By way of an example, here's (above) Chaplin and Marie Dressler, two discoveries of Mack Sennett. I'm guessing the film is Tillies Punctured Romance but I might be wrong. Notice how the comedic set-up makes a more vivid impression than the one found in most photos of drama.
I don't mean to say that comedy is useful just because it's funny...it's also a simplifying and organizing principal in a story. If you want a laugh you're forced to use a certain kind of pacing and a certain kind of camera placement and a certain kind of lighting. As soon as a filmmaker commits to humor half his filmic problems are solved. Where do you put the camera? In the spot that gets the biggest laugh, of course.
I'll be real interested to see how Sennett's techniques evolved. Here (above) he's got editing and story compression down to a science, but he hasn't totally figured out the principal of laughter release. When you build up an audience's good will you need a trigger to release the laugh. This is where he toys with the idea of a slapstick trigger in what would later become The Keystone Cops. Good old Sennett...always thinking.
The Sennett films run every Thursday night during the month of September. In the Pacific time zone TCM's night begins at 5PM. Times for your zone can be had on the TCM site:
http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/495622%7C0/Mack-Sennett-Thursdays-in-
September.html
BTW: Many, many thanks to Mike Fontanelli for telling me about the Sennett festival. I had no idea it was coming.
9 comments:
Interesting. I always wonder Eddie why older animators like Shamus Culhane dismissed the kind of comedy Sennett pioneered as mindless and tasteless, and lacking the ability to display the individuality of stars like Chaplin (ironically, Chaplin's popularity was at an all time high in 1933, the same year Sennett's studio went belly up). Now I can see the films myself and see if that holds up or not, but I'm guessed like with Terrytoons, its largely due to biased over analyzed, or just plain unfounded scorning.
Thanks for telling us about the Mack Sennett film nights on TCM. I haven't watched the channel in a while, but I'll be watching every Thursday night this month because of this. One of the few great channels on television now.
Sparky: Culhane said that? I must have missed it. I wish I could have talked to him about this.
Chaplin owed a lot to Sennett. He just added personality and star power to Sennett's ideas.
Apart from Chaplin, the closest Sennett came to star power was Mable Normand. She was likable and delivered a nuanced, skilled performance, but she didn't have the kind of charisma and strong personality that Chaplin had. Sennett tried to develop other comedians but they simply didn't have Chaplin's star potential, and Sennett couldn't hold on to Chaplin.
Culhane directed but he didn't have the knack that it takes to be a great director. If he had I can't help thinking that he would have been more aware of the conceptual barriers Sennett had to overcome in order to achieve the things he did.
I should have put Culhane's words into context better Eddie. Here I quote from his biography "Talking Animals and Other People", page 137;
"Live action comedies were being exhibited as early as 1914. Under the leadership of Mac Sennett, a definite form of comedy had been created as epitomized by Sennett's famous Keystone Kops. For years this type of humor was enormously popular with the moviegoing public. No matter what their individual styles of comedy had been before, the actors were expected to adhere to Sennett's formula, namely, chases, wrecked cars, pie throwing, explostions, arse kicking, falling off ladders, out of windows and over cliffs. The action went by so fast it was impossible to identify individual actors. Comedians as dissimilar as Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Wallace Beery, and Harold Lloyd worked within this atmopshere of frenzy as little more than vehicles for kinetic gags."
Of course, I'll be able to see whether Culhane's account of this holds up or not when I watch Sennett's comedies on TCM tonight.
Huge update: I got my first job interview tomorrow at noon. Do you have any advice? I don't want to mess this up.
Good topic for a debate, Eddie. I see where you're coming from, and certainly the kind of comedy pioneered by Sennett and Chaplin as well as their peers (Keaton, Arbuckle, Laurel & Hardy, etc) is pretty close the bedrock of movies. On the other hand, sex might even closer. Hitchcock was surely onto something by emphasizing how essential voyeurism is to the movie-going experience. Which is more basic: the pie-in-the-face gag or the money shot?
Roberto: Yes, I do have some advice! Make sure that you don't come off as overqualified. Research the job and make sure your interview replies are narrowly directed to getting just that job and no other. You can impress them with your other talents later after you've gotten your foot in the door.
Stephen: Sex? As serious film??Fascinating! I hadn't even considered it til you mentioned it.
The problem with hardcore is that it doesn't follow the normal rules for film. You can have lots and lots of humor in a softcore film, but the hardest stuff...somehow it seems out of place there.
Also you're stuck with the physical limits of the guy in the film. He couldn't do too many retakes, even if he was willing.
My guess is that the art of those things depends on the preparation. Knowing what to shoot would be even more important than knowing how to shoot.
Ugh, no luck with the so-called job interview. I went to Walgreen's today to finish the assessment test and they told me that there weren't any positions available but they would call me within the next few weeks if there was one or not. I wish I had gone faster on the math part of the test because I didn't know that it would be timed. Frustrating, but I will keep persisting. My mom knows a few people who know the managers at two grocery stores that I applied to, so most likely, I'll be working at either one of those.
Stephen: I didn't really address myself to what you said. Sorry.
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