Sherlock Jr.

December 14, 2009 by Leave a Comment

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.

Filed under Buster Keaton, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Silent Film, Theatrical, With the kids

Waxworks

November 29, 2009 by Leave a Comment

(1924) dir. Paul Leni, Leo Birinsky
viewed: 11/22/09

My third Paul Leni silent film (The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Man Who Laughs (1928)) further proves that while not necessarily a master, certainly on one of the higher rungs of Expressionist Silent film.  Waxworks earns its Expressionism via odd sets and strange angles, curious and occasionally Surreal moments.

Waxworks is an anthology film, an oddly structured thing, with three stories told from the quill of a writer (believe it or not, a publicity writer), hired to promote the scary figures from a traveling Wax Museum.  First, he tells the tale of Harun al Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad, posing the young writer and the waxworks’ owner’s daughter in lead roles.  Emil Jannings is the rotund caliph.  It’s kind of hard to see where it’s going, but it ends up to be a more heroic narrative (supposedly also the inspiration for Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924)).

The second story is that of Ivan the Terrible, played by the also notable Conrad Veidt.  It’s more a tale of insanity and evil, with some very arch moments and designs.

And then you think there’s going to be a third segment, and then the “Jack the Ripper”/”Spring-healed Jack” segment turns out to be a hallucinary nightmare of the tired-out writer, just asleep on the job.  Ultimately, the film seems sort of ill-balanced, from both a narrative and also a thematic perspective. 

It’s probably a silent film for more of a hardcore fan of the period, not having the more powerful peaks and images that some could concoct.  And yet, at the same time, as a further example of German Expressionism, it’s an interesting additional entry, certainly to an extent due to its use of the potential fear factor inspired by wax figures, a theme that would enter the horror genre as a significant subgenre.  The set designs and camerawork are the films’ highlights, but with the cast and participants, this is far from B-movie fare.

Filed under DVD, Germany, Silent Film

Lady of the Pavements

July 15, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Lady of the Pavements (1929) movie poster

(1929) dir. D.W. Griffith
viewed: 07/12/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

The final of three features that I caught at the Silent Film Festival this time around, D.W. Griffith’s Lady of the Pavements turned out to be a much more interesting experience as part of the festival than it could have been merely on its own.  While Griffith is well-known as a father of cinematic techniques and a vastly influential early filmmaker, I came to realize that I don’t even know that much about his career arc.  Lady of the Pavements was Griffith’s first sound film of sorts, despite having tangled with sound in a much earlier film, this film was made in the transitional year of 1929, and the back-story provided by the Festival, made for a pretty rich contextualization.  Apparently, the film was shot mostly as a silent, and then, musical numbers were added, shots re-shot, and process of recording on was records actually exemplified the problems of a burgeoning tecnhology.

Additionally, Griffith and his style had fallen out of favor, and this film, unlike his major works, was one in which he was pretty much a “hired gun” of sorts, with much of the script and casting and so forth in place.  And the film itself, suffering from mixed reviews and a commercial failure, lost its soundtrack along the way.  The soundtrack was not just some fluff, but featured a theme by Irving Berlin and some other notable pieces.  For the festival, along with the piano accompaniment, a singer was brought in, to sing some of the sequences for which the music could be identified, and that experience elevated the film in many ways, not to its original state, but perhaps even better still.  What would Griffith have thought?  Who knows?

The film is a romantic comedy in which a Prussian nobleman dismisses his French noblewoman bride-to-be when he discovers her to have other lovers.  He tells her that he would rather marry a “woman of the streets” than her.  So, in her conniving, the lady sends one of her men out to find a “lady of the pavement” to disguise her as a “lady”, have him fall for her, and therefore fulfill his statement, shaming him.  The man doesn’t find a true “woman of the streets”, but rather a cabaret singer, played with great verve by Lupe Vélez.  It’s one of those stories that you can pretty much map out without having to see the rest of the film, knowing that they’ll fall in love, he’ll discover the trickery and be upset, but in the end will come to take her away.   And it does all happen that way essentially, but yet…it’s still very successful.

Vélez is terrific, fiery and energetic, almost too much character for silence.  Actually, the whole film almost “feels” more like a sound picture.  I’m not sure why I think that, but it may just be the character of the cinematography.  Vélez apparently stole the show back in the film’s initial release, reaching her brief height in fame rather close to this point.  And she is definitely the best part of the cast, though Jetta Goudal, the villainess is a top-notch ice queen in contrast.

While this film is certainly not one of Griffith’s masterpieces, it has amazing charm, enhanced no doubt by the performance of the musical score at the festival.  It is remarkable that even challenged by a pretty stereotypical narrative trope, played out against evolving cinematic technology and the marginalization of one of cinema’s original masters, that 80 years later, this film charms as it does.

Kudos to Vélez and Griffith.  And kudos to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival!

 

Filed under D.W. Griffith, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Silent Film, Theatrical

The Fall of the House of Usher

July 15, 2009 by Leave a Comment

(1928) dir. Jean Epstein
viewed: 07/12/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

This version of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher was not something that I was familiar with prior to this year’s Silent Film Festival.  And I have to say, that on reflection, as I read through the well-researched and interesting program that came from the festival, what it is about the festival that is so rewarding.  The festival is not just a celebration or simply showings of films, nor is it simply preservation or historical information, but it is a very intelligent conglomerate of an organization, constructing a wide, diverse program of films from the silent era and showing them with erudition and context, with the written program, the diverse selection of knowledgable people who introduce the films, and the interesting and informative slideshows that are made for preview to each showing.  This is a fantastic festival on so many levels, and I feel so lucky to be able to attend it every year.

There was a time when I was less interested in silent film, and that time wasn’t even so long ago.  I have watched silents since I was a child, being interested in Expressionist cinema (not knowing that it was anything more than the earliest “monster movies”) since I was quite young, so I have been more open to them than the average person.  But I think it’s been in the last five years or so that this has changed and my interest has developed and diversified.

I selected the films that I wanted to see from the program (limited by other scheduling obligations) based on a quick glance at what “looks” interesting.   I chose Underworld (1927) because it was a crime film.  I chose The Fall of the House of Usher because it was both a “horror” film and looked from the still images to be on the more avant-garde side.  My final selection was Lady of the Pavements (1929) because it was a D.W. Griffith film.  And I also took the kids to see the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts because I like animation and like to take the kids to things that are appropriate and different (I won’t be writing about the Oswald films here because I write mostly about feature films, not shorts).

Interestingly, due to a last minute change in schedule, they showed The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), a short film by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webster, which was even more abstract (and vaguely familiar to me, perhaps from an Avant-Garde Cinema class that I took as an undergrad).  It was an interesting contrast, in that the short was far less clear in its narrative, though it stuck more with the plot of the short story.  The film was perhaps Surrealist, but clearly strange and dream-like, with interesting uses of multiple image layers repeating images of coffins or buildings or people.

The Jean Epstein film was quite the avant-garde piece, if still more clearly narrative in its telling, mixing a few different Poe stories together to expand the storyline.  Made with great visual panache, the constructs of the mise en scene almost all could be captured in still images to make fascinating deconstructions or simply arresting images.  The narrative is of a doomed relationship, set in a Gothic mansion, home of Rodderick Usher and his slowly-dying wife.  Usher is painting her portrait and seeimingly sucking out her life in the process.  Of course, the disease is all mysterious, the causality open to intereretation, which ultimately leads to her “death”.  Her “death” leads to spectral visions, haunted thoughts, and madness for Usher, finally revealing itself to have been a premature burial.  The cataclysms bring the house down around their ears, though they escape across the moors.

Full of psychological angst, love and obsession as a near vampirical relationship, and an ill-defined “corruption” of the souls of the Ushers, the film is much like a dream itself, a fever dream in Gothic setting, and a rich and effective piece of cinema.  This was probably my favorite of the films that I saw from this festival.  A surprising film, an unusual film, a remarkably artful feature film by a very interesting filmmaker.

Filed under Haunted House films, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Silent Film, Theatrical

Underworld

July 14, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Underworld (1927) movie poster

(1927) dir. Josef von Sternberg
viewed: 07/11/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

The first of three or four films that I went to see at the Castro this last weekend as part of the Silent Film Festival, Underworld is notable as a prototype “gangster” film, written by Ben Hecht, who would go on to a very notable career in screenwriting, including Scarface (1932) and others far too many to mention.  The film was directed by Josef von Sternberg with great style and flair and features quite a bit of fun.

The film was introduced by Eddie Muller, local noir aficianado, who suggested it as one of the earliest instances of the gangster film and one of the precursors to noir, though certainly not noir specifically.  And those points were easy to see.

It was interesting to see the gangster film as a silent, since in watching several gangster films lately, the language and delivery of the dialogue seemed so key.  The story is more purely prototypical, as are some of the characters: the moll, the smallish but very tidy gangster, the bigger than life antihero.  According to Muller, Hecht felt that von Sternberg ruined the film with some more sappy sequences.  Again, hard to say, but the film wasn’t as “hard” as some of the later, more well-known gangster films that would soon follow.

I enjoyed this film, but oddly, I am not finding a lot to say about it.  So, I’ll leave it at that.

 

Filed under proto noir, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Silent Film, Theatrical

Nanook of the North

June 28, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Nanook of the North (1922) movie poster

(1922) dir. Robert J. Flaherty
viewed: 06/19/09

The best silent documentary about Eskimos that I’ve ever watched.

Seriously, though, Robert J. Flaherty’s classic film, Nanook of the North, is deemed to be the first feature-length documentary film, following the life of a Canadian Inuit and his family as they hunt walruses and snow foxes, build igloos, and romp with their huskies.  The film has many amazing pieces to it, many fascinating elements.  But the film is criticized from a documentary angle in the Flaherty staged most of the sequences, building a partially full igloo, with an open end so he would have enough light to shoot by, but also that the family is not Nanook’s and Nanook is not Nanook’s name for instance.

Being the first of its kind, many of these standards didn’t exist.  Flaherty’s approach is almost diorama-like, setting Nanook on display more in the ways to document they ways that Inuit people survived in the times before the Europeans came along.  In fact, according to my reading, Nanook hunted typically with a gun, though for the film he is shown with spears and bow and arrows.

The most interesting sequence either way includes Nanook and company snaring, killing, and eating a walrus, which they did with traditional means.  Flaherty’s intentions were good, if dubious by standards of non-influence in documentary methodologies of today.  The film is still a landmark in cinema and still captures actualities that still have great power.  One of my favorite images was the naked baby, slung from his mother’s back-pouch, dropped among the husky puppies, some simple, beautiful image of nature and humanity.

According to Flaherty, Nanook went on to starve to death in a hunting expedition only two years after this film was made.  Again, research suggests that this may have been a fabrication and that Nanook may have succumbed to illness brought by the Europeans.  This particular element shows what truth is lost in the fabrication, why documentarians try to rely on “truth” to be the powerful element in the process and the soul of the production.  When the truth is lost or altered, it clearly diminishes the power of the image.  But clearly, no matter how much staging is created, these people are captured in many ways doing things or at least acting out the realities of a life long now gone.

Filed under Documentaries, DVD, Silent Film

The Lost World

May 6, 2009 by Leave a Comment

The Lost World (1925) movie poster

(1925) dir. Harry O. Hoyt
viewed: 05/05/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

As part of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, this showing of The Lost World, the silent film version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story about a “lost world” of dinosaurs, was screened with a live accompaniment by the band Dengue Fever.  I’ve been to a couple of live performances now accompanying showings of silent films.   Last year, it was Black Francis of the Pixies performing alongside The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920).  I also caught Sherlock, Jr. (1924) presented with the Club Foot Orchestra last year, and before that it was Jonathan Richman performing with The Phantom Carriage (1921).  So, I’m getting a bit familiar with this sort of thing and gauging from last night’s sold out audience, more of these presentations are to come.

The film I had never seen before, but had seen in clips and stills, mainly the notable stop-motion animated dinosaurs, developed by Willis H. O’Brien, the man most noted for his work in King Kong (1933) and the mentor of Ray Harryhausen, whose films I have been watching with the kids a lot lately.  I’ve always liked “monster movies”, as I used to call them as a kid, so I’d always been interested in this stuff.  The film is something else!

And I mean that in a good way.

Really, The Lost World is sort of a prototypical special effects action film, the kind that are now the summer movie stand-bys that makes Hollywood all their money these days.  And it’s interesting, because if you think about it, this film really is a prototype for a film like Jurassic Park (1993) and its several sequels, and even an inspiration point for the coming summer film, Land of the Lost (2009), adapted from a children’s show from the 1970′s that probably riffed on Doyle’s original concept.  Even all the Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) and their offspring harken back to this concept, a way of visually re-creating the image of living dinosaurs, monstrous creatures that really existed on our planet but who we know only from their fossils.

And the amazing this is that The Lost World is a pretty good, goddam version of the same thing circa 1925.  Certainly the acting and story and comical and campy and anachronistic in its style and age, but the visual effects are really awesome.  Though quite cartoony and less anatomically “correct” than conceived of today, the creatures are lushly detailed and vivified with great personality in O’Brien’s hands.  And there is plenty of action in the jungle!  But perhaps most exciting, we even have a brontosaurus rampaging in London, crashing London Bridge into the Thames!  I posit that this might be the first time a giant creature rampaged in a major city on film.  Though I could be wrong.

And the film uses real animals within the story well, too, certainly exotic, but in featuring real, live animals sort of leads up to the spectacle of the animated monsters.  We see pythons, jaguars, alligators, bears, and monkeys, again with very effective integration in the story.  And I developed a significant soft spot for the animal “hero” of the film, Jocko, the monkey, who performed many a scene and stunt.

The whole thing was great fun.  The Dengue Fever music actually helped propel the film along, keeping a toe-tapping beat through some of what might have been slower portions and really energizing other sequences when the music really kicked in.  The band, whose music is described as influenced by 1960′s Cambodian pop psychedelia, seemed a potentially odd mixture with this film about London adventurers in the Brazilian rainforest, but really, it was great.  Perhaps the most fun of any of the live performances that I’ve witnessed with silent films, odd as it may sound.

Really, very cool, all the way around.

Filed under San Francisco International Film Festival, Silent Film, Theatrical

The Cat and the Canary

February 24, 2009 by Leave a Comment

The Cat and the Canary (1927) movie poster

(1927) dir. Paul Leni
viewed: 02/14/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

The last of the three of the silent films from the Castro’s mini-fest for Valentine’s Day, The Cat and the Canary was one that I’d been wanting to see for a while, too.  It’s one of the oldest of the “old dark house” horror/mystery/comedy genre, and directed by Paul Leni, who had directed The Man Who Laughs (1928) from last year’s Silent Film Festival, it’s got some Expressionist street cred as well.

All told, it’s a pretty loopy little film.  “The old dark house” genre is one in which all sorts of strange, evil things seem to be happening, in “an old dark house”, and everybody is weird.  In The Cat and the Canary, the story revolves around a will and an inheritance, and a cast of oddball characters.  Actually, the funny thing is that this movie reminded me the most of a Tex Avery cartoon, Who Killed Who? (1943), but spoofing a genre that spoofs itself, is comedy in its own horror, seems almost like the same thing.  Still funny, actually.

Some of the imagery is quite weird and effective: creepy hands, scary demon faces.  And “Mammy Pleasant”, the hilariously inaptly-named housemaid, is a total crack-up with her arch-bizarreness and sullen glares.

It’s quite good fun.

Filed under Haunted House films, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Silent Film, Theatrical, Universal horror

Sunrise

February 24, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Sunrise (1927) movie poster

(1927) dir. F.W. Murnau
viewed: 02/14/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

I’d long wanted to see F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, a film that is often cited as the greatest film of the Silent Era, and perhaps one of the greatest films ever made.  High praise indeed, but it has been pervassive, certainly, this praise, over time throughout institutions, critics, and personal opinions.  And as the second of three films that I saw at the Castro this day, I was more than ready to see it.

I’d watched a few other Murnau films of late: Faust (1926) and The Last Laugh (1924), two other significant, arguably masterpieces from Murnau’s German production.  Still, Sunrise is something quite amazing and beautiful.  In some ways, it’s hard to relate exactly.

As in The Last Laugh, the story is most powerfully evoked without intertitles, simply through the narrative driven by the visual action and visual storytelling.  It’s the kind of beauty of narrative that one is always instructed when writing to “show, not tell” when relating story.  And the imagery and the cinematography are stunning.  Again, as in The Last Laugh, the camera moves in such powerful ways, innovating in ways that are harder to grasp today since these are all now part of cinematic grammar, but it’s not just the innovation but the actual execution and implementation of these devices — they are commanding.

The story is a simple yet classic one.  In a small village, a young farmer is tempted away by a seductress who comes from the city.  She enthralls his heart and then suggests that he murder his wife and come away with her.  Tortured by the decision, the farmer takes his loving, idealized wife on a boat, planning to drown her.  And he almost does, only at the last minute dissuaded by her prayers.  Once back on shore, the woman tries to run away, ultimately catching a tram into the city.  The man, who realizes his guilt and mistake, is redeemed in a church and tries to win back the trust and love of his wife through a day and night in the city.   Through their escapeades and adventures they are redeemed.  But a storm brews on their trip back across the lake and the wife is thought drowned.

I don’t need to tell you the whole story.  But it’s a story of love and redemption.  And it’s beautiful.  Intensely moving.  George O’Brien, as “the man”, I found intensely powerful, acting with his face and his whole of his form.  His internal torture through love and lust and love, duty and regret, everything is evoked through his entire form.  The film won a unique Oscar at the first Academy Awards.  The film is utterly unique.

The opening sequence, the seduction, the town, the scene in the weeds and moonlight, is stunning, aesthetic, amazing.

Perhaps, this is something that is more easily appreciated by seeing it with one’s own eyes.  Though the film has this reputation, making it have to live up to a reputation, an ideal, an ultimate of cinema, how one approaches it is of unique experience and opinion.  And those who are not already open to the silent film could be challenged by it as well.

But I support the chorus of appreciation for Murnau and Sunrise.  I think it’s an amazing film, certainly one of the most moving that I have seen.  And beautiful.  Masterful.

 

Filed under Germany, Silent Film, Theatrical

Our Hospitality

February 24, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Our Hospitality (1923) movie poster

(1923) dir. John G. Blystone, Buster Keaton
viewed: 02/14/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

There was a special winter Valentine’s Day Silent Film Festival at the Castro and I made the most of it.  Three films was a bit of an endurance run, especially with a lot of outward travel wrapped around it, but the opportunity to take the kids to see Buster Keaton on the big screen was just plain not to be missed.  Unfortunately Felix had a conflict, having to do some karate testing to earn a stripe for his belt, but Clara was availble and the family from upstairs, both girls and their folks, plus my ex-in-laws, come from England for a visit, we had quite the little crowd for the event.

It was quite something, lots of young kids and families and people.  I mean, it’s Buster Keaton!  He’s the man.  The most amazing and wonderful silent film comedian/writer/director/actor/auteur.  And, you know what?  Fun was had by ALL!  I mean it.  Coming out of the film at the end, the joy and smiles on everyone’s faces were as fresh and pure as one could imagine, the true and genuine response to such masterful, wonderful, fantastic stuff.

And this is not even Keaton’s best!

Our Hospitality is the first of Keaton’s feature films to be created and conceived as a feature film, the story of a dilletantish fellow from the North, who inherits a family estate (such as it is) and a historical feud (of the Hatfield and McCoy variety) that had pushed his widowed mother from the South in the first place.  It’s also the setting for a Romeo and Juliet-like romance between Keaton and “the girl” that he meets on the “train”-ride down, who happens to be the descendent of the opposing family.

The main story takes place in that Keaton ends up in the warring family’s house as a guest of the girl, but the family has sworn to kill him to settle the blood feud…only they can’t shoot him, out of Southern hospitality while he is a guest in their house.  They just need to wait for him to go outside.  Thus is the setting for many of the gags, with Keaton finally aware of his predicament and trying to stay indoors.

The two main other sequences that are the prime pieces of the film are the train ride down in the very old fashioned train and the amazing waterfall rescue that sets the finale.  The old fashioned train is a working model of Stephenson’s Rocket, a hilarious steam-driven train that is far closer to the carriages of the Old West than a proper train, a true missing link in the evolution of transit.  The discomfort of traveling by this means and the rickety qualities of the train are the setting for a series of a number of gags, exacerbated by the tracks built for the job, making ride more twisty and bumpy than necessary.  And it does sort of lead the way for the work that will be one of his true masterpieces, The General (1927).

But the totally amazing stunt, the waterfall rescue at the end, is just one of those great cinematic moments.  Clara was sitting on my lap so that I could whisper the intertitles to her, and when Keaton swoops over, tied to a rope and snags the girl from the boat just as it is about to go over the waterfall, is just pure physical genius.  Clara sponaneously started clapping and cheering the stunt, the heroics, the wonder.  It was awesome in the most pure and wonderful ways.

Keaton is a true cinema god.  Wonderful beyond words.

Filed under Buster Keaton, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Silent Film, Theatrical, With the kids

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