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.

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.

Danger Ahead

Danger Ahead (1935)

Sub-par B fare but with very good fighting (long silent fighting sequences) and a very good number by Fuzzy Knight at the piano. Something funny happens after the first 15 minutes. To all purposes the film is as good as over — but then it just has to fill another 45 minutes of screen time. So more nonsense and changes of hand of “that dough” — but wait ! Fuzzy Knight gets going at the piano in a pretty funny act.

The goings-on are quite erratic but those B-films are what you’d get if Hollywood went cheap and realistic on you: filming in the streets with non-star quality material in the leads, and very simple shooting techniques (for once we see the dolly tracks as the dolly pulls back — but they’re motivated as railway tracks along the docks !). No rhetorics. Very straighforward drama. Sounds like the Danish Dogme 95 ? Apart from that bit in the Danish contract about the drama being born of the situations and characters themselves, it could almost be. (except that Dogme 95 films are not opposed, in practice, to a lot of rhetorical effects, high angle shots, parallel editing, and so on)

Funny thing about that basic Hollywood realism: it’s never very disturbing. The plot is foolish and naively sunny enough to fend off any nastiness.

daily-life beauty, questions

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

Finding beauty in daily life, unaware

Tzvetan Todorov, Eloge du quotidien: essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIè siècle (1993)

Vers la moitié du XVIIè siècle, pour des raisons esthétiques (le Carravage, Rembrandt) mais aussi historiques (commerce) et culturelles (protestantisme, valeurs domestiques), des peintres hollandais se sont retrouvés à peindre avec précision et, souvent, bienveillance des scènes de la vie quotidienne: vie quotidienne des femmes, des enfants, et moins souvent, des hommes. Mais ces tableaux ne nous parlent-ils que de cette “réalité” — ou bien parlent-ils surtout du bonheur du quotidien ?

In My Father’s Court

Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court, 1966
Singer in autobiographical bits from his (mostly) Warsaw childhood. Through the cases heard in his father’s room (unofficial rabbi) it’s a picture of Jewish life in Poland in the early 20th century that emerges.
There’s a review from the NYT here.
The cases themselves are all precise anecdotes that are worth reading in themselves, but what impressed me most was…