The General

1926, US, directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton

Having seen a variety of lesser versions, this beautifully restored print from Kino Lorber really allows you to appreciate the genius of Keaton's visual construction, particularly in gags like that  involving a moving train, a loaded cannon, and a key corner on the track, further explored by Kristin Thompson with copious stills. There's little for me to add to the many previous commentaries on the film, though I found myself far more aware on this occasion of the political components -- such as the brilliant gag involving Keaton's obliviousness to both advancing armies, and the concomitant commentary on the insanity of the entire tragedy. 

Underworld

1927, US, directed by Josef von Sternberg

I loved every minute of this, shot and edited with tremendous verve, and providing the template for many of the gangland riches of the 1930s, most obviously under Hawks's baton. The film's brevity also gives a preview of the quickfire Warner Bros ripped-from-the-headlines style, while the set pieces are handled with exceptional skill and drama. 

Go West

1925, US, directed by Buster Keaton

Brilliant stuff. Keaton's character is frequently mystified by the vicissitudes of technology but the joke here is he's equally confused when faced with more traditional challenges -- riding a horse, milking a cow, and so forth. The milking scene is one of my favourites in all of Keaton's work, absurd and filled with tiny details, like the repeated attempts to offer the cow a three-legged stool as Keaton's character labours under the misapprehension that the object is for the cow's comfort rather than his own, or the almost casual manner in which he flicks at the unfortunate animal's udder in the hopes that she will supply her milk.

Along the way, of course, he does acquire a certain competence -- he mixes his shaving cream with a few drops of expertly-extracted milk -- and even gets the upper hand over a card sharp, at least for a time. In that, his character surely influenced some famously beleagured cartoon characters like Tom the cat, almost always the loser except for those exquisitely pleasurable moments when he finally gets something to go his way. The long sequence late on when he leads hundreds of cattle through the streets of Los Angeles echoes the bridal stampede of Seven Chances, released earlier the same year, making said maidens even more animalistic in retrospect, and increasing the sense that Keaton's character regarded the women with fear more than anything else.

Even in the midst of the chaos, though, there are calm moments, none more striking than the brief sequence when Keaton stops to watch a young black man demonstrate his dance steps; his audience has disappeared as the cattle race down a nearby street but the man keeps moving, enjoying his own skill and absorbed in the moment before he finally realizes there's a problem. 

Three Ages

1923, US, directed by Buster Keaton

Keaton apparently commented that Three Ages was essentially three two-reel films spliced together, although the repetition of certain scenarios in different contexts -- the prehistoric era, Ancient Rome, the 1920s -- is central to the film's effect. The biggest problem is one of quality control: while all three eras have their share of gags, the modern sequence is by far the most polished, with the most spectacular and memorable stuntwork (the football game, the leaps from tall buildings), and each time the action switches back in time I found myself getting antsy, particularly once the intention to repeat each theme became clear. The jokes in the earlier sequences also seem a good deal more obvious at times, almost lazy by Keaton's meticulous standards at times, although that perhaps marks the transition from shorter work to feature films.

Seven Chances

1925, US, directed by Buster Keaton

Almost like two different films welded together -- the first an often very subtle romantic farce, the second an all-out chase sequence that seeks constantly to top itself -- Seven Chances again showcases the range of Keaton's talent: compare, for instance, the brief early sequence where he completes a marriage proposal by casually throwing a card to a woman seated in a gallery only to have the pieces flutter back down to him, to the epic, occasionally injury-defying, plunge down a steep hill as Keaton is threatened by rolling boulders and furious maids. It's not clear which of these is more terrifying to Keaton: he seems more adept at handling any physical harm. What makes the film more troubling, though, is the vein of race humour that sits very uncomfortably now -- while it's possible to construct some narrative around each of the individual incidents involving a black character as though to absolve Keaton the director, in the aggregate it's hard to see them as anything other than unpleasant even if perhaps only too characteristic of their time. Far more difficult to explain away, though, is the use of blackface by white performers; Keaton seems to have been a particular aficionado of the genre, at least based on his interviews.

Our Hospitality

1923, US, directed by John G. Blystone & Buster Keaton

It's only Keaton's second feature film behind the camera  -- though he shares the credit here -- but Our Hospitality is a fine example of the range of both Keaton's talent and his targets, marrying the expected thrills and comic spills with some fine satire of the mores of the American South. Like many of his films, the film starts relatively slowly only to build to a tremendous climax in terms of both scale and drama, and it would be easy to forget how subtle a performer (and director) Keaton was: watch his hands, for instance, as they reveal his character's inner turmoil, as though they've taken up the emotion often absent from his face. Of course, Keaton doesn't save all of the good stuff for the finale: there's a hilarious sequence early on involving an absurd train journey, which must have caused considerable whiplash for the performers involved (as befits a little boy fascinated by machinery, Shay found this section particularly funny, and he was thrilled by the finale, too).

Bucking Broadway

1917, US, directed by John Ford

I'm not at all familiar with Harry Carey's silent work -- this was one of a series of films featuring his Cheyenne Harry character, an affable, sometimes comical fellow. While it's mostly a pretty straightforward fish out of water story (or rather a double fish out of water story, with a city slicker's visit to Wyoming later matched by Harry's comical trip to New York), there are some beautiful touches in the first half particularly, capturing the beauty of the west and affording Carey several surprisingly subtle scenes, most notably when he has to ask for the hand of his beloved. The villain is drawn in broad strokes, and city living as a whole gets a bad rap, with the "genuine" country folk obviously to be preferred. I won't presume to see the hand of the future Ford at work here, except to note that the film is smartly paced, with ambitions that are occasionally hemmed in by technical restrictions (the camera can't move to capture the antics of a bucking bronco, with the result that the action disappears offscreen for several seconds at a time).

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

 

1928, US, directed by Charles Reisner


A wonderful slow burn -- in so far as film of less than 60 minutes can be such a thing -- with small-scale gags gradually building into some of the most iconic sequences of Keaton's entire career, with buildings collapsing, a jail floating into the river, and Keaton blown six ways to Sunday by the enormous wind machines stationed offscreen. Most satisfying, though, is the way in which Keaton, and director Charles Reisner, marry the comic's daredevil inventiveness with plotlines that sketch both a familial reunion and a nascent romance (which Buster, in the final shot, is determined to consolidate before anyone has a chance to change their minds).

Keaton finds a remarkable pathos in many of the early gags, with his character clearly a disappointment to the father he hardly knows -- a rough and ready riverboat captain who despairs of his ability to mould any kind of man out of the college-boy raw material that he's presented with. The sequence in which the father tries out hat after hat on his son manages simultaneously to comment on Keaton's own iconic headgear, the tense father-son relationship, and class differences, but Keaton then punctuates everything with a gag that deflates everything that's come before. 

While the gags are models of careful construction, the film has an overall visual polish, too, whether in the use of smooth tracking shots or the careful construction of say, the shot where we see Buster's father look out of his jail cell past the sheriff and to Buster, with absurdly upturned umbrella, outside in the pouring rain. A few minutes earlier, there's an equally impressive sequence where Buster watches his father's imprisonment as his (Buster's) girlfriend hovers in the background, the two actors' movements perfectly coordinated in a dance of miscommunication. 

The Navigator

1924, US, directed by Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton

Made the same year as Sherlock Jr., this doesn't soar quite as high for me -- the astonishing inventiveness is there, as are many of the laughs, but perhaps the fact that it's essentially a film built around a prop, however gigantic, robs it of a certain amount of soul. That quality is, for me, at the heart of Keaton's strongest films, and Wes Anderson captured this aspect of Keaton's work rather well in Moonrise Kingdom, alongside several memorable sight gags.

There's something wonderfully ridiculous, though, about the complex setup that Keaton and Crisp engineer to have Keaton and the girl of his dreams aboard an otherwise empty ship -- nefarious agents of obscure foreign nations, shipping magnates, and a foppish family embarrassment all factor into the mix -- but once on board some of the sequences have a brilliance that doesn't always transcend the mechanical, at least from my perspective (the scenes in which Keaton and co-star Kathryn McGuire run up and down the various gangways and passages are amusing but a little over-extended for my taste). By contrast, the sequences in which Buster is convinced that there's another man aboard -- a cutout of director Donald Crisp that floats past his window -- as well as the later scenes on a tropical island, Buster emerging from the sea dressed in a deep sea diver's outfit, restore the sense of absurd invention.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

1922/1968, Sweden/Denmark, directed by Benjamin Christensen

A true oddity, this one. Christensen's film purports to be a quasi-academic discourse on witchcraft from antiquity through the present, with the opening section quoting from a variety of manuscript sources and quickly sketching in the apparent ubiquity of the notion of witchcraft, before settling into some kind of ill-defined European middle ages location and unveiling its true purpose, a series of often lurid vignettes depicting the depraved reality of the phenomenon, complete with lascivious devils, torture chambers, and slavering inquisitioners, the better to point up the church's role in creating and sustaining that which it purported to condemn. Christensen shows himself to be a very nimble director, using all manner of effects, from a sort-of live-action tableau of hell to several extraordinarily atmospheric night-time sequences (the most chilling of all perhaps that where a woman mistakes the activities of two anatomists for something rather more sinister -- the scene has none of the wilder elements that are more amusing than alarming to a contemporary audience, and thus retains all of its power).

The White Shadow

1924, UK, directed by Graham Cutts [Assistant Director Alfred Hitchcock]

The streaming version of this film was made possible in part by the 2012 For the Love of Film Blogathon, and I'd urge you to watch the film at the National Film Preservation Foundation site, while it lasts -- streaming is an expensive business, and the site is unable to host the film on a permanent basis.

The White Shadow was originally a six-reel picture but only the first three reels survive -- or I suppose to be more accurate only the first three reels have been found thus far. The picture is in many ways a pretty standard melodrama from what we can judge, though based on surviving plot descriptions the potboiler aspects really kick into high gear in those lot reels.

I won't pretend to see too much of the nascent Hitchcock in what's available here -- my knowledge of his silent work is very limited, and there's a considerable gulf between the style of this film and 1930s sound films like The Man Who Knew Too Much (particularly when it comes to framing and camera movement); Hitchcock had learnt much in the intervening years, and the art itself had evolved. There's also another important presence, of course -- the actual credited director Graham Cutts, and while it's not hard to imagine Hitchcock's vision contributing to, say, the striking staging of the scenes in The Cat Who Laughs nightclub in Paris, or the effects that show Betty Compson in a dual role as very different sisters, Cutts was a competent and occasionally imaginative director himself, and shouldn't be entirely dismissed from the picture. Still, it's an intriguing glimpse into the great man's apprenticeship, and wonderful that such historical treasure still crop up from time to time in distant corners of the globe.

Sherlock Jr.

1924, US, directed by Buster Keaton

I'm not even going to attempt to dissect Keaton's wonderful comedy, which provided easily the most laugh-filled evening I've enjoyed at the cinema this year, except to note that after only a few minutes I started thinking about how much I was looking forward to screening this for my son, still only 18 months old and thankfully as yet pretty uninterested in the television (except in so far as the remote control can be used as an improvised telephone). I loved Chaplin and Keaton when I was young, and Sherlock Jr reinforced my sense that it's been far, far too long since I spent time in their excellent company. I'm not sure if I'd ever seen this particular Keaton before, but the imaginativeness of the gags, both small-scale and death-defying, is often breathtaking; you're still recovering from the previous gag, or the previous portion of a multi-layered gag, when the next laugh is upon you.

Sunrise

1927, US, directed by F.W. Murnau

I'm always a little lost for words when dealing with the true masterpieces, mostly because it often seems as though everything's already been said -- even when writing mostly for myself, I have the strange sense that my thoughts are more than likely just repetitions or reworkings of things I've read along the way.

Murnau's film carries the sub-title "A Song of Two Humans," and that's as good a description of the film's effect as anything else -- despite the difference of medium, there's a direct, intense lyricism that reminds me of the best popular music, which functions as a kind of emotional essence in three of four minutes. Though the running time is rather longer here, as with the subsequent City Girl, Sunrise has the simplicity of mythology: a man yields to the temptation of another woman, a visitor from the city, before rediscovering his love for his wife. It might be a country song -- and there's no dismissive sarcasm in the comparison.

The point, of course, is what Murnau does with this bare skeleton: while preserving that straightforward narrative, the director finds complexity in the emotional shadings of the central couple as they stumble toward some form of reconciliation, a reconciliation embarked on in the most unpromising of circumstances. The director's effect is achieved particularly through the mastery of shifts in tone, from the leading man's darkest hours -- as he struggles with murderous thoughts -- through to the extraordinary explosion of joy both at the moment he realizes the depths of his love for his wife, and in the film's final granting of a kind of redemption just when things seem once again to be lost. There's a intentional universality to the setting, too: filmed in the US, the scenery transitions from what looks like a gloomy European village through bucolic landscapes to the razzmatazz of the vibrant 1920s city, as if to underline that this particular story could play out against any backdrop; the tram that marks the passage from country to city is almost like the tornado of The Wizard of Oz, whirling its passengers to a new and different world.

City Girl

1930, US, directed by F.W. Murnau

On the narrative level, Murnau's film is pared down to almost mythic levels -- boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy struggles to win father's acceptance of marriage. That's hardly the point, though -- Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, directed inspired by City Girl, similarly transcends the simplest of narratives to strive for emotional resonance, again among the hypnotic wheat fields of the heartland. The early sections of the film take place in the big city, where a young man has been sent to sell his family's crop. Murnau's unpicking of the city experience is as acute as Chaplin in Modern Times -- he re-casts a city restaurant as a a virtula factory, each widget, or diner, quickly slotting in to replace the last, every minute frantically assigned a purpose by the streams of workers. It's an overwhelming experience for a man used to rhythms dictated by the seasons and the elements rather than by the daily clock, and the joyful return to the land as the film advances is surely not just the joy of a young man in love but equally an embrace of another way of living. His run through the wheat fields, new wife in tow, is the high point of the film, an apotheosis of filmmaking romance as the camera is in exhilarating motion with the pair.

West of Zanzibar

1928, US, directed by Tod Browning

Remade a few years later, with sound, as Kongo, it's hard not to draw comparisons between Tod Browning's version and the later film, so closely do they hew to the same template. There are a few substantial differences -- the remake cuts out the extended stage-magic prologue that no doubt fascinated Browning, always a fan of unusual theatre folk, and also adds in a significant character -- but for the most part the narrative is almost jarringly similar, entire scenes playing out with near-identical results. The sound version is, if anything, rather more thoroughgoing in its seediness, layering further outrages on the manifold moral excesses already onscreen in 1928.

Ultimately, though, the films come down to something of a comparison between the differing acting styles of Lon Chaney, in one of his final screen appearances, and Walter Huston. There's no doubting the physical commitment of either actor, although Chaney is particularly arresting as he drops, animal-like, down the rope that leads to his sleeping area. He allows his withered legs to drop before him, before slinging the useless limbs one by one into a wheelchair: it's a fascinating bit of physical acting, which Browning repeats a number of times with variations. Chaney achieves an entirely different, subtler effect in the key scene where he realizes just how mis-guided his vengeance has been; the transition on his face from feral outrage to heartbroken sorrow is extraordinarily multi-layered, and no speeches from Huston in the later version can hold a candle to the intensity of the moment.

Note: This is part of the Watching Movies in Africa project. The film was shown in some locations in East Africa in the late 1920s/early 1930s, although white audiences objected to the film on the grounds that it suggested that whites were less than moral paragons, and also implied that white civilized values could not overcome African superstitions.

It

1927, US, directed by Clarence G. Badger

Where I struggled to comprehend the fuss made over Mae West's charms, I had no difficulty understanding just why Clara Bow's star blazed so brightly in the late 1920s: she's almost mesmerizingly charming, completely dominating the screen with her energy. In her way, Bow's character is as single-minded as West's in She Done Him Wrong or Barbara Stanwyck's in Baby Face, but her zestful approach to life is more endearing, if ultimately a similar exercise in social climbing. There's a striking zoom shot near the beginning that's highly unusual for the period - distractingly so at this remove, since I kept wondering whether the zoom lens had been invented that early or whether the filmmakers had used some other trick to achieve the effect.

Wings

1927, US, directed by William Wellman

I've only seen a sliver of William Wellman's sizeable filmography, and nothing in the last couple of years, but what struck me most here was his mastery of tone, adeptly navigating the switch from comedy in the idyllic pre-war phase through to poignant farewells, dramatic combat action and ultimately, even inevitably, catastrophe. Despite the scale of the production, there's a visual economy to his work, efficiently signaling emotional tone through placement of his actors - Clara Bow and Charles Rogers at play in a tight shot under a car, not a care in the world, followed later by the sober shots of Rogers's rival Richard Arlen and his parents as he prepares to head to war, with the film reaching is emotional high-point in the sequence reuniting Rogers and Arlen late on, the two men joined in tragic embrace at the centre of the frame as signs of destruction surround them.

Wellman displays an extraordinary invention in his shot choices, too, his camerawork often startlingly "modern" to my eye. An early shot of two lovers on a swing has the camera mounted on the swing itself, foreshadowing the woozy shot in Mean Streets where Martin Scorsese attaches the camera directly to Harvey Keitel. More showy still, and yet entirely in keeping with the liberating feel of the sequence, is the wonderful travelling shot through the patrons at the Folies Bérgères. Elsewhere, Wellman simply uses camera placement, rather than motion, to achieve his effects - as in the low-angle shot that emphasizes the enormous bulk of a German bomber.

I saw the film at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, with live organ accompaniment by Peter Krasinski. His work became such an absorbing part of the action that it was easy to forget there was an actual human being up there near the screen, adding drama and, not infrequently, humour to the visuals. The choice of film was no accident: the Chevalier in question was a wartime pilot from Medford.

Picture credit: Still scanned/uploaded by Silent Film Still Archive.

Nana

1926, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Renoir's second solo feature is a large-scale literary adaptation, an attempt to condense Emile Zola's eponymous novel - part of his multi-volume Rougon-Macquart epic - to manageable length. At times, the film slips explicitly into literary mode, with many, and sometimes lengthy, title cards to clarify the action (there is a certain amount of redundancy, with some cards repeating information that can clearly be deduced even in the absence of dialogue). Despite that occasional clumsiness, Renoir generally seems confident working on this expanded scale, even if the film occasionally misses the naturalistic settings of his previous La Fille de l'eau, confined as it is to sets that don't quite capture the heart of Zola's realist project (there are, though, several compositions which recall something of the earthiness of Flemish and Dutch art).

He uses his increased budget especially well in the theatrical scenes, creating a memorable portrait of the different social classes on one of the rare occasions when they occupy the same space - with the raucous upper decks contrasted with the genteel though hypocritical upper classes in the box seats. There are also a number of scenes shot in the stunning entrance way to a grand residence, including one particularly moving sequence where two of the men bewitched by Nana (Catherine Hessling) mend fences as they attempt to disentangle themselves from foolish liaisons. Those men are complicit in their own debasement, however, allowing Nana - a theatre actress and child of the streets, whose manager is as much pimp as impresario - to humiliate and exploit them.

While there are several fine performances (perhaps especially from the film's writer, Pierre Lestringuez, as a Bordenave, the theatre manager who foreshadows Jules Berry as Batala in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange), the film's most obvious weakness is Hessling, then Renoir's wife, whose acting style is often extremely distracting. While it's natural that Nana would continue to perform offstage as well as on, it's hard to accept that Hessling's version of the character could prove quite so beguiling and dangerous to otherwise intelligent, and powerful, men - though Renoir, perhaps naturally, might not have been in a position to perceive this.

La Fille de l'eau

1925, France, directed by Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir's first film as a solo director immediately introduces one of the director's recurrent tropes, that of a flowing river. While proximity to that river is critical to the development of the film's plot, Renoir's great preoccupations are present only in embryonic form, however, as the film moves somewhat jerkily from one event to the next, sometimes across gaps of logic (or at least credible motivation). The tone, too, is at times uncertain, veering from high melodrama to outright slapstick, at times in the same breath (as in the sequence where a hot-headed young farmer threatens a violent attack, then promptly falls into a tub of water; the dunking in no way cools his ardour, as might have been expected in a more comic register).

Nonetheless, even where Renoir is clearly finding his feet, he displays great creativity with his staging, such as in the remarkable scenes where his heroine (played by Catherine Hessling, Renoir's then-wife) is entrapped first in the bunk of her uncle's barge, and later in a gypsy wagon threatened by fire; both scenes are genuinely suspenseful, with striking placement of the actors in the former sequence. There is also an extended dream sequence that makes creative use of a variety of special effect ideas, whether reversing the film or playing with scale; in the middle of the sequence, a title card with the single word "Délire" appears, which must have been reassuring to any cinema patrons who happened into the theatre during that particular portion of the film.