THE ART OF SILENCE
By Dick Meister
It's become a common experience at movie theaters and museums around
the country: Show a silent film and you're almost certain to draw an
overflow crowd.
Some of those who turn out undoubtedly do so only for the sake of
novelty. But there are many who undoubtedly are drawn by a genuine
appreciation of what has been the most neglected of the visual arts.
Until recently, anyway, silent films clearly had not been of interest to
most people. For the average person's exposure to silents -- if any -- had
been primarily through the speeded-up, bleached-out, "sound-enhanced"
versions shown occasionally on television, that greatest of all the enemies
of thoughtful, imaginative silence.
Relatively few people had seen silents as they were meant to be seen -- on a
big screen, accompanied by live music, projected at the slower camera speed
of their day, and often shown with hand-tinted frames.
No blaring TV sound tracks were added to the films that had been carefully
crafted to be seen but not heard. No bubbly-voiced TV narrators explained
the films that had been made so as to explain themselves.
It was a creative experience unlike any other, one that brought the silent
screen players and their audiences close. It required special skills of the
film directors, film editors and players, who could not rely on the crutch
of words and sounds to reach the audience, and great involvement and
concentration by the audience. Viewers were not denied their creative
rights to interpret cinematic actions and to imagine for themselves the
retort of the gun, the scream of the heroine, the lonesome whistle of the
train.
Silent films are not the primitive, herky-jerky, faded black and white
relics television had made them seem. They are not merely simple-minded,
dated and ridiculous precursors of the slick, richly-colored and, above
all, sound-filled movies of today.
Silent films are much more than that. They stand alone. Technological
improvements in filmmaking have not diminished their excellence. The best
of them are timeless, like the best of books or of any other artistic
creations. They are like books that are no less worthy of attention for
having been produced with the techniques of a past era or having been made
into films. They are like plays whose merits are not diminished for having
been forerunners of films. They are like the black-and-white sound films
whose lack of color enhances them.
The silent film was a true and distinct popular art form. It was truly
designed to move -- to show by movement rather than tell by words and
sounds. It was as artistic as the other art forms -- books, plays, jazz,
painting, sculpture, the dance and the rest -- and at least as artistic, far
more experimental and daring, and certainly as imaginative and innovative,
as the talking picture that supplanted it.
Compare, for instance, the 1925 version of "Ben-Hur," its climactic and
incredibly gripping chariot race that took 42 cameramen and 200,000 feet of
film to record, its massive sea battles, its grandeur and overall
magnificence, to the ineptly imitative "Ben-Hur" of 1959.
I discovered the joys of the silent film three decades ago, when I climbed
up to the balcony of the Avenue Theater in San Francisco, then the only
theater anywhere to show silents on a regular basis. I had anticipated
merely an evening of quaintly amusing entertainment, only to return again
and again for immersion in the artistry of moving pictures without sound.
Few talking pictures could surpass what we viewed at the Avenue, to the
soaring accompaniment of a "mighty Wurlitzer" organ.
Few actresses, however well-spoken, could match the sheer skills of Louise
Brooks, few actors match the skills of Lon Chaney, few better explore the
true nature of the human condition.
No comedians, whatever the words they choose, could possibly equal the
silent genius of Chaplin, or Lloyd, or Keaton.
Sexual energy, beauty? Clara Bow did indeed have IT, and in quantities
and of a quality not even Marilyn Monroe could display.
Nothing on film, not "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" or anything else,
has more tellingly illuminated human needs and desires, human strengths and
weaknesses, than the 81-year-old "Greed" of Erich von Stroheim. No film has
better illustrated the futility and horror of war, yet at the same time the
beauty and pain of love than King Vidor's "Big Parade," also released in
1925. No film has ever conveyed a clearer feeling of the ancient past, and
none with such splendor, as D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" of 1916. Never,
anywhere, at anytime, has anyone seen a more dramatic, exciting and engaging
film than the "Napoleon" of Abel Gance, that magnificent work of biography
and film art.
Gance's "Napoleon," as Kevin Brownlow wrote in "The Parade's Gone By," his
brilliant study of the silent film, "is a masterpiece in the original sense
of the word, containing every conceivable technique of the cinema.
We were privileged, there in the darkened balcony of the Avenue, to see
the French filmmaker's 79-year-old masterpiece several years before Brownlow
and Francis Ford Coppola brought "Napoleon" to audiences across the nation.
We were the first people in many years to experience the film, maybe the
greatest ever made, and to experience what is probably the greatest ending
in movie history.
We watched, and then stood and cheered, as three separate images burst upon
us, in three separate frames spread massively across the screen, in green
and gray and black and white. Armies marched up into majestic mountains and
down into fertile valleys on the left, armies marched on the right. A hugely
intense Napoleon Bonaparte glared out at us from the center panel.
Finally, a mammoth eagle soared into the very center of the triptych, to the
final crashing, heroic strains of the Marseillaise on the mighty Wurlitzer.
"It would have been more logical," as Mary Pickford said, "if silent
pictures had grown out of the talkie instead of the other way round."
Copyright © 2006 Dick Meister