Posts Tagged ‘silent film’
“Music proposes. Sound disposes.”*…
On the heels of Bach and Gluck, a visit to a temple of sound…
The BBC Sound Effects Archive is available for personal, educational or research purposes. There are over 33,000 clips from across the world from the past 100 years. These include clips made by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, recordings from the Blitz in London, special effects made for BBC TV and Radio productions, as well as 15,000 recordings from the Natural History Unit archive. You can explore sounds from every continent – from the college bells ringing in Oxford to a Patagonian waterfall – or listen to a submarine klaxon or the sound of a 1969 Ford Cortina door slamming shut…
– source
Open and easily searchable: “The BBC Sound Effects Archive,” from @BBC.
See also: 32 Sounds (and here).
(Image above: source)
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As we listen, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music and lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated sequences)… that’s to say, the first “talkie.” Based on the 1925 play of the same title by Samson Raphaelson (the plot, adapted from his short story “The Day of Atonement”), The Jazz Singer was warmly received– and effectively marked the end of the silent film era.
The Jazz Singer won two Oscars at the first Academy Awards, has been added to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress (as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”), and was chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of all time, ranking at number ninety. It has passed into the public domain and can be seen at the Internet Archive: here.
“Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another”*…
… and in one sense, it is. From Matan Stauber, a remarkable demonstration…
“Histography” is interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015.
The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events.
The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years.
The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time. For example you can look at the past century within the categories of war and inventions…
Explore “Historiography.”
* Arnold Toynbee
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As we connect the dots, we might send well-preserved birthday greetings to Kevin Brownlow; he was born on this date in 1938. A filmmaker (documentarian and editor), he is best known as a film historian– the film historian of the Silent Era. His initiative in interviewing many largely forgotten, elderly film pioneers in the 1960s and 1970s preserved a legacy of early mass-entertainment cinema. He received an Academy Honorary Award at the 2nd Annual Governors Awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on 13 November 2010– the first time an Academy Honorary Award was given to a film preservationist.
“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.”*…
A consideration of the GOAT…
It always feels like an appropriate moment to talk about Buster Keaton, if only because talking about him leads naturally to watching his films and experiencing again the shades of awe and amazement they reliably awaken.
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For all his fertility in superbly improbable inventions, what counted for Keaton was a sense of realness, an avoidance of the “ridiculous,” an adjective by which he indicated the disconnected gimmicks and anarchically unleashed aggression typical of Mack Sennett and Keaton’s own cinematic mentor, the ill-fated Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle.
He insisted on gags that evolved logically, story lines “that one could imagine happening to real people”—imagine being the appropriate verb, and the logic in question being of a peculiar sort unique to Keaton. The predicaments of his heroes were made to seem not only plausible but inevitable, even when they involved being chased over hills and valleys by a mob of women in wedding gowns (Seven Chances, 1925) or guiding a herd of cattle through the traffic-clogged streets of Los Angeles (Go West, 1925).
The pursuit of realness was carried to extremes in the epic proportions of the landscapes he sought out, the use of actual ocean liners and railroad trains as comic props, the execution of stunts like making an eighty-five-foot jump into a net in The Paleface (1922) or standing motionless in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) while the façade of a building falls on him—he is saved only by a conveniently placed window opening. (“We built the window so that I had a clearance of two inches on each shoulder, and the top missed my head by two inches and the bottom my heels by two inches.”) Magic act merges with cinema verité in films that become documentaries of the impossible. The fantastic structures and machines have the stark authenticity of the handmade. Most authentic of all is Keaton himself, continually testing the limits of the body’s capacities, not with bravado but with a demeanor that could pass for self-effacement…
Geoffrey O’Brien‘s illuminatingly-appreciative consideration of two new biographies of Keaton (the wonderfully complementary Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis and Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens)– and of the genius himself: “Keep Your Eye on the Kid,” in @nybooks.
* Buster Keaton
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As we marvel, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that Keaton’s The Chemist was released. A short from Education Pictures (which is remembered not only for its Keaton comedies, but also as the studio that introduced Shirley Temple), it was directed by Al Christie, who was Mack Sennett’s great rival in the silent era.
While it’s not of the same stature as Keaton’s self-directed silent masterpieces, it’s a treat:
“We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”*…
Director Steven Soderbergh lovingly cut Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho together with Gus Van Zant’s shot-by-shot remake into a single film…
Marion Crane: Do you have any vacancies?
Norman Bates: Oh, we have 12 vacancies. 12 cabins, 12 vacancies.
See Psychos (“This… comes from a place of ‘total affection, openness, and honey bought directly from a beekeeper’”) here. And browse “Salon des Refusés” for Soderbergh’s list of movies and TV shows seen, books read, and music heard in 2013, for his appreciation of Josef von Sternberg, and for gobs of other goodies…
* Norman Bates
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As we recall Norman’s adage that “a boy’s best friend is his mother,” we might spare a thought for comic genius Harold Clayton Lloyd, Sr.; he died on this date in 1971. While your correspondent marginally prefers the extraordinary Buster Keaton, Lloyd has some real claim to being the finest physical comedian of the silent film era (even as his career extended to talkies and radio). Like Keaton, Lloyd did his own stunts– many of them, breathtakingly dangerous. Indeed, after 1919, he appears wearing a prosthetic glove, masking the loss of a thumb and index finger in a bomb explosion at Roach Studios.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a king…
There’s a boxing ring planted in the middle of a London nightclub.
So far, nothing too out of the ordinary. But there’s also a folding table in the center of the ring, and on it, a chessboard. And rather than gloving up to start sparring, the two boxers, hands wrapped, sit down to square off over the board. Because this isn’t regular boxing—it’s chessboxing.
Chessboxing is a hybrid sport that is exactly what it sounds like: Chess plus boxing, or, more specifically, a round of chess followed by a round of boxing, repeated until someone comes out the victor. As Tim Woolgar, founder of London Chessboxing, says, “If you know how to play chess and you know how to box, you know how to chessbox”…
Get the dope at “TKO By Checkmate: Inside the World of Chessboxing.”
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As we roll on the ropes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1926 that Thomas Alva Edison opined that “Americans prefer silent movies over talkies.”
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