Landscapes

One of the fascinating things about silent film is the look of the land. Films could be, and were, shot outside with no worries about sound (and much less traffic than now), and they provide a look into the cities and countryside of the past.

It's hard to imagine, now, Los Angeles with streetcars, or New York City, for that matter, but there it was. The streets look miles wide; dusty, unpaved, with those now-antique cars moving along them at a pace that would barely be tolerated today. Horse-drawn carts still have a place amidst the motorized traffic. Everything looks so much bigger than the cityscapes of today.

The Los Angeles of, say, 1910 looks nothing like the sprawling monster city that it would become. The coastline is largely empty; the buildings are only around ten stories high, if that; people can ride horses down the street and hitch them up when they go indoors. The early films of D.W. Griffith show areas that have long since been swallowed by urban sprawl. Some of them, no doubt, have turned into high-crime districts.

But not in 1910. Not yet; not before two world wars had blasted the innocence from the faces shown on the screen. Southern California was still a place for people to visit - and move - due to the climate, the almost-constant sunshine that still reflects from the objects in the flickers that survive. There were many places to have a private ranch, with no one within miles of you. It was a town/city of neat little houses, covered with flowers, and the front porches that hardly anyone builds these days. Vandalism is rarely seen, and spray paint hasn't made its ugly mark.

One of the joys of watching a pre-WWI movie made in Europe, is to discover just how the cities looked at the time. Buildings that have long since been destroyed are still intact and in use, with no steel-and-glass monstrosities towering uncomfortably over the older neighboring buildings. Paris, Berlin, London - they are all as they had been for centuries.