The Art of Creating Special Effects in Silent Movies: Ingenuity Before the Age of CGI

in Film | January 10th, 2019

If any­one tries to claim that mod­ern day movies have too many spe­cial effects remind them of this. Films have always used spe­cial effects to trick the audi­ence, and we’re just using new vari­a­tions of tools from a cen­tu­ry ago. In fact, right from the begin­ning, cre­ators like Georges Méliès were push­ing the bound­aries of cel­lu­loid and 24 frames per sec­ond like the show­men and magi­cians they were.

By the time we get to the silent come­di­ans as seen in our above video, tech­nol­o­gy had advanced along with the pure phys­i­cal com­e­dy of the stars. Yes, they were amaz­ing and nim­ble ath­letes, but they weren’t stu­pid. Cam­era trick­ery helped them look super­hu­man.

The first exam­ple shows Harold Lloyd’s icon­ic stunt from 1923’s Safe­ty Last!, where he hung over the streets of Los Ange­les from a clock face. Only he wasn’t real­ly. Using forced per­spec­tive, a con­struct­ed build­ing edi­fice, and a safe mat­tress a few feet below shows how Lloyd faced no dan­ger at all. Edit­ing, too, cre­ates so much of the effect, as we have seen how high the clock is com­pared to the ground in pre­vi­ous shots. The angle on the streets below and in the dis­tance real­ly sell the scene com­pared to just shoot­ing sky.

In fact, this forced per­spec­tive is still used in mod­ern films: Peter Jack­son used it a lot in The Lord of the Rings to give the impres­sion that Gan­dalf was twice as tall as Hob­bit Fro­do sim­ply by con­struct­ing the sets small­er.

And when back­grounds are basic like sand dunes, even the low bud­get film­mak­er can achieve some amaz­ing effects with no mon­ey, just a bunch of cool minia­tures:

Then again, Jack­ie Chan one-upped Lloyd for real in his 1983 film Project A, when he dan­gles from a three-sto­ry clock hand only to crash through two canopies onto the ground below. It’s a stunt so nice, they show you it twice!

The oth­er favorite trick of the silent films was mat­te paint­ing. As long as the cam­era doesn’t move, a piece of glass with a pho­to-real­is­tic paint­ing on it can seam­less­ly fit into the action.

In Char­lie Chaplin’s 1936 Mod­ern Times, that allows the come­di­an to skate very close to a three floor drop with­out even being in dan­ger. (Tech­ni­cal­ly, the cam­era *does* move in this shot, but it’s a short pan which wouldn’t affect the illu­sion.)

This old-school method has gone away, though up through the ‘80s great mat­te paint­ing artists were work­ing on films like the Star Wars tril­o­gy and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now a dig­i­tal mat­te artist works in three dimen­sions, not two, with end­less finesse and tweak­ing at their dis­pos­al, like in Game of Thrones:

The mat­te is the basis, real­ly, of all mod­ern dig­i­tal effects. Wher­ev­er there is a green screen, you’re see­ing the evo­lu­tion of the mat­te. You prob­a­bly have an app on your phone that does some­thing sim­i­lar, and can mag­i­cal­ly trans­port you to where you real­ly want to be…just like film.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts–and Keaton’s 5 Rules of Com­ic Sto­ry­telling

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

Cap­ti­vat­ing GIFs Reveal the Mag­i­cal Spe­cial Effects in Clas­sic Silent Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The Hu, a New Breakthrough Band from Mongolia, Plays Heavy Metal with Traditional Folk Instruments and Throat Singing

in Music | January 9th, 2019

Maybe you’re jad­ed, maybe you think it’s time for heavy met­al to final­ly hang up its spikes, maybe you think there’s nowhere else for the world’s most the­atri­cal­ly angry music to go but maybe blue­grass…. Or maybe Mon­go­lia, where folk met­al band The Hu have been invent­ing what they call “Hun­nu Rock,” a style com­bin­ing West­ern head­bang­ing with instru­ments like the horse­head fid­dle (morin khu­ur) and Mon­go­lian gui­tar (tovshu­ur). “It also involves singing in a gut­tur­al way,” Katya Cen­gel points out at NPR—no, not like this, but in the man­ner of tra­di­tion­al Mon­go­lian throat singers.

Now YouTube sen­sa­tions with mil­lions of views of its two videos for “Yuve Yuve Yu” and “Wolf Totem,” the band plans to release its first album this spring, after sev­en years of hard work. The Hu are not flash-in-the-pan inter­net fame seek­ers but seri­ous musi­cians who didn’t quite expect this degree of atten­tion, or so they say. “When we do this,” said gui­tarist Tem­ka, “we try to spir­i­tu­al­ly express this beau­ti­ful thing about Mon­go­lian music. We think we will talk to everyone’s soul through our music. But we didn’t expect this fast, peo­ple just pop­ping up every­where.”

Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin’s Kip Hutchins, a doc­tor­al stu­dent in cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gy, has tak­en an inter­est in the band and thinks their appeal, writes Cen­gel, has to do with how “the sto­ry of Mon­go­lia has been writ­ten in the West. Nomadism and horse cul­ture has been roman­ti­cized, and the empha­sis on free­dom and heroes tends to appeal to the stereo­typ­i­cal male heavy met­al fan.” The band’s themes focus on past nation­al tri­umphs, the leg­endary rule of Genghis Khan, and the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the nomadic warrior’s life.

Or so it would seem to West­ern­ers pars­ing their lyrics in Eng­lish. It may also be hard to read “Hey you trai­tor! Kneel down!” in a song about “tak­ing our Great Mon­gol ances­tors names in vain” and not think about metal’s role in a few vio­lent ultra-nation­al­ist scenes. Some sug­gest the songs are iron­ic or trans­late dif­fer­ent­ly to Mon­go­lian lis­ten­ers. Or that the band might be a sophis­ti­cat­ed satire, like Laibach, using nation­al­ist themes, cos­tumes, and dra­mat­ic set­tings on the steppes to cri­tique nation­al­ist nar­ra­tives.

One observ­er who knows the cul­ture sug­gests it’s more com­pli­cat­ed. The Hu are not mock­ing tra­di­tion­al Mon­go­lian cul­ture and his­to­ry, far from it. “The graph­ic visu­als used in the video cer­tain­ly evoke pride in our nomadic cul­ture,” writes Bat­shan­das Altan­sukh, “but the lyric is quite the con­trary. It’s very polit­i­cal and high­ly crit­i­cal of today’s Mon­go­lian soci­ety” and what the band sees as their country’s propen­si­ty for “emp­ti­ly boast­ing about the past” rather than actu­al­ly learn­ing about and respect­ing it (with motor­cy­cle gangs rid­ing across the plains).

The lyrics we read in trans­la­tion are appar­ent­ly “too west­ern­ized or sim­pli­fied” to real­ly get their point across and slo­gans like “tak­ing our great Mon­gol ances­tors names in vain,” Cen­gel points out, “are almost exact­ly what was sung in the late 1980s dur­ing the tran­si­tion to democracy”—a means of fierce­ly assert­ing an inde­pen­dent cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty against the hege­mon­ic Sovi­et Union. Mon­go­lian folk rock and jazz bands picked up the sen­ti­ment and Mon­go­lian hip hop acts pro­mote respect for the country’s tra­di­tions with new dance moves.

But whether or not The Hu’s pol­i­tics get wrong­ly inter­pret­ed, or ignored, by their mil­lions of new fans, it’s clear that peo­ple get it at the uni­ver­sal lev­el of metal’s com­mu­nal fre­quen­cies: long hair, leather, gui­tars, growl­ing, and epic medieval badassery.

via NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ori­gins of the Death Growl in Met­al Music

Finnish Musi­cians Play Blue­grass Ver­sions of AC/DC, Iron Maid­en & Ron­nie James Dio

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Actress Lucy Lawless Performs the Proto-Feminist Comedy “Lysistrata” for The Partially Examined Life Podcast

in Literature, Music, Podcasts | January 9th, 2019


Remem­ber Lucy, aka Xena the War­rior Princess, per­haps bet­ter known to younger folks as Ron Swan­son’s (even­tu­al) wife on Parks and Recre­ation? Before her career re-launched via major roles on Spar­ta­cus, Salem, and Ash vs. Evil Dead, she took some time off to study phi­los­o­phy and so got involved with The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast, which is com­ing up on its 10th birth­day and has now been down­loaded more than 25 mil­lion times.

She has now joined the gang for cold-read on-air per­for­mances with dis­cus­sions of Sartre’s No Exit, Sopho­cles’s Antigone, and most recent­ly Aristo­phanes’s still-fun­ny pro­to-fem­i­nist com­e­dy Lysis­tra­ta. For the dis­cus­sion of this last, she was joined by fel­low cast mem­ber Emi­ly Perkins (she played the lit­tle girl on the 1990 TV ver­sion of Stephen King’s “IT”) to hash through whether this sto­ry of stop­ping war through a sex-strike is actu­al­ly fem­i­nist or not, and how it relates to mod­ern pol­i­tics. (For anoth­er take on this, see Spike Lee’s 2015 adap­ta­tion of the sto­ry for the film Chi-Raq.)

And as a present to bring you into the New Year, she pro­vid­ed lead vocals on a new song by PEL host Mark Lin­sen­may­er about the funky ways women can be put on a pedestal, pro­ject­ed upon, unloaded upon, and oth­er­wise not treat­ed as quite human despite the inten­tion to pro­vide affec­tion. Stream it right below. And read the lyrics and get more infor­ma­tion on bandcamp.com.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Actress­es Lucy Law­less & Jaime Mur­ray Per­form Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” for The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast

Pablo Picasso’s Ten­der Illus­tra­tions For Aristo­phanes’ Lysis­tra­ta (1934)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: A BBC Adap­ta­tion Star­ring Harold Pin­ter (1964)

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When Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire Were Accused of Stealing the Mona Lisa (1911)

in Art, History | January 9th, 2019

If you vis­it the Lou­vre today, you’ll notice two phe­nom­e­na in par­tic­u­lar: the omnipres­ence of secu­ri­ty, and the throng of vis­i­tors obscur­ing the Mona Lisa. If you’d vis­it­ed just over a cen­tu­ry ago, nei­ther would have been the case. And if you hap­pened to vis­it on August 22nd, 1911, you would­n’t have encoun­tered Leonar­do’s famed por­trait at all. That morn­ing, writes Messy Nessy, “Parisian artist Louis Béroud, famous for paint­ing and sell­ing his copies of famous art­works, walked into the Lou­vre to begin a copy of the Mona Lisa. When he arrived into the Salon Car­ré where the Da Vin­ci had been on dis­play for the past five years, he found four iron pegs and no paint­ing.”

Béroud “the­atri­cal­ly alert­ed the sleepy guards who fum­bled around for sev­er­al hours under the assump­tion the paint­ing might have been bor­rowed for clean­ing or pho­tograph­ing, until it was final­ly con­firmed the Mona Lisa had been stolen.”

The imme­di­ate mea­sures tak­en: “The Lou­vre was closed for an entire week, muse­um admin­is­tra­tors lost their jobs, the French bor­ders were closed as every ship and train was searched and a reward of 25,000 francs was announced for the paint­ing.”

High on the list of sus­pects, thanks to the word of an art thief not involved in the heist named Joseph Géry Pieret: none oth­er than Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire. Con­fess­ing to his habit of pur­loin­ing small items from the Lou­vre, which then took no great pains to pro­tect the cul­tur­al assets with­in its walls, Pieret informed the police that he had sold a cou­ple of small Iber­ian stat­ues to a “painter-friend.” Pieret, writes Art­sy’s Ian Shank, “had left a clue — a nom de plume in one of his pub­lished con­fes­sions, pulled straight from the writ­ings of avant-garde poet Apol­li­naire. (As police would lat­er dis­cov­er, Pieret was in fact the writer’s for­mer sec­re­tary.)”

As the pow­ers that be knew, “Apol­li­naire was a devout mem­ber of Picasso’s mod­ernist entourage la bande de Picas­so — a group of artis­tic fire­brands also known around town as the ‘Wild Men of Paris.’ Here, police believed, was a ring of art thieves sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to swipe the Mona Lisa.” Though the Span­ish-born painter and Ital­ian-born poet had noth­ing to do with the theft of the Mona Lisa, Picas­so had indeed bought those stolen sculp­tures from Pieret, and in a pan­ic near­ly threw them into the Seine.

“Apol­li­naire con­fessed to every­thing,” writes Shank, while Picas­so “wept open­ly in court, hys­ter­i­cal­ly alleg­ing at one point that he had nev­er even met Apol­li­naire. Del­uged with con­tra­dic­to­ry and non­sen­si­cal tes­ti­mo­ny the pre­sid­ing Judge Hen­ri Dri­oux threw out the case, ulti­mate­ly dis­miss­ing both men with lit­tle more than a stern admo­ni­tion.” Two years lat­er, the iden­ti­ty of the real Mona Lisa thief came to light: a Lou­vre employ­ee named Vin­cen­zo Perug­gia (shown right above), who had eas­i­ly smug­gled the can­vas out and kept it in a trunk until such time — so he insist­ed — as he could repa­tri­ate the mas­ter­piece to its, and his, home­land.

All this makes for an enter­tain­ing chap­ter in the his­to­ry of art crime, but if you still believe that Picas­so must have had a hand in the Mona Lisa’s dis­ap­pear­ance, have a look at “All the Evi­dence That Picas­so Actu­al­ly Stole the Mona Lisa.” Com­piled by the Huff­in­g­ton Post’s Sara Boboltz, the list includes such facts as “He was liv­ing in France at the time,” “He’d tech­ni­cal­ly pur­chased stolen art­works before” — those lit­tle Iber­ian sculp­tures — and “He loved art, duh.” None could deny that last point, just as none could deny the Mona Lisa’s endur­ing sta­tus as some­thing of a Holy Grail for art thieves. But what mod­ern-day Perug­gia — or Picas­so, or Apol­li­naire, or as some the­o­ries hold, Béroud — would dare make an attempt on it now?

via Men­tal Floss/Art­sy/Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ado­ra­tion of the Mona Lisa Begins with Theft

Mona Lisa Self­ie: A Mon­tage of Social Media Pho­tos Tak­en at the Lou­vre and Put on Insta­gram

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

The Post­cards That Picas­so Illus­trat­ed and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apol­li­naire & Gertrude Stein

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Classic Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories by Gustave Doré, Édouard Manet, Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley & Arthur Rackham

in Art, Literature | January 9th, 2019

What do you see when you read the work of Edgar Allan Poe? The great age of the illus­trat­ed book is far behind us. Aside from cov­er designs, most mod­ern edi­tions of Poe’s work cir­cu­late in text-only form. That’s just fine, of course. Read­ers should be trust­ed to use their imag­i­na­tions, and who can for­get indeli­ble descrip­tions like “The Tell-Tale Heart”’s “eye of a vulture—a pale, blue eye, with a film over it”? We need no pic­ture book to make that image come alive.

Yet, when we first dis­cov­er the many illus­trat­ed edi­tions of Poe pub­lished in the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies, we might won­der how we ever did with­out them. A copy of Tales of Mys­tery and Imag­i­na­tion illus­trat­ed by Arthur Rack­ham in 1935 (above) served as my first intro­duc­tion to this rich body of work.

Known also for his edi­tions of Peter Pan, The Wind in the Wil­lows, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Alice in Won­der­land, Rackham’s “sig­na­ture water­col­or tech­nique” was “always in high demand,” Sadie Stein writes at The Paris Review.

Some­time lat­er, I came across the 1894 Sym­bol­ist illus­tra­tions of Aubrey Beard­s­ley, and for a while, when Poe came to mind so too did Beardsley’s sen­su­al­ly creepy prints, influ­enced by Japan­ese wood­cuts and Art Nou­veau posters. His styl­ized take on Poe, notes Print mag­a­zine, offers “a very dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ic from the works of his pre­de­ces­sors.” Most promi­nent among those ear­li­er illus­tra­tors was the huge­ly pro­lif­ic Gus­tave Doré, whose clas­si­cal ren­der­ings of the Divine Com­e­dy and Don Quixote may have few equals in a field crowd­ed with illus­trat­ed edi­tions of those books.

But for me, there’s some­thing lack­ing, in the 26 steel engrav­ings Doré made for an 1884 edi­tion of Poe’s “The Raven.” They are, like all of his work, clas­si­cal­ly accom­plished works of art. But unlike Beard­s­ley, Doré seems to miss the strain of absur­dism and dark humor that runs through all of Poe’s work (or at least the way I’ve read him), though it’s true that “The Raven” relies on atmos­phere and sug­ges­tion for its effect, rather than tor­ture, mur­der, and plague. In the lat­er, 1923 edi­tion of Tales of Mys­tery and Imag­i­na­tion illus­trat­ed by Irish artist Har­ry Clarke, we find the best qual­i­ties of Beard­s­ley and Doré com­bined: fine­ly-detailed, ful­ly-real­ized scenes, suf­fused with goth­ic sen­su­al­i­ty, sym­bol­ism, grotesque weird­ness, and an almost com­i­cal­ly exag­ger­at­ed sense of dread.

Poe sig­nif­i­cant­ly influ­enced the poet­ry of Charles Baude­laire and Stéphane Mal­lar­mé, and Clarke fore­grounds in his work many of the qual­i­ties those poets did—the tan­gling up of sex and death in images that attract and repulse at the same time. Ear­ly Impres­sion­ist mas­ter Édouard Manet also illus­trat­ed an 1875 edi­tion of “The Raven,” trans­lat­ed into French by Mal­lar­mé. Manet draws the French poet/translator as the speak­er of the poem (rec­og­niz­able by his push­b­room mus­tache).

Manet’s min­i­mal draw­ings of the poem con­trast stark­ly with Doré’s elab­o­rate engrav­ings. Just as read­ers might imag­ine Poe’s macabre sto­ries in innu­mer­able ways, so too the artists who have illus­trat­ed his work. See con­tem­po­rary illus­tra­tions for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for exam­ple, by South African artist Pen­cil­heart Art and Brook­lyn-based illus­tra­tor Daniel Horowitz, and rec­om­mend your favorite Poe artist in the com­ments below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Har­ry Clarke’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions for Edgar Allan Poe’s Sto­ries (1923)

Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Sto­ries (1894)

Gus­tave Doré’s Splen­did Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Édouard Manet Illus­trates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edi­tion Trans­lat­ed by Stephane Mal­lar­mé (1875)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The “David Bowie Is” Exhibition Is Now Available as an Augmented Reality Mobile App That’s Narrated by Gary Oldman: For David Bowie’s Birthday Today

in Fashion, Film, Music, Technology | January 8th, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvP1ZczQ-C8

Maybe it’s too soon to divide pop music his­to­ry into “Before David Bowie” and “After David Bowie,” but two years after Bowie’s death, it’s impos­si­ble to imag­ine pop music his­to­ry with­out him. Yet, if there ever did come a time when future gen­er­a­tions did not know who David Bowie is, they could do far worse than hear Gary Old­man tell the sto­ry. Luck­i­ly for them, and us, Old­man nar­rates the new David Bowie aug­ment­ed real­i­ty app, which launch­es today on what would have been the legend’s 72nd birth­day.

Bowie and Old­man were both born and raised in South Lon­don. They became friends in the 80s, starred togeth­er in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, and col­lab­o­rat­ed on the 2013 video for “The Next Day,” in which Old­man plays a sleazy, duck­tailed priest. As much the con­sum­mate changeling in his medi­um as Bowie, Old­man brings a fel­low craftsman’s appre­ci­a­tion to his role as docent, with­out any sense of star-struck­ness. “I see him less as ‘David Bowie,’” he once remarked, “and more as Dave from Brix­ton and I’m Gary from New Cross.”

The app is based on the sen­sa­tion­al 2013 Vic­to­ria & Albert muse­um exhi­bi­tion David Bowie Is, which trav­eled the world for five years before end­ing at the Brook­lyn Muse­um this past sum­mer. Focused on “the colour­ful, the­atri­cal side of Bowie,” Tim Jonze writes at The Guardian, the show drew “a stag­ger­ing 2m vis­i­tors” with its stun­ning breadth of cos­tumes, props, sketch­es, lyrics sheets, film, and pho­tog­ra­phy. The dig­i­tal ver­sion intends, how­ev­er, not only to “recre­ate the expe­ri­ence of going to the exhi­bi­tion,” but “to bet­ter it.”

Learn how “Dave from Brix­ton” (or Davy Jones, before a Mon­kee of the same name came along) made “sketch­es propos­ing out­fits for his teenage band the Delta Lemons (brown waist­coats with jeans).” See how that young aspir­ing croon­er learned to love “hikinuki—the Japan­ese method of quick cos­tume change that he exper­i­ment­ed with dur­ing his Aladdin Sane shows at Radio City Music Hall.” The exhi­bi­tion bril­liant­ly ful­filled his own wish­es for his lega­cy. “As Bowie him­self puts it,” Jonze writes, “he didn’t want to be a radio, but a colour tele­vi­sion.”

Bowie prob­a­bly would have been pleased to have his friend Gary host­ing his vari­ety show. But does the AR app match, or bet­ter, the real thing? It’s “no match for see­ing the cos­tumes in real life,” or see­ing Bowie him­self in the flesh. But for the mil­lions of peo­ple who nev­er got the chance—a cat­e­go­ry that will soon include everyone—it may cur­rent­ly be the best way to expe­ri­ence the musician/actor/writer/one-man-zeitgeist’s career in three dimen­sions. See a pre­view of the app from Rolling Stone, above, and down­load the AR David Bowie Is for iPhone and Android via these links. The cost is $7.99.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream David Bowie’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy in a 19-Hour Playlist: From His Very First Record­ings to His Last

The Thin White Duke: A Close Study of David Bowie’s Dark­est Char­ac­ter

David Bowie Memo­ri­al­ized in Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Four Daring Films by Lois Weber, “the Most Important Female Director the American Film Industry Has Known” (1913–1921)

in Film, History | January 8th, 2019

These days, every cinephile can name more than a few women among their favorite liv­ing film­mak­ers: Sofia Cop­po­la, Ava DuVer­nay, Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Cam­pi­on, Agnès Var­da — the list goes on. But if we look far­ther back into cin­e­ma his­to­ry, com­ing up with exam­ples becomes much more dif­fi­cult. There’s Ida Lupino, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, whose The Hitch-Hik­er made her the only female direc­tor of a 1950s film noir, but before her? No name from that ear­ly era is more impor­tant than that of Lois Weber, in some esti­ma­tions “the most impor­tant female direc­tor the Amer­i­can film indus­try has known.”

Or so, any­way, says Weber’s exten­sive Wikipedia entry, part of the rel­a­tive­ly recent effort to res­cue from obscu­ri­ty her vast body of work: a fil­mog­ra­phy esti­mat­ed at between 200 to 400 pic­tures, almost all of them con­sid­ered lost. Weber’s cham­pi­ons empha­size not just her pro­lifi­ca­cy but her bold­ness, not just tech­no­log­i­cal­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly — 1913’s Sus­pense, for exam­ple, pio­neered the split-screen tech­nique — but social­ly.

Even in its infan­cy, she used her medi­um to deal with issues like pover­ty, drugs, cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, women in the work­force, and even con­tra­cep­tion. (In 1915’s Hyp­ocrites, she went as far as to include the first full-frontal female nude scene in motion pic­tures.)

Though born in 1879, well before the advent of cin­e­ma, Weber grew up with a sur­pris­ing­ly suit­able back­ground to pre­pare her for this kind of film­mak­ing. Raised strong­ly reli­gious, she left the fam­i­ly house­hold to take up street-cor­ner evan­ge­lism and church-ori­ent­ed social activism. Ear­ly in the 20th cen­tu­ry she moved from her native Pitts­burgh to New York, where she set her sights on singing and act­ing. “I was con­vinced the the­atri­cal pro­fes­sion need­ed a mis­sion­ary,” she lat­er explained, and hav­ing heard that “the best way to reach them was to become one of them,” she “went on the stage filled with a great desire to con­vert my fel­low­man.”

Weber’s work in the the­ater opened the door to oppor­tu­ni­ties in the then-nascent movie indus­try. By 1914, she could con­fi­dent­ly say in an inter­view that “in mov­ing pic­tures, I have found my life’s work. I find at once an out­let for my emo­tions and my ideals. I can preach to my heart’s con­tent, and with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to write the play, act the lead­ing role and direct the entire pro­duc­tion, if my mes­sage fails to reach some­one, I can blame only myself.” The recent restora­tion of sev­er­al of her sur­viv­ing films has made it pos­si­ble for her mes­sage to reach a cen­tu­ry she nev­er lived to see — and to give their view­ers the chance to eval­u­ate the claims made by film his­to­ri­ans like Antho­ny Slide, who puts her along­side D.W. Grif­fith as “Amer­i­can cin­e­ma’s first gen­uine auteur, a film­mak­er involved in all aspects of pro­duc­tion and one who uti­lized the motion pic­ture to put across her own ideas and philoso­phies.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

103 Essen­tial Films By Female Film­mak­ers: Clue­less, Lost In Trans­la­tion, Ishtar and More

The Ground­break­ing Sil­hou­ette Ani­ma­tions of Lotte Reiniger: Cin­derel­la, Hansel and Gre­tel, and More

A Short Video Intro­duc­tion to Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968), the First Female Film Direc­tor & Stu­dio Mogul

Watch The Hitch-Hik­er by Ida Lupino (the Only Female Direc­tor of a 1950s Noir Film)

The First Fem­i­nist Film, Ger­maine Dulac’s The Smil­ing Madame Beudet (1922)

An Ambi­tious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Film­mak­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Bustling Streets of Mumbai, India in 1929: Vintage Footage Captured with Very Early Sound Cameras

in Film | January 8th, 2019

“Though hard­ly a cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­piece,” film crit­ic Andre Soares writes, “or even a good film,” Al Jolson’s 1927 The Jazz Singer will for­ev­er bear the dis­tinc­tion of “the first time in a fea­ture film that syn­chro­nized sound and voic­es could be heard in musi­cal num­bers and talk­ing seg­ments.” What usu­al­ly goes unre­marked in film his­to­ry is that Indi­an cin­e­ma was nev­er far behind its U.S. coun­ter­part. The country’s first fea­ture sound film appeared just four years after The Jazz Singer. Now lost, the love sto­ry Alam Ara debuted in March of 1931 and ini­ti­at­ed a ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion with its sev­er­al songs, includ­ing the first major fil­mi music hit.

The movie was so pop­u­lar, one his­to­ri­an notes, “police aid had to be sum­moned to con­trol the crowds.” Its direc­tor Ardeshir Irani was inspired by anoth­er ear­ly Hol­ly­wood part-talkie musi­cal, 1929’s Show Boat, which, like his film, used the Movi­etone sys­tem to record sound, rather than the Vita­phone sys­tem used in The Jazz Singer. Movi­etone, or Fox Movi­etone, as it came to be known after William Fox bought the patents in 1926, was also respon­si­ble for anoth­er ear­ly film devel­op­ment, the sound news­reel, a tech­nol­o­gy that made its way to India almost as soon as it debuted in the U.S.

The first sound news­reel, show­ing footage of Charles Lindbergh’s tak­ing off in the “Spir­it of St. Louis,” debuted in 1927 in New York. In Novem­ber 1929, Fox opened the first exclu­sive news­reel the­ater on Broad­way, and in Jan­u­ary of that same year, a Movi­etone cam­era cap­tured the street scenes of Bom­bay (now Mum­bai) that you see above, over 13 min­utes of footage com­plete with live audio record­ing of bustling crowds, busy ven­dors and laun­dry work­ers, honk­ing auto­mo­biles, and clip-clop­ping hors­es.

This incred­i­ble doc­u­ment pre­serves the sights and sounds of a sig­nif­i­cant Indi­an slice of life from 90 years ago, and shows how ear­ly the tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing sound films arrived on the sub­con­ti­nent. When Ardeshir Irani began film­ing his ground­break­ing musi­cal the fol­low­ing year, he would use exact­ly this same tech­nol­o­gy, shoot­ing all of the dia­logue and music live, on a closed set late at night to avoid unwant­ed noise like the street sounds you hear above.

Learn more of the Fox Movi­etone news­reel sto­ry here, and here, learn how Indi­an cin­e­ma began in Mum­bai in 1899 when Indi­an pho­tog­ra­phers, writ­ers, the­ater impre­sar­ios, and entre­pre­neurs like Irani took the new tech­nol­o­gy and used it to build a cul­tur­al empire of their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

India on Film, 1899–1947: An Archive of 90 His­toric Films Now Online

100 Years of Cin­e­ma: New Doc­u­men­tary Series Explores the His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma by Ana­lyz­ing One Film Per Year, Start­ing in 1915

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 His­tor­i­cal Films on YouTube

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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