Quotes About Silent Films

#1. In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors' gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points.

Laurie R. King

#2. I was sent to boarding school - a grim place. The only good thing the headmaster did for us was every Sunday evening in the winter he would show us films in the chapel. He couldn't afford a sound projector, so we saw silent films, which you could then still rent from photographic shops.

Kevin Brownlow

#3. Over-the-knee socks remind me of the 1920s, silent films, and the stars of the era who wore the rolled-down stockings. They sort of referenced that in 'Cabaret,' when Liza Minnelli was singing 'Mein Herr,' and I love the way she looks in that scene.

Amy Heckerling

#4. I have a very 'theatre' face. I have what they call a wide mask. I probably would have been a big film star in the '20s with the silent films where they used a lot of key lighting, and make-up carved out your face.

Faith Prince

#5. My father is a silent cinema freak, so he took me to 1925 silent films that took forever, like 5-hour movies, but I've seen a lot of that stuff since I was young. And then I saw the film 'Annie,' and I just wanted to be Annie; I just wanted to be that orphan kid and wanted to sing and dance.

Carice Van Houten

#6. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me-I still watch silent films. I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don't say, 'I read an old book by Flaubert,' or 'I saw an old play by Moliere.'

Alain Resnais

#7. I intend more of a kinship with silent films than more modern film. I like the old cinema. My films are more of a hybrid - a different style of filmmaking to what I call talking head movies. Some people don't get it. Especially the more academic types.

George Lucas

#8. With today's movies, if we took out all the bad language, we'd go back to silent films.

Bob Hope

#9. I wasn't that familiar with silent films. I didn't know, for example, how hugely popular silent films were in the 1920s, how people would go to the movies several times a week.

Laura Moriarty

#10. Now I'm the go-to-girl for silent films.

Penelope Ann Miller

#11. I never thought of becoming a director. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me - I still watch silent films.

Alain Resnais

#12. Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

Peter Weir

#13. I'm a Hollywood kid, and I know that there are only so many stories. Only so many tales around the campfire that we have to tell. Then we have to regurgitate them. Our grandparents' movies were all remakes of silent films - we forget that, but it's true.

Robert Englund

#14. All of the silent films had live music accompaniment, so it's actually a very rich period in music.

Howard Shore

#15. Horror has been a genre since the beginning of cinema, all the way back to the days of silent films. I don't think it will ever go away because it's so universal. Humor doesn't always travel to other countries, but horror does.

John Carpenter

#16. The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion.

Pedro Almodovar

#17. Garrel has succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen.

Serge Daney

#18. When I couldn't speak English, I loved silent films circa 1914-1929, Abel Gance being my favorite director.

Kola Boof

#19. I like some of the early silent films because I love to watch how actors had to play then. What would interest me today is to do a silent film.

Catherine Deneuve

#20. The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.

Peter Weir

#21. Ballet for a rainy day Silent film of melting miracle play Dancing out there through my window To the backdrop of a slow descending grey

Andy Partridge

#22. I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.

Twyla Tharp

#23. On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films.

Stella Gibbons

#24. I always found Louise Brooks interesting. She was an icon of the silent - film era, and I knew she'd grown up in Kansas, and that she was smart and rebellious and sharp - tongued.

Laura Moriarty

#25. I got a chance to work with Mel Brooks on two of his films: Silent Movie and High Anxiety.

Barry Levinson

#26. I love silent cinema but don't hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces.

Michel Hazanavicius

#27. I was introducing [director and producer] Hal Roach - Mr. Roach was 100 years old, he was one of the fathers of early days in films, he put Laurel with Hardy, he created the Our Gang kids, and all these silent movies he did - he was a giant.

Billy Crystal

#28. For me, each book is kind of like a silent film. If you were to remove the words and just look at the pictures, you should be able to tell what the story is about without having to read a word of text. That's what I think I brought from doing artwork for film to doing artwork for books.

Kadir Nelson

#29. I love some films with very silent characters, people who don't speak, but I wouldn't be able to do that.

Arnaud Desplechin

#30. I watch 'Entourage.' I aspire the good life that they live and lead. Honestly, I am just trying to be me by trying to do good films, have fun at it and trying to work with good directors, and, of course, I am a bit of a silent party boy, also. I have my share of fun sometime, too.

Ranbir Kapoor

#31. I'm obsessed with those old romance films. I also would love to venture into the silent film world. I think that's extremely compelling and interesting and really relies on the acting, even more so than when you have an actor speaking.

Sami Gayle

#32. I love the silent era because you can see the rules being written, the grammar of film being created. Most of my films are in some way love letters to the silent era.

Dave McKean