Silent Movies and Me

A couple days ago, I happened to stumble upon a blog run by Jessica Keaton called "Silence is Platinum," which is all about the stars of the silent movie era.  I'm surprised that I hadn't stumbled upon it earlier, since Jessica's blog contains entries on several silent stars with whom I've long been fascinated, and about whom I still know little, even after all these years.

Given that Jessica has written around 200 entries, I thought it would be a good idea to organize the information into alphabetical order, so that any visitor could easily see at a glance what topics and individuals have been covered already.  (I seem to have a habit of thinking this way.  Back in the early 1990s, when I discovered that a Doctor Who program guide I had was lacking an index at the back, I compiled one myself.  Fortunately computers have made such indexing a lot easier!)

So, I spent yesterday putting together an alphabetical index of every entry on Jessica's blog.  That way, if you want to see who has been written about (or who hasn't yet been written about), it's simpler to find out: just see if their name is on the list.  I compiled this index for my own benefit, so I could go immediately to the entries that I was most interested in; but Jessica's blog is so well-done that you will find yourself becoming interested in some actors that you had never heard of before.

Two of my favorite blog entries that Jessica has written are her photographic travels to see the grave sites of deceased stars of the silent era.  In the posts titled "Grave hunting" (Sept. 2010) and "Grave Pictures" (June 2012), she visited the final resting places of such notables as Buster Keaton, Marion Davies, Clara Bow and Valentino, as well as less well-known names (but perhaps even more fascinating to me) like Pola Negri and Maude Fealy.  It may sound morbid, but such pilgrimages to these graves do allow the person of today to get about as close to the stars of yesterday as possible. And sadly some of the people who were involved in the early days of film have been forgotten, so it's great to see their names being recognized and appreciated by someone.

There are many other fascinating entries on Jessica's blog, offering tributes to a large number of people (both the famous and the forgotten), so check out my index for the A to Z list of them!

BECOMING A SILENT MOVIE FAN

Although I was curious during my early teen years about science fiction/fantasy silents like Metropolis (used by Queen in their "Radio Gaga" music video) and Nosferatu, it wasn't until my late teens that I became a fan of silent film in general.  One of the first things to get my attention was seeing a photo of Clara Bow in a book about movies that was in my high school library.  The stark B&W photo made her almost look like a goth idol like Siouxsie Sioux, a refreshingly hard-edged alternative to the bland, pastel-colored visuals that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 1980s.  

I subsequently saw a postcard of the famous photo (at right) of Louise Brooks holding a string of pearls, much of her figure concealed by darkness, and I was hooked.  I got and read Barry Paris' biography of Brooks (as well as her autobiography Lulu in Hollywood, and the very first book about Brooks, Portrait of an anti-Star) and became fascinated with this early era of film history. I told a friend at the time that reading the Barry Paris book, following the story of her life from beginning to the end, felt like having a lifelong affair with another person, being with them as they went through the ups and downs of life.

In the early 1990s, I acquired one of my all-time favorite books: A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen by Daniel Blum, which was released in 1953 (a few years before serious interest in the artistry of the silent film era had gained acceptance).  What this book may lack in quality (since much of it consists of rows of tiny photos printed on non-slick paper), it more than makes up for in quantity!  One can really get lost in the past just by looking through this book, seeing stills from early films that in many instances no longer exist.

It was particularly cool to see photo stills that looked more modern than I had expected -- or conversely, a fashion trend that seemed bizarre to modern eyes.  Most of the leading men would be clean-shaven, even back then, but supporting character types would often appear with wild bushy whiskers on their faces.  (Whenever I see a film today that takes place during that period, such as Murdoch Mysteries, I often think that there would be a lot more whiskery men walking around.) 

The rise of the vamp in the mid-to-late 'Teens, most notably Theda Bara, was a vivid example of this -- a fashion or trend that dominated the scene but then disappeared, never to return in quite the same way.  Yes, there were other femme fatales later on, but usually not depicted in the fantastic, literally vampiric style of those early vamps.  When I saw a photo (not the one of her shown at left) in the Blum book of Valeska Suratt,  she was wearing a veil that was designed like a huge spider web, and I remember thinking it odd: "Is this what was considered sexy back in 1917?"  (Of course, in recent years, when I saw Lady Gaga's fashions, my first thought was "Ah, she's bringing the vamp back in style!")  Sadly none of Valeska Suratt's films survive today.

Back in the early 1990s, it was a little more difficult to see an old silent movie than it is today (with the advent of YouTube, etc.) and my viewings of them were limited to what aired on TV or what I bought or rented on videotape.  There were also mail-order dealers whose catalogs were filled with tapes for sale, but limited funds prevented me from pursuing that opportunity.  (Today, magazines like Classic Images are still published which contain numerous ads for such dealers.)  Fortunately, American Movie Classics (AMC) still played old movies back then, from whence I taped Clara Bow's 1927 film Wings, and Lillian Gish's 1928 film The Wind (which was preceded by a new introduction from Gish herself that you can watch here).  On Sunday morning, Comedy Central would air "Dead Comics Society," hosted by comedian Robert Klein, which would air (with commercial interruptions, alas) silent shorts by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon, among others, as well as later (talking) shorts by Charley Chase and Edgar Kennedy.  And of course Turner Classic Movies (TCM) would play silent movies each week, especially in their Sunday night at midnight slot.  I recall commandeering the family TV to see Erich von Stroheim's Greed one evening and watching it on the couch with my mom (not a silent movie buff)!

The appeal of silent movies to me initially lay with the simple fascination of being able to witness history -- things that had happened before recorded sound itself was a staple of the moviegoing experience.  But the more I watched, the more I realized that silent movies could touch the heart in a way that sound films often didn't, through the use of gestures that expressed feelings that words couldn't convey.  I recall first noticing this in the aforementioned Wings, when one of the pilots brings to a grieving mother the tiny good-luck bear that she had given her son.  I saw this as well in the modern sequence of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (the silent version) where two friends are in love with the same girl, and when she chooses one over the other, he gently squeezes the hand of his crestfallen friend in sympathy at his heartbreak.  Even some of the comedies, such as those of Chaplin and Langdon, were known to tug at the heart strings, utilizing the silent films' strength in stirring depth of feeling.

However, most of the silent comedies specialized in another strength: the humor of watching clever bits of business being perfectly played out on screen.  Physical comedians like Keaton and Harold Lloyd drew laughs for the zany pitfalls that befell their characters, somehow surviving to the last reel.  Although lines of dialogue can often help carry a gag over with the audience, too much can get in the way of the joke.  A simple title card sufficed to add a line here or there, to complement rather than slow down the symphonic movement of the figures.  One of my favorite silent film comedy sequences is one from a 1926 Charley Chase short called "Dog Shy" where he misunderstands an order to give "The Duke" (a dog) a bath, and proceeds to force a visiting dignitary into the tub.  The scene works on a few different levels: the humiliation of the Duke (and the undermining of his earlier boastings of his valor as he is dragged off by Charley) and the way in which Charley's behavior is presented as normal in his own mind (he was ordered to give him a bath) and lunacy in his victim's.  It's a slight entertainment, but the simple purity of the scenario still makes me laugh.

A happy medium between reading a book about silent movies and actually seeing a silent movie is when one can watch a well-made documentary on the subject.  In the 1990s, I used to love whenever PBS would air one of the British documentaries about silent film, such as "The Unknown Chaplin" "Buster Keaton, A Hard Act to Follow" or "Harold Lloyd, The Third Genius."  These and several other documentaries were written and produced by the great film historian Kevin Brownlow, whose work is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the silents.   Brownlow is best known for his book on the subject, The Parade's Gone By... (1968), but my favorite may be Behind the Mask of Innocence (1990) which looks at silent films in a sociological way, especially ones which were produced for that purpose.  My one regret is that I have none of Brownlow's books on my own bookshelf, having always borrowed them from the library!

At the other end of the spectrum, we have Kenneth Anger's two volumes of Hollywood Babylon.  While they have a very poor reputation (Jessica Keaton refers to it as "trash" more than once on her blog), and shouldn't be relied on for historical accuracy, they helped fuel my interest as I first became a fan of silent movies.  If you know someone who thinks silent movies are boring, Hollywood Babylon may change their mind.  (Especially the first volume, which is more amusingly-written.)  However, they are to silent film history what Perez Hilton and TMZ are to modern cinema: a fun, guilty pleasure but not to be mistaken for actual scholarship.

THE EVER PRESENT PAST

One of the great things about being alive right now is that we have access to materials at our fingertips that many researchers and fans of the past may not have had.  As more and more items from the past are scanned or uploaded to the net, our base of knowledge about the topic increases.  Information that has been buried in movie magazines from a hundred years ago can now be read anew with the click of a button.  Case in point: The poem shown above was published in the May 1915 issue of Photoplay magazine, credited to one "M. C. Davies."  Could this have been actress Marion Davies, before she was famous? According to Wikipedia, she made her film debut in late 1916. IMDB's earliest film for her is from 1917. And her middle name? Cecelia. 

How did I get access to a 1915 issue of Photoplay?  It's available online.  There are other websites which contain a numerous amount of magazines and newspapers that can be viewed on your computer.  And it seems that the more sites that pop up, the more information about (and photos of!) stars of the past become available, too.

One silent movie actress that hasn't yet been featured on Jessica Keaton's Silence is Platimum blog is one about whom I knew nearly nothing for over 20 years, but (thanks to the internet) have recently learned a great deal more about.  I first heard of (and saw a couple photos of) Valda Valkyrien in Daniel Blum's A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen book.  She appeared in a couple tiny photos therein, and that was pretty much it as to the information about her -- that I ever ran across, anyway.  However, since more old magazines have been scanned and uploaded to the net, more information is now available about her than I'd ever seen in print before.  (Although maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to the right publications.)  Since the old magazines can be read online, it's no longer necessary to have someone else filtering that material to the reader; the original magazine articles can be read for oneself.  On the other hand, not everything that appeared in the old magazines was the truth either, so the critical skills of a researcher and historian are still needed to sift through the data and find if the oft-told tales match the known facts.  

Fans can also use the internet to obtain books and magazines (the physical objects, not just downloads) about silent movies more easily than they might have done in the past.  I remember in the early 1990s at a B. Dalton bookstore seeing a new book about Natacha Rambova (who I knew about from Hollywood Babylon) titled Madam Valentino, but I didn't have enough money to get the book at that time -- and never saw it again.  In recent years, I saw that it was available on eBay, but again for more than I was able to pay for it.  Biding my time, I would search for it on eBay every now and then, until finally I found it from a seller for ten bucks and nabbed it.  The seller also had a book about Nazimova for around the same price and I bought that as well.  Of course I could have visited a well-stocked used bookstore and perhaps found them there as well (emphasis on "perhaps") but it was nice to be able to "shop around" for an item that is (or was) fairly obscure (as most items relating to silent film history are likely to be).  Old movie magazines can sometimes be hot items on eBay, though.  Last May, I was surprised to see a 1931 movie magazine sell there for $160, when the starting bid had been $25.00.

Perhaps that demonstrates a possible future: where these once-obscure, neglected things become more well-known, partly through the internet, and they become not-so-forgotten after all.  However, part of the appeal of silent movies (and other neglected artforms like radio drama) is that they offer an alternative to the prevailing tastes of today.  Both silent movies and radio demand a certain level of engagement on the part of the audience, so that it's likely they will never again enjoy widespread popularity as they had in the past.  No worries, though!  The fact that silent movies continue to be appreciated by new generations of fans (however small their number) bodes well for their survival in the years ahead.