the silent film thread

I just ordered a big pile of DVDs from Amazon, including...
A bunch (all?) of silent pre-Judy-Garland-version Oz movie adaptations!
Both silent versions of Student of Prague (1913 & 1927)
Faust

the Oz w/ Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man is VERY strange.

I saw something at the video store that looked interesting that has apparently just come out on DVD- something from Mauritz Stiller called Sir Arnes Treasure.

One of the interesting things about the 190x films is the transition
from vaudeville to movies. Most of those really early films are just
theater productions, with a single camera planted front & center.

That Mauritz Stiller DVD isn't supposed to be on the shelf yet! I know, 'cause I have a different one -- Erotikon -- that I'm writing on today and it streets next Tuesday. (Erotikon, by the way, is pretty creaky but still randy enough to seem datedly modern.)

Yeah, I just saw that. Maybe I just saw a poster for it.

The Wind = teh awesome, even the recent score by Carl Davis, he of Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio fame, I think.

I hoped you taped it off TCM (4a.m.?). I think I've told the story of Lillian Gish introducing it at Radio City Music Hall 20 years ago...

You got it. Re: LG at RC anecdote. Please refresh our memories.

She made a very short intro to the effect that the movie was called The Wind-DUHHHH, which is odd because you can't see the wind-DUHHHH!

and there were little old ladies with flowers waiting for her at the stage door.

Sunrise ws teh girlfriend's favourite movie. I am unsure if i prefer that or the last laugh.

but i like both marginally more than nosferatu.

anyone seen Victor Sjostrom's Phantom Carriage? playing at Lincoln Center tomorrow.

Dr. Caligari in Houston with Live Accompaniment 2-nite and Sunday

http://www.mfah.org/main.asp?target=films&par1=1&par2=1&par3=685

Got "Broken Blossoms" and a trio of Fantômas films from lovefilm this week. Watched BB, "Fantômas" and "Juve contre Fantômas" last night. I remember seeing BB on CH4 in the eighties, finding the racial stereotyping grotesque, but nevertheless being drawn into the victorian penny-dreadful melodrama story. This time round the racist cariacaturing totally, totally grossed me out, and the story just struck me as being cruel to the point of sadism. The melodramatic cruelty in "Way down East" has the awesome payoff when Gish's character points the finger at Lennox - unbelievably great performance from Gish as she works herself up into a fury, wild eyes staring at the camera, I grabbed a couple of images when we had that one, she actually looks frightening. This time round, Gish's great performance is where she's locked in the cupboard, and her worthless no good turd of a father is breaking down the door, it's too horrible, too much. When she plays the death of the character, it's so realistic, it's disturbing. I didn't enjoy it at all. Gish's acting is great, and the sets are beautiful, but I hated everything else about it. Surely even at the time, some of this stuff must have been a bit much?

I remember seeing the clip from Fantômas, where Juve is looking into the corner of his room, and a spectral Fantômas appears, wearing a domino mask on TV years ago, and thinking, wow, that looks great, I've got to see that. The first film was somewhat primitive but nevertheless visually striking in lotsa places & v enjoyable. The second one much better storytellingwise. I was amazed at how hardass & amoral the story was, & just how much of a badass mother fucker Fantômas was! I especially liked the scene where Fantômas rips off the princess' money & jewels at the beginning, & he hands her his card, which is blank on both sides. After he leaves, she looks at the card and the word "Fantômas" appears on it & she freaks out. Also the model train in the second one, the street scenes in Paris, the special effect where Fantômas blows up the house at the end of the second film. Great, warped stuff, I thought.

cant bring myself to watch a silent movie silent, I want the whole package; big screen, musicians and an MC.

My absolute favourite is Victor Sjöströms The Phantom Chariot (Körkarlen, 1921), with the fantastic new score by Matti Bye. Also Pabst´s Die Freudlose Gasse (1927, with Greta Garbo) is very enjoyable in a depressing way.

In the category silent, but not silent M wins.

WTF about M has anything to do with silent movies?

M has more to do with silent movies than talkies, for sure.. sound is used a bit different due to limitations in sound recording; more as a score perhaps. And silent films never where silent anyways, so its just about in which way sound is incorporated, as I see it..

Incorporated by having long dialogue-heavy scenes and a key plot element that revolves around Lorre whistling "Hall of the Mountain King" you mean?

Yeah, well.. sound is used as a novelty, and its not really dialouge-driven is it? As a whole I think M relies on the silent stylistics in narration. It would work well without sound. Only thing is the whistling, and that could be in the score.. It would work I tell you. Its not a view I would write an essay on, but it holds in the forums..

Okay I see what you're driving at, but I disagree. I think Lang's masterful in his use of sound in the movie. Schränker in particular is a character who would've been portrayed very differently in a silent.

Yep, youre view is the common one, and i dont really disagree..

david brooks - carolyn and me[!] - camera as antagonist - trees and sky and snow and light as psychological cues

On the way home last night, I picked up the 4DVD set of "Ben Hur" - the 1959 version takes up 2 DVDs(!), there is a "making of" DVD, the last DVD contains a restored version of the entire 1925 silent version. I watched a bit of it last night - there are a few scenes shot in 2-strip tyechnicolor, which are kind of kitschy-looking, but nevertheless, absolutley beautiful. The nativity scene near the beginning, w/Betty Bronson as Mary is just amazing to look at! This is the first 2-strip technicolor I've seen moving, now I've got to see some more - that early American cinema box set w/"Toll of the Sea" on it, apparently "Gold Diggers of Broadway" has it's surviving 2 reels tacked on as an extra on some 30's musical DVD?

Other things I noticed on the brief bit I watched last night were that there seemed to be a bit of bare breast flashage here and there (pre code, I suppose?) and that there seemed to be a lot of intertitles. I'll watch the whole film tonight or tomorrow night, I'm really looking forward to it.

Fuck if I'm going to watch the '59 version - I've seen it before, Charlton Heston is terrible, and it goes on forever and ever and ever. If I want to watch a 50's/60's Romanesque spectacle, "Spartacus" totally pwns "Ben Hur". The 4DVD set cost a tenner in HMV, so it's not exactly a rip off, is it.

I also picked up "Pandora's Box" at the same time - I saw it in the late eighties/early nineties and thought it was OMG AWESOME at the time - I'm a little more jaundiced about it now, and was expecting not to be that keen on it - the whole "brooks cult" thing is a bit offputting, TBH, though I admit I do find her to be an incredibly fascinating character, & also undoubtedly the hottest actress ever, so it's understandable - I put it on, meaning to watch a couple of scenes from it, but I was surprised to be gripped by the story pretty quickly, I watched it all. Thoughts were/are:

1/Brooks' acting is weird - sometimes she's really hammy & quite frankly not that great, a lot of the time though, she seems like a real person who is surrounded by people who are acting, & she's responding unknowingly to the script they're reading from. Her performance in the bit where Dr Schön tries to get her to kill herself & she winds up shooting him is great & unfuckable with.

2/The ending is hateful to me, as I thought it would be. When I saw it before I was like all "wow, profound", this time round I was like "oh, FFS, give the poor girl a break" - for all Lulu's character is infuriating, it seems to me to be utterly undeserved & obnoxiously moralistic. I think a far better ending would have been to show Lulu several years down the line, in the exact same situation she's in at the beginning of the film, except she is now the mistress of a different sucker, and instead of Schigolch turning up, Alwa turns up, in the same dilapidated/seedy state.

Still, I think it's a pretty great film.


My friend who works in HMV (where I got the Ben Hur set) tells me that "Diary of a Lost Girl" is coming out on DVD in the UK soon, though he didn't know if it includes "Windy Riley goes to Hollywood", like the US version. He also reports that there is a DVD box of Lon Chaney films forthcoming, which will include a DVD of "The Unknown" Wow, man.

As the CC has now skipped over a month, I can afford to pick up a few DVDs - here is what I fancy:

1/Pola Negri in "The Woman he Scorned" - her last silent film (I think it's one of those "silent with music/fx soundtrack" things like "Sunrise"

”The Woman he Scorned” aka “The Way of Lost Souls”
DVD here

2/Pola Negri again, in "A Woman of the World", which sounds pretty fucking wild:

”A Woman of the World”(1925)

I imagine these are going to be transfers off 16mm reduction prints - I'll take what I can get, I guess. I've never seen a complete Pola film, only clips. She is kind of the archetypal silent movie star to me. The ones I'd really like to see are "three sinners", b/c she looks so cool w/her hair dyed blonde:

http://www.polanegri.com/lc_three_sinners_bw_4.jpg”>

...and
"The Garden of Eden", starring Corinne Griffith:

garden of eden

The clips, I thought, were very funny, although the visual humour can't help but come across as being slightly Benny Hill-ish. I especially liked Lowell Sherman playing the EXACT SAME CHARACTER that he plays in "Way Down East", except he plays it for laughs here.

Finally, Colleen Moore in "Ella Cinders"
http://www.reelclassicdvd.com/silent_era.htm

Frustratingly, the only Colleen Moore DVDs I seem to be able to get are either this (which I've seen before, albeit a long, long time ago, maybe even in the '70's!) Or her talkie version of "The Scarlet Letter", which I've also seen, and which is quite awful. Colleen Moore is interesting to me b/c she was a huge, huge star back in the late '20's, and she's completely forgotten now. A fair few of her popular films seem to have survived - Lilac Time, Irene, Orchids & Ermine (which I REALLY want to see) Her Wild Oat, Twinkletoes - all sporadically or non-available on DVD. Gah. I can't help obsessing over one of her lost films - "We Moderns", in which her character attends a wild jazz party held on a Zeppelin (!) - a plane crashes into the zeppelin, setting it on fire, and she barely escapes. To me, that sounds like the best film ever?

Anyway, enough rambling, I'll see if I can get some screen grabs of the color bits from "Ben Hur" over the w/e.

POV books about silent films (from whatever approach -- history, theory, biography, technique, stills, whatever).

Is that point-of-view, or do you want us to pick only 5?

The Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow

"Classics of the Silent Screen" "by" Joe Franklin (I think it was mostly written by Franklin's assistant in reality) is the one that kept my interest in the genre going over the years. It presents 50 American silent films listed chronologically, and the 75 "greatest" stars of American silent cinema. The films should all be viewable reasonably easily w/the exception of "A Kiss for Cinderella" (which exists, but in a pretty poor copy, apparently.) The sections on the stars is clever and sneaky in that many of them do not appear in films listed in the other section of the book, and many of the stills are from other films as well, some of which can be obtained, some of which are lost, sadly. So, it tends to get you even more interested in other silent films.

PO5, then, if you will.

By the Joe Franklin?

Murnau's Phantom from 1922, recently restored by the people at Flicker Alley, looks really interesting. Also, if you can find it, John Ford's Four Son's, which is indebted to Murnau (actually uses the same set as Sunrise, although it is much more like The Last Laugh) is highly worthwhile.

http://www.flickeralley.com/images/home_34.jpg

All of Flicker Alley's stuff looks really great to me, the Feuillade serial especially.

Someone has put up on YouTube, a clip from Norma Talmadge's notoriously bad, career-ending early talkie "dubarry: woman of passion"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MjdOJVi4Lw

It is AWFUL - so much worse than I ever imagined, far worse than Colleen Moore's version of "The Scarlet Letter", even. I suspect that anybody would have struggled with such leaden dialogue. Poor Norma, it makes me feel really sad :( I note that the archetypal problem of very early talkies - the microphones apparently weren't much cop, so everyone has to stand still, resulting in static tableaux - is very apparent here.

Also on Youtube is this '70's britishes tv interview w/little-old-lady gloria swanson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MjdOJVi4Lw

She's great! What an amazing star, I could probably listen to her talking about the old days like that for hours. In the clip of the old movie at the end, she's really annoying, but somehow also quite charming. Olivier: "who told you you could sing!" haha. It mentions in the Joe Franklin book that as soon as talkies came in, miss Swanson would always contrive to have at least one singing scene in every film she appeared in. I'd actually really like to see the film excerpted, it looks cute.

I interviewed the Joe Franklin in his famously discombobulated office when I was 17. Didn't seem the authorly type, but he knows/knew a lot about silent film.

Jill was a bit off colour last night & went to bed early, so I sat up and watched the 1925 "Ben Hur" spectacle all the way through. I was a bit alarmed at the 2hr22min running time, but in reality it only dragged in a few places. Downsides were that it beats you over the head a bit much w/the religiosity, even taking into account the fact that it's a bibical epic, that it's pretty much totally lacking in any humour, and that Francis X Bushman overdoes it quite a bit as Messala. If someone who had never seen a silent movie asked for a recommendation this sure as fuck wouldn't be it. W/o understanding the vocab of silent film acting, sitting through this, let alone enjoying it would be a real struggle. On the upside, May McAvoy is great as Esther, w/her sub-Mary Pickford curls and her expressive face, the backdrops and background models are fantastic - like Escher, Piranesi and Dore brought to life, the chariot race is really exciting (the sea battle is a bit of a mess though), the colour sequences are expertly deployed and hit like a bomb when yer watching it. Well worth a tenner, haha.

I grabbed a bunch of pics, using VLC player:

Betty Bronson appears briefly as Mary. All she really does is sit there, pulling the mona-lisa face. She is unbelievably beautiful:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/03bronsonmary2.png

Early technicolor nativity scene:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/09nativity2.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/10nativity3.png

The mean old Romans mistreat the Jews, Pre-Hayes Code style:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/06meanoleromans2.png
The actress looks kind of wryly amused by this, going by the look on her face.

1st appearance of ramon navarro as ben hur. Easy on the eyeliner there. He's about 1,000,000 x better and 1,000,000,00 times hotter than Charlton Heston:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/07navarrobenhur1.png

Part of the Roman fleet - who needs CGI when you can actually build what you're supposed to be representing in yer film?

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/13triremes2.png

The most WTF moment of the film - the guy beating out time for the galley slaves aboard the trireme. It looks like something from one of Derek Jarman's period pieces! (poss NSFW if yer employers are uptight nazi assholes, like)
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/14galleyjarmanesque.png

Best exchange of the film - the ppl in the crows nests spot their opponents:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/15pirates.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/16pirates.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/17romans.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/18romans.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/19golthar.png




Ben Hur returns to Rome, a free man, his athletic prowess & strength gained during three years of pulling oars as a galley slave makes him a hero to the populace:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/22navarrobenhur2.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/24rome3.png
He looks a lot like Peter Cook in "Bedazzled", I think.

Great calligraphy on some of the intertitles, I'd love to get a font that looks like this
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/27typography.png

Ben Hur's mother and sister in the Roman dungeon. Very Gustave Dore-esque:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/28dungeon1.png

The roman arena at Antioch. Seamless use of hanging models. Awesome spectacle. Fuck CGI, heh:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/50arena4.png


May McEvoy as Esther, the "romantic interest". NB hairstyle ripped straight off Mary Pickford. She's really good
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/38estheranddad4.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/34esther2.png

The background models are great, they look like MC Escher or Piranesi etchings brought to life:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/30antioch1.png
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/31antioch2.png

Look at this backdrop! It looks like they just blew up a Gustave Doré etching:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/Ben%20Hur%201925/52lepervalley.png

Pash, your YouTube links are the same, do you have the Swanson link?

Those stills are gorgeous.

Oops. The Gloria clip is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcgZzL3vZyU

& thanks! It's actually a lot of fun grabbing the screenshots. I was really pleased with the first one of May McEvoy looking into the camera.

He's about 1,000,000 x better and 1,000,000,00 times hotter than Charlton Heston

Damning with faint praise.

I saw the '25 version long ago. Ramon was hot indeed. Beaten to death in his old age, alas.

"A Woman of the World" Paramount 1925:
Chester Conklin and Pola Negri
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/vlcsnap-93613.png

"The Show Off" Paramount 1926
Louise Brooks, Ford Sterling, Gregory Kelly and Lois Wilson
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b379/Vietgrove/vlcsnap-131198.png

They just moved some stuff around and hoped nobody would notice they used the same set, didn't they.