Gimme shelter... Zuflucht (Refuge) (1928), with Günter A. Buchwald, Bonn Silent Film Festival

So many vanished back then, never to be seen again…

 

This restoration was one of the highlights of the recent Bonn Festival and whilst it’s a relatively simple tale told very well it’s a reflection of its time in terms of polished late silent technique and the central premise of class loyalties disrupted during the Weimar years ten years after the uproar of war and revolution.

 

Whereas so many German films of this period we shot in studio, Refuge features a host of location shots of Berlin as director Carl Froelich exhibits the realist, "New Objectivity" style, a reaction against the expressionism practiced on the silent stage. It also features perhaps the most popular film star of this period, Henny Porten – star of The Ancient Law, Merchant of Venice (1923), and Lubitsch’s Anna Boleyn (1920) - providing an opportunity to see just why she commanded the affections of so many. This was also a co-production of the actress with Froelich; she chose the role and it shows.

 

This was the World premier of the new digitization from Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum and it looked fantastic even on our screens hundreds of miles away from the festival with the experience being enlivened by accompaniment on piano and violin from the maestro Günter A. Buchwald!

Francis Lederer, he lived long and prospered

We start with passengers unloading from a train repatriating German combatants from the German Revolution of 1918-19 which saw many communist sympathisers flee into exile. These include Martin Falkhagen played by Francis Lederer who was later to feature in Pandora’s Box and live a long life in film and education, stopping work just before he died aged 100! Born in 1899 Lederer lived through until the 21^st Century and also saw action in the Great War for the Austrian-Hungarian Imperial Army. There’s a collection of photographs at his mother’s desk and one includes him in his uniform as she muses over all those lost in the war; a time when the losses were still so keenly felt across Europe.

 

Refuge is all about the War, it’s about loss and injustice and poor people trying to make ends meet in a society with huge inequality. It doesn’t beat the drum in the manner of say Kuhle Wampe but it is presenting a shared experience to an audience fully ware of the circumstances… Martin wants to make ends meet with people he loves and, as we learn, he turns his back on easier options, a man of principle in a country that, sadly, couldn’t always afford them.

 

People didn’t go to the cinema for politics, they went to see actors like Lederer and, especially, Henny Porten, living life as they did and here the film is as political as it needs to be. Germany was broken, what was to be done? Henny and Martin just want to get on with their lives and their love.

Henny Porten's character goes to work

Now, that’s jumping the gun… but yes, Henny meets an exhausted Martin after he has tramped his way to Berlin form the eastern border and slept rough at the allotment. She invites him back to the apartment she shares in a run-down tenement with the Schurich family, father (Max Maximilian), mother (Margarete Kupfer) and flighty daughter Guste (Alice Hechy). Their living space is cluttered and humble, with a bunk also being rented out to a loud-mouthed butcher, Kölling (Carl de Vogt).

 

Later that evening Kölling arrives back drunk gathering himself just enough to insult Martin and Hanne before the younger man falls deeply asleep. He’s still asleep the next day as Mrs Schurich and Hanne go to work in a vegetable stall at the market, the latter having to contend with the butcher’s “banter”… he doesn’t mince his words. Meanwhile Guste is fascinating by this sleeping prince… and flirts with him once he does awaken only for Hanne to rebuff her.

 

Hanne and Martin, well Hanne mostly, fall out with three out of four of the household – only her workmate supports her – and she goes off to another block to stay with her best friend Marie Jankowsky (Lotte Stein) who’s husband is away. Here they enjoy some freedom and begin to fall in love.

 

Mathilde Sussin

Meanwhile, across town, Martin’s background is revealed as his elder brother Otto Falkhagen (Bodo Bronsky) puts an advert in the paper calling for information about his missing brother. If nothing is forthcoming Otto will have him declared dead and therefore no longer able to benefit from the family’s fortune. Naturally mother Else (Mathilde Sussin) holds on to hope but Otto, having fallen out with Martin over the revolution, misses him rather less.

 

Martin gets a job as a manual labourer on the build for the Berlin subway and for a time the two are happy and plan to get married. But we know the lose ends will need to be tied and that a reckoning will need to be had.

 

What I like about this film is the balance of the characters, most of whom have shades of grey even the boorish butcher who shows concern and provides help when needed. The verbal scuffles are exactly as you’d expect from people living in such cramped conditions and, whilst the politics is under played, the crowds of genuine urchins who stare at the rich visitors and their car when Martin’s mother visits one tenement block. These buildings are all too real in comparison to the stage designs of say Murnau’s Last Laugh and the unpaid extras speak for themselves.

 

Simple pleasures for Hanne and Martin

Direct Carl Froelich keeps things at a believable pace whilst his cinematographer, Gustave Preiss works wonders, especially in catching the flight of expression across Porten’s face. She’s no Garbo but she is a great technician and so watchable.

 

The film was a success with Hanns Horkheimer of the Berliner Tageblatt raving: Henny Porten… has grown from a propaganda star to a human actress of such shocking urgency that, as a comparative standard, I would have to name the most sublime names even in spoken theatre…

 

For her alone the film is worth watching but this “small story” is still powerful for the concentrated and commonplace drama it presents. Günter A. Buchwald of course delivers the poignant and perfectly balanced support it needs and it still amazes me how he can do so playing violin and piano both at once!

 

Bravo Günter and danke Bonn again!!

Expressionism… Fior di male (1915), Bonn Silent Film Festival with Cellophon

 

I don’t just sit here waiting for a new Diva film to be restored you know although sometimes maybe I do… Here was a prime cut of imperial Borelli in all her operatic pomp and with a collection of magisterial emotional displays only matched by her gorgeous and frequently changing wardrobe. Only in Italy miei amici and it took a German film festival to highlight that point. 

 

There's one review on IMDB that dismisses the lasting appeal of such "soapy melodrama" but this implies little awareness of the Diva cinematic concept that flourished in Italy in the 1910s and you would need a heart of stone and, frankly, zero fashion sense, not to appreciate the film. Flower of Evil is mannered, stylised, convoluted and skilfully excessive but it’s also – as with opera – meant to be like that, it’s not an accident or a wilful decision to piss off viewers a century later. 

 

Film historian and Diva specialist, Angela Dalle Vacche*, gives a very informed explanation of Borelli’s style and how she was not only influenced by Eleonora Duse, who she performed with, but also by classical art. The great Italian stage actor had a passion for simplicity and spirituality whereas Borelli took more erotic allusions into her art according to Dalle Vacche who also quotes art historian Robert de la Sizeranne concerning her clear debt to the Pre-Raphaelites especially with “…the desire to intensify the most minute of feelings sometimes... an obsession.”

 

Lyda Borelli and friend

For Borelli, acting was something of “a tightrope walking act between naturalism and expressionism…” and she was keen on using cliché to prick the audience bubble… as evidenced by a sequence at the start of the film where she holds a lion cub in her lap and shoots her most feline expression at the viewer… the actress “engaging in a camp deconstruction of the cliché”. Not a sex kitten but definitely one with claws.

 

So, fundamentally, the story matters less in terms of narrative context than in the provision of opportunities for La Borelli to show us her range of knowing eroticised expression. To this end Fior di male does not disappoint in the slightest.

 

As if to emphasise this relationship between story and actress, Lyda plays a woman called Lyda, a poor young woman who “lives among the lowest social classes”, dancing for the creepy men who pay for their pleasure. Borelli is shown lower screen right, her Lyda drenched in oppressed boredom, only just coming alive for the slinky show, taking a superior delight in the reaction she easily encourages; despising their petty passion.

 

A year later Lyda has given birth to a son but has to give him up not being in a position to care for him. The baby has a distinctive birth mark and, in her heartbreak, she knows there’s just a chance she might find him later in life. Things get worse for Lyda after the club where she dances is raided and she is sent to a correctional facility but, having hit rock bottom, the tough gets going and escapes.

 

Now the story really begins… as Lyda, exhausted from her flight, is found by the kindly Count van Deller who offers her food and rest. Restored she naturally robs him, only thinking twice when he mentions that the trinket comes from his daughter’s room, left untouched since she passed away. Lyda’s flicker of remorse turns into full repentance as she prays for forgiveness and returns the stolen item under cover of the night and there are some stunning shots of her guilty silhouette shot against a low sun on the beach – Domenico Grimaldi’s camerawork is fascinating throughout.

 

One of the great profiles

The Count sees Lyda’s good character and sets her up with a new name, Helena Simons enabling her to flourish as a tailor and then as manager of a fashion house. All the while she searches for her son and whilst he proves elusive other threads in the story begin to weave together, and at pace. The fashion house is funded by a bank run by one Bambi Rogers (Augusto Poggioli) who’s sister Fulvia (Fulvia Perini) is a trustee of the correction house where Lyda was incarcerated. Bambi makes eyes at Helena/Lyda and his sister suspects her of gold-digging before spotting who she really is and threatening to reveal all. But the Count stands by his new ward who, nonetheless, has rebuffed Bambi’s gifts and attention, she is no longer to be “bought”.

 

Nino Oxilia’s story being chock full of connected themes chief among which is parenthood, Lyda’s childless mother, the Count, robbed of his daughter becoming her surrogate father and Helena/Lyda herself adopting young seamstress Cecyl (c) as her daughter. Nothing supplants her desperate search for her son though, the natural bond is too strong and the search obviously will not be never ending…

 

Look at that for composition! Lyda and Cecyl Tryan

Things change when famous violinist Ruggero Davusky (Ruggero Barni) has a car accident near the family home and Helena and Cecyl nurse him back to good health, both falling in love with him without realising the other’s feeling. Once again Lyda must let her child go free and her broken heart is revealed in supple contortions of Borelli’s feature and form; her exquisite pain played out in lingering set pieces beautifully tinted in the EYE’s restoration.

 

The wheel of fate turns again and you just know the finish will be bigger than anything that has gone before. This is the unwritten code of Diva film, it’s what we expect and what gets delivered with skill and grace.

 

This was one of the first features for Carmine Gallone, who would go on to direct Borelli again in the darkly magnificent Malombra (1917) and to make films up until the early sixties. He uses his asset well, framing her in so many delicious set pieces combining lighting, design and the glorious costumery you’d expect from Borelli the clothes thoroughbred.

Lyda and Ruggero Barni

Accompanying were the Cellophon duo, aka Paul Rittel and Tobias Stutz who both play cello in ways that are emotionally resonant and respectful of the source visuals. There’s admirable flavour and restraint with both recognising the need to underplay when confronted by the operatic fireworks on screen. The cello is the most mournfully flexible of instruments and they put nary a foot wrong is musical tribute to perhaps the greatest Italian silent film diva…

 

Another excellent presentation from this year’s Bonn festival and I have completely run out of reasons not to go there in 2022!

 

Vielen Dank für die tolle sendung!

 

* In Diva, Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema by Angela Dalle Vacche (University of Texas Press) – essential reading with super commentary on contemporary acting including Danish diva, Asta Nielsen who, although not a diva per se, has to be the point of excellence against which all other performers are measured.

Champagne Katya... The Girl in Tails (1926), Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane-Baldry, Bonn Silent Film Festival

I’m to be disgraced simply because I’m a girl. A meek and mild, simple and unassuming girl…

 

Warm glow… this is such an uplifting film, a delicate mixture of comedy and drama that fully lives up to its promise as A Light Summer Film Story especially with truly delicious accompaniment from Horne and Baldry, without whom no remote access Bonn would be complete. It is notable for addressing so many issues that might be considered more modern concerns and it tackles proto feminism in ways which are never black and white, flowing naturally with the story. It’s sophisticated about its subject and uses cross-dressing as a means of creating conflict as well as comedy and makes points about fairness that doesn’t bang the drum so much as rolls it around the ballroom between social conservatism and the heroine’s “fight against injustice”.

 

This restraint is ostensibly surprising as the film, Flickan I Frack in Swedish, is directed by Karin Swanström who also plays the terrifying matriarch, “the undisputed monarch” of the small-town society of Wadköping, Widow Hyltenius, but that’s acting for you. She was one of the few women directing film in Sweden in this period – or anywhere else by this stage – and is clearly responsible for the emotional intelligence that raises the film above broader comedy and simplistic melodrama.  The characters are fulsome and nuanced and there is a very satisfying pace to the story throughout; it’s coherent and never forgets to entertain.

 

Who knows what conversations it started in contemporary Sweden but the debate is still ongoing in certain aspects of equality…

Magda Holm

There are many good performers in the film but everything revolves around the outstanding verve of Magda Holm as Katja Kock. Holm featured in several Swedish films during the silent period and was also a top-class sailor, with the nickname” Bimbi”, which was also the name of one of her dogs. Both Bimbi’s feature in a nautical interlude in which the hound’s mistress falls into a lake, swimming to shore with all the assurance you’d expect. But, far more impressive in this context, is Maga’s acting ability and she performs as well as she freestyles.

 

The tonality of the film turns of Holm’s expressiveness and her ability to flick from the dramatic to the tongue in cheek without ever the giving the game away. She has so much of the camera’s attention and rises magnificently to the challenge every time – what a team with Swanström!

 

Holm plays Katja the eldest child of Karl Kock (Nils Aréhn) the town’s unsung genius not only down on his luck with unwelcomed inventions, but also being defrauded by his accountant Björner (Gösta Gustafson).

 

Einar Axelsson

Katja is the smart one in the family with brother Curry (Erik Zetterström) being “Wadköping’s only, or at least, most perfect, snob” and the favoured sibling, his father’s investment matched only by his sister’s endless patience and generosity. They both attend the town’s co-educational school where Magda’s pal Count Ludwig von Battwhyl (Einar Axelsson), is on course to fail all his exams. Magda decides that he can still be saved if he studies with her help for a solid month although the Counts get up and go has got up and gone and his main interest is in his new tutor…

Axelsson is also a delight in this film with a world-weary energy informing Count Ludwig with a cheerful listless charm; he’s a decent chap though just saddled with the burden of his position even though he will prove to be steadfast when the going gets reactionary.

 

How can the world see how pretty you are when you dress like a washerwoman?

 

Ludwig chides Katya for her dowdiness and she agrees so, when the Count arranges a ball to celebrate the end of term, she asks her father for funds to buy a dress to impress. Father is not unsympathetic but he’s broke and decides against this investment even though he has long splashed out on Curry’s living beyond their collective means. This, patently, is unfair… but Katya is determined and she will go to the ball!

 

Anna-Lisa Baude-Hansen and pals

 

The Count is heir to the Larsbo estate, 20 kilometres south of Wadköping and where his cigar-chomping Aunt Lotten Brenner (Anna-Lisa Baude-Hansen), university lecturer in comparative anatomy, leads The Wilde Hoard of Learned Ladies a group of bluer-than-blue stockings who do as they will. It’s a great group and I’d love to know more about this lot, a mix of future-thinkers and privileged political thought who, as with everything in the film, Swanström paints evenly with hints of intellectual snobbery mixed in with their liberalism.

 

Against this is not only Widow Hyltenius and her Council of Mothers but also the traditions of the school as embodied in Rector Starck (Georg Blomstedt) and yet the latter shows more understanding when the ball arrives and Katya makes her grand entrance in her brother tails. The ball sequence is so well developed, at first showing the town’s social structure in miniature with the Widow and her Mothers overlooking the dancers and then the absolute shock when Katya arrives in male clothing – the reaction shots are a hoot but the whole room visibly pulls away from this “unnatural” apparition leaving her confidence draining.

 

The belle of the ball.

Starck intervenes and turns everything on its head, seeing only a “damsel in distress” and turning the Mothers’ prudishness around by pointing out how sober Katya’s clothing is in comparison to distasteful modern décolletage – on awkward display in a number of the group. The tide turns and the young men queue to dance with Katya but disaster strikes when her drink is spiked by creepy Björner and she enjoys herself rather too much.

 

Ludwig sees only one route froward from now, they must leave to become missionaries in the Congo but with Katya now disowned and the town’s elders attacking her in the local newspaper with a series of articles on modern youth… she finds refuge with The Wilde Hoard of Learned Ladies at Larsbo…

 

And that’s barely the half of it; can young and old, father and daughter, vindictive and forgiving be brought together. The conclusion is as easy going and narratively uncompromised as the rest of the film, an absolute belter!

Karin Swanström and Georg Blomstedt

 All of this was of course enlivened by the piano, flute and accordion of Stephen Horne and the harp of Elizabeth-Jane Baldry. The two work so well together leaving each other space and supporting as they share the leading lines with the harp being used as percussion and bass as well as the heavenly flourishes you’d expect. There we some exceptionally lovely themes and the improvised was hard to separate from the pre-arranged which says it all. The ideal accompaniment for this uplifting film!

 

As if by magic, the date of the film’s climactic moment is Thursday 12^th August, the day before Friday 13^th August and… the Bonn organisers chose this film to be the first streamed last Thursday, 12^th August. 

 

The link to the full schedule, screenings and, most crucially, donations is right here. Please help to support this festival and, hopefully, see you there next year.