After only two days, I am beginning to show the first signs of fatigue. Obviously it’s not because of the movies themselves, none of them have been bad at all. It’s more like my body cannot sustain seeing so many movies on the same day anymore. During the first movie that I have rather disliked, I ended up falling asleep for perhaps 1/4 of the film.
Schastye (Happiness)
USSR 1934, Aleksandr Medvedkin, 95’
Why this movie is among the 1000 greatest films of all time is absolutely beyond me. Some critics must be freaks or something, but really this is nothing but a nice film at most. It has a few funny scenes (without being really, really funny) and the actor portraying the protagonist is fairly decent. Apart from that, we are dealing with quite a propagandistic piece of cinema, in which about we, uh, learn about the lives of farmers in Soviet Russia. Topic-wise, I am not a big fan of films that are all about harvesting, at hard-working women, making horses move and keep them up from eating too much etc. At least there was no war propaganda, thank God.
Film-wise, I also disliked it. I might be plain ignorant, or it could be the horribly preserved copy of the film, but there wasn’t much direction-wise about this film that I have found memorable so far. All in all, it was interesting to see a film like this, but maybe I could also have done without.
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam
Germany 1920, Paul Wegener, 85’
I am sad that I couldn’t have seen “Greed”, but oh well, such is life. “Der Golem” was accompanied by this amazingly great duo with violin and piano. At first, it felt weird to have a violin there and I realized how much I was used to hearing the piano to silent films. But as soon as I quickly got used to it, I am so glad that they had the violin for it, adding so much more drama and complexity to the film score.
Perhaps I would have liked the “Golem” even more if I had seen more monster movies, but it was very great already. The only sad thing about the film was that the story didn’t offer all that much (the jews are in danger, the rabbi creates the golem to save them, then has problems to control his creature). But in terms of directing, production values and design, the film was a refreshing contrast to the bland “Happiness”. Paul Wegener’s facial expressions as golem were pure gold, and I am a huge fan of the German expressionist style, which I immediately recognized to be quite similar to “Dr. Caligari”.
“Der Golem” is definitely a must see, and a film that is much better when seen in a large movie theater with live music, making me feel very lucky that I had the opportunity to.
Blind Husbands
USA 1919, Erich v. Stroheim, 90’
One can easily see that this is Stroheim’s first film. I missed the prostitutes, the voluptuous female bodies and the decadent décor, ha ha. To be honest, I even missed a real scandal in this whole thing. Sure, even this film is very sexy, psychological and subtly criticizing the bourgeoisie in a beautiful way, but at the end of the day, this film was merely about one blind husband who doesn’t realize that this evil German officer is courting his wife. I was actually a little surprised at how simple and morally convenient the story ended up being.
All the other elements of a typical Stroheim film seem to be there, be it good or bad ones: On the good side, we have wonderful details such as “Auf der Alm gibt’s ka Sünd”, on the bad side, the film is awfully long (and straining me quite a bit after so many days full of movies). “Queen Kelly” was greater when it comes to its female characters and the depiction of royal decadence, but “Blind Husbands” featured Stroheim himself! He is absolutely wonderful as the bad guy, although I must admit that I admire his achievements as director much more than as an actor. Whereas he typecasted himself quite a lot, as a director I find him to be absolutely unique. I don’t think anybody in this world could mirror the fervent and craziness he worked with, and we should consider ourselves lucky that he has made some films, even if it’s just these few. He’s… the Kafka of film-making or something.
Finally, I have this perhaps naive hope that “Foolish Wives” (since Gorp likes it so much) and “Greed” (the supposedly most acclaimed Stroheim) will be even better than this.