victor hugo

David Bradley’s Silent Monsters

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The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended, Zeitgeist’s Silent Films series feels like an open secret, a kind of backroom speakeasy version of local theatrical programming. The vibe in the room can be electric, as pianist David Bradley’s live, semi-improvised movie scores add an immediacy to century-old relics like Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! that wouldn’t earn nearly as big of laughs or gasps streaming alone at home with a canned soundtrack. It can also be remarkably intimate, echoing the spirit of a D.I.Y. punk show whenever Bradley finds himself playing to a near empty room, engaging his audience in conversation and asking for help wheeling his instrument into the theatre. These are live concerts after all, even more so than they are movie screenings, with all of the fluctuating charm & chaos that distinction suggests.

The reason I got such a wide sample of live-concert experiences at Zeitgeist’s Silent Films showings is that Bradley’s weekly programming veered hard into my personal interests last month, in a series he titled “Silent Monster May.” In the immediate days after I had fallen in love with the century-old romance horror of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), Bradley announced that he’d be exclusively screening silent horror movies that month, including a precursor to Chaney’s Phantom in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I hit all three screenings in the “Silent Monster May” series, which varied in attendance & intensity but were consistently high quality. Before live-scoring 1920’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Bradley mentioned that he hadn’t seen the movie in a while and doesn’t like to overprepare before showtimes, choosing instead to react and respond in real time along with the audience. His silent movie soundtracks are rolling moodsetters that emotionally ebb & flow along with the action onscreen, which in the case of “Silent Monster May” meant accentuating the pitiable romance & tragedy of horror cinema’s earliest monsters.

The most pitiable monsters in the program were also the most famous, both penned by French literary hero Victor Hugo. Lon Chaney’s aforementioned hunchback, Quasimodo, is ugly-cute like a scraggly stray dog. He lusts after the Romani bombshell Esmeralda while playing voyeur from the upper tiers of Notre Dame’s ornate walls, occasionally descending to join in her community’s orgiastic parties so he can watch her dance along with her other, handsomer suitors. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gets a little sleepy in the middle stretch whenever Esmeralda indulges in romantic flings outside of Quasimodo’s’ crooked view, but Chaney is dependably entertaining as the lovelorn monster in every scene which he appears. Not only is “The Man of a Thousand Faces” notoriously talented at transforming himself through rudimentary prosthetics, but he also proves to be an impressive stunt performer here; he crawls all over the church’s exterior walls and hangs upside down from the ropes of its ringing bells like an impish Tom Cruise with wagging tongue & protruding eye. He is, unquestionably, a silent horror movie star, and he carries that burden on his bulging, knotted shoulder with apparent ease.

1928’s The Man Who Laughs also presented a kind of silent-horror celebrity, although one associated less with an actor than with pop-culture IP. Conrad Veidt’s titular laughing man is most famous for having inspired the design for Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker, which would be immediately apparent to any modern audience who catches a glimpse of his Glasgow smile. Paul Leni’s post-German Expressionist adaptation of Hugo’s novel says less about comic books than it does about the ever-evolving history of Universal horror movies, though. Since they’re no longer considered scary, the modern take on Universal’s famous monsters is that they’re tragic figures, sympathetic victims of society’s ills. The Man Who Laughs didn’t waste any time waiting around for that reclamation; the laughing man’s only monstrous quality is a surgical disfigurement that makes him look extremely friendly, however grotesque. Its circus-carny setting (the only place a permanently smiling abomination could find work) also positions it as a softer, kinder version of Freaks, which Tod Browning would soon direct for MGM. Like every monster in this series, he’s just looking for love, but the world around him is too cruel to allow it. It wouldn’t even qualify as a monster movie at all if it weren’t for the disturbing intensity of Conrad Veidt’s facial contortions, which he intentionally undercuts by reflecting deep wells of pain from behind his watery eyes.

Because the legends of Lon Chaney and The Joker came with their own pre-packaged expectations, I was most impressed by the 1920 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, which is saddled with a much lighter load of modern scholarship & hype. Admittedly, it’s been several decades since I last read its Robert Louis Stevenson source material, but I don’t remember quite so much of the original Jekyll & Hyde novel being set in a strip club & brothel, so the silent movie version largely took me by surprise. John Barrymore plays the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose future father-in-law and other colleagues find unnerving for his high morals and buttoned-up demeanor. So, they drag him to the local house of pleasure to catch a glimpse of the real him and, thus, trigger his first ever crisis of conscience. Jekyll doesn’t especially enjoy feeling adulterous lust for the first time in his life, so he invents the mad-scientist concoction that separates his monstrous impulses into the dastardly doppelganger Mr. Hyde. It’s a continually relatable story about the fact that there’s a lecherous pervert lurking in all of us, desperate to claw its way out at the slightest wayward temptation. As a result, it’s not only a great monster movie but also a great strip club movie, placing its dual nature early in the lineages of both Striptease and The Substance — the full Demi Moore spectrum.

All of these vintage monster flicks are highly demanding on the modern attention span, but well worth the effort. The color-tinted frames that distinguish their interior-exterior settings (like the pink hue of Jekyll’s brothel and the cold blue of Hyde’s moonlight strolls) and the massive scale of their crowd scenes (like the castle-storming sequence of Hunchback, wherein Quasimodo scalds the crowds below with vats of molten lead) are remarkably, inextricably cinematic for an artform that was still working to distinguish itself from the moods & methods of stage theatre. You just have to put down your smartphone long enough to witness them. Even with the distracting sounds of traffic, parties, and general urbanite mayhem occasionally audible through Zeitgeist’s theater walls, it’s much easier to lock into the wavelengths of these cinematic relics than it would be at home, especially with the guiding hand of a live piano score reacting to each scene’s emotional gearshifts in real time. If you have any interest in silent era cinema, there’s no better way to experience its old-world magic in New Orleans than to keep up with David Bradley’s microcinema concerts. I’ll be returning to them soon myself, and I’ll hopefully meet more classic movie monsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

The Story of Adele H. (1975)

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As recently as a few years ago, the gold standard for an actress performing a full mental breakdown onscreen was the late, great Gena Rowlands’s starring role in Cassavettes’s A Woman Under the Influence. It has since been surpassed—at least in terms of press-junket citations—by Isabelle Adjani’s equally astonishing turn in Żuławski’s Possession. Whether it’s due to the overall cultural warming to Genre Cinema as a respectable artform or it’s due to the wider home video distribution of Possession in particular, Adjani’s horrific mid-film freakout is now cited as artistic inspo for actresses as wide ranging as Sidney Sweeney (in her self-produced nunsploitation film Immaculate) and Reinate Reinsve (in the much classier schoolboard-meeting drama Armand). Even Rowlands’s recent passing hasn’t lessened Adjani’s ascent in influence. In either case, it might be nice to hear a few other performances from those immensely talented actors’ oeuvres cited as influences from time to time, so that Adjani is not only remembered for smashing her groceries against a tunnel wall and Rowlands is not only honored for coming up with that thumbs-up raspberry tic.

Luckily, Isabelle Adjani does have at least one other major role in which she’s tasked to perform manic mental anguish to great success. She does such a stellar job embodying the violent psychosis of unrequited love in the 1975 classic The Story of Adele H. that it often feels as if she’s being directed by Ken Russell instead of François Truffaut. The French New Waver mostly behaved himself behind the camera, shooting the anti-romance period piece with the made-for-TV aesthetics of a Masterpiece Theatre episode – complete with TV-friendly screen wipes. Adjani initially appears to be on her best behavior as well, arriving on the scene as a lovelorn romantic tracking down the traveling soldier who once proposed marriage to her against her family’s wishes. However, the more we come to understand just how obsessed she is with making this romantic connection happen (and just how little affection the soldier has expressed in return), it quickly becomes apparent that she’s a woman possessed. Then she gets worse, scarily so. Adjani’s ecstatic performance as a globetrotting stalker gone mad works in direct contrast to her director’s muted browns-and-greys historical aesthetics, so that all you can focus on is the immense power she wields as a screen presence. It was an incredible feat for the still-teenage actress, and it’s admittedly even more incredible that she somehow pushed her craft even further in Possession.

For his part, Truffaut is seemingly more preoccupied with the real-life historical spectacle of the story he’s telling than he is by the filmmaking mechanics of telling it. Stepping away from the more obvious visual & artistic trickery of his preceding film Day for Night, he instead reassures his audience with onscreen text, archival photographs, and vocalized diary excerpts that the events depicted are real things that happened to real people. The only overt trickery of the picture is hiding the full name of his subject from the audience, as the titular Adele H. is better known to the public as Adele Hugo, daughter of the famous French novelist Victor Hugo. As in the film’s narrative, the real-life Adele Hugo did travel to Canada & Barbados against her father’s commands to chase an unlikely romance with a fuckboy soldier who spurned her. It was a passionate, one-sided obsession that eventually drove her to the madhouse just as performed by Adjani in her first starting role – often expressed in the exact words of her personal letters & diary. Outside a couple double-exposure sequences in Adele’s sweaty nightmares, however, Truffaut never matches the mania of his subject in the film’s visual palette. He instead leaves that task entirely in Adjani’s scarily capable hands, which she uses to feverishly scribble endless love letters in her cramped Nova Scotian apartment instead of resting her mind with sleep.

Just in case the connection to Adjani’s now career-defining performance in Possession wasn’t already top-of-mind, Adele H. does include a brief scene in which the actor performs a manic episode against the brick walls of an urban tunnel – this time while being attacked by a wild dog. It’s just one of many jaw-dropping moments of ecstatic physical performance in the film, but it is still a visual reminder that Adjani’s one of the best to have ever performed that total breakdown routine in the history of the medium. Before Rowlands was the go-to citation for that manic extreme of the craft, I’m sure Catherine Deneuve’s performance in Repulsion made the publicity rounds in the same way. Maybe someday Elizabeth Moss’s work in titles like Queen of the Earth, The Invisible Man, and Her Smell will get its turn. For now, though, Isabelle Adjani is the reigning queen of melting down onscreen, and that icon status is well earned (in more films than one).

-Brandon Ledet