Silent Films
Are They Worth the Watching?
The silent movie is, for the vast majority of audiences, even those that have
serious interests in films, the pariah of the movie world. They are commonly
viewed as quaint, old-fashioned, melodramatic, and technically immature. Worst
of all, there's no sound, unless you happen to have an organ and a capable
organist handy. (And how many of us do?) Those with serious interests in film
are often willing to grant that certain silent movies are seminal works, films
of importance that everyone should know, but they treat them about the same way
that readers treat Moby Dick and Silas Marner.
There is, of course, a minority that champions silent films. They contend that
silent films are artistic and entertaining; that a different, and perhaps
superior, form of acting prevailed during the silent days ("We didn't need
voices, we had FACES!", as Sunset Boulevard more or less put it); that, in fact,
some of the best cinematography of all times is found in late silent movies; and
that silent films have a freshness and newness lacking in today's films.
Of course, to a great extent the issue is one of taste, but, without entering an
endless argument about whether any absolute standards exist in art, is either
position simply based on errors? An impartial observer with no knowledge of
silent film might suggest that the advocates are more likely to be in the right.
After all, most of those who avoid silent films have seen few or none of them.
What they have seen is rarely the cream of the crop, and is usually shown at the
wrong speed, often from a bad print.
I've seen a lot of silent films, including most of the very famous ones. I've
seen Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Ben Hur, The Crowd, The Big Parade, The
Thief of Baghdad, Cabiria, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Broken Blossoms, The
Wind, all of Chaplin's features, most of Keaton's, some of Lloyd's, The
Battleship Potemkin, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, Napoleon, Way Down East,
Pandora's Box, Wings, Orphans of the Storm, The Sheik, Greed, The Merry Widow,
and at least 100 others, probably more. How were they? Well, I sure saw a lot of
them, so I must have liked them. But I'll watch almost anything, and I've been
known to go to films that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like, just because I felt I
should see them. Actually, my feelings about silent films a bit complex.
As far as I'm concerned, there's some truth to the feelings of the detractors of
silent films. Many of them are highly melodramatic, especially those made before
the 1920's. "Quaint" is probably an accurate description of some of them.
"Old-fashioned", too, is a truthful description, on the whole. And many of them
indeed show technique that is very poor, by today's standards, or, for that
matter, by the standards of the 1940's. If you made a list of the 100 silent
films that are most frequently mentioned in articles, books, and lectures about
film, I'd say that the majority of them would require the viewer to make some
compensation for them. You couldn't go in just expecting a flawless
entertainment, and come out fully satisfied. And I don't think that the same
would be true of the 100 most famous films of the 1930's. By and large, they
hold up pretty well.
The two most common problems that make silent films inaccessible for modern
viewers are probably the dramatic style and the primitive technique. The latter
is easily understandable. Films were young, techniques improved as they grew
older. Comparing the technique of even certain silent films, early to late,
makes it clear that the problem here isn't the lack of sound, but the state of
the art. The Wind and The Crowd, both made towards the end of the silent era,
are infinitely superior in technique to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The
Great Train Robbery, which were earlier. In fact, the late silents are pretty
incontrovertibly superior in technique to almost any sound film made in the
first four or five years of the sound period.
So what does that mean? Well, if you're going to see a silent film, with some
exceptions from 1923 or later, the chances are fair that the camera movement,
the lighting, the special effects, the editing, the makeup, and so on, are going
to look rather primitive. Not always. I don't think anyone ever edited a film
better than Potemkin, the sets in Intolerance rival anything ever done on film,
and the special effects of the silent Thief of Baghdad are really better than
those of the sound version made in the 1940's. But generally.
As far as the second problem goes, again, the earlier the film, the greater the
problem, with notable exceptions. Silent film originally started with theater as
its dramatic model. Theater at the turn of the century was solidly melodramatic,
with acting that would be laughed off the stage, today. And, since the obvious
source of film actors was the stage, film acting started with much the same
style. The better actors and directors quickly realized that the intimacy of the
camera made large dramatic expressions and gestures totally ridiculous, but it
did take a while for the bulk of the industry to follow suit. Douglas Fairbanks
is really pretty silly in The Thief of Baghdad, swinging his arms wide and high,
forever throwing his head back and laughing when he eludes his foes, and
striking foolishly heroic poses. And the Carthaginian queen in Cabiria gnaws the
exquisite sets in ludicrous imitation of Sarah Bernhard. The leopard she shares
some of her scenes with is an infinitely better screen performer. At least it
acted like a leopard, while she acted nothing like a real person.
The acting is not the only holdover from the melodramatic stage. Many of the
early silents are staged as plays - static camera, cuts only between scenes,
proscinium framing, and so forth. Few of these are shown nowadays, except
occasionally in restrospectives of famous directors or performers. More
insidious was the continuing use of somewhat maudlin stage conventions. D. W.
Griffith was probably the best-known offender in this field. Despite technical
flash, it's often a bit hard to take his films seriously, because they take
themselves so very, very seriously. It's a tribute to his talent that audiences
don't burst into laughter when a sinister man in black face stalks the innocent
young Southern belle in Birth of a Nation, or when Danton makes a cowboy ride to
rescue the Gish sisters from the guillotine at the end of Orphans of the Storm.
Chaplin's sentimentality, which almost scuttles a few of his films, is a similar
holdover from Victorian dramatic conventions.
Probably the films that suffer least nowadays are the comedies. The great screen
comedians of the silent era weren't stage actors, but came from vaudeville.
Vaudeville had its own artifices. The dumb clowning typical of Mack Sennett
shorts has no more relation to reality than Bernhard histronics, and really
doesn't play any better today than the dramas. But perhaps because they never
thought of themselves as capital-A Artists, the great silent comedians were
quicker learners than the dramatists. Chaplin may have fallen into traps when he
tried to tug heartstrings, but he was a great, instinctual filmmaker when it
came to sustained laughter.
Yet even the silent comedies do not always enthrall modern audiences. If they
won't watch a thirty year old film because it's in black and white, what chance
is there to please an audience with a film that's not only black and white, but
also has no dialog or sound effects, but, at best, a musical accompaniment? And
it's not just inertia. Even when they are persuaded to watch such an oddity,
many modern viewers just don't like them. One can argue that their taste is
poor, that they don't know masterpieces when they see them, but they still don't
like them.
Silent film is a medium for a select few, I think. It requires a bit more effort
to watch a silent film than a talkie. And the past of the silent era is becoming
a bit too remote for most audiences. There are still many people alive who saw
silent films when they were the only game in town, but they are getting older
and older, and their world recedes daily from the world of today. Only those not
only willing to make the effort of mind to comprehend a silent film, but also
willing to take the step into the past, are today's audience. It is an audience
similar in kind to the audience for ballet, opera, and Shakespearean theater, an
audience that is able to appreciate the standards of the past, that will take
the intellectual leap the medium requires.
I think that no one who cherishes the belief that he has a serious interest in
film can afford not to be a member of that group, however. Alone among major art
forms, almost the entire past of the art is there for its students to see. We
don't know who performed the first play, in whatever primitive form. We can't
see what the first recognizable ballet looked like, or listen to the early
orchestras of the past. But cinema bares its childhood to any willing to see.
Yes, much has been lost, but almost all of the seminal works of the silent era
are still here, some of them almost in the same pristine condition as the first
time that they flickered through a hand-cranked projector and danced across a
screen to delight a virgin audience of a virgin art. How can the serious screen
student resist watching the baby steps, the vitality of childhood, the
awkwardness of adolescence, when it is all there, waiting for his attention? And
if these early moments lack the polish of what was to follow, they have the
charm of discovery and a vital excitement of artists suddenly realizing that
there is a totally new way to express themselves. How can you love cinema
without loving silent film?
Copyright © Peter Reiher
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