Silent films aren’t for everybody, although they should
be. If you’re not into silent films or you’ve never seen one, you should give
it a try. Even I will admit that I often find films from the silent era
difficult to connect with. They require a different focus from your brain. For
one thing there’s occasional reading involved. Apart from that, we’ve just
become so conditioned to having things spelled out for us in the visual arts
that many of us have become inured to anything less than an assault on the
senses. When you no longer have things like sound effects and spoken dialogue
to help you understand the story, it means your brain has to do the work of
filling in the gaps. You have to imagine how the lines are spoken and how the
scene sounds.
Yes, it can be hard work, but it can be greatly
fulfilling. Charlie Chaplin is a great place to start with silent cinema.
Another one is one of the great silent classics that I recently had the
pleasure to enjoy at a local arts cinema with live musical accompaniment. The
film is The Crowd directed by King
Vidor. I had already seen the film probably about 12 years ago and remember
thinking at the time that it was unlike any silent film I’d seen. At that point
I could probably count on both hands (and maybe one foot) the number of silent
films I’d seen. Now I’ve seen quite a few more and it remains a fresh and
lively film more in the style of modern dramas than anything that was being
produced in the late 20s.
