Gimme Some Truth* … Hypocrites (1915), Woman with a Movie Camera, BFI with Caroline Cassin

"Everyone told me that ...plays, aiming at anything like a moral, would never pay... Hypocrites was my first chance to prove that I was right."

Lois Weber from a Moving Picture Weekly interview in July 1915.

 

By 1915 Lois Weber was reaching a peak of popularity that would see her as one of the highest paid directors in Hollywood and also rival to DW Griffith for prestige. They were also both “Banned in Boston” but for completely different reasons one for her art the other for his racism (as clearly articulated at the time). But, as Anfield’s finest, Caroline Cassin, film programmer and MC at Women & Cocaine, pointed out in her introduction, Lois has been largely left out of cinema’s history books even as her competitor continues with more respect than he deserves.

 

Caroline quoted screen writer Clara Berringer in 1919 saying that no other industry has given women such an opportunity as the motion pictures had and it’s still an astounding statistic that more women were working in the first 20 years of the American film industry than are working now – and in more senior positions. Lois Weber made 40 feature films and 95 shorts in a 26-year career which compares well with Griffith’s 33 features and Cecil B DeMille’s 70 over his lengthy career. But this also means that she made almost as many features as Greta Gerwig (four), Katherine Bigelow (ten), Clair Denis and Chantal Akerman (14 each).

 

The problem is now and not then and, as Caroline said, looking back can be the most radical action especially in a world in which the progression of rights and equality is no longer a given. By 1920 California had given women the vote ahead of almost everyone else, women had the minimum wage and outnumbered men in LA but at the same time, the business of filmmaking was being consolidated into male-dominated consortia and accountants were getting an ever firmer grip on the means of creative production.

 

Blessed are the Marketers...

Weber had always been commercially successful and this film returned $133,000 at the box office¹ against a budget of $18,000 - a return on investment rarely found in today’s multiplex-driven portfolios in which even micro-management of from concept to edit does not guarantee success. In 1915, Griffith and Weber both had the final say throughout (which leaves him with no excuses and her with an extraordinary body of work tackling social and moral issues. If Shoes was about poverty, Where Are My Children family planning, then Hypocrites is about Weber’s view of Christian morality… and basically the way we live our rotten lives.

 

The moral underswell of the film is so much rooted in contemporary Christian belief that it is slightly obscure to modern viewers, especially those, like me, who skipped Sunday school and let himself down in O Level RE – I mean how can you go from 90%+ in mocks to a Grade C?! Anyway… the film’s publicity makes the aims clear, quoting from a “special report” from the National Board of Censorship: “This allegorical satire hits at the foibles and immoralities of modern society and asks for a recognition of the truth in all things…” This serious piece of “artistically-handled” symbolism only reveals itself if we understand the strict moral Christian teachings that were supposed to underpin American society the – actual – truth being now as then that the more these are trumpeted in church the more they are contradicted by the behaviours or ordinary citizens and, of course, by those in power.

So, whilst we might not all be fundamentalists we can certainly agree on the mass hypocrisy. We can also recognise Weber’s bravery in picking a fight with the immoral majority, especially given their role in distributing the film. Let he or she who is without sin or sense of perspective, cast the first stone…

 

Readers of this blog...

Hypocrites begins its twisty narrative in a small-town church in which an earnest priest (Courtenay Foote) is trying his upmost to connect with his mostly complacent parishioners. Weber’s camera focuses on groups in the audience, a bored businessman here, a distractedly faint-hearted family there and many caught up in everyday concerns who are just going through the motions, attending church as a social obligation whilst they think of better things to do. The preacher despairs of truly reaching them, the wandering attention of his own choir being aptly demonstrated by his discovery of a Sunday scandal-sheet featuring a story on Why the Truth has Startled Paris. This is a painting from 1914 by Adolphe Faugerson and is not Weber’s only illusion to classical art and literature in the film.

 

Truth is naked in the illustration in the paper… as she will be throughout as portrayed by Margaret Edwards, former winner of a body beautiful competition - "the most perfectly formed girl on the stage..." - who reveals pretty much all in misty double exposure… with Weber deploying a flesh-coloured bodysuit according to Stamp, to protect most of her modesty.

 

“I want to take exception to your statement that The Hypocrites was produced to attract by reason of the nude woman… I hoped that the picture would act as a moral force. The nude woman is too delicately carried through to act otherwise.”

Lois Weber, New York Mail, 23^rd January 1915

Myrtle Stedman wants to follow Courtenay Foote

Exhausted the priest falls asleep and starts to dream of his struggle, finding himself attempting to lead his parishioners up a steep hillside. Few follow, and as the people cannot make the journey to find the truth the priest asks for the Truth to come to them and the two descend into a story within the dream in which he is Gabriel the Ascetic, sculpting a statue of Truth which nearly blinds even his fellow monks once it is revealed to the public there is mayhem.

 

The scene involving the public unveiling is a great set piece from Weber, her camera panning round a circle of assorted rich and poor, the royal family, soldiers, drunkards, working girls and the innocent. They are made up of the same faces from the church all deaf to the truth with the exception of a young girl, a woman who has fallen too far and a nun who loves Gabriel the man not the monk...

 

We see a lot more Truth as the narrative moves through the ages until Gabriel brings her to the modern world in order to hold her mirror up to scenes of politics, high society, relationships, and family. All are found to be flawed with the family facing the death of a child through their overindulgence. Weber’s composition is so strong and in one remarkable sequence, The Mote in the Eye, the camera focuses on the eye of Myrtle Stedman to show Gabriel's face: she wants to do the right thing but her feelings for him overwhelm her moral decision. It's a great bit of composition and if you look hard enough you can see the cameraman's hand whirring the camera's handle round.

 

Fashionable fibs...

Lois makes sure we get the point, again and again... and Courtenay Foote convincingly holds the hope and despair of the pious whilst Myrtle Stedman is also convincing as the woman with the Ascetic in her eyes, Adele Farrington covers a range of roles with assurance and Dixie Carr makes for a mournful Magdalene. Of course, Miss Edwards deserves a special mention for great posturing and Lois is right, her appearances do not present in a salacious way: what the viewer sees is what they wants to see and a decade before Hitchcock, Weber was making voyeurs of her audience.

 

Naturally there was naked controversy and in spite of scrupulous efforts to ensure that religious and secular authority were won over by the moral message Ohio banned the film and the Mayor of Boston reputedly asked for Truth to be painted over - so that the whole truth was less revealed? Nevertheless, Hypocrites was a smash and Mr de Mille was no doubt taking notes about classicism and fleshy displays.

 

The film opened on 20th January 1915 at the Longacre Theatre in New York with an actor dressed as a monk providing a live prologue... this was serious and very popular, stuff. The New York Times called it "daring and artistic" whilst the Evening Telegram went so far as to say it was "...the most remarkable film ever seen". Margaret Edwards even appeared at the Los Angeles opening, dancing between the screenings - it was an event.

 

Can you see the cameraman?

As it established Weber’s reputation – securing her “authorial signature” as Stamp puts it– it was also “a meditation on her own enterprise” with Paul D. Young² saying that Hypocrites “embraces its own constructedness, the better to elevate the filmmaker to the status of an artist.” So, as Weber later said, it was she as well as Truth that was holding a mirror of truth that her audience might see themselves. Surely a more worthwhile endeavour than re-telling the alternative facts about the formation of the KKK?

 

Weber remains a vital historical figure for such revelations about the emerging motivations of “art-house” filmmakers as well as what her successes show of the appetite of audiences to be challenged. America’s first homegrown woman film director needed to pay her way in this business and for a good while she did just that, the story of Lois Weber is one of ground-breaking success and it’s that vibrant career which still informs the period and should be celebrated just as we did tonight!

Two Weber shorts were also screened, Fine Feathers (1912) and the immaculate Suspense (1913) which fits together so many advanced cinematic technique that Griffith fans really do need to give their heads a proper wobble!

 

The film was screened as part of the Woman with a Movie Camera strand and more details can be found on the BFI website.

More classical allusion... Rodin or earlier?

 

^1. As per Shelley Stamp in Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, (2015) University of California Press – the definitive text on the filmmaker’s work and recommended reading as is Anthony Slide’s Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History (1996), Greenwood.

^2. Yours Sincerely, Lois Weber: Hypocrites and the Passionate Recognition of Authorship, Cinema Journal 55, no.1 (2015) as quoted by Shelley Stamp in the above! 

*John Winston Ono Lennon

Breathless… Suspense (1913)

This film shows another side of the multi-talented Lois Weber’s film-making being a terse exercise in drama designed to agitate the audience in a rather different way to her more political outings. Directed by Weber and husband Phillips Smalley from her own script, there’s a wealth of invention and incident in its eleven adrenalized minutes.

The film packs a lot of shots and cuts into this time, maybe not quite as many as Griffith (and someone has counted…) but enough to show that he was far from the only gunslinger in town whilst Weber adds and adapts some stunning innovations of her own.

Lois Weber and baby

Lois Weber plays a young mother living in quite isolation on the edge of town. As she tends to her baby her housekeeper decides she’s had enough and sneaks off leaving the house keys under the front door mat. Weber’s camera is angled cleverly here,  showing the maid from an acute overhead angle which creates a sense of distance and vulnerability around the house.

As the housekeeper walks off she is replaced in shot by the figure of a tramp (Sam Kaufman) who, putting one and one together decides to investigate the possibly empty house she has just vacated.

Changing places... the Maid and the Tramp

In one of the film’s signature shots, Weber creates a triptych of triangular shots that show the wife on the phone to her husband (Valentine Paul) at his workplace, whilst the tramp edges nearer to the house in the top left. It’s a clever device and takes telephone split screen device on step further to build up the tension.

Now all alone the wife begins to sense that something is happening and, pausing from putting her baby to bed, looks out of her bedroom window to see the face of the tramp slowly, horribly, lift upwards! A master stroke and then as now the audience quickly computes how things can play out for good or bad.

The view out of the window!

The wife calls the husband in another triple exposure and we see the tramp cut the telephone wires – gosh he’s cunning! But there’s just enough for the husband to work out what’s happening and then rush off to the rescue…

His gallantry takes an unusual course as he steals a car and is then followed by the police who are now trying to catch him. So, double jeopardy and there are three races against time… as the tramp breaks down door after door in pursuit of the girl, the man races to evade the police who follow on in hot pursuit of the car thief.

Cops in the mirror and in pursuit...

It’s all very slickly edited and does indeed hold up well against Griffith’s action shorts from the same period. So few of Weber’s films from this period survive and we may never know if this quality was representative or not save to assume that DW was not alone in driving the medium forward.

Lois also acts of course and turns in a fine performance as the threatened mother – she looks exhausted at the end and who could blame her.

Suspense is available as part of the Flicker Alley Savedfrom the Flames box set which features four discs of early cinema rescued from various remote archives. It is to be hoped that there’s more out there.