Friday 2 November 2018

Dancing Queen… The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), with John Sweeney, Cambridge Film Festival


The Lois Weber revival continues and this year’s Cambridge Film Festival featured four films from a director increasingly rated alongside anyone in the second full decade of film. Dumb Girl is her blockbuster and is quite different from her social dramas like The Blot and Shoes even though it includes some intricate characterisations. But here we get the chance to see Weber with a big budget, Cabirian camera movement, close-ups, a full-scale revolution with a cast of thousands and a moving coda so cinematically-perfect it had me in bits.

Weber’s cinematic instincts are so different from, oh, let’s say Mr David Wark Griffith, and she creates narrative tension equally well with multiple tracks, gruesome horror (heads impaled on sticks?!) and a lighter melodramatic touch. Yes, there are problems with this film which sometimes sags but all is rescued by a dynamic closing half-hour.

Anna Pavlova
Part of this was due to John Sweeney’s masterful accompaniment. John has written the splendid score for the Milestone DVD set – which I’ve relished watching after this screening - but playing solo is a different proposition especially given the complexity of aligning music with movement. Mr Sweeney has much experience of ballet accompaniment but with a film the editing and cutting means that you the dance is not always on beat – with the exception of one set piece from the original opera/ballet, John improvised and does what he does, not just tracking the narrative but weaving around it, adding flexibility of his own that lifted the action scenes and otherwise intensified the drama of a rather long film: a master at work and the essence of top notch live silent film!

It’s Ballet Month here with a trip to see the Jasmin Vardimon Company’s Medusa at Sadler's Wells last week and an evening with my favourite company, Ballet Cymru, coming up this weekend as well as silent-Swedish prima Jenny Hasselqvist’s stunning show in the Pordenone screening of Mauritz Stiller’s Ballet Primadonna (1916).

Anna Pavlova and Douglas Gerrard
Queue Anna Pavlova and a film of the same vintage I’ve been waiting to see on screen for some time – one of the most famous ballerinas in history, one of silent film’s greatest directors, Lois Webber and of course maestro John Sweeney, no stranger to ballet let alone silent film.

Now, I barely know my brisé from my Birdy Dance but it is fascinating trying to understand this world of disciplined motion. Whereas Hasselqvist is all power, Pavlova is smaller and relies more on her famous grace. She was not the ideal physical type for late Nineteenth Century Ballet and evolved a style of her own using her physicality to the upmost as an asset. Biographer Therese Heckenkamp wrote in A Princess of Ballet, that the Russian prima " made the most of her slender frame and danced the way she was made to dance, moving gracefully, expressing emotion with her flexible body.”  

On the beach
Pavlova was also the first dancer of her standard to tour the world and no doubt helped to raise the profile of the art alongside establishing herself as something like a global superstar. By 1915 she was living in Britain and then found herself marooned in the USA by the War, where she toured extensively. She was offered $50,000 to star in a film version of the Opera she had been touring D.F. E. Auber’s 1829 La Muette de Portici and the funds were much appreciated given the struggles of that tour.

The story is set in the seventeenth century when Spain ruled most of Italy and an actual incident in 1647 when the local population, under the leadership of a humble fisherman named Masaniello, revolted against their overlords. Now Masaniello (here played by Rupert Julian) was described as “...a young man of twenty-seven, beautiful and graceful in appearance, his face was brown and somewhat burned by the sun: black eyes, blond hair, with locks that ran down his neck.” But the history books don’t mention whether he had a sister called Fenella or indeed whether she played a part in the revolt.

A well-read fisherman: Rupert Julian years before he directed The Phantom of the Opera
Here she does, a mute who expresses herself through the physicality of graceful dance, innocent energy and a smile to stir hearts and sink ships. Naturally this part was made for Pavlova and it’s hard to see anyone else in the role, certainly in this way… you need a lot of skill to reign in the physical signifiers… and some of the other cast members fail to follow suit and so sometimes the acting can be, shall we say, overly specific. The narrative can also be over-literal with brother Masaniello described as keen to improve himself and then seen deeply engrossed in a book on his return from fishing: surely reckless boats-manship on a par with texting at the wheel of a car?

Fenella dances for joy, and with see-weed, when her brother comes home and we see their small community in a set built right on the beach. Their simple lives, in which Fenella helps the suffering with her effervescence, contrasts with the ruling Spanish nobility who are imperious and indifferent. There’s a superb close-up shot from a camera mounted on their coach, as the Viceroy, Duke of Arcos (Wadsworth Harris) and his wife Isabella (Betty Schade) arrive and look on with distanced disdain at the locals; discontent is brewing…

Close up on the Viceroy and Mrs Viceroy as they respond to the locals' displeasure all around them
A young Spanish noble Alfonso (Douglas Gerrard) cares enough to find out why and goes off in disguise to learn more about the people; he finds Fenella and soon they are galivanting in woodland areas and staying up all night lost on love. The only trouble is that Alfonso is lined up to marry Elvira (Edna Maison) plus, he’s a Spanish nobleman and a spy…

Startlingly, we see more characterisation for Elvira – and several other women characters – than you might expect and, it does seem that Weber was more interested in adding depth to her women than many a male director, before or since. In the end too, Elvira and Fenella work together to prevent complete disaster (for some).

Meanwhile, the men wear huge black wigs and moustaches and they make war! Weber’s action scenes feature some outstanding camera mobility with a great tracking shot across dozens of men as they try to repel revolutionaries – I’ve tried to show the breadth of that take but it’s much better than the cut and paste shows.

The moving camera records and having recorded, moves on... and on.
Critic and film historian Daniel Eagan also points out that Weber’s lens is freed to follow Pavlova as she gracefully weaves her way through the film. The dancer’s schedule was such that over a lengthy shoot she was only available some days for an hour and so Weber had to catch as much of her as she could. It worked and whilst she does her best with an undercooked script there are some excellent set pieces at the beginning and the ending of the film.

The film was once eleven reels long but, even now at around two hours it’s uneven but all the same a magnificent record of two major artists work. Not as eye-popping as Intolerance nor as narratively-dynamic (or racist) as Birth, this is still an epic romp.


The Milestone DVD is a double set is available directfrom their site and includes a welter of extras: The Immortal Swan (1935) – “a record of her art and life”, Anna Pavlova Dancing, 1925, produced by Douglas Fairbanks along with Anna Pavlova in Newsreels and some fascinating Home Movies from the twenties. For anyone interested in dance as well as silent film it’s essential.

Pavlova died aged 49 in 1931, after an illness for which a possible cure could have prevented her continuing the dance: she declined as life was not worth it without her precious movement.

Nigel De Brulier plays a priest, later he was John the Baptist in Nazimova's Salome

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