1915: Birth of an Industry

Let's leave behind 1914 (which truth be told was somewhat of a disappointment) and move to 1915. On the face of it, this is a year of masterpieces.  First and foremost is of course D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.  Hailed for its technical achievements but controversial for its positive depiction of the Ku Klux Klan, Birth is the first movie I have been chomping at the bit to get to.  It's available on NetFlix Watch Instantly, so this will definitely be on my review list.


Beyond Birth, AMC's Film Site recognizes The Tramp as Chaplin's first masterpiece.  I'll try to track that down.  Theda Bara became one of the first "sex symbols" in A Fool There Was.  And Lois Weber served as actress, director, writer and producer in The Hypocrites, a controversial film for its nudity.

Technically, a lot of innovations this year.  The first camera that allowed for close-ups without picking the whole thing up and moving it was used.  Thomas Ince created an assembly line system for producing movies that cut down on costs (as well as creativity).

Finally, a couple of important court cases get decided in 1915.  First, Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company was declared an illegal monopoly.  When the film industry was getting its start, Edison used his patents on camera equipment to control every aspect of film making and distribution.  After this case, Edison's company was broken up and all of the component studios except one almost immediately folded.

Second,the Supreme Court upheld the right of states to censor movies.  I discussed the censorship issue previously, but this is the decision that would lead to decades of oversight.


So what are we watching?  Birth of a Nation obviously and The Tramp if I can find it.  Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat is available on Netflix Watch Instantly so that seems likely.  Beyond that, I'm sure there will be a couple of surprises.

On a personal note, doing 100 years of movies leads to some easy mat so I can say I am officially 5% done!  I expect my pace will slow as we enter into the feature film era, but I am enjoying the experience so far.

Picture from iGuide

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In the Land of the War Canoes (1914)

There is a lot of watching boats in this one

In the Land of War Canoes is what I imagine you'd call a docudrama directed by Edward S. Curtis.  The director was a photographer who spent his life capturing the American Indians rituals and culture and this film represents a reenactment of how life might have been for the natives.

The basic plot follows a love story between a young Indian man and woman.  Through a tale of love and revenge, Curtis shows us traditional canoes, costumes, dances and rituals of his subject.

And bores me to tears in the process.

There is nothing about this that works.  Curtis' focus is entirely on the documentary side of his film, with almost no attention on the drama.  Advertising for this might have read "Marvel as a man stands on a shore watching a canoe paddle away!" or "Thrill to the sight of a Native American sleeping!"  The story is a way for Curtis to get from one traditional dance to the next.  It may work for a high school social studies class, but it is not something you need to experience if it's not for a grade.


The movie also suffers from the same problem as L'Inferno: the title cards all tell you exactly what is about to happen, then you watch it.  The movie would be incompehensible without the cards, but they did not have to be so literal.

I have to say something about the sound in this.  Apparently, in the 1970s, the movie was restored and a sound engineer recorded the sounds and music of Kwakiutl Indians. They also recorded sounds of canoes on the water and birds overhead.  This was added to the restored footage (I imagine) in the hope of making it sound authentic. Instead, it comes across as though the cast of Mystery Science Theater is talking in a foreign tongue over the whole movie.  Very annoying and distracting.

I can't recommend this one to anyone.  I am sure a lot of it is authentic, but it's not engaging. At all.

Watched on DVD from Netflix
Picture from Canadian Heritage Film Festival

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Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)

An ad for Gertie

Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short by Winsor McCay, the artist who we previously saw in Little Nemo.  The set up here is largely the same, with McCay making a bet with friends that he can make a moving dinosaur, some attempts at humor as he prepares the animation and finally a showing of the finished short.

For me, this effort was less successful than Little Nemo.  The animated portion of Gertie is straightforward in set up: a dinosaurus receives instructions from McCay in the form of title cards.  Sometimes he listens to the directions, sometimes not.  Little Nemo had this surreal nature which kept me interested.  Gertie follows the same dinosaur in front of the same background with almost no other characters.  The commands are simple like lifting up her left foot.  Not exactly a lot of drama.

The most amazing aspect of the animation is the historical significance.  This was produced prior to cel animation used by Disney.  Each frame was hand drawn by McCay and another artist.  The movements of Gertie are very smooth and precise, demonstrating McCay's attention to detail.

The non-animated set-up (as in Little Nemo) is painfully unfunny.  The animation is very well done, but not very interesting as a story.  Recommended for hard-core animation fans, but not anyone else.

Viewed on YouTube
Picture from Silent Movie Monsters

Random fact:  Gertie can still be seen today.  Recognizing the importance of McCay in the history of animation, Disney's Hollywood Studios includes an ice cream store shaped like Gertie.

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The Squaw Man (1914)

Interracial romance

The Squaw Man is considered by many to be the first feature film produced in Hollywood at 74 minutes.  Some claim it as the first feature film, period, though my own movie watching over the last two months demonstrate that is not true.  This also the first film by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, who co-directed with Oscar Apfel.

Jim and his cousin Henry are charged with overseeing a trust fund to support orphans and widows of the war. Henry embezzles from the fund to cover gambling debts and when the theft is discovered, Jim takes the fall.  Jim escapes the authorities and travels to the American west, where he is twice saved by an Indian woman. They eventually marry and have a son.  Will their troubled pasts find them in the deserts of Wyoming?

There's a lot here to like. There are some wonderful shots throughout, including a special effect on the boat traveling to America that gives it a real sense of movement and a saloon where you can literally see trains racing by outside the front door.  The story is engaging and has some great action set pieces including a tragic mountain climbing accident that is well choreographed and edited.

The film also deals with a presumably taboo subject for the time, interracial marriage.  When Jim actually marries the Indian woman, the minister is forced to do so at gunpoint.  Events will ultimately conspire to eliminate the interracial marriage, but the fact that the relationship is portrayed at all is notable.

That said, this movie has problems.  The scenes barely add up to the whole story.  It feels like large pieces of this are missing and extraneous pieces are added.  The boat he is traveling on catches fire and they are rescued by another ship. No aspect of that plays any role later in the film. There are random edits of secondary characters talking to one another without any context or explanation.

None of the characters ever feel like real people.  They are contrived simply to push the story to its next beat.  The directors often don't know where to point the camera as some scenes take place with characters barely in the view of the camera.  Most distracting to me were scenes early on that featured main characters with their back to the audience in the middle of the shot.

The acting is over the top in ways I have not seen in this marathon yet. Large hand gestures, deep emoting, but ultimately too showy.

Lots of stereotypes in this one, particularly with the native Americans.   The chief is shown to be an alcoholic and at the end of the film dons the full headdress of a your prototypical chief. 

DeMille clearly loved this story as he remade it twice (in 1918 and 1931).  It's an interesting first effort that demonstrates the ambition of the director even when it fails.  Overall, this one was just okay.

Watched on YouTube.
Picture from Three Movie Buffs

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Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914)

The Little Tramp

Here's a piece of film history.  Charlie Chaplin appears for the first time as his "Little Tramp"character in Kid Auto Races at Venice.  The plot of this one is pretty straightforward. A camera crew is attempting to film a kid's race, but one of the spectators keeps finding his way into the director's viewfinder.  How can the film crew get rid of this guy without getting him killed by the oncoming traffic?

I was a little underwhelmed by this one.  I expected it to be something more than the same joke over and over.  The only thing that keeps it from being entirely boring is Chaplin's performance.  All of his physical humor is on display here.  I love the way he nonchalantly wanders into the shot.

Early in the film the movie pans to follow Chaplin across the race course.  It is also important to note that this movie is the first I have watched that is improved. The main actors went to an actual race with their camera crew and figured out there movie on site.  All of the spectators were just there for a race.

This one is good for the Chaplin completist, but otherwise wears out its welcome quickly, despite being only six minutes long.  One interesting note: there are apparently multiple cuts of this film.  The movie is listed at 11 minutes long in multiple place.  The only cuts i could find average a little more than half of that.

Watched on YouTube
Picture from Look Back in Anger

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1914: USA! USA!

Cecil B. DeMille

1914 is the year that establishes American dominance in film. This was obviously because of the important technological advancements the country was developing as well as the emergence of artists unparalleled...

Okay, it was because of a war.

Europe was subsumed by World War I in 1914 and the U.S. was left as the only game in town.  Hollywood established itself the year prior as the center of the American film universe and that fact, combined with the shuttering of Europe's studios in support of the war effort, led to America's foremost place as THE place for film in the world.  After the war, American films dominated Europe because the movies had recouped their costs in the U.S.  The stalled European studios started closing and Hollywood became the predominant force.

Some important names got their start in 1914.  Cecil B. DeMille made his first film, The Squaw Man, which became a success in part because of the marketing by Samuel Goldfish.  DeMille would go on to direct some of the biggest and most successful movies ever produced, including The Ten Commandments.  And Goldfish would change his name to Goldwyn and found a studio that we call MGM.

All of that and I have not even mentioned that Charlie Chaplin's first appearance as his "Little Tramp" character in Kid Auto Races at Venice.  Or that Jesse L. Lasky started releasing films under the newly-formed Paramount Pictures Corporation.

So what are we watching this year?  Unlike 1913, there is a real lack of 1914 films on Netflix, so it looks like we are back to the web.  The Squaw Man is available and I am hoping to watch Kid Auto Races at Venice as well.  I'll have to find a couple of others (perhaps The Spoilers which was later remade several times starring unknowns like John Wayne and Gary Cooper).

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Traffic in Souls (1913)

Early exploitation film

After a brief hiatus, I'm back with a classic from 1913, Traffic in Souls.  The film was directed by George Loane Tucker and was one of the most expensive, but successful films of its time.

The lives of two sisters and their invalid father are shattered when one of the sisters goes missing.  The family fears for her safety as they are very aware that woman are being abducted and forced into slavery.  Can the police and the family find the woman in the bustling metropolis of New York?

This was one of the first feature films to focus on delivering a social message to the masses.  The movie feeds into a very real fear amongst women at the time: that they would be abducted and forced into prostitution. The film depicts in detail how the white slave trade works, following recent immigrants off of boats and trains and tricking them into their own capture.  Some of the methods used by the slavers seem lees than authentic, but that's to be forgiven in a 74 minute film. 

The movie also was one of the first exploitation films.  The advertising explicitly sold the sexual aspects of the movie (which seem downright quaint now) and the movie features misogynistic slavers, including one prepared to whip one of the slaves into submission.  Depictions of the white slave trade would later be banned under the Hays Code in the 1930s.

Technically, there is not a lot of innovative camera work here.  The camera basically remains in the same position for each scene.  There is an amazing shot of the head of the slavery ring descending the steps of the jail from an overhead angle and a well done pan across multiple jail cells.  Where the movie shines is in the editing. There are a lot of quick cuts between scenes and character and, despite the multiple plotlines, you never get lost.  The acting is solid, but never showy which lends the film an almost documentary feel.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this movie.  The first half showing the slave trade mechanics was much more interesting than the latter half.  The ultimate plot resolution involves a big coincidence and shows the local police methods in sometime monotonous detail ("let's show the viewer that every exit of the building is covered").  However, the film is briskly edited (a rarity in this time period) in a method rivaling D.W. Griffith and the plot structure following multiple characters reminded me of more recent films like Traffic and Crash.  Compared to most of the other movies I have watched, Traffic in Souls seems ahead of its time.

Watched on DVD from Netflix

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