Silent movies

(from 2012)

I have always been fascinated by silent movies. Not just the evolution of cinema storytelling, but the very early efforts – Fred Ott sneezing in 1894, the train coming into the station at La Ciotat in 1896, which reportedly caused panic in the audience – my family thinks it all rather strange, but still make sympathetic noises and ask if I want to lie down when I go into over-enthusiastic mode.

Of course, when the movies found their feet there was a lot more to be fascinated by. I once spent a whole holiday holed up inside the Academy Cinema in London when the British Film Institute first showed the restored Buster Keaton films, rescued from a vault in his old house. One might gather that I was single at the time. I still watch the DVDs. I collected the silent films of Laurel and Hardy on standard 8mm film and was a sure hit at parties showing Liberty and Habeas Corpus. (Fortunately for L&H, their voices suited their characters and their film career survived until 1951, but those early silents remain the cream for me.) I learned to appreciate the grandeur of Griffiths’ films and the stupidity of his vision at times. And I enjoyed the epics – from CTR’s Photodrama of Creation, to the 1920s Ben Hur – with a better chariot race than the 1959 version. Even the duds had their charms – Michael Curtis’ Noah’s Ark had the Almighty talk to Noah through a burning bush and presenting him with instructions for building an Ark on tablets of stone – Curtis had obviously recently seen De Mille’s Ten Commandments, and was not too clear on his Bible stories... But the actual flood on my 8mm print was quite spectacular – and not a touch of computer graphics on the horizon.

Although it is off the point – but hey it’s my post, I’m allowed to ramble – I also love the early days of sound – when for a short while films were so dire, they have a hypnotic appeal. I have fond memories of Joan Crawford – later Grande Dame of cinema, singing – badly – and doing the Charleston even worse! Oh the joys.

But back to the silents - which brings me to the current film, The Artist.

After all the ballyhoo – for a couple of weeks there was only one cinema in my country of residence showing it. This one cinema was in a city where I used to live and work, but the costs of parking for the performance were three times the cost of a ticket, and the thought of the traffic trying to get home afterwards would have dominated the experience. But then, as it gained awards and more publicity, a few more locations took a chance – and there was a reasonable audience when I saw it earlier today.

In Britain it has had mixed reviews. Apparently patrons of a cinema in Liverpool walked out because it didn’t have any sound... Duh!

So what is the Occasional Reader’s critical review?

First, to call it a silent film in a sense is a misnomer. Music was the key. It always was. Not a just a tinkly piano with Keystone cops flickering on the screen, but a full orchestra in picture houses that were often called picture palaces, they were so grand. The music in The Artist really held everything together. And the conventions of silent film were observed, and not sent up. (I can still enjoy Mel Brooks mugging in Silent Movie, where the best joke was when the only sound spoken was by Marcel Marceau – a famous mime artiste – but The Artist was not a parody. People who watch opera don’t expect method acting, and people who watch ballet manage quite OK without dialogue – once you accept the conventions of the form). In The Artist sound gradually came in as it did in the movies. For me one of the best sequences has the “hero” who cannot speak suddenly discovering sound. A cup put on the table makes a noise, to his horror something knocked over makes a bigger noise; at the end of the sequence, he opens his mouth to scream – and nothing comes out.

At the very end he does speak a couple of words. You then realise why he couldn’t speak in movies at that time. It’s not as funny as Jean Hagen’s Brooklyn accent in Singing in the Rain (“Well of course I can talk – don’t everybody?”), but it makes the point – silent cinema had a universal language. Once sound came in everything became regionalised by language and even accents within language groups. Until of course dubbing was mastered and America did its best to take over the world of commercial film. (Which is another subject).

There was a brilliant performance by the dog, Uggie. My other half came along to please me, but found herself really enjoying the film, but especially the dog. A canine Oscar should be in order.

It was a film that also paid homage to the history of film – sequences brought back fleeting memories of the music from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the pathos of Chaplin’s The Kid, and the ending of Welles’ Citizen Kane. There was a nifty rush to the rescue sequence – which brought back memories of the race to save the condemned man in Griffiths’ Intolerance, or the so politically incorrect Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue in his Birth of a Nation. And there’s a lovely payoff sub-title joke at the end of it.

I hope the eventual DVD will have some extras.

Yes – silence is golden.

Now for an evening of noisy TV.