Silent Films



I find silent films are a little hard to watch.
I've seen most of Hitchcock's films and like them all, but the silent films were made when films hadn't yet become sophisticated as an art form. The acting is awkward, the pacing is slow, and Hitchcock hadn't yet perfected his craft.
The other problem is that the music (at least on the DVDs) is usually pretty bad.
All in all, The Manxman was a pretty silent good film though, the story was good.
I guess working in the silent era played a big part in Alfred Hitchcock developing his visual style.

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Silent films aren't always as slow as The Manxman. In fact, the slapstick comedies typically have a breakneck pace.

You're right about the music scores. With any luck Criterion will start releasing DVDs of Hitchcock's silent work. I can never find any of his silent films that have good scores. Usually the score is just something the distributor slapped on and wasn't even written for the film.


...Om

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I always wonder if the music in silent films are originally or not. I guess not.
By the way, this film is very good in his style and plot, remind me Erich von Stroheim's "Blind Husbands" (1919), I invited you to see this movie that was restored by the Library of Congress.

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Some of the silent films of the late 20s aren't truly silent: they were released with soundtracks that had music scores but no speaking. Most silent films really are silent, though. The movies were originally shown with live accompaniment, which might have meant anything from a single organist to a full orchestra.

As far as I know, this film was not released with a soundtrack. As for the release date (your question in another post): IMDb doesn't list the British release date at all: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020142/releaseinfo They should. This is a British film. I'll see if I can find it myself and submit it to the database.


...Om

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This movie date is 1928, and here in IMDB the release date in USA is 1929. It seems it wasn't release in Britain first??

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I agree that Hitchcock developed/matured as a filmmaker rapidly in the 30s, but I do not agree that silent films in general are necessarily not sophisticated, awkward, etc. Hitchcock's silent films, like his early talkies, are a bit hit and miss, in my opinion, but The Manxman is one of the better ones.


http://www.rateyourmusic.com/~JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies

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Agreed on both counts - that Hitchcock wasn't yet fully developed as an artist, and that silent films could still be extremely sophisticated.

Films like Sunrise, Strike, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Lonesome, The Crowd, Faust, Dr. Mabuse, The Man with a Movie Camera, The Gold Rush, The Docks of New York, Asphalt, Our Hospitality, etc. are more than enough proof that silent films could be just as artistically sophisticated as anything that came afterward. They're genuinely great works of art by intelligent and mature artists.

Yes, stylistically they're very different from most sound films, but on an artistic level they can still hold their own against anything made since.

the silent films were made when films hadn't yet become sophisticated as an art form.


I suppose on a clear day you can see the class struggle from here

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This film is the last one in a set of 15 early Hitchcock films I just bought, released by TGG direct (whoever that is...). They are generally good prints and the soundtrack i.e. dialogue is generally pretty intelligible (in the talkies, obviously.)

Interestingly, apropos of this thread, the other film on the same side of the disc is "The Farmer's Wife," and that film I found awful for three reasons, the (long) length, the distractingly odd "dialogue" on the title cards (and I can follow British idiom pretty well) and the AWFUL music they used.

I'm reasonably sure neither of the films' scores are original, but are someone's choices added somewhere along the long road from 1929 to my DVD. "The Manxman's" was very well chosen Classical music (I recognized a very slow rendition of Liszt's "Liebestraum" I think at one point) that always fit the mood and almost seemed to be written for the film, which made the film so much more watchable than "The Farmer's Wife," which mostly used the same 3 or 4 less serious pieces (more like pre-Mantovani light orchestral muzak) over and over mostly indiscriminately and even broke into a totally inappropriate rinky-dink bucolic novelty piece that was way too cutesy and distracting. (Although to be fair, I think I heard a bit of Bizet once too.)

Essentially, I agree that the score is a huge factor in how I perceive a silent film. What I really enjoy is a silent horror film with improvised pipe organ music, but if you can't give me that, have someone who's serious about music and film make some good classical choices and I'll be happy.

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I used my Mozart channel for background music and it was great. This was a very good film. Not hard to watch. Since there is no sound, I find lots of these silent movies fascinating because the acting is very physical. Eyes, facial expressions, body language, little things that I find really great.

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They are a bit more difficult but a lot of them are really good.

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