GELFAND’S WORLD-One afternoon I arrived at the train station in Munich, Germany, fairly ignorant of what might be considered interesting by the locals. And there in the station bookstore was a movie poster on the wall, showing a thin man with glasses, high up the side of a building, hanging from the hand of a clock. You will of course recognize that image and the description of Harold Lloyd, a Nebraska native and San Diego transplant who made the classic comedy Safety Last! right here in Los Angeles.
The 1920s were a moment of genius in the development of comedy, and the three reigning monarchs were Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charles Chaplin. They all created studios here and did as much as anyone to make the word Hollywood known all over the world. They used our streets, intersections, stores and office buildings, bringing the images of L.A. to far parts of the world and to rural America.
I bring this up because John Bengtson, a film historian and investigator who has made a name for himself rediscovering the filming locations that were used by these masters, will be here at the Cinecon film festival this Labor Day weekend to talk about how to find the places where some of the most important films were shot.
And we have a lot of those places. I think that this is one of L.A.'s best attributes, the fact that we are home to places and structures, some still surviving, that have become iconic in world cultural history.
First a word about Cinecon, the elite film festival that is, paradoxically, open to the public, and then a little about Bengtson's research.
Labor Day weekend of each year, a special part of the cinema community comes together to celebrate our film heritage. We actually watch movies, most of them in glorious black and white. In this case, we've got Charlie Chaplin's first attempt at the little tramp character, made almost exactly 100 years ago. We've got a 1940 film starring (get this) Jack Benny, doing a send up of the movie western and all its cliches. There are a series of silent films that are rarely shown, featuring people I've not actually heard of. That's the really fun part of Cinecon.
It's at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. You can actually show up and buy a one day pass for about $30 if you're so inclined. If you want to do 4 or 5 days and catch another 1914 Chaplin on the final day, you can do that too. I've linked (above) to the schedule, but there are lots of other interesting tidbits on other parts of the website.
And then there is Mary Pickford. After she stopped working for another founding genius, D.W. Griffith, she made a 1911 film directed by Thomas Ince called Their First Misunderstanding, which will be shown on Friday.
A little later in the festival, there is another Pickford silent called The Eternal Grind, this time from 1916. Anytime you get a chance to revisit (or visit) the Mary Pickford canon, it's a good thing.
Back to Bengtson.
To the film historian, wandering around Hollywood or downtown L.A. provides the kind of feeling that a history buff gets in retracing the battle lines at Waterloo. These are places where things happened, things which have altered the history of the world on the one hand, and the history of art on the other. Film can never be the same since Lloyd made Safety Last!, since Keaton made Seven Chances, and since Chaplin made The Kid. All of these ground breaking works of art are represented in our cement, our hillsides, and our stone walls.
Rather than go into the details, I'll just link to Bengtson's web page where he shows the details of how that clock scene was made. You can find it in the section How Harold Lloyd filmed Safety Last! This web page has a wealth of material, including links to lots of other investigations and, in particular, a link to directions for a walking tour of historic film locations.
Bengtson will be answering questions and then leading a short walk on Friday.
Why should anyone have an interest in old films? It's a worthy question, but with a lot of answers. The most obvious to me is that a lot of films that were made in this first golden age (figure 1910 to 1930) are really quite excellent. The lack of a synchronized sound track is not necessarily a deficit. It's just a difference. The lack of spoken dialog allowed comics like Lloyd and Keaton to ramp up the action, going from one sight gag to the next without introducing boring spoken dialog.
There is a similar analogy for the dramas and tragedies of that era. Lack of spoken dialog forced actors and actresses to communicate subtleties of emotion and excesses of passion by movement and expression rather than by raised voices.
For us Angelenos, there is another excuse to watch old films. We get to see L.A. as it once was, before we were born, and before the massive population influx. Imagine a Los Angeles without the San Diego Freeway, a Los Angeles where air shows took place in broad open fields right around where Wilshire and Fairfax intersect nowadays. It was also a city where much of downtown L.A. looked fairly similar to what is there today. Absent the high rises, of course.
And finally, the early history of film has directed much of world culture ever since. There is a pretty good hypothesis that Picasso developed some of his cubist ideas from watching movies, and that Shostakovich developed some of his musical ideas out of his experience accompanying silent films. But those are just curiosities. What's vitally important is that the people of this world watch television shows and movies that follow a kind of visual grammar that was developed in that earlier era.
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Put it this way: When we go through life, walking down the street or eating dinner, our vision is essentially uninterrupted. We blink, but at the end of each blink, the dinner table is still in the same place.
Early filmmakers played around with this reality, violating it first in one way, and then another. They might have a shot of people walking along a boulevard, and cut abruptly to another street or even the inside of a building. These kinds of "cuts" don't happen to us in real life, unless we are seriously insane, but movie viewers came to accept all these cinematic transitions that we call by words such as fade outs and dissolves. By now we don't even notice these cinematic devices, we just take them as a different kind of reality, that of the movies and television.
It is fascinating to watch the intermediate efforts that arose and then died away in the very earliest days of movie making. Most of all, it's fascinating to see how each era of technological capability and each era in the art of film editing led to different approaches to art, but to some amount of great art in every era.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 70
Pub: Aug 29, 2014
