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Tuesday, July 13
SOULS FOR SALE (1923)
by
Lloydville
on Tue 13 Jul 2010 12:08 AM PDT
Souls For Sale is, I think, the second best movie ever made about Hollywood, and makes a perfect pendant to the best, Sunset Boulevard. Souls For Sale is a portrait of Hollywood as a kind of Eden, just as Sunset Boulevard is a portrait of Hollywood as a kind of purgatory.
The sheer, delirious joy of movie-making before the studio bean-counters took full control of the industry is present in Souls For Sale. The film tries to present a balanced view of Hollywood from the other side of the camera, but it can't really -- it's too swept up in the nuttiness and energy and attractiveness of the movie folk.
The film features a lot of cameo appearances by real Hollywood stars and directors of the time. One of them is especially poignant. We get a glimpse of Erich Von Stroheim at work on a set for Greed. We know now that he was creating one of the greatest works in the history of American art, but the cameo was filmed when the production still belonged to Sam Goldwyn's company. Before Greed was completed, that company was sold to Metro and the production thus came under the control of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, who, in an act of unspeakable thuggishness, decided to mutilate Von Stroheim's masterpiece, to send a message to the rest of Hollywood's talent -- you are no longer in control here . . . the industry you built now belongs to thugs like us.
In Souls For Sale you can see what was lost in that transfer of power -- the giddy excitement of a new art form still in the hands of the artists who created it -- just as in Sunset Boulevard you can see the rot and decay of that erstwhile Eden under the influence of the thugs. It's no accident that Louis B. Mayer was outraged by Sunset Boulevard. It was an epitaph for everything he personally destroyed.
The giddiness of that time before the thugs took control informs every moment of Souls For Sale. It's a thoroughly self-reflexive work of art, which pretends to examine how the dream world of the movies is constructed while itself infected with the very dreams it pretends to examine. This tension in its point of view is quite deliberate and often played for laughs, though it more often results in a kind of surreal poetry.
The story opens on a train racing through the desert on its way to Los Angeles. A young bride on her wedding night has suddenly become revulsed by the man she's married and jumps off the train at a remote watering station. She wanders hopelessly through the desert until she comes upon . . . an Arab sheik on a camel, who rescues her from death. He's an actor on location with a film crew, making a movie.
So we have moved with the mad logic of a dream from melodrama to costume drama to comedy. The whole film navigates a similar dream landscape -- it's a hall of mirrors from which we never emerge. At the climax, an intertitle informs us that a real hurricane is threatening to wreck the artificial storm set up for the climax of the film within the film -- and we proceed to watch the "real" artificial storm ruin the "fake" artificial storm.
If Jorge Luis Borges had ever made a movie, I suspect it would bear an uncanny resemblance to Souls For Sale.
The film was based on a novel by Rupert Hughes and also directed by Hughes (who was Howard Hughes's uncle.) He was a successful playwright, novelist and historian who directed seven films between 1922 and 1924 -- then went back to writing. Souls For Sale is a handsomely mounted and photographed production, with fine performances, and it has a few images of real grace and power. Hughes was either exceptionally well-supported by Goldwyn's studio technicians or else he had a genuine gift for directing. In either case, it would be interesting to know why he abandoned the craft.
He left us a minor masterpiece, though -- a vision of what the movies might have been without "boy geniuses" like Irving Thalberg and "benevolent patriarchs" like Louis B. Mayer.
Saturday, June 19
A WESTERN MOVIE POSTER FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 19 Jun 2010 01:29 AM PDT
Nobody said the way to Las Vegas was going to be easy . . .
Thursday, May 13
HAROLD LLOYD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 13 May 2010 12:45 AM PDT
Check out Matt Barry's blog The Art and Culture Of Movies for one of the best appreciations of Harold Lloyd ever:
The Dilemma Of Harold Lloyd
Sunday, February 21
PARADISE RECLAIMED
by
Lloydville
on Sun 21 Feb 2010 12:29 AM PST
[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 cinema of the past 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 an exercise in nostalgia.
In other words, the cinema of the past 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 -- it may even be passing this way:
Majestic Micro Movies
MMM Facebook Fan Page
Sunday, February 7
VISUAL MICRO FICTION
by
Lloydville
on Sun 07 Feb 2010 12:04 AM PST
The first story films were very short -- either little gags that could last less than a minute or narratives lasting about ten minutes. There's a reason for that. Because movies were a new form, novelties, they fell into story frames that audiences were already familiar with -- newspaper cartoons and comic strips, which could be read in less than a minute, and vaudeville skits, which lasted about ten minutes. These familiar forms helped audiences fit story films into their habitual patterns of consuming entertainment.
In this era, movies and comic strips fed off each other, expanded each other's boundaries.
The first truly sensational American story film, The Great Train Robbery (see the frame grab above), appeared in 1903. There had been story films before this, or anecdotal films with narrative qualities, but The Great Train Robbery was so popular that it almost singlehandedly created the new market for story films. In a short time they had replaced gag films and actualities as the preferred cinematic form.
D. W. Griffith made his first ten-minute short in 1908 and at once began expanding the expressive range of the short story film. In 1909, the first regular comic strip, Mutt & Jeff (above) began appearing in newspapers. There had been multi-panel strips before this, along with single-panel cartoons that told little stories, but Mutt & Jeff signaled the emerging dominance of the strip. Just as single-panel cartoon gags had provided a template for early gag films, so the longer story films helped pave the way for the popularity of the multi-panel strip.
In the YouTube era of Internet cinema, we are about where projected movies were before The Great Train Robbery. The next step will probably be very similar to the next step projected movies took -- into the territory of the newspaper cartoon and comic strip and vaudeville skit, all of which can be studied profitably as exercises in micro-fiction. The idea that Internet cinema can leap from the cute pet or baby video into feature-length narratives is a fantasy. People will eventually consume feature-length narratives via the Internet, but what happens between now and then will be intensely exciting. This is when the shape of cinema to come will be determined.
Friday, January 29
SILENT MOVIE SNOW
by
Lloydville
on Fri 29 Jan 2010 01:02 AM PST
Lillian Gish, Way Down East.
Sunday, January 24
THE MOVIES BEGIN . . . AGAIN
by
Lloydville
on Sun 24 Jan 2010 01:13 AM PST
When new technologies appear, the instinct is to try and figure out ways to make them the vessels for existing content. But new technologies usually need a new kind of content -- or old content wholly re-imagined.
When it became possible to distribute movies on the Internet, everybody tried to figure out how aging, worn-out Hollywood content could be shifted over to the new venue and monetized. It was an effort doomed to fail. Content can never be considered apart from the means used to distribute it, and thus the ways it is consumed.
What we need to do is look at what kind of movies are working on the Internet, and proceed from there. What's working are short comedy bits, short sexy images and actualities -- real-life anecdotal videos of a cute or startling nature.
It's strikingly like the content that first made movies popular, when the technology of projected film first hit the scene at the end of the 19th century. Films were novelties then -- people had no way conceptually of consuming them as self-contained works. So they were shown as peep-show attractions in arcades or as interludes on vaudeville bills. What people responded to were . . . short comedy bits, short sexy images (a dancer showing a bit of leg was soft porn back then), and actualities, real-life anecdotal films of a cute or startling nature.
Plus ça change, huh?
But people soon grew tired of these snippets. They wanted longer, more coherent pieces, which meant that they wanted stories. But it wasn't possible to jump straight to any existing story form. Attention span still could not support film stories the length of plays, much less novels, or even short stories. Ten minutes was the absolute limit of attention one could count on from an early film viewer -- about the length of a vaudeville skit. So a whole new form of storytelling was developed -- one that incorporated short comedy bits, sexy stuff and documentary footage (of trains, for example.) But now these were integrated into a narrative.
Audiences had to learn to absorb these short narratives before they could be expanded into feature-length film narratives -- into an evening's entertainment. It happened remarkably fast, primarily because the ten-minute and then the twenty-minute form was developed with such brilliant invention by storytellers like Griffith. The density of content and suggestion in Griffith's one-reelers and two-reelers, and the extraordinary beauty of his images -- like the one above from The Country Doctor in 1909 -- eventually made it clear (to some) that movies could hold an audience's attention for even longer than twenty minutes.
Filmmakers need to start anticipating what story forms are going to work on the Internet. There will not be a straight jump to feature-length narratives, or even half-hour narratives. Even the length of a ten-minute vaudeville skit is probably too long. What's needed are stories no longer than a cute cat video.
Can stories, real stories, be that short? Of course they can. Micro-fiction is as valid a form of fiction as any other -- if it is dense with content and suggestion, if it can conjure up whole worlds beyond the frame of its images and brief running time.
Hemingway was once challenged to write a six word story. He came up with this -- "For sale, baby shoes, never used." That tells a real story, and a good one. It resonates in the mind and in the heart, like any good story. The micro-movies that will introduce real narrative content to Internet cinema will have to learn that kind of dynamic compression, and they will have to be told in images of genuine beauty, depth and inventiveness -- there will be no room for the slick, throwaway non-images of the current Hollywood cinema, which have to be hurled past us at lightning speed because they would not reward close scrutiny.
This path is really the only way forward for filmmakers of the Internet era. It may seem like re-inventing the wheel, but filmmakers of the nickelodeon era were also re-inventing the wheel when they tried to figure out how to put over a grand Biblical epic in ten minutes. They seem to have had an awful lot of fun doing it, though, and in the process they created a new art form.
An essay like this can't really suggest the kinds of films I'm proposing, but my friend Jae Song is currently directing a series of movies in New York -- I call them Majestic Micro Movies -- which will make the whole thing clearer. You'll be able to watch them soon -- here, there and everywhere.
Monday, January 18
SILENT MOVIE SNOW
by
Lloydville
on Mon 18 Jan 2010 12:02 AM PST
From The Wedding March, 1928.
Tuesday, June 2
STELLA MARIS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 02 Jun 2009 12:28 AM PDT
Mary Pickford's Stella Maris, from 1918, is a genuinely strange film, not by any
means, I think, the conventional melodrama it pretends to be. Pickford plays two roles in it -- the pampered, protected,
ethereal Stella Maris and the homely, hard-luck Unity Blake, a
characterization bordering on the grotesque. On paper, the title role
ought to be the star part, and in a way it is -- Stella gets the good
lighting, the pretty clothes and the guy. But Unity steals the show,
blowing all the other actors off the screen -- including Pickford as
Stella in the double exposures.
Stella is sweet, but she delivers little more than poise on screen,
while Unity has energy, quirkiness, self-perception and soul. The
performance by Pickford in the role is sublime -- she never strikes a
false note, never steps beyond the twisted, battered persona of the
orphan Unity . . . and yet in her moments of despair, yearning,
resolution, she achieves the kind of transcendent beauty we often see
shining out from behind the many grotesque masks of Lon Chaney. Stella,
by contrast, seems like something seen in a shop window.
It's hard not to believe that there was something deliberate in this,
however unconscious. Perhaps it could be explained by the fact that
Pickford simply got carried away, inspired beyond reason, by the role
of Unity. But why pull back so far in the other role? Stella has little
to do beyond smile or sigh at the wickedness of the world. Stella is a
doll-woman, Unity is a force of nature, and the contrast is
illuminating.
It's finally very difficult to come up with a reason for the hero to fall in
love with Stella -- the love scenes between them are oddly bloodless
and perfunctory. There are a lot of reasons for him to fall in love
with Unity, who loves him hopelessly. The two times he and Unity
embrace in the film are electrifying and very moving. There's something
close to bitterness in the choices Pickford makes in the two
characterizations and it sets the melodrama of the story on its ear.
I think it's fair to see in the dual role some kind of metaphor for
female duality -- not the duality of woman as a man might conceive it,
between angel and whore, but as a woman might, as Pickford might,
between ugly-ducking and swan. Pickford was hardly a "normal" woman of
the early 20th Century -- but she played one on stage and on screen.
The contrast between the normal life she incarnated dramatically and
the actual life she led must have weighed on her psyche. She was not a
conventional beauty, yet her attractiveness put bread on her family's
table -- the judgment of others, of men, often meant the difference
between success and failure. Is it too fanciful to imagine that she
sometimes, in the tough times, looked at herself in the mirror -- as
Unity does in this film -- and despaired of her assets, feeling doomed?
Certainly Pickford's heart is with Unity in this film -- and so is the
viewer's. The performance is one of the greatest achievements of silent
cinema. It defines the film in a way that would not have been possible
in the sound era, when the literary text set such a limit on what a
film could be, could mean. A transcendent performance that violated the
text, as Pickford's performance as Unity violates the text of Stella
Maris, would have resulted at best in an interesting failure in a
sound film. Here it results in an improbable, breathtaking, emotionally
disconcerting masterpiece.
Tuesday, April 21
THE ATTACK ON THE SETTLER'S CABIN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 21 Apr 2009 01:03 AM PDT
Recently, watching an excellent documentary about Buffalo Bill Cody, from the PBS American Experience series, an image jumped out at me. It was part of the relatively rare surviving film depicting Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in performance. It depicted one of the show's most popular episodes -- "The Attack On the Settler's Cabin". A fairly small, square replica of a cabin was set up in the middle of the arena. Performers portraying a pioneer family would defend this from an attack by mounted Indians until Buffalo Bill and his trusty cowboy compadres rode in to rescue them. (The photograph of the cabin above gives a sense of its stage-set quality but not of its isolation in the emptied arena, conveyed in the documentary film footage.)
The precise iconography of the image, and not just the dramatic situation, seemed oddly familiar, and I quickly realized where I had seen it before -- in the film's of D. W. Griffith. Several times -- in The Battle At Elderbush Gulch and in The Birth Of A Nation, for example -- Griffith had staged an attack on an isolated cabin that evoked the staging in Buffalo Bill's arena. Griffith would start with a long shot of a small, square cabin in a valley that had the theatrical quality of an arena. He would cut back repeatedly to this long shot during the course of the attack.
Of course, an attack on an isolated cabin would become a staple of Western films, as would most of the episodes of Buffalo Bill's show -- the attack on the wagon train, the ambush of the Deadwood Stage, the heroics of the Pony Express Rider, the buffalo hunt, Custer's (or some other cavalry leader's) last stand against swarming Indians -- but Griffith's iconography was very distinctive and rarely reproduced, the cabin looking too small to hold the defenders later revealed to be inside it, set in the middle of a topographical amphitheater, seen from above, as though from some ideal vantage in the bleachers.
Note also (in the frame above from The Battle At Elderbush Gulch) the curious isolation of the cabin, with none of the outbuildings or stock pens one would expect to see surrounding a real pioneer home. The cabin has something of the feel of a set, or a prop, as did Bill's cabin. Contrast this with the remote homestead attacked by Indians in The Searchers, which looks like a working ranch complex.
I'm sure that Griffith was echoing, consciously or unconsciously, something he'd witnessed in a performance of Buffalo Bill's Wild West -- augmenting the theatrical spectacle with the photographic authority of a movie shot on a real location. The reality of the location was important -- it was part of what made all Wild West arena-show recreations seem old-fashioned to the growing audience of 20th-Century moviegoers -- but the evocation of Buffalo Bill's show was also important, because this was where so many moviegoers had gotten their first thrilling glimpse of the mythic West that Bill had done so much to create or consolidate in the world's imagination.
Thursday, April 9
FIRST AND LAST
by
Lloydville
on Thu 09 Apr 2009 01:21 AM PDT
[These thoughts on Murnau's The Last Laugh contain plot spoilers -- don't read them unless you've seen the film . . . instead, go see the film, one of the greatest ever made.]
The original German title of Murnau's masterpiece The Last Laugh was Der Letzte Mann, "the last man". In English this phrase can have a positive connotation, something like "the last real man", or "the last man standing", but in German it only connotes degree or place in a literal sense -- something like "the lowest man", "the least of men", "the last man in the pecking order".
In the film, the title is explicitly but somewhat ironically linked to the Biblical phrase "the last shall be first, and the first last". This saying of Jesus appears four times in the New Testament but only in the Synoptic Gospels (i. e. not in John) and in a couple of different contexts. The phrase is often read as simply contrasting the rich and powerful with the poor and oppressed, who will somehow triumph in the fullness of God's justice, but this is a misinterpretation in at least two cases. In those passages, "the first" Jesus refers to are his own self-righteous followers who feel they have some special connection to him and to God because of an imagined advantage they possess -- either from having "seen the light" before others, or having spent more "quality time" with him.
Jesus is making the point in those cases that status in some imaginary "Jesus club" has nothing to do with true righteousness, as judged by God. He is offering a rebuke not to those with power who oppress believers but to believers who lord it over their fellow believers. This is obviously not a congenial message to the organizers of religious institutions, for whom sanctioned membership in the official "Jesus club", with attendant privileges, including eternal salvation unavailable to others, is a prime selling point and recruiting tool.
Jesus's phrase is obviously deeply ironic, and it is introduced ironically in Der Letzte Mann. It appears in the very odd epilogue to the film -- the preposterous reversal of fortune in which the doorman demoted to restroom attendant receives an unexpected inheritance and suddenly becomes a man of wealth and privilege, elevated even above the position whose loss had crushed him earlier.
This epilogue follows the film's only intertitle, which is interjected after the washroom attendant has reached the depths of defeat and despair. The intertitle is unrelated to the narrative proper and represents the filmmaker addressing the audience directly and commenting on the narrative. He says that the defeat of the protagonist is how such stories end in real life but that he (the filmmaker) is not content to leave the matter there and will instead, out of love for the protagonist, supply his story with a happy ending.
This is, to put it mildly, disorienting. We're being told, in effect, that the happy ending we're about to see is a fraud, or a fantasy -- and that's exactly how it plays. The new dream life of the protagonist is exaggerated and surreal, moving beyond the precincts of expressionism into the realm of the purely fantastic. The protagonist doesn't just enjoy a fancy meal, he stuffs himself from a dessert concoction the size of a small building. He doesn't just serve caviar to his best friend, he shovels gobs of it from a vast pot onto his friend's plate. The whole things seems to be an insolent challenge to the audience, asking, "Do you buy this?", "Is this what you wanted to see?"
The first shot of the epilogue shows a group of silly-looking rich folk reading a newspaper account of the protagonist's reversal of fortune and laughing derisively -- as though they know how ridiculous it is. It's hard not to see these people as Murnau's image of us, of the audience, cynically demanding happy endings for "the least of men" all the while knowing that happy endings are only for the privileged, for the self-styled "first" of men. Exceptions to this rule are the stuff of comedy, of satire or farce.
Murnau shows us the newspaper account the rich folks are laughing at, and it's this account, ironic and unserious, which quotes Jesus's saying, rather frivolously -- "It looks as though the old Biblical saying is being fulfilled, that 'the last shall be first'". Then we are shown the rich folks laughing even louder.
Murnau was apparently forced to add the happy ending to the film, but he subverts it mercilessly, suggesting that Jesus's observation about the first and last is just a joke to most people, something that only applies to the dreamworld of popular entertainment. It's hard to imagine Jesus disagreeing with him.
In a film about the making of Der Letzte Mann included on the new Kino DVD edition of the restored film, it is suggested that the story is an anti-militaristic fable -- the doorman's obsession with his uniform as a status symbol being a metaphor for German society's obsession with military adventurism. This of course casts Murnau in the best possible light as a "good German" -- going against the grain that led Germany to start the Second World War. Murnau and his screenwriter Carl Mayer may have had some such criticism of Germany in mind, but it's hardly the heart of the film -- which I think is much closer to the Biblical text they reference in their story's title and in the newspaper article their rich folks find so hilarious.
This is not to say that Murnau and Mayer (a Jew) meant their film to be interpreted from a "Christian" perspective, but it seems inescapable to me that they were using a Christian image -- die Letzten, as Luther translated the Greek of the New Testament, εσχατοι, "the last men" -- to express their deep love of one beaten and defeated man, and their anguish over his oppression by a cynical and arrogant and hypocritical society, a "Christian" society.
Interestingly, and tragically, Carl Mayer died a "last man". Like many Jews in the film industry he fled Nazi Germany and ended up in England, where he had trouble finding work. He developed cancer, which was apparently poorly treated, due to to wartime strains on medical facilities, and died with 23 pounds and two books to his name. I'd love to know what those two books were.
I must add that the recent restoration on the Kino DVD is miraculous. The film was shot to produce three negatives, one for German release, one for American release and one for general international release elsewhere. The footage for the German release is far superior in terms of framing and action and has been reconstructed from a variety of sources for the version found on the new Kino edition. The quality and beauty of it are really breathtaking. This is probably the best version of the film ever available to American viewers in any form.
Tuesday, March 24
THE WARNER ARCHIVE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 24 Mar 2009 08:25 AM PDT
Warner Home Video has just announced what I think may be the most important development in home video since the introduction of the DVD -- The Warner Archive. It is making available, online and for U. S. customers only, selected titles that Warner doesn't plan to release widely but that will be manufactured on demand for customers who order them, at $19.99 each.
The DVDs will be burned, rather than pressed, with no extras, but Warner promises professional-quality transfers, with 16x9 enhancement for the widescreen films. The site provides sample clips from most of the films offered and the quality is indeed impressive.
Many films that would otherwise fall between the cracks will see the light of day, opening up, I suspect, a whole new customer-driven market, much as Netflix did. Netflix made certain assumptions about what kinds of films their customers would want to see (i. e. mostly new ones) which turned out to be totally wrong (people wanted to see mostly older films), but they had a system in place which allowed the market to define itself.
Warner is also co-opting the black market for films unreleased on DVD, which can almost always be found somehow online, usually in barely watchable versions burned from tapes of old TV broadcasts. With luck, the Warner model will find its way into the world of public film archives, encouraging them to make their holdings available cheaply to a wider public than the occasional theatrical screening could ever reach.
I placed an order on the Warner site the first time I visited it and can't wait to see the two Garbo silents in that order -- Love (above) and Wild Orchids -- and a talkie, Westbound, the only Scott-Boetticher Western still unavailable on DVD. I'm sure you'll find something among the first 155 films offered that will tempt you, too -- and Warner is encouraging people to submit their own requests for future offerings, which will be announced at the rate of about 20 new titles each month.
Early reports indicate that the site has been flooded with orders in its first hours of operation, in numbers far greater than Warner anticipated, all but overwhelming its system. George Feltenstein, the Warner Home Video executive responsible for the project, is said to be thrilled by this response -- and so am I.
Let's hope that Feltenstein's little experiment earns him a place alongside Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, and Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, of Netflix -- visionaries whose willingness to listen to consumers, rather than dictate to them, created new markets and made their companies tons of dough.
In any case, we're clearly looking into the future here. How close that future is rests entirely in the hands of consumers. So order something from The Warner Archive today and speed the plough.
Monday, March 9
THE RIVER (1929)
by
Lloydville
on Mon 09 Mar 2009 12:21 AM PDT
Frank Borzage's The River is a turbid erotic fairytale about a boy-man and a "fallen woman" who awakens him sexually and is in turn saved by his innocence.
It's a film uncharacteristic of Hollywood in that its sensuality is both frank and serious -- it takes adult sexuality as a given and presents it without the adolescent leer and snicker or the aura of the exotic which usually accompany erotic idylls in American cinema. In this film, Huck Finn meets Sadie Thompson at a dam construction site and learns about currents more treacherous than the Mississippi's.
The River stars Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan, who would be re-teamed a year later in Murnau's City Girl (above) -- a very different kind of film, reviewed earlier here. Murnau, for all the poetic imagery in City Girl, was trying to create a more naturalistic atmosphere than he had in Sunrise -- it was a break from his characteristic expressionism, an attempt to situate the story in a recognizably American context, as opposed to the mythic, vaguely European storybook environment of Sunrise.
The setting of The River isn't quite European but it's fantastic -- the construction camp, with its tiers of workers' cabin jacked up on stilts on the side of a mountain, looks like something from Middle Earth. The narrative has a feverish, dreamlike tone which accords with its odd setting. One might link it to the home-grown American expressionism of Hawthorne and Poe, minus the high-Gothic spookiness.
Mary Duncan gives an extraordinary performance, as she does in City Girl -- perfectly conveying a raunchy kind of lust mixed with cynicism mixed with a longing for something she can believe in. She's very sexy and very touching at the same time, much as Swanson was in Sadie Thompson. Farrell's mixture of naivete and virility is almost as impressive.
The plot of The River gets wildly melodramatic but the movie doesn't feel exactly like a melodrama -- everything reads as metaphor, never to be taken quite literally. Farrell chopping down tall lumber to relieve his sexual frustration, nearly freezing to death in a snowstorm before Duncan's body heat restores him to life -- it's all about sex and not much else.
Only one print of the film has survived and it's incomplete, missing a few early scenes and the whole last reel. The version on the recent Murnau, Borzage and Fox box set is a reconstruction using production stills and intertitles derived from the script to fill in the gaps. The loss of the last reel is very frustrating -- one is desperate to know if Borzage was able to give the final action sequence the climactic excitement and release the tale demands.
We are left with a fragment (about half) of a minor masterpiece of the silent screen and one of the most original erotic reveries in all of cinema.
Thursday, March 5
EARLY MURNAU
by
Lloydville
on Thu 05 Mar 2009 08:35 AM PST
This month, Kino is releasing two early Murnau films that haven't been available on DVD before in this country -- The Haunted Castle (from 1921) and The Finances Of the Grand Duke (from 1924). Here are reviews of both films:
THE HAUNTED CASTLE
Murnau made radically diverse kinds of films in the early Twenties -- still feeling his way as filmmaker. In The Haunted Castle we see him at his most conventional -- and least interesting. The film is
a cheesy melodrama based on a magazine story. It is exceptionally
well-designed and carefully photographed, in something resembling a
"studio style" -- handsome, elegant, tasteful, uninspired.
On its face the tale is a kind of simple-minded Agatha Christie-type
murder mystery in which a gang of aristocrats assembles at a country
estate for a hunting weekend and dire secrets are exposed. There's a
monk among the party, whose tragically unconvincing tonsure appliance
immediately gives away the climactic gag involving assumed identity.
On the other hand, the impeccable interior sets, the graceful if
unimaginative mise-en-scène, the generally excellent acting and the
occasional flights of visual fancy give the production a weight which
the story can't begin to support. The mood and pace of the film evoke The Rules Of the Game even as the narrative evokes The Old Dark
House. Ultimately it has the feel of an assignment -- or a
demonstration piece in which Murnau proved he could deliver a classy, conventional,
"well-made" commercial product.
As usual when Murnau moves outdoors, there are beautiful images of the
countryside -- always involving a dynamic spatial dimension . . . not
just pretty pictures of pretty places but images of a geography
penetrated and revealed by carefully choreographed movement though its space. There are some sweet and
lyrical and memorable images illustrating a flashback to the halcyon
days of a marriage that went very wrong.
And there is one goofy interpolation which alone feels like Murnau being
Murnau. A kitchen assistant gets hold of a bag of whipped cream and
violates it with antic lust -- thrusting two fingers deep into the bag
and then thrusting the fingers deep into his mouth. Later, the boy
dreams of having another crack at the cream, this time with the monk
standing over him approvingly and sanctioning his delight as the boy
takes a slurp of cream and then slaps the head cook who scolded him for
stealing it in real life. There's a gleeful homoerotic aspect to the
gag and a tone which violates the grave hokum of the rest of the film.
THE FINANCES OF THE GRAND DUKE
In The Finances Of the Grand Duke, a much
more confident Murnau expands on the juvenile glee of the whipped cream
gag and makes a whole fluffy dessert out of it. A tiny island Duchy is
about to go bankrupt -- the carefree Grand Duke has a hard time taking
the crisis seriously. He prefers throwing the last coins remaining from
his fortune into the ocean for a group of half-naked boys to dive
after.
Salvation appears in the form of a speculator who wants to buy
part of the island in order to exploit the sulfur deposits there. The
Grand Duke imagines his subjects fainting from the fumes -- but really
what disturbs him, we know, is the sheer bad taste of the thing . . .
the simply awful smell. A rich Russian Grand Duchess, who doesn't
actually know the Grand Duke but has heard good things about him,
offers salvation of a different kind, if only she can escape her
brother, trying to track her down before she can offer herself in marriage to the penniless
sovereign.
Meanwhile the speculator has concocted a rebellion among the
subjects of the island, with the aid of four scoundrels, one of whom is
played by Max Schreck. Without the Nosferatu make-up and with a full
head of hair, and with a charming dumb smile, he looks quite human and
harmless -- a burlesque version of Max Von Sydow.
The silliness multiplies exponentially and all comes right in the end,
of course, and the result is a real little jewel of a movie, with a
very distinctive tone -- juvenile in spirit but visually elegant,
feckless but good-hearted, frothy but really funny, too. (It played
wonderfully in the crowded theater where I first saw it, with genuine happy laughter -- as
opposed to "knowing" film-buff chortles -- throughout.)
Here is Richard Ellman on Oscar Wilde, from his magisterial biography
of the writer: "As for his wit, its balance was more hazardously
maintained than is realized. Although it lays claim to arrogance, it
seeks to please us. Of all writers, Wilde was perhaps the best company.
Always endangered, he laughs at his plight, and on his way to the loss
of everything he jollies society for being so much harsher than he is,
so much less graceful, so much less attractive."
One can't help seeing Murnau in the Grand Duke of this film -- the
director bedeviled by the money men, the homosexual threatened by
exposure, by the loss of everything, yet so sure of himself, of his
genius, so exhilarated by life and the energy of creation that he just
can't take the grim side of things too seriously.
The sheer joy that radiates throughout this movie -- the joy in
filmmaking, the joy in beautiful places (like the gorgeous Dalmation
coast locations where the film was shot), the joy of watching people
and ships and waves inhabit and transform space -- is finally very
moving. We rarely get to share this aspect of genius, which is usually
engaged in weightier endeavors. This movie is weightless -- like a
helium balloon -- and it's marvelous to watch it rise up and disappear
into nothingness.
The films will be available separately from Kino or as part of a box set with a new edition of Faust and previously released versions of Nosferatu, The Last Laugh and Tartuffe. I haven't seen the Kino versions of the new titles but I'm looking forward to checking them out and you should be, too. I mean, it's Murnau.
Monday, December 29
SUNRISE RECONSIDERED
by
Lloydville
on Mon 29 Dec 2008 11:40 PM PST
[Warning: If you haven't seen Sunrise, don't read this -- instead go
see Sunrise immediately.]
Sunrise may not be the greatest film ever made -- it may not even be
the greatest film of the silent era -- but it certainly has passages,
many passages, that rank among the greatest in the history cinema and
still help chart the limits of what the medium can do.
Oddly, though, most of these supremely great passages happen in the
first 45 minutes of the film. After that, there are many wonderful
moments, much gorgeous lighting and many striking plastic effects, but
none of them are breathtaking in the way the high points of the first
half are.
I think there's a fairly simple explanation for this, and it has to do
with the structure of the story itself. The film tells the tale of a
simple man living in a rustic farming and fishing village who's seduced
away from his wife by a vamp visiting the village from the city. He
determines to drown his wife in the course of a boat outing but when he
moves to do so he sees himself, sees what he's become, in her terrified
eyes and draws back from the deed. She flees him when they get to land
again, jumps on a trolley -- he jumps on, too, and they ride into the
city. There, as he's trying to atone for his awful behavior, they
stumble on a wedding. The man falls apart, begs for forgiveness, is
forgiven, and they walk out of the church like a newly married couple.
This is the artistic, emotional and spiritual climax of the film . . .
but the film is only half over.
We then see the couple recover their former lightheartedness at a
fairgrounds. We cut back to the scheming vamp in the village, and this
sets up an expectation that she will somehow intervene in the couple's
reunion and jeopardize it -- but in fact this never happens. The man
has made his choice -- the vamp has no more power over him.
On the boat ride home a storm washes the couple overboard, the man
thinks his wife has drowned, and he's devastated. There's great irony
in this, of course, but no great dramatic weight, because it doesn't
involve any further development of the characters' inner lives. The
storm is a mechanical contrivance -- an impersonal threat to a marriage
that has already been reborn and renewed.
The man rejects the vamp with physical violence, almost killing her,
before being told that his wife has been found alive -- saved by a
bundle of reeds the vamp had gathered as a device for the man to use to save
himself after he'd killed the wife. Again, there are multiple
ironies in these developments but, again, no real progression in the
inner lives of the characters. The storm isn't a direct consequence of
the man's past behavior and the reeds don't redeem the vamp -- they are
like visual and narrative puns with no fundamental significance for the
basic drama.
The second half of the film does contains things one would miss if Sunrise had ended at the halfway point. In the fairgrounds
carousing, Janet Gaynor's character gets to reveal herself as a sensual
being, something she isn't really able to do as the long-suffering wife
in the opening sequences, where her astonishingly bad helmet-wig seems
to be giving her a headache -- as it gives us one. The George O'Brien
character is so frankly sensual, even when he's menacing, that there
would be an imbalance without those fairgrounds scenes. O'Brien's
character also suffers in the second half from the apparent loss of his
wife, a tragedy he almost brought upon himself. Without seeing that
suffering, we might feel that he'd gotten off too easily for his
despicable behavior. And of course the vamp gets her comeuppance --
though it's almost more comeuppance than she deserves.
But none of these things transcends the emotional and dramatic climax
of the scene in the church or adds anything of essential significance
to it. They're like echoes of and reflections on a story that's
already been told. In the second half, Murnau can't summon up sublime
cinematic expressions for powerful emotional developments -- because
those developments simply aren't there.
Pointing out the flaws in the dramatic structure of Sunrise does
nothing, of course, to diminish its stature as one of the most
important works in the history of cinema. It was the film that taught
John Ford the secret of movies, and that alone would make it a work of
inestimable value. It's one of those rare films that one one can watch
again and again with increasing astonishment and enchantment, and it
continues to inspire each new generation of filmmakers, especially
cinematographers, for whom it is a kind of touchstone. But recognizing
its structural flaws might help explain the vague and perhaps even
guilty feeling of disappointment which steals over one whenever that
"Finis" card comes up on the screen.
The great passages of the film, great as they are, don't add up to a
great whole work.
[Vincente Minnelli's fine film The Clock has a couple of intriguing echoes of Sunrise, which I think are too close to be accidental. Both films deal with moments of crisis in a marriage that play out in an urban setting. In both movies, the crisis is at first exacerbated and then transcended by the city environment, which becomes a kind of character in the drama. In the aftermath of both crises, the married couples try to get back to a state of normality in a restaurant, but the simple act of trying to share a meal only emphasizes the distance between them. In both restaurant scenes, the women break down. These scenes are followed by ones in which the couples happen upon a wedding in a church -- they enter the church and participate vicariously in the ceremony, which restores their sense of commitment to each other. In each film, the church scene is the emotional climax of the story. In The Clock, the rest of the film is coda -- in Sunrise the rest of the film is coda, too, but stretched out far too long, and too loaded with incident, to work properly as such.]
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