Ryan, Carey "Empathy Is the Devil: Employing Conventions and Themes of Early Cinema in Contemporary Practice." PhD
, Griffith University, 2017
Keywords/Fields of Study : Silent cinema techniques
Dance in drama
Contemporary drama
Abstract: Over the last decade, the international screen has witnessed a revival of silent cinema techniques. Eighty or so years after the advent of the talkies, titles such as France's The Artist (Hazanavicius, 2011), Spain’s Blancanieves (Berger, 2012), Australia's Dr. Plonk (de Heer, 2007), Portugal’s Tabu (Gomes, 2012) and Argentina’s La Antena (Sapir, 2007) have drawn on a palette of almost forgotten techniques to great effect. While each might be read as an homage to this foundational period in cinema history, the filmmakers’ objective has not been to remake silent films or to reject modern digital modes of filmmaking, but to reinvigorate the rich and varied ways by which stories may be told on film.
Empathy Is the Devil is a 12.5-minute silent black-and-white film strongly featuring dance, the themes of which include addiction, mental health, and homelessness. The film’s protagonist, who is at odds with the modern world, suffers a curious addiction: a daily pressure to give to charity more than he can afford. He finds solace in a nostalgic past in which property is freely shared and wealth is not the ultimate goal.
In keeping with many films of the silent era, the project addresses social issues both subtly and overtly, using humour and pathos. Importantly, the film revisits the close collaborations of modern dance and film, two art forms that emerged alongside each other in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as witnessed by one of the earliest films Carmencita (Dickson, 1894). Each discipline contributed in a fundamental way to the development of the other: film looked to dance for an exploration and understanding of movement, while the filming of modern dance both authenticated this new art form and provided another platform for its expression. An example of this is the work of Loie Fuller, creator of the Danse Serpentine [Serpentine Dance] (Lumière, 1896), whose innovations in staging and lighting influenced early film techniques. After their foundational phases, however, the two disciplines drifted apart.
In Empathy Is the Devil, dance is employed for twin purposes: to reinvest dance and film with an equal and collaborative partnership, neither one at the service of the other; and to drive the narrative, by allowing the protagonist's inner thoughts to be expressed through choreographed movement. Empathy Is the Devil utilises the silent era cinema techniques of inter-titles, iris transitions, and a reactive score. It also draws on elements of melodrama and broad slapstick to offer the viewer a cultural/historical link to the silents’ glorious past, even daring to invoke Chaplin and, by extension, the social issues with which he engaged, such as: addiction and society’s treatment of the poor and the socially awkward.
In this doctorate I pursue the questions: What intersections can be found between the advent of modern dance and early cinema? How might the now anachronistic techniques of early silent, black and white cinema be reinvigorated in contemporary screen practice? And how might such techniques be used to elicit empathy today for social themes that hark back to the 1920s and 30s but are still live issues? What role might dance now play in realising such narratives? And how might the processes of film production shift to most fully realise these possibilities. Overall, the objective has been to devise a film complex enough to reward the cineaste and simple enough to be enjoyed by the public as a visual/aural feast.
Department: Griffith Film School/Queensland College of Art
, Griffith University
Advisor(s): Patricia FitzSimons
