Silent Movie Day: September 29
This coming Sunday, September 29, is Silent Movie Day. The link gives information on several locations (albeit mostly in California) where films can be viewed.
But assuming that you don't want to travel, and assuming that you don't have any silent films handy in your DVD collection (personally, I have something like 75 of them), there is always YouTube. Just search for "great silent films" and you should get suggestions of a few different playlists to browse.
Silent films, properly done, fascinate me. They really are a separate art form from sound movies. Particularly later silents tried to tell stories with a minimum of title cards, preferring to tell the story visually--often with beautiful camerawork. Warning Shadows (1923) went so far as only using title cards right at the beginning to introduce the characters. The rest of the movie was entirely told visually.
But you have to watch the film as it was intended to be seen. If there is no music track provided, do not watch it. Silent films were never intended to be viewed in silence. It was planned to have musical accompaniment ("mood music" if you will) to reflect the action on the screen. Unfortunately, some will provide music but it is just random selections of classical music slapped on to the movie with no real attempt to match the music to the action. Again, this is not how the movie was meant to be watched.
But if you can find a silent with a proper score matching the action, it is a delight. If you watch Don Juan (1926) with John Barrymore, it was originally issued with a recorded sound track--the first feature-length film to use the Vitaphone sound-on-disk system. It was sort of a trial run for The Jazz Singer (1927), which used the same system and allowed for spoken dialogue.
I have not yet decided on what film to watch to celebrate Silent Movie Day this year. I feel like I should watch one that I have never seen before. I am considering Earth (1930) because I viewed the first minute of the film and the cinematography is beautiful.
So, any other Shipmates interested in participating in Silent Movie Day?
But assuming that you don't want to travel, and assuming that you don't have any silent films handy in your DVD collection (personally, I have something like 75 of them), there is always YouTube. Just search for "great silent films" and you should get suggestions of a few different playlists to browse.
Silent films, properly done, fascinate me. They really are a separate art form from sound movies. Particularly later silents tried to tell stories with a minimum of title cards, preferring to tell the story visually--often with beautiful camerawork. Warning Shadows (1923) went so far as only using title cards right at the beginning to introduce the characters. The rest of the movie was entirely told visually.
But you have to watch the film as it was intended to be seen. If there is no music track provided, do not watch it. Silent films were never intended to be viewed in silence. It was planned to have musical accompaniment ("mood music" if you will) to reflect the action on the screen. Unfortunately, some will provide music but it is just random selections of classical music slapped on to the movie with no real attempt to match the music to the action. Again, this is not how the movie was meant to be watched.
But if you can find a silent with a proper score matching the action, it is a delight. If you watch Don Juan (1926) with John Barrymore, it was originally issued with a recorded sound track--the first feature-length film to use the Vitaphone sound-on-disk system. It was sort of a trial run for The Jazz Singer (1927), which used the same system and allowed for spoken dialogue.
I have not yet decided on what film to watch to celebrate Silent Movie Day this year. I feel like I should watch one that I have never seen before. I am considering Earth (1930) because I viewed the first minute of the film and the cinematography is beautiful.
So, any other Shipmates interested in participating in Silent Movie Day?
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The first silent film I ever saw was Battleship Potemkin, in college - I have no idea what the score was, though.
The church I used to work for periodically shows a silent movie with live organ accompaniment; there is a local organist who improvises wonderfully. I've seen Buster Keaton's The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Safety Last! (Harold Lloyd), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that way (and probably others, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind). They're showing Metropolis in late October.
Some years ago I saw The Passion of Joan of Arc accompanied by the Los Angeles Master Chorale singing Richard Einhorn’s “Voices of Light," which was inspired by the film.
The first film he did was the 1922 Nosferatu, and he's also done The Cottage on Dartmoor, a thrilling tale of unrequited love and murder, which includes scenes showing the changeover from silent to talkies, when the characters go to a movie, and part of the film has a band playing, and part of it is with sound, which means that the deaf old lady in the audience suddenly can't follow the film any more.
I am also a fan of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, which operates out of Colorado. I have DVDs with their scores on editions of The General, Beggars of Life and People On Sunday.
And I always buy a copy of their annual calendar, the profits of which are directed to film restoration.
I'm a big fan of Buster Keaton and went to quite a few of his films when they were shown at the BFI also a few years back. I took my son too as he also likes him, though he is more of a Laurel and Hardy fan.
There are so many great silent films. I've said it before, but Ben-Hur, A Tale Of The Christ (1925) with Ramon Novarro is a considerably better film than that pompous version with Charlton Heston. And it is fascinating to realize that Fritz Lang's Spies (1928)(original German title: Spione) set the template for spy movies that is still being used today. And then there are the adventure films of Douglas Fairbanks, such as Robin Hood (1922), The Mark of Zorro (1920) and its sequel Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925). And then there is John Barrymore in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (19200, Don Juan (1926) and The Beloved Rogue (1927)....
...and then I get saddened that the estimate is that 80% of all silent films are now lost, never to be seen again. What treasures did we miss?
As promised, I viewed Earth (1930), a Soviet era Ukrainian film. It is one of those films that seem more devoted to providing wonderful imagery...without too much bother about a plot. The basic idea is that the villagers either work for the property-owning kulaks, or they work for the collective farm. We have a father who works for the kulaks and uses the old method of plowing with oxen, and we have his son who has joined the collective and gets machinery to grow and harvest the crops. There is a fairly long montage of shots of the wheat grain being harvested, gathered, processed and turned into bread before we get back to the village conflict. The son, dancing happily in the street, dies suddenly. It is not entirely clear why. The father mourns the death of his son and, when the priest appears at his door, declares that there is no God and no priests. The father then goes to the collective and asks them that, since his son chose to live the new way, they should bury him in the new way, without religion or priests, and singing the new songs of the new life. Which they do. We are then treated to a collection of images of the priest in his empty church shouting for God to punish the sinners; a kulak property owner shouting that he will not give up his earth (literally putting his head in the ground like an ostrich) and then shouting at the people who have gathered for the funeral to attack him because he would rather die than give up his property. And a few other images that I think are meant to show that life goes on.
So not a great story, but the cinematography is interesting. One thing struck me as odd. The film started out with scenes of wheat fields and abundant crops and an old man dying after having plowed the fields for 75 years. The film ends with shots of wheat fields and abundant crops.....soooooo, wait, are we saying that, old way of farming or new way of farming, the crops stay the same? Surely that is not the message that was intended to be sent??
Anyway, that movie only ran for about 70 minutes, so I decided to watch a second movie: a Tom Mix western The Man From Texas (1915) (clocking in at 43 minutes). Tom gets a letter from his sister saying that he will never see her again, as she has been callously abandoned by her husband--photo enclosed. (Sister dies, off screen) Of course, Tom sets out to find the varmint. A lot more plot and action than Earth