Help! Black+white... Intertitles... length...

To expand a bit on things:

1. The film was no doubt shot in black and white, and any tinting or toning was put in post-production. (Tints were very common in silent films before the advent of true color. In fact, one thing I've always wondered about was why they suddenly stopped cold when sound came along. You could argue that true color film was available by then, so anything shot in black and white was intended as such...except that true color was available as early as 1922, yet tinting and toning went on for years!)

2. Once talkies came along silent films were considered a poor stepchild (grandmother?) for years, with no remaining commercial potential whatsoever. That's why so many have been lost. But another unfortunate result is that, of the few remaining, many have been edited and truncated in one form or another, with large chunks of footage gone, in a feeble effort to make them more accessible, and cheaper to copy. (Compare the 1925 "Phantom of the Opera" with the "sound" version released in 1929...or "Metropolis," or, arguably the poster child for this, "The Lost World," which, despite the best efforts of film restorers, still has HUGE parts missing.)

3. Probably most important of all is that, until sound came along, there was no standard film speed. Electricity being what it was (or wasn't) at the time, a lot of films were hand-cranked. (You've actually got to give a lot of credit to the cameramen from back then, being able to pretty consistently crank at a steady speed for 10 minutes at a time!) But the pretty much standard speed of a projector back then was around 20 frames per second.

Once sound came along, however, it became absolutely necessary to come up with a standard, otherwise the sound would be distorted. That standard became 24 frames per second (I assume anything slower wouldn't have allowed the true sound to come across); by that time hand-cranking had already become a thing of the past, so it was an easy matter to simply adjust any forthcoming cameras to the new spec.

Within a couple of years every (surviving) theater in the country had converted to sound, and had a projector running at 24 fps. But unfortunately it meant that, on the rare occasions when a silent film was run, it went too fast! That's why old silents can sometimes seem so frantic, and why, to this day, some old afficionados of, say, Chaplin or Keaton, can still express disapproval at some new restoration as having slowed the film down too much. The reality is that they're seeing the film as it was originally meant to be seen, they've just been seeing it wrong all these years! (That frenetic speed may have worked fine for the old comedies for some people, but it made the dramas seem completely ludicrous.)

An adjunct of that, of course, is that a film being projected too fast winds up with a much shorter running time. That's why most authorities (IMBD NOT being one of them) "time" silent films by their length (in feet of film, or at least in number of reels), not by hours and minutes, since the projection speed wasn't standardized yet.

4. A lot of silent films (and ALL before 1926, at least in the U.S.) are in public domain, meaning that anyone can do whatever he likes with any copies of them that come along. (A complete restoration can be newly copyrighted as such, and is off-limits, oddly enough, even though it's arguably the exact same film as came out 100 years ago. Copyright laws are very strange.) But there are dozens of companies out there who make their dough selling old prints of public domain pictures, unrestored, possibly heavily edited, sans color or tinting, and often run at the wrong speed. (On top of that, those offering silent films often provide their own soundtracks by simply throwing old records on, with no regard to mood.)

So, put all of those together, and you'll understand why a lot of silent films you may run across have wildly varying times and color and whatever.

Public domain outfits like Alpha or Mill Creek or Sinister Cinema are actually a great source for old talkies which we'd otherwise never get to see. Their condition is often deplorable, of course, but it's better than nothing, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for someone to do a full-scale restoration of some primitive old picture from one of the poverty row studios.

But for the classic silents, you unfortunately really, really need to invest in one of the all-out restorations. The difference is astounding.



Losing your virginity, burying your pet and killing your sister...can take a lot out of a girl!