For my money, the best of the early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz. Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.
The result, Lucanus Cervus, was a sensation and Starewicz became a full-time director. In 1912 he made his best film, The Cameraman's Revenge, in which an adulterous insect is captured on film by her cuckolded husband then invited with her unwitting lover to the film's premiere at the local cinema:
Starewicz was decorated by the czar and won the Gold Medal at an international film festival in Milan in 1914, but fled Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. He continued to make films for the rest of his life, dying in 1965 while working on the film Like Dog and Cat.
ACTRESS winner: Dorothy Bernard (The Girl And Her Trust) nominees: Lillian Gish (The Unseen Enemy and The Musketeers Of Pig Alley); Mary Pickford (The New York Hat); Ynez Seabury (The Sunbeam)
SCREENPLAY winner:Dorothy G. Shore (The Land Beyond The Sunset) nominees: D.W. Griffith and Anita Loos (The Musketeers Of Pig Alley); Wladyslaw Starewicz (Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge)
SPECIAL AWARDS G.W. "Billy" Bitzer (Cinematography) (The Musketeers Of Pig Alley)
It's a busy day here at the Monkeyhouse—Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary, the dog is celebrating her fourth anniversary of being with us, and silent film comedian Max Linder is celebrating his birthday! Who was Max Linder? Why, the first international film superstar, that's who. If you've seen Martin Scorsese's recent movie Hugo, perhaps you spotted a couple of Max Linder posters in the background.
Anyway, in Max's honor, I've stitched together excerpts from three separate essays about silent film comedy into a single post focusing on his life and films.
The first international movie star was Max Linder, a French comedian not just in the style of Charlie Chaplin but the guy Chaplin was often imitating early in his career, a fact Chaplin himself freely acknowledged. Born to a family of vintners in the Bordeaux region of France, Gabriel-Maximilien Leuvielle joined a troupe of actors touring France. In Paris, he discovered motion pictures and signed with Pathé in 1905, changing his name at the same time. He made over two hundred movies in his career, most as the recurring character "Max," an upper class roué who is a bit baffled by practical matters.
Linder wrote and directed his own films and in the years before World War I, he was the biggest star in Europe.
Unlike most of the comics of this era, Linder largely eschewed the slapstick style of Mack Sennett's Keystone comedies in favor of gesture and reaction; and as film historian David Thomson points out, "there was little of the sentimentality that American comedians resorted to."
Thanks to the close-up, a storytelling device unique to film, an actor no longer had to play to the back row of the theater—the camera brought the back row to him. Whether intuitively or by design, Linder realized the broad gestures and inane dialogue of music hall comedy were largely devices for indicating to an audience what to pay attention to as the actors set up a gag. On film, simply lifting an eyebrow would suffice.
While situational comedy had been around since the theater of ancient Greece, until film allowed for recognizable settings, and more importantly, recognizable characters with recognizable needs and desires, film comedy was limited to the most simplistic gags. With a reel of film growing longer—around ten minutes rather than the 45-seconds of the Lumière brothers' standard offering—it became possible for filmmakers to put fully-realized characters and situations on the screen, and so far as I can tell, Linder's "Max" was the first three-dimensional character in the history of movie comedy. You can imagine "Max" existing before the cameras started rolling, continuing to exist after they stopped, and in between, behaving on screen the way a real person would, albeit at the heightened levels required of farce comedy.
With the elbow room to portray an actual character, Linder could derive laughs from the juxtaposition of this character—the dapper aristocrat—and the chaos he created around it, a welcome breakthrough, believe me, if you've suffered through more than a hundred comedy shorts featuring mischievous boys and one-note gags.
Not to mention he was just better at it than anybody else, until Charlie Chaplin came along in 1914 to raise the bar.
Because, as I mentioned before, Linder worked during a time when it was cheaper to buy a camera and steal an idea than to pay the rental fee on the original film, it's easy to compare and contrast the way different filmmakers handled the same comic idea—a laboratory experiment, if you will, in what is and isn't funny.
For example, one of the favorite props used to generate laughs in turn-of-the-century comedies was glue—apparently, a hundred years ago pots of the stuff just sat around waiting for people to fall in it. Alice Guy's La glu (The Glue) (1907) is typical of the era: a mischievous boy brushes glue on various surfaces—a staircase, a bicycle seat—much to the consternation of various adults. Basically a one-joke pony repeated over and over again to no great effect.
Linder, on the other hand, in the one-reeler Max ne se mariera pas (Max Is Stuck Up) (1910), built on the idea the way a classic comedian would. On his way to his fiancee's for dinner, Max stops at a bakery to conduct a little routine business and accidentally gets stuck to a sheet of flypaper. What begins as a minor inconvenience, shrugged off with bonhomie and good humor, becomes a minor annoyance, then becomes a potential source of embarrassment when he arrives for dinner only to find he's still stuck, and escalates into a full scale disaster as he and his future father-in-law wind up wrestling over a serving dish and destroying the entire set.
You've seen this sort of progression in a hundred comedies, from the Marx Brothers to Adam Sandler, but you didn't see it before Max Linder, not in a movie anyway.
My favorite Max Linder short is Max victime du quinquina (Max Takes Tonics), and his performance in it makes him my choice as the best actor of 1911. He made it three years before Chaplin, but if I had told you Linder copied it move for move from the little Tramp, I dare say you'd believe me. The intertitles are in French (with a German translation!), but there are only a couple and the gist is easy enough to figure out—feeling rundown, Max visits a doctor who prescribes a tonic of red wine and quinine bitters. Soon roaring drunk, Max is mistaken for a big shot and helped "home" by a helpful policeman.
It's in two parts:
Part One
Part Two
Linder's career came to a virtual end during World War I after he was injured by mustard gas while serving as a dispatch driver in the French army. He never fully recovered and although he later made films at Chaplin's United Artists, he never again regained his audience. In 1925, he and his wife killed themselves as part of a suicide pact.
Postscript: And for those of you who can't get enough of Max Linder, here are two more short comedies, Max reprend sa liberté (a.k.a. Troubles of a Grasswidower) (1912) and Le hasard et l'amour (Love Surprises) (1913).
If you're only going to see one comedy about adulterous insects this year, make it The Cameraman's Revenge!
Seriously, it's one of the best short movies of the entire silent era.
1912 PICTURE winner:Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge (prod. Aleksandr Khanzhonkov)
nominees:How A Mosquito Operates (prod. Winsor McCay); The Land Beyond The Sunset (prod. Edison Company); The Musketeers Of Pig Alley (prod. Biograph Company); Richard III (prod. J. Stuart Blackton and M.B. Dudley)
ACTOR winner: Elmer Booth (The Musketeers of Pig Alley)
nominees: Martin Fuller (The Land Beyond The Sunset; Max Linder (The Pathé Frères Comedies)
ACTRESS winner: Dorothy Bernard (The Girl And Her Trust)
nominees: Lillian Gish (The Unseen Enemy and The Musketeers Of Pig Alley); Mary Pickford (The New York Hat); Ynez Seabury (The Sunbeam)
DIRECTOR winner: Wladyslaw Starewicz (Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge)
nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Biograph Shorts); Harold M. Shaw (The Land Beyond The Sunset)
SCREENPLAY winner: Dorothy G. Shore (The Land Beyond The Sunset)
nominees: D.W. Griffith and Anita Loos (The Musketeers Of Pig Alley); Wladyslaw Starewicz (Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge)
SPECIAL AWARDS G.W. "Billy" Bitzer (Cinematography) (The Musketeers Of Pig Alley)
I'm racing along trying to finish Part Five of my essay covering the years 1906-1914, which I absolutely must post by tomorrow so I can post my essay about The Birth of a Nation on the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, which is Tuesday, in case you didn't know.
In the meantime, here's another short I think you should see, which unfortunately I'm only otherwise going to mention in passing. The Land Beyond The Sunset, written by Dorothy G. Shore and directed by Harold Shaw, is a touching tragedy that goes right to the heart of what storytelling is all about. It also boasts a couple of film techniques common today but nearly unheard of in 1912—the lap dissolve, which is where the end of one scene fades out as the next scene fades in; and the double exposure to show a character's thoughts.
At the time, these effects had to be created in the camera, by filming a scene then cranking the film back and double exposing it. The lap dissolve was especially difficult because the cameraman had to gradually close down the lens to create the fading out effect, and gradually open it up to fade in. And of course no one would know until the film was developed whether the effect had been successful.
[To read part one of this essay, click here. For part two, here; for part three, here; and for part four (a), click here.]
Early Silent Comedy (continued): Mack Sennett and the Keystone Comedies So far, I've written quite a bit about the Frenchmen who shaped comedy during the first decade of film, the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Max Linder. And then there were those European animators—Émile Cohl, Segundo de Chomón, Wladyslaw Starewicz—whose work was largely comedic in nature.
But what of the Americans? A variety of comedians worked in the United States between 1895 and 1914—Ben Turpin, still remembered for his crossed eyes and brush moustache; John Bunny, middle aged with jowls like a walrus, promptly forgotten with his death from kidney disease in 1915—but it was really Mack Sennett, with his slapstick pie fights and manic chases, who defined the genre for American audiences.
Sennett began his film career at Biograph Studios as one of the regular players in D.W. Griffith's troupe of actors. In the course of directing nearly 500 shorts for Biograph, it's not unusual that Griffith—the greatest director of the era—tried his hand at comedy, but while his dramas and action pictures were deft and groundbreaking, his comedies were leaden and derivative. The fact is, Griffith didn't have much of a sense of humor (he's the bore who corners you at the office party), and his early attempts at comedy, in shorts such as The Little Darling (1909), are painful to watch.
But to his credit, Griffith recognized his limitations and turned to the naturally-funny Sennett, first to write comedy scenarios and then to direct them.
In 1912, Sennett founded Keystone Studios in Los Angeles, California, and began producing comedy shorts, more than thirty in that first year alone. Soon earning the sobriquet "The King of Comedy," Sennett produced more than a thousand films in his career and introduced such comedy acts as the Keystone Kops, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Mack Swain, W.C. Fields and Charley Chase, award-winning actresses Marie Dressler and Gloria Swanson, and a dapper little Englishman named Charlie Chaplin.
His empire was built on barely-controlled chaos and an unshakeable faith in his comedic instincts.
"We have no scenario," he once told Chaplin, explaining his methods, "we get an idea then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase, which is the essence of our comedy."
And indeed, the emphasis on pie fights, pratfalls and wild chase scenes make the Three Stooges look like Citizen Kane. People get hit in the face with a pie for no reason other than that they have faces and a pie is handy; they fall down for pretty much the same reason—the world's a big place and there's always somewhere new to land. It's all so random, it borders on the surreal.
"Run his movies, forward and backward," David Thomson wrote, "and you may see how little difference there is."
Rob King, in his treatise The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, traces the roots of Sennett's comic sensibilities to the class divisions of the Victorian era—theater and the opera were for the educated and wealthy, vaudeville and burlesque for the working class. Given that early filmmakers came from the immigrant and working class ranks, and had often worked in vaudeville, it should come as no surprise that early film comedy borrowed most directly from vaudeville, burlesque and the British music hall traditions. Indeed, some of these early one-reel comedies are little more than filmed records of skits performed on the local stage.
To this foundation, Sennett would eventually add bathing beauties and sentimental narratives, which King complains "substantially dissolved slapstick's significance as a site for engaging the conflicts and pressures of working-class experience," but which undeniably broadened the commercial appeal of Sennett's comedy—laughs and commerce rather than class warfare being the point.
Slapstick Stars Sennett's first star at his new studio was Mabel Normand, who began her career as a model—she was one of the "Gibson Girls"—before following Sennett from Biograph. At first cast simply for her looks—Chaplin called her the beauty among the beasts—Normand quickly displayed a flair for comedy, and within a couple of years was not only Sennett's most popular performer but a director, writer and producer as well.
Her onscreen character "Mabel" was much like Normand herself, a wild, playful, mischievous free-spirit able—for a while at least—to charm her way out of any difficulty.
"Say anything you like," she told reporters, "but don't say I love to work. That sounds like Mary Pickford, the prissy bitch."
She's often credited with throwing the first pie in movie history, in 1913's A Noise From The Deep, but as I wrote here in the essay "Buster Keaton's Pie Recipe," the matter remains an open question. What's not in doubt is that she was greatest comedienne of the silent era.
Normand and Sennett became romantically involved during this period and were engaged to marry—if he wasn't the first director to sleep with his star actress, neither was he the last—but the relationship eventually fell apart when Sennett couldn't keep his hands off another of his discoveries, actress Mae Busch.
Normand's most frequent co-star was Roscoe Arbuckle, better known by the nickname he hated, "Fatty." Legend has it that Arbuckle had abandoned his failing vaudeville career for steady work as a plumber and was rediscovered while fixing a clogged drain at Sennett's house. As the cherub-faced plumber capered up and down a flight of stairs, Sennett saw the contrast between Arbuckle's girth and his nimble footwork as a potential comedy goldmine and signed him to a contract on the spot.
Before the decade was out, Arbuckle would earn a million dollars a year, a record at the time.
Despite his rotund size, Arbuckle was amazingly agile and contrary to what you might expect, Arbuckle's films were not a series of cheap "fat jokes." Instead, he focused on physical comedy, farcical romances and occasional forays into cross-dressing. It was also said that Arbuckle could throw two pies simultaneously—in different directions.
"I've never used my weight to get a laugh," he said. "That is, used my size as the subject for humor. You never saw me stuck in a door-way or stuck in a chair. If you'll analyze my pictures you'll see that they're humorous in themselves, except, of course, that the audience remarks about the agility on account of the weight."
During his career, Arbuckle appeared in film shorts with the three greatest comics of the silent era, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. This two-reel short, The Cook made with Buster Keaton in 1918, shows off Arbuckle's dexterity in front of the camera and his comic sensibilities behind it.
"Next to Chaplin," Buster Keaton said in 1964, "[Arbuckle] was considered the best comedy director in pictures."
Still, as popular as Normand and Arbuckle were, the real stars of Sennett's films were a bumbling collection of clowns in police uniforms, forever known, in association with the studio that employed them, as the Keystone Kops. It seemed that every Sennett picture ended with the Kops riding to the rescue—or more accurately, failing to ride to the rescue while raising the level of chaos to a crescendo. In fact, the high-button collars and domed helmets they wore became so associated with incompetence and buffoonery that police forces the world over redesigned their uniforms.
The Kops made their first appearance in The Bangville Police, a one-reel short produced in 1913. Starring Mabel Normand, it's typical of the style Mack Sennett fostered at Keystone Studios.
Those of you have been following this blog closely may recognize The Bangville Police as a spoof of D.W. Griffith's short thriller An Unseen Enemy, with Normand in the Lillian Gish role and the Keystone Kops subbing for Elmer Booth. Believe it or not, it's one of the more plot-heavy shorts Sennett ever produced.
"Here's something you want to bear in mind," said Arbuckle, who remained faithful to Sennett's style even after leaving his employ, "that the average mind of the motion picture audience is twelve years old. It's a twelve-year-old mind that you're entertaining." (To which Buster Keaton, his co-star at the time, replied, "Roscoe, something tells me that those who continue to make pictures for twelve-year-old minds ain't going to be with us long.")
The Little Tramp In 1914, with Keystone Studios already synonymous with great comedy in the minds of American moviegoers, Sennett made the single greatest find of his career.
Born in London in 1889 and growing up like an urchin in a Dickens novel, Charles Chaplin was touring the United States with Fred Karno and his "army" of comedians that included Stan Laurel and Chaplin's brother Sydney, when Sennett saw him on stage and signed him to a film contract.
Within a year, Chaplin was the most popular film actor in the world and the most important director of comedy, well, ever. Eventually, he would also write, produce, edit and score his own movies, and along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, would found United Artists.
As immense as Chaplin's talent was, however, very little of it showed up on screen in his debut, Making A Living (February 2, 1914). His next film, Kid Auto Races At Venice (made five days later), and the ones that immediately followed it, were no better. Many of them are available at the Internet Movie Database and you can see for yourself that Chaplin clearly had no idea how to play to the camera—mostly he smiled a lot and stood around—and Sennett was so disappointed in the results, he was going to fire the English actor until Mabel Normand convinced him otherwise.
Still, it was while filming the otherwise forgettable Kid Auto that Chaplin stumbled upon an idea for what would become the most memorable character of the entire silent era.
"[O]n the way to the wardrobe," he wrote in his autobiography, "I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born."
Chaplin exaggerates—the Tramp's debut here may have been the most inauspicious of a legendary character in movie history—but he built on the idea over the course of several shorts and in later years rarely played anything else.
The turning point in Chaplin's stint at Keystone came during the filming of his eleventh short, Mabel At The Wheel. Directed by Normand herself, she and Chaplin had a terrific argument about a gag he had worked out.
"We were on location in the suburbs of Los Angeles and in one scene Mabel wanted me to stand with a hose and water down the road so that the villain's car would skid over it. I suggested standing on the hose so that the water can't come out, and when I look down the nozzle I unconsciously step off the hose and the water squirts in my face. But she shut me up quickly: 'We have no time! We have no time! Do what you're told.'
"That was enough. I could not take it—and from such a pretty girl. 'I'm sorry, Miss Normand. I will not do what I'm told. I don't think you are competent to tell me about what to do.'"
Normand won the argument, but Chaplin won the war. Putting his money where his mouth was—in the form of his life savings as a surety that the resulting film would be worth releasing—Chaplin made his directing debut with his very next film, Twenty Minutes Of Love (April 20, 1914). The film was a success and Chaplin rarely thereafter worked for anyone but himself. (You can see the best of his Keystone efforts, The Rounders, here.)
While at Keystone, Chaplin played the usual assortment of drunks, mashers and incompetent waiters—by then already stock film characters—but he had, especially when directing himself, a sense of rhythm that turned comedy into a dance, and a gift for finding an unexpected twist in any comedic situation, subverting expectations, delaying or denying the expected payoff and giving us something we would have never thought of instead.
Indeed, seeing Chaplin in the context of his times, it's clear to me now he was to film comedy what D.W. Griffith was to film drama, establishing the rules and raising the bar. Even when he's just doing variations on Mack Sennett's everybody-fall-down brand of comedy, the internal logic of the characters' actions creates a sense of anticipation that makes the payoff so much more satisfying than one based on pure surprise and absurdity.
"That Chaplin exploded the boundaries of film comedy with each successive phase in his career," Rick Levinson wrote in Ranking the Silent Comedians, "much like Picasso exploded the boundaries of art with each successive phase of his career, is either known too well or too often taken for granted. You have to have a sense of what film comedy was like before, during and after Chaplin's career to get an inkling of the immense impact he made on 20th century culture."
This is not just a case of pretending to see something in retrospect that no one saw at the time. Audiences immediately recognized that Chaplin was something special and during the silent era, only his future business partners, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, would rival him in terms of box office appeal.
I've written at length about Chaplin here, here and here. We'll return to his story many times before I'm finished with the silent era.
Tillie's Punctured Romance: The First Feature-Length Film Comedy In mid-1914, Sennett began production on the most ambitious project of his career, history's first ever feature-length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance. The project was risky—feature-length films were a relatively new phenomenon, especially in the United States, and the jury wasn't in yet on on whether an audience would sit still that long—and Tillie's cost of $50,000 was fifty times the budget for a typical comedy short.
Sennett loosely based his story—about a naive country girl seduced for her money—on a Broadway musical, Tillie's Nightmare, which had run for 77 performances in 1910. In the title role, Sennett recruited Broadway veteran Marie Dressler in what would be her film debut. She had a face like a bulldog, with a lantern jaw, bulbous nose, and heavy bags under deep-set eyes, and her pear-shaped body sagged like a field of potatoes had crawled into a burlap sack. But Buster Keaton called her "the greatest character comedienne I ever saw" and she was a star.
It didn't hurt that she had pointed Sennett out to D.W. Griffith back when the former was still a struggling young actor.
To play the part of the villain, Sennett cast Charlie Chaplin, one of the few people who could get laughs from such an unsympathetic role. Other than cameos, this was the last film Chaplin starred in that he did not also direct. For the part of Chaplin's mistress, Sennett chose Mabel Normand, then rounded out the cast with comedy veterans Mack Swain, Charles Bennett, Charley Chase and Chester Conklin. (Milton Berle later claimed to have played the part of the six-year-old newspaper boy, but no studio records exist to confirm his assertion.)
The plot, what there is of it, is largely episodic—the city cad seduces Tillie for a small wad of cash her father keeps in the house, later abandons her in the city to return to his mistress, finds Tillie again working as a waitress when he reads that her rich uncle has died and left her a fortune, then tries to juggle the affections of the two women long enough to rob Tillie once more—and if you want to know what it's like to watch a half dozen Keystone comedies in quick succession, look no further than Tillie.
The result is repetitive and often inane, but also undeniably funny in stretches thanks to the performances of its leads. Chaplin was one of the most charming actors of the silent era, and he turns what could have been a misogynistic creep into a naughty imp, driven as much by an impulse to mayhem as greed. And Dressler deftly keeps the action from drifting into the pathos of heartbreak and humiliation. She's twice Chaplin's size and she yanks him around like a toddler with a rag doll. Despite the scam he's running, it's Chaplin who receives all the punishment, and after a while, the movie mostly began to remind me of that O. Henry story where the kidnappers pay the parents to take their son back. Dressler's Tillie is unflappable and clearly having fun despite her suspicion that Chaplin is just in it for the money. She's going to squeeze every bit of living—and life—out of him before the deal is done.
Tillie premiered in November 1914 and its reception at the box office fully justified Sennett's faith in the full-length form. Surprisingly, though, Sennett didn't follow up with another feature until 1918's Mickey, which starred Mabel Normand and was produced by her and Sennett at her own film company.
Decline and Fall Sennett may have been a great director but he wasn't a great businessman. In 1915, Chaplin asked for a raise to a $1000 a week, and even though the Tramp's films were grossing a hundred times that at the box office, Sennett turned him down. It was the first of many ruinous business decisions. His one-year contract at Keystone completed, Chaplin left for Essanay where he received $1,250 a week, a $10,000 bonus and more creative control.
More talent, in search of money, artistic freedom or both, would walk out the door as the decade progressed. Sennett truly believed he could produce comedy the way Henry Ford produced automobiles, on a factory assembly line, and that the actors were as interchangeable as widgets. He was able to plug the gap for a while—he turned up Gloria Swanson and Harry Langdon—but he couldn't keep them either and eventually the loss of such talent took its toll.
"The minute you take Ford Sterling, Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler away from Sennett," Keaton said later, "you don't replace those people. I know Sennett didn't. He couldn't find them."
In 1917, Sennett sold his interest in Keystone and formed the Mack Sennett Comedies Corporation. His distribution deal with Pathé was a disaster: instead of spacing out the release of Sennett's product, Pathé tended to bunch them all together so that Sennett wound up competing with himself. Adding to his woes was genuine competition in the form of producers Hal Roach and Joseph Schenck and such acts as Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields and Buster Keaton, not to mention such talents as Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle that Sennett had let slip through his grasp.
Despite winning an Oscar in 1932 for his short comedy Wresting Swordfish, Sennett went bankrupt. He made his last film in 1935. Much of his film catalog was lost when Warner Brothers destroyed the original negatives to make room in its storage facilities.
As hard as Sennett fell, though, his two biggest stars fell even harder.
Arbuckle's fate you're probably aware of. In 1921, still at the height of his fame, he and friends director Lowell Sherman and cameraman Fred Fischbach checked into a hotel in San Francisco and threw a wild party. By the time it was over, actress Virginia Rappe was dead. Evidence of what transpired was scant but accusations were plentiful, and with newspapers to be sold and careers at stake, Arbuckle wound up on trial for manslaughter.
After two hung juries, Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, a just verdict, historians now agree. The damage, however, had been done. Egged on by the Hearst newspaper chain, Arbuckle's former fans turned on him, and Hollywood, never a place to stick to unprofitable principles, quickly caved to the pressure. Arbuckle was blacklisted and never acted again.
Thanks to Buster Keaton's generosity, he did earn a modest living as a director under the pseudonym "Will Goodrich", and, ironically enough, directed Marion Davies—William Randolph Hearst's mistress—in the 1927 comedy The Red Mill.
Arbuckle died of a heart attack in 1933 at the age of forty-six.
Mabel Normand fared little better, and like Arbuckle, she too became tabloid fodder. In 1922, her name was linked to the never-solved murder of director William Desmond Taylor—she had left his home minutes before he was shot—and when the subsequent investigation made public her long-term addictions to cocaine and alcohol, the papers savaged her. In 1923, she returned to Sennett and attempted a comeback in what is now, thanks to the vagaries of film preservation, her best-known movie, The Extra Girl, but the public was no longer interested.
Normand died of tuberculosis in 1930. She was thirty-four years old.
Documentaries and Animation ● In the years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and D.W. Griffith's first film in 1908, the most interesting films were documentaries. Although in form, they more resemble "newsreels" than what we now think of as documentaries, these short films provided audiences of the time a window into people and places they might otherwise have never seen and continue to offer an insight into the era for historians.
● The first great documentarians were the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, who I wrote about at some length in a previous post. Their forays into documentary film making were more in the nature of experiments with their newly-invented camera, mostly recording scenes from the world around them although they did occasionally film newsworthy events, such as the arrival of delegates to a conference on photography in 1895. The Lumière brothers abandoned movies altogether in 1900, famously declaring "the cinema is an invention without any future."
● One of the first American docum- entarians was G.W. "Billy" Bitzer. Better known now as D.W. Griffith's cinematographer, Bitzer began his career making film shorts, first collaborating with W.K.L. Dickson after the latter left Thomas Edison's lab, then later at the American Mutoscope Company, the forerunner of Biograph. Bitzer filmed hundreds of shorts, such as Film Registry title Westinghouse Works and Arrival of Immigrants at Ellis Island. In 2003, the International Cinematographers Guild named Bitzer one of the ten most influential cinematographers of all time.
● Footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake proved once and for all the power of the new film medium. Perhaps the most interesting of the many shorts emerging from the disaster is A Trip Down Market Street Before The Fire, which by happenstance was filmed four days before the San Francisco earthquake. Coupled with footage shot at the same locations immediately after the earthquake, the devastation is still shocking. Imagine what it must have been like to see this footage in 1906, the first time in history the public could bear witness to a catastrophe that had happened a world away. (I encourage you to click the fullscreen function when you watch this.)
● A pair of feature-length documentaries from 1914 show the diverging approaches to the form. In the Land of the War Canoes, Edwin S. Curtis used staged re-enactments and fictional events to show the life of an aboriginal tribe in British Columbia, aiming more for entertainment than veracity. That same year Vilhjálmur Stefánsson brought back actual footage of his own disastrous expedition to the Arctic. (I'd tell you that the latter style of documentary eventually won out, but the fact is documentarians such as Michael Moore stage events for the camera to this day.)
● The fields of animation and stop-action photography also made significant strides during the pre-Griffith film era.
● Émile Cohl was a well-known caricaturist working in Paris who got into the motion picture business when he spotted a movie poster design obviously stolen from one of his drawings. To placate Cohl, the management of the Gaumont Film Company (the oldest studio in the world) offered him a job on the spot, mostly turning out short animation sequences for insertion into live-action films. In 1908, Cohl drew and directed a two-minute film, Fantasmagorie, believed to be the first all-animated film in history. [But see the discussion in the comments section where Matthew Blanchette and I agree that the distinction should go to Charles-Émile Reynaud's Pauvre Pierrot.] ● In America, J. Stuart Blackton took an early stab at animation with such shorts as The Enchanted Drawing and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, a series of faces chalked up on a canvas and a blackboard, respectively, but it was Winsor McCay who earned the title as America's first great animator. Already a successful newspaper cartoonist, McCay was inspired by his son's cartoon "flip" book to turn four thousand ink drawings based on his comic strip "Little Nemo" into a film cartoon.
After the success of Little Nemo, McCay signed with the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain where he continued with his work in the field of animation. In 1914, he produced his most famous character, Gertie The Dinosaur, often credited as the first anthropomorphic cartoon character. McCay toured with the country with the film, "interacting" with Gertie in front of the audience, using a whip to coax her out from behind an outcropping of rock and even feeding her an apple.
● Known as the "Spanish Méliès," Segundo de Chomón special- ized in surreal optical effects films. Working in France for Pathé, Chomón successfully combined miniatures and live-action, pioneered hand-tinted film and invented the "film dolly" which allowed complex tracking shots. As a director, he was known for his trick photography—for example, building one short (The Electric Hotel around a suitcase that unpacked itself, and another (Les Kiriki) around a troupe of Japanese acrobats who perform impossible stunts. Later he provided the special effects work in important feature-length films such as Cabiria (1914) and Abel Gance's Napoleon.
● For my money, though, the best of these early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz (he later changed his name to Ladislas Starevich when he moved to France). Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.
The result, Lucanus Cervus, was a sensation and Starewicz became a full-time director. In 1912 he made his best film, The Cameraman's Revenge, in which an adulterous insect is captured on film by her cuckolded husband then invited with her unwitting lover to the film's premiere at the local cinema:
Starewicz was decorated by the czar and won the Gold Medal at an international film festival in Milan in 1914, but fled Russia after the October Revolution in 1917. He continued to make films for the rest of his life, dying in 1965 while working on the film Like Dog and Cat.
[To read the first entry in this series, The Silent Oscars: 1888-1905, click here.]
Must-See Movies:The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906);A Corner in Wheat (1909); The Country Doctor (1909); The Lonely Villa (1909);Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo (1911); The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912); Mest kinematograficheskogo operatora a.k.a. The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman, a.k.a. The Cameraman's Revenge (1912); The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912); An Unseen Enemy (1912); Suspense (1913); Cabiria (1914); Judith of Bethulia (1914); Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) Recommended Films:Dream Of A Rarebit Fiend (1906); Le théâtre de Bob (1906); A Trip Down Market Street (1906); Fantasmagorie (1908); Moscou sous la neige a.k.a. Moscow Clad in Snow (1909); Afgrunden (1910); The Lonedale Operator (1911); Max Victime du Quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics (1911); The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913); Der Student von Prag (1913); Fantômas (1913-14); Ingeborg Holm (1913); Twilight of a Woman's Soul (1913); The Avenging Conscience: or "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (1914); The Rounders (1914) Of InterestLa vie du Christ a.k.a. The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906); Swords and Hearts (1911); Richard III (1912); The Bangville Police (1913); Traffic in Souls (1913); Gertie The Dinosaur (1914); The Squaw Man (1914)
● The twelve years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth Of A Nation (1915)—what the blog Film: Ab Initio calls "cinema's forgotten decade"—might be the least known years in all of movie history. Yet it was during these years that movies developed from a novelty into the most popular art form of the 20th century:
» D.W. Griffith took basic techniques introduced by his contemporaries and used them in ways so imaginative, he virtually invented the "language" of film we now take for granted.
» Speaking of language, a new concept entered the lexicon—"movie star"—with audiences for the first time flocking to theaters to see specific performers, among them Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand and Lillian Gish.
» And the idea of what constituted a movie evolved from brief, simplistic snippets viewed through coin-operated "peep shows" to ambitious, feature-length projects with complex storylines and characters.
● It's often difficult to discern evolution as it is occurring. It's especially difficult to see when the evidence remained squirreled away in studio vaults for half a century while critics and public relations men spun up easy to grasp narratives of film's history that sold tickets but did little to describe the true events. Fortunately, historians such as Kevin Brownlow and David Bordwell, among others, have devoted their careers to setting the record straight; and blogs such as 100 Years of Movies, Alt Film Guide, the aforementioned Film: Ab Initio, and others, have taken on the task of watching these early films and reporting on their efforts in thoughtful essay form.
And then there are crazy people like me who try to swallow the entire decade in one, 170+ movie sitting and boil it all down to a single, indigestible post.
● All of the movies on my must-see list (and many, many more) are now readily available to view. (I've only seen the first episode of the twenty-part serial The Perils Of Pauline, else it would make the list as well.) I can tell you from personal experience, if you watch movies in chronological order starting with those two-second fragments from Louis Le Prince in 1888 and work your way forward, film techniques so commonplace now as to be invisible to a modern fan will jump off the screen and you'll find yourself saying aloud, "Thank you, D.W. Griffith, for rescuing me from yet another static, single-shot movie where the actors mill around like ants."
D.W. Griffith and the Invention of a Film Language
● Speaking of David Wark Griffith, he was born in Kentucky to Confederate colonel "Roaring Jake" Griffith and Mary Perkins. He had aspirations of being a Broadway playwright, took small acting parts in movies for the money then switched to directing when he discovered it paid better. He directed his first movie, the twelve-minute short The Adventures of Dollie, in 1908 working from instructions written out on a single sheet of shirt cardboard by his cinematographer G.W. "Billy" Bitzer.
Over the course of the following five years, Griffith directed just shy of five hundred movies, mostly for the Biograph Company located in New York City.
● Like every other director of that era, Griffith wrestled with the problem of narrative—how to tell a story in a silent medium—but whereas other directors simply parroted the techniques that worked on stage and wound up with actors in togas milling around in front of painted backdrops, Griffith seemed to understand from the outset that film presented its own unique set of problems and opportunities. By composing his actors within the frame, by relying on revealing actions rather than words and, especially, by juxtaposing images and events through editing, Griffith was able to create within his audience an emotional involvement in his stories.
● A trio of short films from 1909 illustrate Griffith's gift at composing the frame, staging action, and creating suspense with pacing and editing.
» One of five Griffith films preserved in the National Film Registry, A Corner In Wheat is overpraised (to my mind) for being the first "message" picture, but its use of composition is masterful. Lone figures confined to the corner of the screen, overwhelmed by empty vistas, conveying through image alone the desperation the characters feel, could have come straight from an Edward Hopper painting—except that A Corner In Wheat pre-dates Hopper's breakthrough as an artist by some fifteen years.
» The Country Doctor opens with a panning shot which if you'd just watched 100+ movies from the years that preceded it, believe me, jumps off the screen with its technical sophistication. Starting with a long shot of a valley, then panning to a house on a hill to focus on a family already emerging to walk forward until they stand in medium shot, Griffith establishes with a single uninterrupted camera movement both the story's setting and the identity and socio-economic status of its characters, the sort of camera shot we take for granted now but which pretty much didn't exist before him.
That only a year into his career as a director, he concluded the tragic story with a mirror of that opening shot, panning from the now-empty house as the film ends to that same long shot of the valley, underscores just how quickly he raced ahead of his competitors in using film to convey emotion.
» Griffith didn't invent intercutting (a.k.a. cross-cutting)—the use of editing to alternate between two locations, usually to show simultaneous action—but he took it farther than anyone before him, using it not just to, say, show a key prop or establish a location, but to create a narrative flow and a sense of anticipation that was sorely lacking in early movies. In the thriller The Lonely Villa thieves break into a secluded country home and terrorize a woman and her children while her husband and the police race to their rescue. Griffith cuts back and forth between three points of view to create genuine suspense—will the would-be rescuers arrive in time to save the day?—an editing technique still used to this day.
(Griffith would return to this theme time and again, most memorably in 1911 with The Lonedale Operator and in what is perhaps the most controversial sequence of The Birth Of A Nation, where the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue of Lillian Gish's virginity.)
● Griffith continued to develop new approaches to film storytelling throughout his career at Biograph.
» For example, in 1911's two-part short Enoch Arden—a wife stands on the shore waiting for her husband's return from the sea while at that moment the husband is shipwrecked and washed ashore on a tropic island—Griffith uses cutting not just to show the same action from different points of view as in The Lonely Villa, or even to establish that the action is simultaneous, but to show parallel storylines linked only by the emotional resonance between them. Griffith cuts back and forth between the two storylines—the shipwrecked sailor, the wife who waits—for the remainder of the film, showing the analogous plights of the castaway and his (presumed) widow as they each struggle to survive.
(By the way, I suggest that if you watch the copy of Enoch Arden I've embedded here, you mute the sound—the accompanying soundtrack doesn't fit the mood in the least.)
» The Musketeers Of Pig Alley (1912) (you can see it here) is credited with being the first gangster movie and while its story of a thug who robs the husband of the woman he fancies is well worth watching in its own right, the film is remarkable for another startling leap in film technique, in this case the likely invention of what is now called "follow-focus"—the practice of having the camera operator keeping moving actors in focus while allowing the background to go out of focus. At a time when cameramen prided themselves on keeping the entire frame in focus, Griffith's longtime cinematographer Billy Bitzer was reluctant to follow Griffith's direction in this instance and only acceded to his request after Griffith took him to an art museum to look at paintings where the foreground subjects were in sharper focus than the background. (Indeed, Griffith got many of his ideas while strolling through New York's museums.)
» Another of Griffith's innovations was the use of the iris shot, which Tim Dirks defines as "an earlier cinematographic technique or wipe effect, in the form of an expanding or diminishing circle, in which a part of the screen is blacked out so that only a portion of the image can be seen by the viewer." The iris shot was typically used to open or close scenes, and to focus the viewer's attention on a single character or action, but in more sophisticated instances (again, credit Griffith) it could be used to link characters thematically.
» Griffith also pushed his actors to adopt a more subtle acting style, eschewing the dramatic poses of the stage for something more reserved, which he thought played more effectively on the screen. The change was incremental, and sometimes you can see both styles in the same scene, but when compared to other films of the era, the difference is striking. Among those actors who worked with Griffith at Biograph were Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, her sister Dorothy, Henry Walthall, Mae Marsh, Harry Carey, Mack Sennett, Donald Crisp, Robert Harron, Constance Talmadge and Florence Turner.
● That we take Griffith's storytelling techniques for granted now—that every movie made in the last one hundred years has repeated these same tricks as a matter of routine—is a testament to just how innovative and influential he really was.
● In 1914, Griffith made his first feature-length film, Judith of Bethulia. Based on a book from the biblical apocrypha, Judith is the story of a beautiful young widow who sacrifices her own sense of virtue to seduce the leader of an invading army and save her people. Aside from its place in film history as one of the earliest feature-length films produced in America (the rest of world had been producing feature films since 1906), Judith of Bethulia features an early example of what is known as "classical continuity editing" or "classical Hollywood narrative"—the practice of cutting within a scene to make clear to the viewer at all times where the characters are in relationship to each other and to their surroundings, both in terms of the physical space and the chronology of the film story.
A good example comes early in the film. Griffith starts with a wide shot of seated figures threshing wheat, holding on them until Robert Harron enters the screen from the left—
and crosses to the far right where he sees something in the distance.
Griffith then cuts to a medium shot of Mae Marsh at a well, back to a wide shot to establish where she is in relation to her surroundings, then to the medium shot again to show Marsh's face as she struggles with the water jug. Griffith cuts back to the wide shot as Robert Harron enters from the left then cuts on his act of helping Marsh to a medium two-shot so you can see Marsh's face as she reacts to his kindness—
then finishes the scene with a wide shot as the couple walks off the screen, holding on the empty screen until someone else enters to draw water at the well. (You can watch Judith of Bethulia in its entirety here.)
The use of classical continuity editing—as opposed to the then-typical practice of having all the actors remain on screen in the same full shot throughout the scene, what David Bordwell calls the "tableau" style—became the industry standard by 1917, but its use in Judith of Bethulia was very advanced for its day and, again, I have to tell you that after plowing through more than two hundred movies made before 1915, all of them using the same tableau set-up, to suddenly see such sophisticated compositions and editing, well, the effect is startling. And a relief.
Although a critical success, Judith of Bethulia was extremely expensive to film and Biograph declined to finance Griffith's further ambitions in this direction. As a result, Griffith struck out on his own, taking his film crew and troop of actors with him. Within a year, Griffith would film The Birth of a Nation, the most lucrative film of the early silent era; Biograph was out of the film business by 1916.
● By ignoring this era of film history, critics have wound up overstating the significance of The Birth Of A Nation as a revolution in film technique. Every technique Griffith supposedly invented in The Birth of a Nation, he had already developed and mastered during his years at Biograph Studios. Likewise, because that film's racism wound up overshadowing his entire career, casual film fans have undervalued Griffith's impact as an artist and innovator.
● Ultimately, Griffith's reward for showing the world how to tell stories on film was to find himself left behind by filmmakers who used his techniques to tell better stories. To a great degree, this was his own fault. As you watch Griffith develop a film language, you can also see him develop the bad habits that would ultimately cost him his audience—his reverence for an outdated Victorian value system, his obsession with female virtue, particularly when Lillian Gish takes over the lead acting chores from Mary Pickford, and an appalling tendency in his Civil War films to sentimentalize, or worse justify, America's brutal system of racial apartheid—vices which have not only dated badly in our 21st century eyes, but which began to alienate audiences as early as the end of the First World War.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
For my money, the best of the early animation pioneers was Wladyslaw Starewicz. Born in Moscow to Polish parents, Starewicz was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Lithuania when he inadvertently embarked on a film career. Attempting to document on film a fight between two male stag beetles, Starewicz was frustrated by the insect's nocturnal nature—whenever the camera's lights were turned on for filming, the bugs invariably rolled over and went to sleep—but rather than give up, Starewicz made two models of the beetles with wax and wire, and staged the fight using stop-motion photography.
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