The story of architectural historian Tim Samuelson and his grade-school fascination with old buildings. Glass of This American Life did the sound and Ware did illustrations in a cool vertical aspect ratio – makes sense, since it’s all about buildings. Tim meets photographer Richard Nickel, and they tour the buildings of their favorite architect together, preserving their memories as they’re torn down. Tragic ending, beautiful story.

Les Horizons Morts (1951, Jacques Demy)

Simple, romantic story. A man alone in his crumbling apartment recalls being dumped by his girl for another man, considers drinking poison but seeing the cross on his wall, decides against it. A student short, I think, with nice camera work.

Glas (1958, Bert Haanstra)

Glassmaking, first by hand then in a bottle factory, edited rhythmically with excellent music added afterwards. At least as wonderful as the other Haanstra shorts I’ve seen. Won the oscar (beating a donald duck short). I should look up his features sometime, since I’m always so impressed by the shorts.

Won in a Closet (1914, Mabel Normand)

Mabel dreams of a neighbor boy, but is pestered by two bumpkins. Somehow her dad and the boy’s mom get trapped in a closet together, Mabel thinks it’s an intruder, and since this is a Keystone production, it ends with twenty people running around and falling over. One nice split-screen shot, but I’d argue with the film preservationists who called Normand a “singular cinematic talent in the making.”

More from the film preservationists:

By the time Won in a Closet was released by Keystone, Normand had already appeared in nearly 150 movies and was a beloved screen presence around the world. As one of the founders of Keystone, the comedienne was well placed to take on new responsibilities and become one of cinema’s earliest female directors. … The story follows the Romeo-and-Juliet romance of Mabel and her beau, played by Charles Avery. As the plot careens into antics and pratfalls, Mabel’s father and Charles’s mother find themselves trapped in a large wooden closet, surrounded by spurned suitors and bumbling neighbors.

A Bashful Bigamist (1921, Allen Watt)

A slight improvement. A woman invents an ideal ex-husband so her new husband will aspire to be better, but she uses a photo of uncle Oswald, who returns from Africa the next day. Much misunderstanding ensues, accompanied by vase-smashing and pistols.

The husband was Billy Bletcher, who would later voice characters in Mickey Mouse cartoons. Cartoons in the intertitles drawn by Norman Z. McLeod, future director of Marx Bros and WC Fields comedies. No music on either of these silent shorts, so I listened to some Ennio Morricone

Area Striata (1985, Jeff Scher)

Dots, lines and patterns. Hyperkinetic geometry. Beautiful indeed but it kinda made me feel ill. Delicate music by a Bach quartet.

Trigger Happy (1997, Jeff Scher)

Negative silhouettes of objects and toys in (of course) rapid motion, set to an extremely happy song by Shay Lynch.

Scher says: “It began as an attempt to make an animated ballet, but as I was shooting the dance turned rowdy, into more of a nocturnal revel. . . . The trigger I was happy about was on the camera, but the title also fits the velocity of the imagery. Much of the animation happens by the rapid replacement of one object with another. It’s the afterimage in your eyes that animates the difference between the shapes, as one is replaced by another, and another”

Caged Birds Cannot Fly (2000, Luis Briceno)

Some very short segments showing different caged birds in would-be humorous situations… either stop-motion, 3D or some combination thereof. I liked the Stereolab song better than the film.

Johnny is born on the 4th of July, 1900, is given every opportunity by his parents, has a big future ahead of him – but his dad dies when he’s twelve. Camera at the top of the stairs with the doctor, fifty neighbors gathered below, Johnny steps out from the crowd and walks upstairs towards the camera, almost in 3D.

John moves to New York City, gets a job as one of Jack Lemmon’s office-mates in The Apartment, a menial accountant but still studying at night because he’s gonna be someone big.

He meets a girl named Mary at Coney Island – they get hitched immediately

The couple heads out towards Niagara Falls aboard a train. You don’t see many 1920′s movies that address the pre-wedding-night virginal jitters. Apparently I’m the only one who noticed, since all the IMDB trivia items focus instead on a toilet visible in the couple’s apartment.

Honeymoon’s over – John and Mary bicker about every little thing. Her condescending family comes to visit on Christmas eve, so John ducks out and goes dancing at his coworker Bert’s place. During one blow-up fight Mary reveals that she’s pregnant, and her husband gets all emotional and promises to be a better man.

Crabby in-laws:

John gets a slight raise, while Bert gets a major promotion. He wins $500 from a slogan contest (after this and Christmas In July, I figure slogan contests used to be a major source of income for Americans) but their second child is killed by a truck.

John having number problems:

“The crowd laughs with you always, but it will cry with you for only a day.” Depressed and anxious, John quits his job, almost kills himself while taking junior for a walk, but is re-determined to support his family, gets a menial new job. They go to the movies and the camera pulls out, losing John in the laughing crowd.

The movie stars James Murray, whose career took off with this picture until he turned drunk/homeless/suicide after a few years, and Eleanor Boardman, Vidor’s wife and star of Souls for Sale and Borzage’s The Circle. John’s friend/boss Bert is Bert Roach, an original Keystone Cop. This was the movie beaten by Sunrise for the first “artistic” best picture oscar, Vidor beaten by Borzage (for Seventh Heaven) for the first best director.

For years I’d been meaning to watch Birth of a Nation, then after reading Rosenbaum’s article about the AFI 100 list, I’ve been meaning to watch Intolerance instead. I’ve enjoyed some of Griffith’s shorts (A Corner in Wheat, The House with Closed Shutters) but never tackled any of his features, which seems a major oversight considering how important they were in film history (or in “the story of film”). While watching Intolerance, I dutifully noted Griffith’s pioneering editing style. I marvelled at the few extreme close-ups and dolly shots, a couple apparent crane shots, and heaping tons of cross-cutting, both between and within the four different time periods. But besides the academic interest, I found the movie boring and heavy-handed. It could’ve used a couple rewrites – the four stories of intolerance told simultaneously don’t work well together, and two of them (Paris and Judea) don’t work at all. Maybe this is because of deleted scenes, but I certainly don’t wish for the movie to be longer. Hopefully I’ll end up enjoying his shorter, more personal stories like Broken Blossoms and True Heart Susie more than this one, but now I’m in no hurry to watch those.

“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.”

Lillian Gish (star of Broken Blossoms) rocks this cradle meaningfully beneath a sunbeam whenever Griffith lacked a good transition scene between time periods.

In the “present” of the 1910′s, wealthy Mary Jenkins, “unmarried sister of the autocratic industrial overlord” is ignored at a party and so “realizes the bitter fact that she is no longer a part of the younger world.” So she joins a stuffy ladies’ reform club dedicated to the “uplift of humanity” (read: censorship, prohibition, and making things generally boring).

Meanwhile, the father of The Dear One (ugh) works at the Jenkins factory. The mill orders a wage cut (to conserve funds for Mary’s reform group), a strike ensues, lots of cannon fire (reportedly modeled after a bloody strike at a Rockefeller factory). The Boy’s father dies (excuse me, “the Loom of Fate weaves death” for him). The surviving protagonists move to the city, where The Boy and “The Friendless One” get tangled up with gangsters (“musketeers”) and Dear One’s dad dies (sorry, “inability to meet new conditions brings untimely death” to him). Boy and Dear are to be married, but his boss doesn’t like quitters, plants stolen goods on the Boy which “intolerate him away for a term” in prison, because the titles love to use that word even when it doesn’t fit. While he’s in prison, his Dear wife has a baby, which is taken away by the Intolerant reformists and raised by careless nurses.

Friendless Miriam Cooper, actually married to Raoul Walsh:

In ancient Jerusalem, there’s some stuff about hypocrites among the pharisees, funniest part of the movie. Jesus turns water to wine, proving that he is on the side of fun, not like the stuffy ol’ reform club of the present-day scenes. Then this whole segment is forgotten.

A hypocritic pharisee, probably not played by Erich von Stroheim:

In 1570′s France, the catholic king’s mother hates the Hugenots (protestants), and despite some royal wedding that’s supposed to bring peace, she schemes to destroy them. Meanwhile, down in the peasantry, Brown Eyes is dating Prosper Latour (the great Eugene Pallette of The Lady Eve – weird to see him young and silent).

The King with mum Josephine Crowell, who’d play queens in The Man Who Laughs and The Merry Widow:

Protestant leader Admiral Coligny: Joseph Henabery, a prolific director who also played Lincoln in Birth of a Nation

At the Great Gate of Babylon in 539 B.C. (an intertitle brags about the movie’s life-size replica walls), the Rhapsode (Elmer Clifton, prolific director of westerns in the 40′s, also made the marijuana scare flick Assassin of Youth) is a warrior poet, agent of the High Priest of Bel, who falls for a Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge, with the most modern look in the movie, despite wearing a hat that looks like a spinach salad with olives). Their leader is great and Tolerant, but the high priest is annoyed that some people worship a rival goddess, so he schemes to assist the Persians when they attack Babylon by having the impenetrable gates opened for them.

Mountain Girl joins in the battle:

So all the stories (not counting Judea) are about poor, pretty girls having their lives ruined because of greedy decisions made by rich, powerful people. The movie is incredibly obvious, so I got bored and spent much of the second half imagining the bloody murder of everyone involved. And then that’s pretty much what happened.

But first – two doves pull a chariot carrying a rose:

In the present: “When women cease to attract men they often turn to Reform as a second choice” – cue montage of the ugly women of the reform movement. But the reformists’ actions have simply moved the drinking and partying underground, where it’s more dangerous for being unregulated. The Boy returns home, the Musketeer gets involved in their lives again, then the jealous Friendless One kills him. Boy is blamed and sentenced to hang, but T.F.O. confesses at the last minute, so a car carrying her races to beat the governor’s train and stop the execution in time.

Robert “Boy” Harron (star of Griffith’s True Heart Susie, who killed himself in 1920) with Dear Mae Marsh (appeared in small roles in John Ford movies through the mid-60′s):

Babylon is attacked by Persian “Cyrus, world-conqueror” with his sword “forged in the flames of intolerance,” assisted by the jealous high priest. Hilarious moment in the fight when a warrior knocks another’s head clean off – then it happens again, in case you missed it.

In France: The Massacre of St. Bartholemew: a morning army assault on the unsuspecting protestants.

Unsuspecting Prosper (Eugene Pallette!) and Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson, later author of The Pocket Book of Etiquette and The Complete Book of Charm):

After hours and hours of long setup, the movie picks up the pace, cross-cutting between two battles and the final hours before the Boy’s hanging.

Brown Eyes is speared to death while Prosper runs through the city to reach her, then when he curses out the soldiers for killing his beloved, they blow him away with rifles.

Brown Eyes meets spear head:

Every character we’ve met in Babylon is killed, the Mountain Girl shot full of arrows.

But the Boy is spared and reunited with his Dear One, though their missing baby is never mentioned. IMDB says all sorts of alternate versions and deleted scenes exist, one of which shows the baby coming home with them. The site also says that after filming, Babylon was declared a fire hazard, and that Jesus Christ was deported for having sex with 14-year-olds. I need to watch Buster Keaton’s parody (only an hour long) The Three Ages again sometime.

Crazy ending:

People supposedly involved in this movie who appeared in minor roles whom I failed to spot: Tod Browning, Frank Borzage, Douglas Fairbanks and W.S. Van Dyke. Behind the scenes: Erich von Stroheim, Victor Fleming, Billy Bitzer, Jack Conway, Allan Dwan, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes co-author Anita Loos and Howard Hawks head writer Charles Lederer.

Firstly, the last person of the year to die must serve Death driving the phantom carriage for the next year – and time moves slowly after death so one night driving the carriage can seem like a year. So said Holm’s drinking buddy George just over a year ago (the movie points out that George knows such things because he went to college), and now George drives the carriage, passing the reins to Holm.

L-R: David Holm, David Holm, George:

Also a year ago, Edith opened her salvation army branch. Holm was her first guest, and she prayed he’d have a good year, asked him to return next new year’s eve. She stayed up all night patching his disease-ridden coat, catching the tuberculosis that would kill her. He stands up the next morning and tears out all the patches in front of her. So it’s the story of the most selfless angelic woman and the worst, drunkest, cruelest motherfucker (Holm also chases his wife with an axe Shining-style – commentary says probably inspired by a domestic violence scene in Broken Blossoms). Edith’s life (and death) and the phantom carriage both exist primarily to reform Holm, get him to drop the bottle and come back to his family – sort of a grimier It’s a Wonderful Life, a prohibition morality tale.

The whooshy ambient music seemed nice at first, but was perhaps too ambient. From the commentary: “Few, if any, previous films had been enveloped in the darkness of the night the way this film is” – and – “Sjostrom tends to avoid compositions that look too balanced, often shooting into the corners of rooms rather than straight at a back wall.” I appreciated this, as well as the great editing and unusual storytelling, making the movie seem decades more modern than the 1910′s tableau style. Also good acting and fun superimposition effects, overall a hundred times better than the contemporary Murnau film I watched this week. Also came out the same year as Lang’s similarly effect-heavy death-poem Destiny, the year before Haxan, and thirty-six before The Seventh Seal. Remade by Julien Duvivier after twenty years, and again back in Sweden after another twenty.

Holm’s wife vs. Sister Edith:

P. Mayersberg:

The film is surprisingly disconnected from Swedish Lutheranism. It is closer to Bergman’s demonic Hour of the Wolf than to the religious crisis of Winter Light. David’s sudden conversion at the end is not altogether convincing. He is given a last chance by coming back from the dead to save his wife from poisoning herself and their children out of hopeless desperation. But it isn’t God the Father who intervenes. It is his dead predecessor, coachman Georges, who is touched by David’s loving wife and the devoted Edit, who have fought so hard and long to save the man.

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The Phantom Carriage (Criterion Blu-ray)

Lon with his wife and benefactor, just before tragedy struck:

Lon Chaney (same year he did Phantom of the Opera and The Unholy Three) is a brilliant scientist married to sweet Ruth King (in possibly her only surviving film) and sponsored by a wealthy baron (Marc McDermott). Life is good, until McDermott steals Chaney’s ideas and his wife. Chaney is humiliated in front of his peers at a big presentation, slapped by the baron, slapped by his wife, and told to fuck off. Treated like a clown, he joins the circus, becomes an actual clown and creates a hugely successful routine wherein he reenacts his humiliation, getting slapped again and again as he tries to be taken seriously, the other clowns and the crowd roaring laughter at him.

A few years later, attractive young Norma Shearer (The Divorcee) joins the circus, drawing the attention of attractive young John Gilbert (The Merry Widow, The Big Parade) as well as Lon (now, hilariously, only known as “HE”). But slimy old Baron McDermott visits the circus and sees his chance to dump Lon’s wife for a younger girl. He makes a deal with her father to marry Norma, causing HE to take his belated revenge via lion.

Attractive young couple, somewhat overdoing it:

Cairns:

The biggest contortion of credibility is when Chaney confesses his love to Norma Shearer and she thinks he’s joking which, given his performance and the lines we get via intertitle, is impossible to accept as believable in any literal way. Nobody could be that dumb. A modern actor might say the scene is unplayable. But it works, because we get what it’s about (this film is deep but it ain’t exactly subtle, so Chaney even TELLS us what it’s about: “I say serious things and people laugh!”).

The first film MGM released, and the first American picture by Sjöström, lured to Hollywood after the international success of The Phantom Carriage. IMDB suggests a pile of related films – a 1917 Russian version, later Chinese and Argentinian versions, and three 1925 shorts with parody titles.

Transformation:

Buy from Amazon:
He Who Gets Slapped DVD

Features the most depressing opening 10 minutes of any movie ever. “There was a mother who had three sons. There was a war. The mother had three sons no more.” Actors stop, freeze in mannequin poses. A man beats his horse, as a woman beats her children. Laughing gas is released on the battlefield. A man with small round glasses has fits of hilarity. In silhouette, a soldier won’t shoot, drops his gun frozen, gets killed by his commanding officer. A Russian troop train is ambushed by Ukrainians, and after revealing its defenses is permitted to roll along, out of control since the driver has left, crashing, some men having leapt to safety, others not – a dying man’s arm cross-cut with an accordion thrown from the wreck. A woman reads a letter straight into the camera. Horses respond verbally (via intertitles) to shouted commands.

Real dissonant music, and editing to fit the scenes – lingering at the start, then all quick and exciting leading up to the train crash.

Ukrainian workers return to The Arsenal after fighting for years, first in WWI then to free their country from Russia, then as far as I can figure out the storyline, there’s internal conflict to decide whether they will join the Soviet Union. Quoth Wikipedia “The civil war that eventually brought the Soviet government to power devastated Ukraine. It left over 1.5 million people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.”

But wait, Wikipedia can explain the movie’s plot as well.

The film concerns an episode in the Russian Civil War in 1918 in which the Kiev Arsenal January Uprising of workers aided the besieging Bolshevik army against the Ukrainian national Parliament Central Rada who held legal power in Ukraine at the time. Regarded by film scholar Vance Kepley, Jr. as “one of the few Soviet political films which seems even to cast doubt on the morality of violent retribution”, Dovzhenko’s eye for wartime absurdities (for example, an attack on an empty trench) anticipates later pacifist sentiments in films by Jean Renoir and Stanley Kubrick.

Whatever specific historical events it may be illustrating, and wherever exactly it may be taking place, I loved every scene. It’s got all the brilliant camerawork and crazy heightened atmosphere of the great Dura Lex, and more. Closes with a firing squad discovering a Ukrainian worker who cannot be killed, baring his chest to reveal no hidden armor or wounds.

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Arsenal DVD

The hyper-rich Oyster King, Mr. Quaker (Victor Janson, whom I liked so much in this role, I’ll try to forget that he appeared in “the key film in Nazi popular culture” in 1942) is disturbed from smoking a cigar the size of his head by a report that his daughter (Ossi Oswalda, “the German Mary Pickford”) has torn up her room upon hearing that the Shoe-Cream King’s daughter has married a prince, so Quaker hires the local matchmaker to procure a prince.

Handsome Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke, title star of The Grand Duke’s Finances) lives in a ramshackle apartment with his roommate/assistant, bald jokester Josef (Julius Falkenstein of Dr. Mabuse The Gambler, The Haunted Castle). The matchmaker pays a call, and the prince sends Josef to check out the girl. But she’s in a hurry, marries Josef immediately, and holds a wedding banquet (Quaker: “Excuse me for introducing you to my son-in-law”). A split-screen “foxtrot epidemic” ensues (above) and Josef gets giddily drunk, while Nucki goes out drinking with his friends. This ends with my favorite shot in the movie, the group staggering down the road, depositing a man on each bench along the path.

Nucki stumbles blindly into “the multi-millionaires’ daughters’ association against dipsomania” (alcoholism) where he’s beaten up by Ossi, who falls for him and takes him home. It’s a setup for heartbreak, since Ossi is in love with a man who isn’t her husband, but then Josef says he got married in the prince’s name so the other two rush off to bed together.

Something like Lubitsch’s 30th movie (they were prolific back then), released a decade earlier than anything else I’ve seen by him.

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The Oyster Princess DVD

It was all very important at the time, a film portrayal of recent political upset and revolution, but with my lack of background in Russian history, most of the movie seems a blur of dates and places and crowds, the significance of most scenes lost, and very few of the alarmingly great compositions of other Eisenstein films. There’s some of the dramatic editing of course – when the crowd is fired upon it seems like single-frame edits, unreal. I don’t think Trotsky comes off well in the end. At least I managed to get used to the unnecessary sound effects all over the DVD.

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October DVD

It’s not as plotless as the Criterion box’s commentaries and docs led me to believe – tells a story, just does it in an unhurried, lingering way. A cowardly young man, a bitter young woman and a helpless child live on the docks, spend their days full of ennui watching a dredge dig the same hole day in and day out, chased around by the dredge workers. One day they up and decide to leave for the city together, after seeing a cat. Take it away, intertitles: “The black cat, like an evil spirit, warned the three nobodies to leave the dredge before the thundering mud could bury their souls.”

My favorite title upon their arrival: “Man’s worst enemy is man. A city is full of enemies.” Some guy who wears lipstick lets them stay at his place for free, knowing that the boy is too stupid to find a job and planning to whore out the girl when the three get too hungry and hopeless. At least I think that’s his plan – things like that used to go unspoken in movies.

But all the makeshift family seems to do is sit on the couch and stare at the walls. Since they expend no energy, they don’t get hungry very fast, so the impatient lipstick man decides to “take her out for a ride in the country and let romance do a little work.” His idea of the country is a depressing little field next to the highway, where he tries to win her trust by beating up the little kid. The young man (“the boy” in the titles) finally asserts himself. “The man was only the victim. The boy was not beating him. He was conquering the harbor, the city, the mud – all the forces that had held him down, and most of all his own cowardly self.”

Horned Lipstick Man:

The titles beam about this moral victory! “Behold! They have fought and won a mighty battle – over themselves! It isn’t conditions, nor is it environment – our faith controls our lives!” The trio walks literally into the sunset, probably falling down and starving to death once out of camera range.

M. Gebert wrote an excellent article about early Sternberg:

Contrary to the usual Hollywood picture of the plucky poor, all must have felt like a slap from something utterly new in 1925. It certainly spawned a fair number of followers— when Lillian Gish gets a face full of wind, when James Murray’s dreams are buried in the crowd, when a Man thinks of drowning his wife for A Woman From the City, you can see how The Salvation Hunters helped shape Hollywood’s idea of what an artistic drama was
…
In between [Salvation Hunters and Underworld] is the famous unseen and lost film, The Sea Gull. We will presumably never know whether Chaplin suppressed it because he was jealous of how good it was, or because it was unreleasable crap. But I have my suspicions; many independent filmmakers have used their second, better-financed film to essentially remake their first film, much more self-indulgently and with a belief in their own genius inflated well beyond reality.

I thought this was quite good for ’25, it just didn’t make me leap out of my seat like Underworld did. I guess now I’ve seen all the silent Sternberg movies that are known to survive. Some of his other lost films include Exquisite Sinner (pre-Underworld, taken out of Sternberg’s hands by the studio after shooting) The Drag Net (after The Last Command) and The Case of Lena Smith (after Docks of New York). On to the talking pictures.

I don’t get the organizational structure here, but “chairman” Hans (Sergei Komarov of The End of St. Petersburg) with two “shareholders” (blonde-bearded Dutchy and black-bearded Harky) are out in the Yukon mining for gold – unsuccessfully, for the most part, along with Hans’s English wife Edith (Aleksandra Khokhlova of earlier Kuleshov Collective film Mr. West) and mustachioed Irishman (proven by fact that he spends his free time playing flutes and dancing jigs) Michael Dennin (Vladimir Fogel, the hero of Chess Fever).

Based on “The Unexpected” by Jack London. London’s stories made for extremely popular film adaptations from 1908 to 1930 – and he lived to 1916, so may have seen some of them. I suppose people back then enjoyed watching lone, underprepared hikers crash through the ice then slowly freeze to death. This group, however, is well stocked for the weather, and just as they were giving up on their present location, Dennin finds a cache of gold. Unfortunately, he makes up for this by developing a dark jealous rage and deciding to kill everybody. He blows away both the shareholders before Hans takes him down.

Edith is upset:

Now the surviving couple have to bury their partners (in a raging storm) then keep guard over Dennin for a whole season until the Law arrives, because Edith insists they not take revenge into their own hands. But Dennin is insane and destructive (he sets the bed on fire during a flood), and Edith seems to fall further into a religious fervor as they all suffer from cabin fever. This is the bulk of the movie’s runtime, the three of them stewing wordlessly in the cabin. It plays very much like a horror film. Kuleshov shows off his pioneering editing techniques, but also some great camerawork, like this post-Nosferatu hand shadow reaching for the gold.

Eventually the couple appoint themselves officials of the Law, give Dennin a British-style trial, sentence him to be hanged, then carry out the execution on a nice spring day. Dennin appears dramatically in their doorway that night amidst a raging storm – a ghost, a shared delusion or something else?

The trial, watched over by a painting of the Queen:

Nice day for a hanging:

I liked the rumbly electronic score by Franz Reisecker, though it provides some weird moments – while Dennin is playing his Irish flute music, the music we hear is despairingly atonal.