Movies of the Mind

I guess what I resent most about Hollywood is that it fell from such heights. There is in Hollywood's Past such grandeur, glamour, vision, incision, and in its Present such choked, bloated, blinkered conformism, not to say institutionalized misogyny and unrelenting publicity for arms manufacturers. When you go waaaaay back to its beginnings, when artists first got their hands on the equipment and experimented with possibilities of light and shadow, you see there are worlds inside the mind worth exploring. Today I'm giving thanks to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for reminding us in stylish ways what was lost but can still be savored. Five feature films at $16 a pop, which includes live and inspired musical accompaniment, await your discernment at the Castro Theatre on a single breakneck Saturday, Dec. 5, starting at 11 a.m.

There is no love or tragedy like that between older woman and younger man. Whether it's Christ crucified with Mary prostrate with grief, or further back, Phaedra self-incinerating with passion for her gay stepson, or further forward, worldly wise Lea spoiling her indolent Cheri. No, they need not be related but that adds spice, as in Oedipus and Jocasta, and serves as the basis for any culture worth having. It's out of fashion now, but was the height of chic for Edwardians, and is preserved in one of the world's most mind-blowing films, screening Saturday at 6:30 p.m.

"L'Inhumaine" (1924), which just happens to be the year of my mother's birth, is a French film, to put it mildly. That final "e" renders the substantive feminine. "The Inhuman Feminine" is how the title should be translated, since we're dealing not with an individual but an abstraction, icon, or archetype as old as prehistory. The woman who says "No" and means it, the Princess of Cleves, the woman who decides her own destiny doesn't include you, Lady Macbeth having cut off the access and passage to remorse, Aileen Wuornos, even Marie-Antoinette letting them eat cake. I seem to be contradicting myself? Yes. The diva in love who says "No."

"L'Inhumaine" is narrative, but no, it's not linear but kaleidoscopic, film hallucinating film as a psychic emanation of aesthetic-frenetic, psychotic-erotic, ecstatic-erratic poses and impostures, furs and feathers, distractions and distress acted out as nonstop trembling and hyperventilating on the razor's edge of sacrifice to the aesthetic gods. Above all, eyes as organs which emit light. "L'Inhumaine" is best enjoyed with a true champagne, if you can get it chilled into the Castro, or an equally valid Perrier, whose revivifying bubbles and dose of magnesium will bolster your nerves for a nonstop thrill-ride-cum-metaphysical-initiation into the mysteries of love and death.

"L'Inhumaine" is a hard act to follow, but at 9:15 p.m. you can fall off your ephemeral Parisian perch and plop into "Piccadilly" (1929), a down-to-earth melodramatic masterpiece focusing on the eternal backstage triangle. An impeccably groomed older man in a tux serves as pivot point to the rivalry of two dance-hall sirens, one fading and one new. Anna May Wong was 24 and Gilda Gray 28 when the film opened, but Gray's trademark shimmy fades when compared to Wong's sinuous, suggestive wiggling in exotic-erotic garb, at least in the eyes that matter, those of the impresario, played by Jameson Thomas as a brooding Warner Baxter capable of Ronald Coleman's restraint.

Narrative is a place for director Ewald Andre Dupont to plant his cinematographer Werner Brandes, who films Wong with a lover's attention to every flicker of emotion on her facial landscape. Wong is one of those rarities who repay such scrutiny, like Louise Brooks or Marlene Dietrich, a purely cinematic phenomenon. Dupont follows the smitten showman into the sordid haunts of Limehouse, and Brandes transforms beer hall and boudoir into opium dreams. In "The Shanghai Express" (1932) Dietrich would meet Wong under Von Sternberg's lens for the epiphany of this film school. Storywise, there is a fourth angle to the triangle, the Chinese boyfriend, enacted by King Hou Chang as passion's plaything, and the whole thing ends in ennobling tragedy.