Maybe it began with Sunset Boulevard. Billy Wilder’s 1950 film is about the forgotten world of silent cinema, while also commenting on the very making of that world. It does this via a highly self-referential and intentionally gothic framework that is held together by a skin of sexual tension that is quietly desperate, and full of perverse longing. Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is an aging silent era starlet who preys upon the more youthful screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden). She keeps him in her dilapidated mansion, but the control she has is just as much psychological as physical. His cavalier attitude eventually dissolves into helplessness. When thinking back on Sunset Boulevard long after it ends, a more abstract specter of silent cinema history is keeping the man bound, using Norma as the living, human manifestation of this. Gillis is not just dealing with one woman, but the entirety of cinematic illusion up to that point. He wants to write original scripts of his own, and clearly have a relationship with his collaborator Betty (Nancy Olson), but this never happens, as Desmond, the specter of cinema history, ultimately takes his life.
Much like how Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom is a metatextual blueprint for all of the slasher films to follow, Sunset Boulevard can be seen as a forerunner of films that use silent era aesthetics ramped up with gothic seduction to tell stories about unbridled characters of a specific visual era. The movie does not necessarily look like a silent film, but you can feel that world existing deep inside it. The presentation of this mood is not a genre per se, but when combing through the weird and sexy cinema of the past couple generations, we encounter films of this ilk over and over again.
The singular filmmaker defined by this psychosexual, nostalgic approach to cinema is Guy Maddin. Almost all of the Canadian director’s feature length films are talkies, but a simple way to describe Maddin is “the guy who makes films that feel like silent movies.” This is a broad generalization, as some of his influences are clearly from the 1930s to the 50s, but Maddin’s fetishization of the grain, decay, and damage of celluloid harkens back to an aesthetic that appears to be superficially “old”. Yet, the mood and magic of his films go far deeper than the emulsion. The characters in Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1990), and Careful (1992) are like ghosts of film players who never existed, creating a kind of nostalgia for a time, place, and emotion that we had never actually felt before.
We also find in Maddin’s cinema, a juvenile crassness that is not part of early film history--or perhaps it is? Regardless of the amount of maturity involved, the silent era is full of sexual tension that changed how people viewed themselves in light of the spectacle in front of them. By now it is impossible to imagine a pre-cinematic time in which one’s own image can not be captured and considered. Cinema allowed for the audience to fantasize about themselves in addition to the players on screen. The pre-code years from 1930 to 1934 gave way to a sometimes wild array of debauchery, sin, and transgression that was otherwise below the surface of Hollywood's conservative, well-mannered facade. In retrospect, the queerness of something like Alla Nazimova’s 1922 version of Salomé is remarkable, while also undercut by its racial stereotypes. Louise Brooks had to move to Berlin in order to make history in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1928), a story perhaps more memorable for the protagonist’s unabashed promiscuity, than her suggested bisexuality. Meanwhile back at Universal near the end of the pre-code run in 1934, we have The Black Cat, a spectacular little gruesome film that ends with a Satanic ritual and Boris Karloff tied to a St Andrew’s Cross, flayed alive.
In addition to pre-code amorality, another aspect to keep in mind are the hedonistic lifestyles of many industry figures, cataloged in the half-truth gossip of Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon (and dramatized more recently in Damien Chazelle’s 2022 epic Babylon). While Anger may not always have the most accurate information, his compendium of excess, violence, perversity, and other bacchanalia is enough to evoke Hollywood as a hellish yet pleasurable landscape. This kind of mood lends itself more to Sunset Boulevard than the true history of the time and place ever could. Few people have been able to live--and die--so extremely than the stars of 1920s Hollywood.
The warm Canadian wit that Maddin gives off in interviews is a marked contrast to the content of his work. His cinema traffics in various kinds of queerness or perversity that are in line with pre-code values--or lack thereof--and implied by the sexual chaos of Hollywood Babylon. There are countless examples, like the homosexual undertones of Gimli Hospital, which might as well be overtones embodied by Kyle McCulloch and Michael Gottli’s ass-grabbing, face-smooshing, wrestling climax. In Archangel, McCulloch returns as Lieutenant John Boles, who in one scene beats a child in a clearly BDSM stylized manner. By Careful in 1992, Brent Neale’s Johann is in the throes of an incestuous obsession with his mother. Yet the entire time it is all presented with a unique coyness not found in most cinematic styles.
Guy Maddin is not the only filmmaker who has produced these kinds of nostalgically kinky cinematic spectacles. Some other artists who have produced films in the same vein include E Elias Merhige, Nikos Nikolaidis, Maria Beatty, and Bertrand Mandico. Before making an overall conventional account of the making of FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), with Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Merhige made the infamous, 72-minute experimental film Begotten (1990). The film is not a straightforward take on silent cinema aesthetics, but more of a cinematic ritual that has qualities akin to the dawn of cinema and the dawn of mankind itself. Greek filmmaker Nikolaidis’ Singapore Sling (1990) operates similarly to Maddin’s films, but pays homage to 1940s film noir, in particular Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944). Singapore Sling captures the beauty of film noir, but with a massive addition of transgressive sexuality that comments on cinematic production and spectatorship. Of all the filmmakers examined here, Maria Beatty is the one operating specifically in the genre of erotica. Among her groundbreaking and original works, Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926 (2004) is one that evokes an earlier era, starting with the title. From there, the 45-minute film takes an experimental, yet documentary-like approach to lesbian, sadomasochistic visual pleasure, fuelled by narcotics. Most recently, French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico has been making weird, extravagant cinema that combines queerness with tropes and visuals of earlier eras. Full of in-camera and practical effects, The Wild Boys (2017) and After Blue (Dirty Paradise) (2021) sublimate pleasure and gender into a nebulous voyage of ecstatic imagination. Some of Maddin’s later work, in particular Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) compliments Mandico’s cinema in both look and cultural commentary. All of the filmmakers mentioned here did not intentionally make their work to look and feel like the others. Rather, the examination in these pages is from a spectator who picked out similarities from a variety of work spanning a couple of generations, and various origins.
But what does it all mean? One framework that can bring a semblance of order to the mood of these films is the psychoanalytic idea of “the return of the repressed”. Freud articulated this a century ago and it still makes sense today. The harder we as individuals or communities attempt to suppress parts of ourselves that could be considered outrageous or antisocial, the more likely it is that these things will manifest in other unexpected ways. Freud also wrote about ideas like scopophilia and voyeurism, although in a generally negative way, as neuroses that must be corrected. But what if we considered the positive aspects of these things, without immediate judgemental condemnation? Voyeurism as a consensual act between audience and filmmaker can go a long way as a means of entertainment and pleasure. Surely the films written about here are not for everyone, but spectators who choose to experience them have the opportunity to find out new things about themselves and the world around them. The writings of playwrights Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud also provide a more complex understanding of these films. The intentionality of Brecht's theater and the alienation it uses to evoke an awareness of the artistic process is on hand in all of these films that, to an extent, present the inner workings of cinema as subject. Meanwhile, Artaud’s descent into primal human emotions and actions can be seen, especially in the films of Merhige and Mandico.
An untrained eye might see only a primitive innocence to early cinema, but a closer inspection reveals just as much, if not more prurient chaos than is apparent in contemporary cinema and media. While it clearly evoked desire and/or disgust at the time, a lot of this subject matter from a century ago had to marinate in the decay of nitrate until filmmakers were born who could articulate the mood in a more direct and clearly appreciative way. The excess of Weimar Germany, for example, is not necessarily any more outrageous than the excesses of today. Some cultural commentators simply feel a need to glorify the past as always being somehow better than the present. By the time the great depression and World War II led to a more conservative and censorious 1950s, the hedonism of the 20s was largely forgotten. Much subversive cinema of the 70s and 80s came out of the countercultural movements of hippies and punks. This makes these examples of subversion influenced by silent cinema that much more unexpected. The works of Maddin, Merhige, Beatty, Nikolaidis, and Mandico are all incredibly unique as works of art made by distinct voices. Their works use a similar approach to say very different things. Nostalgia for past aesthetics arise with each new generation so we can feel like our visual pleasures are part of a lineage.