Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today is going to be the first time on this show that we are going to be looking at films of the Silent Era. Rob and I were talking about this, and we think maybe this will be a recurring episode type where we look at a couple of short films from the Silent era, because most films of this time are not very long. Though maybe it would be hard to talk about for an entire episode on their own, so we're doing a double feature today.
Yeah. Boy, Already there's a lot of to unpack though, because yes, it's true, there are a lot of short silent films, but they are also a fair number. When I was looking around at possibilities for today, some of them are longer than you'd expect them to be. And add to that that they are also silent films, which, if you know, unless you're dealing with very certain high standard silent films, you know, true classics of the time period, it could feel a lot longer than it actually is.
You know, Oh yeah, totally. I mean I was thinking about this before we got started. I was thinking about that quote from Videodrome where Professor Brian Oblivion is talking about television and he says, the television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality
is less than television. Now that's turned up a little bit past the ten marker to get it into the weirdness of Cronenberg territory. But essentially there's a nugget of truth in that. And what I mean by that is that the films of the Silent era have generally not yet breached the raw experience threshold. They are works of art that have to be appreciated across a kind of mental distance and with effortful dedication of attention, more like a painting or a work of fiction. In text, like
reading a book. You know, it takes a certain amount of sustained, effortful attention to read a story, but at a certain level of development. The techniques used in film and television, especially once you introduce synchronized sound, and like really good film editing techniques and good acting and all that.
At a certain point, they become so well honed that no effortful dedication of attention is required and no distance must be crossed, Like the films of today are generally automatically engrossing, even if they're not good, as soon as you're aware of them, they're simply happening in your mind.
Yeah, that's a great point. So it's in a way, interacting with a silent film or even a challenging piece of stationary art, it's it's like one of those scenes in Cronenberg Scanners where you're staring intently at another thing and your your your brain is beginning to like boil and swell in your head as you concentrate and force yourself to merge your your consciousness with the art before you.
Yeah, totally. And so while I would say I really enjoy a lot of silent films, but for me they are they are not as easy, not as automatic, not as magical as the films of the modern era that are automatically engrossing. Like that, they're more like the way I have to appreciate written fiction as text. You know that there's something that can be very rewarding to pay close attention to, but it takes work.
Yeah, And you know, when you when you mentioned films of the modern era, it is worth noting just how quickly the technology and the craft evolve, because I think both of our films that we're going to focus on at lengths today are from the nineteen twenties. And as an experiment, I looked at the year nineteen twenty five and there's a silent film titled The Lost World from that year, based on the story by Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle with dinosaurs in it. So of course it has pioneering stop motion dino animation in it that looks really cool, but it is still a silent film. There's still all these barriers to being able to properly immerse yourself in it.
You fast forward just one decade and you have nineteen thirty five, that's the year Mad Love came out, which, you know, despite very much being an older film, you can watch it and you become immersed in it and you're feeling the characters and you feel like you're a part of this world, and it illustrates just how far it came in those ten years, you know, just how much the craft and the technology changed, enabling you to tell different types of stories and bring the viewer closer,
you know, truly creating this videodrome situation that you described earlier.
Yeah, and I would say there are a couple of things there. I mean, I would say, like you're pointing out, one of the main technological differences is synchronized sound. I mean that that's a game changer on its own. But on top of that, i'd say, with Mad Love, you have a really exceptional example from its era as well, the exceptional photographic techniques of Carl Freund. You know, behind the camera, you've got the exceptional charisma of the actors
on screen, of course, the incomparable Peter Lorrie. Then you have the hyper nervous energy of Colin Clive in it, and so so all of that is true. But yeah, as time goes on, it's funny how much the techniques just like get developed and become sort of self referencing and industrial automatic cliches, where even the bad movies of today are typically very engrossing automatically, like if one's playing in the room, you so easily just start watching it and then it's just in your brain.
Yeah, well, and it is worth with no you mentioned Carl Frond, the director of Mad Love. He of course was cinematographer on nineteen twenty seven silent masterpiece Metropolis. So the great work that would come with the talkies, I mean it very much emerges from the silent era. Like the silent era is the period in which the tools were coming online, the sort of substructure of our cinematic legacy was being built.
That's a very good point, and I would say for me, Metropolis is probably the most engrossing silent film I've ever seen.
Yeah, that's one of the all time greats. So we have to mention Nosferatu, the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, a trip to the Moon, and I believe we talked about a trip to the Moon a little bit in our Invention series on filmmaking and photography, where we discussed more of the technological side of the silent film era.
Oh, that's a very good point. If you want to get some background before the rest of this episode, you could pause here, go listen to our entire series on the Invention podcast that we did. But I think we did one that started with the history of photography, beginning with the camera.
Oh I think we started with the camera obscura.
Yeah, yeah, even going back to there, but then then going into photography and then going into motion pictures, and so if you want more contexts, probably a lot of things that at this point I don't even remember that we talked about, so I may have lost some really good contexts. So if you want, go listen to that and then come back and listen to the rest of this. But so today we are going to be talking about a couple of silent films. I think are they both
from the early twenties. Minds from nineteen twenty two is yours from twenty.
One, It is, indeed from nineteen twenty one. Yes, Okay, However, we are not doing any of the classics we discussed earlier. I think both of these are harder to come by. They're maybe more obscure, So, you know, I think they're both very fun choices, and in a way they're choices that circumvent your expectations the silent era, unless you, of course, are already just versed in the silent era and you know a lot of the history and the culture of what was going on at the time.
Yeah, all right, Joe, do.
You want to you want to go first and roll right into your selection?
Sure, I'll go first. The film I selected for this episode is an early animated film by a German filmmaker named Latta Reineger, and it is the nineteen twenty two
short film Cinderella. The German title is Ashenpuddle. Now. My main source of biographical information about Reineger comes from the twenty nineteen New York Times retrospective by Debbie Lockwood, which is part of a series called Overlooked, which seems to be sort of post hoc obituaries for remarkable people who originally didn't get obituaries in the Times when they passed away. So Lota Reineger was born Charlotte Reineger. I think Lotta
is a German shortening of the name Charlotte. She was born on June second, eighteen ninety nine to carl and
Eleanor Reineger and live in Berlin. And when she was in school she learned about something called scheren Schnitte, which means scissor cuts in German, and this was similar to a Chinese art form that dated back hundreds of years, but it had become popular in German art at the time, I think in Swiss art too, and essentially it consisted of making art by cutting silhouette images out of paper with fine shears. But Lotta Reineger enjoyed this art form
when she was young, cutting out silhouettes of people. She knew not just to mount them on the wall or press them in an album, but she would make them move and act out scenes in a homemade shadow theater
to do scenes from the plays of Shakespeare. And as she got older, she became interested in the at this point blossoming art form of film, originally thinking of becoming an actress, but she soon discovered the possibilities of animation as an art form that's unique to film, and of course this would have been still during the Silent era, and she ended up studying at the Max Reinhardt School of Acting under the German filmmaker Paul Wegner, where she
showed off her talent for silhouette cutting, cutting out these figures in paper and then, to read from Debbie Lockwood's article quote, Wegner soon enlisted her to help with his nineteen eighteen film The Pied Piper of Hamlin, an adaptation of the folk legend about a man who's hired to play his magic flute to lure away rats from a German town. When the town refuses to pay him for his services, the piper plays another tune to hypnotize the children and lead them out of the town, never to
be seen again. Wegner had Reineger help him animate wooden puppet rats for the film, and after this she had
the bugs. She wanted to make films for a living, so she later met and married an art historian named Carl Koch, who she would collaborate with on a number of her films, and her career would go on at this point to span sixty years, including over seventy films animated by this silhouette cutout technique, where she would cut figures out of paper with scissors and then film them moving on a transparent surface to create the action that you see on the screen.
Now, Paul Wegen, who you mentioned earlier, for anyone out there who just wondering who that is, he was one of the directors and writers on the nineteen fifteen film The Golum. You've probably seen images of this. The clay golum figure in black and white, very haunting, and he also played the golum.
Yes, that is correct. So in nineteen nineteen, Lada Reiniger and Carl Koch together created a silhouette animated short film called The Ornament of the Heart in Love, which is, in the words of Debbie Lockwood, here about two lovers, both ballet dancers, and a morphing ornament between them that represents their emotions.
Now, one thing I really love about that description is that if that description sounds like you could easily describe a current or upcoming Pixar short, you know. So an area of animation, of mainstream animation where we often think of like this is where the really inventive ideas and formats that are going to be explored, you know, and we think of it as kind of at times, we can think of it as a place that we can only come to after, you know, a century of animation
and filmmaking. But here we are in nineteen nineteen, and there's just as much ingenuity and creativity in using you know, different formats to tell a story with visuals.
That's a very good point. Yeah, early on, there was a lot of elasticity about what a film could be, what should be the contents of a film.
So while well, today it's more like what can we break to create something new? Like this is an age where a lot of stuff was unformed, you know. It was the amorphous age of filmmaking.
Yeah, yeah, So her most his famous film is the nineteen twenty six silent movie The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, which is an adaptation of the Arabic classic One thousand and one Nights, which was one of the first feature length animated films in history. And to quote from Lockwood here describing her technological and creative process, quote, Reineger's editing
was meticulous. Starting with more than two hundred and fifty thousand frames, she and her crew used just over one hundred thousand in the film, which ran for an hour and twenty one minutes each second, requiring twenty four frames. It took three years to complete and premiered in Volkspoon or People's Theater in Berlin when Reineger was twenty seven. The film showcased the fantastical potential of animation. A prince defeated an army of demons to win over a princess,
birds battled witches and sorcerers, horses flew. The French film director Jeanrenois saw Princemed on its opening night in Paris and later recalled that he wanted to tell her, you have fairy hands. Reineger designed a complex process to make her films. She cut each limb of each figure out of black cardboard and thin lead, then join them together with wire hinges. For research, she spent hours at the
Zoo Berlin watching how the animals moved. And then I was reading later in this article that she also pioneered new technology for creating animated films, including a device called a trick tish or trick table, and this involved a camera that would be hanging in the air facing down onto a table made of layers of glass, which would form the stage for the silhouette cutouts to play upon, and then you would have a bright light underneath that would cause the wire hinges used at the joints of
these figures to disappear, and it was basically stop motion animation. They would take a photo of a that she had set out, and then she would advance the figures slightly in their movement to advance the action, and then take
a photo again building the film frame by frame. Now, as with any German filmmaker working in the first half of the twentieth century, you end up wondering, okay, did they end up within the Hitler machine right, Because of course Nazi Germany was big on using film as propaganda. So I was reading about this, and it seems like after Hitler came to power, Lata and Carl left to Germany and tried to make a life in other countries
like France and Italy and England. Apparently they were politically opposed to Hitler, but they could not get visas, or they couldn't get the visas they wanted to stay permanently in the other countries they went to, so it seems like they were essentially taking long vacations in other countries where they were working and then having to come back
and then leave again. They were eventually forced to move back to Berlin in nineteen forty four, apparently to take care of Latta's mother, who is very sick, and I can only find evidence that she worked on one film in this period called The Golden Goose, which I have seen described as a propaganda film, but I can't find much about it, so I don't know, but together they moved to England in nineteen forty eight and she made some children's films for the BBC, and she passed away
on June nineteenth, nineteen eighty one, at the age of eighty two. So the film that we're going to be looking at today is from her early period, from nineteen twenty two, and it is an adaptation of the Cinderella
folk tale. I was reading about this in Lockwood's article where apparently the Cinderella adaptation was reviewed by The New York Times in nineteen twenty eight, where the author Charles Morgan wrote, the small black shapes laugh at you from a world of their own, into which naturalism makes no laborious entry. And I really like phrasing it like that, because I think this little animated film is wonderful. And uh, and I see what he meant by that with naturalism
makes no laborious entry. Something about the animation style feels so free.
Yes, yes, this is a beautiful picture. And if anybody who wants to see that, the two films that we're discussing here, I'll make sure that I include links to them or embedded versions of them on the blog post. That accompanies this episode at Summuda music dot com. But the yeah, the style of this is so divorced from from reality. It just comes out of It's like it's a reality that is passed from from from fairy tale
book to fairytale book. You know, there was a there's a quote that you included in the in our notes for this episode from Ao Scott where he describes quote dreamy images that seem to tap right into the collective unconscious that suggests both in antidote to Disney and a precursor to Tim Burton. And it's interesting that Scott mentioned Disney here because in nineteen twenty two, Disney Walt Disney the Animator also put out a Cinderella animated short. But
it is very much connected to the real world. Like you see, I didn't even watch it in its entirety. I just kind of flipped around and got a sense of it. But like there are scenes of like flapper culture, you know, and stuff like that, and like it's very it's hitched to the real world of the time, whereas yeah, this one is it seems to exist in an artistic unreality that is so much more engrossing.
Yeah, so it is the story of Cinderella. The story element is fairly straightforward, but it's the animation that really sings here. It is an animation based on these silhouettes, these cutout these paper cutout figure silhouettes and stop motion animation.
And as for the plot content, it is decidedly more in the brothers grim direction than the sanitized versions would come later, like the in the full length animated Cinderella by Disney and so in that version, And so that means that in this version it is a magic tree instead of a fairy godmother, a creepy magic tree on a hill and a cemetery.
Yeah, it's as if nature itself is the force that answers her call, as opposed to, you know, any particular human, humanized force.
Yeah. You also get that Cinderella's wicked stepsister absolutely does chop off part of her own foot in order to fit into the slipper and get with the prince. Oh yes, but the slipper fills up with blood and it doesn't work. And then there's a really funny scene where the other sister tries is she's about to chop off her own foot to fit in the slipper, and the Prince is just like, no, no.
Yeah, this is such a fun silent film. Like when I told that my family, I'm like, hey, guys, we're gonna sit down and watch a silent film together. And the boy didn't really even know what I meant by that because he didn't have much exposure to sign films. My wife was hesitant. Then I'm like, don't worry. It's it's animated, and it's it's Cinderella, and it's really really delightful. It's you know, has kind of a shadow puppetry. I look to it, and so they're like, okay, and we
sit down. We watched it. The the the bits of humor generated laughter from all of us. The toe cutting made us all scream out loud, you know, in a fun way, because it's, you know, the style divorces it enough from reality that you're not legitimately horrified, but you're like, ah, don't do that, so it Yeah, it's just tremendous fun. Now.
One choice about this movie that I found very interesting was the choice to include the animation method as part of the narrative. So I don't know, Rob, did the version you watched have title cards or or what language were the title cards in if it did.
Oh, well, the version I watched it did have some title cards, but I believe they were No, they were in English. Maybe I just didn't read them. I was just getting set up at the time. But for the most part, Yeah, it's just a visual presentation, and I guess it helps to know the story. So as we watched it, we were kind of taking it apart a
little bit. We're like, oh, yeah, I guess she's doing this now, Oh, yes, this must be instead of a fairy godmother, it's this tree and now the birds are involved that sort of thing.
Well, I meant the inter title cards, yeah, between the action.
Well, you know now that you mention it, though, Joe. The version that I watched with my family was on vimeo, okay, and I don't think that one had title cards in it. I think that was just the animation. But I've been playing the YouTube version in the corner of my screen as we record here, and yeah, I'm getting some dialogue that was not present in the version we screened.
Yes, so at the beginning of the version. There are different versions. Different ones have different title cards, inner titles, and the version that I was watching had the English titles that begin what Cinderella suffered from the two sisters and her stepmother, how she grew into a fairy princess. Here is seen told by a pair of scissors on a screen, so they're like including the fact that this is made by scissors, and it's in the animation too.
It begins with black silhouettes on a blue background of a small pair of scissors kicking around in the void, almost like a frog paddling in the water. And then a pair of hands comes in and they chase the scissors around, they catch them, and then they use them to cut a figure out of a piece of paper, and that figure will be our heroine, Cinderella, which I thought was a very interesting choice. One totally unrelated side
note about the inner titles. If you're watching this with kids, you might want to check the version you're watching first because one of the inner titles in one of the ones I saw, had a word in it that used to have a different connotation now has Now it is a pejorative term used for women, but I think it was previously a pejorative term used for women, but with different connotations.
Yes, Fortunately that was not in the version that I watched with my family.
Yes, check which version if you're going to show it to kids, But I.
Do love the visual opening of watching the hands cut out a character with the scissors. It reminds me of some of the differences you see in puppetry, where you know, sometimes it's about hiding the fact that it's puppetry and hiding the puppeteer and letting the figures take on a life for themselves. Other times you have very visual puppeteers, and part of it is about acknowledging that the role that the puppeteer plays and bringing this to life, and it not mattering that you can see that it is
not real and is in the story you like. You know, you're not looking at real people, You're looking at a very stylized form of paper cutting and an animation. But that's part of the magic.
Yeah, totally. And it's very creepy at the beginning actually with the scissors and the figure, because when the hands finish their work, there's this moment where the figure of Cinderella is created and then she's posed dangling with the scissors attached to her head and displayed open, and it resembles a kind of torture device or something. I don't know.
I didn't get that so much. I thought I thought it was more she was manipulating it with the scissors. So it's just the artistos now I do want to This is a great place to discuss this though, the creepiness quote unquote of this short film. The version that you sent me had some added music. Music is a whole separate issue in silent film, because, yeah, sometimes you have specific works that are passed down where we can
look at the sheet music and reproduce it. Other times we don't know what music, if any, was associated with a particular silent film. A lot of times music from that era can sound herky, jerky and kind of annoying. And you can, of course always play your own music on top. And there have been numerous cases where someone has composed new music, you know, be it rock or electronic or what have you, for classic silent films. So the version you and ually sent me had some added music.
I don't know if it was composed by him for this or someone who just picked a track by them, but it has music by evangelists.
Yeah.
The composer, of course, probably most famous for his work on Blade runner and I love vangelists, but it's kind of creepy music, and it was kind of leading to a creepy interpretation of what I was seeing. So just a minute or two into it, we switched to some more upbeat music to play over it. We played just a channel on Soma f M, and I found that lighter tone hit almost immediately and was ultimately more fun.
But the music that we choose or is chosen for us, with silent films like this, they can have such a huge effect on how we interpret them.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right about that. And it's funny because the animation has both elements, Like the animation is a little bit creepy, but it's also funny. It's both at the same time, and so you can easily lean more in one direction or the other by adding the right tone in the sound.
Yeah. Because again, it has some laugh out loud moments. Yeah, I'm sure we'll get to them here in a minute.
So I'm obviously not going to spend a lot of time explaining the implied plot. Like it's Cinderella, you basically know the plot. I love the cutouts of the Wicked Stepsisters. One is very thin and very tall, and the other one is very short and stout. And so we see the wicked stepsisters being mean. We see the wicked step mother abusing Cinderella. She's like poking her with a cane
while Cinderella is cleaning the stairs. And then you get more references to scissors and cutting intertwined with the plot in the inner titles. So there's an inner title that says snip and we have the Kings rs VP snip and the magic birds have set her free.
Yeah, a lot of fun is had with the magic birds in this. Oh, I love the magic birds are perfect for this kind of cutout technique.
Yes, And so according to the story, Cinderella cannot go to the Prince's ball, but she has to help her wicked stepsisters get ready to attend, and this is a good comedic scene. She has to comb their hair and lace their corsets for one of their sisters, the very thin, very tall one. There's a moment where you see Cinderella dumping household objects into her bodice, presumably to fill it out. So she's like throwing I think like pots and pans in there. It's very funny.
Yeah, this is this is a lot of fun. And you know, another thing worth driving home. You mentioned how we didn't really have to describe the plot of of Cinderella. One of the reasons is that, like this is pretty much a universal story. The basic story of Cinderella exists in various cultures. You know. It's just it's it's that important of a trope, you know, this idea of the downtrodden and the oppressed rising up in this in this nature. There's a there's an old Chinese version of this as well.
Oh, I don't think I knew that.
Yeah, yeah, and there are various other versions of it from just around the world, like the It's it's interesting how such a potent fairy tale like this you just find versions of it throughout human culture.
Yeah, I'm sure that does help with getting it. And the other thing is you mentioned earlier the idea of like nature itself sort of being the thing that helps Cinderella. In this version, it's not like a single fairy godmother, but it's the birds and it's the tree. And it's really interesting the way she's got this pre existing connection with the birds, like they're just on her side from
the beginning. So the wicked stepmother is having Cinderella clean up spilled lentils from the floor while the wicked stepsisters go off to the ball. But then a flock of birds come by to help her out, and we get a title that says snip and she gathers from her apple trees the golden gown of the hesperites the silver coach. But when the clock strikes one warn the bird voices Cinderella run, and so we see the magic tree and Cinderella goes out to this creepy, lonely hillside with a
tree at the top of it. It's kind of sad drooping tree, and the tree ends up granting her wish for a gown and a coach to take her to the ball.
I like how this was pre code so she could stay out till one.
And Cinderella's gown I have to say, this looks sort of like a cyberpunk pressure suit like Bruce Willis is wearing at the beginning of Twelve Monkeys. I guess maybe she's going to work in the Prince's virology lab. But it's very puffy and it's covered in these lines around the top that could be gas hoses.
Yeah, it looks like it's just made out of nature, Like she's coated in mycillium and stuff. You know, it's pretty cool looking.
Yeah, that's really good. So Cinderella goes to the ball. She dances with the prince. The stepsister is very jealous. The prince falls in love with Cinderella and kisses her, but then of course she has to flee at midnight, and the prince loses her. And then comes the search you know from the story, based on the slipper that she drops while she's running out, and so you see this royal raid go out to find the owner of
the slipper. They're putting it on people's feet, and when the prince comes to the house, Cinderella is made to hide in the cellar because the wicked stepmother does not want her to be seen by the prince, and the wicked stepsisters are trying to they're trying to snag the prince. So one of them, yep, she chops part of her own foot off. And that part was seriously hilarious.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, again, we were all just going ah when it happened, and you know, I know that that's a part of you know, the grimmer versions. Of this tale, but I guess it wasn't quite expecting and it happens so suddenly too it catches you off guard.
Yeah, she just reaches down with the knife and just chops off the front of her foot, and then she's still trying to put the mutilated foot into the slipper, but it fills up with blood. So this is the X rated version. But eventually, of course, the magic birds tell the Prince that Cinderella is hiding in the cellar, and he goes down and he gets her out and he lifts her up, and it's a happy ending, true love. And then there's a great moment where I don't know
how else to describe this. The wicked stepmother is so mad about Cinderella getting to marry the Prince that she literally cracks in half, like a fissure runs down the middle of her and she looks like a venus fly trap opening up.
That's interesting. It was interesting because it made me think of one of our recent episodes. We were talking about changes to fairy tales, and there was one in particular in which somebody gets so mad they basically explode, which I so, I guess it was an idea that existed sort of in the fairy tale storytelling world at the time, and you know, though, I and perhaps it occur as in a written version of Cinderella, but it was. It was a delightful surprise here that you're having sort of
Mortal Kombat type fatalities occurring in this children's tale. Oh but, on the speaking of violence in this animated short, on the foot cutting, that the first foot cut was fabulous and shocking and hilarious, but the second one was even better. Oh yes, the second sister goes to put on the shoe and it's not fitting either because her foot is
like too plump. And then you see her hand come down with the knife because she's going to do the exact same thing cut off part of her foot, and the prince's hand slaps it out of the way as it's like, nope, nope, you're not doing that trick.
That not allowed against the rules, no foot cutting. And I love the implied sneakiness with the knife or she's like, oh I think I dropped something.
Yeah, let me saw through the bones of my foot.
So yes, in the end, this movie is definitely worth checking out. You can find different versions of it online. I think that I have different title card situations and different levels of restoration, but I absolutely love her animation style.
Yeah, it's tremendous. I'm really glad you turned me onto this one. Yeah, So if you want to see it, I just recommend you, know, you can find it on the blog, but just go to something like YouTube or or any other streaming video side and if you just do a search for Cinderella nineteen twenty two, this will turn up. You'll probably also turn up the Disney the Walt Disney version as well, But this is the one to watch. Choose your own music though, whatever you want.
Really you want to listen to Nurse with Wound while watching it, then that's going to create at a certain feel. But you can also put on something up beaten peppy.
You know, you could put on the hair metal band Cinderella.
Why yeah, why not? I mean, that's that's ultimately the fun about this stuff. Do what you will with the music on a silent film. I noticed in the Psychotronic book by Michael Weldon, like he pretty much had the same advice. Like he was like, the music often sucks, turn it off if you don't like it, and then realize You're gonna have to put in a little bit of work sometimes to enjoy these films, but it's worth.
It, all right. Are we ready to look at our second silent film today?
Yeah? And again, this is one that I think a lot of people are not going to be that familiar with. I was not familiar with it until I started looking around for something to cover, and you know, again, I wanted to cover something that that wasn't one of the classics that were all somewhat familiar with, you know, that's not Nosferatu and so forth, And so I came across an Italian science fiction action comedy from nineteen twenty one,
The Mechanical Man. And it's especially worth discussing on weird House cinema because this is the grandfather, or even the great grandfather of films like Robot Jocks and gun Head. Not only is it a film about robots battling each other, it is seemingly the first film about robots battling each other.
Whoa so the elevator pitch on this one is a remote control robot man with exceptional speed and strength is captured by criminals and forced to do evil and this eventually Coleman in an all out battle between two different robots.
Now, from what I understand, the robots are definitely what drew us in to watch this, and they're a major part of the section of the film that remains in the archives. But if I understand correctly, the majority of the original film was really focused less on the robots and more on sort of the exploits of the lead villain or antagonist.
Right, yeah, yeah, that's that very much seems to be the case. This was a second film in a proposed trilogy that revolved around a cunning female criminal as opposed to the robots. The robots I am to understand, we're not in the first film.
Right, and this criminal lady is named do you call it her? It's m a d O? Is it Madow or Mayto?
I'm not sure, you know. They never say it out loud in the film, so I read it as Matdow in my head and kept thinking of it as such. Yes, Maddow is described as an evil countess. And the first film was a human document from nineteen twenty and there's
not really much I could find out about it. It's possibly probably a lost film in its entirety, so I don't think there's any of it that remains, but it featured many of the same characters as this film does, and perhaps deals with the same central conflict between Maddow and the Dara family, which is considered which is centered around a dar a patriarch who is a brilliant inventor.
Okay, yeah, So throughout this film, or at least the parts of it, we were able to see Maddow is running around doing evil with her identity hidden behind a mask. So she's got like a thing wrapped around her face and head. And then at the end she is unmasked and it is revealed that she is this Russian countess.
Right, and she's also electrocuted at the end. But I guess she wasn't supposed to die because there was a third film planned, but it didn't come together in the post World War One period. So I thought we might just look at some of the people involved in this one, since you know, Cinderella did not have people in the actual film it was animated and was largely revolved around a singular individual. This one had multiple people involved that
are worth mentioning. First of all, the director was a man by the name of Andre Dead who lived eighteen seventy nine through nineteen forty He was a French actor and director who made a name for himself in this series of comedy shorts called the fools Hed Comedies, and they all had titles like fools Heads Holiday or Fool's Head Has Lost a Needle, So, you know, just little comic adventures centered around this one ridiculous individual.
Fools had Scared Stupid.
Yeah exactly. You know, these were the earnest movies of the day, and these were apparently internationally successful during the nineteen hundreds and the nineteen tens, like these were, you know, big money as much as anything was big money cinematically in those days. They're mostly forgotten today, and certainly Deed is I think mostly forgotten today by the public at large.
But he was a big deal at the time. But his career was somewhat disrupted by the outbreak of World War One, in which he was conscripted into the reserves, and he may have served in the trenches. It seems a little foggy on that. And afterwards he returned to direct just a few more movies, and The Mechanical Man was his final directorial effort. He continued to act through nineteen thirty eight, and he acts in this as well. He plays a comic character name Saltarello who pops up
at one point. But yeah, for the most part, like he's the director of this is his baby, his mechanical baby.
Do you know if he was the guy who was bouncing his butt up and down on the chair in that scene that I couldn't understand.
I think he was, Yes, a very physical comedy, you know. I guess it would be like because I think he played Fool's Head in the fools Head movies. So it's like, you know, if Ernest Or to direct a film like he'd have to go in there for a cameo just to keep the crowd happy, that.
Sort of thing. Okay, Yeah, yeah, So I enjoyed the parts of this movie that we were able to see that remain I will say, I don't think this guy is quite on the Buster Keaton level as far as the physical comedy of the Silent Era goes.
Yeah. Now, the main star of this again, this is ultimately about, yes, the robots, but also it's about Matdow, this villainess that we've been discussing here, and she is played by Valentina Frascaroli, who lived eighteen fifty five through nineteen fifty seven. She also played the role in the previous movie. She has eighty six film credits on IMDb, including a bunch of Fool's Head shorts. According to Mary Anne Lewinsky, writing for Il Cinema rich Ovata, she was
a versatile leading lady actor of the day. She starred in both comedies like Clearly the Fools Heead Movie and This to a ar degree, but she was also in serious films as well. She was in a nineteen twenty two film about Dante I believe it had a title that translated to the Life and Times of Dante, and she was also in an interesting looking puppet themed film, The War and the Dream of Momi, from nineteen seventeen. Now, as I learned in a Bruce Sterling article about this
is a twenty twelve piece for Wired magazine. This was the second film in what Deed Planned is a Mado trilogy, which he says explains why Mattos given so much screen time. Mattow is the adventuress. She is a quote scheming white Russian exiled countess, So you get the impression that again, the first film I think is entirely lost. I can't find in really any details about what it was about. But she seems like she's always on the run, always
escaping and falling into more schemes. Even in this film. I think she escapes a couple of times, once from a prison infirmary by setting it on fire. And this scene is also interesting because it contains some mild nudity, like some side nudity, but you can't really make anything out of it given the quality of the film, Like you really have to squint to even tell that there was maybe some mild nudity in this scene.
It's very European.
And also, I mean it speaks to like what this movie was trying to do. It did not have as much of a high minded artistic purpose this was about. I mean, this is a film in which giant robots
ultimately battle each other. It has the same sort of appeal that it's always had to us, you know, and which again I think it speaks to the certainly the creativity and you know, the science fiction dreams that were present even in the nineteen twenties, but also the fact that like people went to the cinema to be entertained this, and this was a film that was trying to entertain people.
Now again, indeed, never got to make that third Matto picture, but you know, we can only wonder what could have transpired in it. You know, she's again she's electrocuted at the end of this film, though perhaps isn't dead, so I'm guessing she would have escaped authorities again and she would have come back after the Darra family, the Dara family again being the family of the inventor who creates giant robots.
So the version of this that I saw had Italian inner titles, and there was there were a lot that I went by, and I did not have time to translate them, so I don't know what they said. But there was one I recognized multiple times, which was where it just said corto cercuto.
And short short circuit. Oh there you go. Yeah. Now, as we've alluded to already, this was for a long time a lost film, and today we do not have all of it. You know, this is another sad fact about film from this period is that they are not always complete if they did survive, and in many cases we've lost everything. There are some really notoriously lost or partially lost films, probably the the the gold standard being Todd Browning's nineteen twenty seven horror film London After Midnight,
which starred Lawn Cheney. I feel like, even though you know you haven't seen it, you've seen images from it. You've seen those stills of lawn Cheney and this brilliant, you know, frightening get up is this kind of ghoulish vampire in a tall hat.
Yeah. We talked about this, I know, in our Invention episodes about the early days of film, Like I think when we were discussing Ali Ski Blachet, we talked about how a huge number of her films are lost.
Yeah, And it's crazy to think about this, especially with films like London After Midnight, because this was a film that grossed over a million dollars in nineteen twenty seven. But you know, the last known copy of it was destroyed in a nineteen sixty five MGM vault fire. So the only thing that survives today are our images from it. And we do have a lot of images from London after Midnight, but that's what some people have used to reconstruct the film in its entirety, just making remaking the
film with still images. Now It's a similar case with the Mechanical Man, except we were not able to We were able to bring back some of it. So the original film is thought to have been sixty to eighty minutes in length, but it was a thought completely lost for many years until reels from the Portuguese version turned up in Brazil, and this amounts to about twenty six minutes of film total. And luckily it's footage from the later portions of the film. Because it's a giant robot movie.
You know how giant robot movies go, They're going to really have most of the special effects in the back end. It's kind of like if RoboCop two were a lost film and you got to reclaim half of it, which half would you get? Which half would you want? You would want the later half in which the robots battle each other.
I guess then you would miss most of that stuff with like the twelve year old drug dealer hitman or whatever.
Right, you would lose a lot of interesting stuff, and more of the point, you would lose stuff that helps you make sense of the later stuff. And certainly that's one of the cases with the Mechanical Man, watching the fragments that remain. It's very interesting. The robots are fabulous looking.
They're these oh man, they're like they they're you know, they're obviously costumes, but they have this cool mechanical like steam punk kind of look to them, or I guess it would be diesel punk, and you know, they're they're sort of mean faced and violent and oh it's They're just fabulous, but you're often confused as to what's going on.
You know, I had to I had to look back at It's some ride ups to really make sense of what was happening and how this would have featured, how this would have factored into the full version of the film.
Well, with those limitations in mind, would you like to talk about the plot?
Yeah, such as it is. This is the plot. Basically, a Professor Diara creates a super fast, super strong, remote control robot that is going to help out humanity, but then enter the criminal mastermind Madow. She has the scientist killed and tries to steal the plans for the mechanical
man the criminals. She and the criminals are caught, but she escapes again by setting the infirmary on fire, kidnaps the scientist's niece, and obtains the plans, so she builds her own mechanical man, goes on a rampage with it. Just sort of like I don't know that there was any like grand criminal plan. It was just sort of like crime in general, Like, Wow, now that I have the robot, I can do crime, more crime and faster
crime than ever before. So that's what happens. But the scientist's brother, who survives, uses the original mechanical man to stop her, so it all culminates in a big robot battle inside an opera house that ultimately destroys the opera house.
Yes, now, I was making a few notes as I was watching this. One is that I really liked Madow's escape from prison or the hospital or wherever she is because it's a multi stage procedure where she injects something and fakes out the orderlies and then starts a fire and then gets out. It's it's it's a good sequence. But beyond that, as I was saying earlier, you know, I tried my best, but there were some scenes where
I had no idea what's going on on screen. So the main thing I wanted to ask about is what's going on with the dude? Possibly the director frantically bouncing on the armchair. Could you tell?
I could not tell this was This was a scene that, again I'd have to chalk up to maybe being just a wink for the audience that involves like a beloved comic actor who also directed the film, kind of a cameo. Maybe that means nothing to modern viewers.
It's the it's the nineteen twenty one version of Jim Carrey going alrighty.
Then yeah, yeah, maybe so yeah, it would be it would be like if if Jim Carrey directed a robot movie but also showed up and did one of his old bits just in the middle of it, you know. Yeah.
But the other thing about you know, confusing moments in this film, you know, we can chalk a lot of it up to the fragmentary nature of what remains, but you know, we can also point to possible shortfalls in the state of the medium at the time, or even filmmaker capability, because ultimately, Deed would not will not be the last film director to craft an incoherent action picture or to struggle transitioning from short form laughs to longer
form dramatic storytelling. So I don't know, it's hard to tell exactly where all the blame levels out.
Yeah, so there's some of that disconnect in movies that we've looked at. You remember with Doctor X there was this strange mixture of creepiness and comedy, and not the kind of comedy that usually goes along with creepiness in movies today, a very wet, kind of slapstick, goofy, gooberree comedy alongside the synthetic flesh.
Synthetic flesh.
Yes, but I will also say to give the director credit here. I mean, we're dealing with a number of limitations. We are dealing with time distance. This was a long time ago things just you know, cinema felt different than we were dealing with a language barrier. We were not watching this in translation. This was in a language we don't speak, and we're dealing with and like watching only a fragmentary part of the second half of a silent film.
So there's a lot of stuff getting in the way of us understanding.
Yeah. Absolutely, but I'm glad that this much of it has survived because you know, especially the scenes where well, yes, when the robots are battling each other, it's awesome, but are all the scenes of robot Mischief are just excellent.
Oh yes, yes, I love So. There's one part with a cocktail party where they're playing some kind of Marco Polo type game. They tie a napkin around a man's face and they spin him around and he's chasing all these women in the in the party room. And then a giant mecha man just burst through the window and is like, I am here to cause panic, and he puts a dude inside a wardrobe, carries him up to the roof of a castle, and I think he's gonna
throw him off the castle tower. Yeah, then I guess the guy gets away and he kind.
Of like falls out of it and then repels down the tower. It's elaborate and ridiculous. Yeah. There's also the wonderful scene where it's like a dinner party and I had to I had to rely on Sterling's right up and wired to make sense of what was happening. But I mean fully happening, because apparently the idea is the robot has shown up controlled by Mattow at this at this party, and it's but it's pretending to be a person in a robot costume. Yes, yeah, and so they're
all like, oh, it's a wonderful, wonderful costume. Come on in and have some champagne. And so it's like calling for champagne and having a lady set on its lap. And then things get out of hand.
Yes, the robot sexually harasses a female partygoer, and then the woman's husband gets mad at the robot and punches it, and then he he pulls out a pistol to duel the robot, and the robot crushes him.
Yeah. There there's more than one scene in which somebody pulls out a pistol and fires a bunch of shots point blank into the robot to no avail, and then the robot just like swats them.
So there's chaos at the opera. But then in the midst of all this, you end up with a mecha man versus mechamn because there's I think, as you already said this, but the dead scientist's brother makes his own mecha man and or.
He uses the original I think to battle the new one that the that the criminals have made. Oh, either way, you end up in the same place, good robot versus bad robot. You know, a time tested formula.
Right, but they're having to be controlled like Mattow is actively controlling the robot in real time by like, by like turning wheels and stud operating steam vents and things. This is going to get a very score on intuitive controls. But the other thing that I thought was interesting was as Madow controls her mechaman during the duel. Unless I'm misunderstanding, it looks like she's watching the duel live on some kind of TV screen as she controls her robot fighter.
And this was in nineteen twenty one. There's no such thing as CCTV at this time.
Right, Yeah, this was a complete glimpse into the future. Sterling wrote that at the twenty two minute twenty nine second mark quote Mattow watches the mechanisms battling through a flat wall mounted remote surveillance televisor screen. So I mean, that's awesome. I mean, this is a great This is a great example of early science fiction and that it gets something phenomenally right, while also you know, it maybe doesn't properly predict the way that controls will work in
the future. For things like this, you know, it's a wonderful mashup of actually pretty spot on digital technology to come. And then also a reliance on very mechanical control systems.
Another thing that's interesting is that the screen she's watching things play out on is not from the point of view of the robot, right, So what's sending the image?
Yeah, it would have to be like a robotic drone that is also part of the operation that is not presented in the film. I don't know, something of that nature. Yeah, or maybe it's a telescope. I mean, there's so many different directions you could go in and then ultimately, you know, given the nature of the film, I guess they don't really have to explain it. They just But it's interesting
too that they didn't explain it. There's so many films I can think of where the film is that it it pains to really elaborate and describe to the audience what sort of technology is being used and how it works and what the rules are. And yet this film is rolling out, you know, to your point CCTV on a flat screen and they don't seem to have to explain it at all, unless it's explained in the lost portion of the film of course.
Well it's funny because it's an that is it's immediately apparent what you know, what its function is like.
You, Yeah, it probably comes back to the video drone quote, right. Yeah, she is doing what you were doing right now and watching the screen. So in a way, it's kind of brilliant.
Yeah. The televisor screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Whatever robots appear on it emerges raw experience.
Let's the other things to mention about this film. I would say that the special effects are pretty cool. There's, you know, in addition to robots like breaking through gates and pulling out safes and whatnot, there's a scene where a speeding robot chases after I believe it's a car and tears you know. So it's it's it creates this this wonderful illusion that you don't you don't instantly think of as being even possible at the time in filmmaking,
and yet they're they're pulling it off. Yeah, and then I think the other thing that was surprising about this is, on one hand, you just don't expect to see a giant robot battle in a film from the nineteen twenties. But fiction has basically been around, had been around for decades at this point, with such titles as The steam Man, of the Prairies by Edward s Ellis from eighteen sixty
eight or Jules Verns The Steamhouse from eighteen eighty. So again it's just neat and worth remembering that people in the nineteen twenties were also really into cool sci fi concepts, many of which still enthrall us today, and you know, are still going to always keep making them. We're not going to stop making giant robot battle movies. There's just
something about them that is wonderful. You know, there's the idea of you know, the small made large of things that are echoes of the human form or animal form and mechanical construction battling each other. And then also we have to consider that this film came out after World War One, and that Deed himself was apparently witnessed to the European conflict, perhaps directly.
So.
Despite the fact that this is totally not a serious film, that it has a very farcical fee to it, it still may have something to say, no matter how shallow, about the new age of warfare in which machines like tanks and warplanes have just utterly changed the landscape of war.
I think it was around the same time that we talked on Invention about remote controlled robots as something that people were claiming to have invented at this time, whether or not they were actually very effective. Yeah, I don't recall the details on that, Yeah.
But certainly it's something that is an idea that's been knocking around the human imagination for quite some time. So you know, it shouldn't come as surprised to see it in the nineteen twenties. But I guess on some level, I feel like I have been kind of reprogrammed to think of the nineteen fifties as the birth period of the sci fi robot, you know, because maybe in part because of there being a lot of images from that
time period. And you know, if you had to, like, if you were to quiz me before this and say, when was the first Sci Fi robot? Might just instantly think to the fifties, even though there are definitely examples from a prior to that decade. And you know, here is one of the prime ones right here.
By the way, I think that thing I was just talking about is in our episodes of Invention on the Death Ray if you want to warn Oh, okay, but yes, I agree with you on all of that. About fiction. I mean, it's gonna be robot jocks forever.
Yeah, yeah, we just we just keep doing it and I will keep watching them apparently no matter what era they're from. All Right, Well, I hope this was a lot of fun for everybody. Maybe we introduced you to a couple of new silent shorts that you weren't familiar with. Maybe you did know of these films already and would like to share your take on them. Certainly, go out watch them and let us know. Also, let us know if you like this kind of format, because obviously there
are a lot of short films out there. It might be kind of neat to do this from time to time, Like maybe you know, to come back to Cronenberg, maybe we do one where we look at a couple of short films, early films from David Cronenberg, crack those open, you know, tackling things that you know otherwise wouldn't make for a full episode of Weird House.
I don't know about that one in particular, but in general, I'm game.
Let's see. So yes, Weird House Cinema. If you want to catch other episodes, this airs every Friday in the Stuff to Blow your Mind Feed It is a place for us to step away from the science for a little bit and talk more about just a weird movie, or in this case, movies. But as you can see, we often find ways to tie it into other pieces of content that we've put out. And oh yeah, and
of course we'll be back next week. And I'm not going to tell you what the film is going to be, but I will say it is another Florida movie, So be prepared.
Cueue up that Lion King song. Huge Things. As always to our wonderful audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.