I must admit that I have never been a huge fan of silent films. Like most people born in the age of talkies, I find it hard to concentrate when I don’t have the sound and rhythm of dialogue to follow. Then, coincidentally, I found myself watching two (mainly) silent films from two completely different eras within the space of a week and I was taken aback by the effect they both had on me,
I had to watch City Lights (1931) as it was required viewing for my film studies module and so I settled in almost reluctantly, phone in hand, thinking I could have one eye on the film and manage to get the gist. It’s difficult to know whether the film itself takes its time with the set-up or if my own eyes took their time acclimatising to this new silent world, but whichever it is I was gradually drawn in and soon I was barely checking my phone at all. The basic plot is that The Tramp, Charlie Chaplin’s iconic comic creation, falls in love with a blind flower seller and tries to find ways to provide for her. This may seem simple enough but the stunning complexity of the exchanges between the two of them is enchanting, all articulated through touch and subtlety of facial expression. The ending particularly is legendary and I would be wasting my time describing it here as far more knowledgeable critics than myself have done it better a hundred times over. Put simply, it lives up to the hype and delivers a romantic and cathartic ending that trumps anything many modern blockbusters or rom-coms could manage.
That’s the heart of the film covered but where the magic of silent films, and in particular Chaplin films, lie is in all the madness that surround that central simplicity. It surprised me just how many clips I recognised within the film, little moments of genius that have become artefacts of film history and have been shown and replicated and parodied over and over again. When you cannot express something through speech, the challenge is to recreate the dynamism that comes from dialogue in another medium and Chaplin uses movement as his weapon of choice. The timing of every step, flinch and trip is sheer perfection and it can’t help but arouse admiration in a viewer. In fact, perhaps one positive of the rise of talkies and the less frequent viewing of silent films in general is that this sharpness of choreography seems all the more brilliant to a modern eye as we are less used to seeing it. My favourite scene in the film is a near ten-minute snapshot of chaos where The Tramp is made to fight in a boxing ring. It plays out like a dance, with him, his opponent, the referee and even the ringbell involved in a series of missteps and mistakes with the end result being genuine laugh-out-loud slapstick brilliance. It just doesn’t feel like acting as I would normally recognise it and hence my affection for the performance goes beyond anything I might experience when watching a modern film. The most fitting reaction seems to be the ones reserved for a live performer, like a stand-up comedian: to stand up and clap and shout for more.
Jumping forward just the 80 years into the future, I then watched Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (2011). I had seen this one before but it hadn’t stuck in my mind and I was more than happy to sit down with my flatmates and watch it again. Now in a wonderfully meta fashion, the film’s plot is literally about the decline of silent films itself, with the lead character (played astonishingly by Jean Dujardin) failing to cope with the new film world he is faced with. The best moment of Dujardin’s performance comes early on when he is shown filming a silent film in a Hollywood studio, worth highlighting just for the sheer amount of complexity within it. Essentially, he, an actor, plays an actor who is filming a scene in a silent film, while then continuously breaking character and becoming the actor (not the character) who flirts and laughs with the new actress on the scene whilst still having to do it silently as of course the overall film is silent as well. Got it? Dujardin is somehow able to communicate all this complexity into his facial expressions and we are constantly shown when he is performing and when he is himself and even when the lines between the two are blurred and indistinguishable.
Where The Artist mirrors, or even borrows from, City Lights is in its romance. Given that decades of films had come in between the release of the two films and an extensive catalogue of how to effectively capture romance on screen was available to Hazanavicius, it is all the more commendable that he chose to follow Chaplin and show the emotions that are present through movement. Dujardin and Berenice Bejo display the love between the two characters best with their bodies, as their playful tap dance sequences are just as watchable and as smooth as Chaplin’s in the boxing scene. It seems that the point the film is trying to make, and one that I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with, is that in the mad and complicated big-budget world we live in, we shouldn’t forget that magic lies in the simplest of things: in a tap of the foot or a touch of the hand.
George F Brown 