New Silent Cinemas

This project will explore the intersection between silent-era cinema and contemporary visual culture. With the incredible success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms and histories of early and silent cinemas. Nevertheless, a process of making this past visible has been underway for decades, led by artists, archivists, restorers, collectors, fans and scholars intent on preserving, thinking and re-imagining film’s first decades. Many recent feature films recall early and silent cinemas in either content or form. Here, one could turn to directors as various as Aki Kaurismaki, Peter Bogdanovich, Michel Gondry, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Peter Jackson, Guy Maddin, Andrew Stanton, and Elia Suleiman. Early and silent film has been used as a kind of primary material for the recuperative practices of found footage and remix cinemas, as well as the experiments of digital, video and analog artists like Martin Arnold, Gustav Deutsch, Harun Farocki, Ken Jacobs, Oleg Kovalov, Les Leveque, and Bill Morrison. Both private and national film archives have participated in the revival as well. In making significant portions of their collections digital, streamable, and downloadable, numerous institutions have embraced an altogether different approach to preservation, one that includes the flexible reformation of film material and film history.

The new silent cinema marks more than a celebration of first films. The cinematic past resurfaces and repeats with a difference. It troubles the stability of objects and origins with deliberate anachronisms. Candidates will thus be encouraged to explore a set of historical and theoretical questions. For example: What do these digital returns and revisions do to and for the “original” film image? What new or forgotten ontologies and epistemologies take shape in this encounter between past and present, physical and virtual? What kind of histories do these works narrate, repeat or occlude? And where does the returned, remixed or recycled belong in the archive of silent cinema?

Comparative approaches to the field are particularly encouraged. Just as early cinema itself developed out of a confluence of cultures and technologies so, too, do its specters cross boundaries, moving from the analog index to streaming video, international film festivals to museum walls. Whether for DVD release or live accompaniment, musicians ranging from Giorgio Moroder to Michael Nyman to Dave Douglas have sonically informed audiences’ experiences of film’s history. Novelists like Steve Erickson, Glenn David Gold and Paul Auster fabricate secret histories of lost films and once brilliant stars. Designer John Galliano turns to the antiquated styles of Chaplin, Keaton and Linder for his latest line of men’s clothes. With iPhone apps like Silent Film Director or Vintagio, websites like “The Artistifier” or the basic filters of a video-editing suite anyone with a Smartphone can transform digital images into sepia-toned, scratched and faded stereotypes of film history. With no respect for traditional disciplinary boundaries, these are phenomena demanding a comparative, curious scholarship, one capable of leaping across art forms and media, as well as epochs and nations.