Photography: Byron Houck, Elgin Lessley
Cast: Buster Keaton, T. Roy Barnes, Snitz Edwards, Ruth Dwyer, Frances Raymond, Erwin Connelly, Jules Cowles
Every kind of cinematic gag gets worked out in Seven Chances, engineering laughter from an astonishing interplay of time, space, and physicality. Take the famous camera angle inside a churchBuster asleep in the front pew, invisible to the hundreds of grotesque women who completely fill the space behind him. (This is really all that remains in the films woeful 1999 remake, The Bachelor.)
The serene nuttiness of Keatons gag concepts buoyed the hearts of the surrealists who were his contemporaries: the plots irrational fixation on the number seven (seven chances for Buster to be married on his twenty-seventh birthday by seven oclock); or the wondrous gags that make complete nonsense of any fixed human identityas in the sequence where a bunch of supposedly white, all-American, adult women turn out to be (respectively) a little girl, Jewish, black, and male.
Keatons best and most extended gag sequences are dynamic and transformative. The whole world seems to unshape and reshape itself before our eyes. In the climactic chase sequence, Buster is pursued by an enormous pack of vengeful women. After he trips on a few rocks, suddenly Earth itself is after him, in the form of a huge avalanche. AM
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1920s
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)
U.S. (Universal Pictures) 93m Silent BW / Color (2-strip Technicolor)
Director: Rupert Julian, Lon Chaney
Producer: Carl Laemmle
Screenplay: Gaston Leroux
Photography: Milton Bridenbecker, Virgil Miller, Charles Van Enger
Music: Gustav Hinrichs (1925 version), David Broekman, Sam Perry, William Schiller (1929 version)
Cast: Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Gibson Gowland, John St. Polis, Snitz Edwards
This 1925 silent remains the closest adaption of Gaston Lerouxs trash masterpiece of the same name, a novel that has a terrific setting and a great central figure but a plot that creaks at every turn. The film is a strange combination of plodding direction (mostly from Rupert Julian, though other hands intervened) and incredible Universal Pictures set design, so that stick-figure charactersweedy hero Norman Kerry is especially annoyingpose in front of incredibly impressive tableaux.
The Phantom of the Opera delivers a series of masterly moments that cover up its rickety structure: the masked ball (a brief Technicolor sequence), where the Phantom shows up dressed as Edgar Allan Poes Red Death; the
chandelier-dropping where the Phantom lets the audience know what he thinks of the current diva; various trips into the magical underworld beneath the Paris Opera House; andbest of allthe unmasking in which the tragic villains disfigured skullface is first seen (so shocking that even the camera is terrified, going briefly out of focus).
The reason this film is a classic is that it enshrines one of the greatest bits of melodramatic acting in the silent cinemaLon Chaneys impeccably dressed, lovelorn, violent ghoul-genius. Favorite intertitle: You are dancing on the tombs of tortured men! KN
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1920s
BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN (1925)
THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
U.S.S.R. (Goskino, Mosfilm) 75m Silent BW
Director: Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei M. Eisenstein
Producer: Jacob Bliokh
Screenplay: Nina Agadzhanova, Sergei M. Eisenstein
Photography: Vladimir Popov, Eduard Tisse
Music: Nikolai Kryukov, Edmund Meisel, Dmitri Shostakovich
Cast: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barsky, Grigori Aleksandrov, Mikhail Gomorov, Ivan Bobrov, Beatrice Vitoldi, N. Poltavseva, Julia Eisenstein
The Battleship Potemkinsuch a famous film! Sergei Eisensteins second feature was to become not just a point of ideological conflict between the East and the West, the Left and the Right, but a must-see film for every cinema lover on the planet. Decades of censorship and militant support, countless words analyzing its structure, its symbolism, its sources and effects, and thousands of visual quotations have all served to make it very difficult for us to see the story behind the film. Eisensteinss The Battleship Potemkin may not be historically accurate, but his legendary vision of oppression and rebellion, individual and collective action, and its artistic ambition to work simultaneously with bodies, light, trivial objects, symbols, faces, movement, geometrical forms and more is a unique keyboard. As a true artist of film, he manages to elaborate a magnificent and touching myth.
It should be kept in mind, however, that this aesthetic sensibility was endowed with political significance as well: the changing of the world by conscious men that had been dreamed of in those times and was known by the term Revolution. But even without an awareness of what it meant, orbetterwithout a precise awareness of what it eventually turned into, the wind of an epic adventure still blows on the screen here, and makes it move. Whatever else one chooses to call it, this adventure is the unique impulse that drives the people of Odessa toward liberty, the sailors of the eponymous battleship to battle against hunger and humiliation, and the filmmaker himself to invent new cinematic forms and rhythms.