The Pre-1920s List: Discussion and Suggestions (Decade Project Vol. 4)

[knives]

You probably shouldn't give Dawley all the credit on the mirror scene. If my memory is serving me that comes from the play they were adapting from.

[Tommaso]

Didn't know there was a play, actually. The credits only call this "A liberal adaptation from Mrs. Shelley's famous story for Edison Production." And unless my memory lets me down, a mirror scene like this is not in the novel.

As to TMDaines' question: the avi version (144 MB) in the backchannels is completely serviceable. The print has a lot of nitrate decomposition, but that can't be helped.

[knives]

It is definitely not in the novel.

[Saturnome]

Filibus (Mario Roncoroni, 1915) is great if you like pulp films from the era, only without the length of Feuillade's serials. Also, unlike Fantomas or Les Vampires, the film doesn't spend much time with the people trying to capture Filibus, but instead focus right on her. She's a very fun character, too : a baron of I don't know what who, mostly for fun (and tormenting a detective), disguise herself as Filibus, an air pirate who own a zeppelin and commit all kind of crimes. She then start to disguise as a man and flirt with the detective's daughter !

In the pulp genre, I also saw recently Le pied qui étreint (Jacques Feyder, 1916), though it's a parody. It claims to be the last four of a 1799 episodes serial, and it's a complete mess. The main vilain is, no reason given, a masked man with naked feet in a stroller pushed around by a kid, and is revealed at the end to be none other than

SpoilerShow

...Charlie Chaplin ?! It isn't Chaplin playing himself, but instead a bad impersonator, making it much weirder

. The movie then forget about it's plot, there's a huge party and a cameo by Musidora in her Les Vampires costume. There's not a glimpse of Feyder's later career in there.

[Tommaso]

Sounds highly interesting, both of them. Thanks for the heads-up, Saturnome!

[domino harvey]

Some of these early novel adaptations, where a few key scenes get adapted, are quite fun (especially the special effects-laden Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903)), but Frankenstein doesn't work for me. I guess it's hard to imagine an abridged/reconfigured ten minute version that is able to encompass the entirety of the novel's themes or import, but simplifying it down this far turns it into something far less effective than I'd have guessed

[matrixschmatrix]

I liked Frankenstein as something that was visually interesting enough to keep me involved, but it didn't really feel like a leap past the early Méliès trick footage oriented shorts from 15 years earlier- I'll never complain about watching it, but it's not something that sticks out much (though the trick photography was pretty great.)

I watched Yevgeni Bauer's After Death, which was at least pretty noteworthy, if not necessarily something I will return to- from what I can tell, it's pretty much the go to Bauer plot, in which a glancing connection in life becomes a haunted, obsessive connection after one of the subjects dies, and the heart of the movie is the final act, in which the protagonist is in a liminal state between wakefulness and sleep- signaled, interestingly, by changes in the tinting- and the dead woman whom he'd met only once, but with whom he has now formed a temporally disjointed mutual fascination appears, over and over, sometimes outside of his eyeline, in a way that suggests she might have reality outside his head. It's a movie that seems to express an experience more than a narrative, and a narrow, difficult to pinpoint experience at that- it feels like something that recalls Edgar Allen Poe, but also prefigures the necrophiliac obsessions of Vertigo and Laura, where the figure with whom the protagonist falls in love is not a real person but a a sketch made of images and ideas. It's a striking work, and might well make my list- even though I can't say that I necessarily liked it very much.

[Shrew]

The most interesting thing about Frankenstein is seeing a very different take on the monster and its creation than what has dominated pop culture since the Whale film. But I agree that after the cool effects of the creation sequence, the rest of the film is a bit bland. The mirror scene seems like it comes from Jekyll and Hyde rather than Frankenstein, and I wonder if it (either in film or in an original play) was inspired by the theatrical success of Jekyll and Hyde, another of those major works most people know from its later iterations and not its very different original version.

[Tommaso]

The mirror scene is just a variation of the popular romantic ( or perhaps even older) doppelganger motif. It can be seen in "Jekyll & Hyde", "Dorian Gray", Poe's "William Wilson", all three versions of "The Student of Prague" (most pronounced in these!), and probably a few other films/novels that don't come to my mind right now. It's not surprising in itself that it comes up in this early "Frankenstein" version, too, as the motif is clearly one of the key points of the novel. I was only surprised to see it so clearly exposed in comparison to other versions, including the Whale one.

Meanwhile, I watched When The Clouds Roll By (Victor Fleming 1919), another film that was eligible for the all-time list which I hadn't seen before and which received quite a bit of praise from zedz and swo in the last round of listmaking. I have to confess I can only partly share the enthusiasm. The film is very entertaining, of course, but it's all over the place in terms of plot and never decides what it wants to be: an early mad scientist/horror film, or a comedy crime story cum romance. And all this including some dream sequences which didn't fully convince me. They are interesting at a first glance and are certainly rather well made but after all they mostly look like something from the early 1900s 'cinema of attractions' placed into a more modern context. And unlike the somewhat comparable nod to earliest filmmaking that can be seen in the dream sequence of Paul Martin's 1932 "Ein blonder Traum", I don't feel convinced of it here. These reminiscenses to the very beginnings of filmmaking simply don't seem to belong in the overall context of the film, or at least they look rather derivative, if you compare them with their obvious models in the films of Méliès or Segundo de Chomon.

Dunno, really, if this film had been made in 1909 I might have praised it enormously, but given that it was made in 1919 - after Griffith, or early Lubitsch, and all sorts of innovations made by others - it feels somewhat backward-looking. But again, yes, I felt entertained. And that certainly is a good thing.

[knives]

The mirror scene is just a variation of the popular romantic ( or perhaps even older) doppelganger motif. It can be seen in "Jekyll & Hyde", "Dorian Gray", Poe's "William Wilson", all three versions of "The Student of Prague" (most pronounced in these!), and probably a few other films/novels that don't come to my mind right now. It's not surprising in itself that it comes up in this early "Frankenstein" version, too, as the motif is clearly one of the key points of the novel. I was only surprised to see it so clearly exposed in comparison to other versions, including the Whale one.

Probably the greatest example in literature is The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

[knives]

Does anyone know the best english friendly editions for the following titles? Lubitsch's Carmen, Rapsodia Satanica, and Liguoro's Inferno,

[TMDaines]

Does anyone know the best english friendly editions for the following titles? Lubitsch's Carmen, Rapsodia Satanica, and Liguoro's Inferno,

Carmen would be the budget/public domain/ropey DVD from TeleVista, but it has English intertitles.

Rapsodia satanica would be a tinted ARTE TV rip with Italian intertitles and German hard subtitles.

Inferno would be the Italian DVD from Cineteca Bologna, which has sadly gone out of print.

Backchannels and Google will likely find all these.

[A man stayed-put]

I'm almost a complete neophyte when it comes to pre-20's cinema (a few RW Paul's, Méliès, some Lloyds shorts, etc) so I'm going to try and use this project as a crash course.
Started with some Lubitsch and was pretty bowled over by Ich möchte kein Mann sein and, particularly Die Puppe. Obviously it’s impossible for me to contextualise them at this point but I was surprised how fresh, daring (in the case of the former) and genuinely funny (the latter) they were.
Visually they’re both really interesting, if in different ways- I loved the dance section of 'Mann' and the constant movement in different parts of the frame, and Ossi Oswalda is really magnificent in both.

An auspicious start then and I’m looking forward to Die Austerprinzessin.
I’ve got Shoe Palace Pinkus on To Be or Not to Be but am umming and ahhing about double dipping on the Criterion Trouble in Paradise for The Merry Jail (I have the MOC). Can anyone advise if it’s worth it?

[jindianajonz]

Is there a good list anywhere of discs which contain easily missed eligible films as supplements? I've put together the following list of Criterion releases:

The Freshman: The Marathon (1919)
Limelight: A Night in the Snow (1915), The Professor (1919)
Modern Times: The Rink (1916)
Safety Last: Take a Chance (1918), Young Mr Jazz (1919)
Trouble in Paradise: Das fidele Gefängnis [The Merry Jail] (1917)
To Be or Not To Be: Pinkus’s Shoe Palace (1916)

[denti alligator]

An auspicious start then and I’m looking forward to Die Austerprinzessin.

A bona fide masterpiece! I will make my case for it at some point soon.

[knives]

Does anyone know the best english friendly editions for the following titles? Lubitsch's Carmen, Rapsodia Satanica, and Liguoro's Inferno,

Carmen would be the budget/public domain/ropey DVD from TeleVista, but it has English intertitles.

Rapsodia satanica would be a tinted ARTE TV rip with Italian intertitles and German hard subtitles.

Inferno would be the Italian DVD from Cineteca Bologna, which has sadly gone out of print.

Backchannels and Google will likely find all these.

Thanks even if the answer is sadder than expected.

[Tommaso]

Filibus (Mario Roncoroni, 1915) is great if you like pulp films from the era, only without the length of Feuillade's serials. Also, unlike Fantomas or Les Vampires, the film doesn't spend much time with the people trying to capture Filibus, but instead focus right on her. She's a very fun character, too : a baron of I don't know what who, mostly for fun (and tormenting a detective), disguise herself as Filibus, an air pirate who own a zeppelin and commit all kind of crimes. She then start to disguise as a man and flirt with the detective's daughter !

Watched this now, and found it completely wonderful. Of course it's indebted to Feuillade, but that the whole story is put into one nice feature film of 76 minutes might be seen as an advantage indeed (even though the final credits promise a sequel, which however never seems to have been made). We never learn about the motivations of Madame Filibus, but it doesn't much matter: the whole airship idea turns out to be pretty cool and allows for (resolving) situations in ways not seen in similar films, and the 'gender confusion' also works out pretty well. It's quite interesting to see how relatively often such gender 'trespassing' occured in films of this era, in films of various genres. In any case, this is a real winner with never a dull moment. Very well directed, and the tintings combined with the Italian landscapes make this visually very beautiful, too. Not to speak of the actress who plays the title character, who can be completely boyish (when she's in disguise/drag) and in other moments a great, divaesque lady. Highly recommended, and thanks again, Saturnome, for making me aware of it.

[Saturnome]

I'm glad you liked it! I knew it was something worth sharing when I saw it.

I haven't participated in a list in many years, but I hope to try again this time. Every year I make a list of the best 100 years old feature films (here's 1916, it's all in french though, sorry!), so I feel pretty confident about a pre-1920s list. Right up until 1917, anyway.

[knives]

At the very least you gave me a little joy. You've got quite the hand with comedy. never heard of the Blom or Wong films and they sound fairly interesting.

[matrixschmatrix]

Ha, well, on an appropriate note:

Hell's Hinges

I bought a copy of the More Treasures set off amazon, and they sent me the original Treasures compilation- which I'm entirely not unhappy about, since I've wanted it and this movie in particular forever. It didn't disappoint. The plot is oddly very close to Ford's later 3 Bad Men- a preacher, a sister, a town in the balance between good bad men and bad bad men, and a blazing church fire in the middle- but despite the advantages Ford's movie has of advances of technique and technology, this one blows it away (and I liked 3 Bad Men). It starts off wrongfooting you a bit, presenting the viewer with a preacher whom we are told outright ought never have been one- there's a nuance to this, a man who is defined not by his role but by his personality, in that the tension between that personality and the role is as much the cause of his eventual downfall as his own frailty as a man; it's not that he is a weak preacher, it's that he's never really a preacher to begin with. Nor is his sister the ramrod that keeps him straight; we don't actually get much of her, just the implication that she wants to protect her brother from himself, even as she recognizes more than anyone that a tragic mistake has been made.

Everything up to Hart's entrance is essentially prologue anyway, and Hart makes his entrance a good one, shooting up a can with the preacher's caricature on it, and giving a damn for nothing- he's an odd presence, with a face that suggests by turns Tim Roth, Joel from Mystery Science Theater, and Voldemort, and for someone famed for his iron countenance, he's pretty cheerful between moments when he needs to be hard. The whole sense of the Western hero- ruggedly individualist yet with a weak spot for community, iron hard yet gentle, tough but with a sly sense of almost silliness hiding somewhere inside- seems to be fully realized in him, and he carries the movie strongly enough that it doesn't seem to be able to pay attention to individuals anymore once he's left the screen, dissolving largely into shots of crowds, masses of people who often have no definition from one another.

The ending is extraordinary, it's difficult to do it justice. It builds and builds, starting out with a fairly normal seeming standoff, moving to a church engulfed in flame and a hero riding in for vengeance (extraordinarily late, and coming back from an errand that seems unimportant)- and becoming suddenly an inferno, a genuine hellscape in which it's difficult to believe anyone could be alive, much less acting. The movie uses the limitations of the filmstock, the haziness of heavy tinting, and the cheapness of the sets all together to create this vast image of a world on fire, and Hart striding slowly and purposefully out of it- he suddenly transcends the Western hero and becomes a prophet, a man who seems rightful and just in burning down a building full of people, justified by his sense of purpose, by his strength. The morality of the thing seems irrelevant, because the movie doesn't need Hart to be a good man, just a powerful one, a man who is able to negotiate with God Himself, and somehow he is merely fulfilling the prophecy of the town's moniker.

The postscript, in which he and the sister ride off to begin a life together, is almost a let down- Hart has burned down the world, and I don't know that I want or need for him to find another one.

[matrixschmatrix]

At the very least you gave me a little joy. You've got quite the hand with comedy. never heard of the Blom or Wong films and they sound fairly interesting.

I've actually been sitting on a copy of Verdens Undergang for a while- the DFI put it out alongside another eligible title, Himmelskibet, and I picked it up on spec when I was collecting their stuff from Christensen and Dreyer. I'm excited to hear it's actually good- I just thought it might be neat.

[domino harvey]

The first set is hardest to find/most expensive, so you came out the winner there

[matrixschmatrix]

Yeah, I'm not complaining, even though it's a beat up ex library copy that had coffee stains I had to scrub off all over the discs. I've been wanting the first set in particular forever.

[domino harvey]

Haha wow-- How does that even happen to a DVD box?

[knives]

At the very least you gave me a little joy. You've got quite the hand with comedy. never heard of the Blom or Wong films and they sound fairly interesting.

I've actually been sitting on a copy of Verdens Undergang for a while- the DFI put it out alongside another eligible title, Himmelskibet, and I picked it up on spec when I was collecting their stuff from Christensen and Dreyer. I'm excited to hear it's actually good- I just thought it might be neat.

Yeah, I'm eyeing that one for when I next go shopping. That short film set sounds pretty good, though there's a lot from Filmmuseum (costs about the same amount from either site) I really should pick up for this list.