Film Nitrate

Carl Laemmle's 1925 silent horror film The Phantom of the Opera was one of the early high points for Universal Studios. As a silent film, it is still very accessible today, with a fast-paced 77 minute running time. It stars one of the best actors of silent cinema, Lon Chaney. And it benefits from a high level of production with, as the original advertising proudly boats: "a cast of 5000 others", a well as a number of memorable sequences. If I was to show a silent film to someone for the first time, I'd probably choose this as one of the most accessible introductions to the period. After the success of Laemmle's 1923 horror film The Hunchback of Notre Dame , which had gone on to become the studios' most commercially successful silent film, it was only a matter of time before a followup was produced. The Hunchback had starred Lon Chaney in the title role, and so successful was the film that he was instantly elevated from being a reliable character acto...

Because of the revolution in sound films that started with the first synchronised sound recording on T he Jazz Singer (1927), silent films over the next couple of years quickly became an endangered species. By 1930 virtually every film in the Western world was embracing sound, and silent films had soon gone from being a medium developed after three decades of experimentation culminating in some of the best cinema ever made, to being almost extinct. Due to the insistence of film studios that every picture was now to be made using sound (though some could later have intertitles added and turned into silents for foreign distribution), for the first and only time in its history cinema took a large step backwards. Suddenly filmmakers who had great confidence in their ability were finding themselves in an alien environment. All of the crew now had to be quiet on set or the background noise would be picked up by the primitive microphones. Sound also meant that clunky camera rigs of the ti...