This post contains spoilers. It must, or it wouldn’t be very long.
Behind the Door isn’t very long itself. A healthy chunk of it is lost; what remains has been pieced together from several sources; the still-missing material now accounted for, onscreen, by a series of text explanations, inserted into the film by the Library of Congress, to whom we are, of course, grateful. Behind the Door is a rare one, after all—unavailable on video or almost anywhere else. (I saw it at Cinefest 33, in Syracuse, NY, in mid-March.) But it’s not the film’s rarity that makes it so interesting, or really, worth writing about at all—lots of silent films are lost, and lots of silent films are better than Behind the Door. What sets this film apart is the way it ends.
I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in history—the product of five years of study. In each of those years, I took at least one course on the Middle Ages.
The period was always great for stories. That’s why we loved it. Kings and queens, tyrannical churchmen, gruesome wars, plagues and hysteria—it was a tapestry woven, it seemed, of humanity’s best and worst capacities. On a bad day, when we were overtired, overworked, or just hungover, these outsized tales kept us focused. I remember them still.
But my best instructors weren’t satisfied with this kind of thing. They encouraged us to look beyond the extremes of the period. Consider the people themselves, they said. Think of their daily lives; the stresses they were under. Ask yourself if you’d be any different, in their position.
I may have been doing this too long—watching Halloween the other night,
I was reminded of silent film.
When I need my fix of 1920s/early-30s human grotesquerie, I know who to turn to: the Austrians. Films like Greed (1924) and M (1931) aren’t just terrific art, they’re freak-shows: displaying up close and personal some of the supreme low-lifes of the early screen. Some of the men and women in these films are ugly, and some aren’t; but they have a rot deep down inside of them and it isn’t pretty.
