Category: 1923

Buster Keaton | 1hr 14min

In a world of overwhelming natural forces seeking to overcome Buster Keaton’s stone-faced romantic, the added threat of an entire family out for his blood only complicates matters further – not that he is entirely aware of the danger closing in on him. When Willie McKay falls for Virginia Canfield, a young woman he meets on the train back to his hometown, he does not know the true extent of the long-running feud between their families. Ever since he was sent away to New York as a baby twenty years ago, his upbringing has sheltered him from the knowledge their continued animosity, making this Southern American village a very dangerous place indeed for the heir to the McKay estate. If there is going to be any saving grace in a situation as tense as this, then it is the Canfields’ unwavering code of honour towards guests, ironically granting Willie sanctuary for as long as he is in the home of his enemy.

Much like Keaton’s great comedic masterpiece The General from a few years later, Our Hospitality finds its inspiration in American history. The Hatfield-McCoy feud stretched multiple decades in the latter half of the 19^th century, and although it becomes the subject of Keaton’s satire here, its politics couldn’t be of less interest to him. Right from his opening intertitles, he brushes off any attempt to derive meaning from their feud with a simple dismissal of their mutual hatred.

“Men of one family grew up killing men of another family for no other reason except that their father had done so.”

As a result, all we are left with in the present day are the giant egos of small men, bound by traditions that only drive them deeper into their blind convictions. Keaton doesn’t hold back from confronting the dire stakes at hand, quite unusually sapping his prologue of all humour and drenching it in a vicious thunderstorm as the two family patriarchs shoot each other dead. It isn’t until he turns up as the happily oblivious Willie McKay that Our Hospitality takes a lighter turn, whisking him through various mishaps as he rides a tiny steam train across America towards his inherited estate.

Both this film and Three Ages may mark Keaton’s first features, but by 1923 he had already spent years refining his art as a director and actor of short comedies, effectively setting him up next to Charlie Chaplin as a master of visual comedy. So too had his personal fascination with locomotives been established during this time, as here he continues to bounce physical gags off these giant symbols of modernity and progress. Crooked railways toss passengers up and down, wheels fall off, and carriages are split apart at a crossroads, yet his stoic vehicles relentlessly chug along at their own steady pace, indifferent to those caught up in its chaos.

What Chaplin never quite got the hang of though which Keaton takes to with ease in Our Hospitality is the enormous potential of the camera in framing these gags, frequently setting us back in wide shots to appreciate the dramatic irony unfolding across each layer of the image. As the train driver thoughtlessly kicks back in the foreground, Keaton squares up his shot to catch the rogue carriages that have broken free behind him, making their way down a parallel track. Later when Willie tries to escape the Canfields disguised as a woman, Keaton once again angles his camera from a distance to catch the back of a frock and umbrella, only to reveal the horse that he has dressed up and put in his place just as it turns to the side. This visual comedy is just as much about the creative conception as it is the perspective taken, abiding by a strict set of cinematic rules. If we can’t see something in the frame, then neither can his characters. If his characters can’t see it, then we still might catch the punchline just behind their turned backs.

It is also through these stylistic devices that Willie remains so clueless to the Canfield brothers’ attempts to murder him, drawing out the tension of their one-sided conflict through the walls that divide them. For a time, he is only getting by on pure luck and blissful ignorance, right up until Virginia invites him home and inadvertently grants him protection as a guest. When the recognition of his perilous situation sets in though, the whole world suddenly shifts for Willie – the moment he steps outside, he is a dead man, and so he must constantly stay one step ahead of his hosts whose hands rest above their holsters. Just as Keaton delights in outsmarting the Canfield brothers, so too does he indulge in some darkly comic wordplay here, with the father making menacing small talk about the rainy weather – “It would be the death of anyone to go outside tonight” – and Virginia failing to recognise the irony of her piano piece, ‘We’ll Miss You When You’re Gone.’

Still, Our Hospitality never strays too far from the real reason Keaton held such mass appeal to 1920s audiences, as right around the corner from every understated witticism is a grand set piece showing off his athletic stunt work. Much of the action here centres around a dam that is blown up early in the film to irrigate the surrounding forest, making for a superbly economical narrative when Willie is dumped from his getaway train into its waterfall. Steep drops such as these are where Keaton the actor works best, scaling cliff faces like a silent era Tom Cruise, throwing his full body into the action, and building up to one of the greatest stunts of his career. With a rope tied around his waist and Virginia being swept towards her death, he leaps from the edge of the cliff, grabs her by the arms, and saves her just as she begins her plummet to the rocky riverbed below.

Keaton’s physical presence may be violently pushed around by enormous forces far beyond his control, but it is his adept navigation of chaotic environments that makes him such a compelling figure to watch onscreen, and which further quells his conflict with the Canfields. Their truce does not just come through a laying down of arms, but a romantic union of children from two warring families like Romeo and Juliet – though of course Keaton does not squander the opportunity to play this as a brilliant final gag, giving up about a dozen guns revealed to be hidden on his body. Ignorance to immediate danger may be bliss in Our Hospitality, but accidentally ending a decades-old feud by saving a life may be even more gratifying.

Our Hospitality is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Abel Gance | 6hr 58min

How odd it is that Abel Gance, this intellectual, pioneering filmmaker, has become so forgotten over the decades. One would have to assume that the reason for this is because of how lengthy his most famous films are, and how difficult it is to find any copies of them. La Roue may not have anywhere near the reputation of Napoleon, but it is surely an incredible achievement of epic storytelling in silent film, miles ahead of what so many others were attempting to do with this new medium in 1923.

Gance is clearly well-read when it comes to the classics, drawing on quotes from such towering literary figures as Sophocles, Rudyard Kipling, and D’Annunzio to ground La Roue in archetypes and symbols. The biggest influence is evident though in the structure of the meta-narrative, which tells the story of a father who adopts an orphan girl, and then follows their relationship into her adulthood. Save for some key deviations, this is the skeleton of Les Miserables, and indeed Gance stated that he wished to be known as “the Victor Hugo of the screen.”

Though he is not part of the Soviet montage movement taking place around the same time, Gance displays a keen awareness over the power of intercutting, montage, and rhythm in his editing. The opening train crash is a thrilling explosion of images – two trains colliding, passengers crawling out windows, plumes of smoke rising over the chaos, a third train heading towards the wreckage, and among it all, the red-tinted hand of a small girl reaching out of the rubble. Later montages build to rapid-fire climaxes, in which images are thrown at us so quickly that our only response is to merge them into a singular, frantic emotional response. But here, Gance lets us breathe – our protagonist, a railroad engineer by the name of Sisif, successfully saves the day, and takes in a young girl, Norma, whose mother died in the accident.

This half hour of setup is merely the prologue. What follows is a story in four parts, the first of which jumps forward approximately twenty years in the lives of this father and daughter. Sisif also has a biological son, Elie, who believes alongside Norma that the two are siblings. When Sisif develops uncomfortable feelings towards his surrogate daughter, this once beautiful family starts to fall apart, and she is eventually married off to a wealthy aristocrat, Hersan.

It is important to note how inventive Gance is with his camera movement here, four years before F.W. Murnau’s huge innovation in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Gance isn’t rigging up any complex systems for his tracking shots, but instead he makes the most of the vehicles available to him, planting the camera on top of trains, cars, and boats. The effect is dynamic, framing characters in static foregrounds while their backgrounds speed by, and at other times simply letting the beauty of his moving landscapes dominate our attention. At one point Gance captures a sunset across a lake, and in tinting the film with a rich tangerine colour he lets us soak in its warm hues.

La Roue reaches its visual peak at the arrival of Part 3, which sees a dejected, ailing Sisif retreat to the French alps with Elie. Though Gance’s compositions of trains and railways in the first half are attractive, they don’t touch the mountainous vistas that we get here. The snow-capped peaks shrouded in clouds rise up as backdrops to Sisif’s new reclusive life, through which he relearns humility and fatherly love. But we don’t forget the terror of the mountains too easily, as its harsh, unforgiving nature proves to be the literal downfall of Elie. For all its healing beauty, opening old wounds in this environment can have devastating consequences.

Gance is always sure to make the avant-garde choice at the most impactful moments, as Sisif’s mournful ride home on his cable car is represented by negative film, with flashes of Elie’s broken body interspersed throughout. His grief and shame bleeds through every single stylistic choice, especially in the use of double exposure to reveal the tangibility of his perverse obsession over Norma. When he stands outside her bedroom door at night, he can almost see through to its other side. When she disappears from his life, a phantasmic memory of her playing manifests over an empty swing set. This technique effectively represents the imprint of Sisif’s mind on reality, illuminating a hunger for what he knows he can never have.

It isn’t an easy narrative to sit through, but Gance is right alongside us in realising just how uncomfortable this father-daughter relationship is. Both Sisif and Elie recognise that their adoration of Norma is closer to an “infection” than love, and the literary passages that appear in intertitles especially hammer home the twisted nature of Sisif’s inner conflict.

“You look at her and you smile. And as you smile, an atrocious thought comes to mind, against which your entire being shudders with repugnance.” D’Annunzio

It is the tangle of relationships between Sisif, Norma, Elie, and Hersan that propel all 7 hours of this, and although there is certainly excess narrative here that could be cut out, it isn’t nearly as much as one would expect from looking at the run time. It is hard to imagine which specific plot points might be missing from the shorter versions, though some individual scenes would benefit from some trimming.

What gives La Roue such excellent form even more than its narrative is its central metaphor, right there in the title – the Wheel. It is a rare scene that doesn’t recall this motif, as Gance is sure to consistently evoke its symbolism in literary passages, cutaways to train wheels, and even in the subtle use of iris shots to frame circular objects. The Wheel represents the natural rhythms of life, spinning for all eternity, seeing new generations grow up and replace the older ones.

As a railroad engineer, Sisif is literally responsible for keeping the Wheel moving, and yet his latent lust after Norma is a subconscious attempt to buck it. He strongly associates his daughter with his train, and his destruction of it coincides with his decision to cut off Norma completely. But even at Sisif’s lowest, the Wheel keeps turning, as we see in each chapter break.

“And it is said that they themselves cannot free themselves of the Wheel.” Rudyard Kipling

It is only when the natural father-daughter relationship between Sisif and Norma is restored in all its purity that they allow themselves to be swept back up in life’s natural motions. High up in the French alps, Norma joins in the “Dance of the Wheel” at a festival, spinning around in a circle with the rest of the villagers. A now-blind Sisif sits in front of a window in his house, picturing the celebration taking place outside his home. While Norma is prolonging these cycles, Sisif quietly passes away, stepping off the circular journey that brought him so much pain and joy.

Though he is experimenting with a relatively new art form, Abel Gance’s absolute devotion to paying tribute to his literary idols endows La Roue with a great deal of historical weight. It is a thrilling, disturbing, and moving piece of epic cinematic poetry, drawing on the works of great writers to craft a narrative with as much to say about life, obsession, guilt, love, and death as any of its influences. It stands incredibly tall as a breath-taking example of what silent film can achieve, especially when the shackles of conventional filmmaking are broken to make way for experimental editing, camera movement, and visual compositions.

La Roue is currently unavailable to watch in Australia.