How should we watch silent films now? When they were first produced and consumed, they were after all just films, not “silent” films – any more than photographs or paintings or sculptures are thought of as “silent”. Yet of course they often had improvised piano accompaniment; Gert Hoffman’s autobiographical novel The Film Explainer (filmed with Armin Mueller-Stahl) remembered the prewar time in Germany when his father was employed in a movie theatre to stand next to the screen with a pointer and literally explain what was going on. When Abel Gance’s Napoleon was revived in the late 70s with a live orchestral accompaniment, there was a new creative excitement around the idea of early cinema’s musical reinvention – we recently saw the re-release of the special edition of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with the 2005 soundtrack composed for the film by the Pet Shop Boys.
