Pre 1920s List Discussion/Suggestions (List Project Vol. 3)

[thirtyframesasecond]

Lois Weber's 'Suspense' was startlingly impressive and inventive for a ten minute short. Particularly noteworthy is that close-up overheard shot of the prowler from the mother's point of view.

Onto Les Vampires next.

[lubitsch]

No, the attraction lies first and foremost in the 'style': the coolness of the villains, the super-sexy ladies and the sheer over-the-topness of the stories, and the inventiveness with which Fantomas or the Vampires group lay out their plots and machinations. This all coalesces to an almost unique experience, even though its pulp (as opposed to 'trash'). I admit that I also found "Judex" slowgoing, but the reason is that it's certainly less interesting to have a positive super-hero as the main character than cheeringly following Fantomas' latest evil tricks.

Pulp can speak a lot about society, precisely because it's on the rims of what is accepted as 'valuable art' at any given time; and while Feuillade's works operate in a different way than 'high art', they are pitch-perfect in their own universe.

I see all that, but isn't there quite few of it for such a bloody long running time? If this would be short 40 minute film with these elements thrown in, fine, I still wouldn't think it great, but at least endurable. But we get HOURS of surprising trapdoors, escapes, secret plots in an endless loop. If the only thing you have to offer is style you better move fast and don't give the audience the time to bother with the plot and characters.

Lois Weber's 'Suspense' was startlingly impressive and inventive for a ten minute short. Particularly noteworthy is that close-up overheard shot of the prowler from the mother's point of view.

Yes, that's a great visual idea. The whole short is full of such genuinely filmic moments where you sense that somebody has understood this new medium. My favorite is the moment when the tramp walks closer and closer ... and CLOSER to the camera, that's still eerie.

[Tommaso]

If this would be short 40 minute film with these elements thrown in, fine, I still wouldn't think it great, but at least endurable. But we get HOURS of surprising trapdoors, escapes, secret plots in an endless loop. If the only thing you have to offer is style you better move fast and don't give the audience the time to bother with the plot and characters.

But that is exactly what Feuillade did. These films were shown in individual episodes at the time, and they were surely not meant to be watched in one go on dvd. If you tried to watch the complete "Vampires" in one or two sittings, I can understand your reaction. But watching only one or two episodes as a starter or as an 'après d'oeuvre' leaves a totally different impression.

[zedz]

One of the great appeals of Feuillade's serials for me - and it's the aspect of his filmmaking that survives in acolytes like Rivette, Franju and Assayas (and any other filmmakers for whom the shortest distance between two points is a rooftop) - is his use and treatment of locations. His depopulated Paris is simultaneously hyper-real and surreal, a Duchampian found object. And the manic variations of his plotting seem to perform a similarly uncanny heightening job on melodramatic conventions. Rather than being heavy-going, I find these films insanely entertaining, and the Stockholm Syndrome crowd with whom I saw Les Vampires over the course of two epic sittings were in no hurry to leave either. They're real movie movies and benefit greatly from being seen with real movie audiences.

[swo17]

I don't have much to add about Feuillade (zedz and Tommaso have summed up my feelings rather nicely) except to say that any dosage of Musidora that is under five hours long is simply unacceptable in my view.

Moving on, I recently watched Sjöström's The Outlaw and His Wife and was very impressed. You could certainly trace the seeds of Bergman here, as promised. I was a little disheartened to read afterward about the issues with the Kino DVD (it runs a full hour less than the full length listed on IMDb). I'm not sure if it's been established how much of this might be due to missing footage, though some of it is certainly due to the film having been sped up. (Surely this is the fault of the composer of the film's score, who must have gotten writer's block after composing to 70 minutes.) To be honest, while watching the film, I didn't necessarily feel like the speed was off, though in hindsight, there were a few title cards I had to rewind to finish reading, and there were a few pivotal images that seemed not to last as long as they should have. (Does anyone know of a better available version of this film?) In any case, even if the Kino is the only way to go, don't let the issues with the DVD keep you from watching it!

[myrnaloyisdope]

There isthis version from the Swedish Film Archive, but I have the feeling that the Kino disc is a port from this set.

I have yet to watch the Kino version, I have an old bootleg of it with Swedish intertitles that seemed pretty comprehensive, but I forget the exact running time.

I started watching my incomplete copy of Tih Minh last night, and although my French is rudimentary and the picture less than stellar, the serial is proving enjoyable enough. The lack of Musidora will probably keep it at least a step below Les Vampires and Judex though .

[swo17]

I take it your copy doesn't have English subtitles then?

Whoever wants to be the Judex of this thread and start hosting an English-friendly copy of Tih Minh somewhere we all can watch it, now is the time to step up!

[myrnaloyisdope]

Sadly Tih Minh is French and Flemish only. I know there was a movement to make English subs on KG, but not sure how far it got. Some of the intertitles are mighty tough to decipher.

[Gregory]

I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on The Man Without a Country, from 1917. It's probably a longshot to even ask, as it doesn't even have five votes on IMDB. There is a DVD, from Televista/JEF, which I'm considering throwing away good money on. I'm wondering about how bad the picture quality is, as well as the film itself.

[feckless boy]

There isthis version from the Swedish Film Archive, but I have the feeling that the Kino disc is a port from this set.

Just to add to the confusion, Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru (aka The Outlaw and His Wife) is not part of the Swedish box-set. Nor is Ingeborg Holm for that matter.

[swo17]

So after sitting at the top of my Netflix queue for a month as a "short wait," Mad Love: The Films of Evgeni Bauer finally made her way to my doorstep. (She fell right into my trap!) I took her in from the cold (it had been snowing out) and rested her gently on the TV stand in the den for about an hour until I had more time to devote to her. I then made myself a light turkey sandwich on toasted bread, which I found quite savory. I followed my meal with a vigorous hand washing session and a leisurely stroll about my estate. Then suddenly, without warning, I dashed to my den, ripped her from her sleeve and thrust her into my DVD player, forcing her to spin relentlessly for hours on end for my pleasure. And oh, the delights we shared! The torture, the romance, the visual innovativeness! How long had it been since I had connected so with something outside of me? After it was all over, I took her from her tray, shoved her back in her sleeve, and put her back out in my cold metal mailbox. True love.

[Gregory]

The big revelation for me this time is Lois Weber's Hypocrites. I think it's as great as anything Evgeni Bauer did (very high praise, I know). Technically accomplished in every way, with amazing compositions and use of the camera. To me, it feels much more like what is now considered "art cinema," partly because it seems to stray from narrative conventions of the vast majority of the dramas of this era. The double exposures never feel like gimmicks or technical showing-off.
I've often seen this called a preachy film, and there are certain moments when that's its most apparent purpose. Looking deeper than the moralistic level, it's a bitter, penetrating work, yet a beautiful one. What it really shows, to my eyes, is not primarily license or decadence but myopia, obliviousness, and human weakness, broadly speaking. At the very least, though, no one should mistake it for a religious critique of a secular target.

This has been out on DVD for almost two years now, but I'm not sure it's gained much wider recognition in that time It took me this long to see it because I'd been waiting to see if Kino would do a box set of their First Ladies discs. I don't know why they haven't, but I hope others will plunge ahead anyway and see this film. It's only 47 minutes, after all, and viewers who bear with it beyond the first reel will find that the level of damage drops off dramatically. Another potential deterrent is the Kino packaging, which might suggest that the film is significant because it was directed by a woman. While I don't want to raise expectations sky-high I can safely say it stands with the best films of the teens. OK, that's probably the only strenuous campaigning I'll do this time around.
A note on the score: I shut it off and watched the film in silence after about twenty minutes because it didn't seem like it really added anything; if anything, it gave the viewing of this film a pedestrian feel that was belied by the images.

[swo17]

Hypocrites is another film that's been sitting forever near the top of my Netflix queue as a "short wait." Hopefully I won't have to wait too much longer for that one. It sounds very intriguing!

Itching for more Bauer, I went looking for those 10 volumes of Early Russian Cinema that lubitsch referred to in his first post. I kind of had to scour the internet to find out what he was talking about, but I see now that he was referring to this set of DVD-Rs put out by Milestone. (Perhaps it would be helpful to add this link to the first post.) The set seems a bit pricey though for a bunch of films that are just going to evaporate in five years. Does the whole set come recommended, or might it be sufficient to just pick up a few of the volumes (i.e. the three that feature Bauer)? I'd appreciate any recommendations.

[Gregory]

First of all, I don't have my set at hand, but I'm pretty sure four out of the nine discs (Vols. 6, 7, 9, 10) have Bauer films, not three.
There was a good bit of discussion about it here on the forum, especially in the Milestone thread. Personally, I got the whole thing and am very glad I did. Some of the Bauer films are just as great as the three on Mad Love, but not all. Devastating psychodrama. There are many other fine films included beyond Bauer, but I won't attempt a full write-up. I will admit to being a little let down by the live-action Starewicz films, but perhaps seeing them again I'll feel differently. It's been a couple years since I watched this whole collection, and I need to revisit much of it to decide which I'll vote for.

[Tommaso]

Good to hear the praise for Bauer here, though it doesn't actually surprise me. I only know the BFI/Milestone disc yet, but what I saw there surely makes me think that this director should be in the top ten of everyone's final list.

The mention of Bauer allows me to hopefully draw some attention to two films by Giovanni Pastrone that I recently watched, namely "Tigre reale" and "Il fuoco", both 1916 and both starring Pina Menichelli as one of the most enchanting femme fatales that ever graced the silent screen, if you forgive some over-acting. My favourite of these two films is definitely "Il fuoco", which is NOT an adaptation of the D'Annunzio novel of the same name, though it could have actually been based on some novel by that great Italian fin de siecle writer. The film, basically a variation of the old story of model and painter, especially reminded me of Bauer in its lavishness, its subtlety, its recreation of an artistic/aristocratic society following its own rules, and the sheer beauty of the leading lady as well as some ravishing outdoor scenes. There is a feverish intensity to both films, and an aestheticism that however never sinks into the traps of pure 'decadence'. Very beautifully restored with extremely lovely tintings on top of it. "Il fuoco" will definitely make it into my top 20 of this list, and "Tigre reale", while somewhat less intense and concentrated (75 min. as opposed to "Il fuoco"'s 50 min., roughly speaking), is also very good with a quite spectacular final sequence involving a burning theatre.

Another, completely different film that I found quite worth watching is "Civilization" (1916) by Thomas Ince (producer and one of three directors). This might be one of the earliest anti-war films ever, and though it's pretty didactic in places, it has quite a few striking moments. The story involves a count serving a war-lusty king of some unspecified European State (we may read Germany-Austria here, I suppose), who in a near-death experience - or even more - becomes more or less literally possessed by the spirit of Christ and re-embodies the peaceful ideas of Jesus in a more modern setting, finally reaching the aim to stop the war. This seems to have been a super-production in its time, probably in order to rival Griffith, with a lot of extras, high production values and some strikingly impressive war scenes, as well as some still rather well-working dream sequences (wrong word, as they are supposed to be 'real' in the film). While the overly Christian tone in the intertitles might put off some people who are not strict followers of that persuasion, there is little room to object to the very humanistic message of the film in general, and as said before: it often is visually very accomplished, even though there is little in terms of real character development outside the central figure of that count itself.

All three films mentioned are not available on dvd (though "Civilization" seems to have had a laserdisc release), but they are available in fine versions in what is popularly referred to here as 'that other place'...

[myrnaloyisdope]

Civilization is very impressive, even it its current state. One of my holy grails is the original release print.

I have been really impressed with the Lois Weber stuff I've seen. Where Are My Children is wildly uneven in its politics, confusingly interchanging birth control and abortion, and quite cynical but the final shot is absolutely monumental, the kind of thing that your jaw drops as you watch it. It's a bit like the final shot in Tarkovsky's Nostalgia, miraculous and reveletory.

I've watched Suspense several times the past couple weeks and it will likely make my top 5. It's a brilliant meld of Griffithian melodrama and cinematic innovation. What's so remarkable is how Weber uses all the 'tricks' to enhance the narrative and increase tension. It's remarkable by 1913 standards to see a director incorporate numerous innovations and make them seem effortless and natural.

I have now watched about 4 hours of Tih Minh, I have found someone with the remaining section, and hope it arrives next week. My French is admittedly pretty poor, so surely some details have been missed, but at this point it appears a weaker serial than any of the 3 that have been released.

Here's what I wrote of the film on my blog:

The general plot has the famous explore D’Athy returning home to France with a new wife (Tih Minh) and a Hindu book that has caught the attention of the nefarious Kistna, a wealthy and mysterious turban wearing gent. Kistna along with his partner in crime La marquise Dolores (kind of a Musidora-lite) have the power to cast out the souls of women, reducing their victims to mute imbeciles whilst there souls wander the seas. Tih Minh becomes one of his victims, forcing D’Athy and his sidekick Placido to uncover Kistna’s secrets.

The film is a bit lacking in visual style, but Feuillade’s direction is sturdy enough, and there have been several very striking sequences, one in particular finds D’Athy and Placido discovering a cell containing dozens of Kistna’s victims…all young attractive woman dressed in white robes, pawing frantically at our heroes. It’s quite an evocative setting, almost like a madhouse. Tonally the film is quite different from the other Feuillade’s (Judex, Les Vampires, and Fantomas), as the hero is not blessed with secret powers or even much in the way of smarts…he’s just as clueless as the audience. Kistna as a villain lacks the sparkle and charm of Fantômas, or Musidora’s various permutations, and as such he is much more of a pure bad guy. There’s nothing really to root for on his end, Dolores isn’t particularly interesting, and Kistna fits pretty nicely in the Warner Oland mold of fat-white guys in turbans planning to rule the world.

I think a great deal of my enjoyment of Feuillade’s serials is the seductive qualities of the villains, I know with all three I’ve ended up rooting for the villain over the hero. So Tih Minh is a much different experience, and in some ways a bit of a disappointment so far.

[Tommaso]

Civilization is very impressive, even it its current state. One of my holy grails is the original release print.

Can you tell a little more, as I know nothing about the history of the film. What's the difference between the original print and the 'current state'? I suppose that original release print is lost?

[myrnaloyisdope]

The version of Civilization that exists today is the 1930 re-release. It was re-edited by religious groups to emphasize the Christian content, this included cutting footage and creating new intertitles. There is about 6 reels missing.

There is a good discussion on it at Nitrateville.

[Tommaso]

Ah, thank you, also for the nitrateville-link. Actually, when watching the film I thought that the only somewhat annoying bits of it were the intertitles, and I wondered if it was really necessary to spell out the message in such a way, especially as the images themselves were on a quite different level of sophistication for most of the time. So, another murdered masterpiece, probably. But it still worked very well for most of the time, even if some allowances must probably be made for the Jesus bits.

[myrnaloyisdope]

I watched a couple of tough to find features recently, Edwin S. Porter's Tess of the Storm Country, and Robert Wiene's Furcht.

Porter's version of Tess is the original film of the story and also stars Mary Pickford in the lead. It feels like a streamlined version of the 1922 version, unfortunately alot of the emotional tension is lost, while also fuzzying a lot of the character's motivations. It's pretty clear that by 1914, Porter hadn't really adapted much at all, choosing to stick with a static camera and filming almost every shot as a master shot. The result is that scenes that are just aching for a Mary Pickford close-up are played from afar and end up losing there resonance. That being said it wasn't terrible either, aside from the occasionally rushed storyline, I still found myself engaged and responding in a similar way to when I watched the 1922 version.

Wiene's Furcht (1917) predates Caligari by a couple years, and stylistically doesn't bare a lot of resemblance to the latter film, although thematically it is very similar. The plot concerns a wealthy art collecting count (Bruno DeCarli) who returns home from 2 years abroad a broken man. He has stolen a precious buddha statue and is now being stalked by an Indian priest (Conrad Veidt). Fraught with paranoia he is given 7 years to live by the priest at the end of which he "will die by the hand of the one who is dearest". The deadline is used to great effect by Wiene as a means of building tension, as every attempt by DeCarli to find happiness...orgies, fame, love is undermined by the looming fear of his demise. Finally the climax is a great one, those Germans sure know how to end a movie. Directorially, Wiene keeps it pretty simple, with the occasional use of evocative lighting, but generally not doing anything flashy. That being said it is pretty smoothly edited, and the final sequence involving a superimposition of Veidt walking through the count's home to collect the statue is superb.

[Tommaso]

Watched "Furcht" recently, too. It's not overly significant, but in its initial stages especially it has a nice claustrophobic atmosphere, portraying the fears of the protagonist alone in his big house very well. And of course it's nice to see Veidt in one of his earliest roles in any case. As I suppose you have the same version that's floating around in the backchannels: were you as put off as I was by that annoying and endlessly repeated Mussorgsky soundtrack? I couldn't stand it anymore after 15 minutes, and put on a CD of Armenian zither music (sic!) instead. Worked very well and enhanced the eerie atmosphere.

Still, I think that Wiene never came anywhere close to "Caligari" with any of his other films I've seen, not with this and not with "Orlac". "Der Rosenkavalier" also seems pretty conventional to me. "Genuine" might be a good candidate for the second place, though, but the only version available (as an extra to the Kino disc of "Caligari") is truncated to only 43 minutes or so, and I never could find out whether this was all that survives of the film or whether it was butchered for this release. Some pretty striking visuals in that film in any case, but as it's from 1920, it will only qualify for the next list.

[myrnaloyisdope]

Yes, the music was pretty distracting. I'm not sure what is worse: turgid organ scores or ill-fitting classical scores. I haven't seen any other Wiene films besides Caligari.

Just a question for anyone, is the imdb date the official date we are using? I have seen both Caligari and Within Our Gates with 1919 and 1920 release dates, but imdb has both as 1920. Within Our Gates would probably make my top 20 if it's 1919.

[swo17]

We have definitely already worked out that Caligari is eligible for our 1920s list. That is, unless IMDb changes the release date to 1919 in the next month or so.

[zedz]

The tradition has always been that imdb is final, even when it's demonstrably wrong. This is simply so that everybody's on the same page and valuable film-watching time isn't wasted with border disputes.

[Sloper]

Just out of sheer interest, is here anybody else bored to tears by Feuillade's serials? I mean I love Chaplin, Stiller and Sjöström, I greatly appreciate Bauer and Tourneur and respect very much Christensen and Griffith, but these hour long trashy stories go on my nerves. If I want to see some pulp, I watch Indiana Jones and not some 10s serials with no sense of story development or any suspense at all. Feuillade's staging seems to me bloody ordinary compared to the directors mentioned before and the attempts to elevate this stuff via "surrealistic tendencies disrupting bourgeois normalcy" ... well that's something you could tell about many trash films.

Pulp can speak a lot about society, precisely because it's on the rims of what is accepted as 'valuable art' at any given time; and while Feuillade's works operate in a different way than 'high art', they are pitch-perfect in their own universe.

Feuillade's depopulated Paris is simultaneously hyper-real and surreal, a Duchampian found object. And the manic variations of his plotting seem to perform a similarly uncanny heightening job on melodramatic conventions.

The Feuillade discussion a couple of weeks ago prompted me to re-watch Fantômas and Les Vampires (still haven’t seen Judex, I’m afraid), and I think Tommaso and zedz identified the two main appeals of these films: the ‘style’ and the use of locations. Having pigged out somewhat on this second visit, I also agree that Feuillade is best approached one or two episodes at a time, as I did find the pacing a little slow at times. Perhaps it’s different when you’re with an audience, but watching this alone while nursing a bag of crisps can be slightly wearing, especially since I have to turn off the annoyingly repetitive music on Fantômas. I ended up feeling that Feuillade’s pacing is actually very effective, punctuating long, leisurely stretches with surprising outbursts of violence; it’s a rhythm you can see operating within individual episodes more than across the series as a whole, although he certainly builds to a fine climax in Les Vampires.

As for the ‘staging’ being ‘bloody ordinary’... There are quite a number of tour-de-force sequences, such as (in Fantômas) the hotel scene at the start – such a brilliant set-up where you see the lift passing each floor on its way up, and then the same thing in reverse while the villain assumes a new identity on the way down. The scene where he hides in the water-tank is genuinely nail-biting, and of course there’s the escape from Louvain prison and the bell-tower sequence in the final episode. I love the scenes where you see Fantômas and his gang meeting up in derelict locations, especially the abandoned train. And there are several great car chases in Les Vampires, including one which transfers to the roof of a train. Apart from anything else, some of the stunt work is extraordinary.

Both serials are also full of beautiful compositions, using light and shadow to create some really iconic images: Lady Beltham watching Gurn’s arrest from behind two sets of shutters, the vampires spying on Guérande in his bed, or the scene where the party guests have been asphyxiated (brilliant high-angle panning shot of their hands clawing at the doors) and then once the lights are out, two vampire-silhouettes appear in the doorways at the back of the room, creeping in ahead of the other vamps.

For the most part, though, it doesn’t seem totally inappropriate to call the staging in these films ‘ordinary’, because I think that’s an important feature of their aesthetic. The mise-en-scène, the set decoration, the choice of actors, is always studiedly ordinary: everything seems very familiar and cosy, with very few 'stark' interiors, always plenty of reassuring clutter and decoration. I don’t like the phrase "surrealistic tendencies disrupting bourgeois normalcy" any more than lubitsch does, and indeed I’m not sure I see anything ‘surreal’ in these serials. I take zedz’ point, though, about the ‘uncanny’ quality of a lot of this material, and Feuillade is consistently working to unsettle the audience by showing ordinary, even homely, settings infected and invaded by the devious criminal elements. This is partly why the use of locations is so important, because the effectiveness of those shots of the vampires creeping over the rooftops, or that fantastic moment when Irma Vep wraps herself in a bundle of rope, then tumbles down the side of a building, consists mainly in their (literal) creepiness.

The villains in these films are scarcely super-villains: compared to, say, Dr Mabuse, they’re actually rather normal. They can disguise themselves as anything, perform every kind of job there is, occasionally hypnotise people, wheel out huge cannons when necessary, and scale tall buildings with ease, yet we are always made to identify with them. Mazamette, the primary ‘everyman’ character, is the one who most often addresses the camera, but notice that Irma Vep also does this quite often, and there’s a great moment towards the end of Fantômas where the villain realises he’s being followed and gestures confidentially to the audience – it’s an oddly Mazamette-ish moment, and makes you realise why these films were rather controversial at the time of release (can’t remember where I read this...) for their glorification of criminal activity, and the relative incompetence of the authority figures. The balancing act of getting us to both identify with these recognisably human, ordinary (and sometimes quite sexy) villains, and feel unnerved and threatened by their fiendish plots, is beautifully executed.

On a second viewing, I was struck by how good a director of actors Feuillade is. It’s a while since I saw Assayas' Irma Vep, but I seem to remember Jean-Pierre Léaud saying at one point how much he admired Musidora’s ‘natural’ performance. Although I can think of a lot of other films from the period whose actors are more restrained and ‘lifelike’ – less prone to strenuous, emphatic gesturing – Feuillade does have a way of placing his characters in a shot, and directing their movements and facial expressions, to convey as smoothly and economically as possible what’s going on. These may be some of the earliest truly successful examples of filmed novels (very plot-driven novels at that), and where film-makers like Bauer, Griffith or Sjostrom are masters at telling an emotional, psychological or moral story purely through images, Feuillade spellbinds us with a compelling and complex plot. Our sense of ‘familiarity’ with both the characters and the settings is essential to this, as is our desire to both fear and identify the anti-heroes’ transgressive behaviour. I think that’s the specific appeal of ‘pulp’ as Tommaso defines it in the quote above. Perhaps one of the reasons this tends to be on the margins of what is accepted as ‘art’ is that it is fundamentally ambivalent, playful and, so to speak, non-serious. That’s a big part of Feuillade’s appeal, especially, I imagine, for those who are quite new to this period of film-making: he gives you an exciting and occasionally nasty story to follow, and neither he nor his actors ask you to take it too seriously.