The Quiet Pleasures of Silent Film

Here we will look at:

Although the full - scale introduction of sound into motion pictures would have to wait until the
late twenties, the silent era gave its directors, actors, and producers ample room for artistry and
innovation. The brief period from 1915 to 1927 was the golden age of silent film, an era that saw
the beginnings of the movies as we know them today, from the "star system" that gave us
Charlie Chaplin and Harrison Ford to the so - called "genre film ," whether the silent Western or,
ultimately , the contemporary urban slasher flick .

Learning to Love, Honor, and Cherish Silent Film ... Why Bother?

MetropolisWatching a silent film can be demanding: The Birth of a Nation and Metropolis are
hard movies to sit through, and many other works from the era before sound test their modern
viewers' patience in more ways than one.

But if you've never bothered to rent or attend a silent film - if you've never watched a tear stream
slowly down Greta Garbo's cheek, or howled at Buster Keaton's comedic acrobatics-then you've
been cheating yourself out of one of history's greatest sources of visual entertainment. The first
three decades of the twentieth century witnessed the birth and initial development of an entirely
new art form, one that too many of us have left by the wayside in our preference for the splashy
flicks of the present.

Studio City

Ever been to Los Angeles? Believe it or not, in 1909 Hollywood was still a quiet little suburb on
the outskirts of the growing metropolis . The country's film industry was still dominated by
Edison and his cohort in the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), the monopoly that kept
most of its competitors out of the business through the early 1910s.
Things started to change, however, when the MPPC was dealt a devastating blow in an antitrust
suit in 1915. At the same time, a small but talented group of independent filmmakers was
emerging to challenge the conglomerate's creative throttling of American cinema.

One of the more important events in these years was the establishment of the short-lived
Triangle corporation, founded in 1915 as a way of bringing together three (hence the name
Triangle) of the country's hottest new directors: Thomas Ince, D . W. Griffith, and Mack Sennett.
Though Triangle lasted only until 1918, it marked the beginnings of a new way of producing,
making, and marketing motion pictures that other emerging studios would imitate with often
resounding success.

Keystone KopsWhen Mack Sennett came to Keystone Studio in 1913, he began directing a
series of comedy flicks that featured a band of incompetent police officers whose hilarious
adventures delighted cinema audiences. In dozens of films through the middle part of the
decade, the Keystone Kops bumbled their way into the nation ' s heart .

Though few of us have seen the Keystone Kops in action, their legacy lives on. In crucial ways,
they're the direct ancestors of Barney Fife, Deputy Dawg , Jackie Gleason's pudgy sheriff in
Smokey and the Bandit (1977), and hilariously incompetent lawmen everywhere.

The silent era's other important American studios included MGM, Inceville, Paramount, Fox, and
Keystone, all of which forged their own identities as film production businesses and gave the
public an ever-growing body of movies to consume and enjoy. As the small independents grew
into major studios during the 1910s and '20s, an entirely new kind of entertainment
phenomenon sprang up on the west coast. Rather than a disrespected and "tawdry" business,
American moviemaking came into its own as a full-fledged industry-one of the nation's three or
four largest by 1920. Not surprisingly, the changing shape of the new film economy brought with
it unprecedented opportunities for those who knew how to manipulate it to their advantage . The
first so-called "moguls," the money guys behind the scenes, pumped newfound wealth into their
studios, and the system immediately opened itself up to widespread corruption, graft, and
greed.

Many of the major studios are still with us today- though what's most interesting (and troubling)
about their history during the last century is how little things have changed. As we'll see in later
chapters, the culture of Hollywood in subsequent decades was characterized by the same
struggle between major studios and smaller independents, who constantly strove to get their
cinematic voices heard .

HollyWorld
With the outbreak and spread of World War I after 1914, the fledgling cinema businesses in
most European countries suffered an inevitable downturn. With their economic and personal
resources dedicated entirely to the war effort, France, Germany, England, and other nations had
neither the motivation nor the financial means to spend on the movies, a form of popular
entertainment still widely viewed as a glorified form of vaudeville.

Paradoxically, if there was one factor that would ensure the total worldwide dominance of the
American film industry in this period, it was the country's continuing isolationism, which kept the
United States out of the Great War for several years and, as a result, narrowly focused on its
own industrial and commercial development. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this
inward-looking trend in American life were the studio heads bent on making the nation's film
industry a global powerhouse.

A phrase coined by one of our own era's more entertaining politicians, Ross Perot, aptly sums
up the relationship between Hollywood and the rest of the world during these years: "A giant
sucking sound" could be heard around the globe during and after World War I, as Hollywood
lured the world's greatest film talents away from their home countries and into the growing
maelstrom of the American cinema industry. Some of the era's greatest cinematic artists came
from abroad, enriching the U.S. film business while practically devastating their own country's
much smaller versions of the industry.

Born in the USA ... Not!

Two of American silen t film's most familiar and defining faces were in fact "imports" from other
countries . Charlie Chaplin was born into an extremely poor London working - class family and
had what many film historians have aptly called a "Dickensian" childhood. But during an
American tour with a child dancing company he caught the eye of Keystone's Mack Sennett,
and the rest of his career was spent in Hollywood. Greta Garbo, a Swedish peasant's daughter,
made a few films in her native Stockholm before her discovery by an MGM mogul and
subsequent move to New York.

The same holds true of foreign-born directors. Ernst Lubitsch made a number of fabulous films
in Germany in the 1910s before coming to America. Victor Sjostrom abandoned the new but
boo ming Swedish film business during the 1920s after making some of the true gems of early
Scandinavian cinema.

So what does this "giant sucking sound" mean for the history of American film? Well, most of all
it means that this history isn't strictly or even predominantly "American." While the moguls were
working in Hollywood and buying up the world's cinematic talent, other countries were making
crucial aesthetic and artistic contributions that made the industry into a dominant worldwide
phenomenon . It was in these crucial years that the Hollywood studio system became a diverse,
international, and global powerhouse.
Film comedy began with the Lumiere brothers themselves , initiated movie slapstick. In the
United States, figures such as the rotund actor John Bunny, director - producer Mack Sennett at
Keystone, the great Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and Marion Davies created a comedic
idiom that swept the world at lightning speed. Major influences on the development of American
film comedy included vaudeville, theater, and the circus, all of which contributed specific
personnel, mannerisms, techniques , and scenarios to cinematic humor .

Silent Stars

The silent screen was filled with new faces every week, and one of the main attractions of the
early cinema was the introduction of unknown performers into American culture. But there were
a few actors and actresses in this era who simply dominated the cinema marquees, the gossip
headlines, and the popular imagination .

The 1910s saw the emergence of what we now call the "star system, " the studio - sponsored
promotion, marketing, and featuring of individual films determined by the performers who
starred in them. Before the public knew who she was, for example , Florence Lawrence was
called simply "The Biograph Girl" after her appearances in Biograph-produced films .

After that things moved very quickly, and soon the public had dozens of stars' names on the tips
of their tongues. As always, the list is too long to do any kind of justice to here, but we'll try to
give you some sense of those names and faces that gave the history of entertainment whole
new ways of experiencing laughter, beauty, and art in the early years of the last century.

The Best Medicine

Watching a Charlie Chaplin film at the beginning of the twenty-first century is like opening a time
capsule, or peering through an opaque window onto another era. Alternately light and serious,
poignant and flip, naive and wise, Chaplin's pale face could register the most cloying
sentimentalism
while conveying the seriousness of his films ' subject matter with moving grace.

In commercial and business terms, Chaplin defined the twentieth-century movie star. While
today's cinema superstars (Leonardo DiCaprio , Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts) can command
tens of millions of dollars per film, Chaplin was so in demand around the world that his salary
virtually doubled every time he switched studios.

Charlie Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel, a thinly disguised Adolf Hitler, in The Great Dictator (1940)
You gotta begin with Garbo, the Swedish star whose sudden appearance on the American
scene was "torrential" in more ways than one. After MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer featured her in
The Torrent (1926), her fate was sealed as audiences across the country became captivated by
the Scandinavian goddess. Though she never won an Academy Award, Garbo received rave
reviews for both her silent and her sound performances (for the latter, check out especially Anna
Karenina ( 1935) and Camille (1937), producing an aura of mystery and unwilling vulnerability
that continues to define the ideal of cinematic beauty. (Whether Garbo could real l y act, though,
remains an open question among film historians.)

If Garbo exuded statuesque expressiveness, the earlier actress Mary Pickford defined
all-around movie-star sexiness for the silent era, playing a variety of roles that made her /
America's Sweetheart" (and, for a few years, the nation's top box - office attraction) in the
1910s. More than a pretty face, however, Pickford exercised tight control over her career,
carefully managing the personnel involved in her film and the public persona she projected to
the world. In films such as White Roses (1910), Madame Butterfly (1915), Stella Maris (1918),
and Pollyanna (1920, in which at 27 she played a 12-year-old!), Pickford displayed a stunning
artistic adaptability coupled with a natural grace on the screen.

Film Acting as Art Form

When D. W. Griffith decided to cast Lillian Gish in The Birth of a Nation as the female lead, he
was announcing to the nation what he had known for several years: that the young woman from
Ohio was a prodigiously talented actress whose adaptability on the screen - a face that could
register a pitiable fragility along with the most bitter strength-was simply astonishing. The
collaboration between Gish and Griffith lasted roughly a decade, after which Gish went on to
direct several of her own films and further consolidate her image as "The First Lady of the Silent
Screen.

As much as any other silent star, Lillian Gish (whose sister, Dorothy, was also a talented
actress) was responsible for the elevation of film acting to an art form. Though it might be
controversial to say so these days, silent film simply made more demands on actors and
actresses than the talkies ever would, creating the need for a brilliant coordination of face, eyes,
and hands for every performance.

Lon Chaney (1883-1930), "The Man of a Thousand Faces," was one of the greatest mimes in
the history of the art form. One of his most dazzling talents was his knack for playing maimed,
disfigured, or disabled characters with empathy and compassion . In films like Treasure lsland
(1920), The Penalty (1920), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and The Phantom of the
Opera (1925), Chaney portrayed characters with missing legs, disabling humps, and disfigured
faces without turning them into dehumanized monsters in the process .
Perhaps Chaney's primary motivation for such empathetic portrayals of disability was a personal
one. Both of his parents were deaf and mute; rather than speaking and hearing , little Lon
communicated with them instead through sign and sight. His parents' physical disability gave
Lon Chaney and the history of cinema a repertoire of gesture and movement that remains one
of film's most treasured gifts to the world.

For better or worse, the silent era bequeathed to posterity the notion of the film actor as artiste.
Some of today's film stars - Jim Carrey , Anthony Hopkins, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep -
truly deserve inclusion in the pantheon of film artists alongside Chaplin, Keaton, and the Gish
sisters. Though many others rest on the laurels of name recognition and stock performances
that never seem to change, this isn't any- thing new either!

Theda Bara, John Barrymore, Lon Chaney , Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, the Gish
sisters, Keaton, Bessie Love, Wallace Reid, Gloria Swanson, Pearl White: Watch their films and
you'll see why acting became the twentieth century's most visible and popular art form, a
passionate medium of human expression unlike any other.

Russian Film Making

It may or may not have been the Evil Empire , but the ex-Soviet Union (or Eastern bloc) has
also been the origin and inspiration for diverse kinds of filmmaking. By turns creative and
oppressive , it has had perhaps the most varied history of any of the national cinemas. It is
really almost manic-depressive: Derivative of other national cinemas during the twilight of the
czarist era, it became brilliantly avant-garde during the Leninist period and the 1920s , then
oppressive and static from Stalin until the 1960s, and has since become in some arenas
technically and ideologically progressive once again.

Finally, the Eastern-bloc cinema has much to offer American filmgoers for several reasons. First,
because communism i s the ideology most opposed to ours in the twentieth century , it can give
us a view of ourselves that it would be difficult for us to have. The images of Western capitalists
in Soviet films are not as flattering as they are in e v en very critical, Frank Capraesque
American movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Second, our own filmic responses to the
Soviet Union tell us much about ourselves.

Czars and Stars

Because Russia and other Eastern European countries were initially dependent on Western
Europe and the United States for film technology (cameras, projectors, film stock), their films of
the first two decades were not as technically or aesthetically innovative as the movies of their
Western counterparts. Exhibitors relied heavily on well-made imports from other countries; 90
percent of the films shown before World War I were imported. The first native production
company was not founded until 1907. One of the three production companies in Russia was
foreign.

However, by the time of the October Revolution, there was a thriving if small national film
industry, producing products made after the styles of other countries.

The Soviet Era

The high point in the history of Russian film comes during the early Soviet era. However, though
Soviet film was born during the Russian Revolution, the form it would take was not clear until
the 1920s. The few short years between about 1920 to about 1925 (in other words from the
completion of the first phase of the film industry's nationalization to the release date of
Battleship Potemkin) saw a breathtaking change in Russian-now Soviet-filmmaking. This rapid
growth is all the more remarkable for the existence of stiff opposition to the new Marxist regime
from the West.

Because of the success of the Bolshevik revolution, many figures in the Czarist film industry
packed up their toys and left for other countries, leaving the new regime hard up for supplies
and expertise. Further, Western countries imposed a blockade on Russia, so little new
equipment could get into the country.

Still, the following events happened in rapid fashion: The film industry was nationalized;
Nadezhda Krupskaia (Lenin's wife) co-founded the Cinema Committee; the Cinema Committee
founded the very famous Moscow Film School; Lev Kuleshov founded the "Kuleshov Workshop"
and discovered the "Kuleshov Effect"; Dziga Vertov established his "Kino-Eye" theory and style
of film-making, blending a realist aesthetic with a propagandic goal; the Russian Soviet tried to
coordinate film production with that of the other Eastern-bloc soviets; Russian montage theory
began to be articulated.

At the beginning of the Soviet era, and before the high moments of Sergei Eisenstein and
Vsevolod Pudovkin, Soviet filmmakers and industry bureaucrats tried to fit the new Marxist
ideology with the new art form in various ways. Among others, they denied that it was an art
form, but not for the same reasons the Western intellectual elite dismissed film. The Soviet
"constructivists," for example, did not think film was low-brow, but an essentially new way of
presenting the world, without all the bourgeois apparatus of the "legitimate" stage, for example.
Unlike aesthetic elitists, they liked the fact that movies appealed to the masses, seeing in film a
powerful organ of enlightenment.

Montage
As we will discuss in "Making the Cut: Film Editing," the establishment of the Moscow Film
School (the first such school in the world) was a watershed moment for filmmaking. Because the
Western blockade of Russia prevented much raw film stock from entering the country, and
because such stock as existed was used to shoot propaganda films, student filmmakers cut and
recut the same prints (of films by Abel Gance and D. W. Griffith) over and over again,
emphasizing different narrative elements and emotional effects, and even telling different stories
using the same film stock. Almost from the beginning, the Soviet filmmakers realized the
importance of editing in the making of a film. Gradually, the idea of montage was born from such
experimentation.

Montage is a confusing term because, like love, it means different things to different people. In
Hollywood, it most often simply means a number of shots edited quickly together in order to
form a brief impression of a character, place, or time. The Madonna musical number "Back in
Business" in Dick Tracey (1990) underscores the visual montage of Several quick shots of
gangsters engaged in various illegal rackets: gambling, robbery, and so on. This montage
simply conveys the idea that a lot of illegal activities are going on in a compressed time.