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Shh… Action! Modern Silent Shorts brings live music and dialogue-free film to New York
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Contemporary silent films are touring around the New York area this summer as part of Modern Silent Shorts.
About a century ago, the talkies took over, and the era of silent movies was done. But is anything really done? These days, a group of young filmmakers is experimenting with modern silent films. They’ve been screening them on the East Coast this summer. NPR’s Chloee Weiner reports.
CHLOEE WEINER, BYLINE: On a recent summer Sunday in Montclair, New Jersey, a full theater watched a man on screen in a pigeon costume, passing out flyers on a street corner. He eats a sandwich on a bench and makes prolonged eye contact with a bird. We’re watching the short film “Flock” by Lucas Ansel. It’s an animated movie about a lonely guy who finds unlikely kinship in a group of Brooklyn-based pigeons.
LUCAS ANSEL: I wanted to do something New York, and I was thinking about maybe rats were controlling – they were the secret architects of everyone’s lives. And then that somehow turned into pigeons.
WEINER: The 26-year-old filmmaker has one of seven silent films screening today.
ANSEL: You’re restricted to just your visual language – is such a great task, a great assignment. Like, I felt like I was back at school.
WEINER: This project is called Modern Silent Shorts. This summer, they’ve held screenings at an event space in Brooklyn, a church in Upper Manhattan and a castle on an island off Beacon, New York. The in-person nature is key to the viewing experience. A live band plays original scores specifically composed for each film.
ANSEL: It’s full of young people just having a good time. People are excited by unique voices in film. They are just kind of bored by how flat and same movies have become.
WEINER: A few years ago, an entrepreneur named Boykin Curry attended a screening of classic silent films – think Buster Keaton.
BOYKIN CURRY: And then I thought, well, these stories are classics but not as relevant to audiences today. And would it be interesting to see what great filmmakers today would do with that constraint, with that format?
WEINER: So he teamed up with filmmakers Lily Weisberg and Michael Bloom, both in their 20s, to reproduce a similar experience. They drew inspiration from other silent film festivals in Chicago and Brooklyn, but they wanted to commission directors to make films for the project. There was just one problem.
LILY WEISBERG: Most people have not made a silent film before.
WEINER: But plenty of people were up for the challenge. Weisberg and Bloom assembled an inaugural class of directors in 2024.
MICHAEL BLOOM: Really great directors tell their films through images first. And this is an opportunity to sort of go full throttle on that instinct.
WEINER: There are films about a lonesome flower seller, a parent who discovers a pernicious mold spreading across his apartment and a young man coping with compulsive Google searches about his health.
WEISBERG: I think that theme of alienation and isolation being one character’s subjectivity is true across the films. There are ones that are – you see that through technology. Like, the alienation that is created and made worse by technology. But I think that theme is present in the films that also have no technology in them.
WEINER: This is the first year the films are touring and phones have been surprisingly absent among their audience. Here’s filmmaker Lucas Ansel again.
ANSEL: It’s not second-screen viewing. You’re just locked in.
WEINER: Organizer Michael Bloom says he noticed this, too.
BLOOM: Yeah. It feels like a lot of content is made to fill the dead space when you’re at home, folding laundry or, you know, cleaning the house or making dinner, and you’re alone, and your roommate’s not home. And it just feels really wonderful to make films that demand to be watched in person, with your phone away. They become so immersed with the music and so in tune with the director’s vision and the way that they’re telling their story that they totally forget they’re watching silent films, and they can just really tune in.
WEINER: Silent films about internet-induced loneliness viewed together, not a phone in sight. Chloee Weiner, NPR News, New York.
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