May 10: The Saphead (1925 -- Herbert Blaché)

★★★

The Saphead is Buster Keaton’s debut in feature length films, and though he didn't direct or write, there are already some familiar Keaton elements here.  Most strikingly, there’s the deadpan, impassive face that confronts situations with a blank gaze and, by a series of unlikely events, leads the character out of adversity.  He wins a fortune gambling in this film, yet he remains unmoved, in fact unaware.  His social disconnect is so great that he follows the rules in a book to woo Agnes, oblivious to the fact that she loves him for who he is rather than for the caddish behavior his book counsels; later, when he tries to engage the society of stock exchange traders, he completely misunderstand the rules.  This impassive, fumbling figure is the Keaton we’ll see lots more of in the coming decade.

Saphead also allows Keaton to display some of his physical comic chops.  There’s a pratfall down a stairwell early on that has its roots in vaudeville, but it’s when Blaché lets Keaton loose on the stock exchange floor that we see the acrobatics we now expect.  After a long roll off the floor, Keaton becomes a human tornado, jumping onto, sliding under, leaping on top of and running around the bidders in an uproarious short scene that reverses the financial downfall of his father and sets everything right in his family.  This moment is the most telling glimpse of what Keaton will be able to do when he has more artistic control.

Keaton becomes the emotional center of this movie even though Blaché doesn’t give him much latitude and doesn't support him adequately.  The director allows Keaton to perform, but Blaché's direction lets the air out of scene after scene.  For example, when Bertie is trying to get arrested, he’s continually repulsed by a cop he’s unwittingly bribed.  This is a flat scene that, if Blaché had put some energy into, has the potential to be as funny as the concluding one in the stock exchange. And while Saphead has plenty of melodramatic elements – the looming revelation of Mark’s infidelity, the sudden loss and recovery of a fortune –Blaché seems unable to crank the melodrama enough to engage the audience.  Instead, it’s the audience’s engagement with Bertie that keeps us involved in the film.  He’s a small, cute, agile and clueless character, all of which makes us root for him in every challenge he faces.

Nor does Blaché avail himself of the elements of cinematic storytelling that were already in use in 1920.  There is no camera movement in Saphead, and Blaché uses crosscutting sparingly, and then only in service to the story.  Griffith could build a sequence to powerful suspense by crosscutting, but Blaché, for example, inserts a scene of a dying Henrietta only to explain why her letters are appearing at Bertie’s wedding.  Likewise, Blaché crosscuts Agnes’ arrival at home with Bertie’s waiting for her at the station, but his purpose here is only storytelling rather than suspense or humor.  Blaché doesn’t inject energy into this film with his direction, so if Saphead seems overly even-keeled, the responsibility for this lies much more with Blaché rather than Keaton, who carries the film the distance it goes.

Slow or not, The Saphead rewards us with a hugely empathetic Buster Keaton whose impassivity, incomprehension, and misunderstanding of his environment make the audience want to take his side in every scene he’s in.  Here in 1920, we see the Keaton we’ll really love in the next few years.

May 9: The Phantom of the Opera (1925 -- Lon Chaney)

★★★★

It’s hard to argue with the reputation of this film.  In 1925, it was drawing on the conventions of the horror/thriller and codifying them to the point that we still recognize these same genre elements 90 years later.  Phantom is a bona fide touchstone American film. 

One of the strengths here is the movie’s extraordinary images.  We’re visually hooked starting at the opening scenes of streams of people flowing to the Paris Opera, up its stairs and into its lavish performance hall.  This is not a chamber movie but instead an epic which set in a single, grand building.  Whether the faux Egyptian statuary back stage or the chiaroscuro of the Phantom’s abode, the frame here is always filled with interesting things to look at, and most shots as much about the background and set as they are about the characters. 

The Phantom does his part, too, to keep the visuals interesting.  When the film shifts to a color sequence at the masked ball, the Phantom steals this bright scene with his glowing red costume, and when he spies on the couple from atop the statue they’re reclining under, his cape billows into the air like a wide streamer of blood.  Even his horrible face provokes interest with his lipless mouth showing his teeth, his patchy hair and his dark, sunken eyes that look like those of a skull.  Director Rupert Julian uses this face especially well when the Phantom is driving his team of horses to flee the angry crowd. 

There are also unmistakably Expressionist gestures with lighting in this film.  The claustrophobic opening is all vaulted arches slashed by single source lighting and a bent figure carrying another light.  Shadows leap on walls throughout the film, too.  In fact, the first time we see the Phantom, he’s nothing but a shadow on one of these walls, and we’re treated to other silhouettes throughout.  Soon after the vault scene, we see shadows of ballerinas prancing on a wall, and we watch a silhouette constructed as the Phantom puts Christine on a horse and they ride off, stretching and deforming their shadow in their wake.  Phantom freely avails itself of such Expressionist visual gestures.

And the confident, fluid editing here moves the film along while engaging us.  The early opera section is almost a montage as the movie tells us the story of people arriving at the Opera house and settling in for a performance with short clips of each phase of the action.  Later, the film tells the story of the fall of the chandelier by cutting from the fall itself to many quick glances at the consequences of its slamming onto the patrons.  We see the same technique around other thriller/action points like the kidnapping of Christine and the pursuit of the Phantom.  Phantom of the Opera succeeds at least in part thanks to its editing techniques.

But in contrast to his success in other aspects of the film, Julien’s decisions with respect to acting stifle our engagement.  Perhaps channeling Expressionist vocabulary that creates an eerie, disoriented feeling in those films, Julian guides his actors into performances that are closer to pantomime than portrayal and that suck the life out of characters.  With this directorial choice, Phantom becomes a series of tableaux with actors’ limbs flung wide and held for effect rather than a series of scenes with humans working out their desires and beliefs.  In one scene, for example, the Phantom’s elevated hand with fingers stretched apart and bent resembles a characteristic gesture of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu.  In the Murnau film, with its consistently macabre tone, this gesture contributes to our sense of how unnatural the vampire is.  However, this same gesture feels like stilted acting in Phantom because the world of this later film is realistic with its business owners, detectives, cousins and art patrons.  Expressionist gestures work well in consistent, Expressionist projects, but offered in a realistic aetting, they simply feel false.  This is one reason Chaney’s naturalistic Quasimodo is far more engaging than his artificial Phantom.  And it’s one reason we hardly care at all about Christine or her beau, Raoul, as the actors pantomime their characters instead of create them.

Phantom of the Opera is a brilliant film to watch on screen.  Its visuals thrill, and its editing engages.  However, the unfortunate choice of acting style here is so inappropriate for the rest of the movie that we can’t stay connected.  Through Phantom, we can see how German Expressionism became a key part of B-movie horror.

May 8: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923 -- Wallace Worsley)

★★★★★

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a much better film than The Penalty, and it’s not just because of the more recent film's huge budget.  The gigantic set built at Universal and the masses of extras surging around the screen certainly helped, but the bigger contribution is that both director Wallace Worsley and actor Lon Chaney made such great strides in their cinema.

Worsley is far more effective here than in The Penalty.  One carryover strength of the visuals is that Worsley again works with light and dark to make a scene’s point.  In a great use of light, we see Jehan stay in the shadows as he sends Quasimodo out to kidnap Esmerelda, but when the armed patrol arrives, we watch Jehan back away, disappearing into the darkness gradually until only his face is left…which then vanishes, too.  It’s a very cinematic use of shadow.  Worsley's camera is looser here, too, even doing a short tracking shot when Esmeralda and Phoebus enter the ballroom.  But it’s in Worsley's editing skills that we find the most effective change.  In Penalty, Worsley primarily uses editing to further the story, but here in Hunchback, the editing quickens the pace of the movie and adds tension.  In scenes like the beating of Quasimodo, Worsley uses close-ups as he cuts from face to face, showing contributions and reactions to the scene.  There’s similar editing during the confrontation between Phoebus and Clopin as we cut between the faces of the antagonists.  This technique intensifies our engagement with the scenes.  Worsley also uses cross-cutting between different locations and even story lines to create suspense.  During the penultimate storming of the cathedral, we continually jump between Quasimodo, the crowd and Esmerelda as Quasimodo attempts to defend the cathedral and the besiegers respond to his defense.  For good measure, Worsley intersperses Esmerelda’s reactions.  This scene has editing fluency largely absent from The Penalty.

In addition to the improvement in Worsley's direction, Chaney’s Quasimodo is also a great step forward for the actor from Blizzard in Penalty.  While Blizzard’s background and actions lead us to have some understanding of his motivations, Quasimodo evokes our outright sympathy and care.  The hunchback could hardly be uglier with his misshapen face, lumbering gait, missing teeth and matted patches of hair, but Chaney’s movements and even facial expressions so effectively communicate Quasimodo’s internal process that we can follow along as the slow Quasimodo figures out that he’s been used by Jehan and later realizes that Esmerelda is on his side.  His confusion and fear before he is flogged is palpable, and his anger, when his tongue flicks out of his mouth, is always visible.  Childlike, Quasimodo obeys those he trusts, like Dom Frollo, in a way that is touchingly simple.  One of the best elements in Chaney’s performance is Quasimodo’s relationship with the bells.  Loud, monotone and inarticulate, the bells sound like the voice Quasimodo would have if he could speak, and as he leaps onto the bell’s ropes and pulls and somersaults, the image on the screen is the visual version of Quasimodo’s communication.  Quasimodo is not a nuanced being, but instead, loud and pure.  And his death monologue on the bells’ ropes is especially poignant.  Chaney creates a real, complex character in Quasimodo who thoroughly engages us when he’s on screen.

Even with its big budget set aside, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an achievement of silent cinema.  In this outing, the team of director Wallace Worsley and actor Lon Chaney hit most  notes right in creating this now-classic film.

May 7: The Penalty (1920 -- Wallace Worsley)

★★★

The Penalty is all about Lon Chaney.  He gives a very effective performance as arch-villain Blizzard, striding around with his legs folded into leather cups so he looks like a double amputee.  Chaney is completely unbowed as Blizzard, walking on the top of a factory table where his female employees are making hats, bullying the workers, grabbing them by the hair and threatening them.  He even uses his missing legs to dominate one of the woman as he sits on a piano bench playing the keys and makes his assistant sit below him to manipulate the pedals.  Chaney brings in moments of athleticism, too, as when he climbs up a series of pegs to peer into a high window looking over the factory floor and when he lowers himself to his underground workspace by using suspended chains.  He also deftly hops into chairs and onto the posing platform for Barbara.

And Chaney uses his face with as much dexterity as he does his body.  Close-ups tell more of this story than inter-titles, and Chaney carries and entire scene with the way he changes his face.  His quicksilver expressions shows us how angry he is in planning to kill Rose and how quickly her musical skill moderates his anger into appreciation.  His face quickly flicks from conveying his love for Barbara to anger at her rejection to penance at offending her.  There’s little action in either of these sequences, but rather Chaney tells us what’s happening by his countenance.  And director Wallace Worsley directs the camera and lighting to focus on Chaney’s expressiveness.  Blizzard can look like an old man at one minute, but high key lighting turns this same weathered face into the Prince of Darkness when there’s mention of Satan.  The Penalty is a tour de force of silent acting by Chaney.

Worsley brings other directorial flourishes to the film, too.  On a couple of occasions, he plays from one small, lit box to the larger dark screen.  For example, as Rose is exploring the subterranean storeroom, we see her backlit, peering at us from a square of light into a dark room whose foreground fills most of the screen.  That image contrast sharply with the surprise we get when she flips the light switch and, in the well-lit room, we’re jarred by suddenly seeing stacks and stacks of armaments.  The play of light and dark in this, and in the pursuit of Nell’s killer, intensifies the feeling of the scenes.  Worsley also knows to use editing and cross-cutting to good effect.  The editing heightens tension when he cuts between Blizzard at Barbara’s studio and Rose exploring the arms cache in the basement, for example.  And a delightfully cross-cut section is Blizzard’s explanation of his plan for looting San Francisco, which is cut with visual enactments of the plan.

The period insight into San Francisco also makes The Penalty interesting to watch today.  Whether it’s a mock-up of the turn-of-the-cnetury dance halls in the Barbary Coast section of the city or a view down a street that shows houses set on canted foundations to compensate for the grade of a hill, the film gives us glimpses of old San Francisco.  The quick flash of a streetcar, an Asian chauffeur, and the Asian décor of Blizzard’s apartment with its statue of Confucius wafted in incense all show us a set of circumstances and values in this city in 1920.

The film is also interesting for the way melodrama plays out in this silent crime thriller as opposed to how it works in a romance or drama.  In this film, actually, melodrama doesn’t function very effectively.  The story is chock-a-block with melodramatic elements.  Blizzard decides not to kill Rose because he loves the music she produces; Rose falls in love with the man she’s supposed to bring down; Dr. Ferris cures Blizzard of evil by operating on his brain; finally happy, Blizzard is killed by his former henchmen.  All this is pure melodrama, and in the hands of a different set of artists, it might have been effective.  Way Down East, also released in 1920, uses such melodrama very effectively.  But The Penalty has no actor who can engage the camera and, through it, the audience.  No one in this film elicits our sympathetic identification the way a Lilian Gish can.  Worsley’s camera shows us the chameleon techniques of Lon Chaney, but none of the cast can touch us and make us really care about them or the outcome of the action.  That lack of sympathetic attraction is the one major flaw with this movie.

There’s a lot to appreciate in The Penalty.  Though it relies primarily on technique, it can be a fun watch on the screen.

April 22: Under the Skin (2013 -- Jonathan Glazer)

★★★★★

I join the nay-sayers on this one, but before I do, it’s worth talking about some of the things that Jonathan Glazer does right in Under the Skin.  For one, he has a knack for visuals.  The fade-ins are repeatedly effective, with the one of a forest fading in very slowly over the image of the sleeping heroine especially so.  There is also excellent point-of-view editing when we’re in the alien’s head and seeing what she’s seeing: the urban streets, the natural areas, the nightclub.  This distance and lack of interpretation of what we see with her conveys the mute, observational aspect of Johansson’s character.  Glazer also does a fine job of maintaining a consistently dark tone throughout.  Most of the film is either at nighttime or during rainy or snowy weather.  Even active night scenes are dark with some garish colors flaring in.

And the director has a good sense of visual effectiveness.  The understated, gray scene of the drowning stays in the memory, anchored there by the screaming baby that the aliens ignore.  The powerful gray in the visuals of this scene convey not only the predators’ own strength but also their lack of flair or distinctiveness.  Another well-conceived visual, the reflective trap that Johansson lures her prey into, has a place in this same unforgiving gray.  To Glazer’s credit, the visuals are so powerful inUnder the Skin that little dialog is needed or used.  From the opening abstract scenes to the snowy fire at the end of the film, Glazer tells his story with a bare modicum of dialog, and even the speech we hear has a pro forma quality to it.

But despite the lack of dialog, one the most effective elements here is how the soundtrack functions.  In the opening, we hear someone practicing English phonemes, learning to talk from a basic level, suggesting the alien learning a new language.  As the film gets underway, much of the speech is indistinct, with overheard clips of unfinished words or sentences until Johansson talks with a victim, when the dialog comes clear.  This sound engineering evokes the alien lack of understanding or care for the communication happening around her.  And the screechy musical soundtrack, altogether lacking melody or rhythm and generally in minor key, is an appropriate choice to communicate an inhuman sensibility.  All these directorial decisions make the soundtrack a crucial element in the film.

But for all its technical triumph, Under the Skin ultimately fails to engage, and this failure comes from significant directorial decisions.  One major problem is the director’s heavy hand that, while not giving us tedious exposition, still seems compelled to hit us on the nose with meaning.  When Johansson is first taking the clothes she is to wear on earth, the Johansson she is taking them from sheds a tear.  This unnecessary, obvious message tells us the rest of the story: An alien is unwillingly taken from the earth she had grown to love.  With that heavy-handed foreshadowing, the movie loses suspense and becomes a fill-in-the-blank set of details for the telegraphed plot, and this plot itself is somewhat conventional.  We await her seduction by humanity and her being hunted down by her handlers.  There’s a similarly on-the-nose moment when Johansson sees a fly trapped inside a window and decides to free her latest victim.  It’s as though Glazer doesn’t trust the limited dialog or Johansson’s acting enough to allow them to communicate the character’s moral development, so he adds a metaphor that is too literal to miss.  This same telegraphing is also obvious when Johansson is walking in the woods and meets a lumber worker who asks if she is alone.  Her role reversal from predator to prey is already well-established in the film at this point without this klunky echo of her own dialog as a predator.  And the remainder of the film is telegraphed in that single line of dialog as we know the man will soon hunt her down.  Glazer also occasionally uses the otherwise skilled soundtrack to cue what the audience is supposed to feel.  Minor key music tells us when things are disturbed, but when something nice – like a kiss – occurs, the music shifts suddenly into a happy major key.  The director's lack of subtlety with such elements in Under the Skin ultimately leaves the audience feeling clumsily manipulated.

Although all this this obviousness lessens the impact of the film, it’s actually Glazer’s direction of Johansson that most cripples it.  Throughout the film, Johansson is an unresponsive, observing alien through whose flat, uncaring perspective we see, and the result of this perspective is that we experience a flat, unengaging world.  Even late in the film, when she’s supposedly experienced some growth, the alien has only muted or animalistic responses and doesn’t convey real knowledge or insight. Glazer’s clear choice to hold Johansson back has the unfortunate effect of leaving the audience outside the film, uninterested and without investment in the outcome.  Given this decision, we don’t much care what happens by the end of the film, we aren’t involved with a character whose arc we can’t discern, and we find ourselves having watched nearly two hours of things happening.  I left this film with a shrug.

There are several contemporary British directors who have shown themselves technically proficient at filmmaking but who don’t create engagement in their films: Christopher Nolan comes to mind, as does Danny Boyle and even Ridley Scott.  It’s this tendency in Under the Skin that makes the film an academic exercise more than an encounter with knowledge and experience.  And a disappointment.

March 6: Martyrs of Love/Mucedníci lásky (1967 -- Jan Němec)

★★★★★

Here is a beautiful little film in the mannered, sweet vocabulary of the silent era, a film that invests in that vocabulary and uses it to communicate rather than taking it just as a formal affectation.  Jan Němec uses sentimentality, gentle irony, caricature and slapstick humor to characterize his three martyrs of love and create a gentle yet experimental portrait of lovable characters who fail at love.

Martyrs of Love consists of three stories.  In the first, The Junior Clerk’s Temptation, a nerdy office worker finds himself restless and unable to stay at home one evening and decides to go out on the town in search of excitement.  With his black jacket, white gloves and bowler, the clerk echoes Charlie Chaplin, and he has some of the hapless Little Tramp’s ineptness.  Naturally, he’s widely ignored at the bars until they close, at which point a woman asks him if he has any liquor at home.  She and two friends go to his place to party, drink his alcohol, and one couple has passionate sex while the clerk’s woman passes out.  It's just what would happen to the Little Tramp.

In Němec’s hands, though, The Junior Clerk’s Temptation goes beyond the conventions of silents.  As the clerk is initially restless at home, visions of leggy women preoccupy him as a whining jazz score animates the scene, and the film quickly takes the narrative pace of a boozy night on the town.  Miroslav Ondrícek’s black-and-white cinematography exploits the sparkle of artificial light and scenes of choreographed dancing to create images of the bohemian nightlife that attract the clerk.  But of course, for all the allure of that life, the clerk ends up back at his office the next day with only his dreams and memories.

The same mix of dreamy whimsy informs Anastasia’s Dream, the tale of the second martyr. Němec’s wit is

quickly apparent in this section.  In contrast to the male clerk dressed in black, the woman here wears a white dress.  And rather than jazz in a nightclub, we encounter classical music in an elegant, baroque palace.  In keeping with the thematic continuity of the film, though, the innocent maid Anastasia can only gaze longingly at her beloved soprano soloist, discovering awkwardly soon after the performance that he already has a companion.  The mood of this section is dreamlike throughout, from the quiet soundtrack in the palace to the surreal narrative as Anastasia jilts the officer at her military wedding finds herself seduced by a gypsy with a guitar on the train.  Reality intrudes at the end of section as she comes full circle as a server with a tray on a train.  The section has the marvelous cohesion of a reverie.

While the clerk wears black and Anastasia white, the main character of the third section, Orphan Rudolf’s Adventure, wears grey.  This meta-cinematic costuming highlights the cinematic self-conscious throughout Martyrs of Love.  In this third section, it’s the silents’ slapstick humor that predominates.  Chaos reigns as a family plays musical instruments badly, chases each other, trips over each other and breaks records over each other’s heads.  The merriment is so great that that when the family discovers that the man they thought was Jacob is, in fact, the orphan Rudolf, they burst into laughter and continue their celebration.  On imagines that, for an orphan, finding such a family would be wonderful, but since Martyrs of Love is about loss as portrayed in the sweet sentimentality of silent film language, Rudolf eventually finds himself alone again.

Martyrs of Love doesn't end with the final story.  Instead,  first the clerk, then Anastasia, appear and walk slowly up a hill to join the disappointed Rudolf.  Black, white and grey assemble and then walk off together into a woods.  In this way, this wonderful tribute to the power of silent film gives us a fitting end to Němec’s experimental appropriation of the language.

March 5: Diamonds of the Night/Démanty noci (1964 -- Jan Němec)

★★★★★

Diamonds of the Night is an unexpectedly beautiful, intense film that shows Jan Němec's control of the medium from his first feature.  Short, it consists of little story: Two prisoners on the way to a concentration camp escape the train and run for their lives.  The film opens abruptly with shots and two men running and stumbling up a hill as fast as they can.  The tracking camera is close in as we hear their feet in the brush, the shots echoing behind them and their fast, tiring breathing.  The scene runs for minutes, and we catch glimpses of them helping each other get away.

The visceral intensity of Diamonds comes from such close, physical detail.  The first boy wears only a loose-fitting, thin shirt that offers little protection from the snags and needles of the conifer forest they escape into, and every time he falls or snags on a stick, we viewers wince.  And the boy has no shoes, no protection from the cold, wet elements of the forest.  The second, taller escapee has a coat and ill-fitting shoes that hurt his feet, and he lumbers as though he is walking in pain.  As the weather varies from cold to wet, the boys take us through their intensely physical trials.

But Němec introduces great beauty into this suffering.  Jaroslav Kucera’s black-and-white cinematography makes the boys’ forest a palette of blacks, whites and grays that flicker and shift as the camera looks up at the leaves overhead or in front of the young men to the branches in their path.   The woods become a multi-toned blur, too, when the camera pans the woods as the boys run.  Near starvation, the escapees come to a village, and Kucera’s camera captures the round face of a farm woman with the even light of portraiture.  Soon, though, the same soft, complementary light is showing us the macabre and ugly old men who are awkwardly hunting down the young boys with the brutality they would use in hunting animals.  Throughout their unrelenting cruelty, the film's cinematography gives these old men a grotesque beauty.  The black-and-white cinematography in Diamonds recalls Jean Vigo’s short À propos de Nice, both for its monochromatic medium and for its focus on the distorted faces of the old villagers.

Elements of Diamonds also recall another Vigo short, Zéro de conduit.  In the Vigo short, as the students take over the school, the film moves into a tone that resembles fantasy or reverie with its stylized celebration, and in Diamonds, the narrative of the boys’ suffering is interrupted by similar mental and tonal digression.  Sometimes, we see a memory as one boy thinks back on trading his shoes to the other, and sometimes we something that may be a dream or a memory, like the shots of the boy walking along a field as seen from a chateau wall.  There are scenes of cable cars and fraying city signs, and memories of women.  At other times, the narrative digressions show the character’s thought, as when the boy is trying to decide what to do with the farm woman.  And this eruptive device, which often introduces beauty into the intensity of the boys’ suffering, becomes key to the ending of the film.

At barely over an hour, Diamonds of the Night is both an intense and beautiful aesthetic experience, a rare piece of cinematic art that is truly under appreciated.