People on Sunday (1930)

I used to have to cross a park to get from my home to the subway. The park was a busy one, popular with parents of little children. In the afternoons, especially on weekends, it would teem with life: the delirious, carefree activity of little people, and the more deliberate movement their parents, grandparents, and nannies: sitting or shambling after them, nudging them down slides, plucking them off high bars, zipping up their coats. Paying attention.

My girlfriend used to say that crossing that park was the highlight of her day. She works with children, and like anyone who truly loves them, she draws energy from their presence. They can exhaust her, but never completely, because they give her something in place of what they take away. She took her time when she passed the kids in the park, drinking in their exuberant spirit.

Today's photo: F.W. Murnau, born this day

Today's photo: Emil Jannings

The Indian Tomb, Parts One and Two (1921)

When the European public of the 1920s imagined India, what did they conjure in their minds? Was it a realistic picture? Could it be? Certainly, most of them had never seen the place.

Presumably, some of the filmmakers whose work the public consumed, had. But filmmakers, for the most part, seek to entertain. So when they set a film in India, they made this India the stuff of fantasy, with beautiful dancers and ecstatic priests, and heathen monuments hewn from rock, all of it encroached upon by jungles filled with terrible beasts. This place was defined by its otherness to the West. Its people were outsiders, even when depicted in their own land.

The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927)

When I need my fix of 1920s/early-30s human grotesquerie, I know who to turn to: the Austrians. Films like Greed (1924) and M (1931) aren’t just terrific art, they’re freak-shows: displaying up close and personal some of the supreme low-lifes of the early screen. Some of the men and women in these films are ugly, and some aren’t; but they have a rot deep down inside of them and it isn’t pretty.

Sex In Chains (1928)

This re-post is part the 2012 Queer Film Blogathon, already underway over at Garbo Laughs.

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Sex In Chains isn’t the exploitation film it sounds like, but if you did find it shelved—accidentally, we’ll say—next to a stack of early-70s convent skin flicks and womens’ prison dramas, you wouldn’t be wholly misled. Those films, like this one, are about people veering to extremes. They’re about people in heat.

Sex In Chains—an often delicately shot, honest film with compassion for its suffering married couple, Franz and Helene—is at a low boil even in its quietest moments. But director (and star) Wilhelm Dieterle isn’t satisfied with mere melodramatics, even of a kind lurid or borderline nymphomaniacal enough to hold our attention. He wants us to be more than observers. He makes us care about these people, all the while tackling social issues that remain, to this day, contentious. I’ll not soon forget Sex In Chains, or the people in it.

The Last Laugh (1924)

The old doorman always salutes. Just a little salute: given with a grin to anyone he greets. To us it’s a charming affectation, but for him it’s a duty. He’s living up to his uniform.

The uniform is a hat and gloves, and a great coat: long, red, and trimmed with gold; closed with a row of shiny buttons. The coat seems huge. It expands the already burly Doorman (Emil Jannings) to an almost kingly girth. When wearing it, he pulls his spine straight, holds his head high, and strides through the streets to work. You would too. This is the outfit of a person with something important to do.