OK, we all know that silents died rather suddenly in the late 1920s when a spate of successful talkies and part-talkies were released to capitalize on sin that made sound. The upside to this is that we got such luminaries as Bette Davis to talk into the microphones for quite a long time. The downside is that silents are forever stuck with 1920s-era acting technique and storytelling, which means cameras focused way too close on performances meant to be seen halfway across a large theater and modern moviegoers way too focused on plots meant to be viewed through a few glasses of wine. Sunrise, Metropolis, and The Phantom of the Opera are all comedies due to this.
A modern silent film would focus on the atmospheric effects of good B&W film* without sound to distract you, but with the further benefits of modern acting, directing, and story. (Melodramas were crap. They are crap. They will be crap for ever and ever, unto the fortieth generation.)
*(None of this gray-and-grayer crap. I mean the stuff that looks like silver on velvet. Sepia tone is an abomination before God and shall be punished as such. I suppose color silent films are possible in theory, but color isn’t atmospheric. Nosferatu was B&W; The Wizard of Oz was color and sepia.)
Guy Madden still makes silent films. The first part of Wall-E is a silent film. Pay attention to action sequences in modern movies, especially heist or robbery movies: a lot of film storytelling is still accomplished without dialogue.
Silent films are just as vital as a compelling way to tell a story today. Watch the films of F.W. Murnau, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin. You’d be surprised how non-silent they seem as you watch them. If you can read a novel without pictures–don’t you hear the dialogue in your head as you read it off the page?–you can watch a silent film; same principle. A silent film isn’t “missing” dialogue any more than a Monet is “missing” a soundtrack.
Yes, I’ve seen a number of those (and Wall-E) but they aren’t the same: They have sound and they know it, so there’s no title cards. Silent doesn’t mean pure pantomime and it certainly doesn’t mean almost-speech beeping and buzzing from the main characters.
Didn’t I just say I’d seen a lot of those? Well, I have. I’ve seen Modern Times, The General, Nosferatu, and so on. There’s a reason I want to see modern ones.
(And, yes, I did put the death of silent films too early. They died in the 1930s, not the 1920s.)
What the hell does this have to do with anything? I want there to be more silent movies!
Silent films were rarely fully silent: there were musicians, or perhaps simply an organist, to produce an ongoing soundtrack. Occasionally from the orchestra pit you would hear a smack, or a thud, from one instrument or another, to accentuate whatever was going on on screen.
Cutaways were done to title cards in order to forward the plot, when it became impossible to convey the complexity. This was partly because of the lack of sound, but also because insert shots wouldn’t have worked. The techniques of film were not yet fully evolved to show us a telegram in someone’s hand, and have that telegram be readable.
The actors in silent films used prodigious amounts of makeup and eyeliner because older films needed so much light. You could get away with much less of that today. Closeups would be much more effective at conveying emotion and nuance.
Therefore I say yes, you could make a mostly silent (or perhaps a “wordless”) film today. It could have a soundtrack; it could even have sound effects and foley. It just doesn’t need to have a lot of words.
Look at Harrison Ford’s parts in “The Fugitive.” He has virtually no lines. You could turn the sound down and get his part. In fact, you could probably do “The Fugitive” as a completely silent picture. The plot certainly would be easy enough to follow. (I might also suggest “Castaway” although I haven’t seen it myself. It seems like a good candidate.)
The 2005 release Call of Cthulhu is a good old-fashioned silent film, shot in shades of grey with insert cards. It never had the budget to promoted widely, but it’s a pretty good movie, and it works well in the silent style.
It’s not technically silent, as there are a few spoken sentences in the fourty minute duration of the movie, but I’ve got to plug a film that a friend of mine helped produce a couple of years ago. The film is “Walkin’ Eddie” - a “day in the life” introspective into the routine of a Vietnam veteran tortured by war turned strolling alcoholic in Hodgenville, KY. Basically, it chronicles his daily walk from his home to a liquor store miles up the road and back. The man would literally wake up in the morning, walk 10 miles to the store and back, drinking along the way, and return to his house in the evening to expire. I think the beautiful thing about “Walkin’ Eddie” is how they were able to capture the sheer beauty and equal torture in Eddie’s mind without blatantly preached against drinking. It comes off more like watching a friend slowly drowning in the wake of his addiction, as opposed to your mother bitching about finding beer cans under your bed.
The film was made on a budget of about $800. What it lacked in dialog and budget, it more than made up for in raw emotion. They didn’t have much to work with, but the execution is flawless and the haunting soundtrack only adds to the devestation portrayed. It kills me inside every time I watch it.
Their Myspace page can be reached here and the film can be watched by searching for “Walkin’ Eddie” on Youtube.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t make a silent film today; it’s just that people don’t want to. Silents didn’t die because of any inherent weakness in the form: talkies became massively popular extremely fast, and the public flocked to them. Since they worked (and made a ton of money – Warner Brothers was close to bankruptcy when they made The Jazz Singer, and its success made then a major studio), studios did what worked.
But silent could work. City Lights and Modern Times* were huge successes. Admittedly, they had the most popular silent film star of all in them, but there’s no reason why studios couldn’t do the same for another big name of the time other than the fact that studios didn’t want to commit the money to them (Chaplin produced his own films, so it was his own money).
So the biggest hurdle for a modern silent film would be financing. Once that is overcome, it could be made.
*Yes, I know there was some dialog, but 90% of the film was silent, and it did use title cards.
Financing probably wouldn’t be as big a problem now as it would be in the past, if you don’t mind releasing the movie on the internet, a la Dr. Horrible. I guess it depends on how much financial success you’re going for, rather than just getting your movie out there.
This is what I came in here to mention. It’s very well made, very atmospheric, and even more importantly, is an excellent adaptation of a story long thought to be unfilmable.
How about The Triplets of Belleville? It has almost no dialogue. I guess it was kind of below the radar for a lot of people, being French, dialogue-less, and an adult cartoon.
Not quite a silent film, but there is the Buffy episode “Hush”, where everyone in the town of Sunnydale loses the ability to speak for most of the episode. Except for a newscaster talking on TV (broadcasting from a station outside of Sunnydale, of course), there is no spoken dialogue at all for about 30 minutes of screentime. Just people pantomiming, passing written messages, and freaking out when someone drops a tray of dishes in a silent cafeteria.