Schneider Steven - Steven jay schneider стр 28.

Vidor was riding high in Hollywood when he made The Crowd, fresh from the success of his World War I epic The Big Parade two years earlier. To play Mary he chose the attractive star Eleanor Boardman, who also happened to be his wife; but for John he took a chance on the little-tested James Murray, whose erratic career ended in suicide less than a decade later.

Although both are brilliant, Murray shines brightest under Vidors expert guidance; for evidence see the sequence when an unthinkable tragedy strikes the couple before their horrified eyes, uniting inspired acting with split-second editing and absolutely perfect camera work to produce one of the most unforgettable moments in all of silent cinema. Its a scene that stands leagues above the crowd in a movie that does the same from start to finish. DS

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1920s

THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK (1928)

The last full year of Hollywoods silent era, 1928, produced some of its greatest masterpieces, marking the final maturation of a form that was soon to be extinct: The Cameraman, The

Crowd, Street Angel, The Wedding March, The Wind. Like these others, Josef von Sternbergs The Docks of New York is a film of consummate economy and refinement. The plot is minimal and the characters few, leaving more room for the films maximal elaboration of atmosphere and gesture.

The characters of The Docks of New York seem to have stepped out of the fatalistic naturalism of a Eugene ONeill play and into the archetypal dreamscape of a fairy tale: Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape meet Beauty and the Beast. Sternbergs waterfront romance contains two main sections: night and morning. Night is a luminous shadowland of mist, smoke, pools of light, and rippling reflections. In this enchanted realm, hulking stoker Bill (George Bancroft) fishes suicidal tramp Mae (Betty Compson) out of the drink. The couple end up at a rowdy saloon where they talk each other into a spur-of-the-moment marriage that might be sincere or just the pretext for a one-night stand. The cold, clear light of morning brings desertion, disillusion, and a change of heart, as Bill impulsively jumps ship and returns to take the rap for a stolen dress he had given to Mae.

The restraint and precision of the performancesBancrofts guarded nonchalance, the deliberate grace with which he moves his massive body, and Compsons languid weariness and the delicate balance between hurt and hope in her upturned eyesmaintain a constantly rippling veil of speculation over the main characters inner thoughts and feelings. How much are Bill and Mae bluffing each other, how much are they deceived by each other, and how much are they deceiving themselves? Sternberg, by all accounts (including his own) was the iciest of directors, yet he created several of the cinemas most moving testaments to the power of love to make fools of us all. The Docks of New York is one of them, made all the more convincing by the self-deprecating reticence with which it reveals its foolish heart. MR

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1920s

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928)

AN ANDALUSIAN DOG

France 16m silent BW

Director: Luis Buñuel

Producer: Luis Buñuel

Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí

Photography: Albert Duverger

Cast: Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí

The directorial debut of Luis Buñuel, collaborating with artist Salvador Dalí, is etched into our consciousness of film history because of one image above all: a razor slicing open an eyeball. What is this: shock tactic, symbol of a modernist vision, male aggression toward woman? For Jean Vigowho hailed An Andalusian Dog for its social consciousnessBuñuels associative montage raised a philosophical query: Is it more dreadful than the spectacle of a cloud veiling a full moon? One thing is certain: The image kicks off a classic surrealist parable of Eros ever denied, ever frustrated by institutions and mores.

Too oftenbecause of its heavy influence on rock videoAn Andalusian Dog has been reduced to, and recycled as, a collection of disconnected, striking, incongruous images: dead horse on a piano, ants in a hand. But this overlooks what gives the work its cohering force: the fact that, in many ways, Buñuel scrupulously respects certain conventions of classical continuity and linkage, creating a certain, disquieting narrative sense among these fragments from the unconscious. This is a dialectic of surface rationality versus deep, churning, forces from the Id that Buñuel would continue exploring to the very end of his career. AM

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1920s

LA PASSION DE JEANNE DARC (1928)