“We Didn’t Need Words, We Had Faces!” (Video)

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

The following video is a TCM promotion for Jacqueline Stewart’s Sunday night/Monday morning 12 midnight silents show.

Although Stewart is attractive and shapely, and has a sexy voice, she is very black, and a tenured professor.

Several months ago, I read of her in a thing on Turner’s death wish (by a racist “journalist” in a Chicago paper, who wants to help along the channel’s demise), in which she was interviewed about getting this gig. Instead of being grateful, she was a sore winner, complaining that it had taken too long.

It has been very hard for me to arrange to be watching Turner on Sunday/Monday at midnight, after watching Red Eddie’s B-films on Saturday/Sunday night. However, Stewart is showing masterpieces, and I need to devote more and more of my time to silents. Moviemakers worked for years to develop this amazing art form, which in the blink of an eye was gone. It then took several years (1927-1934) for everyone to figure out how to create a new art form. In the meantime, that beautiful, magical world was lost.

If you ever want to get a notion of what the silent world was like, within a talkie, check out Giuletta Massina’s performance in her husband, Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, La Strada (1954). Although Massina occasionally speaks, she mimes through much of the picture as “artichoke head,” in a performance that consciously evoked the silents. It’s the greatest performance I’ve ever seen by a movie actress.

I will try and post the occasional silent picture here.

Why didn’t I check out Stewart’s show tonight? Confusion reigned. The Boss thought yesterday was Father’s Day, and bought wonderful food on her way home from work (pernil, beef roasts, fresh salmon) in the morning, and everyone agreed to watch Ford’s How Green was My Valley (1941). (We almost never all can agree to watch a picture together anymore.) This is my favorite Father’s Day picture, and that of my chief of research. The Boss had never seen it, and would never have watched it a week later.

She liked it very much.
 


Silents, Please!




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•Jan 15, 2020
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Scott McGee

Short original TCM production on why silent movies matter, featuring new interviews with Honorary Academy Award winner Kevin Brownlow, filmmaker Bill Morrison, TCM Silent Sunday Nights host Jacqueline Stewart, and film collector/expert Shane Fleming. Edited by Sabotage Film Group. Written/Produced by Scott McGee.