Silent Shadows on the Screen

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 915, 22 February 1957, Page 4

Silent Shadows on the Screen

-T is at first a little disconcerting to realise that the article on page 7 may arouse in younger readers no more than the amused interest that the rest of us feel for Victorian melodrama. The silent films are now seen to have been an experimental approach to the cinema proper, which apparently was not born until Al Jolson was heard bellowing for his Mammy. Since then it has grown in so many ways that critics are able to treat it as an art, And those of us who have fond recollections of its infancy are obviously being sentimental. It would no doubt be disillusioning to sit again in one of ‘the early theatres and _ hear ‘nothing but music while the shadows on the screen made their appropriate gestures. And yet the tricks and betrayals of memory cannot altogether explain the magic. At the beginning of the First World War the feature film was only just coming into use. Until then, a programme might have up to a dozen short pieces, among which a few favourites (John Bunny, for instance) could be recognised and welcomed. The audience was likely to be seated on rows of chairs or forms, an arrangement which helped a slow stamping on the floor when the machine at the back of the hall suffered a breakdown. But presently theatres were built specially for "the pictures," programmes were more ambitious, and orchestras replaced the tinkling piano. The spectacles of D. W. Griffiths and Cecil B. de Mille revealed possibilities of landscape and action that the stage could not hope to emulate. (The theatre was dying, anyway, they said.) Already the star system was established, and interesting profiles were to be seen. (Has any woman of the shadows been more beautiful than Vilma Banky?) And some of the names to be remem-bered-Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd-are of men who provided miraculous entertainment. With the exception

of Chaplin, the greatest of them all, they are now slightly comic figures of the past; but for a generation that grew up with them they have no equals.on the talking screen. When the talkies came, no doubt, adult audiences were ready for them. All the tricks had been played, and sight by itself was in the same condition as radio on the eve of television. Yet TV has not destroyed radio, and seems unlikely to do so: there are too many functions — especially news and music — which need no visual intervention, in spite of attempts to prove the contrary. The silent cinema had to be_ superseded. Most people, eager for new excitements, welcomed the talkies, and have not looked backwards except indulgently, to marvel a moment at what amused them in more primitive times. But there were some who had no wish to go forward. They might have been conservative, deploring all innovation because it disturbed their settled habits. Some, too, must have realised what horrors would be loosed upon them while the screen tried out its voice and learnt the new tricks. This delighted exploration of sound has not yet ceased, especially in the use of lethal weapons which range from bowstrings to bombs, with an interminable popping of pistols in the middle register. And for some diehards it was a sad day when the first jazz bard, shining with brilliantine and bonhomie, announced a long line of "musicals." But a few people loved the silent films for their own sake, needing no assistance except from an orchestra while the story carried them into fantasy. If the cinema gained a wider freedom when captions no longer had to.interrupt the action, there was also a freedom of the imagination which became restricted. Or perhaps it only seemed that way to those for whom at that time the end of silence was somehow the end of youth.

M.H.

H.