Flashback: Silents, Please

   When my colleague Dr. Sporgersi and I were, like, 13, we had these fat-tire, one-speed bicycles that we'd ride all over Madison. One of our favorite places to bike to was the public library just off the Square, and our favorite place to hang out in the library was where the books about movies were. 
    Two books especially caught my attention back then. Both were oversized coffee-table books with lots of pictures in them. One was titled simply "The Movies", and covered the history of film from the beginning to 1956, the year of the book's publication. The other was "Classics of the Silent Screen" by the longtime New York television host and silent film buff Joe Franklin. 
    At about the same time, Ernie Kovacs was on TV - when he wasn't doing one of his marvelously weird comedy specials - with a weekly program called "Silents Please", in which he'd introduce a movie from the teens or '20s, cut down from feature length to about 25 minutes, with a voiceover narration to explain the story you were seeing on the screen. 
    Looking back on it now, it was a horrible way to watch a movie, but even in such a mutilated form, I was fascinated by what I saw. That was where I first saw John Barrymore in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", Lon Chaney in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", Valentino in "The Son of the Sheik" and the Gish sisters in "Orphans of the Storm". I'd been watching movies my whole admittedly short life, but these films weren't like anything else I'd seen. 
    They still aren't, and I still love watching silent films. 
    Like early live television, silents covered a relatively brief time frame - roughly from the turn of the century through the 1920s. Viewed today, the earliest silents look primitive and quaint. The sets are spare. The camera's mostly static. The acting owes way too much to the conventions of 19th-century melodrama. But the medium evolved rapidly over 20 or 30 years, as production values became more elaborate, cinematography became more expressive, and acting (some of it, anyway) became more natural and restrained. It could be argued (as Charlie Chaplin said) that silents were just getting good when the silent era came to a close. 
    The end was abrupt. 
    Warner Brothers released Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer" (not a very good movie) in 1927. By 1930, everybody in Hollywood except Chaplin had switched to sound, and even he was composing a musical score for his next picture, "City Lights".
    While it's our good fortune that so many silent movies have survived, it's a cultural tragedy that so many more (about 90 percent, by some estimates) are lost. These days, not many casual viewers would bother to look at silent movies at all. But those who manage to track them down can see an art form grow from a low-end novelty to (in some cases) greatness, right before their eyes. 
    For anybody with a passing interest in silent films, or cinema history in general, here are ten titles worth looking for:

                    "A Trip To the Moon" (1902)
                    "The Great Train Robbery" (1903)
                    "Intolerance" (1916)
                    "Tumbleweeds" (1925)
                    "Metropolis" (1926)
                    "The General" (1926)
                    "The Black Pirate" (1926)
                    "Napoleon" (1927)
                    "The Circus" (1928)
                    "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928)

   And if anybody out there should come across a dusty print of "London After Midnight" in an attic or a closet or a vault somewhere, let the rest of us know.