The NFR Project: 'Manhatta'

Manhatta

Dir: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand

Scr: N/A

Phot: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand

Ed: unknown

Premiere: 1921

9:52 

Just pictures. Pictures of buildings, bridges, trains, boats, and the people leaking out of and into them. That’s the premise of this 10-minute ribbon of reality, captured and preserved forever as a monument to the look and feel of a big city in the last century. Its largely static shots turn the urban landscape into a triumph of abstract line and form.

It’ been tagged as the first avant-garde film made in America. It’s also the parent of later, similar films such as Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1926 Rien que les Heures (‘Nothing but Time’), Robert Flaherty’s 1927 Twenty-Four-Dollar Island, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (also 1927); and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

Sheeler was an artist who turned to photography early on in his career, who was consumed by a love of documenting technology, industry, and large-scale change. Strand, solely a photographer, weighed interests and themes markedly similar to Sheeler’s, making the natural collaborators.

The grand accomplishment of painter Sheeler and photographer Strand is to exit the need for narrative entirely. The film is what it is, a seemingly simple recording of everyday reality. But it is grander than that. It is an echo of the early cinema’s reliance on recording and screening travelogues, actual visits to far-off places such as the Holy Land.

This film focuses on New York City, treating it as an unknown quantity to be examined and considered almost from an archaeological perspective. Steam shovels gape, wrecking balls cavort. The city tears itself down, rebuilds itself, climbs higher and higher. The interpolated, laudatory quotes from Walt Whitman’s poetry reinforces the sense of wonder Manhatta is trying to convey. It’s the city as a poem in steel and brick.

In the end, the film shows us abstract mass against mass, a nearly alien, strictly geometric portrait. The only real creatures at large are large mechanical ones — trains, boats. People are ants, at best scrabbling along the edges of a graveyard (Trinity Church’s). New York City personified.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: ‘Tol’able David’.

The NFR Project: Chaplin's 'The Kid'

The Kid

Dir: Charles Chaplin

Scr: Charles Chaplin

Phot: Roland Totheroth

Ed: Charles Chaplin

Premiere: Jan. 16, 1921

53 min.

Chaplin was eager to make his first feature film, and he planned a parent/child theme, half slapstick and half sentiment — what became The Kid.

At this point in his career, Chaplin was moving on past short subjects, as well as contracts with companies that pressed him for fresh material, ready or not. In January 1919 he formed United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith. This move gave him and the others creative freedom and autonomy. He took his time making The Kid — nearly an entire year was spent shooting footage that boiled down to a little over an hour’s run time. (Chaplin recut the film later for posterity, whittling it down to 53 minutes.)

The best of the early child actors was Jackie Coogan (best known later as the original Uncle Fester, in TV’s The Addams Family). At the ripe young age of 5, he was chosen by Charlie Chaplin to co-star in Chaplin’s most successful film, and his first feature-length.

Now, I hate children in film. There is something fundamentally off-putting for me about the presence of the squeaky-voiced little ones on the big screen. Their cuteness is annoying as hell. They are usually included in a film as convenient plot points or for the manipulation of sentiment. Honest film work that depicts the complex, kaleidoscopic nature of childhood is rare. However, Coogan is spontaneous and engaging, and makes the movie work.

Chaplin nakedly depicts the catch-as-catch-can experience of the poor. Undoubtedly, he drew on his own memories of growing up poverty-stricken, practically homeless, without a stable parent or sufficient resources. He keeps the framing functional and on a human scale, maximizing the warmth the protagonists exude.

The story is simple, right out of Victorian-era melodrama. An abandoned mother of a newborn leaves her baby in a rich man’s car, which is stolen. The baby is left in an alley, where it is found by none other than Chaplin’s Tramp character. After a short spurt of trying to get rid of it, the Tramp relents and takes the child home to his squalid attic room.

Time passes, and now we see the Tramp and the Kid scraping a happy living together. The Kid breaks windows, and the Tramp comes along and repairs them. Only when the child becomes ill does the heedless claw of bureaucracy stretch into their lives. The authorities invade their garret and takes little Jackie away to the orphanage, spawning an epic pursuit and battle across and through the city. The Tramp may be laughable, but his fierce love for his adopted child is laudable. In the end, the child is reunited with the mother, and the Tramp is put together with both.

Ironically, Coogan would find himself let down by his real parents, who blew all his savings from his child-acting career, prompting the creation of the Coogan Act, which mandated the protection of child performers’ earnings.

In this film Chaplin successfully unites comedy and drama, laughter and pathos. His confident and mature craftsmanship would only get better.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: ‘Manhatta’.

The NFR Project: 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' and Valentino

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Dir: Rex Ingram

Scr: June Mathis

Phot: John F. Seitz

Ed: Grant Whytock

Premiere: March 6, 1921

150 min.

It is interesting to note how cultural artifacts age. Some stay front and center in the collective memory; a vastly greater number vanish or hide in plain sight. The latter is the case with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an anti-war epic that out-earned every other film at the 1921 box office. If it is remembered at all, it is for the fact that it made a star of Rudolph Valentino.

The film is an adaptation of the popular 1916 novel by Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez. It’s the story of two related families who find themselves on opposite sides during World War I. The movie starts in the pampas of Argentina, where a ruthless cattleman establishes an empire. He has two daughters. One marries a Frenchman, the other a German. After the paterfamilias dies, both families move to their husbands’ respective countries of origin, setting up a situation in which their sons destroy each other on the battlefield.

It was thought to be too difficult to turn into a film, but screenwriter June Mathis pulled off an engaging adaptation, which led her to spearhead the project. She selected both the director, Rex Ingram, and Valentino, a handsome young Italian dancer who had only played bit parts to date.

In this film, he plays Julio Desnoyers, a pampered playboy who thinks little beyond his own desires until he is shamed into serving in the military. Why was Valentino such an icon? He was conventionally handsome, but not extraordinary. The key to Valentino’s appeal was his vulnerability. In an age when the ideal man was strong and emotionally unavailable, Valentino' doe-eyed sensitivity appealed strongly to women and made him a screen idol. Soon he was labeled as the Latin Lover, and was stereotyped as such for the rest of his short career (he died at age 31).

Four Horsemen’s powerful anti-war message resonated with filmgoers. America had been most reluctant to get involved in the conflict, overcoming its isolationist sentiments with the help of massive amounts of government and media propaganda. The World War was cast as a messianic struggle for freedom and human decency — a “war to end all wars.” (D.W. Griffith’s 1918 Hearts of the World was the first to depict German troops as despoilers; Four Horsemen also demonizes them.) Despite America’s decisive intervention, many still fought the idea of such foreign entanglements, especially those that cost American lives.

The film’s 1993 restoration, complete with frame tinting and a new musical score by Carl Davis, is a delight. The film’s production design is lavish, and the action tends to overcome a plethora of long and complex explanatory intertitles. The bravo set piece of the film is a nightmarish fantasy of the unleashing of the Horsemen — Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The reference crops up again and again, culminating in a final scene in which the survivors mourn Julio at the bottom of a steep ravine crowded with the graves of war dead. “Peace has come — but the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity — stirring unrest in the world — until all hatred is dead and only love reigns in the heart of mankind.”

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Chaplin’s ‘The Kid.’