Author: The Mythical Monkey

  • Silent Cinema: Buster Keaton, Part One (The Roscoe Arbuckle Years, 1917-1920)

    Of all the developments that made 1917 such a landmark year in film - the industry-wide adoption of what is now known as 'classical continuity editing,' Mary Pickford's emergence as the most powerful woman in Hollywood history, Charlie Chaplin

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  • Silent Cinema: Douglas Fairbanks - The King of Hollywood

    He was called 'The King of Hollywood' and if any actor during the Silent Era could credibly claim to be more popular than Charlie Chaplin, it was Elton Thomas Ullman, better known to his adoring public as Douglas Fairbanks. The star of forty-eight movies, including some of the greatest action films of all time, Fairbanks was a superstar before the...

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  • Silent Cinema: Little Mary Takes Charge

    Known as 'America's Sweetheart,' Mary Pickford was actually Canadian, born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto in 1892. Shortly after the death of her alcoholic father, the seven year old Gladys hit the stage, and along with her brother and sister, began to tour Canada and the United States regularly as part of a series of low-rent theater troupes. Hoping to become a Broadway actress, Smith moved to New York in 1906 and cha...

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  • Silent Cinema: Louise Brooks

    'There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!' Or so curator Henri Langlois said when asked why he had chosen to prominently display a huge portrait of Louise Brooks rather than Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich at the entrance of the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris on the occasion of its retrospective of the first sixty years of motion pictures. Langlois was overselling his case-after all, I wouldn't want to imagine a movie histor...

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  • Silent Cinema: The Chaplin Mutuals

    I classify Chaplin as the greatest motion picture comedian of all time. - Buster Keaton After his apprenticeship with Mack Sennett at Keystone Studios in 1914, Charlie Chaplin signed a one-year deal with Essanay Studios where he directed fourteen shorts, including such films as The Tramp and Burlesque on Carmen. By the end of that year, Chaplin was the most famous entertainer in the world. He had, especially when directing himself, a sense of rhythm that turned comedy into ...

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  • Silent Cinema: Mack Sennett and the Fun Factory

    I've written previously about the evolution of cinema from the earliest experimental tinkering of the great inventors to the stylistic breakthroughs of D.W. Griffith and Louis Feuillade, a twenty-five year period when movies went from nothing more than a gleam in Louis Le Prince's eye to a world-wide phenomenon playing in a form not all that different from what we still enjoy today. The fastest and most startling evolution in film, though, may well have been in the genre of comedy...

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  • Silent Cinema: Louis Feuillade - Hitchcock before Hitchcock

    Almost from cinema's beginning, recurring characters were popular with filmmakers and theatergoers alike. With the actor's persona—Chaplin's Tramp, for example—clearly established before the film had even begun, audiences knew what to expect and could make their choices with some confidence. Directors meanwhile could dispense with character exposition, which ate up precious film time, and get right to the action. And theater owners, who drove the development of film much more than people reali...

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  • Silent Cinema: D.W. Griffith and the Development of a Film Language

    The twelve years between The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Birth of a Nation (1915) might be the least known years in all of movie history. Yet it was during these years that the idea of what constituted a movie evolved from brief, simplistic snippets viewed through coin-operated 'peep shows' to ambitious, feature-length projects with complex storylines and characters. Any number of early pioneers during this period are worthy of examination—animators Émile Cohl and Winsor Mc...

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  • Silent Cinema: Who Invented the Movies?

    Trying to say definitively who invented the movies is a little like trying to say who invented fire—the records are sketchy, everybody who knows for certain is dead, and what evidence that does remain comes largely from the self-serving accounts of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers. And where do you start, which is to say, what was the first indispensable step toward what we now think of as motion pictures? If I knew his name, I'd say it was the first caveman who thought to entertain h...

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