The Pre-1920s List: Discussion and Suggestions (Decade Project Vol. 4)

[knives]

I would appreciate it too.

[zedz]

I've just got all those pre-revolutionary Russian films so I might finally participate in the discussion.

[swo17]

Please do!

[Minkin]

I've been meaning to post in this thread for awhile now, and I'm sorry that -after promising to be more active in this round of the decades list, I've been no better! I see that time is rapidly drawing near (even with an extension), so I should probably start looking into this more + giving some of my recommendations, because I'm tired of having 75% orphans.

What I would find most helpful is if someone could perhaps base recommendations off of various DVD sets. I own the Edison (which I bought new for $4, thanks Amazon 3rd party screwup), Unseen Cinema and Treasures from the American Archives (3-NZ), but am never terribly sure of where to begin. So any "must-sees" from those sets will aid my time tremendously.

I'm glad that we're doing pre-1920s, but I do wonder how dominate the 1910s will be here. Would be lovely if the participation were higher and we could even do a 1900s or pre-1900s list, but this will do for now.

One immediate question: Does Westinghouse Works (1904) count as a single entry or can we count individual segments - as I'm not sure if they were presented as one work or 21 films. I suppose either way, it will likely be my orphan - as Girls Taking Time Checks (1904) (#6 in the series) will make my list.

Girls Taking Time Checks (1904)
I suppose, per the recent discussions, I should actually discuss a film, especially when I want someone to watch it. Here's a link to the short on youtube. This is another entry in the Westinghouse "series" - of which 20 of the shorts focus on the actual assembly footage of various foundry or industrial components. Girls Taking Time Checks breaks from the other films by being an odd mixture of the mechanical rhythm on trend with this series with a more personal take on the worker. Granted, the employees are present in most all of these, even if briefly - but they're far too engaged with their task, and are rather dehumanized - as they're just further integral in the mechanical process (and assuredly their positions have since been replaced by full automated plants). That said, this is still pre-automation for most factories and there's still a level of artistry with their work. Anyway, like the other films - we see the women in full assembly mode - marching in a single file line taking and punching their checks in what should again be a just as dehumanizing film. Yet there is such a level of personality on display. Even though they're all dressed nearly identical and that hairstyle must've been popular that year - every single woman has a different reaction upon completing their task with the time check. Some prudishly avoid any emotion and soldier forward, avoiding any contact with the camera; while others fully embrace their brief moment in the spotlight. Its a rapidfire mix as you barely have enough time to gauge one person's reaction before the next person in line takes her place. It seems like the bulk of individuals took the engagement seriously, but then this will be interrupted by what must be a few friends laughing together, or someone gesticulating with their arms. There's a great moment at about 1min 30 - where one woman drops her card, and then hurriedly runs ahead to catch her place, while the next two or three people behind her laugh at the situation. By the fourth person - they didn't see the amusing event that took place, so its back to a more surly parade, until the next lighthearted person rolls along.

I'll put this in spoiler tags, since its at the very end and a bit interesting (yes, I think there's spoilers to be had in a 2.5min Actuality Film from 1904).

SpoilerShow

At the very end, right as the film cuts off and all the women have disappeared to either the beginning or end of their shift, a random man runs into frame from the left. He doesn't look like the sort of person who is prone to running unless absolutely necessary. so it makes me wonder what caused this sudden outburst of speed. Was there an industrial accident? Did someone steal a timecheck? For what reason did this guy suddenly appear and worriedly move at a fast pace before the film could offer an answer! An intriguing mystery.

The best comparison I can think of (to this film) is a graduation ceremony - with its an endless hell of people in single file having their name called while some claps are mustered from the audience. During that brief moment (typically filmed + on jumbo-tron as well!) there's a certain embarrassment and expectation as the graduate performs their menial task of walking across a stage, getting a paper and shaking a hand. For the audience, all we ever know of the person is their brief appearance on that screen. Its only those who break the brief maneuver and inject some level of personality do we care. (sorry, I've had to sit through alot of graduation ceremonies).

So, its a lovely film and a top five of this era for me. Perhaps I've been over-analyzing a two and half minute short film. When I first watched the Westinghouse Works series - I didn't watch them in order, and so this was one of the last I saw. To break up the somewhat monotony of industrial processes with this strange and oddly beautiful film caused its impact to be all the greater. I love the dynamics going on with this short - and its placement in a series of films that are devoted to these mechanical actions. I know that it really owes its existence to other Actuality films - mostly Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory - but that film is far too impersonal (very few facial expressions are viewable) and chaotic (with its bicycles, horses, and even dogs just flowing out of the factory gates). Girls Taking Time Checks manages to capture a whole range of personalities and juxtaposes them against the factory surroundings and the otherwise glorification of the industrial age at play with the Westinghouse Works series. I'll stop my analysis here before I go into Marx and beyond.

[swo17]

One immediate question: Does Westinghouse Works (1904) count as a single entry or can we count individual segments - as I'm not sure if they were presented as one work or 21 films.

As per the instructions in the first post, you can vote either way, with the entire series and each individual entry competing against each other. I was planning to vote for Panoramic View, Aisle B.

[jindianajonz]

Add me to the list that would greatly appreciate more time. I started out strong, but real life happened and I've only gotten through about half of what I had hoped for.

[zedz]

Please do!

Moreover, in light of recent developments, I'll try to post about every single film in that collection, so if anybody else has those discs, or access to any of the films, let's do an informal viewing project in this thread.

[swo17]

Pardon my ignorance but what collection are you referring to?

[zedz]

That ten volume set from Milestone, recently on sale at a reduced price.

Here

[matrixschmatrix]

I've got the Starewicz and Bauer discs, so I can try and pace you on those

[swo17]

Ah, that was all I could think of but I've had those since the last time we did this project! There's some great stuff there, especially from Bauer (he's actually featured on four of the discs, and the best film--For Happiness--isn't even on his dedicated disc). Just brace yourself for the VHS-level picture quality and lack of navigation options.

[Satori]

Anders als die Andern (aka Different from the Others) (1919)

While this gay classic only exists in a truncated version—the Edition Filmmuseum disc runs about 50 minutes—it still feels like a miracle that any of it successfully made the journey across history to our present.

The first part of the film prefigures Dearden’s Victim by showing how laws against homosexuality create a fertile ground for blackmailers. Veidt plays a famous musician harassed by a criminal who threatens to tell the police about Veidt’s sexuality unless he pays him off. This is all the more tragic since Veidt is in the midst of a new relationship with a younger violinist who began as one of his students. The second part of the film uses flashbacks to flesh out his experience growing up as a gay man, including an unsuccessful attempt to “cure” him before he comes across the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (playing himself), who assures him there is nothing wrong with homosexuality.

Anders als die Andern is something of an essay film, presenting the real-life findings of Hirschfeld within a fictional narrative. It also offers an early queer historiography by placing Veidt’s victimhood within a line of gay men throughout history (including figures like Wilde). The film is built around Hirschfeld’s lectures in a way that reminded me of early American exploitation films that justify their lurid subject matter by tacking on “educational” lectures about the evils of drugs or VD or whatever. Yet Anders als die Andern treats homosexuality with respect rather than dismissal, completely reversing the conservatism of the American exploitation film in which the titillating exploitation content was disavowed by the film’s overt message.

Finally, unlike American exploitation films in which the science was dubious if not outright false, this film’s understanding of queerness is pretty remarkable. I knew that Weimar Germany was on the cutting edge of gay theory—plus home to a thriving gay scene—but I was still impressed by its awareness that gender and sexuality are two distinct discourses. During the Hirschfeld lecture, he clearly distinguishes between them, telling the viewer that not all gay men are femme and not all lesbians are butch, etc. This is fascinating given how most queer films of the era use crossdressing and cross-gender behavior as a signifier for gayness. (I’m thinking of Alice Guy’s hilarious Algie the Miner, Lubitsch’s wonderful I Don’t Want to be a Man, or the bananas A Florida Enchantment.) The 1910s are a remarkably queer decade of film, but homosexuality is almost always mediated through gender crossings. Anders als die Andern is a corrective to this, laying out a theory of homosexuality that is explicitly separate from gender.

[jindianajonz]

Her Crowning Glory: I would have bet money on the Governess being played by a man in drag, but it seems that is not the case. Indeed, it must have been hard for Flora Finch to appear in a role where her wig is her only redeeming feature, and the misogyny of the era shines through the films final moments when the removal of her lengthy locks get her marriage called off and sees her chased out of the house. Still, there's an element of charm to this comedy in the relationship between the punchable little girl, the shallow old man with the curious ability to see beyond quite a few shortcomings in people, and the vengeful nurse who is apparently threatened by her tressed competition.

White Fawn's Devotion: The first thing to strike me about this film is how little time they spend developing the relationships between the Settler and the Indians. As with the Buffalo Bill and Calamity Jane shorts, it's bizarre to realize that these films are much closer to heyday of manifest destiny and the wild west than our own time. Unlike those shorts, this one really made me feel like an outsider in that I couldn't fathom why White Fawn wouldn't accompany the settler to collect his inheritance or understand if the tribe thought her attempt at suicide was worth hunting down the settler or if they thought he was culpable in her wounding. Even though these elements are likely stereotypes and cultural falsehoods, its interesting to think something like this would have made sense to the audience back in 1910.

Other than that, the framing and editing in this film is top notch. There is a great sense of geography as the settler flees across the plain, rappels down a cliff, and across a river. Unlike other shorts I've seen from the period, I always have an awareness of which way the action is moving and where the hunter and the quarry are in relation to eachother.

Finally, I was surprised at how fake and bloodless White Fawn's suicide attempt was. I guess it makes sense considering she recovered on her own mere minutes later, but I'm not sure if this was due to technical limitations on the effects of the time, or if there was a social taboo on showing gore and violence. This is well before the Hayes code, so it seems like directors had freedom to do what they like, but was this common for the era? Were they trying to keep it accessible to a family audience? Did theater productions of the time have more realistic effects? Perhaps somebody with more knowledge than me can chime in.

[dustybooks]

Her Crowning Glory: I would have bet money on the Governess being played by a man in drag, but it seems that is not the case. Indeed, it must have been hard for Flora Finch to appear in a role where her wig is her only redeeming feature, and the misogyny of the era shines through the films final moments when the removal of her lengthy locks get her marriage called off and sees her chased out of the house. Still, there's an element of charm to this comedy in the relationship between the punchable little girl, the shallow old man with the curious ability to see beyond quite a few shortcomings in people, and the vengeful nurse who is apparently threatened by her tressed competition.

I think the weirdest thing about this film, which I too just saw this week, is John Bunny's face. I was previously unfamiliar with him -- apparently he made 170-odd films like this -- but he looks like a slightly demonic version of Edmund Gwenn to me.

Probably says a lot that the main effect this had on me was making me want to listen to the Beach Boys' "She's Goin' Bald."

Well into the second disc of the first Treasures set -- I'm watching all of it, not just the parts relevant to this -- and I was extremely impressed by Hell's Hinges. I agree with matrixschmatrix:

The ending is extraordinary, it's difficult to do it justice. It builds and builds, starting out with a fairly normal seeming standoff, moving to a church engulfed in flame and a hero riding in for vengeance (extraordinarily late, and coming back from an errand that seems unimportant)- and becoming suddenly an inferno, a genuine hellscape in which it's difficult to believe anyone could be alive, much less acting. The movie uses the limitations of the filmstock, the haziness of heavy tinting, and the cheapness of the sets all together to create this vast image of a world on fire, and Hart striding slowly and purposefully out of it- he suddenly transcends the Western hero and becomes a prophet, a man who seems rightful and just in burning down a building full of people, justified by his sense of purpose, by his strength. The morality of the thing seems irrelevant, because the movie doesn't need Hart to be a good man, just a powerful one, a man who is able to negotiate with God Himself, and somehow he is merely fulfilling the prophecy of the town's moniker.

I found the ending much more effectively apocalyptic than Unforgiven, which strives for the same kind of feeling. Anyway, Hinges is the kind of feature that gives the lie to the talk about features from this period being "primitive." Same thing with Walsh's Regeneration.

[fiddlesticks]

I'm intrigued by the discussion of Hell's Hinges. What would anyone recommend as my best avenue to see this? I see that the Treasures from the American Archives box is going for well north of $100, so that's not an option. There's a $6 DVD at Amazon, and there seems to be multiple YouTube versions (with multiple durations). And maybe other sources. I wish I hadn't missed out on the Archives sets when they were still at popular prices, they look great.

[dustybooks]

I'm intrigued by the discussion of Hell's Hinges. What would anyone recommend as my best avenue to see this? I see that the Treasures from the American Archives box is going for well north of $100, so that's not an option. There's a $6 DVD at Amazon, and there seems to be multiple YouTube versions (with multiple durations). And maybe other sources. I wish I hadn't missed out on the Archives sets when they were still at popular prices, they look great.

As far as physical copies go, if there's an academic library near you they may well have Treasures. But if you are OK with streaming, the NFPF streams nearly everything on that first boxed set at this link, including Hell's Hinges.

[fiddlesticks]

Thanks. I've never tried streaming (and get off my lawn, by the way) but this may be the time to start.

[matrixschmatrix]

I found the ending much more effectively apocalyptic than Unforgiven, which strives for the same kind of feeling. Anyway, Hinges is the kind of feature that gives the lie to the talk about features from this period being "primitive." Same thing with Walsh's Regeneration.

Darn, Regeneration appears to be another one I thought I had written up, but didn't- it's on youtube in a perfectly watchable copy, and it's very good. I don't think it ever hits blood and thunder heights of Hell's Hinges for me, but it does have the same sense of prefiguring better known genre stuff from much later (in this case, gangster films) and doing it better than a lot of them do. It feels like if The Roaring Twenties weren't a period piece, and the lead has a Cagney-esque charisma, though he doesn't have the same sadistic energy that gives Cagney a sense of danger even when he's playing a good guy. It DOES feature a lot of visibly physically disabled people, and mostly does pretty well by them- the lead's sidekick is a hunchbacked guy, and while he's represented as being a bit too physically weak really to run with the gangsters, he's also portrayed as fairly heroic in his own right and as capable of making his own moral decisions, in a way few of the other characters in the movie are.

I will say, though- it was a mistake to watch this shortly after Guys and Dolls, which runs close enough to it to make it feel like a satire of it.

[fiddlesticks]

Old folk like me shouldn't try newfangled tricks like streaming. I've been looking at

"You boys oughtn't to mind a little heat like this. It's nothin' to what you all got comin' later."

for about a half hour now with no hope that the boys will get what they got comin' anytime soon. Oh well, at least it's not like it's a pivotal part of the movie or anythin. *sigh* Give me my physical media and let me die in peace.

[knives]

Nerven
The film is incoherent enough (thematically as well as a more forgivable narratively) that I can't call this a great film. I'm not sure what it whats out of all of the directly political knots it creates. It's no shocker that this was so heavily censored since it is so on the pulse. It's like the paint hadn't dried on WWI yet and Reinert is already lobbing bombs that would take everyone else another couple of years to decide to throw. That daring is connected to a filmmaking maturity that makes the film feel like something more from the '60s than the silent days. Which all makes this a tantalizing experience, but doesn't stop the confusion of what exactly Reinert is aiming for. The best I can get a sense of is that he's doing Antonioni's dance right with Eros is Sick as the seeming rallying cry. Even some of the framing seems eerily similar L'avventura. There's also something, which again the film shares with Antonioni, weirdly right wing and almost fascist friendly about the film even as the basic plot could easily be a series of left wing platitudes (I'm thinking Metropolis here). It makes this Sartian idea of nerves something worthy of suspicion because I don't quite understand what Reinert's usage is getting at. Maybe not a film to love, but certainly one that is easy to get intellectually lost in. Which is all to say I suppose the Germans of the board are a little in my recommendation zone after so many recent flops.

Hoodoo Ann
I genuinely do not like this movie. Firstly I'm just fed up with the whole 30 year old woman playing a 10 year old thing. Though at least this film has the sanity to cast other 30 year olds in the orphanage so that Marsh doesn't stand out. That little positive doesn't matter much though when the rest of the film is a series of actions in which Marsh shoots someone, we're supposed to feel bad for her, she saves her victim, and then she is congratulated. It's a vile and dumb movie. The scene where they watch movies though is fun.I genuinely do not like this movie. Firstly I'm just fed up with the whole 30 year old woman playing a 10 year old thing. Though at least this film has the sanity to cast other 30 year olds in the orphanage so that Marsh doesn't stand out. That little positive doesn't matter much though when the rest of the film is a series of actions in which Marsh shoots someone, we're supposed to feel bad for her, she saves her victim, and then she is congratulated. It's a vile and dumb movie. The scene where they watch movies though is fun.

A Fool There Was
This is kind of incoherent in a way where it feels like the sequel to something. Powell really seems to think the audience is coming in with a lot of foreknowledge of the story so he elides many things that could be useful and brings forth characters without introduction. While I suspect that is born out of incompetence it does lend a charm to the film and heightens the already shocking nature of Theda Bara. The film plays the vampire concept quite literally with Bara being a black haired variant of Deneuve in Hunger. It's a fun performance that instantly makes clear why she worked perfectly for this era even as the film around her never really gets more than mildly entertaining.

[matrixschmatrix]

A Fool There Was is on the short list of movies that really feel like they come from an unrecognizable different set of social assumptions that I've seen for this project. Fool obviously reflects a similar set of ideas about women to later femme fatale movies, but the actual plot mechanisms are like if The Blue Angel was played without Jannings being an obvious chump. Bara's allure is still recognizable, but the society feels so Edwardian in its shock at the idea that people might want to have sex with each other, which one can't really attribute fully to the era- I mean, Lubitsch was making movies within five years of this point that are as or more sexually sophisticated than things come out now.

[knives]

That in itself didn't bother me though now that you mention it the chumps of the screwballs and von Sternberg films do work as a better attitude if just because I dislike the idiot man anyway and Bara just seems cool (it is really no wonder she became a huge star afterward). I think if anything it shows that Edwardian attitude as just a mask that Bara even to the audience of the time was so much more worthwhile.

[matrixschmatrix]

Huh, that's an interesting thought- that Bara's ongoing career shows that even back then, people were rooting for the villain? What would you attribute her career plummeting a few years later to? I've always heard it argued that she was essentially a threat to a social order that died with the teens, so her appeal died with it.

[knives]

That's possible, though I sadly suspect the reason is the same for nearly every big actress in film: Hollywood wants the next young thing.

[matrixschmatrix]

Reading up, it looks like her career fell apart right when her contract ended, so it may just have been studio politics