear the emotion in the actor’s voice.

    I saw Battleship Potemkin at a military museum.  It was an excellent film, but I don’t see how it would be superior to a version shot with voice work.

    • #12
  13. Wolverine Inactive
    Wolverine
    @Wolverine

    I remember reading that Hitchcock cut his teeth in the silent era, which is why some of his most suspenseful scenes in the sound era have no dialogue, so I can see how the lack of dialogue and sound can force you to think more creatively to create tension. 

    • #13
  14. MeanDurphy Member
    MeanDurphy
    @DeanMurphy

    Gary, what movie do you suggest for my son (17) who says “no movie made before 1997 is worth watching”?

    I’ve seen a couple of the early silents, Metropolis, Nosferatu; the pacing seems off.

    • #14
  15. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    A great example of a silent film–and one of the last of the genre–was People on Sunday, made by Billy Wilder in 1930 when he was still in Germany.  The plot:  four young people going to the beach on Sunday.  They production team could not afford to hire “real” actors:  instead, they chose likely-looking people off the street and had them play characters who shared their own real-life professions.

    Erwin is a taxi driver, Wolfgang is a wine salesman, Brigitte sells records for a living, Christl works as an extra in movies, and Annie (Erwin’s girlfriend) is a not-very-successful model.

    This has been called an “effervescent, sunlit” film; it has also been called “cynical.”  Both interpretations are correct, IMO, although the cynicism aspect is pretty subtle. I thought the acting done by the nonprofessionals was quite fine.

    My review is here.  The film is available from the Criterion Collection; the whole thing is also on-line.

    • #15
  16. Clavius Thatcher
    Clavius
    @Clavius

    Excellent discussion of silent film.  We can’t forget that these are evolving arts with constant experimentation and change.  We have far more technology now, but you still have experimentation at two ends of the money scale.  There are the big money productions that pour everything into whatever (if you can edit the film in half the time, do twice as much editing).  Then there are the low budget people who squeeze creative output from the smallest cost.  The latter, I think, is where progress is made.

    • #16
  17. Al French, sad sack Moderator
    Al French, sad sack
    @AlFrench

    When I was in college (early 60s) one of the old Portland theaters ran silent movies on Saturday or Sunday. One of my fraternity brothers played the organ for the shows.

    • #17
  18. Mike-K Member
    Mike-K
    @

    My father was given a wind up movie camera in 1948. I have a collection of home movies beginning that year, when I was 10, until one of my last movies, a film made while racing my sailboat to Hawaii in 1981. That year, I used a sound equipped movie camera, super 8 film size, which had a second sound track so I could add a music track in addition to the sound from the boat. Once video cameras came along, I could not do that since there would be no place to recharge a battery. The movie camera ran on AA batteries in the handle.

    A sample of the sailing movie is here.

    http://abriefhistory.org/?p=4532

    • #18
  19. Matt Balzer Member
    Matt Balzer
    @MattBalzer

    MeanDurphy (View Comment):

    Gary, what movie do you suggest for my son (17) who says “no movie made before 1997 is worth watching”?

    I’ve seen a couple of the early silents, Metropolis, Nosferatu; the pacing seems off.

    Are you sure 1997 was the year he used? Seems a bit late IMO.

    • #19
  20. Mike-K Member
    Mike-K
    @

    We watched “Primal Fear” last night and my wife can’t stop talking about it. She thinks she wants to watch it again today. I had told her about it and had a DVD but she was just blown away by Edward Norton in it. It was his first movie role and he was nominated for an Oscar.

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117381/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_40

    1996 movie.

    • #20
  21. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Mike-K (View Comment):

    We watched “Primal Fear” last night and my wife can’t stop talking about it. She thinks she wants to watch it again today. I had told her about it and had a DVD but she was just blown away by Edward Norton in it. It was his first movie role and he was nominated for an Oscar.

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117381/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_40

    1996 movie.

    That first transformation to Roy, am I right?

    • #21
  22. Gumby Mark Coolidge
    Gumby Mark
    @GumbyMark

    David Foster (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    Foster seems determined to lift this thread onto an intellectual level it hardly deserves, and I like it!

    For even more lifting, see the Assistant Village Idiot on color vs B&W photography:

    History becomes lost, but is found again by the Beatles

    I’ve read AVI for years.  Nice to see him on your blog.

    • #22
  23. Nanda Pajama-Tantrum Member
    Nanda Pajama-Tantrum
    @

    Love this, Gary and everyone!  My world just got bigger again…Thanks!

    • #23
  24. Hang On Member
    Hang On
    @HangOn

    David Foster (View Comment):

    A great example of a silent film–and one of the last of the genre–was People on Sunday, made by Billy Wilder in 1930 when he was still in Germany. The plot: four young people going to the beach on Sunday. They production team could not afford to hire “real” actors: instead, they chose likely-looking people off the street and had them play characters who shared their own real-life professions.

    Erwin is a taxi driver, Wolfgang is a wine salesman, Brigitte sells records for a living, Christl works as an extra in movies, and Annie (Erwin’s girlfriend) is a not-very-successful model.

    This has been called an “effervescent, sunlit” film; it has also been called “cynical.” Both interpretations are correct, IMO, although the cynicism aspect is pretty subtle. I thought the acting done by the nonprofessionals was quite fine.

    My review is here. The film is available from the Criterion Collection; the whole thing is also on-line.

    Thanks. I really enjoyed that. Had never heard of it nor seen it. And agree it is both effervescent and cynical.

    P.S. If you want link to movie, read the review.

    • #24
  25. Dorrk Inactive
    Dorrk
    @Dorrk

    Some silents can seem long-winded by today’s standards. I would introduce someone to silents with a barely-feature length comedy like Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. It’s less than an hour long but is non-stop creativity.

    The biggest problem young people have with silents today, really, is effort. It takes participation on the part of the audience to reframe their perspective and allow for something to come at them from a different time with different expectations. You need to do some work to watch most silent films, but if you do so it can be greatly rewarding. I first watched Metropolis back in my teens when a newly scored cut-down version was released, and then again a few years later in college. It’s influence was obvious but I didn’t “get it.” It wasn’t until earlier this year, with my third viewing — this time, as close to a full version as possible — that I fell in love with it. It’s a jaw-dropping spectacle. But, I’ve also been training myself for years to be able to really appreciate different forms of movies rather than expecting everything to fit inside the neat little box that we’ve already determined is what is worth watching.

    • #25
  26. Judge Mental Member
    Judge Mental
    @JudgeMental

    Dorrk (View Comment):

    Some silents can seem long-winded by today’s standards. I would introduce someone to silents with a barely-feature length comedy like Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. It’s less than an hour long but is non-stop creativity.

    The biggest problem young people have with silents today, really, is effort. It takes participation on the part of the audience to reframe their perspective and allow for something to come at them from a different time with different expectations. You need to do some work to watch most silent films, but if you do so it can be greatly rewarding. I first watched Metropolis back in my teens when a newly scored cut-down version was released, and then again a few years later in college. It’s influence was obvious but I didn’t “get it.” It wasn’t until earlier this year, with my third viewing — this time, as close to a full version as possible — that I fell in love with it. It’s a jaw-dropping spectacle. But, I’ve also been training myself for years to be able to really appreciate different forms of movies rather than expecting everything to fit inside the neat little box that we’ve already determined is what is worth watching.

    One thing that might get them interested is the stunts in some of those old comedies.  Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd were doing stuff that was flat out insane, with no wires, CGI or even pads to land on if they fell.

    • #26
  27. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    OmegaPaladin (View Comment):

    I honestly cannot see how silent films would be superior to films with sound. There is so much meaning carried in vocal tones, with memorable dialogue. You cannot replace that with title cards. Even in a foreign film with subtitles, you can hear the emotion in the actor’s voice.

    I saw Battleship Potemkin at a military museum. It was an excellent film, but I don’t see how it would be superior to a version shot with voice work.

    That’s reasonable, Omega; like old time radio drama, you just can’t get around the fact that to a modern audience, there’s something missing. (One reason why early talking pictures were called “radio movies”; the stories you couldn’t see and the stories you couldn’t hear were finally combined). Unlike Kevin Brownlow, I’m not going to claim that silent movies were “it”, the ultimate pure form of film. But I am saying that there’s a lot more there than most people realize, especially if you see a good one, well thought out and edited, that isn’t scratched, jumpy or flickering. Subject matter has a lot to do with it, too: there are mediocre silent movies that cry out for sound because so much of what’s going on has to be explained with titles. There are also very good ones whose subjects lend themselves to silence and you hardly notice what’s missing. 

    • #27
  28. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    MeanDurphy (View Comment):

    Gary, what movie do you suggest for my son (17) who says “no movie made before 1997 is worth watching”?

    I’ve seen a couple of the early silents, Metropolis, Nosferatu; the pacing seems off.

    Often the pacing is off. Sometimes they run it sound speed, sometimes for the opposite reason they “faithfully” run it silent speed, slowing down an already slow plot. What kind of subject matter does your son like?

    • #28
  29. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    Mike-K (View Comment):

    My father was given a wind up movie camera in 1948. I have a collection of home movies beginning that year, when I was 10, until one of my last movies, a film made while racing my sailboat to Hawaii in 1981. That year, I used a sound equipped movie camera, super 8 film size, which had a second sound track so I could add a music track in addition to the sound from the boat. Once video cameras came along, I could not do that since there would be no place to recharge a battery. The movie camera ran on AA batteries in the handle.

    A sample of the sailing movie is here.

    http://abriefhistory.org/?p=4532

    Wow, quite a location shoot! Interested that you chose black and white; it was available in Super 8 but was never very common. 

    • #29
  30. Dorrk Inactive
    Dorrk
    @Dorrk

    This silent short was a hit with my kids, but I wouldn’t consider it significant. It is novel…

    • #30
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