“Silent” Films
Share
“To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence,” wrote Saul Austerlitz in 2010. “To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound, appeared downright perverse.”
Austerlitz is referring first to Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights and then to Modern Times, “a recapitulation of his earlier work, the director taking a triumphant final lap around the style he did so much to invent, before reluctantly turning to the new challenges of sound.” Modern Times, in which Chaplin and his global audience bid farewell to the Tramp, the character that showcased his unique mastery of pantomime, is chronologically the first of ten films screening in “Silent” Films, the weeklong series opening Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
None of these films are strictly silent—hence the scare quotes in the title of the series. BAM is focusing on filmmakers who “turn the visual language of the silents to new purposes.” There are sound effects and musical cues in Modern Times, for example. The soundtrack gets pretty flighty and excitable during what Austerlitz calls the film’s “most memorable” sequence, which sees the Tramp hypnotized by the repetitive movements of an assembly line and eventually, almost giddily drawn into the meshing factory gears. “One could argue,” suggests Austerlitz, “that all of Jacques Tati’s work springs from this segment of Modern Times.”
BAM will screen 35 mm prints of Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and PlayTime (1967). “The fact that he always shot his films without sound and composed his soundtracks separately made it easier for him to use images and sounds interactively, employing sound in part as a way of guiding how we look at his images, by stimulating and directing our imaginations,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum ten years ago. “This means that any discussion of Tati’s mise-en-scène has to cope with the reality that he effectively directed each of his films twice—once when he shot them and then once again when he composed and recorded their soundtracks.”
Tati’s alter ego got name-checked when Guy Lodge reviewed Mark Burton and Richard Starzak’s Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) for Variety. Sticking to the no-dialogue rule of the series spun off from Aardman Animations’s stop-motion franchise, Wallace and Gromit, “lends Shaun himself the absorbent, observant innocence of a Monsieur Hulot figure, albeit in a considerably fuzzier guise; he’s an endearingly ingenuous vessel for the pic’s choreographed-in-clay physical comedy.”
Archangel (1990) brandishes Guy Maddin’s “obvious love for late silent and early talkie studio productions with kitschy pictorial effects,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum for the Chicago Reader. “What comes across is a fascinating fetishist delirium, where memories of remote war movies get recycled into something that’s alternately creepy and beautiful.”
Kaizo Hayashi’s “love for detective noir, silent movies, and cinema itself shines brightly in his offbeat black-and-white first feature,” writes Diabolique contributor Joseph Perry, who finds it “difficult not to compare Hayashi’s approach to To Sleep So As to Dream [1986] with some of Guy Maddin’s work.” Detectives Jin Uotsuka (Shiro Sano) and Kobayashi (Koji Otake) “have been tasked with finding Bellflower a.k.a. Kikyo Tsukishima (Moe Kamura, who also composed the film’s score), the kidnapped niece of silent film star Madame Cherryblossom (Fujiko Fukamizu), who played a prominent role in a silent era samurai film without an ending.”
“The ingenuity of silent cinema, its speed and stillness: all this came back to me, in a flash, when I watched Miguel Gomes’s Tabu (2012),” wrote Adrian Martin in 2014. “What we witness here draws upon an aggregate memory of every cornball, hopelessly imperialistic ‘tropical adventure’ movie of the 1930s (of the kind that the original King Kong in 1933 was already wisely distancing itself from), crossed with the minimalistic, bargain-basement inventiveness of an Edgar G. Ulmer . . . The way in which Tabu steps back in time, in stages, from the depressed present-day to the drunken past—but without the usual, dropped-in flashbacks—does a great job of conveying a process of remembering that is both individual and collective, romantic and political.”
Raúl Ruiz’s The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) tells “the story of a collection of paintings by Tonnerre, a French academic painter of the mid-nineteenth century, whose rather undistinguished works, with no consistency in style or subject matter, are said to have provoked a major but mysterious society scandal,” explained Thomas Elsaesser in a 1984 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. But this set-up is just “the starting point for an erudite but nonetheless highly ironic study of the difference between filmic and pictorial rules of representation which leaves one wondering until well into the middle of the film whether Ruiz might not, after all, be *serious* with his conceit of these paintings bearing a dangerous secret.” Hypothesis will be preceded by The Suitcase (1963), an experimental short Ruiz codirected with Valeria Sarmiento.
The series will wrap with Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature, Je tu il elle (1974), which she made when she was twenty-three. “At an impossibly young age, she’s got everything working already,” noted Andrew Bujalski (Support the Girls, There There) last year. “Fully formed voice, piercing gaze, fearlessness, humor, invention, and—with apologies to Delphine Seyrig, Aurore Clément, Sylvie Testud—her finest leading lady.”
Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
