Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, two young blokes
who would both go on to achieve stratospheric heights in their respective
fields, decided over a discussion in a restaurant to make a film. The result
was the 16-minute short called Un Chien
Andalou – unarguably the most famous short film ever made and a landmark
work in avant-garde surrealism. This was everything that a conventional film
can never aspire to be – a delirious mix of bizarre occurrences, grotesque
images, unrelated events, disjointed chronology, and what-not. The film opens
with one of the most shocking yet canonized film sequences – the slashing of a
woman’s eye with a neatly sharpened razor, shot in disturbing close-up and
without so much as a hint. Thereon, it presented one outlandish moment after
another – ants crawling out of a hole in a man’s palm, a guy dragging a couple
of grand pianos with a pair of dead donkeys on them, an androgynous man
casually poking at a severed hand with a stick in the middle of the road, a man
shooting at his own mirror image, so on an so forth. Film historians, cineastes
and psychologists have racked their brains and suggested a plethora of interpretations for this; but
Bunuel and Dali, in the most gleeful thumb of their noses to all the
intellectuals of the world, might just as well have created this just for
the fun of it. The grainy black-and-white short had a number of visual and
editing tricks that were remarkable for its time, and was backed by an excellent
score, comprising, among others, Wagner’s compositions, that wonderfully aided
the distressing imageries and the zany playfulness of its tone and pacing.
Director: Luis Bunuel
Genre: Avant-Garde/Experimental Film/Surrealist Film/Short Film/Silent Film/Short Film
Language: French
Country: France
Over the years a number of filmmakers have
experimented with form, but rarely have such exercises been as iconic and as
universally adulated as Dziga Vertov’s seminal avant-garde work The Man with a Movie Camera. Watching the
film felt like witnessing a wide-eyed kid playing with a new-found toy with
complete abandon, oblivious to the world around him. Completely bereft of
dialogues and thus nullifying the requirement of inter-titles and subtitles,
this was a celebration of what some refer to as “pure cinema”, as Vertov went
about capturing day-to-day life in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, randomly juxtaposed
one after the other. And, as the film progressed, from an energetic zeitgeist
of the era, it turned into a collection of a host of trickeries and pyrotechnics
with camerawork and editing, like fast-mo, slow-mo, camera placed in the frame
of reference of a rotating object, jump cuts, rapid-fire edits, double
exposure, stop motion, superimpositions, split screens, breathtaking montages, oblique
camera angles, etc. – displaying Vertov’s tremendous grasp of and his
willingness to explore the technological possibilities of the medium, and reinforcement
of his philosophies of Kino-Eye and Kino-Pravda. The meta-narrative aspect
was tad too forced at times, and the zany trickeries, though interesting to
watch (albeit up to a point), obscured, to the film’s detriment, the
socio-political observations that it inadvertently comprised of. Nonetheless,
its kinetic and jumbled depiction of everyday working-class life, achieved through
a host of unrelated movie clips of both the mundane and the interesting, was
quite illuminating and even dazzling at times. The fine orchestral score,
too, nicely complemented the actions on display.
Director: Dziga Vertov
Genre: Documentary/Avant-Garde/Experimental Film/Silent Film
Language: Russian
Country: Russia (erstwhile Soviet Union)
Sherlock Jr. was
a hilarious physical comedy alright, but more importantly, it was an astounding
reflection on the medium of cinema itself, with all its illusions and
artificialities. It starts with Keaton as a movie projectionist, an aspiring
detective, and in love with a girl, only to be falsely framed by the film’s
villain. Though decidedly funny till now, this is the point where the movie
jumped to a different level altogether. Sad and heartbroken he falls asleep
while projecting a film, and in his dream, he finds the movie’s characters
replaced by the girl and the villain, and he, now an accomplished sleuth, enters
into the movie by seamlessly blurring the ‘fourth wall’. Armed with skills,
resourcefulness and infinite luck, he is now invincible, and through one deliberately
impossible move after another, he beats the bad guys and wins the girl. The
movie comprised of a host of incredibly dangerous stunts – he even broke his
neck (albeit, not fatally) during one such stunt! It was also filled with brilliant
slapstick comedy, deadpan humour, wit, and ironies, making it a laugh-riot.
However, what spectacularly stood out was one breathtaking montage that was
jaw-dropping in its ideation and execution – as he enters into the screen, with
the bemused audience watching on (making the self-consciousness of the situation
blatantly obvious), he suddenly finds himself at the mercy of a series of rapid
cuts accompanied by drastic changes of locations. Such audacious yet loving
techno-philosophical subversion of the medium has rarely, if ever, been achieved in the
history of this artform. And yes, one must also watch the movie to realize what
a terrific pool player he was.
Director: Buster Keaton
Genre: Comedy/Slapstick/Fantasy/Silent Film
Language: English
Country: US
The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer’s final silent film, is one of only handful
of films that are de facto members of
the elite group reverently referred to as “essential arthouse classics” – and
like those that have made that qualification, it has been worshipped, beatified
and canonized ad nauseum over the
years. The film began with the epigraph announcing that it was based on
recorded testimonials of Joan’s trials. But, quite obviously, subjective
judgement and artistic liberty were freely employed by Dreyer in his depiction
of her inquisition by a group of judges who consider her a heretic. The
proceedings were memorably dramatized through the use of extreme close-ups,
which unequivocally established the physical suffering and spiritual crises of
Joan on one hand, and the hypocrisy and self-centeredness of the church
tribunal, on the other. The torment that the 19-year old Joan faced at the
hands of the old and morally corrupt cynics is bound to leave an impression on
most viewers, though the religious blindness of the naïve, young girl, and
Dreyer’s refusal to put some sort of leash on the overt religiosity of the
contents, was tad off-putting for me. The film’s orchestral score or the
technical virtuosity of the film, particular the disorienting camerawork,
however, were not just beyond reproach, they were positively great – and not to
forget, Renée Maria Falconetti’s startling and iconic turn, solely through
facial emoting, as the wronged heroine (interestingly, this was her only movie
role). The film was censored upon its release, and then thought destroyed
until, in 1981, its original copy was found at, of all places, a Norwegian
mental institution.
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Genre: Drama/Religious Drama/Biopic/Docu-Drama/Silent Film
Language: Danish
Country: Denmark
Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal silent era classic Battleship Potemkin is one of those
chosen few films that film scholars can’t have enough of, and which no cinephile
worth his salt can afford to avoid (at least, not forever) – such is its
iconic and larger-than-life position in the history of the medium’s development.
Though commissioned by the Soviet Union government, it managed to expand beyond
the propagandist confines of an agitprop on account of the role it played in
elevating form to the level of content. This frenetic chronicle of the 1905
revolution remains a case study on Eisenstein’s landmark theories on montage
editing – the legendary Odessa Steps sequence (where Tsar’s soldiers are shown
massacring innocent civilians), in particular, is an icon in itself from that
respect. Though crisply timed at just over an hour, the film is a flurry of
activities. It begins with the growing discontent among the crew of the
eponymous battleship on account of poor food and hygene; and, when confronted in
draconian fashion by their brutish superiors, it takes the form of a
spontaneous and violent mutiny. The sole casualty among the crew becomes a
legend, and the incident goes on to spark outrage and more mutinies, even if
the revolution, in the end, was unsuccessful (albeit, not in hindsight).
For someone not interested in film study or the role of politics in cinema,
this might seem a bit dated, aesthetically “rough”, in-your-face in its ideological
expression, and most notably, bereft of any coherent storytelling. In the end, therefore,
the vitality of this film in today’s context is principally from an
intellectual standpoint.
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Historical Drama/Propaganda Film/Docu-Fiction/Silent Film
Language: Russian
Country: Russia (erstwhile Soviet Union)
