I devoted yesterday at the Silent Film Festival Winter Event. Great way to spend a Saturday. Here are the details:
It’s Mutual: Charlie Chaplin Shorts
Before the movie started, I visited the retail section on the Castro‘s mezzanine. At the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum table, I bought a bumper sticker – "Films have a right to remain silent." Downstairs in the theater, I was delighted to see a lot of families with kids. It’s good to start them early.
Do I have to say that all three shorts were hilarious? I didn’t think so.
One thing that struck me was the emphasis on work – a theme you find throughout silent short subjects. Think about how many two-reelers you’ve seen set in a store or factory or farm, with the star playing an inept employee. The first short screened, "The Pawnshop," is a classic example. The second, "The Rink," has many gags about Chaplin as a waiter before he puts on skates. The third one, "The Adventurer," was the exception. He played an escaped convict, which put him closer to the tramp character his onscreen persona would evolve into. Curiously, in both that and "The Rink," he pretends to be an aristocrat.
Another observation: The early Chaplin character can be exceptionally selfish and cruel–even sadistic. When he’s not making people miserable through incompetence, he’s doing it on purpose, hitting and kicking them with little or no justification.Yet you root for him. That’s star power.
L’Argent
This French epic update of a Emile Zola novel disappointed me. The story about stock market speculation (as timely in 1928 as it is now) was slow to start and difficult to follow, making it one of only a handful of silent films I’ve seen that would have been better as a talkie. The presentation didn’t help. The intertitles were in French, and rather than having someone read the translation out-loud, the festival projected yellow subtitles onto the film image. Long and wordy intertitles was broken up into series of short subtitles.
The movie had a handful of great scenes, including the suspenseful take-off of an airplane and a big party where everything goes out of control. But these weren’t enough to make it’s nearly three-hour runtime enjoyable. And even with these, I found myself wondering if the scene was great on its own, or only because of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra‘s brilliant score.
In fact, Mont Alto made the movie bearable. When the picture was dull, I could at least enjoy the concert. The group complimented their music with occasional and creative sound effects. For instance, during the above-mentioned airplane scene, someone used a salad spinner to simulate the plane’s propeller.
With the possible exception of Carl Davis (who I’ve never seen perform live), the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra are the best silent film accompanists working today.
La Bohème
Officially based on the same stories as Puccini’s opera, but actually taking its plot from the opera itself (which was still under copyright when the film was made), this MGM version is one piece of sweet and sad romance.
It helps to have the director and star of The Big Parade (King Vidor and John Gilbert, respectively). But the spotlight really belongs, both as star and auteur, to Lillian Gish, who gives a beautiful, funny, and heart-breaking performance as Mimi. Gish, who was instrumental in inventing the art of film acting, had a great deal of control over the picture. She used it to good advantage, without sacrificing other actors’ performances to her own glory.
This is grand, romantic tragedy that takes you from the despair of poverty through the dizzying ecstasy of new love to inevitable disaster, all set against Paris in the early 1830s.
For copyright reasons, and much to Gish’s displeasure, the film could not be accompanied by Puccini’s music during its original, 1926 run (although it wouldn’t surprise me if a few theaters got away with it under the radar). In 1979, Dennis James created a new score based on Puccini’s music. The elderly Gish gave that score her wholehearted approval. James performed that score last night.
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