“That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!”

I have always been a fan of the stars of early cinema. They took a brand-new technology and used it to combine what they knew already (in many cases, clowning) with new ideas, creating a whole new genre of creativity. Of course, for the first generation of cinema actors, it was not possible to synchronise pictures with sound – but if you watch their films you really don’t need it. They developed a method of acting in which they communicated everything they wanted to say through tight plotting, gestures and some wonderful facial expressions. There was also the new, and related, profession of being a cinema pianist or organist, who had to improvise music to accompany the film, often with added sound effects (literal “bells and whistles”) stuck to the top of the organ. Some silent movie stars stopped work in the 1930s, when sound arrived, but others kept going – and I love that even into the 1940s, Laurel and Hardy movies don’t really need the dialogue.