Tag Archives: 1926

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FAUST (1926) / FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (2000)

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We all think we know Faust. The guy who sold his soul to the devil, right? But before there was Christopher Marlowe’s dramatization of the tale of Faust, or Goethe’s two-volume epic Faust, or Rembrandt’s etching of Faust, or Liszt or Berlioz or even Randy Newman’s Faust, there was the actual guy. The historical record finds a Johan Georg Faust born in the last 13th century who went on to become a respected alchemist and astrologer, but who may also have been an outrageous con artist, claiming the ability to reproduce the miracles of Jesus Christ. Rumors suggest that he died in an explosion, a fate which his contemporaries attested to his ties with the devil. Before the century was out, tales of his extraordinary misdeeds had begun to proliferate; one such copy fell into the hands of Marlowe, and the legend of the man who made an unwise bargain with the devil began to spread.

The price of immortality is steep. “Faustian bargain” has become common parlance, and on this very site, two different interpretations of the Faust myth are currently under consideration for eventual induction into the Apocrypha, including a Jan Svankmajer-directed surreal mix and a version of more recent vintage from Russia. Today, let’s dive into a couple more such interpretations, one attempting to faithfully deliver the classic tale with what were then newfangled tools of cinema, while the other takes what it wants from the myth to reach its own, not-especially-lofty ends.

FAUST (1926)

 

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DIRECTED BY: F. W. Murnau

FEATURING: Gösta Ekman, , Camilla Horn,

PLOT: Heaven and hell make a wager over the fate of Faust, a pious man who sells his soul to the devil to save his city from the plague. 

COMMENTS: The short directorial career of F. W. Murnau is so loaded with classics — Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise, Tabu — that a remarkable achievement like Faust could easily get lost in the shuffle. The film more than earns its place in this august company, though, with style to burn. Though the tale is familiar and the visual gimmicks are naturally dated, there’s a freshness to this telling that sidesteps a lot of the expected reservations.

Murnau is particularly proud of his in-camera effects, and he deploys these techniques with Zemeckisian fervor. An early scene in which the devil looms over a small medieval town like the most imposing mountain would have justified recalling the film a hundred years hence, but Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FAUST (1926) / FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (2000) →

Capsules

CAPUSLE: RETURN TO REASON: FOUR FILMS BY MAN RAY (1923-1929/2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Man Ray

FEATURING: Alice Prin, Robert Desnos, Jacques Rigaut, Man Ray

PLOT: Four experimental films form Man Ray shown in rhythmic sequence, set to a partially-improvised score by ‘s band SQÜRL.

Still from "Les Mystères du Château du dé" (1929)

COMMENTS: Though May Ray considered himself a painter, he experimented with photography for decades. In the 1920s, as part of his explorations, he decided to try his hand at making motion pictures. Paradoxically, he cut strips of film into their individual frames, dusted them with salt and pepper, covered them with tacks and pins, exposed them to light according to his Rayograph process, then spliced the images back together. La retour à la raison/Return to Reason (1923) was his first result, two minutes of visual chaos in which random objects and detritus dance across the screen.

Ray had originally planned to screen Retour with a performance by George Antheil, but the enfant terrible of avant-garde music failed to appear. Antheil’s atonal sound remains associated with Ray’s films (Kino Lorber previously released Return to Reason with an Antheil score, as part of the collection “The Silent Avant Garde,” in 2022). This latest release by the Criterion Collection provides a moodier, atmospheric take on Ray’s imagery, through SQÜRL’s signature feedback-laden guitars, electronic tones, and resonant drums. The score’s dirge-like cadences slow things down, encouraging the viewer to notice each intricate detail in every frame while falling under their spell.

Jarmusch, familiar to readers of this site as the director of Dead Man, is also a guitarist, and has written scores for many of his films together with musician Carter Logan. The duo’s sound, at times reminiscent of late ’90s-era Sonic Youth, wraps the listener in a sonic net woven of reverb and ambient drones. Electronic blips and beeps rise out of the static, like distant signals from sonar equipment; deep resonant tones echo like the moan of foghorns. A sudden metallic tinkling, like a forgotten wind chime on the porch of an abandoned house caught by a stray breeze, heightens the uncanny atmosphere.

The disc presents the films in rhythmic, rather than chronological order. The first, L’Étoile de Mer/The Starfish (1928), inspired by Robert Desnos’ poem, has the most coherent plot of the four. A man falls in love with a beautiful woman who gifts him a starfish in a jar. Filmed as though through a pane of rain-streaked glass, or from behind an aquarium wall, the impressionistic visuals come into focus only at key moments. The intertitles feature lines of the poem, but unlike in many silent films where the title cards explain the action, here text and image juxtapose each other in surrealistic fashion; for example, the phrase “women’s teeth are such beautiful objects” precedes a shot of the female character (portrayed by the famous Kiki de Montparnasse), lifting her skirt to adjust her stocking garter.

Emak Bakia (1926) follows. With financing from stockbroker Arthur Wheeler, and featuring his wife driving her Mercedes around Biarritz, Ray created another, longer experimental film (22 min.) in Continue reading CAPUSLE: RETURN TO REASON: FOUR FILMS BY MAN RAY (1923-1929/2023) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

321. A PAGE OF MADNESS (1926)

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Kurutta ippêji

“Things are not what they seem; nor are they otherwise.”–Shurangama Sutra

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DIRECTED BY: Teinosuke Kinugasa

FEATURING: Masuo Inoue, Yoshie Nakagawa

PLOT: A man takes a job as a janitor in a mental asylum in 1920s Japan to be closer to his institutionalized wife. He is occasionally visited by his daughter, whose marriage he opposes. One night he attempts to escape the hospital with his wife, but she does not appear to recognize him and is reluctant to leave her cell.

Still from A Page of Madness (1926)

BACKGROUND:

  • A Page of Madness was co-written by future Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, who later published it as a short story. Kawabata was a major figure in Shinkankakuha, a Japanese literary movement influenced by the European avant-garde. (It should be noted that at least one scholar questions Kawabata’s actual contribution to the script, suggesting he should only be credited for “original story”).
  • Some experts suggest the title met better be translated from the Japanese as “A Page Out of Order,” a pun on the fragmented narrative.
  • Director Teinosuke Kinugasa began his theatrical career as an onnagata, an actor who specialized in playing female roles at a time when women were not allowed to be public performers.
  • Kinugasa financed the film himself. Star Masuo Inoue donated his acting services for free.
  • Like most Japanese silent films, A Page of Madness would have originally been screened with a live benshi (narrator), who would explain plot points that weren’t obvious to the spectators, and might even offer his own interpretations of the director’s vision. No recordings or other records of a benshi’s thoughts on Page of Madness exist.
  •  Kinugasa was credited with 34 films before this, all of which are lost. His long and storied career was highlighted by 1953 samurai drama Gate of Hell (which won the Palme D’Or and an Oscar).
  • The only copy of A Page of Madness was thought to have been lost in a fire in 1950; a surviving negative was discovered in 1971. A 2007 restoration added an additional 19 minutes of rediscovered footage.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The smiling Noh masks the janitor places over the faces of the inmates of the asylum, a sight both strange and touching.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Crazy cell dancer; madwoman cam;  asylum masquerade

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Do you think today’s Japanese films are “weird”? Are you grateful for that fact? Then take a trip back in this time capsule to the great-granddaddy of Japanese weirdness with this survey of vintage insanity, the Rising Sun’s first attempt to translate the European avant-garde into its own idiom. Japan takes to Surrealism like a squid takes to playing a piano.


Blu-ray trailer for A Page of Madness (and Portrait of a Young Man)

COMMENTS: There’s little question that A Page of Madness is more Continue reading 321. A PAGE OF MADNESS (1926) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED (1926)

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Historians, film buffs, and Disney fanatics all cite Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) as the first animated feature. While it is the first animated feature as we Americans tend to think of animation, actually that “first” honor goes to a little known, innovative oddity from eleven years earlier. The Adventures Of Prince Achmed (1926) is a labor of love from the pioneering female German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger and her husband, Carl Koch.

What makes Achmed still unique 88 years later is animation entirely composed of cutout silhouettes. The result  was one of the silent era’s most enchanting and captivating films. It is also a lucid reminder that the medium of film was at its most innovative in its infancy, before the rules were set and the mediums defined.

Reiniger lucked into a patron for her artistic efforts: Louis Hagen supplied her with enough film stock and financing to proceed with her project. Using scissors and black construction paper as her primary tools, Reiniger spent three years meticulously working in an attic on Achmed with a small crew that included her husband/cinematographer, Koch.

Influenced in part by Georges Méliès and Arabian Nights, Reiniger created a world of sensuous, exquisitely detailed beauty. The film has an almost surprisingly coherent and linear narrative, given that Reiniger was embraced by the European avant-garde. Unfortunately, the director had difficulty booking Achmed, and with the exception of Dr. Doolittle And His Animals (1928), the rest of her career was relegated to short films. There was work on a third feature, to be based on Maurice Ravel’s enchanting opera, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges”; unfortunately, rights to the music could not be secured and the film was abandoned. The Adventures Of Prince Achmed is the only one of Reiniger’s films to date that has seen a home video release. Some of her shorts occasionally appear on television, but often in truncated versions. One such example is Doolittle, which has aired with added (and intrusive) voice over narration, coupled with woefully inadequate projection speeds. Fortunately, YouTube has been more respectful. The Star of Bethlehem (1921), Cinderella (1922), The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Papageno (from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”) (1935), The Magic Horse (1953), and Jack and The Beanstalk (1955) along with a short documentary of her work can all be found there. The documentary shows her storyboarding techniques and the almost rapid-fired speed at which she crafted her baroque figures.

Still from The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)There is a noticeable gap of activity in Reiniger’s filmography from 1938 to the early 1950s. With the rise of Fascism, Reiniger and Koch struggled to flee Germany. Although not Jewish, politically they leaned left, which marked them as subversives. Jean Renoir was among those who aided the couple, but they lived in abject poverty until finally being able to settle in England in 1949. Despite the initial financial failure of Achmed, Reiniger and Koch were respected in film circles and were able to be relatively prolific.

Achmed is of its time in its portrayal of the good guys as completely good, bad guys as completely bad, and the pretty girl as in need of saving (Reiniger’s later films frequently had biblical, Victorian, fairy tale, and operatic themes). Still, it’s put over so beautifully, even the most hardened cynics will hardly care. The color tinting renders the film a phantasmagoric smorgasbord of gemstones. Achmed is awash in emeralds, sapphires, rubies, garnets, aquamarines, amethyst, topaz, citrine, tanzanite, and fire opal.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed weaves interrelated narratives involving our protagonist, his princess sister, their Caliph father, an erotic heroine (who Achmed voyeuristically spies on while she is bathing), a flying horse, a malevolent shape shifting African magician, the Witch of the Fiery Mountain, dancing harlequins, sphinxes, terrifying demons, Aladdin, and the genie of the magic lamp. Locales include an exotic island, a majestic palace, Peru, and China.

Reiniger was  master of her medium and an innovator. Every step through her unique world is an enchanting one.