SILENTS ARE STILL GOLDEN

By RICHARD CORLISS

What would you pay or risk to see a movie? In inflation-racked Germany after World War I, people paid for film tickets with lumps of coal. In Paris in 1896, audiences gasped at one of the very first films, of a train chugging toward the camera. They feared it would crash through the screen, yet were thrilled by the spectacle.

A matter of life and death, cinema was an instant sensation. In Europe it attracted not only lifelong fans but also visionary artists. On a par with, or ahead of, directors in the U.S., they created film art. Color, sound, musical scores, special effects, the chase, the epic, the sequel--all were pioneered by Europeans in the early 1900s, long before Americans made movies in a town called Hollywood.

Today Hollywood so dominates the film landscape that Americans may think they can ignore work from abroad, whether of the 1990s or the 1890s. Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood, a six-hour TV history of European silent film by the nonpareil team of Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, could upend that notion. Faster than a speeding Twister, more sweeping than Braveheart and, in its insistence on Europe's artistic superiority, as contentious as an Oliver Stone screed, Cinema Europe will pry open the viewer's eyes and mind. It is airing five nights this week on cable's Turner Classic Movies.

On Dec. 28, 1895, when Louis and August Lumiere showed a Paris audience a brief film of workers leaving a factory, cinema officially began. (They exhibited the train film a few months later.) France also nurtured film's first artist, Georges Melies, a master conjurer who, in the 1900 One Man Band, plays six members of a band and the conductor--all in one shot. Melies made color films; the Germans, in 1905, made talking pictures. Italians developed the historical epic. The French persuaded Camille Saint-Saens to compose a score for a 1908 film and Sarah Bernhardt to bless the infant medium with her stage-star quality.

That decade was one of firsts; the 1920s was a decade of bests, as Europe produced films and filmmakers that were the envy of American producers and art-house audiences. In Sweden, Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom made sweeping dramas of man in tune with or enslaved by nature. Denmark's Carl Dreyer shot his heroically austere The Passion of Joan of Arc in France. The Germans boasted Ernst Lubitsch's puckish historical sagas and Fritz Lang's grand parables. Lang's Siegfried had a fire-breathing dragon, a contraption 50 ft. long operated by eight men; his gigantic, prophetic Metropolis nearly bankrupted its backers.

Cinema Europe's hero is Abel Gance, who in the 1927 Napoleon harnessed an epic delirium unmatched before or since. "Here," Gance said, "was a new alphabet for the cinema." But with the entry of talking films that year, the language of silents became as obsolescent as Yiddish. Films got chatty, conservative; they still are. Most modern directors don't know Gance's "alphabet." They can barely spell cat.

In Britain, film art lagged. Stage actors were ashamed of their film work. The trick, as John Gielgud says with a smile, was to "Shut your eyes...and think of England." Britain's most gifted director, Alfred Hitchcock, didn't think of England; he learned his trade from the Americans and the Germans. On the set, instead of "Action!" he'd cry "Achtung!" Cinema Europe reveals him as an impishly sadistic fellow--he is seen lifting an actress' skirt while she tries to rehearse. But Hitch could make movies; Hollywood saw that. He went to the U.S., as had Lubitsch, Lang, Sjostrom, Stiller (and his young star Greta Garbo). Some were chased there by Hitler. European cinema was nearly stripped clean.

Most of these facts are in books, but it's a joy to see the evidence come to life, both in the rare, thrilling clips and in interviews with film veterans, still vital, still proud. Simon Feldman, the Russian techno-wizard who worked on Napoleon, was 103 when Brownlow found him. Feldman caresses photos from the film as if they held the secret of eternal youth.

They do. Cinema Europe is a glorious time machine transporting us back 70, 80, 100 years. A train, a dragon, a beautiful face: Look, it moves! It moves us now to relive a time when films were possessed of such ambition, achievement and optimism. Back then, you could believe that nothing mattered more than films--and that they could only get better.