Early Cinema DVDs (Web Exclusive) by Rahul Hamid

In trying to find a final article to write on, I decided to go to older topics, or rather older films to try and learn more about how we got to where we are now. The article is about three DVD's that contain rare early cinema films. These films show how some of the techniques that we take for granted were performed in the early 1900's, such as sound and color. The first half of the article is for the most part a history lesson on how things like optical sound were invented and still used today. While these things are nice to know, what I was looking for was more of the expectations that these new devices brought from black and white silent films. The writer states at one point that the DVD "Discovering Cinema", "...presents a teleological argument that color and sound were the inevitable future of cinema and that each step along the way to the talking, color cinema of today was simply a crude preamble... but it worth noting that audiences and filmmakers alike saw silent film as a complete and perfect art form." I completely agree with this in terms of the silent film being its own perfect art form and that the color, sound films are in their own art form. There are so many differences that are brought with color and sound that make the two impossible to compare. Whether one or the other is better is opinion, but most can agree that they both have their highs and lows. Whether it's color and sound making for the ability to have too much to really make anything look good, or with silent not having enough; it is more based on the skill of the filmmaker and what they can show their viewer. I found this part of the article to be the most interesting, but Hamid shows more about the political history of film on another section "Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film". Another history lesson about how when films first arrived they were used by many filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith to question what it was to be American. This is a tradition that continues today through documentaries by people like Michael Moore and films such as W. Unfortunately film has been and always will be a political tool.