Silent Era

Silent films were never really silent. They played to live music, sometimes a single piano and sometimes a full orchestra, and audiences read the story off intertitles, faces and movement. This section covers the features, comedies and stars of the decades before synchronized sound took over at the end of the 1920s, and how to watch them today without it feeling like homework.

New to the era? Silent movies: where to start deals with frame rates, scores and intertitles, and silent comedy compares Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd as a first step. Silent film stars follows the careers that rose and fell when the talkies arrived.

The section also looks closely at single early films, including the 1913 David Copperfield, and is careful to say what survives and what does not. A large share of silent features is lost, so where the record is incomplete, the articles say so.