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Silents

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Geoffrey O’Brien has a great essay on silent films in the New York Review of Books. A very small selection:

The seduction of silent cinema is the seduction of a form as unique as opera or kabuki, a peculiar way of organizing one’s attention. It is a perpetual learning how to see, and a way of coming to the truth of one of Emerson’s observations: “The eye is final.” But there is the further peculiarity that what you see takes place in a world no longer there. Here are cities since reduced to rubble and rebuilt, stretches of countryside by now turned into interstates and strip malls, glaciated wilderness that has probably succumbed to climate change—and of course the faces of those now long dead, something too easily taken for granted but that haunts movies from the start. The inventors of the medium were already thinking about recording the living as a future consolation for their survivors.

There are really so many reasons to watch silent films: to see how people told stories without sound, to revel in the so very different styles of acting and filmmaking, to understand how Americans of all ethnicities could come together over entertainment that you didn’t need English capability to understand, because silent films often told amazing stories.

And of course because the past is weird. One thing I love about silents, particularly those before 1920, is that no one knew what they were doing. By this I mean that the standards of cinema and the creation of expectations on how to tell a story were still developing. So when turning on an early silent, you never really quite know what you are going to get.

Last night, I watched the remarkably bizarre and incredibly awesome The Mystery of Leaping Fish, starring Douglas Fairbanks. This 1916 film has Douglas as the Sherlock Holmes-esque detective Coke Ennyday trying to find out why a man with no discernible employment has so much cash (quite literally, he sleeps covered by money instead of blankets). Why does our hero have this odd name? Because he really loves cocaine. And other drugs. He constantly is shooting something into himself for uppers (he carries around a belt of syringes). He has a giant tub on his desk labeled “COCAINE” that he dips into rather liberally (by the handful). And when he discoverers a jar of opium, Coke Ennyday starts scooping it into his mouth with his fingers.

This is jaw-droppingly weird. Technically, cocaine had just become illegal under the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1915, but its use was well-known enough for audiences of the time. The best way to watch it is on Fandor, though there are incomplete versions available on YouTube. I guarantee it is worth your time.

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