Destiny (1921)

In a way I travel time and trot the globe when I watch movies, but, in reality, of course, I remain fixed in my time and place. Although the way in which I do travel when I watch movies is sometimes stranger, sometimes more interesting.

When I watch Destiny I place parts of my mind in Berlin in 1921, where and when the film was seen for the first time. We, the audience, are uprooted from the ordinary; in a way, to travel back to Berlin in 1921 to watch Destiny would be to immediately leave again, but through the screen. Destiny, written and directed by Fritz Lang (and based on a dream he had), motivates willing hearts and minds to contemplate the wonders of physical and spiritual existence, and always present is a sense of expansive realities and surrealities. Its story provokes one to consider oneself as a unit within a tremendously vast and exciting network of people and places, lives and moments.

Death visits a town. He buys, with gold coins, some land intended to be used as the cemetery's annex. Around the land he builds a massive, towering wall, with no entrances that anyone can see.

Death takes, from the world of the living, a woman's husband. The woman confronts Death. She tells Death that love is stronger than death, and she asks for her husband's resurrection.

Death has his woes, too - the German title's literal translation is Weary Death - and he tells the woman that it's hard for him to carry the burden of hate for obeying the commands of god. He explains that he can't bring someone back, it's simply impossible, irreversible. But the woman is persistent, will not believe what she is being told, and forces Death to demonstrate the truth of his words. He offers to resurrect her husband if she can prevent the flames of three others from going out.

Three trials begin, staged in separate places, outside the barriers of time, and as fantastic experiences. In the above, a hookah is smoked from on a rooftop rug during a starry night.

Then, just as quickly and as easily, and for no apparent reason, we, the audience, are in Renaissance Venetia, experiencing a cock fight. The fantastic, the imaginative, and the romantic are framed within this quest by a woman that's a battle with death over the corporeality of her husband. Each of the three Stories of the Light is about wanting to defeat death, explicitly about this; and for me it's also about the death of time, and the impossibility of re-experiencing a moment.

Because time moves forward in movies as in reality. Running its natural course, as in a theater, and not at home with a remote control, movie time is fleeting, the gasp of a white light, sent through a lens, to give life to a celluloid image, that spans the room's length, where it dies, instantly, in a gorgeous collision with the screen, twenty-four temporal deaths a second.

If you're not still with me, I'm in China. Supposedly. I do not believe that this China ever existed, in reality or even in the imaginations of anyone else. The above image is the descent of a flying carpet into a royal court. The event's purpose is explained in a letter that's so perfect I have to quote it in its entirety:

Oh, Highly Venerable One,
Oh, thousand-year-old One,
Oh, leading light of wisdom,
Oh, precious jewel!

Tomorrow is my birthday and I have
ordered that there should be great
rejoicings throughout the Empire of
China. And for my birthday I ask
that you, oh pearl of all magicians,
should drive away my imperial boredom
with magical tricks such as were never
seen before, from the treasure-chamber
of your illustrious spirit!

With amiable greeting
Djin Schuean Wang,
Emperoror

P.S. If you should also bore me,
contrary to expectation, Oh Highly
Venerable One, I shall be forced, with
my deepest regret, to have you
beheaded!

The Above

For me there's the magic in the screen and the magic of the screen, and watching Destiny bridges them together.

Queen Kelly

Queen Kelly is an unfinished film from 1929, story and direction by Erich von Stroheim, produced by and starring Gloria Swanson (also produced by Joseph P. Kennedy, father of JFK). It's unfinished because Swanson fired von Stroheim while shooting scenes for the film's final act. She objected to both her role in the material, as the madam of a brothel, and to von Stroheim's treatment of the material, e.g., requesting that an actor drool tobacco juice on her during a wedding scene.

If I understand correctly, and if my information is true, the film was not released in America in its time, owing to clauses in von Stroheim's contract. In 1931 Swanson directed scenes that ended the movie before the final East Africa sequences, and Queen Kelly, with its truncated 'Swanson ending,' photographed by Gregg Toland, was released overseas in 1932. Queen Kelly was, with perhaps some exceptions, not shown in America until after Sunset Boulevard had reached an esteemed place in movie culture, and then it, Queen Kelly, was shown on television, in the 60s.

The Kino version of Queen Kelly I saw used stills to piece together von Stroheim's intended ending, similar to their technique for Swanson and Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson. The difference is that Sadie Thompson was once complete. Large portions of Queen Kelly, intended by von Stroheim to be over four hours long, were never shot or performed, simply never had physical existences. Eighty years later I see the movie and wish they could have reconciled their differences and finished the film, somehow; and I wonder about the magnitude of the inner tolls that prohibited either Swanson or von Stroheim from compromising.

Queen Kelly is a silent psychosexual romantic tragedy period piece, among other things (e.g. wacky). It's a class act pre-code film: everything is powerful, memorable, and sensational, and no one looks back.

Queen Kelly's narrative flexibility and von Stroheim's attention to detail (the characteristics seem to compliment each other) are still relevant. The movie also has psychological material, i.e. character developments and insights, and, perhaps most impressively of all, von Stroheim fuses the interior with the exterior. This gives the film a tremendous scope, a richness of texture that's also very modern.

Von Stroheim paints his characters. He uses the sets, the art design, lights, and costumes: all things feel carefully considered. It feels, in every way, large. This bigness is like Josef von Sternberg; and there's a fluidity that's like Max Ophüls.

Von Stroheim creates sequences that unravel and captures feelings as they bloom. The meeting scene between Kitty Kelly (Swanson) and Prince Wolfram (Walter Byron) is graceful and charming. She throws underthings at him. He follows her on a horse. He's engaged to the queen. She's in a nunnery (she's out with the nuns during the scene). They flirt. They get to know each other. Von Stroheim captures the experience of two people from different worlds colliding, then conjoining. Our investment in their relationship is earned because we experience the sensations of its formation.

Underworld (1927).

Of course I romanticize the careers of screenwriters such as Kuang Ni, Ennio De Concini, and Ben Hecht, prodigious as they were, and it's nice that they each wrote films now considered classics, it's nice that they were successful, but who cares, they wrote and wrote, dozens and dozens of films, and the facet I most romanticize is my perception of them as full-time, professional daydreamers. They lived a continuous fantasy, yes, but also fantasies of their own design. They had projectors for minds, and their eyes were tunnels that led to the treasures of their skull-sized kingdoms; this I admire most.

I read Ben Hecht's treatment for Underworld before I watched the movie, figuring it would hardly spoil anything as he was "legendarily unhappy with Josef von Sternberg's revamping." It was my first unfiltered Hecht experience and it was great. Dreamy, hard-boiled prose, meaningful and expressive, written and constructed with intelligence and aplomb. This treatment, I believe the first Underworld treatment he wrote, and I believe he wrote a second with Art Rosson, is divided into twenty-one sequences. There's a letter insert in the twentieth. The story is of a criminal named Bull Weed (they all have adorable nicknames: Paper Collar Sam, Piano Joe, Slippy Lewis, etc.) who escapes from prison just before his scheduled hanging. Hecht was a Chicago journalist who specialized in prohibition era gangsterism and his emphasis is a kind of poetic realism - the final sequences bank on a motif of fate - and perhaps in its time Underworld was penetratingly real. The dramatic structure (it bounces between parallel searches and reactions to Weed's escape) is transparent and compounded with Hecht's writerly voice nothing, including the behaviors and emotions of the characters, strikes me today as particularly authentic.

So why was he legendarily unhappy with von Sternberg for adding "sentimental touches that falsified his story" is beyond me. Maybe it was more of a general thing that Hollywood kept doing to all stories and Hecht wasn't able to separate this precise incident for an objective evaluation. Josef von Sternberg's story is better told. Feathers has a much stronger presence. In Hecht's story her charm is toxic, while in von Sternberg's it's multi-dimensional, and her magnetism to competing love interests is better motivated, better explored. As for the different endings, I prefer the concept of willed destiny to inescapable fate, dramatically speaking. The truth is both Hecht's initial treatment and von Sternberg's film depend on a last-minute instance of altruism (the gravest sentiment? the most Hollywood, yes) from a character to bring the story to a close. Hecht gives it to a supporting character, von Sternberg gives it to the main character.

Underworld the 1927 Josef von Sternberg film begins with the same clock imagery used in Hecht's story but then opens on Bull Weed robbing a bank, and from there introduces Rolls Royce (Weasel in the story) and then Feathers, blossoming their love triangle as the story and characters grow too. The images of the film are so strong, may I say the film is less black and white and more lightning bolts and thunder clouds? As a true filmmaker von Sternberg is conscious of the connectedness of the major aspects of film; he weds photography, editing, and (in this film) story, creating a film that eighty-three years later retains its white-knuckledness. Perhaps a really great white-knuckler is always such, as this quality is achieved by fluidity and grace of cinematic design, elements incorruptible by time, founded on inalienable concepts of film theory.


Though timeless as a piece of art, one of the joys of Underworld is how grounded in the 1920s it is. Eternal human traits are expressed through social characters now vanished. The above party scene, saturated in streamers and populated by men in suits and women in gowns, evokes all the bygone romance of its time. As the character of Feathers embodies both romance and destruction, so too this party sequence features champagne happiness and backroom despair. The "devil's carnival" montage of faces is the type of playfulness and technical splendor sorely lacking in many contemporary films. I can't explain what the recurring cats in the film mean dramatically, but their inclusion adds to the sense of reality. Von Sternberg's not a filmmaker to erase cats from history, no, he pushes against the walls of drama, expanding them with his cinematic mastery and perceptive eye. The way he choreographs scenes (the famous jewelry store robbery), composes his photography, dresses his sets, and his dramatic use of lights, all bulge and breathe, pulse and quiver, encapsulating the beast of cinema for all to cherish and behold (if you don't mind me saying).

The White Hell of Pitz Palu and Leni Riefenstahl.

The White Hell of Pitz Palu is apparently a single example in a genre of German films that dealt with the perils of mountain climbing. Arnold Fanck was the director of the exterior scenes and had directed a handful of mountain films prior. G.W. Pabst directed the interior scenes. The exterior mountain scenes take up the majority of the film. Leni Riefenstahl's career began by acting in these types of films and she had worked with Fanck previously in this vein. Riefenstahl would direct one mountain film herself three years later in 1932, The Blue Light, reportedly because she could find no other director, and this would be her directorial debut.

A young engaged couple prepare for a leisure-type trek of a mountain when a doctor enters their cabin. The doctor's misery involves an ice casket and a lover's unrecoverable corpse. The White Hell has fantastic body-in-ice-casket scenes. The young couple is convinced by the doctor into convincing themselves by sentiment and pity to join the doctor on his journey for discovery of his lover's lost corpse. The body is buried on the north side of the mountain, the most dangerous side of the mountain, and it's apparently the last chance to climb this area because summer approaches and temperatures rise, causing avalanches and proportional risk increase. Other people are climbing this side of the mountain too, on the same day.

They all die. The entire other group of people climbing the north face of the mountain. Their bodies are recovered though, unfortunately, and none of them receive the reward of a badass ice-casket. But anyway if I have to tell you I will: the young couple and the doctor endure all sorts of avalanches and personal injury and become lost on the mountain. The two men are gravely injured. There's a sensational and beautiful sequence of attempted rescue, by the local people, involving midnight blackness and torches through snowy tunnels. The emergency crew only finds the other group of dead people. C'est la White Hell of Pitz Palu.

Later a friend in an airplane spots them. He's flying around the mountain face looking for them: he loops and flips his plane and throws parachutes with informational material. It's a critical moment for the stranded group: the engaged man has gone mental owing to head injuries and the reality and implied doom of their plight pressing upon his mind, he's tied to a rock, and the group has been in the gelid environment without food for a number of days. I won't tell you what happens but you know someone gets a badass ice-casket.

That's the movie. When I watch it I think mainly of Leni Riefenstahl. What was on her mind? She's three years away from seeing Hitler for the first time. What are her passions now, and is The White Hell one step toward artistic obsession culminating in Triumph of the Will and a contentious legacy? She smiles a lot. There are close-ups of a snow covered Riefenstahl throwing back hair from her face and she's intensely movie beautiful in these moments.

On the Kino dvd there's an extended interview with a 100 year-old Riefenstahl from 2002 (that means she was born in 1902 - no prob). The interviewer is kind of vicious I think. She probes Riefenstahl not only on her connections with Hitler and Nazism, something you can sense she's had to explain 1,000,000 times, but she also challenges her on details of her sexual history and the merits of an old lady re-entering filmmaking. Riefenstahl was promoting her 2002 film Underwater Impressions, a film that's only 45 minutes long and was filmed by Riefenstahl herself while scuba diving. It's a grandma film, don't you think, is what the interviewer seems to be saying. Sometimes I want to choke the interviewer because I feel so bad.

I feel so bad in a lot of ways. It's very difficult for me to separate and identify the sins of Leni Riefenstahl, a woman who held hands with Hitler on the beach. A woman who sent him a letter that said, "With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany's greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?"

The accusation is that Leni Riefenstahl glorified Hitler in her Triumph of the Will and created a strong, effective, and lasting propaganda tool for his hate machine. The counter-accusation is that Triumph of the Will is a beautiful and amazing cinematic revelation. Both are true. There's an opinion that they can't both be true. My personal sympathy goes to Riefenstahl, whose greatest work can never be discussed without a series of caveats. And I wish Olympia wasn't public domain or someone would pay for a great transfer so I could really see the film the way it was intended to be seen.

Waxworks.

Do 20 year-olds review silent films? I feel like I'm talking from the outside. But here I'll go, and I apologize for all self-references. I want to omit self-references from my reviews as much as I can. I feel it's a part of the this review however. I came to this filmmaker through James Whale, who was apparently a Paul Leni fan. This is the beginning of Leni's career on dvd. It's as beginning as I can get. He'd made a number of films by this time and he was 39 years old. Douglas Fairbanks would see Waxworks and be inspired by it for his same-year The Thief of Baghdad, according to Kino, which offers convincing visual evidence through excerpts of the Fairbanks film. Leni's next film would be for Carl Laemmle at Universal Studios in Hollywood.

They (the obvious references) call it three stories in one film. It's two mostly. It's four kind-of (was my 83 minute version the full print? I'm not sure). They (the casual referrers) call it The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-lite. I've seen The Cabinet and don't agree. Or I think it's too easy to say. Some people call silent dramas boring. I fell asleep the first time I watched it, which happens to me too often with silent dramas I'll admit, but it was to my advantage that I decided to give it another go before returning it to Hollywood video. It's not at all boring that was my bad. This review will begin with the assertion that Waxworks is not boring in any way.

In the first story there's a moment where a guy jumps off a building. Others are pursuing him. He lands on a tree and the tree bends, and the bending allows him to escape freely to the ground where he can continue his flight. It takes place on a single set with all the buildings shown together in certain scenes. This happens often in the first long sequence. The character's house/workspace (he's a baker) is also on a similar set, and there are long shots and close-ups which reveal the set for its major and minor details. It convinces me as a viewer of the reality of the scenario. The believability is based on the set design. Waxworks is a German Expressionism film, or a child or a product of that movement, and in German Expressionist films the set is the total reality of the film. In Waxworks the reality blends cultural and fictional aspects in order to enhance the experience of spectatorial immersion: when the guy jumps off the building, I believe in the tension of his movements and the context of their motivations. It's very gripping and very filmatically convincing.

The second story is more drama-heavy. In it Ivan the Terrible looks like Ivan the Terrible from Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. It's not the same actor. I guess that's what Ivan the Terrible really looked like. I kept thinking of Eisenstein's film because of this visual similarity, and it also made me think of Eisenstein's penchant for visual repetition. That was pretty cool and enhanced what was otherwise a much duller second story. There's a scene where Ivan fears an assassination attempt, owing to a prognostication, and asks a visiting noble to disguise himself as Ivan and they switch places in the carriage and also exchange clothing. It's the best scene. After that some unnatural narrative propulsion culminates in a bizarre loveless escapade with a female that leads to an hour glass fixation I can't explain in under 200 words.

It's bizarre other-worldly and faintly exotic material. I think the cultural differences are exaggerated, combined with the set design, in order to achieve this effect. That seems typical for the period and certainly links Leni with Whale, Tod Browning, Fritz Lang, etc. The dramatization and aggrandizement of cultural behavior works to energize the narrative and also archaically tints the film. It's nothing I expect from reality. That's kind of cool shit too, because the film attempts to deal in true emotional currency inside of this melodramatic framework and it grants an ethereal quality to the film. It's sight and spectacle at its most fundamental, but it's executed so earnestly and elaborately that it enriches the effectiveness. You want to believe: you want to believe your eyes, you want to believe the story, you want to feel the characters. As a 21st century man I still feel the meaning of that want. It's the bedrock of an entire future of filmmaking. This is a root.