Film archivist and programmer Kyle Westphal has mused for the SFSFF blog before—on music and silent-era film, Magnascope, and the Nitrate Picture Show, among other things—and now takes on the intertitle.
"Titles are regarded as the blight of silent pictures, an insurmountable obstacle to full enjoyment by a modern audience," lamented Kevin Brownlow in The Parade's Gone By in 1968.
"Titles are regarded as the blight of silent pictures, an insurmountable obstacle to full enjoyment by a modern audience," lamented Kevin Brownlow in The Parade's Gone By in 1968.
The situation has not much changed in the intervening decades. Query someone who's never seen a silent movie before, and the biggest presumed hurdle to engagement is almost always the presence of intertitles, a foreign pathogen attacking the orderly flow of the story. Follow up afterwards and "I was enjoying it so much that I almost forgot I was reading intertitles" is likewise offered as the highest praise.
By accident or by design, many silent films that circulated in subsequent decades saw their intertitles minimized or eliminated entirely. Giorgio Moroder's infamous 1984 edition of Metropolis, for example, not only married Fritz Lang's images to the music of Pat Benatar and Adam Ant, but also significantly sped up the proceedings by cutting most of the intertitles and rendering the dialogue as subtitles running along the bottom of the screen as the action continued unabated.
Even during the silent era, intertitles were roundly seen as a stumbling block and occasionally abjured entirely, as in such title-free films as Joseph De Grasse's The Old Swimmin' Hole (1921), Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows (1923), and most famously, F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924). The latter was greeted as an aspirational challenge to the American film industry, a work of art so inimitable that its director had simply to be brought over from Germany to teach Hollywood the way forward. Even noted wordsmith and Algonquin Knight Robert Benchley sang the praises of The Last Laugh in Life, predicting that Murnau's example would upend not only movies but the legitimate stage as well:
Our whole system of dramatic valuations has gone to smash. This movie made the subsequent example of the theater's art [Walter Archer Frost's 1925 play Cape Smoke] seem cramped, tawdry, and old-fashioned. It made us feel that in a hundred years there will be nothing but movies, and that the spoken drama will then occupy the place that the Punch and Judy show now holds .... The Last Laugh embodies all that is easy and poignant in the unspoken word. (There is not a subtitle in The Last Laugh. Not one.)
So the intertitle was an object of grudging tolerance in its own time, and a cause for preemptive apology in subsequent decades. Indeed, when I first began reading about silent films as a teenager, I quickly noticed that even the scholars who wrote the historical surveys seemed to abhor the intertitle and treat it as an anomaly, something to be noted and tossed aside as the medium advanced. Typical in this respect was Arthur Knight in The Liveliest Art, who celebrated Carl Th. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) as the "summing up" of its era, while lamenting that it left viewers "disturbingly aware of the limitations of the silent film," chiefly the "intrusive" titles that "break the rhythm of the visuals, the emotional continuity of the scene."
Rather than crimping the wings of silent cinema, the intertitle gifts the medium a grander wingspan. The intertitle doesn't represent the absence of spoken dialogue so much as the presence of text as a graphic, rhythmic, and literary force.
• • •
Anyone who works with old movies in a professional capacity knows the routine: mingling at a party, meeting smart and well-read people who never contemplated that film restoration was even a thing, trying to find a way to make the particulars of silent cinema seem novel and relatable to non-specialists.
I had my best luck with a medievalist, who was probably filled with comparable social anxiety. As I began to explain the challenges of researching and restoring silent films—the intertitles were usually cut into each individual print, export versions freely discarded and shuffled the titles around, surviving negatives often present the film in tinting order and thus require a painstaking effort to reconstruct basic narrative continuity—she barely batted an eye.
"Yeah, that sounds a lot like what I do," she said. "When you're studying at medieval manuscripts, you're parsing transcription errors, glossing over missing pages, trying to arrive at the true version of a text that survives only in a vulgar translation. I get it—you work with corrupted texts."
Aha! The best vocabulary for describing the perils of film from a century ago already existed—just applied to forms considerably older.
Even the most pedestrian silent film had to settle on a typographic style that complemented its story, which meant a reckoning with the expressive dimensions of typefaces, layout, line-spacing, and even kerning. The intertitle forced practitioners of a new art to play by the rules of a very old one. It was a more sustained and weightier engagement with graphic design than filmmakers would face after the arrival of spoken dialogue: many sound films recover from a generic or misconceived opening credits sequence, but few silent films can manage to limp along if the intertitles are treated as an afterthought.
Intertitles rarely strayed from the compositional examples set by newspaper headlines and playbill credits, so films that recognized the graphic potential of text itself remain notable. Consider the screen-filling torrent of text in Erich von Stroheim's Queen Kelly (1929), which uses every corner of the frame to suggest a verbal pile-on. Similarly, there's a moment in Rowland V. Lee's Barbed Wire (1927) when a prisoner of war sputters out news of a captured comrade in a naturalistic and novel manner; instead of all the dialogue appearing at once when the intertitle flashes on screen, each word tumbles out one after another, materializing in staccato rhythm as if being read from a stock ticker. It's an all-too-rare instance where the intertitle seeks to mimic the rhythm of human speech, finding a creative and clever work-around for the absence of spoken dialogue. It's an artistic constraint that fosters new expressive means.
Intertitles could be self-consciously arty, too, such as the famous moment in Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) when the temptress asks her paramour to murder his wife: "Couldn't she get drowned?" rendered in wavering, dripping text. But subtler choices could be even more effective, especially when played against the monotony of most intertitles. When most titles look and feel the same—a line or two of text, perfectly centered on screen—the slightest deviation can stand out. The unadorned intertitles of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc largely play by the rules and present dialogue lifted directly from the manuscript of Joan's trial, square at the center. When she's finally brought to the stake, Joan cries out for "Jésus!" and the text appears in the bottom right corner of the screen. It's a small but consequential disruption, a pattern break that suggests an overheard whisper, a narrative rupture, an act of faith that transcends the boundaries of the historical record. Ultimately, the off-center title works as a grammatical breakdown, an artistic choice that we don't have the means to fully decode.
Of course, not every silent film acceded to less, and many filmmakers of the era can claim a literary style in their own right. The verbose, flowery intertitles of D.W. Griffith could not be confused for anyone else's, no less essential to his art than the last-minute rescue or the visage of Lillian Gish. Likewise the terse evangelical certitude of the William S. Hart titles or the refined aestheticism of Maurice Tourneur's and Rex Ingram's art titles. One intertitle in Frank Borzage's Street Angel (1928) describes "souls made great by love and adversity," a summation of Borzage's art so compact and perfect that many latter-day critics still quote it when trying to pin down the director's style and thematic concerns. 
While his contemporaries were lamenting the tyranny of the intertitle, the critic Richard Watts recognized exactly this rhythmic quality when reviewing The Passion of Joan of Arc for the New York Herald Tribune in March 1929:
Subtitles have frequently been damned, even by admirers of the silent cinema, as crude handicaps to the medium of pantomime and as almost a justification for spoken dialogue. In The Passion of Joan of Arc, though, they are an essential part of the work, acting as sort of chapter headings to the mighty pantomimic drama that is to follow them. Were the questions and answers of the trial put to you audibly, the entire mood and intent of the picture would be ruined viciously. The whole effect of the film demands that everything be visual and even the captions, which provide a necessary key to the moving sculpture of the drama, are not an intrusion but an integral part of a magnificent work of art. Here is the complete justification of the sub-title.
The justification came too late. The title of Watts's review: "Dying Art Offers a Masterpiece."
• • •
The intertitle also plays an outsized part in the restoration of silent cinema, as my earlier conversation with the medievalist suggests. It is both the easiest aspect to recreate and the most ephemeral and elusive. If an archive revisits an old restoration without new source material turning up in the intervening years, the odds are good that greater attention to titling (and tinting) is the chief motivation.
A simple but profound axiom of preservation: you can only restore what already exists. Digital techniques can stabilize images, remove scratches, and return color to faded film elements, but they cannot conjure up what's genuinely gone. If footage is missing from every extant copy of a film, no algorithm can restore it. Nor can an archivist fill in gaps by asking Clara Bow to shoot a few retakes.
What's the proper way to embark upon recreation after the text has been identified? Should an archivist strive to emulate the typeface used by a specific studio in a specific year, cross-referenced with other surviving examples and recreated meticulously in Photoshop? Or should the archivist take the exact opposite approach, using an anachronistic font such as Times New Roman to mark his efforts as fundamentally conjectural and ahistorical? Beginning in the mid-1990s, several institutions began to stamp the bottom of each recreated title with the name of the archive and the year the title was recreated (e.g., "Filmoteca Española, 2004"), basically turning the archival print into an annotated, scholarly copy of a classic that could never be confused for a first edition.
(An earlier generation of archivists would surely have found these competing scruples to be baffling and perhaps hilarious. Some of the earliest films preserved by James Card, the first film curator of the George Eastman Museum, made no pretense of historical accuracy, simply photographing new intertitles from type-written 3 x 5 index cards.)
No recreation will be perfect, but the mutability of the intertitle is essentially baked into the form. The intertitle was not an essential component of the work, but instead its most interchangeable. Silent film negatives often used "flash titles"—single-frame intertitles that could be extended during printing as a means of conserving footage in the negative. When an American film was sent to Europe, local distributors would replace the flash titles with their own local language translations; there was no need for ten meters of a stationary title that would just be replaced anyway.
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| Intertitle cards from the Cinémathèque française version of Sherlock Holmes (above) and the recreation in English for the 2015 restoration. |
So what is an archivist to do when an American film survives only in, say, a French copy? Do you keep the French intertitles (which are undoubtedly authentic, if perhaps a second order of authenticity) or use them as the baseline for a modern, conjectural recreation of the original American titles? (The Flicker Alley Blu-ray edition of SFSFF's restoration of the 1916 Sherlock Holmes, taken from a French copy from the Cinémathèque française, presents both options.)
But not all intertitles are so simple. We are truly fortunate that the art titles of Maurice Tourneur's The Bluebird survive intact, as they are essentially irreplaceable. The same applies to some of Lois Weber's films, such as What's Worth While? and The Blot (both 1921), which matte select intertitles to leave space at the sides for live action footage. In both cases, we're left at the mercy of what's extant. We must be grateful for what survives, no matter how corrupted.
About the author of this post
Kyle Westphal is a programmer at the Chicago Film Society, which he founded with Becca Hall and Julian Antos in 2011. Under the auspices of CFS, he oversaw the photochemical preservation of the independent musical Corn's-A-Poppin'; he is currently working on preserving the avant-garde films of Fred Camper. He is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and was a past recipient of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival Fellowship. Westphal has also worked at the Pacific Film Archive and the George Eastman Museum.
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