THE SILENT TREATMENT
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Everything you said about silent movies [April 12] was either wrong or semi-wrong. [The question was why the action moves so fast in silents; I said they were shot at 16 frames per second but today’s equipment can only project them at 24. –C.A.] Sixteen frames per second was not the standard speed for films of the silent era. There was no standard speed. Actual speeds ranged from under 16 to well over 24. Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), for example, had a recommended projection speed of 30 fps. Projectors in those days were variable speed, and the projectionist merely adjusted the projector speed to suit the movie. Most films of the teens and earlier were shot at less than 24 fps but for budgetary, not technical, reasons–the slower the speed, the less film used. When sound came in in the late ’20s, a standard speed of 24 fps was chosen because that was the average speed of silent films being made at that time.
I suppose I should have said the average speed of silent movies was 16 fps. My point was that the films (the older ones, anyway) were shot at speeds significantly slower than 24 fps and that’s why the action moves so fast when they’re projected on modern equipment. True, later silents often ran at close to sound speed, but those aren’t the films people mean when they talk about the frantic action in old movies.
