I've been on a silent movie kick of late with Tmonkey, a welcome relief considering my language skills have been rapidly deteriorating since my introduction to the world of lolcatz, an extremely disturbing phenomenon which need not be expounded upon here... (except I'll just say that it makes me seriously fear for our society, as it sinks further into meaningless, saccharine infantilism)
ANYWAY, it all began when I'd netflixed the French film Irma Vep, starring the gorgeous but surprisingly kind of vacant Maggie Cheung. Tmonkey claimed to have seen the movie before, but he did not seem to remember any of it. Irma Vep is a film about making a film based on another film, taking a rather pragmatic and exasperating look at the process of film-making (with all its idiosyncratic power dynamics, drama and chaos). The moment this film became interesting to me was when they showed clips of the original silent movie that the filmmakers in Irma Vep were attempting to re-create: Louis Feuillade's 1915 silent serial Les Vampires.
This was absolutely fascinating. Through the same highly-stylized acting that I associated with the American silents, but entirely different in aesthetics from Chaplin or Keaton movies, here was an intriguing, dark thriller-mystery: a reporter's dogged pursuit of an enigmatic band of thieves calling themselves the Vampires have been terrorizing Paris. Merciless killings, kidnappings, secret tunnels, underground performances, poison ink pens abound. Totaling 7 hours (I think we're only at hour 2.5) this enthralling film experience proves how great story-telling in the cinema need not depend on text-language.
This sent us off hunting for more from Feuillade, when Tmonkey happened to receive an announcement for an event at the Morgan Library: a screening of the famed 1919 silent German film in five acts Das Kabinett der Doktor Caligari accompanied by live music by Richard Marriott's Club Foot Orchestra.
A psychological thriller about a man who is probing into the truth behind the sudden and violent murder of his friend and rival in love. His pursuits lead him to a madman-psychiatrist who has trained a somnambulist to murder. Through surprising plot revelations and riveting gestural performances, this film toys with the audience perspective/perception of in/sanity; I began to see this film as a sort of progenitor to Jan Svankmajer's truly grotesque psycho-horror live-action Lunacy. I wish Svankmajer would do something with lolcatz to completely pervert and obliterate that inane cute culture. That would be something to see. Oh that just reminded me of this video Banana sent me a while back.
Oh god help me, the lolcatz are taking over my brain! I am in ur Kabinett vomiting Cheezburger!?
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Just watching the beginning of this "Film Renters" Google video version of Das Kabinett makes me realize how horrible the translation was that we saw at the Morgan.
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