Unseen Cinema -- the Mechanized Eye

Unseen Cinema -- the Mechanized Eye is a compilation of about 15 short films, loosely designated as avant-garde.  Ostensibly, the 100 minute film is part of seven DVD package, restorations released through the Library of Congress.  The package of films shown on Turner Classic Movies doesn't match play-lists on individual DVDs in the set and, so, I'm not sure how the sequence of short pictures as shoqn on the network relate to the actual discs in the the series. 

As one might expect, the group of films is a mixed bag, some of them fascinating and others utterly dull. The first samples shown are simply very old movies, moving pictures that date back to 1894 and, also, just before the turn of the last century.  As is always the case, when watching these pictures, you have sense of straining your vision very hard because the images are rarities, street scenes in some cases that show a world that no one living can recall.  Even damaged ancient films like these have a certain authority and mystery.  A German strong man filmed by Edison in 1894 grimaces as he poses almost naked for the camera -- the pictures have an intense sculptural quality.  In Paris, around 1900, just about everyone seems to have carried a parasol against the sun.  Some of the pictures of the Eiffel tower are distorted by damage and look like black and white paintings by Derain.  The more "artistic stuff" on the program is generally dull.  There's a picturesquely shot one-reeler of a young poet who falls in love with a dyad, that is a tree-nymph who is the spirit of a cedar on what seems to be the Monterrey coast.  Scored to Debussy, it's pretty much insufferable.  A dynamically edited collage of skyscraper shots is similarly dull and there's a ten minute homage to oil that represents industrial film-making at its absolute worst -- it's a failure as a documentary, dull as cinematic poetry, and, more or less, inexcusable.  (I don't know why this picture was conserved -- it's  terrible.)  An abstract color film by Norman McLaren features schematic spooks and goblins flying around in time to music -- it is, in fact, an early music video and was shown for years as a kind of Entr'acte at the music hall where the Rockettes performed.  It's interesting and has a certain brazen elan but a little bit of this kind of stuff goes a long way.  A bizarre collage by Joseph Cornell pieced together between 1930 and 1970 contains snippets of big cats, flying birds, an old Melies peep-show with figures vanishing and reappearing and a cartoon that is printed to run both in its normal aspect and upside down in a single frame.  It's interesting but the movie is only as good as its archival sources -- Cornell has picked out some strange footage and its very interesting, but what he does with it seems, more or less, random; for the most part, he just splices the disparate stuff together and supplies a rinky-tink sound track:  the film is called Thimble Theater.  A very early one-reel "comedy" shows a man fitted with a prosthetic arm that seems to have a life of its own -- the thing wriggles away from him and steals things from people.  The picture made around 1910 is very convincing, essentially a record of magic tricks involving the artificial arm, but its both macabre and funny at the same time. After World War One, Douglas Fairbanks made a series of ineffably weird two-reelers.  Some of them feature special effects that are supposed to simulate drug trips -- apparently marijuana and cocaine were both popular after the Great War.  In the film shown in the program, Fairbanks is sadistically fed horrible food and, then, experiences nightmares due to indisgestion.. The nightmares include a fiend shot through a distorting lens who is genuinely creepy and, then, a bunch of acrobatic running and leaping by the immensely athletic and powerful-looking actor.  One scene in which the hero walks up walls and, then, strolls upside-down on the ceiling is fantastically effective -- and I have no idea how this seamless effect was achieved.  Some montages by SlavkoVorkapich, who later worked in mainstream films producing the same sort of hallucinatory short sequences, are shown --they're interesting but nothing special.  A city-scape shot with distorting lens, the work of a "loony cameraman" is also interesting and has some very disturbing images of distorted faces.  It's supposed to be funny but the disfigured heads are monstrous and some of them look like mutilated war veterans.  Charles Vidor's The Bridge is an early adaptation (1920) of the famous story by Ambrose Bierce Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge -- it's very good, intense,and the plain style in which the movie is executed adds to its success.  The real find in the program is Orson Welles' juvenile effort, Heart of Age.  Welles made the short film when he was 19 or 20 -- it's shot at a Boy's Academy in Woodstock, Illinois that Welles attended.  The picture is an imitation of expressionistic cinema -- made in 1934, Welles later claimed that he made the movie as a joke, to imitate Werner Krauss in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Be that as it may, the film is very spooky and enigmatic.  Welles appears as a figure in a topcoat and wearing an pretentious hat -- he's obviously intended as a grotesque of the kind one might encounter in E.T.A. Hoffmann and his stark make-up is alarmingly hideous.  In fact, Welles seems to have hopped right over The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to dive into its source material, the macabre grotesque of the German Romantics, particularly Hoffmann.  The movie is dream-like and ambitious -- Welles prints some of the footage in negative and,even, I think solarizes some the shots.  An old woman, her face literally lined with age, squats on a big bell and by rocking her hips causes it to toll. (The rather plain-looking young woman made-up as a crone was Welles' first wife.) The bell's tolling is over-determined since a man in black face also is tugging at a rope and causing a bell (another or the same?) to toll as well.  The woman's movements as she straddles the bell are unmistakably sexual and the whole thing is distinctly kinky, a bizarre mix of sexual innuendo and surrealism.  Welles pretended to be ashamed of the film, but I think this was an act -- the little picture is memorable and the best thing on the program.