The Golden Age of Silent Film ― The Birth of Hollywood

There was an age when an art that needed no words made people the world over laugh and weep all at once. The figures on the screen uttered not a single word, yet with one small gesture, one face that suddenly clouded over, audiences rejoiced and felt their hearts grow warm. Soundless film ― silent film ― was by no means an immature cinema. Rather, it was precisely because it could not rely on voice that the craft of conveying story through image and motion alone was honed to its very limit; it was one complete and finished form of expression. In Episode 2, we trace the kings of comedy who colored that golden age, and the path by which a small town on the West Coast transformed into the world’s capital of film.

In the Five-Cent Darkness, People Gathered

In the process by which cinema grew from a spectacle into popular entertainment, the appearance of ‘a place where one could watch films with ease’ was indispensable. At the dawn of the twentieth century, small permanent movie houses appeared one after another in cities across the United States. Around 1905, one house that won acclaim in Pittsburgh, because it could be entered for a single five-cent coin, was called a ‘nickelodeon,’ combining the word for the coin with the word for a theater. It was a simple space, no more than chairs lined up in a narrow room, but its arrangement ― cheap, short, and enjoyable over and over with changing programs ― captured people’s hearts at once.

The nickelodeon was an entertainment open even to workers and immigrants. Even if one did not understand the language, so long as one watched the motion and expressions on the screen, the story came across. To be enjoyable across barriers of literacy and language was a great strength of silent film. In the crowded houses, live performance on piano or organ added music in time with the scenes, and in some regions a person whose role was to explain the images and narrate the story would guide the audience. The soundless screen was by no means left in silence; it was a lively place wrapped in music and narration.

As the number of houses grew, so too did the need for ever more films to screen. Short spectacles were not enough, and audiences came to want longer, more absorbing stories. Cinema shifted its weight from rare scenes of a few dozen seconds toward ‘story films’ with rising and falling plots. As the three bonds ― making films, distributing them, and screening them ― grew thick, cinema began to take on clearly the outline of an industry.

Laughter That Needs No Words ― The Age of the Comedy Kings

When one speaks of the golden age of silent film, comedy is the first thing to come to mind. Laughter that needed no words crossed borders with the greatest of ease. One who stood at its summit was Charles Chaplin, born in Britain. The baggy trousers, the tight jacket, the perched little bowler hat, and the bamboo cane ― the figure of that ‘Tramp gentleman’ was beloved by audiences the world over. In his first feature, ‘The Kid,’ released in 1921, through the story of a poor man raising an orphan, he wove sorrow into laughter and warmth into the comical. This style, which moved the heart even while being comedy, showed that film could rise above mere amusement.

Another not to be forgotten is Buster Keaton. Called ‘The Great Stone Face’ for an expressionlessness that never altered no matter what befell him, he thrilled audiences with acrobatic, body-thrown performances. As the wall of a collapsing house topples toward him, he passes unharmed through the frame of an open window and stands untouched ― even such perilous scenes, it is said, he performed himself. If Chaplin honed a laughter that appealed to feeling, Keaton, it is sometimes said, perfected a laughter of precisely assembled motion and contraptions. Where one places the higher estimation differs from person to person, but few would dispute that the two, each by his own road, pushed comedy film to the heights of art.

A West Coast Town Became the Capital of Film

The place where this film industry gathered was a region called Hollywood, on the outskirts of Los Angeles on the West Coast of the United States. As to why it was this land, several reasons are told. There was the stable sunlight, with many clear days through the year, suited to outdoor filming. There was the variety of scenery near at hand, from desert to seashore to mountain ranges. And there was the fact that wide tracts of land could be had comparatively cheaply, among other reasons. Around 1911, one of the first permanent studios is said to have opened in Hollywood, and thereafter the bases of filmmaking gathered in this land one after another.

Around 1912, the sources of film companies that would later wield great influence were born one after another. A single company would handle everything from production to distribution to exhibition, hold actors and directors under exclusive contract, and mass-produce works ― such a system gradually began to take shape. The studios, much like factories, turned out films according to plan. The age in which the existence of the star drew the audience, and that name supported the box office, also sprouted around this time. Cinema was changing from the handiwork of craftsmen into an organized great industry.

In 1923, a large sign of great white letters was erected on a hill in Hollywood. Originally a real-estate advertisement to market a new residential district, it is said to have read ‘HOLLYWOODLAND’ at first, and to have been meant to stand for only a short while. Yet the sign was left in place without being removed, and in time its ending fell away to become its present form, and somewhere along the way it came to be cherished as a sign symbolizing the very capital of film. A momentary piece of advertising transforming into the symbol of an age ― the course of it seems, too, to tell of the strange momentum of the land called Hollywood.

The film that had no voice had reached one summit in this golden age. Chaplin’s melancholy, Keaton’s marvelous skill ― without words, they bound the world as one. Yet technology knows no standing still. In time, the day when the screen would sound forth the human voice and music themselves was drawing very near. It was, for cinema, a great blessing, and at the same time the beginning of a violent change that would shake to its very roots all that had been built in this age.