Tag: Decade: 1920s

  • The Unknown (1927)

    The Unknown (1927)

    Dir. Tod Browning

    The San Francisco Silent Film Festival‘s opening night screening of Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother (Wilde, 1927) was preceded by Broncho Billy’s Adventure (Anderson, 1911), a short Western about a gun-toting barkeep, his teenaged daughter, and the man she loves. Midway through the film, we see the young woman weeping over her lover, who is bedridden after being shot outside of the saloon. In the style typical of shorts from the 1910s, the actress’s performance is all wild-eyed, teeth-gnashing, and chest-thumping. It was too much for the San Francisco audience, who hooted and laughed throughout the scene. Behind me, I heard a confused four-year-old ask her mother the same question I was asking myself: “Why is this silly?”

    Twenty-four hours later, Guy Maddin introduced Tod Browning’s The Unknown with a succinct defense of melodrama:

    At night, when we sleep, in our dreams we are liberated. Our selves, our story selves, are liberated. Our ids are loosed upon our little dreamscapes and — if we’re lucky — we get to grab the person we lust after; we get to hit the person we hate; we get to wail and scream and moan all we want without anyone scolding us. And, also, we’re given access: little repressed fears and anxieties grow into monstrous terrors in our dreams and our true selves become so uninhibited. I use the word “uninhibited” pointedly because melodrama is always aligned as something sort of grotesque or a tasteless exaggeration of real life. If that’s all melodrama were, it would deserve that slag; but, I think a melodrama isn’t a true life exaggerated — that would be bogus — it’s true life uninhibited, just like our dreams.

    It was a perfect prologue to The Unknown, a collaboration between Browning and Lon Chaney that exists almost completely in uninhibited, symbolic space. Chaney plays Alonzo, an armless knife-thrower in a traveling carnival show, whose love for Nanon (a very young and incredibly sexy Joan Crawford) threatens to expose his carefully guarded secrets. Alonzo’s deformity is given a funhouse mirror reflection in the person of Malabar the Mighty (Norman Kerry), whose desire to hold Nanon in his arms repulses her. The specter of sexual abuse (at the hands of her father?) seeps into every corner of this film, which is overrun by tragedy, dread, heartache, and transgression.

    Or, at least, that was my experience of The Unknown on a second viewing — this time alone in my home with the soundtrack muted. (The film is available on disc 2 of TCM’s Lon Chaney Collection.) Despite his opening testament to the artistry of melodrama, Guy Maddin turned the San Francisco screening into a bit of a camp fest. The beautiful print we saw was on loan from the Cinematheque Francaise and had French intertitles, which Maddin then “untranslated” by reading aloud from the original American release. If you’re familiar with Maddin’s films or have heard him speak in other contexts, then you can surely imagine the effect of hearing him deliver lines like, “You are a riddle, Nanon. You shrink from me . . . yet you kiss my flowers when I am gone.” The sold out house never stopped laughing, it was so silly.

    Except the film isn’t silly at all. (And I’m sure Maddin would agree). Watching it alone, in silence, I was struck by images like this:

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    Melodrama is a matter of narrative and performance style, of course, but, particularly in silent cinema, the core of melodrama is mise-en-scene. The exaggerated emotion in this shot is not generated by plot intrigues but by the deep focus photography (that open balcony in the background), the clash of patterns in the set decoration and costumes (the checkered tablecloth, striped blouse, and ornate headscarf), and most importantly the staging of the two actors — Chaney’s intimate smile, Crawford’s stiff shoulders and the curve of her neck, and the unnatural light that illuminates Nanon’s body.

    Nanon’s Redemption

    The turning point of The Unknown comes when Alonzo flees the carnival to have a ghastly operation, which, unfortunately for him, allows time for Nanon and Malabar to become better acquainted. After Alonzo decides to leave, Browning cuts to the following shot of Nanon, with Malabar’s flowers in hand, descending a flight of stairs. The strange, textured camera effect Browning uses here heightens the unreality of the scene, as if we’ve entered Alonzo’s subjectivity. Notice, again, the curve of Crawford’s neck. Browning has a bit of a fetish, I think. Notice, also, the empty bed in the foreground.

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The first three shots are a standard progression: extreme long, long, medium. Then Nanon slowly turns, and on an eyeline match we enter a perspective just outside of her point of view. Malabar the Mighty has returned. (Is it just me or does Norman Kerry look exactly like Kevin Kline here?)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    And then the close-up, with tears poised to drop. Just a ridiculously beautiful image.

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    Finally, Nanon’s redemption. So much emotion packed into a single, simple movement.

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    Nope. It’s not silly at all.

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

    The Unknown (Browning, 1927)

  • The Iron Horse (1924)

    The Iron Horse (1924)

    Dir. by John Ford

    According to Tag Gallagher’s biography, John Ford: The Man and His Films, only five of the fifty or so films Ford made between 1918 and 1924 have survived; two of them, Just Pals (1920) and The Iron Horse (1924), are included in the Ford at Fox DVD collection. Just Pals is a fun little romp starring Buck Jones as a charming ne’er-do-well who falls in love with the local school teacher, befriends a young runaway, thwarts a crime, and generally makes trouble for himself and for others.

    The Iron Horse is a much more ambitious and fascinating picture. The story revolves around the laying of the first transcontinental railroad, complete with a final-reel reenactment of the driving of the Golden Rail at Promontory Summit, Utah, that features the actual locomotives that first met there in 1869. (We know they’re the actual locomotives thanks to a series of title cards that notify viewers of the filmmakers’ every effort to achieve historical authenticity.) At nearly 150 minutes, The Iron Horse was a massive production, employing thousands of extras, builders, cooks, rail layers, Indians, cavalrymen, cattle, and horses, and spawning countless legends. Gallagher quotes assistant Lefty Hough: “The Ford outfit was the roughest goddamdest outfit you ever saw, from the director on downward. Ford and his brother, Eddie O’Fearna, were fighting all the time.” Ford remembered the production as “births, deaths, marriages, and all in the icy cold.” The Iron Horse went on to gross more than $2 million and became the first Fox film to play on Broadway.

    Along with simply being a tremendous pleasure to watch, The Iron Horse offers a fascinating peek into the evolution of the Hollywood film style. By 1924 — and with four dozen films under his belt — Ford already understood the mechanics of what would eventually be called standard continuity editing, and so, for me, the most interesting moments in the early films are when something breaks, as in the following sequence.

    The Establishing Shots

    Shot 1 lasts for only a few seconds, giving us too little time to get our bearings or to pick out any recognizable faces (there aren’t any, actually). What are we looking at, exactly? And from where are we looking?

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    In the next four shots, none of the eyelines match. The two men in the first two shots are seated together, though you’d never know it from Ford’s montage, and he’s also made it impossible for us to situate them at any particular spot in the saloon.

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    The bad guy enters, and a group of men turn to look at him. But where are they in the room? (Go back to shot 1 to find them.) And who are these guys? So far, the two men seated together are the only people in the room who appear elsewhere in the film.

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    The Reestablishing Shots

    Now that most of the characters have made their appearance, Ford begins to map out the room. Bad guy mosies toward the bar . . .

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    Bartenders remove the mirror . . .

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    And now we’re back to that odd position from shot 1. It turns out that we’re standing behind the bar. In this cut, Ford essentially gives us an eyeline match from the p.o.v. of the mirrorless wall! This time, however, we’re also allowed to figure out where everyone is standing.

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    And in case we’ve lost our bearings, Ford jumps 180 degress to the other side of the room and cuts together three medium shots from one end of the bar:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    . . . and then from the other end of the bar:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    . . . and then, finally, from the middle of the bar:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    The Crosscut

    Ah, our beautiful young lovers, George O’Brien and Madge Bellamy. In most respects this is standard, silent-era, melodramatic cross-cutting. After introducing a mysterious batch of villains, Ford cuts to our hero, who relents to his love’s request that he lay down his guns. O’Brien even strikes his best Valentino pose, staring off meaningfully into the distance. (Between this film and Ford’s Three Bad Men (1926), George O’Brien is fast becoming one of my favorite leading men of the silent era.)

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    But what I love are the moments when life interrupts the theatrical staging, as when Bellamy bites her lower lip, an incredibly sexy and unexpected rupture of silent film convention:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    Or the way she takes his hand in hers and brings it to rest, very slowly, on her . . . dress. Beautiful!

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    The Showdown

    And finally our hero arrives at the saloon, walking straight into the trap:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    Which springs all of the mysterious men into action:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    Leaving only our hero, who is defenseless, and our central villains, the fop and the sadistic mastermind:

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    John Ford's The Iron Horse

    All of the strange editing has served to focus the emotional energy of the sequence onto this one point: the showdown between the chaste Fordian hero, who is protected on all sides by an amorphous social structure, and the foppish villain. That the ensuing fist fight turns out as something of a draw is irrelevant. The hero wins the battle before the first fist is thrown.

  • Short Takes

    Short Takes

    I’m adjusting to a new schedule. Getting up early, driving to campus, setting up my laptop in the library, and forcing myself to sit there — to write — until late-afternoon. In other words, I’m finally turning my dissertation into a full-time job. By the end of the day, I have little energy left to write about films or anything else, really, so instead I’ve been relaxing each night with a DVD. Because GreenCine doesn’t carry the later seasons of The West Wing, I’ve re-upped with NetFlix as well, meaning that, until I cancel one of the subscriptions, I’ll have a steady stream of titles to choose from. Good times. Some recent viewings:

    Notre Musique (2004, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) — I won’t even attempt a reading of this film after only one viewing, and I’d be suspicious of any reviewer/critic who does so. Is it anti-American? Anti-Semitic? Anti-Intellectual? Maybe. I have no idea at this point. I’ve already mailed the disc back, but I think I’d like to buy copies of Notre Musique and In Praise of Love (which I loved, also after only one viewing) and give both films the time and attention they deserve.

    I can say without hesitation, though, that the opening ten minutes of Notre Musique, the “Hell” section, are absolutely compelling. A collage of violent images, some real (documentary), some imagined (fiction), “Hell” is disgusting and fascinating. Godard digitizes, distorts, and makes abstract a timeline of human sadism and suffering, and I’m beginning to suspect that the remainder of the film is an argument about the moral and political consequences of that very act.

    The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, dir. William Wyler) — The night before my grandmother’s funeral, my grandfather told me about a letter he wrote to her when he was in Europe. Actually, he dictated the letter to a nurse. And in it he told her that he would be returning “half the man” he was when he left. He’d been wounded badly by a German mortar somewhere in western Europe, and he was ashamed of the toll it took on his face. I wish now I’d had the chance to watch this film with them.

    If I hadn’t seen Best Years, I wouldn’t believe a film like it could exist. The story of three men returning from war to the same home town, it unsettles every expectation I had about Hollywood World War II films. The heroic Army Air Force captain is haunted by nightmares and unable to find his place in a booming postwar economy that places little value on the skills he learned as a bombardier. The gruff and hard-drinking ol’ Sarge’, a staple of service films, is a banker who discovers that words like “collateral” and “investment” are absurd when used back home. And Homer, who lost both hands to a fire, returns to a society better-equipped to accept a heroic death than a disfiguring wound.

    And along with that setup, you also get brilliant performances from Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael, and Teresa Wright (with whom I’ve fallen in love again); you get the patient, impeccably-human direction of William Wyler; and you get a stream of jaw-dropping images from Gregg Toland that rival his more famous work in Citizen Kane. Best Years might be my single favorite film of the classical Hollywood cinema. An absolute masterpiece.

    Sunrise (1927, dir. F. W. Murnau) — I first watched Sunrise several years ago on a 9″ viewing carrel* at the university library. Having now seen it projected at 100″ — thanks to the kind generosity of a friend — I finally get what all of the fuss is about. I’d seen Janet Gaynor a week or two earlier in Frank Borzage’s Street Angel, which was made the same year, and I’d become fascinated by her face. It’s the perfect silent film face — all round eyes and round cheeks, like Betty Boop. Her character is almost too perfect, too forgiving in Sunrise, and I wonder if the film would hold together if not for that face.

    The star of the film, though, is Murnau’s camera. Nearly every image is a knockout, but it’s the double-, triple-, quadruple-exposures that take your breath away. I’m not sure which film is the greater miracle, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, which was brash enough to toss away the old book of film grammar, or Sunrise, which displays many of the same feats of daring but in the service of a more traditional narrative.

    Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, dir. Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller) — I think I’ve watched too many great essay films over the past year. Too much Resnais, Marker, Varda, Jost. They’ve changed my expectations for non-fiction films. Unfairly, perhaps. I tuned in to Moving Train on IFC a few nights ago because I was curious about Zinn, and the film gave me all of the information I was looking for — a biographical sketch, interviews with him and those who have known him, archival footage of key moments from his career, and historical context. Moving Train is interesting because Zinn is interesting. I wish the film were more than just a Biography channel profile, though. I wish it had a voice of its own, a voice offering insight into why Zinn matters, if Zinn matters.

    * Note: Apparently, this is the first time I’ve ever typed the word “carrel.” Did you know that both “carrel” and “carrell” are acceptable spellings? English, really, is a ridiculous language.

  • Un Chien Andalou

    Un Chien Andalou

    Over the years, I have, of course, heard and read a great deal about Luis Bunuel’s surrealist masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou (1929), but until Friday I had never actually seen it. Created in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Bunuel’s first film is most remembered today for one of its opening sequences, which cuts between shots of a razor blade, a woman whose left eye is being forced open, and a thin line of clouds passing before a full moon. Just as we’ve become convinced that the cloud and moon will serve as a symbolic gesture, comfortably eliding the violence implied by the sequence, Bunuel cuts to a close-up of the eyeball being sliced open. The scene still works, more than seven decades later.

    My favorite discussion of the sequence can be found in Virginia Carmichael’s Framing History, where she compares Bunuel’s film to E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, a novel that attempts to make sense of the early Cold War years. There’s a remarkable and disturbing moment in the novel when the title character reaches over to burn his young wife with a car cigarette lighter. Instead of showing the horrible scene, though, Doctorow (through his narrator) attacks the reader, writing:

    Shall I continue? Do you want to know the effect of three concentric circles of heating element glowing orange in the black night of rain upon the tender white girlflesh of my wife’s ass? Who are you anyway? Who told you you could read this? Is nothing sacred? (60)

    Carmichael on the scene:

    What seems merely gratuitous cinematographic aestheticism on Bunuel’s part becomes something more radically critical in a political sense when considered as [Daniel’s] symbolic discovery of the function of symbolism in history to mask the horrors of reality—realities such as Stalin’s purges, the U.S. government’s knowing exposure of government workers to high-level radiation. (143)

    So much of contemporary filmmaking is about misdirection, about exciting the emotions and disregarding the consequences. I appreciate Bunuel’s film for its refusal to let us off so easily, though I must admit that, as with so much of Modernist surrealism, I found myself often stunned by the images but unwilling to engage in the intellectual gamesmanship necessary to decode them. I’m sure that great articles have been written that carefully trace contours through the fifteen minute film, but I couldn’t find the motivation to do so myself.