The Kid (1921)

The Kid (1921) movie poster

director Charles Chaplin
viewed: 01/14/2011

Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length film, The Kid, highlights as much of Chaplin’s pathos as much as his humor.  Who knows, maybe even more?

My kids, when queried what they were up for on movie night, said “a classic.”  I’d long been holding back on this, figuring it would do well with them.  It did.

What struck me most were the images of poverty portrayed in the film.  This isn’t the Great Depression, but the stark images of the poor are very  much of their time yet strikingly timeless as well.  Poignant for today’s world perhaps more than one might initially realize.  Most striking for me were images shot on location on downtown Los Angeles’ Olvera Street (I’m a sucker for location shoots, capturing landscapes in place and time as they do.)  More than however dressed up the sets were or the cast was is how the images of need are as commonplace as they are, as simply readable.  From Chaplin’s Tramp’s clothes to the begging, scamming, and other hardscrabble means that people are portrayed as living by.

“The Kid” is Jackie Coogan (who would go on to becoming one of film’s first child stars and eventually become a well-known character actor as well, including notably Uncle Fester from TV’s The Addams Family.)  Coogan’s story is interesting in itself, how his parents spent all his money and left him broke, something that eventually led to laws changing the way that child actors’ money is managed.  But Coogan is as cute as they come and a wily, lively, miniature of Chaplin with his knack for physical humor.

Oddly, and it could just have been the time I was watching it, but I think it’s my favorite of Chaplin’s features that I’ve seen while tracking such things in this film diary.  Not to say that it’s necessarily “the best” of those films, just my favorite.

The Artist

The Artist (2011) movie poster

(2011) director Michael Hazanavicius
viewed: 12/04/2011 at Embarcadero Cinemas, SF, CA

Modern day silent films are none too common.  With the exception of Canadian director Guy Maddin, I can hardly think of any features that have been shot as silents.  The Artist from French director Michael Hazanavicius is pure homage to the era, a meta homage, an out-and-out love letter of a film.  It’s interesting that the last two features that the kids and I have watched have been both paeans to early cinema.  Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) peers back at the medium’s birth, its earliest creations, its first master and its DNA.  Hazanavicius peers back at the height of the Silent Era, its final years, and its sudden death with the advent of “the talkie”.

The Artist stars Jean Dujardin as Hollywood movie star George Valentin, an amalgam of a number of romantic leading men, dashingly handsome, confident, and suave.  He’s just finished his latest hit in 1927, is about the biggest thing on Earth, when he meets Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a would-be starlet, whose career is just about to take off.  When sound film is touted as the next big thing and studio bosses stop all production a year or two later on silent films, Valentin bets his own money on another big spectacle, in his classic manner.  The stock market crashes, his film tanks, and Peppy’s career suddenly blooms.  It’s a true story of many silent stars, though these characters are all fictional.

Dujardin is smashingly charming and his wonder dog, Uggie, gives one of the best dog performances in recent memory.   It’s a crowd-pleaser.  Hazanavicius’s loving details of the design and character of the film, filming in the style of the era, a story about the era, is a sweet and swell fun thing.  Odd that it’s French, when the story is so totally American, filmed in the United States, though its main stars are French.

The kids were a little bored by it, actually.  The funny thing is that we’d been watching Buster Keaton/Fatty Arbuckle shorts just the night before.  It wasn’t the silence that left them edgy, maybe it was the melodrama.  It certainly wasn’t Uggie.  They loved him.

This film has been wow’ing audiences since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is already an Oscar favorite.  Indeed it is a charmer.  I don’t know if I was too distracted with the fidgeting of the kids, but while I really enjoyed it, I wasn’t as knocked out as many others have been.  It’s a very good film, to my mind, perhaps even an excellent one.  It’s certainly well worth seeing.

The Freshman

The Freshman (1925) movie poster

(1925) director Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor
viewed: 08/13/2011

After watching Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother (1927), we went on to watch his 1925 film, The Freshman.  It’s another of Lloyd’s most well-known films, his biggest success in the day and one that has endured as well.  While I’m pretty sure that I’d never seen it, parts of it seemed more familiar, so maybe I had at some point.  The kids loved it too.

As everything (almost) in a film more than 80 years old, it’s of a different era.  Set as it is in the world of the college campus, it’s all about the trends of the day.  The kids asked why everyone was wearing these weird little beanie caps.  That’s just what they did back then.

Harold again plays Harold, this time he’s the titular “Freshman”, so excited to be going to college, having watched a film about the bully fun of being a BMOC, he’s taught himself all of the team cheers, has emulated the quirky habits of the film’s star (which include a silly little jig prior to an introductory handshake), and strives to be just like the Most Popular Man on campus, the hero of the football team.

In this sense, things haven’t changed immensely.  Seeking popularity, but being played for a fool, hazing freshmen, the rubes of the campus, and the insane popularity of football.  Of course, Harold is as earnest as they come, gets duped into spending lots of money in trying to grow friends, and tries to host the biggest party shindig.  Mostly, this happens while everyone shines him on.  The coach of the football team even allows him to think he’s part of the team when he’s really only the water-boy.

Of course, this is Hollywood, so you know he’s going to somehow surpass his problems, win the big football game, and get the girl.  And it’s a lot of fun getting there.  While I think I preferred The Kid Brother, the kids hooted with laughter and really enjoyed the football game sequence.  An excellent, fun, funny film, another classic from the silent era, another legend of Hollywood comedy.

The Kid Brother

The Kid Brother (1927) movie poster

(1927) director Ted Wilde, J.A. Howe
viewed: 08/13/2011

In my ongoing quest to expose my kids to a variety of classic, as well as contemporary, cinema soldiered forth to yet another of Silent Film’s great comedians.  We’ve watched a number of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplain films, as well as some Keaton-Fatty Arbuckle shorts, but we hadn’t forayed into the work of Harold Lloyd.  Which is only a little funny in that the one major silent comedy that I saw more than once as a child was Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923), which may have been an anomaly based on our local PBS channel in Gainesville, FL in the 1970′s.  But as an adult, and as I’ve developed a greater interest in Silent Film in the past decade, I myself hadn’t revisited his films.

So, on Friday night, we nestled down for The Kid Brother, which I had never seen, but had read that it was one of his better films.  It’s great, actually.  And the kids really liked it, too.

Set before the turn of the 20th century, the story takes place in a small town.  Harold is the “kid brother” to two big burly fellows, smaller still than his father, the town’s sheriff and major figure in the town.  With no mother around, Harold is given the “women’s work” and is considered too little/young for any of the more manly stuff.  When a traveling medicine show comes through town and Harold falls for the young woman traveling with it, it also unleashes the two other members of this show as the villains.  The sheriff has collected money from the townspeople to submit for a big dam project, but then the money goes stolen.   And the sheriff’s rival likes to blame the sheriff.  Harold ends up saving the day.

What was particularly striking to me was some of the camerawork in the film.  In an early scene, when Harold is introduced to the young woman, he climbs a tree as she walks away so that he can shout one more thing to her.  But he keeps having to climb higher as he keeps thinking of things to say.  The camera “climbs” up behind him, giving the vantage further down the slope of the girl ever further in the distance.  It’s a remarkable shot, or series of shots.  And as in this scene, there are a number of scenes in which the camera moves around, which is quite unusual for the period.

Lloyd’s “glasses character” as he is known, perhaps because he’s not as implacable as “Old Stoneface” Keaton nor as winsome as Chaplain’s “Little Tramp”, is given to a far greater range of emotions and as a result, the story seems to have more depth and development.  It does indeed build from a relatively slow beginning to a wonderfully madcap adventure with a number of clever and funny stunts and gags aboard an abandoned ship, trying to retrieve the townsfolk’s money from the big thug.

I really enjoyed it a great deal and the kids did too.  It’s funny how now they don’t even bat an eye at transitioning from a full-color summer action movie like Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) or some of their favorite cartoons like Phineas and Ferb to these movies that are 80 years old,  silent, black-and-white.  I’ve often patted myself on the back about this, but I truly enjoy sharing these experiences with them, especially when they are as satisfying as this one was.

Battleship Potemkin

Battleship Potemkin (1925) movie poster

(1925) director Sergei Eisenstein
viewed: 03/20/11 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

Most every film student is familiar with Battleship Potemkin, while people who have never set foot in a cinema studies classroom may never have heard of it.  Oddly enough, most of those same film students who are familiar with it probably haven’t actually seen the entire film.  Because, though the film itself has a running time of less than 90 minutes, the most typically excerpted sequence from the film, known as “the Odessa Step” sequence or “the Odessa Staircase” sequence, is the segment of the film that everybody knows and most everyone has seen.  And with good reason.

It’s amazing.  And it’s easy enough to view out of the context of the film and still understand the complexity of the montage sequence.  It really is a primer in film-making in itself.

Battleship Potemkin is essentially a propaganda film, made by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925, one of several features that he made that focused on aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution, including Strike (1924) and October (1927).  This film is based loosely on events of 1905, when the sailors on a battleship revolt against their cruel leaders who are trying to feed them rotten, maggot-infested meat.  They rally together as brothers and toss their oppressors into the drink.  The people of Odessa, where the ship is docked, support the sailors and their cause, offering them food and cheering for them.  Until the tsarist Cossacks are brought in to slaughter them, which is what takes place on the Odessa steps.

Frankly, as a former film student, I’ve seen the “Odessa Steps” sequence many times, but never then entire film.  So, this opportunity was prime.

Eisenstein, who was not only an innovator in cinema through his work but was also one of the earliest and foremost film theorists uses film as a tool.   For Eisenstein, the language of cinema was a set of constructs, and he believed in an almost scientific system of montage, cutting images and movements together to evoke specific effects.  And thusly, the entire film, is an amazing array of images, juxtapositions, movement, shapes, machines, and men.

On the ship, building the story before the mutiny, each shot is posed in the machinery or might of the battleship, contrasted with the human forms, moving about through its passageways, working alongside the pumping mechanisms, in rhythm and measure.  Shots are composed like Constructivist  art, patterns of shadows fall across faces, angles of light all fit into each mise-en-scene, each composition.  Every shot is striking.

And the use of montage is dramatic and amazingly formalized.  The “Odessa Steps” sequence is truly the film’s highlight, it really is one of the most remarkable scenes ever created in film, often imitated (or homaged) but never equaled, the movement of the soldiers down the steps, firing on the innocent, young, elderly, the fleeing horde, the mother killed, the baby carriage pushed to fall, the elderly woman with her eye shot out…it’s cinema in one of its purist forms.  And whereas Eisenstein’s theories proved brilliant as ideas, though perhaps not a rigorous science of language, it’s easy to see what one would hope a film student could learn from such an amazing, innovative and novel piece of film-making.

It was cool to finally see the film as a whole, though the ending does have a sense of anti-climax given the massive build-up of drama around the famous massacre scene (which was a fictionalized narrative point — the Odessa steps were not the scene of a brutal quelling of uprising).  The red-tinted flag, the symbol of the revolution and the brotherhood, however, looked badly hand-painted, more like a magic-marker and someone without enough time to stay in the lines.

The other aspect of the film was the sense of revolution, not so specific to the mistreated sailors or the oppressive tsarist regime, but simply that of a people rising together to protest and to overthrow their oppressors.  It seemed poignant in many ways to the events that have been going on throughout the Middle East over the past several months, a metaphor of solidarity against oppression.  A hopeful note, not one tied purely to the specific history that was the film’s primary goal in its propaganda.

The Navigator

The Navigator (1924) movie poster

(1924) directors Donald Crisp, Buster Keaton
viewed: 10/01/10

It had been a while since we’d watched a Buster Keaton film for Friday night movie night, quite a while for a silent film in general, so I wrangled Buster Keaton’s The Navigator to play for the kids and myself.  Of the several Keaton features that we’ve watched together, I think that The Navigator is more of a second drawer film, not achieving the greatness of Sherlock Jr. (1924), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) or The General (1927), or even Our Hospitality (1923) or Go West (1925).  But that’s fairly quibbling, since the former three are all masterpieces and the latter two are total genius.

And that is not to say that the kids didn’t enjoy themselves.  By the end of the film, with cannibals raging to take over the Navigator and Keaton and his gal shooting off fireworks galore, the kids were howling with laughter and fully wound up.  Great joy for all.

The Navigator is the name of the a large ship upon which Keaton, playing a wealthy useless fop, and his would-be fiancee find themselves adrift, all on their lonesome.  Some of the initial gags revolve around their uselessness on the ship, never having had to fend for themselves in a kitchen, much less aboard a large ship with no crew.  But the film kicks up a notch or two when they become lodged on a reef near an island of cannibals (not your most politically correct depiction of native peoples, as I’m sure you can imagine).  And Keaton also has to don a large old fashioned diving suit to go under water to repair a leak that the ship has developed.  And the battle with the cannibals, as I mentioned above.

Though I am eager to see all of Keaton’s features, I’m a little tempted to re-view Steamboat Bill, Jr. with them because that was the funniest and the biggest round of laughs.  Also there are lots of collections of Keaton’s short films which we’ve watched before too.  Felix is just now 9 and Clara is 6 1/2 at this viewing, so the first time around they were much younger.  I can only imagine that they’ll enjoy it even more.

The Circus

The Circus (1928) movie poster

(1928) director Charles Chaplin
viewed: 09/18/10 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

When the Castro Theatre announced that it was doing a mini-Chaplin festival, I was pretty keen on bringing the kids down to watch one, if not more, of the films.  But circumstances being what they are, schedules conflicted and as a result, only Felix was free to accompany me to see The Circus.

In the Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton debate, I fall more into the Keaton camp.  Not that I think that one by any means excludes the other, but the expectations and enjoyments often play out that way.  And it’s funny, but I’d have to say that it’s pretty consistent.  I actually think Felix would be in the Keaton camp too.

The Circus played with two shorter films, The Idle Class (1921) and A Day’s Pleasure (1919), which, under consideration, I think I may have enjoyed more than the feature film itself.  The Circus isn’t considered one of Chaplin’s major films, and though the Castro is playing several of those such as The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936), I thought it would be interesting to see one that I hadn’t seen before.

In The Circus, the “little tramp” becomes the star attraction at a down-on-it’s-luck circus run by a tyrant of a ringmaster.  The ringmaster’s much-abused daughter becomes the tramp’s love interest, and while his natural inventiveness and/or clumsiness leads to his main schtick, he also takes up the tight-rope walking to impress the girl.

There is a lot of fun in the film, and Felix enjoyed the whole show, as did I.  Sadly, in comparison to a couple of years ago when I first started showing the kids silent films, Felix can now read most of the inter-titles himself (not the ones in cursive, however), and so the experience is a little less interactive than it once was.  I’ve been planning to bring over another Keaton film for the kids to watch, and with this under our belts I’m even more encouraged to do so again.

There is something amazing and profound about enjoying a film that is 80-90 years old with a child.  It’s an amazing form of time travel of sorts, looking at the automobiles and other ancient technologies, laughing at gags that persist to be funny throughout so many changes in the world, and to share in such a unique experience.  I have to wonder how he will come to look back on these kinds of memories as an adult.

I was also much brought to mind of the influence of these silent comedies on another “retro” experience that I have with the kids, namely watching old Warner Brothers and other studio cartoons from the Golden Age of animation.   The influence of the slapstick and the outright “borrowing” of jokes and gags never seemed clearer, even with their color and sound and far out lunacy, the basics of physical humor were well captured by Chaplin no doubt straight out of Vaudeville and transformed into the truest elements of cinema.

Metropolis

(1927) director Fritz Lang
viewed: 07/16/10 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

A huge event in the world of silent film, by far the most complete version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metroplolis that has been seen since its initial release was on display.  Only two years prior, in a Buenos Aires film library, a beaten 16mm copy of the film was discovered, allowing for over a 1/2 an hour of long-lost footage to be reassembled with existing prints, nearly completely reconstructing one of the periods most important and impressive films.  And since its initial showing in Berlin earlier this year and again in New York, this showing at the Castro Theater was about as big an event as you get in the silent film world.

And it was fantastic.

Accompanied by a brilliant performance by the Alloy Orchestra, it was amazing to see this film in its near entirety.  I had only chanced to see it before on video, a version that was released in the 1980′s with a then current pop soundtrack produced by Georgio Moroder, colorized/tinted and with the intertitles changed to subtitles.  As I recall, I turned off the sound and adjusted the picture to try to make it black-and-white again.  And while much of the visual imagery had been intact, with its striking designs and verve, the film wasn’t the easiest to follow as I recall.  I don’t think I then knew that it was as compromised as it was (with a running time of 80 minutes as opposed to the original 153).

Oddly enough, though, I (and perhaps some others my age) owe it to Moroder that the film’s images are as familiar as they are, in that the music video for Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” was comprised of sequences from the film.  It’s funny, but as I was watching the film this time, for the first time in probably 20 years, those images echoed with a familiarity much stronger than I had anticipated.

Metropolis, at the time of its production, is considered to be the most ambitious and radical feature film that had been made up to the time.  Emanating from the Weimar Republic era in Germany, influenced by Expressionism, Art Deco, and Futurism, the designs are still compelling nearly 80 years later.  The film has influenced designs from Star Wars (1977) and Blade Runner (1982) through so many, many more.  And yet nothing is quite like it.

Set in a future world in which the working class lives underground and people work and march like cogs in the giant machine, the story tells of the son of the overseer of the aboveground Metropolis, an idealized modern city in which the children of the elite frolic and play without a concern or knowledge of the world below.  When Maria, a young woman from the underground city appears to the young man, he is intrigued and goes below to find this world of which he’d had no knowledge and the beautiful Maria, the religious leader and center of a peaceful movement to change the world for the better for the workers.

Meanwhile, a mad scientist has created a robot, the film’s most iconic image, a female form, which he has constructed to turn into a replica of his long-lost love, the former wife of the city’s overseer.  However, the overseer comes to hear of the revolutionary movement and convinces the scientist to abduct Maria and make the robot over in her form to control the workers and drive the revolution on so that he can crush it down.  This leads to a manic riot, the destruction of the underground city, and the near destruction of everything.

There are so many amazing images, it’s impossible to simply recount them all.  But married to the rhythmic soundtrack of the Alloy Orchestra, the film has features patterns of movement, a construct of sight and sound, which build and climax in a completely amazing way.  It’s virtuoso stuff.  Mesmerizing.  Dazzling.  Fantastic.

This is really what it’s all about, when you boil it down, the greatest of cinema from any period, any era.  And the true testament to that is how powerful and visionary the film still is, how fresh, how unlike anything else there is in the world.  And this treasure rediscovered, this most-complete version ever found, is a testament as well to film preservation (it’s really the dream come true of film preservationists).  Because even though the newfound footage is much damaged in comparison to the rest of the film, it is a stark reminder of how amazingly unappreciated this material was in its day.  That films were considered throw-away, mincable.  We are lucky, lucky, lucky to be able to see this film, to still have it, to see it on the big screen, and to see the best of the best of world cinema.

The Iron Horse

(1924) director John Ford
viewed: 07/15/10 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

One of my favorite things is the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, a now 4 day event showing any number and variety of silent films.  I’ve been attending now for a few years and was excited to go to the opening night showing of John Ford’s epic silent Western, The Iron Horse.  I’d never seen it before, but it seemed a great film to check out, an early epic Western by the film director most associated with the genre.

The film retells the tale of the building of the transcontinental railroad, a crowning event in American history, and a fascinating and meaningful story.  Of course, it’s told through the story of the son of a “dreamer” who, while a neighbor of Abraham Lincoln’s, pondered the possibilities of a railroad that connected America’s East with the American West.  But it’s his son who works the railroad, helps to find the passage through a tough area, not to mention some conniving villains which all add this up to a much more traditional “oater” as the writers of crossword puzzles like to call Westerns.

What is fascinating is that the two trains that meet at Promontory Summit the where the “golden spike” was driven in are the two actual locomotives that were at the real event.  Ford has much dedication to this narrative and sought to make it as true to life and accurate as possible from an historical standpoint.  Additionally, according to some of the notes, some of the Chinese workers on the film also participated in the building of the railroad.  But I have to wonder, since the railroad was completed in 1869 and this film was made in 1924, one has to wonder about the potential accuracy of such a statement.  (I also have read that the story about the locomotives being the actual engines is also potential hooey.)

It’s a rather rip-roaring yarn, though, and quite a bit of fun.  One other aspect that is quite interesting is the dedication Ford puts into showing the diversity of the work effort.  Irish, Italians, Chinese, and even the good natured Pawnee indians are on the side of good, and he likes to show the combatative members of each various group of national origin working alongside each other.   A strong melting pot message.  Of course the Cheyenne are the baddies, though the two-fingered main bad guy is supposed to be a white man who poses as an indian.

What’s additionally interesting is the whole of the Western genre, what will continue to be a popular genre through the better part of the 20th century, was already going through its ups and downs.  The festival offers an insightful booklet on the films, plus a slide show of images and facts prior to each film, plus an introduction by experts or notables on each film.  I tell you, it’s a great way to see these movies.  I keep telling people about them and I really think they’d enjoy getting to see these films on the big screen with full musical accompaniment.

Sherlock Jr.

Sherlock, Jr. (1924) movie poster

(1924) dir. Buster Keaton
viewed: 12/12/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

Odd, yet not so odd, that this would be the first film in the eight years that I’ve been writing this diary, that I will have reached a third entry on.  I write about every film I see in full, and it’s not surprising that the brilliant Buster Keaton and the fantastic Sherlock Jr. would make for such repeat viewing.  I had first seen it in a literature class on DVD and then a couple of years later at the Castro Theatre, along with a live accompaniment.

This time around it played at the Castro as part of the Silent Film Festival’s winter event, sadly the only film I got to catch that day.  And this time, I took the kids and their mom and her boyfriend, the latter two having not actually been exposed to Keaton before at all and the most latter who had not even been to the Castro before.  Much like the last outing to the Castro for a Keaton film, Our Hospitality (1923) with new initiates, a good time was had by all.

And, you know, how could one not have a good time?

Felix and Clara love Buster Keaton, and even at their young ages, having to read intertitles to them and explain certain anachronisms or complex story changes, they are as caught up, laughing, and awed by his cleverness, his timing, his stunts, and sight gags.  We spent the next half hour or so, talking through the best scenes, the most impressive stunts, and the sheer fun of the damn thing.

They played another Keaton short beforehand, a very good one called The Goat (1921), which I think we’d watched on DVD when we had rented some of the Keaton shorts.  We’ve really watched a lot together.  We’ve watched The General (1927), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Go West (1925), The Cameraman (1928), Our Hospitality (1923) and now Sherlock Jr. As well as some of Keaton’s shorts and some of the work that he did with Fatty Arbuckle.  And yes, I am bragging a bit.

I had forgotten that the scene in which Keaton falls with a huge pipe from a watering basin onto a train track that he had sustained the worst injury of his career.  Apparently he didn’t realize it for some years, but he had fractured his neck, which led him to have migraines for the rest of his life.  With knowledge of this, in watching the scene, you can see his distress and disorientation are real.

Keaton is a master, a joy.  And this film, which is interesting on numerous levels, is also just plain fun to watch and enjoy.