Reflections: Get Serious or Get Real

Powerful silent images populate my memory. They can even inform the way I feel. Facing deadlines, I think of Freder Fredersen contorted under the giant clock in Metropolis (1927). When odd things turn creepy, I remember the vampire rising from its coffin in Nosferatu (1922). For all the laughs in City Lights (1931), the scene that lasts longest for me is the final one, when the blind girl’s sight is restored and she looks for the first time upon Chaplin’s shabbiness. It sums my belief in genuine love. While these scenes come from different kinds of movie, including comedies, the scenes themselves are almost always dramatic.

Yet silent dramas themselves are now an acquired taste. They feel lecturing and old-fashioned. The comedies seem fresher; they work for modern audiences much as they must have in the 1920s. If the measure of a comedy is its ability to make you laugh, then the measure of a drama is its ability to move you—why do silent dramas now struggle to do this?

Such a question needs more than a thousand words, but I believe the absence of speech can be quickly blamed. Without speech, a director must convey information either through the actors’ pantomime or intertitles (word cards), along with pictures of signs, telegrams and letters. This is a balancing act, because pantomime expresses emotion better than precise information, while intertitles, if over-used, make viewing tedious. As a result, most successful silent films have simple plots, exploring common themes requiring little explanation.

With simple plots come simple characters. Silent characters are often archetypes (hoodlum, girl-next-door, bully, fool), and can proceed through the movie quite plausibly without much development. Nevertheless, silent actors put tremendous work into these roles; one of the joys of watching silent films is seeing the humanity imbued into a being with no name, odd clothes, and perhaps a singular goal: win the girl’s love; make friends; get a job.

However, an archetype’s dramatic power relies on the viewer’s ability to relate to it—that is, to believe the archetype is drawn from life. This is crucial if the viewer is expected to take a further step and actually empathize with the character. I argue that to empathize with an archetype is really to feel empathy for the social element that archetype represents.

Some archetypes still work pretty well. Consider the social ill of poverty: Silent drama’s Orphans, Beggars, and Labourers are all emblems of Poverty, and while we may possess only the barest of backstories about these characters, our belief in the regrettability of poverty and the suffering it causes allows us to fill in the rest. When archetypes fail, it is because the viewer’s conception of the world cannot be reconciled with them. If they no longer represent universal truths (or even widely held assumptions), the suffering the actor exhibits can seem overwrought, silly, or even obnoxious. This is ever more likely as years pass, societies evolve, and the archetypes remain fixed.

Tramps......

Aside from racial stereotypes, it is women’s roles that build the most dissonance between silent dramas and modern viewers. Clamped into their pre-feminist roles, these women are typically victims, and may provide little more than a male character’s obligations. A man might want to marry his sweetheart, but cannot propose until he’s made his fortune. Once married, her expressions of jealousy, fear or devotion may indict him as a failed husband. As virginal characters, women are often the sought-after ideal; when ‘fallen,’ they are tempters to corruption. Finally, they are a treasure—to be protected against whatever depredation the director felt plausible at the time. When D.W. Griffith’s Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) is threatened with sexual assault in The Birth of a Nation (1915), she’s embodying the women he saw as imperilled after Reconstruction. Notably, if the silent female is a spunky tomboy (like many of Mary Pickford’s characters), it is usually due to poor upbringing.

Yes, it’s possible to contextualize these characters and understand why they act as they do; it’s certainly possible to dislike the ‘fallen’ woman, even if her only real crime, by today’s standards, is sexual liberation. However, it is very difficult to place oneself so fully into someone else’s shoes that you can be hurt or offended by something that today seems backward or trivial.

......Vamps.......

This is even more difficult when the movie resolves itself according to the morality of its time, rather than ours. Among the many silent features I’ve seen about cheating or deadbeat husbands, almost all conclude with the man returning to his wife. The wife remains in love with her husband and devoted to the marriage, though certainly wounded. Her faith symbolizes her purity and his foolishness. However, even if we accept that divorce was not an option, there is something off-putting about a woman who unconditionally loves such a slimeball. The story of the man’s redemption, which may be the point of the film, seems beside the point to us. We’d rather pity the wife, but to side with her is to support him, which feels wrong. She becomes hard to respect. Their happy marriage seems false.

......and Married Life.

Silent characters are given life through facial expression and gesture. They speak, too; but we can’t hear it, only see it, so the issue is usually not what they’re saying, but rather, how they feel as they say it. The relationship between character and viewer is therefore an emotional one, with the film relying on a shared value system to answer certain questions in advance. That assumption cannot always be made today.

* * *

I don’t mean to paint all silent dramas with the same brush—many of them are still successful, at least aesthetically. There are also silents, especially from the 1920s, that allow for greater moral ambiguity. Nevertheless, when recommending silent film to a newbie, it’s usually comedies I suggest first. Next week, I’ll examine why this genre seems to have aged so well.

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

This is a silent film for the uninitiated. With kinetic camera work and naturalistic acting, Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs builds no barriers to the modern eye. And it’s timely, too. This week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Heath Ledger for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. Ledger drew his performance from over sixty years' worth of maniacal material, but those first artists and writers needed inspiration of their own, and here's where they found it.

The Man Who Laughs begins with an exchange between English king James II and Lord Clancharlie, a nobleman lethally out of favour. Before passing sentence, James declares that he has turned over the lord’s son, Gwynplaine, to the Cormanchicos, a tribe of gypsies infamous for carving permanent grins into the faces of children they capture. Lord Clancharlie meets the iron maiden soon after.

The film moves immediately to the child Gwynplaine, his mouth concealed by a scarf, standing on a snow-swept wharf before a boatload of Cormanchicos. They have been banished from England and wish no proof of their crimes to follow them. Left to die in the blizzard, Gwynplaine instead reaches the shack of a charlatan, named Ursus. Ursus takes in both Gwynplaine and Dea, an infant girl, blind from birth. The pair grow up together, become performers in Ursus’ travelling circus show, and fall in love.

Disfigured man, blind girl—she loves him for who he really is, doesn’t she? It seems so simple. Yet Gwynplaine (Conrad Veidt), an utterly pure and decent man, refuses to let Dea (Mary Philbin) touch his face. He detaches her from his disfigurement, denying her a complete picture.

Leni does the same thing to us. His camera spies on events through windows and half-closed doors; between carriage-wheel spokes; from above and below his actors. In one memorable scene, he places the camera in a ferris-wheel pod, swooping us suddenly upward and backward, then lunging us toward the ground, through several rotations. All of these shots affirm the obvious—that we are removed from the action—but in making it so obvious, Leni prevents us from forgetting it. We remain conscious of our watching, and soon, our point of view seems unhealthy, intrusive, even underhanded. We see more than Dea, but are we seeing it wrong?


Gwynplaine is certainly worthy of a stare. Veidt's head is long and pale; his eyes are round, dark and furtive. He combs his hair straight back, so it seems to pull his face after it. His grin--perpetual, painful--completes a character for whom peace is alien. To these features Veidt usually adds a sad look; late in the film, he shows fury. Yet the melancholy and the rage are always set against a grin that cannot alter. His face is in conflict—a battleground between the emotions he seeks to express and one, unresponsive feature that mocks them all. You can't take your eyes off it.

As for us, we barely rank above the freak show patrons that populate the film. Our first look at Gwynplaine prompts laughter. Even when he earns our sympathy, Gwynplaine's smile never looks sad—it simply is sad. That's the best we can do, and he knows it. Many times he covers his mouth with a handkerchief, even when no one can see him but us.

The film’s other characters range from atypical to weird. Dea is pretty, but cannot see; Ursus has hair like an SOS brush, and spends his days surrounded by carnies and clowns. In the royal palace, a plump and constipated Queen Anne reigns over absurd courtiers, some so overcostumed they resemble birds or pieces of food. Leni found some of the ugliest actors around to play these parts. However, his real jackpot was Brandon Hurst, who plays the wicked jester (later, powerful courtesan), Barkilphedro. It's Barkilphedro, not Gwynplaine, who truly prefigures the Joker--not just in looks, but in temperament and occupation. Take a look at this clip, starting at 2:28.

Among this crew, there’s only one character free of disfigurement, disability or regular misfortune: the Duchess Josiana. Played by Olga Baclanova (a duplicate of Madonna, right down to the mole), Josiana enjoys beauty, wealth and an abundance of time. For the rest of the court, she's a titillating distraction—something she encourages, since it prevents her from sharing their boredom. Josiana steals away to the circus, witnesses Gwynplaine’s performance and attempts to seduce him. What would people say? By bringing him into her life, and then to the court, she achieves her only aim, which is to piss people off. The disfigurement will do nicely.









Gwynplaine’s agonizing smile first blinds us to his deeper value—he’s either grotesque or comical, and in either case, a curious object. As the film unfolds, we come to understand him and appreciate his character. But we cannot do this unless we embrace the strangeness and consider how it enriches the role, rather than distancing it. Perhaps there's a deeper lesson here. Can modern viewers take this same approach to silent films themselves?

Grimacing Gwynplaine looms over the maiden. Though Veidt’s character is totally benign, the public is encouraged to see a monster. Even advertisers presume the worst.

The Man Who Laughs is a terrific introduction to silent film. Made as the era was ending, it takes advantage of techniques and technology unavailable to earlier directors. You’ll see an abundance of outdoor scenes and a minimum of heavy makeup. The characters have lightness and nuance and roundness, freed the heavy moralism of some early silents. In keeping with this, the intertitles rarely ‘set a scene’ before it is played; allowing the characters to express themselves, rather than acting out a prescription. The Man Who Laughs even has 'sound,' of a sort. By 1928, studios could produce sound-synchronized film, though not many theatres could play it. For those that could, The Man Who Laughs provided an orchestral score, some lyrical music (sung off-screen) and the occasional laugh or yell.

Where to Find The Man Who Laughs:
The film is widely available through Kino International, a distributor specializing in classics. In addition to the film, Kino's DVD includes an excerpt from Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, upon which the movie is based; a short production documentary; photo galleries; restoration notes; and a side-by-side comparison with the Italian version, shot at the same time. Check it out here.