Ménilmontant (1926)

[wilder]

I love this short and everyone should watch it so watch it watch it now:

Kirsanoff's best known work is Ménilmontant (1926), which takes its name from the Paris neighborhood of the same name. The film is a silent, but does not contain any intertitles. It begins with a flurry of quick close-up shots depicting the axe murder of the parents of the protagonists, two girls. As young women, they are portrayed by Nadia Sibirskaïa, Kirsanoff's first wife, and Yolande Beaulieu; their mutual love interest is played by Guy Belmont. The film uses many other techniques that were relatively new at the time, including double exposure.

[Pubrick]

that was pretty good. it felt modern and alive. there were some really impressive sequences in there.

what strikes me most about these silent films made near the end of the silent film era is how far they were advancing the art form in those last years. apparently this guy, according to wikipedia, made his best films in this period, and this one is only his second ever (out of heaps). i'd like to see those other silent shorts before he lost his magic. but my point is i can't get over how much the introduction of sound put an end to innovation in cinema for at least a decade.

were audiences really into Sunrise and this film? as i understand it they seemed to actually understand what was going on despite these filmmakers using techniques and forms never EVER seen before. so everyone who saw Battleship Potemkin, did they get the metaphors? did they get the impressionistic devices Kirsanoff was using in this short? that makes me think these early audiences were like babies in the best way possible, able to absorb any new language with the greatest of ease. they must've had their minds blown constantly in really abstract ways.

if these ignorant silent film watchers really were able to accept an understand all the new techniques thrown at them (eg. strange narrative structures like parallel storytelling) then they were FAR more sophisticated filmgoers than audiences today. today something as loosely ambiguous as The Master makes people sick because it doesn't tell the story in the most straight forward way possible. it's not even inventing new techniques! 2OO1 had this same effect on everyone, the syntax of cinema had become so stagnant that it really took the atomic bomb of movies to wake everyone the fuck up.. and when you think about it that movie plays more like a silent film than anything that had come since the dawn of sound.

the best silent films hold up MUCH better than early sound pictures. obviously part of the problem was the camera became stagnant and movies became more like filmed plays. but the audiences.. did they become dumber so quickly? it's saddening but at the same time optimistic. if they can be dumbed down so quickly it should be possible to reverse the effects just as easily, the potential has to still be there.

a silent 3D feature film, that's the next epic achievement.

[wilder]

were audiences really into Sunrise and this film? as i understand it they seemed to actually understand what was going on despite these filmmakers using techniques and forms never EVER seen before. so everyone who saw Battleship Potemkin, did they get the metaphors? did they get the impressionistic devices Kirsanoff was using in this short? that makes me think these early audiences were like babies in the best way possible, able to absorb any new language with the greatest of ease. they must've had their minds blown constantly in really abstract ways.

but the audiences.. did they become dumber so quickly? it's saddening but at the same time optimistic. if they can be dumbed down so quickly it should be possible to reverse the effects just as easily, the potential has to still be there.

Interesting way to put it. I feel like there are a couple obstacles to this...partially audience patience now, although there seems to be a polarizing effect going on as of late...art films becoming more "arty" and aimed exclusively at the cinephile crowd, mainstream movies going the opposite direction...more than that, though, I feel like the need to keep up with _the_latest_fucking_ thing_ and be plugged into the internet community zeitgeist constantly is a greater barrier to the reversal of this kind of development. -- "DID IT COME OUT TODAY??? IS IT WHAT PEOPLE  ARE TALKING ABOUT? OH IT DIDN'T? IT'S NOT? I'M GOING TO SPEND MY TIME ON THIS OTHER THING THEN BECAUSE I HAVE TO BE PART OF THE PUBLIC CONVERSATION FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I CAN'T BE ALONE!"

Acclimation to this kind of storytelling takes time...consistent exposure. Even if the reversal occurred it would be incredibly gradual... I can't see people focusing attention long enough on a series of films that had techniques like this for any kind of lasting difference to take effect. Nothing lasts, now. Whatever takes hold has to be graspable in a day, fast enough to circulate and have its effect within the confines of a 24-hour half life that going viral necessitates. I'm reminded of Johnny's line from Naked:

"That's the trouble with everybody - you're all so bored. You've had nature explained to you and you're bored with it, you've had the living body explained to you and you're bored with it, you've had the universe explained to you and you're bored with it, so now you want cheap thrills and, like, plenty of them, and it doesn't matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new as long as it's new as long as it flashes and fuckin' bleeps in forty fuckin' different colors."

And then it's on to the next thing.

[jenkins]

the best silent films hold up MUCH better than early sound pictures. obviously part of the problem was the camera became stagnant and movies became more like filmed plays.

myth.

first of all the first sentence is broken. you're, what, comparing the best silent films to like random early sound pictures?

second, let's be decent. murnau's sound movies didn't stink, he died. that's a fucking loss. von stroheim went awol. keaton went awol. losing masters hurts cinema in general. eisenstein went through a kind of wellesian project hell but later bounced back. gw pabst didn't die but i don't know what the fuck happened to him, like i just haven't seen past the 3 penny opera, which to remind is the 1931 pabst/brecht sound musical that's great. chaplin made silents into the sound era.

von sternberg, his first sound movie was the blue angel. his first sound movie, in 1930, was the blue fucking angel. that's a great movie. he had a string of early sound greats -- morocco, dishonored, shanghai express, blonde venus, the scarlet empress, and the devil is a woman.

fritz lang started with m, m, and the testament of dr. mabuse. theset are tight numbers that are way more watchable than some of his silent spectacles. i'd pick testament over any of the silent mabuse movies, for example.

rouben mamoulian, who never made a silent movie, made a sound equivalent to a city opera with applause in 1929. he moves his camera all the time. the guy tracks everywhere. in his next two movies also, in 1931, city streets and dr. jekyll and mr. hyde. rené clair started a hat trick in 1930 with under the roofs of paris, finished in 1931 with a nous la liberte and le million.

tod browning, impressive in the silents with like the unholy three and west of zanzibar, made the early sound greats dracula (with like the best atmosphere of the universal horrors, imo) and freaks. james whale, after the very fine sound melodrama waterloo bridge, made frankenstein in 1931.

on a personal note, i think precode melodramas are the most interesting genre period in the us until the 1970s. saying i prefer precode melodramas to film noir. by a country mile. barbara stanwyck in the early 30s is the best femme of all time. jean harlow <3, hell's angels to public enemy to platinum blonde to red-headed woman to red dust. norma shearer. joan fucking blondell, are you kidding me. any of these women over bogart.

i'm not sure how reasonable you're willing to be. are you considering "early sound" like 1929 and 1930 or something. i really think it's reasonable to call 1929-1934 early sound, and in there you'd find renoir's boudu saved from drowning, scarface (and if you went just a bit further with hawks, and think about many other directors who began in silents but made most of their greats in sound), capra's american madness and the bitter tears of general yen, she done him wrong, l'atalante, dinner at eight, grand hotel, 42nd street, i am a fugitive from a chain gain, trouble in paradise, etc. like probably most cinephiles have a few favs in this period.

think there were other ones i wanted to mention but i forget them now. not trying to exaggerate the size of my defense, just saying that maybe someone here is like "why didn't he mention" and it's 'cause i forgot. for some reason i couldn't remember if blood of a poet was silent or not. and i couldn't figure out how to phrase a thing i wanted to say about king vidor.

the best early sound pictures hold up as much as the best silent films. all great movies hold up the same. they hold up great.

i'm not like mad at you, i just happen to love this period of cinema.

[Sleepless]

It's threads like this that remind me why I love this place.

[BB]

With a few prominent exceptions (Grand Hotel, Trouble in Paradise, Dracula, American Madness, and It Happened One Night, chief among them), it seems there was only a real quality dip in early talkies when it came to American studio pictures. The greats mentioned above are either foreign, made with foreign money, or are cast-offs and misfits like Freaks.

I guess I'm mostly basing this on Fritz Lang's career, where he went from making M and Testament of Dr. Mabuse in Germany, to Fury and Western Union for MGM and Fox. Not that these are bad films by any stretch, and his camera still moves a fair bit, but they don't contain one ounce of the innovation and inspiration of his earlier work. Oddly, it wasn't until The Big Heat -- and that was in the 50s -- that Lang made a "filmed play" kinda picture. Maybe he was just getting old (and Tarantino is right).

With regards to the dumbening of modern audiences, I think wilderesque is at least on the right track, if not dead on. Over the last twenty years or so, there has been an active drive against semantic innovation in the mainstream (which probably accounts for the overwhelming focus on the technological elements of filmmaking). It's probably partly a matter of 'well, where else do you go?' but also that the techniques developed by those still pushing boundaries don't necessarily translate or would be difficult to incorporate into popular fare. Peter Greenaway was never going to have a wide audience -- perhaps wider at some time in the past, but never mainstream.  The devices in this short (thanks, by the way) or things like montage are far easier to grasp, I think. Not only is there something fundamental about them, they were techniques that would've been seen regularly in the novels and plays of the day -- themselves undergoing extreme formal transformations. People used to read Ulysses, not just professors. Now a 400+ page book, stands a slim chance of ever getting published unless it's YA.

But the public is still, I'd say, smarter than they are often given credit for. I think the whole Scientology buzz on The Master set up expectations for a lot of people who were confounded when the film didn't follow through on that promise. Had they been prepared for a strange, arty, dreamy film, I think audiences would've been more receptive. Also, CMBB was a far more straightforward film with clear character motivations and so forth. Except for the very end, but by that point it had already sunk its teeth. When Magnolia came out, people tended to go along with it until the singing, then they got pissed off. That wasn't part of the deal. I guess you could call this stupidity (it certainly is self-centred), but I don't think it's that they didn't understand the techniques. I think they got what he was going for, they just didn't like it. I don't know.

a silent 3D feature film, that's the next epic achievement.

Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity...? I kid, I kid. But if, against all odds, it's the next 2OO1 I called it.