A major discovery screened Mostly Lost this year. Researcher James Fennell has identified a clip from some footage purchased on eBay as scenes from one of the most sought-after “lost films” of all time: Cleopatra (1917), starring iconic vamp Theda Bara. While the image of Theda Bara in her risqué pearl breastplate (now on display at the V&A as part of the Diva exhibition) is well known to all silent cinema fans, the film itself has long been missing.
Continue reading Watch Theda Bara in Cleopatra (1917): lost footage rediscoveredCategory Archives: video
Video: behind the scenes with Charlie Chaplin on City Lights
The Criterion Collection has shared this very special clip with Silent London to mark the release of Chaplin’s City Lights on Blu-ray in the UK. It is presented courtesy of MK2.
In this footage we see Chaplin out of costume rehearsing one of the most graceful bits of comic business in the film, as the Tramp steps back to admire a statue in a department store window – with perilous results.
It’s a fascinating insight into the working processes of this famously perfectionist filmmaker, during what was very possibly his most painstaking, and certainly most protracted, shoot. It’s just one of the glimpses backstage offered on the new Blu-ray edition of the film.
Continue reading Video: behind the scenes with Charlie Chaplin on City Lights
Young cinema
This week, I had the honour of delivering the Philip French Memorial Lecture at the Cinema Rediscovered festival in Bristol. Due to the strange times that we are living in, the lecture was livestreamed as well as being held in person at the Watershed Cinema.
My task for the lecture was to talk about the role of critics in reframing film heritage. I spoke a little about Silent London, and also about Musidora, why cinema is like a tree and what I like to call “young cinema”.
Continue reading Young cinema
Binge-watch alert: Early British animation on the BFI Player
Deadlines done? Laundry basket empty? Dinner in the oven? Sure? Then prepare to fritter away some time. The British Film Institute has launched a new collection on the BFI Player. Animated Britain presents more than 300 animated films from the UK. There are some nostalgic favourites from my own childhood here, and also a fine set of films from the infancy of cinema.
Browse the “Early Animation” set on the BFI Player (or the BFI YouTube channel) and you can watch, for free, gems such as WR Booth’s 1909 trick film Animated Cotton, or the Shakespeare spoof Oh’phelia: a Cartoon Burlesque, from 1909. You’ll build up a mental picture of Britain in the early 20th century while you you titter. There is plenty of Great War Propaganda here, lots of cricket-comedy and a couple of shorts produced on behalf of the Conservative Party.
I was especially taken with an episode featuring Giro the Germ, made for the Health and Cleanliness Council, a rather haunting warning about hygiene hazards. In this sinister short, germs hop on fly-taxis right out of dustbins and into the mucky homes of hapless Brits. It’s rather repulsive, but may well encourage you pass the duster around after you’ve had your cartoon break.
Best of all, though, is Running a Cinema (1921), which offers a few quirky insights into what a trip to the pictures was like nearly a century ago.
Unsilent Movies: touring the UK with The Phantom of the Opera
Unsilent Movies has been touring silent film and live music events for a couple of years now. This month, they are bringing their score for The Phantom of the Opera (1925) to venues across the UK. Percussionist Ric Elsworth tells you a little more about the project in this short video:
And here are those tour dates:
26th October – Leicester Phoenix Cinema
28th October – Shrewsbury Theatre Severn
29th October – Newcastle Tyneside Cinema
30th October – Oxford Ultimate Picture Palace
31st October – London St. James Studio
London’s Hollywood: a visual tour of Gainsborough Studio in the 1920s – video
It’s remarkable what you can pick up in three minutes and 45 seconds. This short video by Gary Chapman, author of London’s Hollywood: the Gainsborough Studio in the Silent Years, is an excellent introduction to the British Famous Players-Lasky outpost.
This is the time and the place where Victor Saville and Michael Balcon began their ascent through the British movie industry, where Ivor Novello smouldered for Graham Cutts, and where Alfred met Alma, while making a film or two you may have heard of …
England v Ireland (1905): watch the earliest footage of the national side
Ready for the game tonight? Warm up with this treat from the BFI archives. England play Ireland at Manchester City’s Hyde Road ground on 14 October 1905. The film is only three minutes long, but don’t worry, I can reveal that England won the game 4-0!
Toronto Silent Film Festival 2014: talking about intertitles
It was a great honour for me to be asked to speak on the opening night of the Toronto silent film festival recently. It’s just a pity that geography was against us. But the speech was recorded ahead of time, and looked very smart, thanks to a colleague in the multimedia department at the Guardian generously helping me out – Andy Gallagher shot, produced, edited and did absolutely everything except sit on that blue chair.
You will probably be able to spot that it’s my first stab at presenting something like this, but it’s on the topic of silent film intertitles, which I am very enthusiastic about – the too-often unsung heroes of silent cinema. I hope you enjoy it.
Wonderful London 1924 & 2014
Film-maker Simon Smith has made another silent cinema mashup to delight any Londoner. His previous film spliced scenes from Friese-Greene’s The Open Road (1927) with the same London streets filmed in 2013. The new clip embeds scenes from the Wonderful London actuality into vistas of the capital in 2014. The effect is stunning – it’s fascinating to compare London as it is and as it was, and as the 1920s city-dwellers step out of their fuzzy sepia frames they become ghosts haunting our 21st-century streets.
As much as London has been rebuilt and redeveloped over the past century, this clip reminds us that its past has not been erased, just sunk below the surface.
Shaun the Sheep the Movie: teaser trailer – video
Will this be something we consider to be a truly silent film? Who knows. But it’s dialogue-free, delightful and comes to us courtesy of our friends at Aardman Animations, whose support for the Slapstick Festival is legendary. Shaun the Sheep the Movie is scheduled for release in spring 2015. Not just for kiddywinks, we’re sure.
More details here – and on the official Shaun the Sheep website.
From Aardman, the creators of Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run, comes the highly anticipated big screen debut of Shaun the Sheep. When Shaun decides to take the day off and have some fun, he gets a little more action than he baa-rgained for! Shaun’s mischief accidentally causes the Farmer to be taken away from the farm, so it’s up to Shaun and the flock to travel to the Big City to rescue him. Will Shaun find the Farmer in the strange and unfamiliar world of the City before he’s lost forever? Join Shaun and the flock on their hilarious, action-packed adventure in Shaun the Sheep the Movie – only in cinemas Spring 2015.
Mark Kermode on silent cinema
Mark Kermode’s passion for the silent film and live music scene, expressed here in a video interview with the utterly brilliant New Empress team, is always heartening. I wish he would talk about a wider selection of movies though. Keep up to date with when Mark’s band the Dodge Brothers are accompanying silent films on their website here.
You can watch Mark talking some more about silents here, from the Kermode Uncut video blog in 2009:
And here he is at the Cinema Museum talking about silent movie accompaniment with Neil Brand:
A Boy and His Atom: the world’s smallest silent movie
Full disclosure: this is basically an advert for IBM. But it tickled me, because this mind-boggling short reminds us that “primitive” film-making is often the most ingenious. This is stop-motion animation at the molecular level, which sounds too convoluted for words. But in the finish, it’s quite adorable.
The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. A movie made with atoms.
You can watch a video about the making of A Boy and His Atom here.
Crosswords: a modern silent set in London
Film-maker Steve Simmons sent me this short film, his second piece of work, and how could I resist sharing it with you? It was shot in south London, in Lambeth in fact, and any hard-working city-dweller will recognise this scene. As a crossword fan, I found Crosswords‘ wry comedy compelling: its premise initially seems simple but spirals into something a touch murkier and more dangerous as events unfold. The witty combination of text and image really caught my attention and I think it’s bound to raise a smile with the readers of this blog.
Steve tells me that he was influenced by the widest possible range of movies, silent or otherwise: “Films that haved inspired me are Metropolis, Once Upon a Time in The West, City Lights, Escape from Alcatraz and I loved The Artist.”
That’s a very diverse list and you’ll notice that although Crosswords is a modern silent, it’s far from an exercise in mimicry. For one thing, it has text, but not intertitles: “I initially considered traditional title cards to display the clues and the man’s thoughts,” says Steve, “but eventually I decided it would work best if the text was incorporated into the action. I think it helps the viewer concentrate on the clues and keeps the story flowing.”
Steve would love to make another silent, he tells me, and not just a short film: “At the moment I’m writing another silent film script but it’s more of a science-fiction based story. One day, if I had the funding I would love to make a feature-length silent – that’s the dream!”
Silent film pianist Costas Fotopoulos – video interview
Costas Fotopoulos is based in London and works internationally as a concert and silent film pianist, and as a composer and arranger for film, the stage and the concert hall. He regularly provides live improvisations to silent films at BFI Southbank and he has also accompanied films at other major British venues as well as in New York, Warsaw and Italy. I interviewed him after a screening of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans in Winchmore Hill, north London, organised by Around the Corner Cinema. We also discussed his score for modern silent film The Projectionist.
Blancanieves (2012): teaser trailer
I wrote about this silent Spanish adaptation of Snow White a few weeks ago, but now we have some footage to whet our appetites. Blancanieves is a new film by Pablo Berger (Torremolinos 73) and it’s a modern silent, set in the world of bullfighting in 1920s/30s Madrid.
Maribel Verdú plays the wicked stepmother, and Macarena García our heroine, the first Snow White I have ever seen face off with an angry bull. The dwarves are bullfighters too, as you’ll see in this Spanish teaser trailer.
According to this article from El Pais, Berger was inspired by watching Eric Von Stroheim’s Greed and the film contains some references to Carl Th Dreyer and Abel Gance also. The lush music you can hear, at least some of it is composed by Alfonso Vilallonga, and yes, they do plan some live orchestral screenings of the film before its theatrical release.
Speaking of which, we only have a Spanish release date for the film so far: 28 September 2012, bang on schedule for a debut at the San Sebastian film festival.
So what do you think? I reckon this could be quite special…
The Queen’s diamond jubilee – in 1897
The union flag bunting has been hung, the coronation chicken sandwiches have been cut and the roads have mostly been closed. Like it or not, it will be hard to escape the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations this weekend. So why all the fuss? Well, monarchs rarely reach the 60-year mark, so this is probably the only diamond jubilee we’ll see – in person that is. It has happened before, when august Queen Victoria marked her 60-year anniversary in 1897. Luckily for us, the newsreel cameras were rolling that day and the BFI has released this fascinating clip of her elaborate jubilee procession. The Queen herself makes an appearance at 1:40, but my personal highlight is 1:23, when a rather wayward horse threatens, briefly, to derail the whole shebang.
This is by no means the only clip to survive, however, and if you want to see more, you can visit the Bedford Park festival in Chiswick, west London on 21 June 2012, for an audiovsual feast of material related to Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee – presented by Luke McKernan and Neil Brand:
A 90-minute show combining archive film from the BFI, photographs, live commentary with actors, and piano accompaniment, recreating the London procession on 22 June 1897 to mark the 60th year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Presented by film historian Luke McKernan, with actors Neil Brand and Liz Fost reading eyewitness accounts of Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and Queen Victoria herself.
Silent Birmingham – Street Act
A few weeks ago, I posted about a competition held by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The task set was to create a short animation, featuring a city landmark, to be accompanied by one of the pieces of silent film music recently unearthed in the archives of Birmingham Library. Now the winner, whose film will be screened at a gala event on 20 April, alongside some Charlie Chaplin classics and accompany by the CBSO, has been announced.
Gareth Hirst’s short film Street Act explores the dark and violent side of slapstick comedy, and the action takes on Birmingham’s Corporation Street. The movie uses the Indian War Dance music from the archive, to great effect – you can listen to eight more extracts here. If you want to find out more about Hirst, his animation work and his prize-winning film, you can read more on his blog. You’ll see that he put an awful lot of work into the film, including a heck of a lot of research. I understand he is a keen silent movie fan and a regular visitor to the Slapstick Festival in Bristol. Congratulations, Gareth!
Tickets for the Charlie Chaplin gala at the Symphony Hall Birmingham on 20 April 2012 are available here.
Video: Air talk about scoring A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès
Culturethèque met French duo Air during their trip to the Institut Français on 12 December 2011 for an exclusive screening of Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902), in its restored colour version. Watch this interview with the band about Air’s contribution to A Trip to the Moon and about their new album, released on 6 February.
The Artist (2011): the UK trailer
After a triumphant run at international film festivals, modern silent movie The Artist is finally coming to the UK – and here is the toe-tapping trailer. The film is set in Hollywood at the end of the silent era and stars Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo as an established and an aspiring star. James Cromwell, John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller also appear and Michel Hazanavicius directs. It’s a charming film, inspired by classic Hollywood movies – the kind of thing that gives nostalgia a good name. You can read the Silent London review of The Artist here.
The Artist opens in the West End on 30 December, then in selected cinemas 6 January and nationwide from 13 January.
Charlie Chaplin Google doodle video
The Charlie Chaplin Google doodle is more ambitious than most. It links to this cute Chaplin-esque video. It hasn’t appeared here in the UK quite yet, but look out for it tomorrow, 16 April, which is the 122nd anniversary of the actor/director’s birth. Very nice of Google to mark the occasion, but this video does make you miss the real thing. Those of you who are Chaplin fans all year round and not just on his birthday might enjoy this article from the Spectator. It’s a preview of the forthcoming Chaplin museum in Switzerland and an interview with the film-maker’s son, Michael. Definitely worth a read.
Silent London 