A Pigment of My Imagination

    Clearly, this gestational period for film was a critical one. Because of their limited use of sound, silent films were able to hone in on telling a story visually. Thus, the lack of dialogue was not a crutch to be overcome, but rather a fortuitous blessing. It enabled pioneer filmmakers to constantly refine their craft, needing to make each shot count.

If a picture can tell a thousand words, then these early moving pictures told volumes. Suddenly artists, painters, and magicians could use their craft in ways that were never before appreciated, and could create fully-dimensional life on screen with crudely recorded streams of images. This new medium allowed for the interaction of both high and low culture in a daring way never seen before.

Film was initially met with both fear and wonder, a feature which stays with it till today, constantly attracting millions of new viewers film after film. It is easy today to merely take all the film techniques we see for granted, to assume that it was always just so. We forget just what a radical experiment film was and how ultimately it is still a very young medium. The explosion of film’s growth in the last century is a testament to its artistic storytelling power. Even if modern audiences are unaware of, or choose to disregard it, nearly every frame that they see today is profoundly indebted to the silent flickers of the early 1900’s and owe tribute to the visionary pioneers of film history.

    Due to masters like Griffiths and Edwin S. Porter, cinema did have a strong tie with American traditions and aesthetics, but the medium continued to develop somewhat independently in Europe at the same time. Drawing from very different cultural, psychological and artistic influences, European filmmakers with little access to American films were birthing their own piece of cinema history.

In Germany, filmmakers were taking the new medium and experimenting in bold, non-traditional ways. They were more interested in a non-naturalistic and subjective use of film to tell dark, psychological stories. This led to German Expressionism, a world of abstract symbolism, and perceptual distortion, of wild, chaotic worlds, which reflected the inner dreamscapes of the mind.

They tried to portray inner subjective reality in objective external images, thus not only telling their characters’ story, but also showing his mind and emotions. This exploration not only radically altered film’s visual style, but also expanded film’s narrative potential to a whole new, deeper level. Expressionism can be seen strongly even today in the work of Tim Burton and others who work in the dark world of the surreal.

Moving further east on the map, the Soviets saw the nascent film medium as a potent tool for their new regime. Visionaries like Sergei Eisenstein seized the chance to chart unexplored territory of artistic potential. Although his first masterpiece, “The Battleship Potemkin”, was clearly a propaganda piece for the government, it is nevertheless a defining moment of film history that is relevant to this day. There, Eisenstein sought to reach the psychological depth and the emotions of the viewer.

He explored the use of sound and image stimuli on the audience, using force and counterforce, and the juxtaposition of images to create something far greater than a mere additional property. His use of montage (a staple tool in modern cinema) and fast cutting were instantly respected for their power to move a story along and were quickly adopted worldwide.

    Enabling this evolution of the art form as a social establishment was the technological and theoretical development that was making it all possible. As the physical machine capacity to record images grew (brilliantly exploiting persistence of vision), filmmakers were forced to move beyond the simple staged setups and individual shots of early flickers. They saw that audiences were becoming more sophisticated and constantly in demand of something more engaging. Thus, they were forced to develop not only their machines, but also their storytelling and communication skills. Enter Georges Melies, the “father of narrative film.” Melies played a crucial role in the early stages of film, taking pictures beyond the simplicity of the Lumiere’s staged skits into a complex new art form. His “A Trip to the Moon”, was not only one of the earliest movies to play with special effects and take advantage of visual illusions, but really took audiences on a journey to a whole new world of possibility never before imagined, and created a strong bond between films and science-fiction, and dreams and fantasy at large. This piece perfectly illustrated the bond between films and the sense of magic and wonder that we all long for.

Following Melies came D. W. Griffiths. Griffiths was responsible for most of the techniques that today we take for granted as the basics of cinema grammar, yet these all had to be created from scratch, or at least solidified for the first time into a unique application. It is staggering to see how within merely two decades of the art form’s conception, most of today’s established theories were already being discovered. Griffiths took the idea of an expanded narrative and really explored how to make use of what made film unique, creating an entirely new visual language. His use of close-ups, cross-cutting, subjective shots, flashbacks, camera movement and carefully composed shots set the standard for everything to follow, till this very day. It is easy today to take these things for granted, but it is really impossible to overstate the groundbreaking nature of these early pioneers.

    Tracing the history of film development, both as a storytelling medium and as a science and craft inevitably immerses us into the realm of silent films. From the earliest days of the medium, film was in a very unique position in the world’s evolution of artistic forms, being a mix of visual expression, composed images, and a literary sensibility towards storytelling and the development of words as a communication tool. Sounds and images, words and pictures. The potential for style and substance simultaneously, and the conflict that these seem to naturally incur. Filmmakers have always had to wrestle with this precarious balance, although ironically, these issues weren’t really visible for quite a while in the early days of film. For modern audiences, we seem to somehow instinctually accept the tension between high and low culture. In the earlier days though, none of this was a given. The early “flickers” were seen as cheap entertainment, as mere trifles, amusements for the masses. People would crowd around, absolutely spellbound by the simplest little tricks of light and shadow. Simple toys like the zoetrope seemed like magic to a generation hungry for something new. The audiences were ready for something different—and film was it.

I find it captivating to study the development of film as a social phenomenon. In the overall history of the human race, film is still an infant oddity, merely a century old, yet in that short time, film has become a major world force. Film is thus not only a medium that draws from a very rich artistic and social heritage, but has also served as a proponent of culture. It is thus, not just reactive to culture, but actually proactive in influencing and actually shaping the world. Film has practically become a world religion in its own rights. This is seen very clearly in the founding days. Hollywood became the new Mount Olympus. Movie palaces were erected as new public temples, shrines to the gods and goddesses of the silver screen, where the masses would flock to worship their idols. The very act of strangers coming together into a dark, silent space, all staring intently at one thing, with the one intention of partaking in a communal story experience is a testament to film’s unique potential.

(Essay written for History of Cinema class…)

I have really enjoyed this class, and especially getting to not only read and study about, but also watch a variety of classic silent films. I have been a lover of films since I was a young child, and have always loved to read and study. For years now, I have tried to get my hands on any kind of film history or production book I could find, and all of them would attest to the groundbreaking power of silent films. However, up till a few years back, I had virtually never actually seen any of these much-praised films, and my knowledge had only been theoretical, limited to words on a page or small images in a book. This class has been a great gift, a chance to dive headfirst into such a rich world. It has been fun to sit down and study the topic more systematically and fully. To mix my fan-boy passions for the subject, with a higher academic knowledge, and ending up both better educated, and all the more excited about film history and filmmaking.

Having watched some of these films now, it is clear what a direct impact silent cinema has had on modern filmmaking. In fact, silent films are not just some relic of the past, and even though film has moved on in some areas, the power of silent films is still seen strongly every day. It is not only something that is nostalgically remembered, but forms the very core of what we today know film to be. They are not only the birthplace of modern film, but part of the very definition of film grammar itself.