The Birth of a Flower (1910)
A remarkable achievement from the early days of cinema: a lovely large scale exploration of a small scale occurrence which often flies under our radar.
The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen (1911)
Once again, Georges Méliès demonstrates his enormous creative capacity, using the story of Baron Munchausen as a launching pad to create as many fantastic and bizarre scenes as he could.
This film features two of his favorite motifs: the demonic and the moon. In Satan, Méliès saw a larger than life character which easily translated to the exaggerated performance needed in silent films and enabled him to utilize his training as a magician without the need for explanation.
He often showed the moon peering through a window antagonizing someone as they tried to sleep. This allowed him to introduce fantastic, surreal elements into his films and provided a natural segue into the world of dreams.
While most early filmmakers were using the camera to explore the world as it is, documenting the world we already knew, Méliès was exploring the world as it could be, using the camera to create a world of his own invention which only slightly resembles our own.
The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912)
Joe lives in squalor with his cruel, selfish grandmother. At a picnic with a charity group, he hears a story about a young prince who escapes an old witch and sails off to the “land beyond the sunset.”
After the story, Joe wanders to the beach and commandeers an abandoned rowboat in hopes of finding a similar happy ending.
This is a bleak story; one of the few which doesn’t romanticize childhood, demonstrating instead that not everyone gets the perfect, happy childhood we read about in story books. We need to be reminded of this.
Fantômas: The Dead Man Who Killed (1913)
Louis Feillaude’s cinematic output isn’t as prodigious as D.W. Griffith’s, but his contributions to the burgeoning art form are equally impressive. The rhythm of cinema and the expectation of structure were codified by Feillaude. While Les Vampires is his masterpiece, this serial about the French criminal mastermind Fantômas is an important precursor to film noir.
The third entry in the series, is fascinatingly morbid, and the ending is wonderfully off kilter and bizarre.
The Perils of Pauline (1914)
After her guardian dies, Pauline’s sizable inheritance is placed in the care of the unscrupulous Mr. Koerner until she marries.
Koerner encourages Pauline to have adventures before marrying, intending to sabotage her so he can keep the money for himself. However, his plans are consistently thwarted and after every adventure Pauline is reunited with her “worried” ward who promises to watch over her more carefully next time.
This film serial originally consisted of twenty-two episodes, but only nine survive. Unconstrained by convention and expectation, these nine are full of the energy and passion typical of early filmmakers and serve as a fun reminder simplistic storytelling can be just as effective as a film with a $100 million budget and a bunch of computers.
After Death (1915)
Andrei meets a beautiful actress Zoia, and when she dies unexpectedly, he’s obsessed.
It’s a beautiful, melancholic picture of obsession and loneliness. Based on a novel by Ivan Turgenev, it’s infused with a lot of the existential angst of 19th century Russian literature. I love the era and their brooding, melancholic prose, and I love this.
Intolerance (1916)
With four distinct stories, this film argues humanity’s intolerance for other points of view is the source of humanity’s ills.
The first story features a conflict between stubborn devotees of two different gods, Marduk and Ishtar in ancient Babylonia in 539 BC and
The second story details the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus.
The third story concerns the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, one of the bloodiest encounters between Catholic and Protestant factions in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation.
The final story takes place in contemporary America and demonstrates the evils and ruthlessness of capitalism.
Without a trace of irony, this beautiful, sentimental film argues reliance on sentimentality is the cause of humanity’s downfall.
Stung by the harsh critical response to The Birth of a Nation, Griffith produced this epic as an apology, but while audiences flocked to see the allegedly offensive Nation, they largely ignored his mea culpa.
The Immigrant (1917)
While crossing the Atlantic, The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) has a series of comic misadventures.
Upon arriving in America, he reconnects with a woman he met during the trip (Edna Purviance) and takes her to dinner, but his happiness is short-lived when his money falls through a whole in his pocket.
Chaplin tapped into our universal fear of ridicule to create a slightly out-of-place, overly self-conscious, lovable loser, and his genius interpretation of the everyman character continues to resonate into a second century.
The Blue Bird (1918)
When wealthy children Tyltyl and Mytyl are rude to their poor neighbors, the fairy Berylune sends them on a magical quest searching for the bluebird of happiness. Various mystical creatures join them, including a talking dog and the souls of fire, water, and light.
The group travels to the Kingdom of the Future where Tyltyl and Mytyl meet their yet-to-be-born brother and learn to appreciate the blessings of their life, particularly their mother’s love.
A remnant of a bygone era of earnest sincerity, this gorgeous, sweet, film could not be made in today’s hyper-cynical environment, but it’s a great movie which reminds us of the power of fairytales, and more than deserves its placement on the National Film Registry.
The Doll (1919)
Ernst Lubitsch’s film is a delightfully zany romp about marriage and male / female relationships.
Lancelot is an overgrown baby who’s dependent on his mother. However, in order to acquire his inheritance, he has to have a wife. Afraid to commit to another woman, he makes a bargain with some corrupt monks: they’ll provide him with a mechanical wife; he’ll give them his inheritance.
Hilarius specializes in creating lifelike dolls, but when his apprentice breaks one, his daughter, Ossi, pretends to be the doll. Of course, this is the very doll bought by Lancelot.
Lancelot is excited to take his doll home to fulfill his obligations, but doesn’t know what he’s bargained for.
Ossi Oswalda (sometimes called the German Mary Pickford) is delightful as the titular doll. Her impish qualities and physical humor are well suited to the material. The surrealism is fantastic with many innovative techniques testing the limits of the camera.
Lubitsch takes on sexual politics, religious corruption, and youthful expectations, managing to be both biting and playful. It never feels mean-spirited, despite the pointed nature of the jokes. It’s a dangerous line to straddle, but he manages to do so (helped tremendously by Ossi’s first rate performance).