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Madeline Brandeis’ The Star Prince is a trip. I feel like I say this about a lot of silent films, or at least think it, but to be fair many of them really ARE, you watch them and you are in fact transported to a strange new world.

However, few movies are quite as out there as The Star Prince, a fairy tale that takes place in a world entirely populated by child actors and animals. (Brandeis founded The Little Players' Film Co, which specialized in movies with all-child casts.) The animals spend a lot of time gamboling - there is a LENGTHY sequence involving two black bear cubs, who as far as I can tell have no relevance to the plot? I enjoy gamboling bear cubs as much as anyone but you’d think the movie would at least pretend they were… transformed knights, or something.

The story of the Star Prince is that he is a prince who came to earth one night on a falling star… except actually he is the child of a beggar woman (played, like all the adults in this movie, by a child), which he discovers only after throwing stones at her because he’s just so full of himself on account of the whole Star Prince thing. He is APPALLED to discover that he is the child of this unkempt creature, and rejects her scornfully, only to be punished with a fairy’s curse that makes him an ugly beggar himself.

The curse is partially lifted when he frees a squirrel (which appears to be stop motion animated taxidermy?), so he is a beautiful beggar rather than an ugly beggar. And that is the point at which he meets… the princess! They fall in love!

But ALAS, there is another suitor for the princess’s hand. He is an Evil Dwarf. (The Evil Dwarf is significantly taller than several of the other characters, including the princess.) He and his Evil Witch ally kidnap the Star Prince and imprison him in a cave, which has a secret magic door that leads directly to the princess’s room, so the Evil Dwarf and the Evil Witch have to summon their imps and send them down the princess’s chimney to kidnap the Star Prince again.

At which point they send him off into the forest to find a hidden bag of gold, which he does with the aid of his stop motion taxidermied squirrel friend… Etc. etc., the princess is almost forced to marry the Evil Dwarf, who towers over the clergyman performing the princess, but the Star Prince shows up just in time and the princess’s fairy godmother proclaims him the true prince and transforms the Evil Dwarf into a pig. The Star Prince’s beggar mother shows up to forgive him! The Star Prince and the Princess are married! The black bears never show up again.
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Mabel Normand’s short film “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” is best remembered now as the first appearance of Charlie Chaplin’s “Tramp” character - in a more drunken and lecherous form than in his later appearances (sayeth the film description; I haven’t actually seen any of Chaplin’s Tramp films so I can’t compare).

It’s a short slapstick comedy about a girl (Normand) who gets locked out of her hotel room in her pajamas, and sneaks into the hotel room across the hall, only to hide under the bed when the gentleman staying there returns… and then to be discovered by the gentleman’s wife… at which point Mabel’s own sweetheart arrives, and jumps to exactly the same erroneous conclusion about Mabel’s presence in the gentleman’s bedroom. A battle royale ensues. The tramp weaves drunkenly in and out of the action throughout.

This is an interesting bookend to yesterday’s musings about domestic violence in silent film, because Normand’s approach is so at odds with Alice Guy Blache’s: The Ocean Waif is a drama, and the waif’s abuse by her foster father is a brutal threat, whereas “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” is a comedy and thus treats its violence comically.

I’m not sure if I have a deeper thought about this - I’m circling around the way that genre shapes the way that audiences view characters’ actions, so that you can have, say, a show like Agents of SHIELD where the heroes will do literally the exact same thing as the villains and a large part of the audience will still accept them as heroes because, you know, the narrative says so!
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Friends! Romans! Countrymen! I have discovered a veritable treasure trove of Alice Guy Blache films on Kanopy, including The Ocean Waif, a collection called Three Films by Alice Guy Blache that includes “A House Divided,” “Canned Harmony,” and “Falling Leaves,” plus!!! six more films in the collection Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology.

This anthology also includes films by Lois Weber (!), Germaine Dulac (!!!), and Olga Preobazhenskaia (!!!!!), as well as filmmakers I’ve never even heard of. I thought I had tracked down at least the names of all the early female filmmakers, BUT NO, there are more! I’m particularly intrigued by Mary Ellen Bute’s early experimental films and Madeline Brandeis’ 1918 fantasy film The Star Prince, directed when Brandeis was just 21…

I’m excited partly just on general principles, but also because I think I’ve finally broken my silent film block. For years I’ve sporadically watched silent films in the hopeless yearning that someday I would understand and enjoy them, and… it finally seems to have happened! I didn’t love all these films, but my love or lack thereof grew from their own merits and not my own struggle with the silent film media.

So as not to crush you under an avalanche of mini-reviews, I’ll just mention here a few of my favorites. My favorite Alice Guy Blache film from the Early Women Filmmakers anthology is “La Barricade,” a six minute film which features a teenage boy going out to the barricades (largely, it seems, out of curiosity) and nearly getting shot by firing squad, only for his mother to fling herself in front of him at the last moment, at which point the soldiers lower their guns. The true heroine of the piece!

I also quite like “Une Histoire Roulante,” a very short film which follows a giant barrel as it rolls through Paris, causing mayhem. Delicious physical comedy - Alice Guy Blache had comic timing down pat. (You can also see some of this comic instinct in “A House Divided,” about a husband and wife who separate, but still have to live together, and communicate by sending each other snarky notes.)

An Ocean Waif suffers somewhat because the print is badly damaged - I’m not sure, in fact, if it is a complete print. A few of the plot developments occur so abruptly that I sort of think that the ravages of Time destroyed part of the film. (There's also less ocean than you might expect from a film called The Ocean Waif. I feel that there ought to be at least a few ravishing sea shots, but no.)

Instead, this is the story of a girl who washed up on shore as a baby. Grown to young womanhood, she escapes from her violent foster father - side note: one of the things that has struck me about silent film is how visceral the violence often is, not in the sense that it’s gory (so far I haven’t seen any blood at all) but in the sense that it’s sudden and feels unchoreographed. Even if emotions are rising in the scene beforehand, it’s still startling when the Ocean Waif's foster father begins to beat her.

The Ocean Waif takes refuge in an abandoned house, which has the reputation of being haunted. In short order, the house is rented by a novelist, who (once he ascertains our girl is not a ghost) finds in her wonderful inspiration for a story! And also falls in love with her, because of course he does.
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I was so taken with the Alice Guy-Blache documentary that I watched last week that afterward I went on another trawl of Youtube to see if I could find any films of hers that I haven’t seen. And I found two! Both had Dutch intertitles, which I translated with Google translate. This may be an official sign that I have gone Too Far in my quest for Alice Guy-Blache films, but here we are. (Neither one has a sound track, so I played Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake as background music, which of course was not tailored to the movies but was easier than watching them in absolute silence.)

The first is God Disposes, a melodrama about a young man whose parents disown him after he marries an actress. After he and his wife fall on hard times, the young man returns! intending to rob/murder his father!!! but the young man’s own son took the bullets out of the gun, so instead the young man and his father reconcile!!!!! I feel that I might be a little more leery of reconciling with a relative who had just tried to shoot me, but whatevs, the grandson is super cute so it’s worth it probably.

The other (my favorite) is Two Little Rangers, an action-adventure Western starring two girls in adorable divided skirts. Their father, the postmaster of this wild west hamlet, is attacked and thrown over a cliff by the local desperado. (Don’t worry, he’s fine after his older daughter lassos him and helps him climb to safety.) Burning for revenge, our heroines set off in hot pursuit of the desperado! He tries to hide in a cabin, but is forced to flee when the older sister sets it on fire with a flaming arrow, whereupon the younger sister (who appears to be all of twelve), gun in hand and murder in her eyes, forces him off the cliff.

This one is delightful. I loved our two little action-adventure heroines; there’s something especially delightful about the fact that they are basically just ordinary girls? They have no special powers, they are not in any kind of fantasy universe, they’re just regular girls avenging their dad.
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I was really sad last fall to miss the showing of Pamela B. Green's Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache at the IU cinema, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to realize that the documentary is now available on Kanopy!

And it's a delight. I already knew the basics about Alice Guy-Blache, who was not only the first female director, but the first director of a narrative film ever, with her 1896 short film La Fee aux Choux (the cabbage fairy, who finds babies among the cabbages), but this documentary has loads of new information plus clips from many of Alice Guy-Blache's currently extant films.

(There's a section that I particularly loved where a film historian, plus a descendent of Guy-Blache and another descendent of her employer Leon Gaumont, walk around Paris finding places that were used in Guy-Blache's films, a bridge or a particularly steep staircase. They take the clip from Guy-Blache's film and overlay it with film of the place as it looks today, so it's this wonderful blend of past and present in this place that is still recognizably the same.)

Some of these films are available on Youtube - The Consequences of Feminism is one that the documentary discussed in some length, as it inspired young Sergei Eisenstein, who described it (without being able to remember the title or director) in his memoirs. But there are also clips from films I'd never heard of, and I was particularly delighted to discover that The Ocean Waif (1916) is also available on Kanopy, as there seems to be a definite shift toward a more modern cinematic style than her earlier works.

I was also delighted to learn that two of Blache's films (plus clips from her epic of the passion of the Christ) were found during Guy-Blache's lifetime, and she did in fact have a chance to see them and indeed to borrow the reels to show at a lecture she gave about her work. Previously I had read that in her later years she searched for her work without success, so it was lovely to lean that she did have at least a little success, and that it came about because in fact there was already a growing interest in her work: she was invited to a conference about early film and meeting her inspired this archivist to go look in his archives and say "Hey, we do have a couple of your films!"
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In 1916, Marion E. Wong founded her own production company, Mandarin Film Company, and wrote, directed, and acted in her first film: The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West, a seven- or eight-reel film that starred her friends and family from the Oakland, California Chinese-American community.

However, Wong couldn’t find a distributor, so the full film was only screened once, basically so the people who had worked on it could see it. Then it moldered in film canisters for decades, until a filmmaker working on a documentary about Hollywood Chinese interviewed the lead actress’s daughter, who gave him the two surviving reels, four and seven.

The surviving film is available on Youtube, but (last time I checked) without a soundtrack, which is why I didn’t watch it even though it sounded super interesting when I first read about it last year: I just couldn’t bring myself to watch 35-minutes of truly silent film when the intertitles have been lost and the reels aren’t even sequential.

So I was awfully pleased when the IU cinema showed it last week (with a soundtrack provided by a DJ!), and I am happy to report that it’s actually easier to follow than you might imagine from that description. There was apparently a story about politics in the original film - conspiracies etc? - this aspect is lost because of the fragmentary nature of the film and the lack of intertitles; but there’s also a love story, which is easy enough to follow and also rather sweet.

There’s a particularly cute moment when the hero and the heroine are dressing up for their… engagement party? Wedding?... and the hero puts on a hat that has long tassels dangling over his shoulders, and the heroine gives the tassels a little tug. Adorable!

Then we skip forward three reels. The heroine, through the machinations of the villainess (played by Marion E. Wong herself), has her baby wrenched from her arms and is tossed out of the house, and wanders henceforth on the moors like King Lear. Then the hero returns from wherever he has been! Still wearing his tasseled hat! And discovers that his baby is ill and his bride has been banished, and goes out to look for her! AND CAN’T FIND HER!

But fortunately in the meantime, she has wandered back to the house and collapsed across the doorstep in exhaustion, so when he gets home he picks her up and carries her bridal-style across the threshold. (This is some A++ silent film melodrama)

Meanwhile, the villainess confesses her evil plot (I’m assuming she accused our heroine of infidelity or something? But this is one of the subtleties that only the lost intertitles could clear up) and commits suicide. We close on a shot of the lead couple sitting on the steps with their adorable fat baby, which seems super conclusive to me, so I suspect that the film was only seven reels originally. Happy end!
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The IU Cinema was showing a medley of short silent films by women on Thursday, and after much waffling - it is a long drive just to see a movie - I went, and I’m glad I did because I had a delightful time. Tea at my favorite tea shop! Catching up on correspondence! A quick stop at the cafe where I used to work to pick up my favorite cookie for morning tea the next day! And then, of course, the movies.

I have a lot of trouble paying attention to old silent films when I try to watch them at home, even if they have a soundtrack (and if there isn’t a soundtrack, good night), but for whatever reason it’s a lot easier in a movie theaters. I expected a less modern accompaniment - I sort of twitched when a rap song started playing to accompany Lois Weber’s “Lost by a Hair”- however, the songs were well-chosen to accompany their subjects, so once I’d adjusted my expectations it went well enough.

A few highlights:

The surviving reels of Marion E. Wong’s The Curse of Quon Gwon, but I’m going to give that its own post.

A selection of Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic films, filmed in the 1920s in the black communities of central and south Florida; it looked to me like someone (Hurston herself?) came back later and cut them together to make a sort of silent documentary, which makes it more fun to watch, but I would have liked to know who did it. (The cutting is particularly obvious in the segment called “Girl Rocking,” with a young woman in a rocking chair; the camera cuts in close to her face, then cuts out, then we get a close-up of her foot on the porch floor as she rocks, etc.) It’s fascinating to watch; I particularly liked the segment about the sea baptism, and the different children’s clapping and dancing games.

“That Ice Ticket,” a short film about a young woman juggling a trio of suitors, whose little brother decides to “help” her by putting up a smallpox quarantine sign to see which one is willing to risk illness to see her. (He’s lucky they don’t all run for it!) This is an example of regional cinema; the director/lead actress, Angela Murray Gibson, made movies in the small community of Casselton, North Dakota. Before the big studios took over movie production in the mid-twenties, a lot of little regional movie companies popped up like this: Nell Shipman’s Idaho outfit at Priest Lake is another example. There’s not a whole lot of information about them and many of the films haven’t survived, so it was a treat to see one.

However, probably my very favorite film was the last one, episode nine of Hazards of Helen: “Leap from the Water Tower.” We’re introduced to Helen when she rides on screen on her horse, wearing a divided skirt and a cowboy hat, with her little dog running at her side, and I was all, “Not to be dramatic, but I would die for Helen.”

Not that I would ever need to die for Helen, because Helen is the original plucky heroine and would obviously be the one saving me as I swooned on a handcar after being kidnapped by villains or something.

Anyway, in this episode, Helen (who is a telegraph operator) receives a message that a train has been SABOTAGED! - so she rides out to the water tower, climbs up, and jumps off the water tower onto the train. Not gonna lie, the leap from the water tower is way less exciting than the title made me expect, but you have to remember that the stars were doing all their own stunts at the time, and when you consider the fact that Helen is taking an actual jump onto an actual moving train and then walking along the train top to warn the engineers, the daredeviltry quotient definitely goes up.
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After doing so much reading about silent film, I decided that I ought to see one of the classics, so I watched Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which stars America’s Sweetheart Mary Pickford and was written by her best friend, Frances Marion.

For the non-silent-film-buffs in the audience, Mary Pickford was a huge star in the 1910s and 1920s, whose legions of adoring fans demanded that she continued playing little-girl characters like Rebecca right up into her thirties. The visual limitations of film stock make this somewhat understandable - basically the picture is unclear enough that you could take twenty-five-year-old Mary for eleven-year-old Rebecca - but nonetheless I think this probably says something distinctive about film audiences of the time.

My suspicion is that it’s saying something about cultural discomfort with female sexuality, but I haven’t watched enough Pickford films or read enough about silent film to say this for sure.

Anyway! This film is definitely a period piece - I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve got a yen for silent film in the first place - but a charming one, and surprisingly close to the original book. Of course there are liberties (I’m pretttty sure that the original book didn’t have the circus scene), but nowhere near as egregious as the Shirley Temple version where Rebecca becomes a radio star for some godforsaken reason.

Also, re: Cari Beauchamp’s book about Frances Marion, the circus scene came about when Frances described to Mary some of the games that she and her friends used to play when they were children, and Mary laughed till she cried because she never got to play such games as a child; when she put on a show it was as a vaudeville performer who was the sole breadwinner for her fatherless family.

So really, if anyone ever deserved to mess around with a homemade circus scene, it was clearly Mary Pickford.
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What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I devoted Saturday afternoon to the newest Charles Lenox mystery, The Vanishing Man, which is always a fine occupation for any afternoon. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get to hear more of Lenox’s reactions to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (we witness him devour it at a rapid rate, but there’s no weeping in the railway carriage a la Horace Greeley), but then it occurred to me that most of the audience won’t have read the book and could not care less about Charles Lenox’s Opinions About Little Eva.

I also finished Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. This book is great: I particularly loved the way that it portrays the dense social connections between those powerful women of Hollywood, like Frances Marion’s friendship with Mary Pickford. (For example: the two of them made a comedy together, and the studio execs said it wasn’t funny and hemmed and hawed about releasing it, but the terms of the contract meant that they had to… and the theatrical audience thought it was hilarious.)

But the later chapters, through no fault of Beauchamp’s, are kind of a bummer, because the big money moves into Hollywood and squeezes all the flexibility and creative joy out of the movie-making process, till Frances Marion finally quits and takes up sculpting because she wants an art form where she has some control over the final product.

What I’m Reading Now

George Gissing’s The Odd Women has been vaguely on my radar for years, but I’ve put off reading it because really, do I want to read what a late Victorian man has to say about the Woman Question? Do I? As a general rule the answer is no, but Gissing has clearly given the matter some real thought; as I haven’t finished the book yet I have no idea if I’m going to like where he ends up, but at least it’s been an interesting ride getting there.

I’m holding out hope for the older Madden girls to actually start their school. No one seems to think they will and I want them to prove the naysayers wrong.

I’ve stalled a bit in Kristin Lavransdattar: I got to the end of Book Two, Part Two, and then I stopped because Expandspoilers )

But I’m hoping to get back in the saddle this week. Can’t stop now! I’m halfway there! And there’s no one else Undset can kill whose death will hurt me like that.

What I Plan to Read Next

The next book on my “I intend to read this because Nina Auerbach discusses it in Communities of Women” list is Henry James The Bostonians. Full disclosure: the only Henry James book I have read is Daisy Miller, which I disliked so intensely that… well, that’s why it’s the only Henry James book that I’ve read. But maybe The Bostonians will surprise me like The Odd Women did?

White Water

May. 2nd, 2019 10:07 am
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In 1923 and 1924, when silent film actress and director Nell Shipman was struggling to save her production company and her menagerie of animals out at Priest Lake, Idaho, she made a series of short films on northern subjects (in keeping with her persona as The Girl from God’s Country, God’s Country being the frozen north for some reason).

One of these shorts, White Water, is available in its entirety on Youtube, and as I’ve been reading Kay Armitage’s book about Shipman I decided to watch it. The credits in the film list Shipman’s lover Bert van Tuyle as the director, but the Women Film Pioneers Project lists it as a co-directed production, so make of that what you will. Shipman did write all the screenplays for all of her Priest Lake projects.

This one is twenty minutes of pure melodrama. Shipman arrives in a logging camp. (Armatage says her character is a wildlife photographer, although there’s no indication of this in the movie.) She stops, enchanted by the sound of a young man playing the fiddle while his younger brother dances… until the boy collapses from hunger.

Why can’t the young man get a job as a logger? Shipman asks. And then unfolds their tale of woe: the young man has lost his nerve to log since he cut down a tree that fell on his younger brother and stunted his growth forever! So Shipman takes them under her wing and helps the young man find a non-logging job.

Then the boy, while playing by the riverside, falls into the water… right before the loggers release the logs to flow downstream! He could be crushed! And if he’s not crushed, he’s HEADING RIGHT FOR THE WHITE WATER!!!

So Shipman jumps into a canoe and rows out to save him and topples in the water herself, but don’t worry, it all turns out fine in the end. It’s an impressive sequence, especially when you realize that actors did all their own stunts at the time, particularly in a shoestring operation like Shipman’s.

(Side note: in my silent film novel, one of the heroine’s HAS to be injured in a stunt gone wrong, preferably by falling off a cliff or something so there’s a heart-stopping moment where the other is afraid that SHE’S ACTUALLY DEAD!!!! But actually she’s just twisted her ankle and wisecracks all the way back to the studio as they carry her on a makeshift stretcher.)

I don’t think most modern day viewers would White Water appealing - movie making has changed so much - but it’s an interesting piece from a historical point of view.
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What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Kay Armatage’s The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema, which has given me for an excellent idea for a novel about a young woman directing a movie near the end of the silent era (I’m thinking about 1924, which was the year Shipman’s productions closed down: the big studios really began to squeeze out independent productions at that point), involving either a car chase or a boat race, and she swoops down on her best friend/former lover all “You should star with me! Our characters are running away from bootleggers!”

I also watched one of Shipman’s short films on Youtube, so I should write a quick review of that.

Marie Rutkoski’s The Winner’s Curse, the first of a trilogy I probably won’t be continuing, because I found this book pretty meh. It’s a slavefic that’s not quite iddy enough to be proper slavefic but also not socially astute enough to be a serious book about slavery, and I found the main romance pretty mushy.

My biggest reaction to Penelope Farmer’s Emma in Winter was that I simply have to read Farmer’s earlier book, The Flying Summer, because Emma in Winter refers to it so heavily that it feels like a reflection of the earlier book rather than a book of its own.

Psychologically this makes total sense. If I learned how to magically fly one summer, I would probably spend the rest of my life pining for it. But from an entertainment standpoint, I wanted there to be a bit more to it than “Emma and a classmate share a dream of flying, which takes them back in time to watch the geological history of England I guess.”

What I’m Reading Now

“When [Freud] dismissed women’s yearning for equality as “penis envy,” was he not merely stating his own view that women could never really be men’s equal, any more than she could wear his penis?”

Betty Friedan is socking it to Freud in The Feminine Mystique and I’m having a good time with it. It’s especially fun because she starts out by proclaiming her enormous respect for Freud and then goes on to demolish his failure to understand at least half of the human race.

I’ve also about a third of the way through Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial, which is a weird book. In someone else’s hands I think this would become a satire - prophecies about the world’s imminent end are so easily satirized, after all - but here it’s gaining uncanny force from the characters’ belief in it, reluctant though that belief is in some cases.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field for my reading challenge “a book outside your genre comfort zone,” and I really ought to begin reading, but I have come to the glum conclusion that “outside my genre comfort zone” will almost inevitably mean “something I’m not that interested in reading.” Ugh. But the point of a challenge is to push oneself, right?

Hypocrites

Oct. 14th, 2018 08:43 am
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Unlike Lois Weber’s short film Suspense, her movie Hypocrites has not aged well. It’s a ham-handedly didactic movie that nonetheless doesn’t seem quite aware of what the word hypocrisy means. It is, in fact, hypocritical for a politician to campaign on HONESTY (he has a giant banner that reads HONESTY) while taking backroom bribes on the sly, but I wouldn’t call it hypocritical for a family to sit weeping at a dying child’s bedside, even though they may have hastened the child’s end by allowing her to stuff herself out of a box of INDULGENCE.

Yes. There is a literal box of INDULGENCE. Her brother is reading out of a book entitled SEX, by the way.

Anyway. The parents may be careless about nutrition, but that’s only hypocritical if they also take every opportunity to preach the importance of plain wholesome food for children while feeding their daughter on INDULGENCE. But there’s nothing in the movie to show that they’re espousing standards they don’t live up to.

The movie is most interesting to me because of the storm of controversy it aroused at the time. In the movie, these instances of hypocrisy and not-actually-hypocrisy-but-whatever are revealed by an allegorical figure of Truth, as portrayed by the ghostly figure of a naked woman (shot with double-exposed film, which does look pretty cool), who has to walk around with one arm held awkwardly over her breasts because it’s 1915. Shock! Scandal!

I have no proof, but I suspect that Weber chose to portray Truth as a naked woman precisely because she knew it would cause this reaction, and wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of film censorship boards. And in that, at least, she was successful.

Lois Weber

Oct. 7th, 2018 08:05 pm
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In her heyday in the 1910s, Lois Weber was one of the most famous directors in America, ranked with Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith. But her career declined precipitously in the 1920s, and now she’s slipped (or rather been forcibly shoved) into the margins of film histories. (Although she’s had a bit of a renaissance lately. Here’s a nice article about her from the New York Times: Lois Weber, Eloquent Filmmaker of the Silent Screen.)

To be fair, the 20s killed D. W. Griffith’s career too: like Weber, he was regarded as a ham-handed, old-fashioned moralist, out of touch with the hedonistic youth of the Jazz Age. But at least he’s still prominent in film history books.

But Weber’s films are still more accessible than, for instance, Nell Shipman’s. The Blot (a film about the low pay of college teachers which has become timely again with the rising use of poorly paid adjunct faculty) is available on DVD - which Netflix has! So I should probably watch it soon, in case Netflix ceases to have it at some point, which has been known to happen with more obscure movies.

Shoes is about a poverty-stricken girl who has to sell her virginity to obtain the pair of shoes that will allow her to continue working and thus supporting her family, and it’s also available on DVD, although neither Netflix nor any of the libraries I can access have it, so for now it will just be the one that got away.

However, there are PLENTY of other Weber films on the internet, so I’m not going to be hurting for choice. Options include:

Suspense, which is the only one of these I’ve actually watched so far, for the simple reason that it is ten minutes long. It’s pretty good! Still effectively suspenseful 100 years on, plus it pioneered the use of a split screen

Hypocrites, a 49-minute film which had a nude scene, in which a naked woman is a symbolic representation of Truth, that scandalized audiences. This version has Portuguese subtitles, buuut it also has music and honestly I find it almost impossible to watch a film that is truly, completely silent.

Where Are My Children?, a 62 minute film about birth control (for) and abortion (against).

And there’s a partial print of Idle Wives, which was believed completely lost till the first reel turned up in the New Zealand Film Archive. (You know what would make a super fun mystery novel, in the vein of Possession? The detective characters discovers a treasure trove of lost silent film prints. Either the discovery is the mystery, ooooor the detective discovers them early on and then has to figure out how they got there - why they were saved - etc etc.)

Anyway, I couldn’t find a version with sound of this one, so I include it in case some more intrepid soul than I wants to take on half an hour of totally silent film.

There’s also a documentary short about Lois Weber’s career, directed by Svetlana Cvetko and produced by Elizabeth Banks (among others), who played Effie Trinket in the Hunger Games trilogy. The link goes to a trailer; I’m not sure how you actually see the short itself, unless it happens to show at a film festival in your area.

***

In this orgy of research about women film directors in the silents, I stumbled upon Marion Wong. In 1916, at the age of 21, Wong founded her own film company in Oakland, California, which made one film (The Curse of Quon Gong), and then folded because Wong couldn’t find commercial distribution.

Much of the film was lost, but two reels were rediscovered in a relative’s basement in 1969, and the link above leads to the footage from those reels. I suspect it will be an interesting but somewhat frustrating viewing experience: the movie was originally eight reels long, so we’re missing a lot. Some blessed soul has scored it, at least.
osprey_archer: (cheers)
Of all the female silent film directors, my favorite - at least in theory; I haven’t managed to see any of her films yet - is Nell Shipman, a Canadian actress who started her own production company in the wilds of Idaho (truly: two days horseback ride from the nearest dirt road) in the early 1920s, where she codirected her own productions, did her own stunts, and starred as a tough, stalwart action heroine who in at least one movie rescues her own husband.

Nell Shipman, I would like to note, wasn’t even the first female action hero. (Here’s an article from the Atlantic about The Forgotten Female Action Stars of the 1910s.) There have been action heroines for essentially as long as we’ve had feature films, and they’ve been wildly popular for nearly that long, and yet somehow each generation forgets all about it and believes that the action heroine is a bizarre innovation that we have invented from scratch and will the audience go for it???

And by “we” I definitely mean “studio execs in Hollywood.”

The two Shipman titles that I’ve managed to track down on Youtube are The Grub-stake and Something New.

I’d also like desperately to see The Girl from God’s Country, which is either Shipman’s sequel or Shipman’s exploration of a screen persona created in two earlier films that she starred in, God’s Country and the Woman and Back to God’s Country. (God’s Country is, of course, the Northlands. Back to God’s Country was filmed in Alberta and some members of the crew got frostbite.)

But unfortunately The Girl from God’s Country, like so many other silent films, has been lost. Oh well.

There is however a documentary about Nell Shipman, which is also called Girl from God’s Country. (The trailer is here.) Unfortunately it’s not available on Netflix or through any of the libraries I have access to (although the Purdue library does have a copy of the book by that name that is about Shipman! ...I may be going a little too far down this rabbit hole), so I would have to buy it, so… we’ll see.

Maybe I should actually watch a couple of Shipman’s movies first, and then decide if I’m interested enough to buy a documentary about her. That would probably be the smart thing to do.
osprey_archer: (Default)
Pink-Slipped has had one good effect, which is that I have spent the day (it’s been slow here at the library) searching out silent films by female directors that have ended up on Youtube.

This is somewhat nitpicky work: it can be hard to pin down, for instance, exactly how long a movie is supposed to be. But I ended up with a rich haul, and I intend to share it with you as I have the opportunity to watch the films.

Today we have Alice Guy-Blaché, who became the world’s first female director - in fact, one of the first directors in the world full stop - when she began directing short films in France for Gaumont in 1896. Another aspect of that nitpickiness: do you hyphenate the name? Refer to her as Guy or Guy-Blaché or just Blaché?

Quebecois director Marquise Lepage refers to Alice as “Guy” (pronounced Ghee, with a hard G) in her documentary about Guy-Blaché’s life, which is available on Youtube: The Lost Garden. It has a bit of a home-movie feeling to it - it's not a slick production, and some of the voiceovers are stilted - but it's full of interesting information. Lepage interviewed Guy’s daughter and granddaughter and also a number of film scholars, who gamely allowed themselves to be dressed up as characters from Guy’s films, which is kind of adorable. I also enjoyed the clips from Guy’s films, which showcase a wider variety of her work than you can see on Youtube.

But Youtube does have a few films: La Statue, a five-minute short from 1905 about a statue that starts moving and two men who seem to be clowns? why are there random clowns? just go with it, as well as The Consequences of Feminism, a six-minute short from 1906 which posits a future in which men and women have switched places. You can tell, because the women are smoking cigars and men can’t go outside without being accosted by a lustful female. But staying indoors doesn’t help either! Then they just come inside to importune you for your sexual favors!

I suspect that men in the audience missed the pointedness of this short.

And then there’s her twelve-minute short Falling Leaves, which has an accompanying piano score written by a guy who specializes in scores for silent films, whose Youtube page I have bookmarked for future exploration. In “Falling Leaves,” a doctor tells a family that the older daughter of the house will die “by the time all the leaves have fallen”... which prompts the little daughter to tie the leaves back to the trees.

This is a little sappy to modern tastes. What particularly caught my attention here is the fact that the little girl (this is in 1912) is essentially dressed like a flapper: simple dropped waist dress, short hair. The flappers were wearing a grown-up version of the clothes they wore as little girls.
osprey_archer: (Default)
I was all excited when I got Jane M. Gaines' Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, but this excitement quickly dissipated when I actually started reading it and discovered that Gaines has no intention of actually answering the question in the subtitle. "Thus in chapter 1, 'What Happened to Women in the Silent U.S. Film Industry?' I refused to answer the question posed, using the 'what happened?' query to anticipate a theory of history in which past and present are put into constant relations."

Well aren't you edgy.

This is particularly maddening because right afterward, literally in the next few sentences, Gaines articulates a few more topics that I want to know more about, which Gaines just as clearly has no intention of exploring: "1) Silent-era women as writers, actresses, producers, and directors disappeared from the limelight. 2) They were left out of historical accounts of the era. 3) They slipped away along with silent cinema and remained buried in the 1970s when they might have been uncovered again. But in the present, I intervene, deferring an answer to my question and asking the reader to take a detour through the book's chapters to find out how the 'answer' to the 'what happened' question eludes us."

I suspect that a slightly less lily-livered writer might have found the "answer" less "elusive," and might indeed have posited some possible "explanations." Gaines instead opts for the argument that "they did not know and we cannot know" what happened, which - for the reader, if not Gaines - inevitably raises another question: "Then why the hell are you bothering to write this?"

It's cowardice thinly veiled by post-structuralism. Rather than saying anything substantive, you say, "Ah, but when we write about the past are we not in truth writing about ourselves?" - and of course from a certain point of view the answer to this has to be yes, because the questions we bring to the past inevitably reflect the issues we care about now. So as long as this sort of bloviating is all you ever do, you'll never be really wrong.

But you'll also never make any real contribution, and I find this especially galling in this context, when gender discrimination in the film industry is still so strong. Gaines may be right that "feminist discourse is academically automatic," but outside of academia it is not such a potent force - and even in academia, the fact that everyone can talk the talk doesn't mean that the academy actually walks the walk of hiring and promoting and publishing and giving tenure to women on an equal basis with men.

And it's such an enormous missed opportunity! She's steamrolled over so many potentially interesting things in order to say absolutely nothing! She brings up, for instance, Gene Gauntier, an actress in the 1900s and 1910s who starred in a series of films as a cross-dressing spy and then directed films in her own production company (!!!!!) till it fell apart around 1915 - and then does nothing with it! Nothing! How do you do nothing with a cross-dressing spy heroine?

Maya Deren

Sep. 25th, 2018 07:22 am
osprey_archer: (Default)
Have you felt a tragic lack of surrealist arthouse short films in your life recently? Well, look no further, because I have just discovered Maya Deren, who directed and starred in a series of strange, dreamy, silent black-and-white films in the 1940s and 50s.

Many of the films are on Youtube, in various stages of completeness, with various soundtracks and also with no soundtrack at all. It’s sort of irritating that it’s hard to tell what (if anything!) is the definitive version - for instance, the one soundtrack Youtube doesn’t have for “Meshes of the Afternoon” is the score written by Teiji Ito, Deren’s third husband - but it’s also strangely fitting, given the amorphousness of the films themselves.

Probably the purest experience is to watch one of the silent versions, but I found it almost impossible to pay attention without sound. Maybe they showed with an accompanist? Or maybe accompanists are not Art.

Also, let me be real with you, as interesting as I find Deren’s films in the abstract, I found Meshes of the Afternoon in particular a bit of a slog to actually watch. (That's a link to the version I watched on Youtube.) A woman goes into a house, and there’s a loaf of bread with a knife in it, and stairs, and curtains billowing out of the window, and she looks out of the window and sees a nun-like figure (who, we later discover, has a mirror for a face) walking away - and herself following… and then the loop starts over again, with variations as we go. It’s interesting afterward but not actually interesting to watch, if that makes sense.

But I did enjoy the other Deren that I watched, At Land. A woman (Deren, with the most fabulously wild curly hair) washes in from the sea, and climbs a driftwood structure - which somehow leads up to a fancy dining room table - and Deren crawls down the middle of it, between the diners, who don’t see her - till she reaches the end, where a man is playing chess (against himself? against the board? the pieces move by themselves; maybe the board is playing chess) and loses a pawn, which Deren then chases along the seaside and down a sunny lane and through a house till we’ve forgotten all about the pawn - until we come upon an oceanside chess game, and Deren snatches the pawn and races back up the beach, back through time, passing her past selves as she goes.

It really does feel like a dream - the seamless transitions between seemingly disparate settings, the way that it loops back on itself, and the way that it seems to mean something but never quite coheres around one meaning in particular. Quite an experience - which is what Deren wanted, of course.
osprey_archer: (books)
Although the supposed theme of this 100 books list is "100 books that influenced me," it's not always easy or even possible to pinpoint any measurable influence from a particular book. But Jeanine Basinger's Silent Stars is an exception: it had a clear and concrete influence on my life and my movie-going habits.

Before I get to that, however, let me sing the praises of Silent Stars, which is one of the most exuberant, enthusiastic, but nonetheless measured and thoughtful nonfiction books I've ever read. Each chapter is the profile of a different star (or occasionally thematically grouped stars) from the silent movie era. In her introduction, Basinger explains that her choices were "influenced by pleasure, by surprise and delight." That delight shines through in all her profiles.

In short, this is the book of a fan. The style isn't internet-fannish (not enough capslock, not enough exclamation point), but the feeling behind it, the willingness to watch and rewatch movie after flickering, poorly preserved movie - this is a labor of love. The melodrama of silent movie plots, the terse and snarky title cards, the sometimes ridiculous costumes: it would be easy to mock silent movies for their excesses, but instead these things fill Basinger with glee.

Her chapter about Mary Pickford encapsulates this beautifully: critics today often see the immensely popular Pickford's films as sentimental sexist twaddle, but Basinger notes instead the immense toughness of Pickford's characters. She was sweet and also an unholy hoyden: as one critic observed, "Good may have prevailed in Mary Pickford's movies, but the set of her tough little jaw told you it damn well better."

Forgiving is not quite the right word for this attitude. There's an element of focus to it: Basinger sees and notes what is bad about these movies, but the parts that she holds onto and internalizes are the parts that are good and useful to her. It's a nuanced and generous approach to criticism.

And generous, I think, is the word that I'm looking for to describe Basinger's attitude. She is generous in her love for these movies, generous in sharing it so enthusiastically with her readers, and generous to herself by focusing on what she likes best, without ignoring what is bad.

Silent Stars is the reason that I branched out beyond recent Hollywood movies. If Jeanine Basinger could get such joy out of Rudolf Valentino flaring his nostrils at the camera, then who knows what kinds of cinema might surprise and delight me? Golden age Hollywood, anime, French films, Bollywood - you never know until you try.

Oddly, given that Silent Stars is the book that started it all, the one kind of movie I've had trouble getting into are...silents. But I live in hope.
osprey_archer: (kitty)
The hero of D. W. Griffith's film Broken Blossoms isn't actually named Cheng Huan, though that's what the reviews all call him. Cheng Huan is the name of the character's shop. In the film the character is never named; he's always called The Yellow Man, as in the subtitle, "The Yellow Man and the Girl."

You can see why the reviewers might feel a little twitchy calling him that.

Cheng Huan/the Yellow Man is in fact played by a white guy, Richard Barthelmess, whose attempt at looking Chinese consists of keeping his eyes constantly half-lidded. Mostly this makes him look sleepy and lecherous, an expression unfortunately at odds with the purported chastity of his love for Lucy, an abused Cockney lass who collapses on the floor of his curio shop after her brutal father beats her.

The chastity of the romance is problematic: it's so much easier to get behind transgressive romances when the icky sex part is removed, after all. But given the shape of the story, the romance has to be chaste. Lucy collapsed helpless in Cheng's shop. Anything but chastity would be creepy and exploitative under the circumstances.

Because sex - not just interracial sex, but all sex - is icky: this is the bedrock principle on which Broken Blossom rests. If Griffith wanted to make a strong statement in favor of interracial romance he should have picked a different story - but if he wanted to make a strong statement in favor of interracial romance, he would have had to be less horrified by sex.

But sublimating the sex in the romance so thoroughly doesn't make it go away; it just transmutes it into something creepy and voyeuristic. Gentle Cheng is so shocked by beautiful Lucy's injuries that he bustles her up the stairs to his hidden Chinese bower. He settles her on his couch, gives her a Chinese robe thing to replace her torn clothes, and tucks the covers gently around her battered body, accidentally-on-purpose sniffing her hair as he leans in.

I submit that one doesn't rapturously sniff a beautiful girls hair if one's actions are merely a chaste homage to her shiningly beautiful spirit.

The undertones of creepiness are only strengthened by Lucy's alternating ignorance and confused acceptance of his attentions. During the hair-sniffing scene, for instance, Lucy is too busy admiring a Chinese doll he gave her to notice that Cheng is leaning over her like Dracula. Her childlike unawareness, coupled with her childlike delight in the doll, make her seem...well, like a child.

But then there are scenes where Lucy does seem aware of the sexual tension floating through the incense-laden air. Cheng appears by her couch late at night, and looks at her intently. Lucy looks back, confused, a little frightened, but accepting. We know that Cheng doesn't expect Lucy to offer sexual favors in return for his kindness, and would in fact be horrified if she did; but Lucy's so happy that finally someone has been kind to her that she's willing to go along with whatever he wants.

This resigned willingness is sad more than anything; and the movie does recognize that. But it expects viewers to see this as a sweet and romantic kind of sadness, akin the sadness of battered flowers, rather than just plain sad.

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