Why I Love Silent Movies: A Personal Essay - Part One

Pictures That Move #17

Something a bit different this week! I thought I’d write a personal essay. It isn’t something that comes naturally to me, as even my therapist said recently, I spend all my sessions talking about others, never myself. So, I’ve decided to give it a go and grow as a writer, as a person.

People always ask me: Martyn, why do you blather on about silent films so much? Okay, that’s not true, nobody cares but work with me here.

Because this is going to be loooong. Eugene O’Neill long. Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) long. So long, in fact, I’ve had to split it up into two parts like Fritz Lang’s epic Die Nibelungen films.

Preamble to the Main Event

I launched my Substack last year in February because one of my areas of interest (read: hyper-fixations) is silent movies. I am incredibly knowledgeable about this era of cinema and yet I never get to write about it professionally (get the violins out, haha). But in all seriousness, my love for silent films knows no bounds. I mean, I travelled all the way from London to Los Angeles just to see a nondescript alley off Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. Okay, I used the visit to see family and friends who live in Arizonia (Jackie Daytona reference) and California, but my true fixation (sorry, my lovely family and friends), was I had to see the alley where Charles Chaplin filmed The Kid (1921), the very spot where Buster Keaton grabbed onto a passing automobile in Cops (1922) and Harold Lloyd (not a favourite) filmed a scene from Safety Last! (1923).

For months, it was all I thought about. That trip and my now-darlst (who runs an amazing Substack on ADHD and women, by the way, which you should check out). Yes, all I did was count down the days until I visited my beloved Los Angeles again (I’d first visited in 2017), reading about silent film locations which, by some fucking miracle, still exist in the city of constant reinvention. I’d Google map the alley and just stare at this little gap between two buildings.

I took off from Heathrow (the worst flight of my life, actually, as the turbulence was insane and constant until we hit the icy coast of Canada then it was smooth air all the way until we hit the Rockies as we approached Arizona, where my sister lives). You can read about my visit to Los Angeles here, because I wrote about it previously.

Okay, moving swiftly on …

Because I have ADHD (with a side of autism), my memory has more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese shot with a further hail of bullets. But I’m sure there wasn't a “Rosebud” moment. Sorry. Is that disappointing? Sorry. I think it was more a culmination of viewing experiences. There wasn’t a single defining one. Sorry.

We must factor in my love of history. I’m a history nut. I love to know about the origins of things and how things develop over time. Because nothing is ever simple or straight forward.

The confluence of events which have to transpire in order for any event to happen, why it can be positively perplexing at a glance, and every story in its own way is an epic of epicness. Hence historical revisionism being a constant. We think we know it all … but we don’t. There is no last word. We must accept the incompleteness of history. Archives are a wonder of humanity and must be cherished and protected.

Of course, I’ve been film crazy since I was knee high to a grasshopper. I was, and still am, a massive westerns fan. Westerns were my first love, as a kid. Give me a cowboy movie, and I was happy. Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider (1985): fuggedaboutit.

I then got into horror movies in my mid-teens. Which would be important when I started professionally. But it’s not important here.

So, yeah, history and movies combined. A personal narrative less lightning strike, more like building a perimeter of bricks until you had a solid foundation. Something like that.

Slicing Up Eyeballs

I can tell you the first silent film I ever saw in full, when I was 17, was a doozy: Un Chien Andalou (1929), by Luis Buñuel et Salvador Dalí. Formidable!

I know most film reminisces about silent films usually begin along the lines of “I saw some Charlie Chaplin films shown on telly in the wrong frame rate”, followed by the statement “Charlie Chaplin isn’t funny” and usually followed by another to complete the hat-trick: “Buster Keaton is superior to Charlie Chaplin”. Our survey says: eh-eh (Family Fortunes reference). Chaplin is hilarious, and neither do we require Chaplin and Keaton to duke it out for cinematic supremacy. These two remarkable talents offered, and gave us, different things. Chaplin more or less invented the comedy drama, Keaton more or less the action comedy. And grow up will ya, this isn’t a playground!

I might well have seen the odd clip on the telly, as a boy, but I honestly don’t remember. Either way, it can’t have left much of an impression, because Un Chien Andalou blew my mind. But it wasn’t a Damascene conversion. Like I said, it was a culmination of experiences.

The library at the college where I did my A Levels was stacked with film classics greatness. I went to a college which was slowly being turned into a branch of a university, and my year was the last one before they booted all the A Level students out to make way for the place to join the University of Chester as its Warrington campus. I remember fellow student, now Guardian columnist and journalist, Laura Mcinerney, who was in my Film class, being the student representative that year and, if memory serves, she kicked off and we were allowed to stay another year. Because before that, they intended to kick us out even earlier. Fight the power! (I was also roped into being a student rep lol … I went to one meeting, had nothing to say and never returned. I was not fighting the power.)

But that goddamn library, it was a hallowed space.

As a kid, I’d watch anything and everything. I used to go to the video shop and read the text on the video cassette boxes and look at the cover art. I’d spend hours going along the shelf, making a mental note, and being a short arse, I’d only be able to gaze up at the forbidden fruit that was the 18 certificate films shelves. Very much the Oscar Wilde quote about being in the gutter and looking up at the stars, right?

Back then on TV, the scheduling boasted all sorts of films. You’d find foreign language films on Channel 4, BBC2 had Moviedrome, first with Alex Cox, whose years at the helm I caught the tail-end of, then Mark Cousins took over. I’d scourer the pages of the TV guide religiously. But also, on BBC2, usually in the afternoons, you’d get classic Hollywood titles. One of my fondest childhood memories? Being off school sick one day, and Father Goose (1964) starring Cary Grant was showing (which began my eternal love for Cary Grant movies). None of this has anything to do with silent films, guy, move it on. Am I supposed to say “squirrel!” now or something? Saying that, my uni personal tutor once pointed out I was obsessed with context. I am though. I need to know everything that came before “the thing” to understand “the thing”. Every mighty river has its tributaries.

Anyway, the library had all sorts of films on VHS. A lot of it was taped off the telly because it would have BBC2 or Channel 4 idents at the start and the voiceover saying it was now time for [insert name of film]. Which is amazing, when you think about it, because they used to, back in the day, show a lot more movies on daytime and night-time television than they do in this cultural wasteland era passing for TV scheduling. Apart from live sports, does anybody even sit down to watch live television these days?

A lot of my life-long love affairs with certain films and certain directors began in that viewing room. The fancy word for viewing room is “mediatheque”.

So, one day, I just plucked Un Chien Andalou off the shelf. Was it the Excalibur moment. Like I said, there was no singular film which stoked the obsession. But it was the starting point, most certainly. The first footsteps.

I love Un Chien Andalou. It isn’t my favourite Buñuel. Land Without Bread (1934), his short travelogue about an impoverished part of Spain, that’s my number one favourite. I put it on my 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll (read it here). If you haven’t seen it, please do. It’s got such sorry sights as: a man pulling the head off a chicken, a donkey covered in honey stung to death by bees, people with goitres, dead babies and a goat being pushed off a mountain. It’s properly extraordinary, harsh, incredibly sad, and makes an important humanist point despite the horrors. Buñuel did have a heart. He loved to eviscerate the bourgeoisie, but he was also a man of the left and compassionate. It’s why he came to loathe Dalí, the opportunist who worshipped two things: himself and money. After reading Ian Gibson’s mammoth biography of Dalí, I came to loathe the guy too.

I even have a notion that Un Chien Andalou is like a proto screwball comedy of the 1930s (another subgenre passion of mine). I can’t remember who said it, but I love the definition of screwball as “fucking without the fucking”. I think Un Chien Andalou fits that description. But I didn’t interpret it that way for another fifteen years or so.

If you’ve seen Un Chien Andalou, you’ll know it’s as bonkers as, well, its makers Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. So, that film, with its horny sexual energy, satirical nature, bizarre imagery and zero dialogue, it was the starting point of my journey, for sure. But not pivotal. One area it was pivotal: it did instigate my grand romance with Surrealism.

Discovering Surrealism, it was like I’d found my spiritual brothers, like I’d come home, like I’d found my guys.

Sure, French Surrealism of the 1920s was a bit of a sausage factory, but there are plenty of incredible female surrealist artists out there, and I urge you to seek out such incredible artists as Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, Frieda Kahlo, to name a trio off the top of my head. Speaking of which, I'd urge you all to see Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman, made a year before Un Chien Andalou, with a script by that brilliant madman, Antonin Artaud! Dulac wasn’t a Surrealist, she was part of the French Impressionist Cinema group era, and the Surrealists actually hated that film, including Artaud who wrote the script, but they’re all dead wrong (and dead), and I really do recommend it. Years ago, I saw it projected at the Royal Festival Hall in London, with a live a cappella score by singer-songwriter Imogen Heap. It was fucking exceptional.

DW Griffith and Me - A Complex Situation

If you read any film history book, the name D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) looms large. If you know him at all, and his wider reputation and importance is purely academic these days, it’s because of a movie he made in 1915 called The Birth of a Nation (originally released under the title The Clansman). This film has a thorny legacy and my own take on it tends to blow hot and cold. In April 2025, it’s a case of “it’s both brilliant and awful” (which is in keeping with the consensus, I believe).

In college, that’s where you go before you go to university in the UK (FYI my American readers), I picked up Richard Schickel’s biography of Griffith and watched The Birth of a Nation. Griffith became a hyper-fixation, and one that has endured. I am utterly fascinated by this man, this director, this Father of Film, and the way he went about making motion pictures (which by today’s standards makes him an experimental filmmaker). He took American film by the scruff of the neck in the pursuit of crafting it into an art form and he bloody well succeeded.

Griffith is also, to quote Charles Chaplin, “the father of us all”. Because that’s precisely what he was to the American film industry: its grand patriarch. And he loved that, even if he ended up penniless and alcoholic, chasing skirt around Hollywood Boulevard in his final years.

This man was cinema’s first genius. It turned out to be limited genius, but it was genius, nonetheless. And just like many fathers, he had some rather iffy views we have to confront and decide what to do with. I have chosen to love the sinner and hate the sin. Especially because he was more than just this one film and his importance to not just American film, but world film, is gigantic and everlasting.

The Birth of a Nation happens to be the American cinema’s first blockbuster. It was a sea-change, it revolutionised the screen, movie presentation, and movie advertising and promotion in myriad ways (it really did, including ways you probably hadn’t even thought about) and made Hollywood into the town it is today (a bit of a tacky shithole with some nice bits).

In transposing the influence of writers as Dickens and Zola to the screen, the Kentucky native brought cinema out of its so-called primitive stage and formalised screen narrative. He did much more than this, like I said, and likely I’m going to write about Griffith in depth at some point. There was nobody like him, either at the time or since. I hate that he’s been forgotten, bar one film, which everybody hates, and not unfairly.

And make no bones about it, The Birth of a Nation is racist as fuck. Like, jaw-dropping, WTF? bruh, racist. But it’s also the American screen’s first overtly political cinema spectacle and it reopened old wounds. Or rather, continued the split in ideologies and views of life and liberty we see in the USA. The reverberations of this film are, tragically enough, present today in the American fabric. The States are not united. North and South might as well be chalk and cheese. In other words, The Birth of a Nation is as American as apple pie, mass shootings and blaming the poor for their own poverty.

But it wasn’t, to quote David Brent in The Office, made “before racism was bad”. The film was picketed, and there were occasional riots too, at the time of its release. People were like, “‘ere, hang on a minute” even back then.

Karl Brown’s memoir of working with Griffith (he was a camera assistant on The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, 1916) really does highlight people around him were aware of the film’s more troubling depictions and the press complained it would not help race relations in the country. But Griffith was oblivious. He really was. He just saw himself as making a film about the history of the country, what’s the big deal? To him, there was no racial hatred anima present, and he wasn’t attacking Yankees of today. The guy was clueless, insensitive somewhat, but also, he genuinely believed he was making a history film, not a racial or political diatribe. Griffith was a proud and bitter Southerner, absolutely. And his reaction at the time of the film’s release was a bit like that Seymour Skinner from The Simpsons meme: “No, it’s the children who are wrong.” But he did adapt a novel by an actual white supremacist, Thomas Dixon (1864-1946), so it’s a case of “okay, racist”.

And you know what? The first time I ever saw The Birth of a Nation; I was bored out of my fucking mind. Alarmed, and bored. Because the racial content is insidious, including the portrayal of racial mixing as an absolute fear and black men seen as lazy, stupid, and a sexual threat to the virgin purity of white women. Mae Marsh’s character, Flora, jumps to her death rather than be potentially defiled by an ex-slave who has taken a shine to her and then chased her through the woods because he’s got the horn. Now, taking aside the racial aspect, an opportunistic predator is an opportunistic predator, at the end of the day. But of course, we can’t take aside the racial aspect. By Griffith’s gross logic, it is precisely his blackness which is causing him to act like a caveman and in Griffith’s mind he has no business trying to court a white lady. He knew the audience would be horrified at the sight of a young woman being chased by a black man (it’s Walter Long in blackface). It’s deeply unpleasant stuff and tone deaf. And that’s not even the worst of it. The Klan are the heroes in Griffith’s eyes, because they brought back order to the South and put the freed slaves back in their place. Yeah, Jesus Fucking Christ. (JC does actually appear in the film’s gonzo final shot).

Even being charitable and saying Griffith was a commonplace racist rather than a white supremacist (despite the Dixon connection), because unlike everybody else in Hollywood at this time, he did actually employ black people in extra roles and small parts, even if he chose to black-up more prominent actors so as not to rock the boat and keep everything commercial. We just have to say it as we see it: he was a racist, no matter the impulse causing that racism.

From everything I’ve ever read about Griffith, he was incredibly naive on the subject of race. He saw black folk through the eyes of a farm boy raised in the South. That meant he had a paternal, patronising and simplistic view of the social hierarchy. Black people were just lesser to him, but he didn’t call for their extermination or anything that like. If he was a white supremacist himself, it was close to Danny Aiello’s character in Do The Right Thing (1989). He’s all smiles and getting along just fine (meaning: as long as he’s in control) until “they” step out of line and forget their place. I think Spike Lee’s film is the greatest comment on race in America, by the way, and I learned a lot about America and race relations watching that film.

Aspects of The Birth of a Nation are horrible. Especially when we consider that, despite his social conservatism and dislike of taxes, when it came to the working class and their lives and stories, he was positively progressive. Hell, something like A Corner in Wheat (1909) makes him practically a socialist. As does the original cut of The Mother and the Law sequences in Intolerance (1916). I’m going to dedicate an entire solo Substack to Intolerance, because that film is a fucking masterpiece, an eccentric marvel, a stunningly compassionate portrayal of the poor and aesthetically it was the moment Griffith dragged American cinema into modernity. He also made a few films about Native Americans which were incredibly sympathetic.

But Griffith was a man of the 19th century more than the 20th. He was outraged when people called him a racist. He didn’t hate black people, he argued. And history is history, he would argue. But really shit just did not compute with this man, sadly. He didn’t have the mental bandwidth.

But then he did make a short film where a KKK-style unit were portrayed in a less flattering light (The Rose of Kentucky, 1911) and he also made a beautiful anti-racist film, featuring a chaste but clearly interracial romance, which still managed to be racist to a degree, I know FFS (1919’s gorgeous Broken Blossoms). But the fact remains, The Birth of a Nation is less “history written in lightning” to quote that gobshite Thomas Dixon, and more hurtful and reactionary in content.

Griffith genuinely believed his epic told the gospel truth about the South. He believed the Yankees manipulated the freed slaves and his thematic ire is reserved for the likes of Ralph Lewis’s misguided politician, Austin Stonemason (the one in the film who looks like 1990s post plastic surgery Mickey Rourke). Abraham Lincoln (Joseph Henabery) is also portrayed in friendly terms and Griffith’s penultimate work, 1930’s Abraham Lincoln, furthered showed the Kentuckian had massive amounts of respect for Honest Abe.

It was only on repeat viewings, when I could set aside my white-liberal-I-would-have-voted-for-Obama-three-times-if-I-was-American discomfort, that I could appreciate The Birth of a Nation’s technical and industry accomplishments, including Griffith’s clever use of photographer Matthew Brady’s acclaimed Civil War photos in order to create absolute period detail realism. The Civil War reenactment is stunning (it was filmed in the area around Burbank and Glendale, in the San Fernando Valley, and where roughly Forest Lawn Cemetery is today).

Griffith was a blood-and-thunder melodramatic filmmaker. Nobody did it better in those early days and his use of editing had major influences on later directors. But that was the limit of his genius. He could only see and do films one way, that is the general consensus, and one I tend to agree with. And by the early 1920s, the world and the film industry had moved on into the post-war Jazz Age. Like I said, he was a 19th century man out of step with the changing times. It happens. And it doesn’t diminish his achievements in cinema because they are frankly insane for the era. Neither does it gloss over a controversial legacy related to The Birth of a Nation. But in a really perverse way, the fact America’s first paradigm-shifting epic is toxically racist, it somehow seems fitting for such a screwed-up country which never really reconciled its past. It tries to, but even when it tries to, it fucks it up. It is the perennial tragedy of America, I think.

And I love America. I have many friends there, and both my older brother and older sister married Americans. I’m no anti-American. The country fascinates me in all its richness and strangeness. I’ve had some of the best times of my life in the US. Like visiting Los Angeles several times or seeing a California grey whale frolicking in the surf off LaPush (in Washington state), driving through the wilds of New Mexico or visiting Monument Valley.

I’d also like to quickly point out, Griffith’s short films for the Biograph company, they were also majorly innovative, and I've already written about one of them here, the fantastic The House with Closed Shutters (1909). I will be writing about more of these, for sure.

Yes, Griffith was the next important brick in the foundation of my growing enthusiasm.

End of reel.

Next week, in Part Two, we will explore further my enchantment with silent movies, covering such things a Kenneth Anger text, German Expressionism, demigods and goddesses of the silver screen, what Hollywood was really like in the early 1920s (I wasn’t there but I’ve read a shit ton about it), and why the silent film was unique, and something was lost when people started flapping their gums.