In the 18th century, the Japanese scholar Motoori Norinaga coined a valuable phrase. Mono no aware roughly translates to a sense of impermanence, or nostalgia for something you haven’t yet lost. When I watch my favourite films from the 1920s, it’s a feeling that resonates with me. In its fourth decade, the cinema was no longer a novelty art form: it was ready to reach for greatness. The 20s saw plenty of the experimentation that had filled the 1900s and 10s, but also a growing refinement of cinema’s universal language: sophistication in camera and editing technique, more naturalistic performances, increasing narrative ambition. The films made in the 20s look like the best of what we watch today, with one quiet difference.
Even as the silent cinema was hitting its famous peaks, from Battleship Potemkin to The Passion of Joan of Arc to The Last Laugh, Napoléon and Pandora’s Box, the dogs were snapping at its heels. By the end of the decade, the coming of sound would change everything. The Jazz Singer debuted synchronised speech and music in autumn 1927, but it took time for change to sweep through the whole industry (in Japan, it took even longer). When it did, for a short period cinema largely reverted to a static, stilted art form while film-makers became accustomed to the new technology and its early limitations, while studios distanced themselves from their mute archive. When the first histories of the silent era were written, the period was passed off as an embarrassment, and the vast contribution of women to cinema in this decade barely mentioned. Now, with an estimated 80% of silent cinema considered lost, part of the pleasure we get from watching films from the roaring twenties is realising that their age has passed and that we’re lucky to be able to see them at all.
The 1920s is the first era in which America dominated the global film market, newly centred in Hollywood, developing a studios-and-stars system that would flourish for decades to come. Slapstick comedians exploited fattened budgets to transform their gag routines into feature-length classics infused with emotion, beginning with Chaplin’s The Kid in 1921 (though The Circus is my personal favourite), through to Buster Keaton’s deadly civil war chase The General and Harold Lloyd’s show-stopping climb in Safety Last!
While Hollywood then, as now, put a lot of its effort into flashy genre pictures – swashbucklers, westerns, costume dramas and war films – the best movies of this era are more subdued. In the 1920s, Hollywood excelled at the melodrama and the romance – many written by the great female screenwriters of the 1920s, including Frances Marion and June Mathis. Frank Borzage, Clarence Brown, King Vidor and Josef von Sternberg directed great films about ordinary people disillusioned with the world but falling in love with each other, while Ernst Lubitsch did the same thing but extra sex and humour. Many of these pictures were brightened by the presence of a new set of camera-natural stars: Mary Pickford, John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Pola Negri, Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell and the inimitable smoulderer Rudolph Valentino.
Many of them came from Europe, where cinema was an even livelier art – in fact it was pretty wild in the 1920s. Famously, the Germans found a new outlet for postwar angst in the extreme stylisation and psychological gloom of expressionism, with film-makers such as FW Murnau and Fritz Lang reinterpreted that mode with masterpieces such as Nosferatu, Faust, Dr Mabuse: The Gambler and Metropolis. Then the street films of the New Objectivity, especially those by GW Pabst and Gerhard Lamprecht, trained the camera unflinchingly on the horrors only suggested by the expressionists, opening up a new vision of realism. Scandinavia experienced its own golden age, with the Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer making several exquisite silents across Europe, while in Sweden, Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström created powerfully heartbreaking dramas about love and loss that seemed to belong to a previous century, despite their beautiful technique.
In the new Soviet Union, government support of cinema combined with the radicalism of artists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Aleksandr Dovzhenko to transform the pacy edits of Hollywood into a frenetic deconstruction of the cinema, and of society itself. The films they made belong fiercely to their era and agenda, but they’re also strangely timeless, still blazing with the energy of modernity.
The aspirations of French film-makers soared with the impressionistic epics of Abel Gance and the ornate art pieces of Marcel L’Herbier. In Britain, meanwhile, a faltering industry produced some underappreciated classics in the first half of the decade before a group of cinephile tyros marched into to inject the best of continental and Soviet cinema into a clutch of brilliant late-20s silents – among them a youth called Alfred Hitchcock, whose Blackmail, The Lodger and The Manxman rank among the finest work in his long career.
The 1920s, then, is my favourite cinema decade, and the only one that for me seems to be self-contained – as if a parallel version of the medium we know today flourished and died in just 10 years.
- Read more about cinema pre-1920 in Pamela Hutchinson’s silent film series
