Silent Films

The silent horror film is often regarded, if it is regarded at all, as a quaint legacy from a bygone age where the larger-than-life histrionics of its actors seem almost farcical and humorous. The horror film’s original intention of scaring its audience is lost as its flickering black and white images are passed by in favour of CGI enhanced spectacle and gore drenched violence. Yet those flickering images of monsters, villains and their screaming victims still cast a resonance that influences, whether directly or subconsciously, over what we watch today, be it in the dark streets and shadows of Sin City (2005) or in the blood and atmosphere of Coppola’s Dracula (1992). In hundreds of films made since the advent of sound the flickering images from our past continue to live on in our present.

Film evolved from a scientific novelty and fairground gimmick, where five minute reels were pitched alongside the bearded woman and the strongest man in the early years of the 20^th Century, to become one of the world’s most powerful entertainment mediums. It is perhaps difficult to imagine now in age where image and sound can be accessed from almost anywhere, and from everything from a phone to huge screens in city centres. No longer does the ability to see people and things move hold any magic for the viewer, rather we have become complacent and jaded by our constant exposure to the moving image and its accompanying sound. In the early days of cinema however people were still awed by this new form of mass entertainment, and despite its lack of sound they were ready to be thrilled, moved and scared by what they saw.

As film developed as an art form during the 1910s so the tastes of its audiences grew more sophisticated and they came increasingly to expect both spectacle and escapism in equal measure. Films like D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), and Intolerance (1916) and, to a lesser degree, the emergence of the screen ‘vamps’ where man-eating femme fatales like Theda Bara and Pola Negri were wowing audiences in films like Cleopatra (1917), Salomé (1918) and Carmen (1918) were all paving the way for a darker kind of cinema. The horror film was about to rear its head.

Although there had of course between forays into horror over the preceding years, particularly in Europe, with films like Frankenstein (1910, Der Golem aka The Golem (1914) and Alraune (1918) it was to be a highly theatrical expressionist German film about a murderous sleepwalker called Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari aka The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) that began the process of establishing horror as a legitimate films genre. The film is the story of an asylum director who gets a white faced somnambulist to murder on his orders, the murderer clambering across roof tops caring the unconscious bodies of his victims. However, it was really the insane concoction of styles and sets arrayed in varying and often extreme levels of black and white that were, in to a degree still are, revolutionary. The net effect was both to brick the shackles of convention that still hampered film makers at the time, and to show cinema audiences that horror could be a creative and worthwhile genre.

Subsequently a number of horror films were produced to prove the style was innovative (x, y, z). All these films set new standards and broke old rules as their directors and producers strove to adapt a horror format that previously only existed in book form or been portrayed on stage to a totally new cinematic medium.

Throughout the rest of the 20’s the horror film grew both in quality and popularity, dispelling along the way any criticisms that it might be in any way a poor relation to other film genres. These films laid the foundation for the explosion in the popularity of horror films that was to follow in the 30’s and 40’s.

The horror film of the 20’s may have been silent but de screams of its audiences were not, and with no previous films to guide them in terms of direction or style it was the work of theses pioneering men and women that was to set the ground rules for the horror film that directors are using in the years to nowadays. What is worth remembering is that regardless of whether a film is watched on a big screen or portable device if it works as entertainment it works, and the fact that the screams from the silent era are still echoing down the decades proves that the silence gave horror film a voice.

Comics & Sequential Art (Will Eisner, 1985)

Will Eisner. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, Florida: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

The format of the comic book presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regimens of art (eg. perspective, symmetry, brush stroke) and the regimens of literature (eg. grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The reading of the comic book is na act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit. (p.8)

The panel as a medium of control - The viewer of a film is prevented from seeing the next frame before the creator permits it is because these frames, printed on strips of transparent film, are shown one at the time. So film, which is an extension of comic strips, enjoys absolute control of its reading - an advantaged shared by live theater. In a close theater the proscenium arch and the wings of the stage can form but one single panel, while the audience sits in a fixed position from which their view is contained therein. (p.40)

Where the super-panel purports to be a page - that is, to make the reader concious it is a page - it serves as a containment withou perimeter. It is best employed for parallel narratives. This narrative for or device is not often explored in comics. The printed form lends itself to this because, unlike the transitory nature of the film medium, i can be referred to repeatedely through the reading. (making the panel that controls the total narrative the entire page itself). The result, a set of panels, attempts to control the reader's line of reading so that two storylines may be followed synchronously. (p.80)

The primary function of perspective should be to manipulate the reader's orientation for a purpose in accord with the author's narrative plan. For example, accurate perspective is most useful when the sense of the story requires that the reader know precisely where all the elements of a drama are in relation to each other. Another use of perspective is its employment to manipulate and produce various emotional states in the reader. I proceed from the theory that the viewer's response to a given scene is influenced by his position as a spectator. Looking at the scene from above it the viewer has a sense fo detachement - an observer rather than a participant. However, when the reader views the scene from below it, then this position evokes a sense of smallness which stimulates a sensation of fear. (p.89)

Expressive anatomy - the human body, and the stylization of its shape, and the codifying of its emotionally produced gestures and expressive postures are accumulated in the memory, forming a non-verbal vocabulary of gesture. They are part of the inventory of what the artist has retained from observation. (p.100) the language of the human body becomes one of the essential ingredients of the comic strip art. The skill with which they are employed is also a mesure of the author's ability to convey his idea.

A gesture, generally almost idiomatic to a region or culture, tends to be subtle and limited to a narrow range of movement. A posture is a movement selected out of a sequence of related moments in a single action. (p.105)

Writing and sequential art - the writer must be at the outset concerned with the interpretation of the story by the artist, and the artist must be allow himself to be a captive of the story or idea. Unlike theatre (including cinema), in which the tecnology of its creation demands by its very nature the coordinated contributions of many specialists, comics have a story of being the product of a single individual. (p.123)