How Watching Silent Movies Will Improve Your Street Photography

Last week, I saw a funny clip on Facebook: a Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy dancing scene with Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ added as music. It was extremely entertaining and amazing how the dancing filmed in the twenties matched the music from the sixties (or vise versa).

Watching this clip, however, also made me realize that street and documentary photographers should watch silent movies to help them improve their photography.

Read after the break, which has one of the greatest silent movies of all time, why.

The Complete Metropolis, 1927, Silent Movie, German, Public Domain Movie

By: Public Domain Movies (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC69JYCM8l93_G8iSR5Dowjg/videos)

It is all about storytelling!

The creators of the silent movies were all exceptionally skilled in telling stories by using composition, non-verbal expression, and sequencing.

Without the availability of sound (the spoken word or music) and only using limited intertitles, they had to build their narrative by showing the viewer the most important scenes.

This was not only true for longer features like Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ as shared above, but this was even more important for the shorter, often slapstick, movies that were produced. The movie needed to be able to show the viewer with a couple of short scenes what the story was.

And is this not similar to what the street and documentary photographer needs to do: telling a compelling story by using a limited number of images (sometimes only one)?

Watching silent movies learns us how to select scenes (individual images) and how to sequence them to maximum effect; using wide-angle, medium-angle and close-up compositions to tell our stories.