His father left the family when he was a toddler and provided no financial support he spent his childhood in and out of workhouses and institutes for destitute children. Likely born in a Romani/Irish traveler halting site in England to a pair of music hall entertainers, Chaplin was raised in extreme poverty. A lot was gained in the transition to sound-knocking over the first domino in a chain that leads to Michael Keaton yelling, “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts!” in Tim Burton’s Batman, for one-but a lot was lost, too.īut there was one guy who kept defiantly making silent movies after everyone else had moved on: Charlie Chaplin. In the long term, an entire way of making movies was snuffed out more or less in an instant. In the short term, synchronized sound made it a lot harder for both cameras and actors to move: you don’t want the mics to pick up the noise of the camera, and you do want the mics to pick up the actors’ voices. There have been plenty of major changes in cinema since-color usurping black and white, the rise of digital over film, the birth and death of the Hays Code’s censorship rules-but none so fundamental to the very nature of the medium. There’s a purity to silent cinema, neither influenced by nor aspiring toward the conventions of theater or literature, and by 1927, silent filmmakers had nurtured the spark into a big, beautiful fire.īut then The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length synchronized sound film, came out. Watch Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and thrill with every sweeping move of the camera. Watch 7th Heaven, a delightful romcom that becomes a heartbreaking war drama, anchored in incredibly vivid and modern performances from Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, and try telling me that it’s worse off for not having dialogue.
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Buster Keaton made The General, still the greatest action movie of all time, and the whole thing is a chase, prefiguring Mad Max: Fury Road by nearly a century. Duffyīy the time The Jazz Singer pioneered synchronized sound in 1927, silent films just flew. A new era of corporate consolidation thereafter pushed women out. The nascent nature of cinema in the silent era saw many women gain positions of power as screenwriters, directors, and producers until the profit potential of film became clear to Wall Street investors. They weren’t making talkies without the talking: they were creating a whole new art form, a universal one that required no translation. Silent filmmakers molded the conventions with their own hands. Film was a newly born art, the rules of which had not yet been established. But silent cinema was a blindingly bright burst of technical innovation and artistic expression at the dawn of the century.
This makes it seem like silent films might, at best, be interesting curios. When your conception of silent movies is a jumble of myths and clichés, from women being tied to railroad tracks to people running from cops in fast motion, it can seem like silent films are talkies minus the talking: that before the innovation of sound, filmmakers tried their best with the paltry tools available, but then sound made way for what cinema was always supposed to be. And although Chaplin made plenty of sound films, ranging from the pretty great ( Limelight forever!) to the thoroughly mediocre ( A Countess from Hong Kong never), his silent films are the glittering gems in which his artistry shines the brightest. His films are not just beautiful, ambitious, funny, and moving: they’re key works of leftist, humanist art. In a world where discussion of old movies is laser-focused on whether something “holds up,” his work is not just worthwhile for modern audiences, but vital. during the Red Scare, spent decades of his career playing a man in poverty with boundless empathy, humor and humanity. He is the most iconic figure in classic cinema, one of the most iconic figures in any visual art, and was certainly one of the most beloved.Ī hundred years or so later, it’s fascinating to consider that The Tramp was a character living in extreme poverty and frequently homeless-that is, the kind of character who has almost no place in the biggest, most popular movies of our time, even as homelessness and extreme poverty are as endemic as ever.Ĭharlie Chaplin, a committed socialist who was kicked out of the U.S.
You can buy a poster of the Tramp in every pop-up poster shop in the world. Samuel Beckett doodled him in his manuscripts, and Pam on The Office dressed up as him for Halloween. His too-big trousers and too-tight jacket, his bowler hat, his toothbrush mustache, his cane, his too-big shoes pointed at right angles to his body: you can recognize him from his silhouette. Even if you’ve never seen a silent movie, you know Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp.
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