fanboy fever!

A couple of years ago I was re-watching Griffith's Intolerance and there was a close-up of some chickens, and I thought, "Wow. Those chickens are long dead!" So were most of the actors, of course, but something - perhaps it was their total ignorance that they were being immortalized - really hit me emotionally about those chickens scratching away for worms, and really brought home that silent films resurrect a vanished world in a way no other art form really does. Even old recordings (and I eagerly anticipate each new Marston release) aren't quite the same revivifiers; it's not so much that the sound requires some aural adjustment as that the repertoire performed (especially, alas, in the case of the operatic solos) is almost exactly the same repertoire that similar performers would record today, whereas silent films, though an integral part of film history, are also a completely self-contained and finished world of artistic achievement, often at a breath-taking level. A few years after sound became widespread you couldn't make a silent film without its being an hommage, or camp, or some type of artificial throwback of a highly conscious sort. Even Chaplin gave up after Modern Times in 1936.

As a teenager I read Kevin Brownlow's superb history of silent film, The Parade's Gone By, and that's where I first heard about the French director Abel Gance, and I became a fan without having seen a single one of his films. They sounded remarkable, a dazzling blend of the old-fashioned high Romantic style of the nineteenth century melodrama with twentieth-century technological innovations that everyone else took years to rediscover. He made movies that lasted four or five hours yet were famous and influential because of the rapid editing that later became known as "MTV-style". As with many of the mainstream operas and ballets, an otherwise extinct theatrical mode has been preserved because of the style used to tell it.

Or would have been preserved if so many films hadn't been unavailable or lost. I did manage while still in high school to see Napoleon as restored by Brownlow. I should find the poster I bought on the occasion to check the exact date and location. It was a theater in San Francisco, and one valiant organist played the mighty Wurlitzer for the film's entire five hour length, and because it was a special benefit for the Pacific Film Archive, admission cost an unheard-of five dollars, and I sure do feel like an old man talking about how cheap things used to be back in the day. Several years later, when Coppola paid to have the film tour America, I saw it again in Boston, and when the cheering died down at the end of the film, someone official came out on stage to inform us that Gance, by then in his 90s, had died that night in Paris (and thank you IMDB - it must have been November 10, 1981), but he at least had lived long enough to see his great masterpiece restored and celebrated.

It's a remarkable film, and just about the only one I can think of that doesn't work even better at home on a large screen, because the last half hour bursts onto three screens, and when you see a cavalryman's horse gallop from the far left of the farthest left screen right up to the camera and then off to the right of the farthest right screen, you understand physically the basic magic of movies. But the three screens aren't just used for their panoramic possibilities; they also break into triptychs and diptychs and a rhythmic explosion of swift shots and double exposures that pull you into accepting Napoleon as a great force of nature instead of the shabby little dictator he was. And all along Gance has used the amazingly fluid camera of the silent cinema to create an entire and realistic world through clearly artificial means. I love the scene where the Marseillaise is first sung. It's been so long since I've had a chance to see the film that I won't even attempt to describe it, but it ends with the singing crowd dissolving into a shot of Marianne, the female embodiment of the Revolution, joining in and swinging her sword wide, and I swear it wasn't until hours later that I realized that no one had actually been singing; that's how effectively the film and its instrumental accompaniment had created the vivid impression of vocal music.

Anyway, I have been looking for other Gance films for over thirty years now. I came close long ago, again in high school days, when SF MOMA announced a showing (appropriately enough, for a museum then located in the War Memorial building) of Gance's great anti-war film, J'Accuse, parts of which were filmed on the front with actual soldiers. My very wonderful mother (hi, Mom!) drove me there only to find out that the show had been canceled for reasons I don't really remember - maybe the print never arrived, or it wasn't the version they thought they were getting. Gance spent a lot of his post-silent-film life recutting J'Accuse and Napoleon. His was not a style that translated well to the static cameras required by early sound equipment, or to the changed tastes of self-consciously modern times. I have seen some of his sound films, and though he does some interesting things (particularly in his film about Beethoven, where he experiments with the sound to give you a vivid feeling of what it was like for the composer to go deaf), they are generally fairly minor. (Besides the Beethoven film, I've seen one he made about Lucrezia Borgia; there's also a shortened version of Charpentier's Louise, which I have but haven't yet seen.)

So here's my big excitement: I was trolling through upcoming DVD releases on Amazon.com, and saw La Roue, which is the name of another of Gance's great silent films. I'd never even come as close as an announcement to seeing this one. I was frankly kind of stunned it was being released, and thrilled to see it was being released by Flicker Alley, since I have (and have even watched!) several of their sets, and they always do an absolutely superb job. According to their website, "[t]his new restoration with a running time of nearly four and a half hours, accompanied by Robert Israel’s symphonic score, is the fullest presentation of La Roue to reach the public since 1923." Even though I found this through Amazon, I didn't buy it from them, since for some weird reason (they do this with Criterion sets as well - does Amazon just hate cineastes?) they do not offer their usual discounts with Flicker Alley sets. So I bought it directly from Flicker Alley, and if you have any interest at all in silent movies I encourage you to do the same. And they have a discount before the release date! Which is Tuesday, May 6, so don't even think twice. Just start clicking your Paypal account into service. And then, once you are a Gance fanboy as well, you can also get J'Accuse, which Flicker Alley is releasing in September.

Obviously I haven't actually viewed either of these sets (or even these movies) yet, but based on what I know and have experienced with both Gance and Flicker Alley I can guarantee these will be outstanding. And if you feel otherwise, please do not tell me. I would like to respect you in the morning.

The other thing that's sabotaged my "get out of debt" plans this weekend is the latest ArkivMusic weekend special: Bantock's setting for "gargantuan orchestra" and soloists of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat. The weekend sale price will no doubt be gone by the time you read this, but the idea of all those succint quatrains about the evanescence of life and the fleeting quality of beauty being presented in an elaborate three-hour Edwardian extravaganza is too whacked out for me to resist. I fully expect to enjoy this, but I'm not making any guarantees about this one - I can really only promise you one sure thing at a time. After all this high Romantic swirling I think I will watch some Ozu films to bring myself back into balance.