The Art of Wordless Story-Telling: Why Christian Movie Makers Should Watch Silent Movies

Most people today don't watch silent films, which I personally find quite tragic. But if I showed you one of these relics of the ancient movie world and then asked for your impression you might use words like "confusing", "silly", "melodramatic", "over the top" or phrases like "too much reading" or "what's with the hairstyles?" to name a few.

I love silent films. Seriously. If you know how to watch a silent film, they become favorites and offer a forgotten but timely perspective on storytelling. Now to be honest I haven't always loved silent movies. I've always found them interesting since I first saw a Christmas themed short on television as a kid (I don't even remember what is was called, just that it was Christmas themed). Then I tried watching longer movies and feature films. I hit a wall. They were everything I just listed above. I stopped even trying. Shorts here and there were fine but no more than that.

So, what changed my attitude? I stopped lip reading. You see, I approached silent films from the perspective of someone accustomed to "talkies", so I perceived them as muted films. But they're not and that makes all the difference in the world. Let me give you a simple suggestion. Try watching a Looney Tunes short. The classic cartoon shorts are simply cartoon silent films- music, action, expression but (almost) no sound (sound effects, but virtually no dialogue). What you have is a moving picture. Ever wonder why we used to call movies "moving pictures"? Probably not, because the reason is obvious. Movies are pictures that are in motion. As a general rule, pictures don't speak audibly but instead communicate in other ways. Visual means such as mood, texture, expressions and even title prompts on the frame are just a few ways art speaks to us. Silent movies use the same language but with the added element of music and actual movement. Art can be realistic or expressionistic and silent movies, like other works of visual art, varied in their attempts at reflecting the real world (expressionist films are the cream of the crop, especially Metropolis).

Communication by audible dialogue was actually considered a characteristic of the theater. In fact, "talkies" didn't catch on until the 1930s precisely because words were the realm of theatrics, not the cinema. If you assume sound was not achievable until the 1930s, you assume wrong. The reality? Not even close. Sound was considered and even experimented with as early as the late 1890s. Remember, the great Thomas Edison invented the first sound recorder, the wax cylinder in the latter 19th Century and as audio technology progressed from wax cylinder to more permanent forms, many in the infant movie industry attempted to marry these two. In fact, there is a 1915 film (which I have not watched even out of historical curiosity because it was a Jehovah's Witness production and I can't bring myself to view it) that had both sound and color. Different methods, including separately recorded audio on phonographs, were tried and actually worked but no one wanted the results. Why? Because sound did not belong in movies. No one wanted sound and most did not want color either.

Of course eventually "talkies" became a hit and the silent movie faded into obscurity and cinematic hipsterdom (which some would argue are the same thing). I guess popular taste evolved to accept the new transition, just as it would do for color (which was already kind of a thing- go check out the color scenes of the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera). Now, I love "talkies" too. I'm glad that we moved to where we could use sound. My point is not to call for more silent films (though that would be cool, and there have been a few in recent years), it's to ask what can be learned from the storytelling process of the silent flicks in days of yore?

Movies are still the art of making a picture that moves and telling a story with it. It's just that now we have really complex pictures. The best movies are still those that show rather than tell us and place an emphasis on the visual aspect.

I think Christian filmmakers, in particular, can benefit from watching silent films and even trying to make them. If you can tell a story without spoken words, you are on your way to avoiding the mistakes of God's Not Dead and every Kendrick's brothers movie ever made. Biblically speaking, while God communicates special revelation to us through explicit exposition in the written word, natural revelation communicates as a sort of real life "moving picture". The Book of Romans says no one is without excuse because nature declares God to them. I tend to believe if you want movies (or other art) to proclaim the Gospel, take your cue from natural revelation because as an Imago Dei you are part of that natural revelation. When we "create", whether on a blank page, a canvas or a silver screen, we reflect the creativity of God. We are not to reflect special revelation in our art, but natural revelation.

Dear Chrisitan movie makers, please realize this truth the silent film era teaches us: A picture is worth a thousand words, but a moving picture is worth a million. Master it, and make pictures that move skillfully with goodness, truth, and beauty and you will do more to proclaim the glory of your creator than all the artless propaganda of Pureflix or the vanilla and anemic screen "sermons" of the Kendricks brothers. So go watch Metropolis, Intolerance or Broken Blossoms. Learn the art of showing and not telling.