Why were there silent movies?

Cafe Society
41

Sounds to me like your making my original argument for me here.

Your original statement was “I’m not saying a silent movie can’t be enjoyable, but better? Never.” Flip this around, and you get “A sound movie will always be better than a silent one.” I can’t possibly agree with this statement.

I said that “better” isn’t the issue…“different” is. To say that, by default, a silent movie would invariably have been better had it been filmed as a talkie is just plain wrong.

But then it wouldn’t have been a Harold Lloyd film. Lloyd developed an identifiable style that served him very well in his prime period. (Few remember that Lloyd was equally as popular as Chaplin in that era, if not more so…plus, he made more films.)

Not that an artist can’t grow, but an established persona, particularly in that era, was golden. Chaplin was still, in some regards, the little tramp even in The Great Dictator in the early 1940s, and he pointedly avoided sound even when it was available in Modern Times (which would NOT have been a better film had it employed full sound capabilities).

Why even speculate about this, when we have indisputably great Keaton films now? If you’re longing for some alternate universe where sound was available to movie makers from the start, you’re taking away an entire genre of great films and hoping that maybe, just maybe, filmmakers would have come up with something equally great while saddled with the limitations of sound (and that’s exactly what sound would have been to them — a limitation.)

In the case of Keaton, his “world” depended on a certain suspension of disbelief that would have been rendered absolutely impossible to achieve with the “realistic” added dimension of sound.

But later in this reply, you state: “Life has sound and color, and not having either is a lesser version of representation in movies.”

Why is an abstract painting or anything other than photorealistic painting not a “lesser” representation?

Why make any distinction? All art, after all, is a representation of life in some fashion, even if it’s just the “inner life” of the artist’s mind.

But you want to straitjacket one art form — movies — into the most realistic depiction of life its technology allows, complete with all of the senses we have to take it in (even though, as pointed out, three of them are still missing!). Why? There’s no more reason to do this than there would be to insist upon only photorealistic art.

Silent movies are one artistic form of representation. Sound movies are another. One isn’t inherently “better” than the other across the board…nor does it need to be.

You must really hate Ansel Adams!

I completely disagree. Again, I’ll speak of some things I’m knowledgable about.

The early Max Fleischer Popeye cartoons, most of which were set in gritty, urban environments, would have far less impact had they been made in color (and the technology to do that was, in fact, available at that time).

The entire output of Laurel and Hardy (save one public service short made for the government) was black and white. No way would any of their films been “better” had they originally been filmed in color (the possible exception being “Babes in Toyland,” which was, of course, a fantasy world rather than a real-life one).

Just as with set decoration, lighting, sound, wardrobe, etc., color is but one more tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal as he/she creates a “world” for the plot and characters to inhabit. In certain films (take the obvious, like “The Wizard of Oz”), color can be a great enhancement. In others, it would actually be a detriment.

Laurel and Hardy’s “world” (as well as that of their Hal Roach stablemates Our Gang) was a black and white one. When we view black and white films through the era of the 1930s and much of the 1940s, we are thrust into that “world,” where in most cases the plot and characters reside quite comfortably.

Similarly, films through the 1920s inhabit a silent world. Wave your magic wand and make sound technology available in 1915 (the start of modern film making), and you take away hundreds and hundreds of great films — in the faint “hope” that maybe those filmmakers would have come up with something “different but just as good.”

That’s not a chance I would ever want to take.

42

Concerning whether silent movies could be better than talkies, Garson Kanin has an interesting anecdote in his book about Spencer Tracy and Kate Hepburn. One night Tracy and Hepburn got together with Kanin and his wife Ruth Gordon and they decided to watch one of Charlie Chaplin’s later unsuccessful films “Monsieur Verdoux” with the sound off. According to Kanin, it was a much better film with no sound. Chaplin’s directorial talent was better suited for visual.

43

In fact, skilled camera operators would often deliberately “undercrank” action scenes, knowing that they would be sped-up in relation to more stationary scenes when projected.

This gave the actors and actions in these scenes a “lighter than air” quality that would have prevailed even when these films were projected at normal speeds to the audiences of the day.

The fundamental flaw in some folks’ thinking here is that movies must always offer a “realistic” version of life — simply because they are capable of doing so.

This is not the case, and never has been.

44

No, it doesn’t. It can mean that they are so different that neither is better than the other. And that did seem to be the point from both of you.

My only argument is that silent films are so different that they do fail in a lot of areas that modern audiences expect in film. They fail so spectacularly that people generally don’t watch silent films for entertainment. Filmmakers don’t even consider making the film silent. The silent film is a product of its era.

And that does hint that it was created by its limitations. That doesn’t mean you can’t have something with artistic merit, but that’s because art transcends medium. But if all you want to do is tell a story with video, a silent film is an inferior way to do it. To do so in a silent film requires you to think about it being silent. To do so with a “talky” does not require you to think about having sound.

45

Really? Tell that to the foley artists, re-recording mixers, dialogue coaches and so forth. And also to the Academy, which has an award for best sound design. Film aren’t usually made by recording the sound as the action happens, and haven’t been for decades. If you hadn’t noticed that, it’s a tribute to how much thought has been put into making the sound seem, if not always realistic, then appropriate.

Which is not to say that your main point is wrong, exactly, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. A well designed sound film makes it easier for the audience, especially a modern audience that’s used to it, to suspend disbelief. It doesn’t make it easier for the creators.

46

I am reasonably sure that silent movies actually were played along with a separate music track. There was no reasonable way they could sync it well enough for dialog but they played mood music to accompany the scene.

47

It was usually a live performance of the music. Wiki link.

48

I can say with higher than 99% confidence that if films had been talkies and in colour from the start, nobody would’ve tried to have silent B&W ones, except for making a specific art case

49

However, in a movie with sound that same effect can be achieved. For instance, that particular scene could be filmed from the outside of a house through a window, with only the visible part of the actors’ performances.

Sound gives you more CHOICE. So if there are scenes which are most effective without dialog, either with silence or with just music, you can make the scenes that way. And when there are scenes that are better WITH dialog (which certainly include a massive portion of the most critically acclaimed scenes in movies in the past 50 years) you have that option available also.
Another way to think about it is this: What’s going to be a better film… the best silent or black-and-white film, remade lovingly by talented and dedicated artists in color and with sound; or the best color-and-sound film (say The Godfather) remade lovingly by talented and dedicated artists as a silent b/w film?

Clearly. Imagine any weird limitation that might have existed early in the development of film:
-films can only be 15 minutes long
-everything is at 6 frames per second
-screen is constrained to a really weird shape, like super-tall-and-thin
-huge fuzzy blurs around the corners of the screen

Any of those are things that talented artists could work around to produce great art. Heck, any of those are things that artists could eventually figure out how to take advantage of, how to turn the limitations and restrictions imposed into strengths. And then once movies were made that way for 30 years, people would start getting accustomed to it, and start to view it as an equally valid artistic choice, and say “well, movies at 6 fps aren’t better or worse than movies at 24 fps, they’re just DIFFERENT”, and so forth. Which is, when you come right down to it, just silly.

50

I think there is a perception that the old silent movies are superior to their talkie re-makes, and that this perception is justified, but that it doesn’t mean that silence is superior to sound.

You see, it’s not really an issue of silent vs. sound at all, but one of re-makes. The movies that people choose to make re-makes of are ones that were very good to begin with, but those are precisely the movies that need it the least. And if the original movie was very good, then the remake is likely to be inferior, just because the original was very good. If someone tried to make a talkie remake of the Little Tramp movies (I expect this has probably already been done), they would probably be inferior to the originals, but not because of the presence of sound: They’d be inferior because they’re not Charlie Chaplain. On the other hand, there are doubtless plenty of old silent movies which sucked, and for which a remake (sound or silent) would probably be better, but nobody remakes those movies, or even remembers them, because they sucked.

On another note, conversions always suck. Even if color is (usually) superior to black and white, if you take an old movie that was filmed in black and white and colorize it, it’ll be worse than the original, not better. If you take a movie that was filmed in 2D and convert it to 3D, it’ll likewise be bad. And if you took a movie that was originally filmed silent and dub sound over it, it’ll be bad, too.

51

Not necessarily true.,
Ray Harryhausen is on record as HATING the colorized version of the 1933 King Kong, in part because they didn’t spend a lot of effort on it (“all the vegetation was the same shade of green,” he complained), and I suspect because they consciously based a lot of the scenes on Gustave Dore’s black-and-whiter engravings, and they weren’t meant to be in color (which is in line with your suggestion – the movies were planned to be seen in black and white, so color was alien to the scenario).

On the other hand, some movies were meant to be filmed in color, and weren’t, often because of budget considerations. That’s what happened with Merian C. Cooper’s version of She from 1935. It was supposed to be in color, and the costumes and sets had been made with that in mind – no Gustave Dore-inspired imagery there. But just as production was about to start the studio announced that the budget would be half of what was intended. Color necessarily went out the window*. The film was released in black and white, and re-released years later, but it wasn’t as successful as hoped. And the film was almost lost, but Buster Keaton had retained a copy (!). In 2002 a DVD of the film was released with colorization overseen by Ray Harryhausen. It’sd impressive, and I think it’s much better in color than it appears in black and white (both versions are on the DVD set). Harryhausen also did a colorized version of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come, but I haven’t seen that yet, so I can’t comment on it. But She strands as evidence that a colorized film can stand up to the original black and white release

*It could’ve been worse. RKO wanted Cooper to do a sequel to his hit King Kong, but gave him a fraction of the budget and a fraction of the time to do it. The result, Son of Kong, isn’t great, and is full of “filler” material., but it’s still much better than it has a right to be, all things considered.

52

In the old times people still hadn’t developed language communication

53

Even if a work is intended for color (or 3D, or sound) all along, conversions still usually end up being pretty bad. There’s always a loss of information, if you don’t capture it in the first place, and that means you need to use various heuristics to guess what the missing information is, and even at their best, those methods are still lacking something. See, for instance, many modern 3D movies, where the objects all look like cardboard cutouts at various depths.

54

Originally Posted by DChord568
Your original statement was “I’m not saying a silent movie can’t be enjoyable, but better? Never.” Flip this around, and you get “A sound movie will always be better than a silent one.” I can’t possibly agree with this statement.

Oh? Someone who says "I’m not saying a silent movie can’t be enjoyable, but better? Never…"is NOT saying “A sound movie will always be better than a silent one,” just different?

How do you figure? Why do never and always not correlate in the above?

If the original statement were true, then a film critic who compiled a list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time would include zero silent films, but would list 100 sound films. Find me any reputable film critic who has done this.

And the failing is 100 percent on the part of the audience, not the silent film. This is no different from young people (and I’ve encountered many) who categorically refuse to watch a black and white film. Are you OK with this point of view?

Sure it is, just as any art form is. And any art form has at least the potential to move you, regardless of the tools with which it was made — assuming you’re willing to give it a chance to, rather than dismissing it out of the gate.

If you’re unwilling to do this, or if you grudgingly go into the experience with the expectation “This is gonna suck” — then it’s you who has the problem, not the work of art.

The fact that many great stories and great characterizations and great works of art have been created using the medium of the silent film belies this statement entirely.

Your second statement has already been successfully dealt with. As for your first statement, I would say “And what’s wrong with that?”

Any artist who approaches the creation of a work of art does so knowing what tools he/she has at hand to do so — and then works with those tools in (hopefully) the best and most creative way possible.

55

While I agree with your general point, that last bit there actually sounds awesome.

(A black-and-white silent close-up on young Pacino’s face as he sits at the restaurant? Sonny windmilling his limbs to knock a guy around in the streets? An inter-title card of the Leave The Gun, Take The Cannoli type? I’d watch the crap out of that.)

56

Then it’s a matter of how carefully the information is recreated. Not all post-production 3D movies (or just images) are bad (although plenty of them are. See Clash of the Titans. The 3D was obviously rushed to get the film to market in time. And I can’t believe that the film wasn’t intended to be 3D from the get-go. Those scenes flying through the arms of the Kraken certainly look as if they were intended for 3D. Maybe there were back-and-forth wars about whether it would be 3D throughout production. And the audience lost.)
As for the example I gave earlier, the colorized She strikes me as superior to the black and white version. They clearly spent a lot of time on the colorization, and were very much aware of the shortcomings of past colorization attempts. Vegetation varies in color. The colorization of fire (which was terribly done in the earlier colorized movies) has obviously been executed with care. And it REALLY shows in the climactic “She in the Fire of Life” sequence, which looks infinitely better than the black and white version. Better than it probably would have looked if made in color originally, I suspect, since they had the advantage of computer imagery to place the colors right where they needed to be. If made in the 19030s, it probably would’ve looked as cartoony as the “Finger of God” effects in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments

57

And the showers.

58

I disagree, the 3D converted versions of “Top Gun” and “Predator” are amazing, at least on my home 3D TV and Blu-ray set-up.

59

Perfect username/post combo.