Canned Writing
These are "canned" in that they were written for other purposes. I'm tired tonight and my eyesight ain't so good. But in the meantime these should prove entertaining.
Incidentally, Mrs. Lewis is still spending a lot of time in bed, but is getting stronger and was even able to attend church on Sunday. And we don't have to move until the end of May - likely that will be to another apartment in the same complex. It will be on a lower floor, which will save us money and save my wife having to walk another flight of stairs (as she has to now.)
Remy's Automated Poem
My ten-year-old daughter Remy used an automated program to write the following poem today - sort of "you add a few random words and we'll do the rest" sort of thing.
Dead Flowers: A Strong Sadlib
I crying in the dark. Where am I? Where is my game? chubby. Phantoms make birds in the night. I am alone. I float like robbin willams.
Remy Lewis
The Beginnings of "Modern" Film Making
As some of you may be aware, I am a subscriber to alt.movies.silent and comment to it woth some regularity. Recently there was a panel discussion in LA with Leonard Maltin, Kenneth Turan and some other heavyweight film critics as to "when does modern film-making begin?" On the list, Griffith's "Intolerance" (1916), "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1919) and "Metropolis" were all advanced as candidates. I chimed in:
In 1912 cubist painter Leopold Survage created at least 105 drawings towards
an abstact animation. Survage never photographed the drawings themselves -
they lacked the property of in-betweening, which Survage could not have known
about as the necessities of animation itself was hardly explored at such an early
date.
In the 1960s or 1970s an animated film was made based on 12 of the drawings
as this was the only segment of the project known to survive. Since then 93 more
drawings have turned up, but if anything has been done with them I haven't
heard of it - they are at MOMA I think. It seems like an ideal project for
computerization. If Survage's film had a title I don't know it.
Also in 1912 Italian Futurists Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra published a
manifesto entitled "Abstract Cinema - Chromatic Music" in which they describe five
films, possibly made 1910-1912, which are abstract animations created through directly painting on film from which the gelatin has been soaked off; they describe how the raw stock was cleaned as well. Ginna and Corra only provide titles for two of the films, "The Rainbow" and "The Dance," films described as their most recent in 1912. It would've been impossible to print such films in 1912, and as far as I know no one has ever even looked for them, let alone found them. Corra died in 1976, Ginna in 1982.
So self-concious modernism in film really begins in abstract animation, although it's hard to keep sight of that idea, as all of the earliest abstract animations that can
be viewed today date from the year 1921 - Hans Richter's Rhythm 21, Walter Ruttmann's Opus 1, and Oskar Fischinger's Seeliche Konstruktionen (various films knitted together on the same reel which date from 1921-1923).
In 1914 Russian Futurists Mikhail Larianov and Nathalia Goncharova filmed
their "Drama of the Futurist Cabinet No. 14" on the streets of St. Petersburg. One dim
still has survived from a contemporary magazine, and reviews of this one-reeler are universally negative. It was distributed through regular film channels in Russia and I hope someday it will still manage to turn up. Italian futurists also made photographic subjects, and even features, in the years 1916-1917. A fragment of one of these, Thias (1916), was shown at Pordedone a year or so ago.
As to notice of modernistic elements in films that were not self-conciously
modern, how early do you want to start?
The Yellow Girl: A Decorative Playlet (1916) by Edgar M. Keller is an
American film that has "modernist" sets well before "Caligari."
(Constance Kuriyama wrote:)
> > Most interesting. 1914 is generally regarded as the year
> > expressionism
> > emerged as a movement. _Caligari_ falls right in the middle of the
> > decade when expressionism flourished.
>
(Lokke Heiss wrote):
> So it sounds like somewhere around 1916 is about the time that
> 'Modernist' sensibility has creeped more or less explicitly into
> films. Part of the confusion is the awful term 'Modernism' and
> 'Modernist' which is mixed up with 'modern.' I think it's easy to
> make a case for Chaplin being film's first representative of the
> 'modern' man, but that doesn't make him 'Modernist.'
> And of course none of these ideas are 'modern' in a contemporary
> sense, unless we take the broad definition of modern as opposed to
> say, Medievalism.
>
Uncle Dave wrote:
There are things in Chaplin that I feel, and not everyone would agree to me,
that are reflective of familiarity with "modernist" ideas, such as the
nymphs dream sequence in "Sunnyside." This sequence echoes in my view the modernism found in the 1890s, such as in Maeterlinck, Symonds, Swinburne, Wilde etc., work which seems late-Victorian to us but was still considered pretty "modern" in
1919. Of course Aubrey Beardsley's work is the jumping off point for Nazimova's "Salome" (1922) which many of us feel is still pretty avant-garde.
Also relating to "The Yellow Girl" is the scenes in Coke Ennyday's wild pad
in "The Mystery of the Leaping Fish" (1916). As in "Caligari," the interior is
"crazy" because we are seeing the world through the eyes of someone who in incapable of perceiving realty like the rest of us; in Coke Ennyday's case because he
is a drug addict. In Abel Gance's "La Folie du Docteur Tube" (1915) there is a
similar idea at work - a chemical powder which is developed by a mad doctor
stretches everything out of proportion (via of an anamorphic lens) when it is blown
onto objects and towards people.
Lokke Heiss wrote:
> OK, I didn't come up with these names. Neither did the panel's
> moderator, Kenneth Turan, who explained that the title of the panel
> had been assigned them. He asked the panel if anyone really understood
> what the *&%& the panel title meant, no one really did, the panel
> threw away the question and spent most of the time railing against
> 'modern' culture's dismissal of all things BSW (before Star Wars).
In my view this was irresponsible on the part of the panel; I see this as a very pertinent historical question. Understand it or not, the panel should've made some attempt to talk about where they felt the beginnings of "modern film" might've fallen in the historical chain of events - with Bunuel, Renoir, Welles, Bob Clampett - what? With whom? I would've expected Leonard at least to have an opinion about that. To go in the other direction and gripe about the refusal of younger audiences to accept the pre-1978 universe of movies can only serve two purposes, (A) to older audiences of "preaching to the converted" and (B) to sound like "preaching" to younger
audiences, and not in a good way. Either way Maltin, Turan et al can hardly
avoid sounding like pundits who, like Confucius, are trying to prop up the
values system of a dying order. The problem is not that simple, and deserves
analysis from a variety of viewpoints - educators, studio executives, archivists,
distributors, consumers, screenwriters, sociologists and others, rather than a handful of film critics grinding their old, dull battle axes for a room of people that mostly agree
with them.
Uncle Dave Lewis
The subject here was attempting to evaluate D. W. Griffith's "greatness," i.e. trying to put your finger on what was "great" about his work. There are naturally MANY things that are so, but the modern vilification of "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) makes it harder to pin down, in addition to the knowledge that in terms of camerawork he added nothing to the vocabulary. His finesse was in setups and in the cutting room, aspects of film-making which are "invisible."
I should point out before proceeding that Christopher Snowden pointed out that my argument is flawed as Griffith himself was making mediocre pictures like Lubin's also in 1912 and there isn't enough of Lubin's work in circulation to really evaluate.
I just thought of another attribute of Griffith's "greatness." Last night my
friend Keith and I watched "The Girl and Her Trust" and followed it with a clutch
of four Lubin films.
In the Griffith film, it was easy to tell who all the characters were - this is the heroine,
this is her buddy, these are the two tramps who are the villians, and these are engineers and other railroad workers who are trying to help the heroine. The way each character is framed in the (many!) shots, the manner in which the scenery is arranged so that you can tell where a given character is in relation to another, even if they aren't in the same room, combined with cross-cutting and functional close-ups, help to insure that you always know who everyone in the story is, down to the most ephemeral child extra. Griffith's Biographs are very easy films to "read."
In comparison, the cheaply-made and carelessly directed Lubins are almost
inscrutable.
In "The Bold Bank Robbery" (1904) the well-tailored men partying and
drinking wine while ostensibly planning the robbery are suddenly running
around in outfits looking like ZZ Top and breaking into a "bank" which is no
more than a painted backdrop. At one point they carry a man off to the side
of the road, and you don't know if he's unconcious or dead, or even who he
is. Later this man is found by a couple wandering by, and the next thing you
know cops are all over the bandits, swinging batons and beating the crap out
of them. Lubin didn't even give us time to wonder if they might not be
caught. Whereas "A Girl and Her Trust" is packed with suspense - the ending
of the paper print is lacking, so we never find out what happened, but we
know that there had to be resolution.
In the Lubin films such as "An Unexpected Guest" (1909) it's hard to know
whether the young lady courting the main male character in early scenes is
the same one shown dying in a hospital later. Scenes are packed with useless
extras with nothing to do. Foregrounding of action seems to elude their
cameramen. There is one scene which is a brief closeup of the father of the
main character trimming a paragraph from the bottom of a letter, and this
does help to explain why the first woman in the story is unceremoniously
"dumped" by the male protagonist. But it is one closeup in a whole reel of
action, and other attempts to clarify the story through camerawork are
totally lacking. Actors gesticulate wildly out of control, their arms
flailing outward, so we can't tell what they are supposed to be "saying" to
one another.
Much is made of credit given to Griffith for cinematic innovations which
were obviously known to others, even guys like Pop Lubin, before him. But
with Griffith everything which appears on the screen is put there in service
to the storyline. The cutting, closeups, setups, gestures, facial
expressions and other visual cues help to advance the story and nothing
more. I really don't know of any other cinematic artist who was capable of
this kind of focused concentration of onscreen action in storytelling before
Griffith, not even Georges Melies.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com