Scifirenegade's Trash Can

It has been years since I watched Dreyer's Michael. So, when I watched the earliest cinema adaptation of Herman Bang's novel, I had to.

Warning: I never read the book, but everything points to Dreyer's version being the most accurate.

Michael (1924), dir. by Carl Theodor Dreyer

While the film is implicit in its subject matter, you can definitely see The Gay (TM). We could be here all day just pointing out lines that are so not-so-subtle. Here's something Zoret, the painter, tells Switzz, his journalist friend, who's jelous of Zoret's relationship with Michael:

He came into my life, when no one but you had a place in it!

Contemporary critics weren't too happy about it, but Michael exists in its entirety, afaik.

With that out of the way, what a beautiful film. It had to be, with Dreyer at the helm. The close-ups and the lighting are a highlight. Some characters are just in shadow and I love it.

Strong performances overall. It may be a drama, but it's not "that UFA acting", as George Cukor once put it while talking about Conrad Veidt (affectionate).

Noticed a winged man statue in the studio. Wonder if that's a homage to Vingarne?

Yeah, it holds up.

Vingarne (1916), dir. by Mauritz Stiller

Ended up writing a lot more about this, since this is my first time watching.

The structure is meta as hell. It's a film within a film, and said film is adaptating Bang's Mikaël. And is also called Vingarne. The meta scenes (of the director getting the idea, assembling a cast, they make the film, they attend the film's premiere, and then the melodramatic ending) bookend our (actual) film, and are lost, along with a few scenes in the middle. Overall, Vingarne is missing around 10 minutes of footage.

The restoration is very good in terms of image quality. Not so much in terms of speed. There wasn't a standard framerate back in the silent film days, so when you force a film into the 24 fps standard, they'll either be faster or slower. And this film moves a tad bit slower than it should.

The actor who played Mikael seemed very familiar. Ding ding, it's Lars Hanson, who played Ingmar (the Jr.) in Ingmarsarvet! Despite my terrible facial recognition, going "Wait, was this guy in Ingmarsarvet?" was pretty good. Still had to look it up to be sure. He's quite good, Mikael is very different from Ingmar (the latter being a more introspective character) and it shows he can do more than one type of character. In fact, unlike Dryer's Michael, who is quite subtle in his attraction, he's suuuuper into the countess from the moment he first saw her (oh yeah, she's a countess here).

The cast is stripped to the bare minimum here. No Switzz, for example, can be seen here.

The film is very pretty. Honestly all the Swedish silents I've seen have been very pretty. Scenaries are rich, location filming is plentiful. It doesn't have the intimacy (?) of Dreyer's version, but still.

Regarding the framing story of a film making-off, it's weird. The critics at the end kept going on and on about "how come Mikael's actor can reject the actress who played the countess". In the film. My guys, it's a FILM. And then someone tries to kill her??

Any queerness is even more implicit here, to the point I'm sure the filmmakers didn't read between the lines. You still have lines like this (the countess tells Zoret),

You are old, Claude Zoret, you no longer understand what love is!

It's explicit as it gets, and it's undermined by the framing story.

Anders als die Andern (my beloved) still gets kudos at the end of the day for using "homosexual" and "homosexuality" openly and freely (amongst other, sometimes dated, terms) on film for the first time. It makes sense, they're German words in origin and didn't have that much usage outside of Germany (but they were still known).

Overall, it's nice for the performances and the cinematography, but I now understand why isn't that much talked about when it comes to queer film history (although mentioning it more wouldn't do any harm).

Note: I am not very articulate. There are people who wrote, and write, much better thannI ever will.