Academic literature on the topic 'Aesthetic of music for the silent film'

Abstract This article examines a series of lawsuits that consumed Italy’s legal establishment between approximately 1924 and 1933. Resulting from a protracted labor dispute between instrumental musicians who worked in cinemas and the exhibitors who employed them, the lawsuits turned on a question of employment law: whether musicians ought to be considered full-time employees—entitled to various benefits and protections against unfair termination—or more precariously situated freelancers whom exhibitors could hire and fire at will. As a consequence of the vagaries of existing Italian labor law and new Fascist legislation governing labor relations, musicians were already at a disadvantage in this dispute. Unexpectedly, their situation was further undermined by the judiciary, as Italy’s highest court made their employee status conditional on the perceived aesthetic value of cinema and its associated music making. That is, musicians had to prove that their musical abilities were integral to the artistic outcome of any given film screening—a tall order in the context of silent cinematic exhibition, where musical accompaniment was materially distinct from the projected film. Precisely because the courts valorized the fusion of music and image, however, the Italian musicians’ lawsuits illuminate a fundamental parameter of cinematic aesthetics—synchronization—and reveal something significant about the nature of film music. Public recognition for effecting music-image synchronization in film conferred symbolic, but also literal, capital; thus I contend that synchronization ought to be understood as a form of musical labor, both in the silent era and beyond.

AbstractAlthough he composed more than 120 film scores during his career, Georges Auric (1899–1983) did not compose his first until well after his thirtieth birthday. However, as a disciple of Guillaume Apollinaire's esprit nouveau he was interested in the genre much earlier. Between 1919 and 1928 he published three pieces of film music criticism that are couched in the rhetoric of Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. In 1931 he composed his second film score, for René Clair's 1931 film A Nous, la Liberté! Although the music was composed after the esprit nouveau movement had effectively faded away, it is one of the clearest examples of that aesthetic. Because of the extraordinary collaborative relationship between Clair and Auric, the film also presents one of the most striking early solutions to the problem of how sound could be incorporated into the artistic rhetoric of silent cinema.

The philosophical and aesthetic ideas of phenomenology have been present in cinema theory since the silent period. Methods of phenomenological theory can be found in the analysis of the visual aspects of films or the artistic style of their authors. The essay analyses signs of phenomenological thinking in the audiovisual aspects of films - a little studied but significant area of directorial aesthetics. Its theoretical and methodological foundation includes the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and elements of phenomenological aesthetics in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Roman Ingarden. Taking the work of a significant representative of auteur cinema, the Austrian director Michael Haneke, the author explores cinematic variations of the concept of phenomenological reduction, the method of perfectly clear apprehension of the essence and the layered semantic structure of the film. Conclusions are drawn about the presence of typological signs of phenomenological thinking in the work of other filmmakers, such as Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Visually, this presence is expressed in the tendency towards asceticism and documentarism in the choice of artistic devices; towards the disclosure of cinematic phenomena (facts); and aurally, in the tendency to minimize off-screen music and get rid of the expressiveness in the actor's speech, towards greater semantic significance of intra-frame music, individual sounds, pauses and non-sounds.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau was the nineteenth-century mime artist who created a new model for subsequent performers to either imitate or reject, but hardly to ignore. Silent cinema benefited from the nineteenth-century vogue for the mime in general – and the Pierrot character that he did so much to popularize in particular. The most famous mime of the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau, derived his character ‘Bip’ in part from Deburau's Pierrot. And while two of the most influential French mime artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux, sought a radical departure from his Pierrot tradition, they ironically found themselves in the now legendary French film Les Enfants du paradis acting the parts respectively of Deburau and Deburau's father. In this article Edward Nye explores the reasons for Deburau's success from two perspectives: first, by considering Deburau's reputation for clarity of expression, and the absence of critical or public debate over any obscurity; and second, the context of the Romantic movement which primed spectators to appreciate his style of performance. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Mime, Music, and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: the Ballet d'Action (CUP 2011), Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in À Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000).

Martin Marks holds an almost unique position to talk about silent film music: he is a scholarly musician and musical scholar. Besides his canonical book on the history of silent film music (1997), he has been playing piano accompaniments for silent films regularly for nearly four decades. In this interview we asked Martin about the challenges and complexities of choosing and creating music to accompany musical numbers in silent cinema. Martin relates how he detects musical numbers and he expounds his decision-making process on how to treat them. His explanations are interspersed with engaging examples from his practical work and based on both his scholarly knowledge and on his musical intelligence. He talks about the use of pre-existing music as well as about anachronisms in choosing music written many decades after a film was first released. In sum, this interview delivers detailed and informed insights into the difficulties and pleasures of accompanying musical numbers or other types of diegetic music in silent cinema.

This essay explores modernism's aesthetic and political implications through examining the works of Humphrey Jennings. The essay takes as a starting point the tension inherent to the democratic aesthetic of Mass Observation between the individual observers and the editors who write up. This tension can be effectively examined in terms of what Jacques Rancière calls ‘film fables’: the Aristotelian ‘fable’ of dramatic action and cinema's ‘fable’ of egalitarian treatment of ‘passive’ images. The essay argues that the paradox between the two ‘fables’ can be observed in Jennings's works, especially in his essays on Thomas Gray, his ‘report’ poems, and The Silent Village (1943), a dystopian propaganda film set in a Welsh village invaded by Nazis Germany. By looking at these works, the essay illustrates how the utopian longing for ‘pure art’ in modernism is related to the impossible idea of ‘democracy’.

The fact that silent cinema is not to be considered just as a precursor to sound cinema, in an evolutionary sense, is today well acknowledged. The studies of scholars such as Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, Richard Abel, Noël Burch and Charles Musser have moreover invited to consider what the “silent era” harbored not just as another cinema than the “sound” one, but as a number of “other” ways to conceive cinema, each one of them needing an accurately different approach, whatever is the chosen perspective (historiographical, aesthetic, sociologic, etc.) to look at them from. However, it is strange how one of these perspectives seems to be reluctant in accepting this awareness towards the silent production. It is the musical perspective: even if studies that deal with silent film music according to the specific features of the different languages of the silents have been developed indeed (most notably, the ones by Rick Altman), they nonetheless remain a minority. The panorama of discourses about film music, as of 2010, can still include authoritative contributions saying that «almost nothing has changed from the beginnings to present days» in the general way in which music interacts with moving images. Signs of this attitude are to be found even in the field of film preservation. Film archives devoted to silents, in fact, do not often accompany their film collections with pertinent music collections. There are, of course, meaningful exceptions, like the silent music collections at the Library of Congress or at the MoMA, or the Eyl/Van Houten Collection at the Nederlands Filmmuseum. But they are, precisely, exceptions. This situation apparently clashes with the need for «painstaking historical research» that Rick Altman recommends to be at the core of contemporary studies on silent films. A research done within an archive of silent film, in fact, is likely to be incomplete on the side of music and sound practices. Musicians of the silent era interacted with films by staying at the side of the screen, in the shadows next to the light of the projector: it is quite ironic how the discourse on their music, now, is again confined in a “shadow” – a metaphoric one, though - which borders with the “light” of the modern studies on silent cinema, but cannot proficiently interact with it. «It is time», as Altman said, «to include sound in silent cinema’s historiographical revival». A complete silent film music archive should be at the interface between a music library and a performing arts collection. Written scores, during the silent era, were a minority: the greatest part of the musical practice was instead based on cue sheets, compilations, repertoires, or even improvisations –which cannot of course have left any trace outside occasional accounts from audience members or the performers themselves. Moreover, practices of non-musical sonorization where often complementary to and concurrent with music performances: so, there is an evident need to keep record of them too. In addition to that, it must be remembered that, especially since the 1980 Thames Television presentation of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, reconstructed by Kevin Brownlow with new music by Carl Davis, the repertoire of the music for the silents started to grow again. In the last 30 years, the venues where silent film are screened in a way respectful of historical practices multiplied, as well as the production of appropriate music accompaniments founded on complete scores, but also, again, on cue sheets and improvisations, just like during the actual silent age. It seems reasonable for this “new” tradition of music for silents to be preserved alongside the historical documents which are its origin and source of inspiration. My Ph. D. thesis uses these considerations as a premise to reconstruct and study a special and circumscribed collection of silent film music: the repertoire played at the international silent film festival Le Giornate del Cinema Muto from 1982 to present days. The accuracy shown by this festival in the presentation and divulgation of silent film music practices provides in fact a solid ground for a project of this kind. In addition to that, Le Giornate have already expressed, in 2009, the intention of having such an archive developed in Pordenone, after a suggestion I advanced during the XI Collegium organized by the festival. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first one includes an introductory chapter, where problems about the archival preservation of musical sources pertinent to silent film music are discussed; then, a first chapter deals with an outline of the history of music for silent films, choosing a non-linear approach based on the insurgence of musical practices more than on a chronological succession; finally, the first part is concluded by a chapter describing the aesthetic of music for silent films, comprehensive of a review of the pertinent literature and a description of the audiovisual strategies used by the composers. The second part is the repertoire of the music that has been performed live at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto on the basis of written scores. 115 films are listed following the 29 editions of the Festival, with full filmographic information. Each film is accompanied by a short analysis of the main audiovisual strategies. The sources of this research are mainly the audiovisual recordings of the screenings at le Giornate del Cinema Muto preserved at La Cineteca del Friuli, Gemona. Other details have been collected through conversations (in person or via email) with some of the authors of the music: Gillian B. Anderson, Neil Brand, Günter A. Buchwald, Philip Carli, Antonio Coppola, Berndt Heller, Stephen Horne, Maud Nelissen, Donald Sosin and Gabriel Thibaudeau.
Il fatto che il cinema muto non possa essere considerato un mero precursore del cinema sonoro, secondo una logica «biologica e teleologica», è oggi ampiamente riconosciuto. Le riflessioni di studiosi quali Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, Richard Abel, Noël Burch e Charles Musser hanno inoltre invitato a considerare il muto non solo come un altro cinema rispetto al sonoro, ma come un sistema di pratiche cinematografiche concorrenti ed essenzialmente diverse da quella del sonoro, decisamente mal raccolte sotto l’etichetta generica “cinema muto”. Ciascuna di queste maniere cinematografiche, numerose e dall’identificazione e denominazione controversa– cinematografia-attrazione, cinema dei primi tempi, cinema primitivo, ecc. – necessita di distinti strumenti d’analisi, quale che sia il punto di vista (storiografico, estetico, sociologico, ecc.) scelto per studiarla. È tuttavia strano come uno di questi possibili punti di vista si stia ancor oggi dimostrando piuttosto riluttante nell’accettare tale genere di consapevolezza nei confronti del muto. Si tratta del punto di vista musicale. È vero che non sono mancati gli studi teorici capaci di trattare la musica per il cinema muto tenendo conto della molteplicità e delle differenti necessità dei linguaggi visivi di quell’epoca: Rick Altman ha in particolare offerto alcune delle riflessioni più interessanti in tal senso. Ma tali riflessioni sono rimaste una minoranza. Il panorama dei discorsi sulla musica per film nel 2010 è ancora in grado di accogliere contributi importanti che tuttavia non differenziano le strategie audiovisive del sonoro da quelle del muto, sostenendo che nella maniera generale in cui la musica interagisce con l’immagine in movimento «poco o nulla è cambiato dalle origini ad oggi». Segni di questa tendenza si riscontrano persino nell’ambito della preservazione dei film. Gli archivi cinematografici attivi nella conservazione del muto, infatti, raramente accompagnano le loro collezioni con archivi paralleli destinati alla documentazione relativa alla musica. Esiste, bisogna riconoscere, la consapevolezza dell’importanza che i documenti musicali possono avere nelle operazioni di restauro e preservazione dei film. Esistono inoltre casi particolari di raccolte di musica per il muto gestite in sinergia con archivi di film, come le collezioni di musica per il muto conservate alla Library of Congress di Washington, DC, o al Museum of Modern Arts (MoMA) di New York, oppure la Eyl/Van Houten Collection presso il Nederlands Filmmuseum. Ma si tratta di eccezioni: e fino alla fine degli anni ’80 in effetti non esistevano significative raccolte di musica per il cinema muto al di fuori di quella del MoMA. Questo stato delle cose sembra in apparente contrasto con la necessità di una «ricerca storica coscienziosa» che Altman raccomanda parlando dell’approccio contemporaneo al muto. Infatti, allo stato attuale delle cose, una ricerca sul muto svolta in un singolo archivio rischia plausibilmente di essere molto carente sul versante delle pratiche sonore e musicali. Durante l’epoca del muto, i musicisti interagivano con i film restando accanto allo schermo, nell’ombra vicina alla luce del proiettore. È piuttosto ironico come oggi i discorsi sviluppati attorno alla loro musica siano nuovamente costretti in un’“ombra” – metaforica, stavolta – che sta ai confini della “luce” costituita dai moderni studi sul cinema muto, senza però poter ben interagire con essa. «È tempo», come ha scritto Altman, «di includere il suono nella rinascita storiografica del cinema muto». Un archivio della musica per il cinema muto dovrebbe porsi all’intersezione tra una biblioteca musicale ed una collezione di materiali legati alle arti performative. Le partiture scritte, durante l’epoca del muto, erano infatti una minoranza: la maggior parte della pratica musicale si fondava su cue sheet, compilazioni, repertori o improvvisazioni – che non possono aver lasciato alcuna traccia al di fuori di occasionali resoconti di membri del pubblico o degli stessi musicisti. In più, pratiche di sonorizzazione non musicali erano spesso concomitanti e complementari alle esecuzioni: esiste dunque una chiara urgenza di preservare anche qualsiasi tipo di documentazione parli di esse. In aggiunta a ciò, occorre ricordare che, almeno dalla presentazione del 1980 del Napoleon di Abel Gance prodotta da Thames Television, che ha mostrato il film ricostruito da Kevin Brownlow con una nuova musica di Carl Davis, il repertorio della musica per il muto ha cominciato a crescere di nuovo. Negli ultimi trent’anni, i luoghi dove i film muti vengono proiettati in maniera rispettosa di pratiche musicali storiche si sono moltiplicati, assieme alla produzione di partiture, cue sheet e improvvisazioni. Sembra ragionevole offrire a questa “nuova” tradizione di musica per il muto un posto accanto ai documenti che ne sono origine ed ispirazione. La mia tesi di dottorato utilizza queste considerazioni come premessa per ricostruire e studiare una collezione particolare e circoscritta di musica per il cinema muto: il repertorio di partiture eseguite al Festival internazionale Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, dal 1982 al 2010. L’accuratezza filologica dimostrata da tale Festival nella presentazione e nella divulgazione delle pratiche musicali del muto offre infatti una solida base per studi di questo genere. Inoltre, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto hanno già espresso, nel 2009, l’intenzione di fondare concretamente un archivio come quello sopra descritto, in seguito ad un suggerimento da me avanzato nel corso del XI Collegium di studi organizzato dalla manifestazione. La tesi è divisa in due parti. La prima include un capitolo introduttivo, dove vengono discussi problemi riguardanti la conservazione archivistica delle fonti musicali pertinenti alla musica per il muto; dopodiché, un primo capitolo tratta della storia della musica per il muto, scegliendo un approccio non lineare guidato dallo sviluppo delle pratiche musicali, e non da una consequenzialità cronologica; infine, la prima parte si conclude con un capitolo descrivente l’estetica della musica per il muto, nel quale si offre una rassegna della letteratura sull’argomento ed una descrizione delle strategie audiovisive utilizzate dai compositori. La seconda parte presenta il repertorio della musica che è stata eseguita a Le Giornate del Cinema Muto sulla base di partiture scritte. Si tratta di un elenco di 115 film, coprente la 29 edizioni del Festival e completo di informazioni filmografiche. Ogni scheda di film è accompagnata da una breve analisi delle principali strategie audiovisive. Le fonti di questa ricerca sono principalmente le registrazioni audiovisive delle proiezioni a Le Giornate del Cinema Muto conservate presso La Cineteca del Friuli, Gemona. Altri dettagli si sono ottenuti tramite conversazioni (di persona o tramite email) con alcuni degli autori delle musiche: Gillian B. Anderson, Neil Brand, Günter A. Buchwald, Philip Carli, Antonio Coppola, Berndt Heller, Stephen Horne, Maud Nelissen, Donald Sosin e Gabriel Thibaudeau.

Film d'Art, the French production company responsible for the development of Henri Lavédan's L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1908), demonstrated a forward-thinking vision for film and music. Through their innovations, the company combined many elements of cinematography with new standards for quality productions. This project report will investigate the goals of Film d'Art and its unusually high ambitions, standard music practices in the silent film era, the issues revolving around the instrumentation to Saint-Saëns' score to Henri Lavédan's L'Assassinat de Duc de Guise (1908), and the performance of my arrangement in a graduate recital.

My research is centred around Silent Era films adapted from nineteenth and early twentieth century Gothic literature with a special emphasis on the figure of the monster and its translation from literary to cinematic form. The corpus I have assembled for the purposes of this analysis comprises sixty-six films made in ten different countries between 1897 and 1929. Many of these films are considered lost and I have endeavored to reconstruct them as much as possible using materials located in film archives. The Introduction lays out the ground covered in the thesis and provides a working definition of ‘monstrosity’ in this context. The first chapter deals with the historical, economic, cultural, social and technological contexts of the films under discussion. The second chapter approaches the eight literary monster figures who form the core of this thesis through the lens of Adaptation Theory. The third chapter examines the elements of cinematic language that were particularly relevant to translating monster characters and Gothic literary narratives into silent film, placing this corpus into the context of silent film history and theory. The fourth chapter reviews a cross-section of intermedial systems of classification that have been applied to monster figures, and proposes a new system that would reflect the multifarious nature of the silent film Gothic literary monster. Chapters Five through Nine offer a theoretical framework for classifying the principal characteristics of the silent film Gothic monster by applying various philosophical and aesthetic concepts. The final chapter summarises the material presented in earlier chapters and offers relevant conclusions demonstrating how these films employ the unique characteristics, conventions, and limitations of the silent film medium in their representations of the Gothic literary monster.

The Basilica Notre-Dame Choir accompanying screenings of The Hunchback of Notre Dame at the Regent in 1924, imaginative community prologues before Mary Pickford’s Pollyanna at the Russell in 1920, and costumed opera soloists singing alongside the showing of The Bohemian Girl at the Imperial in 1926: the history of Ottawa’s silent cinemas is an exciting mix of film, theatre, technology, music, and community. Unfortunately, Ottawa’s musical history in the early 1900s has been, by and large, forgotten, and local cinema histories are relatively sparse. In much the same manner that Ottawa theatres incorporated both North American and local elements into their programming, this thesis demonstrates that an examination of the musicians of local cinemas can not only provide information to understand the development of silent film music practices in general, but also unveil a network of musicians and a series of important histories. This thesis reconstructs parts of Ottawa’s silent film music history using a number of methodologies (digital research, archival research, and social network mapping) and primary sources (IATSE union documents, Department of Labour strike documents, newspapers, and trade journals). It also analyses several screenings where music and film were uniquely combined and introduces key figures in Ottawa’s silent film music scene (including violinist Rudolph Pelisek and organist Amédée Tremblay), showing how their training provided prestige to cinemas and how their involvement in military, religious, and communal activities added to cinemas’ appeal. ----- Le Chœur de la Basilique Notre-Dame accompagnant les présentations du film The Hunchback of Notre Dame au Regent en 1924, les prologues communautaires inventifs avant le Pollyanna de Mary Pickford au Russell en 1920, et les soloistes d’opéra chantant à côté de la projection de The Bohemian Girl à l’Imperial en 1926: l’histoire des cinémas muets d’Ottawa est un mélange excitant de film, théâtre, technologie, musique et communauté. Malheureusement, le passé musical d’Ottawa au début du vingtième siècle a été largement oublié, et les histoires locales du cinéma sont relativement rares. De la même façon que les théâtres d’Ottawa incluaient à la fois des éléments locaux et nord-américains dans leur programmation, cette thèse démontre qu’un examen des musiciens des cinémas locaux peut non seulement procurer des renseignements pour comprendre le développement de la musique du cinéma muet en général, mais encore lever le voile sur un réseau de musiciens et une série de récits d’importance. Cette thèse reconstruit des aspects de l’histoire de la musique du du cinéma muet à Ottawa en utilisant un plusieurs méthodologies (la recherche numérique, la recherche en archives, et la cartographie des réseaux sociaux) et de sources primaires (documents du syndicat ouvrier IATSE, documents de grève du ministère fédéral du Travail, quotidiens, et revues spécialisées). La thèse analyse aussi quelques instances uniques de combinaison de musique et de film, et présente des personnages clé de la scène musicale du cinéma muet d’Ottawa (incluant le violoniste Rudolph Pelisek et l’organiste Amédée Tremblay), tout en montrant comment leur formation procurait du prestige aux cinémas, et comment leur implication dans des activités militaires, religieuses, et communautaires ont ajouté à la popularité des cinémas.

This thesis argues that how-to manuals and cue sheets are indicative of ideal performance practice amongst musicians from the silent film era. Pre-scored music was widely practiced amongst musicians. How-to manuals and cue sheets helped the musician accurately and consistently accompany a film. Authors of period manuals include W. Tyacke George, Edith Lang and George West, Ernst Luz and George Tootell. Compilers of cue sheet include James C. Bradford, Ernst Luz, Edward Kilenyi and Michael P. Krueger. Cue by cue analyses of The Cat and the Canary and The Gaucho show a high repetition of music, establishing continuity between the music played and the image on the screen. This shows how compilers associated music and film. These manuals and cue sheets prove that the musician community strove for a close connection between the image on screen and accompaniment. By 1920, arbitrary improvisation was unacceptable.

The thesis examines ’intermediality’ in Svenska Bios (Swedish Biograph) first fiction films. Värmlänningarne (1910), Fänrik Ståls Sägner (1910), Bröllopet på Ulfåsa (1910), Regina von Emmeritz och Konung Gustaf II Adolf (1910), Amuletten (1910), Emigranten (1910) and Järnbäraren (1911) are analysed in relation to theatre, literature, music and ‘reality’. A detailed discussion of intermediality is combined with specific theories relating to pictorialism and literary presentation in film. The thesis conclude, that early fiction films in general, and Svenska Bios films in particular, depended on their association with other media. The thesis also includes a short discussion concerning silent cinema music.

Célèbres et reconnus mais peu discutés, les films réalisés par Erich von Stroheim, entre 1919 et 1929 à Hollywood, occupent une place problématique dans l’histoire et la théorie du cinéma. Les discours contradictoires ou paradoxaux qu’ils ont inspirés animent cette recherche. Œuvre à la fois mutilée, reconstruite ou ruinée, elle est indissociable d’une expérience du temps. La versatilité des mondes et les métamorphoses de l’intrigue qu’elle propose, malgré un régime narratif évident, invitent à reconsidérer les catégories de l’histoire du cinéma muet américain. Interrogeant la représentation de l’histoire, ces films donnent à penser l’événement de la Première Guerre mondiale comme un point aveugle, et livrent une historicité composite. Au sein des pratiques du cinéma muet hollywoodien, les films de Stroheim se distinguent par l’invention d’un montage en accolade produisant une continuité qui incite à envisager la question de la durée. Ces films s’écartent de ce qu’à la même époque instaure le naturalisme américain par-delà les modèles littéraires. Pour analyser ce cinéma dans sa complexité, sera examiné l’être stroheimien selon les devenirs qui le font changer dans la durée, différemment de son appréhension dans le temps chronologique. De sorte que leurs devenirs se mesurent relativement aux êtres cédant à l’entropie ou au contraire demeurant des invariants. Selon cette configuration générale, Stroheim crée les conditions d’une expérimentation distincte de celle du naturalisme traditionnel
The films directed by Erich von Stroheim in Hollywood between 1919 and 1929, though little discussed, are famous and renowned, but they still remain an issue in both film history and film theory. Contradictions and paradoxes that characterize the discourses on these films drive this research. The works of Erich von Stroheim were in turns butchered, reconstructed, destroyed. Our aim is to show that it entails strongly an experience of time. Despite their obvious narrative plots, these films suggest a changeability of worlds and a metamorphosis of plot that lead us to review the standard approaches of American silent film history. While they question the representation of history, these films make the event of World War I appear as a blind spot, and reveal heterogeneous modes of historicity. Within the experiences of Hollywood silent films, the works of Erich von Stroheim are characterized by the creation of a bracket montage (montage en accolade), producing a continuity that invites us to consider the issue of duration. Beyond literary models, these films differ from what is established by American naturalism at the time. In order to make way for their complexity, we will study the Stroheim-being according to what it becomes and changes itself in duration, which is not what we could understand of it in chronological time. So what becomes of it is estimated with regard to its yielding to entropy, or, on the contrary, its remaining invariably the same. In accordance with this general configuration, Stroheim creates conditions that experiments a new way for naturalism