Introduction to The Silents: The Classics
Calling the best silent films classics seems both humdrum and pretentious. Humdrum, because we tend to call any old thing classic, regardless of its quality. Pretentious, because what are most often called classics are the literary works of ancient Greece and Rome that modeled for subsequent Western literature its genres, forms, and techniques. Old movies just don’t seem analogous in quality, at least, to the epics of Homer and Virgil, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the picaresques of Apuleius and Petronius.