We invite you to sample the vast body of work in The Masters of Cinema Series that makes use of the silent aesthetic — not necessarily contained to a single pre-1929 era (the early short works of Maurice Pialat from the 1950s spread across our releases of
La Gueule ouverte and
Sous le soleil de Satan were shot silently), nor to a singular approach to synchronized sound (scores might have been written and timed for playback as live performance during then-contemporary screenings of a given film;
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, as another example, broke new ground with its pre-recorded Movietone soundtrack — although this track was not shot synchronously with the images). Thus unhindered by the sync-sound apparatus, the 'silent' camera was allowed an incredible mobility that simultaneously "opened up" the inner world of the film, and encouraged new and ingeniously inspired ways to represent both ideas and emotion. Even when particular silent works might not be best characterized as "Expressionist," the mantra of the silent cinema might nevertheless be summarized as such: "Let the image express what words cannot." And as Norma Desmond put it so well in remembrance of her pedigree: "We didn't need dialogue. We had FACES."
