Author: Ben Model
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“Undercranking”, the Key to the Silent Film Universe
I don’t know when I first noticed the aspect of Silent Film that I quasi-retroactively refer to as “undercranking”. It’s also unclear when actors and directors in silent movies started using it. But it does appear to be ubiquitous in practice from a certain point in the early or mid-‘teens through the rest of the…
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(My) Best Laid Plans…
I started blogging as daily as possible back in late January, getting my ideas about the Language of Silent Film and my impressions and understandings of it “on paper” and out of my head. My plan was to try to write these pieces in a deliberate order. Which worked fine for a couple months. I…
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Knowing What Everyone’s Thinking
I remember seeing an interview several years ago with someone involved with Blake Edwards’ “Victor/Victoria“ who said that one of the challenges in moving the film to stage was that you couldn’t have those close-ups of different characters thinking “wait a second, is that person actually…?” Which is half of the whole concept of the…
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Blending Visual Ingredients
Soviet cinema in the 1920s takes the Silent Film use of showing us something that represents a fuller picture for us to fill out to another level. Borrowing on some of the editing techniques seen in Griffith’s films to build tension or create an impression, filmmakers like Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Vertov and others used this visual…
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Meanwhile, Just Out of Camera Range…
Silent Film’s visual shorthand can also ask us to conjure up an event or physical act by not showing it at all. Films in the 1930s, or earlier, might avoid depicting something particularly nasty by cutting to a shot showing a wall silhouette. Silent Film, because of its absence of recorded synch-sound, has the ability…
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Take the Hint
The visual shorthand of Silent Film also functions with physical objects. Often, by connecting them with other objects or between shots of people, an impression is intended to be made on we viewers, rather than spelling the point out blatantly. The Soviet filmmakers had a field day with this. The iconography of the items or…
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Some Cultural Shorthand
This visual shorthand employed in Silent Film helps us know immediately what sort of behavior to expect of the person we see on screen. It invites us to make assumptions about their needs or wants or fears etc, and assumes we all have a shared expectation of a character who has a certain look or…
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Trick or Treat!
We know who on the train with us is a conductor by their uniform. When I see a film crew in my neighborhood, I know which of the people standing around drinking coffee is going to stop me from walking because they’re holding a walkie-talkie and because they’re in the middle of the sidewalk or…
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The Boy, The Girl
Another way Silent Film engages us is by telling us very little about our story’s players and events. It’s similar to the way these same kinds of story elements are presented in young children’s books. In Silent Film it doesn’t come off like we’re being told a child’s fairy tale, though. It feels like its…
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Say, Did You Hear That?
A ventriloquist isn’t actually throwing their voice, although that’s often how the skill is referred to. The ventriloquist’s voice appears to be coming from the dummy because the artist is creating an illusion. She or he is paying attention to the dummy or puppet as if it were actually the one speaking. A similar misdirection…