The Silent Film

       

The next bit of this foolish endeavour to justify four years of top class education will focus on one of my favourite courses, Interwar Cinema, particularly on Silent Cinema. Interwar was brilliant, as it covered a lot of films that I never knew were my favourite until I watched them for the first time; The Scarlet Pimpernel, A Star is Born, Lost Horizon, Madame Bovary (that last one’s French, so you know it’s good and mental) but none were as good as the silent movies I indulged in.

Can I just take a moment to say how good silent films are? It’s like what that Norma Desmond said in Sunset Boulevard – “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces!”

Norma was obviously the picture of reasoned argument

With a silent movie, you’re relying totally on the cinematic language to tell the story. Actors could remain an enigma, their characters barely ever even having names in the early years. They weren’t the star; the camera was, showing wonderful new things with new equipment every single day. Nickelodeons and later Picture Palaces sprang up across the globe, and new art movements were created in the blink of an eye, let alone techniques which are still used today (apparently, the montage existed before Rocky IV, which was astonishing news to me). Sunrise is one of the most life-affirming films I’ve ever seen, and that little gem starts with attempted wife murder.

Cinema really found its stride just before the 1920s, right when Thomas Edison was chasing all the early filmmakers out of New York and into Los Angeles, where the sun always shone and unions hadn’t been invented on the west coast yet, so everything was nice and cheap (if just a touch deadly). Come the 1920s, some smart people thought that what this new Hollywoodland real estate needed was a big old sign in flashing lights –

Yeah, this would do nicely

And films became less of a curious phase, and a full on glamour fest of epic proportions. The actors, once looked over like so many sultanas in a fruit salad, suddenly became the main attraction, as so many of them embodied that elusive American Dream. Rudolph Valentino for example was an Italian immigrant who came over to Hollywood in 1913, worked his way through small parts until Paramount bought his soul (contracts were harsher back in the day) and modelled him as a Great Lover in the amazingly bonkers The Sheik.

                                                 

This guy.

Oooh, The Sheik is fun. It’s about an English Rose who gets kidnapped by Arabs, only to fall in love with their leader Valentino, who boggles his eyes seductively throughout the film and turns out to be quite nice really, underneath all of his foreignness. Valentino epitomised all that was enticing about the new Hollywood system; if you worked hard and looked the part, you too could live in a fabulous mansion and be adored by millions. So what if you died young (like Valentino), had your marriage destroyed (like Mary Pickford) or flamed out so spectacularly your fall from grace is still whispered in rehab clinics across the world (like Clara Bow)? For one moment, you could be the star of a studio, you could be immortalised in lights forever.

Which is why it’s strange that so many films about Hollywood seem to really hate Hollywood. Take, if you would be so kind, The Extra Girl. Sue Graham (Mabel Normand) dreams of becoming an actress and escaping an unwanted marriage, but when she arrives in Hollywood from Pittsburgh (she was the original small town girl living in a lonely world), it turns out her picture, with which she won a competition to get a part in a movie, was switched with another woman’s photo. Her dreams of acting languish as her parents follow her to Hollywood, where they’re promptly robbed blind and Sue nearly shoots a guy. So come to Hollywood, follow your dreams, but don’t think for a moment you can be like us, good Lord no.

If Hollywood was the stuff of dreams, then European silent films, especially German films, was fast becoming the artsy (and indeed fartsy) cinema of the world. Films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Un Chien Andolou (which I’ve written at length about here) and Battleship Potemkin (which you are obliged to mention in every single film essay you write) were instant, weird classics, pushing the boundaries of technology, art and sometimes taste. It wasn’t all good stuff though; one of the absolute classics, the type that critics talk about in hushed tones, The Joyless Street, is a struggle and a half to get through. 

For a start its three hours long without a single joke; nary even a flicker of a smile can be raised to alleviate the constant oppression of the noble German. Each and every single female character becomes a prostitute at some point, all of the male characters are hatefully ignorant and no one has a happy ending, apart from a baby whose parents are killed by a fire which he somehow escapes. I know there’s a place for films like this, but the horrible tragedy is so overwhelming that it becomes a self parody by the time the third lady heads to the local brothel to feed her elderly father.

However, the march of technology meant that despite many people’s misgivings, the talking picture sensation, which first came to screens in 1927 and was a cultural behemoth by 1929, put a nail in silent cinema’s mainstream appeal forever. Looking around, silent cinema seems to be restricted to short animations (the gloriously delightful Paperman being a prime example) and experimental affairs, like Silent Movie and The Artist, the former a homage to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd style slapstick, the latter a homage to really, really good films, told in the way which best suits their stories, sound, colour and 3D be damned.

 

And since this is my blog and my rules, I can end how I like, so here are some production stills of the King of silent Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks, who out-Errol Flynned Errol Flynn before out-Errol Flynning Errol Flynn was even a thing.

                                                                          

Now he did have a face...

A Moment of Innocence

A Moment of Innocence, M2K Productions, 1996, directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Starring Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mirhadi Tayebi, Ali Bakhsi.

Watch the film here: 

As you probably gathered, I graduated with a 2:1 MA in Film and TV Studies last week from Glasgow (pause for applause). Apart from the mountains of debt, amazing people I met and just general awesome experience of doing an arts degree in a place like Glasgow, I picked up a few decent films over the four years of studying them, and I’m going to spend the next few posts talking about my favourite ones, starting with one from my Iranian Cinema course, A Moment of Innocence.  

Iranian Cinema has most in common with high European art film, and if you’ve stayed awake during that last sentence, you’ve done better than me. It’s a difficult world to go into, because although Iranian filmmakers are respected worldwide, censorship laws in Iran (which, simply put, are mental) means that exposure to Western cinema in Iran is severely limited, meaning Iranian cinema evolved into its own style. Another thing to keep in mind is that cinema is a huge deal in Iran; not movies, but proper grown up cinema which would listen to Italian opera and casually refer to Wittgenstein. Everyone in Iran knows who Mohsen Makhmalbaf is and his life story, bringing us round to A Moment of Innocence.

  It may not look it, but this shot will make you cry.

Like, sob for minutes in the most ungainly manner possible.

When he was seventeen, Makhmalbaf and his cousin stabbed a Shah policeman to steal his gun and rob a bank to help fund the revolution. He was released from prison by revolutionaries and became one of Iran’s most successful directors, when one day the policeman finds him, telling Makhmalbaf that the director owes him a job as an actor as payment for the stabbing. The story follows Makhmalbaf, the policeman and the two young actors who play them in the reconstruction of the stabbing as they discover more about each other, the recent history of Iran and what the future holds for the country.

But oooh, it’s so much more than that. Makhmalbaf actually stabbed a man, and the man actually came to see him years later for a job. This basis in reality means that you're constantly looking for truth in the narrative, where real events and people intertwine with fiction and filmmaking. Makhmalbaf plays himself, acting as a voice of God behind the camera and in front of it, giving more weight to the documentary reconstruction interpretation of the film. But Makhmalbaf is not so clumsy as to use mere flashback and narrative constructs to depict the past, no no no. A gentle rush of wind is heard in the periphery and suddenly the young actor is no longer himself, but a seventeen year old Makhmalbaf plotting with his cousin to bring down the Shah, one policeman at a time. It’s an incredible moment, because just for those brief five minutes, it feels like you’re not watching film, but a piece of history.

It’s a complex film, with each scene deconstructing the previous one until it seems that the film falls under its own weight and snaps, the final scene played so intensely straight and for real it’s a chokingly powerful moment. The policeman’s gun is real, Makhmalbaf’s knife is real, the emotions and relationships between the characters are so real that though it’s supposed to be a reconstruction of the stabbing, when the films turns another way, it’s as though history has been rewritten.

This was Makhmalbaf’s intention all along. He has since moved away from his radical ideology and is now friends with the policeman, who is shown to be sympathetic, noble and most of all human. A Moment of Innocence takes an intensely violent period of Iran’s history, but rather than dwell on it and stir up the violent emotions again, the film shows the potential future of Iran as one of peace and friendship. It’s an important message, compounded all the more by the fact the film is still banned in Iran for being anti-revolutionary.

Bloody censorship, eh?