Silent Movie Day 2023
Soak up the splendor of the silent film era on Silent Movie Day (9/29) at The Nightlight
On Friday, September 29, 2023, The Nightlight will be celebrating Silent Film Day! We’ll be showing captivating classics from the silent era all day — including shorts from Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin, as well as Within Our Gates and The Doll, two of the greatest silent films ever.
Silent Movie Day Screenings & Info
🎟️ Ticket prices per screening:
$5 – Adult
$2.50 – Child or Student
FREE for Gold members*
$2.50 for Silver members*
$3.75 for Bronze members*
* Learn more about our membership program and perks!
🎞️ Laurel and Hardy shorts (1927) — 10 AM, 4:45 PM
Laurel & Hardy’s Duck Soup
Duck Soup
Two vagrants find shelter in a temporarily empty mansion but have to masquerade as its owner and his maid when a wealthy couple call to rent the place.
The Second 100 Years
Two convicts escape from prison but are trapped into masquerading as a couple of French prison officials at a dinner party given by the Governor.
Putting Pants on Phillip
A prominent businessman is embarrassed when his Scottish nephew’s kilted attire, and his girl-chasing antics, bemuse everyone in town.
The Battle of the Century**
After a terrible boxer loses a bout, his manager takes out an insurance policy on him and tries to cause an accident, which results in an epic pie fight.
**Check out this 2020 blog post from the Library of Congress about the rediscovery of the missing reel from the Laurel & Hardy two-reeler Battle of the Century, which featured a reportedly legendary pie fight!
🎞️ Chaplin shorts (1917) — 11:30 AM, 3:30 PM
Easy Street
The Little Tramp becomes a defender of law and order in a tough neighborhood.
The Cure
An alcoholic inadvertently foils his attempts to get sober.
The Adventurer
Charlie Chaplin evades police as he goes on the run.
🎞️ The Doll (1919) — 1 PM, 7:30 PM
"The Doll embraces artificiality and self-awareness from the opening credits. Lubitsch himself opens the film, pulling pieces from a small chest to build a diorama in front of us, complete with a pair of dolls that he places inside a toy cottage. It is one of the greatest metaphors for moviemaking ever put on the screen. The film cuts to the now full-size set to observe his actor-dolls coming to life in the fantasy setting. The theme continues with cardboard clouds parting to reveal a smiling sun, pots and pans cartoonishly drawn on the walls of a kitchen, and a carriage drawn by actors in horse costumes. This is indeed a toybox of a movie." — Sean Axmaker, TCM
🎞️ Within Our Gates (1920) — 2:15 PM, 6:15 PM
While the majority of the other films we’re playing for Silent Movie Day are comedic, this one’s a pretty hard-hitting drama. A few years back, we screened this one in our virtual cinema for its 100th anniversary. And we felt it’s worth bringing back again.
Learn more about this film’s significance here: Why I’ll Watch Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates until I Wear It Out — W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Why Silent Films Are Still Important
If you were to travel back in time to 1899, when motion pictures first hit the commercial scene, any movie you could see would be a silent film. The technology wasn’t yet available to record and synchronize accompanying sound.
That’s why it’s called the ‘silent film era,’ of course — the period of about 40 years from the film industry’s start into the 1930s, when adding a soundtrack directly to the film became the norm — but catching a flick back then wouldn’t have been so silent! Usually there’d be live musical accompaniment like pianos, theater organs, or even small orchestras providing the soundtrack.
“If you’re at all interested in cinema, then you’re interested in silent cinema, because that’s where the art form originates. That’s where the language of cinema came into being.”
Instead of spoken words, moviemakers used intertitles to convey character dialogue or describe what was happening on the screen. But the top directors of the time knew the magic of images and used intertitles only when absolutely needed.
While the film industry may have moved past silent filmmaking, it’ll always have a special place in the history of cinema. After all, the work of many filmmakers was already incredibly advanced, especially by the 1920s. Great directors used this format to tell amazing stories through stunning visuals. In fact, today's screenwriting students study silent films because of how cleverly they used images.
“Silent pictures were the purest form of cinema.”
Now, these silent films were usually printed on super unstable and flammable nitrocellulose film stock. That means they could deteriorate over time until they couldn't be watched anymore. Sadly, lots of them are gone forever – around 80% of them! Thankfully, some dedicated folks around the world have worked hard to save and share the ones that are left, so we can still enjoy them on screen, whether at home, at film festivals, or at your favorite arthouse cinema.
So when we celebrate Silent Movie Day, we're not just watching old movies; we're experiencing cinematic history.
Come join us September 29, 2023 for a truly inspiring journey into the grandeur of the silent movie era!
Making arthouse cinema more accessible in Akron
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Making arthouse cinema more accessible in Akron 🎬
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