Buster Keaton in The Love Nest (1923)
Photograph: NFT
People chatting in films. Such a distraction, I really wish they'd all shut up. The ones on the screen, that is. So many beautiful pictures ruined by so much artless guff, it's nothing short of criminal. Toss out the talkies, writes Guy Dammann, it's time for a silent film renaissance.
But perhaps it's happening already. On the musical side of things, the tide has been turning for some time. The relentlessly trendsetting Cinematic Orchestra, who were commissioned by the organisers of the 1999 Porto Film Festival to produce a new soundtrack to Dziga Vertov's avant-garde The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), took this as a bit of a sign and have made something of a habit of "accompanying" their concerts with silent film footage. More recently, Jean Vigo's Vertov-inspired study of Nice (1930) has elicited a score from no less a compositional luminary than Michael Nyman, and the more au-courant among lovers of that most eloquent of silent romances, F W Murnau's Sunrise (1927), now have the option to watch it with a fresh soundtrack by Lambchop.
But I also get the feeling this musical activity reflects a wider upsurge of interest in the cinema's silent golden age. The comedian Paul Merton has been pushing a line about silent slapstick for some time, and tomorrow sees the beginning of a Buster Keaton season - for the second time in less than ten years - at the National Film Theatre, centring around his 1927 mute masterpiece, The General. This makes a wonderful opportunity to get audiences closer to the artist whose "stoneface" was honed by his vaudevillian parents bashing him on the head and throwing him off the stage - an upbringing which today would be considered abusive, but which then was able to launch a glittering career. Eventually, Keaton turned slapstick into an artform which, at its best, rivals Athenian tragedy in the pathos with which it pits man against cosmos.
But Keaton, though the best of his kind, is not the only star still shining from a period when Hollywood's output was at its numerical (roughly double) and artistic (just my opinion) zenith. The greats of silent cinema come in all shapes and sizes, from Rex Ingram's 1921 epic Four Horseman of the Apocalypse to Eisenstein's cutting-edge (literally) Battleship Potemkin (1925), and movies that both made and shattered epochs seem somehow to have been everywhere. Nowadays the only boundaries Hollywood is breaking are the artificial ones they have constructed for themselves. After all, cowboys who like cowboys have been around for quite some time, but only now does Hollywood feel brave enough to show them at it.
