Paul Reni's Silent Film 'The Man Who Laughs' Is Serious Cinema

There's so much tragedy present, so many skullduggeries afoot, and so many cruel and vindictive characters in attendance that a sad and heartbreaking ending seems to be an obvious given in Paul Reni's silent film, The Man Who Laughs.

                                      
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There's so much tragedy present, so many skullduggeries afoot, and so many cruel and vindictive characters in attendance that a sad and heartbreaking ending seems to be an obvious given in Paul Reni's silent film, The Man Who Laughs.

Silent film A Cottage on Dartmoor brilliantly captures Anthony Asquith's fascination with the French impressionists' preoccupation with the still, singled out expression.

The bamboozle is on in silent films One a Minute and Bell Boy 13, starring comic actor Douglas MacLean.

Hitchcock's silent films demonstrate that he was not only a master of visual storytelling but confidently made silents as though they had sound effects.

Sidney Olcott's silent film Little Old New York falls into a tradition of men who find themselves strangely attracted to boys that turn out to be girls in disguise.

In our era of relentless "noise", if you will, there's a growing appreciation for silent film, as seen in the rise of festivals and the flourishing availability of silent film on Blu-ray. Fans and initiates are certain to enjoy Michael Barrett's 10 best silent films released on Blu-ray this year.

Hitchcock's motif of treacherous toying with filmgoers is intriguing to spot in his early silent-to-talkie thrillers, Blackmail and Murder!

Masterpieces of the silent era, L'Argent and Fragment of an Empire (Oblomok imperii), revel in the delirium of creativity.

Flicker Alley's The Extraordinary World of Charley Bowers gathers and restores what remains of an elusive and very clever film pioneer, and Kino Lorber shares the silently charming magic of Herbert Brenon's Peter Pan.

Paul Leni loved to move the camera to unsettle viewers -- under curtains, through doors, down trapdoors, swinging on ropes -- as seen in The Man Who Laughs and The Last Warning.

Filmmaking was only one element of a much wider feminist movement that was manifesting itself in various forms, from the flapper to the suffragette to the birth control advocate to the bohemian female writer and political activist.

While Anthony Asquith's Shooting Stars and Underground look excellent on Kino Lorber's digital restoration, Arthur Robison's The Informer, looks most spectacular, thanks to working from the original negative and a tinted nitrate print.

Over 90 years later, silent film The Kid Brother works well as entertainment for modern audiences, for whom its calculated old-fashioned corn and apparent simplicity aren't a problem but par for the course.

Silent film actor Alice Howell conveyed the persona of a working-class clodhopper with a huge pile of frizzy hair plopped on top of her head, and she threw herself into physical comedy as much as Lucille Ball.

A boon for Sherlockians and silent film fans, Flicker Alley presents Der Hund von Baskerville, a DVD/Blu-ray combo containing the 1914 and 1929 silent German versions.

Flicker Alley, Milestone Films and Kino Classics offer the works of silent film directors Georges Méliès, Lotte Reiniger, Abel Gance, and F. W. Murnau on Blu-ray.

Pioneers is an essential gathering of early film treasures that help redefine an era of glorious creativity by women filmmakers and often surprising access to means of production.

Kino Lorber's release of Old Ironsides offers derring-do with cannons firing and masts breaking off and hundreds of extras swarming all over each other's ships.

Well into her 30s, silent film star Mary Pickford was the waif-iest waif in film history, and the number of convincing variations she wrung on this theme is remarkable.

William Welllman has made elegant use of shadows to convey serious issues before, and uses them in silent film You Never Know Women with a flourish.

Sponsored by the Library of Congress, Mostly Lost is an annual film workshop in which unidentified or mis-titled silent films are screened to an audience of scholars and fans who try to figure out what they are. Sometimes they succeed.

One way to understand the form of Walther Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, is to see it as producing states of flow that reinforce a flat ontology among humans, animals, machines, buildings, bodies of water, etc.

Flicker Alley collects works from one of Hollywood's most glamorous stars -- and one of its most glamorous casualties -- Rudolph Valentino.

Like many of the best comedies and tragedies, this Weimar-Era silent film understands how each mode is often a hair's breadth from the other.

Throughout his career, Fairbanks scrubbed his scripts of racist elements. The Half-Breed is a rare example when racism is foregrounded as a theme.

Widely considered the largest and most prestigious silent film festival in North America, 21 feature films from nine countries will be represented at the Fest, with more than 40 musicians from around the world accompanying the various programs.

The film is imbued with a painterly quality wherein the not-quite static framing of the human visage is its main concern, its aesthetic gambit, and the source of its affective impact.

As is his wont, Lewis Milestone's direction is lively, even flashy, indulging in gratuitously beautiful camera movements, lighting tricks, and clever editorial juxtapositions.

Annie is a servant who delights in telling tales of spooks and spirits, always ending with the refrain "An' the Gobble-uns'll git you ef you Don't Watch Out!"

New organ scores help kick up some dust in these two reissues from Grapevine Video.

Freshly released on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Classics are two hits, part of a series of Swanson vehicles directed by Allan Dwan at the height of her stardom.

Silent films The Dumb Girl of Portici and Shoes reveal two sides of the early Hollywood director: the filmmaker who wanted to tell epic stories on a grand scale, and the social activist who wanted her films to spark discussion and prompt change.

Film history is re-written both deliberately and inadvertently, and so the consideration of it as "fact" becomes tricky, as Jane Gaines' work reveals.

The big-eyed Louise Brooks makes a comeback on the big screen. Silent London critic Pamela Hutchinson talks about her new book on G.W. Pabst's cult classic.

You'll find more people watching silent films today than during any decade since the '20s, thanks to a busy restoration and preservation industry that thrives through festivals, revivals, the internet and home video.

One can't help but feel as though the movements of the Fantômas romantic and dreamlike world are the work of some whimsical puppet-mastery.