Animation has progressed from hand-drawn cels and stop motion techniques to computer generated imaging capable of producing incredible special effects. Radio has moved from local to satellite broadcasting. Thanks to the Internet, podcasts now offer a popular way for individuals to build a brand as they develop a niche following.
With Netflix and Amazon becoming the new titans of film production, distribution models have undergone startling changes. Theatrical releases now take second place to streaming (some films only have limited runs in cinemas in order to qualify for industry awards). HBO has become one of the largest producers of top-of-the-line documentaries.
Some television series are now being released in ways that facilitate binge watching rather than insisting audiences sit tight through an entire season in order to simultaneously experience the suspense of dramas like Queer As Folk, The West Wing, and Six Feet Under.
Meanwhile, the concept of selling subscription series to theatre, ballet, opera, and symphony audiences has been subverted by mobile apps that make it easier to purchase single tickets online. The Metropolitan Opera recently announced plans to switch from Monday night performances (which used to have the highest number of subscribers, many of whom belonged to an elite audience) to Sunday matinees.
Though today's technology makes it so much more practical for consumers to purchase tickets on a whim, it has made it increasingly difficult for nonprofit performing arts organizations (that must now work harder for every earned dollar) to take risks with unfamiliar repertoire.
There's no question that the digitization of the entertainment industry has led to previously unthinkable advances in sound, lighting, distribution, and film restoration. Nevertheless, it helps to remember that, during the 1920s, silent film witnessed an explosion of innovation and experimentation from a generation of artists and entrepreneurs learning how to work with moving images.
Curiously, some stories never seem to lose their appeal (especially when they involve women who have been unlucky in love). During its December 1st mini-festival entitled A Day of Silents, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival screened two intriguing melodramas. One was a classic case of a story being "ripped from the headlines." The other showed a filmmaker experimenting with a new art form to create cinematic montages that captured a mood without needing to rely on any kind of speech.
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In his 1923 film, Coeur Fidèle, French filmmaker Jean Epstein aimed to create “a melodrama so stripped of all the conventions ordinarily attached to the genre, so sober, so simple, that it might approach the nobility and excellence of tragedy.” At its heart, his film told the story of a doomed romantic triangle.Marie (Gina Manès) is a young woman who, as an orphan, was adopted by a couple that owns a restaurant near the docks in Marseille. Unbeknownst to her parents, she has been seeing a tall, handsome, and sensitive dockworker named Jean (Léon Mathot). As far as her parents are concerned, she is little more than a financial burden who works as a servant in their business.
When a small-time thug named Petit Paul (Edmond van Daële) shows an interest in Marie, her parents are only too happy to get rid of their adopted daughter. Despite her protestations, Petit Paul drags her away. To celebrate, he takes her to a fairground, where he obviously loves the thrill of the rides and the excitement of the crowd. Marie, however, is limp and despondent. When Jean shows up, the two men fight and a policeman is accidentally stabbed. Petit Paul disappears in the crowd, but Jean is arrested and sentenced to a year in jail.
By the time Jean is released from jail, Petit Paul has moved to another town, where he and Marie live in a squalid apartment. Not only is their infant sick, Marie has to cope with the domestic abuse that ensues whenever Petit Paul has enough money to get drunk. When Jean finally locates Marie, he tries to help support her by using her crippled next door neighbor (Marie Epstein) as an intermediary. But when Petit Paul overhears some local women gossiping about Marie's new lover, he returns home with a gun. As the two men fight, the gun falls to the floor and the crippled neighbor manages to pick it up and shoot Petit Paul.
The film ends with a surprising twist. Now living together in what should have been bliss, Jean and Marie are back at the fairground on the same ride she was once forced to endure with Petit Paul. Unfortunately, his death has cast a pall over her relationship with Jean. Though Marie appears happy and carefree, Jean now looks like a man who has been trapped by the old adage that "No good deed goes unpunished."
Noting that Epstein wanted to make a movie in which "nothing much happens" (it is rumored that the filmmaker and his sister, Marie, wrote the story in one night), Monica Nolan explains in her program essay that:
“Epstein was in pursuit of photogénie, that elusive quality sought after by French avant-garde filmmakers, which at its most basic level can be understood as the opposite of all that was static and theatrical in films of the day. He gives us soulful superimpositions of Marie’s face floating on the waves; he films on location in Marseille’s gritty port; he employs close-ups, inserts, tracking shots, in-motion POV shots. He dreamed of filming on a merry-go-round or an airplane; in Coeur Fidèle he realized his dream. He told his melodramatic tale using every cinematic technique in the book, and inventing some new ones.”
“In the dazzling carnival sequence, time and space collapse as miserable Marie and gloating Petit Paul whirl on the merry-go-round, their surroundings blurred, their dizzying ride deconstructed into dozens and dozens of shots, some no longer than a few frames. It’s a jaw-dropping, deservedly famous sequence. His whirling couple achieve a kind of frenetic horror, the abstraction forcing us to see this stale situation with fresh eyes. In the film’s final sequence, as the neighbor chases Petit Paul through the streets and up the stairs, losing her crutch and crawling desperately after him, melodrama and visual pyrotechnics fuse into pure film poetry.”One of the advantages of watching silent film at a festival that uses live musicians is the chance to experience a film with a different soundscape than what one might hear on a DVD. At the Castro Theatre, the screening of Coeur Fidèle was accompanied by one of my favorite ensembles, the Alloy Orchestra (a percussion ensemble that bring such intense levels of suspense to cinema that it sometimes makes the audience feel as if their heads are about to explode). In the following video, you can watch the entire film with a noticeably different style of accompaniment. Equally powerful musical compositions, both beautifully support the drama.
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Long before the Law & Order and CSI franchises became two of television's most impressive cash cows, numerous tales of heartbreak and murder had made their way to the screen. A famous example from 1915 is the murder of Leonard Topp by his lover, Gabrielle Darley. According to Fritzi Kramer:“She swore that she hadn’t meant to kill him that New Year’s Eve. Gabrielle had brought the pistol along for self-defense and it had been tucked in her fur muff when it fired the fatal shot. Her defense attorney, Earl Rogers, offered up a hole in the muff as evidence. The prosecutor saw it differently and declared, ‘If that isn’t a moth hole, I’ll eat the muff!’ Rogers objected on the grounds that the prosecutor had failed to offer evidence that he had ever actually eaten a muff. The spectators giggled, the jury smiled, and the case continued. Darley was acquitted after a deliberation of just eight minutes. As a trial-as-entertainment, it had been a masterpiece.”
“As Darley told it, she was a naïve waitress barely out of her teens when she fell under the power of Topp, the charming bounder who promised to make her his bride but was merely interested in being her mack. A free woman after the verdict, Darley was whisked away to the home of the famous singer and philanthropist Lark Ellen, whom Rogers had invited to the trial to prove to the jury that the smart set sided with Darley. The defense attorney’s daughter, Adela Rogers St. Johns, continued the story in the November 1924 issue of Smart Set magazine in a piece entitled 'Gabrielle of the Red Kimono.'"
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| Poster art for 1925's The Red Kimona |
Directed by Walter Lang and produced by Dorothy Davenport (Wallace Reid’s widow), the The Red Kimona is an adaptation of the Darley-Topp saga. The following year, a play by Maurine Dallas Watkins would introduce Broadway audiences to Roxie Hart (the silent film version of Chicago was released in 1927). Years later, defense attorney Earl Rogers would become the inspiration for Erle Stanley Gardner's famous detective, Perry Mason.
Viewers first see Gabrielle (Priscilla Bonner) doing most of the chores in an unhappy family situation in New Orleans. After being lured into prostitution, she meets the dashingly handsome Howard Blaine (Carl Miller), who gives her the old "humped and dumped" treatment when he blows town for Los Angeles.
Convinced that Howard really loves her, Gabrielle follows him out to the West Coast, only to find him trying on wedding rings in a jewelry store. Overcome by his callousness, she reaches into her pocket, grabs a petite, ladylike gun, and shoots him dead. During her trial, she catches the eye of Mrs. Beverly Fontaine (Virginia Pearson), a wealthy socialite who collects strays like Gabrielle to show off to her friends while using them as trophies that will attract media attention to enhance her social status.
Fontaine's chauffeur, Fred (Theodore von Eltz), takes a liking to Gabrielle and warns his employer that he's on to her tricks. One day, he takes Gabrielle to the Venice pier, where they get a taste of freedom while riding a roller-coaster. Soon, Mrs. Fontaine sends Fred on an errand to Sacramento. During his absence Gabrielle says something which embarrasses Fontaine in front of her friends. She promptly throws the young woman out of her house so that she can rescue a new underdog who will help keep her name in the papers.
Upon returning from Sacramento, Fred is horrified to learn what has happened and starts to search for Gabrielle (who, after visiting her former prison matron for advice, is headed back to New Orleans). He makes it to the train station just moments after her train departs. By the time Fred arrives in New Orleans, it becomes impossible to find the woman he now realizes he loves.
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| Fred (Tyrone Power, Sr.) and Gabrielle (Priscilla Bonner) reunite in New Orleans in 1925's The Red Kimona |
While there is a happy ending to The Red Kimona, the film was planned to showcase an ongoing social justice problem facing women who have fallen from grace: the inability to find employment (much less get a second chance in life).
"Reformers were among the great recurring villains of the silent era, ready to snatch infants from their mothers’ bosoms and expose the darkest secrets of fragile waifs who were then turned out into blizzards," explains Kramer. "In The Red Kimona, these reformers were given another layer: cattiness. Gabrielle is there to provide them with salacious details so that they can revel in the sin while simultaneously condemning it. Red Kimona scenarist Dorothy Arzner later directed Dance, Girl, Dance, which featured burlesque dancer Maureen O’Hara giving similarly smirking high hats the lecture of a lifetime.”
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| Following her acquittal, Gabrielle (Priscilla Bonner) visits her former prison matron in The Red Kimona |
The Red Kimona gained an unexpected legacy after the real Gabrielle Darley married Bernard Melvin in 1919. The press had a field day with the news and Darley (claiming that, because her name had not been changed in the script, the 1925 film ruined her reputation as a dutiful wife) sued for damages in the amount of $50,000. As noted on Wikipedia:
"In Melvin v. Reid (1931), an ex-prostitute was charged with murder and then acquitted; she subsequently tried to assume a quiet and anonymous place in society. However, the 1925 film The Red Kimona revealed her history, and she successfully sued the producer. The court reasoned that 'any person living a life of rectitude has that right to happiness which includes a freedom from unnecessary attacks on his character, social standing or reputation.'"During the screening of The Red Kimona at the Castro Theatre (which was accompanied by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra) Gabrielle Darley's story took on new relevance considering the increasing numbers of people who have been slandered on the Internet and fought for "the right to be forgotten." As Wikipedia notes:
"In March 2017, New York state senator Tony Avella and assemblyman David Weprin introduced a bill proposing that individuals be allowed to require search engines and online speakers to remove information that is 'inaccurate,' 'irrelevant,' 'inadequate,' or 'excessive,' that is 'no longer material to current public debate or discourse' and is causing demonstrable harm to the subject."
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