As promised, I am going to post a weekly essay/musing on the previous night's class, to try to sum up what I thought were the most important issues we touch upon in our discussion, and how they relate to that night's film. My classes tend to get a little rambly, so this way I can reflect on what we talked about in class, compare it to what I INTENDED to talk about in class, and reconcile the two.
As we look at the early development of film, the most important thing to be thinking about is how movies developed from pictures that moved (they are "movies," after all) and simple spectacle (salacious dancing girls and boxing cats) to one of the most influential and pervasive elements of 20th-century culture. This wasn't inevitable, though it seems that way in hindsight. One of the pioneers in cinema, Louis Lumiere, famously stated, "Cinema is an invention without a future." (Though, of course, he said it in French.) And if films had remained as simply "moving pictures," he may have been right. But they didn't. Innovators and artists like George Melies ("Trip to the Moon," Edwin Porter ("The Great Train Robbery,") and D.W. Griffith ("Birth of a Nation,") began to develop a language of film that not only made visual storytelling possible, but also exploited the cinema's ability to grip viewers' emotions and make them care about the characters on the screen.
This is surely why silent comedey stars so often played put-upon fellows who finally triumph over an escalating cascade of problems, such as Chaplin's "The Little Tramp," and Harold Lloyd's "Harold." They are underdogs that the audience wants to root for. Take Johnnie Gray in
The General. He seems to live in a world where the universe is against him. Rescuing his beloved from Union soldiers, he faces torrential rain, lightning, bears, bear traps, a cannon with a mind of its own, as well as the efforts of Union soliders to thwart his escape. But all the while, we see the humanity through the comedy. Calling Keaton "The Great Stone Face" is something of a misnomer. While Keaton's impassive face does contrast with the more emotional acting of other great silent movie stars, we are never unsure about Johnnie Gray's feelings throughout
The General. The new language of film, so masterfully crafted by the director (also Buster Keaton) gives us shots that not only present visual information but also clue the audience in to the characters' thoughts and feelings, makes sure that we experience the ups and downs of the story right along with those in the film. Think of the close-up of Johnnie's beloved, Annabelle, through the burnt hole in the tablecloth. We see only her face, which is just what Johnnie would focus on, discovering that the girl he loves is a captive of the Union army.
We take this emotional connection for granted, raised as we were as native readers of film language. But we have the film makers of the early decades of the 20th century to thank for envisioning what we accept so naturally. In our next class (not next week, but on September 13), we'll see how this language was "spoken" with a German accent, in the deliberately "arty" genre of German Expressionism, as exemplified by
Metropolis.
