L'Etoile de Mer (1928)

"Nous sommes a jamais perdus dans le désert de léternèbre."

This is an interesting little comparison to Un Chien Andalou, directed a year earlier by Man Ray. The version I saw had a superb soundtrack by Paul Mercer which I recommend hugely.

The other film used conventional film-making tropes and techniques to depict surreal scenes, divorced from any context or sense of cause and effect, and that made it seem rather slippery to me. I found it hard to grab on to anything so I could talk about the film. That isn't the case here, with the use of soft focus. The blurring of the picture throughout the film is as much a part of the narrative as the events depicted, which I suppose can be understood in terms of the modernist foregrounding of form as opposed to content. As a piece of art this is far more a modernist work than a surrealist one. Interestingly, though, the picture often has a kind of Impressionist quality.

While there isn't any obvious plot here, there is a definite theme of beauty, which is interesting precisely because by 1928 it was a very old-fashioned conception of what art was supposed to be or do. We are tantalised with the beauty of the woman, with the first shot of her face which is in focus showing her peeping, face half-hidden, over a newspaper. Only at the end of the film are we male voyeurs finally rewarded.

The scenes of pieces of newspapers blowing across a beach remind me of the scene from American Beauty where a plastic bag, floating in the wind, is said to be beautiful. I couldn't say what their significance was, though. And as for the starfish I have no idea. But this is a fascinating film.

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

No quote, unless "wtf?!" counts.

Got me a movie, I want you to know. Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know. Don't know about you, but this is beautiful. Also weird. But good weird.

It's rather hard to say much about the surrealism, or indeed to get any kind of grip on a film that isn't really a narrative at all. When you're looking at a movement based on Freudianism and free association it's rather hard to find anything much beyond "a bit random, innit?" to say about the various weird scenes. The captions denoting that it's "eight years later" or "sixteen years earlier" are presumably supposed to indicate the random way time passes in dreams, much like cutting between scenes in a film, so I suppose that's a bit metatextual. The man's unexpected assault on the woman's boobs is probably supposed to be some sort of illustration of how the id is let loose within dreams- Freud and all that- but I'm otherwise wary to use phrases like "supposed to be" at all. I have pretty much the same attitude about Salvador Dali's paintings. What do you say about them beyond "Ooh, a bit Freudian, dreamlike and therefore random"?

What matters for the surrealism to work is that the film should look gorgeous and be creatively shot. Thanks to extraordinary work from Luis Buñuel, it does and it is. The use of light, camera angles and dissolves makes the whole thing look gorgeous and appropriately weird. It helps, from a 2012 perspective, that it all now looks so charmingly period, with the look of the cars, the relative lack of them and, yes, the clothes. The flapper looks gorgeous. The hats look cool. The beachwear is, er, less so. Tanktops, on the beach? Really?

I'm glad I've seen this film though- it really is beautiful and, although I'm sure the makers wouldn't thank me for saying so, a charming document of intellectual thought between the wars. You should see it too; it's on YouTube, and it's only sixteen minutes. Go on.

Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902)

I can’t just keep putting “….” For silent films; quotes are strictly for talkies from now on!

This might be the first of a few entries, too. I’ve recently discovered the excellent Cane Toad Warrior blog, and had one of those “duh” moments. Last week I paid the princely sum of £1.35 each, plus postage, for two silent films (Frankenstein (1910) and The Man Who Laughs, which will be reviewed soon). It didn’t occur to me that loads of silent films are in the public domain and therefore easily accessible on YouTube. Yep. That’s how much of a dunderhead I am.

So tonight, on my cheapo night in and having little else to do, I plan to watch a few short early silent films and review them on here. I’ll stop once I’ve had too much beer, but hopefully I’ll get a few in and pad out the number of films I’ve reviewed with short silents. I’ll probably keep doing this at odd moments, too- it’s rather easier to make time for a fifteen minute short than for a full two hour movie.

So, somewhat inevitably, tonight’s first film, and possibly the first ever science fiction film, is the most well-known of these early silents from the splendid Georges Méliès, and it’s so, so wonderful. I’ll just pause for a moment to make the obligatory reference to the video for the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight, and we can actually start to talk about the film.

Back when I reviewed Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, the first silent I covered for this blog, I commented on how the static camera and the fact that everything is in mid-shot give the effect of watching a stage with a camera pointed at it. A film, at this early point, is therefore different from theatre not in any fundamental sense but only in that the level of spectacle is much greater. Any attempt at “realism“ therefore makes as little sense as it would on the stage.

And that’s why what we probably shouldn’t call “special effects” works so beautifully in this film. The use of matte paintings to denote anything either fantastical or in the background is so frequent that the film comes across as a cross between live action and a rather basic kind of cartoon. The roofs of houses, the telescope at the back of a lecture hall, even a very turn-of-the-century industrial scene with gloriously belching chimneys- all of these are made possible by the delightfully cheeky use of blatant matte paintings. This gives the film a real sense of whimsy and playfulness.

All this gets ratcheted up even further once we get to the moon. The rocket (fired out of a cannon, a la Jules Verne) lands in the eye of the Man in the Moon, and there’s a wonderful scene with dancers playing the stars and planets. The aliens can just be zapped with umbrellas(!) and the rocket takes off to return to Earth by, er, falling off a cliff. It’s all such fun.

There are a few interesting things to note, too. The Tricolour at the lauch scene makes it clear that the first nation to reach the Moon is, naturally, France. The clothes worn be everyone, and the obsession with headgear, looks far more “period” to modern eyes than anything from after the First World War.  And the film does at least manage to be “scientific” in the small detail of having the rocket eventually land in the sea.