If you’ve ever seen Fritz Lang’s Metropolis you know that silent, black and white movies can be every bit as vibrant, entertaining, intense, visionary, and rich as any other movie. In fact, in the period just before the advent of sound film reached visual heights and complexity unrivaled until decades later. Sound forced a reduction in scale, due to the requirements of rudimentary early sound equipment. All this means that there are some astonishing silent science fiction films that can be found. Here are 5 silent science fiction films that pre-date Lang’s masterpiece, from the British Film Institute:
A bait-and-switch space travel movie from the Soviet era, Aelita Queen of Mars combines science-fiction, enjoyably preposterous costume design, constructivist sets and a story of revolution. In contemporary Moscow, a mysterious radio signal inspires a young engineer, Los, to dream that it is a communication from Mars. The red planet is shown as a desperately unequal society where aristocrats are waited on by mistreated slaves, but the cruel queen trains her galactic telescope on Earth and falls in love with the engineer. Events back home in Moscow are interposed with Los’s voyage to Mars, where, with all the good instinct of a Soviet worker his companion, Gussev, encourages the Martian underclass to rise up against their oppressors. The message is that solidarity extends across borders and even between planets, but this film is far more celebrated for its bizarre and brilliant style, which has been cited as an influence on Lang when he came to make Metropolis.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
