From Silent Cinema—An Aesthetic Call to Arms

GEORGE TOLES

Artifice and reality intermingle with much less strain in silent than sound film. Things are less cumbersomely grounded in the realm of silence, and our eyes do not require that a material-world weightiness be maintained, or accounted for. Weight can be invoked when it serves an image’s purposes, but it can also be whisked away when it proves too much of a hindrance. Life can play, untroubled, at a variety of speeds in silence, and the Newtonian universe becomes, in a phrase of Hugh Kenner’s, “a great spinning toy” where machines and humans expand their capacities for velocity as need or the spirit of play dictate. The first decades of the twentieth century, recall, were a period when the simple fact of motoring—the process of picking up speed and watching familiar sights sail by—was an ample reward. Travel by Ford, by airplane, even by the well-established railway was not yet reduced to “an anxiety to be elsewhere.” Motion all by itself could still enchant, even at moderate tempos. The mere sight of men and women shaking loose from old impediments and moving without encumbrance was a reliable intoxicant. All the animate and inanimate components of the silent world can move up and down the ladder of wakefulness and momentum, as Vertov’s man with a movie camera discovered. At times a chair, a bush, a bench, a wagon, a hand, a shop window achieve a pitch of presence (of rapturous attunement ) to the things around them that is like an explosion. And everything made of energy longs to dance.


(Excerpted from Brick 80, used by permission of the author)