Kicking off a season of Czech silent films put online for free from the country's film archive, "White Paradise" is a mixed bag. It's a lovely film and promising scenario, but two figures did their worst to try to ruin it, one from the original production and another from the otherwise admirable work done to present the film today. The past perpetrator is whoever wrote the title cards; they're just too many and too verbose. We don't need to be told a character heard gun shots; we saw it. Ditto, later, when the title cards tell us characters we see are marching that they're marching. I mean, obviously, shut up. The more recent suspect is the multi-instrumentalist score by Tomás Vtípil of a series of annoying and irrelevant sounds. I've reviewed hundreds and surely, if you count shorts, seen thousands of silent films, and I'm not sure I've ever muted a score--maybe once or twice, but I'm usually rather tolerant--even the generic ones they put on cheap copies. I muted this one for most of the presentation. It's not a musical accompaniment; it's it's own thing counteracting what the visuals depict. This is most evident when there's a dramatic shift in the narrative and especially the more comedically slapstick moments and yet the atonal score continues with same repetitive noises regardless. Oh well, at least watching this at home, one may mute the score if not hush up those title cards. "Being silent can also be a kindness," as an intertitle laughably puts it at one point.
That said, let me talk about the picture's positive qualities. The scenario is somewhat novelistic in the way it crisscrosses between characters and the various fates that are thrown their way in the snow-swept wild mountain country. Mainly, there's an orphan living and working at an inn where she's abused by her guardian (and who also provides most of the comic relief, as well as then-Hollywood-style bee-stung lipstick, which although that look is often associated with Mae Murray, I'm thinking this actress is more of Lillian Gish meets Mabel Normand), an escaped prisoner visiting his ill mother and chased by trigger-happy law enforcement, and an itinerant puppet master who enters half way through to aid in the narrative's resolution. Although the 35mm print is a bit choppy, it's generally pictorially lovely--it looks like a white paradise, the acting is all fine enough, and the influence of Hollywood filmmaking is evident.
Most of all, there are two aspects here that I especially like. The first is the "Crystal Palace" scene of a superimposed daydream by the orphan of being royalty. It's something of a film-within-film vision. Even more uniquely reflexive is the introduction of the puppeteer, which also probably contributes to my distorted and limited knowledge of Czech filmmaking largely consisting of animation and puppetry from the likes of Jirí Trnka, Jan Svankmajer and Karel Zeman, but I digress. Once introduced, I swore I would favorably or unfavorably review the film based on whether or not they eventually exhibited some marionettes or merely teased the spectator with the prospect. Forget the resolution of the convict, who the rightful owner of the inn is, or whether this or that young couple get together in the end, the important thing is we finally get to see a bit of the mute performance within the mute performance that is silent film, and the picture aptly ends with the curtain being lowered in the puppet-theatre box. I approve.
