With the silent French production The Artist vying for Oscar attention this year (which I have yet to see at this writing), this seems a good time to broach the subject of silent films and modern viewing habits. My questions are as follows:
Have you ever seen a silent movie?
Do you watch silent movies with any regularity?
What prevents you from watching silent movies?
I would like to believe that virtually everyone has at least sampled silent screen cinema, although I’ve known people that refused to watch anything that wasn’t even in color, so my hopefulness is tempered. I freely admit that I am not a big fan of silent movies, but I do watch two or three per year, on average.
Silent movies were all that were available for the first thirty years or so of cinema in America. Before 1930, virtually everything made had no dialogue soundtrack, nor inherent music accompaniment. Those movies depended solely on visual narrative and title cards to tell their stories. And because of that restriction, writers, producers and directors had to be very creative in how they conveyed their ideas. Many silent films are far more inventive than their modern counterparts.
Why is it then that interest in silent movies is meager at best? Silent movies were made in many genres (except, of course, musicals) and the Hollywood star system was already a powerful force before 1920. While far too many examples of the art form have disappeared (nitrate won’t wait, unfortunately) there are plenty of really good silent movies to watch and enjoy, with more being released on DVD all the time. It can be argued, in fact, that now there are more silent films available to the general public than at any time since 1930!
As I said, I’m not a big fan of silents, but that’s because I haven’t seen as many as I probably should. Those I have seen have been very impressive, whether they be dramas by D. W. Griffith, comedies by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, German science-fiction and horror films or early Zane Grey westerns. Some of them, such as Metropolis (1927), The Crowd (1928), The General (1927), The Lost World (1925), The Wind (1928) and Napoleon (1927) have been astonishing! In fact, one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life occurred when I saw Napoleon at the Chicago Theatre in 1981, accompanied by a orchestra conducted by Carmine Coppola; it was absolutely amazing.
When I take the time to actually sit down and watch something like Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Farmer’s Wife (1928), Lon Chaney’s The Penalty (1920) or F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), such films thoroughly entertain me and often inspire me to watch another silent offering soon afterward. Yet I too often resist the urge to watch something made nearly a century ago in favor of a Transformers movie or something equally insipid. Why?
Some viewers are so entranced by color, by 5.1 channel sound (or better), of 16×9 widescreen ratios, and now of 3-D, that the thought of watching a movie that offers none of those characteristics is utterly alien. I don’t share that bias, yet the notion of no dialogue is daunting to me; I want to hear Jean Arthur’s squeaky voice, Fay Wray’s screams and Bela Lugosi’s accent, even in films that are far less cinematic than many silent titles. I do believe, however, that it is worth the time to seek out a silent film once in a while for a change of pace — and, usually, for an upgrade of entertainment.
How about you? 10 Dec. 2011.