Library of Silence

[JasonPratt]

Or, "This is what happens when I get bored one month and don't have a wife to restrain me with common sense and/or to spend money on her instead."  :D

Pursuant to a discussion with RooksBailey here on the forum about the roots of the noir film genre, I talked about how I naturally picked up a few of Fritz Lang's sound films (none of his well-known ones though) as a side effect of working on a collection of silent films on DVD a few years ago, where Lang happened to start his directing. This reminded me that I only got to somewhere in 1916 working through my collection: right this very moment I can flick my eyes leftward and sitting close to the top of two... two and a half... three... uh... three and a half stacks of game DVD cases  ::) (not counting the other stacks of those around my room), I can see the Thomas Ince silent classic fantasy parable Civilization. Which has been sitting there for about two years now, because I got distracted from my project and started collecting early Dr. Who serials from back when it was legal in fandom to call him "Dr. Who" because that's how BBC itself described the character in their post-credits.

But I digress.

(Also, I'm whiling away time while my hard drive does its daily defragment before playing Arkham Knight. I felt I ought to be honest about that...  O:-) )

So in order to feel better about spending only-God-knows how much money on a stack of about 60 DVDs I will most likely only watch once in my life -- the silent films, not early Doctor Who, that's another project of soothing my financial conscience -- I have decided to inflict my unlearned comments about the films on anyone foolish enough to have read this far down the opening post.

To increase the challenge involved, and to save some time, I will do so without rewatching any of the films I've watched so far; so up to a point I'll only be working from a vague memory I formed a few years ago.

Because I'm going to be totally real: these films are, usually, pretty slow and boring, and I am not going to have them suck away another umpty-seven hours of my life on top of whatever time I spend amusing myself (and possibly some other people) in writing about them somewhere on the internet.

That said, I didn't buy them because I fell for some nostalgic and/or marketing blather about how films were better in the old days and no one makes films as good as these anymore. I bought them because I wanted to satisfy some curiosity -- even a latent professional curiosity, since my college degree is in broadcast communications and I trained once upon a time to make films (and TV) -- by watching how people straight up invented and laid down the art of filmed drama over a period of about 30 years.

But if I get distracted by doing something else with my free time, and I most certainly will, don't be too surprised. ;) Ooh! Defragging is done, time to play the Batman game!

(The cinematics of which, like all other cinematics ever will in the history of mankind, trace back in an unbroken line to the first silent films. Kind of literally sometimes even: comic book supervillains derive from a silent film subgenre, and Batman's greatest villain, the Joker, is directly based on the anti-hero of a silent film. Which somehow amazingly doesn't star Lon Chaney Sr., the man of a thousand faces. Batman himself owes some portion of his original development to some silent film characters. But more on that later when-if-ever I get around to it.)

[JasonPratt]

The collection begins with George Melies: First Wizard of Cinema (sorry, here at the house I can't figure out how to add the proper accents to his name) and Georges Melies: Encore, two sets published by Flicker Alley.

GM is best known for that fantastic short film based (very loosely) on Jules Verne's A Trip To The Moon (combining what was originally a prose duology of course, with the first book being about the design and launch of the capsule, and the second book being about the trip around the moon and return to Earth.) Most people have seen at least a few frames of it, where the capsule is sticking in the eye of the man in the moon. The whole thing runs about 12:30, and was filmed in 1902. (He also adapted a 20 minute version of Verne's Impossible Voyage in 1904.)

I have to indulge in my first correction here: Melies wasn't using true color film, he was hand painting the cells (or having people do it), but these collections still feature the oldest surviving 'color' film in the world, including what counted at the time (1900) as a color feature film: a whopping 10 minute epic about the life of Jeanne d'Arc!

As simplistic and sometimes dull as these films may seem to us today (well, to me anyway), their importance cannot be understated. Practically everything was being invented, including special effects -- some of which still have artistic power and elegance today. But aside from him using film to duplicate and vastly bound beyond what stage magicians of the day were doing, GM was also innovating basic ideas such as close-ups, and studio lighting -- which for decades would require practically all films to be shot during a narrow slice of time on sunny days (at certain times of the year!) in order to use sunlight focused through high windows weighing, by themselves, over thirty thousand pounds!

This restriction also meant that the first 'newsreels', several of which are collected here due to their use of innovative special effects, are actually filmed stage productions, including a serial of shorts (each lasting about one minute) on the Dreyfus treachery. It would be a while before technology advanced to the point where "A Panorama on a Moving Train" could be shot on an actual moving train (or even before a camera and mirror trick could create that famous early silent film of a moving train running over the audience.)

Around fifteen hours of film are collected (plus about ten minutes of two films originally thought to be GM's but actually made by his fellow worker Chomon, who himself invented the original hand-painting colorization process, mimicking his style) on six DVDs, including perhaps the oldest colored film still surviving (from 1897).

Mechanically produced color motion picture film itself was invented during this period (1905) by Pathe Freres, who later hired GM for his production studio; and we'll be seeing a lot of Pathe Studio later by the way. But it was still machine painting with stencils hand-cut by women (instead of a group of women hand painting the frames) in an elaborate process: by 1910 Pathe employed over 400 women to cut 6-color stencil sequences for mechanically processing black and white film into quite amazing detailed color. (Apparently this is how the French color WW1 footage was made.) There were also extensive experiments in shooting b/w films through rapidly rotating colored gels, then printing and projecting the film back through a similarly timed set of rapidly rotating colored gels, but this was more of an optical illusion of color, though of course much cheaper than mechanical stenciling (much less painting by hand).

What we think of as "color film" wouldn't be produced until 1915 with the first Technicolor experiments. The most famous of the first feature films made in this process (the third such film made) is Douglas Fairbanks' The Black Pirate in 1926, which we'll get to later God willing and the creek don't rise.


None of that has much to do with GM's films per se in this collection, but I wanted to clarify and correct some things I was talking about in my first post and in the film noir thread (linked above) with RooksBailey. The Pathe stencil process was amazing, but was so grossly expensive that even Pathe preferred to make feature films using a standard monocolor gel process for providing single-color tint and toning; and even the two-color film process cost about three times that of standard black and white. This encouraged the critical push I mentioned in the other thread, for arguing against any color motion pictures at all (and even shot photography for a while) on artistic grounds.

[JasonPratt]

DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE

This isn't the ultra-famous John Barrymore silent film from 1920, nor the far more obscure and technically inferior (but still quite interesting) competing film starring Sheldon Lewis the same year -- though we'll be getting to those someday when I get around to it.

No, this is a 1910 film starring James Cruze; and while I'm not sure I can say it is the oldest feature film I own, since it only lasts ten minutes, it's the oldest film I own that wasn't made by Melies (and/or Chomon).

Then again, even by 1910 a twenty minute film would be of epic length, so this and some others from the Melies collection would count as a feature film by the standards of the time.

It's short enough I rewatched it a minute ago before writing this entry, mainly because I could not recall a single detail (other than it being, you know, a J&H story); as I suspected, what little I thought I recalled was apparently from the Lewis entry later.

I can't tell if the version I own, published by low-end (possibly print-on-demand) Classic Video Streams (and bundled with both the Lewis and the Barrymore versions), is overexposed in a faulty transfer to DVD (or to archival film), or if that reflects the state of the film when last archived, or perhaps was done on purpose: only certain scenes look glaringly overlit, and those are all inside. (If I recall there are only two inside sets, in J's apartment.) If so, was it accidentally on purpose because due to mislighting from having to use sunlight 'on stage'? Or purposefully on purpose in order to make J look "whiter" in contrast to Hyde? I suspect this is the explanation because his scenes as Hyde indoors don't look overexposed, nor do other actors indoors when the Doctor isn't sharing a scene. (But if I recall there aren't really any scenes indoors shot with Hyde and other actors together, perhaps by coincidence.)

At any rate, unless I am forgetting or haven't noticed some GM entries, this is the oldest film I own with scenes shot outside; a good half of the film is shot outdoors in fact, and lit pretty well by the way -- probably to save money on indoor sets!

One oddity that amused me both times I've watched it, is that the transformation scenes (which are a big selling point of any J&H visual adaptation) only once involve a film cut, for the first time. It's a bit clunky by the standards long-set by Melies but not incompetent for the time, and certainly no more difficult to do than any other film edit in the movie! -- yet the director (or producer, neither of whom the movie has any credit for and I'm too lazy to do more research on) apparently didn't like the effect or didn't trust that they could pull it off more than once, because every other time the transformation happens going between doors or after a brief cutaway.  ???

The mask itself is blatantly a mask, with hilarious static fangs, and looks terrible (not in a frightening way), but Cruze sells the hell out of it, leaping and bopping and creepy-crouching around -- all in perfectly broad daylight by the way. There aren't many other characters: a butler, J's fiancee and her father a minister, a policeman, and a few extras. But it's only a ten minute adaptation so...

The basic plot points are zipped through in quick succession. J reads about a theory in a book; he tests 'his' theory (the intertitle isn't clear about whether the book was giving his theory or not), changing to Hyde and back; he dates the minister's daughter to the father's approval; he changes into Hyde without the drug (but still needs a drug to go to Jekyll); he, uh, molests a child in the street or something (the edit is jumpy here so it's hard to say if there's footage missing or not); his butler brings him a stack of mail, but the intertitle doesn't clarify whether they're bills or letters from his fiancee (probably the latter); he goes on another date to reconnect with her, but changes into Hyde mid-date (getting away from her first so no one knows it's him) and tries to assault her in the park; the minister protects his daughter but Hyde kills him; police chase him back to J's house where he mixes the J-drug and transforms back; J tries to break off the engagement (so he can flee the country) but transforms into Hyde again (still away from the fiancee if I recall correctly); another police chase with the Butler alerting them Hyde is in the the lab; he can't mix the J drug and so, apparently, takes poison instead, dying on the floor. The end.

The editing and pace is surprisingly rapid for a film shot at this time, practically modern, though the modern viewer may feel odd watching a very narrow and static camera view at constant medium distance all the time. Viewers expecting, perhaps from later films, elaborate intertitles may be surprised at how few there are, with only one bit of 'spoken' dialogue (at the end, the Butler alerting the police), and the titles only describing the action. Yet you might not notice until you've seen some more very early films that these titles are uncharacteristically good about filling in details not shown on the screen (like Hyde's night life on the town, which is never exactly shown). At least I was surprised when, watching some slightly later films first (collecting this one later kind-of by accident), I noticed a trend of the intertitles regularly describing the scene and action that was about to be shown, being forward-redundant as it were. In that sense, this little film is quite modern: something I had forgotten I had been surprised to discover the first time I watched it, and which I was pleasantly surprised to discover again.

By no means can this be truly compared to the Barrymore version (which feels as modern as any Universal horror picture from a decade or two farther on, or a comparable studio film -- Universal didn't make a J&H film exactly), or even to the weird Lewis version with its unique little quirks. But it serves as a nice bridge to the first (by our standards) feature length films in my library of silence.


Next up: some final bridges to the features, from 1910 and 1911. D. W. Griffiths and the American Civil WaAIT, THIS ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK IT IS! Sort of...

[JasonPratt]

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR SHORT STORIES

I had forgotten, until I went back to my early-collection drawer to put up the 1910 Jekyll and Hyde, that around this same time, 1910 and 1911, D. W. Griffiths was making short films, too -- well, short by our standards, ten to twenty minutes. Kino, who publishes the majority of silent films in North America, included a set of these on Disc 3 of their deluxe edition of Birth of a Nation, and yes I own that film because I was studying the development of film-making and like it or not it's part of that story, too. But we'll get to that later.

Man, going from... uh... whoever did that J&H film to Griffiths, shows why he was beating the poo out of everyone else in film at the time. I mean, it's hard to specifically quantify, but the sets (indoor and out), the shot composition, the acting looks like he might actually have chosen from multiple takes. ;)

I would say I forgot that Griffiths was shooting outdoors, and so the 1910 J&H isn't in fact the oldest film I have which does that, but I've got to be honest: after watching Birth of a Nation I just didn't feel like going 'back' on Disc 3 to watch his earlier Civil War work. So this was all new material to me.

Modern viewers familiar with Griffth's notorious BotN, or at least familiar with his noteriety for making that film, might be surprised -- I certainly was -- that the collection starts with a brave and pious Union soldier leaving his wife and daughters (and her father apparently) to join a company mustering up to march out of town "In the Border States". Then I remembered that Griffiths' problem wasn't with the Union exactly -- he regarded Lincoln as the greatest friend of the south and his assassination a tragedy and monstrous crime -- but with black people.  ::) He goes out of his way to stage the film as a painting coming to life, and while it doesn't look a thing like a painting (that'll come later with the German expressionists), it isn't a bad stylistic effect.

A modern viewer might think it's tedious (it is) to watch the whole (rather short) company march around a corner out of town, but then I remembered that I was kind of spoiled by my brief J&H film: this is early silent film, where the novelty of movement was so currently strong that if you paid money to watch this thing you dang well expected to see all that company marching out of town. ;) The great difference with Griffiths is that he chose a great shot composition for that scene with realistic period scenery (which at least looks like it dates back to the War, and might really do so) in the background. So I could look at that until the troops rounded the corner and crossed the road -- or watch them laughing and trying not to look at the camera, though I don't think I was really supposed to be noticing that. ;) The little girls being obviously TOLD NOT TO LOOK HERE, LOOK OVER THERE AT THE DAD KEEP YOUR EYES ON HIM, were more inadvertently hilarious, and extras are just a little too excited about being in a real, modern, moving picture, to be overly sad about the Union boys marching away.

Still, going from even Melies to Griffiths, even comparing their contemporary short work, is like going through an arch reading WELCOME TO MODERN FILM ALREADY SORT OF! (And in Griffiths' case perhaps also ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER. ;) )

And I'm not gonna lie: by the time the father falls in at the end of the passing company, I was pretty well emotionally invested. Especially when I realized the particularly haunted look of the old actor playing the wife's father, might very well have been from having lost older relatives in the Civil War! -- maybe remembering promises to return. This wasn't even quite fifty years later.

Then the Confederates start foraging nearby. And at first they look like pillaging thieves, until one throws away his gun and (successfully) begs water from one of the little girls -- who's a pretty amazing little actress, even though she looks for all the world like Wednesday Adams plotting to herself (as he gratefully buries his head in her water bucket, not a euphamism) about how many pieces she's going to vivisect this handy new specimen. When the Union garrison troops show up chasing the forager a minute later, she looks HELLANNOYED over being interrupted with her reading! :D And imperiously sends the Confederate deserter away, before going back to the house to get in an argument with her older sister about (apparently) forgetting to finish the actual chore about bringing back water. It's delightful.

Around this time I remembered again how far in advance of his time G's cinematography was, because there are a number of shot angles which make this look like a modern film again; mentally I was comparing it with things I had previously seen from even several years later -- themselves seminal and influential works -- where the staging, though sometimes ambitious in scope, was basically still that of stage plays. (Explaining, by the way, why the intertitles in this period read more like occasional cues for scenes in a theater program. Including in these shorts.) Yet we're still clearly in the era of static shots: Griffiths' visionary genius for things like deep composition, instead of everything being staged at medium distance from the lens, doesn't extend to even a short pan left to reveal something not yet shown to the audience. Also, he's not exactly apt (yet?) with basic directional continuity between scenes: a Union picket might shoot a rifle leftward and the bullet arrive from screen right, that sort of thing.

I have to admit that around this time I kind of forgot to take regular notes, due to following along with the stories as they developed. Also partly due to making up an alternate story in my head involving the little demon girl plotting to capture more rebel specimens in her web: her face when she realizes her wounded father makes perfect bait for her plans is... well, probably not what Griffiths was actually going for. Also, the set decorator played a surreal practical joke, like an Easter Egg for sharp-eyed viewers, where one of the decorations on the bedroom wall, set almost directly center of camera focus, is the insignia of the production company! (Featured, as usual, in the corners of the intertitles.) Whenever I thought my soul might be imperiled by the evil captured on film (cameras do suck out a person's soul!) my mind remained baffled by whether I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. A few scenes later it was gone, though, suggesting someone caught the joke and removed the winky bling.

The actual story ends with the little girl assuming control over the rebel soldier and, marking him as her slave for recalling a few years later, sending him away. Or not really, it's actually pretty cute, but alternate-head-canon couldn't stop laughing at the priceless facial expressions she was throwing up. Everyone leaves Harlan alive (this is supposed to be Eastern Kentucky I think), except for those who died. Also, no black people were treated in godawful ways during the making of this film, so there's that in its favor.

The same can't be entirely said for the next short story, "The House With Closed Shutters"; but to be fair (for certain values of 'fair'), having a blatantly white actor (who looks like an English rector) in blackface clowning around in the background wasn't unusual for the period. And the story certainly isn't about how blacks seduced white folks into starting a war with the south in order to run riot until whites from both sides of the war team up to stop them. Ahem. But we'll get to that later.

It's actually rather a nifty little piece, like something from the golden age of American short stories, with a few twists I won't spoil in case anyone wants to look it up on Youtube and isn't worried about what kind of filthy pr0n you might turn up instead with a title like that. Also, the production logo shows up again hanging on a bedroom wall, appearing and disappearing between scenes in order to erode your sanity.

Maybe more importantly, this little film features what could be the oldest surviving footage of a re-enacted Civil War battle, or anyway acted out "in the field" where a Confederate line... um... well, it looks like it sneaks up and ambushes a fellow Confederate line in the back, but everyone misses. So, yay? The weird looking staging probably resulted from trying to get too much action into one fairly narrow shot (they were supposed to be coming to the support of the tattered looking company a few dozen yards upfield, not red-on-red assassinating them for their failures. ;) ) Whatever bad can be said about Birth of a Nation later (and there's plenty to say about its material), Griffiths learned how to ambitiously stage and execute battle shots better as he went along. But for such an early specimen, it looks pretty good, and looks better if you keep in mind that such multi-layered action deep into the shot, or things like a chase with horses running into and out of the screen, must have hit contemporary audiences almost like casually exhibiting 3D effects in a market with only 2D films. (And the Confed officers look pretty boss, especially the guy playing General Lee in one scene.)

I don't know where "The Fugitive" was shot, but it was clearly somewhere with an old house on top of a mountain significantly taller than Godzilla and a grand view in all directions, including of a fairly broad river. I thought maybe Chattanooga or somewhere in East TN, but I'm relatively sure the Tennessee river isn't that wide even today after all the TVA damming. It's a stunning backdrop for another heartfelt story about two families on the mountain (who yet don't seem to know one another) -- one I won't spoil but which I honestly felt like crying a bit over.

And then came the 1910 film (though released in '11) "His Trust: The Faithful Devotion and Self-Sacrifice of an Old Negro Servant", and I just about quit there out of suspicion of Griffiths. I endeavored to persevere because at 25 minutes (presented in two equal parts which also work as self-contained stories) this is the longest earliest work I own; but the immediately horrifying levels of jigaboo blackface didn't help matters, especially the dancing celebration as the Confederate company musters up to gather the officer/father of the house and marches off -- something that certainly happened, so not unworthy of filming in itself, but I knew Griffiths wasn't thinking of the dreadful irony of things like this happening. I was hoping the little daughter would be played by the spawn of the first film, but alas that was not to be. Perhaps just as well; she really wouldn't have fit in this film.

My perseverance was, I'm glad to say, rewarded by, among other things, the largest filmed Civil War battle to date -- itself worthy of archival -- and Griffiths straight up burning down a house on film, which by the standards of the time must have been a punch to the stomach. And as long as I'm being as fair as possible about the slaves cheering on the heroic Confederate company, having a victorious Union company burning and looting afterward in (worse than) complete disregard of trying to free the slaves, was like it or not something that happened, too.

Then in the sequel, "His Trust Repaid", my trust is fully repaid: the little daughter has aged a bit into the spawn!! :D Though minus the evil Wednesday Addams eye makeup. But still. (Maybe this was due to smoke inhalation; it looked like Griffiths actually set fire to a set the younger actress was wandering around in previously...) She's only in it for a couple of minutes, but she sucks the soul of her mother to death before passing on.

Joking aside, we're pretty lucky (for certain values of 'lucky') to have the second part at all, as the best version Kino could find has suffered significant water damage and is missing a number of frames. (Probably they have the first part that way, too, since the intertitles make clear this copy of the second part comes from a combined set, but they found a much better copy of the first part.)

And despite my complaints, and a notable lack of the old fellow having his trust exactly fulfilled -- partly because of that, actually -- Griffiths does end up showing how hard it was for black people to live in conditions of being regarded as lesser beings, even after emancipation. That couldn't be accidental, and helps soften the notoriety of the context of who made the film.

The next short, "Swords and Hearts", mixes up the class warfare (so to speak) by noting that some poor whites had it as rough or rougher, despite their nominal freedom, than some slaves. Good and evil are found in both classes over the film, though notably the heroic black servant's happy ending is to go back to hoeing his row, chuckling in satisfaction at how he helped save the nice white couple. Though this might have been meant as a cutting comment about the blithe ingratitude of the hero and heroine -- it's hard to tell, given the source, unfortunately.

The final short in this ancient collection, "The Battle", is What It Says On The Tin: probably the largest Civil War battle filmed up to that time (and possibly up until Birth of a Nation itself). It's a snappy piece focusing on the Union defense of a homestead in the early months of the war.

In this, as in other films of this collection, and to be fair in Birth of a Nation itself later, Griffiths does play fair in not constantly making Confederate forces the heroes and Union forces the villains, but rather both sides get equal treatment, and can be portrayed as rough pillagers, too.

As an aside, reading and watching the self-martyring propaganda that accompanies these shorts on Disc 3 of the Kino collection, while certainly of historical value, is something I wouldn't recommend except to people wanting to experience a bogglement of the mind for entertainment. The highly staged and scripted "record of a private conversation" between Griffiths and Walter Huston is especially if acidly hilarious in its arrant mendacity; and reading an essay of the time fellating the director as being, not only a technical genius (which is true) but a declarer of truth on par with Socrates, Guttenberg, and Christ (!!!)... well, words don't seem adequate. The pimping for his next coming picture (which would be Intolerance) on the ground of it being even more daringly offensive on its own merits? -- shows his typical tone-deafness. For that picture offended no one except in his continuing hypocritcal insistence that people were intolerantly mistreating him for being a racist swine (and, by proxy in the film, for putting himself on par with Christ and the murdered Hugenots.)

Anyway. I have spent much more time on this essay than I plan for most of the entries, mainly because I thought each film though short deserved some commentary; and because, whatever one thinks of what followed, if you get a chance to find these on Youtube you might spend an hour and a half watching the world of modern filmmaking being born, a bit prematurely, in the opening years of the 1910s.

[RooksBailey]

Wow, thanks for writing all of this up!  It made for fascinating reading!  O0  And funny, too!  ;)

At any rate, unless I am forgetting or haven't noticed some GM entries, this is the oldest film I own with scenes shot outside; a good half of the film is shot outdoors in fact, and lit pretty well by the way -- probably to save money on indoor sets!

This is an interesting observation.  In film noir, it wasn't until the late forties when directors starting shooting scenes on location rather than inside a studio.  The change,  I am told, came about mostly because cameras became lighter, hence easier to move around. 

Your observations on lighting were also interesting.  Film noir is noted for its use of low-key lighting (an increased lighting ratio where lighting is limited to specific locations, something that produces lots of shadows) as opposed to high-key lighting (a reduced lighting ratio where an entire scene is bathed in equal lighting, something that reduces or eliminates shadowing).  As with shooting on location, this only became available as the technology of film and camera became more sophisticated.  Without low-key lighting, would noir even exist as an artistic genre?  I doubt it. 

Good stuff!  Keep it up!  Like you wrote, it can be really interesting to see how cinema gradually developed.  I haven't gone as far back as you have, but I have seen how the noir era also witnessed a great deal of innovation in the art of cinema, something that would serve to influence contemporary films, too.   

[JasonPratt]

Your remark about low-key lighting just not being available yet for noirish effects for a while, which was because for a long time you either had to film inside in daylight under daylight windows, or outside in good daylight weather, happens to segue nicely into today's short entry.  ;D

As I was sorting Birth of a Nation into my First Drawer of Silence (until later), the existence of its short films from 1910ish reminded me I ought to look around other DVDs of super-early silent films and see if any of them happen to contain a few short specials from the period. And one of them did! -- in Kino's collection of the Fantomas serial, they had included a ten minute Nativity film made in 1910 by Louis Feuillade (the guy who directed the Fantomas epic, more about which later).

This led to me trying to decide if I should pick up at least one of Kino's two collections of early Gaumont Studio short films, namely the one that features Feuillade's 1913 The Agony of Byzance and Alice Guy's 1906 The Birth, the Life, and the Death of Christ, but then I decided I wasn't spending $60 on those (none of the other short film topics interested me) when I can probably find them on Youtube somewhere. Which I did for Byzance, though the intertitles are only in French.

Anyway. The 1910 Nativity is nothing much to write home about, but Kino's print looks super-sharp and at least it features actual ethnic people even in leading roles, unlike some directors I could name like Griffiths but won't.  The small orchestral soundtrack is great, too, though of course not original to the film -- in fact it seems to be Kino stock music, because some tracks are used in Kino's presentation of Byzance, too.

But as long as I'm taking a side-punch at Griffiths, let me say it's a big change to go from what he was doing in 1910-1911, to what Feuillade (and Pathé) was still doing in 1910, with the Nativity, and still would be doing in 1913, with Byzance. Sure, Feuillade is using live animals on some gorgeous sets -- but it's all sets, and pretty cramped sets, too, thanks to the narrow view of the camera combined with things like Feuillade not having invented simple camera panning yet! ;) (Which he wouldn't do until 1914, which is also when he started filming outside a little apparently, for Fantomas.) Meanwhile Griffiths is shooting on location, mostly outside, over in America, and having straight up rifle battles and chases through forests of several different kinds, and setting a film entirely on a mountain top with jaw-dropping deep-background views, and burning down whole houses on location. He may not have close-ups yet (no one did really, aside from some experiments by Melies), but Griffiths often has deep focus things going on in the background.

That being said, Feuillade by 1910 (in the Nativity) has clearly advanced relative set lighting a bit. It's still all high-key, but he's using dark set dressing and design to nicely simulate, indoors and outdoors (and some sets involving a simulation of both), that the whole thing is set at night: the visit of the angels to the shepherds, the visit of the shepherds to the nativity cave (a nice touch there; as is the writers going with the Joseph's-an-old-man theory to subtly explain why he isn't around later in Jesus' life), the arrival of the three kings and their retinue, their visit with Herod, their visit to the child (still in the cave for this nativity story), Herod and his wife/sister deciding to send the soldiers on the Slaughter of the Innocent (not shown), and the Holy Family taking a travel break for a minute or two at the end, in Egypt, napping with a sphinx. :)

It never looks like anything other than a stage production (with narrowly focused stages), but it does look more like night scenes than what Griffiths (and others in 1910 like that obscure J&H story) was doing shooting day for night without even filtering or anything other than an intertitle to hint that it's happening at night.

Actual night scenes wouldn't be shot until 1915. By Griffiths for Birth of a Nation, by the way. ;) (In combat scenes which, during shooting, led to some panic about whether one of the nations currently fighting WW1 was invading America!  :D )

[JasonPratt]

Richard III -- 1912

I'm not sure if anyone has found an earlier feature film by now, but at the time of its release on DVD by Kino this was not only the oldest surviving American feature film, it was possibly the first feature length film in the world.

Clocking in at 50 minutes, the film was conceived as an adaptation for the aging 19th century Shakespearean actor Frederick Warde, who jumped at the chance to make the film, figuring that this would allow him to retire from the stage and travel circuits: he would only need to spend a few weeks a year helping make these new-fangled portable stage productions!  :D

Ironically, he ended up being asked to tour with the film so that he could read some of the lines to the audience live. Which introduces a certain problem with the film: adapting a 3+ hour story to 50ish minutes, when the original material is designed as a bunch of characters talking to one another, and the new format is silent with only a few cue cards to explain what the audience is going to see.

It did at least bring to life much of the action previously only imaginable on stage -- some of it shot on cardboard castle-sets, some of it shot outside in Long Island and the Bronx!

(That may seem super-weird, but back in the early 1900s even a lot of what is now metropolitan New York was rather wooded. I even happened by coincidence to read this morning about what we would now call Bigfoot sightings on the eastern islands during that time.)

This is also the first film in my collection (though not in history of course) to use monochrome gels to color each scene: a fairly cheap and sometimes quite artistically effective practice which I found rather more abundant than I was expecting. The film itself is still black and white of course, but the gels provide some attempts at colored ambiance. (And occasionally more than that: the frequent yellow gel tends to solarize the film accidentally, lending an inadvertent fever to some proceedings.)

Though partially shot outside, the film is staged much like other productions of this time, as a theatrical play, except that the stages are much smaller (proportionately) than what a theatrical director with $30,000 in 1912 money would be able to afford to work with. ;) As noted above, we're still in the period where intertitles exist to explain to the audience ahead of time what will be happening in the next scene; after which the audience gets to watch an enactment shot mostly at medium distance with settings all square with the 'frame' of the 'set'. It feels quite clunky to come back to this from the short films Griffiths was making as much as two years earlier! -- but then he was the Spielberg of his day (although a Spielberg who would shoot a rather different kind of film than Schindler's List...  )

This director, James Keane, is, to be blunt, no innovative director. But he makes some surprisingly fast edits between mini-sets, and actually tilts the camera down early in the film to help show a winding column of marching footmen -- not in the same league as showing a dead body that had been hidden off screen, and possibly even an accident of sorts, but still. And he still deserves everlasting credit for being the first (apparently) to bump the form of film into a feature length; and no one can argue against his effectiveness in doing so. Not only did the demand for longer films mushroom from here, but he practically killed his star with the popularity of the film: instead of ending his final years in semi-retirement, he spent them on the road, as noted, adding sound to the film in person. (The director also killed his star fictionally, since the Keane plays the character who swords Richard at last.)

The film also opened the door to a peculiar side effect of early movie-stardom. It was easy enough for audiences to figure out that Richard the 3rd was not a live character walking around today doing supervillain things, yet the filmmakers found that a surprising number of people came to think of Warde as literally evil as Richard; consequently they filmed a special prologue and epilogue, simulating the ability of theatrical actors to mingle with audiences, so that people would realize Warde was only playing a character (albeit a historical one who died long ago).

This supervillain notoriety effect would soon come into play more strongly with a French production; but first I'll be talking about the original feature-length ancient costume drama.


Edited to add (and to correct some earlier things I wrote in the post): the recovery of the film was so important, that Kino contracted the elderly composer Ennio Morricone (world famous for Italian Western film scores like the Man With No Name trilogy) to draft one of his final works. It's... well, not as thematic as his more memorable work, and often amounts to a growing shuddering malaise, which often overwhelms the quaintly filmed proceedings, to be honest.

[Huw the Poo]

But I digress.

Frequently! 

[JasonPratt]

The Last Days of Pompeii -- 1913

While Feuillade was busy making a twenty minute stage production of the final overrun of Byzantium, France's rival Italy was busy carving its way into being a serious international rival in filmmaking, with a dozen studios based in Turin alone. Case in point, today's entry, which if it isn't the first truly feature-length sandal-era drama, it's certainly one of (maybe the) oldest surviving ones, and would later help inspire Griffiths to make Intolerance (or part of it anyway). (Richard III from the previous entry is the oldest known feature length costume drama of course.)

French companies like Gaumont and Pathe had good reason to be worried, and jealous, about Italy's companies. In France (or America), if you want to film an ancient period piece you had some options going back to medieval times, but in Italy grand monuments and architecture dating back to the Roman period and beyond are just down the street. Did the director, Mario Caserini, want to film a collesium battle between mounted knight groups, and a swarm of lions? -- then he dang well hired a thousand extras, plopped them in a handy collesium, and filmed armored cavalry charging each other while twenty lions are busily being hustled by other extras in another shot! Even if the scenes seem suspiciously cropped to a few narrow angles, doubtless to hide more modern portions of his ad hoc set, he can provide a verisimilitude for such pictures that other directors would need to spend a ton of money on (as Griffiths eventually did).

"Pomp" is also the longest running feature so far in my library at 88 minutes. And brothers, friends, you will feeeeeel every minute. This was still the era when intertitles briefly described what you're about to see, and then you watch what you just read about. There is almost no dialogue (except a couple of bits which are part of the description); it is not unusual to spend a few minutes watching people mime out an intricate scene, sometimes with multiple shots, other times not.

Still, the characters, drawn from Edward Bulwer's historical romance, are lively and rounded for archetypes. The evil high priest and the loyal best friend of the hero are the only 'flat' characters; everyone else has good and bad points to them. This high priest's assistant is bored with his new job learning the Isis mysteries, and takes the opportunity to do the right thing and betray his master's murderous treachery mainly because it's exciting -- for which he's promptly knifed (off screen). The hero and his girlfriend are adorably lovey-dovey until you wish the ground would split open and consume them in a wall of firey death, and are clearly of the idle rich, but they're also kindhearted -- although the fiancee is far too ready to suspect her lover of consorting with prostitutes in his spare time. (To be fair, not an unreasonable suspicion for that time and place...!) The saintly blind beggar girl is homely instead of beautiful, and by the way also no saint: jealous of her rich rival, and maybe sort of mentally retarded herself, she begs Isis for help and is ready to accept a love potion (from the high priest who wants the heroine for himself) which she quickly applies hoping to basically date rape the hero. Fortunately the drug only drives the hero harmlessly crazy, making him prey for being blamed for the death of the new assistant priest (remember that thread?). Where did the drug come from? A sorceress whose cave the lovebirds visited while out on a walking tour, where the hero kills her little pet lizard to protect the heroine; the witch is only too eager in her palpably pitiable grief to sell the high priest a poison, although not one to kill the hero (which the priest was after). The blind girl meanwhile tries to explain what really happened with the hero when the crowds are arresting him, and when she's arrested and thrown into the dungeon, she tricks a curious and kindly slave to foster her escape -- though who knows, maybe the slave had dishonorable motives toward her anyway.

Then with ten minutes left in the movie, Rocks Fall And Everyone Dies. Well, not everyone, but the blind girl can navigate the hero and heroine out of the city in the nightmare hellscape unleashed by Vesuvius, and for a film made in 1913 it's pretty striking. The final ten minutes are certainly the best part; but the director mixes up some fairly deep setwork sometimes with shots on location, and the mimework acting works despite the lack of dialogue in the intertitles. Oddly the severe damage to the film in the final reel -- the previous reels having survived well -- melds in a fitting surreal fashion with the devastation.

Director: "And now we should have some shots of lava sweeping down a volcanic mountain. Hm. Jovino! Let's go shoot a volcano!" {goes and shoots film of a volcano currently erupting somewhere in Italy's territory} "I... was honestly expecting lava to move faster, not crumble slowly into frame... but considering I was standing only twenty feet away, watching it obliterate all that it touches, perhaps I shouldn't complain. Eat that, Griffiths! Now let's go light some columns on fire and drop them on extras as they run around the set!"

[JasonPratt]

FANTOMAS -- 1913-14

With this entry, we reach a number of other firsts or earliests. I declare "earliests" to be a real word.  >:D

When I first started collecting silent films (with an eye toward early sci-fi, fantasy, horror, war, ancient history, and other related genres), I figured correctly there would be some serials, but incorrectly expected them to be like the 10 to 20 minute entries of the later talkie periods.

No. Nooooo, they're more like an hour to an hour-and-a-half each.

This is the earliest one I own, clocking a combined total of 5-1/2(ish) hours over five episodes.

Based on the hugely popular pulp novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, the Fantomas films... well, they didn't exactly create a subgenre of supervillain stories, because obviously such things were being written in the pulps already, but they did introduce and so kind-of create this subgenre in motion pictures. In this subgenre, the supervillains themselves are the stars, and the various heroes, though worthy adversaries (worthy enough not to die before defeating the villain, perhaps permanently perhaps not), are not the main focus. Imagine Dr. Moriarty having to be opposed by Inspector Lestrade instead of by Sherlock Holmes, with Lestrade struggling to keep up and manage to eke out a win.

That's what "Inspector Juve" and his best friend the crime journalist "Jerome Fandor" have to deal with: a Batman-level supervillain, who like many Batman villains starts out operating apparently alone or with a few accomplices (including a moll) and then upgrades to having a gang.

Well, perhaps I should say Fantomas started the contemporary supervillain focused subgenre. A year earlier, an American production company had scored huge with Richard the Third after all!

As you might recall from that entry up-page (unless you skipped over it), the actor Frederick Warde ran into an unusual problem: moviegoers got the impression he must be just as evil in real life as in the film! Rene Navarre faced a worse version of the same problem, because these stories were set in contemporary 1913 (and '14) Paris; and because the era of dramatizing the "news" on film had only recently ended, and the brave new era of capturing news "live" on film had only recently begun, a shocking number of people came to believe Fantomas was a real, monstrous supervillain haunting Paris, and outright attacked Navarre if he showed his (real) face in public! Nor could he go around in disguise in public much, because Fantomas was clearly shown to be a master of disguises looking faintly like Rene Navarre! This problem largely went away when the production team soon went on to do charity work for war orphans.

Anyway, I braved a rewatch of the series for my report -- though at 10-times speed, because I very accurately recalled that the pacing in this serial is dreadful and I have other things to do with my life. I did slow down a bit for some of the intertitles, and so got to hear some of the wonderful orchestral score presented with the film(s) by Kino in their collection, although it seemed like maybe the music was taken from a "catalogue" stock somewhere.

Fortunately, we're still in the early silent era of rare intertitles, so long stretches of 10xspeed silent film can soar by without seeing one. Fortunately, we're also today in the era when I can soar long stretches of silent film ahead at 10xspeed.

I was surprised to notice this time something I either had forgotten or hadn't noticed before: this is the earliest film I own where at least half the intertitles feature dialogue, something quite rare in earlier entries.

I was also surprised to notice that the first "camera pan" doesn't happen in one of the later eps, featuring a surprise reveal of a dead body on the floor -- though that's the one that so popped audiences on the jaw -- but rather in the first film with a casual pan left and then right to watch Navarre playing an actor playing Fantomas playing a man about to be hanged (this part of the story is a bit complex) walk back into the room through a door after hiding behind some curtains in the same room as Fantomas playing a man about to be hanged. I had been watching specifically to see if anything of the sort happened earlier than I had remembered; and indeed throughout that and the subsequent entry the camera doesn't move again. (The second entry also features the earliest film I have which is shot live on a train, though possibly not the earliest such scene shot in history. But I seem to recall from the David Kalat commentary that that's true.)

This is also the earliest film I own, though possibly not the first such in history (I don't recall even faintly either way), where the director changes 'lighting' during a scene by writing that the projection gels be changed. Usually, though not always, this involved flipping on or off an electric light, itself a pretty fantastic recent innovation in real life at the time! -- so the effect was created by switching from a yellowish to a bluish gel or vice versa.

Also, a constrictor is straight-up killed on camera; and crawls into a bed on one of the main actors, who fortunately is wearing spiky armor which probably weren't real spikes, so... not sure how the fortunateness evens out on that...

Fantomas as a property came back several times, both in films and eventually in comic books; and as a concept was ported over to some other characters, usually in European productions. You could say he helped inspire the supervillains of Batman, too: a vampire criminal mastermind called the Monk in one of the earliest stories owes a lot to both Fantomas and to one of the next entries I'll be getting to soon. Batman's own character owes something to one of the later serials from this production company, as played by Navarre (Fantomas' actor) himself! -- which we'll also be getting to, a little later.

[RooksBailey]

Thanks for the continued write-ups!  You provide interesting insights into this pivotal period of filmmaking.   O0

As you might recall from that entry up-page (unless you skipped over it), the actor Frederick Warde ran into an unusual problem: moviegoers got the impression he must be just as evil in real life as in the film!

The more things change....  What is funny about this statement is that it is still true today.  I have met more than a few people over the years, intelligent all, who have been so bewitched by an actor's portrayal of a particular character on TV or in the movies that they innocently believed that the actor was as evil/stupid/nice/smart/dumb/what-have-you as the character they played in the show/movie.  I am always taken aback when I hear this.  I think a lot of people, even in this tabloid era, don't truly understand what an actor is.

He may not have close-ups yet (no one did really, aside from some experiments by Melies), but Griffiths often has deep focus things going on in the background.

Interesting observation.  Deep focus would become one of the hallmarks of film noir cinematography.  Prior to the arrival of the noir period, deep focus wasn't used all that frequently (from my limited understanding); the actors were the center of attention.  But with the arrival of the camera technology that allowed deep focus, now the actors had to share the scene with much else, particularly the furnishings of a set that often became characters themselves.  This was pivotal in creating the characteristically claustrophobic mise-en-scene that is so essential to film noir. 



We take such deep focus for granted today, but at the time it was quite revolutionary.  As can be seen above (from the iconic Double Indemnity), directors made good use of it to frame characters (in more ways than one).


Are you familiar with the silent film, A Cottage on Dartmoor?  I was reading an article that said it can be considered a true film noir from the silent era:

Cinema is full of scenes in which characters go to the pictures, but there is nothing else quite like the long sequence at the heart of A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) that is set in a movie theater. This radically experimental tour de force may be the most deeply probing examination of the collective experience of watching movies—a visual treatise that unfolds almost entirely without words.

...

One of the last silent films made in Britain, A Cottage on Dartmoor was directed by Anthony Asquith, then still in his twenties.  The privileged son of a prime minister, the future director grew up in No. 10 Downing Street and was nicknamed “Puffin” Asquith— a moniker suggesting the kind of upper-class twit who would appear in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. He remains best known as the director of genteel theater adaptations (Pygmalion, The Winslow Boy, The Importance of Being Earnest), and his work has been subject to the widespread critical disdain for British cinema as stagey and stodgy. Kino’s 2007 release of A Cottage on Dartmoor was revelatory, and the BFI has since restored Asquith’s second film, Underground (1928), which was shown at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in 2014. Despite his later association with stage adaptations, Asquith had no theater background; he became passionately interested in cinema as a university student and in 1926 joined London’s pioneering Film Society, through which he immersed himself in the avant-garde works emerging from Germany and the Soviet Union.

You can download the entire article here (it is in this issue of NOIR CITY).

[JasonPratt]

No, I hadn't heard of Cottage yet, though I see it's available on Amazon Prime. We'll be getting to the most famous silent Hitchcock film down the list, though: a Ripper film called The Lodger.

Yes, Alfred Hitchcock made a Jack the Ripper film. Though I can't recall if it was a proper period Ripper film, or a contemporary (1926) setting; the killer calls himself "the Avenger".

Alfred Hitchcock's The First Avenger.  :D

Widely regarded as Britain finest film to date at the time, I don't recall it holding up as well as I was expecting. Probably the Hitchcock name was just too large to live up to, though this was the film that transitioned him into having an identifiable "style". But we'll get there later.

[JasonPratt]

Cabiria -- 1914

As noted earlier with Last Days of Pompeii, Italy had been gunning hard for a few years to catch up with France as the world's leading producer of silent films. Their historical-epic surge had been partly, as I said, a side effect of just dang well living in Italy (and/or near other nations with ancient culture ruins) which they could go add to a film whenever they wanted. But it also stemmed from a semi-unofficial nationalist propaganda, as Italy's leaders, having not long previously united the Boot into one nation again, were looking beyond their borders to reclaim the glories of ancient Rome. Unfortunately, a lot of ancient Rome, where not in modern Italy, was held directly or indirectly by the national superpowers of the day: France, Germany, and Great Britain. (And Spain, cough. And the Turks, cough cough.) Fortunately, some portions of Africa that had once been highly connected to Imperial Rome still lay relatively untaken despite the 19th century imperialization scramble. Unfortunately, those were the provinces of modern Lybia, which were untaken because no one (in Europe) wanted a long meandering gateway to a moonscape desert (unless it guarded part of the mouth to the Mediterranean).

But invading Lybia meant more historically to Italy anyway than to other nations; because the area was once home to the major local superpower of the early days of Rome, the Syro-Phoenician trading colony known as "New Town", aka Carthage. (It was also home much later to a highly influential set of Latin Christian theologians, the most famous of whom nowadays would be Saint Augustine of Hippo.)

So in 1911-12, Italy had waged a campaign to reconquer Carthage, sort of, or at least the area that used to be around it (the old city having long since been destroyed, though new New Towns had been raised occasionally since then), namely the provinces of Cyrenacia and Tripolitania, taking them back from from the Ottoman Empire. This might not have been a stunning military victory by the standards of anyone else at the time, but it meant a lot to the Italian people. Or the government wanted it to mean a lot to them anyway.

Therefore, Italian sword-and-sandal movies were born.

Pompeii, from the previous year, was the most influential such film up to that time, but this year came Cabiria -- an exponentially more influential film from director (and co-writer) Giovanni Pastrone.

At 123 minutes, it's the longest single film yet in my Library of Silence (Wiki says a 190 minute restored cut exists somewhere, but not on my Kino edition!?!), and the first feature film that almost feels modern in its pacing and shot compositions. It's the oldest film I own that features camera dollying, for instance, with the camera rolling forward and back (and executing some limited pans); and it also features slow-zoom closeups in some scenes.

The epic plot is far more "epic" than the dowdy spectacle of Pompeii, too, which for an hour and fifteen minutes is a costume romance drama that briefly shifts over into a (rather cramped-framed) collesium cavalry fight with some lions rustled around, before flaming rocks fall and (almost) everyone dies.

The volcano scenes, as I said in that entry, are by far the best things in the film, at least to a modern eye. The volcano scenes in Cabiria aren't quite as extensive, and so overall might not be as good, but the brief model shot of the volcano itself is impressive for the time: Pompeii had two or three, and at least two different models, but the detail isn't as good and the composit of the live-action and model layers isn't quite as smooth as Cab's.

Much more importantly, Cabiria starts with a bang -- the bang of its volcano, Mt. Etna, setting off the plot -- and barely slows down for the next two hours. The story is crammed with incident and spectacle, and a godawful huge Moloch Temple set for part of the action.

It's the kind of movie where Archimedes shows up to sun-laser a Roman fleet that one of the heroes happens to be involved in somehow, and treats this as a nifty aside before getting back to the story. It is also, you may have just noticed, the sort of story where Archimedes shows up to sun-laser a Roman fleet and the Romans are nominally the good guys.

We're still in the time when there isn't a whole lot of spoken dialogue in the intertitles; but the written descriptions of what the hell is going on are impressively extensive -- and friend, you'll be glad, because unlike Pompeii this movie has a ton of characters plotting for and against each other.

It also has a black Roman slave, who may have actually been played by a black man [hindsight note: sorry, no], and he straight out steals every scene he's in. The movie could only have been better had he been the main character. Having helped save a little girl from the fires of Moloch early in the film (!), he bluffs a pursuing company of soldiers into thinking they followed the wrong guy (they didn't, because he's clearly the most competent person in the film overall, and should be the guardian warrior of all little girls everywhere), and then when they want to arrest them he smacks them back and walks off to his torture and living death punishment with his head held high and his arms braced behind his back because he knows no one is brave enough to tie them!

I'd say he's a stone cold badass, except he's pretty jolly, even after spending ten years grinding a millstone like Conan by himself. (John Milius possibly borrowed that from this movie.)

In fact he's a character, "Maciste", who turns up in other films afterward. I may have to research this, because he's awesome beyond reason. {checking} Oh, okay, he's basically named after a region (Makistos) with a famous statue of Hercules, and in many films his character actually is retitled as Hercules or Samson when exported to other areas of the world! Some works regard his name as a nickname for Hercules anyway, and the writer of the film originally wanted the character to be named Hercules but this was substituted. In Greek mythology, though, Makistos has only the vaguest connection to Hercules, being the third child of Nephele a nymph or sylph goddess of hospitality: his older brother and sister were saved from being sacrificed by villagers by the ram which came to be the Golden Fleece -- as a wedding gift given in gratitude by Makistos' brother for the hospitality and elder daughter's hand in marriage provided by king Aeetes, eventually stolen by Jason among whose Argonauts was, briefly, Hercules. In some myths, Nephele was also the mother of all Centaurs, who factor pretty damningly into the Hercules story. Mak's sister Helle drowned during the escape on the Golden Ram, providing a name for the Hellespont.

Anyway, back to the movie character: alas, he's played in blackface after all, by the actor and former circus strongman Bartolomeo Pagano, who went on to have such a prosperous career playing the same character in thirteen more films up through 1929 -- still more or less in blackface, though often less than more ;) -- that he ACTUALLY CHANGED HIS LEGAL NAME TO MACISTE! The character was so popular that there were 27 silent films, some not actually starring "Maciste" obviously (though Wiki facts on this differ, with another entry saying he starred as the character in all 27), and an estimated 60 films in all. That's more than Godzilla, y'all! -- though around half of those, in their English titles and dubbing, call him Herc, Samson, Goliath, Ulysses, Atlas, or Colossus. (But then in Germany, Godzilla films, like most giant monster films, are named after Frankenstein, which you'd think Germans of all people would be more sensitive about the proper use of, but oh well.) A number of Maciste films not imported for theatrical use were syndicated as Saturday morning live-action serial material in the series called Sons of Hercules. As you might imagine, a few (two) of these movies ended up on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

But this is where it all started: the Italian version of the human Godzilla who could fight in the Ice Age, late Medieval Scotland, World War I or in the afterlife, y'know wherever, began as the creation (partly inspired by a slave in the historical novel Salammbo on which this film is about half based in the same way Nosferatu is based on Dracula) of the film that not only invented "the epic movie" but, according to Martin Scorcese anyway, invented the first usage of the moving camera! (For those dolly and pseudo-zoom shots I mentioned earlier.)

I really don't want to go into many more details, because this is the first film in the list I'd actually recommend readers go find on Amazon Prime or Youtube or whatever, if not buy the Kino disc outright. It inspired Cecil B. Demille to challenge those silly Europeans on making spectacle films (by throwing money at the screen to build sets that half of Cabiria just had lying around to use ;) ), and shamed Griffiths into abandoning The Mother and the Law -- a film that apparently turned into Demille's first Ten Commandments film anyway(?) -- and trying to out-gloss it with the mega-epic Intolerance. (Though it didn't shame him into using actual black people as actors. ;) Not for Birth anyway; and I don't recall him doing so for Int' either. But then to be fair, neither was Maciste after all. :( )

There is some dispute over whether Cabiria or Birth of a Nation (the following year) was the first film screened at the White House, but I gather that the difference can be attributed to Cabiria being shown outside, and Birth being screened inside. No doubt this was the original 200 minute version. A 190 minute reconstruction has existed since 2006, and was showcased that year at Cannes, but has not been made available anywhere I know of, including at Kino.

Sad to say, that might be just as well: the film brisks along at two hours, but might not fare so well at 3 hours ten -- what I think of as relatively modern editing might BE, somewhat by accident, modern editing! (The relatively detailed intertitles might be a modern artifact as well; like many silent films they were reconstructed, of course, but they may be summarizing plot that was originally shown.)


Next up: Griffiths and Lilian Gish seduce an Assyrian king then chop off his head! (Noooo, you know what time it is now; but I'll mention that along the way, don't worry...)

[JasonPratt]

Judith of Bethulia -- 1913 (released 1914)

Not gonna lie, I've been delaying partly because I feel like I ought to give Birth of a Nation a fair shot by watching it again, at least at 10x speed to remember things going on in it. And I really, really dislike that film.

So I'm shirking my schedule to step back a moment to discuss Judith, a historical/biblical feature film which Griffiths produced and shot in 1913, and which could be considered the first "feature length" film ever made at about 90 minutes run-time, even though due to a spat with the financial backers the studio didn't release it until 1914 after Cabiria -- itself (as noted previously) regarded as the first released feature-length film. Though that ignores Richard III from upthread, released in 1912 at 60 minutes; and Pompeii. Kind of depends on what your definition of 'feature-length' is, yo?

Anyway. Judith, based pretty faithfully (in its action anyway) on the intertestamental book of the same name (found in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles), only features Lilian Gish (and some relatives) as minor extras, not in the main role; with the heroines Judth and Naomi played by Blanche Sweet and Mae Marsh respectively. (Not to be confused with Mae West, who played the tile role in a crazy color version much later, though that work was intended as an affectionate homage to the silents.) Naomi quickly disappears from the film until being rescued in the final few minutes, and mainly exists (with her boyfriend, who also quickly fades into the background) to give the audience some personal stake in the action at Bethulia, a fort city with walls 75 feet thick (!?) guarding one of the key approaches to Jerusalem.

Most of the film is dedicated to the lively outdoor action sequences (perhaps the most that had been put to film by that date); to Assyrian general Holofernes lounging on the couch in his command-tent as various people come and go (cowards to punish, temple prostitute dancers to writhe, captains to plan, gay-looking eunuch official flouncing around); and to Judith, a young wealthy Jewish woman recently widowed who, once the siege sets in, is inspired to try seducing the general to murder him. (In line with a prior famous stage play, though not with the Biblical account, Judith starts lusting for the general after meeting him once, which in the film as shown makes no sense; presumably she just misses having a man, and is tempted to be a wealthy courtesan since there's no guarantee her side will win even if she guts up and kills him. I'm making guesses as to what the play might have meant, the film gives no real clues other than a general lust for his nobility. The Biblical Judith is scamming him the whole way and celebrates with her town for three months after winning.)

We're still transitioning out of the age of the tableaux, and it never seems to me that Griffiths makes as much use of his camera shot-placement as in some of his earlier Civil War shorts -- he still isn't even panning the camera around, much less rolling with it. But the intertitles feature more dialogue than had usually been the case up to now, and otherwise serve to tell the story rather than to announce what the audience would see next.

Still, it's pretty clear why Griffiths would feel challenged to step up his game by the arrival of Cabiria, with its epic-length plot, numerous twisty characters, monstrously huge (and monstrous) sets, and the daring rolling cameras on occasion, dollying in and out. By comparison, Judith, though hailed as a new zenith in American filmmaking genius, could only seem lacking in ambition.

The actor lounging around giving orders and being bored by merely fishy girls, will come back soon as the main protagonist in Birth of a Nation, where Lilian Gish will be graduating to lead heroine; Lionel Barrymore can be seen floating around uncredited in the background here and there as well.

Not here though. I think. All your fishy orgy belong to us.



Credit to Fitzi Kramer at MovesSilently.com for that gif. (The attendant article can be found here.)