newyorker:

The Joy of Silent Film

Clowning, it seems to me, is where silent film is at its most playful and its most poetic. Nowadays, we talk of “standup” comedy, a phrase that indicates by its very description how frozen the body has become; entertainers are now “talking heads.” Silent films celebrated the poetry of motion. Silent film elevated the kinetic to metaphor. “I was alien to the slick tempo,” Chaplin wrote of his first trip to America in 1910. “In New York even the owner of the smallest enterprise acts with alacrity…. The soda jerk, when serving an egg malted milk, performs like a hopped up juggler.” The silent clowning—Chaplin’s especially—turned the exhausting American momentum into fun.

- John Lahr on the joy of silent film and his recent experience seeing Marion Davies in “Show People” (1928): http://nyr.kr/zJOysH