Nine of Hitchcock's silent films survive, and the British Film Institute (BFI) wants to restore them. In fact, several are available on DVD already, which the clip below doesn't mention, but having never seen them, I can't judge the quality of those prints. Spare a pound for film history, mate:
If you're a gamer, you're probably all over Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games' latest console-based blockbuster. Redemption is an 'open world action-adventure game' (says Wiki), set in 1911, in the waning days of the Old West. Players control a gunslinger named John Marston, who must track down his former outlaw gang-members.
The game is apparently terrific, but someone else can blog about that. What interests me are the two silent films that Rockstar has added to it--mostly for colour, I've been told, but sometimes it's the little touches that make the difference. Both are cartoons, and both are on YouTube, which means they can be here, too:
Quick impressions? An animator in 1911 would have given his non-dominant hand to produce a cartoon that moved this smoothly. Rockstar's brand of humour also seems a bit edgy for the period, but if you know more about early animation than I do, feel free to enlighten me otherwise. My last complaint: the arch wording of the intertitles seems more like what modern gamers think people of the 1910s sounded like than what silent film intertitles from that period actually say. But something is certainly better than nothing, and if Rockstar Games inspires a few players to delve deeper into the silent artform, good for them.
Conquest of the Pole is bonkers, like most things Georges Méliès filmed in his near-20-year career. It may also be his most complex work. But it has a tragic tone, at least if you know its place in the master's canon. Only a year after it debuted, Méliès was finished. Bankrupted. The victim of pirates less fantastical than his films would have made them. Conquest of the Pole was one of his last major achievements.
Consider it, then, to be a glimpse into a possible future: one in which a genius—whose unique skills brought him from the dawn of his artform to the brink of its next evolutionary step; from the Nickelodeon era to the beginnings of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin—might have either progressed, or dissipated. Could this man of the theatre, this magician, have embraced a medium that had grown up? Conquest offers clues.
A friendly Friday reminder that Silent Volume has a new Facebook page. Any and all of you are welcome to join. I won't be adding a static link to it here on the blog, since that's a banquet for the clutter-monster. But please have a look anyway. It's the happenest silent-film-page loading.
Oliver Twist is well shot and well paced; the work of a director, Frank Lloyd, confident in his art, his cast, and his source material; a model, really, for adapting great work without being enslaved by its reputation. It is unlike so many silent films based on books, which acknowledge and lionize their source (often in the film!) then deliver their take on it almost apologetically. The orphan’s hardships are all here in Oliver Twist, but condensed. Intertitles are rare, despite the temptations of Dickensian prose. It demands to be judged on it own terms.
