What Silent Film and Found Photographs Can Show Us About Writing

“Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.

If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without color. Every thing there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless specter.

I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness.”

–Maxim Gorky, after seeing a program of Lumière films at a Russian fair, 1896

*

The summer I was 13, my father taught in Madrid. It was August and we were told that everyone who could afford it left the city to go somewhere cooler. We had a tiny apartment which, in my memory, did not even have a fan. I slept on a dusty couch. The cushions slid halfway off every time I moved. All the women I saw on the streets wore skirts or dresses. I wore unfashionable jean shorts, hideous blocky sunglasses. My depression was in full bloom by that age. I felt like a pale, fat monster. I quested fruitlessly after ice water in my ignorance of local custom. Nothing was ever cold. Midday, the heat knocked my brain out of my skull, my legs out from under me. I melted onto the couch, flipped around the small television. I knew very little Spanish, so I watched Korean soap operas, puzzled over redubbed American sitcoms.

One afternoon I flipped a channel and what I saw on the screen felt like cold water. What I saw needed no language. Buster Keaton. Face as still and pale as mine was. Still, but not expressionless. His dark-rimmed eyes held cool and endless depths. There were two short films shown back to back: The Paleface (1922) and The Scarecrow (1920). I was enraptured, as much in awe of these comedies as I had been of the Bosch paintings I saw at Museo del Prado (the only building in the city which seemed to have air conditioning).

After we returned home to the States, I checked out every book the library had on silent film and read them all. I watched every Keaton film I could find. I watched other films, too, other faces. Rudolph Valentino. Clara Bow. Harold Lloyd. Douglas Fairbanks. The formidable Mary Pickford. I had a crush on Louise Brooks. Who wouldn’t? Even if you don’t think you know who she is, you do. That’s the thing. All of these people, all of these films, they haunt every single movie that came after them.

Each Sunday at midnight, Turner Classic Movie channel would show a different silent film. I had to be up early for school, so I’d set the VCR to record. Monday evening, I’d rewind the VHS, press play, and see which door to the kingdom of shadows I had opened. Which door I could step through.

*

There is a certain quality of light in old photographs. The older they are, the more intense this quality. I don’t think we have a good word for it. Luminous is too obvious. Spectral too dire. Ethereal strays too far into the saccharine.

I collected these photographs, as a kid, even before I got into silent films. I found them at antique shops, flea markets, yard sales. Back then you could find a box of them tucked away in a corner for five dollars, a whole album for three. Mostly pictures of people. Sometimes houses. The family cat, but from a hundred years ago.

What I saw needed no language. Buster Keaton. Face as still and pale as mine was. Still, but not expressionless. His dark-rimmed eyes held cool and endless depths.

In the evenings, I would flip through the albums, shuffle the gently curled loose photographs like collectible cards.

This was not what the world really looked like back then. The real world, I think it is safe to say, had color, nuance, depth, motion.

This was another world. Not drained of color, but granted a special quality of silver, a special depth of shadow, brilliance of light. I could stare at those pictures for hours, reading the faces of strangers like a book.

*

For the first year of high school I had a metal spacer across the top of my mouth which I had to turn with a key each day so that it could slowly, painfully, break open my palette. The metal of the spacer cut into the soft meat of my tongue when I spoke, made a raw red line which bled and didn’t heal until weeks after the spacer was removed. After that, of course, braces. Rubber bands strung between top and bottom teeth, holding my jaw shut.

Perhaps it goes without saying: I didn’t speak much. Didn’t smile much, either.

In my mind’s eye I was a large pale formless lump, barely human. A moon with a face, like in Méliès’ 1902 Le voyage dans le Lune. I wore too much black eyeliner, because otherwise, I believed, my eyes might not show up. Might just disappear into the broad blank expanse of my face.

I did not feel real. I did not feel quite human. I did not feel that I was in the right world.

*

I’ve often felt that this world is too loud.as always the one child in school who covered my ears when the fire drill alarms went off. I am still the only person I see on the street covering my ears when a police car screams past. Is everyone else just afraid of looking stupid? I’m honestly not sure. A falling pot is enough to bring me to tears. I would like to track down every stranger who has ever shouted at me from a passing car and punch them in the face.

The silent films were never, of course, silent. They always had music. Often performed live. But no voices, no shouting, no sirens.

Reading really is silent. The sounds are inside us. The images, too, of course. For all that I love movies (and I do, even the talkies) there’s something to be said for the power of that—the way the reader is also inherently a collaborator. If you give your audience everything—sound and color, explosions and explanations—they may be entertained, but you’ve left them no room. If you give them just enough—the perfect word, the perfect image—they will build your world right alongside you, build it inside themselves.

I believe that constraint, in writing or in film, can lead to greater ingenuity. You can’t fall back on the easy option. It’s one of the things I love about flash fiction. It is more difficult (and more rewarding) to say something well in a thousand words than in a hundred thousand.

My writing owes a strong stylistic debt to the matter-of-fact surrealism of Buster Keaton films, his melancholy comedy, the grace and ease with which he bends reality around himself. And yet it is funny to say this, perhaps, since he was known in the industry as using practically the fewest title cards of anyone. If he could eschew words, he would. In comedy, as in writing, show don’t tell. Or as Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond would put it: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.”

*

There is an air of tragedy hovering around the whole silent era. It was cut short prematurely, just as it was reaching its artistic peak. More than two thirds of silent films have been lost forever, the flammable nitrate film destroyed or degraded past saving.

This suited my teenage sorrow. I did not expect to live long. I did not plan to live long. The old photographs I coveted were primarily from the early 1900s. Most of the people in them were probably dead.

If you give your audience everything—sound and color, explosions and explanations—they may be entertained, but you’ve left them no room. If you give them just enough—the perfect word, the perfect image—they will build your world right alongside you, build it inside themselves.

Florence Lawrence was the very first movie star. Initially known to an adoring public only as The Biograph Girl because the studio did not want to name their actors and thus give them power, she was enormously popular. She was also, to my teenage eye, not exactly beautiful by modern standards, which meant I identified with her immediately. She starred in hundreds of films, but in 1915 she was badly injured in an on-set fire (the stunts were all real back then). Her career declined. Sound killed it completely. She ate ant poison and died in 1938.

I do not know how the photographs in my collection ended up at the flea markets and vintage shops where I found them. It always seemed to me that someone along the way must have decided, intentionally or through carelessness, that they did not want them. They had been abandoned and here I was to cherish them, to bear witness, to tell stories about them. Like the head which had fallen off a neighbor’s statue of St. Francis of Assisi, which lay in the dirt for weeks before I picked it up, took it home. The neglected. The forgotten. I will never forget.

*

What is the point of looking back? Of coveting the past?

Things were not better back then. There is joy and beauty to be found in the blossoming of cinema as an art form, but the era also produced, among other problematic films, a particularly odious piece of Confederate apologia, one which did lasting damage and which is still shown in film classes today. (Birth of a Nation’s enduring popularity in the silent film canon is a shame, honestly; its impact as insidious racist propaganda is absolutely worth discussing, but there are so many better silent films to actually watch—why not show Sunrise? The Big Parade? Pandora’s Box? Anything even remotely good?)

I used to make up stories about the people in my photographs. When I eventually wrote some down and made a book out of it, the theme which emerged was childhood, that lost kingdom, when the promise of portal fantasies feels true. Not better, but different. Everything wild and violent and new, like the early days of cinema, untamed. Everything magic until proven otherwise. Growing up, I think, is like opening a long series of doors and finding, behind each one: just another room.

*

A family of four, two adults and two children, float on the ocean. They are not in a boat, but in a bathtub, having lost their boat to a storm. One of the children picks something up and tosses it overboard: the drain plug. The father frantically grabs for it, but he is too late.

The sky is black. The water is black. The bathtub is sinking.

The two adults make a mad attempt to bail water out of the tub with their hats, but it is no use. There is only one way this can end. The four all close their eyes and embrace each other, faces calm, awaiting death.

But it doesn’t come. Abruptly, the bathtub stops. They’ve run aground.

The family clambers out of the bathtub and wades through knee-deep water into the waiting darkness until slowly, finally, a pale white shore emerges from the horizon where before there was nothing.

This is the end of Buster Keaton’s 1921 two-reeler “The Boat.” There is a final joke, of course, and don’t get me wrong, this little film is both funny and technically impressive, as most of his movies are. But that final image has always stuck with me, has planted itself deep inside my mind, my heart. It gives me chills. It gives me hope.

What is that pale shore? A place past death, past knowing. In the kingdom of shadows, in another world, somewhere I can’t quite reach. But I can visit, for a few reels or a photograph at a time.