Lois Weber is in some ways a complex film-maker. She is often accused of being preachy but this is largely because critics tend to ignore the extent to which she deliberately undercuts the apparent preachiness in tone that she adopts in the intertitles, creating a tension between what is seen and what is read.
So the most attractive aspect of her work is the constant refusal to adopt fashionable attitudes towards her subject-matter - attractive, even if, as here, that determination would often lead her into expressing poiltical vies of an appallingly even medievally conservative kind (there is not virtue in the active life, the poor and the malcontented should learn to be happy with their lot).
There are certain constants in her films. Women are invariably the active agents. Weber in this, although insisting on the central importance of women, actually takes the complete reverse of a standard "feminist" view. Far from society being controlled by men, she portrays a society where men are virtually ciphers, barely aware at all of what is going on around them, and where it is who control society by manipulation of the men. Weber was dismissive of women's political movements and of any notion of female solidarity (see Too Wise Women).
Here she takes a novel that expressed a sort of fashionable quasi-feminist view of the kind that seems particularly to have irritated Weber. It explores the attempts by three different women to escape from the idleness of their existence to achieve a more active life with differing success according to their character ("good" or ""weak" or "bad" - all sentimental categories that Weber in practice rejects although she makes use of them in her intertitles).
Weber entirely undercuts this story by relegating it to a film within a film (retitled "Life's Mirror, supposedly a film made by herself - she did apparently make film of this title several years later) and providing a frame story with another three sets of characters which completely reverses the moral. In the frame story it is by avoiding the active life, by restraining ambition and by accepting one's lot in life whatever it happens t be that the characters are shown as achieving some sort of mild contentment.
The main interest of the film is without doubt the reflexive idea that the cinema itself, to quote David Borden, is "is granted the power to divine the problems of its audience, and to heal their lives". But the nature of that "healing", as Weber portrays, is rather horrific. Cinema is an opiate, simply another way of enforcing a particularly conservative version - "count your blessings" - of that distasteful myth "The American Dream" by ensuring that people should 'know their place" and accept their lot in life, but the fact that Weber should even dare to promote such an idea is fascinating.
The film does stylistically contain some good things but nothing really comparable to the exactly contemporary work of film-makers like Yevgeny Bauer or Victor sjöström where the quality of the mise en scène matches the power of the content. Here it is in the end only the manner in which the content is generated that is of interest.
As for formalism it is a device precisely for ignoring the content of the film -and has proved a very necessary device for US critics for the obvious reason that content is relatively rarely a strong point of US films. And this is what formalism invariably fails to grasp. A "montage" of a bunch of cowboys going yee-hah may be formally the same as a montage of people being slaughtered on the .Odessa steps but any cinematic effect can only be as good as what it sets out to achieve and that cannot possibly be measured in formal terms by any bunch of monkeys with a fanciful Saltometer.
So the most attractive aspect of her work is the constant refusal to adopt fashionable attitudes towards her subject-matter - attractive, even if, as here, that determination would often lead her into expressing poiltical vies of an appallingly even medievally conservative kind (there is not virtue in the active life, the poor and the malcontented should learn to be happy with their lot).
There are certain constants in her films. Women are invariably the active agents. Weber in this, although insisting on the central importance of women, actually takes the complete reverse of a standard "feminist" view. Far from society being controlled by men, she portrays a society where men are virtually ciphers, barely aware at all of what is going on around them, and where it is who control society by manipulation of the men. Weber was dismissive of women's political movements and of any notion of female solidarity (see Too Wise Women).
Here she takes a novel that expressed a sort of fashionable quasi-feminist view of the kind that seems particularly to have irritated Weber. It explores the attempts by three different women to escape from the idleness of their existence to achieve a more active life with differing success according to their character ("good" or ""weak" or "bad" - all sentimental categories that Weber in practice rejects although she makes use of them in her intertitles).
Weber entirely undercuts this story by relegating it to a film within a film (retitled "Life's Mirror, supposedly a film made by herself - she did apparently make film of this title several years later) and providing a frame story with another three sets of characters which completely reverses the moral. In the frame story it is by avoiding the active life, by restraining ambition and by accepting one's lot in life whatever it happens t be that the characters are shown as achieving some sort of mild contentment.
The main interest of the film is without doubt the reflexive idea that the cinema itself, to quote David Borden, is "is granted the power to divine the problems of its audience, and to heal their lives". But the nature of that "healing", as Weber portrays, is rather horrific. Cinema is an opiate, simply another way of enforcing a particularly conservative version - "count your blessings" - of that distasteful myth "The American Dream" by ensuring that people should 'know their place" and accept their lot in life, but the fact that Weber should even dare to promote such an idea is fascinating.
The film does stylistically contain some good things but nothing really comparable to the exactly contemporary work of film-makers like Yevgeny Bauer or Victor sjöström where the quality of the mise en scène matches the power of the content. Here it is in the end only the manner in which the content is generated that is of interest.
As for formalism it is a device precisely for ignoring the content of the film -and has proved a very necessary device for US critics for the obvious reason that content is relatively rarely a strong point of US films. And this is what formalism invariably fails to grasp. A "montage" of a bunch of cowboys going yee-hah may be formally the same as a montage of people being slaughtered on the .Odessa steps but any cinematic effect can only be as good as what it sets out to achieve and that cannot possibly be measured in formal terms by any bunch of monkeys with a fanciful Saltometer.