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| Awesome film. Crappy viewing experience. |
3. We're not used to the lack of stimulation: From the moment we're born, we are bombarded with electronic stimuli. iPhone games and youtube are what I count as the most superficially-diverting forms of entertainment yet invented, but the technology will soon get even more diverting, and then even more diverting after that. When sound cinema was first introduced in 1927, recorded dialogue was a new form of diversion, and before that, it was cinema itself.
We've gotten used to allowing the medium to do the stimulating for us, and when we watch a silent film, robbed of the stimulation of the spoken word, we need our thoughts to fill in the quiet spots, and those parts of our brains have become culturally atrophied.
Don't get me wrong: nothing stops progress, and I'm not saying that any of this is categorically bad. Our appendices became atrophied and vestigial after we learned how to cook our food; we might as well say that this is the same process, but applied to a different part of the body. And just as eating raw meat with a vestigial appendix sucks, so does watching a silent film with a hyper-stimulated brain.
2. You can't watch the screen if you're busy reading the subtitles: When you're busy reading subtitles, you're not looking at what's happening on the screen. And if there's anything worse than a film without sound, it's a film without video (no offense, radio).
That's the inevitable downside of any subtitled film: you have to take your eyes off the action every time someone speaks a line. If you've ever wondered why it's so hard to get into a subtitled foreign film, it's not (just) because you hate to read: if you spend all your time reading the bottom of the screen, you can't watch the action, and so you effectively lose the ability to watch the film.
But make no mistake: if you're the kind of person who would return a film to Blockbuster and demand a refund just because the film you rented happens to have subtitles... you're an idiot.
1. Silent films tend to be old, and old films don't have to be bad, but many are remembered for being trailblazers, not masterpieces: What I mean by all of that is simply that lots of so-called silent "masterpieces" aren't remembered for being masterpieces, but because they were simply the first films to do something. Don't get me wrong, that makes them incredibly important from a historical standpoint, but it can mean absolutely nothing artistically.
The Lumiere Brothers were, as I count them, the inventors of modern theatrical cinema. They were the first guys to make films and exhibit them in theaters in what's basically the modern fashion.
Now, you can buy their films on DVD, but what they are is a collection of wordless thirty-second shorts. They carry great historical and cultural significance, but artistically, they're nothing special.
So, too, with many silent films I've seen that I can only assume I was supposed to like: L'Atalante, Cocteau's Orpheus, and even The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari are far more interesting to read about than actually watch -- but since we have classes like "Advanced Silent Film Aesthetics," colleges need to pick out more than twenty silent films to pad their syllabuses.
Again, none of these is a good reason to swear off silent film. But if you're struggling to get through any particular silent film screening, take solace in the knowledge that you might not be the only one with those feelings.
Here are some silent films that transcend the inherent problems of the medium, and are unequivocally awesome: The General, Nosferatu, Metropolis, Sunrise, City Lights, A Trip to the Moon, The Great Train Robbery, The Man Who Laughs, and Greed (any cut shorter than two hours), just to name a few.
--Serge
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