Win tickets to watch silent films at the BFI this summer

August 1, 2012 PH 2 Comments

Don’t forget that the BFI’s Genius of Hitchcock retrospective begins in earnest this month. In fact, you can kick off the celebration with a Blackmail silent-and-sound double-bill tonight. For the other silents in the season, check the Silent London Calendar.

First off you won’t want to miss the theatrical release of The Lodger on 10 August – there’s a special screening at BFI Southbank featuring a Q&A with composer Nitin Sawhney too.

Next month, you’ll want to note some other Hitchcock dates in your diary to see the new restorations of his silent films. There’s a second chance to see The Pleasure Garden with Daniel Patrick Cohen’s marvellous score on 13 September. Downhill will screen with a live score from beatboxer Shlomo on 20 September and there’s a screening of Champagne with “boldly classical” music from Mira Calix on 27 September. There’s the restoration premiere of Easy Virtue on 28 September, too.

Plus, it has now been announced that The Manxman will be this year’s London film festival archive gala, screening at the Empire Leicester Square on 19 October with a new score from Stephen Horne. If you saw last year’s gala screening of The First Born, also with a score by Horne, you’ll know this isn’t be missed.

Back to August, the BFI is showing a fine roster of other silent films, including Greed, The Dumb Girl of Portici featuring Anna Pavlova, and Drifters, with a live score from sound artist Jason Singh. Search to find out more on the BFI website.

To win a pair of tickets to the any silent screening at the BFI this month, simply email the answer to this simple question to silentlondontickets@gmail.com with August in the subject header by noon on Friday 3 August 2012.

What is the name of Hitchcock’s lost silent feature film, starring Nita Naldi?

The Genius of Hitchcock season runs until October and showcases a complete retrospective of his films, from his early British silents, to his later Hollywood classics. Also included in the season is a dedicated microsite, The 39 Steps to Hitchcock, which is a step-by-step guide through one man’s genius, featuring exclusive film extracts, interviews with close collaborators (Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren and more) and a journey through his life and career through galleries curated by Hitchcock experts.

Review

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari with Martyn Jacques: live review

July 30, 2012 PH 2 Comments

Martyn Jacques and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

Familiarity with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the totem of German Expressionism, cannot dim its angular beauty, nor its power to baffle and tease. This luridly geometric film invites a wild accompaniment, one that will embrace its puzzles and schlocky plot twists, and so Caligari pops up time and again in repertory cinemas, with scores veering from rock to electronica to jazz and all points in between. Martyn Jacques of punk-cabaret adventurists The Tiger Lillies has answered the call, and his theatrical, seedy style couldn’t be more simpatico.

Jacques has set up a short residency in the West End’s Soho Theatre this summer, playing his Caligari score night after night in a basement cabaret bar that’s a few shades too salubrious for that sleazy Weimar vibe. The venue wins on atmosphere, then, but the downside of watching a film in a bar rather than a cinema becomes obvious the moment we clock that we’ll be a watching Caligari on DVD, projected a little wonkily at that.

But we’re here for the Martyn Jacques show, and I’m happy to squint and imagine his folksy-sinister piano-accordion-vocal score accompanying the real deal. If Jacques’ music can shine tonight, it will worthy of a showing that will please the projection purists too. And Jacques’ music does shine. He says that he was inspired to write his score by his childhood piano teacher, who worked as a film accompanist in the silent era, and clearly he was an observant pupil. Jacques’ piano proves nicely responsive to the film, turning, pausing, and marching when the film does. His punchy accordion, too, can screech with the high-strung horror of it all, or rumble along as a creepy echo of the fairground’s barrel organ. The occasional foot stomp adds drama, and acknowledges the fact that this is a musical, hummable score – the audience are nodding their heads, tapping their toes, as we go.

What’s really distinctive about Jacques’s score, though, is his vocal, which can switch between a low grumble and a rising falsetto. It’s dramatic, percussive and at its best, when quietly threatening, a low non-verbal bass line for the piano melody. Mostly, though, Jacques is singing his own colourful lyrics: a musical narration for the film that goes out of its way to introduce the carnival’s bit-part characters and to explore the fears and motivations of the film’s leading players.

Those lyrics are the score’s fatal flaw: often what Jacques is singing differs from what’s on screen in some small but important detail. His lyrics can clash with the intertitles, making the viewing experience anything but immersive. At worst his words can pre-empt the next plot twist, which sadly dissolves the horror-movie tension. Occasionally, the lyrics and the film are in different worlds altogether. At these times, one suspects this score to be in reality a rehearsal for a project such as Jacques’s hit grotesque operetta Shockheaded Peter. I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing, a cabaret Caligari with puppets? I think it could be a another smash, in Jacques’ hands.

As I said earlier, this is Martyn Jacques’ show, and while his Chaplin-death-mask makeup and fruity lyrics may threaten to steal the limelight from the movie, his fluid score reveals a real sensitivity to the art of silent film accompaniment. Perhaps he has his eyes on other horizons, but I’d be more than happy to hear another silent score from such an exuberant talent.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari screens at the Soho Theatre in London until 11 August 2012. To find out more and to buy tickets, visit the Soho Theatre website.

Blog, Charlie's London

Charlie’s London: Chaplin’s women – part one

July 30, 2012 PH 4 Comments

Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard in Modern Times

This is a guest post by Ayşe Behçet for Silent London.

Welcome to another edition of Charlie’s London! For this segment and the next I’m going to look at some of the women in Chaplin’s life, showing how influential, important and ultimately empowering some of these women’s roles really were.

A lot has been written about Chaplin’s private life; he was a dashing and charismatic individual whose appeal extended beyond stage and screen. Recently I was talking to a fellow Chaplin fan and friend in Bologna. We both agreed that there was something so beautiful about Charlie, it was no surprise that his private life become front-page news, whether the stories were true or not. Putting the gossip aside, for me the women who shaped, moulded and even changed Chaplin were his mother Hannah, Mabel Normand, Edna Purviance and of course Oona O’Neill.

This subject will often be debated, with some enthusiasts and historians adding Hetty Kelly, Charlie’s first love, and even Paulette Goddard, his third wife and star of Modern Times and The Great Dictator, to that list. I hope with these two blogs I will explain why I have chosen this group. In this first instalment I will talk about Hannah Chaplin and Mabel Normand.

Hannah Hill, Chaplin’s mother, was arguably the most influential woman in his life. Her struggles in order to give Chaplin a decent upbringing, only to suffer such terrible mental health problems, no doubt haunted him for the rest of his days. I have spoken of Hannah before, and I am quite fond of her as a historical character, not only because she is the mother of my hero, but because I feel she is incredibly interesting. Historians have labelled Hannah as everything from a woman of ill repute to an undiscovered music hall genius whose renditions of the era’s classics would ignite her son’s thirst for the art.

The “fallen woman” analysis comes very much from psychologist Dr Stephen Weissman whose book Chaplin: A Life paints Hannah in a very unflattering light. His depiction of her affair with stage star Leo Dryden (the union that would produce Chaplin’s brother Wheeler) and his suggestion that syphilis was the cause of her madness (including references to her working as a prostitute) are seen as very controversial by other Chaplin enthusiasts and historians. David Robinson is quite rightly kinder to Hannah, noting the confirmed ancestral link to mental health dificulties within the Hill women as the roots of her tragic downfall, while also highlighting her faults such as her affair.

Continue reading Charlie’s London: Chaplin’s women – part one →

Festival, Screening

The Great White Silence at the Exhibition Road Show, 28 July 2012

July 25, 2012 PH Leave a comment

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is contributing to Olympic mania by staging what it describes as “London’s most sophisticated street party”. It’s a festival really, featuring games, dance, science, debates, music, writers’ commissions and visual art installations, with a little nod to the Great Exhibition that took over Hyde Park in 1851. The Exhibition Road Show will take place on the street they’re calling “London‟s cultural and intellectual heartland”, just a short hop from the Olympic beach volleyball venue in Earl’s Court.

The Show runs from 28 July to 5 August, and on its opening night you can pop along to a free outdoor screening of Herbert Ponting’s elegant, unflinching Scott of the Antarctic documentary The Great White Silence – with its acclaimed live score by Simon Fisher Turner and his musicians.

Fisher Turner’s score for The Great White Silence premiered at the London Film Festival in 2010, and was described by The Guardian as “”skillfully judged, and the blend of real sounds – such as the gramophones that would have played on the ship, the Terra Nova, as well as a recording of the ship’s bell – and sparse musical scoring seemed to respect the idea of silence while making sound”.

The Great White Silence screens on the evening of Saturday 28 July 2012. For more details, see the Exhibition Road Show website.

Blog

Anson Dyer: Britain’s forgotten animation pioneer

July 24, 2012 PH 6 Comments

This caricature of Anson Dyer is probably a self-portrait (Source: ukanimation.blogspot.com)

This is a guest post for Silent London by Robyn Ludwig.

The animators whose films will be showcased at the British Animation Film Festival this Sunday owe a debt to Anson Dyer – though many may not even know it. 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Ernest John Anson Dyer (1876-1962), a masterful animator and pioneering director in the silent-era years of the British animation industry. Much less is known about Dyer and his early films, than of his peers in America and continental Europe. Yet film historian Geoff Brown notes: “For all the current lack of critical attention, Anson Dyer was a major figure in British animation for over 30 years, from the first world war to the aftermath of the second … [He] was promoted for a time as Britain’s equivalent of Walt Disney, with a prolific and popular output of children’s cartoons” (Brown, BFI Screenonline). Donald Crafton, in Before Mickey: The Animated Film (1898 – 1928), credits Dyer as helping British animators come “closer than anyone else in Europe to establishing a significant cartoon industry” (Crafton 252).

Dyer began his animation career in 1915, at the late age of 39, having spent 20 years as an ecclesiastical artist designing stained-glass church windows on commission. Yet most of his earliest films were secular in theme: propagandistic political satires in the “topical sketcher” tradition. When he joined Kine Komedy Kartoons in 1919, however, he began directing children’s material, including the Phillips Philm Phables series (also known as the Uncle Remus series). Later that same year, Dyer signed with Hepworth Picture Plays in Walton-on-Thames, and during this prolific period, he produced a number of Shakespearean parodies, and the family-friendly Kiddie-Graphs fairy tale series, including The Three Little Pigs (1922) and Little Red Riding Hood (1922).

Continue reading Anson Dyer: Britain’s forgotten animation pioneer →

Screening

Sonic Cinema: Drifters (1929) with Jason Singh at the BFI

July 19, 2012 PH 2 Comments

UPDATE: This event has been rescheduled for 5 November 2012.

In November, the BFI will release a dual-format DVD/Blu-Ray edition of an intriguing double-bill: Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and John Grierson’s Drifters (1929). It’s the second instalment of the BFI’s The Soviet Influence series, which has the stated aim of revealing the impact of 1920s Russian films on later British film-makers.

Drifters premiered at the Film Society on November 10, 1929, on the same bill as Battleship Potemkin, which was receiving its British premiere. Grierson had previously produced an English language version of Eisenstein’s film for its American screening and the influence of Eisenstein is clearly revealed in Drifters.

To tide us over until the home video release, we have a screening of Drifters, a film about herring fishing, and fishermen, directed by the father of the British documentary movement, John Grierson:

Like Potemkin, Drifters employs montage in an expressive manner, creating dramatic tension in the absence of any psychological characterisation. Both films also use ‘types’ (non-professional actors) instead of actors in order to create a more ‘authentic’ reality, and both films make use of extensive location shooting. Grierson, nevertheless, always stressed that he was keen to make a film with distinctively ‘British’ characteristics, which he saw as moderation and a sense of human importance. Drifters is, therefore, slower paced than Potemkin, and focuses on more mundane, less inherently dramatic events. (BFI Screenonline)

I am resisting making a “red herring” gag, but you should feel free to do so. This NFT1 screening of Drifters will be accompanied by a live score from Jason Singh, a recording of which will also be presented with the film on the disc. Singh is a “beatboxer, vocal sculptor and sound artist”, and his score combines both live and prerecorded vocals with all manner of processing and sampling. You can read more here, and watch a snippet of Singh in action below. I think you’ll agree it’s very atmospheric.

Screening

Anna Pavlova at the BFI: ballet and silent film

July 18, 2012 PH 2 Comments

Dance and silent cinema have a natural affinity. Many of the earliest films were records of serpentine dances: mesmerising, rainbow-tinted swirls. And these days, when choreographer Matthew Bourne discusses his blockbuster productions with grand sets inspired by German Expressionism, he says: ”it’s almost like pure cinema. It’s like a silent film.”

It’s no surprise then that silent film-makers pointed their camera at the dance stage and the best ballerinas of the day. And the ballet world was fascinated by cinema too. This intriguing article by Henry K Miller relates the thwarted ambitions of Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes, to make a colour film of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Princess. A short season at the BFI this August celebrates one of the greatest ballerinas of all time, Anna Pavlova, who arranged for many of her dances to be filmed and appeared in a feature film too:

‘Next to seeing Pavlova in person, there is no better substitute than seeing her through the mechanism of the kinema.’ So noted a critic in The Guardian following the release of her American feature film, The Dumb Girl of Portici, in 1916. As a ballerina, Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) was as an inspiration; she was also an independent career woman and mega-star loved by the media and her audiences throughout the world. She was also the first major ballerina to truly investigate the medium of film during the 1910s and 1920s. Not only did she star in a Hollywood feature film, but also had a number of her solos filmed. At the end of her life, Pavlova travelled with two movie cameras to record her productions and travels. This season includes documentaries, recordings of dance and features indicating the range of ballets she performed and placing her screen career in context with contemporary recordings of dance.

The BFI will be showing that film, Lois Weber’s The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), which features this beautiful sequence of Pavlova dancing with an “invisible” partner. The film will be screened with live piano accompaniment and an introduction by dance historian Jane Pritchard.

The Dumb Girl of Portici is an adaptation of the French opera of the same name. Watch out for the character Masaniello, who is played by Rupert Julian, the same man who directed The Phantom of the Opera in 1925, which opens with this gorgeous ballet scene:

You can see The Phantom of the Opera at the Volupté Lounge on 19 August with a live score by electronic duo Cipher.

In the BFI’s Pavlova season, there will also be a chance to see Evgeni Bauer’s The Dying Swan (1917), in which Vera Karalli, a Russian silent film actor and dancer with the Bolshoi ballet, performs the famous routine from Swan Lake. The film will be shown alongside an Omnibus documentary about Pavlova, and with a score by Joby Talbot.

Click here for more details of the BFI’s Anna Pavlova season.

Review

Wonderful London: DVD review

July 12, 2012 PH 6 Comments

This is a guest post for Silent London by Karolina Kendall-Bush

Sitting in the bowels of the BFI at Stephen Street watching the 20 or so Wonderful London travel films in silence, I often dreamed of the day when these mesmerising scenes of life in the 1920s might be restored and released on DVD with a score. Finally, ithat day has come. In autumn last year, those of us who could get tickets to a soldout performance at the BFI London film festival were lucky enough to see six of these films in all their glory, fully restored from the original coloured nitrate prints. Now the BFI has released those films, along with six “extras” (in good black-and-white prints) on DVD with music by John Sweeney and essays from Bryony Dixon, Iain Sinclair, Jude Rogers and Sukhdev Sandhu.

Although these films were simply shot commercial “fillers” to be shown before the main feature, they were remarkable in many ways. Most travel films of London in this period tended to flit between landmarks with a few explanatory intertiles. They were, dare I say it, ever-so-slightly dull. Having devoted a lot of time to watching travelogues of London, I often groan as repeated shots of Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and Tower Bridge pass before my eyes. In this context, the Wonderful London films are quite treat. Paying as much attention to pet cemeteries and street performers as they do to London’s best-known tourist destinations, they are, I think, antecedents to Norman Cohen’s The London Nobody Knows (1967) and even Patrick Keiller’s London (1994, below).

Each Wonderful London instalment goes on a thematic excursion. Barging through London charts the course of the Regent’s canal, Cosmopolitan London goes in search of the city’s diverse ethnic communities, London’s Sunday looks at what Londoners do on their day off, and so on. The conversational intertitles, which can veer between amusing and patronising, invite viewers to go on a journey through the city. In her essay, BFI silent film curator Bryony Dixon notes how these films exploited the popularity of St John Adcock’s 1922 magazine Wonderful London. In this publication, famous writers described various aspects of the capital for readers eager to discover London in all its complexity.

Continue reading Wonderful London: DVD review →

Blog, Charlie's London

Charlie’s London: from the archives to the airwaves

July 10, 2012 PH 2 Comments

The Charlie Chaplin Archive, Bologna — Heaven for a Chaplin fan … the archive in Bologna

This is a guest post by Ayşe Behçet for Silent London.

Welcome back for another edition of Charlie’s London. This week I am going to be talking about my debut appearance on the Silent London Podcast, as well as my recent trip to the thoroughly mindblowing Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy

Being a Chaplin fan you are never short of on-screen comedy capers to keep you entertained, but when someone tells you you can visit the Charlie Chaplin Archive in Bologna, Italy should you be in the area, well you don’t really have to think twice. My partner Kieran and I took a 6am flight to Bologna so that I could visit the archive, but also so we could enjoy the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival too.

At the Cineteca in Bologna we registered for the archive and the festival. All around us everyone complained about the heat, but being half Turkish I didn’t really mind. No sooner had we sat down for a coffee, my phone began to ping, it was Jenny, a fellow festival-goer who had not only made the journey to Bologna but was also staying in the same hotel as us. Pretty soon we were all together, along with Mark, another friend and great supporter of Bristol Silents looking over the festival plan.

Initially I began to look over the schedule from Wednesday to Friday, because I was due to be in the archives Monday and Tuesday, but this turned out this was a pointless exercise. In the end, I was in the archive until Friday morning and in total saw only five films at the festival. The film that left the biggest impression on me was the new restoration of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Mark had told me many times before that it was a film I would enjoy, not only because I have a soft spot for Technicolor but because I have spent a lot of time researching the first and second world wars. He wasn’t wrong! It was a feast of restored beauty, history and irony.

My biggest adventure came on Monday when I finally got to visit the Chaplin archives. Everything has been digitised to make viewing incredibly easy. The staff are so helpful and friendly, even with the busy festival under way in the grounds. Before I knew it I was engrossed, flicking through pages and pages of useful and exciting documents all relevant to a massive piece of research I am undertaking. Kate Guyonvarch, Kevin Brownlow and of course David Robinson all were there to give me a helping hand: their support was priceless. Imagine, as I have done, having read someone’s work since you were 11 years old, only to find them standing behind you in an archive and clarifying a sentence in one of their books that you want to quote in your research! That what David Robinson did, and he refreshed my memory on something I had a mental block on. After many cups of lovely Italian coffee and long chats I had more than 40 pages to take back to England: the tip of the iceberg had been scratched.

Bologna is a long way from South London! Charlie’s London had very much gone continental. Here is where my biggest conundrum lay – you can’t just take a bus to these archives. I knew I had so much I wanted to look at, but I was meant to be at a film festival, what was a girl to do? Luckily enough I have a very supportive partner who smiled and told me to book more time in the archives. So, what started as two days ended up being the whole week, and it was worth it! I discovered so much more about my hero.

Continue reading Charlie’s London: from the archives to the airwaves →

Blog, Review

Giorgio Moroder presents Metropolis: DVD review

July 5, 2012 PH 2 Comments

The mediator between the head and hands must be the heart, and so the popular affection for the 1984 revamp of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has finally led to a 2012 DVD release. It’s 85 years since this film was made, but 28 years since it was made over by Giorgio Moroder – so will the original film or its renovations have dated more?

On the face of it, we really don’t need Moroder’s Metropolis on DVD. This may be the version that turned a generation of film fans into silent movie buffs, turning the fledgling early-80s silent film renaissance into a mainstream movie moment, but surely we’ve moved on since then? We’re still waiting for many silent classics to appear on DVD, but among those that are available there are some absolute beauties: masterpieces of restoration, with audio commentaries, informative notes and sensitive, sometimes even historically accurate, scores. In this country, many such DVDs and Blu-Rays have appeared on the Masters of Cinema imprint, part of the Eureka Entertainment group that has released Moroder’s Metropolis.

Most salient of these releases is The Complete Metropolis, the almost-full restoration of Fritz Lang’s film: a product of skill, patience and the great fortune to find the missing footage in an archive in Buenos Aires. At a stroke, the movie was rehabilitated: no longer a grand mess, a gorgeous design pocked with plotholes. Simultaneously, Moroder’s idiosyncratic restoration was rendered obsolete.

But silent film fans don’t fear obsolescence. It’s our stock-in-trade. Nor are we averse to the first faltering steps towards new technologies. We embrace part-talkies, Pathécolor, Polyvision and undercranking. Moroder’s Metropolis should be viewed in this spirit. Would we restore a film this way again? No, but what will they think of our “state-of-the-art” digital restorations in 2040? Very little, perhaps, particularly if those digital copies become obsolete themselves, incompatible with new projection technology.

Continue reading Giorgio Moroder presents Metropolis: DVD review →

Blog, Silent Hitchcock

An introduction to silent Hitchcock: Blackmail

July 5, 2012 PH 8 Comments

Blackmail, perhaps the greatest British silent film, was the work of a young director firing on all cylinders. As well as this masterful silent movie, Hitchcock made an acclaimed and pioneering talkie version, Britain’s first. It’s the silent Blackmail that concerns us, though, and it’s a fitting finale to Hitch’s silent years.

Anny Ondra is back, as Alice White, a young woman who rows with her dull policeman boyfriend in a Lyon’s Cornerhouse and wanders off with a dashing artist instead. When the dauber tries to take advantage of her in his studio, Alice defends herself, lethally, with a breadknife …

Here, as in The Lodger, Hitchcock’s London is superbly seedy. The opening scene of Blackmail shows the arrest of a shifty crim, holed up in bed in a tenement flat, and from the gossip who torments our heroine in her parents’s shop, to the blackmailer himself, everyone in the city seems to take an unnaturally keen interest in murder.

The way that Blackmail muddies a police procedural thriller with sex, moral compromise and guilt (and splashes of earthy humour) is a classic Hitchcock manoeuvre. Alfred was definitely hitting his stride here. However, one reason that Blackmail feels so much like the Hitchcock thrillers we know and love is that Charles Bennett, who wrote the play it is based on, went on to collaborate with Hitchcock on films from The 39 Steps to The Man Who Knew Too Much. Together, they created much that we think of as classic Hitchcock.

The question is, with a celebrated sound version available, why bother with the silent Blackmail? Of course, you don’t need to choose – they both have moments to recommend them. The finale at the British Museum (future shades of North by Northwest) is one of those great Hitchcock sequences that was conceived, and succeeds, visually. Sound adds nothing. Elsewhere, Hitchcock uses the freedom of a microphone-free set to set up some more experimental camera shots, where the sound film is a little more constrained. You won’t want to miss the famous “knife” sequence in the talkie Blackmail, but the silent version is unsettlingly creepy in its own way. I’d also like to champion Anny Ondra’s silent performance here – Joan Barry’s dubbed RP accent is just bizarre.

Synopsis:

Grocer’s daughter Alice White kills a man in self-defence when he tries to sexually assault her. Her policeman boyfriend covers up for her, but she has been spotted leaving the scene by a petty criminal who tries to blackmail her. (BFI Screenonline)

Hitchcock moment: Here’s the pivotal, and supremely Hitchcockian, murder scene. With Neil Brand’s score to boot.

Watch out for: That gruesome painting of a jester.

Links worth clicking:

Blackmail (both versions) screens this summer as part of the BFI’s Genius of Hitchcock season. More information here. There’s also a gala performance featuring Neil Brand’s live score at the British Museum on 6 July.

Blog, Podcast

The Silent London podcast: comedy special

July 3, 2012 PH 2 Comments

Another podcast, and this time it’s all about the laughs in our comedy special. I’m joined in the studio by Phil Concannon of Philonfilm.net, Ayse Behçet, who writes the Charlie’s London series for Silent London, and podcast expert Pete Baran. Plus Chris Edwards of the wonderful Silent Volume blog also contributes a few well-chosen words on his favourite silent film: Exit Smiling, starring Beatrice Lillie.

We’ll be talking about our favourite silent comedies, and yours, and perhaps touching on a few films and film-makers you won’t expect. Plus we’ll be reviewing some recent silent film screenings, Ayse will be reporting back from the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna and we’ll be taking a look at the calendar too.

There’s also a lot of business about trousers. And possibly the odd 90-year-old spoiler.

The Silent London podcast: comedy special

The Silent London Podcast is also on iTunes. Click here for more details. The music is by kind permission of Neil Brand, and the podcast is presented in association with SOAS radio.

If you want to get in touch with us about anything you hear on the podcast, email silentlondonpodcast@gmail.com, tweet @silent_london or leave a message on the Facebook page: facebook.com/silentlondon.

Blog, Silent Hitchcock

An introduction to silent Hitchcock: The Manxman

June 29, 2012 PH 3 Comments

Often referred to as Hitchcock’s final silent, because Blackmail was also shot as a sound film, The Manxman seems to be growing steadily in popularity, and with good reason. It’s a romance, yes, another Stannard adaptation of a hit novel by Hall Caine in fact, and I’m far fonder of it than Hitchcock professed himself to be. “It was a very banal picture,” he told Truffaut. “It was not a Hitchcock movie.”

Well, that’s his opinion. The Manxman lays out a love triangle, with Anny Ondra (Kate), Carl Brisson (Pete) and Malcolm Keen (Philip) at each corner. Poor Brisson gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop again, when his best friend takes care of his girl while he is away at sea. The setting is a fishing village on the Isle of Man. Pete is a fisherman, but Philip, who wants to become a judge like his father and his father’s father, may have more to lose by the liaison than his friend does.

Anny Ondra is fantastic here: mesmerising and sensual. One moment a flirtatious femme fatale; the next a confused young woman. It’s a wonderful rehearsal for the performance she gives in Hitchcock’s next film, Blackmail. She’s gorgeous too, but perhaps not as gorgeous as the stunning coastal scenery. The landscape towers over, and frames the lovers, as if to say they’re trapped by their destiny, and by the place they come from, both. It’s not really the Isle of Man, by the way, but Cornwall.

While this isn’t Hitchcock’s final silent film, it’s worth taking a moment to enjoy, and appreciate his virtuoso work here. The Manxman remains a testament to Hitchcock’s achievements in silent film-making, and it’s no wonder that decades later he would still refer disdainfully to “photographs of people talking”.

Synopsis:

In a small Isle of Man fishing community, two men, friends since childhood, find themselves in love with the same woman. Rejected by the girl’s father, Pete leaves to find his fortune in Africa, and Philip sees his chance with Kate. (BFI Screenonline)

Hitchcock moment: Sometimes good news feels like bad news, especially when there’s a dark blot on the horizon.

Watch out for: Windows. And how much they can hide.

Links worth clicking:

The Manxman screens this summer as part of the BFI’s Genius of Hitchcock season. More information here.

UPDATE: The Manxman: London film festival review

Screening

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari with Martyn Jacques at the Soho Theatre, July & August 2012

June 24, 2012 PH 3 Comments

Well I do enjoy posting news of silent film screenings, but 12 in a row takes some beating. Martyn Jacques, of punk-cabaret band The Tiger Lillies, will perform his own score to expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari at the Soho Theatre this summer four days a week, three weeks on the trot. Jacques is known for his eccentric performances and his powerful falsetto voice – he will accompany himself and the film on piano and accordion.

It’s very lazy blogging to copy and paste Wikipedia. However, this is really all the introduction to Mr Jacques you’ll need I feel:

Martyn Jacques spent 7 years living above a brothel in Soho while training his characteristic falsetto voice. In his Tiger Lillies appearances, Jacques commonly sings about “sexual perversions, seedy underbellies, the gruesome, macabre and visceral”. Jacques has been described as enjoying when audience members walk out of his shows, noting “It’s always funny when people are offended by what I do … after all, I’m just an entertainer.”

So this is clearly not going to be your common-or-garden silent film screening. However, Jacques is a devotee of silent cinema and this is a very personal project for him:

‘When I was fourteen my childhood desire to play the piano was finally satisfied. My first teacher was Florence De Jong. This was forty years ago and Florence was a very old lady. She had been a famous theatre organist accompanying silent films. She was so good she made gramophone recordings. I’ve always remembered her and this is my tribute to her and the profession. Silent films were for me the golden age of film. They had a magic and enigma you don’t get with talkies. Dr Calagari is a fine example. A freak show in the fairground…

If you’re not familiar with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, you have a treat ahead. It’s a nightmarish, audacious and superbly stylish horror film, featuring a carnival, a sinister medic, a bloodthirsty somnambulist and a string of murders, let alone some mindbending sets and unforgettable imagery. It sounds as if Jacques’ music could be the perfect fit.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari screens at the Soho Theatre in London from 25 July to 11 August 2012. To find out more and to buy tickets, visit the Soho Theatre website.

Blog, DVD, Poll

Moroder’s Metropolis – the people have spoken

June 23, 2012 PH 1 Comment

Ach, it’s no fun being a silent cinema purist sometimes. And while I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself that way very often, I was pretty sure I was in the fun-hating minority when the UK DVD release of Moroder’s Metropolis was first announced. Just to make sure, I ran a poll here on Silent London to find out what you guys think.

If you need to refresh your memory, Giorgio Moroder’s version came out in 1984 and looks very different to the latest restoration. Working with the most complete version of the film he could find at the time, Moroder added a rock soundtrack, washed some different scenes with bright tints and made the whole thing run faster by removing the intertitles and using the text for subtitles. It’s a strange beast, and perhaps needless to say, a cult favourite.

You ruddy love it. Well, some of you do. Quite a few of you like it, and while there’s a solid 20% with me, arms crossed and tutting in the outraged camp, you have convinced me to give Moroder’s Metropolis another go. What’s the worst that can happen? I first saw it many moons ago, on a worn-out VHS borrowed from the college library. Since then, I’ve seen the beautiful new restoration of the original film, and my appreciation for Metropolis has only grown. I hope I have lightened up a little, and I have even learned to play a Pat Benatar song on Guitar Hero.

So I’ll definitely be taking a look at the DVD when it is released on 23 July this year. Apparently it’s arriving in a smart “steelbook” edition, and interestingly, you’ll be able to stream it on demand from www.metropolismovie.co.uk too.

In 1984, Oscar-winning composer Giorgio Moroder (Top Gun, Midnight Express, Flashdance) reintroduced Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction epic METROPOLIS to a new generation of moviegoers. He colourised scenes, added new subtitles, plus a throbbing rock soundtrack to Lang’s iconic imagery. Featuring songs from some of the biggest stars of the early MTV era: Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Bonnie Tyler, Loverboy, Jon Anderson and others, it became a dramatic vehicle for Moroder’s visionary music and a beautiful retro-futurist timepiece. Through faithfully maintaining Lang’s intriguing and timeless storyline, today, it is this version of METROPOLIS that first comes to mind for millions around the world.

Yeah, that last sentence does still grate a little… watch this space.

Blog, Silent Hitchcock

An introduction to silent Hitchcock: Champagne

June 22, 2012 PH 4 Comments

With The Farmer’s Wife Hitchcock proved that he could excel at comedy, but Champagne (1928) unhappily revealed that froth was far from safe territory for the director. The critics were hardly impressed, with Close-Up crowing about: “champagne that had been left out in the rain all night”. Looking back, Hitchcock tended to agree, saying: “That was probably the lowest ebb of my output.”

Hitchcock wasn’t happy at the time either, no fan of the source novel and uncertain how to proceed. What Champagne does have is a promising cast: Betty Balfour (the “British Mary Pickford”) takes the lead role and one of Hitchcock’s favourite character actors, Gordon Harker, plays her millionaire father. Balfour, who had made her name playing cockney sweetheart Squibs, does her best, but her likable screen persona fares much better in the second half of the film, when her character (The Girl) develops a touch more vulnerability and sweetness.

In the earlier stages of the film, The Girl is a spoiled, grandstanding heiress, but a combination of Balfour’s hard-to-repress charm and Hitchcock’s steely gaze means she’s very hard to hate. She invokes her father’s displeasure by commandeering a plane to catch up with her boyfriend’s cruise liner. For this, he wants to teach her a lesson. But Hitchcock gets in first, shooting Balfour triumphant in a ballgown after her dramatic entrance, but with her face covered in soot from the flight. I was rooting for her from that moment on. Further humiliations are in store, but it’s a blessed relief when she reaches the point of redemption.

That said, there are some hugely enjoyable glimpses of Hitchcock on top form here: including a cynical street robbery (shades of a similar scene in The Pleasure Garden, maybe even a nod to Graham Cutts), and some bold subjective camerawork.

Champagne is also of considerable interest as film that is utterly of its own time – a cocktail-swigging flapper, her father with his fortunes balanced precariously on Wall Street, her straitlaced fiance with his old-fashioned views – and a reflection of our own. Mira Calix, who will be scoring the film for its gala screening later this year, points out that Champagne attacks a continuing 21st-century obsesssion with celebrities who, just like The Girl, behave atrociously and are famous off the back of their parents’ success. It also, she hopes, will chime with supporters of the Occupy movement: a front-row seat to watch the 1%ers behaving badly and meeting their icky comeuppance.

A minor work, but not without its charms, Champagne maybe largely a waste of Balfour’s talents, but it’s a showcase for the director’s style and his mean streak both.

Synopsis:

Disapproving of her love affair, a millionaire sets out to teach his irresponsible daughter a lesson by pretending to lose all his money. (BFI Screenonline)

Hitchcock moment: Our heroine is attacked by a creep (7:25). Pure Hitchcock. But not entirely what it seems.

Watch out for: Those alarmingly close subjective shots, most notably some tricksy ones through the bottom of a champagne glass.

Links worth clicking:

Champagne screens in September with a new sccore from Mira Calix as part of the BFI’s Genius of Hitchcock season. More information here.

Blog, Silent Hitchcock

An introduction to silent Hitchcock: The Farmer’s Wife

June 18, 2012 PH 3 Comments

The Farmer's Wife (1928) — The Farmer’s Wife (1928)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. And every schoolchild knows that statement is never more true than when the gent in question is a farmer.

Jameson Thomas, whom you you may not recognise under his bristly facial hair as the dashing lead in Piccadilly, plays Samuel Sweetland, a widowed farmer whose thoughts turn to matrimony. Samuel surveys the village women and sets about wooing potential Mrs Sweetlands, with hilariously disastrous results. Disastrous, but not in the usual vein of Hitchcock calamity. Samuel isn’t a perverted sex killer bumping women off in the dead of night. The Farmer’s Wife is a comedy, a broad one too, and the only injuries sustained are bruised egos and spoiled dinners.

LIllian Hall-Davis and Jameson Thomas in The Farmer's Wife — LIllian Hall-Davis and Jameson Thomas in The Farmer’s Wife

Comedies are meant to have happy endings of course, and when I tell you Samuel is assisted in his quest for a new spouse by his sweet-faced and good-hearted housekeeper Araminta (Lillian Hall-Davis) perhaps you’ll be reassured that all will end well.

So how well does Hitchcock, acclaimed for his urban thrillers, succeed in staging a rural comedy? With flying colours. It’s not all down to the director, of course, this is an Eliot Stannard adaptation of a very popular play, but Hitchcock shoots The Farmer’s Wife as if it were a thriller, which somehow emphasises the poignancy of all these lonely people and their missed connections. His brisk economic style also ensure that the horseplay mostly doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Not exactly what you may expect from Hitchcock, but the silents rarely are, and there’s a huge amount to enjoy here.

Synopsis:

A middle-aged widowed landowner decides to marry again. With the aid of his faithful housekeeper he draws up a list of all the eligible women in the neighbourhood, each of whom in turn rejects him. (BFI Screenonline)

Hitchcock moment: Never mind the jelly and ice-cream, nor the awkward trouser situation. This proposal looks like one of Hitchcock’s murder scenes and features a very bizarre intertitle

Watch out for: The empty chair by the fireside. And what Hitchcock does with it.

Links worth clicking:

The Farmer’s Wife screens this summer as part of the BFI’s Genius of Hitchcock season. More information here.

Blog, Silent Hitchcock

An introduction to silent Hitchcock: Downhill

June 15, 2012 PH 3 Comments

Ivor Novello and Isabel Jeans in Downhill (1927)

Welcome back to our silent Hitchcock series. This week we’re looking at Downwhill (1927), hardly one of the director’s most acclaimed films, but one that offers rich, if distasteful, rewards for any Hitchcock aficionado. Dreamy Ivor Novello stars as Roddy, a sixth-former at a private school and thoroughly decent chap who takes the blame for a friend’s misbehaviour and suffers a degrading decline in his fortunes.

Downhill is clunky in places, and the thirtysomething Novello is one of cinema’s least convincing schoolboys, but the film’s strength lies in its brutal, single-minded nastiness. Cynical, misogynistic and determined to reveal the seediness beneath polite society, Downhill expresses the darkest of Hitchcock’s dark side – all without a single murder. It also gives us an insight into Novello’s psyche too; he co-wrote the play the film was based on, and one can only speculate whether he based it on any of his own experiences.

If you thought The Ring took a graphical idea and ran wild with it, then get a load of Downhill. Roddy’s progress through society, after his expulsion from school, is only going one way and that’s, er, down. You’ll find a lengthy shot of Novello slinking underground on Tube escalator – it’s widely mocked as the clumsiest example of Hitchcock warming to his theme.

C'est la vie … Downhill's French title — C’est la vie … Downhill’s French title

There’s another, more interesting, pattern running through Downhill, though: the reveal. The most celebrated example is introduced by the intertitle “The world of make-believe”: a series of slowly retreating camera placements reframe a shot of Roddy in contradictory ways, forcing the audience to continually shift their interpretation. At first we think he’s a smartly dressed gent. Then a waiter. Then a thief. Finally, the camera pans right to uncover the true extent of Roddy’s social degradation – he’s on stage, an extra in a cheesy musical, bobbing like a chump.

Poor Roddy: such a noble young man, and so unfortunate to meet, and be mistreated by, some of the most grotesquely venal women ever committed to film. Hitchcock’s misogyny is often discussed in relation to his sound films and some possibly apocryphal pranks and fallings-out on set, but Downhill suggests the rot set in a lot earlier than that – in fact, it makes the likes of Vertigo seem positively sensitive. The Farmer’s Wife gets laughs out of silly and unattractive spinsters, but the women of Downhill are almost entirely self-interested monsters. There’s even a spot of casual transphobia (see the clip below).

Ultimately, these crudely drawn villainesses are not just a cause of politically correct 21st-century complaint: they contribute to the structural failure of the film. Downhill is all Roddy, all the time, and virtually everyone else on screen is a mere cipher, which is unsatisfactory all round.

Synopsis: A boy takes the blame for his best friend’s misdeed and is expelled from school. From that point on, his life proceeds on a downward spiral into poverty and degradation. (BFI Screenonline)

Hitchcock moment: Another painful reveal: here’s why sunlight and early-hours drinking dens don’t mix.

Watch out for: A foretaste of Vertigo. No, not that shot, but a splash of sickly green tinting.

Links worth clicking:

Downhill screens in London this summer as part of the BFI’s Genius of Hitchcock season.

Lecture

The Women of Old Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard (1950)

June 13, 2012 PH 4 Comments

When the tintypes first galloped westward in the 1910s, what was it like to be a woman working in the film industry? A special event at Conway Hall, part of the Looking In Looking Out festival of film and philosophy, hopes to find out. The evening will take a look at the earliest days of Hollywood, the era of Lois Weber, Frances Marion, June Mathis Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand and Clara Bow.

We’ll be asking questions such as: how much did women contribute to the formation of the cinema as we now know it? Were there more opportunities for women in the then-new industry or did broader social ideas about women’s roles hold them back? Do the films that women made during this period represent a specifically female or even feminist point of view? Have women been written out of cinema history? But we’ll also be celebrating the many fantastic achievements by women both well-known and obscure in silent-era Hollywood.

The LILO event will comprise, first, a panel discussion chaired by Bidisha and featuring Kira Cochrane, Jenny Hammerton and Muriel Zagha as well as um, me. This will be followed by a screening of Billy Wilder’s sublime Sunset Boulevard (1950), with its unforgettable lead performance by Gloria Swanson as the embittered silent film star Norma Desmond.

6.30pm Bidisha leads a high-kicking whirl through Hollywood history and a celebration of the brilliant women who co-founded Hollywood, with film experts, critics, Old Hollywood fans and film lovers Jenny Hammerton, Muriel Zagha, Pamela Hutchinson and Kira Cochrane.

8pm Sunset Boulevard (1950) Gloria Swanson’s career-defining performance in Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s Oscar-winning tragic tale of a star in decline. As much a reflection on the idea of Hollywood itself, as it is on love and loss.

So please, come one, come all – this should be fun. The Women of Old Hollywood event takes place at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London on Tuesday 3 July 2012. Doors open at 6pm. Tickets cost £10 and are available here. You can read more on the Conway Hall website, or on Facebook. There’s a Twitter feed too. And if you want more, here’s a very smart feature from the clever chaps at Real|Reel Journal introducing the festival.

Blog, video

Blancanieves (2012): teaser trailer

June 12, 2012 PH 4 Comments

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…