Tag: Genre: Silent

  • 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.

  • Week in Review

    Week in Review

    • Films Watched: Nosferatu dir. by F.W. Murnau; 28 Up dir. by Michael Apted; Vers Nancy dir. by Claire Denis; Me and You and Everyone We Know dir. by Miranda July; Los Angeles Plays Itself dir. by Thom Andersen
    • Books Finished: The Public Burning by Robert Coover; Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction by Amy Elias
    • CDs Purchased: Until the End of the World (soundtrack) by various artists; Me and You and Everyone We Know (soundtrack) mostly by Michael Andrews

    With apologies to Nick Hornby. While reading The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer, two things occurred to me. First, Hornby’s columns are essentially blog posts by another name: they’re written in the first-person, they’re chronological (especially once collected in book form), and they’re unified by a single topic. Second, like Hornby, I could chart the course of my life by pacing slowly through a library full of books, CDs, and DVDs.

    Because Long Pauses is essentially a notebook, a diary, and an archive, all in one, I’ve decided to give this “Week in Review” idea a shot. Granted, seven days from now this will all likely have taken on the smell of a deadline, but for now, it seems a fine way to spend a Sunday morning. If I stick to it, the Song of the Moment feature will probably be absorbed into the weekly review, Borg-like.

    As I mentioned a few days ago, Miranda July’s first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, left quite an impact on me, though I sense the effect waning somewhat. I worry that, when all is said and done, the film’s message is only slightly more nuanced than “carpe diem,” though, really, as far as messages go, that’s a pretty good one, especially when handled with a certain grace. July has a deep, deep fondness for her characters and a child-like wonder about the world in which they live. As a storyteller and filmmaker, she’s ambitious in the best sense of the word, and her ability to capture something of the beauty and fear (often simultaneously) that characterize love and life in the modern world is something special. Maybe the best compliment I can give the film is to say it doesn’t feel like it was made in America. “When I call a Name” is the opening track from Michael Andrews’s fine soundtrack, which reminds me a bit of those Brian Eno Music for Films albums.

    Nosferatu is the latest entry in my Great Films series. I watched it last Sunday after a long weekend that involved two trips to the emergency room, an overnight stay in the hospital (for Joanna), and very little sleep. Which is to say that Nosferatu is an almost perfect film to watch in a waking dream state. Murnau’s brand of expressionism is so organically “uncanny,” and Max Schreck’s performance is so utterly alien. It’s my new favorite Dracula, bar none.

    Like any great essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost too rich to be eaten in one bite. I want to watch it again before commenting at length, but three quick points for now: 1) It made me want to watch Blade Runner again. 2) It made me want to track down the films of Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billie Woodberry, Julie Dash, and other independent black filmmakers of the 1970s. 3) I love the idea of looking for documentary moments in narrative films, an idea that was raised in Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves, as well. (Doug has a really great essay on Los Angeles Plays Itself, by the way.) I’ll return to the 7 Up films and the Denis short in later weeks.

    Seeing only two titles on the “books finished” list undersells the size of my accomplishment, I think, considering that the novel weighs in at 534 pages and the other is a book of critical theory. The next chapter of my dissertation, ostensibly a tight reading of The Public Burning and E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, is actually about the rise of the academic Left in the 1970s and 1980s and the political problems of postmodernism. Elias’s book posits that “history is something we know we can’t learn, something we can only desire,” which she wraps into discussions of “the Sublime,” the traditional historical novel (think Walter Scott), and post-1960s American fiction, in particular those novels she calls “metahistorical romances.”

    Did I mention that Elias is on my dissertation committee? Or that her book was blurbed favorably by Linda Hutcheon? Or that in her preface she thanks Hayden White for his encouragement, advice, personal generosity, and kindness? (I know those two names mean, like, nothing to most people, but if you’re working in history and postmodern literature, they mean a lot.) The Public Burning comes up quite a bit in Elias’s book as an example of an avant-garde metahistorical romance, which is quite a nice way of describing it, I think. Its voice alternates between first- and third-person (the former from the p.o.v. of Vice President Richard Nixon), and Coover also cuts into “Intermezzos,” which take on various forms: a poem pasted together from snippets of text from President Eisenhower’s public statements, a dramatic dialogue between Ike and Ethel Rosenberg, and a mini-opera sung by the Rosenbergs and James Bennett, then-Federal Director of the Bureau of Prisons.

    The novel reaches its climax in the middle of Times Square, where all of American history has come undone. Betty Crocker, Uncle Sam, and the nation’s Poet Laureate (Time magazine) are all there to witness the Rosenberg execution, as are the Republican Elephant, the Democratic Donkey, Cecil B. DeMille (who’s producing the spectacle), Walt Disney (who’s selling souvenirs), and fighting bands of patriots and redcoats. Elias (via Soja, Jameson, Frank, and Foucault) would describe the scene as an example of spatialized metahistory: “What one gets is a view from above, a critical view akin to the perspective of aerial photography, flattening out time, space, and history in order to map them.” The question for my chapter is this: “What does this mean for a ‘real’ politics of the Left?” I’m intrigued by the line that ends Elias’s second chapter:

    The humanities [English and philosophy departments, for example] not only take seriously the challenge to history in fantasies and novels; they have forcefully asserted that history is fantasy and fiction allied with power, and have thrown down a gauntlet to the social sciences to prove otherwise.

    That “prove otherwise” puts an interesting spin on the debate, I think.

    That covers everything from this week except for the Until the End of the World soundtrack I picked up used for $7, proving once again that spontaneous buys are seldom good buys. I think I’ll enjoy these songs more when they show up randomly in iTunes. They don’t make for a very cohesive or compelling album.