MACK SENNETT: GENIUS

Unbelievable! Finally...FINALLY...TCM is doing a whole month (four Thursday nights) of Mack Sennett films.  This is a major event since Sennett may have single-handedly invented slapstick film comedy, and had an immense influence on other genres as well. Now we get to see the evolution of his ideas.

I imagine that readers with a dramatic bias would prefer to study Hitchcock or John Ford rather than Sennett. That would be a mistake. Sennett was the leading theoritician of film comedy and comedy is the very heart of the film medium.

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.

See what I mean (above)? Filmed drama simply doesn't have the pictorial juice that comedy does.

The film medium favors comedy. Who knows? Maybe someday we'll have holographic films and the medium will favor drama or documentary...maybe. All I know is that right now it favors humor. Maybe that's why successful dramas like Raiders of the Lost Arc and horror films like Drag Me to Hell are half comedies.

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.