A silent revival

Peter Hoskin says that thanks to the DVD and advances in film restoration there has never been a better time for movie fans

Whatever happened to silent cinema? Oh, yes, that’s right, it was supplanted by the talkies in the late Twenties and early Thirties, until it suddenly came back to life in time for the Academy Awards next week. Never since the first Oscars were handed over in 1929 has a silent film looked more likely to win the Best Picture statuette. And even if The Artist doesn’t achieve what every bookie expects it to, then there’s always Martin Scorsese’s Hugo; not itself a silent film but — perhaps a first for a 3D kids’ film — it does revolve around the work of the early cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès. No wonder people are already talking about a ‘silent film revival’, and brushing up on their Méliès and their Chaplins, their Keatons and their Murnaus.

But the truth about this revival is that it has been going on in the background for years. I was lying when I used the word ‘suddenly’; ‘gradually’ is more like it. Silent cinema has been making ground for at least the past decade. This isn’t in terms of the movies being produced by Hollywood, of course, but in the range of silent films available to view. It hasn’t been this easy to see a silent film since silent films were all there was to see.

The American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has a neat phrase for it: ‘Goodbye cinema, hello cinephilia’. It is hard to be optimistic for traditional film culture, he suggests, but there has never been a better time to be a film-lover. And much of it is down to an unassuming silvery disc, about 12 centimetres in diameter: the DVD.