Guest Guide to Silent Cinema...

Pamela Hutchinson runs Silent London, a website dedicated to silent cinema and silent film screenings in the capital. She wrote her MA dissertation on early cinema, and got hooked on silent movies after seeing a Buster Keaton double-bill, accompanied by a live band. Since then she has been to screenings featuring live improvised piano, raucous punk rock, obscure medieval string instruments, classical cello and a healthy amount of techno, all of which she writes about on her site. We asked her for a beginner's introduction...

Words: Pamela Hutchinson

Silent cinema covers a long period, from the first moving film reel showing a train entering a station in 1895 to well into the 1930s, so there's no such thing as a typical silent movie. You've got strange early films using trick photography to dazzle, heart-stopping Soviet montage, slapstick at every level of sophistication and slick Hollywood romances. Silent filmmakers were literally making up cinema as they went along, so it's one of the most inventive eras in film history, and the diversions and failed experiments are almost as fascinating as the successes.

Silent film might sound like a niche interest, but there's a huge amount going on in London: in art-house cinemas, concert halls, festivals, film societies and clubs. I started Silent London in November 2010, to try to keep track of all the silent film screenings in the capital and I'm rushed off my feet.

FIVE SILENT FILMS EVERYONE SHOULD SEE
Your first steps into silent cinema...

1. The Gold Rush (1925)

You can't talk about silent cinema without mentioning Charlie Chaplin, a comic genius from London who became one of Hollywood's first megastars. In The Gold Rush, the Tramp goes prospecting in the snowy wastes but the only treasure he finds is the beautiful Georgia – and she's spoken for. As ever, Chaplin snatches comedy from the jaws of tragedy, and the scene in which the starvation-crazed Tramp sets about eating his own boot as if it were a gourmet supper is clever, poignant and hilarious. Avoid the re-edited 1940s version with the voice-over.

2. Battleship Potemkin (1925)

You may know the Odessa Steps sequence already – the Cossacks advance, the peasants run, a woman is shot, the pram falls out of her grasp, the stone lions rise in anger – but there's more to Sergei Eisenstein's majestic film that this much-copied scene. Lauded rightly for its montage editing, Battleship Potemkin is a rousing call for Soviet solidarity based on an incident from the failed 1905 Russian uprising. A group of sailors mutiny when their superior officers order them to eat rotten meat and find moral support when they dock at Odessa. But will the rest of the fleet turn their back on the rebels? It's a scintillating, high-octane 75 minutes – catch the newly restored version in cinemas now while it's on theatrical release across the country.

3. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

Director FW Murnau might be more widely known for his vampire flick Nosferatu, but this beautifully made film about true love in the face of big-city temptations is a bona fide classic. Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien play a newlywed couple from farm country, Margaret Livingston the urban vamp who drips poison in the young man's ear. By turns romantic, menacing and comic, Sunrise is a dazzling and charming film that represents a high point in Hollywood silent-era filmmaking – it would take the "talkies" years before they could make anything as good as this. If only Gaynor's wig wasn't so ridiculous, one might say this was a perfect film.

4. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Made in France by a Danish director (Carl Theodor Dreyer), with a star (Maria Falconetti) who would never make another film, The Passion of Joan of Arc was thought to have been destroyed and lost for ever until a copy was found in a Norwegian mental hospital in 1981. This chance discovery in a cleaner's cupboard was one of the most fortuitous moments in cinema history, because this is a film unlike any other. Based on the original court transcripts of the trial of the Maid of Orleans, Dreyer's film eschews establishing shots for a series of disconcerting close-ups, from the grotesque to the radiant. Falconett's unforgettable performance as a woman sustained by faith in the face of death may owe something to Dreyer's unorthodox methods: apparently he forced her to kneel on the stone floor for hours and then told her to wipe the expression of pain from her face. A brutal, ultimately cathartic film.

5. A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Yes, I'm recommending a French science fiction film from 1902, but this is not so much a movie, more an iconic work of art. You know the image of the grumpy man in the moon with a rocket stuck in his eye? That's A Trip to the Moon, George Méliès's 14-minute fantasy adventure, which uses animation and special effects as he follows six astronomers' loopy space voyage. It has inspired countless other films and more than a few pop videos, but you can't beat the delirious original. And if you want a real treat, a rare hand-tinted copy was recently found and lovingly restored, so we'll soon be able to see this whimsical masterpiece in full colour.

Click here for an in-depth interview with Pamela on Silent Cinema

Check out the latest news on silent film screenings in London at Silent London here or on Facebook and Twitter.

Click here for details of the Prince Charles Cinema's year-long Silent Cinema season.

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