Silent Films As They Were Intended

Well it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, but it’s been busy; I’m back on the “silent film” track again though, so here goes…

Back in October, I had a pretty cool first experience – I watched my first silent film on an actual movie screen. Two weekends in a row, actually, I spent at the Hollywood Theater watching a series of silent films. One weekend, they held a showing of a collection of silent films from 1914 to 1918, showing the evolution of early cinema. Then on Halloween, I saw the original screen adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney.

The first weekend was pretty exciting. During that first moment when the lights went out and the organist began playing the excitement was almost tangible in the air – well, at least for me it was! Aside from the young family, with a toddler, I was youngest person in the theater by about three decades, so maybe the novelty of it wasn’t shared by all, but I smiled in delight. The first film, from 1914, was sweet and cute, and basically not more than a play on film. All of the scenes were shot from a single camera, uncut with not so much as a flicker of movement from the camera. The following films journeyed through the early years of cinema, and the evolution of the cinematography was interesting indeed. It snuck up me, and by the time the final film was playing, I thought to myself “wait, when did these start looking like ‘real’ movies!” It is amazing what camera movement can do to the feel of a film. Not that the earlier films weren’t fun, but had they been longer than a single roll (about 14-15 minutes max), I think they would have had a little bit more difficulty holding the audience’s attention. You couldn’t, for example, shoot The Sheik in short, fixed camera scenes; a master piece like that requires sweeping shots and a cinematographer who uses the camera like an artist uses a paint brush. The other most noticeable change was the evolution of the “dialogue.” In early films, the text was inserted before each scene giving a description of what was to come, much like what you would get in a program at a ballet or opera. As the films evolved though, the text was changed to become the written dialogue one typically thinks of in a silent film. It is amazing how that simple little innovation can change the entire feel of a film and mesh so beautifully with the acting and energy of the film to create, true dialogue – not spoken, but for all intents and purposes just as powerful.

Then on Halloween, I went and saw the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, a 7 year jump in time from the previous weekend’s film collection. It was also fun. Lon Chaney was superb was the tortured protagonist, not quite villain not quite antihero. A friend went with me, who had never seen a silent film before, and though skeptical at first, when we left he admitted, it held his attention much better than many modern films and was “actually pretty good.” So if you are a fan of the classic French story, or if you want a story of love, sacrifice and human suffering, then check out the original (film version) of The Phantom of the Opera.

I think though that the greatest thing I learned from this experience was that any movie really is better on the big screen, as it was intended. It’s part of the experience of film viewing. Call it escapism, but if you are going to watch a movie, and truly appreciate it for the art that it is, you really need to see it on a big screen. Even when the film is a deteriorated from lack of proper preservation and the sound comes from a live organist rather than Dolby Digital, it’s still utterly fantastic! Let yourself get sucked, and enjoy the moment!