Lately I’ve been watching silent movies. Part of the reason is because they’re mostly pretty short – you can watch one of the silent comedy shorts in a lunch break, so I’ve been making that a habit – but the main reason is that I haven’t really paid much attention to silent films before so I thought it might be interesting to further explore a style of film that I don’t often watch.
I can understand completely when someone says they don’t enjoy silent films, they’re very different. You realize quite quickly that voice is one of the most versatile tools an actor has, and so they have to amplify other parts of their repertoire to compensate.
There are plenty of silent performances that a modern viewer would find completely over the top, founded on the belief that you have to amplify emotions to make them appear on screen. Someone like Buster Keaton is inevitably refreshing because he’s always subtle, a rare quality in the era.
It’s a fundamentally different form, and couldn’t have been approached in a very modern way. Even early sound films feel approachable to a modern audience because, as much as things have changed in the decades since, they tend to feel like movies. Silent film feels like something very different.
But it’s still very interesting to watch a glimpse into another time. Sometimes it’s surprisingly relevant, such as a vampire using disease to cover his tracks in Nosferatu. Sometimes it’s just surprising, like The Ten Commandments being mostly about a modern story about an immoral industrialist, though it still uses the finest special effects 1923 has to offer to part the Red Sea.
Not all of the glimpses are positive, you definitely have to prepare yourself for a chance of racism every time you take a trip to the silent era. While that can be a learning moment, if you’re just looking to be entertained it can be a jarring experience to go from “I’m enjoying this wacky comedy” to “oh no.”
It’s a primitive form, and as much as there were hold-outs into the 1930s it was inevitable that silent films would fall out of favor. Synchronized sound just, inevitably, makes things better, and is more appealing to an audience which has grown up with sound. But it’s worth watching because it’s history, and it can give you a clearer glimpse into the world of 100 years ago than many other accounts of the time.
Art is a mirror, a reflection of the world we live in. We can learn a lot about people from what they used to entertain themselves. Sometimes, we might even surprise ourselves by being entertained by the same thing. Some things change dramatically, some things not at all, and silent film is a great example of that.
