Silent Film
He believed strongly in “taking music to the people.” Guardian
Many of the greatest movies ever produced were made in the silent era. The cinematography in Napoléon and the stunts of great comedians Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton are still amazing today. Actors like Charlie Chaplin could express the meaning of a spoken sentence through a single gesture.
The silent films were never meant to be silent. At that time cinemas were the largest employers of musicians. Major cinemas had their own music directors who would often assemble accompaniments to films by drawing liberally on popular classics and tunes of the time. The most artistically ambitious films had original scores composed for them.
The silent era was the era of cinematic pioneers. New film-making techniques were being discovered from week to week and huge cinema audiences consumed these changes with relish. However, silent films eventually fell victim to this relentless pace of change.
Carl Davis CBE conducting
Carl Davis CBE conducting to a silent film
Carl Davis, Photoplay Productions & The Silent Film Revival
In the fifty years after the first talkie was made, two-thirds of all silent films perished. Many others were lost, cut to pieces or had inappropriate music dubbed on them. To top it all, because of varying film speeds, most silent films could not be shown on sound-film projectors or on television without a ludicrous speeding-up of the action. This changed irrevocably in 1980 when Thames Television sponsored a theatrical presentation of Abel Gance’s Napoléon. The print of this (then) five-hour masterpiece had been painstakingly restored by Kevin Brownlow and the late David Gill, and a new orchestral score composed by Carl Davis. The impact on the audience was extraordinary and Live Cinema - the fusion of film and live music - was reborn. The same team, Brownlow, Gill and Davis, have since that auspicious beginning worked together on over thirty restorations of silent films, initially financed by Thames and later by Channel Four Television. Their efforts have resulted in a worldwide revival of this lost art form.
In 1990 Brownlow and Gill formed Photoplay Productions with Patrick Stanbury. Photoplay’s approach to restoration is uncompromising. The best surviving print material is used to produce prints which are as close as possible to the originals, and the results utterly dispel the preconceptions of those who believe early prints were jerky, grainy affairs with speeded-up action. The beautiful clarity of the cinematography, the use of colour tinting, Technicolor and special effects are, to the uninitiated, a revelation. Combine this with the spectacle of a live orchestra or ensemble playing powerful music which leads you through the emotional structure of the drama, and the effect is exhilarating.