Sometimes I will amuse myself looking for very old silent movies available online. I do this partly out of an interest in the early days of cinema and how movies have changed in their century and some of dominance in Western culture, and partly because really early movies have mostly outlived their copyrights by now and are legally public domain and I won't get into any trouble for downloading or viewing them online without paying. I'm unreasonably fucking paranoid when it comes to this shit--statistically speaking, getting into any real legitimate trouble over my internet activities is a pretty remote chance, but I just know I'd be the one person who actually gets in shitton of trouble over illegal downloading. That's how my luck works--I'm really good at defying all the odds in the worst possible way. If there is even the slightest chance that something bizarre will go wrong, then it will fucking go wrong for me.
Anyway. Silent movies. I watch them. But I don't watch them often, and it's not for the reason you might think. I don't have any trouble reading the intertitles (the dialogue/descriptive writing on the screen that predated synchronized dialogue and sound) or anything. I don't find them strange, or hard to relate to because they were filmed in a time and place far removed from my own experiences. I don't even have anything bad to say about what passed for 'high-tech special effects' in the early twentieth century since, considering all the massive limitations of technology in those days, they actually did astonishingly well.
It's none of that.
It's because silent movies are unreasonably fucking creepy.
Most silent movies have an accompanying score so they're not completely 'silent', but there is no sound from any actions, dialogue, or background activity and watching the characters move their lips and go about their business without making a single sound is incredibly unnerving. Because you expect these things to make a sound and they don't. It's eerie.
Also eerie is the exaggerated facial expressions, body language, and makeup necessary in early movies. Cameras didn't have very good resolution and weren't particularly good at capturing a lot of moving details (still photos were better quality due to being, well, still) so of necessity the actors had to wear a great deal of very bold, exaggerated makeup in order to appear well on camera--artificial enhanced contrast where film failed. The effect works but it also manages to be very creepy. Eyes were ringed with an emo-kid level of black eyeliner, lips were painted with what appears to be road tar, and everybody's face was caked in thick makeup that's noticeably a different colour from the rest of their bodies.
And everyone had their eyes opened really, really wide because fuck if I know. But it doesn't help the whole creepiness factor at all.
I just tried to sit through the 1927 German epic 'Metropolis' with English intertitles (that's a perk of silent film--no dubbing necessary, just translate the freaking intertitles) and couldn't get through it. I was just way too freaked out. Silent films are scary, and early sci-fi movies could be a little insane just because of the madness they tried to pull off and pass off to an audience as 'science fiction'. 'Metropolis' happens to be both of these and also features the first robot in film history. It's a bit telling that the robot is female and invented by a crazy mad scientist trying to re-create the lover who left him some thirty years before.
The robot fucking scares me.
But a lot of shit scares me so maybe I'm not a really great gauge of this sort of thing.
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