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Sloper wrote:I take zedz’ point, though, about the ‘uncanny’ quality of a lot of this material, and Feuillade is consistently working to unsettle the audience by showing ordinary, even homely, settings infected and invaded by the devious criminal elements.

I think the key to the uncanny is that it's the negative imprint of the ordinary. I'm no Freudian, but it's illuminating that one of the words you chose takes us straight back to his conception of 'the uncanny': homely / heimlich / unheimlich / uncanny. And I agree that this vulnerable sense of the ordinary is absolutely central to the secret power of Feuillade's aesthetic.

Is Maudite soit la guerre / War be Damned (Alfred Machin, 1914) available anywhere online? Where I've searched, it is not, but from what I've read this is recognized as an important film.

zedz wrote:I'm no Freudian, but it's illuminating that one of the words you chose takes us straight back to his conception of 'the uncanny': homely / heimlich / unheimlich / uncanny. And I agree that this vulnerable sense of the ordinary is absolutely central to the secret power of Feuillade's aesthetic.

Yes, I fell in love with Freud a few years ago while briefly studying him, and although I haven't read that essay for a while I think he makes quite a lot of the occasional identity between the 'heimlich' and the 'unheimlich'; the uncanny effect results the simultaneous unity and contradiction between these two qualities, or something like that. Of course, in Feuillade, this effect reaches fruition when Juve, having already been mistaken for Fantômas by the authorities, has to take his place in jail, even divesting himself of his trademark moustache; or when Guérande has to defeat the vampires by resorting to their methods, secretly infiltrating their lair and installing traps in it. Watching the heroes and villains gradually converge and mingle is one of the great delights of this type of fiction: we root for the good guys most energetically when they adopt the less heroic, but more attractive and exciting, qualities of their enemies. I'd be interested to see if something like that happens in Feuillade's other serials.

I picked up the Alpha William S. Hart disc on a whim, and am quite satisfied with the quality. 2 solid westerns in very watchable shape for 5 bucks. Totally worth it. Neither The Silent Man or Blue Blazes Rawden reaches the heights of Hell's Hinges, but both have some wonderful directorial flourishes, and Hart's usual engaging performance. The weakness of each film derives from how short they each are...the disc is 98 minutes total, so some potentially interesting scenes are rushed through, and it seems that Hart tries to cram too much into too little time. I'm looking forward to tracking down some more of his films. Anyone know where I can track down a copy of The Disciple?

myrnaloyisdope wrote:The weakness of each film derives from how short they each are...the disc is 98 minutes total, so some potentially interesting scenes are rushed through

That's significantly less than the correct runtimes for those films. Should be about 126 minutes. I don't know if somewhere along the line the 16mm prints were run too fast, or if the films are incomplete.
I've held off on buying Alpha's DVD of the early Student of Prague because its runtime is drastically less than it should be -- around half, unless I'm mistaken. To me, this is the most troubling thing about a number of their releases.

Interesting. The action felt a bit sped up at times, but I'm don't think it is enough to account for 28 minutes of difference in running time.

So… DeMille. I recently watched the first three discs of the Cecil B DeMille Classics Collection as well as The Golden Chance. My feelings about DeMille’s other work are quite mixed: I don’t love any of it, but of the silents I’d seen I liked the Godless Girl (bold, even wild filmmaking at times) far more than King of Kings (which, to my eyes, is none of the things it aspires to be, just an ugly, crashing bore).
Of this pre-1920s batch, the bottom tier included The Squaw Man, The Virginian, Joan the Woman, and Romance of the Redwoods. Carmen seemed similarly dull and silly, but it’s hard for me to judge it fairly because I kept comparing it to Chaplin’s Burlesque on Carmen.
Interestingly, some less characteristically “DeMille” works (i.e. not period and not epic) held a higher level of interest for me, though still with strong reservations: The Cheat, The Little American, Old Wives for New, Don’t Change Your Husband, and The Golden Chance. It still baffles me, though, how The Cheat became such a solidly canonical film not just for a film from the teens but among silents in general. Maybe it was harder for me to appreciate whatever melodrama and suspense it did pull off because I’d already seen the pre-code-era remake. The DeMille struck me as a somewhat clumsy attempt at an openly lurid film that doesn’t succeed even at the level of camp. The others in this group were all more interesting, I thought.
My two favorites were The Whispering Chorus and Male and Female. The latter is an extreme of camp and kink in DeMille’s work (at least of those I’ve seen). As I was watching it I actually became convinced that the director may have had a shoe fetish. The, er, interesting class and gender politics of his other silents about marriage reached a bizarre extreme here. I was pretty captivated by it -- far more than with later films based on the Crichton story, such as We're Not Dressing and Swept Away.
The Whispering Chorus is another wild story in which DeMille pulls out pretty much all the stops, but (with the poor music on the Passport DVD shut off) it succeeded in creating an effective mood with the double exposure effects, at least toward the beginning. I also thought Raymond Hatton gave a tour de force performance as the main character. Still not sure it’ll make my list, though.

Ooh, De Mille. I think The Cheat is fantastic, in spite of the film's inherent racism. The film's claustrophobic framing, and chiaroscura lighting are used to great effective to create tension and suspense, and the threadbare plot is buoyed beautifully by an out of this world performance by Sessue Hayakawa. The courtroom sequence is genuinely terrifying, an unintentionally powerful indictment of mob justice. In some ways a precursor to Peter Lorre's impassioned pleading in M, a shifting of sympathies from the victimized to the guilty. Although I must add that I was rooting for Hayakawa all along.

Don't Change Your Husband is enjoyable because it stays light. It doesn't delve into pseudoseriousness or explicit melodrama, but instead stays light and breezy, as even the climax is played for laughs. Contrasted with the dreadfully boring Male and Female, it reveals a lot about De Mille's tendencies...at his best he keeps things simple and direct, emphasizing character and keeping a consistent tone, and at his worst he sacrifices plot and tone for bombast and moralism.


The Whispering Chorus I thought was another outstanding film, as a depiction of mental illness it is very effective and Hatton's performance is another of the truly tour-de-force performances of the decade. The film is uneven and gets a bit caught up in convoluted plot mechanations, but it remains gripping throughout. I loved the use of superimpositions to create the image of hearing voices, a very effective stylistic conceit. I was disappointed by The Golden Chance, but Hatton is again at his grimy best, although sadly doesn't appear much until the film's final act.

It is not pre-1920's but if you are working through the Passport box, Miss Lulu Bett is probably the best film in the set.

By coincidence I watched a couple of DeMille films just today. I have to say, and I know I'm in minority here, that I really enjoy DeMille's films in general. Yes, they are campy and fillled with heavy handed moralizing and symbolism, but for me it's part of their charm.

Male and Female has been the greatest of his 1910s films thus far for me. Awesome (heavyhanded and campy as usual) thoughts about class differences and how they vanish when society around is not there to uphold them. Great photography, as usual for DeMille, and great use of on location shooting. Romance in the Redwoods was the other one I watched today and this might be the other DeMille to make my list.

And, by the way, I also watched Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen just a few days ago as well and didn't like it at all - I did see this after Cheat which I admittedly watched quite a long time ago but remember liking a lot. Chaplin's version just felt to me like a lazy parody in which slapstick with a lot of kicking in the ass is supposed to turn the material into a great comedy.

I think David Hare likes him and I'm not prejudged agin' 'im either

re: Blue Blazes Rawden/The Silent Man,

I asked about runtimes at nitrateville, and the response has suggested that the run times on the DVD are correct.

It seems quite difficult to find any definitive answer. Ninety-eight minutes for both of those films sounded too short to me, so I checked a torrent site to see what runtimes they had listed there, and that's where I got the 126-minute total. Looking more closely, however, the files on that site were from the Alpha disc, so the runtimes that totaled 126 minutes were probably just taken from IMDB.
I just checked James Limbacher's catalog of Feature Films on 8mm and 16mm, and the runtime listed for the reduction prints of each film is 70 minutes. I checked a few other runtimes in the catalog and they were correct. However, 70 minutes does seem too long for a five-reeler, assuming that each reel is 11 or 12 minutes. However, if The Silent Man were really only 47 minutes, it seems like it would have been a four-reeler when in fact it was five.
Doing a quick search of library listings for The Silent Man turned up a VHS release and the film itself, both with runtimes of about 60 minutes. I'm a little curious about this now. I know of one other book I can check, I just need to dig it out. If it has any information on this I will post it.

Some highlights from the past week:

Abel Gance's La dixieme symphonie (1918), an entertaining occasionally convoluted melodrama starring Severin-Mars as a composer whose new wife (Emmy Lynn) harbors a dark past. The wife was once entangled with a brother-sister team of blackmailers, accidentally murdering the sister. Thinking she has escaped, the brother (Jean Toulout) comes back into her life this time as the fiancee of Mars' daughter. Interestingly the film has a noir-ish feel, with the elements of the past coming back to haunt the lead, as well as the blackmail, and the sliminess of Toulout's portrayal, 30 years later he'd be played by Dan Duryea. My favorite sequence in the film, simply for being so mindblowingly audacious is the "transfiguration" scene, where Mars' playing his new concerto composed under the duress of his world crumbling around him, is so distraught with grief over his wife's past that he literally transforms into Beethoven. Fucking awesome.

I also finished the first disc (only 6 more to go!) from the Gaumont volume 1 set. I'm not especially impressed with Alice Guy's work, but it's good to see simply to flesh out this early era.

Some highlights from the disc:

Faust and Mephistopholes (1903) - a bizarre and delirious attempt to cram the entire story into 2 minutes. Incomprehensible, but nonetheless tremendous.

Alice Guy tourne une photoscene (1905) - the first 'making of'? A film of Alice Guy filming a scene, it has a ghostly quality to it, it's like travelling deep into the past and seeing a completely different universe.

Le resultats du feminisme (1906) - a bizarre and weird role reversal film, with men acting like women and women acting like men. The result of feminism is that men become women apparently and vise versa. This is the earliest example of the "fairy" I've seen, as all the men in the film act very prissy and dainty, and oddly enough wearing flowers in there hair. The women carouse and spend most of their time at the bar. The film ends with the men revolting and taking back their rightful place at the bar, leaving the women to go home and take care of the kids. The film is pretty loaded, and although I know nothing of Alice Guy's politics it seems strange that a woman would be responsible for this kind of film.

Very briefly (busy with other things right now), but I can only second the praise for "La dixième symphonie". Far less grandiose than "J'accuse", but I think that in the end it's the better film. And yes, that transfiguration scene is indeed awesome. The film is very high on my preliminary list right now.

I thought the Gance film was a boring piece of s***. As usual with his films the story and intentions are hopelessly confused, mixing ordinary melodrama with high art (or what Gance thinks as such) and a dubious uncritical fascination for genius figures which lead him to his fascist Napoleon. Two, three pretty shots, yes granted. Not worth seeing and the copies floating around are not too good either. Sorry fot my nasty attitude, but this was one of the films that made me wish I could switch to the 20s as fast as possible.

The DeMille discussion is quite interesting though I'm disappointed with the lack of love for my favorite film. Today DeMille is considered a pitiful buffoon with very limited abilities at best, a reactionary swine at worst. But while his later films especially of the 40s and 50s are indeed often excruciatingy badly staged (taking the silly melodramatics for granted anyway), DeMille was an artistic force in the 10s. His first two films widely available, The Virginian and the Squaw Man are so insanely bad that it's obvious that the director is a newbie with no experience. People talk endlessly in long shots, no filmic grammar whatsoever. Then it's only a year later and DeMille is making The Cheat and The Golden Chance. Now the Cheat is nothing more than cheap, racist melodrama, but it shows some good camera work which is so miles ahead of the DeMille from 1914 that you have to wonder what exactly happened.
But the crown jewel for me is The Golden Chance, a simple Cinderella story not buried in melodramatic or moralistic molasses, filmed with tact and has one of the great unsung heroines of silent cinema, Cleo Ridgely as lead actress who was quite striking because she reminded me very much of Romy Schneider. Rare is such delicacy and feeling in the acting of these times only in Tourneurs Wishing ring and the best Griffiths you find this still rather Victorian female idyll, but possessing a quiet dignity and strength and not merely being a precious doll or fluttering cuteness signpost as in the worser Griffiths. For once DeMille managed to keep one of his simple stories simple and not overload it with baggage and it's a beautiful film that found some adherents like Robert Birchard in his new book about DeMille who also points this film out.
As for the other films I could live without the historical stuff as well as the war propaganda and the comedies aren't that thrilling either though their influence shouldn't be underestimated. The Whispering Chorus certainly isn't the lost art film (and also neither the flop that ended DeMille's higher ambitions) as legend has it. I had a weakness for Romance of the Redwoods which I found rather clever in its story construction asking some good questions about gender and justice. And I hope you folks are working your ways towards Pickford's films and not avoiding them imagining some melodramatic stuff with a little curly angel at the center. Few stars are as wrongly remembered as her and she's one of the driving artistic forces of 10s cinema and her films with Marshall Neilan are full of inventive touches.

Since this post has gone towards leading ladies of the era, there's another tip which fits quite well since Alice Guy-Blache takes quite a beating here. Very much worth a look for a performance to rival the one of Ridgely or those of Pickford or Gish in this decade is Doris Kenyon's performance in The Ocean Waif which again offers us the poor girl meets richer/better educated/cultured man, but has also an added shot of vitality which makes her portrait even more remarkable than Ridgely's.

lubitsch wrote:Today DeMille is considered a pitiful buffoon with very limited abilities at best, a reactionary swine at worst.

No no, you meant to write

lubitsch wrote:Today I consider DeMille to be a pitiful buffoon with very limited abilities at best, a reactionary swine at worst.

Please stop dictating your own opinions onto the masses with absolutist proclamations! Even if DeMille is the dog a lot of film scholars kick around, your alleged universal take is uncharitable past the point of credibility. You're obviously well-versed in films from this era but I'd love to be able to read your thoughts on film without being told what my own now are

Quick question : does «L'Assassinat du duc de Guise» (1908) survives? Is it possible to see it anywhere?

Saturnome wrote:Quick question : does «L'Assassinat du duc de Guise» (1908) survives? Is it possible to see it anywhere?

It does survive, because I saw a beautiful print of it about 10 years ago. From MoMA, maybe? UCLA also appears to have a 16mm print, and I would venture a guess that the Cinémathèque Française has a copy. You used to be able to get a videotape from Grapevine Video, but it doesn't look like it's available anymore. You might be able to find that tape at some college/university library or other.

Matt wrote:

Saturnome wrote:Quick question : does «L'Assassinat du duc de Guise» (1908) survives? Is it possible to see it anywhere?

It does survive, because I saw a beautiful print of it about 10 years ago. From the UCLA archive, maybe? You used to be able to get a videotape from Grapevine Video, but it doesn't look like it's available anymore.

There was a Grapevine VHS in the 90s but at the moment the film doesn't seem to be floating around.
Then again if you've seen one film d'art you've seen them all. There is a rethinking of the earlier dismissals of the 10s theater staging (read e.g. Bordwell's blog) in favor of a more filmic style. Ingeborg Holm is seen as the first great feature film even though it's completely "outdated" by comparison with other films from this year in its scene dissection and intercutting (compare it to a film like Traffic Souls which juggles multiple stories via intercutting). But the sheer power of the blocking and movements of the actors focusing and shifting the attention of the viewer as the shot progresses is equally worthwhile and artistic.
But this doesn't mean that every filmed theatrical play is worth watching today because these films were essentially a product of snobbery or rather an attempt to cater to the snobbery of bourgeois taste. The results are stifling and Max Mack is a nice example where a director gets completely spellboung by the "worthiness" of its subject and the great actor he has at hand (Bassermann in Der Andere) so that he turns out an unwatchably stiff film without any sense of direction at all.

lubitsch wrote:Ingeborg Holm is seen as the first great feature film even though it's completely "outdated" by comparison with other films from this year in its scene dissection and intercutting (compare it to a film like Traffic Souls which juggles multiple stories via intercutting). But the sheer power of the blocking and movements of the actors focusing and shifting the attention of the viewer as the shot progresses is equally worthwhile and artistic.

Though I love Ingeborg Holm (and inevitably cry at the end - I love the way the print starts to disintegrate just as the tears fill my eyes...), I'm glad to hear you say this. The editing in Traffic In Souls is just amazingly sophisticated, and things like Atlantis or the Leonce Perret features also seem much more 'cinematic' - as opposed to theatrical - than Sjostrom's film. The leap between Ingeborg Holm and Terje Vigen (which I think will come near the top of my list) is dizzying.

Well, I have a curious experience: whenever Lubitsch recommends a film, chances are high that I might like it, too. However, whenever he actively disapproves of a film, I'm almost sure I will love it. . Thus I took his unintended 'recommendation' and finished watching Max Mack's "Der Andere" right now, and, well, I wasn't disappointed .

Seriously though: sure, the direction itself may not exactly be adventurous, but I can't see how any take on the Jekyll & Hyde-story may particularly add to the 'worthiness' of the subject, even if it is done in a surprisingly non-horror-like way. Mack indeed has a great actor at hand, but that is only for the better of the film in my view. What you perceive as 'stiff' is a certain slowness in the film, perhaps even indeed an intentional stiffness in Bassermann's character, but that only helps to create an eerie atmosphere that is entirely psychological here. It is quite fascinating to see how Bassermann portrays his 'other self' without much outward ado, with small gestures and facial expressions, but with a certain 'deranged' quality that is genuinely creepy, especially in the - for me - very ambiguous ending. Probably this is the first film that actually portrays a clinical psychological illness, without resorting to the all-too- well-known clichés of the horror film with its terrifying physical changes etc. It might make a nice extra on any further future release of Pabst's "Geheimnisse einer Seele" in this respect. Not a film that may have changed film history, but really quite astonishing for a 1913 film. Definitely on my list.

A few brief responses regarding DeMille, in response to myrnaloy and lubitsch, respectively:
I do see some good qualities in The Cheat, such as Hayakawa's performance and some of the lighting, but these things can't make up for what I found fundamentally lacking here (more below). As for the "claustrophobic framing," I hesitate to credit DeMille with this, partly because the telecine on so many silents seems inclined to obvious heavy cropping on all sides. I'd have to take another look, but having seen so little inspiration on display in most of the other DeMilles from the 1910s I honestly don't know how claustrophobic The Cheat was supposed to be. Of course there may be formal qualities here that I failed to appreciate on these first viewings.

Regarding The Golden Chance: if one is going to call out The Cheat for its racism, as lubitsch has, I think fairness requiress one to call out The Golden Chance for its classism. Both are built on a similar foundation of stereotypes and otherwise simplistic characterizations. These are not grounds per se to dismiss these films, but I'm looking for redeeming qualities and coming up with little in the way of underlying substance. Many of the films in Treasures III set also portray poor people as vicious, but many nevertheless managed to be more thought-provoking than the DeMille films of this era that deal with similar class distinctions, with the exception of Male and Female. Returning to The Golden Chance, I did like Cleo Ridgely's performance (and I remember looking up her biography afterwards) but as I said with The Cheat, something like that seldom "makes" a narrative film for me. Perhaps surprisingly, I thought DeMille's domestic comedies offered greater richness and interest.

However, even in the better DeMille films, I'm not seeing anything that comes close to rivaling the artistry of Griffith (and I hope there will be more discussion of the Biograph shorts before the deadline). Unsung works like "An Unseen Enemy" and "One is Business, the Other is Crime" seem far superior to me than anything I've seen of what DeMille was doing even years later.

I have been lucky enough to see some De Mille teens picture on a big screen recently. I saw a whole lot of superb GEH tinted prints. Believe me, it makes a huge difference with the DVD release of those films. Rather than The Cheat, the films that really caught my eye were The Golden Chance and Kindling. The clever narrative combined with some stunning lighting effects makes the two films a must see of the teens. I felt the stories had aged very well as well as the acting. But if you watched some grainy dupe on DVD, you loose half of the excitement. Kindling is unfortunately unavailable on DVD. It's a shame. It's a very good social film about an immigrant couple who lives in Hell's Kitchen.
In terms of artistry in the teens, I must admit that for me, the director that tops them all in the pre-WWI period is Léonce Perret. There is a sense of composition, back-lighting and overall sophistication in so many of his films that I just cannot find in the Biographs of the period. According to Henri Fescourt (another forgotten French silent director who made the best Les Misérables version in 1925), Mary Pickford decided she wanted to play a Dutch girl after watching Suzanne Grandais in Perret's La Dentellière (1912). Just an example of the influence of French cinema on the American one in the early teens.

I rewatched The Cheat this morning, and still digging it. Whether or not the "claustrophobic framing" is intentional or a by-product of telecining, I still find it adds to the the tension of the film. A lot of the appeal of the film for me comes from things that could very well be unintentional. The framing which adds so much to my enjoyment may simply be technical fault, the dynamic and terrifying courtroom sequence which seems to me a stirring damnation of mob justice, could actually be meant as a stirring reminder to the white audience that purity and virtue must be protected from malevolent outsiders. It is 1915 afterall, the same year of Birth of a Nation. I think it'll be really high on my list, if only because it's a really unique filmic experience.

I also watched Terje Vigen, much like The Outlaw and His Wife I was a bit disappointed given all the advanced hype, but it still ended up being an excellent film. I suppose I just expect every Victor Sjöström film to match The Wind or Korkarlen or Ingeborg Holm. Some wonderful framing and the tinting is glorious, really adding to the already stunning beauty of the natural environment. Victor Sjöström gives another remarkable performance, he might be the greatest actor of the age, he's impossibly versatile doing a fine job with broad comedy in the Mauritz Stiller films, and then giving one of the heaviest performances ever in Korkarlen. It should be a crime to be so gifted at multiple things.

I was pleasantly surprised by several of the films in Flicker Alley's set devoted to Douglas Fairbanks (A Modern Musketeer). I'd expected adventure, but not all of the physical comedy, general zaniness, or cocaine binging(!). The highlight for me was When the Clouds Roll By, in which a scientist tries to drive a man (Fairbanks) to suicide by drugging him, giving him bizarre dreams (and when I say bizarre, I mean it!), and meddling in his burgeoning love life. In films from this era, some camera effects, while impressive, can be obvious to the audience how they were achieved. Well, there's a scene early on in this one (in a dream sequence) that's still got me stumped. I'm also quite enamored with the way that Fairbanks exits through a doorway midway through the film when he has a particular skip in his step after getting some good news from a girl. As a final note, I feel obliged to mention that this film was also the directing debut of one Victor Fleming.