Cinema’s first actor to receive a screen credit was a woman — Florence Lawrence, the erstwhile “Biograph Girl.” In one of Hollywood’s earliest publicity stunts, Lawrence allowed her death to be faked, only to be resurrected as the poster girl for Biograph’s main rival, the Independent Motion Picture, as the “IMP Girl.” Soon, every studio had to have their own “girl.” Florence Turner was “the Vitagraph Girl.” Redheaded Brooklynite Clara Bow became Paramount’s “It Girl.” Mary Pickford, “the Girl with the Golden Curls,” became “America’s Sweetheart,” the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and cinema’s first superstar. Pickford’s friend Lillian Gish, meanwhile, became cinema’s first onscreen artist, “the First Lady of the Silent Screen,” pioneering a subtle and nuanced screen acting style that contrasted sharply with the broad strokes of the adapted stage methods then prevalent.
Before “talkies” prematurely turned movies static, awkward, and landbound, these silent goddesses reigned over flickering worlds of endless possibility and invention — of swooping, gliding cameras, of bodies moving in exquisite choreography, of sensuality unsheathed and seething. Like the 1920s themselves, these “girls” embodied a liberation and strength destined never to be recaptured once the prudish Hays Production Code restricted their dialogue, their costumes, and their roles. And, like silent cinema itself, these women radiated a grace and poetry that would never be fully re-created once cameras had to be held down and walled off, lines had to be rehearsed, and sets had to be soundproofed so that Al Jolson could utter the first spoken words in a full-length feature film: “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”
The Austin Film Society’s upcoming “Actresses of the Silent Screen” series screens a selection of films starring five silent actresses — Bow, Greta Garbo, Pickford, Gish, and Louise Brooks — with five original scores performed live by Golden Arm Trio prodigy Graham Reynolds. The series’ fluffiest and most fun entry, It (April 16), is a charming early romantic comedy in which Bow plays a poor flapper salesgirl who, through good-heartedness, ingenuity, and sheer sex appeal (the title’s “It”), wins the heart of rich department-store heir Antonio Moreno. While It‘s tactic of backgrounding a love story with desperate circumstances of poverty provided many films of the Twenties and Thirties with their dramatic tension (Pickford’s entry in this series, April 30’s Amarilly of Clothesline Alley, mines similar territory), no film transformed these circumstances into quite as devastating cinematic poetry as D.W. Griffith’s ethereal melodrama Broken Blossoms (May 14), in which Gish plays the 15-year-old daughter of a brutally abusive prizefighter and Richard Barthelmess plays the sensitive Chinese shopkeeper who loves and briefly shelters her. Visually stunning, Broken Blossoms boasts sequences tinted violet, rose, antique yellow, and deep blue, as well as beautiful photography by Griffith regular G.W. “Billy” Bitzer, who captures both the weathered roughness of Limehouse-district London and — with specially created soft-focus filters — the heartbreaking vulnerability in Gish’s face.
Meanwhile, the love story in the supremely unchaste Flesh and the Devil (April 23) is that of blood brothers John Gilbert and Lars Hanson, with Greta Garbo as the siren whose insatiable sexuality threatens to tear them apart. An overheated and melodramatic masterpiece, Flesh and the Devil contains, among its three smoldering love scenes, the first ever horizontal-position kiss in American film, between Garbo and her real-life lover Gilbert. It also made a household name out of Garbo, who plays the ultimate femme fatale: a sophisticated and deliciously sultry incarnation of feminine desire whose white-hot evil — in classic Hollywood style — can be purged only by her sacrifice in an icy lake. Finally, G.W. Pabst’s startlingly frank Diary of a Lost Girl (May 7) tells a radically different story, featuring Louise Brooks as a woman freed and empowered — rather than rendered monstrous — by her sexuality. As a beautiful naïf who, after a series of horrendous misadventures finally finds true happiness and fulfillment working at a brothel, Brooks remains not only unrepentant but virtuous — the only truly strong character in a film populated by hypocritical moralizers.
A mainstream, wide-release film like Diary of a Lost Girl, with its harsh realism and defiantly unconventional morality, simply couldn’t be made today. None of these films could: Modern restrictions and astronomical financial stakes have resulted in movies whose intellectual and aesthetic conservatism couldn’t differ more drastically from the vital experimentation and elegant simplicity of silents. Fortunately, while these films can no longer be made, they can still be watched. And, on the Alamo’s big screen, accompanied by Reynolds’ live scores, they can be watched in ideal circumstances.
‘Actresses of the Silent Screen’
“Actresses of the Silent Screen” runs Tuesdays from April 16 through May 14 at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (409 Colorado). Graham Reynolds provides live musical accompaniment at every screening. Admission is free. For more information, call 322-0145 or visit www.austinfilm.org.
APRIL 16, 7 & 9:30pm
It (1927) D: Clarence Badger; with Clara Bow
APRIL 23, 7 & 9:45pm
Flesh and the Devil (1926) D: Clarence Brown; with Greta Garbo
APRIL 30, 7 & 9:30pm
Amarilly of Clothesline Alley (1918) D: Marshall Neilan; with Mary Pickford
MAY 7, 7 & 9:30pm
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) D: G.W. Pabst; with Louise Brooks
MAY 14, 7pm
Broken Blossoms (1919) D: D.W. Griffith; with Lillian Gish
This article appears in April 12 • 2002.