MUNCIE, Ind. -- It has been a long time since a silent film won an Oscar, so Richard J. "Richie" Meyer, the Edmund F. and Virginia B. Ball Chair in Telecommunications at Ball State University, is excited about the five Oscars "Saving Private Ryan" earned Sunday.

Private Ryan? Silent?

It’s an odd suggestion for a movie nominated for two Academy Awards in sound and sound effects, but Meyer said it’s a matter of perspective.

"People hear the words silent film and think all you hear is the projector," he said. "That’s not true. They’re making silent film today but they’re really not silent because you hear the sound effects."

With no dialogue in the now-famous first scene, a portion of "Saving Private Ryan" fits the category.

"Think about the first 20 minutes," Meyer said. "It was a silent film with sound effects. The battle scenes in 'The Birth of a Nation’ were made without sound, but the orchestra created the sound effects. It wasn’t as realistic as "Saving Private Ryan"; it was artistic. If you look at films made today, many of them have sequences that are basically all visual."

The earliest films, including D.W. Griffith’s "The Birth of a Nation," had no audible dialogue but depended on live orchestras, pianists or organists to play the musical soundtrack. But even after "talkies" emerged, some filmmakers found silence to be golden.

Charlie Chaplin made his film "City Life" three years after the first talkie, snubbing his nose at the new genre. Meyer cites the Mel Brooks film "Silent Movie" and the entire genre of martial arts films as examples of modern silents.

"All these violent films, where they do kung fu and they blow

up things," he said. "They can export them to other countries and not have to worry about dialogue. They knew their audience was international, so they communicated universally."

Music combined with the universal visual language sounds familiar to his video-watching students, Meyer said.

"MTV is probably the greatest producer of silent films," he said. "Except for the song they are plugging, it’s all visual. They’re playing the music, but they’re shooting silent."

Because the films have no dialogue, Meyer said they require more from audiences.

"In silent film everything is not packaged for you," he said. "You have to use your own head, your own imagination. You are part of the artistic experience."

Meyer, who discovered silents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a graduate student, spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar teaching and studying Chinese silent film at the National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan.

He has been promoting silent film in Muncie by arranging showings of rare films with live accompaniment.

"The more we expose students and the general population to the art of silent film, the less they’ll think it was just a lack of technology or that it’s all pie-in-the-face slapstick," he said. "The more accessible these films are, the more people will come to understand and know them. The depth and breadth of the genre is just incredible."