Das Kabinett Des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919)

From The Book:

"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the keystone of a strain of bizarre, fantastical cinema that flourished in Germany in the 1920s and was linked, somewhat spuriously, with the Expressionist art movement.  If much of the development of the movies in the medium's first two decades was directed toward the Lumiere-style "window on the world," with fictional or documentary stories presented in an emotionally stirring manner designed to make audiences forget they were watching a film, Caligari returns to the mode of Georges Melies by constantly presenting stylized, magical, theatrical effects that exaggerate or caricature reality."

I'm not usually a big fan of Expressionism, and the scenery for this film was no exception.  It was almost Seussian in style, but badly done.  I wanted to like it.  I really did.  It was meant to be a flashback to memories in the mind of a crazy man, and the scenery was supposed to reflect that, but it really got distracting after awhile.  However, the story was great; a patient in a mental hospital recounting the events that put him there, though the events are a bit inaccurate in his own mind.  Despite the distraction of the scenery, I very much enjoyed seeing Caligari again (I'd seen it years ago, but didn't remember it very well).  It was a rather simplistic film for the period, most filmmakers were trying new techniques, trying to come up with something that would make the process better, faster, or more innovative, and Wiene went for the simpler methods of a still camera, painted backdrops, and theatrical devices instead of camera tricks. 

I would highly recommend this to any fan of the horror genre; it's got some great moments of suspense and a fantastic story behind it.

Want a clip?  Here you go:



Next movie: Broken Blossoms (1919)

Intolerance (1916)

From The Book:
"Perhaps in part a retort to those who found fault with the racial politics in The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith was equally concerned to argue against film censorship.  This was addressed more directly in the pamphlet issued at the time of Intolerance's exhibition, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.  Griffith's design for this film, which he finalized in the weeks following the release of his earlier epic production, is to juxtapose four stories from different periods of history that illustrate 'Love's struggle throughout the ages.'  These include a selection of events from the life of Jesus; a tale from ancient Babylon, whose king is betrayed by those who resent his rejection of religious sectarianism; the story of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of French Protestants by King Charles IX of France on the perfidious advice of his mother; and a modern story in which a young boy, wrongly convicted of the murder of a companion, is rescued from execution at the last minute by the intervention of his beloved, who gains a pardon from the governor.  These stories are not presented in series.  Instead, Griffith cuts from one to another and often introduces suspenseful crosscutting within the stories as well.  This revolutionary structure proved too difficult for most filmgoers at the time, who may also have been put off by Intolerance's length (more than three hours).  Griffith may have invested as much as $2 million in the project, but the film never came close to making back its costs, even when recut and released as two separate features, The Fall of Babylon and The Mother and the Law."

Apparently, the "revolutionary structure" was too difficult for me as well.  I didn't much care for this film...the cutting back and forth between the 4 stories was choppy, and there wasn't much transition between them.  The characters weren't really given names, simply referred to as "Brown Eyes", "Mountain Girl", etc.  Griffiths went extremely heavy on the use of filters, nearly every scene was tinted glaring pink, blue, or green.  Almost every time a slide with text came up, the word "intolerance" was there, and it wore a little thin after the first hour. 

I don't really have much more to say about it, because I don't have much of an opinion. 

Next movie: Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligeri) (1919)

Been A Long Time...

Yeah, well, I've been busy. I'm going to try to stick to a "2 movie per week" schedule from now on, but I can't make any promises (that whole having a 4 month old kid kind of makes it difficult to watch any movies until after she goes down to sleep for the night, and by then I'm exhausted and really just want to go to sleep).

Anyway, I mentioned in an earlier blog that I would try getting netflix to stream on Linux; well, I did and it didn't work. Big surprise. Which kind of sucks, unless I want to watch everything on the bedroom computer (or wait for it come on disc), because we don't have a TV set, the living room is a home-theater system that's hooked up to a computer that runs Linux. I did some creative googling and found a couple of different ways to get Linux to do it, but it required a lot of stuff that may be a little less than legal. However, my darling husband came home today and said that he'd heard somewhere that netflix was going to be releasing a disc that made the Nintendo Wii compatible to stream with their website. Awesome for me, because we also have our Wii set up through the projector in the living room, so I looked around the netflix site and found the area to pre-order the disc.  So, if you have a pre-existing account, click here, and if you don't, click here to sign up.  

One more note, I already said that in my haste to watch Les Vampires, I didn't notice that netflix only had the first 2 episodes.  They're in the process of getting the rest of it on disc, and I have it saved in my queue, but they don't have it yet and so they can't send it to me yet.  So I'm going to have to wait to review that one until I can get my grubby little paws on it, and I have no idea as of now when that will be, so I'm going to forge ahead, and get on with the next movie, Intolerance (1916), probably tomorrow (if the baby lets me sit for a couple hours uninterrupted). 

"Les Vampires" (1915) (Part1)

I have to admit, I screwed up on this one a bit. When I found it on Netflix, it had slipped my mind that it was a serial, so I didn't check its page and see that they only had the first 2 episodes available for streaming. So I've only actually been able to watch the first 2 bits. However, I wanted to get the blog up today, and that doesn't allow for me to put the DVDs at the top of my queue and wait for them to come after returning the DVD I currently have out (Orphan, which I missed when it was in theaters, but I'm totally excited to see). So I can't really blog about it yet, but I don't want to wait for it to watch and blog the next one, so this one's going to have to be a bit out of order. But I have added it to my DVD queue and as soon as I can, I'll get it blogged.

"The Birth of a Nation" 1915

From The Book:
"Simultaneously one of the most revered and reviled films ever made. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation is important for the very reasons that prompt both of those divergent reactions. In fact, rarely has a film so equally deserved such praise and scorn, which in many ways raises the film's estimation not just in the annals of cinema but as an essential historic artifact (some might say relic).
"Though it was based on Thomas Dixon's explicitly racist play The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, by many accounts Griffith was indifferent to the racist bent of the subject matter. Just how complicity that makes him in delivering its ugly message has been cause for almost a century of debate. However, there has been no debate concerning the film's technical and artistic merits. Griffith was as usual more interested in the possibilities of the medium than the message, and in this regard he set the standards for modern Hollywood."

Wow. Just...wow. I'm only at about 2 1/2 hours through it (it's 3 hours long), and I'm finishing watching it as I type. I'm a little sickened. The portrayal of blacks as sinister, diabolical, evil beings who wanted to take over the nation, and the KKK as the saviors who prevented them from doing so, is appalling. At one point, Congress is shown as having a black majority, and the session is portrayed as a circus...members taking off their shoes, eating peanuts and tossing shells on the floor, gnawing on a chicken leg, unable to be civilized, it was horrible. The movie opens up with a disclaimer claiming that it was meant as a means to show the atrocities of war and that it was made as an anti-war film, and it does, sort of, in a rambling kind of way during the first half. But then in the second half, it goes on to portray blacks as power-hungry demons. Overall, I was horrified at the romanticism of racism and bigotry.

And though I'm disgusted at the thought of glorifying the KKK, I do feel that this is an important movie to watch. As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." To think that less than a century ago this is how people really felt about different races, and now we have a black President, it's amazing to realize the evolution of the American people. I know that blatant bigotry and racism still exist in this country, but seeing this movie really makes me realize how far we've come, and how far we still have to go.

Here's a video of the trailer:


Next movie: Les Vampires (1915)

Not About a Movie...

But I did want to send out a short update.  I've added a link to The Book in the upper left hand corner of the blog, so if you'd like to purchase it and peek at the reviews to come, click there and it'll take you straight to the Amazon page for The Book.

Also, I'm loving Netflix again!  I cancelled my subscription around 3 years ago, I had hit a period of time where I'd gotten too busy to watch enough movies to make it worth the $20 a month, and I felt like I was just wasting the money.  However, in light of my new quest, and in the interest of not wanting to spend a fortune on movies that I may very well only watch once, I've signed up again.  They've updated so much...there's a ton of movies you can just watch online, and the suggestions have gotten really advanced.  I'm keeping it at the lowest unlimited plan, although I may downgrade it to the cheaper limited plan since there's so much that I can stream (side note on their "Instant Watch" feature, the last I checked, it did not work with Linux; for most people, that won't make that big a difference, since Netflix will interact with certain other devices, but my husband and I opted not to get a TV for the living room, and instead there's a computer running Linux that's hooked up to a projector...yeah, it's like a movie theater, and I know you're jealous ;) I haven't had a chance to try it, but as soon as I do, I'll slip in a note here).

Another side note, as I write this, I'm watching Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and though it's not in The Book, I do very highly recommend it if you have any kind of sense of humor at all.

Oh, and I've found Birth of a Nation Silent Film Plus Bo on Netflix, so the review should be up by Tuesday, hopefully tomorrow (depending on how the day goes, still kind of decompressing after the holidays).

"The Great Train Robbery" (1903)

I'm going to be in Catalina (off the California coast) for the next two days, so I won't be able to post (or find any films, for that matter), but I wanted to get this one out before I leave.  I've seen it before, in a media history class, but wanted to find it and refresh my memory before posting.  

From The Book:  "What is exceptional about Edwin S. Porter's film is the degree of narrative sophistication, given the early date.  There are over a dozen separate scenes, each further developing the story.  In the opening scene two masked robbers force a telegraph operator to send a false message so that the train will make an unscheduled stop.  In the next scene bandits board the train.  The robbers enter the mail car, and after a fight, open the safe.  In the next scene two robbers overpower the driver and fireman of the train and throw one of them off.  Next the robbers stop the train and hold up the passengers.  One runs away and is shot.  Then the robbers escape aboard the engine, and in the subsequent scene we wee them mount horses and ride off.  Meanwhile the telegraph operator on the train sends a message calling for assistance.  In a saloon a newcomer is being forced to dance at gunpoint, but when the message arrives everyone grabs their rifles and exits.  Cut to the robbers pursued by a posse.  There is a shoot-out, and the robbers are killed. 
There's one extra shot, the best known in the film, showing one of the robbers firing point blank out of the screen.  This was, it seems, sometimes shown at the start of the film, sometimes at the end.  Either way, it gave the spectator a sense of being directly in the line of fire."

Every Western fan should see this at least once.  Though some claim that it's not truely a Western, because of its shooting location (Delaware and New Jersey), or because it takes its roots from non-Westerns, but there is an undeniable connection between train robberies and Western lore.  I very much enjoyed it; for some reason I find it so much easier to suspend disbelief when watching these older films.  Yes, I did chuckle when characters were shot "dead" and still moved a limb through the rest of the scene, also when the man was thrown off the train and it was painfully obvious that it was a rag doll, but it didn't distract me from the story the way that modern film tricks do.  Though none of the innovative techniques (such as cross-cuts, camera movement, and on-location shooting) used for this film were original to it, but it was a significant step forward in movie making.  It was one of the first films of significant length to be fully narrative. 
From Edison Films Catalogue, No. 200, Jan. 1904: "This sensational and highly tragic subject will certainly make a decided `hit' whenever shown. In every respect we consider it absolutely the superior of any moving picture ever made. It has been posed and acted in faithful duplication of the genuine `Hold Ups' made famous by various outlaw bands in the far West, and only recently the East has been shocked by several crimes of the frontier order, which fact will increase the popular interest in this great Headline Attraction."

I had a bit of a harder time finding this one; A Trip to the Moon had a link right on its IMDb page to a site where I could stream it, this one didn't.  I had to do a Google search, and wound up finding it on YouTube.  I highly recommend watching it by clicking here.

Anyway, like I said, I'll be out of town for New Year's Eve and the day after, so I won't be able to get another blog out until Sunday at the earliest (though I won't promise one until the middle of next week, Wednesday at the latest).

Next movie:  The Birth of a Nation (1915)