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

#226 Post by knives » Sun Aug 27, 2017 9:49 pm

Yeah, that's unfortunate I was able to just guess that. It's also sad only four of her films survive apparently. She's so good here and it sounds like she would have made a great and very different Cleopatra.

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Satori
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#227 Post by Satori » Wed Aug 30, 2017 8:16 am

I was looking through TCM listings this morning and noticed some programing relevant to this project: on Wednesday Sept 6th they are doing a day of women filmmakers, including pre-20s stalwarts Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché. The only pre-20s Weber is Where are My Children?, which is both aesthetically brilliant and an utterly bizarre document of Weber's complicated stance on reproductive rights. It's a good opportunity to see it if you don't have access to the third Treasures From the American Film Archives set. There are also several Alice Guy shorts, including the amazing Algie the Miner. (Also, this is unrelated to this project, but if you haven't seen it, Ida Lupino's Outrage (1950) is showing later in the day. It's incomprehensibly unavailable on DVD but it is a masterpiece of noir melodrama and one of the most shattering depictions of post-rape PTSD that I've ever seen)

This seems like a good time to post on some Alice Guy films I've been working through lately, including the whole Gaumont disc and some of her American films. I apologize for the brevity/ lack of detail on some of these- I didn't always take the best notes so a lot of the films ran together in my head.

Alice Guy-Blaché

Her early films work within all the major genres: she has Lumiere-like documentaries such as Bathing in a Stream (1897) which show off their locations, some dancing films like Dance of the Seasons: Winter, Snow Dance (1900) and The Tango (1905) (a film which shows that it does not, in fact, take two to tango), some animal-based comedy films like Cook & Rilly’s Trained Rooster and Clown, Dog, and Balloon (both 1905) and some Melies-esque “trick” editing magic films like Disappearing Act (1898) or Magician’s Alms (1905). Some of her early 20th century films are more substantial versions of these genres. Faust and Mephistopheles (1903), for example, reminds me very much of Melies with its fantasy setting, costuming, and trick editing, although the background sets are less elaborate. Spain (1905) is a Lumiere-style “tourism” film in which we get to visit various locations in Spain, augmented by the use of pan shots. It also includes a funny moment in which an intertitle jokingly points out Alice Guy herself in one of the shots. Finally, her dancing films expanded to include musical performances with the help of the Gaumont Chronophone sound system in a series of films like Félix Mayol Performs “Indiscreet Questions” (1905), which is also colored.

There are some other interesting ones, two: I especially like Cabbage Patch Fairy (1990), a pretty nutty film about in which a woman pulls actual live babies out of a cabbage patch and leaves them on the ground while she dances about. This conceit is reprised in the later Midwife to the Upper Classes (1902) in which a couple visit this woman at a stand. She takes them in a back room—giving us a cut and change of locations—to a cabbage patch in which she pulls babies out of cabbages and shows them to the couple so that they can choose the one they want. There is an unfortunate racist joke in here but the intent is to satirize the upper class. The film is most interesting because the couple are both played by women, one in male drag. So the cabbage patch baby business becomes something like a turn-of-the-century lesbian adoption service! Similarly, Pierrette’s Escapades (1900), a rather beautiful hand-colored dancing film, also features a pair of women dancing together, one of whom is kind of in drag (she is the one who is leading). It even ends with a smooch between the two. At the Floral Ball (1900) is another dancing film with two women, one in drag. This one actually credits them as "Miss Lally and Miss Julyett of the Olympia.” I’m sure most contemporary audiences didn’t bat an eye at these films, but I can’t not read them as queer from a current vantage point. I'd recommend these two in a sub-five minute triple bill with Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894)!

The Birth, Life, and Death of Jesus Christ (1906) might be her most accomplished film from France that I’ve seen, although I confess that I find most of it a bit dull. It does notably race through the story of Christ in a little over thirty minutes, spending particular time on the last supper through the crucifixion. There are some great sequences: I love the busy frames with great throngs of people while Christ drags the cross through the streets. The resurrection is also quite beautifully done.

I actually prefer the comedies of 1906. I quite like A Sticking Woman (1906), a social satire about a rich woman who makes her servant girl lick her stamps for her. It is also rather risqué: a guy kisses her, leaving their tongues stuck together. There is some goofy slapstick in An Obstacle Course and A Story Well Spun, the latter about a guy rolling around in a barrel who hilariously takes out a woman on a bike. A Drunken Mattress is another fun slapstick movie about a drunk guy who gets sewn inside a mattress while a maid is cleaning it. The film consists of her trying to bring it home, all sorts of hilarity ensuing along the way. It is delightfully bizarre.

Consequences of Feminism (1906) is one of those films that I’m not quite sure what to do with politically. It is similar to A Florida Enchantment (Sidney Drew, 1914) in that it flips gender: the women are all tough and macho while the men are effeminate. While I suppose it could be read as a satire against feminism, I’m not inclined to read it this way. What is interesting is that the women get into fights over the men and exhibit obnoxious behaviors traditionally associated with male gender roles. So I’m going to risk reading it anachronistically and propose that it is about how silly all gender roles are. It is quite funny too, so I’m also willing to put its politics aside.

I’m also not quite sure what to make of Cruel Mother (1906), about a mother who beats her son for no real reason and then he runs away. I can’t quite get a handle on the tone: sometimes it seems like it could be comedic but other times like a serious expose on child abuse.

The 1907 films on the Gaumont set are mostly comedic ones. We’ve got more animal comedy with Sausage Race, in which a dog grabs some links of sausage and leads the townspeople on a chase throughout different locations. In The Glue, a prankster kid puts glue everywhere so that people end up stuck to steps and bicycle seats, etc. Eventually the gluer gets glued, though. The Fur Hat is a bit more elaborate in plot although it is set in a single indoor location as opposed to the multiple outdoor locations of the others. A guy in a fur hat is trying to seduce a woman and ends up getting stuck inside her tall cabinet. Other people come in and out of the room and various misunderstandings accrue.

The Cleaning Man is pretty fun: when his mistress leaves the room, the guy hired to clean just tears up the dining room, going absolutely bonkers as he throws things everywhere. Later it develops into some holes-in-the-floor comedy. The Rolling Bed is a pretty dull “bed rolls down the street” film without much of interest happening. A Four Year Old Hero is pretty delightful: a girl runs around catching burglars, stopping drunks from running into oncoming train and the like. The train gag is shot from across the tracks, requiring some good timing for her to close the gate right before the drunks would wander onto the tracks as the train speeds by. I also like The Irresistible Piano, in which a guy’s piano playing apparently makes listeners stand up and dance against their will. There are some really runny shots of people doing some insane dancing that should really be seen.

More substantial is At the Barricades (1907), a melodrama about a guy trying to get milk for his mother during the revolution. He gets caught coming back and is about to be executed when he begs to take his mother the milk first. Some of the shots of soldiers running down the street and firing at the rebels are impressive and it has a pretty good plot for a film just a little under five minutes.

On to her American films that I’ve seen:

Falling Leaves (1912) is a sentimental tearjerker about a girl with consumption whose doctor tells her that she will only live “until the leaves fall” that autumn. Her younger sister tries to tie the leaves to the tree so that they won’t fall, keeping her sister alive. While there isn’t much happening formally, the scenario is emotionally engaging, even with the twist towards the end.

Algie the Miner (1912) is a favorite of mine: an effeminate man wants to marry a woman but her father won’t bless the marriage until he makes a “man” out of himself. He decides to go out west, where he takes up with Jim, a virile image of masculinity. There are some quite funny jokes about how small Algie’s “gun” is compared to Jim and Jim’s attempts to get Algie to toughen up. The film is thematically fascinating in that Algie becomes masculine by essentially becoming Jim’s wife: he moves in with him, takes care of him while he’s drunk, etc. When Algie has to return east to marry the woman, Jim is visibly upset until he learns he can go with him. So while Algie plays a stereotypically prissy gay man early in the film—clips that were later used in the documentary Celluloid Closet to show depictions of gays men as “sissies” in early cinema—it is actually when he becomes more masculine that the homoerotic subtext between Jim and Algie more or less becomes text!

The Making of an American Citizen (1912) is quite interesting. An eastern European couple immigrate to the United States, where the husband learns what the title cards call “four lessons”: he is stopped from beating his wife four times. I say the film is interesting because it is a critique of spousal abuse that can also be read as a satire about assimilation and the process of Americanization. This creates a radically irresolvable tension at the center of the film that can still be found in contemporary conversations about (first world) feminism and imperialism.

Girl in the Armchair (1912) is about a guy who loses a bunch of money gambling and has to take a loan from a guy who charges exorbitant interest rates. His only way out is to steal money from his fiancé’s father, who rather stupidly leaves his safe open. While a bit moralistic, there is a really cool nightmare sequence in which playing cards float around his bed and faint superimposed images of him playing poker appear over his head. This gives the film a surreal touch not really present in most of Alice Guy’s American films.

A House Divided (1913) is a comedy about a married couple who mistakenly believe the other is having an affair and decide to get separated but continue to live together! They draw up a contract in which they cannot speak to one another, creating all kinds of problems when they host a dinner party. It is quite funny overall, although my favorite character is a female worker in the man’s office. She manages to convey a great deal of sass with her facial expressions and does things like drop a heavy book on the floor to remind him that it’s time to leave.

Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1913) is another good comedy in which a man loses all his money in the stock market, causing him to break off an engagement with his fiancé because he can’t support her. This is absurd because she is already wealthy, but he won’t let her support them. She them cooks up a scheme, pretending that a distant relative left him all her money as long as he is married by noon that day. While the focus is on the comedy, it is doing some quite interesting things in its examination of gender roles as well, creating an interesting contradiction in that he would accept free money from a distant aunt but not his bride-to-be.

The Ocean Waif
(1916) is the most narratively substantial Alice Guy film I’ve seen. A young woman runs away from her abusive foster father and takes refuge in an abandoned villa near the ocean. Meanwhile a young writer rents the place so that he can work on his next novel for a few days before meeting up with his fiancé. While the initial parts of the film are melodrama, the film shifts into a romantic farce with the addition of the writer and his servant. It seems that the villa is rumored to be haunted, so when the servant catches glimpses of the young waif running about the villa and stealing food, he thinks that she is a ghost. Doris Kenyon plays the waif, who is pretty adorable in her tramp drag.

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zedz
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#228 Post by zedz » Wed Aug 30, 2017 6:59 pm

Okay, I've started on Milestone's set of pre-revolutionary Russian films, so here are capsule reviews of the first couple of discs.

Volume One: Beginnings

A Fish Factory in Astrakhan (1908) - A Pathe actuality, pretty standard stuff of smiling girls gutting fish.

Sten'ka Razin (Drakov Studio, unknown date) - Razin was an actual historical figure, but this film seems to be based on a popular folk song from the 1880s, and it's one of those primitive narrative films that presents tableaux-like 'scenes' from a well-known story knowing that the audience will be able to connect the narrative dots. It's interesting in that it's entirely shot on location, including scenes of characters in boats on a river, but the mise-en-scene is extremely basic and unimaginative: variations on crowd scenes in long shot, with big dead spaces above and below the central gang of figures stretching from screen left to screen right.

Princess Tarakanova (Kai Hansen & Maurice Maitre, 1910) - This is another quasi-historical tale, about a pretender to the Russian throne. It's studio-bound, and the narrative is more fully developed but still lumpily delivered (people stand around reading letters which advance the plot in lengthy intertitles). It's rather conventional for the time, but there are two formal elements that make it stand out.

First, it has an extremely dynamic z-axis. The vast majority of the significant movement within the frame is towards or away from the camera. Almost all character entrances and exits are from or into the depth of the frame (or, occasionally, from behind the camera) not from either side of the frame. I remark this specifically because I seem to recall that an uncommonly active z-axis was a feature of Evgeny Bauer's work, and there are other films in these two volumes that suggest that it was a significant marker of Russian mise en scene at the time.

The second remarkable aspect of the film is that it has an alternate ending. After the 'historical' ending (the imprisoned 'princess' dies of grief / despair / overacting in prison), it announces that there's another version of the story where she drowns, and proceeds to show us that scene as well.

Romance with Double Bass (Kai Hansen, 1911) - Already a much more fluidly directed and sequenced film from Hansen, shot outdoors. A brief, risque gag film involving stolen clothing and public 'nudity'. Insubstantial, but a reasonably deft piece of filmmaking for the period.

Volume Two: Folklore and Legend

Drama in a Gypsy Camp Near Moscow (Vladimir Siversen, 1908) - Brief, fragmentary, primitive (barely) narrative film. Nice use of locations and (allegedly) non-actors.

I'm shuffling the order of the remaining three films on the set because they're all by the same director and I want to deal with them chronologically.

A Sixteenth Century Russian Wedding (Vasily Goncharov, 1908) - Studio-based, dramatically basic sequence of easily understood 'scenes' largely relying on the same kind of centrally-positioned, crowded mise-en-scene evident in Sten'ka Razin. Since that film also featured wedding scenes, we're basically seeing studio and location versions of the same thing in some instances.

Rusalka (Goncharov, 1910) - Two years later, Goncharov's skill has markedly improved, and the film is a good deal more sophisticated in constructing a narrative. This film moves between location and studio footage. The staging is still largely proscenium-friendly, but there's one shot of a character emerging from a background forest and advancing towards the camera on horseback.

The Brigand Brothers (Goncharov, 1912) - A further two years on, and Goncharov's cinema is far more complex. This tale is largely told in flashback, covers the entire lives of its protagonists, consistently employs composition in depth (as was the case in Princess Tarakanova, virtually all the dynamic movement in the frame is along the z axis), varies its framing (including an asymmetrical shot with one half of the frame occupied by the negative space of a house wall) and even utilises point-of-view shots. These three films are an excellent demonstration of just how fast film grammar was advancing during this period.

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jindianajonz
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#229 Post by jindianajonz » Sun Sep 03, 2017 12:03 pm

I finally gave up my slog through the Keystone Chaplins and move on to Essanay, but after reading a bit about His Prehistoric Past, I went back to check it out, and I'm glad I did. Perhaps its only the comparison of his other Keystone output, or maybe I've developed some form of Stockholm Syndrome that makes me desperate to find value in order to justify the hours spent on this set, but I actually enjoyed this one quite a bit. The premise is simple: The Tramp is a caveman drifter who stumbles across a new clan, and after falling for the leaders favorite consort, seemingly overcomes him in a challenge to become the new "Kink" of the tribe. It's the same Cock Fight trope that Chaplin has employed countless times before, but the new setting allows him to inject some creativity into a slapstick repertoire that was getting pretty long in its tooth. He has some Flintstone-esque fun in scenes where he lights his pipe and exchanges business cards with the clan chieftan, and the sexist undertones of the winning-her-over plot seem much more palatable when set in such primitive times. Another unintended boon is that the most off-putting characteristic of the Keystone era Tramp- his tendency to drink to belligerence and creepily leer after women- is completely absent. This results in a much more lovable and empathetic Tramp than what had been seen until now. I am hesitant to recommend this as the "only" Keystone Chaplin to seek out, since some of my appreciation was built on a knowledge of what led up to it, but at this point it's looking pretty good for making my list.

My first foray into Essanay, on the other hand was a bit disappointing. I had hoped the change in studios would spark a similar creativity in Chaplin that the new setting did above, but his first two Essanay films, His New Job and A Night Out, feel like complete rehashes of what he did at Keystone. The latter especially feels almost like a complete remake of something he did there, although his output is so blurred in my mind that I couldn't single out which film it is copying. But the main gags in this one- two drunks knocking each others hats off and routinely kicking each other, a nightwear-clad wife from the hotel room across the way inadvertently ending up under the Tramps bed afraid of the impropriety implied if her husband catches her, and the food-based hijinks with prot-Snidely Whiplash in the restaurant- all appeared in one form or another in his earlier work. His New Job feels a little more original, but still feels like a cross between A Film Johnnie and The Property Man. But at least the comedy is more refined here, and moves along at a quicker pace. For those who want a sense of what he was doing at Keystone without subjecting themselves to the tedium of that era, this could be a good substitute.

I intend continue to keep chugging away at his Essanay work, but if it starts getting repetitive, I may jump straight to his Mutual films, which I hear are where he really starts to become enjoyable. For those who are more familiar with his work, are there any films in Essanay that I should definitely seek out?

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knives
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#230 Post by knives » Sun Sep 03, 2017 12:13 pm

The short answer to your question is no, but to go a bit longer kind of. Most of them are bad. Something like Burlesque on Carmen at least has the interest a new setting gives, but even that is mostly same old same old. A Woman is probably the best of the Essanay films if just because it gives everyone something to do.

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knives
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#231 Post by knives » Sun Sep 03, 2017 5:15 pm

The Italian
This is overall a pretty optimistic look at the immigration experience with broad comedy and broader performances as a constant. Yet the fascination comes from how even this bright take on the topic is filled with darkness, corruption, prejudice, and all other manner of degradation. Being any sort of immigrant to America in the early 20th century clearly is not an experience anyone would want, only need. Halfway through when he reunites with his love I was genuinely frightened and tense that she would get deported especially considering the premonition of Bad News in the intertitle just before. It seems a miracle they survived to the extent they did. In that way, and this is where Ince's script really comes alive, that optimism and humour seems to be forcing a subjective view on the narrative where the comedy comes from the in congruence between the world as the audience is seeing it versus how Beppo is making us experience it. This is particularly true with the nasty sendoff the Boss gives Beppo which is a sort of political cynicism that gets cutely played with now a days (I'm thinking of Gangs of New York's horrendous approach to the politics). This is helped a lot by Beban's amazing performance which switches on a dime from cheap stereotype to an animalistic fury that brings an unvarnished reality to the film.

This is only the second Barker film I've seen, but he seems like a true lost genius understanding performance and editing in a way that not many directors of the age seemed to appreciate. This really makes me hunger for more of his work.

Traffic in Souls
In a reversal from The Italian this is a pretty dark take on a really dark subject told in as silly a manner as possible. Part of it is that the film makes clear that it is being salacious in order to make tickets and the artistic nature of the subject or even the real depth of it is just a fortunate side element. This gives the movie a throw away feel even though it is important for a number of reasons. Every choice from performance to the cheap seeming limitations of the sets (you'd think that house would be closed down after the first bust) and even an unnecessary sci-fi thing forces a sense that what is being witnessed simply is not interesting.

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knives
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#232 Post by knives » Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:53 pm

matrixschmatrix wrote:A Modern Musketeer

I'm a little torn about this one- for the most part, it's wonderful. From the start, it feels like Fairbanks is finally finding his footing- not only do we see him in period costume that suits him (and a mustache that, while itself ugly, makes him handsomer), but we get a movie that opens with two excellent brawls and then a good bit about Kansas tornadoes. His character, too, is better defined and more suited to him as a performer than the rest of what I've seen in the set- finally, he's not just a straight man dropped into a Harold Lloyd role, nor just a merry, athletic young man, but an actual character- and 'an irrepressible, boyish man, defined by his sense of chivalry' fits Fairbanks and his skills wonderfully. For the first big chunk of the movie, everything goes along very well- his rival is a rich, dickish Vanderbilt type, the girl is charming and gets at least a few hints of having a character of her own, and we get setpiece after setpiece in which Fairbanks gets to show his stuff- including, at one point, ghost riding his car, for the sheer fun of it.

Unfortunately, the back half of the movie- though still loaded with great physical stuff- is burdened by the introduction of a secondary villain, who is both dull and pretty super racist in conception. Were he just a bandit who was also a Native American, it might not feel that unpleasant, but there is an entire conversation about how the villain is going after 'white women', and the implicit horror of this is such that another bandit becomes our hero's ally. The actual setup- Fairbanks Solid Snake-ing his way into a desert encampment of bandits- is actually pretty good, though the Western vibe feels like an odd turn from the rest of the movie- but the bandit leader is also burdened with a bunch of business about a symbol which he feels makes him an invincible king, which he brings up virtually every time he's on screen, and it drags even apart from how cringeworthy it is. There is a nice beat in which the movie makes explicit the moral equivalency between an outright bandit and a brutal capitalist, though.
I wish I could be as positive as you on this. While the acrobatics are excellent and the stuff in the desert works completely and totally I found the humour in this to be so dull I can't really come up with anything else to say. The movie felt too long despite some deep virtues spread throughout. This set though has done at least one thing and significantly deepened my appreciation for Harold Lloyd who while imperfect really knows how to pace even a feature.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#233 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sat Sep 09, 2017 11:05 pm

A Man There Was

This exists nicely within the realm of most of the other Scandinavian stuff I've seen from this era, most of which serve to remind one that they have some of the highest rates of depression in the world- I swear an actually majority of them involve child death. Here, at least, that's not the ending, nor the point.
SpoilerShow
A sailor becomes a dedicated family man when his son is born, and attempts to run a blockade to get food for his family during an English/Swedish offshoot of the Napoleonic wars, is caught by a cruel English captain, and is stuck in jail as a prisoner of war for five years. When he returns of course, his family have starved to death, and he becomes a white haired, reclusive man, living by the sea and piloting travelers- which turns when one such traveler proves to be the same cruel English captain, who has his wife and child with him, and whose yacht is sinking. The man takes them aboard his own little skiff, and puts a hole in the bottom, mirroring what had happened when he was sunk during his capture years earlier- but is turned from his intended course when he recognizes his own child's innocence in the face of the captain's. The madness of the years of pain and the desire for revenge fall off of him, and he saves the captain and his family, and the captain never faces any real repercussions for his cruelty- but the man, at least, is freed from his demons.
It's a movie where the real point of it seems to be the beautiful shots of the ocean, and of ships and boats and men fighting the elements on it, which are genuinely impressive for the era- it feels a bit like a nautical take on The Outlaw and his Wife in that respect, though it doesn't quite have the harshness nor the profundity of that one. Sjöström is reliably good, and while other people show up, his is the only part with real depth- the movie is only like 50 minutes long, so his simple arc takes up the entirety of it. It's maybe not the absolute top tier for movies I've seen for this project, but it's a movie where the virtues are often invisible ones- it's told so simply and starkly that it's easy to miss how clear the narrative is, how much one is not feeling the disconnect that often happens with movies of this era, where they feel like the cinematic language in which they are being told is one that you don't wholly understand.

Sjöström's moral concerns seem to be consistent, at least in the movies of his I've seen- the violence that happens to people's souls when they are made to suffer, and whether they can overcome that violence and find themselves or drift away into oblivion- different characters meet that test differently, but I think it is easier to understand why so much cruelty must exist in his worlds if one seems him as being interested primarily in the human ability to outlive it. It's a concern the harsh environment he's filming in suits well, and I think this is a movie that gains depth when viewed alongside The Outlaw and his Wife and The Phantom Carriage- the former of which feels like a similar test in a similarly harsh environment, but a different outcome, and the latter of which takes the external harshness and visualizes it as an interior and spiritual one. He's a director I think I can now mark among my favorites, even if every one of his movies makes me want to die.

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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#234 Post by Jonathan S » Sun Sep 10, 2017 6:45 am

jindianajonz wrote:I intend continue to keep chugging away at his Essanay work, but if it starts getting repetitive, I may jump straight to his Mutual films, which I hear are where he really starts to become enjoyable. For those who are more familiar with his work, are there any films in Essanay that I should definitely seek out?
The consensus is that The Bank and particularly Police are the best of the Essanays. The Tramp is historically interesting as Chaplin's first (rather clumsy) attempt at including pathos. A Night at the Show has at least curiosity value with Chaplin in a dual role and as a record of vaudeville (both the acts within the film and the entire Fred Karno skit itself). Work is one of the best of Chaplin's pre-Mutual pure slapstick efforts, with a little commentary on exploitation of labourers. Personally, I find the Burlesque on Carmen rather tedious.

If you dislike the Keystones (as I do too), then avoid In the Park and By the Sea which are basically one-reel returns to the Keystone formula. But otherwise I think all the Essanays (except perhaps the Burlesque) show some improvement on the first two you've already watched.

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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#235 Post by Sloper » Wed Sep 13, 2017 12:08 pm

The Coward (d. Reginald Barker, p. Thomas Ince, 1915)

This can be found on disc 2 of the BFI Birth of a Nation set, and it’s a terrific film. Narrative-wise it’s a hoary old Civil War tale of a young coward who at last lives up to the bravery of his ancestors. Buster Keaton fans will have fun spotting various motifs he went on to parody in The General, including the ‘hiding under the table’ bit.

This film is a wonderful illustration of how much a film-maker can accomplish without ever moving the camera. There are three grand set-piece moments, at the beginning (when the young men are enlisting), in the middle (when they march off to war) and at the end (when the battle is fought). The beautiful compositions, the intricate blocking and direction of actors and extras, and the complex layering of the action, make these moments of spectacle genuinely awe-inspiring – you’ll want to rewind and watch them again to try and take everything in.

Alongside this big-scale stuff, the film is also adept at handling more intimate, close-up moments. For instance, the hero’s first scene – in which he tentatively reaches for his girlfriend’s hand – lays out the whole trajectory of his character (fearful at first but he gets there in the end) in a way that might have seemed clunky and on-the-nose, but it’s played with sensitivity and restraint, and above all with patience. This is perhaps the film’s greatest virtue, and one of the ways in which it goes beyond Griffith: it has the confidence to slow things right down and give the actors time to express themselves and interact with each other using (relatively) subtle gestures. This means that despite the occasionally glacial pace, the film is never less than hypnotic.

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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#236 Post by swo17 » Fri Sep 15, 2017 11:35 am

OK, so this is your friendly reminder that lists are due in a month. Feel free to PM me your lists at any time. But before doing so, please take a moment to review the first post of this thread for reminders about how all of this works. Thanks everyone for your participation thus far!

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#237 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sat Sep 16, 2017 3:05 am

I've just gotten the Kino Edison set, so I'm going to give writing things up in short a try. I'm going to try to work through these by year, as the set divides them, but I'm starting with the fourth disc:

Overall, these feel very stolid- the camera never ever moves, cuts only happen on scene changes, and mostly everyone acts like they're in a pantomime. Pleasantly, though, the narratives are very clear, and often feel like one is taking a shortcut through a plot that might otherwise get stretched out to an hour- these mostly have roughly as many complications and conflicts as a feature length movie of the period, but they all just get resolved super quickly. In the interviews, they point out that there's a sort of deliberate harmlessness to all of this, which seems borne out by the material- it's all very anodyne, though not always dully so.

1913

At Bear Track Gulch Life at a gold mining camp in the West is disrupted by the arrival of a w-w-woman! Only everyone is delighted and nobody ever actually opposed her presence at all. This is the Western myth of the civilizing female presence to a ridiculous degree- it reminds me of the dwarves in Snow White, both in terms of how delighted they all are by their mascot and the degree to which the men are infantilized. She teaches them class, and when one is being made fun of, he pulls a gun on everyone, which she then confiscates as though it were a slingshot. The short tries to add a plot complication at the last minute by having her love interest confuse her looking at a picture of her dead father as a young man for her longing for a lover back home, and then resolves it two minutes later when she simply explains the confusion. It's silly, but it's fun silly.

The Ambassador's Daughter There's a striking clash of tones here- a young woman is introduced walking in on her love interest plinking away at a piano, to which she reacts (relatively) realistically and playfully, acting like the discord is killing her and flirting with him, before telling him in the next scene that she's not prepared to get married- which she amusingly signs out by making an N-O with her fingers. Then, the most cartoonish villain I've ever seen is introduced plotting with some evil foreigners to steal an unspecified paper. After some contretemps in which cartoonish villain literally twirls his moustache and tiptoes around, he steals the paper, which she recovers, only to be menaced by the evil foreigners. The love interest then saves her, after which he asks her to marry her again- and she says no. Playfully, before acquiescing. It's cute, and the villain (Marc McDermott) must be seen to be believed. Apparently he's a villain in He Who Gets Slapped as well, which I'm looking forward to.

A Serenade by Proxy A daughter who wants to marry a dude, but is forbidden to do so by her father, played as farce. The daughter, in her frustration, decides to help pair up two of the servants, as the milk boy (?) has been told by the cook he isn't romantic enough for her- he serenades her with a phonograph (which feels like a bit of early product placement on Edison's part) and they fall in love, with the girl amusingly peeking out at them from behind an armoire as they plan their elopement. Her dude, looking around for something heroic to do, comes upon the eloping couple as they leave, and takes them for thieves- and when they scamper off, he's left holding a suitcase as she climbs down, and her father arrives, now thinking they are eloping. So they do, doubling up with the servants. There's a couple of inspired ideas- I quite enjoyed the beat of the father being mistaken about the couple's intentions, and them essentially being like 'good idea!', and it gets a lot of mileage from the milk boy soliloquizing at an actual cow, who gives a few reaction takes to the camera.

All On Account of a Transfer Another farce, this one less successful- a German tourist is trying to get someplace, and is told to follow a woman to make his transfer. He then follows her into a lingerie shop, where he causes a panic, because evidently being German means he has no idea that invading women's personal spaces is a weird thing to do. After his true intentions are explained to her, she apparently develops the ability to understand him, and they fall in love. The costume they put the German character in feels unpleasant to me for some reason, and the comedy beats didn't work. There are some nice shots taken in the actual street, though, and one kind of cool one where a streetcar slides into frame. Still, the first of these that fell flat for me.

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Sloper
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#238 Post by Sloper » Sat Sep 16, 2017 6:22 am

The Passer-by (1912) and One Touch of Nature (1914) are the two highlights that really stick in my mind from that set; as you say, much of the material on there is pretty stolid, but along with the supplementary material it forms an amazingly valuable historical document.

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swo17
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#239 Post by swo17 » Sat Sep 16, 2017 10:04 am

Meanwhile, I gravitate toward Monkeyshines No. 1 (1890), which succeeds as an experimental film both in terms of being aesthetically pleasing and in having birthed the entire medium, in a way.

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zedz
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#240 Post by zedz » Sat Sep 16, 2017 11:12 pm

More Early Russians:

Volume Three: Starewicz's Fantasies

The Dragonfly and the Ant (Ladislaw Starewicz, 1913) - Characteristically enchanting insect animation: complex, fluid and personal. It's a version of the old grasshopper and ant fable. Not his finest work, but nevertheless marvellous.

Christmas Eve (Ladislaw Starewicz, 1913) - Whereas this live action folk tale (with a few basic camera 'magic tricks') is by far the most ordinary thing I've ever seen bearing Starewicz's name. An object lesson in the virtue of sticking with one's knitting.

The Lily of Belgium (Lasislaw Starewicz, c. 1915) - And this is Starewicz messing with Mr. Inbetween. A charming live action frame story (mixing location and studio footage) of a grandfather telling his granddaughter a topical fable (about the German invasion of Belgium), illustrated with insect animation, starring evil black beetles as the Vicious Hun. As with the best of Starweicz's animation, it's the eccentric, characterful details that count: where else could you see a pinecone playing an accordion?

Volume Four: Provincial Variations

The Wedding Day (Evgeny Slavinsky, 1912) - This is one of those odd artifacts that comes down to us as a kind of double film. The original film isn't quite there, as all the titles are missing, rendering much of the action vague or obscure. Instead, we get an accidentally avant garde concoction, as in place of the missing titles are very messy, intrusive cuts, often marred with unreadable writing or scribbles and frequently incorporating, for some mysterious reason, stray frames from different films. Most unnervingly, on several occasions there are brief flashes of what seem to be travelling shots through a flooded village, material which is orders of magnitude more visually arresting than anything else in this rather ordinary film. So, completely inadvertently, it's as if this familiar narrative is haunted by flash forwards to an apocalyptic future, which makes the film far more interesting than it has any right to be, all thanks to the vicissitudes of dodgy film preservation.

Merchant Bashkirov's Daughter (a.k.a. Drama on the Volga) (Nikolai Larin, 1913) - Another relatively static romantic drama, but there is one formally interesting moment when the camera pans to reveal what's going on in an adjacent room. In a number of these early films, the only trace of camera movement is the lateral pan, but its use is curiously circumscribed. Bauer's Silent Witnesses, for example, is full of pans, but they're all extremely modest, serving only to slightly expand the frame (e.g. turning a few paltry degrees to the left or right simply to keep an important character fully in the frame). It serves, in a peculiar way, as a kind of primitive pseudo-widescreen, a timid railing against the tyranny of the square frame, rather than a technique for revealing new cinematic space. But the latter is exactly what happens, just the once, in this otherwise rather formally staid film.

Volume Five: Petr Chardynin & Pushkin

The Queen of Spades (Petr Chardynin, 1910) - Brisk adaptation with some obvious trick shots (ghosts appearing and vanishing) and solid composition in depth for the time. An interesting mix of studio and location footage, sometimes within a single shot, as with a painted-backdrop drawing room, clearly roofless and lit by sunlight, revealing the magical movement of real wind in real trees through fake french doors.

The House in Kolomna (Petr Chardynin, 1913) - Drawn-out cross-dressing comedy, most notable for its verse intertitles. Shot by Starewicz, for those with scorecards, and Chardynin appeared among the cast of Goncharov's A 16th Century Russian Wedding. Exhibits more of that very constrained panning I mentioned above.

Volume Six: Class Distinctions

The Peasant's Lot (Vasily Goncharov, 1912) - Evocative location shooting, but this is another film rendered unnecessarily obscure by the removal of intertitles.

Silent Witnesses (Evgeny Bauer, 1914) - An honest-to-god feature (approx. 65 minutes) and the most sophisticated film in the sets so far. There are a handful of eye-catching shots (one where half the screen is masked, a couple of split-screens - one of which is a triple-split, and an impressive overhead shot of a social gathering), but throughout Bauer employs a complex, multi-planed mise en scene, with consistent movement between and through those planes.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#241 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Sep 17, 2017 2:49 am

Cabiria

I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any of the huge landmarks, and 'huge landmark' seems apt to describe this movie- it's comparable to Intolerance for sheer bigness (not by coincidence) and it moves remarkably well for a movie this early. Apparently it was well known at the time for moving the camera, too- though the actual movement is pretty minimal, just some pans and push ins, the language of it is very clear, and what movement there is helps to clarify it further; I had to keep reminding myself of how early it was, because it doesn't feature the sort of camera held back 20 feet at all times seeing-it-from-the-stage viewpoint that a lot of the early ones do.

Instead, we get a movie that is essentially one of those personal story told against the backdrop of vast historical event things, but one which keeps the main characters in focus well enough that it's pretty easy to be affectionate towards them, which guides on the through the story. After what amounts to a prologue, in which the titular character's home is destroyed by an impressive looking volcanic eruption, she and her nurse wind up in Carthage, and she is due to be sacrificed to Moloch. The volcano is neat enough- mostly for a cool looking glass shot that lets the film show tiny people running below this enormous eruption, and which reading up sounds like it would have been hand tinted on original release to look that much cooler- but the Moloch temple is clearly the most impressive set on the movie. A giant temple with steps leading into the maw of a three eyed monster god cuts into an interior, where a frenzied worship of a statue of the god is taking place- and a high priest is opening a bay in the statue's chest and using it to dump little children in, where they being burned alive. It's genuinely an unsettling sequence, though also a spectacular one, as it keeps going and going- probably 20 kids go in onscreen, and I started to worry about what was actually happening to them. The title character is saved, though, by the actual leads, a Roman noble named Fulvius Axilla and his slave, Maciste. Though initially blase about the child's plight, they are convinced to run to her rescue by her desperate nurse, who gives them a ring she'd taken from the estate of Cabiria's parents as they fled the volcano.

The plot is somewhat one damn thing after another after this- after holing up in a hotel room long enough to bond, the three try to make their escape, but only Fulvius gets away cleanly; Masciste is caught and chained into brute slavery, turning a millstone, while Cabiria is protected by the city's princess. There's a lengthy time jump, in which the only actual event is that Fulvius gets his ship sunk by Archimedes and washes up in Cabiria's parents' estate, allowing him to find out who she actually is, before it is ten years later, and he's sailing back to Carthage with the Roman fleet. The plot gets pretty complex at this point- there's a lot of ancient world geopolitics involved- but basically, he reunites with Maciste quickly, but Cabiria is offscreen and either serving the princess or due to be sacrificed for pretty much of the rest of it. There are a number of good battle sequences and excellent stunts- a memorable one being a sort of vertical phalanx, in which the Romans stack themselves nine high using shield walls as floors, allowing Fulvius to slip into the city over a wall- but it feels a bit chaotic, as he and Masciste are constantly getting captured and breaking free again.

One of the interesting factors here is the treatment of race- Maciste is a black character, played by a white dude in blackface, and is introduced as a slave, but he's also essentially a co-lead and the most charismatic person in the movie. One of the only really likable leaders in the movie is another white guy in blackface (I think?)- Massinissa- who is represented as being an incredible soldier and a man capable of actual love. I found a fairly interesting academic piece in part about the issue here which implies that there's a sort of proto fascist/nationalist element to the movie's treatment of the different powers that our heroes bounce between, which seems plausible, but it's interesting in that light that the only Roman leader we meet is Scipio- and he immediately demands Massinissa's beloved wife as spoils of war, which the movie depicts as reflecting the arrogance and cruelty of Rome. Then too, while our hero is a loyal Roman solider, he's far less likable when in uniform than when acting of his own accord; strange, if part of the movie's purpose was to promote Italian ultranationalism.

At any rate, this seems like a key text for the films of the era, and whatever race issues it has going on, they're certainly not anything like the ugliness of Birth of a Nation- they're more a bit perplexing than anything that seemed particularly horrible, at least to modern eyes. Griffith apparently decided to turn The Mother and the Law into Intolerance after seeing it, and the connections aren't subtle- and while Intolerance is ultimately the more spectacular movie, I think the historical epic storytelling here might actually be better. I had the feeling going into it that my list wouldn't be complete without seeing this one, and that feeling is reinforced having gotten through it.

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Tommaso
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#242 Post by Tommaso » Sun Sep 17, 2017 8:36 am

I have finally received Edition Filmmuseum's outstanding 4-disc set "Kafka geht ins Kino", which assembles - with the exception of Chaplin's "The Kid" - all surviving films which we know that the author has watched and commented on in his diaries and letters. While I don't care much for the Kafka angle, the set is a fine collection of rare films from the period 1907-1921, all of which have been restored from the best available materials (which doesn't necessarily mean they all look pristine, though). Here are my impressions of what is on Disc 1:

The programme starts off with a two-minute Tram Ride Through Prague (1908). A very beautiful film showing the Czech Bridge across the Moldau river, over which the tram finally enters the inner city proper. A truly delightful opener.

This is followed by footage of the Primo Circuito Aereo Internazionale di Aeroplane in Brescia (1909), one of the first aviation shows in Italy. This is more historically interesting than as a film proper, but it's very well made and worth seeing in spite of the heavy nitrate decomposition.

Next there are four short Italian 'local films' (Peschiera/ Lago Maggiore/ Liguria/ Il corse de Mirafiori, 1907-1913), which are presented as one 20 minute programme. Depicting locations in Northern Italy, often shown from lakes or other bodies of water, these are very atmospheric records of a time long past, often making alluring use of against-the-light shots. Well-known touristic places like the Rapallo castle or the grottoes near Genua are also shown. The final of these four short films is not about the landscape, but documents a social occasion (a horse race) with many rich local people displaying themselves, their horse coaches and cars. I loved all four films.

Then the programme moves on to fictional films. The first one is Nick Winter et le vol de la Joconde (Paul Garbagni, 1911), which is a ten-minute humorous farce about the stealing of the Mona Lisa painting from the Louvre. It features the character of detective Nick Winter, rather popular at the time and appearing in quite some other films, too. This is basically a parody of the Sherlock Holmes character, with Winter appearing as slightly inept which leads to the arrest of the innocent museum director. The painting gets back to the musuem by means of a nice surprise ending, though. As a film this is largely conventional, stage-bound and a bit too theatrical and could have been made five years earlier (an enormous timespan in the early development of the cinema!), but still this was quite entertaining.

Next is the longest film (55 min.) on this disc, whose original Danish title is translated as The White Slave Trade's Latest Victim (1911). I mention this because the German title translated is "The White Slave", and as the film was directed by August Blom I expected it to be Blom's 1910 film of (almost) the same name which can be seen on the Danish Film Institute's website. But actually, the film on the Kafka set is a sequel to that earlier one, and not available before. Apart from this pleasant surprise, the film very much fulfills the expectations: a young girl is to be tricked into prostitution by some evil characters. An early example of an 'exploitation film', but one shouldn't expect too much erotic titillation here (for instance, Asta Nielsen's Afgrunden (1910) is on a totally different level in this respect!). Instead we get a well-made pulpy story, involving a series of forged telegrams, abductions, chases, and rescues, a greedy madam, and a suspenseful finale on the rooftops. Good stuff, but by no means exceptional. Perhaps I've seen such stuff a bit too often in the later serials, though.

Finally, the most ambitious film so far. Theodor Körner (Gerhard Dammann and Franz Porten, 1912) is a bio-pic about the early 19th century writer and soldier who died in battle against the Napoleonic troops and whose character and works have often been used - and abused - by German patriots and nationalists ever since. This 1912 film was marketed as a "vaterländischer Kunstfilm" (patriotic art film) and was really a large scale production, featuring original historical costumes, cavalry troops, and more than 450 extras. Unfortunately, the film does only survive in a truncated version which seems to miss all the most spectacular events (fight scenes), so that's a bit of a letdown. What remains is well made and follows the main events of Körner's short life with a lot of patriotic fervour, but as an artist's portrait I find it less convincing than for instance Carl Froelich's and William Wauer's Richard Wagner (1913), which is the far more inventive film in every respect (available in Germany on an excellent dvd from Murnau-Stiftung, btw). Theodor Körner however is historically rather significant as an attempt to turn film into a serious medium, and its approach to history and big effort turns it almost into a blueprint for all those 'Fridericus' films of the 1920s.

Summing up, I find this first disc very well worth seeing and it also features excellent and totally appropriate new scores by Günther Buchwald and Richard Siedhoff, but so far there hasn't been an earthshaking discovery for me. But the truly important part of this set is probably the new resto of Max Mack's "Der Andere" which is on disc two. I'll report about that one soon.

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TMDaines
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#243 Post by TMDaines » Sun Sep 17, 2017 9:11 am

Does the set have original-language intertitles for the various works?

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Tommaso
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#244 Post by Tommaso » Sun Sep 17, 2017 10:46 am

With one English exception, the short Italian films are in Italian. "Nick Winter" is in French, and "Theodor Körner" is in German (both recreated from the censorship cards). Strangely, the Danish film is in German, too, even though the DFI's restoration originally had recreated Danish titles, taken from a production list. The Munich Filmmuseum replaced these with titles found on a contemporary official German textlist by Nordisk, and they also emulated the original Nordisk card design. So likely these can be considered as 'original', too. From what I gather from the as usual highly informative booklet, all the films on disc 2-4 have original titles, too. Everything comes with optional English subs, of course.

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knives
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#245 Post by knives » Sun Sep 17, 2017 4:32 pm

Just as a general observation this set of films makes me really appreciate pasteurized milk. So many of these films hinge on how hard it is to get healthy milk for children.

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Tommaso
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#246 Post by Tommaso » Wed Sep 20, 2017 7:56 am

My impressions of "Kafka geht ins Kino", disc 2:

The programme starts with a 16-minute newsreel about the 300th anniversary celebrations of the Romanov dynasty, which is probably mostly interesting for those with a special interest in Russian history. Military parades etc. are meant to display the imperial power, but all this self-celebration of the ruling class very quickly felt as hollow as it probably was. At the end of this document I thought that it actually was quite fortunate that a few years later the Russians would make their revolution and do away with all this nonsense... ;)

Next comes what is likely the most important part of the whole set, the newly restored Der Andere (Max Mack, 1913). One of the earliest German attempts at creating a serious, artistic film, the film attracted much attention because of the participation of the famous stage actor Albert Bassermann, who however received varied reviews at the time, and it seems that even nowadays people don't agree about the merits of this film. I already defended it in the last round of the listmaking, and this new viewing confirmed my positive impressions from then. Bassermann's acting is certainly 'theatrical' (in the sense that for example someone like Klaus Maria Brandauer would always seem theatrical in his films), but it isn't histrionic 'over-acting'. Instead, Bassermann gives this slow-paced film a certain 'kammerspiel'-like intensity, and the variability of his facial expressions is quite astonishing. Even when he exaggerates, he leaves the impression that he knows exactly what he's doing, and when he is 'the Other', there's often a certain 'mechanical' or somnambulistic (or almost 'drugged') way of moving around that I find quite convincing because it is done without any sensationalism. Admittedly, as an 'art film' Der Andere is certainly less groundbreaking and not as inventive as Der Student von Prag, but I'm pretty certain that it will again make my list. The new resto from a 16mm source looks surprisingly good, and Richard Siedhoff's music is even better here than on the other films. Extremely convincing use of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' as a leitmotif.

The disc is rounded off by the 47-minute La broyeuse de coeurs (Camille de Morlhon, 1913). The 'heartbreaker' of the title is a stage dancer/actress who first tempts the protagonist Pierre to cheat on his fiancée and then plays with a famous torero who in the end commits suicide in the bull ring. Quite sensationalist and melodramatic stuff which hasn't aged too well, but there are some quite stylish club scenes and all in all it's worth seeing, even though it may be not too memorable.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#247 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sat Sep 23, 2017 2:16 am

Die Pest in Florenz

So- this is undeniably a powerful, well made movie, and the presentation of it (the print is gorgeous, and the music minimalist, and unsettling) reinforces that- but ultimately I think I was as confused and unsettled here as I was by Die Nibelungen. The story of the film is very simple, as despite having seven acts, there are only a handful of actual events- Florence, when we enter, is under the rule of a hateful old council of elders, lead by Cesare, a leering hypocrite, and backed by the Church. A beautiful woman comes to town; Cesare assumes she must be opposed to the power of the Church, and thus his own, when she tells an underling that she believes that god is Love, a belief reinforced when she throws a party to which the poor are invited. He has his minions capture her, and begins to torture her, when the palace is liberated by an army of the people led by his son, Lorenzo, who has fallen in love with the woman. Lorenzo kills his father, and becomes the effective ruler of the city.

After a time cut, we are told that the city now ignores its priests (which, given their obvious hypocrisy, seems only fair) and dedicates itself to hedonism, and particularly the pleasures of the flesh. Lorenzo and the woman rule over a court in which, honestly, everyone seems to be having a pretty good time- there are some suggestions of sexual violence around the edges, but the great majority of what we see appears pretty wholesome, just people running around and dancing and watching tricks and things. There's no real sense of frenzied debauchery to it, no sense of Dionysian madness, but nonetheless the figures of the Church declare the city a lost cause, and take off. Eventually, a hermit monk comes to the city, to demand that they repent, but leaves without really changing anything- except that he has captured the woman's heart.

We then move to the hermit's mountain dwelling, where he is trying to purge himself of his own attraction to the woman. She tracks him down, and claims sanctuary, saying she is lost and needs food and drink. He gives her some water, and prepares to make a hard sell of repentance- miraculously creating a doorway to Hell, which they then explore. He seems to be having some effect on her- she is looking frightened and unhappy- when he sees a vision of himself and her as a knight and lady, which for some reason causes him to lose his own self control and fall for her. He kisses her, and she swoons; when she awakens, she runs back to the city, followed by the monk. He comes upon Lorenzo trying to force himself on her (in a scene reminiscent of Lorenzo's father trying to do so earlier in the movie) and kills the ruler in a fair fight.

After another time cut, the monk has taken Lorenzo's place, but nothing else really changes- same court, same debauchery, same odd wholesomeness. We are told that the Vatican has excommunicated the city, but the monk becomes really concerned only when God's wrath threatens, in the form of the plague. In the first genuinely morally questionable act in the movie, he orders the gates of the city closed, so they can keep their party going while death reigns without. However, the party is interrupted by the appearance of Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharshin upon the walls- and, basically, the monk repents, leaves the city, begins caring for the dead and dying, and is then commanded by God to expiate his guilt by bringing the plague back into the city and killing everyone.

The specific reference to Belshazzar's feast here makes for an interesting comparison to Intolerance, because it's essentially what's going on in the fall of Babylon scene- and Griffith, who conjured a much vaster and more frenzied scene of orgiastic joy than this film does, was on Babylon's side. The biblical Babylon was a cruel place, building its feasts upon the backs of its slaves, and literally using their holy relics as cups to drink wine out of- an active desecration of God, rather than just refusing to knuckle under to the Vatican, as we see here. They are also compared to Sodom and Gomorrah, but again- that story involves active cruelty and murder, not simple party times. Die Pest in Florenz never really makes an effort to show the cost of Florence's party culture, nor any real ugliness of behavior that comes of it, certainly nothing compared to the open embrace of torture of the previous regime, a regime which had the Church's active support. The monk's repentance does carry some force- there is horror going on, and instead of trying to pretend it doesn't exist, he gets his hands dirty and helps- but God then commands him to commit mass murder. This is a movie in which it is very difficult to side with God.

As I said earlier, it's a really good looking movie, and it's powerful enough in its technique to feel somewhat seductive- Lang's ghost haunted world shows more clearly here than it would in any of his own movies until maybe Destiny. It's hard to read it as anything other than an arch-conservative message movie, though, one whose ultimate thesis is that a repressive, hypocritical theocracy is still better than freedom and licentiousness.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#248 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Sep 24, 2017 1:56 am

Præsidenten

This is an interesting movie, and one well worth seeking out, though I think it's one I admire more than I like. It's very Dreyer- even here, in his first movie, a lot of the concerns that animate his run of masterpieces are already present- the brutality of the law applied coldly, women brutalized by men, even something of Ordet's sense of the fear and pain of birth. Here, though, I don't know that it ever really reaches past the level of melodrama.

It's essentially a story of aristocratic men who impregnate servant women, across several generations, though it focuses primarily on one man- the titular president, whose position seems to be something more akin to a chief magistrate and judge, as he's the president of a town, not a country. The movie opens with his dying father making him swear never to marry a commoner, because he (the father) had been forced to do so by his own father, on the grounds essentially that it was better to be foolish than evil. It's a bit odd, but the movie skips over why the father believed this marriage to have been such an error; he calls himself a wretch, but we never really see any consequences. One also wonders why the lead character felt no allegiance to a woman who was presumably his own mother, nor anger at his father's weak rage at having been forced into marriage with her. Nonetheless, he acquiesces to his father's dying wish, and swears he will never marry a commoner.

Thirty years later, he has attained the titular position, and when returning from a trip is presented with a docket notice- a woman has confessed to infanticide. He's shocked, as we find out, because she's his own illegitimate daughter; despite genuinely loving her mother, he allowed himself to be talked out of marrying her by his uncle, who reminds him of his promise to his father. He is also a man who is rigidly dedicated to the form of justice, and addicted to his own sense of honor, so he will not allow himself to try her case, even though the opportunity to do so is offered to him. The daughter- whose act of infanticide was, unsurprisingly, caused by her own dalliance with a rich man, who had his mother cast him off for her, in a way that is represented as far crueler than the president's family's own way of dealing with such problems- is tried and found guilty, and sentenced to death.

After seeing her, and finding out that her mother had forgiven him for his abandonment of her before she had died, the lead requests clemency for his daughter- which is, of course, denied. He find this out in the same letter that tells him he has been promoted to a higher position in the judiciary in another town. He puts into a place a plot to spring her with his servants. We then get a montage in which the feast- and his haunted face- is intercut with her in prison, various shots of the town, and a series of absolutely gorgeous shots of a torchlit procession in the dark, with only the torches visible, tinted red against the stark black background. The president cannot bear the praise and adulation he is receiving, and goes to free his daughter from her cell and to write a letter of resignation. They and their servants get out of town with no real difficulties.

We then have another time cut, and it is several years later, with the lead, his daughter, and their servants seeming happy in some unknown location out of the country. A Javanese plantation owner is arriving to marry her, and the boat carries also the man who had been her attorney, and the lead's only real friend in his town. The beat is not played for melodrama- the man just tracks down the lead's servant, and asks him to tell the lead that, despite all, he still has the man's love and respect. Nonetheless, the lead cannot bear the feeling that he has broken his code of honor, and after seeing his daughter married, returns to the town and confesses his act- to the same underling who found her guilty. He will not accept the confession, and threatens the lead that if he goes public, he will have the daughter hunted down and prosecuted. Unable to resolve his internal conflict, the lead returns to the family castle where his father had died, and kills himself.

I apologize for the lengthy plot synopsis- and the second one running, at that- but I think apart from the banquet scene, this is a movie that is interesting as much for how much it prefigures Dreyer's later work as for anything filmic, and the haunted world in which moral characters are torn between mutually incompatible but inescapable drives- and in which the cruelest figures of authority are also the weakest and the most craven- seems very much apiece with Day of Wrath and The Passion of Joan of Arc in particular. Religion doesn't play a huge part here; there are two marriage ceremonies shown, between the lead's father and his common wife, and between his daughter and her planter husband, with the latter being used to contrast the former, as the one is between two willing and loving partners, and the other between a woman who seems to be pleased that she's landed a rich man and a rich man who wants nothing more than to get out of it. Nonetheless, the oppressiveness of social mores represented in Ordet, and the sense that rigid codes pull away from justice rather than leading to it, seem like key elements in Dreyer's representation of this one. Dreyer doesn't occlude the possibility of goodness- the lead is a figure who redeems himself, even if he can't bear his own redemption, and Dreyer seems to feel that the daughter bears no guilt for the act she was driven to- but it is a hard world, and one where behaving decently comes at a sometimes extraordinary cost.

The torchlight scene really does come as a shock- given that Dreyer never actually worked in color, as far as I know, I wasn't expecting a striking use of it, and it's easily the most visually memorable thing in the movie. It feels like it's being used to represent something, though what it represents is not entirely clear- that it's the townspeople expressing their admiration for the lead's honor as a judge in the moment when he is planning to betray it would seem to make it a representation of conscience, of the palpable feeling of hypocrisy that he can't bear. I haven't seen all of Dreyer's 20s work (or Gertrud, for that matter) so I'm interested to see if he looks for shots of this kind anywhere else; the only other thing I could compare it to is the drowning-in-white sequence at the end of Vampyr.
Last edited by matrixschmatrix on Thu Oct 05, 2017 2:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

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zedz
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#249 Post by zedz » Mon Sep 25, 2017 4:00 pm

Wrapping up the Wrussians:

Volume Seven: Evgeni Bauer

A Child of the Big City (1914) - A standard melodrama about a destructive vamp given considerable visual interest by Bauer. He deploys his characteristic cluttered, layered mise en scene, with a large role played by oppressive decor, but is trying a bunch of the latest cinematic inventions on for size: inserts, close-ups, angled shots. The big wows are delivered by tracking shots in and out of scenes, a whole new, sensational movement for Bauer's cinema.

The 1002nd Ruse (1915) - The syntax here is more basic (there's a keyhole frame representing the p.o.v. of a peeping husband, but that's nothing to get excited about), and this is little more than the same kind of saucy romp that you could find all over Europe at the time.

Daydreams (1915) - A year later, Bauer's distinctive style is really starting to cohere. There's actually less happening here at a formal level than in Silent Witnesses or A Child of the Big City, but it's more fully integrated into a distinctive style, with less of a sense of trying out things he's seen or heard about. The tracking shots here are a logical part of the language of the film, rather than aesthetic jolts, for instance. The death-obsessed mood that would become his hallmark is here in full flight, and this film features perhaps the most morbid murder weapon in cinematic history!

Volume Eight: Iakov Proazanov

The Passing of a Great Old Man (1912) - Milestone use 'departure' on the sleeve, but 'passing' is a much more natural translation, as the film is about Tolstoy's death, not his trip to Las Vegas. This is very staid cinematically, after the Bauers, with lots of stiff, frontal compositions and stagy blocking. It's a hagiographic biopic, with saintly Tolstoy trying to foil his shrewish, proletariat-hating wife.

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.

Volume Nine: High Society

Antosha Ruined by a Corset (Eduard Puchalsky, 1916) - Broad, racy trifle. Drunk carousing husband just can't get rid of the telltale corset left in his parlour before his wife gets home. I guess corsets equated 'instant hilarity' for early cinema audiences, because about all this film does is waggle the apparatus in our faces every couple of minutes.

A Life for a Life (Evgeny Bauer, 1916) - Now Bauer is really cooking. This heady melodramatic concoction (adoptions, rival sisters, mismatched partners, adultery, debauchery, fraud) contrives a complicated web of misery for its characters that's far more involving and affecting than it has any right to be. Bauer largely keeps a lid on the performances, and his filmmaking is more refined than ever, with complex mise en scene resolving into frames within frames and tracking shots employed to convey crescendos of emotional intensity. This will definitely be figuring on my list.

The Funeral of Vera Kholodnaya (newsreel, 1919) - Brief footage of the funeral of the star of A Life for a Life.

Volume Ten: The End of an Era

The Revolutionary (Evgeny Bauer, 1917) - The two Bauer films from 1917 on this disc present a fascinating what if. He'd be dead by June that year, and these two last films are quite different in style and content, but both extremely accomplished. The Revolutionary sees Bauer aligning himself against the old guard with a tale of a freed 1907 agitator reuniting with his son and the pair of them going merrily off to war to fight for the motherland. It's a curiously limp, abrupt ending to what was an emotionally rich film. Bauer's style in this film seems a lot more conventional and 'western', with medium close-ups, more cutting within scenes, and much less complicated images (instead of multi-layered clutter of decor and people, we have instances of 'blank' backgrounds that draw attention to a single face in close-up, for example). But all of this is extremely accomplished, with gorgeous use of locations and much more expressive lighting than in his earlier works. One curious side-note about this film: it has more male-to-male full-on-the-lips kissing than any other film I can remember. I assume this is culturally unremarkable, but I don't recall seeing this in any of the other films in this collection and, seriously, they're hard at it in every second scene!

To Happiness (Evgeny Bauer, 1917) Called 'For Luck' on the box, which doesn't fit the film at all, so I'm going with the alternate translation on the print. This film is simply breathtaking, and the best example in this collection of how Bauer can ennoble melodramatic material (up to and including hysterical blindness) simply through his craft and masterful control of tone. The star here is the mise-en-scene, with Bauer applying a consistent asymmetry to every shot. He finds so many ways to keep the frame off balance that it becomes a master class in creative image-making. Characters will occupy the centre of the frame, but get distracted to one of its sides, or are joined by another character on their left or right to throw the composition off; they'll enter from the left of the frame, move towards the centre, but then go just too far and settle on the opposite side. In perhaps the most playful variant, when the daughter is having her portrait painted she is posed perfectly in the centre of the frame by the artist, who then retreats, but doesn't leave the frame, staying in view on the lower right to drag the balance to that side. In a couple of instances, characters do settle down into a perfectly balanced composition, but then the camera pans slightly into empty space to push them to the edge of the frame where they belong. Bauer is really doing interesting things with the look of his film, and one can only wonder where he might have gone with this had he not died of an injury sustained on the location shoot.

Behind the Screen (incomplete) (Georgy Azagarov & Aleksandr Volkov?, 1917) - Inconclusive but intriguing. This is only a single reel of a bigger film, and it has no intertitles, but it's interestingly shot and a self-reflexive movie about movie-making, with Mozzhukin playing himself - or a rather an insecure version of himself.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Pre-1920s List Discussion and Suggestions

#250 Post by matrixschmatrix » Mon Sep 25, 2017 7:15 pm

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?

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