Silent films keep the attention of spectators mainly on the image and use purely the language of film itself to help us interpret the story. Just as Béla Balázs points out, “What is left out and what is included have a significance of their own and this significance is provided only by the camera and transmitted only by the picture projected on the screen”.
In the movie, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, directed by F. W. Murnau. There is a scene at the beginning when the husband goes to meet the mistress and they kiss under the moonlight. The very next shot shows the wife kissing and hugging the kid in sorrow. The montage of these two distinctive yet similarly framed shots integrate perfectly with a strong contrast and sarcastic effect.
This film uses a lot of overlying shots to produce and intensify the desire, especially in the forepart of the film. While the male character is in the dilemma of whether to take his wife on the boat and drown her. He wakes up and there is a close-up to a pile of straw. In the next shot, the man is standing there and there emerges an overlying shot that a semi-transparent figure of his mistress is seducing him.
In a silent film, the expressions and movements of actors and actresses are extremely important. A noticing fact which is very common in films produced in the twentieth century, that the transition from one emotion to the other needs to be clear and straightforward. Take one example from the movie, while the wife is waiting for her husband taking away the dog, she was at first perplexed, frowning and being curious. Later on, she becomes happy with a fleeting blissful smile, probably picturing their upcoming trip across the water. However, as if remembering something all of a sudden, she gets tense and vigilant. These three explicit phases of emotional transition invite us into the movie and experience the feelings from her point of view. As indicated in Béla Balázs’s Theory of the Film, “Our consciousness is identified with the characters in the film”.
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