The 1927 Effect

Posted by davidkalat on August 11, 2012

Conventional wisdom will tell you that the arrival of talkies killed off silent film, especially silent comedy. (This is, for example, the premise of The Artist, and a couple of generations earlier the premise of Singin’ in the Rain). I’ve been tilting at this windmill pretty much since I showed up on this board back in 2010, but I don’t think I’ve ever been properly systematic about organizing my counterargument. So, I intend to devote the next several weeks to exploring this moment in film history in some detail. It’s going to be story about F.W. Murnau and Harry Langdon, Charley Chase and Cary Grant, Howard Hawks and Mack Sennett—it’s going to build a bridge from Murnau’s Sunrise to Hawks’ His Girl Friday. It sounds like a sprawling mess, and maybe it will be, but in my mind’s eye this all ties together. We’ll see.

I am generally leery of absolutes, and the absolutist position on the transition to sound is deeply problematic.

If you want to say that The Jazz Singer killed off silent filmmaking, that’s not an outrageous position to take. But there have been stray anomalies here and there—The Artist and Silent Movie are obvious examples, but there are also an array of films whose makers digested the aesthetics of silent comedy and managed to make sound films in that tradition: Tati’s Playtime, Etaix’s Yo-Yo, Pixar’s Wall-E. Arguably, much of the realm of animated cartoons from the 1930s through the 1960s recapitulated silent comedy aesthetics in a raucus, noisy new style. Filmmakers like Blake Edwards or Jackie Chan self-consciously paid hommage to the silent comedies that inspired them, and did so in modernist films.

If you want to say that the great filmmakers of the era were stopped in their tracks by the transition to sound, well, that doesn’t quite hold water either. Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Langdon all continued to make movies without breaking their stride. It may be the popular consensus that their talkie era work was so diminished as to be incomparable to their silent greats, but that’s a matter of opinion, not fact.

Even if we were to agree that the talkie era work by Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon was of such diminished quality that it couldn’t be connected to their silent work, that still leaves Laurel & Hardy, Our Gang, and Charley Chase as silent era comedians who made the transition to talkies without missing a single step or changing their aesthetics at all. And then there’s the likes of the Three Stooges, whose work exists entirely on the talkie side but could easily have been done in the silent era without any changes.

What of directors like Leo McCarey, Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, who got their start in silent comedy but are best known for talkie comedies?

Basically, if you want to stake out an absolutist position on this point, you have to clutter your argument with asterisks and carefully draw boundaries around what films and filmmakers you’re willing to consider.

That being said, you can’t really take up a contrarian position either—to say the silent-era style slapstick comedy continued unchanged into the talkie era is clearly a nonsensical statement.

So let’s try softening the absolutist stance and see where it takes us: what if we just say that there were a set of comedy aesthetics associated with silent films that were prevalent and popular in the 1910s and 20s but a different set of comedy aesthetics associated with talkie films were prevalent and popular in the 1930s and 40s. That’s a lot of qualifying weasel words, but it’s an easier stance to defend—and phrasing it this way shifts the emphasis away from the technological shift and onto an aesthetic shift.

The technology was never the central story here anyway, and putting it at the center was a mistake.

Just imagine, as a thought exercise, that sound technology had been part and parcel of the movies since Day One—that when Fred Ott sneezed, we heard “A-choo!,” that when the workers filed out of the Lumiere factory we could hear them grumbling about their lousy jobs. This isn’t so much of a stretch, really-there are experimental talkies from this early period.

Would this have changed things so very much? I doubt it—the early history of cinema is dominated by forceful personalities, great visionaries whose pioneering work helped establish what the movies were and what they meant to audiences. And these people—Melies, Feuillade, Griffith, Porter, Sennett—were the people they were because of their peculiar idiosyncrasies and personal quirks. Had they been given an extra tool to play with, they wouldn’t have suddenly been different people or had different sensibilities. The trajectory of American slapstick followed the course that it did because Mack Sennett was an anarchist rebel who liked to ridicule authority and convention.

So let’s try the opposite thought experiment—what if movies stayed silent. What then? Suppose the Jazz Singer never sang—would silent comedy have lived on?

Again, the evidence does not support this theory. Audience tastes were moving away from silent slapstick even before the advent of sound. The aesthetic shift we noted above was underway on its own. This aesthetic shift happened to coincide with—and was benefitted by—sound technology, but it wasn’t dependent on it.

And we can see this aesthetic shift in action, well before The Jazz Singer, if we take a look at Harry Langdon’s Three’s a Crowd.

For those of you playing along at home, Three’s a Crowd has been tagged with the infamy of being the film that tanked Harry Langdon’s career. Never mind that this myth is easily debunked—the fact that Three’s a Crowd is a disorienting and deliberately off-putting experiment has always singled it out for criticism. It isn’t hard to imagine that something like this would destroy one’s career.

But then again, all of Langdon’s films are weird creations, and he shot into pop superstardom in 1926 and 1927 on the basis of stuff that was really quite strange, so Three’s a Crowd’s quirks should be measured against that benchmark, by which it doesn’t come off nearly as bizarre as if you compare it to, say, anything made by anybody else.

According to Frank Capra, the problem with Three’s a Crowd were rooted in Langdon’s misconceived direction of the film—an error that existed because, well, because Langdon went and made it without Capra. Capra had been with Langdon since 1925 and had been a key creative collaborator on Langdon’s most acclaimed works. But fundamental personality clashes drove them apart and Langdon fired Capra; Three’s a Crowd was the first feature he made without any Capra involvement of any kind.

Capra needed to insulate his ego from the humiliation of being fired, and so told the story that he was the source of all Langdon’s success—and by extension, Langdon’s fall from popularity was attributable to Capra’s absence. Mind you, Capra told this story after Langdon had passed away, after he himself had become a Hollywood fixture, and during a period where access to Langdon’s films was virtually impossible—Capra’s version of the story had no one to dispute it.

Three’s a Crowd does not appear to have been treated as a flop in its day. Critical reception appears to have been positive, and its box office performance not too far off the mark. The perception of it as a failure developed later, in hindsight, in large part due to Frank Capra’s sour grapes retconning.

To the extent that Three’s a Crowd did fall short of commercial expectations can be explained by a variety of factors–1927 saw something of a Langdon glut. When he quit Mack Sennett’s studio to strike out into features at Warner Brothers/First National, Sennett still had a handful of unreleased Langdon films waiting in the queue. Looking to capitalize on someone else’s investment, Sennett sat on them until Langdon’s First National features started to come out, then released them. And these were now pretty stale items—made in 1925 by a less experienced comedian, juxtaposed with his latest and most daring works. This may well have tested audience patience to the limits.

But here’s the thing: focusing on these minutiae is causing us to miss the big picture. As long as the argument stays focused on “was Three’s a Crowd a flop because Capra was fired” or “were audiences tired of Langdon’s man-baby character,” we are ignoring the fact that across the board, and all at the same time, the great silent comedians hit rocky shores together.

In the case of Harry Langdon, we have an intensely personal and daringly experimental work—Three’s a Crowd—underperform at the box office, and in response Langdon retreats to familiar material and makes The Chaser, a more pedestrian and conventional comedy. His career was in a tailspin, and he went from comedy superstar to being largely marginalized to being a has-been. (Let me be clear: I think Langdon’s late period sound era work is wonderful, but we’re talking here about commercial success measured on the ground, in the day).

The same thing happened to Harold Lloyd—his personal, perfectionist project was The Kid Brother, the recipient of more gag-writing and cinematic effort than anything he’d made before it. Yet it grossed a mere $2.4 million, less than his previous For Heaven’s Sake. Lloyd was so disappointed by this he allowed the film to fall into complete obscurity for the next 30 years—unscreened, unrevived (although it is today hailed as a masterpiece). Having been bitten on his personal project, he followed it up with Speedy—which got an Oscar nomination and rave press, but grossed even less than Kid Brother. In strictly commercial terms, Lloyd was on a slide. He never again made a movie now considered to be great, and never again made a silent film.

Let’s look at Buster Keaton. It’s no surprise that The General was Keaton’s personal perfectionist project, which he spent nearly a million dollars making. When it opened, it was panned by the New York Times, Variety, and Life—critical opinion at the time held that Raymond Griffith’s Hands Up! handled similar material much better. Gauging audience reaction is a bit tricky—many texts, including Tempest in a Flat Hat, report that the box office was poor, but there are other sources that contradict this. But the critical drubbing is easily documented, and Keaton’s response is also undeniable: he retreated to familiar material of College, a less ambitious work.

And what of Charlie Chaplin? Following the success of The Gold Rush, he embarked on The Circus. David Robinson described this as “a production dogged by persistent misfortune. The most surprising aspect of the film is not that it is as good as it is, but that it was ever completed at all.” Chaplin suffered a nervous breakdown, quit for 8 months, and then never even mentioned the film at all in his autobiography. Like Lloyd and The Kid Brother, he let it quietly vanish and didn’t revive it for many years.

The Circus was, like the General, an uneconomical production marked by excessive spending, which set the bar very high for it to be considered a profitable success. Despite strong reviews it performed disappointingly; although it won an Oscar (beating out Speedy) it failed to surpass the box office returns of The Gold Rush.

Chaplin retreated even more than his peers, and didn’t make another film until 1931.

Have you spotted the pattern?

All four of the top comedy stars of silent slapstick—Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd—made expensive, experimental, personal films in 1927. All four of these movies were received in ways that disappointed and demoralized their makers. All four of the filmmakers responded by pulling back, making less ambitious follow-ups in 1928 (or in Chaplin’s case, not even making a film at all). (While I’m putting in parenthetical asides about Chaplin, I need to attend to a matter of pedantry: technically The Circus came out in January 1928, not 1927. But c’mon—January 1928. That’s awfully close to 1927. And the film was delayed due to Chaplin’s breakdown. I don’t think I’m on thin ice lumping it in with the other 1927 features).

In other words, the audience reaction to these films was consistent. Slapstick comedy from the very best practitioners operating at the height of their powers, making the films for which they would be best remembered and for which they expected to be the proudest, was dismissed. You simply cannot come to the end of 1927 and believe that the future of silent slapstick comedy looks promising or bright.

Audiences had spoken with their pocketbooks and the world of American screen comedy was going to have to respond by recalibrating what it offered in the way of movie comedy—an aesthetic shift was signaled, well before The Jazz Singer was even a gleam in Warner Brothers’ collective eyes.

Meanwhile, over at Western Electric laboratories, engineers were tinkering around with ways to record sound on discs. . . but that’s another story.

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27 Responses The 1927 Effect

Posted By vp19 : August 11, 2012 9:19 am

Fascinating entry, and I eagerly await the followups — but you’re only examining one side of silent screen comedy. What about the female-oriented romantic comedies from the likes of Marion Davies, Clara Bow, Colleen Moore and Constance Talmadge? Did they have similar commercial problems at the time (1927), or did the sound transition more directly affect them? (Connie never made a talkie, of course, but Bow, Moore and Davies all did, with mixed aesthetic results.)

Posted By jgordner : August 11, 2012 3:40 pm

Doesn’t the fact that the experimental movies failed, and so the comedians retreated to more familiar projects show that audiences didn’t want am evolution of silent comedy, not that they were tired of silent comedy altogether?

What percentage of experimental movies today see overwhelming box office success? The mainstream doesn’t like experiments.

Posted By davidkalat : August 11, 2012 3:48 pm

@vp19: I actually haven’t seen enough of those films to be able to comment intelligently. Based on your question I’ll make it a priority to delve into and return to in future posts, but to be honest or isn’t a part of the discussion at hand. But I always live being introduced to new movies, do thanks for giving me a project!

@jgordner: I think those movies were experimental only within an existing context of silent comedy and slapstick traditions. You’re right that mainstream audiences are typically cold to daring works when they first emerge, and are better appreciated in hindsight, but the point remains that to anyone standing on the ground in 1927, you wouldn’t conclude that the world needed any more GENERALS or GOLD RUSHes.

Posted By Juana Maria : August 11, 2012 7:01 pm

I actually love many silent films,not all of them of course. It is the same with talking pictures. In the case of those who are hard of hearing or deaf,silent pictures have a different meaning than those with excellent hearing. I know this from personal experience…I know I write I am multi-lingual,I am. However,I have hearing loss in my right ear,my righjt ear drum burst when I was 3 yrs. old. So,silent or sound,in English or any language,film captures my imagination! Which may I say I have a very vivid imagination! I liked a film years ago called “Silent Movie”. It was very funny,no one talked except the famous mime who did a cameo appearance! I know it had Paul Newman too. That is itself is reason to watch that picture! As for classic silent films,yes I am a fan!! There are a lot great examples here on TCM! Bye!

Posted By Brian : August 12, 2012 6:01 am

It seemed like with slapstick, less became more as they evolved into to the two reelers. arguably the perfect format for that particular type of comedy. I’d love to see TCM devote a day to the shorts of L & H, Todd/Pitts/Kelly, Edgar Kennedy and so many others.

Posted By Emgee : August 12, 2012 7:53 am

“You simply cannot come to the end of 1927 and believe that the future of silent slapstick comedy looks promising or bright.”

But why then did Laurel and Hardy make their best work IMO in the talking Thirties, and did their contemporaries indeed pretty much fail to reach the heights they had in the Twenties?
Was slapstick really dead, or was it that both Chaplin and Lloyd, as well as Keaton, were too artistically ambitious to please a mass audience?

Posted By Stacia : August 12, 2012 8:10 am

Interesting points, and like VP I’m keen to read more.

My only comment would be about your aside regarding the box office returns for The General: My own experience is that even contemporaneous reviews and articles are contradictory, let alone current texts. Movie studios often kept terrible records in the silent era (I’m lookin’ at you, Mack Sennett) and I recall people who had compiled some vintage exhibitor forms practically chewing their foot off from contradictions about film popularity. So I’m not completely sold on the idea that one can declare audience tastes as X when X can barely be defined… but I am absolutely willing to have my mind changed!

Posted By robbushblog : August 12, 2012 1:15 pm

Could these bold artistic failures of 1927 be compared to the overindulgent pet projects of the film school generation from the late 70′s and early 80′s? Could both groups have fallen prey to their personal quests to further expand beyond the formerly rigid constraints, which made them popular in the first place?

Ambition can seem offputting to those on the periphery, but in the cases of Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton it paid off over time. Those failures of 1927 have come to be called classics. I think The General, The Circus and The Kid Brother are all great movies. Am I just smarter than audiences of 1927 (and early 1928)? No. Will the film school generation’s missteps (Sorcerer, Heaven’s Gate, New York, New York, Apocalypse Now, etc.) be much more appreciated by future audiences than they were at the time of their original releases? Some have already begun the transition to becoming appreciated.

I think that you can only carry the audience along with you for so long. If you tweak a known formula the chance is they won’t like it. If you stick with a well-worn formula for too long they tire of it.

Along with this discussion of the death of silent comedies we could also ask “What happened to the western?” The answer to both could possibly be: “Tastes change”. I think you may be on the right track, David.

Posted By Deron : August 12, 2012 1:33 pm

Just out of curiosity — who is staking this absolutist position you’re arguing against?

Posted By davidkalat : August 12, 2012 5:03 pm

Who’s staking out the absolutist position that I’m arguing against? Why, paper tigers of course. They’re the easiest to argue against!

Posted By Deron : August 12, 2012 6:26 pm

So you more or less admit that you’re constructing a non-argument? That is, you’re giving us a history lesson couched as part of a debate that no one, other than yourself, is actually having. I guess your claim to be “tilting at windmills” wasn’t entirely ironic, then.

Posted By Tom S : August 12, 2012 6:59 pm

He’s constructing this argument as part of a long term, ongoing dialog (if you look through just the Movie Morlocks history, there are maybe a dozen posts about it,) and it’s certainly not received wisdom that the distinctions between silent and sound cinema are rooted more in the prevailing trends than in technological development.

The assumption that the new technology changed everything is so deep rooted that, as it says in this very article, you can see it operating in movies that are about the silent era, like The Artist and Singing in the Rain- both of which bear a narrative in which something is very very popular, then BAM sound comes along and it becomes passe overnight. That’s practically always the narrative.

Posted By Deron : August 12, 2012 8:14 pm

Tom, to point to The Artist and Singing in the Rain as part of a “narrative” about the history of silent v. sound film is problematic to say the least. They weren’t works of historiography, they were fictional narratives that used the transition to sound as a dramatic linchpin or backdrop.

Frankly, the new technology did change a lot: it made Warner Bros. one of the major film studios (albeit not as powerful as MGM or Paramount), it made possible a different kind of screen comedy and thus introduced a need for different kinds of writers and performers (screwball comedies would not have been possible in silent cinema), etc. The author’s argument that some of the great silent slapstick comics saw their careers hit rocky patches or even downturns just before sound broke is not especially controversial, either — and nor is the recognition that several filmmakers who flourished in the sound era got their start in the silent era; in addition to Sturges and Capra, one might add Borzage, Ford, Hitchcock, DeMille, Fleming….

In other words, it seems to me that the author is taking the slimmest of evidence for a “conventional wisdom” and attempting to mount a counter-narrative to that slimly supported “conventional wisdom.” The author is certainly right in much of what he says; I just don’t see that it goes against the grain in the way that he says it does.

Posted By davidkalat : August 12, 2012 8:53 pm

I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I said when the absolutist position was a paper tiger–to the extent there are specific histories I am arguing against, they were mostly written by Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, who very eloquently articulated a position that the emphasis on dialogue comedy killed an interest in “business” as they termed it, and consigned their brand of silent comedy to the scrapheap. I do think that this position has been generally picked up by subsequent writers and historians and that the appearance of the theme in The Artist in Singin in the Rain both reflects this and perpetuates it to new generations–a lot of people see those movies who don’t spend a lot of time studying film history. And fair enough, if what I’m saying this week isn’t as discordant as I implied, then I suppose that’s a good thing.

Posted By Stacia : August 12, 2012 10:40 pm

I don’t think it’s all that problematic, Deron. As David pointed out, silent film stars talked openly and frequently about how talking pictures changed everything, usually for the worse. And while those films you listed weren’t necessarily presented as historically accurate, the cultural idea of silents being ridiculous and ruining careers (SITR, Sunset Blvd., The Artist) absolutely had to have been a common cultural belief. The films would not have worked unless the audience came to the film with that knowledge already; I’d say that undeniably counts as “common knowledge.”

It’s not particularly difficult to see why the idea has been so widely accepted. When you realize all the careers that ended, how people like Karl Dane and John Gilbert were affected, how silent films were treated (i.e. basically thrown away), and the huge changes in filmic culture between 1927-1930, it makes a reductionist kind of sense to say that silent films and filmmakers were “killed off” by the talkies.

If we’re being honest here, and I suspect we are, I find it rather odd that someone would say this was not conventional wisdom.

Posted By Deron : August 12, 2012 11:47 pm

Silent film stars who have been dead for forty to fifty years determine the conventional wisdom? Two of the three films we can point to as exemplifying this conventional wisdom are fifty to sixty years old? If we’re being honest here, and I suspect we are, “conventional” and “convenient to the argument” seem to be synonymous here.

I’m a film academic, so maybe my frame of reference is different. All the same, I don’t see how David is really challenging anything. No one, so far as I can tell, would argue that the introduction of sound technology changed a lot and no one would argue that silent film form continued to influence cinematic aesthetics. The industry certainly transitioned to sound films quickly but that doesn’t explain why Chaplin, Keaton, et al. failed in their last pre-sound films, and those failures don’t explain the quick conversion to sound or the general audience’s enthusiasm for synchronized sound films. And the failures of those films certainly don’t indicate a general distaste for slapstick comedy. And, while we’re here, the fact that films were destroyed doesn’t by itself indicate the studios suddenly hated — hated — silent comedies; silent films were routinely destroyed for several reasons, including recycling and general disinterest.

It just seems to me that David is taking two contributing factors in the transition to sound and setting them against each other for the sake of an essay. If he were to argue that 1926/1927 was a watershed period for silent slapstick comedy — that innovative slapstick films struggled to find an audience — that would be enough for an interesting essay. I guess I’m just having a hard time understanding why this particular windmill looks like a giant in need of vanquishing.

Posted By Stacia : August 13, 2012 12:06 am

So you’re saying this may have been conventional wisdom decades ago, but no longer qualifies? I think The Artist demonstrably throws a big, over-polished, comically large wrench into that theory, as does the continued relevance of SITR and Sunset Blvd., two of the most currently popular and accessible classic American films.

And a hearty “So what?” to David taking two ideas and pitting them against each other for the sake of argument. I don’t agree that is what he’s doing, but even if he is, that’s not an inherently bad thing. As an academic, surely you are aware of the benefits of this sort of exploration of ideas and encouragement of a dialogue. Instructing David on what is or is not worthy of discussion as though this was tangible, solid fact and not a matter of great subjectivity seems pointless. Talk about tilting at windmills! Who knows, an interesting idea or new perspective can be born from this discussion, and that alone would make it more than worthwhile.

Posted By Deron : August 13, 2012 1:12 am

No, I’m not saying it might have been conventional wisdom decades ago: I’m saying that to cite three films, two of which were made sixty years ago, and two silent film comedians who died in the 1960s as evidence of “conventional wisdom” is silly, to be frank.

As an academic, I can say that we generally want our ideas to be supportable; we might take an unconventional or even counter-intuitive approach to a subject, but we wouldn’t just say “Hey, everything you knew is wrong!” and expect it to be taken at face value. What David has done here is take two non-opposing strands of thought and present them as though they were opposing, and that one of the strands is “conventional wisdom.” Hell, if he were to have written “An under-appreciated aspect of the transition to sound is the apparent decline in popularity of silent slapstick comedy,” then this would be a well written, thoughtful essay. But he set the whole thing up as a reasoned response to an absolutist position that no one has. Heaven forfend that someone point that out.

Posted By Stacia : August 13, 2012 3:40 am

Well, Deron, it seems goalposts have been practically flying all over the field over the last several replies. First, you took David’s obvious sarcasm as an admission of guilt. When that didn’t pan out, you accused David of claiming SITR and The Artist were “historiographies.” When that also did not pan out, suddenly your reasoning was that these films were too old — well, The Artist is a relatively new film, but you prefer to only talk about SITR and Sunset Blvd., because those are older movies which fit into your claim that they are too old to matter in any real cultural sense. Same with the first-hand quoted opinions of people who were in the industry during the transition that David mentioned; per you, those opinions don’t matter because those who uttered them died in the 1960s. (Lloyd, by the way, died in 1971.)

That simply does not follow. Further, I’m having a tough time understanding how someone who has allegedly studied film could possibly claim that the idea of silents being killed by talkies is not “common knowledge.” No one is saying that this common knowledge is true — we’re all adults here and we all know common knowledge is often no such thing, and from what I gather, David himself is saying that.

Also, I’m not sure how anyone who is truly in film academia would believe it’s not worth listening to something said “sixty years ago.” You are deliberately throwing out the opinions of Keaton and Lloyd, two stars who worked in the industry and experienced the transition first hand because … why? Because they died 50 years ago? It’s impossible do research if that’s how you feel about contemporaneous, first-person remarks from well-known sources.

Posted By Deron : August 13, 2012 12:45 pm

Stacia, I’m not moving goalposts, I’m responding to the arguments and suggestions put forth:

1. I didn’t take David to be sarcastic alone — I took it as a sarcastic admission that he didn’t really have any “absolutist” to name.

2. Several people here, yourself included, pointed to The Artist, Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard as evidence of, if not an absolutist position, then certainly conventional wisdom. I said those were slim reeds on which to make such an argument because (a) they’re movies taking dramatic license and should not be treated as histories or exemplars of the thought of any given time period; (b) two of three films are old enough that it is problematic to assert they shape any sort of modern conventional wisdom, especially when no evidence (other than their very existence) is presented to demonstrate they continue to shape modern conventional wisdom; (c) three films does not a conventional wisdom make.

3. The same goes for citing two people who felt their careers were ruined because sound film undermined their style of comedy: (a) two (or three, or four) people is not enough; (b) their distance in time makes it difficult to identify them as shaping a current conventional wisdom. But thank you for pointing out that Lloyd died in 1971; that decade makes all the difference.

4. I know very well the claim that silents were killed by talkies; I teach it. The point here is that David is suggesting an absolutist position that doesn’t exist; it is quite possible that the introduction of sound technology came at a time when slapstick comedies encountered rough going at the box office and that sound technology shifted film aesthetics away, to some extent in any event, from what Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, et al. excelled at. No absolutist position that I know of would suggest that boom sound arrives and all that silent stuff was done, end of story, full stop.

5. Finally, don’t put words in my mouth: I never said that Keaton and Lloyd should be thrown out — I’m just saying they don’t, by themselves, prove what you or David apparently want them to. I do archival work, I quote people from 100 years ago — I’m just very careful about how I use those quotes and what they can tell us. As David himself points out regarding Frank Capra, people have self-serving motives when writing their memoirs; that Keaton, Lloyd, or a fictional character like Norma Desmond, made some claim about the transition to sound certainly should not be taken as proof that everybody believed that claim as the truth or staked some absolutist position based on it.

Again, go and look at my first post: it asks David to name who he thinks takes such an absolutist position; his response, which is basically no response, is that “paper tigers” are easier to argue against. Sarcastic or not, it’s close to an admission that no one really takes such an absolutist position. Anyone who has studied the period knows that a lot of reasons explain the industry’s sudden movement, the need for adaptation of styles, the need for the introduction of new styles. Thus my statement that were he to simply not make claims about “absolutists,” this would be a much stronger essay.

Perhaps the windmills at which I tilt are blogs that don’t display the kind of argument or evidence I think they should. On the other hand, this is also the kind of site that my students turn to when looking for film history commentary. In fact, a former student sent me the link to this article (and I’m sure you’re all wishing that had never happened).

Posted By Tom S : August 13, 2012 1:26 pm

So what exactly comprises your burden of proof for conventional wisdom? You are evidently unsatisfied with firsthand evidence from two of the three people most associated with silent comedy, and you are unsatisfied with examples wherein the idea is used as a ‘convention’, as a backdrop that the viewer at home is unlikely to question.

Kalat is not necessarily arguing with some specific academic, he is arguing with the received wisdom that the overall narrative of film history entails- and that history is nearly always shown as technology driven, where movies go from silent to sound to color to cinemascope and so on. That’s how it is in the Muppet history of film that they show in Universal Studios, in every movie that shows the coming of sound within it, the stories people tell about the silent days, and so on and on.

Moreover, this is a really stupid argument, because literally the only thing you’re taking issue with is the fact that Kalat brought up the word absolutist. It’s also pretty obnoxious to keep bringing up your own position in academia, as though that gives your argument more validity.

Posted By robbushblog : August 13, 2012 1:38 pm

I’m just enjoying this whole conversation.

Posted By Emgee : August 13, 2012 3:30 pm

I wonder what Chaplin and Keaton would make of all this academic swordfighting over their movies. “Ah. Recognition at last!” or “Lighten up, folks. All we did was try and make funny movies.”
Probably “Glad you like them now; wish they did back then….”

Posted By DBenson : August 13, 2012 4:50 pm

The films that reign today as classics have a certain timelessness in their content, so we still “get” them as they were intended. “The General” certainly doesn’t demand a familiarity with the 1920s, or even much knowledge of the Civil War. Everything you need to know is there on the screen.

Everybody else’s best-regarded comedies are similarly self-explanatory despite the Model Ts and telephone booths. Comedies that hinge on social mores, current fads or other contemporary matters are a bit dicier. “Blotto” doesn’t really make sense unless you know about Prohibition; if you do, it’s a riot.

Keaton’s “The Cameraman” opens with a montage of fearless newsreel photographers at work; I suspect that little touch has a great deal to do with why the movie still plays so well for general audiences who’ve never heard of a newsreel. The moment the newsreel folk burst into Buster’s life we don’t have to puzzle out what’s happening. We’ve just been shown who they are and what they do.

With Langdon, I suspect “The Chaser” suffers today because it’s riffing on some current trends or movies now unknown to us (aside from that perennial favorite, liberated women who henpeck their husbands). You really have to stretch to think he’s struggling to achieve Chaplin-style poignancy .

Posted By Deron : August 13, 2012 5:02 pm

Well, Tom, you’ve certainly provided more evidence for conventional wisdom than anyone else here has, though I would still say that the Muppets aren’t exactly a solid source. (And I love the Muppets. Menah menah.)

Some histories present technological change as the driving force in film history — they’re called technological histories. However, not all do, and they’re not all meant to be exhaustive or absolute… which is how David positioned his argument, which is what led me to ask him who he saw as an absolutist. Apparently that was a bad thing for me to have done.

And I haven’t used my position in academia to make my position more valid; I used it first to say I don’t see much evidence for the absolutist position — though maybe I should have been more explicit that when I asked David who he saw as representing the absolutist position that he himself quite clearly identified, I was open to learning about that evidence — and then to indicate why I might be concerned about people accepting this essay’s assertions about absolutist positions.

However, I think I get the point. It was my mistake to not take the explanations of two former silent stars as evidence of a widespread common sense about the transition from silent film, and it was my mistake to not take three movies (and don’t want to forget the theme park ride!) as evidence of a widespread common sense about the transition from silent film. And it was my mistake to treat David’s clearly thoughtful, carefully constructed essay (and I mean every word of that; there is no snark there) as something more than a guy chatting with his friends on a tcm site.

In retrospect, I should have mentioned my appreciation for what he did accomplish and then ask the question about the absolutism that he frames his argument with. (And let’s be honest: he does that; if you think I make too much of it, fine, but it is more or less the gambit of this article.) So apologies for that and for any hurt feelings, and for making Tom deal with things that he feels are beneath him.

Posted By Stacia : August 13, 2012 6:41 pm

Heaven forfend that someone point that out.

In fact, a former student sent me the link to this article (and I’m sure you’re all wishing that had never happened).

Apparently that was a bad thing for me to have done.

An academic and a martyr, ladies and gentlemen!

Posted By Jenni : August 15, 2012 9:45 am

Deron-I actually enjoyed your points and am glad that you brought them up. Stacia, please lighten up! Lastly, I viewed The Artist last week and thought it a wonderful film. Glad that it did so well at the Oscars.

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