Silent Film Festival

Classic films with new educational audio commentaries: Charlie Chaplin, Superman

Take your first step in learning to appreciate and love the art of silent film.

Classic films with new educational audio commentaries. This app streams four classic films, from Charlie Chaplin to Superman, with new commentaries which examine the ways in which they reflected or, sometimes, challenged the status quo. Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant features an audio commentary with visual aids, as does the WWII era animated Superman short, Eleventh Hour (technically not a silent film, but it was something of a throw back, featuring very little dialogue). Two D.W. Griffith films round out the roster with audio commentaries. The finale from his problematic 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation; and a short western from 1909 entitled The Mended Lute.

Featured as a part of The Artist in American History (podcast) on iTunes (Jan-Feb 2014). #1 in Higher Education by series and episodes.

Featuring:

• Charlie Chaplin: The Immigrant (1917) with an audio/visual commentary - In his 1917 masterpiece, Charlie Chaplin attacked the anti-immigrant attitudes that were so prevalent in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. Instead of mocking and scapegoating, this film treats immigrants with sympathy in a beautifully subversive example of Chaplin's approach to cinema.

• The Birth of a Nation, Finale (1915) with an audio commentary - 1915's The Birth of a Nation is one of the most controversial pieces in the history of early cinema. Its problematic use of race and the eagerness with which it reinterpreted the Civil War make it a difficult film to understand out of context; a new audio commentary has been added to the finale of that film which explores some of its more disturbing racial coding.

• Superman: Eleventh Hour (1942) with an audio/visual commentary - This short animated film from 1942 is not technically a silent film, but its minimal use of dialogue and strong thematic links to The Birth of a Nation and The Mended Lute gives it a place in this collection. Created by the Fleischer brothers (Betty Boop, Pop Eye), the Superman cinematic shorts from the early 1940s were fantastic pieces of animated history but after the departure of the Fleischer brothers they tended towards providing wartime propaganda, in contrast to the Superman comics of the time. The commentary on this film explores how and why this film utilised anti-Asia, racial propaganda.

• D.W. Griffith: The Mended Lute (1909) with an audio commentary - This early short film reflected how Native Americans were viewed at the turn of the twentieth century. The love triangle at the centre of this film is used to depict the character in this film as 'noble savages'. The contrast between director D.W. Griffith's views of African Americans and Native Americans is vivid, particularly when this film is compared to the finale from The Birth of a Nation, also included in this collection. Extra film buff point - this film stars Florence Lawrence, one of the first movie stars.

• Featuring Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Bod Collyer, and Florence Lawrence

• Audio commentaries created by Dr. Darren R. Reid (The Artist in American History)

• Explore how these classic films have reflected, or subverted, prejudices of the times in which they were made.