Book Review: Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema, by Maggie Hennefeld

If the women laugh… I don’t care what the men do. I go ahead and prepare for a long run… (if) they don’t like the show - turn off the pipe organ, Tessie; there’s nobody behind you but the ushers and they’re all asleep. 

Broadway star Taylor Holmes, Motion Picture Magazine, May 1918

 

This book achieves the rare feat of being both enlightening and thoroughly entertaining; Maggie Hennefeld’ s work here is so rich in content but it is also packed with the light touch of someone truly on top of their subject who is also able to define and then extemporise on the humour under study. Maggie’s historical analysis is compelling and revelatory, with the fluidity of her style making light work of the detail of whilst gleefully leading us on to the most interesting of conclusions.

 

Here is a book that explains the influence of societal changes on cinema, a liberation of feminine laughter that fuelled the popularity and monetization of the new media of the 1900s, as well as the opportunities the industry provided to enable the further acceleration of these changed sensibilities. The studios may have been laughing all the way to the bank but women were laughing all the way to greater liberation, self-expression and representation. None of this happened in isolation – other factors were at play – but The Killing Joke was definitely on the archaic attitudes of the late Nineteenth Century medical-political consensus. In capitalist society, nothing speaks louder than a new market found and served. Trust me, I’m a marketer.

 

I’m also a historian though – I’ve got the paperwork to prove it (just about) - and the first two sections of the book provide a thorough and fascinating feminist, “hysterical-historiographical” description of the view and status of women on the edge of nervous breakdowns as defined by the male mentalities of the Nineteenth Century and beyond. The appeal of silent film is always its view of the culture of the time, it’s a primary source showing not just the evolution of technique but also social mores, Death by Laughter adds so much context and breaks new ground for me and I would expect many others.

 

Léontine s'envole (1911)

“… women’s laughs were ruthlessly suppressed, muffled, corseted, defanged, gaslit and hystericized throughout the nineteenth century.”

 

Part One: Death by Laughter

 

Hennefeld splits the book into three sections, the first looking at the way laughter – something we would now count as a freedom – was once considered not just improper but also dangerous. From 1879 to 1920 hundreds of women supposedly laughed themselves to death, including one Bertha Pruett, killed by a joke in 1893 – allegedly.  It’s easy to laugh now but far more serious to lose control then, especially as a woman, prone as they were to nervous complications brought in by merry excess and wild laughter. Whilst there have been cases of people laughing just too hard, the poor man who couldn’t stop himself watching The Goodies episode about the ancient Yorkshire martial art of Ecky Thump, the dangers were used for marketing purposes very early on in the cinema.

 

Yet there was also deep-rooted disapproval of allowing one’s funny bone the full tickle. According to Charles Baudelaire writing “On the Essence of Laughter” in 1855, all merry laughter was “satanic”, “grotesque” or a symptom of lunacy. As bad as this is, he never used the term hysterical which was a gendered signifier reserved in a non-humorous way for the “weaker” sex for whom excess excitement was considered inappropriate by many. Indeed, as Hennefeld observes, women’s joyful laughter was actively censored and suppressed in the Nineteenth Century, they simply required more control.

 

The evolution of mid-to-late Nineteenth Century perceptions of laughter is analysed through sentimental novels, those reported health impacts and the works of Darwin (evolutionary purpose) and Marx (revolutionary purpose) until we get to 1898 and The New Laugh offered by the New York Herald; a “ripple of merriment” for a generation of girls making far too much noise. Buckle up Herald, the next century’s going to be a bumpy ride, and making more noise shall be the whole of the law.

 

I like the way Hennefeld draws contemporary analogies, especially the reference to the Monty Python sketch about the most dangerous joke in the world; one that is so funny it kills in seconds and which is used to win the Second World War. It’s un-survivable and un-sayable. Even lethal in German.

 

No Monty without Mabel?

Part Two: Female Hysteria

 

“I therefore claim all symptoms of female hysteria as unrealized eruptions of exuberant laughter… I see women’s hysterical symptoms as laughs cut off at the knees…”

 

This long-debunked aspect of early psychological analysis has been the subject of much examination by feminist historians. Hysterical was not a word associated with rollicking laughter until the end of the Nineteenth Century and was a signifier of female strangeness for much of the time before that and even beyond during the work of Sigmund Freud who here stands accused of “gaslighting the libido” of his subject Dora who simply refused to surrender to his interpretation of her symptoms. Dora’s will to resist is surely under-pinned by increasing education and the broader movement towards self-expression among better educated women. In Britain the reforms of Liverpudlian William Gladstone’s Liberal governments would have a long-term impact on the thinking and expression of the middle and even lower classes… soon more and more would want to vote and the disenfranchised were not laughing anymore.

 

Hennefeld shows how the “hysteria chronicles… map onto long-standing debates about the subversive potentials of disruptive feminist comedy” – can women’s laughing defiance tangibly impact the social order or are they just blowing off steam. This debate continues to this day across a whole range of the arts and even sports: how much “protest” does it take and is this also a manifestation of wider processes of change and challenge? She delves into the historiography of hysteria and the views of contemporary feminists balanced against those of the time to provide a whole spectrum of interpretation – from Freud to Foucault, who, whilst he is not gender specific, the facts show that hysterical women incarcerated in asylums were in greater numbers than men with similar conditions.

 

Next it is posited that pathological, noncomedic laughter is “the forgotten symptom” of female hysteria despite its frequent use as a cinematic signifier of unhinged evil/madness – think Bette Davis serving up a rat salad in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). “As a symptom – unlike hallucinations or somnambulism – laughter was never allowed to speak…” it was an uncoded message of madness, an end in itself in terms of cinematic creativity as well as contemporary psychotherapy.

Ultimately, the greater concern was possibly the transmissibility of hysterical laughter and the potential destabilisation of the social order. Living in the new age of mass hysteria – when the appearance or otherwise of a photoshopped princess can absorb the attention of millions – it is all too easy to relate to these turn of the last century concerns, “… emotional contagion and ideational suggestion are not so easily separatable…” as Hennefeld says.

Chrissy White and Alma Taylor. Dangerous women. 

Part Three: Early Cinema

 

“… female enjoyment was mined as a source of affective capital, conjuring transgressive fun as an exploitable compulsion.”

 

Did early cinema not only legitimise women’s freedom of hysteria but actively encourage it in the making and marketing of film? With the rise of this new media, women were able to become members of a “society of spectators”, participating in “…mass culture and a new urban crowd…” (Vanessa R Schwartz). A new context, new comedy and auditoriums enabling infectious mass merrymaking en masse.

 

Sadly, early cinema is, as Hennefeld says, “…a treasure trove for retroactive hope”; not all the news was good and she quotes Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai’s description of a nightmarish “permanent carnival” with its diminishing returns of compulsory enjoyment. This sits alongside Neil Postman’s concepts in Amusing Ourselves to Death, which, incidentally, had my son in ironic stitches as he read it for the first time recently and thought of Donald Trump: 40-year-old book, 80-year-old liar and 130-year-old lost opportunities.

 

Female and laughter from the marginalised was quickly commoditized in every conceivable way with phonographs featuring such as the “Hee-Haw Girl” Ida May Chadwick and “Laughing Girl” Sallie Strembler. Comedy films proliferated such as the 425 ft of laughter contained in Edison’s Sandy McPherson’s Quiet Fishing Trip (1908) and Essanay’s He Who Laughs Last, Laughs Best (1908) containing even more laughs per foot…

Frank Tinney &“Hee-Haw Girl” Ida May Chadwick, Philadelphia Inquirer, November 9, 1919

Hennefeld prefers the period of “early” cinema, from 1896 to 1907 “at which point films became increasingly concerned with storytelling and character development”. This formative decade of white-hot innovation and “…hasty exhilarating temporality- the sheer enthrallment with unforeseen play of wild, shape-shifting figures. This is surely an energy we can all connect with, youthful, risk-averse, putting the show on here and with a pre-jazz ideology that there are no mistakes. It sounds like hysterical unruly production, one with fewer rules and more room for everyone outside of the settled hierarchies of theatre.

 

As the medium developed so too did a “moral panic” about the impact on audiences with films such as The Soul Kiss (1908) advertised as “…free from the slightest trace of suggestiveness… “even as the main make character goes on a kissing spree, something a female protagonist would not be allowed. The worry began that films with “too much meaning” might make their audience anxious, hysterical even – that old hack phrase making a comeback. There were even advisory notices attached to certain films such as Vitograph’s Jerry’s Uncle’s Namesake (1914) which was, “one of those wild comedies that are dangerous for hysterical persons to watch”.                                                                                                                                                                 

By 1915, movies were established (and, no, not because of Griffiths’ lengthy advert for the bed linen industry) as were its clientele with Hennefeld introducing a Madame Medusa as an exemplar of the every-woman crowding most cinemas. She quotes Mauritz Stiller’s The Mannequin (1913) in which Lili Ziedner jumps upon screen to knock out a boxer (Andre Deed) before re-joining the audience in ways that clearly foreshadow Keaton’s Sherlock but also reveal how women wanted more control on and off screen. Dangerous thinking at the time and a challenge to a society in which the needs of the many cannot possibly be met in reality.

 

Cinema was a hysterical medium that “let our minds fall asleep and create with our eyes whatever the soul desires…” (a sadly unknown German writer in 1910) and “hysteria-historiography” means understanding cinema as a somatic language – the body not the mind – and “… proxy reality for a spectator on the cusp of having a powerful voice.” In this case it was to be a reality increasingly controlled by male-dominated studios but they were addicted to their audience; this push and pull continues.

Florence Turner in Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914)

 

The book also covers neurodivergent spectatorship in asylums as well as the fascination with mental health which led to such gems as Ham in the Nut Factory (1915) which does exactly as the title suggests. Tales that witness madness include of course, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) a depiction of the rise of the tyrannical psychiatrist, the cure being confused with the symptoms in a word of cognitive uncertainty in which films are also projected onto our doubts and fears.

 

Léonce Perret’s The Rocks of Kador (1912) is also quoted as “perhaps the most remarkable example of a meta film…” founded on the curative properties of cinema especially for female hysteria. Here, after having her sanity pushed to the limit by those wishing to make her miss out on her inheritance, a filmed reconstruction of her breakdown brings clarity back to her. Cinematic kill or cure would drive so much content as we were turned it on, tuned in and were turned on in return.

 

In her spectacular final chapter, Maggie brings forth the spirits of Daisy Doodad (Florence Turner) and her amazing Dial along with the legendary Léontine, a so-far un-named actress who produced a string of comedies in the early 1910s, to advance a Theory of The Laughing Head. Contrary to followers of David Wark G, close-ups were not his invention and indeed, human faces were a staple of cinema from the start. Scotsman James Williamson’s The Big Swallow (1901) gets his performer up close and digestible with his cameraman – which I’ve seen on 70mm at the BFI’s IMAX - then there was George Albert Smith’s series on Humorous Facial Expressions including Grandma Threading Her Needle (1901) and many more.

 

Gradually the performers and their parts are absorbed into more complex narrative spaces - the diegesis – although women’s faces remained as a close-up priority in many films, almost detached from body and this space as an object of wonder and desire. This is highlighted by the “low hanging fruit” (this is a playful book!) of When Cherries are Ripe (1907) which involves a woman chased up a cherry tree by a “masher” who evades him and is shown in triumphant close-up eating cherries, the most erotically coded fruit.

 

Marie Dressler throttles Charlie as Mabel watches Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)

This “emblematic shot” was seen less as faces were used to connect more complex narratives – Mabel Normand’s brilliant look to camera deployed to this affect in Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914) as she tries to avoid a drunken tramp. The focus remained on the female face though and you only have to think of the stars of the twenties and beyond to recognise this.

  

What Maggie does in 350 pages of disciplined and tightly referenced writing I can’t hope to summarise in full but what I can tell you is to buy what is certainly one of the books of the year in terms of silent film and the society it fascinated, reflected and helped transform. This is surely a rich new area for historical study and, as Maggie and her contemporaries are proving, there are a lot of connections still to be made.  

 

The book is dedicated to Léontine (whoever you are) and whilst the search for this ground-breaking silent comedian continues we can see for ourselves how potent she and other women were on the Kino Lorber’s Cinema’s First Nasty Women four-disc box set which Maggie helped to compile with others from the Women Film Pioneers Project, Eye Filmmuseum, FIC-Silente, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, and Carleton University. Read the book then watch/rewatch these films; the past is being brought back to life in front of our very eyes and it means more.

 

Author note: Maggie Hennefeld is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is also the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia, 2018) and co-editor of Unwatchable (2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (2020).

 

You can order Death by Laughter from all reputable booksellers and direct from the publisher Columbia University Press.

  

Léontine's box of bellowing balloons begin to blow up the patriarchy!

High hopes… Stranded (1927), Edward Lorusso Kickstarter

 

I’m a sucker for a film about film and whilst many might think of Show People I go back to Eleanor Boardman in Souls for Sale (1923) and also the lost film Merton of the Movies (1924) the source novel for which, by Harry Leon Wilson, thankfully survives along with a few plates showing the film’s stars, Glenn Hunter and Viola Dana (born Virginia Flugrath). The novel allows your mind to run wild with the ideas of Merton sleeping out on the set hoping for his big break, the film craze was in full flight and people did indeed make desperate attempts to make it big against all the odds.

 

This film, transferred in lovely 2k from the Library of Congress’ 35mm copy, is Edward Lorusso’s 25^th Kickstarter project and it was once again successful enabling Ed to enlist David Drazin to provide a lively jazz-aged new score for this delightful slice of life story. The story came from Anita Loos, who was a big enough draw at tis point to get mentioned on the promotional material, assisted by Frances Guihan with witty titles from West Indian writer Wyndham Gittens. Loos’ next film project was the first production of her novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928).

 

The star here is one Leonie Flugrath, aka Shirley Mason who is the younger sister of the aforementioned Viola and bears more than a passing resemblance as you’d expect. I’d say she was more of a classically good-looking star and with a “leading lady” persona that lacks Viola’s intensity and spunk. I have seen more of Viola and she’s a more rounded actor but then who knows what else young Shirley had in the tank.

Shirley Mason and the Godlike Genius that was Gale Henry!

Here she’s very sweet and sympathetic as Sally Simpson, a young woman in a small town who has reached a crisis point in her life, stranded between her love for Johnny Nash (William Collier Jr.) and her dreams of “making it” in Hollywood. Johnny can offer her security as well as love and yet she wants to try her hand at fame, eve though she’s very little preparation for this endeavour… The American Dream is a bit vague but that doesn’t stop her mother played by the great Florence Turner – yes, "The Vitagraph Girl" who spent time in Britain making Daisy Doodad's Dial (1914) and others.

 

Despite protests from Grandmother (Lucy Beaumont) and falling out with Johnny – who, not unreasonably, suggests that acting training as well as talent may be necessary – Sally duly heads off West, with a young boy sent by Johnny to hand over chocolates and an apology note, just missing his mark. Sally is on her own and Johnny doesn’t know if she got his peace offering or not.

 

In Hollywood Sally gets an early break and meets up with a host of extras earning $5 a day. One of the older heads, Lucille Lareaux played by the marvellous Gale Henry, knows the ropes and tries to advise the younger woman as well as to set expectations but when she does engineer a big chance for Sally she completely blows it… she just can’t act and it’s painful to watch.

 

So, unlike Show People et al, Stranded is dealing with the downside of Hollywood and it’s now not so much will Sally make it but will she manage to avoid the salacious scheming of Grant Payne (John Miljan) a self-styled friend of the stars and man in the know who trues to seduce the young woman with great promises…

 

Directed by Phil Rosen, the story races along and Shirley Mason makes for a winsome leading lady just as John Miljan excels at the evil. It’s the kind of film that would please cinema goers at the time and a reminder of the nature of so much cinema during this high-volume period. As the saying goes: they can’t all be classics… but in its way, Stranded is, a classic example.

 

Very few of Mason’s films survive and it’s to Mr Lorusso’s credit that he’s made this one available as well as Shirley’s The Apple Tree Girl (1917) and The Awakening of Ruth (1917) along with two of Viola Dana’s films. In addition to working on a number of Marion Davies films, Ed’s also written the definitive book on her cinematic works which I can highly recommend.

 

I’ve said it before, “blessed are the Kickstarters” but everything is driven by curious and determined characters like this and I commend Mr Larusso’s ongoing efforts just as I back his next project, The Enchanted Cottage (1924) – details here! The funding stage is completed but if you missed that it should be available later through Grapevine Video.

 

Mary Pickford, J. Farrell MacDonald and John Harvey

There’s an added bonus of a delightful and very rare short film, The Lighthouse Keeper (1911), directed by Thomas H. Ince and staring young Mary Pickford as Polly, a young woman caught in a tug of love between honest Tom Atkins (John Harvey) and the no-good Bert Duncan (William E. Shay) who tries to get his revenge after the two are married. Unluckily for him, Polly’s steadfast father, Nat (J. Farrell MacDonald), won’t let his lighthouse be used to doom his daughter and son-in-law.

 

As with Stranded, this was transferred from a Library of Congress print and has its original tints, some new (?) title cards and some cracking shots of the raging sea. Ed Lorusso provides the music this time and it’s a job thoroughly well done! 

Ed’s films have been broadcast on TCM and screened elsewhere. Grapevine Video have also made some available on home media which is what I hope will happen in this case: Shirley Mason and her co-stars deserve to be recalled and their skills appreciated anew by the silent film curious and around the world. We just can’t get enough of new old stuff!

Florence Turner

Would you trust this man? 

Anarchy in the UK… Nasty Women: A Comic Tribute, BFI with Meg Morley

There was a guy, I’m not sure if you remember him, who once referred to his presidential rival as a “nasty woman” long ago in The Time Before. In response film historians Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak ran a programme of comedy shorts at the 2017 Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone featuring women behaving nastily for comic effect. As that festival is about to run live for the first time on two years and because female silent comedy is as funny as it is often unrecognised, the BFI decided on a re-run with a few old favourites thrown in.

In the ten years or so I’ve been stricken with this silent film bug, there has been much restoration and re-evaluation of women’s role in early film direction with Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Webber, Nell Shipman, Germaine Dulac, Dorothy Davenport Reid and, of course, Mabel Normand amongst those now getting their due. But many of the key players in global comedy still require elevation in modern discourse, these women having faced the double bind of having to battle for recognition at the time and then being overwritten by a history that has favoured the men… we know their names and yet perhaps the greatest of all was directed in his first film by Mabel.

Today we gathered just to watch women being funny in the manner they were appreciated at the time: gender-neutral daftness all perfectly illuminated by Meg Morley’s improvisational excellence and introduced by long-time champion of the comically under-rated nasty women, Bryony Dixon.

The first two films got us warmed up…

The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901) USA

Here Lies the Remains of Bridget McKeen Who Started a Fire with Kerosine

 

This brief comedy outlined the perils of using inflammatory material to start a fire with the titular hero meeting her end after causing an explosion.

 

Mary Jane’s Mishap; Or Don’t Fool with the Paraffin (1903) UK

A couple of years later and this rather more sophisticated British effort told the same tale. Directed by George Albert Smith this film has Bridget/Mary Jane played by his wife Laura Bayley, a former variety performer, who hams it up splendidly with many pleading looks right to camera, busting the fourth wall and still connecting with the disruptive soul onlooking natives.

She rests in pieces...

Léontine s’envole (1911) France

Our lessons in fire safety completed it was off to France for the enigmatic gallic anarchy of the legendary Léontine, also known as “Titine” in France and Betty” in the United States, about whom almost nothing is known. Maggie Hennefeld’s essay on the LA Review of Books¹, shows what is known about this energetic screen presence but all this is entirely based on her surviving celluloid with her life off screen a closed book. She made some 22 episodes of her comic film series for Pathé-Frères from 1910 to 1912 after which she disappears apart from being spotted as an extra in a 1916 comedy.

Here she burns bright as a brat who keeps on begging her parents for one more balloon until, inevitably, she takes off and is carried across the sandy streets of what looks like the south of France pursued by all and sundry attempting to pull her to earth. This includes three acrobats who stand on each other’s shoulders to try and catch her. Everyone falls down and the camerawork is startling, following our brave star as she gamely hangs from balloons dangling from a crane metres above the ground.

Léontine after the balloons go up

Léontine enfant terrible (1911)

I’m not surprised Léontine is so awful in this film as her parents look like creatures from a gothic fairy tale, mother complete with prosthetic nose. Their daughter strikes back and smashes all of their plates and most of the house before spreading her destruction to the outside world. She ties two workmen together so they drop their boxes, sets fireworks off and smashes a man’s head into a pumpkin. There may be a deeper meaning to all this but surely there’s nothing more purely amusing than watching someone break completely with social convention and just let rip. A fanfare for the common woman.

Léontine garde la maison (1912)

Now, there’s one thing you really don’t want to do and that’s leave this woman in charge of the house and the baby… and the dog. Léontine feels put upon and responds in the only way she can, dishes are washed and smashed, kitchens are set alight and bathrooms flooded, then she goes to play with her pal and the dog and child disappear. Advertising for her lost items she gets dozens of children and dogs in return before being told off by mother. At the end she cries only until she’s left alone to fight again.

What is she rebelling against? What have you got?

Butter wouldn't melt: Chrissie White and Alma Taylor

 

Tilly’s Party (1912)

In the Tilly series, Alma Taylor and Chrissie White play merry havoc with social norms by cheeking their way through anarchic adventures which must have made the women in the audience feel just that bit more amused than the men. Here the girls disrupt a gathering at their parent’s house, lead the angry guests on a merry chase sat on the handlebars as their boyfriends cycle away. They manage to get to their “music lesson” just in time to get away with it all.

At the height of the suffrage debate, the women’s movement was so ingrained in society and so many women went to the pictures… perhaps cinema was more subtly supportive than the government may have thought?

Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914)

Not only does American actress Florence Turner prove that if the face fits anything is possible, she also demonstrates the comedic special relationship between her home country and the old country. DDD concerns the efforts of Ms Turner and her hubby to win a face-pulling competition. They’re both very adept but Florence's facial flights of fancy end up getting her arrested before she finally wins out with her extraordinarily flexible fizzog².

Flo’, this is great content for Tic-toc, bring back pro-face-pulling, there’s gold in gurning!

The Night Rider (1920) Texas Guinan

Not for nothing was Texas Guinan described as “the female William S Hart” who, as the Kennington Bioscope’s Michelle Facey ³   has said, was very much the real thing, a ranch gal from Waco, who could ride and shoot as good as any man on her father’s farm. Guinan toured as an itinerant rodeo performer before the stage (not the Deadwood one…) called. She featured in vaudeville were her pep and knack for self-promotion stood her in good stead: she once claimed to have accidentally shot herself in the side, but the show still went on, it being just a flesh wound an’ all. She was still a chorus girl in 1917 and as she rode a horse down the runway in the theatre, she was talent spotted by a movie man… probably.

Texas is as charming as she is tough and here she has to choose between two men, one of whom may be rustlin’ her cattle… as is usual, she doesn’t stand on politeness and if any man has wronged her… there ain’t no mercy! Not nasty, just assertive!

Meg Morley accompanied with thematic variety and satisfying melodic invention. No two “scores” were the same and she kept pace with the on-screen anarchy with the acuity of a seasoned jazz player, one used to working as part of an improvisational team.

A splendid afternoon on the Southbank and we drank a toast to the nasty but nice trailblazers who are being remembered anew.

 

Texas

1. Looking for Léontine: My Obsession with a Forgotten Screen Queen, Maggie Hennefeld, Los Angeles Review of Books September 24, 2019

2. Early 19th century: abbreviation of physiognomy.

3. In her introduction for the Kennington Bioscope’s screening of The Girl of the Rancho (1919), Wednesday 2^nd May 2018!

All the world’s a screen… Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film on DVD/Blu-ray

“We’re not creating Elizabethan music, we’re not creating early twentieth century music… we’re doing something for us to enjoy these incredible films right now…“ Stephen Warbeck, composer

When I wrote about the debut of the Play On! Back in April, the focus was very much on the exhilarating live performance from the Globe Theatre musicians as much as the subject matter. The films whisked by and just as you were spotting the plays you’d move onto the next one: impressions of Shakespeare all featuring the buzz of silent invention as the medium of cinema was rapid-prototyped over its first three decades.

Now the BFI have released the piece on home cinema – DVD and Blu-ray – there’s more time to study the source material and, in addition to discrete titles identifying each clip, there’s a handsome booklet that lists each film used and their players: it is fascinating stuff and so very compelling for silent buffs like me who just have to know, you know.

Pina Fabbri and V Cocchi in The Winters Tale (1913)

In an introduction to the film from the BFI’s Bryony Dixon and Professor Judith Buchanan explain the origins of Shakespeare in silence and its rapid development as film-makers began to present the stories in ways only cinema could allow: special effects, lavish costumers and stencil colouring, grand sets, casts of thousands and locations including Venice for The Merchant.

From early films, limited to less than a few minutes and which showed just key moments from the plays, productions became more ambitious as the 1900s moved on and by the post-war era we have Asta Nielsen’s gender-bent Hamlet which not only attempts the entire narrative it also adds a twist or two.

Performance style developed also and from those first precious glimpses of Beerbohm-Tree's performing King John in Victorian theatrical style, through screen-skilled pantomime of the 1900s to a fascinating Shylock from Matheson Lang in 1916 to the naturalism of Nielsen (who, in fairness, played a huge part in these developments from 1910’s Afgrunden onwards) and the screen acting intensity of Emil Jannings whose Othello leers out of the screen with the force of his anger and betrayal.

Herr Jannings

Play On’s five acts are based on these developing trends and whilst they make a more cohesive statement in the context of the disc’s extras, they are also an opportunity for some wonderful music and it is the music which makes everything gel – no mean feat considering the changes in visual tempo across the twenty films.

In another visual extra, the Globe musicians are seen recording the works in the candle-lit Sam Wannamaker Theatre – the Globe’s covered playhouse – and it would have been interesting to see them play the whole pieces in that context. This band of multi-instrumentalists – and they are a band – run the gamut from pastoral to industrial with one section seeing them hitting metal with hammers as Mark Anthony appeals to the populace after Caesar’s assassination: Einstürzende Neubauten meets Warwickshire poetry in Rome.

Julius Caesar (1908)

This was a challenge in variable tonality but one the composers and musicians were more than prepared for.  As Bill Barclay, the Globe’s director of music says the score reflects “…the unique theatre music know-how that the Globe engenders in all its live energy and variety.” His composers, Jules Maxwell, Olly Fox, Alex Baranowski, Sophie Cotton and Stephen Warbeck all came experienced in the art of emotional engagement “in-the moment” as audiences normally hear the music only once – much like their silent counterparts – but also with an intuitive approach to telling richly-detailed stories with “sound and surprise”.

Sarah Homer and Jon Banks

All of which depends on the abilities of this very talented band of players to express and there’s so much experience in the dextrous hands of the band: Jon Banks plays accordion, santouri, harp and tuba, Sarah Homer plays flutes, piccolos, recorders, clarinet and bass clarinet, Harry Napier on cello, tenor horn and dilruba and Dario-Rossetti-Bonell on guitar, mandolin and oud. Stephen Bentley-Klein combines violin, trumpet and flugelhorn whilst Rob Millett plays vibraphone, percussion and cimbalom.

All are very adapt in the art of hammers on steel as even Sarah demonstrates in the aforementioned section: for a flautist she strike very hard! But they’re all jacks and masters of these instruments – a team: a band!

The band play on in  the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

I watched the DVD twice – once just to enjoy the sights and sounds and again to dig deeper into the source material. Sandwiched between a Prologue and an Epilogue are five acts…

Act I Artifice – deals with the camera-trickery that allowed a clear demarcation between the cinema and the stage. Here we see Puck (Gladys Hulette) take off and fly around the Globe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1909) that looks joyful and intriguing – the full 12 minutes is included in the extras. Characters appear and disappear and poor Bottom (William V Ranous) gains the head of an ass in the blink of an eye.

Prospero releases the fairy sprite Ariel from a tree in a 1908 Tempest whilst in Julius Caesar, Calpurnia has disturbing dreams about the Ides of March. You get two ghosts for Hamlet’s father from 1908 and 1913 before Richard of York dreams his own demise in a 1911 UK version.

Gladys Hulette about to take off in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1909)

Act II Spectacle – there’s only so much room on a stage and on film the canvas quickly widened to include real locations and casts of thousands. A shadowed figure carries a scythe across a field filmed from a low camera-angle in a 1913 Italian version of A Winter’s Tale which was 43 minutes long. Another Italian production was Il Merchante di Venezia (1910) filmed not only in Venice but in sumptuous stencilled colour.

Il Merchante di Venezia (1910)

We’re back in Venice for a UK take in 1916 which features what looks like a superb portrayal of Shylock by Matheson Lang. But even earlier films had grandiose ideas with the 1908 Tempest having a brilliant sequence with actors on stage in the foreground with the shot of ship floating on an actual sea in the background.

But the films were getting bigger and more ambitious culminating in some huge set pieces: Caesar’s triumphant march through Rome, Cleopatra’s royal barge arriving centre-stage to carry her off in glory and a cast of thousands in the weary spread post-battle as the old king is carried wounded down a hill in Asta’s Hamlet (1920).

Set, sea and ship in The Tempest (1908)

Act II Dramatis Personae – focuses on the major players in the canon and no matter when the films were made, we recognise so many old faces.

Other rarer plays get “quoted” including Cardinal Wolsey (1912) – admittedly of disputed authorship – which sees a naughty Henry (Tefft Johnson) eyeing up the latest arrival at his court as she gets dressed in her boudoir – it’s Clara Kimball Young as Anne Boleyn: an early foretaste of Syd and Babs! There’s more star-spotting with a young Francesca Bertini playing a colourised Cordelia in Re Lear (1910) another included in full in the extras.

Tefft Johnson eyes up Clara Kimball Young in Cardinal Wolsey (1912)

Sometimes the clips are unfamiliar or fragmentary but the music holds firm and brings a cohesion and consistency of emotional engagement in spite of the sweep of centuries, style and content.

Act IV Performance – this section focuses on the actors and the development from stage to screen performance.

We start with those precious seconds of Herbert Beerbohn Tree as the dying King John – this is essentially a promo film for his 1899 tour of the play and features co-star Dora Senior as Prince Henry (hope she didn’t get typecast).

Johnston Forbes-Robertson in Hamlet (1913)

The expressions move on and as close ups develop we begin to see a more naturalistic tone as demonstrated by a trio of Hamlets. The 1908 Amleto version is crude in comparison with Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s reprisal of his signature role in 1913 – he was an impressive 60 years old at the time but still spritely.

But none are more sophisticated than Der Asta and her scene welcoming the hot new student, Horatio, is a hoot as she eyes the young man up and down with barely-contained glee. Emile Jannings comes close though in Othello (1922) – larger than life he’s a dangerous weapon whose main danger is when he’s miss-directed.

Matheson Lang's Shylock broods in The Merchant of Venice (1916)

Act V Famous Scenes – all ends on a high with a run through of some of the greatest hits; as crowd-pleasing now as they ever were.

Othello blows out his candles and nurses his raging grief as Richards murders those boys one more time. The Macbeths absorb the enormity of their murderous passions and Brutus proves to Julius that he didn’t always have his best interests at heart… Lose ends are tied up at pace in a celebration of Shakespeare’s undying ability to resolve a plot.

Florence Turner left and right as Viola/Cesario in Twelfth Night (1910)

But it’s not quite over as we’re shown glimpses of “Shakespeare’s Land” – Stratford-on-Avon in eternal calm in films from 1910 through to 1940 a reminder of the connection we still feel through place to the writer of these works whether it’s in his school, his house, The Swan or The Globe.

Stratford-on-Avon

In addition to those already mentioned the extras include the remastered seven films of Silent Shakespeare – along with King Lear (1909), The Winter’s Tale (1913) and Living Paintings – John Gielgud’s screen debut from 1924.

The DVD and Blu-Ray are released on 18^th July and are available from the BFI Shop – you can pre-order here or Amazon.

As commemorations of the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s leaving us goes, this one is appropriately memorable – it only makes you want to see more… so, play on!