The last and biggest hurdle to overcome to becoming a real lover of cinema is learning to appreciate silent films.
Stick enough violence or action in a movie and you can get anyone reading subtitles. Show them “Singin’ in the Rain” and they’ll be able to watch any musical ever made. Watch a movie timeless enough and you’ll forget that it’s in black and white.
But silent films are different. They’re a hard sell for a number of reasons, and there are a few myths and cultural problems to address before we notice a change.
Debunking silent film myths
Myth #1: Sound Movies are Better
The biggest misconception about film is that it was once seen as nothing more than a novelty, and only later did it become art.
Anyone who believes that transition happened between silents to talkies is wrong.
Of course sound and dialogue is a good thing. Movies would not be the same if we had been denied the clever dialogue of modern wordsmiths like the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin and more.
Rather, silent films hardly told stories the same way as talkies, even to the point that storytelling had to be reinvented with the introduction of sound.
But this form of silent storytelling was not primitive or inferior.
The best directors of the silent screen were gifted at telling a story through purely visual means, minimizing intertitles and composing moods through facial cues and striking shot placement.
Consider the chilling images of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” the cinematic ballet of any of Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick, the mesmerizing first-ever montage of “The Battleship Potemkin” or the simple love story behind “Sunrise.”
I can’t think of more elegant, poetic or even easier ways of telling any of those stories, and I certainly can’t imagine how words would help. Continue reading “Debunking Silent Film Myths”