Dialogue in film is so 2009

Is Under The Skin looking into the rear-view mirror of film history and aesthetics?

You've probably learned at some point that once The Jazz Singer debuted in the autumn of 1926, with Al Jolson not only singing, but ad-libbing dialogue, every studio rushed to get into the talking picture game and that the silent film died almost immediately.  That is almost completely untrue.  (If you are interested in the much more complex true story of this relatively rapid technological changeover, a precursor of a process we live through a couple of times per year nowadays, I highly recommend Talkies:  America's Transition to Sound by Donald Crafton, part of the University of California film history series, possibly the best series there is.)

A few weeks before The Jazz Singer opened, Warner Bros. opened another film for which they had high hopes, which represented a format they believed would be more enduring and popular than the novelty of synchronized speech and song.  The film was Don Juan starring John Barrymore, and it had a synchronized sound track, but only of score music and selected sound effects.  The dialogue was still delivered in title cards.  (Jazz Singer has title cards for most of its length, BTW.)  Here is a sample.  The Spanish subtitles on the title cards are not original, but I wanted to use this excerpt because of the swordfighting sequence.

From the filmmaker's point of view, this format offers the best aspects of silent and sound film.  It preserves the universality of film, since characters are not only not tied to any language, as title cards are replaced in each territory with those in the local language, but not burdened with a voice which does not match either the character nor the actor's appearance.  Undercranking and other silent film devices are still possible.  Yet the filmmakers can ensure that the audience is given the proper emotional cues with either a specifically-composed or a hand-selected underscore, rather than being dependent on the whims (and often limited skills) of the local musicians in each theater.  And key sound effects can be included as may be advisable to inform the audience, and reducing the need for close-ups on noise-making objects, often needed in silent film to call attention to unheard sounds (as if the audience had to be reminded that things CAN actually make sounds, even in the strange dream world of silent film).

This, the moguls of 1926-7 believed, was the technological future of movies, mixed with a program of short subjects with synchronized sound featuring singers, dancers and novelty acts; plus occasional synch sound features to show off singing stars of Broadway and popular music.  But a film was to have a truly dramatic story, it needed to be shot silent with music and effects added in post-production.

History went another way, and by 1928, it was important for films to be All-Talking, All-Singing, All-Dancing, All-Run-Around-And-Bop-You-On-The-Head-With-Our-Synch-Sound.  But perhaps, at least aesthetically, those moguls of the late 1920s were right about the technology.  We've put up with too much jabber over the last almost 90 years of film, and it's time to put things back.

Scarlett Johansson might have felt that way herself, having to yak non-stop in three Woody Allen movies, and (after Under The Skin was produced) being heard but not seen in the super-creepy Her (2013).  Under The Skin (2013) is Ms. Johansson's boldest and most significant project choice since her breakout role, Lost In Translation, and the first since that earlier film to employ her somewhat unreal aura, after so many projects which attempted to root her in everyday reality.

As you can read in a thousand other places, Johansson plays a visitor from another planet who wears the body of a young woman provided by its handler.  The alien uses that woman's allure to draw in young men who are consumed or transformed in some way that looks like this.

What is more interesting, and what makes the film worth seeing, is the alien point-of-view of our world the film presents so successfully, employing some documentary techniques to place the glamorous Ms. Johansson in the least glamorous environment in the world, the city of Glasgow, a working-class city, the largest in Scotland.

In fact, although I lived in Glasgow for a year, the accents were so thick that I had to switch the titles on for the scenes Johansson improvised with non-actor Glaswegians, shot by hidden cameras.  Nonetheless, those scenes are the ones I found the most valuable, though their aesthetics might cause Abbas Kiorastami to weep in recognition.  (That's a small joke.)  Her reticence, the use of the fewest words possible and the blankness, the "silence" of her facial expression is what makes this part of Under The Skin so effective.  This clip also features the main theme of the brilliant score by first-time film composer Mica Levi.



Tellingly, director and co-writer Jonathan Glazer has revealed that the original version of the script contained lengthy preliminary explanations of the aliens, their plans, their methods, all of which were deleted and replaced with a few stunning and mysterious images which, on re-examination, are visually packed with hints and clues about the story.

Curiously, strange and disorienting as they may be, the sci-fi special effects come off as more conventional than the "van" footage; nonetheless, Under The Skin would be almost meaningless if it had unpacked its heart with words like a very drab.  Its very opacity makes it not unclear (except to the willfully obtuse) but clears the deck to let the pictures convey the meaning instead of the text.

As I wrote earlier in this blog, silent pictures may be coming back.  No, not silent pictures -- the music and sound are too important to the title effect.  Pictures with sounds, instead of the years of illustrated radio which is so easy and comforting for film financiers but so limiting for film artists.

Paradoxically, this may have been enabled by the shift to digital imaging.  The new cameras handle low light extremely well, encouraging filmmakers to move cameras into environments that require less artificial preparation.  Moreover, long takes are easier (no worry about how much film remains int he magazine) and breakdowns within a take are less of a problem, since editors can digitally stitch together two different takes into a single seamless entity.  Whereas long takes are looked at as being theatrical in the work of Welles, Wyler and Renoir, these new long takes constitute a new definition of cinematic, as cameras weave together multiple events and multiple environments into a unified physical and emotional environment.  First digital tools and non-linear editing sped editing up, encouraging the rapid cutting that vapid and lazy journalists called "MTV editing"; now digital filmmaking has not only resuscitated the long take, but made it the norm, liberating actors and cinematographers into more complex and revelatory work.

We just might be entering a silver age for pictures that move.

Silent film lives

This might be wishful thinking, but I think I am detecting a mini-trend in films that eschew dialogue, at least as a means of conveying narrative information.  Even in some fairly talky films, what seems to be important is who is talking to each other and why, not whatever it is they're saying.

I'm not talking about the obvious examples such as The Artist or Biancaneves, which aspire to an earlier form in a self-conscious way, but the stripping away of dialogue in order to arrive at deeper narrative revelation that words can cover up.

Exhibit A:  Blue Caprice (2013), an abstract fictionalization of the 2002 Beltway sniper incident.  Although there is a soundtrack, it is one of the most profoundly silent movies made in the last few years, both literally and metaphysically.  It seems to have infuriated many of the critics that the film offers no explanation or motive for the violence this would-be father-and-son team inflicted.  But really, what explanation would be possible?  The point of it WAS motiveless crime.  It's even sketched out by John Muhammed (played by Isaiah Washington) in those very words.  What makes the crimes insoluble is their sheer motivelessness, their lack of connection and lack of predictability.  Go ahead -- you explain that.  Irrationality is the heart and soul of the act.  So the film is built on a spiritual silence as to what these acts mean or what their purpose is, a silence it never ever breaks.

C'mon kids, artists are not here to explain.  They are here to observe, to re-interpret and re-present the world back to us.  Judgments are for the audience, not for the artist.  You want an explanation for terrible violence? Check out the psychiatrist scene in Pyscho.  Boring.  Meaningless.  Just there to give everyone a chance to calm down from all the screaming before they leave the theater.  Explanations don't belong in movies.

But there are even more profound and localized silences around the deaths in Blue Caprice.  The first on-screen shooting incorporates a visual misdirection and an audio clue that the shooting has begun.  As one victim passes into oblivion, an oblivious shopper goes by with her cart.  The placid surface of the carpet-like grass disturbed by the incongruity of a snowblower.  The rampage is represented by the sounds of police calls playing asyncronously against shots of police cruisers and pictres of crime scenes.  The arrest itself is literally silent as far as the film is concerned, since it takes place offscreen.  And once that arrest happens, Muhammed disappears utterly (and silently) from the film, and his "son" Richmond's only utterances are to confirm his intention to maintain his silence.

Critics seemed to get downright angry about this film.  Why wouldn't it explain the roots of gun violence, they said?  What is it avoiding?  But the film is not about gun violence -- it's about psychological violence.  The child abuse of a man who picks up a drifting boy and turns him into an emotionless killing machine, seeking only the "father's" approval for a well-aimed shot.  Sorry -- no socio-economic, legal, policy explanations behind this tale, just complementary illnesses.  The film portrays the very lack of affect that makes such crime possible -- which is its strength and the very reason the professional opinionators and verbalizers are uncomfortable with it.

Such chilliness would have been anathema to Hitchcock, who I suspect would have loved All Is Lost (2013), given all its very deliberate limitations.  For one thing, Redford's virtually wordless turn is the kind of eloquent, expressive performance that places him alongside Hitchcock favorite James Stewart, as well as Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood (the latter two nearly always better when they're not talking.)

Paradoxically, the film was built as an explanation for a brief letter that writer-director J.C. Chandor wrote in the earliest stages of creation.  It was an apology and a confession.  As he read it, Chandor realized that this imaginary farewell was built on the unspoken question, "How long is hope reasonable?"  Here is the text:

13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here... except for soul and body... that is, what's left of them... and a half-day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure... but it did. I fought 'til the end, I'm not sure what this worth, but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all... I will miss you. I'm sorry.

Other than the sentence in the middle about "soul and body" and "a half-day's ration" nothing in this sentence calls for a story about a man lost and alone at sea.  Which is what makes the nit-picking about the safety details of this film so ridiculous.  (So what if the man had had an "EPIRB."  Then he either gets rescued or the EPIRB is somehow made non-functional.  Narratively or emotionally speaking, what has been added by attending to such a detail?)  It is a real boat and not a real boat.  It is the Indian Ocean and not the Indian Ocean.  Our Man is a real man or not.  They are both at once.  It doesn't matter.  This is a metaphysical journey from hope to reality and the necessity of letting go.  The subject itself is profoundly silent -- it lives at the core of the soul and not subject to debate or persuasion.  It is a feeling question, and therefore perfectly suited to film.

It is about accepting failure.  It is one of the most painful movies ever made.

It is wordless but not at all silent.  Wind, water, the creaks of the boat, some expletives.  But mostly wind and water.  And pictures of a man thinking.  He thinks deliberately.  He moves slowly, with purpose. No panic.  No false hope.  Reasonableness.  Reasonableness defeated.

Two "silent" films -- one cold, the other cool, both warming themselves at the glowing hearth of the origin of film -- pictures in motion, without the intervention of theatrical chatter.  "Look at this" says Film.  Don't measure it, don't judge it.  At least not yet.  Just look, then look closer.  Only see.

What did you want?  A speech?

Surprises from the pre-classical era

I've only just gotten around to The Phantom Carriage (1921) which has been rediscovered and hailed as an early landmark of Swedish and of silent cinema.  As for the content of Victor Sjöström's remarkable and haunting film, I don't have anything to say beyond the reams that have been written, either about the contemplation of death-in-life, nor about the impeccable in-camera double-exposure effects that seem incomprehensibly impossible before the advent of the optical printer.

But it is always a pleasure to see films made before styles and studio procedures were set into the hard expectations of the market and of genre itself, which is one of the principal rewards of early silent cinema itself.  The filmmakers were still working out the rules, syntactical, stylistic and commercial.  And one of the issues that most concerns the producers and exhibitors is making sure that the actors are clearly visible at all times, so that the audience knows that they're seeing the people they paid to see.  This is no concern of the filmmaker, who is driven primarily by narrative (which is not the same thing as plot or story).

So look at this still, which (unlike many production stills) is an accurate reflection of this scene in the film.  The low and partially obscured light source perfectly sets the hushed, anxious yet warm tone of the scene.  Is there any question that this is a deathbed, albeit not a frightening one?  This is the deathbed of a person who is lived well and wishes to die well.  The light is neither evenly balanced, as Classical Hollywood would demand, nor is it dramatically expressionistic, as in Citizen Kane and its film noir offspring. The effect is oblique, but not in overstated way. The light throughout Phantom Carriage is rarely realistic, yet it often seems that it is, because--although it is NOT expressionistic--it is highly expressive of the inner states of the characters.  A photographer like Julius Jaenzon becomes a true co-author in a work like this, especially in silent film, in which dialogue is not a significant factor.

Students and even devoted film lovers are always resisting silent film, perhaps sensing that it requires closer attention and is therefore, harder work.  But without a stream of chatter, sound effects and music closely synchronized to the image, the viewer is forced to shut up and look.  And when it comes to film, the pictures, there's where the goodies are.

Sunday in the Park with Wolfgang

No, not that Wolfgang.  It's the name of a wine-seller, who along with several other non-professionals spent the weekends of Summer 1929 to make a film about the delights and ambiguities of everyday life and romance in a major city (Berlin).  People on Sunday (1930) is almost an unintentional classic, intended merely to earn its makers a foothold in the high-powered German film industry, which would soon become unavailable to them as Jews. 

There are many places to learn about the interesting history of the making of this film, not the least the package of goodies to be found in the Criterion release of the film and at this page.  I don't intend to go into that, nor the way People on Sunday anticipates Italian neo-realism, which is also rehearsed and rehashed in many places.  No, to me, the remarkable thing about the film is that it stills works.  It is not a stuffy museum piece, nor a mere time capsule of the Weimar Republic.  It can, against the odds, still speak to an audience.  The question is why.

Here's an excerpt, after the central foursome have been swimming and are now lazing in the afternoon summer sun.  Swimming costumes aside, they seem completely contemporary and modern.



Oddly, one of the aspects of the film which makes it most archaic rescues it from being as dated as it might be, specifically, the decision to shoot a silent film after that form had virtually died in the cinema.  But the film's silence interlocks perfectly with the other key decision, to use non-actors in the leading roles. As we know from far too much reality television, most people are pretty bad at acting, even as themselves.  There needs to be a simulation of the lack of self-consciousness and ease before the camera that makes the events being enacted convincing as real events taking place in the real world.  Delivery of dialogue requires real acting experience and training to carry off as being "real."  Liberated from having to memorize and deliver a writer's lines, the non-actors are free to simply "be," to just exist.

Second, the story is so natural as to be virtually off-handed.  There is no melodrama and no artificial "writer's humor" to be delivered.  What little story there is concerns possible pairings and re-pairings among the foursome.  Momentary jealousies, imagined slights and palpable delights.  This may be the most "neo-realistic" aspect of the film, its eschewing the conventions of theatrical drama, which dominated mainstream commercial film right through the 1950s.

Third, Eugen Schufftan's photography stays close to its subjects, dispenses with glamour and reveals the true, tousled and freckled beauty of these people.  It looks like snapshots of your friends, or at least of your grandparent's or great-grandparent's friends, who, despite your notions to the contrary, were also real people.  By ignoring fashion, it frees the film from the ravages of time.

I have to admit, that as a student of Brecht, Weill, Piscator and that crowd, it is wonderful to see the streets and byways of Weimar Berlin in its twilight moments.  One can sense how the city was a magnet for the young and the creative of that day.

Happily, you don't have to take my word for the virtues of this film.  You can view at archive.org using this link, or view it below via YouTube until it (probably) gets taken down.  Enjoy a summer Sunday in the city, preserved forever via hard work, indirection and accident.

Steven Spielberg, film historian

Echoing "Night of the Hunter"?

Written reactions to Steven Spielberg's film version of War Horse (2011) is virtually a litmus test of each writer's film history knowledge.  Youngsters who think Titanic is a classic old-timey movie dismiss the film as sentimental slop, riddled with cliche and overstatement.  A few recognized some quotes from Gone With The Wind, usually misattributing the palette and compositions of the film to Victor Fleming, the named director.  But Fleming essentially directed the actors.  The look of the film was designed from top to bottom by William Cameron Menzies with the collaboration of cinematographers Ernst Haller and Fleming's favorite, Lee Garmes.  These would be the source of the oversaturated colors behind near-silhouetted figures as in, for instance the final shot of War Horse.

But Gone With The Wind is just the beginning.  War Horse draws from the work of David Lean (who Spielberg evoked brilliantly in Empire of the Sun) but also other epic filmmakers of the 1950s George Stevens and Fred Zinnemann.  But it also goes straight back to Lewis Milestone (specifically All Quiet On The Western Front), and silent filmmakers F.W. Murnau, Frank Borzage and especially King Vidor, director of The Big Parade and The Crowd as well as the 1956 War and Peace.  Spielberg does not do DVD commentaries (a sensible position), but I would love a commentary by really knowledgeable film scholar who could annotate the sources, whether overt or sub rosa.

Which is not to say that the film is pasted together from film references like a Brian DePalma movie.  Spielberg has thoroughly absorbed this vocabulary, like an author deliberately writing in an archaic style.  With all the fuss about last year's The Artist, I would love to see Spielberg make a substantially silent film--I think he is the director most qualified in the world to express himself in that challenging and classical form.  The exquisite no-man's-land sequence, designed by Rick Carter, would not be out of place in an epic of the mid-1920s, and the dialogue (with a German fluent in English) might have played even better on title cards than being heard.

Which is not to say that Mr. Spielberg doesn't know how to use a soundtrack.  For one thing, John Williams has written his best score in many years, although, he, like Spielberg, is creating in a borrowed idiom.  In this case it is the work of early 20th century British composers such as Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Bax, Walton, Britten and Grainger.  Again, there is no actual plagiarism, but the full immersion in a particular language.

Non-musical sound plays a part in one of the three-shots in this film that I would nominate for all-time greats in film history.  That is the moment when two young German deserters have been discovered and are being shot on the spot at late dusk or early evening.  The camera suddenly jumps from the base of the windmill in which the boys have been ensconced to high in the air, just the other side of the windmill's sails.  The boys are lined up with their backs to us.  The officer calls "Fire" and at that very instant a windmill sail obscures our view.  We hear the gunshot and the sail has passed revealing the bodies strewn on the ground.

Earlier in the movie there is a shot that would have made Eisenstein weep in recognition of a brother filmmaker.  The British are making an insane, under-manned, under-weaponed charge on a German encampment.  (The sequence begins with a brilliant shot of the officers mounting amid tall grass that obscures  the horses.)  At first, the Brits seem to be triumphant until they reach the end of the open field and the edge of the adjacent wood.  There the Germans have hidden their automatic guns, with which they proceed to demolish the British cavalry.  But we never see the falls.  We see the moment of recognition on the cavalry officers' faces that they have made a devastating miscalculation.  Then we see riderless horses leaping over and past the German guns.  Back to the mounted charge.  Back to the empty horses.  The audience puts those two shots together with that beautiful mathematics of film editing:  (Shot of mounted officers charging PLUS shot of riderless horses leaping past machine guns EQUALS officers falling dead from their horses.)

My next is a throwaway, but it simply demonstrates that Spielberg breathes the syntax of film.  It is an establishing shot of a person entering the stable in which the title character, Joey has been hidden.  We see the person first as a large, dark, convex reflection.  Then we realize it is a reflection in Joey's eye.  It is not only an inventive way to open a sequence, but it reminds us that the film is really about Joey and that we are always viewing the world through Joey's eyes.  All of this work, I have to presume, is executed with the superb collaboration of Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's cinematographer since Schindler's List.

We knew that Spielberg is great with young actors and he has done his usual sterling work with Jeremy Irvine as Joey's faithful friend Albert and most especially with Celine Buckman as Emilie, the beautiful and tragic young protector of Joey.  But one must add to this the evocative "acting" of the horses playing Joey and Topthorn.  Be it the work of handlers and experts, Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn have put the shots together so as to simulate acting that is more convincing than many a so-called human actor.

The climactic reunion between Albert and Joey is most frequently acted as ridiculous, sentimental, implausible.  Again, this demonstrates an ignorance of this classical mode of storytelling.  It is not meant to be journalism, nor is it meant to be startling or surprising.  The mechanics of the scene were carefully put in place in the first act (my wife and I remarked to each other that the particular device would doubtless return in Act III).  The genre is closer to fable or legend than to film realism.  That is not an accident -- it is a choice.

Not only is War Horse one of the best World War I films I have ever seen, making it clear what a price nearly every person in Europe paid for that bit of insanity: I would list it as one of Spielberg's five best films, with Empire of the Sun, Jaws, Munich and Duel.  Yes, it's a perverse list, but hey, this is my blog.  Make your own list on your own blog.

Revisiting the pre-verbal pleasures of film

The triumphant march of The Artist (2011) through the 2012 award season only highlights what I see as an emerging trend in film around the world, a rediscovery of the delights of the pre-verbal aspects of film. I use the term "pre-verbal" advisedly. Just as a black-and-white film should not be defined as a film which lacks color, a sequence which relies on cinematic tools other than dialogue need not be defined as "silent" or even "non-verbal" which connote that something has been removed.

To a great degree, film speaks to the limbic brain, the center of emotions. The best films are not illustrated scripts, but images (and often sounds) arranged in time so as to suggest cause-and-effect relationships among human events which trigger emotions in the viewer. Movies do not make $200 million and make year-end best lists by having either well-organized data or elegantly artistic designs. We want them to move us, and for that, filmmakers, especially those who have taken the trouble to steep themselves in the canon, have found the Land Before Talk Began.

Hugo (2011), for example, is the first 3D movie in the current post-Avatar wave which is likely to be looked at 50 years from now. (I suspect that Avatar, as good as it was, will retain interest only as a historic landmark, as its technological achievements will soon be surpassed.) Not only does it earn a permanent place as a Scorsese film and as a unique celebration of the great Georges Melies, but it uses the 3D toolkit in an almost indispensible manner in telling its story. At its heart, Hugo is an investigation, a delving into. And whereas 3D films of the 1950s were about things popping out at us in the post-war America of abundance -- paddleballs, hubcaps, breasts -- Avatar taught that 3D is even better at delving inside a world, at entering it in depth and exploring all around it. Thus, Hugo keeps penetrating deeper and deeper into long-held secrets, with an extra overlay of clockwork mechanics which also benefit from the sculptural plasticity leant them by the 3D format. It doesn't hurt when 3D is put to work enhancing the hand-colored exuberance of Melies own work in the delightful finale.

On the other hand, the pre-verbal work of Tree of Life (2011) seems to infuriate more film fans than it delights. This film has been attacked far and wide by the people Lenny Bruce used to call the "whats-it-mean"s; the people who cannot enjoy anything unless it has a clear explanation. These people curl up into a fetal position in the face of the ambiguous, let alone the wholly ineffable. Unless there is a planned program of meaning, like a bad Stanley Kramer movie, they stamp their feet and threaten to turn blue until you bring them The Help. (I didn't mind The Help, but did anyone have the slightest doubt of either its intended message or its eventual outcome at any point?) Tree' s two central characters, son Sean Penn and father Brad Pitt (how I wish there were photos of a family reunion) are both singularly incapable of significant verbal expression. (Reportedly, this only happened to Penn's character during post-production, when his long verbal exegeses were excised.) So the audience must read between the lines, and go back to studying faces, postures and tics in order to "read" the real dialogue beneath the words.

And in a manner recalling the days of Douglas Fairbanks, who appeared to do wonderful stunts because he had a certain energy and grace plus sets designed to his exact physical specifications, Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) delivers some marvelous treats for the eye not limited to falling down the face of a large skyscraper or blowing up part of the Kremlin. My favorite sequence has to be the deranged 3D-pinball-intricacy of Tom Cruise caught in a car elevator system like a malevolent round of Plinko. In fact, to recall MI:GP is strictly to remember the visuals -- there is not one memorable line of dialogue in it -- not even a snappy catchphrase, and I would be willing to bet you could follow the action completely with the sound turned off. Let's try it when the DVD comes out.

Even a film which should qualify as a conventional egghead-arthouse-international-politics movie like Incendies (2011), based on a play about a family torn asunder in the turmoil of the Middle East (are you bored yet?) is brilliantly realized by the filmmaker's decision to hack away at the dialogue original play and substitute the expressions of the actors and a wealth of visual metaphor, not least the film's entire key -- or MacGuffin depending on how you look at it. It even has the courage to play out lengthy scenes in unsubtitled foreign languages, relying on the audience's ability to read the visuals.

Even The Artist itself relies on its pictures uncontaminated with chatter to pull off two of its most telling and moving scenes, as we see each of the major characters fall in love. For Peppy, it is the scene in which she caresses Georges's tailcoat substituting her arm for his in the sleeve, caressing it and speaking with it in a way that would be ludicrous in a "talkie" but is poetic in its silence. Similarly, the dancing scene with its multiple spoiled takes gives us a man who literally cannot let go of a woman in a sequence that could have been irritating had we been compelled to hear the same dialogue and/or music over and over, but which is singularly charming as Georges "breaks down" before our eyes, helpless in his infatuation.

And then there is the very literal pre-verbal developments of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which I had avoided in the theaters because it looked like another lunkheaded CGI-fest, but which is instead a powerful metaphor of colonialism and racism, the only Apes worthy to stand next to the original (and superior to it in my own view). Here the acquisition of language means acquiring power and status, but that does not invalidate the dignity of the apes as they were before language: they always had dignity and strength--the language is merely the instrument that allows them to communicate that to humans. In fact, the downfall of the humans was their inability to read pre-verbal communications. I'm kind of looking forward to the subjugation of the arrogant literates in the next film. And I know that's weird for an English teacher, but then film itself really has no business being taught by an English teacher.

Please don't tell my bosses.

Codes and silences

At the very least, The Town (2010) settles the issue: Ben Affleck is a real movie director, not just an actor who takes an occasional flyer behind the lens. Gone, Baby Gone was extremely accomplished, but whether because of its modest scale and star (Affleck's brother Casey) or its downbeat and somewhat ambiguous tone, it did not make a big impression in the film business community. Still, every talented actor probably has one pretty good film in them. Affleck came roaring back with another entry in the evolving sub-genre of films set in Eastern Massachusetts, wrapping his drama of growth, loyalty and betrayal in a hard boiled heist-move coating.

Frankly, the coating is more convincing than the gooey center of the film, which tries to suggest that a career criminal can win the love and loyalty of a Good Woman and then completely quit being a thief. But although that premise is hard to take, Affleck's depiction of what FBI man Jon Hamm's character calls "Irish omerta" is utterly persuasive, especially the strong ties between Affleck's character and that of Jeremy Remmer (Hurt Locker) a probable sociopath who is nonetheless fiercely loyal and, in his own way, trustworthy.

Most impressive is Affleck's handling of an urban car chase midway through the film reminiscent of the best aspects of John Frankenheimer's Ronin. Shot and edited with an economy, lightness and realistic scale that make it more convincing than many more hyperbolic sequences (e.g. The Matrix Reloaded). The light, swift style in which all the crime-action scenes are put together heighten their plausibility, even though the premise of the climactic sequence, an attempted heist of Fenway is prima facie ridiculous.

The economy of the shooting is mirrored in the elliptical dialogue (Affleck is also co-writer of the final shooting script with Aaron Stockard). Here's how we learn of the loyalty of Remmer's character (James) to Affleck's character (Doug):

Doug MacRay: I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.
[Beat]
James Coughlin: Whose car are we gonna take?

And later they discuss the big job that could set them for life, either as wealthy men or permanent prisoners:

Doug MacRay: You know if this thing goes right, could be your turn to step away, too.
James Coughlin: Yeah. Sure. What am I gonna do? Dougy, huh? Go down to Margaritaville, drink half a yard and fall off the [bleep]in' bar stools?
Doug MacRay: Do me a favor, the weight of this thing...pack a parachute at least.
James Coughlin: You know the funniest thing about being in prison guys pretending they wanna get out. I can't do any more time, Dougy. So if we get jammed up, we're holding court on the street.

The criminal mastermind in The Town runs a flower shop as a front, as does one of the rival gang leaders in what is often cited as the film that kicked off the gangster film cycle of the early '30s, the romantic Underworld (1927).

Journalist and future screenwriter Ben Hecht concocted a hard-boiled story, is first for the movies, of a gangster's rise coupled with a bit of romantic rivalry, trying to be as true as he could be to the real Chicago gangsters he new personally. Paramount assigned the story to the struggling young Josef von Sternberg, who had established two reputations, one as an efficient technician and "movie doctor" and the other as a visual poet with less interest in narrative than in pictures. Luckily, this was a perfect qualification for a director of silent film, in which the best stories were the simplest ones which could be explored in purely pictorial terms.

Von Sternberg took Hecht's gritty story and made it an operatic love triangle, a competition between two spiritual brothers, one "Rolls Royce", representing Mind, and the other, "Bull" representing Body, for the possession of the sensual yet ethereal woman, evocatively called "Feathers" (and covered in them most of the time). Von Sternberg's reputation rests on his exploration and exploitation of actor's faces, of subtle details of eyes and corners of mouths. But he is also the master of light and shadow and the moving camera. The sequence below begins with what is quite clearly an attempted rape, without showing anything which could seriously disturb a censor.



If you don't want to take the time for this entire clip, start at about 4:00 and see how von Sternberg absorbs the lessons of German cinema in staging and lighting, and how he allows his audience thrill to grotesque violence without showing it directly (yet without cutting away). Then von Sternberg exercises a superb economy, cutting straight from the murder of Buck in his flower ship (just like The Town) to Bull's sentencing; from one kind of justice to another.

One of the toughest things about watching dramatic silent films today can be the long focus on faces which seem to be barely changing. In sound film, a silent reflective moment can be effective, but when all the action is silent, long close-ups can seem really languorous. But von Sternberg keeps the story alive even as we see thought flicker over the characters' faces. I don't know of a silent feature which is so consistently engaging and absorbing, even with its simple characters and symbols. (Look, for instance, at the confetti which covers the floor of the Criminal's Ball like a thick soup of moral squalor.)

But powerful as it is, Underworld doesn't really feel like a true ancestor of those rise-to-the-top gangster films like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and the original Scarface. (And incidentally, every fan of The Godfather, Wiseguys, the Scarface remake and The Sopranos owe it to themselves to see those primitive antecedents, many sequences of which are still blood-chilling.) Bull Weed is a well-established success at the beginning of the film, and Underworld has more to do with choices and loyalty than about the role of the gangster in society and the manner in which he gathers power, which is at the heart of the 30s cycle.

That trope is, however, central to the latest remake of The Public Enemy, the South African crime epic Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema (released theatrically here in 2010). Although it incorporates real-life story elements such as the collapse of apertheid and the use of rent strike law to acquire title to real estate, the film still feels like a long-distance echo of the old Warner Bros. classics, for which black skin stands in for Irish heritage and cocaine substitutes for illegal booze. The central character even dies of a fatal gun show surrounded by cops exactly like Jimmy Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. All that is needed was for Kunene to gasp out, "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Lucky?" Jerusalema is even directly derivative of Michael Mann's Heat, as Joburg gangsters imitate one of the key MOs in that film, plowing tractor-trailers into armored trucks.

The one truly original. element is the first half-hour of the film, depicting the future gangsters as clueless and inept youngsters, stealing trucks they don't even know how to drive, and planning to hijack drivers while standing under a sign warning drivers that they are likely to be hijacked in this area. The mix of English, Zulu, Afrikaans and pidgin is also quite interesting and illustrates the slippery social distinctions of the South African criminal world (specifically, the depredations of the refugees from Ghana).

But for all the trappings, the elements of gangster films remain the same: poverty, lack of opportunity, violence, family, loyalty and betrayal. I don't think any of this is going away soon.

You say "prostitute" like it's a bad thing

Diary Of A Lost Girl (1929) has always been treated as the lesser younger sibling of the first collaboration between director G.W. Pabst and incandescent actress Louise Brooks, Pandora's Box. And certainly, it has nothing like the light, glancing touch or the existentialist amorality of the earlier film. Diary is a melodramatic fable, of how broken families breed corruption. Nonetheless, it still has the amazing Brooks and its share of iconic images and moments. For example, if you're in a rush (and why are you reading my blog when you're in a rush?), start the video above at around 1:35. There in a luminous close-up, Brooks enjoys her first trepidatious sip of champagne (translation: illicit sex) and finds she enjoys it. There is as good an example of silent film acting as you could see. (I wish I 'd known Brooks's work during my film course last year -- I used Lon Chaney as my exemplar of silent film acting, but he is too often unreliably stagy, whereas Brooks is Pure Film.)

This close-up contains almost the entire essence of the film -- that without a real sense of identity, as provided by a circle of loving people -- putting yourself for sale in the world, as represented by literal prostitution in this case, is as good a way as any for defining yourself and obtaining power over your circumstances as any. (Especially true when your family is ready to sell you and not even let you share in the profits!)

Late silent film reached an astonishing height of efficiency, compression and expressivity. Even today, screenwriters wrestle with backstory -- how to get the information out with an elegant and organic way, rather than the manner of the housekeeper in The Real Inspector Hound: "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring...I hope nothing is amiss because we are completely cut off from the world..." etc.

Look at the first few minutes of the film, which get so much information across so quickly with the minimum of titles and the maximum of facial reaction, setting out not only the facts but the social context of those facts:



The film is both more explicit about sex and more conventionally moral than Pandora's Box (could this be because it's based on an actual memoir of a "fallen woman"?), and even contains the kind of message for the audience, satirized by the play and film Chicago: "My audience loves me. And I love them. And they love me for lovin' them and I love them for lovin' me. And we love each other. And that's cause none of us got enough love in our childhoods."

Never mind. There's not much to analyze in this film, and if I continue it will be only to describe and praise the subtextual clarity and precision of its storytelling, time better spent seeking out the movie and watching it from beginning to end.

80 years on, still wreaking havoc

I don't know why it's taken me so long to see Pandora's Box (1929) a film I have been reading about and hearing about for at least 40 years. Perhaps I was afraid that being German, silent and over two hours, it would be heavy going. I couldn't have been more wrong. The film is at least as breathtaking as it must have been 80 years ago. It needs no apologies, no excuses. It barely even needs historical context. Few films of any age leap off the screen with the power and immediacy of Pandora's Box, and especially not silent films.

Naturally, much of the power and immediacy come from the extreme direct and unaffected performance of Louise Brooks as Lulu, around whom much of the legend of this literally legendary film is built. As Orson Welles said in another context, "it's all true." Brooks triumphs in the first and most important task of the film actor--to appear to be unaware of the camera and of the fact that one is giving a performance. The best film performances do not appear to be constructed or considered, but "caught." Brooks simply is Lulu, the strangely innocent destroyer of men and their lives, the femme fatale whose fatale quality finally reaches even her own self. She is no immoral vampire, sucking the life out of her helpless victims, but an almost pre-moral toddler of sex, who tears the lives of others apart like a small child kicking over a castle of blocks, for fun and to see what happens.

She is a fool, but not a dullard. She has a strange intelligence, and she is one of the few femmes fatales who seems to enjoy sex for its own sake, rather than merely what it can do for her material circumstances. And Brooks has a powerful flesh impact--not in a blowzy way like Monroe or other conventional sex symbols, but with a glow of youth that could have been fresh and redeeming, but here carries the stink of corruption of death. There is an ambiguity, a duality in this performance that is indescribable. It has to be seen.

Lulu is a narcissist and a sociopath, but the people around her are far worse. Her "mentor" (read "pimp") Schigolch is an evil troll who encourages her in prostitution and murder. Her "lover" Schon clearly hates her for his obsession with her (you can see that in his face at the end of the clip that appears above). Her "true" lover Alwa, is young, weak and easily manipulated. Her final lover turns out to be Jack the Ripper. Lulu does not have the power to make this world evil--she is merely a reflection of the cesspool she finds herself in. That might make the film sound repulsive and difficult to watch, but it is riveting.

Much of this has to do with the brilliant cinematography and staging of the film. In the clip below, we see one of the most authentic and detailed stagings of a backstage setting, with only a modicum of exaggeration for comic effect. The clip illustrates the expressiveness and fluidity of silent film at its height. This is not a form that is "missing something," but has created a detailed and effective visual vocabulary and syntax. This is silent film that speaks for itself.

A harmless Chaney is a toothless Chaney

Lon Chaney's films occupy an aesthetic space that doesn't exist in film anymore. He made popular entertainments based on solid acting and a disinclination to pander to the audience. If the stories veer into the sentimental, that was what Chaney sincerely desired.

He is most famous for his characterizations which amounted to disguises, and his role in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928) is no exception. (And yes, that cheesy song with the lyrics, "Even though your heart is breaking/Laugh, Clown" that turned up in 1930's cartoons was written to publicize this movie.) But though he disguised himself, there were common qualities to all his characters--strong romantic desire, a penchant for self-sacrifice, and, in the best of films, menace--or at least power--held in check. Writer William Goldman describes in his book The Season how Burt Lancaster and George C. Scott suggested that power and menace, even in a meeting. There is always the sense in a good Chaney film that whatever he's doing right now, he could choose to do something much, much worse.

But not in Laugh, Clown. It's the literally pathetic story of the clown who raises a little girl and falls in love with her, but she loves the other fellow, so he nobly steps aside, which somewhat relieves the story from its inherent skeeviness. But throughout, he is completely harmless. He is not going to strangle the handsome young fellow, or whack him over the head, or cut off his limbs or do anything interesting. And Chaney not being weird and twisted, is just another sentimental old ham from the 1920's. I cannot imagine he would have the reputation he has today, 80+ years later if the body of his work were no edgier than this pablum.

When is a dream really like a dream?

It is the hoariest old cliche that films are dreams. I don't know about you, but my dreams don't have neat three-act structures, perfectly scripted dialogue and elegant production design, like your typical Hollywood product. They're usually a chaotic collage of the flotsam found in my brain. Cowards Bend The Knee (2003) is the first movie I've ever seen that actually looks the way I think I dream (sometimes).

Let's be straight with this, though. It's not clear that Cowards (by cult filmmaker Guy Maddin) is even a movie. It began as an art installation, in ten peepshows, now manifested as chapters. The films are primarily monochrome, shot in out-of-focus silent, 8-millimeter, with a vague continuity and jump cuts and repetitions galore. You can search the internet to read about the plot, which was not comprehensible to me until I listened to the comment track, and which ultimately did not affect my opinion of the movie.

I used to like the fever dreams I had when I was a kid. They are some of the few dreams I can recall. I think I could even control or direct them. I remember that many parts were in grainy black-and-white (perhaps influenced by the cheap prints of Charlie Chaplin films that were shown incessantly on TV in my childhood), that the motion was jumpy and choppy and that many parts repeated and others were complete non sequiturs. Could Guy Maddin have gotten into my head? Not sure I want to see any of this other films, but I'm glad I saw this one. It was short, too (61 minutes).

Johnny No-Trump

I want to keep this short. It's hard enough to get people to view and appreciate silent films without a stiff like this making things harder. I watched The Ace of Hearts (1921) by way of getting to more of the work of Lon Chaney. You could describe this as Anarchists in Love. It's the usual Chaney triangle where he doesn't get the girl (surprise!) In this one they took the 75-minute running time of the film and packed all of 8 minutes worth of story. Nothing happens over and over and over and everyone pulls a face to show how they feel about it. With so many interesting Lon Chaney films lost, why did this one have to survive?

Unknown to me

Even as a silent-film buff, I had only seen Lon Chaney's two most famous performances, in Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame. But with Halloween on its way, it seemed appropriate to catch up on some of his other work.

Chaney's films aren't really horror films, but they dwell among the grotesque, bizarre and sometimes horrific. The Unknown (1927) is a prime example. Co-written and directed by frequent collaborator Todd Browning (best known today for the Lugosi Dracula and Freaks), the story is typically weird. It concerns a criminal with double thumbs who poses as Alonzo, an armless knife thrower, to avoid police detection. He falls in love with a young woman (played by a very young Joan Crawford) who is sorta sweet on Alonzo, since she has a phobia about men's arms and being touched. Alonzo blackmails a doctor into removing his arms, only to find that the young woman has fallen in love with someone else. Chaney's performance when he realizes what he has done to himself for no reason is still quite startling, ending in a cry which is no less piercing because there is no soundtrack.

The film's technique is rudimentary--it is all about Chaney's acting (which includes some well-staged stunts using a real armless actor). But it has set me off on the trail to see as much of Chaney's work as I can.