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NYT Syndicate
The summer's hottest destination for video entertainment is a UK-based social media brand called LADbible. In July alone, the viral clips that churn out of its Facebook page were viewed more than 3 billion times.
Although the site is nominally branded around young British men, its offerings hold an oddly universal appeal. On a recent afternoon, it served up videos of a guy accidentally hitting himself in the head with a baseball bat; a pizza being made out of french fries; a dog bathing in a Jacuzzi; a woodworker crafting a salad bowl; a tourist riding a slide down the Great Wall of China and a manatee kissing a snorkeler.
The videos are curated from disparate sources, filmed on smartphones and GoPros around the world, but they all have one thing in common: They're best watched silently. If they even have sound, it's completely beside the point.
We are living in the golden age of the silent video. Although we may still pop headphones in to watch a YouTube rant, social media has cultivated its own mute visual culture. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are designed to encourage endless scrolling, and that boosts videos that are made to catch the viewer's eye without offending her ear with grating bursts of noise.
The clips that spread the furthest online are the ones that can be consumed anywhere without disruption: on the subway, the sidewalk or in the doctor's office; next to a partner in bed, behind the counter at work or under the desk in class. They're the ones that allow for private experiences in the most public of places. And in the internet's global marketplace, they're the ones that transcend language barriers, instantly legible to viewers in Peoria or Paris.
Tubular Labs, the online video analytics company that placed LADbible at the top of its rankings, has found that of videos posted to Facebook by media companies, 46 percent of views go to videos that are completely silent or just accompanied by music. And in practice, an even higher proportion of social videos are watched silently. Advertising agency BBDO Worldwide says that more than 85 percent of its clients' Facebook videos are viewed with the sound off.
All of that has given rise to a particular kind of video spectacle on social media, one that is able to convey its charms without dialogue, narrative or much additional context. To entertain soundlessly, viral video makers are reanimating some of the same techniques that ruled silent film more than 100 years ago.
"For coincidental reasons as much as knowing reasons, we've seen a rebirth of a very image-forward mode of communication," said James Leo Cahill, a professor of cinema studies at the University of Toronto. Among its hallmarks: a focus on spectacle, shocking images and tricks; the capture of unexpected moments in instantly recognisable scenarios; an interplay between text and image; and a spotlight on baby and animal stars.
The very first short-form cinematic experiments ” silent clips that arose even before film evolved into a feature-length narrative form in the early 20th century ” have become known as what film scholar Tom Gunning calls the"cinema of attraction," films that worked by achieving a kind of sensual or physiological effect instead of telling a story.
Created by early filmmakers like French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumi'e8re and US inventor Thomas Edison, these early movies took cues from the circus and the vaudeville circuit, featuring performers from that world, and were then played at vaudeville shows. Taken together, they formed what Gunning has called an"illogical succession of performances."
Social media has created a new kind of variety show, where short, unrelated videos cascade down our feeds one after another. If early films were short by necessity ” the earliest reels allowed for just seconds of film ” modern videos are pared down to suit our attention spans and data plans.
Some viewing habits of social video also recall Edison's Kinetoscope, one of the earliest film-watching contraptions, which invited single viewers to view short clips through a peephole, offering a voyeuristic look at everything from Annie Oakley shooting to some guy sneezing. Mobile video has again returned us to a cinematic form that's screened for an audience of one.
In the absence of dialogue and involved narratives, early films focused on"actualities," or setups that would appear instantly recognisable to audiences. Often, on both social media and in early film, textual clues are provided to viewers outside of the filmed image ” in film titles presented to early-20th-century audiences, or in Facebook captions that guide modern viewers. A series of Edison actualities with titles like What Happened When A Hot Picture Was Taken and What Happened In the Tunnel parallel the modern meme format of pairing a short video with a brief emotional cue:"That feeling when ..."
One of the most striking parallels of early silent film and modern social video is the foregrounding of animals and babies. They make natural silent stars because they are largely speechless; they communicate largely through gesture, movement and expression. But they also suit cinematic forms that are focused on realistic spectacles as opposed to masterful narratives. The old truism ” don't work with children or animals ” speaks exactly to why they are the ideal stars of both early actualities and of contemporary Facebook videos. They can't be tamed, so it seems as if what they are doing is somehow natural and true.
It's striking that with all of the technological advances that have allowed us to shoot and share video instantly, we've returned to some of film's most original instincts. It wasn't long after the rise of Kinetoscope, actualities and the cinema of attraction that new technologies upended those early forms, giving way to feature-length narratives, talkies and Technicolor. It's unclear where social video innovation will take the form next, but if anything, modern video is moving in the opposite direction of cinema's rise: We keep cramming more spectacle and information into smaller and faster bits of entertainment, even discarding whole experiential possibilities ” like audio tracks ” if they seem to slow it down.
