Silent Cinema
An Aesthetic Call to Arms

George Toles

Now that mainstream movies have become as dull as theatre, where are cinephile pilgrims to go in search of pleasures untried and suitably raw? Silent film, the lost world of cinema’s infancy and unbridled youth, may provide the best way out of our present listlessness, our habitual mood of diminished expectations. For many decades, silent movies commanded a dutiful respect that was seldom accompanied by passion. Rudolf Arnheim and Kevin Brownlow seemed merely quaint or contrarian when they contended that the silent era was “the richest in cinema history.” At this remove, however, silent film has finally shed the stigma of obsolescence and the feel of embarrassing old-fashionedness.

Just as modernists once found the means of “making art new” by returning to the large, unruly texts of antiquity, we might similarly begin afresh by apprenticing ourselves to the grandeur and visionary excitement of the pioneers in the art of pure (well, almost pure) image. Encounters with silent film force a drastic re-orientation of our viewing reflexes, shaking and shattering our amply conditioned moviegoer self. The overthrow of this Pavlovian dullard is, of course, what many of us claim to seek. Perhaps an even greater number of us crave such a remedy for our spectator malaise without fully realizing it. Even silent movies of no special distinction partake of the alien majesty of this abandoned expressive discipline. The silent screen, in part because of its deep, unshakable alliance with death, reveals an invincible otherness.
The Passion of Joan of Arc seems to lay bare the quivering mortal roots—the death’s head secret—of all silent film, and maybe this is why it appears to provide an awesome and alarming template for the entire haunted medium. The human form in a silent film nearly always seems tethered to a ghostly counterpart, like Buster Keaton’s unflinching and unstoppable dream double in Sherlock, Jr., who dissolves limitations and boundaries as though external reality were a bright series of magic tricks. Or consider Norma Shearer at the beginning of Lady of the Night. A prostitute fresh from the penitentiary, venturing onto a lonely city street, Shearer is greeted by an old-fashioned hearse, with a glass window fronting the coffin. Keaton-style, Shearer uses the window as a mirror for herself, and calmly adjusts her makeup. There is a kind of nimbus attending so many silent film faces that seems eerily wafted from the afterlife. Often actors confront the camera with what feels like unearthly awareness, as though they have been struck by the thought that they may already be dead and are momentarily transfixed by this possibility. Whether the ghosts are literal or submerged, the world of silence has the atmosphere of a rollicking graveyard, where, as in so many cautionary medieval paintings, skeletons peer unobtrusively through windows and doors at the deceptive feast of life. Because death is so tangibly hovering over these mimed shadow plays, human striving and doing acquire both a forlorn inconsequentiality and a lovely nobility that comes from meeting inconsequence head on. “The set trap never tires of waiting,” in Joy Williams’s memorable phrase, but every human gesture, every risked connection in the fleeting time being, has an unlikely air of victory. Silent film narratives are never far away from ceremony and ritual: bacchanal , swelling sentiment, tableaux of suffering, sublime vistas, peep show unveilings, and feats of sustained looking all take on a quasi-sacred character, as though the new art would ideally emulate the form and mystery of a Catholic Mass, where death is transmuted into a redeemed life.

Possibly because of their missing color and sound dimensions, silent pictures can more readily induce in the viewer a state akin to trance. Roland Barthes has written in his meditation on the silent face of Garbo of the “deepest ecstasy” of losing oneself entirely in the contemplation of an image. The Garbo face represents an absolute of our fleshly incarnation, which can “neither be reached nor renounced.” In the presence of so many similarly exalted forms and faces, palpably tenured to death without quite losing their hold on life, the viewer of silent films is often ushered to what feels like a threshold of immortality. The threshold opens to our gaze for brief instants, then we are required to draw back from it, and descend to a (slightly) less ethereal plane. The screened reality, beheld in ever-deepening folds of silence with a cathedral-like musical accompaniment, tantalizes us steadily, and need I add erotically, with intimations of transcendence. The finest silent film actors—among them Gish, Gaynor, Chaplin, Keaton, Pickford, Brooks, Chaney, Jannings—use the dispensation of silence to release an almost superhuman expressiveness. Body and face unite to form one large communicative vessel, making luminously transparent every flicker of intention, everything shared with others and everything withheld from them. These dauntingly exposed creatures take us to the furthest reaches of privacy, and divine ways to convey the heretofore inexpressible. What we are inclined, in our fear of untrammeled expressiveness, to call melodrama is in fact the “naturalism of the dream life.” The actors bear witness to the frenzy and giddiness of the feelings we expend so much daylight energy holding in check. Only in the night gardens of our silent movie dreams do our starved bodies demand restitution for all the ways they have been cheated and denied.

Artifice and reality intermingle with much less strain in silent than sound film. Things are less cumbersomely grounded in the realm of silence and our eyes do not require that a material world weightiness be maintained, or accounted for. Weight can be invoked when it serves an image’s purposes, but it can also be whisked away when it proves too much of a hindrance. Life can play, untroubled, at a variety of speeds in silence, and the Newtonian universe becomes a great spinning toy where machines and human expand their capacities for velocity as need or the spirit of play dictate. All the animate and inanimate components of the silent world can move up and down the ladder of wakefulness, as Vertov’s man with a movie camera discovered. At times a chair, a bush, a bench, a wagon, a hand, a shop window achieve a pitch of presence (of rapturous attunement) to the things around them that is like an explosion.

Music, like visual artifice, is not obliged to fight for its right to exist credibly in silent movies. It does not tilt against other sounds (noises and voices) as a competing, possibly unwarranted presence—a calculating intruder. The silent film accompaniment—whether piano or orchestra—is summoned into being by the images. The music potentially gives voice to every shy signal and shaded window in the visual flux. It imbues the actors’ speech and motion with the delicately responsive melody that they long for. Without it they must live in exile from the redemptive powers of sound. The music (often improvised) that anticipates the image and follows in its wake escapes the toils and cloddish approximations of the verbal. The world sound is all of a piece—airborne and harmonious, the music drawing all sound desire together, as if through the eye of a needle.

The silent film camera, innocent of the requirements of television, tends to be placed further back from the action than current convention dictates. This extra distance allows figures to be much of the time viewed in full and in concert with their physical circumstances. There is typically in silent film a high degree of integration of humans and their defining environment. The long view also makes it possible for performers to approach every scene as a “whole body” statement. It is assumed that every beat of the action must be creatively physicalized. Costumes, therefore, are designed with a realization that they must beautifully accentuate and enhance motion: they focus the actors’ characteristic walk, way of holding themselves, and amplify their gestural resources. Clothing can never be taken for granted in silent films. They sculpt the body in a manner that seems sharply, thrillingly at variance with contemporary norms, and create another mystifying merger of naturalness and stylization. Clothes are themselves a form of architecture, making bold supportive design statements within the lavish settings. It was a crucial concern of designers that the vast sets and ornate décor not overwhelm the costumes, but rather cause them to shimmer more eloquently.

A frequent architectural tug-of-war in silent films is conducted between immense interior spaces and cozily cramped ones. The grand sets, all built in the dream shadow cast by D.W. Griffith’s Babylon, proclaim wealth in such surfeit and Charles Foster Kane vacancy, that the human being can only seem stranded there. One can pass through these sets, as though in a formal procession, or one can display oneself opulently in a well-staged entrance, but never convincingly inhabits them. The tighter, Chaplinesque locales give the human presence a vivid, inviting security, a warm (if sometimes perilous) sense of being accommodated. The smaller spaces and shadowy grottoes, frequently suggestive of poverty or mental illness, almost hug the actors, putting every item that serves their needs within friendly arm’s reach. The usual intimate texture of the “limited means” milieu gives a strong implicit endorsement of the human struggle for survival. A room that presses in tenderly toward its occupant is already a manifestation of community. The settings, on the other hand, that exist to support fantasies of magnificence are chill and recessive. Their dominant note is isolation, which magnifies with every step taken, alone or in company.

To conclude, it is well-known that that the grammar and narrative language of film are worked out in the silent era. The countless surviving movies and fragments are a sprawling flea market of forgotten experiments and audacious alternatives to contemporary storytelling practice. The star and studio system were also consolidated in the silent period, in addition to the conventions and codes still operative in most film genres. The central creative role of the director was defined, in the public consciousness at least, by the grand, reckless, self-mythologizing work of D. W. Griffith. In the incredibly diverse written response to the new art form (these “bewitching mass séances in our midst”), there is intense, moving debate about what movie aesthetics and popularity could mean and be in relation to everything that came before. Surely there are sufficient reasons to pursue, with the zeal of an Antarctic adventurer, the lure, unsorted mysteries, and religious vertigo of the silent screen.