The One-Man Band (1900)

More trickery in front of a static camera from Georges Melies here, less than two minutes long and presented as a novelty rather than a narrative. Like The Haunted Castle, it feels like a piece of music hall-style light entertainment with a camera pointed at it. We are still at the stage where cinema is a novelty and the basics of film grammar are not taken for granted.

It's fun amusing to watch, though, and it's nice to imagine that it has something of Melies' personality to it.

The film is, naturally, in the public domain, and easy to find on YouTube or the online channel of your choice.

Nosferatu (1922)

Might as well review Nosferatu now; hopefully I'll get a good few pageviews after Mark Gatiss' documentary is screened on BBC 4 on Thursday...! My version has a rather splendid electronic / industrial soundtrack which suits the mood of the film superbly, although the death metal growling after an hour and seven minutes is somewhat unexpected! There are some wincingly bad translations of some intertitles (and there are a lot of intertitles) but the picture is excellent, and it's good to see the sepia tint.

I'm surprised that this is only the third version of Dracula that I've reviewed- not, of course, that F.W. Murnau or anyone making it at the time would have admitted any such thing. The film is blatant version of the novel and, in particular, the stage play: Count Orlok is Dracula, Ellen is Lucy, Hutte is Harker, Knock is Renfield, and so on. Transposing the action to Germany in 1838 doesn't change any of this. There are differences in emphasis combined with other versions, perhaps, and the ending is unexpected, but there's no mistaking this as anything other than a version of Dracula.

This is a film very much in the German Expressionist style, although the style does not dominate as it does in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; for the most part there is realism, with Expressionism being used only to emphasise the evil and sinister, notably in the depiction of Knock's office, a distorted room with along-legged chair and wring proportions, accompanying the deeply sinister and melodramatic acting and make-up through which the character is shown. Nosferatu is shown through bizarre camera angles- one shot from below, on the ship, is particularly effective, as is a scene towards the end where we see his distorted shadow attacking Ellen.

Max Schrek gives us a deeply unsettling and nightmare-inducing Count. His performance and appearance alone makes this one of the most frightening movies I've ever seen. The appearance of Count Orlok is far more terrifying to me than any amount of gore. The flip side of this, of course, is that the monstrously ugly Count is de-sexualised. The erotic subtext of the novel and most adaptations is pretty much discarded in place of chills.

There is some impressive special effects work here for 1922- Orlok's lack of any underlings whatsoever is compensated for by magic, as his coffin loads itself on to a cart and a shop sails as if by magic. The emphasis on "plague", with much Black Death style imagery, and the extended, claustrophobic sequences on the ship are highlights, and a nice change from the more traditional adaptation that we would later come to expect.

Nosferatu looks great, as we would expect, and is probably the only film I've reviewed for the blog so far that I've found genuinely scary. I recommend it hugely.

The Lost World (1925)

Again, no quote, what with this being a silent film. Like all silent films, it's from sufficiently long ago as to come from another age entirely: this is a film in which cars have to share the London streets with horses and carts. It's an arresting thought that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may have conceivably see this film, if he'd managed to teat himself away from all that spiritualism stuff, being fooled by little girls with their unconvincing photographs of "fairies",  and cultivating that bushy moustache. I haven't read the original novel; like many people. I've read absolutely everything Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes, and absolutely nothing else he wrote. He's probably turning in his grave.

I'd be surprised, though, judging by the film, if this was one of the "literary" works that Doyle was forever going on about. It's a fairly straight early twentieth century pulp adventure story, and a rather fine example, but the film, at least, gives no indications of any loftier ambitions. Essentially, we get an expedition by some explorers, some set pieces of dinosaurs fighting and doing cool stuff, and a sauropod rampaging through London. This is, of course, an extremely cool set of stuff, but that's it. There's not really any subtext. Even the love triangle, such as it exists, is very British and stiff-upper-lip. I'm reminded of Frau im Mond, a German silent film from four years later with a similar plot, but with the expedition (similarly including a token woman) being to the Moon rather than to a plateau full of dinosaurs. In that film the love triangle looms much larger in a very un-British way.

The dinosaurs are, if you consider the context, amazing. Yes, the slow-motion animation isn't exactly Ray Harryhausen. The dinosaurs look like plasticine, and move sparingly and stiffly. But this whole style of admittedly primitive animation seems to have survived in popular culture for a long, long time. The Chewits adverts I remember from my 1980s childhood didn't look too different. Mind you, I had to raise an eyebrow at the fact the only dinosaur species encountered by Professor Challenger and his motley crew were the well-known ones such as triceratops and, er "brontosaurus", most of which are not exactly native to South America. Still, best not to think too deeply about such things. After all, we also see some brief stock footage of a cheetah, a suspiciously African mammal.

Of course, this being the 1920s, there are rather a few things to raise the eyebrow. I don't think I can exactly be accused of political correctness gone mad for suggesting that the portrayal of Jacko is, er, really quite racist. I'm half-convinced that he's portrayed by a white actor in blackface. It's also interesting to see how much respect is accorded to a big game hunter, and how no one shows any regard whatsoever for conservation or the fact that these dinosaurs might be somewhat dependent on the ecological conditions that nourish them. Health and safety standards appear rather lax, too. I mean, felling a conveniently placed tree to cross a gorge and make a bridge is, you know, a bit dangerous.

But, you know what? This film is fun. I loved it. Who cares if it's never explained how they managed to get the dinosaur to London, or that the costumes for the early hominids look rubbish. This is a film in which London landmarks get trashed by a brontosaurus and, believe me, it gave me great pleasure to type that.

Pandora's Box (1929)

No quote, alas: this is a silent film, albeit one of the last. Like a rather large proportion of the silents I've reviewed, it's German, despite having an American star. The Weimar Republic seemed to have so many of the best directors on the planet during the 1920's and, in a time when films were without sound and consequently language didn't matter, it was able to compete on a global stage, in a way that hasn't been possible since the Tower of Babel that was the onset of sound. Nevertheless, it's tempting to imagine what German cinema would still have been capable if only it had not completely abandoned civilisation, and all its trappings, in 1933.

This is a superbly made and directed film, and Louise Brooks gives a sublime and outstanding performance of a type which simply can't be seen these days. Without the option of speaking, she has to convey some immense subtleties by gesture and expression alone. This naturally leads, up to a point at least, to a "big" performance, and yet there's a lot of naturalism there too. It's a real tightrope, and Brooks walks it with aplomb.

This is also a fascinating film from an historical perspective; it's the 1920's, the flapper generation. And yet these flappers, with their bobs, their cigarette holders and their loose, boyish, semi-revealing clothing, are just one generation away from corset-strapped Edwardian ideas of sexual mores and gender roles. It's tempting, and perhaps not entirely inaccurate, to compare the flappers of the roaring '20s to the mods and hippies of the swinging '60s, although in both cases we should remember that to a large extent we're talking about a relatively small number of young, wealthy urbanites. Also, in the 1920s, there is as yet no contraceptive pill, so the sexual liberatedness of the younger generation tends to stop short of penetrative sex. And, whatever the parallels of flappers to hippies, the general public in the 1920s, well within living memory of Victorian times, was far more socially conservative. Yes, the likes of the Bloomsbury Group, a rather posh bunch of people, may have shagged indiscriminately, enjoyed modernist art and talked about Freud a lot, but in the wider world things were rather different. Case in point: women only gained the right to vote on equal terms with men in 1928 in the UK. In short, the gap between the Bohemians and the majority is rather wide.

We can see this gap rather clearly in the film. For all that Lulu is bobbed, liberated and uber-modern (look at the art in her apartment, and the interior décor), she's a character in a highly moralistic and conservative melodrama which purports to show that such behaviour leads to tragic accidents, imprisonment, gambling, cheating at cards(!), alcoholism and prostitution. It's only the superb quality of the film that prevents it from being the Reefer Madness of flapperdom.

Also interesting is that this film should be not only from the Weimar Republic but set, interestingly, in Berlin, notorious for its licentiousness in Germany at the time. It's all very Cabaret. This film is part of a general mood in Weimar Germany that decadence and loose morals have gone too far, and we all know where that will eventually lead.

The Man Who Laughs (1928)

"A queen made me a lord, but God made me a man!"

Gosh, what a fittingly republican sentiment that is for this of all weekends. Personally, I'm actually a bit of a moderate royalist these days but I don't really go in for the whole personality cult thing. Is it just me who finds the jubilee a bit scarily conformist, even threatening? This weekend you'll mostly find me battening down the hatches and playing the Sex Pistols very loudly. Anyway…

I first became aware of this film as an influence on Bob Kane when he came up with the character of the Joker back in 1940. Whatever book I was reading (something to do with the fiftieth anniversary of Batman back in 1989, I think) featured a photograph of Conrad Veidt in this film, looking uncannily like the character. And now I've finally seen it. It's tragic melodrama about a man deformed with a permanent grim, with a lot of pathos and a lot of meditating on how, like, all clowns are sad. There's one scene in particular, with Gwynplaine (the eponymous character) on stage in make-up, where it suddenly becomes obvious that this is exactly where the image of the Joker sprang from. In fact, not only does he look exactly like the Joker, he looks exactly like Heath Ledger as the Joker. It's quite uncanny.

This is based on a novel by Victor Hugo, albeit one so obscure that I suspect few people reading this will ever have clapped eyes on a copy, let alone read it. It's exactly what you probably expect, though; a melodrama with tragedy, romance, swordfights and an absurdly virtuous heroine, who in this case is blind. It's an entertaining enough romp, in a melodramatic kind of way, although the depiction of gypsies raises eyebrows, and so does the fact that the only two women in the film are the blind, virtuous Dea and the flighty, flirty Duchess who, in spite of the period clothing, is quite the flapper. Er, virgin / whore dichotomy, anyone? Also, there's a scene where the camera peers through a keyhole at the semi-naked Duchess. It's not so much the male gaze as What the Butler Saw.

It's ostensibly set in England during the reign of Queen Anne, with a flashback to the reign of James II… and these two monarchs are literally the only characters with names which sound remotely English. The setting doesn't remotely convince, costumes aside, as seventeenth and early eighteenth century England, and I suspect a lot of this would be due to the original novel, and Victor Hugo failing to realise that Stuart Britain was not like Louis XIV's France. We have scenes of Queen Anne ordering people to be tortured for information, and aristocrats being forced to live at court and marry at the whim of their monarch. All this is contrasted against a rather cruel world of clowns and freak shows which, while very, very creepy, is much more interesting.

It's also rather odd, even jarring, that this film is in the style of contemporary German Expressionism. It often looks great- there's a particularly eerie scene of hanged bodies swaying on the ropes- but it doesn't really evoke the setting. Still, it's worth watching for Conrad Veidt alone. It's also fascinating in that it isn't quite a silent film but it isn't quite a talkie either: there's no dialogue but there's the odd incongruous sound effect, of bells, wind and the like. We even get crowds shouting.

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.

Frau im Mond (1929)

"Learned ignoramuses, lacking in fantasy, whose brains work in inverse proportion to their level of calcification…!"

I can't watch Metropolis yet, as I still haven't got around to buying the restored version, including all the recently recovered clips. But I do happen to own this, a very different science fiction film by Fritz Lang, from just a couple of years later and grounded very much in "hard" sci-fi. And it's a fascinating document of film history as well as of space travel in popular culture.

For all that it's very much of its time and very German (the car number plates are recognisably German even in 1929, and I was amazed to see that the credits and intertitles use the long "s", something which I imagined had fallen out of use during the eighteenth century!), this reminds me very much of Bollywood films in one important respect. Bollywood films tend not to specialise, but to be aimed at a very wide audience of all ages and backgrounds, and both genders. Hence films tend to include action, romance, comedy, songs, etc. This film may not have any songs (a silent film hardly could!) but it ticks pretty much all the other boxes.

We have science fiction, obviously. We have romantic drama in the form of the love triangle between Helius, Friede and Windegger. We have an extended comic sequence at the beginning, in the Professor's flat. Most of the first hour is devoted to a bizarre, but entertaining, conspiracy theory thriller. There's even a quick shoot-out. This is several films in one; no wonder it's so bloody long.

It doesn't feel too long, though, strange though it can feel for a silent film, to feature so many sequences of people talking. It's never boring; the acting style sees to that. This is very much a melodrama, with all that entails. This is probably essential, and it works; the characters are all extremely well-rounded. We have the brave, determined but worry-prone Helius, whose name seems to evoke the Icarus myth, rather appropriately. We have the decent but cowardly Windegger. We have Friede, the bravest, most loyal and most collected of the whole of them, and the epitome of the strong woman. She's the heroine of the film. We have the Professor, our requisite comedy character. We have Gustav, the boy in short trousers with his sci-fi pulp magazines.

But perhaps the most interesting character is Walt Turner, he of the superhuman powers of disguise. The hairstyle and mannerisms evoke Hitler very, very strongly, and in the Germany of 1929 this can be no accident. Interestingly, the Hitler character is the only one who isn't German, and he hasn't got a moustache (that would be too blatant!), but it's hard to escape the conclusion that Fritz Lang was not exactly a fan of Hitler's; it's hardly a flattering portrayal. Not only is Turner incredibly sinister and villainous, but he's by far the most cowardly (and dishevelled!) during the g-force section. Hitler is being treated as a contemptible Nick Griffin figure which is, of course, exactly what he was in 1929. The Nazi party didn't exactly come to power by promising to shove people into concentration camps and murder six million Jews; they kept rather quiet about that. That's something which should be borne in mind by anyone who imagines the BNP or the like are remotely less dangerous.

Still, it's weird to see the Hitler figure as the one who's part of the sort of conspiracy which, in Germany between the wars, can hardly not have anti-Semitic overtones. This cabal of four rich men and one cigar-chomping woman is utterly ridiculous and not remotely believable. Then again, there are depressing numbers of people today who believe even more obviously stupid conspiracy theories, so perhaps I shouldn't judge.

It's hard not to be impressed by the prescience with which manned space flight is depicted, with two caveats, both forgiveable. Yes, to have the Moon (or even just an unseen part of it) be breathable and habitable is a bit dodgy. But there are, I think, very good grounds to plead artistic licence here. It's 1929; everyone knows that actual travel to the Moon is decades away, and at least they're acknowledging that the known part of the Moon is airless. Besides, there's a literary tradition of a habitable Moon from Verne and Wells (whose novel is echoed in the strong element of greed here).

The other odd thing is that this is a private expedition, not state sponsored, although surely only a nation, and a major one at that, could possibly be able to fund such an undertaking, especially back then? But, those little things aside, there are so many amazingly correct predictions. An unmanned vessel, equipped with a camera, was sent first. Travel is by rocket, and it has three stages. There's a countdown, the first ever example of what would become a well-worn trope. There's a sort of spacesuit which, rather logically, looks like a deep sea diving suit. There's even weightlessness, with people walking by aid of footstraps in the floor!

There are things to raise eyebrows, of course. The Moon has an atmosphere as strong as the Earth's, which is not only a problem in itself but raises the question of how they can take off again. The different stages of the rocket have to be jettisoned manually during a period of strong g-forces, which seems rather risky. But the film gets so many things right that it seems churlish to complain; I'd be amazed if Werner Von Braun didn't turn out to have seen this film...

The film may have dated a little, it's very long for a silent movie, but it held my interest throughout and is a fascinating little historical document.

Frankenstein (1910)

“…”

Oh my. I’ve no idea how I’m supposed to judge this film, more than a hundred years after it was made. It’s completely alien to my entire conception of what a film actually is, far more so than the several 1920s silent films I’ve seen. At least they can be watched from a modern perspective of what cinema is supposed to do, minus sound. This can’t, but it’s utterly fascinating to see.

For a start, it’s just twelve and a half minutes long, which is why I’ve been able to knock out two movie reviews in one day. That’s only long enough for half a dozen set-piece scenes which is what we get. Such plot as there is gets relegated to the intertitles.

The picture is so blurred that it’s impossible to make out the actor’s facial features, which isn’t helped by the fact that everything takes place in mid-shot. The camera is completely static- it’s more like watching a play than a film, even one from as little as ten days later. One scene is quite clever, though, using an on-screen mirror to give us two different perspectives on the screen.

Given how blurred and indistinct the actors are, the acting styles are not exactly understated. There are lots of big, big gestures from actors who are presumably based mainly in the theatre. It’s often not so much like narrative but something closer to dancing. Everything is about spectacle rather than plot.

It’s fascinating to see the different tints for different scenes, which works particularly well in the scene where the monster is slowly coming to life from skeletal beginnings in a large cauldron. The orange tint gives a real sense of being in a furnace. The whole scene is extremely effective, and is actually a superb example of special effects. It’s just a pity that the picture is so blurred that we never really get a proper glimpse of the monster.

One historical oddity is that the first thing we see is a credit to Thomas Edison, whose company was responsible for this film. That’s how long ago this was.

Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920)

“…”

Well, that was interesting. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this, and not the only silent film I’ve ever seen. But I haven’t seen all that many, and it’s many years since I last saw this. I found it very, er, visual (duh!) and hard to follow the plot at times; all these young grey besuited men look the same!

Still, I love the overall look. The tint is very noticeable, and so is the over-the-top acting style, much as this seems effective and even necessary, given the lack of dialogue and the practical restrictions on how many captions you can have. And aren’t the captions on screen for just aaages? Some of us can read perfectly well, you know.

It’s fascinating to think this was made in 1919 and 1920, in the early days of the Weimar Republic and just after Germany (and indeed all of Europe and much of the world) had experienced a rather traumatic four years. It’s tempting, but possibly unwise, to read all sorts of things into the style and themes of the film because of this. I shall tread carefully, as I’ve deliberately not researched much about the film’s background so as to come to it fresh.

We start with a framing sequence as our narrator, Francis (why not Franz?) relates the bulk of the film to us. I know I’m always banging on about unrealistic narrators, but the expressionist style of the film is in hindsight a bit of a clue that all may not be as it seems. I like the spotlight technique that often opens and closes scenes, drawing our eye to things that the director wishes to highlight. And the expressionist style is fantastic. All of the buildings in the film are grotesquely distorted, and remind me very much of the sort of paintings Picasso was doing at the time. This is nicely alienating, and gives us what turns out to be a highly appropriate dreamlike quality. There are lots of nice stylistic touches; it’s noticeable that the town clerk, the police, and officialdom generally, are seated on massive tables that completely dwarf the mere mortals who are our protagonists.

More interestingly, though, this is a total rejection of realism. I know this is another thing I keep banging on about, but in the best possible way everything looks more like a theatre set than reality, and the effect of this is heightened by the fact that the camera never, ever pans; the effect really is that of looking at a dressed theatre stage. And, interestingly, to compensate for the lack of any movement by the camera, we get a great sense of depth on screen, with corridors, roads and crowds stretching in front of us.

The whole set-up with Caligari and Cesare is an historical curiosity these days- this sort of travelling freak show is very much a thing of the past, and it’s strange to imagine people queuing up for something as random as a somnambulist! Unfortunately, the plot is agonisingly slow, slower than I remember from other silent films I’ve seen- is this because it’s an early film? Does the storytelling get pacier throughout the ‘20s? It’ll be interesting to find out.

I was particularly struck by the scene where Cesare fails to stab Jane; he looks so Goth it’s unbelievable. It’s like a member of the Misfits nearly sixty years early. In fact, is it just me who’s reminded of a particular chap in the background to the video for Marilyn Manson’s version of Tainted Love? Jane is unbelievably sexy, by the way. Then again, all women in silent films are unbelievably desirable.

The bit where Caligari is “revealed” to be the director of the madhouse is agonisingly slow; exposition scenes are not pleasant to sit through when it means reading a series of captions which are on screen for what seems like minutes! I love the twist ending, though; it rather cleverly puts the dreamlike quality of the film in quite a different light.