Silent Film's Impact on Cinema and the Visual Arts

The Advent of Silent Film and Its Effects

The Lumière brothers advanced the art of photography by producing some of the first silent motion picture shorts and showing them for pure enjoyment at the end of the 19th century in a café in Paris. This paper examines the effect that their advancement in film technique had on the world and demonstrates how silent film offered a new outlet for creativity in the humanities.

Silent film has its origins in ancient history. One may point to Mo-tzu of China, who in the 5th century BC observed that when light bouncing off an object traveled through a pinhole and hit a surface on the other side, it produced an upside-down and backward image of the object (Richter, 2006, p. 3). More than a thousand years later, one finds Al-Hazen writing about light shining through a pinhole into a darkened room, and in the 1500s artists were using the camera obscura as a drawing aid (Richter, p. 3). As inventors sought ways to produce permanent images with camera obscuras, using mixtures that darkened when exposed to light, the germ of the modern day camera was planted. By the 1800s, photography was born and silent film—the projection of a string of photographs onto a screen—was simply the next step in photography: the capturing not just of an image but of an action and, thus, a narrative.

Film is a visual medium. Silent film, from its beginnings in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris in 1895, was ever a medium that relied solely on the visual power of its moving pictures. Indeed, the Lumière brothers' early films were simply brief clips or photographs of simple actions: a train pulling into a station, a gardener at work, workers leaving a factory. These films were visually exciting for the audience because they reflected life as it is witnessed in motion. However, there was more to the experience than simply seeing. On the contrary, the experience was felt. In fact, the Lumières provoked panic in their theater upon showing the train pulling into a station; the audience is said to have shrieked and ducked when it saw the train (Mast, 2006, p. 33). Even such a simple, ordinary event produced a visceral thrill because it played upon the imaginations of the audience and the audience was encouraged to fill in the gaps between what it was seeing and what the real thing was like. Therefore, it is likely that the Lumières' audience in 1895 could hear the sound of the train and the rush of the crowd and the noises of the station in its mind even though in reality all it was seeing was the silent flashing image of the train on a screen. This was its gift to the humanities.

Visual Storytelling and Audience Imagination

The ability of film to produce such a trick has always been its main selling point. When Melinda Szaloky (2002) states that Rick Altman's claim that silence was in fact a regular practice of silent film exhibition appears to challenge the historical accuracy of the received opinion that the silent film never existed (p. 109), she implies that silent film did not necessarily need the live musical accompaniment that modern audiences so often associate with silent film showings. On the contrary, it is likely that the silent films themselves often ran silently. In fact, Szaloky makes the point that the term "silent film" came to denote early cinema only after the coming of sound had turned presound films into "silents" (p. 109). What this means is that silent film as it has been conceived since the introduction of talkies is not the way it was conceived before sound was introduced into the filmmaking process. Films in the early twentieth century were simply conceived as a photographic art, in which information was conveyed via sight. This had, then, two effects: (1) it forced actors of that era to hone their craft in a much more expressive manner; and (2) it allowed audiences to use their imaginations in much the same way that a book encourages the reader to imagine scenes of dialogue, action, climax, and so forth.

William K. Everson (1998) marks 1919 as the year that silent film, already grudgingly admitted to be art, began to take itself seriously as a business (p. 4). It brought classical works of fiction to the big screen and compelled writers and actors to reflect their own day and age in original and mostly comedic ways.

The Golden Age: Comedy and Social Commentary

The best silent films of Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd were not only comedic masterpieces, producing laughs with slapstick gags and tricks of physical humor; they were also, sometimes subtly, full of a kind of social commentary. Chaplin, of course, was the most blatant in his commentary, but Keaton provided some of the most insightful looks into the human condition. As Ebert (2002) states, Keaton's films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes after it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Indeed, Keaton's films depict him in all sorts of wild predicaments, having to face tornadoes, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders, and falls from great heights (Ebert, 2002).

The Decline of Silent Film

Keaton's silent films required more from the audience than perhaps the audience, according to the New York Times at least, was prepared to give. It is no wonder then that talkies replaced the silent film era: the audience had lost the ability to be affected by greatness in film and now needed more spectacle and more noise to fill the void in its own empty head. Times reviewer Hall says as much when he writes of The General in 1927 that "this is by no means so good as Mr. Keaton's previous efforts. Here he is more the acrobat than the clown, and his vehicle might be described as a mixture of cast iron and jelly" (Hall). Truly, no one was ever further off base about a film than Hall in his New York Times review. Keaton's General foreshadowed the action-spectaculars of today.

The fact is that by 1927, audiences had tired of the kind of fare delivered by studios—the kind of films in which Florence Vidor turned ever so slightly and gave the audience a momentary thrill, a glimpse of neck, of sparkling jewelry and the like. The same medium that once inspired panic in the basement of a French café in 1895 now failed to produce any effect whatsoever when the same subject (a train) was taken to new soaring heights by Keaton in The General and splashed on the big screen. The only problem was that in the intervening decades, a generation had gotten wise to the nature of cinema and no longer cared to be inspired by the same old, same old: the world wanted more and The Jazz Singer provided more—it provided noise. If Keaton could wreak havoc on an entire town and give thrills (without ever once showing the natural disaster that was doing the mischief) in Steamboat Bill, Jr., the audience did not care. Imagination was, in a sense, dead and when it died, so too did the silent film era, for it depended on the audience's ability to bridge the gap between the visuals on the screen and the reality that it meant to depict. The audience could no longer do so, and instead it opted for noise as a stop-gap; the talkies were introduced and no one ever looked back except for a few movie lovers, like Ebert, who could still appreciate the imaginative powers of the silent film gems of men like Buster Keaton.

Conclusion

Silent film was the natural next step for photography lovers in the 19th century. It told stories by capturing the illusion of an action and brought creative geniuses to the medium to entertain a new generation of people with a new art. Its effect on the humanities was to shift the word and the world to the big screen. But in time it lost its appeal and newer gimmicks had to be added: sound and sound effects, which took away from the imaginative process rather than heightened it. Thus, today, film is no longer silent, but when one considers the state of cinema today, one wonders if maybe it should be.