We entitle this accompaniment to our screenings “Why We Picked This Film,” but we really want to call this one “Why You Should Watch More Silent Films.” The reasons we hear not to watch silent films are legion and often non sequitor – they’re old (?), they’re boring, they didn’t know how to make “real” movies back then, they might be hard to understand because they don’t have words, etc.
But really there’s only one thing keeping people from seeing some really great films from the silent era – they’re different – and that’s not really a good reason to skip what might be a very fun experience. So here are three reasons why you should jump at the chance to see silent films, not that those chances materialize very often.
1. Silent films have retro cool potential. In an era when most of us are wearing ‘70s t-shirts, listening to early rock-and-roll music, and letting “Mad Men” return us to the style and sexism of the 1960s, there’s caché in exploring the style and stand-out examples of film-making dominant at the beginning of the form. Now, it’s not like folks are dipping into the silent era and stealing techniques, looks, or content for modern “retro” silent films. But “coolness” is a state of mind. If we are excitedly reliving the patriarchal oiliness and style-over-substance vibe of the ‘60s, why shouldn’t we celebrate the kooky human-as-clown comedies of Max Sennett or revel in our knowledge of the first filmed versions of vampire flicks (Nosferatu, 1922) or westerns (The Great Train Robbery, 1903) or animated cartoons (Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, 1906). If we don’t think of silent film as a archaic technology but more as a style of film-making, then, seeing Battleship Potemkin becomes a social interaction, the establishment of a certain kind of cultural cred, and you’re only “in” if you’ve seen a few.
2. Silent films are wacky. We won’t go into the history of the form, but very little in a silent film looks like movies today. There’s a certain goofiness – part technology, part style of the time, part viewer’s unfamiliarity – that comes off the screen. So in that sense, watching a silent film, from the comedies of Buster Keaton to the historic epics of D.W.Griffith, is not like going to the a movie but like going to a completely different visual experience, and because it is an unfamiliar one, it’s weird. But weird is often fun. Think about the strangest food you’ve ever eaten, or when you and your fiends jumped into a hole in the ice at Widji, or maybe the first time you heard a Tom Waits song, and you thought, “okay, that was weird ... but fun.” Weird + fun = wacky, really, and many of the things we do for the first time, if we’ve never thought about doing them before or they don’t conform to our conventional expectations, are wacky. That’s the silent film experience. So you get home from Battleship Potemkin, and your parents ask “what have you been doing?” You say, “I’ve been watching this wacky movie where people don’t speak out loud, so they do a lot acting with their faces and gesturing with their arms. It was pretty cool.”
3. Silent films are fun because they’re different; it’s all the other stuff that becomes boring. We suspect that this summer you are likely to watch only movies that are made only in 2011, and not only that but maybe only movies made in 2011 about male superheroes (Green Lantern, Thor, Captain America, X-Men: First Class). There’s a certain sameness to the American film-going experience. Then every once in a while a movie comes along that’s a lot different from what we’re used to seeing, something like Blair Witch Project, or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or anything written by Charlie Kaufman, and we celebrate its difference, its breath-of-fresh-air-ness. The fact that silent films are different, that they give us a moment to cleanse our palette and to rethink what it is that we get from the other films we go to, that they’re wacky, is their value to us. While people do like familiarity (the only reason MacDonald’s exists), failure to experience “the different” traps us in a culture of mediocrity. Difference is experience; difference is life. And life is better if you’re becoming more experienced, trying new things: ice hole baths, grasshopper tacos, muy Thai martial arts films, Tom Waits’ cover of “Heigh Ho,” Snakefinger, black lighting, hot dog eating contests, Tiny Tim and his ukelele ... well, you get the picture.
In some ways, Battleship Potemkin is neither that cool, nor that wacky, nor that different. It tells a simple story of a group of sailors, fed up at mistreatment, protesting their condition, and the resulting revolt against authoritarian rule. We hope, though, that viewers set aside any fear of the no-longer-conventional techniques and style and enjoy one of the best films ever made.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
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