SILENT MOVIES

 

SILENT MOVIES

The tendency is to think a “Silent Film” is same as a “Silent Movie”.

Quite confusing you may think, but its simple.

A silent film has no synchronised audible dialogue. The story is carried across using written indications of the key dialogue lines. Its a summary sort of. It doesn’t tell the whole story. A single sentence may be used to represent over twenty lines of dialogue.

The title cards, like today’s subtitles,don’t tell the real story.

Sometimes a narator interpretes the title cards to the audience.

The viewer is forced into guesses and conjectures. He watches the facial expressions of the actors to interprete the plot.

Two people may watch the same film and tell different stories.

The Silent Film is often accompanied by music and sound effects playing in the background. Charley Chaplin was one of such.

In that era (1890s to 1920s) these limitations were caused by the level of technological development at that time.

That was the best the world could offer then.

In 1927, ‘The Jazz Singer’ was the first sound film. Within a decade the production of silent films had ceased.

However in 1976 an American film SILENT MOVIE was produced. By that time sound movies were the norm. The film which was in color had the sound removed and replaced with intertitles instead of spoken dialogue.

Other silent movies followed.

They however were not much success.

It was an attempt to reverse development and advancement. Mel Brooks and 20th Century Fox attempted to take the world back by almost a century.

An attempt was made to see the present like the ancient. Silent Movies tried to see modern situations with old eyes.

My focus here is actually not Charley Chaplin or Mel Brooks. It is what they represent in Politics, Business and Everyday life today.

After achieving so much with the way things are, we are persuaded not to demand today’s performances in their actions. They want us to compare today’s events and performances with what it used to be in the past, when technology was not this advanced.

Instead of listening to the real dialogue, they still want to give us a narrator. We are being cajoled to think it was better to limit ourselves to guesses and conjectures.

That way the people will not even know what they know.

The real motive behind it is MASS DECEPTION.

Like in the Silent Movies, people should rather see the development in colour but must not understand the true dialogue.

Governments don’t want the people to measure them with modern barometers but old ones. That way their short comings will be eclipsed. Or so they think.

You hardly understand what the policy or priority of any government is today. All you see is Papparazzi and make belief. The narrator tells us what he wants us to hear. Government today is so much about propaganda and image making.

But, like with the Silent Movies, the scale is falling off the eyes of people and they are beginning to see beyond the glitz.

The real sound movies will soon hit the market.