Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (review)

Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse is Judith Buchanan's second monograph on Shakespeare film adaptations. Her previous work, Shakespeare on Film (2005), includes two chapters on silent Shakespeare, and these are radically revised and rewritten for a new delivery in a book dedicated exclusively to Shakespeare films made during the silent era (1899-1927). The book also serves as a companion piece to the British Film Institute Silent Shakespeare DVD (2004)—a collection of seven silent Shakespeare films with both introduction and commentary provided by Buchanan. There was an audience for silent Shakespeare: Buchanan counts between 250 to 300 films based on Shakespearean material during cinema's silent era, and over the course of seven chapters, she examines why Shakespeare was such an attractive source for silent film.

The idea of wordless Shakespeare productions might seem paradoxical on first conception, but as the subtitle of Buchanan's monograph reminds us, character muteness is a phenomenon already explored in Shakespearean drama. It is Alonso's dialogue from The Tempest that Buchanan borrows for her title on silent Shakespeare films, and through the use of a pleasurable incongruity, Shakespeare's words bridge us to the concept of a wordless Shakespeare. Later in the preface, Buchanan seizes another opportunity to recall Lavinia from Titus Andronicus, who, dismembered of her hands and tongue, is unable to communicate through voice, and as a result her "signs, winks, nods and kneelings" replace her verbal discourse (1). Upon remembering that wordlessness is an occurrence already explored in Shakespeare's plays, the feeling that we are being presented with a novel and incongruous idea is dispelled.

At the same time, the mere thought of Shakespeare without words has the potential to incite feelings of violation or to evoke sentiments of loss. This is not a book that laments the muting of Shakespeare. There are no expressions of bereavement, only articulations of gain. As foregrounded by Alonso and Lavinia, in the absence of the spoken word a variety of other expressions emerge that are equally Shakespearean in content. The book covers a range of British, American, Italian, and German productions, which are separated chronologically into the pioneering years of cinema (1805-1906), the transitional years of cinema (1907-13), the 1916 tercentenary, and the later silent films of the 1920s, with Buchanan's research offering exhaustive examinations into the marketing, distribution, exhibition, and reception of the films. In an endeavor to press us to rethink the ways in which we experience Shakespeare, Buchanan presents engaging, in-depth and lively analyses of the nonlinguistic dimensions of Shakespeare films of the silent era.

Opening with an account of the nineteenth-century legacy of magic lantern productions of Shakespeare plays, Buchanan notes that artistic nuances seemingly unique to silent cinema actually derive from and share many similarities with theater. Drawing on performance conventions associated with the nineteenth-century stage, actors are seen to perform words through stylized gestures and other acting codes that have become familiar through theater. Buchanan then recalls the speech act ban, which monitored the spoken word onstage during the Restoration, and she supplies examples of difficulties surrounding the delivery of dramatic dialogue prior to the arrival of silent film. In order to evade the policing of words during the speech act ban, innovative methods were required, and linen scrolls became an alternate way to supply dialogue. The use of linen scrolls can be seen to anticipate the cinematic intertitle, and as Buchanan notes, the effect of the dialogue scrolls in each case was remarkably similar:

In both instances, words were stripped of vocal inflection and performance emphasis, and became instead part of the visual scheme of the piece. Like the earlier stage scrolls, intertitles were similarly to impose a temporary interruption of the performed action in order to supply dialogue, plot, summary or location report in written form. The alternative suspension of action and dialogue that the intertitles of silent film brought in...