"It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around." -Mary Pickford

Silent Film was based mostly on stage and vocal performances such as radio programs. While on stage performances offered a realistic presentation their settings where limited. As for radio programing, though vocal, it was limited since you could see no action, emotion, or setting.

Silent Films were able to offer a creative Art not done before! An endless supply of settings! The Actors were mobile and taken to the settings: Streets, buildings, parks, etc...

Another benefit was that the characters not being able to express themselves verbally had to use body language. They had to use pantomime at first, an overexaggerated deliberate body and facial movement to make their point! But later, by way of close-ups an actor was able to express their emotions in such places as their eyes, mouths and stature. Such actors as Gretta Garbo for example, though on the stage you might be touched by her verbal dialog on love, on close-up camera it is her eye's that will tell the story of eroticism! No words needed!

Another wonderful aspect of Silent Film development is montage. This is the expression of ideas in only visual means. This is done by juxtaposing a rapid succession of discreet images which taken altogether add up to a meaning larger than the sum of the parts. An example that Alfred Hitchcock liked to use: If you take a picture of a man who has a smile on his face and follow that picture with a picture of a baby smiling, you form an opinion of the man. He is none threatening. If you follow the picture of the man smiling with a picture of a bikini clad girl, all of a sudden that smile looks more like a leer and your opinion changes! He becomes threatening!

The greatest achievement of the Silent Film era in my opinion is that it forced the directors and the actors to bring every bit of their artistic ability into their scenes, to be expressive in ways that directors and actors who have the technology of sound now do not have to do!They had to force a concentration of artistic imagination that gave us Films like Greed with its bleak desert, showing the wasteland with the oppressiveness in the end. The Big Parade a Classic Silent Film with Renee Adoree clinging onto the moving truck that was carrying John Gilbert to war. You do not have to hear anything to feel the pain of lovers separated by war!