Fairly recently, I watched two old silent movies: Pandora’s Box, and Haxan. One of the only things they had in common (besides being Criterion DVDs with the requisite goodies) was their penchant for dark humor that often belied their sheer pathos. I will touch on the other commonality later in this post.

Pandora’s Box, directed by the German filmmaker G. W. Pabst, was the movie that made a name for Louise Brooks. Watching it, I could easily see how she inspired such a devoted following. I could also read Henri Langlois’s statement (quoted by Kenneth Tynan in his essay from the New Yorker that is reprinted in the Criterion booklet) —

“… As soon as she takes the screen, fiction disappears along with art, and one has the impression of being present at a documentary. The camera seems to have caught her by surprise, without her knowledge. She is the intelligence of the cinematic process, the perfect incarnation of that which is photogenic …. Her art is so pure that it becomes invisible.”

and not take it as hyperbole.

The movie was pretty good too.

A riches to rags story where the former was hung onto by a thread and the latter, once reluctantly embraced, proved fatally inescapable. Brooks’ character sails through the majority of the movie amidst her mates on a Ship of Fools (at times literally) and when she finally disembarks, she finds redemption from the demons that have plagued her, in a very perverse way.

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Haxan is a quasi-documentary that investigates witchcraft through the ages. Using still images culled from books on the subject in addition to live-action portrayals of “witchcraft,” hysterical finger-pointing among women in the communities visited by witch-hunting inquisitors, and finally, a contemporary example of what the filmmaker believes drove the women in the middle ages to behave like witches. He uses a mixture of sociology and early psychology to define the affliction that befalls women who have this particular tendency towards abnormal activity. In the end, then, Haxan is a social realist film, and a vehicle by which the director (who appears early in the film as Satan at a witches’ Sabbath) hopes to publicize and address the problem. The film wasn’t as gripping as I thought it might be, but strange enough to hold my interest (and the strangeness lies not so much in the witchcraft, but the oddness of what seemed to be the director’s objective, at last – curing modern social ills).

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The thing that really struck me as essential to both these films, or at least to a viewing of them in the Twenty-oughts, with the accrual of archival material and a wealth of documentation for each, is the music. In the case of Pandora’s Box, one can view the film with any one of four different soundtracks: an orchestral score by Gillian Anderson (no, not that Gillian Anderson) meant to approximate “music that an orchestra director of one of the grand European ‘cinema palaces’ might have chosen” (the original soundtrack for the film has been lost); a Weimar-era cabaret score composed by Dimitar Pentchev; a modern orchestral score by Peer Raben, who worked extensively with Fassbinder, and whose score accompanied the showing of the restored print of Pandora’s Box at the Berlin Film Festival in 1997; or a piano improvisation by Stephan Oliva(information from Reflections on Pandora’s Box (Criterion Collection edition accompanying booklet), pp.16-17). After watching a good portion of the movie with all four soundtracks, there was no question that the cabaret score was the ideal accompaniment to the movie. It was so good, in fact, that I think it should be available as a CD. If I owned the DVD, I would probably play it with the TV off just to listen to that soundtrack.

Haxan is presented in two editions: the original 1922 incarnation, which was the brainchild of Danish director Benjamin Christensen, and the 1967 version “prepared” by British filmmaker Anthony Balch. This latter version includes an amazingly atmospheric jazz score by percussionist Daniel Humair*. Although much fuss is made over the Humair-led group including Jean-Luc Ponty, it’s really the interplay between the other members that creates, for me, the memorable audiovisual moments. Whenever I think back to one of the scenes, I hear the music, even though I’ve only seen it once. The 1967 version also features a narration by William S. Burroughs that’s not nearly as creepy as one might suspect.

Conversely, the original 1922 version features a comparatively boring score by, again, Gillian Anderson. She also wrote an essay for the Criterion booklet which is very interesting, but leaves no room for any elaboration on the 1967 Humair score.

So much for “silent” films!

*see previous Steve Lacy-related post.