TELEVISION: SILENTS ARE STILL GOLDEN

• Share

What would you pay or risk to see a movie? In inflation-racked Germany after World War I, people paid for film tickets with lumps of coal. In Paris in 1896, audiences gasped at one of the very first films, of a train chugging toward the camera. They feared it would crash through the screen, yet were thrilled by the spectacle.

A matter of life and death, cinema was an instant sensation. In Europe it attracted not only lifelong fans but also visionary artists. On a par with, or ahead of, directors in the U.S., they created film art. Color, sound, musical scores, special effects, the chase, the epic, the sequel--all were pioneered by Europeans in the early 1900s, long before Americans made movies in a town called Hollywood.

Today Hollywood so dominates the film landscape that Americans may think they can ignore work from abroad, whether of the 1990s or the 1890s. Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood, a six-hour TV history of European silent film by the nonpareil team of Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, could upend that notion. Faster than a speeding Twister, more sweeping than Braveheart and, in its insistence on Europe's artistic superiority, as contentious as an Oliver Stone screed, Cinema Europe will pry open the viewer's eyes and mind. It is airing five nights this week on cable's Turner Classic Movies.

On Dec. 28, 1895, when Louis and August Lumiere showed a Paris audience a brief film of workers leaving a factory, cinema officially began. (They exhibited the train film a few months later.) France also nurtured film's first artist, Georges Melies, a master conjurer who, in the 1900 One Man Band, plays six members of a band and the conductor--all in one shot. Melies made color films; the Germans, in 1905, made talking pictures. Italians developed the historical epic. The French persuaded Camille Saint-Saens to compose a score for a 1908 film and Sarah Bernhardt to bless the infant medium with her stage-star quality.

That decade was one of firsts; the 1920s was a decade of bests, as Europe produced films and filmmakers that were the envy of American producers and art-house audiences. In Sweden, Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom made sweeping dramas of man in tune with or enslaved by nature. Denmark's Carl Dreyer shot his heroically austere The Passion of Joan of Arc in France. The Germans boasted Ernst Lubitsch's puckish historical sagas and Fritz Lang's grand parables. Lang's Siegfried had a fire-breathing dragon, a contraption 50 ft. long operated by eight men; his gigantic, prophetic Metropolis nearly bankrupted its backers.

Cinema Europe's hero is Abel Gance, who in the 1927 Napoleon harnessed an epic delirium unmatched before or since. "Here," Gance said, "was a new alphabet for the cinema." But with the entry of talking films that year, the language of silents became as obsolescent as Yiddish. Films got chatty, conservative; they still are. Most modern directors don't know Gance's "alphabet." They can barely spell cat.