Ken Eisner
A spectacular essay on the enduring power of cinema, "Film ist. (7-12)" also provides an invaluable service encapsulating hundreds of pics locked away in Euro vaults. Docu should be mandatory viewing at film schools and is equally effective as a haunting record of cultures in transition. Helmer Gustav Deutsch has multimedia art installation and CD-ROM versions of this - here transferred to 35mm , with beatless electronic music as a common thread - but this stuff belongs on the silver screen.
Fist outing ("1-6") was interested in scientific and aesthetic origins of the seventh art. Here, in a more widely accessible approach, Deutsch looks at silent cinema in its most social context, as entertainment or propaganda. Again dividing things into six chapters, with 10 subsections each, he collates dozens of clips each for categories such as Comic, Emotions and Passion, and Conquest. That last one combines travelogues with aristocratic fluff, so that Edwardian gentlemen can peer through a keyhole to see, for example, wild New Guinea tribesmen.
He doesn't always impose a narrative on the clips; in Magic seg, tinted and hand-colored images are enigmatic enough to carry their own weight. Writing and language consists mostly of title cards from all over, mixed with a fex textual artifacts, as when characters read telegrams and letters for dramatic effect. Only a few faces are widely known, like those of Fatty Arbuckle or Harry Langdon. But it turns out that a cyclist knocking fisherman off pier in Amsterdam was just as funny as it was in New Jersey and Hollywood. So many of these grainy images, or ones like them, are deep in the public consciousness that even the most obscure extracts appear familiar - albeit from the distance of fading starlight.
GUSTAV DEUTSCH
Bibliografie thematical
