Monday, October 7, 2013
Silent Film and Literature
Steven J. Ross argues that before World War I silent films often portrayed working-class life sympathetically, but that after 1917, films became substantially more conservative.His choice of date works for both the ending of the war (it would conclude the following year) and the Bolshevik uprising that led to the fall of the Russian Tsars, the rise of Communism, and a western paranoia about "Reds" that has never completely subsided. Ross adjusts our ideas of who made and consumed silent films, though his historicist bent is toward a rather standard view that reactionaryism affected culture post WW I.
What about the arts? Specifically cinema? The word "silent films" is rather a misnomer, perhaps, in that they were accompanied by music and (in lower class halls) plenty of commentary from the peanut gallery. How "interactive" was cinema? If vaudeville was any gauge, "tremendously."
Ross, Steven J. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1998.
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ReplyDeleteI can't really speak to what kinds of films were made before 1917, but Ross's reactionary contention is one that still exists today. Look at the current glut of superhero movies, sequels, reboots, remakes, and adaptations that dominate the box office. Audiences take comfort in the familiarity of these products, and so the Hollywood machine keeps churning them out. It would seem that this was largely true about the silent film era as well, though in that case there appears to be a proclivity toward comedy, which would make sense as an escape from the overall seriousness of the times.
ReplyDeleteAs to the topic of interactivity--the arts invite community, and the nature of silent films made it possible for that community to have their voices heard without, I would gather, taking much away from the experience of others. After all, there was no dialogue being talked over, and the music (at least in the two films that I watched, The General and "It") was largely repetitive. The interactivity of silent films, where one could sit in a darkened theater and shout at the screen with a degree of anonymity, is really not all that different from our Twitter culture, except that now the whole world is a stand-in for that theater.
Film was not only an emerging medium, but in addition to its newness, it was also accessible to nearly everyone, unlike books. Books were expensive and to read one, a person needed to be literate and have the time to commit to reading it, whereas a film can be viewed and watched in a single sitting as a source of entertainment for the whole family at a fair price. Going to the movies was also an experience, which could be considered a day out as opposed to the reclusive nature of reading a book at home. Also, books tended to have more intellectual stimuli and complicated storylines that could be hard to follow for an uneducated person. Film allowed for a visually stimulating experience and a simpler, more predictable form of storytelling than many books could claim. In addition to the clarity of the silent film, watching it allowed a moviegoer the opportunity to passively absorb the story, rather than being forced to actively engage with it as one would with a book. As Michael stated in his post, a movie-watcher could also socialize with other viewer during the film because there was no dialogue to contend with, only music. The topic of film probably also made some people feel included as a part of the popular culture of the time because they are able to use the most current film as a topic of conversation, giving many people a sense of inclusion in modern society.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about American cinema of the time, but the work of the Lumiere brothers in Lyon, France was aimed at a mass audience. Their first film of workers leaving the Lumiere film factory was one of the first films to be shown to a paying audience. The footage of a train pulling into the train station at La Ciotat had the audience literally diving out of the way—that's some serious interaction. Early films tended to be documentation of everyday life and so I wonder if the audience (as Shanna comments) tended towards passivity (and general gobsmackedness at moving images). It seems like modern editing (cross-cut, flashback, etc.) and its ability to carry narrative is what facilitates a deeper interaction with an audience. By cutting from one scene to another (such as two scenes of opposite emotions), a narrative is formed which provokes an emotional response from the audience. My point—I guess—is that the evolution of cinema from purely documenting everyday life to a narrative storytelling medium resulted in emotional interactions with the audience who were now challenged to respond to the image instead of, say, printed words. I believe the emotional investment with the characters on the screen created a new mode of interaction with cinema that continues today.
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