But before we silence silent movies ...

January is usually the month where I wrap up my previous year's monthly viewing series and tell you which one is coming next.

January 2017, however, is the month where I feel like I may be recovering from jet lag until February 2017.

But I still wanted to give you some kind of closure on No Audio Audient, perhaps the series I was most personally worried about before starting. Even if it won't be as lucid or as thorough as a post like this may have been in the past.

Twenty sixteen was my sixth year doing a monthly viewing series, although the first two years featured the same series. In 2011 and 2012 I did Getting Acquainted, in which I watched three films per month by a cinematic luminary with whom I was previously unfamiliar. Deciding that three movies per month was more than I could handle -- what a wimp -- I downshifted to just a single movie per in 2013, offering up what turned out to be my least-inspired series: Famous Flops. The series itself was a bit of a flop, at least as far as I was concerned, though not because the movies were difficult to watch. (I enjoy a good flop as much as the next guy, I just didn't think my picks were all that great.) I upped my game in 2014 with Australian Audient and in 2015 with Audient Auscars, which helped me catch up with unseen Australian movies and best picture winners, respectively. But outside of a stray undeserving best picture winner here and there, these didn't feel "difficult" either.

Silent movies were a bit different. There's a certain barrier to entry with silent movies that can be difficult to overcome -- even when some of them are only 45 minutes long. It wasn't the 45-minute ones that had me worried. It was the ones that ran over three hours. One even hit the four-hour mark.

But guess what? The four-hour film was one of two I awarded a five-star rating. (The other being the 45-minute one, ha ha.) And in fact, this may be the only series that has yielded two different films I gave my highest possible star rating. It never happened in Famous Flops, that I can tell you for certain.

Have I grown as a viewer? I don't know. I'm probably still seeing most silent movies as medicine, and not particular eager to get back to them right away. I'll need an excuse, I think.

But I sure am glad I did it. I saw four films that I consider masterpieces, the two that didn't get five stars coming in with a very respectable 4.5. And I didn't hate any of them.

How did I rate them? Well, here, I'll rank them from best to worst, making a fairly arbitrary choice between my #1 and #2:

1. Sherlock Jr. (February)
2. Greed (December)
3. The Kid (June)
4. The Big Parade (September)
5. The Lodger (May)
6. The Phantom Carriage (October)
7. I Was Born, But ... (November)
8. The Freshman (January)
9. Regeneration (March)
10. The Sheik (July)
11. Intolerance (April)
12. Broken Blossoms (August)

And the two Griffith movies pull up the rear. In 2016, I wasn't willing to rake Nate Parker over the coals for the personal baggage he brought to his version of The Birth of a Nation, but the director of the original got no love from me.

Want to know what's coming up in 2017?

Well, let's save that for tomorrow, so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. I'm guessing there are some of you who view silent movies as medicine as well, and stopped reading this post after the words "But before."

No Audio Audient: Greed, or how to watch a four-hour movie in 24 hours

This is the final installment of my 2016 series No Audio Audient, and now I will be taking a short/long break from silent movies. (No judgment, though; I quite enjoyed it.)

Sometimes, when finishing one of these year-long series on my blog, I metaphorically collapse in a heap from exhaustion.

Sometimes, though, I save the best for last.

And sometimes, it's both.

I'm not going to say Erich von Stroheim's Greed was the best film I watched for this series -- I also gave a full five stars to Sherlock Jr., and I can't say who would win in a face-off -- but it certainly ended things on a strong, if long, note. Especially given the baggage I brought into it, the difficulty I had getting a hold of it, and the difficulty I had carving out the significant time investment to watch it -- in the thick of the holiday season at that.

I'll address those in that order.

First, the baggage. Even without knowing much about Greed, I always associated it in my mind with Griffith's Intolerance, which I also watched for this series. Both are silent movies, both have abstract nouns as their titles, both figured to take an epic and multi-faceted approach to examining their chosen abstract nouns, and both are incredibly long. Because I didn't like Intolerance very much -- respected it somewhat, but didn't like it -- I worried that Greed would be another yucky spoonful of medicine. As it turns out, Greed is a far more focused effort than Intolerance, in spite of its epic running time, and that's just the first of myriad differences between the two.

Then there was the difficulty in getting my hands on it. I mistakenly believed that Greed, like most silent movies, is in the public domain, meaning that a multitude of versions would be available to watch on Youtube. I actually can't say for sure that it's not in the public domain, but I will tell you that a number of the Youtube links that apparently go to this movie end up saying that the content is not available for copyright reasons, providing pretty good circumstantial evidence. I did, however, find one available at about an hour and 47 minutes, a severely truncated version of the movie, though I thought I didn't care at that point. (See: previous comment about the holidays and exhaustion). Only after about five minutes did I realize that the title cards were in Italian. This was what stopped me in the midst of the November viewing I had planned, and forced me to rent it from iTunes instead. In retrospect, I realized I might have been able to turn on English subtitles (a funny option for a silent movie), but I'm glad I didn't recognize that at the time, because von Stroheim's full (or close to full) vision was what I ended up loving.

Which leads directly to my difficulty watching the movie. That difficulty arose from something I didn't notice until after I'd already started my iTunes download: that the version I was downloading was four hours long. I've never downloaded anything close to that long from iTunes -- I don't think I've even crossed the three-hour mark. It's not a problem of hard drive space, but a problem of time. No matter how long the movie is, you have to watch it during a 24-hour window before your rental expires. (It's the one time I wish I were linked up to the Australian iTunes instead of the U.S. one, because Australia gives you two days.) So I planned out how I would manage it very carefully. Having identified Tuesday as a viewing date because my wife was going to a Christmas party that night -- she didn't go, but that's neither here nor there -- I brought my computer in to work at lunch just so I could get an early start. I watched 20 minutes during lunch, then another 40 here and there before I finally got time to myself at night to tackle the remaining three hours. Figuring I'd watch the final few minutes the next morning if I just got too tired, I managed to avoid that fate by pulling in to the fish line around 12:30. And managed to write 40 Christmas cards (well, addressed 40 envelopes and stuffed in the cards) as I was doing it. So really, I watched it in just about exactly half of the 24 hours promised in the title of this post. Given that most of the remaining 12 hours would have been comprised of sleeping and working, it was still pretty tight.

How could I give a movie five stars if I were also addressing 40 Christmas cards?

A movie like Greed exceeds the status of a movie -- it becomes more like an experience, one you don't have to be closely watching every single second. At this point I should probably tell you more about it.

Even this four-hour version is a severely truncated version of von Stroheim's original vision. The film he originally made was more than eight hours long, and it was seen by only a dozen people. Needless to say, this version was hacked up by the studio, since even back in 1924 people were not watching eight-hour movies. The extra footage has subsequently been lost. The version that emerged was between two and three hours, as I understand it, and was a source of intense sadness and frustration to its director -- especially after the dozen who watched his original cut praised it as the greatest film ever made. (Not the same type of claim back then as it would be today, with nearly a century more movies to choose from, but still.)

The version I watched from iTunes was a 1999 attempted restoration of the director's original vision. This was managed with still photographs of the scenes that were cut and subsequently lost, inserted into the narrative at relevant junctures. Most of the cuts came from two subplots involving four other characters that are truly tangential to the main narrative -- one understands why the studios cut their material. But since the stills still existed, the restoration team placed them according to von Stroheim's original specifications. Realizing that still photographs don't play particularly well in an art form that relies on movement, the stills are given a sense of movement by the panning of the camera, the focusing in on certain parts of it, etc. And the content and composition of these photos is so rich that you really do feel like you're seeing the parts that were lost. As a technique, it reminded me a bit of that part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they show the passage of time in these guys' lives from still photos pored over lovingly by the camera. I almost feel like I preferred the Greed still photo approach to if I'd actually been able to see the moving images, as it made the movie feel like a historical relic of something that really happened -- like one would review old photos to get a window into the way the world once was. I found the effect captivating, and that it played an essential role in building this world.

What world? I should probably tell you a little bit about the story, which is remarkably simple. It's the story of a California miner named McTeague, who has a rotten streak he inherited from his no-good drunkard father, who dies early on. His mother begs a traveling dentist to take her son on as an apprentice, to get him out of this life, and indeed, McTeague picks up a new career. He falls in love with a patient, the cousin and intended fiancee of one of his best friends, who reluctantly agrees to let the more smitten McTeague step in and court her. She's initially resistant to a romantic involvement but is eventually convinced to marry McTeague. Just before they are able to get married, a lottery ticket wins her the very large sum of $5,000, leading to resentment from her cousin, who now regrets having allowed McTeague to step in. As they get married, she has a strange reluctance to ever spend any of the $5,000, which leads to ... well, not good things.

If this movie were directed by D.W. Griffith, this would be just one of six stories meant to illustrate the concept of greed. Von Stroheim restricted himself to three, two of which are the aforementioned subplots that were cut out of the movie, and indeed, I do believe they had significantly less screen time than his main narrative thrust. This leaner decision did wonders for me. I wasn't constantly left wondering which plot was progressing in which way, the feeling that overtook me as I steadily began paying only half my attention to Intolerance. Even while addressing Christmas cards, though, I could easily keep abreast of what was happening in Greed, a pace partly managed by the captivating use of the still photographs. I did seek clarification on a couple things in Wikipedia afterward, but they were minor.

And something about this story just blew me away. We burrow down deep into it. I mean, deep. In a weird way I was comparing it to the French storybooks about Babar the elephant, which I actually tease for their formidable length and their odd mixture of sweeping epic and minor detail. One we have, for example, tries to do everything from capture the entire building of a village, to talking about a single math lesson where someone thought that 4+4 = 9. I don't have time to explain it much better than that as this piece is already reaching a daunting length, but just know that that doesn't work in a children's story. But it works like gangbusters in a movie made for adults -- or at least, when the vision behind that movie is von Stroheim's. The depth of the development of these characters resembled something it might take a TV series a couple seasons to capture, as you bunkered down with them and really lived their lives with them. Greed is renowned for being shot on location, and I think that plays a big role here -- you get San Francisco of the era, as well as Death Valley, and dozens of other locations somewhere in between. The difference between location and a studio set is profound.

The performances here are also amazing. Von Stroheim gets real subtlety from his actors, as we watch emotions creep over their faces -- he didn't feel like had to have them play to the back of the theater at all. So Greed also feels more modern in its approach in this respect. I'll name the primary three in case their relatives are reading: Gibson Gowland as McTeague, Zasu Pitts as his wife Trina and Jean Hersholt as his friend-cum-rival, Marcus Schouler.

I'm quite sure I could go on about this movie for another hour or two of typing time. I'll just close by saying that the movie's cumulative effect is profound and immersive, and where it goes is uncompromising and bleak, worthy of the blackest crime thrillers -- and feeling years ahead of its time in that respect as well. The Death Valley climax is a real show stopper. The weight of everything that's happened and how it's all resolved just leaves you speechless.

I do have one final thought, though. At the very beginning of Greed, when von Stroheim's credit is on the screen, it says "Personally directed by Erich von Stroheim." Never seen the word "personally" inserted in there, and initially I thought it was kind of funny. The more I watched, and the more I realized the type of epic vision (I need a synonym for that word) that was compromised by what the studio did to his film, I felt the tragedy of that extra adverb. He did put his whole personal self into the movie, but it was just too large, too ungainly, and too brilliant for its time. His contemporaries didn't know what to do with it. Maybe we would today.

And on that note, we bring No Audio Audient to a close. Well, not quite. I imagine I'll have a post to wrap it up in January, but that's a consideration for another day. I'll also be giving you a little taste of the movies I'll be watching each month in 2017, since I've already got my idea for next year (as well as 2018, come to think of it, though I'll wait a year before telling you about that). But 2017's monthly series will wait for another day as well.

For today, back to getting ready to get on an airplane in five days, and all the things I still have to do before then.

No Audio Audient: I Was Born, But ...

This is the penultimate installment of my 2016 series in which I am catching up with previously unseen silent movies.

For those of you coming here expecting Erich von Stroheim's Greed -- all none of you -- you're going to have to wait until December. There's a whole story that goes with why I didn't see Greed in November, full of twists and turns and developments that are interesting only to me, and maybe not even then. I'll save that for next month.

This month, it's all about my 11th hour substitute: I Was Born, But ... 

And it was literally almost an 11th hour substitute, as I began watching it at 10 p.m. on the last night in November my schedule would allow me to watch it.

The movie was on my Letterboxd list of potential candidates for this series, but I didn't imagine I'd get to it because I planned to watch Greed in November and then some silent Christmas movie (there must be some out there) in December. Well, the Greed debacle (I'm calling it a debacle now?) opened up an opportunity to go abroad for a silent movie for the second straight month after Sweden's The Phantom Carriage in October.

What surprised me most about I Was Born, But ... is how dissimilar it was to what I've come to think of as the style of the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. I've only seen one of his films, sadly -- that's Tokyo Story -- but I saw it twice back in college and actually wrote an academic paper about it, so I feel like I know it well despite not having seen it in more than 20 years. On first viewing I was kind of bored to tears, but something compelled me to revisit it -- I don't know what came over me as I surely could have chosen an "easier" film to write the paper about. I'm glad I did, because I loved it on the second viewing when I started truly dissecting its themes. In fact, given that experience, it's kind of amazing I've never gotten back to Ozu, and it was something I had already intended to rectify when I got the chance to kick off that effort with this movie.

So yes, Ozu's style tends to be slow and deliberate, with many long takes and the camera almost never moving. No evidence of that style is present in I Was Born, But ..., which he directed in 1932, 21 years before Tokyo Story. (In fact, well into the sound era -- not sure why he was still making silent films.) This film is almost frenetic with its editing, and his camera has none of its future sedentary ways.

Probably time to tell you a bit about the movie. It's essentially a series of episodes involving children in suburban Tokyo of the time, which would look a bit more like the rural outskirts of Tokyo except for the single train cars passing in the background almost constantly, suggesting a higher population density than there would seem. Two of the children, who dress like twins but don't look exactly alike, are brothers who have just moved there due to the job requirements of their father, a lower-level executive type in a big firm. Many of the episodes are comical in nature, relating to such things as tussles with local bullies, contracting the help of other kids to assist with their integration into the community, and the tall tale that the consumption of a sparrow's egg gives you additional strength. As the twins (let's call them twins) have a habit of doing everything in unison, a real charming element to the performance of the two young boys, even events that might not ordinarily be comical have a comedic overtone. Simply put, this movie is breezy and fun.

What little plot it does have comes to relate to the shame the kids feel toward the way their father must prostrate himself in front of one of his superiors, who is also the father of one of their new school acquaintances. The last 20 minutes or so relate to the kids grappling with this and coming to accept it, as their father imparts lessons about social dynamics in the workplace and in the world. Here we see the real roots of Ozu's future concerns, as Tokyo Story (I know for a fact) and many of his other films (I'm led to believe) deal with the type of low-level, non-catastrophic family issues we see here, specifically failures to communicate between the generations.

To suggest that this film is heavy in any way, though, is to misunderstand its main reasons for existence. It is sweet through and through, frequently funny and always amusing. The packs of kids interacting with each other, daring each other to do things and establishing power dynamics, reminded me a bit of the Little Rascals or something. The film also establishes a real sense of place in the neighborhood where most of it takes place, as Ozu builds up a community of familiar faces over the course of the narrative. The regular appearance of the train going back and forth in the background seems to both suggest a sense of transience, and to more firmly establish the stability and specificity of this particular locale, if that makes any sense.

Okay! Just one month left to go in this series. And I've got Greed downloaded from iTunes now -- all four hours of it -- so at some point over the next month I'm going to figure out how to cram that in to the 24-hour viewing window allotted by iTunes.

Halloween 1921, or No Audio Audient: The Phantom Carriage

For Halloween this year, I traveled 95 years into the past, viewing both a movie about how they saw themselves then, and a movie about how we see them now.

The movie I knew would be from 1921 was The Phantom Carriage, my monthly viewing from my silent movie series No Audio Audient, which I almost didn't manage to get in during the month of October.

The movie I didn't know would have anything to do with 1921 was The Awakening, a 2011 period horror starring Rebecca Hall and Dominic West, which I chose as our Halloween night viewing.

Since only the first one was much good, and since the one that wasn't very good is kind of hijacking the other's spot on the blog, I'll spend most of my discussion on the silent Swedish film.

I'd tried to start The Phantom Carriage on October 30th at around 10:30 -- an ironic time to start watching it for a number of reasons, not least of which was that just last week, someone in my Flickcharters Facebook group specifically warned against starting a silent movie, and this silent movie in particular, at 10:30 at night. In a follow-up comment in that thread, anticipating my own upcoming viewing, I vowed to start it at 10:29 or earlier -- and lived up to that vow just barely, starting it at 10:28. In part because my previous night's sleep was fitful and almost nonexistent while camping, I was more compromised than usual in an attempt to start that late, and adding a final nail into my coffin was that neither version I found on YouTube had a score with it. It's kind of a miracle I made it the 40 minutes I did. With many silent films, that would have gotten me pretty close to the end, but this one was 106 minutes, leaving me well short. (I guess the last irony was that it was 10:30 on 10/30, which I'm only just now realizing.)

The lack of a score did help in my attempt to surreptitiously watch the rest of it the next day, Halloween day, a workday. It figured to be a slower day, a single workday sandwiched between a Sunday and a Tuesday holiday, and after lunch it finally became one. I ended up wrapping up the viewing at five minutes after five, and then headed straight home to take my kids out trick-or-treating. May not have been the ideal way to watch an atmospheric proto-horror movie, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Actually, The Phantom Carriage isn't much of a horror movie at all -- which is not a bad thing. Sure, the basic premise is well within horror's broader wheelhouse, but if you're looking to tie this one in with a holiday, Halloween is not the first one you'd think of. In fact, Halloween might only be the third most relevant holiday with which to tie it in. I'll explain.

The story revolves around a legend (a real legend? not sure) that says that the last person to die in a calendar year is rewarded with/saddled with the responsibility of driving Death's carriage for the following year. I suppose it's actually the last sinner to die, since in the course of the story we see another December 31st death involving a godly person who is not a candidate for this task. But as this newly departed soul takes on the guise of Death, complete with shroud and scythe, he basically becomes the Grim Reaper for a year. The carriage is his mode of transportation. As the events of this story surround two consecutive New Year's Eves, New Year's Eve might be the most appropriately themed holiday.

But the story actually made me think of Christmas, as it very closely follows the themes and even story elements of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The main character in the movie is David Holm, played by Victor Sjostrom, the film's director. David is a drunkard who has fallen out with his wife and two children, who spends his time in ill repute with his friends. When we catch up with him he's drinking in a graveyard on New Year's Eve, regaling his friends with the legend of the phantom carriage, a story another friend had told him the previous New Year's Eve. That friend coincidentally died that night, and little does David know at the time, but his friend has been driving Death's carriage during the intervening year. David's about to find out, though. During a fight that breaks out with his friends when they try to take him to see a dying Salvation Army nurse who cared for him the year before -- and contracted consumption from him, an injury added to the insult of his ingratitude to her -- David is killed. When his soul leaves his body, he meets his friend from the previous year, who tells him he will drive Death's carriage for the next year. But first he must atone for the terrible life he has led, and travel with this apparition to visit and look in on others he has hurt, including the nurse who has asked for him on her death bed, and his wife and kids. Without spoiling the ending, I can tell you that it too is very Dickensian and Carolian. (Hint: David may not be dead dead, after all.)

But Halloween comes in third, and there are certainly some creepy things in among a story that soon takes the form of a morality play. At the time the film was lauded for its use of special effects, namely, the ability to overlay film such that the characters who are dead appear as transparent, ghostly images. It was actually a double exposure of the same film in the camera, and it was pretty revolutionary at the time. The effects are seamless and also creepy. When we first see this ghostly carriage arrive with Death as its driver, you do get a chill, even 95 years after the movie was made. Tod Browning's Dracula is pretty scary only ten years later, and I'm sure there are other examples of early scary movies, but this is probably the oldest movie that has actually "scared" me. I wasn't quaking in my boots or anything, but the appearance of that carriage was the equivalent of a ghostly caress of a finger along my spine. I think the lateness of the hour (at least I got to see the carriage for the first time when it was nighttime) and the lack of a score only contributed to the sense of sepulchral dread.

The film goes on to use those special effects quite profoundly, allowing David and his companion to drift through walls as they go about looking in on the living. The single "scariest" moment is probably when the carriage drives over the crashing waves of the coastline, creating an additional sense of the impossible that is one of the very reasons we go to see movies. I don't know why I found that image as effective as I did in terms of being scary, but I did.

The movie does abandon being scary pretty early on, though, so the portion I watched at work was more like the other silent movies I've watched for this series, which don't benefit from a nighttime viewing. And though I did use the Wikipedia plot synopsis as a crutch in being sure I knew everything that was going on -- the movie uses several flashbacks as well, though does not always delineate them from the thrust of the present-tense story, leading to the sense that you weren't paying proper attention or had missed a title card -- I did get quite engrossed in this man's story of attempted redemption. You can really see why this film is also credited as being an inspiration to Sjostrom's fellow countryman, Ingmar Bergman. Most obvious among these inspirations are the religious themes The Phantom Carriage shares with Bergman's work, but even that crashing waves scene I mentioned earlier made me think of the similar setting for Antonius' chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal. I got a lot out of watching another Swedish director who influenced Bergman (Carl Theodor Dreyer) and I'd say I got a lot out of this as well.

Okay, now for a few words on the other half of our 1921 double feature, The Awakening.

This is a fairly typical setup for a ghost story. Rebecca Hall plays a woman who debunks ghost sightings in post-World War I England (1921 to be exact, as listed in a title that appears on screen), though of course she has her own haunted backstory that the events of the story start to tease out. She is hired to try to either locate definitive evidence of or disprove the existence of the ghost of a child who died in a boarding school for boys. Events that initially seem to have nothing to do with her are ultimately entwined with her own history. There are startle scares and ghostly images of boys in photographs. That kind of thing.

It wasn't completely unworthy, and I do admit to having a weakness for ghostly images of boys in photographs. But it was far more valuable to me as a coincidental viewing to incorporate into this blog post than as an effective way to scare myself on Halloween night.

But hey, at least it disproves my recently expressed concern that I am scared by even the lesser entries in the horror genre.

Hope you've got some good scares in your North American Halloween night viewing, which should still be ahead of you as I type this.

Oh, and for the November installment of No Audio Audient, the penultimate installment, I'm looking at Erich von Stroheim's Greed, if I can fit its epic running time into my schedule.

No Audio Audient: The Big Parade

This is the ninth in my 2016 monthly series watching silent films.

I didn't intend to choose a three-hour-and-eight-minute movie as my September choice for No Audio Audient. But once again, the ineffable running times of silent films have come in to play. Wikipedia says King Vidor's 1925 film The Big Parade is supposed to run for 141 minutes. Unfortunately, the two different copies available on YouTube ran at lengths that were not that. The shorter, and therefore seemingly more palatable, was 116 minutes. The longer, and frankly unimaginable that I would actually sit through, was 188 minutes. The fact that there was a second on there that was 187 minutes seemed to lend legitimacy to this as the more standard version, but I started to watch the 116-minute version anyway. I'm just a working dad with other priorities, after all.

Fortunately, this working dad is also right in the middle of school holidays, a time of year in which there is far less to do at his job. So little to do that one can watch a bit of a movie here and there while at work, if one does not feel too guilty about it and if the movie is available through a site like YouTube. So when the 116-minute version was improperly framed, leaving an unviewable area around all sides of the image, and even preventing a complete reading of the title cards, I switched over to the three-hour version. I thought, maybe this is really the 141-minute version and there are some additional 45 minutes of tangentially related content tacked on to the end.

It wasn't the case, but in the end I didn't care. I damn near loved this movie.

I knew nothing about it going in. In fact, only from the YouTube description -- "A young American soldier witnesses the horrors of the Great War" -- did I even know it was a movie about World War I. Indeed, it now seems to be to be one of the great sweeping wartime romances I've ever seen.

But first let me tell you how I even came to the movie in the first place.

Its director, King Vidor, directed a movie that I loved, that I now feel like I might love in spite of myself. That's 1949's The Fountainhead, an adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel. When I watched it, I had only a dim sense of who Rand was, and nothing of her political proclivities. That's probably just as well, because if I love a movie, I don't want preconceived notions of its political intentions mucking it up. I'd like to think that a good movie is a good movie is a good movie. I'd like to think that even if Rush Limbaugh made a really great movie I would recognize it as such, without Limbaugh's idiocy tarnishing it before I even got a chance to judge it.

So when I heard Vidor's name come up in an episode of the podcast You Must Remember This that was dedicated to John Gilbert, I decided to throw the related movie on to my list of films to watch this year. The movie was, of course, The Big Parade, in which Gilbert stars. The episode was devoted to talk about Gilbert's uneasy transition to talkies, as Jean Dujardin's character in The Artist is often thought of as based on Gilbert. In truth, we learn, studio politics had more to due with his decline than his inability to work with his voice, and, poor guy, he was dead of a heart attack by 36.

In this movie, Gilbert plays a spoiled rich kid who learns about responsibility by deciding to enlist in the Great War. That decision seems a bit strange for his character -- he's accused by his parents of being a layabout, and really, he is -- but you should never discount the infectious power of a parade. It's during such a display of patriotism and American righteousness in its cause in the war that Gilbert's Jim Apperton feels his toe start tapping, and undergoes the realization that it's his duty to serve his country. Leaving behind a girl next door who is for all intents and purposes his fiancee, he ships off to France with two from his same city that he befriends, a bartender named Bull (Tom O'Brien) and a riveter named Slim (Karl Dane), and begin the long wait for action in a small town called Champillon. (And I mean long -- these sequences consume well over an hour of the movie.) There he falls for a local girl, Melisande (Renee Adoree), despite the fact that neither understand a word the other is saying. Their relationship develops through a number of cute set pieces before Jim and co. are finally called to the front.

Two things about The Big Parade immediately disarmed me and put me at ease. The first was the straightforward approach to the material. The silent movies I've seen this year can be divided into roughly two categories: comedies, and films directed by D.W. Griffith. There have been a few others of course, so I'm exaggerating, but the point is that the dramas I've watched have seemed represented by Griffith. Griffith, I now realize, is incapable of being straightforward, at least not in his title cards. One of the annoying things about the two Griffith movies I saw were the flowery title cards, which seemed written with abstraction in mind. I now realize that my mind started to wander a bit because Griffith was more interested in trying to be poetic than tell a story. These title cards, on the other hand, were all business. They establish the characters, move the plot, and deliver you where you need to be. I felt like I was in good hands.

The other thing I noticed was how well Vidor uses nascent film grammar. I may be giving him too much credit -- I mean, people had been making sophisticated narrative films for ten years by then -- but I really appreciated the editing, how nicely shots continued on action, how fluidly the narrative was conveyed. He made effective use of the rare zoom or tracking shot, close-ups were employed correctly, and overall, the film just flows.

After moving pretty quickly in its first 20 minutes, though, the movie slows waaaaaay down. It became easy to see how a 116-minute version of this movie could exist without basically losing anything. I began to wonder how much of the material I was watching was considered unnecessary for later cuts. Rather than losing individual scenes, though, I imagined it would have been easy to compress them, just by shorting shots that were 45 seconds to 25, by cutting scenes that lasted seven minutes to three. Or scenes that lasted 15 minutes to seven.

All this said, the fat was lovely. It meant I got to spend more time with the swoony romance between Jim and Melisande. In these scenes I felt like I was discovering both of these actors, because, well, I was. I'm not conscious of having seen a John Gilbert film before, and though Renee Adoree has a certain "1920s silent actress appearance" that in some ways makes her interchangeable with numerous others, something about her really distinguished herself to me. Appropriately for her last name, I simply adored her (and was sad later on to learn that she also died young, of complications from tuberculosis, at only 33). The two of them together made me pleased as pie, and by spending so long with them, their terrific parting scene surely had more emotional weight for me.

So let's talk about that scene. Jim and company are finally moved out to the front, though he and Melisande have already unwillingly parted because she finds out about his fiancee at home. (And I should pause to mention that for a moment -- as lovely as all their scenes are together, you can never forget that Jim is essentially cheating on a devoted love interest at home, one who has sent him multiple letters and a cake she baked. This does get resolved in satisfactory fashion by the end, but I was never comfortable with the idea that he was stepping out on her, and that detail surely would not have made it into the movie if it were being made today. Either that or the love interest at home would be an obvious harpy he was too decent to dump.)

Sorry, got distracted there. The convoys are shipping out of Champillon and Melisande rushes out to try to find Jim. It seems hopeless as troops and trucks are flowing by in impossible numbers, a barely controlled chaotic military sea in which it will be impossible to find her one fish. The look of stress and desperation on her face as she searches for him is priceless. When they do finally connect, they pour affection atop each other and have to be drawn apart by other soldiers. I'm getting chills just writing about it now, it's so damn romantic. She hangs on to his leg as the truck is pulling away, then on to a chain hanging off the back of the truck. I suppose something like that could almost be played for comedy, but in this moment it totally works. He blows kisses and tosses her two different trinkets to remember him by, promising to return. She finally stops and just looks after him. An hour later, she's still rooted to the spot, though slumped down on her knees now, as the streets are empty.

This kicked off my favorite section of the movie, which also includes an incredible first battle sequence while walking through the woods. I was really impressed by how well the battle sequences are filmed here, especially this first one. Unfortunately, the film does slow down again considerably in its last hour, particularly during one scene where the three buddies are tasked with the responsibility of trying to take out a German machine gun post. There's some nice stuff in these scenes -- the bonds between the three men are also conveyed wonderfully -- but it does slow things down again. I was impressed, though, by how a movie that had been largely amiable to this point took a genuinely darker turn in the end.

The movie really has it all, the horrors of war promised in the YouTube synopsis and plenty of light set pieces, some of which almost play like Chaplin or Keaton -- particularly the scene where Jim and Melisande meet, and he's peering at her through a hole in a bucket over his head. Three hours of Griffith were not a joy for me to watch, but I'll watch three hours of The Big Parade any day.

I should mention also the music. Although this was obviously not the same music that was used when the film was played in theaters, it became sort of an essential component to my viewing, as trumpets and cannon blasts and the like were incorporated into the score in time with the images. I had considered watching the movie without music because I was at work for part of it, and having an ear bud in your ear tends to draw attention, even if people can't see your screen. But I was really glad I listened to the music, because it helped sweep me up in scenes like Jim and Melisande's parting.

Okay! We've finally reached the one month in this series where I knew which film I'd be watching way back when I started. For Halloween I will be watching Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage from 1921. Not only does it make a good themed viewing for the month of October, but I think it's also the first foreign-made silent film I've watched for this series (Sweden).

No Audio Audient: Broken Blossoms

This is the eighth in my series No Audio Audient, in which I'm watching one silent film per month in 2016.

When I first started this series, one of my concerns about silent films in general was how they don't make good apples-to-apples comparisons with modern films. I wasn't talking only, or even primarily, or even at all about the fact that they have no spoken dialogue and are black and white. No, I was talking about their length. I can compare almost any dissimilar dimensions of films, but length was a real sticking point for me. Simply put, I had a hard time considering a 45-minute moving picture to be a "film."

As soon as I saw Sherlock Jr. in February -- a 45-minute film (yes, film) I gave five stars -- I basically dropped that concern.

And now I want more.

At 85 minutes, D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms is kind of exactly the movie I was looking for when I started this series. It's a significant movie from the era while also having a run time that meets my idea of what a movie is. While also not being too long.

Except Broken Blossoms really is too long. It would have been much better off at 45 minutes.

I had a weird moment where I looked up at how much time had passed in the movie and saw it was 55 minutes, and felt that the movie was only just getting to its semblance of a plot. How is that possible? Where was the other time spent?

The story, such as it is, involves a Chinese immigrant to London (Richard Barthelmess) who does not find the welcoming home in the west he thought he'd find. (He "dreams to spread the gentle message of Buddha to Anglo-Saxon lands.") He has a shop in a wharf area, where one of the neighborhood girls (Lillian Gish) is beaten by her father, a drunken prizefighter (Donald Crisp). When one of his beatings leaves her seriously injured and wandering the streets, he takes her in and nurses her back to health. When the prizefighter discovers her whereabouts, all his instincts as a brute and a racist kick in to try to punish both the "Yellow Man" (ugh, that's how he is referred to) and the girl.

I imagine this seemed progressive at the time. There is no overt romance between the "Yellow Man" (also sometimes referred to as "the chink," and sometimes by his name, Cheng Huan) and Gish's Lucy, but the mere suggestion of an interracial affair between them would have likely been a pretty big deal. Unfortunately, knowing what we know about Griffith, it's difficult not to see elements of his racism here -- even when the movie is overtly fighting racism. I suppose referring to him as the "Yellow Man" ("chink" is usually reserved as an epithet used only be nasty people) would have been a fairly inoffensive crime in 1919, but nearly 100 years later -- and taken in combination with the values put forward by Griffith in Birth of a Nation -- it doesn't play particularly well. Then there's the fact that Cheng Huan is played by a white actor, which is probably obvious but is no less troubling, since they had to give him what we might call "yellowface" in order to make him look Chinese. (We would only use that term to play off the existing term "blackface," of course.)

But let's set that all aside and give Griffith the benefit of the doubt. One of the biggest problems with this movie is its slow pace and its scarcity of plot. This was again part of the style of the time, but things that seem like they should take place in a matter of ten or 20 seconds take more like a minute or two on screen to transpire. The whole movie is elongated in that fashion. One of the most comical is an interaction between Huan and the boxer, named Battling Burrows, where the two stare each other down for about two minutes, exchanging disdainful and suspicious looks. It reminded me most of the recurring bit by Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he and an adversary look each other over suspiciously from a distance of about two feet away from each other, for a period of maybe 30 seconds. Imagine that but taking two minutes.

The elongation of action is problematic in many other ways. I suppose before I tell you about them I should give you a spoiler warning, especially since I want to reveal one of my other problems about the movie and the only way to do that is to spoil it. So, SPOILERS ahead.

At the end of the movie, Lucy dies, because her father has raged so hard against her and beaten her so hard that the life simply escapes her body. We are meant to believe this is the result of her father's drunkenness and therefore is some kind of unpremeditated crime of impulse. Yet after the father corrals her at the end, there are two to three minutes of yelling, making threatening motions, raising and then lowering a whip, and muttering "Why I oughta" with the proverbial raised back of the hand before he actually descends upon her. If we are to believe that this father was so out of control that he was capable of killing his daughter, shouldn't we also believe that he'd be incapable of several minutes of preamble in which she is pleading for mercy? I suppose some of this can be excused by the melodramatic storytelling styles in fashion at the time, but not all.

And let's talk about this boxer. He is the epitome of the over-the-top silent movie villain. Would that the had a moustache to twirl. When I was watching the film, I failed to understand that he was actually the girl's father, which makes his behavior both better and worse. She calls him "Daddy," but I thought that was used in the way that you call your sugar daddy "Daddy." I thought this was a girl who was under this guy's thumb for some reason -- not that he was her pimp I guess, but someone he had the right to claim as his property. I thought his behavior was that of a jealous lout. Reading the wikipedia synopsis afterward, I discovered the actual blood relationship between the character. That he's actually her father makes his moral claim over her at least righteous -- a good father would want to save his daughter from being misused by someone -- but makes it far more unlikely that he would beat her to death. (And not seem to care that he had done so.) He's just so damn evil that it strains all credibility.

Then there's the movie's message. Huan's philosophy throughout has been that that he believes in peace and non-violence, even when confronting his enemies. By the end of the movie, he pulls out a gun and shoots Burrows. (Which leads to a hilariously prolonged chest-holding and staggering death.) I suppose this is Griffith's point, that he has come to such a state of despair the he has lost his core philosophies completely. Yet that point doesn't translate with any certainty, meaning that it seems more like carelessness and confusion on Griffith's part.

Technically speaking, the film does seem to have a few advances worth noting. In that prolonged scene before Burrows administers the fatal beating to his daughter, Griffith uses a close-up on both faces that's very effective, to illustrate the intensity of their interaction. The image also seems much clearer and in focus at this depth, and more use of it would have helped me become more involved in the film. But filmmakers were not yet ready to consistently shoot at a depth closer than mid level. I guess there are certain things I need to be patient on.

Gish is worth a special mention. She's quite good here, and it's easy to see why she became an icon whose acting methods engendered an entire legacy of acting for the screen. She does have some moments of silent-movie exaggeration, as Griffith would have directed her to do. But her more subtle instincts shine through, and she's heartbreaking.

I did find myself just a wee bit moved in the last few moments of the movie, when in spite of what I said earlier, I did recognize Huan's sacrifice and loss of idealism. Griffith is not an ineffective filmmaker. He just could have been more effective in this one, I thought.

Also, I'm still annoyed about how he includes his initials at the bottom of each of his title cards.

Narcissist.

So having been exhausted by Intolerance (but rewarding it for its ambition) and with Birth of a Nation being what it is, maybe I'm just never going to be big into D.W. Griffith. I feel like I should watch Orphans of the Storm before reaching that conclusion once and for all, and that was a film I was considering seriously for this series. But it's two-and-a-half hours long, and really, I think I'm done with him for now. Two in this series is enough. That'll probably already be one more than anyone else gets, even the classic comedians like Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd.

Instead, in September I will watch the 1925 film The Big Parade, directed by King Vidor. This was on my radar from the You Must Remember This podcast, where it was mentioned briefly. Vidor is on my radar from a film of his I love, The Fountainhead, which I probably need to watch again now that I know more about Ayn Rand, to see what I'd think about it nowadays. But for now, The Big Parade.

No Audio Audient: The Sheik

This is the seventh in my 2016 monthly series watching silent films I've never seen.

I understand Rudolph Valentino to be legendary for his suave screen presence, but in the first film of his I saw, I just thought he was pervy.

That's how he comes across for about the first half of The Sheik, George Melford's 1921 epic romance.

In regrettably backward fashion, Valentino's titular sheik captures an English singer, Diana (Agnes Ayres), while she's on horseback in the desert outside of Biskra in Algeria. In that backward time, you might say she "had it coming" by having dressed up as an exotic local dancer in order to gain entrance into an Arabs only casino where Sheik Ahmed was being entertained. During that time, she bewitched him and he got his mind set on capturing her when she went out into the desert on a trip to some remote villages.

If this behavior weren't creepy enough, though, Valentino makes it more so by the broad acting style that made him seem unlikely to transition successfully to talkies (if his death hadn't come before talkies did). Valentino's eyes are never more than a few moments away from bugging out, and it's even worse when they bug out in a way that is pregnant with innuendo. He spends a lot of time sneering and looking at Diana lasciviously, which makes it seem impossible that he will ever become the story's romantic hero.

Which of course he does. It is ultimately a Beauty and the Beast tale. Ahmed captures the beauty against her will, and she naturally rails against her captivity initially. Of course, the more time she spends, the more he has the opportunity to demonstrate some grace and kindness, and eventually she falls in love with him. And by "eventually" we mean "suddenly." It happens rather quickly that her Stockholm Syndrome turns her from prisoner into love interest, though of course that is accomplished by means of this story's Gaston character, a bandit named Omair (Walter Long), who also has designs on capturing Diana but intends to be treat her far less benevolently. And yes, the more traditional heroic aspects of Valentino do start to shine through at this point.

The Sheik is definitely the least technically progressive film I've watched in this series so far. It doesn't really have artistic ambitions with the form. It longs for nothing more than to be a romantic epic and a crowd pleaser. And in this way I did appreciate it, as a relic of another era of entertainment for the masses.

There are of course some significant problems with the handling of the Arab characters, but that's par for the course in 1921. None of the actors are actually Arab of course, but that's the last thing we would expect at that time. The worse problem is the way they behave, even the reformed scoundrel Ahmed. I suppose it's not entirely inaccurate in terms of how women are treated in Arab countries, but a movie made today would try to do better. The thing I thought was particularly funny is that (spoiler alert) at the end it's revealed that Ahmed is not actually Arab, but rather, the son of a Spaniard and a Brit, who died in the desert, leaving the boy to be raised locally by the kindly sheik who took him in. This piece of information arrives so late in the story, and with so little apparent narrative purpose at that juncture, that the only explanation for its inclusion seems to be to mitigate the taboo of Diana falling in love with an Arab.

One detail of the movie I did appreciate, which gives a window into the type of fourth-wall-breaking spectacle movies were at the time, is that as each character gets introduced in the story, a title card appears that also includes the actor's name. Very quaint and cute. You're supposed to be casting a spell on the audience at that point, and drawing attention to the fact that the character is being played by an actor seems to work in opposition to that. But I did enjoy it as a detail about how films were made in the 1920s.

Okay, on to August! I think it's time for me to wade back into the waters of D.W. Griffith. I didn't particularly care for Intolerance, as you might remember, but maybe Broken Blossoms will speak to me a little differently.

(A literal) No Audio Audient: The Kid

This is the sixth in my 2016 series No Audio Audient, in which I'm getting better acquainted with silent films.

In the waning hours of June I finally squeezed in my sixth film in this series, Charlie Chaplin's The Kid from 1921. And this one was a truly silent film, without even any music or other sounds to speak of.

The reasons for this are twofold:

1) I watched most of it at work. We're in the midst of school holidays, meaning the call volume is already lower (I work for the department of education), plus there was a technical issue that was affecting most incoming calls. So it seemed like the perfect time to throw on a little The Kid on Youtube, since I wouldn't need to plug in earphones like I would trying to watch almost any other movie. No one can see my screen, and the film is in public domain -- easy peasy. Plus I'd planned my schedule poorly, leaving me in the last 16 hours of June without having watched my No Audio Audient film, and no certain path to watching it last night either. And Lord knows what would happen if I did not get in one of my series movies within the proscribed month.

2) The actual copy I was watching had no sound anyway. I had noted that the particular one I'd chosen said something at the start about a captioning institute or something of that nature, something that exists for the hearing impaired. But I thought nothing more of it because there was no evidence of any additional captions on the copy I was watching. Only when I finished the movie on the tram ride home did I notice its lack of sound. I understand Chaplin actually composed the music to accompany screenings of the movie, but I guess I'll never hear it -- or not until my next viewing, anyway.

And I'm pretty sure there will be a next one. The Kid was great, my second favorite in the series so far (behind Sherlock Jr.). Neither watching it without any music nor watching it in fits and starts as I did occasional work made me love it any less.

It's our first introduction to Chaplin's tramp character, who we meet in the context of him discovering a baby abandoned in an alleyway. The baby got there through a strange set of circumstances, which we've already witnessed ourselves by this point in the movie. His mother had him out of wedlock, and deciding she cannot care for him and bear the scorn of being unwed, she leaves him in a limousine parked outside a mansion, attaching a note to love and care for this orphan. She's hoping a rich family will either give him a great life or at least be responsible enough to determine a good placement for the boy, but what happens instead is that thieves come across the car and sense an opportunity to steal it. Only after they've been driving for some time do they notice there's a baby in the back seat. Just wanting to be rid of the problem, they leave the baby in the alley. Enter our protagonist, minding his own business. After making several attempts to pass the buck himself, the tramp ultimately reads the note and accepts taking the boy under his wing and raising him.

I was struck by the bold way Chaplin introduces us to the tramp, whom he probably did not then know would become a recurring persona. Nonetheless, it's a rather pessimistic view of a supposed protagonist. The tramp tries to pretend he doesn't see the baby, tries to leave him in the already occupied carriage of a nearby mother (thinking he might have fallen out?), tries to return him to the same spot he found him, even tries to leave him in the arms of an old man walking with a cane. Only because of the episodes of slapstick happenstance that Chaplin would become famous for, such as police officers seeing what he's doing it and misconstruing it as abandoning his own child, is he foiled in these attempts. If Chaplin's tramp had had it his way, he would have just wandered off uninvolved, and we never would have met him.

The tramp's initial unwillingness to accept responsibility for the baby sets up a really powerful character arc over the course of the movie. Soon we see him charmed by the baby, rigged up in some makeshift cradle and drinking from the spout of a tin kettle. Five years pass, giving us a young boy (now played by Jackie Coogan, who would break out as a child star from this movie). Even then, though, one senses the tramp's relationship with the kid is more utilitarian than paternalistic -- for example, now he has a partner in crime to pull off his low-level scams, like selling replacement windows to customers after the kid shatters their old windows with a rock. But when child protective services intervenes and tries to take the boy away, we see the powerful affection for the kid that has built up in the tramp. That affection manifests itself in a lovely dream sequence near the end, in which the tramp imagines that he and everyone else has become angels, dancing and flying around his neighborhood. The dream ends in the tramp's death, and the kid caressing his face before disappearing himself. Because it would be misleading to characterize this film as sentimental to this point, the power of this dream sequence really surprises.

It was interesting in Chaplin's first film to see the ways he was already trying to pursue serious themes through his visuals, an unexpected bit of ambition for a man who apparently just wanted to make people laugh. At the very beginning, the misbegotten mother is seen in front of the front doors of a church, having identified the couple she plans to try to leave her son with, who have just gotten married. A circular part of the door is framed around her head, and a light shines on it in such a way to create a halo effect. She's an angel as well -- a theme that ultimately pays off at the end with the tramp's dream sequence.

I was surprised by how frank Chaplin was about the realities of human existence, beyond the fact that no one initially wants to take responsibility for this baby. There's a really interesting scene where the kid's father, who has become a famous painter, crosses paths with his mother, who has gone on to become a famous actress. They are the only two who know the guilt and shame in their past. But instead of the movie trying to create redemption for the father, it just leaves him looking forlorn on a balcony, destined to live with his choice. He never enters the story again.

Chaplin's economy of language also struck me. The story was incredibly easy to follow almost entirely without title cards, and even some of those he did include seemed superfluous. He was such an effective visual storyteller that you get everything instinctively, and even if you don't know the exact dialogue exchanged by two people in a given scene, you know its essence. Which is all you really need to know.

Then of course there are also just a bunch of funny set pieces, like Chaplin's "fight" with the older brother of a boy who picked a fight with the kid. "Fight" is in quotation marks because it involves mostly just a bunch of ducking and weaving on the tramp's part -- the guy is much bigger than Chaplin anyway, but then his shirt is stuffed to give him even greater girth. Each time the older brother misses, his fist has a destructive impact on some part of the set -- a chunk of brick wall knocked out here, a lamp post bent in the middle there.

The Kid doesn't have many or possibly any of the iconic scenes we have come to identify with Chaplin, like eating his shoelaces or the bread roll ballet in The Gold Rush, or getting run through the machine in Modern Times. But on the whole I think I liked it better than either of those films, and it certainly packs more of an emotional punch than they do -- though City Lights could probably take The Kid in that department.

I think we'll stay in 1921 for our July movie, The Shiek, starring Rudolph Valentino. I believe it will be my first Valentino film.

No Audio Audient: The Lodger

This is the fifth in my 2016 series No Audio Audient, in which I'm catching up with classic silents I haven't seen.

If you watched Charlie Chaplin's The Kid expecting to come here and compare your thoughts with my thoughts on it -- because that's totally something you're doing -- you have been the victim of a programming change.

As part of one of my recent weekly trips to the library, I picked up Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger, recognizing it only as a Hitchcock movie I hadn't seen. A little closer look at the cover revealed that indeed, it was one of his silents -- none of which I had seen yet. Seemed like a great choice for May, especially given that two of my four choices thus far have already been comedies from silent greats (Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton).

I was a tad wary, though. The oldest Hitchcock film I'd seen previously was the original 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which I found decidedly disappointing -- even without having yet seen Hitchcock's 1956 remake. I found Hitchcock's trademark faculties severely diminished in this earlier work, and part of me worried the same about a film made seven years earlier -- without even the benefit of sound.

How little did I realize how little Hitchcock needs sound.

The Lodger -- or as it sometimes goes by, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog -- had me in the palm of its hand from its first shot. Which is this:

That's the Hitchcock I know and love.

And what an arresting way to start a movie about a serial killer murdering a new blonde woman every Tuesday night. Hitchcock spends about the first five minutes of the film just establishing a sense of paranoia through images alone, with barely any title cards. Detectives encircling the latest body. Panicked bystanders descending deeper into fear. The flashing lights of a theater marquee, as the victim was one of the girls in a revue. Hitchcock does communicate some exposition during these five minutes, but it's largely through newspaper headlines and stories being dictated via teletype, the circumstances of the crime marching out ominously one letter at a time. Score is also instrumental in establishing this mood, though that would have been something Hitchcock had less (if any) control over, and may not have even been the score that was used at the time. I try to set aside score in my analysis of silent films, even though it can undeniably contribute to my experience, as it did here.

The story comes to be about a mysterious lodger staying in an extra room in the home of his kindly old landlords and their daughter -- who just so happens to fit the profile of the women this serial killer has been killing. Upon his first arrival on screen, the lodger (the creepy Ivor Lovello) fits the description witnesses have reported of the murderer -- the lower half of his face is shrouded by a scarf. He's also got a queer way about him and seems to recoil at the images of young blonde women on the walls of his room. Thinking him just eccentric, they don't make the connection with the story filling all the newspapers ... until a few strange occurrences makes it impossible to overlook.

If The Man Who Knew Too Much seemed flat by Hitchcock standards, The Lodger seems to embody what we think of as a Hitchcock movie almost perfectly. I wouldn't have guessed that he was already devising unconventional filming techniques and props by 1927, but clearly, he was. One of these is a see-through plexiglass floor, which takes the place of the natural floor for a couple shots. This allows the lodger's male landlord to "visualize" him pacing back and forth a floor above, a seeming indicator of his guilt (or at least an unsteady mind). What he's actually seeing is the chandelier shaking, but the plexiglass floor shows us what he's imagining. This type of trick with sets and props would come to be a Hitchcock trademark.

Another was just a shot that floored me. As the lodger is going out secretly late at night, we see him descend the spiral staircase from above. But we don't see his whole body. We only see his gloved hand gliding along the bannister, making all the turns in the stairs as it gets lower and lower toward the first floor. The effect was profound.

I was also surprised by how little this seemed to feature what I will call "silent film acting." By 1927 I suppose directors knew that actions didn't have to be broad and over-the-top to communicate meaning, but Hitchcock shows an even greater sense of subtlety than would come from the natural refining of filmmaking techniques over time. He's already a master of this craft, even in the film that would come later to be thought of as "the first Hitchcock film." (It was his eighth overall, though that also includes shorts and lost films.)

One thing I did find strange as I was watching it, that probably contributed to a slightly diminished appreciation of the film, is that it barreled past its projected running time. The movie was supposed to last 71 minutes, according to the DVD case, but as it ticked up into that range I could tell it was nowhere near resolution. I found a different running time of 80 minutes on the web, but that minute mark came and went as well without a resolution. It finally wrapped up around 94 minutes -- which was not a running time I could find listed anywhere on the web. (And in yet a fourth different running time, IMDB lists it as 68 minutes.) I didn't get the sense of there being any filler footage, and I couldn't imagine what might be missing from shorter versions of the film. The only reason this bothered me was because I was trying to watch the movie during a set window of time, and the more it ran over the budgeted time, the more it threatened other things I had to do that day. Which made me wish I just hadn't known the running time at all, so I wouldn't have spent the last 20 minutes feeling impatient.

So The Lodger didn't only jump easily into the upper half of the Hitchcock films I've seen, but it also had clear influences on some of the other greats from this time period. The movie it reminded me of most was Fritz Lang's M, which wouldn't come along until 1931 and was clearly inspired by The Lodger. That's not to say The Lodger is better than M, because I don't think it is. But M might not exist, or exist exactly as we know it, without it.

Okay! Barring another unforeseen library rental, The Kid will indeed make its way onto the docket for June.

No Audio Audient: Intolerance

This is the fourth in my 2016 monthly series in which I am catching up with classic silent films I haven't seen.

When I asked my Flickcharters Facebook group which of four versions of D.W. Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance available on YouTube I should watch, one of the first responses was "The longest one."

It's possible that was a sarcastic response designed to subject me to a lengthy endurance test, but I took it at face value as meaning "The longest one is the one that's truest to the director's original vision."

While that's probably correct, it was with some reluctance that I discarded the 2:42, 2:46 and 2:57 versions and opted for the one that ran 3:17. Which would make this one of the longest films I've ever seen, right up there with Seven Samurai and 2014's Winter Sleep, though trailing the Abraham Lincoln epic Gettysburg.

Well, I don't know if you can sit there and give your full attention to a three hour and 20 minute silent film, but if you can, you're a better man than I am. Or if you're a woman, you're a better woman than I am.

It's fair to wonder whether I really gave Intolerance a fair shake. Almost from the start I was put off by its poetic, flowery title cards, which prized abstraction over narrative exposition. The fact that the title cards were used to beautify what we were already seeing, rather than to explicate it, meant that I probably should have been paying more attention to the images, rather than less. But I decided pretty much from the start that I'd try to multi-task through Intolerance -- that it would be the only way I'd survive the experience. I'd be sure to look up every time there was a new title card, but I could not be expected to stare raptly at the screen the rest of the time. Once I realized that the title cards weren't helping much with the exposition, it was probably too late.

The movie is divided into four stories of supposed intolerance through the ages, and makes certain to continue to remind us of the theme, as the word "intolerance" appears a good 20 times in the title cards. One is a modern story of a worker's strike and the unfolding repercussions on a girl ("The Dear One") and a boy ("The Boy," which is a funny name for him because he has a moustache and is clearly an adult for much of the movie). One is a story in ancient Babylon, which is probably the most grandiose but is also the one I tried least hard to figure out. One takes place in 16th century France. And then one is, naturally, the crucifixion of Christ. Transitions occur between these scenes with the aid of a figure rocking a cradle, intended to represent "eternal motherhood" or some such nonsense. He also goes to pages of a book to indicate the transition.

The one that gets the most screen time -- and the one I made the greatest attempt to follow, beat by beat -- is the modern story. Which makes sense, as the other three were added to a movie Griffith was already making, which seems a bit strange as they are by far the most technically ambitious three stories. Griffith apparently added them as he reconceptualized Intolerance as a response to the NAACP and others who criticized the racism in The Birth of a Nation from the year before. The odd thing about that was that Intolerance was not, as is sometimes thought, an apology for Birth of a Nation. Rather, Griffith dug himself in deeper by presenting himself as a victim of intolerance by those who didn't understand Birth. Puh-leeze.

And so again it becomes difficult to separate the art of Griffith from what we know about him as a person. Intolerance was obviously the most ambitious film that had ever been made at that point, but it may also be the most ambitious film that has ever been made, relative to the prevailing standards of the medium. Of all the other films that we think of as great technical breakthroughs throughout the years -- from Citizen Kane to Avatar -- few are perhaps as off-the-charts, go-for-broke ridiculous in terms of sheer gumption. The number of extras alone made this an astounding logistical feat, and that's not taking into consideration sets and costumes that seem authentic and then some. It's as though Griffith got a taste of grandeur in Birth and decided he was going to make what might come to stand as the greatest movie of all time.

Yet despite all this ambition on display, Intolerance fails as basic storytelling, which is why I came very close to giving it a thumbs down rating of 2.5 stars. I ultimately chickened out and went with a three. Still, I feel like one's feelings about the man shouldn't affect one's perspective on this film any less than they affect one's perspective on Birth. Although he does not offend in the text of Intolerance, he offends in the subtext, especially once you learn more about what drove him to make it. All the artistic skill and ambition are therefore tainted.

And I was really taken aback by his ego. There may be some logical expectation for this, but I kind of laughed to note that his initals -- D.G. -- appear in a little insignia at the bottom of most title cards. (I say "most" because the title cards are oddly inconsistent, with different fonts used and different formats presented -- I assume this was either to differentiate the stories, or perhaps as a later attempt to fix up the surviving cuts of the film with whatever materials were available at the time.) So while we would assume a massive ego based on what we know about Griffith, here we get actual evidence of a sort of narcissism that seems to have no functional explanation other than Griffith just liking the appearance of his own initials.

Before we just dismiss the movie as a bunch of impressive technique in service of empty and hypocritical platitudes, I should of course again reconsider the notion that I just didn't give Intolerance a chance. I was almost pre-checked out on it. There were baseball games I wanted to follow online as I was watching it, and follow them I did. During two of the three sittings it took to watch it. The other one, my shortest sitting, was at night, when I watched 23 minutes starting at hour two. And fell asleep about four times.

But I'm not watching this movie again. A little of it goes a long way. When you watch Intolerance, I think the point is to recognize it as a staggering cinematic achievement, to admire the commitment to grand spectacle, not to breathe in every nuance and really care much what happens in it one way or another. When you know the driving force behind it, you are even less interested in meeting it on its own terms.

So yeah, I've seen Intolerance once, or at least three-quarters of a time. I will never watch it again.

What will I watch in May? I think I need a light palette cleanser. How about a little Charlie Chaplin? The Kid it is.

No Audio Audient: Regeneration

This is the third in my 2016 series where I catch up with one per month of one of my biggest blind spots: silent movies.

Regeneration marks the first movie of this series into which I came in having no preconceived notions whatsoever. It's also the first non-comedy. While I started with silent comedy superstars Harold Lloyd (The Freshman) and Buster Keaton (Sherlock Jr.), the only name I knew associated with Regeneration was Raoul Walsh, who would later direct the excellent White Heat, starring James Cagney. So this movie -- which I learned about only because it was mentioned as newly available on Youtube by someone in my Flickcharters Facebook discussion group -- interested me as a study of a directing career that bridged from silent films to talkies. In fact, Walsh's career dove deep into the talkie era, as he made his final film in 1964 and lived until 1980. Regeneration was his first feature.

The other interesting thing about it is that it immediately became one of the three oldest features I've recorded myself as having seen -- and that includes The Great Train Robbery from 1903, which is only a feature in the loosest definition of that term. When I want to find the next oldest I have to skip ahead a whole 12 years to 1915, which now contains two films I've seen: Regeneration, and of course The Birth of a Nation. (Interestingly, Walsh appears in Nation as an actor -- he played John Wilkes Booth.)

As Regeneration came out nine months after Nation, it understandably does not get the same credit for redefining the narrative form that D.W. Griffith got. While watching it, however, I didn't have any idea of their respective release dates within 1915, and I wondered why more people didn't talk about Regeneration for its sophistication within early narrative film. Not only is there a real sense of editing and the varying of medium and long shots, both attributes that Griffith generally gets credit for, but the camera even moves tentatively on a dolly, which likely also occurs in Nation (don't remember that movie all that well) but startled me in a movie as old as this.

Speaking of the film's age ... this also marked the first time I have ever watched a movie that was more than a century old when I saw it. I've seen movies that are now more than a century old -- well, just The Great Train Robbery and The Birth of a Nation, I guess -- but they were not yet that old when I saw them. Kind of neat.

So in terms of plot, this is a gangster movie, which would come to be Walsh's specialty. (Since I've only seen this and White Heat, though, I can't really compare and contrast the silent Walsh and the talkie Walsh like I hoped I might be able to do.) However, Regeneration is not particularly heavy on plot, as you might expect. Or rather, there's enough plot, but it goes by slowly, and some of the nuance is lost by the decision to have comparatively few title cards. The title cards it does have tend to be long and somewhat flowery, though the actual blow-by-blow of conversations between characters is often left mostly to the viewer's imagination. That did cause my mind to wander a bit, and at times I thought I was lost within a more complicated plot. Later, I realized that not that much had really been happening, which is not all that surprising for a film made at the very dawn of sophisticated narrative filmmaking. It takes 71 minutes for not that much to happen, but they're a pretty interesting 71 minutes for the flavor you get of that time.

In short, it's the story of an orphan named Owen, who grows up poor and eventually falls in with a gang, steadily rising to become its leader. He then meets a girl who makes him want to change his ways, and the story is essentially his attempts at heroic redemption as his old life keeps pulling him back in. What's perhaps most profound about this movie in terms of its sophistication (spoiler alert) is that it does not have a happy ending. The beautiful girl that tries to save him ends up dying at the hands of a villain who was once in league with the hero, the hero not quite shaking off his dark side enough to save her. I would have guessed that at the very least, the filmmakers of 1915 were trying to send their audiences home happy. I didn't figure that tragedies would be very big in the nascent years of feature-length filmmaking, but tragedies have been big on the stage through the history of drama, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to me that Regeneration ends tragically -- but was anyway.

One thing that really impressed me, especially compared to what I remember of Birth of a Nation, was the subtlety of the acting. I remember Birth of a Nation being pretty big, but here the actors communicate a lot with subtle shifts in their facial expressions, and long, solemn looks. That seems like it should be a credit to Walsh for sure.

I found it interesting how easy it was to differentiate a movie from 1915 from a movie that came out in, say, 1925. If you had any tendency to lump all silent films together in the same group visually, Regeneration is the type of movie that reminds you otherwise. Some of this is damaged footage that was only partly salvageable, but even beyond that, the stock looks different -- more sepia. I also noted the old-fashioned effect of having only a small area lit around a character on a close-up, for all intents and purposes changing the shape of the frame to that of a locket -- probably not altogether surprising given that lockets were still quite in fashion back then.

One technical achievement worth drawing attention to is a fire aboard an excursion ferry, complete with flames, characters rushing in a panic and even a long shot of people jumping off the flaming boat. It's not Titanic, but it's pretty darn impressive for 1915 -- which would have been only three years after the real Titanic sank. (And actually, it was based on the real sinking of a boat called the General Slocum in 1904. The Slocum sank in New York's East River, killing more than a thousand of the 1,342 people on board.)

Okay! I think in April it might finally be time to tackle a true demon -- not only a silent film, but a silent film with an incredibly long running time. Let's grapple with an actual Griffith film and move forward one year to 1916, with the 163-minute Intolerance. Here's hoping I can tolerate it.

No Audio Audient: Sherlock, Jr.

This is the second in my 2016 series No Audio Audient, in which I catch up with one silent film per month.

I've been chastising myself lately for being too indiscriminate with my high star ratings on Letterboxd. I'm desperately trying, by hook or by crook, to recalibrate my personal rating system, so a wider range of the available star ratings can be used to fairly describe my feelings about the movies I see.

But if I can't give five stars to one of the most delightful and imaginative silent films I have ever seen, I don't know when I can give it.

And even watching it late at night, after I'd tried to go to bed but tossed and turned for 20 minutes before giving up, didn't damper my appreciation of it.

Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. was one of the films that prompted me to choose this as my series for 2016, and it was what I meant to start with last month before a separate movie challenge led me to select the Harold Lloyd vehicle The Freshman instead. If I'm not mistaken, Chicago film critic Michael Phillips chose it as one of his ten films to submit to the Sight and Sound list in 2012 -- either actually, or as a theoretical ballot composed just for his appearance on Filmspotting for their Sight and Sound-themed episode. I hadn't had all that much familiarity with it prior to that, but quickly stashed the title away in the back of my mind for future use.

It's a 45-minute "feature" (remember, I'm expanding my usually rigid definition of what constitutes a feature for the purposes of this series) from 1924, involving a projectionist (Keaton) who is studying to be a detective (as the poster above shows you). He's also in love with a girl and is trying to buy her a fancy box of chocolates that will help woo her, but is poor and can only afford a $1 box of chocolates. His rival, the "local sheik," is also poor, but steals the girl's father's pocket watch in order to pawn it and buy her a $3 box of chocolates. He slips the pawn ticket into Keaton's character's pocket in order to frame him for the crime once it is discovered. Keaton's own amateur detective work to find the culprit leads to himself, and he's banished from the girl's home. Upon returning to work, he dreams himself away into the film he's watching, replacing the actors with people from his life and trying again to solve the crime on celluloid.

Although the film ultimately ends up having a fairly well defined plot, Sherlock, Jr. is as close as I've seen to a film that exists purely to celebrate the possibilities of cinema and their inherent joys. This film is full of lovely optical tricks, which had to have been comparatively simple by today's standards, but whose actual mechanical details still sort of escaped me as I sat there watching them. The proof in the pudding of their success was that I didn't want to try to figure out what they'd done. I just wanted to sit there, reveling in it.

The most notable instance of this is probably when Keaton first tries to join the film in his dream, and he actually runs up to the screen and dives forward into it. That in itself is impressive, but it's only a prelude of things to come. As is always the case in the silent films of Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the hero must be constantly challenged by changing circumstances out of his control, and in this case, that couldn't have a more literal interpretation. The image on the movie screen keeps changing to scenes from different movies, such that the item he's sitting on in one scene will suddenly be gone; he'll be on dry land one moment and standing in the water the next; he'll be alone, and then moments later he'll be joined by tigers, which pass before him in the foreground to prove it's not just some visual trick. (I mean, it is a visual trick, but it invites you to believe it isn't.)

This type of sensibility is demonstrated throughout. There's a part where Keaton is being chased, and he meets a strange man in alley with a briefcase. The man seems to be offering him a way out. Before we know it, the man has opened his briefcase in front of him, in the classic position of a peddler showing you his wares. But instead of wares, it's some kind of portal to another dimension -- or simply to the other side of the fence, I guess. We see Keaton run forward and dive into the briefcase, still held at chest level for the man, so not only is he diving in to the briefcase, he's diving into the space where the man's chest should be. Only later is it revealed that he's on the other side of the fence. Again, how they did it had to have been fairly simple -- by today's standards. But I don't want to know, because the illusion was so damn pleasing on its own terms.

Then there's the part where Keaton is driving in a car with the woman and the car goes through all kinds of transformations as it's going along, losing its top, losing its bottom, driving over surfaces it should not be able to drive over, driving over surfaces that are present only for the very moment that the car is passing. As ever, Keaton and his passenger are completely stone-faced. Keaton's ability to underplay a zany moment is perhaps unparalleled in cinematic history.

Then there's the scene where he's playing pool with a #13 ball that is rigged to explode, only he doesn't know it (or does he?). It's actually incredibly tense as we watch him execute one shot after another that miraculously does not involve any incidental contact with that particular ball. This took some incredible trick shooting on Keaton's part, and it's not a feat we should just take in stride -- though by making it look so easy, Keaton does indeed invite us to do that.

I also love the moment when he perfectly rides one of those wooden arms that prevents cars from crossing train tracks, down from the top of the building to the back of a passing convertible. It's not a trick in this case, just one of Keaton's famous perfectly executed stunts.

I could probably go on, as I feel like I have not even scratched the surface of what's stuffed into these 45 minutes. But let me instead end by discussing the final scene, and if you really want a spoiler alert about a movie that is 92 years old, well here it is.

Sherlock, Jr. does end happily for its protagonist, who wakes up from his dream to discover that his girl has gleaned the true identity of the thief and has come to reconcile with him. It's then that we learn that as with his detective aspirations, the projectionist has modeled all his behaviors and goals on the cinema. He looks up at the screen to discover that characters in the movie are also having a romantic reconciliation. Clueless how to do this on his own, he simply mimics the behavior of the movie's romantic lead. And here we are reminded of one of the main philosophical underpinnings of the study of art and culture, which is that life imitates art. And the comparatively young medium of cinema is the perfect way for that occur.

Watching Sherlock, Jr. was also highly informative in the wake of listening to the episode of You Must Remember This on Keaton, which discusses his disastrous decision to sign with MGM and give over creative control on his movies to the studio. When Keaton was at Metro in the 1920s, he was allowed to do whatever he wanted because it was always a financial (and critical) success. But once sound came in, which more or less coincided with the signing of his MGM contract, Keaton became creatively castrated, and he promptly stopped being able to create things with this seemingly effortless sense of artistic joy and imagination. And so I felt like I watched this movie with an extra layer of sentimentality, as I knew that Keaton's days as a genius free to frolic within his element were numbered.

If that's not a five-star movie, I don't know what is.

Next month I'm inclined to start diving into some of the three-hour silent epics I've been meaning to watch for years, but I expect March to be a particularly busy month for me, so let's instead jump back in time ten years from the first two films I've watched in this series and check out the 72-minute Regeneration from 1915. I know nothing about it except it was recently recommended in my Flickchart group on Facebook, and that it's available on Youtube.