I’ve just started to watch “Siren of the Tropics” – the 1927 film debut of Josephine Baker. I was surprised, right at the opening credits, to see that the assistant director is a very young Luis Bunuel. This film came out a full two years before his wonderfully infamous directorial feature “Un Chien Andalou”. Now I am hoping to spot, in this film, influences here and there upon his later work.
I’m currently about ten minutes into the film. Rather than see it all the way through in one sitting, I’m viewing it in pieces – the way one might read a novel a chapter at a time – so that I will have time to think about what I’m seeing as things unfold.
I do this because, for me, a visit to a silent film is like a visit to a foreign country. I need time to adjust my thinking to really appreciate much that the film’s original audiences took for granted – some way to understand what I am watching in approximately the way it was intended to be understood.
After all, watching a silent movie, even a great one, eighty years into the era of talkies is necessarily an exercise in culture shock. Filmmakers and audience shared quite an elaborate visual language in the days before sound, a language that is now gone. In particular, actors employed many techniques to suggest the unheard dialog between inter-title cards. To audiences of the day those techniques seemed natural and unforced.
In a way this convention was an excellent start to cinema, since it forced the writer and director away from mere words and into the real core of what a film offers – human emotion expressed through a camera’s observation of human faces and bodies in motion.
I suspect that in another eighty years many of our current film conventions – practices of acting, directing and cinematography that we don’t even think of as conventions, but rather as examples of naturalistic storytelling – will appear not merely dated and stilted, but downright incomprehensible to curious but puzzled viewers.
At this point in the story, Josephine Baker has not yet shown up on screen. The film is still setting things up, introducing the characters one by one in that oddly formal way that silent films often do. When she does make her entrance, I’m keen to see whether she will come across as more “modern” than the rest of the cast – a cultural visitor from the future – the way Leslie Howard was far more modern than anyone else on screen in “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, or Bob Dylan than anyone else in “Don’t Look Back”.
From what I’ve heard of the legendary Ms. Baker, I suspect I will not be disappointed.