We’ve all heard of or referred to Silent Film as a universal language. It’s not just because the films are wordless, although that certainly levels the playing field. But it’s true. But it’s because of that same leaving-out that is at the core of the medium’s communication and storytelling.
There is something about Silent Film that tends to rely more on the universality of the human experience. By its allowing us to assemble pieces of what we’re seeing into gags, emotions, drama, this same right-brain function we all possess kicks in, and in the same way.
Why else would an audience in South Korea get all the jokes and react with the same laughs that an American one does? I had an opportunity to accompany Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman at the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival in 2016. Outdoors, in front of close to 3,000 people. As roaring-20s American as one may think Harold Lloyd is, as well as the plot of The Freshman, absolutely everything landed. I’d actually played for Steamboat Bill, Jr. a few times earlier that year, and — because I listen to the audience when I’m playing — I noticed that the Jecheon audience not only laughed in the same places, but in the same way.
The same goes for the audiences of 6th graders in Tromsø, Norway, above the Arctic Circle, when I accompanied and helped to present Arbuckle’s The Cook and Keaton’s One Week. And for the Kindergarteners I show Oranges and Lemons with Stan Laurel to every year at a private school in NYC.
You can hear some of my playing at the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival in episode 19 of my Silent Film Music Podcast. The segment is toward the beginning of the episode, or you can just drag the slider to about 7:20 here.
The first post in this series is here.
The previous post to this one is here.
The next post is here.
Keep em coming…..
Silent films are not only a universal language, but also a unique art form. I will be posting on the Norman Studios website in the next month or so a review of The Art of the Silent Motion Picture by Robert A. Hall, Jr. This short pamphlet, published in Puerto Rico, has many important insights concerning silent motion pictures: “The really moving picture had inherent potentialities all its own, due to its peculiar limitation to images in silent motion, which had not been present in that combination in any medium previously exploited in the Western world.” He also notes: “We have preferred to return to a form of motion picture which, whatever its characteristics may be as an art form in its own right, is certainly much nearer the traidtional form of spoken drama, and consequently that much less of an advance in artistic form. It would hardly be surprising, therefore, if future historians of art were to say that, in abandoning the silent form of motion picture and permitting it to perish almost totally unappreciated, the twentieth ccentury threw away its greatest chance for original artisitc expression.”