By Slanted Light

Yay! The 20s is one of my favorite decades! :D

I will insert a plug for silent movies here: complex as any modern film (and more complex than many), though often projected at wrong speeds and in need of restoration, silent movies often get unfairly maligned. There's a particular sensibility to them that is easy to understand with familiarity, and they open a window onto what 1920s culture was really like (while movies aren't historical documents, they do shed light on social expectations both physical and political).

They reflect the first peak in the art form - so many things in the genre taken for granted today first came up in the teens and twenties. And it really was a true peak: the movies made in around 1926-28, right before widespread retrofitting theaters for sound began, overall were technically unmatched for a good ten years. Even though every era has great and godawful films, I would put the top films from the silent era against any other period and have no concern for how they compared.

One note: Ernst Lubitsch's early film So This is Paris shows a jazz dance contest scene. That scene is incontrovertible proof that you can have dance in a silent film and depict the frenzy perfectly.

There's a really intriguing film: A Cottage On Dartmoor. In it, the protagonists (and, actually, the Bad Guy in the row behind) go on a date to see a double feature. The first film is a silent film; the second is one of those newfangled talkies. Is it incredibly fascinating to see the audience (and musicians') actions and reactions in the theater, and see the huge effect sound films must have made at the time.

...Boy, I didn't mean to go on quite like that. (And I'm out of practice writing about film.) But I do love me some silent film.