To start this blog-strand off, I'm going to describe couple of recognizable classic film examples to go with my current (night) train of thought.
 
2001: A Space Odyssey ¦ Stanley Kubrick ¦ MGM/Warner Bros ¦ 1968

  • A bone is thrown up, slow motion. 
  • The blue Technicolour of a Super-Panavision 70 frame tilts up with the spinning bone. 
  • Gravity takes control. 
  • The revolution slows, it peaks, and starts coming down again. 
  • The frame tilts back and tracks to follow. 
  • A cut. 
  • The film jumps a million years in 1/24 of a second. 
  • The sky blue is now space-black and the bone is a satellite. 
  • Debussy joins and we waltz among the stars for a while. 
  • Nothing is said.

Lawrence of Arabia ¦ David Lean ¦ Columbia Pictures ¦ 1962 

  • A match held upright is burning down just left of center. 
  • The action lies on shallow plane, with everything behind out of focus. 
  • We are expecting the match to burn all the way down, but it won't. 
  • The blonde head of Peter O'Toole occupies the far right of the frame. 
  • He looks with his Technicolor blues at the flicker of flame. 
  • We look as well. 
  • He blows. 
  • A cut. 
  • The screen is divided by a dark fiery line. 
  • The focus is set hard right to infinity, leveled low one quarter horizon to three quarters gold rumble of sunrise. 
  • Maurice Jarre (father to Jean-Michel) and his brass section start to get in on the act. 
  • The sun slowly rises. 
  • Other instruments join the dawn chorus. 
  • Nothing is said. 

 
Common ground

"A cut."
Film's unique quality is its ability to manipulate our perception of time. Allowing an illusory 4 dimensions of creative space to fit in a 2D frame no different in size and orientation to a big old fresco. It's very simple. Editing, the choice of what to show and when, is what defines every single thing that anyone will ever watch. From a 2,000 shot megabusterboxgangofficebang to some half hour home movie shot in one continuous record. The other elements of motion picture production all have a direct companion in other arts and crafts. Of course we could be analogous and say that film editing resembles literary editing in some way, or that it can be likened to sculpture...but that's not the same as it being directly taken from another expressive form, in the way that cinematography is from photography/painting, acting from theater and writing from, well, writing. It's basic culture/art theory stuff and easy to deal with. When the element of time is manipulated to produce a certain effect, at a certain place in a film experience, it connects cognitively in a way that nothing else can, because it is the forms defining trait.


"Nothing is said" 
Then, importantly for this blog and blogs thereafter...there is...the silence. Or rather; the lack of dialogue and the highly specific use of music in the scenes directly following the cuts. Such moments occur regularly in great films from all around the world and throughout the 120 years of film's existence. In them you have a moving image and music/sound that augments that moving image in such a way that the effect is both appreciable as narrative and as idea. It transcends the basic story-plane of most consumable art and it makes some wider associative pattern emerge, linking primal trio of light, sound and thought. The two film examples I began with are "classic", popular, talking films, they contain dialogue (Lawrence more so than 2001) that is replayed in synchronization with actors lips moving on screen. That is a tool for the telling of stories, for fluffing emotions and for keeping things easy to understand, through a constant grounding in aquasi-realist-pact whereby if you see someone, you must  also be able to hear them. In a transverse rule of diminishing guitar solos, the accompanying soundtrack must be careful not to tread on the toes of the structural duplicity of pacing and emoting. 

Don't get me wrong 
I don't dislike talkies, that is not the point. The point is that I feel so disappointed at what they are and aren't that I have questions like- What cinema would be like now, had it not been for this dialogue fetish? What if there was a clearer consumer demarcation line between talking pictures and films? What if today our Talking Pictures were viewed as a kind of steroid version of an audio-book, and The Film was something different, something that hadn't stopped evolving in 1927? Talkies had to happen, they were a logical step, but were they an errant mutation? Film is young, are the talkies a sort of dark age of inflexibility and over convoluted formal conventions?
    This brand of question burning in my ex-film-student-now-a-novelist brain is the reason why I've started writing about it all, here, now. I want to see what I can learn about cinema as a whole, by focusing on this theme of silence. It's not just because I feel it's somehow worthy or important, it's more simple and selfish than that.
 
It's a rush
There's a feeling, a heightened, nervous excitement that comes when you watch one of the great silent era movies, on a decent size screen and with a score that has a lot of thought put into it.  Again, I am at pains to highlight that It's a state not exclusive to Silent Film, and it happens quite regularly with the films of Kubrick, Lean, Tarkovsky, Lynch or whichever big name director you want to throw up on the wall. The essential thing is, that you don't get everything explained for you, and it makes you think, think a lot. 
    The brain gives inner voice to multiple characters, creates virtual dialogues between them whilst narrating and cross examining the plot on top of trying to decipher the broader code of the edited sound and image. You miss things, you misinterpret things, you feel good when scenes start according with the inner narrative you have for them. In short the silent film experience involve you more fully and more personally than any talkie ever could hope to, because if you look away, if you try and talk to the person next to you while you watch, you might miss everything. I enjoy a sense of risk and higher stakes when the word art is being sprayed around the place.  


Enjoying The Silents
Exploring this sub-subject, interest, avenue is going to be simple, I'm going to watch silent movies and selections of world cinema, in Hi-Def, and I'm going to case-study, dissect, blog and vlog them hard in the image sensor until I reach a point of bifurcation...that magical time where inquiry itself gets horny and begets the knowing of new things. I'll be paying particular attention to the use of sound. Up first it's Eisenstein, and after that, something Swedish I think...
 
"A cut."