/r/SilentMovieGIFs

13,877 Directors cutting clips for 200 days

Silent movies and GIFs seem like a natural fit. Visual jokes that amused people 90 years ago are just as entertaining today, with no need for any added text.

We aren't a huge subreddit, but you might have seen some of our posts that reached the front page when X-posted to some bigger subs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, our content includes a lot of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd GIFs, but GIFs from all silent movies are welcome. Users can submit either individual GIFS, or albums of GIFs focused on a certain topic.

What are some good examples of the posts in your sub?

Good Example Posts:

• How some cool silent film effects were done.

• Some of the creepiest makeup of the silent era.

• Some of the best silent movies about the First World War

• The movie Metropolis was released 90 years ago today. Here's a look at how it was made, using diagrams from a 1927 magazine

• Harold Lloyd does a sound-based joke in a silent movie. (The Freshman 1925)

• Buster Keaton cleaning a window (The Bell Boy 1918)

I included a few popular GIFs, but also some albums of GIFs, as I felt they represent a type of content that's more unique to our subreddit. The albums aim to provide a bit more context for the GIFs, and to focus on some interesting aspects of early cinema, whether it's pioneering visual effects or the makeup work that people like Lon Chaney were doing.

How did the whole sub get started?

I saw a Buster Keaton GIF (of him cleaning a window from The Bell Boy) on the front page of Reddit, and I thought it was cool that an almost 100-year-old joke was still able to get such a positive response from people.

As a fan of silent film, I thought that Keaton and Chaplin movies could be a gold mine for little moments of comedy that would make good GIFs. So I created the subreddit, then I didn't really do anything with it for over a year.

In the meantime I created a silent movie GIF Twitter account (@silentmoviegifs), and used that to work on my GIF making skills and build up a library of GIFs. Then I finally launched the subreddit last fall.

What do you think the cultural significance of your sub is to reddit?

I don't know how significant the sub is, but my goal for it is just to increase the supply of silent movie GIFs on Reddit (and by extension, the rest of the internet). Stuff from our sub has been cross-posted all over the place, which I think is pretty cool.

I figure the more silent movie GIFs there are out there, the easier it is for people to discover the genius of filmmakers like Keaton and Chaplin. GIFs seem like a very accessible medium, compared to someone actually sitting down and watching a silent movie.

I do hope though that some people might see a few GIFs from Keaton (or Chapin or Lloyd or Fritz Lang or whoever) and actually be interested enough to check out a silent movie.

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Written by special guest writer /u/Auir2blaze.