It is the custom of illuminated manuscripts to transform sacred words into shimmering icons which break, easily, beyond the sensory limitations of simple text, rendering ordinary letters into evocative, animate visual form that invites the eye to idle awhile at the brink of transcendence, rather than stand at a distance, remote and unyielding, daring to be comprehended, accepted, believed. Strange and barely recognizable wildlife appears on vellum leaves, creatures that wind and unwind in ceaseless whirlpools of bejeweled abstraction. Or they are, if you prefer, the spirited exoskeletons of snakes, dragons, waterbirds — Celtic and Germanic obsessions meeting the Apostles of Christendom. Emerging in the British Isles between 500–900 C.E., The Lindisfarne Gospels provide an arena, lapidary and starlit, where paganism devours Christianity while also birthing the religion anew into what can only be described, if you're honest, as “motion pictures.”

Put simply, movies are books, volumes of light, zoetic leaves and letters that move beyond their trellis, leaving us to decipher a purely visual enigma; all the more impossible to contain within mortal consciousness because the light of this steadfastly irrational art has swallowed up the text. There are those, however few in number, who have claimed to decode this cryptic iconography. But mysteries remain, not unlike those — strange, delved, bewildering — contained within the  gospels of Christianity.

These mysteries urge upon us a wholly radical reconsideration of silent cinema, of the book in film, of whispering pages. Pages fluttering like leaves. Of Stan Brakhage, who gave us a series of works entitled The Book of Film — yet otherwise seemed incapable of regarding the universe independent of its sensual properties. Of Hollis Frampton and Peter Greenaway and even Wes Anderson, and certainly of Robert Beavers, who incorporates the sound and motion of turning pages, placed in relationships and analogies with other actions, as with the moving of birds' wings in flight. The films of David Gatten, which deeply engage with the idea, even the history of books.

This is not, in other words, the middlebrow notion of film as pure, narrative-bearing text that we are confronting. This is Mallarme’s concept of the book, the Proustian model of the book. It is its ultimate realization, par excellence, and by far the most apposite. Works that require different modalities of reading/touching words and saccadic rhythms involving different velocities of hyphenation and partial retention and compound phrases through the softest of collisions, where we come up against the everlasting mystery of the silent voice, the ‘little’ voice inside each of us; an imagined external voice that reads to us quietly, that is ours but seems to be another's. This voice is not the voice of the author nor the voice of a corporeal stand-in for somebody who may once have read to us the most thrilling book in the world somewhere in our long-ago childhood. It just is. n she wields that power to vex and trouble the supposed obligations of horror films with such an obscure species of realism that it would not be difficult to imagine her long and powerful strides walking us into cinema’s distant past, where naturalistic acting sheds decorum, taste, chivalry, and good table manners; and where, decades after Venice Beach had appeared in Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) — Charlie Chaplin’s debut film — a major Hollywood production once stood. 

When Laura Hope Crews first appears in The Silver Cord (1933), she seizes the space like the experienced theater star she was, arms and furs flying, crying for her son: “Dave boy!” It’s the kind of entrance that seems meant for entrance applause, and Crews earns that courtesy from the moment she arrives, or even before that, when we hear her off-screen (or off-stage) voice. As Mrs. Phelps, a smother mother of monstrous proportions, Crews acts at the highest possible level of intensity.

It’s hard to keep track of Mrs. Phelps’s passive aggressive and sometimes just aggressive aggressive tactics to sever the marital engagements of her two sons David and Robert (Joel McCrea and Eric Linden). Mother Phelps descends, sometimes, to outright cattiness: “That dress needs distinction…and a figure,” she says to David’s fiancée (Irene Dunne). She’s fond of crying, “I haven’t a selfish hair on my head!” but she’s so obvious a manipulator that her sons seem a little dim to be taken in by her incessant posing at motherly self-sacrifice. Crews plays her like a drawing room wild animal who must always keep up the most furiously gripping kind of playacting if she is to keep her sons, and her audience, in her thrall.

Through all my years, the daily comics (“the funnies” as they were once called) have been my nearest thing to religion. At home in the late 1940s, we subscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer as well as the Evening Bulletin, then  the largest-circulation evening daily in the country.

Sometime in there, the Inquirer Sunday color comics took on a new glossy sheen, using what I recall as a Rotogravure process, while the Bulletin retained the standard muted, non-reflective color on Sunday, once they absorbed the Record (which folded in 1947). The Bulletin itself succumbed in 1982. (When it closed, the paper held a week-long sale of items; I picked up their newsroom dictionary, the Webster’s Second International, glued to a bright blue stand, along with a surprisingly comfortable wooden rolly desk chair.)

Today’s daily strips I still download. Lots of fun, but lacking the tactical fondness of the printed page. But I’m not aiming at a rampage through all the newspaper comics of yesterday. This is a paean to Will Eisner’s The Spirit, the visual anchor of my pre-teen years.

 The Spirit came out in a unique format for a newspaper “strip,” an eight-page tabloid (half-news-page) Sunday supplement folded into the comics section, in full color, a complete story each week. In our Philly suburban area, it ran in the Bulletin. It had started nationally in 1940, along with two backup features, later dropped, as an attempt by a small newspaper syndicate to insert a “comic book” into Sunday newspapers.

Mary Henry, a passenger in an apparently fatal car accident resurfaces hours later from the river where locals on the scene futilely search for the vehicle and the remains of its occupants after it careens off a bridge during a joy ride.  Mary’s miraculous reappearance from the wreckage is not so much a testament to her survival but a hint that she has been reborn in the shape of herself but somehow not her self.  Once the river’s placental matter is washed away, restoring her to the cynical, coolly detached young woman she was before her brush with death, we are already asking what - not who - is Mary Henry?  How she survived unscathed when her fellow passengers remain entombed in their unrecovered vehicle is as much as a mystery as her decision to relocate to Salt Lake City to become a church organist.  Nothing in Mary’s demeanor suggests religious devotion.  On the contrary, she appears downright annoyed by the suggestion that her occupation is motivated by anything other than “business”, coldly insisting the choice is a pragmatic one.    

After a long walk I find myself in a third class compartment, where there are other travelers I can barely make out. Just as I’m about to fall asleep I notice that the regular jolts of the train are chanting a word, always the same one, and which is more or less “Adéphaude.” The “adéphaude” is a precious yellow stone that I see sitting in the mesh bag next to a poorly wrapped package, enveloped in wrapping fabric with a railroad label on it bearing the inscription “Rhodes 1415,” which I am convinced is an error. It is impossible for me to place the battle in question despite the basket weavers I question one after the other along the interminable marsh I am crossing with the air of a vagabond. I have arrived at a second class wagon. I sardonically make the observation that there are now in the mesh bag two packages bearing the mention “Rhodes no date.” At that moment I notice in the opposite corner a young woman who is speaking agitatedly to a companion who is at first invisible and who could be me, or some distant relative of a certain Lady Carnegie who I think I knew when I was young. The young lady is dressed with great elegance. I am only able to make out a few words of conversation: “…lacking lacquer…” It is obviously a question of the packages which, in fact, look extraordinarily scaly. I turn my eyes towards the lady’s interlocutor and I see that he is covered in armor, which completely hides him. I stand up, indignant. At my feet are the remains of a cold meal. The lady wipes her hands with a lace handkerchief. We are in the middle of the countryside, near an embankment. It’s the evening of the battle of Marignan.

by Louis Aragon

La Révolution Surréaliste, 3 yr, No. 9-10, October 1927

Translated by Mitchell Abidor

I don't expect agreement when I claim that Trump personifies anti-Establishmentarianism. For the sake of consensus-building, I'll rephrase: Donald Trump has successfully represented himself as the embodiment of a very specific kind of rebellion, rebellion against career politicians tethered to corporate power. That's a good thing, a potentially healthy politics that we can, and should, build upon. His voters, a vast and growing constituency, hate the Neoconservative ideology that has migrated from the GOP to the Democratic Party, and now dominates its every thought. Don't we all feel volcanic about enormous expenditures undemocratically sent willy-nilly by Joe Biden for the purpose of death and destruction in Gaza and Ukraine? Oh... I forgot... The Democratic Party Faithful loves its taxes paying for that shit.

On Wednesday night, November 6, bands of supporters of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv roamed through Amsterdam, waving national and team colors. Though they were ostensibly there to attend a UEFA Europa League match between Maccabi and Ajax  of Amsterdam, they took to the streets and chanted “Death to the Arabs” and “Why are there no schools in Gaza? Because there are no children”, celebrating the slaughter their nations has carried out over the course of nearly fourteen months. They attacked and destroyed a taxi, tore down one Palestinian flag and burned another. In short, they acted as if they were home in Israel where, protected by the police and army, any and every form of racist language and violence is permitted. The display of Palestinian flags is forbidden in Israel, and the fans acted as if Amsterdam was an occupied city and that Israeli mores and laws ruled. They acted like a combination of soccer hooligans and right-wing terrorists. In acting this way, the Israeli fans taunted Amsterdamers, particularly Arab Amsterdamers, and in tense times received the response they should have expected. Was this antisemitic violence or anti-Israeli violence? This is an entirely valid question, since there are no reports of Dutch Jewish citizens or sites being attacked. For Arabs, the enemy had shown its face in their hometown, and that enemy is Israel.

What in the Sam Hill are sound engineers talking about when they talk about “hearing the room”, you ask?

It’s very simple. Imagine flattening Dante’s Hell into a hunk of common shellac, pressed into a 16’’ grooved platter; rotating, in a herald of the future, at 33 1/3 revolutions (yes!) per minute; from which pours into the human ear a cacophony unlike any before or since: Honks, jeers, whines, bellows, wisecracks, sweet nothings, et'nic accents, urban despair, operators and their spiels, the rare poetry of low commerce. Oily-voiced capitalist Warren William, later dismissed as a poor man’s Barrymore, ranking among the greater Satans of that period while lesser imp Allen Jenkins gets on the horn: “You sound like you look sad”, he squawks at girlfriend Joan Blondell, forever chewing gum in spirit if not in fact.

With a voice like Jean Arthur on the verge of ending it all, Blondell’s status as a screen icon would not outlive America’s Great Depression, even if she herself did, and with remarkable ease; preferring instead to remain its avenging conscience – a sensual wraith in the guise of everything from prostitutes, carny racketeers, and women kingpins, beating the men at their own dirty game without even mastering it.

Another doomed crack at empathy resounds on the Vitaphone system.

by Tom Sutpen and Daniel Riccuito

“Neg sparkle" is a kind of film damage manifesting as twinkling constellations on the image. This column is about a different kind of film damage, the mental havoc wrought by overindulgence in cinema, though I hold out the possibility that a human being so afflicted may be in some ways better than the normal kind.

Movie stars are created by an unholy synthesis of industry practices and audience response. The star themselves sometimes seems to have little to do with it. This is most clearly indicated by the story of the Biograph Girl.

Since, in the early twentieth century, films did not come with credits, merely an opening title featuring the company name for reasons of copyright protection, the actors were anonymous and it had not occurred to anybody in the business that promoting them would be useful. But it was easier to have a stable of performers under contract than to seek out new ones for every picture, especially if you were constantly grinding out pictures “like sausages,” as I believe both Griffith and Chaplin complained.

So audiences got used to seeing the same faces, and they preferred some to others. They had no way to ascribe names to them, so they invented their own. The Biograph Girl was simply a leading lady under contract to Biograph, a major film company in the teens.

When the Biograph Girl left Biograph, she was signed by Carl Laemmle, later founder of Universal, who promised her a marquee. Her real name was Florence Annie Bridgwood but her professional name was even catchier than “the Biograph Girl”: she went by Florence Lawrence. 

To exploit her fame and effect a name-change in the public mind, Laemmle staged a publicity stunt: he told the press that the Biograph Girl had been struck down by a streetcar and killed. The articles all made mention of the star’s “real” name. Then he was able to debunk his own fake news, announcing that Florence Lawrence, formerly known as the Biograph Girl, was alive and well and working for him.

Although barely remembered today, back in the early decades of the twentieth century, Charles “Chic” Sale was one of the most popular comedians in America. Born in South Dakota in 1885, Sale began performing on the vaudeville stage at age 15. Over the next three decades he developed a number of characters, but by the end the most popular—and ostensibly the only—character in his repertoire was Len Putt, a Midwestern carpenter who specialized in building outhouses. The character became so widely known that it wasn’t any surprise to hear that other comedians were borrowing (or just outright stealing) his routines.

As a way of copyrighting and protecting his material, Sale gathered his best monologues into a book entitled The Specialist. When it was published in 1927 it became a huge bestseller, and for a while there, “Chic Sale” became a euphemism used nationwide not just for outhouses, but for toilets in general. (There may be more palatable ways to get your name out there, but it worked.)

In 1930 with vaudeville gasping its last breath, Sale left the stage and moved to Hollywood. He’d appeared in a handful of silents and shorts beginning in the mid-20s, but it wasn’t until 1931 that his career as a character actor took off. In a risky and potentially career-killing move, he not only left the stage behind — he left his outhouse carpenter back there, too, instead developing a new persona who would appear in nearly thirty features and shorts over the next five years.

By donning a gray wig, a gray beard, and a few extra wrinkles, the rail-thin Sale (then in his mid-40s) became the model of the feisty, lively, straight-talking octogenarian. Better still, his stage experience together with the fact that he was still so young meant that his cranky old man could jump and dance and do pratfalls as well as hobble—all to great comic effect.

As a supporting actor, he played any number of grandpas and uncles during his brief film career, but they were all the same character—an elderly man with a fierce pride, no patience for bullshit, and a sense of history who refuses to let something as silly as age hold him back. As a result, he was often the most youthful character on the screen, and had a knack for stealing the show from much bigger names ) like Walter Huston, Dickie Moore, and Wallace Beery).

On rare occasions he did take on other personas, playing Abraham Lincoln, for instance (not much of a stretch with Sale’s tall, lanky frame) in the 1935 short A Perfect Tribute, and Ben Gunn in Victor Fleming’s 1934 Treasure Island. But it was always back to Grandpa afterwards. He was unmistakable, hilarious, and audiences loved him.

Sale died of pneumonia in 1936 at age 51. The ironic pity of it is that I’ve always wondered what Sale would have done with his octogenarian when he really was in his eighties.

by Jim Knipfel

Thirties films had a unique sympathy with the older woman. Films today barely represent the menopausal or post-menopausal at all, and if they do, it’s in the form of a few stars who are usually holding the aging process back by any means possible.

But the forty-something woman was invaluable in old movies, as the voice of skeptical experience. Older men were frequently buffoonish goats of the Guy Kibbee persuasion, probably because that was obviously more amusing than towing the patriarchal line. But older women could snipe from the sidelines, seeing through the lies of leading men and the folly of women who love them.

Like Jean Dixon, perennial romantic-cynic with her putty face alive with eyes that have seen it all and a smile that forgives without forgetting. It’s startling that she made so few films (13 in a career of just 9 years), her presence is so indelible, whether as Joan Crawford’s prostitute pal in Sadie McKee, maid to William Powell’s butler in My Man Godfrey, or best pal in most of the rest (which include Cukor’s matchless Holiday and the criminally underrated Swing High, Swing Low).

“Zasu Pitts and her director, John Stahl, taking time out of the Universal commissary during The filming of Fannie Hurst’s "Back Street.” Zasu’s newest part is that of Miss Leighton, the supercilious receptionist in ‘Once in a Lifetime,’ in which Louise Fazenda will also be seen.“ photo by Ray Jones

~New Movie Magazine, 1932