A curious mix of rip-roaring adventure filmmaking, Soviet socialist propaganda, and ethnographic documentary, Storm over Asia is never less than entertaining. It is distinguished by Pudovkins epic compositional sense, evident in the cavalry column fanning out to fill the horizon, and some striking, cubist-like montage sequencesas well as for its sardonic satire of Buddhist ritual and Western betrayal of faith. TCh
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1920s
BLACKMAIL (1929)
G.B. (BIP, Gainsborough) 96m BW
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Producer: John Maxwell
Screenplay: Alfred Hitchcock, from play by Charles Bennett
Photography: Jack E. Cox
Music: James Campbell, Reg Connelly
Cast: Anny Ondra, Sara Allgood, Charles Paton, John Longden, Donald Calthrop, Cyril Ritchard, Hannah Jones, Harvey Braban, Ex-Detective Sergeant Bishop
Though Alfred Hitchcock laid down many of the themes he would return to throughout his career and staked his claim as master of the suspense genre with the silent The Lodger (1927), this 1929 picture really sealed his reputation and set him on the road to a remarkable career. Blackmail went into production as a silent movie but was rethought in midshoot as Britains first all-talkie; that this decision was made shows how ambitious Hitchcock was even at this stage of his career, but also that his talents were obvious enough for paymaster producers to fund technical innovations. One of Hitchcocks greatest tricks was to be both avant-garde and commercial at the same time: here he uses newfangled technology of the sort many still suspected would be short-lived in the service of a melodrama that may be psychologically acute but still succeeds in delivering thrills (and titillation).
Alice White (Anny Ondra) quarrels with her policeman boyfriend Frank (John Longden) and impulsively accompanies a lecherous artist (Cyril Ritchard) to his apartment. When the heel tries to rape her, she stabs him in self-defense and gets away, though a breakfast-table conversation with her family becomes a reminder of the trauma as the word knife keeps stabbing at her and the sight of a bread knife nearly sends her into hysterics. Whereas other directors converting to talkies were working hard to ensure that every line of dialogue was recorded as if for an elocution demonstration, Hitchcock monkeys around with the soundtrack in this scene so that most of the conversation becomes an inaudible babblethe better to highlight the crystal-clear key word. This may be the moment when the talkies stopped just talking and singing and the real potential of sound as an addition to the directors arsenal became apparent.
Stuck with an already-cast Czech actress whose English wasnt up to standard, Hitchcock also experimented with dubbing, having Joan Barry off-camera reading the lines as Ondra mouthed them, an unusual (and rarely repeated) approach that allows for a successful synthesis of performance. Ondra, among the first of Hitchcocks bedeviled blondes, is a remarkably fresh, engaging presence and turns the trick of making her
innocent killer sympathetic while the slimy creep who blackmails her is painted as the real villain. KN
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1920s
CHELOVEK S KINOAPPARATOM (1929)
THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
U.S.S.R. (VUFKU) 80m Silent BW
Director: Dziga Vertov
Screenplay: Dziga Vertov
Photography: Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov (Denis Kaufman) began his career with newsreels, filming the Red Army as it fought during the Russian Civil War (191821) and screening the footage for audiences in villages and towns who boarded the agit-trains. The experience helped Vertov formulate his ideas about cinema, ideas shared by a group of like-minded young filmmakers who called themselves Kino-glaz (Cine-Eye). The groups principlesthe honesty of documentary as compared with fiction film, the perfection of the cinematic eye compared with the human eyeinform Vertovs most extraordinary picture, the dazzling The Man with a Movie Camera.
In this film Vertov combines radical politics with revolutionary aesthetics to exhilarating, even giddy effect. The two components of filmmakingcamera and editingfunction as equal (and gendered) partners. Vertovs male cameraman (his brother Mikhail Kaufman) records a day in the life of the modern citywhat Vertov called life caught unawareswhile his female editor (wife Elizaveta Svilova) cuts and splices the footage, thus reformulating that life. By the end, Vertov has exploited every available device of filming and editingslow motion, animation, multiple images, split-screen, zooms and reverse zooms, blurring focus, and freeze-framesto create a textbook of film technique as well as a hymn to the new Soviet state.
The camera begins to roll as the city gradually awakens, its buses and trams emerging from their night-hangars and its empty streets gradually filling, and continues by tracking denizens of the city (mostly Moscow but with extensive footage shot in Kiev, Yalta, and Odessa) through their routines of work and play. A lifetime is compressed into that day, as the camera peers between a womans legs to watch a baby emerge, espies children entranced by a street conjuror, tracks an ambulance carrying an accident victim. New rituals supplant old as couples marry, separate, and divorce in a registry office instead of a church.