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

[Tommaso]

"Hypocrites":

This film has been much praised here by Sloper and Gregory, and for good reasons: it's technically extraordinarily inventive indeed. Still, this is one of the few cases where I actively disliked a film for its message while being amazed at its visual marvels. The film exudes an unbearable piety, either of the Puritan or a more general Victorian kind, you decide: even a harmless chocolate box is labeled 'Indulgence', for instance. In the same scene, 'Sex' apparently is charged to be as something equally unhealthy. Also, I didn't like the much too simplistic allegory; at times I thought I was watching a filmed version of Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress". And while I'd normally totally approve of films that quote Milton and Browning in the intertitles, the general sermonizing simply was a little too much for me. Despite of the nudity, this film would have been cherished by those who were instrumental in getting the Hayes Code into action in 1934...

Sorry if I sound too dismissive about what is certainly an impressive piece of cinema in many respects, but I can't help finding the film well-intentioned, but utterly reactionary in a way that perhaps gives me the creeps even more than "Birth of a Nation". That intertitle about 'the narrow path and the broad road', and that self-castigating ascent that follows. Just one instance....

It was quite a relief to watch the unimportant, but quite charming "Eleanor's Catch" by Cleo Madison on the same disc afterwards.

[markhax]

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.

Yes, I agree. They are incredibly good films. I wish someone would release some more! Birgit Beumers devotes eleven pages to Bauer in her A HISTORY OF RUSSIAN CINEMA, and discusses quite a few films, so I assume they are extant. She says "A Life for a Life" is his best known film. "For Happiness," "Dreams", and "Nelli Raintseva" are some others she discusses.

[knives]

Zedz, believe it or not Ask Father may be on my list. I'd rank up there with some of Chaplin's Mutuals and I see the irony that your talking about with it. Actually the irony is so forced forward, especially with that what should have been predicted ending, that I can't help smiling. It's really the twenties where I start to find him obnoxious. Though, and I think this is a 10s film, Why Worry? is probably my least favorite of his films I've seen. The characterization of Lloyd's character bugs the hell out of me. The jokes, also just float there without making any serious impact.

[Gregory]

"Hypocrites":
This film has been much praised here by Sloper and Gregory, and for good reasons: it's technically extraordinarily inventive indeed. Still, this is one of the few cases where I actively disliked a film for its message while being amazed at its visual marvels. The film exudes an unbearable piety, either of the Puritan or a more general Victorian kind, you decide: even a harmless chocolate box is labeled 'Indulgence', for instance. In the same scene, 'Sex' apparently is charged to be as something equally unhealthy. Also, I didn't like the much too simplistic allegory; at times I thought I was watching a filmed version of Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress". And while I'd normally totally approve of films that quote Milton and Browning in the intertitles, the general sermonizing simply was a little too much for me. Despite of the nudity, this film would have been cherished by those who were instrumental in getting the Hayes Code into action in 1934...
Sorry if I sound too dismissive about what is certainly an impressive piece of cinema in many respects, but I can't help finding the film well-intentioned, but utterly reactionary in a way that perhaps gives me the creeps even more than "Birth of a Nation". That intertitle about 'the narrow path and the broad road', and that self-castigating ascent that follows. Just one instance...

I often respond to films in ways similar to what you describe, where some pedantic or deeply wrong-headed message rubs me the wrong way and takes over the film, at least my viewing of it. However, there is another kind of viewing experience that can happen when a film is subtle enough aesthetically to allow it to happen (completely subjective, I know). What happens in such cases is that I can acknowledge a dated, problematic "message" and consciously reject and it, letting the beauty of what's shown carry the film beyond (and possibly in a different direction than) what is stated. It's particularly easy to do this when something is quite foreign to me, as with century-old religious proselytizing. And yet withCivilization, in contrast, the existing cut at least, struck me as clunky and bogged-down to the point of being ruined even though the film still has a lot going for it.

Anyway, I would emphasize that ignoring the overt message is not to deny it's there. Nor is placing one's focus so completely away from the message to try to separate style from substance, or form from function, but perhaps there is something of a slippery slope toward those fallacies.

In Hypocrites, for me, something comes through the surface level of the film and conveys things far truer and more mysterious than any boilerplate religious attack on immorality (not to imply at all that your take on it was "surface" or superficial). However, I know that hitting viewers over the head with a religious attack on immorality is pretty much what Weber consciously intended to do. She was, among other things, a street-corner evangelist and social reformer who went onto produce what she called "missionary pictures." This is part of the reason I was so bowled over by this one when I hadn't felt any meaningful connection to any of her other work I'd seen (not even Suspense). I will probably watch it again before 6/1 to see what it's like with the initial awe diminished.

[Tommaso]

What happens in such cases is that I can acknowledge a dated, problematic "message" and consciously reject and it, letting the beauty of what's shown carry the film beyond (and possibly in a different direction than) what is stated.

Oh, I do the same all the time; otherwise, an enormous amount of old films, some of which are often regarded as masterpiece, would make for quite 'problematic viewing', and I'm not only talking about obvious cases like "Birth of the Nation" or "Olympia" here. I'm not even having so much of a problem with religious proselytizing, but I have the curious feeling that - unless Weber was indeed an angel - the film in a way is as hypocritical as the hypocrisy it tries to expose. Perhaps it's the underlying puritanism that irritates me, whereas I see in "Civilization" a much more general and essentially humanistic message. And I simply can't see that deeper mysterious level that you're talking about in the film, again unlike as in "Civilization". 'Truth' for me is indeed something much more mysterious than branding a wish for chocolates as 'indulgence'.

However, I know that hitting viewers over the head with a religious attack on immorality is pretty much what Weber consciously intended to do. She was, among other things, a street-corner evangelist and social reformer who went onto produce what she called "missionary pictures."

I didn't even know that, nor anything else about Weber's biography. But it doesn't surprise me at all. Yet again, what comes to my mind in this context is Capra's "The Miracle Woman", which perfectly exposes the very thin line between true 'inspiration' and utter hypocrisy. Perhaps I'm just too cynical, though, or this kind of religiousness clashes too much with my own beliefs.

In any case, I still consider it as a very powerful and perhaps even unique film. Some of the sequences still are very vivid in my mind, and at least that is indication for me that there is something to this film. After all, I'm myself a little surprised about my very strong gut reaction. Not like me at all, normally.

[zedz]

Thomas Graal’s Best Film (Stiller)

A fine film with, for its time, state of the art film syntax. Stiller’s really pulling out his bag of tricks, appropriately enough, for a film concerned with filmmaking. Scenes are broken up into individual shots, including close-ups, point-of-view shots and shifting angles within a scene, plus he’s deftly cross-cutting between scenes. He’s even audacious enough to deploy flashbacks within flashbacks.

It’s a film that presupposes a good deal of sophistication on the part of its audiences, and as with many Scandinavian films of the era, the acting is more effectively calibrated for the medium than many comparable American films. The sophistication of the story is neatly illustrated by the light dusting of irony with which it is told, particularly in terms of the discrepancies between intertitles and the actions they supposedly represent (for example, a complaint about slaving night and day is juxtaposed with a flashback of the complainer lazing in bed) and the way Stiller plays off against melodramatic conventions.

Stiller mastered this particular kind of deft, ironic comedy early on, and his work provided a template for a lot of what followed (not least Lubitsch, who carries the torch of influence well into the sound era). My top ranked Stiller (indeed, top ranked pre-1920 film) in the last round of voting was his 1916 Love and Journalism, but without any apparent opportunity to see it again (first, last and only time was in the early 90s) it’s starting to slip down the list. This one seems to me a notch down from that, but at this distance, who really knows for sure?

Thomas Graal’s Best Child (Stiller)

And this is a notch down again, but still a fine, proto-screwball marriage comedy with some contemporary satirical stabs (notably at aesthetic dress, which it seems is presumed to be dowdy). Rather more straightforward than the first film, both in terms of structure and syntax, but entertaining enough, though I doubt it will be troubling my top 50.

Figures de cire (Tourneur)

A nifty little miniature. I’m late to Tourneur and still need to get ahold of the highly praised Wishing Ring. This one-reeler is effective enough, but rather basic in its storytelling, some nice tilts and pans aside, though the florid damage to the print gives it an arresting (and thematically appropriate) Decasia-like splendour that might just about convince me to include it.

[Gregory]

Just watched Hypocrites again and found it to be just as elegant and fascinating as before.

Perhaps it's the underlying puritanism that irritates me, whereas I see in "Civilization" a much more general and essentially humanistic message. And I simply can't see that deeper mysterious level that you're talking about in the film, again unlike as in "Civilization". 'Truth' for me is indeed something much more mysterious than branding a wish for chocolates as 'indulgence'.

It is not without some flaws in the basic scolding message and occasionally with how it’s delivered in the part of the film near the end with the little iris scenes. (I think the short indulgence/sex scene you mention is a rare low point.) This is the presumptuous of telling someone a dogma about what is morally/ethically right in the eyes of a higher power, which comes with most similar religious messages.

At the same time, however, it was and is a politically progressive film in other ways. It eloquently shows the ignorance and hatefulness of a public who is shocked by the simple beauty of the human form (the statue) and too cowardly to face the truths it signifies. Included in these "truths" I mean not only what is shown in the film's later part (some of which is overtly political, such as the portrayal of government corruption) but also the social truths as shown in others of Weber's works: child labor, capital punishment, and other injustices. [Spoilers ahead.] And when they lynch the monk who created it, at least one apparently high in the Church hierarchy can be seen joining in the mob. In its portrayal of the modern era, it shows the hypocrisy of wealthy churchgoers.

The fight to get the film released with nudity intact shows, I think, some measure of the conviction behind this social critique.

As for the “mysterious level,” I do find that this comes to the fore only when watching the film without the musical accompaniment. It’s probably an unusual inclination, but I find the included music on most non-comedy silent DVDs interferes with the mood and makes whatever is shown seem more quaint and trite.

And now I’m off to make this a double feature with a viewing of Buñuel’s The Milky Way.

[vivahawks]

Thomas Graal’s Best Film (Stiller)
...
Thomas Graal’s Best Child (Stiller)

I really loved these two when I saw them a few years back, so this makes me even more eager to see Love and Journalism, should that day ever come. Best Child seems to get less notice than the first movie, maybe due to its less politically correct story and fewer self-reflexive touches, but I thought it was actually funnier, although Bessie becomes a much less interesting character. Maybe my memory's playing tricks but I remember being very surprised by her in the first film--there are a lot of dreamers and a lot of "wildcats" in early comedies, but she's one of the few combinations of such I remember seeing. Best Film also goes pretty well with Tourneur's A Girl's Folly, which is a lot more uneven but has some brilliant behind-the-scenes sequences--some of those shots wouldn't be out of place in Ruiz.

[swo17]

I thought I'd put in a good word for Pastrone's Il fuoco, which Tommaso had recommended earlier. It's really quite a different film from Cabiria, but no less essential. I'd actually be less surprised to find that it had been directed by the likes of Bauer. There might even be a little bit of Erice's Quince Tree Sun in there as well. It stars Febo Mari (who also directed and starred in Cenere -- there zedz, have I hit enough of your pleasure buttons yet?) as an artist who meets, um, an exotic owl woman and becomes obsessed with her, as she overpowers both his life and his art. There are some stunning visual moments here, and the final scene to me features just a perfect (I think) serendipitous moment where a string of paper birds start fluttering right as a certain character is just burrowing through the camera with his eyes fixed in this lobotomized stare. It's great, chilling stuff.

[zedz]

Okay, okay! Uncle! You sold me.

(Strangely enough, it wasn't the Erice or Cenere comparisons that convinced me. It was the owls diddit.)

EDIT: Watched it - thanks for the recommendation, Tommaso, and thanks for the arm-twisting, swo. You're right about that great (Psycho-esque) final shot, and right about the Bauer comparisons (two mesmerising little diagonal tracking shots, one back and one forward) and Cenere references (that lovely open air beginning), but surely you're kidding about The Quince Tree Sun!? Il fuoco has about as much to do with documenting the artistic process as Herschell Gordon Lewis's Color Me Blood Red!

Still, it was worth it to see Owly the poet ruin that poor sap's life. She has shot right to the top of my 'definitive vamp' list.

[zedz]

The Invaders (Ford? Ince?)

Revisited this very early western. Story-wise, it’s generic, but it’s generic in a historical moment where that’s anything but a criticism: it’s a genre-founding film. It’s weird to think that, as you’re watching unfold story ideas and specific narrative beats that would be repeated and ritualised into the dust over the next hundred years, you’re there on the ground floor, watching the rockslide-to-be starting out as one of the handful of pebbles being gently pushed off the cliff.

So at this distance, it’s almost impossible to judge the film as a narrative, except to say that it’s bracingly bare (and short, so that’s fine), includes intriguing elements that didn’t evolve into genre mainstays (despite all the ‘railway coming through’ narratives, surveyors never really took off as archetypal western heroes), and is far more even-handed in its depiction of Native Americans than much of what followed.

Visually, the film also sets up a number of archetypes, but for me the film retains a primal power in its compositions, and it’s that pictorial quality that’s putting it on my short list. There are a number of superbly organised deep focus exteriors in which the vast receding landscape and the movement of tiny figures in deep space really makes ‘history come alive’. The film offers a hint of the breath-taking composition in depth that reaches some kind of pinnacle in Walsh’s The Big Trail. There are also some attractively messy battle scenes, where the distant camera takes in a lot of furious action, without picking out specific characters or elements of action – they’re big battle tableaux that owe more to painting traditions than not yet existent filmic ones which would prioritise character.

Pulling out this disc, I also went back to a film that will definitely figure in my final list, probably the earliest film that’ll be on there: the Dickson Experimental Sound Film from 1894. Sure it’s an incredibly early sound film and all, but it’s the memorable oddness of what’s on screen, for all of fifteen seconds, that I can’t shake: the way that enormous horn dominates the left hand side of the screen, theviolinist and the dancers squeezed in on the right. The forlorn music is just perfect for this bizarre scene.

I also love the detail of the guy who wanders into the background of the shot in the final seconds. They’re making what might well be the world’s first sound film, and some guy walks in on them. Did some kind of altercation follow? “What do you think you’re doing?” Dickson bawls. “We’re filming here.” “What’s ‘filming’?” Bumbler probably thinks it’s some fin de siècle euphemism for guy-on-guy action.

I also love how they have to loop the fragment for the commentary. It really makes this seem like the saddest gay nightclub in the world.

[Tommaso]

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.

Have finally watched this now and agree completely as far as the filmmaking aspects are concerned; this is impeccable and truly captivating in many sequences, with the various animals and the 'ghouls' having the greatest impact on me. I also liked the pastoral ending very much, though here we almost come back to the familiar Victorian style of 'nature spirits', which you can also see in "The land beyond the sunset", for instance. Surprising how long this particular way of depicting such beings lasted.

All in all, a very good film, but I can't deny that myrnaloyisdope has a good point when he highlights the weaknesses of the narrative; I was also rather annoyed with the cop-out solution to the story's main point, and the Poe references seemed rather random to me.

[zedz]

Hypocrites

I’m a bit late to this party, but I’ve been enjoying the back and forth about the film. Frankly, the pompous piety of the film’s content leaves me cold, and some of its moralistic implications are batty (Did that girl really die from a bonbon overdose? And how come her brother drooling into the Book of Sex got off scot free?), but Weber uses her effects to create a unique, atmospheric film. The allegorical vision that dominates the second reel (climbing that hill) is a sequence unlike anything else I’ve seen from the era, and the search for transparent nudie Truth that follows is beautifully executed. The ideas behind both sequences are fairly trite and banal, but Weber conveys her sense of their deeper significance superbly, making them, like the film as a whole, much more affecting and convincing than it has any right to be. Which is why we go to the movies instead of reading books.

Arbuckle / Keaton

I’ve worked my way through the first MoC disc, reacquainting myself with these fun, formative works. In general, it’s reinforced my earlier impression of the films, alluded to in my comments on Lloyd’s Ask Father. Most of the films are ‘first one thing, then another’ daisy chains of thematically related gags. There’s a set and a premise, and Arbuckle will explore one comic idea to its logical conclusion, then move on to the next, then find another, or if he can’t, change scenes or focus - as opposed to the more carefully constructed and interwoven strands of humour in the Lloyd film.

Of course, many of Arbuckle’s (and, increasingly, Keaton’s) comic ideas are brilliantly conceived and executed, but for me they rarely come together as a fully satisfying whole the way Keaton’s later shorts (or the contemporary Lloyds) do. But I’m certainly going to make an exception for Out West, which is a little more ambitious in its narrative structure than the preceding films and a lot more ambitious in its use of cinematic effects, particularly in the way Arbuckle will seamlessly blend purely physical comedy with camera tricks within a single gag or suite of gags.

The (largely irrelevant to the rest of the film) opening sequence on the train is imaginative, audacious (Fatty grabbing ahold of the passing train at the last minute is a great moment) and pretty much perfectly paced and executed, and this is before we even get to Keaton, really starting to establish the boundaries of his screen persona.

[Gregory]

In some ways, the messages of Hypocrites are very much of their time, to be sure. Mainstream progressives and social reformers in that era took it upon themselves to protect and improve society's moral fiber, often in rather plain terms, and on the surface level of its message the film is a historical document of this.

Was anything in Hypocrites especially ridiculous in the context of its time? It's difficult to say, but comparing it to other "social problem films" of the era, I find that the messages are only unusual in who is the target of the social critique. From what I've seen, most films of this period dealing with vice equate it with the lower classes: there's a moral hierarchy, and, due to the squalid condition in which they live, poor people are trapped in a cycle of poverty, alcoholism, and vice that's largely of their own making. Weber's film, in contrast, points to the new urban middle class, high society, and the political establishment and chips away at the flimsy basis for their own complacency and assumed place of moral superiority. Again, there are a couple of brief moments in the course of this effort that are dated and silly -- and it's pretty simple for us to spotlight these, risking overemphasizing them -- but I'm hoping to argue for a bigger picture that shows why it's different. Looking at the film and the censorship battle over its release, it was by all accounts an uncompromising film, and again I think it shows genuine conviction rather than shallow editorializing to give a veneer of "seriousness" to a formulaic melodrama, as some of Weber's contemporaries were doing.

Some amount of heavy-handed preaching and moralizing is so common in the non-comedy films of the period: it's there in Civilization, J'Accuse, Life Story of David Lloyd George, The Sinking of the Lusitania, much of Griffith, Sjöström, and on and on, not to mention innumerable less famous works. As in the best of those films, in Hypocrites there is subtlety and ambiguity mixed right in even at the most overt "message" level: witness the odd, poetic "The mote in the eye" scene that falls between two of the more didactic "Truth's mirror" segments. Nonetheless, many of these have moments where this tendency now strikes one as dated or simplistic. That may border on the obvious, but I think fairness requires an explicit acknowledgement of how widespread these tendencies in fact were.

I also wonder if it isn't all too easy to gravitate toward more apolitical works that are in some respects less prone to extremely dated moments, even though these may be fundamentally schematic stories told at times with highly accomplished and beautiful filmmaking. I can appreciate some amount of that, but I also need to be able to see something like Hypocrites that breaks the mold, even if it falls flat on its face a few times in the process.

[Note: I hope no one sees any of this as strident "campaigning" for the film in terms of the poll. I'm in this for the discussions and the process of creating my own lists. How much I agree with the lists from the overall tally doesn't really matter to me.]

[Sloper]

Much of what I was going to say in defence of Hypocrites has now been said by Gregory: I can’t really think of a film from this era that doesn’t have some seriously dated ideas or values behind it. Indeed what’s so refreshing about Weber’s film is that the didactic elements are its whole reason for being, rather than the going-through-the-motions window dressing they serve as in most films. This discussion made me think of Intolerance. As some have pointed out, the film’s ostensible theme – intolerance – often seems to be pushed back in favour of awesome spectacle, and it feels as though Griffith is really only protesting against the intolerance of those who would censor his art: those who might have wanted to deny him the right to speak his piece in The Birth of a Nation, for instance. For all that it’s a magnificent film, there’s a creepy disingenuousness to it – not sure I can put my finger on what I mean.

The same is true, actually, of Weber’s Where Are My Children?, which myrnaloyisdope paid tribute to back on page 5 (‘a cynical but quite moving anti-abortion drama’, pretty fair summary), and which, as Gregory has pointed out, fails even as a piece of didacticism. At the time it was met with general confusion from birth control campaigners and censors alike for its incomprehensible stance on these weighty issues. Here’s a snippet from the accompanying booklet (on Treasures 3) which I couldn’t resist posting here:

Variety complained that the wordy opening titles – added at a late stage by universal – concerning whether or not to bring one’s children to the film, were absurdly contradictory: “You pays your prices and you takes your pick.... Minors should or shouldn’t be permitted to see this film.” Another commentator was amused by the “inconsistent sign” on his neighborhood theater marquee:

WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?
CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED

As well as being incoherent, the ideology behind the film is, to modern eyes, archaic and even downright sinister (eugenics, ‘race-suicide’ etc). I thought Hypocrites would look different after seeing this disturbing mess of a film, but actually Children? just throws into relief how earnest its predecessor is, and how completely Weber was trying there to put her astonishing talents in the service of a message and (more interestingly) a theme.

I said before I thought the allegory in Hypocrites was a bit clunky, and I kind of still do; but it’s also impressively complicated and intricate, and spells things out far less than it appears to. Much has now been made of the ‘Indulgence’ box, which I can understand people finding ridiculous – but it’s a little unfair to say that the girl is made out to have died from eating chocolates. Literally that’s what the vision says, but to read it literally is to ignore the most interesting thing about it: this is an almost entirely symbolic film, with hardly any narrative to speak of, and the intent with that sequence of visions at the end is to suggest as succinctly as possible the corruption that lies beneath these respectable, familiar bourgeois institutions.

We see the loving family (the same people who are so friendly with the priest after the service; he picks up the daughter and kisses her) gathered around the girl’s sick-bed, and it’s like a scene from a stage play or a film (cf The Country Doctor). You can almost hear ‘Hearts and Flowers’ playing in the background. But then Truth holds the mirror up to the scene, it blurs away leaving only her naked body distinct – we look into the mirror ourselves, and see ‘Indulgence’ and ‘Sex’ laid out in this respectable home. The little girl throws away one of the chocolates with a petulant gesture, and her father placates her as she chooses another one. What Weber’s doing in this scene is no more or less hysterical than what Jamie Oliver is (so I hear) trying to do to America at the moment: she’s telling us that we’re killing our children with indulgence. The chocolate box is just a convenient metaphor. I know this is obvious, but I just find the filmic technique here too bold and rich to care about the killjoy morals being extolled.

As for the ‘Sex’ book – this seems to me a rather ambiguous moment. The most obvious point of this is that the parents have irresponsibly left the book lying around, and the boy is being corrupted by it. But given Weber’s transparent desire to recommend Where Are My Children? as an edifying spectacle for all the family, and given that she has chosen to represent Truth here as a naked woman, the sight of whom only offends hypocrites, it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to suggest that these parents are preventing their son from learning about the important facts of life, while hypocritically indulging the every whim of their wayward daughter. I don’t know... Maybe I’ve gone off the rails here?

This all becomes even more interesting in the light of the hill-climbing sequence, where we see these same parents thwarted in their attempt to climb by their daughter: the mother gets a few steps up, but the father can’t ascend while carrying the girl, who is herself reaching out towards the slope. This is far from simplistic allegory, and the point is not revealed until the later iris shot: the blot on this family is their treatment of their children, and this is what prevents them from making the spiritual ascent. At the end of the hill-climbing sequence, the ‘virtuous’ lady, who has climbed almost to the top, begs Gabriel to reach out and help her up – ‘I need your hand’. Why doesn’t he give it to her? Again, the ‘mote in the eye’ scene (which Gregory refers to above) explains why: because this is his own Achilles’ heel, his sexual attraction to the young lady. He has to release himself from her grasp in order to answer his calling. What a great shot of his eye, with his own face reflected in it; I’m pretty sure you can see someone cranking the camera in there as well, which I suppose is a gift to the film theorists!

And then of course there’s the lady in black – this is not mourning, I feel, but an indication of sinfulness; a sort of Mary Magdalene figure. This becomes most clear when the statue is unveiled, and the ‘medieval’ version of the dark lady collapses in front of it, veiling her eyes in shame at seeing her own sinfulness exposed by this vision of innocence. Compare her reaction to that of the young man who looks over Gabriel’s wall, and is blinded and traumatised by what he sees. This is the same young man who was looking at the picture in the newspaper, and later he is the one who

Spoiler

discovers the priest’s dead body, slumped over the same newspaper.

And what about the shot where the ‘virtuous’ lady in white is suddenly shrouded in a robe of mourning, equating her with the ‘sinful’ one beside her? Sure it’s annoyingly pious, but it’s also a lot more layered and thought-provoking than it at first appears. It's full of inventiveness and imagination.

And an unscrupulous Freudian could have a field day with this stuff: in Hypocrites we have Truth, a naked woman, entering the world through a white gate, later emerging from a huge oval hole in a dead tree (a beautiful shot where her white skin blends in with the sun-drenched field seen through the hole, and she becomes visible as she creeps in front of the dark wood); in Where Are My Children? we have the babies' souls emerging from a strikingly similar golden gate in Heaven (these bizarre sequences are a euphemistically pious representation of sex, of course) and throughout the film you have near-constant use of shrubs, potted plants, fountains etc, which form a pattern of imagery that’s suggestive in ways I wouldn’t want to comment on without thinking about them for longer, although check out that extraordinary horseshoe-shaped shrub outside Walton’s front door, which frames his driveway, and which is seen in several important shots.

Like Gregory, I’m not campaigning here – well maybe a little, but I think Weber deserves it.

Despite its ideological issues, Where Are My Children? is an extremely accomplished film that will definitely make my list. It isn’t experimental or innovative in the way that Hypocrites is, but still obviously the work of a very talented director. Whatever you think of the film’s politics, its final shot is (as myrnaloy said earlier) unforgettably haunting. The acting is also pretty good, and this is easier to appreciate on a second viewing: there are several confrontation scenes, and one death scene, that are imbued with a verisimilitude I’m not sure Griffith would have been capable of. It’s so interesting to see Weber toning down her more adventurous impulses to try and produce something accessible; to try and compromise between didacticism, entertainment, and artistic quality. Despite complaints about incoherence, the film made truckloads of money, unlike Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control and Weber’s own The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, which were made soon afterwards, dealt with the subject much more straightforwardly, and were apparently not very successful (they sound fascinating, though; anyone seen them?).

[swo17]

Tih Minh

About a month and a half ago, a complete version of Feuillade's Tih Minh started making the rounds. It was only subtitled in French and Dutch (neither of which I speak) but I wasn't about to go through this iteration of the lists project without having seen it. Absolutely not. So, with a friendly online French->English and Dutch->English translator in hand, I spent the last week and a half gradually going through the film, meticulously typing in the contents of each intertitle card (every last accent and cedilla!), sometimes in both languages, making the most sense out of them that I could, and crafting English subtitle files out of all of this. In short, if you know where to find the film, you can probably now also find it with English subs. Actually, to be technical, I was able to translate a little over 95% of the intertitle cards. Some were too hard for this non-native to figure out, but if anyone here is able to help out with the rest of them, I would greatly appreciate it.

As for the film itself, well, um, I watched it in such a non-traditional context that I really need to just sit down and watch it all over again (sans five minute pauses every couple of minutes) before I can speak with any authority on it. But at this point, I find it hard to envision that it would not end up making my list (if only to justify the amount of time that I will have ultimately spent watching it!) Though for the uninitiated, I'll leave it at this: 6 hours of diabolical twists and turns, magic potions, mind control, hiding in baskets, kidnappings, exotic texts, international espionage, hidden microphones, mine explosions, a reenactment of the upcoming Criterion cover for Night Train to Munich, and a double love story, as only Feuillade could do it. What more is there, really?

[Tommaso]

Literally that’s what the vision says, but to read it literally is to ignore the most interesting thing about it: this is an almost entirely symbolic film, with hardly any narrative to speak of, and the intent with that sequence of visions at the end is to suggest as succinctly as possible the corruption that lies beneath these respectable, familiar bourgeois institutions.

Understood, but while I agree that the film might perhaps be symbolic rather than allegorical, it still seems to me that the symbolism is rather easily 'readable'. I guess I quite generally have an aversion against allegory/symbolism in film, unless the signified is something that lies beyond the easy grasp of spoken language. In this respect, allegorical/symbolic films like Jodorowsky's "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain" work excellently for me: to explain what lies beyond the allegory there, you'd need hundreds of pages; to explain what lies beyond the allegory of "Hypocrites", Weber would probably have needed only two paragraphs. In other words: if you have an easy message to convey, write an essay, don't make a film, at least not an allegorical one.

It's obvious that the film can and should be defended because of the visuals and Weber's adventurousness alone; but if you want to exclude the reactionary message in your assessment (something that the old formalist in me always approves of), then please do the same when it comes to "Birth of a nation" or "Triumph of the will".

---

Changing the topic: two more Tourneurs.

"Trilby" (1915) is an early filmed version of the Svengali-story, and honestly, it cannot quite compete with the 1931 sound version by Archie Mayo. Sure, the latter takes a far stronger 'horror film' approach and is pretty derivative in its referencing of the German cinema of the 20s, but it still works better than Tourneur's somewhat down-to-earth approach. Not bad, though, but somehow I was rather underwhelmed.

On the other hand, I really liked "The Pride of the Clan" (1917). One of the lesser known Mary Pickford vehicles, this is nominally set on a Scottish isle, but was actually filmed somewhere in the US. It doesn't matter, as Tourneur has a knack to make these locations look authentic and suitably rough, and I find Pickford quite convincing as a Scottish lassie in this oldfashioned-story of island life. Might make a nice double-bill with Tourneur's 1922 version of "Lorna Doone" with the gloriously overacting Madge Bellamy.

Oh, and bingo to all Swo said about "Tih Minh". It's simply an astonishing film.

[myrnaloyisdope]

I finally finshed up with Tih Minh a couple days ago as well. I've been watching it on and off for the past couple months, usually in 20 minute intervals. I just moved to Montreal last November and have been taking French classes since January, so I was able to follow the gist of the storyline, but I feel like I was missing a lot, which combined with rough quality of the print and the absence of music made things a tough go.

I would love to see it in it's restored form and hopefully in English, so I can properly appreciate the film. As it stands it's an interesting film, but I'm not sure it measures up to Judex or Les Vampires.

I watched Joan The Woman and was pleasantly surprised. It's not great, and the WWI framing device is pretty pointless, plus it's overly long, but it was pretty enjoyable. I thought the battle sequences were very well done, and the Wallace Reid/Geraldine Farrar love story is engaging despite being pretty ridiculous. I was expecting much worse.

[swo17]

By popular demand, I'm hosting the aforementioned English-subbed version of Tih Minh at the following links, in seven separate rar files:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Most updated subtitles

You need to have WinRAR (a free download) installed in order to open these. In order to get the film, you have to download all seven of these rar files, then simply select them all and extract the contents (two avi files and two srt files). Given the size of the film (about 4.5 GB in total) this was the only way I could think to do it.

If anyone has any concerns about me doing this, let me know and I'll take it down.

[zedz]

CABIRIA (Pastrone)

I hate historical epics.

Even with the best of the bunch, from a director I adore (say, Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire), I can’t get past the fundamentally hokey high-school pageant-ness of the whole thing. And though I’m completely in favour of ‘slow cinema’, I find the ponderousness of most of these films deadly (look at my sets, look at my cast of thousands, look at my stars and their ACT-ING!)

So I was approaching Cabiria with some trepidation. On the one hand, it’s been on my to-watch list forever, since I first read about “the first feature film (even before Birth of a Nation – wa-hey!)” as a wee-ish lad and saw some impressive stills.

On the other hand. . . Let me count the ways:
1) It’s a historical epic.
2) Almost every account I’d read of it criticised it for ponderousness and being a series of discrete tableaux rather than a flowing, convincing narrative (and thus the critic – somehow – saved the honour of making the ‘real’ first feature film for Griffith and The Fucking Klansman).
3) The positive comments about the film (‘monumental!’, ‘great sets!’) revolved around stuff about which I couldn’t care less.
4) Its major claim to fame seemed to be that certain scenes anticipated Metropolis – a film I just can’t stand.
5) Its other major claim to fame seemed to revolve around the guy who wrote the intertitles. Oh my.
6) It’s a goddamned historical epic.

So with a good stiff drink at the ready (it was a toss-up between castor oil and cognac – hmm, wonder what kind of cocktail that would make? Or should that be cogtoil?) I braced myself for 2+ hours of tedium.

Well, no tedium for the first ten minutes, at least, but how could there be, with all of that amazingly staged death and destruction? And after that, the hours just flew by.

Sure, the plot is as hoarily contrived as any togaed blockbuster, with the titular heroine a glorified MacGuffin, or the parcel in a game of fancy-dress pass the parcel (for a while there, I thought they actually were removing one layer of clothing every time the music stopped), and the acting is as eye-rollingly overemphatic as the stereotype demands, and the plot advances lumpily, with lots of exposition of big historical events that happen off-screen consigned to the intertitles (thank Jupiter!).

But the film moves at a great clip, and it’s a technical marvel – and not just in terms of its spectacle (which is as spectacular as everybody says, and quite seductive on those limited terms). When people were talking in this thread about Pastrone’s moving camera, I was expecting the standard tilts and pans, and maybe a couple of impressive primitive tracking shots designed to show off a particularly grand set. But what blew me away about the film was how pervasive the camera movement was and – far more importantly – how gloriously gratuitous.

In the vast majority of cases, the camera movement in a given shot is completely unnecessary in pragmatic terms. The movements are often slight and subtle – a small track to the right, then a small track back to the left, or a tiptoe track into a scene – and the same information could have easily been captured by a minor reframing (move the camera back a couple of feet, say) or no reframing at all. However, this fetishistic movement elevates the tracking shots from mere elements of functionality to elements of style. They enliven the entire film and confer directorial personality on the generic material, allowing it to be inflected with far greater subtlety of emotion (even when the actors are playing to people outside the theatre and across the street).

There are several extended tracking shots that really do show off the sets and the filmmaking mechanism, but it’s the tiny, sometimes almost imperceptible, reframings that I find most moving and modern about the film (a comparison to Gertrud at this point would be just too improbable, so I’ll refrain). Maybe Griffith’s montage-based filmmaking won the evolutionary race, but the longer-take mobile camera mode pioneered by Pastrone anticipates a lot of great subsequent filmmaking too, and it tends to be the stuff I like the most.

The other great asset of Pastrone’s filmmaking here is his expressive lighting. So much for The Cheat and its breakthrough chiaroscuro: Pastrone’s shadow work in stretches of this film is pre-Alton more than pre-De Mille. It’s particularly powerful when he combines this with his mammoth sets. Pastrone’s smart enough to realise that you don’t need to show off your art direction in every shot: sometimes enshrouding much of your cavernous, detailed set in darkness is far more spectacular.

So, this was a big hit with me, despite the odds. If anybody else has been avoiding the film because of a similar generic allergy, I urge you to reconsider.

The Land beyond the Sunset

So much praise for this film, which I remembered as nice but ordinary. Well, it is ordinary, a by-the-numbers socially engaged didactic drama, until at the last minute it becomes extraordinary. I don’t know if that transcendent ending is enough to earn it a place on my final list, but it definitely puts it in contention.

[Gregory]

zedz, reading the first part of your post, it seemed like we shared a similar view of Cabiria, especially on the basis of No. 3 on your list, which I took to mean the film can't merit the very highest praise solely on the basis of how "impressive" it is. But then it seems like that was about all that won you over.
Personally, I find its technique extremely impressive, I would even say 'beautiful,' on the level of viewing pleasure, but it doesn't offer much fodder for post-viewing reflection. It seems like empty calories, except as a primary source in looking at film history--namely, trying to weigh the innovations of Griffith/Bitzer, Sjöström, Ince/Barker, Weber, and other important early feature-filmmakers.
A two-part question, then, if you're inclined to elaborate: Do you find some deeper significance to what's presented in this epic; and doesn't the "gratuitousness" of the camera movements and other techniques pose any kind of problem for that significance?

[zedz]

It's odd. I actually find the emotional core of the film buried within the film's style rather than within the film's content, in its way of looking at the characters and the milieu of the film rather than what they're saying or doing. It exhibited a sure and sensitive directorial eye and - via its style - an unforced empathy for the characters / actors and their plight even though the plight may have been conventional and the actors / characters broad. For example, when a character was having a big emotional moment, she might have been grimacing all over the place, but the 'real emotion' of the shot for me would have taken the form of the director's tentative, subtle little track in, then his track back out, as if he were cautiously emphasising the emotion of the scene but then retreating before it became too intrusive. I actually found the restraint of this approach (as opposed to Griffith's close-ups) rather moving. I also found - and didn't mention this clearly enough above - the tension between the monumentality of the conception of the film and the delicacy of the syntax in this respect very productive.

I actually found real similarities to Evgeny Bauer's technique. Once again, I generally don't find Bauer's stories particularly original or the acting in his films particularly refined: it's all in the way the director handles the material.

And of course, objectively, I have to admit that most of those initial misgivings about the film still stand, but this list-making business isn't objective, and if the film worked for me - against whatever odds - I've got to give it credit for that.

EDIT: Just noticed that I handily ignored your question!

Do you find some deeper significance to what's presented in this epic; and doesn't the "gratuitousness" of the camera movements and other techniques pose any kind of problem for that significance?

Not really any deeper significance in terms of heavy-duty content, but I do find that the emotional core of the film (anxiety over Cabiria and sympathy for the other characters - which seems to be clearly where Pastrone has focussed the story) is expressed through the 'gratuitous' style.

Let me put it this way. If the film were purely dedicated to relating its story with clarity (and this seems to be a fair enough aim for a lot of early narrative cinema, where clarity in the context of narrative complexity was one of the central challenges and opportunities for early filmmakers) it could have done so with not a lot of difference to its staging and much more conventional shooting: no need for such fancy lighting, no tracking shots. And it might well have been a rousing success, with all the other spectacular and unprecedented elements in play.

But the extra, strictly unnecessary artistry in the film is what speaks to me across the years and, more to the point, it's the element of the film that actually delivers the narrative and emotional involvement Pastrone was striving for. This may be entirely unintentional on his part - that stuff may have just been put in there to show off, to add some more spectacle to the stew (like that gorgeous closing trick shot, which I also find affecting), but for me it delivers a human heart to what could so easily have been merely hollow spectacle.

EDIT THE SECOND:
And to clarify further, that 'human heart' is Pastrone's, not any of the characters'.

[Tommaso]

His Teutonic Highness, Herr Graf Ferdinand von Galitzien, has blogged his thoughts about Herr Holger-Madsen's "Himmelskibet", a film that I hope won't be neglected on anyone's list.

As to "Cabiria": weeellll..... my problem with the film is that it seems to fire from all guns in its first thirty minutes with the Etna eruption and the Moloch sequence, but then sinks down into what now seems almost standard 'sandal film' fare; this is of course a sign of its huge influence, and it towers heads and shoulders over contemporary efforts like Caserini's "Last Days of Pompeji", but still: it's difficult for me to find it really exciting, despite all the interesting characteristics zedz has pointed out. There is an enormous amount of characters, some only mentioned in D'Annunzio's intertitles (which are a fine read even in the translation), and that adds to a certain confusion about the narrative. Perhaps that would change if we had the longer version instead of Kino's truncated one. But, all in all, while it will surely be on my list, it will be somewhere in the lower tier, quite unlike Pastrone's "Il fuoco".

[myrnaloyisdope]

I just picked up a William S. Hart set that I hope to get through before the deadline. I watched The Disciple yesterday and although it's not his best work it's still quite good, much like Blue Blazes Rawden and The Silent Man part of the problem is that the narrative feels rushed. Hart plays a parson who arrives in a rough & tumble town with visions of reform in his head. In a very promising sequenece that sadly doesn't really pay off, the parson gets brushed off of the rough element, and then he borrows the sheriff's gun and march into the saloon gun toted to get their attention. After his initial request that they go to his church, he lets loose with one of the great threats I've ever read/heard/seen: "Am I going to have to preach to a bunch of cripples?". So awesome.

The narrative quickly changes though as the parson's wife leaves him for a slimy gambler/ex-doctor and the parson then retreats to the hills with his daughter and forsakes God. The daughter gets sicker and sicker and the parson becomes increasing distraught when in the midst of a brutal storm, he finally comes back to the Lord. All the while his wife is having doubts about her decision, and wanders out into the wilderness during said storm, remarkably coming upon the cabin in which the parson and his daughter are holed up.

The storm sequence is quite effective as Hart cuts back and forth between the parson's cabin and his wife wandering in the wilderness. The tension is built quite well through this cross cutting, and the storm feels violently authentic. The payoff has the villain saving the life of the child, and being forgiven by the parson. It is interesting that the film contains no violence, and the payoff isn't a shootout but rather features the restoration of family, and the redemption of the villain.

The frustrating aspects of the film are simply that character development is rushed, so there isn't any time to really let things sink in. In one scene Hart is hellfire and brimstone, praying for strength from God, and in the very next scene (which appears to take place the sameday) he forsakes God. Likewise his wife's decision to leave him is very rushed. It's problematic given the issues involved and it's a shame because the possibility for a great film is there, if only Hart had a couple more reels.

[zedz]

Regeneration (Walsh)

I know this film was mentioned early on as a major favourite of some, but it hasn’t got a lot of attention since.

It’s almost certainly going to be my top-ranked American feature of the period. If any 1915 film deserves to be celebrated as the pioneering American feature film, it’s this one, not Birth of a Nation or The Cheat. And although the film has languished in comparative obscurity, in an odd way it is a more formative film than either of those two: its direct descendants number in the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, even though the makers of those films may have been blithely unaware of its existence.

For me, this film still works a charm. Even though elements of it (particularly the plot) are generic (or would become so), there’s always something fresh and compelling happening onscreen. Raoul Walsh has already completely absorbed all the important lessons of his mentor Griffith, as well as picking up all sorts of ideas and techniques from elsewhere, and he’s applying them with great restraint and discernment, the style smartly moving out of its own way and serving the story and characters.

In the film you’ll find sophisticated use of intercut parallel scenes, close-ups, inserts, point-of-view shots, tracking shots and superimpositions, but all of this is deployed in an unforced, unfussy way. Walsh has by this point already managed to make his complex syntax more seamless than that of his master.

He’s also much more modern in his approach to screen acting. There’s the residue of stage conventions, which is only to be expected (though Anna Q. Nilsson’s performance is sensationally cinematic), but he’s also doing incredibly exciting things with non-actors – the film is full of striking physical types there to give a documentary dimension to the goings-on. There’s also the thrilling sight of real human behaviour (in an American feature film, of all things!) on the margins of the film. One particularly cherishable moment is when, on the boat trip in the middle of the film, we get a couple of shots of three vivacious young women reacting to the attention they’re receiving, in completely natural and believable terms – a tiny time capsule of real behaviour that says more about the era and its continuity with the present than most entire features.

It’s just a great film, with Walsh already showing his mastery of staging film action on different scales, from the epic to the intimate. It’s inspiring to realise that the director who would be responsible for the Great American Gangster Movie was already there at the very start of the genre, installing the various elements that he’d later bring to their expressive zenith.