Wired Articles on Silent Films

Yes, this article is here for a reason. Silent film can allow low budget directors a chance to tell a story, and tell it in a unique way, especially if they don't think their actors are really up to par for a script's dialog. Also, It can be used just as a way to work on methods and to do a fun film project. I remember in Austin the Alamo Draft House doing silent films with love scores as well. Anyway, here is the story:

Filmmakers Seek Future in Past

By John Brownlee
02:00 AM Feb, 23, 2007

Silent film was never meant to be silent. It was meant to be heard. Orchestras swelled in the pits of the cinemas, crescendoing their strings when Chaplin's Tramp gave his girl a daisy, or smashing their cymbals when Buster Keaton fell down a flight of stairs.

So, when the modern silent Passio premieres Friday at the Adelaide Film Festival in Australia, it will be accompanied not by the spooling whir of film feeding through the projector of an otherwise quiet theater but by a symphony orchestra and dozens of singers.

The work is one of the most recent and ambitious in a revival of silent film -- a medium killed nearly 80 years ago by advances in sound recording. Over the past two decades, artists have explored the legacy of silent cinema, not as a dusty anachronism but as a rich medium from which lessons about music, performance and art can be drawn.

Prolific modern-day directors like Guy Maddin work largely in the medium of silent film to convey postmodern tales. Silent film festivals are held annually around the world: from San Francisco to Kansas, from Italy to Australia. The Chilean subways are plastered with thousands of still images, coming to life as contiguous strips of film as the trains rumble by. And numerous groups throughout the United States have been inspired to compose and perform live original scores to silent film.