the silent film thread

Anyone seen this Italian epic, prominently featured in Scorsese's Italian doc? I may go Monday at MoMA.

Cabiria. 1914. Italy. Written and directed by Giovanni Pastrone. With Bartolomeo Pagano, Umberto Moszato, Marcellina Bianco. In Carthage during the second Punic War, the Roman Fulvio Axilla and his faithful servant Maciste rescue the child Cabiria as she is about to be sacrificed to the god Moloch. World cinema's first great historical epic, restored to its original length and vibrant colors. English intertitles. Restored by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, with the collaboration of MoMA. Silent, with organ accompaniment by Ben Model. Approx. 180 min.

No, but they're playing Maciste at this year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Likeable (albiet somewhat chopped by the look of it) little 10 minute short from 1913, featuring none other than Pearl White:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6063104318913165236&q=%22pearl+white%22

She's pretty cute, an impression you don't get from seeing stills of her. I wonder if THE BARRYS got thrown out of their home as a result of her somnambulistic kleptomania?

Also, typing "hollywood brownlow" into google video's search box yields a good few hours great viewing.

Awesome, thanks for the tip! Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood is pretty much required viewing.

I think Cinema Europe must have been on TV during one of the times when we didn't own one. I don't remember it at all, but I'll watch it over the coming week.

The Hollywood series I remember really vividly. There's probably a bunch of people aroundabout my age who's interest in silent films was brought about by watching this series.

On the ones I've watched, the sound has an annoying tendency to slip out of sync 1/2 way through, but it's still watchable. The section on John Gilbert is heartbreakingly sad, poor fucking guy. Old lady Louise Brooks in the section on Clara Bow has a weird magnetism about her, it's easy to see how she wrapped k tynan around her little finger, she is such a fascinating character. Lack of vintage Leatrice Joy or Norma Talmadge footage is frustrating, but I haven't watched all the parts yet.

Highlight is that clip from "the fire brigade" in the 1st episode, it's so thrilling!

Also holy shit! Colleen Moore!

I must have watched that clip from "the fire brigade" about 20 times over the weekend. It has the same effect on me as the helicopter attack sequence from " Apocalypse Now". I can't believe how exciting it is.

Apparently "Hollywood" briefly came out on DVD in the UK, before getting pulled over a copyright dispute. So pathetic! "lets take all these films that like less than 1 on 10,000 people have even the faintest interest in anyway, and restrict access to them" WTF.

Also, I'm curious about the brief bit you see in the credits between the bit of garbo and gilbert dancing and the bit from "wings" - it looks like Pola Negri - from "Gypsy Blood"?

It'd be so nice to be able to watch this stuff. :(

Restored print of Griffith's Way Down East playing July 20 in NYC:

http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/gswaydowneast.html

The Passion of Joan of Arc is captivating. Falconetti = w0ah!

-- Leee (Leee), Friday, December 6, 2002 6:07 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

^^^^^^ this is true

god, her expression. Completely rapturous and sad.

It'd be so nice to be able to watch this stuff. :(

Wouldn't it just. It is SO frustrating. Bad enough that you have yr own personal list of lost titles you'd love to be able see for whatever reason, there's the stuff that does exist, that is unavailable to view - Borzage's "Secrets" and "The Lady", feat. Norma Talmadge, for example, then there's a bunch of titles that get exhibited at festivals from time to time, like that "The Fire Brigade" Or "The Lilac Time" w/Colleen Moore & Gary Cooper, or many others that if I could get on a nicely-presented DVD, w/a decent score, I'd happily pay over the odds for. So annoying.

I just ordered Mauritz Stiller's "Hotel Imperial" feat. Pola Negri and a copy of "Norma Talmadge double bill #1" on DVD-R from Grapevine. You take what you can get, I suppose. the Pola Negri Paramount comedy that I bought from them the other month wasn't the best transfer I've seen by a long way, but it was watchable, very enjoyable, and the compiled score was pretty cleverly done & effective. "Hotel Imperial" is supposedly one of their best transfers.

I love "Way Down East", def one of my favourites. Lowell Sherman is great.

well, I specifically meant online video, which is banned at work (and I'm a Luddite at home).

Hahaha oops. You know what I mean though, I'm sure.

MoMA is showing a bunch o' Griffith this month, including 1908-13 Biograph shorts tonight.

I got the package from Grapevine yesterday, & watched some of it last night. I got a Norma Talmadge double bill, featuring "The Social Secretary" (1916) and "The Forbidden City" (1918), "Beggars of Life" featuring Richard Arlen, Louise Brooks and Wallace Beery, and "Hotel Imperial", dir Mauritz Stiller, featuring Pola Negri. I watched a bit of all 4 titles, then watched all of "The Social Secretary" and half of "Beggars of Life". Given that Grapevine is a "PD" company, I guess w/o much in the way of budget, the image quality on all 3 DVDs was acceptable. Dude who runs Grapevine seems to be pretty adept at doing compiled scores as well. "Beggars of Life" has pretty bad image quality, I've read in a few places that only one print of this film has survived, and that print is a pretty poor 16mm reduction in beat-up condition. It's a pity it's not better, because the bit of this film that I watched was really outstanding. The opening sequence, in which Richard Arlen's hobo knocks on the door of a farmhouse, begging for some breakfast, enters the house, only to find the farmer dead, then finds the farmer's adopted daughter, and she recounts how she'd shot him after he sexually molested her was tough & rugged & brilliantly done. I'll watch the rest tonight, and if it keeps up this level, it's got to be one of the best films I've seen. Trawling through alt.movies.silent, it seems that there was a good print of this at some point that got loaned out to a european film festival, and wasn't returned/lost. Wouldn't it be great if it turned up.

One of the things that interests me the most about silent films is these actresses who were massive stars & loved by moviegoers in the '20's, but who are just totally forgotten and ultra-obscure today. Colleen Moore, Corinne Griffith & Norma Talmadge. Talmadge especially because there's a couple of interesting/intriguing backstories - her appearance, the absolute epitome of sophisticated '20's glam, contrasted with her supposed rough upbringing and alleged
harsh Brooklyn accent IRL (which she supposedly managed to hide in her talkies), and also the fact that there's a good proportion of her ouvre that survives mainly complete in decent condition, but which is unviewable(IE almost no DVDs or exhibition prints), unless you book a special viewing session at the LoC.
This site is also responsible for making me more interested. The site author is very enthusiastic about her films, but not uncritically so.
I watched "The Social Secretary" w/great interest & enjoyed it loads. Being from 1916, it has the more direct/simple style of storytelling, and seems much more archaic that "Beggars of Life" or other films from the '20's, this effect magnified by the older-fashioned clothes the players wore. The story (a farce written by Anita Loos) was charming and pretty funny in places. Norma plays Mayme, a temp secretary who's employers all get the hots for her, they keep trying it on w/her, but she's a virtuous girl, and she quits. She then goes back to the female stenographers club (!!) where she hangs out, and shares her woes w/her comrades there. At the same time, a wealthy old lady gets frustrated because all of her social secretaries keep leaving to get married, so she places an ad for a new one, stating that the place is only open to those "extremely unattractive to men". Norma/Mayme sees the ad, combs her hair back tight, wears a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, adopts a dorky/stern-looking expression and gets the job. Rich old lady's daughter is a head-in-the-clouds romantic, who wears so much kohl round her eyes that she looks really fucked up on drugs. The son, Jimmie, is a raving alcoholic. One night Jimmie comes home ripped to the gills. He drops his key, so he has to break a window to get in the house. Mother hears this, you see a title card "oh there's Jimmie, inebriated again" and she goes back to sleep. Norma/Mayme hears it, assumes it's burglars, goes downstairs and beams Jimmie over the head with a vase of lilies. Thus does Jimmie find out that Mayme is actually pretty cuet. They start dating and Jimmie straightens himself out, at the same time as the daughter starts dating one of Mayme's old short-term employers who is clearly a BAD SORT. To add to the trouble, a reporter starts snooping round, the reporter played by Erich Von Stroheim, believe it or not (he hams it up a bit). It all turns out OK in the end. Norma is pretty impressive, she does the telling the story with eyes and facial expressions thing very well, quite subtly, and only overdoes it a few times. Despite wearing some terrible-looking clothes (she also dresses down to get the social secretary job) she looks great too, although in a real old-fashioned way. You could probably drop Louise Brooks or Leatrice Joy into a modern idiom, and they wouldn't look out of place, not so Norma.

The other film, "The Forbidden City", I watched a bit of, but it totally sucked. It was a madame butterfly-ish "east meets west" (cough) piece, somewhat racially awkward to say the least in this day & age, w/Norma looking utterly ridiculous made up to look like a Chinese woman. The title cards looked nice is about the best I can say about it.

Now I want to see "Secrets", "The Lady", "Smilin' Through" and so on all the more. Bummer.

I'll watch the Stiller/Pola Negri film tonight, most likely.

wow.

At MoMA, Henry B. Walthall, Harry Carey (Sr) and Griffith himself all got someone to applaud when they appeared onscreen.

via Dave Kehr's blog:

The good people at the National Film Preservation Foundation have taken the occasion of tonight’s opening of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival to unveil the contents of the third box set in the ongoing “Treasures from American Film Archives” series. Titled “Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934,” the collection consists of 48 films from a time when movies were actively engaged with the world around them, rather than marshalling all available technology to deny it (no, I still haven’t seen “Transformers”). Four features are included: Cecil B. De Mille’s delirious melodrama “The Godless Girl” (1929), with Lina Basquette as a defiant young athiest (if memory serves, she is the president of her high school’s Young Athiest Club) who changes her tune when she finds herself behind bars in a juvenile prison; Victor Schertzinger’s “Redskin,” a two-color Technicolor feature from 1929 with Richard Dix as a Navajo who discovers the limits of assimilation; Lois Weber’s forthright pro-choice drama of 1916, “Where Are My Children?”; and one that is new to me, William Desmond Taylor’s 1920 “The Soul of Youth,” apparently the first film about male prostitution.

http://davekehr.com/?p=207

Way Down East at Linc Ctr tonight at 7 (they sent me a 2-for-1 admission deal, so tix available)

How was the print of "Way down East", I wonder?

I found a eureka double-dvd of Murnau's "Faust" at Borders the other week - Oh man, it's so good, beautiful from beginning to end:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16804034@N00/sets/72157600394601327/

The harp soundtrack is great.

I've never seen a Mary Pickford movie and have the urge to see the plucky little orphan fight & win against whatever adversities life throws at her (or whatever). The DVD of "Sparrows" is apparently rather jerkily transferred, can anyone recommend another title?

Who is following this, I wonder?

http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7022

Big, big, BIG news, if the guy isn't kidding people around. Not just for the obv big-name top of the "lost film" list item, but a whole bunch of late fox silents & early sound films from what he says? John Ford? Borzage? Not that any of it is likely to come out on DVD, eh.

^ Was that thread purged?

Not really 'silent,' but relevant:

New DVDs
By DAVE KEHR
NY Times

THE JAZZ SINGER

“The Jazz Singer,” which Warner Home Video is releasing today in a glittering new restoration, has long been fixed in the American imagination as the movie that touched off the sound revolution. When Al Jolson, as the cantor’s son who has abandoned tradition for a career as a Broadway belter, turns to his audience between numbers to promise, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” the silent cinema immediately keeled over and died. Or so the story goes, greatly aided by that spoken line, so seemingly full of portent.

But the truth is more complicated and a bit less poetic. When “The Jazz Singer” opened in a single theater on Broadway on Oct. 6, 1927 — the day before Yom Kippur, the High Holy Day that figures prominently in the plot — filmgoers had been hearing synchronized music, sound effects and even dialogue in commercial theaters for more than a year.

“Don Juan,” the first film to be presented in the Vitaphone process, as Warner Brothers called the sound-on-disc technology it had licensed from Western Electric, made its premiere in New York on Aug. 6, 1926. A lively costume romance starring John Barrymore and directed by Alan Crosland (who would direct “The Jazz Singer” too), “Don Juan” didn’t have synchronized dialogue, but it had a full orchestral score augmented by sound effects. More important, the first half of the program consisted of a selection of musical shorts, introduced in a three-and-a-half-minute speech by Will H. Hays, the former postmaster general selected to be president of the industry’s lobbying group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

If anything, it was Hays’s flat Midwestern voice that touched off the initial sensation, not Jolson’s wildly emotive blackface balladeering. Warner Brothers made three more Vitaphone features before “The Jazz Singer”; one, “The Better ’Ole” (showing on Turner Classic Movies tonight at 12:45 a.m.), was preceded by a Vitaphone short called “Al Jolson in ‘A Plantation Act,’ ” in which he performed three blackface numbers standing in front of a painted backdrop of a cotton field. He speaks almost as much in that 10-minute short as he does in the whole of “The Jazz Singer” and uses the “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” line twice. It was not the improvised exclamation that studio publicists later made it out to be, but his standard tag line.

Box office figures for early films are hard to come by and notoriously unreliable. But the film historian Donald Crafton, in his splendid history of the period, “The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931” (University of California Press), devised a formula based on the earning power per seat of Broadway movie theaters. It suggests that while “The Jazz Singer” was a substantial hit, it was outgrossed in New York by the real sensation of the season, William A. Wellman’s “Wings” (a synchronized sound film from Paramount that went on to win the first Academy Award for best picture), as well as by Edmund Goulding’s “Love,” with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert; a “sonorized” reissue of Raoul Walsh’s “What Price Glory”; and Frank Borzage’s romantic drama “Seventh Heaven.” (The season’s big flop was a film now widely regarded as one of silent film’s greatest achievements, F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise,” which itself had a synchronized music and effects track courtesy of Fox’s rival sound system, Movietone.)

If “The Jazz Singer” heralded a revolution, few if any contemporary observers noticed it. The critic for The New York Times, Mordaunt Hall, predicted that “the future of this new contrivance is boundless” in his “Don Juan” review. But he seemed less impressed by the talking sequences in “The Jazz Singer”: “The dialogue is not so effective, for it does not always catch the nuances of speech or the inflections of the voice so that one is not aware of the mechanical features.”

But “The Jazz Singer” will always have its place in history, if only because, as Mr. Crafton suggests, it is easier to put a name and a face to an innovation than to trace a slow and complicated transformation, which wasn’t really complete in America until 1930. (Silent film hung on in other countries, notably Japan, until the mid -’30s.) The picture remains one of the crown jewels of Warner Brothers, and the new version does it royal honors. The images shine, and the sound — which for decades has been heard only through a poorly re-recorded optical soundtrack — has been taken from the original Vitaphone discs. Though presumably some electronic twiddling has been done, the audio is now deep and clear, presenting Jolson’s performances of both “Mammy” and the Kol Nidre prayer with a new immediacy.

And Warner Home Video hasn’t skimped on the extras. The three-disc set includes a new documentary, “The Dawn of Sound: How the Movies Learned to Talk,” produced by Turner Classic Movies, as well as a number of promotional shorts from the period; examples of two-color Technicolor (a process that flourished along with the early talkies); a brilliant Tex Avery cartoon parody, “I Love to Singa,” starring a feathered crooner named Owl Jolson; and a surprising rarity: a 1938 short, “Hollywood Handicap,” that features a brief appearance by Jolson but is more notable as the next to last directing credit of one of the medium’s fallen giants, Buster Keaton.

The third disc is devoted to Vitaphone shorts, many recovered with the help of the nonprofit Vitaphone Project. (A detailed account of the group’s activity can be found at vitaphoneproject.com.) The two dozen titles included here — from the nearly 2,000 shorts produced by Warners between 1926 and 1930 — are the results of patient detective work, involving tracking down long-separated silent prints and sound discs and putting them back together.

These fascinating documents may belong more to the history of American theater than of American film: perfect records of some of the most celebrated vaudeville performers, nightclub singers and opera stars of the day, performing exactly as they would before a live audience. To watch George Burns and Gracie Allen soft-shoe their way through “Lambchops,” the turn that had sustained them as vaudeville headliners for years, is to be transported back to an orchestra seat at the Palace. The fixed camera and proscenium framing are throwbacks to the earliest years of the movies, but here the outdated technique enhances the illusion: an evening’s entertainment on the Great White Way in the days when the bulbs burned most brightly.

that's all true but quite america-centric. there had been regular sync-film programmes, with dialogue, in public cinemas in london since 1925 -- fox actually tried to buy up the process c. 1926. but also it's feature-film-centric, the worst centric of all. the british programmes were often of music-hall (trans. vaudeville) acts.

Are you getting that "Jazz Singer" set, Morbius? I don't particuarly like the film myself (Jolson's act too OTT, overly sentimental - this from a guy who blubs @the end of "City Lights") but the extras certainly are tempting. The segment from GDoBW might swing it for me, though annoyingly it isn't all of the surviving material.

The criterion thread seems to have been moved fro some reason. It's here:

http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7040

Fairly certainly a hoax @ this point, which is a shame. Who hasn't imagined themselves in such a situation, though?

I like Jolson in shorts I've seen, and Hallelujah I'm a Bum, Wonder Bar etc. I buy very few discs, but I imagine I'll rent that one. The Burns & Allen short is great btw.

I lost, &^ in fact didn't even come close:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=250180308235&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=015

:( :( :(

It would have looked great on my wall.

from Dave Kehr's NY times review of the John Ford at Fox box:

Least familiar to most will be the five silents included here. Ford’s first film for Fox, “Just Pals” (1920), already displays his innate, impeccable sense of composition and his manner of moving fluidly and invisibly from shot to shot, each angle and edit calculated to shape the audience’s impressions without calling the slightest attention to technique.

“The Iron Horse” (1924), a sweeping account of the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, established Ford as a major director. It is presented here, a bit confusingly, in two different versions: an “international version” that runs 2 hours 12 minutes and a “U.S. version” with a running time of 2 hours 29 minutes. Though the export version has been subjected to extensive digital restoration and will probably look more pleasing to the casual viewer, the domestic, taken from a print held by the Museum of Modern Art, is the one to see. It has more scratches and speckles but is truer to Ford’s intentions. The 1926 film “3 Bad Men” is an even greater work, with a thematic complexity that anticipates Ford’s postwar westerns. A commercial failure, it would be his last western for 13 years, until he returned with “Stagecoach” in 1939.

In 1927 the great German filmmaker F. W. Murnau came to Fox’s Hollywood studios to make his masterpiece, “Sunrise,” a study in lighting and camera movement that left a profound impression on American moviemaking in general and young John Ford in particular. Ford incorporated elements of Murnau’s technique into his “Hangman’s House” (1928) and, supremely, “Four Sons,” a devastating 1928 antiwar film that made creative use of Movietone, Fox’s new sound-on-film technology. Unfortunately, because of music rights clearance problems, the original Movietone soundtrack has not been used here, though, like “The Iron Horse,” it is accompanied by a fine, newly commissioned orchestral score by Christopher Caliendo.

I got that Edison box set, pretty great stuff though missing the now-available Edison Frankenstein which is truly fucking awesome - the end scene of it is the most haunted moment, just shocking and revelatory.

also has anybody seen any Japanese silent cinema?

Does anyone speak/read spanish?

This appears to be a Spanish DVD issue of Borzage's "7th Heaven". I want to order it, but damned if I can navigate the page! (yes I am lame)

http://www.culturalianet.com/pro/prod.php?codigo=21771

A must-have, surely!

Help!

google translate

I'll order it in January, I think.

10 minutes from Norma Talmadge's first talkie, "New York Nights":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KPaNuo4E3c

There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with either her diction or her acting, I mean, she's a bit creaky, but who wasn't in 1929? Pity she didn't make it in talkies. She was a looker, for sure.

Japanese silent cinema?

Haven't seen any, but kabuki plays would cross the bridge into silent cinema pretty easily.

A Page Of Madness is the only Japanese silent I've seen. I'm guessing it's pretty atypical though, being some kind of surrealist fever dream set in a madhouse.

The most durable and watchable silent films seem to be comedies and films with a heavy dose of surrealism like Nosferatu or Metropolis. The dramas and romances are just too overwrought for contemporary tastes, but wild exaggeration works just fine for comedy and surrealism.

Something I've read about quite a few times, but have never seen is Marion Davies taking off Mae Murray, Lillian Gish and Pola Negri from "The Patsy". Thanks to (as usual) youtube, here she is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4X4E1JdSE

I've never seen any Mae Murray films, so I can't judge on that one, her Negri takeoff is very good, she has some of Negri's facial mannerisms down, but seems to owe as much to Gloria Swanson as it does to Pola, The Lillian takeoff is killer, though, WOW. When she sits in front of the mirror, she almost seems to turn into Lillian Gish! It is very, very cruel, but also v v funny.

This sounds like a good, funny movie, I wish I could get it on DVD.

The dramas and romances are just too overwrought for contemporary tastes, but wild exaggeration works just fine for comedy and surrealism.

I've lend a few DVDs out to relatives and friends since I started buying them, and weirdly enough, the one that people seem to like the best is "A Woman of the World", a 1925 rom-com starring Pola Negri (who pretty much defines "overwrought"!) That said, it is a pretty funny film, though not physical/slapstick funny. Not sure whether this backs up what you say, contradicts it, or what TBH. Worst responses, again weirdly, from "Pandora's Box" (depressing/Lulu is very annoying) I think Pandora's Box is great, personally, but whatever....

Borzage's "Seventh Heaven", split into 12 parts, and the italian intertitles translated by its uploader:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ykwwpASbOc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWdv-zV5pTs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya73AddlCPQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4MSxXa-sBQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZRemY8dEL0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxMwTtVOUL4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5MMoEBvFBs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNmyto4YaQk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9OvCeqRfhw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZehBExWIWaM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1kUTkGYpNQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRbnTXmMUbg

Also, Donnell Media Center, NY is showing five Norma Talmadge titles, including one directed by Borzage over the summer:

http://www.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/NT/home.htm (scroll down a little)

I'm jealous of those in or near NYC! I'd love to see these films.