How and why did you start watching silent movies?

This was a question asked in a comment a while ago, and I had to think about how it actually started.
On March 11, 2025, I wrote my first silent movie post and ever since I have one every Thursday. To be honest, I was surprised about that myself - and hadn't even assigned a day to the "series" in the first post - and I would be lying if I said it was always easy.

"Wanna watch a silent movie with me?"
"Oh boy, looks like he's a weird one.
Good looking, but weird."

Sometimes I had to resort to presenting shorts simply because I didn't prepare ahead and then didn't find the time or, even more important, the concentration to do a long one (expect a short next week as I'm back to work tomorrow, by the way).
That doesn't just have to do with the runtime of a movie, however, but also with the way I write those blog posts. I know I'm not a gifted writer to start with and on top of that I sometimes have writer's block. Yes, for a "simple" blog post that not many of my readers are interested much in, anyway.

In March, I wrote about my attention span and how I wanted to work on improving it again after a friend had said that movies had become much too long for her attention span.
I had done a "Little Lord Fauntleroy" marathon with different adaptations for Christmas and couldn't make myself watching the silent one with Mary Pickford. That gave me the idea.
"You need a lot of attention for a silent movie and some are really long, too.
So I thought that could actually work quite well as a part of my "training". I'll be watching silent movies and writing about them here."

"You still haven't watched my movie.
Do it quickly or you're gonna get it."

Little did I know then that I wouldn't just watch movies, but also read blog posts and reviews and even some academic articles which didn't always make it easier for me to get to the actual writing in time.
Little did I also know that I would really enjoy jumping around like that, so much in fact that I now started reading biographies and treated myself to a fat book (second-hand at a great price) on the history of silent films in the US (which I haven't dared to start yet, though).

The question remains how I even got the idea to use silent movies for this "project"?
I also wrote in March "Watching silent movies has never been easy for me although I grew up with them. No, I'm not that old, they were re-runs on TV, thank you very much." Thinking about it, that's probably not completely true. I doubt I really ever watched a whole film, but snippets in the compilation shows broadcast on weekends, for example Bob Monkhouse's "Mad Movies" which actually had a narration.

So my first real watch was probably the night before my English-"Abi" (the final exam in my "Abitur" before I left school). My plan had been a last moment vocabulary cram, but instead we watched "Phantom of the Opera" with Lon Chaney and we laughed so hard at some of the scenes.
Years later, I had a classic horror phase - Dracula, Phantom, Nosferatu, Frankenstein, etc. - and suddenly loved the film.

"So you thought we were funny, did
you?" "Actually, Nosferatu, I thought
you were creepy as heck. Still do."

Even more years later, the TV channel ARTE, which I have mentioned before, showed several silent movies. I recorded a few of them and watched them in installments. Then the hard drive on my TV broke, interrupting my efforts abruptly. I had never finished the almost three hour long "Die Frau im Mond" by Fritz Lang and couldn't get myself to pick it up again (on YouTube, for example).
Film documentaries are my favorites on ARTE. History, life stories, reviews. Mostly classic and black and white, though. I have always loved old movies.
One of those documentaries was about Douglas Fairbanks and it was really interesting.

Now I'm going to blame Lisa from Boondock Ramblings for the final kick (along with Pickford of course).
When I joined her in the "Winter of Fairbanks" watching movies with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., I remembered that I had been wanting to see his dad's movies for so long now.
His "Thief of Bagdad" was the one to start my project, and if you have been following my posts at all, you may have noticed that I have a soft spot for him.

"Girl, you would have fangirled over me so hard
in the 20s. Come on, admit it." "Yup, I would have.
Especially when you laughed, you rogue. Even
if your son looked much better."

Well, there you have it. That's how I came to bore you with a silent movie post each week.
I don't regret a thing. There are more of us out there than you may want to believe 🙃