Here’s a movie that’s more significant for the repercussions it caused
than for its inherent fascinations.
On July 4, 1910, in the middle of downtown Reno, Nevada, two men
squared off for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. One was
black, and one was white, and therein lay the problem.
The black man was Jack Johnson, first African-American heavyweight
champ. His unapologetic prowess and confident personal style upset racist whites
– a vast majority nationally at the time. His opponent, James Jeffries, was a
former champ brought back to battle Johnson by those who yearned for a “Great
White Hope” that would defeat Johnson. (This later became the title of Howard
Sackler’s Pulitzer-winning 1969 play on the same subject, which also brought actors
James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander fame.)
On a punishingly hot day (110 degrees), observed by 20,000 spectators,
Johnson ground Jeffries down until his side threw in the towel in the 15th
round.
The fact that a black man had beaten a white man in an athletic competition
was intolerable. Race riots broke out that night in more than 25 states and 50
cities. More than 20 were killed and hundreds were injured.
Meanwhile, the complete film record of the bout (nine cameramen were on
the job that day) was being rapidly copied and distributed for exhibition throughout
the country, as films of such contests were routinely done at the time (see “TheCorbett-Fitzsimmons Fight” entry here). Three days after the fight, calls to
ban the film began. Eventually, in 1912 Congress banned the interstate transportation
of fight films; the ban would remain in place until 1940.
Jeffries never fought professionally again. Johnson held his title
until 1915, and continued to fight until 1938, when he was 60. He continued to
suffer persecution, legal and otherwise, for the rest of his life.
The film still exists, now primarily as data for boxing scholars and
historians to assimilate. It remains a relic of the sad days when the idea of a
black person being the equal or better of a white person was enough to cause
panic in the streets.
The NFR
Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film
Registry, in chronological order. Next time: ‘White Fawn’s Devotion.’
The “trick” film has been around since Georges Melies built
his own camera in 1896. Special effects sell tickets. Here’s one that admirably
combines a handful of animation and filming techniques to create a madcap fancy
on film.
Vitagraph Studios was founded in 1897 by J. Stuart Blackton,
a former journalist and sketch artist, and Arthur E. Smith, a stage magician.
They soon found themselves attacked by Edison over patent violations, but
soldiered on and eventually worked out a settlement with the litigious
inventor.
“Princess Nicotine” takes its name from a popular 1893 stage
vehicle for the legendarily beautiful singer and actress Lillian Russell, but
little else. The film’s marching-cigarette stop-motion concept was attributed
to the earlier short animation “The Animated Matches” by French animation
pioneer Emile Cohl in 1908.
More recent research has revealed that Cohl stole the
conceit from English animator Arthur Melbourne Cooper, who made the first
stop-motion animation short in 1899, that pled for the donation of matches to
British troops fighting the First Boer War in South Africa (the government had
forgot to send some, you see).
Until it turned out that Cooper had in turn filched the
stop-motion concept from its true originators: Vitagraph’s Blackton and Smith.
1898’s “The Humpty Dumpty Circus,” featuring jointed dolls seemingly walking
under their own power, was the true first stop-motion film.
This illustrates vividly how imitative film was at the time.
It was a brand new medium, with no rules. People were making hundreds of films
a year, trying anything, seeing what took the public’s interest and responding
to that, or blithely going their own way. Repeating formulas, doing knockoffs
of others’ successes, things we think of as contemporary problems in the
commercial film industry, were present at the beginning. And we see similar patterns
of development with the many significant, pervasive mediums that characterized
the century.
The film is notable for the way it subordinates its effects
to its theme, if not a coherent plot. The previous “trick” film discussed here,
1906’s “Dream of Rarebit Fiend,” seems clunky in comparison.
Blackton and company craft a fun little romp, utilizing
double exposure, stop-motion, and mirror work (Blackton worked as a magician
also). Stage experience gave Blackton the sense of knowing what to play to –
and the sense to nail the camera down, the better to pull off the many
incorporated stage illusions that form part of the film’s charm. (The only cut-in
shots are there to make the particular effects work.) It’s a hybrid – a
theatrical form now embedded in something a bit more interdimensional.
In the film, a gentleman nods off while loading his pipe.
Two tiny fairies pop out of a cigar box and play tricks on him. There are oversized
props – hay serves as tobacco – and the man traps the fairies in the box. Out
of it he pulls a rose that blows smoke at him – his peer through a magnifying
glass at it reveals a rose/girl hybrid puffing away gaily on a cigarette
European-style, with the third and fourth fingers.
We cut back to the wide shot of the room; for some reason,
the richly appointed drapes and furnishings that were there for the first two
minutes vanish for the rest of the film. The matches, cigarettes, and smoking
implements dance. (Anyone who remembers the smoking culture of the 20th
century knows that it was largely a male ritual, complete with tools such as
cigar cutters, Zippos, cans of loamy pipe tobacco, papers and bags of Drum or
Bugler for roll-your-owners, cleaners and scrapers, the ubiquitous pipe
cleaners, etc.)
The most transcendent moments belong to a rose that takes
center stage via stop-motion, then de-petals itself and swirls dreamily into
the shape of a dancing, circling wreath that transmogrifies and condenses into
a dancing cigar. The man returns, lights up, finds one of the tiny fairies
trapped in a bottle, smashes it. She flashes him coyly. He blows smoke at her,
she sets fire to the table top, he washes her away with a squirt of seltzer
water (could this be the earliest use in film of this ancient gag?), and manically
ends up squirting himself in the face as well.
It is often alleged that the film served in part as product
placement for Sweet Caporals, a popular cigarette brand of the day; however, a
frame examination of brand names on the boxes don’t seem to correlate with any
known at the time. If this were a true purpose, that would make this the very
first example of the integrated commercial.
The NFR
Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film
Registry, in chronological order. Next time: ‘Jeffries-Johnson World’s
Championship Boxing Contest.’
I'm betting on Morgan Freeman's hair for the win, Dick.
I have always been a fan of big, cheesy films, none more
than Biblical ones. Part of it was the time I grew up in – the days of “The Ten
Commandments” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” Well, here comes the reboot
of a classic – a new adaptation of Lew Wallace’s “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ,”
written in 1880.
There have been six movie versions of the book including this
new one, the most memorable being the 1959 William Wyler-directed monster
starring Charlton Heston. This time, the director is Timur Bekmambetov, famous
for his pair of dark-fantasy Russian epics “Night Watch” and “Day Watch.” The
star is Jack Huston, grandson of director John.
Supposedly, Jesus figures big in this one. Way big. Producer
Mark Burnett and friends, known for many Christian-oriented film and TV projects,
are helming this one, and it seems we are going to get a blockbuster for
Christ. In an interview, the director talks about this version being much more about
forgiveness than revenge, but I couldn’t really see any forgiveness in the trailer,
due to the massive amount of intervening REVENGE.
Here are some of the impressions I got from a look at the
trailer:
1.We are in CGI Heaven. We see a battle scene, and
not one element of it is real.
2.Sweaty bodies. Always OK in a Bible movie, if it
indicates suffering.
3.Were the ancient Romans in the habit of using
people they didn’t like as hood ornaments for their battering rams?
4.Oh, no. POV CGI.
5.Ben-Hur is adrift, floating on a mast after the
battle. And the mast is in what shape? Johnny? That’s right. A cross. I guess
you would call it a Christ-mast.
6.Morgan Freeman in the Hugh Griffith role! Wow. I
dig his dreads, and of course he gets all the sonorous exposition in the film Good
call.
7.Looks like there’s even a wit bit o’ sex.
8.And lots more Jesus!
9.And vengeance. Let’s face it, the most memorable
scene in “Ben-Hur” is not everything working out at the end thanks to
you-know-you (hint: rhymes with mee-sis) – it’s when one guy’s trying to kill
another with a buckboard while they’re racing plimmety-bimmety around a big
track, 27 horses flyin’ this way and that, fans getting horse snot and wore all
over ‘em!
The new “Ben-Hur” will, I predict, be as deliciously awful
as the recent “Noah” and “Exodus,” both of which I went to voluntarily and paid
my own money to get into. I will do the same here. It’s the same ridiculous,
hypocritical dynamic that drives all religious epics.
To make your money back, you have to show the vengeance. You
have to get some sex in there, and the sinning – making sure to condemn by
examining it in luxurious detail, the better to commit them to memory for
future reference. It’s OK as long as the bad guys get it in the end – as graphically
as possible, of course. Violence is fine as long as it metes out what is
usually interpreted as God’s punishment and slakes the thirst for revenge.
Then, as in the book, after revenge is taken, the
forgiveness can begin (and the vengeful Jew turns into the loving Christian, which
ends up being the point of all this). The dialogue already sounds awful – a great, random mash-up of contemporary colloquialisms and pretentious pseudo-Scripture. Messala actually says during the chariot race, “Are we having fun yet, brother?”
I can hardly wait!
At last, an entry that allows me to say: what gives?
This film is very difficult to find; in fact, I can’t find
it. Normally, I do pretty well with research. If by chance you know where and
how I might watch it, please let me know! I am particularly happy to find out
if I’ve overlooked some resource or research technique, so that I can get better
at this.
I am able to find mentions via Mubi, and Roberta E. Pearson’s
excellent “The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph
Films,” and synopses via the usual encyclopedic resources. Even David Shepard’s
expertly curated 2002 Kino compilation “D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Shorts” does
not include it.
It features the first “movie star,” Florence Lawrence AKA
Florence Bridgwood. This is one of no fewer than 81 films that she shot that
year. She was anonymous for most of that year, as Biograph, the studio she
worked for, did not list players in the credits, as a rule. Neither did any of
the other American studios. Why?
First, film was disreputable among stage actors, akin to a legit
film actor using their real name in a porn movie today. Second, the producers
were afraid that player identification would create a star system that would
take money out of their pockets. They were right, but the Hollywood system
introduced a branding concept when it came to players the audiences responded
to, and everyone wound up making more money.
At the time, though, film production companies had a chokehold
on the means, and manner, of production. Although fans wrote in asking who
Lawrence was, the studio would not name her. Finally, when she and her husband,
director Harry Solter, went to Essanay Company to try and get better pay,
Essanay simply ratted them out to Biograph, which fired them.
Fortunately, Carl Laemmle, the feisty independent who
started Universal, took them on, and started using Lawrence’s name in
advertising. Sales skyrocketed, and soon all the studios were busy building and/or
manufacturing stables of “stars.”
Florence Lawrence
The film’s plot description: “A bored Lady Helen goes
slumming as a domestic in a boarding house. There she falls in love with a
sensitive young musician. The other women in house are jealous, and accuse her
of trying to steal the musician’s violin.”
All this in eight minutes? It really deserves a look. The
Freudian implications of the violin alone make it worth watching. And this begs
the question of why it’s not readily available. In an ideal world, all the
films in the Registry would be collected, annotated coherently, and made available
to all and sundry. However, there are immense problems with rights and
licensing, to begin with; revenue streams still issue forth form the screening
of many of these classics as well. That’s a task I wouldn’t envy anyone
attempting.
But – these designations of significance are surely for a
reason. What does it mean when we can’t grasp those cultural artifacts that we
deem important? (Insert my generic rant on the lack of funding for cultural
endeavors that would only interest a few folks.) Well, if we can spend all that
money and time on missiles, celebrity freaks, and traffic-camera tickets, we
can throw a few bucks and a little effort into the preservation and propagation
of art as well.
The NFR
Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film
Registry, in chronological order. Next time: ‘Princess Nicotine: or, The Smoke
Fairy.’
But we weren’t averse to enlightening ourselves. In high
school, our particular group centered itself inside the theater department.
And, as soon as we could drive, we were out auditioning for shows around town.
Our baby experiments with the world outside home and school were rewarded. We
fell in with rapscallions.
Aunts Tim and Jerry, to be precise. In the foul, dimly-lit
dens of community theater they prowled, singing, dancing, acting, writing, and
directing. They were hilarious, brutally honest, incredibly gay, and up to no
good. (Why were they hanging out with high-school boys? Please.)
Still, they were kind and thoughtful, protected us from real
sexual predators, and for better or worse treated us like fellow adults,
complex humans with identities who had ideas. They weren’t afraid to talk about
art and politics, and they knew who played Laurie in the original London cast
of “Oklahoma!” instantly, long before there was an Internet to look things up
on.
There we were, in bars we had no business being in (“How old
are these children?” roared the bartender. “These girls are 18!”), drinking –
except me, I remained pure for some time, immensely dull for everyone else but
I had enough problems to keep me occupied. And, of course, part of the running
the gauntlet was going to “Rocky Horror.”
Midnight movies were still a relatively new phenomenon,
centered in New York and San Francisco, where films such as “El Topo,”
“Targets,” “Equinox,” “Freaks,” “Pink Flamingos,” “The Harder They Come,”
Arrabal’s “Viva la muerte” and “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” tested the
sensibilities and stomachs of true-blue, hardcore, film-loving guerilla freaks everywhere.
“Rocky Horror” opened as the midnight movie at the great
Waverly cinema in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in mid-April 1975, replacing
“Night of the Living Dead.” The B-movie horror template of the young couple
menaced in a haunted house became a metaphor for budding sexual awareness. A
mad scientist makes a big, strong surfer-dude monster, for the express purpose
of using him as a boy toy. By film’s end, everyone’s in corsets, fishnets, and
heels, almost indistinguishable (which I suppose is the point, really.) By the
fall, people in the audience at the Waverly were cracking wise at the screen.
By Halloween, people were dressing up and singing along and acting along with
the film. It took two years to spread to 50 cities.
What made it explode? The ‘70s were a lot about pure carnal
satisfaction, for one. It was truly the Me Decade. We were psychically spent,
rebounding from the bitter, dragged-out end to Vietnam, Nixon’s criminal
betrayals, and the beginning of real loss as an industrial power. We wanted to
get screwed up and dance. There were lots of drugs and sex and rock ‘n’ roll,
and few consequences – or was that the consequence of being that age as well?
Touchy-feely spiritual vibes floated in the air; we were open to suggestion.
A corrective was coming. “Rocky Horror” caught the first
board in the wave of punk cynicism, with star-spangled panache. It equated
old-school horror with its long-dormant subtext, alternate sexuality (even
filming in the Bray studios that housed Britain’s cherished Hammer horror
studio for decades). It camped it up as hard as it could. Jim Sharman and
Richard O’Brien’s adaptation of O’Brien’s original stage “Rocky Horror Show”
was fast-paced, tuneful, and genuinely funny.
The show’s tough, kinky production style leaned on quoting
the ‘20s, much as the ‘60s had done – but this was the dark, German,
Expressionist, Brechtian ‘20s. ‘50s values were being spoofed through the
putative hero and heroine, squeaky-clean Brad and Janet, but so were ‘60s
values – by their sheer omission. There’s no peace and love in “Rocky Horror,”
just sex, violence, and jaunty despair.
Through its heavy lean on horror tropes, it became a joyous
puzzle for the hip to unravel and comment on – it’s not surprising that this
would become the first piece of participatory cinema. Like a true cult, its
members repeated the ritual week after week, enacting its liturgy. Only it’s
dark and funny, and you could cross-dress. Danger and transgression in the
safety and comfort of your local movie theater. We could be rude, and fresh,
and cuss out loud, and dance in the aisles, and sing as loud as we liked. These
forbidden slabs of raw, bleeding Weirdness were like crash-cart convulsions
applied to our boring suburban souls.
And what better house to witness the glory in than Denver’s
wonderful old repertory cinema, the Ogden? Now a first-class concert hall, it
was a treasure house of obscure double-, triple-, and quadruple-bills changing
almost daily – a complete cinematic education on the city’s seediest street,
East Colfax.
Part of the fun of “Rocky Horror” was standing in line
outside, being harassed by the born-agains. There was a nearby Pentecostal
church, the Lovingway, set up in an old house near 14th and Emerson
Streets, close by the theater. The group had an old panel van spray-painted
with slogans such as ‘REPENT OR DIE,” which they drove up and down Colfax in
front of the theater as we stood in line, shouting helpful phrases such as
“Burn in hell!”
The Ogden was one of the last old-time neighborhood movie
houses, and it was in moderate disrepair – not as bad as the former movie
palaces downtown that had deteriorated into scummy porn houses. It reeked of
cigarette smoke, the floors were a little sticky, but it was comfortable.
The balcony was the best, and reeked of a different kind of
smoke. We crowded as close to the front as we could, laden with the proper
participatory props: rice, newspapers, squirt guns, candles, toilet paper,
toast, playing cards. Already a tawdry handful of reenactors was gathering on
the main floor in front of the screen.
“Rocky Horror” taught us tolerance. Difference was illusion,
and today’s prom queen could become tomorrow’s Lotte Lenya. We weren’t doomed
by the culture’s expectations of us. We learned, too, that if the dominant
paradigm didn’t speak to us, we could create our own culture and be perfectly
happy within it, oblivious to the tides of normalcy, at home in the Weirdness.
Of course, subcultures and modern tribes have their own codes, tyrannies, and
shit lists, which we would find out about later.
The house lights went down. Aunt Jerry snorted a noseful of
poppers, lit a joint, stretched out his arms in Jolson-like supplication and
screamed, “GIMME THE LIPS!” And out of the darkness, those steamy, bright-red
lips appeared, like Man Ray’s “A L’Heure de l’observatoire: Les amoureux,” or
Beckett’s “Not I.” And they began to sing . . .
This anti-capitalist fable is the work of silent film legend
David Wark Griffith, still years away from making his controversial masterpiece
“Birth of a Nation,” his directing career had begun a year earlier. Like
everyone in the new movie-making industry, Griffith was cranking out dozens of
short films a year to begin with; the quantum difference is his eye and his
superb sense of how to make film tell a compelling story. Griffith learned
quickly.
He’s thinking, much as a stage director would, of the
picture as perceived from the audience. Instead of just filming actors and action,
Griffith is thinking from the perspective of the camera. His compositions are
meticulous, designed to communicate the maximum amount of meaning in a given
frame. Before in film, actors stood in a stele-like row, or clumped together
naturally and awkwardly. Griffith is positioning his actors so that they relate
coherently not to each other, perhaps, but definitely from the perspective of
the viewer.
There are parallel stories here, and ideas at play. Three hungry
farmers cast their seed while a business tycoon corners the market in wheat.
(The trio uses a wooden harrow, outmoded even in 1909.
Emphasizing the archaic nature of the farmer’s toil serves to ennoble the
rustic types. Griffith frequently synonymized the urban life with sin and
corruption, as did most of the movie-going audience, still predominantly rural
at the time. Griffith’s camera placement, with the farrows angling into and
past the camera from deep right rear to left foreground, is ballsy for the time
– the actors end up walking right out of the shot!)
Prices rise, the poor begin to starve and riot, put down by
police. The rich man, visiting one of his granaries, exults over his good
fortune – and tumbles into a silo, suffocated by the sluicing grain. The farmer
at film’s beginning is shown again, minus his companions. He ambles weakly
along, casting his seed again.
The huge advance here is the cutting together of three
stories, the principals of which have no awareness of each other. Meaning is
created through juxtaposition, the montage technique later perfected by
Kuleshov and Eisenstein in the Soviet Union. Near the center of the film, the
poor’s breadline is presented as a static shot – not a frozen frame, but as a
kind of mural of misery.
It is easy to cast “A Corner in Wheat” as the first
Socialist film. It certainly stigmatizes the rich and the social control
systems in place at the time – but don’t forget, this is the same director who
glorified the Klan in “Birth of a Nation” six years later. The tycoon in
“Wheat” is more a God-punished sinner than the terminal sufferer of ironic
consequences. Griffith’s real ideology is sentiment, and through the
still-viable dramatic strategy of melodrama, he is a master at invoking it.
Griffith is using all the elements at his disposal to create
sympathy and emotion, and it’s here that film goes right and wrong at the same
time. All of a sudden, it seems that seeing a film can be a much deeper
experience – and it opens up the possibility that the same kind of pretensions
that plagued existing art forms could infect cinema as well. For better and for
worse, every film made from this point on has the potential to be, or not be, a
work of art.
The NFR
Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film
Register, in chronological order. Next time: ‘Lady Helen’s Escapade.’
