Yesterday I went to Cinematheque to catch G. W. Pabst's 1929 Pandora's Box, famous for its inclusion of Louise Brooks, herself famous for her sexuality, temper, and excellent haircut.
I hadn't seen the film since Junior High, about nineteen thousand years ago when television remote controls without wires were the most newly fangled thing around.
Back then I spent an inordinate number of my weekends doing one of two things: assembling and programming homebrew computers, or watching old films at the library. This sort of nerdly activity is why I'm so pale in all those photos of me as a kid. The fact that I'm just as pale now is, well, for much the same reason.
Both the North York and Toronto library systems had little cubicles I could use to watch films on tiny little black and white monitors. By tiny I mean really tiny, probably no more than 6 or 7 inches across. The films themselves came on both crinkly reels and huge video cassette.
I had no end of trouble keeping the reels threaded in the projector, which sat on the table and faced sideways into a box. I suppose there was a prism or a mirror inside which turned the image to face me. There were multiple reels for each film, usually mislabeled and almost always wrapped backwards because the last viewer didn't spin them back the way we were instructed to.
The video cassette players were those huge old ones with pop-up tops for loading the cassette. There are some films that even today immediately make me think of shoving a cassette down and pressing a big manual play button with a thunk.
I'd sit there all day watching film after film that had been recommended by the librarian or that I'd selected simply because of its title. Between the ages of 12 and 15 I watched literally hundreds of films that way, leaning on my elbows to stare into tiny, too dim screens and wearing a pair of big headphones that usually smelled moldy. Such is the life of a young film fanatic. I had lots of my weekend time free because girls hadn't been invented yet, and the few prototypes I met were icky.
Strangely enough for a kid into science fiction and horror flicks out in the real world, the films I'd watch at the library were generally not mainstream flicks. The library system didn't have much of anything modern. Instead, I watched endless hours of Japanese and European films, plus a lot of silent American films, dating from the turn of the century to the mid-Sixties.
Half the time the foreign films had no English subtitles; I'd have to figure out the story as I went from the images alone along with little typewritten cards that would describe the film and how it was cataloged. All the films that came on reels had no audio tracks at all, even though most of them were not actually silent films. There was a long time when I thought a large number of films from the 40s and 50s were silent. I only realized my error when the books I'd read about the movies would quote lines from them and I finally figured out that meant somebody must have actually heard the lines. It still amazes me that it took me so long to figure that out.
The first time I saw most of Kurosawa's films they were in Japanese with what looked to me to be Japanese subtitles. But films like The Seven Samurai and Stray Dog were so interesting and so different from anything else I'd seen that I watched them repeatedly without understanding a word. Funnily, I liked neither Ikuru nor High And Low the first time I saw them, but I suppose that's because I couldn't figure out what was going on—they're now among my favorite films.
The first time I saw Metropolis I think I watched it five or six times that day. I'm sure I gave some thought to how I'd smuggle it out of the library—which wouldn't lend the films—and I suspect the only thing that stopped me was I'd have no way to watch it at home.
Sitting in the shushed library watching films that were either silent or might as well have been for all I could understand is probably what led to my love of the films of Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and especially Harold Lloyd.
Talkies are a fad.
