Investigation Blog Post 3

Introduction: 

For todays blog post I wanted to look at the history of silent movies. When we watched Metropolis in class in 9th grade I was very intrigued by the concept of silent movies. You would walk into a theatre and you would watch the movie and a pianist would play the soundtrack but the movie you would have to read the titles through the movie. That was peoples movies then. The first ever talkie movie was The Jazz Singer it stared Al Jolson and it was a blackface, offensive, and very racist film, but people then where mesmerized by it. The film came out in 1927, after that the 1930s became an even more popular time for the entertainment industry. Many popular movies came out during the decade after too including; The Wizard of OZ, Gone with the Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Each where unique films with The Wizard of Oz using color and black in white, Gone with the Wind was the first color film, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full length animated movie. Movies became a popular form of entertainment since it was cheap and one of the only things to do during The Great Depression. Movies evolved going from silent and black and white to color and sound.

Inspirational Silent Movies:

Each description if from: Top 10 Silent Movies

- City Lights- The movie is about Chaplin's vagrant falls for a blind flower-seller. Chaplin's films rarely used intertitles anyway, and though it is technically "silent", City Lights is very mindful of it own self-composed score and keenly judged sound effects. Nothing, though, is more important than the final scene, still powerful in its ambivalence. Blind no more, the girl slowly realizes that the hobo in front of her is her secret benefactor, and the flicker of conflicting feelings on Chaplin's face – humility and joy – vindicate his decision to stay silent.

- Earth- Officially, this Soviet-era Ukrainian silent is a paean to collective farming, crafted around a family drama, but its director, Alexander Dovzhenko, was a born renegade, for whom plots were far less important than poetry. Its most celebrated sequence is the magnificent opening scene: the painful counterpoint between a dying man, his infant grandchildren and the bursting fruit of his orchard. This is living cinema, as refreshing and vital as the film's own climactic downpour.

- Battleship Potemkin- As the Tsar's soldiers march on civilians (an incident which never actually happened), the eye widens just to keep up with the action; the speed of the cuts and the frenzy of each frame makes it seem as though the action will spill from the screen. When the sequence ends with a close-up of a woman bleeding from behind her shattered glasses, it feels like a sick joke on what the images have done to us; we can well sympathize with the sensation of optical assault. The film still stands as a distillation of all that was revolutionary about this filmmaker, and all that can still be revolutionary in cinema.

- The General- The General is highly unusual among comedy films, simply for being based on a true story. Keaton seized upon the story of a civil war train hijack and embellished it with humor, spectacle (including a notoriously expensive train-wreck) and a slightly sour love story. Orson Welles, who knew a thing or two about silent movies, famously anointed Buster Keaton's crowning achievement "the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest civil war film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made".

- Metropolis- We watched this one in class and we already explored the themes, but I still wanted to add it in. It draws on deep roots (Biblical, Jungian, Wagnerian, fairy-tale) to explore themes that continue to concern us: the dehumanizing effects of industrialization; the fetishization of technology; the divide between the rich and poor, the rulers and the laborer, the "head" and the "hands". Lang was already the most modern film-maker of the era; to his knack for imagery and editing he added state-of-the-art special effects, here, which still hold up pretty well (it's all done with mirrors). He also had access to a more old-school special effect: personnel. Both armies of set-builders and vast crowds of extras (mostly poor Berliners), the latter of whom he conducts in great swathes across the screen as he orchestrates the story's mass uprising.

- The Cabinet of Dr Caligari-The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is unusual in that, for such a singular and one might say auteurist film, it did little for its director, the relatively unsung Robert Wiene. And yet this 1920 film is perhaps the very first art movie, since it is impossible to discuss it without mentioning its extraordinary set design, which perfectly complements its tale of murder and madness, as well as the deliberate abstractions in the storytelling. Interestingly, Caligari is often credited as a horror movie, and it is significant that it pioneered many tropes of the genre that would hold over into the sound era. But it is Hermann Warm's sets that have endured, creating light traps of shade that not only paved the way for the dark postwar heyday of film noir but also planted seeds of macabre surrealism that carry on today, notably in the chiaroscuro works of David Lynch, still the undisputed master of the unsettling and the bizarre.


- The Wind- The Wind is one of the four or five movies that best demonstrate the richness and variety, and the purity and clarity of expression that silent cinema had achieved by the time it was fatally and forever subsumed, like a lost Atlantis, beneath a deluge of sound and speech. The Wind nominally stars Lilian Gish and Swedish import Lars Hanson, but the real stars are the seven aircraft propeller's Seastrom dragged out to the Mojave desert to lend his maddening titular onslaught more realism. It worked. After a while you almost feel the skin peeling from your face under its vicious assault - it will unbury a corpse, given time. The Wind remains surprisingly harrowing 85 years later, as harsh and elemental in its way as Greed had been three years earlier.

- The Lodger- Hitchcock's most successful silent movie, as he himself acknowledged to Francois Truffaut, was the first that could plausibly be called Hitchcockian. This variation on the hunt for Jack the Ripper features themes and motifs that would recur throughout Hitchcock's career: the suspected killer who may be innocent (see Suspicion and The Wrong Man, just for starters); the heroine who loves him but who may yet become his next victim. Daisy and he become enamored of one another exactly as her parents' paranoia and suspicion reach fever pitch, while the detective's jealousy clouds his vision, and everything culminates in a mad pursuit of the lodger by an angry drunken crowd bent on rough justice.

- Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans- Sunrise seems to take place in our dreams. It's a macabre love-and-murder story that takes place in an almost-real landscape, somewhere between reality and our collective imagination. There's still nothing quite like it. The characters are nameless archetypes, and it revolves around an archetypal opposition: the country versus the city. Sunrise simply sweeps you away. It's gripping and tragic, menacing and romantic, beautifully orchestrated and paced, and imbued with a dreamlike radiance that seems to come from more than just well-placed studio lights.

- The Passion of Joan of Arc- It takes a star to carry a closeup, they say in the film business — and by that token, it takes a superstar to carry an extreme closeup. But what Maria Falconetti did in Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc was something else again. His film imagines the catastrophic aftermath to Joan of Arc's heroism on the field of battle in the Hundred Years war; she claimed divine guidance, and indeed showed miraculous untrained military genius — in some ways, this is a film to set alongside Abel Glance's Napoleon (1927) The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of those films whose clarity, simplicity, subtlety and directness transcend their time. There is real passion in every frame.

Each of these films all have unique things about them they brought to the screen. The thing that I've seen with all of these is that in order to create a silent film you have to have to make sure you have a set that makes people believe its real events and actors that can display emotion without sound. For example in City Lights its said that you can easily tell Chaplin's emotions on his face for each situation. 

Each silent film is unique to how each is personified and created. Metropolis for example was more futuristic and played on how things could be like in the future. The you have films like Battleship Potemkin that where used as propaganda. Each film had there own messages and sometimes they had tp be creative with how they where personified. Silent films are so fun to watch in the sense that we really get to see how people really react and feel without having to worry about music, their emotions themselves tell us how how we should feel. 

Brainstorming/Experimentation: 

I think it would be fun to make a silent film. You could try and see how well you can act and show how you feel during a scene. The sets would be fun too, you wouldn't exactly have to worry about color since it would be black and white. The first silent film was The Great Train Robbery and it was produced by Thomas Edison but directed and filmed by Edison Company employee Edwin S. Porter, the 12-minute-long silent film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was the first narrative movie—one that told a story. The last silent film ever produced in Hollywood was released by Paramount International in 1935 was Legong: Dance of the Virgins. I tried researching any silent movies made recently and I couldn't fins any but I found some that are almost completely silent. For example there's a horror movie called Hush about a a deaf-mute woman stalked by a masked killer named Maddie. Besides the stressful and scary silence that reigning over the film, the unsteady camera shots make you feel trapped in a horrifying and deadly maze. Silent films were definitely very creative since there was no color and no sound but the actors expressions and the set. If you where to watch a series of silent films and then create your own silent film researching, you could create your own film. 

Reflection:

After looking at silent films and the history of silent films, they where really a interesting genre of movies. They needed be creative with how the story would be told in the movie without the sounds and color. I have watched one silent film and that was metropolis, but I have watched a fair share of black and white movies. Although colors can bring a lot to the story told in a film like 1977 Suspiria where color is used a lot, in a way color doesn't really always necessary for a film like Psycho 1960. Silent films are a really cool part of history and the evolution of film has come to far. Silent films is what gave us the modern movies we have today. Silent films used to be what we all used to watch and know we watch movies with color, sound, and a lot of effects that you couldn’t do then.

Work Log:

This week I worked on my script and making this blog post. Im working on trying to figure out how to make my script work since Covid is still around and locations and costumes.