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| Andre Bazin and his kitty via Writers and Kitties |
29.4.11
12.4.11
Piccadilly
As a disclaimer, I've taken the Silent to Sound film studies class, so I'm familiar with silent films, and generally like them. But for some reason I found Piccadilly intensely boring. The problem, I think, was that I was comparing it all along to another film from the same year, Pandora's Box. Pandora's Box is a German silent film about a dancer whose uncontrollable sexiness leads to despair, death, and her own eventual murder by Jack the Ripper. Lulu, as played by Louise Brooks, is part free-wheeling innocent, part scheming seductress, and it's her performance that makes the film what it is. Interestingly in relation to Piccadilly, Brooks popularised the bubikopf - the short, sharp bob haircut Anna May Wong's hair imitates in this film.
What I like most about Pandora's Box is the unabashed joy Louise Brooks/Lulu has in her own seductive powers. She loves people, and she loves to be loved. The film is set in Berlin at a time when the city was known for its hedonistic, avant garde, and sexually open artistic sphere. The musical/film Cabaret romps through this world, showing its final days prior to the rise of fascism in Germany. German films of the Weimar era drew on a futuristic aesthetic, a kind of hyperactive art deco, and while Pandora's Box isn't as abstract in its design as films by directors such as Fritz Lang, it still has that grand, modern style. The fashion and hairstyles, as well as what is regarded as the first depiction of a lesbian in film, make Pandora's Box ahead of its time when compared to American films of the same era. Released about six months before Piccadilly (in Germany) I feel that Pandora's Box is doing a similar thing in a more interesting way.
I suppose it depends what you see Piccadilly as attempting to do, but if the moral is one read along gendered lines (assuming there is some sort of moral, and ignoring the racial aspect) both films seem to have a message about women who are commodities (performers, in particular) attempting to turn their commodity status into a kind of purchasing power of their own. Lulu, Mabel and Shosho's lives go awry (or end) when they misinterpret their commodity value as power and try to wrangle themselves stable positions as the wives of the men who employ and exploit them, rather than settling for their appropriate partners; other employees. Mabel should go with Victor, who is the real attraction in their partnership. Shosho should stick with Jim, her equal in race and class. In Pandora's Box, Lulu toys with the son of her... the man she is the mistress of (you can't exactly say 'master', can you? But there isn't a name for it! You can be a concubine, but not a concubiner, a mistress, but not a master), before marrying the father. Lulu attains a bit of a coup here, stealing her man-she-is-the-mistress-of (who also backs the shows she dances in) back from his (wealthy, sophisticated) fiancee by throwing a screaming tantrum (see top two images above). After the wedding, her husband finds her with his son's head in her lap, and attacks her. In the ensuing tousle he is killed, and Lulu faces prison. From there it gets rather messy. The lesson for Lulu is that she has overplayed her hand in trying for the father rather than settling for the son, who is more her equal.
I would say Shosho is Lulu's parallel in Piccadilly, and while I don't know that Piccadilly could feasibly have been influenced by Pandora's Box the thematic similarities are notable, as are the physical similarities between Anna May Wong and Louise Brooks, in their hair and their small, slim body types. Next to the curvaceous and handsomely feathered and upholstered Mabel, Shosho looks tiny, and very young. Lulu and Shosho, young, slim, often near-naked, with their hair close about their heads, are indicative of a new type of femininity. The New Woman is androgynous, free spirited, alluring and flirtatious. The kind of slang recorded in this 'Flapper's dictionary' indicates something about the attitude of this type of young woman in the 1920's. To my mind, while Lulu still ends up murdered in an icy London garret, Pandora's Box seems to offer a more forward-looking view on this trend in its more thorough exploration of Lulu's character. Shosho is less sympathetic largely because we don't see enough of her. I found Piccadilly less interesting because I didn't care for any of the characters in the same way I cared about Lulu. Piccadilly's view on the New Woman seems particularly grim, with none of Lulu's joy.
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| Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora's Box. |
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| Vic, Mabel and Shosho in Piccadilly. |
I would say Shosho is Lulu's parallel in Piccadilly, and while I don't know that Piccadilly could feasibly have been influenced by Pandora's Box the thematic similarities are notable, as are the physical similarities between Anna May Wong and Louise Brooks, in their hair and their small, slim body types. Next to the curvaceous and handsomely feathered and upholstered Mabel, Shosho looks tiny, and very young. Lulu and Shosho, young, slim, often near-naked, with their hair close about their heads, are indicative of a new type of femininity. The New Woman is androgynous, free spirited, alluring and flirtatious. The kind of slang recorded in this 'Flapper's dictionary' indicates something about the attitude of this type of young woman in the 1920's. To my mind, while Lulu still ends up murdered in an icy London garret, Pandora's Box seems to offer a more forward-looking view on this trend in its more thorough exploration of Lulu's character. Shosho is less sympathetic largely because we don't see enough of her. I found Piccadilly less interesting because I didn't care for any of the characters in the same way I cared about Lulu. Piccadilly's view on the New Woman seems particularly grim, with none of Lulu's joy.
8.4.11
Berlin: Symphony of a City and Man With a Movie Camera
I just went on an internet journey in researching this post which pretty much peaked when I found this quote: "The male lead, played by Ewan McGregor ("Trainspotting"), is a bisexual translator named Jerome who spends most of the film with his uncircumcised penis flapping in the wind." Sounds fairly promising, I think. The journey itself was fairly straightforward, it's from a Salon interview with director Peter Greenaway, and I've been trying to track down an interview I heard last year on ABC Classic FM in which he discussed the changing nature of film viewing. The interview isn't there any longer, but hopefully I won't completely mangle what he said in trying to remember it.
I was reminded of this interview because in it he discussed the way he watches films. He said he hadn't been to the cinema in about ten years, and that he much prefers to watch films at home, where he can eat what he likes, talk, answer the phone, and stop, start and rewind at a whim. In other interviews, such as this recent one with The Guardian, he says artists should always be at the cutting edge of technology, and it's this technology that imparts more control over the text to both the creator and the spectator. This is obviously a modern way of viewing, turning the film into less of a cinematic experience and more of a personal commodity. To an extent, silent films have an element of this non-universality of experience in their music, which would necessarily be different everywhere the film was shown, and possibly in the projection rate. But this is still a communal experience, whereas the viewing style Greenaway talks about, and the style most of us were talking about regarding these films, is very much isolated and personalised.
I noticed our discussions of Rutman and Vertov kept coming back to what role music or YouTube or silence played in individual understanding or appreciation of the films. Personally, I watched both of them with the Cinematic Orchestra soundtrack for Man With a Movie Camera. I already had the soundtrack and I didn't know when I watched Berlin that it and Vertov's film were almost identical in intention, style, and (crucially) length. I just stuck it on and marveled at my own ingenuity when the results were so excellent. It seemed less miraculous the next week when I watched Movie Camera and it was practically identical.
This sense of control over the film by playing the music I wanted with it was undermined by a guilty feeling stemming from not watching it with its intended soundtrack. Until I actually tried watching it with the 'real' soundtrack, of course, and it was so didactic that I would rather have watched it with practically anything else. I've decided to watch silent movies with music that makes me feel more sympathetic to the film, rather than what might be contextually appropriate (although the question of trying to be sympathetic to the text and put the wishes of the creator first is fraught itself). So, for example, if I watch Metropolis I prefer this soundtrack by The New Pollutants, because it's brilliant, and modern in a way that suits the futuristic aesthetic of the film.
Given that the films we're watching are concerned with and reflective of the modernity of their own times, it seems appropriate to use the technology available in watching them. It doesn't seem to me to be a question of whether or not this is how the films were supposed to be experienced, but I know there's an argument for the immersion of a communal experience of theatre viewing out there which might be convincing.
And to demonstrate the wizardry of the internet, this quote from the Guardian interview about Greenaway's latest film Nightwatching links me neatly to the previous post: "Martin Freeman plays Rembrandt: oddly plausible and often nude". I've never seen a Greenaway film but they sound like the sort you watch with headphones on and one eye on the door.
I was reminded of this interview because in it he discussed the way he watches films. He said he hadn't been to the cinema in about ten years, and that he much prefers to watch films at home, where he can eat what he likes, talk, answer the phone, and stop, start and rewind at a whim. In other interviews, such as this recent one with The Guardian, he says artists should always be at the cutting edge of technology, and it's this technology that imparts more control over the text to both the creator and the spectator. This is obviously a modern way of viewing, turning the film into less of a cinematic experience and more of a personal commodity. To an extent, silent films have an element of this non-universality of experience in their music, which would necessarily be different everywhere the film was shown, and possibly in the projection rate. But this is still a communal experience, whereas the viewing style Greenaway talks about, and the style most of us were talking about regarding these films, is very much isolated and personalised.
I noticed our discussions of Rutman and Vertov kept coming back to what role music or YouTube or silence played in individual understanding or appreciation of the films. Personally, I watched both of them with the Cinematic Orchestra soundtrack for Man With a Movie Camera. I already had the soundtrack and I didn't know when I watched Berlin that it and Vertov's film were almost identical in intention, style, and (crucially) length. I just stuck it on and marveled at my own ingenuity when the results were so excellent. It seemed less miraculous the next week when I watched Movie Camera and it was practically identical.
This sense of control over the film by playing the music I wanted with it was undermined by a guilty feeling stemming from not watching it with its intended soundtrack. Until I actually tried watching it with the 'real' soundtrack, of course, and it was so didactic that I would rather have watched it with practically anything else. I've decided to watch silent movies with music that makes me feel more sympathetic to the film, rather than what might be contextually appropriate (although the question of trying to be sympathetic to the text and put the wishes of the creator first is fraught itself). So, for example, if I watch Metropolis I prefer this soundtrack by The New Pollutants, because it's brilliant, and modern in a way that suits the futuristic aesthetic of the film.
Given that the films we're watching are concerned with and reflective of the modernity of their own times, it seems appropriate to use the technology available in watching them. It doesn't seem to me to be a question of whether or not this is how the films were supposed to be experienced, but I know there's an argument for the immersion of a communal experience of theatre viewing out there which might be convincing.
And to demonstrate the wizardry of the internet, this quote from the Guardian interview about Greenaway's latest film Nightwatching links me neatly to the previous post: "Martin Freeman plays Rembrandt: oddly plausible and often nude". I've never seen a Greenaway film but they sound like the sort you watch with headphones on and one eye on the door.
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