Catfisher blues… Cyrano de Bergerac (1925), with John Sweeney, Phoenix Cinema

My daughter explained a new take on this eternal fable of head and heart, the modern practice of catfishing, whereby people create a “sock puppet” account on social media in order to convince people that they are someone they are not. Catfishing is – apparently - used for romance scams on dating websites which brings us right back to point: in this story is Roxane being deceived by the sock puppet or by the hidden hand? Edmond Rostand had no clue about any of this when he wrote the original play in 1897 and nor did Ferrer, Depardieu and Steve Martin when they were in filmed versions but the essential device is the same even though Cyrano is only of good heart in letting Christian use his words to impress the woman he loves.

In her introduction, Miranda Gower-Qian, explained how it took three years of painstaking post-production to bring this film to release as the Pathe Stencil process was used to add colour throughout this almost two-hour long film. Cyrano stands almost uniquely as an extant colourised feature from this period and is even more remarkable on the big screen and with John Sweeney’s skilled accompaniment. It’s a sumptuous classic that revels in its own excesses in full expectation that the audience know exactly what’s coming.

Repeat after me...

The story is set in 1640 during the reign of Louise XIII when France was on the verge of war with Spain. We see some of the main players arriving at the Hôtel Burgundy Theatre to watch a performance by the actor Montfleury. There’s the beautiful Roxane (Linda Moglia) who is admired from afar by the youthful cadet Baron Christian de Neuvillette (Angelo Ferrari) and who is hardly in the running as the Count De Guiche (Umberto Casilini) has plans to marry her off to a noble ally.

The theatre fills and the colours are superb as the play begins and, Montfleury who has been banned by another noble cadet, Cyrano de Bergerac (Pierre Magnier) after making “sheep eyes” at Roxane, bravely ventures forth to the centre of the stage. There is movement in the crowd and two white plumes are seen passing through the throng, eventually revealing themselves atop the hat of Cyrano - a man revered as much for his poetry as his swordsmanship - Montfleury pulls back in alarm and, after a volley of rhyming couplets retreats as fast as his legs can carry. One of De Guiche’s party challenges Cyrano and is swiftly despatched by a combination of his words and blade…

It’s an audacious opening and all the more difficult to pull off in a silent film, yet director Augusto Genina paces things well and allows his lead the time to use his expressiveness to good effect with his prosthetic proboscis somehow drawing the viewer’s focus to his eyes.

"Look into my eyes..."

Cyrano’s cousin Roxane is more than impressed with his display – no one seems that bothered about the play - and his eyes reveal his depth of affection as the two agree to meet the next day. He accompanies his pals Le Bret (Maurice Schutz) and the pastry chef-cum-poet Ragueneau (Alex Bernard) to the latter’s home were his heroism is celebrated en masse: who needs a stage play when you have the best improv in France?

Roxane reveals that she is in love and, his hopes flickering, Cyrano is crushed to discover that it is with another, the youthful Baron Christian who, like so many in this film, looks like a refugee from an early seventies progressive rock band (the guitarist in Jethro Tull or Gentle Giant’s bass player?) Cyrano promises to do his best to protect his fellow cadet and he is soon bound by an additional duty after meeting the fellow and discovering his tongue-tied reciprocation of Roxane’s infatuation.

Now this is going to get complicated and the story’s most famous scene is soon played out as Christian tries to woo Roxane by repeating words of love fed to him by Cyrano. As he stands below her balcony Roxane melts at the sweet phrasing as if words meant more than looks ever could… and here is the universal appeal, as truth is found in expression not necessarily in beauty. So, put a sock in your puppet, you catfishers!

Linda Moglia being sublime

Roxane and Christian marry but war is coming and the men must away… who will survive and will the course of ventriloquent love ever run smoothly?

Again, my daughter found new meaning in the letter Cyrano writes on Christian’s behalf as they ready from almost certain death on the battlefront. Cyrano has exposed his heart by the teardrop he shed on the paper whilst Christian’s blood is there too after he is wounded. Roxane loves them body and soul but will she realise the additional separation without which her feelings would never have been so stirred… Modern love is so complicated.

The acting is so strong especially from Linda Moglia and Pierre Magnier who is superb even from with under the prosthetic. The cinematography by Ottavio De Matteis is dynamic too but you really have to take your plumed hat off to those colourists: the film was followed by a mass outbreak of carpel tunnel syndrome which was only alleviated by the advent of technicolour.

John Sweeney provided suitably stirring motifs and drove the narrative onwards with a mix of dash and daring do that Cyrano himself would have loved. You could almost see two feathers bobbing over the keyboard.

Another excellent silent film from the Phoenix and well worth braving Storm Ciara for on a day National Rail told us not to travel! Faint hearts and all that…

It's just a gorgeous film!

New dawns fade... Tonka of the Gallows (1930), Phoenix Cinema with Stephen Horne

“To become a little child again…” or "Verily I say to you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you." Matthew 21:31, as quoted at the start of this film.

This film was one of the hits of this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival and understandably drew a substantial audience of the Capital’s silent cineastes to the Finchley Phoenix. We’d come to see the serene Slovenian Ita Rina who had impressed me so much in Gustav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929) and who had, as Phoenix Programmer Miranda Gower Qian described, a delicate beauty which underpinned her quite staggering performance in this film.

Tonka was the first synchronised sound film in Czech Republic and the latest restoration, from 2017, is based on the French release which features one song and a prayer amongst the scratchy dialogue. The Phoenix elected to show the film as silent, with the exception of those two moments, partly because the film unarguably is directed as a silent but also because Stephen Horne, who played with it in San Francisco, could repeat his alchemical accompaniment for what is visual tone poem played out across Rina’s immaculate features.

Jack Mylong-Münz and Ita Rina

It was an event for the connoisseur, described by the SFFF’s Jay Weissberg as “…a deeply empathetic portrait of a prostitute whose self-contempt is equal to the scorn she receives from those around her.” We’ve seen that movie many times but rarely as affecting as here with an actress on song and a director who knows enough to hold back on the melodrama and let the audience and actress collude on the meaning and the depth of tragedy.

All starts well enough as city girl Tonka Sibenice (Ita Rina) returns from Prague to the village she came from, impressing the yokels (all great “faces” tempted from the fields of the Moravian countryside around Veselí nad Moravou) with her style – stockings and high heels. Her mother played by the terrific Vera Baranovskaya (star of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 film Mother) is delighted to greet her and the homecoming is like a fairy tale as Tonka sets out a coffee grinder and other presents. An old flame, Jean (Jack Mylong-Münz) rushes to the house and her romantic future seems assured… this is how films are supposed to end and yet this is only the start.

Jean's proposal only makes Tonka realise what she has lost

As Jean proposes, Tonka tumbles down from this blissful plateau and pulls herself back to Prague drawn by her guilt having lived life as a very popular prostitute – she has deemed herself not worthy and not for the last time. The key to her downfall is not her chosen profession but her self esteem mixed with a kindness that exceeds her calling. One night two policemen arrive after a condemned man has requested a woman for his last night, the others shrink away but Tonka willingly accepts although she doesn’t quite understand why until after she arrives.

Her scenes with the killer (the excellent Josef Rovenský who featured in Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl) are exceptional, the two terrified, she of him and he of his last night, until Tonka brings out a child’s wind up toy and they become distracted. The two are lit in close up, the condemned cell flooded in shadow as the focus is on their desperate attempt to find comfort and, as Tonka says, courage. It’s a tour de force from the performers and tribute to Karel Anton’s direction as well as cameraman Eduard Hoesch - the gravitational core of the film drenched in the darkest night before the final dawn.

Josef Rovenský and Ita rina

Tonka gives the killer the strength to comes to terms with the end of life and the second sound sequence features her reading of the Lord’s Prayer; surely a sign that she too has found peace through this kindness… only words are exchanged as she realised, at last, what made her come to this man.

As with the Spring, so too is this moment another moment of tragic misdirection from Anton for her act only serves to condemn Tonka in the eyes of the World. The other workers at the brothel have always been jealous of her and now they exact merciless revenge on “The Widow of the Hanged”… Tonka’s appetite for the life she lives drains away and soon she is on the streets, battered with charity is in shorter supply than cheap booze.  A chance encounter with Jean in a dive bar brings hope as  he takes her back home and this time they will be married but on the eve of their wedding another meeting in a bar with one of her old customers drives him wild and he throws her across her mother’s floor in a shocking rage.

Back she goes to Prague and deeper and deeper she declines… will there be one last chance?

There are many silent films that show the descent from, often rural, innocence to degradation via sex in the city and yet Tonka is cleverly structured to give the viewer more pause for thought. At many points Tonka could save herself and yet, clearly, she doesn’t… why is this? The tragedy is all the more poignant for our having to wonder why and Tonka’s evocations of childhood bliss make our awareness of the fall from innocence even more pronounced.

There’s also an ending worthy of David Lynch which, as with many points of the film, wrong-foots the viewer; have we just watched a dream of the doomed?

Stephen Horne accompanied with the range and sympathy you would expect and there was more than one moment of exquisite timing such as when the bordello’s pianist stops in readiness for Tonka’s song. Such an emotional film requires a delicate touch and Stephen had many deliciously-poignant lines to underscore Ita Rina’s delicate emotional shifts – a sublime and heart-breaking duet.

As Miranda Gower Qian had said in her introduction, the combination of live music and visuals can lift silent music free of its time and place. In the magnificent setting of the grand old Phoenix and with such an appreciative audience, this is always assured!

You can order the Czech DVD of the 2017 restoration screened from Amazon or direct from the Czech Film Institute which is cheaper! 

A million miles, for one of your smiles… The Ancient Law (1923), with Meg Morley, Phoenix Cinema, London

This was the UK premier of a new restoration from the Deutsche Kinematek and, possibly, for the film itself: a real coup for the Phoenix and ace programmer Miranda Gower-Qian. Finding a German film sympathetic to the Jewish community in 1923 is not too surprising perhaps – the community was arguably more integrated than in other parts of Europe - but there had long been undercurrents of anti-Semitism even before the Great War and its aftermath. The Weimar arts community was liberal and forward thinking and hadn’t yet been shut down by the dangerous populism filtering through a society deeply in debt and poltically-fragmented.

Directed by EA Dupont – later to direct Variety, then Piccadilly and Moulin Rouge after his escape to Britain – Das alte Gesetz is a highly accomplished film that deals with the push and pull between those who want to integrate and those who want to stay separate.  Assimilation can split families but so can self-exclusion, it is still an every day tragedy and one that gives this pitch-perfect story significant power still. There’s additional resonance from the fact that so many of the cast and crew were Jewish… actors enjoying the freedom to ply their trade denied their more orthodox forebears with far worse to come.

Avrom Morewski and Robert Garrison

This restoration was completed from several non-German copies (as with Pandora’s Box and many others… the original negatives have long since been purged) and first presented at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and today the Phoenix was presenting the premier hours before it was unveiled at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Set in 1860’s Vienna and – apparently the basis for The Jazz Singer – the story focuses on tensions between orthodox society and the ambitions of a Rabbi’s son to become an actor. Rabbi Mayer is superbly played by Avrom Morewski and his son Baruch by Ernst Deutsch - such a feature of later talkies.

Ernst Deutsch 

The family lives in the Ghetto and are happy to stay amongst their own people as they follow a life of religious and traditional diligence. Baruch seems happy to be a part of things but during the festivities of Purim where the young dress up to act the part of religious figures, Baruch can’t resist and plays one of the leading roles much against tradition and to his father’s displeasure.

Baruch wants to be an actor, he wants to leave the Ghetto and is inspired by Ruben Pick (the excellent Robert Garrison) who travels afar and amongst wider Gentile society. Ruben sees the wanderlust and ambition in Baruch as a good thing whereas Rabbi Mayer believes the only way is to stay. There’s a great shot of Pick leaving the Ghetto, a low-angle showing him walking off down a path stretching to the far distance, he walks for some time and then a gust of wind suddenly floats a cloud of dust across the path behind him: the cinematography from Theodor Sparkuhl is crisp and inventive - this is a very good-looking film and the restoration is quite lovely.

Margarete Schlegel - told you...

Baruch is in love with a local girl, Esther (the striking Margarete Schlegel) and promises to return for her once he has made his name and fortune: it will break his mother (Grete Berger), he is determined to leave even after his father locks him in the house. He finds a way and his father’s desperate cries reflect the film’s subtlety – unlike The Jazz Singer perhaps, we have sympathy for all the characters, throughout. Plus, there’s no minstrelling… this film is just more authentic and nuanced. 

Baruch has no money and finds work mucking out the horses and writing programme notes for a travelling band of performers with whom he eventually gets a chance to act. His Shakespeare is not to everyone’s taste – far from it – but it attracts the attention of the Arch Duchess Erzherzogin Elisabeth Theresia (the always watchable, Henny Porten) who takes a shine to more than just his acting talents… She engineers him his big break at the Royal Theatre managed by the fearsome Heinrich Laube (Hermann Valentin) upon whose memoires the story is originally based.

Henny Porten and Ernst Deutsch

Proper cultured, urban types really love his work and Baruch is soon playing Hamlet and Don Giovani…  and it’s during a performance of the latter that Ruben persuades the Rabbi to come and see his son. It’s overwhelming… and the impact so great that the old man enters a decline his broken heart unable to resolve his love with acceptance.

Can there be a meeting between minds old and young, before it’s too late, and will the struggle even end there?

Phoenix-debutante Meg Morley played up a storm on keyboards, presenting flowing accompaniment of impressive warmth and narrative flexibility. This was the first time I’d heard Meg play electronic keyboards and the added bass allowed a jazzier feel more akin to her day job, with music that – for me - channelled Keith Jarrett, Jacques Loussier-baroque and a flavour of Klezmer. Very assured and full of likeable content, her improvisations flew by just like this absorbing and gently stunning film.

The Ancient Law is just being released on Blu-Ray DVD by FlickerAlley and is already on my birthday list.

Uncanny Tales… Häxan (1922), with Reece Shearsmith and Stephen Horne, Phoenix, Finchley

“It is the satanic, perverted cruelty that blazes out of it, the cruelty we all know has stalked the ages like an evil shaggy beast, the chimera of mankind. But when it is captured, let it be locked up in a cell, either in a prison or a madhouse. Do not let it be presented with music by Wagner or Chopin, to a swanky audience in comfortable seats, or to young men and women, who have entered the enchanted world of a movie theatre." Berlingske Tidende, Copenhagen, 1922

All Hallows Eve and the streets of North London have an eerie feel, an extra edge of fear amongst the garish costumes and innocent trick or treaters… but tonight something altogether deeper and disturbing is happening on Halloween; the spirit of Benjamin Christensen is present in these leaf-blown streets and his astrally-projected image haunts the big screen at the Phoenix Cinema.

They don’t make films as grade-A strange as Häxan very often and from the age when the supernatural was still empowered with belief, as the reviewer’s quote above confirms, it sends a knowing message to the modern mind as we embrace faith over facts once more… It’s no surprise that the film was banned in the United States.

You may think Häxan deserves the Halloween-hype but in a shocking denouement the real villain of the piece turns out not to be Old Nick nor even his disciples on Earth, the witches of the title… no, it’s mankind, happy to proceed in ignorance and to, literally, demonise those who are different or eccentric or who just get in the way. Then there are those who chose to sacrifice others just to make themselves a little grander…

Reece Shearsmith was an excellent choice to read out the English translation of the film’s title cards as the voice we really hear is that of writer, star and director Benjamin Christensen. Reece injected humour and performance quality into the reading and interpreted Christensen’s intended tones as surely as Stephen Horne’s music. The real horror is in how people treat other people and for all the humour in the old witches’ tales, the closing shot of bodies burning – convicted on the no-win logic of witchfinders and inquisitions – is telling. Christensen quotes a figure of eight million dead from the witch purges and four years after the end of the Great War, that’s a telling statistic.

Mr Horne was not only at his interpretative best, he was playing the widest array of instrumentation possible, this being a bit of a “home match”… The Theremin was dusted off, the drums, multiple keyboards, bells, chimes, trumpet, samples… you name it. Stephen played them all in sympathy with the film also allowing Reece the space to articulate the story… a precision duet all played out in time with the action on screen.

The diversity of sound is not for mere affect, everything serves the film and there was not a single miss-step as Stephen improvised his way thematically and tonally, hopping between the instruments sometimes two at a time bringing richly satisfying textures to the episodic narrative.

For his part Benjamin Christensen held up his end of the trio with a film that develops almost like a detective story with a laugh-inducing set-up on the history of witchcraft and supernatural belief that ends up as a forensic examination of the actuality behind the fables.

We learned of the Egyptian’s conviction that the World is like a giant snooker table with a sky held up by metal pillars from which the stars are suspended like so many chandeliers. It’s a compelling theory if you were around five thousand years ago and the message, clearly, is that we have learned a lot since.

But it’s the ideas of Satan that are the most elaborate and, in their own way, doubly frightening: people attributed so much to this third party and he eventually became the excuse for all evil. But the need to demonise – to externalise our guilt, to triangulate and deny responsibility - is instinctive and ever present.

The rituals for Devil worship are elaborately explained and then played out including a fair share of old crones, ass-kissing witches (literally) and extensive nudity (did I mention that the film was banned in the States?).  It’s surprisingly graphic for 1922 but I think old Ben is lulling his audience into a false sense of security… he knows we’ll lap this all up and be all the more receptive for the serious stuff at the conclusion.

It works and Häxan is worthy of its reputation as uncanny horror-documentary but there is so much more as it shows our unlimited capacity for cruelty. Sensibilities change but that human aspect remains undiminished by centuries of civilization.

The Phoenix was rammed for this show and the cinema is to be commended for such a bold programming - take a bow Miranda Gower-Qian! There were many new faces and I look forward to more adventures in silent cinema at North London’s lovely old home of classic cinema!