Update to Research Page and to my Doctorate

I’ve updated the research page on this site with relevant links to latest research activity and to samples of my doctorate (sample of first 16 pages, bibliography) which I’m happy to say I successfully defended last month: it talks of hokum, ballyhoo, and the pleasures of silent cinema….

You need to contact me for the whole dissertation (right now it’s in French only, sorry). Here’s the official summary in English:

In the 1920s, as Hollywood cinema is undergoing industrial institutionalization, critical and advertising discourses maintain active a spectatorial pleasure derived from the sensational presence of reality in fiction films. The notion of « realism » used in those discourses is a « cluster concept » aiming on the one hand to derive cinema’s legitimacy from the serious purpose of realistic arts, and on the other to emphasize the relationship between film and the reality of on location or studio shooting, of the manufacturing of films, and of the tricks behind the realistic illusion. Those discourses therefore reveal all that is real in how fiction works in films and support a realistic project to construct an active and non-illusionistic spectatorial gaze that is invited to analyze film as an artifical illusion. These discourses are extended to spectators’ daily life through advertising practices that aim to create a playful space of reception where reality and romance merge in circus-inspired ballyhoo, in lobby decorations, and in on-stage prologues before, or during, the film. This realistic gaze developped by such discourses and practices allows us to analyze the reception of Hollywood silent films as a playful and participative moment. Aiming to awaken spectators’ senses and sharpen their attention, such discourses and practices allow us to raise the question of a Hollywood realism that would aim to create an active, conscious and critical game with the filmic illusion.

The Reel Journal 1925-1926

Just stumbled across this online version of the The Reel Journal (1926), self-described as “The Film Trade Paper of The SouthWest”, and which seems heavy on the Kansas area. Of course, one could always go to boxoffice.com, since that’s the name under which this magazine is published today: its vault is free of charge and copies can be PDF downloaded.

Directors at home

(Photoplay, may 1927)

Cinema as exhibition excitement

The boys and girls over at Secret Cinema have got it exactly right: they’re offering modern audiences a chance to get excited once more about going to the cinema — whether or not the film appeals. Their next event is about California classics,

While you’re at it, check out some of their videos on their website for explanations behind the events and for the Red Shoes event where the audience does not even know what the film is going to be:

That is exactly the sense of excitement that my dissertation is trying to reconstruct, with theoretical implications about what this means for the art of cinema. Glad to hear this sense of the multimedia pleasures of cinema exhibition is still alive.

Lost 1924 Hitchcock film found in New Zealand

Always good news. From the people that brought us Ford’s 1927 Upstream. What more is there in those vaults ?

The acclaimed director was 24 when he worked on what was billed as a “wild, atmospheric melodrama” starring actress Betty Compson as twin sisters, one angelic and the other “without a soul”. He was credited as assistant director and also wrote the scenario, designed the sets and edited the footage. At the time silent Hollywood films were distributed worldwide and, while many prints were discarded and lost in the US, others survived abroad where they were kept after runs in cinemas had finished. The White Shadow owes its survival to Jack Murtagh, a projectionist in the provincial New Zealand town of Hastings, who was regarded as an eccentric collector of films, cigarette cards, stamps and coins. After his death in 1989 Mr Murtagh’s private collection of highly flammable nitrate film prints was sent for safekeeping to the national archives in Wellington by his grandson Tony Osborne.

dialogue balloons – the cartoon take

An addition to the still ongoing series on words on the image theme we have here at flycz: the cartoon version. This is an example from Bobby Bumps, the 1916-1919 cartoon series from Bray studios (thanks to the Bray Animation Project) :

A simple solution to the inter-title problem, in line with other cartoon-based methods of commenting and orienting the action on screen used widely at the time — I’m thinking of the question or exclamation marks so frequent in more famous Felix the Cat series, or the literal eye-line used also in this same Bobby Bumps :

What’s odd is that earlier in that Bobby Bumps usual inter-titles are indeed used :

Does this incoherence reflect an ambiguous positioning of American cinema’s aesthetics circa the late 1910s as regards the inter-title issue and the whole question of allowing words to appear on the image ? Not that words on the image disappear later in the 1920s either, as we’ve started to document on this website (see here for a live-action example, there for another, later, cartoon example).

Mute Spectacles

We know the filiation : movies share exhibition space with vaudeville (and chatauquas, visiting circuses and fairs, and so on)  in the early years of the 2oth century, and this is how they become popular.

Here’s another additional link : mute spectacles. This is what the Larousse entry about popular French theater of the 19th century (“Théâtre de Boulevard”) says about them :

Cependant, la naissance effective du théâtre de boulevard peut être datée du décret de Napoléon I^erconcernant les théâtres (8 juin 1806).

Mimes et pantomimes

L’empereur, qui méprisait la comédie et le drame, voulait ressusciter un grand théâtre tragique, d’inspiration héroïque et apologétique ; par ailleurs, le théâtre populaire lui semblait susceptible de devenir un instrument de subversion. Par ce décret, les théâtres principaux, la Comédie-Française et l’Opéra, sont consacrés à un art impérial officiel, tandis que les théâtres secondaires : Vaudeville, Variétés, Ambigu-Comique, Gaîté, etc., sont voués à des spectacles muets, c’est-à-dire à la pantomime, au ballet, aux numéros des acrobates et des jongleurs. Ce décret entraîna la désaffection des salles officielles, et de leurs ennuyeuses tragédies néoclassiques, par le grand public qui reflua rapidement vers le boulevard.

Après la chute de l’Empire, les spectacles muets continuent à avoir la faveur du public : on adapteHamlet en pantomime (1816) et Othello en ballet (1818). En 1817, les spectateurs des Funambules découvrent le mime Jean-Gaspard Baptiste Deburau, qui devient un célèbre Pierrot. Le mouvement prime encore la parole : Frédérick Lemaître lui-même, débutant en 1816, fait son entrée sur scène en marchant sur les mains.

Vers un théâtre des mots

À ce théâtre muet, gestuel et direct, succède, sous la seconde Restauration, un théâtre fondé sur le mot et les situations ; c’est, d’une part, le mélodrame, avec les pièces de Pixérécourt, de Caignez, de Ducange ; d’autre part, le vaudeville.

Mute spectacles were inherited all the way from Giovanni Servandoni’s 18th century spectacles of sets in movement to tell a story through décor only. Note how they survive in unofficial, secondary, underground dramatic formats in France’s early 19th century. Cinema piggybacks on existing popular, if unapproved, cultural forms: vaudeville, the melodrama, and mute shows. 

SERCIA’s Film Journal

Welcome to Film Journal, SERCIA’s online journal. The first volume is available now, on “Hybridity, borders and margins in English-Speaking cinemas”. Two of the contributions deal directly with the issue of miscegenation in early Griffith and DeMille works, while a third looks at prostitutes in early talkies.

SERCIA has an upcoming conference in september in Bath for those who are nearby…Ken Loach will be visiting

Silent Films Today

Am starting a new series today about silent films made today. The list is there, and I’ll be adding titles as I find more information. I’d love to have you people contribute too, so we can make this an exhaustive resource of films made today as silent movies. The goal would be, indeed, to understand what silent film aesthetics are, what they are understood to be today, and whether there’s more that could be done with it.

I’d define a silent film as a film that has no limit on the world it represents, but that does not offer spoken dialogues. Music, foley, sound effects can be recorded or not, what matters is the absence of spoken dialogues, with or without intertitles.

I’ve included on that list films that are either in full, or in part, silent as per the above definition, made in the last 30 years or so.

I will post my reviews and analyses of those films here as I get to see them and have the time to write about them. Hypotheses to be confirmed :

• modern silents tend to be about the past, as if silent cinema could only represent the world of the 1910s/1920s — the anachronistic effect of taking away spoken dialogues being overwhelming, aesthetically speaking, and forcing those films towards a nostalgic representation;
• modern silents tend to be about slapstick, either because the medium is identified today with slapstick comedians, or because the medium is best adapted to visual jokes.
• modern silents are heavy on the paranormal stuff, à la Expressionism. This because the overwhelming sense is that taking sound away is today perceived as un-natural.

Yes, the line of inquiry here is : is it possible today to have silent film aesthetics as a possible aesthetic alternative to filmically speak about the world around us — an alternative just as modern and vibrant and complex as sound color film ?

To be continued…

This is pantomime ?

An example of silent film acting, middle-of-the-road mainstream light comedy-drama set in contemporary surroundings: from The Show Off (1926) :

Three short shots, with a range of feelings expressed, from physical exhaustion (with some leftover, marginal hope that marital life will still turn out ok, in the non-aggressive, little-girl acceptance of exhaustion) to a mother’s care and worry. None of it achieved through rolling eyes or outrageous pantomime as usual clichés would have it. Incidentally, also an example of intertitles that complement meaning and should not be necessarily avoided. Time to accept US silent cinema for the complete artform that it was and stop grading it according to artsy concepts in vogue, if at all, in other silent cinema critical apparatus (apparati?).