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If you were teaching a silent film class to newcomers to film history...

posted 11 years ago by jormalucke
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If you were teaching a silent film class to newcomers to film history, which films would you choose? I am currently in this same situation and here's my picks.

Intolerance (Griffith)

For the Golden Age of American Silent Films
Safety Last!
The Thief of Bagdad
The Wind

For German Expressionism
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Pandora's Box

For European Avant-Garde Cinema
The Passion of Joan of Arc
(I drew blanks here, Gance's Napoleon?, Bunuel's early works?)

So what would you pick for these categories?

[–] casablnka 11 years ago

No one has mentioned -

Broken Blossoms - Griffith
City Lights - Chaplin
Sunrise - Murnau

Also skipping "The Great Train Robbery" would be blasphemy.

Also note Quo Vadis, the first feature lengtht movie (preceded "Birth of A Nation") out of Italy.

[–] dreaming (43) 7 years ago

Another Italian feature-length film made before birth of a nation (a racist and ignorant flick by any standard) is a historical epic called Cabreria. There's also a 1922 surrealist flick called The Seashell and the Clergyman, made by a French female director named Germaine Dulac---you can check them both out on the tube.

[–] dreaming (43) 7 years ago

And Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (which actually started out as a silent film,and was actually made before Universal's Dracula) but was independently made,and took a longer time to make. It's worth seeing not just because it's a good and truly genuinely eerie flick, but also as an example of how silent films were transitioning into sound flicks back then. It's also what I call a postmodern vampire film (one of the earliest ones, I believe) in the sense that it has some of the then-traditional trappings of an average vampire film of that era,but then it starts to deconstruct those same trappings before your very eyes,by not being a traditional vampire film at all. Which is why it was a flop in its time,but it's since been recognized as the true genuine work of art it really is. I think it would be fun to deconstruct it in a film class,lol.

[–] Strannger (2007) 7 years ago

Maybe show some Charlie Chaplin videos by his overreacting to natural phenomenon and everyday life.

[–] dreaming (43) 7 years ago

Also,WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES, by Benjamin Christiansen (a good silent and imaginative docudrama on the history of persecution for witchcraft) and TEN MINUTES TO LIVE (1930) by the pioneering black director Oscar Micheaux. This is another interesting example of a silent fim transitioning into a sound film----it's basically a group of stories---one involving gangsters and all that. It's a sloppy put-together flick,and not all that great,but it's worth studying just as an early example of black indie filmmaking. Another film called THE BLACK KING (1932) is another better made indie with an all-black cast that would definitely be worth studying in a class,because it's kimd of funny (it's not a comedy though) but it also deals with the theme of black pride in one's roots,which is unusual subject matter coming from the era it was made in.

[–] Cookie.L.A. (2117) 7 years ago

Like others here, I would add SUNRISE to the list. And GREED.

What's interesting about INTOLERANCE, to me, is that Mae Marsh gives quite a naturalistic performance in her segment. A lot of silent film acting now reads as very melodramatic and "fakey" but she's moving in that, in a very subtle way.

And I think INTOLERANCE is a better choice than BIRTH OF A NATION. You can encourage students to watch it on their own. It has brilliant technical advancements in it and of course it was a HUGE achievement in its time (both for the medium, and commercially) but the way that blacks are depicted in it, not to mention that they're played by whites in blackface, just makes it too insulting to show in class to a modern audience.
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