Silents : cinema's golden age ?

[julian_craster]

Too late, we realise that silence was golden in the cinema
The success of The Artist and Martin Scorsese's Hugo has opened our eyes to a world of silent movies that is now lost forever.

By Matthew Sweet

Daily Telegraph
Too late, we realise that silence was golden in the cinema - Telegraph

10 Dec 2011

Cinema has fallen in love again – with itself. The affair began in the spring at Cannes, when the science-fiction spectacular that opened the festival inspired a collective gasp of wonder. Up on the screen, a gaggle of explorers blasted off to an alien world of incomparable strangeness and beauty. Faces flickered in the stars. Rose-tinted rings glowed around Saturn. Bizarre crustaceoid monsters loomed. But the director, George Méliès, was not present to hear the cheers. He’s been dead since 1938. A Trip to the Moon was made in 1902. A silent movie, hand-painted, frame by frame, in the Paris of Dreyfus and Degas – a place quite as alien as anything it conjures on the screen.

The technology that produced A Trip to the Moon is now old, but in 2011, it is indistinguishable from magic – and its spell remains strong. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo has just brought Méliès to the multiplex, in the form of an impersonation by a sleek-bearded Ben Kingsley and a barrage of 3D recreations of century-old films. After Christmas, British audiences will be invited to enter the monochrome dream-world of The Artist – a film set in the Hollywood of 1927 and crafted in the style of its period. It stars Jean Dujardin as a silent matinee idol with a pencil moustache and a career he fears will not survive the coming of the talkies. Dujardin won the best actor award at Cannes and Harvey Weinstein immediately bought the picture for US distribution. If The Artist doesn’t clean up on Oscar night, Weinstein’s marketing people may find their own careers coming to a sudden end.

The silent picture was pronounced dead in 1927, when Al Jolson’s “You ain’t heard nothing yet!” trilled from the speakers of the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system. Everyone who was at those first screenings was sure of it – or so they all claimed, years later. Certainly, the Jolson-related anxiety felt by the hero of The Artist was real. Lya de Putti, one of the great vamps of the Twenties, had elocution lessons to soften her Hungarian vowels. It didn’t work. When she died in 1931, she was reported to be as “unknown as a Chinese village”. Five years after starring in the three biggest British pictures of 1927, the Hitchcock heroine Lillian Hall-Davis was living in obscurity on a housing estate in Golders Green – a condition she remedied with a razor blade. The Jazz Singer killed more than careers.

Despite this, the films of the period have refused to die. John Garden of the band Scissor Sisters has spent the last few months touring with his thrillingly weird new electronic score for the 1925 Hollywood version of The Lost World. (Hordes of animated dinosaurs thrashed across the screen; his music roared; audiences were transfixed.) Last month at the King’s Place arts centre in London, Evelyn Glennie tested her percussive reflexes on Harold Lloyd – while at the Barbican, Neil Brand and the BBC Symphony Orchestra presented a scorching new score for Anthony Asquith’s 1928 masterpiece Underground. Next month in Bristol, the Slapstick festival will fill the city with the ghosts of Keaton, Chaplin and Snub Pollard.

Why do they still attract the crowds? Silent cinema is much more than film without words. Silent is precisely what silent cinema is not. It is what happens when an audience and a band of musicians gather in a dark room to observe a powerful light projected through a reel of film that bears the captured images of men and women who lived in the first three decades of the last century. Faces move on the screen; the musicians interpret the action; the members of the audience respond to both, and each other. At its best, it has more in common with attending a séance than going to the multiplex.

Warner Bros was on the brink of collapse in 1927. If it had not been so desperate to change its fortunes, it might not have taken its gamble with sound. And if Jolson had sung just a few years later, silent cinema might not have perished, persisting as an art form in its own right. Television did not kill radio. 3D may not murder 2D. The execution of silent by talkie was not a historical inevitability. And yet, it happened.

Eighty per cent of pre-Thirties film has gone to oblivion – and not just thanks to the effects of fungus and entropy. Studios were reluctant to pay for the storage of old films, and boiled them up for scrap, extracting the silver and camphor they contained. If you had walked along the rooftops of Wardour Street in the Twenties, you would have seen reels of nitrate stock being fed into vats of hydrogen peroxide. When the pioneering British film-maker Cecil Hepworth went bankrupt in 1924, his entire back catalogue was melted down and turned into waterproof paint. In the United States, prints of silent movies were deliberately junked to hide them from the Internal Revenue Service, which considered them a taxable asset. Some may still be out there, sunk off the Pacific coast or concealed in a Californian desert cave, spooled inside their sealed tins.

I spent a number of years interviewing the last survivors of British silent cinema, many of whom had become accustomed to hearing their work dismissed as archaic, primitive, faintly embarrassing. I chatted with Joan Morgan, a star of the Teens and early Twenties, whose father shot a film of Far From the Madding Crowd, for which Thomas Hardy came on location. I heard from Sybil Rhoda, who recalled her part in a 1928 epic about the life of Boadicea, shot under studio lights in Cricklewood. I met Nerina Shute, the former studio gossip columnist of Film Weekly, who was banned from the set by the haughty German director E A Dupont, but sneaked back disguised as a rabbi. They were sanguine about having been forgotten, but it pained me that nobody remembered their names, or how rich and arresting the movies of their day had been.

Cultural history doesn’t work like that – something has to be forgotten before it can be recalled. The Romantics knew the attractions of architectural ruins, and old film exerts the same pull. If every movie made before The Jazz Singer survived in pristine condition – if all their personnel, by some miracle of medicine, were still bright-eyed in their retirement homes – I suspect their work would be as unregarded as it was in the Thirties. The colour version of A Trip to the Moon would still lie in decayed fragments; The Artist and Hugo would have no business to exist. Why are we receptive once more to the pleasures of silent film? Because they are lost. Because it’s too late.

[Sgt Sunshine]

A most fascinating article Julian.....
I look forward to seeing both of those films...as I have enjoyed a few silents (mostly comedies) in the past.
Thanks
Sgt S

[didi-5]

I absolutely adore silents and wish there could have been some way for them to continue alongside the new talkies. Many silent films stand up well now and even those which fail are of interest.

Are silents regarded though simply because many are lost? We will never know the truth of that.

[Moor Larkin]

Gimmicks.

Koyaanisqatsi was a Silent in the sense that was no discernible dialogue, but not promoted as such.

[CaptainWaggett]

I saw The Artist at the LFF and it's that rare thing - a film that really is as good as all the hype . Do see it at the cinema if you possibly can. It won't be half as good on telly and you'll have all the best jokes spoiled for you . And it has the most talented dog I've ever seen! I can't wait to see the film again!

[Richard_in_wales]

To be honest, silent don't work for me, not even Chaplin who in my opinion is over rated to the nth degree; interesting from an historical point of view but I'd never sit and watch any.

[CaptainWaggett]

To be honest, silent don't work for me, not even Chaplin who in my opinion is over rated to the nth degree; interesting from an historical point of view but I'd never sit and watch any.

You don't have to like Chaplin to like silents (I can't bear him, or indeed Keaton though I quite like Harold Lloyd ). Have tou seen any silent Hitchcocks? The sound Blackmail is extremely creaky compared to the silent version and The Lodger is a cracking thriller

[alan french]

Hi,
I found years ago, that my patience with silent films started to fray a bit. But as years have progressed, I find that it depends on the quality of the image/presentation. I saw some very early Chaplin films, not so long ago. Quite frankly, the quality was not good. I also saw some others a little later, and found the presentaion was a lot better and I still laughed at EASY STREET. The other problem is, that a lot of silent films have been rescued, but when re-produced, the system used is actually also in danger of duplicating not only the good, but also the bad flaws. And of course a lot of things have evolved since they were made, in turn making them more dated. But the makers were excellent. And they acheived some remarkable effects. Many of which, continued well into the talkies.

Alan French;

[MikeB]

I can understand why people don't always like silents - but we are looking through different eyes to those it was meant for, and we are used to sound/dialouge. In 1920's, it would have been a quantum leap to have actors speaking in film's, audiences just weren't used to it.

Many of the surviving silents (and 80% of silents are lost forever) show the best in photography and writing. Acting is likely to be a bit on the melodramatic side, but if you watch something like Sunrise or one of the Fairbanks films, your seeing the best of everything, these were the Oscar bait/blockbusters of their day. Nosferatu is still scary now! Silents were seldom silent - they had their own music and occasional effects. And of course film-makers were trying to add sound to film from pretty much the start.

Part of the problem with silents is that we seldom see them at their best. I got my introduction to them by watching the Harold Lloyd TV series years ago, and other TV series using Keystone Kops footage, etc. Since silents were hand cranked, the speed could be anything from 16-28 frames a second (and vary slightly even with the same film), with most being at the slower end of the scale. Since sound is at 24 frames a second (standardised speed for sound, and 100 feet of film a minute), and TV 25 frames, showing a silent at sound speed makes them look much too fast. Its not too bad for comedies, but drama just gets ruined. And of course we don't often get the music, unless Carl Davies or someone similar is involved.

Most films are also pretty beaten up - you notice how good the stuff generally is from archives from Chaplin, Fairbanks, Lloyd, Keaton, etc. I have to admit I'm not really a Chaplin fan (the Gold Rush is good though), but love Lloyd and my kids really like Keaton (they really loved Steamboat Bill) and Harry Langdon. On the other hand, a lot of silents were probably no better than a lot of the sound films that came after - made quick, with a so-so script and indifferent acting/direction. We'll sadly never know, because the majority have simply gone.

The early sound ones are pretty creaky , but by the time The Jazz Singer came out, they'd had about 30 years to get everything right, and they were at the top of their game. Once talkies came out out, a lot of the techniques they'd perfected had to go, or at least wait until technology caught up. You couldn't shoot a fluid crane shot with an early sound camera, because it had to be inside a soundproof cabinet, and they had to invent the sound boom (have a look at Singing in the Rain). A lot of silent scripts tried to be remade as talkies, and often didn't work. But once they got going, you got a whole load of classics. The people who made silents hadn't gone away (as opposed to the actors) - the directors, set designers, etc were all the same, and people like John Ford, King Vidor, Hitchcock, etc all carried on making films, they just built on what they already knew.

There are loads of websites on silent films (this ones very good Silent Era : The silent film website), but I found one of the most interesting sources to be Kevin Brownlow's 'The Parades Gone By'. Its not exactly new (1968!)or cheap, but his access to former silent stars back in the sixties make the book essential. His 'Hollywood' book is great, and more of a basic intro, being based on the TV series. About £2.50 will get you a copy. The series is still not out on DVD, because of a copyright issue some years ago (Ahhh!), but you can get some parts from Google Video (and VHS versions are around on the net) - its certainly worth getting hold of. I taped my copy from C4 years ago. On the other hand, his programmes on Keaton and Chaplin are on DVD

Hopefully, C4 and BBC4 will show some silents over Christmas, with some input from Paul Merton, whose a real fan (he's written a book on silent comedy). A lot is now on DVD, and some (particularly Keaton) are even on Blu-Ray. And there's always You Tube.

People often say that the silents were killed by sound, but perhaps its better to think that they inevitability evolved. Film doesn't stand still, although its great to think a silent might win an Oscar this year!

[Moor Larkin]

I recall that some years ago, I couldn't find a video copy of 'The Gypsy & the Gentleman', and eventually located an Austrian market Rank video on ebay, which I duly purchased, but found it to be dubbed, as is the Europen way quite often. As I knew no Deutsche I had to watch it in the manner of a Silent movie, but retained the sound on, so as to appreciate the music at least. I have to say that when, some years later, I obtained a copy in English, I found, by the end, that I had pretty much been able to follow all the plot, with the exception of one tiny twist that was not especially a material one to the main plot. Dialogue can be over-rated if the film is cinematic in it's essence, rather than depending on endless plot twists or *explanation*.

I recall that 'The Hard Way', starring Patrick McGoohan, a largely overlooked ITC movie has long periods of negligible dialogue and indeed, not very much happening onscreen, and the first half of Many Happy Returns, in his Prisoner series is famously Silent TV. I think there can be more silence going on in the movies than they are given credit for sometimes. Robbery starts with a long silent sequence I think.

[Richard_in_wales]

I did enjoy


But I'm a fan of vampire films. Early films with sound I've no problem with, lots of full versions of some classics are popping up on youtube these days it seems.

[orpheum2]

i have to say that i am agreat fan of the early talkies particularly part talkies.BIP were arch exponents of these.A number of their films eg The Flying Scotsman,The Informer are silent for the first half and then without warning lurch into sound.Actually quite effective.think what it must have been like when they were first shown in cinemas,a very startling effect.

[Moor Larkin]

I wonder if Silents became disposable in the mid 20th century, in part because Germans had made all the best ones.......