“You and I may dream of gold or grocery bills — but when a child slaps Morpheus on the back and says 'Hello, old man' — well it's a different story.”Moonland (William A. O'Connor, 1926)
Aug
15
Chant At The Moon Day
Mickey (Mickey McBan) and his dog looking up to the crescent moon from a perfectly round window with beaded curtains made of stars. Spot the Milky Way! DP: Edward Gheller.
A little boy and his dog are invited over by the Man in the Moon himself. The trip to the Moon is a big adventure for the drowsy duo and they meet peculiar flora, fauna and men along the way, lifted straight from the Great Moon Hoax.
– opening title card
Post-McCay's serial Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905) and pre-Fleming & Cukor's The Wizard of Oz (1939), William A. O'Connor is heavily indebted to both. Which doesn't make his short Art Deco-styled science fiction fantasy any less magical.
shortfilm
His Wife's Mistakes (Roscoe Arbuckle, 1916)
Aug
4
National Water Balloon Day
Janitor Roscoe uses the comedy staple seltzer bottle to fill a balloon with some spritz!
The great Roscoe Arbuckle just can't help himself while at the wonderfully hedonistic Oriental Café in this delightful short slapstick.
Moć [Power] (Vlatko Gilić, 1973)
Jul
25
Threading The Needle Day
One of the men, threading the needle. He's young, bearded, and shirtless and in what appears to be a cave or cellar. DP: Ljubomir Ivković.
Slobodan Ćirković aka Roko was (or is? I cannot find a lot of information online) a Serbian hypnotist capable of making people painlessly self-inflict torment. In Vlatko Gilić's short and rather disturbing Moć, Roko initiates a large group of men to thread a needle and slowly, going from him to the next to the other, connect the one thread through their bodies until all of them are stitched into one.
Strangely homoerotic and determinately violent, Moć feels deeply rooted in the #Serbian psyche. There's beauty and an unflinching élan-vital under the skin, a tenderness that comes with great, unmentionable #pain, love and death.
Swirlee (James Lorinz, 1989)
Jul
23
National Vanilla Ice Cream Day
Newspaper clipping. Mr Softy's roommate (David Caruso) and Mr Softy (James Lorinz), a man with a softee for/as a head, pose for a picture.
“Salt, pepper, sugar, ketchup and napkins, New York.” 66 scener fra Amerika [66 Scenes from America] (Jørgen Leth, 1982)
Jul
4
Independence Day
Director Jørgen Leth capturing Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii [Merrick Butte] in Monument Valley, AZ, for the opening scene. He's waving a small American flag in front of the camera. DP: Dan Holmberg.
A road movie becomes interesting when the traveller is a stranger. When he or she takes that first step, head still firmly planted at home, soul on its way out.
Jørgen Leth is a Danish documentary maker who in the early 80s sent sixty-six postcards from America. These postcards form a #travelogue of bewilderment. The #landscape, #food, language, anything an American may take for granted framed in a moving still. The American, ever ready for stardom, poses and orates. The scenes become show, regardless if it's a New York cabbie or a man famously (falsely) credited for predicting fame, slowly eating a Whopper.
The resulting 66 scener fra Amerika is as much a time capsule as it is a portrait of forever.
“An diesem Tag war das Bild, drei Monate nach Beginn und 67 Arbeitstagen fertig.”Ein Bild von Sarah Schumann [A Picture of Sarah Schumann] (Harun Farocki, 1978)
Jun
26
National Sarah Day
A close-up of the artist's hand at work. More stills and details about this film on Frieze. DP: Ingo Kratisch.
Commissioned for a West-German TV series called Kunstgeschichten (litt. both “art stories” and “#art histories”), filmmaker Harun Farocki visits artist Sarah Schumann in her #Berlin studio.
– narrator
The resulting documentary shows the process of creating one art piece over the course of nine weeks. Schumann's work in that period consists of collage portraits of women important in her life.
“Tire dié!”Tire dié [Toss Me a Dime] (Fernando Birri, 1958)
Jun
20
National Flag Day – Argentina
A young boy running along the train. Another, even younger, child can be just seen behind him. DPs: Oscar Kopp & Enrique Urteaga.
A slum survives next to a railroad bridge. When the train travelling from the city shows up, the children who are old and gutsy enough run along and yell tire dié! toss me a dime! Some of them make more than their parents do.
Tire dié is a sobering account of #poverty and how it's as much a part of life's schedule as a slow running train on a rickety bridge.
“This isn’t playtime, kids, it’s work.” “Any star can be devoured by human adoration, sparkle by sparkle.”Kid 'N' Hollywood [Kid in Hollywood] (Charles Lamont, 1933)
Jun
12
Child Labor Day
A movie set on a movie set in Kid 'N' Hollywood. Shirley Temple can be seen on her knees scrubbing the floor as the character Morelegs Sweettrick. Standing next to her with a bullhorn and adult spats is Arthur J. Maskery as the tyrannical movie director Frightwig von Stumblebum. As in all the Baby Burlesk shorts, the kids are only half-dressed with their diapers showing.
Despite Shirley Temple's clear statements of what was going on on set during her child actress days, her output remains wildly popular. Who cannot resist her precocious lines, her cute dimples and baby doll innocence? And tapdancing with ánd befriending a Negro, during the segregation years? Miss Shirley truly was wise beyond her tender age.
Shirley Temple was “discovered” at the age of three by then-casting director Charles Lamont and promptly shot to stardom is his satirical Baby Burlesks: short talkies starring toddlers in diapers (a burlesque being a short, humorous skit). The gag was that the kids behaved and spoke like adults, seemingly unaware of being #children.
– Charles Lamont, Baby Burlesk director
In the Baby Burlesk Kid 'N' Hollywood, Temple plays a Hollywood hopeful called Morelegs Sweettrick, who gets her break when the star doesn't feel like showing up (kids, right? no discipline).
While Kid 'N' Hollywood is relatively innocent, others in the series are much more sexualised (War Babies (1932) stars Temple as prostitute Charmaine) or plain racist (Kid 'in' Africa (1933) with Temple as Madame Cradlebait, bringing civilisation to Black kids portraying fearsome cannibals).
I'm not the one to take events from the past out of context and apply modern-day sensibilities to them, and with the advent of #ChildLabor laws for #Hollywood child actors, many of the horrors recalled by Temple and her peers are history. School is mandatory, long hours restricted, and using twins to split the workload is definitely not unheard of.
And then I watched teevee, and saw chubby, precocious blondes with dental plates to hide their missing baby teeth, wearing lipstick and baby-dolls, grinding and crooning with no backup in sight. And I remember Miss Temple say:
– Shirley Temple
Suspense (1913)
Triangular split-screen in Suspense (1913). While the Wife (Lois Weber) is on the phone with her Husband (Val Paul), unbeknownst to them the Tramp (Sam Kaufman) cuts the telephone wire.
June 11: say Hi! on #SayHiDay
Suspense (Phillips Smalley & LoisWeber, 1913)
Now he's in the…
Suspense is not only the title of this short silent thriller, but also the state of mind the viewer is put into as soon as the film opens. Using POV (point-of-view) shots and breaking the fourth wall, the imminent threat – a vagrant trespassing and creeping up to a lone woman and her newborn child – creeps up on us. We know we're safe, on the other side of the screen, but the Tramp (a particularly haunting Sam Kaufman) looks us right in the eye. He passes us on the stairs, but he's going around us so he must be, hopefully, aware of our presence.
Meanwhile, we also see something that only cinema and books can give: multiple happenings at once. The Wife (Lois Weber) calls her Husband (Val Paul) on the phone. Suddenly the screen splits into three: in the middle, the Husband on call, listening to his Wife on the right who's begging him to hurry home. On the left, the Tramp. Unlike us, he cannot see the conversation promising a happy end. But instead that bringing some relief to the viewer, he cuts the phone cable. While we see that happen, we have no way to tell the Husband to make haste, or the Wife that the Tramp's getting closer.
What's striking too is the omnipresence of modernity: the couple's home and Husband's office have telephones and therefore electricity, and the Husband speeds off in an automobile. The cinematography for the telephone and car chase scenes are filmed and edited with great knowledge of the technical possibilities of the medium; split-screen (only gathering popularity much later, see Pillow Talk (1959), and the usage of the Entfesselte Kamera [unchained camera], the latter a mid 1920s German invention.
A similar, triangular split-screen scene from Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk (1959) with (LtR) Eileen (Valerie Allen), Jan Morrow (Doris Day), and Brad Allen (Rock Hudson) on the party line. With Ms Day's character centred, we know that she's the one to identify with in this particular scene. DP: Arthur E. Arling.
With that, Suspense not only preceded Italian futurist cinema, but also the usage of suspense as a cinematic technique. Now go and watch, and remember
it's only a movie it's only a movie it's only a movie
#Bales2023FilmChallenge #PhillipsSmalley #LoisWeber #SamKaufman #USA #ShortFilm #SilentFilm #drama #suspense #crime #thriller #HomeInvasion #1910s ★★★★☆
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)
Gertie raises her creator Winsor McCay in her mouth. McCay holds a dressage whip but in his tuxedo resembles a musical conductor more than a lion tamer. DPs: John A. Fitzsimmons & Winsor McCay.
June 1: dinosaurs for #DinosaurDay
Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay, 1914)
I made ten thousand cartoons —each one a little bit different from the one preceding it.
Long before we all flocked to the movies, there was vaudeville. Vaudeville comes in many flavours, from raucous song and dance, acrobatics (see #BusterKeaton's start) to chalk talk: a live performance in which an artist would chat and draw on a blackboard in real time. The format is perfect to enlighten and entertain an audience, about the dangers of alcohol, the importance of religion, the demand for women's suffrage.
But where there's a scholar, there's a showman. As a chalk talk consists of a succession of quickly drawn illustrations, one flowing into the next while the performer raps over it, the leap to animation is a logical one. In 1914, a brontosaurus named Gertie and a comic strip creator called Winsor McCay travelled the land – both animated and real.
McCay, known for his fantastic comic strips Little Nemo in Slumberland and its predecessor Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, introduced the great animated animal to the audience with little tidbits of knowledge about the mighty brontosaurus, throw her an apple, demonstrate her gentleness by stepping into the screen (a parlour trick made the transition from real to animated look incredibly convincing) and let Gertie carry him around in her prehistoric world. In front of the delighted audience, the showman then would reappear into our realm.
The movies were young and promising, and Gertie's leap to celluloid was made the very same year. Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), an adaptation of the vaudeville act and the first animated dinosaur movie, moves the stage to a dinner party at the animator's studio, where McCay shows off his animation skills as part of a bet.
Gertie, with its combination of animated and real content, had a huge influence on film makers to come. You can see it in Max Fleischer's wonderful Out of the Inkwell cartoons (1918 – 1929) and Ubi Iwerk's Alice Comedies (1923 – 1927, the only original work that ever came out of the Disney studios). And Buster Keaton? In honour of Gertie he rode a claymation brontosaurus in his Three Ages (1923).
The Boy's (Buster Keaton) nifty use of a pre-Willis O’Brien stop-motion Brontosaurus' high vantage point. DPs: Elgin Lessley & William C. McGann.
#Bales2023FilmChallenge #WinsorMcCay #JohnAFitzsimmons #vaudeville #comedy #dinosaurs #animals #animation #ShortFilm #SilentFilm #USA #1910s