For a while at least, the good folks at Hulu.com have made Carl Theodor Dreyer's horror classic Vampyr available for viewing. And how do you know it's a classic? Why, because it received Katie Award nominations for best foreign language picture and best director—it must be good.
Just part of our ongoing mission here at the Monkey to cram a little culture down your throat.
And now with limited commercial interruption, Vampyr.
Boudu Saved From Drowning (prod. Michel Simon) Liebelei (prod. Herman Millakowsky) The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (prod. Fritz Lang and Seymour Nebenzal) Vampyr (prod. Carl Theodor Dreyer and Julian West) Zero For Conduct (prod. Jean Vigo)
The nominees for best director of 1932-33, Take Two.
As with the acting nominees, some of the nominees for best director could have gone into either the comedy/musical category or the drama category; I chose one or the other based on a complex and proprietary calculus known as "doing whatever I felt like."
Best Director (Comedy/Musical) Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) (on left, with Jane Russell) George Cukor (Dinner At Eight and Little Women) (here with the cast of Little Women) Victor Fleming (Red Dust and Bombshell) (here with Clara Bow) Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living) Leo McCarey (Duck Soup) Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved From Drowning) Jean Vigo (Zero For Conduct) Best Director (Drama) Frank Capra (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Lady For A Day) Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (King Kong) (with Marguerite Harrison) Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr) Fritz Lang (The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse) Mervyn LeRoy (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Gold Diggers Of 1933) (on right) Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight and Queen Christina) (center, on set of Queen Christina) James Whale (The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man) (with Paul Robeson)
"But Mr. Monkey," I hear so often on the street, "while it's true our lives rise and fall on the rhythms of your wonderful prose poetry, a movie blogger can never aspire to the status of cultural icon without posting an end-of-the-year top ten list." And even as I'm running away, I'm thinking, yes, it's probably true, I must write an end of the year top ten list. So as the decade of the 'Naughties comes to a close, I give you a list of the ten best movies I not just mentioned but wrote full essays about this year (thus the absence of The Kid, Safety Last, Sherlock Jr., Metropolis and many other).
As always, my choices are a reflection of my values and are in no way binding on the universe as a whole.
In chronological order and suitable for mounting on your refrigerator door:
The Thief Of Bagdad (1924)—Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Douglas Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie made before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The Gold Rush (1925)—A 72-minute comedy about a gold prospector in the wilds of Alaska, chock full of laughs, action and some of the most inventive bits of business ever committed to film. I mean, there is something pretty entertaining about watching a man eat his own shoe. This is also the movie that introduced two oft-imitated bits, the one where a starving man thinks his partner is a chicken and the one where Chaplin spears two dinner rolls with forks and does a little soft-shoe with them under his chin. Throw in a little romance, an attempted murder and a happy ending and you've got the recipe for a real good time.
The General (1926)—Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which [Buster] Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame. Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as "The Great Stoneface"—only adds to the modern feel of the production.
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)—Directed by the great F.W. Murnau, who had previously helmed such classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Sunrise starts out as a silent era film noir with a beautiful temptress from the city persuading a handsome young farmer to murder his wife then becomes a surprisingly touching story of reconciliation and redemption. The exaggerated story is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)—The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being. More importantly, though, the movie reminded me that telling a story in such a simple and straightforward manner, letting the chips fall where they may, can uncover truths about human nature so eternal that even an eighty year old film based on a nearly six hundred year old historical event can be as relevant and timely as this morning's news. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way. Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)—This Buster Keaton comedy is a classic fish-out-of-water story, the reunion of a ukelele-playing, college-educated fop (Keaton) with his strapping, working class father (Ernest Torrence). In the course of the seventy-minute story, Keaton contends with shipwrecks, hurricanes and an unreasoning prejudice against French berets to win over his father and get the girl. The most unforgettable sequence of Steamboat Bill, Jr., perhaps the most famous single sequence of Keaton's career, is the one where a cyclone blows a house over onto Keaton, who only misses being killed because he miraculously happens to be standing right where an open attic window allows him to pass right through. Keaton always dismissed talk of his greatness—"How can you be a genius in slapshoes?"—but there's no doubt in my mind, or anyone else's these days, that a genius is exactly what he was. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert calls him simply "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)—In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either. These are boys, raw recruits who soil their underwear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.
City Lights (1931)—Released more than three years after The Jazz Singer's premiere ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. The romance is as delicate as the flower the Tramp carries around with him throughout the movie, and if there's one thing I prize in a romance, it's delicacy. Still, what City Lights mostly is, is funny. Fully fifty-seven of the film's eighty-three minute running time is devoted to comedy, and even those moments of tenderness with the girl are usually punctuated with a laugh—the first meeting, for example, concluding with a dash of cold water in the Tramp's face as the girl rinses a flower pot. A masterpiece of comic timing and invention, on my short list of history's great comedies, great romances, and well, great movies, period.
Le Million (1931)—A musical comedy about a struggling artist, in debt to his landlord and every shop owner in town, who discovers he has won the lottery—if only he can find the ticket. He remembers it's in the pocket of a jacket he left with his fiancee, but she's given the jacket to a beggar on the run from the police and soon everybody is scrambling to get their hands on that jacket. Director René Clair gets great mileage out of the deference we pay to money and the people who have it regardless of their worth as human beings, and we laugh at the contortions of the shopowners to ingratiate themselves to a man they had just minutes before been chasing through the streets. The story is tight and precisely put together, the songs and dialogue are witty and memorable, and the resulting comedy is as light and frothy as a glass of cold champagne.
M (1931)—Fritz Lang's M is a masterpiece of psychology, not just the psychology of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre in a performance that launched his career), but the psychology of the audience as well. Using nothing much more than sound and shadows, Lang created a genuine sense of suspense and horror by exploiting a basic fact of human psychology, that we are most afraid of what we can't see. Indeed, the most explicit act of violence Peter Lorre does in M is to the orange he surgically skins with a switchblade. Had it been just an exercise in style, M would still be one of the most effective thrillers ever made, but Lang is interested in more than just a resolution to his police procedural, instead shifting the focus to a study of vigilantism and mob rule. In so doing, Lang raises questions about the balance between freedom and security, justice and efficiency, and the rule of law and the rule of the mob, that are still relevant today. If you watch carefully, you realize nothing much has changed—we've just moved the proceedings to cable television.
Beginning today, Sunday, August 2, 2009, and running through August 22, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. will be hosting a film program on Sunday afternoons, "Carl Theodor Dreyer: The Late Films," focused on, yes, Katie Award winning director Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc) and his later films.
Four rarely shown sound features and one short film by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968) are presented in recently restored or preserved prints to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth. While the director's dedication to the form and contributions to world cinema are now celebrated, his first sound film Vampyr was a commercial failure, and the war and other material matters interfered with the accomplishment of these later works. Ultimately, however, they became his most remarkable achievements. The Gallery wishes to thank the Danish Film Institute for its cooperation in loaning these films.
The schedule:
Today, August 2 at 4:30 p.m. Vampyr (1932) and the short film They Caught The Ferry (1948)
The last of the Katies for 1928-29 have been awarded—and it only took six weeks! At this rate, I'll reach the present day in, hmm, let's see, nine years.
Well, better get to it.
In case you've forgotten who won Katies for 1928-29, here's a recap of the year's winners:
Picture:The Passion of Joan of Arc (prod. Société générale des films) Actor:Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill, Jr.) Actress: Lillian Gish (The Wind) Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc) Supporting Actor: Ernest Torrence (Steamboat Bill, Jr.) Supporting Actress: Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters) Screenplay: Frances Marion (The Wind) Special Award: Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks (the creation and marketing of Mickey Mouse); Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck) (Best Picture-Comedy); Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March) (Best Actor-Drama); Marion Davies (Show People) (Best Actress-Comedy); Douglas Shearer (The Broadway Melody) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "The Broadway Melody" (The Broadway Melody) (Best Song); Un Chien Andalou (prod. Luis Buñuel) (Best Short Subject); John Arnold (The Wind) (Cinematography) And because a list of awards doesn't tell the whole story, here's another list, this time my selections for the "must-see" movies of the year:
Must-See Movies Of 1928-29:The Cameraman; Un Chien Andalou; The Docks Of New York; The Iron Mask; Our Dancing Daughters; The Passion Of Joan Of Arc; Show People; Steamboat Bill, Jr.; Steamboat Willie; The Wedding March; The Wind
I've written about each of the listed Katie Award winners and in doing so I've also written about each of the must-see movies—except The Wedding March, the last movie directed by Erich von Stroheim that can be reasonably said to work. It's the story of a young aristocrat forced to marry for money rather than love. Von Stroheim was surprisingly sympathetic in the lead role, reminding you, as he would again in Sunset Boulevard, that he wasn't just a pretty face in a monocle. For his performance in The Wedding March, I nominated him for a Katie (he lost to Buster Keaton).
Like most of his work (see, e.g., Greed and Queen Kelly), the version of The Wedding March that wound up on the screen was quite a bit less than what von Stroheim had envisioned. Most film buffs have heard tales of von Stroheim's nine (nine, Mrs. Bueller!) hour cut of Greed that the studio whittled down to 130 minutes. In this case, The Wedding March is only the first third of what von Stroheim, who was not one to learn a lesson, conceived of as a six-plus hour movie tracing the reluctant courtship and subsequent marriage of the young aristocrat and a rich industrialist's crippled daughter (Zasu Pitts). The studio shut down the production after nine months and ordered von Stroheim to split the film as conceived into three parts, with The Wedding March at two hours to be followed by its sequel, The Honeymoon, and an unnamed third film to complete the trilogy. The Honeymoon was started but apparently never completed; its elements were destroyed by fire in the 1950s.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I suspect the studio's intervention, rather than destroying a work of art, may well have saved von Stroheim from himself.
In retro- spect, I think it's clear that von Stroheim was attempt- ing, with all these six and nine hour cuts of his movies, to invent the HBO miniseries. And he was absolutely right that there is artistic merit to taking time to tell a nine-hour story—I mean, think of The Sopranos reduced from a thirteen-hour season to a two-hour movie. Instead of having a deeply-layered, nuanced story, you would wind up with the same slam-bang surface-level gangster fluff that routinely shows up in the theaters, here for a disappointing opening weekend and then gone forever.
But unfortunately for von Stroheim, HBO and the miniseries hadn't been invented yet. Hell, they hadn't invented television yet. He was stuck with what he had, silent movies, a brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit medium. And while I support an artist's right to chase a vision no matter how impractical, there is no way von Stroheim could have expected in his wildest fantasies that an audience was going to sit still for nine hours while he threw shadows on a screen. In that context of the world he worked in, von Stroheim was not so much an artist pushing the edge as a gasbag who couldn't get to the point. (Or in his case, most likely a pompous poseur with a pathological need to prove himself superior to a public he regarded as rabble. But I digress.)
But let's say for the sake of argument that von Stroheim was a genius and further that some scientist somewhere is working on a time machine that would bring von Stroheim, contract and camera in hand, to the home offices of HBO. The fact is, he still couldn't make a miniseries for HBO because he'd insist on a $100 million budget. Need to film a scene in a nondescript San Francisco boarding house? Go to San Francisco! Have a desert scene in the screenplay? Move your entire company to the desert for months to shoot a scene that winds up looking like something shot on a Hollywood backlot. He was extravagant beyond all reason, insisting on a fidelity to realism that didn't translate to the screen. With the way he spent money, on what in the end were tiny little art films, he never had a hope of turning a profit. No wonder he drove people like Irving Thalberg nuts.
"What's that about?" Thalberg asked von Stroheim as they watched the rushes from the director's 1925 movie, The Merry Widow, referring to one of the odder scenes in a movie heavily censored before its release. "That is a foot fetish," von Stroheim said.
"You, Von," replied Thalberg, "have a footage fetish."
In all fairness, I should point out that Cecil B. DeMille routinely spent more money than von Stroheim. But I also have to point out that DeMille routinely made more money than von Stroheim. And as nasty a notion as that is to an artist, when you're making pictures with somebody else's money, you have to create the possibility that the guy writing the check will turn a profit or he's soon going to stop writing those checks.
Which really brings me to the most important point, that what survives of von Stroheim's work really isn't that pretty. Von Stroheim's characters may have indulged a wide variety of fetishes—the panty sniffing of Queen Kelly, the foot fondling of The Merry Widow—but von Stroheim himself had a fetish for the grotesque, grotesque in the true sense of the word, "characterized by the fanciful," distorting "the natural into absurdity, ugliness or caricature." For all his blather about realism, von Stroheim was attracted to the fantastic, and the problem with a fetish is that it is inaccessible to anyone who doesn't share the fetish, a serious problem if you're looking for an audience of millions to defray the cost of your particular brand of lunacy.
I'm willing to concede that it's possible that the nine (nine!) hour version of, say, Greed was subtle and brilliant and absorbing (that is, if you didn't have to watch it in a single sitting). As I said, The Sopranos whittled down to two hours would never have had the same impact that the full series had. We'll never know.
But I think it's more likely that von Stroheim needed someone to rein him in, control his impulses, find the movie buried within the miles of footage. The director needed direction.
In any event, von Stroheim only directed nine movies (two of which he didn't finish; five others were heavily cut). His last movie, 1933's Hello, Sister, was mostly reshot after the studio fired von Stroheim. I think to a degree his reputation is based on a sense of what-might-have-been rather than on what-was, the romantic cliche of the great artist with the corporate boot on his neck; but I think based on the what-was I've seen, the-what-might-have-been is a bit overblown.
All of which is an appropriately long-winded way of saying that The Wedding March might be the best movie Erich von Stroheim ever accidentally made.
Of my nominees for best picture of 1928-29, I've had three of them—Steamboat Bill, Jr.; The Wind; and my eventual choice, The Passion of Joan of Arc—penciled in for the award at one time or another, trying each on for size. Any one of them would have been a good choice and I'll bet if you looked at enough Alternate Oscar-type lists, you'd find all three of these as somebody's choice for the top prize.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. was 1928's best comedy and one of the best features Buster Keaton ever made. The Wind was the capstone of Lillian Gish's long and justly-celebrated silent film career. But it was something Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert said the other day in his blog that tipped the balance in favor of Carl Dreyer's film of the trial and execution of Joan of Arc.
Ebert was writing about how he tries to keep an open mind when approaching a new movie and had this to say about Pauline Kael's own philosophy of watching movies: "Take everything you are, and all the films you've seen, into the theater. See the film, and decide if anything has changed." That's what I find I have done with my first three best picture winners, The General (best of the silent era), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927-28) and now The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928-29): each has changed the way I feel about some aspect of movies and, on a good day, of life itself.
The General, aside from being a great comedy, probably did more to inspire this sudden mad interest in silent movies I've been riding for three months now than any other movie. For Katie-Bar-The-Door, too. Our trip down to the Kennedy Center to see The General presented with a live orchestra did more to make her an enthusiastic champion of this blog than did even the irresistible clarity of my sparkling prose. And Sunrise, a touching story of marital discord and reconciliation, showed me that my pre-conceived notions about film history—that Orson Welles singlehandedly invented modern movies—were flat out wrong.
The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being.
More importantly, though, the movie reminded me that telling a story in such a simple and straightforward manner, letting the chips fall where they may, can uncover truths about human nature so eternal that even an eighty year old film based on a nearly six hundred year old historical event can be as relevant and timely as this morning's news. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way.
Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.
Writer-director Carl Dreyer was all set to film a conventional telling of Joan of Arc's story when he ran across the transcripts of her trial in an archive in Paris . Reading the transcript prompted Dreyer to throw out his first screenplay and focus strictly on the trial and subsequent execution.
Now I've read a lot of trial tran- scripts in my time, first as a judicial clerk for a here- unnamed state's Court of Criminal Appeals then later as an appellate litigator for the federal government, and I can tell you, that while it's often difficult to discover justice in the cold written record of a trial, it's almost impossible not to discern the caliber of the trial's participants—their prejudices, their passions, their (very) occasional brilliance, their (much) more common incompetence. What I'm sure came across in startling clarity to Dreyer as he read the transcripts of Joan's trial was that her judges were motivated not by a search for the truth but by, first, cold calculations of national interest (Joan was the leader of France's military rebellion against an English occupation), and then, more interestingly, by the unsettling fear that Joan might be exactly what she purported to be, a saint working at the behest of God.
Dreyer dispenses with the usual exposition, stories of Charles VII, Henry VI and the last decade of the Hundred Years' War, and begins instead with the prisoner being led in chains through a makeshift courtroom into the witness dock. After the swearing in and some preliminary verbal fencing, the judges get down to it: "You claim to be sent by God?" a notion that elicits their scorn and amusement.
The nineteen year old peasant girl is seemingly no match for a roomful of learned scholars, but as the inquisition fails to trap Joan into a fatal misstatement or contradiction, the judges' derision gradually turns to frustration, anger, and eventually fury. They hammer at her relentlessly on the issue of whether she expects some sort of reward from God for her sacrifice—a sacrifice, Dreyer implies, the judges themselves would not have dreamed of making without assurances of more earthly rewards.
But this all for show. The presence of heavily-armed soldiers makes clear, both to the audience and to the judges, that the verdict is pre-ordained. As the troop's commander puts it, "Not for anything in the world do I want her to die a natural death."
Unless you skipped your high school history altogether, you know how this is going to end.
Finally, to move the proceedings along, the unyielding Joan is led to the torture chamber and given the option of renouncing her claim to being "a daughter of God" or suffering the excruciating consequences.
If Dreyer had filmed this sequence in 2008, I would say it was a fairly obvious commentary on Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, military tribunals and the like. But he filmed it in 1928 based on the transcripts of a fifteenth century trial, and it serves as a simple statement of fact, that torture is designed not to find the truth but to extract compliance, conformity and an affirmation of a narrative the torturer already has convinced himself of. I doubt it even occurred to Dreyer that anyone in the civilized world had a different opinion of the matter.
As a general rule, I'm quite tolerant of a filmmaker's point of view (political and otherwise) regardless of what it is—unless we're talking about, say, Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Nazi propaganda—as long as (1) said filmmaker is as hard on his own beliefs as the beliefs he's attacking and (2) the politics are well-integrated into the story. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn't. For example, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I were in D.C. this weekend watching a production of King Lear at the Shakespeare Theater—Stacy Keach as Lear—and the director managed to shoe-horn in some action that was clearly a comment on our current wars in the Middle East. Quite frankly, it felt about as organic to Lear as a coconut does to a bowl of chili and we both left after the final curtain more than a little annoyed. But here, Dreyer let the action speak for itself without seeing any need to gild the lily, and the truths emerge on their own quite effectively.
When you sit down to watch this movie (if you sit down to watch this movie), how you choose to watch it may affect your reaction to it. At the time the original film was discovered in 1981, Richard Einhorn wrote a choral and orchestral accompaniment that gives the film an elegiac feel, spiritual, meditative, like praying in a cathedral as the shadows lengthen on a late-autumn day.
Dreyer himself though preferred the movie to be shown completely silent; and watching it that way, the feel is much more like the intense white light of an operating theater, with everything on the line and nowhere to hide. Without the accompanying choral score, the film is no longer a prayerful meditation on saintly virtue but an uncompromising look at the naked exercise of power and the ability of the state to pervert justice and destroy an individual for its own ends.
The DVD from the Criterion Collection gives you the option of watching it either with the score or without, and I've watched it both ways. Dreyer's choice may not be as pleasant but it's a lot closer to the truth.
So who was the best actress of 1928-29, Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc or Lillian Gish in The Wind?
As I was saying yesterday, movies are such a collaborative process that trying to figure out where one person's contribution ends and another's begins is as difficult as trying to separate out the ingredients of a cake once it's been in the oven. We look at what we think we see on the screen, we read (often self-serving) anecdotes from the set and we make some guesses.
In close cases like this, it helps (to my mind) to look at the actor's work in other movies, with other crews and directors, a process of triangulation if you will, and if you keep seeing great work from an actor regardless of the director, script, editor, etc., then maybe you're looking at a great actor. So while it is certainly true, for example, that the director and editor had a great deal to say about what work of Brando's showed up in On The Waterfront, I'm comfortable in saying based on the whole of his career that Brando was a great actor (at least when he wasn't phoning it in, that is).
When I read behind the scenes stories of The Passion of Joan of Arc and The Wind and I look at the careers of Maria Falconetti and Lillian Gish, this is what I see:
Maria Falconetti's work on The Passion of Joan of Arc, while great, was the only significant film appearance of her career and was collaborative only in the sense that director Carl Dreyer said, "Give me tears," and she gave him tears or said, "Be a saint," and she was a saint. While the character works brilliantly, it was Dreyer calling the shots and it was Dreyer who assembled the performance in the editing room out the raw footage. Falconetti made no speeches (obviously), appeared in no long scenes that revealed shifts in character, had limited interactions with her fellow actors. She may well have been a brilliant actress but she had no real opportunity to prove it here and since she made no other feature-length movies, it's impossible to draw any inferences about her talent.
Gish, on the other hand, who turned in more great performances in more great movies during the Silent Era than anybody else, and then after her return to the big screen in the 1940s, continued to give great performances until her retirement in 1987, gave the best performance of her career in The Wind.
The Wind rests on Gish's shoulders in a way that The Passion of Joan of Arc never rests on Falconetti's. While legendary writer Frances Marion laid out the psychological components of the story in her screenplay, without Gish on screen to convey that psychology with a single look—for example, a glance that reveals her desperation, knowing she's not welcome in the house of a childhood friend when the only other choices are a loveless marriage or death in the desert—the story as it plays out would make no sense.
I don't have to draw inferences about her talent—her talent is an established fact.
Gish was also stretching herself as an actress in The Wind. She commissioned the project in part to play with her established screen image. For years, as D.W. Griffith's favorite actress, Gish played the passive victim of any variety of men looking to relieve her of her treasured virginity. In The Wind, perhaps the single biggest threat to Gish's virginity is her own desire, a marked departure from her established screen image. And to see Gish—not just the character she plays, but the artist and the actress—choose to take up a gun and kill an attacker after all those years of playing the long-suffering, passive victim is liberating in a way Thelma and Louise only pretended to be.
The auteur theory holds that it is the director who is the author of a movie. It's a popular theory that has shaped film criticism for decades now, but it's one of those theories that is more normative than descriptive (i.e., recommending what should be rather than describing what is), for in motion picture history, movies have in fact born the stamp of any number of people involved in their creation—producers (David O. Selznick), writers (Paddy Chayefsky), actors (Fred Astaire) and yes, directors (Alfred Hitchcock).
In the case of The Wind, the driving force behind the movie and the hand controlling every aspect of its production was clearly Lillian Gish. Gish alone picked the director, the stars and the story. She alone decided to take her screen image and play with it and deepen it. And she alone was the one who signed off on the final product and paid the price with her career when The Wind failed at the box office despite its creative brilliance.
Frances Marion later said of Lillian Gish, "She might look fragile, but physically and spiritually she was as fragile as a steel rod. Nobody could sway her from her self-appointed course. With a Botticelli face, she had the mind of a good Queen Bess, dictating her carefully thought-out policies and ruling justly, if firmly."
Am I giving Gish credit as an actress because of her role as a producer? Probably, but why not? Her choices as producer help reveal the choices she made as an actress—that process of triangulation again, trying to separate the sugar from the flour of the baked cake.
So my choice for best actress of 1928-29 is Lillian Gish in The Wind. For me, I would rather reward Gish for the most complete performance of a long career than Falconetti for what is in fact a one-hit wonder, no matter how great that one hit was.
Note: As I have said, despite its brilliance, The Wind was a box office flop. This was no doubt due in large part to the arrival of sound movies. But silent era actress turned film historian Louise Brooks also believed there was a concerted Hollywood effort to destroy Lillian Gish's reputation and box-office appeal and that a box office was exactly what the studio was hoping for. It was a simple matter of economics, says Brooks. Gish was making $400,000 a year and had complete creative control of her career. Emerging star Greta Garbo was making $16,000 and wholly dependent on the studio to solve the visa problems that would allow her to work. Brooks lays out evidence of the studio's manipulation and then posits the studio was tired of paying big money to an actress with the power to map her own career when it could pay a younger actress a lot less money to do exactly what it wanted.
Ironically, the studio eventually did to Garbo what it had done to Gish—undercut her career when cheaper actresses came along.
Of the three nominees for best actress of 1928-29, one of them, Marion Davies, is pretty much here just to round out the field. Which is not to say Davies didn't deserve the nomination. While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for no-talent opera singer Susan Alexander in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane—a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her—Davies was actually a very talented comic actress and it shows in the silent comedy, Show People, for which I've nominated her. But the fact is, no matter how good Davies was, 1928-29 boils down to a race between two actresses, Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Lillian Gish in The Wind, who between them deliver not just the two best performances of the year, but two of the best performances of any year.
By now if you've been following this blog (a big "if," I'll grant you), you've heard of both Lillian Gish and Maria Falconetti. Gish, as you may recall, was my choice for the best actress of the Silent Era. She was D.W. Griffith's go-to actress for every great movie he ever made and then after his career faded, she carried on for another decade making nothing but top-notch films. The Wind is probably the finest performance of her award-winning career.
Falconetti, on the other hand, only made one movie of significance, The Passion of Joan of Arc, but, boy, what a movie. Pauline Kael, the influential albeit erratic critic for New Yorker magazine, said after Carl Dreyer's masterpiece was rediscovered in 1981 that Falconetti's performance "may be the finest performance ever recorded on film." Premiere magazine ranked it as the twenty-sixth best performance of all time in a list of the 100 greatest performances in film history, making it the highest ranked silent performance.
Choosing between them involves not so much a matter of knowing good from bad as knowing what it is in a performance that you value. And this is where I run into a problem: as a woman I once knew said to me twenty-five years ago, "You don't have any values."
True. But she of the Katie Awards, Katie- Bar-The- Door, and Mister Muleboy of the blog The Mouth O' The Mule are positively silly with values and fortunately for me, often have strongly held opinions even on issues they have no opinion about. They both agree that Lillian Gish was a great actress; where they disagree is on the issue of whether Maria Falconetti was an actress at all.
Two events in movie history permanently scarred Katie, Ali McGraw's Oscar nomination for Love Story and Anna Paquin's win for The Piano. Subsequent work firmly established in Katie's mind that neither can act a lick and that honors were bestowed on them in anticipation that they might one day prove to have talent and in recognition of the work of other people. In reaction, she's adopted an informal rule: "Never give someone an Oscar for their first performance."
Here, Maria Falconetti wasn't technically appearing in her first movie—the Internet Movie Database lists small roles in a pair of 1917 shorts—but she might as well have been. And while Katie agrees that The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the greatest movies ever made and that Maria Falconetti is effective in it, she's convinced Falconetti's performance is a product not of any particular skill but of director Carl Dreyer's relentless bullying, Rudolph Maté's excellent camera work and Dreyer's and Marguerite Beaugé's patient work in the editing room.
Roger Ebert describes the effort that produced the performance this way: "Legends from the set tell of Dreyer forcing her to kneel painfully on stone and then wipe all expression from her face—so that the viewer would read suppressed or inner pain. He filmed the same shots again and again, hoping that in the editing room he could find exactly the right nuance in her facial expression."
Katie-Bar-the-Door thinks that given to what degree Dreyer hectored and humiliated her, and worked her to the point of exhaustion, it's no surprise that Falconetti convincingly comes across as hectored, humiliated and exhausted.
Consider too that since this is a silent film we're talking about, there are no line readings, which greatly complicate the actor's task, and because Dreyer shot the whole thing in a series of close-ups, there's very little need for Falconetti to play off the other actors. Dreyer simply put the camera on Falconetti and recorded everything and then assembled a character out of the footage.
Katie says that's not acting, it's something else—maybe a perfect face and a lot of film. I mean, if you put a stovepipe hat on your dog and took a hundred pictures of him, in one shot he's bound to look like Abraham Lincoln. But that doesn't make your dog the 16th president of the United States. (And no this is not my dog, who actually bears an uncanny resemblance to Woodrow Wilson.)
On the other hand, Mister Muleboy who is actually a trained actor in addition to being a highly intuitive blogger, points out that's "presumably the case in every feature film," that most screen performances consist of "a director badgering, sucking, pleading, or manipulating a 'performance' out of the actor. Usually manipulating it at the editing table. Crafting that 'great scene' from the (potentially nonsensical) multiple takes that, when combined, gave rise to that 'perfectly modulated, brilliant' performance. And that, in this director's/editor's medium, the idea of one acting performance that is in the control of the actor is—at best—only conjecture."
In fact, this is true of every per- formance, he says, even Marlon Brando in On The Water- front. Trying to identify where the work of the director and editor and cinematographer leave off and the work of the actor begins is like trying to identify the individual ingredients in a baked cake and then hand out an award to the sugar and the butter.
Hmm. So who's right?
Oh, wait. Katie-Bar-The-Door just reminded me that I'm married to her which pretty much means that even if she's wrong, she's right. But I don't think she's wrong. You know?
Also she says it's recycling day and can I please put out the newspapers? Gotta go.
For a while at least, the good folks at Hulu.com have made Carl Theodor Dreyer's horror classic Vampyr available for viewing. And how do you know it's a classic? Why, because it received Katie Award nominations for best foreign language picture and best director—it must be good.
"But Mr. Monkey," I hear so often on the street, "while it's true our lives rise and fall on the rhythms of your wonderful prose poetry, a movie blogger can never aspire to the status of cultural icon without posting an end-of-the-year top ten list." And even as I'm running away, I'm thinking, yes, it's probably true, I must write an end of the year top ten list. So as the decade of the 'Naughties comes to a close, I give you a list of the ten best movies I not just mentioned but wrote full essays about this year (thus the absence of The Kid, Safety Last, Sherlock Jr., Metropolis and many other).
The Thief Of Bagdad (1924)—Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Douglas Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie made before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
The Gold Rush (1925)—A 72-minute comedy about a gold prospector in the wilds of Alaska, chock full of laughs, action and some of the most inventive bits of business ever committed to film. I mean, there is something pretty entertaining about watching a man eat his own shoe. This is also the movie that introduced two oft-imitated bits, the one where a starving man thinks his partner is a chicken and the one where Chaplin spears two dinner rolls with forks and does a little soft-shoe with them under his chin. Throw in a little romance, an attempted murder and a happy ending and you've got the recipe for a real good time.
The General (1926)—Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which [Buster] Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame. Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as "The Great Stoneface"—only adds to the modern feel of the production.
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927)—Directed by the great F.W. Murnau, who had previously helmed such classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Sunrise starts out as a silent era film noir with a beautiful temptress from the city persuading a handsome young farmer to murder his wife then becomes a surprisingly touching story of reconciliation and redemption. The exaggerated story is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1928)—The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being. More importantly, though, the movie reminded me that telling a story in such a simple and straightforward manner, letting the chips fall where they may, can uncover truths about human nature so eternal that even an eighty year old film based on a nearly six hundred year old historical event can be as relevant and timely as this morning's news. That, I think, is one of the hallmarks of true art, an ability to speak across generations in a unique and unforgettable way. Or leaving all that aside, it's just a great, very watchable movie.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)—This Buster Keaton comedy is a classic fish-out-of-water story, the reunion of a ukelele-playing, college-educated fop (Keaton) with his strapping, working class father (Ernest Torrence). In the course of the seventy-minute story, Keaton contends with shipwrecks, hurricanes and an unreasoning prejudice against French berets to win over his father and get the girl. The most unforgettable sequence of Steamboat Bill, Jr., perhaps the most famous single sequence of Keaton's career, is the one where a cyclone blows a house over onto Keaton, who only misses being killed because he miraculously happens to be standing right where an open attic window allows him to pass right through. Keaton always dismissed talk of his greatness—"How can you be a genius in slapshoes?"—but there's no doubt in my mind, or anyone else's these days, that a genius is exactly what he was. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert calls him simply "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."
All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)—In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either. These are boys, raw recruits who soil their underwear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.
City Lights (1931)—Released more than three years after The Jazz Singer's premiere ushered in the sound era, Charles Chaplin's City Lights represented both the peak of the actor-director's brilliant career and a definite exclamation point marking the end of the silent era. A sublime romantic comedy, City Lights was arguably the greatest silent movie ever made, a huge worldwide hit and, along with Buster Keaton's The General, the movie I would recommend to anyone who has never seen a silent movie and is wondering what all the fuss was about. The romance is as delicate as the flower the Tramp carries around with him throughout the movie, and if there's one thing I prize in a romance, it's delicacy. Still, what City Lights mostly is, is funny. Fully fifty-seven of the film's eighty-three minute running time is devoted to comedy, and even those moments of tenderness with the girl are usually punctuated with a laugh—the first meeting, for example, concluding with a dash of cold water in the Tramp's face as the girl rinses a flower pot. A masterpiece of comic timing and invention, on my short list of history's great comedies, great romances, and well, great movies, period.
Le Million (1931)—A musical comedy about a struggling artist, in debt to his landlord and every shop owner in town, who discovers he has won the lottery—if only he can find the ticket. He remembers it's in the pocket of a jacket he left with his fiancee, but she's given the jacket to a beggar on the run from the police and soon everybody is scrambling to get their hands on that jacket. Director René Clair gets great mileage out of the deference we pay to money and the people who have it regardless of their worth as human beings, and we laugh at the contortions of the shopowners to ingratiate themselves to a man they had just minutes before been chasing through the streets. The story is tight and precisely put together, the songs and dialogue are witty and memorable, and the resulting comedy is as light and frothy as a glass of cold champagne.
M (1931)—Fritz Lang's M is a masterpiece of psychology, not just the psychology of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre in a performance that launched his career), but the psychology of the audience as well. Using nothing much more than sound and shadows, Lang created a genuine sense of suspense and horror by exploiting a basic fact of human psychology, that we are most afraid of what we can't see. Indeed, the most explicit act of violence Peter Lorre does in M is to the orange he surgically skins with a switchblade. Had it been just an exercise in style, M would still be one of the most effective thrillers ever made, but Lang is interested in more than just a resolution to his police procedural, instead shifting the focus to a study of vigilantism and mob rule. In so doing, Lang raises questions about the balance between freedom and security, justice and efficiency, and the rule of law and the rule of the mob, that are still relevant today. If you watch carefully, you realize nothing much has changed—we've just moved the proceedings to cable television.
Four rarely shown sound features and one short film by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889–1968) are presented in recently restored or preserved prints to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth. While the director's dedication to the form and contributions to world cinema are now celebrated, his first sound film Vampyr was a commercial failure, and the war and other material matters interfered with the accomplishment of these later works. Ultimately, however, they became his most remarkable achievements. The Gallery wishes to thank the Danish Film Institute for its cooperation in loaning these films.
The last of the Katies for 1928-29 have been awarded—and it only took six weeks! At this rate, I'll reach the present day in, hmm, let's see, nine years.
I've written about each of the listed Katie Award winners and in doing so I've also written about each of the must-see movies—except The Wedding March, the last movie directed by Erich von Stroheim that can be reasonably said to work. It's the story of a young aristocrat forced to marry for money rather than love. Von Stroheim was surprisingly sympathetic in the lead role, reminding you, as he would again in Sunset Boulevard, that he wasn't just a pretty face in a monocle. For his performance in The Wedding March, I nominated him for a Katie (he lost to Buster Keaton).
In retro- spect, I think it's clear that von Stroheim was attempt- ing, with all these six and nine hour cuts of his movies, to invent the HBO miniseries. And he was absolutely right that there is artistic merit to taking time to tell a nine-hour story—I mean, think of The Sopranos reduced from a thirteen-hour season to a two-hour movie. Instead of having a deeply-layered, nuanced story, you would wind up with the same slam-bang surface-level gangster fluff that routinely shows up in the theaters, here for a disappointing opening weekend and then gone forever.
But let's say for the sake of argument that von Stroheim was a genius and further that some scientist somewhere is working on a time machine that would bring von Stroheim, contract and camera in hand, to the home offices of HBO. The fact is, he still couldn't make a miniseries for HBO because he'd insist on a $100 million budget. Need to film a scene in a nondescript San Francisco boarding house? Go to San Francisco! Have a desert scene in the screenplay? Move your entire company to the desert for months to shoot a scene that winds up looking like something shot on a Hollywood backlot. He was extravagant beyond all reason, insisting on a fidelity to realism that didn't translate to the screen. With the way he spent money, on what in the end were tiny little art films, he never had a hope of turning a profit. No wonder he drove people like Irving Thalberg nuts.
Which really brings me to the most important point, that what survives of von Stroheim's work really isn't that pretty. Von Stroheim's characters may have indulged a wide variety of fetishes—the panty sniffing of Queen Kelly, the foot fondling of The Merry Widow—but von Stroheim himself had a fetish for the grotesque, grotesque in the true sense of the word, "characterized by the fanciful," distorting "the natural into absurdity, ugliness or caricature." For all his blather about realism, von Stroheim was attracted to the fantastic, and the problem with a fetish is that it is inaccessible to anyone who doesn't share the fetish, a serious problem if you're looking for an audience of millions to defray the cost of your particular brand of lunacy.
Of my nominees for best picture of 1928-29, I've had three of them—Steamboat Bill, Jr.; The Wind; and my eventual choice, The Passion of Joan of Arc—penciled in for the award at one time or another, trying each on for size. Any one of them would have been a good choice and I'll bet if you looked at enough Alternate Oscar-type lists, you'd find all three of these as somebody's choice for the top prize.
The Passion of Joan of Arc, with its tightly-framed close-ups and unadorned emotions, is quite frankly something I'd never seen before in a silent movie—or any other movie, for that matter—an impossible, anachronistic artifact that proves once again that our forefathers were much more modern that we currently dream of being.
Now I've read a lot of trial tran- scripts in my time, first as a judicial clerk for a here- unnamed state's Court of Criminal Appeals then later as an appellate litigator for the federal government, and I can tell you, that while it's often difficult to discover justice in the cold written record of a trial, it's almost impossible not to discern the caliber of the trial's participants—their prejudices, their passions, their (very) occasional brilliance, their (much) more common incompetence. What I'm sure came across in startling clarity to Dreyer as he read the transcripts of Joan's trial was that her judges were motivated not by a search for the truth but by, first, cold calculations of national interest (Joan was the leader of France's military rebellion against an English occupation), and then, more interestingly, by the unsettling fear that Joan might be exactly what she purported to be, a saint working at the behest of God.
The nineteen year old peasant girl is seemingly no match for a roomful of learned scholars, but as the inquisition fails to trap Joan into a fatal misstatement or contradiction, the judges' derision gradually turns to frustration, anger, and eventually fury. They hammer at her relentlessly on the issue of whether she expects some sort of reward from God for her sacrifice—a sacrifice, Dreyer implies, the judges themselves would not have dreamed of making without assurances of more earthly rewards.
If Dreyer had filmed this sequence in 2008, I would say it was a fairly obvious commentary on Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, military tribunals and the like. But he filmed it in 1928 based on the transcripts of a fifteenth century trial, and it serves as a simple statement of fact, that torture is designed not to find the truth but to extract compliance, conformity and an affirmation of a narrative the torturer already has convinced himself of. I doubt it even occurred to Dreyer that anyone in the civilized world had a different opinion of the matter.
When you sit down to watch this movie (if you sit down to watch this movie), how you choose to watch it may affect your reaction to it. At the time the original film was discovered in 1981, Richard Einhorn wrote a choral and orchestral accompaniment that gives the film an elegiac feel, spiritual, meditative, like praying in a cathedral as the shadows lengthen on a late-autumn day.
As I was saying yesterday, movies are such a collaborative process that trying to figure out where one person's contribution ends and another's begins is as difficult as trying to separate out the ingredients of a cake once it's been in the oven. We look at what we think we see on the screen, we read (often self-serving) anecdotes from the set and we make some guesses.
Maria Falconetti's work on The Passion of Joan of Arc, while great, was the only significant film appearance of her career and was collaborative only in the sense that director Carl Dreyer said, "Give me tears," and she gave him tears or said, "Be a saint," and she was a saint. While the character works brilliantly, it was Dreyer calling the shots and it was Dreyer who assembled the performance in the editing room out the raw footage. Falconetti made no speeches (obviously), appeared in no long scenes that revealed shifts in character, had limited interactions with her fellow actors. She may well have been a brilliant actress but she had no real opportunity to prove it here and since she made no other feature-length movies, it's impossible to draw any inferences about her talent.
Gish was also stretching herself as an actress in The Wind. She commissioned the project in part to play with her established screen image. For years, as D.W. Griffith's favorite actress, Gish played the passive victim of any variety of men looking to relieve her of her treasured virginity. In The Wind, perhaps the single biggest threat to Gish's virginity is her own desire, a marked departure from her established screen image. And to see Gish—not just the character she plays, but the artist and the actress—choose to take up a gun and kill an attacker after all those years of playing the long-suffering, passive victim is liberating in a way Thelma and Louise only pretended to be.
Frances Marion later said of Lillian Gish, "She might look fragile, but physically and spiritually she was as fragile as a steel rod. Nobody could sway her from her self-appointed course. With a Botticelli face, she had the mind of a good Queen Bess, dictating her carefully thought-out policies and ruling justly, if firmly."
Of the three nominees for best actress of 1928-29, one of them, Marion Davies, is pretty much here just to round out the field. Which is not to say Davies didn't deserve the nomination. While she is mostly remembered now as the inspiration for no-talent opera singer Susan Alexander in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane—a grossly unfair characterization if that's what Welles really thought of her—Davies was actually a very talented comic actress and it shows in the silent comedy, Show People, for which I've nominated her. But the fact is, no matter how good Davies was, 1928-29 boils down to a race between two actresses, Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Lillian Gish in The Wind, who between them deliver not just the two best performances of the year, but two of the best performances of any year.
By now if you've been following this blog (a big "if," I'll grant you), you've heard of both Lillian Gish and Maria Falconetti. Gish, as you may recall, was my choice for the best actress of the Silent Era. She was D.W. Griffith's go-to actress for every great movie he ever made and then after his career faded, she carried on for another decade making nothing but top-notch films. The Wind is probably the finest performance of her award-winning career.
True. But she of the Katie Awards, Katie- Bar-The- Door, and Mister Muleboy of the blog The Mouth O' The Mule are positively silly with values and fortunately for me, often have strongly held opinions even on issues they have no opinion about. They both agree that Lillian Gish was a great actress; where they disagree is on the issue of whether Maria Falconetti was an actress at all.
Roger Ebert describes the effort that produced the performance this way: "Legends from the set tell of Dreyer forcing her to kneel painfully on stone and then wipe all expression from her face—so that the viewer would read suppressed or inner pain. He filmed the same shots again and again, hoping that in the editing room he could find exactly the right nuance in her facial expression."
Katie says that's not acting, it's something else—maybe a perfect face and a lot of film. I mean, if you put a stovepipe hat on your dog and took a hundred pictures of him, in one shot he's bound to look like Abraham Lincoln. But that doesn't make your dog the 16th president of the United States. (And no this is not my dog, who actually bears an uncanny resemblance to Woodrow Wilson.)
In fact, this is true of every per- formance, he says, even Marlon Brando in On The Water- front. Trying to identify where the work of the director and editor and cinematographer leave off and the work of the actor begins is like trying to identify the individual ingredients in a baked cake and then hand out an award to the sugar and the butter.
