Page "Silent film" Paragraph 15

Interest in the scoring of silent films fell somewhat out of fashion during the 1960s and 1970s.

There was a belief in many college film programs and repertory cinemas that audiences should experience silent film as a pure visual medium, undistracted by music.

This belief may have been encouraged by the poor quality of the music tracks found on many silent film reprints of the time.

More recently, there has been a revival of interest in presenting silent films with quality musical scores, either reworkings of period scores or cue sheets, or composition of appropriate original scores.

A watershed event in this context was Kevin Brownlow's 1980 restoration of Abel Gance's Napoléon ( 1927 ), featuring a score by Carl Davis.

Brownlow's restoration was later distributed in America re-edited and shortened by Francis Ford Coppola with a live orchestral score composed by his father Carmine Coppola.