Not unless you’re doing it wrong.
To begin with, silent film is one of the most misleading labels of all time. They were the farthest thing from silent.
A modern blockbuster film is a hot sonic mess. The sound is overpoweringly loud, as if the filmmaker feels the need to bludgeon you with light and noise, beat you down into your seat. I always wonder, if the volume were lower—maybe the audience would be able to think well enough to realize how mediocre, or indeed bad, most movies are—and walk out.
Movies in the 1910s and 1920s were a much different affair.
First of all, they were not at all silent. They were much more a collaborative, interactive experience than today. A piano player would sit in the theater with the audience and improvise the musical “sound track” while watching along. And a skilled movie pianist was very skilled indeed. Improvising was a jazz skill—jazz grew a lot as a result of silent films. So no two screenings (or performances) were the same.
Seeing a Chaplin film was a much different experience in Hicksville than in a big New York theater that had live Vaudeville performers onstage at intermission or between two features. My grandfather was a vaudeville singer in the 1920s and he often sang between two movies, and sometimes got his name on the marquis along with the scenes and titles that were painted for each movie engagement, before the era of movable letters.
In Hicksville, the theater would be small, it might be a room behind the saloon. Or movies might be screened in the Elk's Lodge. The piano player might be Miss Wilson, the church organist making a little extra income. Or Mr. Smiths who taught music at the local high school.
Silent movies were more interactive and the performances were more distinctive—but they also were much more social.
You and your friends went together, sat together. When the despicable landlord was evicting the young widow and her children from his tenement but hinted that she could stay if only she were a lot friendlier to him . . . the audience would hiss angrily! And their reactions could be heard! If the audience—made up of your friends and neighbors, your fellow Hicksvillains, gasped with surprise or laughed out loud, you gasped or laughed right along with them.
And here's another thing. Silent films were much sexier than what came later. There was no code of sexual censorship, no movie ratings board. When actress Lupe Vélez, The Mexican Spitfire, was onscreen seducing a cowboy in a gold rush saloon, she could display an unlimited amount of leg and cleavage. Lovemaking couples were not banned from the screen, in fact love scenes were prevalent and sometimes played in bed. Nudity was far from unknown.
Today you sit in the dark with a lot of silent strangers. You are warned to “silence your cell phones.” If you laugh out loud at a bit of humor, you’re likely to be asked to leave. Everyone sits still, battered into immobility by the Dolby speakers.
Movies today are the real “silent films.”
Credit
Theda Bara as Cleopatra, 1917.