Sight and Sound (2002) Greatest Films Club - Page 90

I think you just need to accept that that was the acting style of the day. This was completely acceptable at the time the films were made with complete approval of the directors who made the films. You're closing yourself off to a lot of great films out of hand. (though knowing you, you'd hate 'em anyway )

George, did you get Les Vampires from Netflix? Because they finally removed it from my queue and sent me a message saying they don't carry the film anymore.

BD is satirical in the vein of Animal Farm, not endorsing communism. Notice that once Dallesandro is the communist leader, he is just as violent and bloodthirsty as a healthy Dracula would be. One form of tyranny is simply replaced by another. The Criterion liner note essay also speaks of it as being a comedy/parody/satire.

274 F For Fake

A movie that has been called an essay, a documentary, and argued as neither, F For Fake is ostensibly about fakery in the art world concentrating on a famous art forger and a writer who produced a fake biography of Howard Hughes. Welles meanders to other topics as well, but the true intent is an exercise in moviemaking magic and a commentary on director as magician/fake.

At first glance one may find little relevancy in 30 year old stories about forgery that take place in a strata of society foreign to most of us. Aside from the obvious thematic extension to how these stories pertain to our definition of art and the purpose served by "experts", neither did I. The true relevancy of F For Fake is what it says about Orson Welles, the artist/faker.

In exploring these other views of art, it explores Welles views of art. In telling these other stories, it presents Welles as the grand storyteller. Obliquely it furnishes us with a veiled self-commentary on Welles' life and career. It is one of the few films Welles made that contains references to his other films. It's attack on the duplicity and redundancy of art experts can easily be extended to film critics. It prominently features Welles' mistress at that time Oja Kodar. And finally features a wonderful trestise on the permanence and impermanence of great art and how art needs no definitions.

From a technical standpoint, the film is brilliantly edited with incredibly intricate intercutting. The film took an entire year to edit with 3 bays operating at the same time. It has a Godardian habit of occasional winks at the audience and jokes at our expense. For all its heady artistic themes, it also possesses a healthy dose of wit and humor. At its heart it is in some ways a coda to the career of one of America's finest artists. A-

I accept and understand it's the acting style of the day. But for action/drama films, that style just doesn't work for me. I don't think I'm closing myself off from great films at all. I watch them, and I don't like them, so I don't watch them again. Basically, by my definition, they're not great films, cause I have no desire to see them again. Now, comedies (especially Chaplin's) work fine as silents. And it certainly is possible to make a non-comedy silent that works. For example, Metropolis. But it does require adopting an unusual acting style for the day. But Metropolis could do it, Chaplin could do it in the Kid, so it's certainly not unheard of.

In a similar vein, cheesy B science fiction from the 50s and 60s doesn't work for me either. Lost in Space was my favorite tv show when I was four. I know this cause I sprained my ankle when I was four, and vehemently fought going to the hospital cause I was going to miss it. But I'm not four anymore, and being older, and seeing sci-fi from 2001 to Star Wars to Dark City, Lost in Space doesn't work for me anymore. Neither does Fantastic Planet which is quite similar.

No, I don't belong to Netflix. I use an alternative called Greencine, which is where I got it from.

Oh well, so you're hopeless then.

Actually as far as Fairbanks stuff goes, the couple I've seen haven't really done a whole lot for me though I haven't seen The Gaucho.

I thought Metropolis had pretty similar acting to a lot of the dramas of the day, Sunrise, The Crowd, etc. The story of Metropolis is pure melodrama with the sci-fi trappings.

I do agree with you on cheezy 50-60's sci-fi. Other than Thing From Another World and Godzilla movies, it doesn't work for me either, not that I've seen that much of it because in general, it doesn't interest me

I'm familiar with Greencine, just a longtime Netflix user that hasn't seen a reason to switch.

To me the three silent dramas that come to mind are:

Sunrise
Metropolis
Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari

All three could be picked on for this and that. But each offers much and are terrific and influential films.

As I said, The Gaucho is a lot of fun - very much in the vein of Indiana Jones.

I'd rank the Fairbanks films I've seen like this:

The Gaucho
The Iron Mask
The Three Musketeers
Don Q - Son of Zorro
The Mark of Zorro
The Thief of Bagdad
Robin Hood
The Black Pirate

I haven't seen Les Vampires, but I have seen Judex, from the same director, Louis Feuillade. Its another serial and pretty entertaining despite its five hour-plus length. It is on DVD so check it out.

When it comes to great silent dramas, everyone needs to check out The Big Parade whenever it comes to DVD, which is rumored to be sometime later this year. According to IMDB--although this info might be a little sketchy no matter who cites it--The Big Parade was the highest grossing film of the silent era. It's really brilliant, and I can't wait to get a chance to see it again in a nice restored form.

Ah, the two I've seen are Thief of Bagdad and The Black Pirate.

Outstanding Silent Dramas other than those already mentioned: The Last Laugh, Tabu, Herr Tartuffe, Faust, The Wind, The Crowd, Broken Blossoms, Intolerance, The Story Of Floating Weeds, Passing Fancy, A Page of Madness (though I wouldn't classify it as drama, but since you mentioned Caligari, I'll stick it in), Blackmail

I also wouldn't place the Russian films in this category, though I suppose one could. IMO the best of these are Strike!, The Man With A Movie Camera, and Earth.

Others Worth Seeing: The Lodger, Cabiria, Destiny, Orphans of the Storm.

I'm going to be seeing some more fairly soon. I have the Von Stroheim's in my queue around 10-12 and 5 Russian discs with 7-9 films in the 20's.

And on the S&S front I should be receiving Love Me Tonight tomorrow, plus taping the 4 Bunuel's I haven't seen, which I will try to watch as quickly as possible. I may just hit 300 before the year is out.

Magnificent Ambersons - 1/2
TCM cablecast
05/04/2005


I enjoyed this film quite a lot. There is a lot to like here but the pace seems a bit too fast for the gravitas the film displays and carries about. I'd like to see this again, but it's a remarkably well done film. My only dislike is that I seriously wanted to smack the adult George, alot, quite often, I'm much more interested in the other characters than in his whiny effect on their story.

I've seen those, plus Robin Hood. I will of course add The Gaucho, etc. to my to see-list, though it's at 735 and counting, so it could be a while before I get round to that film.

As far as others which people have mentioned, I've seen:

Sunrise
The Big Parade
The Wind
The Crowd
Broken Blossoms
Intolerance
Blackmail
The Man with a Movie Camera
Earth
The Lodger
Cabiria

These range in my feelings for them, but except for Blackmail (which I agree is a great film, but don't think qualifies as a silent), I have zero desire to see any of them again. Some suffer from the 'acting' problem, others don't, but whether it's acting, or story, or direction or whatever, they just don't work for me.

Now, that can't be blamed entirely on being silent, after all there are thousands of 'talkies' that I don't ever want to see again either.

I thought Robin Hood and The Thief of Bagdad were both longer than they needed to be, especially if one isn't acclimated to silents. The Black Pirate was just routine, mainly of interest for its being in color.

I'll also recommend the Mad Love DVD, featuring three pre-1920s shorts by Russian film pioneer Evgenii Bauer. There are fascinating both on a technical and thematic level.

Mad Love is on my list

Blackmail isn't silent? I remember it that way, maybe I didn't turn my receiver on.

My Netflix queue stays perpetually around 200. Unless I bump something up it can be well over a year before I see something I add at the bottom.

What a day to be alive, there's NEW BUNUEL TONIGHT, NEW BUNUEL TONIGHT....sing it with me..NEW BUNUEL TONIGHT

Brook,

Thanks for the Brunuel reminder.

There are two versions of Blackmail, a silent and a talkie version.

In McGilligan's book on Alfred Hitchcock:



I've only seen the sound version (on DVD).

Nice list of silent dramas Brook. And as you had an Ozu, I would most certainly place I was born, but... on a par with the ones you mentioned.

I don't necessarily expect that early Ozu (or late for that matter) is George's cup of tea, but those films don't contain the type of acting to which George objects

I wasn't aware of there being multiple versions of Blackmail. It was being filmed as a silent, and then they decided to turn it into a talkie. The only version I've ever seen begins with a long silent passage, and then Hitchcock surprises his audience at the time by introducing sound for the rest of the film.

If there's a truly silent version, with intertitles and no sound, then I haven't seen it, and can't speak to it, though I suspect I'd like it. But I'm not sure if it was ever released as a silent, since the London papers at the time of it's original release include reviews such as "perhaps the most intelligent mixutre of sound and silence we have yet seen" and "the best talking film yet - and British".

I've only seen one Ozu (Tokyo Story), and was impressed by the acting. As a matter of fact, that's one of those cases of Negative Gestalt*, where every aspect impressed me, but the overall film just didn't invoke in me a desire to rewatch, though I enjoyed the one-time viewing.

* - where the whole is less than the sum of it's parts.

Actually I had 2 Ozu's, Passing Fancy being the 2nd. I haven't seen I Was Born, But... or it would likely have been on my list. I haven't seen Greed or Napoleon either, so that is why they don't appear.

Guess my memory is not so good. I saw the DVD, so I must have been watching the part silent, part talkie version.

Napoleon is pretty damn amazing. There are like 10,000 different versions of it, and I saw a theatrical cut last year that I think was a little under 5 hours long, the Coppola-supervised restoration from the early '80s. Some really brilliant scenes, and a lot of stunning things for an 80-year old movie.

Seen - L’Eclisse (1962)


305 down
38 to go

Those are the first 3 I think of too when talking great films, great acting. I own them all and have already watched them all more than once.

At least I'm not the only one who saw BfDrac and said "come on man".


Okay, I've been grinding out stuff I had on DVD and Tivo so here is a big dump of stuff. I'll start with the worst one..

Satyricon
Man, talk about "let's just go for weird" that George hates, this is one I would list in that category. I understand that the story is incomplete too and that Fellini was in some ways paying tribute to that. BUT, if you already have a partial story and then you layer that in just full-on Fellini oddities to the extreme, then you have a film that is just annoyingly incomprehensible.

It was beautiful enough, creative enough, to keep me getting invested, but then FF would just go so out there that I pulled out and became annoyed again.

I've seen weird done much better than this, even if you could cite hundreds of great shots in the film. Get this off the S&S IMO.


A Touch of Zen
Loved the first 3/4ths, but then the last part felt very tacked on, like a 2nd story just added in (and maybe it was). Obviously you see a precursor to films like Crouching Tiger (which I realize is 100th generation in the line) and I see why it would make a list just for that. It's a pretty strong film, though with the wire work you now see I can imagine this film redone even better (less "hiding" action with edits required).

Pretty solid. Okay with it on the list.


A Brief Encounter
A solid Lean piece but miles behind his greater works on the list. I thought it was much more bland than even Great Expectations, and forget LoA or Kwai. Its a nice enough story, though clearly play adapted in its presentation. In fact its primary strength is the story itself and I found the telling of it here to be only average. This could have been cranked out by the H'wood studio factory just as well.

Off the list, this is good but not great.


M. Hulot's Holiday
At times this was annoyingly disjointed too which kept me out of the joke I think. There are lots of good gags in the film and I got some laughs out of it, but sometimes I wasn't quite sure what was going on. Overall it felt like a precurser to a Benny Hill segment on vacations with all the sub-characters and various gags and mostly silent jokes.

I can see its value in that way and did laugh with it often enough to enjoy it. Not a big repeat viewer for me, but I wouldn't kick it off the S&S either.


And two by a guy I'm coming around on...
Los Olvidados
This is a lot less traditional Bunuel because its narrative is so much clearer. It's a powerful story about ghetto life for children much in the same vein as City of God or The 400 Blows, and perhaps a harsher look than those films. The nuances of situations were outstanding and it was nice to see them not being drowned out by Bunuel's more traditional surrealistic habits.

The Exterminating Angel
But even his surrealism is growing on me. I had to research this one after seeing it to try and find out what some of the meanings were in the film that I was missing. What I found was that maybe some of the odder aspects of Bunuel's work aren't really all that odd after all. Repeated scenes at the start of the party turn out to be based on real things Bunuel saw happen at these social functions (people introducing themselves again by mistake, etc), functions that he found to be never ending.

Even the dropped ice sculpture gag was something that he saw happen.

So maybe what is really there is a lot simpler than the oddness of his surrealistic exaggerations make things out to be. If anything it could be that once you identify his main themes he actually becomes redundant and heavy-handed rather than obscure and difficult.

In the meantime he's presenting a pretty fun satire of the upper/ruling classes that is clever and inventive. There is a certain logic to the utter lack of logic which is true in several other of his films, with the obvious strongest connection between Discreet Charm...


And not on the S&S but one I took the time to check out, his short film
Simon of the Desert
More religion satire, often very funny, sometimes hard to tell if Simon is a metaphor for general Judeo-Christian beliefs. I wondered if the changing of the pedistal was the transfer to belief in the new testament, for example. I assumed at the end it was nuke destruction that was wiping out humanity and religion/Simon.

Again, a fun film that can be followed even if its not always clear.



This puts me at 220 seen, 124 to go if the 344 total entry count is correct. Now to go look up who put Satyricon on the list.

Got to see the fantastic
F for Fake
Remarkably interesting film by Welles, proving just how engaging a story-teller he is. Great both on the screen and behind the camera/editing, he essentially has crafted real art out of a rather bland story followed by an unlikely coincidence. The fact that he was able to so cleverly adjust on the fly like this and tie it all together with his own career under one overall theme about reality and forgery is what gives us reason to call him a genius.

This is just the excuse i need to rent some movies

Did i miss it, or is Hidden Fortress not in the list??

The Hidden Fortress is on the list (#226).

Fanny & Alexander

The highest ranking of my unseen films. Middle of the road Bergman, an OK film, but not anything I'd want to watch again. Nowhere near the masterpiece of The Seventh Seal, and nowhere near the piece of shit that is Cries & Whispers.

208 down
145 left

caught F For Fake

306 down

37 left

scratch off another

The Phantom of Liberty

307 down

36 left

Man, I wish I could go at Jim's pace.

Stray Dog
My last Kuro on the list, though I rented Kagemusha just to check it out, so I still have another to view technically. Anyway, its a great crime procedural though not quite as strong as High and Low. Even still its yet another in a giant list of great films by one of the best ever.

He has to be right there with guys like Hitch, Ford...err, that might be the end. Kubrick if he made a couple more films, maybe Scorsese or Spielberg or Wilder.


122 left

And Stray Dog has a scene right out of Hitchcock when Shimura goes to the hotel to find the killer and the audience finds out he's there before Shimura does. I prefer it to High And Low. It's a tighter, more energetic film and achieve's an intimacy with its characters that High and Low's large cast and two-prong structure doesn't allow for.

I've fallen way behind again so I'll catch up with just some brief comments rather than the time-consuming longer reviews I prefer to do for S&S films.

275 Love Me Tonight

Isn't it romantic?
Soon I will have found some girl that I adore.
Isn't it romantic?
While I sit around my love can scrub the floor.
She'll kiss me every hour or she'll get the sack
and when I take a shower she can scrub my back.
Isn't it romantic?
On a moonlight night she'll cook me onion soup.
Kiddies are romantic
and if we don't fight we soon will have a troupe.
We'll help the population,
it's a duty that we owe to dear old France.
Isn't it romance?

With the wonderful music and lyrics of Rodgers and Hart, the boundless energy of Maurice Chevalier, and the innovative techniques of director Rouben Mamoulian, Love Me Tonight is a charming comic confection. A tailor (Chevalier) ends up impersonating a nobleman in an effort to get some money he is owed, falls in love with a princess (Jeanette McDonald).

The story may seem a trifle, but under Mamoulian's direction it comes alive. From the opening scene of Paris coming alive to a collage of isolated sounds which must have been astounding for a 1932 audience, to his way of staging musical numbers that link characters' emotions across distances, and his use of the unexpected to great comic effect, it is obvious the film was made with skill and care. Aside from the charms of Chevalier, the film is filled with small comic supporting roles that make watching the film a pure pleasure.

Love Me Tonight is ripe for rediscovery and should take its place among the great American musical classics. A

276 The Phantom Of Liberty

Starting from the audacious premise of taking a story, telling it to the point just before it becomes interesting, and then switching to another, less intersting story, and then repeating this practice over and over, The Phantom of Liberty is a series of linked comic sketches; each with its own set of actors and characters. Bunel is at it again, skewering the church, social convention, sexual mores, commercialism, all his career themes.

Whether it is monks playing poker with saint medals and relics, a family sitting on toilets and discussing their day, or a child who is thought to be lost yet remains in the same room as those looking for her, Bunuel brings a playful nudge and a sarcastic bite to each scene. While some episodes are funnier than others, the film's wit and Bunuel's desire to push filmic storytelling in new directions make The Phantom Of Liberty a film well worth experiencing. A-

Boy, your PotLib review doesn't exactly have me excited about it. Just when I'm getting into him I'm not sure if I need more of his most extreme version. Of course I have Un Chien still to go, but its also much shorter.


I still prefer High and Low, but your points are solid. It does suffer from being 2 distinct acts. I think I like the premise of each act more though. The first part has that great moral dilemma and the 2nd part is a very tight procedural, much more focused on that aspect than a character arc.

Stray Dog is obviously about a green cop becoming a vet and learning the ropes, so it drifts from the procedural aspect at times to focus on the character growth. There's nothing wrong with that, just personal taste. Each film is rock solid. Kuro was simply amazing, more than perhaps even his rep today.

Think though about how Hitch feared cops and worked on police mistakes and the process of misunderstanding in contrast to Kurosawa's obvious interest in the details of police procedure (and even judicial procedure when you consider a film like Rashomon). Just an interesting contrast of viewpoints.

Great Expectations
06/06/2005
35mm

Got a chance to catch this screening in 35mm, and I must say the film works even better on the big screen, in fact I think I may prefer it now to Oliver Twist, though I'd need to see that on the big screen to compare. Outstanding film!

Kagemusha

It's not on the S&S list, but I watched it anyway because it's a Kurosawa.

Excellent although not quite on par with five or six other Kurosawas.

Dome, I'll be watching it tomorrow hopefully, right after Phantom of Liberty.

Just watched Un Chien Andolou
Wow. Fun. And I thought Age d'Or was annoying. Who knew.

Okay, I respect the experimental aspects and its true that film not only needn't be all narrative, but shouldn't be either. Still, hard-core surrealism nonsense like this really needs some crib notes to go with it. I could make sense of some things and saw images that Luis would continue to return to throughout his career, but I just can't imagine what a 1929 audience thought after seeing this.

At least it was only 16+ minutes. I remain torn on my feelings about Bunuel.