Mute in High Def, or, Lilies of Pictures

Criterion Collection
A scene from Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, 1921; an excerpt from The Phantom Carriage
Geoffrey O'Brien, cultural historian and editor-in-chief of the Library of America, in the NYRoB, YouTube-enhanced with exhibits, on "The Rapture of the Silents":

... Audience reaction to The Artist tended to mirror a phenomenon I have observed many times at revivals of silent movies: the initial uncertainty, punctuated by nervous laughter, giving way to emotional engagement and finally to a kind of rapture.

... [In Hugo] Scorsese averts, just barely, the antiquarian melancholy that otherwise tends to cling to the contemplation of silent movies. From the moment they disappeared they have been a metaphor for grandeur turned abruptly obsolete, a metaphor burned into cinematic tradition by Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson’s “we had faces” became a Gothic epitaph rather than a justified celebration. To linger over the glossies of forgotten silent idols might almost be the definition of obsessive estrangement from the present, the faithful-unto-death adoration of what will never again be marketable. Nita Naldi? Betty Bronson? Lou Tellegen? The sudden and irrevocable outmodedness of the silents, those hypnotic gazes thrown over for the brash noisiness of the living, seem to bring us close to the domain of Edgar Allan Poe or Miss Havisham.

... Most people, it is fair to guess, do not find it difficult to ignore silent movies altogether. Beyond the circle of specialized film viewers I rarely encounter an extensive familiarity with silents or much regret at that fact. Outside of film schools there has never been a particularly wide standard repertoire of silent films, because most people don’t watch them. A sampling, however brief, of Griffith’s huge body of work; Chaplin and Keaton, and Harold Lloyd clinging to the hands of the clock; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis; and a smattering of Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney, and Louise Brooks would pretty much cover the field. There is after all so much else, far too much of it, to look at. A friend once confided that she “didn’t get” how to look at silent films, and before I could offer glib assurance of how easy it is to just sit back and let the images have their way, I remembered how many times I too had been stymied or irked when starting down that road.

First of all there was, in those days before digital restoration, the frequent necessity of contending with inadequate prints whose washed-out, broken, splotched, or shaky images gave the impression not of a film but of the grossly damaged remnant of a film. But beyond such barriers there were filmic practices that took getting used to: mimed interchanges hard or at least tedious to interpret, plot developments unperceived for want of verbal cues, tableau-like presentations in which shots were held long after the point seemed to have been made, not to mention (especially in American films) wordy intertitles that brought the film to a dead halt while the slowest readers in the audience were given time to absorb them—and, famously, there was the acting, built on a vocabulary of gestures and postures and gazes that had bit by bit become as remote as the Rosetta Stone.

... Anyone who does set out now to explore the silents finds that we are living in a golden age, or at least golden moment, of film restoration and, through DVD and Blu-Ray disks, a golden age of accessibility. (It remains to be seen whether such accessibility will continue to be the case in the wake of the total digital conversion now underway.) An immersion that once required travel to distant archives can now be accomplished on one’s couch.

It is a very different sort of viewing experience. These restored and digitized editions are often a transformation of the originals they undertake to reproduce, collating disparate elements and restoring a look of wholeness to torn or decayed images. They are in some instances cleaner than any print ever was. The film speed has been calibrated and adjusted with a precision that would have been unlikely when they were first shown. (At times the images unfold with a voluptuous smoothness and slowness so beautiful and revealing that I cannot help wondering if this is as much a product of the restorer’s art as of the filmmaker’s.) They are accompanied by modern soundtracks that—sometimes more intrusively and anachronistically than one might wish—tease out new implications of feeling and cadence. We watch them in carefully controlled settings of our own choosing, with no hint of the raucous world of vulgar entertainment or mass propaganda into which they were originally beamed.

More significant than these seductive accoutrements is the dramatically expanded repertoire we are now privileged to experience. Newly discovered and restored films rarely or barely discussed in general film histories have been emerging at such a pace that it is hard to keep up. In recent years there has been a stunning procession of rescued films that turn out to be of far more than historic interest: Léonce Perret’s L’Enfant de Paris(1913), George Loane Tucker’s Traffic in Souls (1913), Gustavo Serena’s Assunta Spina (1915), Evgeni Bauer’s The Dying Swan (1917), Mauritz Stiller’s Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919), Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Bergkatze (1921), F.W. Murnau’s Phantom (1922), John Ford’s Hangman’s House (1928), Frank Borzage’s Street Angel (1928), Franz Osten’s A Throw of Dice (1929), George Schnéevoigt’s Laila (1929), Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (1930), Hiroshi Shimizu’s Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933).

How could we not have heard about Laila, with its extraordinary scenes of wolves chasing a reindeer-driven sled across a sub-arctic landscape, or Salt for Svanetia with its sublime contemplation of Central Asian isolation and unforgiving folkways? The list may seem long, but it only scratches the surface. There is much more still to come, films already restored and films just recovered in archives from Russia to New Zealand. The inevitable decay of nitrate film has apparently not in every case been as swift as feared, and so there are still opportunities to uncover, here and there, what was thought lost forever.

The seduction of silent cinema is the seduction of a form as unique as opera or kabuki, a peculiar way of organizing one’s attention. It is a perpetual learning how to see, and a way of coming to the truth of one of Emerson’s observations: “The eye is final.” But there is the further peculiarity that what you see takes place in a world no longer there. Here are cities since reduced to rubble and rebuilt, stretches of countryside by now turned into interstates and strip malls, glaciated wilderness that has probably succumbed to climate change—and of course the faces of those now long dead, something too easily taken for granted but that haunts movies from the start. The inventors of the medium were already thinking about recording the living as a future consolation for their survivors.

It is a property that will only get stranger. People have had millennia to get used to the idea of the ancientness of written texts; we have not yet seen truly ancient films, having got just a little beyond the century mark. A passenger—a babe in arms—who got off the train at La Ciotat station as the Lumières were filming it in 1895 may well have lived on into the age of television and 3-D. In time everything prior to that may come to seem prehistoric, dating from the era before people could see the vanished generations moving in something like real time through a world also in movement ...