Harold Lloyd in 12 takes

 

 

 

 

 

Harold Lloyd: cropped and chopped

The experiment: cropping some of my thousand or so Harold Lloyd gifs (most of which I made myself over the thousand or so years I've been in love with him). It was an interesting experiment to remove all the extraneous material from these tiny little ten-second movies, and some worked out better than others. I didn't even think I could crop gifs, in fact I probably couldn't, until the apps or programs or whatever-they-are became more versatile/easier to use. Things that aren't dead-easy aren't in my internet vocabulary.

I ended up with gifs that are extremely tiny, 1/4 the size of most of them. If you blow them up very much, they're too blurry to bother with. In some cases the effect is startling: Harold's face is zoomed in a little too close for comfort. We're not used to seeing him on a screen the size of a postage stamp, but neither are we accustomed to looking so deeply into those expressive and slightly haunted eyes.

Harold's director Hal Roach famously said, "Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the best actor playing a comedian the world has ever seen." It's true that Harold's was the humour of humiliation, social awkwardness, rejection and pain. How he made humour out of that is anybody's guess. But the other "big two", Chaplin and Keaton, also used pathos and struggle to good effect, and turned it all into laughs. I think it was Jerry Lewis - whom I hate - who said, "Comedy is a man in trouble." About that, I think he had a point.

Harold, you sweet thing

NOTE. Though I make 95% of my gifs (mostly from YouTube or private videos), I did not make these, and I wish I knew who did. I saw them on someone else's site who ALSO did not know who made them. The only identifying label is Tumblr, with five thousand letters and numbers after it. Pretty hard to track down.

I've seen my stuff on other people's blogs, and so long as they don't try to say they wrote it, fine. If they say my name, even better. But it all belongs to the world, doesn't it?

Actually, no, it doesn't. These are sweet and clever and have combined animation with still photos from Lloyd's actual pictures, with nice pastel colours added. 

I've seen a couple more of these:

If the artist would step forward and proclaim, "I did these, take them down", I will. I'd prefer they say who they are first. I am NOT trying to take credit for them. But they're adorable, aren't they? And in a split-second, they say so much more about Harold than I ever could in all my blatherings.

POST-BLOG: Though I've probably posted these before, it's time to see them again. They're snippets of cartoons featuring Harold. He's in and out of them pretty quickly, which is why I was able to make them into gifs.

Multiple choice quiz. No, figure them out yourself. Who they all are, I mean. If you can't, what are you doing on my blog? This is a silent movie blog, for God's sake! What are you trying to do - learn something? It won't happen here.

Also tastes as good as it smells.

Turkey walk

Some cool Harold Lloyd movie titles