This post is a short essay I wrote while preparing to introduce my students to Silent Cinema. My approach is to introduce them to Silent Cinema via Charlie Chaplin's engagements with sound in comedy.

The Silent Era can roughly be periodized, in an American context, from the invention of film technology in the mid 1890s to around 1929, with the invention of synchronized sound and its widespread adoption in the industry. The 1920s are generally considered to be the golden age of Silent Cinema, insofar as it had by then become a highly complex visual and gestural form. By that point, certain industry standards, such as continuity editing and the feature length film, had also become established.

This period is fascinating for many reasons. Consider that there were more women and Native folks working in film production in the early years of the industry (mostly pre-1920) than there are today! The African American filmmaker, Oscar Michaeux, made more than 44 films (that we know of) during his career, leading many film historians to consider him to be the most prolific independent black filmmaker in American history. Such pieces of film history can help us contest facile historical progress narratives. We can look to the archive to help us to think about how to create new images and new ways of living in the present.

I want to emphasize two things in my brief overview. The first is my use of the term synchronized sound. Although we call the era and films from that period "Silent Cinema," this is something of a misnomer. Sound was always present in the so-called silent era. Live and recorded musical accompaniment was a part of the exhibition of these films, with live narration in Japan and Korea. People could read the dialogue and rely on highly developed gestural performance (performances that we now may experience as 'over the top'), and the theaters were often lively spaces with many people talking to each other. The term "synchronized sound" is meant to indicate synchronized sound recording technology that could match voices with bodies. I point this out in order to encourage my students to think about how the Hollywood film industry cultivated aesthetic realism through synchronized dialogue and realistic sound effects as the primary value of synchronized sound technology.

Synchronized sound is also used as background music and to cue emotions in the audience, much like it had during live musical accompaniment in the silent era. Such a particular use of sound, paired with synchronized dialogue, effectively heightens the realism and immersive escapism of Hollywood narrative and represents one specific way to use sound, but not the only use. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) offers some key examples of alternative uses of sound and the value of the visual and gestural aesthetics of Silent Cinema form. How, as the promotional lunch machine robot from the film says: "Actions speak louder than words."

This leads to the second point I want to emphasize. The common sense narrative about the history of film suggests that Silent Cinema was deficient in some way — that it lacked the technology of synchronized sound — and that it thus represents an immature stage in the development of the medium. But my approach to Silent Cinema contests such a characterization. I want us to think of these films as already mature in their form; a form that we should think of as distinct, not superior, inferior, nor immature. The advent of sound simply changes the forms of acting and produces more films centered on that which can be exploited via synchronized sound technology: singing, realistic effects, and dialogue.

Such a shift in forms in the transition to 'talkies' meant that theaters no longer had to have infrastructure and staff to perform live musical accompaniment. The term Silent Cinema can be thought not to describe the lack of sound in these films — for there is sound in their exhibition contexts — nor does it describe a period of cinema history, the time before the arrival of synchronized sound. Silent Cinema can be understood primarily as a different form of cinema, emphasizing visual and gestural aspects of cinema — sets, costumes, editing, framing, and especially a performance tradition meant to convey emotional nuances through the body and the face, which is arguably a more difficult task to accomplish without the use of verbal dialogue or emotional musical cues.

"It has already been said that the sound film was not an organic continuation of the silent film, but another art in its own right."

— Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film

During the silent era, comedy primarily emphasized slapstick and physical comedy, which were well-suited to a form of a cinema without synchronized sound. It is for many, perhaps, a more accessible kind of Silent Cinema than the historical epics and melodramas that were popular in their own time but demand a rather high degree of patience for the contemporary viewer. Although physical comedy sometimes reappears as a part of the repertoire of forms of comedy in today's movies, much of the humor in our own era is often derived from witty dialogue, word play, and punchline timing — aspects that all rely on the use of synchronized sound.

One of the most well-known cinema comedians is of course Charlie Chaplin, and his work as a silent era comedian, writer, and director gives us some of the most memorable and amusing moments of physical and slapstick comedy. Straddling the transition between the Silent Era and the Talkies, Chaplin was also concerned with the different possibilities of sound technology beyond its ability to synchronize dialogue. Dialogue, we should always remember, is written and edited into the form of a script. Even the immersive fantasy of synchronized and realistic-seeming dialogue is itself, in Jack Smith's terms, a form of "phoniness,"¹ for our conversations are never so meticulously scripted and delivered. Narrative cinema dialogue is never natural, nor is the primacy of dialogue the natural, only, or best use of synchronized sound technologies in the movies.

Let's look at some clips from Chaplin's films to consider how he was engaging the possibilities of sound within the context of comedy and silent cinema aesthetics.

Chaplin's silent romantic comedy, City Lights (1931), was released when talkies had already begun to become the dominant form of Hollywood cinema. The film uses synchronized sound but within the aesthetic forms of silent cinema and slapstick comedy. In this scene, Chaplin uses the sound of a kazoo to replace the voices of these city officials making pompous speeches to dedicate the city monument, "Peace and Prosperity." My students often point out the similarity with the voices of the adults in Peanuts. In this case, the specific words of the officials aren't important and they are rendered ridiculous by the substitution of the kazoo for the voice. What they are saying, the content of their speech, is unimportant. They are simply reiterating platitudes and promoting liberal ideologies like peace and prosperity as agents of the state, while people suffer in Depression Era poverty and get evicted by capitalist landlords ("lobsters" in Jack Smith's lexicon). Chaplin uses humor and distorted speech to make this critique.

I like to pair Chaplin's films with Béla Balázs's early film theory, specifically his chapter, "Problem of the Sound Comedy":

"We may exaggerate or distort a mannerism of speech for instance and produce a funny effect. Intonation and cadence can be thus exaggerated even without intelligible words. But the limits to which words can be distorted are fixed by the limits of intelligibility. Words and sentences which are quite unintelligible cannot be funny…They turn into empty, conglomerates of sound which convey nothing and rouse no association of any kind in us."

There is some doubt about whether this scene from City Lights qualifies as "unintelligible words and sentences" or if it is instead a distortion of mannerism, cadence, and intonation. Nonetheless, the final scene from Modern Times works strongly suggests that even nonsensical language can indeed "produce a funny effect."

The comedy in this scene begins from the situation that the Tramp has to perform a song and dance, but he cannot remember the words and loses the lyrics that he wrote on his cuffs. The Gamine (Paulette Goddard) tells him, in a silent cinema intertitle — "Sing!! Never mind the words." We know the gist of the song's narrative from a brief glimpse we get of the lyrics, but the real pleasure here is Chaplin's pantomime performance of the song's narrative. The words that he sings are mostly a nonsensical mishmash of French and Italian. Well into the era of the sound film by 1936, Chaplin's Tramp finally uses his voice, but does so singing gibberish.

There are numerous ways that both films use sound in interesting and humorous ways that eschew synchronized, realistic dialogue. The whistle and boxing bell bits in City Lights are both funny incidents in which sounds are rendered disruptive or appear as misunderstood signs. Chaplin accidentally swallows a whistle and cannot stop whistling because he has the hiccups. This interrupts the singer at the party and has both a taxi driver and dogs chasing his incessant, uncontrollable whistling.

In Modern Times, voice is present, but it is always (with the exception of the Tramp's nonsense song) a technologically mediated voice of power or authority: the recorded lunch robot, meant to automatically feed workers and increase efficiency; the boss on the TV screen barking orders to speed up the assembly line; and radio news.

Chaplin's films help me to introduce my students to the aesthetics of silent cinema, the value of comedy to offer social critique, and illustrate how there are compelling ways to use synchronized sound beyond realistic dialogue.

[1] In his discussion of his own archive of "secret flix" — Maria Montez movies, Judy Canova movies, I Walked with a Zombie, Spanish Galleon flix, von Sternberg/Dietrich collaborations, "each reader will add to the list" — Jack Smith makes the case for phoniness in our cinematic imaginations against the supremacy of the officially sanctioned GOOD PERFS ("good acting") and convincing realism: "These were light films — if we really believed that films are visual it would be possible to believe these rather pure cinema — weak technique, true, but rich imagery. They had a stilted, phony imagery that we choose to object to, but why react against that phoniness? That phoniness could be valued as rich in interest and revealing. Why do we object to not being convinced — why can't we enjoy phoniness?"

Smith's own films were in many ways steeped in the aesthetics of silent cinema, something I'd like to explore further. "In my later work, I have taken as my point of departure that moment before the arrival of sound. (The art of silent film was never perfected and that is what I have spent the last 20 years in doing.) The story is rendered pictorially and, drawing upon psychology, something like the logic of dreams is deployed." (From a letter to Heiner Ross, July 1987).