Well, it's unfortunate that I said I was going to go and then couldn't make it.

Now I'm a film buff too, ain't I? Can't I be a film buff but not a big fan of silent film? I recognize the importance of studying them to understand the history, and I recognize that there are masterpieces among them. I've studied the opening snow fight sequence carefully and I can see the ways it's remarkable for its time, indeed for any time. It's very inventive at certain points and visually extremely lively. However I think the medium at that point has certain limitations. One has to make many allowances. You yourself qualify your praise of the film, "Abel Gance did the best job you could hope for, given his times and resources." There are problems of the silent medium itself. Acting becomes mime. And the language of mime doesn't communicate in the same way at all as speech. I saw Marcel Marceau various times both on film and live, and frankly I could never really tell what he was getting at. I'm a visual artist, so one can't say I'm "not visual." The other thing is that one has to make allowances for the quality of the image itself. It works best in closeups. In the long shots, the figures are twisted and attenuated. The images are rickety and the whole image doesn't hold to the horizontal but at times shifts off kilter in one direction of the other. This was a medium in its infancy. We can adore early renaissance Italian painnting, yet know that perspective had not yet fully developed. In writing, the English language changed completely from Chaucer's time through the 16th, 17th, 18th, to today, yet we can read any book written in modern English without making any allowances. We don't have to make allowances because Dickens didn't have electricity or because Hemingway didn't have a computer.

The long passage when the screen shows overlays of young Napoleon's face with images of the battle is the most inventive. However, it is only a very impressionistic and partly expressionistic version of events. Do we really know that Napoleon was the winner till he comes forward at the end? That is the clincer. It's a clear, simple scene, and the text where the schoolmaster tells him he will go far is more essential to the whole sequence, conventional though it is, than the fantastic overlays.

19 heads! How is that possible? My VCRs aren't currently even set up to work, though i do have plenty of tapes still on file. i also have a small collection of laser discs. i read somwhere that there was a version of Gance's Napoleon on laser disc. I do hope to get to review the whole film in some form some day.

Thanks for your further notes about the two actors. I don't find Albert at all appealing. Maybe one doesn't have to.

Kubrick became a master at a time when the art was highly developed. However the early film we saw by him during New Directors this year was not particularly impressive. It would be useful for scholars though, because it has hints of certain things to come. This is listed in the ND/NF + Film Comment Selects thread (forums) but I didn't "review" it because I focus on new films when I cover festivals. This is more a predictor of themes than a preview of technical accomplishments or style.

FEAR AND DESIRE (1953) 72min
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Country: USA
Directed, photographed, and edited by the talented and ambitious 24-year-old
Kubrick, FEAR AND DESIRE was written by his high school classmate, Howard
Sackler, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in playwriting. Some Kubrick
scholars see this wartime drama of five soldiers behind enemy lines and their
encounter with a native woman as a dry run for PATHS OF GLORY; others see it
as the original to the second half of FULL METAL JACKET. A Kino Lorber
release.