The Silent Oscars: 1917—Part One

PICTURE
winner: The Chaplin Mutuals (Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant and The Adventurer) (prod. Charles Chaplin)
nominees: The Poor Little Rich Girl (prod. Adolph Zukor); Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm (prod. Mary Pickford); Terje Vigen a.k.a. A Man There Was (prod. Charles Magnusson); Umirayushchii Lebed a.k.a. The Dying Swan (prod. Aleksandr Khanzhonkov)
Must-See Movies: The Adventurer; The Cure; Easy Street; The Immigrant; The Poor Little Rich Girl
Recommended Films: The Butcher Boy; Coney Island; Down To Earth; His Wedding Night; Oh Doctor!; Reaching For The Moon; Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm; A Romance Of The Redwoods; The Rough House; Terje Vigen a.k.a. A Man There Was; Umirayushchii Lebed a.k.a. The Dying Swan; Wild and Woolly
Of Interest: Das Fidele Gefängnis a.k.a. The Merry Jail; Furcht; The Heart Of Texas Ryan a.k.a. Single Shot Parker; A Modern Musketeer; Over The Fence; Straight Shooting; Teddy At The Throttle

ACTOR
winner: Charles Chaplin (The Chaplin Mutuals) (Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant and The Adventurer)
nominees: Roscoe Arbuckle (The Roscoe Arbuckle Comedy Shorts); Harry Carey (Straight Shooting and Bucking Broadway); Elliott Dexter (A Romance Of The Redwoods); Douglas Fairbanks (Wild and Woolly, Down To Earth and Reaching For The Moon); William Farnum (A Tale Of Two Cities)

ACTRESS
winner: Mary Pickford (The Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm)
nominees: Vera Karalli (Umirayushchii Lebed a.k.a. The Dying Swan); Doris Kenyon (A Girl's Folly); Ossi Oswalda (Das Fidele Gefängnis a.k.a. The Merry Jail)

DIRECTOR
winner: Charles Chaplin (The Chaplin Mutuals) (Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant and The Adventurer)
nominees: Yevgeni Bauer (Umirayushchii Lebed a.k.a. The Dying Swan); Victor Sjöström (Terje Vigen a.k.a. A Man There Was); Maurice Tourneur (The Poor Little Rich Girl)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Buster Keaton (The Roscoe Arbuckle Comedy Shorts)
nominees: Eric Campbell (The Chaplin Mutuals) (Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant and The Adventurer); Sam De Grasse (Wild And Woolly)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Edna Purviance (The Chaplin Mutuals) (Easy Street, The Cure, The Immigrant and The Adventurer)
nominees: Bebe Daniels (The Harold Lloyd Comedy Shorts); June Elvidge (A Girl's Folly); ZaSu Pitts (A Little Princess); Florence Vidor (A Tale Of Two Cities)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Frances Marion, from a play by Eleanor Gates (The Poor Little Rich Girl)
nominees: Anita Loos and John Emerson, story by Horace B. Carpenter (Wild and Woolly); Frances Marion, from a play by Charlotte Thompson and a novel by Kate Douglas Wiggin (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm)

SPECIAL AWARDS
George James Hopkins (Cleopatra) (Costume Design)

A Landmark Year
In the last decade of the 19th century, if you wanted to make a movie, you pretty much had to build a camera from scratch. In the first decade of the 20th century, all you had to do was buy a camera and point it at something. In either case, the product on the screen was primitive, amateurish, and with a few notable exceptions, barely distinguishable from the sort of home movies you might find these days on YouTube—except maybe not as good.

But by 1917, as film's third decade came to a close, movies had evolved into a purely professional medium. The moguls who would dominate film's Golden Age, men such as Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor and Jack Warner, among others, were already running Hollywood studios. With the screen debut of Buster Keaton in April 1917, the stars who would dominate the Silent Era—Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford, Gish, Chaney and even Valentino (indeed, all but Garbo and Clara Bow)—were present and accounted for.

Perhaps most importantly, the movie industry as a whole had settled once and for all on a film "language"—the methods by which directors, editors, cinematographers and actors conveyed action and information to evoke an emotional response in their audience. Since the middle of the century's first decade, directors such as D.W. Griffith had been experimenting with intercutting between different locations to show simultaneous action—for example, a thief breaking into a home, the frightened woman inside it, her savior riding to the rescue. But intercutting within the same location—to establish, say, a room and the players in it, then cutting to close-ups of the various actors as the action focused on them, all while keeping clear where each actor is in relation to each other—was relatively rare before 1917, with directors still relying heavily on what is referred to as a "tableaux" or "proscenium arch" technique, where the camera stayed locked in place and the entire set and all the actors remained visible throughout the scene.

By 1917, however, it seemed that (in America at least) every director was using set-ups and close-ups and intercutting—what is called classical Hollywood continuity editing—and what was once rare was now so commonplace, it was taken for granted.

Which is to say that, visually- and narratively-speaking at least, movies from 1917 are indistinguishable from what directors now turn out every day on television and in theaters, and from this point forward, as a critic you can no longer shrug off a film's technical incompetence as an inevitable consequence of its age.

While the production of a film hadn't yet hardened into the assembly-line approach of the studio system, and while innovators such as Orson Welles would come along to shake things up, for all intents and purposes, film's frontier was closed.

Click here to continue to Part Two, "Little Mary Takes Charge."

The Silent Oscars: 1916

First, the year's nominees and winners:

PICTURE
winner: Intolerance (prod. D.W Griffith)
nominees: The Chaplin Mutuals (prod. Charles Chaplin); Hell's Hinges (prod. Thomas H. Ince); Judex (prod. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont)
Must-See Movies: Intolerance
Recommended Films: Behind The Screen; The Count; The Fireman; The Floorwalker; The Habit of Happiness; Hell's Hinges; Judex; The Matrimaniac; One A.M.; The Pawnshop; Police; The Rink; The Waiter's Ball
Of Interest: Civilization; Flirting With Fate; Hævnens nat a.k.a. Blind Justice; His Picture in the Papers; Hoodoo Ann; Joan the Woman; The Mystery of the Leaping Fish; Reggie Mixes In; Snow White; The Social Secretary; Sold For Marriage; 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea; Where Are My Children?

ACTOR
winner: William S. Hart (Hell's Hinges)
nominees: Charles Chaplin (The Chaplin Mutuals); Douglas Fairbanks (The Fine Arts Film Company Comedies); Tyrone Power, Sr. (Where Are My Children?)

ACTRESS
winner: Mae Marsh (Hoodoo Ann and Intolerance)
nominees: Marguerite Clark (Snow White); Lillian Gish (Sold For Marriage); Norma Talmadge (Going Straight and The Social Secretary)

DIRECTOR
winner: D.W. Griffith (Intolerance)
nominees: Charles Chaplin (The Chaplin Mutuals); Louis Feuillade (Judex)

SUPPORTING ACTOR:
winner: Eugene Pallette (The Children In The House and Going Straight)
nominees: George Fawcett (The Habit Of Happiness); Theodore Roberts (Joan The Woman); Fred Warren (The Matrimaniac)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Constance Talmadge (Intolerance)
nominees: Dorothy G. Cumming (Snow White); Bessie Love (Reggie Mixes In); Musidora (Judex)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, from a story by L. Payton and F. Hall (Where Are My Children?)
nominees: Charles Chaplin (The Chaplin Mutuals); D.W. Griffith (scenario); Anita Loos (titles) (Intolerance)

SPECIAL AWARDS Eugene Gaudio, George M. Williamson and J. Ernest Williamson (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) (Cinematography); D.W. Griffith , James Smith and Rose Smith (Intolerance) (Film Editing); Walter L. Hall (Intolerance) (Art Direction-Set Design)

Coming to terms with D.W. Griffith is like coming to terms with life itself—you either demand perfection of everyone you meet and wind up alone, or you accept that everyone (including yourself) is deeply flawed and you enjoy what you can.

As I wrote in my essay about the films of 1915, Griffith's The Birth of a Nation is so profoundly offensive to a modern audience (and to an audience of 1915, for that matter) that it overshadows everything else the director accomplished, and some of my readers have admitted that they've given the entirety of Griffith's output a miss as a result. And while that's an understandable reaction—life is short and we'll never have time to do all we'd like, much less what we don't like—Griffith made at least two films, Broken Blossoms and my choice for the best picture of 1916, Intolerance, that are not only indispensable for a student of film history, but also are among the best, most entertaining movies of the silent era.

In case you know nothing about it, Intolerance weaves four separate story lines—the life of Christ, the fall of Babylon, the massacre of the Huguenots, and a modern-day story about the victims of a overreaching reform movement—into a three-plus hour spectacle that might be the most ambitious movie ever made. Accounts vary as to how much of his personal fortune Griffith poured into the production—some say as much as $2 million, the most for any film before Gone With The Wind—but there's no question that this was the most lavish production of the silent era.

Or to put it another way, to show the sack of Babylon, Griffith basically built a full-scale replica of the ancient city on a Hollywood backlot and then laid siege to it.

"Imagine," wrote Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy, "how audiences in [1916] must have reacted to the sight of walls and battlements four and five stories high, to courtyards set on three different levels and filled with hundreds of costumed extras, to visuals so expensive it's like they were filmed on and made out of gold."

The film opens with the story of a modern-day reform movement determined to improve the spiritual life of the working class if it kills them. Fueled by jealousy and financed by an autocratic mill owner, the reformers crush the life out of their would-be beneficiaries, particularly "the Dear One" (played so memorably by Mae Marsh), the embodiment of youthful joy and innocence. Only a crabbed, self-righteous hypocrite could find fault with someone so pure; that the reform movement's machinations lead to Dear One's fall is a testament to its destructive purposes.

To underscore the point, Griffith cuts to a scene from the life of Christ, that of a Pharisee praying in public so that others might better observe his piety. "Oh Lord, I thank thee that I am better than other men."

The film's third storyline focuses on the political intrigue in the court of King Charles IX that led to the massacre of Protestants in Paris in the late sixteenth century, while the fourth and final story, about the jealousy between rival religious factions that led to the sack of Babylon, rounds out Griffith's theme, a rousing condemnation of the humorless, meddling, Puritanical impulses that characterize so much of America's reformist zeal on both ends of the political spectrum. Watching it, I thought it was a pity that Griffith never directed a screen version of Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry.

Structurally, Intolerance is as audacious as anything ever attempted on film—four simultaneous stories linked only by a common theme and the generally rising action—with the editing style growing more complex as the action in each story reaches its climax. The film's last half hour, with quick cross-cut shots between a marauding army, a racing car, a speeding train, the slaughter of the Huguenots and the crucifixion of Christ, has been described as a fugue, a concept borrowed from music where two or more voices entering successively and sung in either imitation or counterpoint to build on a common theme.

Griffith's visual fugue later inspired Sergei Eisenstein and other Russian directors to develop the montage—quick shots cut rapidly together to condense several events or a lengthy period of time into a single short sequence.

Questions have persisted almost from the beginning as to Griffith's motives in making Intolerance. For years, historians assumed Intolerance was his apology for the racism of The Birth of a Nation, but more recently, biographers have suggested Griffith was lashing out at those who were looking for an apology. Personally, after watching it in the context of the times, Intolerance looks like the act of a supremely self-confident artist determined to top both himself and his chief competition, Cecil B. DeMille and Thomas H. Ince, who that year directed ambitious historical epics of their own, Joan the Woman and Civilization, respectively.

Whatever his motivations, Griffith succeeded brilliantly.

Which is not to say that all four of Griffith's stories are created equal. Christ's life, for example, gets the least amount of screen time, presumably because Griffith assumed his audience knew the story so well, he needed only reference a particular well-know incident to underscore a point he wanted to make in one of the other story lines.

Too, the story of Protestant-Catholic infighting in sixteenth century France isn't all that interesting even if it does result in a satisfyingly bloody slaughter by the film's end. Without a central figure as compelling as the Dear One or Babylon's Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge), the court intrigue becomes a bit opaque, delving too deeply into the minutiae of history without giving us someone lovable to root for.

But when it focuses on the modern and Babylo- nian stories, the film soars. It's telling that in the role of the Dear One, Griffith cast Mae Marsh from his stable of performers instead of his usual go-to girl, Lillian Gish. For truly tragic suffering—and for an ideal of Victorian womanhood that existed only in Griffith's head—no one was better than Gish. But Marsh, with her kewpie doll face, bow-tie mouth and round, startled eyes, was better suited for a role that required joy, passion and an almost childlike innocence. Along with her work in Judith of Bethulia, The Birth of a Nation and Hoodoo Ann, this represents Marsh at the peak of her career.

After Intolerance, Marsh left Griffith's studio for Samuel Goldwyn's where the pay was better—$2500 a week instead of $35—but to Marsh's chagrin, the roles weren't nearly as good. Her career went into a gradual decline and she wound up playing bit parts in sound pictures, mostly in John Ford films such as My Darling Clementine and The Quiet Man. Marsh made 198 films during her career, the last in 1964.

She was married to the same man for fifty years, had three children and passed away at the age of seventy-three.

The film's most unforgettable performance—and for me, the best in any film in 1916—came from Marsh's co-star, Constance Talmadge. In the Babylonian sequence of Intolerance, she plays "the Mountain Girl," a pretty, perky, petulant teenage beauty who finds herself fighting against a palace conspiracy that threatens to topple the kingdom. Wide-eyed and gangly-limbed, Talmadge is as hyperactive as a puppy amped up on kibble and amphetamines, windmilling her way across the screen, and you can't take your eyes off her. Neither could audiences in 1916 and she quickly became a star.

"[I]t's a mark of her skill," Eagan wrote, "that she stands out in a segment filled with orgies, sacrifices, semi-nudity, wild animals, and wholesale destruction."

Working primarily in comedies, Talmadge would excel throughout the silent era—look for her in The Matrimaniac, the best of the dozen films Douglas Fairbanks made in 1916, a wild, stunt-filled romantic comedy that no doubt later served as a blueprint for the get-me-to-the-wedding-on-time story lines of Harold Lloyd's Girl Shy and For Heaven's Sake—then retired with the advent of sound, famously telling her sister Norma, "Quit pressing your luck, baby. The critics can't knock those trust funds Mama set up for us."

Among actors, William S. Hart gave the best performance of his career in the National Film Registry western, Hell's Hinges. The father of the taciturn Western hero—or more accurately, antihero—Hart came to movies late, at the age of forty-nine, but he quickly established himself as the first movie cowboy superstar. As different from his contemporary Tom Mix as John Wayne was from Roy Rogers, Hart preferred playing morally-ambiguous characters—violent men who find a measure of redemption—to the white-hatted good guys who came to dominate the genre.

Hart's close-set eyes glowered from a hollow, weather-beaten face that looked like it had been chiseled out of granite, a face "as rugged as the plains," wrote Jen at Silent Stanzas. Because he had been a real cowboy before he became an actor, there's an authenticity in the way he carried himself, with a rolling gait, simultaneously loose-limbed and stiff-legged, and you can see shades of Hart in the later work of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, who no doubt saw his films.

Hell's Hinges tells the story of Blaze Tracy, a roughneck gunslinger in a roughneck western hamlet, who falls for a preacher's sister and winds up turning on his gang. It sounds like the makings of the hokiest sort of B-western, but thanks to Hart's quiet, intense performance, the drama plays out on an intimate scale, and even when he settles down, it's not without the sense that he knows his best days are behind him.

Audiences gradually tired of Hart, who retired in 1925 at the age of sixty, but mark Hell's Hinges down as the forerunner of such "serious" westerns as The Searchers, Bend of the River and the Man With No Name trilogy, and Hart himself as the first in a line of classic western heroes that includes Wayne, Cooper and Clint Eastwood.

In preparation for this essay, I tracked down and watched more than forty films, and saw a number of great movies and performances, but the most startling revelation of the year came in form of Eugene Pallette.

You remember Eugene Pallette, don't you? During Hollywood's Golden Age, he was one of that army of supporting actors whose name you might not recognize but whose face—in Pallette's case, a fat round face with wobbly jowls—you never forget. Coupled with his squat, round body and bullfrog voice, he's one of the most recognizable supporting actors of his era, and most of us remember him as the long-suffering father in My Man Godfrey, as Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood and as the fat-bellied pol who can't get out of a phone booth in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

But it turns out Pallette was young once, and thin, too. With silent films concealing his trademark voice, Pallette wasn't limited to comic relief and starting in 1913, he appeared in over 130 silent films including such classics as Intolerance, The Birth of a Nation, The Three Musketeers and The Ten Commandments.

In 1916, he appeared in seven movies, but in giving him the award for best supporting actor, I chose two of them, Going Straight and The Children in the House, to give you a sense of his range.

In the former, where he plays a career criminal who threatens Norma Talmadge with her secret past, Pallette is the nastiest of thugs, guilty of attempted rape, murder, theft, blackmail, Faganism—you name it. His introduction is startling: a close up as he spits tobacco juice on the sidewalk, and not nice, clean movie spit either, but a flowing stream of foul, brown saliva that he must have been saving up between takes. You get a nice look at his eyes in that same scene, glowering and menacing under a Neanderthal brow.

Contrast that with The Children in the House where you first see him in a tuxedo, not handsome but elegant, a prototypical noir antihero adulterously involved with a beautiful dancer who ropes him into a bank robbery with her rapacious demands. Pallette once again shows a flair for naturalistic gestures—stifling a yawn, for example—but also demonstrates a mastery of the artificial ones that enabled him in film after film to sketch a character quickly. Watching him convey a man's entire life just by the way he enters a room, I was reminded again that while the Method gave us some of the best acting in movie history, we also lost something when actors abandoned studied artifice.

Finally, I want to mention Lois Weber, who wrote and directed one of the year's most controversial films—then and now—Where Are My Children? As you may know, Weber was the first American woman to find real success as a director, and I've briefly written about her before, here, where I also showed you what is probably the best work of her career, the short Suspense.

Perhaps because she began her career as a street-corner evangelist before becoming an actress then writer-director, Weber's feature films tended to tackle the social issues of the day and Where Are My Children? is no exception. This is the story of, as one reviewer put it, a "curiously infertile" woman whose husband is a crusading district attorney bent on prosecuting back alley abortion doctors—maybe you can see where this is going.

Weber's film advocates birth control as a means of avoiding abortion, which she abhors, positions which still manage to offend politically-active film fans of both the right and left. She also seems to support the notion that birth control is an effective means of combating poverty, which to some smacks of eugenics, which pretty much offends everybody.

Still, as Daniel Eagan wrote, "The film is remarkably forthright: it would take many decades before movies would be this open again about abortion. Weber didn't concentrate on salacious details, but on the human costs of betrayed relationships, something that many modern-day filmmakers still find uncomfortable."

Effectively marketing the controversy surrounding the film's subject matter, Where Are My Children? was a big hit for Carl Laemmle's Universal Studios. In 1993, the Library of Congress selected Where Are My Children? for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Weber continued to direct movies into the 1920s, but her style didn't adapt to changing tastes and her film company eventually failed. Following a divorce from her abusive husband, co-writer Phillips Smalley, Weber suffered a nervous breakdown and her career ground to a halt. Working mostly as an uncredited script doctor for Universal, Weber directed only one talkie and died penniless in 1939. She was sixty years old.

The Silent Oscars: 1915—Part Three

Forget auteur theory, formalism, genre studies or any of that other film school claptrap, the unifying thread running through any well-rounded and not so well-rounded film education is Oscar trivia. People who wouldn't know Follow Focus from the French New Wave can tell you every Oscar winner from the first ceremony to the present day; fanatics have known for years that Citizen Kane should have won best picture of 1941; and even the most casual filmgoers will fight ninety-nine rounds over the latest Oscar snub.

But when it comes to movies made before the Oscars were invented, well, for most of us, they might as well have never been made at all.

And why? Because we like a winner and even more, we like crabbing about our favorite loser. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn't start handing out awards until 1929, and no movie made before August 1, 1927, was eligible. If the Academy had come up with the Oscars in, say, 1924, we'd all have an opinion about whether Greed should have won best picture over Sherlock Jr. or The Thief of Bagdad. But the Academy didn't and even lifelong film buffs will cheerfully shrug and admit they've never seen any of those pictures, much less have an opinion about them.

Without winners and losers, there's no controversy—and in America, at least, no controversy means nothing to talk about. I tell you, silent movies will never be as popular as they ought to be until we have something to argue about.

So I'm starting the argument, here, now.

The "Silent Oscars" are my choices for best picture, director, screenplay and all four acting categories for the years before the Academy began handing out awards, beginning with 1915 and running through July 31, 1927. I might get every single pick wrong, but you've got start somewhere—and besides, based on past history, getting it wrong is what the Oscars are all about.

Let the argument begin.

PICTURE
winner: Les Vampires (prod. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont)
nominees: The Birth Of A Nation (prod. D.W. Griffith); The Cheat (prod. Cecil B. DeMille); The Italian (prod. Thomas H. Ince); Regeneration (prod. William Fox)
Must-See Movies: The Birth Of A Nation; Les Vampires
Recommended Films: Assunta Spina;The Cheat; Fatty's Tintype Tangle; His New Job; The Italian; Posle Smerti a.k.a. After Death; Regeneration; The Tramp
Of Interest: Alice in Wonderland; The Coward; A Fool There Was

ACTOR
winner: George Beban (The Italian)
nominees: Roscoe Arbuckle (The Keystone Comedies); Charles Chaplin (The Essanay Comedies)

ACTRESS
winner: Francesca Bertini (Assunta Spina and La signora delle camelie)
nominees: Theda Bara (A Fool There Was); Geraldine Farrar (Carmen)

DIRECTOR
winner: Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires)
nominees: D.W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation); Raoul Walsh (Regeneration)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Sessue Hayakawa (The Cheat)
nominees: Marcel Lévesque (Les Vampires); Henry B. Walthall (The Birth of a Nation)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Musidora (Les Vampires)
nominees: Anna Q. Nilsson (Regeneration); Clara Williams (The Italian)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Raoul Walsh and Walter C. Hackett, from the autobiography My Mamie Rose by Owen Frawley Kildare (Regeneration)
nominees: Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires); Thomas H. Ince and C. Gardner Sullivan (The Italian)

SPECIAL AWARDS: G.W. "Billy" Bitzer (The Birth Of A Nation) (Cinematography); D.W. Griffith, Joseph Henabery, James Smith, Rose Smith and Raoul Walsh (The Birth Of A Nation) (Film Editing); Robert Goldstein and Clare West (The Birth Of A Nation) (Costumes); Frank Wortman (The Birth Of A Nation) (Set Design)

Boy, what an obscure bunch of winners, you're no doubt thinking, and I agree with you. Two years ago, I doubt I had heard of any of them except Sessue Hayakawa and Raoul Walsh—the former you may remember for his Oscar-nominated performance as the commandant of the Japanese POW camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai, the latter for directing such films as White Heat and The Roaring Twenties. The rest of them? Not a chance.

But let's face it, other than Charlie Chaplin, The Birth of a Nation and maybe Theda Bara, all of 1915's potential choices are pretty obscure.

If the Silent Oscars were simply about trying to predict what the Academy might have chosen in 1915, then The Birth of a Nation would be the big winner, taking home awards for best picture, director, cinematography, editing, set design, costumes and acting awards for Lillian Gish and maybe Henry B. Walthall, making it the early silent era's equivalent of Gone With The Wind, which cleaned up at the Oscars a quarter of a century later.

But that's not quite what the Silent Oscars are all about. Aside from the fact that the Academy wasn't founded until 1927, its rather conventional wisdom is wrong more often than it's right. The Academy over the years has shown a real prejudice against comedies, commercial flops, foreign films and "mere" entertainment—which explains why Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock never won competitive Oscars—and there's no reason to think it would have done any better just because the films were silent.

The Birth of a Nation, the story of two families torn apart by the American Civil War and its aftermath, has some extraordinary sequences, particularly the battle scenes and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but ultimately director D.W. Griffith's heedless devotion to the historical myths underlying the movie's source material—an unapologetically racist novel called The Clansman—renders the movie nearly unwatchable to a modern audience.

Even the most charitable reading of the movie, that it is a Faulkneresque tragedy about American apartheid told through the eyes of a triumphant white supremacist, can't explain away the tedious romance that dominates the film's second half. For all its importance to film history—its box office success pretty much guaranteed the future of the motion picture—The Birth of a Nation is a deeply-flawed, would-be masterpiece. (Read more about it here.)

Besides, just because you may not have heard of my choices doesn't mean that an audience in 1915 wouldn't have. Les Vampires was a huge hit in France, Francesca Bertini was Italy's most famous actress during the silent era, The Cheat and Regeneration were big hits in the U.S., and while The Italian flopped at the box office, it proved to be a major influence on directors of the time, with specific shots echoed in such films as The Immigrant, 7th Heaven and The Cameraman.

My choice for best picture, Les Vampires, you're familiar with, if only because I wrote 2000 words about it (here) last week. The ten-part, seven hour serial written and directed by Louis Feuillade tells the story of a criminal organization, The Vampires, that terrorizes Belle Époque Paris, corrupting those it can, murdering those it can't. Feuillade's serials, which both glamorized crime and anticipated the anxieties that came to define the 20th century—violence, paranoia, alienation, conspiracy, terrorism— influenced directors as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.

"All the roots of the thriller and suspense genres," David Thomson has written, "are in Feuillade's sense that evil, anarchy and destructiveness speak to the frustrations banked up in modern society."

Although she doesn't show up until the serial's third chapter, Musidora as the sinister, seductive Irma Vep is the real star of the show, robbing, murdering and kidnapping her way into the hearts of a generation of Frenchmen. The surrealists worshiped her amoral sexuality," Tom Gunning wrote, "and the revolutionary poet Louis Aragon later claimed that Irma Vep's dark bodysuit inspired the youth of France with fantasies of rebellion."

Musidora also starred in Feuillade's next serial, Judex, and later produced and directed her own films.

The serial has a wonderfully nutty quality, showing us a simultanously whimsical and dangerous Paris where you can lean out a second-story window and wind up with a lasso around your neck, where every cupboard hides a body, every hatbox a head, and your neighbor's loft conceals a cannon. "[T]he orginality of Lang and Hitchcock" (Thomson again) "fall into place when one has seen Feuillade: Mabuse is the disciple of Fantômas; while Hitchcock's persistent faith in the man who wears high heels, in the crop-spraying plane that will swoop down to kill, and in a world mined for the complacent is inherited from Feuillade."

Simply put, despite being a product of the early silent era, Les Vampires more than any other work from the first thirty years of film history (1888-1918) feels like it was written for a 21st century audience and is my choice for best picture of 1915.

Francesca Bertini, my choice as 1915's best actress in a leading role, was Italy's first great star and inspired one of the two significant genres that characterized silent Italian cinema, the "diva" film. Similar to Hollywood's film noir of the post-war era, diva films told tales of beautiful, aristocratic women who destroy men as a sort of bloodsport.

In Assunta Spina, Bertini's seemingly trivial attempt to provoke her fiance to jealousy leads to a brutal beating, and her seduction of a corrupt judge to secure preferential treatment for her imprisoned fiance leads to disaster. Rather than playing a cartoonish vamp, however, Bertini's characterization is heartbreakingly three dimensional.

Likewise, her performance in La signora delle camelie, an early adaptation of the Dumas novel Camille, is both intimate and deeply-felt, and the anguish she conveys as she juggles true love, tuberculosis and the demands of her crass profession, rivals anything the great Greta Garbo managed in the 1936 version of the same story.

In her essay "Naturalism and the Diva: Francesca Bertini in Assunta Spina," Lea Jacobs argues that Bertini's "pictorial" style of acting—the broad, stylized gestures that modern audiences find so off-putting—is not so much representational as akin to a dance, with a rhythm and use of space reminiscent of Sarah Bernhardt. "An appreciation of this kind of acting," she writes, "involves not only an attention to the grace and aptness of the gestures employed, but also, how they mobilize the space of the set and exhaust the range of emotional possibilities of the situation. Rather than being 'read' for their meaning, they should be savored like a jazz musician's improvisations on a well known theme."

(The other Italian genre was the "Maciste" film, named for the heroic strongman at the center of Giovanni Pastrone's 1914 classic, Cabiria. Also known as "swords and sandals" cinema, the Maciste films focused on Italy's glorious past, a subject of particular interest at a time when the unified nation of Italy was only fifty-five years old and still groping for a national identity. After the debacle of World War I, Mussolini and his fascist supporters rode a wave of "strongman" sentiment to power.)

You might also want to check out Theda Bara in A Fool There Was. Bara was one of Hollywood biggest stars during this era, playing the original "vamp," a seducer and destroyer of men (in real life, she was a devoted wife and ardent feminist). The story of woman who seduces a married man and slowly destroys him, A Fool There Was serves as a reminder of just how long the plot of Fatal Attraction has been kicking around—since the Garden of Eden, I'm thinking.

Unfortunately, this Victorian morality tale doesn't answer the question of whether Bara's fame was based on talent or the notoriety of the roles she played. Nearly everything else she ever did, including her triumph, 1917's Cleopatra, was destroyed in a studio fire in 1937, so this is pretty much all you get. (Dawn at Noir and Chick Flicks posted a nice review of A Fool There Was yesterday. Check it out here.)

The best performance by an actor in 1915 was given by Sessue Hayakawa. The Cheat, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, is the story of a rich, spoiled housewife (Fanny Ward) whose profligate spending is driving her husband to financial ruin. Rather than give up her lavish lifestyle, she embezzles a charity's funds then turns to an Asian businessman (Hayakawa) for an emergency loan. Long on the receiving end of Ward's flirtatious attentions, and impatient to consummate their emotional affair, Hayakawa gives her the money but insists she sleep with him in lieu of payment.

When she takes the money but reneges on her end of the bargain, Hayakawa brands her flesh with a heated iron—one of the most startling scenes of this or any other era.

Like Francesca Bertini, however, Hayakawa elevated this potentially trashy material with a terrific performance.

At a time when The Birth of a Nation could play on Americans' fears of interracial sex to sell $16 million worth of tickets, DeMille no doubt intended the explicit attraction between Hayakawa and Ward as a means to provoke the xenophobic passions of his audience. But Hayakawa brings such elegance and subtlety to the role that, prior to his brutal act of violence, a modern audience is likely to find him the only sympathetic character on the screen.

The years before the United States' entry into World War I represented a brief moment of acceptance for Asians in the American film industry and with the box office success of The Cheat, Hayakawa became a major star. Later, he and his wife, actress Tsuru Aoki, formed their own production company and made several films together, most of which are now lost.

Rising anti-Asian sentiment in the early 1920s, however, put an end to Hayakawa's Hollywood career. After failing to find work in his native Japan, Hayakawa moved to France and launched a second film career. After World War II, he returned to Hollywood and earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

An even bigger sensation at the box office was Raoul Walsh's film of crime and redemp- tion, Regeneration. Based on Owen Kildare's autobiography My Mamie Rose, Regeneration is the story of a small-time hood who meets a social worker and fights to go straight. The film is even-handed in its portrayal of Kildare, showing his suffering as a child at the hands of abusive stepparents, but not flinching from his crimes as an adult.

Walsh must have liked the basic story—a violent man goes potty over a dame—because he directed variations of it for the rest of his career, including High Sierra and The Strawberry Blonde.

Walsh filmed most of Regeneration on location in New York's slums and saloons, lending the film a documentary feel. His real coup, though, was the casting of veteran actress Anna Q. Nilsson, whom Walsh later accurately described as "ravishing." (You may remember her, along with Buster Keaton and H.B. Warner, as one of the "waxworks" who plays bridge with Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.)

With the Progressive politics of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in full flower, films with a social message were almost a cliche during this era. In addition to Regeneration, you might also check out A Corner in Wheat (1909), Traffic in Souls (1913), Where Are My Children? (1916) and the last film I'll mention in this post, Thomas H. Ince's The Italian, all of which are preserved in the National Film Registry.

While my other choices for the best films and perform- ances of 1915 are obscure by the standards of today, my choice for best actor in a lead role, George Beban in The Italian, is obscure by any standard. Although the film has been deemed worthy for inclusion in the Film Registry, it was not a box office success in 1915 and Beban himself appeared in only twenty films during his career. Still, it's one of the best films and best performances of the year and worth the effort to track down.

The Italian was one of several films about immigrants to emerge from this period of history, an issue understandably of interest to audiences since immigration from Europe to the U.S. had recently reached its peak of more than a million persons a year, with more than 13.5 million first-generation immigrants living in the U.S. The story of an immigrant who arrives in New York with the American Dream of prosperity and upward mobility in his heart only to find poverty, crime and disillusionment must have been a familiar one.

Despite a successful career on Broadway—Beban was able to command a salary of $7000 and percentage of the profits—The Italian was his first film and it takes him a few scenes to find his legs. In fact, I got the sense while watching the film that most everybody was learning on the job—and maybe they were—but by the time the film kicks into gear, with Beban's Beppo Donnetti traveling steerage from Italy to New York, Beban is in complete command of his craft.

"The actor's style is boisterous but grounded in psychological truth," wrote Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy. "He is also an astute judge of his audience. He knows when to appeal to viewers' sympathies and when to pull back, something that could not always be said about his contemporaries."

Beban's descent into despair as his child falls ill and then his icy rage at the politician who used him then spit him out in his hour of need is moving, and his planned revenge chilling—a terrific performance in a small, but unforgettable movie.

Even More Trivia: Lastly I want to mention Frank Keenan who played a supporting role as the father in another highly-touted movie, The Coward. Keenan isn't good in this or any other movie but I bring him up because in my researches I discovered that in his day he was known as a "furniture actor," which turns out to be an old theater term meaning an actor who habitually turns up for work drunk and has to lean on the furniture to keep from falling down

You learn something new every day.

The Silent Oscars: 1906-1914—Part One

[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 Interest La 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.

[Click here to continue to Part Two.]