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Movies Forum Index » Silent Movies Forum » IFC reviews HYPOCRITES (1915)
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| Bruce Calvert |
 Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 9:14 pm |
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http://www.ifc.com/film/film-news/2008/04/the-guatemalan-handshake-hypoc.php
Another revelation, Lois Weber's "Hypocrites" is a deeply eccentric,
troublingly lyrical vision, for its day - 1915! - and ours. Whatever its
daring and innovation, it's a film that needs to be seen through the scrim
of pioneering feminist filmmaking, which is the political hook upon which
the four-feature Kino set it's part of hangs (work by Alice Guy-Blaché, Ruth
Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison and "Mrs. Wallace Reid" is included). Talk about a
secret history within a history; bizarrely, women directors were common in
the day of reactionary-bigot bigwig D.W. Griffith, and within what quickly
became just a few years later an almost completely male industry. The
scholarship exploring these newly recognized careers is far from done, and
you'd stump your average film school prof by asking them to name a single
title from these filmographies. But in the teens audiences were well aware -
the title sequence of "Hypocrites" begins with a statement and signed
portrait of the filmmaker.
Weber herself was an acute visualizer, with a moral sense that easily
outgrades Griffith's neo-Victorian ethos, and "Hypocrites" is infused with a
quite feminine sympathy even as it excoriates entire chunks of society for
their amoral selfishness and fake piety. For a 50-minute movie, it has a
dazzling complex structure, layering (but not paralleling, exactly) the
story of an old-time monk persecuted for a nude statue, and a modern
minister troubled by his congregation of middle class four-flushers and
gossipers. The same actors serve both tales, but then Weber falls into a
third mode, mixing the first two in guided tour (our hostess is Naked Truth,
played by an anonymous nude woman) of the modern American's iniquity hidden
within his and her public lives. Weber could shoot, too; the exposure of the
ascetic's statue to a medieval community of fair-goers is performed in a
breathtaking series of long dollies, encompassing vast amounts of human
activity and emotion at a point in the history of cinema when Griffith's
cramped-room-tableaux were supposed to be the height of eloquence.
[Photos: Will Oldham in "The Guatemalan Handshake," Benten, 2006; Lois
Weber's "Hypocrites," Kino]
"The Guatamalan Handshake" (Benten Films) and "Hypocrites" (Kino Video) are
now available on DVD
--
Bruce Calvert
--
Visit the Silent Film Still Archive
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