Silent Film Comedy

Before the advent of sound, visual comedy was the primary means of reaching out and engaging with an audience. Slapstick and burlesque leant themselves to the silent screen, providing cinema goers with larger than life entertainment. The early, brilliantly innovative film experiments of Georges Melies played with the medium of film itself, and n... show more >

Before the advent of sound, visual comedy was the primary means of reaching out and engaging with an audience. Slapstick and burlesque leant themselves to the silent screen, providing cinema goers with larger than life entertainment. The early, brilliantly innovative film experiments of Georges Melies played with the medium of film itself, and numerous other examples are to be found on the Retour de Flamme collections. Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were of course the three best known silent comedians, while later, Jacques Tati continued the tradition, developing his own language of 'democratic comedy'. < show less