The Guardian 27 June, 2007
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Art forms and market forces
Have you ever considered just how destructive "market forces" can be when applied to the cultural sphere?
Take the destruction of art forms like silent cinema or radio drama, or the virtual eclipse of the once-flourishing "little theatres".
The public was given to understand that their disappearance was the inevitable result of technological progress, the "harsh reality of the market place". However, it had much more to do with the desire of producers, network bosses and studio chiefs to enhance their bottom line, to make more and bigger profits.
The silent cinema tends to be lampooned these days, held up as "quaint" or even laughable. When examples of silent films are screened at the Sydney Film Festival, half the subscribers don’t bother to come.
Those that do divide into two types: true cineastes, savouring films that are told in purely visual terms, and those who are only interested in "new" films, usually a younger audience.
Why this latter group attend the screenings of the silent classics is anybody’s guess. They certainly don’t appreciate them.
People who sit apparently entranced by the pretentious claptrap of trendy "modern" filmmakers, whose work will soon be passé, giggle uncontrollably at the work of master filmmakers of earlier times, whose films like all great art are timeless.
Of course, it is not their fault: they have not been brought up to appreciate these masterpieces from the "silent" days. Many of them have never seen a black & white film, let alone a silent film.
There were attempts to design and introduce viable systems of making sound films from at least the beginnings of the 1920s. Indeed, sound feature films were made and exhibited, but they were treated by filmmakers and actors alike as novelties, extraneous to the real process of making movies.
Cinema by the mid-1920s was a sophisticated art form, a visual art form. The beautifully photographed images on screen were supported by music, usually played by an orchestra or at least an organist at the Mighty Wurlitzer.
If you ever get the chance to see some of the great films of the 1920s, at a film festival in Australia or, when travelling overseas, at one of the world’s major film archives (at say the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the National Film Theatre in London), do yourself a favour and take it.
If you are lucky you will see such wonderful fare as Victor Sjöstrom’s American-made drama with Lillian Gish, The Wind, one of the most visually powerful films I have ever seen.
Or Soviet director Alexander Dovzhenko’s extraordinary drama of the Russian Civil War, Arsenal, whose poetic editing makes the hubbub of a hall full of arguing men (in this silent film) into a palpably visual experience. An amazing piece of filmmaking.
However, under capitalism, films are not considered an art form but a commodity. And those responsible for making them are in business.
So in 1926, the Warner Brothers’ studio, cut costs by eliminating live music altogether and introducing films with their music score on records. Still in financial difficulties, the studio then introduced recorded dialogue into its movies, accompanied by a big publicity drive to sell sound films as the "latest" thing. The public was deliberately sold the notion that silent films were "out of date" and "old hat".
The Soviet Union, Chaplin and a few other artists held out against this rush to embrace audible dialogue, but Hollywood led the way and no commercial interest could stand against the force of that colossus.
The silent screen went out, vanishing into the museums. A sane society, not driven by purely commercial interests, could have preserved the art of the purely visual film as a living art form, as Marcel Marceau preserved the art of the mime.
It was similar story with radio drama, a recognised art form when I was at school, using sound alone to create images in the listeners’ heads. The half-hour drama Night Beat was one of my favourites, along with the very clever and funny serial Mrs ‘Obbs.
Mrs ‘Obbs was set in an inner-city working class neighbourhood of Sydney, and comprised conversations (at once recogniseably down-to-earth and surreal) between Mrs ‘Obbs and her neighbour Mrs Bottomly, with incursions by Alfie ‘Obbs and his workmate Dickie Bart.
By contrast, Night Beat was an American series. The Australian producers received the scripts from the US, recorded them afresh with Australian actors using American accents (or sometimes US actors resident here).
This did not help Australian writers to get work but at least actors and technicians did. When television was given free rein to overwhelm radio drama, the commercial radio companies simply switched to filling their schedules with talkback.
If you’ve ever looked at an old copy of the ABC Weekly, you will have been struck I am sure by the large number of "little theatres" being reviewed each week. Live theatre was seemingly everywhere, performing classics and popular modern productions in a pot-pourri of drama and comedy.
The ABC, a non-commercial government organisation, used to promote their activities, seeing the promotion of cultural activities as part of its brief, in fact as one of the reasons for its very existence.
It may be a pale shadow of its former self, but the ABC is still a cultural treasure of this country.