The Butcher Boy [1917]

Known primarily for being Keaton's acting debut, this one's mostly an Arbuckle film, and so it's really too bad that I've never been a fan of his fat-acting [which is less a slight about his appearance than it is about his manner of acting]. Having said that, Keaton gets a decent bit of screen time, first appearing as a hapless customer in the general store where Arbuckle works [flour in the face, feet stuck in molasses, you know how it goes]. In the mostly unrelated second reel, when the love of Arbuckle's life moves to an all-girls school, both Arbuckle and his love rival also move there, dressed as girls, when Keaton makes a second appearance in helping the rival take the girl. The film's not very funny, although Keaton remains very recognizably Keaton -- his understated reactions noticeably stand out amongst Arbuckle's ham, and a certain degree of his vaudevillian athleticism is shown, but mostly he's just thrown around a lot. Worth seeing for historical value, but not much else.

The Fall of the House of Usher [1928] and The Fall of the House of Usher [1928]

I just read the Poe short story earlier today, and I thought it was quite good. What I didn't think was that it would be easily interpretable to film, considering its very wordily-constructed atmosphere and mood. Figures that the first two movies I watch after reading it would prove me very wrong. On to the films:



The Fall of the House of Usher (American)

If you're looking to understand the narrative of a film, it would be near impossible to watch this film without reading the short story first, or at least knowing what it's about. Unless you just care about gut impact, in which case you'll be fine.

Since this was the film of these two that I watched first, I was extraordinarily pleased to see that in the very first moment of the film, as the novel's narrator (the film has no such reference point) draws up to the cloud-enveloped dark blot that's the Usher mansion, that Webber and Watson got the story's atmosphere exactly right. To quote from the book: "I know not how it was -- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible." Although I can't really follow the grammar in the last quarter of that passage, the general gist is that this place is pretty much the suxx0r. Hang on to that thought, because it's pretty much the last cohesive thought that you'll get out of the film.

To continue talking about this, some degree of summary of the short story will probably be necessary: a nameless narrator is called to the Usher mansion because Roderick Usher is dying and lonely, with mental problems to boot! Upon arrival at that dreary mansion, the narrator finds Usher's sister to be in some sort of odd trance-like state and when she enters a catatonic state, Usher buries her alive. In the final moments of the film, as the narrator tells to Usher a medieval story about the defeat of a dragon by some brave doosh, the doors fly open and the sister staggers in and dies upon Usher, who dies of fear or something. Plus, as the narrator flees the place, it splits in two. Wikipedia sez that a major theme of the novel is of Usher's "self-fulfilling prophecy," including that he's such because he expects to be sick and that he buries his sister alive because he expects to. I just take wikipedia's word for stuff like this.

The film manifests Usher's "self-fulfilling prophecy" when the screen literally splits apart to reveal the inside of the mansion. It's an intriguing bit of foreshadowing, coupled with the fact that it seems that the house has become the film (within the realm of foreshadowing). Epstein's film perhaps does similar (aka "tangentially related at best") material a bit better, but I'll leave that for when I talk about the other film.

As I said, the screen splits to reveal Usher and his sister having dinner, whereupon the sister is served something that sends her into some surreal mindtrip mental state, at which point the film becomes heavy surrealism, complete with sets straight out of Caligari or Aelita. The sister walks down a corridor with staircases twisting off in every other direction. She walks down a ramp as escalator-type stairs move down towards the bottom center of the frame, with obvious symbolic meaning. The orientation of those escalators themselves resemble the rip in the frame at the beginning of the film. I'm not sure what this could mean, but I'm sure there's something there. A shadow on the wall shows the hammer nailing the lid of the coffin down (presumably), which is repeated multiple times to accentuate its importance to the mental state of the characters (here, Usher). The camera's doing a continually rotating Dutch angle thingy to illustrate the haze of the characters. A series of jump cuts moves impressionistically through the rooms as the woman reaches out at the screen, trying to claw her way out of her fate. Then it gets more dense with hypnotically surreal stuff. And it remains effective.




The Fall of the House of Usher (French)

I might be a bit biased towards this one given my previous admiration for Epstein and my tendency towards films that reveal the artificiality of film, or art in general. Epstein was no stranger to this thematic territory, given that he had made The Three-Sided Mirror a year earlier -- and probably earlier films too, although those aren't available for my viewing pleasure. Epstein changed the brother-sister Ushers to be man-wife (perhaps to remove the somewhat unnecessary possibility of an incestuous relationship between the two), and also changed it so that Usher (and indeed, every Usher) is obsessed with painting his wife as she dies. The obvious interpretation is that he's trying to preserve her through art, and that's certainly an element of it, and this is what Roger Ebert noted in his review of the film. But more than that, it displays the self-deception and artificiality in the painting, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, in the paintings of the wife, sometimes it is actually a painting, and sometimes it is the camera filming the wife in real time posing within the frame; this bit of fakery only exists in the film world for us as viewers, and not for anybody within the film. The fakery in the painting has been generalized to film itself. On a side note, considering both this and Le Tempestaire some twenty years later, it would seem that Epstein was one of the earliest directors - along with Evgenii Bauer - who was interested in those themes [if you know of any others, let me know!]. In almost a trivial addendum, two or three intertitles show Roderich saying of the painting: "Here, she really lives!" That bit of heavy-handedness is my only complaint about the film. The film itself is revealed to be artificial when it resorts to surrealist techniques, such as brief time-lapse and blurred images.

This film better than the American film - and even better than the Poe story - captures Usher's psychological anguish as his wife is presumed dead, using a slew of techniques from slow motion to slowly tilting camera frames. This makes it somewhat similar to the American film, although that was more global in terms of producing unsettling images -- rather than this film's focus on Usher himself. This is also a very beautiful film, especially when it builds to the climax. There's also a swift tracking shot along the ground that can only be described as kewl.

And it's narrated by that guy with the voice, which is awesome.

By the Law (Lev Kuleshov, 1926)

If you already read my thoughts about this film on IMDb, there's no need to read this, since it's basically the same stuff I already said there (albeit with spoiler stuff). I just needed to break out of my Dark Knight/Frost/Nixon/Benjamin Button rut...

SPOILERS WITHIN

Even before just a few months ago, I thought that Kuleshov was just an early film theorist – I didn’t know that he actually had made any films. When I learned that he had made some feature films, I stupidly thought that they would just be dry and uninteresting experiments in film technique. I was terribly wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. By the Law is one of the most tense and gripping dramas I’ve seen – and that’s true even without the silly label of “for its time.” It concerns a group of gold miners in the Yukon who aren’t having any luck with their mining at a certain location. As their manual laborer, Michael, is packing up their camp, he discovers gold nuggets and they decide to stay in the location for longer. They have further success, but a few months later, Michael walks into their cabin and inexplicably shoots and kills two of their group before the remaining two manage to subdue him. Although the leader of the group, Hans, is all for killing him on the spot, his wife Edith insists that he get a fair trial back home (by the law, you could even say!). But before they can move back to civilization, the yukon ice starts melting, flooding the area and stranding them for weeks.

Regardless of however exciting that may or may not sound, the film is a success on a level beyond just plot. Michael is shown as a sort of symbol of nature: as Hans and Edith go out into the wilderness to bury the deceased, he thrashes around in the ropes they bound him in like some crazed wild animal. Another indication of this is that in the opening scene, while four of the five the miners sleep, Michael’s playing with the group’s dog – he’s the only one to really connect with nature. On the other hand, Edith and Hans are more reminiscent of civilization, in their desire to have him stand trial by the law, their practice of religion, and so on. That isn’t to say that the film is a simple allegory for something like the the taming of nature by society, as the end of the film shows in full effect: due to the protracted nature of their visit with nature, during which time Michael has tempted both Edith and Hans individually to kill him, they eventually decide to conduct the trial themselves – from which they conclude that they have to hang him. They do. But in the film’s final moment, as they’re packing up to leave, Michael appears in the cabin’s door frame with the noose still around his neck. He takes the gold, taking off his noose, tossing it to Edith and Hans for “good luck.” In a bizarre sort of metaphysical and symbolic turn of events, nature has resurrected Michael. An IMDb reviewer said this, and I can’t possibly try to say it better:
“Dennin represents the adaptable, at home in the selfish wilderness. Hans is prepared to respond in king to Dennin’s brutal greed, but Edith must cling to the grooves of civilization, religion and the law. But in the wild, the laws of man do not reign. Edith and Hans have done nothing more than conduct a false trial, giving false authority to actions. So Kuleshov has taken this irrationality unique to man, and given it to nature. Nature response with the mysterious and incomprehensible unexpected.”

The film’s visual style is equally brilliant – although it was made in the Soviet Union at the same time as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko, while the soviet montage theory was still largely in effect, it’s a precursor of Tarkovsky's cinema more than anything else. It never does a Eisensteinian electrifying collision of shots; rather, it goes for the poetic image that we can immerse ourselves in [whatever the merits of Eisenstein, this is a style I far prefer]. While the land is flooding, the exterior shot we get of the cabin is that of it being reflected in a large puddle of water – subtly, Kuleshov is juxtaposing a sign of civilization, the cabin, against the forces of nature, largely foreshadowing what will happen by the end of the film. As Edith, Hans, and Michael make their way to the tree that will serve as hangman, they’re followed by an oddly emotional tracking shot, observing each one in turn as they each try to come to terms with what they’re doing. I hardly expected this from someone who I thought was just a film theorist: Kuleshov's an utterly brilliant director.

The musical score on the Kino VHS is absolutely indispensable – if you can locate it, it’s worth however many arms and legs you have to give to get it.

I also watched Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, which is somewhat amusing but doesn’t amount to much. It’s worth seeing, but don’t try judging Kuleshov’s directorial skill from it – he’s capable of better, as this film shows in spades. It’s a travesty that these are the only available films from him.

One of my absolute favorite films – possibly even top ten stuff. Certainly my most recently seen film that I can consider a favorite.