nanook of the north | Richard Nilsen

I was once taken aback, talking with my young twin granddaughters about what movies they liked, that they refused, flat out, to consider any movie made in black and white. Not even a question. Jamais. Never.

For them, black-and-white meant antique, superannuated, something with no relevance to their lives. They wouldn’t even see a current movie if it was in black and white. Life was color; monochrome was irrelevant.

There are other disqualifications that some people maintain. “Read any good movies lately?” They won’t see a film with subtitles, which, of course, cuts out an entire half (at least) of all movie history and some of the greatest films ever.

But by far, the biggest disqualification for the majority of filmgoers is what are called silent movies — movies made from the invention of the medium through roughly 1930, when sound synchronization became the standard.

Without sound, dialog becomes disruptive title cards held motionless for long moments, long enough that the slowest readers in the audience can parse their way through; audio clues, such as traffic noises or train whistles are mute; and worse — actors have to act like semaphore signals to convey their thoughts and feelings. Silent movie acting seems grotesquely over-the-top, more like pantomime than anything we now consider proper acting.

There are other problems, too. In the earlier days of movie-making, frame speed was not standardized, and to complicate matters, most cameras were hand-cranked, which means that the idiosyncratic crank-timing of the cameraman could vary quite a lot. This meant that for decades, long after sound had taken over, and movies began showing up on TV, the old films were projected at the wrong speed, too fast, making everything herky-jerky.

And, because the studios that made those old films never thought of them as anything but disposable entertainment, there was no incentive to archive them or care for the old prints. Add to that, they were made with flammable nitrate film stock, which deteriorated over time, and that there were several devastating studio fires that consumed whole catalogs, what is left is often only a fossilized remnant of what the old films actually were. As a result, an estimated 70 percent of all the movies made before 1930 are lost. Ceased to be. Gone to meet their maker. Joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.

And what survived was seen most often in poorly made copies of copies, bleached out, scratchy, grainy and out of focus. As if silent film technology was roughly akin to the Stone-Age chipping of flint arrowheads.

But that is not what they were when they were made, as we have seen when film restoration has brought us clean prints of some of the more important movies from the era. The photography was as good as anything done currently. The motions of the actors, when projected at the proper speed seem less silly.

You can look at the development of cinema from its earliest beginnings in the 19th century as a constant advance, not only of technology, but of the esthetics of film. At first, a stationary camera just records a few things in front of it. Later, the camera learns how to move. Film learns to tell stories and directors figure out how to edit bits of film together to make those stories move faster and express more. Wholesale changes in blocking, acting, lighting, editing, camera angles and motion all add to the growing sophistication of the art. There are the traditional mileposts in this development: the close-up; the intercutting; the over-the-shoulder back and forth; the use of double-exposure; and of matting.

By the time sound came in, intermittently beginning in 1927 or so (the dates are hard to pin down, depending on how complete the process was and which competing technology was used), silent film had become a fully developed art form, capable of expressing a huge range of thought and emotion. In fact, the advent of sound caused more problems than it solved, and the constraints of microphones and movie-set noise, took away some of the expressive possibilities of the silents.

Cameras tended to stay still (they often had to be ensconced in stationary booths or sound-cancelling “blimps” so that the microphones wouldn’t pick up the noise of the machinery) and actors needed to stay still near the microphones. Films became more stagey and set-bound. Early sound films often looked more like recorded stage plays.

Worse, because sound made dialog possible, much was explained rather than shown and talkies became rather talky. The best continued the old dictum, “show, don’t tell,” but it became economically advantageous to let the tongues do the talking rather than the images.

Alfred Hitchcock, who had been making artistically sophisticated silent films, initially thought that “the silent pictures were the purest form of cinema,” and the first talkies were little beside “photographs of people talking.”

All this has been well covered by myriad books and videos about the history of Hollywood. But there is one aspect of silent films that has too often been neglected, and that is that they were never silent films.

During their era, movies were always accompanied by either a live orchestra playing in the pit, a pianist, or an organist. Major features usually had a bespoke musical score that was distributed along with the film, so that orchestras in the large theaters could play along with the movie. In smaller venues, a piano or organ reduction would be provided. For lesser films, music publishers provided regular cues — short bits of piano score describing certain types of action or emotion — for the in-house pianist to improvise from.

The process was very like the incidental music written — often by major composers — for stage plays. Mendelssohn’s music for Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Grieg’s for Peer Gynt, for instance. Several major composers, such as Camille Saint-Saens, also wrote scores for movies.

Or more apt, like the music that accompanied ballet. Tchaikovsky or Leo Delibes or Prokofiev would write music to order, according to the needs of a dance scenario. “I need three minutes of mazurka for Act 2,” the composer might be told, and would produce it on order. We think of composers being divinely inspired by their muses and pumping out symphonies, but really, they often made a living as subcontractors, part of the team that produced popular entertainment. Even Beethoven wrote incidental music and ballets.

So, the tradition of writing music for films was much like that for ballet. It would be silly to imagine Swan Lake with no music, only dancers. But nobody would ever call ballet, “silent theater.”

But the first time I ever saw The Birth of a Nation was at my college film series where it was run with no sound. I complained to the projectionist that he forgot to turn on the audio and he looked at me like I was an ignoramus. “It’s a silent film; there is no sound.” Yes, there is, and it was written for the movie by composer Joseph Carl Breil who created a three-hour-long musical score made up of adaptations of existing works by classical composers, new arrangements of well-known melodies, and original composed music. (The British Film Institute’s Blu-Ray restoration of the film includes Breil’s music). (Although, if you never get a chance to see Birth of a Nation and its promotion of racism and the Ku Klux Klan, you may be intellectually poorer, but your soul will be so much cleaner.)

It helps to keep the ballet model in mind when considering silent film. Movies developed together with the music that accompanied them, and we would appreciate them more if we saw them that way.

Of course, the basic level of appreciation is the story being told, and most movie-goers even in those early years, were there for the plot. Good over evil; love conquers all; the hero saves the maiden.

But we, watching now, should notice not just that surface level, but also how the movie was made: How the director uses a moving camera to advance the story; how the lighting underlines the mood of a scene; how the editing manages to keep us up-to-speed on parallel plot points, back and forth; how the close-up lets us into the mind of the actor.

And so, watching a silent film should be more like watching the dance. It is a different art form from sound film, and one that needs to be understood in its own way. The story drives the action in Swan Lake too, but we watch for the dancing and choreography.

I have a list of 10 silent films that demonstrate what the silent film can do. Recent film restorations have improved image quality, when a print can be struck from the original studio negative, and with restored musical scores, either from original sources, or new scores written in period style.

We’ll go from the easiest to understand and love to more adventurous films. In my experience, one of the best places to start is Buster Keaton’s Civil War film, The General.

The General

Keaton’s 1926 story is easy to follow, as Southern railroad engineer Johnny Gray spends most of the movie chasing a locomotive stolen by Yankee forces and then being chased by them. There are plenty of gags — Keaton was a genius with those — but also a comprehensible plot, easy to follow, and believable. Keaton’s direction is always clear, and with many exceptionally beautiful or intricate shots. The most expensive special effect shot of its time was later copied for The Bridge on the River Kwai, as Keaton has a train crashing off a burning bridge, followed by a dam breaking and a flood washing soldiers downriver. It’s a great film and for a wide audience. One of the great films of all times, silent or sound.

Metropolis

Fritz Lang’s 1926 sci-fi masterpiece has benefitted more than most from restoration. Seen previously in shortened versions, a new version has most of the missing footage returned so that story begins to make sense (even at its best, the plot never really made much sense). But it has some of the most stunning visuals ever put in front of a camera. It is a glorious film to watch, even if the acting sometimes seems maybe a smidge over the top. Despite that, it is also one of the greatest films of all time, and one of the most influential.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog

This 1927 Alfred Hitchcock thriller is a masterpiece of visual storytelling. Called the “first true Hitchcock film,” it plays with the fear raised by a Jack-the-Ripper style murderer in London and a mysterious lodger in a boarding house who may or may not be the killer. The film is chock full of Hitchcockian ticks, including a “wrong-man” plot, the obsession with blondes, and the plot-twist ending.

These three films offer little problem to the modern viewer and can be seen with little forgiveness needed for their lack of spoken dialog.

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The next three are milestones in technical experimentation and the invention of cinematic conventions that are in common use today

Battleship Potemkin

In 1925, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein told a story of the aborted 1905 rebellion through a version of the mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin. The film uses editing as fast as an MTV video to further the story, and inventing the montage. The section called “The Odessa Steps” still carries as much punch as anything ever made.

Napoleon

French filmmaker Abel Gance intended to make six films covering the life of Napoleon, but only finished the first. But it is five and a half hours long and uses many experimental techniques, putting his camera on a swing, or on the back of a galloping horse.

And in its climax, using three cameras and three movie screens to make a precursor version of Cinerama — huge widescreen images. It is an astonishing film for 1927.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

It sometimes seems as if Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc is entirely made up of close-ups of lead actress Maria Falconetti’s anguished face. But if proof was ever needed of the power of human expression, this movie is Exhibit A. It is emotionally overwhelming.

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The next three films are documentaries, made before documentary film became hamstrung by an inflexible puritan ethic (fooey on you, Frederick Wiseman). Some use recreations and re-enactments, but give us real information nonetheless.

Häxan

Häxan, from 1925, is a Swedish film that investigates the phenomenon of witchcraft through the ages. It was banned or censored in many places for its anticlericism, nudity, and depictions of depravity, but ultimately comes down on the side of modern understandings of schizophrenia, hallucination and bigotry to explain the witch stories. It is mostly filmed recreations by actors, but tells a real story.

Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life

From 1925, the story of Grass’s creation is as breathtaking as the story it tells of the annual migration of 50,000 of Iran’s Bakhtiari people across the vast Zagros mountain range with their cattle. Stunning landscapes and death-defying river crossings, all captured on film by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison (Cooper and Schoedsack later made King Kong). The filmmakers took the migration along with the tribespeople, and suffered all they did along with them. This is one of my favorite films of all time.

Nanook of the North

Three years earlier, Robert Flaherty made what many consider the first film documentary, when he took his camera to northern Canada to film the lives of Inuk native, Nanook (“The Great Bear”) and his family.

It shows us how they lived and how they survived. Purists now complain that some of the shots were staged and that Nanook was an “actor” (although he was a genuine Inuk native. But the ideas of documentary right-mindedness didn’t exist in 1922, and there is a genuineness in Flaherty’s film that many more virtuous documentaries cannot equal.

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Number 10 on my list is actually a group of films. One thing that silent film did immeasurably well is horror. German filmmakers in the 1920s were immersed in an Expressionistic milieu that gave us films such as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Golem and How He Came into the World. But Germany wasn’t the only place that worked out the magic of film images of the supernatural and spooky. Hollywood had its share, also.

Nosferatu

F.W. Murnau’s plagiarized version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula nearly was lost to history. Stoker’s estate sued over the film, which Murnau had not secured the rights to, and the court decided all copies of Nosferatu should be destroyed. Luckily, a copy survived and is now seen as one of the true masterpieces of silent film. All shadows and sharp angles, gothic castles and claw-like hands, it is a much spookier version of the story than 1931’s sound version with Bela Lugosi.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

With its Expressionist cityscapes, with nary a right angle to be seen, and with Conrad Veidt’s pasty-faced somnambulist, the film is an absolute feast of visual inventiveness. If you ever needed a picture of what insanity might look like from the inside, this film is it.

The Phantom of the Opera

All of the films I have discussed here are among the best made in the silent era. Phantom of the Opera, if seen merely as the result of film direction and writing, is rather ordinary. But its visuals are unforgettable. Lon Chaney’s skull-like make-up for the phantom, the Gothic underworld of the Paris Opera, and perhaps most of all, the Two-Strip Technicolor episode where the phantom descends the grand staircase of the opera house wearing the costume of the Mask of Red Death.

Visually stunning, if less than brilliantly told, the Phantom of the Opera is buried in the consciousness of its audiences. I doubt that the several remakes of the film or the eponymous musical would have ever existed if the original film hadn’t been so compelling.

This hasn’t been my list of the Top 10 (or 12) silent films. Such a list would have to include Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans; Greed; City Lights; The Big Parade; Pandora’s Box; The Last Laugh; Flesh and the Devil; Cabiria — and a host of other contenders. Nor are these just my favorite films. I have others among the silents, including The Lost World or Hell’s Hinges.

Nor have I listed any of the many silent short comedies — especially missing: the films of Chaplin, Arbuckle, Lloyd, Keaton, the Keystone Cops or Laurel and Hardy. They are familiar enough and require no special pleading from me.

But I have hoped to make the case for an entire era of cinema, and that it is its own artform, and not merely film manqué, waiting quietly to be perfected by Al Jolson.

Click on any image to enlarge

Call me Wordsworth.

When I was in my 20s, strapping and idealistic — i.e., an idiot — I lusted after this landscape. I knew it only in the photos in the Sierra Club coffeetable books, thinking how grand it would be to live in an alpine meadow in the Cascades, Sierras or in Alaska, with distant lightning-zag waterfalls dropping in a pencil-line a thousand feet down the face of a granite escarpment. I could feel the bracing air in my imagination.

The attraction was part a Longinian yearning for the sublime, for the vastness of the landscape; part of the attraction was its isolation, away from the ordinariness of daily life with all its people, some of whom might well be my boss. There was no TV in this idealized world; only bear and moose.

I am older now, still an idiot, and I can no longer feel that fervid longing, at least not directly, but I remembered it keenly visiting the mountains and glaciers of Alaska. They are vast, the air is ice on the skin and the vistas are the kind John Martin might paint.

The pianist Glenn Gould once made a radio show for Canadian listeners called “The Idea of North.”

For those of us south of his border, the idea of north is Alaska. Endless forests, grizzly bears, rock-cobbled rivers, salmon, snow and rime.

Alaska is an inaccessible place, where no interstates lead, and even its state capital cannot be reached except by air or sea. For most of us, Alaska is important precisely because we cannot get there; it is proof that there is still a moment on the planet that is not yet filled with highways, billboards, Nike ads and grinning tourists. For most of Alaska, to be seen is to be explored; it takes dedication, muscle and energy, just as it did for the Gold Rush prospectors who hiked over the Chilkoot Trail.

We think of Robert Service poetry or Jack London novels. Perhaps our idea of the frozen north comes from Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North,” or Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” In any case, it is a north that is still dangerous. A landscape that carries with it the final sense of the sublime: beauty that can kill us. And even if we survive, it is beauty on such a scale that our human minuteness shrivels our ambitions and makes us harbor cosmic thoughts.

Two hundred years ago, European art and literature was chockablock with the frozen Arctic. From paintings by Caspar David Friedrich to “Frankenstein,” it was icebergs and glaciers that told of the vastness and sublimity of nature. Make that Nature, with a Capital N.

The dark, stormy North was inaccessible and remote; humans were pismires in its vastness; danger lurked everywhere. Ice froze on the ship’s rigging and mariners had to chop it away with axes.

“We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed by their conflict.” — “Frankenstein”

Or, from “The Ricome of the Ancient Mariner”:

“And now there came both mist and snow,/ And it grew wondrous cold:/ And ice, mast-high, came floating by,/As green as emerald. … / It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,/ Like noises in a swound!”

As green as emerald? Rather, as blue as sapphire.

In College Fjord, the glacial ice is blackened at the margins with sooty dirt and rocks, but the central part — the “filet,” as you might call it — is pure and clean. It is there, in places where deep fissures in the ice let you see into the glacier, that the ice shows bright, clear blue. The color is brighter when the sun briefly shines on it. It is Tarheel blue, as bright as a new paint block in a watercolor set.

One of the vertical slices of the glacier has been worn through, leaving an icy natural bridge. In its donut hole, the blue is intense. Ice, it turns out is blue. It is not the mere reflection of the sky that makes it so — if proof be needed, there is no blue sky most of this day — but rather that the ice is not clear. Turns out, water is not clear, either. It really is blue, although so thinly colored that a glass of it looks transparent. Put enough of it together and the blue is apparent enough. And the ice made in this giant Frigidaire is also blue where it is pure enough, although much of the surface is roughed up with layers of snow, to make them white and glistening.

Crack and boom, and some more ice falls off the front of the glacial wall. Most of the calving involves an avalanche of small ice cubes and snow balls rather than the giant heaving chunks we see on the nature TV shows. The center of the glacier’s face is where most of the action is happening; a certain section is concave and its upper surface, overhanging its lower, keeps dropping bits like plaster falling off a wet ceiling. It crashes into the water in big ice slides and sends up waves that circle off toward the boat. They peter out into wide ripples before they reach us, so we can hardly notice them as they pass.

When a bigger chunk falls off, it drops below the surface and immediately pops back up, like a whale breeching. Sometimes, as it reappears, it also turns over on its back, like a restless sleeper, before settling back down into the water. Seabirds rush to the spot to seek food.

It was the north that attracted Amundsen, Nansen, Peary. Parkas of animal fur made their heads three times normal size and they walked about in a stiff-leg shuffle in the ice and snow. The sky was always gray and the air always frigid. Snow blew sideways.

It was the ice and isolation that drew Byron’s Manfred, Jack London’s White Fang, Robert Service’s Dan McGrew. In Finland, it is the snow and ice of Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” the thin, remote trombones of his Seventh Symphony.

The problem is, that for most Americans who venture to Alaska now, they do so on a cruise ship, eating rib roasts and sherry triffle, looking off the taffrail for the spout of a friendly whale, or the antics of a sea otter. The cruise industry has turned the sublime into Disney ride. Whee!

It can take some concentrated effort, but for anyone who wants to invest the psychic and emotional energy to do so, the Alaska of vast spaces and endless emptiness is still there. But unlike the days when leathery men packed mules to go across the passes, we have to make that journey more in our heads than on our feet. It is an act of imaginative will to see the skull beneath the skin, the rocky sublimity under the coating of easy tourism.

I went to Alaska to find the wilderness I fantasized about when I was 20. It was the allure of the Sierra Club coffeetable books, with their glossy photos of deep glacial valleys and snow-capped sierras. I imagined living on some Cascadian mountainside with mountain goats and bear grass.

Which brings us all back to Wordsworth and the “Intimations Ode.”

We gain a good deal as we accumulate experience like barnacles. We are stronger, less easily angered or driven to political excesses, and we certainly have learned something about love that we could never have guessed when our hearts merely wanted. But, we have lost a good deal, too.

“I know, where’er I go,/ That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.”