#TheyAlso… Claire (1924), Kennington Bioscope with John Sweeney

Lya De Putti

Good programming from the Bioscope tonight with two films variously entitled Passions of Men and The Woman Always Pays… even in the early years there were important social questions being raised especially in Europe, in this case Germany and Denmark.

What a year it’s been for Weimar Cinema and out of the blue comes a rarity to Kennington extracted by Bioscope stalwart Tony Fletcher from the BFI archives – not lost but certainly a film that hasn’t been seen for some time.

Directed by Robert Dinesen, Claire (aka Passions of Men), stars the incredibly watchable Lya de Putti, the sharpest profile in Berlin with pencil-thin eyebrows capping sublime arches over eyes flickering the deepest darkest black… There’s something about Lya and that’s exactly what this film is about as the plot is essentially a story of her efforts to evade unwanted male attention; that might be a proto-feminist theme and it’s certainly not the only film of this period dealing in man’s inhumanity to woman.

Frida Richard playing another mum in The Path of Grete Lessen (1919)

Claire lives with a rich older man (Eduard von Winterstein, Claudius in Asta’s Hamlet) who has taken her in along with her mother (Frida Richard, who played the manically possessive mother in Lupu Pick’s New Year’s Eve aka Sylvester (1924)) with the aim of marrying her – he’s over fifty and she’s just twenty which means she was about sixteen when he made an offer that couldn’t be refused. The film repeatedly has Claire “facing the World” – a woman with little power and reliant on the kindness of male strangers.

Claire is, however, made of stern stuff and refuses the old man’s take it or leave it offer, leading the old buzzard to turf both her and her mother out immediately. He soon relents and chases after them on horseback in terrific shots along a snowy lane lined as far as the eye can see by winter trees. He loses the women and falls off his horse, losing the use of his legs in the process.

Eduard von Winterstein - a face made for drama

Claire gets a job as a poorly paid administrator whilst her mother grows increasingly frail in their one-room apartment. They can’t afford to eat properly and the old woman collapses and is almost gassed for want of a decent meal. A kindly Doctor (Theodor Loos) helps and even waves his fee after Claire tells him they can’t afford him again. Claire attendance at work is affected by her mother’s plight and she is dismissed by her boss unless that is, she would like to make up for her tardiness in kind.

On her way home she catches the eye of a con artist (Erich Kaiser-Titz) who spies the chance to romance only to have his plans interrupted by the police. He makes a break for it and hides thousands of Marks worth of forged notes in Claire’s bag. Claire gets arrested trying to buy her mother a chicken for supper… but has a lucky break when the police commander believes her story even when she opens her purse to reveal the rotten notes.

By the time she gets home her mother has passed away and, alone in the world as the Doctor says, accepts his kind offer of work as his assistant. The two go close and she frets over the visits of a woman who turns out o be his sister. The film could end with their embrace and the Doctor’s highly prominent hair fetish – he just can’t stroke it enough – where it not for the surprisingly early release of the forger.

Theodor Loos in kindly Doctor mode

This is where the plot gets a little convoluted when he works out where Claire lives and – successfully - tries to drive a wedge between her and the Doctor. Claire’s options begin to narrow but, as she has done all along, she refuses to sacrifice her independence and morality and, after a chance encounter, meets her former master’s son (Eberhard Leithoff) who pleads with her to return and look after him as his mental and physical health declines.

Trouble is, the old fellow is still infatuated with Claire and he has the gun in his pocket to prove it! Will Claire’s luck finally run out – I know it doesn’t sound like she’s had much – or is there one more twist to prevent the woman from paying?

Claire is convoluted fun and John Sweeney enlightened the narrative with romantic flourishes and dramatic interventions that ensured we were firmly focused on the extraordinary expressiveness of Lya. Michell Facey introduced and told of the Hungarian actress’ success in Germany – including Variety and her off-screen/in-trailer relationship with Emil Jannings – before she tried her luck in Hollywood. She couldn’t sustain success there and died tragically young after surgery to remove a chicken bone led to infection. By coincidence tonight was the anniversary of her death in 1931.

Asta on the tram

Claire was a rather calming experience after the Bioscope audience was left shaken and rather stirred by young Asta Nielsen’s outrageously sexual dancing in Afgrunden (1910). Colin Sell ventured that the actress might have had control of her costume design because the fabric used could hardly have been more revealing as she writhed her way around circus cowboy (Poul Reumert) in a deliberate, distended demonstration of dominance over her bound “captive”. Syncopated BDSM with a beat and a swing... as it were.

The alternate title for this film is The Woman Always Pays and even as early as 1910, Asta was questioning why this should be with a character who is dependent on male patronage and who cannot be free of the “male passions” that plague Lya too. They were making sophisticated films for women as well as men and you can only wonder what Die Asta – the first true European film star along with Max Linder – did for her sisters over this time?

She is famously one of the inventors of screen acting and her ability to express cinematically – nuanced and naturalistic – is something to behold. On the big screen she’s stunning, using fine-motor physical control that, as Angela Dalle Vacche has said, seemed to anticipate the close-up's subliminal impact.

Colin Sell accompanied with remarkably steady hands despite the on-screen excitement and combined so well with this remarkably advanced film which, blemishes aside, stands as one of the pinnacles of early European cinema.

"And she can dance..."

Weimar mania… Opium (1919), with Jonny Best, BFI

In her sparkling run through of this major BFI retrospective of Weimar Cinema, Margaret Deriaz said that in the years between 1919 and 1933, Germany produced over 3,500 films, second only to Hollywood in scale and productivity. Of all those films it would be hard to find one more purely quirky than Opium and yet, for all its strangeness the film has plenty of charms especially when accompanied by Yorkshire's finest, Jonny Best, whose patient minor chords and plaintive discords did much to liberate Robert Reinert’s original dramatic flavours.

The film has a distinctive visual style, almost a series of tableaux in the manner of pre-war Italian film but very vibrant and filled with ambitious double exposures as well as some superbly-captured performances. Reinert’s cameraman was Helmar Lerski, a former portrait photographer who used deep focus and careful lighting to capture every performer in the frame with absolute clarity. Over and again one actor is joined by another and then another moving into frame and adding layers of meaning as they react to events. Another startling shot sees the main character, Professor Gesellius (Eduard von Winterstein), on a boat moving relentlessly in focus towards a distant shore filled with opium-induced faeries and sprites (of which more later…).

When the Professor gives a lecture a glass remains in close-up on his lectern as do his students as he approaches to speak, it’s very skilled and apt for a film about perception: The Doors of Perspective perhaps? It’s a very powerful style and whilst it wasn’t the way movies were to go it is still a compelling example of the experimentation of the time.

Conrad fades away and Eduard marvels at the depth of field as Sybill stays calm

This was also that brief period, post-war, when all censorship was dropped and so the film’s frequent Faerie nudity adds some extra surprise as does the take of mixed-race relationships and, yes, drug addiction. The effects of opium are revealed through double exposures and static montage of dancing sprites and pools of water, sometimes inverted over the character’s head. It’s clear that Psychedelia nearly happened here and yet the summer of love was far from the thoughts of film-makers still trying to make sense of the Great War.

As film historian Tobias Nagl, quoted in tonight’s hand-out said: “under the surface, Opium captures the experience and shock of the War… (using) … a brilliant, hallucinatory cinematic language.” So it is that the sanatorium the Professor sets up for recovering addicts is so very like those for the shell-shocked and the physically-destroyed, men who were all but dead already trying to piece themselves together away from the adrenal rush of fear and mortal dread.

Now some of the audience and I’m naming no names couple in the second row with horsey laughs… found all this a bit too melodramatic but maybe they’d been caught up in BFI Weimar Mania (it’s a thing!) and hadn’t quite – literally – got with the programme.

"Smokers, get high..."

This being 1919 some stereotypical characters are deployed but the relationships between the “Indians” in brown face, the “Chinese” and the white men are more even-handed than you might credit. Granted there is a completely bonkers bad guy, Nung Chiang (Werner Krauss, yes the good Dr Caligari) who literally pops up onto screen to the surprise his enemies across the World with a manic grin and acid jazz hands but I think, like so much of the film, his character is representative and not meant to be a genuine description of a contemporary drug dealer.

Lotte Eisner shoot me down in flames but, whilst this is most definitely not an expressionist film, there are elements of the style not so much in the mis en scene but the performances all of which are designed as emblems rather than characters. No one plays it straight but then this is a drug-den of a movie and we’re all out of minds with grief and as the first tentative buzz of the new democracy kick in. No censorship mein Herr: we’re so out of it, we see lions in India!

The story is about addictions to love and revenge with Nung Chiang swearing revenge on Richard Armstrong (Friedrich Kühne) an Englishman who smoked his opium and then stole his wife in China. There’s a further grievance for Chiang when Professor Gesellius rescues a young woman, Sin (Sybill Morel) from his den of multiple iniquities – you name it he’s selling it – and takes her back to his sanatorium in the West. Sin is mixed race and you can guess who her father is… but, none of this is known to Gesellius’ wife Maria (Hanna Ralph) who just happens to be having an affair with Dr. Richard Armstrong Jr. (Conrad Veidt).

Eduard von Winterstein, Werner Krauss and Sybill Morel

Connie’s younger and better fed than I’m used to and is convulsed with shame after his boss comes back… so much so that he’s not long for this World, dying on a bed surrounded by almost all of the main characters in another remarkable tableau with centimetre-perfect depth of field.

His death is considered suspicious and with the Professor in the frame, Sin takes the blame only to be whisked away from execution by Gesellius. Which is how we find ourselves in India with all those lions and so many scores to settle.

Opium is opulent and over-wrought and I’d love to see it again. The restoration from Filmmuseum München, as premiered at last year’s Berlinale, is crisp and clear, is as close as we’ve been to the original which is one of Reinhert’s few surviving films.

Jonny Best took the film in his stride and maintained a watchful poignance that fitted the sparkling visuals perfectly; this film is an elegy as much as a beginning and despite appearances there was more unknown than known emotion on screen.

An excellent start to the BFI Weimar season!

Just say no.

Jungle Book, not The Lion King

Boys don’t cry… Hamlet (1921), Wilton’s Music Hall with Robin Harris

Another year another celebrity Prince of Denmark and as London reels from the Cumberbatch-lash (To be or not to be… was moved in previews to the start of the play in the Barbican’s new version - imagine!?) this screening at wonderful Wilton’s provided the perfect opportunity to reflect on just how malleable this play can be.

This wasn’t the first time that a woman had played Hamlet but it was almost certainly the first time that the Prince had actually been a Princess – one forced to conceal her sex in order to maintain the Danish throne and who’s dithering route to revenge is now explained by her femininity. Well, that’s how Dr. Edward P. Vining's book The Mystery of Hamlet had it in 1881 but here, with Asta Nielsen as the Prince, it’s a little different…

One of the tinted sequences - Hamlet rides with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Die Asta was calling all of the shots and with this being her self-titled company’s first production, she appointed the directors Svend Gade and Heinz Schall and – one presumes – had plenty of say in the direction of her character: a Hamlet whose function is not just smothered by surmise (as distant cousin Macbeth once remarked) but through force of circumstance. She is a woman in a brutal man’s world, whose position is purely dependent on her being perceived as a man.

Asta Nielsen and Lilly Jacobson

Some of those down from Hoxton for the evening may have found the premise a little too funny but Asta knew full well what she was about and there are some wonderful digs at Hamlet in the opening titles: “ an ass” said Goethe, “an affected fop” said Herder and a "taseless mix of whim and nonesense" said Voltaire (ooh, get you!). Vining’s theory could explain it all and is all the more gender-bent because of the fact that in Tudor times a young man would have had to play the woman playing the man…

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman...

This was also post-War Germany, after a conflict that had seen women stepping into so many of men’s roles – Asta was already the money and the talent: here was another way for her to promote equality of opportunity…

My father was killed by a Danish sword...but let us put their hatred behind us!

I’d seen the film before – the splendid Edition Filmmuseum DVD and this was the version used for tonight’s screening but I wasn’t just here for the movie and the newly re-furbished Wilton wonderland: I was here for the music. We were treated to an exceptional live score composed by multi-instrumentalist Robin Harris who played piano, flute and percussion whilst regular collaborator Laura Anstee played Cello and a lot more besides. They also had Aaron May on electronics, who sampledg the other players’ and creating enriched soundscapes layered over the acoustic instruments: a fusion of modern composition for silent film with modern sound collage.

Hamlet instructs the players

They provided a multi-textural accompaniment to Nielsen’s meta-textual film and you got the feeling that Asta would have smiled that knowing smile, winked and said “well done”! I especially liked the deployment of the Swanee Whistle but there were many instruments played to great effect throughout highlighting the comedy as well as the usual tragedy – I think this Hamlet was meant to be played with a swagger and to be fun. Mission accomplished Robin, Laura and Aaron!

Hamlet teases Polonius

Hamlet: Drama of Vengeance, to give its full title, is a tour-de-force from Nielsen who, whilst she wouldn’t actually pass for a man does pass as a woman playing at being a man. Mr. From-Hoxton, the jokes are intentional and the country that was busy inventing and perfecting the art of twentieth century cultural transgression was more than capable of holding all of the contradictions of Asta’s Hamlet in its cinematic consciousness all at the same time.

How lovely Provence must be...

Hamlet goes to university and casting an appraising glance up and down Horatio (Heinz Stieda), who is from Provence, remarks how lovely the place must be; she occasionally has to pull her shirt closed to conceal herself and you can imagine the double-think of the Ophelia situation. All is explained by her attempt to keep Horatio away from Polonius’ daughter but there’s a lot of love that might well dare not speak its name otherwise.

Hamlet’s situation starts with her father, also called Hamlet (Paul Conradi), almost dying in battle. Her mother Queen Gertrude (Mathilde Brandt), delivers a baby girl but decides the only way to secure the throne is to tell the world it is a son. King Hamlet recovers but agrees to go along with the deception.

The Danish Royal Family: complicated...

By the time the girl has grown almost into a man, Gertrude has grown tired of her father that she’s carrying on with his brother Claudius (Eduard von Winterstein). A power struggle’s afoot and you wonder how Gertrude is going to break the news to her new lover that her son is nothing like he seems…

The King is removed by snakebite and his funeral wake quickly morphs into a wedding party as his brother and murderer hastily arranges a wedding. Hamlet enters the great hall, dressed in black with her cape flowing impressively behind as she storms towards the throne: she has her suspicions and when she discovers Claudius’ knife next to the snake pit from which he took the viper that did the deed… she knows her enemy.

Hamlet flies in to challenge the new King

How to revenge herself given her precarious position and the new King’s superior strength? Hamlet makes the decision to not only pretend to be mad but to carry on pretending to be a man.

Kindly old Polonius (Hans Junkermann) – who is quite splendidly made up like an out-take from an Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Japanese fairy tale – tries to help the seeming unfortunate who then persuades his daughter Ophelia (Lilly Jacobson) to fall for him and not Horatio… That’s just not going to work out and, by the same token, nor can the Norwegian King Fortinbras (Fritz Achterberg) expect his relationship with the young Price of Denmark to ever be more than… fraternal.

The fair Ophelia gets closer to the water...

Hamlet is always amongst my favourite Shakespeare with an uncertain hero given plenty of great soliloquies en route to the neat bloodbath at the end… Here the tragedy is stripped down and given new dimension as Horatio realises his buddy is really his love: an extra twist – love as well as life wasted.

Asta Nielsen

It goes without saying that Die Asta is quite magnificent – amidst the pantomime the big screen revealed even more of her ability to present the appearance of nuanced reality on film. It’s her casual glances and smaller gestures that succeed the most; underpinning her ability to rise to the more obvious dramatic crescendos.

The Edition Filmmuseum DVD is available direct and can find it on Amazon.de, .com and ,co.uk too.

More details of Robin Harris can be found on his website which also features musical samples from his score for Der Golem! Lovely stuff.