A day at the opera… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day Two

I think we may have just hit peak Pordenone and it’s only Sunday. There are moments of submersion in the best of silent film with live accompaniment and these happened repeatedly through the day whether it was Lyda Borelli’s sublime movements in hand-coloured Rapsodia Satanica with piano and harp accompaniment, a disturbing and impactful unknown film (for me) from Uzbekistan about the plight of women in polygamous marriages or Lilian Gish wasting away in operatic style with accompaniment featuring elements of La Bohème itself. As if this wasn’t enough, we saw Paris menaced by a group of runaway pumpkins… and, thankfully after Lilian, a group of boarding school women making merry at Coney Island in 1905. Variety is the spice of le Giornate!

 

Rapsodia Satanica (IT 1917), with Stephen Horne, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

If Bertini is the thought, the determined intellect of classic Italian Diva films then Lyda Borelli is the beating heart, the style, grace and soul. Less naturalistic than her “sister” she was the one with the classic theatrical training (Bertini being more purely “of the movies” although she did theatre too) and was remarkably expressive whilst creating a natural intimacy that compels the viewer still.

 

For me Borelli’s status as Primus Inter Divas are perfectly exemplified by this odd and spectacularly colourful take on the Faustian pact… A skilled melange of contemporary dance, art and literature, based on a contemporary poem by Fausto Maria Martin and directed by Nino Oxilia in 1915 but not released until the year of his death in the trenches of 1917.It looks divine and the hand colourization gives it an uncanny charm that seemed to fill the entire auditorium of the Teatro Verdi, touching its audience.

  

Lyda plays Alba d’ Oltrevita, an elderly society lady, who has little life left and spends her days remembering her former beauty. She wishes far too hard and from out of a painting pops the malevolent form of Mephisto (zestfully realized by Ugo Bazzini) who offers to return her youth on the condition that she destroys a small statuette of Cupid which will mean that she will be restored but never again be able to feel love… We see her looking at her reflection in a pond, surrounded by a veil of white silk that floats around her upper body born aloft by her movement: this is youth and beauty in motion and repose. She meets two brothers Tristano (Andrea Habay) and Sergio (John Cini) and proceeds to enchant them both in playgrounds, parks and parties.

The film is split into three parts with the first a prologue setting up the rejuvenation, the second the tug of love with the brothers and the third a dance of regret, desolation, hope and mortality. Borelli dominates this sequence even more than the others and there is no end of colourful moments as she wrestles with her turmoil.

 

Satanic Rhapsody is “operatic” and I doubt any other actress in Britain or Hollywood could carry it off in quite the way La Borelli does in her way. Angela Dalle Vacche – in the excellent Diva – Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema – points out the similarities between Borelli’s rapturous dance and American performer Loie Fuller but then Borelli was not only well-educated but also keen to express as much of her influences as possible. This is the richest of cinema. Art in moving expression with interpretation still sublimely elusive, just as the actress as she dances enfolded in those iconic fabrics.

 

Stephen Horne’s piano, flute and accordion were accompanied by Elizabeth Jane Baldry’s harp and their unique understanding enabled them to accompany with the beauty and emotional subtlety the film deserves. Tonally they are a two-person orchestra but they also know how to create the most magical and uncanny worlds of their own. Transported we were and the streets carried a weird vibration for hours afterwards…

 

 

La Bohème (1926) with Donald Sosin

 

 “When Lillian Gish now appears, you know she is due for a beating. . . A Society for the Prevention of Screen Cruelty to Lillian Gish should be organized." 

Herbert Howe, Picture Play Magazine

 

Did someone say opera? For an entirely different approach on capturing the music and emotion on screen I give you Lillian Gish who made something of an art form out of physical deprivation in her roles with Director King Vidor fearful that he might lose his lead as well her character. To prepare for the tragic ending of this story (c’mon it’s from the opera by Puccini, what do you expect?) she visited sanitaria to study tuberculosis patients in order to learn how to breath with minimal movement of the rib cage. Then she starved herself of food and water for the three days before she shot the ending…

 

It is genuinely shocking to watch her frail last moments as she hauls herself across Paris to meet her lover for the last time. It could be horribly melodramatic but she transcends this with conviction and incredible physical bravery. Why was she doing this? Maybe she felt the need to make a statement as in some quarters her characterisations were staring to be seen as old hat. You might fault her style but never her courage and commitment. Gish also picked the best rising talent she could to make this film after seeing early cuts of King Vidor’s magnificent The Big Parade. Vidor directed with his stars John Gilbert and Renée Adorée plus the likeable Karl Dane also involved.

 

The story is set in 1830 and shows the lives and loves of a group of bohemians living in the service of their art in a tumbledown house in the Latin Quarter. Gilbert plays the would-be playwright, Rodolphe, who, to pay the rent writes stories about cats and dogs for a pet-fancier’s journal. His roommates are also struggling artists, musicians and writer Colline (Edward Everett Horton – yay!!). Their landlord constantly chases them for rent but they just about make ends meet and their diet is enlivened by the occasional windfalls of Marcel’s girlfriend Musette (Adorée) who lives downstairs in rather more salubrious circumstances… the source of her income is more than hinted at.

 

The film does allow Gish to act as a happy woman in love... and with Mr Gilbert too!

Alongside the bohemian’s room is that of a lonely lace maker and embroiderer, Mimi (Gish) who has only her pet bird for company. It’s almost too pitiful but not in the hands of Gish who, even in her early thirties could carry off “innocent battler”, she’s believable in this extended operatic universe. The landlord wants her out and she is saved by the scheming Vicomte Paul (Roy D’Arcy, relishing the in the villainy) who has more than her fabric in mind… He starts to commission work from her just so he can stay close and work out a way of having his evil way…

 

Mimi meets Rodolphe and the two fall in love. Mimi encourages the writer to work on his first play and starts to sacrifice herself for him especially after he loses his work at the journal and she has to work nights to get the money to make him think he’s still employed… Nothing must come in the way of his work but, obviously things will, pride, jealousy, the Vicomte… nothing can compete with Mimi’s love though.

 

All of this was given exceptional musical force by Donald Sosin’s accompaniment which quoted extensively from Puccini (I think?) and was one of the most potent and powerful piano accompaniments I’ve seen in this theatre. He met the film with operatic force pulling the sentiment into the Verdi in ways that made me truly engage with a film that had left me slightly cold on home DVD. Brava!!

 

 

Ra Messerer, The Second Wife

The Second Wife (1927) with Gunter Buchwald and Frank Bockius

 

To Uzbekistan and this extraordinary film from Mikhail Devonov based on a story by Lolakhon Saifullina, a polish woman who married an Uzbek man and converted to Islam. It’s a reflection of the enormity of the old USSR and the challenged Moscow faced in co-ordinating so many diverse cultures into one modernising state. Saifullina worked for the Sharq Yulduzi studio writing scripts sensitive to the issues of Uzbeki women her along with former legal consultant Valentina Sobberey. The result is a tale in which women and children are exploited by old male custom and dominance.

 

Director Devonov does not lapse into bucolic orientalism and focuses on the story and the depiction of prevalent practices of early marriage and polygamy. Here a merchant Tadzhibai (Grigol Chechelashvili)’s first wife Khadycha (Maria Griniova) cannot have children and so he has a second wife, Adoliat (Ra Messerer) who can.  A child duly arrives and Khadycha tries to destroy her competitor. She is far from alone in malevolence as his brother Sadiqbai (Mikhail Doronin), steals money whilst his older brother is away and also preys on young boys being seen to go through some form of marriage ceremony later in the story, as things escalate elsewhere.

 

At the same time there are two representatives of Russian youth enjoying heartier endeavous, enjoying the benefits of education and financial independence – emancipated by communism as their sisters (and brothers) suffer medieval indignities. It’s propagandist but still shows the harshness of unresolved “tradition” and male power. The tragedy continues in many parts of the World.

 

 

Gunter Buchwald and Frank Bockius accompanied with their telepathic combinations of perfectly pitched themes and punctuations, musically at home in any part of the world as it was or will be.

 

Also on my silent film dance card for today was Anna May Wong in a minor role in Driven from Home (1927) with John Sweeney on accompaniment and Virginia Lee Corbin as a young woman who wanted to marry for love not money as she frustrated her father. The family’s “sinister housekeeper” engineered a deep rift that saw everyone estranged and, as mother slowly faded away we wondered if anything would heal the rift. Anna May helped!

 

 

I watched the great Clara Kimbell Young in Trilby (1915) accompanied by Philip Carli and directed by the even greater Maurice Tourneur. Trilby was an adaptation of 1894 George du Maurie’s 1894 novel which features the mystical abilities of Svengali (Wilton Lackaye) to hypnotise his subject, Trilby O'Ferral (CKY) into being a great opera singer. I’d seen John Barrymore doing the same thing to Marian Marsh in the 1931 talkie and so this silent version struck me as rather slow (and more sober), but still fun.

 

After the opera we were also treated to some rare and magnificent shorts in Feminist Fragments 1. No Work and All Play including some Bubbles! (1904) and the street humour of Departure from the “La Sin Bombo” Cigarette Factory something along the lines of Aladdin and the Forty Thieves only in modern Argentina. A couple of short fantasies about housework preceded our badly-behaved boarding schoolgirls who, really, just wanted to have fun. And, they did! Accompanist Mauro Colombis made sure of it.

 

 

Ah yes, La course aux potirons (1908)!!