criterionforum.org

A strange thing happened as I’ve watched more films for this leg of the lists project. I found myself become less and less interested in early narrative cinema, particularly of the ‘landmarks in film grammar’ school, and more and more fascinated with the paths not taken: actualities, oddities and non-standard or ‘primitive’ narrative forms. Basically, I found that I was about as interested in finding a classical shot-reverse shot in a film from 1913 as I would be in finding one in a film from 1963. And with a few masterful exceptions, the narrative films with the least in common with ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ were the ones I responded to most strongly.

Antiquated forms like the static tableau could, from this distance, be as strange and compelling as those of Paradzhanov. Time has a way gentrifying the mustiest aesthetic culs-de-sacs. And I’ve come to value other qualities in these early films.

The mise en scene of the Lumieres’ gorgeous washerwomen shot may have been fortuitous or pragmatic (e.g. they needed to shoot from across the river to show the action they wanted to document, and that distance resulted in the necessity for a three-tiered composition), but I find it extremely eloquent and expressive. If you came across a 19th century painting featuring an identical composition while wandering through the Musee d’Orsay, it would stop you dead in your tracks, and I don’t have any problem evaluating these artful one shot films as a new form of painting, just as I could do for a one shot film by Andy Warhol.

De Mille’s The Cheat, on the other hand, a film I’d been looking forward to seeing for years based on the extravagant claims made for the film by several generations of French critics, didn’t evoke much more than disgust. The central branding / fight scene was well staged and many scenes had extremely effective lighting, but as drama it was lumpy and contrived and the performances were cartoonish (with the noble exception of Hayakawa, who underacts beautifully and steals every scene he’s in). The big problem for me, though, was that the film was racist tripe as unambiguous in its hate as Birth of a Nation. Just because Hayakawa’s performance shines through the years doesn’t forgive the scuzzy construct of the film in which it’s stranded, and the film’s conclusion sends the uplifting message that anything is permitted - theft, lying, attempted murder, perjury, lynching – so long as the slant-eyed chink gets his comeuppance and the rich white folk get off scot free (with $10,000 of the chink’s money into the bargain – cheers!). If the American justice system can’t swing it, the American mob can. There’s a very telling shot at the end of the climactic trial when the verdict is announced. Even though the substance of the trial has consisted of a witness identifying the smoking gun found in the husband’s hand, the victim identifying the husband as the man who shot him, and the husband admitting he shot the victim and refusing to offer any justification for the action, both husband and wife are shocked – shocked! – to hear the guilty verdict. That’s not the way the American justice system is supposed to work! Never mind – a white knight lynch mob will be there in a second to set things right and allow them to live happily ever after. Whew!

No amount of moody chiaroscuro could make this trash work for me.

In more pleasant news, I'm grateful for the deadline extension. I still don't have 50 films from the era I'm absolutely passionate about - but then my favoured position is to have more than 100 'can't possibly exclude' films vying for a place.

cysiam wrote:I just watched both of these as well, along with The Oyster Princess. The Doll quickly became one of my favorites, it's quite funny and charming. He handles the fairy tale quality of it superbly. What really surprised me is how light and quick these films move. They seem much more modern than 1910s. I thought The Oyster Princess was the weakest of the three (that foxtrot sequence is incredible though) but they were all delightful.

Oddly enough I had the opposite reaction; finding The Oyster Princess to be the best, even though I am not fond of the ending, while The Doll didn't entirely work for me. All three though were great grammatically and far more humorous than I usually find this sort of thing. In that last regard I'd actually lift I Don't Want... as the MVP, with every aspect of the film's narrative and style containing things I despise, yet I found it mostly consistently funny and wonderfully explosive. Maybe I'll place it above Oyster instead.
As an aside I'd like to throw out Flicker Alley's Saved From the Flames set which I haven't really seen mentioned here, but is deserving of notice. One of my favorite films from this project, La Peine du Talion. It's blunt as all hell in its message, but is superbly wonderful. It takes more from ballet than the theater that most films steal from. The version on this also has without a doubt the best handtinting I have ever seen. You could swear it was shot in 40s technicolor.

Nice hatchet job on The Cheat, zedz! I also am very grateful for the extended deadline, as my pre-1920s kevyip is still quite daunting, and I'm not quite up to 50 films I genuinely love (currently 40...)

Tommaso wrote:But I'm sure I should watch "Birth of the Nation" again before ranking it, not to speak of some less famous films.

Maybe I should take this opportunity to recommend (not for the first time) an old VHS edition of The Birth of a Nation; here is an Amazon UK link, which offers used copies for about £5. You'll need a PAL video player to watch it. I'll just copy and paste what I wrote over in the D.W. Griffith thread:

Many thanks to forum members htdm and Jonathan S for directing me to the Connoisseur Video release of The Birth of a Nation (see the ‘Kino Griffith boxsets’ thread), featuring a Brownlow/Gill restoration and John Lanchbery’s arrangement of the Breil score. I’ve watched it, and it’s a revelation on a number of levels...

First, it contains footage not present in the Shepard restoration. The only major bits I noticed were Stoneman flirting with his 'mulatto' housekeeper (censored for obvious reasons) and the second Cameron son dying in battle during the burning of Atlanta. Both very brief moments, but they fill up holes in the plot. Apparently Griffith was a compulsive re-editor of his films, and there may be many other differences in this version but I haven’t had time to do a thorough comparison.

Second, the image on the Shepard version is cropped. This becomes noticeable just after Mae Marsh has killed herself, and there’s a long shot of the cliff with Gus standing at the top of it, looking down. In the Kino release (and judging from the Beaver caps the Eureka image has the same AR) the shot looks ineptly composed, with only Gus’s legs visible at the top of the cliff. In the Brownlow restoration, you can see Gus’s whole body, his arms waving in despair. It’s a much, much better shot this way.

Third, Lanchbery’s score is sensational. The purist in me wishes he’d stuck to the original score all the way through, but his additions are always intelligent and appropriate, especially in the Gus/Little Sister chase sequence – a real tour de force. The best thing about this soundtrack, though, is that it reveals just how effective Breil’s score can be if played properly, by a really good orchestra in a studio with good acoustics. It has quite a ‘live’ feel to it, unlike many of the Davis scores on the Thames Silents, which are a little too clean and flat for my money. The occasional sound of a trumpet going wrong in the Lanchbery score just adds to the drama and vitality of it. The performance of Ride of the Valkyries is a major highlight, with the howling woodwind almost drowning out the main theme, creating a tremendous sense of hysteria and excitement. Karl Brown’s enthusiastic account of the musical accompaniment at the film’s premiere is cruelly belied by that manky noise on the Kino release, but with Lanchbery at the helm you really can get a feel for just how thrilling this film must have been in 1915.

Now if only the BFI would release this on DVD...

I'm actually not sure if I will be having Birth of a Nation on my list. There's still about a hundred potentials just in the waiting room let alone possible and I really do find the two battle scenes uninteresting almost to the point of ruining everything else ( the same thing can quite nearly be said for Intolerance for me, but luckily everything else about the film is so perfect I can ignore a few small battles). Plus I think I'll pay more than the needed lip service to Griffith anyways. I'll probably leave it at number 50 though.

Oh, you don't have to include "Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance" just because they are so famous. "Intolerance" did very little for me the last time I saw it, but I'll give it another try, if only because my recording of the arte broadcast of the newly restored version with full orchestral score (NOT on the disc released by arte edition!) has been lying on my kevyip for nearly a year or so. With the caveat that I'm still waiting for the second Kino set to arrive, I'd probably rank "Broken Blossoms" higher than both these and other Griffith films.

Let me briefly add to the praise for "The Land beyond the sunset". A truly beautiful and very sad film, which completely effortlessly combines harsh social criticism with the fairy-tale mood of Kirkwood's "Cinderella" or similar films, and with an ending that is at once ambiguous and truly transcendental. A very concentrated and impressive film with a running time of not even 14 minutes. I was not really happy with the classical singing + piano score on the soundtrack, so with my second viewing (on the same evening) I put on the more moody score specifically composed for the film by Wim Mertens, which is available on his 1993 "Epic that never was" album. Too bad the score as released on that (live) album is three minutes shorter than the film, so I had to wait a little before switching it on. But the music isn't scene-specific, and it worked wonderfully for the rest of the film and greatly enhanced the experience of it for me. So check it out if you can find it. The album is pretty great all the way.

Well the last time I watched Intolerance, I thought it was pretty much one of the grandest films ever made. I've never really bought into the idea of the "epic" before, but here the word almost seems like an understatement. The scope and scale of this thing, particularly in the Babylonian scenes and in the audacious finale, are as ambitious as what you might find in modern twaddle like Titanic or Avatar, but here, instead of numbing the audience with tired CG effects, they inspire eyes-a-burning, mouth-agape, honest-to-goodness true awe. How many films can you say this about? Seriously. Watching this film on my newish 50" plasma might have been the first time I ever thought I needed a bigger TV. Though I doubt even a giant movie screen could contain this film. The only worthy venue is if they could somehow project it out into space and you could just lie down on the grass and watch the film play out across the entire horizon of the night sky. I mean, I'm having a great time with this project and all, discovering lots of new and great favorites in the process, but let's not lose perspective here: Intolerance makes pretty much anything else you put up next to it look like a peanut.[/gushing]

P.S. Land Beyond the Sunset is also very good.

I just watched Intolerance for the first time this week, and swo, you won't get any argument from me about it being one of the grandest movies ever made -- you communicated its visual splendor better than I could.

The problem for me is that, in several other respects, it's a mess. Often times in the Babylonian story, just as Griffith was starting to let one of his awe-inspiring images sink in, he'd interrupt it for one of those goddamn convoluted intertitles that over-explained the plot in the main part of the card, then capped it off with a note at the bottom further explaining some excruciating minutiae about the time period.

Also, as baldly as the movie states its theme (which I don't necessarily have a problem with), it still manages to not actually carry through with it in a few of the stories, particularly the Babylonian one -- where exactly was the intolerance here? We're just informed that some of the characters are bad or treacherous, without much information about what beliefs or behaviors they're intolerant of (this is handled much better in the modern story with the Dear One and the Boy).

Anyway, I'm sure it will still be on my list -- maybe even relatively high, just for Griffith's insane visual ambition, which he pulls off -- but I'm pretty sure Broken Blossoms will be my highest-ranking Griffith (although I haven't seen The Avenging Conscience yet.

It's interesting how several times now I've been watching films for this project, and then I come to post something, and people are already talking about it.

I've been working through D.W. Griffith 2-disc Biograph Shorts, and am almost finished. I find the quality of his shorts to be wildly uneven, with many getting buried underneath layers of saccharine, or otherwise falling prey to heavy-handed sledgehammer moralism, but every so often there's one that knocks me out. The best film on the set so far is The Miser's Heart which manages combine a wonderfully suspenseful plot with some really understated moments of beauty. I particularly liked the closing shot of the petty thief, who has saved the day by alerting the police of the robbery and the child in peril, once again back on the streets grabbing a scrap of old leather to use as a blanket. Given Griffith's penchant for the power of restoration to improve one's social position, it was surprising to see him go the complete opposite route, and have the hero no better off than he was to start the film.

Enoch Arden was also very moving, buoyed by understated performances by all the leads. Death's Marathon also packed a wallop, with Henry B. Walthall giving a marvellous turn as a slimy husband driven to suicidal thoughts by all his failures.

I think The Country Doctor is still my favorite short of his though. Anything that can make me cry in under 10 minutes works, the shot of Frank Powell slumped against his daughter's bed post, completely dejected is wonderful.

What other shorts besides what's on the Kino discs are worth watching?

As for his features, I seem to be the only one on the board who didn't like The Avenging Conscience, perhaps I'll give it another go. Judith of Bethulia hints at the spectacle of Intolerance, but the copy I have is very poor quality so I can't rate it effectively. The Birth of a Nation is possibly the most deeply conflicting film I've ever seen. It's like being torn apart inside, marvelling at some aspects and being repulsed by others, and then Jesus Christ shows up, and I have no idea what the fuck to do. It will rank quite high from me, if only because it's an essential film experience, but I'll probably watch it again to get some better traction on it. Intolerance is grandiose to be sure, but I only really like the Babylon storyline and the Modern one. I think the Modern one would be an outstanding melodrama on it's own merits, is it that story that is used in The Mother and the Law? I have a copy of Hearts of the World that I ought to watch, and Broken Blossoms is probably my favorite Griffith film, it's brutal and grim, and of course Lillian Gish being Lillian Gish.

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

I love the Country Doctor too. It's amazing how much story they were able to get out in so little time back than, even though it's For His Son that really got me. I'm a sucker for Greek tragedy sort of stories. Sadly enough his short that will probably be the highest for me is His Trust Fulfilled. That bizarre, especially in hindsight, little thing makes my brain go into an overactive mode. The moral almost seems to be the opposite of that in Birth of a Nation. It still manages to be terribly racist of course, but in a less caustic way that I don't think has an ounce of hate and is more a matter of convention.

I re-watched The Avenging Conscience last night and still am not particularly impressed. Aside from Griffith's use of visual metaphors and Henry Walthall's performance I don't find much that makes it stand out, and then there is the cop-out ending that undermines everything that precedes it. Plus there is the convoluted subplot with the Italian vagrant that doesn't result in anything, and the Robert Harron plot that takes precendence for about 10 minutes and then never gets mentioned again.

I keep meaning to re-watch the Biograph shorts at some point; I know Sharphedin2 is something of an expert on them, but sadly he doesn't seem to post here anymore.

Anyway, just a quick post now to link to a fascinating appreciation of/interview with Griffith from 1914 (pre-Birth), published in an issue of Taylorology. It's some way down the page, just search for Griffith. Here are the first few paragraphs:

Richard Willis of Movie Pictorial wrote:Just a little while ago I saw the four-reel [sic] photoplay "The Massacre" exhibited in Los Angeles. I enjoyed every foot of it, and I could have sat through it again, a thing I can do with very few motion pictures. When I arrived home I thought over "The Massacre" and it was borne in upon me that I had seen that same story before, not once but several times. The "punch" was not new and the story was not original. An immigrant train is surrounded by Indians and dwindles rapidly and a man escapes and brings the cavalry. The little circle of defenders gradually fades, as one by one the men fall, and in the center of the circle a young woman with a baby is nearly buried by protecting bodies. The soldiers arrive and the Indians are killed or escape, leaving as the only survivors the woman and her baby. And the man who leads the would-be rescuers to the scene is the husband of the woman! That is the story, one which has been done before many times.

What was it then that held and enthralled me, that made the audiences applaud? It was the genius of the man David Griffith, aided of course by superb acting and the marvelous photography of Billy Bitzer. Sifted down, the credit belongs to the man who produced the play, and produced it without a script in his hand or pocket, as is his way. In fact, it was the little "touches" of the subtlest sort which made this such a remarkable photoplay.

During the attack we were taken back and forth between the grim defenders crouched in their death stand, and the circling Indians, with sudden occasional "cut backs" showing the husband with terror in his heart for his loved ones, imploring the troopers to better efforts to save the members of the immigrant train. It was the masterly way in which the agony of this man was exploited and the valiant fight in the circle that made "The Massacre" different. Earlier in the play we saw a burly gambler and a French gambler scoffing at the efforts of a timid little clergyman to bring them to a sense of better things; here in the circle of death the same big gambler interposes his own body to save the parson, the Frenchman darts from the closely packed ranks to pick up a battle-crazed boy and laughs and boasts as he picks off an Indian or two and then falls back with a smile--shot through the heart. It was these inspired touches which made "The Massacre" not an ordinary play but a veritable masterpiece, and it is these same strokes of genius--there is no other word for them--which make Griffith what he is--a director just a little better director than the best.

There was a time, I frankly own it, when I considered Griffith overestimated, but that was before I had studied his plays closely or had met him and talked with the man himself. I used to say with others, "It is easy to make a great play with all the resources he has at his command." Is it? I think not. Give others the same facilities and they will not make use of them the same way that Griffith does.

Because he knows human nature, his audiences and his art, he can introduce little incidents and touches of a like character which put vital interest and "grip" into the most ordinary happenings. That is why I put up "The Massacre" as an argument in defense of the genius of David Griffith.

He is an interesting man in himself and an excellent talker when once he gets going--and if you do not interrupt. I tried to interview him and he is an impossible subject! Yes, he is. But you learn a lot and have something to think about when you leave him. He is very courteous, and contrary to the general impression, does not place himself on a pedestal. He has confidence in himself and is sure of his points as he makes them, but he never attempts to put on a picture until he is sure of what he intends to do. He is a voracious reader and studies all the necessary details regarding the period which he is about to portray and is a stickler for the correctness of these details.

I’ve been trying to get back to some old favourites, so here goes.

A Lively Quarter-Day (Paul)

The reliably inventive R.W. Paul takes a Méliès template and outdoes him completely through sheer mastery of technique. I mentioned this before as a likely inclusion in my list and seeing it again only confirms this, even though it might seem very slight.

A room to let. The landlord removes the sign and tells the washerwoman to finish up so that the movers can bring in the furniture. There ensue a couple of minutes of chaotic slapstick during which the incoming furniture and much of the room is comprehensively destroyed, culminating in a gas explosion. This is all well and good, and very well-executed, but it’s the second half of the film that’s magical, as the tenant arrives and sets things magically to rights.

Piece by piece, cupboards resurrect themselves, shattered lampshades fuse together and sail up to the ceiling, and finally the magician’s clothes slink off to hang themselves in the cupboard. All of the techniques employed - reverse filming, pixilation, substitution – are old standbys, even at this early stage of cinema’s development, but they are orchestrated with the brilliance that similar simple effects would be in The Testament of Orphee. For example, Paul reassembles objects in a different way from how they were destroyed (a smart trick Cocteau uses in Testament, when a photograph is unburnt and then torn up – or vice versa), and his elaborate reverse motion sequence is very carefully composed and orchestrated, rather than presented action by action, and, most importantly, it’s slowed down just enough to give the magician’s actions a dreamy edge. The match cuts are very well done, and allow Paul to transition to completely different effects without missing a beat. It’s one film that communicates exactly how persuasive and poetic even the most basic cinematic tricks can be.

Suspense (Weber)

Everybody’s favourite, and I’m not one to disagree with the brilliance of the film, but, in line with my previous comment about my waning interest in early narrative cinema as Hollywood prototype, I don’t love this film because it anticipated so much of later filmmaking grammar, but rather because it didn’t. In some cases the gimmicky shots that Weber inserts into her trad, frontally-composed melodrama suggest later standard film grammar (i.e. pre-empting Griffith), but in most cases they’re shots which would be striking, odd and memorable in any era. The wonderful car chase shot revealing the second car distorted in a side mirror looks like it belongs in an Impressionist masterpiece by Gremillon or Kirsanov, not in a Hollywood gangster film, and that incredible close-up of the prowler gazing upwards into the camera wouldn’t be out of place in Herz’s baroque Cremator.

Split-screen effects would subsequently be formalised, and telephone conversations would become a clichéd occasion for their application, but Weber’s example is much bolder and more impressive, as she’s combining three different locations, only two of which are linked by the phone line and one of which is parallel action which only intrudes on the conversation at the end. I’d like to think that this was the director’s brilliant answer to a problem that perhaps nobody at the time suspected could be solved by montage, namely, how to intercut three separate and simultaneous, distinct but interrelated places, characters and actions (not just two!) without confusing the audience. Not only does she find a fine and dramatically effective technical solution to the problem, but she also tailors her compositions superbly to the eccentric screen spaces with which she has to work.

The Outlaw and His Wife (Sjostrom)

After praising this to the skies the last time around and recently seeing it kicked to the curb, I had to revisit it to see if it really was as great as I thought when I saw it all those years ago.

It wasn’t. It was even better, and it’s now in strong contention for my top spot.

The Kino disc is way less than ideal. Looks like an old analogue transfer, and it might be slightly fast (but I don’t think it’s as sped up as others seem to), but it’s all I’ve got and it’s more than enough. For me, this is one of the few early narrative films that is completely, compellingly emotionally involving. I find it incredibly moving and incredibly beautiful.

What’s so good about it? Where to start?

The performances are terrific. I’m afraid I don’t get any of Sloper’s sense of Sjostrom’s hamminess. Sure, he’s merry early in the film and somewhat boisterous, but as things get grimmer later on, he screws it down. I certainly don’t see the couple as mindlessly happy. I mean, even when Kari confesses his love for Halla, we get a deadpan, almost bitter close-up, not any kind of radiant love cliché. By the end of the film, I find the depiction of a long relationship soured by acrimony convincing and harrowing. For me, the level of acting in this film is streets ahead of almost any American product of the era in its subtlety and power. The potentially catastrophic sexual tension when Arnes joins the couple is almost entirely conveyed through John Ekman’s gaze (and Sjostrom’s handling of that stark landscape, but we’ll get back to that), without any of the histrionics that would normally be demanded.

Above all, Sjostrom’s sense of visual composition as psychology and drama is impeccable. His use of the landscape is consistently stunning and expressive, as far as I’m concerned this film is up there with The Big Trail, Toni, The Searchers, Andrey Rublyov, Porcile and The Red and the White in this respect. And Sjostrom’s mise en scene is just as superb in other areas. The central flashback, conveyed in consistent dark tones that contrast with the framing material, is full of stunning compositions: a door opened to a nocturnal snowstorm, a tight frame-within-a-frame containing furious abstract movement and silhouetting the hero; Ejvind lurking outside the parsonage in the middle of the light, the beams of light from the window traced in flying snow and partially illuminating his figure; the binding of the sheep in near-darkness.

Sjostrom’s also expert at dramatically structuring his material, and in building the landscape into that structure. The film’s key event happens offscreen, but it’s anticipated in three preceding sequences, all slightly different, all of which suggest different aspects of the horror of that absent shot (including one of cinema’s all-time greatest tilts, a breathtaking shot in a film which largely avoids camera movement – when Sjostrom finally moves the camera, he really makes the shot count). The combination of these three trial runs with a pregnant ellipsis drastically amplifies the dramatic impact of the event for me. Sjostrom’s intelligence and economy also means that the film’s sole in-camera special effect is saved for the very end of the film, and looks back at this event. The copious effects in The Phantom Carriage are extraordinary, but I find they overwhelm the dramatic heart of the film, which is one of the reasons why I prefer The Outlaw and His Wife.

For more visual marvels, look no further than the tense chiaroscuro of the final part and the stunning shot (again, worthy of Walsh or Ford) after Arnes sees the horsemen approaching and runs to warn Berg-Ejvind and Halla: the horsemen in the foreground, black silhouettes racing across a thick band of white snow, oppressive black rock hanging above them in the middle of the frame and the tiny figure of Arnes, another black silhouette, racing atop it across a thick band of white sky. It’s a brutal, hair-raising, doom-laden image.

Ditto everything you just said on the Sjostrom. I just watched the Kino again over the weekend as well (slowed down to 70%) and it was just a mesmerising experience. A few of the breathtaking shots you mention only last a second or two played at normal speed; lingering on them another second does seem to make a difference. I actually found that if you turn the volume down low enough, you can get it so you don't notice that the score sounds all stretched out, but still hear enough of it to enrich the viewing experience. Anyway, this will definitely place very high on my list as well.

Now where can I find this Paul film?

swo17 wrote:Now where can I find this Paul film?

It's on the BFI's R.W. Paul DVD. Amazon UK link here.

I got the Paul disc as part of Moviemail's BFI 75th Anniversary box, which is still available. Even though it's not as heavily discounted as it has been in the past, it's still fantastic value. You get the Dickens set as well, which is relevant for this leg of the project, and Piccadilly, which is relevant for the next.

Continuing on the Griffith kick, I watched Hearts of the World yesterday night. It's a pretty entertaining film with some genuinely striking images, and some strong though uneven performances from the Gish sisters and Robert Harron. Interesting to see Robert Harron mustached and looking much older than the perpetual babyface he usually plays, he is quite convincing in the more mature role, and it's too bad he died a couple years later as he could have done quite a bit I think.

It's pretty clear that Griffith was struggling with how to balance the film's love story with suitable amounts of propaganda. It's pretty heavy-handed in it's depiction of the Germans, although being a 1918 film it is understandable. I also thought it odd that the two leads are supposed to be American yet they and their families are living in provincial France. It's a contrivance that confuses me a bit. Erich von Stroheim makes a brief appearance as "the hun" but sadly doesn't get any real screentime.

I couldn't help but watch it with J'Accuse as a reference point, given their similarities, and although Hearts never quite reaches the heights of the final section of J'Accuse, it also doesn't have an annoying poet running around accusing things. I think in some ways it's a better film, less overblown than Gance's film, more of a solid piece of work (though still uneven).

I don't think it'll make my list, but it's a fine film that's gotten relatively little attention, though being sandwiched between Intolerance and Broken Blossoms in Griffith's filmography doesn't help.

Thanks for the R.W.Paul reminder, zedz. Have just rewatched "A lively quarter-day", and have to agree with everything you say about the second half of the film, including the Cocteau comparison, which wouldn't have come to my mind without you naming it, but the similarities at least in execution, though not necessarily in feeling (for me) are indeed there. Quite amazing how assured and 'invisible' the special effects are for a 1906 film. The first half, though, seems much more conventional to me, though I'm not sure how much this is true given the year the film was made. But that kind of 'physical comedy', as Ian Christie calls it in his as usual wonderful audio commentary (not only that the man is a wellspring of knowledge, he also has a voice whose pure sound I could listen to endlessly), has never really been my cup of tea unless it is in a Laurel & Hardy film. A matter of taste, I suppose.

I took the chance to quickly sample a few other films from the BFI disc again, and while all praise usually (and rightly) goes to "The ? Motorist", I would also single out "The Magic Sword" from 1901 as particularly worth-while. A fairy tale of Old England, it features an astonishing amount of 'transformations' and other 'magical' tricks, almost constantly appearing only two or three seconds one after the other. I always loved this early kind of 'magical' tales, this particularly Victorian variety of fairies and other beings. It's quite interesting to see the same 'style' still more than 10 years later in "Land beyond the Sunset" or the Mary Pickford-"Cinderella" (and I guess quite a couple of other films in between, too). But "The Magic Sword" has quite a dazzling quality due to its rapidity and variety, quite apart from also being a very 'poetic' film. I'm not sure whether I should really put three Paul films on my list, but I'd feel hard-pressed if I had to decide now which of the three I mentioned to include or exclude.

Thanks Tommaso. I completely agree about the first half of the Paul film being no more than a quite conventional set-up, but one of the things I love about the film is how it transforms into a completely different kind of film before our eyes. Using your apt referents, it's almost as if The Battle of the Century turned into Orphee. Or, more modestly, maybe it's the Something Wild of 1906.

First, eh, pardon my spectral (non)presence. Lots of flimflamium good & bad coming outa the margins and constituting a time-suck. But I've been meaning to jump back in here for quite some time.

I can certainly sympathize with, and aim to echo that general distaste for The Cheat. I've never been impressed by much of anything DeMille did in the silent era (there are a couple of good-time gigglefests from the sound era that I can go for, at least after screwing in my Amused Eye, most prominently The Ten Commandments... hyperserious bad beards and biblical chicks in false lashes and push-up bras twirling and going moist in their sheepskins for a pre NRA Chuck is always good for a rumpus). That whole dictum that DeMille, flush with earnestness and aesthetic sincerity, tried "the quality art film" and learned his lesson fast by poor ticket returns that "art doesn't sell-- sex does," sounds like rampant apologist bullshit to me, especially considering the very high quality work that was going on all around him. More likely DeMille's 'serious' pictures--then as now-- simply weren't all that much to write home about, and, owing to his lack of depth, he had to lean back on heliumized melodrama that was simulataneously moralizing and sexed up (talk about hypocricy), to make his living. Despite some visual flourishes here and there in pics like JOAN and ROAD TO YESTERDAY etc, this business is little else but grotty melodrama-- and melodrama hammered firmly in.

I checked out THE CHEAT years ago, with a hefty dose of cautious skepticism built in, owing to the stories about the French avant garde being influenced by some unique and powerful chiaroscuro effects that they'd not previously encountered in the cinema. After viewing the film carefully and waiting for The Epiphany That Never Arrived, I decided that if this story about the French was truly the case, then the issue more worthy of note and contemplation in the whole matter is-- as opposed to whatever salutary chiaroscuro effects are resident in CHEAT, more or less-- who was programming the cinematic intake of the French avant garde? Had they not been watching their own, most prominently Feuillade? Or the grand scale work that was coming out of Italy with chiaroscuro and lighting effects and camera movements that were light years ahead of their time (certainly eclipsing whatever noodling with shadows is resident in THE CHEAT). Bauer in Russia, work that is still ahead of its time? Not to mention the wonderful work that was coming out of Denmark which was extremely dominant both in the US and on the continent-- the work by that time of Christensen (THE MYSTERIOUS X, now that was wonderfully avant chiaroscuro beyond all shadow of doubt), August Blom, Psilander, Urban Gad, etc. And of course the work of US directors Griffith, Walsh, and the forgotten George Loane Tucker. In the end one realizes that cinematic enthusiasts during those years were operating at the mercy of first time programming-- there were no revivals, retrospectives, or film libraries... what you managed to catch on first run was what you saw, and therefore constituted your picture of What Was Going On In The Cinema. This doesn't take into account the lopsided arrangement between countries that existed at the time for import versus export of titles. Though it may have been difficult to see someone like Bauer in Paris in 1915/16, it certainly shoudn't have been all that difficult to catch the work of the prominent Danish filmmakers-- and certainly not that of the Italians... most notably a work like Cabiria (where D'Annunzio, who signed off on the interttitles he'd created for Patsrone, lived).

As for INTOLERANCE, my awe for the film just grows and grows. The scale of the achievement, the strange mix of elements, the incredible size of the sets, the uniqueness of the conception and the execution (no script was apparently used), the strange pall of religious--almost gothic-- gloom that hangs over these tales of the doomed.. all this heightened by the antiquity of these tales set in medieval and ancient times (not to mention the sense, for us today, as Intolerance nears its centenniary, of blanket antiquity about the production itself )... there's a looming quality about the film which causes it to register in my viscera like one of the Wonders Of The World. The fact that the Babylonian sets, and the incredible rolling elevator shot that brings us down out of the sky to ground level before the steps of the pirouetting temple dancers, are executed on a scale well nigh on a par with the Great Pyramid only serves to potentiate that looming effect. But there's a vast sense of mystery for me running beyond the grand physical execution and general surface text, that arises from the subject matter and the way the film is fragmented into these multiple strands that exist side by side yet are to be connected... yet for some reason do not entirely gel quite right ("That failure," says Orson Welles about the film's conception, and the possibility that the four stories do not quite "work" as a unified narrative whole, "is one of the greatest successes in the cinema,"). I love that feeling of almost accidental mosaic. The same sense of confused montage that one may get from reading the multiple, unattributed texts that constitute an ancient religious book, where wisdom tales are laid up against ritualistic songs, laid up against ancient tribal geneologies ("Fred begat Louie, Louie begat Hank, Hank begat Mary Lou, Mary Lou begat Archie and Bert, yadda") and accounts of war and temple building, laid up against aphorisms-- i e texts that were completely separate from one another and indeed written dozens if not hundreds of years apart by multiple authors who never knew one another, texts now forced together under the same conceptual/religious roof-- I get that from Intolerance. That same sense of "sacred confusion" (or wannabe-sacred confusion)--for want of a better phrase, my agnosticism probably prevents me from finding a better descriptive-- one finds in the Bible for example, finds an echo for me in Intolerance. One doesn't have to be a believer to appreciate the unique aesthetic characteristics the bible makes available to the reader, purely as a piece of literature. This result, which for me is purely atmospheric, a pall that hangs over the whole proceedings (albeit potentiated by the elements of narrative and production) feels in a way almost accidental. Intolerance seemed to come together half at random as it moved along, taking on a life of its own as it developed, under the forward-guiding motion of its director, who worked without a script, taking in elements from this, expelling those in turn... kind of like the way religious texts morph, taking found elements in as time moves along while pushing others out, under the general force of the faith itself but with no ironbound preceding sense of final grand design. Just like there are multiple varieties of the Christian bible, some sects proclaiming certain texts apocryphal that others accept, there is not one but many Intolerance's-- there is a substantially longer version of Intolerance--versus the Kino and Shepard versions, and the recently restored version that came out of Europe-- held by the MoMA. Robert Klepper says:

The original running time of the director's cut of Intolerance was 8 hours. Lillian Gish stated that the full 8-hour version should have been released as was, as valuable footage was lost forever in the editing process. The running time of the original theatrical release print was approximately 3 hours, 30 minutes. A restored print in The Museum of Modern Art comes close to this original length, but is held hostage and inaccessible to the public. The most complete print that is widely available is one of 2 hours, 57 minutes, which was the version used for Kino's video release of Intolerance. Most available prints run at 2 hours, 50 minutes. There were several different edit cuts of Intolerance. For example, there are three different ways in which the baby of the Modern Story's fate is presented. In one print, the baby just disappears and is never mentioned again after he is initially taken away from his mother, played by Mae Marsh. In another print, the baby dies. In the print used for the Kino Video version, the baby is reunited with his mother.

What's always most bothersome to me, and what quickly dated Griffith the most as cinema matured as a genuinely credible art form in the teens, was not his roots in the proscenium stage, Victorian narrative sensibility, his old fashioned lily white conception of womanhood (at precisely the time women were breaking out of their girdles and learning to have a rollicking good time as the 20's took shape), but his inability to restrain from intrusive editorialization in his own personal voice. The simple fact that he was posessed of such old fashioned worldview and moral values (combined with the obvious residue of Confederate racism and bitterness) did not neccessarily have to spell his industrial doom as the new art form really matured to sophistication during the Jazz age-- more likely it was the fact that he was inexorably, and inevitably one of that art form's first genuine auteurs, unable to speak in anyone else's voice but his own, that doomed him. His narrative preoccupations-- the old corn and cotton patriotism, the black and white moral universe completely unfamiliar, in terms of narrative craft, with the human attraction to lustiness, the bad boy, the criminal, and the bad girl.

What's so impressive is that a man with such apparently old fashioned worldview crafted his tales with such a completely flexible, anything-goes sense of experimental aesthetics. In his life he was nailed to old ways & means-- in his work he made it up as he went along. It's too bad that he didn't produce more works like BROKEN BLOSSOMS-- a real high point for Griffith in my view: in visual terms and in terms of pure film grammar, he produced what essentially was a blueprint for what would constitute the 'quality art film' of the 1920's... meticulously composed in visual terms, each frame beautiful, painterly, indulging richly in use of light and shadow, and playing these masterfully off of gorgeous tins of sepia, gloomy purple and blues... narratively, free (despite some hypermoralizing introductory titles) of much of the old fashioned, ponderous Victorian sensibility (not to mention silly humor) of his preceding works. Seeing Griffith sketch the sadness and melancholia of the denizens of a squalid Limehouse opium den--whores, addicts, general lowlives-- in a manner completely devoid of judgement and even in sympathy for their plight.. well, for Griffith (notwithstanding the fact that he'd been consciously on a mission to rehabilitate his post B.ofNATION image, endeavoring, starting with INTOLERANCE, to appear the kindler, gentler, more tolerant Grif) that's a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, out of these compelling shades of grey, Griffith would go right back to the hypersimplistic black and white moral universe of Way Down East (a well made film beyond all doubt), Orphans of the Storm, America, etc... so that, despite some interesting technical achievements in the 1920's (Isn't Life Wonderful has a lot to commend it) when he returns to the more nuanced pallette of The Struggle, it was just a bit too late for him.

I ordered the Perils of the New Land disc from Flicker Alley, after reading some raves about Traffic in Souls (which I viewed on youtube some time back and was thoroughly underwhelmed), and because of my desire to finally see The Italian.

I haven't rewatched Traffic in Souls yet, but The Italian justifies my purchase a million times over. What a marvellous film, featuring one of the great performances in all cinema by George Beban, a riveting story by Thomas Ince and some strong direction by Reginald Baker. Beban is thoroughly magnetic as the title character, Beppo, he's Cagney or Tracy-esque, brimming with life and menace. The character could easily have been played as a broad stereotype (some of the intertitles feature some "shut up you face" type dialogue), but Beban transcends the stereotype even as he works within it. He gives a rounded shape to the "brooding foreigner", his exaggerated hand gestures (in the "Italians talk with their hands" mode) become another tool to convey Beppo's joys and sorrows.

The greatest scene in the film comes during a marvellously long close-up where Beppo spots the men who have robbed him of his last dime. The look of menace and ferocity that comes upon his face is the kind of thing that will haunt a man for decades. It's mesmerizing, as Beppo slowly inches closer and closer to the camera (ala Suspense, or Musketeers of Pig Alley), before brushing past and getting into a vicious fight with his two muggers. It's astonishing, and a bit surprising that such a sequence doesn't get much attention.

The story is a melodrama but is filled with grim and unpleasant images, and keeps one guessing during the climax. It's really emblematic of the daringness that Lubitsch talked about regarding 1910's cinema. The willingness to take chances and go the less travelled route is something that makes this cinema feel so alive. Beban gives the story all the depth it might be lacking with his virtuoso performance adding layers of depth and nuance.

Barker's direction is strong as well with some nifty dissolves, and a really effective use of close-ups to reveal information and develop character. The use of a prologue and epilogue to frame the narrative is pretty brilliant as well, as it is revealed that Beban the actor is reading the story of The Italian, the opening shot being a curtain opening and the closing shot being the curtain closing.

A Tremendous film that deserves much more attention.

Nice to hear some fulsome praise for The Outlaw and His Wife; I suspect my reasons for disliking it are very personal. Terje Vigen is currently number 3 on my list, so I may post an encomium to that one at some point...

Also nice to see Schreck back. Nothing to add to the chorus of worship on Intolerance, except to say ditto to everything. I’d be very surprised if it didn’t top the final list.

Also also nice to be reminded of A Lively Quarter-Day. I actually think the slapstick in the first part is pretty funny, but maybe it just seems that way after those funny-as-leprosy ‘comedies’ with which the rest of the disc is peppered. I remember watching this for the first time and being surprised at how well-choreographed the mayhem was, only to be fairly knocked unconscious by the last minute or so.

I’d like to put in a word for The Haunted Curiosity Shop, for the generally sinister tone with which it imbues the familiar tricks, and also for the ending: the brief glimpse of the blurred face looming towards us is perhaps more unsettling than the complete shot would have been. (This may seem an unworthy comparison to some, but it reminds me of the hand coming out of the well in the original Ring.)

One more favourite from the Paul disc – Hammerfest. As picturesque as any of those Lumière or Mitchell and Kenyon ‘travelogue’ films, a really gorgeous little ‘moving picture’. Worth watching three times in a row.

And yes, Christie’s commentary has to be one of the most well-researched I’ve ever heard. Everything I know about early 20th-century whaling practices, I learned from him.

As a rule, I’m not in love with ‘trick’ films in the way I used to be when first discovering this era. The ? Motorist, for instance, doesn’t seem to push my buttons anymore. And I’m desperately trying to think of a Méliès film I genuinely love... The Devilish Tenant is the only one I still feel any real affection for (coincidentally similar to Quarter-Day...), but perhaps I just haven’t seen enough of his films.

Among the recent items to fall off the kevyip was James Keane’s Richard III, as recommended by Schreck. It’s an impressive piece of work: first of all, Frederick Warde’s performance is suitably hammy and charismatic, like a cross between a grasshopper and an evil clown. His body language is oddly hypnotic, and at times he appears to be orchestrating the movements of everybody around him like some demonic conductor. Watch his hands wave Edward into signing Clarence’s death warrant, and later on knead him, with mock-lamentation, into death; better still, when one of the princes parodies Richard's hunched back and the onlookers burst into laughter, Warde swings round and hushes them with a menace that is at least half comical. The best thing about him, in fact, is that he has a sense of humour about the whole thing. I loved his little victorious thigh slaps and hand flourishes at every achievement; since we can’t hear his verbal rhetoric, his wooing of Anne and of the crowd stirred up by Buckingham are less than convincing, so Warde’s partly ironic performance helps to ease things along. Apart from Keane himself (who swashbuckles pleasantly enough as Henry of Richmond, providing an effective contrast and corrective to the anti-hero’s crooked, stalking movements) no one else really does any acting here. There isn't time.

Although the film is very lavish for 1912 (big sets, well-handled crowd scenes, and of course it’s an hour long), there isn’t anything terribly groundbreaking here in cinematic terms. Still, it’s very thoughtfully staged and composed: the familiar dynamic between light as goodness and darkness as evil is at play throughout the film, but more interesting than this is the dynamic between interior and exterior action. This is set up from the beginning, when Richard murders Henry VI in his cell: Richard a dark figure pictured against the stone wall on the right, Henry lit by a glow of sunlight coming through an opening that leads to a balcony; after the murder, Richard steps out onto the balcony to wave down at his brother, who is arriving in triumph, thronged by cheering crowds; then Richard retreats into the cell to stab Henry a couple more times, before wiping the blood on his cloak.

The play depends to a great extent on Richard’s frequent and lengthy asides to the audience, and on the fun of seeing him hatch various schemes, then put them into practice. In the absence of these famous speeches, the film conveys the same point visually. Later on, the same cell and balcony are used for the scene (the best in the play, I think) where Buckingham and Gloucester stage-manage the latter’s ascension to the throne; and I’m pretty sure we see the young princes imprisoned in this cell shortly before their murder. We see both the creeping, poisoning Richard of the shadows and dungeons (including one very effective shot where he directs the poisoning of his wife), and the public Richard in the sun-drenched exteriors, all charm, piety and sincerity.

Henry of Richmond is introduced towards the end as he departs in a boat for England: in a shot that looks forward to Nosferatu, we see this boat sailing slowly in the direction of the camera, its huge white mast with a black cross on it looming towards us – until this point the film is saturated with imagery of concealment, darkness, hypocrisy etc, so this shot serves as a highly effective moment of liberation and release, as we see this avenging angel sailing fearlessly across the sea. The final shot of Richard’s corpse, laid out beneath a low stone wall strewn with weapons, and the fields, trees and sky layered above him, is nicely composed in itself, but also sums up and rounds off the visual narrative we’ve been witnessing.

All that said, much as I admire the care and intelligence with which the film was made, I can’t warm to it. It doesn’t help that I’ve always hated this play. And it’s not because Shakespeare doesn’t work in a silent film (re-live that argument over on the CC RIII thread...). What really struck me was how much this movie sets the standard for so many Shakespeare films over the following decades. It’s lavish, ripe for study and analysis, skilfully balances highbrow sensibilities with the need to keep everything accessible – and yet somehow remains profoundly uninvolving, unexciting. Shakespeare never really seems to work on film, unless a genius is in charge (that leaves Orson Welles and, er, well no one else really). But that’s an argument for another thread. In any case, even though I’m not sure I’ll include it in my list, this is a film I’m sure I’ll go back to some day.

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

I've just seen this and, while I certainly think it's worth renting (I got it from ClassicFlix, but it seems to be available from GreenCine as well), I'm not sure I could recommend it for a blind-buy. The film's central message about how important it is to love one's country (and how empty one's life would be otherwise) is presented without much subtlety, but the story surrounding its propaganda is told in a visually interesting way--there are some striking compositions, double-exposures, and an extended flashback sequence that reminded me a bit of a certain work by Dickens. All told, it's fairly impressive on certain fronts, but I think I'll like it more once I've forgotten how it drums on and on about patriotism.

As for picture quality, I've posted a few screencaps here.

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

myrnaloyisdope wrote:...The Italian... What a marvellous film, featuring one of the great performances in all cinema by George Beban, a riveting story by Thomas Ince and some strong direction by Reginald Baker. Beban is thoroughly magnetic as the title character, Beppo, he's Cagney or Tracy-esque, brimming with life and menace. The character could easily have been played as a broad stereotype (some of the intertitles feature some "shut up you face" type dialogue), but Beban transcends the stereotype even as he works within it. He gives a rounded shape to the "brooding foreigner", his exaggerated hand gestures (in the "Italians talk with their hands" mode) become another tool to convey Beppo's joys and sorrows.
The greatest scene in the film comes during a marvellously long close-up where Beppo spots the men who have robbed him of his last dime. The look of menace and ferocity that comes upon his face is the kind of thing that will haunt a man for decades. It's mesmerizing, as Beppo slowly inches closer and closer to the camera (ala Suspense, or Musketeers of Pig Alley), before brushing past and getting into a vicious fight with his two muggers. It's astonishing, and a bit surprising that such a sequence doesn't get much attention.
The story is a melodrama but is filled with grim and unpleasant images, and keeps one guessing during the climax. It's really emblematic of the daringness that Lubitsch talked about regarding 1910's cinema. The willingness to take chances and go the less travelled route is something that makes this cinema feel so alive. Beban gives the story all the depth it might be lacking with his virtuoso performance adding layers of depth and nuance.
Barker's direction is strong as well with some nifty dissolves, and a really effective use of close-ups to reveal information and develop character. The use of a prologue and epilogue to frame the narrative is pretty brilliant as well, as it is revealed that Beban the actor is reading the story of The Italian, the opening shot being a curtain opening and the closing shot being the curtain closing.
A Tremendous film that deserves much more attention.

I'm right there with you on this; it'll be very high on my list. By the way, I re-watched this for the project with the commentary track, and it's quite good.
I'd thought about posting some sort of brief write-up about The Italian, but there are so many marvelous qualities and moments in it, it's difficult to know where to begin. You definitely nailed a few of them. It's wonderfully conceived and acted -- and just beautiful visually. I'm still not too familiar with Reginald Barker's style (although I finally have the VHS of Civilization in hand and am about to watch it), but it seems like he was pretty quick to fully assimilate a lot of the grammar that Griffith and a few others had been developing in terms of editing, capturing action, and so on.
If there was a richer portrayal of the immigrant experience in the movies during this period, I don't think I've seen it. Speaking of which, it's too bad The Jungle (1914) apparently did not survive.

reno dakota wrote:

Gregory wrote:I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on The Man Without a Country (1917) ...

I've just seen this and, while I certainly think it's worth renting (I got it from ClassicFlix, but it seems to be available from GreenCine as well), I'm not sure I could recommend it for a blind-buy. The film's central message about how important it is to love one's country (and how empty one's life would be otherwise) is presented without much subtlety, but the story surrounding its propaganda is told in a visually interesting way--there are some striking compositions, double-exposures, and an extended flashback sequence that reminded me a bit of a certain work by Dickens. All told, it's fairly impressive on certain fronts, but I think I'll like it more once I've forgotten how it drums on and on about patriotism.
As for picture quality, I've posted a few screencaps here.

Thanks for the follow-up and posting the caps. It looks like something I'd watch if it were on one of the Treasures sets but not go out of my way to own. I'm no longer in San Francisco where I saw it in the bins at Amoeba (and I used my meager funds instead to get the DVD of My Grandmother for the next round). It bugs me that Televista and other PD stuff like that often sells for $20 a disc.