Day 19: SILENCE!

Today Maren chose Film.

We haven't yet done film, so I thought we'd start our study of film at the beginning--silent movies!

We found a series of Charlie Chaplin films on Netflix and watched one called "The Rink."

It was hilarious! And CLEAN! And apparently people at the beginning of the 20th century didn't read very quickly, because the word placards (You know, when they stop the film to show what someone is saying or give some narration on a beautifully decorated placard that was set up in front of the camera?) were kept on the screen long enough to read them 5 or 6 times.

As we watched we also talked about how the music would usually be played live by a band or an organist or a pianist while the movie played.

When I was a kid there was a restaurant near my home in Salt Lake City called Pipes and Pizza. You'd order your pizza, sit down, and watch silent movies while a live organist played this amazing old-fashioned organ that was set up on a big pedestal at one end of the room. Very cool. Here's a picture of the restaurant at Flicker: Pipes and Pizza Photo. Notice the added feature of the windows through which to view the organ pipes, and the old-fashioned belt-driven ceiling fans.

We also talked about how the first silent films were an offshoot of the Vaudeville stage tradition, so the acting was very gregarious, the makeup gaudy, the sets simple and straightforward. Early films were really nothing more than stage productions on film.

Buster Keaton, on the other hand, made some huge strides in changing that. In his film The General, Keaton takes his crew on location and plants the camera on a moving train.

The history of the early filmmakers is fascinating. Charlie Chaplin and others were instrumental in the formation of United Artists that began as a group of independent filmmakers who, in 1919, wanted to support greater freedom in their art rather than be swallowed up by the controls of the Studio system, which was already growing very early in the century. In fact, the term "The inmates are taking over the asylum," came from the head of Metro Pictures who said it of Chaplin's group and UA.

United Artists today is a subsidiary of MGM. Sad.

But that's all boring if you're a 7-year-old.

It's boring if you're 12, too, apparently. *sigh*

But we do have a new fan of Charlie Chaplin in the house.