One of the pleasures of silent film is that there’s no such thing as a definitive viewing. There’s always a new take on an old film—be it a new score, or restored footage, or new footage, once thought lost. Perhaps the addition of colours or tints that recover, for audiences in the early 21st Century, a theatrical experience more authentic to the early 20th. We are part of a paradox here: one in which current art is impressed upon the art of the past; and that past, in turn, appears to us like something more fully of its own time.
These thoughts were in my mind as I watched Flicker Alley’s new restoration of Behind the Door (1919). I’d seen this film once before, at a Cinefest screening back in 2013. It impressed me enough then to write about, and in the years since it has remained strong in my memory—usually bubbling up whenever I see some new example of depravity depicted onscreen. ‘You don’t need to show the terrible thing,’ I say to myself. ‘Not if your audience feels it, through to the bone.’
I’ve been reading a lot of vintage comic books lately, most made between the 1940s and the ’60s. By the current standards of the medium, they’re pretty silly: Characters are broadly drawn, in both the literal and figurative sense, and the stories are predictable. But the pages are also bold and colourful; the language strident; the enthusiasm for every implausible event clear and unapologetic. And that’s just fine. In these old, well-loved tales, everything deserved an exclamation mark.
The Ice Flood is like that. It delivers with gusto from start to finish, and director George B. Seitz (who specialized in action serials) even shows some artistic flair along the way. I bet you’d like it.
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.
The best scene in Three Women is the very first one. That’s not to say that what follows it falls short of it—just that it establishes facts and truths that enrich everything after it. It is a scene about choice. And that choice concerns grapefruit.
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