Q&A: 'Silent Movies' Author Peter Kobel

AMERICA'S COFFEE TABLES are about to get a whole lot more beautiful.

Arts writer and former Premiere magazine managing editor Peter Kobel collaborated with the Library of Congress on "Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture," a ravishing, oversize, million-pound study of the silent movie era, not just its films, but its promotion, its culture and the way these movies changed how we think about the world.

In honor of the book and the Library's archives, a silent-movie showcase is coming to various D.C. venues beginning this weekend with a screening of the D.W. Griffith epic drama "Way Down East," and continues through Nov. 24 with a restored print of the 1927 thriller "Chicago."

» EXPRESS: How did this project come about?
» KOBEL: They wanted to do a book on based on their movie collection, their archives. ... They're known for books and they wanted to get more attention for their movie archives, which include not just films but an incredible amount of movie artifacts, poster, lobby cards, fan magazines, glass slides, stills, you name it. So they wanted this book to be a more popular book, not in the sense of best-selling, but to have broad appeal.
A lot of what I tried to do is relate these movies to modern directors. ... it's enriching for your experience of modern films.

» EXPRESS: And they threw open their doors?
» KOBEL: This book has been five years in the making. I am not a silent film scholar; I'm an arts and entertainment journalist. By talking to people there, I came up with outline and a way of organizing the material. They took me on a tour of their collection, the posters and the film department material was mind-boggling, I mean it was just Jorge Luis Borges once said that he imagined heaven being a sort of library and that quote came into my head as I was walking around on my first tour. The curators and wonderful people who worked there opening drawers and showing me things that weren't even cataloged, and then I saw these beautiful, perfectly preserved one-sheet and posters of Chaplin and "Metropolis." It was pure pleasure.

» EXPRESS: It's not just about the films; the book really sets the scene for the silent era's culture around film.
» KOBEL: I loved the idea of doing book like this, where you can read about something and see how films were promoted, for instance, through posters and fan magazines. But I also tried to include other things, like what was happening historically, or try to grab a quote from Fitzgerald about flappers. ... I couldn't have gotten a better gig.

» EXPRESS: Even with your background in film, you must have learned a lot.
» KOBEL: What became totally fascinating to me was that the Library's collection was especially good on early films. In no other art form can you see this growth from birth to childhood to adolescence to maturity over the decades.

» EXPRESS: There are many surprises in the book, including the fact that early filmmaking was so international.
» KOBEL: Yeah, there was this big race worldwide. Part of that was the temper of the times — science and technology were just hurtling along at the turn of the century. Early on, certainly in the 1890s and first decade of the 20th century, Europe was a very important player in advancing film beyond one-shot actualities, developing the means of telling a story, and so much of silent films that I love are either European or Russian. One area that I knew about but got to explore a lot more was Scandinavian film; a lot of it is so breathtakingly beautiful.

» EXPRESS: What effect did the Hays censorship code have on filmmaking?
» KOBEL: I think the Hays Office was like a pubic relations agency for the film industry. All of the Hays Office rules and regulations, if you could even call them that, were voluntary, and Hays was a PR man who did damage control the way people do in Hollywood now. The Hays Office was really started more for things that happened in real life with actors like [Roscoe "Fatty"] Arbuckle, than the content of films.

And everyone was given the outlet of compensatory values in which, if they showed vice, as long as the perpetrators of vice or committers of vice were punished, you could do it. DeMille was really good at that having crazy scenes of Babylonian orgies that had nothing to do with the contemporary story — they were hallucinations — and then the contemporary story would go on to have a serious moral.

» EXPRESS: It seems that there was a lot of very challenging filmmaking, what we now call adult themes, even though we make the mistake of thinking of our ancestors as childlike and simple.
» KOBEL: They dealt with all kinds of serious subjects and in most cases, in the case of Hollywood films, vice would be punished. In Europe — "Pandora's Box" is actually a good example. In the end of "Pandora's Box," Lulu is killed by Jack the Ripper, but that is not like the punishment of vice; it's just something that happened. It's not like some god or force is punishing her — it's just this tragic arc of her life. But the American version has to end with her working for the Salvation Army.

Anyone who hasn't gotten into silent film at all has this impression that it's Victorian, that it's melodrama, that it's 30-year-old women in pigtails trying to look like teenagers. There is that. But there's so much really brilliant, thought-provoking, daring stuff happening. That's the biggest prejudice you have to get people past. Some people will never get past it. ... Anyone who goes through life without seeing Louise Brooks on film, I feel sorry for them.

» EXPRESS: It also surprised me how quickly the players became stars.
» KOBEL:That has to do with the intensity of the film experience, both for silent films and talkies, the sort of intimacy of connection you make with people on the screen that turns people into nuts or turns them into fans. Rin Tin Tin got thousands and thousands of fan letters.

There's also something about ... being immersed in silent film for so long, and being in a small room just watching the films by myself on a flatbed, there's this incredible opportunity to move into kind of a dreamspace.

» EXPRESS: You also have to concentrate to follow a silent movie; even the coedies have intertitles and title cards — you have to pay attention to the action and emotions.
» KOBEL: It's more than that. It's the experience of not hearing them talk somehow makes them more than human, in a strange way. You end up totally identifying with them. Like, Douglas Fairbanks — I never really expected to like him as much as I came to like him, but the way he leaps through his films so effortlessly, it's like he's flying.

» EXPRESS: I suppose it's condescending and millennialist to say, but some of the films you describe sound very modern, like "The Italian."
» KOBEL: Yes, you don't know things like that exist — a lot of people don't know that. I mean, film scholars do, but they're not really getting the word out. This is a movie that influenced [Francis Ford] Coppola, and you can see why, because of its narrative realism and the story it tells about immigration. The realism of the slum environment — it's just, again, this is a way in which I always try and connect silent film to things people are likely to have seen, like "The Godfather."

» EXPRESS: Do you think the book and the film series will spark an interest in silent film?
» KOBEL: I really have strong sense, especially over the 5 years that I've been working on this, that a lot more people are interested in silent films than ever before. ... Movies haven't been very good lately. But in silent film, you have a kind of originality. Even though the genre cliches were forming, they would violate genre cliches all the time. You can be surprised and delighted and enchanted by silent movies in a way that so many movies today are so dismally formulaic.

» Visit loc.gov/pickford for various venues, dates & times.

Images courtesy Library of Congress