silent cinema: World Cinema Before The Coming Of Sound

Joel W Finler

Batsford Film Books, #20

n LIKE no other art form that has ever existed, silent cinema is complete - or, as the philistines would say, finished. When the talkies took over, it was almost as though literature or music had been replaced overnight by some undreamed-of technical development that shared only its raw materials (words, notes, light) with its predecessor.

Add to that the poignant reflection that the whole life of the silents (1896-1928, RIP) took place within the lifetimes of people still alive today, and books like this take on an unavoidably antiquarian, almost necrological, air.

The great thing that Joel Finler understands, you see, is that the silents were not a primitive ancestor of the talkies - indeed, early talkies were technically and artistically far less sophisticated - but a whole different medium. He demonstrates what makes the silents so different, so appealing: their universality, their far from artless simplicity, and their ability to engage the audience's emotions in a way that was less ''realistic'' but also less artificial than the comparatively stilted and stylised gab-fests that replaced them. Another distinction he makes clear is that class distinctions between movies, from art-house to blockbuster, came in only when the actors started talking. Before, there were just good movies and bad, and the highbrows and the lowbrows (by and large) watched the same ones: silents were the last truly egalitarian art.

Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of rare and evocative stills, this is a fine biography of the only art ever to have been both midwived and buried by technology.

Kenneth Wright