Silent Film

The era of silent film encompasses the thirty-five-year span between the initial development of film technology around 1894 and the widespread adoption of synchronized sound around 1929. It was a vitally important period in film history, both for the artistry of the films it produced and for the societal impact of the various institutions that developed to produce and display those films. Numerous films from the silent era are regarded as landmarks of world cinema, just as some of the stars and filmmakers that dominated the period remain among the most beloved and influential in film history. Despite the era’s vitality, for decades many scholars took a primitivist view of all but its latest films, regarding the bulk of the silent years mainly as the period of the cinema’s nascence. An evolutionary reading of film history often prevailed, one that saw interest or merit primarily in those aspects of silent film artistry and production that directly anticipated later cinematic developments. Beginning in the 1980s, a new generation of scholars came to fundamentally question this approach and began to see silent film as part of a distinct historical moment worthy of attention in its own right and less as a series of progressive steps on a predefined evolutionary ladder. One impact of this reevaluation has been the periodization of silent cinema into a series of distinct historical stages, each with its own prevailing stylistic features and reigning social dynamics. The details of such periodization can vary significantly between scholars, but one overarching effect is that the term “silent film” has become less frequently used by academic film historians as a viable catchall, given the term’s potential to elide significant differences across cinema’s first decades. Yet the study of filmmaking across the whole of the silent era, or substantial parts thereof, remains an important facet of film scholarship, and in these contexts the idea of a transhistorical silent cinema is still regularly employed. This article looks at those studies that take a broad view of the silent era, both those that predate the trend toward reperiodization and those more contemporary studies that look across a substantial portion of the three and a half decades of the silent years and encompass multiple historical and stylistic periods. In so doing, it aims to offer a starting point for readers wishing to better understand the rich world of filmmaking that existed before sound.