Behind the Door (1919) New Restoration

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.

These thoughts were in my mind as I watched Flicker Alley’s new restoration of Behind the Door (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.’

The Epic of Everest (1924)

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.

You’d need to check your awe, I suppose. Just enough to keep going.

The Epic of Everest is a documentary about that act: that checking of awe. It details a 1924 attempt by a team of Englishmen, aided by Tibetan 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 Captain John Noel 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.

The Racket (1928)

If I could point to one scene in The Racket 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.

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.

Before 1915: An Appreciation

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?”

Be happy. Anyone who asks that wants to learn.

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!

You want to grab their shoulders and shake them. “But, but, have you seen—”, you’d sputter, your head whirling with silent classics like Metropolis, Pandora’s Box, The General, IT, The Crowd, Sunrise, Modern Times—movies demonstrating the scope, depth, eroticism, intellectualism, artistry, and beauty of silent cinema.

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.

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?

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.

But it can be intriguing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These movies exploit the malleability of an art form still gloriously free. I love them all.

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Washerwomen on the River (1896)
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, Washerwomen on the River could even be described as found art.

Arrival of a Train (1896)
Trains were big in film from the very start, thanks to shorts like The Black Diamond Express no. 1 (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.

The Black Diamond Express was a gimmick film. Arrival of a Train, 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.

Jeanne D’Arc (1899)
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.

A Trip to the Moon (1902)
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 A Trip to the Moon 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.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)
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. The Great Train Robbery is a flawed film, but even its failings demonstrate where cinema had to go, both artistically and technologically.

Modern Sculptor (1908)
A masterpiece by Méliès’ Spanish counterpart, Segundo de Chomón, Modern Sculptor will have you questioning the nature of matter itself. Not bad for a short film.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910)
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.

Frankenstein (1910)
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?

The Dream (1911)
One of Mary Pickford’s darker shorts, The Dream 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.

A Christmas Accident (1912)
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.

Conquest of the Pole (1912)
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.

The New York Hat (1912)
D.W Griffith, a galaxy of silent stars, and in the centre of it all: Mary Pickford. The New York Hat was a prestige picture for a woman on the verge of greatness.

The Mothering Heart (1913)
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.

His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz (1914)
His Majesty 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.

Grass (1925)

A friend asked me the other day if documentaries were common in the silent era. I told him I’d seen a few—Nanook of the North (1922) for one, and Chang (1927), and that Nanook was the most famous. I also told him that silent documentaries differed a bit, philosophically, from what came later.

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.

The reason my friend had asked me about silent docs was because I’d told him I’d just watched Grass. 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.

Mistress Nell (1915)

There is more than one way to appreciate Mistress Nell, and it depends, I think, on how many Mary Pickford films you’ve seen in your life.

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, Mistress Nell is a good one to start with.

Mabel's Dramatic Career (1913)

Mabel Normand 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.

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 Mack Sennett’s 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.

Mabel’s Dramatic Career 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.

The Manxman (1929)

There is no love triangle quite like this one.

I first watched The Manxman 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.

But The Manxman? 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.

I like to think BFI 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. The Manxman, in my opinion, soars.

Blackmail (1929)

Yesterday evening marked the start of the Toronto Silent Film Festival’s 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.

Alfred Hitchcock 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.

But things are looking up. In 2012, the British Film Institute (BFI) completed restorations of all nine silents, and by all accounts they look gorgeous. I can vouch for only one so far: the opening film of TSFF’s series: Blackmail.

Sex (1920)

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.

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.

Sex 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, Sex is the most conservative movie I’ve seen in a while—more conservative than many silent films, including some that predate it.

The Yellow Ticket (1918)

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.

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 The Yellow Ticket.

La Voz de Los Silenciados (The Voice of the Voiceless) (2013)

Long ago (in the 90s) I fell in love with a video game called Out of This World. 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.

Out of This World was unsettling, because its designer, Éric Chahi, 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.

Talk to men and women of my vintage about Out of This World 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.

One artwork suggests another. I thought of Out of This World many times while watching La Voz de Los Silenciados (The Voice of the Voiceless), 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.

The Wind (1928)

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.

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.

There is no intertitle to tell us their marriage is saved. But it is. The plates said so.

Wild Oranges (1924)

 
There are moments in Wild Oranges 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.

Lady of the Night (1925)

Lady of the Night stars Norma Shearer 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.

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. Lady of the Night 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.

Yasujiro Ozu, born this day

Fritz Lang, born this day

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

When you mention Grave of the Fireflies to someone who’s seen it, they give you a rueful grin. “Saddest movie ever,” they say, or something like that.

I’ve seen Grave of the Fireflies 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 Grave of the Fireflies, to go. Because sometimes, it’s good to be sad. And when it comes to being good, and very, very sad, Grave of the Fireflies is nearly unparalleled.

The Show (1927)

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.

Tod Browning 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, The Unholy Three (1925) and The Show, and the early-talkie, Freaks (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.

Louise Brooks, born this day