HYPOCRITES (1915)

Before movies became Big Business in the mid-1920s, women could be found working just about all positions other than cameraman.  (The weight of equipment an obstacle?*)  In the ‘aughts, Alice Guy-Blaché probably best known before Lois Weber came along in the ‘teens, acting, writing, producing, directing before slowing up significantly after THE BLOT/’21.  Unlike Guy-Blaché, Weber was specifically drawn to female protagonists & woman’s issues, though she’s equally interesting for technical prowess, as a recent KINO set shows.  (Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers)  Her 1911 short, SUSPENSE, about Mother & Child threatened by a tramp home invader, boasts dynamic angles, multi-plane framing within a single shot, and a doozy of a threatening extreme close-up as the tramp moves right into the camera lens.  It’s basically the same shot found in D.W. Griffith’s superb MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY/’12, but made one year earlier.  (Guess which is taught in most Film 101 courses.)  But the main item on this disc is her 1915 feature HYPOCRITES, a strange affair that looks toward those Cecil B. DeMille allegorical stories comparing modern times to ancient fables.  Why we’re just like the Romans!  The Bible!  The Egyptians!  Here when a religious leader dares to show his flock ‘The Naked Truth,’ in olden days a monk and a nude statue and the parallel match a modern parson with a ghostly nude lady.  Live ‘tasteful' full-frontal nudity not something you see in much mainstream fare circa 1915.  (Banned in Boston?  You bet.)  Lots of camera trickery, but the story awfully slow & confusing, showing Weber without a nose for narrative to carry us along.  Lots of nitrate decomposition, too.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Weber better represented by THE BLOT, even more by her weirdly compelling anti-abortion melodrama WHERE ARE MY CHILDREN?/’16 where society wives use abortion as birth control, and their unborn children wait out eternity in a ghostly nursery-room.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-blot-1921.html

CONTEST:  *Come up with a camerawoman on any major silent-era motion picture and win a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice on any streamable film we’re able to get hold of.