ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

Ah I was wrong ... I remembered it being the water tower gag, but for some reason misremembered it as being in The General.

There was "movie poster on walls" talk which reminded me that on watching The General I realised that my parents had a framed print from it on the wall all through my childhood. Asked my mum about it and it turns out they only watched it for the first time a couple of years ago.

I remember a lot of Chaplin posters in relative's houses growing up.

i do remember being home for christmas and turning The General on as a random alternative to the endless sport and we all sat there quite happily as a family and watched it. (similar thing happened with Hulot's Vacance iirc a decade earlier)

Just finished Sherlock Jr. and moving onto Battleship.

I am the young one that never touched silent cinema. I offer myself as the dunce for you all to play off in this thread. I realise now I had a quiet and small fear I wouldn’t enjoy silent cinema due to only ever gouging on high definition colour and sound. Glad to have all fears and inhibitions ridiculed with how amazing Sherlock Jr. is! That motorcycle scene was just hit after hit. Then to be reminded it is all Cinema with the fade back to reality (with another hit!) was the perfect affirmation of the art form. Such a celebration of life and goodness. None of this 21st century cynicism, no irony, no meanness. It was so refreshing.

How many of these one-vote wonders from the #SightAndSoundPoll have you seen? https://t.co/wM9jWDP2ZD@letterboxd pic.twitter.com/oExu2YmQWu

— BFI (@BFI) March 6, 2023

4

Fear
Macario
Casting Blossoms to the Sky
The Organizer

Sadly zero.

And speaking of things I shamefully had not seen before...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/97/Metropolis_%28German_three-sheet_poster%29.jpg

Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927
Morbsies #597, Sight & Sound Critics #67

Still have to watch last 40 minutes, here's the version I'm watching- youtube link

Possibly my most famous haven't-seen film.

Undoubtedly the greatest film featuring Loverboy and Bonnie Tyler songs.

Thanks for doing this
Had a blast watching the two Keaton films - that suitcase stunt in insane

Finished Metropolis (finally) - some thoughts

I said that Battleship Potemkin was a few brilliant shots & scenes surrounded by a lot of other stuff that didn't grab me. Well Metropolis includes an absolute load of simply astonishing scenes and shots, ones I was familiar with, ones I was not, just so many superb ideas in design, direction, editing, the dancing scene with all the eyes watching has to be my favourite. However, as a whole film I was often left either confused or bored. The plot is nonsensical, the villain of the film is a grotesque personification of communist revolution, and the ending where the heroic son-of-the-billionaire makes his dad shake hands with the union leader is straight-up terrible. I'd love to put together a solid 60-minute edit, no intertitles, no explanations. So I'm basically looking forward to Man With A Movie Camera.

Oh and Brigitte Helm is an absolute genius.

Does the version you linked have an intermission, Camaraderie? Would like to tick this one off but I don't think I can do a single setting.

there's a note at the start of this that it includes a lot of once-lost material which has been recovered, tbh I would have preferred to see the cut-down version, but some of the deleted parts are worth including. I'll have a look for a shorter cut.

Just checked and no intermission, not even chapter breaks! Damn Fritz.

I did find a shorter cut, but the quality is terrible.

there's no intermission, but the version of the film Camaraderie linked to is divided into three parts - 'prelude', 'intermezzo' (beginning at 1:06:25) and 'furioso' (beginning at 1:34:49).

I think the full length version is by far the best, but maybe you need to see it on a big screen with the soundtrack blaring to really appreciate it? It's not a film that really suits being watched on youtube, with all the extravagant gestures and balletic elements.

the villain of the film is a grotesque personification of communist revolution, and the ending where the heroic son-of-the-billionaire makes his dad shake hands with the union leader is straight-up terrible.

The politics of the film are definitely crypto-fascist (society is on the verge of being torn apart by the division between workers and bosses, what is needed is a charismatic populist figure who can unite the whole city/nation in common purpose) and the screenwriter (and Lang's wife at the time) apparently became a supporter of the Nazi party. Goebbels apparently admired Metropolis enough he asked Lang to become head of UFA.

The plot is nonsensical

this is true, but I don't think it matters because it's not a realist film, it's more like a ballet or opera.

I love Metropolis and I love Moroder, but the 1984 Moroder soundtracked version is just dire. The soundtrack is ok to listen to as an album in itself, but as a soundtrack to the film it's dreadful. One thing that makes more a difference than I'd have expected (for the worse) is the replacement of intertitles with subtitles.

Intertitles are a silent film tradition that I've never liked, despite being a Godard fan. The only film I can think of where they really work to punctuate the images is Dreyer's Joan of Arc. Surely the technology existed to superimpose titles on images before 1930?

If you think Metropolis is nonsensical, try Sunrise.

the intertitles on Metropolis are more impressionistic though, you don't get the impression that you're supposed to be seeing every single line of dialogue the characters are saying. And they express things physically rather than via dialogue.

xxp it did (you make another film with just the subtitles and everything else black, project one over the other and film the result) but it's fiddly and messy - audiences expected intertitles at this point in any case.

xxp I will, this weekend!

another thing wrong with the Moroder version - in the original the score is constant, only stopping between the three chapters, the Moroder soundtrack is divided into individual tracks

ideally I would cut all the intertitles. just let the viewer either work out what's going on or just enjoy the experience without understanding the plot

have to keep this one though

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CrazyTatteredBlackfish-size_restricted.gif

also the titles that go from the bottom to the top of the screen as the elevator is descending

ok, keep that one. the elevator ones were poorly re-made in the version I linked, just looked too shiny and computer-generated.

I thought there was another animated intertitle later on in the film (maybe during the whore of babylon part), but I can't seem to find it, maybe it's not in this version

projected metropolis a few weeks ago, silent w live accompaniment from our pipe organ: otm about its politics but if i couldn't let sentimental corporatism slide (even at a time like this) i wouldn't have any liberal friends, and this is metropolis. audience was thrilled.

subtitled dialogue (in anything) makes you look away from the image: bad imo.

(audience also didn't seem to mind the length; in 2023 being two and a half hours long makes you a brisk, zippy family entertainment)

(i minded it lol)

I am Grot

subtitled dialogue (in anything) makes you look away from the image: bad imo.

You always prefer dubbed dialogue in foreign movies?

Speech not synced to mouth movements is way more distracting imo. Why you’d want to replace Toshiro Mifune or Alain Delon with a second rate anglophone beats me.

Dubbed is the worst.

Ok I finished it.

Above all else I think the city is still a total marvel, can totally understand why so many subsequent creators wanted to play within that sandbox.

I don't know if I think of the story as nonsensical - perhaps I am more fond of pulp than most on this thread. Much of it was fun adventure stuff to me, lots of cool conceits (did Hammett take the title of The Thin Man from this???). It is def bloated but I can't say I was bored often - actually the closest I came was parts of the climax, which reminded me of modern disaster movies in a bad way.

The politics of the film are definitely crypto-fascist (society is on the verge of being torn apart by the division between workers and bosses, what is needed is a charismatic populist figure who can unite the whole city/nation in common purpose) and the screenwriter (and Lang's wife at the time) apparently became a supporter of the Nazi party. Goebbels apparently admired Metropolis enough he asked Lang to become head of UFA.

Add to this the subversive intellectual element which ruins the upper classes with Decadent Art and the lower classes with violent rabble rousing; the star on Rotwang's door I'm sure is supposed to signal sorcery but it's a bit too close to a star of David for comfort.

But at the same time, as per difficult listening hour's post, I think you can easily cast it as a liberal (pejorative) work instead: the mediator, after all, is not a military strongman, but an effete bleeding heart rich kid with a passion for social reform. Class conflict is cast as being fundamentally about miscommunication. The workers have indeed been given a hard lot in life and are right to protest, but for God's sake they should never resort to violence, and trying to wreck the system can only end in catastrophe - don't you see it's there to protect you, as well? In the end if we all just have a bit more heart things will turn out ok. Won't somebody please think of the children??

Brigitte Helm's later life is uh interesting too

Helm was involved in several traffic accidents, and was briefly imprisoned. According to the Nazi Party's Press Chief Obergruppenführer Otto Dietrich's book, The Hitler I Knew, Adolf Hitler saw that manslaughter charges against her from an automobile accident were dropped.

Helm married her second husband, Dr. Hugo Kunheim, an industrialist, after her film contract expired in 1935. Helm stated that she retired from films because she was "...disgusted with the Nazi takeover of the film industry..." In 1935, she moved to Switzerland, where she had four children with Kunheim. In her later years, she refused to grant any interviews concerning her film career.

Sunrise next week, eh? Murnau I find very hard going, unless there's a vampire or a demon to liven things up.

of course i use subtitles to watch movies in languages i don’t speak. that doesn’t make them good for the movie.

Add to this the subversive intellectual element which ruins the upper classes with Decadent Art and the lower classes with violent rabble rousing; the star on Rotwang's door I'm sure is supposed to signal sorcery but it's a bit too close to a star of David for comfort.

i wondered about this too.

But at the same time, as per difficult listening hour's post, I think you can easily cast it as a liberal (pejorative) work instead: the mediator, after all, is not a military strongman, but an effete bleeding heart rich kid with a passion for social reform. Class conflict is cast as being fundamentally about miscommunication. The workers have indeed been given a hard lot in life and are right to protest, but for God's sake they should never resort to violence, and trying to wreck the system can only end in catastrophe - don't you see it's there to protect you, as well? In the end if we all just have a bit more heart things will turn out ok. Won't somebody please think of the children??

I think apart from 'effete' most of this could apply to fascism as much as liberalism, but there's not always a clear distinction between liberal/progressive corporatism and the fascist kind, particularly in this era (e.g. Mosley's New Party). There's an argument that fascism is not right-wing per se (or left-wing) but centrist, both fascism and liberalism promise an alternative to class conflict by appealing to a greater authority that supposedly transcends it, the nation for the fascism and abstract principles that are above/beyond politics for liberalism.

and even if he's a an effete bleeding heart rich kid rather than a military strongman, having the class reconciliation be embodied in a single chiasmatic person with a populist following pushes it more towards the fascist side (but this is probably just the nature of cinema, an individual hero obviously more cinematic than abstract humanist principles)

Does he have a populist following tho? At rhe very very end maybe, mostly he's ignored.

Metropolis also exists pretty much in isolation - there is no evidence of other cities, other cultures. The subversive within is there and as I said coded in an anti-semitic manner, but he is also in the end just a dude grieving for his dead wife. Can fascism truly exist without the threat of an Other?

I think he has a populist following in that he turns out to be the mediator, the figure of destiny that all the workers are explicitly waiting for even when they don't know who exactly who it's going to be.

of course i use subtitles to watch movies in languages i don’t speak. that doesn’t make them good for the movie.

Sometimes I think that subtitles have a negative effect, not because they disturb the purity of the image itself, but because they draw on a different, verbal part of the mind than the image and distract from it. So I wonder, "do I like this subtitled film because in fact I prefer reading"?

some of us have ears that don’t work good!