imogensara_smith

My first book, BUSTER KEATON: THE PERSISTENCE OF COMEDY, was published in July 2008. Two of my articles appear in the August 2008 issue of Bright Lights Film Journal.

My name is Imogen Smith and I live in Brooklyn. I owe my love of old movies in large part to my parents. We didn’t have a television when I was growing up, but they used to take me to film society screenings at Princeton University; as a kid I particularly enjoyed Hitchcock and the Marx Brothers. As a teenager I leaned towards weighty foreign films like Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders), but I didn’t have a serious interest in film until I was nineteen, when I discovered Buster Keaton. I was home from college, I wandered into the living room while my parents were watching The Goat (a 1921 short comedy) and was immediately hooked. I fell for Keaton like a ton of bricks, and he remains my favorite filmmaker, my favorite actor, and one of my favorite human beings.

I’ve written a lot of comments and some reviews on the site about Keaton, so I won’t say much more about him here, except that his movies embody a number of the traits I value most in films. They have a strong visual style that is beautiful but also efficient and functional, not merely decorative. They are funny. They are dry and unsentimental. They are tightly constructed and exciting. They expect their audience to be alert and intelligent. Above all, they embody the quality of understatement. I love underacting and low-key presentation; I love it when a film can do a lot with a little, or when I can feel that an actor has more than he’s showing.

Through Buster Keaton I became interested in silent films generally, both comedy and drama. I consider silent films an entirely different medium than sound films, perhaps the only unique art form ever to have flourished and then become extinct. Like ballet or opera, they have their own stylized language, a purely visual form (accompanied by music of course) that communicates through photography, pantomime, and the expressive power of the human face. Cinematography reached arguably its highest level in the late twenties, as did art direction and special effects. Many late silent films are breathtaking in their imagery, settings, and fluid, expressive camerawork. Never again would filmmakers stage such authentic spectacles, or would actors and stuntmen undergo such risks and hardships for the sake of authenticity. Location shooting was commonplace, as it wouldn’t be again until the fifties; innovation and experimentation were commonplace too. There was a free-wheeling, wide-open quality about movie-making, before rules and regulations, before the crushing power of the studios, before official censorship. This atmosphere encouraged some of the most dedicated, ambitious and talented artists in the history of cinema.

Although the demise of silent movies was tragic, and very early talkies are mostly depressingly clunky and static, I also adore the films of the “pre-Code” era, that is 1930-1934. Actually the Hays Code, which policed the morals of Hollywood films, already existed during this time, but it was very weakly enforced, and studios desperate to stay afloat during the Depression tried to lure audiences with sensationally risqué entertainment. Obviously, there’s no need to go to movies of the early thirties for sex and violence, since there’s more than enough of that in the films of the past thirty years. The appeal of pre-Code movies is their attitude: irreverent, wised-up, hard-boiled and sassy. The combination of sleek art deco style and gritty, racy dialogue always gives me a kick. These films reflect the Depression, Prohibition, and the radical cultural changes that followed World War I, which led to pervasive disillusionment and lack of respect for any kind of authority. Women’s roles in films of the thirties were better than they’ve ever been before or since: smart, tough, competent, yet also funny and sexy. Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, Claudette Colbert and Myrna Loy are some of my favorite “fast-talking dames.” And of course men like Cagney and Cary Grant could keep up with them—just barely.

Screwball comedy maintained some of the virtues of pre-Code, but the restraints of censorship make it a little hysterical at times. Two of my favorite filmmakers, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, seemed to be able to get away with anything despite the code. They both excelled at black comedy and wrote killer dialogue. When I go to the movies, I don’t want to hear people talk as blandly as they do in real life; I want dialogue that crackles, and at times cuts like a knife.

During and after World War II comedy declined sadly, since it allied itself with the sunny, conformist mainstream. The wised-up, unsentimental strain went into film noir, which is my favorite classic Hollywood genre. Great visuals, great dialogue, urban settings, suspense and dark comedy—I love it. My top noirs are Out of the Past; Force of Evil; Sweet Smell of Success; Laura; In a Lonely Place; Murder, My Sweet; Night and the City; Thieves’ Highway—but there are so many great ones.

One the things I love most about living in New York is the chance to see old movies the way they were meant to be seen, on the big screen with an audience. I’ve enjoyed pre-Code and noir festivals at Film Forum, rare silents at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music—there’s always more going on than I can manage. One of my happiest memories is of seeing my favorite movie, The General (Buster Keaton) in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, with live music and a big, enthusiastic audience loving every minute of it. I was in film buff heaven.