The images of violence in Western cinema of 1910-1920-ies: mental substratum of "permanent war"
Even before the Great War, the cinema appreciated the aesthetic and commercial signicance of military themes. The war is understood in silent films as a key element of human activity. The purpose of the study is to analyze the role played by moving on to the military theme in the artistic language of silent cinema, its formal and substantial aspects. The article shows the presence of visual and semantic recurring motifs in the lms on a religious theme (highly popular in the early twentieth century), war films and some lms, that are not devoted to military and war problems. The life of any historical period is interpreted quiet often as a kind of military action of a society, a state or a powerful corporation against individuals. This view promotes departure from the traditions of the picturesque shot, and the development of a more dynamic cinema narration, the embodiment of illusionistic documentary into the feature film. A new kind of episode appears, its «silence» is motivated not by the technical imperfection of «silent» cinema, a young art, but by the inability to speak inside the screen reality, the impossibility to develop the verbal element in the world, steeped in military chaos. The myth of an invisible camera, omnipresent and inaccessible to anyone's inuence is born during the silent period. Position of a «camera eye» is interpreted as the position of forced non-interference in the captured events. Cinema vision develops as internal conict between «indifferent» camera that captures the horrors of the disharmony, violence, death, on the one hand, and the emotional dynamics of a person operating the camera and at the same time acting as experienced observer portraying the world, full of aggression and suffering, on the other hand.