The saying goes, “History is written by the victors.” If only that were true. Real life isn’t a game, or, if it is, it isn’t one where the rules are easily articulated and the winners are easy to tell from the losers. For instance, in the 1910s, director-producer-screenwriter Lois Weber made over 100 films, many of which were giant box office hits, making her one of the most successful creators in young Hollywood and the worldwide filmmaking sphere. She was a superstar. And, more than that, she was a visionary. Famous in her time, innovative and with plenty to say, a woman who succeeded in her career before women even got the right to vote in the US—in all regards, a genius, someone who should be a “victor,” or at the very least someone worthy of inclusion in history.
And yet, despite going through several film history classes and reading several film history books, it’s just now that I’m even coming across her name.
Recently, I watched her 1915 film The Hypocrites. For a little context on this film—film had been a thing for barely twenty years when this film was made. It was released in January of 1915, months before the “groundbreaking” Birth of a Nation and a year or so before Intolerance was released. The plot begins with an abbot giving a sermon to a distracted congregation about hypocrisy. After the sermon—and an example of hypocrisy, in which an upper class man in the congregation congratulates the abbot for a good sermon but then outside the church tells his friends the abbot should be fired—the abbot falls asleep inside the church. Most of the rest of the film follows a surreal and allegorical dream sequence that jumps through history and shows that throughout time most every human being (including abbots and monks) couldn’t bear to see “the nakedness of Truth.”
It’s a film with religious themes, yet it doesn’t preach or place religion or the religious on a pedestal. It’s a film about ideas, and yet there are wonderful action sequences, such as when a mob riots violently because the true from of Truth has been exposed. It’s a film that at its heart is moral, and yet when released it faced backlash for being immoral—since Truth as an allegorical character is depicted as a naked woman.
In other words, it’s a complicated gem of a film—one that uses some of the same techniques that film history books claim D. W. Griffith created or was the first to bring to maturity, the first to develop “film’s language.”
What I was thinking about when watching The Hypocrites (other than musing on its deep messages and themes) was how it uses special effects in a revolutionary way. Truth the character is this ghostly spirit that hovers in and out of the picture, disappearing and reappearing through double exposure. Georges Méliès had done this technique, had practically invented it, but had mainly used it for shock and awe. Special effects were there to show off the spectacle that could be presented on film. But in The Hypocrites, special effects are used in a way that illuminates the story and its messages. Supernatural events are treated in a more realistic and natural manner. They aren’t showing off the spectacle of film as a medium, but instead building the world that this particular film creates—a world that is meant to mirror our own.
How Weber treats special effects will be used later—all the way to our current times. Movies like those Universal horror flicks, Blade Runner, Jaws, Alien, our superhero movies, our Star Wars movies—those films wouldn’t be possible if pioneers like Weber hadn’t had the vision to use special effects in a serious way, using them in serious, heavy films with real-world, complex themes and messages.
I don’t know what happened with history or Hollywood. I don’t know why by the mid-1920s Weber’s production company had failed and she had fallen (or been kicked) from power and was no longer considered a successful filmmaker. I do know that we’re lucky The Hypocrites survived whatever strange revisionist history was going on, erasing the female touch from the history of American filmmaking and Hollywood. The Hypocrites is a classic, with as much to say about society and human beings in 2018 as it had to say in 1915.
In fact, considering its historical context, it may even have more to say now than it did originally, if folks are willing to face the Truth.
Explore more:
Lois Weber Profile by the Women Film Pioneers Project
The Hypocrites (1915) on YouTube
—CFH
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