Silent film
2 December 1895. A private room in a house on Boulevard des
Capucines in Paris. Two brothers, aptly named the Lumières, are showing a
programme of short films to an audience of about thirty. The films are chiefly
documentaries, scenes of everyday life such as a group of factory workers
emerging into the sun at the end of their shift. The single fictional offering
on this occasion is called L’Arrosseur
arrossé, the hoser hosed. This, as it happens, is the first comic film in
history. It consists of a gardener watering with a hose. A boy steals up behind
him and stands on the hosepipe, cutting off the flow. The gardener inspects the
nozzle, at which moment the boy releases his foot and the victim is drenched.
The brief film ends with the gardener chasing the boy into the distance. Not a
sophisticated plot. I wonder if the two participants knew they were the first
ever film actors. At any rate, they disappeared into the bushes and away from
the Lumiere’s camera into complete oblivion. It wasn’t until 1910 that anyone
took any interest in actors’ names.
More exciting even than L’Arrosseur
arrossé was the documentary film,
shown on the same iconic evening, with the resoundingly unexciting title of
‘The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station’. This piece shows, from a fixed
point on the platform, the arrival of a steam locomotive at a provincial
station and the subsequent disembarkation of the passengers. Could anything be
less extraordinary? But because the camera is near the track, the train gets
larger and larger as it approaches the foreground. It is said that the audience
was alarmed that the train would actually crash through the screen, and that
they ducked, screamed or ran for the door, no doubt with the thrilled howls of
someone at the funfair. It’s easy to smile at their reaction today, but in my
case it’s also a smile of envy. What a time this generation lived through: they
were the first to see their living spaces transformed by the modern city with
electric lighting; in 1910 they would hear an entirely new music, inflected by
African rhythms, the sound of jazz; they would hear the first radios; they would
see the first cars; in 1914, tragically, they would witness – or be destroyed
by - a mechanized war that overthrew every notion and image of conflict in
human history. Amid this blizzard of innovation, one can forgive them ducking
an imaginary train. After all, until then, every image on a wall, whether a painting
or a photograph – photography arrived in the late 1820s – represented space freed
from time. And now, suddenly, through the illusion of images moving so fast
they seemed to depict action, space shifted: there was time, there was motion,
there was the motion picture. The factory workers must have seemed like ghosts,
phantoms released from the stillness of the frame; the train a fantastic
presence, somewhere between reality and representation. The thrilled onlookers
were witnesses to a new art form, the art of cinema.
Or, to be precise, the silent cinema, the first period of
film dating from roughly 1895 to about 1929, when the ‘talkies’, using a sound
tape synchronized to the images, changed the form forever. I’ve long had an
affection for early cinema, though it’s not an affection that everyone shares. To
someone effectively governed by an iphone, a silent film is probably something
as alien as a medieval painting, as altogether other as a monastic chant. That is, in a curious way, a sign of their freshness.
Given time, old things have a way of becoming new again; and we can renew
ourselves by letting them into our lives, by forming an acquaintance with them.
So in the next eight minutes or so, rather than talk about a particular film,
I’d like to share with you my enthusiasm for silent cinema as a whole, and make
the best case I can for giving it a go.
Three reasons, then, to watch a silent film. At the risk of
sounding self-indulgently paradoxical, I’d give as the first the sound of them. I’m not talking about the
beautiful whirr of the old projector reel, though, along with the crackle of a
vinyl record and the clunk of a cassette deck, that has a treasured place in my
aural memory. No, I refer to the fact that silent films were anything but
silent. Even on that first evening in Paris, the films were accompanied by a
piano, there to set the mood and underline the rhythm of the imagery. There are
a few exponents of this jangly piano style today, with its set patterns for
chases, romance, intrigue and slapstick. And you can hear plenty online, in the
old films of silent comedians like Harold Lloyd and Fatty Arbuckle. Rather like
the hosepipe gag, there’s somthing innocent and healthily basic about this
music, inviting us into a world where the emotional contours are clear, a
prelapsarian world before irony. Often, silent films were accompanied by
orchestra. I’ve only experienced that once, at a showing in the Royal Festival
Hall of Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, Napoleon.
This film, which bankrupted the studio, is so huge it is actually in some sequences projected
simultaneously onto three screens, concluding with a huge panoramic shot of
Napoelon’s entrance into Italy. I had
the good fortune to see it accompanied by a symphony orchestra playing the
score specially composed by Carl Davis, and one felt that in the presence of
such vast ambition and subject matter anything less wouldn’t do.Intoxicated by the eyes and ears, one
didn’t for a moment wish for a speech. I suppose rock concerts which combine
music with large-scale digital projections are continuing a form first invented
over a century ago. And the challenge of composing to a film continues to be
taken up today: in 2004 the Pet Shop Boys performed live a score for the great
Russian film Battleship Potemkin by
Sergei Eisenstein; and one of my
favourite bands today, British Sea Power, have written wonderful music for
Flaherty’s Man of Aran and for a
documentary showing footage of Britain’s rivers, From the Sea to the Land Beyond. To take a small digression, film
remains one of the best introductions to music I know of: I would challenge
anyone who feels unattuned to modern classical music not to respond to
Kubrick’s The Shining, which uses
works by Bartok, Ligeti and Penderecki. Suddenly what sounds dissonant and
shapeless makes perfect sense. There are large stretches of that film with no
speech at all, and the combination of moving image and music takes us to a
place deeper than words.
Though words, in those early days, there undoubtedly were.
And that brings me to my second reason for giving silent film a go, and that is
the sheer beautiful strangeness of it all. How wonderful to learn from the memoirs of the
Spanish director Bunuel that many early films had to be explained to an
audience. We see someone looking offscreen followed by, say, a shot of a car
crash. Simple: the person is looking at the car crash. But that skill of
reading a new kind of narrative had to be learned. So the first viewers were
guided through the first films by someone explaining how the pictures link up.
An early film of a fireman entering a building and saving an inhabitant, then
going in again, exists in two versions: one, a chronological account where we
see the fireman go up a ladder and then see him inside the room; and another
where we see all the outside scenes followd by the inside ones. It is thought
that it was the second version that most people saw; they simply would not have
connected the external and internal scenes as a logical sequence in their minds. Actors would sometimes
provide voices from behind the screen. In Japan a performer called a benshi
would improvise voices and commentary to accompany a film.
And as they watched this new thing projected before them,
viewers in West and East were also looking back to something older. For
innovations often start by imitating the technology they are replacing. The
first printed books, for example, imitated the appearance of manuscripts; early
photographs stick closely to the composition and subject matter of paintings.
Similarly, films imitated theatre: kabuki in the case of Japan, and in the West
the world of popular spectacle that has now vanished. I suppose an early film
of Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin takes us as close as we can ever get to
the raucous, slapstick world of vaudeville and music hall. This was the world
film hung onto for a bit: many early films are observed from a fixed point.
There was some reluctance to use close-up as it was felt that the viewer, used
to seeing a show from a stationery seat, would find the sudden change of
perspective confusing. I love the melodramatic gestures and expressions of the
first performers, though they learned very quickly that what was needed to get
attention in the palladium was not appropriate for the big screen. Even by the
1920s, you can see subtle shifts of expression, tiny movements of the eyes,
that suggest a character’s inner world –
the stock-in-trade of the film actor today. Have a close look at what Buster
Keaton is doing with his supposedly expressionless face – it’s miraculous. An
old world is moving through joyous experiment into a new one. Strange and
beautiful.
My third reason for watching silent film must of course be
to do with the images in front of you. Above all, what we see is movement. That
is the natural matter of the art. Of course, the performing arts – theatre,
ballet, opera – can all offer movement, particularly the moving body. But only
film can convincinly show battles, bank heists, stagecoaches rushing through
the desert, the whirrings of a gigantic machine. Or, for that matter, a train
arriving at a station. And all of these were relished from the first moments.
One very early film, George Melies’s Journey
to the Moon, is a twelve-minute riot of movement, from an animated meeting
to a journey to the moon, to an exciting chase across moon mountains to the
return to earth. How did they do that in 1902? Go and watch it on YouTube and
find out. And while you’re there, watch the first ever vampire film, Nosferatu, directed by F W Murnau with a
mysterious producer called Albin Grau who subsequently disappeared into a world
of clandestine occult societies. Few could be scared by this film today, but
few could resist the lure of the expressionist imagery, from the rats crawling
around a ship’s deck to the ruined castles of the Carpathians. It’s staright
out of Arnold Boechlin and Caspar David Friedrich. One art learns from another.
Silent film did not, of course, really end in 1929. It’s
been recreated lovingly, in The Artist
(2011), while a film like The Turin Horse
by Hungarian Bela Tarr, has barely any dialogue at all. The recent Robert
Redford vehicle, All is Lost, is
practically speechless and the recent Gravity
has long beautiful stretches of pure imagery and music. And recent films are,
very often, retreading stories and situations explored by the pioneers of a
century ago. In Lang’s Metropolis,
itself interestingly similar to H G Wells’s The
Time Machine, we have the basic plot of the recent sci-fi pictures District 9 and Elysium. Change is underscored by continuity. Film-makers are,
today and yesterday, working in what Maxim Gorky called ‘the kingdom of the
shadows’, the ray of light that pierces a darkened room and takes us out of the
shade and back again. Like children we stare up at the giants and heroes before
us, from Napoleon to the Dark Knight, and we are at one with our ancestors
around the flickering camp fire listening to tales of spirits and monsters. So
that is my invitation today: attune yourself to a slower tempo, a different
style of seeing things, and enter that wonderful wordless, monochromatic,
unbearably lost world of the first cinema. Feel free to be irreverent, to
laugh, but at the same time measure your own efforts at mastering something
against theirs. Take a leave of absence from the noisy, digital, frenetic
endlessly clicking present of the iphone, and enjoy a spell in the world of
early film, in the kingdom of the shadows.
