{"id":34905,"date":"2016-05-26T02:00:16","date_gmt":"2016-05-26T06:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34905"},"modified":"2016-05-24T09:26:05","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T13:26:05","slug":"terry-teachout-on-silent-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/05\/26\/terry-teachout-on-silent-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"Terry Teachout on silent movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ten years ago, Terry Teachout<\/a> finally got around to watching D.W. Griffith\u2019s The Birth of a Nation<\/em>, and found (to his relief) that it was just as offensively racist as everyone had always said. He also discovered that silent movies are becoming terra incognita<\/em> even to those who love old movies:<\/p>\n

None of this, however, interested me half so much as the fact that The Birth of a Nation<\/em> progresses with the slow-motion solemnity of a funeral march. Even the title cards stay on the screen for three times as long as it takes to read them. Five minutes after the film started, I was squirming with impatience, and after another five minutes passed, I decided out of desperation to try an experiment: I cranked the film up to four times its normal playing speed and watched it that way. It was overly brisk in two or three spots, most notably the re-enactment of Lincoln\u2019s assassination (which turned out to be quite effective \u2013 it\u2019s the best scene in the whole film). For the most part, though, I found nearly all of The Birth of a Nation<\/em> to be perfectly intelligible at the faster speed.<\/p>\n

Putting aside for a moment the insurmountable problem of its content, it was the agonizingly slow pace of The Birth of a Nation<\/em> that proved to be the biggest obstacle to my experiencing it as an objet d\u2019art<\/em>. Even after I sped it up, my mind continued to wander, and one of the things to which it wandered was my similar inability to extract aesthetic pleasure out of medieval art. With a few exceptions<\/a>, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don\u2019t speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film \u2013 not just just The Birth of a Nation<\/em>, but all of it \u2013 is no more accessible to most modern sensibilities. (The only silent movies I can watch with more than merely antiquarian interest are the comedies of Buster Keaton.) Nor do I think the problem is solely, or even primarily, that it\u2019s silent: I have no problem with plotless dance, for instance. It\u2019s that silent film \u201cspeaks\u201d to me in an alien tongue, one I can only master in an intellectual way. That\u2019s not good enough for me when it comes to art, whose immediate appeal is not intellectual but visceral (though the intellect naturally enters into it).<\/p>\n

As for The Birth of a Nation<\/em>, I\u2019m glad I saw it once. My card is now officially punched. On the other hand, I can\u2019t imagine voluntarily seeing it again, any more than I\u2019d attend the premiere of an opera by Philip Glass other than at gunpoint. It is the quintessential example of a work of art that has fulfilled its historical purpose and can now be put aside permanently \u2013 and I don\u2019t give a damn about history, at least not in my capacity as an aesthete. I care only for the validity of the immediate experience.<\/p>\n

[…] Thrill me and all is forgiven. Bore me and you\u2019ve lost me. That\u2019s why I think it\u2019s now safe to file and forget The Birth of a Nation<\/em>. Yes, it\u2019s still historically significant, and yes, it tells us something important about the way we once were. But it\u2019s boring<\/em> — and thank God for that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ten years ago, Terry Teachout finally got around to watching D.W. Griffith\u2019s The Birth of a Nation, and found (to his relief) that it was just as offensively racist as everyone had always said. He also discovered that silent movies are becoming terra incognita even to those who love old movies: None of this, however, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,15,13],"tags":[102,86,122,99],"class_list":["post-34905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-technology","category-usa","tag-art","tag-criticism","tag-movies","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-94Z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34906,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34905\/revisions\/34906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}