--- title: "How to watch a silent movie" subtitle: "Tips for enjoying old cinema" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-04-12 08:00 date: 2025-04-12 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: film-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: culture tag: [ movie, cinema, review ] --- Since I was a child, I've been a fan of old cinema. Movies made before synchronised sound fascinate me both artistically and historically. I love that we can literally see, with our own eyes, what the world was like (or what filmmakers thought the world was like, in the case of fiction) 100 years ago. It's the next best thing to time travel. And I also love seeing what kind of artistic expressions people invented when asked to tell a story without sound. A silent movie can be a tough sell to a modern audience, but in my experience that's often NOT because the movie is old and silent. There are several factors that make silent movies unappealing to modern audiences, but many of them can be mitigated. Here's the 4 things you can do to help yourself enjoy a silent movie. ## 1. Find a good print Silent movies are physically really old. With many dating back more than 100 years in the past, they actual physical film the photographs are printed on is literally old enough to be classified as a historical artefact. Unfortunately, that means that all the movies made in the early years of the 20th century have been gradually decaying. Somebody, somewhere, at some time in the past could have mitigated the decay by making copies from the original negative, but movies were (and still are, largely) considered ephemeral. They're meant to play in a cinema a few dozen times, and then shelved. It's a marvel that anybody bothered preserving the prints at all (and in some cases, they didn't). My point is that most silent movies you've seen were made from decaying film prints that were hastily digitised, with sub-optimal lighting and focus AND the wrong frame rate. It's true! The reason so many silent movies look like they're playing at twice the correct speed is because nobody shot movies at 24 FPS before sound was recorded, but most digitised copies of them play at 24 or 29.97 FPS (nearly twice the speed they were photographed at). The reason they look washed out and blurry is partly because they've faded over time, but also because the person photographing the photograph (that's how most transfers are made) didn't adjust the projector's lamp for optimal levels (the correct way would to be scan the negatives, frame by frame, and then adjust levels for each shot or scene). It's a shame, and a real cultural loss, that silent movies haven't been preserved the way they should have been. However, some movies are lucky enough to get restoration work done on them. Seeing a restored print that's been digitised cleanly makes an amazing difference. You're actually seeing what the original artist intended you to see, in focus, at the correct speed, with definition in the photographs. A restored version is woefully difficult to find, because it takes money to do the work so companies only bother doing it for films that have a good chance of selling. It's profoundly sad that we have this requirement to justify cultural preservation, but that's the current reality. **Solution:** Look for a restoration. It's worth it. ## 2. Bring your own score I wasn't alive in the 1920s but from what I understand, a cinema hired a pianist to play music live along with moving pictures. There was no official musical score, the pianist just played appropriate music, or maybe improvised. You could go to see **King Kong** at one cinema and hear one score, and then go to a cinema across town and hear a completely different musical accompaniment. To approximate this, digitised releases of silent movies often grab the cheapest royalty-free piano music they can find and slap it obligatorily in the background. I don't know about you, though, I don't find that 80 minutes of the top 40 of classical solo piano is always the best soundtrack for every film I watch. Here's what I do instead. I mute the movie and play some album or playlist of music I enjoy. I don't put too much thought into it, I just choose something I like and see what happens. You might be surprised at how many moments in the film are accentuated by a random choice of music. An early Internet urban legend was that if you turned down the sound of **Wizard of Oz** and played Pink Floyd's **Dark Side of the Moon** over the visuals, then you'd see hidden meanings in the movie, or hear new meaning in the music, or something. It was weird and silly, but it demonstrated a simple truth about humans and synchronicity. When you allow two unrelated things mingle long enough, you'll find correlation. When you play music you enjoy to a silent movie, you're guaranteeing a positive experience for yourself with at least half of the senses involved. Maybe you won't enjoy the movie. Not all movies are good. But you know already that you enjoy the music. Best case scenario, you enjoy both, and your brain notices the moments when the movie and music line up so well that you start to wonder, just like the early Internet, whether in fact the album you love was written with that movie secretly in mind all along. **Solution:** Mute your silent movie and put on some music you like. ## 3. Remember your history People in our past were different to us, and also not so different. I think in general, people were blatantly racist 100 years ago, and sexist, classist and, at least in the USA, increasingly capitalist. It's uncomfortable and disappointing at best, and it's hard to witness. This isn't limited to silent movies, but in silent movies you literally _see_ it with your own eyes. I try to approach this grim reality rationally. I have my limits, and there are movies I won't watch, regardless of what cinematic technique they may have pioneered. In movies I do watch, I usually register things that are offensive to my modern sensibilities, and to give them some serious thought. Why did the filmmakers think it was acceptable, what process of logic or emotion convinced them that it was reasonable? And what process of logic and emotion am I using to remind myself that it was not and is not acceptable? Even more importantly, I ask myself what in my own life I'm fooling myself about. Which of my assumptions or convictions will people in 100 years find reprehensible? What unreasonably compassionate stance can I adopt so that the equivalent silent movie of my lifetime makes people in 100 years proud? **Solution:** Old media is as an opportunity to learn from the past, and to avoid similar errors and false assumptions. When you see something that strikes you as outdated or offensive, don't ignore it. Give it some thought. It's a history lesson. ## 4. Find something that interests you The problem with saying things like "I enjoy silent movies" is that it makes it sound like silent movies are monolithic. Fact is, some silent movies I enjoy and others I do not. Some I respect and am glad I watched once, others I wish I'd never wasted my time on (and still others I wonder whether I'd have thought differently about, had I seen a better print). If you're going to go watch a silent movie, pick something you think you'll enjoy. If you like comedies, then choose a comedy. If you like adventure, then choose an adventure. If you like horror, then choose horror. And so on. **Solution:** The chance of enjoying any movie increases when you choose a movie you think you might enjoy.

Lead photo by Anika De Klerk on Unsplash