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.
Tag: silent
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.
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.
Jean Painleve shorts
The Fourth Dimension (1936)
Right after I watch the movie Deja Vu there’s a “Deja Vu” title card in It’s Not Me, then the first Painleve film I find is showing time as an image flipbook and imagining that higher-dimensional beings can change pages at will. Pretty dry science film but it’s fun that scientists have always been excited about time travel.
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The Octopus (1927)
Pretty random assortment of live and dead octopus…
Great doc, because octupusus are great.
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Sea Urchins (1929)
More cool sea creatures which become increasingly disturbing as you learn more about them, zooming into their spiny surface to discover a horrid living forest of waggling suckers and claws
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Daphnia (1928)
Nothing cool or cute about the microshrimp “water fleas,” ghastly transparent insectoid monsters, silently battling their nemesis The Hydra by the million in every lake and pond.
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Freshwater Assassins (1947)
This one has sound – enjoy some swinging horn jazz while underwater insects munch on even smaller insects, 24 minutes of weird shrimpies chowing down on each other.
The Lodger (1927, Alfred Hitchcock)
There’s a serial killer murdering the blondes of London, but the movie is more concerned with showing us all the media technologies of the time (telegraph, newspaper, radio, electric billboards). Meanwhile after a performance of “Golden Curls,” the few performers who weren’t wearing wigs are worried about their walk home. Good music by Neil Brand, and I love the construction paper graphics on the intertitles.
Ivor Novello arrives, pale and scarved, at a boarding house, acting like a dramatic ghost while renting a room, and is assumed to be the killer so everything he picks up is implied to be a possible murder weapon. He likes local girl Daisy, which annoys her hanger-on Joe. First the landlady then the cops go snooping through Ivor’s stuff, then the real killer is caught off-camera but not before jealous Joe gets an angry mob to beat Ivor half to death.
Killer calling card:
British people must spend 15% of their day standing in shocked silence after something mildly disagreeable happened. Novello’s legacy: he would be portrayed ninety-some years later by the guy who also played young Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia 2.
POV: Ivor Novello wants to kiss you
DW Griffith shorts (1909-1913)
The Unchanging Sea (1910)
Multi-generational romance and amnesiac drama. The actors are phony from the second they step onscreen, but there are long shots of people looking away from camera staring at the sea, trying to match the tone of the poem they’re adapting, which makes up for the rest. The not-actually-widow is the future Mrs. Griffith, their daughter grows up to be Mary Pickford.
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A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909)
The reformation comes from taking his daughter to a play where he sees himself in the lead character – a drunk guy with enabler friends who’s violent with his family. The spectator returns home and vows to give up liquor immediately, instead smoking a giant pipe in the face of his young child. This couple is the same actors as the fishing couple, sans Pickford.
getting really into the play:
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The Mountaineer’s Honor (1909)
Is he a mountaineer because he wears high boots with his suit and tie? That’s no kind of costume to go mountaineering in. Pickford is playing teenaged, sneaking away from family gatherings to hang out with this guy. Her brother chases the guy into town, shoots him and some passer-by. The law chases the brother to the house, catches him, says he’ll be hanged, so mum shoots her son dead (death before dishonor). Continuity between shots is maintained by having actors always point where they came from, then point where they’re going next.
autographed still of Pickford pointing to where she’s going next:
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Enoch Arden (1911)
Enoch and Annie go home after their wedding, a title card says “later” and now they have three kids. Enoch goes to sea and might never return. Movie gets a lotta mileage out of people standing on the beach in front of crashing waves. Homely Philip pines after Annie and she finally agrees to marry him after Enoch has been lost at sea for a decade, but we’ve seen The Unchanging Sea and know that anything is possible. Sure enough, Enoch gets home after years on a desert island, sees his wife with Philip, then crawls away and dies. Remade a few years later with Lillian Gish (and Griffith in the cast), then twice in 1940, as Too Many Husbands and My Favorite Wife.
Island Enoch:
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The Painted Lady (1912)
More like the Unpainted Lady, our heroine refuses to wear makeup to impress the boys, so she’s unpopular. When some mustache guy finally goes for her, he was apparently only trying to get to her whitebeard father’s money, and she shoots him when he breaks into the house. In the aftermath, she does put on makeup, goes mad, and dies, not necessarily in that order. She was Blanche Sweet, and her dad was later in a Bela Lugosi movie called Murder by Television.
ice cream festival of wicked temptation:
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The Mothering Heart (1913)
Griffith’s concerns seem entirely domestic in these movies. Men go off to work – work where? Doing what? It doesn’t matter. Lillian Gish’s husband gets rich, somehow, and they start going to awful rich-person gathering places, where The Idle Woman starts pursuing the husband. Lillian catches on to the shenanigans and leaves him, goes to her mom’s and has a baby, which gets sick and dies. Meanwhile, The Idle Woman tires of the husband/dad and picks up a new guy. What’s the moral here?
Segundo de Chomón shorts (1906-1908)
I’ve got no handy documentary on Chomon like I did with Alice Guy, just watching some films. I’d only previously seen The Golden Beetle – these all turned out to be less colorful and more coherent.
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Electric Current (1906)
Pretty good one-minute gag film. A couple steals from the grocer, has a picnic then goes back for more, but the grocer has rigged his wares to the electric lights. When they grab the food they’re paralyzed from electricity – and so are the cops who arrive to arrest the thieves, so they arrest the grocer instead.
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Kiriki, Japanese Acrobats (1907)
Splendid gravity-defying stunts, using the same which-way-is-up technique as Massive Attack’s “Protection” video. The actors really sell it, trembling and straining in their positions.
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En Avant La Musique (1907)
If we’re meant to believe that elite Japanese acrobats have developed incredible skills of strength and balance, this one tosses believability out the window. Just a Mr. B Natural-type conductor transforming the musicians into musical notation and miniaturized song-slaves.
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The Diabolical Pickpocket (1908)
A liquid-metal T-1000 criminal escapes two clueless cops by making a mockery of spacetime physics.
Looks like this was part of a series about uncatchable thieves in checkered suits, along with The Invisible Thief and Slippery Jim.
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The Electric Hotel (1908)
Before people knew what electricity could do, this imagines a fully automated hotel. Guests get a small electric switchboard and accompanying instruction manual. Each switch causes a whirl of stop-motion – shoe-shining, hair-cutting, suitcase-unpacking. One writes letters home using AI. I was waiting for something to go comically, catastrophically wrong, but all the tech works properly, until a drunken basement employee starts throwing switches haphazardly and all the hotel’s objects violently revolt against their masters.
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Legend of a Ghost (1908)
At 14 minutes this is over twice the length of the others, a de Chomon epic. Old fashioned set building and fireworks create a hellscape of dancing demons, or maybe tortured souls, or reveling partiers – in the cavernous set I can’t make out faces. Yeah, it’s either a Halloween parade float or the beginning of the apocalypse, maybe the point is not to know. Then we got hula-girl vikings in a Meliesian underwater scene? An anarchist blows up the parade float and we’re sent to heaven for a minute. It’s almost halfway through the movie before the grim reaper provides some transformative camera tricks, then back to cavorting with fireworks and costumes. The death parade reaches its cavernous destination and the participants celebrate with a scythe dance (The Seventh Seal was a remake of this). But the movie’s not over – the viking frog queen’s servants do an involved dance with the lizard people, layers upon layers. Morning comes and everyone lays dead, except for Death Himself, who transforms into a fancyman. Certainly more expensive than the shorter films, not necessarily more fun to watch.
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018, Pamela Green)
A pure info-dump doc – I took no pleasure in watching, though I instantly flagged the narrator as Jodie Foster. Very busy visuals, the audio chopped half to death. I noted one interview with especially yucky sound editing: Pamela Green… the movie’s own director! Just re-record! Motion graphics, desktop cinema stuff and zoom calls. I learned what I needed to know about Alice, anyway – she hired both Lois Weber and Louis Feuillade. She had her own studio until Edison’s patent racket drove the filmmaking world from NJ to CA. Studio fire, divorce, and investment problems all hit at once in 1918, ending her cinema career. Gotta give it up for the outstanding location scout sequence where they superimpose her films onto their present day locations, and good work weaving her post-career 1920s-40s correspondences with the filmmaker digging up a 1957 interview.
Then I attempted to enjoy some Alice Guy films…
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Falling Leaves (1912)
String music by Tamar Muskal was far more engaging than the movie, a standard-looking drama with its one famous plot point, young girl tying leaves onto the trees after hearing her sister will be dead of consumption before the leaves have fallen. A passerby sees this behavior and announces the following.
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Cupid and the Comet (1911)
A silly crossdressing comedy, everyone gesticulating wildly. The doc got its title from Alice Guy’s studio motto: “Be Natural” – but there’s none of that here.
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The Consequences of Feminism (1906)
Comedy portraying a woke society where women hang out and drink and are sexual predators while the men iron and watch the children and make themselves pretty. Big modern music by Max Knoth, I liked it.
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A Story Well Spun (1906)
Dude crawls into a barrel and a prankster pushes it downhill, causing much chaos. Later remade as 2000 Maniacs. Hope the editor got in trouble for leaving in those couple frames of the stagehand crouching behind the barrel.
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On the Barricade (1907)
The barricade doesn’t hold for two seconds before the military run right over it and execute its constructors. Some kid who excitedly joined the battle claims he’s not a combatant, the soldiers let him go home, then he guiltily returns ands demands to be executed, but his mom protests and he’s spared a second time, how embarrassing. Somewhat shorter than the other movie I’ve seen about the Paris Commune.
Hotel Monterey (1972, Chantal Akerman)
After reading Beatrice Loayza’s essay for the new box set, I had to watch an Akerman movie. But I cannot tolerate silence in a home screening, so, per the artist’s original intent, I made a playlist with Colleen then Titan to Tachyons then Tomeka Reid Quartet.
Static camera, hanging around in the hotel lobby and hallways and especially elevators, even getting into a couple rooms. Then back to the hallways… long static takes of hallways. Then movement! Dolly up a hallway, looking out the window at NYC, impressive jump cut from night to day, back up and down the hallway. Movie ends on the roof, slow rotation looking out at the city, the movement reminding of La Chambre. Akerman had moved to NYC and made these films with DP Babette Mangolte, both artists influenced by Michael Snow, then Mangolte shot Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew the following year.