The silent film and the passionate life

The silent feature film as a medium of art and mass commercial entertainment was born, flourished and died within a span of less than twenty years. Of more than ten thousand silent features produced in the United States between 1912 and 1929, only a handful remain in circulation for screening on television, at museums or by university film societies–the tip of an uncharted iceberg of surviving prints in archives, studio vaults and private collections. Though they date back little more than half a century, well within memory for many, they are, no less than Etruscan vases, artifacts of a departed culture, an irrecoverable past.

Who can re-create the experience of going to the pictures in the radiant dawn of popular mass culture? By the 1920s every large city and most medium-sized towns boasted at least one brand-new sumptuous picture palace. Outside on the sidewalk stood a doorman, attired in frock coat with white gloves, waiting to open your car door and direct you to the ticket booth. If it was raining, he held an umbrella over your head; if snowing, an usher in the lobby rushed forward to brush off your coat.

Posterity, however, has found it easier to recognize enduring artistry in American silent films. In a world-wide poll of critics published in 1972 by the British Film Institute in its quarterly, Sight and Sound, some twenty American silent features were named at least once on the various critics’ lists of the top ten motion pictures in the history of world cinema. One, Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), ranked among the ten leading films; it was surpassed by only two other silents, Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (USSR, 1925) and Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1928). Two more, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), were the only other silents to place in the top-twenty selections. In all, thirty-five silent films received mention.

The tactics of moviemakers in transforming social codes were nowhere more successful than in the films of Cecil B.DeMille. He became notorious early in 1918 when he unveiled the first in a series of spicy morality tales of extramarital temptation, Old Wives for New. His audacity has since become a centerpiece of the Hollywood legend, but like many such stories, the facts are much more interesting.

The DeMille legend focuses especially on the most controversial of his early postwar films, Male and Female (1919).

By all accounts, Male and Female could never have been made before World War l. It was “a highly moral picture,” Adolph Zukor, whose Famous Players-Lasky company produced the film, recalled in his autobiography, “yet its emotional theme–the noble lady falling in love with the butler–world probably not have been acceptable to prewar audiences.” In Lewis Jacobs’ classic study, Male and Female is called “more daring in its subject matter than any other picture Hollywood had produced.”

The vast majority of the world’s nonwhite peoples were not considered subjects for the movies, any more than they were treated as other than stereotypes in the fiction, travel books, social sciences and political rhetoric of the time. An artist could rise above the barriers of his own culture and carry an audience with him, as Robert Flaherty proved with his classic silent documentaries Nanook of the North (1922), about Eskimo people on Canada’s Hudson Bay, and Moana (1926), about the people of the western Samoan island Safune. But the audience for Samoans was smaller and did not go to movies so frequently as those who preferred to see Gloria Swanson on a tropical island, and Flaherty had few followers in the documentary field.

Only one possible alternative form of human interaction remained, and moviemakers were not required to think of it themselves, because the American reading public gave them the idea: for more than a year after the book buyers and readers had clamored to get Vicente Blasco Ibáňez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a romantic novel about an Argentine playboy in Europe who at first disdains the struggle, then converts to the cause of civilization, enlists in the French army and dies a hero’s death in battle.

Metro got the chance to pioneer this new conception by buying the rights to the Ibáňez novel. For the part of Julio, the playboy, they assigned a young Italian, a former tango dancer who had been biding his time in movies playing bit parts as a south-of-the-border villain. His name was Rudolph Valentino. The rest, one is tempted to say, is history. In the brief span of years before Valentino’s sudden death in 1926 at the age of thirty-one, Metro as well as Valentino’s subsequent employers and the women and men of America got considerably more emotion than they had bargained for.

Burdened with their nation’s defeat and the accumulated odium of Allied anti-German propaganda, the UFA studios and director Ernst Lubitsch planned to regain their international audience by a tour de force, making intimate sexual dramas about great figures in the histories of their conquerors.

The first of these films, Madame Dubarry, appeared in 1919, with Pola Negri in the title role and Emil Jannings as Louis XV, and was hailed as a classic. It was taken up by American distributors and opened a year later in New York, the first postwar German film to be shown in the United States.

Madame Dubarry also was given a new name for its American run- Passion.

The list of Europeans who came to Hollywood reads like the guest list of Gatsby’s parties. Lubitsch, Negri and Jannings all came, the first two to stay, and the director continued his brilliant career, bringing an altogether new kind of sophistication and wit to Hollywood comedy. From Germany also came Conrad Veidt, the leading actor of Dr.Caligari, and directors Paul Leni, E. A. Dupont and F. W. Murnau. Murnau’s first American film, Sunrise (1927), was ranked in the Sight and Sound poll mentioned earlier as one of the half-dozen greatest silent films of world cinema.

Hungary gave the American movies director Paul Fejos and actress Vilma Banky.

France contributed director Jacques Feyder, and the Swedish film industry lost its two leading directors, Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström (known as Seastorm in Hollywood). Sjöström (who was an outstanding actor and matinee idol in Sweden) directed Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter (1926) and an extraordinary work of cinema naturalism, The Wind (1928). With Stiller to Hollywood came his protégée, Greta Garbo, a young actress who became the new embodiment of European passion in the same year Valentino died.

Though she was obviously a fine actress, her studio, MGM, gave her little chance to show it. Her ten American silent films were not exactly alike in their plots, but to all intents and purposes they were the same; following the first two came Flesh and The Devil, Love, The Divine Woman, The Mysterious Lady, A Woman of Affairs, Wild Orchids, The Single Standard and The Kiss. Garbo’s principal challenge was to show how a passionate Russian woman differed from a passionate Austrian, French or English woman.

There was a time after the war when the arrival of the latest American Western was an exciting cultural event in European cities. With its tough, lean men, spectacular riding and blazing guns, the Western seemed to represent American action at its purest. But the novelty of Western stereotypes quickly paled. American producers began sending over films that combined a more refined, supple, versatile kind of physical genius. After a time Westerns came to seem unintentionally comic; these new films were comic by design. European audiences were among the first to recognize that the silent comedians were artists as well as funny men, and that in their antics the heritage of cultural values was more thoroughly explored and exploded than anywhere else in American movies.

 

EXERCISES

I. Match the words with their definitions and translate them into Russian.

1. vague   2. humble   3. nurture   4. tenement   5. teeming   6. proximity   7. craft   8. surpass   9. notorious   10. temptation   11. matinee

a. full of people, animals etc. that are all moving around b. large building divided into apartments, especially in the poorer areas of a city c. unclear because someone does not give enough detailed information or does not say exactly what they mean d. nearness in distance or time e. to help a plan, idea, feeling etc. to develop f. not considering yourself or your ideas to be as important as other people's synonym modest g. famous or well-known for something bad h. a performance of a play or film in the afternoon i. a job or activity in which you make things with your hands, and that you usually need skill to do j. to be even better or greater than someone or something else k. a strong desire to have or do something even though you know you should not

 

II. Phrasal Verbs

a) Exchange the bald-typed phrasal verbs into the expressions with the close meaning from the box. Put the verbs into the appropriate grammar

Tense.

to establish to be valuable to head for to control wipe accepted

The company was set up just after the war.

His promises don't count for much.

I think it's time we made for home.

The company was taken over by Sony in 1989.

He brushed the tears off his eyes.

She took up their offer of rent-free accommodation

 

b) Find these phrasal verbs in the text. Use them to make up your own sentences.

III. Word Forms

a) Often the same base can be used in verb, noun, adjective and adverb form. Complete the following chart with the missing forms

Verb	Noun	Adjective	Adverb
accept	acceptance	acceptable unacceptable	acceptably unacceptably
	craftswoman craftsmanship
		sumptuous
	clamour
	сreator creation
		versatile
		humble

b) Complete each sentence with the correct verb, noun, or adjective