carolyn kellogg

The Silent Movie Theatre in LA is doing subscriptions, under the new banner of the Cinefamily. Pay $25 a month and go to as many movies as you like; they’ll even give you a free bucket of popcorn. Wednesdays are still for silents, but the rest of the week is all over the place – electronic music with live DJs, Asian horror, and a December series on the “Perverse Puppetry of Jan Svankmajer.” Silents aren’t just for those in their dotage anymore.

Which speaks to this review of Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture. Richard Shickel contends:

Moviegoers have — or had — real feelings for the stars and the narrative conventions that absorbed their attention when they were young and impressionable. But nostalgia is sub-critical and anti-historical — emotional near-beer. To unleash its power, a writer has to have been there, sharing the joys of movies when they first burst upon the screen. That, however, is no longer possible in the case of silent films.

Which would mean that I cannot understand the films of Hitchcock, Truffaut, John Ford. I cannot watch Double Indemnity nor It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World nor It! Came from Outer Space. Not if I want to write about them. Because I cannot watch them with childish passion. Except that I bet I can, and I bet those folks who want to see a couple of Australian TV movies and Czech new wave alongside their silent films can watch them with passion, too.

And just for the hell of it, here’s a link to one blogger* learning about Gloria Swanson through a book by Peter Bogdanovich (born 1939, also not, according to Schickel, eligible to write about silent film). The best thing I’ve read about Gloria Swanson, though, she wrote herself — in her candid and unsparing autobiography Swanson on Swanson. It’s wicked cheap on Amazon.

*A random blogger that I went to elementary school with in Rhode Island.