Alice in Wonderland (1915)

Some stories beg to be filmed. I’ve seen five versions of Alice in Wonderland—two of them silent—with at least ten more to go. That’s just movies, mind you; not TV. The appeal of the story seems simple enough: a children’s classic with hidden depths; compelling to kids and their parents alike; humorous and frightening in turn… and profoundly weird, in a mostly visual way that leaves f/x pioneers licking their chops, generation after generation. Alice has infinite potential, it seems; so much so that no one adaptation has eclipsed its fellows the way The Wizard of Oz did all others, before and after 1939. There will always be room for another Alice. The 1915 version, alas, makes you grateful.

What Price Glory? (1926)

There is a space between the film you are watching and you. Great sound films make that space seem to disappear. But great silent films--accompanied by sound that is not a recording of events onscreen, but an evocation of them--can keep us very conscious of our role in the interplay between image, sound, space and time. I’m not saying silents can’t be immersive—quite the opposite. I’m saying there’s a constant give-and-take going on when you watch one, especially a very good one; viewing them, we must often deal with shifts between the literal and the figurative.

There is a point in What Price Glory?, a war movie, where I occupied this mental-emotional in-between ground, and felt under attack. It was during a big battle scene, predictably; a long and harrowing, but not literally brutal succession of moments—violent, but without the blood and entrails of Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Platoon (1986), or even the murderous mechanical pounding of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). In What Price Glory?, the warfare blurred into pure expressionism. Clouds of ash, smoke and dirt filled the screen, punctuated with flashes of light, like smatterings of fireworks, always accelerating. Marching lines of soldiers, in longshot, faded into those clouds: enforced order dissolving into the chaos that was its ultimate purpose. I felt utterly at its mercy.

Glorious Betsy (1928)

If you have a low tolerance for silly plots, silent film is probably not for you. A lot of the greatest silent tales come alive only in the telling—maybe they have to—and if you try to describe them to someone else, you get grins. Try summarizing Sunrise, for example, and see.

Now listen to this one: In the early 19^th century, a beautiful Baltimore socialite falls in love with her French teacher. He is handsome and clever; impoverished, it seems, but well-educated and handy with a rapier. What the socialite doesn’t know is that the teacher is not really a teacher, but a nobleman. He is the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. He is on the run, and the French want to find him. They have a noblewoman they need him to marry. This is Glorious Betsy.

Glorious Betsy is a film in three guises: romance, farce comedy, and a third, not often paired with the second: historical drama. Yes, these things really happened. Kind of, anyway. There really was a Jerome Bonaparte, who really did live in America where, in 1803, he married Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Patterson, daughter of a Baltimore merchant. Napoleon really did have plans for his brother: a marriage to  Catharina of Württemberg, a German princess, and in real life, Jerome’s marriage to Betsy was annulled by brother Napoleon, in favour of the political union. This was the weight of history, and in 1908, playwright and songwriter Rida Johnson Young displaced most of it, creating the frothy stage production upon which the 1928 film was based.

Circus Dreams (2011)

A talkie, courtesy TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto.

“The Most Benevolent Show On Earth.”

What a lousy banner that would make. Imagine it strung over the main street of your mid-sized American town one summer. The circus is coming, and it’s a Good thing—would you buy a ticket?

Maybe, but that’s not why. You’d buy your ticket, and tickets for your kids, because this circus—Circus Smirkus—blows your socks off. Who cares if it’s a circus made up of youth performers? Never mind that it seems a place of belonging for them—so much so that they weep when its seven-week annual tour is done. It’s the end-product that sells. And here’s how you get to it.

Faust (1926)

Of Faust’s dozens of memorable images, big and small, comic and tragic, harrowing and absurd, it is for me the looming, bat-winged shadow of Mephisto over a medieval town that means the most. In terms of plot, this is the moment when the king of demons (Emil Jannings) unleashes Plague upon the town; a scourge intended to be so virulent that it will drive the town’s foremost wiseman, Faust (Gösta Ekman) to bargain with the Devil for help. This is really Mephisto’s game to lose. If Mephisto can corrupt Faust (so claims his angelic opposite number), then the Earth is his.

 From an aesthetic standpoint, however, it is this scene which establishes director F.W. Murnau’s vision for Faust: An overly-dramatic, excessively costumed being, impressing its will over what appears to be toy buildings—a scene of almost impudent fakery. So obvious is the artifice in Faust that I doubt it will wholly draw you in—it never has me, with the exception of a single scene late, late in the film. But Murnau does entrap us, in a way. Through the tricks of his craft, he takes an operatic tale and buries it in a dismal, soundless basement, and us with it. His Faust is a claustrophobic experience, even by Expressionist standards.