Silent Films

this is the cream of the crop when it comes to silent film. the actual print is in very good condition on the dvd (at times, it looks as good as prints from the forties) and the acting is excellent in this movie. falconetti's performance in particular is right up there with the all time greats. it could have won an oscar this year, let alone in 1928. note how i am praising the acting in a silent film. note it. the musical score available on the dvd is very appropriate. lots of good scholarly features on the dvd as well. let me put it this way. i am a child of today, and this is the second silent feature i've ever watched. and now i'm going to buy the dvd. that's how good it is.

incredible visuals for the time, but everything else about the movie is very dated. lots of cliched action scenes and plot twists. there were some interesting allusions that i couldn't put anything very deep onto. maybe if i saw it again. strikes me as more of a blockbuster type film than an arthouse type film, if i am able to accurately extrapolate that far back.

this strikes me as a film with great elements rather than a great film. the plot is simple and has lots of discontinuities, but this is forgivable given the point of the movie. there are a ton of murnau's horror touches in the first half of the film but they seem campy and overemphasized. the acting is better than in an average silent film but not the best i have seen. i did find myself relating to both leads quite a bit, however. the print is fine on the dvd and it has a nice score.

truth be told, i was somewhat disappointed. i was expecting photographic mastery of the highest order and unending tension. what i got was a pretty simple popcorn-style movie with very few moments of real fear. clearly, however, this is far more advanced than even the cabinet of doctor caligari, which is only 3 years older. in the end, i went with 4 instead of 3.5 because of the clever use of the nosferatu character as a manifestation of death via the plague rather than as a simple queermo emblem of seduction.

for most of the movie i thought the set pieces were understandably expressionistic, but still tacky and not having any substantial reason to be there, and i thought the plot a hackneyed melodrama. i was ready to spring the 3 star rating. but the way it ended made everything fall into place and let all of those things i thought were crappy about most of the movie make sense and become necessary. this is truly a movie you have to watch to the end to enjoy. you will probably not be impressed by the first 7/8 of it. but after it is done you will think, hey, that wasn't bad. i might add that the score on the dvd is excellent.



trivia i learned in film class last fall: the sleepwalker cesare in this movie came to america amid the rise of the nazis and played general strausser in casablanca.

this doesn't have as much comedy as a chaplin movie or a marx brothers movie. it is more oriented towards being action-packed and touching. it took some elements directly from birth of a nation. heck, i wouldn't be surprised if i learned some of the same sets were used. the campy midi score entices a blasphemous comparison to cannibal! the musical. trey parker and matt stone probably got stoned after watching this movie and wrote that one. this movie is definitely a crowd movie and not meant to be artistically high-flown like many silent classics. but it is still a quality flick nonetheless.

certain things about this movie i thought were great. juxtaposition was what i was lectured on in film class, but i found the novel use of intertitles and the shots of the sailboats in odessa harbor to be the highlights. those things really signified valid artistry to me.

however, this will never be my favorite silent film because the propaganda is not subtle like i expected, it's straight out old fashioned camp. i mean, i hate to rain on eisenstein's parade, but people just decide to be on the side of the potemkin too easily in this film. it doesn't strike me as believable in a narrative sense.

significantly better than i expected. i found oliver twist to be a very boring book, and i had watched the 1920 dr jekyll and mr hyde, which was exceptionally boring as well, save for a great final scene. but this film passed by pretty quickly. there were a few instances of camp, but on the whole the story was effectively told and the message effectively conveyed. and that was significant, given my prior opinion of the story.

this is very much in the blockbuster style. not an artsy film at all. very one-note characters and ridiculous sequences throughout. and it looks about five years older than it is, which is significant in the silent film era. but the film is very entertaining. let me put it this way. i was not planning to watch this movie, but flipped to it and kept watching. and this is a silent movie we're talking about here! the plot is a bit disingenuous because of the slightly positive depiction of slavery and the choice of mulatto slave protagonists for the audience to relate to. also, many of the african americans in the film verify stereotypes of them. but tom's character, the best acted part in the film, redeems most of that latent racist pathos with his excellent demeanor. so while it is a bit shallow on the literary front, it is entertaining for a silent film.

the first half of the film didn't seem all that dated to me, like something from the late twenties which griffith so inspired. if the film had ended with ben cameron coming home, it wouldn't be nearly so controversial a classic. of course it wouldn't have been called birth of a nation in that case, but death of a nation (if you've seen the film you know what i mean). i also liked the historical facsimiles very much, and the assassination of lincoln was very well done.

not only is the film's merit degraded because the film goes from being implicitly racist to explicitly racist, but also because the central aspects of filmmaking developed in the first half are not nearly as adept in the second. three loosely related griffith chase scenes (though one was done quite well and surprised the viewer) as part of a convoluted plot basically describes the second half of the film. finally, there are two extremely shoddy allegorical double exposures that end the film (the only parts that are severely dated). add that to the fact that the movie is bigoted in the first place, and you have a very influential but not all that meritous movie.

i thought this would be much better. the critics love this and think it's one of the best silent movies ever. throughout the film, i had it below the other silent classics. i mean, the guy is a hotel doorman, and wearing the uniform is important to him. i get that. it's touching and it matters when he gets demoted. but then all of his neighbors think he's a piece of shit all of a sudden? i mean, this is an old man with an intimate relationship with his neighbors, wouldn't they sympathize? and is it really a difference between hotel doorman and washroom attendant? the psychology of the film is just off to me. finally, call me a douche, but i thought the ending was stupid.

don't you dare watch if you like things that come anywhere close to cohesion or a plot. what this is does not constitute a story. it is a one-note painting of soviet propaganda. this film is filled with moments of sheer genius (the excellent use of silhouettes and parallel juxtaposition comes to mind) and moments of sheer incompetence, and many of them are congruent. for example, in ninety percent of closeups the actor stands still, and some of these are in dialogue. there is dialogue for horses at two points. and these are not near the maximum when it comes to the departure from the literal or the realistic. this film represents a zenith of montage-based abstraction.