Der Müde Tod (1921)

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / 114 mins.
Alt: "Destiny"


For all intents and purposes, Fritz Lang's career begins here, with 1921's Der Müde Tod, released in the U.K. as "Destiny." In the United States, it found itself with different English translations — "Between Two Worlds" and its literal translation, "The Weary Death" — but none has stuck quite as well as "Destiny." Looking back over Lang's entire career, it's not difficult to see why: whereas Lang's previous film, the adventure serial Die Spinnen, is breezy and fun, Der Müde Tod sets course for a career of fatalism and determinism, the impending doom (and potentially subsequent resignation) captured by the eventual understanding of the inescapable. The arch-rival of the protagonist in this film is the personification of Death, and although people have tried for thousands of years to cheat him, there has been headway only in prolonging the inevitable.

This is one of the earliest examples of great expressionistic German filmmaking, shy of masterpiece status (like many of the early ones) but enthralling nonetheless. F.W. Murnau cited it as an influence, particularly on The Last Laugh; no less than Alfred Hitchcock would count it among his all-time favorites, and Luis Buñuel noted its fantastical nature helped draw him into film. I've not heard any words on Ingmar Bergman's thoughts on it, but the influence seems too striking to be unavoidable, even if it's merely tangential.

The story of Der Müde Tod, co-written by Lang and Thea von Harbou, is the story of cycles, fantasy, and fable. While riding into a small town in what appears to be nineteenth-century Germany, a young woman (Lil Dagover) and a young man (Walter Janssen) encounter a mysterious man (Bernard Goetzke). His presence and purpose soon become quite evident when he, later revealed to be Death, abducts the young man into the afterlife — seen here as a large windowless, doorless stone wall that keeps the living out while the spirit of the dead pass through. The woman, determined to retrieve her fiance, manages to slip the bounds of the wall and is given a brief tour of the ephemeral backstage of life by Death. She beseeches him to let her have her love again, and he strikes a deal: she will have three chances, in different eras and locales, to save a man (always played by Janssen, with Goetzke lurching in the background) who is destined to die. If she can merely save one of these men, she will get her own fiance back.

Like the best silent cinema, the story is not simplistic for the sake of being purely simple. The moral and narrative stakes are always higher in silence — extreme cases of life and death, love and loss, etc. — which either can allow the story to synthesize quietly with the art or create a situation where the story overwhelms the technical elements. It is a testament to Lang's talent that this early in his career he was capable of doing the former and doing it well. Although he had been unable to direct The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari due to other obligations, he wisely hired that film's production team (Walter Röhrig, Walter Reimann, and Herrmann Warm) to help bring to life the fantasy world of Der Müde Tod (which is not nearly as surreal or geometric as Caligari's, and instead stays closer to embellished visions of ethnic nations) to life. The film features five primarily exotic locations: first, the world of nineteenth century Germany and the castle of Death; then, as the young woman attempts to save men in order to save her own fiance, she is transported to Persia, circa One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; the Renaissance courts of Italy; and a far eastern trip to ancient China.

The cumulative appeal is broad. Like the best of Lang's films, Der Müde Tod is a visual exploration of the space within the lens, which stands as a filmic metaphor for our own limits and boundaries in life. The acting is slightly overworked, but there is balance from Lang in maintaining our interest in both the characters and their story and the ornamentation of the sets and the haunting composition. The special effects hold up even ninety years later. They are used strategically and infrequently so as to dazzle: transformations, materializations, a flying carpet, a horse riding in the sky, a burning home, etc., all lend power and mystery to the design. The effects were trailblazing enough by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who delivered the greatest argument in favor of Der Müde Tod through his fear of it. He purchased the rights to its distribution in America so he could effectively keep it from the public and stash it in cinematic limbo while he and Raoul Walsh co-opted many of the special effects for The Thief of Bagdad, a rewarding movie in its own right but not as powerful as Lang's. It's difficult to be upset with Fairbanks, however; they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

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Die Spinnen (1919-1920)

d. Fritz Lang / Germany / Two parts, 124 mins.
Alt: "The Spiders"


The earliest surviving film from Fritz Lang (that we know of, at least) is his third, Die Spinnen, a two-part adventure serial released between 1919 and 1920 known commonly as The Spiders. It is a relatively simple film, bare-bones in its plot and very action oriented, and the influence from the already growing genre of the American western and from France's serial master Louis Feuillade are quite clear in the sense that "The Spiders" — a band of outlaws looking to reap treasure for themselves — are vaguely reminiscent of Feuillade's criminals in Les Vampires. Yet outside of the idea of Lang directing an uncharacteristically airy and chipper adventure serial, there's not much here to chew on.

The hero of the serial — which is divided into "The Golden Sea" and "The Diamond Ship" — is Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt), a wealthy and cavalier sportsman. He acquires a bottle found at sea that proclaims the possibility of Inca treasure in first episode and a powerful diamond in the second, and must race with The Spiders, led by Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) to be the first to reach the objects of their desire. What Hoog and The Spiders are searching for, of course, essentially doesn't matter; Lang, the film's screenwriter as well, happily employs the full force of the "Macguffin" practically a decade before Hitchcock. The plot serves only as a way to get characters from one exotic locale, or one fabulously decorated interior, to another — to put characters on trains, on boats, on balloons, on rocks, and in caves; to introduce kidnapping, espionage, gun-fights, and horse races; and to evoke as greatly as possible a sense of extravagance. There's nothing wrong with these sorts of things, but they're underdeveloped and occasionally gratuitous. The sense of exoticism linked to theme hadn't yet been developed in Lang's storytelling.

It should be of interest to those who regularly muse what might have been that Lang turned down The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to make The Spiders, which was originally envisioned to be a four-part series. It wouldn't be fair to suggest it was a bad career move for Lang, as he's obviously earned his own place in the pantheon through films much better than The Spiders, which is messy and unfocused and not as tight as it could be. The first installment ("The Golden Sea") is the better of the two, but both have soft strengths: lavish sets designed by Hermann Warm and above-average camerawork from the great cinematographer Karl Freund in one of his earliest films. There aren't many Lang fingerprints here, but The Spiders functions as a moderate thriller in spite of its insubstantial script. I wouldn't recommend it for attention outside the outlaw-ish band of Lang completists.

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Best Films of 2002

My top ten list for Counting Down the Zeroes is now up at Film for the Soul. In a few days it'll be cross-posted here.

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URL Note

Due to a glitch in the Google/Blogger system, any screensavour.blogspot.com URL isn't currently connecting in Internet Explorer or Safari and is prompting those with Firefox to proceed to an unprotected page.

If this is affecting your reading of Screen Savour, my apologies. Although I have never given it much thought, I've used two different URLs — both screensavour.blogspot.com and screensavour.net — for many of my in-site links; before the glitch, re-direction was not a problem. I'm doing my best to correct them all to screensavour.net where applicable.

Thanks.

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Broken Blossoms (1919)

d. D.W. Griffith / USA / 90 mins.


As a text, Broken Blossoms is perhaps D.W. Griffith's most rewarding film to experience. He dabbles in themes ranging from the large and complicated to the delicate and subtle (or as subtle as Griffith is capable of being), and combines those themes with Griffith's advanced approach to cinematic engineering. It is the story of two neglected souls — an adopted girl with a brutalizing father; a Chinese immigrant who experiences London for all its foggy demoralization — who have crossed paths numerous times before but finally come together and burst outward with the energy of mutual adoration. As a film, it is a tip toward greatness, tarnished if slightly by its stereotyping propensities and occasional mawkishness.

The film is a study of triumvirate of characters. Cheng (Richard Barthelmess) is leaving China for England to become an entrepreneur and bring the tenets of Buddhism — or, as Griffith seems to see it, eastern Christianity — to the English. He has fallen in love with a young girl named Lucy (Lillian Gish) from afar, but due to constraints on him from the culture and constraints he has put himself, almost never is close enough to say anything meaningful to her. She is a resident of a violent household, where her adoptive father, Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), is a drunken boxer who regularly turns to violence against her when he is upset. It is typical silent melodrama, though enriched by Griffith's small storytelling flourishes along the way (and a gorgeous array of expensive sets). He dips into nonlinear narration early on by allowing all three characters to have cutaways depicting scenes of thought — Cheng, depressed and alone in England thinking about life back in China; Lucy, reflecting on a married woman who warns her to avoid marriage unless she wants a lazy husband and bratty children and on prostitutes who warn her away casual relationships; and Burrows, given a moment of victory in the ring.

As with the rest of Griffith's works, Broken Blossoms is a study in comparisons and contrasts: masculine versus feminine, poverty versus wealth, peace versus violence, East versus West. Such dichotomies, often easy to glean from first impression, make the engine of silent drama churn more fluidly. The appeal of Broken Blossoms as a text exists in the way Griffith uses such contrasts and applies to the triangle of characters: Cheng reflects both in Lucy and Burrows, for example (and Lucy and Burrows each reflect in the two they are not). We immediately sense the differences between war in Burrows and tranquility in Cheng, who treat Lucy in categorically opposite ways, and what is even clearer is the way in which Burrows's ignorance will lead to certain doom for all involved. More interesting, however, is the subset meditation on masculinity and femininity viewed through the lens of war and peace, a recurring contrariety in Griffith's work, most notably — and explosively — in The Birth of a Nation. In this work it is not as explosive, but neither is particularly subtle. Cheng and Lucy draw visual likeness in their perpetual hunches, a posture in Gish's acting to reflect her submission to Burrows and her despondency in all aspects of life, and a posture in Barthelmess's acting that reflects a similar hopelessness and, more awkwardly, a cultural stereotype; Burrows, meanwhile, stands erect and barrel-chested, both at home and in the ring.

The masculine/feminine contrast is no more apparent than in the cross-cutting sequence between Burrows's boxing fight and Lucy's perceived threat of Cheng attacking her. Burrows finds out through a compatriot that Lucy is convalescing at Cheng's shop, but rather than leave his boxing match he sticks around to complete it before going to "save" her. Meanwhile, we constantly suspect Cheng will force himself onto Lucy (the film instructs us to read it as such, given its inherent xenophobia and its previous portrayals of male characters), but he never does. He is quick to act, quicker than Burrows in many ways; when he realizes Burrows has taken Lucy from his shop back to their home, there is no hesitation on Cheng's part to save her, as there was with Burrows earlier. Griffith's ultimate view of masculinity has less to do with the strength and power embodied in the male figure than it does with the strength and power to restrain oneself and act in an appropriate and timely manner when needed. (It should be noted, however, that the source of such restraint is spurious; it's not only the fact that a real man wouldn't force his way with a woman, but that a Chinese man couldn't be portrayed actually giving such love to a white woman. The only way such love would be possible would be in the metaphoric image that opens and closes the film, silhouettes of overlapping boats against the harbor. More on that in a moment.)

Gish is a peculiar actress, no more evident than her work in Broken Blossoms. Her performance is at once overwrought but highly effective, a sort of expressionistic acting that occurs at the edges of realism. When she and Griffith decide to portray Lucy as so unhappy that she can barely smile and must force her muscles upward with his fingertips to create the illusion of happiness, it borders on the overdone. And yet, the moment she willfully and authentically smiles later is affecting, nearly erasing what felt too stagy earlier. The emotion meant to be interpreted through her posture is almost too evident, and her earlier moments of fear (coupled with the occasionally sensational inter-title cards) are enough to draw suspicion; but again, near the film's end when Burrows's threats against her are deadly serious, a look of fear washes over her face that cannot be taken in any other way but true. If she hadn't made you afraid for her life in the film's first act, by its third she's become striking and convincing. Her acting is somewhere in between the laconic approach of Barthelmess and the fiery approach of Crisp, exemplifying her troubled state of mind.

Historians often label Broken Blossoms as perhaps cinema's first interracial love story, a definition that works as long as you acknowledge the lovers on screen are both of the same race. Of course, a Caucasian playing an Asian character was customary (though not essential), and continued long into the era of sound. "Yellow face" — which consists of a silken wardrobe, a straw conical hat, and eye-squinting — is not nearly as distracting as the horrendous black face in The Birth of a Nation. because it is not objectively racist, as it was with the ignorant and vicious portrayals in Birth, although surely Griffith and Barthelmess take considerable advantage of cultural stereotypes. (The line might seem arbitrary, but there is a distinguishable difference in the films' attitudes.) Barthelmess, though white, is not ineffective in his portrayal of Cheng. The exterior might be poorly and lazily channeled, but the character's interior struggle with loneliness and fear should be lauded. Still, when Barthelmess is given a close-up, the film unavoidably showcases the ersatz nature of the actor and subtracts from what could be a more organic narrative. We can be generous and grant the film this as a result of its time and place, but assessing art is always a balance between what it meant upon its debut and what it still means today; it might not have raised many eyebrows then, but today it does, and should appropriately be considered a flaw.

I've held back comparison to Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat until the end. In a way the films are so different it seems almost unfair to draw a comparison, except to elucidate the flaws of Broken Blossoms by way of suggesting DeMille's is better — or at least has aged better, due to its own innovations and emphasis on avoiding the pitfalls of silent melodrama by channeling genuine subtlety. DeMille's film is not an innocent bystander, and is indeed a product of the 1910s in the way that it doesn't steer clear of possible xenophobic interpretations. But its thematic transgressions are ultimately less than Griffith's. DeMille has an Asian actor (the grand Sessue Hayakawa) playing an Asian character, and realizing the potential theatricality of his story, opted to hew as close as possible to subtlety. As a result, DeMille's film is self-sustaining, playing as well outside of context as within, and that's something that can't quite be said for Griffith's film. Compared to his other works, Broken Blossoms does move in that direction to, but properly put into context of other films, it is still guilty of superficiality and few editorial decisions that draw inessential attention to its production. But in its multiplicity and push toward a subdued narrative and reined thematics, Broken Blossoms proves itself to be perhaps the top work in Griffith's canon.

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The Blue Bird (1918)

d. Maurice Tourneur / USA / 81 mins.


Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird rests on the cinematic palette as some sweet and twisted hybrid of German expressionism and The Wizard of Oz — all the more impressive because it would two more years before the lead-off jewel in the expressionist canon, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, would find its way to America. L. Frank Baum's novel and its many filmic adaptations had already been percolating through American culture for almost two decades, but to compare Maurice Maeterlinck's fine stage play and Tourneur's equally fine film to Baum's creation is ultimately a bit unfair to both. True, both are stories of children whisked away to magical realms and searching for something; but if Baum's is a journey about finding yourself and returning home, then Maeterlinck's allegory of children with a home searching for "the Bluebird of Happiness" to make such a life bearable is incrementally more sinister. If the most sublime incarnation of The Wizard of Oz is Victor Fleming's lavish Technicolor vision as a reflection on the dream-like material at hand, then Tourneur's shadowy, unsettling silent vision of The Blue Bird must be noted for the way it suits its material with equal metaphoric faithfulness and, though less achieved, provides an enjoyable experience.

The pursuit begins when two young children, named Tyltyl (Robin Macdougall) and Mytyl (Tula Belle), are visited by the fairy Berylune (Lillian Cook), who accompanies them on a journey into wondrous lands to find the "the bluebird of happiness," but as with many journeys, it will not be until the end that the children realize what they've traveled for and why their views on life will perhaps not be the same. Along the way they are accompanied by their (now anthropomorphic) dog and cat, portrayed rather effectively by men in transparent costumes who smoothly scamper on all-fours, and by the incarnations of elements like Fire and Water.

The special effects here, if one can call them such, are inspiring. Equipped with only physical materials (which are used to create striking angular sets and loose, simplistic costumes that evoke the story's origins in the theater) and a knowledge of celluloid, Tourneur pulls off a distinctive world positioned with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy. No doubt Tourneur was heavily influenced by the cinema of Georges Méliès, where strategic cuts could make people appear and disappear from and into thin air; overlay images to create ghostly amalgams; and blend the real and the artificial into a gimmicky sort of cinematic pleasure. In the sense that they are conducted with the same skill as Melies they are tricks, but in the sense that enrich the story with child-like wonder they are successful bursts of brilliance. To those unacquainted Maeterlinck's play, it may seem as if Tourneur waits to reveal these special effects. It is fifteen minutes before a sense of fantasy even creeps in.

Contrast this to something like Snow White — the Famous Players Company production from 1916 — which all but erases its sense of wonder by spoiling the entire opening through an image (completely unrelated to the film, it should be noted) of Santa Claus leaving toys. Realism as a device, particularly in the faces and emotions of the young children who are our central characters, is treated with as much deference as fantasy, which is why this adaptation works well in the end. In what surely must be chalked up to accident, there is a blanketing effect of the silence — it suppresses favoritism, allows the children to exist as captivating characters and allows the fantastic sets, costumes, and characters to come to life with the delight of youthful imagination and the sheer terror of adult knowledge.

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The Birth of a Nation (1915)

d. D.W. Griffith / USA / 187 mins.
Click here to read my 2008 review of this film.


I feel compelled to revisit Griffith's The Birth of a Nation for four reasons:

1) I am curious if my saturation in a summer of silent cinema has fundamentally changed the way I read this film — that is, if a film that struck me one way with a previously limited exposure to silent drama will strike me differently after a broadening of said exposure.

2) The title has come up in numerous reviews of silent films in the last few weeks, often in contrast (i.e., to DeMille's The Cheat); but the more I've thought about the film, the less its visuals come back to me and the more I feel myself inflating its technical aspects into pure abstraction. A revisit is thus necessary to hit the refresh button on my brain.

3) James Agee, who I have been re-reading under the prompt of the recent Movie Book meme. I respect Agee, and often disagree with him, but it felt nearly impossible to resist a wade back into the fray after reading Agee's eulogy in The Nation upon Griffith's death in 1948: "This was the one time in movie history that a man of great ability worked freely, in an unspoiled medium, for an unspoiled audience, on a majestic theme which involved all that he was; and brought to it, besides his abilities as an inventor and artist, absolute passion, pity, courage, and honesty. The Birth of a Nation is equal with Brady's photographs, Lincoln's speeches, Whitman's war poems; for all its imperfections and absurdities it is equal, in fact, to the best work that has been done in this country. And among moving pictures it is alone, not necessarily as 'the greatest'—whatever that means—but as the one great epic, tragic film." It's hard to resist the simple act of re-watching a film with writing like that.

4) Because we are enjoined by the philosophies of criticism to wrestle with tough films, to meditate on them and revisit them from time to time as we see fit, the way any other thinker struggles with content and form. In the movies, there is no bigger wild beast for a film critic to wrangle than The Birth of a Nation.

Allow me to begin by turning to the crux of my August 2008 review of the film, which asked, its virulent racism and white supremacy aside, whether Griffith's work is a fundamentally great movie:

The ultimate answer is: not by a long shot. The adjective "well-made" can only be applied to the strictest technical elements. The camerawork during the battle sequences is powerful and remarkably fluid, and the cuts are sharp throughout. Griffith also plays with light in ways that were wholly unique; the captured landscape is as haunting as the ghostly photography that came out of the war. But when the film is broken down into pacing, plot, characters, etc. — the hallmarks of any good movie — "well-made" doesn't even begin to describe The Birth of a Nation. At 190 bloated minutes, it's entirely too long (the second half containing the most egregious episodes of racism, too). Most of its characters are abstract and non-emotive (the result of a sagging story). Like Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, it is a film that has eclipsed its original intent (to entertain) and has become a stolid artifact of film history. Rendering a verdict might involve more a struggle if the film was consistently entertaining, tightly edited, and robust in its story.

Where to begin with myself? I suppose the best place would be a concession that my feelings of the film have improved; certainly not to Agee-levels (I doubt I shall ever declare this film a masterpiece), but I would be remiss to say "not by a long shot" again. My second viewing of the film within a year (my third viewing overall) marked my most appreciative attitude toward it yet. I have a hunch that this might actually prove itself to be a criticism plateau, however; many of the elements I praised in my original review — the camerawork and the editing, primarily — continue to be the elements I most revere; some of what I disliked, namely the characters and the approach to the plot, fared better at times during this screening; and what I disliked the most about it — the pacing, theme, and point-of-view — will be forever lost on me. I still find The Birth of a Nation at the least a half-hour too long, and the pacing in the first halves of both sections is problematically sluggish (it makes it difficult to get into the film at first and makes the mid-section lag).

So why was there an improvement? I'm not too sure, but one of the surprising aspects of this viewing was that in many ways, and as surprising as this may be, The Birth of a Nation works better when its racism is accepted as a foregone conclusion. Certainly that does not mean an endorsement of such abhorrent material (more on that in a moment), but my viewing of the film opened when I basically wrote off the second half as nonsensical, insulting rubbish. A typical reading of The Birth of a Nation leads the audience to focus more on formal mechanics in the first half — which includes an introduction of the characters and plot; the Civil War; the Lincoln assassination; and the launch of an shaky Reconstruction — than in the second half, which largely concerns itself with channeling fear, formalizing xenophobia, and fabricating a heroic visage for the Ku Klux Klan. This offensive content rages thunderously and drowns out clearer examples of Griffith's contributions to film grammar. In reality (and again, I say this aside from the content itself), an argument could be made that the second half is superior film-making from a sheer technical standpoint. It lacks the epic scope of a Civil War battlefield, but its shift to vengeance and pursuit, however morally wrongheaded, translates into a grander production: the cross-cutting during the chase scenes is tighter, and the cinematography is more nimble and experimental (in one shot, the horizon is high in the frame and silhouetted Klansmen ride across in front of a red-tinted sky).

That is not to dismiss the style of the first half. The battle sequences do command attention, both for their aforementioned ghostliness and their realism. (So real, you might say, that sometimes not being able to follow what's going on while the camera is positioned in extreme long-shot is pure toss-up between flaw and enhanced realism.) And then there is the miraculous shot when the camera first moves — something that sounds banal in this text, but when compared to the relative stasis of much of the film (and until then the battle sequences only gain momentum through editing) arrives as a bit of a shock. The battle charge forward, culminating in the breathtaking shot of a Confederate colonel jamming a flag staff down the barrel of a Union cannon, lasts just a second but makes sure the audience is paying attention. The Lincoln assassination is another thrilling sequence, an example of Griffith's remarkable authority in camera placement and editing. Through a mix of close-ups, long-shots, varied angles, and iris shots, Griffith creates a sequence that stirs the system with suspense and tension.

And what of film's notorious, nefarious approach to racial issues? Back to the original review: I want to stand by the central thesis I posited then, that the film causes angst primarily due to the difference in Griffith's approach to the film's most noteworthy elements — its formal construction and its politics:

In order to be as technically innovative as he was, Griffith needed to be as detail-oriented as possible. There are shots that attempt to recreate scenes with unrivaled precision and exactness (Abraham Lincoln's assassination, for example). But when it comes to the film's approach to race, it is the categorical opposite of detail-oriented; its picture is painted with sweeping, inflammatory, and prejudiced strokes: white actors appear in blackface as barbarian caricatures; it endorses anti-miscegenation and pro-slavery positions; it glorifies the Ku Klux Klan and is audacious enough to imply that the white supremacy hate group brought law and order to the post-war South. (The critic Andrew Sarris wrote, "[The film] was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word.")

We normally give Griffith a pass on the racism charge, primarily because he asked us to. (He asked for our acceptance publicly, he asked for it during the film's re-release, he asked for it in Intolerance, and he asked for it in Broken Blossoms.) If this second analysis of the film made me appreciate certain aspects to a greater degree, then I must confess it made me feel that Griffith was more culpable in the film's content than he wanted it to seem. More than ever I'm less inclined to believe that Griffith was truly innocent, and I find the claims of "That's just how it was in 1915" to be equally unsatisfactory. I have no doubt such racism was rampant in the 1910s (it was rampant all through the 20th century, though noticeably not in our national cinema) and I certainly understand the narrative complexity with telling this story from the point-of-view of angry and insular Southerners. But the film's objective point-of-view, illustrated in the title cards that were unaltered, is too extreme to be innocent. It's not incidental; it's active. There are passages in the film that are detached from the characters and seem to harness the voice of someone else (perhaps Griffith), passages that are so offensive it creates an unsustainable balancing act — it seems virtually impossible to claim ignorance on something as heinous as the racism here; to do so is to show yourself to be more unconsciously removed from social mores than ever previously thought; to not do so is to admit such views were consciously inserted, and thus creating culpability. It was Griffith, after all, that wanted to adapt this story — not any story of the Civil War, but this story from Thomas Dixon's "The Clansman."

All this leads to the common claim that we must consider The Birth of a Nation as an apolitical whole. If and when such things are possible, I contend they are only possible on an isolated and deconstructed scale. One can examine the climactic ride of the Klansman, for example; you can notice the camera moves not once but thrice, exciting and riveting movements; you can notice and commend the sophisticated editing, which is effective enough to create suspense and moral discomfort. But inevitably such strict scrutiny can only work in the moment. The Birth of a Nation and its politics are inseparable; one comes forth from the other, and vice versa. It is unfair to ask for consideration of the film with its racism set aside because it is truly impossible, and such, an irrevocable flaw in the fabric of the work. This tension between exacting attention to technical detail and a lack of control whatsoever over the political elements is the chief angle for criticizing the film for its racism. If the film's best-made scene is the Lincoln assassination (where technical construction seems perfectly and acceptably in tune with political messaging), then the film's worst scene occurs in the second half when a single white man fights off ten black men — and if it weren't for a gun, he'd win! It is flagrantly ridiculous, both in its absurd portrayal of white (and masculine) supremacy and for the way it retreats the audience, fabricates its own vulgar mythology, and entrenches itself deeper into moral obsolescence. It is a lack of control on Griffith's part that makes the film spiral away from the audience in these moments.

So The Birth of a Nation can never be, by my own personal standards, great art. Great art is much of what The Birth of a Nation has to offer: ascertainable qualities such as creative vision, influence, and technical skill, as well as esoteric qualities like controversy, crisis, and an intellectual coercion that demands that you wrestle with its challenging elements. But great art is timeless and self-sustaining, which are things this film is not. We make excuses for Griffith and for The Birth of a Nation because we wish to recognize their importance, but great art doesn't need an excuse made for it; great art stands alone, without support or defense, without tomes of analysis and sometimes even without context. Everyone who says this is great art is forced to use the word except, and what sort of praise is that? Without reservation we can call it what it is: important, influential, apoplectic. But we should not call it great.

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The Cheat (1915)

d. Cecil B. DeMille / USA / 59 mins.


Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat is one of the great early silent films precisely because it feels like it should have been released a decade after its late 1915 premiere. With swiftness and grace DeMille impressively merges the two crucial elements so often undefined in early cinema — narrative and photography — and one-ups his contemporary D.W. Griffith in the process by making the totality of the final work something that's stunningly subtle. There's no doubt Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, released the same year as The Cheat, is one of cinema's truly capital-I-capital-F "Important Films," and there's also no doubt that its size and magnitude allowed it to be literally sweeping in its approach to all elements across the planes of production. DeMille's film is smaller, a third the length of Griffith's, and nowhere near as incendiary, but somehow it matches to be more breathtaking and imminently more watchable.

The story, one of both prurience and possession that DeMille acknowledged in autobiography was both melodramatic and lurid, is tight and focused: a vacuous Long Island socialite named Edith (Fannie Ward) burns through her husband's (Jack Dean) money, and when a ten-thousand-dollar copper investment completely bottoms out, her neighbor Tori (Sessue Hayakawa), a wealthy ivory dealer from Japan, lays hold of her debt in exchange for her body. If that sounds vaguely racist ("East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," a title card tells us), then yes, it's necessary to say The Cheat cannot escape its possible xenophobic interpretations, particularly near its end when a shocked audience demands vengeance. The depictions of a Japanese man would so infuriate Japan that for its 1918 re-release (and most of the versions available today) the film identifies Tori as Burmese instead of Japanese and changes his name to Haka Arakau.

To those willing to forgive Griffith's Nation for its extraordinary racism, The Cheat will seem profoundly tame. Even against Griffith's Broken Blossoms (which also features an Asian principle character) The Cheat seems to come out ahead of the curve, precisely because its Asian character is not played by a white man (as was the custom of the day, and as Griffith employs in Blossoms) but instead played by Hayakawa, whose performance is dynamic in its control; in praising his performance in 1915, some critics at the time went as far as to say his effect on American was "more electric" than Rudolph Valentino's. Although an "exotic" character, Tori is not an epitome of Eastern stereotypes; his wardrobe is decidedly western, his house elegantly styled, and his syntax well developed. These might seem innocuous, but they go a long way toward making the art of the film go unbothered by the context of the narrative. The action that does him in (meant to interpreted in multiple ways) is his use of a cruel branding iron — "That means it belongs to me," he says as he applies the smoldering device to Ward's shoulder.

But that moment and many that follow demonstrate DeMille's profound interest in cinema for all its visual opportunities. Griffith may have brought the camera outdoors and introduced mobile panorama to his audience, but DeMille ventures into the territory of grounded artistry. Looking back on the film in his autobiography, he says that because the plot had such a great possibility for overblown melodrama (a cardinal sin of much silent cinema), he "resolved to direct its acting with great restraint." More than the image of a branding, DeMille is interested in the image of hot steam wafting off the heated iron from off-screen and slowly and fluidly entering the frame. He utilizes lighting is a painterly fashion, such as in the film's most famous shot, where Edith fires a gun at Tori and he falls to the floor against a back-lit rice paper screen, his shadow slumping downward and leaving a trail of blood behind. Even when DeMille does venture into the wider and more expansive shots (as in the film's culminating moments set in a courtroom full of angry townspeople), there is an authority over the images that one might expect from an august craftsman instead of a relative newcomer who'd only been releasing films as a director for two years.

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Hell's Hinges (1916)

d. William S. Hart and Charles Swickard / USA / 64 mins.


Note: This review discusses details of the film's ending.

Relatively few Westerns made in America and released before the 1970s brandish the level of cynicism and despondency seen in Hell's Hinges, perhaps the first important and truly serious Western film in terms of both its scope and negation of genre principles. As early as 1911 film writers were already bemoaning the formulaic nature of the Western, but Hell's Hinges does away with many of the elements we would expect and substitutes them with an innovative structure and a disaffected hero whose every-man-for-himself moralism is broken only to save a woman his loves; the rest of the town literally burns to the ground.

From the outset it's clear we're in territory far outside the Code-friendly atmosphere the Western would mature within by the guiding hands of John Ford and others. Hell's Hinges opens with a city-dwelling minister (Jack Standing) who puts no faith in the Bible but relishes a congregation that sits rapt at his words. Church elders send him out west into the small community of Hell's Hinges — a veiled Sodom on the frontier, described as "a good place to 'ride wide of'" and whose good citizens are nothing but "a drop of water in a barrel of rum." The parson is accompanied by his genuinely pious sister, Faith (Clara Williams), and they clash with a town where a majority of residents are as godless as they are lawless.

In typical western construction, the town can almost without exception be clearly divided among its good and its bad, but Blaze Tracy (William S. Hart) occupies a moral limbo. He's a stoic gunslinger who enjoys the benefit of an unguarded community, but he drifts away from the nihilism when he falls in love with Faith at first sight. But brilliantly, Blaze is not an instant convert to anything other than his love for Faith. He pushes back against the unsettled town, protecting Faith and her parson brother; when the parson drifts into the den of iniquity that is the local saloon and begins drinking heavily and cavorting with a prostitute, it is Blaze who defends him from the upset good citizens and successfully argues to give him a second chance. In a not-so-subtle way his faith is to Faith alone, and all of his outward actions seem designed to earn her love through a humanistic chivalry. If parting the town makes her life easier, then that is what he will do; he doesn't pretend to be anything he's not, which makes his wooing both more complicated for him and for us.

The official director here is Charles Swickard, but Hart, who dominated the early western format as both its on-screen hero and its off-screen craftsman, is recognized with having unofficially directed most of the film. Hart saw the potential in the western to explore themes of good versus evil; Scott Simmon writes in an essay accompanying the restoration of Hell's Hinges that this is a movie bathed in the extreme — "extremely sentimental in its Victorian vision of the instantaneous effect of a 'good' woman on Hart's 'bad' man, and extremely harsh in its barren look and ethical judgments."

While the former element crossed over into the 1930s through the Western's heyday of the 1950s, the latter didn't. The glory in the finale of Hell's Hinges is that the hero doesn't want to save the town from itself and set the citizens right; with the town at its breaking point, Blaze lets it snap. An angry mob burns down the church, with the parson holding the lead torch. Blaze rushes to town to save Faith, and when he punishes the arsonists, it's for the risk it posed to her. The film's cinematographer, Joseph August (founder of the American Society of Cinematographers and future D.P. in some of John Ford's more expressionistic films), lets the camera move as much as it can and introduces a series of previously unseen high and low angles to make the finale gripping. He and Hart take full advantage of the incinerating church as an exterior backdrop and the fire that spreads to neighboring buildings, such as the saloon, as a claustrophobic interior.

In the end, for Blaze to save the day is to save Faith alone, to bury her brother and attempt to bring her some closure. Even in the film's final moments it's not clear that she loves him, and Blaze for the first time points his head skyward and prays for her happiness and that she'll marry him. The good people and the bad people of Hell's Hinges are punished equally through the destruction of their town. It is a backward view of civilization, the opposite direction many Westerns will take. It channels the darker corners of the soul by admitting sometimes we have no interest in saving the whole of our community; sometimes even the hero is only concerned with saving himself.

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Snow White (1916)

d. J. Searle Dawley / USA / 61 mins.

I think it's safe to say that if it were not for Walt Disney, few would care about this 1916 live action version of Snow White, directed by J. Searle Dawley and produced by the Famous Players Film Company. But as it is, this is the fabled film — long thought to be lost, moreover — that Disney saw as a young man growing up in Missouri, the film that stuck with him for twenty years and churned within his imagination and led not only to his vision of a feature-length animated film but the first animated masterpiece. If this film were ask the magic mirror which version of Brothers Grimm tale is the fairest of the them all, I'm not sure it would like the answer.

Even by 1916 standards, Snow White feels archaic, a throwback to the theater instead of a blazing future of cinema. Many chalk this up to the fact that the film is deeply rooted in Winthrop Ames' stage version of the Grimms' fairy tale. Ames wrote the screenplay for this film, and he and director Dawley frame it as proscenium in frequent static long-shot. Such a technique is hindered by its bland editing. I'll concede that a live staging of something so entrenched in my mind as an object of animation (by Disney, Flesicher, Clampett, and others) is partially interesting. And thirty-three-year-old Marguerite Clark, who played the role previously on Broadway under Ames's direction, turns in a lively performance that captures a bit more personality in the character of Snow White than many others. (Her childish demeanor makes it easy to escape the fact that she's about fifteen years older than she should be.)

Above all, I'm happy Disney found it to be as inspiring as he did. Perhaps if I were a fifteen-year-old Midwesterner at the dawning age of film I would have felt the same. But I'm not, and neither are you, so satisfy yourself with the knowledge that we've preserved this film to honor its rightful place in the chronology of cinema; then do your best to avoid seeking it out.

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Chaplin at Essanay (1915-1916)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / Four selected shorts, 118 mins.


Conventional wisdom would lead one to expect Charles Chaplin's short comedies at Essanay Studios to be better than his work for Keystone but still not as tight and brilliant as his work for Mutual; for once, conventional wisdom doesn't disappoint. Frustrated with the rules of Keystone, Chaplin left the studio for a lucrative contract at Essanay, which afforded slightly more of the creative control he desired. In effect, Essanay was as particular as Keystone's Mack Sennett, but Chaplin could more easily ignore and avert their story demands as long as he stayed punctual in production. (Trying to shape Chaplin's output to their own preferences is seen as somewhat ironic today because, as Gary Johnson notes, "If not for Chaplin's comedies for Essanay, it's doubtful if more than a handful of people would now recognize the Essanay name.")

At Essanay, Chaplin's short films grew from one reel to two, he began developing a cast of regulars, and without the pressure to abandon story for silliness, he amplified the narrative and brought what would become one of his signatures — a healthy amount of pathos — into the daylight. What speaks to that fact the best is the sense that in his first film for Essanay, His New Job, the Tramp is already fully formed. We follow the Tramp taking up employment at a movie studio and is a not-so-veiled riff on leaving Keystone for somewhere new. It is one of his two great short films at Essanay, and a proper appreciation of it comes after watching undeveloped films like The Rounders and Tillie's Punctured Romance from Keystone.

His New Job shows a Tramp virtually indistinguishable from the character who would appear through the 1920s: tricky, naive, klutzy, ready to make a fool of himself or of anyone else. Like many plots involving the Tramp and work of some sort, he makes the job miserable for everyone else involved. There are antics you would expect to occur when you give the Tramp a two-by-four or a sword to go with a Renaissance costume, but already the difference from Keystone is made clear: Chaplin realized the Tramp had become strong enough to warrant time on screen alone, small moments of quiet comedy that could nevertheless make us smile. Chaplin does take full advantage of multiple person slapstick, particularly in the Tramp's relationship to a rotund director and a leading prop man, but His New Job does something remarkable off the bat by allowing us to observe the Tramp in solitude. What Chaplin gained by increasing the running time from one reel to two reels is an ability to include a scene of like the one in His New Job where the Tramp wanders curiously around inside a star's dressing room and eventually dons the costume intended for the star. It delivers insight into the Tramp but fits into the narrative in preparation for antics that will arise when the star arrives on set looking for his costume.

Chaplin never had much of an interest in dazzling technique as a director (which speaks well to how great they are, relative camera stasis aside), but there are a couple moments in His New Job that are important enough to illustrate that his mind was nonetheless thinking about technique. For starters, the camera moves — simply, of course, but the effect is lovely. As the later portion of the short shifts to focus on the crew characters trying to make their movie, Chaplin keeps the director character and the cameraman character in the frame. The lone exception is a splendid dolly in where you can see the director and cameraman on the left side of the screen until the frame tightens exclusively on the actors, creating a splendid illusion of the actors now performing for Chaplin's camera as well as the now-unseen camera out of frame. And Chaplin is able to surprise us with locations, too. His Now Job occupies approximately five sets, and the relation of one to another is generally clear; but Chaplin earns a big laugh in the second half by cutting back and forth between two sets that it's possible we have forgotten are actually separated by a thin curtain. Once somebody on the other side of the curtain gets the tip of a sword into his rear end, it all clicks in marvelous timing.

At Essanay Chaplin also produced what many believe is his first masterpiece, albeit a minor one: The Tramp. Chaplin resembles more of a vagabond than ever in The Tramp, where he saves a young woman (Edna Purviance, who Chaplin first began casting and wooing in these early comedies at Essanay) walking along the road from a band of bullying hobos, and as a reward earns the hospice of the young woman and a spot on the workforce of her father's farm. Like His New Job, the superficial appeal of The Tramp is what sort of trouble can Chaplin cause with a pitchfork, with a ladder, with a bucket of cow's milk, etc. But on a deeper level, The Tramp allows Chaplin's character to lovable good guy we know him to be. When the hobos finally track down the woman and her father, it is up to Chaplin's Tramp to save the day.

The Tramp ends with perhaps the most iconic images we associate with the Chaplin: walking down a lonely road by himself. By the end of the short, the young woman's beau has returned to the farm and it becomes clear that the Tramp had mistaken her kindness and thankfulness for love. Losing the girl that was never really his in the first place is a motif that recurs regularly through Chaplin's films, and it is an ending we often conclude is bittersweet. More appropriately, we should consider it a form a cinematic courage; these endings where the hero doesn't get the girl bear a stronger semblance to reality than many Hollywood films would dare. And the fleeting final shots in The Tramp, as the iris is in the process of shrinking inward, instruct us how to read these finales. We assume the Tramp must be forlorn, and perhaps he is, but suddenly he shakes himself and does a silly jump. It allows the ending to remain ambiguous and open-ended, and lends an unexpected sense of continuity between the Tramp films. There's always something else down the road — more trouble, more police officers, more unrequited love, and always more laughs.

Many of the Chaplin shorts at Essanay (aside from the two already mentioned) feel calculated to an extreme, revealing an underlying formula that is functional enough with a wide array of stories. Police (1916), for example, shows the Tramp being released from jail only to anger patrol officers on the outside and fall back in with his old cellmate who convinces him to help rob a woman (Purviance). But of course we know the Tramp will come around, and when the cellmate threatens the woman, the Tramp fends him away and saves her. It ends with the aforementioned patented Chaplin loneliness: the woman rewards him for his bravery with some money and sends him on his lonesome way.

The lone standout among the Essanay crowd in strict terms of subject matter is The Burlesque on Carmen, a strange and unmoving parody of Georges Bizet's opera and contemporaneous film adaptations. Chaplin doesn't play the Tramp, but uses that perception of aloofness in his character Corporal Darn Hosiery, who is seduced by Carmen (who else but Purviance?) in an effort to distract him from the nefarious deeds of gypsies. It is sort of a mishmash of slapstick and swashbuckling that doesn't deliver, and I would assume those unfamiliar with Bizet would most likely have a difficult time gleaning the humor of the parody. In the sense that it's largely different from Chaplin's other films at Essanay, watching it as a Chaplin fan might be satisfying — but His New Job and The Tramp are more rewarding and more representative of the high-quality filmmaking that would soon be in store for Chaplin.

Note: The Chaplin short films at Essanay are in public domain and are widely available, but the transfers from Kino are the best there are. If you're interested in The Burlesque on Carmen, the Kino transfer is particularly important because it most closely resembles the two-reel version originally envisioned by Chaplin instead of the four-reel version created by Essanay after he had parted ways with them to go work at Mutual Studios.

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Regeneration (1915)

d. Raoul Walsh / USA / 71 mins.


Raoul Walsh's debut feature film, Regeneration, pulses with the influence of his mentor, D.W. Griffith, although not always for the best. No doubt made in quasi-homage to Griffith's proto-gangster film The Musketeers of Pig Alley, Regeneration is typically seen as the first feature film on the subject of gangsters (not of the organized crime variety, but of the street-smart turn-of-the-century tough types). It is also among the first films to make great use of on-location filming, in this case New York City's more impoverished neighborhoods. There is an unmistakable sense of realism captured in Regeneration, but like life itself, the film occasionally falls into bouts of lethargy that make its slim running time feel inordinately longer than necessary.

As the title suggests, this a film centered on second chances and social movement. Regeneration opens on young street urchin named Owen (John McCann) who climbs the social ranks to become an older street tough (played by the wonderfully named Rockliffe Fellowes), which, while not necessarily a position mothers wish for their sons, is at least more stabilizing than a life in rags and trash-picking. The life as a street tough does given allow Owen to make friends, however shady they may be. The story, adapted by Walsh from Owen Frawley Kildare's autobiography, initially avoids becoming too static by introducing movement in the opposition direction; Marie (Anna Q. Nilsson), a well-to-do if slightly naive society girl, wants to invest herself into the lower class by teaching literacy and — in the case of Owen — teaching how to love. If it seems cliche, it can be dismissed as at least a 1915 release that is probably the source of such cliches in the first place. But the theme of a tender tough-guy and is encouraged into comfort by a girl with a 24-karat ticker was already becoming commonplace in the cinema of the 1910s

Besides, it's not so much the formulaic (from this vantage) aspect of the plot that troubles me as much as it is the formulaic aspects in much of its style. Walsh had a leg-up on many of his peers as an assistant director and editor on Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and so Regeneration didn't need to benefit from a post-Birth release to begin stylistic exploration. In fact, stylistically speaking Regeneration begins on the right foot. Owen, as a young boy, is adopted by his married tenement neighbors after the death of his mother. During this section Walsh uses point-of-view shots and irises effectively to empower emotional transfers and social commentary (the husband is an abusive drunk). Later there is a scene of a ferry that catches fire, which is stupendously shot and edited — one of the real thrills of not only this movie but of many from the 1910s. Though the camera was incapable of being placed into too many different angles, Walsh compensates with varied shot distances and locations (sometimes on the boat, sometimes inside the fire, sometimes in the water looking out at it in flames as people jump to safety) and a fine montage of editing. The subject and staging naturally draw your attention, but the final result brings an excitement that overwhelms the rest of the somber film and draws attention to the slower, more clumsily edited sequences. As debuts go, particularly in an age when cinema was still learning to speak, Regeneration is by no means a failure.

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Programming Note

My return to regular blogging coincides with a summer vacation of sorts. I'm happy to be back, to be watching movies again and writing on them. But after drawing up a list of films I want to review on Screen Savour in the coming months, I noticed there were a great many silent features. So I've decided to go ahead and call this a Summer of Silents.

I'll be choosing my selections from the National Film Registry and other essential lists of silent films. This will cover both the 1910s and 1920s, both American and foreign cinema, both the groundbreaking and dull as well as the simple and entertaining. The series will culminate in August when I give Buster Keaton the same analysis I've devoted to Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Chaplin.

I'm by no way swearing off "talkies," and hopefully I'll have some reviews of those to add to the mix as we go along. Hopefully, too, you'll not be put off by the devotion to silent cinema and you'll keep coming back to see the likes of DeMille, Griffith, von Stroheim, Walsh, Murnau, Borzage, Vidor, and others.

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From the Manger to the Cross (1912)

d. Sidney Olcott / USA / 71 mins.


From the Manger to the Cross is valuable for two reasons: it is among oldest surviving American feature films, and it is the first narrative depiction of Jesus Christ. Nearly a decade earlier the French film The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ (1903) featured 31 tableaux from the story of Jesus (in fact, the two films are often packaged together on DVDs), but From the Manger to the Cross takes it one step further by putting the full story into chronological order and, in the span of slightly more than an hour, documents the life of Jesus. Yet this is another in the long line of silent historical artifacts that do not hold up in the passage of time.

Olcott and his screenwriter elected to add no new words to their production; the title cards are arrangements of selected verses from all four Gospels that put the story in order, and the effect works if you're already familiar with the story. To fit the entirety of the Gospels into 70 minutes, however, requires some rather hasty storytelling. The film is divided into four primary sections — birth and youth; the performing of miracles; travel and ministry; and the final sacrifice — and Olcott tries to hit on every notable element. Miracles seem to zip by: the blind suddenly see, the infirm suddenly walk, the possessed suddenly tranquilize.

As later films about Christ would realize, in the narrative of his life these demonstrations of divinity are meant to be felt as hope as much for the ill as for the living. The speed with which Olcott shows them robs them of their objective importance. (How easy it seems to cure leprosy in long shot and with bandages covering the leper's supposedly festered head!) The only miracle with any emotional importance is the raising of Lazarus from the dead. That scene functions well due to the patience and tension built by the director, and the expressionistic approach from the actor (Sidney Baber), who, more than gallivanting at the ability to walk, exudes an understandable shock and disorientation. The full dramatic arc shown in the moment is sorely lacking from others.

From the Manger to the Cross is reported to have been a crowd-pleaser as far into the twentieth century as the late 1930s, when many churches would screen it for their congregations over Easter weekend. That alone may be enough to outline the proper context for the film: the grand emphasis here is on delivering a mere visual depiction of the majesty of Christ without much regard to the possibilities in the power of cinema. Long stretches of the film feel untethered and the compositions are largely jejune. There are the occasional moments that feel inspired, such as the foreshadowing shot of a young Jesus as a carpenter across the frame with a beam on his shoulder and the cross-shaped shadow cast on the ground beside him. (The later crucifixion should be noted, too, for its rather staggering sense of realism.)

It simply be that, had it been made a decade later — after the features of Griffith, DeMille, et al. — this could have been a film of both robust emotion boosted through a development of its visual language. For those merely looking to have a simplistic moving image to associate with the Gospels, I imagine From the Manger to the Cross would have seemed like an affecting success; for those interested in how cinema can be used to strengthen a story through a thoughtful and artful construction, it is not a film that delivers.

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The Movie Book Meme

Tony at Cinema Viewfinder has tagged me in a movie book meme, created by MovieMan at The Dancing Image.

Most of the film writing that has influenced me has come my way from Xeroxed pages, film theory books, and criticism anthologies. As such I almost feel I could avoid naming any books and simply say the names Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann, Susan Sontag, Richard Schickel, Leslie Halliwell, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman, Manohla Dargis, Kristin Thompson, et al. The Internet is no hardcover book in your hands, but the information is more abundant and loved just the same.

But I'll cite a few books. I'd love to have listed ten, but I couldn't make it; my exposure to film literature is admittedly limited, but here are five books that I've read in the last two years that I would consider influential and would recommend to any other film lover. I encourage as many participants as possible, and the creator of this meme has graciously promised to post a collection of the books on his website in the future. Many of my regular readers have been tagged so far by others, and I'm a little late to the game so I'd hate to be duplicative. If you're reading this and no one else has tagged you, I beseech you to join in. (Particularly you, DeeDee: any film noir books you could recommend would be great.)

Your suggestions will be very helpful to a guy like me who's always thinking about the next trip to the library or what should belong in my Amazon shopping cart.

The list:

• Agee On Film (Part I), James Agee. He wrote for Time and The Nation, he helped audiences realize a previously unknown nostalgia for silent comedy, he passionately defended Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux over three weeks yet was capable of dismissing an entire film outright in less than five words (his entire review of You Were Meant For Me (1948): "That's what you think."). Agee wrote poetry, short fiction, screenplays (The Night of the Hunter and The African Queen), and his novel won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. Andrew Sarris wrote that upon Agee's untimely death in 1955 at the age of 46, a vacuum was created that allowed for Sarris and the other rebel critics to break onto the scene. That Agee never lived to see New Hollywood and bless us with thoughts on it might be the reason he's less read today than those still alive or recently deceased. But his rigorous approach to classical cinema — he came to criticism after a love of movies, with demanding expectations that it function as modern art, and could lovingly praise you or savagely eviscerate you with his wound and eloquent prose — makes him one of my favorite critics. (Not to mention I have similar aspirations as critic and literary writer.)

• Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, Patrick McGilligan. One of the most complete, objective (as can be), and passionate biographies of a filmmaker I've ever read. McGilligan chronicles the Master of Suspense through personal story, production details, critical assessments, and scores of interviews with those who knew him best. He pays a debt to those works that have come before (Spoto and Wood), and debunks many of the cultural myths that have spread about the director. Those of you who followed my Hitchcock retrospective are no doubt familiar with this name. (He's written on George Cukor and Oscar Micheaux as well.)

• American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate. The best collection of sundry film writing out there, with extensive samples from the silent era through the contemporary era. All the usual suspects are here, from the critics to the theorists, and what Lopate has sampled many writings you'd expect and a few you might not into what culminates as a surprising crash course in Intro to Criticism 101.

• Narration and the Fiction Film, David Bordwell. This book did more to make me appreciate the mere mechanics of film than any other, and the lessons I've learned from it have carried over into all the other narrative I work in. His chapter on classical Hollywood narration is the definitive look into the template utilized by nearly all directors in the 1930s through the 1950s. Plus, Bordwell earns immediate bonus points for using Rear Window as a template film to show how our brain processes cinema.

• The Silent Clowns, Walter Kerr. Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy: they're all here in this magnificent analysis of silent comedy. Kerr begins with a hypothesis that I believe wholeheartedly — that silent comedy doesn't suffer the baggage of silent drama — and sets forward a case-by-case analysis of how some of the most brilliant minds in early Hollywood made us laugh so hard in the 1920s and why you can still hear the echoes today.

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Chaplin at Keystone (1914)

d. Various / USA / Four shorts, one feature: 145 mins.


Mack Sennett, founder of Keystone Studios, plucked Charles Chaplin from Fred Karno's touring American troupe in 1913, but the path to stardom of the man many consider the greatest silent comedian of all time was anything but easy. To begin with, Sennett — the founder of American slapstick — almost immediately regretted the decision. Chaplin was a replacement for Ford Sterling, one of the original Keystone Cops, and apparently didn't live up to the high hopes of Sennett. It was director and comedienne Mabel Normand who apparently argued for Chaplin to stay, and thankfully she did or the name Charles Chaplin might have been lost to the ages.

Chaplin's year at Keystone Studio, his first year in cinema, is as historically important as his later years at Essanay (where he grasped creative control for the first time) and Mutual (where he produced what many consider his first truly great short comedies). Once saved from firing, Chaplin's rise was meteoric. He appeared in 35 films at Keystone — all shorts except one, all released to the public at the rate of nearly one per week throughout 1914. More than half of those films he directed, and later he began to trend away from Sennett's superficial focus on mere slapstick and begin to insert genuine emotion into his characters. At Keystone there was also the genesis of Chaplin's Tramp character, which appeared in Chaplin's second short, Kid Auto Races at Venice (directed by Henry Lehrman). The short thrives as a literal showcase of Chaplin's new character: as a cameraman attempts to capture an auto race (often in point-of-view shot), the Tramp continues to wander in front of the lens and anger the crew. In this early incarnation the Tramp is a little scruffier than we're used to, but still naive and innocent in the ways we know and love, and the short, while narrowly imagined, is effective.

By the time Chaplin began directing himself, he'd starred in ten shorts. He rubbed many directors the wrong way and they didn't sit well with him (ironically, although Normand saved his job, Chaplin resented being directed by her because she was a woman). His directorial debut is the throwaway one-note short Twenty Minutes of Love, in which the Tramp marauds around in a park and makes passes at women in front of their men. The Rounders, directed by Chaplin and co-starring Fatty Arbuckle, is among the first films where Chaplin roots nearly all of the laughs in his character being drunk — or, in silent cinema parlance, being "thirsty." At times it feels like a rough draft for the sort of drunk humor Chaplin sharpened later in his career, most notably in Pay Day and City Lights. The jokes here are fairly typical: missing chairs, feuding with his wife, going to a restaurant and causing a commotion. Aside from its minor authorial importance (and the co-starring of another prominent comedian, something that wouldn't happen again until the appearance of Buster Keaton in Limelight), the short is only adequate.

The film that proves itself worthy of all audiences is Chaplin's best at Keystone, The New Janitor. Not only is it quite funny (without question I laughed aloud for the first time watching the Keystones in the scene of the Tramp attempting to clean a window high from the sidewalk by sitting on the sill and leaning outside), but it served as a general outline for the direction Chaplin would take silent cinema. While Sennett focused almost exclusively on nearly anonymous slapstick, in The New Janitor Chaplin slows down the antics and lets the story lead the way. The comedy — and our empathizing with the Tramp and understanding of the supporting characters — is rooted back into the narrative in a way that Keystone hadn't yet accomplished. Though certainly no masterpiece, it does pack multiple layers into its brief 16-minute running time, as opposed to other Keystone shorts that feel as if the material is being stretched perilously thin to merely fill a reel.

* *

Under different circumstances I'd give a full review to Tillie's Punctured Romance, the Sennett-directed slapstick-fest that is widely considered to be the first feature comedy in American film. But the film has more in common with the shorts Chaplin starred in than it does with many other feature films. Because so many of Sennett's jokes could originate in gags practically unrelated to the underlying action, Tillie's Punctured Romance unrolls in the fashion of a few shorts surgically stitched together. In the film Chaplin plays a shameless con artist named Charlie from the city who woos a country girl named Tillie (Marie Dressler) to make off with her father's money. Once they arrive in town, however, he promptly leaves her so he and another woman, Mabel (Normand), can buy new clothes. Tillie ends up in jail for alcohol consumption and becomes a waitress. Of course, Charlie and Mabel are later visitors at the restaurant and the antics continue, driven forward by Tillie's scorn for Chaplin (one of the most heartless characters of his career). There's a hell of a gag in the first few minutes involving a thrown brick, but the comedy generally fails to rise above the level of most Keystone shorts. The Keystone Cops do show up, but it's only their scenes toward the end where numerous characters go careening off a dock that come off as fresh. It's certainly recommended for those interested in the history of silent comedy or the career of Chaplin, but otherwise mid-level Keaton or Harold Lloyd would be a better use of valuable viewing hours.

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The Movie Period/Place Meme

Daniel at Getafilm tagged me last week in what is probably one of the most creative memes I've seen circling the web (moreover, he created it!): a favorite movie period/place meme. For this particular challenge, you select a place and a time captured on film that you would particularly like to visit.

The movies take us places, as clichéd as it is to admit, so in the spirit of all the potential destinations a film can offer, I present my choices broken down into three categories: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The important qualification to me was not that the time period and place necessarily be a place I'd like to vacation, for example, but a place that was so evocative to me that I would (my safety secured) insert myself into the experience if only to capture all the senses possible aside from sight and sound, a setting so empowered by its art direction, costumes, cinematography, set design, and makeup that I'm not content with the images the film has given me: I want to see more of this place, damnit!

With that in mind, some of my choices might seem a little offbeat, but what the hey. Consider yourself tagged (I'm so late I don't know who's done it already) and link back to Daniel!

Yesterday: Films set in the past

• Shakespeare in Love (1998) — The Globe Theater, 1590s — Because I have a continual love for all things related to The Bard, and visiting him in the context of this funny and fictitious film would be among the best ways to live a moment of Shakespeare.

• Paths of Glory (1957) — French trenches, 1916 — Because it's one of the most graceful depictions of a battlefield I've ever seen. To witness more through the roaming eye of this camera would be a delight.

• L.A. Confidential (1997) — Los Angeles, 1950s — Because it's gritty, dirty, and tough world out there.

• The Right Stuff (1983) — NASA Headquarters, 1953-1963 — Because I want to watch history unfold.

• Far From Heaven (2002) — Connecticut, 1957 — Because cinematographer Edward Lachman used all the skill and abilities from the 21st century to recreate a gorgeous and faux Technicolor world that kept a polish across its entire surface while in the insides were ripping apart. It's as beautiful as it is painful to watch.

• In the Mood for Love (2001) — Hong Kong, 1962 — Because director Wong Kar-wai captured the smoky, hazy, humid days of summer perfectly and tragically.

Today: Films set in their present

• All the President's Men (1974) — Newsroom, 1974 — Because I'd love to work in my former profession before I was born.

• Breaking Away (1979) - Bloomington, Ind., the 1970s — Because I'd love to visit my alma mater before I was born.

• Manhattan (1979) — New York City, the 1970s — Because I'd love to have visited this city before 9/11.

Tomorrow: Films set in the future

• Minority Report (2002) — Washington D.C., 2054 — Because the future has always fascinated me, particularly when the joy of innovation meets the rainy streets of a dystopia. (Runner-up: Back to the Future Part II, Hill Valley 2015, but Daniel got there first. Ha.)

• Wall•E (2008) — Earth, the 29th-century — Because it's a terrifying take on the apocalypse made strangely gorgeous through the power of animation.

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Griffith at Biograph (1908-1914)

d. D.W. Griffith / USA / Five selected films: 127 mins.


Although I've never been much of a fan of The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance — the two films most regularly cited as D.W. Griffith's masterpieces — I've also never been dismissive of Griffith's legacy. Certainly he did more for the nascent days of American film than virtually anyone else, and an examination of those early days with the Biograph company between 1908 and 1914 reveals a pioneering cinematic mind at work in his most famous shorts. At Biograph he wrote and directed melodramas, comedies, westerns, thrillers, and social commentaries. Fortune would have it that he helped develop a coherent cinematic language in America. Not so bad for a man who had ambitions to be actor and a playwright.

During his years at Biograph, Griffith made somewhere in the ballpark of 450 short films — a staggering amount, approximately two or three every week. Biograph became the preeminent film company in America with Griffith at the helm. Although many of the earliest U.S. films have been lost, a surprisingly number of Griffith's survive, due in large part to an acquisition of the Biograph collection the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1930s. Only the smallest fraction of the films can be said to be genuinely good, and not all were influential. Maybe only a half-dozen fit that description, and my personal choices — from the ones I've seen, at least — include two of Griffith's most profound social commentaries, two of his most appealing action films, and a ground-breaking melodrama that helped pave the way toward his most famous films.

His earliest success is probably The Country Doctor (1909). It is a success in the sense that it demonstrates Griffith's incredible control in structure and pacing, but it is also a success in terms of fact that it's not excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch in a contemporary setting. Like many of Griffith's early films, this one demonstrates the director's penchant for populism. Structured around two houses — one rich, one poor — the story follows a rich country doctor forced to choose between helping his own ill daughter and the ill daughter of a neighboring poor woman. Griffith crosscuts back and forth between both houses and both girls, creating suspense and tension in not only whether the girls will live but whether the doctor will be able to help both. Film historian Tom Gunning notes that more than any other film from the period up until 1909, The Country Doctor showed what had become possible in movie-making. This film is among the first that demonstrates a fictional character exhibiting a judgment in ethics, a judgment that turns out to be at the detriment to his own daughter. And while the cutting back and forth in the film's midsection is done with great delicateness and skill, perhaps more impressive is the symmetry of the opening and closing shots. At first we're given a long shot of country hillside and then camera pans right until the house of the doctor comes into the view, and we see the happy family leaving; at the film's close, Griffith reproduces that same shot from in the opposite direction, leading us away from the death of the young girl and back toward the pasture. It is a rather simple camera movement, but still able to evoke a surprising amount of emotion in its relative stasis.

The same principles of The Country Doctor are on display in A Corner in Wheat (1909). Again this is a Griffith exercise in crosscutting and montage (and seeming socialist propaganda and moralizing), although the control is slightly less firm than in The Country Doctor. The comparison is again between rich and poor, this time between the rich barons who casually decide to make a pass at controlling the wheat market and the poor citizens, now unable to buy bread, who are unknowingly affected by this decision. (A Corner in Wheat is on preserve in the National Film Registry, though of the two, The Country Doctor would have seemed to be the more likely candidate.)

By the early 1910s, Griffith was capitalizing on his cinematic experimentation by working with material that felt inherently less focused on the manipulation of the actual film itself. The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1913), two of Griffith's great action and suspense films, use the same tense editing and complex shot composition than A Corner in Wheat and The Country Doctor — both on a zoomed and zoomed-out scale — but as part of more complex stories, the techniques, while no less effective, rightly fade into the background. The Musketeers of Pig Alley is typically hailed as the proto-typical gangster film; a husband and wife living in an impoverished neighborhood of New York are tossed into the world of organized crime when the husband is robbed by two thugs. If Griffith asks us to notice too much within the frames with this densely built compositions, he can be forgiven by the powerfully focused and tense standoff in the second half.

Griffith considered The Battle of Elderbush Gulch to be his best film up to that point in his career, and from what I've seen I'll gladly agree. He had ventured into the western previously with shorts such as The Last Drop of Water (1911), but here is the film that in many ways seems to portent The Birth of a Nation in terms solely related to technical skill (and in terms of accusations of racism as well). So many essays point back toward that film as the moment American cinema changed, but it's not fair to assume all of its innovations suddenly sprang forth from nothing. The story is simple — a group of settlers are attacked by vengeful American Indians who are then held at bay by the last-second arrival of the cavalry — but it's remarkably well told with tight editing and grand, well-staged (for its time) cinematography. Limited in ability, financing, and time, Griffith nevertheless made a western that should continue to be looked at for as long as we're studying the genre.

Griffith's final film with Biograph, Judith of Bethulia (1914), is worth mentioning on two counts. First, although it falters at times from a lack of narrative comprehension in the early reels, it has held up well. I would not rush to place it on a list of the best silent films ever made, but I think there's possible a greater jump between The Battle of Elderbush Gulch and this film in the course of a single year than between The Country Doctor and The Musketeers of Pig Alley. Judith of Bethulia is an adaptation of a biblical story about a woman (Blanche Sweet) who gives herself to the leader of the Assyrians (Henry B. Walthall) to infiltrate his palace and kill him to avenge her slain countrymen. This is a film that, if nothing else, illustrates Griffith was still perfecting his skills of blending melodrama and action — the latter being rather impressive, though largely recorded through a static lens at first. Griffith's crosscutting here is now more effective with disparate narratives instead of evoking mere montage, a technique that would be absolutely necessary in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. There are also a few impressive cinematic tricks, including strategic light adjustments. After it gets the unclear narrative under control, however, we're given a series of title cards and cut-to emotions that feel a little overbearing.

The second, and perhaps most important, reason for acknowledging Judith of Bethulia is the feud that erupted between Griffith and Biograph. The production company had a strict rule limiting their films to two reels, and with Judith, Griffith ventured into four-reel territory. Such a length is nothing compared to his later epics, but the breaking point between the two proved momentous. It was Griffith who took his skills into films of greater scope and ambition and ultimately succeeded, while Biograph — which thought longer films were nothing but a trend — never recovered from his absence and ceased making new films in 1916. In a rather ironic twist, it was Biograph that re-released Judith five years later with added footage, making it longer (and ultimately worse off) than Griffith's cut. And if nothing else it showed clearly that Biograph's success was wound by one man who parts ways and made a right turn toward history.

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