Object #68 - Masks - The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1928)

Dir. Robert Florey + Slavko Vorkapic

I hate the term 'up its own ass', and I hate how many use it as a cheap criticism of experimental film. True, some films have pretensions of deeper meaning where none exist, but if you've read any of my past posts, it's clear I'm not opposed towards reading 'too much' into things. If you have an emotional response to a film, and in a way which may seem bonkers when externalised, then that film has spoken to you in a way it hasn't to someone else, and that's something that should be celebrated. The documentary Room 237, about various people's interpretations and theories about the titular room of Kubrick's The Shining, is far more entertaining than it has any right to be for this very reason. People's responses can be so off-the-wall towards 'regular' film, so when experimental film-making and deliberately interpretive works are presented, you can get some fantastic responses. I'm reminded of an interview with Nicolas Winding Refn, where after a screening of his film Only God Forgives, a woman informed him that the film clearly took place within a vagina.

Funnily enough, none of that applies here. There is a beautiful simplicity to this film, despite its experimental nature. A simplicity that may seem empty to some: "So what? Extra goes to Hollywood, wasn't good enough to become a star, died in poverty. Heaven. Big whoop!". But underneath that simple plot is a beauty of expression in the telling. And underneath again, subtext, which due to the nature of the film is arguably, well...text due to how obvious it telegraphs the message. 

In this 13 minute film, our protagonist 9413 (Jules Raucort), is a man who travels to Hollywood, the land of dreams, to become a movie star. He's greeted by an agent, drawing the number 9413 onto his forehead, as he becomes just another extra. A woman, 13 (Adriane Marsh), obeys a director to the letter. 15 (Voya George), 'performs' by presenting various masks in front of his face, wowing his audience, as his forehead now boasts a drawn star, the allusion pretty obvious - he's made it. 9413 meets 'Star' who doesn't give him the time of day. 9413 is met with 'No Casting Today', to the point where he lives in poverty, unable to pay his bills, and later dies. He leaves his body, and we see a cut-out version of him rise away from Hollywood, away from Casting (literally expressed in words), and onto Heaven, where he now has wings, his forehead free of the numbers, and he flies, happy again.

Very simple plot, of a story heard a thousand times. Firstly, it's novel to us now that such a story is told in 1928, as many of today's film viewers, including myself despite knowing better, don't really equate the silent age with the concept of a big-budget blockbuster, one requiring copious amounts of extras. It seems an odd concept, but just like theatre, film has always needed extras, silent or not. The film satirises the big Hollywood pipeline which fed productions such as Thief of Baghdad, Ben-Hur, countless Zorro and Robin Hood films, The Black Pirate, even the famed Intolerance, released a decade prior, but take a look at that Babylon set and count the extras, you'll be there for hours. 

Secondly, there is a beauty in the economy of this satirisation. All it requires is very few actors, a couple of face-masks, and an ingenuity in presenting Hollywood itself - made of cardboard tubes, re-dressed toy trains, and a few wires. Take the masks for example. 15's first mask is a Douglas Fairbanks type, moustached, angular jaw, handsome - and the crowd eats it up, turning to themselves and expressing surprise at the great acting being shown. The next mask, noticeably the same face, but angry, scarred - a villain, but one played by the same man. This is even more commendable, you'e one guy but you can play good and bad? Welcome to Hollywood!

After a montage of flashing 'SUCCESS', clapping hands, and blaring trumpets, Star places a simple mask (the first image on this page) briefly on his face. Now here then, my interpretation comes in. As he does this we see the crowd clap, mouths opening (like almost all do in the film), fish-like - their praise as empty as the still performance of Star. Indeed, this is what I love about the bare mask (two eye dots, and a triangular, simple smile) - to me, it represents when an actor has made it, and any performance they give, while different, defaults to the viewer as 'The Star'. Think George Clooney, the man can act, but I'll be damned if he doesn't look exactly the same in most of his films, and acts fairly similarly in them all. So at this point, Star has reached that stratified height of Hollywood, where the acting itself is of little quality, the star-power is all-important, which of course contrasts to the 9413 atop 9413's forehead. 

When in a scene together, the mask for Star shifts to the one pictured above, more detail, more ornate, in comparison to the floppy, ugly mask of 9413. Even from scene to scene, the masks represent different things, and are used in a different way. Now here, we are into 'reading too much into it' territory, but again, if one mask is fancy, and another crappy in a scene, isn't it clear what the message is? A past scene with Star has the blank mask, representing (in my own interpretation) the star-power quality of his acting career, but by having different masks, which mean different things in different scenes, there is a richness and life to the prop choices of the filmmakers. You could say it reflects the themes of how status is represented to and perceived by a crowd of movie-goers, as compared to the perception of an extra vs. a high-profile film-star. Or maybe, I'm opening my mouth like a fish, thinking that the words I speak (type) have any higher meaning. 

That's the beauty of interpretation. Having said all that, as I stated earlier, beyond a few instances, the film is clear in its message: Hollywood chews up and spits out the dreams of hard-working actors to, ironically, create films which make you dream of bettering yourself. That last part is again, my interpretation, now I come to think of it. But the film couldn't be clearer in showing 9413 being happy in Heaven, far from the earthly concerns of Hollywood. There's a deeper message there to unpack, but it's a simple one at the core - Hollywood is shit. That is the core. I could argue it warns jobbing actors to be wary of Hollywood, I could argue that it represents stardom as empty and vacuous (as I did above), and I could argue that Hollywood has no place for ambition. Hell, if I dig deep I even think that when we see 13, the female extra, bend down and back up again repeatedly at the command of a male director, that that's a commentary on the sexual abuse that many actresses go through in Hollywood to get a break. I don't know for a fact if that was the case in the 1920s, but it still echoes into Hollywood's future. 

Like any great experimental film, The Life and Death of 9413 leaves room for the imagination. It is stylised, has a clear plot and message, but has elements, such as the masks, which while telegraphing a message pretty heavily, allow the viewer to think for themselves about what it means. Any film does this, silent or not, experimental or not, but some leave more room for interpretation than others, and as this post shows, there's still life and accuracy in the meaning behind this film. Most of what I've said doesn't buck the trend from the central theme of the film, that Hollywood is shit, and so remain in the realm of plausibility. But as Room 237 shows us, there's entertainment, to say nothing of value, in a compelling argument, even if it's a highly implausible one. 

If you have 13 minutes, you can view the film on YouTube here, and if you've read this far, you've probably killed a few minutes anyway, so what's the harm in giving it a watch yourself, and draw your own interpretation.   

Object #67 - Log - King Kong (1933)

Dir. Merian C. Cooper + Ernest B. Schoedsack

Film and technology are inextricable. The camera, itself a complex bit of tech, captures images onto some form of storage, be it film, videotape, hard-drive, or some future form we haven't even invented yet. Multiple still images are captured in rapid succession, to the point where, upon later playback, a sense of motion is created - and so we have the film medium. In King Kong, more than any other film before it, the very technology that allows us to film the real-world is invaded by stop-motion trickery. 

Stop-motion entails the slightest movement of an object for each and every frame that the camera captures, so that when the images are played at fast speed, the object appears to move in real-time. Talk about movie magic! It's a magic trick that imbues objects with soul, and King Kong gave us, thanks to the magician, Willis O'Brien, the first real character of this technique, Kong. True, O'Brien gave us life-like dinosaurs in The Lost World, but a dinosaur is a simple beast - Kong, well, Kong is something else entirely. 

The inanimate maquette, a rudimentary skeleton upon which the 'costume' of Kong was made-up, becomes animate as it moves, millimetre by millimetre between frames. This is the art of the animator. It's why Ray Harryhausen, or Aardman's Nick Park are household names to any film hobbyist, because like O'Brien, they have a skill to create facsimiles of life itself, and oftentimes, as with Kong, they give life to creatures fantastical. Admittedly with Kong, that process is easier than most, as he's an ape, a real animal suped up, human-like in concept. In Peter Jackson's 2006 remake of King Kong the CGI animators ran into the opposite problem, translating Andy Serkis' human performance into the performance of a fictional giant ape.    

With all that said, the scene in King Kong I find remarkable is not due to the movie magic of stop-motion, although it is a component of the scene, but rather the crudeness of filming special effects at the time, and the effect it has on an audience. The 'Log-Scene' as it's become known, is a memorable scene from the film for displaying the brutality and ingenuity Kong has in dispatching the human pests who have invaded his island. You can view it in, frankly, abysmal quality here but I'd like to think you're familiar with it anyway. If not, it's the same principle as in Jackson's 2006 version, which you're more likely to have seen - some of the Venture crew flee from Kong in the jungle, attempting to cross a fallen tree, which bridges a ravine. (It's not technically a log, but it's simpler to call it that.) 

As they attempt to cross the log-bridge, Kong appears, roaring at them as they attempt to flee in fear. Kong grabs hold of the log, the crew hold on tight. The massive log is shaken by Kong, like you would a stick covered in bugs, and one by one the crew-members fall to their deaths into the ravine, their screams cut short by the impact of the fall. 

What's impressive about this scene is the interaction between the fantastical Kong and the humans. In the film, Kong picks up and puts down Ann (Fay Wray), and the blending of Wray, and the model of Ann used by the animators isn't always the smoothest. This has only been made worse by our ability to see the film in crystal clear HD. But, the log scene avoids this, by having an object as an intermediary between fantasy and reality, where the interaction of Kong shaking a human-infested tree, and the humans shaking and reacting to Kong's action, is entirely believable. 

Oddly, technology fails the film, not in Kong, but in the bodies and corpses of the falling men. As they fall and scream, we see a side-shot of the ravine, vines hanging down, conveying the size of the gap. The music goes all-out during the entire scene, conveying the fear and panic Kong causes, and this is joined by the screams of the falling men. However, the bodies are quite obviously dummies, inanimate, incapable of reacting in any way like a real human. The fall speed isn't too unrealistic, perhaps a little too fast, but as they hit the ground, they almost bounce, and the limbs of the dummy flail unrealistically, bending at angles that we can charitably call, 'floppy'. Worst is when Kong throws the entire log, with one crewman still hanging on, into the ravine, and as it hits one of the already fallen crew, the body bounces left, when it should be crushed into a bloody mess.

Now yes, obviously, you won't get hardcore gore in a 1930s proto-blockbuster, but in more modern films which aim to convey the horror of a monster attack, usually on a 12A rating, bloodless violence is creatively hidden and obscured by camera motion, or objects on screen. That said, this can sometimes be just as, if not more horrifying than the 'real' thing, as our imaginations make the violence that much worse. In Jackson's King Kong, we follow the characters into the ravine, and as they fight off the deadly, hellish insects, the soundtrack and methods of dispatch, while not showing gore, are horrifying. Andy Serkis' Lumpy, who perishes to writhing, muscle-like ring-worms has stuck with me since my teenage years, and remains one of the most disgusting character deaths I've seen in any film, and that's a 12A!

I'm not one to criticise effects-work out of hand, and I don't for one second feel that those unrealistic corpses reflect poorly on the film. They are an on-screen representation of the deaths of the sailors, utilising the best methods available at the time. Your imagination can write away the take where the log fell and the body bounced instead of being crushed. The deaths do still have impact, as the sudden cut off of the screams, and the hard impact of the bodies hitting the floor still resonate to this day, just as in Jackson's Kong, the near-silent, bloodless shot of a crewman's corpse being flung from pincer to pincer still resonates the horror of the ravine. 

This is King Kong for god's sake, criticising the effects for not looking 'realistic' isn't the point! At this point in time, this was the top-tier of film effects work, where a monstrous, giant ape could realistically fling sailors into a ravine. It's notable however that this bold new film-making technique more convincingly animates an inanimate object to life, than the then-current effects work available to represent a real human being. 

Nonetheless, the imagination and skill at work in the entire film lit the fire for generations of effects artists, stop motion animators (including Harryhausen), and filmmakers such as Jackson himself, whose 2006 remake was a passion project, birthed from his childhood love of the film. So much was his passion for the original that he used era-accurate techniques of stop-motion, costuming, and back projection to re-create the legendary lost Spider-Pit Sequence, as a supplemental on the home video release of his film. 

The sequence was animated originally by O'Brien and takes place immediately after the log sequence, as the fallen soldiers, some of whom survived, are picked off, one by one, by the creatures which dwell in the dark recesses of the ravine. Jackson's recreation is a delight, and makes me appreciate the passion of Jackson to recreate a piece of film history, now lost. The original sequence was cut due to pacing issues, as the already long log scene extends into a superfluous massacre of the sailors down below. The footage was lost to time, with only still photographs of the scene surviving. A real shame, and one which loses the revolutionary work of O'Brien, whose animation of insects, rather than giant apes, and dinosaurs would have been interesting to see. 

As noted earlier, Jackson included his own interpretation of the sequence with his own interpretation of the characters in his remake, to great effect. My own childhood/teenage imagination was sparked by the doom-laden atmosphere, and the CGI creepy-crawlies conjured by Jackson; it's a real-stand out scene in a film which I admire very much, and goes to show the direct influence of the incredible effects work of the original King Kong. 

Technology and film are inextricable, but the quality of both are not co-dependant. Many criticise the shallow plot/scripting of Cameron's Avatar, while the effects filmmaking is clearly superb. Other films have robust and effective stories, but are hampered by poor effects work, say, The Mist. Indeed, many, including myself, criticise the early scenes of King Kong, for hokey dialogue, mediocre framing, and now, somewhat dated sexism and racist portrayals. With that said, King Kong could not exist without the technological aid of stop-motion, back projection, model-work, and camera trickery, and so more than most films, it is a film that is inextricable from technology in conception. But, it is a film that uses that inextricable nature, and runs away with it, embracing it, creating and developing bold new techniques of filmmaking that echo in time. A few dodgy dummies of dead sailors can't stop movie magic of this scope.