This year is the 80th anniversary of The Jazz Singer, the film that brought the silent era to an end. The talkie revolution undoubtedly enriched the cinema, but it ended something magnificent. The silent film was a universal language. Change the titles, and your film could be seen from Alaska to Zanzibar. The new art began with simple scenes of workers leaving a factory and graduated to multi-screen epics lasting hours. The fixed camera was soon on the move — lashed to the front of a train, swooping on a trapeze, plunging over a cliff, the editing dazzling the audience with single-frame cuts. Vast picture palaces were built, equipped with symphony orchestras and seating thousands. In New York, the streets around Times Square had to be closed to traffic every evening because the movie-going crowds were so massive. They were not flocking to see the jerky, flickering image of comic legend; silent films at their best were technically superb and aesthetically astonishing. Their stars, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, were the best-loved people in the world. The movies surpassed even the press as the most powerful medium. And this was achieved, incredibly, in a little over 30 years. Have we come as far since 1972?

Henry Ford said that history was bunk and all too often film history is just that. It is so often based on what survives — and 80 per cent of silent films have perished. We are told, for instance, that feature films began with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man in 1914. Quite apart from the fact that the Vitagraph Corporation had made The Life of Mosesin l9l0, a five-reeler released as a reel a week, the Australians had made the four-reel The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906 — the surviving elements of which will be shown at the Barbican in London today. This is a UK premiere, nearly 101 years after the film’s release. What better time to look back, and acknowledge our debt to the silent pioneers? Virtually every technical advance known to the cinema — except computer-generated imagery — was introduced in the silent days. In more than 50 years of watching early films, I have seen sync dialogue films from l9l3, produced by the Edison company. I have seen examples of most of the colour experiments, including two-colour Technicolor, which suggested you were seeing the full spectrum while reproducing only red and green. The Phantom of the Opera (1925), to be shown at the Barbican on April 1, includes a spectacular masked ball in Technicolor. The rest of the film is tinted — except for one scene which shows the Phantom on the opera house roof, his red cloak billowing against a blue night sky. This was achieved by a stencil process called Handschiegl. Surprisingly few silents were shown in black and white; tints and tones were used for effect — red for fire, blue for night, light amber for daylight — and for emotional impact.

I remember as a boy being amazed by the famous shot in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) in which the camera descends as if from the clouds towards the city of Babylon. Film historians tell us that this was done by placing the camera in a captive balloon. Well, er, yes — but how do you haul it back to earth without the rope showing? In Hollywood, I met an assistant from Intolerance who said it was achieved with a huge tower fitted with an elevator and mounted on mining rails. Men pushed the tower forward and the elevator slowly descended.

Griffith didn’t have to take so much trouble. Audiences would have been happy with a static long shot, for the set, with its massive columns topped by elephants, was staggering enough. But Griffith had seen a monumental Italian film called Cabiria (1914). Its director, Giovanni Pastrone, was fascinated by architecture. He had many of his sets built full-scale, and he moved the camera to reveal the third dimension. This was so unusual that for years American technicians referred to the mobile camera as “a Cabiria movement”.

The first examples of the moving camera had appeared at the beginning of cinema, in the mid1890s. These developed into Phantom Rides, in which the camera was mounted on a train and you saw exotic scenery from the viewpoint of the engine driver. Yet in story films the camera remained static. I saw a one-reel drama called The Passer-By, made in l9l2, in which a man is brought off the street to make up the numbers at a dinner party. As he tells the sad story of his life, so the camera tracks in to a close-up. There is a dissolve — one scene melts into another — and he is young again. But it was not appreciated. Audiences watching complained that it made them feel seasick.

Even this was not the earliest use of the tracking shot in a dramatic film. G. W. Bitzer, who would eventually become D. W. Griffith’s camera-man, shot a little film in 1904 called Photographing a Female Crook.A prisoner is dragged in by police for a mug shot and she knows that if she flails about and distorts her face the photograph will be blurred. As the policemen try to keep her still, Bitzer slowly tracks from long shot into close-up. The kind of close-up that film historians would have you believe was invented by D. W. Griffith. Yet he did not even enter the business until four years later. Griffith admittedly became a great and influential director, but he had a hyperactive press agent. When he left the Biograph Company in l9l3, an advertisement appeared listing his achievements. It seemed that he had invented everything.

As if in answer, the people at Universal made a film called Suspense (1913), one of those woman-trapped-by-burglar-in-lonely-shack stories that Griffith had made his own. They threw into it every technical device, adding a few that Griffith hadn’t thought of. One of these was a remarkable telephone triptych — the wife in one triangle calls the husband in another, while the burglar cuts the wire. I thought this was the first time this effect had appeared on the screen, but it is fatal to claim anything as the first in film history. I subsequently saw a similar device in a Danish film of 1908. And remember, you couldn’t send your film to a laboratory for these special effects; you had to do them in the camera.

Special effects in silent films ranged from the baffling tricks of the French magician Georges Méliãs to the sleight-of-hand of Hollywood epics, which were often kept secret. Where a three-dimensional effect was needed, hanging miniatures came to the rescue. These were most impressively used in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Universal knew that the original cathedral had taken a century to build; they had only a few weeks. They constructed it full size up to the gallery of kings. The remainder was added by a model, suspended in exact register just in front of the camera.

Ben-Hur (1925) demanded a spectacular set for the chariot race, along with thousands of extras. But thousands more were needed so the art department created movable dolls, seated in a hanging miniature of the Circus Maximus — dolls that could jump up and wave when the race got exciting. Not a whisper of this reached the public. It was thought that were they to know how the tricks were done, the illusion would be shattered.

If American technique was designed to conceal the artifice, European technique gloried in it. Germaine Dulac, in The Smiling Madame Beudet, used camera tricks to create the moods of a woman in a loveless marriage. F. W. Murnau strapped a camera to the cameraman’s chest and revolutionised the moving camera in The Last Laugh(1924). The French master Abel Gance regarded the tripod as a set of crutches for a lame imagination; in his Napoléon (1927), a glossary of technical innovation, he threw his camera over a cliff, lashed it to a swinging pendulum to recreate the movement of a storm and strapped it to the back of a horse.

Nonetheless, he felt that the screen was too small for his ideas and he presented the climax of Napoléon on three screens, creating a new language for the cinema with polyphonic editing — an epic symphony of images that still thrills audiences whenever it is shown. Yet even this was not the first use of the multi-camera, multi-projector setup. In 1898 a French inventor called Raoul Grimoin-Sanson had filmed Paris from a balloon with ten cameras and presented the result on a circular screen. He called it Cinéorama and it created a sensation at the 1900 Paris Exposition. It was closed down after three days because of the fire risk.

Another inventor, Henri Chrétien, was convinced that Gance’s innovation should be simpler. He had developed a wide-angle lens called the Hypergonar. The director Claude Autant-Lara used it for a short drama, Construire un feu, in 1929. French exhibitors, already coping with Gance’s extravaganza and the arrival of sound, refused to take this on as well. So the lens waited for a couple more decades, until Twentieth Century Fox acquired it and launched it in the 1950s as CinemaScope.

The zoom lens made its appearance in American films with the Clara Bow comedy It (1927). The film opens with a shot from the top of a department store and zooms down to the street. And you could see short, three-dimensional films in series such as Plastigrams. The earliest films had included examples of large-format film – early Biographs were shot on 68mm stock – and wide-film reappeared at the end of the silent era. But the most astonishing reaction to Gance’s wide-screen experiment was Magnascope. As the elephants stampeded towards the audience in Chang (1927), thunder drums resounded beneath the screen, which appeared to expand, the picture getting bigger until it filled the entire proscenium and children hid behind their seats.

Perhaps the most impressive development was in editing. The first films were single shots, lasting at most a minute, designed for the automatic machines you viewed in amusement arcades. The owners realised that if they put a film of a couple meeting on one machine, and the couple kissing on another machine, the viewer would be compelled to see what might be on the third machine and the money would roll in. When films were taken out of these machines and projected on big screens, these strips were joined together and thus editing was born. It took a while to develop; audiences needed long-held scenes to aid their concentration and were thrown by interruption. But films began to develop a rhythm and by 1916 the cutting in American films could be surprisingly fast.

Nothing, however, could match Abel Gance’s monumental La Roue (1922), which introduced rapid cutting in a hectic railway ride. This style appeared in so many Soviet films it became known as Russian cutting. It was immensely difficult to do, and sometimes grew so frenetic it ended up as a series of single frames. It has disappeared from feature films and now, sadly, you see only cack-handed versions on MTV and in commercials. Sic transit Gloria Swanson.

Silent Film and Live Music Series Barbican, London EC1 (www. barbican.org.uk 020-7638 8891), March-June; The Story of the Kelly Gang (today, 4pm) is also part of the London Australian Film Festival

10 ESSENTIAL SILENTS

The Birth of a Nation, 1915 The most influential and controversial of all silents

Broken Blossoms, 1919 Poetry on the screen

The Phantom of the Opera, 1925 Inspired hokum

Variety, 1926 Dazzling sex drama set among trapeze artists

Flesh and the Devil, 1927 Garbo and Gilbert fell in love on this picture – and it shows

Metropolis, 1927 The silliest great film yet made

Napoléon, 1927 The most technically innovative film yet made

Sunrise, 1927 Masterly use of the camera

The Crowd, 1928 A young couple’s fight against poverty

The Wind, 1928 Lillian Gish enduring relentless Texan storms

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