Category Archives: Silent Movies

THE MOVIES BEGIN . . . AGAIN

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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.

STELLA MARIS

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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.

THE ATTACK ON THE SETTLER’S CABIN

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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 films 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.

FIRST AND LAST

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[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.

THE WARNER ARCHIVE

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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 16×9 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.

THE RIVER (1929)

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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.

EARLY MURNAU

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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.

SUNRISE RECONSIDERED

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[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.]

THE LODGER (1927)

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Alfred Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger, from 1927, is wonderfully entertaining, alive with visual inventiveness, with the director's unbridled joy in making cinema.  It's not, however, a terribly successful thriller, and thus not a terribly successful film, since a thriller is what it sets out to be.

The problem is the presence of Ivor Novello in the title role — or perhaps the way Hitchcock uses him.  Novello was a handsome fellow with a decidedly fey quality.  Hitchcock would eventually find ways of using an actor's ambiguous sexuality to disturb an audience, keep it off balance, but he doesn't seem to be trying to do that with Novello.  He lurches back and forth between presenting Novello's lodger as an almost inhuman visual icon of menace and mystery (see above) and letting the actor present his own impersonation of a matinee idol.  Novello does his best to appear brooding and menacing from time to time but he succeeds only in suggesting a man vaguely distracted and slightly peeved about something.

There's nothing really creepy about Novello's lodger, except that he seems to inhabit a different film than the one Hitchcock is trying to make.  He comes across as conventionally, not pathologically, insecure.  The unhinged desperation we sense in Bruno from Strangers On A Train or Norman from Psycho is nowhere in evidence.  It's really impossible to take Novello's lodger seriously as a suspect in the “golden curls” murders, or as a passionate suitor of the heroine.  At the same time, he can't really secure our sympathy as that archetype familiar from so many later Hitchcock films, the innocent man wrongly accused, since we spend most of the film without any clear information about his guilt or innocence.

Still, Hitchcock constructs his movie with relentless, creative imagination as though it had a real villain or potential villain or wrongly accused villain at its center.  We can admire and enjoy its brilliance but we can't care about its story — which offers only the most perfunctory kind of  suspense, without any subliminal psychological undertow.  The film is aesthetically dazzling without being really engaging on any other level.

THE PENALTY

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American
popular literature has a long grotesque tradition, stretching back to
Washington Irving, our first literary celebrity. It achieved its
apotheosis, in terms of both sensationalism and art, in the work of
Edgar Allen Poe — and it migrated naturally into the exaggerated
conventions of Victorian theater, and from there into movies.


After
WWI, and perhaps in part owing to the unprecedented horrors of that
conflict, grotesque melodrama became a distinct genre in cinema, much
as film noir became a distinct genre after the collective nightmare of
WWII. Its power and prestige is best illustrated by the extraordinary
popularity of Lon Chaney. One of the most celebrated stars of the
silent era, he specialized almost exclusively in the genre of the
grotesque.  (He's seen above in and out of make-up for The Miracle Man.)


In
tracing the rise of the modern horror film from its roots in silent
cinema, we can easily misconstrue the grotesque genre as it was
experienced by early audiences. The Phantom Of the Opera and The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, proto-horror films starring Chaney, actually
have more in common with a grotesque contemporary melodrama like The
Penalty, also starring Chaney as a legless underworld crime boss —
and the three have more in common with each other than any of them has
with Dracula, for example, with its supernatural elements, or even Frankenstein, with its elements of mad-science fiction.

The
Phantom, the Hunchback, and the legless Blizzard from The Penalty are
all disfigured men whose afflictions have rendered them terrifying,
while not quite extinguishing the romantic souls within. It's hard not
to see in this an echo of the many thousands of mutilated survivors of
WWI, and a metaphor for the psyche of a world scarred by previously
unimaginable battlefield carnage.


The
word grotesque does not quite describe the dramatic tone of The
Penalty or the world it creates. Demented is closer to the mark. It
does not present us with a vision of normality penetrated by grotesque
elements — it is set in a universe which has become unhinged at the
core, and this nightmare universe is delineated matter-of-factly, as
though its logic were the logic of the world as it is.


This
creates a wonderful, dreamy kind of surrealism, with great poetic
force, and a delightful atmosphere of frisson — but it is finally very
disturbing. One is tempted for this very reason to dismiss it as lurid
pulp, but one cannot — mostly because of the authority of Chaney . . .
the physical authority of his shockingly convincing impersonation of a
legless man, and the artistic authority of his performance as the
paradoxical Blizzard.


We are
given to drawing a distinction between silent film performers who
“over-acted” and those who played in a more restrained and “modern”
style. Chaney is usually considered more modern in this sense. But in
truth, Chaney overacts in every frame of The Penalty, by modern
standards. It's just that the broad strokes of his expressions and
gestures are so grounded in psychological truth, so complex in their
suggestiveness, so graceful and sublime in their execution, that we are
swept beyond our modern expectations of what acting should be. We are
experiencing screen performance as audiences of the time experienced
it.


The
intimacy of the camera certainly did require a technical toning down of
physical expression and gesture for actors coming from the stage —
much as a smaller theatrical venue would have for actors accustomed to
playing huge auditoriums — and there were certainly lunkheaded actors
who couldn't pull this off. But most of the time, when we talk about
the difference between over-acting and more naturalistic acting in
silent films, we are simply noting the difference between bad acting
and good acting.

One of
Cocteau's great maxims was “You have to know when it's all right to go
too far.” Great silent film actors knew this — and great modern actors
know it, too. James Cagney and Jack Palance — and Jack Nicholson, for that
matter — habitually overact by so-called modern standards, yet their
performances still seem fresh and convincing, perfectly au courant.
Daniel Day Lewis's performance in The Gangs Of New York, one of the
very greatest performances ever committed to film, is as wild and
over-the-top as any silent film performance ever was, and yet it is a
work of complicated and compelling genius.


The
camera did allow a new breed of actors to step to the fore — the
minimalists, of whom Robert de Niro is probably the most astonishing.
But Lon Chaney was no minimalist. He was an actor in the grand style —
and, quite simply, a supreme master of that style, consistently
pitch-perfect, and consistently breathtaking.



The
delirious tale of The Penalty begins with a boy injured in a traffic
accident, treated by an incompetent doctor who unnecessarily amputates
both his legs. An older doctor covers for the younger physician's
mistake, and the chastened bumbler goes on to an exemplary career in
medicine. But the boy never forgets.

He grows up to be the crippled criminal mastermind Blizzard, played by Chaney, who amasses power, covets more, and plans
his revenge — on the doctor and on the world.



On
the first front, he insinuates himself into the life of the doctor's
daughter — a sculptor torn between her ambitions as an artist and
society's expectations of exemplary womanhood (domestic and submissive)
— by posing for her portrait of Satan. On the second front he is
plotting a takeover of the city of San Francisco by means of a lunatic
scheme involving ten thousand “foreign malcontents”, armed to the
teeth, and uniformed in silly matching straw hats, cunningly woven in
advance by harlots conscripted from the ranks of Blizzard's working
girls.


It's all quite mad, but presented as an authentic threat to the civil order.



A
subplot involves a plucky undercover female police operative who
infiltrates the crucial straw hat operation and quickly learns more
than it's safe for her to know. Principally she discovers the
underground lair where Blizzard stores the munitions for his planned
insurrection — a subterranean world, reached through a trick
fireplace, that's right out of the wildest Gothic fiction, and vaguely
reminiscent of Erik the Phantom's underground kingdom beneath the
Opera.


Blizzard is a beast, with the soul of a poet. He is a fine critic of art, and fires the sculptor with the courage she
needs to break free of her bourgeois shackles and strike out on her own for glory. Villain indeed!



Blizzard
also wins the heart of the undercover operative by his soulful piano
paying — and she wins his by her skillful operation of the pedals
while he plays. She comes to her senses only when she discovers that
his grand plan involves amputating the legs of a certain . . . but you
get the idea.


Female independence is presented as possibly sexy and possibly admirable but, in the end, a very bad idea, for which a
woman will inevitably pay a dreadful price.



The
preposterous villainy resembles the harebrained villainy of Feuillade's
serials — at once innocent and unsettling, mundane and surreal.
Possibly both reflect a post-war malaise informed by a sense that the
ordinary world has gone subtly but irrevocably insane.


Chaney's
performance, as usual, gives it all an unlikely interior coherence and
logic. The filmmaking is aptly described by Michael Blake, Chaney's
biographer, as craftsmanlike — the shots are handsomely framed and
lit, and the narrative moves along at a lively clip. Chaney alone
elevates the film to greatness.


Every
time he moves himself around with his crutches or with his hands alone,
we watch a ballet on stumps unfold — the aesthetic determination and
commitment of the actor become the villainous determination and
commitment of the character he's playing. We admire him and recoil from
him at the same time.


This
is the thrill of the grotesque drama. We are allowed to engage and
embrace our deepest fears and discontents subconsciously, while
retaining our outward allegiance to conventional virtues. The film
dangles the possibility of Blizzard's redemption before us — then
snatches it away at the last moment . . . as it snatches away the
possibility of new horizons for the women.


The
ultimate effect, however, is one of ambiguity, a suspension of faith in
the old certainties — an intriguing discombobulation of the moral
universe.





Kino's
edition of the film on DVD features a splendid print and some wonderful
extras. They include the surviving footage from The Miracle Man —
which is painful to watch, because this lost film looks as though it
might have been marvelous. Included also is one of the few surviving
one-reelers from Chaney's early years at Universal — By the Sun's
Rays. It's not much of a film, but it's fascinating to see Chaney at
work at the beginning of his movie career. His physical grace commands
attention, even when his choices as an actor are obvious or even crude.
Chaney was born for the screen, as Chaplin and Pickford were — with an
instinctive insight into the movies's mysterious expressive power.

There
is, perhaps most delightfully of all, a brief short in which Michael
Blake shows us some of the Chaney artifacts held by the Los Angeles
Museum of Natural History. We see the suit and the stumps Chaney wore
in the movie, his make-up case — the mirror he looked into while
working his magic. Blake handles them all with the delicate hands of a
make-up artist, which he is — and the awed respect of someone who
genuinely admires the craft of a master.

THE STORYTELLER'S VOICE

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D.
W. Griffith was a product of the stage, an actor and a failed
playwright. But he was also a product of the Biograph years, where he
honed his craft as a filmmaker in short self-contained stories, which
often have an anecdotal quality. In his feature work Griffith frequently used stageplays written by others as source material — he never mastered this formal discipline in stories
he wrote by himself . . . but this is a crucial failing only if you think
movies need to be tightly-plotted narratives with an overall structure
which the individual scenes all serve and to which they are subordinated.


This
ideal became the Hollywood norm, but Griffith was at his best when he
didn't follow and didn't need to follow it — which is why his later
films, when he was trying to fit in to the standardized studio style,
are so inferior to his earlier work.


The
Birth Of A Nation is a rambling, disjointed film narratively — more
like a collection of tales than a unified story in its own right — and is least satisfying when it narrows its focus in its final episodes
to the melodramatic mechanics of its theatrical source. Only the pure
cinematic beauty and power of the Clan ride redeems it from this
reductive derailment of its epic expansiveness.

Intolerance
of course takes this narrative expansiveness to wild extremes, but even
Griffith's great small films, like Broken Blossoms and True Heart
Susie, have an anecdotal quality. There may be a heart-stopping final
action climax or melodramatic denouement, but the films as a whole
don't build towards it with the kind of precision and economy and
momentum we have come to expect from popular movies since the onset of
the studio era.


This
is a criticism one could also level at Huckleberry Finn, which lies
somewhere between the delightful, rambling yarn-spinning of Life On
the Mississippi and the tauter formula fiction of Tom Sawyer. It is
a criticism one could level at The Odyssey, too — and the Bible. All
of these works use narrative formulas, with a more or less developed
overall structure, but proceed episodically, like a series of related
tales told by the fire over the course of many evenings.


One
can see why the studios resisted this sort of storytelling in movies.
It's too hard to predict in advance how movies made this way are going
to turn out — they depend too much on the instincts and the genius of
the storyteller and they lend themselves too much to improvisation.
Griffith's style of anecdotal epic was still fresh in the mind when one
of his truest disciples, Eric Von Stroheim, tried to emulate it in
darker tones in Greed. From his perspective, the experiment of Greed probably didn't look that outrageous — Griffith's method had,
after all, led to astonishing success both critically and commercially. Greed was longer and grimmer, but followed the same loose-knit narrative
strategy.


Thalberg,
a corporate functionary with taste, but a corporate functionary first
and last, really had to destroy the film — not just as a warning to
profligate directors but as a signal that the days of Griffith's method
were over. Enter Rupert Julian and the era of the sensibly-made,
pre-visualizable film. That era produced its own kind of treasures, but
I think one of the reasons we are attracted to the silent era is
because it was the last time the ancient voice of the storyteller could
be heard it all its eccentric, iconoclastic, unclassifiable glory.

Its
echoes took a long time to die out. It was last heard clearly, I think,
in The Godfather, Part II, with its parallel storylines that
reflected each other elliptically and suggestively rather than
according to some formal narrative dialectic. It's a messy film, on one
level, but unified by the passion and conviction of the storyteller's
voice — and the same is true of Griffith's messy masterpieces.

AN IMAGE FOR TODAY: TWO COHANS

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George M. and his sister Josie, when they were, with their parents, part of The Four Cohans, a family vaudeville act, before George became the King Of Broadway.

Josie later married the silent film director Fred Niblo.  Josie died of heart disease at a relatively young age, in 1916, the year Niblo entered movies as an actor and director.  He's best known for directing the silent version of Ben-Hur, but a film he made a year later with Garbo, The Temptress, is probably his best work.

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923)

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Given a terrific story, Lon Chaney in the role of a lifetime, some of the most spectacular sets ever built in Hollywood, a cast of thousands and a decent cinematographer, even Wallace Worsley could make a great movie — and in The Hunchback Of Notre Dame I think he did.

There's a lot about the film one could criticize.  Much of the filmmaking and much of the acting, apart from Chaney's, is merely serviceable.  Worsley can be clumsy in his staging of ensembles and in his handling of the comic relief.  But with a film this entertaining, a film that showcases a performance like Chaney's, criticism seems a bit churlish.

Chaney's performance is highly theatrical, highly stylized, but it's always calculated in terms of movement, of dance.  His physical presence is never less than riveting.  He doesn't stint on the grotesque aspect of Quasimodo, whose teeth seem to be rotting out of his head and whose tongue flicks out like a lizard's when he gets excited.  He's genuinely repellent — which only makes the revelation of his kind heart more affecting.

Orson Welles said that as a kid he never had much interest in movies as a medium per se — what he was interested in was movie actors, and he singled out Chaney's Quasimodo as one of the performances that most inspired him.  This probably had a lot to do with Welles's lifelong interest in make-up effects, especially his obsession with facial applications, which he wore in almost all of his stage and screen roles.

In The Hunchback, Chaney's Quasimodo pops in and out at irregular intervals through most of the film.  When he takes center stage in the final reels, the movie sings as only a silent film can.  Chaney dances to a melody that only he and Quasimodo can hear — until suddenly, by following the shapes and rhythms of the dance, we can hear it, too.  It's a kind of miracle.

Sadly, the film survives only in poor prints.  Kino's recent “Ultimate Edition” on DVD is mastered from what's identified as an “original”
tinted print, and it's not bad, considering.  The movie still manages to shine through the scratches — and makes one dream about what the thing must have looked like on its initial release.  The Kino edition also offers a fine commentary by Michael Blake, Chaney's biographer and a make-up artist himself, who provides a wealth of information about the cast members and the production.  The musical score, complied by Donald
Hunsberger and orchestrated and conducted by the always reliable Robert
Israel, is first-rate.

FLESH AND THE DEVIL

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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.