Early films (1905-1908)

Rescued by Rover (1905)

So far as I can tell, this is the first film with a dog in it.  Like the more famous Lassie, Rover is a collie dog with a knack for seeking out lost infants, and calling the relevant adults to their aid.  It's a strong idea for an early film, as the sight of a dog rushing down lanes and through rivers is something one couldn't represent nearly so well on stage or in print.

The film was made by Cecil Hepworth, a British director who in 1900 made the wonderfully gruesome special effects film 'Explosion of a Motorcar', and in 1903 an excitingly early film of 'Alice in Wonderland'.  The man was evidently a smart cookie, realising the potential of the cinema and delivering a blend of narrative and effects (hitherto films had often been one or the other) with a really good framing and timing.  Watch it here - it's exactly the sort of melodrama one might expect from the silent age.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)

‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces’ contests with ‘The Merry Frolics of Satan’ to be the most immediately arresting movie title of 1906.  It’s a logical progression of the tricks we saw in ‘The Enchanted Drawing’ (1900) - faces are drawn on a blackboard, but come alive and interact with one another.  While the earlier film was about the relationship between the artist and the art, this one puts the emphasis on the picture, which suits the camera better.  The animated part now fills the whole of the frame, and the artist is a cameo, rather than a star.  Quite amusing!  Chortle at it here, if you will.

If you’re curious, ‘The Merry Frolics of Satan’ is a hand-tinted Méliès film, and has a much less exciting title in its native France  It has a great skeletal horse in it, and some fine special effects.  Not much Satan, though.

Ben Hur (1907)

Long term readers may know that The 1959 'Ben-Hur' is my favourite film.  It’s been shot a few times, and this was the earliest.  The film is most notable for having been made without the permission of the rights-holders, meaning the production company were sued for copyright violation.

It’s not a very satisfactory adaptation, even by the standards of the age.  The film assumes a familiarity with the novel, serving as moving illustrations to aid the imagination, rather than a narrative in pictures.  We’re given no reason to think or care about the characters, and when a slate falls from the Hur family’s roof, injuring Valerius Gratus, the camera pays it no heed.  If you don’t know the plot, the movie has very little to offer.  There are crowds and chariots, but no spectacle, no excitement.  Nobody has yet thought of moving the camera to follow the action, and since everything is shown in long shot, there’s no real detail to look at.  I suspect most of the cast are in splendid historical costumes of some sort or another, but they’re all just distant blurs.  You can watch the film here if you wish.

So, those Bens-Hur, in order of preference:

1. Ben-Hur (1959), a true epic, full of excellent performances and strong dialogue (though some Esther’s more religiose comments in the second half come across rather weakly).  This version has the best theology of all, and its chariot race is one of the most exciting sequences in all cinema.  Plus, Charlton Heston!

2. Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ (1925).  Many people favour this silent classic over the 50s talkie.  It certainly has style, and some fantastic hats.  One of the best American silents, and certainly the most expensive.  Its chariot race is pretty thrilling, though technological limitations of the time mean parts of it are too obviously faked in studio.  Jesus is manifested as a disembodied arm, which I’m inclined so say lacks his characteristic humanity.

3. Ben Hur (2003).  An animated version, which at 80 minutes does most of the things its far-longer predecessor did in 212.  It’s for children, so simplifies the story quite a bit, and gives Messala a happy ending.

4. Ben Hur (2010).  A TV miniseries.  I’m not a fan of this version, with its jerky slo-mo, its disappointing Jesus and its wilfully unmemorable chariots.  It tries too hard to avoid copying the 50s film, and so ends up lacking its merits.  A good cast, though ill-used.

5. Ben Hur (1907).  As above, this is limited by its era, but far more by a lack of imagination.  Edwin Porter or Georges Méliès could have made it beautiful.

A new version will be in the cinemas in 2016, so expect me to pop up then to provide heavily biased comparisons with my favourite film.

Japanese Butterflies (1908)

When I resolved to plug some gaps in my chronology, I asked friends if they could name any extremely old films.  Two of my lodgers had once seen a movie ‘about butterfly women’ in a museum in Berlin, and a little research revealed it to be ‘Japanese Butterflies’, a Spanish film from 1908.

Like a lot of very early films we’ve looked at, it eschews plot for spectacle (though, as mentioned in the film above, sometimes we’re presented with neither), and gives us a number of special effects and striking images.  Japan!  Some men!  Dancing butterflies!  A woman!  A chrysalis!  A giant butterfly!  A slightly different giant butterfly!  That’s really all there is to it - a  of Oriental beauty and mystery, its frames coloured-in by hand.  You can watch it right here.


Tune in again for 1909-1912, though since films start expanding from shorts to features (which is to say, films an hour or more in length), these years may be spread across a few posts.  Technology is marching on!

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

I'm rather wary of war films.  As part of my job I visit elderly people in their homes, and I've known a couple of them to spend their entire lives sitting before the television, watching war-film after war-film.  They wake in the morning, put on a war adventure channel, and watch it until bed-time, every day until they die.  It's one way to spend retirement, I guess, but one of them shouts and screams death-threats at the films' villains, 'bloody Japs', 'we're gonna kill ya', and so on, and many phrases far too coarse or murderously racist for me to reproduce in the pages of The Penciltonian.  War films seem to play to, and encourage, a horrible sort of xenophobia.

For this reason I spent a long while avoiding 'All Quiet on the Western Front', which I'd bought from a very interesting charity shop in Walkley (the right-hand half of the shop was a charity shop like any other, and the left-hand side was a pet-shop.  One of the shop assistants was a giant dog).  If I'd given the film's packaging slightly more attention it might have allayed my fears.  Firstly, the protagonists are WWI Germans, an unlikely set of heroes for an American film, and secondly this is a famed anti-war picture.  That's a genre I can more easily get behind.

War.

I've heard it said that it's impossible to make an anti-war-film, as war always looks really cool.  I'm not sure I agree with the argument, but it's an interesting one.  War looks absolutely awful all the way through this movie.  The youths, a class of boys, are stirred up by their schoolmaster with a torrent of rhetoric about glory and duty to defend their country.  They chant joyfully about their fatherland as one might today yell 'U-S-A!  U-S-A!'  Inside twenty minutes they're on the front lines, and everybody starts starving and dying, being blinded, losing limbs and freaking out.  The main character, Paul Bäumer (Lew Ayres) sees all his friends and contemporaries wiped out, and, when he returns to his home-town on leave, finds his old community refuse to believe his stories of a futile, unwinnable war.  They're too convinced by their own opinions, and by the propaganda from the media.

In Britain today, the old idea that soldiers are all inherently heroic is making a return, meaning that any future wars will be far more appealing to our society.  So far as I can ascertain, soldiers have two main jobs: shooting people, and threatening to shoot people if they fail to obey.  As a career, it's a very exciting way out of the poverty of austerity Britain - glamorous, masculine, and with the chance to punish the enemies most cursed by xenophobic tabloids.  One needn't be heroic to find that appealing.  One need only be physically fit.  Perhaps I'm excessively liberal, but I favour peacemakers to gun-toting peacekeepers, and find teachers, firefighters, missionaries and (when they're not being scary) police officers more admirable than armed drones.

The opening slide of the movie

I was pleasantly surprised to find 'All Quiet on the Western Front' so well-made and watchable.  If you've been following The Penciltonian with an obsessive avidity, you may recall that I've really liked the 30s films from Germany and Russia, but found the English-language stuff like 'The Island of Lost Souls' (1932) and 'Lives of a Bengal Lancer' (1935) for instance, to be rather heavy-going.  This was made only three years after the first feature-length talking picture, and the transition from silent films to talkies was a pretty bumpy one.  Here, though, is a well-crafted film, directed with a flair - with, for instance, some extremely disturbing shots of mass death when the British come over the top - and which wouldn't seem outdated even if it were released a decade or two later.  This is an impressive film with a message worth hearing.


P.S. Happy Poppy Day, if that's what floats yer boat.

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Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Alexander Nevsky had terrible hair, but a nice tunic.  He lived a nine-hundred-ish years ago, and was a prince and a saint and a general all at once.  He was the Christian Mohammed, the Orthodox Jeanne d'Arc, and he kept a peace with the Mongols, that the Russians of Rus might war against the Teutons, who were all a load of jerks.

This, then, is an anti-German film made in thirties Russia.  It was intensely popular, then banned when the government realised how nice the Germans were, then unbanned and intensely popular again when the Germans became the enemies once more - all this inside three years.  It was an exciting time.

Parp!

The film is directed by Sergei Eisenstein, who made that other handsomely-edited propaganda piece 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925).  Like that film, 'Alexander Nevsky' is much easier to appreciate than to enjoy, though it surely has its merits.  One such merit is the famous musical score by Prokofiev - at least, I've often heard it's famous.  I wasn't sure I recognised it, but it had a great power to make me exclaim 'uh oh' and (more crudely) 'oh crap' at my television whenever it indicated the stirrings of impending catastrophe.  The Teutons, you see, are very horrid enemies, and whenever the film cuts to them in their vast and amazing helmets the dialogue disappears and the music takes over.  Though 'Алекса́ндр Не́вский' is a talkie, it's a silent film at heart, meaning the Catholic foe are presented for the most part as mute, unutterably malign, communicating only through helmet-size and loud instruments.

The other thing for which the movie is famed is the battle on the ice, which takes up the latter third of the duration.  It's a tremendous spectacle, and it left me thinking that Eisenstein could have made a really watchable 'Birth of a Nation' (1915).  At the time it was the greatest battle in all of cinema, and it's hard to know when it was surpassed.  The battle is immensely long, showing the overall flow of the fight, and great amounts of detail, from seething crowds to small moments of character or comedy.  It's easy to see how we got from this to The Battle of Helm's Deep, and though I'm sure Tolkein had some experience of real-life battles I wouldn't be surprised if he had seen and enjoyed this film.

Alexander Nevsky says 'Fish'.

I thought I would like Alexander more than I did.  He turned out to be rather a dull sort of fellow with little to humanise him.  He did his job, winning the war, well and functionally, and showed little reason to be posthumously canonised.  A fair résumé for a hero in the age of Stalin, but not great for a movie protagonist.

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Don't buy the DVD - the print is soft and shaky - not to an offensive degree, but it could look much better.  Get yourself the soundtrack instead, which comes with Prokofiev's music to 'Lieutenant Kijé' (1934) too.
 

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

I was expecting to write about how 'Doctor Zhivago' is a film that, though I respect as great, well-made and technically excellent, I don't like at all, and find intolerable to watch.  Disconcertingly, though, watching it for a third time, I found myself enjoying it tremendously, not irritated by the wet passivity of the eponymous poet, not wearied by the tragedy, but interested and engaged.

What had gone wrong this time, or right this time and wrong before?  Perhaps, because I now knew the order of events, I knew what I was meant to care about - or perhaps Yuri Zhivago irritated me less this year because, since seeing it last, I had a lodger, a scientist from Dijon, who strongly resembled Omar Sharif's bright-eyed, moustached humanist, meaning I find the character more familiar and sympathetic than I did before.  I'm disinclined to suggest that this is a case of my tastes maturing in the last five years, as that would seem an insult to my younger self, who I believe found legitimate reasons to dislike the film back in 2007 and 8 - and might imply that I'm now more inclined to accept the boring.  No, I wonder whether the real reason for my turnaround is that we are now living in revolutionary times.

Zhivago, after the revolution

Before I get to that, let me praise the film for a moment.  Like 'Bridge on the River Kwai', this is a film by David Lean (this time adapting the work, and to an extent the life and the funeral, of Boris Pasternak), and there's good reason Lean is so well-regarded, and is the favourite director of another erstwhile housemate of mine.  His 'Doctor Zhivago' is exceptionally well directed - and I know I've been saying that about a lot of films without really explaining what can be an empty phrase, so on this occasion I'll try to explain what I mean: Lean presents a convincingly freezing Russia, and makes good use of quick cuts and transitions, sudden jumps through actions or conversations, to give us what we need to see but suggest a story in which everything takes even longer than this long film can put on screen.  He makes fine use of a limited palette of black, white and brown, with occasional red for the Bolshevists and big yellow flowers in the spring.

His images are striking and his camerawork inventive, sometimes moving through the dark to peer through different ice-covered windows, sometimes following in characters' drafts, making their way through dense crowds or packed rooms where there hardly seems space for a camera.  My favourite moment in the film comes straight after the intermission and entr'acte - the screen is entirely black, but not empty.  There's the sound of a steam-train, and after almost a minute a pinprick of light appears in the centre of the screen, and grows, until we realise our camera is mounted on the front of the train, and we've been watching a journey through a long, dark tunnel.  This isn't just a lot of fancy technique, indeed a lot of it is subtle unless one is watching for it - but it builds a real epic, lives fuller and more complex than we see on screen and a huge and deeply troubled Russia in need of a revolution, and then suffering from it.  The way the film is made, and the story told, raises questions: there is something fascinatingly odd about the meeting between the two Zhivagos, Yuri (Omar Sharif), the doctor and poet, and Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), his half-brother, the secret policeman, who bookends and narrates the film.  On the one occasion they meet, we never see Guinness speak to his brother.  His side of the conversation is carried entirely through narration in the past tense, leaving the two terribly distant even in their one happy union.

Says Klaus Kinski: "I am the only free man on this train.
The rest of you are cattle!"

This the second Russian Revolution film I've watched for The Penciltonian.  The first was 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925), which had the merit of actually being Russian.  That film was a work of propaganda, so presented the revolution with great optimism.  Perhaps rightly so, as change was surely needed, and the men well motivated, but 'Doctor Zhivago' gives us the unpleasant 'what happened next', and even the unpleasant 'what happened during'.  It starts with peaceful protests, but our media often tells us how unsuccessful those are, and what tends to happen to innocent protestors.  Alas, it seems the police will always put down peaceful protest, as is memorably the case here, and as they did in New York and other cities two years back, tearing down the Occupy camps, and in many cases exceeding their jurisdiction, and that of any human being.

'Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex' (2008) made a convincing case that peaceful protests are always punished and never achieve their aims, and that violent action and domestic terrorism are the only ways one can really highlight injustices and strike against their causes.  They're extreme and unpleasant techniques, but it may explain why peaceful protests, where they don't peter out and fail, tend to grow into the kind of revolution we see here.  As the film shows us, the Russian Revolution wasn't clean and wasn't very successful.  The old order was certainly overthrown - and eventually we'll get to 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971) for the Tsar's sorry side of the story - but despite the change of regime, the social injustices stayed, or got far worse.  It's the same story of hopeful revolutions gone bad that we see in Iran in 'Persepolis' (2007) or in England in 'Winstanley' (1975).  Watching this as the story of a troubled Russia, rather than simply that of a mild-mannered medic, made the story come alive for me on this viewing.  This isn't merely a tragic romance, though it certainly is that - it's the story of revolutionary times, such as the world is experiencing today.  They're terrible times, where hope is trodden down in the name of progress, or else survives to blossom into something yet uglier.

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Cabiria (1914)

The giant statue of Moloch consumes another victim!

'Cabiria' was the first truly epic film - and I do like an epic.  It's a story of melodrama, adventure and rescue set during the second Punic War - which is to say Phoenicans, Carthaginians and Romans in the minus-second Century, with Hannibal and his elephants.  The film plays out on huge sets with a real sense of depth, and tells a story tremendous scope, with crowds engulfed in convincingly hot smoke as they flee the flaming mount Etna.   For the 1910s, it's quite a thing.  It's strange to think that people almost a hundred years ago were making movies at all, let alone movies as grand and impressive as this.

To begin with, the pictures, sets and framing reminded me of the yet earlier 'La Vie et La Passion de Jesus Christ' (1903), but this is an even more ambitious picture, less reliant on an audience's knowledge of the story being told.  Unfortunately it gets around this unfamiliarity by asking the audience to read what's happening rather than watching it, with paragraph-long intertitles of an occasionally poetic character.  Still, in terms of telling its tale clearly and presenting attractive pictures, this eclipses the other 1910s films I've seen and wouldn't seem too shabby in the mid-'20s.  It leaves 1915's 'Birth of a Nation' looking crude and ugly, a reminder that America was still a decade or two away from being coolest country.

Thanks intertitles.  Thintertitles.

Being a decade ahead of your time is quite impressive in early cinema. The only things I'd really complain about are the length (though it is an epic), the amount of off-screen politics we're expected to follow, and the dearth of mid-shots and close-ups, though of course those hadn't really been invented yet.  Watching this left me appreciating the facial closeup far more than I have before.  Without it, the main characters all seem a little too distant, like members of the crowd. Without an audible voice an actor really needs their facial expressions visible if they're to present any emotion beyond flailing-armed distress.  Still, considering how much I found to bemoan and condemn in 'Birth of a Nation' or the 1917 '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', this really is the great triumph of the decade.

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You can see the whole thing on Youtube if you fancy.  It's like looking back in time: everyone involved is surely dead.