READING Silent Films

1. Work in groups and discuss these questions:

• Have you seen any silent movies? If so, describe one of them. What world
famous stars of silent movies can you name?
• Do you prefer modern films or old ones? Give your reasons.
2. Read the passage about silent films and then answer the questions that follow.
Talk to people who saw films for the first time when they were silent, and they will
tell you the experience was magic. The silent film, with music, had extraordinary
powers to draw an audience into the story, and an equally potent capacity to make
their imagination work. They had to supply the voices and the sound effects, and
because their minds were engaged, they appreciated the experience all the more.
The audience was the final creative contributor to the process of making a film.
The films have gained a charm and other-worldliness with age but
inevitably, they have also lost something. The impression they made when there
was no rival to the moving picture was more profound, more intense; compared to
the easily accessible pictures of today, it was the blow of a two-handed axe, against
the blunt scraping of a tableknife.
The films belong to an era considered simpler and more desirable than our own.
But nostalgia should not be allowed to cast a sentimental quaintness over the past, for
it obliges us to edit from our mind the worst aspects of a period and embrace only
those elements we admire. The silent period may be known as “The Age of
Innocence” but it included years unrivalled for their dedicated viciousness. In Europe,
between 1914 and 1918 more men were killed to less purpose than at any other time
in history. In America, men who stood out from the herd – pacifists, anarchists,
socialists – were rounded up and deported in 1919, and were lucky to avoid being
lynched. The miseries of war culminated in the miseries of disease when the Spanish
flu swept Europe and America and killed more civilians than the war had killed
soldiers. With peace came the Versailles treaty – collapse and starvation in Central
Europe – the idealism of Prohibition – gangsterism in America.
The benefit of the moving picture to a care-worn populace was inestimable,
but the sentimentality and charm, the easily understandable, black-and-white issues
were not so much a reflection of everyday life as a means of escape from it. Again
and again, in the publications of the time, one reads horrified reactions against
films showing “life as it is”.
You did not leave the problems of home merely to encounter them again at
the movies. You paid your money, initially, for forgetfulness. As the company
slogans put it: “Mutual Movies Make Time Fly” . . . “Selznick Pictures Create
Happy Hours”. And if the experience took you out of yourself and excited you,
you talked about it to your friends and fellow-workers, creating the precious “word
of mouth” publicity that the industry depended upon. You may have exaggerated a
little, but the movies soon matched your hyperbole. They evolved to meet the
demands of their audience.
Gradually movie-going altered from relaxation to ritual. In the big cities, you
went to massive picture palaces, floating through incense-laden air to the strains of
organ music, to worship at the Cathedral of Light. You paid homage to your
favourite star; you dutifully communed with the fan magazines. You wore the
clothes they wore in the movies; you bought the furniture you saw on the screen.
You joined a congregation composed of every stratum of society. And you shared
your adulation with Shanghai, Sydney and Santiago. For your favourite pastime
had become the most powerful cultural influence in the world – exceeding even
that of the Press. The silent film was not only a vigorous popular art; it was a
universal language – Esperanto for the eyes.
(from Hollywood, The Pioneers by Kevin Brownlow)
1. What did the audiences of silent films think of them? (They will tell you the
experience was magic)
2. What do modern audiences find attractive about silent movies? (The films
have gained a charm and other-worldliness with age. Nostalgia is a very
strong feeling)
3. Why do modern audiences appreciate silent movies less than their original
audiences did? (The novelty of cinema was alluring and it used to be almost
the only escape from a gruesome reality and nowadays we have more
accessible films of completely different genres)
4. Why did people go to the cinema in the days of silent movies? (Films were
not so much a reflection of everyday life as a means of escape from it)
5. What was the most effective publicity for a film?( And if the experience
took you out of yourself and excited you, you talked about it to your friends
and fellow-workers, creating the precious “word of mouth” publicity that
the industry depended upon)
6. What were large city cinemas like? (In the big cities, you went to massive
picture palaces, floating through incense-laden air to the strains of organ
music, to worship at the Cathedral of Light)
7. What influence did silent movies have on their fans’ lives? (You wore the
clothes they wore in the movies; you bought the furniture you saw on the
screen.)
8. Which social classes did silent movies appeal to most? (You joined a
congregation composed of every stratum of society)
9. Who is being referred to as “you” in the last two paragraphs? What is the
effect of this stylistic device? (The author addresses the reader. This literary
device helps the reader to imagine himself in the place of an average citizen
of that era)
3 Read the passage again and mark the statements as true (T) or false (F).
1. The audiences of silent films appreciated them so much because they were
asked to do voices or create sound effects. FALSE( It made audiences
imagination work. They weren’t asked)
2. Modern motion pictures make a much more powerful impression on modern
audiences than early silent films did on their audiences. FALSE(The
impression they made when there was no rival to the moving picture was
more profound, more intense; compared to the easily accessible pictures of
today)
 3. Silent films are likely to evoke sentimentality and nostalgia for the past.
TRUE(The films belong to an era considered simpler and more desirable
than our own. The silent period may be known as “The Age of Innocence”)
4. Silent films allow modern audiences to realize all the miseries of “The Age
of Innocence”.False
5. Black-and-white silent films tended to be a way of avoiding unpleasant
realities.TRUE (black-and-white issues were not so much a reflection of
everyday life as a means of escape from it)
6. Film company slogans helped people forget about their problems. TRUE
(As the company slogans put it: “Mutual Movies Make Time Fly” . . .
“Selznick Pictures Create Happy Hours”)
7. To keep pace with the audience’s demands, silent movies greatly
exaggerated reality. TRUE (You may have exaggerated a little, but the
movies soon matched your hyperbole. They evolved to meet the demands of
their audience.)
8. Film fans used to pray for their favourite stars at cathedrals.FALSE (You
paid homage to your favourite star at the so called Cathedral of Light. It’s
metaphorical)
4. Find words and phrases in the text with these meanings and give them in
the form they are used in the text. The meanings are given in the order the
words and phrases are used in the text.
1. Enormous power--- Magic
2. Quality of being closely connected with spiritual rather than ordinary
things-----Extraordinary powers
3. Quality of being attractive because of being unusual and old-fashioned
-------Other-worldliness
4. Accept---Appreciate
5. Having no equal---No rival
6. Captured--- Embrace
7. Put to death without a lawful trial--- Were killed to less purpose
 8. Breakdown--- Culminated
9. General public---Populace
10. Find oneself faced by--- Encounter
11. Made you forget your worries and unhappiness---Forgetfulness
12. Developed gradually---Evolved
13. Showed respect--- Paid homage
14. Kept in touch--- Dutifully communed
15. Group of people with common interests--- Congregation
16. Extravagant flattery--- Adulation
5. Work in groups and discuss these questions:
1. What are the writer’s feelings about silent movies – and about modern films?
2. Why do people go to the cinema nowadays? Has the “magic” been lost?
3. To what extent do you share the writer’s feelings?
READING
6. Read the first paragraph of this magazine article. Then write down four
questions that you would like to find the answers to in the rest of the article.
REMARKABLE CHARLIE
ALEXANDER WALKER looks at his life and times
HE WAS BORN in the slums of south London. He wore his mother's
old red tights cut down for ankle socks. He was sent to a workhouse
when she was temporarily sent to the madhouse. Dickens might have
created Charlie Chaplin's childhood. But only Charlie Chaplin could
have created the great comic character of "The Tramp", whose ragged
dignity, subversive mischievousness, hard-grained resilience and soft-hearted
sentimentality gave his creator the dimensions of an immortal.
7. Read the continuation of the article and find out if your questions are
answered.
Other countries – France, Italy, Spain, even Japan and Korea – show more
surpassing love (and profit) where Chaplin is concerned than the land of his birth. It's
not just that Chaplin quit Britain for good in 1913 when he journeyed to America
with the Fred Karno vaudeville troupe to perform his mime, juggling and comedy
acts on the stage where Mack Sennett's talent scouts recruited him for the Hollywood
slapstick king.
Sad to say, many English filmgoers between the wars thought Chaplin's Tramp a
bit, well, "vulgar". Certainly the middle-class filmgoers did: the working-class
audiences were warmer towards a character who defied authority, using his wicked
little cane to trip it up, or aiming a well-placed kick on its broad backside with the
flat of his down-at-heel boot. All the same, Chaplin's comic persona didn't seem all
that English or even working class. English tramps didn't sport tiny moustaches,
baggy pants or tail coats: European dictators, Italian waiters and American maitre d’s
wore things like that. Then again, the Tramp's ever-roving eye for a pretty girl had a
promiscuousness about it that was considered, well, not quite nice by English
audiences – that's how foreigners behaved, wasn't it? And for over half of his screen
career, Chaplin had no screen voice to confirm his British nationality.
Indeed, it was a headache for Chaplin when he could no longer resist the talkies
and had to find "the right voice" for his Tramp. He postponed that day as long as
possible: in Modern Times in 1936, the first film in which he was heard as a singing
waiter, he made up a nonsense language which sounded like no known nationality.
He later said he imagined the Tramp to be an Oxford-educated gent who'd come
down in the world. But if he'd been able to speak with an Oxford accent in those
early slapstick shorts, it's doubtful if he'd have achieved world fame – and the
English would have been sure to find it "odd".
He was an immensely complex man, self-willed to a degree unusual even in the
ranks of Hollywood egotists. The suddenness of his huge fame gave him the freedom
– and, more importantly, the money - to be his own master. He already had the urge
to explore and extend a talent he discovered in himself as he went along. "It can't be
me. Is that possible? How extraordinary," is how he greeted the first sight of himself
as the Tramp on the screen. But that shock set his imagination racing. Unlike Buster
Keaton, Charlie Chaplin did not work out his gags conceptually in advance. He was
the kind of comic who used his physical senses to invent his art as he went along.
Inanimate objects especially helped Chaplin make “contact” with himself as an artist.
He turned them into other kinds of objects. Thus a bust alarm clock in The
Pawnbroker became a sick patient undergoing an appendectomy; boots were stewed
in The Gold Rush and their soles eaten like prime plaice (the nails being removed like
fish bones). This physical transformation, plus the adroitness with which he managed
again and again, are surely the secrets of Chaplin’s great comedy. It may be a legacy
from working alongside jugglers and acrobats on the English music-hall stage in his
youth and developing something of their sensory proficiency. But Chaplin not only
charged things with energy, he altered their personalities and, in so doing, extended
his knowledge of his own.
He also had a deep need to be loved – and a corresponding fear of being
betrayed. The two were hard to reconcile and sometimes – as in his early marriages –
the results were disastrous. Yet even this painfully-bought self-knowledge found its
way into his comic creations. The Tramp never loses his faith in the flower girl who'll
be waiting to walk into the sunset with him; while the other side of Chaplin, the man
who's bought his cynicism dearly in the divorce courts, makes Monsieur Verdoux, the
French wife killer, into a symbol of man's misogyny.
It's nice to know that life eventually gave Charlie Chaplin the stable happiness it
had earlier denied him. In Oona O'Neill Chaplin, he found a partner whose stability
and affection effaced the 37 years age difference between them that had seemed so
ominous when the Santa Barbara registrar, who was marrying them in 1942, turned to
the luminous girl of 17 who'd given notice of their wedding date and said, "And
where is the young man?" – Chaplin, then 54, had prudently waited outside. As Oona
herself was the child of a large family with its own turbulent centre, she was well-
prepared for the battlefield that Chaplin's life became as unfounded charges of
Communist sympathies engulfed them both – and, later on, she was the fulcrum of
rest in the quarrels that Chaplin's act of stem fatherhood sometimes sparked off in
their own large brood of talented children.
 Chaplin died on Christmas Day 1977. A few months later, a couple of almost comic
body-snatchers stole his coffin from the family vault and held it for ransom: the Swiss
police recovered it with more efficiency than the Keystone Cops would have done. But
one can't help feeling Chaplin would have regarded this macabre incident as his way of
having the last laugh on a world to which he had bequeathed so many.
8. Answer the multiple-choice questions about the article.
1 Which is NOT true about Chaplin according to the first paragraph?
A He had a poor childhood.
B His mother went insane.
C He based his comic character of “The Tramp” on Dickens’ books. (false)
D His comic character of “The Tramp” made Chaplin eternally famous.
2 Chaplin left Britain and went to the USA to ________________
A act in movies. C direct movies.
B perform on the stage D escape from his mother.
3 British audiences thought Chaplin's Tramp was _____________
A heart-breaking. C unmistakably English in origin.
B very funny. D apparently foreign.
4 The Tramp _________________
A never appeared in a talking picture.
B appeared in several talking pictures.
C appeared in one talking picture.
D appeared in talking pictures but didn't speak.
5 When Chaplin saw himself as the Tramp on the screen for the first time, he was
_________________
A bitterly disappointed. B extremely surprised.
C perfectly satisfied. D terribly frightened.
6 Chaplin’s comic scenes were ____________
A carefully planned and scripted. C improvised.
B planned but not scripted. D improved.
7 Probably Chaplin _________________
A was born with adroitness.
B developed adroitness when he worked on the English music-hall stage in his
youth.
C developed adroitness when he made his silent slapstick comedies.
D developed adroitness when he made his later films.
8 Chaplin _________________
A had romantic feelings about love and women.
B was cynical about love and women.
C was a misogynist.
D had mixed feelings about love and women.
 9 When he married his last wife she was _______________
A 17. C 37.
B 42. D 54.
10 After their wedding Chaplin’s professional and family life was
____________
A tranquil. C turbulent.
B uneventful. D disappointing.
11 The theft of Chaplin’s coffin _________________
A was solved by the Swiss Police.
B was solved by the Keystone Cops.
C was never solved.
D was scripted by Chaplin as his last joke shortly before his death.
9. Highlight in the text the words in the first column. Try to work out their
meaning from the context. Match them to the definitions given in the second
column. Then summarize the text using as many of these words as possible.
1. Subversive--r a) ability to recover from
2. Resilience--a setbacks
3. Headache--i b) allegations
4. postponed--n c) broken
5. gags--t d) erased
6. inanimate--l e) filled
7. bust--c f) harmonize and resolve
8. adroitness--p g) hatred of women
9. charged--e h) horrifying
10. corresponding--k i) lack of trust
11. reconcile--f j) left after one's death
12. cynicism--s k) matching
13. misogyny--g l) not living
14. stable--o m) problem
15. effaced--d n) put off
16. ominous--q o) secure
17. prudently--u p) skill
18. turbulent--m q) threatening
19. unfounded charges--b r) undermining authority
20. macabre--h s) violent
21. bequeathed--j t) visual jokes
u) wisely