“What Silent Film Taught Me About Storytelling”: faculty member Dominic Smith on the power of an Obsolete Art Form
An excerpt from “What Silent Film Taught Me About Storytelling” by faculty member Dominic Smith, published by Literary Hub.
What Silent Film Taught Me About Storytelling
In 2013, the Library of Congress reported that more than 75 percent of all silent films are gone forever. As a writer obsessed with the gaps and silences of history, this statistic grabbed my attention. At the time, I was working on The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, which explores the largely forgotten story of the women painters of the Dutch Golden Age, but the idea of this disappearing medium stayed with me. It seemed less like a gap or silence and more like an entire missing layer of our storytelling history.
