Reel Conversations: The Everyday Cinephile

Welcome to CMBA's Reel Conversations, our feature spotlighting members sharing their passions for classic film. For this feature we plan to alternate between interviews and peer-to-peer blogger Q & As.

In this month’s Reel Conversation, it's Shawn from The Everyday Cinephile talking silent film. But this is only part of the talk: his movie recommendations, his gateway and intro to silent film, and more, can be found in the September issue of the CMBA Monthly Star newsletter, and yet another portion will be posted at The Everyday Cinephile, so be sure to stay tuned and pay a visit.

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Have you had an amazing live cinema/screening experience that you’d like to talk about?

The most impactful live screening was my first silent film with live accompaniment. I saw a screening of DeMille’s first film The Squaw Man (1914) at the Harold B. Lee Library Special Collection as a college freshman. What blew my mind is they had a prop, a little red notebook with a message scribbled on it, used in that very same film preserved in their archive that I got to touch and hold! This all came full circle when I volunteered at the very same barn DeMille shot The Squaw Man at–now the Hollywood Heritage Museum right by the Hollywood Bowl in LA. The movie is a cliched Western yarn with uninspired direction but everything about that screening was so magical and pivotal to not just my love of silent film but my visits to archives and deep dives on the era and its films.

And of course attending the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in person was a lifelong bucket item I crossed off a couple years ago. So amazing to see all the work archives around the world are doing and seeing films that an audience often hasn’t seen together in over a century is just a one of a kind experience.

Who do you feel is criminally under-discussed by modern cinephiles, and where should someone start with that person?

He’s actually a name most people know but Cecil B. DeMille’s amazing silent career is overshadowed by his later work. While I’m still a sucker for his tin ear for dialogue (Moses, MOSES), he was one of the most important pioneering directors in early Hollywood held in the same high esteem as D.W. Griffith and Lois Weber in the mid-1910s. 

I highly recommend everyone see his 1915 The Cheat. At a time when most films sought to cast an even lighting over the actors and stage without a single shadow in sight, DeMille and cinematographer Alvin Wycoff went in the opposite direction. Borrowing heavily from theatrical lighting practices made popular by the DeMille’s family friend David Belasco, the pair experimented with several lighting setups and featured heavy shadows at pivotal points throughout The Cheat. When Sessue Hayakawa’s character is shot, we only see it from another room through a Japanese sliding paper door. His silhouette slowly sliding down the door is one of the most jarring, effective shots in all of cinema that was an inspired break from previous filmmaking thought. 

 

From there I’d check out his string of early films, like The Captive and A Golden Chance (both 1915), that are deliciously entertaining hour long pictures. His bedroom parlor comedies with Gloria Swanson, like Why Change Your Wife? (1918) Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) are so transgressive and surprisingly different from DeMille’s later epics. And lastly I love his early 1920s film, like Forbidden Fruit and Fools of Paradise (both 1921), that aren’t afraid to insert a random leopard or color sequence just for the fun of it. Watch DeMille’s 1910s for his innovative approach to directing and watch his 1920s films for his over-the-top showmanship. You won’t be disappointed.

Is there a great lost film that you’re kind of obsessed with?

Too many to count! I tried making a Top 10 several years ago and couldn’t whittle it down so just made a Top 20 instead.
One recently that has captured my imagination is a 1928 French adaptation of Jack London’s short story How to Build A Fire. It used a tryptch widescreen method—similar to Abel Gance’s climactic battle sequence in Napoleon (1927)—but all that survives is a couple production stills. I recently visited the Utah State University archives to view several items related to this lost film held in their Jack London Collection. The onset photographs of Jack London visiting the set and some drawing boards for shots of the film just made me want to see this innovative film even more.
Even if we can’t watch the film, I just love the detective work finding out plenty of information about its production and reception with the surviving supplementary materials left behind.
 

...and there's much more! keep reading at The Everyday Cinephile.