Tag: 1918

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Kuleshov Effect (1918)

The Kuleshov Effect is the process by which we derive meanings from shots not just from the shots themselves, but by their relationship to the previous and subsequent shots in the sequence, first demonstrated by the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s.

Editing together different sequences showing the actor Ivan Mosjoukine reacting to various scenes, Kuleshov noted how audiences ascribed different emtions to the actor’s expressions despiet the fact that in each case the exact same footage was used.

Which is both obvious to us now (100 years later) and also still endlessly interesting (or at least I think so).

___________

Notes

1. I watched two versions of this on youtube (1, 2)

2. And although both claim to be the original I’m pretty sure neither of them are.

__________

Film Information

Title: The Kuleshov Effect
Director: Lev Kuleshov
Year: 1918 (approximately)
Duration: 1 minute
Watch: youtube; youtube
Related Articles: wikipedia; Movements In Film; Nashville Film Institute

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Cook (1918)

After the absolute horror of Good Night, Nurse!, Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton return to form with this pretty wonderful film. Which is nice.

As you can probably guess from the title, Fatty Arbuckle is a chef in this, while Buster Keaton plays a waiter. The owner of the restaurant, meanwhile, is a man with an absolutely magnificent moustache. Which is nice.

This first section is really great, with Fatty Arbuckle serving up the food in increasingly absurd ways, while Buster’s all charm and acrobatics as the waiter (a pretty good combination, I’d say). There’s even an extended dance scene, which is pretty fun.

And there’s Luke the Dog. Lovely Luke the Dog.

The middle section is the only real lull here, with Fatty Arbuckle and the rest of the staff eating pasta for a full five minutes for some reason, intercut with occasional scenes of Luke the Dog chasing a bad guy around outside for a while.

But at least he gets a hug for all his hard work at the end.

After the interminable pasta interlude, it’s off to the seaside for a day out. I don’t know why. Maybe they just wanted to go back to Coney Island again (and who can blame them, really).

Anyway, at the beach, Fatty’s going fishing, Buster’s going to Goatland (which looks amazing), and Luke the Dog is still chasing that man around. And then there’s a pretty astonishing stunt at the end, which I have spoiled in the image below, I’m afraid.

It’s pretty good fun, all in all. I liked it.

___________

Notes

1. I watched this on blu-ray yet again. The screenshots are taken from this version on youtube (which seems to be the blu-ray restoration, but with different music).

2. This film was lost until about twenty years ago.

3. But then it was found.

4. I am glad it was.

5. Fatty Arbuckle’s dancing scene in this is also apparently a parody of the dancing seen in Salomé.

6. Another lost film

7. Which unfortunately seems to have stayed lost.

8. One of the few surviving clips from Buster Keaton’s 50s TV shows is him doing/re-doing Fatty’s dance here.

9. But I can’t seem to find it on the internet anywhere, I’m afraid.

10. And I’m not sure it was quite funny enough anyway really to warrant a remake.

___________

Film Information

Title: The Cook
Director: Fatty Arbuckle
Year: 1918
Duration: 20 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Good Night, Nurse! (1918)

In Good Night, Nurse!, Fatty Arbuckle is drunk. That’s about it.

The first five minutes of this involve a drunken Fatty Arbuckle trying to light a cigarette in the pouring rain. A woman kicks him in the face at one point.

This is as good as it gets.

The rest of the film involves Fatty Arbuckle being sectioned and operated on to cure him of his alcoholism. It’s an unfunny mess, really

__________

Notes:

1. I watched this on blu-ray again, and took the screenshots from here.

2. I found this genuinely distressing.

3. And didn’t like it at all.

4. Although a pillow fight resulting in a the sudden wave of feathers following Fatty down the hall like the blood gushing from the lift in The Shining looked quite nice.

__________

Film Information

Title: Good Night, Nurse!
Director: Fatty Arbuckle
Year: 1918
Duration: 20 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Moonshine (1918)

In Moonshine, Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton play some sort of government agents trying to capture illegal bootleggers making, well, moonshine out in the hills somewhere. It’s brilliant.

There’s a kind of manic energy to everything here, and a lot of inventiveness throughout. Condense this down to six minutes, animate it, and replace Fatty Arbuckle with a rabbit of some kind and you’d have something pretty good, I reckon.

_________

Notes

1. I watched this on blu-ray. The version I took the screenshots from seems to be an exact copy of that one.

2. With the same captions.

3. Of which there are a lot.

4. Including a lot of self-referentiality

5. Which is nice.

6. And builds well into the ending.

7. Which I loved.

8. And which reminded me of David Lynch again (Lost Highway, this time).

9. I hope I have accidentally discovered his secret source of inspiration now.

10. And the key to understanding everything.

11. Also, it’s kind of a shame that this one is the worst quality restoration so far (switching, sometimes frame by frame, between looking absolutely pristine and hauntingly ghostly), as a lot of the good visual gags sometimes get lost in the murk.

___________

Film Information

Title: Moonshine
Director: Fatty Arbuckle
Year: 1918
Duration: 18 minutes
Watch: Youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Bell Boy (1918)

The Bell Boy is the seventh Fatty Arbuckle/Buster Keaton collaboration (or at least the seventh surviving one), and probably the best yet, in which the pair of them play Bell Boys at a dysfunctional hotel.

The plot of this is basically that Fatty Arbuckle is utterly bored at work and decides to piss around. It’s a pretty good plot, to be honest, and beats the usual Fatty Arbuckle storyline, where he’s just relentlessly unpleasant for 20 minutes for reasons I find difficult to discern.

It’s also an almost non-stop cavalcade of jokes (including an incredible window cleaning gag from Buster Keaton), with a nice line in slightly surreal humour, and some good use of pulleys and contraptions too, which I always like (though nothing on the scale of the stuff Buster Keaton contrives in The Scarecrow)

Towards the end, they run out of hotel jokes and stage a bank robbery instead, presumably so Buster Keaton can show off his incredible range of acrobatic skills. There’s a five minute fight, followed by a motorbike chase, and a runaway tram. It’s pretty exciting.

THE END

__________

Notes

1. I watched this on blu-ray yet again. The stills are captured from this youtube version.

2. I liked this one a lot, although it’s still probably only the third best hotel based silent film I’ve watched this year, after these two wondrous marvels.

3. This one also has a (very short) stop-motion sequence (I think), so keeps up the hotel/animation theme of The Electric Hotel and Hotel Electrique, even if only for about a second.

4. Also there’s a shaving scene, but rather than being pretty delightful, like the one in Hotel Electrique, this one is just utterly interminable.

5. And probably the only part of this I actually disliked.

6. This might also be the first Fatty Arbuckle film I’ve watched where he’s not just an absolute arsehole.

7. Which makes a nice change of pace.

8. And also the scene where he and his girlfriend drive around in a car for a bit reminded me of this bit from the new Twin Peaks for some reason.

9. Which was nice.

10. (This one also had a brief shot of a dog in it but it wasn’t Luke the Dog at all unfortunately it was some other dog entirely)

__________

Film Information

Title: The Bell Boy
Director: Fatty Arbuckle
Year: 1918
Duration: 25 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Out West (1918)

Out West is another 20 minutes of silent comedy directed by and starring Fatty Arbuckle, with able support from Buster Keaton. This one sees Fatty Arbuckle indulging in all the staples of the Western – vagrancy, theft, murder, train top chases, gunfights, bar brawls, extreme racism that’s incredibly unpleasant to watch, casual participation in genocide, and everything else that was the style at the time.

Yeah, this one takes a turn for the unpleasantly racist halfway through, and no amount of horses getting drunk can save it after that, to be honest.

__________

Notes

1. I watched this on blu-ray again, which was in plain normal black and white.

2. But I captured the screenshots from this tinted version on youtube.

3. This one also stars Buster Keaton’s dad near the start.

4. But beyond that I don’t have too much to say.

__________

Film Information

Title: Out West
Director: Fatty Arbuckle
Year: 1918
Duration: 20 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

The Allotment Holder’s Enemies (1918)

The Allotment Holder’s Enemies (1918) is a short film made to advertise The Smallholder, a magazine for allotment owners, providing exciting instruction on how to rid your garden of pests. It was made by Charles Urban, some of whose films I’ve looked at here before.

Alongside slightly strident title cards like the one above, The Allotment Holder’s Enemies contains five minutes of surprisingly lovely and vivid footage of various kinds of fairly benign British garden wildlife, all of which are probably far less benign if they’re about to eat the last cabbage in the country. But it’s still quite amusing to see such ferocious disgust at, well, sparrows.

Poor sparrows.

(Incidentally, that reminds me of this beautiful old bestiary description of bees, which is, and shall always be, one of my very favourite things.)

Anyway, these most destructive birds are then presented to the viewer with some footage (see image immediately below) that doesn’t exactly do much to illustrate the dire biblical plague that obviously at the time they represented.

Just terrifying.

So to calm you down, here are some lovely pictures of snails, caterpillars, grubs.

Although even caterpillars can be quite ferocious.

“Especially to ladies.”

__________

Notes

1. I watched this on the BFI Player

2. And gleaned, as usual, most of my information from there.

3. A sequel/companion to this, The Allotment Holder’s Friends, was made at the same time.

4. But unfortunately, except for mention of its title in various online catalogues, can find no evidence of its existence.

__________

Film Information

Title: The Allotment Holder’s Enemies
Director: Charles Urban
Year: 1918
Duration: 5 minutes
Watch: BFI Player