by Walter Chaw Denver Art Museum curator Tom Delapa is a one-man production. He books the prints, rents the space, does the research, and twice annually puts on a show consisting of possibly the most historically vital revivals in the Mile High City. Past years have seen screenings of pictures as varied as The Fountainhead and It Came From Outer Space in its original 3-D form–and now, over the course of seven consecutive Tuesdays at Denver's Starz Filmcenter beginning April 5, Mr. Delapa brings us "The Art of Silent Film." It's an ambitious program consisting of lesser-known pieces or rare prints from well-regarded artists of the silent era, giving cineastes the opportunity to see King Vidor's The Crowd (as yet unreleased on DVD) in 16mm with live accompaniment from pianist Hank Troy, as well as 35mm prints of both Buster Keaton's The Navigator and Charlie Chaplin's defiant Modern Times. These share the bill with 16mm presentations of Sergei Eisenstein's Strike, F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives, and G.W. Pabst's bleak, profound Diary of a Lost Girl. While the audience has grown for the Denver Art Museum film series, the truism remains that for as much lip service as is paid to the dearth of quality cinema in the heartland, if you don't get out and support essential institutions like this one, then they'll just go away.
THE CROWD (1928)
****/****
d. King Vidor
A forerunner to the neo-realists (its plot much like The Bicycle Thief's, its climax almost identical to Umberto D's) and a stalwart repository for many of the themes and images of German Expressionism, King Vidor's The Crowd opens with the July 4, 1900 birth of everyman John Sims (James Murray), a kid instilled from the moment of sentience with a crippling sense of entitlement. The picture is prophetic in any number of ways: made a couple of years before the Great Depression, it begins to chip away at the Roaring Twenties' lie of prosperity, and decades prior to the school shootings, it begins to comment on the pitfalls of a nation founded on self-esteem instead of individual achievement. Vidor fought hard for a toilet centre stage in the tiny Murphy apartment of John and his long-suffering wife, Mary (Eleanor Boardman)–the whole point of the film, it seems, is to reveal the mendacity behind the spit-shined promise embedded in advertisements and material possession. Indeed, it's an ad-man's life to which John aspires, a taste of which and its attendant booty what dooms his youngest child to a rather startling demise. The Crowd ends with a long closing shot that verges on hysterical (mirroring an earlier, infamous establishing shot up the side of an office tower) as John, his dignity shattered, his illusions humiliated, tries to win back his wife by taking her to a vaudeville show. (April 5)
THE NAVIGATOR (1924)
***/****
ds. Donald Crisp & Buster Keaton
"In a way [Keaton's] pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's effortless, uninterested face." -James Agee
The thing about Buster Keaton isn't the curve, it's the straight–this idea that in the midst of an increasingly absurd world flying apart in the widening gyre, there is at the centre a possibility for calm that surpasses understanding. It's what T.S. Eliot called Shanti at the end of his poet's wander through the wasteland. Where Chaplin is the great sentimentalist and Harold Lloyd is the great choreographer, Keaton is the great metaphysical existentialist: a modernist in the finest sense of the word, he appeared in the American cinema just as Eliot was appearing in letters–the both of them espousing a message of cities falling down and nature gone awry where the artist is the last, best hope of uniting the uneasy polarity of being. Even with a middle-of-the-road film like The Navigator, Keaton's themes of children of privilege placed in inescapable cycles of peril and anxiety–here Rollo, adrift on an abandoned ocean liner–locate the artist as a Kierkegaardian hero, asked to endure his own smallness by embracing the eternity of his toil. Thus Keaton's gags involve fluctuations–the way that a cannon zeroes in on our hero every time there's a bend in the tracks in The General, for instance. (Find in The Navigator an amazing scene where Rollo tries to juggle milk.) Screening in conjunction with a 35mm print of Keaton's one-reel classic, One Week. (April 12)
FOOLISH WIVES (1921)
***½/****
d. Erich von Stroheim
A towering example of Erich von Stroheim's intimidating genius and astonishing egocentrism, Foolish Wives finds the director somewhere near the height of his budding post-modernism, establishing him as the silent era's Orson Welles in not only the scope of his ambition (and the cant of his protagonists), but also the sense that all of his films were taken away from him and re-edited without his consent. Speculating on what hit the cutting room floor is a difficult pastime, as what remains is as perverse and discomfiting as anything produced by mainstream cinema. Von Stroheim, the hidden Jew, crams his films with subtext about shame (even in its truncated form, his masterpiece Greed is emotionally gruelling) and the sweet/toxic allure of façades–first for the trio of titular spouses von Stroheim's Karamzin woos, intimidates, and tries to rape, then for Karamzin himself, his Machiavellian bestiality balanced by a fevered undercurrent of regret and, that word again, shame. With one character reading a book called Foolish Wives by, who else, Erich von Stroheim, a suicide, a murder, the stalking and defilement of a mentally-impaired girl, and a corpse dragged from a closet and thrown into a sewer, Foolish Wives is a horror film in very much the same way as his Blind Husbands or Greed (or Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd., in which von Stroheim plays Gloria Swanson's butler): it's self-aware and alive with loathing for the self, for the world, and for the hypocrisy that clothes its wolves. (April 19)
DIARY OF A LOST GIRL (1929)
****/****
d. Georg Wilhelm Pabst
The prototype for broken girls-turned-femmes fatale, what with her wide eyes, soft features, and bobbed haircut (see Anna Karina in Bande à part, Melanie Griffith in Something Wild, Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, etc.), Louise Brooks teamed with German director Georg Pabst first for the better-known Pandora's Box and again in Diary of a Lost Girl. Brooks's turns in Pabst's films cemented her as something like the cameo emblem of the brazen sexuality of the flapper era (see the wanton girl in Bert's apartment in The Crowd), blended by the German director ineffably with the perfidious decadence of the Weimar Republic. The Hollywood ideal corrupted by the deleterious social effects of the Third Reich remains one of the most haunting synergies in silent film, and a scene where father and daughter are reunited over long glances across a crowded café locates in theme, setting, and execution the genesis of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret. Brooks is especially fine here, resisting much of the exaggeration of her Hollywood goddess routine in favour of a character who only midway finds her confidence and self-reliance in, of all places, a brothel, to where she's escaped after a stint in a hellish, expressionistic reform school. Pabst touches on social realism as well, ending in a kind of naturalism that teeters on the precipice of Faulknerian (indeed, As I Lay Dying (1930) seems inspired in part by the plight of Thymiane (Brooks)). Complex and–especially through the prism of history–devastating. (April 26)
THE LAST LAUGH (1924)
***½/****
d. F.W. Murnau
F.W. Murnau, the auteur behind Sunrise (possibly my favourite silent picture), weighs in here with the stygian The Last Laugh, the story of a man, a uniform, and a position that serves as a precursor to Paths of Glory or even The Remains of the Day in its crippling commentary on duty and identity. Not about a war, it plays as an anti-war–specifically, anti-Nazi–picture, one that cunningly uses the camera as a character throughout, gliding through windows, down elevator shafts, and around its expressionist environments as its hero, the porter (Emil Jannings), is demoted to washroom attendant in the near-mythical Hotel Atlantis. There's a sense of regret to The Last Laugh that marks the director's best films (think of the couple looking apart into the middle distance in Sunrise, or the fiend's death from a broken heart in Nosferatu), here expressed in a picture that is almost entirely free of intertitles, the lone exception occurring near the end as an apology for a forced happy ending. (It plays, much like the one in The Crowd, as ironic commentary on the impenetrable cynicism of the rest of the film.) The great DP Karl Freund's camerawork is astonishing–ditto Jannings's fall from obsequious boor to mortified bootlick; and The Last Laugh, artificial ending and all, works as one of the darkest commentaries (intra- and extratextually) on the cost of comfort and compromise in art and life. (May 3)
STRIKE
****/****
d. Sergei M. Eisenstein
A Marxist engineer and closet Pavlovian who effectively transformed Kuleshov's editing theories into montage technique, Sergei Eisenstein came to prominence in the film studies-crazed 1970s, with his Battleship Potemkin the template for the works of American film brats as diverse as Francis Ford Coppola and Brian DePalma. See in Strike the juxtaposition of a failed workers' rebellion with shots of cattle being slaughtered–it ain't subtle, but it might be art. But while he's seen mostly now as a political intellectual first and a director second, Eisenstein made films that are almost animalistic in their kineticism, and his second goal after Marxism was the creation of an ecstasy in his audience through bio-mechanical manipulation (his editing on a heartbeat a precursor to Walter Murch's dictum of editing on an eye-blink). This finds curious expression in Strike, a tale of workers in rebellion that, as is typical of Eisenstein's early work, discards individual protagonists in favour of a Marxist people. What happens here and in Potemkin and October is a sense of mass inevitability–and the piece itself ebbs and flows like some rough beast trapped in celluloid and light. It's lemming cinema: tragic, brutish, and inexorable. Screening in conjunction with Chaplin's weirdly conformist Easy Street. (May 10)
MODERN TIMES (1936)
***/****
d. Charles Chaplin
"The Art of Silent Film" closes out with Modern Times, Chaplin's final turn as The Little Tramp in a picture that, released in 1936, mulishly refused to cave to the talkie innovation. (In truth, the advent of synch sound set cinematic craft back several years.) It, like many of the films in this series, finds a man at desperate odds with the insanity of time who's searching for the centre of the swiftly tilting maelstrom of modernity. Reminding a great deal of John Keats's poetry, the silent medium is a fascinating one in that there is embedded in many of its best examples the understanding that its life is an ephemeral one–nowhere more so than in Chaplin's work, self-reflexive as it is inside and out. In its sublimely infernal eating machine, Modern Times subverts the Russian formalism of Eisenstein; in its exploded surreality, it comments on German Expressionism; and at its heart, it predicts Italian neo-realism (the soap operas of De Sica and the more accomplished avant-garde of Fellini). A high-wire act balancing Chaplin's disdain for authority with his urge to tug at the heart strings, Modern Times is, alas, secondary Chaplin behind the incandescent City Lights, the original version of The Gold Rush, and the underestimated The Kid–just Paulette Goddard's exhausting performance as a barefoot minx causes one to eye the exits. But as the swan song for a silent-era retrospective, it's vital stuff all the same: an artist with vision swimming against a tide we know will eventually win, but nonetheless root against with the ridiculous energy of his squawking automatons. (May 17)
