The New York Hat (1912)

Yesterday I told a Toronto International Film Festival staffer that this city is one of the best in North America for silent film. Not only do we have TIFF Bell Lightbox, our still-new festival theatre, showing silent films regularly with live accompaniment; we also have smaller theatres showing silents in regular rotating programs, plus the Toronto Silent Film Festival, the Toronto Urban Film Festival, and some truly tricked-out rental stores offering obscurities I’ve never heard of until I start to browse. Yes, we’re lucky here in Toronto. New York and Los Angeles may offer more, but they’re an awful lot bigger too.

I had this chat at the Lightbox, following a very interesting pair of lectures on the career of Mary Pickford. Profs. Charlie Keil and Rob King educated us (a nearly-full auditorium) on the development of both cinematic acting and the movie star-as-public-entity—concepts that could not be seriously discussed without mentioning Pickford. Sandwiched between the lectures were 35-mm prints of three Pickford Biograph shorts: Wilful Peggy; An Arcadian Maid (both 1910); and The New York Hat (1912). The first film was used to demonstrate Pickford’s mastery of the older, ‘histrionic’ style of film acting; the second, her equal mastery of the developing ‘verisimilar’ style, characterized by fewer outsized gestures and channeling of internal conflict through props. Kudos to Prof. Keil for reminding us that histrionic does not equal ‘bad’, even if we laugh at it now.

The New York Hat, a 16-minute film and Pickford’s last for Biograph, shows her embracing verisimilitude as fully as she ever would. She plays Mollie Goodhue, the only child of a just-widowed Calvinist-type (Charles Hill Mailes). Mrs. Goodhue, who expires in the film’s opening scene, leaves Preacher Bolton (Lionel Barrymore) a letter: in it she confides that her husband ‘worked her to death’ and begs the minister to spare Mollie that fate. What she really means is that he allowed his wife not the slightest frivolous pleasure, and her daughter, who loves beautiful clothing but doesn’t own a stitch of it, faces the same joyless, frugal life. Preacher Bolton agrees to take a bit of money the mother stashed away and buy Mollie something she’d like, from time to time. The father is not to know.

Convict 13 (1920)

I’d planned to write about Convict 13 a couple of times before this. It’s a long-time backup choice for me: something short and quick, a film I could watch in a busy week, late at night, in a state of fatigue, when I just, really, needed, new content for the blog. This week was that week.

Convict 13 was never my favourite Buster Keaton short; not even close. By the standards of his later shorts, especially The Playhouse and Cops, it’s crude; a succession, mostly, of vaudeville gags Keaton brought from stage to screen. Compared even to his earlier shorts, One Week and The High Sign, it is uninspired. But one thing about Convict 13 has always, always impressed me: its incredible violence.

Packaged Goods

I write about silent movies for many reasons. One is the opportunity it gives me to watch, and think about, incredible short films. Some of the world’s finest short comedies were made in the 1920s (you can guess the names behind them); in the 1910s, a crop of remarkable fixed-camera fantasies and dramas mixed old theatrical and new cinematic techniques in intriguing ways.

Go back even further and you’ll see films that are short because they had to be. Those that survive often seem silly, primitive, and very fast, and of course they’re very brief—but whatever their technical limitations, they were state of the art. A 10-minute film, in 1902, wasn’t a ‘short’; it was just a movie. Maybe it was screened with a dozen other movies in a tent somewhere, and maybe it wasn’t considered high art by the standards of stagecraft, but that’s was cinema at the time. And so figures like Georges Méliès, Alice Guy, Segundo de Chomón, Edwin S. Porter and J. Searle Dawley poured feature-worthy energies into films well under 30 minutes’ long. Bold work resulted. Or dreck, but that’s art.

That’s my Silent Volume lead-in to a post not about silent film. This week I was invited to a screening, at TIFF Bell Lightbox, of Packaged Goods, a selection of international short films, music videos and TV spots produced by commercial directors. Programmed by Rae Ann Fera, former editor of Boards Magazine, it begins with a selection of films conceived for the Cíclope International Advertising Craft Festival, and ends with several pieces from Skin Flicks, a music video production house founded by Richard Skinner and John Hassay. Total running time is 70 minutes, covering 24 pieces.

Strike (1925)

As anyone who follows my Twitter feed knows, I’m a politics junkie. And I’ve been getting a steady supply of the good s**t for about a month now, thanks to Canada’s federal election. It’s been a shocking one, and it ended yesterday. Among its many ups and downs, the lowest low was, as always, the mud—slung accurately, though not always effectively, in all directions.

The politics of grievance can backfire. Because the smear is too petty, perhaps; or the politician too loved; or, occasionally, because the smear is poorly delivered. This is the challenge of propaganda: an art that confounds even smart practitioners with the nuances of truth and tone it requires.

Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike is propaganda. So is The Battleship Potemkin, his masterpiece, filmed later the same year. Strike is good, but Potemkin is much, much better, and it took me a while to figure out why. They make the same points, in much the same ways. But Potemkin is the work of a man who had mastered the means to his end. With Strike, he tried harder and achieved less.

The King's Intertitles

I'm a bit of grouch about all this William and Kate business--partly because of my latent republican streak (in the Commonwealth, not U.S.-political, sense of the word). Partly, too, because I didn't know what a 'fascinator' was until today. And partly, I think, because all this talk of Kate Middleton the commoner makes it sound like she was working at some deli when the Prince picked her up. I'm a commoner too, and I ascend to a less exhalted throne, though I try to do so regularly.

But enough griping. This blog's all about silent film and its continued relevance as an artform, and once again, a link to modernity has been found. You may have seen this link already, since it's been zipping through the Twitter stream (I'm @SilentVolume, btw): footage of future-King George VI and future-The Queen Mother's nuptials, and very nice footage at that.

I'm not going to analyze this material, but I will call your attention to one thing. Note that we only see one establishing shot of the interior of Westminster Abbey, with the groom and bride reciting vows, before cutting to this intertitle: "Married." That's it.

Now, the BBC was apparently barred from recording the proceedings for radio, so it's not as though there was no public interest in hearing the vows. (Which is also not to imply, if The King's Speech is accurate, that Bertie wanted his voice on tape that day). Cameras, on the other hand, were allowed in the Abbey, at least briefly. What's the result?

In a silent film, it's often not the words said, so much as the act of saying, and the significance of why they're said, that counts. 'Saying' is itself a message--an act sometimes rendered symbolic, even ritualistic, in silent films, and one that can make those doing the talking seem archetypal and symbolic themselves. That's the effect I get here. What do you think?