The Style of Silent Films

What started as a mere novelty with the invention of motion-picture cameras in the 1890s has since become a marker of different cultures worldwide. The art of filmmaking massively grown and innovated in the last 127 years since the first minute-long silent snippets of clips which back then involved little technique, no camera movement, and a big, wooden contraption that resembled a camera obscura. Silent films were captured in black and white due to how expensive it was to produce the variety of colour we see nowadays. But as technology has progressed through the years, creators of film challenged themselves, starting with films which only merely silently captured the movement of people moving for three seconds, to slowly introducing sound and then colour, to which gives us our multimillion blockbuster movies we all know and love.

What put together the silent films were un-synchronized recorded sound, especially as there was no spoken dialogue. The silent film era lasted from around 1895 to 1936. In silent films for entertainment purposes, the dialogue was transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards with a written indication of the plot or key dialogue so that in some way the audience would understand what was happening in the sketch.

The reason as to why there was little camera movement during the silent film era, was due to the fact of the equipment being too heavy to freely move, which meant that films also took longer to create, even if the films were much shorter.

Films nowadays, play on enormous screens in a variety of colour, cameras will also dramatically capture over expansive cityscapes that appear to have been decimated, and sound will captivate the room from all sides, thus making viewers question whether they’re merely watching a film or are right in the middle of it. Considering the incredible features of the cinema industry that we enjoy now, we must redirect our attention and give credit to the silent films which began this global sensation, without which the contemporary film industry is a perfect example of the technological and creative success that we see today.