



Kino Video continues to put out sets devoted to the preservation of early avant-garde cinema. Volume 3 just came out, and, on YouTube, I managed to stumble across one of its more intriguing offerings. Directed by silent film-makers James Sibley Watson and Alec Wilder, Tomato Is Another Day (1930) featured an acting style that emphasized a flatness that was both weirdly druggy and overtly explanatory.

This was, of course, all by design. Watson and Wilder hatched TIAD as way of mocking the hyper-verbosity of the then-faddish “talkies” that were poised to sweep aside the expressive, gesture-based film-making of the silent era.