by ·Comments Off on Early films by Ken Jacobs

Orchard Street (1955)

Doc with good color, up and down a short NYC commercial street, staring at the shops and the workers and patrons. Pretty wonderful. Watching some Varda films this week, so this brings Daguerrotypes to mind. These are silent so I’m testing my new music mix, had to cut some Orbital.

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The Whirled (1961/63)

Different unreleased segments stitched together. In the first couple, Jack Smith prances through the streets of NYC. This has sound, but it’s generic silent movie music, so I thought it would be funnier to watch Jack prance to the new Nine Inch Nails Tron soundtrack. Then we get filmed-off-the-TV footage from when Ken appeared on game show Play Your Hunch along with Carolee Schneeman. Then Jack prances through a graveyard.

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Window (1964)

Both the Les Rhinoceros and the LCD Soundsystem songs that shuffle chose were inappropriately high-energy for this camera test looking at and through a building’s window and other materials (mirrors and rainy tarp).

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Blonde Cobra (1960/63)

We’ve reached Peak Jack Smith, as Ken films Jack doing face/body antics and also records Jack on an audio commentary doing voice/speech antics. “Mother, mother, mooootheeerrrrr.” Too much improv nonsense over black leader, I’ll be glad to be finished with Jack for a while. “What went wrong?!”

by ·Comments Off on A Woman of Paris (1923, Charles Chaplin)

Parents in these movies are all stern, stiff and disapproving, eagerly disowning their kids for dating somebody. Jean’s dad drops dead rather than say goodbye. When Jean doesn’t show at the station due to his dead father, Edna gets on the train and goes to Paris without him. A year later she’s a rich society chick, kept in jewelry and hats by Adolphe Menjou, when Jean shows up to act all righteous then lose her yet again. After a defeated Jean shoots himself, Edna does what all penitent rich women do: open an orphanage.

Adolphe and Edna:

After meeting up again Jean is hired to paint Edna:

I know Chaplin wrote original music for this but I ran my silent movie playlist instead, and heard Cluster, Takako Minekawa, Sly/Family Stone, Shigeru Umebayashi, London Sinfonietta, Sir Richard Bishop, Seefeel, Jacob Mann, Sun Ra, Hania Rani, Squarepusher, Neu, Cyro Baptista, Bar Kokhba, Matmos, bunch of Zorn Book of Angels tracks. Good acting, good cast, good final scene – it seems like Chaplin was determined to prove himself in an area outside his wheelhouse, and unlike Polanski he succeeded.

by ·Comments Off on Orphans of the Storm (1922, D.W. Griffith)

I was kinda dreading this, but after putting it off for a couple months I hit on a music plan, put a bunch of not-terribly fast/aggressive instrumental albums in a folder, hit shuffle, and it was perfect. Righteous story of poor girl and her blind sister who come to the cruel city and get kicked around until the French Revolution arrives and solves everything. A couple mistaken identities and a pile of blustery men later, all is well.

L-R: Gishes Dorothy and Lillian

by ·Comments Off on Leaves From Satan’s Book (1921, Carl Dreyer)

Satan and Judas:

The Spanish Inquisition:

French Revolution:

Russian-occupied Finland:

A Finn girl named Siri kills herself rather than fall into Russian hands, and this sacrifice releases Satan from his thousand-year punishment. Movie was pretty good, but I had an incredible time watching it while blasting the latest albums by:

    Ikue Mori
    Ches Smith
    Kris Davis Trio

by ·Comments Off on Way Down East (1920, D.W. Griffith)

The DVD has a music score, but in interviews towards the end of his life DW Griffith said he intended for this film to play in sync with Coil’s The Golden Hare With a Voice of Silver. Despite my issues with Coil soundtracks in the past this worked out nicely, with a barn dance set to “The Anal Staircase” a special highlight.

A Lillian Gish desperation spotlight – she’s betrayed by a man who pretends to marry her, then after her baby dies she moves to another town to start over, but not far enough away from the local busybodies. Now handsome Richard Barthelmess (disgraced flyer of Only Angels Have Wings) is falling for her, and the heel is after Richard’s ex-girl Kate, who is beloved by comic-relief butterfly professor Creighton Hale (The Cat and the Canary). It all works out, ending in an absurd triple wedding.

The Prof, Kate, and hat-rack cow:

Rightly known for its climax, when Gish runs into the frozen wilderness and passes out on an icy river which breaks into chunks heading for a waterfall until daredevil Richard rescues her, this being before stunt doubles had been invented. An editing quirk I noticed throughout: we’ll see a character action in a medium shot then it will cut to a wide shot and we’ll see the same action again, as if whenever our perspective pulls back we have to rewind a couple seconds.

Gish finally fingers the heel:

by ·Comments Off on Chaplin’s First Nationals (1919-1922)

After the Essanays and the Mutuals…

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A Day’s Pleasure

Family vacation, but the family fades into the background as Charlie (1) tries to start the car, (2) fights with a big dude on a bouncy boat, (3) argues with an intersection traffic cop. I heard about three seconds of the intended music then switched over to Hesitation Marks.

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Sunnyside

A couple good jokes (sending his girl’s annoying brother to play in traffic blindfolded) but mostly plotty, as hotel odd-jobsman loses his girl to a city slicker then finds out he’d been dreaming the whole episode.

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The Idle Class

Two Charlies – the idle rich drunk neglecting his lovely wife Edna, and the golfing tramp who stumbles into a costume ball where everyone thinks he’s the husband, who is stuck inside his armor costume. The golfer whom Tramp Charlie has been antagonizing turns out to be Edna’s father. Lotta asses get kicked.

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Pay Day

The best of this batch, with great elevator timing and reverse brick-tossing gags. Episodic like the others, he works in construction, takes a lunch break, goes out drinking with the boys, can’t catch a bus, finally makes it home to his horrible wife Phyllis Allen. Edna barely appears, but Foreman Mack Swain played her dad in this and The Idle Class.

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The other three First National shorts were rounded up in The Chaplin Revue, then he got into features with The Kid and never looked back.

by ·Comments Off on Happer’s Comet (2022, Tyler Taormina)

Wordless nighttime portrait of a restless town. Opens with rotting corn, ends with a rollerskate couple making love in the cornfield. An hour-long pillow-shot between Ham on Rye and the new Christmas Eve thing.

by ·Comments Off on The Doll (1919, Ernst Lubitsch)

Closeted heir marries an AI, relevant again 105 years later. He intends to, anyway, but the robot inventor’s assistant (a kid, the funniest character and best actor, who keeps trying to kill himself by drinking paint) busts the doll, and the inventor’s daughter covers by pretending to be the heir’s sex robot until they can repair it. Everything is gleefully artificial – the costumes and sets and acting all preposterous. I didn’t jibe with the organ soundtrack on the blu-ray, so – per the director’s original intent – I put on Nine Inch Nails Hesitation Marks as the soundtrack. I find myself playing Hesitation Marks all the time lately, Lubitsch knows why.

by ·Comments Off on A Couple Keatons and a Tower

Convict 13 (1920)

Buster goes from incompetent golfer to escaped prisoner to prison guard via costume changes. He foils a one-off super-violent prisoner and a full-scale riot using makeshift weapons. More people get killed or injured by sledgehammers in this than in any other movie. His girl is the warden’s daughter, at least until he wakes up, the whole prison stint a dozing golfer’s dream. Running down the street from a horde of cops is always funny, as is the painter/bench bit.

When you are beginning to suspect that Joe Roberts is behind you:

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Hard Luck (1921)

These made a good double feature – from trying not to get hanged to trying to hang himself. Unemployed and suicidal (I cannot relate), Buster stumbles into a gig catching armadillos for the zoo. He never finds one – we get increasingly large fishes, a fox, some horse stunts, and Buster tied to a bear. As all movies must, it ends with him rescuing a woman from bandits. Pretty good shotgun shells-in-the-fire gags.

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The Black Tower (1987, John Smith)

Something completely different: male narrator is haunted by a tower appearing in all different parts of the city. He tries not going outside anymore, living on snacks from the passing ice cream van, then is hospitalized, then while recovering in the country he sees the tower again, walks up and steps inside. Story starts again with a female narrator who sees the tower while visiting his grave. Calm movie with various tricks and playing around, narrating over color fields later revealed to be closeups on household objects, editing back and forth in time to make buildings re/disappear, or masking the image so passing cars are swallowed by a mid-frame tree.