I loved silent movies and still do. There was a programme on when I was a child hosted by Michael Bentine (an original member of the Goons) in which he introduced a silent movie or two every week. It was a must watch. It was during that time that I laughed with the Keystone Cops and always thought Buster Keaton had the edge over Charlie Chaplin.
But what I didn’t realise then, as I do now, is the wealth of silent movies that every country in the world was experimenting with, and the joy of the experiments. Even today they are still finding new film lost over the generations and putting new scores to them. And these are all watchable without subtitles because silence is truly universal.
We gained a lot in terms of quality and engagement when talking pictures came into the world but we lost that instantaneous universality; the way in which the characters and music spoke to everyone and made the world laugh. Talking films possess a natural barrier even if they contain greater story depth. Many years ago an artist told me he respected artists who knew all about the history of art and were experts at drawing, then decided to branch out and do something else (like Picasso) more than artists who just did something and called it art because they couldn’t draw to save their lives.
In modern film making the arts of communication inherent in silent movies has been lost in favour of the easy sentence. It is a heavy loss because in the real world there is a huge depth in silence.