Lillian Gish on silent film

Lillian Gish (1893–1993), with her sister Dorothy (1898–1968), starred in many early D.W. Griffith classics. Her work in his Birth of a Nation (1915) established her as one of silent cinema’s greatest stars. She was also a distinguished stage actress and, less well known, an expert in the technical aspects of filmmaking and a poetic expositor of the unique virtues of this budding art form. Her latter abilities are fully evident in the excerpt below from the 1929 article she wrote for Britannica’s new 14th Edition (1929–73). Although “talkies” had debuted in 1927, Gish’s theory of motion pictures as a kind of aesthetic Esperanto is based on what she knew best—silent films.

The motion picture, by virtue of its intrinsic nature, is a species of amusing and informational Esperanto, and, potentially at least, a species of aesthetic Esperanto. Of all the arts, if it may be classified as one, the motion picture has in it, perhaps more than any other, the resources of universality. Even a simple waltz by Johann Strauss may remain alien and unassimilable to the musical ear of the Chinese; a Michelangelo fresco may fail to impress its significant beauty upon a Japanese or Hindu; a drama by Ibsen may remain completely unintelligible, even in competent translation, to a maharaja of lndia, just as Chinese music must ever remain strange, peculiar and incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon ear. But the motion picture art of Charlie Chaplin will inevitably make a Japanese laugh as heartily as a Dane.

The reason is simple. Pantomime is the aboriginal means of human communication and intercourse, and pictures bring to a child his first acquaintance with and understanding of the world about him. The motion picture, combining the two, is thus addressed to a common human understanding. It begins with the elementals of human perception and comprehension; it starts at the outset with the advantage of the fundamentals of human intercommunication and explicitness. It is for this reason that the moving picture has spread through the world and has been accepted far and wide in what has seemed an unbelievably short space of time.

The motion picture tells its stories directly, simply, quickly and elementally, not in words but in pictorial pantomime. To see is not only to believe; it is also in a measure to understand. In theatrical drama, seeing is closely allied with hearing, and hearing, in turn, with mental effort. In the motion picture, seeing is all—or at least nine-tenths of all.

This, of course, is the screen in its fundamental aspect. This is the motion picture simple and unsophisticated. This is the universal engine that is the cinema. The motion picture, plainly enough, in certain of its manifestations may remain largely vague and ambiguous to a people alien to the source of its imagination, preparation and making. But the motion picture in itself and in the aggregate is based upon materials of easy, common appreciation. Love, hate, desolation, despair, joy, ecstasy, defeat, triumph—these are universal emotions. Conveyed by words, as drama conveys them, they may offer difficulties to remote and various peoples. But conveyed by the movements of the human face and body, by smiles and tears, troubled brows and dejected shoulders, sparkling eyes and fluttering hands, they are immediately recognizable. A laugh or a sob is the same the world over. They need no words to explain them.

In another phase of the cinema, the so-called news-reel has already proved itself to be a form of journalistic Esperanto, just as the so-called educational moving picture has shown itself to be a form of informational Esperanto. The news-reel has brought to the far corners of the earth the life and daily activities of all nations and people. The educationals, as they are known, have acquainted the audiences of the world with various phenomena associated with invention, manufacture, discovery, ingenuity and enterprise peculiar to a certain country. The news-reel has informed every country of its neighbour, his leaders, his achievements, his troubles, his pleasures, his problems. It has spread a direct acquaintanceship with alien lands, peoples and customs to other lands. It has provided an international newspaper self-adapted to the understanding of all peoples, and a running commentary on contemporaneous history.

The motion picture is at once the common story-book, newspaper and text-book of the 20th century. In its loftier aspects, it may conceivably elude the comprehension of audiences remote from its birthplace. That is, when it abandons its more elemental nature and strives for isolation as an art form. But that is the fate of art, all art, wherever it be found. Art is for the few, unfortunately; the generality of people have difficulty in taking it into their understanding. Shakespeare and the Orient may remain strangers; Leonardo and Dostoievsky may find no sympathy and hospitality in the consciousness of half a dozen lands. But there is probably no land where the spectacle of soldiers marching off to war or a fat man being struck with a custard pie is not instantaneously hailed with understanding. It is in elementary excitements and humours such as these, together with the thousand and one others that they connote, that the motion picture, reaching constantly after higher things, finds the mainspring of its wide and comprehensive appeal. It deals for the most part with primitive instincts, primitive impulses, primitive human peace and alarm, happiness and ache, ambition and dream. These may be dressed in strange costumes and may be shown through strange peoples, but underneath they are the emotions and inspirations and trials of all the human race. The backgrounds may be unfamiliar, but the hearts that beat and struggle, triumph or fall, are the hearts of all mankind. And so the world laughs with Chaplin and Lloyd, cries with Seastrom and Murnau and Griffith, startles at the revelations of Eisenstein, gasps pleasurably at Fairbanks and Valentino, feels tenderness with Mary Pickford and warms to the homely lovableness of Wolheim and Beery.