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Cleopatra (1912)
Watching Cleopatra was like watching a toddler learning to walk
I happened onto "Cleopatra" on Turner after it had begun, so I didn't know who made it or when. I figured it had to have been made early, as it appeared to be little more than a filmed stage play: tableaux shot by a static camera; moreover, there were absolutely no close-ups. And I gathered it was something of an early "indie," as the costumes were howlingly inauthentic, the sets amateurish and many of the actors "stagy."
I decided the film's date had to be early, around 1910, 1912. But because of the production's growing sophistication towards the end of the film the camera got more frisky and intimate it was like watching the vocabulary of cinema being developed before your eyes, like seeing a toddler, very unsteady at first, gaining better equilibrium and more assurance as we watch. While it never gets to the level of either art or storytelling mechanics that Griffith was employing contemporaneously, "Cleopatra" is a fascinating time capsule... It would be intriguing to see her movies in sequence (the presumption being each is better and more sophisticated). It's a shame that so many have disappeared forever.
I had never heard of Helen Gardner, an ambitious actress who opened her own studio. As Cleopatra, she was sort of an ur-vamp whose eye makeup, heft, extravagant gestures and bare feet were several years later appropriated by Theda Bara. She was obviously an important actress, auteur and entrepreneur who should be far more celebrated than she is.
One last point, which others have made but I would like to reiterate: the newly appended score was so annoying and obtrusive that I muted it. I used to accompany silent films when I was in college, so I have a fair idea of the appropriate musical vocabulary. I once saw a revival of "Wings" in New York, and the elderly accompanist simply played everything she remembered from the 1920s, regardless of the on-screen action. Biplanes strafed trenches and killed soldiers by the dozen to the strains of "I'll be down to get you in a taxi, honey." Many of the major silent movies had their own scores written by studio musicians and played either by orchestras or reduced to organ or piano arrangements. I doubt that Gardner's "Cleopatra" had its own score, but SURELY somebody could have produced something more consonant with the time and place of this movie, something that sounded like, well
silent movie music.
Steffan Aletti