Quote of the Day (David Denby, on the Language of Silents)

“Silent film is another country. They speak another language there—a language of gestures, stares, flapping mouths, halting or skittering walks, and sometimes movements and expressions of infinite intricacy and beauty.”—David Denby, “A Critic at Large: The Artists,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2012

David Denby’s essay on silent cinema appeared the week before the Oscars this past Sunday night, but the triumph of The Artist makes all the more timely his analysis of film in Hollywood’s formative period. I have my problems with one or two of his points (e.g., John Gilbert did not have a voice unsuited to the talkies, as I discussed in a prior post). Moreover, his piece is neither as pathbreaking as James Agee’s 1949 Life reexamination, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” nor as lovingly detailed as Walter Kerr’s 1975 tribute to Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and their imitators, The Silent Clowns.

But Denby does recover a feeling lost in nearly a century in which filmmakers have employed so many technical tricks that the original revolution has been forgotten.

By the 1930s, Charlie Chaplin, the last holdout against the onslaught of talkies, was viewed as a mossy throwback, a Luddite. Today, The Artist is regarded, even by admirers, very much like a pleasurable stunt, hardly likely to inspire any imitators.

What Denby does, better than anyone I’ve read since God knows when, is revivify the shock of the new bred by this new art form, which “hit the world like a hurricane, destroying elite notions of culture overnight.”

Far from being a conservative, quaint, even reactionary medium, silent film, he notes, was “an art devoted to physical risk and to primitive passions, to rage, lust, ambition, and obsession (silent made emotions more extreme in many ways), and it produced obsession in its huge audience.”

Denby is especially good in distinguishing poor silent actors (the luckless Gilbert again, joined by the even more unlucky Rudolph Valentino, pictured here), from the best of “the hams” (Lon Chaney, John Barrymore), and especially Douglas Fairbanks, possessed of “a sense of the absurd that helped him triumph over the claptrap.”