The last and biggest hurdle to overcome to becoming a real lover of cinema is learning to appreciate silent films.
Stick enough violence or action in a movie and you can get anyone reading subtitles. Show them “Singin’ in the Rain” and they’ll be able to watch any musical ever made. Watch a movie timeless enough and you’ll forget that it’s in black and white.
But silent films are different. They’re a hard sell for a number of reasons, and there are a few myths and cultural problems to address before we notice a change.
Debunking silent film myths
Myth #1: Sound Movies are Better
The biggest misconception about film is that it was once seen as nothing more than a novelty, and only later did it become art.
Anyone who believes that transition happened between silents to talkies is wrong.
Of course sound and dialogue is a good thing. Movies would not be the same if we had been denied the clever dialogue of modern wordsmiths like the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin and more.
Rather, silent films hardly told stories the same way as talkies, even to the point that storytelling had to be reinvented with the introduction of sound.
But this form of silent storytelling was not primitive or inferior.
The best directors of the silent screen were gifted at telling a story through purely visual means, minimizing intertitles and composing moods through facial cues and striking shot placement.
Consider the chilling images of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” the cinematic ballet of any of Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick, the mesmerizing first-ever montage of “The Battleship Potemkin” or the simple love story behind “Sunrise.”
I can’t think of more elegant, poetic or even easier ways of telling any of those stories, and I certainly can’t imagine how words would help.
Myth #2: All silent films are dated and old
More so than black and white to color or any other technological advancement of film, the silent era is called an “era” because it can be easily bookended from the birth of cinema to 1927 when “The Jazz Singer” virtually wiped out silents.
This signals to everyone that silent films are old, old, old.
Lots of people dislike things that are old, and there are some who believe film critics like things simply because they are old.
But not all silent films are completely unrelatable. There’s a universal quality to Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton’s slapstick. The setting may be a relic, but the ideas are as poignant as ever.
On a side note, not all silent films are as racist as “The Birth of a Nation.” Even the first half of “Birth of a Nation” is not as racist the rest.
I’m more alienated by horrid ‘80s or ‘90s fashion, hair styles, expressions and early computer generated special effects. You can do a lot worse throughout film history than the silent era.
Myth #3: Silent stars were corny actors
Today’s audiences watch silent movies ironically. They view the time as quaint and full of wide-eyed over-actors.
It’s true they weren’t exactly minimalist, method actors, but people who apply such a broad, blanket statement to all silent stars are simply naïve.
Buster Keaton is a great example of a performer who has arguably aged better than his rival Charlie Chaplin, whose double takes have since become cartoonish. Keaton had the perfect stone face for getting a laugh at the life-threatening stunt of having a side of a house collapse on top of him.
Even dramatic actors like “Sunrise’s” George O’Brien or Rudolph Valentino, possibly the first ever sex symbol, feel very modern with their messy features and cold, glowering stare.
Some actors even had better luck pushing their way into talkies than did many of their colleagues. Joan Crawford and Mickey Rooney both got their starts in silents, and let’s not forget Lillian Gish’s role in “The Night of the Hunter.”
Why people don’t know silent movies
Anita Page died in 2008. As the star of 1928’s “Our Dancing Daughters,” she was considered the last living silent film actor.
There is simply no one left who participated or remembers that era. To have even been born in 1927 as the genre hit its zenith and took a fatal nosedive, that person would today be 84.
Now numerous generations have grown up without any awareness of silent film, and barely a soul would think of recommending one for a movie night at home.
This is assuming that watching a silent film at home would be easy. Many silent classics are bundled in strange box sets and do not have proper DVD distribution.
Even a handful of the titles streaming on Netflix, such as D.W. Griffith’s three-hour-plus “Intolerance,” include no background soundtrack at all, of which not even a silent film should be without.
Options are limited to places like the IU Cinema, which just showed “Sunrise” with a piano accompanist on Sunday. This is the real way to watch a silent film, and a good place to start, but those opportunities are few and far between.
Silent films coming back
My hope for silent films seeing a revival rests with “The Artist.”
Yes, a French filmmaker has gone full out in making a black and white, silent motion picture. It was a critical darling at Cannes and is now making a lot of Oscar buzz.
The story is a loose adaptation of the end of the silent era as depicted in “Singin’ in the Rain,” and American audiences should recognize the likes of John Goodman and James Cromwell.
The Weinstein Brothers have purchased the film in hopes that it will sweep awards season and be a box office success.
What “The Artist” spells for me are amateur filmmakers on YouTube and elsewhere trying their hand at silent filmmaking. I’ve always found a tendency to go on a silent film bender after watching just one, and I expect others may do the same.
But if not these obvious changes, we may see more modern filmmakers attempting to tell stories the way silents once did.
Films that favor visuals over dialogue such as “The Tree of Life” or “The American” have been polarizing experiences for larger audiences, but many people love and cherish the silent montage in “Up” or whole chapters of “Wall-E.”
Silent films are not dead and gone. They’re not old, outdated, silly, inferior or unentertaining.
Just because they’re silent doesn’t mean they should go unheard.