US 1920s Film Magazines Online

This is a list of US silent film magazines that you may read online through Googlebooks:

“The Aristocrat of motion picture magazines”: Photoplay

• vol. 10, June 1916
• vol 11, mars 1917
• vol. 13-14, dec.1917
• vol. 18-20, june 1920

“Service to Exhibitors”: Motion Picture News

• vol. 20-24, nov. 1919

Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers

• no. 3, 1916
• no. 4, 1917
• no. 10-11, 1920
• no. 12-13, 1921
• no. 14-15, 1922

8000 AND ONE !!

8001 hits to FLYCZ ! Now I’m impressed…This started as just a way to store thoughts and tidbits that I didn’t want to lose yet could not find a place to store. Half-baked cookies so to speak.Yet some 400 of you out there, come what may, visit this site every month. I realize that by Internet standard 8000 hits is a paltry, miserable figure, yet I’m impressed. And I’d be very curious to know what you have found of interest on this site, and where you think I could improve things.

(hint: don’t even try to tell me to get the site more organized, that’s a dead end right there)

As it is, the site is taking a back seat these days as I’m furiously finishing writing my dissertation (am doing 10 pages a day, feeling pretty good about it too). But I’ll be back posting soon you just wait and see.

Actually no, don’t just wait and see Take this as your opportunity to speak up and let me know about your experience here at FLYCZ.

And thanks for all those visits !!

Titles and images on a silent image

Continuing this ongoing series dealing with the separation of written words and images (click on the intertitle tag below in the “What’s On” section). Was alerted today (by the resourceful Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment) to this passage in Lescarboura’s manuel on motion picture techniques first published in 1919:

A considerable amount of thought must be devoted to the audence’s understanding of the picture. The center of interest in a cartoon must always be played up prominently by subduing other features. For instance, if one of the characters throws a missile, it is necessary that there be no further movement of his arm after the missile begins to travel across the picture. The character–and every other character in the drawing, for that matter–must remain absolutely rigid so that the attention of the audience will not be distracted from the missile which at that moement is the center of interest. Then again, when a character is made to speak by the introduction of what is known as a “balloon” within which is hand lettering, there must be no motion in the cartoon until the audience has had time to read the legend which then disappears. (306)

Lescarboura is here talking about animation technique, an example of which could be this 1920 Mutt and Jeff cartoon (Mutt and Jeff Go on Strike) recently restored by a cooperation between the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and the National Film Preservation Foundation, and which you can see online for free (also available on the same site, an alluring trailer for the 1922 Sin Woman in which she almost disrobes…need I say more?). But I’m tempted to apply his reasoning to the apparent ban (not always respected, as I’ve shown in the above-mentionned series, but quite wide-spread anyway) on mixing titles with moving images in live features: words flashed would be too distracting (though distraction is not the taboo that some would have us believe in a Hollywood film…but I’m getting ahead of myself).

For curiosity’s sake, I’d like to read what Lescarboura thought of that 1920 experiment….

ANDERSON Mark Lynn (2008)

ANDERSON Mark Lynn. “Taking liberties: The Payne Fund Studies and the Creation of the Media Expert”, in GRIEVESON Lee, et WASSON Haidee éds. Inventing Film Studies. Durham, Londres : Duke University Press, 2008, p. 38-66

Revient sur 2 figures des Payne Fund Studies : Frederick Thrasher et Paul Cressey. Les deux sont des diplômés de l’université de Chicago où l’influence de Münsterberg est importante dans les cours de sociologie, notamment sa conclusion en 1916 sur le pouvoir de suggestion du cinéma (pas forcément en mal d’ailleurs). L’école de sociologie de Chicago regarde le domaine urbain à la recherche des “zones intersticielles” = zones qui échappent à l’organisation sociale. Puisque dans cette vue darwinienne le changement social est dû à un processus de croissance où la désorganisation est nécessaire à l’organisation sociale. D’où l’étude des zones désorganisées: danses, cinéma, quartiers pauvres, etc. Alors que leurs études (notamment Cressley) montrent une remarquable capacité à se noyer dans l’anonymat des foules et à reprendre les concepts fournis par leur observation, l’objectif reste néanmoins didactique et normatif : comment réglementer ce qui ne l’est pas encore. Ainsi ces études créent l’expert en études des média (media expert) : celui qui aura analysé la “situation totale” empiriquement et sera donc l’autorité en vue d’une réforme. Reste que ces sociologues sont les premiers à ancrer le cinéma dans les études universitaires (cours de Thrasher à NYU en 35-36), même si leur voie (sociologique) va être rapidement oubliée au profit d’études textuelles du cinéma.

projection speeds

That other little pesky problem of silent film exhibition. Here’s the situation from 1923 :

At the time of writing there is a rumour of action about to be taken both by Northern Licensing Justices and by the Council of the Kinematograph Renters’ Society to prevent film being shown at speeds greater than 15 minutes to the 1,000 ft (equivalent to just under eighteen picture shifts a second). Meanwhile, present average projection speed is more like 12 to 13 minutes for the 1,000 ft. [or about 22 fps]. What complicates the situation to a point where any attempt to lay down a general rule becomes hopeless, is that many motion picture producers are deliberately directing the action of staged films in such a way that their subsequent projection at the olld standard sixteen-picture rate would be ruinous to any sense of life and brightness in the film’s screen effect. (Bennett, Guide to Kinematography, 1923, p. 164)

First time I hear about an attempt to license projection speed, though it makes sense and there may be other instances. Wonder what happened to that action…

This would fit, though, with what Kevin Brownlow has described here*: 16 fps was described as the ‘correct’ shooting speed in most magazines and articles…yet his experience shows that most films were projected at much higher speeds 22-24 fps, and cue sheets confirm that. His conclusion ? Undercranking allowed for brisker pictures when shown at 20+ fps.

*If you’ve never done so, check out the Silent Film Bookshelf for reprints of invaluable articles and books.

Pordenone ‘09

Mae Murray is coming to town !

The program for this year’s Giornate del Cinema Muto is almost all online. It’s full of treasures (Sherlock Holmes ! Macpherson’s Monkey’s Moon ! Three recent finds with Asta Nielsen ! etc.)…As usual, you gotta be there !

…and yet I can’t help but feel underwhelmed. Why’s that ? Maybe the end of the Griffith project, completed last year ? Or the sheer number of goodies that last year had and that this year does not seem to match ?

I’m probably missing something (if so, please illuminate me!). Of course one thing I’m missing is what’s not yet detailed on the Giornate website : the retrospective from La Cinémathèque Française of its holdings of restaured Albatros films. And judging from this online virtual exhibition, it promises to be quite a feast (samples of Albatross films in the collection are here). In itself, this may be enough reason to attend this year !

Still, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the melancholic fact that because of teaching and dissertation writing I will not be able to attend this year. I don’t know.

Any thoughts ?

Doxa : silent cinema was symbolic art

Is this a traditional French view ? Alain Masson’s L’Image et la parole (note the capital I to Image) is built on the premisse that silent cinema had become largely a symbolist affair by the end of the 1920s, and sound cinema was to easily overthrow this by the immediacy, the concrete and easy realism of its sound environment. This view was also taken up by Edgar Morin back in the 1950s and 1960s, with his sociological studies of cinema’s imaginary workings. And it seems to have been Sadoul’s opinion too:

Sadoul “mettait en cause l’extrême raffinement des derniers films muets”
(Masson p. 15)

This may have been standard doctrine under Lea Jacob’s contrarian study, The End of Sentiment. This is a particularly clear expression of that view, from Edgar Morin’s 1957 Les stars (p. 22 in the 1972 re-edition).

Why no words on images ?

The subtitle mystery continues.

This opinion in French from Alain Masson (L’image et la parole, 1989) : images + words written on separate title card = discourse recomposed in the spectator’s mind. Subtitles in silent films thus create a tension, threatening to empty images of their significance while being necessary to their intelligibility. Not sure I’d agree with this last sentiment, but I agree with the tension, though to me the tension is between an image where interpretation is free and subtitles that try to steer the film back to its narrativity.
In this view, words flashed on the image itself are either assimilated to visual signs (hence their use, mostly, in comic-style situations for cartoonish effects) or they totally cover up the image (in the documentary context). Flashed separately from the images, they help in the creation of a complex film discourse, heterogeneous, juxtaposed, unified in the audience’s perception only.

This tension goes both ways : it also raises the possibility that the image will surprise and not just fulfill the program announced by the subtitles :

d’abord, les intertitres. Ils précédent presque toujours l’événement ; ils sont rarement équivoques. Mais la netteté de l’annonce change l’illustration en variation ; sous peine de pléonasme, dans la séquence qui suit une légende, ce qui ne l’illustre pas prend la plus grande importance : la nuance indécise, non l’exécution d’un programme. (52)

Name that movie house

Kathryn Helgesen Fuller has some details on that Essanay naming contest that gave the world the “photoplay” (1). It could have been “kinorama”or “mutodramic” (!) or even the race-inspired “photodrome” – but instead it was the submission of one Edgar Strakosch, from California,

theater owner whose own nickelodeons were named Dreamland, Bijou, and Wonderland.

Fuller also has looked at naming conventions for nickelodeons and what they reveal about early cinema’s cultural position and acceptance strategies: escapism (Amuse-U) , exoticism (Alhambra), lights (Star), cheap prices (Nickelette) — but also names that aimed to inscribe cinemas within very local contexts : as civic centers (Town Hall), or as family centers (Family Moving Picture Parlor).
Still others named their theater with names of places that had some sort of allure :

Chicago, besides having a Boston theater, was also home to a California Theater years before the film industry moved there.

Another instance of myths guiding reality…

UPDATE 31/07/09:
The curious may scroll down the list of theater names operating in Toledo, Ohio, as of 1919 (2), for confirmation: status (“Grand”, “Bijou”, “Empress” or “Princess” or “Duchess” or etc.), drama (“Quo Vadis”, “Ivanhoe”), civic (“Colonial” or “Liberty” or “National”), entertainment (“Pastime”), exotic (“Japanese Garden”, “Orient”, “Mystic”), or familiar (“Home”), etc.

(1) At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (1996)
(2) Phelan, Motion Pictures as a Phase of Commercial Amusement in Toledo, Ohio (1919)

Three audiences in one gaze

James Card about Clara Bow :

Who’s to say which one of these expressions is more important, aesthetically, than the others ? There’s a lot more ambiguity and incoherence (1) in the Hollywood film text than clean-cut classical models may want to admit.

(1) A quick read on this is Noel Burch, “Double Speak” in Réseaux, n. 99, 2000. It’s a short article, it’s in French but don’t let that stop you. Burch extends the notion of the “incoherent text” (Robin Wood, 1980) to the whole of Hollywood cinema, and finds some room for ambiguity in the negociation process taking place between censors and producers. That concept can easily be extended to other aspects of Hollywood filmmaking. Hurray for distractions !

Talking like comic book heroes

I’ve been looking for this for quite a while, and of course the information was right under my nose in a book I’d bought a while back but never actually gotten around to even open: James Card’s idiosyncratic Seductive Cinema. Here it is, then, the killer example of someone, in American cinema, trying to have titles flashed over the image of characters talking in a silent film: The Chamber Mystery, 1920, directed by a guy from Pinsk. Here’s what imdb.com has to say about him:

Abraham S. Schomer
Date of Birth
2 August 1876, Pinsk, Russia
Date of Death
16 August 1946, Los Angeles, California, USA
Mini Biography
One time leader in the Jewish Congress, Schomer was a well-known Yiddish novelist and playright. A New York attorney specializing in immigration law, he gave up his law practice in 1915 to write for motion pictures.

I’ve been on the lookout for instances of words used over photographic images as you can see in my series on Words over Images, but this is the purest example of a narrative use I have found – the other uses were more in pseudo-documentary contexts or in comedy situations where the comic book subtext was more obvious.

Carr offers this image and adds that this was Schomer’s last film and the last time this experiment was tried. Was it ? I’d love to see other photograms of the film, and I’m happy to report that there is a three-minute excerpt of the film on DVD from Flicker Alley (Discovering Cinema, 2007) – along with some Caruso recordings that I’d very much like to get, also.

But was it the last time this was tried ? If so, why ? Is there some sort of ontological reason why written words could not be mixed with the visuals — an hypothesis that bodes well for the bifocal nature of Hollywood silent narratives : the text brings in another, often dissonant voice that never fully meshes with the visual flow and has always been described as a “problem” for silent film, even at the time, with the goal being that of the title-less silent film. That this ideal was rarely achieved in the 1920s (litterature always mentions the same two or three examples: Ol’ Swim Hole, Murnau’s Last Laugh…) is itself a tell-tale sign that this was an ideal but not a particularly important one from a concrete point of view of cinematic pleasure. 99.99% of silent films had titles, and not just because audiences (real or imagined by promotional campaigns) were “dumb”. I’d argue that titles, in their non-synchronic nature, because of the very nature of the juxtaposition and discontinuity they offered, were part and parcel of cinematic pleasure. Flashing titles on the image, from the point of view of narrative efficiency, is the smartest way to go: all the info one needs is given all at once. American cinema did not go that route, however, because narrative efficiency is not its be-all and end-all: the pleasure was (is) to experience the image and then to experience the often strong narrative voice that speaks through the titles, to feel that there’s a strong pull to bring the images back into a 19th century narrative fold, but that images always escape that fold, because they give out much more information and open themselves to all sorts of non-directed gazes.

In other words, the solution “titles on the image” was not long-lasting because it went agaist the fundamental heterogeneous pleasure of silent cinema, because it brought images down to a mere level of being a support for narrative information carried out through the titles. On their own, images were much more fascinating because they gave out (give out) much more than mere narrative information. In-between the images, the titles attempt to reimpose some sort of order on what promises to be an orgy of visual stimuli, with the audience granting, or not, the authority to do so to the written narrative voice – thus remaining on the edge, always, of narrative incoherence and madness. Just, you see, on the edge.

images vs. words: Neurath’s isotypes

Chris Mullen – collection ISOTYPE

“Words make division, pictures make connections…” Otto Neurath, ‘Museums of the Future’, Survey Graphic

Michael North in his Reading 1922 has a fascinating discussion on this 1920s idea, best exemplified by Neurath’s utopia to develop a visual language that would be universal. The idea permeated cinema discussions in the 1920s by projecting cinema (silent cinema, that is) as the Esperanto of the Eye – a utopia I’ve written about here.

Chris Mullen’s site from the university of Reading has galore visual examples of isotypes in (statistical) action. Enjoy !

Shipping Warner silent films on demand from Amazon

First time I notice this little text to a prosuct om Amazon:
This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media.
Guess Warner’s has moved ahead with its plans to make its library of silent films available on demand. Very nice (if a bit pricey at 28.99 a pop).

Bardelys lives again

FlickerAlley releases a restored copy of King Vidor’s 1926 fun and magnificent swashbuckling romance, Bardelys The Magnificent: check out the other treasures of that edition here

Check out my previous rapt review of the film when it played last year at Pordenone.

Glyn meets Chaplin and acts perverse

Sam Goldwyn tells the tale:

Glyn: “Dear, dear, so this is Charlie Chaplin ! Do you know you don’t look nearly so funny as I thought you would ?”

Chaplin: “Neither do you.”

In his Behind the Screen (1923), Goldwyn has very few nice things to say about Glyn: conceited, busy-body, self-righteous, and as Sam hints it, English (Goldwyn is very proud of having signed American authors in his ill-fated Eminent Authors company, as opposed to the more upscale efforts of rival Famous Players-Lasky with their import of foreign names such as Glyn).

My favorite is the following anecdote, after a dinner with the Fairbanks, at the Fairbanks’:

Pictures were turned on, and in this case the selection happened to be Mrs. Glyn’s story, “Her Husband’s Trademark,” in which Gloria Swanson took the leading rôle. I can truthfully say that never in my life have I enjoyed any film so heartily. This was due, not to the character of the performance, but to the remarks which garnished its entire unfoldment.

“See that frock,” whispered the author eagerly as, sitting beside me, she pointed to one of Gloria’s creations; “I designed that gown.”

Another second and she was calling attention to the finish of a certain setting. “Do you see that? An exact copy of my rooms in London. Do you suppose they would have known how to arrange a gentlewoman’s rooms if it hadn’t been for me?”

But there were other times when this robust major of self-congratulation shifted to a minor chord. “Ah, how terrible, how shocking!” I heaerd her moan several times. “All wrong, all wrong–they’ve ruined that scene. I might have know it. I was away that day, you see.”

Verily that evening the “silent drama” renounced its salient characteristic ! (p.238)

I like it because this is a clear example of a perverse spectator who refuses to sit rapt in silence absorbing images in her chair: this is a very active audience indeed ! The last line seems to imply that this is hardly the norm — though it could be read as more of a pun than a statement on silent film spectatorship.

That Marvel – The Movie

Edward van Zile’s 1923 thoughtful and gently pedantic pamphlet, That Marvel The Movie: A Glance At Its Reckless Past, Its Promising Present, And Its Significant Future, is the classic locus of the concept (traced back at least to Griffith’s Intolerance pamphlet by Miriam Hansen) so prominent in 1920s discourse on cinema of movies as the new Esperanto, the Esperanto of the Eye. Consider the following:

The race has found at last its universal language, its Esperanto not of the ear and tongue of but of the eye. The evolution of the motion picture, developing in a few years from a toy kinetoscope to a Griffith wonder-worker, has made possible, for the first time in the history of humanity, an appeal to the heart and mind and sould of man that overcomes the ancient handicap of the confusion of tongues. After many centuries the check to human progress given at the Tower of Babel has come to an end at the enctrance to the motion-picture palace. It has made possible at last for history to reveal its secrets, and vouchsafe its warnings, not to the comparatively few who read scholarly books but to the millions who, as democracy conquers the earth, have become masters of the destiny of nations.

Clearly, this soaring rhetoric will come crashing with the introduction of sound back into films at the end of the 1920s. But for a while they’ll ride this trope quite actively. Both their despair over the carnage of World War I, and their uneasy perception of the miracle of film, part fancy, part reality, will find expression through it. For if you think Zile only has “educational” films in mind, think again: The Covered Wagon is more his idea of a candidate for that “Lighthouse of the Past”, that “university of universities” that the movies promise to mankind:

To-day I find the screen achieving wonders in conserving, for the sake of posterity, the memory of epic, epoch-making deeds of derring-do that not only glorify our past but inspire us with hope and courage and ambition for the future. (p. 196)

Passive spectator, you who now only has to sit to learn, since “seeing is believing”, beware ! The joys of post-modern simultaneity of heterogeneous points of view still lie in the distant, post World War 2 world…

On a related subject (thank you to the Bioscope Library for the links!):

• Knowlton, Daniel C. and J. Warren Tilton, Motion Pictures in History Teaching: A Study of the Chronicles of America Photoplays as a Aid in Seventh Grade Instruction deals with the Chronicles of America series of lavish short subjects produced 1923-1929 by Yale University Press, and how useful they might have been in terms of education (the assumption being that the photography was historically correct, that “seeing is believing”, again).
• Ellis, Don Carlos and Laura Thornborough, Motion Pictures in Education: A Practical Handbook for Users of Visual Aids, 1923, also looks at the intersection of films and education. I haven’t looked at it but I’m betting they define “educational” film as a pretty broad category…

The Three D’s

Culled from browsing through GOLDNER Orville, et TURNER George E. The Making of King Kong: The story behind a film classic. New York : Ballantine Books, 1975, the motto of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack Productions:

Keep it Distant, Difficult and Dangerous.

Channeling his inner Barnum

Do you believe in the reincarnation of Barnum ?

Advertisement for the Feejee Mermaid from the Charleston Courrier, Jan. 1843 (Museum of Hoaxes online)

These are two publicity stunts suggested by publicity material (from the great Kino 3 dvd set):

 

Do you believe a man beaten unconscious, frozen into an iceberg, and hewn therefrom a century afterward, with animation suspended, can be brought back to life?

and

As Houdini in The Man from Beyond is first disovered in a mass of ice on board a derelect barkentine, a lobby display might be arranged with a fish frozen in a cake of ice. The placard on the ice can read: “The Man from Beyond slept in an ice prison for a hundred years but was restored to life. He will be inside this theatre (date).”

Feejee Mermaid, anyone ? Or, as Barnum (in Neil Harris’s Humbug) would ask: “is it real, or is it humbug? You decide.”

questionable taglines: 1922

The Man From Beyond, Houdini’s latest photoplay, pictures the romance of a man of 1821 for a girl of 1922.

talk of a June (1820) – September (1922) romance

meanwhile in the “real” world…

…there’s teaching to be done and this and that and I haven’t been able to update this blog as often as I’d want. But I’m working on the following, teaching-related topics — a list of coming attractions:

• a personal note on film in the classroom — what’s a teacher to do with such obvious films as Hollywood classical films ?
• help me, my students are trapped ! — or project notes on how to join the flat classroom project
• educators discuss film in the classroom — in the 1920s

and I haven’t forgotten my “Released Today” series, looking at a silent film released on a a given day in the 1920s (though I did miss Valentine’s Day, I had entries for Dec. 4 and for Christmas Day) . It’s more fun if it falls on a famous date, but there’s lots to be learnt in any case from audiences reaction and priming, to distribution patterns, to reviving forgotten films that illuminate tastes and silent film pleasures…Potential targets: March 17, St Patrick’s Day, or April 1.

4,800 people (and counting, one hopes, with humble gratitude) can’t be wrong, so keep checking this blog !

Released today: The Little Minister (1921) – the Christmas edition

 

Stanlaws in his studio, 1955

When looking for films officially released on Christmas Day in the 1920s, one faces an awkward choice: Should it be Flesh and the Devil (a personal favorite) or Curtiz’s The Third Degree (a timely topic), both from 1926 ? A swashbuckling family romance (Regeneration, from 1923, which tells the story of a couple left on some uninhabited island they call “Regeneration”), or a romance of the French-colonized, Foreign-legion owned desert (A Man’s Past from 1927, with Conrad Veigt), or one of a myriad of small run-of-the-mill westerns (the alluringly-titled Land of the Lawless, also from 1927) ? A family drama from 1921 (Ashamed of Parents, where poor boy turned college footbal star is ashamed of his poor relatives) could be ideal for family viewing…But parents beware ! The family drama is a slippery category as Eden and Return, from 1921, shows. It has a promising title, but the plot turns around a rebellious girl who refuses her father-approved suitor for a flashy big spender who regains his fortune by stealing stock market tips from his father-in-law ! Ah, the stock market really brings out the best in people…

One thing is clear: there is no Christmas pattern here. One reason for that is that the release date, as indicated on AFI records, does not necessarily coincide with the premiere date. But even when it does, there is still no Christmas pattern here, at least in the film plots. Consider Back Home and Broke, with a New York premier on 24 dec. 1922: featuring Thomas Meighan, it has an impossible story of a young man who goes West to make money through oil, then returns home and saves village business owners from the threat of a Mr. Keane. Not much of Christmas here (Regeneration, quoted above, is another example of a Christmas premiere with nothing of Christmas in it: it opened in Jacksonville FL on Dec. 24, 1923, but it’s largely a treasure island yarn).

So I’ve picked a very obscure film, offering a genre that is quite remote from us: the Scottish fantasy highland life. The film is The Little Minister, 6 reels from Famous Players-Lasky, directed by Penrhyn Stanlaws, with Betty Compson. Moving Picture World offers this plot summary:

“When the weavers of Thrums, enraged by a reduction in prices for their products, rise against the manufacturers, Gavin, ‘the little minister’ intervenes with the constables in their behalf. Babbie, a supposed Gypsy girl, is suspected of having notified the rioters that the police were coming so they might be prepared to fight, and a price is placed on her capture. But when Gavin questions her, her beauty and appeal charms him and he aids her to escape. A romance between the pair impends, much to the dislike of the elders of the Scotch kirk and Gavin is about to be defrocked when the Gypsy girl is brought into the meeting and discloses that she is in reality Lady Barbara, daughter of Lord Rintoul, the baron-magistrate of the district. In aiding the girl to escape Gavin had told the constables she was his wife, which in Scotland constitutes legal marriage if admittance is made before witnesses.” ( Moving Picture World, 7 Jan 1922, p112.) 

Recommending it to our attention, the film was based on a James M. Barrie novel, then play (the novel is accessible through Google Books, here). This would be the same Barrie as wrote The Admirable Crichton (DeMille turned this into a statement on modern morals in his 1919 Male and Female) or Peter Pan. Childish romance, meet hard realities: a strike in Thrums is averted by the Minister but helped by a Gypsy girl who in reality is none other than some socially OK big shot…The pattern is well-known.

Stanlaws, it turns out, is quite a figure: a commercial artist who drew covers notably for the Saturday Evening Post, from 1913 to 1935 (and other similar proper publications),

from American Art Archives

he also had a very short lived (1921-1922) film career as a director for Lasky, and the vein seems to have been goody-two-shoes stories on par with his illustrations. Stanlaws had been specializing in genteel drawings of nicely behaved ladies since the late 1880s, and had made quite a name for himself (his illustrations are everywhere: Life, New York Times, Ladies’ Home Journal…): a 1903 article from The Atlanta Constitution, noting the illustrator’s desire to become a playwright (his first, one-act play, had just been taken up for production in London), reverently called him ”the American depictor of pretty girls” and  ”the inventor of the ‘Stanlaws girl.’” In sept. 22, 1907, Stanlaws “gallantly leapt to the rescue” of the American girl, slandered by a Mr. Masson-Forestier, a columnist in the British Standard, who had claimed the American girl inferior to the Italian or the English in beauty, as judged by the paintings they all had inspired. Stanlaws was not amused, and concluded his defense with an interestingly proto-multicultural appeal:

Does M. Masson-Forestier believe himself to be a better judge of Japanese beauty than the Japanese? As for the Indian type, I wonder if M. Masson-Forestier has ever seen a Pawnee girl or a young Iroquois brave. (New York Times, 22 sept. 1907)

Quite a polemic, indeed. In 1913 the “American Girl” is back to the fore in a series of articles in the New York Times, for those interested. And in an interview to The Atlanta Constitution taken at the Famous Players Studio, Stanlaws decidedly assumes an air of knowledgeable authority over “the” American girl and her beauty thanks to a solid supply of meaningless clichés (“our modern woman has more in common with the great English beauties, etc.”) and has this to contribute to the motion pictures:

After waiting a moment I ventured to intrude with my next question, concerning Mr. Stanlaws’ aims in the moving picture industry, into which field he has but recently entered. What at first seeme da rather strange adventure on his part was defined more clearly as he talked about it. In spite of the marvels so far accomplished, the moving pictures, not as an industry so much as from the purely dramatic and artistic standpoint, are still in their swaddling clothes. And it is with this recognition that the services of such men as Barrie, Stanlaws and many others of dramatic and artistic note, to say nothing of the eminent actors from the speaking stage, are being enlisted, so that through the wonderful medium of the camera not only varied types can be introduced, but whole and successive stages of their lives and emotions, their manner of dressing and of behaving through all the stress and complexity of the manifold conditions of modern life.

Mr Stanlaws feels that the real American girl should be depicted more freely and more faithfully in the modern pictures. The Western girl, and that not as she is today but as she was thirty or forty years ago, has been done to death. Let the more representative girl take her place. And dramatist as well as artist, Mr. Stanlaws is putting all his artistic fervor and genius into the work of writing and producing and assembling the most realistic and the truest types of interest to the restless, exacting theatergoer of today. (Atlanta Constitution, 8 aug. 1920, p. 13)

Between Poses (1915)

Typically for the times, Stanlaws could both be a commercial artist purveying rose-coloured pretty girls for immediate consumption, and a realist. He’d already established this position through paintings such as the 1915 Between Poses. Frank light that avoids any hint of dramatic, hyped-up conflict, a simple background opening up into more space in back (not unreminiscent of sets that movies would come to use in the late 1910s), and its thinned-out, unclassical view of the feminine body (the arms are bony, the stomach is bulged), it has Eakins written all over it. The moment itself is a familiar trope of realist painting, debunking the tradition-sanctioned moment of the artistic pose by showing a scene taken in between posing sessions: a behind-the-scene type of look, so to speak.

Interestingly, the movies, in their quest for cultural legitimacy, were indeed hungry for whatever recognized artists such as Stanlaws or Barrie could offer in terms of marketing: the double promise of beauty and realism was, from a commercial perspective, simply irresistible for movie producers. It fit right in with the critical trope of the days applied countless times to movies, the infancy-adulthood debate. The nature of movies, a modern product, was to offer a modern view of modern life: technically deficient, the movies could only progress, “grow up”, and their nurturing would be provided by artists versed in the modern artistic schools of the theater or of painting: the realist and the beautiful schools. Stanlaws, as H.H.Hill makes clear, is a perfect choice for both (The Atlanta Constitution has the story, in Feb 12, 1922, of how actors on a Stanlaws production, Over the Border, were arrested by Revenue Agents who had taken them for real bootleggers. Their advice to Stanlaws: “not to be so derned realistic” the next time…). 

Evidence that Stanlaws could read this game perfectly is shown in a 1914 interview from the New York Times: Stanlaws, based on his experience of drawing the portrait of Miss Norma Phillips (the Mutual Girl?)  shows himself interested in the movies “as a means of spreading the desire and cultivating a taste for art”. 

Stanlaws, the New York Times of 29 may 1920 notes, is “a native of Scotland”, so his selection for a Scottish story makes, for the time, sense. Though this argument only goes so far: Stanlaws’ first film for Lasky, At the End of the World, also featuring Betty Compson, took place in China. Still, the Los Angeles Times pulled it for its pre-release review of the film, noting:

It was peculiarly fitting that Penrhyn Stanlaws should direct this production, for he was born within a few miles of Thrums, and was reared amid the atmosphere which b arrie so successfully wrote into the play. The result of this knowledge, plus Stanlaws’s artistic perception, is an exceptionally beautiful production, which loses none of the homely humor and shrewd insight that originally made the play a success. Add to this the acting of Betty Compson, and you have what should prove a most appealing holiday presentation. (Los Angeles Times, 18 dec. 1921)

So it was a Christmas movie with Christmas on its mind, after all. I guess the formula hasn’t changed much: fantasy, Olde England, beautiful girl…and appropriate music indeed:

In addition to this feature picture, Sid Grauman has prepared a musical program that will harmonize with the spirit of the season, and numerous novelties also devised to promote holiday cheer. (Los Angeles Times, 18 dec. 1921)

While the music was probably heavy on carrols, the fact remains that the “holiday” in a “christmas” release did not have to be borne by the film itself, as is the case today, as the film presentation was surrounded by other media opportunities to fit the film within the calendar.

Still the film advertised its true-to-life documentary quality as it could. The Boston Daily Globe informed its readers (Dec. 25, 1921):

It was some search for a weaver in which the property department indulged when Penrhyn Stanlaws was filming “The Little Minister.” A loom was ordered by Mr. Stanlaws, and everywhere the property men searched before they at last found the required Scotch loom of the vintage of 1830 safely tucked away in the attic of a Los Angeles Scotchman. But no one knew how to operate that loom. For some days the scene was delayed, until the right man was found who could operate the loom and teach the actors how it should be done.

A story dutifully reprinted in The Washington Post of dec. 25, 1921, which had no qualm naming its review of the film “Scotland in 1830″. And The Chicago Daily Tribune agreed:

While it wasn’t made in Scotland, it is vurra suggestive of ye bonnie braes, so far as I can see (Never having been in Scotland). The photoplay has that intangible thing known as “atmosphere.”

The New York Times (dec. 26, 1921) approved of the “artistic” sets (“well-composed”, “pleasing as pictures, easy to comprehend with the eye”), but found the film too talky (“its dependence upon conversational subtitles”). But Robert Sherwood, in Life (Jan. 19, 1922), had no criticism for the film; Penrhyn Stanlaws the illustrator, however, came in for some characteristically Sherwoodesque fun:

Penrhyn Stanlaws has undergone a magnificent metamorphosis. When he was doing magazine covers a year ago, he was unquestionably a bad artist. In fact, he wasn’t an artist at all. He was a professional depicter of beautiful dumb-bells. Then he went into the movies as a director, and today he stands out as an artist, in a field where real artists are all-too rare.

“The Little Minister” is a work of art. Pictorially, it can be compared favorably with any motion picture that has ever been made. In composition, in lighting, in selection and construction of backgrounds, and in photography, “The Little Minister” is as close to perfection as it is possible for a movie to be. To eyes that are weary of looking at miles of harsh photography, crude, unintelligent settings and careless, uninspired composition, this picture is incredibly beautiful and soothing.

It is fine, too, from a dramatic point of view (…). The story is developed in simple and logical style in Edfrid Bingham’s scenario.

Was the film re-titled between Christmas and New Year ? Was Sherwood not as bothered by the dialogue titles, where the New York Times, in its highbrow fashion, would have placed the artistic bar higher, and in a more visual dimension, than Hollywood films were accustomed to ? The film, sadly, appears lost today. 

(and that, folks, is all for 2008. I’ll see you all back in ‘09 as I’m off to some skiing. Thanks and come back in January!)

 

 

Realism’s in the eye of the beholder

Life, oct. 28, 1920:

How We Advertised America (1920)

If you like to think that media, in the US, frame audiences’ view of reality, I have the reading just for you. George Creel, How We Advertised America, published in 1920, tells the efforts of the Committee on Public Information, created by President Wilson in 1917, and discontinued in 1919 by order of Congress. Creel was in charge of all the efforts of the Committee, and was he an active busybody for a while ! His responsibility was to organise the effort of the US government to communicate efficiently about its war effort, and to win hearts and minds, both at home and abroad among allies and enemies. (I’ll let you decide if it’s a sign of a healthy democracy or not to have a book about such a subject published so quickly after the facts — and then again, no need to read in the past our own problems is there?)

Back then embedding correspondents was not an option (rather, official tours of the front were the norm, or faked reconstitutions of battles). What Creel attempted was to bring the government news to the newspapers of the world — without it being government propaganda. It’s quite a trick to pull and it doesn’t quite work out, at least in his book. (I’m yet to check on how some of the newspapers covered his activities back then).

• On the one hand, he is adamant that no censorship was ever established, but that he communicated the facts, and only the facts. This is his defense of the Division of News in his Committee: 

 ”On the part of the press there was the fear, and a very natural one, that the new order of things meant “press-agenting” on a huge scale. This fear could not be argued away, but had to be met by actual demonstration of its groundlessness. Our job, therefore, was to present the facts without the slightest trace of color or bias, either in the selection of news or the manner in which it was presented. Thus, in practice, the Division of News set forth in exactly the same colorless style the remarkable success of the Browning guns, on the one hand, and on the other the existence of bad health conditions in three or four of the cantonments. In time the correspondents realized that we were running a government news bureau, not a press agency, and their support became cordial and sincere.” p. 73

“colorless style”: enough here to give fodder to those who see how Hollywood’s famed transparent style as masked ideology…(1)

• but on the other hand, he is equally clear about the role of the Committee: to win the support of the American (and later, the world’s) population for the war, including a fascist-like call for the fusion of the individual with the State:

“What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination. The war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice. What had to be driven home was that all business was the nation’s business, and every task a common task for a single purpose.” p.5

The interesting point, for me, is how he reconciles the obvious contradictions between truth and government message. He is aware of the contradiction, since he himself points out that such committee could only exist in war-time,

since “peace is far from simple, and has as many objectives as there are parties and political aims and prejudices. No matter how honest its intent or pure its purpose, a Committee on Public Information operating in peace-times would be caught inevitably in the net of controversy, affording the highly improper spectacle of a government organization using public moneys to advance the contentions of one side or the other.” p. 401-2

But he’s not too concerned with it either. Concurrent with a time when news was faked, when documentaries pretended to show the real thing (an example of that is given in this note on Homer Croy) but did not, truth and the ideological opinion I have of truth tends to be the same thing for him.

 We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts. p. 5

But later, this educational and “informative” emphasis gives way to something more sinister:

it was not only that the committee put motion pictures into foreign countries. Just as important was the work of keeping certain motion pictures out of these countries. As a matter of bitter fact, much of the misconception about America before the war was due to American motion pictures portraying the lives and exploits of New York’s gun-men, Western bandits, and wild days of the old frontier, all of which were accepted in many parts of the world as representative of American life. What we wanted to get into foreign countries were pictures that presented the wholesome life of America, giving fair ideas of our people and our institutions. What we wanted to keep out of world circulation were the “thrillers,” that gave entirely fallse impressions of American life and morals. Film dramas portraying the exploits of “Gyp the Blood” or “jesse James” wee bound to prejudice our fight for the good opinion of neutral nations. p. 281

Creel wants to have it both ways. He wants to show America in a good light (and he is proud of his success, pointing that “From being the most misunderstood nation, America became the most popular. A world that was either inimical, contemptuous, or indifferent was changed into a world of friends and well-wishers” p. 11), and he wants the world to believe that this is the truth about America.

In other words, this is another hit taken by the already much-maligned notion of authenticity. He’s not blind to ideology, he just plainly states that his is the authentic version. 

 

(1) That would be…basically everybody today ? It probably all started taking shape with NARBONI Jean, and COMOLLI Jean-Louis: “Cinema/ideology/criticism.” in John Ellis éd., éd.: Screen Reader. Londres, SEFT, 1977, pp. 5-8.

of bobs and fashion

 

Los Angeles Times, 14 march 1926

Two interesting studies of Pauline Starke, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer featured player appeaering in “Love’s Blindness” by Elinor Glyn, in which she wears Hepner’s wigs exclusively. The top photograph is of Miss Starke in a long, black wig, dressed in a girlish fashion designed especially for her by Hepner. The lower photograph shows Miss Starke with her natural bob. Hepner declares that long hair and the use of long-haired wigs is becoming more popular every day.

Released today: Love’s Blindness (1926)

This is a new series: everyday, a film from the 1920s brought back to life on the day it was released, with whatever film reviews I can cull from where I’m standing.

Love’s Blindness, dir. John Francis Dillon, and MGM product with Pauline Starke and Antonio Moreno, from the Elinor tiger-rug Glyn novel.

Detail view of Movies Page from the AFI catalog, including a not too clear plot summary:

when [Hubert's / Moreno's / the husband's] jealousy is awakened at a dance, he begins to realize his love for her. Following the birth of her stillborn child, Vanessa’s [Starke's] disillusionment turns to happiness when she learns of her father’s bargain [huh??]; and she accepts Hubert’s genuine devotion. 

Not sure I ought to resurrect this one from the dead, as it features an anti-semitic staple of moneylender ready to pawn off his daughter in marriage in exchange for a loan to rich Earl (and thus society wedding). All clichés together, please. But, hey, the husband will eventually come to love his Jewish wife, so I suppose all’s well that…(should I really be quoting the Bard here? Nah. Reviews at the time noted that the father was Jewish, but the daughter would be just an 19-year old girl….go figure). The New York Times had quite the ironic review of the novel, but still noted how there was a message in it, 

that it is wrong for a lord or lady to look down upon another because of race or station

Amen for that.(1) As for the book, it was “high-hat”, filled with “extreme exaggeration”, a “version of English society that is current in backstairs fiction,” but, sadly, too sincere to be taken as “burlesque”.

The end blushes with lushness: “And some kisses are worth today and tomorrow, and even the hereafter! But only those who have come through the tempering fire know them–and they are blessed of God.”

A more misplaced sentiment doesn’t exist.

Pauline Starke a 1922 WAMPAS Baby Star, had already been stuck in a plot-line with money lenders in Fleming’s 1924 Adventure – apparently there was something the matter with Pauline Starke, as her character has another crooked father (a gambler this time) in The Devil’s Cargo (1925). She is supposed to have had a “mediocre” career in the 1920s (i dunno…she did a lot of Fleming pictures, and playing opposite Moreno is something, no?). Antonio Moreno was fresh from two huge A pictures, The Temptress with Greta Garbo and Mare Nostrum with Alice Terry — but the Los Angeles Times (Feb. 13, 1927) noted that he had been fully “anglicized” only in Love’s Blindness (they may not have had Glyn’s message).

The film however was well received by the none too fastidious Atlanta Constition, who wrote (or maybe just pasted the studio press release) on Nov 21, 1926:

In many respects this is the most appealing story ever written by Mrs. Glyn, and to assure a perfect production she selected the cast herself, chose every piece of furniture used and passed on all costumes worn by the characters.

Keep in mind that Glyn was not only the main source of prurient purple prose back then, but was also considered, from certain not too critical quarters, as an authority on all things worldly (2):

The locale of the story shifts between London and the baronial country estates of the Culverdale family and affords opportunity for a  brilliant and convincing display of the diversions and routine of smart English society.

Romance, or documentary ? The real star, in any case, was Glyn herself

It says something about Elinor Glyn’s salability in 1926 that, reportedly, her bungalow at MGM was larger than the one occupied by Love’s Blindness star Pauline Starke.(3)

Glyn used this occasion to launch several how-to interviews explaining how easy it was to have your novels faithfully transcribed into films, if you only took the pain to adapt them yourself and follow on the filming (take that, Dreiser!)–thus forgetting to mention that if your books also had a faux noble background and a few spicy bedroom scenes, it might help.

 

(1) Maybe that’s why the film is listed on Silent Era’s Progressive Silent Film List ?

(2) King Vidor in his autobiography (A Tree is A Tree, 1952) famously describess what a nuisance it was to have Elinor Glyn on the set “advising” on the authenticity of costumes, sets, even table placement at the court of Russia…The film was His Hour (1924).

(3) allmovie ((( Love’s Blindness > Overview )))

Thought-O for the day

Rather today, cartoon for the day 

(New York Times, 28 march 1926)

The chief impression I received last night was that Mr. Ingram has become neurotic, and is ridding himself of some of his inhibitions. The direction seemed totally uninspired and old fashioned.

Alice Terry and Antonio Moreno appeared passionless; the spectator could not feel sorry for them and their sorrows.

(Anabel Lane, The Film Mercury, 10 sept. 1926)

Heart o’ the Hills (1919) and other realistic romances

I’ve added one more VoodooPad project for you to browse and peruse. This one deals with the 1919 Kentucky film with Mary Pickford, Heart o’ the Hills, and it’s a bit wee more meaty than the still developping Fields Project already uploaded. (Notably, it features my first notes on a narrative process at work in Classical cinema that i’ve called, and I’m not particularly proud of the name either, re-fiction –theoretically, just an expansion on Rick Altman’s principle of co-presence of the melodramatic within the classical text (1)

Enjoy, and comment !

 

(1) That seminal study is in Rick ALTMAN, ”Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today.” in GAINES Jane, éd.: Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars. Durham, Duke University Press, 1992 9-48.

Thought-O for the day

 

Let it snow, Beloved Rogue (1927): when cardboard meets Paris, a study in shapes

New feature: ask flycz !

I was browsing thru the list of terms that visitors to this site have searched for, using our right-hand search box. While most of you have probably found a nugget or two around the site in answer to your queries, some off you must have come up empty-handed: “sammlung silent films” ? (turns out “Sammlung” in German means “collection”, but, sadly and to my deep regret, I don’t speak nor write German…and in any case, I don’t have much in terms of collection of silent films online as The Bioscope has a whole page listing online resources). Or “how to make a fighting film” ? (now that’s an interesting one. And I do have a few ideas about that, too…)

So methought I’d start a new feature: the ask-a-flycz page ! Have a question on silent films, don’t know where to ask, or don’t dare to ask it to your prof ? The flycz will try to help you out.

That’s all I can promise: I’ll try. When I know the answer, I’ll post it on that same page, so all can benefit form it. When I don’t know the answer, I’ll direct you where you may find an answer. Deal ?

I have no idea if you will have any needs for it. So I’ve launched it the easy way: it’s a simple page where you may use the comment function to ask your question; I’ll reply on that same page. 

Now if that proves popular (hm, as popular as a page about silent films may be, that is), we’ll see if we can’t come up with a more elegant design solution for it. And if it proves absolutely useless, I’ll just yank it in a month or two.

Meanwhile, ask away !

Gradation of emphasis

As always, a great post this week from David Bordwell’s blog, Observations on film art and FILM ART : Gradation of emphasis, starring Glenn Ford

This caught my attention:

Today I want to consider how the notion of gradation of emphasis has a more general usefulness.

Barr contrasts the open, fluid possibilities of CinemaScope with two other stylistic approaches, both found in the squarer 1.33 format. The first approach is the editing-driven one he finds in silent film. This tends to make each shot into a single “word,” and meaning arises only when shots are assembled. Barr associates this approach with Griffith and Eisenstein. The second approach, only alluded to, is that of depth staging and deep-focus shooting, typically associated with sound cinema of the late 1930s and into the 1950s.

Both of these approaches, montage and single-take depth, lack the subtle simplicity of Scope’s gradation of emphasis.

There are innumerable applications of this [technique] (the whole question of significant imagery is affected by it): one quite common one is the scene where two people talk, and a third watches, or just appears in the background unobtrusively—he might be a person who is relevant to the others in some way, or who is affected by what they say, and it is useful for us to be “reminded” of his presence. The simple cutaway shot coarsens the effect by being too obvious a directorial aside (Look who’s watching) and on the smaller [1.33] screen it’s difficult to play off foreground and background within the frame: the detail tends to look too obviously planted. The frame is so closed-in that any detail which is placed there must be deliberate—at some level we both feel this and know it intellectually.

To see Barr’s point, consider a shot like this one from Framed (1947).

The shot, rather typical of 1940s depth staging, displays an almost fussy precision about fitting foreground and background together. That bartender, for instance, stands squeezed into just the right spot. (2) Barr claims that we sense a certain contrivance when primary and secondary centers of interest are jammed into the 1.33 frame like this.

We don’t sense the same contrivance in the widescreen format, he suggests.

Not to want to split hairs here, but the notion that “we sense a certain contrivance” puts the whole reasoning on rather shaky ground. Did this feel also contrived in 1947 ? Or did it look highly realistic ? Or was it felt to be a generic noir convention, and thus not a “contrivance”, but a formalistic statement ?

There are countless instances in silent Hollywood films of characters popping in and out of backgrounds (and in perfect deep focus, too), though (to speak à la Bordwell if I may) that stylistic element belongs, in the 1920s, to a different stylistic system than in the 1940s film noir. The sense of suffocation, in other words, results from a recombination of stylistic elements (close-up, large focal, many people in one frame, stark black and white organized with an abstract photographic eye) that existed before in Hollywood cinema, but were used separately or in different combinations.

That is also Bordwell’s point in his post (which, as always, you gotta take the time to read by yourself): gradation of emphasis happens more frequently than Barr thougt back in the 1960s (Bordwell links it to his notion of priming: one way for Hollywood classical films to manipulate audience expectations is through background details subtly, or not so subtly, emphasized), and some silent film techniques tend to regroup many actors together in one frame. Bordwell notably (and conclusively) cites tableau-framing, though the 1920s offer other examples, as in these two shots from Beyond the Rocks (1922):

One is an instance of two actions taking place on different planes (Valentino flirts with Swanson as Swanson’s husband is discussing exploration plans on the sofa on foreground) and utilizes the absence of synch sound to create a working equivalent of the theatrical aside; the other of opening up story space through some sort of background device (here the desert seen through an arch). 

And one is not likely to forget that daunting Buddha statue standing in the background over the sacrificial ceremony in Green Goddess (1923; sorry no picture, was seen only at last Pordenone Film Festival). It doesn’t take an Eisenstein, in other words, to have film objects explode with meaning in the frame – and who’s to complain if said polysemy is beyond anyone’s control ? In fact, I can’t think of a single Hollywood film that does not have some intentional or unintentional (who cares?) gradation of emphasis.

But maybe emphasis is the wrong word here, as it comes ladden with the notion of intentionality: some agent, somewhere, wants you to notice this, and therefore emphasizes it. Let’s do away with the whole (again, rather shaky) notion of intentionality here. Hollywood film images, tightly controlled though they are, brim with details that subvert one’s attention away from plot consideration (or not: the point is not to argue that we don’t watch the plot in a film, but more simply, that we don’t have to…and that the film encourages us no to, just as much as it asks us to….)(1). And one would be hard pressed to find examples of total suppression of distracting, secondary details — one in fact often finds examples of celebration of such details, especially in the 1920s. Bordwell, and Urbanora, give good examples of that for the 1900s, with dogs straying in pictures (2). This is a pretty standard idea of cinema as purveyor of many ideas to many people (you can see where this is going: to censorship). Such millenarism can only be grounded in a “perverse” (read: non normalistic) understanding of cinema: that it offers more than what plot and foreground show. Whether or not it is true, here’s a good example of that view, from Eugene V. Brewster in 1925 (3). 

Every day fifteen million people are learning something from the silver sheet. They unconsciously study character, manners, motives, emotions, life; their own characters are being molded by what they see and absorb. The poor learn how the rich live, the idle see the hardships of the workers, the American learns something of thhe manners and morals of his brothers across the seas, and each nation studies the other. If the motion picture were in the exclusive hands of one man, he could almost accomplish what Alexander did and Napoleon nearly did. What if Confucius, Mohammed, Zoroaster, Caesar, Luther, had had control of the motion picture ! What if Kaiser Wilhelm had had it! More powerful than the ballot or the bullet, it can sway multitudes, breed wars, make or unmake empires.

Fortunately, the motion picture is free to all.

 

(1) Yes, this is heavily indebted to must-read Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators (2000). While acknowledging (and refusing) its negative connotations, Staiger uses the term “perverse” “to highlight the willfulness of the spectator while also avoiding the implicit, but false, conjunction that doing something different is necessarily politically progressive.” (p. 32)

(2) A “cinema of distractions” is how Urbanora suggests to call it, in his quest for the first stray film dog…

(3) “Sight Gives Insight.” Motion Picture Magazine. vol. 29 No. 3, avril 1925: 5.

Though-O for the day

 

an orphan, a fallen "Woman of Paris", and gipsies: outcasts meet on a sunny day

Theatrical asides in silent films

Think of that scene you’ve seen countless times: A character is in a room (sitting at a desk, busy doing something), and B character walks in. A character does not react until B has crossed the whole length of the room, and is standing right next to him. Why not ? Could it be that silent films are indeed ridiculous in their stilted, un-natural ways ?

In this sequence from The Delicious Little Devil (1919), Barney does not hear his brother walking in:

Or could it be that this is a theatrical aside: since space does not carry sounds in silent films (or at least, not always), the possibility exists to have several actions take place at the same time, in the same frame, but remain distinct, as in the theatrical aside. And just as in the theatrical asides, the secondary action comes to comment on the principal action (in our example above, it creates a little dramatic suspense in delaying the beginning of the next scene, where both characters sit together to eat; it also nicely hints at the uncomfortable situation of the brother who’s come, basically, to eat Barney’s food).

This theatrical aside technique is often used in the early 1920s. As more “naturalistic” acting and staging techniques are deployed by the end of the 1920s (thus giving a leg to the argument that sound cinema was not so much an invention by 1927 as a fulfillment of stylistic expectations(1)), these asides tend to disappear from the repertoire of stylistic devices in non-slapstick Hollywood films. By the late 1920s, a knock on the door is heard by actors in the film – though the audience still can’t make it out.

See how Garbo (foreground) has heard Gilbert (deep-focus background) coming into the room way, way back there.

 

 

(1) Ainsi par exemple COMOLLI Jean-Louis: “Technique et idéologie.” Cahiers du cinéma. n. 214, sept.-oct. 1972, pp. 23:

“Les histoires du cinéma remarquent (pour s’en étonner naïvement) que les cinéastes hollywoodiens du muet se sont d’emblée et mieux “adaptés” au parlant que les européens et les soviétiques. C’est qu’à Hollywood le parlant au niveau des formes ne tombait pas du ciel, s’insérait dans des structures, dans des cases à peu près déjà constitués, dont il était à la fois le produit et le perfectionnement.”

Thought-O for the day

 

Valentino, a menace in white galloshes, goes Beyond the Rocks (1922) for coyly head-veiled Gloria Swanson

Thought-O for the day

 

A very "Plastic Age" (1925)

Chang: a drama of the wilderness (1927

Dir.: Schoedsack and Cooper titles by achmed abdullah over a still image of jungle vegetation

The Natives “who have never seen a moving picture” (even though they are very good actors, as will be shortly seen) Wild beasts “who have never had to fear a modern rifle” (even though Kru and the other villagers will use nothing but rifles to do their hunting) “before man trod the earth – then, as now, there stretched across vast spaces of farther Asia a great green threatening mass of vegetation…the Jungle…”

hokum all…(even though the rifles really are not modern, and even if this is really the first — and last — film these actors ever played in)

The beginning is about…the beginning of civilisation itself: the battle between civilisation and the jungle. Rather than a “historical” introduction, it serves to build plot rather than background. Immediately after the film shows the life of the Kru family: daily life, details of farming, husking the grain. But the difference with a Flaherty is clear: Flaherty lets each gesture go to its natural limit, taking the time it needs (the tatoo ceremony in Moana), while here all gestures are as much as possible made to fit into some suspenseful narrative (the attack of the leopard, or the planting of the rice which is right away tuned into the suspense of rain and survival). Similarly, the “night” scene (obviously shot in the day) plants the family retiring to its fort-like house (retiring the ladder, closing a gate on top), and then lets loose all kinds of dramatic encounters (tiger and buffalo, leopard and goat). In the editing, it’s enough to let you agree with Bazin that reality in cinema is better translated in the long take…(whereas the editing carries meaning, plot meaning or philosophical or political or…).

The transformation into narrative and drama is astonishing: even the flight from the elephants and the subsequent leopards is staged, the family faking the panic, the flight of the monkey edited to make it look like it catches up with the family who waits for it at some point, the father faking his near-fall in the trap, and so on. It’s more than subtitles telling a story: the editing is strongly fictional.

And even when, as opposed to Flaherty, the lifestyle may not be reconstructed. Those villagers have guns and those do seem to be their houses–though this should be checked of course.Flaherty re-creates a reality long gone, but lets actions flow morre or less naturally (though drama is there too), so that he gives us a bit of nostalgic reality. Schoedsack and Cooper take a bit of current reality and turn it into a drama, to the point where even the elephants seem to obey them (or when the villagers transform what was their village into a huge elephant trap, one has the feeling to be watching the rehearsal for a Griffith battle — feeling also of desolation: what price for those spectacular images ? the entire village ? Why did villagers submit to this extensive safari ? Why did they agree to be turned into extras ? Apparently they got help from local missionaries into selecting the actors for the film — Kru for instance played the lead role, his wife in the film was some one else’s wife).

On the one hand, reconstituted fiction turned documentary; on the other, actual reality channeled into fiction. Even if that “reality” is strongly focused on the hunting. The plot is at times nonsensical: the village destroyed, do they repair it ? No, they build an elephant trap and go capturing part of a herd.

Everyday reality, undramatic, is abandonned rather quickly indeed. But then, also unlike Flaherty, Schoedsack and Cooper are upfront about it: they wanted to make a fiction, planned it as such. Flaherty disguises his staging as documentary truth. Is it a realistic fiction, then ?

Thought-O for the day

 

From Mary Pickford's 1920 "Suds"

W. C. Fields, repeats, and VoodooPad

I’m in trying-out software mode these days. Voodoopad uses the simple power of wikis to link thoughts and bits of information and allows for a web-like growth of your reflections.

My first use is the W.C. Fields repeat project, which you can read about here. Note that this is a work in progress and will be updated as I have time to work on it…

Indeed you may find other web notes and thoughts in progress wiki-like under the “My web notes” page on this site. 

That same page has also links with updated info on film conferences, film festivals, and bits of information collected reading the web, all related to silent films…

W. C. and repeats

During last Pordenone festival, it became obvious fairly quickly that W.C. Fields had a habit of using the same gags in several films. We had the following instances:

• the golf routine of The Golf Specialist (1930) had been already filmed in So’s Your Old Man (1926) (the Lescarboura prince being the plot motivation for the gun shot that downs the bird that ends the skit in 1926, as opposed to the cops in 1930).
• the whisky and water gag, where Fields fill a huge glass with whisky, and then adds just a drop or two of water, appeared in Janice Meredith (1924), and then again in So’s Your Old Man (1926) — where it is expanded with the realization that it is not whisky but roach exterminator that he just drank, and the further gag that when given actual home-brewn whisky, he prefers the roach exterminator.

And with Fields’ background in stage stand-up variety comedy, there is no reason why the gags he had perfected on the stage before his film career should not be used in films. 

But I wasn’t quite prepared for the shock of You’re Telling Me! (1934), a complete remake of So’s Your Old man (1926), and a plodding remake at that. It is telling that although the film is correctly identified on imdb.com as a remake of the Silent La Cava film, the trivia section still insists that the golf section is taken from the (sound) Golf Specialist. Time for film history to break from the industry’s practice of ignoring all film silents, to the point where remakes were made that do not even come close to the quality of the silent original (as in this case), and to recognize the continuity between 1927 and 1930.

A detailed study would be necessary to establish exactly how the 1934 version bombs where the 1926 version was jogging along at a clip pace. The early sound practice of motivating and explaining and justifying every plot element with some dialogue

as in when he makes it back to his town, and the women shun him like a social pariah. The sound version lets them comment audibly, and the gag becomes that much belaboured

, an unhappy delivery of lines from Fields himself who seems to suffer under the plot (where in the 1926 version he tries to guide the plot, but fails)

a good image of that would be the choice made to replace the fantastic poney he wants to offer his wife, in 1926, with an ostrich he barely can manage in 1934,

and you have the elements of a fiasco. In 1926, Bisbee had invented an unbreakable window-pane glass, the resistance of which he attempted to demonstrate by hurling bricks at cars parked in the street (under the delusion that one of those cars was his)–thereby promptly destroying several cars before high-tailing it.

Need I point out the childish delight of seeing such a childish thing to do as to hurl stones at windows ? See Bringing Up Baby with Ginger Rogers’ stone…or Sally of the Sawdust (1925) and its own stone-throwing incident

in case you missed it, this is the moment when Carole Dempster wants to throw a rock at a rich man’s house; her father, Fields himself, stops her, reproachful, and picks up a smaller stone for her to throw.

What do you think happen in 1934 ? Bisbee’s invented a flat-proof car tire

he does attempt to bring back the old childish flavor by rolling his tire home with a stick

but the demonstration consists in a more elaborate set-up: he uses a gun to shoot at the tires, just one car, and a police car to boot (which ties in too nicely with the plot).

(Fields also remade Sally of the Sawdust in Poppy (1936)…)

Pordenone diary – day seven

More music in silent film stuff.

Count me in as one of those that wasn’t overtly impressed by Michael Nyman’s playing for either Jean Vigo’s A propos de Nice or Dziga Vertov’s Kino Pravda. A propos de Nice, a naughty, irreverent and poetic piece, I had seen last year already, with, per force, a different accompaniment. I can’t say the four or five musical themes that Nyman brought to the film and kept on repeating time after time after time did much for me. On some dreamy plane they did fit the film, but I suspect it’s because of the inherent nostalgic feeling most black and white silent films create in viewers. The repetition of lush musical themes will nicely contribute to the same feeling. But there was something utterly mechanistic about Nyman’s accompaniment, where one musical theme was tightly identified with one theme in the film (music for workers; music for people strolling; etc.). And to read, the next day, in the local newspaper, an interview where the maestro explained how what he wanted to do, with his music, was to surprise the listener…that’s too much for me to bear.

But then, I don’t have much feeling for celebrities. I like the old Hollywood adage: 

you’re as good as your last film.

which Stroheim used as a sign of Hollywood’s utter philistinism (Stroheim enjoyed being lionized for his past achievements in Europe). I only wish it would apply to more professions…

Now day 7 for me: nothing about Shiryaev here. Couldn’t get past the social context, of a rich Russian enjoying life filming himself and his family in little summer playlets while Cossacks and poverty went raging through the land, and therefore I still fail to see the significance of all this

(but, as Urbanora said, “we’ll all be wiser” by the end of the festival…)

So I went to see the 1916 British newsreel/documentary film The Battle of the Somme. There was an introduction to this by the restoration team from the Victoria and Albert War Museum, with the keynote address being, for me, from pianist (and composer) Stephen Horne (the only pianist playing at Pordenone to have a groupies’ website on Facebook ?). How to restore the original score for the film ? 

Indeed the film had premiered with the 1916 score at Pordenone in 2006, and the restoration DVD will feature both that score and a new score by Laura Rossi (her goal: to find music that fits the mood of the soldiers shown on film). But the film, while very moving, was also essentially a propaganda piece at the time, and the music was supposed to reflect the upbeat, optimistic mind frame that military authorities were trying to project on what was a very bloody battle. To me the interesting point was how to gauge audience reaction by the music: did musicians in 1916 all play the upbeat music provided by the British Bioscope ? New Yorkers seem to have reacted to the devastation portrayed in the film with horror…would they have accepted a gay march to accompany the film ? Definitely more research in the reception of this film (or more reading!) is required.

Next: our last Pordenone day: Fields, Marion Davies, and Griffith, ever the visionary, starts the last film he ever made with a strong Obama endorsement.

why we’ve always loved movies

I mentionned the song “Take Your Girlie To The Movies” as sung by Joanna Seaton with Don. Sosin accompanying, during the Pordenone festival.

(from Indiana University Sheet Music Collection)

This is Billy Murray in 1919:

girliemv.mp3

And this is a recent youtube version of the song, by Frederick Hodges (the last chorus is changed but it’s all in good fun):

Pordenone diary – day six

A few strange things happened at Pordenone this year in the programming: films about the first World War from Italy and Austria, shown at the same time in two different venues, Bardelys the Magnificent shown early morning, Laïla, just as magnificent, a 2 hours epic shown at 4 p.m. siesta time, and a Digibeta “documentary”, hardly better than your average DVD extra, shown in prime time at 8 pm with much fanfare. All in all, a strange day. 

Check out The Bioscope before you read this here post, because I too loved Bardelys, tongue-in-cheek, ironical, Bardelys, with Gilbert’s nose longer than you’ve ever seen it, and fight scenes where wit is more important than brute physicality (the soldiers’ lances turned into sliding ramps for Gilbert, the parachute…), as a visibly happy Serge Bromberg said in introduction to the film

Bardelys is magnificent again

Laïla, the 1929 Norwegian surprise, was also very, very good, as only silent films can be.

And Lady of the Pavements…Here my notes are a bit more organized, maybe reflecting how engrossed I must have been during the screening itself (Sosin ! Seaton !):

• the last scene: she sings the Song of Songs (“where is the song of songs for me?”), thinks about Karl: one by one the customers in the low-life cabaret where she works are changed, in lap-dissolves, into Karl. All the men that is ! And as she sings, and as she sees only Karls everywhere, the real Karl appears – is he the real one, or a reflection of Joanna Seaton, the vocalist, as she sang the song ? Hard to tell.

(This is Lupe Vélez – not Joanna Seaton – but you’ll get the point)

• The social issue is from another time, another planet. The melodramatic plot (will aristocratic Karl agree to marry a poor, lower class girl ?) is so ancient it is largely irrelevant.
• The girl’s training to become a lady (how to talk, walk, eat, and dress), on the other hand, is used in the film as an occasion to unmask melodramatic stereotypes, as she is taught to conform to the image of a lady, but falls back, when training’s over, into her natural, easy-going self. Thus do silent films wink at their audience. She has that coarse gesture to put her dress back in place, she takes her shoes off because they are too tight, she scratches her back against the door post when her back’s itchy (!), she head-buts, Pickford-like, her seducing etiquette teacher. One second she’s a lady, the next she’s a pest. And for all we know, it all looks like we’re witnessing the very making of the scene and the camera’s just stopped.
• But that’s all part of the Griffith head-fake: after her introduction to Karl, the melodramatic takes over and all symptoms of her former self and its pains at acting out the lady, all vanish entirely. She neither hits nor tickles, not anymore – she becomes, for all plot intents and purposes, the operetta character she was playing before.

In other words: another sign that Griffith is indeed irresolute (see my take on Drums of Love)

Next up: war on films (or was this tourism?), and more enchantment.

Pordenone diary – day five

Slowly catching up…

The affaire du jours, as The Bioscope notes, was the showing of The Watermelon Patch, a 1905 Edison film with so much blatant racism as to make you want to throw your chair at the screen. It’s not often that a film asks you to share a laugh by showing Blacks locked in their home by Whites who proceed to set fire to it. Amazing, yes, that the catalog described this as a purely formal exercise in alternate cutting – though I’d respectfully disagree with Urbanora that the film ought not to have been shown. I’m certainly all the wiser (read, the more disgusted) for having seen it — and I’d love to see a program entirely devoted to racial relations in early cinema, as one comment at the Bioscope suggests. 

from Blotto Online International

The grand affair of the day, to me, was the evening concert. Jean Darling, Donald Sosin, Joanna Seaton – and you think I’m not there ! Jean Darling…I had discovered her last year at Pordenone, both on screen in some Our Gang short comedies (she started when she was 4 years old) and in person on stage at the festival (she was then…), and if you’ve never seen a real, old-time Hollywood pro – and not a fancy-smart-pants modern-day celebrity – you’ve got to see Jean Darling today. She’s beyond good. Give the woman a mike, a chair, and a stage, and she’ll ham it up as best she can – and she’s good at that, too. I didn’t say I’d like her for my grand-mother, but on stage ? Any time, any day. She lives 200% more on a stage.

So she came back this year, and sang an evening of early 1910 (and a few 1920) popular songs that dealt with “the movies”, alternating with Joanna Seaton at the mike, and even Sosin took a turn singing ! With such gems as a naughty “Take your girlie to the movies / if you can’t make love at home”

you can do a lot in seven reels

or the ethnic “When Sarah Saw Theda Bara”, and 15 other songs, and the good humor that went on on the stage between the three performers, it was quite an evening. And the songs were a brilliant, and to me moving, reminder of cinema’s popular attraction: sex, escapism, youth, a sense of freedom, a dose of enchantment, and a large helping of self-aware silliness, you could sense the revolution of the dark room on the march in those songs. Why do we still like cinema today, if not because we like stories, we like colors, we like music, we like taking our s.o. out, we like holding hands, etc. etc. etc. just like they did, one hundred years ago.

And Jean Darling, bosom-twisting:

The things you can get away with when you’re old !

“When you’re old”, yes, Jean, but mostly when you’re good ! Here’s hoping we see you next year, too.

Pordenone diary – day four

A word on D.W. Griffith’s Drums of Love (1928), which was shown in a 16 mm print, and which I take as a case in point about the problematic acceptance of melodramatic forms by the late 1920s. I’m more and more convinced that the problem with late Griffith films is less that they’re outdated, but rather that they’re irresolute. Griffith by the late 1920s is going in two directions:

• one is his old stock-and-trade melodramatic store of hyperbolic titles

(we’re here treated to a description of Lionel Barrymore as a “super-dwarf”–I kid you not)

and punctuation of scenes by frontal long shots that have long been superseded in American cinema, by that time, with more dynamic editing and more kinetic shots (look for interrupted tracking shots in this film, as in other late Griffith films, as a clear sign that D.W. doesn’t quite know what to do with the new idiom: the camera starts moving forward, but stops in mid-flight without accomplishing, without revealing anything).

• the other direction is decidedly more modern, and ought to put to rest any notion that Griffith is just out of touch. 

Go back to the love scenes here, slow though they may be. Griffith (and indeed, photographer Karl Struss) is here pairing down the number of signifying elements in the staging (a candle, shadows, one look), or the number of emotions shown (there seems to be a consensus that Don Alvarado, as Count Leonardo, is just not acting at all), in a strategy that seems so anticlimatic (where’s the passion) as to be worth a reconsideration, it seems to me. What if purposefully Griffith is slowing the lovers down so the sexual tension builds up ? I’lll admit this sounds rather goofy if you read Scott Simmon’s assessment of the film in the festival catalog

The Drums of Love comes close to being a fascinating film – if we weren’t forced to spend so much time with the two lovers

or if you read what “Penrod” has got to say about it over at The Bioscope. But to me the repetition of love scenes (we got it the first time around, why repeat if not to further the pleasure of dealing with unexpressed passion), the leg-massage that Mary Philbin gets just before her big midnight rendez-vous, the business on the sofa, as languid as they come, are signs that there’s a something that Griffith is trying to tell us, and that something is a bit more modern that the ol’ melodrama: desire !

My partiality to these love scenes, slow, long shots, repetitive, toned down, may be due to the accompaniment that was provided, that day, by none other than the irrepressible Gabriel Thibaudeau — and I was sitting right next to the piano, too ! In those scenes, instead of playing the action (slow, drawn out), Thibaudeau, as he so often does, played the sentiment (wide, passionate, exuberant). The dissonance was very moving, the music taking you to heights of passion that the film refused to go into, providing the dark, unuttered subtext of their love. But at moments like this the distinction between the film and the music is largely irrelevant: the “accompaniment” is the film. 

In this sense the double ending is a symptom that the two trends cannot be reconciled. None of the endings is satsifactory: one just piles on corpses in an orgy of sacrifice that is utterly disgusting, and that even Struss’s mysty photography cannot do anything for; the other mechanically gets rid of the only hindrance in the way of romantic love for the young couple by having Barrymore and the court jester kill off each other. There was a “Bancroft” direction that this could have taken (I’m thinking of Bancroft in Thunderbolt: Thunderbolt, the great big bad gangster, accepts his own sacrifice and execution on the chair to make room for the lovers), when in the second ending Barrymore throws all literary conventions (honor, revenge, etc.) off the window by a simple

who knows ?

But the jester remains a creature of the melodramatic world, where revenge once sworn must take place, and attacks him there and then. So no self-sacrifice here à la Bancroft, but rather a hodge-podge of inconclusive lines. What to choose ? The modernity of desire, the religious sacrifice line, the conventional young romantic couple, a more elaborate Beauty and the Beast moment ? Human, or conventional ? Seems like Griffith just couldn’t decide.

And now a question on Douglas Fairbanks’ Modern Musketeer: has anyone studied out there how Fairbanks sells Fairbanks in his films, how the films are large advertisements for the ”Fairbanks lifestyle” ? Note here the characters who are spectators, too, of the bouncing Doug. And another hint at why Fairbanks was so popular: he turns gold into mud, and lives to smile about it

Golly, what a gully !

(that’s his take on the Grand Canyon – but check out his interactions with the Indian (“How” – “Scrambled!”), or….anything he touches turns to, well, just a joke.)

The next day, day five !, is when Jean Darling, again, descends upon us in her show-biz glory.

Pordenone diary – day three

A hurried post today. I saw the same program as The Bioscope did, but stayed on for Paris en Cinq Jours (1925), a harmless enough little comedy about American tourists in Paris which features, notably, a hurried 15-minute rush by the tourists through Le Louvre (a gag Godard, in Bande à part, was to renew, though Jacques Feyder had also used it in his Hollywood-made 1929 The Kiss). Isn’t it bad business to go about showing your main customers as boobs ? In the magnificent festival catalog, Lenny Borger comes down hard on the film, and on star-director Nicolas Rimsky:

The film’s central weakness is Rismky himself — his bumbling and grimacing are mostly uninspired mimicry of American models. Still, Rimsky enjoyed popularity among French cinema aurdiences of the 1920s.

I dunno…I thought the film breezed right along (not like that plodding Triplepatte which Lenny Borger seems to have liked…thought for another day!), and I actually enjoyed the pastiche element in that film: it took me a little while to figure out that this was indeed a French film (once the tourists hit Paris then it’s impossible to doubt anymore: hand-held, jerky, out-of-focus shots, long pans on crowds and streets, nervous editing of out-of-balance shots, those would seem to have been de rigueur in all French films seen during this week). But the American segment is, aesthetically, a good copy of an American film c. 1919:  the sets are, notably, American. Dark, velvety, textured, with camera in frontal position, the ubiquitous large desk in front. Is there a good study out there of French pastiches of American silent films ?

But now my main Pordenone complaint. I too went to the Collegium. While I imagine this opportunity given to students to hobnob with the best in international scholarly erudition can only be fantastic (witness for one instance the link Phil Carli just dropped during that session: the University of California Santa Barbara has digitized, in its Sound Collection, 1890-1900 cylinders of theatre or early film music), and while I think it’s a great idea to open said sessions to the public, I wish the sessions were, well, really open. Not to make a mountain out of a molehill, but it sounds jarring to hand out a bibliography “only to Collegians”. This is 2008, information should not, cannot, be proprietary.

Got to be a pretty cool festival if that’s the only bummer of the week. And it is. Check out day four ! I have tons of notes on day four in my little notebook — hopefully there’ll be time this weekend to upload it all here.

Pordenone diary – day two

There’s a small conversation going on over at The Bioscope on how good, or how bad, Sally of the Sawdust was. Let me add one detail that’s a problem for the film: the now infamous Griffith titles.

a rich young man – a homeless waif – the eternal land of youth

is indeed bad enough, but

if the grandmother only knew that the judge was torturing their baby’s baby

is beyond caricature. And I’m afraid silent films have suffered from the perception that they engage in such schmaltzy over-the-top overt narration all the time, when they’re actually rather rarely this maudling. Here’s what the ever perceptive Robert Sherwood thought of the titles, back in August 1925:

There is [in the film] a fine collection of ham sub-titles, all bearing Mr. Griffith’s trade-mark, in several of which he comes out boldly for Mother Love.

Snap !

Those titles rather should be considered tell-tale signs that something’s going wrong with the narration: and indeed, there’s plenty of evidence here that Fields and Griffith don’t go together as Hazel and Bay Rum do in another Fields film screened later during the week. Take the lack of pay-off to important set ups, such as the court-room scene, or the Ford chase, or Dempster’s drop-dead gorgeous nightgown: it doesn’t mesh either with the rhythm of the film. It points to a later Griffith (the still to come Battle of the Sexes), and to an older (Isn’t Life Wonderful? or Broken Blossoms) Griffith. The incoherence was clear to Sherwood:

“Sally of the Sawdust” is inexcusable. It is absolutely incoherent as to story; its attempts at pathos are illegitimate; its characters-with one exception-are artificial. it is the work of a man who has become so completely soaked with theatrical trumpery that he wouldn’t recognize reality if it stepped up and slapped his face.

The one exception in “Sally of the Sawdust” is provided by W.C. Fields, who manages to inject some of his own matchless comedy, and some of his own human warmth, into this otherwise bloodless story.

I think this contemporary opinion sums up nicely the drift of the conversation going on over at the Bioscope. I’d add only this: Dempster, whose body language oscillates between “a very unconvincing counterfeit of Lillian Gish” (zinger! Sherwood!) and a sexed-out pre-Garbo (just as unconvincing, although more surprising), is the incarnation of this hesitation in the film. (This being said, Carl Sandburg had a much more favorable opinion of the film)

So what has the Bioscope not seen on day 2 of the Giornate film-fest? Well, charitably enough, it has left out a forgettable Renoir, Tire au flanc (1928), built in episodic fashion around the farcical–but not very funny, IMHO– figure of the ill-fitting poet serving in the military. Take that premise, think about 30 seconds about jokes built from that, and…they’re all in there. Contrast Fields’ Golf Specialist who piles up reason after reason for not hitting one simple golf ball (from the banal paper sticking to one’s fingers, to the absolutely irrelevant woman looking for her horse), to the girl every soldier wants to paw. Hmm…

Not that the film doesn’t have its moments of brilliance: the opening scene, with a Michel Simon possessed by an irrepressible urge to kiss his girlfriend as they’re setting up the table, the naughty camera movements, or, later, the march with gaz masks that becomes a huge collin-maillard party are good…but they’re only moments. The lack of a narrative arch is clearly a problem. While the first scene works because its main stated goal (the woman of the house wants to impress the invited Colonel) is smashed to bits, another scene such as the barrack scene has no clear narrative goal, and asks for our nostalgia for barrack life to function (along the line of “do you remember how droll army life was?”). And, let me tell you, that’s a non-starter: take it from one who’s been-there-done-that.

Next day: a lot of folks come to visit: Satan, Pickford, and American tourists — in that order.

Pordenone – diary – Day One

As always, the Bioscope has been there before and Urbanora (hiya there!) should always be your first stop when silent-film sleuthing – but you could make this your second stop as I’ll try to post my Pordenone diary with other films the Bioscope has not reviewed (here’s to collaboration).

I’ll add this to his take on the first evening Special Event, Pickford’s 1926 Sparrows: with 88% of all shots visual shots, and only 9% (9%!) of all shots dialogue titles, and less than 1% (you read that right: 0.8%!!) of all shots exposition titles, this has got to be close to a Hollywood record for lowest reliance on intertitles. Small wonder everyone loved Pickford: there is time to see her, her eyes, her pouts, her wildest gestures. And sure, it’s a meller – except when there’s no plot at all and it’s only Mary interacting with children: feeding a kid, arbitrating a fight, pushing another with her head up the stairs, waiting for the night to end…

Had I but world enough  and time (huh, Marvell, is that you?), I’d go a little further. It’s a film that does the meller thing half-way, because it’s pulled in another direction by Mary’s playing a 12-year old: the thrill is not fully in the chase, it’s also in watching the spectacular achievement of this 30+ woman completely at ease, in her element, surrounded by kids one third her age. The fascination is less with the wired crocodiles (an amazing feat of restoration, that: after all this time, the image is so crisp and clear that the wires used to operate the gators’ mouths were clearly visible…) than with the show-woman.

Anabel Lane, Film Mercury, Aug. 1926:

After seeing the picture the writer feels the audiences have taken Sparrows too seriously; it should have been accepted in the same spirit as The Black Pirate. Sparrows might have opened with the subtitles: “Once Upon a Time There Lived” and ended with, “And they All Lived happy Ever After.”(…) Through the harrowing scenes of crossing the swamp she displayed comedy touches; not to relieve the situation but because she knew very few would be able to receive it earnestly.

Carl Sandburg, december 1926:

Yet, while this is melodrama it happens that once in a while the picture achieves fantasy. It’s a real world and it isn’t. Of course, such sweet, tough kiddoes and kiddees are not seen in actual life. And the ending scenes are not dragged too far. Yet it rises and holds one with elemental power of story telling and of character portrayal.

I’ll return to that later in that Pordenone diary: there’s a twinkle in the eye of American silent melodramas, a something that tells the audience this is all for a laugh and the thrill is in knowing it’s a thrill. A reflexive pleasure, so to speak.

And here’s another stat for you: 8 days of film viewing at Pordenone comes down to some 10h of sheer viewing time, on average, every day en route to a marathon 40 feature-length films in the week. That first day alone I spent 352 minutes watching that big, BIG screen. Ah, the happiness of it…

But to return. After the Pickford fest, those that stayed for more were treated to Running Wild, a 1927 Fields/La Cava that to me was the best W.C. Fields of the whole week (with, maybe, the exception of the soundThe Golf Specialist, which is a shorter skit anyway). 80 minutes of Fields trying, trying to impress everyone around him that he is a man. From the waking up to a gym routine (thanks to a chain-smoking instructor on the radio) with Strongfort on the wall, to the step-son wailing that his dad was a man, to the “I’m a lion!” zanniness, the theme is pretty obvious to pick up. Ah, for the day 

when me or Mary want to buy ourselves a new dress !

It’s a riot of a film and what works very well is the mirror structure: the last half of the film is a replay in reverse of the first half of the film. First half: he wakes up, gets humiliated by wife and Junior, goes to the office where more humiliation follows (he is turned down laughed down when asking for a raise), then goes to Mr. Johnson’s office to get his firm’s money back, and is quickly thrown out of there. Then he falls under hypnosis

I’m a lion ! (fist raised, reminds one of the Sister Suffragette routine in Disney’s Mary Poppins)

and retraces his steps, methodically: first Johnson where he gets his money back and signs the big contract, then his office where he insults all the big shots, then home where he straightens (“I’m a lion!”) his standing with wife and Junior (Junior’s beating, a classic of Fields humor, shakes the whole house). Home-office-Johnson-Johnson-office-home. It’s what gives the later scenes, for all their “obstreperous” character (not my word ! That’s Mordant Hall, New York Times, June 19, 1927), their punch. Retracing our steps, the final confrontation is expected, desired, and fulfilling:

It was satisfying (says Mordant Hall, but now I think I know why) to the spectators to observe Mr. Finch even up matters with his wife (his second marriage), first by breaking up a tea party and then by smashing the portrait of Mrs. Finch’s first husband.

There’s another point where I agree, after a good 81 years, with that crowd at the Paramount Theater, New York:

It was interesting to observe that the episode in “Running Wild” that afforded the most enjoyment one afternoon last week in the Paramount THeatre was not where Mr. Finch is perceived slamming people right and left, but during his simple act of trying to avoid the joinings in the pavement as he goes to work. This was an excellent thought, something really human, for after all there are many, many persons in this world who are superstitious, say what they will to the contrary.

It’s also an “excellent thought” because that tip-toeing at full walking speed on the pavement looked remarkably like dancing (thank you Gabriel Thibaudeau for the accompanying jazz beat at that point). But human it is – and so is the “slamming people right and left”, pace Mr. Hall. For, “say what they will to the contrary”, who wouldn’t want to be a lion for a day.

A pretty good day’s work, I’d call it. There was more of Fields slapping kids and people around, thankfully, to come in the festival — but that’s a tale for another day.

Multiple set-ups, an example from 1917

(this is just a follow-up on this post)

Vivian M. Moses, in an article (“With Art as Her Handmaiden”) published in The Moving Picture Worldof July 21, 1917, offers this illustration of how widespread continuity principles, with multiple camera set-ups, were accepted by  1917 : it’s a shooting diagram from Hugo Ballin, for a scene for Baby Mine, with Madge Kennedy. (In his article Moses celebrates the arrival of several artists at Goldwyn’s as a sign that movies are growing up.)

Continuity editing must have been firmly entrenched by 1917 for Ballin to pick it up so quickly. Notice too how Ballin has picked up on another Hollywood trait — the desire for control: everything is either “selected by HB” or has to be “submitted to HB” or must be referred “to HB”. Sounds like Sam Goldwyn, in an effort to maximise on his investment in big name artists, has given them a free hand…

Here’s that document:

The state of cinema – 1917

The July 21, 1917 issue of The Moving Picture World published the opinions of leading figures of Hollywood about the state of cinema then. DeMille, Buckland, Fairbanks, Henry King, Maurice Tourneur…All believed cinema wasn’t completely matured — but their ideas of how it ought to develop take them in different directions. There’s an array of options: Buckland believes in a non-realistic, all-suggestive future when Fairbanks calls for “page of life” stuff (yes, this is Fairbanks way before Thief of Bagdad). Henry King makes ‘em “heart high”, what’s become a cliché of Hollywood filmmaking (the love angle), but Edward Sloman takes on that other cliché of Hollywood filmmaking, the blue-tinted day-for-night shooting that my friend Shaye also hates so much. Tourneur is going for the artistic, calls actors “human pigments” and declares his preference for studio shooting (control, control), while British actress-turned-producer Peggy Hyland (brought to the US by Vitagraph in 1916–her studio, “Mayfair Film Corporation”, produced the Charles Brabin directed Persuasive Peggy) defines the artistic as realism…”wholesome” realism, that is.

Look beyond the slightly pompous style and you’ll find quite a variety of opinions. What’s Hollywood cinema in 1917 ? You tell me:

      

P.S.: For a bit of context on the pivotal 1917 year, you could worse than start with David Bordwell’s introductory post on 1917. A more recent post on Hart’s early films revisits 1917 with more examples of the domination of continuity principles — fast cutting, multiplication of set-ups, etc.

what’s news ? 1909

I haven’t blogged from Bologna and its Cinema Ritrovato and I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to do that — in the meantime you ought to check out David Bordwell’s post on his weeklong film viewing extravaganza. For the moment, this little item from an excellent, rich program.

I had a great time with the retrospective of short films dealing with suffragettes (and women comedians). Yes they were absolutely retrograde and the machism was insufferable, but it was the variations on male patriarchy that made it a fascinating exercise, as one could almost sense cultural variations at play unfolding before one’s eyes, from the British where the images tended to show women as fighters, strong, respectable…or impish, but on their own, to the Italians where do as they may women were trapped in the seduction game (even the woman-lawyer, sadly, fell for the persistent, and obnoxious, man of leisure who was pursuing her). To be sure, the British newsreel or fiction films, just like the French or the Italians, showed palpable discomfort with the whole suffragette movement (bombs, a sense of civil chaos even in those impressive, well-planned marches, a sense of the threat that out-of-control women may represent to the male hierarchy). 

One newsreel item showed, amazingly, the horse-race accident at the Derby at Epsom on June 4, 1913: Miss Davidson jumped on the course as the horses rounded Tottenham Corner to grab the King’s horse, but was hit and died of fractured skull (another newsreel showed the funeral). Amazingly, the camera captured all of it, and the scene is as shocking now as it must have been for contemporaries…at least for feminist contemporaries. The newsreel, unconcerned by the shock of that image (we’re talking horses running, human figure running to meet them, impact, flying body, horses tumbling — even in the long shot, it’s a big, gory mess), goes on to describe the end of the race, and that frantic moment when one jokey seemed to have pushed another close to the finish line, which a slow-motion revealed as perfectly true (what thrill!). The newsreel ended with shots of the winner, the horses, and so on. But nothing on the “accident”. Indeed, talk of newsreel as revealing cultural attitudes…

This short newsreel came back to mind this morning as I was reading from The Moving Picture World, July 10, 1909. One F. H. Richardson, from Chicago, is trying to give an example of “Practical Utility of Moving Pictures.” His candidate:

the recent auto races at Crown Point, Ind. These races were run within twenty miles of the corporate limits of Chicago, were very exciting and full of intense interest, yet not one in then thousand of the citizens even of this city could view them. The course had many sharp, dangerous turns and the race was replete with exciting incidents, few of which were viewed even by the people who did go to Crown Point and swelter in the hot sun all day long, returning with blistered faces minus quite a respectable chunk of coin of the realm. But the incidents they miseed they have seen. They have viewed them in all the vividness of their actuality days after the race was but a matter of history. How ?

Simplicity itself ! The Selig Company had a corps of men stationed around the twenty-three mile course at all points where there was most likely to be high speed, accidents or other things of more than passing interest, and it is simply amazing what they secured. Even myself, an old picture man, could scarce believe my eyes when I viewed the film at the Orpheum. At one of the bad turns a car skidded and turned squarely end for end. It is almost unbelievable that the camera could catch this incident, but there it is, every detail of it, and at close range at that. There is no manner of doubt about its being genuine either. No driver on earth would risk his life, to say nothing of the great, heavy racing car, to accommodate a motion picture man, no matter how much money he might be offered.

The article goes on, but Richardson has nothing more to say about the lives or limbs lost in said accidents (he goes to cite another example: motion pictures of Washington or Lincoln). No, the thrill of it is what matters — and I can’t help finding a common representational attitude with the Derby newsreel of Miss Davidson: what matters is the fact that reality is at all represented, not what is represented : or newsreels as “attractions” first, news second.

Note how it matters, too, to establish, however awkwardly, the “genuineness” of those accidents: as if there were lingering doubts about the truthfullness of film-recorded events. To me those doubts can be understood if newsreels themselves are understood as “spectacle” first and “news” second. There are far more reasons to doubt the veracity of a “spectacle” than “news” — at least off-hand.

Big films, little theaters – 1926

This looks like quite a program :

 

According to David Bordwell (On The History of Film Style, p. 23), the “International Film Arts Guild” was linked to the magazine Close Up and was one of the institutions disseminating the idea of cinema as art because it did more than record reality (or what Bordwell calls the Basic Story). That program conforms to the dedication of those small theaters and groups to build an understanding of cinema as an art through showing old films along with more recent ones, and international “art” films along with more original American fare. But as the program shows they were not adverse to showing good ol’ blockbusters (Robin Hood!) either: cinema as an art did not exclude Hollywood filmmaking. (Bordwell indeed provides many other examples of inclusion, in the Basic Story, of Hollywood giants).

Surprise, surprise: most (all?) of the films shown are now recognized classics. Is the Basic Story so much with us still ? And isn’t it ironic that modern viewing conditions of silent films look more like minority practices of 1920s art-film exhibition ? 

Tony Guzman has all the details on “The Little Theater Movement” in the US and the Cameo Theater:

The Shadowbox did not remain New York’s only art theatre for long. The first film theatre to adopt art film programming was the Cameo Theatre on 42nd Street near Broadway in New York. The Cameo had been programming first run Hollywood films, but with only 549 seats it was much smaller than the nearby film palaces in the Broadway area and was thus hopelessly outmatched in attracting desirable product. However, its prestigious and lucrative location made it a tempting target for the International Film Arts Guild, an organization formed by Symon Gould in early 1926. The Guild was modeled after New York’s 16,000 member Theatre Guild, the largest little theatre organization in the United States.

The Guild sought to provide a sanctuary for artistic films as well as the history of cinema as the Guild ‘dedicated itself to the task of reviving and keeping alive the classics of the cinema’.  Gould believed ‘that the cinema has an art-destiny of its own, unrelated to any other existing art, and that a little theatre movement of the cinema is essential at this time to keep the flame of its artistic ambitions burning brightly and shielded from the miasmatic vapors of commercial animosities’. There was nothing in Gould’s statements suggesting that the Guild would concentrate on European films, and in fact the Guild’s most cherished ambition was to present the complete version of Greed (1924) on a series of successive evenings similar to the way the Theatre Guild had staged George Bernard Shaw’sBack to Methuselah on three evenings in February 1922.

When the Guild leased the Cameo in February 1926 dubbing it ‘The Salon of the Cinema’, most of its early presentations were revivals of American films like A Woman of Paris (1923),The Miracle Man (1919), Broken Blossoms (1919), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Why Worry?(1923), Merry-Go-Round (1923), Tol’able David (1921), A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1921), Outside The Law (1921), and Doctor Jack (1922). Interspersed within these ‘repertoire weeks’ were a few revived European films like Othello (1922), Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) and Crainquebille (1922) as well as two weeks of ‘repertoire’ devoted to the American and German films of Ernst Lubitsch from 7 March to 20 March billed as ‘a challenge to “movie-scoffers” and a feast for film-lovers!’ The Guild invited audience participation by sponsoring contests such as essays arguing ‘which is the greater screen characterization – Emil Jannings in “The Last Laugh” or Maurice de Féraudy in “Crainquebille”‘ as well as soliciting requests for future ‘repertoire weeks’. 

Can I just interject here that solliciting audience participation is not limited to art film practices ? This 1927 ad for The Big Parade, with its $50,000 cash prize for anyone who can answer six questions about the film, published in Motion Picture Magazine (Nov. issue), is a good illustration of an mainstream Hollywood seeking an active audience — and an audience engaged both in reading narrative clues (questions 2 or 4) and in searching for documentary, real-life clues (question 5):

But to continue with our Cameo:

These ‘repertoire weeks’ produced grosses consistent with and sometimes better than the house average for first run films which, with the lower film rental costs, made them profitable to the Guild.

The Cameo’s programming would soon become more adventurous:

The Guild soon found that among their most successful evenings were the nights when they sponsored screenings of European films that had not been widely seen or shown at all in New York. These were shown on special evenings for Guild subscribers. The usual ticket prices at the Cameo ranged from $.50 to .85 but these special screenings featured prices as high as $2.75, well above the highest film ticket price on Broadway which was $1.65. Nonetheless, these screening were often sellouts. The first such evening was on 18 March 1926 when the Guild presented the American premiere of Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (The Three Wax Works, 1924) at the Cameo preceded by The Pilgrim (1923), Prismatic Polychrome(an experimental abstract color short film by Eastman Kodak) and Ballet Mécanique (1924). This was followed on 29 April 1926 with the second American screening of Shatteredsupplemented by Ce Cochon de Morin (Red Hot Papa, 1924) from France and the pioneering American experimental short Manhatta (1921). On 3 June 1926 the Guild presented the American premiere of Hintertreppe (Backstairs, 1921) with a revival of Universal’s Driven(1922), Edison’s The Kiss (1896), The Great Train Robbery (1903), Going Straight (The Better Way, 1911) with Mary Pickford and The Fatal Mallet (1914) with Charles Chaplin. The Guild turned to France for its subscription night on 29 June 1926 with the double premieres ofVisages d’Enfants (Faces of Children, 1925) and Paris qui Dort (Paris Endormi/The Crazy Ray, 1924) in addition to two experimental shorts, Film Without Pictures and Knee Deep in Love, plus a revival of A Feud in the Kentucky Hills (1912).

These screenings demonstrated the three interests of the Guild at this point: film history, experimental films and European films. The Cameo continued its ‘repertoire’ policy until 28 November 1926 when it gave Ufa’s Manon Lescaut (1926) its first New York run. Ufa had failed to place it with a major distributor because of the impending release of Warner Bros.’ version of the Prévost novel retitled When A Man Loves (1927) with John Barrymore, so the Guild picked it up and it enjoyed considerable success during its two week run.

What if !

What if film conventions were set aside for a change ? Motion Picture Magazine of nov. 1927 suggests the following results:

News flash ! Trotsky was an extra at Vitagraph circa 1910

Yes, you’ve read it right. Leon Trotsky. The one and only.

That’s what we learn thanks to Vitagraph founder, Hollywood veteran, and Motion Picture Magazine founder J. Stuart Blackton, in an article he wrote on his magazine’s 14th birthday (Feb. 1925). Blackton is reminiscing about the differences between cinema in 1910 and cinema in 1925. Ah, the good old days before the star system when all hands were on deck to help out:

Except for Cos [Maurice Costello], every actor, cameraman and director hammered sets, ran errands, rummaged the neighborhood for props, and generally took the place of the
 machinists, carpenters, architects, designers, interior decorators, animal trainers and efficiency experts we have today. Anybody who wasn’t needed as a lead in a picture cheerfully played as extra. Perhaps, on the whole, this is the greatest difference between then and now ! I have stills in my desk showing Earle Williams, Norma, Constance and Anita [Talmadge] as a part of the mob. There was one silent, foreign chap who often worked in mob scenes for two dollars a day, who is now the ruler over fifty-million people. His name was Leon Trotsky.
 

Nothing is too good for Hollywood lore.

Putting words on the image 03 – “ethnography”

This is so far the earliest example of this rare practise in Hollywood silent films of having titles run on a moving image. It is from Terror Island (James Cruze, 1920), and as the titles dissolve on the shot the image shrinks noticeably:

Clearly an effort to throw a little documentary dust into the eyes of the audience. There really is no mistaking this for what it is, a straight out-and-out melodrama with little to none documentary value: are we in Polynesia or Africa ? What’s the feast about ? What “long pig that speaks” ? This is no “Paepae Tapu”: it’s flat and not a height by any measure — in fact it’s right there on the village center (so much for the “Forbidden” sacred spot). The “ethnic” part of the film is a simple and artificial foil for the hero (Houdini), and nothing more. The use of a quote from O’Brien’ 1919 White Shadows of the South Seas is part of that transformation of the documentary into spectacle that is so frequent in the literature and “documentary” filmmaking of the day. 

But the titles dissolving on the moving image stand out: they are a visual quote of more precisely documentary formats, and as such, it’s an interesting little technical twist, almost an aesthetic attempt to give more legitimacy to the scene.

Houdini invents Television !

From Terror Island (James Cruze, 1920). Houdini plays a treasure hunter who perfects a submarine to salvage treasures from boats sunk by German subs during World War I. Two inventions stand out: one is a side-door to the sub that allows for quickly coming in and out of the sub. The other is dubbed “an electric periscope”, and Houdini demonstrates its use in this sequence:

     

Sure it’s not radio but it’s already the promise of the most ubiquitous window (actually a window fixed to a window!) to the world ever (this ad from 1932 makes that point most emphatically).

In terms of bringing reality to the spectator it could hardly perform any better: the young lad shown on periscope walking towards the audience to deliver a paper really delivers the paper

- and the point is ?

- That they’re making a redundant point…

- (under his breath) and so are you

- (pretending not to have heard)…about the new media’s ability to represent reality: it represents reality to the nth level. It shows reality as it unfolds. It shows it as something real, actual, happening. And one has to suppose that the same thinking informs their approach to cinema’s ability to represent reality.

- Though you could also argue that the opposite is true: they need to project their fantasies of representational authenticity on a new medium yet to be invented, since cinema with all its tricks and shortcuts and literary baggage is coming way short.

A pause.

- Yes, I guess you could.

 

Film Cartoon – news – 1924, or 2004 ?

From realist painter / cartoonist William Gropper, in Motion Picture Magazine, Feb. 1924, a little “edukational news” reel:

 

Film cartoon – more hokum !

One of the obsessions of film criticism in the 1920s was about film hookum. Motion Picture Magazine offers a good illustration of that: in the Feb. 1921 issue, G. Kauffman had already provided cartoon treatment to 4 “hokey” situations. Eldon Kelley is put to the task of illustrating yet another “hoke” story, by Frederick Van Vranken, in the July 1923 issue (“The Film Drama Versus Life”). 

Here are the six illustrations drawn by Kelley for the article (my favorites are #1 — because I’ve actually not seen it that often in silent films — and #5):

     

Film cartoons – ideas for censors, 1923

This from Leo Kober, 1923: “If I were Will Hays”….

Nose correction ? tiniest computer in the world ? Tubular home-movies ?

Modern Mechanix publishes ads  and mechanical items from the past from popular mechanic or scientific publications. Theyre all great fun, but more to the point here, there are several publications with issues from the 1920s:

• Modern Mechanix
• National Geographic
• Physical Culture (NOT for the faint-hearted)
• Popular Mechanics, our old friend: no, smoking ain’t that bad…
• Popular Science
• and Scientific American

Added to my links !

Film cartoons – Olive Butter 1922

The Bioscope has another of those informative posts on where to find (mostly British) cartoons around the web for (mostly the 1910s) silent film period, and if you haven’t checked it out then you really should now.

My own contribution is more limited in scope: after Kaufman’s old hokum bucket comes a series of five witty cartoons by Olive Butter published in Motion Picture Magazine, april 1922, dealing with “Shadow-Drama in the South Seas” (yes I’m currently going through my pile of material xeroxed from the University of Southern California archives, and that includes all 1920s volumes of Motion Picture Magazine):

Enjoy!

    

 

No courage in romances

It’s depressingly easy today to call silent movies out on the racist representational shorthand their narratives sometimes resort to (Arabs, Asians, Blacks acting usually within the confines of conventional literary prejudices). But they could be called out on it during the 1920s, though I haven’t seen this point often raised in cinema criticism of the time, at least not in a “main stream” news outlet. The review is about The Sheik (1921), and it is from the New York Times (7 nov. 1921):

Somehow, this doesn’t seem to be exactly the idea of Mrs. Hull’s novel as reported in the book reviews, but never mind: here’s the picture tale of a nice sheik and his agreeable English girl. And you won’t be offended by having a white girl marry an Arab, either, for the sheik isn’t really a native of the desert at all. Oh, no: he’s thhe son of a Spanish father and an English mother who were killed when he was a baby so the old sheik could raise him as his son. These romantic Arabian movies, you know, never have the courage of their romantics.

To be absolutely fair, in The Sheik, while the (English) girl (Agnes Ayres) is indeed reassured that the sheik (Valentino) is not of Arab origin — and though somehow that information is supposed to validate the entire love story that has sprung between them — nothing is said of the sheik’s cultural roots: the racism is based on blood identity, but the sheik’s cultural identity never becomes an issue. I may be reading too much into that (the blood identity being probably thought of, in those very primitive days long before multicultural thinking, as the true and only real identity), but I find the omission worth pointing out (and it’s not like the film has forgotten about the sheik being Muslim: the last four shots are of men praying to Allah outside the sheik’s tent, and the last title read: “All things are with Allah!” — though that could just be for exotic purposes).

Am I wrong ? Are there many more examples out there of critical dismissals of ethnic stereotypes in US mainstream 1920s press ? 

 

putting words on the image – 02

This is a series that started long ago here and then rebounded here, but this is its true second installment.

This is an example of words written on a moving image, in this case the runners in the background:

 This is from The Plastic Age (1925). I’ve seen this done before, and in a sports context too: The Way To Strength and Beauty, that 1924 German film shown last year at Pordenone, had a few shots of track athletes, introduced with their names printed on their moving image. 

So to conclude in this instance, the infringement of what seems usually like a pretty rigid rule (no words written on a moving image) gives a realistic, newsreel touch to the presentation.

The Show Off (1926)

ASL: a surprising 5.8 – Melodramas like Vidor’s Love Never Dies (1921) or Elmer Clifton’s action packed Down To The Sea in Ships (1922) have similar ASLs. A comedy such as this one ought to cut faster — Mary Pickford’s Suds (1920) clocked in at a brisker 4.4 seconds/shot. What gives ?

Ford Sterling’s histrionics and an eye for dramatic composition are the answer, as the next striking shots show:

  

Extra hypothesis: on par with the massive use of dialogue titles over exposition titles (90% of titles are dialogue), with its increasing reliance on psychological motivation, shots let us read human reactions and are therefore longer.

See for yourself: here’s the link to the shot-by-shot breakdown of the film. Thanks to Shot Logger’s explanation, you now have the timecode as part of the file name (“showoffqq00:45:33qq00503″ means the frame you’re looking at came 45 minutes and 33 seconds into the film – qqHoursMinutesSecondsqq)

 

Film cartoons – The Old Hokum Bucket

Today we relax with Motion Picture Magazine, February 1921, and four hokey situations that felt already old in 1921 (drawings by G. Francis Kauffman):

The Boat (1921) – deconstructing the family

Buster builds a boat. In typical Keaton logic, the boat is too big and Buster needs to break the garage door to let it out.

  

The logic is pure Keaton’s, of course: destroy your home for your pleasure boat.

The comment is also clearly social (or rather, anti-social), as the house crumbles in perfect bourgeois indifférence: as long as Father looks sternly on, and Mother is behind also looking as though nothing had happened, then appearances are OK and the family’s safe…

(earlier, she had reacted to the catastrophic news that the garage had to be busted to clear the boat, with a perfect oh-this-man-will-never-change shrug

Part of the fun here is in the systematic destruction of the family to the point of non-existence (indeed this is fairly frequent in slapsticks: See the end of Along Came Auntie (1926), and the [[bourgeois couple busted]]). After the home, the family loses the car

but soon rallies round Father

 In the boat, the family painting (a standard marine view that could be found in any bourgeois interior) is leaking. Dad’s repair skills are not quite up to code:

and Mother’s cooking is not quite what it should be

But just when he’s through destroying the topoi of family life, he pieces it back together and, eventually, the holy family is together, praying:

or saying goodbye:

or walking away together:

…even though that reconstruction is the conclusion of a painstakingly ridiculous belief that they were all drowning together under Father’s enlightened guidance. 

(And then, as always, the perfect catastrophic logic of conspiring forces, and the loser’s poetic stance which Keaton does to perfection.

The loser’s poetic stance

Keaton, in The Boat (1921), does the loser as only he knows how: Loser loses boat

not just once, but twice:

and both times, stoically, resigned, poetically oblivious of the mass of natural forces that have conspired against him.

In the Land of Nitrate (1926)

Underpaid, overworked communists with strange religious inclinations, loving rough Wild West films: the workers in German-operated nitrate mines in Chile, 1926.

A nice collection of silent films online

If you like:

• silent films
• not paying
• diversity

then there’s a nice online collection I found this morning:scottlord’s video collection – Videos about Af Satans Bog, True Heart Susie, Pickford, Victor Sjostrom 1918 The Outlaw A…Added to my links !

Pordenone 2007 – days 2 – My first day with the 6-act structure

The thoughts:

1. Plot structure of German films: too close to theater source
2. Entertainment in American films means disregard for situation comedies, and a celebration of modern reality

The day’s program:

• Buddenbrooks (Germany, 1923)
• US Silent sponsored films: safety first !
• Baby Brother (US, 1927), Wiggle Your Ears (US, 1929)
• Il Piccolo Garibaldino (IT, 1909), I Mille (IT, 1912)
• Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: von der Schönhauser allee nach Hollywood (DE, 2006)
• Paris Qui Dort (FR, 1923-25), Séraphin ou les jambes nues (FR, 1921)
• Lumpen und Seide (DE, 1925)

Kammerspiel…in terms of plot construction, it’s astonishing how close to their theater source those German films were. Not only is the act structure written into the film (titles: “end of Act 1″ – “Act 1″ etc. –some american films did the same with “Part 1″ etc., but one had always suspected it was more to indicate reel changes), it’s written into the plot: Buddenbrooks gives us an early example of that. It’s condensed a 1,100+ Thomas Mann novel into 85 minutes, but it’s kept the dramatic structure of a play intact. Because they don’t fit into the tight dramatic structure some key human elements are missing (the marriage for instance) or simply vanish (the child!). It’s still early but I’ll try a thought here:

American silent films tend to be constructed more around notion of psychological development rather than around ideas about the dramatic structure. German films seem to prefer dramatic structure over psychological content.

And indeed, the day’s other ‘Other Weimar’ film, Lumpen und Seide (1925), confirms this: it opens in a poor club, but once inside the rich apartment, there’s no leaving it, and the dramatic workings take over. “Pleasant entertainment” says the Pordenone catalogue (G. Brown) — not the same idea of “pleasant” as American films.

Entertainment in 1920s American films is at times hard to distinguish from a celebration of modern reality: thrills and individuals locked into formula drama (as opposed to semi-human pawns written into brilliant situation comedies)

Mawson, Shackleton, polar expeditions — and authenticity

The Bioscope

But modern video is too bright, too much of the moment – it anaethetizes the ordeal. The monochrome silent footage, by its very distance, makes those things endured in the past seem all the more astonishing, because they seem so distant. In seeing the films of Scott, Shackleton and Mawson we long for close-ups and the camera techniques of today that will bring them that much closer to us, but maybe it is the lack of intimacy that is their strength. When Hell Freezes’s own faux dramatised scenes were strongest when they showed figures lost in the white distance, not trying to show the agonies etched on their faces.

Or, as I argued in Pordenone 2007 – day 1 – spaces (although about filmed sport events):

it’s more important for the film to tell us that we are indeed spectators, just like the real spectators in the film, rather than to show us what happens. It’s about status — and this still new joy of “being there” thanks to the movie camera. Today the editing is complex, and the spectator is not just a priviledged individual but someone whose participation is required.

Pordenone 2007 – day 1 – spaces

The thoughts:

• 1 filming sport spectacles: the thrills of spectatorships, or the thrills of participation by proxy?
• 2 the rhetorics of space: multiple aesthetics of space collide in films
• 3 do silent films always show old ways of doing silent films ?

The program:

• Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1924-25 – Germany) [The Way To Strength and Beauty]
• The Cook (1918 -US)
• Pass the Gravy (1928- US)
• Csak Egy Kislány van a Vilagón (1930 – Hungary)- [Only One Girl in the World]
• The Stolen Voice (1915 – US)

(See the diversity here ? And this is only in one afternoon…)

The Way to Strength and Beauty is a kulturfilm that would like to be about how to best keep in shape — only it’s really about how to look nice — and as could be expected it defines nice in non-intellectual, anti-glasses, cliché terms of women in long garbs dancing symbolic dances on unmotivated meadows. The whole aesthetic presentation creates a weird distance for the viewer, as in that football game where they say they’re going to show the Lazio Roma playing: you end up being shown the backs of onlookers (all priests) while the camera is happily oblivious of the action on the field.

Is there something here ? Could one look at how soccer games have been shot over the years ? To compare those distant shots of onfield action with the close-ups of bloodied rugby players one has been treated to recently, there is a distinct contrast: the Lazio game is a distant affair, and what seems important is less what happens than the fact that it does happen — in other words, it’s more important for the film to tell us that we are indeed spectators, just like the real spectators in the film, rather than to show us what happens. It’s about status — and this still new joy of “being there” thanks to the movie camera. Today the editing is complex, and the spectator is not just a priviledged individual but someone whose participation is required. The close-ups help us become referees all of us (video refereeing being only the logical conclusion — it turns everyone in the stadium itself into referees), but they also push us into being supporters. It asks us to be in a rather uneasy position.

But before the Lazio can get anything going you’re on to madcap humor with The Cook and its subtle reminders that in silent movies jokes can also be audio jokes: Buster Keaton as the waiter screams the order to the kitchen and into the ear of the young melancholic woman next to him, who remains perfectly melancholic. Pass the Gravy takes space staging one step further: it creates spaces that function like realistic ones, with none of the asides that mar space construction in early silent films. Here all characters can hear and if one doesn’t want to attract attention, then one should…make signs. I always like it when silent movies turn their announced infirmity on its head and use pantomime realistically. Here the chicken that shouldn’t be eaten but shouldn’t either be noticed is the source of endless pantomimes, the best being probably the egg-laying scene that becomes a football moment. But wait ! The last gag turns this plausible space on its head again: Shultz hurls a small stone on Max’s rapidly dwindling figure in the distance, and implausibly enough, it lands. Funny because implausible, implausible because until then staging had been very careful to construct plausible spaces…

I hope that’s clear. I think there’s something bigger here — indeed that’s part of my research work right now. There’s a whole underlaying aesthetics behind this construction of space, realistic or not, in silent films. And they play with that code self-consciously. The difficulty is for us to reconstruct those codes. In Pass the Gravy, as in many other cases, staging and space construction creates expectations that can be tragicallly met or comically disregarded.

Case in point: Only One Girl in the World. I’m going to make a fool of myself since this was my first Hungarian film ever, but talk about melodrama and realistic staging ! Only the climatic moments in terms of drama are shown, leaving all psychological developments to be deduced rather than experienced: Gyorgy and Kalinka fall in love (when have they met before?), Gyorgy brings a mistress back to the village (when did he get married to Kalinka?), and so on…until the final conversion: Gyorgy becomes all right again for Kalinka thanks to…the title song. And each time, to go with melodramatic story-telling, you have melodramatic spatial staging: one space per scene, unconnected spaces throughout (even when they’re outdoors: where’s that train station?)

Compare this with what followed on the program though it did not quite follow chronologically: The Stolen Voice, 1915, US. So the plot is about a hypnotist who steals a tenor’s voice out of jealousy over the singer’s success with women, notably his. Singer goes to Europe for cure, comes back still mute, finds a job acting…in silent films. Happy end. Now that melodrama travels freely in the modern world: cabaret sccenes, dance halls, boats, cars, phone conversations, film studio, New York and the El…the whole of the modern world is there on screen, and multiple spaces are used in the staging.

Melodrama and modernity (pace Ben Singer). Interestingly, that film shows how films used to be made: archaic. A limited set that moves to the wind and shakes with every door that closes, exaggerated acting — this tells us how cinema considered itself by 1915: a much more naturalistic medium than 3 years before…But here’s another question: when films show film-making in the ’10s and ’20s, do they mostly show archaic film-making ? And is that to make the point that cinema is modern — fast-changing, constantly evolving ?

Silent movies in the classroom – teaching History

Another link that comes through The Bioscope: Motion pictures in history teaching; a study of the Chronicles of America photoplays, as an aid in seventh grade instruction (1929)

Thank you Bioscope !

Silent movies in the classroom — teaching English

Found a fascinating little journal article this morning, written by an English teacher based in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1923. It’s the result from a little test to see whether movies could help teach children about English literature, better than books. (CUNNINGHAM Adelaide: “Teaching English with the Movies.” English Journal. vol. 12, no. 7, sept. 1923: 488-490. You need a JSTOR subscription to access it).

Incidentally, this English teacher in 1923 has no qualms about using the word “movie”, though she seems to prefer “moving pictures” and she uses “movies” in between quotation marks the first time around:

The promise of a “movie” stimulated the class like an electric current. The idea that a school book was actually suitable material for a movie gave it a charm never before associated with the textbook, which had ever been the symbol of “all work and no play.” A movie! They would study Silas Marner in order to understand and enjoy the movie.

Now, results are indeed encouraging, not just as regards interest and attention of students (some things never change), but also plot retention, moral lesson, and – my favorite – documentary value:

The effect of the movie upon the pupils was expressed also by a theme written November 1 upon the subject “The Pleasure and Profit I Derived from the Silas Marner Movie.” To quote from several of the themes: “It is a pleasure to be able to sit down and see the people who lived in the seventeenth century pictured before me. Their quaint dresses and customs are interesting. I think that if a person reads a book and then goes to see the picture of that book, he will understand the book better. The events in Silas Marner were made clearer in my mind by seeing the picture. It showed plainly the different characters and helped correct any wrong ideas I had about their appearances.

Miss Cunningham may have been a rather enlightened individual (though movies, even fictional movies, were often thought in relation to their educational value in the 1920s):

it seems to those of us who teach English that our pupils should in a great measure guide and determine our methods of teaching. It is useless to condemn moving pictures; we may as well condemn all novels because “dime novels” are pernicious. Why not bring the movies into the schoolroom ? The future appears bright for the educational moving picture. The schools of New York City are using it in the teaching of English, history, and science.

Still, she does seem unaware that images also lie. One can wonder at the “truthfulness” of the last example she gives:

A film is being staged in the “Sleepy Hollow Region” featuring the comedian, Will Rogers, as Ichabod Crane.

One can also wonder about the unrecognized paradox of an art form that is described in the same breath as close to “dime novels” and as having educational value — or Will Rogers as historian. (the film mentionned by miss Cunningham appears to be the 1922 version of The Headless Horseman)

The word “movie”

Thanks to http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0501D&L=ads-l&P=5480 :

20 March 1915, THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD, pg. 1749, col. 1:

One thousand editors in the United States, asked by the Photoplay Magazine as to whether the word “movie” shall be entered in the dictionaries and used as pure English, have decided in the affirmative. Of the 733 who voted, 511 voted “yes” and 222 “no.”

27 March 1915, THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD, pg. 1912, col. 1:
CHICAGO LETTER
BY JAS. S. McQUADE

_Regarding the Childish Word, “Movie”_

IN a brevity in my Chicago letter last week, it was stated that out of 733 editors throughout the country who cast a vote for or against the use of the coined word “movie,” 511 voted “yes,” and 222 “no.” It is to be regretted that the reasons for their voting for or against were not given and printed.

Within the past week I have read an article in one CHicago newspaper in which the hope was expressed that the word “movie” would be retained, because it comes in so handily in the writing of newspaper headings! In another instance a writer was gleeful over the fact that even the infant, among the first words mastered by him, used the word “movie,” and that “movie” was also the children’s word and so had come to stay. But somehow, much as I still like the old nursery rhymes and love to hear children repeat them, I am of the opinion that it is best to put away tenderly childish things when one has reached manhood or womanhood.

The coinage of “movie” was most assuredly childish. It stands for “moving picture.” The coined word, please note, is not taken from the name of the thing itself, but from the qualifying word “moving.” It is not at all unreasonable, therefore, to call everything which is not at rest a “movie,” including the sun, moon and stars, the earth, an automobile, an airplane and the city garbage cart. Even man himself when in motion is a “movie,” and so is a fly, and so is that other pestiferous insect with a name nearly alike.

Is this childish word “movie,” on the ground of etymology, a correct word to represent “moving picture” in our dictionaries? Is it a correct word from the common sense point of view? Is it a correct word for grown-ups to use, unless they are still fit for the nursery in mind and accomplishments?

By all means let the children use “movie” to their little hearts’ content; but in the name of all that is logical and customary in the making and adoption of the words of a language, let us, grown-ups, put it tenderly away.

Space bloopers from Harold Lloyd

From Just Neighbors (1919). Anything wrong in this sequence ?

In shot # 3, Harold Lloyd and Snub Pollard exit left, but on shot #4 they re-enter the frame left (instead of right as classical editing would have it). What’s more, if you look at the background, they’re just going back to where they were (same house in the distance, same stairs) ! Only the frame has moved to the left slightly so it is not too obvious — a sign that space continuity is a requirement that Lloyd is aware of, even if he thinks he can get away with a cheap solution.And that bucolic, beautiful suburbian Eden, lightly populated, filled with unfenced grass plots ? How does it get transformed into this small, closed-in backyard surrounded by neighbors nearby ?

Even worse, how come the neighbor’s youngest gets to play at this crossroad unattended, and that this crossroad is supposed to be next to the house (still in that peaceful, unsettled suburbia that was shown first) ??

And how come when her older brother comes along whistling, he’s walking along such an urban sidewalk ?

The answer is that the first environment fits a narrative idea and a social ideal: tired husbands get back home after a hard day’s work (narrative idea: peace and break from work; social ideal: peaceful suburbia under the California sun). The second, very settled environment fits the story line (neighbors fighting, too close to each other) and the gags (kid among cars). The requirements of a uniform space go only that far. There are many other requirements on the film and the story that need to be taken into account to allow for the best solution.And speaking of bloopers, here’s one last one. Notice that in California, cars going in opposite directions drive in the same lane:

(the car coming from the right is going to drive between the child and the camera)

(but then, so does the car coming from the left!) Why do cars, in California, always drive between a child seated in the middle of the road and the camera ? Because it makes more visual sense: there’s a fraction of suspense, as the car passes the child, that would not be there otherwise (did she get run over or not?). At least that’s the only sense I see: it’s visual, aesthetic sense — a value not enough recognized, I believe, in classical Hollywood, and often buried under considerations about realism and such.

Merry Go Round (1923)

The full shot by shot breakdown of the 1923 film, from the 2003 Image Entertainment edition with the original 1923 score (with many interesting ironic musical comments at times).

The DVD edition is 114 minutes, so that’s a rather slow ASL of 5.2 second/shot. The film does slow down noticeably by the (Rupert Julian directed) second half…(Stroheim’s previous Blind Husbands has according to my edition a faster cutting rate at 4.8 second/shot)

Cobra (1925) – ASL

• Version: Grapevine, 1996 VHS release, 68 minutes (imdb.com indicates a running time of max. 75 minutes)
• ASL = 5,75 seconds/shot (a slightly slower cutting rhythm than the average silent film 4 – 4,3 second/shot ASL
• Number of shots: total 709, 535 non title shots, 177 titles with 33 exposition titles and 144 dialogue titles).
• Only 81 exterior shots (15% of total non title shots)
• 17% LS, 33% CU, 50% MS.

A musical joke in a silent film

Yes, that’s possible: M’Liss (1918) has one: it allows the audience to perceive that M’Liss-Pickford sings Rock a My Baby off-key….without music ! Quite a trick eh ?

What’s a silent film, film forgers ?

Observations on film art and FILM ART : Film forgery has a couple of examples of silent films forged in mockumentaries around the years. I’d be especially intrigued by Forgotten Silver (1995) as I haven’t seen it yet; but judging from the screen grabs that Bordwell has made available, the pastiche references (Cecil B. De Mille’s 1916 Joan of Arc for one) seem pretty obvious.

Forgery was so prevalent in silent Hollywood films that I’m surprised it is not mentioned in Bordwell’s post at all: from faked WW 1 battle shots presented as authentic to safaris that never quite took place, not to mention the countless times that the trade press reports an “authentic” background, or a “historically correct” background, opr a raging debate about how “authentic” a background is in a film — when what you really you get is a beautiful fantasy land of “Hungary” or “Europe” as Hollywood sees it –forgery was a constant. I’ve given a few examples of faked news on a previous web site of mine, cinebuds which I’ve stopped maintaining for some time. I’m sure one could find plenty of other examples.

And all this forgery was never an issue — not until, that is, the Ingagi scandal in 1931: a faked African documentary made of shots lifted from other documentaries and faked jungle scenes, and forbidden by the MPPDA in 1931

not because of the insinuations of relations between the African women and gorillas, but because Congo Pictures had represented the film as authentic when in fact it wasn’t. (Los Angeles Times, Jan. 8, 2007)

So far, Ingagi is the only and earliest example I’ve found of a film forbidden on the ground of its being “unauthentic” and of not being what it purports to be (on that ground wouldn’t most Hollywood films of the 1920s have to be forbidden ?). I’d love to get more examples. So far, and given the absolute lack of precedence, I don’t really understand why Ingagi was such a big deal…

daily-life beauty, questions

Tzvetan Todorov, Eloge du Quotidien, my link between Dutch 17th century paintings and 1920s Hollywood cinema:

a dreary world

From The Show Off (1926)
Youth, and Louise Brooks’ hard glaze, give this close-up its power.

You talking to me ?

Any idea as to what those two birds are saying to each other ?

a silent film as a musical ?

Music, costumes, scenery, dancing, all meshed into a gloriously dreamy whole: this was already a possibility back in 1922.

Another of those pleasing Music Films is at the Rialto, also. It is called “Arabian Duet,” and was produced under the direction of J. F. Leventhal, with a setting by Claude Millard and choreography by Ted Shawn. The dancing, done by Martha Graham and Charles Millard, does not seem as graceful as that of Lillian Powell and Miss Graham in the “Bubble” and “Egyptian” pictures, but the setting is effective and the colors, reproduced by the Prizma process, are clear and bright without being harsh. So the eye is satisfied.
There Music Films are, indeed, something more than a novelty on the screen. As compositions of movement, color, mass and line, they are cinematographic creations, entertaining in themselves and significant of the beauty and expressiveness which may be achieved through the medium of kinetic photography. An additional value possessed by them is that they may be shown accompanied by music played in time to the dancing, wherever a screen and one or more instruments can be brought together, because the arms of a director beating time are shown in the foreground of each picture and, according to Mr. Leventhal, all the musicians have to do is follow the lead of this figure on the screen. If this is the case, however, the films have not been exhibited to the best advantage at the Rivoli and Rialto, for, instead of sitting down and letting the orchestras follow the leader in the pictures, the real leaders at these houses have remained on their platforms and directed as usual. As a result, spectators have been disconcerted by seeing simultaneously the unsynchronized movements of two leaders.
(“The Screen”, New York Times, 15 may 1922, p. 24)

it’s the drama, stupid, now as then

We have found out it isn’t necessary for a photodrama to have only one dramatic scene, but each scene must be a drama in itself. The whole picture must be made up of a series of small dramas. This makes the completed drama a mosaic of little ones. Scenes that have no dramatic value in them, or say nothing, must be eliminated. So the scenario writer must bear in mind at all times not what he can put into a picture, but what he can leave out. If each scene has a why and a wherefore and an excuse for being, then you get a perfect continuity.
Jeanie Macpherson, Moving Picture World, 11 july 1917

putting words on the image

From Harold Lloyd’s Just Neighbors.
The only instance I’ve seen so far of anything at all written on a moving image in silent films is to indicate any noise, sound, usually of non-human origin,, and usually for comic purposes.
For instance in this sequence (where Bebe Daniels is, incidentally, doing a lot of looking at the director off-camera, who is probably directing her — on top of the usual slapstick look-at-the-audience routine)

This sequence is what silent films traditionally do. Shot #3 is ridiculously short, just a flash on the screen, since there is no time between the two lines, and practically this is a case where the audience is engrossed in reading funny lines, rather than looking at images. There could be no image in between and it wouldn’t matter much, except that it’s a bit more comfortable anchoring the Bebe’s reply to her image of shock, however brief.
But then the parrot in the background joins the shouting match with:

Words flash on the screen. Rather than dialogue, this is a background sound which belongs materially to the image itself. The other solution would have been a close-up, an insert of the parrot “talking”, as with instruments, trumpets, horses’ hooves, and so on. But since the parrot needs to be shown talking and his word is also important, this is probably the most economical solution.

Nordisk Film

World Record Nordisk Film Centenary
I was intrigued, in this article from the magazine of the Danish Film Institute called Film (latest issue available here), to read about the material that made Nordisk (and its producer Olsen) famous in the 1907-1920’s: if it had an exotic setting, if it dealt in something exotic, a bear hunt in Russia, a lion hunt somewhere in Copenhaguen-recreated Sahara, or a love story

in the desert-like dunes of Råbjerg Mile on the tip of Jutland

(and how about 3 films with the same star and title released 3 consequent years with similar story lines: Gunnar Tolnaes as the Maharaja in Oriental Love), then it was popular throughout Europe. Even Dreyer started by writing some of that mysterious-lady-mysterious-poison stuff. Hollywood was of course doing the same thing then, and for the same reasons. The taste for oriental hokum was widespread, not least in Europe.

Film of the Year: 1924: The Great Swashbuckler

Film of the Year: 1924: The Great Swashbuckler

Camera and editing tricks are well used to power the Arabian Nights-inspired magic items. But, some of the creature effects (especially the beasts our hero tackles along the way) appear less-than-believable and I wonder how these looked to the film’s contemporary audiences. The New York Times review lends a clue, “[the Princess] beholds the daring Thief on his white-winged horse, loping along with the chest he has found at the bottom of the sea. To us this sight of Fairbanks on his steed is one of the finest bits of satire in this beautiful screen effort. It was merely a white horse decorated with wings…when it appeared before the audience the theater was filled with laughter.” (“Fairbanks and Fantasy,” New York Times, 23 March 1924, X5). Based on that I’d say the fake-looking bits looked as unreal to audiences back then as they do to us today. However, we enjoy this picture because it submerges us into a realm of fantasy, not reality, and there’s nothing real about magic ropes of Ispahah, cloaks of invisibility or flying carpets either, and yet they’re all fun to watch.

Because they’re real, and appear for what they are, real ropes, the ropes are magic. By drawing attention to the artifice the magic becomes alive. The magic then as now looked unreal, as true magic should.