Louis Feuillade: 140 Years Young Today

One of my favorite of the early silent directors, Louis Feuillade, made a big splash in France with Fantômas, five interlinked feature films (each running between fifty and ninety minutes) based on a series of novels about the eponymous master criminal, one of film history's first anti-heroes. Feuillade alone of the great early directors anticipated the chief maladies of the coming century—violence, anxiety, paranoia, alienation—and even this century's scourge, terrorism.

His film serials Les Vampires, Judex and Tih Minh directly influenced filmmakers as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. Throw in the fact that Feuillade's films are extraordinarily entertaining—not just as film history but in a 21st century sense—and he winds up, along with Charlie Chaplin, as my favorite director of the first three decades of film history (1888-1918).

The Private Life Of Don Juan Douglas Fairbanks

I can't help it—I never met a blogathon I didn't vow to skip yet spent so much time thinking about, I wound up writing for it by default.

Shadowplay (which bills itself as "The Willfully Eccentric Film Blog") (as opposed to this one where I strive daily for what Warren G. Harding dubbed "normalcy" and yet fail with bewildering regularity) (I mean seriously, dammit, have you ever met me? I'm about as quirky as a coatrack. And yet this site ends up filled with jibber jabber like this!)

(Um, where was I?) (Oh, yes.)

Shadowplay is hosting The Late Show Blogathon, which so far as I can tell—I can't actually find the original announcement—is a collection of essays about the last film of a director or actor or caterer or anybody else connected with movies. Which means, theoretically, I could write about my sole foray into film, back in 1982, when I held the camera for and acted in Pete Wilson's (or was it Dees Stribling's?) student film, Das Volkswagen.

But instead I find myself making notes for The Private Life of Don Juan, the last film of one of the Monkey's favorite silent film stars, Douglas Fairbanks.

I chose his last film because, unlike most actors who have little control over their choice of a final film project before they die, retire or simply peter out, Fairbanks specifically selected a vehicle to sum up—and blow up—his image and career before settling into a well-earned retirement.

Douglas Fairbanks: A Silent Legend

If you're reading this, I assume you know who Douglas Fairbanks was. He was arguably the most popular actor of the silent era, a superstar before the word existed, rivaled in terms of fame by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and no one else.

After starring in a series of athletic comedies between 1915 and 1919, Fairbanks practically invented the action-hero film genre with 1920's The Mark of Zorro. Admittedly, his Don Diego Vega—Zorro to you—had no supernatural or extraterrestrial powers, ala Superman or the Hulk, but he was the first film hero with a secret identity and hideaway, a costume, a mask, a sidekick and a backstory, not to mention a compulsion to carve a "Z" on the anatomy of oppressors and evildoers while fighting for truth, justice and the old Spanish California way.

Later, Fairbanks's Zorro would inspire Bob Kane as he created the comic book crime fighter, Batman.

Fairbanks followed up The Mask of Zorro with a series of the greatest swashbuckling action-adventure movies in history, the best of which are The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and The Black Pirate, an early Technicolor film from 1926. With the graceful and athletic Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer. And simply put, The Black Pirate is the best pirate movie ever made.

In 1929, with talkies already well established, Fairbanks made his last silent movie and it proved to be the perfect cap to his action hero career. Set twenty years after the events of his 1921 hit, The Three Musketeers, The Iron Mask reunites d'Artagnan (Fairbanks) with Athos, Porthos and Aramis to rescue the rightful king of France from prison. The movie features plenty of action, as you would expect, but is also a touching buddy movie and commentary on retirement and even death. Fairbanks even recorded a spoken prologue, the first time his adoring fans ever heard him speak on film.

The Legend Becomes Fact

"When d'Artagnan bids farewell to his earthly existence in the final moments of The Iron Mask," Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta wrote, "Fairbanks also appears to be bidding farewell, not only to that character, but to Zorro, the Thief of Bagdad, the Black Pirate, and all the other romantic roles of his swashbuckling past. It would have been a superb swan song to his life and career ..."

Unfortunately, as is often the case with middle-aged men who have outlived their ability to delight those who once loved them, Fairbanks didn't have the good grace to immediately drop dead. Instead, he lingered for another decade, during which time he divorced, traveled extensively and, more to the point for our purposes, dabbled in talkies—four features plus a documentary, none of them successful box office performers.

The first of these talkies, The Taming of the Shrew, paired him with Mary Pickford for the first time as leads. Given that the couple was on the verge of divorce, it was a particularly catty choice, and while the film turned a profit, it didn't help either star's standing with the public. Reaching for the Moon was originally an Irving Berlin musical, but after a preview, all the songs (including one Fairbanks number) were excised. What was left wasn't worth the effort. Mr. Robinson Crusoe, with Fairbanks living alone on an island for a year on a bet, was a throwback to his pre-swashbuckling films of the World War I era, but moviegoers were not in the mood.

(I haven't seen the documentary, Around the World in 80 Minutes with Douglas Fairbanks, but it sounds like a forerunner of the "Pete Smith Specialties," with a trip around the Pacific Rim that is more comedic than informative.)

On their own merits, these films are not bad, but they don't hold up in comparison to his silent work. Audiences didn't much care for Fairbanks's voice, which was nasal and squeaky; and pushing fifty, he was too old for the energetic stunts audiences had loved him for. Worse, though, he was passe, too much associated with silent films to thrive in the new medium.

The Private Life of Don Juan

By 1933, Fairbanks was at loose ends. As he and Pickford drifted into semi-retirement, the combination of infidelity, general lack of purpose and the unaccustomed sting of box office failure cracked the fault lines in their marriage wide open. With free time now plentiful, Fairbanks longed to travel while Pickford preferred the Hollywood social life, and they laid eyes on each other only once that entire year.

Fairbanks turned his attention to the business of running United Artists, and in 1934 took on as a new partner British film producer Alexander Korda. The previous year, Korda had scored a major hit with The Private Life of Henry VIII, a comic look at the tangled love life of England's infamous royal Bluebeard. The film won Charles Laughton an Oscar, and won Korda a legion of admirers, among them Fairbanks.

The two men cast about for a follow-up project and came up with L'homme à la Rose, a play about Don Juan that had been a hit for Henry Bataille in 1920. Rather than a reverent or romantic look at the notorious libertine, the story mocks the legend, and mocks our obsession with fame and myth-making. If Don Juan is not quite up to Henry's standards, that doesn't mean it isn't a lot of fun, and it emerged over time as the one talkie worthy of inclusion on Fairbanks's lustrous resume.

The movie opens, symbolically enough, on a gushing fountain, before which a balladeer sings of the legend of the great lover, Don Juan. Women smile dreamily as their husbands scowl—what mere man could possibly hope to live up to such a standard?

None, of course. Not even Don Juan himself, as it turns out. Despite the appearance of a mysterious stranger in town, the real Don Juan (Fairbanks) is a weary, middle aged hypochondriac, with a spreading waistline and a waning libido. Whether he was ever worthy of the legend surrounding him is a matter up for debate, but there's no question his best days are behind him.

"Now when I sit down to play a quiet game with a lady," he laments, "I'm no longer sure of holding the cards."

Nicely put, and separate bathtubs weren't required.

Delivered in Fairbanks's thin, reedy voice, the confession is (perhaps unintentionally) hilarious, a bit like Woody Allen boasting of the "coiled sexual power of a jungle cat," but in a similar way is highly effective, for this is a movie about the seductive power of our imaginations. Even if the young women in the story could climb into a time machine and bed the Don Juan of legend, as their mothers claim to have done, the act would never be half as satisfying as the anticipation of it.

In the film, every woman wants to boast of having slept with Don Juan, but nobody really wants to meet him. As John Ford taught us in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Indeed, despite the careers to be made from claiming to have "kissed" Don Juan, there's only one woman who actually wants him, Dona Dolores (Benita Hume), his long-ago abandoned wife who has gleefully bought up his debts and threatens him with prison unless he comes home to her.

Don Juan prefers prison.

Not that there's anything wrong with Dolores—she's delightful. The problem is within Don Juan himself, because for him, sex and romance are not means to achieving intimacy but avoiding it, and far from revealing himself to his lovers, his practiced, rote wooing is a mask behind which he hides his increasingly bored, lonely self. Before the story is over—am I spoiling anything?—he will learn a valuable lesson, that when it comes to love, lasting triumph lies not in conquest but in surrender, particularly the surrender of posturing, pretenses, and even dignity, the happiest kind of surrender, without which real love, meaning and purpose is impossible.

In the meantime, though, Don Juan agrees to switch places with an aspiring Lothario, and when the lad is killed by a jealous husband, he is able to escape the burden of his legend at last. Turns out, though, he's not quite sure how to fill the hours once he's retired. The question of what a man wants to be when he grows up is apparently a lifelong one, and no easier to answer at fifty than it is at fifteen.

And un-retiring is even more problematic—no one wants to believe this middle aged has-been is the great lover of their memories.

Despite the underlying seriousness of its themes, there's no brooding or melancholy in the movie's tone—nor should there be. Death and decay are as inevitable as the setting of the sun, and the wise man faces an unpleasant but unavoidable task with laughter rather than tears.

Besides, that's why God invented gin and cracked ice.

A Farewell to a Fare-thee-well

Although it definitely plays as a valediction, the studio, London Films Productions, and the film's distributor, United Artists, billed Don Juan as a comeback. If that was indeed the plan, it didn't work —contemporary critics slammed Fairbanks ("the microphone is ruthlessly unkind to him," Andre Sennwald wrote for the New York Times in a typical review) and the picture flopped at the box office.

No doubt Fairbanks and Korda were surprised by the commercial failure of their finished film, but they probably shouldn't have been. While audiences don't mind laughing at a king, they're very rarely keen on laughing at themselves—and it's very much the audience and its worship of celebrity that's the subject of the film's derision. Nor do people much care to see that their heroes have feet of clay. That Fairbanks spent the entire film with his metaphorical shoes off must have been distressing to the few people who bothered to watch.

With the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, though, Don Juan has proven itself to be an artistic success and a worthy final film for one of the silent era's greatest stars.

The screenplay is light and witty, the direction fast-paced, and the supporting performances, particularly those of Merle Oberon, Binnie Barnes and the aforementioned Benita Hume, very good. But mostly, of course, it's worth watching because Douglas Fairbanks spends the entire 89 minutes of the film's running time so gleefully—and ruthlessly—taking the piss out of himself. Even William Shatner, the master of self-parody, has never subjected himself to such lacerating onscreen introspection.

"When a man finds himself sliding downhill," Fairbanks said, "he should do everything to reach bottom in a hurry and pass out of the picture."

Don Juan was not the first movie to feature a self-referential commentary on a star's life—1933's Bombshell, for example, began as a comedy about Clara Bow but wound up as a comic examination of the life of its star, Jean Harlow. But Don Juan was one of the first to so thoroughly skewer its own star, to make his shortcomings the butt of the movie-length joke.

"[I]t is fair to say," wrote one film historian, "[Fairbanks] was a bit of a Don Juan himself, his marriage to Mary Pickford began as an affair and ended with one as well!"

In 2005, Jim Jarmusch used The Private Life of Don Juan as a jumping off point to tell his own story, Broken Flowers, of an aging Casanova (Bill Murray, playing a character named "Don," no less), referencing the 1934 film both explicitly (it's playing on the television in the opening scene) and later implicitly (in the way he staged a funeral scene).

Fairbanks didn't much enjoy filming Don Juan, largely for personal reasons that had nothing to do with the production itself. Shortly after arriving in London for the shoot, he began an affair with Lady Sylvia Ashley and was soon named as co-respondent in Lord Ashley's divorce suit. The British tabloids, the most vicious in the world, hounded Fairbanks day and night, the story crossed the Atlantic, and Pickford, who had always ignored Fairbanks's peccadilloes so long as they remained private, made Fairbanks acutely aware of her wrath.

That Lady Ashley had begun life not as an aristocrat but as Edith Louisa Hawkes, a chorus girl and lingerie model, only added fuel to the fire.

I've seen conflicting accounts of Fairbanks's feelings about the film. Some have suggested he hated the script—it "played to all his fears of getting old"—but others insist he was eager to address honestly his inability to live up to the legend he himself had created. Given that Fairbanks wasn't under contract to anybody but himself, and that he had tightly controlled his material and image from the beginning of his career, I'm inclined toward the latter view, with any ill-feelings on his part revisionist sour grapes after the film failed at the box office.

Either way, Fairbanks was self-aware enough or lucky enough to have chosen his own epitaph, not once but twice (remember The Iron Mask), a rare feat for any artist.

Film historian Sparrow Morgan calls The Private Life of Don Juan "the perfect final film for a great Hollywood swashbuckler." I wholeheartedly agree.

J'accuse! (1919)

This is my contribution to the Speechless Blogathon now underway at Eternity of Dreams.

A contemporary of D.W. Griffith and Louis Feuillade, Abel Gance directed over fifty movies in a career that stretched from the silent era to 1972, but his reputation as one of France's greatest directors is founded on three silent movies, the epic bio-pic Napoleon (1927), 1923's La Roue ("The Wheel"), and this one, J'accuse! from 1919.

Contrary to what you might expect if you know anything about French history, the novelist Émile Zola and/or the phrase "J'Accuse," this is not an early film version of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, in which a virulently anti-semitic French military court-martialed Alfred Dreyfus for selling secrets to the Germans without evidence of anything other than that he was Jewish (after Zola's essay "J'accuse!"—"I accuse!"—turned Dreyfus into a cause célèbre, an investigation revealed that another officer was guilty of the crime).

Instead, Gance tells a fictional tale set during World War I, a conflict Gance served in, was wounded during and then returned to in order to film authentic combat scenes for the film. The story, such as it is, concerns itself with a poet who is in love with a girl who has been forced against her will into marriage to a wealthy brute. The husband (Séverin-Mars, who later managed to star in 1923's La Roue despite dying in 1921) is the kind of guy who leaves slaughtered deer carcasses bleeding on the dining room table while he beats his wife. The poet (Romuald Joubé) writes naive pastorales which he rapturously reads to his bedridden mother. And the girl (Maryse Dauvray, who looks like Florence Vidor but isn't) frets by the window.

Fortunately, war breaks out before the husband makes good an implied threat to kill his wife and the poet. Both men march off to war while the girl is sent to live in shame with her in-laws.

And then in a series of improbable twists, the girl is taken captive by the advancing German army while the poet winds up as a lieutenant in command of a front line unit that includes the husband. When both men perform absurdly fanciful acts of heroism, mutual suspicion and resentment turns to grudging respect and even abiding friendship.

The rest of the movie's twists and turns I'll leave to you to discover except to say that I didn't really believe in any of them. Gance moves his characters around like chairs on an empty stage in service of a plot that strains credulity and a message that is so muddled I can only assume I know what it is.

This is typical of the three films for which Gance is best know. Any individual image or sequence in a Gance movie is as beautiful as any you've ever seen, and the rapid cutting he employs strongly influenced the Russians (such as Sergei Eisenstein) who were busy developing the montage as a means of quickly compressing events that occur over a period of time or in many places at once.

The problem is, Gance gleefully piles up image on top of image until whatever point he was trying to make or mood he was trying to evoke is muddied at best. Gance is a jazz musician lost in a solo that goes on so long both you and he forget what he's trying to play.

Fernando F. Croce of Slant magazine calls Gance's work "[f]ertile to a fault" and accurately complains that "Gance's ... experimental joyousness clashes with the film's disenchanted mood." Michael S. Gant writing for DVD Reviews notes that "Perhaps Gance, who, as silent-film historian Kevin Brownlow has written, thought of cinema 'not as a single art, but as a pantheon of all the arts,' couldn't constrain his creative fervor to fashion a coherent message." Even David Camak Pratt, an unabashed fan of the film writing for PopMatters admits "J’Accuse is a messy picture. The title (translating to I Accuse!), the director, and much of what has been written about the film insist that it is a pacifist manifesto. As such, it fails."

It's like the first time I saw Napoleon, I marveled at the beauty and technical innovations (such as the use of a handheld camera) on display in a sequence where the little boy Napoleon takes charge of a snowball fight at school. And then the scene kept going and going, for eight-and-a-half minutes, and it began to dawn on me, "What the what?—Spielberg didn't take this long to show the invasion of Normandy!"

A sense of proportion is also the hallmark of a great artist (said the man who once wrote a 12,000 word blog post about the Marx Brothers).

So J'accuse!—"I accuse"—who of what? Gance is a little unclear, pointing his finger at so many targets (French leaders, old men, unfaithful wives, the sun in the sky), and denouncing them for so many sins (war, rape, adultery, profiteering, but also of not proving worthy of the troops and their cause), that in the end I have to assume he's accusing his audience of that defect common to all human beings that makes unhappiness possible in a world of so much beauty. Which is a rather gross simplification of war's—any war's—causes, but then it's a rare artist who has ever analyzed his way to a deeply-felt response to the grim realities of war.

In that sense, J'accuse! reminded me of Thomas Ince's Civilization (1916), another ambitious film that tried and failed to explain war in cosmic terms. Not until directors narrowed their focus to real stories of the men who fought and died in the Great War did they produce such classics as The Big Parade and All Quiet on the Western Front, films that didn't need to gild the message that war is a barbarous pursuit.

As for Gance in general and J'accuse! specifically, revel in the beauty of any given moment, admire and respect his influence on the craft of filmmaking, but abandon all hope ye who enter here looking for a coherent narrative.

Postscript To capture the authentic footage of combat that shows up in part three of J'accuse!, Gance traveled with the United States Army's 28th Infantry Division during the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in September 1918.

The Silent Oscars: 1911

As I've mentioned before, the first international film star was the French comic, Max Linder. He was also the first true film comedian—the first to develop a "language" of gesture and expression that not only overcame the limitations of silent film but took advantage of the relative intimacy of the medium.

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.

And now because I love you, I present my favorite Max Linder short, Max victime du quinquina (Max Takes Tonics) (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.



PICTURE
winner: Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo (prod. Winsor McCay)
nominees: L'inferno (prod. Milano Film); The Lonedale Operator (prod. D.W. Griffith); Manhattan Trade School For Girls (prod. unknown); Max Victime du Quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics (prod. Pathé Frères)

ACTOR
winner: Max Linder (Max victime du quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics)

ACTRESS
winner: Dorothy West (Swords And Hearts)
nominees: Linda Arvidson (Enoch Arden Parts 1 & 2)

DIRECTOR
winner: Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro (L'inferno)
nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Biograph Shorts); Max Linder (Max victime du quinquina a.k.a. Max Takes Tonics); Winsor McCay and J. Stuart Blackton (Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics, a.k.a. Little Nemo)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Francesco Bertolini and Sandro Properzi (L'inferno) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Emilio Roncarolo (L'inferno) (Cinematography)

The Silent Oscars: 1909

I've written about D.W. Griffith quite a bit—most wordily here, here, here and here.

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 style 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 continued to develop new approaches to film storytelling throughout his career at Biograph—parallel storylines, follow focus, the iris shot—culminating in what is now know as "classical Hollywood continuity," 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. You see a little bit of Griffith every time you go to a movie or turn on a television, and directors as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock publibally acknowledged his influence on their work.

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.

PICTURE
winner: The D.W. Griffith Biograph Shorts (prod. The Biograph Company)
nominees: Le locataire diabolique a.k.a. The Devilish Tenant (prod. Georges Méliès); Moscou sous la neige a.k.a. Moscow Clad in Snow (prod. Pathé Frères); Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (prod. J. Stuart Blackton)

DIRECTOR
winner: D.W. Griffith (The D.W. Griffith Biograph Shorts)
nominees: J. Stuart Blackton (Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy); Joseph-Louis Mundwiller (Moscou sous la neige a.k.a. Moscow Clad in Snow)

The Silent Oscars: 1908

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, one of the best of the early animated films. In the film history Animation: The Whole Story, Howard Beckerman called Fantasmagorie "a key juncture between the aping of stage trickery and the exploration of animation as a medium in its own right."

Actually, the leap from "stage trickery" to "a medium in its own right" might sum up this entire period in film history ...

PICTURE
winner: Fantasmagorie (prod. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont)
nominees: The Tempest (prod. Clarendon); The Thieving Hand (prod. J. Stuart Blackton)

DIRECTOR
winner: Émile Cohl (Fantasmagorie)
nomiees: J. Stuart Blackton (The Thieving Hand); D.W. Griffith (various Biograph shorts); Percy Stow (The Tempest)

The Silent Oscars: 1905

I think for most people, the history of the sound era in movies begins on October 6, 1927, with the premiere of The Jazz Singer—and certainly that's when sound captured the fancy of the paying public and changed the nature of film (and the film industry) forever.

But the fact is, inventors began trying to combine sound with moving pictures almost from the beginning. William K.L. Dickson, for example, working in Thomas Edison's laboratories, made a short sound film as early as 1894, and shortly thereafter, Edison produced and marketed what he called the kinetophone, one of his peepshows in a box with a set of headphones connected to a rubber tube. (It was a commercial flop—the $400 asking price was too steep an investment to make back one nickel at a time, and anyway, audiences preferred to see their movies in a theater.)

The problems with combining sound and film proved to be legion. Sound could be recorded on the film itself (as it is now), but developing an amplifier so that a theater audience could hear the result took decades to iron out. And the alternate method of recording the sound on vinyl came with its own problems—once the record was scratched or the film broken, synching up the sound to the image was virtually hopeless.

Still, filmmakers persisted.

Among those who worked on the problem was Alice Guy, who is generally credited with being the first woman director in movie history.

You remember Alice Guy (pronounced a-LEES ghee), don't you? She began her film career as a secretary at Gaumont studios in Paris, began writing screenplays because she had access to a typewriter, and began directing movies because she had access to a camera. Her early work was, frankly, derivative, although the same could be said of every early director—homage, plagiarism and outright copyright infringement was the order of the day in the 19th century—but she quickly developed a style of her own, with La vie du Christ, a 1906 feature film about the birth, life and death of Christ, being her best work.

Between 1902 and 1906, Guy conducted her own experiments with synchronized sound films using Gaumont's "chronophone" technology, directing over a hundred short sound films starring popular singers of the day.



The films were popular with Parisian audiences, but the technology wasn't well-suited to recording spoken dialogue. It would take another twenty years for such men as Lee De Forest to resolve the remaining issues and turn sound films into a commercially-viable medium.

In 1907, Guy married Herbert Blaché, moved to America and eventually founded her own studio, Solax, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Successful at first, the company eventually foundered as the bulk of the film industry fled to the west coast to escape censorship and the interference of east coast investors.

"My youth, my lack of experience, my sex all conspired against me," she later said.

In 1953, France awarded her the Legion of Honour. She died in 1968 at the age of 94.

(If you're interested in seeing more of Alice Guy's films, Chris Giddens of The Giddy is spending the month of April looking back at her work.)

Oh, and as for my choice for best picture, Rescued by Rover was film's first "animal as hero" movie, with, in this case, a dog saving a kidnapped infant. The story set the pattern for similar movies starring Rin Tin Tin and Lassie—"What's that girl? Timmy fell down the well?"—and popularized the name "Rover" for dogs.

PICTURE
winner: Rescued by Rover (prod. Cecil M. Hepworth)
nominees: Le diable noir a.k.a. The Black Imp (prod. Georges Méliès); The Night Before Christmas (prod. Edison Manufacturing Company); Panorama from Times Building, New York (prod. American Mutoscope & Biograph)

DIRECTOR
winner: Alice Guy (various synchronized sound experiments)
nominees: Lewin Fitzhamon and Cecil M. Hepworth (Rescued by Rover); Georges Méliès (various short films); Edwin S. Porter (The Night Before Christmas)