What I Watched: February 2024

Before January ended I started re-watching Disc 1 of Edison: The Invention of the Movies, a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art & the Library of Congress issued by Kino sometime in (I think) the early 2000s, but going through the disc took me into February; the films are short but there are quite a few of them. The first disc goes from 1889 to 1903. Sometimes people tell me they're watching "an old movie" & it turns out to be from 1964 or suchlike. I laugh! "An old movie" means pre-1915.

This is a wonderful collection. There's always a fascination in old movies in seeing not just a vanished world but a vanished way of looking at the world. The commentators on this set are very useful in this regard, pointing out, for example, that Edison had a keen eye for what would sell & tended to promote basically sex & violence (contrasted with the Lumière Brothers in France, who were more likely to show domestic family scenes, rather than belly-dancers, or factory workers rather than boxers). Sometimes you need the context pointed out to realize what's really going on: there's one film showing a Black woman washing a Black child. I assumed this was one of those "actualities", a scene from daily life. It turns out that it's actually a comedy film, as no matter how much she washes that baby . . . he's still going to be Black! Horrifying, yet revealing. This is not the only such film; there's another "comedy" short showing an "old maid" (played by a man in drag; it was his vaudeville specialty) having her picture taken, only she's so homely (hence her old-maid status!) that the camera cracks. Comedy gold, obviously. There's a current fad now for "honoring the ancestors" & whenever someone trots out that number I always think of things like these films.

Some of these films take on a different resonance for us, in our very different era: there's the famous film with the clinical-sounding title Dickson Experimental Sound Film, one of the first (possibly the first) attempt to synchronize sound with image. A man plays a tune on a violin while two other men slowly dance around him. We tend to see this as a homoerotic image, though it wasn't necessarily intended as or perceived as such in its own time. It is rather mesmerizing & dreamlike, either way, & of course you can put your own interpretation on what is essentially an unmediated image.

These films are very old & summon up a vanished time, but also can reverberate in surprisingly contemporary ways. There are quite a few shots of "serpentine dances" & Eugene Sandow, posing in skimpy briefs, ripples his muscles at us aesthetically; you can see surprisingly similar dance-based short films on Instagram & TikTok; & there's a minor industry on those platforms of young men acting as Fitness Influencers who are basically doing what Sandow did, & in the way he did it (he sold fitness instruction books the way our contemporaries sell on-line personal training).

There are a number of famous films on this disc, including The Great Train Robbery, but for me the somewhat disturbing highlight is one of the most memorable films I've ever seen, Electrocuting an Elephant from 1903. I first saw it decades ago, when I lived in Boston, in a program at the Museum of Fine Arts. I have no idea what the theme of the program was & I can't remember anything else that was on it. I'm not sure I realized this particular short was from Edison & my recollection is that it was played in ahistorical silence. But there was definitely a change in the atmosphere of the auditorium as the film unrolled in its misty shades of oneiric grays. An elephant, wearing some sort of harness, is walked over to a stand. After a moment, smoke starts to curl up from the bottom of her feet. Slowly, slowly, she lists to the left & then falls on her side. She twitches slightly. A man walks in front of her, between us & the camera; the closeness of his torso is unexpected in a film this early, & almost is like an iris-wipe of the screen.

It's all slow & silent & gray, like a nightmare image that you can't shake even in the brightest hours of your waking day. I was amazed to rediscover it when I first watched this set. It turns out Topsy was an elephant who had killed people: one (according to Wikipedia) was a drunken spectator who burnt her trunk with a lit cigar; according to the notes on the set, he was an employee of the circus who fed her a lit cigarette, & in either case I say he got what he deserved, but as is sadly the usual case, the poor animal had to suffer for the stupidity of people. It was filmed for commercial exploitation but is an unsettling piece of found poetry. Rest in power, Topsy.

Then I watched the Criterion DVD of King of Jazz from 1930. I bought it when I was transitioning from DVD to Blu-Ray, & I wish I had bought the Blu-Ray, but oh well. This is an early Technicolor film, using their two-strip method, so it is strong (very strong) on red & green & not so much on blue. The colors are used deliberately; the whole thing is very designed in a fascinating way. The titular king is Paul Whiteman, best remembered now for commissioning & premiering Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, but at the time a general leader in popular music, including his version of jazz. Sadly but typically, the Black contributions to jazz (which of course means most of jazz) are overlooked here. Nonetheless it's a very enjoyable film; the musical numbers are interspersed with little pre-Code comedy bits which, almost surprisingly, are still pretty snappy. This is a Criterion release so of course there are lots of fascinating ancillary materials. There were attempts to come up with a narrative, but the chubby bald Whiteman was too unlikely as a romantic lead (on film, at least; I make no judgments about how he would succeed in life) so we have just a series of numbers, a random succession of scenes which holds up better than most narratives would. There is an overriding "here's Paul Whiteman's scrapbook" idea which loosely, very loosely, links things together. There are early sound cartoons interpolated in (including offensive racial stereotypes of "African natives"). Revealing period limitations aside, quite an enjoyable film.

Next up was The Midnight Girl from 1925. Describing the plot, which is already slipping from my memory, would make it sound more fun than it actually was: rival singers, tempestuous divas, a philandering father (played by a goateed & alarmingly sexy Bela Lugosi) & a simp son both in love with the same woman, a refugee from the dread Bolsheviks who has to work as a nightclub singer. . . . I couldn't help thinking that a director other than Wildred Noy (whom I'd never heard of, apparently for good reason) might have made something more striking out of all this. (Where is Louis Feuillade when you need him?) It all gets tied up in an improbably happy ending, with marital love & fidelity established even among the unlikeliest pairs. How disappointing.

That was followed by Something for Everyone, the feature-film directorial debut of Hal Prince, starring Michael York & Angela Lansbury. I had been curious about this film for a long time, maybe only because I remembered the summary by (I assume) Pauline Kael back in the day, in the New Yorker movie listings: "Nothing much for anyone, really. . . ." It turns out I don't disagree. York plays an outsider who comes to a small town ruled socially by an impoverished aristocrat (Lansbury). He proceeds to insinuate himself into the household's graces, mostly through seduction & murder, & as with The Midnight Girl, that makes the film sound more fun than it actually is. It's all weirdly unfocused: except for Lansbury, the aristocrats are dead-minded & conventional (&, improbably, opposed to any Nazis still lingering in the countryside) but we also seem meant to admire them, or maybe just her. There is a nouveau-riche couple with a marriageable daughter who are screeching social-climbing horrors. Why caricature them like that unless you're siding with the so-called aristocracy, but why side with the aristocracy? What do I care if they get to move back into their traditional home, a fancy castle? It's called a black comedy, but it doesn't cut very deep, & doesn't seem very black or very comic. The film seems too pleased with its own sense of daring, though it's not really shocking at all. In fairness, it probably was more daring in 1970, when it was released, as there is a fairly sympathetic portrayal of an affair between York & the Countess's son. (York is also sleeping with a number of others, including the daughter of the nouveau riche couple, so, you know, complications ensue.) I was reminded vaguely of Pasolini's Teorema, also about a handsome stranger who seduces & upsets a household, but I saw that film so many years ago that I can't make a more specific comparison. Time to re-watch that, I  guess.

Next up was Robert Altman's A Wedding, one of my legacy Netflix films. Netflix told us just to keep whatever discs we had when they shut down their disc rental service. They also said they might send us up to 10 discs from our queue once the service ended; presumably they found other ways to get rid of their inventory, as I never received any additional discs. May I just say I was increasingly annoyed with them as the end approached? They made a decision based purely on greed (disc rental is still a viable business, just not as profitable as it once was; there was an implication that only clueless old people were still renting discs, but actually it was mostly movie fans who wanted a more diverse selection than streaming gives you). But they kept marketing "Hey, didn't we have some great times?" It's like someone breaking up with you who insists on getting together to talk about how great things used to be. And . . . you're breaking up with me, just go away!

Anyway. I had not seen Altman's film since its release in 1978. I think it suffered a bit at the time from comparisons to its great predecessor, Nashville. This movie also involves numerous story lines that weave in & out, but it's smaller in scope & implication than Nashville. Nonetheless it's a wonderful film, & I even managed to watch it all in one night. Lillian Gish makes one of her last film appearances, as a family matriarch who dies quietly upstairs while the family is at the church. She hovers beatifically over the film, or such was my recollection; it turns out, on a re-viewing, that her character is more ambiguous than I had remembered. She is a gracious old lady, but also, in her gentle way, sternly controlling & hypocritically attentive to outward proprieties; early on, she has an affectionate scene with one of the family's Black employees, in which she gently tells him that during the wedding reception he should remain distant with her daughter – the one whom, as she knows, he's having an affair with; she also let another daughter marry an Italian man on the condition that his family never come to the house. There are lots of storylines that are only hinted at, or given us by implication. Things are unexpected. There is a fiery car crash (which I had completely forgotten), but the victims are not who we thought they were. There is a scene in which a gay classmate is trying to sober up the groom by hauling him into the shower; it looks like a seduction, but it's not. And the gay classmate is wearing the standard baggy white boxer shorts, while the straight groom is wearing colored briefs of a type that were, at the time, not usual with straight men. The film is full of unexpected twists like that, even in the details. Carol Burnett has a major role as the mother of the bride, a woman in a dead-end marriage; she brings to it her Chaplinesque depth of pathos.

Next up was The Silent Enemy, a late (1930) silent film, filmed in Canada, telling a story of the Ojibwe people before Europeans arrived on this continent. The film, directed by HP Carver & produced by W Douglas Burden & William C Chanler, inspired by Merian Cooper's Chang, is clearly a labor of love, an attempt to tell a native story in an authentic & respectful way. The set carefully notes, though, that it is a product of its time & needs to be taken as such; the implication that the Indian nations are vanishing is one assumption that no longer holds. And though all the performers are indigenous peoples, they are not all of the Ojibwe nation (the distinguished-looking man who plays the Chief, who has a brief spoken prologue in an otherwise silent film, is Sioux), & the driving forces behind the camera are white. I had seen the film years ago, but I don't remember its being as beautiful to look at as it is in the Flicker Alley blu-ray, which is what I watched this time. Scene after scene is just gorgeous; you could print & frame many of the shots (the cinematography is by Marcel Le Picard). The scenes of animals in the wild are stunning. The story is fairly standard: there is an elderly Chief, with an attractive daughter, & there are two main rivals for both her affection & leadership in the community: a studly hunter & a nefarious medicine man (the villain in these tales is so often the medicine man, or the high priest, or some similar religious functionary). Winter is coming & the group must deal with imminent starvation (the "silent enemy" of the title). But you don't really watch this for the storyline; it's more about the native performers (rather than the characters they're playing), & for the stunning images. FlickerAlley, as usual, did a beautiful job with the set; there are two different musical scores, including a new one from the Monte Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, & a commentary track in the form of a recorded conversation between the great Kevin Brownlow & W Douglas Burden about the making of the film.

Now that Netflix has abandoned film lovers, I have turned to my local library as a source of movie rentals, & I ended the month watching Yellow Submarine, the 1968 animated feature starring the Beatles & some of their songs. I had seen it many, many years ago on TV. The animation is striking, with vivid use of color, & those colors are absolutely glowing. The look is very reminiscent of its time (the iconic year 1968, to be exact) but also manages to look still fresh rather than dated. The general attitude is also of the period, with a sort of optimism & cheer (All you need is love!) that can leave us, in our time, feeling either wistful or incredulous. The storyline is piffle, but it's not really about the story, which is mostly an excuse for striking visuals & the songs. I'm an odd age for the Beatles; I was too young to be a fan at the time, so I came to them in later, in bits & pieces (I would still say I am far from a maven of their music, though I like it). The film does a striking segment featuring my favorite song by them, Eleanor Rigby, which I've been singing to myself, & sometimes out loud, for days now. \Ah, look at all the lonely people. . . .