Posts tagged ‘Kevin Brownlow’
Summer of Silents at The Academy
Attention Los Angeles-based Pictorial readers: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced a summer long celebration of silent film with their new screening series Summer of Silents.The focus here is quite intriguing: Photoplay magazine, once the undisputed king of movie fan rags, bestowed upon America’s most popular films an award called the Photoplay Magazine Medal of Honor. This is widely considered to be the first significant annual award in the film industry. Photoplay readers voted on the best film of the year, based on “the ideals and motives governing its production…the worth of its dramatic message.”
The Academy has chosen to screen a collection of these Photoplay-winning films, and in my mind it is a great decision: just as we use the Oscars as a barometer for our collective mindset, the Photoplay Medal of Honor award should prove similarly instructive.
From the Academy website:
Today these films tell the story of the American film industry’s first true Golden Age and offer now overshadowed work by some of Hollywood’s most influential directors and performers.
The nine evenings will feature the best available prints, music performed and composed by a variety of accompanists specializing in the period, a comedy short featuring a different silent screen comedian each week, and surviving fragments of lost films from the era, introduced by film historians including recent honorary Oscar recipient Kevin Brownlow.
Tickets are only $5 per film ($25 for a pass) and the lineup is as follows:
June 13 – HUMORESQUE (1920)
June 20 – TOL’ABLE DAVID (1921)
June 27 – ROBIN HOOD (1922)
July 11 – THE COVERED WAGON (1923)
July 18 – THE BIG PARADE (1925)
July 20 - THE GENERAL (1927)
July 25 – BEAU GESTE (1926)
August 1 – 7TH HEAVEN (1927)
August 8 – FOUR SONS (1928)
(I missed Monday’s screening of Humoresque, but am much looking forward to seeing Richard Barthelmess in Tol’able David ..
Magic at the TCM Film Festival: The Cameraman
From the very beginning, motion pictures were… magic. Of course, the medium has evolved to become one of the most important means of artistic expression that we’ve ever had– complex, subjective and ever-evolving. But sometimes all we want– indeed, all we need– is a little magic.
Perhaps the magic of cinema is found, in its purest form, in silent comedy. Hardly a definitive statement, but after tonight’s screening of Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre for the TCM Classic Film Festival … I am hard pressed to find anything more magical than in the visual purity of silent comedy. One definition of magic is, in fact, “The exercise of sleight of hand or conjuring for entertainment.” At the ripe age of 10, it was that sleight of hand and truly magical conjuring of delightful laughter, and wrenching tears, in the films of Charlie Chaplin that gave me my first love of silent film, and my undying passion for silent comedy. And the skilled sleight of Buster Keaton’s hand in The Cameraman (indeed, the exceptional skill in most all of his work) fits Merriam-Webster’s definition to a tee. How did he do it? There are books dedicated to the exploration of it. But the result is magic.
Ask the audience at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre. A crowd of crisscrossed demographics, truly boggling in their variety. USC film students, venerated film historians (Kevin Brownlow, Leonard Maltin), Hollywood hipsters lured by word of mouth and Midwest purists on pilgrimage. Some of us clapping madly at the The Cameraman’s iconic moments (Keaton riding proudly on a fire-engine) while others’ jaws dropped in awe at witnessing Keaton’s physical fearlessness for the first time. Packed in like sardines, different (quite possibly) in the extreme, yet all with the same knee-jerk reactions of Buster’s seemingly effortless comedic… magic.
I do not mean to imply that silent films are in some way uncomplicated or without depth. Quite the contrary in fact. And it is indeed those delicate complexities and layers of humor and heart that are integral to the magic of silent film.
The live orchestra was a definite feather in Buster’s cap.
Vince Giordiano and his Nighthawks are an east-coast based jazz ensemble that are absolute purists for the music of the ’20s and ’30s. Their music has appeared in period films like Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and shows like Boardwalk Empire (also Scorsese, hmm…) and what sets them apart is that they do not imitate hot jazz– they are highly fluent in the language of early 20th century music, understand the psychology and sociology of the culture that created it and there fore play it with striking authenticity. It was that authenticity that provided a truly perfect background for Keaton’s film (their set list weaving in period hits like Because My Baby Don’t Mean Maybe, Runnin’ Wild and The Mooche), creating an extra layer of energy that ramped up the audience’s already considerable excitement.
My favorite moment of this weekend’s festival hands down. And one of my favorite experiences to have ever had at the movies period.