Leonardo Digital Reviews

Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses.

By Anthony Slide. The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, U.S.A., 2002. 464 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 0-8131-2249-X.

Reviewed by Michael Punt

mpunt@easynet.co.uk

“ Leslie Flint was a well-known medium, and at seances, he would have lengthy conversations with Valentino. I was never invited to attend, being a non believer, but once in his living room, I did point out a strange cloud that seemed to be hanging down from the ceiling. Flint explained that I was seeing Valentino’s ectoplasm, which had yet to dematerialise after his last contact. Flint was very kind to me and …” Slide, p.xvii

Nowhere in the twentieth century has the fusion of art, science and technology been so seamlessly institutionalised than in the cinema. The explanation for the seemingly effortless achievement of fusing competing world views rests with the inscription of human consciousness that distinguished the cinema from technological spectacle. Some quite special people became movie actors and actresses standing in for what is beyond the mere representation of space, time and movement in two dimensions, and became a prosthesis for another kind of intelligence. Often this is overlooked as the image overwrites the person but Anthony Slide’s biographical and autobiographical study of one hundred silent film actors and actresses brings the forgotten dimension of humans in cinema to the fore with such ease that it might be mistaken for coincidence.

Slide is one of the great historians of early American cinema. Despite his relative youth (compared with cinema), over the past thirty years he has lived the decades of the silent era as an historian and detective haunting archives, assiduously gathering data and talking to people. In a collection of articles of two or three pages this book recounts the lives of one hundred actors and actresses chosen on, what seems to be, an entirely personal basis. They are often informed by deeply personal relationships and anecdote they come across as historically sound unsentimental historical documents. As a consequence the brief pen portraits often read like obituaries for people who are still alive. At times an actor’s life becomes a silent vehicle for Slide’s gritty criticism of the industry, a terse description of unpleasant individuals, or a truculent comment on a career squandered or a corrupt (or corrupting) agent. But above all these biographies are descriptions of lives lived by both the people and the author detailed with such particularity that in some, rather extraordinary, way the book manifests a vitality that, I am sure, Leslie Flint would have recognised. The trick of it is that Slide writes about the images of humans not as a star discourse, a story of reworked press releases or industry gossip, it is a book about images as though they were humans. A collection of stories about what some people did with their lives while they were also showing audiences what they were told to do with their lives. It’s a powerful cocktail in which bitterness and frailty are continuos with love and genius. Slide takes offence at some actors and rejects them with unapologetic prejudice, he recognises poor craft and naked Emperors and, I suspect, used anecdote to settle old scores and snubs, unthinking sleights and malicious intentions to both him and his chosen actors. Such assured humanity in biography makes for a heady mix such that on occasions (for example his account of Blanche Sweet) one is almost moved to tears.

Throughout the book there are high quality photographs to remind us who these people were, and of course the reader is expected to have seen at least some of the films that are cited. Indeed the more silent cinema the reader has seen the greater the rewards, but even for those with only a passing knowledge of the movies the humanity and energy of the writing makes it a worthwhile read which will almost certainly stimulate a curiosity to see some of the material. Slide’s own verdict on the book is that it is both an ave and a vale, and although the tone is never nostalgic it is, at times, quite grave in its reflection on life which in the cinema has its greatest power in its very vulnerability, flickering at around 16 frames per second. There are many biographies and memoirs of Hollywood but unlike Kenneth Anger’s or Gore Vidal’s personal histories (of which this is a version with less scandal and an extra helping of fact), Slide’s will satisfy both the scholar and the enthusiast, arranging hard evidence and posing questions about history and anecdote that makes it so much larger than the amplified lives it is devoted to.