It happened the very first time I saw a silent film, and it hasn’t stopped. Every so often, when a very old film plays, the audience get the giggles – often at the least appropriate moment. Yes, even at the most la-di-da venues and highbrow festivals. Recently I was watching a film in which a chap was horribly injured in a train accident, and despite the fact that his sight had almost gone, he struggled manfully off to work. Heartlessly, several people in the row behind me chortled.
Sometimes just the idea of watching a silent film is enough to send people into fits of mugging, hooting with laughter as they strike melodramatic poses and silently mouth: “I love you.” For some people, the films are allowed to get old, but not these corny jokes.
I’ve got some sympathy with both sides, but more for the chortlers than the muggers. I forgot to tell you that the blinded hero bumped his head on the doorframe not once but twice, as he attempted to go to work. So that’s slapstick. Also, his job was as a knifethrower, so there’s a little irony too. It’s no one’s fault if a film is unintentionally amusing, as happens when it’s bad, or just a little outdated. Laughing, even when you think you are not supposed to, might just reveal that you are engaging properly with the movie. And there are a few specific reasons, too, why silent films are more likely than others to set the audience’s shoulders shaking.
Let’s put comedies aside – laughing with the film is not the same as laughing at it. And let’s assume that we are all serious enough about movies not to want to poke fun at the expense of the film we have chosen to watch. Most of us want to take our films seriously enough that we become immersed in them. That said, you shouldn’t watch a movie with the emotional equivalent of a held breath. There’s no point attempting to enjoy a film while suppressing your natural response. It’s interesting, not embarrassing, that we laugh sometimes.
First off, we don’t dress like our great-grandparents, so we likely don’t have the same values and sense of humour as them either. Everything in old films is likely to have fallen out of fashion – from the quaint flapper slang to the unfortunate racism. Only one of those things is funny, but our laughter comes from nervousness sometimes too. And we might not realise that we are in sync with the film after all – not everything in a movie is meant to be taken seriously. Sharp-tongued intertitles in silent films can offer a slightly arch comment on the action. They’re single-shot jokes to be enjoyed by themselves without interrupting the flow – much like the one-liners in a James Bond movie.
The reason most people get fidgety in silent movies, though, is the acting. Lots of the earliest films feature stage actors, giving stage performances. The gestures are often too broad for film, and it’s a style, and language, we don’t understand any more. The arms flung wide, hands clasped to the heart, or back of the hand resting on the forehead can be very effective in their place, but had largely disappeared by the 1920s because audiences preferred a more naturalistic style – the nuances of facial expression that can be revealed by a closeup. Go ahead and giggle when you spot the Victorian acting, but remember that with a fixed camera position and the early, lower-grade film stocks, actors often had to give it both barrels just for their expressions to register on screen.
The second reason is more technical. Silent films were mostly shot on hand-cranked cameras, which meant they were intended to run at variable speeds through the cinema projector, rather than today’s standard 24 frames per second. Run a silent movie at the modern speed and more often than not it will look ridiculous – jerky and comically fast. And many people did once show silent movies at that speed, no doubt to audiences doubling up in laughter. Today, silent film specialists argue over and tirelessly investigate the correct speed for each film – but all agree that defaulting to 24fps for everything is wrong.
There is another complication here. Film-makers in the silent era made the most of the hand-cranked cameras they used. A technique called under-cranking recorded fewer frames per second, but meant that when that sequence was played back at the same rate as the rest of the film, the action appeared speeded up. Silent comedians were particularly keen on this technique, often using it in very sophisticated ways. We now associate this fast-forward technique almost exclusively with comedy, such as rapid chase scenes, so when silent films use undercranking elsewhere, it’s tricky not to laugh. FW Murnau uses undercranking a couple of times in Nosferatu to create an uncanny effect, such as when a demonic carriage zooms off into the countryside, conveying the hero to the vampire’s castle. But to a modern audience, what was intended to be sinister becomes silly – this part of the story seems to be no place for a joke.
Which leads us to special effects – you can very often see the join in silent movies. The effects can be crude, not to mention the fact that gunshot wounds sometimes don’t bleed and a sword tucked under the armpit can represent a fatal blow. This is down to technical limitations, and sometimes a hangover from all that old-school stage acting. We laugh any time we see a blooper on screen, so these early special effects can be amusing too, but personally I’d rather these than a backdrop of digitally manipulated pixels. Not to mention today’s tendency to put more work into the realism of the blood splatter than the characters.
It’s probably in anticipation of all these factors that some people find the idea of silent cinema itself a little goofy. Most likely they haven’t seen a silent film recently, and think that a film without spoken dialogue is as ludicrous as a photograph that talks. I’ve got no quibble with people who feel that way, although recent movies, from All Is Lost to Blancanieves to The Tribe show that dialogue-free cinema can still be relevant. And if the fear of giggling in the wrong place is putting you off going to see a silent movie don’t worry, because you may find yourself in good company.
Did I laugh when the blind knifethrower hit his head on the doorframe? Of course not. Well, only the second time.
