Tuesday 3 January 2012

The Alternative Oscars

As we hurtle headlong towards awards season, and specifically the  84th Academy Awards on February 26th, I find myself more interested than usual in predictions for the best picture 'Oscar'. There's been a lot of talk this year about Michel Hazanavicius'  'The Artist' and how it could be the first silent  film to pick up the coveted award since 'Wings' in 1929 - the very first year the Oscars were awarded. It stands a good chance, not only because it is a very good film but because it's a film about the movies - which Hollywood tends to love, self-congratulatory whore that it is (yet 'Singing in the Rain' wasn't even nominated - hmm, go figure...).




Best picture and very good films don't always go hand in hand: 'Terms of Endearment' and 'Chariots of Fire' spring immediately to my mind. Every critic has their own opinion of what should have won, right? (If I had a dime for every time I've read that 'Raging Bull' should have won over 'Ordinary people' in 1980 I'd have more money than... than Robert Redford & Martin Scorscese put together. Almost).



Well, this critic is no different. Hence this intended series, 'The Alternative Oscars'.  There is one twist, I suppose. Rather than discuss current films I want to go right back to the beginning and use this as an excuse to explore early Hollywood - working my way forward through the decades.  

A few words by way of explanation. I have restricted myself to films that could have been eligible in terms of when they were released for each given year, although some liberties have been taken with where they were released (it was often the case that foreign films weren't given a U.S release until years later - where this is the case I have used the release date in the country of origin).  

The first academy awards were held on May 16th 1929 for films released between August 1927 and July 1928. But there was no 'best picture' award' that year; 'Wings' won what was then called the 'outstanding picture' award.  Yet for the only time in the academy's history an alternative 'Oscar' was awarded for 'best unique and artistic production' (clumsy, I know). That award went to F.W Murnau's 'Sunrise'. My subsqeuent entries  then are suggestions of films that could have won that alternative Oscar, had the Academy continued with it.

EDIT 15/3/13 A couple more caveats. As I quite clearly stalled in 1931 I've decided to publish the full list from 1929-1951 on my home page and link pages to the list. This way I don't have to write about every single film in the list in chronological order and this will hopefully breathe new life into the idea... I've also decided, for the sake of variety, to allow myself only one film by any given director, otherwise this will be a Hitchcock and Powell & Pressburger list!

1929   'Sunrise' (Director F.W Murnau)

Murnau was a leading figure of German Expressionism who made his name in 1922 with 'Nosferatu', the first Dracula movie (renamed for reasons of copyright). Murnau moved to Hollywood to further his career and 'Sunrise' was the first product of that move. As David Thomson has observed it is 'a strange combination of German talent and American material'. On a technical level it is an extraordinary film bearing the hallmarks of those early German masters: dazzling montages, long tracking shots, dissolves, flash-backs, flash-forwards, dream sequences etc.  Yet the story is deliberately simple - as the preface explains, 'this song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and very place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time.'   A simple farmer, known only as 'The Man' (George O'Brien)  is seduced by 'The Woman from City'  (Margaret Livingstone) who, in the heat of passion, persuades him to murder his wife (Janet Gaynor) and run away with her to the city.



                                 



A film noir then? Not quite, although it pre-empts that genre in many ways. 'The man' cannot bring himself to commit the crime at the last moment. The wife flees, and the man pursues, full of remorse. Ironically they find themselves in the city as the man attempts to regain her trust. She forgives him (surprisingly quickly for an attempted murder) and the film shifts gear, romantically depicting  the simple, rural couple's bewildered excitement in the metropolis. I use the word metropolis deliberately as Murnau's depiction of the city is every bit as dazzling as that of contemporary/compatriot Fritz Lang's science-fiction movie 'Metropolis', released the same year.  Yet this is no mere marvel of technique, there is an emotional core to the film and Murnau's brilliance lies not  just in grand set pieces but in finding poetry in everyday reality.




Their return home is perilous, and again ironically, the wife nearly drowns in the very same lake as the murder was attempted.  She has only survived by clinging to the same reeds with which the man had planned to make his escape. Near death, she awakens to see the man by her bedside and their kiss dissolves into the sunrise, heralding a new start for them both.




1927 was a sunrise for the film industry as a whole in many ways, heralding the arrival of sound and the first talking picture, 'The Jazz Singer'. The industry would never be the same again and pictures like 'Sunrise' would swiftly become a thing of the past. It's a shame really, as this critic would prefer to think of 1927 as the year of arguably the greatest silent movie of them all.





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