The Silent Film Festival App for Android Tablets and Phones

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The Silent Film Festival app brings four classic movies with new educational audio commentaries to your Android tablet or phone.  The app is, as with everything on this site, open access (i.e. free) and presents the four episodes from The Artist in American History podcast films studies series from late 2013 and early 2014.  Each of the films that this apps streams to your device includes a new academic commentary which examines the ways in which those movies supported, or even challenged, the status quo, from Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant, sympathetic defense of immigrants to the problematic use of race in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.  You can download the app from the Google Play store free of charge.  It will shortly be available via the Amazon Appstore.

Features

• Stream four classic films with new educational audio commentaries.
• Charlie Chaplin: The Immigrant – the new commentary track on this film examines how Chaplin used this 1917 film in order to defend the much maligned immigrant population that was then arriving in the United States.  Rather than using immigrants as scapegoats or treating them as subhuman, as so many at the time seemed happy to do, Chaplin leapt to their defense with this sympathetic, touching piece.
• D.W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Finale – despite being a landmark in the history of early cinema, The Birth of a Nation remains one of the most deeply troubling (and most influential) films ever created.  In this Civil War and Reconstruction era epic, Griffith draws upon some of the worst African American stereotypes to help paint the Confederacy in a sympathetic light.  The film’s troubling finale is examined through a new audio commentary which seeks to place this difficult film into context.
• Superman: Eleventh Hour – this short animated film from 1942 is not technically a silent film, though it does feature minimal vocal performances, instead relying upon action and physical drama to carry the day. More than that, it is thematically linked to much of the rest of this collection because of its problematic use of race.  Unlike the comics which inspired it, this film dealt directly with World War II, acting as a type of anti-Asian wartime propaganda.  The new audio and visual commentary explores how and why this occurred.
• D.W. Griffith: The Mended Lute – though Griffith is best known for 1915’s The Birth of a Nation, this short film from 1909  gives an insight into how the legendary director, and the world he inhabited, viewed Native American culture.  In the accompanying audio commentary, Griffith’s use of the ‘noble savage’ stereotype is laid bare.

Download the app from the Google Play Store – Click Here

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