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View Article  FLESH AND THE DEVIL


This legendary film has a set-up that promises a rattling good yarn -- two lifelong friends pitted against each other in mortal combat by a callow but irresistible woman. It is directed in bravura style, with flashes of cinematic brilliance, by a master of film narrative, Clarence Brown, and it features two of the silent screen's most appealing actors, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. The result is watchable, even entertaining -- but deeply unsatisfying on almost every level.


We see in this film what the 20th-Century, and the studio system in Hollywood, did to the melodrama -- perverting it meretriciously, heartlessly, systematically, fatally.

The melodrama of the Victorian stage, of Griffith and Pickford and even Murnau, was a stylized form in which a glamorized virtue was beset by crude though recognizable obstacles which seemed invincible but which virtue could vanquish, though often only by self-sacrifice and in death.

We may laugh at the form today, or find it charmingly quaint, but it represented a sophisticated dramatic tradition capable of conveying deep emotion and serious moral reflection. It is hardly more laughable or quaint than modern forms, in which a superior display of aptitude with firearms can right any wrong, in which glamor or cuteness alone can resolve any romantic complication, in which material or professional success signals the triumph of the good.

Melodrama only becomes grotesque and artificial when those who make it lose faith, consciously or unconsciously, in virtue, especially in self-sacrificial virtue. In our self-obsessed age, at least before 11 September 2001, virtue became suspect -- a sucker's game -- and sacrifice unthinkable. Not being able to have it all seemed a crime against a basic entitlement of humanity -- or at least that part of it lucky enough to be born into Western middle-class comfort.

This is why modern intellectual sophisticates laughed at the melodrama of Titanic, though its moral complexity far exceeded the dime-store nihilism, or self-referential fantasy, delivered by the hip filmmakers of the 90's. It was taken seriously, however, by ordinary people -- and especially by teenage women, who knew on some level that the nihilism and fantasy of their parents' generation had come to a dead end, had not prepared them for the world they saw before them, the world of Columbine and Osama bin Laden.



Flesh and the Devil represents a first step in the destruction of melodrama as a viable form -- as Titanic may represent a first step in its rehabilitation. In Flesh and the Devil, virtue is dessicated -- evil lush and ripe. Though the story tells us again and again that Barbara Kent is the good girl and Greta Garbo the bad girl, every single act of craft and genius on display in the film struggles to persuade us otherwise.

We are far from Griffith and Pickford here, whose great heroines showed us how appealing, energetic, sexy and even seductive virtue could be. Greta Garbo becomes, in essence, the auteur of Flesh and the Devil, because all its narrative ploys, all its moral stances, collapse into worship of her mysterious presence, her oddly luminous flesh.



In strictly narrative terms, there has rarely been a more extreme example of misogyny on film. Garbo's character is unremittingly evil -- her heartlessness, until the last unconvincing moments of the role, is absolute, her greed and selfishness both repellent and unmitigated. But Brown's camera and Brown's casting and Brown's staging worship at her feet. All the other characters are perfunctorily drawn, wooden in presentation, with two exceptions. One is the kindly old priest who is roused to an almost sexual excitement by his hatred of the Garbo character -- a hatred which the narrative invites us to share. The other is Gilbert . . . who struggles manfully to discover a complexity, a moral gravity in his character. In his final scenes he almost succeeds, but the odds are against him, the game was rigged from the start. The film believes in nothing but Garbo -- virtue has no defense against her, can reassert itself only by killing her.

One thinks of what the film could have been if those who made it were aware of this -- had some sense of the moral questions it raises. If Garbo's character had been granted a soul, instead of stripped of it, if Barbara Kent's character had been given even a hint of Gish's or Pickford's complexity and will and sensuality, the delicious possibilities of the tale could have unfolded into real melodrama -- which is to say, real drama.

But this film is an early demonstration of the use of a star to avoid drama, to avoid moral questions, to parade unfelt clichés and undeveloped characters and irresponsible attitudes before an audience mesmerized by glamor alone. A melodrama in which virtue has evaporated is not melodrama anymore -- it's more like Grand Guignol, without the shameless energy, the giddy frissons, the amoral abandon of a real Theater of Blood.



I'm not sure we can blame Garbo's collaborators too harshly for this, though -- she is sui generis. There is really no word for what she does on screen. It's not acting, it's not even performing -- she is simply a creature who has her being on film . . . the camera devours her, every molecule of her. The process leaves nothing behind -- no memory of a character, or even of a human being caught on film. She paradoxically incarnates the gossamer moods of certain kinds of passion, certain kinds of physical enchantment -- and vanishes as mysteriously as they do. But it's useless to deny how spectacular the phenomenon is, how strange and pleasurable -- just as it's useless to deny the charm of falling in love.

Brown and his cameraman and his screenwriters and his actors may have to be forgiven for losing their heads in her presence, and even for hating her power to undo them so utterly.
View Article  ELECTRIC EDWARDIANS


Jean-Luc Godard once observed that, with the passing of time, the fantasy films of Georges Méliès have become actualities, now that man has in fact made a voyage to the moon, while the actualities of the Lumière Brothers have become fantasies, since they record lost worlds to which we can never return, as mythological now as Oz.


I thought of this while watching Electric Edwardians, the Milestone DVD of Mitchell & Kenyon actualities of Edwardian Britain.  I must say I was blown away.  It's the most gorgeous collection of cinematic images outside of Intolerance or Sunrise or Welles's Falstaff, lyrical and deeply moving.



With the possible exception of a few infants who lived to a great age, all the people in these films are dead.  As a commentator on the DVD observes, the young boys in the films were part of a generation that would be swept into oblivion long before their time by the mass carnage of the Great War a decade or so later.  The bustling street life that most attracted Mitchell & Kenyon becomes for us now a memento mori, incredibly sweet and sad.



I can't imagine that anyone who loves movies and owns a DVD player wouldn't want to have this DVD and to watch the films on it over and over again.  They may constitute a kind of unconscious art, but it's art of a very high order.
View Article  EDWIN S. PORTER


Check out The Art and Culture Of Movies, a great blog by filmmaker and writer Matt Barry, for some interesting thoughts about film pioneer Edwin S. Porter (director of the
The Great Train Robbery from 1903.)  The post is illustrated with terrific screen shots from Porter's films.  (The frame above is from It Happened On 23rd Street -- shot in 1901 on a block, between 5th and 6th Avenues, which looks almost the same today, architecturally speaking.)
View Article  MÉLIÈS


From a strictly historical, generic perspective, the work of Georges Méliès was a kind of magical dead end.  Although his films are commonly spoken of as the precursors of science fiction and all forms of film fantasy involving special effects, they are in fact so peculiarly original in form, so deeply rooted in the traditions of the stage, that they presaged nothing.

Méliès was a magician and the operator of a theater dedicated to stage magic.  He used cinema as an extension of the sort of acts he performed and presented in his Théatre Robert-Houdin, built as a showcase for his own art by Robert-Houdin, the great 19th-Century conjurer, the legendary pioneer of modern theatrical magic (and the man after whom his masterful successor Houdini named himself.)

Méliès saw cinema as a way of presenting stage magic and amplifying its effects by the use of in-camera tricks like stop motion and super-imposition.  His images evoked the stage precisely, with strict proscenium framing and frankly theatrical painted flats and props.  He used many practical tricks from the stage, like flying people and objects on wires or making them appear and disappear through traps.  He added his camera tricks on top of these time-worn effects.



The problem was that camera trickery is not the same as live trickery in the presence of the trickster -- the novelty of camera tricks dissipates quickly, once you become familiar with them. 
Méliès's films were wildly popular for a while and then, with the rise of the narrative form in movies, suddenly went out of fashion -- to a degree that live magic shows never have.  In great live magic shows, you know you're being tricked, but you can't for the life of you figure out how.  You may not know exactly how a camera trick works, but you know it has to do with some fundamentally technical resource of the medium -- and so can't be real magic.  As early as 1905 people began to get wise to the mechanical tricks of movies, as this postcard, part of a series, shows:



In movies, if the tricks are not done in the service of a story, or at the very least in the service of creating a convincingly unified alternate reality, they grow stale. 
Méliès never tried to create a convincingly unified alternate reality -- his reality was always the reality of the stage, without the excitement of the live presence of the performers.  His magical stop-motion substitutions were charming as ideas but could never take the breath away like the "impossible" substitutions of the live magician.

Méliès could not, in short, enlist the magic of the camera as an extension of the magic of live stage performance.  He created a vision of a theater where anything was possible but in the process he lost the core of the theatrical experience -- the tangible presence of its spectacle.



Méliès influenced other filmmakers, like Edwin S. Porter, in the area of narrative.  Méliès's films occasionally have simple narrative structures, but these are always just the armature for his tricks.  He called his scenes tableaux -- they were self contained, and he was perfectly happy to sell individual scenes as stand-alone attractions to the fairgrounds showmen who constituted the initial market for his films.  Each scene had a gag, after all, and he saw the gags as the principal element of his art.

When story films began to dominate the market he lost interest in the industry, even as his audience lost interest in him.  Storytelling wasn't at the heart of his ambition.



This is all speaking to the formal side of
Méliès's work, but of course it had qualities which transcended its formal side.  Méliès had a sweet, antic, energetic, whimsical imagination which comes across excitingly in his films, even today.  It reminds one of the imagination of the great Warner Brothers cartoonists of the 1940s, silly, flip and surreal.  But cartoon animation was of a piece and so created an alternate universe that was of a piece, that audiences could surrender to wholly.  Méliès, who never could leave the imaginative precincts of his beloved stage, doesn't allow that kind of identification -- we are always reminded that we are, and are not, in a theater.

Méliès was, in one sense, a great artist who made ephemeral art, in a form that had no future.  But his irresistible sensibility often soars above the contradictions of his formal means.  His films will always be fun to watch, simply because it's so clear that he was having an incredible amount of fun making them.  He communicates his joy in stage magic and his joy in camera magic, even if he never quite finds a way to reconcile the two practices aesthetically.

In the history of cinema, his only legacy is joy -- but there are many more important formal pioneers who left us less.

View Article  LEAP YEAR


In 1920, Roscoe Arbuckle became the first great comedian of the silent screen to make a full-on transition from shorts to feature films. Chaplin had appeared in the feature comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance as early as 1914, but under Mack Sennett's direction and as a second lead. Chaplin wouldn't release his own first feature until 1921. Buster Keaton starred in The Saphead in 1920 but he continued to make shorts after that until 1923, when his feature career began in earnest with Three Ages.

Arbuckle made nine feature films in the two years before scandal interrupted his career, and never appeared in another. I believe that all but three of them are lost, and the last two were never released in America, due to the scandal. One of these, Leap Year, survives and is included on the magnificent DVD set The Forgotten Films Of Fatty Arbuckle. It's absolutely fascinating.



In the earlier shorts offered in the collection we can see Arbuckle transition slowly from the comic actor of the Sennett farces to the full-blown silent clown of the Comiques. Chaplin and Keaton seemed to have intuited almost from the moment they stepped in front of a camera that the silent cinema was perfectly adapted to a fixed clown persona -- a character who could migrate from film to film yet still stay essentially the same, with a way of moving, of being in space, that, along with a few clothing props, singled him out as a distinct, slightly hyper-real being, much like a circus clown or a figure from the Commedia dell' Arte.

Roscoe moved slowly from being a comic actor who did funny physical bits to incarnating "Fatty", the slapstick clown, and all along the journey he was pulled back to the former mode. In the films he did with Mabel Normand, character, especially as embodied in their relationship, took precedence over slapstick -- at least until the trademark Sennett mayhem of the climax. In one of the Sennett films Roscoe directed, He Did and He Didn't, he takes this mode even further, edging into the realm of upper-class drawing-room comedy, with very sophisticated lighting and photography.



Until I saw Leap Year I would have seen this mode as a detour in Arbuckle's development as a comedian -- a detour on the road to the Comiques, where Arbuckle takes his place with Keaton and Chaplin as a classic slapstick clown. Leap Year, though, totally altered my sense of what Arbuckle was about. It's as far from the universe of the Comiques as it's possible to get.

It inhabits, in fact, the universe of P. G. Wodehouse, whose gentle, kindly satires of the young and well-heeled beautiful people of his time were immensely popular in 1920. Leap Year perfectly captures the sweetly daft world of Wodehouse's slightly nutty, vaguely dimwitted but immensely lovable trust-fund kids of the jazz age.

The miracle of it is that Arbuckle, knockabout comedian extraordinaire, funny slapstick fat guy, fits so perfectly into this world. He does it by simply behaving as though he's Cary Grant in a romantic comedy, Fred Astaire in a romantic musical -- and because he doesn't doubt it for a moment, neither do we.

Roscoe plays the feckless nephew of a rich man, presumably the heir to a vast fortune. This could explain part of the reason he's so irresistible to the women in the film -- but not all of it. He's a genuinely romantic leading man. His sweetness and his physical grace sell us on that. He just dances through the role.

The film doesn't allow for much slapstick, but Arbuckle finds ways of slipping it in delightfully -- most notably in a scene in which he's trying to convince his would-be brides that he's having fits. The fits are little masterpieces of physical comedy, as fine as anything Chaplin and Keaton were capable of at their best.

But the performance doesn't depend on these things, and the film remains a frothy drawing-room farce. The farce becomes strained at times, particularly towards the end, and the froth congeals a bit, but the overall effect is of lightness and joy. It reminded me a little of Murnau's The Finances Of the Archduke from 1924 -- particularly in its use of the sunny Catalina settings of the film's middle section, in which the landscape seems to conspire in the fun, as the Dalmatian coast did in Murnau's film..

Was this really the sort of film that the mad surreal clown of the Comiques wanted to make? He certainly seems to be fully committed to the work and having a hell of a good time. Were the other Arbuckle features anything like this? If Arbuckle's career had continued on its natural course, and he'd taken greater command over his films as a director -- where on earth would he have ended up?

This film expanded my appreciation of Arbuckle's range and genius and altered my sense of the comic landscape of films in 1920. It's easy to think of Arbuckle as an actor whose journey towards becoming another Chaplin, another Keaton, was tragically diverted. But maybe he would have become something else entirely -- something we can't even imagine, because he wasn't able to show it to us.


View Article  LOST PARADISE

                                                                                           [Photo © 1960 William Klein]

An excerpt from a 2000 profile of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody in The New Yorker:


During our interview, Godard referred to the New Wave not only as "liberating" but also as "conservative."  On the one hand, he and his friends saw themselves as a resistance movement against "the occupation of the cinema by people who had no business there."  On the other, this movement had been born in a museum, the Cinémathèque: Godard and his peers were steeping themselves in a cinematic tradition -- that of silent films -- that had disappeared almost everywhere else.  Thus, from the beginning, Godard saw the cinema as a lost paradise that had to be reclaimed.


If love of the silent cinema doesn't point the way to new, revolutionary work -- as love of ancient Greek art sparked the innovations of the Renaissance -- then it's just hobbyism.


In other words, silent cinema can be alive as a cultural force, as it was for the young French cinéastes of the Fifties, just as ancient Greek art was alive for the artists of the Renaissance.

The parade has not gone by.
View Article  HANGMAN'S HOUSE


Hangman's House
is the last, and least, of the five silent films included in the new Ford At Fox box set.  It's not a bad film, exactly, just sort of respectably mediocre.

Ford here abandons his effort to out-Murnau Murnau.  He moves his camera very little, and only once or twice with any real effect or beauty.  Generally he returns to his more characteristic style of fixed camera positions looking into deep spaces with lots of choreographed movement within them.  There is some moody lighting here and there, and some fog effects on studio "exterior" sets, reminiscent of those in Sunrise -- but the film rarely comes alive visually.

You get a feeling that Ford simply wasn't all that inspired by this somewhat creaky melodrama -- entertaining enough, but just barely. 
Viewers who only know Victor McLaglen's work as a comic Irish drunk in later Ford films will be surprised by his easy, restrained performance here.  It makes you wish he were the romantic lead in the film, instead of the limp Larry Kent.  And there's one really powerful camera move -- in on the villain as he appears suddenly in an apparently deserted house.  It's spooky and unsettling -- like the push-in on Ethan's face in The Searchers as he registers the horror of the condition of the female captives just  freed from the Indians.  It's markedly different from the longer, Murnau-esque camera moves in Four Sons, which are typically about exploring locations or expressing high spirits.



In his book on Ford, Andrew Sarris said that if Ford's career had ended with the coming of sound, he wouldn't be recognized as a major director.  Even Joseph McBride, in his notes for this new set, says that Pilgrimage, a talkie from 1933, is Ford's first great film.  Having seen just the five silent films in this set, along with Kentucky Pride a few years ago, I must say I find these judgements puzzling.  3 Bad Men and Four Sons are hardly lesser works than Pilgrimage, The Iron Horse is a masterful film with elements of greatness, and Four Sons is one of the finest achievements of the silent cinema.

Ford would go on to make finer films, but he was "major" well before the coming of sound, at least in my book.
View Article  FOUR SONS


Four Sons
, from 1928, is one of the greatest works of German expressionist cinema -- even though it was made by the Irish-American John Ford in Hollywood, U. S. A.  Ford doesn't just seem to be working under the influence of Murnau here -- he seems to be channeling Murnau.  If the film had somehow been misattributed to Murnau, it would be very difficult to correct the mistake by means of a stylistic analysis.  Ford even, at one point, seems to be following in Murnau's missteps -- Four Sons, like The Last Laugh, has an odd extended epilogue which violates the tone of the rest of the film but somehow seems to work in spite of that, lightening the mood in a strange, surreal way without diminishing the power of the work as a whole.

In Four Sons Ford moves his camera as elegantly and expressively as any director ever has -- and the plastic invention involved is ravishing.  The lighting is typical of Murnau, employing soft, glowing, complex chiaroscuro effects as opposed to the stark contrast of light and shadow often associated with expressionist cinema (and which Ford himself came to favor in his later "expressionist" films, from The Informer to The Fugitive.)



Ford had two great masters in his formative years, first Griffith and then Murnau.  What's astonishing is how totally he was able to absorb each man's style -- he didn't seem to be imitating it so much as working within it naturally and unselfconsciously.  Maybe even more astonishing is that Ford absorbed Murnau so quickly.  We know how powerfully Sunrise affected him -- just from viewing the rushes he declared it the greatest film ever made.  Less than a year later he was working with full confidence and mastery in the Murnau style -- and even shot parts of Four Sons on sets from Sunrise that were still standing.

Apart from its lack of a strong female lead, Ford's Just Pals could have been directed by Griffith and would rank among Griffith's more enjoyable minor films.  The epic visual poetry of Ford's The Iron Horse bears favorable comparison with the epic visual poetry of The Birth Of A Nation -- which is saying a lot.  If Four Sons had been directed by Murnau, it would rank among the German director's most important works -- and that may be saying even more.
View Article  3 BAD MEN


[Caution -- this post contains plot spoilers.]

In modern-day Hollywood it's fashionable to analyze drama in terms of "character arc".  A character starts off a tale with a problem which he or she must then develop the skills and inner resources to solve, and this development follows a chartable arc.  I think corporate executives are drawn to this model of storytelling because it reminds them of the charts and case studies they used in business school -- it reduces human experience to something resembling the problem of growing a business or maximizing profits.

The model is useless, of course, for understanding the actual life experiences of human beings or the great stories and dramas in the art of the past.  Achilles has no character arc, neither does Hamlet.  They both undergo various experiences which sometimes reveal their characters, and sometimes make their characters seem hopelessly mysterious.  Neither of them "solves" anything.

The character arc model is particularly useless for analyzing the films of John Ford, which are full of characters who suddenly do complete turnarounds, often without the slightest explicit motivation -- the most famous case in point being Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.  Their "arcs" are unchartable, mysterious -- they raise more questions than they answer, but the questions are ones of profound interest . . . they provoke moral thought in audiences.



In 3 Bad Men, a silent film by Ford from 1926, three criminals are suddenly converted into saints by a young woman who mistakes them for heroes, and from that moment on they behave like heroes, and in the end sacrifice their lives for her.  Such a tale would never make it past the first story conference in Hollywood today.  The film would have to spend most of its length working up to that moment of conversion, showing the conflict within the men as they struggled with the decision to be good.

Instead, Ford presents us with a mystery up front, and lets us spend the rest of the film wondering what it means.  For Ford, the answer lies somewhere in the realm of the moral, the spiritual, the religious.  This is a realm not studied in business schools, not relevant to ordinary business practice, and thus meaningless to the corporate executives who run Hollywood today.  In modern corporate culture, which is Hollywood's culture, moral issues are covered by charitable contributions, perhaps by a dedication to ethical behavior or to worthy political causes.  The issue of saving souls does not arise.

But the saving of souls is what Ford's films most often concern, which involves positing the existence of souls in the first place.  3 Bad Men suggests that the worst of men have souls and are just waiting for a chance to save them -- just waiting for a call to goodness.  And it further suggests that goodness is not always approached on paths with chartable arcs.  Sometimes goodness descends on men like a dove and changes them in an instant.

We may cheer when the hapless nerd grows his business or maximizes his profits against all odds -- but the bad men in Ford's movies, unaccountably redeemed, make us cry.  It can be argued that they also make us wise in the actual ways of the human heart.

[With thanks to the Silents Are Golden web site for the images above.]
View Article  THE IRON HORSE


You can look at John Ford's The Iron Horse in two ways -- as a silent melodrama set against the epic backdrop of the building of the transcontinental railroad, or as an epic poem about the building of that railroad with some melodrama woven through it to give it a more coherent structure.

In truth the film is both these things, simultaneously or alternately -- the two halves of its nature are never entirely reconciled.

The melodrama isn't at all bad -- it's entertaining and sometimes moving -- though it has one of the lamest lovers' misunderstandings in all of movies.  (Interestingly, the international version of the film tries, through rewritten intertitles, to make the misunderstanding more plausible but just succeeds in making even lamer than it already was.)  The real problem is that the epic poem which hosts the melodramatic narrative is one of the most sublime achievements of the silent cinema.  It's hard to imagine any melodrama which could holds its own with such poetry.  (It should be noted that Griffith faced the same dilemma with The Birth Of A Nation, and similarly failed to solve it.)

The epic poem within The Iron Horse has themes and developments peculiar to itself.  Ford is interested, as he often was, in the process of things, which in this case centers on the land, the physical fact of the land, which determined the challenge the road builders faced.  Ford is also interested in the moral development this challenge prompted -- specifically the uniting of diverse peoples in a national consciousness.



The inclusiveness of the film is notable, and notably modern.  Building the railroad unites former antagonists in the civil war between North and South.  It unites Eastern engineers with Western scouts and hunters.  It unites ethnic groups -- most specifically the Irish and the Italians, though there are a few scenes demonstrating good-natured camaraderie between Europeans and Chinese.  It unites women and men, who at one point take up arms together to rescue some besieged track layers . . . and in the climax of that scene, a band of light cavalry rides to the rescue -- not U. S. soldiers but Pawnee Indians, allies of the train workers.  The only people conspicuously absent from this American mosaic are blacks -- probably to avoid alienating white Southern audiences of the time.



The epic poem of America that's at the heart of The Iron Horse unfolds at a stately pace, even though it's brimful of incident and exquisite lyrical images.  (There's enough pure cinema in this picture to supply a dozen ordinary movies)  Unless you surrender to its rhythms, are willing to just sit back and enjoy the sheer spectacle of it, you are likely to find The Iron Horse tough going.  If you're primarily interested in the melodrama, wanting Ford to get on with it already, you'll find it even tougher going.

On the other hand, if you let Ford take you at his own pace, show you want he wants you to see, you'll be deeply rewarded.  Here is the vernacular lyricism of Leaves Of Grass applied to a truly epic subject and translated into visual terms that transcend its melodramatic armature.  It's an imperfect but genuinely awesome work.



The film is part of the new Ford At Fox box set, where it's presented in two versions -- the American release and the somewhat abridged international release, derived from a separate negative made up of second-camera shots and alternate takes.  The American version is far superior but apparently better print material survives from the international version.  You really need to be familiar with both to appreciate the film fully.

The international version on the set has a first-rate commentary by Robert Birchard, filled with a wealth of information about the personalities involved in the making of the film and about the production.
View Article  JUST PALS


Just Pals
, the first film John Ford made for Fox, makes an illuminating pendant to another silent film also recently released on DVD, D. W. Griffith's True Heart Susie.  They could have been made by the same director -- which is to say that Ford, the younger of the two and the one newer to the business, obviously studied hard at his master's feet.


Both films fall into the American Pastoral genre, both feature plots that are outrageously melodramatic, unashamedly sentimental -- and both are visual masterpieces.

We forget it sometimes, but American culture is in love with virtue -- a love tempered only by the desire not to be taken for a fool.  We like our virtue delivered sidewise.  In less cynical times than the present, this sidewise delivery could be only slightly oblique.  So we have Griffith's gentle teasing of the innocent protagonists of his tale, and Ford's cursing urchin in his.  But simple decency is the theme of each film -- as it is of Huckleberry Finn, from an earlier age, and of Casablanca, from a later one.  The differences in attitude mainly involve how cynical the narrator or protagonist has to pretend to be before getting down to doing or celebrating the right thing.

The message of most works of art can be boiled down to a platitude, if one is so inclined.  The message of Huckleberry Finn is "blacks are human, too, and anyone who thinks otherwise risks losing his or her own humanity."  But art is not about messages.  It's about creating psychic movement within the audience -- about internalizing the wisdom trivialized in a platitude.

In silent movies, this process of internalization happens visually -- not in the plot or in the intertitles.  In Just Pals, Ford convinces us that he loves his protagonists not by making them narrative agents of good but by the way he situates them in space, in the settings of the story.  The cursing urchin is revealed as plucky and independent and admirable not by his curses but by the way he rides a moving train. Bim's moral authority in foiling the express office robbery is conveyed not by his statements of resolve but by the way he commandeers and rides a horse in the execution of his resolve.

Just Pals is a celebration of sacrifice -- of the mechanics of sacrifice -- not a sermon about sacrifice.  It makes sacrifice seem beautiful by making the mechanics of sacrifice beautiful.



Just Pals is part of the recently released Ford At Fox DVD box set. 
It can't be said often enough that the release of this set is one of the most important cultural events of recent times.
View Article  GLORIA SWANSON'S SADIE THOMPSON


In 1947, an old, bitter, alcoholic has-been named D. W. Griffith complained to a journalist that movies had lost something -- "the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful blowing on the blossoms in the trees" is how he summed it up. It's sort of an odd thing to say, since movies never stopped moving, and when there are trees on screen you can often see the wind moving their leaves.

But of course Griffith was talking about something more profound -- harking back to his own heyday as a filmmaker, when those moving blossoms were not just a grace note, an accident of location, which might possibly affect the taking of live sound, but in some real sense what movies were about . . . movement, the illusion of movement in space, the transformation of that illusory space, drawing us into it imaginatively, investing it with emotional drama.

Griffith was bemoaning the loss of the discursive style of cinematic narrative, in which the accumulation of passages of plastic transformation were not simply the accouterments of style but the very method of storytelling, of emotional communication, in film. He was bemoaning the terrible efficiency of the studio method, in which those moving blossoms became incidental decoration, garlands gracing the elegant, ruthless machinery of narrative exposition.

Those of us who love Westerns love them in part because the Western genre alone for many years after the coming of sound preserved that discursive style -- in which they way people and horses and things moved and penetrated and transformed the spaces of a room or a street or a landscape carried the burden of the drama, the narrative exposition being pretty much formulaic and predictable.

Raoul Walsh, a Griffith protege, became a brilliant craftsman of the studio style in the sound era, with an eye for plastic values which lifts most of his work above the ordinary. But not far above the ordinary. His Sadie Thompson, from 1928, is a masterpiece, however -- and a film that in many ways defines the crossroads movies had come to in Hollywood on the eve of sound.



Sadie Thompson is a very slick film, of great narrative economy -- a studio picture in that sense. But in scene after scene the narrative momentum is suspended dreamily as we are invited to appreciate, to inhabit intimate spaces and moments -- to linger in them languorously. Swanson plays a hardboiled dame, but we can sense the girlishness and innocence that has survived her smarmy past -- and Walsh takes time to let us inside that quality of hers . . . not with a line of thought-balloon dialogue, but in a rapturously lit scene at her window with O'Hara, in which the way she looks at him illuminates her face from within, absolutely breaks your heart. It's like a movie within a movie, and when you're watching it, it seems as though this is what the whole story is about.

Walsh doesn't have a soundtrack to deliver the incessant noise of rain, so he lingers on moments of transition between the wet outdoors and the dry interiors, physical business with umbrellas and ponchos and damp clothes. He luxuriates in exploring the fabulously atmospheric and spatially intriguing inn set designed by William Cameron Menzies. He rarely moves the camera, but when he does it has an emotional purpose -- Sadie being drawn into the interior of the island after she gets off the ship, surrounded by the marines, O'Hara trying to carry her away from Davidson and his creepy spell.

One of the most powerful moments is also one of the most subtle. Just before the climax, Davidson looks down at the redeemed Sadie, slumped in a wicker chair. She's removed her make-up and straightened out her hair, but still looks beautiful, in a severe way. Then Walsh pans down very slightly from a close-up of Swanson's face -- just enough to let us see her upper chest moving as she breathes. There's no skin -- we don't even see the curve of her breast under her dress -- but the very subtlety of the shift of attention is wildly suggestive and erotic. We know exactly what Davidson is thinking.



Lionel Barrymore, as Davidson, looking gaunt and somewhat terrifying, plays an extreme character, but his performance is beautifully nuanced, particularly at the beginning. We feel the sensual pleasure he takes in tormenting sinners, which prepares us for his surrender to another kind of sensuality at the end. It's far more effective than Walter Huston's more tasteful and buttoned-up take on the character in the 1932 sound remake.



The simplicity and reserve of Walsh's performance as O'Hara (above) serves the role well -- he used his very inexperience as an actor to sell O'Hara's shy, straightforward decency.

Swanson is brilliant -- and brilliantly inconsistent. Her tough-girl swagger is charming, and not entirely convincing, which makes her sweetness with O'Hara, her innocent faith in his love, believable, and her sudden breakdown in front of Davidson plausible as well . . . she was never as hard and self-possessed as she seemed to be, and her first look into the face of irrecoverable loss unhinges her completely. Joan Crawford's Sadie in the 1932 remake is a one-note impersonation by comparison, and could have been played almost as well by a man in drag, which is what Crawford sometimes suggests.

It's a shame the last reel of the film has been lost -- though the reconstruction of it on the Kino release is well-done and as satisfying as possible under the circumstances.

It's a wonderful movie, with a foot in two different eras of Hollywood filmmaking, but with its heart and soul in Griffith's.
View Article  AMARILLY OF CLOTHESLINE ALLEY


I fell in love with Mary Pickford when I watched this film a few years ago. I know you're probably thinking, "What took you so long?", but I really hadn't seen much of her work before -- some of the Biograph shorts she made for D. W. Griffith and Sparrows, one of her later silents. I liked Sparrows a lot, thought it was a very well-made film, and admired Pickford's craft extravagantly . . . but there was something self-conscious about it, something built into the idea of a masterful artist playing a child, which had the flavor of a brilliant (a really brilliant) stunt.

But when I watched Amarilly Of Clothesline Alley all my resistance melted. First of all, Pickford plays a sexually mature female, innocent by choice but well aware of her options -- and she's very sexy, very self-possessed and powerful, which makes her goodness all the more vexing. The whole film is permeated with a strong aura of female power, expressed most poignantly and convincingly in the easy camaraderie between Amarilly and her mother -- you get a sense that there's no problem on earth these two can't solve . . . and haven't solved, in a sense, keeping a fatherless family together in crushing poverty. (You also get a clear echo of Pickford's actual early life, growing up too fast, more of a peer than a daughter to her own mother.)

The wry eye they throw on the rest of the world, especially the world of men, delightfully underlined in the snappy intertitles by Frances Marion, their exuberant enjoyment of each other's company, and of life itself, exactly as it is, suggest a whole universe of female self-sufficiency and dominion which our culture has managed to eradicate almost entirely from the mainstream of popular art. (I begin to think that the national euphoria over Pickford's marriage to Douglas Fairbanks may have reflected America's pride, and perhaps relief, that the country managed to produce a man worthy of her.)



The style of the film as a whole, and Pickford's performance in particular, is shockingly casual, fast-paced, breezy and naturalistic -- Amarilly seems to have a whole and real and complicated inner self which she chooses to share with others, and with us, out of sheer generosity and goodwill. Virtue has never seemed so alive, so glamorous.

Well, I'm not the first person this has happened to, and thanks to the miracle of DVDs, I won't be the last.
View Article  STAGE AND SCREEN


If you look at narrative films made in the first decade of the 20th Century you'll be struck by a very odd aesthetic anomally.  Scenes shot out of doors will often be dynamically composed, emphasizing spatial depth in the image -- they look modern and can be extraordinarily beautiful.  Scenes shot on interior sets will, by contrast, be framed head-on, creating the impression of a shallow space -- this, combined with the obviously painted sets, mostly using flats, looks decidedly cheesy to modern eyes.



Why did audiences accept this violent contrast of cinematic practices within the same film?

One reason, of course, is that the interior sets reminded audiences of the stage, where painted sets and proscenium framing were familiar.  They could think of these scenes as filmed stage-plays, which is how story-based movies were often defined and sold.  The exterior scenes, on the other hand, reminded viewers of pre-narrative cinema -- the "actualities", short scenes of picturesque places and real events, which were the primary content of movies presented as novelty attractions.



These actualities tended to be agressively "cinematic", emphasizing the illusion of spatial depth to show off the magic of movies -- their ability to create the convincing illusion of a real place on the other side of the screen.

Novelty-attraction actualities were often part of a theatrical presentation which featured live performers as part of a variety bill -- so viewers were accustomed to an alternation of cinematic actualities with theatrical stage-bound scenes.



The narrative structure of early story films was apparently enough to knit the two types of cinematic practice into an aesthetic whole for viewers of the time.  Indeed there's a curious Edison film from around 1904, not part of the regular Edison release schedule, which shows a group of people making its way by various means of transport from one end of Manhattan Island to the other.  There's no connecting narrative -- the shots just seem to be a series of "actualities" linked only by the presence of the same characters in each sequence.  It's been suggested by film scholars that these sequences may have been shot as "entr' acts" for a stage play, showing the play's characters moving from location to location in the story -- something to pass the time and amuse an audience while the stagehands shifted sets behind the projected images.

If in such a production you just replaced the scenes on the stage sets with filmed interiors, shot head-on against painted theatrical backdrops, you'd have a pretty fair paradigm for an early narrative film.

Even imagining how such anomalous cinematic approaches could have been reconciled for viewers within the same film, it's hard not to see the results as crude.  But such anomalous approaches have almost always been a part of cinematic practice -- and the momentum of narrative has always been able to reconcile them.



Look at John Ford's Stagecoach again and see how stunningly photographed images of real locations alternate with studio work (above) in which sets and back-projections stand in for exterior locales.  It's objectively weird, aesthetically inconsistent, but our eyes, accustomed to back-projections in films of this era, don't read it as such.



The conventions are always shifting, of course.  The studio-built interior sets of Stagecoach (above) are fully three-dimensional and convincing as actual locations -- a far cry from Edison's patently two-dimensional interior sets painted on flats.  But Ford's back-projection exteriors are convincing only to the degree that we choose to be convinced by them, as Edison's audiences chose to be convinced by his artificial interior sets.

The history of the shift from "theatrical" to fully dimensional interiors in movies would be fascinating to chart.

One of Griffith's main formal concerns in the Biograph years was developing a way of staging and photographing interiors on sets in spatially interesting ways, to create a stronger illusion of being in real rooms -- but he never totally abandoned proscenium framing.



Why?

I'm beginning to think that proscenium framing for interiors continued to have a degree of glamor for filmmakers throughout the silent era, by evoking the prestige of the stage.



Twice in Erotikon, from 1920 (above), which has elaborately constructed and convincing interior sets, such a set is introduced by a wide, head-on proscenium type shot -- before Stiller moves in and starts shooting the room as though it were a practical location, sometimes even shooting in mirrors that reflect the wall behind the camera, utterly abolishing the theatrical mode by showing us the "fourth wall".



In Peter Pan, Herbert Brenon (above, with camerman James Wong Howe and Betty Bronson) does something similar with the opening sequence in the nursery -- which he starts out showing only from angles that would have been available to members of an audience seated in front of his set, but then proceeds to penetrate from angles only available to performers inside the set.

Both Erotikon and Peter Pan were adaptations of popular stage plays, and the filmmaker in each case may have wanted to remind viewers of the film's prestigious theatrical provenance.



Von Stroheim seems to have been the first film artist to abolish the theatrical mode for interiors as a matter of basic aesthetic principal, and he was followed in this approach fairly consistently by Murnau as well.  From them derive the dynamic spatial interiors of Renoir and Welles.



[With thanks to shahn of sixmatinis and the seventh art for a recent post which got me thinking about this subject again.]
View Article  THE SLAPSTICK ENCYCLOPEDIA


In case there's anyone out there who doesn't know it, The Slapstick Encyclopedia is awesome -- offering about eighteen hours worth of silent comedy shorts on five DVDs. It's an education in silent comedy, and the first lesson it teaches is that silent comedy could accommodate a stunning range of talent and tone, from the subtle sophistication of Sidney Drew to the certifiable madness of Charlie Bowers.

The pantheon isn't seriously challenged, however -- the work of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd shines with a special radiance, as you'd expect -- but there are pleasant surprises at every turn.


Harry Langdon remains a puzzlement to me, based on the two shorts included here, from his Sennett days. I can't decide if his art is sublime or boring or, by some mysterious alchemy, both at once. Langdon moves so beautifully that you simply can't take your eyes off of him, even though you desperately want to.

The Charley Chase vehicle Fluttering Hearts, directed by Leo McCarey, has a light but sure comic tone that never falters, and a short directed by Roscoe Arbuckle after the scandal, The Iron Mule, is proof positive of Arbuckle's exquisite plastic imagination.

The collection is organized logically but flexibly, with shorts grouped sometimes by studio, where there was a strong studio style at work (in the cases of Sennett and Roach,) sometimes by artists noted for their collaboration, sometimes by theme.


Chaplin appears in a volume devoted to the influence of the English music hall, and it's fascinating to see how much he took from its traditions, and also how magically he transformed them. Lesser artists working from the same traditions -- even the wondrous Stan Laurel -- simply inhabit another, more circumscribed realm of cinematic possibility.

The Slapstick Encyclopedia ends with a grab bag called The Anarchic Fringe, which presents several shorts of outright lunacy verging on the incoherent, but the collection actually climaxes in the penultimate volume, The Race Is On, which offers comedies involving various mad chases. Chasing Choo Choos, with Monty Banks, cut down into a short from the climax of a feature, includes the God-damnedest train sequence ever put on film. Delirious, relentless, impossibly beautiful and beautifully impossible, it's one of the most glorious passages in all of movies, and is as close to a religious experience as one can have by purely cinematic means.



The DVD set is marred by one irritation. There is no single listing by volume and disc of all the shorts included. This will only bother you when you decide to revisit one of the many treasures included -- but then again that's something you'll probably end up doing a lot. The Silent Era website offers a complete listing of the films which is worth printing and keeping with the box.

Here's a link to the list:

The Silent Era Web Site

Check out other posts in the Slapstick Blog-A-Thon here.

View Article  FROM CANVAS TO SCREEN


Here is Anders Zorn at his most academic.  The composition offers a dramatic illusion of deep space, with an optical integrity which evokes the photograph -- but it's all inflected with the suggestion of narrative, as we're invited into the darkened area just off the ballroom where private intercourse is taking place.

And yet for all this we still have Zorn's delightful treatment of the surface of the canvas, with its sensual strokes reminiscent of the Impressionist style, its magical ability to render the subtlest play of light.

The total effect can only be described as cinematic -- and wouldn't it be nice if cinema offered more images as exciting as this one, visually and plastically?

I think it's possible that this image was in the back of D. W. Griffith's mind when he composed the shot below from Intolerance, with its own darkened area just off a ballroom that opens up brightly behind it:



As I've written before, we tend to see early film as a medium emerging from the Victorian stage, but Griffith himself wrote this about Intolerance:

"You will see the world's greatest paintings come to life and move and have their being before your eyes."

The important thing to remember is that painting itself, even before the invention of movies, was aspiring to the condition of cinema.  The spatial depth of Zorn's image, its desire to evoke movement in space, found a kind of fulfillment in the cinema, especially in the cinema of D. W. Griffith.
View Article  PETER PAN (1924)


The first half hour of Herbert Brennon's Peter Pan is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, masterful in a delicate and unusual way.

Almost all of it takes place in the Darling nursery, on a set that is shot from basically one angle and seems designed to suggest a theatrical stage. I'm guessing that this was a deliberate strategy, meant to associate the film with the celebrated stage productions of Barrie's play, even though it was somewhat anachronistic for a film from 1924. Brennon, however, has taken this limitation as a challenge, and in his own subtle way has mastered it.

The long shots of the set, with a frame that seems to mimic a proscenium arch, are lit with extraordinary care by James Wong Howe. He achieves a stunning impression of depth in the way his lights define discrete spaces within the room and sculpt individual figures within those spaces. Brennon's choreography of movement within the constricted location reinforces the stereometric nature of
Howe's lighting.

Slowly, and with great subtlety, Brennon allows his camera to tentatively explore this space from slightly different angles -- almost like a tease. We never feel that our general sense of watching a stage play is challenged -- but seem suddenly, briefly transported up onto the stage for a privileged view of the action, as in a dream.

The lighting shifts progressively throughout the sequence in a decidedly expressionistic way -- from the high illumination of the opening to the more atmospheric shadows of the room lit by the nightlights. Then Peter appears, and the gears shift radically. Wendy sews Peter's shadow back on in a gorgeous half-silhouette downstage, then Peter dances with his shadow in a circle of light, shot from slightly above, that seems to have no logical source.

When Peter teaches the Darling children to fly, our head-on view of the set is explicitly violated as we see one of the boys flying up towards a camera placed near the ceiling and shooting in a near-reverse angle to the one we've mostly been watching from. It's a shocking and magical shift -- echoing the shock and magic of the child's first flight.

 

Alas, the rest of the film, in Never Land, is not as magical as this first act. The Catalina locations, the studio forest and underground lair, the actors in animal costumes and the actors in human costumes never quite cohere into a vision, despite many delightful passages. The final action sequence on the pirate ship is confused and dull -- until the wondrously choreographed sword battle between the Lost Boys and the pirates lifts it all into magic once again.

The special effects vary in quality, too. Most of the wire-work flying is well done, but the flight of the pirate ship at the end is underwhelming, and some of the superimpositions involving Tinkerbell are poorly executed.

This is a title-heavy film, but the titles are faithful to Barrie's truly charming text, tastefully selected and arranged.

The general result is a very uneven but endlessly fascinating film. Brennon's vaguely perverse sensibility, always delivered with a gossamer touch, is evident most especially in his use and appreciation of Betty Bronson in the title role. She dances the part in a frankly sensual way, and she is unmistakably and delightfully female -- which allows Brennon to exploit an unmentionable eroticism in certain passages.



The half-silhouetted shadow-sewing sequence between Wendy and Peter has the quality of a sexual encounter, and there is nothing innocent in the numerous kissing scenes -- between Bronson and Mary Brian, Bronson and Anna Mae Wong, Bronson and Esther Ralston.

When Peter lies down to sleep on the leaf bed after Wendy and the Lost Boys have left the underground lair, Bronson is photographed in a languorous and sensual and purely feminine pose -- which gives Captain Hook's spying on her a wholly different spin than the narrative might suggest. Hook's hatred of Peter reads as thwarted lust, pure and simple. He knows as well as we do that the creature on that bed is a woman.

Sex in silent movies was a lot more interesting than it is in movies today.
View Article  INTOLERANCE


In order to enjoy and appreciate Intolerance you have to watch it the way you read Dickens -- submitting to its rhythms, surrendering to its asides and narrative diversions.  You simply can't be too impatient to find out what happens next in the story (or stories.)  Dickens and Griffith are more interested in how things happen, where things happen, to whom things happen.  There's no shortage of fascinating incident in either artist's work, and much of it is spectacular -- but sometimes the incidents are very small indeed, and no less fascinating for that.



I've seen Intolerance many times, and I find I remember small gestures and glances, brief passages of body language with the same vividness that I remember great lines of dialogue from talking films.  The flirty and then dismissive looks the girl outside the dance hall gives the mill owner Jenkins who's come to spy on his workers make for an indelible moment -- involving a bit player we never see again.  The Mountain Girl's postures of energy and defiance look in retrospect like a primer on flapper attitude, years before the flapper even existed.



It takes Griffith over half an hour to introduce us to all four of the time periods covered in the film.  We start in the modern story, proceed to the time of Jesus, then to 16th-Century France -- then back to the modern story before seeing the walls of Babylon for the first time.

Almost every image in this first half hour is stunning, worth studying for its dynamic composition involving movement and deep space. The illusion of depth draws us emotionally into the film just as surely as the interwoven narratives and the performances.



This effect is most powerful on a big screen, of course, but it's effective enough on a decent-sized TV monitor.  When you consider a video screen's tendency to flatten any image, it's all the more amazing that Griffith's images retain their stereometric brilliance in that format.

One great virtue of the DVD format is that it allows one to watch (or, one hopes, re-watch) a film like Intolerance in segments -- which is the way one reads those long Victorian novels originally published serially.  The film reveals much when experienced this way.  There's almost no chance in any continuous viewing of the three-plus hours of Intolerance that one could sustain the intensity of attention needed to fully absorb its torrent of beautiful images in detail.

If you have Intolerance on DVD, go watch just its first half hour -- to the end of the first Babylonian segment.  There's enough cinematic brilliance in that half hour to justify, by itself, the whole medium of movies.

[If you don't have Intolerance on DVD rush out and get it immediately.  The Kino edition is generally considered to have the best image quality.]
View Article  MERRY-GO-ROUND


Erich Von Stroheim was above all else a wondrous spinner of tales. His storytelling mode was, at heart, melodrama, but much modified from its conventional forms. He embraced all the sensational elements of melodrama, its reliance on wild coincidence and its stark dynamic of good versus evil but subverted them to his own ends. He made the erotic subtext of much melodrama explicit, he used coincidence to serve his own fatalistic vision of human destiny, and he inverted expectations about protagonist and antagonist, making the former often weak and foolish and the latter invariably fascinating and appealing, especially when he himself played the role.

His vision of the world was brutal and harsh, but he preserved the romance and the celebration of virtue at melodrama's core -- in the form of his faith in a pure and spiritual love which could transcend the vagaries of fate, even if his version of such love often existed outside the realms of strict propriety.

He was a popular artist of his time, speaking to audiences in a language they could understand, even as he extended the expressive and thematic range of that language. Of the seven films he completed only three were released to the public in versions close to what he intended, and all three made money -- quite a lot of money. Von Stroheim knew his public and its taste, and we err when we accept too quickly the judgment of the studio executives who decided that this public would not have accepted his four mutilated films in the longer versions he originally prepared. We will never know for sure, of course, but it's an insult to a popular artist of Von Stroheim's stature and achievement not to give him the benefit of the doubt on this score and to accept uncritically the verdict of the creative mediocrities who vandalized his films.

The tale Von Stroheim concocted for what would have been his fourth film, Merry-Go-Round, is perhaps his most romantic -- inspired as it was by his nostalgia for the old Vienna he grew up in, the one that vanished forever in the catastrophe of WWI. Von Stroheim's participation in this old Vienna was not what he claimed it to have been -- it was part of his dream world from the start -- but it was at the center of his imaginative life and he seems to have felt its loss just as keenly as (perhaps more keenly than) the loss of something real.

In
Merry-Go-Round