Silence Stars. The Star System in Hollywood Silent Films

30 June 2014 to 25 January 2015 – Museu del Cinema

This exhibition aims to discover the modernity of silent films, the hand of boundless creativity of its stars, who built a universe of extraordinary power and visual poetry.

The exhibition Silent Stars: The Star System in Hollywood Silent Films sets out to show us the most important faces from the early days of the ‘dream factory', and trace the popularity of the actors and actresses according to how they were publicized or according to the type of films they starred in. Audiences liked to re-encounter familiar gestures when they entered the cinema; the stars found the way to talk with an emotional language, ranging from tears to laughter, resorting to the purest feelings so that audiences all over the world would recognize them as their own.

Even though sound films began in 1927, some film-makers continued to explore the resources of silent films, but within a couple of years they had virtually disappeared. From 1910 to 1929, in America's ‘age of progress', Hollywood's fictional stories were able to reflect on screen the moral, social and economic changes of the new century without saying a single word. With boundless creativity, the stars, who had become gods of the screen, constructed a world of extraordinary visual power and poetry. This exhibition sets out to reveal to twenty-first century spectators how modern silent films were, and to invite them to marvel at images that are replete with feeling and hence still resonate in today's audio-visual culture.

Free entrance