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

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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knives
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#251 Post by knives » Mon Sep 25, 2017 7:27 pm

Not eligible, but Queen of Mars is quite good.

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zedz
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#252 Post by zedz » Mon Sep 25, 2017 9:50 pm

matrixschmatrix wrote:
zedz wrote:The Queen of Spades (1916) - A feature adaptation of the Pushkin ghost story, this is much more fluent filmmaking, with lots of dissolves tying things together, and Ivan Mozzhukin scowling like a star throughout.
I got to see this one at the Harvard Film Archive a little while ago, before I dove into this project- the sequences in which he's degenerating into madness are really effective. It sounds like Proazanov's other work doesn''t measure up, though?
Well, Aelita is a hoot, but that and the rather primitive early film on this disc is all I've seen. I don't think it's fair to judge Protazanov on the 1912 film, though, as Russian cinema was only a few years old at that point, and nobody was doing anything particularly sophisticated yet. There's a big leap in his accomplishment in the four years between these two films, but there was a big leap for everybody whose development we can chart from the very partial representation on these discs.

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Emak-Bakia
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#253 Post by Emak-Bakia » Tue Sep 26, 2017 1:47 am

I'm hoping to have an opportunity to post some more in this thread, since I've been viewing many films for the project, but life's been too hectic to sit down and carefully reflect on everything. After a very quick review of the thread, I do just want to briefly share some thoughts in response to matrix's write-up of Hypocrites, which I feel is one of the highlights of the films I've viewed in recent months.
matrixschmatrix wrote:This is an extremely cool looking movie- the double exposure of the nude woman throughout, the cuts and dissolves and mirrorings and everything, all feel really effective in getting across the sort of unreal allegorical quality of the movie- but in terms of what it's actually saying, it just felt alternately hokey and rather cruel. The whole thing is about the impossible purity of Truth, this abstract ideal, and how people are too hypocritical to deal with it, but the conception of truth here seems to lack any real sense of community compassion- in searching for it, the protagonist leaves everyone behind, refusing to help them to share his destination with him (and while some fail because they can't be bothered to seek, others fail because they have children to protect, or they're physically unable to keep up- surely such people are worthy of empathy and aid!) When he finds Truth, people of course can't handle it- first in a sort of doubly metaphorical past, where Truth is a nude statue, and everyone is SHOCKED by it (though I feel as though nude statuary wasn't... all that rare?) and then in a series of encounters in which Truth reveals hypocrites such as politicians who claim not to be corrupt, but actually ARE corrupt, high society people who... secretly want to wear decolletage-bearing clothing? Parents grieving over a sick child who had earlier given the child candy? Obviously some of this part is obscured by changing social mores- the 'modesty' section, in which everyone is revealed immodestly to be wearing extremely modest bathing costumes, most clearly, but in quite a few of the ending sections as well- but ultimately, the whole thing makes me question exactly what good Truth as some divine ideal actually does for anybody. It gets the protagonist killed, and nobody seems the better for any of it.
Regarding you question about what good is truth as personified in this film: none. I think Weber suggests that a singular truth does not exist. For starters, truth (as depicted by a nude woman frolicking around the landscape) physically doesn't exist. She's transparent and fades in and out of existence. Additionally, there are multiple intertitles which suggest the subjectivity of (and therefore nonexistence of a singular) truth. For instance, one about Gabriel's character reads, "With prayer and fasting, he reverently formed his idea of truth." (Emphasis added.) Finally, truth only appears in Gabriel's non-corporeal, dream/journey to the pearly gates. Truth's scenes (and the bulk of this movie) are not set in the "real world."

So what's the point of including this figure of truth? I wonder if Weber included truth simply for the sake of having a naked woman in her film? It might sounds like a stretch, but read on! To me, the relationship between speaker and audience is central to this film. In both the "real world" and fairy tale settings, there is the story of a speaker/artist/pastor/whatever -- someone attempting to communicate a message to an audience -- and the majority of the audience not getting the message. I find it easy to align Weber personally with the side of the speaker, since, after all, she is world famous for her moralizing.

Continuing with this line of thought of Weber's personal investment in the production, and in consideration of the film's aim, I can't help but view it as something much more specific than the abstract message you have suggested above, matrix. Consider that Weber, by her own admission, was drawing most of her scenarios at this time directly from newspapers, illuminating some hot-button social issue of the day. As such, I think it's likely that Weber anticipated the censorship battle Hypocrites would face upon completion, and that it's possible that she was consciously engaging with that topic within the film itself. To include this kind of nudity in a film being made in 1914 was controversial, no doubt about it, and there's no way that Weber went into the production naïvely thinking the scenes of full-frontal female nudity would go unnoticed.

Consider the lengthy scene in which the statue is unveiled. The explicit parallel within the film is the opening in which the pastor delivers his sermon to a mostly bored congregation, but, to my mind, this is an allegory for the movie-going experience. It's a scene of artistic consumption, communal gathering, and mingling of classes (as might be found in movie houses of 1914.) If you're still following me, what Weber is showing us with this scene is an audience's reaction to a work of art deemed vulgar because of its depiction of nudity and the subsequent censoring of that work by authorities (by covering it up in this case.) Sound familiar? Intentional or not, this scene parallels the real-world reaction the film would generate upon its completion, which to me is fascinating to think about.

I'm not sure if all the pieces and ideas in this film fully come together, and perhaps my ideas here are half-baked, but I find this a fascinating one to puzzle over. And, oh boy, how about that thrilling bit of surrealism with the "mote in the eye" sequence? Did you catch that, visible for a moment in Gabriel's iris, is the cameraperson cranking away? Incredible.

Image

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#254 Post by matrixschmatrix » Tue Sep 26, 2017 10:22 am

Well, it's an interesting thought, and undoubtedly in making a movie about the blowback various artists received when presenting a naked woman in their art, Weber must have expected precisely the same kind of blowback, thus proving the plausibility of her scenario- I guess- but ultimately, it doesn't fully answer the question of what good the naked truth is. It's a strange movie if its point is 'you guys are going to crucify me for this one' and nothing else!

If truth is subjective- and again, you make a fair case, though it's hard to see a Rashomon esque subjectivity in a movie that also posits Truth as a messianic vision- then the visions of hypocrisy Weber's characters expose must therefore also be subjective, which makes the ones that are cruel (the parents whose child deserves to die in particular) that much crueler. To me, the movie feels like a fairly straightforward and didactic message dressed up in glorious cinematic garments, along the lines of Intolerance; here, the message is that people are liars and hypocrites, and will persecute anyone who tries to take their lies from them. Again, I think that as with Intolerance, the intertextuality is there, and Weber is depicting herself as the noble truth seeker- but to me, the movie depicts a seeker so blinded by the beauty of his destination that he has abandoned his humanity in reaching it. Of course the humans he left behind aren't terribly interested in seeing what he brings back.

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Gregory
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#255 Post by Gregory » Tue Sep 26, 2017 12:38 pm

To answer the "why" question about Naked Truth, whether the nudity was just to provoke, it's necessary to look at the film as being directly inspired by and commenting on Faugeron's painting La Verité and the controversy over it in Paris. The audience is reminded of it fairly early in the film when a newspaper article depicting the painting is briefly shown. It's the same newspaper the minister is still clutching in the final scene. I don't think it goes too far to say the film is an adaptation of the painting and its social and political context into a new medium. It's the inspiration for the minister's dream—giving the film's framing device a real ripped-from-the-headlines counterpart to the dreamy, poetic quality of its central part.

A crucial part of that context is other censorship battles being waged in the US at the time, such as the conviction of one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Elbert Hubbard, on charges of circulating obscene or objectionable materials through the mail in 1913. I started reading a bunch of his commentaries in his little chapbook-sized journal The Philistine several years ago when someone gave me a collection of them dating from 1907 through 1915, the year Hubbard was pardoned.

Then, watching Hypocrites yet again, I was astonished to see that the newspaper article on La Verité that's so crucial to the film was written by none other than Elbert Hubbard! No other commentary on Weber or the film that I've read noted this connection, but I think it's a pretty interesting and revealing one.
I also found out that this was a real newspaper, not one created for the film: it's from the magazine section of the San Francisco Examiner, July 12, 1914, which in term of chronology supports the theory that Hubbard's own battles with censorship and the article in question could have played a key role in inspiring Weber to make Hypocrites, along with, obviously, the Faugeron painting.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#256 Post by matrixschmatrix » Tue Sep 26, 2017 2:18 pm

Interesting! I didn't know there was a specific public scandal it was in response to, but it's not too surprising. I do feel like the film goes out of its way to depict the Truth as being alienating though- the painting is almost directly quoted in the movie, but the parts surrounding it- the path leading to The Truth, and the cruelty The Truth displays- almost implies that people are right to flee.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#257 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:52 am

Sir Arne's Treasure

Knowing this one won the last round, I went in with weighted expectations. I wasn't disappointed, but I'm still not entirely sure in my mind what I think of this one.

It's a complex and sophisticated movie, both visually and thematically- there's a lot of cool tracking shots, including several that are both tracking shots and special effects shots featuring a ghost, including one in which the character who is being haunted becomes so starkly white that the real actor also begins to look ghostly, particularly with the alienating effect of the heavy blue tinting against the real snowscape backdrop. It's a fascinating movie to look at all throughout, and by and large the photography actually contributes directly to the themes... I think. It's unnerving looking, creeping and unsettled, jumpy and often carrying a feeling that something bad is about to happen (a feeling aided by the score Kino put on it, which is an outright horror score) and I think the movie itself is meant to feel that way, so it's quite successful in that respect.

As for the plot, though- this is yet another Scandinavian movie from this era in which just horrible shit happens to everyone all the time. Here, some Scottish mercenary lords escape prison- by murdering a bunch of people- and then after some further shenanigans murder an entire vicarage worth of innocents for a chest full of silver, the titular treasure. After they clean up (they'd been bearded and disguised as peasant tanners while committing their atrocities) they then hang around waiting for the ice to melt enough for them to sail home- during which time the youngest, a man who stabbed a child through the heart, falls in love with the one survivor of the massacre, who does not recognize him. There's an act in which both he and she are haunted by the ghost of the child he murdered (the survivor's foster sister) and then, tipped off by the ghost, she hears the killers admit their guilt to one another. She is torn, because she has come to love the young killer, but reports them anyway- and then rushes off to protect her beloved. He gets her killed by using her as human shield, attempts to hide aboard a ship, and then decrees that his capture was God's will when he gets caught.

The movie has a lot of different moods, feeling almost like different genres for each of the five acts- it is sometimes a historical drama, like A Man There Was, sometimes an adventure movie, sometimes a movie of small town characters- but most notably, it behaves like a horror movie. The girl, the survivor, is literally haunted, unable to escape the trauma she has undergone, and she never really finds a way to move past it, and the vibe of the movie is sometimes like Carnival of Souls, feeling somehow terrified of being touched but also terrified of becoming unreal. She never really speaks to anyone except the killer, when he is courting her, and a few of the women in the town, who try to ease her trauma through normalcy and work. It never really makes sense that she falls for the killer- the courtship is pretty perfunctory- but perhaps the idea is that he too is haunted by the same ghost, so what they have is not so much love as trauma bonding.

His character is a monster. When pressed with the murder, he excuses his actions by saying he and his fellows were drunk and starving, but this doesn't hold- he's a pretty callous murderer when they make their escape, and he uses his 'beloved' as a human shield (literally, holding her in front of him to ward off the pikes of the city guard) almost immediately after making this excuse. He claims that there is a true self who is not like this, but there is a sense of an abusive partner, someone who keeps his lover on the hook by always dangling a redeemable man just out of reach- he even blames her for taking away his shot at redemption by reporting her. There's also something vampiric about him- he's ghostly pale, and his face looks a bit like Lugosi's at times; moreover, his power over the girl seems outrightly hypnotic, something based in mesmerism rather than honesty or normative courtship. It's not clear if we're meant to believe that he has a real conscience- he does see the ghost, and is crushed by it, but he doesn't appear to do so until he starts spending time with the girl- perhaps he is undergoing the painful formation of a conscience, but if so, it never fully forms, and he's one of the more thoroughly villainous people I've seen in what is arguably a lead in one of these movies. As I said, I'm not entirely sure what I make of this movie, but it's certainly one worth seeking out.

Also, on a trip to Europe this summer, my partner and I went to Kristianstad, in Sweden, where there's a small museum commemorating the earliest home of the film industry there- one of the objects on display is the lead's dress from this movie.

Image

I can recommend the museum, though if you're going, I wouldn't go during the summer- apparently all of Scandinavia takes the summer off, but during the rest of the year, they show movies from this era on 35mm.

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Tommaso
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#258 Post by Tommaso » Sun Oct 01, 2017 3:08 pm

matrixschmatrix wrote:
zedz wrote:The Queen of Spades (1916) - A feature adaptation of the Pushkin ghost story, this is much more fluent filmmaking, with lots of dissolves tying things together, and Ivan Mozzhukin scowling like a star throughout.
I got to see this one at the Harvard Film Archive a little while ago, before I dove into this project- the sequences in which he's degenerating into madness are really effective. It sounds like Proazanov's other work doesn''t measure up, though?
I've just watched The Queen of Spades and found it rather impressive. Of course this doesn't have the visual perfection of a 1920s film, but Mozzhukin's acting is already very stylish (and stylized). Somehow he often reminds me of a Russian version of Conny Veidt, and especially in this film. Anyway, the film in general doesn't skimp on glamour in the scenes that re-create the countess' youth. Very good special effects, too
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(especially the one near the end when German's madness is depicted by Mozzhukin getting entangled in a huge spider's web, which looked genuinely frightening).
Disregarding the films of Bauer for a moment, this was among the most captivating films I've seen from Tsarist Russia so far.

And definitely do search out Protazanov's work from the 20s and 30s. There are some real gems to be found, like "The man from the restaurant" or "On the strangeness of love", to name just two of them. The man made so many more very fine films apart from "Aelita".

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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#259 Post by swo17 » Sun Oct 01, 2017 3:19 pm

Friendly reminder that lists are due in two weeks

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#260 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu Oct 05, 2017 1:06 am

Nerven

This goes on the lengthy list of movies I've watched for this project which I'm happy to have seen, but which I don't think I like very much. Knives, I know you had mixed feelings about this one, and compared the effect of the politics to Metropolis- I think that's a fair touchpoint.

This movie is a weird hybrid of a sort of allegorical/metaphorical state of the world thing like Caligari or Metropolis and a more traditional set of melodramas woven together- a bit like J'Accuse in that effect, though I think Gance is much more successful in making the melodrama feel connected to the more florid and political scenes (and also I think he handles the melodrama itself more interestingly.) Here, there's a small cluster of people, all of them fairly rich, with varying political outlooks and states of mental health:

-there's Roloff, who begins the movie a more or less outright fascist, but who becomes weakened and neurotic almost immediately
-John, who begins the movie as something of a leftist firebrand, telling the common people that they have a right to fight for themselves, before later regressing into a position that seems a combination of sort of current Democrat (telling the crowd that violent demonstration can never achieve progress) and fascist (he comes very close, in the same speech, to saying 'arbeit macht frei'- and in context, it's very clear that he is not reminding them of their own power as workers, but telling them essentially that they were made as laborers to be subservient to the people like Roloff)
-Roloff's sister Marja, who is in love with John for his charisma and commitment, and who becomes more committed than he is, and winds up being the only cast member truly committed to much of any political cause
-Roloff's wife Elizabeth, who is in love with John as well
-John's sister, who loves John and is blind and doesn't appear to have a lot of other characteristics

The movie seems to be trying to link the political unrest of the post WWI collapse of the German monarchy to 'nerves' generally and a case of schizophrenia that overcomes Roloff, but it never really makes the case, perhaps in part because there's something like half an hour of footage missing, almost all of which deal directly with the political subplots. The melodrama side is pretty packed- a false rape accusation made and retracted, a fire which brings two people together but kills another, a man nobly committing suicide to let his wife get together with the man she truly loves- and it's not hard to imagine a Dickensian patchwork along the lines of A Tale of Two Cities being made with some of the same stuff, but to me, most of it just doesn't work very well. The one section that really does work is almost all confined to act 4 (I think?), which deals with Roloff realizing that he has hallucinated evidence he gave before court, and descending into schizophrenia- I think it's meant to be allegorical, but it's both the most beautifully realized filmic thread of the movie, with Roloff's troubled imaginings leading to a lot of cool double exposures and reflection shots and all sorts of neat things, all of which work pretty well at getting across intrusive images taking over one's mind, and also the part of the movie I found most genuinely affecting, as despite Roloff being kind of a horrible person in the first place, it plays him as someone who recognizes how much he's losing control and is increasingly desperate to maintain some corner of himself that can still see lucidly before succumbing altogether.

Unfortunately, Roloff- and the blind sister- are both knocked out of the way in a way that fits into the melodramatic mode (both are implicitly making noble sacrifices to allow the True Couple of the movie, John and Elizabeth, to get together) but also feels unpleasantly eugenic, as implying that the ill or disabled are unfit for the glorious white future of farming and standing around naked that John and Elizabeth are destined for. The movie also loses the jittery sense a world that is falling apart around one in the last couple of acts, which might otherwise have made the reactionary politics feel more palatable- obviously, I do not think the German aristocracy deserved to continue to govern, but it's not hard to feel empathy for members of it whose world is falling apart around them, however deservedly. I brought up Knives' comparison to Metropolis at the beginning of this post, and I think that ultimately the suggestion it puts forward that the strife between workers and overlords could be resolved by just sort of talking it over together is pretty similar to the political outlook here- but Lang's movie is so rich with images and so compelling moment to moment that despite Von Harbou literally spelling out the moral several times over, it's pretty easy to ignore, or to substitute with one's own reading. Here, the well of imagery runs dry well before the movie ends, and it never has the lickety speed that it would need to slide past whatever message it thinks it's putting out.

I should also mention- the prologue to this movie is visually stunning and worth watching in its own right, both for the tableaux of horrors- murder, war, pain, madness- and for the 'living titles', titles optically printed onto scenes of moving water, or Olympia esque beautiful nudes, or people stacked around columns like the first letter in an illuminated manuscript. Apparently, there were originally more of them, but the great majority were lost- the movie as a whole might have more momentum if it had kept them.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#261 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu Oct 05, 2017 8:20 pm

The Sinking of the Lusitania

I watched this one mute, in a somewhat lousy youtube presentation, but it's nonetheless immensely compelling, even as propaganda demanding entry into one of history's stupidest wars. I think that only really matters insofar as the subtitles seem intrusive, particularly when they seek to rile the viewer up by reminding them that a Vanderbilt was killed, how dare those dastardly Germans-but the animated segments are remarkable, even now.

Windsor McCay's hand is somewhat more hidden here than in something like the Rarebit Fiend series- he keeps to verisimilitude, so his imagination is somewhat in check- but he's recognizable nonetheless in the black smoke coming out of the ship's stacks, the insidious, oddly alive smoke, that never breaks into puffs but stretches, reaches out, and when the first torpedo hits, seems to be conjuring the white plumes that emanate from the explosion. It feels... demonic, somehow, a bit like the animated segment of The Wall in which the planes become killer birds, or the fascist bird in this classic Soviet propaganda cartoon- it's not a bird, but there's a similar brutality of line. It reminds me too of the dreaminess of the Nemo strips, which on the Sunday strips are vertically stacked, and involve similar long, attenuated lines- when shown statically, the effect is not as sinister, but still has a feeling of unreality, of something stretching into infinity and drifting away. There's some beautiful use of perspective, too- the ship is shown cutting sideways across the proscenium, and doesn't much move from that line, but the U-boat cuts in a perpendicular line, sneaking past us to our right, moving directly towards the vanishing point, and also directly towards the ship. The ship does not seem either good or evil, but the U-boat feels immediately predatory, sharklike.

After the first torpedo hits, we see the sort of standard drama of the boats being lowered- which is interrupted by another torpedo strike. The effect is like an atomic blast, the screen becomes totally overwhelmed in white, as though the world has ended. When we can see the ship again, there's a repeating cycle of some kind of object springing from the railings into the sea- whether this is meant to be water or smoke or people jumping to their likely deaths is not entirely clear, in a productive way. McCay also employs what could feel like a whimsical note in a cutaway to the first torpedo cutting under the surface- two fish look at one another in surprise- but the moment heightens the starkness of the rest of the movie, as it gives us the only faces we ever see within the animation, and puts the silhouettes and distance the rest of it uses into relief.

As I think I mentioned, it's only the titles that really hold this back- they're not very artful in of themselves, even as propaganda, and they are so frequent that they really damage the rhythm of the editing, particularly since McCay's visual storytelling is so clear that they're totally unnecessary. Even so, it's a pretty astonishing work in general, and a truly remarkable one for something so near the origins of animation as a form.

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swo17
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#262 Post by swo17 » Sun Oct 08, 2017 11:09 am

With one week to go until the deadline, I have received...one list. The overall #1 film is currently
SpoilerShow
a tree falling in the woods that makes no sound.
I'm also somewhat surprised by the strong performance of
SpoilerShow
the cold, empty void of non-existence.
The world at the moment is entirely inhabited by orphans, walking dejected tramp circles in a futile attempt to ascribe some sort of meaning to their lives.

Hopefully I start getting more lists soon.

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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#263 Post by knives » Sun Oct 08, 2017 11:30 am

You'll be getting my on Tuesday. I've just been putting off the last four discs I've been meaning to watch for this.

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domino harvey
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#264 Post by domino harvey » Sun Oct 08, 2017 11:40 am

I think a lot of our previous contributors to earlier decades lists participate less or not at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if this and the next decade face a tough climb to even ten lists (my own marker for actually bothering to tally the other List Projects lists, though swo no doubt has his own policies or numbers in mind for these lists)

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#265 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Oct 08, 2017 11:42 am

Well that would be a disappointment, I really made an effort on this one

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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#266 Post by swo17 » Sun Oct 08, 2017 12:12 pm

I'm tabulating no matter what. And someone else just submitted a list since my last post. But certainly, anyone on the fence that thinks they could manage to put a decent list together, go for it!

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zedz
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#267 Post by zedz » Sun Oct 08, 2017 4:04 pm

swo17 wrote:With one week to go until the deadline, I have received...one list. The overall #1 film is currently
SpoilerShow
a tree falling in the woods that makes no sound.
I'm also somewhat surprised by the strong performance of
SpoilerShow
the cold, empty void of non-existence.
The world at the moment is entirely inhabited by orphans, walking dejected tramp circles in a futile attempt to ascribe some sort of meaning to their lives.

Hopefully I start getting more lists soon.
Are the orphans played by the Gish sisters?

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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#268 Post by TMDaines » Mon Oct 09, 2017 8:35 am

The 20s list will be fine, but this is a tough slog if you appreciate film more for narrative more than technological achievement, documentation or experimentation.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#269 Post by matrixschmatrix » Mon Oct 09, 2017 11:47 am

As someone who tends, probably unfairly, to dislike including a lot of shorts in my list- I literally had never seen a feature length film from before 1920 before last year, and I think I'd seen two before I started on this project. It was a lot of work, though ultimately fairly rewarding, I think, and even now my selection pool is shallower than it was for any other decades project I've participated in.

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swo17
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#270 Post by swo17 » Mon Oct 09, 2017 11:51 am

You're right, that is unfair. :wink:

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#271 Post by matrixschmatrix » Mon Oct 09, 2017 12:48 pm

Haha I mean I DO include them- and obviously for this list several are going to place highly- but I would still feel weird about a list where I had only watched a dozen features, even if I watched hundreds of shorts.

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Shrew
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#272 Post by Shrew » Tue Oct 10, 2017 5:13 pm

I'm planning to do a list, but I almost always submit on the last day. Do you listmakers hate that? Do you spend this last week worrying about last-minute lists dropping in like corpses from bells?

I'll also try to post something on some films in the next few days. Even if it's just some bile-purging about Birth of a Nation (which isn't even the film whose politics have made me the angriest in this project--that would be the Asta Nielsen set's The Suffragette).

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#273 Post by matrixschmatrix » Tue Oct 10, 2017 5:16 pm

For the couple of lists I did, I was working on the assumption that more than half the lists would come in on the last day, so it wasn't a big deal. My only pet peeve was people who put the title in a nonstandard format, since that meant I split a couple of entries.

I'm very curious to hear your anger- both Nielsen and BoaN are on the pile of things that keep being just out of the top of my to-watch queue.

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swo17
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#274 Post by swo17 » Tue Oct 10, 2017 5:20 pm

Yeah, I expect to get maybe half the lists on the last day. The only annoying thing about that is if there are issues with the last minute lists that need to be corrected, potentially holding up the results. Though maybe that will be less of an issue with the two rounds of voting...

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Satori
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#275 Post by Satori » Tue Oct 10, 2017 8:50 pm

Shrew wrote:(which isn't even the film whose politics have made me the angriest in this project--that would be the Asta Nielsen set's The Suffragette).
Oh man, yeah, that movie sucks. The idea that being a suffragette automatically leads to acts of violent terrorism is bad enough but the worst part was the ending:
SpoilerShow
Don't worry about voting when all the real power is in motherhood! :roll:
I have no idea what Nielsen's politics were, but the idea of her playing this role that was written and directed by her husband bothered me a bit too. I like the Gad films I've seen, but Nielsen is without a doubt the best part of all of them.

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