A look at the Silent Film Era

(Just a precursor, for this class we have weekly film viewings that relate to the topics we learned in class. These are my journal responses to the films.)

Film Journal Entry #1

The General

directed by and starring Buster Keaton

I have never really watched any film from the silent era. In fact, roughly the oldest film I've ever sat down to watch is any of the Three Stooges movies or one of my personal favorites, And Then There Were None. But these are almost twenty years after synchronized sound was introduced into the film industry. The extent of my experience with silent films, therefore, is all the minor clips I've seen portraying the damsel in distress while black card pops up with the villain's dialogue on it. I had a rather biased and jaded point of view about silent films, believing them to be nothing more than a series of shorts, with overdramatized acting, more similar to stage performance or comic book, even, than a movie.

So when we sat down to watch Buster Keaton's The General, I was amazingly surprised to find out how insanely capable and talented the actors were. There was next to no need for the dialogue boxes because the actors were able to express such significant, yet not over the top, emotions that you knew exactly what was going on anyway. Buster's expressions were especially charming and hysterical. Not only was dialogue near unneeded but the actors were so good at communicating silently, you could almost tell exactly what they were thinking. This all takes so much skill, I would not be surprised if half of todays actors would not have been able to make it in the silent film era.

Another astonishment came from the stunts and scenes which one has to remember were not touched up by computers. Now, even a simple dance step is thrown in by a computer graphics AI. However, in a time when computers didn't even exist, it's amazing to think that the actors had to know not only how to act, but also how to do whatever it is their character was doing. If the character needed to dance well, the actor had to dance well. If the character needed to be able to rides horses, climb trees, jump off moving trains, so did the actor. More over, if there was a scene where a bridge collapsed into a river, dammit a real bridge was going to collapse into a real river. Imagine the cost, the time and the effort that goes into that?! And the most stunning part, is that for a scene like that, you've got only one chance to get the shot right. No producer will pay for that even twice over.