A Quick Thought on the World of Silent Film

I recently watched the great Sergei Eisenstein's Stachka (Strike), a silent masterpiece from 1925. This was only his second film, made in the same year as his magnum opus, Battleship Potemkin, one of the most important and influential contributions to the world of cinema. Strike focuses on the plight of Russian factory workers in a -- for lack of a more powerful term -- stressful work environment while simultaneously struggling with domestic distress, a poor economy, and "office politics", so to speak. While a movie with this kind of plot makes my point a bit easier, I could literally pick any silent film ever made and still be able to argue the fact that they are all fucking frightening.


Sure, living in a nation under the rule of a Czar while being on strike in Nineteen-Fucking-Twenty-Five is a frightening concept on its own, but try speeding everything up by a second or two and then remove all color and sound. Even backed with some sort of light orchestral arrangement, it's still nightmarish. And that's the strange thing. For me, it doesn't vary in levels of horror. F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Buster Keaton's The General (1927) are both equally disturbing for different reasons. I love The General. It is legitimately hysterical, and Buster Keaton is still one of the great comedic talents in movie history. And I love Nosferatu, with its heightened suspense and unparalleled atmosphere. It's not really even the content that gets to me. There's so many technical factors present in both films that creep me out. Am I pointing out the obvious? Is this necessary at all? I've made it this far, so I'll continue....


Take, for instance, the iconic scene pictured above from Harold Lloyd's silent comedy masterpiece Safety Last! (1923) where "the boy" (played by Lloyd) is hanging from the hands of a giant clock about eight stories off the ground. Now, imagine for a moment that he slips and falls to his death. Unless his scream sounded like a fuel-injected V10 Mt. Olympus doom-shriek, there's no way in hell anything would be scarier than watching him plummet helplessly to the concrete slightly faster than real life, in black & white, in complete silence. Actually, that kind of defeats my point. You don't really even have to create a scenario like that, most everything that exists in the world of silent film can be found disheartening in one way or another.


Well, I'm just recycling my argument now. And, as this post gets longer, the subtle undertones of its insensitivity towards the deaf are becoming more and more prevalent, so I'll end here. This entire thing doesn't make much sense anyway, does it? It's all just rambling, which I guess is the purpose of a....aw fuck, give me a break, it's my first post!

Listen (ha haaaa), I love silent movies, and I love deaf people. I also love movies with sound and people that can hear because, well, they're less scary. Suck on that, deafs!