Excursion En La Luna (Segundo de Chomon, 1908)

Segundo de Chomon is one of cinema’s true originals. At the beginning of the twentieth century, working for the Pathe company, de Chomon turned out a highly inventive series of spectacles that pushed the boundaries of the medium in ways that surpassed even the efforts of Melies and Zecca. De Chomon eschewed any kind of traditional narrative structures in his films in order to offer a heightened sense of spectacle. His work lasted well into the first decade of the twentieth century, and seem to be very much the kinds of films that Tom Gunning had in mind when he coined the term “Cinema of Attractions” to describe this period of filmmaking. Above all, de Chomon’s work is marked by a high level of inventiveness and originality, even when compared to the work of his contemporaries Melies and Zecca, both of whom worked in the trick film genre so popular at the turn of the last century.
It was a surprise, then, to come across this film by de Chomon which is a blatant copy of Melies’ “A Trip to the Moon”. Dating from 1908, it came a full six years after the Melies film, and is startling in how blatantly it follows the Melies film, right down to movement of actors and the placement of scenery and props within the frame. Like the Melies film, de Chomon’s “Excursion en la Luna” reflects the influence of 19th century literature on the choice of story, borrowing (by way of the Melies film) from Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” and H.G. Wells’ “First Men on the Moon”. This narrative impulse, borrowing from the 19th century novel, stands in sharp contrasts to the moments of spectacle which borrow from the stage traditions of the period.
De Chomon’s film begins at night, with a group of astronomer’s gazing upon a full moon neatly placed in the night sky. The costumes, the gestures, and the comic personalities of the astronomers are borrowed directly from Melies. De Chomon frames the image so that the spectator can appreciate the painted scenery representing the outside of an astronomical observatory. With the actors in the foreground, the building mid-plane, and the cloudy night sky with the moon in the full background, de Chomon achieves a sense of depth missing from most of the Melies’ films, which tend to frame their subjects in a very flat space. In this original, hand-tinted print, de Chomon uses a blue tinting to indicate nighttime. The astronomers, excited about the idea of traveling to the moon, dance about merrily. As with many films of this period, the lack of intertitles makes it difficult to follow the action precisely.
We then cut to the interior of the observatory, very reminiscent of one of the similar observatories seen in numerous Melies films with an interplanetary theme. Here, though, the viewer may be struck by the smaller scale of de Chomon’s set. The great hall at the opening of Melies’ “A Trip to the Moon” suggests a giant structure, even if it’s all paint and plaster. De Chomon, however, keeps the set smaller, revealing only part of the observatory’s dome open to the sky. There is a large, Meliesian telescope pointed upward. The head astronomer, dressed like a wizard (identical to Melies’ Prof. Barbenfoullis in “A Trip to the Moon”) sketches out the logistics of the voyage on a blackboard, while the other astronomers sit and listen impatiently. Before long, the other astronomers rise, seize control of the blackboard, and without further ado, don their astronomer’s garb and exit the frame together.
We are next in the casting works, in a scene so strikingly similar to that in “A Trip to the Moon” that it could have been borrowed from Melies’ film. The bullet-shaped capsule is pounded out, and some comic mayhem ensues when one of the astronomers gets his belt loop hooked on the arm of a crane that lifts him off the ground (replacing the gag in Melies’ film which features the astronomer tumbling into a tub of nitric acid).
The astronomers’ ascend to the top of a platform where a giant cannon waits to shoot the capsule off into the stratosphere. The capsule is loaded into the cannon in a shot extremely similar to the corresponding one in Melies’ film, except there is no chorus line of girls to see the astronomers off.
De Chomon next rips off Melies’ most famous and iconic image, that of the rocketship making contact with the moon, although instead of kissing the moon’s eye, de Chomon’s rocketship flies directly into the man in the moon’s mouth, whereupon the man in the moon belches forth flames, hand-tinted yellow against the blue-tinted outer space background. This scene fails to achieve the iconic level of imagery that Melies created, and reminds the viewer that this but an imitation of a far more original work.
As in Melies’ film, the astronomers bed down for the night before awakening to snowfall. In the moon’s interior, they are almost immediately confronted by the moon men, who proceed to take them before their king. In the king’s chamber, consisting of a throne set against a cavernous backdrop of painted stalactites, they are treated to a line of dancing girls in hand-tinted dresses who perform a show for them. This is a perfect example of de Chomon’s willingness to pause the narrative for spectacular effect. The dance number goes on for quite a while, and both the number of dancers, plus the elaborate choreography, suggests the kind of music hall influence that was so prevalent in the early cinema. Before long, the king becomes irate, beckoning forth a small army of moon men who give chase to the astronomers. De Chomon switches gears back to a narrative mode on a moment’s notice, barely even providing motivation for the king’s sudden change of temperament other than to provide an excuse to move on to the next scene. Unlike Melies, de Chomon provides no sense of thrill or suspense in the form of a chase sequence. In Melies’ version, the astronomers make a daring escape, with Melies himself wielding an umbrella at the moon men, striking them and causing them to burst into puffs of smoke. De Chomon completely eschews the chase structure, instead bringing the astronomers directly back to their ship, followed by only two moon men, in the next shot.
Finally, the astronomers arrive back at their ship, resting precariously on a cliff, in a shot composed with exact precision of the corresponding shot in Melies’ version. It falls through a painted night sky, and bursts into flames (yellow-tinted), as fellow astronomers watch from the ground, in the same setting that we saw in the first scene of the film. The capsule lands on the ground right in front of them, still flaming, as the astronomers emerge, apparently unharmed. Also emerging from the capsule is one of the dancing women from the moon! De Chomon ends on this shot, with the astronomers, and the moon woman, in full frame.
De Chomon’s film is an audacious piece of plagiarism, of course. It’s almost difficult to be able to enjoy on its own terms, especially considering how devastating the effects of imitation (and outright piracy) were on Melies’ company financially. It’s interesting, though, to see how another “trick” filmmaker of this period handles the same subject matter. Ultimately, the film is less satisfying than the one Melies gave us. Melies was fully enchanted by the idea of filmic spectacle, and in “A Trip to the Moon”, was able to weave such moments into a wholly satisfying narrative. De Chomon, on the other hand, seems to move less freely between the two approaches. The film is heavy on narrative when it should be light, and conversely, the dance sequence brings the action to a noticeable halt just when events should be building toward a climax. Melies was a master of pacing, and even though his work is most often (and rightly) noted for its moments of highly stylized spectacle, he was also quite innovative at developing longer and more complex narrative structures within the fantasy framework. De Chomon is at his best in films consisting of pure spectacle, such as his “The Red Spectre” (1907), and the delightful “Danses cosmopolites à transformation” (1902), which fellow film blogger Tom Sutpen has written about on his blog (Show and Tell: Segundo de Chomón's Danses cosmopolites à transformation ([1902]). When he moves into these more complex narrative forms, one is given the impression that he’s rather bored with the story, and doesn’t quite know what to do with the actors in this “downtime” from the spectacle. Strangely, though, when the appropriate moments for spectacle do present themselves, de Chomon seems to stop short of taking advantage of their full potential, instead preferring to keep things moving on to the next scene. As a result, the film is over before it’s really had a chance to display any particularly memorable moments of spectacle (the few that are present are rather half-hearted imitations of moments stolen from Melies).
The tension between narrative and spectacle in the early cinema is one that demands further examination, and the emphasis on one element over the other can be seen as a result of stylistic choices on the part of individual filmmakers, as well as part of larger historical and cultural discourses of the period.
I will presenting a paper on this topic, titled “Narrative and Spectacle in Early Cinema: ‘The Cinema of Attractions’ in Silent French Film”, at the 2010 NYU Graduate English Organization Conference on April 2nd. The paper examines this issue in the broader sense of literary and theatrical influences on the early cinema, contrasting the approaches of different filmmakers to represent the full artistic diversity of the French cinema in the early period. For more information on the conference, visit:
http://nyugeoconference.wordpress.com/

Alfred Clark: Narrative and Special Effects Pioneer

In late 1895, Thomas Edison replaced W.K.L. Dickson with Alfred Clark as supervising director of his film division. Dickson, of course, is the man generally credited with the actual invention of the Kinetoscope, the device patented and distributed by Thomas Edison as a peep-show viewer for the earliest films produced in the United States.

Comparatively little has been written on the contributions of Alfred Clark to the early American cinema, but this film, “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots”, which he produced in 1895, is a testament to the innovations in storytelling that Clark brought to the medium.

This is one of the earliest films to feature a historical re-creation of a scene. Earlier Edison films, of course, featured re-creations of contemporary scenes (“The Barbershop”, dating from 1893, for instance). Perhaps the only other film to pre-date this in terms of staging a historical re-creation was “Blacksmithing Scene”, which -- as Charles Musser has noted* -- depicts an earlier era of the blacksmith shop, with the three men passing around a bottle of beer.

In any case, “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” can safely be called the first historical film in the sense we have come to think of it. Clark stages in the action against a white backdrop, suggesting that this is also one of the earliest Edison films to be photographed outside of the Black Maria. Clark conveys a sense of distance by dividing the frame into four rows of actors: Mary, in the front; the executioner directly behind Mary; two officers behind the executioner; and finally, a row of four guards in the very background. This creates a much greater sense of spatial dimensions than was commonly scene in the Edison films shot against the flat, black backdrop of the Black Maria, which utilized very little sense of depth at all.

There is, of course, the fact that by staging a historical re-enactment, Clark is also working with a heightened level of narrative. The story, as it is, is quite simple-depicting a single event. But rather than the documentary-like subjects that Edison had showcased in the months priors (“Sandow”, “Annie Oakley”), this film features actors portraying characters, and acting out a very rudimentary scenario.

Mention should be made, too, of the special effects; in this case, stop-motion. Clark may very well have been the first filmmaker to utilize this technique. The effect is actually quite convincing here, as Mary (actually played by a male actor) kneels down, the cut is made as she is replaced with a dummy, whose head is (quite realistically) severed right in front of the viewer’s eye. It’s difficult to know how viewers in 1895 would have responded to this. It’s hard to imagine that they could have been technically savvy enough to understand the way in which the effect was achieved, even if they believed (or wanted to believe) that a real human head wasn’t actually being severed.

The film was produced on August 28, 1895, predating the Lumiere screenings at the Grand Café by exactly four months. It’s worth noting that, while the Lumiere films screened at their December 28th show are often heralded as the “birth” of the motion picture, Edison, Dickson and Alfred Clark had already achieved a remarkable degree of technical sophistication.

Largely overlooked in the history of both narrative and special effects, Alfred Clark’s “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” stands as an important, early landmark film in its use of both techniques. It’s rather unique among the other Edison films of the period. Alfred Clark is one filmmaker of the early American cinema whose reputation is ripe for re-appraisal.

*See Musser's program notes on "Blacksmithing Scene" included on the DVD Edison: The Invention of the Movies (Kino International, 2005).

The Films of Edwin S. Porter, Part III

How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns (1904)

The film opens on a French nobleman, in slightly grotesque makeup, looking at the ad he has placed in the personals for a wife. The ad says to meet at Grant’s Tomb.

The next scene finds the nobleman waiting at Grant’s Tomb, framed in a magnificent long shot. A woman enters the frame, introducing herself to the nobleman. Then another enters. And another. Finally, an entire crowd of women has shown up, and outraged, give chase to the nobleman through the city and countryside. Finally, they chase him into a stream. The basic idea for this chase was perhaps the inspiration for Buster Keaton’s later “Seven Chances”.

What follows is a typical Porter chase, with each shot allowing all of the figures to run through the frame, all the way from the very far background and up past the camera. This is not the way audiences came to expect chase sequences to be shot or edited, of course. It provides an interesting glimpse at the developments that were taking place before settling on anything approaching a Classical style of filmmaking.

While humorous, the comedy wears thin after a while due to this approach to creating the chase sequence. The idea itself is a good example of the ways in which early producers borrowed (read: stole) from eachother: the film is a remake of a Biograph picture from earlier in the year, and later, Lubin would remake the same idea.

The European Rest Cure (1904)

This is without question the funniest and sharpest comedy Porter ever made. A brilliant parody on the kind of “sightseeing” approach to travel that lives on in the Rick Steves programs today, the film seems positively ahead of its time in its mocking of the stereotype of the “American abroad”.

The very beginning of the film is as much a travelogue as anything else, this film begins with a couple embarking on a boat headed for Europe. Porter takes advantage of the location shooting to hold on long shots of the crowd waving goodbye to the passengers on board, as the ship sails off. There is a nice traveling shot of the Manhattan skyline from the boat as well.

Porter cuts into a theatrical interior for the “storm” sequence, in which the man is shown becoming seasick due to the rocking of the boat (an effect which appears to have been achieved by rocking the camera, as the action lacks the kind of physical movement achieved by Chaplin with his stage built on rockers that was used for “The Immigrant”).

From this sequence, Porter cuts to an entirely different scene: “Kissing the Blarney Stone”. The set is a patently fake painted flat. The man is held over the edge of the castle to kiss the Blarney Stone when he is suddenly dropped, falling out of frame. The tour guide seems strangely unfazed.

The next scene is “Doing Paris”. A goateed, beret-wearing, cigarette-smoking Frenchman sits at an outdoor café while the traveling American husband and wife talk loudly, the husband excitedly pound his fist on the table and calling for the waiter. After a little too much wine, they stand and begin dancing a kind of manic, drunken Can-Can, while the Frenchman continues to look on silently. This scene is one of the few instances of truly sharp satire in the films of Porter, whose comedy usually took the lower approach of sex- and slapstick-based humor. Some women try to settle them down. One of the American tourists stands on the table and pours wine over the man’s head.

Next up is “Climbing the Alps”. The party arrives in the gloriously fake, painted alps wearing Swiss alpine get-ups. One of the men falls over the edge of the cliff, but is miraculously pulled back up.

“Hold Up in Italy” is the next scene. The tour guide takes the group into one of the roughest sections of the city, and after one of the party gets separated from the rest of the group, is targeted by some thieves and is mugged at gunpoint.

We next find the party “Climbing the Pyramids of Egypt”. There is a brilliant bit of comic timing, as one of the men begins to climb the pyramid, and after climbing out frame, the camera holds for what seems like an unusually long time, until the man comes crashing back down in to the frame.

Finally, they visit the “Mud baths of Germany”, where the older American man is forced into a tub and covered in mud, then has buckets of cold water hurled at him.

The couple returns “home sweet home”, thoroughly exhausted from their trip. This is a unique film in the sense that it runs 14 minutes, which is rather long for a 1904 production. Even though it lacks the imaginative editing of Porter’s best work, the painted flats representing the different locations have a certain charm about them, and as satire, Porter never did better.

The Strenuous Life; or, Anti-Race Suicide (1904)

It’s the little moments that make a film like this one so interesting. In the scene when the office manager is brought come in a horse-drawn carriage, the streets of New York are covered in snow. It’s amazing how, before films were routinely shot on the West Coast, weather elements were a natural part of so many films. In this same shot, the camera happens to catch an elevated subway train racing past in the background.

This film itself is nothing terribly interesting in Porter’s output. The overworked office manager comes home and finds his wife has apparently given birth to quintuplets. I can’t help wondering if there is footage missing from this film, as it seems to end rather abruptly and doesn’t make terribly much sense as it currently runs. It is perhaps only notable otherwise for a use of a medium shot when the husband and wife are weighing their first child.

The Ex-Convict (1904)

Porter opens this film on the shot of a man leaving for work, saying good-bye to his wife and daughter. A title announces him as an ex-convict. When his boss finds out about his past, the man is fired. Looking for work, the man is discriminated against everywhere he goes. Walking home, he saves a little girl from being hit by an oncoming car, but is gone before the family can thank him. Returning home discouraged and humiliated, the man is out of options. In a fit of desparation, he heads out into the night to burglarize a home, which just happens to belong to the family of the young girl whose life he saved. The girl’s father catches him, and holds him at gunpoint while he calls the police, but the girl, recognizing the man, identifies him to her father as the man who saved her life. The police arrive, but the father sends them on their way.

An incredibly powerful film, this is perhaps Porter’s masterpiece as a filmmaker. It lacks the kind of narrative structural techniques that marked “The Great Train Robbery” as his most important contribution to the medium, but unlike that film, contains deeply believable characters and profound character dynamics. The discrimination faced by the reformed ex-convict is all too believable, and the sight of the man humiliated in front of his family is just painful to watch. The film avoids going over-the-top in its display of emotions or performance style, and as such, remains a model of restrained expression in the early cinema.

Cinematically, Porter seems to have been fairly well set in his ways by this point. As a cutter, it seems that “The Great Train Robbery” is something of an anomaly in his career. By 1904, working in a more complex narrative mode, Porter chooses to emphasize performance and mise-en-scene over editing. “The Ex-Convict” is a film that must be seen by anyone interested in tracing the development of early narrative forms.

Capra's Bitter Tea

At the 1933 Academy Awards ceremony, Frank Capra experienced what must have been one of the greatest embarrassments of his personal life, let alone career. Nominated that year for “Lady for a Day”, a light comedy adapted from a Damon Runyon story, Capra was sure he would finally win the coveted Best Director award. When Will Rogers, who was hosting the ceremony that evening, announced the best director, he ended his speech with “Come and get it, Frank”. At this point, or so the story goes, Capra leapt to his feet and rushed triumphantly to collect his award, when suddenly he realized his horrible mistake: the “Frank” that Rogers was referring to was Frank Lloyd (nominated that year for “Cavalcade”, a staid, theatrical historical drama from a Noel Coward play about the British Empire at the turn of the century). Capra froze, embarrassed, and returned to his seat.
Capra would win the award the following year, of course, for the “sleeper” hit, “It Happened One Night”, which would go on to become the first film to win the five major Oscars, and one of the biggest hits of the year, much to the surprise of everyone involved. Despite one of the most chaotic production histories ever recorded, the film ended up an effortlessly fun and charming film that forever established the Capra style, and firmly entrenched him as a kind of cinematic observer of the American social landscape during the pre-WWII years.
In the years before his success with the prototypical screwball comedy, Capra had tried his hand at a wide variety of styles. After a stint writing and directing for the comedian Harry Langdon, Capra became the star director at the low-budget Columbia Pictures, ruled over with an iron fist by Harry Cohn. Columbia was hovering just above “Poverty Row” status during the late 20s and early 30s, and Capra’s films were virtually the company’s sole “prestige” product during that time. His “war” trilogy (“Submarine”, “Flight” and “Dirigible”), comedies (“Platinum Blonde”), social message pictures (“American Madness”) and women’s pictures (“The Miracle Worker”) couldn’t have been more different from each other. It was as if Capra wasn’t merely content to turn out a house product, as so many other directors were, but was constantly struggling to find his style.
Surely the most unusual attempt from this early period is his 1933 film, “The Bitter Tea of General Yen”. The story involves the wife of a missionary (Barbara Stanwyck) who accompanies her husband into a war-torn zone of China to rescue some children from an orphanage. Captured by the bandit leader, General Yen (Nils Asther), Stanwyck struggles with her simultaneous attraction and repulsion for the general. When the general symbolically dies in the end, Stanwyck is on her way back to her old life, realizing she will never be the same again. The film is a striking stylistic hodge podge, seeming to owe a lot to the films that Josef von Sternberg was making over at the Paramount lot at the same time. Yet there is still unmistakably something “Capraesque” about the film. (I’ve written on the film’s connection with the later Capra films on Dan Streible’s “Film Historiography” blog, “‘The Bitter Tea of General Yen’ as Capra-corn”).
Watching the film, one has to wonder what on Earth inspired Capra to make it. It’s so unlike anything else in his oeuvre that it’s impossible to watch the film without noting its bizarre mix of approaches that seemed to have been borrowed willy-nilly from a variety of sources. In particular, there is a dream sequence that seems to owe much to German Expressionism, as well as surrealism. In the dream, Stanwyck imagines herself being attacked by the General, done up to look like a weird cross between Fu Manchu and Nosferatu. Another figure, presumably her husband, dashes into the dream wearing a Zorro costume (!), knocking the villain out of the picture (he vibrates and shakes, moving toward a wall, before disappearing in a burst). When the “husband” removes his mask, it is revealed that he is in fact General Yen, thus representing Stanwyck’s confusion and lust for the general.
The sequence is unlike anything in Hollywood cinema of the period. The entire sequence plays as if Capra was just trying to cram in every single stylistic idea he could purloin. Dan Streible referred to the film as “Capra’s art film”, which is an apt description, I think, of what he was trying to achieve with it. In his quest to bag an Academy Award, it was as if he was going to make a picture that pulled out all the stops. The ultimate “Oscar” movie. One that the Academy just couldn’t say “no” to.
In the process, Capra created a labored, self-consciously stylized effort that remains a strange, atypical film in his output. Contemporary audiences seem unaware how to even take the film, often responding with a mix of incredulous laughter and confusion at the film’s racial elements. The film is ultimately a melodrama, but one that operates under serious restrictions due to the interracial relationship of its protagonists.
The following year, Capra would find his style, and in the process would finally find the success he’d craved so badly. While there’s no question that his post-“It Happened One Night” display a maturity of technique and a consistency of directorial style, Capra would never again make a film as perversely strange and fascinating as “The Bitter Tea of General Yen”.

Balazs, the Close Up, and Dreyer's "Passion"

Few canonical works of cinema draw more split reactions than Carl Th. Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc”, perhaps the last great film to emerge from the silent period, released right at the tail end of the medium in 1928. While not an “entertaining” film in the conventional sense, there is a truly gripping dramatic element to the film that cannot be ignored. Dreyer fills his film with such a sense of historical atmosphere and “presence” that it’s almost eerie. The film’s universe seems to exist in a kind of suspended state, as if Dreyer were somehow magically able to transport his camera back in time. The starkness of his sets, the stylized yet restrained cinematography (by Rudolph Mate), and of course, the subtlety of his perfectly-chosen actors, achieves a level of verisimilitude without equal in the historical film. The original court transcripts of Joan’s trial, preserved in an archive in France, were used as source material for the script. In addition to the standout performance of Falconetti, Antonin Artaud brings an incredible level of humanity to his performance as the sympathetic clergyman.
The film is a virtual textbook example of Balazs’ idea of the emotional qualities conveyed through the close-up. The film is filled with faces, most notably the unforgettable image of Falconetti, her face conveying the unspeakable ordeal she is to endure. The images of the judges are equally powerful, their intolerance and impatience conveyed through the communicative gestures of the face, once again demonstrating the capacity of the close up as technique to provide the viewer with an opportunity to read all sorts of emotion and psychology into the image. The sense of "impatience" I refer to is one that Dreyer seems to emphasize in the close ups of the judges; rather than being outraged, they seem rather tired of Joan's claims, as if they just want to get the whole ordeal over with. It is easy to forget just how much of the film contains extreme close ups. Dreyer isn’t afraid to let the camera linger on these close proximities without providing an establishing or master shot to orient the viewer. Dreyer is less interested in spatial orientation than he is in emotional orientation, and the close up is the perfect means through which to convey this.
Through Joan, Dreyer presents a character so absolutely committed to her belief in her mission from God, her ideology and spiritual position is never questioned by the audience. Dreyer places Joan within the historical context to provide a framework from which the viewer can identify with this single-minded character. As I mentioned earlier, there is a very real sense of gripping drama in the proceedings thanks to the emotional investment that Dreyer provides. The film is never dull. After the trial sequence, Joan is led through an emotional torture chamber in which she is humiliated, degraded, and finally threatened with physical torture. She weakens momentarily, signing a confession that will allow her to escape execution, but realizes her mistake, recants her confession, and faces the burning at the stake.
This last sequence is the kind of scene that filmmakers would usually exploit for its spectacular qualities, despite the grim and even tragic nature of the event. Dreyer contrasts Joan’s preparation for the execution with the daily lives of the townspeople, including much merry-making and even a shot of a mother in the crowd casually nursing her infant, who seems unfazed by the goings-on. Joan’s execution is handled in an appropriately subtle manner, and is followed by a sequence in which the townspeople riot in protest to her death. Again, this sequence, which other filmmakers might take the opportunity to turn into a major spectacle, is kept brief and subdued by Dreyer.
The strangely mixed reaction to the film seems to draw viewers into two camps: those who find the film overwhelming dull and boring beyond all reason, and those who invest in the emotional power of Dreyer’s imagery. Few silent films really require an engagement with the image for full effect in the way this one does. It has been reported that Dreyer hoped to shoot the film in sound, which would have been extremely risky from a technical standpoint in 1928. There are arguments that the use of intertitles interrupts the visual rhythm of the film, as well as creating a momentary disconnect from the viewers’ connection with the emotional conveyance of the close ups. It could just as well be argued, I think, that the medium of the silent film is perfectly suited to this film, as it allows the images to speak for themselves. The images are the key to the film’s power, and offer a rich experience for viewers willing to engage with them.

Melodrama Meets Screwball: Red-Headed Woman (1932)

Melodrama meets screwball comedy in this bizarre offering from MGM.

MGM, the studio of gloss and glamour, with “more stars than there are in the Heavens”, was capable of producing some pretty off-beat stuff in the early 30s. One can cite the obvious examples-films like “The Unholy Three” (Jack Conway, 1930) and “Freaks” (Tod Browning, 1932), both of which have their origins in the Lon Chaney-Tod Browning cycle that was so popular for the studio during the 20s. But to take a much less obvious, and therefore much more interesting example of the kind of strangeness that existed even at the mightiest and most conservative of Hollywood’s major studios, one need look no further than this 1932 melodrama from director Jack Conway. The delirious, hysterical and contradictory “Red Headed Woman” remains as fascinating for its contradictions as anything else.

The plot involves a scheming gold digger, Lil, played by “platinum blonde” Jean Harlow, her usual blonde hair dyed red for the title role of this picture. She pays a little visit to her boss, the young and handsome Bill Legendre (Chester Morris) to convince him to give her a promotion. Bill’s wife Irene (Leila Hyams) is out of town, but returns unexpectedly at the worst possible moment, and all hell breaks loose. Divorce follows, as Bill marries Lil, who proceeds to bask in her new wealthy lifestyle, even going so far as to start an affair with the head of a rival company (Henry Stephenson) that is in competition with her husband. What she doesn’t realize, of course, is that everyone else is laughing at her behind her back, and when Bill and Irene begin to make plans to get back together, Lil will stop at nothing short of murder to preserve her happiness.

The film is a weird mix between melodrama and elements of the screwball comedy (which, even though it didn’t really become fully formed for another two years after this film was made, elements of it pop up in the kind of over-the-top romantic wheeling and dealings that take place between the film’s protagonists). The script, by Anita Loos, presents Lil as an absolutely psychopathic characterization which borders on the satiric. Harlow is first presented to the audience underneath a towel, after which her new red hair is revealed. Loos inserts a delightful little inside joke here, as Harlow, commenting on her new hair style, says “So, gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?”

Both Harlow and Morris give outstanding performances. The supporting cast is great, too. Leila Hyams conveys the perfect amount of strength and vulnerability as the wife whose world is rocked by Harlow’s gold digging antics, providing a good dramatic counterpart to Harlow’s often light-comical portrayal. Lewis Stone is Morris’ wise and patient father (a kind of forerunner of his Judge Hardy character), and May Robson is a delight as always as the humorous Aunt Jane. Special mention should be made, too, of Una Merkel as Harlow’s wise-cracking roommate, and an early appearance by Charles Boyer as a chauffeur with whom Harlow begins yet another affair while on a trip to New York.

The film is decidedly “pre-code” in its attitudes and sensibilities, although as an MGM film, still skirts some of the harsher issues that films by Warner Bros., say, were grappling with during the depression era. There’s a strange kind of moral compass in the film which doesn’t seem to know quite which way it’s pointing at any given time. Harlow’s character, whom we’re clearly meant to sympathize with as she’s the star, is strangely unlikable. I’d argue that this is largely due to shortcomings in the emotional range that Harlow is able to project in her films, which is a consistent problem I’ve had with viewing her work. Playing the role more as a caricature, the audience is left to decide for themselves how we should be reacting. If this were a more open-ended drama, that would work fine, of course. But in a film such as this, with plot and narrative wrapped up so tightly and moving at such a quick pace, there cannot be any room for doubt. Unfortunately, the film, largely as a result of the one-note performance delivered by Harlow, fails in this respect, making it much less satisfying dramatically than films like “Baby Face” (Alfred E. Green, 1933) from the same period that dealt with similar subjects. Plot-wise, it tends to get a bit overcomplicated toward the end, and gravitates away from the two most sympathetic characters (Morris and Hyams) who really keep the viewer invested in the plot.

The workman-like direction of Jack Conway doesn’t help matters, either, as the film tends to get slowed down at points during which it should really keep moving. Conway was one of MGM’s most reliable “house” directors, and could deliver great genre pictures and star vehicles, where a strong directorial style was not a requisite. With a film such as this one, and especially considering the wildly varying emotional tones of Anita Loos’ script, a director like William A. Wellman, or even Howard Hawks, would have perhaps been ideal, with their ability to keep things moving and to veer between comedy and melodrama with the speed and precision of a race-car driver. Harold Rosson’s cinematography is similarly flat and uninspired here, with the camera serving more as a recording device rather than being allowed to engage in the kind of interesting transitions and visual metaphors that helped propel so many early sound films. The art direction, attributed to Cedric Gibbons, is strangely flat as well, lacking the best Art Deco gloss that makes films of this period so visually distinctive from a standpoint of production design. It’s tempting to speculate that, because of the subject matter, MGM made the decision to “dress down” their sets for this one. Unfortunately, it tends to get stuck in a kind of artistic middle gear between the grittiness of Warner Bros. and the “Grand Hotel” opulence of MGM’s signature style.

In some ways inspired by the “vice” pictures so popular at the time, which studios like Warner Bros. tended to specialize in, MGM was ultimately the wrong studio for this kind of thing. In an age when film studios are but one asset among hundreds owned by giant corporate conglomerates, it sounds positively absurd to argue that “one” studio was right for a film while “another” wasn’t, but one has to remember the absolute authorial control of the studio heads such as Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer. While Warner’s studio might have seen this film as an allegory for survival during the depression, Mayer’s approach tended to emphasize the star, and the glamour aspect, which seems positively at odds with the actual story at work here. There are a number of contradictions at work in the film as a result, aside from the fact that we’re asked to identify with a schemer capable of murder in her selfish pursuit of money just by virtue of her star image (this is the kind of thing Alfred Hitchcock would have great fun playing with in his casting of stars like Cary Grant in films like "Suspicion". Hitchcock was master enough to subvert star image and genre; Conway seems to play everything at face value). There’s the stylistic contradiction between melodrama and comedy, and the contradiction between the glossiness of the studio style and the grittiness of the subject matter. The opposition between comedy and melodrama is most obvious in the last scene, in which the strong melodramatic conclusion we have just witnessed is capped off with an unnecessary prologue featuring a cute wrap-up gag with Harlow’s character. It’s a stylistic violation, a kind of winking at the audience as if to say, “you know Jean Harlow wouldn’t really do anything like that.”

Despite the contradictions at work in the film, it still makes for interesting viewing in terms of understanding the kinds of approaches and studio styles toward different subject matter. While not the kind of film MGM specialized in as a studio, the movie has still has strong performances to recommend it. The film may be of the most interest today for anyone examining the role of star image and star vehicles in studio-era Hollywood.

Becky Sharp (1935)

Adapted from "Vanity Fair" by William Makepeace Thackeray (and the play by Langdon Mitchell), "Becky Sharp" is a delightful satire that is so much more deserving of praise beyond its technical achievement as the first feature shot in three-strip Technicolor.

In circulating prints, the color has faded. I'm aware that a full restoration has been done, but it is not available on DVD, and the current copies don't fare too well in that department. A reviewer at the time wrote that the film's color pallet resembled "boiled salmon dipped in mayonnaise", and available public domain copies don't even look this good.

Watching the film for the first time, I was prepared for more or less a historical curio. What I found instead was a delightfully funny satire, so completely subversive that it's hard to believe the film was made after the crackdown of the Production Code.

Produced by the independent Pioneer Pictures (and distributed through RKO Radio), the film moves along at a crackling pace, with a splendid leading performance by Miriam Hopkins, who plays the conniving Sharp with a definite wink to the camera. Hopkins was the perfect choice for this part-striking just the right note between scheming opportunist and romantic figure. Alan Mowbray is her husband who descends into a mire of debt as a result of her extravagant spending. Nigel Bruce is perfectly cast as the bumbling, asexual "best friend" of Hopkins' character, who avoids asking her to marry him by taking a job in India.

The film, skillfully directed by Rouben Mamoulian, has a largely theatrical feel to it, but that doesn't matter. The film is unashamedly theatrical, and features a wonderfully over-the-top performance style that perfectly matches the witty dialogue. The color cinematography adds to the garishness and highly stylized nature of the film, and in that context works well, although I wouldn't argue the film is greatly enhanced by being filmed in color the way "The Adventures of Robin Hood", say, would be. Overall, the film does have a distinctly low-budget look, perhaps necessitated by the added cost of Technicolor. Ray Rennahan, Technicolor's cameraman, offers quite ordinary compositions, suggesting perhaps he was far more a technician than a cinematographer. (On future projects, Rennahan would always work in collaboration with another cinematographer, such as Ernest Haller and Lee Garmes on "Gone with the Wind").

What's perhaps most striking about the film is how shamelessly opportunistic the Becky Sharp character is. This works perfectly, especially in the final fade out, which is almost startling. Her telling off of the headmistress at the beginning of the film, and her pointed jabs at upper class Billie Burke during a society ball, all make for fun, biting moments of humor. There are definitely moments that make a contemporary viewer ask how it could have possibly gotten by the censors.

While not in the ranks of the greatest works of the Classical Hollywood period, "Becky Sharp" proves that films need not be "great" to be strong entertainment. In many ways, it represents the true artistic diversity that Hollywood was capable of during the studio era. A perfect mix between high and low humor, mixed with sharp satire, "Becky Sharp" holds up very well after more than 70 years.

A New Approach to Narrative

“The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you're dead.” –David Lynch

Short films are nothing new. The very first movies were “shorts”, at least as we think of them today. Of course, if you were to ask a viewer in 1898 to describe a movie like “An Astronomer’s Dream”, they would describe it simply as a movie. It wasn’t until film began to expand into longer narratives that the idea of “shorts” and “features” became established. Over time, even some of the finest practitioners of the art of short filmmaking came to think of the form as the bastard step-child of the two-hour narrative feature, which has remained the measure of “real filmmaking”.

Thanks to emerging distribution models as a result of the Internet, everything you thought you thought you knew about “real” filmmaking is changing. It’s time to stop thinking in terms of “shorts” and “features”, and to start thinking in terms of “movies” again.

The short film and the online video of the 21st century are close cousins-close, but-I would argue- are not one and the same. The short film has traditionally existed in relation to the feature film. It has been seen as secondary to the feature (and for most of the Classical Hollywood period, supported the main feature on the program). Too often, shorts are seen as “junior movies”, as if they have to wait and grow up to be the real thing. And too many filmmakers treat shorts merely as a training ground before going on to make features.

Therefore, I would suggest it’s time to forget this notion of “short films”, which carries all sorts of archaic connotations that can safely be left in the 20th century. With the Hollywood feature film in its death throes, the time is ripe for re-thinking our whole notions of producing content, and what to do with it.

Launched in 2005, YouTube was the first online video site that really exploded in a burst of user-generated content, and it resembled nothing on the current media scene. Many people noted the similarities to the early period of cinema-the period that Tom Gunning calls the “Cinema of Attractions”, and which is generally accepted as having lasted from about 1895 to 1906. A major reason for this comparison was the democratization of filmmaking as a result of filmmaking tools becoming available to everyone. Video had certainly been shown online before, but the time was right for a kind of video distribution revolution. The Flash-based media player used by YouTube, which eliminated the need for long download times, the DSL and broadband connections for uploading, and of course, the widespread accessibility to the tools to shoot and edit high-quality digital video all came together at just the right moment to make it all possible. Writing at the dawn of the online video boom in October 2005, Tom Moran noted the ease with which professional-level filmmaking tools were becoming available, “not just to a relative handful of highly paid people in Southern California, but to almost anyone who can afford to buy a Mac G5 and Final Cut Pro. The implications of this revolution are only just now beginning to be felt.” (Moran, “Celluloid Chickens Come Home to Roost”)

Well, the floodgates burst and, according to YouTube, they currently receive 20 hours of uploaded video every minute. That’s just one site, mind. To get an idea of the content being uploaded to the web every day, would one have to take into account the hundreds of other sites, some of which-such as DailyMotion and Vimeo-have become quite popular among online filmmakers as alternatives to YouTube.

Now, mainstream producers of content are attempting to get into the online game. This is particularly ironic, considering that these same companies fought so hard against online video when it first emerged. In coming late to the party, they have proven how out of touch they are by trying to force their old content into the new form of online video. The most interesting part is, despite their efforts to promote their already-heavily marketed content, it appears that the approach just isn’t working. In a news piece of 15 April 2009, David Silversmith is quoted, saying that, “Depending on whose version of revenues you accept, Google is losing anywhere from $513 million to $663 million annually on YouTube”. (Silversmith, quoted in “YouTube: The Bigger It Gets, the More it Loses”, retrieved from www.imdb.com). In other words, the effort of Hollywood to push their old content into this new medium has been a losing venture. Lloyd Fonvielle notes that this approach was “doomed to fail” and that “content can never be considered apart from the means used to distribute it, and thus the ways it is consumed.” (Fonvielle, “The Movies Begin…Again”) He sums up the basic issue that producers of content are currently grappling with: “When new technologies appear, the instinct is to try and figure out ways to make them the vessels for existing content. But new technologies usually need a new kind of content -- or old content wholly re-imagined.” (Fonvielle, “The Movies Begin…Again”) Rick Altman, speaking at the Alice Guy Blache Symposium, “Woman with a Movie Camera”, at New York University’s Cantor Center in November 2009, made a similar point in relation to emerging media, specifically addressing the problem he referred to as “pouring old wine into new wineskins.” (Altman, “Emerging Media: Then and Now”) Both Fonvielle and Altman point to the same basic problem: how do you shape your content when hardly anyone can even describe the medium you’re trying to work in?

A new generation of filmmakers is emerging, whose work will, whether intentionally or not, explore that very issue. These are trained filmmakers, many from a generation that has grown up with unprecedented access to production tools, working with an eye to quality and style, and above all, a desire to express ideas, but in a way that is appropriate to the medium of online video. The results are a new kind of film, freed from the demands and prejudices of commercial distribution that have plagued the art form since Edison first tried to wrest control from the independents over 100 years ago.

Lloyd Fonvielle calls them “MicroMovies”, a term he introduced in his piece, “The Movies Begin…Again”, in which he calls for a new way of thinking about the role of storytelling in the online video medium.

As Fonvielle notes, “A million people with cameras making movies means a lot of bad movies…and a few really amazing ones. It was the same in the early, anarchic days of cinema before the studio era…but in the course of that era a new art form was created.” This “looking back” to the early days of cinema is an approach Fonvielle advocates in his piece, “Surfing the Micro Wave”, drawing a comparison between the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers in France during the 1950s, and producers of online content in the 21st century, both of whom have looked backwards at earlier models for inspiration.

Fonvielle has collaborated with Jae Song, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, on a series called “Noir Bars: New York”, which premiered earlier this month. Song’s approach to directing the segments take full advantage of the small size of the equipment needed to produce a video. Fonvielle, in describing the production history of the “Noir Bars: New York” series, notes the small and portable size of the equipment being used, with a full production package that can “fit into a backpack”, and shooting in extreme low-light conditions, such as the candlelight emanating onto the actor’s face in a small, dimly lit bar. (Fonvielle, “Majestic Micro Movies: Tech Specs”) Shooting entirely in natural light, director Jae Song is able to achieve remarkable images. In addition, Jae’s camera shoots in high definition, another major technical breakthrough at the level of consumer-level filmmaking tools.

In addition to this “micro” form of production, they’re also exploring what it means to tell stories in the age of short bursts of sensationalist video that has tended to dominate the online venues thus far. This gets at an issue I have explored in my own work, most recently in "The Agreement", in which I attempted to explore the full depth and complexities of narrative in a format that was still appropriate for the online venue.

It’s important to remember that narrative filmmaking represents only one approach available to filmmakers working in new, emerging media. Because of the lack of commercial dictates, many alternative forms, including experimental video and the video essay, have been able to flourish.

The video essay format provides a chance for filmmakers to experiment with film theory, and to apply theory to production. In “Visual Pleasure”, produced at New York University by Monica Sandler, several theories come together in a kind of Godardian essay, including those of Laura Mulvey and Andre Bazin, which are directly evident in Sandler’s cinematic style and technique (one scene combines Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze on the female subject with a Bazinian long-take, which Sandler achieves through a great panning shot of Tompkins Square Park, with both figures in the frame). The result is the kind of provocative exploration of ideas that are all too often absent from projects emerging from film schools. By incorporating theory into the form of an essay film, Sandler demonstrates the effectiveness of such theory, and provides a great example of its practical applicability to the production process.

Charles Tashiro is another filmmaker exploring the possibilities of non-narrative formats. Preferring to refer to his films as “theoretical” rather than “experimental”, Tashiro’s new video series, the “Mysteries”, is an ongoing exploration of ideas that he is working with as alternatives to traditional narrative forms. As with the “Noir Bars” series, Tashiro decided to work with as simple a production set-up as possible, and chose the mystery genre, as it is “arguably the most intellectual of popular genres, in the sense that there is little effort in most of them to make you empathize much with the characters”. The genre, therefore, was ripe for a theoretical exploration of its form and structure. Tashiro decided to play with certain generic elements of the mystery, recognizing the Modernist writers’ technique of using elements of the genre: “So the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could make a series of little mysteries but only if I approached the subject matter obliquely. In other words, I would set up a situation, and allow the atmosphere to ‘tell the story,’ which, however, is nothing more than the way the film makes the viewer feel.” The “Mysteries” series, then, presents yet another alternative to the traditional narrative discourses that have been present in mainstream cinema for nearly the last century.

In “Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method”, Gerard Genette argues that “we currently use the word ‘narrative’ without even paying attention to it”. (Genette, 25) This would seem to be a source of confusion right now when talking about its role in new forms of digital and online-based content. Genette goes on to distinguish between the “story” (the content conveyed by the narrative), and the “narrative” itself; that is, the narrative text, or the way the story is presented. (Genette, 27) What I would like to propose, then, is that it is not the “story” itself that is transforming as a result of emerging trends in digital media and online distribution venues, but rather the narrative-the way filmmakers are choosing to present stories. This is not to argue that films must tell stories, or that they must adhere to any dominating literary traditions. I am suggesting, however, that for filmmakers who choose to use the medium to convey fictional events of some kind, a new approach to narrative is the only way to make the full transition to a form that will be totally unique to the online medium. Just as the earliest films contained staged or fictional scenes, whether it be men playing cards, or parents feeding their baby, it was the development of new narrative forms by people like Melies and Porter that allowed the format to grow out of the existing models and traditions from which the earliest works borrowed.

The examples of films I have noted throughout this essay-“Noir Bars”, “Visual Pleasure”, and the “Mysteries”, all provide a model for different directions narrative and non-narrative filmmaking may take in the coming years. The greatest single potential of online video, however, is that filmmakers will hopefully never have to choose only one “model” to follow, which would effectively put us back in the same position as we were in the early 1910s when narrative films became the dominant, and therefore “correct” model of “real filmmaking”. The key, then, is to keep the field open to new approaches at any cost. As Lloyd Fonvielle suggested, doing so will mean a lot of bad movies being made, but the potential to explore the full possibilities of the medium would be endless. And only then will we be able to refer to “movies” without having to qualify them by their length.

Citations: Altman, Rick. “Emerging Media Then and Now” panel. Woman with a Movie Camera: The Alice Guy Blache Symposium. New York, 14 Nov. 2009.

Fonvielle, Lloyd. “The Movies Begin…Again”. Mar de Cortes Baja. 24 Jan. 2010. http://www.mardecortesbaja.com

Fonvielle, Lloyd. “Majestic MicroMovies: Tech Specs”. Mar de Cortes Baja. 9 Feb. 2010. http://www.mardecortesbaja.com

Fonvielle, Lloyd. “Surfing the MicroWave”. Mar de Cortes Baja. 13 Feb. 2010. http://www.mardecortesbaja.com

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin, foreword Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”, published in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven, pp. 381-389. Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam, 2006.

Moran, Tom. “Celluloid Chickens Come Home to Roost”. CelticProgressive. 14 Oct. 2005. http://celticprogressive.blogspot.com

Mysteries. Dir. Charles Tashiro. 2010.

Noir Bars: New York. Majestic MicroMovies. Dir. Jae Song. Writer: Lloyd Fonvielle. 2010.

Silversmith, David, quoted in “YouTube: The Bigger It Gets, the More it Loses”. WENN news. 14 April 2009. http://www.imdb.com

Tashiro, Charles. “The Mysteries”. Email to Matt Barry. 17 Feb. 2010.

The Agreement. Dir. Matt Barry, 2010.

Visual Pleasure. Dir. Monica Sandler. 2010.

An Experiment in Narrative

I wanted to let everyone know about an exciting new series that's premiering online today, called "Noir Bars: New York", a collaborative effort by Lloyd Fonvielle and Brooklyn-based filmmaker Jae Song which is exploring and challenging the traditional ideas of narrative filmmaking in the YouTube age. The premise of the series is deceptively simple: a different character in a small, dark New York bar speaks a few lines of voice-over dialogue. I say it's "deceptively simple" because each of these voice-over monologues conjures up whole back stories which may vary from viewer to viewer, each possessing the scope and richness of narrative found in the feature film, but in the compact format of the online short. I had the pleasure of acting in one of the segments myself, and I was amazed at the variety of tones that director Jae Song was able to get from me while coaching me on my line reading (I won't reveal any more than that-you'll have to wait to see the segment for yourself!) On Lloyd's excellent blog, Mar de Cortes Baja, he poses the question: "Can modern micro movies learn to tell real stories, just as directors of the nickelodeon era learned to tell real stories?" (Fonvielle, "Surfing the Microwave") This series is an effort to explore that question. By drawing the comparison with the Nickelodeon, I'm reminded of Tom Gunning's essay on the period of early film that he calls the "Cinema of Attractions". There are definitely some similarities between the infant medium of theatrical cinema, and the infant medium of online video. Lloyd goes into great examples of these similarities on his blog, so I encourage everyone to check out his writings on the subject there. The subject of narrative filmmaking in the age of the "short sharp shock" has been one that I've been considering for several years now, since first publishing with YouTube in 2006. As a narrative filmmaker myself, I had just recently finished a feature film, and found myself in the predicament that there was no market for it. Through my undergraduate work at Towson University, I came to produce a short film ("The Wrong House", 2006) which consisted of a short slapstick comedy bit. I decided to see what kind of response it would get at YouTube, and surprisingly, this simple little sketch of a film ended up a fairly popular title (it still remains my most popular film online). I was struck by the possibility of such a simple, short narrative finding such an audience. In producing short films, the challenge is to express your ideas with what Charles Tashiro calls "economy of expression". Tashiro was also one of the pioneers in the form of the "web series", with his pivotal "Video Haiku" series which premiered over the course of one year on YouTube from 2006-2007. The short, 30-second videos proved quite popular, combining Tashiro's signature visual style with an original haiku poem that provided a counterpart to the image being depicted, sometimes including hints of a narrative that seem to invite the viewer to imagine the events that led up to the scene. Tashiro followed this with the even more challenging "American Alphabet" series, which debuted in the fall of 2007 and played out at the rate of one per week for the following 26 weeks. This series combined visual style with the direct address format, posing a series of thoughts on a variety of issues related to American society. Tashiro has compared the short film format with other arts requiring compressed expression, such as the portrait miniature. In "Noir Bars: New York", Lloyd and Jae have found an incredible way of blending a narrative into the short mode that has established itself as the standard for online video. By providing key details, they allow the viewer to create a rich narrative in his or her mind, sort of a cinematic "Mysteries of Harris Burdick". I encourage everyone to check out the series as it unveils. It promises to be a fascinating experiment in narrative storytelling in the age of the viral video. Visit Lloyd's page at Mar de Cortes Baja, and Jae's page atJSong.org

"My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done" (2009)

The newest film by Werner Herzog is a deceptively simple inversion of narrative expectations.

The film is told largely through flashbacks, recalling the events that have led up to a man, Brad McCollum (Michael Shannon) being involved in a standoff with police (headed by a brilliant Willem Dafoe as Detective Havenhurst) after murdering his mother. Chloe Savigny as Ingrid, Brad's girlfriend, and Udo Kier as Brad's friend Lee, round out the main players in the cast. Other familiar faces include an interesting turn by Brad Dourif and a brief appearance by Verne Troyer. A real standout is Grace Zabriskie, so memorable in David Lynch's 2006 masterpiece, "Inland Empire", here portraying a mother role that is quite unlike anything I've seen before.

The film takes it narrative and stands it on its head, creating a sense of humor and reflexivity that works well. The opening sequence with Willem Dafoe really sets this tone perfectly. There are the delightful absurdities: Brad's pet flamingos, the ostrich farm, the basketball in the tree, and so on. The relationship between Brad and his mother, and Brad and Ingrid, and Ingrid and Brad's mother, provides a fascinating character dynamic.

There is also a reflexive use of the staging of a play around which Herzog weaves the film's themes, couched in the terms of a Greek tragedy. The scenes are at one pathetic and funny.

The film's narrative discourse is arranged in such a way that the careful revealing of plot points to the audience allows the plot to unfold in such a way that, even though depicting events which have been revealed early on, the film's ending is a magnificent moment of surprise.

"My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done" played at the IFC Center in the West Village tonight with Herzog himself in attendance. Speaking before the film, Herzog explained his desire to make the film on a low budget, allowing for greater control. He also spoke of his collaborating with David Lynch's Absurda company, which produced the film, and that, specifically, Lynch took a very hands-off approach in terms of intervening with the film's direction, despite rumors that he had directed certain scenes himself. Herzog did point out a delightful reference to Lynch's "Blue Velvet" in the scene in which Michael Shannon observes a man, running on a treadmill, and wearing an oxygen mask.

"Petulia"

I recently had an opportunity to attend a screening of Richard Lester's film, "Petulia", from 1968. I had never heard of the film before, which is surprising considering how much I have sought out Lester's work from that period. I was even more surprised to learn of the high reputation the film enjoyed (tying with "Annie Hall" for third place on a 1978 list of the best films of the past ten years).

With this bit of build up, I was quite intrigued to see the film itself. Watching the film, the influence of the French New Wave, and Godard in particular, became quite apparent. The film involves a recently-divorced middle-aged man, played by George C. Scott, and his relationship with a mod London girl, played by Julie Christie. The film is awash in 60s cultural touchstones, including musical performances by Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead.

Without getting too wrapped up in the details of the plot (which is quite complicated), I couldn't help but feel, as I watched the film, that a large part of its critical reputation was based on the fact that Lester was employing these New Wave techniques in the service of a "serious" drama. It was, in fact, the film's narrative concerns that held it back and seemed to restrain the brilliant visual flourishes that Lester engages in during the film's more inspired sequences.

I couldn't help but compare the film with Lester's previous work; his two films with the Beatles, certainly, but also "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum" and "How I Won the War", in which New Wave techniques are allowed to flourish without concern for narrative logic. It's hard to think of any scene more vibrantly joyous and alive than the "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence in "A Hard Day's Night", with its perfect synthesis of rock and roll and New Wave cinematic technique. The techniques that Lester employs in his work from this period seem much better suited to the kind of freewheeling comedy and musical films he'd been making up to this point. In The Beatles, he found the perfect subjects for his filmmaking style-as eclectic, vibrant and innovative in music as Lester was in the cinema. In "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", Lester has the opportunity to work with one of his direct cinematic ancestors-Buster Keaton-whose performance style works perfectly in the context of what Lester is doing. And "How I Won the War" is one of the best satires from any period. With the same aesthetic applied to a character drama, there is a definite tension between the elements as Lester deals with narrative concerns on the one hand, and with stylistic concerns on the other.

None of this is to take away from what Lester does achieve in "Petulia". It's a remarkably mature film, and particularly through Scott's nuanced performance, is a very intricate character study as well. Nicolas Roeg's cinematography, with its heightened emphasis on bright reds, works very well within Lester's visual style. There are certainly moments where the film's narrative and character development seem at odds with the techniques Lester is employing, though. It comes back to the concern that critics are willing to see things in a serious drama that they may never acknowledge as existing in "lower" genres, which overlooks the incredible work that Lester had been doing all along up to this point.

"Petulia", in this sense, may be a kind of 1960s equivalent of equally-forgotten films like "Cavalcade", wherein the very qualities the film was praised for have become passe. Fortunately, in the case of "Petulia", the film still has much to recommend it for contemporary viewers, from Lester's strong visual style, to the intricate performances of its lead actors.

Bold Bank Robbery (Lubin, 1904)

Siegmund "Pop" Lubin is remembered today perhaps as one of Edison's chief rivals in the patent wars at the turn of the last century. Lubin was based in Philadelphia, and is all too often referred to in the history books only for his "remakes" (rip-offs) of popular Edison titles.

It's true that the Lubin company turned out some pretty audacious imitations (their version of "The Great Train Robbery", released a year after Edison's version), but along the way, Lubin turned out some pretty interesting films which deserve to be evaluated on their own terms.

One such picture is "Bold Bank Robbery", made in 1904 by Jack Frawley (who also wrote and shot the picture). The film begins a group of men enjoying a drink and a smoke, dressed in elaborate tuxedos and top hats. They are framed in a theatrical manner in front of a painted flat. What's remarkable is the sense of space that this single, flat backdrop provides. It's both highly theatrical yet also hints at the kind of screen space that more sophisticated sets would come to provide in the near future.

The gentlemen depart, and head out to their horse-drawn carriage waiting outside the club. We are immediately aware of the use of the actual exterior location compared to the interior shot we had just witnessed.

Arriving at a home, they don masks and change into burglar garb, then head out to meet a car parked out front waiting for them. They are driven down to an embankment, where they proceed to tie up their driver and dump him in a ravine. The rest of the group drives off to the bank (another painted set), where they knock out the teller and proceed to blow up the vault, making off with bags of money and make their getaway in the car.

Meanwhile, a couple stumbles upon the bound body of the driver, laying on the side of the road. Telling them what has happened, the police are called, who track the robbers down to the home they are meeting in. A rooftop chase ensues, leading through the streets, through a lake, on a streetcar, and even on to a train. The police miss catching the last robber as he rides off on the train, so they have the station agent wire ahead to the next stop, where two officers wait for the robber to get off the train, whereupon he is placed under arrest. Finally, we see the three robbers serving time in a prison, working on a chain gang.

This ten minute film includes a tremendous amount of action. There are numerous chase scenes, and the final business, with the last robber being pursued through the streets, on the train, etc. is a remarkable bit of action staging. The exciting outdoor visuals contrast nicely with the painted flats of the interiors.

There are, of course, inevitable comparisons to be made to Edison's "The Great Train Robbery" and to Frank S. Mottershaw's "Daring Daylight Burglary" (produced by Charles Urban), both from 1903. Even the title is reminiscent of the latter film, and the staging of the action recalls Edison's "Great Train Robbery" in the bank scenes, and also the final chase with the law pursuing the criminals. Lubin's films may not have been the most original in their content or innovative in their style, but "Bold Bank Robbery" remains an exciting film in its own right, with some interesting location changes and, in a few instances, above-average production design.

Tunneling the English Channel (1907)

One of Georges Melies' most prophetic of his pseudo-science fiction efforts, "Tunneling the English Channel" is a delightful combination of political satire and fantasy.

Made in 1907, the film is presented in a lavishly hand-colored print (although the print used for the recent "Melies: First Wizard of Cinema" collection begins with a rather rough, black and white copy and switches to a pristine, hand-colored source about halfway through. This was presumably pieced together from the best surviving elements). The films begins with a sort of split-screen set up, featuring the King of England and the President of France getting ready for bed. As they dream, visions of the building of the tunnel underneath the English channel play out. We see the construction of the tunnel on both the English and French sides, as well as the celebrations following the successful completion of the project. However, their dream turns to a nightmare when disaster strikes as two trains collide in the tunnel, waking both the King and the President from their dream. At this very moment, an engineer comes to see both men with plans to build a channel tunnel, and both leaders forcibly eject him from the scene!

Delightfully stylized moments occur throughout. The set representing the channel tunnel is very elaborate, with sand and silt underneath the tunnel, and the sea itself above, in which we see various submarines, fish, and other aquatic creatures moving about. Melies packs an incredible amount of visual detail into every frame.

Melies' fascination with industry and technology is present throughout. In Melies' narration, written to accompany the film, he goes in to great detail on the scientific and technological details of the construction. In his book "Flickers: A Century of Cinema" (1995), British critic Gilbert Adair notes that, technically speaking, "Tunneling the English Channel" offers a more daring vision of the future than Melies' more famous film, "A Trip to the Moon", in that-while travel to the moon became a reality 67 years after that film's release, the Chunnel did not become a reality until 88 years after the release of this film.

The ending of the film, with both leaders soured on the idea of a tunnel because of their nightmare, leads to a perfect comic close to the whole film. There are some moments of fun political satire throughout, such as the moment when the leaders' respective footmen mock their pompous march in a celebratory parade.

A delightful film on all counts, this lesser-seen Melies title deserves its place among his best work. It is available as part of the "Melies: First Wizard of Cinema" DVD set, available from Flicker Alley, which includes 173 of the cinematic magician's films in pristine copies with the original hand-coloring and narration intact.

Rough Sea at Dover (1895)

There is something strangely haunting about this short (very short) actualitie piece shot by Birt Acres and R.W. Paul in what must have been one of their earliest efforts. It provides an interesting contrast to Edison's films in terms of the use of a location. Whereas Edison preferred to showcase a performer, making location a secondary issue of concern strictly for practical purposes, Acres and Paul showcase the sea as a subject in itself.

Shot on an apparently stormy, dour day at a pier at Dover, the filmmakers capture the raw energy made possible by the scope of the subject (the sea would return as a favorite subject for many future films, and its continual movement still possesses a hypnotic quality and a strangely cinematic element, which Griffith used to such good advantage when he shot his first film on the shores of Santa Monica beach nearly 15 years later).

The film also differs from the Edison approach in its use of two shots, one a full view of the pier, and the second a medium shot, taken a little closer to provide a greater detailed view of the waves.

Unfortunately, the surviving print (featured on Kino's "The Movies Begin" DVD set for those interested in seeing it) is in pretty rough condition itself. It would serve as a nice reminder to DVD producers that perhaps another set is in order, consisting of more of these early pioneering efforts from around the world, in order to shed some light on lesser-seen films by people like Acres and Paul.

Caceido with Pole (1894)

On the excellent Kino/MoMA Thomas Edison set, there is a fascinating little film that I've been tempted to write briefly about for some time now.

Titled "Caceido with Pole", and dating from 1894, the film is remarkable for being the first Edison film shot outdoors of the Black Maria. There is something strangely enticing about the film for this reason alone. Without further research, I can't be sure where the film was photographed, precisely, though it was almost certainly either right outside of the Edison lab, or in a very nearby location to Orange, New Jersey.

In many ways, the subject matter and presentation are no different from the countless other early Edison shorts, depicting popular vaudeville and show business figures performing a condensed version of their act before the static Kinetograph. Yet there is something undeniably vibrant, fresh and even cinematic about the performance of Juan Caceido as he performs elaborate leaps and somersaults on a wire.

For some reason, I find this short strip of celluloid both very exciting and also hilariously funny. The "outdoor" location plays a part in both. It's exciting to watch the elaborate tricks of the performance, of course, but it's also fun to see W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise, the film makers, discover the cinematic qualities of shooting outdoors in a natural location. The location in the case appears to be someone's backyard, with a tall wooden fence and a neighboring house visible in the background. This brings me to the part which I find so utterly hilarious-the idea of such a fantastic performance being recorded by the cinematic medium, then in the earliest stages of its infancy, against such a seemingly "normal" backdrop.

Edison films like this one are, of course, also a great reminder of the tremendously diverse kinds of entertainment audiences had available to them at the turn of the last century. Watching Juan Caceido seemingly effortlessly bouncing off the wire, while keeping his balance with a pole, and performing complex somersaults, is a spectacle to see. One can only imagine what other spectators must have thought.

Above all, it's a fun reminder of the joy, energy and even cinematic fervor that can be found in even a little film like this. Dickson undoubtedly shot the film outdoors for purely practical reasons (the act was too complex to shoot inside the Black Maria's confined space). Yet, whether or not he fully realized it, he was tapping in to the same kind of effects that "real" locations provide which Louis Lumiere would really take to new heights the following year (the moving leaves in the background of "August Lumiere and Baby" from 1895 captured audiences' attention as much as any of the staged foreground action).

While "Caceido with Pole" is hardly a groundbreaking film in any real sense, it nevertheless presents, for perhaps the first time in the American cinema, the qualities of outdoor shooting that countless directors have explored since.

The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr. (1996)

This 1996 documentary remains perhaps the most thorough look at the man who came to earn the reputation as the "worst director of all time". It focuses a great deal on his failures, which is also a big part of the problem I have with it.

The film consists of interviews with a number of Wood's friends and collaborators, beginning with Crawford John Thomas. Thomas and Wood set up a commercial production company in Hollywood in 1947, the year they both arrived there. Interviews with Thomas lead in to some rare behind the scenes footage of Wood directing a 16mm Western short with future collaborator Conrad Brooks, who produced the short film with his brother to serve as an acting demo reel. The footage shows Wood, impeccably dressed in a sports coat with his Errol Flynn mustache, enthusiastically directing the scene.

We next see outtakes from an unfinished early short, "Crossroads of Laredo", which Wood produced in 1948, ostensibly to sell to television, although it's hard to imagine the film, which essentially amounts to a home movie, being shown on TV at all.

The major Wood films are addressed individually, with comments from a whole host of collaborators, including makeup man Harry Thomas, actors Conrad Brooks, Lyle Talbot, Paul Marco and Gregory Walcott, even Rev. Lynn Lemon (who produced "Plan 9 From Outer Space". There are also comments from Vampira, one of the key members of Wood's cinematic entourage, as well as actresses Dolores Fuller and Loretta King. Bela Lugosi Jr. has very little positive to say about his father's work with Wood, whom he sees as a "user and a loser". This may seem rather harsh, since by most accounts Wood and Lugosi shared a deep friendship, and Wood did provide Lugosi with work, even if it was below the standards of his best work.

The problem I have with the documentary is that it focuses too much on Wood's failures. While his career in the movie business could hardly be labeled "successful" by any conventional definition, the simple fact is that Wood succeeded where so many have failed; namely, in actually making his films.

I'd like to see a serious, non-ironic study of Wood's contribution to independent filmmaking. Not that I would encourage some sort of postmodern view that elevates Wood to "auteur" status on the basis of effort alone, mind. However, as has been pointed out, Wood made very well have been the first horror/science fiction filmmaker who actively loved the earlier serials and B-movies of his youth, and who sought to recreate some of their spirit and energy. Considering that his films still hold up as entertaining more than half a century after their creation, I think it's fair to say that he succeeded in terms of entertainment value, even if the production values and technical craftsmanship are genuinely subpar. It should be noted, though, that when given a half-decent budget, as he was with 1955's "Bride of the Monster", the results are actually quite good. "Plan 9 From Outer Space" is justifiably recognized as a poorly-crafted piece of filmmaking, but one has to consider the extreme difficulties Wood faced in just getting it finished at all. And there's still no denying that Wood populated his films with memorable characters that are rather unlike anything else in Hollywood cinema of the time.

The documentary does skirt over Wood's final years, jumping from the completion of "Plan 9" to his death in 1978 in a superficially brief amount of time. Granted, the details of Wood's final years are not necessarily the kind that one would want to dwell on in a biography, but he did produce a prolific amount of work in that period which should not be ignored.

This documentary can be purchased as part of the "Ed Wood Box", a DVD set which features his major films (plus a recently-restored film "Night of the Ghouls", which Wood completed in 1959 just after shooting "Plan 9", but which he was unable to release as he never had sufficient funds to have the negative developed. The film was restored in 1983 by Wade Williams.)

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

Robert Altman was a filmmaker who never seemed to feel the need to keep "in fashion" the way other directors have. Beginning with his real breakout film, "MASH", he developed a very personal approach to filmmaking with emphasis on character and dialog that was perfectly suited to certain films ("Nashville", perhaps his supreme masterpiece), but other times seemed wrong for the material ("Popeye").

Altman's final film is a wonderfully dreamy film that depicts a highly theatrical world; in this case, the backstage of the "Prairie Home Companion" radio show. Stylistically, the film belongs to Altman, although it's cheery yet dry humor is pure Garrison Keillor. Keillor holds court with his performers, acting as a kind of master of ceremonies for a variety of acts, mostly country-western types (recalling "Nashville"). The performers are all standouts: Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as a sister country-western act, Lindsay Lohan as their daughter, Kevin Kline in a wonderfully comical turn as detective Guy Noir, L.Q. Jones as Chuck Akers, an aging country music singer, and perhaps the biggest standouts, John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson as a comic cowboy duo, whose "Bad Jokes" number provides the best laughs in the film.

Most interesting is Garrison Keillor playing himself, an inveterate weaver of tall-tales and interesting characters, and facing his responsibilities as host with a wonderfully deadpan sense of humor and calm. Keillor is a living legend, and this film (from his own script) stands as a real testament to his unique brand of humor that stems from a long tradition going back to Twain.

Altman died just shortly after completing the film. Like Stanley Kubrick, who died just weeks after completing his final film, "A Prairie Home Companion" is also a kind of tribute to the show business world in which Altman spent his career working. In one scene in which the new owner (Tommy Lee Jones) of the show's theater arrives to survey his new property, he comments that the whole thing seems like something out of the past, a point also made in the opening narration by Kline's Guy Noir. There is also a wonderfully supernatural element to the film that seems particularly resonant given Altman's passing shortly after the film was released.

"A Prairie Home Companion" is a film both of an earlier time, and ahead of its time. It stands as one of Altman's finest and most personal works, and a wonderful record of the uniquely American humor of Garrison Keillor.

Scorsese's First Feature: Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)

Scorsese's debut feature, Who's That Knocking at my Door has an interestingly checkered history which may account for moments of unevenness in an otherwise intriguing and personal film.

According to various sources, the film began life in 1965 as a student short by Scorsese at NYU, about J.R. (Harvey Keitel) and his friends. This was then combined with the plot between J.R. and the Girl that became a feature in 1967, then titled I Call First. Finally, in 1970, an independent distributor agreed to pick the movie up if Scorsese shot some sex scenes to be edited into the film.

As it is, the film has much to offer. The clear influence here is John Cassavetes. In fact, there are moments that the film feels so much like a Cassavetes picture that it's almost hard to tell them apart stylistically. Scorsese lets his actors improvise long scenes of dialog, which doesn't always work well. As in Cassavetes' work, the improvised dialog all too often comes across as awkward, unnatural, and even occasionally embarrassing. There is also simply too much talk-the scene where the guys go hiking in the woods, for instance, could have played much more effectively without the dialog.

The moments that stand out are the scenes with Keitel and Zena Bethune, both who achieve a good chemistry with oneanother. Their initial encounter is pure Scorsese, with Keitel extolling his praise of John Wayne, and of The Searchers in particular.

The film takes an interesting and dark turn when Keitel finds out that the girl has been raped, or so she claims. Torn with guilt, he must choose whether or not he can continue his relationship with her. What stands out in the film is Scorsese's clear embracing and exploration of his Catholic upbringing. At a time when so many Catholic film makers were exploring their faith on screen, Scorsese in particular stands out for his fascination with the Catholic iconography, beautifully photographing the inside of the St. Patrick's Cathedral.

The black and white cinematography, no doubt more a budgetary choice than an aesthetic one in this case, actually works to the film's advantage, and offers a few moments that are visually stunning, especially the scene on the deck of the ferry, with Keitel and Bethune cast in harsh, bright light from the lights on deck. As it is, though, the film is primarily carried through its dialog, and does not present as many of the visually distinct, stylistic flourishes that Scorsese developed in his proceeding films.

What ultimately makes the film of such interest is that it is an intensely personal work by a film maker who has always pursued a singular vision, even in his more "commercial" projects, and seamlessly weaves aspects of his own life, experiences and interests into a work that transcends its time and place.

Pilgrimage (1933)

The gem of the new "Ford at Fox" set is this 1933 melodrama filled with Ford's favorite themes. Profoundly sad, moving and sentimental, this film marks the beginning of Ford's mature style in the sound era.

The story involves a small town mother, Hannah Jessop, played to perfection by Henrietta Crossman in the role of a lifetime. Norman Foster turns in a surprisingly subtle performance as her son, Jim, who is engaged to be married to the daughter of a local drunk. When Hannah finds out about this, she signs Jim up for the draft, whereupon he is shipped off to war. During a brief layover in his home town, Jim learns that his fiancee is pregnant, but he is killed in France before being able to return home to marry her. The rest of the film deals with Hannah's coming to terms with her relationship with her son during a visit to France to visit his grave.

"Pilgrimage" has been referred to as a "women's picture", which might surprise casual viewers more familiar with Ford's macho stories of tradition in the face of battle. What is remarkable about the film is that Ford's direction keeps the story from ever becoming mawkish or overly sentimental, preferring instead to portray the strong and noble qualities of his characters. Hannah Jessop is a remarkably defined character, helped in no small part by the incredible performance of Henrietta Crossman (it is truly surprising that she didn't have more of a career in films). Ford steers clear of cloying, manipulative sentimentality by portraying Hannah as a flawed woman, driven to despair by her own sense of self-righteousness. In one scene, she expresses regret over hiding her selfishness under the guise of "Christian" values. Realizing that her stubbornness has cost her son his life, she shows her change of heart by helping out another young couple whom she meets in France, and whose situation resembles that of her own son and his fiancee.

To dismiss "Pilgrimage" as a "women's picture" is to deny the raw emotional intensity of what Ford accomplishes here. He puts his audience, as well as his characters, on an emotional rollercoaster by indulging in his penchant for rustic, "cornball" humor between the film's more heart-wrenching moments. The extended visit to France provides a good opportunity for some "small town folks in a strange land" type of humor, which is interesting in pitting the stereotypical rustic types against the "sophisticated" urban types. In doing so, Ford draws an interesting parallel between the clearly distinct types of films so popular during the period in which the film was made (directors like Ford and Capra tended to portray smaller, even rural environments, while Lubitsch, say, or Stevens, focused on an upper-middle to upper class urban milieu). It has the effect of giving the film a truly encompassing, human-epic feel. There is a particularly funny moment at a shooting gallery, in which Hannah surprises the onlookers with her sharpshooting skill. It ends with a ridiculous bit of corny humor that is so silly and good-natured that it's impossible not to laugh.

Stylistically, Ford plays with some of the classical conventions in which he was working. An unusual approach used early on in the film features the actors speaking directly into the camera, rather than looking slightly off-screen in the direction of the character to whom they're speaking. It seems to have been an effect that Ford abandoned, as it really doesn't turn up in his later work, or even in the later scenes of this film.

The cinematography, by George Schneiderman, is gorgeous, particularly in the rural scenes. Ford frames his actors in deep focus shots, allowing the backgrounds to sprawl out behind them for as far as the camera can see. There is one scene, in particular, where Norman Foster's character leaves his home at night to meet with his fiancee, that shows the influence of F.W. Murnau and of German Expressionism in general which had so affected Ford's style in the late 1920s. Indeed, the theme of the film resembles those he dealt with in his seminal 1928 work, "Four Sons".

Ford's theme of Catholic guilt is very heavy throughout the film. There is a scene in particular, in which the mayor of the town tries to convince Hannah to make the trip to France to pay tribute to her son, and to represent the town. He shames her into going, playing on her guilt, while in the next scene, as he is seeing her off on the train, tells her how "proud" the whole town is of her. There is a particularly painful scene in which Hannah tells the other mothers with whom she is traveling that she doesn't deserve to be there, as she feels so wracked with guilt over her son's actions. The theme of guilt runs heavily throughout the film, serving as a catalyst for several of the film's major plot turns. As usual with a Ford film, the characters develop organically from their environment, rather than serving as pawns in the plot. Several other Fordian elements are present, including the presence of a family dog which follows Hannah around in moments of distress, and which plays an important symbolic role in the final scene.

There is no denying that Ford had developed into a full-fledged artist with a distinct style during the 1920s. In the silent film medium, his masterworks such as "The Iron Horse", "3 Bad Men" and especially "Four Sons" stand as a testament to that. With the coming of sound, however, Ford-like so many other directors-had to take time to re-adjust and to develop his style within the new medium of the talking picture. With "Pilgrimage", he emerges fully formed, displaying the kind of breadth and scope of subject matter which has earned him the reputation as America's finest filmmaker.

"Pilgrimage" is available on DVD through the "Ford at Fox" collection, in a pristine restored print. The disc features an optional commentary track by Ford biographer Joseph McBride, and comes with my highest recommendation.

The First Films

Question: when was the first movie made?

Ask this question to ten different historians and you will receive ten different answers. For years it was fashionable to say that cinema was "born" on the night of December 28, 1895 in Paris, when the Lumieres held their famous first screening (in actuality, it wasn't even the Lumiere's first screening, let alone the first screening before an audience anywhere in the world).

Others will say that it was Edison, with films like "The Sneeze" and "Sandow", although of course Edison's own output goes back earlier than that.

Still some will make a case for one of the sadly neglected, often overlooked pioneers like Max Skladanowsky in Berlin, or William Friese-Greene in England, or France's Augustin Le Prince (who actually did succeed in capturing a few frames of motion as early as 1888, but never perfected playback of his device-despite persistent rumors to the contrary-and disappeared under mysterious circumstances before he could make any more progress).

Thanks to a joint effort between Kino on Video and the Museum of Modern Art, we can now get a little closer at looking at the beginning of film, at least from the Edison company.

The two earliest experiments on the set are called "Monkeyshines" (nos. 1 and 2). Dating from sometime in late 1889 or early 1890, the fragments (or what survives of them, at least), represent nothing so much as a series of very blurry still photographs.

The second film offers a slight improvement on the sharpness of the image, but is still a blur in terms of its movement.

These images were played back on a cylindrical device that could be cranked by hand. The images were run in front of a little viewer, creating the illusion of continuous movement-sort of a "live action" version of the Zoetrope. While these represent an important step toward the eventual development of the full blown movie, I feel that they are closer to the "series photography" of Eadweard Muybridge or Jules-Etienne Marey than they are to the moving picture that Edison and his chief developer, W.K.L. Dickson, would eventually arrive at.

An important development came in 1891, when Dickson completed the "Dickson Greeting" test, in which the inventor steps before the camera and removes his hat. This film has the distinction of being the first test shown to a larger audience. Edison's wife was a member of the Federation of Womens' Clubs, and Edison arranged a demonstration for the members at his Orange facility. The event was recorded in the news of the time.

Viewed today, the film is extremely brief when projected at its proper speed. The important step is that the movement appears entirely natural. The Kino DVD offers the opportunity to view the film in a "slow motion" playback to better appreciate the individual frames.

Two more of these early camera tests are included on the disc, "Newark Athlete" and "Men Boxing", both from 1891 and both demonstrating a "natural" movement upon playback, along with a photographic clarity, missing from the first tests.

With the invention of the Kinetograph, Edison and Dickson succeeded in perfecting playback of their films within the "peepshow" viewing format. Edison, of course, preferred the "single person" viewing option of the Kinetoscope as he thought it would increase revenue by charging admission to each individual viewer rather than screening it for an entire audience. At the time (1893), it was surely enough to have perfected not only the photographing but the playback of the moving image with such natural movement, such image clarity, and for such a sustained amount of time.

What's most interesting about Edison and Dickson's "Blacksmithing Scene" from 1893 is that Dickson chose to use costumed actors for his subject. The artifice of the medium is already apparent in the staged scene, with actors (most likely other technicians) dressed in blacksmith garb, and passing around a bottle of alcohol after finishing their work. (It's also worth noting in passing that another one of Dickson's technicians-maybe even Dickson himself!-is visible in silhouette, blocking part of the image by standing in front of the camera during the first half of the film, an error oddly overlooked in many accounts of the film).

By choosing to re-create a scene from the past, Dickson was already getting at the possibilities that moving pictures provided to stage fiction as well as record reality, and how often that line would be blurred over the years. Although it may not be apparent to viewers today, at the time people would have recognized the blacksmith scene as deliberately hearkening back to a "simpler time", especially in the allowance of alcohol in the workplace (which was already frowned upon by 1893). Dickson also draws a parallel between the simpler "industrial" workers of an earlier era, and the craftsmanship of his own team of inventors who developed and built the camera being used to film it.

Most importantly, Dickson had discovered the ease of shooting in a studio. Due to the incredible size of the early camera, it made sense. The "Black Maria", Edison's studio, provided an ideal means of shooting each film, as it could turn to face the sunlight, and even had a dressing room attached for the various celebrities who would
come to be photographed before Edison's camera. Dickson's preference for shooting in the studio was certainly echoed by whole generations of filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, who found the artifice and controlled conditions of filming on a stage to be preferable to working on location.

The "Blacksmithing Scene" was also notable for being displayed at the Brooklyn Institute of Technology in 1893, providing an important step up in the public awareness of motion picture development.

Examining these early tests provides an interesting glimpse into the development of the medium in its earliest days, and as is apparent by looking at the work of just one of the people developing the motion picture at that time, we can see why it's impossible to point to any one film as the "first".

Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog must surely rank as one of the most ruggedly individualistic filmmakers working today, with a kind of adventurous, "pioneer" spirit that would have made John Ford or Raoul Walsh proud.

In the past, he has explored the most obscure regions of the world in films like Aguirre the Wrath of God, and more recently in Gizzly Man, in which he ventured in to the documentary format to examine the eventual breakdown and destruction of a man at the hands of an environment he did not fully understand.

Encounters at the End of the World takes the viewer to the unexplored vastness of Antarctica. Herzog looks at the individuals who choose to come there to explore. Many of them are Ph.D.s, musicians, philosophers and other unlikely types with a passion for adventure, exploration and knowledge. Herzog shows us the practical side of their experiences (training for white-outs by placing buckets over their heads, and quickly losing all sense of direction), drilling holes in the ice for diving (and explaining that a diver must be able to find his way back to the exit or risk being trapped under hundreds of miles of ice).

He makes the point that Antarctica is largely the final frontier among the continents. Somehow it seems very appropriate that Herzog would make this film. In the process of revealing the vastness and even danger of the environment, he also paints a very revealing picture of the individuals who choose to make such exploration possible in the first place.

Shadows (1959)

John Cassavetes must surely rank as one of the most influential filmmakers from any country, in any style or genre, of the last 50 years. His work is, in many ways, so influential that his influence is almost hardly noticeable, much in the same way the stylistic touches of Godard-so radical in their time-have almost come to be accepted as conventional.

However, like the films of Godard, it's impossible to watch a Cassavetes film and feel indifferent or blase about his incredible innovation and startling originality. I had the pleasure of watching the Criterion DVD of Cassavetes' "Shadows", a film so ahead of its time that it's almost difficult to conceive of what it must have looked like to audiences in 1959. The Criterion DVD uses a print restored by UCLA, and the care put into the restoration is detailed in a special restoration featurette included on the disc. The film is still rough, given its independent roots, but looks and sounds quite good all things considered.

It's the seminal film of the American Independent film movement, and departs from the experimental "underground" movement of the same period by weaving the technical and thematic innovations with a slightly more conventional approach (a feature length, narrative film). "Shadows" is a truly experimental film, however. It captures its setting-Manhattan circa 1957-with the same kind of "documentary" realism that Truffaut and Godard lensed the city of Paris through in their seminal New Wave films such as "The 400 Blows" or "Breathless". The jazz score, featuring incidental music by Charles Mingus, compliments the imagery perfectly, but also works well with Cassavetes' cinematic technique, which is almost jazz-like in its improvisation and deft style.

"Shadows" is, above all, an intensely personal film. As I mentioned earlier, it's impossible to watch it and not get caught up in the excitement of something new and original. It's easy to imagine younger viewers seeing the film and wondering what the "big deal" is; especially ironic considering how many younger filmmakers indirectly steal Cassavetes' techniques without even realizing where they come from. The film is technically rough, yes, but shooting it on 16mm, "guerilla style", as Cassavetes did, was the only way to achieve the kind of results he was after.

It remains one of the truly seminal films in the history of American cinema, and like his counterparts in Europe, Cassavetes remains a true innovator whose ideas will never grow stale, regardless of how many times they are imitated, copied or stolen.

Unnerving Cinema: Touch of Evil (1958)

Is there a more unnerving film that "Touch of Evil", Orson Welles' final Hollywood film from 1958? If there is, I haven't seen it.

I re-watched the 1998 reconstruction by Walter Murch last night on DVD, and I have to say it's one of the most tense, unnerving and unsettling experiences I've ever had while watching a film. From the very first shot, when a ticking time-bomb is placed in the trunk of a car, to that final confrontation between Vargas and Quinlan by the bridge, every second of the film had my stomach in knots.

I won't write about the film's various technical achievements here, nor its "place" in the film noir canon (I'll leave that for another time). Instead, I want to focus on just why the film is so successful in creating a sense of very real panic and dread. The scenes with Janet Leigh in the motel room, owned by the family who her husband (Charlton Heston) is currently prosecuting, are even more unsettling for me than the similar scenes of Janet Leight in another motel room in Hitchcock's "Psycho". Even Dennis Weaver manages to deliver a somehow more maniacal, frightening performance for me that Anthony Perkins in the Hitchcock film. It is a tribute to Welles' talent that, even without aiming for pure "horror", he delivers a situation just as frightening as anything out of a horror film.

The most unsettling aspect might be the film's theme of betrayal, in which no one is safe from the corrupt hand of the law, personified by Welles' gross, bloated Quinlan. The one honest officer (Heston) sees his life, and that of his new wife, torn to shreds within a day of his involvement in the investigation that has led to the conflict.

"Touch of Evil" has gotten a mixed response, but it may be a case of a film that was ahead of its time in 1958, along with other masterworks by real film artists, including Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and Ford's "The Searchers", both films that somewhat confused audiences at the time by their self-reflexive nature and their somewhat unconventional approach to then-common generic conventions. Welles delivers a film noir that is so self-reflexive, and so conversant in all the conventions and expectations of that genre (while subverting them at the same time), that it effectively put an end to the "classic" noir period (although I would argue that it had been coming for some time, especially with the hyper-noirish films of the 50s such as Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly"). Part of the film's unsettling nature may not come from the actual content at all, then, but from the assured mastery of Welles' technique in shattering our expectations of the genre.