How do we watch a silent movie like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)? Really, most film-goers feel the same way about silent film that we feel about rotary phones and typewriters – why would we even spend time on something so technologically out of date? Well, we’re not dealing with a tool here (you don’t use a movie), we’re looking at an art form. One of the problems with film lately is that the technology of it, special effects if you will, seems to have overwhelmed our appreciation of that.
So say this to yourself, out loud (or you can silently mouth it for less ironic effect): silent film is not an antiquated, obsolete method of movie-making. It is a specific form of expression, different from what we are currently used to. Few musicians currently write and perform music using the instrumentation of the western European medieval period (the lute! the sackbut! the hautbois! the vielle!), but that doesn’t mean that the music of that period has no value or that it cannot be appreciated. In fact, it’s pretty cool. And so is silent film.
Here are some things to love about silent film. First, its black and whiteness. Nosferatu is a horror movie, and horror movies are better in black and white. Yes, we know blood looks cooler if it’s actually red, but horror movies are more effective if they don’t show the blood. The original Halloween (1978), for example, avoids any blood, and it’s a slasher movie, but it is scarier than most of the horror that follows it in the genre because so much of takes place in your mind. Psychological horror is freakier than gross-out horror. Black and white further engages the psychological effect of a film because it recedes from the verisimilitude of color, it’s unreal. And horror is all about otherness. What’s more, if you do have blood, isn’t it creepier if it’s black? Tim Burton thought so in Batman Returns (1992).
Second, silent movies are silent. Film-makers struggled for 30 years to sync up sound with image, a technological difficulty that took ingenuity to overcome and didn’t happen until 1925. But in the meantime, the silent approach developed into a laudable form. Watch Singin’ in the Rain (1952) sometime. Underneath its musical plot, it recaps the transition from silent to sound and acknowledges that many great silent actors could not make that transition because their voices weren’t auralgenic.
But look at that phrase: “great silent actors.” What does that mean? It means that actors of the silent era created indelible characters, memorable, expressive, larger-than-life actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Ramon Novarro, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, and on and on. And a lot of them did this with their faces; if you can’t speak out loud, emotion must be communicated through face and physical expression. Watch for this in Nosferatu, how the actors capture love, horror, fear, sadness – the basic human emotions – effortlessly with their faces. Now, this is a bit more expressionistic, or exaggerated for emotional effect, than we’re used to, and that can seem weird. But as we get used to it we realize we’re seeing human emotion more clearly as an element of narrative than we do in modern film.
Finally, one of the modern film-making’s most bothersome elements, to this writer anyway, is the soundtrack, so manipulative, so distracting, so much like a band-aid slapped over a film’s weaknesses or a chaperone that interferes with our engagement with a hot date. In true silent film, film without the ongoing organ accompaniment that would have been improvised and played by an organist, live during the movie, we connect directly with these emotions. All modern DVDs of silent film include musical accompaniment, mostly because contemporary film fans cannot fathom the total absence of sound. We’ll leave the recorded organ accompaniment turned on during tonight’s screening, but imagine if it was just you, and the vampire, alone in a castle room so dark there’s no color, and no one can hear you scream. Because there is no sound.
Happy Halloween!
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
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