Last week, I tossed out a little gripe about 3-D. This week I’m on to silent films. Don’t worry, there will be no rent clothes or gritted teeth over ancient cinema, I promise. See? I’m smiling.
This past weekend, I took a trip to Denver to partake of our local Silent Film Festival. It was an experience I’d highly recommend to one and all. Friday night featured a screening of the very first Academy Award winner, Wings—the 1927, William Wellman-directed film about fighter pilot buds who go off to war.
The film was up on the big screen in all its flickering black-and-white glory, accompanied by a live five-piece orchestra. And by the time we reached the end of the two-and-a-half-hour pic, and the crowd rose to its feet with a standing ovation—cheering as much for the inventive orchestral arrangements as for the classic itself—I was joyfully considering just how important movies have become in our modern life and just how much it has changed in the last 85 years.
For all of my personal grumbles about the medium sometimes (I’m still on a 3-D rant), experiencing a theater presentation of a good movie from a different era drove home the escapist joy and internal soul-searching that film has the power to deliver. Good drama is good drama no matter how our technology and sensibilities change. Even a decades-old pic like this one, with its melodramatic physical reactions and overly drawn-out grayscale scenes, can raise subtle questions about patriotic fervor and the agonies of war—without condemning anyone’s sense of patriotism one whit. It’s a pretty cool deal.
At the same time, boy are things different. Wings was a technical marvel back in the late ’20s, sort of the Star Wars of its day. But the only special effects it had were a number of scenes with painted-on orange flames to help point out that the plane spiraling downward through the black-and-white clouds was supposed to be on fire.
Then there’s all that silence. A movie with only occasional panels of brief printed dialogue forces audiences into something of a heady scavenger hunt. They scan the screen intently for subtle clues—a slow shrug of a shoulder here, an abundantly eye-lined teary eye there—that tell us volumes about a certain personality, a quirky sense of humor, a thematic outcome. (I’ll also say—as a side note—that for all the bombs dropped in Wings, not one was of the f-word variety. Nor did anyone seem to mind.)
Now, I’m not stumping for the re-emergence of silent films (even though a pretty, um, “doggone” good one won the Academy Award for Best Picture just last year), but I am cheering movies in general for what they can give us. Yes, it can seem that, with today’s crop of raw-mouthed remakes and envelope-pushing derivatives, Hollywood is in the risk-aversion business (or maybe, the titillate-the-teens business) as much as they are in the movie biz. But, hey, it’s not always that way. There are enough risk-takers, impassioned dramatists and skilled technicians out there to make today’s and tomorrow’s movies thrilling and provoking. And I can’t help but think that some of them will keep getting it right.
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