The Age of Silent Movies: When Silence Was Silver

I have often found myself hanging from the beams of a lofty ceiling or looking over a mountain top at the sprawling arms of a road. I have felt the warmth of a single candle flame and imbibed the golden hues that come off its light without being anywhere near it. Fall has set ablaze a forest in the neutrality of black and white and a deer has been rooted mid-stride with its ear to the distant rustle that only he and I can hear. Even a stone has at times willingly come to life in a single frame. My imagination has then indulgently followed the frenzied momentum of unassisted, raw human emotion and returned with the gifts of rich perspective. When such slideshows and more, entice me into their many dimensional journeys, I have made my own thoughts, dialogues and background scores as visions told me their stories. Such is the magic of silent films.

Sometimes refered to as the "Age Of The Silver Screen" this glorious chapter in the history of cinema blended two fundamental aspects of entertainment: story-telling and photography. There was a time when by a mere look, an actor evoked the very response that filmmakers now valiantly attempt to draw out of audiences world-wide. The keys of a piano aroused a gamut of emotions; curiosity, fear, drama, sorrow and of course there were the few merry notes of joy that added life to a tale. It is with good reason that beauty was defined then by the facial features, which so smoothly extracted such complicated moods.

Years later we now get to witness the age of home theatre systems pouring heated exchanges accompanied by soulful songs into our living rooms. I sometimes picture our senses scattered in different directions, as blaring music, stunning visual effects and dramatic dialogues each demand, a share of our enraptured psyches.

In 1896 India saw the advent of stories brought to life. Slowly the lit mouth of a purring projector transported mythology and regal tales to the eager eyes of an audience that had the vital creativity to cultivate the art beholded and the abundant culture from which to choose its many stories.

I have always been in support of beautifully crafted language. In fact the film industry of a nation is responsible for colorful phrases and tag lines that define a generation. In India, the popular Bambaiyya slang has been heavily influenced by films and brings rhythm to street-colloquy. Nonetheless, it is awe-inspiring to chronicle a time in the history of an art that braces the largest film industry in the world, when emotion and imagery were the only languages one needed to comprehend. Worthy of mention is India's earliest silent film, the classic Raja Harishchandra, that was released in 1913 and directed by Dada Saheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema.

Recently, Shiraz, a silent film made in 1928 was screened at a San Francisco Film Festival and upon reading the story all I could infer was that there was a time in Indian filmmaking when story-telling took precedence over glamor by quite a few notches. I dedicate this article to the pioneers of the movie industry, who first made entertainment palpable enough to be conveyed and to those, who through the art of simple visual stimuli reached out to audiences, irrespective of language.