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

[myrnaloyisdope]

DeMille's been mentioned in this thread before, but I saw The Whispering Chorus last night. I really liked it. The use of superimposed "heads" around Tremble as he agonised over each choice he made, the angel/devil on his shoulders, if you like, seemed a neat, inventive trick. Its plot might have a little too melodramatic, but I like melodrama. Is it worth watching The Cheat, Carmen or Joan the Woman?

I'm probably the biggest (only?) booster of The Cheat on this forum, I think it's marvellous in so many ways, Sessue Hayakawa gives a superlative performance as the villain, and DeMille's direction is top notch. The caveat of course is that it's bogged down by a very racist story, and that might be hard to overcome. For me it's an experience like The Birth of a Nation, in that it's a sort of polemicized blend of cinematic mastery and deeply problematic racism. It's equally compelling and repulsive. Whether you like it or hate it, I would argue it's an essential film of the period.

Carmen is pretty underwhelming, and Joan the Woman I have not seen.

[lubitsch]

I found myself become less and less interested in early narrative cinema, particularly of the ‘landmarks in film grammar’ school, and more and more fascinated with the paths not taken: actualities, oddities and non-standard or ‘primitive’ narrative forms. Basically, I found that I was about as interested in finding a classical shot-reverse shot in a film from 1913 as I would be in finding one in a film from 1963.

I agree that's not a fruitful approach especially for our list here. It's ok if you do stilistic analysis a la Barry Salt or David Bordwell, it's interesting and even entertaining, but one doesn't see the movies anymore as movies but begins to play a game of "spot the innovation" which is pretty deadly.

Oh, you don't have to include "Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance" just because they are so famous.

Indeed. I will not vote for BOAN and I will not vote for Metropolis or Sunrise in the next decade. They aren't sufficiently good in all departments of a film, 50 others are and out they go. Very simple.
As for Intolerance it's neither a desaster nor the great film of the age. Sheer scale and ambition in itself mean nothing. It has a good modern story, a splendid Babylonian epic and two narrative strands we all could do without. The intercutting looks spectacular, but the idea behind it is half-baked. Nice attempt, there are films which set out to achieve less and ultimately bring more on the table.

Edit: Forgot about True Heart Susie, a lovely little film that taps into some of the themes that Murnau would later on with Sunrise and City Girl. Gish of course is great as usual.

And you really forgot about Romance of Happy Valley which is a fine companion piece to True Heart Susie. there are multiple voices in the Griffith scholarship which point out that he is a more successful director of pastorals than of epics.

DeMille's been mentioned in this thread before ... Is it worth watching The Cheat, Carmen or Joan the Woman?

Mostly no, no and no regarding the entertainment value. Yes, mostly yes and yes for historical value.

Some important figures got almost zero discussion as yet, Maurice Tourneur being the most prominent.

[zedz]

Daydreams (Bauer)

More Bauer, and a great one. It’s been identified as the ‘pre-Vertigo’ one, which is fair enough. The plot has certain superficial similarities, but I also think there’s some atmospheric resemblance.

As so many people have noted, Bauer was way ahead of the game stylistically, and this film from 1915 exhibits subtle camera movements and relatively sophisticated techniques such as cuts from long to medium shot on action within a scene. But as I’ve noted, I’m not really interested in that sort of evolutionary one-upmanship, and the aspects of the film’s style I find most intriguing are its residue of early cinema ideas that didn’t necessarily survive natural selection: its Feuillade / Christensen / Lumiere aspects.

Compositionally, Bauer utilises real locations with the mysterious freshness and alertness of Feuillade, and he also employs that fascinating technique – also seen in Christensen’s The Mysterious X - of deploying mirrors within the mise en scene to offer oblique views of offscreen space. There’s a particularly eloquent chair back that we glimpse several times in the hero’s lobby by this means, and I actually find that tiny frame within a frame somehow as moving as entire Griffith melodramas. Mirrors within shots would later be used effectively enough to directly reveal key information and effects (e.g. that unforgettable split-second in Repulsion), but it’s this utterly casual superfluity of the effect here (and in another location shot where a passing horse and cart is reflected in receding shop windows but not seen directly) that is so delicious. It would be another half century before this visual idea would be systematically followed up in the work of advanced visual stylists like Antonioni, Pakula and Yang.

Another of Bauer’s great strengths is his angled mise en scene. Even when he’s shooting on sets that invite the proscenium approach, such as highly decorated drawing rooms, he avoids it, instead positioning his camera at an angle to the architecture and thus creating much more interesting spaces and much more interesting possibilities for movement of his characters. One thing I’m going to be taking away from this leg of the lists project is just how much more alive and cinematic the Lumieres’ simple receding diagonals are compared with all manner of more overt and attention-getting camera tricks.

The playing in the film isn’t exactly subdued, but it is very effective, partly because of its deliberate slowness. This slowness, combined with the eerily mechanical and deliberate pans, tilts and tracks Bauer deploys, create for me a kind of suspension that’s really dreamlike – which is the other point of comparison with Vertigo.

Finally, I have to put in a ‘wow’ for the condition of the elements. The range of shadings and level of detail visible in the okay but not stellar transfer I saw was amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen orthochromatic stock render such nuance of light and shade. It almost looked panchromatic.

The Heart and Money (Feuillade)

I’m making my way through the (Kino) Gaumont Feuillade disc, and I’m enjoying the films, but nothing comes close to the grand serials yet (not even Spring, I’m afraid), though this film is one to cherish and has made it to my short list. Despite the conventional melodramatic content, the film plays to the director’s strengths, with gorgeous use of natural settings, culminating in a stupendous, if truncated, final shot.

[reno dakota]

The Heart and Money (Feuillade)

I’m making my way through the (Kino) Gaumont Feuillade disc, and I’m enjoying the films, but nothing comes close to the grand serials yet (not even Spring, I’m afraid), though this film is one to cherish and has made it to my short list. Despite the conventional melodramatic content, the film plays to the director’s strengths, with gorgeous use of natural settings, culminating in a stupendous, if truncated, final shot.

Completely agree. It was my favorite Feuillade from that set and will certainly be making my list. I also really enjoyed The Colonel's Account, which made me laugh more than anything else in the set.

By the way, where is everyone finding Bauer's Daydreams?

[swo17]

Volume 7 of this collection. Volume 10 is also essential for Bauer's For Happiness. Tell your local library to buy the whole thing!

[thirtyframesasecond]

Volume 7 of this collection. Volume 10 is also essential for Bauer's For Happiness. Tell your local library to buy the whole thing!

We have this at work. I've seen the Bauer, the Starewicz and the End of an Era volumes but will try to watch some of the others in time. At the moment, For Happiness would probably be top of my list. Astonishingly good.

Cheers for the DeMille discussion above, I won't prioritise them for now.

[Ann Harding]

The Heart and Money (Feuillade)

I’m making my way through the (Kino) Gaumont Feuillade disc, and I’m enjoying the films, but nothing comes close to the grand serials yet (not even Spring, I’m afraid), though this film is one to cherish and has made it to my short list. Despite the conventional melodramatic content, the film plays to the director’s strengths, with gorgeous use of natural settings, culminating in a stupendous, if truncated, final shot.

I absolutely agree that Le Coeur et l'argent is certainly one of the best films on the set. Though I have huge doubts about the attribution to Feuillade. To me, the cinematography, composition and acting makes me think of Léonce Perret. Early Gaumont pictures never named its directors. So beware about the attribution to one director. I am not sure Gaumont researched properly this aspect.

[HerrSchreck]

By the way, where is everyone finding Bauer's Daydreams?

Miss this stuff at your own peril, furchrissakes! Run dont walk! It is absolutely upon every silent film enthusiast, serious about that enthusiasm, to raid the BFI or Milestone and secure all of the available Yevgeni Bauer materials. The dude was a one-man film movement, producing works in the middle teens that easily stand and stood alongside the very best masterpieces of the following two decades, which in my humble view represent the apex era of b&w filmmaking. Every here and there in all the various art forms, you get an individual who existed in their own twilight zone of aesthetics, utterly unique and light years ahead of their contemporaries in terms of technique-- Bauer was one of those guys. His decadent and gothic preoccupations, his entirely subjective use of the moving camera, his incredible use of chiaroscuro and other lighting effects, exaggerated closeups, not to mention the tightness and perfection of his overall sensibility and assembly.. a wonder to behold. MAD LOVE should be considered old news at this point, for any real enthusiast, and a wending through the Early Russian Cinema set should be on the docket for all involved here, even if only to tweeze out Bauer. DAYDREAMS, CHILD OF THE BIG CITY, just to name a couple... epiphany after epiphany.

As for Intolerance ... Sheer scale and ambition in itself mean nothing. It has a good modern story, a splendid Babylonian epic and two narrative strands we all could do without. The intercutting looks spectacular, but the idea behind it is half-baked. Nice attempt, there are films which set out to achieve less and ultimately bring more on the table.

Did anyone actually say "Intolerance is a great film because of the sheer scale and ambition, and nothing else."

As for myself, the statement was,

The scale of the achievement, the strange mix of elements, the incredible size of the sets, the uniqueness of the conception and the execution (no script was apparently used), the strange pall of religious--almost gothic-- gloom that hangs over these tales of the doomed.. all this heightened by the antiquity of these tales set in medieval and ancient times (not to mention the sense, for us today, as Intolerance nears its centenniary, of blanket antiquity about the production itself )... there's a looming quality about the film which causes it to register in my viscera like one of the Wonders Of The World(...)

(...) there's a vast sense of mystery for me running beyond the grand physical execution and general surface text, that arises from the subject matter and the way the film is fragmented into these multiple strands that exist side by side yet are to be connected... yet for some reason do not entirely gel quite right ("That failure," says Orson Welles about the film's conception, and the possibility that the four stories do not quite "work" as a unified narrative whole, "is one of the greatest successes in the cinema,"). I love that feeling of almost accidental mosaic.

I actually enjoy all of the narrative strands equally. The "splendid Babylonian epic" suffers greatly from an excess of a kind of juvenile silliness which Griffith could be subject to. The whole substrand of the mountain girl and the 'rhapsode' with a terminal boner anxious to break into her sheepskins (he waves her over, a complete stranger, winking and pointing to the seat next to him, she looks at the camera and bulges her eyes with her mouth an O, then turns and wings a rock at him.. a moment later while she watches a dance procession near the main gate, he sneaks up behind her and kisses her shoulder and runs.. she turns around and beats the living crap out of an innocent man standing behind her... the whole section is plagued with this nonsense, not to mention her Brooklyn-chick tough gal act when up on the marriage block.. at one point she actually gives the men in the marriage market, after she triumphs over them with the help of the king, a ghetto girl finger-snap and head wag.. it's totally hilarious) there is some incredible dopiness there. I greatly enjoy the France and Biblical sequences. Theres a haunting long shot of the crucifixion tinted in red, which I once remarked "It looks like the man got actual footage of folks' most gloomily atmospheric imagining of the crucifixion."

I think it's a magnificent experiment, with much to commmend it, entirely unique, from a greatly talented man, desperate to rehabilitate his cruddy public image after BOaN, and anxious to utilize, at the same time, the vast amount of filmmaking capital and credibility he'd accrued in the wake of the aforementioned film. I agree wholeheartedly with Welles, that whatever aspects of the film remain a failure both today and in contemporary times remain one of the greatest successes in the history of the cinema.

[myrnaloyisdope]

Edit: Forgot about True Heart Susie, a lovely little film that taps into some of the themes that Murnau would later on with Sunrise and City Girl. Gish of course is great as usual.

And you really forgot about Romance of Happy Valley which is a fine companion piece to True Heart Susie. there are multiple voices in the Griffith scholarship which point out that he is a more successful director of pastorals than of epics.

DeMille's been mentioned in this thread before ... Is it worth watching The Cheat, Carmen or Joan the Woman?

Mostly no, no and no regarding the entertainment value. Yes, mostly yes and yes for historical value.

Some important figures got almost zero discussion as yet, Maurice Tourneur being the most prominent.

I'm definitely interested in checking out more Griffith, I just finished watching the Brownlow doc and I'm now pumped to rewatch the big 3, and check out any features I haven't seen. Frustratingly there is the first half of The Mother and the Law up on youtube, but not the second half (the poster doesn't know where the second half is). I'd love to see that and Romance of Happy Valley given your recommendation.

I've mentioned some of Tourneur's films, I'm a big fan of his work during the period. Le Friquet will finish really highly on my list, and Alias, Jimmy Valentine will probably end up on my list too. I just ordered the Fort Lee disc, so I'll be able to comment on The Wishing Ring.

Another overlooked film is Maurice Elvey's The Life Story of David Lloyd George, which I wrote about at length here. It tops my provisional list at this point, and I urge everyone to see it.

[Tommaso]

Thanks for the Tourneur reminder. I watched "The Wishing Ring" last night and am quite impressed about the effortless flow and the quiet, restrained mood and subtlety of it all. The film might be easily overlooked because of its almost introspective nature, but there is a lot of beauty to be found here, without the over-dramatisms of, say, "The Poor little rich girl" (which however is a pretty impressive film on its own terms). The filmed 'actors' introduction' at the beginning and end is very charming, too. Quite an enormous horizontal tracking shot for this at the end.

Have managed to get the three French Tourneur films from 1913 that are floating around in the backchannels, and hope to see them very soon. But with all those comparatively unknown Tourneurs, don't forget "The Blue Bird", still the Tourneur film that impressed me most, though again its been ages since I last saw it. Need to re-watch that one soon, too.

[reno dakota]

But with all those comparatively unknown Tourneurs, don't forget "The Blue Bird", still the Tourneur film that impressed me most, though again its been ages since I last saw it. Need to re-watch that one soon, too.

I second all of the praise for The Wishing Ring and The Blue Bird. There has been no discussion yet of Tourneur's Victory, but I think it is worth a look as well. It's a stylishly told melodrama with some rather dark undercurrents and an interesting performance from Lon Chaney.

[HerrSchreck]

One thing I can say beyond all question is that in my top three-- if not in my top position of all-- will reside Otto Rippert's Homunculus (1916). I guess I should revise this by titling it Homunculus Episode Four (Revenge of Homunculus) and a fragment of Ep #2. The rest of the series is lost, but I do have a copy of some vintage analog telecine of the two unsrestored episode elements.

This series-- which I hesitate to call a serial, as each "episode" is up to a full five (then-contemporary) reels long, approaching an hour long each entry, making it less a "serial" (a la, say, a Feuillade serial, which generally ran two or three reels per entry) than a series of feature films conveying an epic tale-- features a number of classic horror and expressionist film stereotypes which jumped out of Rippert so fully formed that one encounters them in later films and regards them as echoes of Rippert's film grammar, rather than--as is typically the case-- a development, an adding to and a building upon the seed of an idea resident in the earlier, foundational text.

Elsewhere on the web, I wrote:

What does one think of when reflecting upon the ingredients of a classic horror film of the early 1930's? A grim and shadowy visual style? A scientist trying to create-- or somehow tinker with the elements of-- life by his own hand... perhaps that creation gone amok, unable to fit in to the human race? Surrounding townsfolk whose vengeance is ignited resulting in unleashed pitchforks, torches, and a chase across the natural countryside? The capturing of the beast... only to find the chains are not strong enough to restrain him? A burning down of a windmill for good measure? Check. Check. Check check check. And check. And check.

All those elements are here in spades, and this is only one episode of the phantasmagoric serial Homunculus by Otto Rippert, a great bulk of which sadly remains lost. If this serial wasn't seen by filmmakers like Whale (and his screenwriters), then surely it heavily influenced their primary influences.

Homunculus, which was the most successful German serial of the period leading up to WW1, may be the most quintessentially German silent film I've seen... if we refer to as 'quintessentially German' those gross stereotypes that have colored scholarship over the past half decade: death obsessions, hypnotic dominance over individuals and peoples, gloomy atmopsherics. Homunculus takes the stoical grimness of 1913's Student of Prague and goes several extra miles.

Olaf Fønss' mesmerizing performance as the raging, tortured, self-intoxicated Homunculus is a sight to see. His performance rumbles up from the soles of his feet, he rolls his eyes and gazes up at the sky as the soulless, disconnected Homunuculus nonetheless marvels at the power of his existence-- at his rage, his suffering, his loveless torment, his inability to connect, his great power over others, his capacity for triumph. He's a walking sculpture of daemoniac heroicism, a strutting bishop of darkness tripping on acid, forever having these asides with himself, shaking his fists, balling his own hair up in his hands, passing a palm over his self-astonished face. Watching Fønss stalk about these half-lit sets, the twilight countrysides, his vampiric cape blowing majestically while scowling, pointing, outwitting all comers, it's intoxicating. It's with this performance that I finally understood his great European stardom in the teens.

There are few films-- particularly during the silent era and especially during the German silent era when grim subject matter and a stern and stoical, a gloomy, menacing and melancholic atmosphere and mise en scene were in evidence as a very large part of the cinematic aesthetic of the time-- which achieve this degree of psychological darkmindedness... highly poetical in its malevolent imagery, grimly effective in terms of visual and narrative power, yet restrained. Always mature and never childish, never juvenile or tending towards the shocks of and narrative and visual terrain of a child's frightened imagination. As a result Homunculus feels, through its stoicism, like an excellent film that just happens to be about the gloomy, loveless and violent travails of a man artificially created in a laboratory... thus-- for example like The Exorcist-- the film escapes the feel of a genre piece. Particularly grim are the intertitles, getting across the dark nature of the subject matter in a very effective prose. Some examples of intertitle translations (thanks to Denti for his help in these).. the numbers represent the intertitle numbers; I've removed the timings:

3
After his last disappointments, 4 Richard Ortmann, the artificial man, 5 had stopped believing in human love. 6 All the more clear was his goal now: 7 the annihilation of mankind! 8 Through his unusual abilities - 9 not least through his ingenious invention - 10 Homunculus had become
head of the corporation 11 that represented the capital and power of the country.
"Let those who are unhappy die!
The path to greatness is violence!"
18 Richard Ortmann agitates the masses against themselves. 19 They do not recognize him in his disguise.

20 Homunculus's fire 22 This is my goal: to impel those who preach love 23 against each other in hate, 24 and thereby have them destroy themselves.

25 The globe will shake under the anger of the people. 26 I am not human like the others ... 27 the place of my birth is a chemical laboratory
28 I have the ingenuity of a learned man to thank for my life … 29 My parents are the retorts and mixtures of a researcher


52 Diabolical plans (..) 59 There can be no love. It is a word found only in the mouths of fools and deceivers.

60 Restless nights 61 "I have destroyed a just man!"

In the following section, marvelously grim imagery of Olaf Fonss in his mesmerising turn as Ortmann/Homunculus appears,



with a faintly superimposed spirit representing the grim force that Ortmann has set loose in the world:

68 Homunculus now sees clearly that he remains
69 eternally cut off from that emotion that binds people together.
70 "Admit that there is no love - or you will die!"
71 "Now I want to settle my accounts with mankind!"

72
The sun sets crimson over the land.

73
The spirit of discord moves
through the world.

74
At every point on the globe
there was turmoil...

75
Homunculus appears everywhere
to fan the flames of destruction.

76

The confusion and enmity among men
becomes increasingly horrible.

I know for many this may constitute a bit of torture since it's extremely difficult to see this unrestored, 66% lost to posterity, never-released on home video title. But for all those who may have a way into seeing it, I can't recommend it strongly enough. A rare combination of the stoically grim and the literarily darkminded, masculine and reserved in its steely execution, tight as a drum as well, it's a specimen with an atmosphere I find exceedingly satisfying... o if only the rest of this sucker could be discovered, restored, and released on DVD (never mind Blu Ray, I'd crap myself and pass out.. wake up in the ER). It was the most successful of the prewar German serials... Olaf Fonss' wardrobe had a huge impact on the Berlin fashionistas of the day.. people wanted to resemble the dark prince that was Fonss' Homunculus:

[swo17]

I've actually held off on watching what's available of Homunculus, as I wasn't aware that the rest of it is lost and thought I would be missing story continuity. I'll definitely be checking it out now!

[zedz]

Homonculus Part Four (Rippert)

Schreck’s call on this film is a good one. Although the available materials – a badly cropped, heavily degraded TV rip – don’t do the film any favours, it’s clear that Rippert was doing interesting stuff. He’s particularly good at deploying groups of people in the frame – on the evidence of this film, the more the better, and we’re treated to some really dynamic mob scenes – and like many filmmakers of this vintage, his compositions are particularly strong once he gets out in the open air.

To Happiness (Bauer)

One of the hot Bauer favourites, though it’s probably not my top pick. Once again, the elements are hair-raisingly beautiful, with subtle gradations of shading and only those mysterious exes to lower the standard (hell, maybe it’s a Christensen reference). The use of natural light is simply gorgeous, and the quality and clarity of the photography means that its possible to read delicate facial expressions even when the characters are backlit by sunlight in a garden.

The melodrama is not exactly original, what with mammoth misreadings of affection, convenient eavesdroppings and that old standby hysterical blindness hanging over the proceedings like the mirror ball of Damocles, but I was surprised by just how powerful the concluding scenes managed to be, even though we could see them coming for most of the film. Bauer’s handling of the actors – their performances less stylised here than in Daydreams – and the expert pacing of those unsurprising revelations demonstrate just how deft a filmmaker Bauer was.

The Avenging Conscience (Griffith)

It was probably a good idea to save this film up for this late point, having spent a long time away from Griffith. Coming to him after wallowing in so much other early cinema, it’s a bit of a revelation to see his hoary innovations as innovations once again: to see just how effective those ground-breaking close-ups and inserts were (this film also features a fascinating leitmotif of insert close-ups of animals – they’re all over the place, none of them particularly central to the plot) and just how fluid and persuasive his cutting had become by this point. The climax he filches from The Telltale Heart is truly a tour de force of cutting edge film grammar and works fabulously well even today.

And it’s not a bad film in other respects, with a surprisingly dark edge to its central section and decent performances throughout. I’m still not a big Griffith booster, but this film has earnt a place on my shortlist along with the above films.

And, having finished the Feuillade disc, I’ll put in a good word for the smartly reflexive Tragic Error, but mainly for its runaway horse set piece.

[Tommaso]

I'm very grateful to Schreck for so forcibly recommending "Homunculus" here. The film had been lying on my kevyip for some time, but due to the quality of the recording and the lack of any music I never really was in the mood to check it out before Schreck's post here. And indeed, the film represented a major knock-out for me. It indeed feels like the quintessential German expressionist silent film, only with the difference that there wasn't very much to take this quintessence of in 1916. Sure, there was the Rye version of "Der Student von Prag", also the first "Golem", but otherwise "Homunculus" almost feels like the invention of a new genre.

I would perhaps especially call it the 'Mother of all Fritz Lang films'. The dark, disguised force wreaking havoc clearly foreshadows "Mabuse", some of the rebellion scenes even "Metropolis", and the outfit and general look of Homunculus probably was a strong model for the title figure in "Der müde Tod". The general nightmarish and somnambulistic quality of the film is echoed in countless other films of the 20s of course, as is the idea of 'artificial life', see "Alraune", for instance. On the other hand, the film takes up a lot of the traditions of German literature and German cultural imagination; the Homunculus already appears in Goethe's "Faust", and the idea of foreswearing love (or turning it to hate by a conscious decision) comes if not from the "Nibelungenlied" directly, then at least from Wagner's take on that story.

So, whatever the qualities of the film itself - and they are great, this is a constantly exciting and inventive film, and indeed with a fantastic performance by Olaf Fonss -, it seems to be of immense filmhistorical importance; and I can't see any reason why a label like Filmmuseum hasn't released it already for that reason alone. A great discovery for me, and certainly very high on my list.

-------------

Apart from this, I was pretty much on a Tourneur trip these last few days, watching not only "The Wishing Ring", but also three of his French films, and there's more to come soon. For now, a few words about those French films, all from 1913:

"Le Friquet": this has already been praised here, and for good reason, although I somehow found the story a little too conventional and melodramatic (perhaps I've never been such a great fan of 'circus films' either), and surprisingly for Tourneur, there is also a bit of overacting present here. But especially the final sequence with the title character's suicide is shot with some exciting camera angles et al. I won't say more here for fear of spoilers; but it certainly looks pretty unusual. Still, my least favourite of the three films.

"Figures de Cire": this, however, made me rave quite a lot. This must be one of the very first purely psychological horror films, if you can use the word for a film in which, strictly speaking, nothing in terms of 'horror' occurs (if you disregard the truly horrifying nitrate decomposition of the print itself). I found the depiction of a man driven by fear even more convincing, because much more subtle, than in Wiene's "Furcht". A very concentrated film, only 11 minutes long, but very effective, not just in the final sequence with its creeping shadows. Simply excellent.

"La Bergère d'Ivry": Still, this is definitely my favourite of the three, and one I immediately fell in love with. While this in a way might be the most conventional of them, I found it amazing how Tourneur establishes a rural atmosphere and seemingly the whole background of the story with only some very brief shots at the beginning, so much so that only minutes into the film you have the feeling that you already really know the characters. The story itself (a servant girl 'sacrifices' herself for her benefactress who has to cover up an extra-marital affair) may sound like standard melodrama, but in Tourneur's hands it becomes totally believable, and it also carries a certain lightheartedness under its serious veneer, helped by very natural and convincing acting. The complete absence of any 'judging' of the characters and the final reconciliation reminded me very much of Renoir; I think the film would make for a nice double-bill with "Partie de Campagne", for instance. A truly beautiful, very 'summerlike' film; and the print was beautifully restored and tinted as well.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Wouldn't say 'A Fool There Was' (1915) was an especially impressive film but it's a wicked enough ride. It's notable really just for introducing Theda Bara's 'vamp' persona.

[swo17]

It seems not much computer ink has been spilled yet on the big three comedians of the era, so I thought I'd go ahead and spill a little of my own (and perhaps slip and fall in it!) Er, or not.

Keaton
Oh, Doctor!
Keaton plays a whiny crybaby here, which gives him some great opportunities to flex his acrobatic muscles as he succumbs to one flagrant example after another of child abuse from Fatty Arbuckle. Though Arbuckle's finest moment has to be when, desperate for cash, he sends a car tumbling toward a small crowd of people, y'know, in order to drum up more patients. Oh, Doctor! indeed. There's another great moment here where Keaton, hot in pursuit of a genuine baddie, dives out of a window without even batting an eye. Admittedly, the second reel isn't quite as strong as the first, but I have to say, that Keaton boy sure shows a lot of potential here. I wonder if he ever made good on it...

Lloyd
Bumping into Broadway
Some nice hijinks with Lloyd ducking his landlord (and at one point, answering a lonely old woman's prayer) followed by some even nicer hijinks with him ducking the cops at a speakeasy. I think there's also something about Broadway in there as well.

Chaplin
You know, I've never considered myself a huge Chaplin fan (in a fair fight, I take Keaton, hands down) but I couldn't help but be won over by quite a few of Chaplin's late 10s pictures:

The Immigrant
This one is of course famous for the brief scene where Chaplin surreptitiously kicks an immigration officer in the behind, but it's chock full of other iconic moments, like scenes showing how a boat's passengers cope with all the constant rocking, and it manages to pull a few heart strings as well, like the moment where Chaplin is caught trying to slip his gambling earnings to a fellow passenger, or the funny but also socially relevant goings-on at a restaurant where Chaplin can't quite foot the bill.

One A.M.
This is surprisingly effective for a 30-minute film consisting entirely of a drunken aristocrat struggling to get inside his home, up the stairs, and into bed after a late night bender. In particular, the sequence where Chaplin tries to scale the stairs for like ten minutes demonstrates an agility for which he is not often given credit. I believe there's also some social commentary here as well, probably something against rich people.

A Dog's Life
This is probably the most solid comically of the three, featuring a string of great gags, some of which may or may not involve a dog.

[knives]

Agree with you on Keaton V. Chaplin. I can't for the life of me figure out the attraction to Lloyd though. Most of the time he just comes off as a creepy Chaplin knockoff minus the sentimentality. (Safety Last though is him in full Keaton mode and all the better for it) He's not as bad as Bunny, but for me at least comes off really mediocre when confronted with Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel, Arbuckle, ect. al

[zedz]

I've been meaning to revisit the Arbuckle / Keaton films, though I don't think any of them are as good as the ones where Keaton took charge, which became astounding almost immediately (One Week and The High Sign). And I hadn't realized that any of the films on that Lloyd set were from the teens, so I'll stick that on as well. Thanks for the reminder.

As for Chaplin, my pre-20s pick has always been Easy Street.

Another American comedy of the period that is guaranteed a place on my list is Fairbanks' drugged-out Mystery of the Leaping Fish - one film that helpfully answers that eternal question "What were they on when they made this?"

(And knives, check out Never Weaken for the ultimate Lloyd-outdoing-Keaton film. The stuntwork in this is among the most amazing you'll ever see. The film is wonderfully risky in other ways as well, with its central section consisting of a number of lovingly-crafted suicide gags. The entire film plays with death and grievous bodily harm and is much darker - if still gleeful - than what other comics of the era could get away with).

[swo17]

Another American comedy of the period that is guaranteed a place on my list is Fairbanks' drugged-out Mystery of the Leaping Fish - one film that helpfully answers that eternal question "What were they on when they made this?"

That is a good one (I love how, um, "what they're on" is labeled in GIANT letters on its container) though the real standout Fairbanks for me is When the Clouds Roll By. I've already discussed the film earlier in this thread, but suffice it to say for now, this one is a likely top 10 contender for my list.

[knives]

(And knives, check out Never Weaken for the ultimate Lloyd-outdoing-Keaton film. The stuntwork in this is among the most amazing you'll ever see. The film is wonderfully risky in other ways as well, with its central section consisting of a number of lovingly-crafted suicide gags. The entire film plays with death and grievous bodily harm and is much darker - if still gleeful - than what other comics of the era could get away with).

I'll take your challenge, got so disheartened by the first disc and a half that I didn't finish the rest of the set. I know he's good for a stunt (though I'll wait to see if he can beat Keaton), but he creeps the hell out of me with his mugging. Doing that weird Chaplin smile does not equal funny.

[Sloper]

Gretchen the Greenhorn was a big surprise. I watched it before reading the notes in the accompanying book, and was genuinely surprised by the naturalism (that word again!) of the acting and staging. Indeed, the way the narrative developed, I kept fearing it was about to become a Children's Film Foundation film where

Spoiler

the kids single-handedly save the day

and was pleasantly surprised when

Spoiler

it's largely left to the police.

Considering how this could have turned out (especially if Griffith had made it - not necessarily a criticism I should add), this feels like a more modern film than my (admittedly comparatively little) experience of the era would lead me to expect.

I just saw this. The restoration guys on the commentary, though they obviously like the film, dismiss the idea that it's a 'lost classic', but I don't know... It seems kind of brilliant to me. Not in the same league as Regeneration, but it's more than just an efficient programmer. As well as oozing professionalism from every frame, it's crammed with little moments of visual poetry: the kids playing outside Jan's window, Gretchen and Pietro's date beneath the cliffs, the sequence where the gangsters close in on the father (lots of great shots of them clambering up and down ladders, over rooftops, spying through Jan's window), the close-ups of the leering sailors when Gretchen is lured aboard the boat... And of course the wedding at the end, beginning with a candle-lit shot of the church interior, then showing the wedding through a sequence of stark, extreme close-ups (against a pitch-black background), before capping it all with the final joyous rush out into the sunlight. If only all films invested their happy endings with so much artistry...

Also very impressed by Leadville to Aspen, as others have been. Yes the interior shots are quite naff, but it's an interesting development of those early 'kiss in a tunnel' films. And the coordination of the three different vehicles during the climactic chase is awe-inspiring. More Bitzer magic, apparently.

That film of the fish market on the More Treasures set is very fine too. The upbeat music really doesn't do justice to it: what with the high (sniper's-eye) angle of the shot, the very slow pan, and the suspicious faces looking up at (or even thumbing their noses at) the camera, the shot becomes unintentionally, but beautifully, creepy.

Oh, and speaking of creepy... I love Harold Lloyd, and his cringe-worthy mugging is a huge part of his appeal for me - used to tremendous effect in The Freshman. No one else could have made that film so funny. I'll try and re-visit some of his pre-1920s stuff.

[myrnaloyisdope]

Gosh, I can't believe there are people who don't like Harold Lloyd. I love love love the boxset and it's probably the best DVD set I own. That being said I don't think I'd put any of his pre-1920 shorts on my list, they are solid, but rough-hewn still a little bit too much humor from the Mack Sennett-brick throwing school.

I don't have any Keaton pegged for my list either, his 1920's shorts are stronger in my books. P

For Chaplin, I really love The Rounders which is basically Charlie and Fatty Arbuckle one upping each other with their drunk routines, and it's outstanding. The closing shot of the two of them lying in a submerging boat, eventually disappearing under the water is wonderful. I really like The Bank as well, one of the best uses of the dream sequence you'll ever see, and very tightly constructed as well.

I'd love to check out the Charley Chase boxset, but might not have time.

I'd also recommend the out-of-print Forgotten Films of Fatty Arbuckle box which has a lot of great stuff. Fatty Joins The Force might make my list simply for the debut of the ridiculous and remarkable backwards bump that Fatty takes upon being slugged in the jaw. A 300 pound man should not be able to move like that. The set can be found in the backwaters of the internet, for those who don't want to pay OOP-prices.

I've watched most of the pre-1920's films on the Slapstick Encyclopedia, and a few highlights include Fatty and Mabel Adrift, which features lovely chemistry between the two leads and an awesome set piece with the floating house slowly being filled with water. Poor Mabel. The Foxtrot Finesse with Sidney Drew is quite charming too, as a nice change of pace to the usual brawling slapstick.

My favorite film in the set is Bert Williams' A Natural Born Gambler, which stars Williams, a black comedian who made films for Biograph, as a hard-luck gambler. The story is somewhat racist, as all the black characters (interestingly all played by black actors) are stereotyped as shiftless and childlike, but Williams gives a wonderfully nuanced performance even as he appears in blackface make-up. The highlight of the film is the final scene, where Williams is imprisoned after a failed poker game, having lost his winnings. He proceeds to pantomime a hand of poker, including all the requisite dealing and betting, as well as interacting with his imagined opponents, and then after going all-in, proceeds to lose. It's a thing of beauty, with the payoff being that even in his imagination he still loses.

I'm not much of a Sennett fan, but I have a major fondness for The Bangville Police, which parodies D.W. Griffith's girl trapped in a room films (Girl and Her Trust, The Lonedale Operator), introduces us to the Keystone Cops (for better or for worse), and features Mabel Normand doing her best to mimic the Griffith school of acting.

I've seen a few Max Linder shorts, and Max victime du quinquina is probably the highlight, people acting drunk is funny what can I say?

Any other slapstick worth checking out?

[thirtyframesasecond]

Watched the 'Mad Love' collection of Bauer films, which includes 'Twilight of a Woman's Soul', 'After Death' and 'The Dying Swan'. OK, this might get a little embarrassing now as practically everything I've seen by Bauer should make my top fifty, including the number one place on my list. I'd never even heard of him before I began the project. 'After Death' might stand out most with its use of tinting for mood and the remarkable dream/'afterlife'(?) sequences, though it's nitpicking really. They're all incredibly good films. Bauer always has such masterful control over his material and what he's doing.

[zedz]

Busy weekend!

ALICE GUY

Really important very early work providing clear signposts to so much commercial cinema of the future, but not a lot of interest for me here. Syntactically everything is very direct and straightforward – an efficient delivery mechanism for basic entertainments. If I had to single out one film it would be the surprisingly inventive and brutal ‘drunk in a mattress’ film The Drunken Mattress, which works its idea into the ground (literally!), and that relentless invention drives Guy to a kind of breathless silliness that gives the film some bite and personality.

L’ENFANT DE PARIS (Leonce Perret)

A rather typical melodramatic subject, but fortunately Perret is not your typical teens director. Although all of the narrative set-up – a good three-quarters of an hour – seems perfunctory to me, things change once the father returns and the moppet is in the hands of the Graduate (no, here’s to you, Mrs Robinson! Give me Louis Leubas (Les Vampires, Judex) over Dustin Hoffman any day.)

After that, the film becomes one long extended chase, right across France and largely filmed in real settings, like one of the fabulous action sequences from Feuillade, but even more sustained. The sequence, which runs for more than an hour, is beautifully paced and beautifully shot, the kind of single long narrative gesture that’s rare for films of any era but probably unprecedented in 1913.

Right now, this film feels like it should be in my top ten, but I don’t know how crowded that purely abstract category is just at the moment.

J’ACCUSE (Gance)

And after Perret I wasn’t exactly sure how well this worthy warhorse would stand up in comparison. So I prepared myself for a self-improving slog. It’s a film I’ve heard so much about for so long I was almost hard-wired for disappointment.

I sat there patiently, watching Gance pull every single trick out of his big sack of cinema, plus a few he just pulled out of thin air (that great rack-focus shot). Well, it worked for me, M. Gance! The film tries as hard as it can to be a masterpiece and it succeeds through sheer force of will. It’s not just that Gance is determined to deploy everything he’s learnt about the medium, but that he deploys that stuff intelligently and appropriately, and within the context of a mastery of other, more elementary skills, such as pacing and composition. It also helps that the story he’s telling has a modicum of nuance and a shitload of awe that justifies the diversity of his kitchen-sink approach.

The performances are well-controlled, and Gance has a smart technique of making his actors extremely still at particularly dramatic points. When Edith reveals the horror of her abduction, the flashback is histrionically expressionist (albeit discreet), but her present-day performance is powerfully restrained, and there’s an eerie moment of repose late in the film when the ersatz family (husband, wife and child – but she’s not his wife and that’s not his child) sit by a stream, in a kind of carefully framed portrait that’s both pastoral and ominous. Gance does really well to mix moods so evocatively in the midst of an epic propaganda piece.

Another one for my notional top ten.


HAROLD LLOYD

After last week’s prompt, I rewatched the teen films from the Lloyd box set (only four, if I’m correct) and thoroughly enjoyed them. I can sort of see what knives was talking about with Harold’s mugging, but I’ve always read those grand gestures as ironic: comic commentaries on conventional performance. Keaton did a similar thing once he started taking on superficially traditional ‘hero’ roles: you know, the arms-open-wide professing-my-love stuff until they get distracted by something, that immediate distraction revealing the pretence of the romantic gestures. Anyways, it’s all a matter of taste.

My pick of the shorts is Ask Father, a one-reeler so dense with invention it’s going on my list. This is a good example of Lloyd’s irony at work. The romance in the film is purely functional, from the ludicrous exaggeration of romantic gesture at the top end (when the loved one is actually buried under chocolates and flowers) to its steady erosion by obsession throughout the film, as Harold’s goal is inexorably shifted from the supposedly unshakable romantic one to the purely pragmatic one of how he gets to ‘ask father.’ And the hollowness of those opening romantic gestures and the entire mission of the film provides the film’s punchline.

What really works for me about this film is Lloyd’s superb sense of pace and classical comic ‘plotting’. There’s a smart, rhythmic way in which the film’s repeated motifs and props (the cushion, the costumes, the treadmill) are marshalled. Rather than be deployed setpiece-by-setpiece, they build and recombine in unexpected ways for brilliant effect. Lloyd’s superb physical comedy is here in full force, but it too is entirely in the service of the rhythm of the comic narrative. This is a film in which Harold Lloyd scales the side of a building as an aside.

And that rhythm is masterfully controlled in other ways. Much of the film’s action – but not all of it – is significantly undercranked, and the extent of the undercranking changes from shot to shot according to the demands of the comic pacing (and so when Harold is going full speed on the treadmill he just becomes a blur of motion, like live-action Tex Avery). Even this very simple technique is carefully controlled for the sake of the final film. It’s all pretty much perfect. Thirteen densely packed minutes of fun.

Second choice would probably be From Hand to Mouth, in particular for its beautifully orchestrated cop chase sequences. Again, there’s a careful and considered comic architecture to these sequences, with recurrent motifs and variations. It’s not just he-runs-they-fall-down, or a simple escalation. Getting the chronology of these Lloyd shorts sorted out (no dates on the box) makes me realise just how much Keaton’s persona and filmmaking was based on Lloyd’s. This film is significantly pre-Cops, but not really far short of that masterpiece.

Bumping Into Broadway is fine, though it boils down to two rhymed setpieces (getting out of a run-down boarding house; getting out of an opulent speakeasy), and Billy Blazes, Esq., a western parody, is rather slight.

HELL’S HINGES (Hart)

I watched this years ago when I first inhaled the Treasures box set, but I had forgotten how bleak this western was. The film has considerable thematic subtlety (there’s only one truly good person, and she doesn’t exactly do much except stand around being good) and an impressively Biblical ferocity, applying a kind of scorched earth policy to sinners and saints alike. Pretty effectively shot, too, particularly in its use of huge crowds as elemental forces seeping or sweeping across the screen. And who doesn’t love a good bonfire? Another one for my growing short list.