PFA Presents The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy

Jacques Demy has taken a lot of hits over the years. He was a man who attempted to make movies for everyone, yet he was never what people wanted him to be. He wasn’t political enough, wasn’t edgy enough, wasn’t rebellious enough.

But his critics were often missing the point. Demy did not aspire to be political, edgy or rebellious. He did not attempt to portray characters burdened with the world’s problems. He didn’t look for timely themes, didn’t try to capture a moment in history. Demy was more concerned with the timeless themes of love, happiness and heartache; he merely wanted to show people swept up in the joy and agony of love.

Pacific Film Archive is seeking to rectify these misconceptions with “The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy,” a series of five of his films, as well as Jacquot, a documentary about the director made by his wife, filmmaker Agnes Varda. The series began Thursday and runs through Sunday.

Demy’s first film, Lola, was greeted with praise by his contemporaries. Lola embodied so much of what the French New Wave embraced: young French people in modern, realistic locales, facing real-life dilemmas, sprinkled with references to American movies and culture.

The New Wave was about aesthetics and attitude; its characters shared a certain disaffection with or alienation from their surroundings. Demy’s work shares the referential nature of the New Wave; his films are steeped in Hollywood lore and mannerisms, but he doesn’t share the New Wave’s alienation and rebelliousness. For while Demy’s characters may become restless and disenchanted with their surroundings, all it takes is a little affection from the opposite sex to rekindle their excitement with the world—much too bourgeois for the New Wave.

Lola’s male lead, Roland (Marc Michel), is lost and wandering through life, as are his counterparts in such New Wave classics as Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Band of Outsiders. But there is no grand meaning or sociological statement behind Roland’s predicament—he’s just lazy. And lonely. He wanders from job to job and cafe to cafe, but he’s not looking for a religion, a political cause, or for fulfillment through work. Nor is he searching for identity, really. He is simply looking for love. And yes, it is through companionship that he hopes to find meaning and fulfillment, but this is almost an afterthought; Roland more or less just wants to be happy.

Though Lola has all the trappings of the New Wave, it is at odds with the movement in that its story is at its root a simple one. Demy is not trying to make a grand statement, he is only trying to make a movie about love lost, found and lost again.

Demy was also at odds with the political motivations of the Left Bank school of thought, of which Varda's work was a cornerstone. Once again, somewhat by chance, he had become associated with a school of filmmaking to whose tenets he did not adhere, and this misunderstanding of his work and his aspirations again led to criticism. His films are not about politics; they are about love, romance, dreams and failure, all wrapped up in a layer of escapism.

And this informs one of the central premises behind Demy’s work: that pain and loss go down better with a layer of frosting. His films are light, fluffy confections of infectious music, swirling emotions and bright, lovely faces surrounded by bright, lovely colors.

The actors in Demy’s films are young, beautiful and full of dreams and longing, and it is difficult not to fall for them. The women—from Anouk Aimée’s Lola to Catherine Deneuve’s Genevieve to Ellen Farner’s Madeleine and even Annie Dupéroux’s precocious 14-year-old Cécile—are without fail lovely and engaging and easily draw empathy from the audience.

Unlike Godard’s heroines, who often have a certain detached aura, Demy’s women have more in common with the flushed-faced excitable young belles of Hollywood’s heyday. Demy’s actresses evince the fresh, bubbly wholesomeness of the Hollywood starlets of the ‘40s and ‘50s while managing to convey much of the moodiness, sultriness and complexity of America’s leading ladies of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

The men likewise are compelling, though Roland at times seems a bit too bland to be fully engaging. Guy on the other hand, in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with his gentle, soulful eyes and all-around good-guy qualities, is a sympathetic character from the start.

In 1967 Demy pursued Gene Kelly as star and choreographer for The Young Girls of Rochefort. Kelly, already in his mid 50s, was well past his song-and-dance prime and was working primarily as a director. Bringing him back in front of the camera in a French musical may have seemed like an odd decision at the time, but it was a perfectly logical extension of Demy’s work. Demy was a great admirer of Hollywood’s golden age of musicals, and Kelly especially embodied much of the creative spirit Demy sought for his films.

Check out Kelly’s musicals of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s and you can see the influence they had on Demy. Kelly was fascinated with dreams and fantasy, placing in each of his great films extended show-stopping dream sequences full of color, dance and romance. On The Town features a balletic demonstration of love and longing; An American in Paris shows the whirlwind of emotions of a couple in love amid the joy and glamor of Gay Paree; and Singin’ in the Rain features an episodic sequence filled with bright, splashy colors as his Don Lockwood character goes from rags to riches to lovelorn in 10 minutes of highly stylized fantasy.

There is a satisfying thread that runs through the PFA series. Umbrellas, strong on its own merits, is all the more engaging when you have seen Lola, which gives you the full import of the character of Roland—his wandering spirit, his lost love, and all the pain and shiftlessness that leads him to Genevieve and to the profession of diamond-selling. And Model Shop likewise gives the audience a chance to follow up on Lola’s title character, catching up with her after she has left France and made her way to Los Angeles.

To see these films together makes clear what so many of Demy’s critics missed: that he was in fact a filmmaker of great originality and integrity. He may not have been the director some wanted him to be, but he stayed true to his vision, making simple, emotional movies about simple, emotional people, regardless of the politics, trends and preferences of his era.

The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy.

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Cut From Different Cloth: Women in Afghanistan

Berkeley husband-and-wife filmmaking team Cliff Orloff and Olga Shalygin have taken several trips to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, and their most recent visit has resulted in a poignant film about the lives of Afghan women. Cut From Different Cloth: Burqas and Beliefs, a one-hour documentary, will air on PBS at 5 p.m. Sunday and again at 8 p.m. Thursday. 

The filmmakers focus their attention on Hasina, a 27-year-old woman who is, as the film states early on, Afghanistan’s equivalent of a radical feminist. 

The film features interviews with Afghan men and women and government officials, but it is at its best when it centers on Hasina. She is a remarkable woman, walking a delicate line between defiance and devotion. She is intelligent, sensitive, articulate, charming and strong. There is no ill will in her stance toward her culture’s restrictive mores; there is only the desire to be true to herself, to be true to womanhood and women’s rights, to do right by her family even when they think it’s wrong. Hasina is too humble to speak of herself as setting an example, as blazing a path, but that is essentially her role; she and other Afghan women like her are sacrificing a great deal to chip away at the barriers that their culture places before them. 

The filmmakers employ an interesting device: Orloff and Shalygin took their 27-year-old daughter Serena with them, to see the country and its women through her eyes as she lived with Hasina for two months. The approach has its rewards—a genuine friendship seems to take shape, and Serena’s presence does provide a vantage point the average American viewer can probably relate to—but it is hardly necessary. There is no need to set up an east-west conflict, for there is more than enough conflict in Hasina’s heart to carry this film. In a series of painful and poignant moments, Hasina’s brothers and sisters discuss their relationship with her and the ramifications of her lifestyle, revealing the unresolved conflicts between family and society. 

The film portrays much of modern-day Afghanistan’s repressive climate as the result of 25 years of warfare, combined with a backlash against the permissiveness of the country’s mid-century Communist era. In a society of great internal strife, women have essentially become the battleground. It’s as if the country’s men have for so long felt so beset upon by outsiders that they have compensated by exerting control over their women. 

The situation poses a difficult and potentially dangerous dilemma: Women must consent to oppression out of compassion for the oppressors. They do not necessarily walk in fear of outsiders or of the Taliban; they walk in fear of the shame they bring to their fathers and brothers should they step out of line. They obey out of love for the men who control them. Defiance is not a stick in the eye of Islam or the Taliban—it is a swipe at the very family that clothes, houses and feeds them. It takes a strong woman to walk that line, to retain the love of and for her family while setting her own path. And though governments may set more enlightened policies and police may enforce them, it is these acts of defiance and devotion that gradually win hearts and minds. 

What is especially maddening is watching a country in such need of strong, talented people as it ignores, stifles and condemns such a wide swath of its population—among them many of the country’s most potentially valuable leaders. It is painful to see Hasina, a woman of such depth, of such charm, of such intelligence, competence and ambition, go unappreciated by her family, by her culture, by her country. What a waste of potential, what a crime to condemn a person of such talent and grace. 

Cut From Different Cloth paints a picture of an Afghanistan that is regressing, that has been torn asunder and is slipping backward in a retreat from modernity. This a hardly a blueprint for rebuilding the country or healing its wounds, and it leaves the viewer with the impression that it is a nation that has little chance of making itself whole again if it cannot bear to embrace its better half. 

Cut From Different Cloth. Produced and directed by Olga Shalygin and Cliff Orloff. 

Airs on PBS at 5 p.m. March 26 and at 8 p.m. March 30.

Stoned: The Life and Death of Brian Jones

Brian Jones seems all but forgotten these days, at least outside his native England. He founded the Rolling Stones, but they passed him by, leaving him to gather moss, or at least ingest a great deal of grass. 

Jones essentially created white-boy blues, using his band to bring the sounds of American blues to a British audience at a time when American blues artists were obscure, even in their own country. Stoned, opening today at Shattuck Cinemas, depicts Jones’ rise and fall, from his childhood in upper-class Cheltenham to the dizzying heights of rock ‘n’ roll success to his ignominious death at the bottom of his swimming pool. 

The opening credits show the Stones performing at a small club, and the staging of the scene is indicative of Jones’ role in the band: The rest of the Stones are in dark clothes and standing in the shadows while Jones wears a white shirt and is illuminated by the spotlight. This is an exaggerated depiction for the sake of dramatization, but check out virtually any of the band’s Jones-era record covers and you’ll see precisely this sort of composition. Jones is almost always dressed differently and standing apart from or in front of the other band members. He was their leader, their founder, the heart and soul of the group. But not for long. 

Jones was basically a blues purist; if it had been up to him, the Stones might never have done anything other than cover blues and rock ‘n’ roll classics. His decline as leader of the band began once their producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, convinced the band that they must start writing original material if they wanted to have a future. 

The problem for Jones was that he couldn’t write. He was a remarkable musician; he could seemingly pick up any instrument and learn to play it within an hour or two. Anything out of the ordinary on those early Stones albums is more than likely Brian’s doing: marimba, sitar, dulcimer. His talent lay in transforming the raw materials of his bandmates’ work into something quite unique. He was not a songwriter, but an interpreter. 

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took on the songwriting duties and excelled, turning out a string of blues-based rock and pop classics and catapulting the band to the top of the charts, positioning them as the Beatles’ primary rivals. Stoned hints at this but doesn’t overtly express it, and this is perhaps the film’s most significant flaw: It speaks to the initiated, to those who already know the tale. Those who don’t may find the film’s plot points and timeline confusing and the characters’ motivations a bit vague. 

Along with the creative responsibilities, Jagger and Richards began assuming leadership roles within the band, further alienating Jones. The band was maturing, developing its talents and range, while Jones himself was essentially stagnating, content to wallow in success and excess. His powerful ego, combined with his fragility and insecurity and growing dependence on drugs, quickly made him a liability as his total immersion in the benefits of fame led to increasingly erratic behavior. And it certainly didn’t help matters when Jones’ longtime girlfriend Anita Pallenberg left him for Keith Richards. 

The movie is flawed from the start in that it takes one possible scenario for Jones’ death and plays it through, the scenario being that Jones was murdered. An apparently unsubstantiated 1993 deathbed confession by Jones’ building contractor provides the rough outline of the musician’s demise. A more interesting film could have been made without taking a position on Jones’ death, instead depicting the mystery and intrigue that surrounded the tragedy, and the circumstances that launched a troubled rock star into martyrdom. Biopics often make this mistake, replacing the messiness and ambiguity of life with simple plot resolutions and facile explanations of character and motivation. 

First-time director Woolley makes a few unfortunate rookie mistakes. For whatever reason, there are no Stones songs on the soundtrack, nothing to denote Jones’ actual contribution to the music of the era. Instead we hear plenty of his influences—Robert Jones, Muddy Waters, etc.— and that’s appropriate. But we also hear several current artists performing very modern versions of blues classics, and the juxtaposition can be jarring. It is likely meant to demonstrate Jones’ influence on the blues-based artists who followed him, but it doesn’t quite work. 

There is also a completely moronic sequence, shot like a music video, in which Gregory lip-synchs his way through “Not Fade Away” during a montage sequence of significant moments in the life of Brian. The scene threatens to sink the film with camp and cheek and should have been left on the cutting room floor. 

But for what it is, the movie is quite good. The direction is for the most part effective and the performances are solid. Luke de Woolfson as Jagger, though it’s only a small part, nails the singer’s mannerisms, off stage and on. And Leo Gregory brings out the fierceness and fragility of Jones, a man who acquired all the fame and fortune he could have wanted, yet immersed himself in it to the point of drowning. 

Stoned (2006). Starring Leo Gregory, Paddy Considine, David Morrissey, Tuva Novotny, Amelia Warner, Ben Whishaw, Monet Mazur, Luke De Woolfson, James D. White. Directed by Stephen Woolley. 

Cowboy Del Amor: Love and Loneliness Along the Border

At 20 paces Ivan Thompson is a dead ringer for the late Hunter S. Thompson—a lean figure in jeans and 10-gallon hat, mysterious and rugged with eyes concealed by large dark sunglasses. However, Ivan—the self-styled “Cowboy Cupid” of director Michèle Ohayon’s documentary Cowboy del Amor—has none of the gonzo journalist’s mumbled, eccentric rapid-fire cadences. Instead he is a plain-spoken, down-to-earth southwesterner with the twangy, no-nonsense voice of a man who has spent his life on ranches, working hard and scraping by amid the tumbleweeds and dust.

Yet his business has a certain gonzo flair: Thompson makes his living finding Mexican brides for lonely American men, placing ads in Mexican newspapers and shuttling his clients across the border to interview prospective mates. It’s as if Doonesbury’s opportunistic Uncle Duke has come to life, mining human frailty and geopolitical realities for mercenary gain.

The film walks a moral borderline as well as a literal one, and consequently provokes mixed emotions. On the one hand, the people are sympathetic—it is easy to understand their pain, their loneliness, their need to find something new and their willingness to resort to such means to get it. On the other hand, the inherent misogyny of the operation is unsettling. The men, it seems, are looking for docile Mexican dolls to sit by their sides, to comfort them and prop them up, to come live in their homes and to generally behave themselves, while the women are looking for respect, love, security, equality and, perhaps most importantly, a shot at the American Dream. 

Doubtless there are success stories—Thompson has apparently made several dozen matches over the years—but it’s difficult to see how these conflicting desires could mesh for very long. The women are looking for a means to an end; their path is an upward trajectory, and marriage is just a first step. The men, however, are generally headed downward; their goal is simply to find someone to share their final years with, or perhaps to help slow the descent and level it off. 

Thompson himself is something of a harbinger of what’s in store for these couples. Already once divorced, he met and married a young Mexican beauty only to learn later that she had four children from a previous marriage. He managed to absorb that shock, but the second shock was insurmountable: Chayo wanted to learn to speak English. This was too much for Thompson; his wife was becoming “too American.” The conflict is a fundamental one: Chayo’s desire to reach her potential and fully engage with the American world in which she was living clashed with her husband’s desire to keep her as merely a part of his own private world. 

But Thompson doesn’t seem to fully grasp the significance of his experience and is all too eager to share the fruits of his mixed results with others. And there are plenty of takers.

What kind of man is tempted by a billboard to hand over $3,000 to a broker to find him a Mexican bride? Well, pretty much just the kind of man you’d guess: middle-aged, perhaps older, with either a history of failure with women or no history with women at all; a man no longer ambitious, but rather resigned and disconsolate, desperate to gain some measure of control over his life and environment. These are lonely, broken men, “men without women,” as Hemingway called them, and the minimalism of the phrase aptly reflects the men it describes: dull, uninspired, uncertain and insecure. They are for the most part simple men, men who speak simply with simple words, if they speak at all. If there are fires burning in their bellies, they’ve long since learned to tamp them down and just get along.

The women, on the other hand, are quite complex. They come from all walks of life; they are housewives, doctors, lawyers, secretaries. During the interviews they walk a delicate line, attempting to appear feminine and desirable while trying to subtly communicate their needs and backgrounds in non-threatening ways. It is only when Ohayon’s camera catches them alone that we begin to glimpse their real personalities.

If you didn’t know going in that the film was directed by a woman, you’d soon deduce it from the scenes that follow. The women, away from the awkward casting-couch interview process, suddenly open up in private conversations in a way they didn’t and couldn’t before the scrutinizing eyes of Thompson and his clients. The cautiousness disappears, the flirtatiousness subsides, and we see these women relaxed, honest and contemplative, dropping the pretense and talking, woman to woman. And here we see their complexity and their pain—the pain of broken marriages and family tragedies, the longing for a better life, or at least another life, and the strained loyalties as they prepare to move away from the only homes and families they’ve ever known.

Despite the charisma, kindness and humor of Ivan Thompson, the film is permeated with a certain sadness—the sadness that comes with the acknowledgment that life is not a story with a fairly-tale ending, but a series of compromises, of people making do with what they have. And the sadness is compounded by the realization that for these women, their only path to independence is through dependence on a man; and that these men, being American, believe that they can simply buy the happiness they’ve thus far been unable to find. 

There is at least one happy ending among the match-ups depicted in the film, yet that does not go very far in masking the film’s essential tragedy: wounded women trying to become Something after rising from Nothing, only to find themselves in the arms of men with a deep-seated need to keep them there. 

Though they may find consolation in having found a partner, in having someone to walk hand in hand with through that dusty, desolate landscape, we are left with the feeling that these couples are destined to always walk with an inviolable border between them.

Occupation: Dreamland Documents Rising Tensions in Falluja

Early on in the documentary Occupation: Dreamland, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne are seen patrolling the streets of Falluja, talking with the city’s residents along the way. At one point an Iraqi man stands before a soldier and tells him that the Iraqi people simply cannot accept colonialism, that resistance is an innate part of the Iraqi identity. “Bear with me,” he says to the soldier. “This is something that is pent up inside our hearts … know it, record it, transmit it.” 

That line informs the film and the filmmakers, for directors Garrett Scott and Ian Olds do just that, removing themselves from the action and allowing the soldiers and Iraqi people to tell the story. 

The documentary follows members of the 82nd Airborne’s Alpha Company in Falluja in early 2004, before the city became a major battleground. Pacific Film Archive is screening the film at 7 p.m. Saturday as part of the traveling exhibition of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Occupation: Dreamland received much critical praise upon its release in 2005, including numerous awards, and is now available on DVD at www.occupationdreamland.com. 

We get to know the soldiers along the way; we learn their backgrounds, their politics, their plans for the future. There is no censorship here; the soldiers clearly have no reservations about expressing their opinions of their mission and of the war itself. 

On the homefront, the Left declares the war unwinnable and calls for these young men to be brought home, out of harm’s way. The Right tries to stifle criticism of the war by claiming that it undermines the morale of the soldiers on the front lines. But these young men hardly exist in a jingoistic vacuum. 

What Occupation: Dreamland makes clear is that it is not the opinions of the Cindy Sheehans and Bill O’Reillys that make them doubt the value of their mission; it is the murky justifications for and logistics of the mission itself. Whether they agree with the politics or not—and both sides are represented in Alpha Company—it is the danger and futility of their work that chips away at their resolve. 

As in Vietnam, the soldiers must fight an unseen enemy. Every day they roam the streets in search of a shadowy insurgency that is inflamed by the sight of soldiers roaming the streets. It is part of the madness of war, a Catch-22 that Joseph Heller’s Capt. John Yossarian could appreciate: Alpha Company venture forth from their barracks to put down an insurgency that is only provoked by the company’s visibility. 

“What exactly are we securing?” a company commander asks during a debriefing after an insurgency attack. The company had been providing security for a Falluja city council meeting when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) exploded on the road in front of them. “Raise your hand if you think they’re going to RPG the sheiks and all the important people in Falluja. 

“So what are we securing then? We’re securing, essentially, ourselves. So what exactly are we protecting? I don’t know.” 

Occupation: Dreamland provides a first-person glimpse of a city of rising tensions, just before it erupts into widespread violence. It is a harrowing portrait of the uncertainty of war and of the uncertainty of the young men we send to fight it. 

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 

7 p.m., Friday, Feb. 24: Videoletters, Program 1 

8:35 p.m., Friday, Feb. 24: Justice 

5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 25: Winter Soldier 

7 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 25: Occupation: Dreamland 

8:40 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 25: State of Fear 

3:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 26: Living Rights 

5:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 26: Videoletters, Program 2 

Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius of Silent Comedy

Harold Lloyd, one of the greatest comedians of silent film, is poised for a comeback. In anticipation of the November release of more than two dozen of his films on DVD, Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco’s Castro Theater are screening some of the comedian’s best features.

PFA is showing a Lloyd film at 3 p.m. every Sunday through Aug. 7 and the Castro will screen a series of double features Aug. 19-25.

Lloyd’s career spanned 34 years and more than 200 films, from one- and two-reel shorts to full-length features. Though he worked with writers and co-directors, Lloyd was one of the early auteurs, controlling nearly every facet of production.

If it sometimes seems that Lloyd cannot be discussed these days without unflattering comparisons to legendary contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, it is at least partially Lloyd’s own fault. Whereas the films of Chaplin and Keaton have been readily available for some years in revivals, on television, and home video, Lloyd chose to withhold his work after he retired, not releasing it to the public other than in a few compilations of the 1960s.

But now, thanks to Suzanne Lloyd, the comedian’s granddaughter and president of Harold Lloyd Entertainment, Inc., these classic silent comedies are finally seeing release, with a dozen or so forming the core of a retrospective now touring the country.

Comedy did not come easily to the young Harold Lloyd. He worked hard to acquire the timing and grace that was second nature to his peers. He did not have the natural and instinctive talents of Chaplin and Keaton; he was not raised in the theater, as they were, nor did he have an inherently comic persona, as Chaplin did with his shabby yet fastidious tramp and Keaton with his stoic and sober fatalist. Lloyd was not only smart enough to recognize this, he was determined to overcome it, and so he went about methodically creating a viable comedic identity.

His first step was a common one among comedians of the day: He imitated Chaplin. That is, he appropriated the situations and style of Chaplin, though he did not adopt Chaplin’s costume. Instead, Lloyd inverted the outfit; rather than baggy clothes, he wore clothes that were too tight. And in place of Chaplin’s narrow brush mustache, Lloyd placed two dots of facial hair at either side of the mouth. This was Lonesome Luke, a logical if not inspired creation that Lloyd played in dozens of one-reel comedies.

But imitation was not enough for Lloyd; his ambition was far greater. He would have to find a unique character, one that suited his talents and appearance. Eventually he found his inspiration.

“I saw a dramatic picture at a downtown theater,” Lloyd wrote in his autobiography, An American Comedy. “The central character was a fighting parson, tolerant and peaceful until riled, then a tartar. Glasses emphasized his placidity. The heavy had stolen the girl, carrying her away on horseback. The parson leaped on another horse and the two were lost in a cloud of dust. When the dust cleared, the heavy lay prone and still, while the parson dusted his clothes with careless flecks of his handkerchief, replaced his glasses and resumed his ministerial calm.”

Thus the “glass character,” as Lloyd called him, was born. He would join the pantheon of the elite comedic characters: Chaplin the Tramp; Keaton the Stoic; Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, the Fat Man; Harry Langdon, the Man-Child; and Harold Lloyd, the Everyman. With a simple pair of horn-rimmed glasses, purchased for 75 cents, Lloyd set off on a career that would make him the highest-grossing film comedian of the 1920s.

Though the audience could at times identify with the situations and emotions in the work of Keaton and Chaplin, their characters had a strange, almost otherworldly quality. Lloyd, on the other hand, sought a character that was common, easily identifiable, someone the audience could recognize in their own lives.

Film critic Walter Kerr, in his book The Silent Clowns, described the character as an archetype that was prevalent and easily comprehended in its day. “The good American, still devoutly believed in during the 1920s, was two things,” Kerr wrote. “He was aggressive, and he was innocent. Americans could not have tamed a continent if they had not been aggressive … But whatever had been done aggressively, or was being done aggressively, had been and was being done from the noblest motives, motives that had just recently helped make the world safe for democracy. The American’s energy was a virtuous energy, spent always in the cause of good. A vigor that extended to brashness on the one hand; a clear conscience on the other.”

With variations here and there, Lloyd played this character throughout the rest of his career. It was a comic take on the Horatio Alger story, the “American boy who rose from shoe clerk to national hero,” in Kerr’s words.

Lloyd’s craft was as studied as his character. In an effort to keep his output varied and interesting to audiences, he diligently worked at broadening the range of his abilities, mastering all the stock elements of film comedy and even adding a few innovations of his own.

First among these was the chase scene, many of which will be on display in the films featured in the retrospective, from the last-minute heroics of Girl Shy to the herding of criminals and ne’er-do-wells into a church in For Heaven’s Sake. But Lloyd took the medium beyond simple chases, bringing a new twist to film comedy.

Though he only made five of them, Lloyd is still best remembered for what he called his “thrill pictures.” One day, while walking in downtown Los Angeles, he saw a “human fly,” a man climbing a skyscraper as part of a promotional event. Though the thought of seeing the man fall to his death was horrifying, Lloyd couldn’t take his eyes off him. This led to the most famous of all Lloyd films, Safety Last, in which the Lloyd character climbs the face of a building as a promotion for the department store in which he works as a clerk. The climax of the scene finds Lloyd dangling from the face of a clock hundreds of feet above Los Angeles.

Lloyd milked the situation for all it was worth, placing his camera above and to the left of the character so that the street below was always in view, never letting the audience forget the danger. While the gags along the way are not all unique—some, like the mouse in the pant leg, were already clichés at the time—Lloyd was using them in a new context, using fear and suspense to augment the comedy.

You can see the hard work involved; Lloyd is consciously and deliberately exploiting every facet of the situation. This is not an inspired bit of comedy from an intuitive master, but it is well-crafted filmmaking of a high order.

What often distinguished the better comedians was their ability to slow the pace of their films and develop their characters with more thoughtful comedy. In fact, some of Lloyd’s most accomplished work are these quieter moments, where he demonstrates the confidence and skill to dispense with the rapid-fire editing, stunts and chase scenes and simply holds the camera motionless, using long takes that allow both he and his co-stars to display their comedic talents.

Again, For Heaven’s Sake provides an excellent example. In one scene, Lloyd, playing a dandified millionaire playboy, is sitting beside a down-and-out thug. In one continuous take, the two men slowly begin to notice the odor of perfume, each suspecting the other as the source.

Lloyd draws the scene out, holding the camera perfectly still while each man’s face tells the story, slowly registering the presence of the odor, looking quizzically about the room, and then gradually settling upon each other and setting up the payoff as the two men silently evaluate each other.

Another scene simply conveys Harold’s growing affection for the priest’s daughter. As she takes him on a tour of the mission, gesturing at various points of interest, Harold literally can’t take his eyes off her. He sees nothing of the mission; he only sees her. The camera follows them around the room, weaving between chairs and tables, capturing the mad whirl of romance.

It is in these scenes, with the Everyman in everyday situations, that Lloyd is at his best. Here the years of work, study and determination pay off beautifully with simple, genuine scenes from which Lloyd draws simple, genuine comedy.

Like the characters he portrayed, Lloyd reached the top through hard work and perseverance. A reevaluation of his work is long overdue, and hopefully the rediscovery of these films will cement his place as one of the preeminent talents in all of silent film, and one of the most accomplished comedic directors in film history. He deserves that much. He earned it.

HAROLD LLOYD AT PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

Safety Last, 3 p.m., Sunday July 17.

The Freshman, 3 p.m., Sunday July 24.

Welcome Danger, 3 p.m., Sunday July 31. Accompanied on piano by Jon Mirsalis.

For Heaven’s Sake, 3 p.m., Sunday Aug. 7.

San Francisco’s Castro Theater will screen 13 Lloyd features and five short films Aug. 19-25. www.thecastrotheatre.com.

Biography

Justin DeFreitas is the editorial cartoonist for the Berkeley Daily Planet, the West Marin Citizen, Here (Marin County), the Sonoma County Peace Press, and several other Northern California publications. His work also appears regularly in more than a dozen other newspapers and magazines and has been reprinted in the Los Angeles Times.

www.jfdefreitas.blogspot.com

DeFreitas is also the Berkeley Daily Planet's managing editor and film critic, as well as the editor and publisher of two film review websites, Moving Picture Review and Silent Film Review.

Contact: defreitas [at] jfdefreitas.com

Awards

• First Place, Editorial Cartooning, San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, 2008.
• First Place, Editorial Cartooning, East Bay Press Club, 2008.
• First Place, Editorial Cartooning, San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, 2007.
• First Place, Editorial Cartooning, California Newspaper Publishers Association, 2006.
• First and Second Place, Editorial Cartooning, San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, 2006.
• First and Second Place, Entertainment Reviewing, San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, 2006.
• First Place, Editorial Cartooning, East Bay Press Club, 2006.
• Second Place, Editorial Cartooning, San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, 2005.
• First Place, Editorial Cartooning, California Newspaper Publishers Association, 2004.
• James Madison Freedom of Information Award, Society of Professional Journalists, 2003.
• Columbia Gold Circle Award, Best College Comic Strip, 1997.

Books

• Published in The Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year every year since 2001.
• Published in Attack of the Political Cartoonists.
• Published in the Union of Concerned Scientists' 2009 Scientific Integrity Calendar.

Newspapers and Magazines

• Berkeley Daily Planet
• West Marin Citizen
• Here
• Anderson Valley Advertiser
• Los Angeles Times
• Bodega Bay Navigator
• Sonoma Index-Tribune
• Kenwood Press
• Sonoma County Peace Press
• Novato Advance
• Petaluma Argus Courier
• Russian River Times
• Sonoma Valley Voice
• Martha's Vineyard Gazette
• Haleakala Times (Hawaii)
• Vineyard Gazette (Martha's Vineyard)
• Fellowship magazine
• North Bay Biz magazine
• The Fishrap Live! (UC Santa Cruz)
• City On a Hill (UC Santa Cruz)
• The Oak Leaf (Santa Rosa Junior College)