tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52283149390152759412024-03-01T00:39:11.313-05:00Silent VolumeChris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.comBlogger481125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-71387215125501343002017-03-30T10:14:00.002-04:002017-03-31T11:02:41.860-04:00Behind the Door (1919) New Restoration<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">One of the pleasures of silent film is that there’s no such thing as a definitive viewing. There’s always a new take on an old film—be it a new score, or restored footage, or new footage, once thought lost. Perhaps the addition of colours or tints that recover, for audiences in the early 21st Century, a theatrical experience more authentic to the early 20th. We are part of a paradox here: one in which current art is impressed upon the art of the past; and that past, in turn, appears to us like something more fully of its own time.<br /><br />These thoughts were in my mind as I watched <a href="http://www.flickeralley.com/">Flicker Alley’s</a> new restoration of <i>Behind the Door</i> (1919). I’d seen this film once before, at a Cinefest screening back in 2013. It impressed me enough then to write about, and in the years since it has remained strong in my memory—usually bubbling up whenever I see some new example of depravity depicted onscreen. ‘You don’t need to show the terrible thing,’ I say to myself. ‘Not if your audience feels it, through to the bone.’</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Anyone who’s seen the film knows what I mean. Cinefest’s program notes were positively spooky: “One of the most gruesome and bizarre of the atrocity films made in the United States between 1917 – 1919,” they read; “the queasy might want to visit the Dealer’s Room.” I ought to have read them by candlelight. The next best thing, perhaps, was to watch the film late at night; which I managed to do: huddled in a conference room, in the dark, with more than a hundred other curious fans, few of whom had seen or heard of it either.<br /><br />That print was rough-going at times. This restoration is not. The product of a partnership between the <a href="http://www.silentfilm.org/">San Francisco Silent Film Festival</a>, the <a href="https://loc.gov/">Library of Congress</a>, and <a href="http://gosfilmofond.ru/?lang=en">Gosfilmofond Russia</a>, it glistens from the opening frame.<br /><br />Our first glimpse of the hero sees him trudging up the hill of a cemetery, returning to the seaside village in Maine he once called home. The image is splendid in its depth and detail. Oscar Krug (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart_Bosworth">Hobart Bosworth</a>) is a broken man, and we see every one of his weary movements, every spot of decay, crisp as life. Behind him is the coastline, surrounded by rolling hills and the endless stretch of the sea: beautiful enough to make us pause, but vast enough to swamp poor Krug with its emptiness.<br /><br />The year is 1925. Immediately something seems off. We know the year the film was made, so clearly, this is a man projected into the future—a theoretical damaged soul. He hobbles his way into the village and finds the shambles of his old place of business. He was a taxidermist. That does nothing to put our minds at ease. And then we travel back to 1917, when everything began to go wrong.<br /></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /><br />Bosworth was over 50 in 1919, and looked it. He was an unlikely choice for a male lead, especially in a film with romantic overtones. But his age is effective in this case, because it implies that he has seen and done much, and indeed we learn that he was a navy man; from a German family, but one with a long pedigree of American service. He is not to be taken lightly. When the U.S. declares war on the German Empire, Krug faces a xenophobic attack from his neighbours. He responds by blaring patriotic rhetoric and knocking several villagers flat on their backs.<br /><br />Krug already had enemies. Not because of his heritage, but because he’s wooing Alice Morse (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Novak">Jane Novak</a>), the daughter of the village banker. Mr. Morse has his own suitor, nearly as old as Krug, already picked out for her, and he’s not used to being crossed. As the situation grows tenser, the War becomes, for the new husband and wife, a convenient excuse to leave. Krug enlists as captain of a government steamer and Alice, through various maneuvering, ends up onboard with him.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />On paper (electronic or otherwise) this all sounds fairly conventional, at least by the standards of silent melodrama. But structurally speaking, it’s odd. There are no scenes in this first act that feel ‘normal.’ What I mean is, there are no little moments that establish these characters as people to whom we can relate, day to day. We get little sense of the industry of the village, or the lives of its citizens—they transform into a fanatical mob almost as soon as we meet them. Krug’s love for Alice is understandable, but the circumstances surrounding it are unusually dangerous, and the reactions of each party unhinged. Krug’s business, to the degree we see him conducting it, is inherently creepy. “Please—she’s all dead,” a girl says to him, bringing her damaged doll into the shop. “Would you skin her and put some stuffin’s in her?” Kindly Mr. Krug is glad to help.<br /><br />This state of weird, heightened emotion propels <i>Behind the Door</i> through to its end. We know that Krug is an upright and moral man, but one possessed of rare and gruesome skills. And so, when his ship is torpedoed by a German U-boat, and Alice, the only other survivor, is captured by the sub’s commander—dragged below the waves to suffer god-knows-what fate at the hands of the crew—we’re sure Krug’s vengeance will be extreme. It’s difficult to go much further without spoiling the film.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br /><br />Better to spend a minute on the U-boat commander, played here by a young <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Beery">Wallace Beery</a>. Beery’s Lt. Brandt is every bit the vile, merciless pig of a man a film like this requires its villain to be. To pity his character in any way would’ve been fatal. But Brandt is a fully realized person too—Beery plays him with just enough restraint to make him believable. This cannot always be said for the rest of the cast. Everyone else, Bosworth included, plays to the back row at times.<br /><br />Ah, how I want to describe to you the scenes in that sub—the primal horrors of them—but no. No spoilers. Maybe something else, then. The restoration is mostly pristine. There is some damage around the seven-minute mark, but nothing that impedes the story. Footage is missing from two spots in the middle of the film (rather crucial action sequences, unfortunately); but stills are used to fill the gaps and the momentum isn’t slowed too much. The intertitles are finely detailed and appropriately over the top. (“Somebody get a rope and start the tar to boilin’!” cries one villager, early in the film, as we see graphics of a noose and animated steam rising).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />The new score, composed and performed by <a href="http://stephenhorne.co.uk/">Stephen Horne</a>, conveys the urgency and delirium that makes <i>Behind the Door</i> what it is. I especially liked his opening piece, played over Krug’s mournful first trip back to the village. The cemetery is a grim place, but the landscape is lovely, and so the music is both melancholy and pretty. But there is something else behind it—a certain shrillness in some of the notes. It makes your shoulders tense up. It feels like a promise. Not only will good people be lost, but so too the decency, and common humanity, that can make even an early death a good one.<br /><br /><br /><b>Where to find <i>Behind the Door:</i></b><br />Flicker Alley releases <i>Behind the Door</i> on <a href="https://www.flickeralley.com/classic-movies/#!/Behind-the-Door/p/76078792">DVD and Blu-ray</a> on April 4. Bonus materials include additional music; a Russian version of the film; notes on the restoration; and an interview with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Brownlow">Kevin Brownlow</a> concerning Irvin Willat, the film’s director.</span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-57121115542955176502016-04-11T13:53:00.002-04:002016-04-11T14:08:46.757-04:00The Epic of Everest (1924)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">What kind of an individual looks at Mount Everest and says, “I will overcome that”? A person of rare drive, I think; a lot of courage and even more ego. And a person of means—lucky in life and in the moment. You’d need all those qualities, so that your fear of the mountain did not lead to intimidation, and then, to a hesitation to climb at all.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">You’d need to check your awe, I suppose. Just enough to keep going.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Epic of Everest</i> is a documentary about that act: that checking of awe. It details a 1924 attempt by a team of Englishmen, aided by Tibetan<i> </i>men and Sherpas, to reach the summit of the world’s tallest peak. As if it were not enough for them to reach the top, the team wished to capture their ascent on camera. And so, through a tremendous mixture of planning and will, endurance and scientific experimentation, they produced the footage that would become this film. I’ve no doubt that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baptist_Lucius_Noel">Captain John Noel</a> and his companions were told, many times, that it could not be done. But they did it, mostly. And we still have the record today.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">You can’t help but be impressed by the effort. Bulky cameras were hauled up sheets of ice, in thinning air, used to photograph (as we see) one colossal Himalayan vista after the next. <i>The Epic of Everest</i> is largely a collection of long- and medium-shots of the mountain itself: its bleak white surfaces gleaming in the sunshine, its rumpled rocky crevices dwarfing the climbers. These men: for much of the film mere black dots, are the ones for whom we’re supposed to save our admiration. So the film implies, anyhow. Yet I found myself conflicted about that, right from the start.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The first quarter or so of the doc is devoted to the Englishmen’s prep, which takes place in a nearby Tibetan village called Phari Dzong <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagri">(Pagri).</a> The residents of this village, who must have received Noel’s team with some grace, are rewarded with derisive treatment, as we read one intertitle after the next about hygiene, innocence, and the artistic preoccupations of uncultured primitives. That these people surely knew more about the conditions on that mountainside than anyone else is barely considered. The Englishmen, by contrast, appear so woefully underdressed in the early scenes that members of our audience openly chuckled. I bet Captain Noel would’ve been surprised by that.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The irony of these scenes is that they provide <i>The Epic of Everest</i> with its most human moments: men and women in traditional dress, going about (we presume) their regular tasks; and mugging for the camera too. We get to know them a little bit, and that’s fun, even though, as a modern audience, we feel the patronizing overtones too strongly and wish the film would just move along.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">(Oddly, no such connection is established with the climbers themselves, who appear in closeup only briefly. The climbers’ identities are defined by their quest; the villagers’, by the Nature of which they are considered a part. Neither portrayal feels satisfying or complete.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">We leave Phari Dzong behind, feeling a mixture of relief and regret. Now the warmth of the village gives way to the frigid immensity of the mountain and Noel’s camera, which captured the Tibetans with such a cavalier swagger, seems suddenly cowed. Shots seem to last forever, as we observe the ant-like procession of climbers moving along one huge piece of terrain after the next; their progress captured nearly in its entirety, over and over; to the point of tedium. I was reminded of very early silent films—the works of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_S._Porter">Edwin S. Porter</a>, for example—made before the lessons of editing had been learned. Yes, some allowance can be must for the climbers’ technical limitations, but the result is the same and the sheer beauty of Everest is not enough to overcome it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">People died on this expedition, we’re told. We are informed of the first expirations via intertitle, having never had a clear look at the dead mens’ faces beforehand. This is a bit like reading a stranger’s obit—the deaths carry the weight of fact, but do not feel tragic. Had we been allowed to ‘meet’ these men upfront, as we did the villagers, it would have been different.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Epic of Everest</i> improves sharply in its last half hour, when the goal of the summit seems within reach and the danger for those intrepid few who make for it becomes palpable. Again, this danger could’ve been reduced to mere fact. But this time we’re pulled in, thanks to another shift in tone: away from the passive reverence for scenery that slowed the film down and toward something more robust, allowing for a more varied and dramatic final act.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There are still long takes, but now several are fronted by intertitles explaining the technical achievements that made them possible. One shot, taken over a distance of several miles, is described as record-breaking. I found the boastfulness of this refreshing, honestly; it gave each shot a sense of purpose beyond the simply picturesque.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is also in this last act that we finally, clearly, see the faces of the climbers—two of them, anyway, and just portraits from their lives back home, though this is poignant in a way that a shot from the slope could not be. What happens to these last climbers is a story worth watching, and I think it makes the whole film worth watching—a reward, perhaps, for all those lingering near-stills we sat through to get there. <br /><br />**** <br /><br />It’s fitting that the last scenic shots in <i>The Epic of Everest</i> employ time-lapse photography—the sunlight crawling rapidly up the face of the mountain in a visual both dynamic and grand. Here we see—and feel—the filmmaker act; showing an aggressiveness in keeping with the mindset he and his compatriots must have possessed. This is the most honest portrayal of them really. If one can truly ‘overcome’ a challenge like Everest, the best example is here.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Epic of Everest<i> was screened at the Toronto’s <a href="http://revuecinema.ca/">Revue Cinema</a> on April 8, 2016—part of the <a href="http://www.torontosilentfilmfestival.com/">2016 Toronto Silent Film Festival</a>. Live accompaniment was provided by <a href="https://ensemblepolaris.com/">Ensemble Polaris</a>.</i></span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-20555910666202428312016-03-22T22:09:00.001-04:002016-03-22T22:09:46.299-04:00The Racket (1928)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">If I could point to one scene in <i>The Racket</i> that sums up the whole thing, it would be the first gun fight. Two rival gangs of mobsters, shooting it out in a bustling urban square—using, as their cover, several large trucks. On the sides of those trucks: the names of politicians. There’s an election coming up, you see.<br /><br />Those trucks are rolling ads for men of high ideals. But inside them are men of violence. Wherever a politician goes, you can be sure there’s a crook along for the ride.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The film’s director, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Milestone">Lewis Milestone,</a> clearly had this theme on his mind. He would go on to make <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2013/10/all-quiet-on-western-front-1930-silent.html"><i>All Quiet On the Western Front</i></a> (1930), which considered institutionalized moral decay in its most lethal form. But it is another Milestone picture: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Front_Page_(1931_film)"><i>The Front Page</i></a> (1931), that most closely recalls <i>The Racket. The Front Page</i> was about a surly group of journalists covering an execution. Not a single character in it, with the exception, possibly, of the anarchist facing the rope, had anything like a moral code. And like <i>The Racket, The Front Page</i> was really a comedy.<br /><br />Here’s the bitter joke of it: in the face of an illegal liquor trade, murder in the streets, and corruption climbing to the highest level—even to the office of the DA—what <i>The Racket</i> is really about is a pissing contest between two guys. On one side we have Nick Scarsi <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wolheim">(Louis Wolheim)</a>: a squat bruiser of a mob boss with deep pockets and dirt on everybody. On the other side is McQuigg <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Meighan">(Thomas Meighan)</a>: a police captain, straight as they come. These men do not hate each other—an early scene establishes that. Their rivalry is the result of positions into which each man has been irrevocably placed. They oppose one another because they must—as though they were two combatants sculpted from the same piece of stone.<br /></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I use that image because I think the appearance of these two men mattered a great deal to Milestone. Several times he photographed them standing nose-to-nose. On the surface these are simple shots, expressing the basic tone of their conflict. But such was the physicality of the two actors that the images come to mean more.<br /><br />Meighan was a handsome man, in that late-Silent Era, kind of bland, Hollywood way. You can imagine a casting director putting out a call for a certain profile, then hiring him on the spot. Wolheim, meanwhile, had a massive head and practically no neck—and a nose pressed flat, as though he’d been run face-first into the base of an iron. To put these men in the same shot, close up, was to mark two extremes of male beauty. There was no middle ground they could share.<br /></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />Nick and McQuigg are not the whole film—there are several other characters whose lives are very much entwined with theirs. There’s Nick’s younger brother, Joe <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_E._Stone">(George E. Stone)</a>: a college boy who loves the nightlife, much to Nick’s displeasure. There are other police officers, and press men and lawyers. And then there’s Helen <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Prevost">(Marie Provost)</a>: a world-weary gangster’s moll who captures the spirit of the film better than anyone else.<br /><br />But none of these people change the order of things. None of them can so much as budge Nick and McQuigg—and even when they do motivate the mobster or the lawman, the result is always a continuance of the greater feud.<br /><br />McQuigg promises to drive Nick out of business. Nick responds by having him driven right out of town—using his connections to get the cop transferred to a precinct in the sticks. Later, Joe’s foibles land him in McQuigg’s custody, resulting in tragic outcomes for both men. But still McQuigg maneuvers—considering ways that he can turn Nick’s situation against the whole criminal organization. Significantly, the closing sequence involves McQuigg trapping Nick in a confined space. This all boils down to territory, after all.<br /><br />You expect fine cinematography from a Milestone film and indeed it is here. There is no angle from which the mobsters are not shot (literally); among the best examples being an early scene in which Nick’s party is crashed by members of an opposing gang, who slowly begin occupying the empty seats in the room, surrounding him in a way that is both casual and menacing. It is never entirely clear where they are in relation to Nick—save one, who is clearly in a line of sight, and therefore has a clear shot—and so one feels they are everywhere. I also liked a shot taken over Wolheim’s shoulder: his broad back consuming most of the frame, and in front of him an underling, dipping in and out of view as he squirms in his chair.<br /><br /><i>The Racket</i> was nominated for Best Picture in the Academy’s first period of eligibility (the category was then called “Outstanding Picture”). It went up against <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2012/02/wings-1927.html"><i>Wings</i></a> and <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2011/11/7th-heaven-1927.html"><i>Seventh Heaven</i></a>—establishing an apples-to-oranges precedent that the Oscars have held to ever since. But the films do have one thing in common: each of them portrays a world that is overwhelmingly bad, and questions what it takes for a person to survive. In <i>Wings</i> they fly as high as they can; in <i>Seventh Heaven,</i> they go down, down deep within themselves. Only in <i>The Racket</i> do the world and the men become one.</span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-8542480766089468692015-06-21T21:00:00.001-04:002015-06-21T21:00:35.698-04:00Before 1915: An Appreciation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />I gave up trying to sell people on silent film a long time ago. Like many things, it’s best appreciated by those curious enough to seek it out. Our role, as fans, is simply to be enthusiastic, and to be open to questions that enthusiasm generates—even frustrating ones, like “how can you sit through that?”<br /><br />Be happy. Anyone who asks that wants to learn.<br /><br />Oh, but it’s tough sometimes, isn’t it? Being a fan of silents can isolate you, even among fans of old film. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who call themselves fans of the classics but who’ve never seen a film made before 1930. That’s nearly 40 years of film history they’ve elected to ignore!<br /><br />You want to grab their shoulders and shake them. “But, but, have you seen—”, you’d sputter, your head whirling with silent classics like <i>Metropolis, Pandora’s Box, The General, IT, The Crowd, Sunrise, Modern Times</i>—movies demonstrating the scope, depth, eroticism, intellectualism, artistry, and beauty of silent cinema.<br /><br />All these films have the modern touch. In terms of character depth, subtlety of performance, complexity of camerawork—if not always aesthetic—they’re hard to distinguish from ones made a few years later. ‘We like silent films because silent films can be like this,” we seem to say.<br /><br />These films have something else in common too: they were all made in the last decade of the Western silent period. What about older films? What about the first thirty years of that first forty? If you call yourself a silent film fan, and you’re tempted to criticize others for ignoring what you love, ask yourself: how many silent films have you seen that were made before 1915?<br /><br />The pre-1915 era of silent filmmaking offered unique opportunities to the artists and craftspeople who worked in it. It was a time of flux, in which the traditions of the stage coexisted, or did battle with, the emerging grammar of filmmaking. In these early silents you can still see a push and pull between the old art form and the new—of which histrionic acting and immobile camerawork are but the most obvious examples. Just as important, and perhaps more interesting, is their mixture of realism and obvious stage fakery. This is something later directors—even later silent-film directors—did away with.<br /><br />But it can be intriguing.<br /><br />When, for example, we see a hurried man gasp in horror as he looks up at a clock with painted-on hands, what are we really seeing? What does it mean to apply to cinema the same suspension of disbelief that works so well for us when we’re watching a stage play? Are the movies a medium that requires greater internal consistency, or is it simply that movies provide it so well that we’ve come to expect it? And if the latter is true, are we missing out? Surely, as silent film fans, we’re already used to blending different media and forms into one—images and music, I mean.<br /><br />I find these questions worth asking, and the mixture of media, even states of reality, in these early films, to be rich and beautiful in their own right.<br /><br />Yet, with the exception of the short films of Georges Méliès and D.W. Griffith, the value of early silents is rarely appreciated on an artistic level. They’re shown as examples of an art form still in development. They’re described in terms of what they lack.<br /><br />I hope the list I’ve compiled below can help correct that. It is not meant to be comprehensive. It’s not even a list of the ‘best’ shorts and features made before 1915, though some would certainly belong on such a list. It is simply a roll call of early silent films that have always stayed with me, each link leading to a longer blog post I've written about the film.<br /><br />These movies exploit the malleability of an art form still gloriously free. I love them all.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />************<br /> <br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2010/05/washerwomen-on-river-1896.html"><b>Washerwomen on the River (1896)<br /></b></a>Imagine a photograph that could move. I don’t just mean a motion picture—I mean the content of a photograph, pulsing with the movement it would have had in real life. The greatest photographers (and painters) strive for such an effect, and you’ll see it here too, in perhaps the finest of the Lumiere Brothers’ actualités. A subversive, multi-layered composition, <i>Washerwomen on the River</i> could even be described as found art. <br /><br /> <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2011/11/arrival-of-train-1896.html"><b>Arrival of a Train (1896)<br /></b></a>Trains were big in film from the very start, thanks to shorts like <i>The Black Diamond Express no. 1</i> (1896), which, we’re told, so terrified viewers with its footage of a train seemingly headed straight toward them that audience members fainted in their seats.<br /><br /><i>The Black Diamond Express</i> was a gimmick film. <i>Arrival of a Train,</i> made the same year, is a piece of art. Beginning with a splendidly composed arrival sequence, it goes on to show us the passengers themselves as they disembark. This must have seemed charming to viewers at the time; but today, it is a compelling glimpse into the past—something both ancient and familiar, mesmerizing us with the very rhythms of everyday life.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/11/jeanne-darc-1899.html"><b>Jeanne D’Arc (1899)<br /></b></a>Joan of Arc has likely been the subject of more films than any historical figure aside from Christ. Georges Méliès, best known for his work in fantasy, delivered an early entry into this canon—an intriguing and surefooted short film that melds theatrical traditions with emerging cinematic ones.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/02/trip-to-moon-1902.html"><b>A Trip to the Moon (1902)<br /></b></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Everybody knows
this one. It is Méliès’ most famous film, and a better summation of the
man’s style and genius you will not find. You could make the case that <i>A Trip to the Moon</i> is the most influential short film of all time, or at least the most
celebrated—its famed moon-shot sequence still well known after more than
a century. Having inspired artists as far afield as Martin Scorsese and
The Smashing Pumpkins, this film will still be talked about when the
next century dawns.</span></span><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/07/great-train-robbery-1903.html"><b><br /><br />The Great Train Robbery (1903)<br /></b></a>That famous close up: would you put it at the start of the film, or the end? Early exhibitors tried both, and that’s just one of the curiosities in this iconic early silent. <i>The Great Train Robbery</i> is a flawed film, but even its failings demonstrate where cinema had to go, both artistically and technologically. <br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2011/03/modern-sculptor-sculpteur-moderne-1908.html"><b>Modern Sculptor (1908)</b></a><br />A masterpiece by Méliès’ Spanish counterpart, Segundo de Chomón, <i>Modern Sculptor</i> will have you questioning the nature of matter itself. Not bad for a short film.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/05/wonderful-wizard-of-oz-1910.html"><b>The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910)</b></a><br />Based as much on the 1902 stage musical as Baum’s book, this early Oz entry cuts a manic pace. Think of the cyclone as an inspiration, as well as a plot device, and you’ll get the idea.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/05/frankenstein-1910.html"><b>Frankenstein (1910)</b></a><br />A hard film to find, but an important one to see, J. Searle Dawley’s take on Frankenstein compliments the later versions well. The creation scene in this movie remains one of my favourites—it is both realistic and grotesque. Are we not all just bones and meat, when you get down to it?<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2010/08/dream-1911.html"><b>The Dream (1911)</b></a><br />One of Mary Pickford’s darker shorts, <i>The Dream</i> turns a simple moral tale into a story of misperception, betrayal and abuse. Pickford married the man who played her husband in this film, and life did indeed imitate art.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2011/12/christmas-accident-1912.html"><b>A Christmas Accident (1912)</b></a><br />Watching this film is my own holiday tradition. And it’s a surreal experience. Imagine the figures in a Medieval painting coming to life—in the 1910s—and learning what matters most at Christmastime.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2010/08/conquest-of-pole-1912.html"><b>Conquest of the Pole (1912)</b></a><br />Méliès’ longest film shows the limitations of his style, I think—but it also gifts us with the Giant of the Snows, his greatest piece of stagecraft, and an artificial monstrosity that still impresses more than a century later.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2011/05/new-york-hat-1912.html"><b>The New York Hat (1912)</b></a><br />D.W Griffith, a galaxy of silent stars, and in the centre of it all: Mary Pickford. <i>The New York Hat</i> was a prestige picture for a woman on the verge of greatness.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/03/mothering-heart-1913.html"><b>The Mothering Heart (1913)</b></a><br />Like Jimmy Stewart a generation later, Lillian Gish excelled at portraying controlled, genteel characters harboring colossal rage. She lets it all out in this bizarre but memorable short.<br /><br /><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2011/09/his-majesty-scarecrow-of-oz-1914.html"><b>His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz (1914)</b></a><i><br />His Majesty</i> is a film in which the metaphoric is treated literally and the phony is very real. It is, in its own way, the truest evocation of the Land of Oz that I can imagine. As a fixed-camera film lasting sixty minutes, it really should drag, but it never does. Watch it with an open mind—asking yourself, all the way through, what it means to accept all these things as occupying the same reality at the same time.</span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-61114673390543953362015-04-28T20:13:00.001-04:002015-04-28T20:13:53.300-04:00Grass (1925)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">A friend asked me the other day if documentaries were common in the silent era. I told him I’d seen a few—<a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2012/06/nanook-of-north-1922.html"><i>Nanook of the North</i></a> (1922) for one, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_%28film%29"><i>Chang</i></a> (1927), and that <i>Nanook</i> was the most famous. I also told him that silent documentaries differed a bit, philosophically, from what came later.<br /><br />The qualities by which we judge a documentary successful today aren’t simply artistic ones. We also want a story we can believe in—on more than emotional grounds. If we see staged scenes, for example, we wonder how the real event differed from what we’re seeing. If persons or groups depicted in the film aren’t given voice, we wonder about the filmmaker’s bias. We acknowledge that bringing any story to the screen requires a degree of artifice—that documentaries are art, like other films. But like a well-written magazine feature (for example), they must be delivered with that objective sheen.<br /><br />The reason my friend had asked me about silent docs was because I’d told him I’d just watched <i>Grass.</i> The film depicts a Bakhtiari tribe’s migratory odyssey from modern-day Turkey to western Iran, in search of pasture land for their livestock. Grass is, by the standards of the decade in which it was filmed, a successful documentary. By today’s standards, not so much.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In no decade, mind you, would <i>Grass</i> be a bad film. Directors <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_B._Schoedsack">Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merian_C._Cooper">Merian C. Cooper</a> produced a story that stays with you, at least in terms of its most harrowing sequences—most of which (I think) are authentic. Its centerpiece is a river-fording, which the tribe accomplishes with a minimum of equipment and considerable guts. Imagine crossing a churning body of water with all your belongings, your elderly and your young, and several types of large animal too—the Bakhtiari manage it with hard swimming, a collection of lashed wooden rafts, and the use of inflated goatskins for buoyancy. I’ve seen scenes like this in other films, but all of them were fictional.<br /><br />The cinematography is often gorgeous. Schoedsdack and Cooper let their camera rest on vistas miles long: we see roads that wind and zig-zag through vast valleys; sheer rock faces and mountains capped with ice and snow. These sights would impress on their own, but they’re even more compelling because we know they’re obstacles the tribe must defeat; and furthermore, ones that we know the tribe really did defeat. All of this actually occurred! We are amazed that it could have. We wonder if we could have survived it, as these people did.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /><i>Grass</i> acknowledges this feeling that we’re feeling. Spends a lot of time on it, in fact. “How would you cross this river?” an intertitle asks, addressing us viewers as though we’re all sitting on a couch together, looking at photos of a trip to a strange land. “…the ancient life of tent and tribe and herd,” another card intones. “The life of three-thousand years ago.”<br /><br />This puts the 21st Century audience member in a slightly uncomfortable position. It’s true that <i>Grass</i> shows us places and people and events that, for a lot of us, really are unfamiliar, spectacular, and even weird. But nowadays we tend to recognize that as a gap in our knowledge. And this is not a thing to be satisfied with—the documentary’s purpose, then, is to open our eyes and widen our perspective.<br /><br /><i>Grass’s</i> almost chummy way of addressing us is a reminder that, at the time it was made, attitudes were different. It was the filmmakers’ intent to dazzle, and to be dazzled was all they expected of us. And they know we would be dazzled, because they’re from the same world. This is a closed conversation between white, western artists and a white, Western audience, and though I am white and Western myself, I’m also living in 2015, and so this felt troubling.<br /></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Within a framework like this, can we ever really ‘know’ the tribespeople? Some are named, but for the most part they are presented collectively. They do not speak for themselves—instead, the narrator substitutes his own quasi-heroic rhetoric and lays it over both scenery and people. “No! Starvation lies behind and ahead lie Grass and Life!” reads another intertitle—one that could’ve been spoken by any one of the tribespeople shown in the previous shot. It could have even been spoken by the dogs, since the film does, occasionally, ascribe dialogue to animals.<br /><br />I find it telling, and ironic too, that the directors and their collaborators, despite having taking part in this journey, still adopted a gaze more in keeping with the audience’s than the tribespeople’s. If we appreciate the Bakhtiari (and to the filmmaker’s credit, I think we do), it is only in terms of what their struggle means to us.<br /><br />This is not really enlightening for the Western viewer. What the filmmakers have actually done is appropriate elements of a foreign culture for the purposes of entertainment—and if there is a deeper level here, it is but one-level deeper into our own past. The Bakhtiari become a means for us to contemplate ourselves, and I submit that Schoedsdack and Cooper could have followed many other people on long and painful journeys and achieved the same effect.<br /><br />The directors of <i>Grass</i> would go on to make a better known, far more influential film just a few years later: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_%281933_film%29"><i>King Kong.</i></a> Whatever you think of Kong (and I find it fascinating), the through-line from this film to that one is quite clear. Fictional or not, the native cultures in both films conform to a type, defined largely by its alien-ness from our own. And while the differences between these worlds are made clear—perhaps they’re even the point of both films—there is no demand upon us to question who or what we are. We are only asked to be amazed by what is not us.<br /><br />By the end of <i>Grass,</i> we’ve seen a lot. But what have we learned?<br /><br /><b>Where to see <i>Grass:</i></b><i>Grass: A Nation’s Struggle for Life</i> was screened as part of the 2015 <a href="http://www.hotdocs.ca/">Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival</a> in Toronto. The film is also available on DVD through <a href="http://www.milestonefilms.com/products/grass-a-nations-battle-for-survival">Milestone Films.</a></span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-78409278927949759182015-04-11T10:53:00.000-04:002015-04-11T10:53:22.834-04:00Mistress Nell (1915)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There is more than one way to appreciate <i>Mistress Nell,</i> and it depends, I think, on how many Mary Pickford films you’ve seen in your life.<br /><br />I’ve seen a lot of them. Enough to know the prototypical Pickford part when I see it: the plucky, forceful youth, the rough-mannered gem who knows herself and inspires the rest of us. And so I can say with confidence that if you like that kind of thing, and you’ve never seen a Pickford film before, <i>Mistress Nell</i> is a good one to start with.</span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Pickford plays Nell Gwyn, the Restoration-era actress famed as the mistress of (well, as the most famous mistress of) King Charles II (Owen Moore). A figure known for her comic talents, beauty and wit, Gwyn was apparently deft at outmaneuvering would-be competitors for Charles’ eye, and so is remembered as something of a trickster figure, too.<br /><br />There was much for an actor to work with here and Pickford makes the most of it. She plays Nell as an independent woman—one who loves the king, but does not fear him, because she is confident in her own appeal. She’s even at ease teasing him. I liked an early scene in which Nell feigns a fall from a horse. The King, discovering her unconscious, betrays the depths of his affection. When she reveals the joke, he’s upset, but accepts her deep curtsey anyway. He has to—he’s the king. And that’s the point. Nell understands that the power which makes Charles king also binds him, and she revels in testing its limits.<br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />There’s a feeling here of youthful exuberance in this film, not just from Nell, but from the king as well. Here are two people reveling in a public love affair for which there can be no punishment, no scandal, because they are too powerful to be hurt. The only threat Charles faces is the Duchess of Portsmouth (Ruby Hoffman)—an aspiring companion who is also a French spy. (We’re informed of this fact in the opening minutes of the film.) But while the consequences for England are theoretically dire, in practice, the Duchess is a comedy foil. She’s someone for Nell to repeatedly thwart and humiliate for our entertainment.<br /><br />It’s interesting to watch Pickford, already an accomplished performer and star, play a character like this. Her Nell is constantly mimicking people: while this is a comic effect, in terms of what it offers the movie, it is also a legitimate part of any actor’s toolkit. And that gets you thinking about other ways that Pickford and Gwyn resembled one another. Both were the greatest stars of their era; both were trailblazing females in their medium; both maintained relationships with powerful men—and several of them. The press often described Pickford as Hollywood royalty; like Gwyn, she was considered a better comedienne than a dramatic actress.<br /><br />All this must’ve made the part intriguing for Pickford. And if you’re someone who has seen a lot of Pickford films, you’ll find the part intriguing too. Because you’ll see this character morph through various iterations of the Pickford stock character, but do so knowingly, as an actor would. Watch Nell in one scene, about halfway through the film, when she finds herself at an awkward three-person meal with Charles and the Duchess. In an effort to rattle the Duchess (and probably tweak the king), Nell begins acting up: she spears a whole chicken with her fork, reaches across the table for a bun and generally displays the kind to terrible table manners that so many of Pickford’s bumpkins and orphans did in other films. In other scenes you see the actress, who is quite capable of getting what she wants through charm or trickery, resort to violence (Pickford characters are often physically aggressive, at least early on). Nell even plays a male character one point—something Pickford occasionally did.<br /></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />This autobiographical element adds much to an otherwise average film. The stakes are rather low in Mistress Nell—one gets the impression that Nell could only lose the king’s attention if she became boring, and that seems impossible. The French plot, meanwhile, is so clumsily executed that Nell nearly defeats it by accident. It is the strength of Pickford’s performance that makes <i>Mistress Nell</i> worth watching. Enjoy it as a series of comic vignettes, starring the biggest comedienne in the world, and don’t expect a story for the ages.<br /><br /><br /><b>Mistress Nell<i> was screened on April 10, 2015, at Toronto’s <a href="http://www.rainbowcinemas.ca/A/index.php?theatre=Carlton&synopsis=true">Carlton Cinema</a>—part of the 2015 <a href="http://torontosilentfilmfestival.com/the-film-schedule.html">Toronto Silent Film Festival.</a> Live piano accompaniment was provided by <a href="http://www.jordanklapman.com/">Jordan Klapman. </a></i></b></span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-22039430041931331952015-01-26T23:25:00.001-05:002015-01-26T23:25:55.987-05:00Mabel's Dramatic Career (1913)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabel_Normand">Mabel Normand</a> was Keystone Studios’ greatest female star. A comedienne of the first rank, she also wrote and directed, and would be better remembered today if her personal life hadn’t ended her career, and her life, too soon.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">For those of us who do know her, the rewards of a Normand performance remain as clear as they were in the 1910s. She had impeccable pacing and natural pathos, and an ability—unmatched, I think, in the silent era—to appear overwhelmed by the chaos surrounding her. This was calculated, of course, and it was a perfect fit for the short comedies <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mack_Sennett">Mack Sennett’s</a> studio produced. For those films were fast—sometimes too fast—and populated with comedy grotesques. Normand brought heart, and even sympathy, to the Keystone films she starred in. She slowed the tornado down.<br /><br /><i>Mabel’s Dramatic Career</i> isn’t Normand’s best work, nor is it one of Keystone’s best shorts. But it exemplifies what Normand’s presence could add to a film. And, maybe, what her absence could take away.</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;">Normand plays “Mabel”: a kitchen maid who’s just been proposed to by the son of her wealthy employer. We learn this in the opening seconds, which is typical of a Keystone short. We learn, too, that the son is a hyperactive clod, which is pretty typical of Keystone too—though its best actors made something more of it.<br /><br />In this case the actor is Sennett himself. I’ve seen many Sennett-produced or -directed films, but rarely ones in which he appeared in any kind of substantial role, so this was a treat. Not that he’s much good, mind you—his take on “Mack”, the spoiled son, is quickly tiring. Sennett had a build a lot like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLean_Stevenson">McLean Stevenson:</a> tall and lanky, but easily reduced to a pot-bellied slouch. And while that can be funny, as Stevenson made it in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M*A*S*H_%28TV_series%29"><i>M*A*S*H,</i></a> it can also be weird, as Sennett makes it look here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />Normand has a lot to work with, in a way. “Mack” is so off-putting in these opening minutes that you pity her desiring him at all. And of course, there’s no hint of the gold-digger in her, so you side with her all the more. This is not a character trait shared by her new rival <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Kirtley">(Virginia Kirtley):</a> a citified hottie who steals Mack’s heart and leaves Mabel crying at the train station. Mabel leaves her job and her love behind, heading for the big city and a fresh start.<br /><br />It’s from this point on that things get interesting. <i>Mabel’s Dramatic Career</i> is one of several Keystone shorts that go “meta”—referencing, as part of their comic scenarios, Keystone Studios itself. In this case, Mabel is discovered, auditions successfully for a part and is made a huge Keystone film star (as only Keystone could possibly do—the braggadocio of this is half the fun).<br /><br />This kind of thing makes <i>Mabel’s Dramatic Career</i> feel less old fashioned. There’s even an artistic bent to it later on, when “Mack” stumbles into a movie theatre screening one of his former fiancé’s films. He sits down next to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Arbuckle">Fatty Arbuckle,</a> then another major Keystone star—though not, in this film’s mixed-up universe, that person at all. Arbuckle is rather subdued in this scene, which may be joke in itself, because Mack is a boisterous character of the type Arbuckle played to perfection. (Had Arbuckle played Sennett’s role here, we’d have had a better film.)<br /><br />I saw <i>Mabel’s Dramatic Career</i> in a theatre, with live accompaniment. So the scene with Sennett and Arbuckle was especially fun. Think of it: we were sitting in our seats, listening to a pianist, and watching a Mabel Normand film, in which the characters were sitting in their seats, listening to a pianist, and watching a Mabel Normand film. You don’t just laugh at this gag, you’re part of it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br />The theatre scene is the film’s best by far. <i>Mabel’s Dramatic Career</i> doesn’t have much of a third act at all—in part, I think, because Normand isn’t in it. In fact, she’s in barely half of the film, if you exclude the ‘film’ Mack sees her in. This was a performance too, but in the context of <i>Mabel’s Dramatic Career,</i> it’s merely footage. Normand’s presence being absent, we’re left with Sennett, who cannot carry things after the kind of performance he’s given thus far. When the movie ends—and like many Keystone shorts, it does so abruptly—we are ready.<br /><br /><i>Mabel’s Dramatic Career </i>can be recommended for its good ideas, but they’re better executed elsewhere. The film-within-a-film gag, in particular, showed up in many other places in the silent era—most famously in Buster Keaton’s <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/07/sherlock-jr-1924.html"><i>Sherlock, Jr.</i></a> (1924). To see the blurring of reality and fiction brought to its silent comedy apex, skip this film and watch <i><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2012/08/show-people-1928.html">Show People</a> </i>(1928), arguably King Vidor’s finest work. And I still think Arbuckle would’ve killed it in the main role here, like he did as the cowardly lay-about in <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/04/coney-island-1917.html"><i>Coney Island</i></a> (1917).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>I saw </i>Mabel’s Dramatic Career<i> this past Sunday—part of a <a href="http://revuecinema.ca/our-programs/silent-revue">Silent Revue</a> quadruple bill at the Revue Cinema, in Toronto. Special thanks to Alicia Fletcher and her team for putting it all together. </i></span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-73165724199552777422014-11-17T20:46:00.000-05:002014-11-17T20:47:12.193-05:00The Manxman (1929)<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There is no love triangle quite like this one.<br /><br />I first watched <i>The Manxman</i> years ago, having already seen several of Alfred Hitchcock’s other silent films. None of those ones had overwhelmed. Though they showed touches of the brilliance to come, they were also the products of a youthful director still finding his footing. They were uneven and, by the standards of late-20s silent cinema, nothing to write home about.<br /><br />But <i>The Manxman?</i> I loved it. Was transfixed by it. My heart broken by it. Could predict not one moment of it. I told people to watch it, promising they’d have a similar experience. A few did, and most of them agreed. But it remains a film few people know about, available in lousy video copies and rarely mentioned even when Hitchcock’s silent films are (rarely) mentioned.<br /><br />I like to think <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/">BFI</a> is changing that. Its 2012 restorations of the “Hitchcock 9” (the surviving nine silents that the master directed—out of a total of ten) lets these films shine as best they can—eliminating, for the most part, the wear of time, and allowing them to be judged, without qualification, on their artistic merits. Some still fall short. <i>The Manxman,</i> in my opinion, soars.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The story takes place in a fishing village on the Isle of Man, in the present day. It concerns three young people, two of whom are friends from boyhood: Pete Quilliam <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Brisson">(Carl Brisson),</a> a fisherman; and Philip Christian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Keen">(Malcolm Keen),</a> a lawyer. Pete is good-looking and well-liked—he’s one of the boys. Philip is more serious, and far better educated, but his heart, too, is with the common man. He uses his skills to help the Manxmen in their struggle against industrialized fishing interests.<br /><br />Pete and Philip have a bond based on brotherhood and trust. It surpasses social position—as it must, for Pete is a near-penniless labourer and Philip the son of one of the Isle’s wealthiest families, on the fast-track to a position as deemster (judge). How these two became friends is never explained, but such is the essential goodness of each man that we don’t question it, at least at first.<br /><br />Only one thing could set these two at odds. The “Manx Fairy”, Kate Creegen <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anny_Ondra">(Anny Ondra),</a> is the daughter of the village pubmaster: a few years younger than Pete and Philip perhaps, and adored by both of them. When we first meet her, working behind the bar during a crowded meeting of Manx fishermen, we find her to be a free spirit, even flighty. She flirts with both men, but more with the handsomer Pete, who confides to his friend, later that night, that he intends to ask for Kate’s hand. Permission for Kate’s to marry must be granted by her father, Caesar <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randle_Ayrton">(Randle Ayrton),</a> who looks like he’s spent much of his life facing into a hard wind. Pete worries, rightly, that Caesar will not give his daughter away to a man without much money; so he implores the more learned, eloquent Philip to argue on his behalf. Philip does this, but painfully—for he loves Kate as much as Pete does.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />What follows is a series of incidents that push Kate closer to Pete while her heart pulls her closer to Philip. To elaborate would spoil the film; it’s enough to say that if Pete were not around, Kate and Philip would probably be happy, and Philip knows that, and feels immense guilt over it. And because he feels that guilt, he works doubly hard against his own happiness, and Kate’s, by continuing to insist that Kate fulfill her promise to marry Pete.<br /><br />Watching this film a second time, in a theatre filled with people, it struck me how close to a comedy <i>The Manxman</i> really is. Kate and Philip’s love is repeatedly thwarted by the blundering Pete, who just wants what’s best for everyone and assumes everything’s fine just the way it is right now. There was something farcical about Philip and Kate—highly intelligent people—being outmaneuvered by this man, whose wide-eyed and clueless approach to anything he couldn’t pull from a net got repeated laughs from the audience. That Pete never obstructs them on purpose—and could not, unless they allowed him to—just adds to the fun. Or it would, if events didn’t take such a painful turn.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />I’d like to have been around when Hitchcock and Brisson discussed this role. Brisson plays Pete as a man without guile—and in a film where he shares every scene with Keen, Ondra or Ayrton, who carry so much more emotional weight, he seems almost like a caricature. This pays off later. But there are points early on when it seems like Brisson’s in a different film.<br /><br />In fact, Brisson’s performance fits in with the rest—you just have to consider it one oddity among several.<br /><br />You notice them after awhile. We’re told, for example, that Pete and Philip have been friends since boyhood, but Philip looks quite a bit older than Pete. It is implied that the story is set in the 1920s, yet—I am almost certain—there is not one piece of modern technology that appears onscreen. Likewise, among the supporting actors and dozens of extras Hitchcock filmed, none are young or attractive. It is as though Pete, Philip and Kate occupy a space where the strictures of time are loose or blurry; where they are unique beings. The only things that feel real and fixed are their emotions and the pain that results from them.<br /><br />But how does Kate actually feel? Ondra’s performance here is truly fascinating. Like Brisson, she occasionally goes over the top, but I believe it’s to a purpose. Her Kate is a young woman who has created a character to help her negotiate the sexual politics of her village—a village in which she is, apparently, the only beauty, yet remains powerless. Kate vamps and teases, at first getting laughs from our audience, who may have thought Ondra couldn’t act. But much of this is deflection; meant to rebuff a man without hurting him. Kate rarely reveals what she’s really feeling, fearful, perhaps, of having her options further constrained by the men in her life. And the more those fears are realized, the darker a figure Kate becomes. Her ‘turn’, which comes surprisingly early in the film, is chilling, and yet she never loses our sympathy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />In fact, none of them do. Like any fine, sad story, there are no villains in <i>The Manxman.</i> Just people trying to do what’s right—for themselves and the ones they care about. That each manages to ruin the lives of the other two is what finally turns <i>The Manxman</i> from a comedy of errors into a tragedy for the ages. I want you to see this film, so you know what I mean. <br /><br /> ***<br /><br /><i>The Manxman</i> was the last true silent film Hitchcock directed. His next one, <i>Blackmail,</i> was filmed as both a silent film and a talkie. <i>Blackmail</i> feels like a Hitchcock film, too—or at least the prototype of one—while <i>The Manxman</i> does not. But <i>The Manxman</i> is better. It has deeper characters, a stronger story, and a better performance from Ondra, who stars in both films. And because this post is already long, I don’t have room to tell you about its other good qualities: particularly Hitchcock’s use of lighting, including the oscillating bright and dim of the Isle lighthouse, which illuminates, then consumes, the Manx Fairy in her bleakest moments. <br /><br /> <b><i>The Manxman</i> screened at Toronto’s <a href="http://revuecinema.ca/">Revue Cinema</a> on November 15, 2014—part of the <a href="http://www.torontosilentfilmfestival.com/">Toronto Silent Film Festival’s</a> Hitchcock 9 series. Accompaniment was provided by <a href="http://www.fernlindzon.com/">Fern Lindzon.</a><br /><br />Read my post on <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2014/11/blackmail-1929.html"><i>Blackmail</i></a> (1929), also screened as part of this series.</b></span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-43069700535188132462014-11-02T11:41:00.001-05:002014-11-02T11:41:16.278-05:00Blackmail (1929)<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Yesterday evening marked the start of the <a href="http://www.torontosilentfilmfestival.com/">Toronto Silent Film Festival’s</a> Hitchcock 9 screening series—an event that will be executed over several weeks. Could you, by chance, be unfamiliar with the Hitchcock 9? You are not alone.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock">Alfred Hitchcock</a> directed ten silent films at the beginning of his career, nine of which survive. They vary in genre, theme and style, and they are little known today—in part because they are silent, but also because they’ve long been available, on video, in prints of such a quality that Hitchcock could’ve sued for vandalism.<br /><br />But things are looking up. In 2012, the British Film Institute (BFI) <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/video/restoration-alfred-hitchcock-s-silent-films">completed restorations of all nine silents,</a> and by all accounts they look gorgeous. I can vouch for only one so far: the opening film of TSFF’s series: <i>Blackmail.</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Filmed at the close of the silent era in the West, <i>Blackmail</i> exists in both a silent and sound version, and the former, in the minds of many, is superior. Having not seen the talkie, I can’t speak to that. What interested me more was the film’s almost prototypical Hitchcock-feel. While <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lodger:_A_Story_of_the_London_Fog"><i>The Lodger</i></a> (1927) is typically held to be the most Hitchcock-like of the nine silents, I say it’s <i>Blackmail</i>—the slighter of the two films, but at the same time, the more familiar.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>Blackmail</i> stars <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anny_Ondra">Anna Ondra</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Longden">John Longden</a> as Alice and Frank: a young couple dating (it seems) seriously in contemporary London. He’s a detective with Scotland Yard; she works in her father’s shop. He’s very busy, and she’s increasingly bored with his busy-ness. One night, after an argument with Frank, Alice makes off with a charming artist. That artist brings her to his studio in the dead of night and attempts to rape her—Alice, however, proves adept with a butcher knife and is the only one who leaves the studio alive.<br /><br />That thrust of the knife turns effervescent Alice into the haunted, enclosed figure she’ll remain for the rest of the film. Frank, assigned to the case, soon discovers a clue connecting her to the murder, which he suppresses. And soon after that, a third man, Mr. Tracy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Calthrop">(Donald Calthrop)</a> appears, producing evidence of his own against Alice and demanding to be paid for his silence. He has a serious criminal record.<br /><br />Alice cheats; Frank obstructs an investigation; Tracy blackmails—three figures, each one guilty of something. If any one of them talks to the authorities, the other two are doomed. Here is a recipe for delicious collusion—or conniving—between people whose distrust of one another will only grow with time and pressure. Who will crack first? And would doing so be a sign of weakness, or strength?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Alas, we get little time to enjoy this dynamic. <i>Blackmail’s</i> juicy middle dries up much too soon, moving to an extended chase sequence that causes us to pity the unpleasant Mr. Tracy. It’s a fine scene, actually; but it solves several problems too quickly.<br /><br />The most entertaining thing about <i>Blackmail</i> today—certainly what a lot of audience members were talking about afterward—are its trademark Hitchcock touches. Even if you’re not a big fan, the man’s work is so famous that you’ll spot things and begin cataloguing them in your mind.<br /><br />In Alice we have an imperiled blonde, though not a particularly icy one. In Scotland Yard we have a persecuting body that does good work, but plays the antagonist nonetheless, since we identify with those fleeing it. In Frank we have an authority figure whose personal and professional duties mutually oppose—a simplistic version of the dilemma Scottie Ferguson would face, decades later. <i>Blackmail</i> looks like a later Hitchcock film too: Alice’s trip to the artist’s studio involves a flight of stairs, the height of which is first exaggerated, then emphasized, to build suspense. Tracy’s attempt to escape the cops takes him into the British Museum, a famous building, and culminates in a standoff high atop it. And of course, there is the director’s cameo—one of his longest—as a fussy bus passenger bothered by a curious kid.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Live accompaniment was provided last night by <a href="https://myspace.com/laurasilberberg">Laura Silberberg,</a> who evoked quite ably the perpetually choked expression Alice wears, post-crime. She also kept things light when the film demanded it—as in one sequence where Alice’s parents blandly comment on the murder and the dangers of knives in general, unaware of the effect this is having on their daughter. I expect this scene works better with sound, but Laura, at least, found the right tone on her keyboard.<br /><br />We also enjoyed a brief introductory talk by local arts and media critic and journalist, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Pevere">Geoff Pevere,</a> who told us the rather interesting story of how <i>Blackmail</i> got made.<br /><br /><i>The Toronto Silent Film Festival’s Hitchcock 9 screenings <a href="http://www.torontosilentfilmfestival.com/the-film-schedule.html">continue on selected days,</a> through to the middle of November.</i></span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-71713929023146106962014-09-23T21:04:00.000-04:002014-09-23T21:04:27.729-04:00Sex (1920)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The act of sex—the physical joining of at least two persons for erotic purposes, to put it in the least-sexy way possible—is neither a moral nor an immoral thing. It is a biological thing. Almost all organisms are equipped to do it, to some degree; almost all species must do it to persevere. Sex is a fundamental part of being an animal, and we humans are animals like all the rest.<br /><br />But we are also social creatures. And the complex societies we build are sustained in part by our ability to define, codify and control our fundamental drives. Thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not skip out on thy wife. Breach the bounds of society, polite or otherwise, and you’ll face the consequences.<br /><br /><i>Sex</i> is a celebration of those consequences. Released in 1920, it looked ahead to a decade of flappers, Jazz and gin-soaked sin that would push against convention a little harder every year—an attitude the wholly opposes. Despite its provocative title, <i>Sex</i> is the most conservative movie I’ve seen in a while—more conservative than many silent films, including some that predate it.</span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;"><br /><i>Sex</i> stars <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Glaum">Louise Glaum</a> as Adrienne Renault, featured performer at a spicy New York nightclub. Adrienne’s act sees her descend from the rafters in the centre of a giant spider web. Clad in a fuzzy hat and more webbing, she stalks and consumes her male prey in a fashion that the audience is meant to find dangerously appealing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Adrienne is playing a vamp: a ruthless seductress. As played by Glaum, she is a vamp behind the scenes as well: the senior party girl in those inevitable, nightly meetings between lightly dressed show girls and their tuxedoed male admirers, most of whom have left wives at home. That these girls prey upon married men (or are preyed upon by them) does not bother Adrienne. Confronted by the wife of one wealthy playboy who no longer comes home at night, she replies, “You haven’t been robbed—you’ve merely lost something.” It’s an accurate, brutal line, and the movie’s best.<br /><br />Were Adrienne the antagonist of the film, she might have been allowed to continue her evil ways, slipping in and out of the story, chewing scenery and wrecking homes with glee. But alas, she is the protagonist. She must face her comeuppance. And so she will: in a succession of defeats and humiliations so predictable—so nearly mechanical—that they repeat upon her exactly the abuses she delivered to other women before her. It’s not easy being the centre of a morality play.<br /><br />The film’s big turn—which, in a more humanistic story, would not have been required—sees Adrienne abandoning her freewheeling ways for the life of a devoted wife. We are told that she has fallen hopelessly, honestly in love with a man she married for money. This seems dubious. It is, however, possible.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">What I found harder to accept was that Adrienne would be so lacking in self-awareness. When her own husband begins to drift, she acts with little more insight than the wife she herself humiliated at the start of the film. Her strategy is no different: find the nightclub hussy, condemn her, then plead the moral high-ground. Could a woman like Adrienne have even considered visiting the other woman’s home before her sense of irony kicked in? Does true love make one so stupid?<br /><br />What’s fascinating here is the degree of repetition. Not only does Adrienne become a victim just like the woman she once victimized; her husband also barges in on their confrontation just as the first wife’s husband did when she confronted Adrienne. This scenario, played the first time as farce, leaves the realm of drama entirely when repeated: becoming instead a piece of pedagogy. The laws of society, in this film anyway, form an unbreakable, perpetual-motion machine—a wheel that is always coming around. When we learn, late in the film, that a couple Adrienne drove apart have been reunited, we can reasonably assume the same happy ending for Adrienne, some day. Because every point on the wheel comes around, given time.<br /><br />What of the men in the film? They are galling, pathetic creatures. Caught red-handed visiting their mistresses, two husbands angrily accuse their wives of spying, as though the women had no good reason to be suspicious. It is telling that the only marriages we see in Sex depict men with unlimited license married to women whose worth is measured in loyalty. The women with the real power—the unmarried showgirls—represent pride before the fall. A female’s best hope for happiness, as near as I can tell from Sex, lies in landing a man who won’t cheat.<br /><br />Louise Glaum was an interesting choice to play this role. She’s not very pretty really. And when she’s introduced to us in that silly spider costume it really does seem like a costume, not the second skin you might expect it to be if worn by one of New York City’s most famous club queens. Only once she sheds this look for the plainer wares of the kept wife does she seem well-cast. Like Adrienne, she might play the bad girl for a while, but she was always the heartbroken wife in waiting. So it goes for all women, or so the film encourages us to believe. <br /><br /><b> </b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Where to find <i>Sex:</i></b><i> </i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Sex</i> is available on DVD through Alpha Home Entertainment. My special thanks to Caren Feldman, of <a href="http://carensclassiccinema.wordpress.com/">Caren’s Classic Cinema,</a> who hosted a screening of the film this past weekend.<br /><br />Director <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Niblo">Fred Niblo</a> helmed several more notable silent films, including <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2012/08/ben-hur-tale-of-christ-1925.html"><i>Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ</i></a> (1925); <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2012/04/blood-and-sand-1922.html"><i>Blood and Sand</i></a> (1922); and <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2010/01/mysterious-lady-1928.html"><i>The Mysterious Lady</i></a> (1928).</span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-21519044703379468822014-09-01T12:10:00.002-04:002015-01-07T20:57:55.496-05:00The Yellow Ticket (1918)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Imagine being told you could not go to school because of your last name. Imagine, even, being barred entry into a city—unless you accepted a legal standing that made you part of a permanent subclass.<br /><br />I’m not referring to current events, although I could be. That’s the thing about bigotry—it’s always a metaphor for, and a callback to, earlier bigotries. And so, while we turn on the news and see (or simply, live through) today’s hatreds, we can also turn to the past and see them manifested there. Even dramatized, as is in <i>The Yellow Ticket.</i></span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;">The bigotry in <i>The Yellow Ticket</i> is anti-Semitism. It is a hardened, institutionalized racism that exists to maintain the social order with Jews at the bottom. While no one in the film protests this openly, the story’s message is unambiguous: a young and capable Polish Jew named Lea <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pola_Negri">(Pola Negri)</a> cannot achieve all of which she is capable, due to a system that unfairly holds her back.<br /><br />Negri was already an emerging European star when she made <i>The Yellow Ticket;</i> within a few years she’d be a global one too, transfixing North Americans with her exotic and slightly offbeat screen presence. With her dark-circled eyes and heart-shaped face, made extra white against a frame of black hair, she was a Theda Bara with real Continental cred.<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Negri plays a victim in <i>The Yellow Ticket,</i> requiring the audience to sympathize with her character more than applaud her proactive spirit. That doesn't mean Lea lacks drive. She chooses to move to St. Petersburg to attend school, even if it means accepting the degrading “yellow ticket” forced upon all Jewish women living there, which effectively brands her a prostitute. And after realizing she will be denied entry into university, she enrolls under an assumed name, and excels. Lea has guts, and she’s prepared to sacrifice a lot for what she wants. But it is still the shame of such laws, more than Lea’s strength in negotiating them, that occupies the centre of the film. Lea embodies a problem, and like any archetypal character, she can feel distant at times.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />The film’s direction is workmanlike, though a few artful moments did stand out for me. I liked our first look at Lea: sitting in deep study in the family’s pawn shop, a picture frame hanging askew above her head. It resembled a guillotine blade. The shot is an efficient, elegant summation of both Lea’s commitment and her many heartbreaks to come.<br /><br />Powerful, too, is a scene late in the film (where most of the good scenes are found) in which Lea, now honoured for her academic record, fears that her secret life is about to be exposed. Here Negri emotes before a mirror—an obvious symbol of her double life. But more interestingly, the woman we see in the glass seems older and wearier, in heavier shadow, than the one on our side. There’s no trick of makeup here. Perhaps it was the lighting. Whatever it was, it worked.<br /><br />This scene, with its near-operatic tone of melancholy, represents <i>The Yellow Ticket</i> at its best. Negri had range and power, and here she floods the screen with energy enough to carry us away. Unfortunately, her cast mates are not her equals—especially <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Liedtke">Harry Liedtke,</a> who plays Lea’s love interest, Dmitri. Liedtke delivers an unintentionally comic performance that unravels every scene he’s in.<br /><br />Luckily, the second-most important role is played by another able performer. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0508985/?ref_=tt_cl_t4">Adolf E. Licho</a> is Professor Zukowski, a physician and lecturer in whose class Lea first distinguishes herself. Like Negri, Licho commands his scenes, closing the film with a tremendous performance in a scene that is preposterous on its face, but works, because the actor at the centre of it projects both gravity and passion in equivalent measure.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />Silent films about race inevitably disappoint, never going as far down the righteous road as modern viewers would like. Too many of them reinforce racial boundaries even as they decry prejudice—the hero of the East being discovered (for example) to be the son of white parents, making him a suitable match for his white love interest.<br /><br /><i>The Yellow Ticket,</i> though not the most tortured example of this I’ve seen, does fall into the same trap. This makes it a film of its time, but, as it also mutes the film’s power today, I think it’s fair to call that a flaw.<br /><br />There are better silent films about prejudice than The Yellow Ticket: some better acted <i><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2013/06/the-goddess-1934.html">(The Goddess)</a></i>; some better directed <i><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2010/07/sex-in-chains-1928.html">(Sex in Chains)</a></i>; a few more intellectually honest <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_American">(The Vanishing American)</a></i>. Negri would go on to do better work, herself. To recommend <i>The Yellow Ticket</i> today is to acknowledge that, while it is imperfect, there is still value in seeing how an earlier time grappled with, in hesitation, but with a real concern, the true meaning of justice.<br /><br /><b>Where to find <i>The Yellow Ticket:</i></b><i>The Yellow Ticket (Der Gelbe Shein)</i> was screened this past August 31, 2014, in Toronto—part of the 2014 <a href="http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/summer/ashkenaz/">Ashkenaz Festival.</a> The screening featured live accompaniment by klezmer violinist <a href="http://www.aliciasvigals.com/the_yellow_ticket.html">Alicia Svigals,</a> who composed a new score for the film in 2013. Svigals, who supplied occasional vocals as well, was joined by Jazz pianist <a href="http://www.marilynlerner.com/">Marilyn Lerner</a> and clarinetist <a href="http://www.seattlechamberplayers.org/about-scp/laura-deluca/">Laura DeLuca.</a><br /><br /><i>The Yellow Ticket</i> is also part of the DVD set, <i><a href="http://www.silentera.com/video/collNegriIconicEarlyHV.html">Pola Negri: The Iconic Collection,</a></i> packaged with other early Negri films, The <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2012/02/polish-dancer-1917.html"><i>Polish Dancer</i></a> (1917), <i>Eyes of Mummy Ma</i> (1918), and <i>Sappho</i> (1921).</span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-86732008570415216152014-06-11T21:19:00.000-04:002014-06-11T21:19:14.823-04:00La Voz de Los Silenciados (The Voice of the Voiceless) (2013)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Long ago (in the 90s) I fell in love with a video game called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_%28video_game%29"><i>Out of This World</i></a>. The game’s protagonist was a scientist, transported to an alien planet where he could understand neither the language nor the motives of the natives.<br /><br /><i>Out of This World</i> was unsettling, because its designer, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Chahi">Éric Chahi,</a> sought to make it art. The game featured a character in isolation, but it also evoked isolation through its game play, using music sparingly—often relying on tones, rather than whole melodies, to make a point about how bad the player’s situation had become. Action sequences were intercut with cinema scenes of dough-headed aliens talking urgently but inscrutably. When the player failed a task—which was often—he returned to the same starting point; usually a prison of some kind, from which he had to escape all over again.<br /><br />Talk to men and women of my vintage about <i>Out of This World</i> and they’ll tell you it was fun. But what they’ll really want to talk to you about is how it made them feel.<br /><br />One artwork suggests another. I thought of <i>Out of This World </i>many times while watching <i>La Voz de Los Silenciados (The Voice of the Voiceless),</i> a contemporary silent film by Maximón Monihan, an American director with a background in skateboarding and skateboarding films. Here again we are presented with a protagonist plucked from her own environment and placed in a new one both hostile and difficult to understand. Again we have a narrative broken down into a series of quests, bookended by sameness, repetition. And again there is an undertone of horror. But while the game’s hero was lost among aliens, in this case, our hero is lost among her fellow humans. She is displaced not just geographically, but linguistically. Because she is deaf.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Olga (Janeva Adena Calderón Zentz) is a Central American teenager from, it seems, a loving family. At the start of the film we see her parents being visited by a polished couple, selling the promise of special education for Olga: a school for the deaf in America. Olga’s parents are duped, and the girl is effectively sold into slavery on the streets of New York City. Not as a prostitute, though. She becomes one of those hearing-impaired peddlers who place a note on your coffee shop table, or next to you on the subway, informing you that they are deaf and asking for a donation. Olga’s profits are absorbed by the cartel to whom she’s been sold. If she returns to the home short, they zap her with a stun gun. If she tries to escape, they’ll kill her parents.<br /><br />None of this is upbeat. But while the film is disturbing throughout, it is not merely, or even mostly, a drama. <i>The Voice of the Voiceless</i> is an avant-garde film, with the same strengths and weaknesses such films tend to have. It is intriguing in concept and execution, but, as a consequence of that, it can leave us emotionally detached from its main character.<br /><br />Monihan’s protagonist is one for whom sound exists only in the imagination (we don’t know if Olga was born deaf) or through its physical manifestation as vibration. The soundtrack to the film is, like <i>Out of This World’s,</i> an ominous, intermittent one—often not melody at all, but just repetitive, muffled thumps and whooshes that a hearing-impaired person might hear, or think she hears, or simply feel. The effect on the viewer is restrictive—we are placed more firmly inside this character’s head than most. We’re almost trapped there.<br /> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Yet I didn’t feel so connected to Olga herself. Yes I rooted for her—you could hardly do otherwise. But the film’s ongoing visual and aural experiments made her feel more like of a participant in those experiments than a fully realized young woman. She worked for the moments, rather than the moments working for her.<br /><br />Any silent film made today is experimental on some level, because to make one now is to deliberately refuse some tool of expression made readily available. This refusal will be so obvious that it must have a point. You can’t help but ponder it. But maybe you can ponder it too much.<br /> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />I kept wondering why the film was in black and white. Was this an homage to past forms? Or was it, more likely, a feature-length counterweight to one remarkable dream sequence, in which Olga is placed back in her tropic homeland, awash in full colour? Visually, we achieve verisimilitude here; but not aurally: the trees and fruits in this sequence, and even the girl herself, squawk and shriek in a distorted mimicry of urban sounds. This sequence is fascinating and memorable and I applaud it, but does it saying anything more about Olga’s geographic, physical and psychological isolation? She is necessary for this sequence, and it is cool to see, but it does nothing for Olga.<br /><br />You may feel differently.<br /><br />Zentz has apparently been called the “Guatemalan Shelley Duval”—a comparison both stylistically and anatomically apt. Like almost everyone else in the main cast, she is a non-actor, yet a well established artist in other areas. I don’t know if Monihan’s choice to use non-actors adds any dimensions to <i>The Voice of the Voiceless,</i> but these women and men certainly have presence, and perhaps this is due in part to their own artistic achievements. They know what grabs attention. They know what works. And in Zentz’s case, that often means appearing before the camera in her wan glory, and letting it gobble her up.<br /><br />I told you what happened when you died in <i>Out of This World:</i> You returned to your prison, destined to repeat your task in hopes of a better result. Likewise, we see Olga tossed from her bed each morning in scenes that seem identical, sent on her way to make money for someone else. That, at least, is something we can all relate to. Like Olga, we all have the choice to adapt to our circumstances or try to escape them.<br /><br />You know what? I’d like to see more modern silents like <i>The Voice of the Voiceless.</i> But I’d like to hear them even more. Good on these artists for taking up the challenge.<br /><br /><b>Where to see <i>La Voz de Los Silenciados:</i> </b><i>La Voz de Los Silenciados</i> screens this Friday, June 13th, at <a href="http://bloorcinema.com/">Bloor Hot Docs Theatre</a> in Toronto. The screening is part of this year’s <a href="http://nxne.com/2014/nxne-film-announcement/#lavoz">North by Northeast (NXNE)</a> arts festival. <br /><br /><a href="http://lvdls.com/">Read more about the film, and its cast and crew.</a></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-68898242415507139432014-04-05T21:07:00.000-04:002014-04-05T21:07:11.403-04:00The Wind (1928)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">You can say a thing a lot of ways. That’s why we watch silent films, isn’t it? To see how, when the sound’s taken away, some great artist got his or her point across. To be reminded of all the options.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Imagine, for example, that you’re watching the story of a man and his wife, both young. They were married under pretences the male party now considers false. They’ve grown estranged. Now he is out on a job and she is home. An intruder muscles his way into the house and attempts to take her away. Realizing, finally, that she would rather stay with her husband than move on, she dispatches the intruder. As his heavy body hits the floor, two dinner plates, set askew on the table behind her, slide into an even stack.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There is no intertitle to tell us their marriage is saved. But it is. The plates said so.</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;">There are several scenes like this in <i>The Wind,</i> director <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Sj%C3%B6str%C3%B6m">Victor Sjöström’s</a> silent era psycho-drama, and one of the last silent films MGM released. To describe them is to praise the subtle hand and breadth of sensitivity of the film’s director, and equally of its star: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Gish">Lillian Gish.</a> But it is also to belie something. <i>The Wind</i> is not a quiet, nor a pensive film. It is big, at times hysterical, occasionally (appropriately?) overblown. Most of the time, these qualities work in its favour.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Gish plays Letty, a Virginian woman headed west to live with her cousin and childhood friend, Beverly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Earle">(Edward Earle)</a>, his wife <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Cumming">(Dorothy Cumming)</a> and their three children. Beverly lives in a remote patch of land fifteen miles from his nearest neighbor. The region is blighted by powerful winds, the worst of them called “northers,” which locals warn have the power to rip a man’s limbs from his body. Though the term is never used in the film, these northers are sandstorms, and they deliver their cargo in much the manner a blizzard does, and to the same dramatic effect. Why Letty’d leave Virginia for a place like this, we’ll never know. All we do know is that she’s leaving for good. So we suspect the rest.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Maybe the wife knows more. She’s a stern-faced woman, proficient with a butcher knife, who appears to take no shit. And she truly loves her husband. She sits coldly while Beverly welcomes the beautiful Letty into their home — Gish looking somewhere between 17 and 25 here, her powers of attraction at their peak. She practically glides into Beverly’s space.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Gish played a lot of pure-hearted, mistreated women. Not this time. Her Letty is a flirt, and a brazen one. And maybe not a bright one, because if she gets kicked out of this house, she’s got nowhere to go. Not for at least fifteen miles.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">This love triangle gets <i>The Wind</i> off to a strong start. It sets up Gish in the atypical role of an anti-hero, and establishes Letty’s surroundings as something she’s not well suited for, physically or emotionally. It also gives Sjöström an opportunity to craft some elegant imagery. My favourite scene—really, sequence—comes in these early minutes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It starts with a sandstorm, some weeks or months after Letty has moved in. We see the window of the house first, with the sand striking it like a slashing blade. We think of grit, coarseness; of scoured skin. Then Sjöström cuts to Letty’s delicate hands. She is trying to iron; she rubs her raw and tired fingers. Now we see Beverly’s wife, her hands bloody—splitting open a side of beef with a large knife. When Beverly returns, she hugs him, blood and all. Isn’t that magnificent?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I wish this dynamic had lasted longer. But soon Letty is living somewhere else—married to a kind young farmer named Lige Hightower <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Hanson">(Lars Hanson)</a>, who loves her very much. Letty, by this point, needs money and a roof. So she loves him too, for that. But when Lige tries to kiss his new wife, she rejects him brutally.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">This is a remarkable scene for anyone familiar with Gish’s other major roles. After the film ended, I spoke to a friend about how strange it was to see her enraged: teeth-bared, wild eyed, bitter and cruel. We’d both seen Gish play angry, even crazy characters, but this was something else. The only comparison I could make was to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikio_Naruse">Mikio Naruse’s</a> <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2013/03/repast-1951.html"><i>Repast</i></a> (1951), in which <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setsuko_Hara">Setsuko Hara</a>, immortalized as the saintly Noriko in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasujir%C5%8D_Ozu">Ozu’s</a> films, plays kind of a bitch.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">But Letty suffers from more than just a bad disposition. The constant howl of the wind is tipping her over the edge. And it gets worse as her marriage withers and she’s left alone in the cabin, in silence but for the shrieking outside, scraping her dinner plate clean with the sand itself, which sits in a pile in their sink. Just imagine that. This place might be Purgatory for Letty, assuming she’s capable of reform.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I haven’t mentioned Wirt Roddy, the travelling cattle buyer Letty meets on her train ride from Virginia. It’s not because <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagu_Love">Montagu Love</a> does a poor job of playing this character—oily, would-be rapist that Roddy is. He’s the film’s only true villain, and a believable one; presenting a serious threat to Gish’s character late in the story. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /> But Roddy is also a plot device—an obvious means of imperiling Letty and facilitating her redemption, if redemption is to come. In a film that, in its best moments, can transport you to a world of madness and lust, evoked through visual poetry on par with Von Stroheim’s, well… it’s frustrating to be pulled back from that world by an ending so easy to predict.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">We shouldn’t ask more of a film than it was intended to give. Sjöström and Gish (and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Marion">Frances Marion</a>, who adapted the screenplay) made <i>The Wind</i> a crowd-pleaser with moments of true artistry. But in the spirit of that effort, I wished they’d gone even further. There are many ways to send an audience home fulfilled. A happy ending is only one of them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Wind<i> was screened this past April 3rd, at Innis Town Hall in Toronto, part the 2014 Toronto Silent Film Festival. All of TSFF’s screenings are a treat, but this one especially so, because </i>The Wind<i> is a tough film to see on video. And also because it was introduced, via pre-taped vignette, by </i><a href="http://silentlondon.co.uk/">Silent London’s</a><i> own Pamela Hutchinson. I’ve heard Pam’s voice, and seen Pam’s face, but I’ve never heard her and seen her at the same time. It was a pleasure. She taught us a lot, as always.</i></span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-20263275917272651972014-02-09T11:46:00.000-05:002014-02-09T11:46:45.204-05:00Wild Oranges (1924)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There are moments in <i>Wild Oranges</i> when you wonder what you’re watching. It’s a silent film alright, and it looks like one—but this story of a love affair in a secluded patch of Georgia coast, at times, seems plucked from another period entirely. In form, it’s the early-20s, but in content, often, it feels like something made much later.</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;">This is a quality you find in several of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Vidor">King Vidor’s</a> silent films. It’s part of what makes them so intriguing today, and it furthers the regret I feel over the director’s work being so little known. Murnau; Lang; Griffith; Chaplin and Keaton—these names every film student knows. But Vidor’s best work is far too easy to miss. And those that miss it, miss out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Wild Oranges</i> is not <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2009/12/crowd-1928.html"><i>The Crowd,</i></a> or <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2012/08/show-people-1928.html"><i>Show People.</i></a> But it shares with these greatest of Vidor silents that curious mix of traditional silent cinema and forms and content that became prominent after sound. There are hints here of <i>Body Heat; Deliverance;</i> even <i>Texas Chainsaw Massacre.</i> It’s not that <i>Wild Oranges</i> is a sex drama per se, much less a slasher film. But what would form the bedrock of those later genres is present.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Wild Oranges</i> stars <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Mayo_(actor)">Frank Mayo</a> as John Woolfolk, a man who lost his wife, then turned to the sea as a means of both making a living and avoiding a life. He’s a dour sort, and if he has any friends, we never see them. None except his first mate, Paul, played by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Sterling">Ford Sterling.</a> Sterling, a comic actor, provides every laugh the film can muster.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">John is an emotionally damaged man, unable to live comfortably in the wider world. This is a trait shared by several other Vidor males of note, including <i>The Crowd’s</i> Johnny Sims. Vidor shows us, in the opening scene, how John became what he is. We see the man riding in a carriage with his lovely new bride. A piece of newspaper, buffeted by the breeze, crosses their path. The horses are spooked. They bolt, and the young woman is thrown to her death. The scene is sudden, and surprisingly violent. The image of the wadded paper, drifting languorously along in the breeze, establishes a sense of an indifferent world that will inform several of the tragedies to come—as it would the entirety of <i>The Crowd, </i>four years later.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">John’s travels bring him to an inlet on the Georgia coast. He needs fresh water and is prepared to trade. His boat moored, he travels inland, through some thick foliage, not far from a swamp, to a large, secluded house. The house appears semi-abandoned. But it has three occupants: the elderly Lichfield Stope, his granddaughter, Millie, and Iscah Nicholas.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lichfield and Iscah are both Gothic grotesques, played to the extreme by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_De_Brulier">Nigel De Brulier</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0692809/">Charles Post,</a> respectively. De Brulier’s grandfather is white-haired, wide-eyed and sunken—a man petrified of everything, an intertitle tells us, following traumatic service in the U.S. Civil War. Iscah (referred to as ‘Nicholas’ throughout) is a loping giant, filthy and hungry most of time, with an eye for Millie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Valli">(Virginia Valli)</a> and a volatile temperament. Thought a dimwit, his power and cruelty are enough to keep the girl and her grandfather isolated in their home. It seems only a matter of time before Nicholas rapes Millie, if indeed he has not done so already.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Geography isn’t the only thing that unifies these three characters. There is also mental illness. Lichfield, we’re told, suffers from “fear”, and that fear is hereditary, Millie later explains to John, justifying her own hesitance about leaving the coast. Today we’d find another name for this fear. Nicholas, too, is troubled: breaking down in tears, moving in jerky motions, displaying ticks. Post’s portrayal is hardly sensitive by modern standards, nor is it particularly good. But you do get the sense that Vidor sees Nicholas, as he does the others in that house, as a sufferer of afflictions, not just someone deeply flawed.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">That John will discover Millie and fall for her is expected. What drew my attention wasn’t the particulars of their courtship but the execution. After setting foot on the Stopes’ property, John helps himself to one of their oranges, plucking it ripe from the tree and peeling back its skin. “Wild Oranges—at first surprisingly bitter, but after a moment pungent and zestful with a never-to-be-forgotten flavor”—the intertitle practically growls these lines, as Millie secretly assesses the new man. The two of them haven’t so much as touched and already, there’s something dirty here. Vivek Maddala’s score backs this up ably. Recorded in 2006 for Warner, and offered with the Warner Archives release of <i>Wild Oranges,</i> it has the ache of a lusty humid night. Millie could have run an ice cube down her throat and not seemed out of place.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Millie is bottled up. And she’s surrounded by degradation and rot—to which John stands in stark contrast. And how long has he been on that boat now? With only a platonic companion to keep him company? These are people with primal needs, who have enclosed themselves emotionally. People for whom lust itself, and perhaps love too (though not necessarily) provides a crack in the dam. Given all this, the extended action sequence that closes the film, violent and well-done as it is, seems more like a grand metaphor than a driver of plot. It is action, finally, after so many years of holding back.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Where to find <i>Wild Oranges:</i></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Wild Oranges</i> is part of the <a href="http://www.wbshop.com/product/wild+oranges+%281924%29+1000179919.do?sortby=ourPicks&refType=&from=Search">Warner Archive Collection,</a> available as a made-for-order DVD from WBshop.com.</span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-62073863791647572602014-01-19T12:55:00.000-05:002014-01-19T12:55:02.432-05:00Lady of the Night (1925)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Lady of the Night</i> stars <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Shearer">Norma Shearer</a> in a duel role: as Molly, daughter of a convict, frequenter of bars; and as Florence, innocent socialite, angelic and pure. They spend most of the picture unaware of one another and share only one thing, besides a freakish resemblance: their love for the same man. Upper class, lower class, not so different really. It is as contrived a structure as a story could have.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">But it’s not what you have, it’s what you do with it. When I finished watching the film, I turned to a friend and said, “with silents, you can tell if they’re going to be good from almost the first scene. And that one was good.” And it was. <i>Lady of the Night</i> really works; not because of some ham-fisted moral lesson about love and class—or a plot structure that makes it insistent—but thanks to its pockets of delicate melodrama. Its poetic moments, imbuing the characters with tragic quality. Without these moments, Molly, Florence, and their hangers-on would be buffoons. Instead, they break our hearts.</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;">The credit goes to the film’s director, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monta_Bell">Monta Bell,</a> and cinematographer, André Barlatier. Bell and Shearer had worked together before, and would again. He appreciated the actress’ unusual screen presence: her ability to portray effervescent women who were, nonetheless, no free spirits. I think that’s hard. With <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Crawford">Joan Crawford,</a> you got a party girl with gusto. For Shearer’s characters, at least in films like <i>Lady of the Night,</i> partying was work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the hands of Bell and Barlatier, this quality is manifested literally. It is not just Shearer, but Molly and Florence themselves, who seem to be costumed—particularly Molly, whose slicked hair, plaid skirt and dangling beads, among other things, put her somewhere between a prostitute and a fastidious bag lady. Molly’s hat, which she wears on every outing, has a pair of white features that splay outward at eight and eleven o’clock. They look like a water sculpture.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">This is a woman trying to be something—more specifically, something men envision her to be—and she is blaring her signal loud. Florence, meanwhile, drifts between elegant gowns and an overhead wrap that recalls the Virgin Mary—again, an image even the thickest male could intuit, to Florence’s advantage. We suspect that Florence’s gimmick is more true to the woman than Molly’s, but in fairness, only Molly has to make a living.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">If Molly and Florence are putting on acts, the men in their lives seem almost wholly unreal. The one they both pine for, David Page <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_McGregor">(Malcolm McGregor),</a> is a young inventor who thinks he’s got a foolproof method for securing a safe. His tiny apartment is dominated by a long workbench covered in wiring and vacuum tubes. The imagery, in a film like this, seems odd—better suited to a silent serial than a melodrama—and David’s motivations are never well defined. He seems earnest and decent enough, but when it is suggested to him that criminals would pay more for his invention than a banker would, he seems open to the option.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Molly’s boyfriend, ‘Chunky’ Dunn <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_K._Arthur">(George K. Arthur),</a> is an underworld figure of some sort. But he could not be less imposing. Arthur was a small man with a pudgy face; as Dunn, he spends the film under an overlarge bowler hat, wearing an expression of bewilderment. Molly is out of his league, and both of them know it. But their relationship is important, because the hapless Chunky really does love Molly, whereas the more eligible David may or may not, and Molly’s decision regarding the ideal man for her is the key to who Molly is.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Two sequences establish this. The first, very early in the film, begins with Florence’s graduation from an exclusive private school. The beautiful girl exits the gates with her friends, each of them looking ahead to a life of luxury. The luxury is rooted not in money itself, but options—even if Florence has no idea what she wishes to be, we know she’ll have time to consider it, and suitors, ever at the ready, with suggestions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">From this moment in Florence’s life, Bell makes the first of several abrupt cuts to a parallel moment in Molly’s. Molly and her friends have just graduated too—from reform school. They stand in a cluster, under gates of their own, and one of them wonders: ‘what’ll we do now?’ None of them claim to know. But really, they do know. Molly advances from this nest, on her own. A hearse pulls to a stop in front of her. She looks at the contents inside, then checks her reflection in the glass. Molly intends to survive.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">She soon finds an apartment, and a job as (I suppose) an escort. And she meets David. David is going places and Molly reasons that she ought to follow suit—so she invites the man to her place for a meal, which she researches in advance by reading an article in a lifestyle magazine. But Chunky arrives first, unannounced and uninvited. Molly does nothing to disguise her annoyance at this, but Chunky is oblivious. He sees the magazine on the table, open to a picture of a fancy dinner-setting. It is illuminated by a beam of light coming through a crack in Molly’s door. Chunky entered through this door without even knocking. Now he traces the features of the picture, almost bathing his hand in the light. He closes his fingers around it and, of course, he is holding nothing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">This all may sound like a bit much. And indeed, shots like these can pummel a viewer if handled wrong, even in the stylized reality most silent films occupy. But in <i>Lady of the Night,</i> they’re kept in check. Or at least they seemed to be, to me. I think it’s because they were always put to work. They advanced the characters’ stories, or revealed to us more about them, or both. Lady of the Night is an indulgent film at times, but never at our expense.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Like the similarly structured, but much more famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Maris_%281918_film%29"><i>Stella Maris</i></a> (1918), <i>Lady of the Night</i> suffers from imbalance. The privileged, delightful Florence isn’t half as compelling as her cynical, hard-luck opposite number. She is tame because she can afford to be, and has little to lose. Molly, on the other hand, has everything to gain.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The real battle, in this film, is not between Molly and Florence for the heart of one fickle inventor. It is between Molly’s competing visions of herself. Is she deserving of the life she must sacrifice so much to have? Or should she resign herself to the life she has, which is not without its pleasant days? We know what we want for her, but we don’t have to live her life in the meantime. Nor do we have to face our own doppelganger, living the life we believe we ought to have, unearned, and doing it well. Florence has everything a girl could want. Molly’s hand is empty.</span></span><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Where to find <i>Lady of the Night:</i></span></span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Lady of the Night</i> is part of the Warner Archive Collection, available as a made-for-order DVD from <a href="http://wbshop.com./">WBshop.com.</a> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Thanks again to <a href="http://carensclassiccinema.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/lady-of-the-night-1925-and-let-us-be-gay-1930/#more-868">Caren Feldman,</a> who screened this film, along with Shearer’s 1930 comedy-drama talkie, <i>Let Us Be Gay.</i></span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-60224404345932749572013-12-12T07:49:00.000-05:002013-12-12T07:49:16.437-05:00Yasujiro Ozu, born this day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-11507075112677183342013-12-05T07:30:00.001-05:002013-12-05T07:31:07.947-05:00Fritz Lang, born this day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-58625984809973321232013-12-01T20:53:00.001-05:002013-12-02T21:55:18.087-05:00Grave of the Fireflies (1988)<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">When you mention <i>Grave of the Fireflies</i> to someone who’s seen it, they give you a rueful grin. “Saddest movie ever,” they say, or something like that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I’ve seen <i>Grave of the Fireflies</i> three times: most recently in advance of a screening happening at TIFF Bell Lightbox, here in Toronto, next month. I don’t know if I’ll be attending that screening or not, but I did want to write about it, to help promote the film, and hopefully entice you, if you haven’t seen <i>Grave of the Fireflies,</i> to go. Because sometimes, it’s good to be sad. And when it comes to being good, and very, very sad, <i>Grave of the Fireflies</i> is nearly unparalleled.</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is many other things too: a war film, a meditation on childhood, a meditation on manhood, and most importantly, a cartoon. <i>Grave of the Fireflies</i> was produced by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli">Studio Ghibli</a>, the same legendary company behind Hiyao Miyazaki’s <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Neighbor_Totoro">My Neighbor Totoro</a></i> and <i><a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2012/02/spirited-away-2001.html">Spirited Away</a></i>, and many more animated hits. Compared to those movies it is relatively bleak, eschewing spectacle. But it is equally unforgettable.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Set in 1945, the film tells the story of two Japanese children, 14-year-old Seita, and his four-year-old sister, Setsuko. They are residents of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Kobe_in_World_War_II">Kobe,</a> a Japanese city firebombed by American planes near the end of World War Two. We witness this firebombing shortly after the movie begins. As Seita and Setsuko and hundreds of others look skyward, a cluster of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-29_Superfortress">B-29 Superfortress</a> bombers spew forth their payload: an almost pestilential raining-down of bits of flaming oily substance that land on the ground and spread their fires. The city is consumed. The childrens’ mother, we soon learn, is burned in the attack—she dies soon after. Their father is on a battleship, somewhere in the Pacific. He may be dead too. Seita and Setsuko have no one but each other.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is an ugly start. <i>Grave of the Fireflies’</i> writer and director, Isao Takahata, has rejected claims that his film is anti-war, and it’s true that no argument is made for pacifism in the film. But by portraying the plight of those impacted by war with such realism and sensitivity, he nevertheless challenges the notion that destruction is a worthwhile means of resolving anything. We begin to care for these two orphans as we would any pair of decent young people faced with terrible loss.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is the film’s capturing of essential childhood, particularly Setsuko’s, that makes this so easy. Conjured by Takahata and his artists, the children move as real, live children their age do. Watch how Setsuko removes her pants and top to follow her brother into the sea for a swim: It’s a fumbling movement by someone with short limbs and small hands, but it is not exaggerated—like most little kids, Setsuko is quite serious when it comes to mundane efforts. And she’s at home in her body in a way adults often aren’t, falling backwards on her bum to free herself from her pant legs. This is what a girl of four would do, anywhere in the world.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Setsuko is immature of course, but a fully realized, juvenile character. She is more than simply something Seita must protect. But she certainly does need his protection. That this responsibility falls to Seita, a boy only in his early-teens, is the catalyst for much of the heartbreak in the second half of the film.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I always ask myself what I would have done, at fourteen, in Seita’s place. It’s frightening to think about. Devoted to his sister but not yet old enough to be a dad to her, he first chooses shelter with his father’s sister, who lives with her daughter and a lodger in a village some distance away. Though the woman takes them in, she’s clearly not interested in taking care of them for long. Her cutting remarks about the advantages of being an officer’s son suggest a difficult relationship between herself and Seita’s father. She berates him for failing to contribute to the war effort as her daughter does, implying he’s a leach. He responds by using his parents’ savings to buy his own stove, and his own food. Eventually, he and Setsuko leave their aunt’s home for good, taking refuge in an abandoned shelter in the countryside with no running water or heat. This is where they’ll live, alone and unencumbered, at least through the summer.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is a testament to the strength of the film’s storytelling that this doesn’t make Seita a villain. Taking his tiny sister to a hovel in the countryside in a time of food shortages—and continued bombings, and threats of lootings or worse—is infinitely stupid. But is it fair to expect better of Seita at his age? He has just lost his mother. His father, whom he looks up to as an example of strength, even carrying a crumpled photograph of the man around with him, has been gone for some time. In his parent’s absence it is up to Seita to provide and protect—to be a man, in other words—and this imperative is only reinforced when his aunt questions his resolve. It is only Seita’s pride which sends him and his sister into their exile. But, we understand, he is in over his head.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Grave of the Fireflies</i> is not without its happy moments. Setsuko, in particular, has the carefree goofiness of a four-year-old. She loves her can of fruitdrops, for example, and her tantrums dissipate the minute she hears one of the pieces of candy rattling out of the tin and into her hands. But the candy runs out. And then Seita fills the can with water to make a sweet drink for her. These are the things you do when you have nothing. He begins to steal, then blatantly loot. Setsuko begins to wither.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Takahata reminds us that it doesn’t have to be like this. Not in a heavy-handed, ideological way, but with literal examples of Japanese society coping and rebuilding around them. Seita and Setsuko’s shelter actually isn’t that far from a nearby town. There are proper shelters in that town, plus doctors, retailers, and even functional banks. “You can’t survive outside the system,” an official tells Seita, partway through the movie. His advice to the boy is bland, almost bemused, which is typical of adults in the film. They are all war-weary. They have no energy left to help him. But they believe he could help himself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The last 25 minutes of <i>Grave of the Fireflies</i> are the most gut-wrenching I’ve ever seen. Having watched the film a few times now, though, I'm reminded that its message is less about dying than about knowing when to give up. When to let go. It delivers this message many times, in many scenes, many of them early on.</span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Right now I’m thinking about the black rain. A result of the firebombing, it falls on Seita and Setsuko as they huddle on the outskirts of their ruined town. In the sky is the bomber that orphaned them, minutes before. The plane is symmetrical, gleaming, far out of reach. The children are squatting in the dirt, filthy and soaked. They’re frightened and lost. The plane is invincible.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">And it’s headed home. </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Where to see <i>Grave of the
Fireflies:</i></b></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Grave of the Fireflies</i> (<i>Hotaru no haka)</i> screens at TIFF Bell
Lightbox on Friday, December 20, 2013, and Wednesday, January 1, 2014; part of
<i><a href="http://tiff.net/ghibli">Spirited Away: The Films of Studio Ghibli</a>.</i> Both screenings are in Japanese with
English subtitles.</span></span></div>
Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-46817031697922166582013-11-17T14:56:00.002-05:002013-11-17T14:56:48.814-05:00The Show (1927)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Carnivals tread a fine line between entertainment and pity. The performers are talented and they work hard; but they live a transient life that, we suspect, they might not have chosen if their luck had been better. We feel much worse for the carnies we see in old films—especially the fat ladies and dog-faced boys and the like. What a way to make a living. But then again, at least they made one.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tod_Browning">Tod Browning</a> understood the complexity of audience reactions when it came to this world. He knew it better than most, having worked in carnivals as a talker (like a barker) and a clown. Some of his films, include the silents,<i> <a href="http://silent-volume.blogspot.ca/2011/06/unholy-three-1925.html">The Unholy Three</a></i> (1925) and <i>The Show,</i> and the early-talkie, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaks"><i>Freaks</i></a> (1932) are set in carnivals of one kind or another. Though these films are very different, they all present us with real characters—people with real problems—who make their way in a business built on the weird and the phony. The films’ structures reflect this: the dignity of their leads juxtaposed with high kitsch. Browning, no arthouse snob, never polished the carnival life for the sake of ‘deeper meaning.’ What you see is what you would have got, had you been there.</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Show </i> stars <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilbert_%28actor%29">John Gilbert</a> as Cock Robin, a man well-equipped to survive in a carnival in this time and place. Robin’s charismatic, even charming when he has to be, but amoral: finding ways to make a lady foot the bill when he can, and failing that, stealing from her. He always gets by. Robin’s role as a carnival talker (the one who gets your attention, then urges you into the tent for the real show) makes the most of his talents. But it’s his secondary role, as the man beheaded in the carnival’s campy, stage-produced bible story, that matters more for the film.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">I’ve never much appreciated Gilbert’s acting, but I’m starting to change my tune. Here, as in some other films, his leading-man presence is distorted in a fascinating way—allowing him to play a rake and a scoundrel who quite obviously lacks the moral core of, say, a Clark-Gable type. Dig deep enough and you’ll find a hero in Rhett Butler. Burrow into Cock Robin and you’ll find a coward, or worse.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">His physicality is part of it. Gilbert had a long, lean body, topped with a large head. His face was handsome, but it belied the actor’s youth. He was almost unnatural. Gilbert spends much of The Show in a skin-tight, striped top and high-waisted pants that accentuate his tapering midsection and thin limbs. His Robin treads lightly through the world: a cruel, trickster sprite, disconnected from serious things.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Show </i>stars two other silent actors of note: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Ador%C3%A9e">Renée Adorée</a> (“Salome”) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Barrymore">Lionel Barrymore</a> (“The Greek”). Salome (so-named because she portrays a dancing girl in the stage show) is Robin’s former lover, and apparently the Greek’s current girlfriend, though they exhibit no obvious affection. The Greek is a mobster. Salome still pines for Robin, which makes for an interesting love triangle, as Robin does not pine back, but could still get shot if The Greek got wind of Salome’s intentions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The bulk of <i>The Show</i> concerns Robin’s attempts to leach money from his current girl, the wealthy daughter of a sheep farmer (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Short">Gertrude Scott,</a> playing another twit); and avoiding both Salome’s advances and The Greek’s aggression. We also get some fun sideshow moments, my favourite being The Living Hand of Cleopatra: a disembodied hand, attached to a pillar, which receives the rubes’ money on their way into the tent. It is not clear how this illusion is performed, but if Browning filmed it, I believe it was possible.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">There is more here than spectacle, however. Browning’s point is that things may be more than they seem; more, in fact, than even the participants in this story are aware of. Sometimes we see this literally, as in one neat little scene when The Greek pulls a switchblade on Robin and Robin produces his walking stick in response—which he then uncaps to reveal a much larger blade. Other times the disguises are more subtle. Robin, we learn, may have more substance to him than it appears. And Salome, who seems pathetic for much of the film, proves to be rather powerful in the end.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Salome’s turn takes the film with it. And the turn is big. I think you’ll appreciate it—I certainly did, and would recommend the film as something special based on that final 25 minutes or so. It turns out that Salome is dealing with a profound problem—one requiring a level of maturity well beyond what Cock Robin is capable of, and one so stirring that even he is given pause. Really, Salome is leading a double life.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It occurred to me that the least worthy characters in the film are the ones who do not. Even The Greek, who seems diabolical enough, thanks to Barrymore, is in the end no more than the common hood he appears to be, and bit of a bumbler. He thinks small, and only about himself, and in time those flaws will put an end to him. <i>The Show</i> causes us to question whether Cock Robin is the same. We don’t know, and for much of the film, neither does he.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Where to find <i>The Show:</i></b> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Show </i>is part of the Warner Archive Collection, available as a made-for-order DVD from<a href="http://www.wbshop.com/product/show+the+1000346565.do?sortby=bestSellers&refType=&from=Search"> WBshop.com.</a> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Special thanks to Caren Feldman, of the <a href="http://torontofilmsociety.org/">Toronto Film Society,</a> for screening this film. And for baking her meatloaf. I am a fan of both.</span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-17600600871126435222013-11-14T19:24:00.000-05:002013-11-14T19:24:33.747-05:00Louise Brooks, born this day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-36296434306126772362013-11-08T07:29:00.002-05:002013-11-08T07:29:42.632-05:00Marie Dressler, born this day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-78160989737033238612013-11-03T17:07:00.002-05:002013-11-03T17:07:48.309-05:00A Woman of Paris (1923)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><i>A Woman of Paris</i> is most famous for who isn’t in it. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chaplin">Charlie Chaplin</a> directed the film, a personal project to ensure star <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_Purviance">Edna Purviance’s</a> lasting success, but aside from an indistinguishable cameo role, he’s nowhere to be found onscreen. History tells us this was a mistake. The movie fared poorly, with audiences showing up to see a Chaplin film and leaving disappointed. <i>A Woman of Paris</i> not only lacks a Tramp; it’s a drama to boot. Though no one who bought a ticket could have claimed to have been duped, their expectations were not met, and that’s what counted in the end.</span></span><br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;">Purviance arguably deserved better. She was, in my opinion, Chaplin’s finest leading lady—his co-star in all but one of the 1916/1917 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chaplin#Mutual">Mutual shorts,</a> which stand, if judged collectively, as his greatest work. She was a talented comedienne with a splendid, subtle range. Never a great beauty, Purviance brought a sense of normalcy to Chaplin’s work that enhanced it—for the Tramp was so weird a character that he occasionally needed that grounding. Chaplin’s later leading ladies, most especially <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulette_Goddard">Paulette Goddard,</a> were stunners. We gaze at them, as the Tramp does, as though they’re occupants of a different world. Purviance, though, seemed like us; or at least, the person we would be if we were in her place: bemused, and sometimes disturbed by this strange little man. This common touch is absent in <i>A Woman of Paris,</i> which is one of its weaknesses.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Purviance plays Marie St. Clair, a French peasant girl who lives with her widowed father <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Geldart">(Clarence Geldart).</a> Humourless and cruel, the man walks through his home like a machine, locking his daughter in her upstairs bedroom at night among other tasks. It is suggested, though never explicitly, that Marie has a loose reputation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Marie has a lover, named Jean <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Miller_%28actor%29">(Carl Miller),</a> with whom she plans to elope. But their plan falls apart early in the film, when Marie, who has snuck out of her bedroom window for a rendezvous, returns to find that her father has locked the front door. He has done this unaware that she is gone. <br /><br />This would have been a good setup for a gag. Were this a true Chaplin film, we’d have spent the next fifteen minutes watching the Tramp try to enter that house without being detected. Were it a Mutual short, Purviance might have been the one inside, trying to help him. But here she is the lead, and this is a sadder film, and so Jean merely knocks on the door. Marie is disowned that night, and through a set of quite convoluted events, finds herself in Paris, without Jean, living a very different life from the one she’d known in the village.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">From here the film progresses into complicated, and occasionally lurid, territory. Marie becomes a kept woman of Pierre Revel, Paris’ most eligible bachelor. Bankrolled by this tycoon, she lounges through her days in lush, over-decorated bedrooms, emerging at night to party with Pierre and her boozed up, twenty-something friends. It’s a comfortable life, but not a stable one. Though much older than Marie, Pierre takes life and love even less seriously than she does. He gladly admits to Marie that he’s engaged to another woman—a richer woman—and sees no reason why it should change their relationship one bit. The question for her, and ultimately, for the film, is whether this should satisfy her.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">We all have to face choices like this. If not in our relationships, then in our careers. How much of our dignity or freedom do we sacrifice for the sake of security? For stability? Money? Benefits? We can all relate to Marie’s predicament on some level.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Yet Purviance is strangely flat in the role. Her naturalness—that unaffected humanity she projected so well in her roles opposite Chaplin—is absent from <i>A Woman of Paris.</i> The fault lies partly with the director, who was too often content to photograph her in stoic poses that failed to tap her innate energy. But Purviance never truly inhabits Marie either. Her upscale flapper-wear always looks like a costume, and an ill-fitting one. Maybe Purviance felt, as I did, that deep-down, Marie is kind of bland. Just kind of there. She’s the sort of person you’d meet at a wild party, and afterward, you’d remember the party.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Marie is at her best when she’s with Pierre. But this too is a problem, since Pierre is not the protagonist. Played by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Menjou">Adolphe Menjou,</a> with all of his trademark delectable cool, Pierre becomes the current to Marie’s dim bulb. In these scenes she seems more animated and intelligent, bantering with the older man about the nature of their relationship, her hopes and dreams, and whether any of this is really worth worrying about when they’re having so much fun. Menjou’s chemistry with Purviance is so good that I’d compare them to William Powell and Myrna Loy. The difference being that Loy held her own in the Thin Man films, whether Powell was onscreen or not.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">There were the makings of something better here. <i>A Woman of Paris</i> is worth seeing, especially for those with a love of films of the 1930s, which it prefigures more obviously than most silents do, even ones from the later 20s. For those who think Chaplin stayed stuck in his glory days, I submit that, with this film, he was looking ahead before those glory days were even over.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Nevertheless, it is no hidden gem. Despite the director’s best intentions, this is Adolphe Menjou’s film, and poor Edna’s just in it.</span></span>Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-90277726652060474142013-10-20T21:26:00.001-04:002013-10-21T07:33:25.381-04:00Edna Purviance, born this day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-26513474516104263492013-10-17T08:05:00.001-04:002013-10-17T08:05:45.766-04:00Segundo de Chomon, born this day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5228314939015275941.post-24582835844405836122013-10-14T16:05:00.002-04:002013-10-14T16:05:27.929-04:00Lillian Gish, born this day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Chris Edwardshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02511805377064572471noreply@blogger.com0