Train keeps a runnin’… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto #44 Day Eight

 

That was the week that was… and it was a Festival of many parts as director Jay Weissberg noted as he introduced the final night’s gala performance and reflected on the creative choices and collective efforts that for this precious week, turn the Teatro Verdi and the surrounding are into the “home” that former director David Robinson always talked about. To the programmers, the marketers, the ticket office, the ushers, projections and even sommeliers and barristers of Pordenone, this is a triumph of organisation but: “we make the table and you the audience are the family” that eats , talks and watches together.

 

Jay had their hospitality in mind because of course tonight’s finale was a projection of Buster Keaton’s master work with a score composed by Andrej Goričar who conducted the Orchestra of the Imaginary, Lubiana in performing it. So many of Buster’s films are a comedy comfort blanket for this audience and there couldn’t have been many who hadn’t seen this film more than a few times. But context is everything with “live cinema” and the film rose to the occasion as the gathering once again found Keaton’s tale funny as it was reanimated by our collective appreciation and the new, exceptionally live music. Some times I think that silent film musicians are there to mostly remind us of the “life” that went into these images – we are all attuned with song lines of the film makers as their new collaborators connect with these ancient meanings.

 

A "Train", not sure they'll catch on?

Don’t get me wrong, a kick in the head from Buster Keaton’s dad Joe who plays the locomotive engine driver, is still funny in any language and at any time. This was a bit of a speciality from Keaton Senior in preference to using his fists and the skill remains impressive. There enough timeless slapstick in Our Hospitality but also a playful surrealism, especially during that first half our as Buster and co take the old Rocket steam loco out west – a train so feeble that Keaton’s dog can easily follow it all the way, and they have to move the tracks to avoid donkeys and other road hazards.

 

The whole rickety journey is one of Buster’s finest and the fact that the entire crew and passengers take it as normal is what makes it work. Out of nowhere, a man throws stones from a mountain side and the driver throws logs back which are quickly gathered and taken to start a fire elsewhere. The United States of Daft… how we miss them.

 

But this comedy is a black one and starts off with the Canfield and McKay family feud as two of the men from each family extend the senseless violence by killing each other. John Canfield’s wife decides to take their son Willie (played by Keaton’s baby – this is a family affair) to New York in an effort to remove him from the front line. This is New York allegedly based on a 1820’s map showing Broadway as a dirt track intersecting with an equally dusty 4^th Avenue… CBGBs wasn’t yet open nor the Met but Bleeker Bob’s record store in the Village probably was…

 

Willie grows up to be Buster and is delighted to learn that he has inherited his father’s estate down south and imagining a fine Georgian mansion, sets off on the new-fangled train. Sitting next to him is a pretty young woman Virginia (Natalie Talmadge aka Mrs B. Keaton) who become gradually impressed as they endure their unusual journey. When they finally arrive, she runs off to see her brothers who are, of course Cranfields. Willie gives the game away saying he’s here for the McKay estate – more of a collapsing barn than a shed… Virginia invites him to dinner and the boys start planning Willie’s leaving do only for the famous southern hospitality to get in the way… up to a point.

 

If the second half doesn’t quite match the first for laughs, we have the love story to hopefully bring peace to this forever war… Bit of a theme this week.

 

Before the main feature there were some precious Chaplin moments. Jay Weissberg has been playing excerpts from his recent interview with former Festival Director David Robinson and they give an insight into Chaplin’s life and works: it’s a wonderful way of bringing David back into the Giornate but also, here’s a man who met Charlie and Oona, who also met Stand and Olly… he’s steeped in the personalities and it is lovely to see him on screen.

 

Following this there were more Chaplin Family Home Movies which have also been a feature of the week. The first features an older Charlie and an older Syd juggling with the younger brother still more poised and co-ordinated and funnier too. Then there’s Charlie and Oona in Venice, the city unchanged as my short break there proved last week. Charlie looks well and is clearly enjoying his later years!

 

Another star of the Festival has been Max Fleischer and the mixed media films featuring Ko-ko the Clown directed by brother Dave. How much did Disney learn from these boys and their endless imagination and dynamism. Fleischer went on to make the ground-breaking Superman cartoon serials of the late 1930s and has a higher level of technique than Disney.

 

Meg Morley accompanied the above session and again I really enjoy her period appropriate melodies and the jazzy fluidity of her playing on the Rolls Royce Fazioli piano. She hits the keys with just that extra bit if style and her ideas always support the action so well.

 

Earlier in the day there was a lot of “Early Cinema” with 18 (?!) short films from Stockholm mostly from 1897. These were followed by two colour-stencilled French films about Japan, La Geisha (1910) and LA RIVIÈRE KATSURA AU JAPON (1914) and other shorts accompanied by masterclass student Ludovico Bellucci. Great though the established musicians are for this Festival it is good to see the future players coming through.

 

My Boy (US 1921), with Neil Brand

 

More from the Chaplin Connection and more recollections from David Robinson, of Charlie meeting Jackie Coogan at a dinner in the early 1960s. Coogan had a difficult reputation at this point and the family was unsure how the meeting would go but Charlie simply looked at the man and smiled “young man” and all was well.

 

By this point Jackie was Uncle Fester in the successful Addams Family – and yesterday was appropriately enough the 100^th birthday of John Astin, the original and best Gomez Addams – but what do you do when you’ve had your career start aged ten in something line The Kid? Well, follow it up with a similar film, this one called My Boy (US 1921), directed by Victor Heerman and featuring accompaniment by Our Kid, Neil Brand. It's sentimentl adn soppy with some good gags and the lad in question is very good, a natural actor at this age who can hit the deeper notes.

 

L’ Ombra (IT 1923) with José Marìa Serralde Ruiz

 

Another in the revelatory Italia Almirante Manzini strand and one of the best, in fact by consensus, probably the best newly discovered film of this last day. I’ve been undecided about Manzini’s position in the top tier of Divadom but there’s no denying her physicality and expressiveness, she dominates every scene and has an imperious way with her.

 

This was a really meaty role as she plays Berta, the wife of a painter Geraldo (Alberto Collo) who is suddenly struck down and paralysed and rendered paraplegic. She rises to the occasion but cannot engage in an active life anymore and, naturally, this is frustrating for her new husband. He starts living a double life starting an affair with a family friend and younger woman Elena Previle (Liliama Ardea) who has recently left her husband. Time passes and a child appears but the once paralysed Berta starts to regain her functions, surprising everyone with a full recovery, not least Geraldo. What follows is a master class in tightly scripted retribution as Berta regains control of her life with purpose and sheer willpower. Almirante Manzini commands the screen and the other characters and dispenses her own judgement on the iniquitous position her character has been left in.

 

Now, that’s what I call Diva!

 

And, this is what I call the finest film festival in the World. See you next year.

The fault in our Tsar… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 44, Day Seven

If Hammer made Soviet historical dramas with a propagandist edge in the silent era it would probably be exactly like The Wings of a Serf (1926) which is, in so many ways, years ahead of its time in terms of blood, gore, S&M, sci-fi, gruesome behaviours and even a touch of what would be termed deviant sexuality. Kim Newman, give Mark Gatiss a call, there’s a classic mondo bizarro movie waiting to be remade….

 

Writing these blogs is the treading of a fine line between instant reactions and hot takes as well as properly understanding the works we have just seen, and clearly there’s a lot more to this particular soviet film than is clear on first viewing and Maya Garcia’s note in the catalogue are very good at providing context. This is also a film made in the more laissez fair years between Lenin and Stalin and the latter’s conservative clamp down of the early thirties onwards. Here homosexuality had been decriminalised and it is indeed witnessed in The Wings of a Serf  in the relationship between the Tsar (Leonid Leonidov) and his favourite Fadke Basamanov (Nikolai Prozorovsky). But here it is being used to emphasis the Tsar’s unacceptable qualities and that can only be the case if you think what they are doing is wrong?

 

Or, as a writer in Kino-Front in 1927 put it, “in a Soviet historical picture, the important thing is class struggle, not the personality and pathology of the Tsar…”Eisenstein would agree and was clearly making notes. Equally you have to wonder at how the flying inventions of serf Nykishka (Ivan Klyukvin) fit in with the depiction of this “terrible” and not “awe-inspiring” Ivan? He prevents the young inventor from being killed by giving him the chance to develop his machine and offering freedom if it works, but then declares it the work of the Devil and orders his execution.

 

So it’s also Ivan the Inconsistent as well as Sadistic… but he’s not alone and the cruelty of the film’s opening section is provided by boyar Kurlyatev who, having called Nykishka to fix his clock, tortures him for his science secrets while seducing his lover Fima (Sofya Garrel) by luring her to his chambers. Now it’s Ivan the Intolerant as he sees a way of dealing with his Kurlyatev problem and sends his private army (Oprichniks) to destroy his enemy's estate and bring his serfs to his court at Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. Here the serfing mechanic once again proves useful by fixing a flax-breaking wheel and gains further reprieve…

 

But the film’s break-neck madness is that no one is trusted and no one is safe from the wrath of Ivan the Unpredictable who will turn on family and friends quicker than Old Joe from Georgia. Meet the Old Boss, same as the New Boss… He can be feeding grapes to Fadke one minute and strangulating his already tortured wife the next as she tries to help the man who, if anyone just stopped and thought clearly for a second, could establish air superiority for the Russians, 300 years before they’d need it!

 

Mauro Colombis provided spirited accompaniment through the many moods of the Tsar and found musical method in spite of the madness on screen.

 

Rediscoveries – Victor Sjöström, with Stephen Horne

 

The film of the day came early… and even this controversial being the first to ever be banned in Sweden. The Gardener (1912) was Sjöström’s second film although he had been working in theatre since the mid 1890s and so was both an experienced performer as well as director. The script was from Mauritz Stiller, his friend and mentor who also makes and uncredited appearance as a reveller when the heroine is on a boat.

 

The film was banned for as contrary to "good practices" and for “embellishing death” although I’m sure there would have been more freedom to express the contents on stage at this time. The story concerns a farmer/gardener (Sjöström) who disapproves of his son (young Gösta Ekman!) having a relationship with the daughter of one of his workers played by Danish actress Lili Bech. Having chased his son of his true motives are revealed as his rapes her in the green house before sending her and her father away to penury just to save his own skin.

 

There are no easy answers in this film and also no predictable narrative decline into drink and prostitution as often seen in films of the period. The woman keeps going and finds a away through the support of a kindly old general (John Ekman) but after a few years he dies and his children force her out. Returning to her home village she must confront the past and what it has meant for her life.

 

Bech is so naturalistic and unmannered something the stage-trained Scandinavians seem to have managed from the get-go helped, no doubt, by the theatrical qualities of their culture and the existence of great performance managers like Sjöström, The film, once considered lost, is just over half an hour but contains more quality moments – cinematography already from the mighty Julius Jaenzon.

 

There were four tantalising fragments from other early Sjöström films and Stephen Horne brought the epic lyricism to the lakes and mountains of Värmland … or close by!

 

It's only 1912 but already the men who would make the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema are already in place, now, why not start taking some of Selma Lagerlöf’s stories and turn them into films?

 

 

Now for the quick-fire round…

Il Siluramento Dell' Oceania  (IT 1917) with José Marìa Serralde Ruiz

Directed by Augusto Genina this was an thriller about sinking ships, family treasure and evil gangs. It moves at quite a lick and whilst missing some sections holds together entertainingly as the Captain of a sunken liner (Vasco Creti) helps a young Viscontessa (Ileana Leonidoff) recover her lost inheritance. There are castles, mysteries, fiendish crooks, fights and chases... it was FUN!

Kissa Kouprine

La Perle (BE 1929) with Meg Morley

 

More Belgian Avant-Garde and one of the most entertaining and cohesive with Henri d' Ursel’s The Pearl (1929). Written and starring Georges Hugnet as Le Jeune Homme, The Pearl could signify possession or it could mean love… it may even be just a pearl. I don’t think it matters to any forensic degree, you can overlay your own interpretation according to mood: the key thing is that the film draws you in and makes you think. This properly defies any constraining interpretations and, by the rules, your guess is as good as mine. All we know for certain is what happens on screen.

 

A young Lulu (Mary Stutz) waits in her garden for her fiancé and he sets off to buy her a pearl necklace. Here is the films funniest joke as Lulu looks out and we see her man running through woods, rowing across a river then running through town getting distracted by a street game… You expect her to view him directly but he’s far away, initially heroic and then just distracted.

At the jewellery store, a pretty shop assistant (Kissa Kouprine, the only professional actor on show who featured in a number of Marcel L’Herbier’s films) steals pearls and carelessly hides them in her stocking top which is all too visible as she sits chatting on a ledge. The girl has no name and is only referenced in the title sequence as La Voleuse – The Thief. He leaves the shop with his pearls and she follows him, hitching a ride on his bike. The man crashes his bike and the string of pearls is broken… the man searches but there is still a pearl missing. It rolled directly to La Voleuse who walks off with it leaving him fatuously pawing the ground...

 

He goes to an hotel and La Voleuse is everywhere, appearing in a tight-fitting silver-grey cat suit – an updated, sleeker version of Irma Vep - from every corridor, pursuing the man and his pearls. She is not alone and there are other women all wearing the same costume. Are all women looking for “The Pearl” and you can make of that what you will.

 

In the evening we travelled back to that place again for East Lynne with Variations (US 1919) featuring the great Marie Prevost showing up the Keystone Boys yet again!

  

The Man Who Came Back (US 1924) with John Sweeney

 

Festival director, Jay Weissberg gave out a number of trigger warnings starting with the unknown ten-minute soft porn films of a young woman being caught skinny dipping by a man after her dog runs off with her clothes. It felt more like a 70s Brit sex comedy than the usual fare but I’m sure it was artistically justified.

 

There was worse to come in the main feature and not in George O’Brien’s drinking and Dorothy Mackaill’s drug taking but in the ways his character beats hers when he suspects her of falling off the wagon leaving her… “grateful”? “Oh Henry… we’ve won…” she says as she staggers to her feat the beating apparently worth it as some show of love? George too was skinny dipping and – as one cineaste later remarked – not for long enough.

 

O’Brien’s tyle of acting does tend to rely on him swaggering around trying to control his abnormal muscle mass and ripping his shirt off at the slightest opportunity. Here he looked ill-matched with the delicate features and other-worldly hair mass of Mackaill who not only looked like she was in the wrong decade but also acted like it versus Burly O’Brien. The two played Henry “Harry” Potter (fnar!!) and his lover Marcelle who he meets on a journey to prove himself to his father that his wasteful gambling and drinking years are over. Sadly things get far worse before they get better which is pretty brave for a film about addiction at this time.

 

The estimable Ralph Lewis plays his self-made and hard to please, father whilst Emily Fitzroy is disapproving Aunt Isabel with Cyril Chadwick as the man of unknown allegiance Captain Trevelan… Emmett J. Flynn directs well and it is a tense film that deals frankly – too frankly in parts – with difficult subjects. The restoration looks fabulous but the special effect for me is Ms Mackaill who’d I never seen in a film before this one and who acted not just George but everyone else off screen. One to watch, mark my words!

 

John Sweeney was again on top form for this one smoothing out the melodrama and heightening the drama in ways that might be unconscious to him now but are the result of many hundreds of thousands of hours treading this remarkable musical path!

Epic Thursday… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 44, Day Six

White Heather (1919)

Are Parents People? (1925) with Neil Brand

Not a lot of people know this but, when this film was screened at the Kennington Bioscope Kevin Brownlow revealed that silent cinema’s sophisticate with that European air, Adolphe Menjou was actually half Irish and could speak Gaelic as well as probably his father’s French. Further investigation shows his mother’s maiden name to be Joyce who was also a first cousin of James Joyce, the writer not the railway worker who is my connection. The more I look at Adolphe the more I can “hear” that brogue…  but also the harder to accept his republican politics and later support of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his co-founding of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

Still… it’s the art and not the artist and he was, on screen at least, always a consummate professional and great to watch. Co-star Florence Vidor later told Kevin that Menjou “fell apart with success”, unable to cope with too much good fortune he fell to self-medicating with a bottle and who knows what impact that had on his politics? In this film as with many others, he makes us happy. Life may be disappointing but it’s also rewardingly contradictory, comic and complex.

Kevin explained the influence of Chaplin’s Woman of Paris on director Malcolm St. Clair’s style with the latter eschewing flamboyant camerawork in favour of a focus on character development. A supposedly simpler approach but the narrative was still driven by silky editing and some touches that might even be described as Lubitsch-esque; a pair of impatient feet here, a door opened just for slamming and the flicking of peanut shells off an armchair in tribute to a habit of Mabel Normand’s… Lubitsch also was influenced by Woman of Paris, thanks Charlie, as ever!

This was an original print from the Kodascope Library and from Chris Bird’s collection – the same one we saw back in 2017 at the KB. At the time it was my first exposure to the sparkling brilliance of Betty Bronson but having recently seen her quicksilver emoting in Peter Pan (1924) I was even more impressed than on that initial viewing. Here she’s Lita, a teenager torn between two parents, Menjou and the elegant Florence Vidor, who are so in love they hate each other. Unable to see beyond their mutual inflexibility they divorce leaving their daughter in a boarding school trying to figure out a way to reunite them. She hatches a plot involving a movie star – an hilarious turn from George Beranger – expulsion and handsome Doctor Dacer (Lawrence Gray).

It’s a hoot, the cast are wonderful and it’s as sophisticated as Hollywood gets! Talking of which, our learned friend Maestro Neil Brand was on hand to provide the lightness of touch for his accompaniment including a wealth of melodic references and an instinctive way with improvisational composition that can only a lifetime of study make! Chapeau!

 

GLI ULTIMI GIORNI DI POMPEI (IT 1913) with José Marìa Serralde Ruiz

 

Eleuterio Rodolfi’s film was one of two competing adaptations of the British novel by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, published in 1834, and itself inspired by the painting The Last Day of Pompeii by the Russian painter Karl Briullov. The other was directed by Giovanni Enrico Vidali for Pasquali & Co. and was released just four days after this version produced by Ambrosio. That version was screened earlier this year at the Kennington Bioscope and whilst I had previously seen this one on the Kino DVD todays’ screening was much longer – 107 minutes compared with just 78 on the DVD - plus far more enjoyable on the big screen and with exceptionally energetic and epic accompaniment from José Marìa Serralde Ruiz!

It is one of the last great “tableau” films, so called as they consisted of a series of, often quite intricate, single takes using a largely static camera. Here there are literally thousands of people placed in some shots, as the action moves across the frame creating the kineticism of a moving shot so convincingly that you stop noticing. One shot is of many hundreds of people and it’s extraordinary although rather spoilt by the presence of one man wearing a modern suit… evidence below!

The story revolves around Glaucus (Ubaldo Stefani) – one of Pompeii’s most eligible, who opens the film walking down the main street with his friend Claudius (Vitale Di Stefano). They are chatted to by a couple of young ladies but Glaucus only has eyes for Jone (Eugenia Tettoni Fior) one of the city’s great beauties. We are shown exterior shots of the two lovers enjoying a picnic in the lagoon but they are observed from the shore by Arbace, Egyptian High Priest (Antonio Grisanti) who, when not plotting to increase the popularity of Isis and other “new” Egyptian gods, is trying to force Jone into his arms… by foul means or fair.

Against this upper-class backdrop is introduced, a poor blind girl, Nidia (Fernanda Negri Pouget, who maintains her eyes in an excruciating upward tilt for the whole film… method miming!). She sells flowers when she isn’t slaving away at one of the local taverns. Glaucus, appalled at her miss-treatment, rescues her and buys her from the landlord. He sets her up as a handmaiden in his splendid villa... a very mixed blessing as it turns out. Nidia falls very quickly for her rescuer but she’s quickly in misery following a visit from his true love… and we see her agonising against the curtains while Glaucus and Jone make love down stage.

So, the human drama unfolds with magic and cult religion used in attempts to divide the lovers by jealous priests, noble but lovestruck blind servants and those of bad intent. But, spoilers ahead, you juts know that the big spoiler is the mountain and that at some point things are really going to kick off.

It’s from the golden age of Italian silent cinema and on a line from L’Inferno to Cabiria and beyond in terms of dramatic ambition and operatic – mythical intensity. It’s an extraordinary document from just 17 years into the new media’s development and I am so pleased to have seen it on the scale intended! And, well played José Marìa Serralde Ruiz: an explosive performance mixed with much intensity and delicate phrasing!

My other highlights…

The White Heather (US 1919) with Stephen Horne

A tinted and toned nitrate print of Maurice Tourneur’s long believed lost The White Heather was found at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam in 2023 and subsequently restored by the SFFP. It looks gorgeous and was presented here in 35mm with a dynamic score from the multi-instrumentalism master improviser Mr Stephen Horne

It’s a rip-roaring nautical yarn and court-room drama in which monied baddie Lord Angus Cameron (Holmes Herbert) tries to annul his secret marriage to castle housekeeper Marian (Mabel Ballin) – and subsequent off-spring – so that he can get even more money by marrying a fellow posh person (honestly, rich folk, are they normally this nasty?). The two were married at sea and unfortunately the ship sank including the only record of their nuptials although the Captain (Greed’s Gibson Gowland who was from County Durham!) survives and could attest to the ceremony, should it be worth his while… A legal battle is followed by a race to find the Captain led by an impossibly skinny John Gilbert as Dick Beach, whilst legal follow up and under-water combat skills are provided by Ralph Graves as Alec McClintock.

Excellent fun and we cheered!

Maggie Hennefeld on weaponising Nasty Fashion!

UCLA David C Copley Lecture: Costume Design and Silent Cinema

Dressed for Chaos: Costumes, Nasty Women and Social Change

This was an excellent lecture by Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı aka The Nasty Women Collective which highlighted the tremendous importance of costume design in the act of creating the chaos of comedy. Costume designers, mostly women, supported the ambition of the leading players by providing clothes fit for purpose as well as the narrative authenticity.

I hadn’t expected to be so fascinated in the subject but that’s education for you and there’s a whole depth of detail I would love to understand more. Professor Hennefeld said that the talk was being recorded and I do hope so as my niece is studying costume design at Central St Martins and I know she will get a lot from this.

I also have to say I love the continuing momentum of this project it only gets stronger and more interesting as the years progress and, as an agent for truth and resistance it is a remarkable tribute to silent cinematic scholarship!

Make more noise!!

 

That man in a suit... small things amuse small minds. Sorry!

 

Futility… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Day Five

 

In the rush to fall over each other’s opinions we forget that there can be no winners in a war of words or of bombs. In the battle to persuade, we hurl our arguments across the internet like ordnance from a 4.5 inch Howitzer and yet, whilst the enemy’s lines may be pockmarked with damage, their response only gains in ferocity with the momentum of the attack. It is quiet something to bring a silence to this discourse and to give us all pause for thought, to defuse the fatuous mechanics of action and reaction but that’s exactly what both the late-night films today did for me. They did so in different and equally powerful ways.

The most effective statements are often the ones that simply let you work out the message yourself… not in an abstract way like the Belgian avant-garde cinema of Tuesday – but in the force of images and or music that show a truth we might never have seen conveyed in a moving image before. If the original aim of the Ukrainian/Soviet propaganda we’ve seen this week, as well as tonight’s British propaganda, was to create a specific response in the audience, the musical context of both scores held us away from that original intent and gave us that pause and somewhere between thought and expression lies the truth. Not surprisingly some of us were a little short on words for a while...

Palestine - A Revised Narrative (LB, 2024)

Cynthia Zaven’s sparse electronica and piano accompaniment for her compilation of Imperial War Museum clips of Palestine during the Great War enabled a presentation of documents devoid of polemic. She turned British propaganda into a neutral statement that simply reminded us that one of the World’s most intractable problems was different before 1917. In the clips we see Gaza, Jaffa, lush farmlands and seafront towns, there’s Nazareth, Bethlehem and a Jerusalem in which Muslims, Jews and Christians intermingle, going about their daily lives – talking together and worshipping their God with his common roots. Clearly not everything is perfect – the Commonwealth forces have just pushed the Turkish forces out of the area, it’s a warzone.

What happened next is of course where the real debate starts and were further reading is essential. The Balfour Declaration and the decisions of a flawed British regime with a romanticised view of The Holy Land played their part but as a historian I must advise caution and cross-referencing: for myself and everyone else, we must investigate not reach for simple conclusions. As a starter, I would heartily recommend three episodes of the Empire podcast with William Dalrymple and Anita Anand which cover the Arab Revolt (Lawrence of Arabia) and the Sykes-Picot agreement to “carve up” the countries of the middle east. All of these were recorded in 2023 before the current war but main essential as History doesn’t change based on what is happening now does it? It helps us understand why what is happening … and silent film is both history as primary sources and secondary interpretations.

The German Retreat and Battle of Arras (GB 1917), Laura Rossi

Made when the Great War looked like it might be winnable and has a propagandist purpose beyond earlier films in showing the changed momentum of the conflict to those back home. It is also historically significant for the events it memorialises, the techniques it uses to do this and its intent.. Geoffrey H. Malins was director of photography as he had been for the two Somme films but even though the first was certainly ground-breaking and a phenomenon, Arras doesn’t carry the sense of excitement ad revelation possibly because the enemy was in retreat and more of a known quantity. It’s still a great technical achievement and awe-inspiring in the greater context but it didn’t feel triumphant, more grimly determined to help complete the job.

Laura Rossi has scored for the other films and was on hand to hear her new composition played in the Teatro Verdi by the Orchestra di Pordenone & Coro del Fruili as conducted by Andrej Goričar. Le Giornate is always the warmest of homes for international collaboration! Rossi’s music acted as with Zaven’s compilation and composition in allowing us to really see the film, devoid of any contextualisation that was connected to the original intent or and deliberate contemporary re-contextualisation. She allowed us a bit of both but underscoring the documentation on display to allow our own interpretation – a most historical musical agenda, incredible effective and created.

Elements of poetry and songs of the period, from all sides, were used as connective themes but also providing contrapuntal lines to neutralise more pointed segments. There was more ground to cover than in the Palestinian film given this was a complete creation of the time, but it enabled us that more conscious consumption of the film than might otherwise have been possible.

A sobering and to the day and brilliant work from all concerned.

Meanwhile, back in the Land of Fiction…

Following on from the top… There’s so much “debate” in the UK right now about “our” “national culture” and surely the fact that Betty Balfour was termed Britain’s Queen of Happiness highlights “our” ability to put fun before fear and jokes at our own expense ahead of others. Anyone who forgets this, is nowhere near as British as they believe themselves to be. Betty doesn’t need a flag, she needs silk clothes, fizzy wine and a good time, but she’s also kind and is an equal opportunities irritator!

Betty featured in Syd Chaplin’s A Little Bit of Fluff (1928) which was presented in gorgeous-looking 35mm and featured a host of GB good ‘uns, including arguably the third-best looking McLaglen, Clifford as Betty’s boxing boyfriend Henry “One Round” Hudson, Nancy Rigg as Syd’s wife and Edmund Breon as his mate John. It’s a hoot with near-Hollywood production values and a remarkably high gag rate. Syd’s very much his own Chaplin but he does have the speed of thought and instincts of his brother as well as that most comedically crucial quality: timing!

Syd loves his wife but less so her Aunt Agatha – the brilliant Annie Esmond - who even after two weeks of wedded “bliss” is pushing him around. As the girls go off to see Agatha’s sister, Syd gets persuaded to go out by John and the wheels start to come off for the entirety of the rest of the film.

It’s fast and furious but remember this even if you forget everything else: a small dog may be used to lick stamps if held at the correct angle and provided with the right incentives> I shall take this lesson forward.

   

Accompaniment was from dog-loving Donald Sosin and cool cat Frank Bockius on the sticks (just don’t throw them for the dogs…)

 

Quick-fire round...

 

Danza Serpentina (US? FR?, 1896-1905?) – who can resist this dance, especially colourised? The images are also being projected on the Teatro Verdi and in one of the squares.

L’Innamorata (IT 1920) with Stephen Horne

Time for some more Italia Almirante Manzini and this starts with a pure visual Diva power play as the man waiting to see her has to await her full preparation and we see her in close-up glimpses, lipstick being finished, hair checked, full-glam eye-shadow… before she is revealed in her full glory.

Sadly, this film doesn’t quite support her in the way that Zingari (1920) did and has a lumpy plot not helped by missing sections but with Stephen Horne to fill the experience with fulsome flourishes and expert under-scoring it was inevitably entertaining!

 

Die Dame mit der Maske (DE 1928) Günter Buchwald, Frank Bockius

When a young socialite has to undertake work as an exotic dancer to convince her father that his books are still being published, she has no option but to wear a mask as she shows far more flesh than she would prefer.

A good cast – including dynamo Dita Parlo – and some fine set pieces are let down by a slightly wayward narrative in which some characters are inactive when really they could save the day with more gumption. Apparently a number of different endings we filmed and you could see anyone of them working… a reflection of the lack of internal logic and depth behind the main characters and their motivation perhaps?

Günter Buchwald and Frank Bockius are on fire this week and their mix of classical, folk and jazz served this Weimar treat very well!

 

Louis, Musidora & Léontine with Meg Morley

Another clutch of excellent Louis Feuillade shorts including L’HOMME AIMANTÉ (Un Monsieur aimanté) (FR 1907), LYSISTRATA OU LA GRÈVE DES BAISERS (FR 1910) and LAGOURDETTE GENTLEMAN CAMBRIOLEUR (FR 1916).

This last was my favourite and featured a reunion of the three key cast members of Les Vampires… Musidora is reading a novelisation of the series and Marcel Lévesque tries to impress her by pretending to be a super thief. It’s daft fun and even Édouard Mathé pops up as a reveller at the club where his former colleague is “committing” his made-up crimes.

Meg Morley joined in the proto-jazzed mayhem. (that would make a good t-shirt slogan surely?)

 

À bientôt!

 

PJ

 

Musi et Mathé!

Tears are not enough… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Day Four

Ruan Lingyu abides...

OK, new rules, we’re halfway through and it’s time to make this blog snappier. Today:

·         Cried – twice

·         Laughed – numerous times

·         Rolled eyes at improbable plot twist and/or directorial time wasting/needless passing of the narrative ball across the midfield and back to the defence and back again… four times

·         Shouted “C’mon John!!” embarrassingly loud to encourage Mr Sweeney on stage for an encore – once!

People, it’s been a roller coaster day… maybe I need more sleep/less coffee?!

Why cry though? Well for that you have to blame simply one of the finest actors of the 1930s, Ruan Lingyu who acts her socks off and breaks our hearts in the overlong but for long periods quite brilliant Love and Duty (CN 1931). She was only just 21 at the time of the film’s making and succeeds in convincing us that she’s a schoolgirl, a young woman, a woman prematurely aged by the concerns of her life and then her own daughter. Not once do the multitude of close-ups betray a single wobble in her expression she is absolutely as good as she will be in The Goddess and other films about the “new women” in China at this time.

This film is her last of the old style in terms of its morality and attitude to women, she plays a woman who is unfaithful in marriage but her husband has already crossed that bridge and yet prospers while she suffers. Stylistically the film is advanced with some intriguing compositions by director Bu Wancang including some choice tracking shops as her character Yang Nei Fang walks to school and is followed by Li Tsu Yi (played by Jin Yan). This really emphasises the moments in which they fall in love at first sight… but their fate is not true to this fairy tale beginning.

A new dawn about to fade.

Her traditionalist parents promise her in marriage to a rich writer Huang Ta Jen whom she doesn’t love… the years pass and they have two children and are sporadically unhappy. Another chance encounter as the returning Li Tsu Yi saves one from drowning in the park and their love is soon rekindled, just as Huang is seeing his mistress. I believe it was Sade who suggested that love is stronger than pride and it’s certainly stringer than the family ties in this film as the two lovers run away leaving Business Huang with the children. It’s the first heart break.

Things do not go well for the starstruck couple and even after they have a child of their own, a daughter, Li struggles to find work and soon succumbs to illness, that first dry cough is a sure sign that he’s a goner before the next reel is run. Yang has various visions of her options standing by her lover’s grave and after seeing all of them end in humiliation vows to bring up their daughter in his honour and give her the chance she never got.

Ah, if only things were that simple and there was an invisible guiding hand – perhaps Mr William H Hays’? – to get us to the happy ending we all long for but this film isn’t taking the easy way out and nor is it in a rush… But, by the time the endings are all tied up even cynical old publishing marketing directors where not alone in sniffing back tears in the Teatro Verdi!

Of course, for this I can also blame John Sweeney whose Stakhanovite efforts in constructing a powerful, emotional musical narrative for the 150 minutes of this film were outstanding and he richly deserved the ovation and the bow we called for. It’s one thing to stand there casually crying but quite another to play a part in perfectly amplifying the key moments in the tragedy and the love on screen. To do it all in such an embedded way is magic of the highest order!

Quickfire round up to 300 words. GO!

More stars than there are in West Lynne certainly...

In the morning we’d returned to East Lynne (US 1925) with new twists and turns, a better-looking cast, and less faith in the plays or novel to the point at which we didn’t get an electoral contents and not even get a dead Young Willy. This is heresy and several of the audience were visibly shaken but it is otherwise perfectly serviceable Hollywood fare and there are some good performances form those good-looking people including Marjorie (“see-saw”) Daw, Alma Rubens and Edmund Lowe as the apple-munching menace Carlyle.

No complaints at all about the wonderful accompaniment from Stephen Horne on piano (and various) plus Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on harp, the two work so well together and elevated this film to thoroughly enjoyable!

 

Mabel & Tillie and the CCEU, with Meg Morley

Miss Normand appeared on screen with her saucer eyed beauty and it was as if the whole auditorium lifted. Her energy is simply unmatched and it was there right from the start in Betty Becomes a Maid (US 1911) and Mabel at the Wheel (US 1914) two perfect comedies that knock the pomp out of the whole process and connect directly to our inner nuisance and devilment. I found myself wishing for a Mabel bio-pic featuring either Aimee Lou Wood, Margaret Qualley or both: whose with me? Let’s make this happen!

We also met another recuring character in the Extended Charlie-verse, Tillie, as played by the magnificent Marie Dressler – see, women are just funnier, ask Mack and Charlie, or just look at Ford Sterling.

Mabel on the left... see what I mean about Aimee?

More fabulous music in the evening session, this time for the Ukrainian children’s film The Adventures of a Penny (UkrSSR, 1929) directed by Axel Lundin. An entertaining new score composed by Olga Podgaiskaya performed by her with a mixed string and woodwind ensemble playing along with this lighter tale from the second year of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan. The kids are great and Lundin directs then exceptionally well, it's a real child's eye view of an adult world that continually lets them down. The solution is solidarity, community and working for each other no matter what the bourgoise commentator from Merseyside says on here.

But sadly, Stalin's fisrt plan lasted seven years and killed millions of Ukrainians in the name of industrialisation and “dekulakization” (forcing the “richer” farmers to surrender to collectivisation and a redistribution of labour and grain to the cities).

It never ends does it?

The remarkable young Kolya Kuryshkin, a fabulous performance for a scrappy kid!

Electric Gypsy… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Day Three

Let’s start at the big finish shall we, let’s begin with the pure diva pomp and circumstance of Italia Almirante Manzini playing the Queen of the Gypsies in Zingari (IT 1920) which brought the Teatro Verdi to its feet with a combination of on-screen energy and the startling accompaniment from a super group comprised of Günter Buchwald, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and Frank Bockius, let’s call them Baldry, Buchwald and Bockius or BBB for short (or B³ for even shorter). I appreciate that gypsy is an archaic term now and that Romani is now favoured, but this film is called “Gypsy” and no offence is meant (certainly not to my wife’s family, who have the heritage).

 

My Uncle played violin for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for 30 years and I remember him giving me a list of violin music to help understand the development of the modern style from Paganini to Jascha Heifetz as he also stressed the influence of Romani music on classical style. It wasn’t just Brahms who used to frequent "Zum Roten Igel*" (The Red Hedgehog) tavern in Vienna to listen to the gypsy musicians’ ferocity and dexterity and he was far from alone in being influenced by the techniques and sentiment.

 

And our pulses did quicken when Günter Buchwald unleashed the “gypsy” in his violin playing tonight, sure he can play the piano but this was him letting rip with glorious runs, double bowing and tapping (? I still don’t know how these things work?!) an instrument that is as vocal as any, with guttural scratching, lighting quick phrasing and pure tonal power. Not for nothing have I previously described Elizabeth Jane Baldry as the Hendrix of the Silent Film Harp and she matched the pace with startling runs of her own, again showing the flexibility and tonal variety of her harp. Elizabeth also sang as Günter played piano and Frank Bockius had, as usual, come to the party to swing and bring order and the beat to even the wildest improvisation.

 

It was the accompaniment that this spirited adaptation of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera Zingari (Gypsies), which was a huge success across the western world after its 1912 London debut and which was based on Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies (1827). The film was directed by directed by Mario Almirante and is essentially an extended exercise in showing off Italia Almirante-Manzini. Shot throughout with huge rings of mascara with dark lipstick, there must be a close-up of the actress every minute, with lighting and camera angle centred on her full regular features, head normally tilted with an imperious angle.

 

Italia Almirante Manzini has a regal moment

As Vielka, daughter of the Gyspy King Jammadar (Alfonso Cassini) she is fierce and unruly, determined to sacrifice everything for the man she loves, Sindel (Amleto Novelli… who is a total miva!) even though he is from a rival clan and physically puts the old man in his place when challenged, starting the feud that runs the entire narrative. Vielka is supposed to marry Gudlo (Franz Sala), whose not a patch on Sindel so no wonder she burns their farmhouse and gets herself exiled. Will there be any happy ending, do operas ever have happy endings?

 

Feelings run high but then they always do in opera and in diva film even though there were claims in contemporary reviews that Almirante Manzini was distancing herself “ever further from the art… of certain divas, and marvellously moves toward reality and life itself…” (La Rivista Cinematografica, 11^th October 1921). I don’t think that’s sustainable when you look at the actual proto-realism of Francesca Bertini or even the elevated theatricality and movement of Lyda Borelli who just had more range… but this is a very impressive performance that utilises so much of the diva art!

 

Brava!!

 

Suzanne Grandais in Le Coeur et L’Argent (1912)

Louis Feuillade shorts with Daan van den Hurk, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

The hardest working harpist in Northern Italy was also on call for a wonderful quartet of Louis Feuillade shorts in the morning session… I don’t want to be mean to David Wark but his French colleague had clearly advanced the art in a number of ways in the years following the Biograph shorts we’re seeing. All three of the films demonstrate a lighter touch in terms of both the narrative, the subject matter and the performance, communicating their purpose with fewer grand gestures and perhaps with the expectation of more audience empathy.

 

The films were part of a series, La Vie telle qu’elle est (Life as it is) made on reduced budgets with fewer actors, designed to be £modern and intimate” as Bernard Bastide says in the catalogue notes. Sadly, according to Bastide, whilst the series started well, it was not ultimately successful although for me at least the settings, more naturalistic performances and – crucially – using the same stock of actors, gives the films a continuity of tone and quality.

 

les vipères (FR 1911) was very much a film for today with a bailiff taking pity on an evicted servant (Renèe Carl) and asking her to look after his sick wife (Alice Tissot) and her domestic duties. Soon rumours spread like a meme on social media and before you know it the spark of doubt has grown into full-on outrage. As with now, nothing is learned and pain only ensues as the poor woman leaves the village for the sake of her good Samaritan and his wife.

 

Le Nain (FR 1912) is a startling take on a form of disability with more than a nod to Cyrano – these programmes don’t just form themselves you know! Delphin (later in Zero for Conduct (1933)) is a successful playwright who falls for the beauteous star of his latest success, Lina (Suzanne Grandais) but cannot dare tell her the truth that although he is an adult he has only the stature of a boy and still lives with his mother (Renée Carl again). He conducts a correspondence with the actress and they form a virtual relationship via the phone with a clever shot showing them talking, each at home and with a split-screen showing Parisian roads between them. It’s as brief as Saturday’s Cyrano was colourful and long but poignant all the same.

 

Suzanne Grandais is also the female lead in the next two Le Coeur et L’Argent (1912) and Erreur Tragique (1913) when she survives an assassination attempt by means of horse after her husband believes she is seeing another man after seeing them in the background of a movie: honestly, how much more meta do you need!?

 

"Fought in the war did you young Arlen, I ran away to sea as a boy!!"

 The Blood Ship (US 1927) with Donald Sosin

 

It was time for some bitter sea shanties and the unique ultra-violent stylings of Mr Hobart Bosworth by now getting on in years but still more than capable of leering with psychopathic rage out from the screen. The Blood Ship is based on the 1922 novel of the same name by Norman Springer and is very much tailor-made for a Hobart Bosworth blood bath. The star of the unforgiving Behind the Door had earned his sea legs at a young age after apparently running away from home at 12 then working as a cabin boy on a sea clipper for three years before work on an artic whaler. The son of a Civil War naval captain, he clearly heard the call of the sea but he became involved in theatre aged 18 when invited to work as a stage manager helping to produce backdrops, work he hoped would enable him to study art. Quite the shift for a man who, in Norman Springer’s words, looked like the sort of “hard case” you would find working the toughest seas… because, he actually was.

 

 

The Blood Ship was one some two dozen nautical films he made and it gives him full rein to bring his weather worn features and remarkable sensitivity for both red-hot fury and despair, to the role of a man robbed of life and liberty who is seeking revenge for more than he knows… and he ramps up the righteous anger with emphatic force as the full extent of his betrayal is revealed.

 

Directed by George B. Seitz it concerns The Golden Bough, a trading ship run by the brutal Captain Angus “Black Yankee” Swope (Walter James) a man who in the late 1880s was “cursed from Liverpool to Singapore as the cruellest master that sailed the Seven Seas…”. We find him ordering the lashing of a would-be mutineer aided by his equally unforgiving First Mate, Fitz (Fred Kohler who would play so many henchmen – he had a face for cruelty). The other crew seethe silently and only the Captain’s daughter Mary (Jacqueline Logan) tries to help the poor man.

 

Swope is a cynical abuser and he knows that treating his crew mean will keep them in line and that they’ll escape the first chance they get without his having to pay them and as the ship’s hull touches the dock they’re all off. Meanwhile at Knitting Swede’s Lodging and Beds, where sailors are parted from their money and new “recruits” shanghaied, the handsome, some might say too handsome John Shreve (Richard Arlen) takes it all in before out muscling the Swede’s henchman (our own Syd Crossley). Then he tries to protect Mary when she attempts to escape her father’s ship and meets the mysterious brooding figure sat smoking a pipe at his table…

 

Both men volunteer for Swope’s ship though, John because he wants to protect Mary and the latter for reasons all of his own. This being a Hobart Bosworth production you just know there will be a hate-filled battle at the end of the film and few actors could match his convincing ferocity and righteous indignation. There is good support from Arlen and all including Blue Washington who is gifted with a dramatic role that doesn’t entirely rely on the usual racial stereotypes of this era – he has agency and isn’t the butt of the usual jokes, until the very end that is…

 

Donald Sosin accompanied as he has on this restorations recent Blu-ray release.

 

In addition, we saw a number of shorts that influenced our Charlie of which Max Linder’s Le Renez-vous (FR 1913) was the slickest and funniest as our handsome hero uses his charm to somehow secure a date with two different women at the same house… a victim of his own success one could say. Neil Brand accompanied this section and he has refined a slapstick technique all of his own with well timed and forceful lines that bring out the full flavours of the Verdi’s mighty Fazioli.

 

God’s Half Acre (US 1916) with John Sweeney

 

This film was impressive but also confusing as a missing reel left most of us wondering what had happened to whom and why? Still… it all worked out fine in the end even though we had to check the catalogue to find out why? Well made and on the sentimental side with a nursing home and a care home for children it provided a glimpse into the welfare provision of the United States at this time – TLDR: fine if we have the room and the generosity of spirit.

 

Henry Norman (Jack W. Johnston) is a novelist who travels to a care home called Rainbow’s End in search of inspiration for his next novel he finds it in the form of the bullying manageress and one of the young women who volunteer, Blossom (Mabel Taliaferro) who he terms as “a dear little mite of wonderment”. Blossom falls for him, initially ignoring his intellectual superiority but then running away after finding both an excerpt of his writing and the fact that he is married. Oh, I do hope this misunderstanding can be somehow rectified in time?

The film also uses the phrase “Pink tea talk”… which suggests a non-caffeinated intellectual preaching to the masses or perhaps someone using herbal tea for mischievous ends?

 

It was left to The Belgians to confuse us even more but then we had come prepared for their surrealist larks – Impose No Meaning, hold back conscious thoughts and just be in the moments watching the whirl. Henri Storck’s Op de boorden van de camera (1932) was a skilful montage of pleasing images passed more pleasurably than Charles Dekeukeleire’s Histoire de detective (1929) in which a detective called H investigated the activities of a suited man in hat called Jonathan who wandered around with his own purpose and his own thoughts and reached his own conclusions about which we cannot speculate.

 

Mauro Colombis’ role on the piano carefully followed a similar brief.

 

There were two shorts from the increasingly pleasing Fleischer brothers to keep us grounded in the realities of pen and ink! Fortune Teller lining up the evening’s big finish perfectly

 

*My mate Jon Banks is a member of a group inspired by this period called ZRI after the tavern – they are virtuosi and highly recommended if you want your classical music to quicken the pulse and even get you dancing! Details are on their website here!