1917 (2019)

 "Am I dying?"

"Yes, yes, I think you are."

Wow. How else can I begin? This film is at once a tour de force of cinematography, an epic quest that is at times both dreamlike and almost evocative of Lord of the Rings... and profoundly, deeply, realistic. It's a profound work of the cinematic art that will linger in my mind. And I'm sure there are subtexts and metaphors which have just swooshed right over my head.

The cinematography, by the great Roger Deakin, is sublimre, giving us a textured world that feels at once both of its time and utterly real. The first few minutes, from the field right through the trenches and what must be a cavernous set, are apparently a single shot... and the feat is repeated again and again as Schofield and Blake traverse the bleak sights of No Man's Land on their desperate mission.

The War and its very real horrors are superbly evoked- the rats, the mud, the fear, the grim humour, the bloody awful food, the normalisation of violent death. The dialogue feels real So do the characters- we get to know Blake and Schofield very well, and Schofield's slow metamorphosis from reluctance to absolute determination is well-earned and feels real.

And yet... there is also, somehow, a mythic element here, an epic quest, a kind of Odyssey, a picaresque tale of wanderings. It is hard not to see the cherry trees as metaphor- cut down in their prime, but they will grow again. And the poor orphaned baby, with milk from Schofield, is another sign that out of death comes rebirth. And yet, at the same time, war is unremittingly grim.

An extraordinary work of genius. Literally my only criticism is of Colin Firth's moustache.

Easy Street (1917)

It's been a while since I've watched a silent comedy short, so here's another one. After all, all of them are well out of copyright and many if not all of them can just be watched on YouTube or similar.

This is a another fairly early Chaplin short, although it's very good indeed, with the visual comedy being truly first class and Chaplin himself being extraordinary- the mannerisms, the walk, the facial expressions. He's every bit as good as his reputation.

As ever, with silent films and especially with comedy shorts, you really have to focus on what's going on visually. I'll admit that there are bits of the plot I only really grasped after reading a synopsis. It just goes to show how the experience of watching a film is so fundamentally different if everything has to be communicated visually in a world where cinema-goers were all used to that level of concentration as a matter of course. The rise of sound would fundamentally change that.

Yet the humour absolutely works, a hundred and five years later, despite coming from a time when Russia had a czar and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were still a thing. In many ways, the world as seen in this comedy is a very different one from ours. But slapstick is timeless. And this is some of the very finest slapstick known to humanity.