It’s cold, it’s dark, I’m increasingly tempted by a glass of port before bed: it must be December. And that means it’s time to gather your votes in the annual Silent London Poll. As before, we’re trying to find your favourite silent film and live music show. The only rule is that you must have seen it this year, in the UK.
To get the ballots rolling, I have consulted with some avid silent cinema fans and together we have drawn up a very long shortlist. All you need to do is to vote for the show you enjoyed the most this year, or suggest an alternative. Then tell all your friends to vote too.
The winner will be announced here on this very site, before the year is out.
I have written before on this blog about Cecil Court, a small street in London that used to be known as Flicker Alley. It’s a turning off Charing Cross Road, crammed with bookshops – and in the windows of those shops you will find circular blue labels commemorating the pioneering film businesses that established themselves here in the earliest days of the cinema.
On 13 December this year, a more permanent memorial will be unveiled, a bona fide Westminster Council blue plaque at No 27 Cecil Court, to mark the street’s importance to the British film industry. And to celebrate the plaque, there will be an afternoon of festivities. First, at 2.30pm, a screening of early films at No 5, with piano accompaniment by John Sweeney, then Christmas carols and refreshments at 4.45pm. Later in the evening, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy will be signing books in Goldsboro Books at No 23.
This blogpost has lots more information about the street, including an audio interview with two Cecil Court shopkeepers Etan Ilfeld and Tim Bryars.
You have probably noticed that Sight & Sound magazine features a regular column called Primal Screen, devoted to “The world of silent cinema”. This is undoubtedly a Good Thing, although it doesn’t appear online, which in some ways, is a Bad Thing. With absolutely no respect for this position, when I was asked to write the Primal Screen column in the January 2013 edition of Sight & Sound, I devoted my wordcount to the relationship between early cinema and the web.
Hyperlinks don’t work on the printed page, or even on the digital version of the magazine, so I thought I would help out by posting some of the links to the sites I mention in the piece here, on Silent London. In fact, Silent London is one of the sites I mention, but you already have that one bookmarked, right?
Here goes:
I can’t possibly list all of the silent cinema Tumblr and Pinterest sites out there, but I am particularly fond of Silent Intertitles, and, well Fuck Yeah Buster Keaton is an excellent example of a fan site.
Nitrateville is a fabulous forum full of wise people whose enthusiasm for silent film knows no bounds.
You all know The Bioscope I am sure, which has closed down but is still addictively browsable.
Do buy the magazine, there’s lots of silent cinema in it this month, from Neil Brand on Beggars of Life, to Nick Pinkerton on Fritz Lang, and even myself popping up again to talk about the Battleship Potemkin/Drifters box set.
Excellent news for fans of British silent cinema (that’s you). Anthony Asquith’s Underground (1928) will be released in cinemas next year. It’s a romantic and thrilling film about a love triangle that sparks jealousy, madness and terrible violence. Asquith’s direction is confident – and richly expressive.
Underground (1928)
Underground is also a fascinating portrait of 1920s London, including a public transport system that has only subtly changed in the intervening 80-odd years. Indeed this theatrical release is intended to celebrate 150 years of the Tube. The film stars Brian Aherne, Elissa Landi, Cyril McLaglen, and Norah Baring in the roles the opening intertitle describes as “ordinary workaday people whose names are just Nell, Bill, Kate and Bert”. It’s no ordinary film though, Asquith uses subjective techniques inspired by European cinema to convey his character’s emotional turmoils and to make Underground both atmospheric and suspenseful. If you’ve seen his final silent film A Cottage on Dartmoor, you’ll know just what to expect.
What is particularly special about this release is that the film has been beautifully restored by the BFI and will be accompanied by a live orchestral recording of Neil Brand’s superb score – played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. You can read more about the film here on the BFI website, or read Silent London’s interview with composer Neil Brand here. Ahead of last year’s Barbican screening of Underground, Brand wrote this fascinating piece for the Telegraph about “Silent cinema and the secrets of London”.
Underground is released on 11 January 2013, screening at the BFI Southbank and selected cinemas nationwide. A special preview screening at BFI Southbank on 10 January 2013 will be followed by a panel discussion hosted by Francine Stock, with Bryony Dixon, Ben Thompson, Simon Murphy and Neil Brand.
Us silent-film bloggers have guilty pleasures too, you know. My weaknesses are a spot of Hollywood scandal – and a good musical. A new West End show, opening at the Arts Theatre in February, promises a touch of both. The Tailor-Made Man tells the tale of William Haines, the openly gay silent film actor who defied studio pressure to marry and put an end to rumours about his love life. He stayed with his long-term boyfriend Jimmy Shields instead, and when the studios turned their back on him, he switched careers and became a popular Hollywood interior designer – working for the stars who had been his colleagues along.
THE TAILOR-MADE MAN is the true story of William Haines, the silent screen star who was fired by Louis B Mayer of MGM Studios because he was gay and refused to marry and give up his lifelong partner Jimmy Shields. The new musical will receive its world premiere at the Arts Theatre in London opening on Thursday 21 February 2013, following previews from 13 February, for a limited eight-week season ending on 6 April. It will star Faye Tozer as Marion Davies and Dylan Turner as William Haines.
In 1930, William “Billy” Haines was one of MGM’s most idolised male stars, second only to John Gilbert. On screen he was tailor-made to get the girl in the last reel. On the back lot he cruised every bit player and stagehand in sight. Billy lived openly with his lover and former stand-in Jimmy Shields. This was tolerated by the studio until rumours started to seep out into the wider world. Louis B Mayer ordered him to marry the sultry silent screen vamp Pola Negri. Billy refused and so Louis B Mayer fired him. Billy’s defiance of the studio led to his second and even more successful career as an interior designer to the stars. THE TAILOR-MADE MAN is a powerful story about Hollywood and its system and hypocrisy, but above all it is the story of Billy and Jimmy’s turbulent, passionate love affair that survived and lasted over 50 years.
So there will be silent film scandal and glamour aplenty on the West End stage next year, but the question that concerns me is, will The Tailor-Made Man be any good? Mack and Mabel or Sunset Boulevard? Dylan Turner, who will play Haines, has a string of solid West End musical credits behind him, and Faye Tozer, who will play his loyal pal and co-star Marion Davies, does too. You might also remember her from Steps. Ahem. No word yet on who will play Shields, Mayer or Negri.
Faye Tozer is … Marion Davies
The musical has been adapted by the well-regarded playwright Amy Rosenthal from Claudio Macor’s play of the same name. He’ll also be directing the show. The songs are by Adam Meggido and Duncan Walsh Atkins who worked together on the improvised musical Showstoppers. I had a dig through the archives to find some reviews of Macor’s work – and I found some positive notices about his other work, but just this, from the Independent in 1993 about the play version of The Tailor-Made Man. I’m afraid it’s not pretty.
The story of Hollywood’s first openly gay movie star, William Haines, Macor’s script is badly hampered by the writer / director’s ambivalence towards both his hero and that dirty rotten town.
Macor shows Haines cavorting arrogantly from sailor to sailor in public parks while his companion, Jimmy, waits long-sufferingly at home. He reveals how Haines was built up by the studio system only to be knocked down once his lifestyle became an embarrassment. But Macor also shows himself half in love with the glamour of the era and Haines’ unpalatable egotism.
This uncertainty of tone is compounded by a cramping set and a series of performances which almost look like parodies. Simon Tweed’s Haines can’t put a charming spin on Haines’ callous treatment of Jimmy. Marion Davies and Carole Lombard become goggling bimbettes, Louis B Mayer a muttering administrator. At least these escape the risible hatchet-job that Macor and actress Rebecca Forrow wreak on Pola Negri.
At the end, Macor uses Haines’ and Jimmy’s later, happy professional and personal relationship as interior decorators to the stars, to make a plea for Haines as a gay hero for today. But most of his scrappy production is at odds with the claim: it’s only in Hollywood that a happy ending makes everything right.
At the Cannes film festival in May 2011, one of the world’s finest movies was reborn – for the first time in nearly 100 years, we were able to see Georges Méliès’ masterpiece A Trip to the Moon (1902) in vibrant, psychedelic colour. And yet, there were those who considered the new restoration of the film to be a travesty. The hand-coloured print had been rescued from nitrate decay, cleaned and mended frame by frame – so far, so uncontroversial – and then a soundtrack had been commissioned. And we all know how contentious modern silent film scores can be.
Groovy electronic duo Air had been lauded for their movie soundtracks in the past – their music for Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides in 1999 was a big hit –with a debut album called Moon Safari the French band seemed an apt choice. But the loudest reactions at Cannes – and at other festival screenings throughout the year – were those of horror. Air’s squelchy, organic electronica and mystifying animal noises were not, it seemed, music to the ears of the cinephile crowd. “It’s a disgrace!” commented one audience member at the Pordenone showing. “Oh no!” cried another at the London film festival.
Which is why, when I finally saw the restoration of A Trip to the Moon at the Ciné Lumière in London, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the music, which is presented here on the DVD release of the restored film. It’s often bizarre, and puzzling, but so is the film, and it powers through at a clattering pace that brings a real sense of blockbuster excitement back to this science-fiction landmark. Given the controversy, there’s an argument to be made for offering an alternative piano score on the disc – but there’s also a case to be made for sticking to one’s artistic guns. It’s ridiculous to speculate on what Méliès would have thought of the soundtrack. He may well have been more mystified that with his own narration missing, no alternative commentary was written. But given the film-maker’s love of cheeky humour and absurd theatricals I think he would have enjoyed it, just a little.
Georges Méliès’ Voyage Dans la Lune (1902)
And the music remains a side issue with a film of this visual brilliance – enhanced by those deftly applied inks, which add both warm, natural skin-tones to the chorus line and lurid primary colours to the lunar landscapes and aliens on the attack. A Trip to the Moon follows the adventures of a group of bearded, chattering astronomers from their lab to the moon’s surface and back to earth again. It’s endearing dappy, from the first simple sketch of their flight, to the gory moment the rocket gouges the eye of the man in the moon, to the scientists’ battle with the selenites – umbrellas at the ready. This is live-action film, but transformed by Méliès’s ingenious in-camera editing and those gorgeous paints to be something more like a cartoon. It’s gorgeous, it’s ludicrous and it’s heaps of fun. The new restoration is a revelation, and here on DVD, it looks brilliant. I wanted to watch it again and again. So I did.
But for all its wonders, A Trip to the Moon is only a quarter of an hour long. It’s very rare to see such a short film as the sole attraction on a DVD, we’re more used to compilations of early cinema. Happily, however, there’s more to this disc than the headline act. Alongside image galleries, you’ll find a fantastic documentary by Lobster Films’ Serge Bromberg and Éric Lange called The Extraordinary Voyage. It’s an hour long, packed with talking heads from the French cinema – and well worth a watch, particularly if you are new to Méliès’ work. The documentary introduces the film-maker, his techniques and personal history, discusses the film and particularly its restoration in depth. There are also re-enactments of Méliès at work in his Paris studio, with Tom Hanks, yes, Tom Hanks playing the director. There’s also a slightly odd interlude when Hanks proposes Méliès as a pioneer not just in film-making but in space travel too.
That may be a stretch, but I remember that when I left the Ciné Lumière last year my mind was boggling that we had managed to put a man on the moon more than 40 years before we had managed to restored A Trip to the Moon back to its full-colour best.
A Trip to the Moon with accompanying documentary The Extraordinary Voyage is released on DVD in the UK from Monday 26 November 2012 by Park Circus. Buy on Amazon here.
This is a guest post for Silent London by Alex Barrett.
When Sight & Sound unveiled the results of their once-a-decade poll of The Greatest Films of All Time earlier this year, I was both relieved and disappointed to see Carl Th Dreyer’s 1928 masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc riding high at number nine: relieved that the film was there at all (it has been literally in and out of the top 10 every decade since the poll was first conducted in 1952), but disappointed that it wasn’t higher. Why? Because, quite simply, it is more deserving of the top spot than any other film.
Rightly famous for its unbridled use of close-ups, The Passion of Joan of Arc is the nearest cinema has ever come to capturing and rendering the human soul on-screen. But lest you worry that that makes it little more than a relic of pious Christianity, the emphasis here is very much on human. As the opening titles state, the film is concerned with a “simple and human” Joan, one who should be seen not as a warrior, but as “a young woman who died for her country”. Dreyer’s choice of religious subjects has led to great misunderstanding of his oeuvre and, in no uncertain terms, his interest throughout his career remained grounded in a thorough examination of human (and often female) suffering.
Here, the suffering woman is Joan of Arc, The Maid of Orléans, a young peasant girl who led an army into battle in the hope of driving the English out of 15th-century France. Believing herself to be working under the auspices of three different Saints, Joan was eventually captured, tried and burnt at the stake at the age of 19. It is her trial and execution – her Passion – that Dreyer retells, basing his film upon the transcripts of the actual trial.
Avoiding the spectacle of many historically set films, Dreyer opted instead to keep his camera focused on the faces of Joan and her assailants. Condensing, as he does, the events of Joan’s lengthy trial and execution into a single day, Dreyer approaches a unity of time, place and action – and yet, for all his painstaking historical research, the film’s fractured use of cinematic grammar elevates the action beyond the physical world and into a metaphysical realm. The sparseness of the film’s sets eliminate depth, while the constant close-ups and broken eye-lines render the space unimportant (and, to an extent, unintelligible). Joan and her suffering are all that matter, all we must understand. The historical context and politics are secondary; first and foremost is a scared, tormented young girl. Dreyer may have denied that his film belonged to the avant-garde, but this is not conventional film-making: every aspect, from the architecture to the camera movements, from the rhythm to the compositions, conspires to contribute to Joan’s assault. Even now, after more than 80 years, Dreyer’s film is as fresh and as powerful as the year it was made: this is form and content synthesising at the highest level. And, while it would be a crime not to comment on the uniformly superb performances, to do so would be to undermine the purity of the film’s perfection. Falconetti does not play Joan. She is Joan. And Joan, for now and for evermore, is Falconetti.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
With this all said, then, it seems like something of a crime that the film has never been released on DVD in the UK (until now). When Masters of Cinema announced that it would be releasing this new restoration of the film on Blu-Ray and DVD, expectation and anticipation began to flutter. But there was also some concern about the fact that the new release would not feature Richard Einhorn’s beloved score,Voices of Light, found on the Criterion Collection’s Region 1 DVD. So, how do the two scores offered by Masters of Cinema compare?
Thankfully, Mie Yanashita’s piano score turns out to be something of a marvel. Echoing the rich simplicity of the film itself, Yanashita focuses on the film’s tenderness, allowing moments such as the shedding of Joan’s first tear a new beauty. Listening to this music with the breathtaking 20fps restoration was like seeing the film again for the very first time (a feeling no doubt cultivated by the insertion of the original Danish intertitles and their new English translation). There is a startling splendour to the restoration, and while the 24fps version may feel more familiar, moments there slipped over take on new resonances here, while the slower pacing allows a fuller savouring of the images in all their glorious detail. As the film progresses and the tension mounts, Yanashita isn’t afraid to pick up the drama, yet still manages to avoid the occasional heavy-handedness that marred Utley and Gregory’s recent score. While it’s perhaps true that Yanashita’s score never reaches the dizzying heights of Einhorn’s, it’s a moving and graceful accompaniment nonetheless.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Loren Connors’ tedious and barbaric soundtrack to the 24fps version, which somehow manages to do the impossible and actually take the life out of the film. Perhaps it will appeal to some, but I found it insensitive and intrusive, and for me it detracted from the viewing experience far more than it added to it. I would certainly urge first-time viewers of the film to steer well clear.
Carl Th Dreyer
It should be noted, of course, that Dreyer expressed a preference for the film to be viewed silent, and Masters of Cinema has loyally made this the default option for playback, so in some respects the choice of soundtracks is irrelevant. However, being given the choice of two scores (or three if you count the silence) and two playback speeds makes this a very special package indeed.
Completing the package is another, alternative version of the film: the complete ‘Lo Duca’ cut. When the original camera negative was thought lost to a lab fire, Dreyer reassembled the film using alternative takes … only for this new version to be lost to a second fire. However, in the 1950s the French film historian Joseph-Marie Lo Duca stumbled across a print of Dreyer’s second version. After recutting the film, Lo Duca put his version into circulation, despite Dreyer’s disapproval. Generally considered a bastardisation of Dreyer’s original vision, the Lo Duca version of the film has been relegated to the status of curiosity ever since the miraculous discovery of Dreyer’s first version in the closet of a Norwegian mental hospital in the 1980s. Yet, for those with a passion for Joan, it’s a fascinating alternative version – an imperfect version of a perfect film. The first thing that struck me about it was the fact that the actual experience of watching it is nowhere near as horrendous as one would expect, given the interference. Additions such as an opening voiceover detailing the historical background may go against the very fabric of Dreyer’s intentions, but his genius still shines through. What’s more, a comparison of the Lo Duca and original versions teaches us much about Dreyer’s film-making choices.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Such a comparison is made easier by the excellent essay Two Passions – One Film? by the preeminent Dreyer scholar Casper Tybjerg, found in the accompanying 100-page booklet. Alongside Tybjerg’s essay are pieces by Chris Marker, André Bazin, Antonin Artaud, Luis Buñuel, HD, and Dreyer himself. But the bulk of the booklet is formed by a chapter from Jean and Dale D Drum’s Dreyer biography My Only Great Passion, which, in detailing the film’s production, puts lie to the idea of Dreyer as a cruel despotic director who tortured Falconetti’s performance out of her (written with approval and assistance from Dreyer, My Only Great Passion remains the definitive Dreyer biography).
Although the excellent booklet goes a long way towards making up for it, it’s a shame that no audio commentary was included in the package (especially given Tybjerg’s excellent commentary on the Criterion DVD). However, while Tybjerg’s commentary and Einhorn’s Voices of Light mean you shouldn’t throw away your Criterion disc just yet, it’s undeniable that the new restoration and the choice of versions take the Masters of Cinema release to the next level. This is an essential purchase in every conceivable way.
This is a guest post for Silent London by Robyn Ludwig.
The British Animation Showcase at the 2012 London International Animation Festival screens this Thursday evening. Yet 113 years before these contemporary animators would bring their cartoon characters to life and to audiences, St. Albans-born Arthur Melbourne-Cooper (1874–1961) began making primitive stop-motion films, arguably the first and oldest surviving animations.
Trained by his father in photography, Melbourne-Cooper began his career in 1892 as an assistant to Birt Acres, another cinematic forerunner who has been credited as the first person to take 35mm film in Britain. Melbourne-Cooper was a cameraman on a number of Acres’ newsreels and trick films, until 1899, when he directed his first stop-motion animated short, Matches: An Appeal.
The film is a highly inventive advertorial piece, both a fundraising appeal and an advertisement for Bryant & May matchsticks. Using matches jointed by wire and captured frame by frame, Matches: An Appeal features a sprite little stick figure writing a propagandistic message on a wall, asking the audience to donate one guinea to send a free box of matches to a British soldier fighting overseas.
But with the original 35mm reel long lost, the release date of the film remains a contentious issue. Melbourne-Cooper, along with his descendants, insisted that the film dated to the beginning of the Second Anglo-Boer War, ahead of J. Stuart Blackton’s vanguard animation The Enchanted Drawing of 1900. Researchers, however, have argued that Matches was released in 1915, as an appeal for the First World War. Film historian Denis Gifford adds to the confusion by suggesting: “Recent research sets it as produced in the Great War of 1914. This may, however, be a reissue as the setting of this film is identical with Animated Matches (1908).”
Debate over provenance also surrounds Animated Matches Playing Cricket (1899) and Dolly’s Toys (1901). The latter is a live-action and stop-motion puppet animation, credited variously to lightening sketch artist and trick filmmaker Walter R Booth (1869-1938) or to stage hypnotist and filmmaker George Albert Smith (186-1959). Again Gifford seems uncertain, noting that “the plot is so similar to many later films made by Arthur Cooper that it could be his first production” or conversely, that “it could be another of … Booth’s regular trick films made at… Animatographe Studio”.
Less controversy over authorship surrounds Melbourne-Cooper’s Dreams of Toyland (1908) though the film is often listed as A Dream of Toyland (1907). In Dreams, a little boy falls asleep and his toys come to life, a surreal but spasmodically animated fantasy with a confounding array of playthings. The film, undeniably, replicates the motif from Dolly’s Toys, only this time with a male protagonist, and Melbourne-Cooper would repeatedly revisit these storylines, themes, characters and techniques in such films as The Enchanted Toymaker (1904), The Fairy Godmother (1906), In the Land of Nod (1908), The Toymaker’s Dream (1910) and Road Hogs in Toyland (1911).
Clearly Melbourne-Cooper was a prolific animator, in the nascent years of cinema to the outbreak of war in 1914, producing dozens of short films combining stop-motion and live-action. Regrettably he has become a dubious footnote in silent animation history, and has been consigned to an obscurity shared with Walter Booth, George Smith, Anson Dyer and other British animators of the era.
Animated Matches Playing Cricket, Matches: An Appeal, Dreams of Toyland and Road Hogs in Toyland can be viewed online at the East Anglian Film Archive.
References
Gifford, Denis. British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography. Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Inc., 1988.
Robyn Ludwig holds a Master of Film and Literature from the University of York, U.K., and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her current research interest is animation from the silent film era. In addition, she has been an administrator in the charitable arts and culture sector for the past ten years, a fundraising consultant for film festivals, and a television critic for the Vancouver Observer.
Who needs to wait for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit? Fritz Lang’s five-hour, two-part Die Nibelungen (1924) is the king of all fantasy epics. Burning palaces, bloody fight scenes, dragons, cloaks of invisibility – this beast has it all, and it’s breathtakingly beautiful as well.
Available for the first time ever on home video, Die Nibelungen still has the power to take your breath away, so we can only imagine how imposing this magnificent saga was for audiences in the 1920s. The first part is called Siegfried and follows our eponymous hero’s outlandish adventures. Early on, he slays a dragon, then bathes in its blood, rendering himself impervious to harm (about from a small patch on his back that was covered by a falling leaf and failed to absorb the blood). Thus super-charged, Siegfried sets about becoming a king of kings, rich beyond compare having won the Nibelungen’s wealth, but doomed, equally, because the treasure is cursed, you see … The second part, called Kriemhild’s Revenge, features his (spoiler) widow seeking vengeance for her husband’s death.
Visually, Die Nibelungen is consistently mind-blowing. The camera is largely static, but the vast, intricately decorated sets, shot from extreme perspectives and filled with massive crowds in extravagant costumes will throw you into a trance. These films are never dull to look at, and sometimes, as when the light falls in elegant slivers through the forest on to Siegried and his horse, or the northern lights dance above Queen Brunhild’s castle, they are simply exquisite. If you’ve seen Metropolis, that will give you some idea of the boldness, and magnitude of Lang’s vision here. This is a strangely modernised, stylised update of the story’s Wagnerian sources, and because it is all shot on sets rather than location (even the forests), Die Nibelungen looks like a fantastical stage play magicked into three-dimensions. And the special effects are meticulously realised, from the mechanical dragon to a “wipe” superimposition that turns the treasure-bearing dwarfs to silently screaming stone. The only time you’ll lose concentration is when you’ll start wondering: “How did they do they that?”
What you see on these discs is the end result of a restoration process bringing together several different camera negatives, fixing damage and replacing missing title cards. This release also replicates the golden tinting thought to have characterised the films’ original release, which soaks lushly into Carl Hoffmann’s high-contrast Expressionist photography (there’s a detailed note on the tinting in the booklet that accompanies the discs). The Blu-Ray HD transfer is excellent, so you’ll want to watch this on the best, biggest screen you can get your hands in and let yourself be swept away by all its glory. Turn up the sound too: frequent Lang-collaborator Gottfried Huppertz’s original orchestral score is available here in stereo or 5.1 mixes and nothing less bombastic or densely textured would do.
That said, it’s an awful lot to swallow in one sitting, and the acting here is of the chest-clutching, hair-pulling grand style. Paul Richter as Siegfried is a notable offender. And the scene in the first film in which Siegfried uses his magic to help his ally “subdue” his wife in the bedroom is unpleasant to modern eyes for an entirely different reason. The illuminated Gothic intertitles are very grand, but the English subtitles are sometimes hard to read because they have been translated so literally: “Invincible be he who is the dragon-slayer!” The second feature also suffers from having a less well-structured, eventful plot than the first, too, relying on endless fight scenes between the noble Burgundians and feral Huns rather than Siegfried‘s gorgeous flights of fancy. Don’t despair though: its flaming finale, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge’s grotesque Attila, are well worth putting in the hours for.
Die Nibelungen (1924)
These are two big, big films, with lots to impart to us about Lang’s film-making style, about German nationalism and myth-making in the 1920s (they are dedicated “to the German people”), and more besides. So it’s valuable that this release comes with one of Masters of Cinema’s characteristically thorough booklets, containing essays from Lotte Eisner and Tom Gunning, some words from the director and a note from British film legend Michael Powell, as well a Geoffrey O’Brien poem, all of which will help you to explore and appreciate Die Nibelungen‘s strengths. There’s also a German-language (with subtitles) documentary, The Heritage of Die Nibelungen, which will bring home to you just how ambitious these films are, and also, what a gruelling experience it was for the actors.
Die Nibelungen will demand your time and attention both – but it is terrifically enjoyable, exciting stuff. This is a hugely welcome and well-considered release of an important epic.
This is a guest post for Silent London by Chris Edwards, who writes the Silent Volume blog.
Being a silent film fan can marginalise you. Recently, I went to a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. Afterward, the cinephiles were discussing Hitch films they’d seen. “What do you think of the Hitchcock 9?” I asked them. “The Lodger’s pretty good.”
Crickets.
It’s better among fellow fans. We all skirt the periphery together. We talk about the great silent classics, arguing their places in the canon; we discuss the latest restoration, the newest score, the anticipated Criterion release date, or what a crime it is that there isn’t one. We hear about an obscure gem, and then can’t wait to see it.
But it is possible to be marginalised even by silent film aficionados. I have felt it. Because, while I love all silent film, I hold a particular affection for the very earliest stuff: films made from the late-19th century to about 1913 or so. Films that many silent films fans have no use for.
Well, that’s harsh. And it’s not quite what I mean. Many silent film fans do love these old curios; it’s just that few of us love them for their artistic merit.
Rarely do we hear anyone discuss a director from this period as an artist, or the works themselves as having any profundity. Brief, stiff, and broadly acted, these ancient movies are valued primarily as museum pieces. They’re notches on a scale of development from proto-film experiments through to “modern” film as we have come to recognise it. They’re assessed in terms of what they lack. And I’m telling you, we’re missing out.
Why do I think that? Because some of these films have left me with ideas to ponder. Not just ideas about the history of film or the paucity of technique early filmmakers possessed, but real ideas. Rarely do they convey these concepts literally. Rather, they express them through their unique mashing up of the abstract and the verisimilar – the theatrical and the cinematic, the fake and the real – whatever you want to call it. They say things in their own way.
I don’t have space to describe too many examples. But I will tell you about some of the features of these films which intrigue me. Though they’re often dismissed as weaknesses, these features can also, in the hands of an artist, become the means by which early films convey meaning.
One feature is flatness. Much as a stage can only push back so far, these films, too, exist mostly in a middle distance. Vistas are, for the most part, backdrops, and not very convincing ones. Almost all shots are medium shots. This flatness is coupled with a strong sense of boundaries—top and bottom, and especially stage-right and -left. This is your space, viewer.
(Vintage gamers will see a natural comparison here to early video games. Much as films evolved from theatre, video games have evolved from board games and pinball. The games of the late 1970s to early 1980s retained the primacy of the board or static plane. There was much action in games such Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Berzerk, and Asteroids, but your avatar typically stayed in that box.)
Yes, the result feels old-fashioned. But flatness and boundaries aren’t simply limitations. They can create very interesting effects. When you’re conscious of a scene as a flat plane with defined boundaries, and the actors are somewhat depersonalised by medium shots, you start looking at set, action, and boundaries as a unified object. As you would look at a painting.
I was struck by this last year while watching A Christmas Accident (1912): a holiday parable about two families (one poor and giving, the other wealthy and miserly) sharing a duplex. I blogged about it:
Director Bannister Merwin pays close attention to the two halves of his frame … he splits the lower façade of the house exactly in two, dividing the centre of the frame with a porch pillar standing between the two front doors. The rear of the house has almost-identical doors as well, with a tall railing spindle marking the midpoint between them. Gilton [the miser] almost never crosses the midpoint … We’re not to see the halves of the house as parts of a literal object, but rather, as the world of sin and the world of righteousness; compartmentalised, but close.
The pillar and spindle were not only part of the scene, but part of the frame, separating the characters visually to make Merwin’s point. In this way, A Christmas Accident resembles a medieval painting more than a modern film.
You can do a lot with a good set. And you’ll typically do more if you don’t have the luxury of multiple camera angles, close-ups and complex tricks.
Georges Méliès’ Voyage Dans la Lune (1902)
In terms of technical excellence and versatility, Georges Méliès’ sets have probably never been equalled. They’re seamless collections of pieces, each sliding into frame, perfectly timed, layer upon layer. They embed Méliès’ often-frantic actors in a fantastical world, pulsing with action. This world bears no more resemblance to reality than a comic strip does, mind you. But that’s a good thing.
Early directors’ near-indifference to aesthetic consistency is what I love most about them. I adore scenes of time-pressed people consulting clocks with painted-on hands; struggling to lift two-dimensional vases, and on and on. On stage, this kind of thing is a practical necessity, but in a film, it’s a choice.
It’s also a declaration of faith in us, as viewers. We’re people capable of merging these disparate levels of reality into one. Anyway, what’s so “real” about the environments we wander through every day – or the ones we see in most modern, live-action movies? Art and trickery is everywhere. These early films were just blunter about showing it.
The most powerful example of this I’ve seen occurs in His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914). His Majesty is not a well-respected film; in part, I think, because it was made in an era when true cinematography was beginning to develop. But it is nevertheless a remarkable thing. Particularly for this scene:
[Mombi the witch] captures Gloria [niece of the King of Oz] and ties her to pillar. With an incantation she summons three other witches … and combines their powers with her own to create a cauldron-full of magic potion. Then … Mombi ladles the stuff over Gloria’s blouse. Mombi now cups her empty hand just below Gloria’s breasts. A heart (a stuffed heart in the shape of a real one) appears in her hand, and ices over. The now-frozen heart disappears, and Gloria’s capacity for love goes with it.
Wikipedia describes Mombi “pulling out her heart,” but that’s wrong. Nothing is pulled from Gloria’s chest.
Filmed in close-up, this scene represents a total dismissal of the boundary between literal and abstract – they co-exist in one cinematic reality, with limitless story-telling potential. I wish more films were like this. The closest modern comparison I can think of would be Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), but even in that case, the human actors acknowledge the physical differences between themselves and the Toons. In His Majesty, the differences are forgotten.
Look at these old, old films, and you can see the potential of the medium. Every hesitant movement of the camera inward, every subtle gesture chosen by an actor, pointed the way forward. But if you see these movies only as first steps to something truly great, you’ll be missing a lot. I say some of them are truly great on their own – in their era, in ours, and in the future.
A folk romance that stumbles into melodrama, an adaptation of a blockbusting novel that is now all-but forgotten, The Manxman may seem to be far more of its time than ours. But the London film festival’s archive gala screening of this neglected Hitchcock film was having none of that. The red carpet was rolled out in Leicester Square and the crowds in the Empire cinema foyer were stocking up on nachos and popcorn before taking their seat. OK, so some of assembled throng were clutching tickets for Dredd or Madagascar 3, but Screen One was devoted to a lush, heartbreaking night of silent cinema.
And the venue was oddly appropriate. Back in its music-hall days, the Empire was the first London venue to run a paid-for programme of films. It’s a long journey from the Lumiéres’ actualities to the gorgeousness of The Manxman – arguably they have more in common with the 3D thrills on offer in the neighbouring screens – but it’s a happy connection to make.
The Manxman was Hitchcock’s final “pure” silent – he was to shoot his next film Blackmail in both silent and sound versions – and the romance of the film’s story is augmented by the thought that the director was leaving his beloved silent cinema days behind him. Perhaps that is why the film is so unashamedly picturesque. The Cornish coast that doubles for the story’s Manx setting is imposing, but gorgeous. Hungarian star Anny Ondra is filmed as a tiny silhouette in front of sun-punctured cloud, skipping down vertiginous cliffs or strolling with her lover in dappled woods – and the film begins and ends with a view of fishing boats in the harbour. These images, like the film itself, combine prettiness with an air of intangible, elemental danger, and it’s this that makes The Manxman such a gripping watch.
Because this movie can be tough too: when a crisis arrives, a disconcerting cut from a body falling into water to a pen plunging into an inkwell is as violent as Hitchcock at his familiarly cold-hearted best. On this screen, and with the benefit of the BFI’s new gleaming restoration, it looked spectacular.
The Manxman (1929)
Ondra plays Kate, the daughter of the local pub landlord (a brilliantly grim-faced turn by Randle Ayrton). Best pals daft-but-dishy Pete, a fisherman (Carl Brisson), and Philip, an ambitious lawyer (Malcolm Keen), are each in love with Kate, but the latter is playing his cards close to his chest. In an excruciatingly twisted balcony scene, Pete coaxes Kate into an engagement, a promise to wait for him while he goes overseas to make his fortune. At first Kate doesn’t take him seriously, and it’s not clear which of the men – the one proposing or the faithful chum who is (literally) supporting him – is causing her to simper and pout. However it was extracted, it’s a rash promise to make, and as we’ll see, it will have terrible implications. Needless to say, while the cat is away, Kate strays, but what happens next is horrific, and not so easy to predict.
We have heard a few silent film scores recently (in this Hitchcock season no less) that have seemed to smooth out, or trample over the nuances of each scene. Not so here. Stephen Horne‘s rich score for The Manxman is alert to each turn of conversation, each double-meaning, furtive glance or blush. It’s a piece that is always a pleasure to listen to, but unafraid to sacrifice its melody to the drama when needed. This is crucial for The Manxman, where the plot hinges on whispered revelations, changes of heart and emotionally gruesome details – Kate’s face when her fiancé appoints his friend best man at their wedding, or she cuts her hand on their cake. The tempo slackens forebodingly when mid-speech, Phil is distracted by the sight of Pete and Kate together and the music follows the lead of Hitchcock’s stormy lighting effects, colouring each scene with shades of what is yet to happen. While the strings and piano offer folk melodies, there’s often a rumbling bass drum warning of impending disaster and even, at one crucial point, a very assertive oboe. The flute solo when Pete visits Phil towards the end of the film is particularly poignant; the ensemble together replicating the texture of nagging voices in the final scene especially cruel.
No one will argue that The Manxman is Hitchcock’s finest hour, the acting from the two male leads is often very weak, and the storyline offers only emotional trauma rather than his familiar bloody shocks. Despite those reservations, it is a sharply beautiful film and Anny Ondra’s sleepy-eyed romantic fool gives us a great Hitchcock Blonde before icy Grace Kelly was even born. The joy for us now is that Horne’s score gives The Manxman its best possible chance to shine, not just following but enhancing our pleasure in watching Hitchcock toy with this doomed love triangle.
Stephen Horne’s score for The Manxman was performed by Stephen Horne (piano/accordion/flute), Jennifer Bennett (fiddle/viola), Joby Burgess (percussion), Janey Miller (oboe/oboe d’Amore) and Ruth Wall (lever harp/wire harp).
The Pathology Museum at St Bartholomew’s Hospital is a fascinating place – and one of London’s best-kept secrets. Access to the collections is currently by appointment only, but if you want to peruse the specimen jars of an evening, while enjoying a glass of wine and learning a little something, you should look out for their lecture and seminar events. Topics covered so far range from the history of tattoos to Marilyn Monroe – and this November, silent cinema.
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
I will be speaking at the Museum on 21 November, about the history of silent cinema generally, and also, inspired by the surroundings, some of the more bizarre bodies on silent film. There will be drinks, freshly made popcorn, film clips and an opportunity to ask questions after the talk.
Do come along, admission costs just £6 a person and we’re hoping that this will be the first of many silent cinema events at the museum.
Cut! takes place at the Pathology Museum, Robin Brook Centre, West Smithfield, London EC1A 7BE on 21 November 2012. Doors will open at 6.30pm for a 7pm start. To book a ticket and find out more, follow this link. The museum’s Time Out listing is here.
The UK Jewish film festival features screenings across the country from 1-18 November, but we’re especially lucky in London as we will be able to see Edward Sloman’s 1925 silent classic His People, with a new improvised score. The film is set in Manhattan and film historian Tom Gunning praised it, saying that: “few silent films give so thorough a picture of Jewish home life in the American ghetto”.
This is an exciting chance to see the work of a director whose work Kevin Bownlow described as: “remarkable … with a very American smoothness of narrative”. Unfortunately, very many of Sloman’s pictures are now lost, but His People was his biggest commercial success, taking millions at the box office on its original release. It also stars Rudolph Schildkraut, one of the director’s favourite actors: “Whatever you planned with Schildkraut always came off – sometimes even better than you’d dreamed it. Rudolph Schildkraut was one of the great actors of his era,” he told Brownlow in The Parade’s Gone By.
A rare opportunity to see one of the most evocative films of the 1920s with a new, live score. The sights and smells of New York’s bustling immigrant Jewish Lower East Side have seldom been captured better than in this sparkling tale of a generational clash of cultures. The two sons of a Jewish migrant family opt for different paths in life and love, but as the story progresses, assumptions about good and bad are soon firmly challenged.
A classic morality tale with a bold, contemporary cinematic feel, accompanied by an improvised live soundtrack from Sophie Solomon, (violinist and artistic director of the Jewish Music Institute), Quentin Collins (trumpet), Ian Watson (accordion) and Grant Windsor (piano).
To win a pair of tickets to see His People at the Barbican, just send the answer to this question to silentlondontickets@gmail.com by noon on Friday 9 November. The winner will be chosen at random from the correct entries.
His People director Edward Sloman was born in Britain – but in which city?
This is a guest post for Silent London by Lucie Dutton. Lucie is currently researching a PhD thesis on Maurice Elvey’s early career. This post contains plot spoilers.
Lights! Fairyland! Romance!
This intertitle from Maurice Elvey’s 1927 version of Hindle Wakes might lead an audience to think that the film is just enjoyable froth; a pleasant way of spending a couple of hours but not much more. In truth, Hindle Wakes is far better summarised by another of its intertitles: “Romance is all very well … but marriage would be a failure.”
Hindle Wakes, from the play by Stanley Houghton, is one of the finest works to come out of the British film industry of the late 1920s. It explores the social and moral pressures faced by a young woman who decides to assert her own sexual and feminist identity. During Wakes Week, mill worker Fanny Hawthorne takes a trip to Blackpool and embarks on an affair with Allan Jeffcote, the son of the mill owner. Fanny and Allan start off being slightly awkward when left alone together at the Pleasure Beach, but develop an ever-increasing ease with one another, until they kiss at the Tower Ballroom. The way the film is constructed leads the audience into thinking it is a conventional love story – but appearances are deceptive.
Estelle Brody
The affair is discovered and Fanny’s and Allan’s parents put pressure on the pair to marry. Fanny, however has other ideas – much to Allan’s consternation. She tells Allan: “I’m a woman, and I was your little fancy – you’re a man and you were my little fancy. Don’t you understand?” She determines to make her own way – without apology – rather than being “given away with a pound of tea, like.”
Fanny’s attitude is so appalling to her mother (Marie Ault at her most disapproving) that Fanny has to leave the family home. Watched by a street full of neighbours and her heartbroken father (Elvey regular Humberstone Wright) Fanny refuses to be shamed by her “little fancy” but retains her dignity: “I’m a Lancashire lass and so long as there are spinning mills in Lancashire I can earn enough to keep myself respectable.” And she does – the film ends with her working in the mill and agreeing that her loyal friend and admirer Alf may take her to the pictures that evening. This is a celebration of practical working-class feminism. It is Fanny’s freedom as a worker – her freedom to seek work anywhere and her confidence that she will find it – that enables her to maintain her own integrity.
Director Maurice Elvey admired Stanley Houghton’s original play greatly. He told Denis Gifford that he thought it was “the finest English play ever written … a really great play; it is really about something.” (The Denis Gifford collection of taped interviews with leading figures from the British film industry is held by the BFI.) He filmed it twice – once in 1917, with Colette O’Niel and Hayford Hobbs (who recently wowed Pordenone audiences as Walter Gay in Elvey’s Dombey and Son); and again in 1927 working closely with his colleague Victor Saville, starring Estelle Brody and John Stuart. Sadly, the 1917 version no longer exists – if it did, it would provide us with great scope for analysing Elvey’s development as a director. We would also be able to compare the performances of the great Norman McKinnel, who played mill owner Nat Jeffcote in both versions.
While Hindle Wakes boasts many fine performances, it is Estelle Brody who dominates the screen. Her examination of her face in the mirror to see whether it has changed following an off-screen sexual encounter with Allan is one of the best examples of acting in British silent cinema.
Hindle Wakes (1927)
Brody was an American actor who worked with Elvey in the UK between 1926-28. Such was the resentment of the dominance of the American film industry at that time, publicists said that she was Canadian. Her obituary (by Kevin Brownlow) describes Brody and other residents of her retirement home watching Hindle Wakes:
“She was glued to the screen throughout. Apart from one or two who didn’t stay the course, all were transfixed. Afterwards, she was mobbed by the others congratulating her. Throughout the screening, the viewers, including some nuns, were constantly comparing the frail old lady in her wheelchair to the image on the screen with fascination and admiration.”
As well as strong performances, the film has some fine locations. Elvey was an early expert in location shooting, starting with his 1913 film, Maria Marten. For Hindle Wakes, he filmed in the Monton Mill in Manchester, in Eccles, at various Blackpool locations, and overlooking the sea at Llandudno. To ensure that the visiting actors appeared authentic in the mill scenes, the foreman advised them how to handle cotton bobbins and machinery.
Elvey, who had a reputation for working quickly and efficiently, shot 51 scenes at the Pleasure Beach and Tower Ballroom at Blackpool in 10 hours over the course of one day. The Blackpool scenes are one of the highlights of the film – with shots taken up Blackpool Tower, and on the Pleasure Beach Helter Skelter and Big Dipper. In the Tower Ballroom, Elvey filmed an ambitious dance sequence, which led to the film being advertised In Blackpool as “starring Estelle Brody and 5,000 local artistes”.
Hindle Wakes novelisation released to accompany the film
The film was well received on its release – Caroline Lejeune, writing in The Guardian (5 February, 1927) called it “the best advocate we have yet seen for the promulgation of British films” and said that Elvey had “made time and space and madness whirl before us on the screen … Elvey has successfully borrowed from the Germans what is apt to his own needs, shaped it to his hand, and made it for the time being his own.” She went on to name it one of her seven best films of the year (31 December, 1927). For Kinematograph Weekly (10 February, 1927), Lionel Collier said that Elvey, with his colleague Victor Saville, had “produced the best picture he has ever made, and an outstanding British triumph.” Even Variety – not known for its praise of British cinema – felt that it was a film that “did more to establish the birth of the British industry than any other” (13 October 1931).
We are privileged that in 2012 we are still able to see Hindle Wakes, 85 years after Elvey, Estelle Brody and John Stuart took their trip to Blackpool. It remains an important part of our cinematic and cultural history and comes highly recommended.
Lucie Dutton
Hindle Wakes screens at the West London Trade Union Club on Saturday 20 October. Read more here.
You may feel weary at the prospect of another love-letter to the silent era. You may feel fatigued by the thought of another Snow White movie. Wait, though – nothing should deter you from seeking out this intriguing, gorgeous film. Director Pablo Berger describes his Blancanieves as a “homage to European silent cinema”, but happily, it has the confidence to wear its influences lightly and transform them into something new, magical and utterly distinctive.
Blancanieves is a sharp, heady cocktail of fairytales, Spanish iconography and silent cinema: a black-and-white film with gorgeous musical accompaniment that tells the story of Carmen, whose matador father remarries after her flamenco dancer mother dies in childbirth. But if you’re expecting a straight 1920s-set adaptation of Snow White, you will be wrongfooted right to the bittersweet end. When we finally encounter the dwarves, we find they’re bullfighters, they’re not all sweet, and there aren’t quite seven of them. A celebrity magazine takes the place of a magic mirror, the wicked stepmother indulges in S&M with her chauffeur and the young heroine’s best friend is a neckerchief-wearing rooster called Pépé.
Maribel Verdú in Blancanieves (2012)
Carmen is no fairytale princess either, but in both her younger (Sofía Oria) and older (Macarena Garciá) incarnations, she is a serious, lonely young woman on a tragic path – both actresses share intense, dark eyes, which Berger makes the utmost of. Maribel Verdú turns in a wickedly funny pantomime performance as her scheming stepmother – although it often feels as if she is in a different, more histrionic, film to everyone else – and Daniel Giménez Cacho is heartbreaking as the destroyed father. Plaudits must also go to the rooster, or rather his handler. There may never have been a cuter cockerel in the cinema.
So why is Blancanieves a silent film? Perhaps it’s because in this version the girl’s parents are both wordless performers, in old-fashioned artforms. Her grandmother teaches her to dance, and her first encounter with bullfighting is via the flickering images of a praxinoscope. Berger also says he was inspired by a screening of Greed with Carl Davis’s orchestral score, and by silent film-makers including Sjöstrom, Herbier, Murnau and our own Anthony Asquith. Whatever the cause, it’s an artistic choice that pays dividends.
Sofía Oria in Blancanieves (2012)
This is no pastiche, although I will admit I could have lived without the Instagram-style rough edge to the Academy frame, a bafflingly naff decision considering the film’s visual achivements: sumptuous photography, and impressionistic editing. There’s so much here that recalls the silent era – a clatter of flashcuts, the rustic faces in the crowd, superimpositions, irises and a restrained number of intertitles – but it feels modern too, with lovely soft light washing over the interiors and nimble, intimate handheld camerawork. There’s nothing in Blancanieves’ exquisite cinematography that could not have been achieved in the 1920s, but its strength is that it never feels anachronistic or nostalgic. And those sumptuous images tell the story too, as when Carmen’s first-communion dress is plunged into a tub of black dye, or she sees Pépé’s face hovering on her dinner plate.
With such riches at his disposal, I almost wish Berger had made a more serious film than this twisted fairytale, which occasionally veers into camp. Blancanieves is a strange piece of work, but a precious one, however, so even if it lacks ambition, its integrity and beauty are to be treasured.
Blancanieves screens as part of the London film festival at the ICA on 18 October. You can book tickets here.
Cléo de Mérode dances Photograph: Cinémathèque française / Gaumont Pathé Archives, Paris
This is a guest post for Silent London by Neil Brand.
Among the gorgeously designed pavilions on the banks of the Seine at the Paris Exposition of 1900 was a small, ornate theatre called the Phono-Cinéma-Théatre, which contained a screen and a small musical ensemble. Across the screen moved the greatest actors, dancers, mimes and clowns of the day – they spoke, they sang, they moved to music provided by musicians playing live and they were often in exquisite, hand-tinted colour. Five years after the birth of cinema, film and recorded sound brought France’s finest theatrical artists to mechanical life for the lucky generation of fin-de-siècle Paris. It was ephemera among ephemera, Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters pulled aside to reveal the artists that inspired him, and, of course, not made to last – half a century of progress and war on an industrial scale would sweep away those films and the spirit of The Banquet Years, as well as millions of those lucky or wealthy enough to experience them, leaving the rest of us with just the books, the posters, a few photos … until last week.
Phono-Cinéma-Théatre poster. Photograph: David Robinson Collection
On Thursday last the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy, showed 23 surviving films of the 41 originally shot, most complete with their hand-colouring, many with their synchronised sound, almost all accompanied live by a small ensemble directed and arranged by John Sweeney. John had spent months finding as much of the original music to the dances and songs as possible, then rehearsed synchronising them to the pre-recorded singing and dancers’ steps, which were set in stone over a hundred years ago – the result was an astounding time-bridge that placed us all more viscerally in the Paris Exposition auditorium than any sound and image record could have done – the artists were now performing for us, their movements driven by John’s piano, their eyes returning our gaze and their efforts aimed at pleasing us.
It was all so relaxed – Little Tich missed a catch with his hat but just picked it up and carried on as if nothing had happened, the odd dance step was fumbled, but unlike the stiff subjects of so much still photography of the time, our performers did what they did for the camera just as they had done on stage for years (in some cases decades), blissfully uncaring of giving a “definitive” performance or of the legacy of our critical response from an unimaginable distance of posterity.
Sarah Bernhardt fought Hamlet’s duel beautifully, despite her 56 years, and with the addition of Frank Bockius’s uncannily precise sword clashes on triangle; Emilio Cossira sang Romeo’s aria from Gounod’s opera silently, his voice reproduced by Romano Todesco’s single notes on accordion, the intent of feeling vibrant in his features and his genial return for a second bow – Mariette Sully wrung genuine comedy out of singing and dancing “La Poupée” and Cléo de Mérode, La Grande Horizontale to many of the crowned heads of Europe, danced in the way that had turned those heads in the first place.
Sarah Bernhardt in Hamlet Photograph: Cinémathèque Française/Gaumont Pathé Archives, Paris
We found out what made 1900 audiences laugh, thanks to Jules Moy’s anarchic dancing master and Polin’s Troupier Pompette singing about, among other things, stroking a lady’s leg, wondering at the lack of resistance and, on raising her skirt, realising he is touching up the table leg. The entire 90-minute show was a triumph of 1900 and 2012 technology – I have worked with early film for 30 years, and never have I felt so privileged to see these wonders more clearly than any generation before, even the one for which they were intended.
Little Tich Photograph: Cinémathèque Française/Gaumont Pathé Archives, Paris
Above all, I now feel I understand turn-of-the-century Paris with a profundity that was impossible before last Thursday night – its potency, its sexuality, within which the highest arts of performance were also the most immediately sensual and arresting, its gaiety and love of sensation, the vibrancy and diversity of its entertainments. The combined efforts of the Cinémathèque Française, Gaumont, Lobster Films, Olivier Auboin-Vermorel and the historical and aesthetic energy of Pordenone director David Robinson have brought not just a corpse but a memory back to life – theatre as film as theatre, a heady concoction only available through the medium of “silent film” – in London, the equivalent would be seeing a complete night at the music hall from 1900, in full colour and with synchronised sound – for now, London must get to see this show, preferably in the perfect surroundings of Hackney Empire where the artists can emerge from the proscenium arch of a Matcham theatre – but maybe after Paris has seen its own long-lost child, this November at the Cinémathèque Française – and, of course, John Sweeney and his ensemble will be there to assist at the rebirth.
Greetings! I’m just back from spending a week at the 31st Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy. Between sipping espresso and circling my favourite films in the schedule, I spoke to some of my fellow travellers about their experiences of this wonderful week of silent cinema. You’ll find full coverage of the festival on Silent London by clicking here, but in the meantime, enjoy this short podcast.
A Woman of Affairs (1928) Photograph: Photoplay productions
I couldn’t possibly imagine a more heartwarming finale to my first Pordenone trip than Saturday night’s midnight show of The Boatswain’s Mate (Horace Manning Haynes, 1924), with our own Neil Brand on the piano. This vigorously witty, quintessentially British comedy is a neat three-hander starring Florence Turner, Johnny Butt and Victor McLaglen, as a pub landlady, her buffoonish admirer and an out-of-work soldier. I loved it when it showed at the British silent film festival in Cambridge, and the Giornate crowd lapped it up too. The humour of the film comes not just from three strong comic performances, but from the pen of Lydia Hayward, who as with the other films in this strand, adapted the scenario from a WW Jacobs short story. Here though, her pithy intertitles are augmented with cute line drawings that underline – or comically undercut – the text. A 25-minute, 88-year-old gem of British cinema.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The final day of the Giornate began in the unfamiliar, but very comfortable, surroundings of Cinemazero, while Carl Davis rehearsed the FVG Mitteleuropa Orchestra in the Teatro Verdi for that evening’s gala screening. We assembled for a double-bill of late Thanhouser features, with all the tightly plotted melodrama that entails. A Modern Monte Cristo (1917), transplanted the classic tale’s theme of long-simmering revenge to California, as a shipping magnate frames his love rival for a crime and lives to regret it. Fifty-six minutes of storms, shipwrecks and Machiavellian machinations later, the assembled audience were thoroughly awake and heartily entertained. The wronged hero (played by Vincent Serrano) bore a passing resemblance to George Clooney I felt, and the heroine was played vivaciously by Gladys Dore as an adult and long-time Thanhouser actor Helen Badgley as a child.
Badgley returned, this time as a boy, alongside Jeanne Eagels in the second film of the morning, Fires of Youth (1917), which appeared to be an early pilot for the reality TV show Undercover Boss. Misunderstood foundry owner Pemberton (Frederick Warde) disguises himself in order to live and work among his staff, to regain the spirit of his long-forgotten childhood. As a bonus, he learns to appreciate his workers – and give them the payrises and safe working conditions they have long petitioned for. Or at least I think that’s what happened. Due to a mixup, the intertitles were unexpectedly in French and so no translation was available. A sweetly moralistic, but energetically played film, although this substitute print was abruptly abridged towards the end. Special mention here must go to Bruno, an “aspirant” from the Pordenone accompaniment masterclasses, who played beautifully and sensitively for both films – even more of an achievement considering the surprise switch.
Anna Sten
Stephen Horne provided the music for the next screening, one of the most hotly anticipated British films in the Giornate: Herbert Wilcox’s highly enjoyable The Only Way (1926), an adaptation of a long-running play that was itself a free-ranging take on Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Theatrical giant John Martin-Harvey made a fine Sydney Carton: understated in the drunk scenes and powerfully charismatic in the courtroom. It’s a shame that he was so much older than his opposite number Charles Darnay, which rendered the crucial mistaken identity aspect of this grand story rather ludicrous.
A return to Teatro Verdi – for what? A sound film? Rest easy, this was the silent (but with recorded musical soundtrack) Italian release of Anna Sten’s German film Stürme der Leidenschaft (Storms of Passion, Robert Siodmak, 1931). Tempestuous it was indeed, with Emil Jannings as a released convict, Sten as his wandering wife and Siodmak rehearsing his noir moves in a precociously hot-headed drama. Sten sang, quite well in fact, but with her highlighted hair, slinky satin wardrobe and sultry pout, she came across best as a silent hybrid of Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert. Steamy stuff: the perfect prep for watching Greta Garbo and John Gilbert circle each other lustily later that night.
A Woman of Affairs (1928) Photograph: Photoplay productions
Before the gala’s main feature came many speeches, thank yous and prize-givings, culminating in the unadulterated joy of Pierre Étaix and Jean-Claude Carriere’s 1961 short Rupture. All by itself, this virtuoso comedy proved Étaix to be, in festival director David Robinson’s words: “the last of cinema’s great silent clowns”. If you don’t;know Étaix’s work, read more here, and take any opportunity you can to see his wonderful films.
Finally, Garbo and Gilbert took to the stage, introduced in a short film clip by one of the film’s other stars, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and accompanied by Carl Davis’s hearty score. Doomed romance, barely repressed sexual passion, treachery, sublimated homosexuality, alcoholism and reckless driving: A Woman of Affairs (1928) had it all. Garbo here is elegant, seductive and a million miles away from the grubbiness (and greasy kohl) of Die Freudlose Gasse; Gilbert is dapper and heartbroken; Fairbanks Jr handsome and unhinged.
Yes, it’s a little over-the-top, and there was more than one dramatic tracking shot too many, but this was silent Hollywood at its starry, crowd-pleasing, beautiful peak. If you didn’t swoon just a little, you weren’t, I would contend, paying proper attention. Not my favourite film of the festival, but well worth the applause.
So that’s it for the 31st Giornate del Cinema Muto – it’s been utterly intoxicating, a feast of cinema and cinema appreciation. Will I return next year? Just you try to stop me.
Unsolicited advice of the day: Would you take makeup tips from Emil Jannings? Both he and John Gilbert admonished their lady-friends (Anna Sten and Dorothy Sebastian) for daubing on too much “lip rouge”. Hmmm…
Giornate stats
Eight days in Pordenone.
47 hours, 37 minutes and 12 seconds of silent cinema watched.
18 cups of caffé espresso.
Eight blog posts.
Four Aperol spritzes.
One frico.
For full details of these and all other films in the festival, the Giornate catalogue is available as a PDF by following this link.
The choices we make in life define us, and this morning I got up bright and early for Viktor Turin’s Provokator (1927), but gave early Selig feature The Ne’er-do-Well (1916) a miss. Did I do right to choose Anna Sten’s anguished student and her revolutionary chums over Kathlyn Williams and the adventures of the rich and beautiful? I don’t know. Provokator, which marks Sten’s cinema debut, was occasionally stirring, but mostly on the pedestrian side, though a raid on the revolutionaries’ den was rather fine, boosted by terrific accompaniment from Gabriel Thibaudeau and Frank Bockius.
Walter Summers
Where I may have erred is in choosing such a downbeat opener on a day that was to close with GW Pabst’s heartbreaking social critique Die Freudlose Gasse (1925). However, I am getting ahead of myself. My afternoon was perked up considerably by the patriotic hubbub around Walter Summers’ lovely postwar tearjerker A Couple of Down-and-Outs (1923), introduced by the producer’s grandson Sidney Samuelson, who was seeing the film for the first time. What could be a very harrowing tale is handled with care, as Rex Davis’s Danny finds unlikely allies when he rescues his war horse from a foreign abattoir: manipulative, but charming with it.
The audience groaned in unison at the start of the next screening, as another tranche of German animated shorts kicked off with a toothpaste advert featuring the “tooth devil” cracking open a poor vulnerable gnasher with his drill. It was, as before, a diverting and diverse hour. In the name of commerce, all kinds of unlikely objects have been animated: detergent, rolling pins, matchboxes, kettles and even, in a sweet but fussy stop-motion ad for aspirin, a silent-film star and director (Im Filmatelier, 1927). Günter Buchwald at the piano followed with apparent ease the rapid changes of subject-matter, media and mood – as when a promo film for a department store dwelt proffered a new suit as a suicide-prevention measure (Der Hartnäckige Selbstmörder, 1925).
Asta Nielsen in Die Freudlose Gasse (1925)
I have a date with Greta Garbo in A Woman of Affairs (1928) on Saturday, but I spent Friday night with both Garbo and Asta Nielsen in the elegant but emotionally gruelling Die Freudlose Gasse (1925), giving a beautiful face to the seedy economic exploitation of women in 1920s Vienna. Both the lead stars are fantastic, and supported by a cast of wonderful character actors including Valeska Gert as a pixie-faced madam. Pabst’s direction veers between sober restraint and wild bouts of inventive, unchained camera excitement. This new print is not quite complete, but mostly crisp, with deep tinting, most especially effective in a fire scene towards the end.
Accidentally profound statement of the day: “The joyless street is long,” exclaimed I, when I read in the catalogue that Die Freudlose Gasse clocks in at 151 minutes long in its present state. It ran for closer to three hours at the Berlin film festival, apparently, but that was based on a projection speed of 16fps, as opposed to the Giornate’s 19fps. Phew.
For full details of these and all other films in the festival, the Giornate catalogue is available as a PDF by following this link.
An exceptionally strong and varied day at the Giornate: Soviet montage, German arthouse, a British drama, Dickens in Danish, early sound films and a big, fat two-strip Technicolor feature in the evening.
Anna Sten took centre-stage on Thursday morning in two very different films set in pre-revolutionary Russia. In The White Eagle (Yakov Protazanov, 1928) she plays a governess, working for a governor who orders soldiers to fire on a crowd of protesting workers. Sten is horrified, and while her boss has largely ineffectual pangs of remorse, she decides to take matters, and a pearl-handled revolver, into her own hands. Protazanov called the film a “low tide” but it’s actually very stirring and although it’s not Sten’s finest performance, by all accounts she had a strong working relationship with the director. It’s an engrossing film, which compares chains of command to chains of oppression and explores guilt and revenge in interesting ways. For example, the way the governor’s peers avoid him as soon as they learn he may be the target of a terrorist attack, while the Bolsheviks refuse to single out one victim for their vengeance.
The White Eagle is largely extant, but exists only in an incomplete print. We have even less of Merchants of Glory (Leonid Obolenskii, 1929), which is a shame, because it’s a strange, invigorating number, loosely based on a play by Marcel Pagnol and Pierre Nivoix. Henri Bachelet is a military hero, who died a noble death and is lionised by his family and community, so much so that his father is urged to transform his popular sympathy into political clout by running for office – and his wife marries a rich factory owner and sidesteps into a life of luxury. Only his quiet cousin (Sten) remains unchanged by Bachelet’s posthumous fame, and through her eyes we see injustices such as the way that wounded soldiers are treated by the regime they fought for. Wouldn’t the political bigwigs be surprised to learn that Bachelet was a communist sympathiser?
In the telling of this tale, Obolenskii gives us a sumptuous ball, battle scenes and even dance numbers. The finale, in which Bachelet, who has unexpectedly been found alive and well, defaces his own portrait and is attacked by his father’s friends, must have been magnificent, but is sadly almost all missing and relayed by still frames for the most part in this print.
The two Stens made for a strong morning, but my highlight was a lyrical German film that came between them, called Jenseits der Strasse or Harbor Drift (Leo Mittler, 1929). A beggar nabs a pearl necklace from a puddle, and promises to share the profits on its sale with a new-found drifter pal, all the while a prostitute plans to take it, and sell it herself … Impressionistic, oddly noirish, tragic and ultimately dark-hearted, this is a real find. The film has been championed for a few years now by Stephen Horne, who accompanied it beautifully on piano, flute, accordion and zither. The recent discovery of the film’s previously missing reel makes this gem ripe for restoration, and a wider audience.
Sarah Bernhardt in Hamlet Photograph: Cinémathèque Française/Gaumont Pathé Archives, Paris
After lunch there was a chance to see The Unwanted (1924), a new find from the hand of Walter Summers. I had seen it in London, so skipped it, but was pleased that the film’s strengths (the Venetian opening, mountain scenes and burst of battle towards the end), played well on the big screen at the Teatro Verdi.
Lille Dorrit (1924), was a sumptuous Danish adaption though necessarily a simplification of Dickens’ weighty classic. A winsome Amy Dorrit (Karina Bell), a sprightly Maggy (Karen Caspersen) and an eccentric, avuncular “father of Marshalsea” (Frederik Jensen) combined with gorgeous sets – and benefited here too from a crisp, bright print. Dickens fatigue has not yet set in here and with beauties such as this one, it will be kept at bay a fair while longer.
The Viking (1928)
The evening’s fare was a story of the sublime and the ridiculous. The Phono-Cinéma–Théatre programme of aearly sound films from the 1900 Paris Exposition, recently discovered in a French archive and beautifully restored, was a hotly anticipated treat. Hand-coloured short films of famous performers from Cléo de Mérode to Little Tich to Sarah Bernhardt delighted the auditorium. In fact, Bernhardt performing the duel scene from Hamlet may well be the highlight of the festival for me – a film I have heard about for years, but never expected to see. You can read more about the night on the excellent Illuminations blog here. Special mention must go to John Sweeney for the accompaniment, taken from the original scores and working both in tandem with the wax cylinder soundtracks or instead of them. The dance shorts were a standout in this regard, including splendid Mérode’s Javanese and Slavic routines.
What to say about The Viking (1928)? Kitsch, unintentionally hilarious, and resplendent in the reds and greens of two-strip Technicolor, this was the very definition of a guilty pleasure. I’d like to say I was laughing with it, rather than at it, but it would be a fib.
For full details of these and all other films in the festival, the Giornate catalogue is available as a PDF by following this link.
My previous reports from the festival are here, here, here and here.
Silent London 