Harry Langdon: Silent Comedy's Forgotten Genius

Comedians were a dime a dozen in the days of silent film, but great comedians were precious and few. The judgment of history has left us maybe a half-dozen top-notch talents, and just a few of those names are much remembered today. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd are the heavy hitters of course, the names that immediately come to mind, with perhaps Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Charley Chase, and a few others lagging not so far behind in name recognition. Still others, like Laurel and Hardy, did well in silent films but are today best known for their sound work. 

But the name of Harry Langdon still languishes in relative obscurity. The consistency and quantity of his best work may not quite place him among the ranks of the big three, but he is awfully close. Or at least he would be, if his work was more widely seen and appreciated. 

For years, the three great films that marked his peak—The Strong Man (1926), Tramp Tramp Tramp (1926), and Long Pants (1927)—have been available on DVD in the form of a single disc from Kino entitled "Harry Langdon: The Forgotten Clown." His tenure at the top was brief, but with few other films readily available for viewing over the years, that meteoric streak across the comedy horizon was difficult to contextualize and fully comprehend. But hopefully a pair of recent DVD releases will help to resuscitate Langdon's reputation, presenting the bookends to that brief, shining moment—the rise and fall of a great clown. 

Kino has released the next two comedic features in Langdon's oeuvre, the films that mark the comedian's descent from his peak. And this disc, combined with the release earlier this year of All Day Entertainment's "Lost and Found: The Harry Langdon Collection," a four-disc set consisting primarily of Langdon's earlier films, finally establishes a body of work worthy of study and appreciation. 

Most of the discussion and commentary of Langdon's career stems from two sources: Walter Kerr's insightful analysis in his landmark book The Silent Clowns, and from the autobiography of director Frank Capra. Kerr, with his graceful prose and articulate deconstructions of the form, has become the de facto authority on the comedian, with virtually every discussion of Langdon centering on Kerr's distillation of the essence of the comedian's work. 

It was Kerr's view that Langdon "existed only in reference to the work of other comedians." The form had to exist already, and "with that form at hand—a sentence completely spelled out—Langdon could come along and, glancing demurely over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking, furtively brush in a comma." 

By 1926, Kerr wrote, audiences were well versed in the mechanics and traditions of screen comedy. The major comedians delighted viewers by their unique approaches to the form, by the idiosyncratic ways in which they both met and flouted those conventions. But Langdon more often than not simply defied those conventions altogether, usually by doing...nothing. In situations where another comedian would have leapt into action, or at least turned tail and run, Langdon just stood there. As the world moved around him, he stood watching and blinking, allowing us to observe the slow thought process that left him hilariously ineffectual. 

Kerr again:

"[L]angdon's special position as a piece of not quite necessary punctuation inserted into a long-since memorized sentence means that he remains, today, dependent on our memory of the sentence. It is not even enough to know the sentence. We must inhabit it, live in its syntax in the way we daily take in air, share its expectations because they are what we expect, if we are to grasp—and take delight in—the nuance that was Langdon. You would have to soak yourself in silent film comedy to the point where Lloyd seemed a neighbor again, Chaplin a constant visitor, Keaton so omnipresent that he could be treated as commonplace, and the form's structure as necessary as the roof over your head in order to join hands with Langdon once more and go swinging, fingers childishly interlocked, down the street. That sort of immersion can never really take place again, except perhaps among archivists, and we shall no doubt continue to have our troubles with Langdon. It seems likely, however, that our reacquaintance with silent film comedy is going to develop a good deal beyond what is is now; the closer we come to feeling reasonably at home in it, the larger will Langdon's decorative work—all miniature—loom."

Kerr's analysis of Langdon's downfall is that the comedian lost control of the delicate ambiguity that defined his screen presence—the mercurial blend of man and child, of sexual adult and pre-sexual nymph. "The ambiguity dissolved," wrote Kerr, as Langdon no longer walked the line but stepped right over it, even going so far as to portray himself as an actual child, at one point peering out from a baby carriage. The character was no longer ambiguous and intriguing; it was grotesque and absurd. 

Frank Capra, on the other hand, was a bit less nuanced in his take. It was Capra's view that Langdon did not fully understand his own character, and that once he dispensed with the directors who had hitherto handled him—Capra among them—he was simply at a loss. Of course, Langdon had been a successful comedian for years in Vaudeville, and had even managed to carve out a space for his quiet comedy amid the bluster and bombast of the knockabout Sennett studio—all suggesting that Langdon had a very complete understanding of his talents. But despite Capra's self-aggrandizing tone, there may some truth in his account. But the better explanation may be that Langdon, in his desire to establish himself as an independent man, as an auteur in the style of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, simply overreached. His understanding of his character was probably quite solid; it was more likely his inability to sustain a high level of quality while acting as writer, director, producer and star that did him in. And the fickleness of the audience must also be factored in; it is possible that the public simply lost interest in him, their fling with Langdon revealing itself as more of an infatuation than the sustained love affairs they experienced with Langdon's rivals. 

The All Day Entertainment set explores Langdon's evolution from Sennett slapstick to the comedian's full flowering as the curious man-child of 1926-27. But it also includes a few films from Langdon's later years. Kino's initial release put the three best Langdon features on one disc. This second edition showcases the two rarely seen follow-up features. Three's a Crowd (1927) and The Chaser (1928) have been deemed by history to be lesser efforts, to have set in motion Langdon's steep decline, but now at least we can make up our own minds. 

And yet it's not an easy task, for as Kerr said, an appreciation for Langdon is predicated on a thorough understanding of the form as it existed in 1927; to understand Langdon, we must first steep ourselves in the idiom of silent comedy, in the quirks and mannerisms and formulae and framework of the great films of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, and the myriad other comedic talents of the day. There are worse forms of homework. 

Three's a Crowd. 1927. 61 minutes. 

The Chaser. 1928. 63 minutes. 

$24.95. www.kino.com. 

Lost and Found: The Harry Langdon Collection 

$39.95. www.alldayentertainment.com. 

Harry Langdon: The Forgotten Clown 

The Strong Man. 1926. 84 minutes. 

Tramp Tramp Tramp. 1926. 97 minutes. 

Long Pants. 1927. 88 minutes. 

$29.95. www.kino.com. 

The Passion of Joan of Arc

A rare event is coming to the Bay Area this next week. One of cinema’s greatest works of art will screen twice—once at San Francisco’s Castro Theater and once at UC Berkeley’s Hertz Hall—accompanied by 200 singers and a 24-piece orchestra. UC Berkeley’s Alumni Chorus will present Voices of Light, an oratorio, as accompaniment for Carl Dreyer’s 1928 landmark film The Passion of Joan of Arc. 

Composer Richard Einhorn was kicking around New York’s Museum of Modern Art one day in 1988 when he came across a still from a movie, an arresting shot of a woman’s face from a silent film about Joan of Arc. Though Einhorn was a film buff and fairly knowledgeable about the medium’s history, he had never heard of this movie. He immediately requested a screening. 

“Some 81 minutes later,” Einhorn later wrote, “I walked out of the screening room shattered, having unexpectedly seen one of the most extraordinary works of art that I know.” 

He had long considered writing a piece about the 19-year-old martyr, and now inspiration had finally struck. The result, Voices of Light, is, as Einhorn describes it, “neither opera nor oratorio, but a mixture of both.” The libretto, containing Latin, Old and Middle French and Italian, is a pastiche of writings by female mystics of the Middle Ages, including Joan herself, the voices of the choir echoing the voices that spurred Joan on in her quest to unite France. 

Soldier, insurgent, terrorist, transvestite, schizophrenic, mystic, witch, saint, seer, martyr, feminist; the modern world could apply many words to this fascinating life, all of them containing a bit of truth but none of them wholly accurate. It is an extraordinary story, one that might have devolved into myth but for the plentiful documentation of her trial: a pious, illiterate farm girl, prodded by voices, rises up to lead an army and to consult with kings, and when captured stands her ground against her captors until breaking under threat of torture, then rises again to retract her confession before bravely facing death at the stake. 

“The piece explores the patchwork of emotions and thoughts that are stitched together into the notion of a female hero,” writes Einhorn. “Such a hero invariably transgresses the conventions and restrictions her society imposes.” 

Einhorn debuted the piece to critical praise in 1994, and though Voices of Light was not written as a score for the film, Einhorn often presented it that way. 

When Criterion released the film on DVD, the disc came with two options: The film could be watched with Voices of Light or in complete silence. The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the few films from the silent era that its director preferred to screen truly silent, without any musical accompaniment at all, but considering the options available at the time, Dreyer’s wish is understandable. While the larger theaters of the era could afford to use an orchestra, most theaters would have presented the film with improvised accompaniment on Wurlitzer organ or piano, and Dreyer probably felt that neither instrument could do justice to his film. He could not have imagined that his avant-garde masterpiece would one day get so lavish and respectful a treatment as Einhorn has provided. 

Mark Sumner, director of UC Choral Ensembles, will conduct Voices of Light along with The Passion of Joan of Arc twice: at 7:30 p.m. Monday at San Francisco’s Castro Theater, and at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23 at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. A 24-piece orchestra will provide the music, while the Alumni Chorus will combine with the UC Men’s and Women’s Chorales and Perfect Fifth for a total of 200 singers. 

It will make for an unusual arrangement at the Castro. Sumner will conduct the orchestra in front of the stage, while the chorus will fill the seats off to the sides in the first few rows, behind the conductor. “It will be a challenge,” says Alumni Chorus Manager Karen Moore. According to Moore, Sumner may have to wear white gloves so that his hands can be seen by the choir behind him, and the singers have had to memorize as much of the multi-lingual libretto as possible in order to reduce their scripts to one page, so that the audience isn’t distracted by the sound of 200 pages flipping every few minutes. 

There will be differences between the two performances. At the Castro the film will be shown full screen in 35mm, and the choir will be joined by San Francisco’s Unitarian Church choir. For the Hertz Hall performance, the film will be shown on a smaller screen with the use of DVD projection, and the Unitarian choir will not participate. 

The Passion of Joan of Arc has a history nearly as turbulent as the life of its heroine. When the French learned that a Danish director, a non-Catholic, was coming to their country to make a movie about their recently sainted heroine (Joan was excommunicated from the church before her execution and was not reinstated and elevated to sainthood until centuries later, in 1920), they were outraged. They were further scandalized by the news that the lead role would be taken by an Italian (though not quite as scandalized as they had been over rumors that Joan would be played by American actress Lillian Gish). French authorities were unable to stop the production but were successful in demanding a few changes. Meanwhile, the producers went ahead with what they may have expected to be a commercial film, a sort of epic biopic; elaborate sets were constructed and a generous budget was approved. 

However, Carl Dreyer was not one to put commercial considerations before artistic concerns, and when he saw what he had in Renée Falconetti it was clear that there was little need for sets and high production values. This would be the only film performance for the successful stage actress, and Dreyer ensured that it would be an immortal one, recognizing that he had a great actress with a face that could carry the film all on its own. Dreyer contrasts the purity and beauty of that face with the harsh, corrupt and scheming faces of Joan’s interrogators in a film that largely consists of close-ups, alternating between the pious sincerity of the girl soldier and the fleshy, self-important visages of her persecutors. For Dreyer, form must follow function, and so he used the actual transcripts of the trial (condensed from several months into a single day) to stage a series of dramatic, face-to-face confrontations. He allowed his actors no makeup, and the walls behind them are almost uniformly white, accented here and there with windows, crucifixes and low-angle shots for a mise-en-scene as stark, as spare and as simple as Joan’s religious conviction. 

It is an avant-garde film, and its impact has hardly lessened over the years. Dreyer’s imagery is relentless, and his editing ranges from staid to rapid-fire, at times juxtaposing shots from multiple angles and culminating in a forceful and dynamic final sequence that rivals Sergei Eisenstein’s fabled Odessa Steps scene from Battleship Potemkin. 

However, the public never really got a chance to see this film. Upon release The Passion of Joan of Arc was shown just once in its original state. Soon after, it was edited by censors, and in fact was edited differently in every country it which it was shown, trimmed, rewritten and re-edited to fit each culture’s prevailing political winds. Consequently, the film Dreyer made was rarely seen at all, and, to compound the matter, at some point the original negative was lost to fire. Dreyer, devastated by the loss, was able to cobble together a reconstituted version using alternate takes, creating a shot-by-shot replica, but this version too was later lost to fire. Thus for decades afterward, the film existed only in bastardized forms: sound versions that imposed a narrator’s voice on Dreyer’s dramatic silent imagery; rewritten versions that softened Joan’s interrogators and even Joan herself; poorly paced re-edited versions that inaccurately gauged the projection speed, reducing the film to a dull, plodding pace. Thus critics over the years were hard pressed to claim that the film measured up to its legend. 

But once again, a resurrection. In 1981 a print of The Passion of Joan of Arc was discovered by a worker in, of all places, a storage closet in a Norwegian mental institution. Canisters were turned over to the Norwegian Film Institute, where they sat unopened for three years. When the film was finally reviewed, it was found to be a complete and nearly pristine print of the original version, unseen for nearly six decades. The mental institution’s director had been an amateur historian of the French Revolution and had apparently acquired the print for his personal use, his staff and patients perhaps among the privileged few to see Dreyer’s masterpiece in its original form. 

Voices of Light / The Passion of Joan of Arc

7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco; 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23 at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Tickets available at the door: general admission $15; seniors $12. For more information, call (510) 643-9645 or see www.ucac.net. Co-sponsored by Pacific Film Archive. 

Harry Houdini: Movie Star...Briefly

Harry Houdini must have seemed an obvious candidate for movie stardom. Famous as a vaudeville performer and as a daredevil stuntman, he was a born showman, charismatic, daring and bold. 

Though limited as an actor, his appeal, then as now, is readily apparent. Short and rugged with piercing eyes, he comes across as an earlier generation's version of Edward G. Robinson, handsome in an unlikely way, tough and scowling, but able to convey a certain benevolent humor and grace. 

Kino has released a three-disc set of all that remains of Houdini's brief movie career. The set includes three feature films, a surviving fragment from a fourth, and nearly four hours of installments from a 1919 serial. Bonus features include newsreel footage of many of Houdini's straitjacket escapes, usually while dangling upside down over a public street before thousands of onlookers. 

But the main attractions here are Houdini's acting performances. The set starts with the 15-part serial, The Master Mystery (1919, 238 minutes), an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink action adventure in which Houdini, as Quentin Locke, battles a corrupt patents company involved in anti-trust practices, along the way battling a robot, rescuing a beautiful dame, endureing a string of torture techniques, and escaping from an array of deadly devices. The enormous success of the serial led to a contract with Famous Players Lasky/Parmount Pictures, which resulted in two feature films. 

Terror Island (1920, 55 minutes), the most lavish of the Houdini films, sees the magician playing an inventor whose state-of-the-art submarine is called into duty to salvage both treasure and romance. The film again affords Houdini the opportunity to display his talent for the escape, as well as his ability to hold his breath underwater for extended periods as he passes in and out of the submarine to stage various rescues and assaults on nefarious foes. 

During the making of The Grim Game (1919), two planes collided in mid-air, leading the producers to re-write the script around the material. The only fragment that survives of the film shows this accident, and though the filmmakers claimed that Houdini himself was hanging from the plane and survived the accident, the editing and re-shoots that sustained the illusion are hardly any more convincing today than they were then. 

After fulfilling his Hollywood contract, Houdini returned to New York to start his own production company, the Houdini Picture Corporation, producing and starring in two more films. The Man from Beyond (1922. 84 minutes) allowed Houdini to indulge his interest in reincarnation, playing a man unfrozen after 100 years who finds his true love of 1820 is alive and well in another woman's body in 1920. In Haldane of the Secret Service (1923, 84 minutes), his final film, Houdini stars as an undercover agent infiltrating a counterfeiting operation in New York's shadowy Chinatown. 

Despite his fame, Houdini's acting career was not a success. It turned out that the art of the escape required a flesh-and-blood performance to hold an audience's attention; cinema, with all its sleight-of-hand editing and shifting camera angles, robbed Houdini's stunts of their veracity and sense of danger. If an audience wanted grace and daring and swashbuckling charm, they had Douglas Fairbanks; if they wanted dangerous stunt work, cinematically presented and with no editing gimmickry, they had Buster Keaton. Though Houdini was one of the most famous men of his time, his fans preferred to see him not larger than life on the big screen, but on the stage, life size and all the more compelling for that fact that he was real.

Vampyr: The Indelible Imagery of Carl Th. Dreyer

Ten years after the release of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the first and greatest of all vampire films, Carl Th. Dreyer released Vampyr (1932), the next great vampire film, and one that took the genre in a new direction. Vampyr is the vampire film reduced to its essence, to an unrelenting flow of eerie imagery, off-kilter camera movements and a hushed soundscape consisting of sparse, enigmatic dialogue and a muted, foreboding score. Less plot than impressionist montage, the film is an almost surrealist blend of unexplained actions and haunted faces. Imagine Dracula as presented by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. 

Criterion has released the film in a two-disc DVD set, complete with bonus features that include an interview with Dreyer, a commentary track, and a book containing the original script and the novella on which Dreyer claimed the film was based—though the final product bears little resemblance to its source. 

The film itself looks superb, though it is still not quite the film Dreyer would have wanted us to see. It’s a sound film—the director’s first—produced in several different languages. Dreyer shot Vampyr silent, his actors reading the lines in several languages and later synching the different scores for release in various countries. However, the only version that currently exists in a form suitable for restoration is the German, and thus we are left with something he tried mightily to avoid: his mesmerizing images are overlaid with the distraction of subtitles. Still, given the fate of other Dreyer films, we’re lucky to have any version at all. 

At the time, Vampyr seemed a most unlikely project for Dreyer. While it was certainly within reason to expect another masterpiece from this uncompromising filmmaker, Dreyer isn’t the first name that comes to mind when discussing the horror film. After all, this was the man who made The Passion of Joan of Arc just a few years earlier, a powerful and uncompromsing avant garde film that to this day remains one of cinema’s artistic masterpieces. 

Dreyer made just 14 films in his career and no two of them alike, altering his style and approach, often radically, to fit his subject matter. He began his career in the silent era in his native Denmark, creating several well-regarded works before venturing into the greater European film industry in search of more plentiful resources and increased autonomy. One of his films from this era, Mikaël (1924), a German production that showed at this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, is considered one of the landmarks of early gay cinema. 

But nothing in that oeuvre would quite prepare a viewer for what came next. 

Dreyer went to France to make a film based on the trial of Joan of Arc. Joan had only recently been sainted after centuries of excommunication, and though the French were eager to see a film about her, they were more than a little chagrined to find the task handed over to a Dane, and the role of Joan given to an Italian. Rene Falconetti was a stage actress and a very successful one; The Passion of Joan of Arc would be her first and only screen appearance, and thus for decades she has been associated in the public mind with this role, a stunning performance of grace, passion, dignity and sorrow. 

Stylistically, it is a radical departure, not just from Dreyer’s previous work, but from virtually anything that came before it. Dreyer relied almost exclusively on close-ups and text to tell the tale, relegating the vast sets to relative obscurity, only allowing them to be glimpsed in a few sequences. The film was a commercial failure, and was recut and altered into many different forms, depending on the prevailing political forces in whichever county it was being presented in. The original negative was lost to fire, and Dreyer re-composed the film from alternate takes; that version too was lost to fire. For decades Passion then was considered lost forever, with no surviving prints of Dreyer’s original film known to exist, until one was accidentally discovered in 1986 in a supply closet in a Norwegian mental institution. 

After observing the fate of Passion, Dreyer sought a bit less controversial and more commercially viable project for his next film, and settled on horror as a genre which was not only popular, but conducive to artistic independence; horror films of the silent era had managed to go relatively untouched by censors while remaining uncompromising in artistic merit. 

The result is a moody, atmospheric film modeled on the horror genre but more restrained, more obscure and more elliptical in its examination of terror, mystery and the occult. Dreyer’s expressive camera work involves wonderfully disorienting movements that shuttle the camera from one indelible image to another. As the camera circles around rooms, the lens distorts the field of vision, causing walls to appear to shift and move, leaving the viewer at all times on uneven ground, with little in the plot or in the visual terrain to anchor oneself. This is not your typical horror film; it is a dreamlike and hallucinatory experience that is content to leave much of its mystery unresolved. 

Consecutive commercial failures left Dreyer unemployed for more than a decade afterward, either unwilling or unable to mount another production. He returned in 1943 with Day of Wrath, followed by Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964), all of which, along with The Passion of Joan of Arc, are also available in Criterion editions. 

Vampyr (1932). 75 minutes. $39.95. Criterion. www.criterion.com. 

2008 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Far from the ragged, blurry, jumpy images in the popular imagination, the silent era of filmmaking was an age of discovery, innovation and supreme achievement in the new medium of cinema. Motion pictures, at first treated as a mere novelty, came into their own between 1910 and 1920, growing from brief, flickering diversions into full-scale narratives. But it was in the 1920s that cinema truly blossomed into the great art form of the 20th century. 

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, now in its 13th year, showcases the breadth and depth of what was the first golden era of cinema, presenting the full range of film treasures—from slapstick comedy to gothic horror, from experimental animation to stately costume drama—as it was meant to be seen: on the big screen, in a beautiful 1920s movie palace, and with live musical accompaniment. 

This year’s program begins Friday night, July 11, at the Castro Theater with Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother and continues all day Saturday and Sunday with 10 more presentations from the peak of the silent era. 

Friday 

Harold Lloyd was not an inherently funny presence as a screen persona. Unlike Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, who rank among the most innately charismatic and unique cinematic artists of all time, Lloyd couldn’t command an audience’s attention simply by appearing on the screen. There were many such comedians struggling to climb their way to the top of the field, to challenge Keaton and Chaplin at the summit, but Lloyd was the most diligent and talented of them, and he alone managed to scale those heights. Through grit and determination he overcame his limitations as a screen presence and established himself as one of the most popular and enduring comedians of the silent era. In the 1920s he was second only to Chaplin in popularity. In fact, in box office receipts, the prolific Lloyd surpassed Chaplin, who only released a handful of films in that decade. 

Lloyd took a different and perhaps more pragmatic approach to his comedies than his contemporaries. Chaplin made relatively quiet, character-based narratives, punctuated here and there with explosive bits of slapstick. And Keaton let his films develop slowly, building steadily to dizzying climactic chases and daring stunt work. But Lloyd first and foremost aimed to please, and thus he filled movies with gags from start to finish, rarely allowing the audience much time to breathe. 

With The Kid Brother (1927), however, Lloyd altered his style somewhat, adopting some of the techniques of his competitors in pursuit of a more artistic approach. He put more time and effort into technical details, especially the photography, using warm lighting to capture the pastoral beauty of a life in the woods. And he put greater emphasis on pathos; more screen time was spent developing his character, showing us his hopes, his dreams and his humiliations. 

Lloyd didn’t make a bad film in the 1920s; all of them are good and many of them are great. Others made more money (The Freshman), crammed in more gags per minute (Why Worry?), or have enjoyed more lasting fame (Safety Last), but The Kid Brother may very well represent Lloyd’s crowning achievement, bringing greater artistry and subtlety to his workman-like career. Lloyd himself cited the film as his personal favorite. Friday’s screening of the film will feature live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. 

Saturday 

Saturday’s screenings include The Soul of Youth (1920), a portrait of the fate of unwanted orphans in early 20th-century America; Les Deux Timides (1928), a comedy by René Clair; and Mikael (1924), a landmark film in the history of gay cinema, directed by the great Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr). 

German actor Conrad Veidt anchors the centerpiece film Saturday night, The Man Who Laughs (1928). Early in the 1920s, German émigré Carl Laemmle, head of Universal, brought Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame to the screen. Centering an epic film on a grossly disfigured lead character was considered a great risk at the time, but Lon Chaney, who would later become known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” used his formidable pantomime skills to create a sensitive and sympathetic portrayal. Laemmle and Chaney then followed Hunchback with The Phantom of the Opera and enjoyed similar success. 

Eager to keep the streak alive, Laemmle turned to his fellow countrymen for The Man Who Laughs (1928), enlisting the talents of Conrad Veidt and director Paul Leni for another Hugo adaptation. Veidt had become the face of German Expressionism with his roles in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and in Leni’s Waxworks, and Leni had recently parlayed his success in Germany into a contract with Universal, bringing the shadowy photography and psychological horror of Expressionism to the States with The Cat and the Canary. These silent classics formed the foundation of what would become a string of classic Universal horror films in the 1930s. Saturday’s screening of The Man Who Laughs will be accompanied by Clark Wilson on the Wurlitzer. 

Following The Man Who Laughs Saturday night is the first in the festival’s new “Director’s Pick” series. Director Guy Maddin will be on hand to introduce and narrate (translating the French intertitles) for Tod Browning’s strange and rarely screened film The Unknown (1927), starring Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford. Live piano accompaniment will be provided by Stephen Horne. 

Sunday 

Sunday’s screenings include The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the earliest surviving feature-length animated film; Her Wild Oat (1927), one of the few surviving films of Colleen Moore, among the most popular actresses of the 1920s; and Jujiro (1928), an avant-garde Japanese film. 

The festival concludes Sunday night with The Patsy (1928), starring the great comedienne Marion Davies. Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, had spent much of her career weighed down with the dreary costumes of the myriad period dramas that Hearst wanted to see her in. It was director King Vidor who finally freed the effervescent Davies from such stifling solemnity, and in The Patsy he gave her free reign to satirize her contemporaries, offering sharp and hilarious impersonations of such silent-era stalwarts as Lillian Gish and Pola Negri. Clark Wilson will again provide accompaniment on the Wurlitzer. 

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival. July 11-13 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.silentfilm.org.

The Artistic Restraint of Yasujiro Ozu

Almost from the beginning of the medium, filmmakers sought to exploit cinema’s unique properties. From the moment they could, directors were eager to transcend the limits of traditional theater by putting the camera in motion, by sending it racing, swooping and soaring; by using a variety of lenses to shape the image, to magnify, distort and exaggerate; and by using the editing process to suggest, startle and surprise. 

And while some of the most exciting filmmakers over the past century have been those who found ways to employ these devices with flash and panache, one of the greatest directors the medium has ever produced was one who limited himself to the simplest and most austere techniques. 

Yasujiro Ozu, rather than employing his camera in bravura displays of pyrotechnic virtuosity, used it to simply observe his characters, to linger on their faces, on their homes, on their possessions—to look into the souls of everyday people under everyday circumstances. Not for Ozu the moody shadows and vertiginous angles of the expressionists, or the heightened reality and stylized melodrama of Hollywood fare. Ozu was both a naturalist and a rigorous formalist, a director who sought to capture life as it is lived, but within a framework of rigidly defined restrictions. He limited the camera’s range of motion and the angles from which it could gaze; he limited his editing to simple, direct cuts—no dissolves or fades; and dialogue was conveyed in simple master shots followed by alternating close-ups. This artistic code focused greater attention on content over form, allowing character to reveal itself, allowing dialogue to breathe, and allowing revelatory spaces to open up between words and gestures and characters. Thus relationships and motivations and plot points would gradually take shape before the viewer’s eyes. 

Criterion has just released a three-disc set of Ozu’s early, silent films, called "Silent Ozu." The set is the most recent in the company’s line of Eclipse boxed sets, highlighting lesser-known works, and follows the recent release of "Late Ozu," a five-disc set of films from the last few years of the director’s career. Together the two sets form the bookends of one of cinema’s monumental oeuvres. 

It is a body of work consisting of more than 50 films, nearly all of them created in the same mold, with Ozu’s patient camera calmly observing his characters. He was not interested in dense plots or edge-of-your-seat melodrama; his work was almost literary, owing more to the novel than to film. “Rather than tell a superficial story,” Ozu said, “I wanted to go deeper, to show ... the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savor.” 

Though he is often regarded as the most Japanese of Japanese directors, whose cinema captured unique and very specific aspects of that nation’s life and culture, Ozu’s work easily transcends international boundaries, delving into character, relationships and commonplace issues to find the universal. His favored subjects included families and the relationships between generations; the aging process; city life versus rural life; and all the values that complement and conflict with one another in the ensuing drama: pragmatism and idealism, love and kindness, justice and forgiveness. “Intellectually we may be different,” said film scholar Donald Ritchie in reference to Ozu’s work, “but emotionally we’re very much the same.”

The three films on this set display Ozu’s remarkable ability to blend comedy with poignant drama. Tokyo Chorus starts with a long comedic sequence that soon seems like a wild digression as young men engage in a series of pranks and gaffes under the stern gaze of a schoolmaster. But once the sequence is over and the Chaplinesque hijinks have concluded, the film takes on a more somber tone, following the hardships of one of the young men as he grows up, struggles to support a family, and in the process learns humility, compromise and the value of friendship. But eventually, Ozu brings the film full circle, and the connections with the earlier scenes are made not only clear but dramatically satisfying. 

These early films also give us a glimpse of a side of Ozu not visible in his later, more well-known work. A clever use of the moving camera draws parallels between the toil of children at school and the toil of clerks at the office. And a sustained bit of Lubitsch-style humor plays up the methods by which the workers attempt to glean the details of each others’ end-of-year bonuses. 

I Was Born, But... examines the difficulties both of children growing up and of their parents in handling them. A man’s young sons brawl with the local kids in their new neighborhood to assert their dominance, and once they do they exercise their power without restraint. Later their father falls from his figurative pedestal as they witness him kowtowing to his boss, the father of one their schoolyard underlings. What follows is both a loss of innocence and a tough lesson in parenting, as the father tries to express the realities of adulthood and the boys learn that there are other ways to get along than by thundering in the brush and pounding one’s chest like a baboon. 

On display in these early films are some of the techniques that Ozu would employ throughout his career: the floor-height vantage points that place his camera at eye level as his characters sit on the traditional tatami; and the alternating dialogue shots in which each character looks directly at the camera, placing the viewer right in the middle of the exchange, allowing greater identification with each character, with each argument and with each perspective. 

The End of Summer, from the "Late Ozu" collection, demonstrates the tenacity with which Ozu stuck to his principles of filmmaking throughout his career. In this, his penultimate film, we see Ozu and his actors spin the same complex web of dreams and desires, motives and secrets. The family patriarch, a widower, seeks the company of his long-estranged mistress in his twilight years, much to the chagrin of his children. Meanwhile the next generation is struggling to maintain the family business he has left in their care. The film examines the issues faced by three generations of the family as they clash, argue and try to understand one another. There is no ill will involved, just the understated spectacle of people at different stages of life, trying to get along. Along the way, we see them share, deceive, sacrifice and scheme, but they are always human, always sympathetic and always compelling. 

And herein lies much of the appeal of Ozu’s films: His calm, gently unfolding dramas give us time to not only get to know his characters, but also deeply care about them—to enjoy their humor, to admire their strength and to forgive their transgressions—so that, when a film ends, there is often a feeling of regret that these characters are gone from our lives. “Every time I watch an Ozu film,” says actor Eijiro Tong, “I start to feel very sentimental as the end of the film nears. As I think back over the story, it’s like a flood of old memories washing over me, one after another.” 

This is the essential sadness and loneliness that resides at the core of Ozu’s work—the awareness of the inevitability of change and that beginnings are followed all too soon by endings. 

"Silent Ozu." 3-disc set. $44.95. 

"Late Ozu." 5-disc set. $69.95. 

www.criterion.com.