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

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Tommaso
Joined: Fri May 19, 2006 10:09 am

Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#401 Post by Tommaso » Tue May 25, 2010 7:58 pm

I completely agree with all you said, Schreck, so just one comment:
HerrSchreck wrote:I don't know if this is something that's difficult for most others-- I recall a conversation I had with Sausage (form vs subtance) where I realized that this clinical observation of the formal qualities of a film's style and techinical prowess/sense of innovation isn't as pervasive (or at least as natural) as I'd imagined it to be among cineastes (or lovers of the other arts).
According to my experience, the 'naturalness' of this separation might have to do with whether you are yourself a 'practising' artist - on whatever level ( I'm not talking about 'professional' artists here exclusively) - or not. If you are in some way actively involved in creating something and not just commenting on it, your perspective over the years changes. You are much more able to value or at least accept a certain craftsmanship which you know isn't easily achieved, even if you don't like the end result for whatever reasons - it doesn't fit with your own world-view, or it simply only doesn't fit with your own 'style' -, and the focus also shifts to the more formal qualities when considering other arts than the one you're involved with. That is why I always tend to trust the statements of the creator of a piece of art more than the critics, because what these find important (a philosophical or social statement, an expression of a personal love affair or anything else) might have been absolutely secondary for the artist, who might have puzzled much longer over the question of whether he should entrust a particular melody line to the oboe or to the bassoon...

This becomes a problem if the artist is so involved in his or her own reality that it overshadows everything else. A particularly bizarre example, even for my taste, is that scene in Müller's Riefenstahl-documentary in which the old lady after almost 60 years still revels about how she managed to cut the marching party-boys in "Triumph" perfectly to the music. In such a moment it becomes clear that her repeated statements that all she had in mind when doing that film were questions of making it 'visually interesting' were not only an attempt to whitewash herself. It shows a loss of touch with reality, of course, but I can at least somehow understand that mindset, even if I don't approve of it.

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HerrSchreck
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2005 11:46 am

Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#402 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue May 25, 2010 8:47 pm

Tommaso wrote:I completely agree with all you said, Schreck, so just one comment:

According to my experience, the 'naturalness' of this separation might have to do with whether you are yourself a 'practising' artist - on whatever level ( I'm not talking about 'professional' artists here exclusively) - or not. If you are in some way actively involved in creating something and not just commenting on it, your perspective over the years changes.
This is precisely what I came to understand, have accepted it pretty much as the primary reason that this impulse is not as pervasive as I once thought it was.

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Mr Sausage
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#403 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue May 25, 2010 9:00 pm

Tommaso wrote:According to my experience, the 'naturalness' of this separation might have to do with whether you are yourself a 'practising' artist - on whatever level ( I'm not talking about 'professional' artists here exclusively) - or not.
My experience is that it depends on what critical school you come out of. The kind of criticism being discussed comes ultimately from Aristotle, and his "clinical" manner of minutely examining how the formal qualities work and fit together was influenced by his scientific inquiries and not any artistic endeavour, which it seems he never engaged in.

Just out of curiosity, am I one of the people you say doesn't engage in "clinical observation of the formal qualities of a film's style and techinical prowess/sense of innovation," Schreck?

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HerrSchreck
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#404 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue May 25, 2010 9:53 pm

Mr_sausage wrote:
Tommaso wrote:According to my experience, the 'naturalness' of this separation might have to do with whether you are yourself a 'practising' artist - on whatever level ( I'm not talking about 'professional' artists here exclusively) - or not.
My experience is that it depends on what critical school you come out of. The kind of criticism being discussed comes ultimately from Aristotle, and his "clinical" manner of minutely examining how the formal qualities work and fit together was influenced by his scientific inquiries and not any artistic endeavour, which it seems he never engaged in.

Just out of curiosity, am I one of the people you say doesn't engage in "clinical observation of the formal qualities of a film's style and techinical prowess/sense of innovation," Schreck?
You can speak for yourself better than anybody else can, sausage. Obviously you're capable of observing the formal qualities of a film-- how much you're willing to see form as a thing unto itself, extricable and observable from the whole of the piece, you'd have to tell us here now or I'd have to dig out the thread to try and ascertain. I'm speaking of the sense (which was a learning experience for me, and it stemmed partly from our convo where others participated) that the seperation of form-- not the mere ability to generally observe form as a component inextricable from the whole of any work-- from substance was not the given that I'd originally thought it was for most folks. I erroneously believed that everyone who thought passionately about art made this 'clinical' separation as routine.

BOAN is the context here, where I maintain it is absolutely possible to salute and be impressed by the form and technique of the film, see it as a thing unto itself, and be under no obligation to be affected by the substance (this also leads into another, separate conversation I'm opening about yielding to the substance of certain films, about the exploration of alien, even poisonous mindsets, and the pros & cons).

Anyhow, why do you ask? Have your thoughts evolved on the subject?

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#405 Post by Mr Sausage » Tue May 25, 2010 11:11 pm

HerrSchreck wrote:Anyhow, why do you ask? Have your thoughts evolved on the subject?
Not really. I asked because you seemed to say something intriguing, that one cannot give a close and purely technical appraisal of a movie without splitting form and content. I just think there's something different worth considering: while I continue to believe that, pragmatically, content and form cannot be separated, I do think one is capable of suspending one's moral judgements on the effect achieved by a film while maintaining one's...let us say 'aesthetic judgement.' So I don't think you need to affirm any form of dualism in order to properly appraise the technical merits of an otherwise appalling film. It's more a decision about what to give your critical attention to and what to overlook, even if you've felt the effect of both simultaneously.
HerrSchreck wrote:BOAN is the context here, where I maintain it is absolutely possible to salute and be impressed by the form and technique of the film, see it as a thing unto itself, and be under no obligation to be affected by the substance (this also leads into another, separate conversation I'm opening about yielding to the substance of certain films, about the exploration of alien, even poisonous mindsets, and the pros & cons).
I mainly agree with you here, and that's because you're only talking about what is "possible" and what one has no "obligation" to do, rather than what one should do. We probably both agree it's difficult to tell someone they shouldn't be morally offended by something that one agrees is morally offensive. In a case like this I think it is much better to defend how you watch the film than convince others to follow your lead (not that you were doing the latter).

My own, perhaps unshared, reaction to Birth of a Nation (which, granted, I haven't seen in a few years) is that it is a great bad movie. The film's a technical marvel in many respects, astonishing in its range of effect and control and innovation, all of which I very much admire both here and in Intolerance. But I don't like Birth of a Nation; not only because it contains material that is not humanly acceptable to me, but because on top of that great fault it contains another: Griffith has no taste nor sensibility. I think the few Griffith movies that I've seen are the product of a great technician and innovator who plain lacked good sense. So while I can overlook this aspect in his other films, it cripples Birth of a Nation because one has both it and racism to deal with. I don't know whether I'd place Birth of a Nation on a list like this, but if I didn't, it would not be without reservation nor without having wrestled with its enormous achievement. Meaning: even if you do not pragmatically divide form from content you can still reasonably reject Birth of a Nation even while being cognizant of its merits.
HerrSchreck wrote:I erroneously believed that everyone who thought passionately about art made this 'clinical' separation as routine.
As an aside: it's a very understandable error. For one thing, it has been convincingly argued that people are naturally dualists (rather than monists), and tend to separate and distinguish even things which perhaps cannot or should not be separated (Richard Dawkins argues that this tendency to dualism is one of the reasons for the emergence of religion). So most people--not even just art lovers--naturally tend to do exactly what you had assumed, separate form and content, word and referent, ect., ect. This was even the dominant critical assumption of the learned until the early twentieth century (twenties? thirties?), when assumptions about language and language forms were shaken by discoveries in philology and linguistics and by radical new poetic and painterly techniques that changed previous conceptions of the relationship between sign and signifier. Hence the divide you talk of is no longer so widely believed, even if it is still the idea most likely to occur.

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Sloper
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#406 Post by Sloper » Wed May 26, 2010 7:17 am

Well said, Schreck; I just wanted to respond to this bit.
HerrSchreck wrote:Some discuss films like BOAN-- and films very much similar to it-- almost as though their very souls were at stake if they allow themselves to dissolve from their armchair and fall into the film's narrative. One slip into the narrative, no matter the intent on the part of the viewer, and they're stained forever, or so the fear seems to go... and the moral hammer is always publicly brandished as a matter of social obligation and ready to come down on those who wish a selective abd quailified recognition of a salutary quality. Any discussion of the film must be preambled with the obligatory hi-volume disclaimer of rampant disgust at the obviously racist qualities the film contains.

I admit that as far as BOAN goes, it's highly unusual territory, as there are very few inflammatory films which have weilded such enormous power and influence over not only our own personal heroes and their era, but the industry entire.

I propose that it's okay to sink into these films, even to allow yourself-- if your moral compass is well magnetized towards the better angels of human impulse-- to be carried away by them, even to try to feel them in the manner of an old bigoted viewer so one can truly comprehend what it is that these people are made of. There is no bad information out there, really-- what matters is what you choose to do with this information, and how you integrate it into your life. If it is in the world, then there can be a beneficial place for it in your mind, if only to broaden the width of your comprehension of human beings and what they are capable of.
First of all, about this fear of 'staining oneself'. I think people (and I guess I can only really speak for myself here) are justifiably insecure about engaging with any part of themselves that is capable of empathising with such prejudices, partly because they are conscious that these prejudices remain in force today, and that they, in one way or another, through action or inaction, are helping to perpetuate them. So it's partly white guilt/self-loathing.

I, for instance, am uneasily conscious that I react more strongly - I mean in an involuntary, emotional way, rather than in a rational capacity - to real-life animal cruelty than to racism in films. So yesterday, while watching The Last Days of Pompeii again (terrific film by the way, overshadowed by Cabiria but it still deserves to be on a few lists for its grandly decorated and animated compositions), I flinched and cringed when the cute little lizard got whacked on the head, and asked myself whether I had really been that upset by the lynching sequence in The Birth. One difference is that you're not seeing actual violence and murder in Griffith's film - and a film which did show such things would surely be a challenge to those who want to keep morality out of aesthetic judgements - but then the knowledge that it caused actual violence and murder, on a large scale, ought, surely, to be even more upsetting. No offence, but I'm not aware that the members posting in this thread are anything other than middle-class white guys, and I can't help but think that, if I were black, I would find it a lot harder to regard The Birth as I do now, or to pontificate about it in such objective terms. This navel-gazing 'armchair agony' of the liberal is pretty tiresome, and I'm slightly embarrassed to air it here, but it's certainly a 'deserved' agony on most levels.

More interestingly, and a lot more sympathetically, this hesitancy to engage with the emotions and ideas behind Griffith's film stems from an unwillingness to participate in something which resulted in such atrocities. To feel roused by the riding of the Klansmen at the end is to put oneself, however momentarily, into the shoes of people who then went out and persecuted, murdered, etc; one gets the same awful frisson from Nazi propaganda, of course, and the knowledge that the reactions it elicits so skilfully were to issue in genocide. And this links to the point about the artist's perspective, because another thing that characterises an artist - one who takes their art seriously, in any case - is a willingness, even an eagerness, to take oneself into these dark places, to find out how it feels to lynch someone, to hate or despise an entire race of people. You need to be able to do that in order to write/portray certain characters, mindsets and situations. And there may well be a genuine danger in taking this sort of 'research' to extremes, not in any melodramatic sense ('oh dear I'm a fascist now') but just in terms of a disordering of one's inner moral sense.

And, as I was saying earlier, one further reason for wanting to step back from all this and revile it is that to engage with it can mean facing some unwelcome truths about the nature of this artform one is so used to thinking of as good and beautiful. But I'm turning into a stuck record now, so I'll stop.
Mr_sausage wrote:But I don't like Birth of a Nation; not only because it contains material that is not humanly acceptable to me, but because on top of that great fault it contains another: Griffith has no taste nor sensibility. I think the few Griffith movies that I've seen are the product of a great technician and innovator who plain lacked good sense. So while I can overlook this aspect in his other films, it cripples Birth of a Nation because one has both it and racism to deal with.
This sounds very much like my own reaction to the film the first few times I saw it, and part of me still feels this way - more so about his other films, in fact, because I think in The Birth Griffith is dealing with subject matter that mattered to him personally, and there is an authenticity to the whole thing that I think Broken Blossoms, for instance (despite its many wonderful qualities), lacks. But this issue of 'taste' is something that affects nearly all the films from this era, so many of which are characterised by a mawkish, quasi-tragic sensibility I normally can't stand, but which I have learned to love as it is handled by Griffith, Sjostrom and others.

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Tommaso
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#407 Post by Tommaso » Wed May 26, 2010 10:35 am

Sloper wrote:I, for instance, am uneasily conscious that I react more strongly - I mean in an involuntary, emotional way, rather than in a rational capacity - to real-life animal cruelty than to racism in films. So yesterday, while watching The Last Days of Pompeii again (terrific film by the way, overshadowed by Cabiria but it still deserves to be on a few lists for its grandly decorated and animated compositions), I flinched and cringed when the cute little lizard got whacked on the head, and asked myself whether I had really been that upset by the lynching sequence in The Birth. One difference is that you're not seeing actual violence and murder in Griffith's film - and a film which did show such things would surely be a challenge to those who want to keep morality out of aesthetic judgements
Exactly my feeling re: the animals; and I think the reason is that if a living being is killed or otherwise mistreated for a film, the film stops to be a 'performance' at this moment, becomes 'real' and we naturally invest all our sympathy for the animal. Here reality takes precendence over art, as it should be, and indeed we can only make a moral judgement, not an aesthetic one. It's only because we perhaps naturally don't have quite the same intensity of feelings for a killed animal as for a killed human being that we still accept "Pompeji" as an artwork, while we probably wouldn't do the same if a human had been killed.
Sloper wrote:More interestingly, and a lot more sympathetically, this hesitancy to engage with the emotions and ideas behind Griffith's film stems from an unwillingness to participate in something which resulted in such atrocities. To feel roused by the riding of the Klansmen at the end is to put oneself, however momentarily, into the shoes of people who then went out and persecuted, murdered, etc; one gets the same awful frisson from Nazi propaganda, of course, and the knowledge that the reactions it elicits so skilfully were to issue in genocide.
I'm not sure whether engaging with the emotions and ideas (in the sense of trying to understand what they are and where they come from, or where Griffith comes from when he uses them) is the same as 'participating' in them. The ride of the Klansmen may be 'rousing', but there are different ways to be roused. Even if you may be fascinated by it on an artistic level, enjoying the patterns of movement, the general pacing and so on, it doesn't follow that you're siding with the Klansmen and their ideas, or even go out and kill someone. I guess it has a little to do with how willing you are to so completely immerse yourself into a film that you don't have a certain distance to your emotions anymore, and that you forget that what you see isn't really 'real', though it tries to leave the impression that it is. Of course such a 'rousing' on all levels, to the point of losing all critical distance, might often have been the dream of filmmakers, but it isn't achieved very often (speaking only for my own reactions here, of course), and then only if the viewer approves of the general tendencies of the film.

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Gregory
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#408 Post by Gregory » Thu May 27, 2010 4:51 pm

Tih Minh is good, but I can’t help but feel disappointed to see so little development in Feuillade’s style after Les Vampires (or at least after Judex -- I haven’t watched that one in several years and would need to revisit it).
There are a few brilliant compositions in Tih Minh, and a few sequences employing inspired montage. More than anything, these make me wonder why he didn’t try to make more of the serial like that. But by Feuillade’s own account, he was far less interested in breaking new ground than in simply making solid melodrama. This is really a false dilemma, though.

I enjoy these serials but am pretty sure that the reasons I like them, and that many others have been fascinated by them, probably have very little to do with Feuillade’s intentions. A central example of this is the anti-hero reading of Fantomas, Vampires, and Tih Minh. I know that many viewers picked up on this when these were first released, with some ascribing to Feuillade the intention of glamorizing crime. However, I’m not convinced this was true. With his right-wing political views, it’s implausible that he would take even a partly sympathetic view of lawless elements, particularly those who preyed on the rich and/or were foreign enemies of the state (and/or were in league with them). And can one really believe he would risk box-office failure (or less success) by making his ostensible protagonists dull in order to make the villains more attractive?

Maybe I should just enjoy the serials and not worry about Feuillade or what he thought he was doing. It’s interesting to consider that he may have unintentionally stumbled upon many of the things that audiences and followers (Buñuel, Franju, etc) later found in the films, which make up his legacy. I welcome anyone else’s perspectives on all this.

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Tommaso
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#409 Post by Tommaso » Fri May 28, 2010 11:03 am

Gregory wrote: And can one really believe he would risk box-office failure (or less success) by making his ostensible protagonists dull in order to make the villains more attractive?
Why would he have risked box-office failure? His 'positive' protagonists aren't dull, they are just perhaps for a modern viewer less interesting than the often very stylish villains. That's why "Fantomas" and "Les Vampires" might be more interesting today than "Judex". I also wouldn't expect to see Feuillade's personal political or social opinions expressed in any of these films; he was a craftsman with a particular style, but not necessarily an auteur in the modern sense of the word. In this respect, I find it more than legitimate that we, almost 100 years later, see these films with a different eye, with different tastes and preferences. That they still work so well is a testament to Feuillade's genius as a craftsman.

A quick round-up of my pre 20s-watching the last few days (not as many films as I had hoped for, sadly):

Benjamin Christensen, "Blind Justice" (1916): the second film on the DFI Christensen disc, and the better of the two in my view. Christensen starts off with showing his actress (and us) a model of the house in which much of the action will take place, an early example of thematizing the production process and the 'artefact'-character of filmmaking; it's not much more than a gimmick here, though, as the film is of a serious nature and doesn't really come back to any such sort of ironic distancing later one (this just as a comparison to Lubitsch's "Die Puppe", for instance). The story is about a supposed murderer who looks for help for his baby child and is betrayed by the woman he trusts. Twelve years later, when is leaving jail, he seeks revenge for this betrayal. The film is very intense in the moments when the protagonist, once called Strong John, wanders lonely and broken through the streets of what for him has become an 'unknown' city; in these passages the film is a very heartfelt (but not melodramatic) social drama. Much else in the film is more conventional, involving a crime plot and a second sub-plot set in a circus (which is not necessary at all), so that like with "The Mysterious X" I have the feeling that Christensen put too much into one film. But it is very well made, with great photography and convincing acting, and it is constantly entertaining. There is also a cool scene in which a bound man manages to make a phone call in a rather unusual manner, and another scene contains what might be one of the very first appearances of a modern vaccum cleaner on celluloid. The film comes with very beautifully illustrated, original English intertitles from the time, which charmingly give the director's name as "Benjamin Christie".

Gustavo Serena, "La signora delle camelie" (1915): another very beautiful Italian silent and an early adaption of the famous book by Dumas. This has the ravishing Francesca Bertini in the title role, and might be described as a very beautiful mood piece for most of its time. Bertini portrays the intense suffering of Margherite rather convincingly, despite some occasional overacting. Great outdoor photography, too. All in all, this is more lyrical and restrained than the two Pastrones, "Il fuoco" and "Tigre reale", that were already discussed here. It's not as great as these or the later Garbo version, but it is very worth seeing and probably quite memorable, too.

Finally another Bauer film, "The King of Paris"(1917): This is actually Bauer's last film, and it again confirms the extraordinary abilities of the man. It's probably a bit more gritty than most of the others I've seen in its portrayal of some of the members of the fashionable society, and there's also an interesting mother-son story which probably has a lot going on under the surface. No need to sing extra praise on cinematography, lighting, sets and actresses. It's Bauer, so you know what to expect. Great stuff.

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Gregory
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#410 Post by Gregory » Fri May 28, 2010 12:48 pm

Tommaso wrote:Why would he have risked box-office failure? His 'positive' protagonists aren't dull, they are just perhaps for a modern viewer less interesting than the often very stylish villains. That's why "Fantomas" and "Les Vampires" might be more interesting today than "Judex". I also wouldn't expect to see Feuillade's personal political or social opinions expressed in any of these films; he was a craftsman with a particular style, but not necessarily an auteur in the modern sense of the word. In this respect, I find it more than legitimate that we, almost 100 years later, see these films with a different eye, with different tastes and preferences. ...
My question arises from a long line of speculation about the films and the motives behind them that indeed go back to their release, when many among the audiences noted a drastic difference in the fascinating and glamorous the criminals in Fantomas and Les Vampires, and the way their pursuers were portrayed. Theoretically, these two serials could have portrayed fascinating, rich characters representing authority (like Judex, whom he was forced to create and who's in marked contrast to the far duller "good" characters in the previous serials) who would be balanced by the fascinating, rich criminals they pursued. The fact that they did not do so suggested to many at the time, and since, that the films glamorized the ostensible villains, possibly intentionally. The intentional part is what I was arguing was implausible, but even putting the conscious intention aside for the sake of argument, and of course not taking the films as intentional representations of Feuillade's social-political views, there remain interesting contradictions to puzzle over.

The serials and responses to them are surely analogous to pre-code Hollywood gangster films and their reception, but for me at least there are more auteurist questions surrounding Feuillade (and I do think he was one). There are so many sharp contrasts between (1) his personal views and the few statements of his I've read about his aesthetic goals (which I alluded to in the previous post) (2) the serials and the ways they've been interpreted not just by modern critics and viewers but by early fans such as Buñuel and André Breton. I started ruminating over these contradictions all over again after viewing Tih Minh, which I thought showed a considerable degree of stagnation at a time when so many other filmmakers were rapidly moving into new territory.

I would guess that the answer to my questions suggest that Feuillade was a sometime creator of things of more profound order than basic story or technique without a conscious awareness of what was being created, and that this was what so fascinated the surrealists who loved his work.

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lubitsch
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#411 Post by lubitsch » Sun May 30, 2010 5:54 am

As we are nearing the very end I see no pressing urge from the members to extend the deadline. 36 users posted in this thread, at least ca. 14 look to be like sure participants.
However since I have to prepare myself for an event at our uni (and am still nuts about Lena winning the ESC \:D/ ), I push the deadline back myself two days because I'll have no time until 2nd of June, so send your lists via PM until 24:00 Central European Summer Time the night from 2nd to 3rd June. If anybody misses out or can't do it, let me know, we surely can work it out.
Please remember the rules on the first page, but if anyone botches up something, I'll contact him back, so that he may correct it. Please read the Viewing Guide so that you don't forget entries and take the different short collections in your hand, so that you don't overlook shorts you wanted to vote for.

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thirtyframesasecond
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#412 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Sun May 30, 2010 1:08 pm

I'm fine with this. There's nothing else really that I plan to watch besides 'The Battle of the Somme' and 'South'.

I just watched the Eureka anthology of Buster Keaton shorts. They're Fatty Arbuckle films essentially. Can't say I was a fan especially. For a chap of his size, Arbuckle's surprisingly agile but the humour just seems less mature and the films themselves don't have much of a pace about them and in fact, Arbuckle recycles the same plot in several. Not a patch on the Chaplin shorts of the same era.

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zedz
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#413 Post by zedz » Sun May 30, 2010 5:42 pm

Final couple of loose ends. No proselytizing at this late stage, but commenting here has become kind of reflex.

The Dying Swan – A great film, but down my Bauer list. It does have one really fantastic touch I’d completely forgotten about. Not really a material spoiler, this is more like not wanting to ruin a joke:
SpoilerShow
When we first see the artist’s terrible skeleton cartoons, it seems like a gigantic misstep – the filmmaker making the mistake of actually showing us the ‘great artist’s’ not-so-great work. Then it looks like the power of his muse is going to transform him into a master – a pretty hoary cliché, but there you go – though we were joking while watching that she’d have to be a hell of a muse (or a hell of a painter herself) to do that. But Bauer’s way ahead of us and offers up the delicious payoff when some discerning guy gets a sneak preview of the masterpiece and goes: “That’s terrible – you’re completely talentless.” It’s as if Bauer is undercutting a cliché that’s hardly been established at this stage. And it’s not only funny, but dramatically effective, making the heroine’s ‘sacrifice’ even more pointless.
That said, one of the reasons the film didn’t completely work for me is that the figure of the artist was just too ridiculous and stereotypical, even if Bauer’s treatment of him had certain nuances.

Edison Victory Lap – Nearly completely through the set – I’m stalled in the middle of the uninspiring The Unbeliever. Though even my lack of interest in this is interesting, as it’s far more accomplished and diverse in terms of film grammar than the majority of what came before it, at least in the box-ticking sense (close-ups, inserts, pans, dissolves and so forth). However, it’s still much drabber than many earlier films that were working with much more circumscribed means. One of the great lessons of this project has been that talented film artists can show their hand in all manner of contexts, and while the master narrative of technological and syntactical advance accounts for a lot of the artistic development we’re seeing in this era, there is always a huge variation in aesthetic efficacy according to the individual talents of the filmmakers.

And further to that, watching this set in order also allowed me to experience the aesthetic revelation many other viewers have noted with The Passer-by, that sudden expansion in expressiveness after a long run of pinched and compromised films. But that revelation came to me from a different film, the one just before The Passer-by in the chronology: Thirty Days at Hard Labour. While it lacks the attention-grabbing ‘money shots’ of the subsequent film, it has the same ease, confidence and fluidity of mise en scene. It’s not all that flashy or overt, but the director’s good eye fairly leaps off the screen after so many indifferently frontal, flatly composed films. (For the record, I still see the same ‘great leap forward’ in One Touch of Nature, though in that case nobody seems to follow right away.)

And for the auteurists amongst us, the director responsible for Thirty Days turns out to be Oscar Apfel, who would make The Passer-by right after. He’s certainly a figure for further research. IMDB is intriguing: he directed the first Bulldog Drummond film and kept busy right though until the late twenties, but shifted very decisively from directing to acting (though pretty minor stuff, by the looks of it) with the advent of sound. Seems like there’s an interesting story there.

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Sloper
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#414 Post by Sloper » Sun May 30, 2010 8:34 pm

zedz wrote:That said, one of the reasons [The Dying Swan] didn’t completely work for me is that the figure of the artist was just too ridiculous and stereotypical, even if Bauer’s treatment of him had certain nuances.
I think you're right, but all three of the films on the Mad Love set are very interesting on the subject of crazed artists (the disc could just as easily have been called 'Mad Art', but I guess that would sound like a judgement on the films), and this one is partly interesting for how it contributes to that theme.

Big SPOILERS here, but it feels as though most members posting in this thread have now watched these films.

First, you have the heroine in Twilight of a Woman's Soul, a character longing to fall into the arms of someone who can make up for her mother's selfish neglect. She tragically looks for this human contact among the undeserving poor, receiving as her reward a horrific parody of the sort of affection she needs. Then, when her 'true love' rejects her later on, she becomes a different person - an artist (an actress in this case). Her connection with other people thus takes place 'en masse', as it were, on an impersonal level. When the husband begs her to forgive him, she cannot, her transformation into an artist signifying a definitive end to her capacity for personal intimacy.

Then, in After Death, we have two artists: the photographer and the actress. The former's reclusive nature, and his discovery of a kindred spirit in the actress, are brilliantly depicted through that 3-minute tracking shot near the start: at first the framing makes it seem as though Andrei is hiding beneath the enormous indoor plants, which obscure him and hang over him like a caul, but the camera movement drags him on through a sequence of awkward greetings with socialites (Sky News recently paid inadvertent homage to this shot with their coverage of Gordon Brown's visit to a branch of Tesco). This is exactly the milieu the heroine of the previous film couldn't get on with, and at the end of this tracking shot, Andrei meets a woman who seems, judging by her pale skin and the rather scary dark rings around her eyes, to be just as accustomed to sitting alone in dark rooms as he is. But here too it seems that the artists cannot connect while alive, and it is as if their status as artists represents not only their retreat from the 'real world', but also a dedication to a world beyond - to death, in fact. (This might be seen as a development from the conclusion of Twilight of a Woman's Soul, where the one lover responded to the other's emotional death by shooting his heart out and literally dying.)

So in The Dying Swan, there are once again two artists. Here, the dancer is not emotionally reclusive but, like Vera in Twilight, socially crippled - in this case by her inability to speak, which seems to be the factor that pushes her lover into another, more socially adept, woman's arms. And of course she responds to this by throwing herself into her art. It is perhaps her broken heart that enables her so convincingly to portray the dying swan, and to serve as an emblem of death for the talentless, mad-eyed painter. When she finds happiness again, she can no longer serve this purpose: once more, there is this sense that art is allied to pain and isolation. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that the other artist in this story is so preoccupied with capturing the essence of death.

The perplexing question is, why does Bauer make him out to be without talent? Although I agree that this makes for a dramatically effective moment, when the friend delivers his scathing assessment, it feels as though the film might have worked better if the artist had been a less ridiculous, more formidable character, since as it is the ending comes across as slightly farcical. Maybe the clue is in the fact that this artist has only the one friend, and he isn't an especially good one. This is a man who knows nothing of human relationships, of love or affection, and so is incapable of producing great art: thus true art is not the negation of love, warmth and humanity, but rather a wounded retreat from the corruption to which these things are subjected by the rest of the world - those sociable people at the parties, the idle rapist Maxim, the philanderers, etc. And the crazy artist in The Dying Swan highlights this distinction. Bauer's heroes fail in life and love, but succeed in art; the would-be painter fails in his art and responds by destroying life and love. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I think these are some of the themes behind the dazzling technique on display in Bauer's films.

EDIT: I meant to say that I haven't read any of Bauer's source material, but it seems obvious that he gravitated towards certain themes, and developed them in cinematic terms.

I look forward to seeing the Milestone set some day: I've tried to convince my university library to buy at least volumes 7 and 10, as they had bought Mad Love at my request a while ago, but so far no joy, and I can't really fork out for it myself. So only three Bauers on my list, I'm afraid, but I'd be interested to know whether these preoccupations with art and alienation are explored in his other works.

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#415 Post by Dr Amicus » Tue Jun 01, 2010 6:39 am

OK - I've made it through the Electric Edwardians set, and I don't think I've much to add to earlier comments. Four have a good chance of making through to my final list, Alfred Butterworth and Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood; Torpedo Flotilla Visit to Manchester; Blackpool Victoria Pier and Panoramic View of the Morecambe Sea Front. I've tended to pick the ones with a deepest pov - there's a much greater slice-of-life feel that I find both fascinating (looking down the streets and seeing advertisements, shop fronts etc) and extremely moving (life going on in the background whilst all the action takes place up front).

On a similar note, Paul's Blacksmith Bridge just might squeeze in as well - a few years earlier and one of the earliest British street scenes (the earliest I've been able to see). As I said way back on page 1 or 2 (and I think several others have echoed this), sometimes the film's status as first/longest/most complicated etc. feeds back in on itself and somehow adds to the pleasure of the film.

Moving to Griffith, I watched Musketeers of Pig Alley last night - and then had to hunt down the narrative summary to work out what was going on. I had a similar issue with The Cricket on the Hearth (luckily the commentary on the BFI disc helped - pointing out that the expectation was that people knew the story), but I don't think to quite the same extent. It's obviously a hugely impressive film in many ways, but I have to admit to spending much of the time thinking who are these people? What's going on? Why are they doing that? Now, thanks to the Biograph summary, it makes sense - so I think another viewing is called for. Anyone else have similar issues? It's not a problem I've associated with Griffith apart from these two films (and Enoch Arden - another 'everyone knows the story' - gave me no problems at all).

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#416 Post by Tommaso » Tue Jun 01, 2010 7:54 am

It's too long ago since I watched "Musketeers" (I didn't revisit it for this poll), but I remember I had a similar problem. At the time I think I ascribed it to being too tired when watching, but perhaps it's really a problem with the storytelling.

As to the M&K-films: the four you mentioned are among my favourites, too, though for the final list I've settled on only including "Morecambe", though it figures extremely high on it. My problem is that I have 50 films on the list already, and that I even had to exclude some very good films that I thought would definitely be on the list at the beginning. Perhaps that's a testament to the extreme diversity and richness of these 25 years of filmmaking.

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#417 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Tue Jun 01, 2010 8:54 am

Tram Ride into Halifax was my first M&K choice, but Morecambe was also on there, so that should help it do well.

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#418 Post by swo17 » Tue Jun 01, 2010 10:51 am

For anyone that hasn't had a chance to see these yet (they're both unavailable on DVD), here are two films that will be placing fairly high on my list:

Il fuoco (Giovanni Pastrone, 1916)

The Man with Wax Faces (Maurice Tourneur, 1914)

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#419 Post by Dr Amicus » Wed Jun 02, 2010 5:22 am

Right, it's deadline time and I'm in the lucky position of having to winnow down my final contenders to 50.

Admittedly, not by much - 55 or so have made the grade - but enough to make me feel reasonably happy about my final list. There's still much to see (I barely started on my Chaplin discs, only managed half of the Paul collection etc.), but I feel that's always going to be the case.

Anyway, unless I have a major change of heart, Fantomas makes my top spot, followed by Hell's Hinges and The ? Motorist.

This has been the most interesting list project to date. The idea to split the silents era into two was a damn fine one (whoever it was - take a well deserved bow), if for no other reason than it's made me really look at the very early short films which, at least numerically, dominated my watched list. I've always found early / primitive cinema fascinating, but have tended to watch it piecemeal (unless it came in a course I was teaching on - in which case it tended to be a week or two of viewing rather than several months) - so having a reason to methodically approach the period has been a big incentive to attack certain discs in my Kevyip...

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#420 Post by myrnaloyisdope » Wed Jun 02, 2010 12:03 pm

Agree with your sentiments Dr Amicus. I had about 70 or so to get down to 50, and then realized I had to get Le Dixieme Symphonie in somewhere.

I wish I could have seen all the Bauer's (only watched 4), and the rest of the Mitchell & Kenyon discs after Electric Edwardians. But mostly I feel pretty good about my list, I wish I had more time to get through everything I accumulated during that last few months. Oh well, on to the 1920's project!

Thansk to Lubitsch for running this project, for all the contributors making some great suggestions. There are quite a few gems I discovered thanks to y'all.

Top of my list is The Life Story of David Lloyd George, followed by Broken Blossoms, and The Sinking of the Lusitania.

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#421 Post by Gregory » Wed Jun 02, 2010 12:22 pm

I'm about to watch Thomas Graal's Best Film and then send in my list. My top choice is J'Accuse.
Dr Amicus wrote:This has been the most interesting list project to date. The idea to split the silents era into two was a damn fine one (whoever it was - take a well deserved bow), if for no other reason than it's made me really look at the very early short films which, at least numerically, dominated my watched list.
I was going to say the same thing. I'm so glad we did it this way. In addition to reducing the category problems that arise when talking of the "silent era" as a whole, I liked having the ability to be so thorough. It was a fun challenge to watch everything pre-1920 that I could without breaking the bank. Fortunately, I'd already bought most of what's available on DVD back when I had more income, so it was mostly a matter of re-watching and re-evaluating, in addition to watching non-DVD stuff. Also, the relatively miniscule body of films (compared to the last few rounds) and the small and dedicated group of discussants allowed for some great discussions, even though most of us were watching the same films weeks or months apart.
If I could do it over again, I'd have passed on a few of the purchases I made and bought the second Gaumont set instead. Sorry, Cohl, but you do have two on my list. I also wish I could have seen Le Dixieme Symphonie and Thais.

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#422 Post by Tommaso » Wed Jun 02, 2010 12:55 pm

I share all those sentiments expressed in the last few posts. I think I wasn't thorough enough in some cases and haven't managed to watch all the films praised here, and so I think we will have some rather diverse lists should we compare them, at least in terms of ranking, if not of films on the list at all.

In retrospect, I think it would perhaps be an alternative for the next time this list is made (in five years or so) to have an extra list for REALLY early cinema; looking at my final list, I simply had to give most of the higher ranks to films made between 1915-20. Nothing against the earlier efforts, I love them, but after all, most are simply not as captivating for me as the fully fledged works from the late 10s which already announce the glories of the 20s. But that might just be my personal taste.

Top Three: 1."Sir Arne", 2. "The dying swan", 3."Fantomas".

And yes, many thanks to Lubitsch for taking care of the project and for always having interesting points-of-view that sparked the discussion.

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#423 Post by swo17 » Wed Jun 02, 2010 1:40 pm

Yes, props to zedz for suggesting this early cinema list. It seems like the more recent years you include in the timeframe, the more early films get brushed aside, which already happened to some extent by including the late '10s, but at least the '20s weren't allowed in to completely dwarf them all. Very few films from this period seem to get much ink in discussions of Great Silent Films, and so it was really a pleasure to be able to go through nearly everything currently extant from this period and value all the films on their own terms, with few canonical guidelines pointing the way. It should say something that, of the 50 films that made my list, I had only previously seen 5 of them. Or that a director I had never even heard of before ended up dominating my list.

Anyway, it seems like something of a lists project tradition for zedz to tell us not to post our lists at the end and for us to do it anyway. In that spirit, here are my top 20:

01 Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)
02 The Outlaw and His Wife (Sjöström, 1918)
03 The Dying Swan (Bauer, 1917)
04 The Sinking of the Lusitania (McCay, 1918)
05 Panoramic View of the Morecambe Sea Front (Mitchell & Kenyon, 1901)
06 Les vampires (Feuillade, 1915-16)
07 The Doll (Lubitsch, 1919)
08 When the Clouds Roll By (Fleming, 1919)
09 The Serpentine Dance (Lumière, 1896)
10 After Death (Bauer, 1915)
11 Where Are My Children? (Weber & Smalley, 1916)
12 Sir Arne's Treasure (Stiller, 1919)
13 Washerwomen on the River (Lumière, 1897)
14 The President (Dreyer, 1919)
15 For Happiness (Bauer, 1917)
16 The Man with Wax Faces (Tourneur, 1914)
17 The Moving Pavement and the Electric Train (Lumière, 1900)
18 Il fuoco (Pastrone, 1916)
19 Fantômas (Feuillade, 1913-14)
20 Homunculus (Rippert, 1916)

And some interesting statistics about my list:

Films viewed for the project: roughly 1500 (about half of these just from the Lumières, Méliès, Mitchell & Kenyon, Alice Guy, and R.W. Paul)
Breakdown of my top 50 by period: 1890s (6), 1900s (9), 1910-14 (10), 1915-19 (25)
Most appearances by a given director: Bauer (6), Lumières (5)
3 other directors with 3 films each and 3 more with 2 films each
Breakdown by country: U.S. (15), France (14), Russia (7), U.K. (4), Germany (3), Italy (3), Denmark (2), Sweden (2)
Number of films under 15 minutes long: 19
Number of films over 3 hours long: 6
Last edited by swo17 on Wed Jun 02, 2010 6:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Tommaso
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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#424 Post by Tommaso » Wed Jun 02, 2010 1:54 pm

Nice list, swo. I'll post my top 20 after the official hand-in time is over (i.e. tomorrow), so as not to influence others too much. But I reveal my No.4 now, simply because I don't want anyone to forget it like I almost did: Stroheim's "Blind Husbands".

And as I'm not as good at maths and stats as you are, only my numbers of most appearances:
Bauer (5), Tourneur (4). The latter not necessarily with those films likely to get the most votes here.

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Re: Pre 1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#425 Post by knives » Wed Jun 02, 2010 2:20 pm

You got two hundred over me Swo. :wink:
While I didn't fall in love with as many films as others have, I do feel this was a necessary learning experience. It really helped me see were really everything came from. That slow bizarre evolution is interesting. For decades it seems film has been trying to get away from this era, but then the '60s pop up and in many ways I think it's returning to this. Of course now we've broken from that tradition too with MTV editing. This overlapping and oddities really is the most pleasant surprise. Not overlapping like the firefighter films, but overlapping with were cinema would go. Bauer especially in this regard. He seems like the forefather to Bresson and Dreyer in some respects. (though all three are drastically different) It was just a nice experience seeing how these small increments helped and hurt film. The von Stroheim film on the Edison box is a perfect example of what I'm saying, and where I got much of my glee. It technically is a great advancement but it does nothing to me compared to some of the people walking in the street actualities. I suppose the lesson here than for me is that advanced does not always equal quality.
I'll put up the rest of my list tomorrow, but here's the top six:

Final list
1 The Dying Swan
2 Spring
3 Broken Blossoms
4 The President
5 Sir Arne's Treasure
6 The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador

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