Joel Adlen on Piano
Lecture by Russell Merritt

An adaptation of Jack London's story "The Unexpected," By the Law is set in Alaska, where the characters have been cut off from civilization by winter storms and spring floods. Filming on a very low budget, using only one interior set and five actors, Lev Kuleshov succeeds in building up an almost unbearable degree of tension as he follows London's drama of three people's inner turmoil as a result of their complicity in a murder. Jay Leyda wrote for The Museum of Modern Art, "The mathematical precision of every gesture and movement contributes to the total effect of each character and episode. Kuleshov taught his workshop that the hands, arms, and legs are the most expressive parts of the film actor's body and we can observe that their movements create as much of the film's tension as does the facial expression. This calculated isolation and intensification of significant detail and gesture, accumulated for totality of effect, Kuleshov had learned from Griffith and from Chaplin's A Woman of Paris."