1913 Poll

[Lencho of the Apes]

Did you spot

Curtiz was in there? I had no idea. I wouldn't have thought to look for a Hungarian in a Danish movie...

[Lencho of the Apes]

Musicals!

Edison Studio's Nursery Favorites goes all the way, combining song & dance routines with some vestigial narrative bits. It plays out like a 1904-06 "attractions" thing, but it's there.

[sally]

i just really like the italian stuff

the last days of pompeii

[Lencho of the Apes]

like the ....... stuff

Mags hasn't seen it, so I'll drop a Mosjoukine alert here -- he's in The Night Before Christmas, playing a panto Satan.

[sally]

Mags hasn't seen it, so I'll drop a Mosjoukine alert here -- he's in The Night Before Christmas, playing a panto Satan.

i'm alerted it just seems to exist in crappy versions though. but i'm sure i'll brave it for ivan before the end...(why is he so ill served? there's not even watchable versions of his megapics casanova or queen of spades)

but in the meantime

au pays des lits clos (maurice mariaud)

the sea! the sea! it's epstein's brittany!

[greennui]

That does look neat.

[sally]

yeah, um. i could write some stuff about the spaces of fantasy and something something myth but in truth i'm only there for the countryside and no one is gonna be watching it for narrative tension. more interesting is the dreaminess that must have carried over to epstein and maurice mariaud in general, who went from france to portugal & made os faroleiros (this one opens with a lighthouse, as if to signal that one in the future, amongst other things)

also watched 2 cutesy wutesy ones with little adorable darling children being cheek-pinchingly twee and i feel pretty sick tbh. i hate children.

[sally]

23:32, I wonder how many chases on top a running train had been done before this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz4HLHVk0ag

pretty hot at the end when she kissed his tattoo. they spent so long on the (admittedly great) action stuff i just wish the rest had had more time, he was totally joyfully living in sin with his doxy at the beginning (compared to the almost intolerably moralising sentimental guff coming from the US in 1913)

[sally]

hang on. there's TWO italian last days of pompeii from 1913? must have been a really popular story huh

[greennui]

hang on. there's TWO italian last days of pompeii from 1913? must have been a really popular story huh

Same poster on lboxd as well, mighty confusing.

[sally]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanother lighthouse! although this one, in auf einsamer insel is merely scenery. and in yet another iteration of another 1910's classic theme: two seamen, one girl & some dirty tricks. wouldn't bother anyone with this version, but i do now fancy dog-loving, tousle-haired snogger joseph delmont. can anyone find any other of his movies on KG or anywhere apart from auf einsamer insel, das recht auf dasein and der geheimnisvolle klub?

[greennui]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanother lighthouse! although this one, in auf einsamer insel is merely scenery. and in yet another iteration of another 1910's classic theme: two seamen, one girl & some dirty tricks. wouldn't bother anyone with this version, but i do now fancy dog-loving, tousle-haired snogger joseph delmont. can anyone find any other of his movies on KG or anywhere apart from auf einsamer insel, das recht auf dasein and der geheimnisvolle klub?

KG only has Lonely Island/Mysterious Club. My bet is If Eye doesn't have them then they're probably not available anywhere else. His books on wild animals seems to be widely available though lol.

[Curtis, baby]

Interesting title! I literally learned "einsamer"
(lonely) yesterday. Well, I learned "einsamkeit" (solitude/loneliness) but I can draw the inference.

It's an interesting word because "sam" of course is the ancestor of the English word "same", and has that idea in mind in its German use, but is mostly used in German as a sort of -ous, turning nouns into adjectives. So the German idea of lonely is one-ous. But here's where it gets really interesting. "Keit", another form of "heit", means -ness, which is how we in English turn adjectives into nouns. So einsamkeit is essentially the noun "one" converted to an adjective then converted back to a noun. So much to unpack there. I haven't been able to discover if this is just a fun quirk of how languages evolve, or if there's some serious philosophical implications of this etymology, as has often been the case in my study of German.

I actually learned this as a result of learning Waldeinsamkeit. Wald means forest, so that would be forest-solitude, or forest-one-ous-ness...? It means spending time alone in the forest to commune with the natural world and spiritually recharge... basically the most awesome word ever.

In BC (my province) and more specifically on a large Island that's a couple hours' ferry ride off the coast into the Pacific (where I did the Canadian portion of my law studies), "forest bathing" is a commonly used phrase. I had not heard it before moving to the Island, but it means the exact same thing. I had previously dismissed it as pseudo-spiritual Manic Pixie Island Girl nomenclature, but clearly I jumped to a most ignorant conclusion!

[Curtis, baby]

Unrelated: where is the Atlantic think-piece about how the German word for island sounds the same as incel? You know it's coming...

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

A Little Hero (Mack Sennett) - 4 minutes on EYE, Mabel Normand with dogs, cat, and canary.

[sally]

hmm, not sure i've come across any german 1913 films with forests in, in fact, not come across any german films for 1913 unless you count austrian delmont, danish gad or some blurry franz hofers.

the only woodsy one i can think of is perret's tense little les dents de fer



and the only thing he's bathing in is...BLOOD!!!! mwahaha

[greennui]

My man Mad Max Mack the Knife seems to be one of the most prominent German directors of the time. Perhaps I should check out one of his '13 films.

[sally]

ah well if you do, pls put in resources

from what i can find aside from the student of prague & the aforementioned fuzzy unwatchable franz hofer's:
Der Millionenonkel (actually austrian but more importantly, terrible copy, unwatchable)
Die Jagd nach der Hundertpfundnote oder Die Reise um die Welt (terrible copy, barely watchable)
Die Insel der Seligen (terrible copy, completely unwatchable)
der andere (unwatchable)
wo ist coletti? (unwatchable)
Richard Wagner

watchable, but unavailable:
Die Tango-Königin

Anyone got anything else?

[flip]

Interesting title! I literally learned "einsamer"
(lonely) yesterday. Well, I learned "einsamkeit" (solitude/loneliness) but I can draw the inference.

Unrelated: where is the Atlantic think-piece about how the German word for island sounds the same as incel? You know it's coming...

maybe they are related, because the italian word for 'island' is of course 'isola', which has the same latin root as 'isolated' (though perhaps surprisingly given how similar they seem orthographically and semantically, 'isolated' and 'solitude' do not appear to derive from the same word - solitude comes from 'solus' = 'alone' and isolated comes from 'insula' = 'island')

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Oh fun! I'm learning Latin right now, which unfortunately has no pay-off in filmwatching. But it's incredible how many words derive from Latin, so I stumble into a fun etymology lesson every day. My guess was that Latin's insula and solus would have a common root in Proto-Indo-European, but a quick look-up suggests otherwise, so it might just be coincidence all the way down.

[greennui]

ah well if you do, pls put in resources

It has been done.

[flip]

Oh fun! I'm learning Latin right now, which unfortunately has no pay-off in filmwatching.

i was an unwilling student of latin for four years in high school, and i can confirm that is true! very little help with filmwatching, but probably helpful if you're reading a lot of florid academic prose, i found it helps me to guess the meanings of a lot of words i've never seen before - people probably know what 'senescent' or 'stultifying' mean anyway, but if you study latin they come from words you learn very early on. knowing latin prepositions alone gets you halfway to a definition a lot of the time. but i think the main thing i took away from it is more structural. latin is so rigid about grammar and case (e.g., with nouns, nominative, accusative, ablative, genitive, etc) that it really exposes the roles words play in sentences written in languages like english that are largely indifferent to case. so it becomes a kind of template that helps when thinking about how to express oneself better in english, or even moreso when trying to learn an entirely new language. i don't care about grammar rules at all (though i do care about writing clearly) but for anyone who does care about 'proper' grammar, it would help with that too.

it's ironic that i'm talking about how latin helps to express oneself clearly and i'm making a mess of expressing what i mean, but i'm okay with that!

[sally]

thanks greennui ♥


first on screen interracial kiss????? or don't young boys count? (altho technically it's a young girl playing a boy)



jack (liabel)

the actor playing the older jack (known simply as 'villeneuve', only made 2 movies, guess he died because those cheekbones were unnatural even without the makeup) is so léaud/doinel-ish. gets dumped by his bird so just lays flat out in the middle of the road in despair. i LOL'd.

[Lencho of the Apes]

"einsamkeit"

There are also eng-lang cognates of -sam that you can ponder: -same' as in "self-same" (mostly archaic) and -some as in "lonesome." Have fun!

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Oh fun! I'm learning Latin right now, which unfortunately has no pay-off in filmwatching.

i was an unwilling student of latin for four years in high school, and i can confirm that is true! very little help with filmwatching, but probably helpful if you're reading a lot of florid academic prose, i found it helps me to guess the meanings of a lot of words i've never seen before - people probably know what 'senescent' or 'stultifying' mean anyway, but if you study latin they come from words you learn very early on. knowing latin prepositions alone gets you halfway to a definition a lot of the time. but i think the main thing i took away from it is more structural. latin is so rigid about grammar and case (e.g., with nouns, nominative, accusative, ablative, genitive, etc) that it really exposes the roles words play in sentences written in languages like english that are largely indifferent to case. so it becomes a kind of template that helps when thinking about how to express oneself better in english, or even moreso when trying to learn an entirely new language. i don't care about grammar rules at all (though i do care about writing clearly) but for anyone who does care about 'proper' grammar, it would help with that too.

it's ironic that i'm talking about how latin helps to express oneself clearly and i'm making a mess of expressing what i mean, but i'm okay with that!

Oh my, I envy your high school curriculum abundantly! It'll be helpful with that florid academic prose, but yes, so far at least, what I'm appreciating the most is everything you mention there, it's giving me a heightened attention to etymology and knowledge of grammar in languages generally. I expect it'll give me a leg-up when I later try to learn languages that can actually help me with filmwatching

[Lencho of the Apes]

I'm happy to see how much Feuillade-adjacent "adventure pulp" there is for the year, but I'm not liking any of those very much. Dr. Nicholson / Blue Diamond was oddly bland, and Tigris was in ruinous nick, with chunks missing, and it played on a gimmick that lost 140% of its significance when the images were so badly degraded -- the three main characters are all played by the same actor, and two of them are quick-change masters of disguise.

Top pics from this month's viewing as of now:
Germinal
Traffic In Souls

[greennui]

I'm happy to see how much Feuillade-adjacent "adventure pulp" there is for the year, but I'm not liking any of those very much.

The other big pulp serial guy at the time, Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset had quite a busy 1913, perhaps a little too busy as he ended up dying in june the same year. 28 imdb credits to his name in 1913 but most of them unavailable, searched high and low online after his Zigomar serial but to no avail. Protéa can be found though.

When I first saw his picture my first reaction was 'dat guy don't look healthy.'

He was remembered as a man of immense energy, versatility, and concern for detail, and he took particular trouble in his direction of actors.[Alexandre Arquillière, who appeared in several of Jasset's films including the role of Zigomar, recalled "a slender grizzled silhouette, with a damaged eye... the tireless energy of this director who did not even take the time to sleep when he was making a film".

Also, "Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset". It's like a name made up entirely of surnames.

[greennui]

Jasset's Bandits en Automobile is probably the closest the silent film ever came to exuding the same energy as a DMX track.

[sally]

i have no idea what dmx is, but bandits is great.

what is not great, is the 1913 version of hamlet. it is, in fact, hilarious. hamlet played by a 60 year old grimacing ham lunatic relentlessly shouting shakespeare's lines to a camera that can't possibly hear them. absolute masterclass in how not to make a silent movie, but the hamlet is insane vibe came across very well for that.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Yeah, that Hamlet... Bernard Shaw apparently loved the guy's stage interp of the character ("best Hamlet of our era") but the only thing the film is good for is documenting 1913 stagecraft as it was done at that time.

Zigomar Vs Nick Carter is/has been available, english titles iirc... but it's 1912 on imdb. If you (green) can no longer find it, I'll be happy to do a thing. Bandits was a revelation.