Category: Language of Silent Film
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While We Change Reels…An Opening Statement
It’s possible I’ve taken up the carpet before I took up the tax. I’ve written sixteen posts so far in this daily series I launched into on January 22. I kinda hit the ground running, and have realized I hadn’t laid out why I was doing this or what I was up to. I’ve started…
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I’ll Just Take the Check, Please
This subtle miming-to-support-what’s-being-said or conveyed appears to have gotten itself set and codified by the mid-‘teens. It didn’t change much for the rest of the silent era, aside from being used a little less as needed. This may not have done deliberately, but during the last fifteen years of the silent era, filmmakers and performers…
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Just Enough For Us to Decode
There is an aspect of physical performance in Silent Film that lies somewhere between what I’ve been writing about and not doing anything different that you’d do in a sound film. It allows for just enough information to come across to us out in the theater or on our sofa that we can decode what’s…
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Drawing on Theatrical Performance
The movement and performance styles in silent films evolved during the 1910s and 1920s, becoming less theatrically-rooted and more naturalistic or at least authentic. But enough of what was adapted to a specific performance style, unique to Silent Film, remained at the end of the 1920s. How much of that is theatrical performance or distilled…
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Monologuing in Silents
In some early silent films one of the main characters will face the camera or at least what it appears they think is an audience, and will talk through the screen’s fourth wall. Makes me think of that moment in “Animal Crackers” (?) when Groucho turns to us and takes a step toward the camera…
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Movement in Moving Pictures
Our performers convey information and emotion to us in their movement, gestures and expressions. They have to. The movement styles and techniques we see in Silent Film range from obvious gesturing that is what some assume is typical of pre-1930s movies to profoundly underplayed emotional stillness. Some of that gesturing is so outdated it’s hard…
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Trimming the Fat
One of the ways Silent Film economizes on storytelling information is by the dropping of non-essential bits of information in a scene. Sometimes these are at the beginning of a scene. But the general idea is to keep moving, and to keep the important dramatic beats — or comic ones — flowing. If someone travels…
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You Can’t Look Away
Let’s start with what we are presented with, what we are literally looking at, when we view a Silent Film. Because it is a purely visual medium, although aided and abetted as needed by the music, it’s the visual cues that are the way that we’re getting any information. This is a question I pose…
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A Need For Speed
I don’t know why Walter Kerr’s discussion of Silent Film projection speeds in chapter five hadn’t sparked my fascination with them earlier. But, I don’t think anyone was as fascinated as I was with what made that speed-up work — that the film was running faster than taking speed but did not look like it…
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Silence Misunderstood
The silence of Silent Film is also its most misunderstood or misinterpreted aesthetic. Many people assume that Silent Film is movies with no sound, hampered by its mute form. True, the word “silent” is incredibly off-putting, and its being the label for films made before the advent of synch-sound or the industry’s switching over to…