EME 6209 – Silent Films

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Silent Films: What are they really?

Review these links (and also see if you can find any additional links of your own) and then see if you can find out any information that will help you answer the questions that follow:

  1. What do the following statements mean?
    • When they came to the screen, people did not call them ‘silent films’ because they really are not silent per se.
    • Silent cinema has an acoustic dimension that originates in the image.
    • The strong appeal of the “suggestive silence” of motion pictures to the “auditory imagination” constitutes “a new possibility of poetic expression which no serious photo playwright can afford to neglect.”
    • Spectators believed that silent films told stories of voiceless people in a soundless world
    • Silent filmmakers believed that the camera captured the essence of characters through their faces.
    • Neuropsychology defines synaesthesia as an “involuntary experience in which the stimulation of one sense causes a perception in another.”
  2. Finally, what was it that piqued Salvador Dali’s interest in silent cinema?

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