Dance of the Silents 1912 - 1926 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 1

The first chapter of "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update - includes Vimeo embed after the jump)


View "Chapter 1: Dance of the Silents"

Dance of the Silents 

In the early days, everything was difficult and anything was possible. Ingenuity and technical know-how were prerequisites, but all was new so imagination was unhampered by exhaustion or familiarity. Vampires glided into bedrooms, Babylonians paraded down colossal stairways, abstract forms danced across the screen, and bugs spied on one another's sex lives. There are quite a few masters in this first chapter, yet most of the films seem to have, alongside their boundless creative energy, a sort of elemental simplicity. Styles will grow more complicated, visions more elaborate in the next chapter, but at first, the wonder of the moving image seemed magic enough.

THE AUTEURS: D.W. Griffith - Intolerance

As I noted last week, D.W. Griffith professed astonishment at the controversy surrounding Birth of a Nation, his 1915 epic. He followed it with another epic, even more lavish, this one devoted to the theme of intolerance in order to prove what a swell ol' guy D.W. was. This film had enormous sets, a cast of hundreds (thousands?), and a ludicrously ambitious structure and concept - the telling of four separate stories, in four different historical periods, cutting between them all so that they unfolded simultaneously. The movie came out in 1916. Think about that. This Herculean follow-up to his masterpiece was executed and delivered a mere year later; that should tell you something. Griffith directs Intolerance with the bravado of a drunken genius, as if he couldn't take the time to sort everything out neatly and just tackled the material on the wit of his whim. Consequently, his sheer enthusiasm makes the unwieldly, potentially overstuffed picture work. As someone who often has several books sitting by my bedside because I can't settle on just one, I have to say I dig the ambition.