Paula Marantz Cohen,
Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth.
Oxford University Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0195 14 094X
240pp
US$18.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Oxford University Press)

Uploaded 20 September 2002

The photographs of British royalty that illustrate the first and last chapters of Paula Marantz Cohen’s study of the themes and impact of American silent film reflect the deftness and audacity of her argument. Silent film fostered a view of human character and potential that would elevate the self-made, robust American above his effete and tradition-bound European forebear, and eventually become the model for the rest of the modern world.

The British royals are Lord and Lady Mountbatten in the 1920s, looking game but ill-at-ease beside their more limber American guests, and Princess Diana in the 1980s, giving the trademark sideways gaze and pensive smile that endeared her to the multitudes. At the time of her death, Cohen says, Diana had come to embody not the majesty of British tradition but the global appeal of the American myth.

Silent film consolidated, but did not create, the American conception of character. That concept was articulated by thinkers like William Hazlitt, who saw that America had no past to venerate; Thomas Paine, who sought to begin the world anew; Thomas Jefferson, who called for laws forged from contemporary experience and not European custom; and James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, who celebrated the native soil and frontier. Cohen sees elements of the American myth in other sources as well, including landscape painting (Thomas Cole), urban design (Hugh Ferriss) psychology and physiology (William James).

But it was the peculiar gift and power of silent film to give visual meaning to the idea of beginning the world anew, and to disseminate it without speech to an audience that, being largely immigrant, lacked a common tongue. Eventually it would reach a worldwide audience. Silent film’s greatest value, she argues, is “as the source of a way of seeing that powerfully informs our present lives.” (18)

What we are primed to see, in Cohen’s view, are three elements that are, simultaneously, the foci of silent film and the defining characteristics of the American myth.

The first element is the body, exemplifying prowess, performance and victory against the odds. On stage and virtually naked, Harry Houdini catered to an American fascination with the body that contrasted with the European preference for the verbal and the metaphysical. On screen, Buster Keaton’s body would at the start of the narrative suffer mishap and pratfall, but by story’s end would accomplish spectacular feats through dogged persistence and sheer luck.

The second is the landscape, a backdrop for action and a testing ground for character. William S. Hart’s early westerns contrasted the nobility of the natural landscape with the degeneracy of an encroaching civilization. Douglas Fairbanks used landscape (not necessarily western) as settings for history, legend, swashbuckling and stunts.

The third element is the face. While silent film venerated the bodies of men like Keaton and Fairbanks, the face on film was that of a woman like Lillian Gish – fragile, vulnerable and infinitely expressive.

Among the film genres, comedies showcased daring and dexterity, and westerns evoked the panoramic space in which to assert one’s manhood. But the close-up made possible the prolonged gaze at a female face that conferred a sense of intimate knowledge of the character on screen, and the person portraying it. The close-up made possible silent film’s third genre, the melodrama.

In time, we would come to believe that we know what there is to know about people by gazing at their faces. And what there is to know is a self of glamour and authority, constructed out of a correspondence between screen narrative and personal life. In Princess Diana’s case, the interplay between photographic image and personal character was seamless. The camera loved her face, her fashionably attired body, and the landscapes of royalty and refugee camps in which she moved. The public adored the free, courageous and pathetic self – straight out of the American myth – she presented to the world.

Cohen’s work is a literate and insightful explication of how Hollywood sustained the myth of America and made it triumphant around the world. But she stops short of considering other manifestations and consequences of that triumph, not always salutary, not always benign. What she does not explore is the the viewpoint of the subjugated world:

That perspective is provided in a book written three years earlier by Filipino screenwriter and film scholar Clodualdo del Mundo (Native Resistance: Philippine Cinema and Colonialism 1898-1941. Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1998).

Cohen identifies silent film’s contribution as a way of seeing that powerfully informs lives. Del Mundo points out that that way of seeing is the way of the colonizer.

In 1898 Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and the United States replaced Spain as colonizer of the Philippines. U.S. President George McKinley justified colonization as a period of tutelage for a people manifestly incapable of self-rule, and American apprenticeship was facilitated by English language newspapers, compulsory elementary education in English, and entertainment in the form of theatrical and magic lantern shows, stereopticon slides, and movies.

The first American films about the Philippines, produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company and American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, document or recreate scenes of battle between American soldiers and Filipino rebels, in which the natives are vanquished and driven from the screen.
As in Spanish colonial times, the Filipino elite was readily won over, adopted the colonizer’s language, aspired to the status of trusted lieutenants. By the late 1910s, American feature films dominated the market, since U.S. imports were tax-free. The first locally made feature films were produced by American businessmen. Filipino filmmakers did not gather momentum until the 1930s.

Del Mundo argues that since culture, a colonizer’s vehicle, is also the site of decolonization, one can discern in early Philippine cinema the elements of native resistance. Resistance began with indigenization of theatrical forms introduced during the Spanish regime, and continued with the indigenization of cinema itself. The more fantasy-oriented of these genres was used to project nationalist messages and ridicule autocratic rule; the more realistic genre depicted the good guys in native costume and the villains in Western garb.

But del Mundo concedes that Philippine cinema of the period bears the stamp of the colonizer, takes on his way of seeing, and casts the native as the imperialist’s inferior. In the Philippines, the triumph of the American myth is manifested not in the unexceptionable themes that Cohen has enumerated, but in the casting of movie stars with Caucasian features in heroic roles, the representation of slaves and subjects of subterranean kingdoms as dark-skinned savages, and the story lines that contrast the lives of rich and poor, but ultimately justify the privileged position of a benevolent elite.

The American myth encompasses energy, liberation, individualism and modernity; but there is a demeaning and pernicious side to its hegemony, and native filmmakers still struggle to break free of its legacy.

Jaime S. Ong