Analysis on Silence

In terms of silent cinema, much the story, due to the lack of story, had to have been told through mainly the camera. That meant having to limit the dialogue to title cards, that usually showed either character dialogue, narration, and passing time. Character dialogue is the most significant of those three title card uses, because this was done due to technological limitations. Characters could not talk, so they had to do some exagerrated motion to draw the audience's attention towards them, and then the card shows up, and this is how the audience would have to know who is talking. It's effective, but this cannot be overdone, as it would get very tedious if the whole movie was to use this throughout the whole thing. So to comepensate for the inability to talk, films had to rely on visuals throughout. This was not easy, because films back also didn't have colour, or a crisp enough quality to see everything all that well. This was the charm of films back then, though. Filmmakers back then had to work around the limitations and this lead to some spectaculous visual styles to make the audience appreciate the story more. Since film was going through a transitional period at the 1900s - 1920s era, filmmakers and studios wanted to innivate with the technology, which, at the time, was seen as a novelty that would eventually wear off.