[Daily Dose #2: To-night Golden Curls (Opening Scene of The Lodger)]

I see more similarities than differences between the openings of Pleasure Garden and the Lodger. First of all there is the fascination with "how things work" whether its the backstage of a show and its spiraling dancers-legs or the printing presses of a newspaper.

There is also the careful construction of point of view sequences. In Pleasure Garden its the men looking at the dancers, in Lodger the crowd (mostly men) looking at the murdered woman.

In the Lodger he's taken the typical point of view sequence apart, he's experimenting with it. A basic POV sequence is

1) shot of person looking

2) the thing the person is looking at

3) reaction shot (back to the person looking and we get the emotional reaction).

 

The shot of the woman screaming is a POV shot without the rest of the sequence: we don't see who is looking at her (assuming its is her killer). That puts the viewer in the shoes of the killer.

 

In other places we see people looking and reacting, but not what they see.

Playing with POV sequences became a standard technique in Hitchcock's movies, for which his regular editor probably deserves a lot of the credit.

https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/power-point-view-pov-shots/

 

 

As for the tinting (the colors applied to different scenes) blue for night and sepia for day were standard tinting and toning by the early nineteen-teens

http://moviessilently.com/2015/10/24/silent-movies-101-color-before-sound-and-why-colorization-is-not-always-a-bad-thing/

 

[Daily Dose #1: Spiralling into View: The Pleasure Garden (1925)]

I definitely feel the lack of synchronous sound when we see the girls dancing and the music doesn't match what they are doing, especially when the focus moves to the lead singer. The medium shot of her makes it easy to see that she is singing, we could almost lip-read, and the men are reacting to her singing, but the lack of sync-sound makes it frustrating, especially for the modern viewer. It doesn't help that the soundtrack at that point (which is probably a modern addition, not anything Hitchcock chose; in 1925 the music with the film would have been live) is completely out of rhythm with the singer's performance.

I didn't miss dialogue, though. The blond-with-a-curl's performance comes across loud and clear without it!

 

I agree with the people who pointed out Hitchcock's penchant for dramatic irony. In this opening sequence, his camera is distant, lighting briefly on this character or that (on the wealthy old theatre patron whose impotence and harmlessness is implied by the fact that he can't even see the girls on the stage unless he uses a monocle or binoculars) and the inserted closeup shots from the perspective of the pickpockets. Although these are POV shots, the emotional perspective is from the narrator, who is saying "see the bomb under the table? See it, see it?" Described in narratological terms, the omniscient camera sets the scene, swooping down to give us a sense of this minor character and that one, until we are finally put into Patsy Brand's emotional perspective and we know the story will be about her and the wannabe ingenue.

 

(As an aside, it's clear that Josef von Sternberg saw The Pleasure Garden, as in 1930 he took the minor character of the old man infatuated with a chorus girl and made him into a tragic figure in The Blue Angel, the film that made Marlene Dietrich into a star).

 

The first true emotional perspective shot is  when Patsy sees the wannabe ingenue about to be accosted by the two shady men in the back of the theatre and is moved by her plight (the end of this sequence). We know from the emotional impact of this shot that the rest of this film will be about these two women.

 

Many of the POV shot devices used here had been used in the earliest silent films. For example, the POV shot through the binoculars and the monocle, the masking of the shot to look the way it looks through the monocle clearly refer back to George Albert Smith films from early 1900s such as As Seen Through a Telescope (even including "the money shot" being a close-up of a young lady's ankle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Seen_Through_a_Telescope

See the film here:

 

and Grandma's Reading Glass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandma%27s_Reading_Glass

see the film here:

 

 

I could see from the end of the scene, where the experienced chorus girl sees what is happening to the wannabee, that Hitchcock had seen and remembered Alice Guy's film The Great Adventure from 1918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Adventure_(1918_film) where a veteran theater actress prevents a young ingenue's virtue from getting ruined. In Alice Guy's film, the veteran actress was "too far gone" to find love herself, but she makes sure the ingenue finds it. I haven't seen the rest of Pleasure Garden yet, but it seems that Hitchcock takes the opposite approach in Pleasure Garden (based on Wikipedia plot summary)

https://onceuponascreen.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/hit.jpg