From my children's book cabinet - Kasperle by Josephine Siebe

I don't know if someone really told me, if I had made it up myself or dreamed it (which would be funny), but at the age of about 5 I believed that if you dream the same thing three times, it comes true.
I have always been a vivid dreamer and in later years often had repetitive dreams, but the particular dream I waited for then just wouldn't come to me.
So I sat down on my bed couch, squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated very hard. What I wanted to come true, you'd like to know? I wanted a living Kasperle sooo bad.
I didn't fall asleep, I didn't dream, I didn't get a living Kasperle, the disappointment was big.
Josephine Siebe and her Kasperle books were to blame for that disappointment.

A linen bound edition of the first volume from 1951

The story of the Kasperle (also Kasperl or Kasper depending on the region) is a long one. It's a puppet (mostly hand puppet) that probably has its origin in Austria. In German speaking countries it has been known since the end of the 18th century.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Similar puppets are for example Punch from the UK, Guignol from France or Pulcinella from Italy.
That kind of puppet play was originally not aimed at children and could be quite violent and later also be used for political purposes, for example by the National Socialists.
In the 20s, however, an educational Kasper also emerged trying to teach a younger audience to do the right thing. This is also the kind of puppet theater that still exists today.

As a hobby, a friend of ours had started a puppet theater with a friend of his. After that friend passed away, the ex took his place for occasional shows at a library. Of course that was way before electronic devices of all kinds took over completely.
It was amazing to see the children's reactions which were much like my own when I had seen a puppet play as a kid. I have no idea if that would still work or if the children just get younger and younger because there are still puppet theaters out there, I sometimes see posters up in town.

An edition of the seventh book from 1957
showing the typical Kasperle with a big nose and
wearing colorful clothes and a pointy hat

Now what about the living Kasperle, though?
For several years, Josephine Siebe worked as an editor for a newspaper's women's supplement and wrote articles, reviews and feuilletons including articles about the women's movement.
Between 1900 and 1940, she wrote almost 70 children's books, the best known ones are the seven Kasperle books published between 1921 and 1930. As you can tell from me still reading those in the early 70s, they were quite popular and actually they are still available in print or as ebooks, the German ones are also on the German Projekt Gutenberg-DE.
Siebe's books were illustrated by some of the best known illustrators of the time, in color or black and white.

Kasperle is not wearing his own clothes in this scene as he has left them
behind to be more inconspicuous which doesn't seem to work!

The story begins in a small house in the forest. In that house, a woodcarver, Master Friedolin, lives with his wife Annette and their adoptive daughter Liebetraut. He carves Kasperle puppets and his wife makes clothes for them.
One day, Liebetraut says she wishes the puppets were alive and Master Friedolin tells her that his great-great-great-grandfather had had a living Kasperle. He had met him one night in the forest and took him home, then he started carving dolls after his face instead of the saints and the household items he had made before. After Friedolin's grandfather had died, however, the secret where the Kasperle was got lost.
A litte later, Friedolin looks for something in his cupboards and finds a little split. When he pulls, a little door opens and out comes the lost Kasperle! They find a note with him saying that the ancestor's apprentice had given him a sleeping potion. Now they also understand why a dealer from the town is always trying to buy the old cupboards. He is a descendant of that apprentice and therefore knew of the Kasperle.

After a little tiff, Kasperle runs into the forest and then travels and has adventures, with a farmer, in a castle, in a school, with a gardener - and there he meets Mr. Severin who knows where he has come from. Kasperle is not like Pinocchio who has changed from a doll to a living boy. He comes from a far away island where the Kasperles live, but no one knows where that island is.
In the end, Mr. Severin takes Kasperle back to the forest house, falls in love with Liebetraut and marries her. Kasperle is happy being back, but thinks it might be even better on the island which is his real home.

Over the next few books, Kasperle has many adventures and I loved all of them. He often got into trouble, got locked up and escaped, had enemies and very good friends, came back home, and he even found his island, but left it again in the end because he missed his friends.

I spent some very happy hours with Kasperle as a child and eventually got myself some older editions of all seven books.
When Kasperle has eaten too much or falls down from somewhere he's sure he's going to die, but instead of "ich sterbe", he says "ich stirbse". I loved that word when I was small and still use it sometimes today.
Maybe Kasperle is how I would have liked to be myself. He was completely free and impulsive and definitely no overthinker.

Siebe's books were translated into several languages. I could only find one entry for Kasperle in English, "Kasperle's Adventures" from 1929 and 1939.
Have you ever heard of it or have you ever heard about the "Kasperle" in puppet theater before?


Source:

Nina Preißler: Siebe, Josephine - Leipziger Frauenporträts. On: Website Leipzig City, 2014 (in German)

Random Saturday - Piggy banks, part 1

This post was inspired by another daily thread in my jewelry forum. "Did you have a piggy bank? What did it look like?"
Now doesn't that sound like another great rabbit hole? Because, you know ... I actually had more than one over the years myself. You probably did, too?

Where do piggy banks even come from, though, and why are they called that? After all, not all of them actually look like pigs.

Let's have a look at the history of the savings box, money box, whatever you want to call it.
Would you have thought that they have been around since ancient times?
I found two different informations for the oldest known money box in the world. The first one is on one called a "Thesauros" (or "Naiskoi" according to one source) which is in the shape of a temple and was found in Priene, an ancient Greek town (today on Turkish land), dated to the 2nd century BC.

Money box held at the
Antikensammlung Berlin,
picture taken by Marcus Cyron,
CC BY-SA 3.0
(via Wikimedia Commons)

Another source, however, says that the Iraq Museum in Baghdad had an even older one in their exhibition in 1990 although it's not clear if it still exists now.
It was found in a private residence in Babylon and was dated to the end of the 4th or beginning of the 3rd century BC. It was thrown on a potter's wheel and looked like an amphora with a slit cut in at the side.
Those easy to make money boxes, which were popular around the world and are still made, had to be broken to get to the money ("break the bank"). You can find a picture of it here.

Earthen pots used in Nepal,
picture by Krish Dulal, CC BY-SA 3.0 
(via Wikimedia Commons)

Over time, money boxes have come in all kinds of shapes and materials, but where does the pig come in?
The oldest piggy bank in Germany is from the 13th century (again there are different opinions about it, in this case about it actually being a piggy bank or just a pig sculpture). 
Then there's the information about one from 1576, but it rather looks as if that story had a satirical background and was then passed on as truth.
Pigs have been a symbol for luck and wealth since ancient times. There are different theories about the reasons. In German, we still say someone "hat Schwein" for unexpected luck, literally "has pig". So it makes sense that a pig would be used for amassing that wealth by saving.

Verified piggy banks from the 12th century were found on the island of Java although these are really wild boars.
I wonder if this one from the 14th/15th century broke from age or if it was broken to get the money out ...

Majapahit terracotta piggy bank,
Trowulan, East Java,
picture by Gunkarta, CC BY-SA 3.0
(via Wikimedia Commons)

In Stuttgart, there's a Pig Museum with over 50,000 items which is an interesting mix of history, art, and kitsch.
Yes, I've been there myself before and was very glad they also had a vegetarian option in the restaurant there.
Of course they also have a few piggy banks behind glass.

Where does the term "piggy bank" come from, though? It's often used for savings in general or for money boxes that don't even have the pig shape.
I wish I could tell you, but again there are different theories. Was there really a clay called "pygg" used to make dishes and pots in which Western Europeans collected their money, so eventually potters started to make "pig banks"? 
Was the word "pig" used for earthenware in general?
So how did the pig get to Germany, for example, where the word is "Schwein"? Did the Germans just translate it? What about the alleged first one from the 13th century then? Which was there first, the "Sparschwein" or the "piggy bank"? 
Is it true that German immigrants helped to make the pig shape popular in the US?
Merriam-Webster tells us the word "piggy bank" was first used in 1917, the Oxford English Dictionary gives us 1913.
Will we ever know? Is it even important?

There is so much more to the history of piggy banks that I decided to stop here and write a second post about this in which I will also be sharing some of my own memories which got triggered thanks to this post.
The post can be found here once it's live.


Selected sources:

1. Spardosen. Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, Spardosen aller Zeiten. On: Kreissparkasse Köln - Geldgeschichte (in German)
2. Twisted tail: The great piggy bank mystery. On: BBC. StoryWorks
3. David M. Robinson: Some Roman Terra-Cotta Savings-Banks. In: American Journal of Archaeology, 28(1924),3, pp. 239 - 250 (open access)
4. Hans Graeven: Die thönerne Sparbüchse im Altertum. In: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 16(1901), pp. 160 - 189 (in German)

Silent movies - The Great Train Robbery

Today I have another short for you. When I started this project, I found a list of recommended silent films. This one was on it and we didn't have a Western yet.
So let's enter the world of the Western movie with "The Great Train Robbery". Kind of, but I'll get to that.

In the early 1900s when movies were still a novelty and mostly had been short glimpses into ordinary life - who could forget the train entering the station or workers leaving a factory, gripping stuff! (I'm not making fun of it, at the time it really was) - a movie 12 minutes long (although the versions on YouTube have different lengths, maybe a matter of speed?) and with a plot was really pretty incredible.

First comes the plot (with spoilers).
The title is a bit of a giveaway.
Two masked men enter a railroad telegraph office and force the operator to stop the train and to order the engineer to take water at this station before knocking him out and tying him up.
The band is hiding behind the water tank and then sneaks onto the train. Two of the bandits enter the express car where the messenger checks the mail. He gets killed and the robbers open the locked treasure box with dynamite.
Meanwhile, the other bandits head to the locomotive. In a fight on the tender, the fireman gets killed and thrown off the train. The engineer is forced to disconnect the locomotive.
The bandits make the passengers leave the coaches and take their valuables. One passenger who tries to escape is shot.
Afterwards, the band escapes in the locomotive. After a few miles they leave the train and go for their horses they had tied to some trees nearby.
The scene cuts back to the telegraph office where the operator is trying to telegraph for help before fainting again. His daughter enters, cuts the ropes, and wakes him up throwing some water at his face.
Next we see people dancing in a dance hall when the operator comes in to tell what has happened. The men get their guns and pursue the bandits.
When they find them, one of the bandits is shot, the other three escape. Feeling safe, they go through the mail bags, but the posse sneak up on them without horses. A fight takes place which costs the lives of the bandits and some of the posse.
The leader of the outlaws takes aim and fires point blank at the audience.

You think I added the picture a second time by mistake? No.
From the Edison Film Catalogue 1904:
"This section of the scene can be used either to
begin the subject or to end it, as the operator may choose."
I don't know how scared some of the viewers might have
been, but I believe it was a cool effect.

For a 12 minute short, this sure has quite the death toll (I think not even Midsomer Murders could keep up with that).
Now why did I say that this is "kind of" a Western?
To us it looks like one, we have horses, cowboys, the setting is right. To people back then, this could well be their ordinary surroundings, though, and the film could have been taken right out of the paper.
Train robberies "emerged shortly after the Civil War" and "became obsolete by the 1930s". The death toll among both robbers and passengers could be high especially if crew or passengers resisted, but if it worked out, the loot could be worth the try. As early robberies still often went unpunished and valuables were transported by train now rather than by stage coach, the idea of a crime you didn't need specialized skills for became quite popular in the USA.
The "Wild West" had also been shown on film before, for example footage of Annie Oakley or Buffalo Bill, but never with a plot, so you could say this kicked off the fascination with Western movies.

I also read that this was the first movie with a narrative and one blogger actually explained why for them it had more narrative than Méliès's Trip to the Moon, but I couldn't agree. Then I found a quote from a TCM article. The link didn't work anymore, but the quote says the movie "became the first influential narrative film in which the editing was imaginative and contributed to the narrative".
I could live with that.

The film used cross-cutting, that means cutting between two scenes happening simultaneously, in this case between the bandits and the posse.
While there were sets which looked like a stage, a lot of the plot takes place outside which gives the movie a more real look, and again, the plot was something people could relate to, either because they lived there or through newspaper articles.
It is a little funny to see the "clock" on the wall here, but at the same time you see a train pass by the big window. Here it's a matte shot that gives the scene reality.

Or take this scene. You don't only have the "special effect" of the explosion, but in the back you also see through the open wagon door that the train is speeding by some trees, also a matte shot.

The movie was a huge success. Imagine what it must felt like to the audience.
It was fast-paced, it showed violence and justice, and there was even a bit of comic relief when a man comes into the dance hall and the men shoot as his feet to make him dance (talk cowboy stereotype, but it seems to have actually happened). It's short, it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but we have scenes like that even today sometimes. Anything to entertain the audience.

To us, some of it seems funny today, such as the obvious dummy the bandit is throwing off the train. I didn't even mind the wire on the bat in Dracula almost 30 years later, though. Who knows, had it been a Keaton movie, they might have thrown a stuntman off.
I was impressed by the sheer amount of passengers leaving the train. I admit it made me think of a clown car for a bit, but then memories of my commute came to me and suddenly the number of passengers seemed totally normal to me.
And the theatrical acting? Loved it. If you can't scream when you're dying, you should at least be allowed to die dramatically. The more silent movies I watch, the more I'm making my peace with wringing hands and rolling eyes.

Believe it or not, this actor - Gilbert M. Anderson - is also one of the bandits
and the dancing tenderfoot in the dance hall scene,
he later became a real Western star as "Broncho Billy".

If you like Western movies, you should give this one a chance.
There are also versions in which some of the dresses or effects are hand painted, but the one I watched isn't, so I can't tell you if that enhances the experience.

This film also inspired another one by the same director, Edwin S. Porter, by the way.
You can watch "The Little Train Robbery" from 1905, which shows a gang of kids rob a miniature train for the loot of candy, here. I loved the ending. Not everyone was so happy with this short, though, because they thought it would make children become criminals!


Selected sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: The Great Train Robbery (1903) A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, November 3, 2013
2. Jeff Arnold: The Great Train Robbery (Edison, 1903). On: Jeff Arnold's West, March 8, 2021
3. Chris Scott Edwards: The Great Train Robbery (1903). On: Silent Volume, July 12, 2009
4. The Fascinating Story of 1903's Biggest Movie. On the YouTube channel "Toni's Film Club"
5. Rick Ruddell and Scott Decker: Train Robbery: A Retrospective Look at an Obsolete Crime. In: Criminal Justice Review, 42(2017),4, pp. 333 - 348 (closed access)

Nostalgia - "Glanzbilder"

Last Saturday I wrote about the tradition of the "Poesiealbum". I mentioned "Glanzbilder" (literally "glossy pictures", in English they are called "scraps" or "die cuts") and that we had used some in a gift for a retiring colleague.
What I hadn't mentioned was that I might have bought just a little bit more than we needed, mostly because we wanted some variety and all went overboard, overcome with memories.
Let's talk about "Glanzbilder".

The history of scraps began in the 19th century. At first, they were black and white and had to be cut out by hand.
The invention of color printing in the form of chromolithography in 1837 allowed printing ephemera in high numbers, in good quality and at low cost. Among those ephemera were series of collectible pictures which came with different products for advertisement, could be collected in special albums and were also traded (which is of course still popular today although the pictures changed from being just advertisement articles to stand-alone products over time).

Around 1860, the German company Hagelberg started to print, emboss and die cut sheets with several pictures connected by small strips of paper.
In English, they are called scrap reliefs.
Until 1900, Berlin was the heartland of the scrap production, but there were also many manufacturers in other countries although they often didn't make scraps exclusively.
Scraps were used in scrapbooking, I have to admit I never knew where the name came from because it's not something I have ever done myself. In Germany, but also in other German or Dutch speaking countries, they were also used for "Poesiealben".

Subjects were often sentimental and romantic, angels, kittens, puppies, birds, flowers, butterflies, holiday themes, children, and much more.
They were colorful, embossed for more depth, and of course there were those with glitter which we loved best, but which were also more expensive.

Scraps are not self-adhesive like stickers, by the way. They had to be glued into an album.
There was also a different way, though, as I found out thanks to a post by a Swedish blogger. She shared scrap albums with sticky leaves you could put your scraps on and then protect with a plastic cover (there's a video showing that).
Scraps are still popular today, thanks to a wave of nostalgia, even if it's a bit kitschy. There are only two big companies left, one in Germany which actually only started in 1948 and markets them worldwide, one in England which also makes paper masks and vintage-inspired cards.
They may not turn up in the old-fashioned poetry album anymore, but they are still collected and used in crafts such as scrapbooking, collages, decoupage or card-making.

Interesting is also that the co-owner of the German company has gone (still goes?) to rest homes to set up small exhibitions and talk about scraps.
The stories and the visual impact are supposed to awaken memories in people and make them think about positive experiences in their lives.

I gave some of my pictures away which will probably find their way into friendship books, the successors of the poetry album, but I also kept some although I have no idea yet what I'm going to do with them.
Actually I thought about starting another poetry album, but that would mean having to send the album around as most of my friends don't live in my town and for me that sounds like too much of a hassle for them.
So I guess I'm just going to look at them every, now and then ... and remind myself that I still haven't found my Poesiealbum"! 😆

Sources (Englisch and German):

1. Die Geschichte der Glanzbilder-Produktion. On: Ernst Freihoff - Glanzbilder - Reliefs / Glanzbilder Historie (in German)
2. Scrap Reliefs Collection. On: Mamelok Papercraft3. Peter Kolakowski: Glanzbilder. On: DW (Deutsche Welle), November 19, 2009 (in German)
4. Glanzbilder - heile Welt auf Papier gebannt. In: Mindener Tageblatt, December 22, 2012 (via Wayback Machine, in German)
5. Hanna Andersson: Collectible vintage Scrap die-cuts | Glanzbilder or Bokmärken. On: Studio iHanna, July 27, 2020 (with a video)
6. Scrapbooking and the origin of scrap relief. On: Fantastik, January 11, 2024

Random Saturday - "Poesiealbum"

The other day I rummaged through my book cabinets. Where was it? I was so sure it had always been right there. Which cabinet or drawer or "safe spot" had I absent-mindedly chosen this time?
I'm talking about my "Poesiealbum", literally "poetry album".
I don't know if you have ever heard of this tradition which has been around for centuries, mostly in German and Dutch speaking regions of Europe.
Thank you to my friend (one of my sisters couldn't find her album, either, and my friend saved the other one having to look for hers) who was so kind to send me pictures of her album to illustrate this post. Of course I edited out the names and location.

The tradition started with the "Stammbuch" or "Album Amicorum" in the early 16th century in the circle of the Wittenberg reformers. Followers of Luther and his associates asked them for handwritten notes to remember their connection.

"Stammbücher" could be books, often theological ones, with added empty pages, but also loose leaves which could then be bound into a Bible.

In the beginning, this tradition was not restricted to academic circles, but to Protestant ones. When it was mainly taken over by the academic community with students collecting notes by fellow students, but also professors, it spread to other countries and also among Catholics.
For some time, it was also adopted by nobility where guest books had already been a custom.

Usually, those albums were used during times of study or travel and ended with the start of a profession. They were kept not only for sentimental reasons to remember friends from that period, but also for references that could be helpful.

While the tradition had mostly vanished in academic circles in the early 19th century, the middle class, which had started taking it over in the late 18th century, kept it alive. Now also women and children collected inscriptions by family and friends and the "Stammbuch" became the "Poesiealbum" which also meant the type of inscriptions changed and were frowned upon by "opinion leaders in matter of artistic taste" who found them too trivial.

They changed even more, however, especially after the "Poesiealbum" mostly became a thing in elementary schools.
The inscriptions could be anything from single poetry verses, quotes, advice, adminitions, religious or secular, but in my time many of the little poems - some of which turned up regularly with some classmates using the same one for everyone's album - were confirmations of everlasting friendship or they were humorous, sometimes both.

Here's an example for the first one :
I sincerely hope that you will not forget me so quickly, and I wish you something special, stay just the way you are!

I can't remember the first ones I wrote, but I got bored of the usual quotes or proverbs after a while, so instead I took poems by a German humorist, for example the one about why the lemons turned sour. From what I read, that's not something many children did.

You usually wrote on the right page and the left page got some kind of picture.
Very popular were "Glanzbilder", literally "glossy pictures" (in English "die cuts" or "scraps"), of kittens, puppies, birds, flower bouquets (sometimes in baskets), angels, even better (and more expensive) if they had glitter. You can still get these today, by the way. When we did a kind of "Poesiealbum" for a retiring colleague, I got some for the nostalgic feeling.

My godmother put a pressed flower in my album, safely covered with adhesive foil.
There were also a lot of drawings, though. Or a mix of glossy and hand drawn pictures. I used to do bad illustrations myself to go with the poems chosen by me, for example lemons with stick legs.

When I look at album pages others share, they all look so familiar to me.
We still had lessons for "Schönschrift" = "beautiful writing" in our early school years - I never got a 1, which was our best mark, no matter how hard I tried - and of course that was expected from us to apply in the albums as well.
Therefore, a lot of those pages could be right out of my own album, down to the embellishments, the dog-ears hiding "secret" little messages, the pencil lines to make sure all lines were straight (sometimes erased afterwards, sometimes not, sometimes badly) - and the typos!
Of course we wrote with fountain pens back then and every, now and then see letters erased with what was called "ink killer" for example (and which came back again after a certain time) or are crossed out.
If you had a "Poesiealbum", you had to live with all of that because you had absolutely no influence on what the others wrote, how beautifully they wrote or not or how messy it got.

I had almost forgotten about this kind of pencil "rubbings"!

My album is quite messy which isn't entirely the others' fault.
I had reserved a spot for my mother and one of the coveted glossy pictures. A classmate thought it was meant for use and glued it in. I ripped it back out which of course looked ugly, so I glued the pages together.

Those who have been following me for a while know about my difficult relationship with glue ... yes, it looked terrible and also I felt really guilty for hiding my classmate's inscription that way. Brigitte, I'm so sorry, I was only 6 and overcome by emotion when I did that.
By the way ... my mother never got around to actually write into my album although I had found a note with a draft once (I knew she didn't want to because she didn't like her own handwriting), so all of that had been for nothing.

I'm always amazed how beautiful and clean older albums look, stunning handwriting, sometimes with drawings, really pretty.

Picture via pxhere

Interesting is also that there are actually books like that in 19th century US America, probably introduced by German or Dutch immigrants.
They didn't catch on, though, and were replaced by the more popular yearbooks.

The "Poesiealbum" finally got a successor, the so-called "Freundschaftsbuch" or "Freundebuch" = "friendship book" or "friend book" which is funny because that's what the old Latin name means.
It doesn't take us back to those old times, though.
The "Freundschaftsbuch" looks like a lot like a collection of questionnaires with pre-printed categories - name, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and so on. I'm not a fan, so I'm not even going to say more about it.

Of course I still haven't given up hope that I'll find my album soon, then I will share some of it (not the glued pages!) in an extra post. As we like to say, "the houses loses nothing", it must be here somewhere!


Sources:

1. Werner Wilhelm Schnabel: Das Album Amicorum. In: Album : Organisationsform narrativer Kohärenz, ed. by Anke Kramer and Annegret Pelz. Göttingen : Wallstein Verlag, 2013, pages 213 - 285 (in German)
2. Antje Petty: "Dies schrieb Dir zur Erinnerung ..." From Album Amicorum to Autograph Book. On: Max-Kade-Institute for German-American Studies. University of Wisconsin-Madison
3. Stefanie Bock: Das Poesiealbum: Eine evangelische Erfindung. On: indeon, August 16, 2022 (in German)
4. Peg Frizzell: My Cherished Poesie Album. On: FanningSparks

Happy Birthday! or Friday the 13th

Happy Birthday to me! Or not?
This is not something I usually do, congratulate myself, I mean, but I will reach the big 60 soon and that seemed like a good occasion to make something for myself in time.
It's not a medal for making it that far ... although years ago I did make a "medal" for a colleague for her 40th work anniversary (I'm close to that one myself, ugh). Just as a joke of course, we gave her something nice, too.

No, of course I wanted something beautiful and something that was yelling my name.
There was something I had been planning for years now, but I didn't know if my fingers were up for it. Wire wrapping has become so hard for me, but I really wanted this.

I had written until here and then this happened today.

After several days with a lot of breaks - and a lot of whining - the piece was ready to be oxidized. I took it to the kitchen and then there was that sound. The lampwork shark I wanted to use with the octopus had been tangled in the tentacles - the irony because that had been the plan - without my noticing it (both my own fault) and it had fallen to the ground.

Couldn't it have fallen three steps earlier in the hallway with the PVC floor which would have given it a better chance? Well, it didn't. I glued the two pieces I could find back on as best I could, but one part is missing. Now I'm heartbroken because I can't get another shark like it.

I had been saving that shark for myself for years.
It won't get thrown away, but I don't know if I will be able to make something with it. It will definitely not work with the octopus. I don't even know if I want to finish that now and also didn't feel like taking a picture of the octopus WIP or the broken shark 😭

I just needed to vent.

Silent movies - Silent Movie

My sister knows more about movies than I do, so I asked her the other day if there was a silent movie she thought I should do.
She said "Silent Movie".

Oh.
I really wouldn't have thought of that myself which is rather funny for a movie whose title is literally what I'm looking for.
Mel Brooks's parodies may not be everyone's cup of tea - I haven't seen all of them, but I definitely have my favorites (Young Frankenstein at the top) while there are others that I can live without - but silly was just what I needed now.

Here's the plot (with spoilers).

Mel Funn, who was a great director once before he took to the booze, is ready for a comeback. He and his sidekicks, Marty Eggs and Dom Bell, plan to make the first silent movie in 40 years.
When the chief of Big Picture Studios rejects the idea, Funn convinces him by saying he will get the biggest stars to sign up. This could save the studio from being taken over by the conglomerate Engulf & Devour.
Funn, Eggs, and Bell set out to recruit stars. While doing that and surprisingly succeeding, they encounter different mishaps, opportunity for a lot of slapstick including Bell's fight with a soda can launching vending machine.
To stop them from making the movie and save the studio, Engulf & Devour pay nightclub singer and dancer Vilma to seduce Funn who falls in love with her. When Eggs and Bell find out about it and tell him, he goes back to boozing with a huge bottle of liquor. Vilma, however, has refused the money because she has fallen in love with him as well, and she helps finding Funn and filling him up with coffee, so he can shoot the movie after all.
On premiere day, Engulf & Devour steal the only copy, but the friends can save it just before it can get burnt while Vilma entertains the audience. During the chase back to the theater, they defend themselves by launching soda cans at the attacking executives.
The movie is a big hit and is celebrated frenetically by the audience.

When talking about "Silent Movie", let's keep in mind that it's almost 50 years old.
Some of the jokes haven't aged well and maybe they wouldn't be included in a remake of today.

On the other hand, this is very much a Mel Brooks movie, completely with visual jokes, ba-dum-tsss jokes, potty jokes and parody of things that I may not always get, especially if they refer to the film industry of those times.
For example, I was not aware that Engulf & Devour hinted at a real-life conglomerate buying up entertainment companies at the time.

There are also some slapstick jokes that would have been funnier if they hadn't been dragged out, like the one when the three are in armor to get access to Liza Minnelli and keep falling over.
And there are scenes that bow to the old silent films and their kind of humor and are very funny, maybe more so now that I got a feeling for it.
For me, the music and sound effects were a bit much sometimes, but they worked really well in other scenes.

Of course, we can't forget the stars who are a parody of themselves in the movie, Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft, Marcel Marceau, and James Caan.

All in all, it was a fun and easy watch and I wasn't bored or tempted to stop in between.
You really need to like a bit of slapstick, though. If Mel Brooks movies are not your thing, this one will definitely not be.

I can't end this post without the biggest spoiler - the movie isn't completely silent.
There is a brilliant scene with world famous mime Marcel Marceau. While all the other stars agree to be in the movie, he's the one who declines the offer - with a loud "Non!" 😆


Sources:

1. Roger Ebert: Silent Movie. On: RogerEbert.com, January 1, 1976
2. Steve Pulaski: Silent Movie (1976) review. On: The Official Steve Pulaski Website, June 14, 2022
3. Fritzi Kramer: Silent Movie (1976) Review. On: Movies Silently, October 27, 2013
4. Alex Dueben: Review: Silent Movie. On: Alex Dueben, February 1, 2021