During the Silent Era there were a number of film magazines that provided an avid film public with copious reporting on motion pictures & their stars. These magazines richly capture the zeitgeist of the film era in its early heyday, their pages bustling with photos, bios, interviews, gossip, story capsules, ads, reviews, and coming attractions. Today these magazines can be bought online for upward of $20 or so each; here I’m sharing the modest starter collection I have amassed over the last few months. The magazines shown here span from 1916, a year of explosion in the popularity of film following the sensational release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, to fifteen years later in 1931, when the “talkies” had all but driven silent film into extinction.
For the serious fan of silent & early-talkie film, these magazines deliver contemporaneous views into the state of “filmdom”, its public, and (most especially) its luminous stars during film’s fast-moving formative years. In their antique pages, tattered with age but resilient in their hardy paper stock, we may regress 100 years to acquaint ourselves with the bevy of attractive talents who served at the vanguard for motion pictures as a mass medium. In future pieces we will dive deeper into some of the issues featured here; here however they are presented by their covers with their colorful star portraits.
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Pictured above (from left across top row, then left across bottom row):
Nov. 1916 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured:Kathlyn Williams
April 1920 Picture-Play Magazine. Pictured: Helene Chadwick
Oct 1931 Motion Picture Magazine. Pictured: Billie Dove
Nov. 1924 Motion Picture Magazine. Pictured: May McAvoy
May 1931 Photoplay Magazine. Pictured: Marlene Dietrich
Pictured above (from left across top row, then left across bottom row):
June 1916 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Evelyn Greeley
June 1917 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured: Juanita Hansen
June 1918 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured:Louise Huff
March 1920 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured:Mae Murray
May 1926 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured:Colleen Moore
May 1926 Motion Picture Classic. Pictured:Richard Dix
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We’ll end here with a lovely color advertisement decorating the (torn) back inside cover from the Nov. 1916 issue of Motion Picture Classic above:
Here we see Mary Pickford, who by that year of 1916 had earned her singular (and still-enduring) sobriquet as “America’s Sweetheart”. That label was first used to describe Pickford as early as 1914, shortly after she had left Biograph studios where she had achieved fame under the direction of D.W. Griffith as the “Girl With the Curls” and “The Biograph Girl”. The use of her likeness here to endorse a beauty product suggests the power of the nascent film industry to move American commerce via the endorsement of its stars.
Jean Cocteau was one of those indomitably creative spirits that are difficult for us to pin down with any one artistic classification. An influential intellect and innovator, he was one of the core vanguard of thinkers who influenced the shape of modernity in the 20th century. Cocteau’s towering creativity could not be stifled by any one box, one form; and so he was a prolific writer, artist, filmmaker, designer, critic, etc. Cocteau however fancied himself a poet most of all, albeit one who also worked in the media of the other arts.
Cocteau approached any given film as a poem, a “poésie cinématographique“, But his 1930-32 film The Blood of a Poet wasn’t just a poem, it was a story about its own self-creation, and the creative process in general. This work of avant-garde art was made in the heyday of European surrealist film, along with Bunuel’s & Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and The Golden Age (1930). The latter, along with The Blood of a Poet, was financed by Viscount Charles de Noailles, a Parisian art patron who also supported Man Ray’s filmmaking.
In talking about The Blood of a Poet here, it will be necessary to spoil its “story” — but this barely denigrates the allure of the film to the initiate — in fact it might given them a useful template on how to approach the “poem”. We need to view the film, as Cocteau intimates, not as a linear plot but as a poetical dive into the amorphous den of inner experience. Cocteau himself recounted as much in a 1932 talk on the film: “In The Blood of a Poet I tried to film poetry the way the Williamson brothers film the bottom of the sea.”
What The Blood of a Poet lacks in length (55 minutes), it makes up for in its diverse imagery & creative conceits. The film follows our protagonist the poet (played by the striking Chilean actor Enrique Rivero) across distinctive dream-like scenes spread out across two acts. In the first act, the poet draws a mouth on a face; the mouth starts speaking from the paper; perturbed, the poet vigorously erases the mouth with his hand; however, this only migrates the image of the mouth to the palm of the poet’s hand, where it asks for air; the bewildered poet seeks to lose the mouth, and finds his unwitting victim in a Venus-like statue in his studio (played by the divine Lee Miller). Here we see the poet after he has smeared the mouth onto the statue’s lifeless face:
The gambit seems to pay off at first, but the statue’s first words portend trouble for the poet, as she calmly disarms him by asking: “Do you think it’s that simple to get rid of a wound, to close the mouth of a wound?” Now the statue (as the goddess incarnate, the living avatar of dead eternity) takes charge of the situation, cryptically commanding the poet to enter a mirror:
We witness the poet diving into the mirror headlong with a splash. This takes him to the hall of the Hotel des Folies-Dramatiques. There are multiple doors behind him. He moves from keyhole to keyhole, peeking at the weird scenes therein: a Mexican revolutionary being shot, a girl climbing up a wall, a shadowy Chinese opium den, “the desperate meetings” of a hermaphrodite lounging on a chaise & holding a sign that ominously reads “danger of death”.
The poet concludes the strange hotel visit by fulfilling the hermaphrodite’s prophecy, accepting a revolver that is handed to him and blowing his brains out. The poet is not dead, however; he returns through the mirror to his studio where the statue silently mocks him; in anger he takes up a hammer and violently smashes the statue to bits. Off-screen the narrator warns that “by breaking statues, one risks turning into one oneself”. Cut to the start of Act 2, where we see a statue of the man (presumably the poet) sitting in a courtyard, surrounded by schoolkids engaged in a snowball fight. One of the kids is fatally struck by a snowball-sized rock. As the child lies freshly dead in the courtyard, a table appears next to him, upon which a high-stakes card game is in progress between the poet and a woman, also played by Lee Miller.
She warns the poet that the game is lost for him unless he can produce the ace of hearts (clearly implying that this is a game of love). Bereft of that card, the poet desperately resorts to base cheating, reaching down to his left to pull the card (the heart) from the chest of the mortally wounded student.
The subterfuge seemingly having worked, the poet is on the cusp of victory. Here, the poet is triumphant — against fate, against denial, against eternity.
But the dead boy’s ghostly guardian angel appears and removes the card from the poet’s hand just as he’s about the play it, giving the poet but one recourse: defeat, and suicide. As in the first act, the poet puts a revolver to his head, and pulls the trigger. It is he once more who is lying dead. As for the woman, we witness her sublimate into a god, becoming the same statue that had been destroyed earlier by the poet. Eternity prevails, but at what price to poetry?
A film of many guises, The Blood of a Poet can be viewed as a rumination on the creative process, presenting it from the interior as a caustic tension between objective & interpretive truth, a struggle that draws a good deal of blood and lucre from the artist/creator who must wrestle with the binding edicts of greater eternity. One might put Cocteau’s film in a set with two later classics on the trials of the creative process, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev & Fellini’s 8½. Tarkovsky, the supreme poet of film, pronounced The Blood of a Poet one of his all-time favorites, including in his list of 77 essential films.
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I highly recommend a detour into the remarkable life of Lee Miller, who plays the symbiotic parts of the statue and woman in The Blood of a Poet.
La Mascota is a Spanish 1920’s card series featuring famous film stars of the day. Each card was included in a pack of cigarettes issued by the Diego Moreno Miranda company based in Tenerife, Canary Islands. Following is a selection from the La Mascota card set of seven great divas of the silent era.
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Clara Bow
Definitive film:It (1927)
Bow exploded into superstardom with the 1927 film It, which literally made her the “It Girl”. Pairing modern feminine confidence with ample sexuality, Bow enjoyed a mercurial run as a top star, starring in the the first Academy Award winner for best-picture, Wings (1927). Alas Bow (who had a heavy Brooklyn accent) was unable to parlay her stardom into talkies.
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Greta Garbo
Definitive silent film:Flesh and the Devil (1926)
The exotically beautiful Swedish enigma became a huge star for MGM when she emigrated to the U.S., starring in a run of torrid romances of the late 20’s, and carrying on an affair with her frequent on-screen partner John Gilbert. Garbo had one of the great faces in film, and her on-screen persona was as mysterious & passionate as she was in real life.
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Dorothy Gish
Definitive film:Hearts of the World (1918)
The younger of the famous Gish sisters did not intend (nor desire) to be a comedic actress, but that was the lot she drew. She was a major star in the late teens & 1920’s, but sadly most of her film catalog is considered lost to history. Fortunately we can still observe her comedic chops in D.W. Griffith’s WWI epic Hearts of the World, a role that Dorothy detested, but that we love.
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Lillian Gish
Definitive film: Way Down East (1920)
The “First Lady of American Cinema” did her best work with D.W. Griffith, with whom she enjoyed a highly productive collaboration. Gish specialized in playing delicately intense types and had many notable turns on the screen including Broken Blossoms (1919) and The Wind (1928), but Way Down East is most representative of her overall range as an actress.
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May McAvoy
Definitive film: The Jazz Singer (1927)
One of the great Irish-American beauties of the cinema, McAvoy generally played mostly straightforward ingénue roles, with one notable exception being The Enchanted Cottage (1924) in which she played a tortured homely soul. She starred brightly with Al Jolson in the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), but didn’t have any spoken lines, as those were limited to Jolson.
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Colleen Moore
Definitive film: Ella Cinders (1926)
The ultimate film “flapper” of the Roaring 20’s, on-screen Moore balanced exuberance with girl-next-door charm. She starred in one of the seminal Jazz Age films, 1923’s Flaming Youth, but the movie is mostly lost. Fortunately we have another film that fully conveys her considerable charm as an actress in the early-Hollywood rags-to-stardom story Ella Cinders (1926).
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Alla Nazimova
Definitive film:Salomé (1922)
Nazimova (as she was known by just her surname) had made a name in the “respectable” (live) theater of Europe before turning to film later in her career. Born in 1879, she was in her 40’s by the time the 20’s arrived. She nevertheless played glamorous roles such as 1921’s Camille (opposite Valentino) & the exhilarating and timelessly modern Salomé of 1922.