Tag: Silent Film Comedy
There are a ton of books about silent film comedy, many of them excellent, but they’re not written by performers. Paul Merton, author of Silent Comedy, is on the other hand a popular British comedian — mostly improv and stand-up, rarely silent —with a love for the heyday of slapstick. He has even done several lecture tours on the subject, bringing screenings with live music to theatre festivals and other venues throughout the U.K. In the past two years he has produced two documentaries on early film (not just comedy) for television: Paul Merton’s Weird and Wonderful World of Early Cinema (BBC Bristol, 2010) and The Birth of Hollywood (BBC2, 2011). He has also done an interactive presentation on early British film comedy for the British Film Institute, which you can view online here.
It hasn’t been hard to find something approaching the complete works of Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon on DVD in recent years, but when I wanted to purchase the Laurel & Hardy opus, I had to order a 21-disc box set available only in the UK and deal with all the region and formatting conflicts. All that has now changed with the release of a 10-disc box set suitable for the region 1, NTSC market, Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection.True, this has only 32+ hours of footage, as opposed to 68+ on the British set, but then who’s counting?
Last month I posted a preview of the Clowns on Film evening at the NYC Clown-Theatre Festival, perhaps a shameless piece of self-promotion since I was co-hosting the event with Audrey Crabtree. I wrote that the work that evening would be great, since Audrey (festival co-director ) had told me so and I believed her, though honestly I hadn’t seen most of the films before stepping on stage. Of course my hidden agenda was to try to fill the voluminous Brick Theater to the rafters. If you’ve never been there, think Radio City Music Hall. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
Well, maybe it’s his birthday. The year was 1895 and the day was probably today.
This post is not mere shameless self-promotion, at least not entirely. This Friday night (Sept. 16th) at 10 p.m., Audrey Crabtree and I will be co-hosting a presentation of short clown films at the NY Clown-Theatre Festival at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And you should come, because we’ll be lonely without you, plus it’s going to be pretty exciting. Here’s why…
From the BBC wire, 12 August 2011. Richard Westcott reports:
Staff at Birmingham’s Central Library have discovered a priceless collection of more than 500 silent movie music scores. They made the find during a clearout before a move to a new building and unearthed more than just a bit of old junk.
A minor post this one, just a curiosity, but I was pleased to see that Wired magazine, in a discussion of the 2010 dream-catching movie, Inception, discovered a connection with Buster Keaton’s innovative Sherlock, Jr. (1924) — enough of a connection that they did this short piece:
One of these days I’m going to find time to write at some length about my hero Buster Keaton, but meanwhile the Keaton industry is doing just fine without me, thank you very much. There’s a new DVD collection, a new book, and a Monday nights retrospective this summer at the Film Forum here in New York. This outpouring is the inspiration for a lengthy (re-) appraisal of Keaton’s life achievement by Jana Prikryl entitled “The Genius of Buster.” Despite its being written for The New York Review of Books, the article does not over-intellectualize its subject. It’s cogent, informative, and down to earth.
French directors Pierre Etaix and Jacques Tati made solid reputations for themselves creating modern-era silent-style movies four and more decades after the dawn of the talkies. Now another French director, Michel Hazanavicius (OSS 117) has followed in their footsteps with The Artist, a silent, black-and-white movie about the transition from the silent era to sound. It was announced yesterday that Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life had won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but according to several reports The Artist gave it a real run for its money.
Max Linder produced, wrote, and directed three feature films for his own company: Seven Years Bad Luck (released Feb. 1921), Be My Wife (Dec. 1921), and The Three Must-Get-Theres (Aug. 1922). I’ve already written about Seven Years Bad Luck, and I guess I really do have some readers because I learned shortly thereafter that there was a short wait to rent it on Netflix. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
Keaton got Donald O’Connor, Chaplin got Robert Downey, Jr., and if screenwriter Samantha Husik has her way, Max Linder would be brought to life by the mega-talented Depp. Husik, a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts film program, is the author of a new screenplay about Linder’s life and career that she is currently shopping around. I put Linder and Depp into my handy-dandy Morphomatic™ and this is what I got:
If I’ve convinced you in my recent posts that Max Linder is worth knowing about, then you might want to read more, no? But when it comes to books (you remember books) there’s still nothing in English devoted entirely to Linder, and the two books in French are both by his daughter, Maud Linder. Luckily, they’re excellent and it would be great to see them translated into English.
The rediscovery and remastering of silent film classics, reintroducing these artists to the public by way of annotated DVD box sets, has been a great gift to the physical comedy fan. First it was Chaplin and Keaton, then Lloyd and Langdon, followed by Charley Chase, Douglas Fairbanks and, most recently, that modern silent clown, Pierre Etaix. And now finally the father of silent film comedy, Max Linder, is being justly celebrated for his pioneering career that spanned over 400 films, about 130 of which have survived, in a handsome 6-disc DVD set complete with historical commentaries and new musical scores by New York’s own Ben Model.
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin