The Docks of New York

The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928)

The story involves an incredibly strong ship stoker named Bill (George Bancroft) and the beautiful prostitute named Mae (Betty Compson), whom he saves from drowning. She was attempting suicide as she had no money, almost no clothes and felt remorse about her life up to then. He steals some clothes for her and invites her out for a "good night".

The Cameraman

The Cameraman (Buster Keaton & Edgar Sedgwick, 1928)

Hopelessly in love with a woman working at MGM Studios, a clumsy man attempts to become a motion picture cameraman to be close to the object of his desire.

This is the first official review of my new feature that I hope to get running longer than the last ones I intended. Since, it’s a part of my film buff quest, to watch the entire list of the 1000 Greatest Films of All Time of the Website They Shoot Pictures Don’t They?, this new feature available on your left by the label Pantheon Directors, must be a more sizable goal to achieve. Starting with one of the few Buster Keaton films left on the list that I needed to see, I wanted to be able to fully judge if I’m still more of a Charlie Chaplin kind of person or if my heart will switch to “The Great Stone face”. This goes out to the good old adversity of Chaplin vs. Keaton or Keaton vs. Chaplin. Well, it ends up that even the most respected film critics don’t agree.

With The Cameraman Keaton does what he knows best while clearly injecting some melancholy and maybe a little bit of pathos. It is interesting to observe that it was Keaton’s first film for the MGM Studios and that they tried to impose their rigid style of film making and impose him their writers. This is one of the main reasons that Keaton felt into alcoholism later and lost almost everything. Hopefully, The Cameraman is clearly a Buster Keaton masterpiece and the MGM reform didn’t altered his touch.

Our main character named Buster just like the actor portraying him, meets a woman (Marceline Day) and wants to be with her. She works at the MGM studios and he wants to get a trial to get to be with her and eventually ask her out. However, he is a clumsy man and even if the road is filled with obstacle he is also stubborn and in love. Just like Keaton said himself, his little fellow is an honest man who works and want to get the girl fair and square. Chaplin’s tramp, on the contrary was a bum with a bum attitude and if he had to steal he’d steal. Another aspect of Keaton’s world is how he represents women and his character’s relationship with them. He treats them as his equal and while having respect for them he also insert them in his gags. Chaplin idolized women and would never touch their goddess-like aura.

With The Cameraman, Keaton proves again that he is a funny man that can make multiple physical gags but moreover that he is a marvellous storyteller displaying emotions with the deadpan expression and his long shots. Even if it’s a guy gets the girl classic story, the universality and the quality of this picture is quite something. One of Buster Keaton’s best Silent comedies.

The Wind

The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)

Only by being on Mediafilm's masterpiece list, this Silent film masterpiece was one of the film I deeply desired to watch since many years. Moreover, it is from one of the most notable Silent Film directors Victor Sjöström or as credited in the film Seastrom. Sjöström actually changed the spelling of his name for its phonetically sound and be more "Americanized". Since he is Swedish, it would be  more literal English to be called Seastrom instead of Sjöström even if it's the same pronunciation. He wasn't the only European director who came from Europe to work in America with the big stars and the big studios. Famous names like Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, F.W. Murnau, were some of the biggest names to have ever worked into Silent films. Many of their movies are considered as masterpieces. It is the same case for Sjöström and his sumptuous The Wind.

Opening with a famous train sequence where Letty (Lillian Gish) from Virginia is going to live with her cousin in West Texas, a place where the wind blows all the time. While on the train, she meets an engaging gentleman name Roddy (Montagu Love) who tries to convince her that moving there is actually an error and that she should continue with him. The train opening strangely reminds the first scenes of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man where a man from the East and the city goes to the West. Arriving at destination, Letty meets up with her cousin but his wife Cora (Dorothy Cumming) doesn't like Letty and clearly is jealous of her. Our protagonist have no choice but to marry Lige (Lars Hanson), a man that disgusts her and that she didn't love. However, a test will convince Letty to see her husband in a different way and she will rethink her life choices.

It is really not often that a pure talent of storytelling is right before your eyes. In the case of Sjöström it is more than pure talent: this is a case of artistry. The brilliant composition of the film and the directing of the structured plot make The Wind one of the major Silent films. Sjöström uses a simple and very sober mise en scène for his film and the special effect of superposition of images gives to Letty's visions a superbly unsettling effect that Lillian Gish performs with one of the greatest performances by any actor from her time.

Thorough her career and her long life, she died at 99 years, Lillian Gish received lots of praised first by her first director D.W. Griffith then by her peers, even François Truffaut in his tribute to her and her sister Dorothy with is dedicate in La nuit américaine. Just to name a few of her greatest performances: The Birth of A Nation, Broken Blossoms, and The Night of the Hunter, were all masterpieces and she managed to be as good with Silent films as with talkies. Nonetheless, in The Wind she was at the top of her game, the intensity of Sjöström's film needed all the fragility, ethereal beauty of the dame, her quick adaptation to the many changes in the attitude and state of mind of Letty and her fall into insanity until her complete recovery in almost one take and a continuous shot.

She was a prisoner of the desert and her containment was even worse she was obliged to marry a boorish man that only disgusts her. Until a great sand storm washed away the ghosts of her past and open her eyes to the man she never let herself appreciate. Then she found everything she was looking for in the hell she thought she was. Like a wild stallion she delivers herself from the holds that made her miserable.

October (1928)

 October (Sergei M. Eisenstein & Grigori Aleksandrov, 1928)

They Shoot Pictures Don't They? The 1000 Greatest Films #345

Of the many quests and lists I impose myself on watching many are unavoidable films. The first ever list I wanted to check'em all was Mediafilms masterpieces there were five Sergei M. Eisenstein films: Battleship Potemkin, October, Alexander Nevsky, Ivan The Terrible Part I &II. October is the last Eisenstein I needed to see.  Of the great filmmakers of all time the British institute of Cinema stated that D.W. Griffith is the supplier of the alphabet, Chaplin the humanism and Eisenstein the theoretical inventor of the media. This is partly true, Eisenstein, especially with October, presents his theories of montage, editing, and decoupage of a scene to demonstrate a narrative. This aspect, as rhythmed as it is, as some interesting facets mainly because in this propagandist film about the recreation of the Revolution of 1917, shot like a documentary, the "propos" embellishes and glorifies the Soviet Union and its rise.

On some level, the fast editing and multi angles of decoupage are giving a gripping pace that carries the film from the events told in a chronological narrative. Other than being a pamphlet to the grandeur of the Soviet Union, October is the shipping banner of Eisenstein's vision of filmmaking and storytelling. His many books on montage are the establishment of modern day Cinema and television. Just watch how many uncountable times the sequence of the steps of Odessa has been reshot and put into great works of Cinema. Anyhow, Eisenstein's approach has somewhat conquered the seventh art. If you watch a mainstream film you'll hardly see a take lasting more than 3 seconds and a scene is shot from sometimes up to ten different angles are used to cut and edit the scene. For example, the Bourne movies, as popular as they were, those modern day action movies from Doug Liman (the first) and Paul Greengrass (the last two) with shots lasting two and even a second, shot with multiple angles giving a fast and heart clenching rhythm. Eisenstein's films feel that fresh to my eyes as a TV like 24 where the decoupage and multiple frames are used to tell many levels of stories.

Altough, personally I'd never shot a scene like any of these people, Eisenstein's lessons are unavoidable and any cinephile, director, or Film Historian should study them. But I' m more on the side of Andrei Tarkovsky when he said in Sculpting in Time:  

"I am radically opposed to the way Eisenstein used the frame to codify intellectual formulae. My own method of conveying experience to the audience is quite different. Of course it has to be said that Eisenstein wasn't trying to convey his own experience to anyone, he wanted to put across ideas, purely and simply; but for me that sort of cinema is utterly inimical. Moreover Eisenstein's montage dictum, as I see it, contradicts the very basis of the unique process whereby a film affects an audience. It deprives the person watching of that prerogative of film, which has to do with what distinguishes its impact on his consciousness from that of literature or philosophy: namely the opportunity to live through what is happening on the screen as if it were his own life, to take over, as deeply personal and his own, the experience imprinted in time upon the screen, relating his own life to what is being shown."

For me filmmaking is substracting the camera from the mind of the viewer and the more sober and subtle the direction is the more it is mastered and successful. That's why when thinking about a film I'll always prefer long takes and slow zooms in/out even if the ballet of Martin Scorsese's masterpieces makes me dream of filmmaking, a great scene can be shot from only one point of view and with one effective tracking shot. Look at the scene in Citizen Kane where Kane goes into the journal and discuss with Cotten's character and many others, Toland's deep focus permits the action near the camera and some action in the back of the room. There is great interaction in that scene with few camera movements all in one effective shot. The viewer actually doesn't even realize that the camera is standing in an impossible place in the room. We'll get back to Citizen Kane soon but now let's conclude that Eisenstein's technique in October shows the possibilities of editing in these early days of a fresh new art even if today this is textbook filmmaking, it has its limits and restrictions.

Jeanne d'Arc selon Dreyer

TSPDT Greatest Films #20 La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928)


I often get questions like: What is the best film of all-time? or What are the true cinematic masterpieces? Well, most of the times we hear Citizen Kane, Vertigo, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bicycle Thieves, La règle du jeu, Seven Samurai, etc. Most of the time the silent masterpieces are forgotten. Maybe because these films are older or harder to find, but of all the masterpieces of the seventh art La passion de Jeanne d'Arc is a one of a kind film! Brilliantly revisited by Robert Bresson in 1962, the 1928 version is still deeper and even more metaphysical.

The story depicted in La passion de Jeanne d'Arc is represented by the messianic figure of Maria Falconetti from the trial of Joan of Arc to her tragic death on the stake. Shot entirely in close-ups by Dreyer who wanted to catch only the dramatic expressions from the face of his heroine. Other elements are out of focus and the sets are there to be backgrounds of the "mise-en-scène". The mise-en-chot became famous but never really used after because of the uncommon way and also because i could annoy the spectator the get all this intensity all along the film. I read somewhere that the sets used to shot this film was very expensive and all the Antiques were bought at high costs. To be only used out of focus...

Presented like that this film could sound very simple and maybe a little boring, the case is that La passion de Jeanne d'Arc is not that simple. It proposes that Joan of Arc was really a messianic figure while being made of flesh and blood. Also that purity and goodness can be found in any human being but also that we all can be executioners and victims. It reflects the time the movie was made: France won the War but suffered from the German attacks. The French nation have been victimized and executioners with the sentence imposed on Germany after World War I.

Carl Th. Dreyer is one of the most religious directors and most of his films are based on faith and the many representations we can find of. His films are austere but also purified the more simplistic. He used to take his actors like puppets and only allow them to move the way he intended them to move. Long shots and few if almost no editing caracterize his films. Those long shots seem like he tried to catch the perfect moment that could help him to catch the light of God. The slow action depicted in all his films feels like we are bewitched by the story and the imperceptible camera moves.

Far from being an easy film, La passion de Jeanne d'Arc is unique and crucial.


A review by Michaël Parent