Film of the Year

1929: All-Talking! All-Singing!

The Broadway Melody (1929)
Directed by Harry Beaumont
100 min; U.S.A.; Black and White; Mono

The Broadway Melody (1929) is a backstage drama centered around a love triangle between a sister song-and-dance act and a singer/songwriter named Eddie Kearns (Charles King). Kearns has just penned the theme song for Florenz Ziegfeld, I mean, Francis Zanfield's (Eddie Kane) latest Broadway revue. It's his big break, and he wants his friends the Mahoney sisters to perform it with him. The trouble starts when the sisters, after spending ten years on the road circuit, arrive and Eddie discovers he's fallen out of love with Hank (Bessie Love) and in love with Queenie (Anita Page) and they're both in love with him. What's more, after blowing their audition for Zanfield its not the talent of the former sister but the long-legged blonde looks of the latter that gets them a part in the show. The tangled triangle is further complicated by the arrival of rich playboy Jack Warner, sorry, Jacques Warriner (Kenneth Thomson) who wants to play Stanford White to Queenie's Evelyn Nesbit and install her in a Park Avenue apartment as his mistress. But this is MGM's "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" picture so in spite of Eddie, Hank and Queenie's personal struggles the show must go on. As the title song by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed says, "Your troubles there are out of style / 'Cause Broadway always wears a smile."

You were meant for me: Queenie, Hank and Eddie form a tragic love triangle in The Broadway Melody.

Audiences in 1929 came to hear the singing and see the dancing but they got something extra: the original release featured a song-and-dance sequence in Technicolor. Sadly this sequence is missing from the Warner Home Video DVD version that I saw. It didn't really mar the experience, after all I don't know what I'm missing, but I'd like to see how color developed since The Toll of The Sea (1922). The Broadway Melody received an Academy Award for Outstanding Picture 1928/29. From all accounts the film was extremely popular. Motion Picture Almanac 1934-35 lists the film as one of the most successful rental's up to that time and it enjoyed box office success in the U.S. and abroad, particularly in England.

I think it's fair to assume that a major reason for the success was the picture's use of sound. In 1929 the major competing sound systems were sound-on-disc and sound-on-film. MGM and the rest of the Big Five studios chose the more versatle sound-on-film system over sound-on-disc, but some exhibition houses were wired for sound-on-film, some for sound-on-disc, some still unwired. Comments made by Harry Beaumont, director of The Broadway Melody, about sound recording for the film confirm that his crew recorded for both sound systems, apparently keeping in mind those theaters that had not yet updated: "we make an A and B sound track recording and an A and B wax recording of the same scene. Then we play back the poorer wax record...if it is all right, the better wax is treated so as to harden it, and the better sound track is used, and we are all set."¹  The advantage of using the sound-on-film system became apparent to Beaumont when his engineers were able to record and replace a dropped "s" in the sound track. A similar edit could not be done with a sound-on-disc recording without a retake of the entire scene—which means that the two types of soundtracks for this movie are at least slightly different (Beaumont didn't mention any other edits). Beaumont's skillful sound team was led by Douglas Shearer, brother of star Norma Shearer; he previously worked on the part-talkie White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) and would earn a total of fourteen sound recording and technical Academy Awards over the course of his career. An oustanding moment in sound occurs in the opening sequence of The Broadway Melody. Inside Gleason Music Publishing Co. four disparate musical acts practice different song material, and we hear all the musicians singing and playing at the same time. Shearer and his team guide our ears through this chaos of music until they settle on the stand-out title song of the picture (already familar to us since it's played in a medley with George M. Cohen's "Give My Regards to Broadway," from the 1904 production of Little Johnny Jones, over the credits) as Eddie Kearns runs through it.

When Kearns performs the song with a small combo of musicians the limitation of recording for both sound systems becomes obvious because the song has to be performed in a single take as edits cannot be made on the sound-on-disc system. A whole song performed in a single shot can be very boring— watch the rendition of "Truthful Deacon Brown" later in the movie for an example. Beaumont might have wanted to break up the stable image by moving the camera, but the limitations of the early sound technology got in the way. To keep the sounds of the motion picture cameras from being picked up by microphones the cameras were placed in large soundproof booths with limited mobility. Beaumont and cinematographer John Arnold (who worked with Victor Sjostrom the previous year in The Wind (1928)) appear to have developed a creative answer to this problem: have the actors and musicians change positions during the number to break up a static shot without cutting or moving the camera (see images below). There is only one cut (compare photo at top with those below) that occurs at the completion of the song but this performance doesn't grow stale thanks to the change in position. I should add that capturing a complete take can sometimes result in a superior performance of a song. Just compare the warm energetic feeling of Eddie's opening peformance of "The Broadway Melody," accompanied by just piano, guitar and clarinet, with the lame orchestral version later in the movie and you'll hear what I mean.

The free-flowing dialogue in this film is a refreshing change from the slow mumbling in Lights of New York (1928). On the other end of the spectrum the speaking parts don't rival something as slick as the witty banter in Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929). Still, the quick unpredicatable language was enough to make some contemporaneous critics bristle with indignation. Mordaunt Hall complained in the Times, "it is..rather disappointing to hear Miss Page's none-too-bell-like tones ejaculating word barrages in which there may be: "Boloney," "guy," "lay off," "hot dog," "gee," "wow," "big sap," "kinda," "gonna" and other such classical epithets."²  Perhaps Hall was one of those yearning for the talkies to increase the audience's vocabulary and teach proper pronounciation. I think the use of slang helps us to better imagine a Broadway backstage in 1929.

Harry Beaumont directing on the set of A Man and His Money (1919).

Director Harry Beaumont was more qualified than we might expect to helm MGM's first talking musical. Before working on The Broadway Melody he directed Joan Crawford doing the "Charleston" in Our Dancing Daughters (1928). That film featured synchronized music and sound effects and was successful enough to spawn sequels. I did a little more digging and discovered something fascinating about Beaumont's history with sound pictures. Beaumont directed movies for Edison, Essanay, Warner Brothers, Sam Goldwyn and MGM, directing since 1914, but he also worked as a writer and actor for the Edison Company. Waaaay back in 1913 he performed in a talkie, a Kinetophone film, that was shown at Union Street Theatre by the Edison Company when that firm was taking a (ultimately unsuccessful) stab at marketing synchronous sound films for projection. Beaumont reflected on the film to the Times in 1929, "my recollection of the world premiere of the first all-talking piece of work is that I was very thankful that I was in blackface so that no one would recognize me as the chap who sang, 'When That Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam.'"³  None of Beaumont's acting jobs listed for 1913 on IMDB agree with his recollection, but maybe the list is incomplete. What was this early sound film he's talking about? One of the Kinetophone films listed in the Edison archives is titled Minstrel Show-first part. That film is not included on the Edison: The Invention of the Movies four DVD set, I checked, but the title does jibe with Beaumont's description of the film he sang in. There is a film listed for the Edison company at IMDB as A Minstrel Show(1913) but it doesn't list Beaumont in the cast. A check through the archives of the Times uncovers a review of the aforementioned Kinetophone exhibition on February 17, 1913: "The second number was a minstrel show [my emphasis] with orchestra, soloists, end men and interlocutor, large as life and quite noisy."⁴  I'm going to take a leap and suggest that this is the same film listed in Edison's archive, listed on IMDB and mentioned by Beaumont. If so, what a strange and winding path Beaumont's career had travelled. He'd gone from singing in an all-but forgotten music film to directing one of the most popular musicals of his time.

Notes

1. "Film Plays Then and Now,'" New York Times (10 February 1929): 117.

2. Mordaunt Hall, "Fair Faces and Wild Slang,'" New York Times (17 February 1929): 119.

3. "Film Plays Then and Now,'" New York Times (10 February 1929): 117.

4. "New York Applauds the Talking Picture,'" New York Times (18 February 1913): 3.

References

Rosalind Rogoff, "Edison's Dream: A Brief History of the Kinetoscope" Cinema Journal 15, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 65.

John Belton, "Awkward Transitions: Hitchcock's 'Blackmail' and the Dynamics of Early Film Sound,'" The Musical Quarterly 83, no. 2 (summer 1999): 227-236.

Photo of Harry Beaumont reprinted from J. Berg Esenwein, Writing the Photoplay, 258. © 1919 by The Home Correspondence School.

This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2007 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1928: Can We Talk?

Lights of New York (1928)
Directed by Bryan Foy
57 min.; U.S.A.; Black and White; Mono

Bryan Foy's Vitaphone gangster flick Lights of New York (1928) isn't available on VHS or DVD nor is it likely to be on the list of any 1920s revival series at (if you're lucky to have one) your local revival theater because it's poorly constructed, trips over a clunky narrative, isn't much to look at, and suffers weak performances. Warner Brothers was looking to cash in on the popularity of their part-talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927) and so the decision was made to expand this Vitaphone two reeler into a feature length talking picture. The resulting movie is a collection of painfully slow scenes with actors fumbling over meandering dialogue. Nevertheless, when it was released July 8, 1928 and advertised as the "first one hundred per cent all-talking feature," it was a major box office success.

Murray Roth and Hugh Herbert's screenplay concerns a group of gangsters who dupe Eddie and Gene (Cullen Landis, Eugene Pallette) , a pair of small town businessmen with big city dreams, into buying a barbershop in New York that's really just a front for a speakeasy and a storehouse for bootleg hooch (prohibition may have done little to curb America's appetite for liquor but it certainly improved opportunities for crime). After being stuck in the middle of a "bootleg war" for six months the barbers are ready to escape back to the relative quiet of the small-town, but the gangsters, a loan and a promise to Eddie's mother (Mary Carr), and Kitty Lewis (Helene Costello), Eddie's love-interest in New York, complicate matters considerably.

Probably the best shot in the movie...and I'm not kidding.

Titles link some of the sequences and nearly all of them contain spoken dialogue. Unlike Al Jolson's ad-libs during the musical numbers of the Jazz Singer all of the spoken parts here directly support the narrative. After weeks of watching films from 1895 to 1928 I'm relieved to finally hear the actors speak. However, beyond that novelty this film is a major disappointment. Maybe I'm still stunned after last week's cinematographic marvels in Napoléon (1927) but it seems like Foy and cinematographer E.B. Du Par are nervous about trying anything interesting with the camera lest they should interrupt a character about to say something. Many of the scenes are built around actors huddling about a telephone, lampshade or something else that conceals the microphone, and s-l-o-w-l-y speaking their lines. To be fair there is one proto-film noir shot of a crime that we see only in shadows (see photo right) but otherwise this movie might as well be a radio program 'cause there's very little worth watching. A New York Times reviewer, writing after the premiere in 1928, thought so too: "In context the 'Light of New York' deserves only a sad smile. It is a sloppy thing, which if divorced from the sound, would be cast at once into outer darkness."¹  Ouch. I wonder if Foy and crew disregarded more advanced cinematographic techniques because they were inexperienced or just preoccupied with recording sound? Evidence that the balance between images and sound could just as easily shift the other way is seen in MGM's first part-talkie, the sentimental island romance White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). In that picture superlative underwater and outdoor cinematography far outweigh the impact of any of its sound sequences (which add little, if anything, to the finished picture, imho). Apparently, balancing excellence in images and sound will require some necesssary steps and experimentation.

Warner Brothers took a chance on Vitaphone, The Jazz Singer and Lights of New York and they all paid off handsomely. Though the best films of 1928 were either silent (The Passion of Joan of Arc) or used sound in an expressive way to support stronger imagery (The Man Who Laughs) it was the new talkies that attracted audiences back into the theaters after a recent slump in attendance. In fact, the talkies brought in enough revenue (a stinker like Lights of New York made many times the initial investment) to convince the notoriously conservative major studios that converting to sound pictures would be in their best interest. The transformation of American cinema (using a sound-on-film system by Western Electric, manufacturers of Vitaphone) was carried out with what seems like amazing alacrity: within two years of the release of the first all-talking feature the seemingly overwhelming (and expensive) task of retooling American motion picture production and exhibition facilities was all but complete. The timing was felicitous too because the vast surge in attendance that resulted (an increase of up to 30 million per week by 1931) protected the studios from ruin in the wake of the 1929 Stock Market crash.² 

Lights of New York opens with a brief shot of a radio while we hear a song with the lyrics, "where do we go from here?" I can't help but think of that question in the context of this blog's journey through film history. 1928, the era of silent pictures is coming to a close. I've seen and written about some of the best drama, spectacle, history, comedy, experimentation and tragedy that cinema has to offer, and I've learned more than I ever expected to learn in the process. I suddenly feel a bit nostalgic about the era of silents but I'm confident that the best is yet to come. On to 1929.

Notes

1. "Love and 'The Racket,'" New York Times (15 July 1928): X3.

2. Parkinson, David History of Film (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 85.

This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2007 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1927: Napoléon Superhero

Napoléon vu par Abel Gance: premiére époque: Bonaparte (1927)
aka Abel Gance's Napoléon, Napoléon
Directed, written and edited by Abel Gance
235 min.; France, Black and White (tinted and toned); Silent

Filmmaker Abel Gance has been called the D.W. Griffith of the French Cinema. Though Gance entered into filmmaking a few years after Griffith, writing scenarios in 1910 before moving on to directing in 1912, similarities exist between the two: both embraced technical innovations, both were known to be fond of shameless self-promotion, both freely mixed myth and history, and both were attracted to grand subjects for their films.¹  After freely experimenting with visual techniques in a trick film a la Mélies titled La Folie du Dr. Tube (1916) (see this on the DVD version of Gance's 1934 film Lucrezia Borgia) Gance directed La Dixieme symphonie (1918), described as the first major film of post-war French Impressionism (a new generation of filmmakers exploring cinema as an art and seeking to convey emotional sensations through visual devices).²  Encouraged by the technical achievements and pacifist messages in Griffith's Intolerance, Gance wrote and directed his own anti-war film, J'accuse (1919) inviting comparisons with the American master. Textbook histories seem to disagree over Gance's relationship with French Impressionism. Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: an Introduction includes a number of his films in their chronological list of the style³  while David A. Cook's A History of Narrative Film maintains that "his affiliation with the impressionists was fleeting at best."⁴  Regardless, Gance experimented with the sort of cinema techniques associated with French Impressionism in his 1927 masterpiece, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance: premiére époque: Bonaparte.

Napoléon is a historical reconstruction film which, according to film historian Richard Abel, was the most popular film genre in France in the 1920s. Perhaps Gance was hoping that an established genre could make his artistic experiments in cinema commercially viable. He began working on the script as early as 1924, planning not one but six separate films on the life of Napoléon. Production commenced in 1925 and continued for a year and a half at a cost estimated at up to 19 million francs. Despite the extravagant time and cost only the first of the planned six films was completed. However, when that film was ready for release it was six hours long. In October 1927, this six-hour version began a months-long stay at the Salle Marivaux theater, but the much more widely shown (in France and England) three-hour condensed version had its premiere on April 7, 1927 at the Théatre National de l'Opéra in Paris.⁵ 

In 1928 MGM distributed a trim 80-minute version in the United States; I have to wonder how these drastic cuts—perhaps the most severe amputation of a director's vision since Eric Von Stroheim's Greed (1924)—appeared to its contemporary American audience. Were the chopped one hundred twenty minutes obviously missing? Lucky for us there are voices from the past to answer that question. Mordaunt Hall, reviewer for the New York Times had this to say, "Abel Gance's picture 'Napoleon,' now at the Fifty-fifth Street Playhouse, is far from satisfying in the abbreviated form in which it is issued here...and its ending, as it is now, is far too abrupt."⁶ 

This wasn't to be the last of the changes made to the movie. Gance, and others, have made various edits, re-edits, a sound version, and even shot more footage. Kevin Brownlow bravely reconstructed the most complete version over some twenty years (it premiered in 1981 1979 at the Telluride Film Festival), but even this version was edited again by Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios to sync with a new score composed and conducted by Carmine Coppola (who regaled his son with tales of his own awe at the orchestral accompaniment to The Thief of Bagdad (1924)).⁷  The Zoetrope cut is the version I saw.

A screencap from famous triptych sequence in Abel Gance's Napoléon.

The story follows Napoléon from his school days at Brienne Collage (where he is put down, bullied and teased for his Corsican heritage and accent yet somehow leads his classmates in a famous though apocryphal snowball battle that foreshadows his military prowess) to his first major victory leading French forces invading Italy in 1796. As a young man he witnesses the French Revolution first hand and is distressed by its turn to chaos and senseless violence. He briefly returns home to Corsica with the idea of bringing the island under French control but is forced to flee back to France by pro-England forces. In France he rises to command artillery laying siege to English-held Toulon. He leads these forces to victory to a cadence of marching drums played by a raging hailstorm in lieu of his dead drummers. Meanwhile, the Reign of Terror grips Paris and Napoléon is imprisoned. Fate intervenes when a Royalist rebellion threatens the city and Napoléon is called upon to command forces in defense of the city. Haunted, no, more accurately, blessed by the ghosts of dead leaders of the Revolution, he is convinced to pursue his destiny ("I am the Revolution," he proclaims). After successfully putting down the rebellion he is rewarded with command of the Army of the Alps and leads the tired troops to victory in Italy. The film closes in the middle of Bonaparte's tale (actually at the middle of the beginning) because, remember, Gance planned to make six films to tell the whole story.

Despite Gance's assurances to cast and crew that they were about to go "through the portals of history,"⁸  and excellent set design, location shooting, costuming, and acting, we don't get a completely factually accurate version of Napoléon's life here. Lest this post splinter off into an exposé of the film's valid and invalid inventions (as an overlong earlier draft did) suffice it to say that Gance and company, while obviously drawing on historical sources, are more interested in creating a screen history that is rich in poetry and metaphor (the mythical snowball fight at Brienne, Napoléon reuniting with his symbolic eagle while weeping on a cannon, portentous visions of his grand destiny, turning back enemies with a glance, talking with ghosts, etc, etc) than one that sticks strictly to the facts, After seeing the film at the Palace Theatre in Warsaw in 1928 one reviewer argued that "while taking a certain amount of historical license, [Gance], on the whole adheres to the facts of the story of Bonaparte's career...and when in the name of art he gives reign to the high horse of his imagination, he never allows it to take the bit between its teeth and bolt."⁹  Mixed metaphors notwithstanding, I think that anaylysis makes the historical value of the film clear. The film is more about Napoléon the legend than Bonaparte the man. One might argue that Napoléon is a case of history film as propaganda like Battleship Potemkin (1925), but I think it treats its subject more as a mythical hero than a political figure. Or as Squish suggested recently, this is a vision of Napoléon as a superhero. However, this treatment of Napoléon doesn't detract from the film or its subject and actually fuels our fascination with both.

The film's famous final moments are a marvel— the screen splits into three distinct images that form an overwhelming whole. However, viewing this sequence on video, even on a widescreen HDTV, is woefully inadequate. I regret that I didn't see this film in a theater if only to experience the triptych sequence in its intended format.

As mentioned at the beginning of the post Gance has been compared to D.W. Griffith because they shared a passion for historical subjects and ambitious cinematographic and editing experimentation. In the humble opinon of this viewer, however, Gance has out-Griffithed Griffith in both style and content with Napoléon. Even after spending nearly four hours in the same seat I want to watch the film all over again—which is more than I could say for Griffith's Intolerance. The film satisfied expectations that had mounted pretty high after all I had read about it. I admit it, Gance's masterpiece got to me. I suspect I'll be humming "La Marseillaise" for the next few days.

Notes

1. Alan Williams, "Reviewed Works: Abel Gance by Norman King," Film Quarterly 38 (Summer 1985): 31-33.

2. Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, Film History: an Introduction, (New York: McGraw Hill, 2003), p. 88.

3. Ibid, p. 89.

4. David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), p. 305.

5. Richard Abel, "Charge and Counter Charge: Coherence and Inchoherence in Gance's 'Napoléon,'" Film Quarterly 35 (Spring 1982): 4.

6. Murdaunt Hall, "The Screen," New York Times (12 February 1929): 23.

7. Alvin Klein, "Coppola's Baton Guiding 'Napoleon,'" New York Times (18 October 1981): L110.

8. John J. O'Connor, "A Documentary on Gance's Making of 'Napoleon,'" New York Times (30 June 1989): C28.

9. Alvin Klein, "France Films Her Napoleon," New York Times (4 March 1928): 120.

This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2007 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1926: The Magic of Silhouette

Die Abenteuer Des Prinzen Achmed (1926)
aka The Adventures of Prince Achmed
Directed by Lotte Reiniger
65 min; Germany; Black and White (tinted and toned); Silent

Think about an image on a movie screen. It’s flat, two-dimensional, with both height (y axis) and width (x axis) but no depth (z axis). After perfecting the illusion of motion, by passing a series of individual photographs before a lamp at speed and projecting the resulting images through a lens onto a screen, the cinema’s next most important task is to produce the illusion of depth; it must convince us that we’re watching an image that is three-dimensional while in fact it is forever trapped in only two. This illusion of depth is the joint concern of proper lighting, cinematography, staging and set design. Without depth images have a tendency to look manufactured and unreal. That's one of the reasons why many of the early silent films look poor to the modern viewer. The performers in the early silents typically work before a flat surface with the camera positioned exactly perpendicular while daylight fills the room with flat lighting; the result is, well, rather two dimensonal. But, by the late silent period set designers constructed larger, deeper and more realistic sets, actors played within a richer mis-en-scene, cinematographers took advantage of camera angles and three-point lighting came into play— filmmakers had all but perfected the illusion of depth.

Why am I writing about all of this? To illustrate how Lotte Reiniger's approach to filmmaking is so radically different in The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). The first full-length animated feature is more or less a shadow play, and shadows, of course, have no depth at all yet somehow Reiniger’s ability to transform these abstract images keeps us entranced and entertained for over an hour.

Apparently not all of the adventures of Prince Achmed are necessarily dangerous.

Shadow plays may be the earliest ancestor of cinema. Both depend on light projection, involve motion and can be used to tell linear stories. Imagine a simple ancient shadow play made with hands casting shadow images from flickering firelight onto a tent wall (or try it yourself with one hard light and a sheet of paper) and I'd argue that there's a spark of cinema there. According to Jubin Hu's article Yingxi: The Initial Chinese Conception About Film, the shadow play developed as an art form in China over 500 years ago, and a connection between it and cinema was drawn years later when film was introduced into China by the globe-trotting Lumiére company on August 11, 1896. Cinema was dubbed "dianguang yingxi (electric light shadow play)...the modifier 'electric light' to differentiate the new form from the traditional shadow play."¹ Shadow plays also have a long history in Europe and in 1907, the New York Times reported that the "shadowgraph" was being revived again in Germany to "drive away ennui" from staid European drawing rooms. ² Shadow plays were creatively put in service of German expressionism by Arthur Robinson in the excellent Schatten: Eine nächtliche Halluzination (1923). In that film a shadow play artist uses his skills at manipulating light to convince a man (and the audience) that his wife is cheating on him.

The creative Lotte Reiniger, born in Berlin in 1899, caught the shadow play bug, learned to create silhouettes and built a shadow theater when she was only 14. Four years later, after studying at the Max Reinhardt Theater, she worked with Paul Wegener on The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1918) creating silouettes for the film’s opening sequence. It was during this production that Reineger first encountered animation when she observed Wegener’s stop-motion techniques to animate wooden rats. By the early 1920s Reiniger was eager to create animated films reminiscent of shadow plays by using silhouttes.

The Arabian Nights serves as the inspiration for The Adventures of Prince Achmed, especially Alaeddin; Or, The Wonderful Lamp and The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Perie Banou (this also served to inform The Thief of Bagdad (1924) which enjoyed great success in Germany). According to Katja Raganelli's Lotte Reiniger: Homage to the Inventor of the Silhouette Film (1999), Reiniger’s collaborators weren’t surprised by her choice of subject because she was a fan of fairy tales, convinced that they contain a certain sort of truth that's seldom found elsewhere. Judging from Joe May’s exotic The Indian Tomb (1921) and the “Harun al Raschid” segment of Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924), tales and legends of Asia were common fascinations among filmmakers working in Germany in the 1920s.

The fairy princess Banu and her bathers in The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

In Reiniger's animated tale we meet noble Prince Achmed who is tricked into riding a magical flying horse to his doom by an evil sorceror who has designs on Achmed’s sister. However, Achmed learns to control the winged creature and he flies from from one adventure after another, falling in love with the mysterious Pari Banu and forging an alliance with Aladdin to battle the sorcerer’s army of shadow demons, as he struggles to get back home. Unlike the abstract animations of other artists in Germany, such as Walter Ruttman or Hans Richter, Reiniger embraced a more commercial, narrative style. While that opens the door to wider audience appeal it also means that ubiquitous intertitles interrupt the flow of delightful animations. The figures and settings are finely detailed (especially the scenes in China) and the animation is very smooth. Shaded colors and overlapping backgrounds help to reinforce our expectations of a 3D reality but the overall imagery is rooted in a two dimensional universe. Fully animated filmmaking had come a long way since Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) but more innovations yet lay ahead.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed was created by making drawings and then cutting out black cardboard and thin lead silhouettes, the posable limbs joined with wire hinges. These intricate silhouettes were laid over an illuminated glass table over backgrounds cut from layers of transparent paper, manipulated and shot one frame at a time from a camera suspended above the table. Before the production began, music was recorded so that the scenes could be timed to the rhythm of Wolfegang Zeller’s romantic original score. This ensured that the film would sync more perfectly with live orchestral accompaniment during exhibition. Beginning in 1923, Reiniger, her husband Carl Koch and their assistants created nearly 300,000 individual frames to produce the first full-length fully animated feature film. The project took the team three years to complete. The aforementioned Ruttman, who created a number of abstract animation films himself in the early 20s and reportedly worked on the amazing expressionist backrounds of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), collaborated on the film and created the lightning, fire, clouds and magic spells effects.

When the film premiered in Paris in July 1926 the avant-garde were enthusiasticly supportive as was Jean Renoir who reportedly loved it. He later worked with Koch and/or Reiniger on Madame Bovary (1933), La Marseillaise (1937) and other films. Unfortunately, Prince Achmed recieved mixed reviews when it was released in Berlin in September and reportedly only started to make money some fifty years(!) after its initial release.

I’ve haven't found any evidence of a theatrical release in the United States before 1978, but the American rights were purchased by the University Film Foundation of Harvard in 1931. In the U.S. the reputation of The Adventures of Prince Achmed seems to have wavered back and forth between avant-garde film and cleverly made cartoon. On April 26, 1931, a full five years after its release in Paris, the film was presented by The Société Anonyme at the Museum of Modern Art in An Evening with the Art of the Future. “It is hard to see how the evening concerned itself with ‘art of future.’” Edward Jewell of the Times quipped. “The films are entertaining though not revolutionary.”³ Other screenings of the movie were held that same year for charitable events such as a benefit for the Westchester Girl Scouts accompanied by The Boston Symphony Orechestra April 26, 1931 at the White Plains County Hall.⁴ In 1941-42 the film was back to being promoted as an experimental movie among such company as The Blood of a Poet (1930) and The Blue Light (1932) in the Fantastic & Surrealist Program at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in New York.⁵ Fifteen years later The Museum of Modern Art demoted the film’s experimental stature and advertised it as a kid’s film.⁶ A recently restored version of the film on DVD gives us another chance to evaluate and enjoy Reiniger’s cleverly consturcted, deliciously magical shadow play film. So, is The Adventures of Prince Achmed great art or great fun? In the opinion of this ever-growing fan of animation, it’s both!

References
1 Hu, Jubin. "Yingxi: The Initial Chinese Conception About Film." Screening the Past 11 (2000): 1-2.
2 "Returning Popularity of the Shadow Play," New York Times, 27 January 1907, SM4
3 Jewell, Edward. “Museum of Modern Art,” New York Times, 29 March 1931, X12
4 "Tarrytown Revue Will Aid Charities," New York Times, 26 April 1931, 28.
5 "Off The Beaten Track," New York Times, 14 December 1941, X6
6 “Children’s Entertainment,” New York Times, 14 November 1957, 52

Note: I'm searching for a citation format that best fits blogging and will try out a few different formats over the next few weeks.

This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2007 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1925: Rewriting the Revolution

Battleship Potemkin (1925)
aka Bronenosets Potemkin, The Armored Cruiser Potemkin
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein
74 min; U.S.S.R.; Black and White; Silent

Spoilers alert: as so many film classes, books and videos show and discuss this week's Film of the Year I'm going to assume that you've already seen it and write about it in detail. However, if you haven't seen the film I recommend that you do before you read more. It's in the public domain and you can download it for free right here.

Sergei Eisenstein's landmark film Battleship Potemkin (1925) tells the story of a mutiny of Russian sailors aboard the titular ship, their support of citizens protesting in Odessa, and the government's bloody response. It is based on actual events that took place during the 1905 Russian Revolution. Lenin suggested cinema's unrivaled intellectual and emotional power to enlighten and persuade a mass audience when he dubbed film "the most important of all arts." Likewise, Eisenstein was convinced of the potential of his films to reveal and interpret the ideas of the socialist cause, and to make those ideas attractive to an audience. His intention was to get across a political message through his movies. In the case of Battleship Potemkin, the political message was the success of the Bolshevik revolution and the socialist ideas of Soviet Russia. To champion Soviet Russia Eisenstein was willing to rewrite history in the film: Battleship Potemkin paints the mutinous sailors as part of a heroic collective who are joined, at last, by the Russian fleet sent out to destroy them. The reality of the revolution in 1905 was very different. The government regained control, the Potemkin was isolated from the rest of the fleet (which did not join the cause) and the revolution failed to overthrow the Czarist government. However, after the success of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and the establishment of a new Soviet regime in Russia, Eisenstein was not only willing, but given his mastery of the visual language of cinema, also able to create a myth of a successful revolution to better underscore the political climate in which he was working. The Soviet government commissioned the film to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution, and Eisenstein was amenable to revising the true history of the failed coup in order to please them. Both understood the power of cinema as a propaganda tool that could be manipulated to benefit the designs of the state. Battleship Potemkin glorifies the convictions of the Soviet regime at the expense of historical accuracy, but in so doing tells us about history in ways it's creators never intended.

Vakulinchuk, a symbol for all the heroes of the revolution.

Early in the film Eisenstein establishes the idea that not one, but all of Potemkin's mistreated sailors are the heroes of his film. Together they protest the rotten food aboard ship, together they face execution, together they take control of the Potemkin. When the sailors protest the miserable living conditions aboard the ship the officers respond by having the protesting sailors rounded up, covered by a tarpaulin, and face a firing squad. One of their fellow sailors, Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov), convinces the firing squad not to shoot at their brothers. Easily swayed by the horrible conditions aboard ship they join their fellow sailors in a violent battle against the officers and take control of the Potemkin. Though spotlighted in this part of the film, Vakulinchuk's rallying cry to the firing squad and subsequent death in the ensuing battle are only significant as catalysts that propel the group to take action. He's not the hero of the film. No individual character is the hero of this film. Rather, an expanding group of revolutionaries fill that role and Vakulinchuk serves as a symbol for them (consequently, this situation also tags the director as auteur since he doesn't have to share creative ideas or credit with any lead actors).

Following the successful mutiny the victorious sailors take the Potemkin to the port of Odessa to bury Vakulinchuk's body. News of the mutiny spreads among the citizens who rush out to support the sailors and provide them with supplies. Tsarist troops, sent out to control these people, shoot at them from the top of the Odessa steps. Here Eisenstein famously uses rhythmic montage to tell a story of relentless cossacks massacring the citizens of Odessa, using editing to convey meaning and emotion. Rapid cross-cutting from the boots and bayonets of the cossacks to close-ups and extreme close-ups of the frightened and suffering victims instills a growing sense of terror in the audience. Moreover, even though we don't see much actual violence take place on the screen we make leaps of logic between the images and are convinced that a massacre is taking place. But the deaths occur mostly in our minds. This sequence reinforces Potemkin's collective hero motif: everyday citizens have become martyrs for the revolutionary cause. However, according to Daniel Gerould's Historical Simulation and Popular Entertainment: The "Potemkin" Mutiny from Reconstructed Newsreel to Black Sea Stunt Men, the history of what occurred in Odessa is quite different: "extensive looting by an unruly mob took place and the cossacks and soldiers shot those trying to escape from the burning port by the only possible route, the stairs" (Gerould 1989, 176). By subverting the details of history to his politically charged aims—showing the people of Odessa as innocents dying heroic deaths instead of an out-of-control mob confronted by troops trying to maintain order—Eisenstein extends the notion of that the populace itself is the hero of the revolution.

We're convinced that a massacre is taking place even though we never actually see any violence occur in this segment trimmed from the Odessa steps sequence.

As Gerould notes, "Eisensten's most striking intervention in the historical record was his turning a humiliating defeat into a great revolutionary victory by ending his film with the triumphant meeting of the battleship Potemkin with the squadron sent to attack it" (Gerould, 177). Eisenstein uses rhythmic montage and rising music to generate suspense around this dramatic stand-off.

The tense scene is marked by a single ominously-worded title card in the middle the montage: "will they open fire?" and ultimately relieved, rather creatively, with a close-up image of one single sailor breaking into a smile followed by a title that reads, "Brothers!" The revolution is a success, the squadron joins the Potemkin (or at least doesn't stop her) and the sailors race on deck to cheer their moment of triumph. The Battleship Potemkin's provocative final shot sees the ship's giant prow head right toward the audience with the sailors now waving directly at us as though the revolution is moving beyond the confines of the screen and into our reality (see photo top). However, in our reality, the Potemkin was run off by the squadron, isolated from the rest of the fleet, wandered the Black Sea for a time, and finally surrendered to authorities near Romania. Eisenstein's version of events turns this ultimate defeat into a victory and a rallying cry to the audience itself to join the revolution.

This film regularly appears in critics' best films of all time lists, and rightly so because the innovations in montage are quite influential (for example, music videos are but one result of this style). However, Eisenstein's rewriting of the history of the 1905 Russian Revolution is just as significant because it reminds us that when we see a film purporting to be a history we must examine the motivation of those who filmed that history and the context in which they are working. More important than knowing that a film "based on historical events," etc,. has changed facts or gets something wrong is knowing why those facts are changed by the filmmakers. Potemkin is obviously propaganda, but the film also stands as a reminder to look closer at filmmakers and the social context in which historical films are made.

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Note: This is a work in progress but I've decided to post it anyway and test the waters so to speak. So far I've only been able to cull together a few facts about the film's American journey. After the movie's release in Russia, it enjoyed a successful run in Germany earning praise from celebrities such as Douglas Fairbanks, Max Reinhardt and Emil Jennings. An invite-only screening was held at Wurlitzer Hall in New York on August 31, 1926. Reportedly, American distributors in attendance doubted the film's commercial potential and none expressed interest after the screening. It was eventually released, however, opening before a packed house at the Biltmore Theater in New York City on December 5, 1926 albeit as a censored version titled, The Armored Cruiser Potemkin (shots of squirming maggots in meat, a dead boy and blood on a woman's dress were among the cuts). Critic Mordaunt Hall recognized Eisenstein's talent, and placed the film in his top ten list for 1926, though he yearned for the director to find inspiration beyond state propaganda, "it would be interesting to see what Mr. Eisenstein could do with a less prejudiced subject, one wherein he did not have to rake up a mutiny of more than twenty years ago" ("Pictures From Three Countries," New York Times, 12 December 1926, x9). These facts only lead me to ask more questions: Were commercial considerations the only factors motivating the film's delay in the U.S. or were politics involved? What firm eventually took a chance and distributed the movie despite its limited box office potential? How/why did censors choose the specific shots to cut? How did the film fare in the rest of the U.S. after it's debut in New York? What was the result of the film's U.S. run? Amazing that this most over-discussed film continues to generate areas of inquiry.

This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2007 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1924: The Great Swashbuckler

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
Directed by Raoul Walsh
140 min; U.S.A.; Black and White (tinted); Silent

The June 11, 1923 issue of Time magazine, then only a few months old, offers an article about the movie-going habits of high school children from some seventy-six schools in the U.S. One question asked the students to name their favorite male movie star. The female students chose Rudolph Valentino (no surprise there), star of The Sheik (1921). Male students however favored Douglas Fairbanks. A rising star since the teens, Fairbanks became a member of Hollywood royalty when he married superstar Mary Pickford and they co-founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith. He spent the twenties famously buckling swashes in some of the most ambitious Hollywood productions of the late silent-era, starring as Robin Hood before Errol Flynn, D'Artagnan before Michael York, and Zorro before Antonio Banderas. What more could a kid want in a screen action hero?

Somebody once called Fairbanks a "cyclone of energy," and I wish I'd thought that up because it pefectly describes his kinetic performance in The Thief of Bagdad (1924). This thrilling adventure is akin to a tale from The Arabian Nights, or maybe it's culled from the best bits of that text, and takes place in ancient Bagdad, "dream city of the Near East." The opening segment of the film introduces us to the Thief (Doughlas Fairbanks). Director Raoul Walsh allows Fairbanks room to explore the full range of his extraordinary physical feats of agility and strength, performing one stunt after another, all in service of illustrating his character's skilled mastery of grift, sleight of hand and theft. If only Fairbanks hadn't performed in such stage-y pantomime. If he combined his physical skills with a more natural acting style, this performance would rate as my favorite so far on FOTY.

Once the narrative kicks in the beautiful daughter (Julianne Johnston) of the Caliph of Bagdad agrees to marry the man who can complete a quest to find the rarest gift of all. A trio of foreign princes accepts the challenge and sets off in search of the treasure. Meanwhile, the princess falls for our hero and he disguises himself as a royal suitor to join the quest. The love-struck Thief travels to marvelous lands such as the Valley of Fire, the Midnight Sea, and the Citadel of the Moon, overcoming danger and battling fiercesome creatures along the way so that he might return with the most valuable of treasures and marry the princess. An unscrupulous rival suitor (Sojin) complicates matters and seeks to win the competition through cruel treachery.

The victorious army marches before Bagdad's celebrating citizens. Just one of the massive sets in The Thief of Bagdad.

Why set the fantasy in a time and place so far removed from its target audience? Maybe the ubiquitous newspaper stories about Howard Carter's 1922 discovery of King Tut's tomb, and the riches that lay within, were fueling American appetites for stories about long ago kingdoms in lands far far away from their Coolidge-era lives. The DVD version of Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett 1924) makes the claim that Thief borrows its set design from a segment of the former film titled "Harun al Raschid." There are some stills on the DVD that look similar, but since both films were released the same year, and were made on opposite sides of the Atlantic, I'm not sure how William Menzies (Art Director for Thief) was influenced by Paul Leni's work on the German film...unless the former traveled to Germany during production of Waxworks. More striking to me than where Menzies culled his ideas is how he fills the massive castle sets and strange magical worlds in this film with all manner of exotic silks, paintings, giant gongs, scarves, carpets, robes, turbans, weapons, thrones and magic items. The ambundantly rich mis-en-scene cries out for Technicolor (Ludwig Berger must have thought so too).

The film's massive sets are more impressive than anything seen here since Intolerance (1916), and maybe won't be matched for pure awe until Cleopatra (1963) or perhaps even The Return of The King (2003). The palaces, fortresses, throne rooms and citadels in this picture were actually constructed on ten acres next to Fairbanks Studios. A two acre area of concrete was painted white-gray to reflect on the set and improve the illusion that events take place in the Middle East. Interesting to compare the effect against post-production work to achieve a similar but more washed-out look in the recent Jarhead (2005). Incidentially, bigger and bigger sets seem to have been something of a rage in the mid-20s with Yolanda (1924) reportedly coming out on top with a castle set that encompassed the space of nearly an entire city block.

Fairbanks claimed that he cast almost every part of his fantasy epic with a relative newcomer to pictures because he felt that casting the same familiar actors would undercut the realism of his fantasy kingdom. His casting offers us some of the more interesting looking characters seen in a Hollywood film. There are massive palace guards, rotund foreign dignitaries, a cruel-lipped heavy and lovely handmaidens. It was a treat to watch the cast of fresh faces (foreshadowing the whimsical methods of Fellini a tiny bit, perhaps?). Too bad such praise can't be shared for the casting of Julianne Johnston as the female lead. The former dancer from Indiana doesn't quite convince us the she's a princess from Bagdad (or Baghdad, why the mispelling of the city's name, I wonder?). Meanwhile, Anna May Wong stands out in her minor role as a servant; maybe I'm biased by having somewhat recently screened The Toll of the Sea (1922).

The Thief searches for treasure inside of the surreal Citadel of the Moon.

Camera and editing tricks are well used to power the Arabian Nights-inspired magic items. But, some of the creature effects (especially the beasts our hero tackles along the way) appear less-than-believable and I wonder how these looked to the film's contemporary audiences. The New York Times review lends a clue, "[the Princess] beholds the daring Thief on his white-winged horse, loping along with the chest he has found at the bottom of the sea. To us this sight of Fairbanks on his steed is one of the finest bits of satire in this beautiful screen effort. It was merely a white horse docorated with wings...when it appeared before the audience the theater was filled with laughter." ("Fairbanks and Fantasy," New York Times, 23 March 1924, X5). Based on that I'd say the fake-looking bits looked as unreal to audiences back then as they do to us today. However, we enjoy this picture because it submerges us into a realm of fantasy, not reality, and there's nothing real about magic ropes of Ispahah, cloaks of invisibility or flying carpets either, and yet they're all fun to watch.

The film took over fourteen months to complete; in the interim ads built excitment for the premiere at the Liberty Theater in New York on March 18, 1924. Star-struck crowds gathered in front of the theater to catch a glimpse of Fairbanks, Pickford and other celebrities attending the sold out show. Live music and burning incense filled the lobby where Fairbanks and Pickford were escorted to their seats by police officers who kept the fans at bay. It was a Jazz Age happening. However, though the film made the Times list of top movies for that year it didn't do as well at the box office as Fairbank's previous swashbuckler, Robin Hood.

The film's special effects, physical feats and magical scenery made The Thief of Bagdad an international hit as well. Released in Germany in 1926, it broke a film record by playing at forty-five theaters simultaneously. It was screened for a month at the Capitol Theater in Berlin where a row erupted because the owners screen it instead of a German film, Bismarck (1927). This resulted in an investigation over alleged bribes paid by the Reichswehr for the exhibiton of military propaganda (must be a fascinating story to follow up on here if anyone out there is into German film history). The following year it was a hit all over again, this time in China.

I first became aware of Douglas Fairbanks through Kevin Kline's brief turn as the writer/producer/actor in Chaplin (1992). But, it was over last year's Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon that I finally saw Fairbanks himself on the screen; he was in the unlikely position of being chased by a giant-sized Welsh rarebit (seriously) in a surreal segment of When the Clouds Roll by (1919). Fairbanks' greatest role may have been as "Douglas Fairbanks," a swaggering superstar who exploited celebrity for his own benefit. However he pushed himself perhaps too hard and died young (he was only 56). He left behind a body of work that defines a type of action hero that's been regularly imitated by succeeding generations of peformers ever since. One of my favorite things about writing this blog and researching films of the past is that I'm introduced to talented people through their movies and then get to know them through facts that've been written down and preserved about them. It's like rumaging through a friend's cache of family photos while she tells me what each relative did with his or her life. The results can be amusing, sometimes disturbing, and nearly always fascinating. Such is the case with the spectacular fantasy adventure The Thief of Bagdad and its incomparable star Douglas Fairbanks.

This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2007 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1923: It's Only Make-Believe

Souls For Sale (1923)
Directed by Rupert Hughes
90 min.; U.S.A.; Black and White (tinted); Silent

"Are you real or a mirage?" Mem Steddon (Eleanor Boardman) asks The Sheik (Frank Mayo) who rescues her in Souls For Sale. "Neither," he replies. "I'm an actor."

There were some fine films released in the U.S. in 1923. The Covered Wagon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Safety Last are among the best. The first because it reestablished the western as a popular genre, the second because Lon Chaney’s performance is outstanding and the scale of the production is impressive, and the latter because Harold Lloyd goes to extreme lengths just to make us laugh. Although Rupert Hughes’ Souls For Sale (1923) can’t compete with the excellence of these movies it cannot be overlooked because it may tell us more about film history than anything else released that year.

Souls For Sale strongly mixes fantasy with reality in an attempt to make us forget that we’re watching a production that’s pure make-believe. Just as Remember Steddon (Eleanor Boardman) rises from obscurity to stardom through hard work and determination, so Goldwyn press releases tell us that Boardman had progressed from photographer’s model to feature film star in just two short years. After Steddon fails to charm a jaded casting director, and suffers through an embarrassingly awful screen test, she realizes how hard it will be to become a movie star. Lucky for her a director (Richard Dix) decides to take her under his wing.

It's all make-believe: Eleanor Boardman as fictitious performer Mem Steddon meets real actor Gibson Gowland playing Macteague on the set of Greed in the film Souls For Sale.

As Steddon climbs the ladder of success Hughes uncovers the craft of motion picture making as perhaps never before in a feature film: cameras and lighting equipment, sets crowded with extras and crew, studio cafeterias loaded with famous performers, dangerous stunts, animal wranglers, and the tough conditions actors must suffer through to make our favorite movies. More levels of make-believe reality are layered on as we see Charlie Chaplin and Erich Von Stroheim appear to be directing on their respective sets (for A Woman of Paris (1923) and Greed (1924)), and 35 other stars hard at work.

All of this behind-the-scenes stuff is much more fascinating than a weak sub-plot about Steddon's cruel Bluebeard of a husband (Lew Cody) which annoyingly intrudes on Hughes' faux-exposé. The director finally brings everything together in a thrilling melodramatic climax that sees a real (make-believe) hurricane wreck a (real) make-believe storm. In the end Hughes seeks to resolve both storylines and convince us of the moral integrity of those hardworking people who make movies at the same time.

There are a lot of (not very) persuasive arguments in this film designed to defend Hollywood from critics and reformers. In some ways Hughes' efforts to defend the movie metropolis with Souls For Sale reflects the work of the MPPDA, established a year earlier by industry leaders to respond to criticism and remove the taint of scandal threatening the American film industry. Hughes (who also wrote the original story published in Red Book Magazine, Sep-Dec 1921) tries hard to convince his audience that the studios are made up of good people who sacrifice a lot and work “factory hard” just to entertain us.

Chaplin playing "Chaplin" checks the shot on his "set" on the set of Souls For Sale.

Despite some successes at mixing fantasy and reality, and weaving the craft of filmmaking into the narrative, Souls is not a great film. The New York Times called it “hokum” (I love that word) and complained about the fact that no one Sells a Soul in the picture at all (this is true, though one hopeful, Miss Slade (Eve Southern), gives it a shot). Hughes even defangs screen vamps when “the wickedest woman in pictures” (Barbara La Marr) transforms into the sweetest woman in showbiz as soon as the camera is turned off. However, as a history the film is an overwhelmingly rich opportunity to get a sense of the time and place in which it was made. It reveals not only what movie sets looked like outside of the frame, and what jobs were performed by directors, assistant directors, cinematographers, electricians, and other members of the crew (or more correctly what Hughes and company want us to believe that sets and jobs look like), but also answers the question that apparently was on every moviegoer's mind in 1923: what’s Hollywood really like? Is it a scandalous playground of Jazz Age debauchery or a community of hardworking people doing their best to keep the rest of us entertained? Perhaps the truth is a bit of both but Hughes only argues for the latter.

Did I write above that Souls For Sale reveals more about 1923 than anything else released that year? Well...there is another film, Soul’s direct competition as a matter of fact, that also seeks to expose the truth about America’s filmmaking capital. It's titled Hollywood (1923), and it made the New York Times’ ten best films list for that year. Unfortunately, it's a lost film today so for a glimpse of what Hollywood looked like in the 1920s, or at least what Hollywood wants us to think it looked like in the 1920s, we’ll have to settle for Souls For Sale.

This essay written by Thom Ryan
© 2007 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved