Waxworks (1924)

Director: Paul Leni

Screenplay: Henrik Galeen

Cast: Emil Jannings as Harun al-Rashid, Conrad Veidt as Ivan the Terrible, Werner Krauss as Spring-Heeled Jack, William Dieterle as The Poet / Assad the Baker / The Boyar, John Gottowt as the waxworks proprietor, Olga Belajeff as Eva / Maimune / the Boyar's bride

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Truthfully, Waxworks for most of its length is not really horror for most of its length, but is important to the canon of German Expressionist cinema. It is still a fascinating piece, an anthology story set up with moments that are purely macabre, set up around the figures of Harun al-Rashid, Ivan the Terrible and the fictional figure of Spring-Heeled Jack all co-existing as waxwork figures in an exhibition at a German carnival. The owner of the exhibit hires a man (William Dieterle) to write their exhibits' stories, building this anthology whilst falling for Eva (Olga Belajeff), the woman who works there. Its director, Paul Leni, would move to the US to make Hollywood films in the last stage of his career, tragically passing away before his time at forty four. He is also very important, alongside the figures who worked with him on and off the screen, for films which find themselves placed into the history of early horror cinema even if not their primary genre as with Waxworks.  Probably the most famous for its cultural influence is The Man Who Laughs (1928), a film which is not horror in genre, but fit into its iconography for the titular figure's iconic appearance, a known inspiration for the Batman villain The Joker.

Waxworks feels like a flex in terms of bringing together figures from the world of German cinema at its time, playing off to later horror anthologies for bringing in big names in their own stories as Harun al-Rashid is played by Emil Jannings, and the future Man Who Laughs, Conrad Veidt, playing Ivan the Terrible. Spring-Heeled Jack, played by Werner Krauss, is more an additional epilogue whilst the other two stories take up most of the film's length. This presents the issue now with Waxworks, as that means Jannings' story takes up a large part of the feature, and means you have to accept a film from a hundred years ago where German actors are playing Middle Eastern figures in brown face against an ancient Persian reality. Of an alternative reality to the actual Bagdad this is set in Harun al-Rashid, as played by Jannings as a cartoonish oaf, is a caliph eyeing the wife of a baker, learning of her when about to have the husband executed for ruining his chess games with the smoke from his work. Barring some actors playing servants, the cast is white actors, something we have to accept from an ancient film from a century ago, alongside the whole issue that some may not know that Harun al-Rashid is quite an important historical figure in terms of the Arabic world, making Jannings' take on him as a buffoonish womaniser, whilst from a great actor, not flattering at all.

It does not come off as racist in terms of mistral acting, to deliberately caricature these figures as harmful archetypes, but a now naive part of the past where the likes of the German film industry of that time, let alone Hollywood, dreamt of stories in these places considered exotic and sincerely wanted to tell the stories, but were at the time they cast actors in these roles regardless of them being white actors being made up into other ethnicities. It is a practice that happened in a few industries - like my bafflement why Rock Hudson kept being cast as Native Americans in the likes of Winchester '73 (1950) in the fifties despite it being plainly obvious he stood out like a sore thumb.  There is the difficulty to watch films like this, even great films, without rolling our eyes , when we rightly found common sense and cast characters based on the actors being of the appropriate ethnicity. Even by the late fifties, you have Fritz Lang's last films including The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (both 1959), fun films part of one single epic story, but bizarre nowadays as sincere Indian set adventure stories with white actors playing Indian characters on staged sets, when Jean Renoir from France, when making The River (1951), shot the film in India with Indian cast for Indian characters.

Sadly, even into the Millennium you can argue cinema was still doing this, but with Waxworks, it does need to be brought up because it is the first segment you have to watch, and some might be put off finish the rest of the work because of this aspect firmly showing it as an artefact. It is still fascinating, this artificially depicted haze of Bagdad architecture through the German Expressionism, but you could have easily dropped this into medieval Germany with a German lord for Emil Jennings to play, and no one a century later would have to bat an eye. Without the issue of crashing into the shores of reality, you still have a gleefully macabre farce in its centre which still works, as the baker is convinced by his wife to steal the caliph's magical wishing ring to prove his love for her, even if it means stealing a completely severed hand. Her character could be dismissed as another questionable stereotype, a two dimensional gold digger, if the story did not deliciously, for all its issues in setting choice, feel so modern still with its sick humoured farce ending. With a fake wax figure involved, there will be a way for man and wife to still stay together, but she and the caliph will be able to have the affair closer to his palace behind the baker's back as the newly appointed staff member. It is a final sick joke I have to admit won me over as being still impactful decades later.

Ivan the Terrible's story, even if not played by a Russian, gets away from these issues of casting for exotic locations to be a more twisted tale bordering into gothic psychodrama, near the horror genre, It is helped by the fact we have Conrad Veidt a Ivan, one of the best actors of that era of any country, whether as Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to, having to flee Germany during the Nazi era, his Hollywood era playing the likes of evil Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942). He immediately, even next to an acclaimed actor like Jannings, stands out, and in an era that can be dismissed for broad acting, gets over a bloody thirsty leader already bordering into insanity perfectly, one who even gets off, to be frank about it, about planning to have people murdered. When he believes his appointed poison maker is betraying him, the later realising his fate is doomed decides to set up a fatal hourglass to get his revenge on the leader. This was my personal favourite of the stories, a gristly tale appropriate for the horror genre even if not technically within it in terms of menace, as when not using an innocent older man as a stand in for an assassination attempt, he intends to steal the fiancée of another man as his own, who is in the midst of grieving for her father who was the stand-in. With Veidt playing the growing derangement, [Spoiler Warning] especially when the fatal hourglass does not poison him but leaves him going insane thinking he is by its sands [Spoilers End], it does feel like a great menacing piece.

In context, it also shows the incredibly production value and aura of German Expressionism. Their complete sense of artificially, turning snow bound Russia in the second story into a claustrophobic series of distorted rooms, is more and more magical as time passes as an aesthetic. Its Spring Heeled Jack ending, the name a reference to the English folklore figure whilst the character could be seen as closer to Jack the Ripper, is sadly short, with one wondering about how a take on either figure would look like in this era of cinema. It is still a good punch line of actual horror however, fully taking advantage of the aesthetics and techniques of silent cinema in general, with its leads now as themselves (rather than characters in each of the tales before) being terrified by this figure stalking them around the carnival, the sequence includes using such techniques as interposing actors so they look ghost-like. It adds a nice conclusion to Waxworks, not really a horror film altogether but with all these phantasmagorical moments which are eye-catching and memorable.

Laila (1929)

 

Director: George Schnéevoigt

Screenplay: George Schnéevoigt

Cast: Mona Mårtenson as Laila; Tryggve Larssen as Jåmpa; Harald Schwenzen as Anders Lind; Peter Malberg as Aslag Laagje; Cally Monrad as Mor Laagje; Henry Gleditsch as Mellet; Finn Bernhoft as C.O. Lind

Ephemeral Waves

Tonight all should be happy.

Continuing on in terms of learning more about cinema, one night I learnt of the existence of Laila, a Norwegian silent film. One night was left to view said film, entirely heard of before that night and from a country, Norway, whose cinema is neglected. The restored version I saw even includes the births and deaths of everyone who created the film, a time capsule set among the Lapps culture of the region, a reminder that films like this, when preserved, come from an entirely different era and that in itself is a virtue to them being seen..

Among the Lapps, in a tiny village of Finnmark in the frozen wilderness, a strong willed woman, fleeing wolves with her infant daughter, speeds across the snow on her reindeer driven sleigh only to lose the baby in the pursuit. The film itself is lost in time, a novel adaptation set in a timeless region of ageless snow covered wilderness, where the baby is found by Jåmpa, a Sámi man of an indigenous Finno-Ugric people in real life, who is the servant of Laagje, a rich man who adopts the infant girl and christens her Laila. Made by George Schnéevoigt, a Danish filmmaker who also edited and wrote the film, Laila in its two and a half hours proves itself to be a melodrama, one of tangents as its entire first forty minutes is a story in itself, Laagje proving his virtue when he learns Laila is the daughter of a merchant, showing honour upon learning this at Christmas.

Laila will return to being his daughter again when the plague arrives next summer, with a boat full of dead bodies to emphasis this. The melodrama proves a perfect catalyst for the film, able to bring to life a culture rich in detail. The adult Laila is given by her father, as a talented rider, a great white reindeer named Stormwind; it proves heroic but, thinking of a Finnish film The White Reindeer (1952), the mind could not help but be amused wondering if anyone was going to turn into a were-reindeer lie that film. Making this joke is not out-of-place either, as the two films together are rewarding documents of this region of people in these environments, with their lives based around reindeer, by individuals taking an anthropological attitude.  

The film looks gorgeous, due to not only its creator's skill but also the location and time. Silent cinema is unfortunately difficult to sell to some, and I myself have always had to readjust to it a style at times, just by telling itself entirely though its visual vocabulary, due to how entirely alien to modern day filmmaking it can be. This type of cinema is however become more dreamlike as history passes, turning what is a very conventionally told drama with anthropological aspect into something magical, able to get away with its length due to the ethereal nature of the production. The verisimilitude contrasting this helps considerably as this film, when required, also feels like a snapshot of an older time, in its costumes and what the characters do. Said film also had to stage stunts which could not be faked. Alongside the sledding sequences, one major one has a person ride on rapids for real in a boat, and grip a real tree by a waterfall. It could be so easy to forget that, when not one of the dramatic scenes, still and based on acting, but in these action sequences how much coordination they required especially as this film, based around snow and sleds, is unique in terms of such scenes.

It is timeless in another way as a film which tackles the conflict between groups, unfortunately still with us, Laila falling for a "darro" merchant and a taboo for her step father. Whilst the arranged husband he has for her, Mellet, is also dashing, it is not true love and considering he was once the young boy who roped Laila like a reindeer as a baby, this is not going to succeed as a relationship. It is going to end in an obvious way, but for all the jaded and cynical modernity you could bring to the film, you can look back to this silent film and see a greater sincerity. Even the Bible Laila gets, a bound with the merchant, is something that is not discarded as in modern culture as a symbol, and is neither badly latched upon to the point of sycophantism from modern organised religion. Instead, with its wholesomeness, it carries more weight as a gift of love. The sense of reality in creating this world also feels so palpable, shot in snow bound environments that look like they staged the same for centuries before the film schedule, but when Laila does embrace the extravagance of cinema, bordering on the ludicrous, it is Jåmpa fighting wolves in the snow, played by real trained dogs than CGI ones, for true love to succeed. If that is not true movie magic, in content and emotion, in one scene I do not know what is.

Surviving into the modern day, part of itself is made in realism, the other in a haze as even Mona Mårtenson, a Swedish actor, playing Laila herself looks like a figure from dreams, made more poignant as she tragically passed only in her mid fifties. Director Schnéevoigt himself would remake this film twice, going for a third attempt in colour in 1958 which was taken over by someone else¹. What he made regardless in the first Laila needs to be more readily available as a good soulful tonic.   

 

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1) Referred to HERE.

Halloween 31 For 31: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

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Director: Rupert Julian

Screenplay: Elliott J. Clawson, Raymond L. Schrock, Bernard McConville, Jasper Spearing, Richard Wallace, Walter Anthony, Tom Reed and Frank M. McCormack

Cast: Lon Chaney (as Erik, The Phantom of the Opera); Mary Philbin (as Christine Daaé); Norman Kerry (as Vicomte Raoul de Chagny); Arthur Edmund Carewe (as Ledoux); Gibson Gowland (as Simon Buquet)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #44

Regrettably, while his iconic status is still held aloft in horror lore through older fans, this is the first and only film I have ever been able to see so far of Lon Chaney's, his body of mostly silent horror cinema incredibly difficult to acquire in the United Kingdom. One of the strangest anomalies of the DVD age, especially as the British appreciate horror cinema with incredible reverence, is huge parts of early American horror cinema (Val Lewton for example) have been barely released, Lou Chaney another victim of this. Considering this film, this is stupefying to consider because I immediately mesmerised by him; for once his sinister plastic mask as the Phantom, haunting the Paris Opera House, is yanked off its not only his (still) incredible makeup work that surprises, done to himself using fishing wire to sculpt his own flesh, but how much of a prescience he is. Not a ham, but like Vincent Price or Boris Karloff, he is giving a great performance in context of a silent film just from body language stalking the screen. His shadow is the first thing seen, hanging off a stone wall as a sinister entity preventing anyone but budding opera singer Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) from playing the lead in Faust, but as he physically appears on screen he stands out incredibly just from magnetism alone, making the unavailability of his career to see in Britain irritating for me.

If there's only one major flaw with this adaptation of Gaston Leroux's original novel it's that, like films nearly a century on, the hero and heroine are a bland duo cast to represent wholesome, lovely normalcy when the diabolical (and sane) viewers like myself are on Chaney's side. Chaney steals the film continually and even if he's psychopathic, you're on the side of this melodramatic, organ playing entity who wants love even if it means kidnapping an opera singer, causing a giant chandelier to fall down on the audience, attempting to drown people in the cellar of his already underground canal lair, and threaten to blow up the entire opera house with gun powder. In comparison, Philbin as the singer threatened by the Phantom and Norman Kerry  as her dashing beau are merely stand-ins for the excitement of the story, out done by Chaney and the decadent production design.

From https://carrieannebrownian.files.wordpress.com/2015/10
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While it's not as elaborate and haunting as what was being depicted onscreen in Germany in the twenties, not just German Expressionism but the set design of films like F.W. Murnau's own take on Faust (1926), I appreciate how theatrical but also tangible the world of this tale is. Giant stairways, trapdoors which propel people up like springs as much as they fall down them, secret doors behind mirrors, a sense of mystery around each set to reveal in, let alone the Phantom's secret lair that requires a boat to get to it where he sleeps in a coffin. It does evoke as a result Les Vampires (1915) in how it's not only horror but a pulp tale where each door, each room is a prop that leads to a new event rather than set dressing, the sense of space felt as the environments engulf their characters and each room representing a new plot point. When viewed in the colour tints of the restored version (of blood red, vibrant green), a greater potency is felt to these sets.

Of course, this version of the Phantom of the Opera is also known for its environment with two tone colour in the Bal Masqué sequence. It's rudimentary but witnessing it in 2016, the sight of colour, of pink skin and the deep crimson of the Masque of the Red Death costume the Phantom wears, is awe inspiring, a magic to it because of its flawed appearance against the visceral nature of the colours themselves, seeing experimentation add new colours (literally) to the painter's palette. The sense of spectacle is felt throughout the film, more so because of its age and how it's from an entirely different era where such extravagant sets were built; famously, until it was tragically demolished in 2014, Soundstage 28 where the set was preserved in Universal Studio was still kept into the modern day. Any issue of the more exaggerated acting amongst the cast, particularly the comedic characters who work at the theatre, or the bland nature of the good protagonists cannot detract from the imaginative, exciting nature of the Phantom of the Opera altogether because of this.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9fAd2phremk/maxresdefault.jpg

Halloween 31 For 31: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

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Directors: James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber

Cast: Herbert Stern (as Roderick Usher); Hildegarde Watson (as Madeline Usher); Melville Webber (as a Traveller)

Synopsis: An avant-garde adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's story in which brother and sister Usher (Stern and Watson) are cursed by a malady that will lead to their doom in their ancestral home.

The Fall of the House of Usher has been adapted a few times. The same year as this one in 1928 Jean Epstein adapted the story for a feature length version that was as unconventional in presentation and style. Roger Corman started his series of Poe adaptations (barring one adapting H.P. Lovecraft) with the House of Usher story. Ken Russell somewhat based a film around the story, if anything of it does exist in said film alongside the other Poe references, and shot said story in his garage. This version is one of only three films made between James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, the others including the equally well regarded Lost In Sodom (1932), and a personal favourite Tomatoes Another Day (1930), shot by Watson only, a parody of bad cinema that predates the use of "bad" filmmaking but uses them, rather than for irony, for turning the scenario it depicts into a hilarious and absurd reality where being shot dead doesn't mean you're staying on the ground a second later. While this does retain the basic outline of the Poe story, the directors only went from memory of what took place in the narrative, allowing the result to drift off into something different entirely. Having e.e. cummings write the shooting script - a poet known for fragmented poetry which played with how their stanzas are structured and how a reader even intonates the sounds reading the words - was as well an encouragement to fragment the tale down to its primal form.

A film of the silent era, it clearly absorbed countless influences from films before it but it itself now exists outside of time, new and alien to current cinema regardless of its age. Set in an environment fully indebted to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) populated by giant, geometrical shapes, the film is entirely a mood piece, whittling the original story down to basic images, the most important of placing someone alive in a locked coffin and the madness that bubbles up to the surface. There was no sound, and barring inspired use of letters marking out sound effects at one point, objects alongside everything else onscreen, there's no intertitles either. Everything is depicted through in-camera effects or artificial locations, the three actors within the film as much puppets or automatons who gesticulate and change their bodies at will for the shot being taken.

From http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10
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Technical Details:

Entirely shot in black and white, it's entirely opposite to Corman's lush colour adaptation but the result is an alternative form of atmosphere, an all-engulfing mass where even if you see a great deal in a shot its melded to the shadows. The film becomes expressionist not just from its look by how the in-camera effects are used, from reverse photography to superimposition, all of which are intentionally unrealistic, the plasticity of the cinematic form effecting the nightmare being depicted too, the later made sculptable by these effects. It's not Vincent Price in states of shock using his acting here but the camera tilting at one stage with the environment following it in its slant, looking like both will fall off the edge. The environment, the walls themselves, can be ripped open by an ordinary people and the film, without needing to follow Poe's tale strictly, can add its own character in how each imposition of images over others have their own character and effect the tone.

Abstract Spectrum: Experimental/Expressionist/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

When set to the right music, this perfectly conveys the emotions from the original short story, the few hand built sets used appropriately claustrophobic and everything reduced to the most pronounced, bold shapes and symbols. What's actually depicted in the film is very minimalist at times, merely a wall of the set behind a distorting camera effect, but from the multiplication of one of the actors' faces to a silhouette on the wall, everything is evocative and once you learn to appreciate the film in how it communicates this with the visuals only, it becomes a lot more bolder as a result.

Personal Opinion:

Avant-garde shorts are a particular favourite of mine. For the many that are difficult at first to understand, and for the few that are just technical experiments in form and light rather than emotionally relatable, at their best they push what you can do with cinematic form. Neither on an intellectual level alone either, as they can effects you with a gut impact like The Fall of the House of Usher does. They subject you to something that strays away from what you expect a film to usually look and act like. Poe's stories are as much about what is not conveyed directly in the lines, even if he's very explicit in his descriptions and ideas, something which links hand-in-hand with an experimental short like this whose main good is to convey emotions like fear through less conventional images that are yet more real and impactful. 

Halloween 31 For 31: The Phantom Carriage (1921)

From https://kalafudra.files.
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Director: Victor Sjöström

Screenplay: Victor Sjöström

Cast: Victor Sjöström (as David Holm); Hilda Borgström (as Anna Holm); Tore Svennberg (as Georges); Astrid Holm (as Edit); Concordia Selander (as Edit's Mother)

Synopsis: On New Year's Eve, the callous alcoholic David Holm (Sjöström) is the last person to die before the new year arrives. This means, in folklore, he will be forced to become the figure who drives the phantom carriage for the next year, the one who picks up the souls of the immediately passed. He argues with the previous driver Georges (Svennberg) for his life, forced to relive his sins including his cruelty to the Salvation Army nurse Sister Edit (Holm), who is dying of consumption at the same time and has been calling for him in hopes of redeeming him before she passes on in her death bed.

Horror as a genre shouldn't just be about repulsion or nihilistic content. That is just one side of the coin of a genre that can depict multiple emotions. It's possible to have very optimistic and life affirming narratives which use the worst fears human beings have as part of the message of perseverance. Fear of death and decay, which are a basic tenant of horror, can led to hope despite them. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843) is as much a horror story as it is a Christmas tale, the horror in Ebenezer Scrooge's potential end, dying alone through his own cruelty, and in the ghosts that warn him of his misdeeds. The Phantom Carriage wouldn't have been in the horror genre if it didn't have its supernatural backbone for the narrative, more of a drama with faith based leanings and a clear alcohol abstinence message, but having the pretext of death and a grim reaper figure weighing down on the protagonist David Holm's shoulders does add an eerie meaning to the message, placing on that when one died you would be judged for all your sins and doomed by them. This could seem silly if one was agnostic or an atheist but it works as much as a metaphorical concept, doomed in death to trawl behind one regrets of one's failed life.

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Like A Christmas Carol, while it may come off as antiquated now, the importance of one's acts in life are given repercussions as the afterlife is made a symbol of failure in improving oneself. Unlike many a sanctimonious movie, dire in their smiling messages of improvement, there is no peddling of any individual being better than those who need to redeem themselves. Baring the devil alcohol, what starts Holm's downward spiral in misanthropy is actually a combination of bad luck fed by the complications of human interaction, culminating in a proto-axe moment before The Shining (1980) was even a novel originally. I see why Ingmar Bergman saw this as one of his favourite movies because while the morality is black and white, the characters are complicated for silent movie protagonists regardless of this. In particular in Holm's wife Anna, pushed to a desperate way of escape to escape from him and his abuse, no one is inherently a stock figure but all individuals hurt or healed by each other, something which directly feeds into Bergman's own films, including the likes of Wild Strawberries (1957) where he cast Sjöström and partakes in the same ideas of reflecting back on one's life at the precipice of death even if in an entirely different context.

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The supernatural context not only adds an all-seeing eye overlooking the human species trying to exist, but it solidifies the drama too. Anyone, even a good person, can end up in this world having to drive the Grim Reaper's titular carriage, trudging through the afterlife for a year that will feel like an eternity, the previous driver a weathered old man who feared this fate in one of the many flashbacks that makes up a flashback heavy plot structure. This aspect returns the story as well back to the complexity of myths rather than the over-simplification of many other movies, willing to see contradictions in the unseen forces and their elusiveness. It also adds to the film as entertainment, a horror film where it's a character's soul and not their lives that's at risk, not about an evil threat from the outside to fear but one man being a violent drunkard being forced to crawl through his own mistakes and to lay by the bed of a dying woman he treated badly without being able to say to her how sorry he is.

From https://melluloid.files.wordpress.com/2013/
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Technical Detail:

What immediately stands out, though it is only a quarter of the film, is the still-to-this-day impressive superimposition techniques used to depict the phantom carriage and the denizens of the afterlife. The hard work that would've taken place, using the technology of that day, is seen but my appreciation is beyond the mere recognition of what was not available and what the creators did to overcome this. Instead my appreciation is that it is entirely done with real props and merely with what could be done in-camera rather than in ones-and-twos of a computer. The ghostly figures have a greater sense of the ethereal than a modern day counterpart created with CGI. The images of the carriage are evocative when they take centre stage, especially in a scene of retrieval of a drowning victim from the bottom of the sea, a haunting nature that benefits the film in its execution by adding immense importance to the moral play of David Holm's redemption. As well, they make powerful images for the horror genre even if they are a mere fragment of the whole picture.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HTv_7hR9Fvc/TiRnTnR4xTI/
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The film's existence as a silent film is of importance too. Silence films have become a unique part of cinema's history, still maligned in some contexts - in how they're rarely played on television, how not a lot are available outside the US on physical media -  but with their aesthetics having an aura around them that has led directors like Guy Maddin to directly replicate their visual structures in their own work. What could be seen as primitive in context of modern films - no sound, colour added in post-production tints - betrays the innovations in their style that are more advanced than some modern films, the aesthetic differences also providing The Phantom Carriage and other such older films different moods in comparison. The smaller screen frame makes the drama more closed in, and the tinting of scenes (orange for lit interiors, blue for night time exteriors) gives the world depicted an unreality of its own. The blackness of the environments, in small rooms, in a sparsely decorated Samaritan ward, or the tombstones of a graveyard, adds an ink-like visual atmosphere which emphasises the dread of the carriage but also the emotions of the figures within the tale.

From http://www.thenativeangeleno.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/PC03.jpeg

Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Barring the eeriness of the "ghost" effects, this is a straightforward drama with little that doesn't make sense directly in its meaning. Nothing is oblique and henceforth not abstract.

Personal Opinion:

It was a long time since first seeing images of The Phantom Carriage, amazed by the visuals in a DVD release trailer, but it's a wonderful sensation to have seen it now and for the film to stand up in reputation. Unexpectedly, like the end of A Christmas Carol, I ended up seeing a sweet film which left me with a warm heart rather than chills down the spine, a sensation special for me as much as the fear one finds in other horror films.

Halloween 31 For 31: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

From http://www.steve-calvert.co.uk/pub-dom/imgs/
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Dir. Robert Wiene

The last review for the Halloween season...and with this I'm stepping further than Wild Zero (1999) into something I first saw, on a college campus, which has had a subconscious effect on me. I was studying this film in fact in my Film Studies class alongside Nosferatu (1922), a immense pair to see, amongst other films, if there ever was one. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari has a weight to it that is utterly profound. One of the first horror films, and such a drastic influence on what was to come. The brilliance of it as a film is that, yet, the movie still feels drastically unique compared to all that came after it in the same genre. In a story within a story, Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) arrives at a town with his carnival attraction, a somnambulist named Caesar (Conrad Veidt). As murders are taking place it's not long before the friend of the one of the victims Francis (Friedrich Feher) suspects that the two are involved somehow, a threat to the love of his life Jane Olsen (Lil Dagover) significant. Immediately the film stands out, for what is under the umbrella of German Expressionism, an artistic style of multiple mediums that wanted to depicted the internal, subconscious reality of the mind instead of realism. This was the context that the film was being taught to us in Film Studies, so at the same time I was being introduced to German Expressionism as well. Using hand made sets, the world of Caligari's is an irregular, distorted place, of angular, disturbed buildings, heavy use of blacks even for a monochrome film, and claustrophobic interiors and urban streets where the buildings seem to be leaning to each other. It's a depiction of a nightmare, and what'll be more interesting for me to write of is what it was like to see this for the first time in college. I was taken aback by it, fascinated by its singular look, seeing the sense of the distorted portrayed fully. Even back then, not able to appreciate films that alarmed and forced viewers into unconventional and uncomfortable positions, Caligari was still able to succeed because its style translated all the menace and unease required for its story to me, and would be able to for any normal film goer, despite its age and potential technical limitations, possessing a fully formed world.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0C6MGIpRoFE/T6KLLW5vuFI/
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You can see the debt directors like Tim Burton have to this, but the film is still radically different, viewing it again, from many films. Even against the couple German Expressionist films I have seen its drastically different and goes further. There is still something unnerving about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in mood because of its aesthetic and tone. A warped frame of mind befitting the fact that the story-within-a-story is possibly up for question, whose obvious artificiality makes it impossible for the film to be absorbed and loosened of its effect. It's too menacing and dark still to be digestible, to be the fun spookiness of Tim Burton or as far as being defanged like a lot of older horror films. So much so that, on a big screen, the little details are what build up the world being depicted the most, even to how impractical the furniture looks to sit on for characters, remoulded a person if they were to use them. Everything has a connection to the aesthetic being used and, of course, being physically real, the weight is felt. Unlike a Burton as well, the small scale of the film gives them a better ability to draw you as a viewer to the atmosphere.

From http://www.silveremulsion.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/cabinetofdrcaligari_1.jpg

A person like me viewing this film is going to be pulled in by how unconventional it is, and being a silent film adds to this factor. With there being no onscreen dialogue at all, only inter titles, there is an additional sense of the film taking place in a different reality. It actually took me a long time, within the last few years in fact, to be able to fully appreciate silent cinema, but back at college this film and Sergei Eisenstein's Strike (1925), being taught in the same subject on Germany's and the Soviet Union's radically different cinematic innovations in the twenties,  immediately caught me because of their elaborate and distinct use of the visuals. Caligari is not a radically advanced film in terms of technique - the camera is static each shot, editing basic, none of the complicated technique of D.W. Griffith that would become mainstream or that of Soviet filmmakers whose editing is even more avant garde now - but aesthetically its advanced. In its use of background and production design, lighting, a scene where text appears in shot overlaid on the images and generally pushing the look of cinema to express its nightmarish story of murder and secrets. A film depicting less than a rational world, while it would influence many films to come, and has a conventional mystery plot for the most part in its core, it's style yet is completely at odds still with most cinema. Acting and how actors are made up is also a factor in this, as German Expressionism went for intentionally unrealistic and choreographed acting, characters depicted with heavy makeup and acting more broadly than was already arch in silent cinema to register meanings without access for sound.

From http://www.black-and-white-movies.com/images/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari-jail.jpg

Encountering a film like this, with an elaborate style, was an eye opening experience. Famously, it's twist ending is just as immortalised, a hackneyed plot twist in modern movies but here still an unsettling sting for how old the film is, one of the first to do this, and for how in lieu of its tone it works perfectly for the mood. I wouldn't be surprised if this film is what got me hooked onto darker, more abstract films I have been covering for this season and watch in general. Certainly watching it again, its captivating still, an immense power to the content and images. The rawness of being an early film in cinema's history with the sophistication of the content making it still incredibly rewarding to watch.

From http://ufa-filmnaechte.de/fileadmin/user_upload/caligari_big_2.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

It would've been insane not to give this the highest rating. Not only does it deserve it for being one of the first films to do many of the things that make up this type of cinema - locations designed to match the protagonist's state of mind, unconventional acting, the abnormal plot content including madness and psychiatry, the twist ending - but it's still a very unconventional film to this day. Its age in fact has added to this, a creation from another era of cinema lost to us because of advancing technology but, made with hand painted sets and a group of actors, its closed-in world is uniquely its own, graspable as filming sets and a world familiar to us, but more disconnected from reality at the same time.

From https://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0unetj4751qzdvhio1_500.jpg

A Cinema of the Abstract movie?

Pretty safe to say that this was one of the films that built this blog and my entire interest in this sort of cinema in the first place, leaving an imprint that has fed my imagination, which is immensely obvious now revisiting the film. It's a representative, the best, for what this blog is meant to be, the poster film above many others for what "Cinema of the Abstract" is meant to mean. Films that you leave feeling you've stepped into another world, which in this case was, fittingly, one of the films that did it first and better than most of its offspring.

Halloween 31 For 31: Faust (1926)

From http://filmnitrate.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Faust-Poster.jpg

Dir. F.W. Murnau

Revisiting Murnau's adaptation of the legend - of Faust (Gösta Ekman) signing his soul to the Devil (Emil Jannings) - has both been a wonderful experience but has been an eyebrow raising one, abruptly meaning a lot more beyond seeing the film again and this season I'm covering it for. I admit that I wasn't a fan of it the first time I viewed it, not as yet fully appreciate the virtues of films like it, but it had importance in hindsight back when I did see it originally because I saw it while I was at college. This period, between seventeen to nineteen or so, while I wish I could've been more of a freespirit and opened up, rather than merely study and be the good student, was when I started developing the interests and fascinations that I have now. I read literature like Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita which drastically changed my attitude to how the written word could be used. I discovered music as diverse as Kraftwerk to the Butthole Surfers which did the same for music. It was also the period where my habit for cinema fully started, originally more inclined to video games as a teenager but growing out of them at this point. Amongst my other subjects, I took Film Studies, opening my mind further, learning the basics of how films were constucted, and seeing movies I'd never considered viewing before, alongside having access to an online DVD rental service and renting films like Faust from the college library. Frankly, I didn't appreciate a lot of the films I saw at the time, artistically important ones, even cult movies I'd love now, many I'm still needing to rewatch after seven years or so from then, but that doesn't detract from what grew in terms of my interest. I found films back then - like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) - in Film Studies class or in my curiosity that stuck out then as great pieces of art even back then, alongside discovering directors like Jan Svankmajer who'd become some of my most treasured auteurs still today. Able to revisit Faust, as I did with Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), another film from the collage library I didn't appreciate until I was much older, I not only find it strange that I once held some flashy, contemporary films of my generation as being significantly superior to them, now having become gimmicky and average, but particularly now with seeing Faust again, I've been given back an emotion from my college days that I can now appreciate more so and use to my advantage. That mindset of being openly curious without bias, without snobbery and able to appreciate anything. The mind that suddenly watches Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975) for the first time on television on a late night, and while unable to fully grasp it, is still fascinated by it. The mind that never gave a time of whether I had the time to go through everything, and could go from listening to a CD of Spanish guitar music and than a book of classical literature, a sponge with no sense of pickiness to what it contacted with. The mind that decided to watch Faust because the DVD cover looked interesting.

From http://constructiveconsumption.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/murnau-faust.png

Murnau's Faust is a giant melodrama, less concerned with the cerebral musings about life and morality, or the murkier side of humanity that could be covered in the folktale. This is so drastically different from the 2011 adaptation of the folktale by Alexander Sokurov as you can get. Instead you have a film in Murnau's take that, along with Sunrise, can seem naive, but is far from sickly sweet, instead passionate and felt from the heart. With Faust falling in love with a young woman Gretchen (Camilla Horn), after being given his youth back by the Devil, and being desensitised and dulled by decadence, the film becomes much more of a fantastical, religious based romantic tragedy than a take on the morality behind the concept of the Faustian pact. Murnau's work here and with Sunrise are significant arguments though for the failure of modern dramatic cinema. When usually "drama" evokes for me transparent musing, material to pad out magazines and festivals, this film, while not even considering to tackle the philosophical nature of the folktale, does nonetheless have a far greater sense of humanity by just being a melodrama in its core. Faust in unashamedly dramatic, a fantasy romance drama that is elaborate, one of the most extravagant looking silent films made in Germany at this time, Murnau's last in his country  before he went over to the US afterwards, and not ashamed to be melodramatic within this style. It certainly fits the season of Halloween, the story of a pact between a man who rejects faith and science with the Devil, the film containing some of the most fantastical and technically complicated special effects from what I have seen of the 1920s. The gristly looking Horse Men of the Apocalypse riding the clouds, Emil Janning's Devil looming as a giant above Faust's town spreading the plague over it to push the moral man into signing a blood contract, and countless model and superimposition tricks used to create the supernatural and Christian iconography. They are obviously artificial to modern eyes, but these effects are so much more spectacular than CGI because they flux between realism and being fake in a way that is inherently more cinematic. Tonally, what is dark is dark, comedic moments are exaggerated and the romantic melodrama cuts at the heart strings.

From http://www.craveonline.com/images/stories/2011/2012
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It's an incredible work of cinema in construction, both by Murnau and the individuals part of the film, from the actors acting out the scenes without audible dialogue, to the crew of film technicians behind the cameras, working together to create images I remembered, despite my disinterest in the film originally, up until the day I saw it again for this season, images from back during that single viewing retained in my memory. The Devil's first appearance to Faust, summoned by him, casually sat on a rock in the blackest night by the crossroads. The Devil's brief moment of as a jolly comedy character as Gretchen's aunt tries to wrap her arms around him in passion, a brief moment in the middle of the film where it becomes wonderfully light-hearted and silly. Gretchen in the perishing snow as the tragedy takes place. This version of the story is not a serious, existential take on the folktale, like Sunrise easy to criticise for a black and white morality the same shade as its exquisite lit monochrome images. Certainly, modern eyes, or at least the eyes that I viewed it through originally at college, could easily use their own presumptions to dismiss the film's qualities, where wholesome, very moral characters are good and there is nothing to question this barring that there should be a tragedy that befalls them leading to a happy ending. But the sincerity wins over this. Never mind that here particular, while God is in the background, an angel representing Him against the Devil, the film's melodramatic plot in current day context paints most of the peasantry and populous, Christian believers, as puritanical and believing a form of Christianity that is blind and cruel as it punishes our protagonists of the narrative. Murnau's humanity means that that for anything that may seem like it's from a different time, of attitudes of the early 20th century, there is still an undated, sincere belief in the good of people - from Sunrise, to Nosferatu (1922), Phantom (1922) and the other films I've seen - where his view on love and humanity negates anything that would be incredibly dated or conservative in any other context. The empathy shown in his narratives, his desire to show the best in his characters, is still relevant and powerful today. It means by the end, as the angel makes his last speech to the Devil, even an atheist or a cynic is going to find the final message beautiful, the apparent naivety still much more weighty and important than dismissible fluff.

From http://www.leninimports.com/faust_masters_of_cinema_series_gallery_uk_dvd_2.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

The spectacle of the film wraps together around it's beautiful emotional core to show how good cinema can be, even if Faust is usually behind films like Sunrise and The Last Laugh (1924) when people think of Murnau's contributions to the medium. Silent cinema, especially with the German films I've seen - by Murnau, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst - be it drama or pulp, or both, has shown how good cinema can be, it's spectacle and its craft. It's also shown a horrible discrepancy with a lot of cinema after them, not just now, but from the last century, where a few films forgot the importance of the visuals in the medium silent cinema had to depend on. I love film before and after sound was introduced, but looking at how films like Faust and Metropolis (1927) were the zenith of silent cinema, the use of visuals and techniques around them like editing are a textbook directors should be inspired by. The way a film like Faust is made also means it is abstract while still able to be absorbed the first time easily by the viewer. Because the practical effects were literally practical. Because Faust is such a fantastical film. Because with few exceptions, such like Guy Maddin films, the techniques used in silent films are noticeably absent now, giving them an alien quality in their rarity. As a result, bordering between German Expressionism as much as legend, Murnau's Faust is as much a smorgasbord of phantasmagorical cinema as it is an emotionally sweet drama.

A Cinema of the Abstract movie?

For this review, Faust does mean more beyond this blog. Not just for the nostalgia of finding films like it in collage, but the emotions they all evoke still upon going back to them, by memory or revisiting them. That I've managed to write a review that links F.W. Murnau and the Butthole Surfers together is as much about this too, a mass of varying, drastically different pieces that yet connect into a semiotic whole, also representing my personality through my interests as well as the world around me in the art I've encountered. Whether Faust sustains the passion I have writing about it here, too early to say what its virtues are in the long run, it's going to be an important film regardless that showed me how cinema can be its best. It doesn't matter if I found it dull the first viewing; upon seeing it again, it's shined and lingered in my memory far more than films I once found superior to it that have vanished from my thoughts completely. The result, which any of my Film Studies teachers at college would be happy to hear if any found this review, is that not only have I reappraised a film and found its greatness, but the result of this is beneficial in reflecting back at how I fell in love with this medium originally.

From http://www.filmlinc.com/page/-/Faust1926.jpg