So it’s finally here! September 1st 2013; the start of Silent September here at Cinemapocalypse. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for quite awhile with my interest in silent cinema soaring in the past couple of years. In this, an introduction to Silent September, I’ll discuss what got me into silent movies, some of my favourites and I’ll be providing a full list of all the movies you can expect to see reviewed in the coming month. So without further ado, lets get started…

A few years ago, I was flicking through all the channels and found that there was a new addition to my movies package; The Horror Channel. Now as everyone that reads this blog knows, I love horror movies so I thought I’d check the TV guide to see what kind of films they’d be showing. One film in particular caught my eye. I’d never heard of it before and the write up for it sounded pretty cool. That film was Nosferatu. This was to be my first foray into the world of silent cinema and to be honest, it didn’t go as smoothly as you might expect. Being 13/14 years old at the time, I wasn’t impressed by it at all. Maybe it was because I wasn’t old enough to fully appreciate the beauty of it at the time but I found myself bored with the lack of dialogue and slow pace of it. I finished it and didn’t think about it again for a long time. Fast forward a few years and there I was doing the same thing again, flicking through the channels and I’d found it again. I was almost 20 I think and I thought that its been a long time since the last time I watched it so I decided to give it another go. Being a lot older the second time around, I found myself in awe of how fantastic it was. I thought it was a thing of beauty and an absolute masterpiece in filmmaking. I was old enough to appreciate the slow pace, understanding that it was to set up tension before the horrors that followed and I actually felt pretty creeped out by the end. Not many horror films creep me out or scare me but Nosferatu did both. I’ve been hooked on silent movies since that day. In the following months, all I did was try and track down other silent horror flicks, discovering classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs and The Phantom Carriage. I couldn’t get enough of them! I then started expanding my horizons a little and moving into other genres of silent cinema, dabbling in comedy and discovering the likes of Buster Keaton, Roscoe Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd and of course, Charlie Chaplin. It was an exciting time for me, finding an area of cinema that was completely new to me and trying to find out about as much of it as I could. Since then, I haven’t looked back. I credit F.W Mernau as the reason I got into silent movies. His film was what got me started and without Nosferatu, I don’t know if I’d be into silent movies as much as I am today. A scary thought indeed…

So as you’ve probably guessed, whenever I talk about silent movies with other fans of the genre, I was discuss Nosferatu. Although I have no definitive list or order as to what my favourite silent movies are, I do know that Nosferatu is definitely up there. Having watched a fair few movies in the past couple of years, I actually find myself enjoying silent comedies over the horrors or German expressionistic pieces of the early 20’s which is the reason that there’s going to be a fair few Keaton and Chaplin pictures in the list that I’m about to make. The problem I find with making lists of my favourite movies is that I don’t know where to put them. I mean movie A might be better than movie B is some ways but movie B might be far superior in other ways so how do you rank them in some kind of order? Well I’m not going to. I’ll have a top 5 in no particular order and then another list of honourable mentions under it. That’s about as fair as I can make it I guess. Anyway here goes…

My top 5 silent movies (in no particular order)

1. The General

2.Broken Blossoms

3. Nosferatu

4. Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans

5. Modern Times

Honourable Mentions:

Battleship Potemkin

The Phantom of the Opera

Metropolis

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

City Lights

The Student of Prague

Believe me, that was incredibly difficult to do but if I listed all of my favourite silent movies, it’d be a pretty big list so I’ll stop there. I definitely recommend checking out the films I just mentioned if you haven’t seen them. Most of the are a good starting point for people who are just getting into the world of silent cinema too!

Now as for Silent September, I’ve hand picked 30 of the very best to review and I hope I can get some of you to gives these movies a try because at the end of the day, if I can turn just one person into a fan of silent movies this month, I’ll consider that a huge success. So, what movies are going to be featured I hear you ask? Well, take a look at the list below!

Silent September Schedule:

1. Broken Blossoms

2. The General

3. Nosferatu

4. City Lights

5. The Lost World

6. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

7. Safety Last

8. The Birth of a Nation

9. La passion et la mort de Jeanne d’Arc

10.The Phantom of the Opera

11. Battleship Potemkin

12. Metropolis

13. Modern Times

14. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

15. Intolerance

16. The Gold Rush

17. Fatty Joins The Force

18. Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

19. Faust

20. The Hunchback of Notre Dame

21. A Trip To The Moon

22. M

23. Greed

24. Sherlock, Jr.

25. The Big Parade

26. The Last Laugh

27. The Hands of Orloc

28. The Black Pirate

29. The Butcher Boy

30. Orphans of the Storm

I pretty interesting looking line-up don’t you think. This is easily the most excited I’ve been to start a project and I hope you can all join in and leave your views on some of these reviews. Lets make Silent September a success!

Also, make sure to come back in a couple of hours to check out the first review of the month, Broken Blossoms starring Lillian Gish!