The Silent Film

       

The next bit of this foolish endeavour to justify four years of top class education will focus on one of my favourite courses, Interwar Cinema, particularly on Silent Cinema. Interwar was brilliant, as it covered a lot of films that I never knew were my favourite until I watched them for the first time; The Scarlet Pimpernel, A Star is Born, Lost Horizon, Madame Bovary (that last one’s French, so you know it’s good and mental) but none were as good as the silent movies I indulged in.

Can I just take a moment to say how good silent films are? It’s like what that Norma Desmond said in Sunset Boulevard – “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces!”

Norma was obviously the picture of reasoned argument

With a silent movie, you’re relying totally on the cinematic language to tell the story. Actors could remain an enigma, their characters barely ever even having names in the early years. They weren’t the star; the camera was, showing wonderful new things with new equipment every single day. Nickelodeons and later Picture Palaces sprang up across the globe, and new art movements were created in the blink of an eye, let alone techniques which are still used today (apparently, the montage existed before Rocky IV, which was astonishing news to me). Sunrise is one of the most life-affirming films I’ve ever seen, and that little gem starts with attempted wife murder.

Cinema really found its stride just before the 1920s, right when Thomas Edison was chasing all the early filmmakers out of New York and into Los Angeles, where the sun always shone and unions hadn’t been invented on the west coast yet, so everything was nice and cheap (if just a touch deadly). Come the 1920s, some smart people thought that what this new Hollywoodland real estate needed was a big old sign in flashing lights –

Yeah, this would do nicely

And films became less of a curious phase, and a full on glamour fest of epic proportions. The actors, once looked over like so many sultanas in a fruit salad, suddenly became the main attraction, as so many of them embodied that elusive American Dream. Rudolph Valentino for example was an Italian immigrant who came over to Hollywood in 1913, worked his way through small parts until Paramount bought his soul (contracts were harsher back in the day) and modelled him as a Great Lover in the amazingly bonkers The Sheik.

                                                 

This guy.

Oooh, The Sheik is fun. It’s about an English Rose who gets kidnapped by Arabs, only to fall in love with their leader Valentino, who boggles his eyes seductively throughout the film and turns out to be quite nice really, underneath all of his foreignness. Valentino epitomised all that was enticing about the new Hollywood system; if you worked hard and looked the part, you too could live in a fabulous mansion and be adored by millions. So what if you died young (like Valentino), had your marriage destroyed (like Mary Pickford) or flamed out so spectacularly your fall from grace is still whispered in rehab clinics across the world (like Clara Bow)? For one moment, you could be the star of a studio, you could be immortalised in lights forever.

Which is why it’s strange that so many films about Hollywood seem to really hate Hollywood. Take, if you would be so kind, The Extra Girl. Sue Graham (Mabel Normand) dreams of becoming an actress and escaping an unwanted marriage, but when she arrives in Hollywood from Pittsburgh (she was the original small town girl living in a lonely world), it turns out her picture, with which she won a competition to get a part in a movie, was switched with another woman’s photo. Her dreams of acting languish as her parents follow her to Hollywood, where they’re promptly robbed blind and Sue nearly shoots a guy. So come to Hollywood, follow your dreams, but don’t think for a moment you can be like us, good Lord no.

If Hollywood was the stuff of dreams, then European silent films, especially German films, was fast becoming the artsy (and indeed fartsy) cinema of the world. Films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Un Chien Andolou (which I’ve written at length about here) and Battleship Potemkin (which you are obliged to mention in every single film essay you write) were instant, weird classics, pushing the boundaries of technology, art and sometimes taste. It wasn’t all good stuff though; one of the absolute classics, the type that critics talk about in hushed tones, The Joyless Street, is a struggle and a half to get through. 

For a start its three hours long without a single joke; nary even a flicker of a smile can be raised to alleviate the constant oppression of the noble German. Each and every single female character becomes a prostitute at some point, all of the male characters are hatefully ignorant and no one has a happy ending, apart from a baby whose parents are killed by a fire which he somehow escapes. I know there’s a place for films like this, but the horrible tragedy is so overwhelming that it becomes a self parody by the time the third lady heads to the local brothel to feed her elderly father.

However, the march of technology meant that despite many people’s misgivings, the talking picture sensation, which first came to screens in 1927 and was a cultural behemoth by 1929, put a nail in silent cinema’s mainstream appeal forever. Looking around, silent cinema seems to be restricted to short animations (the gloriously delightful Paperman being a prime example) and experimental affairs, like Silent Movie and The Artist, the former a homage to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd style slapstick, the latter a homage to really, really good films, told in the way which best suits their stories, sound, colour and 3D be damned.

 

And since this is my blog and my rules, I can end how I like, so here are some production stills of the King of silent Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks, who out-Errol Flynned Errol Flynn before out-Errol Flynning Errol Flynn was even a thing.

                                                                          

Now he did have a face...