With Applause, we move from the silent film era to the talkies. Surprisingly, this isn’t just one of the earliest talkies, it also pioneered a number of interesting innovations while being its director Roubien Mamoulian’s first feature film. Unfortunately, its technical achievements are much more interesting than its annoying characters, unsatisfying plot and simplistic moralization.
I think it says something that when my wife saw the DreamWorks logo appear, she adjusted her expectations accordingly, especially in the context of this being a film about white and black race relations in 1960s United States. We’d look out for a competently put together film that is aimed squarely at the mainstream market, a strong social message, plenty of entertaining bits and most of all an uplifting and hopeful ending. In the event, this was exactly what we got.
A few minutes into this second film on my upcoming course’s watch list, I can guess at some of the reasons why the professor picked it and the previous Street Angel. Both are silent films and both are ultimately love stories. Yet the two are very different films. Where the first film was elegant and timeless, The Docks of New York is gritty, dirty and very much rooted in the New York of the steam-ship era. The opening shot sets the tone for the whole movie: deep within the bowels of a ship, a gang of stokers shovel coal into the engines. Sweat runs down their bodies and drenches their shirts. Gravel and goal scrunches under their boots. The flame from their cigarettes and the fires of the engine cast stark shadows within the tight confines.
I like to think that we watch a fairly broad selection of the best films from everywhere around the world, as represented in the posts written here. Some regions are under-represented, such as South Asia and Africa, because I’m not sure how well their output matches up to the best the world has to offer. But as my wife notes, some regions are known, including South America and the Middle East, but it isn’t always easy to know what to watch out for.
Yes, occasionally I do pick movies based on a personal indulgence instead of inherent cinematic value. This is one of those times. We actually watched the first movie not too long ago, but that was before I started my film writing spree. I recall seeing ads for the movies in the comics I had when I was kid but never watched them. Years later, I discovered that while they’re aren’t exactly paragons of cinematic excellence, they do have a decent reputation among geeks and I knew I had to watch them eventually.
I am planning on taking a course on Coursera called The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color in February. The course specifies a list of movies to watch and as such I am slowly working through that list. As I watch them, I’ll write about them and this 1928 silent film is the first of these.
As an aspiring writer herself, my wife is always drawn to movies about writers. Since this film is a biography of one of the most prominent female writers of early-20th century China, it was on my wife’s radar long before its release. She was very pleased to see it being played in Malaysia, even if only in a select few theatres. When we first entered the hall, it was empty so we believed that we were the only ones going to watch it. But actually around a dozen people in all turned up, so it seems that there is at least some audience for serious dramas of this type among Malaysians.