If you actually go to see a silent film, you will find that it may be unexpectedly noisy, and in contrast, some art films after the maturity of sound films are silent to the point of deafness.
There's probably nothing more frustrating about something like movies that's characterized by fashion than it was a hundred years ago, and horror movies, which are often based on fast-paced subjects, are even more so.
To this end, through the two films "Ghost Carriage (1921)" and "Faust (1926)", we will share the film aesthetics of that era, or from the personal perspective of appreciating these films, to the development of the entire film history.
In the twenties of the last century, shortly after the development of cinema, a decade ago, Giotto Canudu listed cinema as the "sixth art" (later extended to the seventh art due to the addition of dance).
Like all new things, film at this time is still following a path of learning from traditional art and becoming independent from traditional art. Therefore, the films of that time invariably had the temperament of art, music, drama and literature. In this regard, horror movies are common to other genres.
1. Artistry
The artistic temperament of early films is most intuitively reflected in their poster design.
Since today's visual effects technology has not yet been developed, their posters are not like today, usually made of stills or makeup photos rendered collage.
On the other hand, Hollywood's star system has not yet been established, and posters do not have the concept of releasing portraits of actors to attract audiences. As a result, these posters are almost entirely masterpieces of graphic design, with little involvement of photographic techniques. Their main purpose is to convey the story elements and artistic style of a film.
For example, the poster of "Ghost Carriage"; it is quite bold to let the black representing the underground occupy most of the frame, leaving only a narrow rectangular area at the top of the picture to the silhouette of a carriage in the forest in front of the dusk background, which clearly creates a gloomy tone of death and night, and the slightly sloped land deepens the imbalance of the picture.
The poster of Faust contrasts the high-saturation red "face" with the low-saturation black "line", and adopts a precise symmetrical composition to form a perfect visual balance.
The tradition of hand-painted posters for films has long continued, and we can still see in David Finch's Zodiac, where one of the suspects, Rick Matthew, painted some posters for his cinema where he worked as a projectionist, and that story was already in the sixties and seventies.
The poster aesthetics of Chinese films have gone through a similar period, but many years later, and posters like "Nezha Noisy Sea" and "Peacock Princess" are unparalleled stunning works.
The artistic temperament of early films is more mainly contained in their picture composition.
Film originated from the development of photography, because from the surface, photography and art are "visual reproductions" of a group of objects, so it is natural to take the photography sutra from the treasure house of art that has accumulated for many thousands of years.
Take, for example, in Ghost Carriage, Sister Eddit goes to the tavern to promote the Salvation Army rally to David Holm and his drinking friends.
The positional relationship and use of light of the three people in this scene are all examples of triangular composition, and in order to facilitate the appreciation of the artistic purpose of it, you can refer to Raphael's "Sistine Madonna".
A particularly noteworthy detail is that the bottle in the stills presents a relationship between left and right due to perspective, balancing the nun's posture of contemplation and the sense of inclination brought about by the difference in height and shortness between the left and right, just as the heads of the two cherubs at the bottom of the picture are high and low, balancing the symmetry of the height difference between the two feet of the Virgin.
In addition, the photographic technology at that time could not make the entire negative film uniform and sufficiently sensitive, and the surrounding areas of the picture, especially the four corners, were often gray and dark due to insufficient sensitivity.
This effect is coincidentally similar to the technique used in later films to express "memories", so that all scenes in old films have a hazy charm of memory, like a painted enamel porcelain statue embedded in an oval pendant box, just like the old films themselves— they have become obsolete.
2. Musicality
Stills from "The Red Circle". The film creates the classic jewelry theft in history, and the whole long and suffocating process does not have any soundtrack.
The threshold that people need to cross when appreciating old movies is actually mainly their inner stereotypes about old movies, rather than the real flaws of old movies.
These stereotypes include slow plot development, monotony in black and white, and the lack of sound and dialogue if a film was made in the silent film era.
All in all, when there is no color to confuse our vision, when there is no sound to disturb our hearing, when there is no plot to confuse our minds, we feel particularly insecure because we finally have to discover how empty and shallow we are.
But if you actually go to see a silent film, you will find that it may be unexpectedly noisy, and in contrast, some art films after the maturity of sound films are silent to the point of deafness.
This is because the silent film itself knows that silence is embarrassing, so it spreads out the soundtrack very fully, like a master who is afraid of the cold and constantly switches topics and gushes endlessly.
And the first thing that comes to mind when looking for a topic is classical music, just as the first thing that comes to mind when it thinks about composition is medieval painting – which is another big reason why people are discouraged from old films.
At that time, the film used chamber music and even symphonic works throughout the chapter, beginning and ending, stunned, and honestly, which, like hand-painted posters, had its corresponding period in the history of China's film and television development.
If anyone had seen the anonymized version of "Bao Qingtian" now, they would have found that when a complaining woman knelt down and began to cry, a whole erhu song like a Bagu baguette would sound without fading in and out.
I dare not argue about the value of these pieces of music as music, but when I find them too noisy, it means that they do not meet the requirements of the identity of "background music", just like a groomsman dressed up so that distant relatives mistakenly think that they are groomsmen.
In fact, the reason why most people who only go to the cinema to see movies hate the soundtracks of old movies is not that they can't enjoy them, but that the music makes people aware of them.
At this point, the narration of Jerry Roll Morton's jazz in The Pianist of the Sea is an excellent footnote to "ideal background music," although in the film the passage is pejorative, and I'm only quoting it neutrally here:
"Jerry Rolle Morton wasn't playing the piano, but stroking the notes. The sound of the piano was silky, sliding over the delicate body of the woman. His hands were as gentle as butterflies. He made his mark in the red light district of New Orleans, and the people who bought spring upstairs didn't want to be disturbed, they wanted the music to slide gently through the window and bed drapes without disturbing their passion, and that was the music he played. And in that respect, he is indeed the best. ”
In an era when there was no dialogue, movies could only intermittently blacken the screen, with a subtitle, or a line, or a narration.
If you think about it dispassionately, you'll find that this may not be so far away from our aesthetic, and people just need to watch such a movie as a life simulation video game: the character goes into a room, meets a friend, and then a few back and forth dialogue pops up under the screen.
3. Dramatic
The drama of early films actually mainly refers to the exaggeration of acting skills.
On the one hand, this is also the consequence of silent films, because you can't speak, you can only use as exaggerated movements and expressions as possible to express what is happening; on the other hand, the film performance has not yet escaped from the stage performance.
Only after the advent of sound films will people realize what a high level of acting is to express themselves without speaking.
Go and see Margaret chasing Faust under a tree and finally being taken into his arms.
Notice that her closed eyes are not really fainting, just reveling in the sweetness of love and unable to extricate herself. If these performances are used as a yardstick for love, then probably no surviving man still dares to boast of his wife's love for him.
Speaking of this, everyone may think of the retrospective of the Republic of China movie in "The History of the Demise of Romanticism". Hu Die (Huo Siyan), and the actor of his husband (actually his husband Du Jiang) talk about the play:
"I think you should do this seriously, you should kill me with a straight face." If, as you just said, your hands are shaking when you put the poison, peeking at me, afraid that I will wake up and find out, it is as if you also feel that you have done something wrong, so the meaning of the play has changed. Therefore, the hands must not shake, do not look at me, be calm. ”
However, he acted according to this, but the director did not do it:
"Stop. You are poisoning your wife now, how can you be so calm? Your heart must be emotionally fluctuating, magnificent, manifested physically, and you must be poisoning while looking back. In order to show this nervous emotion, the hand you took the medicine at that time must be shaken. ”
In the middle of the director's Wu Nong soft language, the four words "magnificent waves" are even spoken in standard Mandarin.
4. Literary
Old movies are shot on film, and film is life, it has life, old age, illness and death. It will no longer think coherently, it will gradually forget things, it will age, it will accidentally lose results and never return, and when it is serious, it will die.
But then again. The value of a film, and any other kind of work of art, has a double dimension: both artistic (literary) and historical (philological) values.
Old movies score high in various online repositories, probably because the only people who will go to see them are PhD students in related majors, and they score them according to the latter value.
This may explain why even literary works such as Pride and Prejudice and Decameron may not be worth shouting at now, the former is really ordinary, and the latter should be banned.
It is as if a person who starts with Han Yue may find it difficult for him to understand; but if he first reads through most of the works of important writers since the Wei and Jin dynasties, and then meets Han Yu, he may make the opposite evaluation and feel that he is refreshed.
That feeling, like taking a somewhat awkward joint in the opposite direction, is a positive bone, making a rattling sound, although it is not necessarily very healthy, but it is "in the internal organs, like an iron, there is no place to disobey."
A hundred years ago, after centuries of relying only on art to make a visual impression of something that did not happen in front of them, suddenly saw a train coming towards them from the screen, which was exactly such a breathtaking feeling.