The average American now spends hours each day consuming voices. Podcasts fill our commutes. Streaming shows chatter in the background while we cook dinner. Social media videos autoplay one after another, each demanding our attention with another talking head. A break from the myriad voices has become almost impossible to find.
Which makes Modern Silent Shorts feel unexpectedly contemporary.
When the traveling film series comes to Bannerman Island on August 6, audiences won’t be watching rediscovered Charlie Chaplin reels or other relics of early cinema. Instead, they’ll see seven newly commissioned short films by emerging directors, each telling a modern story without spoken dialogue. Accompanied by a live synthesizer-driven score performed on-site by composer Kevin Donald, the evening lands somewhere between a film screening, concert, theater performance, and community gathering.
“We found that the silent form is just cinema in its most pure, basic form, which is just images telling a story,” says producer Michael Bloom, who co-founded Modern Silent Shorts with filmmaker Lily Weisberg and philanthropist Boykin Curry.
The idea began, improbably enough, in Isabella Rossellini’s backyard. Curry had attended silent film screenings hosted by his Hamptons neighbor, where century-old films were accompanied by live musicians. Curry was struck less by the movies themselves than by the atmosphere they created.
“He was really enticed by what a communal event it was,” Bloom recalls. “How it was merging concert and film and theater and community all in one.”
His challenge to Bloom and Weisberg was deceptively simple: Could they recreate that experience using contemporary films and contemporary music? Neither knew whether it would work.
Three years later, the answer appears to be yes. After commissioning a dozen films over three seasons and refining the program through outdoor screenings on Long Island, Modern Silent Shorts is embarking on its first tour, bringing seven of its strongest films to venues in New York, New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley. Bannerman Island, with its Gothic ruins rising from the Hudson, is perhaps the most evocative stop on the itinerary.
The project’s biggest surprise has been discovering how naturally the silent format speaks to modern life. “We realized a lot of these stories have to do with isolation or loneliness or being online or living in a digital world,” Bloom says. “And those are silent experiences.”
Rather than asking filmmakers simply to eliminate dialogue, Bloom and Weisberg look for directors who already think visually. Throughout the year they scour film festivals, Vimeo Staff Picks, and sites like Short of the Week for emerging filmmakers whose stories are driven by action, performance, and composition rather than conversation. Those directors are then invited to pitch original silent films.
“The biggest criteria we’re looking for is how big a range we can curate of how the silence is working,” Weisberg explains. “We’re looking for a relationship between form and content. Why is this movie silent? We don’t want it to feel like the dialogue has just been taken away.”
The resulting films use silence in dramatically different ways. One unfolds almost entirely through a character’s Google searches, revealing an anxious internal monologue that could never be spoken aloud. Another follows an exhausted father pacing an apartment late at night with a sleepless infant, using quiet itself to heighten the emotional tension. Comedies embrace the absurdity of contemporary life, while other films explore alienation, desire, and the strange intimacy of digital existence.
The challenge, Bloom says, forces filmmakers back to cinema’s fundamentals. “If it’s not working as an image, it’s not working as a film.”
Music provides the connective tissue. Composer Kevin Donald performs each score live with a four-piece ensemble using synthesizers—an intentional modern descendant of the theater organs that accompanied silent films a century ago. The electronic textures give the evening a distinctly contemporary sound while subtly linking the films into a single experience.
That live performance is one reason Modern Silent Shorts works best outside a traditional movie theater. “It’s somewhere between a film screening, a play, a concert, and a party,” Weisberg says. “We want it to be an evening.”
Few places seem better suited to that ambition than Bannerman Island. Audience members begin with a boat ride through the Hudson Highlands before climbing illuminated pathways into the ruins, where the films are projected beneath the open sky. “The boat sort of emerges out of the water, and you walk up these gorgeous steps until the screen is nestled in the ruins of the castle,” Bloom says. “The setting instills the event with this gravity because you’re in this gorgeous historical place.”
For the filmmakers, many of whom are accustomed to festival conference rooms and black-box cinemas, it’s an unforgettable premiere venue.
Bannerman is only one stop along a much larger journey. Bloom and Weisberg ultimately imagine Modern Silent Shorts becoming what they call a “traveling picture show,” touring parks, community spaces, and outdoor venues across the country. Someday they hope to have enough commissioned films to mix and match programs depending on the audience and the setting.
The ambition isn’t commercial, Weisberg says. “It’s not to make money. It’s to create community events.” That may be the project’s most modern idea of all. In an age of entertainment designed for solitary consumption through phones and earbuds, Modern Silent Shorts invites audiences to gather and experience cinema the way it began: as a communal event where images, music, and an audience come together in the same place at the same moment.
Modern Silent Shorts takes place on August 6 at 7pm. Tickets are $5.
