A Faustian Bargain (or, white robes and turkey soup)

One of my weirder dreams, which I only remember in detail because I had it right before I woke up.

Faustian Dream  March 24, 2023

We were having people over for homemade turkey soup which I always make after Xmas.  I don't know how many (seven?), or whether they were friends or relatives, though my brother Walt seemed to be in the mix. 

I was busy preparing for this by knitting white garments out of sheep wool for everyone to wear. These were long robes, floor-length, with long sleeves and hoods.

We were all going to watch the silent film version of Murnau's Faust on TV.

I realized there was not enough meat for the soup, so I went to look in the freezer. I also realized all the knitted robes were child-sized and would not fit anyone. The robes also had legs like they were pants or jumpsuits.

I had complaints (from someone?) that the wool used in the robes irritated some people’s skin and they couldn’t wear them, and I wished I had used synthetic, but the real wool was to give the robes a special quality and significance and would cost more.

We watched a part of  Faust which I hadn’t seen before (I expected to see the phantom horses at the start, but saw some sort of Cyclops being killed and wondered if this was a director’s cut). Gabor Mate was at this event and wearing a very short version of the gown with skinny legs sticking out – he was on my right. He was the only person I recognized. Others were there, very vague and shadowy but, did not know who they were or how many or even why they were there.

I wore the gown with the hood pulled up, like a Druid.

Now that I look at it, this seems like a sort of cult wearing robes I’d made, and eating food I made, but I still have no idea who they were or why we were there or what sort of cult it was, or why I would ever organize or take part in a cult to begin with, as I hate them, but am also fascinated with them and can't get enough of reading about them and watching documentaries about them. I have recently been reading about NXVIM, or however you spell it, the cult where women are held down and branded. No branding took place, but no one ate turkey soup either, and except for Gabor Mate no one seemed to be wearing the robes (but I am not sure because I could not really see them). The familiar music from the opening of Faust was playing, but it looked all different (I had seen a clip from it recently).

And all this before breakfast!

BIZARRE Silent Movie (with Creepy Nurse, Canaries, and DEATH!)

The only thing I love more than creepy old ads are bizarre old silent films. I will admit I "borrow" a lot from Pics and Portraits (a. k. a. Sleepcore), but he in turn borrows from other sources. I know there are people who lift his entire content, and one channel even sent him a request to CORRECT his material so he could lift it more accurately! I try not to use more than a couple of minutes. This was so surreal I HAD to "quote" it. I do not know where he finds stuff like this!

ONE HUNDRED YEARS of film logos!

A lot of people fnd old film logos creepy, or even scary. Not sure why they exude such strangeness. Pathe beats them all in the flapping, crowing rooster design. The accompanying music is nearly as disturbing.

Harold and Bebe: spinning or slow?

This little snippet from Harold Lloyd's Young Mr. Jazz (1919) is meant to be comic dancing, a whirling-dervish sort of spin satirizing the jazzy steps of the day (though in 1919, this trend had barely begun). The bit at the end hilariously exposes Bebe's Daddy in a huddle with a sweet patootie he just picked up, a woman wearing a bizarre striped ensemble and a tall feathery hat. 

I couldn't help but take this gif and s-l-o-w-w-w it down, just to see how the mad whirl might look at a much slower speed. And look at this!

This is just about the most graceful dancing I've ever seen, more typical of Harold's natural skill as a dancer. Really, it doesn't look silly at all, does it? He's sweeping her off her feet.

But then. . . then I noticed something. It's possible that the original dance has been "sped up" just a little, by something called undercranking (literally, cranking the camera more slowly so that fewer frames per second are exposed, thus making it play back faster). Just look at the piano player - he's a jittery blur! In the second version, he appears to be playing at a more normal speed.

Everyone else in the frame is either carefully still, or only gesturing minimally. What made me think of this tweaking of speed was a tiny video I just saw on The Freshman, in which Harold does a fast-footed "jig" that becomes his signature. It goes so fast you can barely see his feet. I found out, with a bit of disappointment, that this too was tweaked to make it look faster than it was.

Damn!

"Step right up and call me Speedy!"

"St-e-e-e-e-e-p  r-r-r-r-i-i-ght  up and ca-a-a-a-l-l-l me-e-e-e. . . not very Speedy."

I don't know why the use of special effects in a movie should bother me. It doesn't, except that dancing was one of Harold's natural skills, one of those things he didn't have to formally learn. To see it enhanced/messed with is a bit disillusioning, but Harold was a filmmaker, and the result was all. Harold's nickname (which I am sure he came up with himself) was Speedy, which kind of makes me shake my head a bit for obvious reasons. He always pushed himself to go farther, faster, longer, than anyone else, and was ferociously competitive. So if he couldn't dance fast enough to create a  blur, he would make it LOOK like he could. 

One has to wonder how much insecurity lay beneath that charming exterior. I don't think Harold was moody or broody (though his temper could be explosive), but for all his inspiration, I don't think he was introspective. He always moved relentlessly forward. At what cost, we can only guess, for the lives of his children were troubled. They had all the problems of rich kids who had come from desperately poor parents. Harold was determined to give his children "everything he never had", but was that what they needed? The question goes unanswered. We only know he could  dance. Reminds me of those old Westerns where some cowboy shoots at the feet of the town drunk, yelling, "Dance! Dance! Faster!"

Maid of Orleans/Cool Cat from Queens

This is my montage of early Christopher Walken/Joan of Arc gifs, the latter taken from the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Of course I do not mean to suggest they look alike, but there is something about the intensity, the luminous stare, the cheekbones. . . especially the cheekbones. 

These are the cheekbones of a saint.

Similarly, his Deer Hunter suicide scene with its implication of self-immolation/self-annihilation is Joan-like as he sacrifices himself to the dark forces all around him. I couldn't use later Walken, because later Walken is a whole different man. He looks like his own grandfather now, and it's kind of disappointing to me to see such a supernatural fox turn so weary-looking. Only the flashbulb smile with that searchlight sweep of the room is the same as before. But you don't see it often, and his face is so saggy and lacking in tone that he looks almost depressed. Most distressingly of all, he has developed a whistle in his speech, one of the most irritating things in existence. I have seriously wondered about him, since someone recently made a comment on one of his YouTube videos about how "the Alzheimer's is affecting him". He played a musician with Parkinson's a few years ago, and the nearly-expressionless, masked look of his once-expressive face made me wonder.

But perhaps we expect too much, expect a Dorian Grey-like supernatural beauty that lasts forever. This is, after all, a 75-year-old man who has given his whole life to performing. Perhaps it has cost him more than we realize. It amazes me how little vanity he has, how little sense of self-importance or entitlement (and he's refreshingly un-crazy for a child star). I remember the old-style stage performers of the past, Jack Benny and Ed Wynn and all those down-to-earth guys who'd come on Ed Sullivan, and he seems to belong to that old-fashioned era, just here to do his job, and always grounded by a sense of his own (human) limitations.

That said, early Walken is supernaturally beautiful, and so charismatic he leaps off the screen at you like a predatory animal. You simply cannot ignore or forget him.

I still feel that we are looking at two men, but that can't be true! I've read somewhere that Walken smokes, and that could account for the haggardness, which is surprising in light of his extreme early fox-hood. Hey, William Shatner is still a good-looking man (if a tad rotund - but who's complaining?) and surprisingly un-wrinkled at nearly age 88. And his energy, speech, and mobility (not to mention his unquenchable enthusiasm) belong to a much younger man. Maybe it's just a trick of genes, though Walken should have this advantage as well. He has gone on record to say his parents lived to be nearly a hundred. Who knows, maybe he's a living Dorian Grey, with his old self taking on all the slings and arrows his face never revealed when he was young.

POST-BLOG OBSERVATIONS. Because of the weird phenomenon of YouTube, with its vast bulletin board/everything-coming-at-you-at-once quality, it's possible to see Walken at every age, moment-by-moment or even second-by-second as you click from one movie excerpt or interview or hosting gig to another. There are some shocking entries, like this 1962 clip from the TV crime drama Naked City, and in some places he's even younger, not quite grown to his full foxhood because of his boyish softness of face. Here he looks as if he's not even shaving yet. This pastiche/jigsaw effect is relatively new, and in the past we had to go and see a whole movie at a time, or watch a whole TV interview, without this capacity to jump around. I LIKE jumping around, myself, because it satisfies my curiosity and lets the detective in me work fast. But it shocks me to think that I've seldom seen a Walken movie all the way through. I think Communion was one of the only ones, and I only stayed with it because I could not quite believe how bizarre it was.

POST-POST. I began to feel a bit guilty about Christopher Walken. Not that I know the man, or ever will, but I think I was a bit hard on the fact he has let his looks go as stringy and baggy as nature intended. I had thought of assembling a before-and-after of wretched plastic surgery among male celebrities, but ended up compiling this horrendous assortment of short gifs. You know who they are anyway, so I won't bother labelling them. A freakier lot you never saw, though they once all looked like human beings. I don't know who butchers these people, celebs who have all the money in the world to get it done right. Facial muscles get pulled so tight that as the person ages, everything starts to pull in the wrong direction. The face begins to fight itself and squirms weirdly as the person talks. Fixed noses shrivel and cave in, or go oddly sideways. Cheek implants threaten to explode, pushing out so aggressively that they show through the skin. Mouths slash horizontally across the face and look Muppet-like, and eyes sink right into the head.

It ain't working, folks. We're not buying it. You're old, and we know you're old. 

Christopher Walken, meanwhile, is jarring in another way, because in the past couple of years he seems to have aged about twenty. I didn't watch him as Captain Hook in Peter Pan Live (and a more miscast Hook never walkened the earth), but apparently he kept forgetting his lines, letting his Walken-ish pauses drag on forever. And that was five years ago.

Why should I worry at all about a celebrity? Who knows. They're like popcorn. We consume them, they amuse us for a little while, until we go on to the next one. That's just how it is. And they must always keep their shiny side out, the only side we can ever see. 

(Unless you're Alec Baldwin. Then you get to punch people.)

Harold Lloyd blinks

You'd better use your hands

Yes sir, that's my Bebe

A two-frame animation I made from gorgeous photos of Harold Lloyd's first leading lady, Bebe Daniels.

Harold Lloyd on the clock: here's how he did it

Harold Lloyd: those long ocean voyages

Harold Lloyd: fists of fury

Harold Lloyd: Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra

Somehow the bleakness of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra expresses Harold's grief at being mocked at the big dance better than anything. I mean, his pants fell apart and all. This is HL's low point in The Freshman, and I will say it was fiendishly hard to get the film and music to synchronize.

Harold Lloyd: Ride of the Valkyries

Another of my incongruous attempts to glom classical music onto scenes from Harold Lloyd. It almost works, in this case. This is the race to the church from Girl Shy set to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.

Harold Lloyd: The Rite of Spring

Experimental filmmaking at its most wretchedly primitive. I got thinking: what if I rescored some of the great moments from Harold Lloyd's movies with great moments from classical music? The result, bizarre as it is, was captured on film (sort of). This is the fight scene from The Kid Brother set to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

An Interesting Story (1905): just the good part

Kevin Brownlow: it's nice to get an answer sometimes

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Brownlow
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2015 1:41 PM
To: Margaret Gunning
Subject: LE MOULIN MAUDIT

At long last I have located that film you enquired about. LE MOULIN
MAUDIT was made in 1909 by Alfred Machin. The English title was THE
MILL, it was made by Pathe and the print emanated from the Cinematheque
Francaise, not the EYE Institute, Amsterdam, as I thought, It was
restored by the CNC. Here is the description in the Bologna catalogue
for 2009; 'Adultery, madness, murder, suicide and a sinister windmill
which confers epic dimensions on this six-minute film. The elderly
husband crucifies his young rival on the mill's sails and their sombre
shadow in the river beats time as the deadly finale is played out. Is
this the film that Julien Green (1900-1998) saw as a child and which
gave him nightmares? The elements and the atmosphere are the same: a
river, an "avenging mill" and a nightmarish escalation of horror.' (I
think Mariann Lewinsky wrote that).

You won't be surprised to learn that the director, Alfred Machin, was
primarilly  famous for making films for children! He was also a
front-line cameraman in WW1. Julien Green was an American  who wrote in
French, and who became the first non-French writer to be elected to the
Academie Francaise.

Phew!
Very best
Kevin

 
Thank you for that - it's pretty gruesome stuff. So, would this be shown as
a double feature with a comedy, perhaps a Chaplin film?  I am not sure who
the target audience was for this sort of dark expressionist stuff. The first
time I watched it, I thought it must be some kind of faux silent film or
even a parody (the heroine tied to the railroad tracks?). It's just so
sadistic, actually shocking. A morality tale, too - everyone gets punished,
even the punisher. (Those pants, though - I guess he just had to go.) My
favorite moment is when the husband finds the wooden shoes at the bottom of
the ladder. The two of them aren't actually shown going up it  - I guess
that would just be too immoral. But the idea of him scurrying up there in
bare feet - . Much more is left to the imagination here. I note too the
woman is wearing an actual corset, not a costume one. I think women were
still wearing them then.

These things are time machines, for sure.

Margaret

I made a gif of this - I'll try to send it - the guy going around and around
strapped to the windmill.

POST-BLOG COMMENTS. Along with my gifs of Le Moulin Maudit (which I will post in its entirety when I get around to it, because I have a lot more I want to say about it - it's a brilliant little devilish piece of early filmmaking/storytelling), I wanted to include my lovely email exchange with Kevin Brownlow, which happened today. In case you don't know, he's the world's foremost expert on silent film and an Oscar winner for lifetime achievement in silent film restoration. And! Of all the people I tried to contact and get interested in The Glass Character, he was really the only one that took any interest or bothered to respond. I had initial interest from Rich Correll, who used to be considered Harold's "second son" and who actually phoned me from Los Angeles a couple of years ago. But there was no followup. The trail went cold when he stopped answering my emails and calls for no reason I could ascertain. Likewise with Annette Lloyd - I somehow turned her off, I think, maybe by making too familiar with her biographical subject.

Of all the people I contacted, or tried to, Kevin Brownlow was the least likely to respond because of his tremendous status and obvious busy-ness as a world figure in cinema. He's also well into his seventies and has devoted decades to the cause. As a matter of fact, he began when silent films were still being melted down and made into bootheels and such, tossed aside as dross that no one would be interested in watching. He met Harold Lloyd when he was a young  film student and immediately loved him, seeing him as charming, unpretentious and not at all vain or self-obsessed.

The first time I sent an email to a major film figure and actually got a RESPONSE, I was amazed. Kevin Brownlow, for whom words like "distinguished" seem invented, with that cut-glass English accent, turned out to be jolly good fun, accessible, and friendly. He usually answered my questions promptly and with pleasure. Though I knew he wouldn't have time to read it, he agreed to write a blurb for my book that leant the back cover more than a touch of class.

If you're interested in silent film, then he is interested in talking to you. I didn't find this kind of courtesy and respect anywhere else, and I don't think I ever will.

This doesn't bring me any closer to my movie version of The Glass Character. It doesn't make the book A Success in the mysterious way it is supposed to be. But it was and is a wondrous thing to connect with someone like this. And to have him do some homework on this movie I asked about, and to GET BACK TO ME about it, is nothing short of a bloody miracle in an age when the unanswered email and the ignored request seems like the norm.

POST-BLOG-POST REVELATION! Today, a couple of weeks later, I actually got something in the mail - but it wasn't just anything. It was postmarked from Britain, neatly addressed by hand (a rarity in itself) with no return address.

I opened it, and saw a greeting card:

A Christmas card from Kevin Brownlow, signing himself as Kevin, yes, as if we're friends. . . or at least, as if he's a wonderful and warm person who goes to the trouble to handwrite a card and send it all the way over the ocean to me.

He has done this sort of thing before, when he sent me a wonderful antique postcard of Rudolph Valentine which sits on my desk in a lucite frame.

Somebody has to come through for me, I guess. And the fact that it's the one who knows the most about this subject is not lost on me. Some days, rare days, almost nonexistent days, this all seems worthwhile.

POST TO THE POST-POST! The card contained an enclosure: a photocopy of a page from a book. It's a little hard to read what's on it, so I'll transcribe:

"Lashed to a windmill by a Nebraska mob that dragged him from court, a murderer faces an exotic death. The sherriff halted the rite - depicted in the Police News in 1884 - and the man got a life term instead."

Kevin's comment was, "This isn't very Christmassy but it certainly is a coincidence! Just came across it in Time/Life's THE OLD WEST."

Nebraska, eh? That's where Harold was born and raised. But this poor man, like St. Peter, is being crucified upside-down.

On the edge

More will be revealed

The hottest kiss in movie history!

YES: it's here in gif form, at long last, after seven years of waiting: my favorite scene from my absolute-favorite Harold Lloyd movie, Why Worry?

It's romantic and sexy enough that this is set on a tropical island where a revolution ferments. But it also has a kind of subconscious romance going on, with (ultimately) explosive results. Harold plays a hopeless hypochondriac, a self-absorbed fussbudget oblivious to the longing glances of his gorgeous nurse, Jobyna Ralston. That is. . . until the very end, when something erupts.

In typical wacky Lloydian fashion, he asks her indignantly, "Why didn't you tell me I love you?" But by this time, Jobyna knows he's in the bag. All she has to do is stand there and wait.

And here it is, one of the hottest, most impetuous kisses I've seen in silent film - or talkie film - or ANY film, for that matter. He doesn't just grab, he SEIZES her while she reacts with a kind of violent spasm, resists him (very weakly), then  melts into his arms, even doing a subtle leg-pop that might have been a first in motion pictures. Up to this point, movie kisses were coy, taking place behind screens or during the fadeout, or followed by big happy-happy grins of boyish glee. What makes it even more exciting is the fact that all through the movie there are not-so-subtle hints that Harold is attracted to her, but refuses to let himself know it. She plays him like a fish for an hour and two minutes, then lands him like a pro.

But it gets even better. The camera pans away for a few seconds, as if to let your eyeballs cool off a bit, then comes back to the lovers, who are STILL KISSING. As I researched Harold's life, I came across several references to his affair with Ralson. This was their first movie together, meaning that we have a sort of Bogart and Bacall thing going, with sparks flying that show up onscreen. Her utter confidence in her charms, her adorable boy's clothing, her swivelling hips - well. Harold never was much of one for marital fidelity .We all have our frailties, and in this case resistance was futile.

I had no idea up to now that my gif program could handle an hour-long movie (in fact, it probably couldn't, and must have been upgraded by the site at some point) or that I could set it up "blind" without using the slider, but voila et voici! Now I want to gif the entire movie, and I might just try it, doing it in 10-second installments. There are many great moments in this film, and I still maintain that with its upside-down dynamics and general wackiness, it's the first screwball comedy ever made, the prototype for everything that came after.

And just when I'm tired of Harold Lloyd, or at least tired of the heartbreak of a book that probably isn't going anywhere, something like this comes along.

SPECIAL BONUS PHOTO! Only a few still photos exist of this amazing scene, likely "captures" taken directly from the film. This one is new to me, with Jobyna's right arm registering surprise and her leg-pop at its maximum. The more I look at this, the more eyebrow-raising it is, because it really does look as if their lower bodies are touching. Was Hal Roach asleep that day? Why doesn't anyone say anything about this? I'm sure I don't know.

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