The Kiss (1896)

My cheek, Dear,
to your cheek pasted;
                                dough applied to moistened wood
                                before the pressing.
My arms, my
Darling, round your bosom;
                                a squeezing corset,
                                quickening breaths.
Your nose—
                               Your nose,
Your eyes—
                                Your nose,
                                is poking my eye.

Then allow me, May,
to disengage and
slick the tapered ends of my mustache—
                                 with flourish please, John
—and clutch your head like—
                                 sale-price produce
—praise it—
                                 appraise it
—pucker and—
                                 brand it
—with star-turning,
scandalous, badge-making lips.

                                CUT.


Where to find The Kiss:
The Kiss is among the many brief, 19th century films found Disc One of Kino International’s must-have, four-disc set, Edison: The Invention of the Movies. The film is preceded by a short commentary from film scholar Charles Musser. A grainier version can be found on YouTube.

The Chalice of Sorrow (1916)

In an early scene in The Chalice of Sorrow, Isabel Clifford (Blanche White) sits to be painted. Her artist is Marion Leslie (Charles Cummings); a man commissioned by the Church but distracted by matters of the flesh. Not Isabel’s flesh, mind you; but Lorelei’s—the same Lorelei who wows the corrupt police chief, Sarpina (Wedgewood Nowell), with her virtuoso vocal performances, night after night. Lorelei (Cleo Madison) is Mexico’s most celebrated opera diva, Marion’s fiancé, and Sarpina’s passion, yet she boils with petty suspicion over Marion’s friendship with Isabel. Doesn’t she know Isabel’s too wound up in her own brother’s affairs to give damn about anyone else? Rance Clifford (John McDermott) is an American diplomat who’s run afoul of Sarpina and been jailed. Isabel bribed his jailer and now he’s on the run. That gives sis a lot to think about.

30 Second Review: Coney Island

Top Stars Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton
Date 1917
Category Slapstick Short

The Story
Fatty’s headed to Coney Island, hopefully without The Wife.

The Verdict
Arbuckle’s funniest film. That ain't light praise.

Best Scene
Arbuckle breaks the fourth wall with his first gag. He’s on the beach with his wife, very much wishing he were not. He keeps turning from her and she keeps pulling him back by the seat of his pants. There’s no exaggeration here, but we know what he thinks of her. And with her eyes on her magazine rather than him, all the communication is really between Arbuckle and us. He winks and laughs toward the camera, pulling us into the joke, and when the moment arrives that he can safely roll away from his foul spouse, we feel like we’re in on the whole thing.

For the full-length Silent Volume article, click HERE.

Major Find.

That's Clara Bow at top left. Really.

Maytime is a 1923 costume-drama starring my favourite ginger-kid, and I boldly predict that it's terrible. Thanks to the good people of New Zealand, I'll one day know for sure.

I bet you've already heard about the Kiwi's big find of U.S. silent films, now heading home, slowly, for painstaking restoration. This is a big story, covered by portals as esteemed than the New York Times and Variety, and rightfully so--we're not talking about pitiful fragments of a few movies, or obscure works of interest only to scholars, this time. No, we're talking about seventy-five freakin' films, including a silent directed by John Ford, the aforementioned Bow pic, a western with a George Melies production credit, and the now-earliest surviving film directed by comedienne Mabel Normand. Normand, like Bow, was a gigantically talented woman whose career was crushed by scandal and who, if alive today, would be unstoppable.

The details are well-covered in the links above. From the Times article:

The films came to light early in 2009, when Brian Meacham, a preservationist for the Los Angeles archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, dropped in on colleagues at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington during a vacation.

 “The conversation inevitably turned to what films we held in our collection,” recalled Steve Russell, the New Zealand archive’s manager of corporate services. “Brian was not surprisingly excited to learn the Film Archive held a number of non-New Zealand titles, primarily early nitrate films, including a substantial number of American films. We offered to compile a list of the U.S. material, and it was a short step to here.”

Restoration efforts will be performed "as funds permit," but private money will speed things up for at least a few of these films. Clean-up of Ford's Upstream is being bankrolled by 20th Century Fox, descendant of the company that produced it, and the film will apparently redebut this fall.
 
First, they find more Metropolis. Now this. It's a good time to be a silent movie fan.
 
 
For more on Clara Bow, see my blog entry on It (1927).
 
Mabel Normand co-starred in many of Fatty Arbuckle's films, including the very strange He Did and He Didn't (1916).

"I Say Fever" (2009)

Defining the boundaries between one artform and another can be tricky. But it’s also good for the brain, and so I present the music video for “I Say Fever,” a 2009 tune by Oregon-based indy rock project, Ramona Falls. This video, and 19 others, comprised the Scene Not Heard program of the Canadian Film Centre’s Worldwide Short Film Festival, screened in Toronto last week. Among several outstanding entries, “I Say Fever” stayed with me the most. So much so that I want to write about it. But can I write about it here?