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.

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