PUTNEY — Did you ever wonder what the movies were like before they learned how to talk?
You can find out on April 20 at the climax of Next Stage's series, “Shhh! Friday Night at the (Silent) Movies!” when Rob Mermin presents the lecture “Silents Are Golden: A Celebration of Silent Cinema.”
In 2007, the Green Mountain Film Festival invited Mermin to create a special live program on silent film. Mermin suspected the festival wanted him to do something on silent comedy. After all, silent film is today best remembered for the classic comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and other great clowns.
Furthermore, Mermin is former Dean of Clown College for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and Artist-in-Residence for the Vermont Arts Council, creating Vermont's “Circus Residency” program for the state's public schools. And, in 1987, he founded the award-winning international touring company Circus Smirkus. He also trained in classical mime with Etienne Decroux and Marcel Marceau.
While Mermin knows quite a bit about the art of making people laugh without the use of words, he decided to focus on silent film acting and “how the vocabulary of theatrical pantomime was adapted to film technique.”
The more he investigated the subject, the more limiting it seemed to restrict his subject matter to merely the silent film comedies.
Not that Mermin does not love silent comedy. In fact, the largest part of his presentation concerns silent comedy.
“No comedies in the sound era can compete with the great silent comedies.” Mermin said.
More than comedy
But Mermin said he wants to demonstrate that silent film is more than just comedy, but rather is a full spectrum of wonderful films that need to be rediscovered and enjoyed.
“During a long Vermont winter, I watched 100 silent features-dramas, epics, adventures, comedies-with a keen focus on acting styles,” he said.
“No TV, no modern films for four months. It was pure delight! From the silly to the sublime, the passionate, often majestic films revealed an engaging artistic integrity,” he said. “But I found it takes time to fully embrace the world of the silent cinema, to become accustomed to its conventions and rhetoric of gesture.”
The outcome of intense study was “Silents Are Golden,” a multimedia master class in filmmaking before the “talkies.”
“This is a full-evening one-man show lavishly illustrated with a dazzling array of clips from 100 silent films,” he said.
“It is divided into film sections-slapstick, romantic comedy, adventure, foreign and American drama, and comedy-with live commentary in between,” he added. “The intent is to shed new light on the acting style of the silent era while giving modern audiences a fresh and entertaining look at the talents of the silent stars.”
The result is what Mermin calls “a celebration of the art of physical acting-what my mentor Marcel Marceau called the “silent language of the soul”-seen through the lens of silent cinema.”
Mermin said he believes people today know very little about silent film, and what they do know is often stereotypical or incorrect. Too often, he said, silent movies today are characterized by fast-moving silly people getting pies thrown in their faces.
Some of this misconception happens, he said, because often silent films are shown on modern projectors at the wrong speed, actually speeding up movement to make the images look absurd.
And, silent pictures, except for a handful of the most well known, are difficult to find, Mermin said. That is why the silent film festival in Putney is so valuable, he added. At the end of his talk, Mermin will share a list of where to find 50 of the films of which he has shown clips.
In his talk, Mermin discusses the silent acting art of such stars as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, Norma Shearer, Ramon Navarro, Marion Davies, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and Laurel and Hardy.
Mermin said that today you can still find “on stage, a few specific pantomime techniques used by the silent stars-arm gestures, hand positions, body postures, facial expressions.”
But silent acting often seems to us a strange and alienating form of expression. Mermin said his goal is to demystify such a perception by analyzing its art.
He said that “while studying the best silent epics, dramas, adventures and comedies, three things became apparent:
“First, the silent stars learned their skills before they got to Hollywood. The physical comedy gags were straight out of the contemporary circus clown alley. The eloquent pantomime gestures were a product of theatrical conventions of the day.
“Second, contemporary stage pantomime techniques were perfectly adapted to the genre of silent film. The early film acting styles developed from histrionic theatrical convention into more naturalistic acting in the 1920s. But certain stylized movements, related to stage mime technique, were adapted and used effectively.
“And third, the traditions of theatrical mime are a straight line from mid-19th century through mid-20th century, with silent film smack in the middle. From Delsarte and early 20th century theater and vaudeville, through silent film acting, and on to the Decroux/Marceau mime technique, pantomime acting in the silent cinema takes its place as a short-lived highlight of the pantomime art form.”
Although silent film has an extensive 30-year history, Mermin primarily focuses on the movies of the 1920s, when the acting became more naturalistic. He believes that here you can find many great film performances. For instance, he said he prefers the silent acting of Greta Garbo to that in her later sound films.
“In her silents,” he said, “she is a more mysterious, sensual, and intriguing character than she ever was in her later talkies.”
Mermin has taken his ”Silents Are Golden” presentation to several countries. Last year, he toured the country, driving to the West Coast and back, visiting circus schools, theaters, and colleges.
While people have been receptive to his talk in the past, he suspects there may be a new enthusiasm the air for the upcoming audience in Putney.
The change is a little thing called The Artist.
As everyone interested in movies probably already knows, The Artist is this year's Academy Award winning film for both Best Picture and Best Actor, and is only the second silent film ever to win an Oscar. The other was Wings, which won in 1929 in the last years of silent film.
Furthermore, another Academy Award nominee for best picture this year, “Hugo,” directed by Martin Scorsese, also concerns silent film, as it tells the story of a pair of children rediscovering the art of the French silent film-making pioneer, Georges Melies, whose most famous film is the wildly fantastic “A Trip to the Moon.”
While Mermin doesn't go so far as to claim silent movies seem to be in fashion again, he does think these films may spur an interest in silent film.
And what does he think of The Artist?
“It is a charming film,” he said. “But it lacks the depth and texture of the best of films from the silent era.”
After all, there is nothing like the original.