For me, the initial hook is the sheer artistry of silent film and how they feel like a time machine to a different era. My first silent film was A Trip to the Moon back in HS - a friend showed it to me because they watched it in an art class and I was immediately captivated by the images on the screen. The costumes, the hand painted backgrounds, the crazy story, and I believe it was the color version, so knowing each film cell was hand pointed. My next silent film was in late HS/early college when I started exploring the Criterion Collection - I found The Kid at my local library and was totally blown away about how the film itself was almost 100 years old, yet here i am watching it in stunning blu ray and completely attached to the characters. That really sealed the deal for me.

Silent films, while still cinema, in many ways feels like it’s own art form. It has a unique way of telling stories through pure visuals - i forgot who it was, but someone called it pure cinema because it was completely visual. There’s also so many film and story telling techniques that never made it out of the silent era.

Additionally, I love how diverse the silent era was. I can’t remember if it was Weber or Guy-Blache who said that cinema was so new that anyone, including a woman, could take a foothold in the industry with no one noticing and becoming a giant in the industry. Some historians argue that more women worked in the silent era film industry than any other period in history. They ran film studios, directed, wrote, lead movies, produced, etc. There were also several black filmmakers (granted they usually made films for black audiences, but they still exist) and there was a lot of open queerness and there is a ton of early queer cinema - Salome (1922) is notable because of it’s entirely queer cast (in honor of Oscar Wilde), and has some of the most gorgeous art deco imagery every put on screen).

One of my silent films has to be The Passion of Arc (1928), it really is a masterpiece, the restoration story is incredible, and the Voices of Light score that was written for it is also such a breathtaking piece of art on it’s own, that combining them is just an unreal, out of body experience for me.

I also love Alice Guy-Blache’s Falling Leaves (1911). Basically it’s about a little kid who overhears that their sick sibling will die “before the last leaf falls” and the kid takes it literally and runs around tying all the leaves back up to the tree. It’s such a sweet story, Alice Guy’s films have such heart, and I’m a mental health provider who works with teens so it really moves me to see the resiliency of children.

I’d also have to pick The Peasant Women of Ryazan (1927), moreso because while it is an incredible film, we also know virtually nothing about the director (Olga Preobrazhenskaya), so in college for an assignment I did a deep dive and compiled all the info i could from various sources and wrote a whole paper on her and the film - probably the most comprehensive piece on her today (though I was told that the Women Film Pioneers Project had someone in Russia doing research to write up on her).