Artsfest Film Festival: Dark Narrative Explorations

Image from Carny

100 Years of Movies recently took a break from our chronological project to attend the Artsfest Film Festival in Harrisburg. The film festival is programed by the folks at Moviate and ran from May 27 through May 30.

The "Dark Narrative Exploration" session screened four films deal with horror and violence. I found things to recommend about each of them, but my favorite was the first short, The Grave by Alexander Monelli. A lone gravedigger works to create a space for another coffin when a bell in front of one of the tombstones starts ringing. The bell is tied to a rope that goes into a coffin buried ten years earlier. The digger flees in horror, but must decide if he can face his fears.

Monelli makes effective use of a creepy location and conceit and rings everything he can from it. The camera is always in just the right place and the ending is both perfect and stays with you. The movie's only real failing is its lack of budget and crew. The costumes are a little too neat and the overall feel is that of a really well done student film (which is what it is). I would love to see this film redone with more money and people.

Where The Grave's violence is primarily imagined, Matthew Garrett's Beating Hearts is the goriest entry of the four, but it uses its violence well. The film follows the violent consequences of a too-close-for-comfort relationship between a man and his granddaughter. It's subject matter is very disturbing, more so because of just how well made and acted the film is. Seeing it once was enough for me, which is a statement on how effective it is. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

Giuseppe Capasso's 108.1 FM Radio

If The Grave is "Tales from the Darkside" and Beating Hearts is "Masters of Horror," the Giuseppe Capasso's 108.1 FM Radio is the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" of the bunch. The setup is simple: A man picks up a hitchhiker just as the radio is reporting a story about a hitcher who killed a family earlier that evening. Each man is suspicious of the other. But just who is the murderer?

My appreciation for this short has faded a bit since I saw it. There are plot elements that only serve to manipulate the audience. Still, it's atmospheric and creepy in the best possible way.  And, it has an ending I did not see coming.

Finally, there was Carny, a film by Kevin Lonano which has impressive production design and establishes a great tone, but which has a confusing and slight story. Stay for the characters and the creepy Tim Burtonesque costumes and makeup, but don't think too hard about the plot which follows a magician's assistant in danger of being replaced for her age.

All four films were well-crafted so, if they screen at a festival near you (and you like your films a bit dark and twisted), they are worth a look.

The Grave trailer:

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Artsfest Film Festival: Experimental Short Films

100 Years of Movies recently took a break from our chronological project to attend the Artsfest Film Festival in Harrisburg. The film festival is programed by the folks at Moviate and ran from May 27 through May 30.

The experimental short session included films ranging from 2 to 13 minutes long. My favorite was easily Slow Fall by Neil Ira Needleman. Using the color palette of autumn as well as some sparse imaginings of branches, Needleman evokes a season that looks ablaze one moment and barren the next. The film brings a sensation of floating and the reflection of colors against the water. It's beautiful to look at and paced well.

Memento Mori by Scott Klinger is the longest of the bunch and follows a woman through a burned out landscape while she reflects on times before some unseen catastrophe. The images of the woman are rendered in a very cinematic black and white which contrasts starkly with the home video quality of her memories. The thoughts themselves seem to bid her farewell as she heads for the ocean and her end. The film makes you think about as you reach the end of your life. Haunting and beautiful.

Christine Lucy Latimer brought three shorts to the festival. The only one I enjoyed was Focus. In it, Latimer takes frames of Super 8 and places them individually on frames of 16mm. The resulting 2 minute film requires the audience to concentrate in order to follow the jumping image at the center of the screen. For me the effect both made me aware I was watching a piece of celluloid, breaking the illusion we experience in most trips to the multiplex. It also made the audience work to understand the images, providing a potent counterpoint on how simple and easy the typical moviegoing experience has become.

Memento Mori

The first film shown was Format, where Latimer shows a Super 8 film on a wall and then films that before pulling the camera back to film the LCD screen on another video camera. It's 4 minutes, but feels like it's twice as long and is too on-the-nose to have an impact. In her third film, Fruit Flies, she mounted a collection of dead fruit flies from her kitchen on film and unspooled that for two minutes. It's better than Format, but it feels like more of an exercise than a film. That said, it's the best film featuring fruit fly carcasses I have ever seen.

Fever Dream by Kevin Vogrin follows a woman through a vaguely winter cityscape. It evokes the disorientation the main character's feeling and keeps the audience unsettled. The swirling camera makes it hard to focus on anything except the occasional random shot of Santa Claus. That said, at seven minutes, it feels a little too long.

Winged by Jennifer Hardacker views two young boys through the eyes of their mother. The film juxtaposes images of young birds with the children. We see predators whose shadow threatens them. It's beautifully realized, but inclusion of text from a horoscope took me out of the imagery of the film.

VAN GOGH'S GARDEN by Warren Bass is a fun distillation of Van Gogh's color palette set to a bouncy score. For the three minutes it's on, it washes over you. The mood dissipates as quickly as it arrives.

Cloud and Bird and Birds at Night (Might Fall) are animations by American animator Bridget Riversmith. The first is a (primarily) black and white film that uses images of a rabbit in a meadow and a bird soaring amongst the clouds to evoke a Japanese haiku. The second follows a couple who fall asleep while driving and turn into birds as their car plummets over a cliff. I liked Birds at Night (Might Fall) more, particularly the way it was animated (the subtle change that turns arms into wings for example).

The session ended with Deux Petits Bateaux a cut out animation that follows a couple as they dance to phonograph on their boat. When the record player goes overboard, the sea life joins in the dance party. There was a whimsy and imagination to the film, particularly with little touches like the musical notes constructed from sea shells. It's a light, fun short and the perfect sorbet before heading into another round of movies.

Below are embedded versions of some of the films:

Fruit Flies:


Format:

Format from Christine Lucy Latimer on Vimeo.

Focus:

Focus from Christine Lucy Latimer on Vimeo.

Fever Dream:



Cloud and Bird Trailer:


Birds at Night (Might Fall) Trailer:


Deux Petits Bateaux

Deux Petits Bateaux from Kate Raney on Vimeo.

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Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925)

Put it on a postcard

Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

Produced by Paramount Pictures 

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life is a great movie. 
 
I feel like I need to get that out of the way up front.  See, it's a silent documentary.  It's hard enough to get people interested in documentaries.  Add the word "silent" and you may as well be spraying mace in their face while dropping a safe on their foot.  But there is a great argument against that line of thinking.  And that argument is: Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life. 
 
The film is about Bakhtiari tribe in then-Persia (northern Iran today) as they make one of their twice-a-year migrations over a harsh wilderness to find grazing fields for the livestock. They migration includes over fifty thousand people and a half a million animals.
 
Within the last century, during a time when my grandparents were alive, during a time when people were driving cars and going to the movies, there was a tribe in the Middle East that would spend a month and a half migrating to greener pastures.  They would cross a raging river either by swimming or by floating on make-shift rafts made buoyant by inflated goat skins.  They would ascend vertical cliffs hundreds of feet high.  They would cross a snow covered mountain in bare feet.  They did all of this while carrying and dragging goats and cows.  And then they would reach their pasture land.  Not all would survive.  And a few short months later they would travel back by the same route all over again.

As a viewer, you sit there in amazement at what these people go through.  Perhaps most shocking of all is how matter-of-fact the whole affair is treated.  This is their life.  There is no moaning or groaning about how hard they have it.  They simply set out to accomplish the tasks that need to be accomplished.  The men dig trenches in the snow.  The women carry babies in baskets on their backs.  It's the way things are.

During the migration, the documentary filmmakers stay back and use title cards to either set the stage or point out details viewers might otherwise miss.  They will tell helpfully tell you to look for the woman carrying a calf on her back as she scales a mountain in the center of the frame.  The title cards substitute for voiceover or special effects that would focus your attention in the frame.

The filmmakers have a knack for knowing exactly where to point the camera.  The imagery throughout the documentary is picturesque and they take full advantage of the sprawling landscape their subjects provide them. They manage to convey both sheer scale of the endeavor and the individual travails of members of the tribe. 

The small black dots? Animals being swept down river.

There are moments that stick with me.  Calves and goats being swept down river by crushing currents.  The tribe placing a calf on a raft in the hopes that the mother will swim across after it.  The men of the tribe shedding what little footwear they have to dig a path through the snow for the rest of the barefoot tribe.   

The migration itself is the latter half of the film and by far the better part.  The first half deals with the documentary crew's travel from Angora (modern day Ankara) to the tribe.  They encounter everything from sandstorms to the local police force.  There are aspects that were interesting but you feel the filmmakers' presence more in this half. 
 
Some of the moments in the early going feel staged.  There are kids shown standing in a market who run off-camera.  Then the scene cuts to (presumably) those same children running across the path of our documentary crew.  It feels like someone is yelling "action!". 
 
We are introduced to a local constabulary and witness a "policeman's ball" that takes place at night.  We know it's night because of a blue tint on the film, but doesn't that mean it was filmed during the day and tinted?  I don't know enough about camera technologies for filming at night in the middle of the desert in the 1920s, but it seems unlikely the events transpired exactly as advertised. 
 
Even then, we get moments that tell us something we didn't know before.  For me, it's a shot of a baby on a cradle with no sides who is tied to the base of the bed.  I had never consider where a baby might sleep in a desert tribal setting. Or the scene of a hunter clutching a kite-like device with eye holes cut through it.  The mechanism is colored to camouflage him against the rocks.  How would a hunter sneak up on prey in this environment?  Again, not something you think about.
 
Grass is not a good documentary for its time; it's a good documentary for any era.  As I casually commute to work in my Honda tomorrow, the harsh life of people half a world away will be first and foremost in my mind. And that's thanks to the visuals and storytelling of Cooper and Schoedsack.
 
**** out of *****
 
NOTE: In a bizarre coincidence, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the directors and stars of Grass, would direct King Kong eight years later.  Kong of course features animation by Willis O'Brien who played a major role in The Lost World, the previous 1925 film we reviewed.

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Comparing The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933)

The Lost World is Willis O'Brien's first venture into feature length stop-motion animation.  He will of course create one of the most iconic "performances" on film in King Kong eight years later.  But I couldn't help but notice some eerie similarities between the films.  Did you notice:

1. Dinosaur Animation.  It's obvious, but both films feature Willis' stop-motion animation of dinosaurs.  The battles here are more abbreviated, but already the animator is imbuing his creations with personality.  See the brontosaurus' snarl as the allosaurus prepares to attack.

2. A driven self-promoter whose hubris becomes his undoing.  In The Lost World, Professor Challenger is obsessed with finding the dinosaurs to prove his value to the scientific community and then, when the opportunity presents itself, he brings one back home to London.  In King Kong, filmmaker Carl Denham is obsessed with showing the world this uncharted island, then decides to bring the ape back to New York.

3. Bringing large, untamed animals to populated areas is a bad idea.  Challenger's brontosaurus and Denham's Kong both run amuck in densely populated areas.  At least it ends better for the brontosaurus.

4. Monkeys love women.  One of the side stories in The Lost World is a monkey's devotion to our heroine Paula.  In King Kong, same thing but with a larger primate.

5. Walking across logs doesn't is not advisable.  When the fellowship in The Lost World crosses a log to enter the land of dinosaurs, one of the creatures knocks the log over, stranding the group.  In King Kong, our title ape removes a log bridging a chasm to attack the human invaders to his land.

6. Remote areas are ideal breeding grounds for monsters.  Skull Island and The Lost World's plateau both use natural elements to shield their unusual denizens from easy discovery by the outside world.

Did I miss anything?

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The Lost World (1925)

Directed by Harry O. Hoyt

Starring Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, and Bessie Love  Willis O'Brien's dinosaurs

Produced by First National Pictures

Professor Challenger has a problem.  He has traveled to the Amazon and is convinced that dinosaurs exist in the middle of uncharted territories.  No one believes him and the scientific community has made him a laughing stock.  Undeterred, he sets out to put together a new expedition to prove his findings.

Ed Malone also has a problem though his is both smaller and larger than Challenger's (after all, what's bigger than love?).  He doesn't have the eyes of the scientific community on him, but he does have Gladys.  He wants to marry her, but she puts him off.  She wants a man who has faced death and danger, and Malone's boring life as a journalist doesn't do it for her.

Malone hears of Challenger's expedition and offers to go.  He needs to prove his bravery to Gladys and maybe get the mother of all stories.  Challenger hates journalists, but agrees once Malone gets his newspaper to finance the trip.

Along for the adventure are Sir John Roxton (the famous game hunter), Professor Summerlee (one of Challenger's biggest skeptics) and Paula White.  We soon learn that the trip isn't just to reclaim Challenger's status, but also to rescue Paula's father who has been stranded on the plateau where the fierce creatures supposedly live.

Off we go on the adventure!  The group travels to the Amazon and soon comes to the plateau where Challenger's alleged dinosaurs reside.  They climb onto the plateau, but are immediately stranded there.  Will they find the fabled beasts and clear Challenger's name?  Or will they be foiled by a random, missing-link-looking guy (don't ask)?  Will Paula find her father?  And will Malone end up falling in love with the young Miss White over the course of their travels?

The Lost World has problems, serious problems, and believe me I will get there.  But first, we have to talk about what works.  

The dinosaurs.

The dinosaur portions as realized by animator Willis O'Brien are epic and gorgeous.  There is some choppy moments of animation, but the dinosaurs all have character in their movements and facial expressions that exceed even the humans (more on that later).  We have an allosaurus that attacks anything that moves.  A triceratops that protects its young.  A pterodactyl that... well, doesn't do much of anything.  And a brontosaurus that is docile unless threatened.

There are set pieces here that thrill.  The allosaurus' fight with the triceratops is fantastic.  The allosaurus' attack on the human's camp is thrilling if a bit too brief.  The dinosaurs' frantic escape from an erupting volcano near the end is exciting, but a bit disjointed.

Nothing however beats the climax.  Challenger and his crew bring a live brontosaurus back to London where things naturally go horribly wrong.  The brontosaurus rampages through the streets of the city knocking over buildings and ultimately collapsing the Tower bridge.  The animation is perfect as is the combination of the creature with the humans.

So what doesn't work?  Almost everything else.

The acting is pretty ham-fisted with the exception of Wallace Beery as Challenger.  He has one note to play, one cantankerous, arrogant note, but he nails it throughout.  The rest of the cast is bland.  When Lloyd Hughes as Malone calls Challenger to inform him the creature has escaped, he is almost emotionless.  No panic. No urgency.  He may have been going over a grocery list.

The romance between Malone and Paula almost came as a complete surprise.  They were the only main actors who seemed like they were under the age of forty, so naturally, they need to come together.  But when Malone professes his love, it's not based on anything we've seen.  Paula wisely points out that Malone has a girlfriend back home, while Malone retorts that as long as they are lost together, they can have each other.  This makes sense to Paula for some reason, but when they do escape from the plateau, they go their separate ways.  Malone back to Gladys and Paula to Roxton. 

How do Malone and Paula get together?  Turns out Gladys married while Malone was gone.  So Malone walks over to Paula and Roxton, the older man gives an "oh well" shrug and off the lovebirds go.  Silly.

The impetus for the adventure is to find Paula's father.  So naturally they find him... dead.  No real discussion about it.  Just a pile of bones and a picture of his daughter.  Again, it's unsatisfying.

There is a subplot involving a Neanderthal/missing link creature who keeps trying throw a monkeywrench into the travelers' plans.  The missing link himself is more Larry Talbot than Encino Man.  And it's not clear why he cares what is going on.  Or why he has a chimpanzee for a sidekick.

But really all this plot stuff is just a device to get us to the spectacle.  When The Lost World is dull, it is painful, but when it soars, it's epic.  

***1/2 out of *****

NOTES: Yes, that really is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introducing the film in the beginning.

I watched the Image cut of this which runs over 90 minutes.  Apparently, there are 30 minute and 60 minute versions out there.  

I'm pretty sure this is the origin story for the Loch Ness Monster.

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1925: Sit Back, Relax and Enjoy the First In-Flight Movie... About Dinosaurs Attacking Humans

Pic is actually from 1925 (with a horrible cut and paste by me)

Goodbye 1924, hello 1925!

Let's set the stage.  Calvin Coolidge takes the oath of office and becomes the first President to transmit his inauguration speech live over the radio.  3M invents scotch tape (it's designed for automobile paint jobs, but soon becomes the gift wrapping staple we know and love).  Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf.  Fortunately, no one will ever listen to this guy, right?  And in monument news, Mount Rushmore is dedicated (and Alfred Hitchcock gets an idea, yay!) and the Sphinx in Egypt is opened (and gave Michael Bay an idea, boo!).

In Hollywood, the film industry is settling into a groove.  The year 1925 sees the formation of the Central Casting Corporation to supply extras for film productions.  I'm assuming that's where we get the saying "he's right out of central casting"?  Willis O'Brien provides the animation for The Lost World, a film where humans head to the Amazon to prove that dinosaurs still exist.  That same year, The Lost World is also the first in-flight movie ever shown on a London-to-Paris flight. Sci-fi disaster flick as in-flight entertainment?  Where do I sign up?

As far as movies I'll be watching, my mouth is absolutely watering at this line up.  We have the aforementioned The Lost World.  Chaplin's Gold Rush (yeah, I mistakenly said it was a 1924 film in my previous write-up).  Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera (Universal monster alert!).  Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (really cannot wait to dig into it).  Grass, a documentary about a nomadic migration (I know you are on the edge of your seat with that description, but I love documentaries).  Buster Keaton's Seven Chances.  Rudolph Valentino's The Eagle.  And that's just the stuff on Netflix Watch Instantly!  Beyond these, I'll be trying to see the original, non-chuck Heston Ben-Hur, The Black Cyclone (which, and I am not making this up, is a Western focused on a horse love triangle) and Little Annie Rooney (a Mary Pickford tale so I'm guessing I know what I'm in for already).

On paper, this is the strongest line-up of any year yet.  Can't wait to dig in!

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The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924)

Directed by Mauritz Stiller
Starring Lars Hanson, Gerda Lundequist and Greta Garbo
Produced by Svensk Filmindustri

Gösta Berling, a priest in a small town, is hitting the bottle.  Hard.  A bishop hears of his antics and is dispatched to investigate.  Gösta delivers an impassioned and fiery sermon to the congregation, but follows it up with an outburst against the believers.  He is defrocked and cast out.

Alone, Gösta wanders the land until he is taken in by a countess at an estate called Borg.  The former priest begins tutoring the countess' step-daughter Ebba and the two begin to fall in love... which of course was all part of the countess' plan.  If Ebba marries a commoner, she forfeits her inheritance and the Borg estate will go to the countess' son Henrik and his new wife Elisabeth.

The countess' plot comes to light at a banquet hosted at a neighboring estate known as Ekeby.  The owners of Ekeby, a major and his wife, throw lavish affairs where their "knights" serve as entertainment.  The knights are in fact more like court jesters and entertainers.  Ebba is shocked by her step-mother's plan and a heartbroken Gösta leaves Borg to join the knights at Ekeby.

Can Gösta find love?  And what other secrets will be revealed over the course of this tale?

The Saga of Gösta Berling, like many silent dramas, is a melodrama.  The danger in melodrama is it either works or it doesn't, there is never a middle ground.  Either the actors and story draw you in enough to buy the flourishes, or it's all too over the top and calculated to ever be satisfying.

Gösta Berling works.  Better than that, it shines.

The Saga of Gösta Berling is first and foremost a tale of flawed and fallen humans, all seeking redemption.  And their penance can only come through connecting with another soul.  If Gösta can find love, he will no longer be the defrocked man of God.  Elisabeth is married, but isolated as she comes to realize her husband is someone she doesn't recognize.  For some it is too late: the major's wife gave up her love for a poor man to marry into wealth and her existence is a private hell she hides from in banquets and plays.

There is a lot to love here, but I have to start with the virtuoso directing of Mauritz Stiller.  He uses the frozen landscape of Sweden as the backdrop and it fits his story perfectly.    The film's camerawork complements its themes and does so in a series of beautiful moments.

Stiller also nails the pacing.  The film has a cadence that just pulled me through the trials and tribulations of these characters.  Just when things are slowing down, we see the next secret revealed and were right back in the middle of the action.  And when all of the character twists and turns threaten to overwhelm, we get a couple of action set pieces in the final third.

The movie opens with a scene from the middle of the tale.  The knights are enjoying their usual merriment in their barracks when Gösta calls for the 13th knight to appear.  Suddenly, a creature emerges from the fireplace and explains he can't stay long; he's here to pick up the soul of a knight.  The men look around nervously, before Gösta reveals it's a prank by removing the co-conspirator's mask.

The scene is the perfect set up for the rest of the movie.  Beyond showing us that the knights are a jovial lot, the scene sets the stakes immediately: Gösta's soul is at stake.  He's broken and needs to be reassembled or  he will find himself in hell. It's a theme repeated again and again throughout the movie.

The actors here are all good, but not great.  Lars Hanson plays Berling with a Sweeney Todd haircut and wide eyes.  All of the actors engage in some grand gestures and over-the-top moments, but there's a lot of subtlety to the players' work here as well.  Greta Garbo was discovered by Hollywood thanks to this film and its easy to see why.  She's tremendous.

That's not to say the whole movie works.  At one point, Ekeby is burnt to the ground.  There's a lot of tension as the fire is set and the knights begin trying to escape.  Then it keeps going on.  And on.  Gösta escapes by a different route then everyone else, but the movie never provides a great sense of location.  I have no idea where he is in the house or what he is doing.

The film also reaches a moment of character overload.  The Sinclairs are shown as minor characters who run in the same social circles as the residents of Borg and Ekeby.  Halfway through the film, they take on a larger role, then shrink right back into the background very quickly.  They all have very superficial motivation, made all the more obvious by the detailed back stories and arcs the rest of the main cast get.

In the scope of a three hour epic, these are minor quibbles.  One of the joys of exploring each year of film in a haphazard and random way is you make discoveries.  The Saga of Gösta Berling was not on my radar before.  Now, I'll never forget it.

**** out of *****

Memorable line:  "You won't escape by turning yourself into a beautiful corpse.  Don't you know that most people are dead already?"

NOTE: The film is based on the novel of the same name by Selma Langerlöf.  The book was loved in Sweden (it's considered the Swedish Gone with the Wind) and critical reception of the movie there at the time was not great.  People thought the book was better.  I guess some things never change.

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