Edited

Above all, Buster Keaton’s The General is a caricaturist cartoon scrawl of history, a historical epic tethered to, and upended by, the hair-raising hare Bugs Bunny. Unmolested by the burdening weight of its importance, The General is Keaton’s excuse to raise a ruckus with the past, to twist the partitions of memory, and to alloy historical event to a study in stasis and kinesis with the primordial essence of pure cinema. The presumption of operatic diction and molasses-thick sobriety assumed in most waxworks-show historical cinema –  often obelisks to history rather than living and breathing exercises in movement with history – is but a distant rumor in Keaton’s phenomenally unpretentious explosion of screen momentum.

In a film beset with, or at least erupting from, the Lost Cause ideology that the South’s loss was a tragic failure of valiant rebels standing up for their beliefs, the two primary causes for Johnnie Gray (Buster Keaton) are his two lifehood loves, his train that he repairs by day and his female companion Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) he woos by night. His life is tarnished when she rescinds his offers once the Confederates refuse to enlist him due to his importance as an engineer. When his beloved train is stolen by Yankee spies, Gray is whooped and hollered into action to retrieve it almost in spite of himself, acting almost without visible emotional comment in his face. Early on, the world, even his own actions, coast by him with a certain predetermined status, like he is part of an unthinking tapestry rather than an active participant in the world. Until, of course, Johnnie becomes a human mid-way through, a transition with vastly more complicated and foundational reflections on American politics, cinema, and social assumptions than even the film’s revealing connection the the Confederacy. But we’ll get there before the review’s end. Continue reading →

In Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven, much like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise from the same year, and same production company, the mettle of duality and human romance is energized with cinematic luminescence, ultimately transforming togetherness into a prism for enlivening the world and lighting the way to an otherworld that, not heaven or hell, is more akin to the resplendence of worldly beauty itself. Producer William Fox was a sky-high romanticist with peaceful, radiant aspirations for humankind both exhibited within his films and enshrined in their making-of stories. Unlike many Hollywood producers quite this early on, he chose to jump the Hollywood ship of home-grown talent by acquiring some of the most rapturously received European auteurs for his productions with the quixotic belief that his production company’s cinema should be unrestrained and untrammeled on by national borders. Continue reading →

Agitprop as festivity more than hoosegow, Sergei Eisenstein’s first film is also his most disarmingly pure and innocent in its desire to agitate not only society but cinema, a film thoroughly unmitigated by its own weight and purpose. The perpetual penitentiary many modern viewers discover when viewing Eisenstein’s unmistakably political films is replaced with a kindled carousel of motion and action, reaction and consequence, that feels not only undated but more progressive and alive with possibility than any film released in the 2010s. A freedom-fighting film that, in a fit of art imitating the dreams of a life that never came to exist, feels palpably liberated from the cinematic status quo. Rather than merely political critique, Strike is a filmmaking polemic, a hustle-and-bustle strike of inventive cinematic mechanisms enlivening the passé “historical cinema” genre that was often as inept and anonymous then as it is now. Continue reading →