In My Opinion: Silent Movies
This week Joe West looks at what silent movies to see before/after you see film awards favourite The Artist…
The Artist has been rightly securing award nominations across the globe, and it is difficult to imagine a more perfect love letter to the golden age of silent film. You don’t need to have seen a single silent movie to appreciate The Artist, because it’s also an exercise in demonstrating the purity and power of an image-driven narrative. However, if you do want to delve into the enormous back-catalogue of chatter-free films in order to better understand the tropes that the movie toys with then these few examples might be worth a look.*
Not only devoid of spoken dialogue but also without speech ascribed to intertitles of any kind, this bleak story of a doorman who is demoted due to his age doesn’t even offer the comfort of schadenfreude. Director F. W. Murnau provides a final ‘fuck you’ to the audience in the form of an epilogue which depicts an improbably happy ending that comes after it is pointed out that in reality such a character would have little to look forward to other than death. An amazing and not exactly a comfortable tale, but it does resonate with the darker moments of The Artist.
D.W. Griffith may have been racist and insane, but that doesn’t stop Broken Blossoms from being an interesting artefact. It stars a young Lillian Gish as a girl who is abused by her boxer father before becoming the object of affection for a Chinese trader called Cheng. The Artist is far more sentimental and schmaltzy than this work, recalling silent films through a nostalgic filter. Broken Blossoms proves that heart-ache and physical violence were not uncommon even in the early years of cinema.
Arguably the most famous silent film of all, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis paints the portrait of a dystopian future in which the hierarchy of society has plunged ordinary workers into the dank bowels of a sprawling city while the ruling classes frolic in its upper reaches. Relentlessly idealistic and political, it may yet bring about the downfall of capitalism, if you’re into that kind of thing.
The montage song from Team America may have spoiled this particular conceit of movie editing for modern audiences, but what director Sergei Eisenstein was doing with the technique in the mid 1920s was revolutionary at the time. The much emulated and parodied Odessa Steps sequence is remembered as much for its violence as its form, but the whole film is packed with nuanced, jarring visuals and effects which warrant closer inspection.
Crazy lighting, weird sets and interminable tension allow this horror to retain its impact 92 years after it was originally released. The scenery twists and turns as much as the plot and you’ll never want to visit a German carnival after watching it.
Seeing Charlie Chaplin in his first feature-length role is a great way to get to grips with why he was so popular during the silent era, as well as why he fell out of favour once sound came in, much like the protagonist in The Artist. The tenderness of the relationship between the kid and Chaplin’s tramp is eloquently and wordlessly delivered. There will be tears.
* If you think these are all obvious choices, stop being such a bloody hipster
