Films can have an enormous emotional impact on a viewer, swaying them emotionally in ways that their intellect would oppose. I was reminded of this recently when I watched two films from the silent era, Buster Keaton’s The General (1927) and D. W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation (1915). The latter was one of the earliest American feature films (the first being made in 1912) with the very first being made in Australia in 1906.
It was purely a coincidence that I happened to watch two films from the silent era so close to each other because the reasons were quite different. I had always wanted to see a Buster Keaton film because I had read that he was a pioneering genius of the silent film comedy genre. I watched Griffiths’ film as part of the College Scholars Program that I help teach.
Coincidentally, both films involved the Civil War and were told from a viewpoint that was sympathetic to the Confederacy. The first thing that struck me about both was how modern they were in the way they told their stories. They did have obvious signs of being old, such as the lack of sound and color and special effects, and poor quality film stock. But apart from these purely physical factors, the narrative structure was surprisingly familiar with flashbacks being the only modern feature of films that was missing.
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