Anybody ever watched a silent movie?

[Brigid]

I'm watching "Orphans in the Storm," from 1922. It stars Lillian and Dorothy Gish as two sisters, Henriette and Louise, from the French countryside caught up in the French Revolution. When their parents die in an epidemic and Louise is blinded, they go to Paris in hopes of finding a cure for Louise. They get separated (it's a long story), and now Henriette, while looking for Louise, has fallen in love with the son of a count. Meanwhile, Louise has fallen into the hands of an evil con man who is forcing her to use her blindness to beg on the streets. All the while, of course, the French Revolution is getting ready to explode. I love old movies!

[onehandle]

1. Silent films are physical poetry. nt

[Denninmi]

2. I watched a lot of 1920s Harold Lloyd comedies in my college days.

This guy was brilliant. Physical comedy with a lot of stunts that were all real without any safety equipment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lloyd

[valerief]

3. Check out Broken Blossoms. I saw it years ago, but it came to mind when I noticed it was on TCM this

morning (but I had to leave for work).

[HopeHoops]

4. Yeah, with the piano music and everything. Some of them are really good - all body language.

[femmocrat]

5. TCM is featuring Lillian Gish movies today.

http://www.tcm.com/summer/#/lillian-gish

[ohiosmith]

6. Lots. Favorite is Abel Gance's 1927 Napoleon with a running time of 5 1/2 hours.

[hifiguy]

7. Oh yes. Saw some silent comedies with live

theater organ accompaniment in my youth. Mostly Laurel & Hardy at their peak. I've seen Nosferatu and Birth of a Nation as well. Great stuff.

Even better with a good theater organist.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. If you ever get a chance to see "The Passion of Joan of Arc," make a special effort to do so!

The director was a stickler for historical accuracy, so his actors performed without make-up. This gives the movie a timeless quality, and Maria Falconetti, who plays Joan, does an amazing job of letting you know what is going through Joan's mind during her trial. (Amazingly, this was Falconetti's only movie, although she was a highly regarded stage actress in France, and she died in obscurity in the 1940s.) You get the distinct impression that Joan is on trial for being an uppity woman as much as for claiming to have received messages from saints and angels (which actually wasn't an unusual thing to claim in those days).

This film was thought to be lost until the 1990s, when a complete print was found in, of all places, a storage closet in a Norwegian mental hospital. TCM showed it shortly after that.

There are no battle scenes here. Joan has already been captured and is being interrogated when the film opens.

You wouldn't think that a silent movie based on the transcripts of an actual trial would be riveting, but it is.

[Brigid]

16. Wow. I have to see this one.

I wonder how a print of it ended up in a storage closet in a mental hospital in Norway. I will look and see if TCM has it available on their website. Coincidentally, I go to St. Joan of Arc Church.

[RebelOne]

9. This one is my favorite.

The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino. He was the heartthrob of the silents. But he died young.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Valentino

[hunter]

10. If you have a fairly fast internet connection check out archive.org

http://archive.org/details/movies

[MiddleFingerMom]

14. Incredible site -- I go there for their MASSIVE collection of free streaming Old Time Radio programs

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There and here: http://otr.net/
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I go to sleep listening to those old shows more often than to music now... though lately
I've been putting on nature sounds -- espec. the combination of lake loons, distant train
whistles, thunder and crackling fires.
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[surrealAmerican]

11. Mostly comedies.

I'm particularly fond of Buster Keaton.

[FSogol]

12. Yes, I love silent films.

Check out these silent ones:

"The Lodger" by Alfred Hitchcock.
"Wings" won best picture in 1928(?)
Anything with Buster Keaton

[Paladin]

13. "Metropolis" (1927) Is a True Work Of Art. (nt)

[derby378]

20. I have a version of METROPOLIS that's about 97% restored

Turns out a 16mm print was found somewhere in the archives of Buenos Aires. It was in bad shape - some segments simply disintegrated - but a German-led consortium of Metropolis fans managed to save the rest and work it into an almost-complete run of the original 1927 release.

I can't believe humanity was so close to losing this gem.

[graywarrior]

15. My boss and I watch them all the time at work

[Ava]

17. I've had to watch Sunrise far too many times in school

Since I'm a film major I've had to take cinema studies courses where we watch and analyze films. I've taken several, and I don't regret it, but I've had to watch Sunrise waaaay too many times. It isn't one of the best silent films in my opinion anyways, and having to watch the full movie that many times is frustrating.

A silent film that I really like is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It's an underwatched one in my opinion and has some really really stunning images. My absolute favorite, though, is Man with a Movie Camera. It's absolutely mind-bogglingly before it's time and visually extremely captivating and powerful. Dziga Vertov is amaze-balls. One of Hitchcock's earliest films is a good one too - The Lodger.

[Major Nikon]

18. I watched "The Passion of the Christ" on mute. Does that count?

To be fair I was drunk and I think I passed out before the good parts.

[El Supremo]

19. Certainly!

I love The General, Ben Hur a Tale of the Christ and any Chaplin. Broken Blossoms and The Wind (both with Lilian Gish) are very good too.