Metropolis

Trivia

Image from Metropolis (1927)

“No optical printing system existed at the time, so to create a matte effect, a large mirror was placed at an angle to reflect a piece of artwork while live footage was projected onto the reverse. To expose the projected footage, the silvering on the back of the mirror had to be scraped off in strategically appropriate places. One mistake would ruin the whole mirror. This was done for each separate shot that had to be composited in this manner. This procedure was developed by Eugen Schüfftan and is known as the ‘Schufftan Process.'”

— Source: Internet Movie Database

Deliberately Bad Music?

Quotes
Bernard Herrmann with Orson Welles (1941)

“[For the opera scene in Citizen Kane] we needed something that would terrify the girl and put the audience a bit in suspense. I wrote the aria in a very high key which would make most performances sound strained. Then we got a very light lyric soprano and made her sing this heavy dramatic soprano part with a very heavy orchestration which created the feeling that she was in quicksand. Later on, that aria was sung many times by Eileen Farrell, who had the voice to sing it absolutely in that key, and it sounded very impressive. Some writers have said that the singer in the film performed it deliberately badly, but that’s not so. She was a good singer performing in too high a key.”

— Bernard Herrmann, interviewed for Sight & Sound magazine (Winter 1971-1972 issue)

The Unknown

Trivia

Poster for The Unknown (1927)

“For many years this film only existed in murky 9.5mm dupes on the black market. In March 1973, at a screening of this film at George Eastman House, archivist James Card said that Henri Langlois and his staff at the Cinematheque Francais discovered a copy of it in 1968 among other miscellaneous cans of film marked ‘l’inconnu’ (films ‘unknown’ due to missing titles, etc.).”

— Source: Internet Movie Database

First All-Talking Movie?

Trivia
Lights of New York (1928)

The Jazz Singer (1927) is often cited as the first sound film. That’s not entirely correct. It was the first popular sound film, and the film that launched the sound era, but it was only partially a sound movie. Much of the dialogue was presented through subtitles.

The first feature-length film with sound throughout (commonly referred to as all-talking) was Lights of New York (1928). And just a year later, Hollywood released its first all-color, all-talking feature. That was On with the Show! (1929).

A Collaborative Art

A Collaborative Art

Reviews

It had been nine years since silent film director Sergei Eisenstein had released a completed film. Fortunately, Alexander Nevsky (1938), his first sound film, was a popular success, and it restored Eisenstein’s reputation as one of the most innovative film directors. With this movie, he pointed the way for combining symphonic music with narrative imagery. Three years before Orson Welles and Bernard Herrmann explored similar terrain with Citizen Kane (1941), Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev treated visual and musical composition as collaborative forms of expression. As Eisenstein explained in his first book of film theory (translated by Jay Leyda and published in English as The Film Sense):

There are sequences in which the shots were cut to a previously recorded music-track. There are sequences for which the entire piece of music was written to a final cutting of the picture. There are even sequences that furnish material for the anecdotists. One such example occurs in the battle scene where pipes and drums are played for the victorious Russian soldiers. I couldn’t find a way to explain to Prokofiev what precise effect should be ‘seen’ in his music for this joyful moment. Seeing that we were getting nowhere, I ordered some ‘prop’ instruments constructed, shot these being played (without sound) visually, and projected the results for Prokofiev — who almost immediately handed me an exact ‘musical equivalent’ to that visual image of pipers and drummers which I had shown. With similar means were produced the sounds of the great horns blown from the German lines. In the same way, but inversely, completed sections of the score sometimes suggested plastic visual solutions, which neither he nor I had foreseen in advance.

Under Stalin’s reign in the 1930s, all Soviet art was subservient to the state. Eisenstein had to work within those restrictions in order to receive funding. That often led to non-artistic — even arbitrary — decisions that marred the completed project. In his book Eisenstein: Three Films, Leyda explains why a reel of Alexander Nevsky is lost, presumably forever:

One night, when he was working on the sequence of a brawl on the bridge at Novgorod, he was taking a nap when a call came from the Kremlin that Stalin wanted to see the film. Without waking Eisenstein the flustered official (probably Dukelsky) gathered up the reels and hurried off to a screening at which Stalin gave the film his approval. Only afterwards did the official discover that he had not shown the reel that Eisenstein was working on that night; not daring to reveal that Stalin had approved an incomplete film, the official removed the reel permanently from the released film, and it has remained hidden to this day.

Alexander Nevsky was meant to reflect events contemporary to the film’s audience, even though the story was based on history. Showing Teutonic invaders repelled by 13th-century Russian soldiers echoed growing concerns about a possible invasion by Hitler and the German army. Following the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of 1939, the film was withdrawn for being politically incorrect. It was reinstated in 1941 after Germany attacked the Soviet Union.

You don’t need to know anything about the political or historical context in order to enjoy this film. There’s a visceral satisfaction that comes from the interplay of images and music. The battle scenes, especially the ones that take place on a frozen lake, are probably the best battle scenes ever filmed. This movie is a feast for both the eyes and ears.

Alexander Nevsky
(1938; directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Dmitri Vasilyev)
The Criterion Collection (DVD)

Wednesday, September 13 at 1:30 a.m. eastern (late Tuesday night) on Turner Classic Movies

Fashion Statement

Trivia

Production photo from It Happened One Night (1934)

Can a movie change clothing trends almost overnight? That’s what happened with It Happened One Night (1934) from Columbia Pictures. Here’s the scoop, according to the Internet Movie Database:

“While shooting the scene where he undresses, Clark Gable had trouble removing his undershirt while keeping his humorous flow going and took too long. As a result the undershirt was abandoned altogether. It then became cool to not wear an undershirt which resulted in a large drop in undershirt sales around the country. In response, underwear manufacturers tried to sue Columbia.”

Hitchcock’s Practical Joke

Quotes

“Once, we were at a party in a restaurant with some twelve guests to celebrate my wife’s birthday. I hired an aristocratic-looking elderly dowager and we put her at the place of honor. Then, I ignored her completely. The guests came in, and when they saw the nice old lady sitting alone at the big table, each one asked me, ‘Who’s the old lady?’ and I answered, ‘I don’t know.’ The waiters were in on the gag, and when anyone asked them, ‘But what did she say? Didn’t anyone speak to her?’ the waiters said, ‘The lady told us that she was a guest of Mr. Hitchcock’s.’ And whenever I was asked about it, I maintained that I hadn’t the slightest idea who she was. People were becoming increasingly curious. That’s all they could think about.

“Then, when we were in the middle of our dinner, one writer suddenly banged his fist on the table and said, ‘It’s a gag!’ And while all the guests were looking at the old lady to see whether it was true, the writer turned to a young man who’d been brought along by one of the guests and said, ‘I bet you’re a gag, too!'”

— Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed in 1962 by Françoise Truffaut

First Sound Film?

Trivia

When was the first sound film made? The Warner Bros. studio began experimenting with its Vitaphone technology in 1925. This technology used a mechanical system to lock the projected film to a phonograph turntable. The synchronized audio worked well most of the time, but could be thrown out of sync if everything didn’t go perfectly. It improved enough within two years for the part-sound, part-silent The Jazz Singer (1927) to become a popular hit. Later, the accompanying sound track was incorporated onto the film itself.

The very first attempts at synchronizing sound with film reach almost as far back as the invention of film. Thomas Edison’s assistant, W.K. Laurie Dickenson, produced an experimental sound film in 1884 using Edison’s “kinetophone” process, which attempted to link a Kinetoscope movie projector with Edison’s phonograph player. The film shows two men dancing to the accompaniment of a violinist. As far as we know, it was never shown outside the Edison movie studio.