Here's part one (of two) of the talk I gave.
Before I began, I started by showing this three-minute clip:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ERG05nOLKGB0btU5sThc5QzfrfF0y41k/view
And then:
At our previous Reel Adventures my focus has been on why directors made certain choices and what we might learn by looking deeper at those choices. Today we also ask why. But we turn the focus on you. Why, just maybe, you, or any of us, should watch and care about silent films in 2025?
It’s 2025. Nearly 100 years after the release of The Jazz Singer, the film that’s often considered the first “talkie”. So shouldn’t we just move on? Why look back? Why watch and care about silent films? For that matter, why watch and care about anything that isn’t 21st century?
Hopefully most, if not all of you enjoyed The Kid and maybe you already do care about silent films so I’m preaching to the choir. But as you leave here tonight and talk to others about silent film, hopefully some of what I’m about to say you can store in your back pocket and pull it out when it might be useful.
As I’ve said to you numerous times now, film - like literature, painting, opera, and sculpture - is an artform. It is a medium that began in 1895 that is now in its 130th year.
What I’m suggesting tonight then should not be new to most of you. I mean we don’t say we shouldn’t care about our ancestry or history that predates us. In fact, we say the opposite. We have museums like this very one where we’re sitting, that preserve the past and teach us about it so we can take lessons from it for the present.
So then, shouldn’t we have some of the same type of curiosity about silent film? I mean, they are the original films. The way all films were for the first 32 years of cinema’s 130 years.
Why then are so many people dismissive when it comes to silent films?
END OF PART 1
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