So let’s keep with the idea of translating essays that I wrote for the MAM-Rio Film Archive. These two are the latest ones. Both are for the 100 Year Anniversary rubric that the archive has, in which it exhibits films that were released a century ago. As you’ll see I started to develop a more historiographic and contextualist approach with these, which Ruy (the head of programming) seems to appreciate. I also like writing stuff like this, so that’s a win-win for me!
Cinema in expansion: the epic western and Hollywood’s new frontiers
James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon (1923)
Nothing more unitedstatian than the western. Within a cinematographic scope the western not only accompanied the development of US industry but it was, for a long time, commonly associated with its great turning points. The reason being that the western – as a set of narrative codes – is almost inseparable from the mythological understanding of the US as a nation. Especially in the decades prior to the 1950s and 1960s, the western was the ideal way with which to argue in favor of traditional american values. But the form and style with which filmmakers made westerns wasn’t always the same.
When fiction films started to gain popularity in the US at the turn of the century, the western was already in the foreground. The Great Train Robbery (1903) is one of the oldest examples, a film about the assault and armed conflict between bandits and policemen. The western stayed relevant with the popularization of the two-reelers, including productions by the format’s own master, D.W. Griffith. A notable example is The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), which already featured the classic (and problematic) conflict between the Native tribes and the white cowboys. With the cliffhanger serials of the beginning of the 1910s, the genre grew exponentially. The first western stars started to emerge, figures like Tom Mix, Texas Guinan, William S. Hart, Harry Carey etc. dominated the screens with their ruthless chases, their risky maneuvers, and their extravagant shootouts. At that moment, the western was a sure shot type of entertainment, but it would soon be in crisis.
The 1910s saw a revolution in cinema as an industry and as an artform. The feature-length format was gaining popularity, the big studios were being formed, the chains of production, distribution, and exhibition were becoming more sophisticated, and with that, films were transforming into something a lot grander than the quick and cheap entertainment that it once was. At first, Europe was ahead of the curve with these innovations. Italian directors such as Giovanni Pastrone and Francesco Bertolini experimented with large scale epic feature-length productions (peplums) like L’Inferno (1911) and Cabiria (1914). These pictures sought to adapt the epic quality of the classical texts using immense sets, state-of-the-art equipment, crowds of extras, aside from editing and photography techniques that brought to life the poems’ fantasies. These films dominated movie theaters worldwide, and in the US, the Italians’ example was taken as a model before the epic feature established itself as the biggest type of cinematic spectacle.
After The Birth of a Nation (1915) – considered the first feature-length epic produced in the US -, D.W. Griffith released Intolerance (1916), which was openly inspired by the peplums of the time. From there he went on to make Hearts of the World (1918), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921), among others. Beyond Griffith. Thomas Ince directed Civilization (1916), Rex Ingram directed The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), and Cecil B. DeMille made The Ten Commandments in 1923. With the vertiginous decline that European cinema suffered thanks to World War 1, these productions ended up proving decisive to the establishment of American cinema in the international market. It was time for Hollywood to expand. But how would the western fit into this?
By the end of the 1910s, the western genre was going through an existential crisis: what started the decade as one of the main national genres ended up seeming irrelevant in face of the grand and luxurious productions that brought crowds to the movie palaces. In response to that, producer Jesse L. Lasky assigned director James Cruze a mission: to make the first western epic. Thus, The Covered Wagon was conceived.
The Covered Wagon tells the story of a group of families that trail the old West with the intention of reaching Oregon, where they could acquire their own land. However, to get there, they must traverse all imaginable sorts of obstacles (of nature and of man). The plot has clear parallels with the famous biblical tale of Moses and the Israelites, which cross the desert to reach the promised land of Canaan. The similarities are intentional: The Covered Wagon is, above all, a story about how the American people managed to overcome all hurdles to establish the bases of what would become “a great civilization”. It’s no coincidence that the American president of the time, Warren G. Harding, considered this his favorite film.
James Cruze opted for a pretty orthodox authenticity in this production, using the actual wagons from the original Oregon trail, hiring actual members of the indigenous tribes to play the parts of the natives, even ordering that the wagons cross an actual river, which resulted in the drowning of two horses. Like it or not, this considerably elevated the standard of how westerns would be produced from then on. The characters, dramatic arcs, and action sequences would be appropriated and permanently included among the narrative codes of the genre.
And the legacy of The Covered Wagon is extensive. One year later, a young John Ford directed The Iron Horse, another epic western about the construction of the transcontinental railway. In 1926, Henry King directed The Winning of Barbara Worth, an epic western with romantic elements; in 1929 Allan Dwan directed Tide of Empire, which is about the California gold rush; in 1930 Raoul Walsh made the ambitious The Big Trail – also about the Oregon trail – which was filmed on the then experimental 70mm widescreen base, and was one of John Wayne’s first acting roles; Wesley Ruggles released, in 1931, the epic Cimarron, the first western to receive a Best Picture award at the Oscars. And, of course, in 1939 John Ford returned to the westerns with his seminal Stagecoach, which requires no further explanations.
Buster Keaton’s not-so-shy feature length debut
Buster Keaton’s Three Ages (1923)
It might seem weird, but the idea of making a feature-length comedy film was once unimaginable. During the silent era, usually features were accompanied by newsreels, cartoons, and comedies, all in short length format. Feature films were the “serious” products, while the “cheap” entertainment remained as shorts. In the 1920s, this started to change.
It all started in 1921 with Charles Chaplin’s The Kid. The ambitious release of a feature-length comedy (even if containing dramatic elements) was a smashing box office success, and Harold Lloyd followed with Safety Last! in 1923, which is, to this day, his most iconic film. Buster Keaton already showed an interest in making features, but until then the closest he got was a role in The Saphead (1920). For three years, Keaton kept making shorts, a lot of which would become classics. Despite his success, he decided to experiment directing his first feature film. The result is Three Ages.
At the surface, it’s a shy production. Composed of three interchanging episodes, the feature could be divided into three separate shorts at any point in development. The structure is similar to D.W. classic Intolerance (1916), a film which has four dramatic cores situated in different historical periods (Griffith also considered dividing his picture in two parts). Griffith’s feature is notorious for its meta narrative throughline that connects the different periods, like the title itself explains: Love’s struggle through the ages. Buster’s film offers a rebuttal: “Love is the unchanging axis on which the world revolves.”
The three periods are strategically selected. The first is the paleolithic, also known as the “stone age”. Thanks to Charles Darwin’s discoveries in the 19th century, a genre of stories involving “cavemen” was popularized in Europe and, in films, it became a brief subgenre kickstarted by D.W. Griffith in 1912 with his film Man’s Genesis. This Biograph two-reeler dramatized the moment in which a primitive man uses his intelligence to produce the first weapon (the stone club) and win against his stronger opponent. In the following years more films were made on top of the same premise and even Chaplin parodied the cliché with His Prehistoric Past (1914).
The second period is the Roman Empire era. Much like the paleolithic, films embraced the Roman Empire like a stage for spectacles with the release of aforementioned works like Intolerance and of films like Cabiria, Ben-Hur, Salomé, etc. The last period is called the “modern era”, but it ends up being a representation of what we now call the “roaring twenties”.
Like in Intolerance (and in other similarly structured movies, like Leaves of Satan’s Book by C.T. Dreyer, and Destiny by Fritz Lang), there’s a poetic repetition of the plot. The same narrative unfolds in the three periods and, in the process, we can see how each era is similar or different to each other. In each story, a young man (Buster Keaton) falls in love with a girl (Margaret Leahy), but in order to conquer her heart, he must convince her family, and in the process, compete with another man (Wallace Beery). The problem? This rival is always stronger, richer, and crueler than the protagonist. In each period, the young man fights for the girl’s love while attempting to survive the villain’s tricks.
That’s when Buster Keaton’s shyness goes away. Each period features daring special effects. In the paleolithic, for example, there’s the use of stop motion to animate a dinosaur on which the protagonist rides (a reference to the work of Willis H. O’Brien, who worked in The Ghost of Slumber Mountain in 1918, and would later make The Lost World in 1925, not to mention the classic King Kong in 1933). In the Roman era, huge sets were used and made to look even bigger with double exposure tricks. In the modern years, there’s a famous scene in which Buster is being chased by cops and jumps from the ceiling of a building to another, but he fails to land properly and falls disastrously down. Believe it or not, that fall was improvised: Keaton fails the landing and falls for real, but instead of cutting it out, he incorporates it into the sequence. Maybe this isn’t his most technically elaborate film, but it’s certainly his most visually varied work.
As someone fascinated by intertextuality and self-references, Keaton plays with the anachronisms in each period, projecting modern elements into the old eras (cavemen playing baseball with clubs and stones, Roman streets having “no parking” signs) while also commenting on the peculiarities of the modern times (if in the first two periods the one who decides who the girl will marry is the father of the family, in the modern era the mom is the authority; while in the first two eras the couple ends up having many children, in the modern era they settle for a small dog).
While Chaplin experimented with feature-length humor in The Kid by combining comedy with tragedy in his own peculiar way, and Harold Lloyd used the format to construct an extensive and thrilling action-comedy sequence in Safety Last!, Buster Keaton played – in his not-so-shy manner – with the clichés and expectations of genre filmmaking through his characteristically irreverent and metalinguistic humor. Three Ages releases in 1923 to establish a new phase in comedy cinema: in an expanding Hollywood, now even the comedians were doing “serious” pictures.
This concludes my essays written in 2023 for the MAM Film Archive website. Hopefully in 2024 I can keep writing out my thoughts on movies for them. And if I do, I’ll make sure to translate them here for you guys.
Not sure if I explained this here at any point, but since mid-2022 I’ve been collaborating with the MAM-Rio Film Archive as a volunteer and with freelance work. It’s been some amazing months and definitely the most fun I’ve had in a very long time. As part of my collaboration, I’ve gotten to join the “writing staff” of the Archive’s website by contributing with 4 essays on topics prompted by Ruy Gardnier, the Archive’s programmer. The first two essays were related to films that were exhibited earlier in 2023, the first was on Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923) which was shown as part of a 100 Year Anniversary rubric, and the second was on Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century (1934), which was part of the Howard Hawks Retrospective that happened back in August, and whose selected films are all accompanied by an essay written by folks like Filipe Furtado, Ruy Gardnier, Hernani Heffner, and Yours Truly.
Since these essays are in Portuguese, I cannot link them to the readers of the Erik Reeds WordPress since most of you don’t read the language, so I decided to translate the ones I wrote and maybe post them in couplets every few months. Hopefully as I keep writing for the MAM Film Archive I can keep translating them and posting them here. So here’s two translated essays on two movies that I like.
Engineering a Cinema of the Future
Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923)
“There is cinema before and after La Roue just like there is painting before and after Picasso” is a phrase commonly cited by Jean Cocteau to describe the weight that the 1923 film directed by Abel Gance has on film history. Other intellectuals also recognize its importance: Sergei Eisenstein and G.W. Pabst have listed Gance as one of their main inspirations, Jean Epstein describes the film as one of the most beautiful in the world, and Akira Kurosawa said it was the first film to impress him. Many see D.W. Griffith as the creator of the cinema of Hollywood, but it’s time to elect Abel Gance as the creator of avant-garde cinema, the cinema of the future.
As with many associated with the French avant-garde cinema, Gance saw the possibility of re-understanding and advancing the ways to conceive cinema and language. While the Soviets were inventing the film school in the early 1920s and incorporating the studies of the then revolutionary “Kuleshov effect,” Gance was materializing these same montage and composition theories that still only existed on paper on the other side of the Rhine.
Already in the prologue of La Roue there’s a sequence that seems pretty familiar to those acquainted with Soviet montage. At a French trainyard, two trains meet in a high-speed collision. Thanks to the immediate help of the protagonist, the train engineer Sisif, the catastrophe was deescalated and the lives of many were saved, one of them being an English child called Norma, who lost her mother in the accident and is secretly adopted by Sisif as his daughter and Ellie’s (Sisif’s biological son) sister. This prologue sets up all the ensuing drama, but it also presents the genius ways in which Gance constructs through montage (done by Marguerite Beaugé, who also did the montage of The Passion of Joan of Arc by C.T. Dreyer) the horrifying spectacle of seeing two immense trains colliding, crashing, exploding, and merging into blood and boiling metal. Through quick, drastic, rhythmic cuts a collision is transformed into an apocalyptic event. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Eisenstein studied this opening before directing the final sequence in Strike or the Odessa steps scene in Battleship Potemkin.
It’s also worth noting the more symbolic use of montage in the work. This is a constant element in Gance’s work even in his earlier film, J’accuse! (1919). There is an imagetic construction through diverse filming techniques to reinforce ideas with relations between trains and obsessions, Norma and nature, Sísif and the railways etc. The title of the movie itself is an allusion to a metaphor made by Victor Hugo, which is mentioned in the opening: “I know that creation is a Great Wheel that cannot move without smashing someone!” Watching La Roue is seeing a set of signs interlacing and forming a net of signifiers until they come to life. The camera presents everything in relation to its signs, the train in relation to Sisif, Norma to flowers, Ellie to his violins, Hersan to his money, until the point when a train, a violin, or a rose start representing all that they were associated with throughout multiple hours. As an effect, the spectator starts thinking in a certain Gancian language and learns to see the symbols as superior to the drama. When the film concludes, so does an entire imagetic logic that the spectator carries to the end. A toy train falling on the floor is the answer to a million metaphors. And to Gance this was the most profound form of cinema, when one stops watching in a rational manner and transcends to a nearly spiritual process of seeing what’s beyond the screen.
After La Roue, his following work was the epic Napoléon, from 1927, which for many represents not only the peak of Abel Gance’s career, but also of French Avant-Garde, and even of silent cinema. But, at the same time, 1927 is the beginning of the end to silent cinema, and from then on Gance had a lot of difficulty adapting his style to the new industry. One might say, alternatively, that he always struggled against the medium that he helped to advance. Napoléon, for example, was originally produced to have a runtime of over 9 hours. It was reduced to 5 and a half hours, and later 2 hours, until finally becoming 90 minutes long. Gance struggled to distribute such a long work, and ended up giving in to the pressure of cutting 90% of the movie. The same happened to La Roue, which was re-edited and reduced from 9 hours to 2, but since the director created different versions of the film throughout the years, eventually it was possible to reconstruct a copy that was close in duration to the original 1923 print. In 2006, Lobster Films spearheaded a restoration of the 4 hour version, using Russian and French negatives. This is the most well known version currently, which was released on DVD in 2008. In 2019, the Swiss and French Cinematheques worked in collaboration with Pathé and the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation to restore another longer version, which is 7 hours long.
In the film’s opening credits, there’s a close-up of Abel Gance gazing at the camera. Theorists and historians interpret it as an “auteur’s signature” in his own work, and while this might probably be the correct reading, it’s also interesting to think that in the moment that an audience in a movie theater in 2023 looks at the eyes of a man from a century ago, that’s the opportunity that Gance had to imagine himself gazing at the cinema of the future that he himself sought to construct. 100 years later, his eyes meet ours.
Svengali and Mata Hari in a train to New York: the invention of the Screwball Comedy
Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century (1934)
The word screwball comes from the technical vocabulary of baseball and refers to the act of throwing a ball as a screw, but it is also an early 20th century slang for insane people. How did this term end up being associated with a romantic comedy genre in the classical Hollywood era? If there’s someone who can help us understand the origins of screwball comedies in the 1930s and 1940s, it’s the American director Howard Hawks, and more specifically, his 1934 film, Twentieth Century.
Romantic comedies are a genre as old as narrative cinema itself. Since the silent era there was a tradition of humor around romantic situations and erotic adventures, but usually with a farcical tone. Some good examples are the German films of Ernst Lubitsch, such as The Doll (1919) and The Wildcat (1921) or even the meta parodies of King Vidor such as The Patsy (1928) and Show People (1928). Even Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd movies usually involved a romantic arc. Only later that a more satirical tone would be associated with the genre, and once again it’s possible to observe this change with Lubitsch himself, who would become a Hollywood pioneer with works like The Marriage Circle (1924) and So This is Paris (1926), but only after the coming of sound cinema did he completely develop the famous Lubitsch’s Touch, with which his romantic comedies satirized not only the European aristocratic culture but also the conventions of love, flirtation, and sex. The biggest examples are The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), One Hour With You (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933).
Thus, a tendency to parody the traditional love story and explore non-ideal love relations – and as a consequence, question the type of social conventions that constituted them – is developed. Enter Howard Hawks, who up until then was known for directing the great hit Scarface, and who in 1934 adapts another Ben Hecht scenario into a film that, along with the Frank Capra classic It Happened One Night (of the same year), is considered the official start of the screwball comedy genre.
The plot is anything but a conventional love story. A highly famous Broadway director named Oscar Jaffe (played by John Barrymore) discovers a lingerie model named Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard) who has the potential of becoming a great actress. He trains her in the art of theater and eventually Mildred becomes the great Lily Garland, a Broadway star. As a result, they fall in love. Years – and many successful plays – later, the two end up in a rocky relationship, in which Lily finds herself progressively more frustrated with the controlling manner with which Oscar Jaffe treats her, and, after reaching her limit, decides to accept an invite to work in Hollywood far from Jaffe. Once without his muse, the director falls into an existential abyss and becomes incapable of producing new hits with other actresses. In a moment of crisis, he boards a train from Chicago to New York, the Twentieth Century Limited, and – unbeknownst to him – ends up on the same vehicle as Lily Garland and her fiancé.
Through this long trip, Jaffe throws himself into a conspiracy to produce the perfect scene which will lure Lily back to the stage. Alongside his assistants, Jaffe fabricates an array of lies in order to reach Lily’s heart, but in the process the two exchange incessant yells, kicks, curses, fits, and all the loudest noises that could be captured by a Western Electric Noiseless Recording system. Chaos reigns from the moment the two meet inside this train. And that is the tone that defined the entire screwball comedy genre.
As a director, Howard Hawks let Carole Lombard and John Barrymore be as creative as possible with their characters by not allowing them to hesitate or to hold back on the violence and even incentivizing exaggerations and ad-libbing. Hawks was given two actors that had the capacity of invoking chaos in their performances, but who also worked well on top of each other’s chaos without stepping on anyone’s toes. Watching Twentieth Century is like seeing what two extremely professional artists can achieve when working with good material, a good director, and with a good work relationship.
But it wasn’t just the performances that made this an iconic film. The characterization and setting were enough to shake the foundations of the love story in cinema. While It Happened One Night broke new ground with a love story that reflected the class divisions of the US and by containing a more sarcastic humor, Twentieth Century showcases a pair of egocentric verbose liars, whose final romance is carried through a war of egos and a net of lies. Lily is a two-faced spoiled crybaby, while Jaffe is a narcissistic controlling liar who is even compared to the mythological Svengali. A love story between maniacs is constructed, and the surprising result is that audiences are enamored and completely entertained by these villains’ intrigue.
The aforementioned paradigm shift was possibly Twentieth Century’s main contribution. In the following years, Hawks would continue contributing to the screwball comedy genre with other classic works such as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday. Both are examples of what can be achieved when a director works with two super sharp actors. Twentieth Century was at the beginning of a north-american comedy revolution, and Howard Hawk’s contribution is immeasurable. With the intention of making a film about two lunatics inside a train, Hawks ended up eternalizing himself in another cinematographic genre.
These were the first two essays I wrote. The other two will be posted soon. I hope y’all enjoyed this idea. Stay tuned!
Watch out folks, I’m back. Sorry for disappearing I was just fighting my own demons, we’re good now. When I joined the writing team of the Erik Reeds WordPress my debut text was a little list called “10 films from the 1910s that you should check out”, a small list of lesser-known movies which, at the time, I felt were worth recommending. I always intended on making this a two-part series, as the real recommendations I wanted to make were stuff from the following decade, the 1920s. In order to follow the poetic convention of the title, I’ll one-up the premise of the previous list and now give you 20 films from the 1920s that you should check out!
1 – From Morn to Midnight (1920, dir. Karlheinz Martin)
The turn of the decade saw a rise in German cinema as an industry and, in turn, a surge in many film styles that would later on be remembered as classic artistic movements inside the medium. The influence of German film on the style and methods of countless film industries throughout the world is undeniable. Of course, in the year 1920 a classic of classics was released in Germany: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. That film is often described as the first German Expressionist movie, or at least is considered to be the first masterpiece within this style. I’m not gonna debate any of these claims, but instead consider an alternative
Martin’s experimental piece was not exactly a precursor to Wiene’s work (it came out a few months after Caligari), but it does show a different angle to the same point: Expressionism in film. Most of what we consider to be German Expressionist Cinema (let’s call it GEC) is a set of signs and forms that were transplanted from pre-war German theater, including but not limited to Max Reinhardt’s plays. This is one of the reasons why many GEC classics feel so stagey; it’s because in fact they were often taken directly from the stage.
In From Morn to Midnight, it becomes crystal clear that we’re watching a film adaptation of a play, but it’s also a lot more than that. Already in this picture, there’s a concern in representing the hidden within the apparent, the latent spiritual forces that undermine everyday life. This concern is one of the cornerstones of GEC, and is why so many of the stories in this movement were related to psychosis or demonic possession; Germans were representing through the fantasy of cinema their own psychological and material contradictions in a post-war Weimar Republic. Through several cinematic tricks (that now seem quaint but at the time were noteworthy), Karlheinz Martin explores a world that is hostile to its protagonist and that, in all its weirdness, is captivating and fascinating to look at
And here’s one element that sets this movie apart from Caligari, and that I’ll cleverly use here as a setup for a later pick in this list: this film is often considered not only an early GEC work, but also a precursor to Streetfilms (straßenfilm). What the hell are Streetfilms? Well, to put it simply, it was a movement (or genre) that existed parallel to GEC and is often understood as a dialectical opposite to it, in which instead of the drama pertaining to the internal contradictions of the German psyche, it was a lot more about the external material contrasts of urban life. From Morn to Midnight’s major conflict is not of a serial killing somnambulist controlled by an evil doctor, but instead the financial and legal effects that an attractive woman (at this time known as vamp, later to be called a femme fatale) had on the lonely and gullible protagonist. This sounds familiar? Yeah, streetfilms (perhaps more than GEC per se) were a major influence on Film Noir
We’ll come back to Streetfilms and GEC later, for now here’s number 2:
2 – One Week (1920, dir. Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline)
I know recommending Buster Keaton in a list of “lesser known films” is ironic but I do think this short film deserves a bit more recognition than it currently has, with it being as much of a masterpiece as his more popular works, in my imo.
It’s a fun and inventive looney tunes type comedy short with some absurd and ingenious gags that culminates in probably one of the best punchlines of all silent comedy. It showcases Buster’s capacity to understand film as a medium capable of its own type of comedy, and while this is something he’d later explore more deeply in other films, here he’s already doing amazing stuff.
Not much to say aside from that, watch it if you want a good time!
3 – Fièvre (1921, dir. Louis Delluc)
One lesser known film movement of the silent era is the French Impressionism movement, or as it’s often called the French Avant-Garde movement (let’s not abbreviate this one). Some films of the movement are quite popular (eg J’Accuse, Coeur Fidèle, Ménilmontant, Napoleon), but they’re often not understood as composing an artistic context and rather were singular in their own genius. The truth is that directors such as Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Germaine Dulac, and in this case, Louis Delluc, were all basically going for the same ideas even if arriving at different results. Let’s take Delluc’s Fièvre as an example.
Around the turn of the decade, French critics and filmmakers (including the ones mentioned above) together tried to establish a new style of filmmaking that neglected the Griffithian method that was codified by Hollywood and was quickly becoming the primary convention for film storytelling. These artists saw the Hollywood style as a denial of the true artistic qualities of film in favor of commercial returns on top of literary and theatrical practices. Basically, Hollywood was too interested in profiting off of adapting books and resembling the theater to actually pursue the highest potential of cinema as an artform. The Impressionists wanted to go the other way around.
I could go into detail on the characteristics and history of French Impressionist Cinema (we can call it FIC, I guess), but I have 17 more films to recommend so I’ll just keep it brief. Louis Delluc was one of the first film critics (an early critic-turned-director) and also a contributor to FIC. He believed film had the capacity to tell stories beyond linear causality, objectivism, or literalism. Much like the other FIC directors, his films often embrace a deeply subjectivist perspective, in which the images are understood as representing the mental (or even spiritual) conditions of the characters involved. In this film, we see the start of the experimentation. This isn’t the most avant-garde of Delluc’s films, but I chose to recommend it instead of his other movies because I see this as a good starting point. It’s conventional enough to be digestible by beginners but it’s also avant-garde enough to get the gears turning. Louis Delluc didn’t make many films (he unfortunately died young) so his filmography is really easy to go through, and if you plan on doing it, I recommend starting at this one.
4 – The Wildcat (1921, dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
In the list I did for 1910s films I included Lubitsch’s The Doll (1919), which was a slapstick sex comedy with somewhat expressionistic art direction but mostly just a fun farcical fare. Well if you enjoyed that film I have excellent news: Lubitsch has done one upped himself with The Wildcat. I can’t begin to describe how much I love the insanity in this flick, but I’ll try
In what is possibly Lubitsch’s most unhinged film, a mountain dwelling gang of bandits decide to invade a military fort and the leader of the gang (played by the delightful Pola Negri) ends up falling in love with the lieutenant in charge. Lots of fuckery ensues.
Really, if I were to recommend one Lubitsch picture made during his career in Germany, it would be this one. Not only for the hectic energy and over-the-top attitude of every breathing thing on screen, but also because this film showcases a type of formal experimentation that we don’t really see in American Lubitsch movies. Aside from so many fantastical sets and set pieces, the film also features an almost non-stop sequence of little framing cut-outs that accompany almost every shot. They give such a different look to the scenes that it really feels like you’re reading a children’s book or something, you just don’t see this very often
To top it off, there’s also something you don’t often see in Lubitsch’s later films: the overall raunchiness. Ernst would later on be known for how well he was able to IMPLY sexuality without actually showing much, but this wasn’t always his ethos. Earlier on he tried to make it very explicit without making it outright obscene. So in this movie, much like in The Doll (1919), there’s quite a lot of onscreen eroticism and libidinous activity. If you’re into the origins of sex comedies and the like, please check this one out
5 – La Roue (1923, dir. Abel Gance)
Rewatching this classic with my buddies as a celebration of its 100 year anniversary is the main reason I decided to write this list down. I’m just a big Gancehead, what can I say…
Of course this is another case of “why are you recommending a film from a popular acclaimed director!” and honestly I feel like among Gance’s big three, this one is often the least talked about – or watched, even. People often talk about his war films a lot more than his train film… sad! Especially when this movie has so many special things about it
So this is often considered the official first French Impressionist film, and as I said previously, the Impressionists were all trying different things even if their objectives were often similar. In La Roue, there’s so many instances of montage and optical effects to reinforce feelings and ideas, in ways that were not done until then. This was so revolutionary that even the Soviets looked at this film in order to study and develop their notions of montage. Not only that but it originally had a whopping 9 hour long runtime, and even though it was edited down to 90 minutes for the original theater releases, it was later re-released in 4 hour versions and recently a 7 hour print. This extreme length allows for so many of the themes and details of the dramas to be reinforced to a hypnotic level, where in the end you see so many of the repeated ideas that you’ve familiarized yourself with the internal language of the film. And when it all ends you genuinely feel like you’ve wandered into a different life and found yourself waking up from a vivid dream.
This is also a picture that represents change in so many different layers in transcendental ways. I might one day go through all the different ways this film explores this theme, but not now. Check it out if you want some super long train movies (they surely don’t make 7 hour long train movies as they used to)
6 – Die Nibelungen (1924, dir. Fritz Lang)
Calling a Fritz Lang film “underseen” might be a crime in some cinephile circles, but to be quite honest this is definitely one of his lesser known works, especially when compared to classics such as Metropolis and M. Even though it’s definitely one of the more popular films in this list, I personally think it deserves even more recognition than it already has.
Based on the German epic poem “Nibelungenlied”, this film duology is arguably Lang’s first venture into large epic scope productions (keep in mind up until this point his most ambitious film was Mabuse, the Gambler), and already he demonstrates such an understanding of how to translate the epic style into film. This is a very unique movie that moves and looks like nothing else at its time, and arguably to this day. The first part captures the classic hero fantasy of Siegfried with the amount of weight and force necessary to convey such a mythological being, and in the second part, Kriemhild’s Revenge, a dark and twisted war epic unfolds into shattering destruction and all is carried by the eternal look of actress Margarete Schön as she leads her army into death.
This is Expressionism at its most gothic; if you like how stark and picturesque Lang can be, please check this duology out. While you can argue that it doesn’t deserve the 4 hour duration, in my opinion this is just how Lang (and screenwriter Thea von Harbou) envisioned a film adaptation of an epic poem. It’s long, it’s heavy, it’s self-reverent, it represents mythology in an exploration of the power of images like so few filmmakers managed to do. Also, arguments can be made for this being a fascist film – I’m not gonna enter this argument, I know the Nazis loved this movie, but honestly there’s not much in the text that I think warrants this descriptor and it’s more a case of how fascists at the time received the picture. Basically how “literally me” bros view stuff like American Psycho nowadays
Great Gothic GEC. Check it out!
7 – The Iron Horse (1924, dir. John Ford)
It weirds me out that this one is so underseen, I mean you can’t get more canonical than John Ford and yet lots of people have yet to peep his silent epic western The Iron Horse, and they should change that! This film rocks
If you enjoy that classic western style and if you’re autistic about trains do yourself a favor and watch this movie. I would argue that this is the real start of Ford’s canonical filmography, and not his other western epic Stagecoach, I mean you already have the strong character dynamics, the relentless pacing, the breathtaking set pieces, plus this one has trains! Did I mention it has trains?
I don’t think I need to wax poetic about John Ford’s style or importance, so I’ll save you the banter, I’m just here trying to convince folks that silent-era Ford was still interesting sometimes.
8 – Variety (1925, dir. E. A. Dupont)
Part of the film series that I like to call “Emil Jannings needs a hug”, this is one film that falls less on the GEC side and more on the New Objectivity side… I’ll explain. So during the middle of the 1920s, there was this art movement in Germany called New Objectivity, which proposed a denial of the fantastical and subjectivist mentality of the avant-garde tendencies of the time such as Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and instead proposed a return to the Realism so common in the previous century. This movement manifested itself in many fields, including in German cinema, and it would eventually become the leading tendency among the aesthetics of late 1920s and early 1930s German film. Two early examples of this movement are G.W. Pabst’s Joyless Street, and this film.
It’s an interesting story. From the get-go we start in prison with the main character finally confessing his acts, and with that premise we go back in time to see what happened to Emil Jannings that led him to that point. The rest of the film is about the story of this man’s relationship with his lover, and his lover’s lover, and they all work in a variety act in a circus.
The style is pictorialist, but differs from GEC in a few ways. Instead of spiritual, fantastical, or obscure subject matters, Variety is a story of the common crime, the drama between lovers and the boiling tension between horny German men. There’s still a subjectivity to the form (we see many sequences that represent Jannings’ point of view in a more Expressionistic way) but within New Objectivity this aspect would be abandoned later on.
New Objectivity’s major player was G.W. Pabst, whose films were shot and edited in a very direct manner, without tricks or effects, and this paved the way for the late 1920s style of Streetfilms and Chamber Dramas, most of which followed a sense of realism (and grittiness) that was explored to different results, and it’s interesting to analyze this other German film movement in detail to see what they achieved and how this related to the rising tensions of German politics of late 1920s and early 1930s. I’ll come back to New Objectivity on this list but rest assured I’ll be writing more about this topic in a future post
9 – By The Law (1926, dir. Lev Kuleshov)
You probably heard of the Kuleshov effect, right? This often namedropped montage concept is named after a soviet film theorist and filmmaker named Lev Kuleshov, who aside from his contributions to Montage Theory, also made dozens of films in the USSR. Here’s one that I think is worth the watch
By The Law is not the type of movie you’d expect to see in 1920s Soviet Cinema (but then again this applies to many films in the country, Soviet Cinema is a lot more diverse than you’d think!), with its less propagandistic tone and a more psychologically led character study in this chamber drama that predates so many similar films of this sort (think The Shining, Knock at the Cabin, etc). A premise simple yet intense: a couple and a murderer are stuck in a cabin during a winter storm, the couple must decide whether to kill the murderer or to wait until the storm is over to turn him in to the authorities. The rest of the movie is about the ever growing tension between the three accentuated by the increasingly terrible weather conditions that envelop them in that small shack.
So many interesting filmmaking techniques are applied, but this is also an amazing portrayal of Soviet acting on screen, with the performance of actress Alexandra Khlokhlova being the highlight. I think it’s worth watching this picture not only for how impressive it is, but also to illustrate the variety of films that the USSR produced in the 1920s, ranging from documentaries to comedies, to action adventures, to psychological chamber dramas, to cartoons… so much stuff! And Kuleshov was spearheading it all, bless this man
10 – The Cat and the Canary (1927, dir. Paul Leni)
Folks usually like to explain the influence of GEC on genres like film noir, but in truth the movement was influencing Hollywood a lot earlier than that, with the first instances of this being the Universal horror films starting as early as the late 1920s. GEC also influenced Hollywood in a very specific way during this same period when F.W. Murnau made Sunrise (1927) and Fox commissioned several filmmakers to make films that looked similar to it (eg Ford’s Four Sons, Borzage’s Street Angel etc), but we’ll talk about that some other time. Back to Universal horror!
The Cat and the Canary is one of the earliest examples of a Universal Horror film, or at least one of the oldest surviving examples alongside The Phantom of the Opera (1925). During this time, Hollywood was in the process of importing German filmmakers to work for them in the US, and Paul Leni was one of the early hires. Leni made some GEC classics such as Backstairs (1921) a sort of prototype to Murnau’s The Last Laugh, and Waxworks (1924), a more fantasy oriented GEC adventure. In the US he’d be responsible for staying at the forefront of Universal Picture’s foray into horror films, and in the process he informed many of the aesthetic and formal principles of this genre for decades to come.
Well, in truth not only was he influential but I’d argue he did things that no one filmmaker could do inside the Universal Horror trappings. Since this is a silent film – and most of the Universal Horror pictures are talkies – it has the added advantage of being free of all the restrictions associated with early sound technology (think of how slow and quiet Dracula and Frankenstein are). Thus, The Cat and the Canary is probably the most visually dynamic Universal Horror film you’ll ever see
This movie has such a high amount of tricks, effects, camera movements, montage, all on top of the very Expressionistic art direction you’d expect from German films. It’s almost like Leni was challenging himself to make every shot as visually interesting as possible. You could argue this hinders the general build of atmosphere in what’s supposed to be a horror film, but I’d argue The Cat and the Canary is pretty honest with the fact that horror films can be pretty fun at times and embraces the entertainment value of spooky looking things moving in spooky ways.
11 – The Telltale Heart (1928, dir. Leon Shamroy, Charles Klein)
Speaking of GEC influence on American Cinema, here’s another example of the phenomenon but on the more independent side
Considered to be the first adaptation of Poe’s classic, this short film is a collaboration between famous Fox cinematographer Leon Shamroy and playwright Charles Klein. In it, they apply an expressionistic style of art direction and mise-en-scene very much akin to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Crime and Punishment (both by Robert Wiene). Since this was made in the latter end of the decade instead of the early years like the German counterparts, many more advanced photography tricks and movements are applied to this formula, which makes this stand out from the GEC classics by having lots of montage and exposure tricks. It’s a fascinating re-interpretation of the style.
Other smaller films were being made in the US at this same time that were also influenced by GEC, like The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, and those are also very much worth the watch, but since I already have a limited amount of recs I chose this one out of the 3. But take this as a 3-in-1 recommendation while you’re at it!
12 – Shooting Stars (1928, dir. Anthony Asquith, A.V. Bramble)
When it comes to classic British filmmakers, the number one name that comes to mind for most people is Alfred Hitchcock, and it’s with good reason, since he directed many classics and masterpieces that are still relevant and beloved to this day. His work in Hollywood is obviously what most cinephiles discuss, but even when talking about his British films, they’ll more often than not talk about his 1930s output like The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, or Sabotage. The only silent film that anyone even mentions among Hitchcock’s filmography is The Lodger. I believe one of the reasons why this is the case is because Alfred’s style and genius only properly developed as the years went on and he refined his filmmaking process, so it’s one of those cases in which the films get better as time goes on. But let’s talk about another British filmmaker that arguably went the opposite way
Anthony Asquith might not be as famous outside the UK as Hitchcock, but at least as far as the 1920s go, he’s way superior, in my imo. While the most interesting film made by Hcock in the silent era was The Lodger (which in my opinion is not even that great), Asquith made 3 excellent silents almost back to back between 1928 and 1929. It’s pretty impressive, honestly. Here, I’ll limit myself to talk about his first (and best) film, Shooting Stars (1928)
Obviously inspired by F.W. Murnau and King Vidor, Shooting Stars is a movie about movies, whose setting is a studio and its characters are actors. From the very beginning the line between reality and fiction is played with, when the protagonist is shot from an angle that resembles a romantic scene and as the camera pulls back it’s revealed she’s merely acting in a studio and as soon as the (diegetic) camera stops rolling she starts complaining and yelling with her co-workers. This is the tone of the rest of the film, a conflation between what is done by the characters as people and as actors. In this meta-textual narrative, the drama is also crossing the lines between action and representation, as the main lady is married to her co-star, and in the meantime is having an affair with a comedy actor who’s making another movie in the same studio lot. Her life is torn between men as it’s torn between movies, genres, sets, and crews.
And I didn’t even mention how amazing the photography here is. With some sweeping dolly shots that fly above the studio sets and some powerful use of lighting and art direction, this is a gorgeous film that any cinephile interested in silent era filmmaking should absolutely check out.
The reason I said Asquith went the opposite way from Hitchcock is because I believe his silent era output is a lot more interesting than anything he made after that (at least from what I’ve seen). All of his silent films are great and worth checking out, while his sound filmography is pretty uneven. So if you want an example of what the UK could achieve in the silent era, don’t limit yourself to The Lodger, do check out Shooting Stars, or any of the other Asquith silents(Underground, A Cottage on Dartmoor, hell, even The Runaway Princess)!
13 – Speedy (1928, dir. Ted Wilde)
Harold Lloyd is sometimes perceived as the lesser of the classic slapstick comedians of the silent era. And while I’m not gonna argue against that notion, I do think that among normie film discussions he ends up being tragically underrated and forgotten, while Chaplin and Keaton take the leading roles in the discourse. Here’s a film from the Lloyd man that people should peep!
While the film is somewhat of a mishmash of several different seemingly disconnected sequences, I sort of think it’s what makes it funny. At one point the characters are going through shenanigans in Coney Island, then at another point Harold Lloyd is suddenly driving Babe Ruth to his own game in a cab, then it’s suddenly a movie about Civil War veterans fighting to protect a horse-drawn tram business in Manhattan… it’s pretty all over the place, but it’s great
Harold Lloyd has this very cartoonish existence that surrounds him which works in pretty unique ways. While I don’t think his films are as genius as the ones by Chaplin and Keaton, there’s still several sequences that I love and that you should definitely give a looksee!
14 – Accident (1928, dir. Ernö Metzner)
This is considered one of the more experimental streetfilms made at this time. By 1928 the genre was already starting to become passé and filmmakers were mostly trying to subvert the soon-to-be tired tropes. This film is an early example, but other examples are G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), Joe May’s Assault (1929), Bruno Rahn’s Tragedy of the Street (1927), and even Fritz Lang’s M (1931). All those films have a subversive character to elements associated with Streetfilms, but let’s talk about this one specifically
Metzner’s short film is very direct with its plot, as it’s about a man who finds a coin in the streets of Weimar Germany. He then uses that money to gamble and to engage in all sorts of debauchery before meeting his unfortunate fate. Not gonna spoil anything, but that’s the gist of it. The reason why this can be considered a subversion of this story is because of how unfamiliar it attempts to make every element while never exactly denying the form of a Streetfilm. With several uses of tricks and montage sequences, the film is more of a bad trip than a grimey realistic tale of a street tragedy, which was sort of the modus operandi of the genre.
Of course it’s not the most experimental film ever or even the best subversion of Streetfilms, but I still think it’s worth watching, especially because it’s short and sweet. Check it out when you can!
15 – The New Babylon (1929, dir. Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg)
Similarly to Kuleshov’s film mentioned earlier in this list, here’s another very experimental and delightful Soviet gem. A movie that 100% needs to get more attention, and I have absolutely no idea why it doesn’t.
The directors of this film have worked together several times, but also each made some solo films that are worth noting (e.g. Kozintsev’s Hamlet adaptations or his Don Quixote film). Their style is less documentary (like Vertov) but more like epic scope dramatizations (like Eisenstein). In fact if you like the specific way in which Eisenstein translated history into grand stories, definitely check this film out.
So it’s no surprise that Soviet films were, more often than not, period pieces seen through Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism. In a similar way that Classical Hollywood had several films about the Old West and the Civil War as means of understanding and narrating the ideals associated with American Exceptionalism or The American Way of Life, the Soviets saw the history that led to them as a series of lessons that people could learn from and to understand what led to the way in which the world functioned at that time. In particular, period pieces were often made to illustrate what were the class struggles and the movements that changed history that led to the existence of the USSR. That’s why so many films were made about WW1 and the late Tsarist period. But here we go back even more and look at what could possibly be seen as the foundational myth of communist history.
The Commune of Paris is considered to be the first attempt at establishing a communist society. After the Franco-Prussian War the city of Paris was under siege by the Prussians, and the National Guard was the one defending the city for the most part. Among the Guard, socialist ideals began to spread as the war went on and their isolation from the rest of the French Government led to the rise of a revolutionary sentiment within the workers. When the Third Republic was established after the war, the workers of the National Guard were so well organized that they managed to fight back the imposition of the government and seized power of Paris for 2 months before being suppressed by the bourgeois funded French Army.
I might have butchered several facts in this little history lesson, but I thought it might have been important to explain this because the film kinda expects that you know about the basic outline. The truth is that The Paris Commune was deeply influential in Marxist thought, as it happened while Marx was alive and he and Engels studied the event to better develop their theory, and later on the Bolsheviks did the same to better develop their own revolutionary plans. For the people of Soviet Russia, the Paris Commune represents the first spark of a communist fire and a cathartic tragedy for the emancipation of the working class.
So when Trauberg and Kozintsev decided to make a film about this event, you know they had to make it as spectacular as possible. And so they did. Of course when I say “spectacular” I don’t mean in the sense of old Hollywood studio productions, but I mean in a new way that represented the revolution in form just as it did in text. Two interesting ways in which this was achieved was first by hiring composer Dmitri Shostakovich to make the soundtrack of the film, which he did by making a whole new composition for the film, and second by hiring the actors of the FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) group, which was an associated of avant-garde players that were involved in a working-class art movement called Eccentrism which valued the way of acting of everyday individuals and the chaotic movement of the big city. So this isn’t your everyday crew
I believe the result of all this can only be felt when you watch it, but honestly this is such a magnificent work. If you like the close-ups in Eisenstein or Dreyer, definitely check this film out, it has such a masterful use of this type of shot. And it’s a story about characters, their reactions, their actions, the conflict between all these sorts of individuals in this mid-century European milieu, all bubbling and exploding into a triumph as the revolution occurs. It’s lovely, and it’s absolutely worth checking out if you’re into communist history and grandiose films.
16 – In Spring (1929, dir. Mikhail Kaufman)
Have you ever heard of this underground movie called uhhh… Man With a Movie Camera? It’s pretty rare, no one has seen it, so it’s okay if you don’t know about it. Well, Vertov might have made the definitive City Symphony classic but that doesn’t mean the one made by his little brother Mikhail isn’t worth checking out, especially since I think it does some cool things on its own that MWaMC doesn’t!
But wait a second, what the h*ck is a City Symphony?? Ok so basically at the latter half of the 1920s, a genre of films suddenly emerged in cinemas all over the world, all inspired by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Ruttmann’s film was innovative at that time because it added an unprecedented aesthetic formalism to documentaries that in itself could also be repurposed as a formula all over the world.
Berlin is a film with no main characters and no story, well at least in the conventional narrative way. It’s a documentary that shows the movements of people, vehicles, machines, and general things as a regular day goes by in the city of Berlin. Ruttmann (who was one of the pioneers of abstract cinema) applied a very rhythmic and fast-paced montage to the footage, owning up to the title of “Symphony of a Great City”. The result is the film that spawned a whole genre of similar pictures made by people all over the world (but mostly Europe) and was arguably the largest documentary genre of the silent era. Once sound films came along the genre sort of died off, but it ultimately inspired lots of modern filmmakers to make similar kind of works (one could argue films like Koyaanisqatsi and My Winnipeg are modern City Symphonies)
Man With a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov is often described as a City Symphony, and it might even be the best one (definitely one of the most interesting ones at least), but it’s true that it’s also a study of Soviet workers’ everyday life as individuals of the USSR. One thing that film critics often distinguish between Ruttmann’s film and Vertov’s is that in the former there’s a detached attitude towards the workers of the city, in which the German filmmaker only really cares about the movement of the things surrounding/being operated by them (trains, cars, gates, bridges, wheels, etc), whereas in the latter a large amount of attention is given to the people operating the things (the drivers, technicians, salesmen, traffic guards, etc), going as far as to show the operation of filmmaking itself as part of the process of the great machine of modern soviet industry. Thus it’s a documentary that not only fits the City Symphony mold (Vertov focused only on Kiev and Moscow as the setting) but explores the great scope a modernizing society in the process of developing new sociabilities beyond Capitalist liberalism and a film industry uncovering new artistic horizons beyond classical Capitalist (Hollywood) modes. It’s a masterpiece, nuff said.
But how many people know about the extended Kaufman universe? Dziga Vertov is the pseudonym of Denis Kaufman, whose brothers Mikhail and Boris Kaufman both also had their own contributions to cinema. Those of you into cinematography might know Boris’ work as the DP for many films like 12 Angry Men, On The Waterfront, and notably the films of Jean Vigo, one of which was also a City Symphony (À Propos de Nice)! Here’s my joint recommendation: watch Jean Vigo’s films!
But anyways, aside from the two aforementioned Kaufman bros, the other one is the director of this film (God, this time I took a while to finally talk about the film huh). In Spring was made at sort of the same time as MWaMC, and it had a very similar mission statement, but I want to recommend it for the fact that it also managed to achieve different results in the process which makes it worth checking out even if only to compare and contrast. Whereas Vertov’s film is mostly limited to narrating the cycle of a single day in a Soviet city, Mikhail’s picture is broader in scope and focuses on the cycle of a whole year, and is not entirely limited to the city, but also shows life in the camps and in the industrial parks. In essence, the film shows how labor related to man’s existence within nature and how this relationship is shaped through the change of seasons and the development of a socialist nation. You might argue that if MWaMC is a movie about a developing socialist culture, In Spring is a movie about a developing socialist environment (in the broadest and most specific sense of the word). For these differences I think the film is definitely worth the watch. You just can’t go wrong with the Kaufman bros.
17 – The Pearl (1929, dir. Henri d’Ursel)
Last time we talked about French Impressionist Cinema was all the way back at La Roue (1923); remember when you were reading the first entries on this list? Feels like yesterday…
This film isn’t exactly French (it’s from Belgium) but it’s adjacent enough to FIC that I can talk a bit about what happened since Gance’s train movie. People like to divide FIC in three periods: the first being the late 1910s to early 1920s when most of the films in the movement were mostly about camera tricks and elaborate art direction (J’accuse, Fièvre, The Man of the Sea), the second period begins with La Roue and is more about complex montage and camerawork (Coeur Fidele, L’inhumaine, Ménilmontant, Napoleon), and finally the last period is this sort of dispersion period in which each director went off to a different direction and decided to do something a bit different. Abel Gance dabbled with sci-fi in La Fin du Monde (1931), Jean Epstein experimented with horror in The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and later in documentaries like Finis Terrae, Germaine Dulac pivoted to a form of surrealism, etc
And it seems that this late period of FIC was very much a transitionary moment in which this movement was dying off and simultaneously paving the way for other movements like Poetic Realism and, in this case, Surrealism. We all know of the surrealist films of Man Ray, Salvador Dali, and Luis Buñuel, but here’s something that some of you might not know.
I haven’t done the proper research on this and would love to learn more from y’all if any of you know this, but it seems that during this same time in Belgium there was a small but notable scene of Surrealist filmmakers also making their own weird little movies. La Perle (The Pearl) is one of these, and the best one that I’ve seen from this time.
Directed by a rich guy who didn’t need to worry about making a profitable film, this movie is pretty loose on its narrative. In fact you might not even understand what is happening the first time you watch it, but what you will see is a sequence of images that harmonize really well to create a movie in which its style is its substance, and the images will mesmerize you. There’s so many interesting shots and scenes here, and by the end you do feel like you went through some sort of adventure, even if it’s a pretty unusual one. If you’re looking for some lesser known surrealist works from the 1920s, this one is a must watch.
18 – A Throw of Dice (1929, dir. Franz Osten)
In case you felt this list was a bit too white and European, I have something special here for you. How about a silent epic Indian war-gambling film?
Indian cinema is one of the largest in the world, and, with the recent success of RRR, many cinephiles are turning their eyes to the subcontinent for other high quality pictures. In case you were wondering if there were any good silent Indian films, I can point you to A Throw of Dice (Pranpacha Pash) for starters. Although of course considering India was, at this time, occupied by the British, this is more of a co-production between India, the UK, and Germany, which might not make it count as a purely Indian film, but it definitely makes it looking at its form and style a lot interesting
The director was a German man called Franz Osten, who lived and worked in India for many years and was responsible for the production of what are now considered many silent Indian classics. He was definitely inspired by the German films of the Weimar republic, and it shows. Films like the epics produced by Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch (not his sex comedies, the epic costume dramas), or even the Joe May serials set in India. All that those filmmakers had in common was a fascination for the exotic, and Osten, unlike his German peers, had the opportunity to shoot on the actual “Orient” that the Europeans so dreamed of. This lent the film to, obviously, be pretty orientalist and capitalizing on how exotic it all looked to white Europeans. There’s no denying it, I’m just getting that out of the way before anything. Also keep in mind Osten would later join the Nazi party, yeah… not the best stuff. But anyways
I still think this movie is worth watching, because it is in itself a unique spectacle. Osten shot with actual Indian actors and used actual historical places as sets (unlike the folks in Europe doing brownface and shooting in studios), it feels a lot more genuine than anything Joe May or Lang tried to do with the similar ideas. Aside from that, it’s an adaptation from a classic story of the Mahabharata, and in case you’re interested in South Asian mythology, you gotta check this out.
It’s not only a war movie, but also a romance (of course), and most surprisingly a gambling film. Characters make political and strategic decisions based on rolls of dice (hence the title) and it adds an element to the drama that you often don’t see in the Western canon, unless it’s in some sort of ironic twist of the usual war tale. No, here it is played straight and it’s a pretty unique twist.
And of course I didn’t even mention the beautiful art direction. So much of this film is just these long tracking shots (reminiscent of Cabiria, in fact. Shoutouts to “10 films from the 1910s…”) that show you the large and lavish palaces and halls that these legendary figures occupy. Obviously this is part of the exoticism, but it still resulted in undeniably beautiful images.
If you want a silent Indian film, a non-European war epic, or even an interesting gambling story, do check this out!
19 – Man-Slashing Horse-Piercing Sword (1929, dir. Daisuke Ito)
Remember when in the 1910s list I recommended a partially lost film whose surviving print looks like dogshit? Wild moment, possibly a highlight of the whole thing. Well, I couldn’t end this list without recommending another partially lost film, and good news, now the surviving print at least looks decent!
Man-Slashing Horse-Piercing Sword, also called The Sword of Enchantment, or Sword Against Authority, or even Master Sword of Man and Beast (!) is a silent Japanese film made by leftist filmmaker and genre revolutionary Daisuke Ito. Much is talked about how Akira Kurosawa defined the genre of samurai films, but in truth the real pioneers were guys like Ito, who actually created the language of what we now know as a samurai film. There’s so much history here, and I’ll try to be brief, but trust me I’m gonna come back to this in a future blog post
Period films (also called jidaigeki) are to Japanese cinema what the Western is to Hollywood, this isn’t a bold statement, most film critics and historians agree with this. The comparison is true not only because both genres deal with an idealized past that had commercial and aesthetic appeal to their respective nations, but also because both genres changed as cinema (and society) changed alongside them. The first Japanese films were more often than not period films, in fact the ratio of period film (jidaigeki) to modern day setting film (gendaigeki) was like 8 to 1. Of course samurai tales were often the focus of these films, but originally they were very different from what we now understand as samurai films
Early jidaigeki was informed a lot by traditional Japanese theater, and the acting was reminiscent of Kabuki, with actors moving in slow and sweeping manners, and action feeling overly theatrical. Samurai films followed this formula and often felt like stagey operas than anything else. It was during the process of rapid modernization of Japan in the 1920s that this would come to change. Inspired by leftist cinema of the time, Japanese filmmakers started to reinvent the jidaigeki genre to change not only on a formal level but also on an ideological one.
Samurai represent not only a historical profession associated with medieval Japan, but also the entire philosophy ubiquitous of that time, the Bushido. To a modern Japanese person he can represent either the platonic ideal of the Japanese man, a fierce and unrelenting warrior who follows the orders of his superior not because he wants something in return but because it’s the right thing to do; or he can represent the epitome of the exploited proletariat of feudal Japan, who murders and commits inhuman violence just to protect the property of aristocrats who don’t even pay him enough to live a wealthy life, often being exploited to death or misery. This historiographic plurality led to several different readings of the samurai figure, and in the late 1920s a movement of left-leaning revaluations of the samurai film started to surge
Daisuke Ito was spearheading this movement, by making some of the first left-leaning samurai films. In his films, samurais were often criminals or anarchists, figures that actively opposed the socio-political configurations of feudal Japan, and often led revolutionary movements among the peasants in order to fight against the lords, instead of blindly following their orders. MAN-SLASHING HORSE-PIERCING SWORD (sorry I just fucking love this title) is an ideal example of this. In the film, the protagonist, Raizaburo, is a rogue samurai who discovers a conspiracy by a magistrate who plans to kill the heir to the land in order to claim his ownership of that territory. As Raizaburo organizes a plan of his own to stop the evil doings of the corrupt magistrate, he ends up riling up the exploited farmers to support his mission and revolt against their lord. In between this drama, many incredible fight scenes occur
I didn’t mention this, but this period was also revolutionary to samurai films because a change from stagey operatic action scenes to gritty realistic ones happened, and that was the birth of the “chambara” genre, which got its name from the sound of clashing swords associated with the rawer actions scenes. This film features some amazing fight choreography that predates the Kurosawa sequences by a good 30 years. The golden age of chambara was not the 1950s or 1960s, it was the 1920s!
But of course this film was lost for many years, and a fragment was discovered recently, so you can’t really watch this in full, but the part that remains is still definitely worth watching. I’m gonna come back to this topic in the future, but for now, this is all I’ll say on the matter. On to the final movie!
20 – My Grandmother (1929, dir. Kote Mikaberidze)
How about ending this on a good note. Here’s a soviet comedy film, did you know those exist? Yeah actually the soviets made a ton of comedies, and they’re really good! This one is also like one of the most wild films to come out at this time, honestly
My Grandmother is a dark satire of bureaucratic life under capitalism, the characters are this cartoonish farcical personification of lazy obtuseness and the art direction is this expressionistic representation of dystopian excessive brutalism, all to add up to pure shenanigans that make you feel like you’re in a bad trip of some esoteric sort. And this is before the story even begins, as it does, things really just go off
A bureaucrat loses his job at an office, and his life instantly loses meaning, he finds himself with no means of raising his jazz-loving feet-swinging wife and kids, and even tries to khs (korean high school) but the attempt fails and he finds himself forced to face the fact that he needs to look for another job. How, oh how does a man like this lazy pen-pusher get a job in this economy? The solution will surprise you! The outcome of that solution might surprise you even more! Do not miss the chance to get some good laughs, some goofs, even some gags, in this Georgian surrealist fever dream MY GRANDMOTHER. Great way to end this list, dontcha think?
Well, here we are. This was the post that I’ve been looking forward to making for a pretty long time, luckily the stars aligned and I finally got to write it. Did you enjoy it? Will you watch any of these (I mean actually watching not just adding them to your watchlist)? Let me know what you thought of them if you do! I hope I was able to recommend something you never heard of before and are now looking forward to learning more about. There are plenty of rabbit holes to go down from this list, and I myself went through many of them and had a great time. Hopefully you do too
There’s no guarantee that I’ll make a sequel to this list with the 1930s and beyond, but I’m not entirely opposed to the idea, we’ll see. But what I can guarantee is that some of the topics mentioned here will return more in depth in a future, more well-researched, blog post. It’s something that I’ve been working on and off for over a year at this point, and I promise it will be at least somewhat interesting (it’s definitely interesting to me!), so please look forward to this future “secret” research project of mine. Can’t give a release date, but I promise it will come out sooner than later. For now, I hope this list suffices. Thank you for reading it all, and I hope you have fun!
If you know me, you probably are aware of the Chronowatch. In case you don’t know, it’s a project in which I embarked starting back in 2019 that involved watching all the films from my watchlist in chronological order. I’ve been doing this for almost 3 years now and have gone through the entire silent era and almost all the pre-WW2 years. Since it’s become my primary method of movie watching, I’ve talked about it with friends online quite a lot, and it’s even become a meme of sorts.
A collateral effect that the Chronowatch’s meme status has had on the small circle of cinephiles I’m in is that now some people are liking the idea of going through cinema history in release order, which I think is great! I’m not trying to convince anyone to do this insane deed but in case anyone wants to, I’m more than willing to help and guide those with the experience that I’ve built up through these 2 and a half years. So here’s a guide that I’ve devised in order to make your chronowatch journey as efficient and fun as it was for me.
Step One: Build a Watchlist
This will be your bible and you should stick to it as much as possible. Chronowatching requires some level of discipline and dedication, otherwise it will never end. In order to build your watchlist you should first consider how much you wanna watch? Is it all of the “canon”? Or just 100 films or so? Do you wanna do one of those “1 movie from every year” challenges? Or maybe just a total of 10 movies? Think about this before making your watchlist.
It’s handy to have it cataloged somewhere. My best recommendation is the website Letterboxd, which most of you use anyways (other database/logger sites such as IMDb or RYM work too). Once you build your watchlist, just sort it in “release order: earliest first”. If you don’t use it and don’t want to, I recommend creating a text document and writing down your list with the release date of the films, which might be a lot more laborious if you plan on having a big watchlist.
What movies should you put on your watchlist? This was mentioned in Erik’s Guide to Becoming Patrician Part 1 and I’ll relay that advice: Look at ranked lists on credible websites. IMDB and TSPDT are 2 great sources, their “top 250 films” and “top 1000 films” lists respectively will already cover your ground for most of the “cinematic canon”. If you plan on going all the way, you might want to add all the films to your list, which will grant you something from 1000-1250 films to chronowatch, which is already quite a lot.
I also recommend going through RYM’s film rankings and genre tags and adding some of the films mentioned in the description of the genres/movements that interest you. Aside from that you can also just pick directors whose filmographies interest you and add their oeuvre to the list in case it wasn’t there already.
When I say that you should stick to your watchlist religiously, it’s because of how many films it might end up being composed of. If you set a list with 2000 films and often leave it aside in favor of other films that interest you at the time, you might as well abandon the chronowatch or at least make a shorter list. You don’t wanna treat it like a chore or have to deal with it for years and years to come without getting anywhere. It should be something fun and engaging. Which leads to my next step.
Step Two: Prepare a Schedule
If you’re someone like me you probably built a humongous watchlist that encompasses everything from New Hollywood to Italian Futurism, and you’re looking at numbers beyond your comprehension (my watchlist is currently 9k films). This might make you panic but fear not, it’s all a matter of routine. If you watch 1 movie a day, in a year you’ve watched 365 films, which is a third of TSPDT’s top 1000 films (and more than the entire imdb top 250). If you watch 2 movies a day, you’re almost done with their list in a single year. Think of these small steps and you’ll realize you can watch a lot in a medium amount of time.
Of course not everyone can watch 2 movies a day, or even 1. If you want to chronowatch but have a really busy schedule, I recommend setting up a smaller list at first, with the more essential films, then going back after you’re done and doing more and more obscure stuff (something I’ll talk about in step five). Doing 1 movie a day is already a fine schedule, but doing 2 movies a day, if you have the time, is also great and will move you forward quite a lot.
Here’s an advanced tip that will probably only apply if you REALLY follow the watchlist religiously and almost never watch anything else outside of it. Set up little “chronobreaks” for every year you finish in your watchlist. What this means is, in order to not go insane from just watching movies from the same period over an extended time, make sure to also watch some recent releases, but if you want to stick to a routine, preemptively choose which movies to watch, set a limit and only do it once you watch a set number of films. This will help you conserve the discipline of the orthodox chronowatch and also keep you from losing touch with the cinematic zeitgeist. The way I do it is: I pick 10 films from any more “modern” year and watch them once I’m done with 1 year in the chronowatch. Let’s say I finish 1938, after the last 1938 film in my watchlist, I go to the chronobreak films and watch 10 modern things. Once I’m done, I go back to start 1939. This has worked for me quite a lot.
Step Three: Use the Tools
The first 50 years or so of cinema history can be pretty easy to find on average. This is because a lot of older movies are now in the public domain or are owned by libraries and cinematheques that are willing to share their copy online. This means that most silent and classic films can be easily found online on places like Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion. It’s all a simple google away. But not always…
When dealing with more obscure films, either because they’re avant-garde or just not well preserved/remembered, you might notice that none of the websites mentioned above can help you. First thing you should do when looking for a more obscure film is knowing if it is in fact a film you can watch or if it’s lost. Databases like Letterboxd don’t check if you’ve actually seen the film you logged so many people claim to have “watched” something when they simply marked it as log (which is why movies that were just announced and don’t even have a release date yet usually don’t have 0 logs on LB). All of this to say that you should take it with a grain of salt when a film has only 15 logs and no reviews. This probably means it’s a lost film. Some lost films will be indicated as such on their description page but not all of them do. Keep a look out for that.
But let’s say your next film on the list is a 1914 Danish melodrama with 60 logs and multiple genuine letterboxd reviews. You google it and can’t find it on youtube. How do you find it online? There’s a couple places you can look.
My go-to recommendation for anything not on Youtube is VK! VK is the Russian equivalent of Facebook and it has an integrated video platform which contains hundreds of thousands of complete films in full HD uploaded to it. I don’t know how it manages to have so much copyrighted content but I think it’s because of Russia’s laws enabling this level of piracy to happen. As a result, the website is consistently the best place to find any movie, including older, more obscure stuff. I use it all the time and recommend you create an account and make the best use out of it. Just make sure to enable that two-step authentication (you’ll thank me later).
The Youtube + VK combo will have you covered for 98% of your early chronowatch. But in case you come across something really obscure, I can recommend some other places too. These were mentioned also in Erik’s Guide to Becoming Patrician Part 2, and not to simply repeat what he said (I suggest reading it in case you haven’t already), I’ll tell you which websites have personally been the most useful to my chronowatch. Those are CinemaZ, AvistaZ and Ubuweb.
CinemaZ and AvistaZ are both private trackers and have open registrations like 3-4 times a year. Keep an eye out and try to get into them. CinemaZ is for western classic films while AvistaZ is for Asian cinema and TV. You’ll find basically all the films from the TSPDT top 1000 list in those trackers alone. Ubuweb is also another great place to look, they focus more on avant-garde artists, usually the stuff with <500 logs on LB. Erik mentions other great sites as well but in my experience so far they haven’t helped as much, though this can just be because I’m still only a third through cinema history. I’ll say that there’s one extra place you can search in as a last attempt which is archive.org, they don’t usually have everything but sometimes they have some gems stored away and you might want to check there every now and then.
Before we move to the next step I’ll give you another advanced chronowatch tip that will probably not need to be used unless you go chronodeep into the chronolife: The techno-wizardry. It’s a meme term but it refers to the process of quickly adding subs to films uploaded to online platforms. The way you do it is by installing JDownloader, a software that allows for easy download of any video you find online. You need to set it up to work on VK and Youtube, I won’t try to explain it here but there’s tutorials online that’ll help you with that (if you don’t find tutorials for VK just look for Facebook ones, it works the same way). If you find a film on VK that has no english subs, download it with JDownloader, then look the movie up on Opensubtitles or other subtitle websites. Get the subs there and add them to the downloaded file. This is the process of techno-wizardry and it might help you out with particularly obscure stuff that you REALLY wanna watch. Ok, on to the next step
Step Four: Watch
This step is less about practicality and more about mindset. There’s not much advice I can give on watching movies alone but I can give you some words of wisdom. Many zoomers and millennials are not accustomed to watching older films, let alone silent films. If you are interested in chronowatching you probably have some interest in the classics, though. But even if that’s the case you might find it, at first, a cultural shock. Many have said this and I somewhat agree that silent films are like a different language of cinema, they work differently and require different levels of attention and engagement. I want you to know that you can absolutely master the language of silent cinema.
I’ll admit that many silents are boring as hell, but for every boring one I’ve seen an equal amount of amazing works that have made me feel things no sound films were ever able to. Silent cinema might be a different language, but it’s often a beautiful one. Once you get used to the rhythm and tropes of 100 year old movies, you’ll feel the deep amusement of discovering a film that escapes those adjusted expectations and delivers something you’ve never seen up until that point.
This is something I learned to value and you should probably keep in mind: Chronowatching is an opportunity to see cinema’s history (and general modern history) happen in front of you. You’ll be watching through a long sequence of works that are, directly or indirectly, responding to each other. Chronowatching is seeing the century long conversation between all artists that contributed to the medium, it’s seeing the influences become the classics and the clichés beget the subversions, you are witnessing the complex web unfold and living the first hand experience of obtaining the full context behind all great works of film magic. If you watch these old movies thinking about what they mean to this long web of conversations, I promise you’ll find it to be a transcendental journey through this artform.
Step Five (optional): Rinse and Repeat
If you think doing a single chronowatch is enough and you don’t need to go back once you’re done with each period, you can ignore this step. But if you feel that you missed some stuff on your way through the silent era or the pre-code years or the 1940s etc, this is the last advice I’ll give. Chronowatch again.
If you’re done with your original chronowatch, I can recommend building a second smaller (!) list with the stuff that you didn’t originally add but really want to watch. If your original watchlist is too large you can try to do 2 chronowatches at once (something I’m currently doing) and alternating 1 film from one watchlist with 1 from the other. This is completely optional and only for the real insane folks like me.
Sometimes we skip an entire movement or director without realizing, and once your mind is chronoaligned you cannot chronoabandon your chronolifestyle. You can’t just go back and watch those movies, you gotta do it in the chronological manner. I know the feeling, if this is how you feel, know you’re not alone. This last step might not reach anyone in particular but in case it DOES, I’ll have been happy to talk about it.
Either way this is all the useful advice I can currently give on the topic. Since I myself am still in the process of chronowatching, I can learn new things and get wiser on the matter as time goes on, which means I might eventually follow up with extra tips and tricks. But for now this is all. I hope this post was useful to you and I hope your chronowatching is fun and safe and that you have a wonderful time
Out of all the periods in film history, the silent era is the one that probably went through the most amount of change in the smallest amount of time, and with the advent of modern technology it’s now quite easy to observe the rapid changes that happened by just watching a bunch of those movies ourselves. As someone who developed a fascination with silent films, I can attest for how magical of an experience it can be to watch the stuff from that time, especially in order of release. So I decided to present 10 films from the 1910s that I think you should check out for yourself and possibly live a similar experience to mine.
The plan is to show 10 movies that you probably have not heard of or watched for yourself, so don’t expect to see Birth of a Nation or the Keystone Chaplin shorts, everyone knows those. If you already know all the movies from the list, I’m glad to hear but you’re probably not the fellx I’m trying to reach.
Why the 1910s? Because that’s when I believe that the medium started growing towards what we currently know as cinema. Plus I’m not confident in writing about the decades prior to this one as I’m not as interested in those as I am with the 10s and 20s.
I’m going to be restricting myself to 1 movie per director and I’ll try to provide links to where you can watch each of them in full (legally and/or for free). LET’S GO
1 – The Unchanging Sea (1910, dir. DW Griffith)
Everything you ever heard about DW Griffith is probably true. No defending the man in this profile. That being said, I have a lukewarm take on his oeuvre in that I believe his peak was not in his epic large scale feature productions, but in fact in his earlier two-reeler films.
I know that a recent revisionist push is happening against his legacy as a pioneer of the industry, and while I am all for demystifying the guy, I disagree with the proposition that nothing in his films is visionary and important. I think that, especially in his short films, there’s a level of poetry and precision that elevates him from most of what was being done at the time.
He still did a lot of racist and preachy films even back then, but I want to point out one that I’d put above even some of his more grandiose and ambitious later works. The Unchanging Sea is a remarkably simple film in a formal sense and that works so much in favor of its message that you’d be surprised that this was just a few years after the Cinema of Attraction days.
In a time when every film wanted to amaze and impress with what it could show, this one is minimal and restrictive; showing less and leaving so much for the viewer to contemplate and urge for. An understanding of what’s inside the frame is just as important as what’s outside. A care for the relationship between human and nature, specifically the ocean.
One thing that many early avant-garde filmmakers had in common was the fascination with the ocean, something that would flourish in the 1920s with Impressionist cinema. Right now, Griffith’s ode to the sea almost makes you forget that he was also super into racism and stuff.
You can buy it here or just watch it full on YT here
2 – Cabiria (1914, dir. Giovanni Pastrone)
Now it’s time to actually demystify the KKK director a little bit. The idea that Birth of a Nation was the first feature length film is just straight up wrong. Before BOAN and Intolerance came out, the Italians were already pushing the boundaries of the medium and Cabiria is the product of this Mediterranean experimental spirit.
Aside from the monumental duration of 148 minutes, Cabiria’s sets are gigantic, the action is explosive, the level of detail is painterly, and the characters are larger than life. When it came to movies, the 1910s Italians liked it big. And Pastrone’s aspirations didn’t stop there, he was one of the first filmmakers to make use of dolly photography, and he used it to explore a cinematic space diametrically opposed to the fixed settings so common to that time. The zooms and pans in this film are so uniquely performed that I have trouble comparing it even to modern movies.
Combining it with the complexity of action in each shot and the precise blocking of the actors which often provide for a natural movement of the eye, watching Cabiria is something closer to looking at a fresco with its intricate geometric compositions than it is to looking at a regular picture or portrait which often was the case with many films of the time.
how many movies with women looking at broken mirrors can you name?
Since I limited myself to 1 movie per director, it was hard to talk about just one project from Lois Weber. She was one of the busiest filmmakers at the time, and her work as a female director is something modern cinebros should be paying more attention to.
Shoes clearly represents Weber’s intention of exploring social issues present in the America of her time; of rejecting cinema as a means of escapism and utilizing the unparalleled cinematic powers of information and persuasion in her favor. Weber’s press towards political filmmaking marks her as one of the most important figures in cinema if you ask me.
Gender roles, birth control, religion, disability and class divisions are some of the topics that Weber approached in her work. All it takes is a couple of her films for anyone to realize that the silent era was not just the slapstick vaudeville fun-ride that some people think it is. And she was busy too; in 1916 alone she made over 12 movies.
I picked Shoes as it’s one of her more allegorical and less fierce pictures, while still containing an impressive social awareness, a great starting point for people who SHOULD get into her work. It’s a story about a young girl who must work a low paying job in order to support her whole family (while her dad NEETs about at the house) and all the while wanting to buy a new pair of shoes as her current ones are so degraded that she can barely wear them. Her crushing workload and hardships lead her down a dark path in order to afford even her bare necessities. Not to spoil anything but uh let’s say this movie gets real.
This will be the only one in the list that you will not be able to watch in full. And that is because this is a partially lost film. It once was the most popular serial in Germany when it came out, but now only 1 episode’s length of the six-parter currently survives.
tho it is a sick effect most of the surviving footage is somewhat like this
The surviving material is worth checking out, though. It’s crazy to think that such a serial even existed. We all know that Nosferatu is a loose adaptation of Dracula mixed with gothic and expressionist influences. Homunculus is very much a similar thing but with Frankenstein (and 6 years before Murnau’s classic). This is an early German expressionist film that transforms the disfigured monster from Mary Shelley’s work into a gloomy young man with an angular and shadowy contour, a design that even influenced German fashion at the time.
more like Dripulus
It can be frustrating to see how the surviving film is kinda butchered and truncated, but I recommend watching it to have a look at the steppingstone for what would later be the iconic look of Erich Pommer productions and even works such as Judex, Shadow, and Batman.
Speaking of influences, Judex not only looks like Rippert’s character but is also another deeply influential character in its visual and themes.
Louis Feuillade is notorious for his iconic serials and while Les Vampires is an art-house darling of his, I don’t see many folks discuss Judex as much as they do Fantômas and Les Vampires, which is a shame because I believe this 1916 serial is exactly the type of story that would fit like a glove in modern capeshit loving filmbro sensibilities.
The titular character in this story is a young man who lost his parents to an incident caused by a corrupt banker and who plans to exact revenge on him using his technological and mystical powers. Sounds familiar? That’s because comic book anti-heroes like Batman were fully inspired by Judex.
The serial goes beyond that though and revolves around two points of view: the anti-hero and his revenge plot; and the family of the banker trying to save the man from the mysterious caped figure. This dynamic works absurdly well and leaves the viewer always guessing who’ll get the upper hand until the very end. It’s fun blockbuster capeshit stuff many decades before that was even a thing.
Though Victor Sjöström is known for his later tragedies in the 1920s such as The Phantom Carriage, He Who Gets Slapped and The Wind, his projects in the 1910s are remarkable in their inventiveness and influence, especially in the Swedish silent films of that decade.
In this feature, a sense of isolation is expressed like nothing seen from that time. It seemingly builds off from Unchaning Sea’s littoral melancholy and turns it into littoral terror. All is captured in an unmatched mysticism that it’s really hard to describe with words how the shots of distant ships and a man swept away by the tide can be so mesmerizing in this film.
This is considered the first of the Swedish melodramas of the silent era, and Sjöström’s contribution to 1910s cinema is just as impressive as what he’s usually attributed to in his later career.
Another Italian innovator: Nino Oxilia helped pave the way for the art-house aesthetic of avant-garde films of the 1920s. While the epics of the early 10s were massive and expansive, Oxilia’s films are minimal and suggestive, but equally as moving.
Rapsodia Satanica is the last in Nino’s small filmography, it’s a genderbent retelling of the legend of Faust in a deep melancholic and contemplative style, playing with hand-tinting, lighting and silhouette, a beautiful visual experience and a heart-breaking narrative which is something that later French directors would replicate with their impressionist works.
how is this 104 years old wtf
The reason why this is Oxilia’s last film is because after making this, the director went on to fight in World War 1 and died in action. If you were wondering where The Great War would factor in this list, keep reading.
World War 1 had started and its effect on the world can be seen in how it affected many european countries in the 1920s and how it directly inspired cinematic movements like German Expressionism, New Objectivity, Soviet Montage and French Impressionism/Avant-Garde. But as early as 1917 were there repercussions on cinema, and here is one example of a film about The Great War which has great importance for movies of the 1920s and forwards.
You probably heard of Abel Gance because of his magnum opus Napoléon (1927) but his mastery goes way back. While WW1 was still happening, he directed J’Accuse, a film about a man going to war and going insane with the things he sees then returning to his hometown and telling the people what the horrors of war are like. Of course the film is a lot more than just that, but the idea of a movie focusing on how the protagonist suffered from his experiences in the war (instead of portraying the soldier as a hero who must overcome his fears to save his nation, like other WW1 films of the time did) is one of the biggest reasons why this movie is amazing. But not the only reason.
Aside from looking beautiful, the film is extremely experimental in its structure. This was made while the Soviet Union was still in the process of being formed, and years before VGIK (the Soviet film school responsible for the first studies in montage) was formed, but Gance was already experimenting with juxtaposing discontinuous shots in order to obtain larger emotional effects on the audience.
A beautiful looking experimental anti-war film with trippy twists and turns that you must watch if you haven’t already.
I admit, these past couple of recs were quite dark, so here’s something lighter that I can recommend.
Lubitsch is known for his comedies from the 30s and 40s but some of his earlier stuff is also incredible and worth a watch. He was already playing with power dynamics and sexual innuendos as early as this 1919 movie, subverting cliché romance tropes like the “will they, won’t they” mold into something a lot more entertaining but still joyfully romantic.
His fascination with gender roles and libido is at full play in The Doll, a story about a Baron’s son who decides to marry a life-like doll but unbeknownst to him he’s actually marrying the doll-maker’s daughter disguised as the doll. This premise leads to some silly and delicious moments of tension between the ignorant lad and the hectic lady. A fun film that precedes the screwball comedy (and by extension the romantic comedy) by several years.
But let’s not detract from the reality of the late 1910s, which was a dark period for westerners; as the decade ended the interbellum generation arrived and the following years would lead to even more issues word-wide.
This post-war sentiment is greatly illustrated in the last film of the list. Irvin Willat’s Behind the Door is about an American citizen that gets peer pressured into serving in WW1 because his neighbors suspected he was German. His wife joins him in secret and they both go to war on a navy boat. A submarine attacks them and his wife is captured by the German soldiers.
What happens next is a spoiler but it’s some very messed up stuff. It’s a movie that presents a sobriety that even J’Accuse sort of lacked. A tragedy inspired by a lot of the things in the list before it, but that announces the following years of American and European sentimentality and is definitely a film you should watch in the tail-end of this journey through the 1910s.
And of course as we started with the sea, we also end with the sea. The brutal unchanging sea. I hope the sea captures you as much as it captured the early filmmakers and audiences and as much as it definitely captured me.
Anyways that was just a huge list of recommendations from a nerd that got lost in old movies during quarantine. Hope you were interested in any of them and I hope you watch and enjoy them soon enough.
core enforcer 