Nanook of the North

Nanook of the North (Robert J.Flaherty, 1922)

Having loved Flaherty's Louisiana Story, I got into Nanook of the North with some expectations of documentary style and realism. This Silent Film shot during one year in the great North of my country, Canada and even more specifically, the Province of Québec, has a very important anthropological value. It shows how those people pratically isolated from civilization lived in these extreme conditions.
However this is not absolutely a great film or the kind of feature you want to buy and watch repeatedly. It's the subject matter and how the techniques of documentaries have been developped within this film. It is more important to see this film as a piece of History, a witness of another time instead of a great film. It is clearly the birth of documentaries, even if Flaherty always had some kind of story structure behind his images, it is still a how to make documentaries.
It was a mandatory stop as a part of my journey through Mediafilm's Masterpieces list and They Shoot Pictures' 1000 Greatest Films.

The General

The General (Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton, 1927)


In the 1920's there was a big opposition between moviegoers: the Chaplin side against the Keaton side. Chaplin's tramp was more emotionnal and had more sensivity in his adventures. While on his side, Buster Keaton was more of a mime, the same sad face of a "white clown" - Fellini. Chaplin used many emotionnal lever to make us care about his little tramp, many faces and so much misery. Meanwhile, Keaton used with his sad expressions the fact that he was made of "rubber" to make us laugh.

Near a century later, this opposition between those two greats is more like a conjunction. The competition they delivered to each other helped to keep better and better quality in their performances for the public. And someone who likes Chaplin nowadays will surely like Keaton. I think Chaplin was a better storyteller: he understood the world around him better than most of the people of his time. Keaton was more a stuntman than Chaplin was, he could do scenes with a high level of danger and never hurt himself.

The danger is palpable in The General, some scenes are total madness: Buster Keaton is in the front of a steam engine for much of the lenght of the film! I was very young when I understood that a train doesn't stop like a bike...and even just a bike you could seriously hurt yourself when you fall from it! So the steam engine can kill the stuntman! The General is like watching extreme sports for the 1920's! It's crazy, it's dangerous, the adrenaline is in the top and the guy could be seriously hurt and he possibly could die if something goes wrong!

For the modern day moviegoers that discovers The General, they may find some gags cartoonesque. Well, they couldn't be more right! When at Warner Bros. they were doing Bugs Bunny cartoons, they openly declared that they were truly inspired by Buster Keaton's films. The cartoons gave more opportunities to the animators that could emphasized some of the gags and stunts Keaton did in his films. His influence is even palpable in Spongebob Squarepants cartoons!

As you have probably wondered, I'm not gonna write a synopsis or an analysis on The General, I love this movie too much to find its weaknesses and I prefered to let you my personal impressions of it. The General deserves its spot on the Top 5 of the greatest Silent films of all time!


A Retrospective by Michaël Parent

Passing Fancy

One of Ozu's three films of 1933, Passing Fancy a Silent melodrama about a father, his son, a coworker, a young lady and a mature woman. On the story level, Passing Fancy is much like the other Ozu work, being on the level of the small events that make our daily life. They aren't grand scale pictures but I've already dissected Ozu's approach and touch on my precedent reviews and retrospectives I've already done on his films.

This films is insteresting on how it brings narrative elements of Ozu's storytelling. Being a silent film it gives another perspective on how Ozu developped his style. Already in 1933, he did the uncommon camera angles that caracterized one of his trademarks. The characters and their interactions with each other are build like in any of his films has many love/hate relationships and codependent groups that live together that everyone must help everyone if one demonstrated kindness.

To me, the main character, the father that tries to be a good dad but with his impulsive character and lack of experience does mistakes, as everyone in life, he represents Yasujiro Ozu as the young director that must fight with himself to be a great director (which he became). A great pre-war Japanese film!

Les Précurseurs

Les Précurseurs du Cinéma sont les pionniers qui ont façonné le langage filmique pour en tirer des récits cohérents et artistiques. Tant du côté de Griffith qui a littéralement mis en place les fondations du 7e Art que du côté de Eisenstein qui a démontré le découpage d'une scène et l'utilisation du montage. Ils ont tous travaillé dans le muet et malheureusement certains n'ont pas vécu assez longtemps pour faire du parlant et d'autres n'ont su se surpasser avec la venue du son.

Les Précurseurs sont:
F.W. Murnau (5e)
David Wark Griffith (9e)
Charles Chaplin (10e)
Sergei Eisenstein (20e)

Mentions plus qu'honorables à:
Cecil B. DeMille
Buster Keaton
Dziga Vertov
Louis Feuillade
Victor Sjostrom
Erich von Stroheim
Ernst Lubitsch
Robert Flaherty

Carl Th. Dreyer