Unseen Cinema 2: The Mechanized Eye

Unseen Cinema 2: The Mechanized Eye salutes the rich - but often unheralded - artistry of avant garde and experimental filmmakers during cinema's formative years. TCM's presentation includes 21 titles hand-chosen by archivists Bruce Posner and David Shepard from their world-renowned 175-film retrospective, which premiered in Moscow in June 2001. Posner and Shepard also selected material from the acclaimed Unseen Cinema seven-disc DVD collection, released in 2005. TCM's Unseen Cinema 2 showcase features such intriguing works as the optical pop art spirals in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic cinema (1926); a surrealistic parody made in high school by Orson Welles The Hearts of Age (1934); an early expressionistic spy film by Charles Vidor, The Bridge (1929); stunning views of the Eiffel Tower shot by Edison cameramen for Paris Exposition Films (1900); and Legacy of A Hollywood Extra (1928-29), a selection of extremely rare, silent montage experiments produced by Slavko Vorkapich for now lost feature films. The fifteen films on the Unseen Cinema playlist called "The Devil's Plaything" represent an American brand of surrealism, the artistic movement that celebrates the irrational, illogical, and unreasonable by delving into the realm of dreams, deliriums, and hallucinations. Many of the filmmakers were clearly inspired by European cinema, including the early camera-trick movies of the French pioneer Georges Méliès, such as The House of the Devil (1896) and A Trip to the Moon (1902), and Robert Wiene's classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920), a masterpiece of the German Expressionist movement. But the visual dynamism of these movies, most of them silent and all made outside the Hollywood system, has a distinctly American flair. Jack and the Beanstalk, made in 1902 by Edwin S. Porter, retells a familiar fairy-tale. Cinema's roots in vaudeville entertainment are plainly visible in elements like the dancing quadruped at the beginning (enacted by two humans in a cow costume) and the theatrical scenery throughout the film; but only a movie could serve up the motion-picture trick effects that energize every scene, from a semi-animated egg to characters who emerge from nothing and disappear as magically as they arrived. The camera doesn't move, as it would in Porter's western The Great Train Robbery a year later, but the director uses elegant lap dissolves to move the sequences along at a lively clip, and moments of projected film-within-the-film anticipate his more famous experiments along that line in The Great Train Robbery and Life of an American Fireman (1903). Porter directed the marvelously titled Dream of a Rarebit Fiend in 1906, apparently inspired by the French fantasy Rêve à la lune, made by Gaston Velle and Ferdinand Zecca in 1905. But its immediate source was a popular comic strip by the legendary cartoonist Winsor McCay, who became a filmmaker himself a few years later and created his own variations on the theme of a man who eats too much Welsh rarebit (a concoction of toast and cheese) and passes an extremely uncomfortable night. The first scene finds our undisciplined hero downing so much grog and rarebit that no more will go down his gullet, then stumbling from the restaurant to the street, where he grabs a lamppost for support as the city swirls up, down, and around, vividly evoked by Porter's whirling, tilting camera and dizzying superimpositions. When the man makes it home and collapses into bed, things get even crazier - his shoes walk away, his furniture leaps about, and finally his bed takes him on a vertiginous ride high above the city's rooftops, ending with the dreamer spinning on a weathervane and finally plummeting through his bedroom ceiling. Awaking from his nightmare, he still has the shivers, and surely vows he'll never touch rarebit again. Viewers might share that resolution. The Thieving Hand, made by J. Stuart Blackton in 1908, is a fantasy about a one-armed beggar who does a good turn for a rich man and receives an artificial arm as a reward - a prosthesis that turns out to have a life of its own, picking pockets and robbing a pawnbroker when the recipient tries to hock it. The trick shots are skillfully done, but the anti-Semitic stereotype represented by the pawnbroker is most unwelcome. The Impossible Convicts was directed by D.W. Griffith's brilliant cinematographer, G.W. "Billy" Bitzer, in 1906. The story is a trifle about prisoners trying a jailbreak, and the movie's main gimmick - parts of it were printed with the frames in reverse order - is mild fun, allowing crazy feats like people jumping backwards and rolling upstairs. Welsh rarebit returns in the "Food-Induced Nightmare" sequence from Victor Fleming's comedy When the Clouds Roll By, a 1919 production starring Douglas Fairbanks as Daniel Boone Brown, an ordinary man who falls victim to a mad psychologist's sinister experiment. Encouraged by his butler, who's in cahoots with the bad scientist, Daniel gobbles rarebit, lobster, mince pie, and other such foods in the middle of the night, believing the butler's assurance that this is good exercise for the stomach. The unfortunate eater then has a horrible night, with morsels literally dancing in his stomach and chasing him so relentlessly that he runs up a wall and across a ceiling in an effort to get away. Slow motion, superimposition, and other trickery enliven the movie, some of which is said to be recycled from Joseph Henabery's comedy His Majesty the American, another 1919 film produced by Douglas Fairbanks Productions and released by United Artists. Adapted from a 1924 play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, the James Cruze comedy Beggar on Horseback premiered in 1925. In the "Dream Fantasy Wedding" sequence, the poor young composer played by Edward Everett Horton has a horrible vision of what his future might be like if he marries a wealthy woman for her money so he can finish his symphony; the wedding musicians are human-sized frogs, the bridal bouquet is a cluster of dollar signs, and the honeymoon train has his mother-in-law's scowling face on the front of the locomotive. It's a nightmare for sure.