Fragments

Fragments (2015) is a collection of snippets from lost films, most of them silent, although some date to the dawn of the sound era.  The rather forlorn bits of orphaned celluloid are presented without much explanatory information -- a couple of fan-boy type curators/conservators introduce the fragments with some cursory information.  Unfortunately, they don't explain why we should be interested in the badly damaged, flickering footage preserved in this film, a digital reconstruction on a Flicker Alley disc.  The movie begins with eight or nine seconds of the notorious Theda Bara, mostly naked, wearing a brassiere that looks like a spider web (her nipples are the spiders).  None of her famous films have survived and so we really have no idea as to the basis for her allure.  There's more left of the winsome Colleen Moore, a glamorous starlet from the early 20's and Clara Bow, the It girl.  Bow is almost impossibly pretty; it's obvious that the cartoon character Betty Boop was based on her and, even on battered and decomposing celluloid, her appeal is obvious.  (There is a tiny fragment showing her in two-color Technicolor -- she had startlingly red hair).  We see a badly disfigured half-reel from Emil Jannings' The Way of all Flesh, a film for which he won an Academy Award, but, now, mostly loss -- it's bathetic, but effective, Jannings standing like the little match girl in a snow storm while Christmas revelers pass him by.  There is forgettable material featuring Douglas Fairbanks (comedy athleticism) and Lon Chaney.  Some clever silent comedy is represented by Charley Chase, a variant of the stepping off the curb into the bottomless puddle gag, and a long, intricate, and dangerous-looking sequence, probably about a half-reel, involving a frantic race between men in chariot-like trotting horse carts -- it's supposed to be funny, but the crashes are frighteningly real and the quotient of sadism in the comedy is alarmingly high. A child star named Baby Peggy appears in a terrifying and melodramatic scene involving a tenement fire -- the child chokes in the smoke and seems in real danger.  The four-year old jumps three stories into a trampoline-net held by firefighters as the façade of the building collapses -- all of this was done without stunt doubles.  There's a two-color fragment featuring Laurel and Hardy from 1930 -- they take refuge from a wind storm in a cave where a bear lives.  The highlight of the film is an extended song-and-dance sequence from The Gold-diggers of 1929 -- scenes that begin with an eerie rendition of "Tip-toe through the Tulips", not quite the falsetto used by Tiny Tim, but sung in a high, wobbly and asexual tenor voice, the scene culminating in giant tulips opening up to reveal nearly naked chorines dancing inside of them.  Another scene shows a big song-and-dance number conducted under an enormous backdrop featuring an expressionistically angled and compressed Paris, all its landmarks toppled together with jutting edges and rays of light like a painting by Lionel Feininger.  In front of this set, we see people doing dozens of backflips, fantastically intricate soft-shoe and tap dance numbers. dancing gypsies and choruses of men in tuxedos wielding canes, even, a mob of can-can dancers.  The film ends with four or five coming attractions "trailers" -- in the silent era, the "coming attractions" were played after the film and, hence, "trailed" it.  Of course, these short, rather crudely made advertisement are all that remains of the films that they promote:  we see a coming-attractions trailer for The American Venus ("a galaxy of beautiful girls" wearing "all the newest styles" -- I see Louise Brooks is credited) and an advertisement for a huge scale French Foreign Legion film, Beau Sabreur.  There is probably no one left alive today who can recall seeing either of these films.