The only hindrance is that a silent film wouldn’t have commercial appeal (until someone comes along with a brilliant idea for a silent film with commercial appeal).
Were we to do in-depth research of experimental independently produced low-budget films, I’ve no doubt we would find more than a few silents from the past 10 years.
Every once in a while I’ll see a nearly dialogue-less foreign film and it helps me to more fully appreciate some of what was lost when silents went by the wayside. Keeping international audiences in mind was part of the reason Chaplin was so resistant to going over to sound.
There was an episode of Fraisier that was silent (dialogue-less) for the first third of the show. It featured only David Hyde Pierce. He did classic silent-era slapstick- he did it quite well, once of the funniest performances from the entire series.
John Sayles’ 1984 film The Brother from Another Planet was nearly a silent film. The main character had no dialogue at all, and the camera was rarely on anyone else.
(To qualify myself, I’ve worked from sound capture to producer on a numberless amount of short movies, vignettes, music videos and pilots. Mostly zero to low budget, but also a fair amount of funded commercial projects.)
One could make a silent. B/W film, today, but why would one want to?
Silent films have, to put it mildly, less commercial appeal than a talkie.
Communication, plot, characterization and accessibility are handicapped, if not crippled.
Colour done right has more character than B/W can possibly dream of. A fair caveat is that far too few colour films make use of colour in an expressive way, but that’s for the sake of realism, not inability. (Pushing Daisies, for instance, makes great use of colour.)
I can see no reason for any movie made today to run silent and be in B/W beyond setting, parody, tribute or provocation.
B/W silent does not help the director of a movie, who will have a worse time of communicating what he wants.
B/W silent does not help the producer of a movie, who will have a headache getting it published in any format or scale worth mentioning.
B/W silent does not help the actor who will have to rely entirely on body language to communicate a message that could have been delivered with far more nuance and subtlety if he had been allowed to let his dialogue or speech to counter-point his body language.
B/W silent does not help the script, manus or screen-writers, who will be hobbled by either ambiguous communication or dramatiscism.
To be honest, I see neither market nor need for B/W silent films and, further, believe nostalgia makes them appear far more glamorous than they deserve.
To be sure, some scenes don’t require words. In that case, they should be slashed. But writing a script for a B/W silent film that could survive or prosper today in mainstream film? I doubt I’ll ever see it outside arthaus productions.
What form would such a product even take? Slapstick comedy? French drama? Surrealist? Dwelling drama? I just can’t see it.
To be sure, I’m not a classic hater or anything like that. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of my favourite movies of all time and Maria Falconetti performed stellarly within the confines of the medium.
This completely passed me by. I didn’t hear about it at all, which is odd considering where my username comes from.
I saw that not long after it came out. It got plenty of press in mainstream movie shows and it even made it to the Oscars. I didn’t like it as a movie as much as I liked its general visual and musical style, though.
I’m aware movies were colorized before Ted Turner. I don’t have to like it and I don’t have to want to see it happen again.
That said, that was a relatively restrained and tasteful example and it plays up another positive aspect of silent films: Title cards are easy to translate well. Subbing, for all of its advantages (no wildly flapping mouths, no temptation to mangle a translation to mitigate the flapping mouth disorder), suffers from having to keep up with the action on-screen in addition to possibly obscuring parts of it. It has, in other words, a somewhat less pressing version of the same sync problem dubbing has. Title cards, being pre-existing sync points, alleviate the problem entirely.
To the benefit of atmosphere and visual flair. The reason people still watch the most laughable silent films from the golden age of the medium, with their painfully pre-Method acting and tacked-together plots (tell me truthfully: Does the ending of Metropolis belong anywhere?) is because they look amazing. Nosferatu suffers less from the stereotypical flaws but its high point is still the amazing atmosphere you can create with moving images and a well-chosen soundtrack.
(It’s the comedies that fared the best by far. The good ones are still funny for all the same reasons, demonstrating the universal appeal of comic athleticism.)
I’m perhaps too adamant in my condemnation of color. Part of my reason for bringing it up here is to draw attention to the fact the B&W movies made in the 1920s and 1930s look so much better than the B&W films made since color began to take over. I suppose it’s too much to hope for to imagine digital cameras can recreate the B&W seen in, for example, Top Hat.
This is a cipher. A null. It depends entirely on directorial intent.
This is valid if you ignore the hobbiest world. It’s an expensive hobby now, I’ll grant you, but microcomputers were an expensive hobby in 1975.
Stoneface managed it. Schreck managed it. Modern actors who do non-speaking roles manage it.
The director is the author of a film, right? That’s what the current dogma holds. Screenplays are important in that they get re-written and acted out.
Both Wall-E and Apocalypse Now refute you and leave you shivering in the rain.
I’m not entirely sure this is a contemporary silent movie in the way the OP uses the term, since it deliberately uses the ‘out-dated’ aesthetic of early silent movies for atmospheric effect and artistic expression. It is, however, highly recommended.
…and to provide plausible deniability for cheesy special effects due to a limited budget. (Which I think was a brilliant idea on the part of the director.)
It’s still highly recommended, and is probably the best Lovecraftian film made to date.
Wrong. [John Ford, the father–well, one of the uncles of film noir, and Orson Welles’s favorite director: “You can get a guy off the street and he can shoot a picture in color. But it takes a real artist to do a black and white picture.”]
Wrong. Check with Holly Hunter, to pick a random name off of a long list. Then watch some Buster Keaton. And note how many action sequences and love scenes are dialogue free.
Dude. Do yourself a favor. Watch some of the great masterpieces of silent film and discover just how wrong you are.
Wow. I wish you some historical context. The silent film industry was HUGE; millions and millions of people flocked to see them every week. Sound was so unnecessary for them to work that many, many people thought the advent of sound would RUIN movies–the medium was considered perfect without it.
So . . . the limits of *your *personal imagination is what dictates possibly the most universal art form of all time? Got it.l
Ah, OK, not ignorant, just, what, insane? How can you know this about *Jeanne *and spout all of that garbage above, irreconcilably contradicting it?
I think *Winged Migration *and *Microcosmos * would have worked just fine without their minimal narration. I loved both of those movies, although I realize they’re not to everyone’s taste.
It’s 25 years old now (but still more recent than Silent Movie, but le Dernier Combat is essemtially a silent movie. There’s NO dialogue (Stranger from Another Planet, while great flick, doesn’t begin to qualify as a silent movie – it’s full of dialogue), so, even though it’s a French film, anyone can watch it. Pretty good, too.
Low-budget post-apocalyptic science fiction:
For that matter, consider the episode “The Invaders” from the original Twilight Zone. Released in 1961, it has no dialogue except Rod Serling’s narration and a bit of overheard radio chatter. It’s from 1961, but it could’ve been made recently.
There’s no fundamental reason that silent movies and TV shows can’t be made.
There’s also Quest for Fire, which has dialogue no one can understand. Structurally it’s essentially a silent film. As a matter of fact, large parts of The Bear are also, unavoidably, dialogue-less.
A musician could write new swing music, today, maybe as true-swing and as worth hearing as anything from Tommy Dorsey or Benny Goodman – but it would be a pastiche, not something honestly part of the canon.
Not that Spielberg had the chutzpah for it, but I could easily imaging Schindler’s List being shot as a silent picture. Not only the black and white, but the subject matter make this seem like a small leap for me.