F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)

How do we watch a silent movie like F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)? Really, most film-goers feel the same way about silent film that we feel about rotary phones and typewriters – why would we even spend time on something so technologically out of date? Well, we’re not dealing with a tool here (you don’t use a movie), we’re looking at an art form. One of the problems with film lately is that the technology of it, special effects if you will, seems to have overwhelmed our appreciation of that.

So say this to yourself, out loud (or you can silently mouth it for less ironic effect): silent film is not an antiquated, obsolete method of movie-making. It is a specific form of expression, different from what we are currently used to. Few musicians currently write and perform music using the instrumentation of the western European medieval period (the lute! the sackbut! the hautbois! the vielle!), but that doesn’t mean that the music of that period has no value or that it cannot be appreciated. In fact, it’s pretty cool. And so is silent film.

Here are some things to love about silent film. First, its black and whiteness. Nosferatu is a horror movie, and horror movies are better in black and white. Yes, we know blood looks cooler if it’s actually red, but horror movies are more effective if they don’t show the blood. The original Halloween (1978), for example, avoids any blood, and it’s a slasher movie, but it is scarier than most of the horror that follows it in the genre because so much of takes place in your mind. Psychological horror is freakier than gross-out horror. Black and white further engages the psychological effect of a film because it recedes from the verisimilitude of color, it’s unreal. And horror is all about otherness. What’s more, if you do have blood, isn’t it creepier if it’s black? Tim Burton thought so in Batman Returns (1992).

Second, silent movies are silent. Film-makers struggled for 30 years to sync up sound with image, a technological difficulty that took ingenuity to overcome and didn’t happen until 1925. But in the meantime, the silent approach developed into a laudable form. Watch Singin’ in the Rain (1952) sometime. Underneath its musical plot, it recaps the transition from silent to sound and acknowledges that many great silent actors could not make that transition because their voices weren’t auralgenic.

But look at that phrase: “great silent actors.” What does that mean? It means that actors of the silent era created indelible characters, memorable, expressive, larger-than-life actors like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Ramon Novarro, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, and on and on. And a lot of them did this with their faces; if you can’t speak out loud, emotion must be communicated through face and physical expression. Watch for this in Nosferatu, how the actors capture love, horror, fear, sadness – the basic human emotions – effortlessly with their faces. Now, this is a bit more expressionistic, or exaggerated for emotional effect, than we’re used to, and that can seem weird. But as we get used to it we realize we’re seeing human emotion more clearly as an element of narrative than we do in modern film.

Finally, one of the modern film-making’s most bothersome elements, to this writer anyway, is the soundtrack, so manipulative, so distracting, so much like a band-aid slapped over a film’s weaknesses or a chaperone that interferes with our engagement with a hot date. In true silent film, film without the ongoing organ accompaniment that would have been improvised and played by an organist, live during the movie, we connect directly with these emotions. All modern DVDs of silent film include musical accompaniment, mostly because contemporary film fans cannot fathom the total absence of sound. We’ll leave the recorded organ accompaniment turned on during tonight’s screening, but imagine if it was just you, and the vampire, alone in a castle room so dark there’s no color, and no one can hear you scream. Because there is no sound.

Happy Halloween!

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)

For years and years, the image of Frankenstein as a square-headed, stiff-limbed, heavy-lidded, electrocuted monster has been the prevailing image for Halloween costumes and decorations. Almost solely because of the 1931 film Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as the monster, the first image that tends to come to mind when someone mentions Frankenstein tends to be this goofy-looking creature, which is interesting because Frankenstein is the scientist, not the creation.

That’s the power Whale’s film has had over our impression of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, written in 1818. The book and the movie may share a name, but further than that, few similarities are to be found between them. Shelley’s version is a Romantic novel that raises questions about the meaning of life, how we can maintain our humanity after the groundbreaking discoveries of the Industrial Revolution, and our responsibilities for the world we create, while Whale’s film is an early horror movie that plays on our fears of the unknown, unchecked science, and human hubris with shock value and a brain-dead monster. In the novel, it is important that the monster has human, if not super-human, characteristics because Shelley sought to explore questions of Man’s place in the universe. In the movie, the (un)jolly green giant bears no similarity to a real man; it is a despicable monster, a sub-human, that needs to be destroyed.

The reason that the movie took such a different direction than the novel is that contemplation and discussion about whether or not scientific advancements will benefit mankind doesn’t sell. Horror movies with a clear villain (the mad scientist), a dumb assistant (the hunchback), and a disgusting monster does, especially in a time, the onset of the Depression, when film was growing as a source of entertainment. People simply found it more fun to see a movie, with exciting costumes and special effects, and no thinking involved.

Certainly, Shelley’s novel has, and probably would have without Whale’s film, stood the test of time. Since the original movie, Frankenstein has been both seriously remade and parodied over and over again, whether in films like Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 feature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Mel Brooks’ 1974 parody, Young Frankenstein, or Frank Henelotter’s 1990 black comedy, Frankenhooker, or Tim Burton’s 1984 short, Frankenweenie (the movie that got Burton fired from Disney, which we’re showing this evening), suggesting the staying power of Shelley’s vision.

But it is Whale’s movie that inaugurated the visual interpretations of Shelley’s book, and subsequent film versions, many closer to the novel’s intent and depictions, have not displaced Whale’s imagery from the popular consciousness. Little kids think the creature is named Frankenstein, has bolts in his neck, wears really big shoes, and that you could balance a stack of books easily on his head because it is flat. And every mad scientist who, upon viewing the result of his work, cried out to the heavens “IT’S ALIVE!” owes a debt to Whale’s lasting and iconic vision.

Sam Rock
Film Club

Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954)

How do we account for the continued popularity of Audrey Hepburn? Ask your parents or grandparents about her and they’ll mention Roman Holiday, Funny Face, My Fair Lady, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and almost no one has anything critical to say about her. She’s beautiful. She’s fabulous. She’s Audrey.

Is it too simple just to say that she was a movie star, in that old time way that movie stars used to be larger than life, more glamorous than any star seems to achieve these days, and so she sticks in our collective consciousness? As do Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor, Charlton Heston.

What it boils down to for Heburn is class. Hepburn had class – style, couture, grace, savoir faire. Watch her in Sabrina. Even when she’s playing the chauffeur’s daughter, before she’s gone to Europe and hobnobbed with culture, she has that class. The only thing different about her when she comes back is she has fashion – gorgeous dresses designed by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head.

(You know Edith Head. She’s the fashion designer Brad Bird caricatured as Edna Mode or “E” in The Incredibles, the designer of their costumes. The real Head, a legend, designed costumes for over 400 movies, from 1927 until 1980. We don’t know if any of them had capes.)

We don’t really need to belabor the point here. To watch Hepburn in Sabrina is to see, to understand star power, to know what was so compelling about her. The other stars in the film – and they were big (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden) – seem to pale when she’s around.

Perhaps a more interesting line of inquisition is why so few Hollywood actors today can achieve this? Certainly part of it is the studio system which no longer exists. The studios controlled, rigidly, the public personae of their stars, and they were able to amplify and shape them into the gods and goddesses we remember. Today things are different; the central publicity machines are missing and the Internet is here, where anyone with a digital camera can catch you nude, overweight, and having a bad hair day on a beach, then post the pictures on their blog for everyone to see. We live in an age in which the sheer volume of personal, and often unflattering data, destroys any possibility of one’s mythologization.

Russell Crowe. Didn’t he hit some guy with a telephone? Julia Roberts is one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. Fans are equally aware of her movies and her tempestuous love life.

Myth cannot exist in a world of trivial minutiae that diminishes star status. This is true not only of movie stars but presidents (a 2005 book about Abraham Lincoln claimed he might have been homosexual – the claim is disputed by most historians – and recent revelations about John F. Kennedy’s indiscretions in the White House have done a bit to tarnish his Camelot image), civil rights leaders (historians have argued that some of Martin Luther King’s academic papers and speeches contained plagiarism), and sports heroes (steroids, anyone?).

If anything, watching Audrey Hepburn now allows us to return to a time when we were allowed to have movie stars, and they could exist in a bubble unpunctured by too much information. Could Audrey Hepburn, the glamorous, the embodiment of class, exist as a star today? We think not. That’s why we can revel in and honor her as the star of movies like Sabrina.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser