“Zur Chronik von Grieshuus” (1925, Dir. Arthur von Gerlach)

English Title: “The Chronicles of the Grey House” / “At the Grey House”



An intriguing if not always successful work, Zur Chronik von Grieshuus offers what might be described as a merger between the styles of Fritz Lang and D.W. Griffith. While I wouldn't compare it qualitatively to even lesser works by those two directors, it holds something of the love pastoral peasant life and natural landscapes one associates with Griffith coupled with the expressionistic sweep and stylized world of a silent Lang. The similarities with Lang could easily come from Thea von Harbou's script for Grieshuus. Von Harbou was Lang's wife, who co-wrote most of his German pictures before the two split over disagreements regarding the Nazi party (Von Harbou was a supporter, Lang was not).

Grieshuus tells the story of the conflict between Hinrich and Detlev, two brothers who are the airs to the ruler ship of the titular Grey House, a castle and small town somewhere in rural Germany. The film has two definite arcs. The first tells how Hinrich falls out of favor with his father by marrying a maid (whom he meets while saving her from gang rape by a group of crazed nomads, in one of the first sections most inspired sequences as well as one of its most Griffith-esque), and has himself written out of the inheritance. The vain and aristocratic Detlev returns just in time for their father to have a heart attack. The two brothers spar over control of the castle and land, with the local surfs on Hinrich's side and the law on Detlev's. The conflict swirls out of control, and after the death of Hinrich's young wife, the “good” son Hinrich finally loses any semblance of sanity and brutally kills Detlev on a windy hill. Hinrich, now a fugitive, disappears. The second arc begins a decade or so later, where Hinrich's son has been raised and groomed by the surfs to eventually take over the now shuttered Grey House. Detlev's widow has returned and plans to kidnap the child and take over the land herself, but Hinrich has also wandered back to his old home town, now worn and aged. The Ghost of Hinrich's wife appears and allows for a miraculous rescue by both frightening Detlev's widow and alerting Hinrich to the danger their son is in. Hinrich dies saving his sons life, and we assume as the film fades to black that the child will become a benevolent ruler of Grey House.

If this all sounds like warmed over folklore by way of melodrama, that's because it is. But it hardly matters, because Grieshuus is not a film about narrative. It is a film about textures. It's narrative becomes almost inconsequential in relation to its images. This is not to say that one does not follow and is not engaged by the story of Heinrich's rise, fall and return, but that it serves as a kind of decoration, a structure which allows the textures and images of the world to exist. Spectacle and narrative content do not work in unison à la Griffith or Lang; rather spectacle replaces narrative content as the films subject, while the narrative content exists to illustrate and enable the spectacle. While this failure to establish connection between style and content prevents Grieshuus from being a great film, it also prevents it from being a dull one. At no one point does it bore the eye; there is always a dank castle wall, angular trees, or rolling mist to observe. The films aesthetic peak is surely the arrival of the ghost of Hinrich's wife. She is simply superimposed with slight transparency, as was standard for the appearance of ghosts in silent cinema. What is unique about this ghost is the textures that lurk behind her. As her figure floats across a field at dusk, we see the tall waving grass and shaking leaves, visible through her drifting body. It's a little bit difficult to explain the effect of this visual, or why that effect is important. But then, it's not a film about explanations.

Recommended, if you can track it down. It does not appear to have ever had a home video release, and has only been screen sporadically since its initial release.

Viewed at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC 01/24/2011

Melodie der Welt (1929, Dir. Walter Ruttmann)

English Title: Melody of the World


A decidedly minor if historically important documentary, Melodie der Welt takes the form of a cruise around the world. The camera documents the lives of people in different cultures, ordered not by geography but by activity. We see children from all around the world, people making food all around the world, different military and religious ceremonies, and so on. This allows for some juxtaposition of how things are different (and how they are the same) but doesn't result in much more revelation than a discovery channel documentary on a similar subject. It is a sincere if uninteresting attempt to show us how all the world is one, even if we differ in our particulars.

The cinematography and editing are adequate throughout, but thoroughly unremarkable. The pacing is static, and the film doesn't usefully build to any specific conclusion or event. What is its early use of sync sound, supposedly the first in a German production. Easily 95% of the film is silent with a musical score, however the few moments where sync sound is employed – two men talking about directions, a sailor playing a concertina, the sound of a fog horn – have a strange tension. You can tell that the film regards these moments as miraculous, and expects the audience to do the same. To some extent this attitude works, although it probably became dated mere months after this films initial theatrical release.

One expects a little more from Ruttmann, who also directed the far more famous (and far more interesting) Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (1927). I've heard it proposed that the sound equipment tied him down here, but considering how little of the film utilizes sync audio, that hardly seems likely. Still, the humanist objective of the film is noble, especially on the eve of the Nazi's political takeover. A few years later, a work like simple work like Melodie would be unimaginable.

Recommended for those interested in early attitudes about sound, Ruttmann enthusiasts and hardcore silent documentary fans. Otherwise it will probably be of minimal interest.

Viewed at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 01/16/2011

“Jenseits der Straße - Eine Tragödie des Alltags” (1929, Dir. Leo Mittler)

English title: "Harbor Drift – A Tragedy of Everyday Life"


Few films dwell on the erotic importance of shoes and feet to the same degree that “Harbor Drift” does. The only work that comes to mind us that of Buñuel, in which images of feet and shoes take on a different weight in the framework of erotic obsession. The focus here is an odd one, which at first glance might appear to be pointless, but in fact accomplishes something important to understanding the rest of the film: it makes one pay attention to apparently minor details. The film opens with a pair of sexualized feet, a female's legs clad in knee-high lace up boots, which dangle in our view partially obscured by the newspaper of a plump man with a twitching, phallic cigar. He neglects to remove the paper; instead he peeks underneath it, interested only in the lightly bobbing legs and their leather casings. It slowly will become apparent that this man is us, the viewers. He takes pleasure in the world around him as if it was made for him; a spectacle of amusing shapes and sounds. The legs are carefully divorced from a face and body-- they are not a woman, but the idea of a woman, something which can be entirely possessed by the imagination. The Fat Man with the twitching cigar is distracted momentarily by an item in the newspaper, which tells of a debated murder or suicide of an old man. Without any fancy camera trick or visual announcement, we shoot back in time, and watch the events unfold that will lead to the newspaper article, and even to the boots.

The narrative of “Harbor Drift” is, at first glance, quite simple. A series of archetypal characters-- The Young Man, The Old Beggar, The Grifter, The Prostitute – are set into a series of motions circling a dropped pearl necklace. The Beggar sees its owner lose it an attempts to return it, but fails and pockets the necklace for his own benefit, as well as that of his associate, The Young Man. However, The Prostitute sees this transpire and begins to shadow the Beggar, with hopes of obtaining the necklace and passing it off to The Grifter for a profit. Things go downhill from there. The Prostitute discovers the friendship between the Beggar and the Young Man, and decides to exploit the Young Man's sexual desire to obtain the necklace. Onto her scheme, the Old Man carries the necklace on his person at all times. After The Grifter beats The Prostitute for failing to deliver her goods, the Young Man goes to force the necklace out of the Beggar's possession in order to save The Prostitute from her lot in life. A desperate, frantic chase along the docks and water results in the old man drowning to death, still clutching the pearls in his hand. A coda reveals him as the subject of the newspaper article, and when the Fat Man finally lowers his paper, we see who the boots belong to. The Prostitute, having separated from the Young Man, is back on her beat. The final punch: it turns out the pearls were fake all along.

This narrative could be an enjoyable series of confirmed expectations, but instead become startling. Not because of the direction the plot moves in, but because of the ways these archetypes are slowly transformed into human beings. Their attitudes become less flat, and begin to reveal hidden aspects: the Young Man, seemingly virtuous, is fickle and lustful. The Beggar, sometimes kind, is also greedy and cruel. The Prostitute is brutal only because she is scared, as one realizes while watching her as she washes her face and prepares breakfast. The film forces the viewer to misjudge, then reassess, all of these people. At first they appear merely to be characters, even stereotypes. But the film argues that underneath every stereotype there is a human being. It is this underlying humanity which is hidden in the details of the film, which one could almost gloss over, if it wasn't for the strange focus on feet and shoes, on the way hands touch the pearl necklaces and the way everyone looks at one another like hungry wolves. If the film was presented in a clean Hollywood style these intricacies would be lost.

The transformation of the characters into people runs parallel to a stylistic transformation from relative realism to expressionism. The result is a constant tension between character and cinematic style. Due to the slow evolution of this relationship, the tension cannot be easily dismissed. Every time one becomes complacent or comfortable, the film shifts slightly, and you are forced to reconsider everything once more. All this being said, the film is far from technically perfect. The rapid fire editing, clearly influenced by Soviet montage, is regularly a hindrance. Clearly the filmmakers believe that “lots of cuts = lots of energy,” a mistaken equation still made regularly by directors and editors to this day. There is none of the discourse between images one associates with Eisenstein, and what we are left with is a string of short, disparate images, which more often than not amount to nothing. Likewise, the use of title cards contributes almost nothing to the film; one gains some insight into the German movement against titles (exemplified in Murnau's “Der letzte Mann”) when reading these. Invariably they disrupt the flow, and provide information already gleaned by the expressions and attitudes of the actors.

The film reaches its visual height near its conclusion, in an arresting sequence of superimpositions which blend the various characters, locations and events into a solid stream of image. The interior thoughts of each individual, the city that surrounds them, and the physical actions they take all begin to merge in a series of almost abstract pulsations of light. In this sequence, the meaning of the film becomes apparent; It is a film about the modern city, and the effect that this city has on those who dwell in it. It is a social film, which sets out to force the attention of the spectator on the individuals that surround them every day. It aims to expose the result of the social structure created by urban life: the lower class human beings, transformed into rats, all clamoring and biting one another for a small piece of cheese. Finally the film insists that we, the Fat Men with twitching cigars, do not think of The Prostitute as a whore, but as a human being.

Viewed at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 01/14/2011.

Statement of Purpose

“Sight & Silence” is an effort to broaden the critical discourse available on silent and early sound cinema, with a special focus on theatrical screenings and unknown work. Remarkably, the silent era of cinema remains alien to many viewers and critics. A few established classics are cited over and over, and critical opinions seem to hover as much around history as aesthetics. “Sight & Silence” will attempt to treat early cinema as it is, that is not only as history but as art and entertainment.

We will attempt to cover as many silents as possible showing theatrically, primarily in the NYC area. Obviously our eyes and hands are limited in some respects, and certain films will fall between the cracks. Our primary focus will be on unknown and unreleased work, as famous silent films and directors can be read about extensively elsewhere. Our dedication is to forgotten cinema.

Secondarily to theatrical reviews, “Sight & Silence” will turn periodic attention to films not commercially available, but obtainable by means of internet trading communities. These sources are important in that they make otherwise inaccessible work available for study and reflection. Unlike commercial DVD releases, there are often limited critical sources available for the discussion of such work, which this site will attempt to remedy to some extent.