Women and Film History International

Women and Film History International opened its blog in July. Here’s hoping it takes off and does well. “A forum to develop networks that make sense for sharing research” is something I’ve been waiting to happen for a long, long time…(see under What is This tab on this page).

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.

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 ? 

 

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):

melodrama’s very modern modernity

1914. Wow:

“Wait!” the latter admonished in a half-whisper. “Look there!” 
Barcus followed the direction of his gesture, and 
was transfixed by sight of a rocket appearing into 
the night-draped sky from a point invisible beyond 
the headland. The two consulted one another with 
startled and fearful eyes. 
As with one voice they murmured one word : “Judith!” (p. 103)

A little later (p. 131), Alan climbs up an unfinished skyscraper:

a colossal apartment structure, the gaunt iron skeleton rearing a web of steel stencilled against the shining sky. (…) The ladders were 
crazily constructed and none too securely poised, 
but at length he gained the gridiron of girders on 
a plane with the lighted window across the way, and 
crept along one of these, gingerly on his hands and 
knees, until he came to its end, and might, if he 
cared to, look down a hundred feet to the sidewalks. 

And still later (p. 159), Alan is picked up by a plane:

Out of the very sky dropped a hydroplane, cutting the water with a long graceful curve that brought it, almost at a standstill, directly to the head of the swimmer. and at the same time forced the police-boat to sheer wildly off in order to escape collision. 

And though the first transcontinental flight had been achieved a mere three years before, this does not seem to bother our Alan Law:

Promptly Alan called up the Aviation Fields at 
Hempstead Plains and got into communication with 
a gentleman answering to the surname of Coast, 
the same bird-man who had come to Alan’s rescue 
with his hydroplane. Their arrangements were 
quickly consummated, Coast agreeing to wait for 
Alan with his biplane in Van Cortlandt Park from 
midnight till daybreak, prepared if need be to undertake 
a trans-continental flight. 

(other takes on Trey o’ Hearts here or here or here)

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.

The transformation of the melodrama…spectacle

How often have we seen this scene in films:

“They’ve made a torpedo-boat out of that tender “
He sprang upon the rail, steadying himself with
a stay. “Ready?” he asked. “Look sharp!”
The two dived as one, and not until three hundred
feet or more separated them from the schooner did
either dare pause for a backward glance.
Then the impact of the launch against the Sea-
venture’s side rang out across the waters, and with a
roar the launch blew up, spewing skyward a widespread
fan of flame. There followed a crackling
noise, and bright flames licked out all over the
schooner from stem to stern.

(Trey o’ Hearts, p. 66 — after a forest fire through Maine, two rapids, and life-defying moments galore. A second boat explosion is p. 114. A car crash p. 116. A car explodes p. 145. There’s a train crash on a trestle above some Western gully p. 184))

The transformation of the melodrama … metaphor

In opposition to what I wrote here, this:

Within the hour Rose Trine stood before her father
in that sombre room whose sinister colour-scheme
of crimson and black was the true livery of the
passion for vengeance that alone kept warm the
embers of his deathlike life.

the metaphorical use of colors that is pretty heavy-handed here, film melodramas (colors in Written on the Wind for instance) will do effortlessly.

(still from Trey o’ Hearts, p. 39)

research essays / research tidbits

Observations on film art and FILM ART : In critical condition

David Bordwell, speaking of critical writing on the web:

If most critical essays have been akin to reviews, what about essays that lie closer to the other extreme, the academic one? I’d like to see more of what might be called “research essays.” If the critical essay of haut journalism tips toward reviewing while being more argument-driven, the research essay leans toward academic writing, while not shrinking from judgment, and even parading tastes.

Amen to that. Utopia: a web-based community of film scholars sharing ideas, tidbits, or more redacted thoughts, Bordwell’s “research essays”. My (oh so) humble contribution on how-to-get-there: the (still too few) research tidbits on this blog (check the “research notes” category below, or see here or here or here for examples).

But I’m not the only one

am I ?

the transformation of the melodramatic hero

The Troy o’ Hearts: a motion-picture melodrama, Joseph Louis Vance, 1914

Take this description:

He was a young man and had been personable.
Just now his face was crimson with congested blood
and streaked with sweat and grime; his lips were
cracked and swollen, his eyes haggard, his hands
bleeding. (. 31)

Note to Hollywood, c. 1914: how do you fit this into an entertaining, attractive formula ? It’s going to take some penetration of realistic styles before this purple-prose battering of the hero can find its equivalent on the not-so-forgiving film image. (It’s easy to uglyfy your hero by words; but on the screen?) And indeed, notice how the face is anything but “crimson”, “haggard” and the like:

How long before serials would show “crimson” for what it is ?

The Red Ace, which began its run in February 1917, represents a milestone of sorts: it is the first serial, as far as I know, that began showing profuse amounts of blood during fight scenes. All previous serials were bloodless (although one does not notice the absence when watching them). The blood greatly intensified the graphic violence critics of sensational melodrama found so objectionable. (Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, p. 217)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 ?

Pordenone 2007 – a reconstructed diary of hypotheses

If you’ve never gone to Pordenone, then you just have to go next year. This was my first year, and what a treat it is! Gorgeous prints, even better musical accompaniment, and for someone like me who just doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t do much socializing, a chance to get lost in foggy thoughts about film, aesthetics, acting, lightings and staging issues — in almost perfect oblivion of the real world outside (almost: in the real world I missed my first flight to Italy and got to the festival a day late. Also in the real world, in the city of Pordenone, during that marvelous week, some crazy residents decided to take benches often used by immigrants to sit and turn them into a monument to Intolerance — benches that no-one can use anymore.)

If you’re looking for a clear diary of films shown at Pordenone this year, you might as well start at the indispensable Bioscope, which has a lot of notes on a lot of the films shown this year — even though Luke couldn’t stay until the end.

What I want to do here is reconstruct the thoughts and research ideas, however banal, that I’ve had during that wonderful week of movie watching (to allow you to skip to those I’ll write them in red). Watching six feature films a day (and then all those shorts in-between!) does something to one’s brain. It’s a highly pleasing experience that brings back happy memories of the film-filled afternoons of one’s lazy, Parisian youth. But it’s also a chance to test aesthetic hypotheses on the go. And the wonderful diversity of the Pordenone program, switching from Holland to Italy, Germany to the US, the 1910s to the late 1920s, really helps with providing a sense of perspective.

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.

Add this to the daily chores

Regularly, read a text (short story, essay) from The GasLight :

one story a week from the genres of mystery, adventure and The Weird, written between 1800 and 1919.

(but their own chronological list of texts goes from 1817 to a generous 1997).

Dear daily chores

You have a friend in academia and you think he’s shooting crap all day ? Ever wondered what a routine day could look like when all one does is research ? This is what my daily schedule should look like right now:

• start the day with a review of the latest posts, mostly from alt.movies.silent and from the invaluable Bioscope, with an occasional sprinkling of the crowd roars, film of the year, and davidbordwell.net
• write my own. The reason for this is that ideas generated at night-time (the last ten minutes before drifting to sleep are surprisingly prolific, wouldn’t you say?) need to be processed the morning after (sorry for the analogy here).
• afternoons: read latest books received/ view (and analyze: shot by shot, metrics, and so on… cinemetrics-style) films. Late afternoons may see me back at the writing desk.

(and, no, I’m not teaching right now)