A real diva… Sangue blu (1914) with John Sweeney, Kennington Bioscope

Watching the extract from the documentary before the main screening, it’s hard to escape the impression that Francesca Bertini was almost more of a diva in real life than on film. Here she was at 94 bossing not just her grandson around but also the man at the Italian film archive and the man trying to direct the documentary: having performed sitting down she decided to stand “… the light is better…” and a re-take ensued.

Such presence of mind and command from a woman who had stopped making films 60 years before: what a remarkable energy she still had.

But as Amran Vance reminded us in his introduction, the great Italian silent divas were not always in command and would suffer for their art and our entertainment and he warned of impending struggles in the film to follow:  Sangue blu (Blue Blood).

Directed by Nino Oxilia, who almost certainly got assistance from his star… the film was thought lost until recovered in a Dutch collection and this extant 35mm tinted nitrate print has now been restored by the EYE Filmmuseum in Holland and it just looks stunning!

The cinematography of Giorgino Ricci captured rich depth of field for large-scale interiors built outside to make use of the external light – the Italians didn’t have the American’s lighting budgets. Similarly there are some wonderful shots of the Riviera and, at one point, Bertini making a break for freedom along a country road lined by trees with the camera pulling further and further away.

GIF from the excellent Silents Please blog

“Inside” there’s one especially noteworthy sequence when Bertinin walks in turmoil along a corridor with large windows to her left, her figure marches camera-ward alternating between shadow and bright light: she is furious. The tints are also wonderfully vivid: there may not be much camera movement or close ups but this is a technically accomplished film.

The film, also known as The Princess of Monte Cabello, is based on the unhappy marriage between Bertini, the titular princess, and her husband played by Amedeo Ciaffi. They have a daughter, Diana (Anna Cipriani) whom they both dote on, but the Princess cannot trust her husband’s feelings especially when he is in the orbit of the scheming Contessa Simone de la Croix (Fulvia Perini).

The spaces between friends...

After one especially fraught party the Prince decides enough is enough and sues for divorce. For a while the Princesses life carries on, as she cares for Diana and performs good works but then she comes into contact with an actor, Jacques Wilson (Angelo Gallina). She is to perform with Wilson in a charity play but, whilst one thing doesn’t lead to another, the Contessa makes sure that her private eyes make it look that way.

Appalled the Prince removes his ex-wife from court and, worst of all, makes sure she can never see her daughter. Cast adrift, the Princess lands herself with Wilson who turns out to be less of a man than she expected and soon bankrupts them both by gambling away their funds in the casino at Monte Carlo.

Wilson taunts the Princess

His only hope is to persuade the Princess to take to the stage and, aided by an aggressive money-lender, he sets about increasing her degradation until she is left with only one choice… or is she?

No spoilers as… a) you really should see this film if you like early Italian silent films and b) the Cineteca Bologna, together with Eye, has now produced a DVD version of this film which is available direct or readily available on eBay.

Bertini is a class act and whilst I don’t think the film is of the standard of Assunta Spina, it is certainly a fascinating watch 101 years after release. It also includes Bertini’s take on Asta Nielsen’s dirty dancing from Afgrunden (1910)… there are fewer gyrations and certainly no bondage but the intent is there…

John Sweeney caressed the keys with his usual fluency and between the Sign of Four on Sunday and tonight really showed his tremendous range and versatility: accompaniment suitable for the great diva!

There were also a number of special treats on tonight’s under-card…

Charley gets the bird in Movie Night

Events kicked off with a Charley Chase romp called Movie Night (1929) in which the Chase family struggle to enjoy their weekly Monday night trip to the flix – on this occasion to see Buster Keaton and Marceline Day in The Cameraman. Stingy dad tries to get over-age son in as a child but his bum-fluff gives him away whilst there’s some trouble involving a free bird: never look a gift goose in the mouth Mr Chase.

It was laugh-out-laugh comedy in the old school sense with some spritely support from Lillian Henley on piano. It might depend on your mood but is it more fun playing along to comedy than drama? Lillian clearly relished the Chase challenge!

Next up was a Disney animation from when he was funny – Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in Trolley Troubles (1927) – a stream of consciousness, surreal symphony in which the titular rabbit tries to navigate the everyday perils of the track, angry goats, immobile cows and unexpected gradients.

That's hazardous, Helen!

It was Cyrus Gabrysch’s turn to hang on to the nonsense narrative and he repeated the trick with a rare sighting of one of the Hazards of Helen shorts. Helen is played by Helen Holmes who did “all of her own stunts” and there are some doozies in this 1915 episode (number 13 of 119!) in which she allows the telegraph to get robbed, loses her job and then catches the thieves and recovers job and money: all in a breathless ten minutes and with her hair almost unruffled.

There was also a tantalizing preview of a brand new silent film called Written in Dust from its director Gareth Rees. Details can be found on the project’s website here. The film is coming to the Bioscope in November and looks a really interesting prospect all round: a modern, naturalistic, gritty drama just like Miss Bertini used to make!

 Written in Dust

Adrift! But… We Have An Anchor (2012), Barbican with Silver Mount Zion and others…

“If I can get people to read those poems, and to stare at the ocean for a really long time, I feel pretty good about what we did…”

So often with silent films I have seen musicians improvise their way around a pre-existing narrative but with Jem Cohen’s ode to Nova Scotia's Cape Breton, the images evolved alongside the composition. Cohen prepared some sequences before showing them to the musicians but then responded by cutting in tune with the resultant score.

Cohen once professed that there is too much music in some films and he usually edits in silence or with naturally occurring sounds, but this is not so much of a departure for a man who earned his reputation through music videos for bands such as REM and, most notably, noise funsters Fugazi. The crucial difference is the parallel processing of editing and scoring which lead to an end product that is truly inter-dependent.

The score was composed and played live by a stellar array of alt musical talent including the violins of Sophie Trudeau (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and her Thee Silver Mount Zion band mate Jessica Moss. They were joined by the esteemed Efrim Manuel Menuck also of Godspeed who is the vocalist and guitarist of Silver Mount Zion (and Ms Moss’ partner… keeping up?) and Fugazi’s guitarist Guy Picciotto, who was also a producer on Cohen’s first feature film, Museum Hours (starring the unique Canadian signer Mary Margaret O’Hara).

The ensemble performing in New York

The sound was anchored (pun intended) by the fluidly-crisp drumming of Jim White (Dirty Three, PJ Harvey etc.) and T. Griffin (from grime-folk combo The Quavers) on keyboards and another guitar. Whilst Mira Billotte, from White Magic, provided vocals plugging the score into local folk and hymns, starting with a crystalline solo of “What Wondrous Love Is This?”

None of the group, or Cohen himself, is from Cape Breton but what we got was an outsider view of this lonesome place – an alternative travelogue from musicians and a director who try to find the difference in the norm. Cohen has been coming to the area since the nineties when he went there on a Fugazi tour and became entranced with this town on the edge of Canada, battered by economic ill-fortune and an unforgiving environment.

As one of the rare voices in this mostly-silent film said, unless you’re from the island you will always remain from outside, you will always be “from away”. This is a phrase I’ve heard in the far North of England and Scotland, evidence of a shared linguistic heritage but also an echo of the geological links: Nova Scotia is part of the same range that runs through to the British Isles – separated by tectonic shifts long ago – and it still looks very familiar – the wind-lashed barren grey cliffs, the trees bent against the elements and the endless sea rolling in from the thousand mile horizon.

The film was originally commissioned and produced by the New York Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in 2012 and, it ticks all of those boxes: especially the E and the A. It’s a meditative art instillation, part film and part gig with Godspeed-esque drones leading into crescendos of noise: a kind of post-rock chamber music.

Falling back into nature...

Cohen edited together miles of your actual film shot over a long period. One section shows a derelict wooden house over a period from 2000 to 2008, 10, 12… gradually falling apart; finally defeated by the elements as it falls back to nature. This is accompanied by some lovely lines from Trudeau and Moss, who are such clear players especially in the company of amplified guitars.

There are excerpts from a variety of local poets and Cohen achieves his aim of getting us to read them. The accompaniment is restrained during these moments and there is remarkable control over the mix of images, screen sound and score: on a Tuesday night after work these things can easily slip from your grasp but the whole is absorbingly greater than the sum of its individually-interesting parts.

 There are some tall tales from a young fisherman as he nurses a pregnant cow whilst an antique dealer raises a smirk or two as he tries to verbalise how he feels about a giant wrench held by a “very strong” man (you had to be there) but he nails a deeper truth when he explains how temporary the items he deals in are… As the artist friend of Cohen later says, when she first arrived she soon learned not to fuss over the harsh conditions but just to get on with life: petty considerations drifted away when confronted with a more physically demanding - simpler – daily routine.

When I go walking in the Scottish islands the same thing happens: you just focus on getting from A to B even when, as another commentator noted, there’s no straight line.

Ultimately the “narrative” of such a work is difficult to pin down – it’s a mix of the specific with the symbolic but you are left with a clear impression of Cohen’s outsider view. For him Cape Breton is a simpler existence, not in a romanticized way but in the very real fact of its relative isolation and physicality. This is not Tuscany or Coney Island but a sparsely populated economic backwater with stunning views.

The film began and ended with three screens – I haven’t seen that since Gance’s Napoleon – it’s what the stunning Breton horizon’s deserved. The band wound up to its meatiest theme and the two violins soared to a conclusion. Would I like to go to Cape Breton? I feel I’ve already been.

Efrim Manuel Menuck and Jessica Moss at the New York premier

The band played direct to screen throughout, almost as if the film was conducting them. Menuck’s groups play extended compositions using orchestrated rock sound – strict discipline as he once joked on stage – not in an old school progressive way in order to mimic classical music, but in an extension of the tonal possibilities of the guitars, bass, drums, strings combination.

By co-incidence the new Godspeed album, cheerfully entitled Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, was released yesterday (I’m listening to it now). I’ve always thought that their shows resembled soundtracks for their disjointed, impressionistic back-projections (the reverse being the case…) and now Menuck, Trudeau and friends have taken that next step: a fascinating development all round.

Mr Cohen and his camera

The hall was sold out so hopefully there’ll be more of this to come: a nearly-silent film with a truly sympathetic modern rock accompaniment. Jem Cohen leapt on stage to take a brief but rapturous bow as the band exited stage left, Jessica Moss breaking ranks to smile and wave at the crowd.

There’s more about Godspeed – who are touring soon - on their site and Silver Mount Zion here whilst Jem Cohen’s site is here. Museum Hours is available onAmazon and I look forward to this work getting a release on digital media.