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The Hypocrites (1915).is of a different genre from most narrative movies. It is a religious allegory. The characters are often moving through landscapes that represent spiritual states and journeys. The film recalls such prose allegories as Dante's The Divine Comedy and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678). It is especially close to the latter work. This is a book that would have been extremely familiar to both Weber and other American Protestants of her day. One suspects that it is Weber's model, to a degree.
Most fiction films of all periods have purported to show us a real world through which the characters are moving. This world can be as genuinely real as a street corner or as imaginary as another planet. But is always presented as a real geography and experience, subject to the laws of physics. Weber's film is not doing this. Her characters wander from one allegorical location to another with no unified geography or story line. Events do not have physical consequences; the action is based on spiritual expression. The whole effect is extremely unusual. It also recalls such dream plays of Strindberg as The Ghost Sonata. There is a lack of any belief that what we are seeing is real on some physical, literal level.
This is not all the effect of the allegorical genre. Even when Weber is doing a drawing room comedy such as How Men Propose (1912), we seem disconnected from reality. We never learn in that short how the film's unusual situation arose, and the characters behave in unusual ways that do not quite correspond to real life. Everyone seems to be in an abstracted state, one in which their interior emotions are the dominating factor.
There are other models for the allegorical aspects of The Hypocrites, that are explored right in the film. The minister sees a photograph in a newspaper of a large allegorical painting of "Truth", which has shocked Paris, according to the newspaper headline. Such allegorical paintings have always been very common. The one in the film rather resembles Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830), although the technique of the painting in the film is far more realistic and academic than Delacroix's. Both paintings feature a noble abstraction, Truth or Liberty, personified as a nude woman, having an effect on a diverse mass of ordinary French people.
Much of The Hypocrites is also presented as a dream or vision. The minister is sitting in a chair in the church. We see his spirit leaving his body; then his allegorical adventures begin. This scene is very hard to interpret. Has he fallen asleep and is dreaming? Is he daydreaming or imagining events? Is he having a religious vision? One wonders how audiences in 1915 interpreted this scene. Perhaps Weber is giving subtle clues to the scene's interpretation on which I'm not picking up.
D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) makes a good cross-reference to Weber's film. It too is a deeply personal work, one that preaches its author's point of view in every frame. Both are First Person movies, one it which the author's presence is revealed to the viewing public. Later, Jean-Luc Godard will also make his presence felt. By the 1960's, this will seem deeply avant-garde.
The Hypocrites also resembles Weber's film in other ways. Both attack modern day hypocrites, contemporary equivalents of the Pharisees. Both are quite direct about their creator's religious views. And both films show two different historical eras, a modern one and a historical one between which they draw parallels. The techniques here are a little different. Weber's film mixes her eras in a religious allegory; Griffith's cross cuts between eras. Still, the resemblances are striking.
Weber's work has a pictorial quality. Many of the scenes are carefully composed, to make visually beautiful patterns. Today we associate such Pictorialism with Sternberg and with John Ford, who would start directing in 1917 for the same company that employed Weber, Universal. I know too little about early film to know how common such a Pictorial approach was in those early days.
Weber likes to pan. During the church scene, she will pan from one member of the congregation to another. These pans are gentle, and do not have a wide sweep.
Weber constructs a set of elaborate tableaux during the medieval parts of the film. These show large groups of people assembled for the festival, all in medieval dress. Weber moves her camera along these groups, using long, horizontal tracking shots. These shots are parallel to the plane of the image. The shots are quite long and striking. They seem partly designed to both include everyone in the shot, and to get close enough to the characters to see every detail of their costumes and appearances.
Weber had previously included two similar tableaux showing people in modern dress. One is the opening sequence in the film, showing the congregation in the church. Each member is individually characterized. They each have their own style of dress, suggesting a different financial station in life. They also have very differing personalities. Through glances, small gestures, and photographs of them saying a few words to a spouse, each develops a distinctive personality. Weber must have put quite a lot of thought into this sequence. We get a sort of reprise of this sequence on the mountain road, where various members of the congregation react allegorically in different ways to the urging to climb the steep mountain path.
Costumes aside, Weber's reconstruction of the past is nowhere as elaborate as Griffith's in Intolerance. Many of the shots take place outside, with a minimum of props, and mainly natural scenery backing up the actors. This scenery is timeless, and does not convey any historical era. This actually aids the allegorical tone of the film. One is seeing a non-realistic representation of moral truths here, not a full realistic reconstruction of the past.
Weber includes several trick shots in the film. These are time lapse exposures. The camera records a scene from a fixed point of view. It is stopped. Different actors are put in front of it, then the shot is resumed. This sort of shot seems to be a common part of film vocabulary of the era; D. W. Griffith does similar things in Intolerance.
There is other trick photography in the film as well, notably the half transparent photography of Truth, who usually looks like a film ghost. One imagines such double exposures were common.