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The Star Prince

I've just gotten the Flicker Alley Early Women Filmmakers set, and this was my initial viewing- it's a bit of a weird one. It's a fairy tale, a bit like The Blue Bird in the sense of feeling very archetypal in that respect, though I don't know if this story exists outside the movie; the hook, though, is that all the actors involved are kids (or animals- and while one, a squirrel, factors into the plot, most of the shots of animals are unmotivated cutaways to baby animals doing cute things, or just hanging out. Which implies that if nothing else, the nature of filler that will make people happy hasn't changed all that much in the last 99 years.)

It's mostly fairly cute- the kid playing the lead starts off playing a little shit, and he's better at it than he is playing the redeemed heroic version of himself, but he's not too bad, and most of the kids are so self evidently having a great time that it's pretty infectious- the villain is a Wicked Dwarf (which you wouldn't know if not explained- he's the same height as everyone else) played by a kid who has roughly one facial expression, but it's a pretty cute grr I'm so evil look (which becomes genuinely unsettling when framed in extreme closeup, as the film does a few times- as the kids are limited actors, it mostly shows them thinking by showing an intense close up of whatever they're thinking about, which mostly works.) The little girl playing the princess- who gets married by the end of it- looks to be about six, which makes seeing her in a wedding dress veer slightly more into creepy than cute, but on the whole it's very charming. It does suffer by comparison to Tourneur's work- the costumes are nice, but there's nothing that feels as imaginative as the realm of Night in The Blue Bird. and the movie never stumbles into the poetic quality his manages so frequently- but on its own terms, it's fairly successful, if minor.

Vampyrdanserinden [The Vampire Dancer] (August Blom, 1912): All right, forget about Theda Bara, as this Danish production is the 'true' origin of the cinematic 'vamp' (and not just as far as the term itself is concerned). Stage dancer Silvia Lafont (Clara Wieth) makes young men fall for her without noticing their love; an 'innocent' femme fatale it seems. Even though it's perhaps a bit indebted to the even earlier (1910) Asta Nielsen film Afgrunden, Blom's film is even more intense and captivating in its decadence, all culminating in a fabulous final stage sequence in which the dancer unintentionally kills her partner; a sequence quite likely influenced by the 'Dance of the Seven Veils' from "Salome". Elegant decors and costumes, and the exotic/erotic allure is everywhere. Great stuff.

Unfortunately the only available version looks rather bad (it might be one of those 'paper prints', which in some cases are the only surviving copies of Scandinavian films of this vintage, but I'm not sure about this), but it can be watched for free on the dedicated webpage by the Danish film institute, which also has some good-looking still photos from the film.

matrixschmatrix wrote:I've just jumped into Les Vampires, after having tried and failed to enjoy Fantômas a few years ago, and I'm enjoying it a lot- I don't know if it's that I've grown as a viewer, or that this one actually represents a significant improvement, or just that the print quality is good enough for me really to get aboard, but I'm two episodes in and fairly excited to keep going. Now that I know that it's at least possible for me to enjoy (though still not to spell) Feuillade- is Flicker Alley's the best release of Judex? Apart from The Spiders, which I've already watched, are there any other pulpy adventure serials I should seek out?

While I do think Fantômas is excellent, Les Vampires is markedly more entertaining in my book, and it's probably also the better introduction to Feuillade. I think the change in villain from the individual master of disguise Fantômas to the more nebulous group Les Vampires makes for a much more interesting premise that heightens the conspiratorial elements that would so clearly go on to have such a huge impact on filmmakers like Lang, Rivette, et al. I just viewed Fantômas for the first time at the start of this year, and I’m hoping to rewatch Les Vampires for this project, so hopefully I can provide a more detailed comparison at some point.
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I’m working my way through the wonderful Early Women Filmmakers set from Flicker Alley, so here are my thoughts on some of the standouts that are appropriate for this project (I hope no one minds all of the images. I’m better at keeping a visual diary with DVD screenshots rather than a written one.)

Les chiens savants/Miss Dundee and Her Performing Dogs (Alice Guy, 1902) – A scantily clad, whip-wielding woman call the shots for what must be at least a dozen on-screen dogs, as she orders them to jump, sit, and draw on a chalkboard on command. Simultaneously spectacular, strange, and erotic. Perhaps an appropriate metaphor for the role of the film director, and definitely a clever start to this particular set of films.



Une histoire roulante/A Story Well Spun (Alice Guy, 1906) - A comic travelogue in which a Harpo Marx-looking fellow is tricked into a barrel atop a hill, and, big surprise, the barrel is pushed down that hill. The theme of the film is movement, as the ensuing two and a half minutes are a delirious whirlwind of the barrel wreaking havoc across the countryside and city, disrupting the lives of people caught in its path and placing the barrel's inhabitant in mortal danger. Even in shots where there is no horizon line to clearly suggest a sloped landscape, the film effectively captures the sense of a hillside location through the frequent downward trajectory of the barrel.

The setting is largely rural, though sprinkled in are two shots of industrialized areas. First, in a suspenseful moment as the barrel teeters on the edge of a train bridge with what appears to be factory buildings in the backgound, and then in a shot of the barrel's stopping point in a large urban canal, the presumptive "bottom" of the film's geography. (I get a kick out of the fact that the legs sticking out of the barrel in this shot are so stiff and obviously fake.) A final comic touch is added when the protagonist, fresh out of the barrel, spins his way along the sidewalk, dizzy, drunk, and/or disoriented by the intoxicating sensory possibilities of the cinema.



Falling Leaves (Alice Guy, 1912) – The melodrama scenario of a girl dying of consumption (bookended by scenes of a scientist working on a cure) is unremarkable here, but the film’s strength is its emotion, as viewed from the perspective of the sick girl’s young sister (who must be about six years old.) The child, with no shortage of glances directly into the camera, is adorable, and really livens up the otherwise stiff setting. She overhears the family doctor’s prognosis of her sister that, “when the last leaf falls, she will have passed away,” and so the child’s naïve misunderstanding of time and death lays the foundation for her efforts to prevent her sister’s demise. I found it to be quite touching, but I’m a big ol’ softie. Of visual note is the "exterior" scene where the leaves falling creates a beautiful, evocative, autumnal atmosphere.



This also inspired me to finally start working my way through the Alice Guy disc in the Gaumont 120 Years set. I’ve viewed about the first dozen one minute films so far, which exhibits a range of styles: actuality, historical, magic trick, comedy, etc. Baignade dans le torrent/Bathing in a Stream (1897), with its gorgeous shot of river rapids, and Danse serpentine par Mme Bob Walter/Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter (1899), with its lovely, sinuous, abstract movements of the dancer’s dress, being the most visually interesting.






Suspense (Lois Weber, 1913) - Perhaps this film’s reputation precedes it (I seem to recall having seen it in a freshman year film studies class in college.), but I had totally forgotten about it, and what a breath of fresh air it is! Within a couple of minutes of the film’s start, its strong sense of a desolate rural atmosphere came wafting back to me. (Indeed, the protagonist family’s maid leaves in the opening minute, citing an incompatibility with “this lonesome place.”) It recalls most directly for me the mood of the early Brakhage film Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection, though that’s more of an intuitive connection based on foggy memories of that film (which I should revisit.)

On top of all of that mood making, Suspense is such a remarkably innovative, stylish thriller. It introduces or makes use of so many tropes that are still omnipresent in horror films, in particular, today. A mother and child are alone in the house while a tramp creeps around outside. The phone cord is cut and the prowler enters the house. There’s something so sinister and lurid about the way the invader ambles through the kitchen, casually holding a knife, digging through cabinets, and eating an already-prepared sandwich as he builds up to his attack on the mother and baby. Meanwhile, the husband steals a car and races home to save his family, the police hot on his tail. All in ten minutes. And it’s told with style to burn, making use of penetrating close-ups, jarring high angle shots, and the famous pyramidal phone call triptych. Exciting stuff. If I actually get a list together for this project, this is sure to place highly on it.





Discontent (Weber, 1916) – This wasn’t really anything to write home about until the ending.

Spoiler

A civil war veteran returns to the simple comforts of his old folks home, preferring it over the highfalutin mansion lifestyle of his relatives. The final image of the old man resting peacefully is lovely, and this, combined with an intertitle directed at the audience – “Are you discontented?” – makes the film a much more interesting swipe at materialism.

Also viewed The Blot, which is outside of the bounds of this project, but with those and Shoes (which I had seen previously and loved. Very eager to view Shoes again when the Milestone disc is released.), it is clear that Weber is a filmmaker of remarkable compassion. She’s four for four in my book, and I can’t wait to view more!

matrixschmatrix wrote:The Star Prince

I've just gotten the Flicker Alley Early Women Filmmakers set, and this was my initial viewing- it's a bit of a weird one. It's a fairy tale, a bit like The Blue Bird in the sense of feeling very archetypal in that respect, though I don't know if this story exists outside the movie; the hook, though, is that all the actors involved are kids (or animals- and while one, a squirrel, factors into the plot, most of the shots of animals are unmotivated cutaways to baby animals doing cute things, or just hanging out. Which implies that if nothing else, the nature of filler that will make people happy hasn't changed all that much in the last 99 years.)

It's mostly fairly cute- the kid playing the lead starts off playing a little shit, and he's better at it than he is playing the redeemed heroic version of himself, but he's not too bad, and most of the kids are so self evidently having a great time that it's pretty infectious- the villain is a Wicked Dwarf (which you wouldn't know if not explained- he's the same height as everyone else) played by a kid who has roughly one facial expression, but it's a pretty cute grr I'm so evil look (which becomes genuinely unsettling when framed in extreme closeup, as the film does a few times- as the kids are limited actors, it mostly shows them thinking by showing an intense close up of whatever they're thinking about, which mostly works.) The little girl playing the princess- who gets married by the end of it- looks to be about six, which makes seeing her in a wedding dress veer slightly more into creepy than cute, but on the whole it's very charming. It does suffer by comparison to Tourneur's work- the costumes are nice, but there's nothing that feels as imaginative as the realm of Night in The Blue Bird. and the movie never stumbles into the poetic quality his manages so frequently- but on its own terms, it's fairly successful, if minor.

The Star Prince is my most recent viewing from the set, and I very much agree with your assessment of it as an overall minor work, but one with some neat kernels sprinkled about just enough to keep me interested for all of the film’s 58 minute runtime. I just adore those shots of the bear cubs, and I did find the crude stop-motion animation used for the squirrel to be oddly charming. Otherwise, as someone with a fascination with old-time Halloween décor and costuming, I thought there was some impressive imagery in the cave. I loved the look of the witch and the imps, and the Wicked Dwarf’s nasty scowl and greedy handrubbing was amusing. Also, I’m always taken with creative uses of framing, as was used for a few shots here, with oddly shaped mats around the screen, such as the star shape and fleur-de-lis. Reminds me of some of the films from around this same time that are in the Lubitsch in Berlin boxset (Die Bergkatze comes to mind right away. Need to revisit those soon as well.)





Post edited to re-link images.

Emak-Bakia wrote:it is clear that Weber is a filmmaker of remarkable compassion. She’s four for four in my book, and I can’t wait to view more!

Make haste to Where Are My Children?!

I've already got the Treasures 3 set, so I really have no excuse for not having already viewed that one. I will be correcting that soon!

You inspired me to take a second trip into that set, and I watched La Cigarette- which I strongly recommend.

The print itself is in fairly bad shape- it looks good when you can see it, but there's a lot of lost information in the middle of the frame for big chunks of a number of important scenes (though more at the beginning, and not so badly you can't follow the action.) The film itself, though, is pretty delightful- moreso that most of what I've seen from the set, it comes off as genuinely feminist, in a really clever and incisive way. I'm going to spoiler tag the rest, since there's a twist (albeit a fairly guessable one.)

Spoiler

The setup of the plot is that an old (well, late middle aged- he's identified as being fifty) man marries a significantly younger woman. He's a bookish museum curator who buries himself in his work, and as such, he neglects her- not so much emotionally, as that she literally can't get him to spend any time with her. She therefore spends time with friends, both women and men- and of course, as he is insecure in his position as husband, he gets jealous and suspicious. He reads an old legend about an Egyptian monarch who poisoned one bun out of a hundred as a way to commit suicide without knowing it was coming while in a similar position, and decides he's going to do the same thing with his cigarettes.

Where the movie has a lot of strength is that it doesn't really play this for melodrama- the wife is very attentive to her husband, and clearly loves him, and he keeps going out of his way to prove to himself that she's 'frivolous' and that he cannot possibly hold her love. He spends a lot of time indulging himself in his self centered misery, carefully poisoning the cigarette, writing the note (in which he passive aggressively 'forgives' his wife while also holding her responsible for his death) and spends the rest of the movie smoking each cigarette with an incredible air of self importance and martyrdom.

The twist, of course, is that the wife figured out what he was up to- with fairly elementary deductive skills and a rudimentary knowledge of her partner, things that he both lacks and appears not to be able to imagine- and switched the cigarettes. Implicitly, then, she has spent all this time knowing exactly why he was taking them so seriously, and lovingly taunting him by offering to get him more. When he's down to his last one- which, of course, he assumes must have the poison, despite the significant odds against the poisoned one being the last- she insists on smoking it with him despite his protestations, describing an equally Romantic lovers-dying-together alternative to his scheme before telling him that she'd been on to him all along. He's thickheaded enough that he STILL doesn't realize that he should trust her implicitly- she has to address his (minor, circumstantial) pieces of evidence before he does that- but the movie ends happily, with him realizing, at least for the moment, what a wonderful partner he has.

It's a really well observed piece, and feels as though it is identifying and presenting this very real piece of male behavior in a way that, by definition, the man in question would never be able to see. It's also just fun- the fact that the twist is guessable makes it all the more so, since you get to watch the wife playing her part, and can enjoy the husband's theatrics absolved of any worry that anything really bad is going to result. This one is absolutely going to make my list.

Good analysis of La Cigarette, Matrix. I also just watched this and was impressed. It is interesting to see a Dulac film with a largely realist aesthetic as opposed to the impressionism of The Smiling Madam Beudet (which is an all-time favorite of mine that I've already revisited three times since getting the crisp new blu ray version) or the surrealism of Seashell and the Clergyman. It does still navigate the relationship between inner and outer levels of consciousness, but in a different way: the husband's inner turmoil is driven by his own suspicions (which are not given representation) and the way in which his fantasies dovetail with the story of the mummified princess. Placing the mummy inside their home was a great touch that added a disturbing memento mori to the mise-en-scene. The editing also seemed to gesture toward inner consciousness through the flashbacks: there is that great juxtaposition of a shot of the husband kissing her hand with his memory of the young man kissing her hand, creating a mirrored image across two levels of temporality. This reaches its apex in the conclusion in which the narrative of the film is re-written through the big reveal.

The mummy itself is presented unromantically- it looks like a corpse, in a very upsetting way- such that it undercuts the discussion of the great beauty of the princess and the romance of the story of her husband's suicide; again, it's clear how far the husband's inner world is from the things that actually exist. It also suggests, to my eyes at least, a critique of the sloppiness of his scholarship- he comes off not as a serious scholar but as a dilettante, a collector of curios who does not really understand or respect their historicity.

Which is similar to his sloppiness as a private investigator! This is in marked contrast to his wife, who immediately figures out what he's up to.

Next two weeks of film club will be devoted to a Criterion-released film from this period. Vote for the one you'd most like to discuss here.

Had no idea this list was going on when I was posting about Lubitsch. Possibly the easiest and the toughest list to write for so many reasons - if I could remember all the Méliès shorts I've seen in the past, those titles alone could probably make up the entire list! Les Vampires will most likely be my number one pick.

More recommendations, most if not all of which are easy to find online - these were generally unknown to me until Dave Kehr and Jonathan Rosenbaum gushed about them somewhere:

The D.W. Griffith shorts A Corner in Wheat and The Musketeers of Pig Alley, and the not-long features True Heart Susie and The Avenging Conscience.

The Lubitsch features The Doll and The Oyster Princess

The Yevgeni Bauer short Child of the Big City

I've actually just watched True Heart Susie, and found it to be a draaag- enough so that I'm starting to think that Intolerance is the outlier for being as interesting as it was, since everything else of Griffith's I've watched has had me checking my watch repeatedly. This one doesn't even have the sort of poetic extremes that make Broken Blossoms work as well as it does, since everyone in it is perfectly capable of being happy if they didn't behave stupidly all the time. Our heroine is such a nothing that she when she's sacrificed everything to bring advancement to the man she loves, she not only gives credit to some stranger, but fails ever to declare herself to the man (but of course, she never actually says that she's against having him know, so the way is clear for the aunt to give it away when the plot needs that to happen.) I assume there's some social mores playing into this, but we're also obviously supposed to dislike Bettina for her forwardness (as well as her carelessness about fidelity, and the rather unconvincing mercenary logic behind her moves.) Lillian Gish just watches these things happen and suffers and suffers and never says or does anything but enable it.

The infuriating thing, I think, is that this absence of character isn't played as being in of itself a tragic flaw- as it is, to some degree, in Brief Encounter, where the tragedy is in part that both characters ultimately let "I dare not" wait upon "I would"- but as something Griffith appears to think virtuous. Gish is a magnetic actress, and I more or less can't help empathizing with her pain, particularly when she's trying to hold it in, but she's fatally undercut by the idiot plot she's stuck in (though her little eye movements in the scene where she's letting Bettina sleep with her, getting across a sort of resignation to being too nice to rat Bettina out, are pretty wonderful.) Still worse is any part of the movie she's not in- the dissolving marriage between Bettina and Bill never feels emotionally real (in part, I think, because it feels like it's trying to protect Bill's virtue and dump everything off on Bettina, while simultaneously expressing his ideals in a partner solely in terms of what she can do for him.) Then too, there's an undercurrent of waiting out a relationship to the whole plot, and the climax feels narratively convenient in a manipulative way- Susie would of course never say she gave him the money, never tell him what his wife had really been up to, never take action to break his marriage apart, but people just wander in and do it all for her, so it's fine.

I probably would have pushed myself more to get something out of this nearer the beginning of the project- and even outside of Gish, there are some moments of characterization that work fairly well, even if I wasn't struck by any of the filmmaking in this one apart from, maybe, the intercut flashbacks to the leads as kids?)- but ultimately, it feels like a creakier, more backwards film than ones that were made six years earlier.

matrixschmatrix wrote:I've actually just watched True Heart Susie, and found it to be a draaag- enough so that I'm starting to think that Intolerance is the outlier for being as interesting as it was, since everything else of Griffith's I've watched has had me checking my watch repeatedly. This one doesn't even have the sort of poetic extremes that make Broken Blossoms work as well as it does, since everyone in it is perfectly capable of being happy if they didn't behave stupidly all the time. Our heroine is such a nothing that she when she's sacrificed everything to bring advancement to the man she loves, she not only gives credit to some stranger, but fails ever to declare herself to the man (but of course, she never actually says that she's against having him know, so the way is clear for the aunt to give it away when the plot needs that to happen.) I assume there's some social mores playing into this, but we're also obviously supposed to dislike Bettina for her forwardness (as well as her carelessness about fidelity, and the rather unconvincing mercenary logic behind her moves.) Lillian Gish just watches these things happen and suffers and suffers and never says or does anything but enable it.

Wow, not my reaction at all. Think about a film like The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and the naïve couple at the center of the story. The whole point is that these people are sweet-natured to a fault (and purposely so) - you see how that fails them time and time again, and how people close to them can take advantage of that. It's frustrating as hell to the viewer, but that's pretty much where all the tension (or entertainment) and most importantly the humor comes from - it's become a classic trope in American comedy. (Just the other night, my roommate was watching an old re-run of Frasier based around the same principle.)

As for their dissolving marriage being unrealistic, given what's in the film, that feels like an odd complaint. There's nothing about that breakdown that's implausible - the marriage was a terrible match from the start. And the economy and brevity of revealing how bad their marriage had become (or rather was destined to be - I can barely imagine them having a good day) is key to the comedic payoff - the image of what the guy expects and what he got. And that brings me to another thing I liked about the film - the intertitles for once in a Griffith film aren't terrible. It probably helps that this is a comedy - his purple tendencies are either held in check or they're done tongue-in-cheek.

The fact that the aunt has to intervene is great - Griffith does not make a big moment of it, but it doesn't matter, after seeing how these two would never have gotten married thanks to their own misguided goodness, it was very charming to see, and charming is pretty much how I'd describe the entire film.

Fair enough, I suppose it's a matter of taste and perception, but I can never see any distance from the subjects or sophistication in Griffith- there are times when that's not an issue for me (as with Intolerance), but here, it makes it feel... manipulative? Like, in Sturges' universe, the reckless indifference to merit shown by fate is always part of the joke, and where people experience personal growth or change, it's rarely related to what actually happens to them. Griffith feels like he's always trying to get us to cheer his heroes and hiss his villains, and in the case of Bettina, she isn't believable as a villain (her death feels like a punishment for her actions, in a way that's wildly disproportionate to anything she actually does) or as a person. My objection isn't to the idea that their marriage falls apart- which it doesn't, really, because divorce can't be allowed to exist, so she just dies instead- but that her getting married to him in the first place seems rather silly, as he's not particularly rich and it seems as though she would need to be far more desperate than her carelessness would imply to link her lot with him. For a movie where the prologue bemoans the limitations women face in finding a man they actually care about, it shows no real sympathy for a woman who is stuck in a marriage that could never work for her.

Honestly, though, I'm probably not giving Griffith a fair shot, because like Christensen's movies are also pretty straight melodrama, and I enjoyed them much more.

Guess I'm back here for at least a while more. I'm really glad with these two films being the return.

The End of the World
Not as doom metal as I was expecting, but still interesting in a way that I can't figure out if it is exceedingly mature or callous. The plot seems somewhere between von Trier's Melancholia and Kramer's On the Beach leaving me utterly uncertain if it is a great film or just the opposite. Either way it is wonderfully made with some very subtle performances that actually make me think that Dreyer may have been an extension of his home rather than some sort of new rebel. The film really emphasizes how catastrophic this crash into earth will be, but is almost only occupied with how that affects this family going through an Ordet like scenario. All this makes clear sense of the von Trier comparison, but the reason I bring up Kramer is that the way the film dedicates itself to domestic melodrama is almost as if this wasn't the end of the world which is a hard approach to do as evidenced with Kramer's film. I think Blom does a better job through having the comet be an essential mover of the plot. For example having halfway through the business stocks sequence which is an essential component to Stoll's character and how Dina will see him. It being forced by the mechanics of the comet is an utterly brilliant move therefore!

The ending more closely mirrors von Trier to the point where Blom has to be an intentional starting part given the structure of parties and how acceptance versus a good face plays into the emotional reality that is the stage for both film's main theme. Blom plays a bit more sincerely to the hedonism of the event which does not make it as great a film, but I think that is an unfair standard to hold any film to let alone one that incidentally goes through the Russian revolution a year early.

The Undesirable
At the very least this restoration Olive has put out is one of the greatest in history. I can't think of any other 100+year old film that looks this perfect and it really adds to the enjoyment of the film which is honestly only memorable for how crisp and clear it makes the world of Hungary circa WWI look. The story is a fairly generic European melodrama for its time with little to differentiate itself from, say, The Marriage Circle. That lets it run on steam far too often which probably helps in just absorbing the culture of the film, but that's just a contemporary enjoyment rather than one meant for its intended audience. It also probably keeps in too many dialogue inserts with the film feeling laborious under each pause. The main actress Berky, is great though and the film is worth renting for her performance.

The one complaint I have for the disc is that they unnecessarily changed the names of the characters into english ones which makes no sense for a release like this one.

Weird, I could swear I remember writing up The End of the World, but I can't find it- it's only been a few weeks, but already a lot of it has faded. I remember the orgiastic end of the world party thrown by the rich, and the rather odd plan for securing himself the rich guy had put together, and I remember how oddly provincial the end of the world seemed to be, but not a lot else. It's interesting that in what might be the first filmed apocalypse, the rich aiding the end of all things for a little extra profit is already such a prominent theme- it's hard to deny that it's still a relevant one.

The Undesirable was interesting, if only in the sort of well-executed melodrama way you describe; I'll admit I got somewhat distracted by some of the legalities behind the plot mechanisms, since the logic behind who needed what papers to be where was important but far from transparent to me. One thing I do always enjoy with movies like this is how different movie-actress beautiful looks to a different culture before modern media made such standards somewhat indistinguishable- and all the scenes with the lecherous husband were pretty fun, though turned somewhat sour but the ugliness of his turning his leering back against the lead.

I've just tonight finished Les Vampires, and honestly right now I think it might be my number one. I got through Fantomas, and enjoyed the sort of pulp-taken-to-absurdism vibe of it, but what Les Vampires loses in dreamlike circularity, it gains in actually having character development and throughlines and things. Nor does it lose out in sheer pulp inventiveness- I think the number of things that don't become vessels for poison over the course of the series is smaller than the number that do, but I was even more impressed by how much it managed continually to flip who had advantage over whom while only rarely making me infuriated at the characters for their stupidity; Guérande does make a lot of unforced errors (at one point, inexplicably standing by and watching while his target has time to stride past his ambush point and around a corner, enabling him to rescue a captive and get away) but frankly I don't think it's interpreting in the teeth of the text to think that he's kind of an idiot, buoyed up by the intelligence of Mazamette (and his mother, and his fiancee, and various other incidental characters. but never the police.) It also gains over Fantomas in that, not only do changes in position and advantage stick from episode to episode, but it actually has a relatively narratively satisfying ending, which was honestly quite a pleasant surprise.

More than anything, though, I think it becomes compelling because it actually has two characters whom I consistently enjoy seeing- the aforementioned Mazamette, who manages to grow from comic relief who shows up for a few minutes per episode to arguably the secret lead, and who has an outsized, engaging personality that managed not to fall into overbroad buffoonery- and Irma Vep. Vep isn't the cipher that the master criminal Fantomas was, and she is the only member of the gang who shows up with any real consistency- and while she doesn't necessarily behave all that differently from any of the other members, Musidora gives her a lot of life in her reaction shots, in the way she plays her roles in her various disguises, even in the way she moves when in full costume. It's hard to put my finger on, but it really does feel like a movie star performance, to the degree that I didn't particularly want her to get caught or taken out (whereas I was more than happy to see any given Grand Vampire put away.)

I think Les Vampires also stands out above nearly everything else I've seen as being sort of distinctly a pre-20s creation, rather than feeling like a dry run for something better still to come. While it obviously inspired a lot of stuff- Die Spinnen and Mabuse, obviously, and ultimately probably Superman and James Bond and all sorts of things, it still feels like the apotheosis of this particular kind of thing, something worth seeking out and watching for its own sake and not for the elements that would become something great later. The only other movie I can think of that I've watched for this project that feel that way- like something that belongs particularly to its decade, and could not have come later without being lessened- is Intolerance, which is probably its nearest competition for my top spot.

matrixschmatrix wrote:I think Les Vampires also stands out above nearly everything else I've seen as being sort of distinctly a pre-20s creation, rather than feeling like a dry run for something better still to come. While it obviously inspired a lot of stuff- Die Spinnen and Mabuse, obviously, and ultimately probably Superman and James Bond and all sorts of things, it still feels like the apotheosis of this particular kind of thing, something worth seeking out and watching for its own sake and not for the elements that would become something great later. The only other movie I can think of that I've watched for this project that feel that way- like something that belongs particularly to its decade, and could not have come later without being lessened- is Intolerance, which is probably its nearest competition for my top spot.

This is a really excellent point. A lot of the pre-20s films that I particularly love are either 'accidental' wonders (e.g. very early one-shot films that have bravura mise-en-scene or a semi-abstract visual impact) or ones that were clearly ahead of their time in anticipating more complex film grammar (e.g. a bunch of Scandinavian films), but Feuillade is the master of a kind of filmmaking that you mostly don't see later on. Even Griffith, to me, comes across as more of a primitive version of modern filmmaking, and as such seems much more dated - not necessarily in a pejorative way - than Feullade's alien magnificence.

Kino's Reel Baseball set has some of the most vile films I have seen from the era. There's some decent stuff too, but so far, I haven't watched the '20s stuff, whatever meritorious films are here are heavily outdated by the sexist and dumb longer films that seem to delight in protagonists that might as well get run over for all the good they do. It's not a fun atrociousness either. I could easily see WC Fields or Groucho Marx taking the plot of Hearts and Diamonds and spinning hilarious villainy out of it, but Bunny doesn't seem to realize just how atrocious his character is. That's not even the worst film here with The Busher somehow being worse. If you want the worst of the decade this set is for you.

Which cut of The Student of Prague is the better one to start with?

I presume the 76 min one if referring to the 2-disc Filmmuseum set? That's the original with fewer intertitles, I think. The other long one was shown on ARTE and is the recut one with additional intertitles. I've only seen that one. Maybe someone can confirm.

I'm not sure whether the arte version has more intertitles (I simply didn't compare the two versions in detail), but it seems that some disagreements arose over the formulation of the intertitles and more so over the projection speed and some tintings. As the 76 min. version is the newer one, it probably can be regarded as a little bit closer to the original, but honestly: both versions work marvellously, and probably the choice is much more down to taste (for instance, whether you prefer a piano accompaniment or a 'huge' orchestral soundtrack) than to any truly significant differences. The time difference is basically only due to the projection speed, which is different but works fine in both versions. So, as long as you watch the new resto and not an older print, everything will be fine.

I don't watch with music so I will probably just go with the shorter then.

knives wrote:I don't watch with music

Not even when you get a score originally and specifically written for the film in 1913? And it's a good one, too.

Phew, I think I would have fallen asleep if I were trying to watch Student muted