As some of you may recall, I don’t have a TV. However, as a way of alleviating the boredom while recuperating from a mixture of injury and illness, I have recently taken to watching DVDs on the computer.
Me being me, I bought a boxed set of Charlie Chaplin, and a big stack of Laurel and Hardy DVDs. It strikes me that if I was going to learn to play the saxophone, I’d start with some easy scales and simple tunes; if I’m going to watch screen-based entertainment, it seeems irrational to jump straight in with complicated modern stuff with CGI and all that.
So, here’s a question:
Decades after the invention of the moving picture, we still have quality radio drama and comedy. So why is it that decades after the invention of the talking film, we don’t still have quality silent film? Radio is still seen as a valid and respectable art form; silent film is seen as an historical oddity.
There are a few exceptions: Mr. Bean springs to mind. Before that? Possibly the chase scenes in the closing credits of Benny Hill? Erc Sykes’ “The Plank” must be 30 years old by now.
A radio has siginificant advantages over a television, such as the low cost of a unit, the portability and compactness of the unit, the lack of need for a license, the ability to be entertained by it while doing tasks that require your vision (while writing this i actually wrote ‘revision’, i’ve been working too hard today) etc. These qualitites make the radio valuable even in today’s society when TVs are so easily available. By comparison, the differences between silent film and ‘talkies’ are far smaller, it’s only a different genre of film, and for a generation brought up with a short attention span like mine a film needs all the pizazz it can find to succeed. I guess the strength of the silent film is that you can watch it while doing a task which requires only your hearing, but I cant think of anything that falls in to that category.
You pose a very interesting question Mike. This is something that I’ve never thought of before. I don’t know how it is on your side of the pond but, over here I can think of exactly one weekly radio program that is marketed as ‘radio theater.’ It’s “A Prairie Home Companion” which is broadcast on National Public Radio" stations across the country. I listen whenever I can and it is relatively popular but still, in the grand scheme of things, I think the percentage of people listing is very small. It seems that movies are all about big money anymore and small audiences just won’t do. In my town, we have a small, independant movie theater that built its business on independant and foreign films. Always very well done films of a typically higher intellectual level than the big, loud Hollywood blockbusters. This theater, the only one I’ve gone to for several years now, is going out of business because they’ve gone broke. I’d often go to a great film there and it would be attended by less than a dozen people. Nobody wants to have to actually ‘think’ about the movies they’re watching. I think there would be a small but probably enthusiastic market for new, well done silent films but the film makers would certainly have to approach it as a labor of love and not a money generator.
I believe we have the general public to blame for this. They just don’t consume the type of entertainment you’re looking for, thus it isn’t produced as much as some of us would like.
My question is what happened to the great “Triple Threats” (actor / singer / dancer) of the stage and screen, and why don’t they appear on film more often?
I’ve been watching my way through a Marx Brothers Box Set and I’ve been thoroughly amused by Groucho’s singing and dancing, Chico’s piano playing and Harpo’s clever slapstick… many of the Brothers’ films were adaptations of stage acts. These days, we don’t have such super-popular stage actors and as such I’d doubt we’d see any such actors on the “big screen” any time soon.
We of course have the BBC. Radio 4 is a breeding ground for quality radio dram a and comedy. We have the longest running “soap opera” in the world (The Archers) which has been running for 50-odd years and has a cult following. Various major comedy series on TV cut their teeth on Radio 4 (Little Britain, Goodness Gracious Me! Dead Ringers…) and afficionadoes tend to agree that the radio versions were better. “The pictures are better on radio” - i.e. you can use your imagination more.
You can have the radio on in the background and listen while you work. With silent film, you have to watch quite carefully to get the full effect. The first time I watch a Laurel & Hardy film, I laugh out loud. The second time, because I know what’s coming, I just admire the careful construction of the sight gags. It’s almost like watching a dance.
Maybe it’s not entertainment for the MTV generation, but surely there’s a place for something more sophisticated than the 5 second sound bite? The twenty minute soundless bite?
i just mentioned silent films on my breakfast radio show and then went on to suggest silent radio, at witch my manager knocked on the window and shook his head
I feel naughty.
I have just decided that my first unicycling video is going to be silent, actually mind change again, i am going to include a radio commentry for those who want to watch it whilst doing other things with there eyes. it will include a detailed analogy of how noticly better i am than what it actually looks like.
Has anyone ever watched Monty Pythons ‘the meaning of life’ with the soundtrack for the lonely?
I think reason silent movies aren’t popular is that it feels odd to be able to see action taking place but to hear nothing.
Radio works so well because we’re far more used to being able to hear things happening without seeing them, even simple things like someone talking behind us.
There is a figure was quoted during my BBC training for the amount of information in a tv programme that’s carried in the sound track. I think it’s around 80%, it’s certainly the vast majority. So 80% of your understanding of the programme comes from what you hear, the other 20% comes from what you see.
If you ever watch tv with Audio Description (like subtitles but for partially sighted/blind people) it sounds just like radio drama with a narrator, the narrator mostly sets the scene and explains the very visual elements. It would be much more difficult to turn most TV programmes into silent movies, you’d need an awful lot of slides with dialogue on them!
The pictures are much better on radio. Radio 4 comedy is far funnier than most TV comedy.
Not to sound obvious, but I think early movies were only silent because the technology didn’t exist to provide the sound. But theaters went out of their way to provide live sound via organ or piano. Sometimes more involved music or sound was provided, or sound effects to accompany what was happening onscreen. I don’t know if feature films were ever commercially screened without some form of auditory entertainment with them.
On the other hand, my first two digital cameras made silent movies. All my early video clips, some of which came out really nice, are silent. Again though, only because the technology wasn’t sufficiently available/cheap to include in the camera at that price point. Nowadays you’ll scarcely find a camera that doesn’t do video clips with sound, except at the low end of the price scale.
Also, many types of film don’t lend themselves well to a lack of sound. Dramas adapted from the stage, with a lot of dialog for example. What plays well is stuff with lots of visual appeal, such as physical comedy or physical/visual arts (dance, circus, sports). Being around a lot of deaf people all the time, I’ve become aware of the kind of subjects a deaf person will go to the movies to see. They are more drawn to the visual, of course. Slapstick or physical comedy is always popular. Drama much less so.
I don’t think this is true. That type of “technology” had probably been well established by 1905 or so. The real question was why not use it?
I think you have it right there. Well, two reasons:
Subtitles take your eyes off the rest of the picture. If things are happening too fast, you don’t get to see the faces, costumes, sets as much. So excessive dialogue may have been considered a detractor.
I don’t know what the literacy levels of moviegoers were like in those days compared to now, but I suspect lower. They kept the text to a minimum so slow readers could keep up. Ever notice how excruciatingly long the titles stay on the screen in some of those old classics?
You always have the sound option now. The silence has to be there to create an effect. There has to be some motivation for it.
If you where making a movie for TV or movie theater, what would your motivation be for making it silent?
Whilst reading through this thread I thought of Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie…
…and was quite shocked to find that this too (like The Plank) was made 30 years ago.
I’m of an age where I can clearly remember my childhood summer holidays sat in front of the goggle-box watching Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd shorts on BBC2. Also Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon and Jonny Weismuller as Tarzan.
Put them back on the schedule I say!
I have sometimes been watching silent movies … aboard planes!
Since I did not want to pay for viewing the picture I just look at it and try to figure the action.
I remember also trying to “talk” the action to my wife: for some films it is really funny , for some you do not get it …
hey! that would be a quality measure for a picture: can you view it without sound or without understanding the language (I remember also viewing egyptian films where I could not understand the original arabic)
another game is to “highjack” subtitles: that was a game played by situationists. I remember viewing such a film whose modified title was “can dialectics break bricks?” : the original was a hong-kong made “eastern” with lot of drama. What was really funny is that half the people viewing the picture were chinese who were taken away by the drama and the other half were french laughing out loud about funny subtitles :o quite embarassing but the public was part of the show!
