Inland, Dreaming of Waves

Only one set of words

Went to see The Last Laugh tonight, a silent movie from 1924. It had amazingly mobile camera work. There was one sequence—I think it was the dream sequence—where the camera was twirling as if it were some sort of amusement park ride. It made me dizzy.

The only written words in it appeared on a wedding cake that said “Welcome wedding guests.” There were some spoken words before the epilogue that were added in 1952.

Other than that, nothing but faces and gestures.

At first I thought such acting must be very limited, compared to what can be done today. But I wonder if silence in films is like form in poetry: it forces you to do something a little different.

I noticed that this movie, like The Diary of a Lost Girl that I saw last week, had its main character go into a trance stance. He is a doorman at a hotel, and when the bosses notice that he’s grown old (apparently it crept up on them), they strip him of his uniform and send him to the men’s washroom in the basement, where he holds soap and towels for the flapper dudes. When they take off his uniform, he loses his identity and slumps, just as Louise Brooks did when she was being seduced in Lost Girl. I thought it was cool—that this same gesture appeared in these two movies to represent the different things that men and women could lose, at least in the 1920s.

Just last night, I was watching A Few Good Men, which has many scenes in which men (and one woman) spar with each other to see who is really in charge. Nicholson was great, of course, but so were Bacon and Kiefer Sutherland. Demi Moore didn’t have the greatest role—it seemed that she was being strong-jawed throughout, and her character’s changing attitudes toward Tom Cruise’s character were forced by plot. As always, my favorite moments from him are not the Cruisesque ones (such as “Did you order the code red?”) but rather the quirky ones, like the conversation between him and Kevin Pollak on the baseball diamond, or the conversations with Kevin Bacon. Though I have to admit I love the scene where he questions Nicholson—the intensity works there but not in the drunken night before the big trial scene.

Not sure where I’m going with this, except to note these two movies were about militarism in different ways.

Cruisesque—that’s my new word for the year.

posted by Price of Silence @ 10:02 PM