John Gilbert | Silent London

This is an extended version of the catalogue essay I wrote for Pirmoji Banga 2022, currently taking place in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The famous phrase attributed to Charlie Chaplin offers a devastating summary of He Who Gets Slapped (1924): “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” Victor Sjöström’s film examines what happens when one man’s bitterest humiliation is replayed for laughs, again and again, like a one-reel comedy playing in a nickelodeon.

The setting is French, but the source play is Russian, an enduringly popular stage hit by Leonid Andreyev, first performed in 1915. He Who Gets Slapped is an example of Andreyev’s “pansyche” theatre, in which the inner emotional state of the characters is more important that the plot. It’s an apt choice for director Victor Sjöström, credited in his American films such as this one, as Victor Seastrom. He had previously made dark psychological dramas such as Ingeborg Holm (1913) and The Phantom Carriage (1921) back home in Sweden. He Who Gets Slapped was one of his first films in his Hollywood career, which would include such similarly anguished fare as The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928), both starring Lillian Gish and Swedish actor Lars Hanson.

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War and Peace is nearly at an end (the raunchy BBC TV adaptation, that is). But don’t despair – Tolstoy up your life with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. Hollywood’s hottest ever on-screen couple ™ starred in the sumptuous Anna Karenina adaptation Love (Edmund Goulding, 1927), which is showing at the Royal Festival Hall this month.

Yes, the Royal Festival Hall – with the Philharmonia orchestra (featuring violinist Vadim Repin) playing a brand new score for the film written by Aphrodite Raickopoulou. You may remember that she wrote a very lush, romantic score for a similarly grand screening of Faust a few years back.

The even better news is that tickets for this event now begin at £5 – which is unbeatable value really. This screening is the premiere of the new score and will kick off the 2016 UK-Russia Year of Language and Literature here in London. The film and score will then embark on a world tour, taking in Russia, Japan and South Korea. But you’ll see it here first in London.