You don't watch silent movies the same way you watch a sound movie.
Silent movies require a different level of attention.
I think a different level of involvement.
They solicit your imagination and your participation in a way that a sound film doesn't.
Something that only lasted about thirty years in the real world but continues to be with
us in a very strong, strong way.
Unfortunately, the great majority of silent films have been lost forever.
They just were not preserved at the time they were made.
They were not seen as products that needed to survive beyond their commercial lives.
And by some estimates, about 90% of the silent cinema has been lost.
My name is Dave Kehr.
I'm a curator in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art.
And today, we're going to take a look at a silent film, one that's very close to me because
I've been working with a team of other people on restoring it for a number of years now.
This is Ernst Lubitsch's 1923 film “Rosita” starring Mary Pickford.
“Rosita” is set in a mythical 19th-century Spain, where a lecherous king has cast his
eye on a popular street singer played by Mary Pickford.
And it is Rosita's shtick, her act, to satirically attack the king in her songs.
He finds this kind of provocative and interesting and decides he wants to know her a lot better.
The king sends a couple of his henchmen to try to arrest her.
A handsome young nobleman, played by George Walsh, tries to help her resist, but they
both end up in prison.
The King tries to break up this incipient romance by having the nobleman condemned to
death and sending Rosita away to a rather nice villa that he's procured for her.
In the meantime, the queen is keeping a wary eye on all of this and is able to eventually
adjust the outcome to her own satisfaction, in very Lubitschian manner.
A silent movie engages your attention the same way a book does.
You are there to finish that work of art.
It exists, really, between you and the page
and a silent movie exists between the viewer and the screen.
You have to supply the sound effects.
You have to supply the timbre of the voices.
You have to supply, in many cases, the color.
You have to be able to assemble those shots into a unified space.
And a good director knows that and takes advantage of that
as does Ernst Lubitsch throughout "Rosita."
It's a constant transaction.
It requires attention and involvement in a way that maybe digital era films don't solicit
so much anymore.
The cliché "Lubitsch moment" is the closed door behind which some delights, usually sexual,
are occurring and the audience is asked to imagine those.
And that's just, you know, it's a funny way of getting around censorship
but it's a principle he applied in so many different ways.
There's a sequence in here where you see Mary circling around a bowl of fruit.
It's a very long take.
She's hungry.
She hasn't eaten.
She's the poor street singer who suddenly finds herself in the royal palace.
And here she is confronted with a bowl of fruit
and she's just awestruck and a little proud, a little wary.
She doesn't want to just dive in there and start pigging out.
She's going to dance around a little bit.
So, we're just watching her
oh, dives in and steals one
hopefully, even though she's alone, she doesn't want anyone else to see her.
She can't resist, goes back for another.
And the way he builds this scene, it gets funnier and funnier.
She keeps going back.
A little guilty look.
Just beautifully timed.
And again, we see so much of her character, her pride, her desperation.
And now, she's suddenly confronted by the King.
And she has to finish chewing very quickly so she can speak to him
and it's a wonderful laugh line.
Suddenly, that sense of embarrassment becomes a wonderful moment, a wonderful joke.
The rest of the film kind of follows their little erotic dance as he tries to seduce
her and she tries to get some advantage for herself.
This is some footage that was supposedly taken by Mary Pickford’s brother, Jack
on the set of “Rosita.”
And we can see Lubitsch trying out some of the masks for the carnival scene.
The reason that there are so many children in this scene is that they would put children
in the background of the shot in order to create a sense of false perspective and make
the depth of the shot look actually longer than it is.
And he has a lot of fun trying on that mask and smoking his trademark cigar.
He had been an actor himself at the beginning of his career
and you can still see he really enjoys being in front of the camera.
He enjoys hamming it up.
“Rosita” was the first American film by Ernst Lubitsch who, in 1923, was the most
famous director in the world.
Lubitsch started getting offers from Hollywood
and he got an offer from Mary Pickford, who at that point was probably the biggest movie
star in the world, certainly the biggest female star in the world.
Very interesting woman who had established her own production company quite early on had been
one of the founding members of United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith.
She very much took charge of her own career, produced her own films.
Mary was famous for playing adolescent girls.
She was America's sweetheart.
She was the embodiment of, you know, innocence, and energy, and grit, and go-get-it spirit.
She was often an orphan who had to find her own way in the world
or solve various problems facing her family.
Saving the day in the end.
“Rosita” was an opportunity for her to change the little girl image
that she had with the public.
A few years later, Mary turned against this movie for reasons that no one has ever quite
been able to figure out.
The reviews were fantastic by all accounts.
It did extremely good business at the box office.
But she allowed "Rosita" both to fall out of copyright and to decay.
And again, I do not know why.
Suddenly, in the fan magazines, she's referring to it as a famous failure.
And it wasn't.
There's just no evidence that it was in any way.
I think she became uneasy with the "Mary becomes a woman" angle.
She immediately went back to playing adolescents in her next film.
She allowed her personal print of Rosita to dissolve.
It disappeared.
Until the 1970s when a nitrate print turned up in the collection of the Soviet state archives.
It was a print that had probably been bootlegged by the Soviets in the 1920s.
The print was in such bad condition that, basically, no one thought they could do anything
substantial with it for a long, long time.
It just remained in this kind of dismal state.
So, you really could not get much more compromised than that film
the next best thing to really not existing at all.
And then a few years ago, with all the new tools we've got from the digital realm, it
suddenly became possible to give a very good restoration to this
you know, to really get some dramatic improvement in the image
to remove a lot of the scratches and dirt that had been baked in over years and years.
And now, we have a "Rosita" that is never going to look perfect but it looks amazingly
good considering how compromised that material was to begin with.
And now, people can see this film and judge for themselves.
Silent films are only primitive in the sense that they came first.
They were primary.
Everything else is built upon that.
The levels of sophistication were immense.
This was not a simplistic art form.
It could contain amazing nuance, subtext, just the richness of emotion, the richness of expression
is perfectly comparable with the best of literature and visual arts during that period.
So, those are a few of my thoughts on why silent films are still important and why we
should try to take care of the ones we have and keep looking for the ones we can't find.
I would love to hear some of your experiences with silent movies
what they mean to you, how you've approached them, how you first encountered them in your life.
And let us know if there are any other topics you'd like to see us cover in these videos.
You could just leave us a note in the comments section below
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and from the Department of Film.
My name is Dave Kehr
I'm a curator at The Museum of Modern Art
and I'll see you next time.