Category Archives: Silent Movies

NOSFERATU (1922)

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Max Schreck’s Count Orlock shares a distinction with Lon Chaney’s Phantom,
Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Rudolph Valentino — he’s an icon
from the silent era that’s still alive in the popular imagination. Kids
who couldn’t tell you the difference between John Barrymore and Lillian
Gish know Nosferatu.

Partly this is because Orlock is such a powerful icon, visually, and partly
it’s because anyone who has ever seen even the shortest clip of the
vampire in “Nosferatu” simply cannot forget it, so powerfully is Orlock
presented cinematically in the film. Orlock is the heart and soul of
the film — the part of it that inspired Murnau’s genius. Scenes
without him can be visually conventional, and the storytelling in
general can be clunky. (Murnau was still feeling his way as a
storyteller in 1922.)

The acting is very exaggerated, which suits the tale, but runs the usual
risk of highly stylized performance — if it isn’t executed brilliantly
it can seem silly. (But that’s the thrill of it, too — it’s the
thespian equivalent of trapeze flying without a net.) The young
protagonists of the tale are not terribly skillful here, and don’t seem
to have interested Murnau very much, so their expressions of marital
bliss, and later angst, can seem unconvincing, even icky. The actor who
plays Knock, however, a borderline nut-case who travels a long way
across that border in the course of the film, is sublime — he’s like a
genuinely insane person imitating a silent film actor and the result is
thrilling, funny and ghastly all at once.

The only featured player who doesn’t go over the top in the film is Max
Schreck. He moves in an exaggerated (sometimes supernatural) way, of
course, but it all seems organic — this is just Nosferatu, an
admittedly strange creature, being natural, being himself. He never
leers or threatens or grimaces — he just kills, like the Venus flytrap
or the carnivorous polyp he’s compared to visually in the film. And
there is a softness in his eyes suggesting loneliness, even shame —
qualities which Klaus Kinski exaggerated pointedly and too crudely in
Herzog’s remake of the film, to engage our sympathy. But Schreck’s
inhuman humanness wouldn’t be affecting, wouldn’t be terrifying, if he
used it to appeal to us. He’d just be a character, an actor in some
great make-up. It’s no wonder people have imagined that Schreck was a
real vampire — that’s how great and subtle his performance is.

Nosferatu incarnates the poetry of death, its cool, elegant efficiency and power,
which has a kind of awesome beauty. His face is the face we most fear
— an image of anyone, of ourselves, as a corpse — yet can’t resist
looking at. It is Murnau’s genius, and Schreck’s instinct or craft,
which let us experience the deep fascination of that face and remind us
of its familiarity. It’s one we will all have someday — and perhaps
that is why a little part of the human heart goes out to Nosferatu.

HE WHO GETS SLAPPED

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As art forms go, the silent feature evolved with lightning speed. Barely two decades passed between the commercial inauguration of film as a peepshow attraction and the magisterial eloquence of The Birth Of A Nation. Less than fifteen years after that the silent feature was gone, apart from what Donald Crafton has called the pyrrhic victory of
Chaplin’s sound-era silents.

The speed of its evolution and the brief span of its dominance meant that it was always a medium in transition. One of the excitements, and sometimes one of the frustrations, of watching silent films is the frequent collision of artistic strategies within a single work. He Who Gets Slapped is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon.

First, you have the play on which it is based — an apparently serious lyric tragedy of the sort that would have perhaps struck readers of the old Saturday Evening Post as highbrow. Derived from this you have the film scenario itself, a wonderfully preposterous and unapologetic piece of Grand Guignol, in the best Theater of Blood tradition. And then you have director Victor Seastrom’s treatment of this scenario, an exaggerated and stylized but basically straightforward narrative presentation of the Grand Guignol element, interspersed with metaphorical visual interludes designed to remind us of the work’s
original pretensions.

Finally, at the center of it all, unifying if not quite synthesizing the disparate elements, you have the very great plastic art of Lon Chaney, supported by several other players — Norma Shearer, John Gilbert and Tully Marshall in particular — who can inhabit the world of Chaney’s eloquent pantomime.

It’s the power and force, the unprecedented aesthetic phenomenon, of a great
silent film actor like Chaney which by its nature confounds the conventional artistic strategies of the piece. The flowery poetic intertitles, which I suspect derive from the play, and the interpolated visual metaphors, are so inferior to Chaney’s performance that they stop the narrative dead. They seem to be apologizing for the sensational nature of the story, the outrageousness of the purely narrative images.

But the purely narrative images are astonishing and fine, pushing an apparent naturalism just a little too far — into the demented dreamscape of the story itself. The odd, mournful swaying of the clowns’ dance, the fantastic dappled sunlight of the Gilbert-Shearer picnic, even the obviously faked inserts of Gilbert and Shearer “riding” the horse, achieve a perfect balance between plastic beauty and a coherent representation of a convincing screen place.

There have been other arts which, in times of rapid transition, displayed this same sort of aesthetic discombobulation. Titus Andronicus, for example, mixes the brutal, grotesque vision of Marlowe with the more ambiguous and humane treatment of character with which Shakespeare would eventually modify Marlowe’s great innovations in theatrical form.
But not yet having internalized Marlowe’s lessons, Shakespeare simply apes Marlowe’s shock tactics and tries to present them in his own voice. The result is disconcerting and perpetually strange.

Seastrom’s arty gloss on the great cinematic achievement that lies at the core of He Who Gets Slapped has the same flavor of insecurity — of lessons not yet internalized, of forces not yet appreciated. John Huston once told James Agee that film can’t be used metaphorically, since filmed reality is by its nature already a metaphor. There is something in Lon Chaney’s eyes, in the way he moves under that clown make-up and clown costume, which is beyond the range of literary expression, beyond the range of metaphor.  “He” is a dream image — and dreams always get diminished by conscious interpretation.

[Above is the principal cast and crew of He Who Gets Slapped — that’s Seastrom in the vest and bow tie standing between Shearer and Gilbert.]

BLIND HUSBANDS

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Blind
Husbands (from 1919) remains the most astonishing directorial debut in
the history of American movies. The film has been compared to Citizen
Kane in that regard, but it has also been pointed out that Welles's
startling debut was preceded by a significant body of work in theater
and radio which brought him serious critical acclaim as well as
national prominence, and made the phenomenon of Kane less surprising.



Erich
Von Stroheim had worked as an assistant in various capacities on the
Griffith lot and for director John Emerson, and he'd made a name for
himself as a character actor doing variations on his trademark wicked
Hun impersonation. He had, in fact, more practical experience of
filmmaking than Welles did before he made Kane — but there was
nothing in his resume which could have prepared anyone for the mastery
of the medium, the creative brilliance, on display in Blind Husbands.



In this
film he managed to refine the documentary power of Griffith at his best
and combine it with an expressionistic visual poetry worthy of Murnau.
It has the feel of a work conceived for its medium alone, with no
echoes of stage practice — not surprising since Von Stroheim had no
significant stage experience himself. (He had written one unproduced
play.)


In his
biography of the director, Richard Koszarski points out that Von
Stroheim saw the importance of Griffith's obsessive concern with detail
and authenticity in costumes and settings — this was a key way of
enthralling an audience and trumping stage practice, no matter how
elaborate. Yet because Griffith usually looked to the melodramatic stage
for his narratives and only occasionally explored interiors in purely
cinematic ways, an aesthetic tension remained in his work — he always
seemed to have a foot in both worlds, that of the stage and that of the
cinema.


The tension is dissolved in Blind Husbands. There is no sense, in either interiors or exteriors, of the theatrical
“set”. The camera seems to be exploring real places — however idealized or fantastical.



Much
has been made of Von Stroheim's obsession with seemingly insignificant
details, as though it represented some kind of pathology, but this was
crucial to his method — to get actors to behave as though they were
inhabiting real places, to convince audiences that they were watching
(and vicariously inhabiting) real places.


Audiences
and critics of the time recognized the power of this approach, even if
they didn't always appreciate how it was achieved — how it moved
cinema one step further from the Victorian stage. Griffith could throw
Lillian Gish out onto a real piece of ice on a frozen river, and in the
same film shoot and stage an interior as though it were being enacted
within a proscenium arch. It was the totality and integrity of Von
Stroheim's realized vision of a cinematic universe that made Blind
Husbands an immediate sensation.


The
film cost a bit more than $100,000, and Universal spent slightly
more than that promoting it — but it brought in over $300,000
during its first year of release, at a time when the average Universal
film was bringing in just over $50,000.


Making
a film like Blind Husbands was obviously riskier than churning out
programmers, but it represented a formula for commercial success all
the same — and one curiously similar to the blockbuster event-film
formula currently followed in Hollywood. Today the money is most often spent on
special effects — but in Von Stroheim's day, his obsessive recreations
and presentations of reality must have struck audiences as very special
effects indeed, and every bit as thrilling, as cutting-edge, as
exploding Death Stars.


It should be added that Von Stroheim's method is still thrilling, some 85 years on, in a way the startling digital effects
of our time may not be in a few generations.



The
film tries for a greater psychological complexity than conventional
melodrama, and presents adulterous temptation with an erotic frankness
unusual in its time, but it is still a rather ordinary love triangle at
heart. It's the organic integration of the physical world into its
drama and the power and beauty of its images which make it magical and
memorable — a purely cinematic masterpiece.


(All
versions of the film available today derive from a cut-down re-release
from 1924. About twenty minutes were removed, and the clumsy pacing and
hurried feel of so many sequences in this version suggest that much of
the cutting simply involved the trimming of individual shots. One can
only imagine the power of the film if its images could be relished at a
more leisurely pace.)


SHOW PEOPLE

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Show
People, a silent film directed by King Vidor, is one of those rarest and most delicious of movie confections
— a romantic comedy that's truly funny, truly zany and also
emotionally affecting. It was my first encounter with the work of
Marion Davies and I was curious about her for all the usual reasons.


Welles's
caricature of Davies as Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane is so
effective and so devastating that most subsequent commentators have
gone out of their way to point out that it was unfair — that Davies
was a truly talented woman. I wondered how much of this was merely
apology for a patently ungallant attack and how much a considered
judgement.


For
the first few scenes in Show People I wasn't really sure. Davies is
certainly beautiful and charming, but she has a kind of eerie calm for
a movie star, an unwillingness to reach out to the audience. She's
willing to mug goodnaturedly in the service of the film, and seems like
a regular kid, but I wondered if her reserve was the assurance of a
confident artist or the smugness of a hostess in a castle. Were the
goofy faces she pulled just genial parlor tricks?


Then
came the wonderful scene where she makes her debut in a slapstick movie
and gets hit unexpectedly with a blast of seltzer water in the face.
Her affronted reaction is effective comically and dramatically as well
— she looks truly humiliated and bewildered. And then, retreating
behind the flats, she falls apart and your heart just goes out to her,
as does the heart of Billy, her romantic leading man. When he carefully
re-does her make-up and re-applies her lipstick, we start to care about
him, and about the couple. It's the heart of the movie.

 

William
Haines is an effective leading man in this very light role, though I
found his mugging, whether slightly manic or slightly fey, unappealing.
It's called for by the part, but a star in a romantic comedy has to be
able to make a complete idiot of himself and still be loveable, and
Haines wasn't quite, for me. What saves the situation is Davies. When
she becomes an insufferable star she launches into her famous
impersonation of Gloria Swanson, which is dead-on, hilarious, and
occasionally downright demented. She doesn't just strike poses, she
also from time to time starts pursing her lips so fast that the
behavior reads as borderline psychotic. The goofiness of Peggy Pepper
which keeps busting out of Patricia Pepoire echoes Billy's goofiness
and reminds us that they belong together.

It's
odd to find in this genial portrait of Hollywood filmmaking in 1927 a
nostalgia already present for Hollywood filmmaking in the Teens, the
days of knockabout improvised comedy. The collision of the two location
casts, when a Sennet-like troupe passes like a dream through the
already dreamlike parody set of a high-class Pepoire vehicle, out in
the sunny California countryside, has a Bergmanesque, melancholy edge
to it. The Hollywood past has already become surreal, even within the
surreal arena of filmmaking itself.


This
episode is one of the few breathtaking bits of visual poetry that
remind us we're watching a film by the man who directed The Big
Parade — though there are shrewd bits of plastic calculation
throughout. The first shot we see of Peggy Pepper's slapstick debut at
the screening of her first film is a furious tracking shot looking back
at Peggy running madly, pursued by a car-full of clowns. It's an
exhilarating evocation of the spirit of early film comedy, with all its
excitement and joy.


By the
end of the film, I admired Davies enormously, and liked her, too —
she's good company on film, as apparently she was in life. But I still
felt some element of reserve — between her and Haines, and her and the
audience. There was no smugness in it, more like a dimension of
vulnerability she was willing to admit but not quite willing to share.
It gave her a mysterious resonance, partly alluring and partly sad. But
perhaps it's just the ghost of Susan Alexander I was sensing, the
gossip and suspicion and envy out of which Welles created his malicious
portrait, and which Davies had to live with long before Kane. It's a
phantom which poor Marion Davies will never really be able to shake.



RENOIR ON VON STROHEIM

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When Erich Von Stroheim was supervising the construction of the Monte Carlo sets (pictured above) for Foolish Wives on the Universal lot in 1921, he insisted that a series of real and very large plate-glass windows be installed in the Cafe de Paris facade so that he could film in them the reflection of the facade of the building opposite.



The windows cost $12,000 — an enormous sum at the time.  But as Von Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski points out, the effect of the reflections remains startling, if subtle — it creates the illusion of a whole real world, including buildings behind the audience.  It is an effect beyond the means of any theater, and purely cinematic.



It is also emblematic of Von Stroheim's vision of cinema — radical for its time.  Koszarski supplies us with a quote from Jean Renoir which sums up this vision eloquently.  Renoir said he saw Foolish Wives at least ten times, and that it was this film which inspired him to dedicate his life to filmmaking.  Renoir said that the film impressed him with “the possibility of creating within a film a world that might differ greatly from reality but still would be experienced as having a wholeness and coherence like that of the world we live in.”



All great directors from Griffith onwards have at least intuited this fundamental and unique potential of the film medium, but Von Stroheim was the first to use it consciously as the basic organizing principle of his style.



It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Von Stroheim's creative insight to the art and subsequent history of film.  Without it, just for starters, Jean Renoir might have decided to go into some other line of work.


UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1927)

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This film is a wondrous curiosity.

It was made 12 years after The Birth Of A Nation
and is on many levels a far more sophisticated piece of filmmaking —
and yet it also seems far more old-fashioned than Griffith's
problematic
masterpiece.

In the 1927 film, proscenium staging and histrionic
acting clash with elegant studio lighting and bold camera movement,
throwing the antiquated methods into stark contrast with the modern. 
Every frame of Griffith's film is tense and alive with the impulse of
innovation,
while Harry Pollard's film shifts back and forth deliriously between
styles, as though trying to improvise something respectable out
of a grab-bag of conventions learned by rote.

The most emblematic shot in the film occurs at the
death of little Eva.  From a close shot on the child the camera hurtles
backwards on a track and then holds on a theatrical tableau in which
angels appear by the magic of double-exposure to waft the soul of Eva
to heaven.  A bold and expressive camera movement takes us into a shot that
harks back to the stodgiest effects of an early Edison potboiler.

The whole film reels maddeningly between such
extremes.  It's filled with some of the boldest and most beautiful
images of the silent era, such as the lyrical passages on the riverboat
and the banks of the Mississippi, and yet is drawn back relentlessly
into visual
mediocrity by a director who clearly had no vision of the medium as a
coherent form.  His wife Margarita Fischer, who plays Eliza in the
film (pictured in the still above,) said that Pollard, a product of the stage, always looked down on
movies, even as he was cranking out hit after hit for Universal in the
Twenties.  This movie was not one of them, though it did eventually
make its money back in a series of re-releases — one of them as late
as 1958 (!) in a narrated sound version that eliminated the intertitles.

The fact that a film this disjointed could break even,
and still be in theaters 30 years after its initial release, is a kind
of confirmation of the old theatrical saw that Uncle
Tom's Cabin is actor-proof and production-proof.  It's such an
effective piece of melodrama that audiences are inclined to go with it
no matter what.  I certainly found that to be true with this version,
discombobulated as it is.  I could be gritting my teeth one moment over
the black-face mugging of the actress playing Topsy, and fighting back
a tear the next as stony Aunt Ophelia clasps her to her breast and says she'll love her.

Melodrama is a highly abstracted form whose stark
dynamics work as a catalyst for emotions we may not have ready access
to on a conscious level.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, by contstructing a
finely calculated conduit for the often unconscious racial tensions of
American society
— ferocious in her time and still potent in ours — created a
masterpice of the genre.

[The Kino DVD of this title has a superb piece on the
film by David Pierce, included as a textual supplement.  It's a model
of clear, informative writing and meticulous research.]

THE SILENT KONG

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Peter Jackson’s King Kong has one of the most extended and impressive silent (non-dialogue) passages I’ve ever seen in a sound film — the love story between Anne Darrow and Kong. It’s a real love story, too, complex and moving — sort of like a little silent film nestled inside what is otherwise a bloated andself-indulgent mess.

I thought the overall script, and the dialogue especially, was dreadful
— veering between clumsy thought-balloon character exposition and
failed wit. The long build-up to the arrival at the island in the
original film is masterful by comparison — breezy, suspenseful, funny
and entertaining. The build-up in the new film is just tiresome. About
twenty minutes into it I seriously considered walking out and waiting
to see the rest of the film on DVD someday — but that would have been
a mistake. The film really takes off with the brontosaurus stampede —
and when Darrow and the ape hook up, the film elevates itself to a
higher plane (as it were.)

Naomi Watts and the CG ape give star performances, particularly when they interact, and the battle with the T-Rexes is not only thrilling visually but exciting emotionally, because it drives the relationship between Darrow and Kong.

Finally, in the stunning, breathtaking — almost nauseating — vertigo of the
climax on the Empire State Building, the Darrow character is given a
chance to repay Kong in kind for his earlier heroics in her behalf.
It’s a genuine dramatic climax to this wondrous silent film within a
film.

It’s too much, I guess, to hope for an “audience cut” of the film on DVD
some day — one that eliminates most of the pre-island stuff and
concentrates on the real magical heart of the film, a brilliant new
take on an old theme . . . beauty and the beast.

THE GREAT K & A TRAIN ROBBERY

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I
caught “The Great K & A Train Robbery” with Tom Mix on the Western
Channel once in the wee hours of the morning. It was a pretty good
print, from the Killiam collection, with a piano score by William
Perry. It was the first Tom Mix feature I'd ever seen.


The film knocked me off my feet. It's a mad, delirious juggernaut of a movie — preposterous, breathtaking and brilliant.



It
has the sort of silliness of set-up and incident that one associates
with serials. Mix makes his entrance dangling from a rope sling up
under a sheer rock overhang a couple hundred feet in the air. He's
wearing a Lone Ranger mask — since he's working undercover as a
railroad detective. When the train robbers he's eavesdropping on
discover his presence he slides down the rope directly into the saddle
of his horse Tony and gallops away.


From
that moment on the pace rarely slackens — it's as though all the
action climaxes of a twelve-part serial have been strung together into
an hour-long feature, with just enough space in between to tell a very
simple story. And what action climaxes they are. Gasp-inducing stunts
on horses and moving trains, some of the most exciting and beautiful
running inserts in the history of Westerns — most of it shot in the
awesome landscape of Royal Gorge, Colorado and vicinity.

The
tone is lighthearted but never campy — the impeccable photography, the
rigor and daring of the stunts, and the frank virility of Mix himself
lend it all a kind of muscular gravity. Yet its speed and the
virtuosity of its photography and action staging give it a lyrical
quality, too — a lilt that is intoxicating.


We're a long way from the grit and grim morality of William S. Hart's Westerns. The tone is in fact closer to that of
a Buster Keaton silent feature, and very nearly as sublime.



There
are some disappointing lapses — a few cheesy-looking moving cycloramas
outside the train windows and behind Mix and leading lady Dorothy Dwan
as they ride double on Mix's horse . . . some lame ethnic humor
involving a black servant . . . an anti-climactic final round-up of the
bad guys in a cave with an underwater entrance (!), which is a real
let-down visually after the earlier confrontations on the hurtling
train.

But Mix and Tony make a lovely screen couple, Dwan is charming and energetic, the intertitles are witty — and the film
is filled with exquisite, unforgettable images.



It's superlative entertainment — one of the genuine miracles of silent cinema.



[The first two images above are from the Silents Are Golden web site — one of the great Internet resources for silent film.  Check it out!]

THE CHAPLIN ESSANAYS

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Check out the three volumes of the Image DVD edition of the
Chaplin Essanays. It's really quite overwhelming. The presentation is
stunning, probably definitive, and the work, it goes without saying, is
beyond stunning.



Obviously
Chaplin was not working at his peak here, either as director or
performer. The images are rarely elegant, the continuity is often clunky
— but in a way these faults only serve to set off Chaplin's genius.
His person alone, his capacity to transform space seemingly by moving
the smallest muscle of his face or body, create riveting cinema by the
second. Even in the same frame with Ben Turpin, a physical comic of
great skill, Chaplin seems to inhabit a different universe of plastic
possibility. (And in the boxing match sequence of The Champion, just
try and watch the other boxer — I mean just try.)



Perhaps
only Fred Astaire has demonstrated the possibilities of performer as
auteur in quite the same way, and Astaire relied on the formal
discipline of dance, lacking the range and depth and particularity of
Chaplin's inspired alter ego, the Little Fellow.



This
character is fully conceptualized in the Essanays, if not fully
developed. There is never a moment when Chaplin the artist leaves the
self-involved, primal, eccentric persona of his creation . . . with one
exception, of course — his extraordinary female impersonation in A
Woman. (Chaplin could have been one of the great leading ladies of the
screen, if he'd been so inclined.)



The
persona of the tramp is, as has often been said, a clown of
Shakespearean proportions, with what Harold Bloom would call an
inwardness that makes him as real as anyone we have ever met in the
flesh, and as unknowable, as unencompassable.



In
this creation alone the whole medium of movies is defined and justified
in a stroke. Chaplin embodies and crystallizes everything that movies,
and movies alone, can do — the aspect of it we can hardly talk about,
only marvel at. When the Little Fellow is onscreen, pure cinema
happens.



I would suggest that this set belongs in every civilized home — and certainly in the collection of anyone who cares about
the movies.




(Is it redundant to add that the stuff is really, really funny?)

THE SILENT TITANIC

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For intellectuals, the best way to appreciate James Cameron’s Titanic might be to imagine it as a silent film. In other words, start with its images and work backwards towards its literary structure, seeing how the latter serves the former, instead of the other way around.

Instead of criticizing Cameron’s screenplay for its clunky dialogue and melodramatic excess, try to think more clearly about what a screenplay is, or ought to be — a framework around which images can coalesce to tell a story quite beyond the range of words on a page.  It would be silly to try and appreciate Don Giovanni by analyzing Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto for the opera as a work of literary art. Better to start with what it served — the music of Mozart, and what that music achieved . . . a sublime evocation of transient sexual love, and one of the supreme masterpieces of lyrical theater.

All of Cameron’s primary effects reside in his images. The real climax of his story lies in old Rose’s eyes — the gaiety and adventure and peace they convey, Jack’s gift, earned by her faithfulness to him and to her promise. Cameron uses digital effects as eloquently as camera tricks have ever been used in a film to link old Rose to the period tale we think we’re watching — morphing from the young Rose’s eye to the old Rose’s eye, from Jack and Rose “flying” on the bow during the ship’s voyage to their ghosts lingering on the encrusted wreck at the bottom of the ocean.


Cameron has a gift for orchestrating movement on screen to create an almost hallucinatory sense of space within the individual frame, and an ability to preconceive digitally composited shots as though he were photographing the real thing from a seemingly inevitable perspective.

The vehicle for Cameron’s imagery in Titanic is, as it was so often in the silent era, unapologetic melodrama, a simple structure pitting irreconcilable forces against each other and creating suspense about the outcome of the collision — and less about the nature of the outcome than about its how and when. That is the source of the film’s narrative momentum, and of that alone — no one has ever experienced the plot of a melodrama as anything more than a ride. It’s the inflections of the tale delivered in the images that give the film its depth — that make us experience the crude conflict as interior emotion . . . just as we do with the crude conflicts summoned up in dreams to express complex psychic states.

Melodrama remains a potent artistic strategy, but it’s one lost on a modernist who has been trained to reject as “phony” anything that smacks too closely of the Victorian. Fourteen year-old girls, who don’t know what 19th-Century melodrama is, and thus don’t know that it is intellectually discredited, experience its power and expressiveness as forcefully as intellectuals of the Fifties experienced Brecht.

The good news for all intellectuals is that, with a little thought and study — and perhaps a little humility in the face of what you don’t know about the history of film, about melodrama, about antique but still wholly viable dramatic forms — it is possible to enjoy Titanic with your brain as well as your heart.

As artists of the Renaissance discovered, a backward glance at forgotten masters — like Griffith and Vidor, in this case — can sometimes revivify an art, and take it more surely into the future than an avant garde that has lost its way.

THE SILENT LAWRENCE

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I
saw Lawrence Of Arabia when it came out in 1962, in the sort of grand
roadshow presentation big movies used to get back then — reserved
seating, an overture and intermission and an expensive souvenir program
on sale in the lobby (I still have mine.) My dad used to take me to
these big roadshow presentations of big films — it was one of the
great rituals of my childhood.


Lawrence blew me away back then, at the age of twelve. I saw it a few times
later and was less impressed. As an adult (and apprentice screenwriter)
I found the dialogue excessively literary and aphoristic — every line
was a bon mot, a philosophical nugget, an intellectual construction.
Real people, I thought, in real wars, don’t talk like that — even if
they’re Oxford-educated British officers or wise old Bedouin
chieftains.


Then I saw the restored version back in the Eighties, on a big screen, and
realized how wrong my second thoughts were. What I’d lost touch with
was the power of the images — the extent to which the images are the
story of this film, its narrative and its subtext, its spectacle and
its subtlety. The moment of revelation came watching the shot where
Lawrence walks along the top of the captured train. His Bedouin
followers run along the ground below him. In the shot, we only see
Lawrence’s shadow on the sand — his followers chase his shadow.


This is the whole film in a single image — the essence of the filmmaker’s
view that Lawrence both invented himself in Arabia and lost himself . .
. created an image that had no substance beyond the events it inspired,
yet cast a real shadow into the future. In the last shot, as Lawrence
is driven away from the scene of his betrayed triumph, we see his face
through the windshield of an open car. A reflection on the windshield
suddenly obliterates his face, and the film is over.


This is a mode of filmmaking — in which a film’s deepest truths are conveyed
by images alone — that characterized the silent era of cinema and which is
rarely seen today except in the theoretical film experiments of
Jean-Luc Godard. I began to see the dialogue of Lawrence in a
different light — as the functional equivalent of title cards, which
offered a kind of running literary commentary on or clarification of
the images but did not drive the narrative or the drama.


In short, I realized that Lawrence is essentially a silent film — in
the same sense that Titanic is essentially a silent film, a film
whose dialogue is virtually irrelevant to the actual meaning of the
work. Relatively unsophisticated twelve year-old boys and girls, for
whom the experience of a film is primarily visual and visceral, who
feel no intellectual need to translate a film into literary terms
before being able to appreciate it, have easier access to such
sound-era “silents”. They are, in this, sometimes wiser than their
elders.

SUMURUN

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In
Ernst Lubitsch's Sumurun, from 1920, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes meets
the Keystone Kops, and the result is an inspired piece of lunacy,
slight but very entertaining.



It's yet
another variation on the mood of silliness that seemed to grip Lubitsch
in the late Teens and early Twenties — a silliness that feels quite
un-Germanic.  Edgar Ulmer said of Lubitsch that “he really should
have been a Frenchman,” but Lubitsch's silliness is not quite French,
either.  When a Frenchman is being silly he'll always take care to
let you know how elegant his silliness is, how artful and
respectable.  Lubitsch could certainly be elegant and artful, but
he was not above using vulgarity when it took his fancy.  In the
early films at least he never seems to stand on his dignity, or his
genius — he strews his effects about like flower petals, or cow pies.



In this film,
we can see the two sources of Lubitsch's early style — the broad
comedy he specialized in as a cabaret performer and the more elegant
spectacle of the theater of Max Reinhardt, for whom Lubitsch did small
character roles.  Sumurun is based on a Reinhardt pantomime, and
it's full of stylish (though silly) choreography and charming scenic
effects.  Lubitsch himself plays the role of a grotesque clown in
love with a dancing girl in his troupe, and offers a few examples of
his eccentric dancing along with a bigger dose of his highly stylized
acting.  His performance has been criticized for its exaggeration,
but I see a lot of art in it, and the theatricality doesn't seem out of
place amidst all the artificiality of the film as a whole. 
Lubitsch doesn't seem to be taking himself too seriously, even when his
character is.



The narrative
feels disjointed and is hard to follow at times, probably because the
version that survives is missing about four reels cut by its American
distributor.  It hardly matters, though, because the story is not
all that important — it's just an excuse for some pleasant diversion
in an Arabian Nights vein.



Pola Negri
plays the dancing girl mentioned above, and she's a real
revelation.  I guess she's technically playing a vamp here, a
dancer who drives men mad, but she plays her with all the freshness and
spunk of a Kansas farm girl or Broadway hoofer.  (She seduces the
Mighty Sheik with what look like cheerleading routines.)  She
seems more like a flapper than an exotic femme fatale and she gives the
film a cheerful tone that matches Lubitsch's blithe approach to the
material.  She must have been a breath of fresh air to film-goers
used to the ponderous dignity, and dignified poundage, of traditional
European divas.

HAROLD LLOYD

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The recent Harold Lloyd box set is both a miraculous treasure and a
daunting challenge.

Like most people of a certain age I got to know the work of Chaplin and
Keaton slowly, in bits and pieces, over the course of many years,
starting with the 8mm Blackhawk versions of the Chaplin Mutuals my
friends and I collected in high school, continuing through occasional
college campus screenings and the theatrical reissues of the 60s and
70s.

This gave one time to absorb the bewildering genius of these two great
artists.

Lloyd’s most important films were much harder, in many cases
impossible, to find.  Before the release of the Lloyd box set I think
I’d only seen Haunted Spooks and Safety Last — enough to know that
Lloyd was a force to be reckoned with but hardly enough to appreciate
the full measure of his achievement.

Now, getting so much of Lloyd’s work all at once, in the fine transfers
on the new set, I find myself a bit overwhelmed — it’s really too much
to react to in detail — but my first impressions of it go something
like this . . .

Having watched each film in the set at least
once, it’s clear to me that Lloyd was not only a filmmaker of equal rank with
Chaplin and Keaton, but of equal rank with any filmmaker in the history
of movies.  With such an artist, it makes almost no sense to
compare and contrast him point for point with his peers — one loves
him for his unique genius.

The center of that genius was Lloyd’s instinctive love for and
understanding of the film medium.  He didn’t comment on it as part of
his method, the way Keaton did, but he used it with unabashed joy and
energy, and with a supreme mastery that’s still dazzling.

There is hardly any film in the new set that doesn’t have its
exhilarating moments, though this is not to say that all the films
succeed equally as unified works.  What distinguishes one from the
other is a central problem Lloyd seemed to wrestle with creatively
throughout his career — the nature of the character he’s playing and
its place in the particular story he’s telling.



The “glasses character” is an everyman in the sense that he presents
himself, whether rich or poor, urban or rural, as a fellow of ordinary
capacities who is impelled at some point to do extraordinary things.
These “extraordinary things” were clearly what inspired Lloyd the
filmmaker most centrally.  He usually thought up the final chase or
thrill climax for his films first, and then worked backwards to create
a narrative rationale for the action in that last reel.

Lloyd’s last reels are almost always brilliant — the narrative rationales vary greatly in kind and quality and determine the success or failure of the films as stories, as whole works.

As a general rule I would say that the films in which the glass
character is motivated primarily by a desire for success, financial or
social, are the least satisfying, even when that desire for success is
linked to the character’s desire to win the approval of a girl.  These
films of course reflected the values of a different time, the Roaring
Twenties, in which unbridled material ambition was seen as a primary
American virtue, but the attitude struck even some observers of the
time as shallow and disturbing, and it hasn’t aged well.



The “romantic” premise of both Safety Last and Girl Shy is that the
glass character must achieve financial success in order to win the hand
of his beloved.  This tends to undercut the “romance” angle
considerably — can’t true love rise above a concern for cold hard
cash? — and turns the “hero’s journey” into the hustler’s
progress.  (In these films we see the genesis of James Agee’s brilliant
observation about Lloyd — he “wore glasses, smiled a great deal, and
looked like the sort of eager young man who might have quit divinity
school to hustle brushes.”)  The last reels of both these films are so
exciting cinematically that we hardly remember what got us to them, but
the excitement is curiously unemotional, like a ride on a
roller-coaster.

Similarly, the desire of the freshman in the film of that name to be
liked by people who are frankly presented as jerks strikes an odd
note.  Lloyd knew that social embarrassment, and even social
humiliation, are good material for gags, but how can one be seriously
embarrassed or humiliated by jerks unless one is a bit of a jerk
oneself?  At best this tends to undercut our sympathy for the freshman
— at worst it puts us squarely in the camp of the jerks who are laughing at him,
too.  The emotional set-up is off-kilter in The Freshman, as is the
emotional pay-off.  We’re told that the protagonist needs to be
himself, stop trying to gain his self-esteem from the opinions of
others — but then he impersonates a football player and achieves
spectacular success on the field as thousands cheer.  The episode is
wonderful, hilarious, magical even — but it doesn’t jibe emotionally
or thematically with the rest of the film.

I would argue that Lloyd’s greatest films, his masterpieces, are the
ones in which the glass character has something more interior to do
than gain wealth or status — who has some inner weakness or
selfishness to overcome before he can win the day and be worthy of his
girl.


These masterpieces would include Why Worry? and For Heaven’s Sake,
in both of which Lloyd plays a character who’s already rich but lacks
inner grit and empathy until spurred on to them by the leading lady.
They would include The Kid Brother, in which the protagonist needs to
grow up and establish his own identity in the face of obstacles both
domestic and foreign.  None of these films has a last reel as awesome
as the ones mentioned above, but they’re awesome enough, and to me more
satisfying, because they reflect deeper emotional transformations in
the film’s central characters.

Because the glasses character isn’t a clown, doesn’t have a clown persona
that migrates more or less intact from film to film, Lloyd always had
to ask who his protagonist was, what he wanted, this time out.  The
nature of the answers he came up with ultimately determined the overall
quality of the films as satisfying stories, as unified works of art.

Watching the business on the building in Safety Last or the
race-to-the-rescue to end all races-to-the-rescue in Girl Shy, you won’t be troubled with
such reflections — they become, for the moment, quite irrelevant.  But the
next time you come back to the films — and Lloyd’s films are films
that can be watched with profit over and over again, if only for their
sublime cinematic inventiveness — you may feel differently, and long
for the more modest but more moving pleasures of Why Worry?, For
Heaven’s Sake and The Kid Brother.

FROM POE TO BAUDELAIRE TO CHAPLIN

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Here’s Walter Benjamin on Poe’s description of “the crowd” — an image
of great importance to Baudelaire:

“We may assume that the crowd as it appears in Poe, with its abrupt and
intermittent movements, is described quite realistically.  In itself,
the description has a higher truth.  These are less the movements of
people going about their business than the movements of the machines
they operate.  With uncanny foresight, Poe seems to have modeled the
gestures and reactions of the crowd on the rhythm of these machines.
The flaneur, at any rate, has no part in such behavior.  Instead, he
forms an obstacle in its path.  His nonchalance would therefore be
nothing other than an unconscious protest against the tempo of the
production process.”

The Parisian flaneur was a type of 19th-Century dandy whose pleasure it
was to wander, and to be seen to wander, the boulevards with no
apparent purpose.  This pose was a conscious endorsement of pure
sensibility over practical endeavor and, as Benjamin suggests, perhaps
an unconscious protest against an increasingly mechanized and
regimented industrial society.

Chaplin’s Little Fellow is a flaneur.  His dandyism has become a bit
shabby but abides in his fastidiousness about his dress and its
pretension to style — well-exemplified in the Tramp’s delicacy in
removing and replacing the detached finger of his glove in one of the
opening sequences of City Lights.  The pretension involved is not
about class, but about dignity.  Like a true flaneur, the Tramp wanders
through the world in a state of detachment from it, observing,
sometimes mocking, sometimes hustling what he wants from it, but never
seeking its endorsement.  Another remark by Benjamin on Baudelaire is
relevant here:

“Baudelaire was obliged to lay claim to the dignity of the poet in a
society that had no more dignity of any kind to confer.  Hence the
bouffonnerie of his public appearances.”

Chaplin’s flaneur, like Baudelaire’s scandalous poet, had to be a comic
figure in the context of his time — his insistence on dignity in an
undignified world had to be ironical.  But it is still sincere, and
heroic.  The buffoonery of Baudelaire and the Tramp becomes an
accusation, and the dignity they insist on is real, if absurd in the
context of their times.

In Modern Times the flaneur is diverted from his strolling about and,
inside the factory, his movements become subsumed by the movements of
the machines, which eventually overpower and consume him.  Contrast
this with Buster Keaton’s battle against a mechanized universe.  Keaton
becomes a kind of uber-machine — a machine with soul and purpose and
courage, more intricate and ingenious and lyrical than the machines
he’s fighting.  He bests the machines on their own terms and in that
way restores the primacy and the dignity of the human being.

But the flaneur doesn’t have this capacity, or this option.  His
triumph is just to wander on, dusting the dirt off his tattered finery,
setting his hat at a rakish angle, flexing his cane, untouched by the
more profound shabbiness of the world around him — a hero not of deeds
but of example.

THE OYSTER PRINCESS

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The first thing to be said about The Oyster Princess, from 1919, one
of the films recently released in Kino's “Lubitsch In Berlin” series, is
that there's little evidence in it of “the Lubitsch touch” — that
gossamer comedy of suggestion and indirection that came to characterize
the director's mature style.




The Oyster Princess is very broad farce, verging on slapstick at
times.  That said, though, the film, for all its aggressive silliness,
has remarkable stylistic assurance and consistency — it's witty,
charming and often very funny.  What it resembles most closely are the
operettas of Offenbach, or rather of his librettists Henri Meilhac and
Ludovic Halevy, which manage to combine delirious frivolity with an edgy
satire of aristocratic pretensions.  The style is frothy and subversive
at the same time.




The Oyster Princess has a preposterous plot, involving a marriage
under false pretenses, and equally preposterous depictions of
aristocratic dementia that often veer into the realms of the surreal.
(In some ways they are lighter-hearted versions of Von Stroheim's dark
and grotesque portrayals of these same aristocratic circles.)  But
there's more to it than that, just as there's more to Offenbach than his
farcical plots — there's Lubitsch's extraordinary cinematic
imagination, which at times causes the film to soar into the same
ethereal realms that Offenbach's music inhabits.




The wedding scene, for example, involves the sublime choreography of an
army of servants in action, and an even more delirious set-piece in
which the guests, and even the servants, break out in an hysterical
episode of fox-trotting — travesties of actual behavior organized with
exhilarating plastic grace.  The film transcends itself in these
moments, just as Offenbach's melodies transcend their dramatic vehicles.




So if “the Lubitsch touch” isn't on display here, except in a few stray
scenes, the Lubitsch genius explodes often enough to make us realize we
are in the company of a master of the medium, even if he's a master
still in search of a distinctive personal style.