The Black Pirate

The Black Pirate is a swashbuckling pirate adventure, a showcase for the daring stunts and swordplay of silent action star Douglas Fairbanks. Made in 1926 and directed by Albert Parker, it was one of the first films shot entirely with the two-strip Technicolor process, which makes it one of the rare surviving silents shot in color. Fairbanks plays a nobleman, the sole survivor of a pirate attack that kills his father. He vows revenge on the pirates, though his plan to achieve that revenge is anything but logical, since it consists of joining the pirate band, becoming their leader, and teaching them to be better, more effective pirates, even helping them to hijack a ship while plotting against them.

It never makes much sense, but the silly plot (from a story by Fairbanks himself) provides ample excuse for Fairbanks to show off his exhilarating stuntwork and obvious love of physical feats of daring. He makes a much more convincing pirate than a nobleman, and he seems to enjoy inhabiting this role altogether too much for a man supposedly seeking revenge. To prove his worth to the band of pirates, he hijacks a ship singlehandedly, pulling up alongside it in disguise as a fisherman and swinging around all over the ship, cutting ropes and sails, sending watchmen flying up into the rigging and finally holding the whole crew hostage with a pair of imposing cannons. He does it all with a big, infectious grin on his face, his teeth shining as he leaps and soars through the ship's rigging and swings from one perch to another, clambering around with the agility of a monkey, gliding down the sail with his knife thrust into its fabric or swinging on ropes. Fairbanks always seems to be having a blast when pulling off these stunts, and his enthusiasm is what makes him so fun to watch.

In between the action scenes, the film flounders a bit, and Parker's direction is mostly static and workmanlike. One exception is a great celebratory shot towards the end of the film, after the action-packed battle scene climax — which itself mostly consists of Fairbanks' allies comically jumping on the pirates en masse as if they're playing football — in which Fairbanks is hoisted aloft by his soldiers. He's in the bottom of the ship's hold and is handed up from one set of hands to the next at each level of the ship, the camera tracking up with him while he simply poses heroically, flexing his muscles and grinning proudly, passively letting himself be carried up to the top deck. It's a gloriously silly and self-conscious affirmation of the hero's potency.


Despite Fairbanks' grinning bravado and the flimsy scenario, some grit is provided by making the pirates — with the exception of Fairbanks' one-armed sidekick (Donald Crisp) — credibly sinister. The film is fairly direct about the brutality of the pirates, particularly with regards to their leering intentions towards a princess (Billie Dove) who the crew takes captive. A few of the pirates fight over her and draw straws to see who takes possession of her, just as earlier they'd drawn straws to settle a struggle over a monkey they'd found. The parallel between the two scenes suggests that these bloodthirsty pirates look at women as property, and it's all too obvious what they want to do with this particular piece of property. Of course, Fairbanks protects her from the pirates' lust, and of course the pair falls in love with one another, though it's funny that the princess is visibly relieved, at the end of the film, when she learns that her paramour is not actually a good-hearted pirate but a duke — a potential class crisis averted!

Early on, there's an offhandedly shocking grisly moment in which one of the pirates' captives, trying to keep them from getting a cherished ring, swallows it. But the pirate captain (Anders Randolf) sees this and gestures towards the man. One of the pirates then strolls offscreen with a knife, and moments later wanders back into the frame, the knife and the front of his clothes coated in bright, sticky red, holding out the ring for his captain.

The color is what makes it so startling, and it's one of the best uses of the film's primitive Technicolor. The clunky, unreliable two-strip process results in a restricted palette of mainly reds and blues, sometimes mixed with queasy greens or purples. There's no potential here for subtle color effects, which might be why color film didn't really catch on in a big way until the later three-strip process. Even so, the novelty of a true color silent film, no matter how basic the color scheme, helps to set this film apart as more than the routine pirate adventure it otherwise is.

Nana

Jean Renoir's second silent feature, Nana, is a tragic, melodramatic satire based on an Emile Zola novel about a failed actress who becomes an obsession of multiple upper-class men, corrupting the noble class with her crass, vulgar ways. For the role of this remarkable young woman, Renoir cast his then-wife Catherine Hessling, the star of several of his earliest films and an actress who was, to say the least, something of an acquired taste. Bold, brash, and extremely limited in her range, Hessling was nevertheless something of an inspired choice to play the corrupting influence Nana, who leads men to their doom with her pouting and mugging, her shameless flirting and her manipulative use of her own sexuality.

It's very interesting that Renoir would cast his wife in a role like this, and the film creates some bizarre subtexts surrounding this woman. Renoir is casting his wife as a terrible actress who's stereotyped as a tramp and a seductress, not fit for serious or "elegant" roles; when she tries out for the part of an elegant duchess, her fellow performers laugh her out of the room. When she gets the part anyway through the influence of her wealthy suitor, Count Muffat (Werner Krauss), she's booed off the stage, though Renoir at least spares her that indignity with an ellipsis, showing her running offstage in tears afterwards. Nana is brash and vulgar, defiantly lower-class, but somehow she manages to attract all these stuffy upper-class men who are seduced by her sour-puss scowl and her hip-shaking insinuations of sexual abandon. When Nana gets up on stage and dances lustily, she earns raucous cheers, and Renoir highlights the class divide in the audience by showing the lower rows recklessly getting involved in Nana's bold performance, while when some of the gentlemen in the more sophisticated regions of the theater get caught up in the act, those around them display their disdain for such unfettered shows of appreciation.

In many ways, Hessling's limited range actually makes her a perfect fit for Nana. She can be a frustrating actress, displaying the same sour expression and widened eyes for virtually every emotion from sadness to ecstasy, but Nana's not exactly supposed to be a subtle or likeable character herself. She's a force of nature, an embodiment of the lower-class invasion of the nobility, a theme that Renoir would go on to explore far more subtly and powerfully in later films, but is already at the center of this sophomore film. Nana revels in her humiliation of these wealthy men with their titles and their fortunes: in one of the film's most potent sequences, she actually makes Muffat beg like a "fat little puppy" for a piece of chocolate, placing his hands under his chin like a dog begging for a treat. She debases these men, driving them to crime and fetishism. One of her suitors, the effeminate, ineffectual young Georges (Raymond Guérin-Catelain), hides in her closet so he can smell her dresses, from which vantage point he witnesses Muffat's debasement, which seems to teach him something ugly about himself as well.


Though Nana quits the stage towards the beginning of the film, in many ways she remains an actress in her new "career" as a courtesan, performing for men, acting out a glamorous lifestyle that elevates her above her previous station into the company of sophisticated men with fancy titles. Renoir repeatedly films her luxurious room in wide shots that make it look like a stage, complete with proscenium arch. Nana leaves the theater but makes her whole life a kind of performance instead, another way in which Hessling's theatrical performance style fits this character so well.

Renoir, working under the strong influence of Erich von Stroheim, adopts a lush, sophisticated, self-assured style here, very different from the blend of naturalism and surreal visual effects in his debut La fille de l'eau. The film's style is big and lavish, capturing the trappings of wealth and privilege that Nana so incongruously wraps around herself. But Renoir also movingly depicts the emptiness and melancholy lurking at the center of this lifestyle: all this money, the manipulations and seductions, leaves this gaping emotional hole that's filled with suicides and psychologically motivated illnesses and the other usual melodramatic tragedies, but also with a general atmosphere of gloom that's communicated in Renoir's elegant visual style. There are numerous shots here that capture that melancholy undercurrent: Nana reclining on her couch, her face framed by flickering candles; Muffat strolling through a dark night that closes in around him, lit up only by a lamp post high above, barely piercing the inky blackness that smothers him.

Nana is an early indication of Renoir's satirical sensibility being directed at the bourgeois and the nobility, with Hessling's Nana serving the same casually destructive role that Michel Simon would later take on in more refined, fully developed films like Boudu Saved From Drowning. Renoir was still finding his voice here, but Nana is still both a fine film in its own right and an early glimpse of the director's developing style and concerns.

The General

The General is one of the purest delights that the cinema has to offer. Its construction, and its appeal, is utterly simple, and yet there's a visual poetry to it that goes far beyond its minimalist surface. Buster Keaton's most famous feature, co-directed with Clyde Bruckman, is quite possibly also his best, and certainly the most direct, undiluted example of his kinetic, visceral comedic action. The film has not a shred of fat on it, not a wasted moment. There's none of the sometimes meandering set-up that kicks off some of Keaton's lesser features, no need here for extended exposition or narrative. It's just one great scene, one great pantomime gag, after another.

Keaton plays Johnny Gray, a train engineer on a Southern rail line during the Civil War. When the war starts, he tries to enlist and is rejected because his civilian job is too important, but his girlfriend Annabelle (Marion Mack) and her family just thinks he's a coward, so the serious young man — who, a title card informs us, loves only his train and his girl, probably in that order — is eager to prove his bravery and his masculinity. With that out of the way, the film then hurtles forward into the two extended railroad chase sequences that together comprise virtually the entirety of its running time. The film is neatly halved: in the first half, Keaton pursues a group of Union train thieves across Union lines, and in the second half he steals back his train and is chased by the Union army back across Confederate lines, in a race to warn the South before a sneak attack is sprung.

The scenario was based on a real incident from the war, and Keaton treats it with his characteristic serious comedy. In fact, it's easily his most straight-faced and least comic film, which isn't to say that it's not funny (it is!) but that its humor is subtle even for him, the gags organically incorporated into the structure of the action-packed sequences. In that respect, it resembles the thrilling action climax to Our Hospitality, and of course it also expands upon Keaton's train fascination from that film, spending virtually the entire film with one great train gag after another.


If The General isn't Keaton's funniest film, it's definitely his most astonishing, the densest of his works in terms of pure how-the-hell-did-he-do-that stunt bravado. Keaton leaps from one train car to another, throws giant beams of wood around, climbs across the front of the engine, bounces from the train to the tracks to clear obstructions, and rigs traps to trip up his pursuers. In one justly famous moment, he sits on the front of the train and throws a beam out in front of the train so that it lands on a second beam and sends them both catapulting off the tracks. It's done casually, as though there's nothing to it, as though these massive wooden blocks aren't careening around a few feet from Keaton's vulnerable figure. It's dazzling, almost more frightening than it is funny, and it displays Keaton's perfect grasp of physics-based gags, his sheer imagination, his courage, his ability to precisely map out movements and make each motion, each trajectory, both graceful and somehow funny.

A perfect example is the scene where Keaton lights a cannon to fire at the Union train, then comically dodges around when the cannon barrel lowers to point at Keaton's train instead. The punchline is typically all about trajectories: the trains turn a curve in such a way that the cannon, at the precise moment that it is fired, is once again pointing at the enemy train. The physical comedy, if it can even be called that, is inspired throughout. Keaton's a real action hero here, and his no-nonsense physicality only makes the moments when he indulges in a slapstick gag — like the scene where he throws firewood onto the train but keeps knocking the beams off — even funnier. There's also some deadpan wit in little details like the hilariously stoic portrait that Keaton gives to his girl (he's posed, of course, in front of his first love, his train). Although Keaton's the undoubted star, Mack proves a very capable foil for him, most notably in the scene where she throws tiny shreds and splinters of wood into the train's furnace, causing Keaton to, in quick succession, strangle her and kiss her.

One great sequence actually takes place in a rare break from the train action, when Keaton hides under a table listening to some Union officers plot their attack. There's a lot of wonderful tension here, both comic and genuinely suspenseful, especially when one of the soldiers burns a hole in the tablecloth with a cigarette and lifts it up. For a moment, Keaton can be seen, staring out at the camera in terror from under the table, while the officer simply extinguishes the embers around the burn hole and lets the tablecloth fall again. That poignant glimpse of the frightened Keaton, looking pleadingly at the camera, is unforgettable. Soon after, there's a pair of shots that cleverly use the hole in the tablecloth to frame Keaton's eye and Annabelle's face (she'd been taken prisoner by the Union). It's appropriate that Keaton here frames and emphasizes his own eye like this, because his eye, his utterly clear and direct vision, is at its absolute peak in this marvelous film.

Battling Butler

Battling Butler follows a familiar template for many of Buster Keaton's features, with Keaton's character starting out inept and gradually gaining in proficiency so he can get the girl. This is one of his features that actually has a bit more of a plot, with Keaton playing Alfred Butler, a snooty society heir with more than a little similarity to his hapless rich kid in The Navigator. When his parents want to toughen up the spoiled brat, they send him out into the woods for a camping trip, accompanied by a manservant (the always funny Snitz Edwards) who makes the trip anything but roughing it.

The camping scenes provide a barrage of great gags, many of them about all the amenities that Butler has lugged with him into the wilderness. But the best moment is Butler's hilarious attempt at fishing, which then leads into an equally inept attempt to shoot a duck with a shotgun while balancing, standing up, on a tiny boat. Then Butler meets a country girl (Sally O'Neil), and again as in The Navigator, immediately decides to get married. In order to impress her tough-guy family, though, he has to pose as his namesake, the boxer "Battling" Butler, which ignites the series of misidentifications and misunderstandings that drive the rest of the film.

The scenes of Butler training so that he can go through with his ruse are typically inspired, with Keaton's agility and deadpan unflappability adding to the slapstick joys of these scenes. There's lots of fun with the ropes of the boxing ring, with Keaton bouncing off and around them, ducking under, getting tangled in them or literally tied to them, sliding around on the floor, all in a desperate attempt to get into the ring — followed quickly by a series of even more desperate attempts to get back out of the ring. It's not quite the most madcap or energetic of Keaton's physical performances, but it's a typically satisfying sequence of gags as the inept trainee leaps fearfully into the arms of his trainer, gets pounded, runs around the ring and keeps throwing wild punches while keeping his gaze locked, not on his opponent, but on the trainer who's trying to instruct him.


There are a few nice moments here where Keaton uses frames within the frame to highlight the separation between Butler and the girl he's married but has to continue lying to. Right after their wedding, he has to rush off to pretend to train for a fight, and as he drives away from her, the girl's face is framed in the oval back window of the car, receding into the distance as the car pulls out. Later, when she unexpectedly shows up at a training session, Butler sees her face framed in the crook of his sparring partner's arm. In the next shot, Keaton reverses the perspective so that Butler is framed in the same angular hole between the other boxer's body and arm. It's a great diptych, which visually encapsulates the idea that Butler's boxing ruse is keeping the couple apart, literally standing between them so that they can only see one another framed by a boxer's arm.

Battling Butler isn't one of Keaton's best works, and its climax is somewhat lacking in the charm and humor of the rest of the film, as well as the usual high-energy hijinks that so often erupt in the last reel of his films — though the last shot, of Keaton walking arm-in-arm with his gal while wearing a top hat, boxing trunks and gloves, is a great final image. This is mid-level Keaton, which of course means that it's still very funny, packed with fantastic set pieces and visual/physical humor.

3 Bad Men

John Ford's Westerns consistently present the mythology of the Old West at its best, romanticizing and glorifying the westward expansion. This is true even very early on in his career. His 1926 silent 3 Bad Men is set in an ad hoc town that builds up at the border of the Sioux lands, which are set to be opened up to gold prospectors on a certain day, attracting speculators and settlers from all over, eager to earn their fortune in the newly opened territory. It's also a story of redemption, similar to his later 3 Godfathers, for three low-level outlaws — Bull (Tom Santschi), Costigan (J. Farrell MacDonald), and Spade (Frank Campeau) — who adopt Lee (Olive Borden), a girl whose father has been killed by vicious thieves. Lee, along with her admirer Dan O'Malley (George O'Brien), becomes a target for the evil, corrupt Sheriff Hunter (Lou Tellegen), who runs this small gold rush town and is also responsible for the murder of Lee's father.

Typically for Ford, he balances this dramatic story with a rich vein of humor, particularly in the scenes where Spade and Costigan, the two comic drunks among the titular three outlaws, try unsuccessfully to find a husband for the orphaned Lee by trawling the local bar. Particularly great is their stalking of a hapless, Chaplin-like dandy — they even check his teeth, like they're examining a horse — who reacts with quivering terror to the rough characters in this makeshift frontier community. There's also some nice humor in the title cards, which are a bit overwhelming towards the beginning of the film — when it seems like there's a lengthy title in between almost every shot — but quickly settle into a much smoother rhythm. At one point, a reporter announces, "they had a lot of trouble takin' out Spud Taylor's appendix — they had to kill him first," in one of Ford's references to the difficulties of the Western frontier.

The cinematography is potent throughout, with lots of typically grand frontier exteriors, including the first shot of the outlaws — riding over a hill, set off against the sun on the horizon — and the exhilarating sequences of large-scale wagon trains charging across the plains. The outdoor photography is gorgeous, imparting a sense of all the wide-open spaces, seemingly just waiting to be filled by the pioneers who flooded into the region, searching for gold or simply new land to settle and plow. Of course, there's little, if any, consideration of just what the Sioux thought about this scheduled invasion of their territory, other than a few probing, stone-faced closeups of Native Americans stoically watching the settlers and their wagons. The ethnic humor is also occasionally uncomfortable here, in the title cards that casually reference "dagoes" and "chinks" while casting the leading man as an Irish hero.


There are numerous powerful scenes here, though, and Ford's direction is confident and expressive. When Dan and Lee first meet, early in the film, Ford intersperses the titles — which establish a prickly attraction between the plucky, sarcastic heroine and the slightly goofy cowboy — with probing closeups that leave the actors plenty of room to define their characters entirely with their faces, their smiles and charged exchanges of glances. This introductory scene climaxes with the seemingly unceasing sexual tension of a kiss that never quite happens, even though both of them are on the verge of consummating the kiss, and Ford cuts to a shot of their legs, visible under the wagon, the girl raising one foot in anticipation. Later, he deftly stages a comic misunderstanding as Dan plays the harmonica for the bathing Lee, only to have another woman creep up behind him and sit down, with Dan assuming that Lee has joined him.

The action scenes towards the end of the film are especially great, as the three outlaws defend the young lovers against Hunter's hordes of criminals, proving that the "bad men" of the title aren't actually so bad after all. Hunter, mugging broadly and staring with wide, eyeliner-rimmed eyes, is the real villain, telegraphing vaguely effeminate creepiness in every shot he appears, and gradually the film focuses on the antagonism between him and the honorable outlaw Bull, whose sister Hunter has seduced and cruelly discarded. The final half-hour is one thrilling action set piece after another, starting with the great scene where Hunter and his thugs attack the preacher's cabin with flaming wagons. Ford shows the preacher, standing in front of a giant cross with the building engulfed in fire behind him, pleading with the villains, who simply cackle in response. The frenzied rescue, led by Dan and the noble outlaws, is exciting and formally enthralling, with smoke drifting everywhere, making the battlefield confused. This is followed by a tense sequence in which Hunter's henchmen pursue the good guys through a narrow canyon, with each one of the outlaws standing off against the encroaching hordes one by one, with the most memorable moment a showdown in a shack stacked with barrels of gunpowder.

This ending is somewhat predictable and schematic — it's obvious from early on that the outlaws will redeem themselves as a sacrifice to enable the formation of a happy nuclear family — but it doesn't detract from this taut, well-staged climax. The outlaws are sacrificing themselves, in a way, not only to save Dan and Lee, but to restore some order and security and decency to the unhinged West, to tame the frenzied rush for gold. This is a charming, funny and action-packed Western that displays one of the greatest directors of the genre at the top of his game.

Faust

F.W. Murnau's Faust was his final German film before the director emigrated to the USA for his all-too-brief career in Hollywood. This grand, extravagant epic, based on Goethe's version of the German legend about a man making a deal with the devil, represented Murnau's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink apotheosis of the German Expressionist silent style. It's a technical marvel, with dazzling effects that must have been utterly cutting edge at the time and today still have tremendous charm and power. This is especially true of the film's opening section, in which the devil makes a wager with an archangel over the soul of Faust (Gösta Ekman), a good man who the devil, in an echo of the Biblical story of Job, promises he can corrupt. Faust is a man of great faith and wisdom, old and wise and well-respected in his community. But he is nevertheless corrupted by the devil's representative Mephisto (Emil Jannings, in a scenery-devouring role), first by appealing to his very best instincts, his desire to help people, then by tempting him with power, then with increasingly base and material temptations.

The film's opening section provides Murnau with the opportunity to unleash a barrage of visual effects, showing the devil towering over a scale-model town, stretching his black wings to blot out the sun, kicking up clouds of dust that spread the plague. Sinister skeletal riders soar through the sky, and the devil's face appears floating in the clouds, taunting the people of the town. Faust, faced with this plague, appeals to both science and God, but both fail him; he can do nothing to cure the disease, and in a fit of desperation, after burning both his religious and his scholarly books, he decides to summon a demonic force to his aid instead. He goes to the crossroads, that mythic site of hellish bargaining, and as he conducts the ritual, Murnau draws a glowing ring of fire around him, fiery circles hovering hazily in the air around Faust, as the demon Mephisto magically materializes by his side.

Mephisto appears first as a ratty, stooped beggar with sinisterly glowing eyes, haunting the terrified Faust, who already regrets summoning this creepy creature, and later as a courtly, vampiric figure in black robes and a jaunty cap with a feather sticking out of it. In either guise, he's a mischievous trickster guiding Faust into the bargain that will doom him. Faust believes at first that he's only doing this to help people, but he's soon seduced by sensual and sexual pleasures, by the lure of power and greed and lust. The film calms down a little stylistically after this initial flurry of baroque visual overload, and when Mephisto transforms Faust into a young man — in order to pursue first a libertine duchess (Hanna Ralph) and then the virginal young Gretchen (Camilla Horn) — the film settles down into a much more understated melodrama, albeit one that takes place amidst the deformed architecture and spiky shadows of the elaborately designed sets.


Faust's romance with Gretchen is what ultimately saves him — the film ends with an angel defeating the devil, citing the power of love, liebe, and the word appears surrounded with a glistening halo of light — but Murnau is somewhat irreverent in his depiction of this tragic romance. Part of it is that Jannings' Mephisto is just so much more appealing and fun to watch than the smooth-faced, feminine young Faust, who's very much cast in the mold of the usual bland silent-era heroes despite his deal with the devil.

Mephisto is the choice part here — although Gretchen's leering giant of a brother (William Dieterle) somewhat unintentionally gives Mephisto a run for his money as the creepiest character in the film. Mephisto is an incarnation of the devil as an avatar of fun, dancing around in the shadows making mischief, mugging wildly for the camera in his agony at the sight of a cross, stalking around with his rapier sticking out the back of his robes like a stiff tail. The film, despite its ultimate message of love and spiritual uplift, has some pretty perverse and provocative ideas about good and evil, confirming the impression that the latter have all the fun.

In one early scene, the plague inspires an apocalyptic preacher who urges the people to repent and pray, the cross he holds looming large within the frame. But this somber, morbid religious assembly is interrupted by a parade of revelers who take the opposite approach, laughing at death and celebrating feverishly since life is so short. There's no question which approach Murnau makes seem more appealing, as the partying villagers briefly stop beneath the preacher, the camera angled down to leer at the women with their cleavage spilling out of their tops, laughing and drinking, their sensuality splayed out beneath the preacher with his cross. To cap off this scene, the devil strikes down the preacher, suggesting that goodness and piety are no guarantees in a world where Hell has as much influence as Heaven.


Mephisto is the most visible embodiment of this sensibility. Jannings, an actor who knew very well how to play big without sacrificing subtlety, rips into the part but never comes across as hammy, instead just communicating this sinister devil's delight in his evil deeds, his pop-eyed intensity and insanity. His best showcase is Mephisto's playful flirtation with Gretchen's matronly alchemist aunt Marthe (Yvette Guilbert), which serves as a parodic counterpoint to the love scenes between Gretchen and Faust. Gretchen plays the "he loves me, he loves me not" game with a flower she picks, and Mephisto repeats the gesture with eye-rolling mockery using a mushroom, sticking shards of it in his mouth as he pulls them off the crown.

Murnau cuts back and forth between these two romances throughout this scene, employing the comic, ribald interplay of the demon and the alchemist as a tonic for the conventionally romantic pursuit of Gretchen by Faust. Mephisto is both randier than the human — putting a necklace on the old woman, he cups her breasts in his hands, then recoils as though disappointed in what he'd felt — and much funnier, as he responds to his paramour's attempts to kiss him by pushing her cap over her face and running away. The whole sequence ends, not with Faust proposing to Gretchen, but with Marthe lovingly taking a piece of mushroom and stuffing it into her shirt as a souvenir, while Mephisto, fleeing the scene, turns back towards the camera, and spits out a mouthful of chewed-up mushroom bits, blowing a raspberry at all this romance and sentimentality.

Though Jannings is the film's most powerful presence and easily steals every scene he's in, Murnau masterfully shifts the film's focus and its sympathies to Gretchen for the increasingly poignant final act, in which the young girl suffers greatly for her involvement with the corrupt Faust. Horn delivers a sweet, pure performance, radiating light and decency, and Murnau draws visual parallels between the girl and both the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc in the film's final stretch. The image of Gretchen in the snow, a shawl wrapped around her head, the tears on her cheeks frozen into delicate white crystalline patterns, is breathtaking and heartbreaking, a tragically beautiful evocation of the Virgin with child. The film, like many of the Faust legends upon which it's based, Goethe's included, pulls back from the darkness at the very last second. But this momentary redemption, as affecting as it is, is in many ways overpowered by Murnau's far more vivid presentation of suffering, corruption, shadow and fog, and the sheer grinning, mischievous fun that is the evil in the world.

Films I Love #4: Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)

Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant is a masterpiece of silent cinema, taking a simple melodramatic plot and transforming it into a deeply affecting work of art with the sheer force of the poetic, intense visuals that Kirsanoff uses to tell his story. The film follows a pair of sisters who leave the country for the city after their parents are slaughtered in a mysterious axe murder. Unusually for the time, there are no intertitles, so the plot is communicated entirely with imagery. This economical storytelling gives the film a lean, stripped-down aesthetic that makes it seem eminently modern. All the unnecessary exposition is trimmed away, and the opening axe murder is boldly stylized and brutally effective, even as its exact details remain unclear. Kirsanoff's dense, rapid-fire montage is perfectly suited to capturing the insane violence that orphans the two girls. Later, as the film traces the disintegration of the sisters' relationship after a man comes between them, Kirsanoff employs a wide variety of aesthetic tools, from superimposition to expressive closeups to poetic non-narrative shots of the urban surroundings. One of the most striking sequences occurs as the girls mourn their parents, and Kirsanoff quickly fades back and forth between the two sisters, who are facing in different directions. As the two faces are superimposed, they form a Janus-headed image of grief, joined into one image and one person through Kirsanoff's sleight of hand. The film also ventures into near-abstract montage at times, as when a frantic burst of layered imagery suggests the frazzled mental state of one girl as she worries about her missing sister. This is a dazzling masterpiece that is as overwhelming and powerful today as the day it was made, its impact completely undulled by the passage of many decades.