The Time Machine... The Toll of the Sea (1922) and Early Colour Live!, Birkbeck University with John Sweeney and Christopher Bird

 

First some maths: film historian and cinematic technologist, Christopher Bird revealed that he would be cranking his 1919 Ernemann projector some 2,100 times during the course of this event – this live cinema is the interface between man and machine we keep on hearing about especially as from 1895 to 1922, the period spanning the films we were to watch, were similarly powered by elbow grease. Added to this were the almost chromesthesiatic improvisations of John Sweeney’s ten digits on piano and the combined perceptions of an audience that could hear the projector whirring, always aware of both men’s efforts as we experienced the past in vibrant colour.

Watching these daring adventures in film technique was fascinating but also strangely humbling especially when, to quote another of Chris’s figures, we watched a hand-coloured film that would have required sixteen images hand colouring for every foot of film equating to one second. So, for Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902) which is 853 ft long, some 13,600 frames would have had to be hand worked for every copy of the film, this was clearly incredibly labour intensive but worth it for the popularity and spectacular response from the viewing public.

In the first section we saw the results of such labour with four films shot in black and white and then painted directly onto each frame of film. The first was from the very beginning with a black and white extract of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) which was, like most films here, a modern 35mm copied from original materials

The Kingdom of The Fairies

This was followed by part of Louis Lumière’s Roundabout in Paris (1896) then Georges Hatot’s The Death of Jean-Paul Marat (1897) both of which were hand coloured in this style. A lengthy extract from George Méliès's The Kingdom of The Fairies (1903) followed, the full film is some 1,050 feet long, so around 16,800 hand-coloured frames and, at two cranks per second, Chris would have moved the projector’s handle… quite a lot!

The story was picked up by Ian Christie who reminded us of the Lumiere’s first screening in London in February 1896 at what is now the Regent Street Cinema I believe. British pioneer Robert Paul also projected on the same day in the evening with the Electrical Journal sure that the technical hitches bedevilling both screenings would soon be ironed out. Méliès bought his first camera from Robert Paul who was working in colour right from the start as advertised in his first catalogues. There are sadly so few colour examples extant as the first archivists copied colour films, some of which only projected as colour via tinted lenses, in black and white.

Ian screened Paul’s Come Along, Do (1898) the world’s first two-shot film and tinted it to look as it might have done at the time. The Dancer’s Dream (1905) was also shown and is the only known Paul film in its original colour, found by BFI and available on the iPlayer. It’s a very Méliès type film with stop motion and camera trickery of a fairly advanced nature – it’s easy to forget how on trend the British were at this time.

Modern Sculptors

Back to celluloid and Pathé pioneering new system called stencil colour which gave much sharper results than hand colouring with a separate stencil for every colour ensuring that there was no colour bleeding over the edge of images. Even though cutting the stencils was laborious, the result automated the colouring process and continued until late twenties in spectacular films such as Casanova (1927) and Michael Strogoff (1926) both staring that most colourful of performers, Ivan Mozzhukhin! Segundo de Chomon was a master of both trick films and stencil colour and his Modern Sculptors (1908) was screened next – a fine example of both from George’s more darkly-comic Spanish “cousin”.

The next step was for filmmakers to attempt to add the colour at point of source and this is where Edward Turner and Marshall Lee come in with a system that enabled the capture of red, green and blue images on adjacent frames in different tones.  This required a projector running at triple speed - 48 frames a second vs 16 – and on the 1902 fragment we saw, this still gives the impression of three colours albeit with slight fringing as subjects moved too quickly to be captured by all three filters. We did, however, see a spectacular yellow sunflower.

Now to Bristol and William Friese Greene’s Biocolour which, as its name suggested, filmed in two colours with alternate green and red frames shot through a filter for each colour and double speed at 32 frames a second producing a jumpy shot of an omnibus not quite caught in both tinted cells. It looked like one of the least successful efforts but would impact the story in a major way…

George Albert Smith in  between hypnotising and inventing

So, now for Kinemacolor! Developed in 1908 it was commercially very successful at a time when there were hardly any cinemas and with films, much like magic lanterns, mostly being an attraction on the travelling fairgrounds. Hypnotist, psychic and magic lantern projectionist George Albert Smith…  invented the system, which was a two-colour additive process that photographed film behind red and green filters rotating at the front of the lens.

John Adderley, historian and cinematographer explained how the machine worked the difference between the Kinemacolor had a Butterfly Gate compared with a Williamson Gate – in the front there was a wheel with different filters. John demonstrated the process and we saw the alternating red and green … it’s a fascinating machine and if you want to find out more there is an exhibition of this and similar machines at The Race to Cinema Collection at the Bournemouth Film School

The film in the camera is black and white and being projected too but there are red and green filters picking up the colours from the original capture. Chris explained that there are only five surviving Kinemacolor projectors left and this 1919 Ernemann projector has been adapted by projectionist and engineer Nigel Lister to support the continued projection of these materials.

Lake Garda, looking slightly greener on YouTube...

There was a lovely short, Pageant of New Romney, Hythe and Sandwich (1910) directed by George Albert Smith and showing the people of these Kent towns re-enacting their past, an event itself now in the past but colourfully so. This was followed by a longer film, Lake Garda (1910) a print courtesy of collector Dave Cleveland and “… the single best surviving example of Kinemacolor…” according to Chris and it fully supported that assertion. During the travelogue, there is an optical illusion as the water looks blue which is technically impossible given that the source is red and green tints… but the camera never lies and we saw it with our own eyes proving that there’s an element of suggestion in the way we perceive true colour. This is a magical film and really captures the Italian lake in dreamy colours, reds, greens, those “blues” and more beyond. 

Sadly, Kinemacolor was to lose out in a legal challenge from William Friese Greene in 1915 who argued it was a duplicate of his Biocolour process and, as Luke McKernan pointed out, the inability to show “blue” was one of the sticking points. We saw with our own eyes the superiority of the Kinemacolor process in terms of stability and effect but so it goes, F-G was unable to capitalise on his concept all the same and things moved on swiftly elsewhere with the invention of Technicolor “Process 1” in 1916 and by 1922 the company had developed “Process 2” with a camera which used a two-strip colour process – similar in concept to Kinemacolor but with two filtered images used to create a subtracted coloured print with red and green stock cemented together in a print that could be presented using a normal projector.

 

As Ian Christie said, the proof of concept was to make a feature film and that was The Toll of the Sea (1922) restored in the 1990s by the UCL archive and available on the US National Film Preservation website in high quality. The film is also notable for staring Anna May Wong in her first leading role as Lotus Flower, the object of the affection of the American man, Allen Carver (Kenneth Harlen) she rescues from the sea. Written by Frances Marion it’s a loose re-telling of Madame Butterfly and Carver must choose between Lotus Flower and a woman from his own background… “Elsie”.

Anna May Wong

Whilst Allen, fully recuperated returns to the United States, Lotus Flower gives birth to a son she names Allen and waits for her love’s return. But when he comes back it is with Elsie as his new wife and Lotus Flower has to make the best choice for her son… or at least that so often presented as such. It’s quite the thing that she has a child with Carver as that’s rather specific for Hollywood at the time. Oh, Mister Hays…

The last reel of the film is lost and so the restorers shot new film of the Pacific Ocean in October 1985 using an authentic two-colour Technicolor camera with intertitles recreated from Frances Marion’s original scenario. It works very well especially as we all know how it’s got to end.

Anna May Wong is a star to us now, and her abilities far outstripped her success for reasons that we all understand. Here she shows even at 17-18 how skilled she was and how much of a gift to the cinematographer, J.A. Ball and director Chester M. Franklin who makes the most of his remarkable lead.

John Sweeney illuminated the story with his melodious inventiveness, his experience and tonal flexibility being first rate as it had all evening. He’s very good with any flowing water, but seas especially, and his emotional narrative was equally fluid and accomplished!

Kenneth Harlen and Anna in the garden

A last word on Kinemacolor… we also saw Stephen Herbert’s 1995 test film, shot by Dave Locke – also on duty tonight - which used the process to capture a colourful group on the Southbank. This is something akin to experimental archaeology and enables the historians and cine-technologists to understand more about the making of the media as well as its meaning and message.

Let’s hope for more of this kind of thing! Blessed are the archivists and the projectionists!

 

Christopher Bird making the magic work (photo courtesy of Stefanie Benz)

 

Mary, Mungo and Neil… Hippfest at Home, Hippfest 2025

As online presentations go, Hippfest at Home is perhaps the most successful in capturing the atmosphere and the feeling of actually being there. You have establishing shots of the live introductions shot from the back of the stalls showing the lovely old stage of the oldest cinema in Scotland, the Hippodrome (1912) and then the option of seeing the film and the musicians accompanying. As always, Alison Strauss leads from the front with such relaxed expertise and enthusiasm – this kind of impassioned poise is reflected across the whole team who love the films but also the audience and the combination is what makes this impossible festival work so well it is now in it’s 15^th edition.

The hottest ticket for this year was as Alison said, Mr Neil Brand who gave the most entertaining talk about his singular career from his first professional accompaniment – Buster’s Sherlock Jnr (1924) – to his most recent – in the most “meta” moment he had to improvise to a mystery film selected by Alison. Neil, always so eloquent and, damn it, charming, had my entire family rapt as Dad’s choice suddenly engaged them all – “ah Georges Méliès!” said the son lured away from his PS5 – “I really must see Nosferatu…” said the daughter and “so that’s my friend Netti’s old landlady!” said my wife watching Cecil Hepworth’s eldest Elizabeth aged two who we met in Camden in the 1990s in her 80s. Even Mungo the dog was of course transfixed by Rover, the Hepworth’s dog, who outwits a kidnapper by driving his getaway vehicle back home… something to aspire to young pup but not in my car!

Neil had updated a show and tell he’d previously performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and it was a story not just of his career and method but also silent film and its revival over the last few decades. He talked of his audition with the BFI and how his acting training had helped inform his response to Sherlock Jnr, a quite intimidating work from an actual genius who gave signals not just to his audience but also the players he knew would accompany his film. Neil recalls the exact moment when the audience’s reaction inspired him to follow Buster’s promptings in ways he hadn’t anticipated.

Neil Brand

Dullard that I am, I’ve mostly focused on the silent film live experience from the perspective of accompaniment and film without really understanding the impact the audience reaction to both has on the player and vice versa. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and this is a Mobius Strip of emotion and anticipation. Neil showed Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer and Billy Wilder’s People on Sunday (1930) and got the audience to score the mood by a show of hands during key moments. Not only were our anticipations split on the direction of Wilder’s smart scripting, but Neil was able to flavour the narrative in ways that reinforced the second-guessing. It was a virtuosic performance all round from a consummate communicator.

We had the wonders of  Méliès’ hand-coloured Impossible Voyage (1906), the dark-heart of the definitive vampire film, Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and finished off with a clever home movie called Early Birds which was a colour film from the fifties (? nowt on IMDN but it was Alison’s Mystery Film after all!) in which a baby escapes from his cot, totters along the hall, shuffles down the stairs and makes a mess in the kitchen. It was delightful and Neil talked us through his musical reaction to this most unpredictable of delights.

It was genuine family entertainment and all on Catherine’s birthday too – the best thing on telly!

Mr Brand and the Baby

The Pride of the Clan (1917), with Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane Baldry

 

There was also drama on a grander scale from one of the great originators of the art of film performance, Mary Pickford in Maurice Tourneur’s The Pride of the Clan (1917). This was a recording of the Friday night gala introduced by Alison and the doyen of silent filmography, Pamela Hutchinson both of whom looked like they’d just stepped off the Oscar’s red carpet. This film was also accompanied by the dreamy team of Stephen Horne and Elizabeth Jane Baldry who had previously accompanied the fabulous The Swallow and the Titmouse (1924) a film that really suits their combination of piano and harp.

Mary plays Marget MacTavish who takes over as Chieftain of the clan after her father drowns at sea. She’s about to marry Jamie Campbell (Matt Moore) and there’s some silliness with couples in the clan biting sixpence in half so they can hang it around each other’s necks – HG Wells should have sued! But it’s all in fun even when Jamie is revealed to be of noble blood and his birth mother tries to sweep him away to polite society. Yeah, good luck with that lady, this is Mary P you’re contending with…

Tourneur’s locations are well chosen to create a genuinely Caledonian feel and the FOMO was real as Elizabeth-Jane’s harp Oberon added further Celtic magic along with Stephen’ expert innovations as the silent film equation gained an extra element with the two telepathically in tune with audience and each other following Mary’s lead on screen. I saw this film in Pordenone but it was presented here in the way that only Hippfest can: the fifth element!

 

The Near Shore: A Scottish and Irish Cine-Concert, with Patrick Smyth

 

As someone who is more Irish and Scottish than English – what do you expect from Liverpool la’? – I was especially impressed with the selection of the five films that made up this Cine-Concert. These shorts were all from the IFI Irish Film Archive and National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive and introduced by Sunniva O’Flynn from the IFI – you cannot understate how international Hippfest is, with collaborators from Norway and Sweden, over to the Americas and beyond.

It began with the earliest known film made by an Irishman, Royal Clyde Yacht Club (1899), which featured a race in the Firth of Clyde and then Ireland by Air – featuring Scottish aviatrix Winnie Drinkwater (1933) which also returned via the Firth with stunning views of my favourite Isle of Arran and a mist-covered Goatfell. Before that we saw shots of Galway – historical family location of The Joyces – and an Ireland still between the centuries with ducks and donkeys in the streets mixed with grand municipal buildings.

As a former Butlins employee – a Hi-de-hi-d for two summer seasons in my youth – I was impressed with Butlins camp photographer John Tomkins’ tow films – Butlins Holiday Camp and Rush Hour (1950s). Tomkins filmed the inmates, sorry holiday-makers, and then screened the films so they could see themselves at the end of the week. This is so much in the spirit of Butlin’s and I especially loved the one in which the children take over, robbing the redcoats blazers as they are frozen by some child’s magic… it was all, literally a dream.

Galway, 1933.

Finally, there was The Farm below the Mountain (1958), Scottish filmmaker Ernest Tiernan’s record of his travels with his young bride Kathleen to meet her family in rural Ireland… so familiar and in beautiful home-movie colour. We have something like this at home… maybe not so well shot!

The films were accompanied by renowned Irish avant-garde pianist, Paul G. Smyth who overlayed some lush textures on these films just out of memory and so full of human commonality. In the Hippodrome there’s no separation by time, we’re all connected as elements of the live cinematic mix, even from home we’re at the Hippfest home.

Until next year then and a visit in person, I think the family are convinced now! Thank you all for the wonder and the show.

 

With Reindeer and Sled in Inka Länta’s Winterland (1926), Hippfest at Home, Hippfest #15

 

Unable to make the annual trek to the mystic shores of Borrowstounness, or Bo'ness as it has become, on the south shores of the Firth of Forth, I am at least able to experience some of the events of the annual silent film festival online via Hippfest at Home. This annual festival is a miracle of imagination and diligence, a cineastes’ Brigadoon coming forth every March as the spring breezes blow away the cobwebs and chill, banishing the modern world’s prosaic unpleasantness. The past comes into view on the Hippodrome’s big screen and with the aid of some of the finest musicians in the World, we are immersed in the timeless moments of recognition and remembrance: With projectors and piano in Alison Strauss’ Spring Wonderland.

I haven’t had much involvement with reindeer to date but for an hour on Friday night myself and the family were virtual herders watching the lives of the Sámi people who co-existed with them in the most precarious of ways in the far north of Sweden, across Scandinavia and even into Russia. The Sámi are now the last indigenous people in Europe inhabiting the region of Sápmi (formerly Lapland, a term no longer used) with some 10% still making a living by herding reindeer. With a population of just 80,000 across five countries, they are a fascinating group with a rich cultural heritage.

Tonight’s screening encompassed Sámi old and new with the UK premiere of a new score by Sámi-Finnish joiker and electronic musician Hildá Länsman plus sound designer Tuomas Norvio, collaborating with the Norwegian-Sámi musician Lávre Johan Eira and Swedish composer, cellist and bass guitarist Svante Henryson. A joik or yoik is the traditional form of Sámi song and is a form of chanting which is one of the oldest musical traditions in Europe. Here it was deployed alongside more recent traditional European instruments and electronica to create a visceral and sometimes startling score to this restored documentation of this remarkable people.

The depiction we see was, as with other ethnographical documentaries – Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) for example – orchestrated by the director, Swede Erik Bergström, using actual Sámi all listed under their names, so Inka Länta is indeed the real rein-deal. This restoration project was led by Magnus Rosborn of the Swedish Film Institute who was on hand to detail the background to the film and the work he had to tirelessly led. He explained that Erik Bergström worked in the nomad school in the Jokkmokk area and only made two films, clearly inspired to show what he knew of this ancient lifestyle especially as the education system tried to teach Swedish and to irradicate the Sámi culture.

Magnus found part of the film in the Eye Museum in Amsterdam and later a camera negative all of which had to be re-edited based on an intertitle list from the Swedish censorship office to recreate the narrative as originally intended. There are still missing segments, mostly of reindeer slaughter – possibly censored at some point – but what remains now is a crystal clear and undeniably raw but beautiful film. Magnus referenced the golden age of Swedish silent film and we are seeing a golden age of Swedish film restoration with this film along with Stiller’s Gösta berlings saga (1924) and Molander’s two films based on Selma Lagerlöf’s epic Jerusalem, were among the highlights of last year’s Italian film festivals dedicated to restored and silent films.

The restoration of this film debuted further north though in the Tromsø International Film Festival who also commissioned the score. Festival director Lisa Hoen, appearing in a lovely Sámi top, her grandmother was Sámi, explained more about the film’s background and the unfortunate treatment of the Sámi peoples which is still in the process of being addressed. The Länta family are apparently still living in the Jokkmokk municipality and you wonder at how their lives have changed over the last century. In this way Bergström’s film is still doing its part in raising awareness and celebrating a people more sinned against than sinning: a way of life in harmony with nature, tough though it might have been.

This is one of the central conflicts in watching Inka Länta’s Winterland, the landscape looks stunning and the restoration has created such a crystal clear view of this world but at the same time there is death and hardship, the Länta family living on the edge having to move with the seasons and hope their reindeer stay free from wolves, and other threats that might lead them astray. At one point we see the family having to de-camp and move their herd because a lone wolf has killed one of the deer. Petter, the best wolf hunter pursues the animal with the aid of Inka’s brother and even if concocted this is a breathless hunt with man and rifle succeeding.

This is life in sub-zero jeopardy with Inka’s family constantly on the move with the seasons coming down from the mountains to the woodlands at the start of winter and never stopping for long… The film opens with light-blue tinted tracking shots of endless snow-covered landscapes, forests of frozen pine trees and a lone figure wading through crisp deep snow. Then we see some frozen water and some pines on the woods at the lower levels.

The man is Guttorm Blind come to visit a siida – a reindeer-breeding community – to retrieve some deer that have wandered off from his own herd. We see a goahti hut belonging to Inka Länta who lives there with her brother Amul and her maternal aunt. Next door live her maternal uncle, Petter Rassa and his children… plus dogs. We see her chopping wood for the fire that keeps the huts habitable in the relentless cold. The deer are identified by their ear markings and Inka, Petter and Guttorm gather his portion before returning to the hut for food and rest. The deer graze on lichen below the snow, perfectly adapted to their circumstances along with their human partners.

Not much happens but a lot happens and this is very mindful watching, a slower world in which young children playing in the snow with their cousin Inka is surprisingly gratifying. So many things we take for granted, no taps out here, no running water and Inka filling a pan of snow to melt for water for cooking and for the dogs. Petter chops up a deer carcass and the family eats bone marrow with even the little ones adept at carving out the marrow with knives.

In part two, it is February and Inka gets the sleds ready for the long trip to Jokkmokk Market… a mad ride with the low-riding sleds attached to reindeers with the riders sometimes dragged from their perch by wayward steeds. Who knows how much of this is actuality or playful but it’s quite a sight and the cinematography is superb from the experienced Gustaf Boge, with whom Bergström had already made one film about Inka Länta. The scenes at the market are poetically composed and we see how the Sami economy is based on trade and exchange with some harvesting ptarmigan as other weave or sell imported coffee and other modern goods.

We meet the local constable, the richest man, various notables such as Anta Pirak and his wife, Henrik Omma, the Laestadianism preacher August Lindberg and others probably all people the director knew well? Talking of which we see the “School Inspector” talking to local parents, is this Bergström’s Hitchcock moment? We see the nomad school where he worked which is formed of four huge goahti huts with smoking “chimneys” quite different from the wooden buildings in the centre of the town.

The School Inspector talks to parents is this Bergström?

Inka also meets with Guttorm Blind, is there a budding romance here? I’d like to know for sure but you root for them anyway. Soon it’s a return to the wilderness and the family uprooting their camp and moving their reindeer away from the wolves. The wolf hunt is well constructed and there’s a superb hand held sequence as Petter races across a frozen lake on fast-moving skis. If you’ve ever watched cross-country skiing, this is faster. The wolf is killed and skinned just as a reindeer will later be shown, after Guttorm’s herd is rounded up for slaughter. Vegans look away now and maybe some carnivores… this is the process. Inka is there as well as Guttorm’s father… oh come on, there’s definitely something going on!

The final sequence sees Petter Länta and Amul setting off after some missing reindeer and this is the most heart-breaking part of the film as the frozen dead body of one of the family is found and placed onto a sled. Bergström films someone rolling down the hill but given the condition of the body they find this is likely to have been staged. Things look bleak for Inka after her brother has died but as she wanders sorrowfully considering a future away from the reindeer and hour mountainous home, who should she run into but… no spoilers.

Guttorm Blind

Whatever the imposed narrative from Bergström, his film is respectful to the culture he as attempting to capture on film and artistic licence can be never more necessary than when filming at -47 degrees! This film is still affecting and none more so that in this presentation. As someone of half Scottish and one tenth Scandinavian heritage, it’s fascinating to see this world so near and yet so far away in history.

As Alison Strauss said in her introduction, part of her job satisfaction comes from finding films that people didn’t know they wanted to see and the unfolding of this evening on screen exactly proves her point. Excellent work all involved!

 

Fantastiskt och grattis till alla inblandade på Hippfest!

Máistte!

Museums of Dreamworlds… Kennington Bioscope Programme of Antiquities

This was a collaboration between the Bioscope, the BFI and the Department of Greek and Latin, at my daughter’s alma mater, University College London as part of Museums of Dreamworlds: Silent Antiquity in the BFI National Archive. Introduced by the BFI’s Bryony Dixon, and presented by Professor Maria Wyke from UCL it was a selection of films from 1901 to 1927 all of which drew their inspiration from the classical world of Greece and Rome – very loosely in some cases!

 

As Professor Wyke said, silent film used classical art as well as theatre and literature to prove itself and to legitimate this new media as one of documentary substance as well as artistic merit. This went hand in hand with a period of archaeological discovery as well as this new era of storytelling in which characters from still popular myth and legend could come alive on screen.

 

A century onwards it’s comic book legends that inform our blockbusters and remakes of older films, mainstream film is less interested in education than entertainment but there were films here that took joy in sharing the incredible landscapes of antiquity whilst also sharing what we know of the artistic and political culture of the time… even in the most comic of ways.

 

This film screening is associated with the AHRC-funded research project Museum of Dreamworlds (2023-2027). The project asks “…how did silent cinema design its Greek and Roman dreamworlds? What did cinema gain from recreating the distant past? What did the past gain from being recreated in moving images?”

 

Tonight, we found some answers and some more questions and we also discovered how Helen’s fabulous face and fancy for the tailors of Troy led to the war between Sparta and Troy: even now we know these stories so well we can understand these jokes. Classical culture runs deep it’s moral lessons still embedded in our Saturday matinee memories. The films were mostly from the BFI archive with the exception of one from Christopher Bird's collection as noted below.

Visit to Pompeii (1901) with John Sweeney

 

Directed by George A. Smith and Charles Urban, for the Warwick Trading Company, UK this British travelogue documents, in long panning shots, the state of the excavations at Pompeii in 1901 and the journey up to Vesuvius in a railway carriage. For those of us who’ve been to the city it’s clear that it is not frozen in time as 124 years later the digs are ongoing.

 

As ever it’s a joy to watch especially for the looks to camera of wealthy tourist, local militia and workers hefting mounds of earth away from the historical treasure below. The demographic may have changed but we still wander round in a daze, amazed at the completeness, competence and, most unnervingly, the familiarity of a city from two millennia past.

 

Dans l’Hellade / In Ancient Greece (1909) with John Sweeney

 This was a lovely surprise and a copy from Christopher Bird’s collection on 28mm digitally scanned by the Cinema Museum. Made for the French company, Pathé Frères, France it was directed by Charles Decroix, it starred dancer Stacia Napierkowska who replicates an approximation of Greek ballet for Andrée Marly swathed in billowing fabric and moving with the disciplined freedom one imagines of Isadora Duncan breaking away from the conventions of ballet. Viewed as somewhat scandalous for its depiction of a courtship dance, it’s a contemporary expression in search of Greek meaning and was enlivened tonight by John Sweeney’s fluid accompaniment.

  

The Death of Caesar, by  Jean-Léon Gérôme

Julius Caesar (1908) with John Sweeney

Cinema sought credibility from literature too and so we have this adaptation of Shakespeare’s play directed by J. Stuart Blackton, William V. Ranous for the Vitagraph Company and consisting of 15 tableau representing the various moments of the play. One of these is a replication of The Death of Caesar, an 1867 painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, which illustrates another visual inspiration for early cinema. It’s a surprisingly energetic and effective summation of the film with come fabulous mime from the actors as plots are hatched, the man is brought down and Mark Antony battles to re-establish order even if it means the death of the noblest Roman of all… Roman politics eh? Times change but not much.

Julius Ceasar is no more...

The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927) with John Sweeney

Directed in the US by Alexander Korda – whatever happened to him!? – this was two frankly hilarious fragments – one some 20+ minutes and the other about five – which broke the real deal about the so-called Trojan Wars. Turns out it was Helen’s (María Corda) shopping habits that launched a thousand ships and not just her face. This is not to say that her face wasn’t important, it just got her more interested in self-actualisation through acquisition of princes and power dresses.

 

This was all too inconvenient for her husband, King Menelaus (deadpan Lewis Stone in convincing wig) who is tired of public duty – all day shaking hands!? – and just wants to go off fishing. What he also doesn’t want is to go to out after a long day glad-handing but as the witty intertitles say: the problem is that the wife wants to go to the theatre and the husband doesn’t so… they go to the theatre. But Helen goes further and heads of with the handsome Paris (Ricardo Cortez) to the shopping heaven of Troy leaving Menelaus’ plans for a day by the river in ruins… reluctantly he starts building the thousand ships and planning war…

 

There’s a light touch and some excellent comic timing and even with just about a third of the running time we were engaged. The BFI holds the only film stock in the world and as Bryony Dixon said, hopefully someone has the rest in an attic or a garage!

 

Facing off against the Hydra!

The Odyssey / L’Odissea (1911) with John Sweeney

 

Directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe de Liguoro, for Milano Films, this spectacular was from the golden age of Italian silent epics from the men who had previously directed L’Inferno (1911) based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The approach is similar with incredibly detailed tableaux packed with dozens of props and actors – the camera doesn’t move much but the actors do create the sense of scale needed. As with L’Inferno the narrative follows the distinct stages of the literary source with Odysseus (Giuseppe de Liguoro) undertaking his long journey home against a host of mystical and heavenly obstacles.

 

There are some very impressive shots and effects with Zeus’ lightning bolts raining down on Odysseus’ ship, the men battling a giant cyclops, a three-headed monster devouring some of the crew and the ship floating through the sirens some of whom, as with the “nudes” in L’Inferno, male not female. Even so, Cecil B DeMille was watching… It’s great fun and illustrated again how much of these stories are still embedded in our minds.

Bending Her / Roaming Romeo (1928) with Cyrus Gabrysch

 

Finally, a divine comedy directed by and starring our own Lupino Lane as Belle-Hure and brother Wallace as Horatio Babaorum in a story obviously inspired by the success of the distinctly less funny Ben Hur (1926). They play two slaves on board a Roman galley who after some marvellous business teasing their guard with feet and a broken oar, escape through a hole in the side of the ship, swim ashore and steal the clothes of two conveniently bathing soldiers. They very quickly get caught up in affairs at the local palace as Belle romances the princes (Anita Garvin). It’s a hoot and Lane shows off his remarkable athleticism and Chaplinesque charm, he and Wallace were of course cousins of the great Ida Lupino and part of an acting dynasty like no other even the Chaplins!

 

 

Such spoofs where a sure sign of the recognition classical tropes had already established in cinema as what first presents as tragedy and history eventually becomes comedy. Cyrus Gabrysch added to the energies and the programme ended on a high with those who had come for the history being surprised by the hilarity!?

 

A splendidly entertaining evening worthy of an emperor and thanks go to the Bioscope Team as well as the BFI and UCL. If you want to know more about Museums of Dreamworlds: Silent Antiquity in the BFI National Archive you can find details on the UCL website and also on Instagram which as Bryony has pointed out is the modern equivalent of early film: short reels and focused subjects!

 

 

The Revolution might be feminized… Bed and Sofa (1927)

Problems which at one time seemed too difficult for the most talented thinkers have now been solved by the inanimate but all-powerful conditions of production. The same forces which for thousands of years enslaved women now, at a further stage of development, are leading them along the path to freedom and independence.

Alexandra Kollontai, The Social Basis of the Woman Question (1909)

 

It was one thing to take control of the means of production in 1917 but any attempt to forge a new society was going to have to involve changes in the role of women and their relationship to work and men. Alexandra Kollontai was a major figure in the evolution of the revolutionary movement’s thinking on this issue and served in Lenin’s first government before helping to form the Zhenotdel, the women's department of the Central Committee with the aim of improving women’s position in the new economy. Before it was closed in 1930 as Stalin tightened his grip, the “Woman’s Committee” played its part in educating women about the new marriage, education, and work laws.

 

From 1918 all marriage was now civil, and divorce was made much easier for both sexes, developments that Kollontai hoped would weaken the institution and lead individuals to focus their loyalty to the state and not family. Yet, while women were expected to be equal participants in the workforce, invariably they retained command of household chores and in terms of parenting, despite the introduction of maternity leave, and the setting up of child-care centres, there was a growth of single parent families in the 1920s. Divorce made easier, was more common and the family was being undermined as intended.

 

Even though men and women had equal rights men still viewed housework and domestic chores as women’s work.

David K. Klass How the Russians Really Live

Lyudmila Semyonova

In 1926 a new Family Code attempted to address the issue by restoring the “economic partnership” of marriage and allowing women an equal share of family property in the event of a split. Alimony obligations were strengthened and other measures to help support women and children. Perhaps this was the starting point for this film and the attempt by writer-director Abram Room and co-writer Viktor Shklovsky to detail the state of romance as the first decade of communist rule drew on for women's position had not improved as had been hoped.

 

Whilst falling out of favour and critical of the Family Code as little more than a restatement of western capitalist ideals, Alexandra Kollontai had been calling for the reintroduction of romance for some time arguing in Make Way for the Winged Eros (1923) that:

 

Collectivism of will and spirit will conquer individualistic self-sufficiency. The coldness of spiritual solitude, from which people in bourgeois culture often seek salvation in love and marriage, will disappear; a multitude of ties binding people to one another in emotional and spiritual union will grow. The feelings of people will change in the sense of a growth of community, and the inequality between the sexes and every kind of dependence of woman on man will disappear without a trace, lost in the memory of past centuries.

 

What Room and his co-writer made of this can perhaps be seen in a film which, the director wrote about in Kino magazine before production:

Love, marriage, the family and sexual morality are pressing contemporary topics, which have been discussed thoroughly in the press and at public debates… but have not yet been touched upon at all by the cinema. Or more precisely, the Soviet cinema has not yet tackled them in earnest, and if it has come upon them by chance, it has shown a shallow, primitive 'delicacy'. We were hypocrites, some rules of decency… stopped us if not resolving then at least sharpening, revealing and posing these subjects…

 

The aim was to make a film focused on a small cast and in an intimate space into which the camera “goes into the very thick of the action, looks at the world through the eyes of the heroes and lives alongside them…”. It is a startlingly frank examination of the relationship between a young married couple, Kolia (Nikolai Batalov) and Liuda (Lyudmila Semyonova) and the former’s former Red Army pal Volodia (Vladimir Fogel) who has come to Moscow to find work as a printer. Like a number of films of this period it makes its points in ways that reach beyond the assumed censorial control of the Party… that would come later and there was certainly a negative reaction on release from the powers that be.

 

Vladimir Fogel and Nikolai Batalov

Watch out, spoilers ahead.

 

Bed and Sofa largely leaves out the party line but at one point it was going to feature a speech from the head of the apartments committee condemning the immorality of the inhabitants of the basement flat of Third Meshchanskaia Street. There was also going to be a different resolution in which Liuda heads off to train as a draughtswoman or similar but all were rejected by Room in favour of a more open-ended one that was viewed very dimly by Party officials and yet one which my Gen-Z daughter fully enjoyed.

 

The film is exactly as Room promised in terms of the forensic depiction of the emotion from his three fine leads and it’s one that genuinely surprises as it portrays the impact of the printer’s cuckoo on the complacent construction worker husband. Wiki has them as a working-class group whereas Kolia is a draughtsman working on restoring the Bolshoi Theatre and so the men are craftsmen and not poor. There are wonderful views of Kolia taking his lunch leaning on the crotch of one of the Bolshoi’s naked male statues whilst taking in the bustling street scenes far below.

Nikolai Batalov's placement was no accident...

His is the outside world while his wife hardly ever leaves the flat and her daily duties. Liuda has decadent tastes though, spending her time reading magazines and with pictures and possessions all through the flat, including one of Douglas Fairbanks by their mirror – shades of A Kiss from Mary Pickford released later in 1927 and featuring Abram Room as one of the players. Soviet Russia was more open to Western cultural influence certainly judging from Liuda’s sharp bob and fashion taste. She may be taken for granted by her self-interested husband but she’s no shortage of fashionable clothes even though their apartment has only a single bed and that sofa where mostly sleeps their cat.

 

Into this environment comes Volodia who we see travelling into Moscow with some marvellous shots of his train and the outskirts of the city from Grigori Giber who’s work inside the small apartment is equally impressive. Liuda’s close ups are often the punctuation point of interaction between the two old pals and whilst she is initially unsure of the new arrival, he soon demonstrates a more chivalrous and caring approach to domestic life. Whilst her husband is away on work, Volodia takes her outside to an air show and it’s the first we have seen of her outside of her domestic realm. The pure joy of their plane ride contrasts to her daily drudgery…

 

The relationship that begins with Volodia feels genuine, there’s no suggestion that he’s scheming beyond his romantic ambitions and this makes the next development all the more surprising as after Kolia’s return and discovery of their affair, he is eventually offered a place on the sofa with his friend now promoted to the bed. What could possibly go wrong? The answer is plenty but not quite in the way you would expect as the boys still enjoy each other’s company and competitive games of drafts… and somehow their camaraderie needs to coexist with the new romance.

Vladimir Fogel and Lyudmila Semyonova

The film has so many moment of high quality in the film as Room promised in his Kino article, a “condensed” film in which everything is focused on the acting thereby maximising the inventiveness of the scriptwriter, director and cameraman*. This he called aesthetic economy with a room full of clues – and so many deft “touches” of which Lubitsch would be proud – as the narrative is moved along with sparse intertitles.  Glances and looks are all it takes and the cat plays its part too… gradually the balance shifts and in unspoken ways, Kolia is welcomed back into the bed as well as taking turns on the sofa.

 

Liuda becomes present and we see Volodia frantically searching the calendar to see if it might be his but, unable to decide who is the father, the two offer to pay for Liuda to have an abortion. The scene in the “private clinic” as she goes alone is so well done with a group of half a dozen women given numbered tokens called out as at a cheese counter when their order is ready. It’s too much for Liuda and as the men arrive much later to see what has happened she is already back home packing and ready to leave them and Moscow far behind.

 

As she packs, she takes her pictures with her, including her own. She picks up a clay model of the cat, now deceased, and tears fall onto the painted eyes… her cat was a true companion whereas the boys have never really taken the responsibility.

The abortion clinic waiting room

There are so many moments during the film and it is packed with overt and hidden meaning. Kolia is immature but then so is Volodia who despite his ability to make tea, is almost as willing to let his lover do the chores. The balance is wrong with each paring and crushed by the double threat of their entitled indifference Liuda heads off on a train with similar shots to Volodia’s arrival. She is free for her future – unspecified but still with child – leaving the final scene to the boys who faced with new decisions about bed or sofa decide on a cup of tea as the first priority. Who knows maybe they don't even need a woman?

 

It’s difficult at this remove to be precise about Room’s meaning but as he insisted in the Kino piece, that the basic task of the film "was not to solve, but only to sharpen, not to instruct, but only to lay bare and pose this theme for the audience to discuss." To the extent that what is shown was typical of a post-revolutionary society still in flux, he was targeting the conflicted thinking of the new regime on “the woman question”. Alexandra Kollontai’s hopes had not materialised and she was by now relegated to overseas duty as a diplomat whilst the NEP was about to be replaced by Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and a far more prescriptive and ruthless society.

 

In 1927 the questions of women’s role could still be asked but not for much longer.

The location is within the Meshchansky District which these days has parks and cafes... 

*I'm reminded by my mother-in-law, noted Wellsian scholar and English Literature academic, Dr Sylvia Hardy, that Room's work was part of the Russian Formalist movement as was his scriptwriting partner Viktor Shklovsky who was a major contributor to the movement's beginings in literature. The basic tenents of Formalism in film context emphasise the aesthetic and technical elements of the medium as alluded to in Room's comments above. This is to foreground the meaning and to remove the author's voice and other conflicting artefacts in the presentation of art.

As Room said in 1925, “Cinema is pre-eminently realism, life, the everyday, objectivity, properly motivated behaviour... If we had to characterise theatre and cinema in simple terms we should have to say: theatre is ‘seeming’ whereas cinema is ‘being’.”

Needless to say this did not suit the Stalinist regime as it wanted more imposed meaning and there's a very instructive artice here in The Slavic Review by Maria Belodubrovskaya Abram Room, A Strict Young Man, and the 1936 Campaign against Formalism in Soviet Cinema. Stalinist cinema did not want naturalism but a curated reality. 

1. A number of quotes were sourced from Julian Graffy’s book, Bed and Sofa: The Film Companion (Publisher: I.B. Tauris, 2000)
2. Details of Aleksandra Kollontai are from BOLSHEVIK FEMINIST: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai by Barbara Evans Clements, Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1979
3. Alexandra Kollontai 1923. Make way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth. First published: in Molodoya Gvardiya (Young Guard) magazine #3 in 1923
4. LIFE INTO ART: Laying Bare the Theme in "Bed and Sofa, Rimgaila Salys, Russian Language Journal Vol. 52, No. 171/173 (Winter-Spring-Fall 1998)
5. How the Russians Really Lived. Willis, David K. Klass, New York: St. Martens Press, 1985.

Back in New York City… Chantal Akerman: Volume 1, 1967-1978, BFI Blu-ray box set Out Now!

 

I sat with my son watching the view from a ferry leaving the south of Manhattan and heading slowly on its way to Staten Island. There was no music just the sound of lapping water, the odd seagull screech and no voice-over as, transfixed we watched the emotional shape of the buildings become clearer on a misty late 70’s morning, the Empire State still poking its way through from mid-town, the old docks on the right where can be found the Liverpool clipper, Wavertree and, ominously, sadly, the twin towers on the left. I had been to the top of both in the 80s and seeing them standing proud carries more meaning than even Chantal Akerman expected when she made this film but, as with all of her work exhibited on this remarkable set, she was mindful – as my son observed – and how our AI crammed minds respond to her images continues to evolve.

This new BFI set collects together Akerman’s work from the first decade of her career and includes all three of her films included in the most recent Sight and Sound poll on the 100 Best Films: Je tu il elle (1974), Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) – No. 1! - and this film of New York alienation and discovery, News from Home (1976). It is one extraordinary film after another and News from Home is every bit as engaging as the other two being a visual exploration of a Manhattan that is both too big to take in and also too familiar to not take personally.

I spent a number of months in New York City over a series of trips in the 80s and 90s and my first ride on the subway felt like I had stepped into a film; its cinematically familiar but also structurally awesome. At one-point Akerman films on the Lower East Side in the fading early evening light and that sense of energy, primeval wariness mixed with a hunter’s anticipation – what-ever you’re after – is palpable. A group are filmed sitting down at a crossroads bar and duly notice and make comments about their celluloid Peeping Chantal, jokingly, slightly threateningly… New York’s fast, funny and frightening.

You find yourself looking for clues in the meaning… overt, hidden and invented by the viewer. For example, Chantal might not have expected me to work out that for one segment I worked out her camera was travelling south on the 1 Train from Christopher Street through Houston onto Canal Street, moving from the West Village to SoHo to where I have had a number of adventures and which looked hardly changed from ten years later. Unlike me she was making her own way in America at the time and needed to establish her own connections. This can not have been easy and you can feel this as letters from her mother, Natalia, are read out over the action throughout the film.

Akerman was originally in America in 1973 shooting Hanging Out Yonkers (1973) before she made her famous features and the regularity with which her mother sends her $20 shows how her life as a “vagabond” might have been precarious. As we’re drawn into the street scenes we feel her vulnerability behind the camera and against this titanic backdrop even as she had returned as an established filmmaker. In artist Sarah Wood’s wonderful newly video essay she talks about the changing relationship between the viewer and the author in the film as she finds herself looking for Chantal’s reflection in the shop windows she tracks from a dolly or hand-held and then from a bus.

Her parents were Holocaust survivors and I couldn’t help thinking of Billy Wilder looking for the faces of his lover in the crowds as he dredged through thousands of feet of film shot at concentration camps. Akerman’s films are troubled but more because of her search for peace of mind and a means of expression but there’s no escaping the tragedy of her background and the one to come for New York City.

After New York but before News… Akerman made her first feature, Je tu il elle (1974), and if you liked Jean you’ll love this too. The title translates as I You He She and that pretty much describes the breakdown of the narrative. It begins with a young woman, Julie (Akerman) alone on her apartment as she writes, reads, moves her furniture and eats sugar. There’s many interpretations for her behaviour and it feels almost intrusive with the young woman appearing vulnerable, childlike and lost. All changes as she finally heads out and interacts with the world in the form of a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) who she hitches a lift from, has a brief sexual encounter and then listens to him monologue in his cab as he drives… he’s uncouth and threatening even though Julie is mildly bemused and then he relays his sexual attraction to his children in the most prosaic of ways… clearly he is a potential abuser and I’m reminded of something a girlfriend used to say, “yes, all men!”

Julie finally arrives at the home of her ex-lover (Claire Wauthion) and despite the latter’s initial distance the two eventually make love for something like twenty minutes in what is certainly one of the longest lesbian scenes in mainstream cinema history. But it’s all with a purpose as Julie, lost in between things, may enjoy the moments but her lover knows there is no post-coital future for them. As with so many of Akerman’s characters, Julie is restless and trapped, in need of a catalyst. Her “language” is holistic though and the entire film makes the statement I, as a male, want to summarise and categorise, but with this filmmaker, no category is sufficient.

Feminism posed the apparently simple question of who speaks when a woman in film speaks (as character, as director…); Akerman insisted convincingly that her films’ modes of address rather than their stories alone are the locus of their feminist perspective.

Janet Bergstrom, Sight and Sound (1999)

Chantal Akerman in Je tu il elle

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is a film everyone should see but you need to be disciplined. Whoever you watch it with or even if you’re on your own, make sure a friend or relative locks you into the viewing room with sufficient provisions and with no electrical devices to distract. I wrote about a screening at the BFI in January here and everything I wrote is true, especially now I am more aware of her overall purpose and development as a cinema artist thanks to this set.

To some extent it’s prefigured by a short film Akerman made as an 18-year-old student Saute ma Ville (1968) in which we follow a young woman (Chantal) and her casual kitchen routine as she slowly prepares her room for suicide. The mix of the mundane and the deadly is a potent one and this film signalled not only parts of Akerman’s future method but also her concerns as the most sincere of artists.

The final feature on this set, Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) was the director’s biggest budgeted effort to date and the contemporary reaction, as Kate Rennebohm summarises in her informed commentary, tended to be a mix of Akerman moving too far to the mainstream and her not moving far enough. As Kate says though at this remove the film is far more accomplished than this snobbery allows and is full of much to admire even if there were more professional and named actors in the production and a different crew from the women who had worked on Jeanne Dielman.

Lea Massari and Aurore Clément 

Unlike some earlier work Chantal didn’t have to play her main character – in this case Anna an arthouse film director played by Aurore Clément whose body of work includes Paris, Texas (1984), who is on a promotional tour through western Europe for a new film. Anna was Akerman’s middle name and the name she went by as a child, and so it’s not too much of a stretch to see this a partly autobiographical. Anna’s mother is played by the fab Lea Massari who of course played Anna, the woman who vanishes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) … I would say that there’s elements of the Italian’s focus on miscommunication and isolation in Akerman’s work as well as the interiority of women but unlike the former’s females, hers can be as closed off to the audience as any Marcello. In fact, she makes an absolute virtue of minimalist signalling which, along with so many static tableaux have us always interrogating and guessing!

 

Anna presents as slightly neurodivergent in modern parlance and often says things that are just a little too blunt or otherwise off the mark. She meets a German teacher, Heinrich (Helmut Griem – another well-travelled Euro star having featured in The Damned and Cabaret et al) and tells him as they cuddle naked in bed that she can’t make love because they aren’t in love. He takes this well as these things go and invites her round to meet his mother and daughters in their Essen townhouse. He's emotionally direct but Anna is on her way to somewhere else.

 

So, it goes with other encounters and even with her mother as the two lie in bed, Anna oddly childlike – though not eating neat sugar… - confessing a lesbian affair to her mother in ways that say everything about their relationship. There is very little easy meaning in these films and as I watch the evidence is mounting that pretty much all of what we uncover is deliberate. As with the books of Paul Auster  nothing is truly incidental and what remains, no matter how unlikely, may well be the actual truth. Chantal is a cinematic game of chess and she remains many moves ahead of her audience who even now delight at the puzzles they can unravel.

The Female Gaze - another intricate tableau 

So, a box set to relish and rewatch and the films look crystal clear and have been restored by CINEMATEK (Royal Film Archive of Belgium), with the exception of Le 15/8, which was restored by L’Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna. In addition to the above features, they include early shorts:

• INSAS Entrance exam films x 4 (1967)
• Saute ma ville (1968)
• L’Enfant aime ou Je joue à être une Femme Mariée (1971)
• Hôtel Monterey (1972)
• La Chambre (1972)
• Le 15/8 (1973)

 

Special features:

• Limited edition 5-disc set (2000 copies)
• Autour de Jeanne Dielman (68 mins): documentary by Sami Frey, and co-edited by Akerman, which explores the on-set relationships between Akerman, Delphine Seyrig and the crew
• Audio commentaries on Jeanne Dielman… and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna by Kate Rennebohm, and on Jeanne Dielman…  by Simon Howell of the Akerman Year podcast
• Audio commentary on Saute ma ville and Je tu il elle by So Mayer and Selina Robertson
• Chantal Akerman 1976: An Interview (1976, 59 mins): the filmmaker discusses her early films with B Ruby Rich
• Interview with cinematographer Babette Mangolte (32 mins)
• Entretien avec ma mère, Natalia Akerman (2007, 30 mins): Chantal Akerman talks to her mother, Natalia
• Interview with actor Aurore Clement (18 mins)
• Leaving Home – New World Vision (2024, 14 mins): artist Sarah Wood meditates on News from Home in a newly commissioned video essay
• 72 page Perfect-bound book with new essays by Lillian Crawford, Catherine Bray, Diana Cipriano, Justine Smith, Daniella Shreir, Pamela Hutchinson, Jerry White, Sarah Wood and Hannah Strong
• Archive articles by Janet Bergstrom and Laura Mulvey

 

You can purchase the set direct from the BFI either in person or from the online shop.

The second volume follows in June which gives you ample time to – slowly – appreciate the stillness and completeness of the director’s work.