Thursday, October 19, 2017

McTeague: A novel by Frank Norris

McTeague by Frank Norris

I come to this through the classic movie Greed by Erich von Stroheim. This is a silent movie that is notorious as one of the movies cut into a shorter version by it’s production company.  We don’t have the whole vision of the director and much of the footage was discarded. Nevertheless it’s a great movie and I have watched it more than once, but this novel that the movie was adapted from is so much more and beyond the film in greatness.

This supports my notion that film is a step back as an art form compared to novels. Film is rather good with action of any sort, with it’s old standbys, sex and violence. But it is terribly clumsy when it comes to the subte in human life, like our rich lives of thought. Fiction writing can easily present thought while film often must revert to writing to show thought in the form of narration. Of course text is not thought, but another representation. What is thought? I’m not exactly, sure but text seems best at expressing it.
If one wants to read this fine novel and are interested in the movie Greed too, I would suggest first seeing Greed and then reading the book. I think there is less disappointment with that mode of consumption since movies are most always less than, a sort of graphic comic of the original.

Greed was not a bad name for the movie. The novel is all about greed, the love and lust for money. It is a very American story set in San Francisco, about as far as one can get in the westward stomp across the conquested continent. California had a big push of white settlement after the gold strikes there 50 years before the publication of this 1899 novel. It’s characters are the typical immigrants and their heirs still at it, still wanting to add gold, money, status and meaning to empty lives and hurting one another in the process.
I looked into the biography of Frank Norris. He died very young, at 32 of appendicitis. McTeague is the product of a man in his 20s. It is also a landmark in Naturalism in USA literature.
I am drawn to Naturalism. I have read all of Theodore Dreiser’s fiction and love his work. I probably ought to look into Zola.
With McTeague the social realism of the piece is never overtly political, he is not pitching a particular political point of view, such as, say, Upton Sinclair with Socialism. Frank Norris just lays it all out there and let’s the reader come to their own conclusions with hints of conditioning and life setting having driven the characters to be what they are.
It is a brilliantly involving and pleasurable read even with all the misery. The tale he tells is a worthy one and remains relevant into the 21st Century almost 120 years since publication. That is because the issues remain and people are as they were and maybe even worse now.  Anyone who has been in a relationship with unequal economic assets might find something to relate to here. The major plot line involves one partner having money but afraid, or for whatever other reason, will not or cannot share with her husband McTeague who is a big not so smart uneducated man who had a good income before a change that ruins his life. This can be deadly in a relationship which the novel illustrates in no uncertain terms. The novel contains serious and violent marital conflict. McTeague abuses his wife who cannot share her money. She is driven to live in poverty to “save” more.  

This is a product of the 1890s and does contain some of the stereotypes of the era. There is a greedy “Jew” rag merchant, but everyone else is greedy too and he is not rich or controlling anyone. Just another victim of a systematic insanity.

It’s my first reading of Norris and I loved it. I will return to him later for sure.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

John Bunny - Film's 1st King of Comedy

John Bunny - Film's 1st King of Comedy
A video documentary written and directed by Tony Susnick

Who was John Bunny?
Well, he was an actor who became a very early cinema star. By early, I mean from 1910 to 1915.


I very much enjoy silent movies and have for years, but most of my attention has been to post-1920 product. My notion being that people didn’t really get to making fine quality movies until around then. I know that is just unsupportable laziness. I've never even watched Tillie’s Punctured Romance and I adore Chaplin’s work.


The scenes from Bunny films in the documentary indicate that he shot in a different style. To show his main performance tool, his face, the scenes were all shot in ¾ body, basically their legs are off and we see their upper bodies and faces. This isn’t the Keystone Cops running around with the model Ts doing Hollywood donuts, not that there is anything wrong with that, but this is more chamber work with only up to four people in the frame, tight like that, talking.


The documentary tells us that Bunny was a rather successful stage actor when he went to Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn and offered himself. He ended up making many films there and achieved the type of fame only accessible through early movies, our first moving picture mass medium.


The film gives us an informative vignette, the story of Vitagraph Studios.


The documentary production is enlivened by some tasteful animation of old stills all done by Tony Susnick himself which besides the content is another indicator that this video is a labor of love.


We hear the words of John Bunny in voiceover. Particularly of interest is the final reading of Bunny’s writing in which he expresses in no uncertain terms an awareness of what he was doing in working in a medium that has the power for the first time ever to transcend time. That was a “Wow” moment for this viewer sitting here 100 years beyond Bunny’s life span watching his mugging shadow. We are the first people to see moving images of our ancestors from over 100 year ago.


The film is narrated by Mark 'Big Poppa' Stampley who does an excellent job with the big voice professional narrator role. Until I checked I kind of thought it was one of the big names who commonly land this sort of gig.
The DVD of the film comes with 4 of Bunny’s films accompanied by Ben Model who has been very active in silent preservation and presentation for years. I don’t have the DVD. I saw the movie on a FACEBOOK video presentation of the movie in celebration of Bunny’s birthday.

Nicely done, with a brisk pace and coming in and less than an hour, this sweet documentary is worth a look for those interested in film history.

MOM

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