Thoughts on 'dialogues' of silent movies, and notes on Josef von Sternberg's The Docks of New York

My earlier post about the movie Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff had an excerpt from Jorge Luis Borges' review of it. The Argentine writer referenced the 1931 German movie with an American movie of three years before, titled The Docks of New York. Borges said that "[Der Morder...'s] reality is no less torrential than Josef von Sternberg's Dock of New York."

When I read Borges' review, I wondered what 'torrential reality' might be, and today, after watching The Docks of New York, also enjoying it, I'm still at a loss to understand what Borges meant. The only parallels between the two films were the party scenes--some of the bordello milieu in the German film might as well have been picked from the American movie's dockside saloon The Sandbar.

Unlike Der Morder..., The Docks of New York is a silent movie. Sitting on our coordinates of History, the best way we have to explain what a silent movie is is to point to Michel Hazanavicius' successful The Artist (2011). As viewers of that recent movie will recall, a silent movie does have dialogues, only that the dialogues are not spoken or heard but displayed. Each display means a harsh cut from the visuals onto the text. It is because of the unnaturalness of this maneuver that conversations between characters have to be minimized, which in turn puts more pressure on each word. In the world of silent movies, there can be no wastage of words; each dialogue has to serve great purpose. This imposition on dialogue-writing has, I believe, interesting results. What silent movie conversations lose in mimesis, they gain in the [plot-defining or character-defining] impact of each word. In The Docks of New York, for example, the movement from the beginning--hero saving the heroine from drowning--to the middle--their marriage--is arrived at with no more than a dozen lines said between them. Yet, no viewer can claim disbelief. The action, which includes many other characters, is perfectly orchestrated, the acting, even if theatrical, is descriptive of the main characters in question, and the dialogue is flawless. The dialogue, in fact, takes the cake for me. It is flawless because everything that is said works in unquestionably taking the movie forward, and yet does not draw too much attention to itself.

Aside: It is just for this constraint-induced beauty of dialogue that I am of the opinion that there should be more silent movies even today. I'm not too sure if the The Artist made a good enough case in that respect, because that movie had as its very subject the transformation from a silent era to a non-silent era, and instructed the viewership, indirectly, silently, with the notion that the only silent movie possible today is one that is about silent movies. That notion deserves a solid challenge, better than that offered by Hazanavicius.

Anyway, here is IMDb's description of The Docks of New York:

A blue-collar worker on New York's depressed waterfront finds his life changed after he saves a woman attempting suicide.

The worker, Bill Roberts, works as a fire stoker on ships. He is about to get a night ashore, in New York, after a long time at sea. There is a scene in which, during a break, the stokers all gather and look at lewd pictures of women that they have drawn over months on the steel walls of the boilers. The shore being nearby, their desires have clearly been stoked. Sternberg captures that moment masterfully. It is the kind of scene that Jia Zhangke today would be proud of.

Bill saves Mae, an indecent girl probably depressed by her own indecency, from an attempted suicide-by-drowning. Mae's jump into the sea is notable, captured as it is not directly but through its reflection on the water surface. The New York Times, in its September 17, 1928 review of the movie, had some attention to give here. But it is difficult to decide whether the folks at The Times liked it or not; they leave it a bit open. I quote below:

Josef von Sternberg has directed the play with tact and with an eye to minute details. There are few spots which do not ring true. When the girl jumps into the water the camera catches it all by reflection. She leaps from the pier and a second or so later the splash ruffles the surface of the water.

Bill and Mae get to discussing love, and soon decide that there won't be any harm in them marrying. Note that this is all happening inside a single night, and as highlighted before, not many lines have really been exchanged between Bill and Mae. Yet it is all believable, to the point that one wonders: What else could they have done? During the drawn out getting-to-know-each-other sequences, there is a scene in which Mae touches Bill's muscular arm and makes a seductive remark about his strength. A true show-off, Bill pulls up the sleeve of his right hand and shows those muscles to her. Also made visible are the various tattoos on his arm, constituting the names of the girls that he has known across 'the seven seas'. Mae makes a dejected comment about that, but despite being visibly enervated at the thought of their earlier failures at love, the two of them are intelligent enough not to talk about them.

Aside: The shot where a naked arm flexes before Mae is vaguely erotic, largely because it is uncomfortably long, somehow inviting the interpretation of the arm as a phallic symbol. I may be off the mark here, though.

Some time before the wedding, one of Mae's friend asks her: "Do you think marrying him will make you decent?" When Mae doesn't answer, the friend adds: "I was decent before I got married," and starts laughing. So much is said here in these two lines, about the social milieu around the docks, about the status of women, about the sexual possibilities that women had in those days, about the disaster that possibly lies in wait for Mae, about the disaster that the friend's marriage already is, and so on. Let this be counted as an example to what I've said about dialogues.

Here is the save-the-dame scene:

A random Sandbar scene from the movie:

***