Silent but Golden

The golden era of the silent film lasted a mere dozen years, but it produced some of the most vivid images ever put on the screen. Most who remember the era know it by faded and scratchy prints shown at the wrong speed--the sensitive black-and-white photography a shadow of its former self, the fragile motion appearing primitive and jerky instead of silky smooth.

Many of the great silent films are lost forever. But others were preserved in private and public film collections. Now, for the first time since the films were first screened, some of the great silent movies can be seen in pristine editions properly transferred and accompanied by appropriate music.

Practically every Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton film is being released by Image Entertainment on laser discs. Republic and Image are issuing movies from private collections, including those directed by D.W. Griffith and others starring Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. Videotape versions also are available, but they do not compare in quality.

Three legitimate masterpieces of the American silent cinema are now available in special laser disc editions: Lon Chaney’s original Phantom of the Opera, D.W. Griffith’s monumental Birth of a Nation and the remains of Erich von Stroheim’s destroyed masterwork Greed.

Lumivision has just issued “The Phantom of the Opera” in a special archive edition showing off Chaney’s unforgettable performance. It also was one of the very first examples of the Technicolor process--the use of red to color the phantom’s cloak in the Bal Masque sequence is especially memorable (Lumivision, about 85 minutes, digitally transferred and mastered from the original master archive print).

The original 1925 film apparently has been lost forever. But in 1929 the film was re-released and that version was found in the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. Together, with archival color material from the UCLA Film and Television Archives, this “Phantom” was created for laser disc.

It includes Korla Pandit’s 1989 music and effects score played on a Wurlitzer organ before a live theater audience. The sound was transferred from analog tape and is not digitally perfect but conveys the proper atmosphere for Chaney’s amazing performance.

Chaney’s makeup distorts his face (he put hooks into his nostrils, clamps on his lips and added false fangs) and the scene in which his mask is ripped off by the woman he loves is one of the most memorable ever on screen. Older surviving prints available on videotape are vastly inferior to this new laser edition.

Lumivision also has produced a special laser disc edition of Griffith’s 1915 epic “The Birth of a Nation” (two discs, 200 minutes). This is the version revised by Griffith years later, but it is the most authentic reproduction available. It is superior to any other video version on tape or disc, including Republic’s laser disc version created from the Killiam Collection. Lumivision received permission to digitally transfer a vastly superior 35mm print from the George Eastman House and did so at a rate of 16 frames per second with authentic color tones electronically re-created per Griffith’s original instructions.

The disc also includes a 10-minute synopsis of the 1918 “The Birth of a Race,” a film created as an antidote to Griffith’s film. It is obvious that “The Birth of a Nation,” although technically revolutionary, is a piece of racist propaganda, an infantile and wrong-headed account of the country’s history. Unfortunately, “The Birth of a Race” is just as simple-minded and one-sided as Griffith’s account.

The same holds true for the album notes, a sad bit of business concerning the care and concern Lumivision took with the discs themselves. These overwritten notes are so concerned with putting Griffith’s film into proper historical context and condemning Griffith’s racist interpretation of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, that they ignore his astounding technical achievement. The fact is Griffith’s film is more sympathetic and far less racist than Thomas Dixon’s novel on which the film is based. It was stupid of Griffith to glorify the Ku Klux Klan and disregard the factual history of African-Americans in the United States, but that acknowledged, it must be recognized that Griffith’s controversial film was an amazing piece of cinema in 1915 that still is awesome more than 75 years later.

One of the joys of watching this laser edition is to hear the original Joseph Carl Breil score compiled and reorchestrated in digital stereo sound by R.J. Miller, who used the original 1915 and 1921 public domain orchestral parts, piano scores and cue sheets to create the score anew. And what a score it is: folk songs, battle songs and hymns of the period mixed together with great hunks of classical music, including “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from “Peter Gynt” by Grieg, used so often that it becomes a grotesque comment on the film’s racism. You’ll recognize bits and pieces of Wagner (once again “Ride of the Valkyries” is used to add to the excitement), Beethoven, Schubert, Bellini, Schumann, Rossini, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and others, including Breil himself and Miller, who composed some additional music especially for this production. If only Miller had an orchestra instead of computer-generated digital sounds. It just isn’t the same.

It is fortunate that we have these two films relatively intact. That isn’t the case with Stroheim’s “Greed,” a brutally realistic version of “McTeague,” Frank Norris’ novel about a man driven by his wife’s obsession with money. Stroheim’s 10-hour masterwork was cut to 10 reels (it ended up running 2 hours, 13 minutes) and by the time critics voted the mutilated version one of the greatest films ever made, it was almost impossible to see this silent classic.

But what is left of Stroheim’s version is startling. Thames Television has put together the most complete version (MGM/UA, two discs, with a special score written by Carl Davis that captures every nuance and innuendo in the silent black-and-white images).

These three silent films offer eloquent testimony that movies lost a great deal when they learned how to talk.