Chapters 4 and 5 of The Silent Clowns’ “Part One” illuminate the two most important elements of what makes silent film Silent Film, a specific entertainment medium of its own. As opposed to seeing it as regular film or video as we know it, with one arm tied behind its back, its shoelaces knotted together and with earplugs. Which is the impression uninitiated folks often have when you mention Silent Film to them.
In “The Fantasy in the Fact”, Mr. Kerr writes of what can be viewed in the rear-view mirror as technological shortcomings as the very elements that give license to Silent Film to liberate itself of the ”Fact”. There are basic components of reality that are removed or missing because of the moving picture element’s capabilities or lack thereof. Silent Film is flat or two-dimensional, it lacks the full color spectrum, and in order to move from one thing shown to another the basic element of the cut elides the repositioning of the viewer through space and time.
There was no way around this. Film is flat. There were several experiments with color processes, yes, but movies were for the first few decades of cinema in black-and-white (or what my daughter called “all-grey” when she was little). And the edit is what brought moving pictures beyond depiction of actualities seen in a Kinetoscope machine. The time and space leaps of the edit were minimal in the early ‘aughts, but once everyone realized you could make a more broad jump and the audience would keep up, the leaving-out of time and space transition could become more of a broad-jump and eventually hit Evel Knieval-leapt chasms.
Kerr lays these out as the set-up to the main leaving-out that is the key element of Silent Film, its silence. Perhaps because hearing is one of the five senses, the absence of sound (from the screen) invites our imagination to engage in the screen entertainment we’re taking in. We fill in the sound and dialog that isn’t present. regardless of our own spoken language, we create the dialog based on visual cues from the screen. It’s one thing about Silent Film that is as entrancing as Old Time Radio from the 1930s and 1940s.
The silence — the complete lack of recorded and synchronous sound — is one of the two key elements that lifts the universe of Silent Film from the factual world we recognize. The other one is that of speed, which Kerr covers in the next chapter.
The first post in this series is here.
The previous post to this one is here.
The next post is here.
Copies of The Silent Clowns turn up on eBay.
(Rest assured…I’m not going to describe and discuss every chapter in The Silent Clowns in this series of posts. I’ve set out here to write posts about my own findings, impressions and experiences with understanding the language of Silent Film here. The opening chapters of Walter Kerr’s book, as it turns out, form the foundation of most of this, and so this is what I’m leading off with in the first week of these blog posts.)
