I may live in the 21st century on the south coast of England, but here on my desk it often looks like I am somewhere else entirely. Weimar-era Berlin, to be precise. It is the epicentre of some truly great silent filmmaking, such as the works I often share on this blog, it is the setting and source for the first film book I wrote (Pandora’s Box, as you asked), and it is here that we find the origins of much of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema that I write about elsewhere.
It also sometimes looks this way when I am reading the news, but that, perhaps, is another matter.
Last night, the fantasy adventure Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. This dialogue-free drama follows a cat, forced to travel far from home in unfamiliar company when an ecological disaster submerges the earth in flood waters.
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!
At the start of the film it appears that the cat lives with a besotted artist who pays tribute to the feline with sculptures of diverse sizes. But even this ailurophile human has abandoned the home, and their pet. As the waters rise and rise, our formerly cosseted hero must learn to survive and make common cause with a ragtag crew comprising a capybara, a secretary bird, a dog and a ring-tailed lemur. Against the odds, the animals have to save themselves from a manmade catastrophe.
Thank you for bearing wth me during a few several technical glitches related to this year’s poll. Relax, enjoy your glass of wine-flavoured carbonated beverage, and welcome to our glittering award ceremony. I have counted the votes, and I am ready to announce the winners of the Silent London Poll of 2024!
Congratulations to all the people mentioned below – as ever, these categories were bursting at the seams with excellent, worthy nominations and a great reminder of how exciting the global silent film scene is. Thank you for all your votes, and your comments, especially.
Without further ado, let me open this giant stack of golden envelopes. Here are your winners.
1. Best orchestral silent film screening of 2024
Your winner: The Winning of Barbara Worth (Henry King, 1926), with a score composed by Neil Brand, arranged by George Morton, conducted by Ben Palmer, performed live by the Orchestra da Camera di Pordneone, at Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone
I said:“t’s a big, big movie, with the youthful star trio of Ronald Colman (on $1,750 a week), Vilma Banky (on $1,000 a week) and Gary Cooper (on $50 a week!) in a desert love triangle, and a tremendously terrifying climax, as the townsfolk run for their lives when the river bursts its manmade bounds. Plus we were to enjoy the world premiere of a wondrous new score composed by Neil Brand, arranged by George Morton, conducted by Ben Palmer, and performed live tonight by the Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone. If you know the film you will know that it is celebrated for its scale, but also that this is a Frances Marion script, with a touch of melodrama (Vilma overhearing Ronald’s confession that he won’t propose to her, but not the reason why), her pet subject of adopted children, and her love of a grand theme – here the pioneers’ battle for mastery over the elements, and capitalism’s battle for mastery over the populace. You’ll also know that between the big action scenes there are several more sedate moments, discussions of policy and payroll. As, quite frankly, we have come to expect, Brand’s score was buoyant and nimble, keeping the film on its toes, teasing out the romance and flooding (yes, I went there) the auditorium with sound during those blockbuster setpieces, starting with a sandstorm in the first reel and the deluge in the last. Timed to a T, so that image and sound met in perfect harmony, and just a joy to listen to – for what it’s worth, I think it’s a winner. Geddit?”
Lillian Gish in The Wind (1928)
2. Best silent film screening with a solo musician or small ensemble of 2024
Robert Eggers has remade Nosferatu. Finally, after long promising to do so. His new take on the FW Murnau classic from 1922 is in UK cinemas on 1 January 2025.
To be completely honest with you, I haven’t seen it yet, but I have some very good, and some slightly more mixed reports.
I hope the new Nosferatu lives up to its influences, though I know those are big shadows to fill.
However, if you are looking for a new horror movie that does something fruitful with the silent movie aesthetic, I can recommend Magnus von Horn’s child-killer drama The Girl with the Needle. Owing to its subject matter, it is not for the weak-hearted, but it is beautiful, and does contain a pertinent glimpse of Asta Nielsen. It is out on 10 January 2025 from Mubi.
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Season’s greetings Silent Londoners. It has been a whirlwind of a year. How much do you remember?
Personally, I watched silent movies on three different continents this year, so I have some great cinema memories from 2024. Pordenone and Bologna, San Francisco, Istanbul, Locarno… and back home, Hippfest, Bristol, Sherlock Holmes at Alexandra Palace, Dorothy Arzner and more at the Southbank, non-stop action at the Kennington Bioscope. We celebrated some major anniversaries. Plus there was a lot of love for Anna May Wong, and Sessue Hayakawa.
This is a guest blog for Silent London by Maria Wyke, professor of Latin at University College London.
Worn out from watching Paul Mescal battle with CGI baboons, rhinos and sharks in the Roman arena? Or trying to avoid the Marvel-style struggle for the future of the Roman empire playing out in a cinema near you? Then you might be interested in these two screenings coming up at the end of November of very different antiquity films from 100 years ago or more. Gladiator II explicitly presents itself as a sequel to Gladiator (2000). That hugely successful film drew on the Hollywood blockbusters of the Cold War era and they in turn built on the global success of antiquity films already established at the start of the 20th century. Those early films, however, often reconstructed the ancient world in ways never taken up by later cinema. These upcoming screenings bring back to us that otherwise lost innovation, vibrantly supported by the live accompaniment of professional musicians.
The Odyssey (1911, dirs. F. Bertolini, A. Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro)
Entering the Ancient World through Silent Cinema
Saturday 30 November 2024, 16:45-17:45 at the Morecambe Winter Gardens
As part of a Northern Silents event, this variety programme begins with a British travelogue, Visit to Pompeii (1901, dirs. George A. Smith and Charles Urban), that takes elegant tourists on a journey around the excavated city and up to the crater of Vesuvius. An Italian historical drama, Nero, or the Burning of Rome (1909, dirs. Luigi Maggi and Arturo Ambrosio)shows the emperor repudiating his wife and driving her to suicide at the command of his beautiful mistress. The people rebel, Rome burns, the emperor plays his lyre. Through cinematic superimposition, a terrified Nero sees a nightmare vision of the Christians suffering for his crimes. His own suicide soon follows.
Similarly, The Odyssey (1911, dirs. F. Bertolini, A. Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro) uses special effects imaginatively to present the daring escape of Odysseus and his crew from a monstrous giant, the apparition to him of his protective goddess, and his miraculous transformations to hide his true self from the suitors who hound his wife back at home. The climactic finale is an American animation, A Roman Scandal (1926, dirs. Charles R. Bowers and Bud Fisher), based on the newspaper comic strip adventures of Mutt and Jeff. Magically transported back to ancient Rome, little Jeff finds himself racing a chariot before the beady eyes of emperor Mutt. In a parody of the great race sequence in Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur (1925), cunning is the winner.
Quo vadis? (1924, dirs. Gabriellino D’Annunzio and George Jacoby)
Quo vadis? (1924, dirs. Gabriellino D’Annunzio and George Jacoby)
Sunday 1 December 2024, 14:15 at BFI Southbank NFT1, London
Magnificent and disturbing, this epic film revels in the debauchery often associated with ancient Rome. The emperor Nero is played as a satanic grotesque by the star Emil Jannings. At the opening of the film, we see him lie resplendent on a couch in the grounds of his ornate palace. He peers with sadistic amusement at a series of female victims being thrown into the fountain to fatten his fish.
The Latin title of the film or ‘Where are you going?’ refers to the question that the apostle Peter was supposed to have asked when he saw Christ coming to save the Christians in Rome. It also refers to a celebrated nineteenth-century novel that told the story of a fictional girl, Lygia, who turns the Roman soldier Vinicius toward God despite Nero’s attempts to stop her. The first half of the film ends with the camera focussing in on a hand gripping a cross. It is a sign that the soldier’s conversion is underway.
The second half of the film puts that story in the broader context of the burning of the city and the subsequent persecution of the Christian community. Here red tinting marks out the danger for Rome and the excitement for viewers. A cast of thousands charges the imperial palace. Christians are arrested and Christ himself makes two appearances. Eventually Nero commits suicide, and the Cross is declared victorious. But not before we are offered a range of extraordinary spectacles: extravagant banquets; beatings and murder; thwarted rapes; a city on fire; a strongman wrestling a bull, lurid martyrdoms and soldiers from the provinces riding to the rescue.
Both screenings are being run in association with the AHRC-funded research project Museum of Dream Worlds based at University College London and led by myself, Maria Wyke. The project (drawing on the surviving films in the BFI National Archive) asks how did early cinema design its Greek and Roman dreamworlds? What did cinema gain from recreating the distant past? What did that past gain from being recreated in moving images? The project also considers how these films were once used as instruments of education and what educative potential they might have today.
Ivo Blom is offering a free download of his recent book Quo vadis?, Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology (Kaplan, 2023) over on his site, as well as the link to buy a paper copy.
Stand outside Alexandra Palace on a clear evening with a full moon, as I did last night, and you can take in the whole city. London may be as silent as it gets from this vantage point, but the landscape is loud in its own way. The glittering towers that dominate the skyline were all built in the last 50, probably 20 years. The red lights dotted in among them are all cranes, standing by to change the shape of the city once again. Scan the horizon, and you’ll be reassured perhaps to see the dome of St Paul’s – a symbol of continuity, a connection between modern times and the age of Christopher Wren, going back to 1710.
Swivel on your heel, and pivot to 1873 or thereabouts, when Ally Pally itself, the “People’s Palace” first opened. I had a date to keep at the theatre, recently restored to what the owners call a state of “arrested decay” and reopened to the public. We were there to travel back to a fuzzy combination of the 1880s and the 1920s, to revel in the BFI London Film Festival’s latest archive presentation: Silent Sherlock.
Just a short note to share some information about a conference I am looking forward to, so that you can also save the dates, and so that I can pass on the call for papers.
The twelfth Women and the Silent Screen conference will take place in Brussels and Antwerp next June. It will be hosted by Université libre de Bruxelles, University of Antwerp, and Cinematek, and will take place 11-14 June 2025. As Anke Brouwers, one of the organisers, Anke Brouwers, pointed out at the Women and Film History International meeting in Pordenone last week, just think of the waffles! And the chocolate, the beer, the frites…
It’s supposed to be big mystery: what do women want from a romantic partner? But there is no mystery at all. GSOH every time. That’s good sense of humour, of course. So if you’re in anyway romantically inclined, you’ll already be asking yourself: what is the FUNNIEST way I can celebrate Valentine’s Day next year.
If you know you know that Slapstick Festival celebrates visual comedy in all its forms. But that include silent cinema and there are especially strong offerings on that score this year, including lashings of Buster Keaton (with expert Polly Rose on hand to guide you through his work), including the gala screening of Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), accompanied by the European Silent Screen Virtuosi, led by Günter A. Buchwald, on the Friday night at Bristol Beacon. Plus Harold Lloyd, Sarah Duhamel, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, WC Fields, and lots more.
A confession. I was conspiring over breakfast, and reader, this was a two-cappuccino problem. The upshot? I was a little late in getting started with the screenings today. But I certainly knew that I was going to be up late, with the gala… and the end-of-festival celebrations!
My sunny morning stroll to Cinemazero was rewarded with a simply terrific film from Uzbekistan. In Her Right (Grigorii Cherniak, 1930), a group of workers from the collective farm are sent to the factory to boost the workforce there, and to learn those valuable Soviet methods. One woman from the village defies her husband and sheds her burqa to join them. It’s a life-changing experience and not only does she gain independence through work, but she inspires others to do the same, through a filmed speech, that the workers clamour to watch, even after he enraged husband slashes the screen. Even with her “throat” cut, in a silent film, she continues to speak her truth. So you have noted already that this is once again pro-Soviet, anti-Islam propaganda in intent, but this is also a remarkable film in style and action. Our Hollywood friends would applaud the excellent, and indeed poignant, action sequence in which our heroine runs to jump on the train to the factory, is repeatedly shoved away by male guards and then, when it seems she has finally found a helping female hand, her husband leaps – for a second we think he has dragged her form the moving train, but no, he only has her coat in his hands. Nail-biting stuff. And the scene in which they watch the film is also very strong. Günter Buchwald at the keys for this one, keeping the energy at exactly the right pace.
Blood, sweat and tears on the screen today. And to cap it all off, prizes! That’s Friday in Pordenone, folks. Read all about it.
Your scribe is a little squeamish, I must confess, so this morning I had to resort to an old trick, and pop my glasses off during some of Arabi (Nadezhda Zubova, 1933), a drama about sheep farmers organising to form a collective and defeat the feudal powers that exploit their labour under the old system. That doesn’t make me squeamish, I’m all for it – it was the killing and skinning of lambs that turned my stomach. Still, I thought this was terrific, with some very sharp editing, especially in the opening sequence, and lovely low camerawork of the herd out in the field.
Wouldn’t you like to go Behind the Scenes with DW Griffith and Florence Lawrence? I sure would, that’s why I was bright and early at the Verdi this morning for the 1980 Biograph package. Behind the Scenes, per the catalogue is the “happy exception” among the 1908 output. Well it certainly had punch. A distraught mother must tear herself from her daughter’s sickbed to kick her heels and shake her hips on the vaudeville stage to earn a crust. But as the crowd roars out for an encore, her baby girl is slipping away from this life; Grandma rushes to the stage door… If “too late!” is the essence of the melodramatic narrative then this was a textbook case. We stayed to see Lawrence reappear as the titular character in The Red Girl, in which a collection of ethnic stereotypes conspire to rob a “girl miner” but Lawrence defies racist convention to lend a hand instead. Impressive to see Lawrence Harry Houdini her way free after being tied up and dangled over a precipice above the rushing river. Extra exciting with John Sweeney at the keys, of course.
Sometimes the old songs are the best, right? Familiarity can breed contentment. And nowhere will you find more consensus on that than here in Pordenone. So today I was happy to rewatch a couple of silent films I love, spend a little time with one of my all-time favourite silent stars. And then see something entirely new to me!
First, the old friends. This morning, we ventured back into the imaginations of Maurice Tourneur, and Ben Carré, with the 1918 adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. Such a strange and beautiful, terrifying and wholesome journey into the shadow world of dreams, where bread and sugar and water have souls, the dogs and cats can talk, lost grandparents always have the table set for supper and babies wait impatiently to be born. If you have not seen this, you possibly can’t imagine quite how weirdly pretty it is. Variety’s critic wrote: “It is quite safe to assert that nothing quite like Director Tourneur’s work has ever been shown on the screen.” So hats off to Tourneur and Carré, and doubly so to Neil Brand and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, who transported us to an enchanted realm with their music. I wrote about the film in more detail here, should you be interested.
And verily, on Tuesday, the fourth day of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the rains came down upon us. And things got quite soggy inside the theatre too, what with Mary Pickford nearly drowning in the hold of her own houseboat in Pride of the Clan, a parcel of wonderful underwater films in the early afternoon, and a wild ride to Neptune’s kingdom to close the day.
Before the rain began, I spent a couple of rapt hours in the Canon Revisited strand this morning. Carl Th Dreyer’s Leaves From Satan’s Book (1920) travels through the centuries with God’s Fallen Angel, who is doing his evil work among humans who prove reliably weak in the face of temptation. Surrendering one’s soul to sin is not to be advised, but surrendering oneself to cinematic greatness – that is a balm for the ills of the modern age. This is a film of deceptive subtlety, and slow-burning excitement. The camera stays still so long that when it moves, the moral universe tilts. The austerity of the first, biblical sequence gives way by degrees to a faster editing rhythm, and cutaways to sympathetic details, a flock of geese, a cat toying with a mouse, a baby in her crib. Soon we’re in action thriller territory as we finally wash up in Finland in 1918, via the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution. Dreyer, being Dreyer, the faces, not least of Helge Nissen as the shape-shifting Satanas, carry boundless weight. It’s a masterpiece, an early one, from a man who made much better films, even, but still. And yes I am smug about having watched it with John Sweeney’s soul-stirring accompaniment, which likewise knew when to hold back and when to rush forward through the ages.
I promise you, I really am in Pordenone, not in Paris. But honestly, the geography is becoming a little subjective. We seem unable to escape the Rive Gauche for long. This morning, a really quite exceptionally taut melodrama from Louiis Feuillade, with sets,of course, by Ben Carré, illustrated how the Latin Quarter exerts its own gravitational pull, morally, if not physically. In La Tare (1911), part of Feuillade’s “La Vie telle qu’elle est” (Life as It Is) series, Renée Carl gave a really beautiful performance as Anna, who works in the dance halls of the Latin Quarter, but given the chance, moves to the South of France and devotes herself to a new career caring for patients young and old in a nursing home. Ah, but cruel fate intervenes and a medical student who used to tap her for cash in the Paris days, takes it upon himself to inform the medical board that their “secular saint” is really a “girl of easy virtue”, sooner than you can say “Madonna-whore complex”. And so we are left with a tragic, yet ambiguous ending, following a rather harrowing scene in the unemployment office with a crowd of women, all of whom had remarkable faces (no, not Léontine, I don’t think, but maybe this is the kind of place where she might be found). A very special film, enhanced, naturally, by John Sweeney’s sensitive accompaniment.
“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” Proof, if proof were needed, that the American people saw through such anti-immigrant propaganda more than 100 years ago, comes in Dee-Dubya’s 1908 New York comedy Deceived Slumming Party – our first film of Sunday morning. Fraudulent tour guides promise show rich tourists the gritty realness of Chinatown and the Bowery, but the trick is, it’s all staged. Everyone in the opium den was upright and chatty before the tour group arrived, in fact, the barroom fights in the Bowery are choreographed by the bartender (DW Griffith himself) and the “meat grinder” in the Chinese restaurant kitchen, the one that the staff are “feeding” with cats and dogs and rats, is nothing but a sham.
Rich kids slumming it in Chinatown, you say? Hold that thought while we segue from comedy to melodrama, in the shape of Driven from Home (James Young, 1927), which yanked and yanked and yanked at the heartstrings with poor Virginia Lee Corbin disowned by her wealthy father after she married for love, although her devoted mother (Margaret Seddon) was on her deathbed and calling out to see her baby once more. Add to this a subway excavation accident, a scheming vamp housekeeper (Virginia Pearson), and you might not think there was room for an excursion to the Chinatown underworld but you would be wrong, as this film was playing in the Anna May Wong strand. So indeed here we witnessed a scant five minutes of Anna May Wong, as a Chinese restauranteur’s “legal wife and illegal accomplice” radiating more star power than the rest of the rest of the (perfectly good) cast could ever dream of. We understand this is a racist trope, yet it is quite nifty to think that on the evidence of this year’s Giornate, in any given situation, Anna May Wong can locate a secret door in seconds.
Grey skies clung to the Verdi this afternoon but you can’t put a dampener on a homecoming like this one. I’ve been to several festivals this year, but nothing really compares to the Giornate. And our hearts were warmed by festival director Jay Weissberg’s words of welcome, in which we pointed out how vital it is, these days more than ever, to cherish these events that bring people together in a shared endeavour.
Today was a day of varying shades and two colour schemes. We had a couple of stonking great classics. And also a slate of fragments, curios, oddities and ends – several of which had their merits, albeit in their own unconventional way. In fact, a certain aura of strangeness hung over the whole day, which you might attribute to the unseasonal weather, but I am partially putting down to the after-effects of watching Megalopolis last weekend.
Can YOU help put names to 14 unidentified films screening at this year’s Giornate del Cinema Muto? The festival is asking for your contribution to a very exciting project. Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi explains more.
The story goes that in the early days of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, a small group of film historians sat in a theatre, watched films arriving from different archives from around the world, and identified them by shouting out the names of the actors and actresses appearing on the screen. Whether true or somewhat apocryphal, this is still an appealing idea for film historians and archivists alike. Surely, there are still many unidentified films in the archives, and what better resource in the world than the combined brainpower of the Pordenone crowd would be able to identify them? Following on the trail of exciting, successful, and fun initiatives like the LostFilms.eu portal and various archival YouTube channels, a couple of try-out sessions held by Eye Filmmuseum, and hugely inspired by the “Mostly Lost” Workshops held at the Library of Congress Conservation Center in Virginia from 2012 to 2019, we are launching a film identification thread at this year’s Giornate.
This year 14 films, sourced from 6 archives, each individually numbered, will be screened as shorts before features scattered through the week. The catalogue notes about them have been written by the archivists concerned, providing as much information as possible about the material, its provenance, and any contextual information that might be helpful for identification. Still images are provided as memory aids where possible. We encourage you to make your suggestions in various ways; whether in discussions during lunch or dinner, but also on the white board at the festival hospitality office, here on this Silent London page, or the “Pordenone People” Facebook group. Please provide evidence when you can, whether to support your suggestions or to prove a theory wrong. Please explain why you think in a certain direction, or why you’d rule out some options. And don’t forget to share with us the sources you are using to support your theory.
As you should know by now, this blog does indeed play favourites. And Stephen Horne’s score for Hitchcock’s The Manxman (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928) is one of my all-time favourites. I loved it at the London Film Festival in 2012, and again with the orchestra in Pordenone inn 2022. Beautiful music, flavoured with folk and nourished by emotion. The film’s not bad, either.
However, for us physical-media fans, limited copies of the CD version are available now. Rumour has it that Horne may have a few of said CDs to sell in Pordenone next week. So if you’re lucky, you can stop him and buy one.
Also next week, the first digital single will be released. I listened to it while writing this post, which is probably why there are tears on my keyboard. I have no higher recommendation…
The Manxman will be screened with Stephen Horne’s orchestral score by the 2025 San Francisco Silent Film Festival on 11 January 2025 at Grace Cathedral. I think I wrote the screening notes for this – hope I did the film justice.
Silent London 