Boxing match… Early Women Film Makers, BFI Blu-ray release

‘There is nothing connected with staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art.’ Alice Guy Blaché

Like London buses, you wait years for a box set of early women film pioneers and then four of them arrive almost all at once. This BFI set is the latest and for those wondering which to buy I’m here to make the case for this over Flicker Alley, Lobster and even Kino Lorber, although in the latter case you really should buy both with the caveat that the Blu-ray version, which has the most content, is Region A and you'll need a compatible player.

Making an American Citizen (1912), unique to the BFI set

The Kino set is six Blu-ray discs and, of course, has a greater range of material than the others but it dovetails pretty well with the BFI set and together they give you 8-9 discs of unique, must have, material from an era that is only now being fully rediscovered. Even in the span of my relatively recent interest in early film, the directors in this set have been re-evaluated with pioneers like Guy Blaché and hugely popular filmmakers like Lois Webber been restored to their rightful position. There are some great films on these sets and they help to broaden our appreciation of the new media as one not just dominated by Méliès, Griffith, de Mille et al.

Kino goes long on Alice Guy Blaché with 14 films from 1911 to 1913 of which the BFI replicates five and adds two, Making an American Citizen (1912) and The Girl in the Armchair (1912). Only Flicker Alley covers her earlier work with Les Chiens Savants (1902), Une Histoire roulante (1906) and La Barricade (1907).

Guy Blaché's utterly lovely Falling Leaves (1912)

Guy Blaché pretty much invented narrative film making as Pamela Hutchinson explains in her essay in the excellent BFI booklet which also allows the contributors to comment on each film. There are two films not covered on Kino, Making an American Citizen (1912) and The Girl in the Armchair (1912) with the former taking the director’s experience of immigration and turning it into a proto-feminist fable. As PH notes, equality in marriage is a condition of acceptance in the new country, and the heroine, played by Blanche Cornwall, sees her husband Ivan abandon his domineering Euro-bullying to fit in with the New World after various American men step in to force him to adjust his behaviour.

It’s not just the fact of these films but their themes; there is a different sensibility at work and a willingness to tackle subjects from within rather from on high (and yes, DW, I’m looking at you).

Claire Windsor and Louis Calhern in The Blot (1921)

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the films of Lois Webber whose work often contains a depth and intimacy that others lack. The BFI set includes The Blot (1921) which is not only one of her best but also one of the most impressive character-based dramas from the period, its tale of bourgeois poverty trap, neighbourly jealousy and conflicted love delivered by superb performances especially from Webber discovery Claire Windsor as the librarian at the centre of a love triangle between an educated but poor theology student and a wealthy Phil West played by Louis Calhern (who I’ve just seen in the BFI’s smashing restoration of Notorious (1946)). Her mother is also well played by Margaret McWade who hangs on in quiet desperation as the family suffers daily humiliation from their immigrant neighbours who make a healthy living through trade. There’s no right or wrong to either side and Webber’s take is sophisticated to stand the test of time better than Griffith’s Victorian morality tales.

Triangulated tension - Lois top right in Suspense (1913)

Webber tackles social issues with an even-handedness that eludes many and Discontent (1916) about an old man who is happier in his old soldiers’ home than with his well-intentioned relations, is another example. Her technical skill and innovation are also evidenced by a crisp restoration of the superb Suspense (1913) famous for its three-way split screen and overhead point-of-view shots: it’s a genuinely pioneering and tense story of home invasion on a par with anything coming out of Biograph.

Kino has 13 Lois Webber films including noteworthy features such as Too Wise Wives (1921), Hypocrites (1915) and Where Are My Children? (1916) yet, apart from the spectacular Suspense (1913), the BFI disc alone includes Discontent (1916) and The Blot (1921). I’m beginning to suspect collusion…

Here's Mabel!

The BFI set gives you by far the most Mabel for your money with five films of which Mabel's Dramatic Career (1913, 14 mins), His Trysting Place (1914, 22 mins) and the magnificent late period riot Should Men Walk Home? (1928, 28 mins) are unique to the BFI set. Mabel’s a marvel and I especially enjoy the rawness and energy of her work with Chaplin in Trysting and Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914). Mabel directed the former and, probably, co-directed the second which sees Charlie progress from irresponsible parent to slightly chastened – and battered – husband; these two were making up so much content on the hoof and had improvisation to burn.

Mabel’s adventures are also marvellously accompanied by the Meg Morley Trio who’s tight, jazz-age playing catches the mood and movement of Mabel’s quicksilver narratives.

That's not how we rehearsed it Charlie...

None of the material on the third and fourth BFI discs is available on the Kino set and one of the main delights is a film from Olga Preobrazhenskaya, regarded as the first female Soviet filmmaker. Kat Ellinger’s essay reveals that little is known about the director and that whilst many of her films are lost, what survives reveals a concern for character over propaganda even though the film included here, The Peasant Women of Ryazan (1927) could be seen as an attack on the Kulaks (rich peasants) who were viewed as in the way of industrialisation/modernisation by  Stalin’s regime.

The Kulak in question is Vasilii Shironin (Kuzma Yastrebitsky) who allows his son, Ivan (G Bobynin) to marry Anna (R Pruzhnaya) a poor girl from the neighbouring village, only to rape her when he is away in the First World War. Anna has her father-in-law’s baby but has to live in disgrace with the village not knowing the cause of her shame. Shironin’s daughter, Vasilisa, (Emma Tsesarskaya) is the face of the new Russian woman, forging her own destiny by deciding who she marries and setting up an orphanage.

Damned by tradition and a Kulak's greed (R Pruzhnaya)

Even as the villain of the piece, Shironin has shame and regret and there’s a lot going on in a narrative that is true to itself and not just instructions from on high. There are some superb sequences of rural life showing the vibrancy of a culture that was under threat even just over a decade after the story was set. The performances are also excellent especially from R Pruzhnaya as the long-suffering Anna and from Emma Tsesarskaya as the modern Vasilisa. Ellinger has this as a feminist film but sadly things were to get worse in the ensuing decade and beyond.

The face of the future? Emma Tsesarskaya's character makes her own decisions.

Over in France, Germaine Dulac and Marie-Louise Iribe were to be allowed considerably more creative freedom. The former is of course well known for The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922), which deals so eloquently with the lot of many French women, a “key feminist text” as Jane Giles points out in her notes for a country which didn’t grant universal suffrage until 1945. Dulac’s range encompassed more regular fare such as La Cigarette (1919) in which a jealous archaeologist and older husband Pierre (Gabriel Signoret) plans on using a poisoned cigarette as revenge on his younger wife Denise (Andrée Brabant), who he suspects of wandering. It’s a stylish and good-looking romantic comedy – lovely locations along with well-designed interiors and there’s a great performance from an Egyptian mummy too…

Some fairies, yesterday

Marie-Louise Iribe has already made a stylish impression on me in Hara-Kiri (1928) which she co-directed with Henri Debain’s and in Le Roi des aulnes (1929), her only film as sole director, she proves to have an uncanny style all her own. Based on Goethe’s poem Erlkönig (1782) and Shubert’s song of 1815, it features a father battling through a forest to take his sick son to a doctor. The two confront all manner of imagined horrors in the deep woods as the Erl King magics up fairies to obstruct their purpose, as if the illness wasn’t real enough…

Last but not least is The Woman Condemned (1934), an early talkie from Dorothy Davenport also known as Mrs Wallace Reid, wife of the film actor who died from drug addiction in 1923, who was determined that his death would not be in vain and that she would fulfil her own ambitions. Ellen Cheshire’s essay details Davenport Reid’s determined creative drive after being widowed as she wrote, produced and directed films with a social conscience. She transitioned to sound films and The Woman Condemned, an entertaining but over-worked and under-budgeted crime film that features an outstanding cross-examination scene with Claudia Dell giving her all.

Under pressure: Claudia Dell

Cheshire quotes Ivan Spear in Boxoffice (13th May 1939) wondering why so few women ‘attain high production or executive niches in the [film] industry and, further, why those few women who have done so have failed to stay at the top’. Davenport Reid was one of those who he said had “dropped from sight” but she continued working as a scriptwriter into the fifties and deserves to be remembered as a filmmaker in her own right and not just a widow.

The set also includes a snippet from Dorothy Arzner’s Dance Girl Dance (1940) along with Mary Ellen Bute’s experimental Parabola (1937). There are also three short featurettes on Mabel Normand, Alice Guy-Blaché and Lois Weber: fascinating lives and there’s a lot more to come in their rehabilitation as all the essays make clear.

Smoking is bad for the health...

I’ll leave the last word to Germaine Dulac writing in ‘Ayons la Foi’ Le Film (1919):

‘The time has come, I believe, to listen in silence to our own song, to try to express our own personal vision, to define our own sensibility, to make our own way. Let us learn to look, let us learn to see, let us learn to feel.’

The BFI set is full of these “songs” and it’s essential for all who want to listen. Available now from the BFI Shop on and offline.

The Kino-Lorber set is also available direct from their site and a reminder that it is Region A so you'll need multi-region capability.  It features a mind-boggling range of filmakers including Nell Shipman, Alla Nazimova (Salome in great quality!), Ida May, Julia Crawford Ivers, Frances Marion - her feature Song of Love (1923), starring Norma Talmadge - serial queens, Grace Cunard and Helen Holmes and more (two silent features from Dorothy Davenport Reid!). There's a 40% discount at the moment and together with the BFI set, this wonderful box set opens up a whole new-old world of cinematic and social history.

A Day in the Museum... Kennington Bioscope, 2nd Silent Film Weekend, Day One

Having missed the inaugural KBSFW due to charity mountain-climbing-in-the-rain commitments I discovered just what I’d missed on the first day of the second edition: warmth, shelter and good company along with a diverse and enriching array of silent film all played by some of the nation’s finest accompanists.

Gathered in the Cinema Museum we kicked off with three British films introduced by the BFI’s Bryony Dixon which, as she pointed out, showed domestic silent cinema at its best simply being itself and not trying to conquer the World. How we could benefit from this simple truth in these times of faulty memory, failed logic and delusions of past and future grandeur (I’m not going to edit that after Thursday’s result for either party).

These films showed everyday Britons – feuding, playing pranks, being oddball, inventive, sing-a-long and ultimately believing in fair play for all: that’s who we are and we don’t need to “take it back” from anyone because it’s never been taken!

Head of the Family (1922)

The Jest (1921) with John Sweeney

This was a short-sharp shock of a film that took an everyday domestic in unexpected directions…one of a series of “Grand Guignol” shorts directed by Fred Paul and aimed at showing the sordid cruelty of “life as it really is…”

Barcelona (1927) with John Sweeney

A tour-de-force of Sweeney-syncopation that showed the great British public dancing along to Tolchard Evans and Gus Kahn’s contemporary hit – from jazz-babies on the beach to a Bobby well on the beat… It culminated in a sing-along session during which, I’m afraid, we audience didn’t cover ourselves with glory… Let’s make this the Bioscope anthem though and work on this!

Head of the Family (1922) with John Sweeney

Directed by Manning Haynes this was a hearty comic drama that featured some glorious coastal locations.

Based on a Sailor’s Knots by WW Jacobs it features the unfortunate tale of Mrs Green (Daisy England) a widow who has re-married a bully of a husband (Johnny Butt), who has spent two years not fixing his broken boat and aims to sell of her long-lost son’s furniture in order to feed his beer and sitting hobby.

The new "head" helps bring back the furniture...

Inspiration strikes as the poor lady meets a young sailor, Robert Letts (John Ashton), who she suggests can take the place of her son in order to supplant Green as the master of their house and property. Robert is at first unsure but is instantly persuaded by embrace of his new “sister” Betty (Cynthia Murtagh).

A lovely flicker that displays the British nod and wink throughout and also features the immortal Moore Marriott who starred in of so many Will Hay films and Arthur Askey's I Thank You (oh yes!) providing much more of the same – we’re at our best laughing with and at each other.

Moore Marriott and John Ashton

  

Jazz Mad (1928) with Cyrus Gabrysch

Time for Hollywood and a film that reminded all of what an excellent actor Jean Hersholt was. This was a 16mm film from Kevin Brownlow’s collection and one he’d once traded but re-purchased: not a great movie but an enjoyable one clearly emulating Emil Jannings “humiliation” films.

Jean Hersholt plays Franz Hausmann a mid-European composer who has come to America to get his symphony performed and to make his reputation. He is supported by his devoted daughter Elsa (Marian Nixon) but the only gig he can get is playing a conductor of an awful-on-purpose “Orchestra” who play to get pelted with food at a nightclub.

Jean Hersholt as the humiliated Hausmann

He reaches his low point when the father of the rich boy Leopold Ostberg (George Lewis) Elsa has fallen for, arranges for the loving couple to see what music her “genius” of a father actually plays. Devastation follows – how low can Franz go?

Hara-Kiri (1928) with Stephen Horne

Marie-Louise Iribe - Hara-Kiri (1928)

Marie-Louise Iribe was one of so very few French female directors (and beyond: have you read Silent Women yet?) and this film was perhaps the most visually inventive of the day. The story opens with a woman packing in preparation to leave her husband. The camera follows her around her room selecting items and positioning her parting note and never showing us her face: it’s a bold opening and one that the film doesn’t quite live up to.

The subject matter is striking though – an inter-racial love affair between a mixed-race European woman Nicole Daomi (Iribe) and the Japanese Prince Fujiwara (Liao Szi-Yen). The man she is leaving is Professor Samura Daomi (Constant Rémy) a man, crucially, who knows all of the old ways of honour and circumstance.

Nicole and the Prince head to the Alps to ski, climb and share a room – would any Hollywood film be so frank? But tragedy strikes high on a mountain as she slips and he dies trying to save her. Their scandalous liaison has been revealed and back home the Shogun orders that honour be restored in the traditional manner.

An exploitative Austrian film poster for the film... Honest Google it's art!

The narrative may run a little slow and deliberately but the mood is maintained amidst some lovely-looking people and places… The set design from Robert-Jules Garnier is stunning and astute cinematography makes the very most of this as it does of the alpine exteriors. Costumes were designed by Shingo Tsutumi and again are luscious in support of the film’s effort at authenticity.

Marie-Louise Iribe has screen presence (for more of that, c.f. Jacques Feyder’s L’Atlantide from 1921) and continually draws the eye with her strength and control. A very interesting film and one that is rarely seen let alone screened … try finding a screen shot!

Mr Horne responded with his usual invention throwing in a snatch or two of Japanese folk music which I mistook for Ryuichi Sakamoto (now I know where he got it from!).

   

The Film Society Programme with Costas Fotopoulos                

 

Nadia Sibirskaya - Brumes d'automne (1929)

The London Film Society was dedicated to showing “fringe cinema” and art-house before we even used suich terms. Here Tony Fletcher presented a rich-mix of six that had been screened by the LFS.

Brumes d'Automne / Mists of Autumn (1928) I do love Dimitri Kirsanoff’s film for its atmospherics and the sheer pleasure it takes in visual beauty, from tyre tracks in the mud to rain falling on water and the puffs of smoke emerging from a chimney. Then there is the strikingly-striking Nadia Sibirskaia whose waters run as deep as those in the lake: she burns lets and ponders the end of a relationship – does she consider her end or does she see the clouds break?

Regen / Rain (1929) Precipitation proceeds also in Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken sodden city symphony… a classic of loose narrative observation all filmed from a hand-held camera.

Lotte Reiniger’s card-cut outs in Aschenputtel / Cinderella (1922) were chopping their toes off to fit into those glass slippers… it doesn’t pay to fib about your shoe-size!

Cinderella (1922) - at the ball

A Film Director's Nightmare (1925) by Julius Pinschewer was a jangled promo film for the KIPHO – showing some behind the scenes including a glimpse of the above Lotte.

Fall of the House of Usher (1928) was dark disorientation from Melville Webber exactly as Edgar Allen would have liked it.

Rachmaninioff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor (1927) Castleton Knight was convinced this was inspired by Poe’s The Premature Burial… if they had Classical MTV in the twenties: this is how it would have looked: a thriller!

This was clearly up Costas’ street and he must have really enjoyed the last especially: and speaking personally, it was one of my father’s favourite pieces of music.

 

The Red Mill (1927) with Costas Fotopoulos                

When I was a young silent film man I believed the line that Marion Davies was “discovered” as a comedienne with Show People but it doesn’t take a King Vidor to see what a natural talent she had for being funny – even if he did help out discretely on this film.

Directed by Roscoe Arbuckle under the assumed name of William Goodrich, his own name having been so wrongfully-blackened by, amongst others, William Randolph Heart’s press coverage… Here Hearst made some amends under pressure from his wife Marion, for whom Cosmopolitan Productions was almost exclusively created.

Game for a laugh

The story is slight but overall very entertaining and features some Arbuckle slapstick set-pieces – an ironing board that just won’t stand, the new sport of soap-suds skating and a lots of “Boo!” in a haunted windmill. It’s a really good showcase for Davies’ enduring comic appeal: perfect timing, mimicry and that buzzed twinkle in her eyes. She’s another with modern looks and style… she doesn’t mind being “made down” for the role of Tina, a scullery maid at the Red Mill Tavern who is berated for even sitting down by her monstrous boss, Dillem (George Siegman).

She catches the eye of visiting playboy Dennis Wheat (Owen Moore – the first Mr Mary Pickford) and his valet Caesar Rinkle (Snitz Edwards) but he has his eye on girls with more money and fewer freckles. Things change though when she swaps places with the Burgomaster’s daughter Gretchen (Louise Fazenda), who is about to be married off to Governor (William Orlamond) for political reasons but is really in love with Captain Jacop Van Goop (Karl Dane).

Marian and Moore

Dennis, attracted by Gretchen’s wealth also decides to intervene in the race but meets a dolled-up Tina and falls in actual love… and Roscoe sets the controls for the heart of the daft.

In the view of Lara Gabrielle Fowler – who is writing a biography on Davies (the first in a generation!) and provided notes for today’s screening: “It is a true silent classic and the joy that went into making it is palpable.”

   

The Man Who Laughs (1928) with Lilian Henley

Conrad

At this point I had to leave to re-acquaint myself with my family – it having been a long week! This meant I missed what was the strongest film of the day which I would have loved to have seen on the screen – Kevin Brownlow’s 16mm copy – and accompanied by the always excellent Ms Henley.

But it had been a long good day already and there’s more to come tomorrow!

A very well-organised day from all at the Bioscope and a day of entertainment and learning – the specially-prepared notes on each film were clearly a labour of love and as I read Michelle Facey’s glorious background essay on Conrad Veidt’s film I was kicking myself all the way home! And then I remembered Olga Baclanova… I was missing Olga!!

Olga!

 End of Part One...