Summary 1910-1919

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/22/2017

Late last year we finished up our chronological viewing of the 1910s, and are now four films into 1920. I thought this would be a good time to single out the films that I most enjoyed or found the most interesting from that period. We watched nineteen shorts and thirty-one features, though the dividing line between the two was a little fuzzy at times, and included some ~45 minute "features." One of those shorter features that I liked was The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs [1912], directed by Léonce Perret and produced in France at Gaumont Studios. As I mentioned in the write-up, it could very easily have been adapted as an episode on the old Alfred Hitchcock show, and coming when it did at the dawn of features it seemed markedly more realistic than the shorts we'd been watching previously, which were largely melodramas or the tail-end of the Melies or Melies-inspired camera-trick films. Two other films, also from Gaumont, were the crime serials Fantomas [1913] and Judex [1916], both of which were over five hours in total length, and both of which were directed by Louis Feuillade. Judex is more consistent in tone, and is probably the better film; I could easily imagine it being rebooted for a modern audience. But Fantomas is more tongue-in-cheek, and more bizarre (for instance the drive-by attempt at murder via python, foiled only by the hero having the foresight to wear a python-proof suit.)

The two films that are likely on any in-depth film history curriculum -- and deserve to be -- are Cabiria [1914] and Intolerance [1916]. The shock of seeing the camera begin moving into a scene during Cabiria -- rather than just panning -- cannot be felt by a modern audience in the same way it must have been felt by a contemporary audience, but one can still apprehend that something new is happening. And it is has a number of elaborate and impressive set pieces as well -- including the dark and weird scenes where children are tossed into an oven embedded in the stomach of a statue of a local god. Intolerance builds upon Cabiria, and adds the famous Babylonian crane shots, as well as an insanely ambitious attempt to make a coherent movie out of four distinct time period. It doesn't completely succeed, and spends a lot of time burrowing down some weirdly misguided moral rabbit-holes, but it's an impressive film, both in its ambition, and in what it accomplishes. Both films are long, and periodically lose focus. Cabiria, though, at least, seems to always have entertainment on its mind, rather than trying to teach some questionable moral lessons.

Besides Feuillade and Leonce Perret, there were three other directors whom we saw more than once: D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Victor Sjöström. Victor Sjöström is the only one of the three all of whose films I liked. Probably the best of his three films we saw was Ingeborg Holm [1913]. Like The Mystery of the Kador Cliffs, it was markedly more realistic than the films we'd been seeing up until that point, and stopped short of some of the sentimental cliches it could have employed, at least up until the very end. It was Dickensian in a sense, in that it told a story about an individual's misfortunes, but also had a focus on the institutional failures that had played a role.

The final feature I'll mention was the one that I personally found the most entertaining from this period: the Douglas Fairbanks feature When the Clouds Roll By [1919], directed by Victor Fleming. It was the funniest of the various comedies we'd seen -- including the films we saw by the canonical three silent comedians -- Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. To be fair to those three, all of their greatest work came in the twenties, and only Chaplin was making features in the 1910-1919 period. Fairbanks, too, probably did his major work in the twenties, but by 1919 he was already well established, and this film features his typical athleticism along with some intricate stunts and some fancy editing. Also it helps that he and his leading lady actually seem to like each other, always helpful in a romantic comedy, and surprisingly missing in a lot of the films we saw from this period (and even today, really.)

As far as shorts are concerned, I can't say there was anything that really stood out for me. Griffith's The Girl and Her Trust [1912] was a good short from the period just prior to features becoming common. I understand there were several other versions with a similar story that Griffith and others shot, but this was the one we saw, and it was a good straight-forward western, sort of a natural evolution of The Great Train Robbery. The Immigrant [1917] was probably the best of the Chaplin shorts we saw, especially the first half which was set shipboard. From Hand to Mouth [1919] by Harold Lloyd was also intermittently amusing. Lloyd's films don't have the touch of obsesssiveness that Chaplin's and Keaton's do, but he does have more of an everyman quality that makes his protagonists a little more sympathetic.

So that's it for the teens for a while -- probably forever in that concentrated a dosage. I'm looking forward to the twenties quite a bit, because I'm expecting the films to be better and stranger and more ambitious, which certainly seems to be the case four films in.