silent film – narrative and style

Silent Film – Narrative and ‘Visual Storytelling’

Lesson Objective: To explore and make sense of how these elements work in silent film

Questions to consider• Is visual storytelling the main purpose of silent film?

• Has visual storytelling been lost or enhanced by modern film making techniques?

Visual Storytelling“I want to put my film together on the screen … This is what gives an effect of life to a picture—the feeling that when you see it on the screen you are watching something that has been conceived and brought to birth directly in visual terms.”(Hitchcock)

In groups – arrange the screen shots into the narrative order you think that they go (you can add any subtitles you think there might be).

“Silent films depict an anarchic universe in which logic of narrative and character falls victim to purely visual humor”

The Sounds of Early Cinema (Abel and Altman 2001)“ … foregrounds also the fascinating concept of "seeing voices", i.e. the set of cognitive mechanisms which make the spectator "hear" something when he is just looking at images … The act of seeing is changed by the fact that we simultaneously hear a sound-track … The visual representation(s) of sound(s) infer in the mind of the spectator a sound-track of which the richness and complexity are not very different from what is achieved today by high-tech.”

Audience reaction to visuals

Kuleshov Effect

How is the art of ‘Visual Storytelling’ affected by these three elements?:• Dialogue in film- Is this always necessary in modern films? Is it overused? Examples

• Digital Cinema- New techniques, pros and cons

• Reception of modern audiences- What do we expect from films now? Do silent films meet our expectations?

Ross shows how filmmakers were far more concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at any subsequent time.

Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended working people and chastised their enemies. Worker filmmakers went a step further and produced movies that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unions, and socialism to transform a nation.

J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1lcB2CRN7E