My favorite silent movie is wings staring clara bow I watch it when I was 13 or 14 and even with my sub-zero heart back then, the final plane fight was so tragic for me. Ps the Artist is a pretty good look one to
You actually got me to laugh to something from a silent film. Younger me would have never done that. Maybe I should experience what you and what your wife did for myself someday.
I can imagine the trombone probably gets a lot of key parts in comedies, haha. I got to help organize and perform something like this but with a score written by student composers for a silent horror film when I was getting my masters, and it was a ton of fun. How often do (or did, if you're no longer with the ensemble since it's been over a year) you put on these performances?
Brian Bethea Woah, that’s really neat! If you visit the Peacherine Ragtime Society Orchestras website, it lists their past performance schedule. I know things are crazy right now with the Pandemic, but I know they put on a lot of shows throughout, touring various locations. I was lucky enough to be on the Midwest tour when Austin was there!
Have you ever watched Tom & Jerry Cartoons? It's basically a silent cartoon because there is little to no Dialogue but we will never call it a 'silent film'. Cartoons even with dialogue is heavily dependant on the sound track and sound effects to present the performance to the audience.
Honestly why most cartoons are just verbal joke delivery systems now a days a la Family Guy and south park, cuz most cartoonists are too lazy/cheap to score the individual notes and beats of what's going on onscreen.
@@poego6045 Hence the contrast when you see something like the *Rabbit of Seville* it's all visual and musical. Looney Toons and Walt Disney had all sorts of segments like that within their shorts. But here's the key word, those were shorts, and a lot of that class of humor, wit, and presentation didn't carry over to television cartoons because lowbrow cheap humor done by the Flintstones changed the industry. By the way, the composer for Family Guy is fantastic and can certainly do what you desire, but the media format of cartoons normally don't allow for it. Batman the animated series is an anomaly when it comes to the music presentation.
If you have a proper sound system and a large screen, silent films can be easily enjoyed at home if they are accompanied by an appropriate soundtrack. I recently watched the restored HD version of Metropolis and watching it with surround sound was an awesome experience. I felt like a 1920s moviegoer.
When I was a kid my parents would take me to a pizza place called the Organ Grinder. This was back in the 60's and 70's. They would play silent movies with, you guessed it, an old, humungous organ, with sound effects. It made the experience so much fun. We would watch movies of Charlie Chaplin and Keystone Cops. It was wonderful! Such nice memories and it also gave me an appreciation for silent movies. I agree, to experience the true magic of silent movies you must have live music to go along with the show. Sadly the place closed years ago, derelict, run down then demolished. My memories of family, good pizza and fun times live on within me forever...
Ha! I didn’t think anybody actually thought silent movies were meant to be watched entirely silent? My friend’s grandfather who just died in his 90’s used to play the piano for the movie theater here in town. Pretty cool stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I know they have soundtracks, the few clips I've seen of them have music all the way through - but I don't think that was the actual point of the video. It's not the silence, because even the available modern versions of silent films have included soundtracks... It's the atmosphere of watching someone perform the music live... That seemed to have been what he was getting at.
In Britain some screenings of Interstellar had full orchestras conducted by Hans Zimmer himself. They were playing the soundtrack live while Interstellar was playing, and it was awesome. That's the only modern movie I can think of which combined a film and orchestra in one performance :( Edit: people from the comments say there are still many venues that perform live soundtracks while a movie is playing, like at the Hollywood Bowl. I need to check some out one of these days :)
It's pretty common movies to do that, though. I think there's a performance like that for most of the Harry Potter and Batman movies. Just depends if the orchestra is in town
@@AyAy008 I didn't see it personally, but damn I would've loved to. I live in southern California, so it was impossible for me to see something like that in Europe. I heard about it online, saw some videos of it, behind the scenes stuff, etc.
They actually do this kind of thing all the time, a month ago I saw Jurassic Park with a live orchestra, and before that Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Trek, Indiana Jones.... You just have to live somewhere where these events are common, or there’s a practicing symphony (usually a large city) It sucks that it’s not more widespread, but it still happens all the time- Star Trek Beyond premiered with the score played live, and that’s modern, so it still does happen
@@michaelhenry3234 The opposite is true, amphitheater means "both side theater", because normally in ancient times theaters made a half circle in front of the scene. An amphitheater makes a full circle around it. The famous Coliseum in Rome was actually called "Amphitheatrum Flavium". Now modern theaters generally have a rectangular shape, but they are definitely not amphitheaters, as you can only spectate from one side.
Actually he's being kind of meta. That frame is from Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr.," where Buster's character has a dream sequence inside a movie theater.
Additionally, early film theorists differentiate film from theatre by writing that the audience is supposed to talk during the showing. Back in the day people would just walk into a movie theatre halfway through the film and sit through the first half of the next showing until they saw the scene that was playing when they walked in
The other day, after class I was watching a silent movie with a bunch of classmates. Hearing my classmate talk about the film during the film wondering how they did x or y scene, or making funny comments about what was happening was so fun. I can't imagine myself enjoying the movie if everyone was religiously silent while watching it.
My dad, who was born in the 20s, used to do the same thing when he would take us to the movies in the 80s. Walk in 20 minutes late, we would see the whole movie, wait for it to start up again, walk out after 20 minutes into the second showing. It was a bit frustrating as a kid, but whatever. He would always just say: "this is where we came in" right before we would leave.
Got to see nosfetatu with the music done by a drummer making the various sound effects and a guitarist with a load of pedals to be able to mimic organs and other instruments, was incredible
I get it's technical innovations and I'm glad it exists, but the story sucks. Everyone is like "no, don't go there" from multiple locations and the guy is just like "lol what does an entire freakin' village and a random inn know? I'ma do it anyway"
This makes a lot of sense. This art was made for a platform that no longer exists - a movie theater with live music. We're butchering these films by watching them the way we do. Ironically, it takes a new modern piece of technology to recapture this. VR can put you directly into a filled theater with live music and the film playing. 1930's limited tech needs 2018's tech to be re-experienced properly. Or of course, this amazing orchestra. The show looked amazing!
ゆい714 there’s numerous theaters around the country-movie palaces of the 1920s-which have survived the modernization movement of the middle twentieth century. To see a silent film with live theater organ accompaniment isn’t too difficult and expensive these days... one must simply learn about these theaters to open up the opportunity to view these movies as intended. I volunteer at a small town theater, medium large in size, essentially a movie palace. It was built in 1928, and was affected by the modernization movement. It still stands, though it’s renovations have defaced the former beauty of the theater. The theater’s organization is restoring it to its original design. I’m helping to install the theater pipe organ, parts of which were made by Wurlitzer in 1917, and other parts manufactured a few years later. It is a Frankenstein’s Monster of sorts, but it is a gorgeous instrument. I’ve found that the theater organ is the biggest thing that draws me to this kind of hobby, but I cannot say that the other parts of the experience-the films, and the theater itself-are any less interesting to me.
My church's music director performs silent movie scores with the movie playing in the sanctuary. Check around at any churches with organs (or a robust music program & culture) in your area, or community centers
3D is exactly like 2D except Chris Pratt’s face is popping out of the screen. It doesn’t add much. I’m sure it can be used creatively but it isn’t widely adopted and doesn’t change the overall experience like moving from silent films too live dialogue. The closest comparison of 2D and 3D I can up with is the change from black and white to color, though 3D isn’t as meaningful or obviously better.
@@thesamuelbutler yes, i think black and white to colors adds up SO much more in the movie industry, do you know the song "Colour" by Mnek? That's what the feeling of coloured movie in early ages lol what
I'm genuinely surprised that this isn't common knowledge. My secondary school taught us this in pretty much the very first term of year seven, and then we had to act out our own plays in the same style!
YES. I saw one of my state's university bands perform some live music to silent film scenes last year, and the reaction of the audience and the timing of the music is what really brought it to life! Then I sort of forgot about silent films until I was reintroducrd to them this summer. My library had a showing with live music - just a piano, but it was really cool. I've been watching a lot of them on my own with recorded music, and I still find them enjoyable and I get really invested in them, but nothing beats seeing them live, how they were intended to be viewed! I was so excited when I got notified of this video. Like, my favorite youtuber talking about my favorite thing? Made my day.
I don't think it's the suspense that's the impactful part of live music. It's that you can see it being made. Recorded music just plays and over time you become desensitized to it because it feels like an abstract concept that has no real world origins. But when you watch people play live you are in the moment and experiencing the physicality of music. Humans are tactile creatures. We need to see and feel with our own eyes to get the actual feel for the emotion especially in this age of streaming where music is detached from the physicality of the past. That's why the live music improves 'silent' films so much.
I agree, but I think the biggest thing that differentiates recorded vs. live is timbre. There’s just no replicating the sound of physically being there at the source of the sound. Recordings just can’t do it justice in my opinion.
@@KaliTakumi That, and live shows are 'surround sound' in the truest sense. Pure sound comes directly from the instruments to your earholes! That certainly adds something that even a fancy spatial stereo recording can't capture.
You did not know that silent movies were never silent? Send a note to your teachers so that they know they missed conveying that. One of the reasons why Metropolis is as complete as we can make it is because we had the original score and could look for missing scenes.
They should do livestreams of orchestra live when they play silent films. It’d be brilliant of they recorded a film soundtrack live, with all their instruments, filming a video with accompanying audio preferably as a high-quality FLAC file, so someone at home could watch a film properly with the orchestra, and the sound and music. But this does seem like something I’d enjoy, if only there was something like this in the UK.
So many folks won't try to expand their aesthetic criteria once they're set (in stone so it would seem) As a serious Jazz Pianist/composer I am greatful that a few like you still exist.
Funny you say that because Le Voyage dans la Lune was the first film I read about and watched that got me into film making. Seeing that huge face in the moon the moment you open 1001 movies to see before you die just did it for me.
NOOOO😭 that movie turned the story into a joke. The book has amazing illustrations and a story that makes sense. Do yourself a favor and read the Marvelous Invention of Hugo Cabret!
There are theaters like those all over the US. I'm in Michigan and I see movies like this with original organ music in an old theater in Ann Arbor, with modern live accompaniment at a modern art museum in Grand Rapids, and even with a live choir at the Detroit Institute of Art.
I've had the pleasure of watching a pristine print of Chaney's "Phantom of the Opera" accompanied by a full symphony orchestra and live opera singers, using the film's original score.
this is so good! I'm so tired of silent films on RU-vid being accompanied by a modern soundtrack that doesn't emphasize the film for this same reason. These films need a soundtrack to really experience them :)
wow, funny, I'm actually in the middle of a French film course, so I've been watching a whole bunch of The Lumiere, Melies, Feulliade, early impressionist films, etc. I started thinking silent films were boring, but I've come to see there are some fantastic works without sound. Le Voyage de la lune is a great example of just fun and Whimsy on the screen.
Tbh I clicked it because I thought it was a vox video. Both the title and thumbnail are very Vox-y. Nevertheless the video lived up to my expectations and I didn’t notice it wasn’t vox for at least 2 minutes *ILLUSION 100*
I've never experienced a silent film in complete silence... Who did that to you? Did you find the original film reels with no context and just try to watch them unaccompanied?
My grandfather took me to a series of screenings like this when I was very young in the early 1980s, it was a seriously magical event... I’m really glad people are keeping the tradition alive as I’d really like to experience it again !!
You know what I want to see? A modern day silent film with modern style music, I don't think I would like it, but I just want to see how it would look like
I must admit that, because of Hugo Cabret and my artsy friend, I once sat down on a Friday night and watched A Voyage to the Moon and An Andalusian Dog.
Now I really want to watch Nosferatu like this. That is the only silent film I have ever seen that still hit the mark for me. Like watching it I was like you know, that is genuinely scary. I wonder what it would be like if it was watched the way it was meant to be originally.
Here in Austin the Alamo Theater showed it with an original live score by (I think) Golden Arm Trio. It was available on VHS that way for awhile, but that again loses the point presented here...
I own it on DVD. I can’t imagine that it is anywhere near the same experience when watched on the computer screen but I was really impressed with how effective it is still all of these years later.
Glad you've come round. 😀 I have had the wonderful opportunity to see "Napoleon", "The Crowd", "Ben Hur" and "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" accompanied by an eighty piece orchestra. Other films I have seen accompanied by a Wurlitzer organ. An absolutely amazing experience! I notice though that you concentrate on the comedy films - the dramas were great too. (I don't know about the orchestra being on stage where you were, with the sheet behind them? I would have found this distracting.)
I mean... Mr Bean is kinda like a silent film in a way... or a much better term, a TV show... and with addition of audiences laughing in the background :v This is just my opinion though...
True! I always felt similarly about Benny Hill’s stuff. The slapstick, exaggerated expressions, limited dialogue etc definitely give off that silent film vibe.
Film at its core is the ability to visually tell stories, and silent movies are pure examples of the success of that and it has carried through. Whenever I judge or review a film I look at whether or not people would understand the gist of the story without any dialogue. That’s something they taught me at film school. The best examples of this are shows like Mr Bean where the lack of any dialogue has allowed it to appeal to people internationally over shows which don’t.
My child (a college music major) and I were discussing musicals last night, and suddenly the realization hit me that LIVE MUSICIANS WERE PERFORMING AT EVERY SILENT FILM SHOWING ACROSS THE COUNTRY!! What a wonderful thing that was. Thank you for posting this. Now I want to see those films in that setting.
What's great about this idea is that anyone can score these movies. Many silent greats can have a dozen scores to their names, of wildly varying era and genre. I watched Man with a Movie Camera with the electronic jazz soundtrack released in 2003 by the Cinematic Orchestra, and as a jazz fusion fan, I thorougly enjoyed the experience.
Wow, what a revelation. It puts The Jazz Singer, that early non-silent film, in fresh perspective knowing how vital the off-screen musicians were to the expectations of a good movie.
The Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA does this occasionally! I actually unfortunately have never attended though, and my ex works there so I can't go again 😕. I actually do enjoy watching silent films at home by myself though lol. But it is always better with a crowd.
Don't think an experience should be ruined just because you used to date someone who works there. Their professionalism should put aside their feelings.
Wear a hat. No joke. I was able to sneak into a friend's theatrical work for years without him knowing. Because I wore a hat. There wasn't even that many people most of the time.
I was lucky enough to attend an International Silent Film Festival here in the Philippines. Some had orchestras, others had modern rock bands. Even the choice of music interpretation was an art, I loved it.
Kyoumimasu Depends which ones you want to see. There's a fantastic new restoration of Metropolis, box sets of Buster Keaton, and individual films. Laurel and Hardy are of course brilliant. I've seen most of their 20s and 30s films and sometimes forget that an individual film was silent as those were just as good as their talkies. In the UK we had a public service channel that showed loads of silent films on Sunday afternoons, before it went over to endless reality shows. Douglas Fairbanks Sr's version of "The Thief of Baghdad" is amazing, as is Lon Chaney's 1925 "Phantom of the Opera". Lilian Gish made Broken Blossoms, I enjoyed it though some parts were a bit mawkish, but I recall her movie "The Wind" was very good. It just depends what you're into, genre-wise.
alvallac21 Bloody auto-correct again. Can't ways tell how stupid it's making me look as I do RU-vid on my phone. Nearly forgot - thanks for letting me know.
I love silent films! They’re awesome! Metropolis is one of my favourite movies! I definitely recommend the Giorgio Moroder version. It has an original score of 80s music and I think it’s easier for modern audiences to get into. It’s great, and it’s also short.
One of the most fascinating things to me about music in the silent era was that oftentimes at smaller theatres there was no sheet music! Pianists were given a lead sheet which listed the times they had to play music that evoked a certain mood. Like "1:04 Emotional, sad." A lot of what made 1920's musicians that worked in film great was their ability to improvise!!
As someone who's into historically informed performance, I raised an eyebrow at 4:30 when you called them authentic period instrument. Maybe I missed something, but from what I can see those are modern instruments (not that there's a huge difference). For example, I can see that the clarinet has a left hand E flat lever, which is a more recent development. Still, this is really cool.
Nice and well produced video, but it doesn’t sound (no pun intended) like you really gave silent film a chance. Watching four of the most obvious and copied silent films isn’t really giving 30 years of silent film history from around the world a fair shot. There are many other kinds of silent films that are just as fun and compelling as today’s film-some of the creepiest and most suspenseful films I’ve seen have been silent. There’s more to silent film than the American slapstick/ragtime shows, many of those were just simple programmers for kids. That’d be like thinking Pixar is the epitome of modern cinema. The gripping hysteria of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” the melancholic horror of “The Phantom Carriage;” one of Hitchcock’s favorites of his own movies was his early silent thriller, “The Lodger.” Also recommend some King Vidor, Victor Sjöström, early Yosujirō Ozu, Carl Theodor Dreyer, F.W. Murnau. Many silent films do great at home, especially with how many good silent horror films there are. Though of course all movie are better in theaters. Again, nice video, but silent films can still be just as entertaining and great as Interstellar, they just might be harder to find!
Tyler Young I thought the exact same thing! I don’t love the slapstick comedy commonly associated with silent film but I don’t like that humor in sound films either so why would I?! I love all other genres of silent film though.
Thank you so much in “enlightening” me as to the splendor of silent movies !! Other than watching and enjoying Metropolis and Nosferatu, I firmly and adamantly refused to watch any other silent films no matter how famous and/or well done they were. I think one reason is that I’m a very detailed oriented person and I was “annoyed” with the few printed words as opposed to the sometimes lengthy conversation I was seeing. I wanted a more descriptive narrative. After watching your interesting video I now realize my thinking about watching silent movies was all wrong. As an aside -- years ago, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, I attended a Halloween evening’s performance of a horror silent movie with music accompaniment by Philip Glass. It came to a sudden end when thunder sounded in the distance followed by lightning. Again -- thanks a lot for awakening my new found love of silent movies.
Our local cinema did this on Thursday nights with a four piece group in the 70's. But the band were off to the side of the screen so they would'nt distract you from the film. Great days. I saw so many Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd films.
"Watch them like this!" You're telling us to see a specific orchestra, on tour in a specific area of the US? Not very helpful - slightly misleading title.
I was a bit annoyed by that too. You're telling us to skip those versions we can find online and wait until some arthouse theater troupe springs up nearby.
That part is wrong...or misleading. I saw Metropolis at a theater with a pipe organ which was fantastic. Theaters with organs or orchestra pits are your best bets to be able to see silent movies with live music. Check your local area. If the theater has an organ and you're in the US, check with the AGO ( American Guild of Organists) local chapter.
I've been watching silent films since I was a teenager. Every time I watched one I imagined being in a theater with a live orchestra or with love piano accompaniment. Maybe it's because I'm a musician or because I love History so much. It wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I finally saw a silent with live musical accompaniment. I'm happy you finally get why these films are so wonderful!
It's great to know people are still preserving this form of entertainment and bringing it back. My primary school was steadily losing money every year and we could never hold a music teacher for more than a year, so it's only by fluke that I learned that "silent" films were always accompanied by live music as our teacher demonstrated with an old film reel and school projector while she played the piano. But this makes sense. Even today, the biggest, most expensive movie showings happen with this set up. Like when Hans Zimmer actually did a live accompaniment to a showing of Interstellar. We forget that some things don't go out of style for a reason.
Funnily enough, this reminds me of the now famous scene in Doom Eternal trailer. Music and almost completely silent charachters, yet already heralded by some as one of the most powerful cutscene ever.
It's actually really hard for me to imagine watching Buster Keaton's The General and finding it boring, in theater or on couch or otherwise. I've watched quite a number of silent films recreationally, not just out of a snobbish sense of elitism but genuinely. On the other hand, many many films on netflix I've sat down and watched and found too boring or too bad to finish. Of course, the reason why is obvious. It is a lot easier to know which silent films are good than it is to know which modern movies on some streaming service are good. Silent films are filtered through time. But point being, I've pretty much had opposite experience as this video. Not saying there's anything wrong with that. Different strokes for different folks.
I have never thought or imagined of such a way to watch or more precise to enjoy silent films. This definitely did change my view and made me appreciate the silient movie much more than before. Thank a lot for this.
I still maintain my best experience with a movie was in a crowded lecture hall watching the 1930s version of To Be Or Not to Be, the movie was one of the funniest I'd ever seen watching it with a crowd. We also watched some Chaplin shorts too and it really added to the experience
He said that listening to recorded music for the film and it being performed live are two different things, like that's the point of 2/3 of the entire video?
I've tried watching B&W films with Spotify open, but my choice of music in real time (when I have not seen the film before) is less than wonderful- and often accidentally comical). This recreated theater experience is amazing! So cool that people do this! Great video. I learned a lot. Thank you!
I always wondered if they had someone reading out the title cards or description cards to the audience. Certainly in the 1920s literacy was lower around the world and they are often written like theatrical lines for a narrator.
Silent films sometimes had full narration, much more than just reading the on-screen cards. It was especially common during the silent film era in Japan, narrators called "benshi" were almost universal.
Can't tell a story without using words? Boy, you'd hate being an animator, we're all about telling stories strictly visually, cause lip sync takes forever.
I’m glad you found your way to the experience!!!! I highly recommend finding a “Music Box” theatre or something of the like in/near your area. I was BLESSED to see a film narrated by Crispin Glover, also Isabella Rossellini- with a LIVE folly group and an “actual castrato” with less-than full orchestra which made the film INCREDIBLE! Also, Mr. Glover’s live reading with his own books & films? Unmatched if you have the understanding of the beauty and not to see where it is construed as “bizarre.” What he does is actually brilliant & so compassionate in it’s function and rationale as a film.Truly works of art, the true understanding of the “human condition.” Once experiencing it? You understand why it will never be available on dvd or streaming & why it is only a live tour. Chicago misses him, truly.
I ADORE Buster Keaton’s films. I find them genuinely funny and his gags and film-making techniques were so innovative and unexpected it really makes me giggle. Thanks for the video! Great :)
@@parachute3754 Interstellar is fine, but not as good as the films that practically *birthed* cinema and in my opinion are more entertaining. You don't have to like chaplin, or any silent movie since they are hard to get into. But seriously...
@Rosencrantz How is Interstellar "better in almost every way". Interstellar may be prettier to look at, but how is it more effective in its story telling, cinematography, and overall filmmaking. In fact, what classics are you talking about for that matter? Are you trying to say that Interstellar is more effective in its filmmaking than a Hitchcock, or Kubrick movie? Sorry, but if you're going to claim something as bold as "Interstellar is better in every way compared to the classics", I'm going to have some problems. Is Interstellar such a masterpiece that no other movie made 50 years ago can compare?
@Rosencrantz I'm simply looking at the statement, "interstellar is better in almost every way compared to the classics". I find that statement to not only be very disagreeable, but incredibly broad. In what way is Interstellar "better in every way" than classics like The General or City Lights? It looks nicer, but what about the story, the way it's told, the effectiveness of the film making. Rather, is it a problem that OP thinks those movies are better than Interstellar?
The score is quite important to me in silent movies and especially with Chaplin who later did scores for all of his movies by himself (and some help). That makes them all have a unique feeling because the style of music is always similar...and I really love his music, it adds so much to the movies.
Silent movies were the best I watch them all the time while I'm working as a security officer. I love all the movie starts to many to name all I love them all.
The thing with silent cinema is that it's way past its time, in a reality where movie making is so different and audiences expect certain things that these movies simply cannot provide. Factor in the need for more frequent stimulation because of lower attention spans and a different approach to information gathering and they become even more relatively boring and "flawed". You have to accept certain things when visiting the past in order to enjoy your stay, something which understandably a lot of people can't do and aren't into.
Man the intro about how you feel about silent films is like you...well, you movied me. You made a video that told me exactly how I feel without me even knowing that it was how I felt. Haven't watched the rest of the vid at the time of this comment so I hope I get as much from the rest of it as you seem to have gotten from the concept!
