First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Find out about the latest releases and exhibition of classic films.
Ben Model
Capo
Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Jun 01, 2009 10:51 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Ben Model » Fri Oct 22, 2010 7:01 pm

Approx 15 per reel comes out to 18 fps. BTW, the VLC player also has a 0.67x speed which takes silents transferred at 24 fps down to 16 fps, which is great for looking at slapstick in real-time.

Bill Coleman
Cugine
Posts: 14
Joined: Sat Jun 06, 2009 2:45 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Bill Coleman » Fri Oct 22, 2010 10:14 pm

Also, the VLC player has a "Faster (Fine)" option, which speeds up 10% each time you choose it, so you can pick 110% speed, or 120% or so on, (with pitch-corrected sound), practically like hand-cranking a projector! A nice option. Just started looking at this Keystone set tonight, the picture quality is great. I'm not too worried about speed, since I have my TV set to connect to my computer and can watch with the VLC player.

Ben Model
Capo
Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Jun 01, 2009 10:51 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Ben Model » Sat Oct 23, 2010 1:00 pm

I'm running VLC v1.1.3 and don't see the Faster(fine) option, just regular 'faster' and 'slower'. Where is that...?

Bill Coleman
Cugine
Posts: 14
Joined: Sat Jun 06, 2009 2:45 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Bill Coleman » Mon Oct 25, 2010 7:07 pm

I have 1.1.4....maybe that's why? The option is one of the choices under playback.

Richard M Roberts
Godfather
Posts: 2895
Joined: Sun May 31, 2009 6:30 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Richard M Roberts » Wed Oct 27, 2010 6:44 pm

Just looked at the transfer of TILLIE, way too slow, you can definitely see the motion frames blur whenever anyone moves fast. If this is natural speed to David Shepard, he definitely needs some uppers.

Has anyone noticed that on the cover of the set, Chaplin looks like he's mouthing the word "sloowwwwwww"?

RICHARD M ROBERTS

Richard M Roberts
Godfather
Posts: 2895
Joined: Sun May 31, 2009 6:30 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Richard M Roberts » Thu Oct 28, 2010 5:50 am

Some more thoughts as we look further at CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE:

One missed opportunity regarding the recreation of RECREATION on the Chaplin Keystone set. The restoration here is made up in part of the standard poor quality 16mm blowup from standard 8mm that used to be available from Film Preservation Associates, the last half from an incomplete 35mm print, but the missed opportunity that I’m surprised was missed is that there is additional existing pristine footage from RECREATION, basically the footage picking up from where the sailor returns to the park bench to find Charlie and the Girl, and their chasing each other off and the introduction of the policemen, to Charlie’s hurling bricks, then being caught by the policeman with brick in hand and trying to act innocent, which is included in the Paul Killiam SILENTS PLEASE compilation THE CLOWN PRINCES OF HOLLYWOOD, which was available from Blackhawk for years, so I’m sure it was known and available to David Shepard. That part of the film is covered by the fuzzy blown-up footage in the set, and if the Killiam footage was combined it would have cut the blown-up footage ratio way down.

Music is up and down, usually fighting the energy and timing drain due to the sluggish film speeds if it is good and energetic like Neil Brand, Frederick Hodges or Stephen Horne, fitting right in when it’s the stately Mont Alto. As for the aptly named Tillie’s Nightmare, although it is not the usual pots and pans rattling as can be expected from Ken Winokur’s Alloy Orch, it is a unsubtle and rather overbearing score, trying sometimes way too hard to make musical jokes sometimes at the expense of the film, it reminds me of those scores Jay Ward did for some of Raymond Rohauer’s prints in the 1970’s, a comedown after hearing Phil Carli brilliantly play the restoration at the proper speed at Slapsticon several years ago. And here it takes so much longer to get through TILLIE………


RICHARD M ROBERTS

David B Pearson
Capo
Posts: 106
Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2009 2:15 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby David B Pearson » Sun Oct 31, 2010 10:48 am

Richard M Roberts wrote:
As for the aptly named Tillie’s Nightmare, although it is not the usual pots and pans rattling as can be expected from Ken Winokur’s Alloy Orch, it is a unsubtle and rather overbearing score, trying sometimes way too hard to make musical jokes sometimes at the expense of the film, it reminds me of those scores Jay Ward did for some of Raymond Rohauer’s prints in the 1970’s, a comedown after hearing Phil Carli brilliantly play the restoration at the proper speed at Slapsticon several years ago. And here it takes so much longer to get through TILLIE………


IMHO, Ken Winokur just needs to stay the hell away from silent comedy.

DBP

Ben Model
Capo
Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Jun 01, 2009 10:51 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Ben Model » Sun Oct 31, 2010 10:16 pm

Bill Coleman wrote:I have 1.1.4....maybe that's why? The option is one of the choices under playback.

Ah. 1.1.4 is only for Windows. I'm on a Mac, and am hoping 1.1.4 will be released for Mac OS soon...

Ben (who saw a bunch of the new Keystones projected at the Zanesville conference)

Chris Seguin

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Chris Seguin » Mon Nov 01, 2010 10:43 am

I've only gotten as far as CRUEL, CRUEL LOVe and, gee whiz, I wouldn't want these running any faster. There is a bit of motion blur at time, but I find myself really savouring these things...and there's still enough bounce to the action to give them that heightened sense of energy needed for the Keystones. Some of the later entries might prove frustrating running-time wise, but so far I haven't got a single complaint about this set.

Oh, except this: I've yet to watch TILLIE, my Disc 4 is proving a bit glitchy -- I'm hoping to get a replacement.

Chris

Richard M Roberts
Godfather
Posts: 2895
Joined: Sun May 31, 2009 6:30 pm

Re: First review I've seen of "Chaplin at Keystone"

Postby Richard M Roberts » Wed Nov 03, 2010 2:21 pm

Okay, so I figure that by now most of you have guessed that I am less than impressed with the CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE set, and as I went through the rest of it this last week, even I had began to wonder why I was so annoyed. It was no real surprise to me that the speeds were going to be Shepard slo-mo, and I’ll leave Doug Sulphy to get jazzed about the missing footage in what is now apparently a number of the shorts, but there was something else nagging at me causing hackles to rise, and it took nearly the whole set for me to figure out what it is.

Going through the special features (anybody notice that the limited animation Chaplin cartoon now moves pretty much like the live action films do?), I came upon the little INSIDE THE KEYSTONE PROJECT documentary that is written and narrated by Serge Bromberg. In his narration, he discusses the reason they offer for slowing the films down:

“—There’s worse, since projectors no longer run at the original speed of 18 frames per second, but at 24 frames per second to improve the restitution of sound films-----“

Okay, to begin with, this statement is, to put it nicely, card-carrying codswallop. Early silent era projectors were hand-cranked, and later motor-driven ones had flexible rheostats that allowed projectionists to vary to any frame rate they like. It wasn’t until post-WW2 16mm and 8mm sound projectors became the rage that they established a 16-18 fps so-called “silent” speed that the concept of running silent films at that frame rate even became a questionable concept. And, in fact, fidelity was not even an issue in the reason 24 fps was finalized as the standard sound film rate. I’ll quote my ol’ buddy Scott Eyman from his book THE SPEED OF SOUND on this:

(footnote, page 112)

“Western Electric engineer Stanley Watkins averred that 24 frames per second for Vitaphone was not part of a capitalist plot, but a purely arbitrary decision. “According to strict laboratory procedures, we should have made exhaustive tests and calculations and six months later come up with the correct answer,” he related in 1961. “What happened was that we got together with Warner’s Chief Projectionist and asked him how fast they ran the [silent] film in theaters. He told us it went at eighty to ninety feet per minute in the best first-run houses and in the small ones anything from one hundred feet up, according to how many shows they wanted to get in during the day. After a little thought, we settled on ninety feet a minute as a reasonable compromise.”

So ninety feet per minute (24 fps) was just an in-the-middle compromise not having anything to do with sound quality, certainly not 1926 sound quality, and films were frequently (probably in the majority, there were far more neighborhood houses than first-run houses) run far faster than 24 fps. And many of the early DeForest and Case sound experiments were shot even slower than 24 fps, so fidelity appears not to have been an issue. In fact, ol’ David Shepard himself, back when he was trying to force his pokey film speed tastes on us film collectors in the Blackhawk days, put scores on some Blackhawk prints that were recorded at 18 fps, and fidelity did not seem an issue then.

In any event, this is not even what was bugging me, back to Mr. Bromberg’s narration:

“—Charlie, already fuzzy, scratched, and unstable, starts walking faster. Gestures are jumpy, the films feel aggressive and unpleasant, and gradually, historians devil up the notion that these early films have no interest and make for painful viewing.”


Bingo! I have my answer. So this is what Messr’s Shepard and Bromberg are trying to do. They are trying to gentrify and genteel these Keystone Comedies in an attempt to make them palatable to the Pordenone populatin’, pompous, pretentious, brie-eatin’, wine-sloshing, scarf-wearin’, academic and artistic film-wusses whose sensitive natures cannot handle the fact that their “genius” idol is acting so common!

Well, hurling a brick at Ford Sterling’s head ain’t `effin Noel Coward kids, and as the song from MACK AND MABEL goes, “no one pretended that what we was doing was art!”. The great thing about Chaplin’s Keystone Comedies is that, for the first and only time, Chaplin was working on a level playing field with the audience that made him a star. Here was Charlie, at twenty-five finally grown and escaping a childhood so horrible that it actually made a career in the English Music Hall look like an improvement, most likely full of rage at the rich, figures of authority, and the general unfortunate turns of life, getting the opportunity to make films that allow him to vent that rage, get laughs at the very uncouthness of the anger, and get paid for it as well, and making it for an audience of working-class and immigrants also living lives that we behind our cushy little keyboards most likely can’t even imagine for dreariness, finally finding a momentary release in the little fellow who does all the things they wish they could do to policemen, big people, spouses, the man, what have you.

Just this once were Charlie and his audience one, before the money and fame gradually morphed Chaplin into the pompous, pretentious, re-invented artistic and autueristic “Genius” whose writers had to be called “assistants” and make him think all ideas were his, and his output slowed to only being able to manage a feature or two a decade in between chasing underage girls, dodging divorce and other attorneys, and just living the high-life he only dreamed of as a child. The Charlie Chaplin of the Keystones still spoke with a cockney accent, not the Henry Higginsed speaker of the MONSIEUR VERDOUX dialogue, or the poshest-speaking Music Hall performer/ philosophy prattler of LIMELIGHT. That is the Chaplin the academic film-wusses know and love, and their OCD cannot reconcile that to the crude and violent vulgarian who so refreshingly lashes out in the Keystone Comedies.

So here comes Mr Shepard and Mr Bromberg to mellow and make politically correct, to slow down so un-naturally that the brick flying at Mr. Sterling’s head seems to sail gently towards a tender tap on the skull, causing no pain. Accompany the films with posh and poncy Palm Court Music that most likely never played for the films on their first release (I’d wager far more gut-bucket ragtime piano originally accompanied them than chamber strings). In short, drain the honesty and energy from those films, remove the edge that makes them great, and slow them enough so those academics have more time to scribble all those notes for books and articles they’re never really going to write.

Well, I prefer my Chaplin straight, the way he actually was, a comedian, not an “artiste”.Keystone Comedies are, at their best, in your face and cut to the chase, wasting no time and getting to the point in their wonderful crass fashion. If Messrs Shepard, Bromberg, and their ilk cannot handle this honesty, they are the wrong men for the job, and they do no justice to Chaplin’s “art” or the comedy at hand. Just as in his release of THE LOST WORLD, where in compiling surviving footage from the various prints he eliminated a blackface character that offended him, these Keystones are not “restorations”, they are just David Shepard and Co.’s versions of these films. The films will outlast and out live them and all of us, and someday, someone else will take another shot. Heck, in my annoyance, I might just finance that one myself. Until then, I have many other ways to look at these films, and a 1.5 speed on my DVD player if I ever care to bring these versions off the shelf again.


But enough from me, other films to see, other fish to fry.


RICHARD M ROBERTS


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 33 guests