The Last Command (1928)

(Directed by Josef von Sternberg, 1928, USA)
(Notes from the 46th New York Film Festival, 2008, Part 2)

Emil Jannings was one of the great stars of the silent and early talkie cinema. In my mind, he will be forever associated with F.W. Murnau's silent version of "Faust" playing Mefistofeles, as the downsized hotel porter in Murnau's "The Last Laugh", as the jealous husband in Dupont's "Variety" and von Sternberg's later "Der blaue Engel" ("The Blue Angel"), the film that made Marlene Dietrich a worldwide superstar overnight. Also he was the first actor to win the Academy Award in 1929 for this film and for the (unfortunately) lost silent film, "The Way of All Flesh".
It was interesting that the NY Film Festival would present a restored lovely 35mm print of this film, with a score by silent movie music vets Alloy Orchestra.

The rather convoluted plot concerns a prologue with William Powell as a director casting for a film on the Russian Revolution; while leafing through 8 x 10 glossies, he finds a photo of an old man and wants him for an extra. This leads to a search through a rooming house and a twitchy old man (Jannings) gets the call. He decided to go to Hollywood Central Casting, c. 1920's There is a superb tracking shot of extras going from window to window getting various bits of costume. When someone questions the old guy about a medal he's wearing, he replies he received, he replies "From the Tsar!" After a bit of teasing and tag with the medal, the plot develops to a long flashback back to Tsarist Russia pre-revolution and the old twitcher was a top general in the Tsarist army, and the director (Powell) was a Russian theatrical director suspected of being an anarchist, along with his beautiful sidekick Natalya (the lovely Evelyn Brent).

The fairly melodrammatic plot pits the eventual seduction to power of the lovely Natalya, who enjoys her role as a Tsarist general's mistress. Once the revolution happens though, she reveals her true feelings for the pompous codger, saving him from an anarchist's bomb aboard a train, but not before his humiliation before the revolutionaries. Saved from destruction, (from Natalya's intervention) he develops his facial tic while realizing he is responsible for Natalya's death.

The film flashes forward to the bleak present, wherein the director (Powell) goads the general to his final humiliation in a film studio, the 'last command' of the title.

Josef von Sternberg's films were usually celebrations of the grittiness of life or of decadence ("The Blue Angel", "The Scarlet Empress", "The Shanghai Gesture"). "The Lost Command" is as melodrammatic as most silent movies can be, but the performances of Evelyn Brent and Emil Jannings make the film, as well as the director's visual style. While not great cinamatic art, Sternberg's film compresses quite a lot in its 88 minutes runtime.

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)

(Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928, France)

This classic silent film existed in a few different versions for years until a print was discovered in an insane asylum in Norway. The version shown today was struck from that one and restored by the Cinematheque Francaise sometime in the mid-1980s. It is a vast improvement from the muddied one I saw on a rental during film school. A short prologue showing a medieval manuscript which intertitles inform us is a record of the trial of Joan of Arc, revealing Joan of Arc as a human being in her own words. Eight years previously, in 1920 Joan of Arc was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church and this might have prompted renewed interest in Dreyer to examine the historical record for film. However the legacy Jeanne d'Arc has left in collective memory in over four centuries since her death at the stake seems never to have abated: given the many representations of her: in opera, novels,theater, and film.

Dreyer's film stands out for the ascetic purity and economy in the film: the use of extreme close-ups, a very sparse set, bright almost harsh lighting and an equally sparse outdoor set. There is a slow rhythm bulding between the interior shots of the trial as Joan answers questions posed to her by the clergy seeking to find her guilty of sacrilege and it builds in intensity until the eventual death at the stake before a sad, reverent crowd that riots after the burning of Joan.

The actors do not wear makeup which, from all that I've read of this film, was rather unheard of for the silent film era. Dreyer psychologically pits Joan against her captors by filming both in extreme closeup: low angle for Joan, higher angle for her judges. It is very effective, emphasizing how powerless Joan is in the grand scheme of things. The filming is rather economical in that regard too, consisting of point of view back and forth extreme closeups.











This was Maria Falconetti's only film and as Joan, she gives one of the greatest performances ever seen on film. Her acting consists in (similar to most silent actors) acting with one's eyes (and in this case, face), yet she also conveys a huge amount of emotion in her restrained performance: she never ever 'mugs' for the camera but gazes head on, with intelligence, emotion, sadness, and fear that the historical Joan must have met her judges with and also a measure of the simplicity of a medieval peasant. She is alternately touching, heartbreaking and devastating in the end to watch, just superbly unforgettable. The austere beauty Dreyer gave to this film and Falconetti's devastating performance are justifiable reasons to watch this late silent film masterpiece.

Out of the silent film era, there are several films that redefined the cinema and raised film to the level of art. Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc remains one beautiful shining example of what cinema can achieve as art.

Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

(Directed by Guy Maddin, Canada, 2006)

The Canadian director Guy Maddin seems to make movies for film geeks and afficionados, obviously being one himself. His films are beautifully photographed, while his stories are deliberately over the top, so much so that they defy any attempt at synopsis and analysis.

His latest work "Brand Upon the Brain!" is being shown theatrically in two ways: as a live multimedia "happening" complete with live celebrity narrator, foley artists and small theater orchestra and also as a prerecorded narration by the wonderfully voiced actress Isabella Rossellini. If I ever directed a silent film, I would want her to narrate it.

Well, dear readers, I saw the latter version. An older 'Guy Maddin" returns home to the isolated island where he grew up, to paint the lighthouse where his parents kept the "Mom and Pop Orphanage", he will refresh the place with a fresh coat of paint. And then the memories start coming back and the movie is an extended flashback to Guy's childhood and the subsequent baroque intensity/insanity. As with most Maddin's current work, this involves a lot of Freudian complexes worked into the plot as well as a lot of absurdist plot complications as well. Some are resurrection, weird substance abuse and anti-aging serums, a Nancy Drew character dressing as a boy and entering into a lesbian affair with Guy's sister SIS and other assorted mayhem.

It's nice to say that Maddin has improved on his editing since the earlier "Cowards Bend the Knee", indeed this film is reminiscent of the earlier one: with rapid fire montage, very deadpan title cards and beautiful images recalling some of the earliest surviving film images and silent film techniques. Some surrealism is apparent too in this film: the 'aerophone' that distorts everything coming out of it and holds on to earlier spoken commands and the sentence "Father was replaced by a hamster and a metronome" among others.

Let's just say you can watch this film as you experience a dream, letting each successive image wash over you. If this is not your cup of tea, there's probably another movie ending with '3' awaiting you at the multiplex.

The live show sounds like fun, if it's playing at a theater near you, see it!

A Page of Madness (Kurutta Ipejji) 1926

(Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa, Japan, 1926)

As my first entry , I am pleased to offer an appreciation of "A Page of Madness", an avant-garde Japanese silent film from 1926, directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa.

The Backstory

Supposedly made without knowledge of the current silent cinema of the time, "A Page of Madness" (aka "A Crazy Page" or "A Page Out of Order") is a classic work of silent Japanese cinema that was way ahead of its time. The legend has it that the film was lost for 50 years (believed to have been destroyed in a fire) until a print was discovered in 1971. Kinugasa's film has often been unfairly compared to Robert Wiene's expressionist silent classic "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" but it is much more advanced in film language than the German 1919 film. For one, the film employs numerous techniques that were state of the art for that time: multiple exposures, distorted perspectives and camera angles, mysterious and bizarre visual juxtapositions.

Perhaps one of the most revolutionary aspects to this film is in its montage editing, somewhat reminiscent of Eisenstein's great early works (i.e., Potemkin and Strike). The film relies on rhythmical and rapid editing, similar to musical themes developing within a given sonata or symphonic work. Given the presentation of a rather disturbing story and its radical cinematic presentation, "A Page of Madness", while nearly breaking Kinugasa finacially (since he self-financed this film), the film was a huge hit in Japan. Kinugasa made a similar film, translated as "Crossroads" ("Jujiro") but it is unavailable in the West (even though it was the first Japanese film to be released in the West). As director, he had one of his greatest successes with "Gate of Hell" (1953).

The Story

"A Page of Madness" concerns an elderly man, formerly a sailor and now a janitor at an asylum whose wife is an inmate. His wife has drowned their infant child long ago, which triggered her breakdown into madness. Their teenage daughter visits and is trying to marry, she is unaware that her father is working at the asylum. Her visit triggers memories and flashbacks in the older man of happier times. In one of the films' saddest scenes, the janitor forces his wife to escape: he literally drags her from her cell, while she screams at being confronted by the stormy outside world, until she meekly crawls back to her cell and four walls. The janitor fantasizes about killing the young doctor at the asylum, dreams about happiness and finally is resigned to his fate, and his monotonous chores in the asylum.

Afterword

This is a very hard film to write about. Besides the main story, the film contains no intertitles or dialogue cards. The film is very dream-like, as it shows the distorted views of the inmates. The first person we see in the film is a dancer:


After a lyrical, rhythmic montage of a storm and a car travelling through the storm, the camera settles on a costumed woman in a surrealistic night club scene (complete with large fuzzy ball with a zebra stripe), at a certain point there is a shot of her shadow flashing outside of a cell and the camera settles on the dancer in rags, dancing herself either to death or exhaustion. This is one of the most striking instances early in the film and later on, the same dancer causes a riot before her fellow patients:



The view of her becomes distorted, bending into abstract shapes and the viewer realizes that these distorted hallucinations are what the patients are seeing. There are a few instances of this in the film and it is visually striking.

After its rediscovery in 1971, the film played at the New York Film Festival, and occasionally resurfaces at various film fests and societies around the worl. As far as I know, the only copy available is a VHS copy from Facets Multimedia. Once seen, you will not easily forget it.