Outlaws and Jesters... Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026, Day Three

Landscape is image in Seastrom…

Robert Herring, Film Image: Seastrom, Close Up (Volume IV, Issue I, January 1929)

Director/actor Victor Sjöström used the coastline to stunning effect in Terje Vigan, but here he moves inland and upwards. Brilliantly photographed by Julius Jaenzon, The Outlaw and His Wife allowed Sjöström to play out his story against the rugged north Swedish countryside with his characters existing on the land and being shaped by it.

Jóhann Sigurjónsson’s 1911 play was set in Iceland but the War having rendered it impossible to use the original location, Sjöström used the barren edges of Lapland as a stand-in: Åre and Abisko in northern Sweden. Sjöström had previously directed the play in which has also played Eyvind and knew the role inside out as well as the way he was going to truly externalise it…

Writing in Close Up, primarily about The Wind, Richard Herring examined Sjöström’s environmental storytelling and the role it played in the Swedish cinematic style he helped to create realism in performance as well as place and celebrating a way of living that had often passed its time.

Their only law was their love…

Edith Erastoff

Eyvind arrives in a small town encountering a wool poacher Arnes (John Ekman) just about getting away with his haul hidden under lichen (makes great soup boiled in milk, apparently: how sparse was their existence). Arnes directs him to the farm of a well-off widow called Halla (Edith Erastoff – who was married to Sjöström from 1922 to her death in 1945) who would be able to offer him work. Calling himself Kari he soon begins to make his mark, his strength and intelligence marking him out as a superior worker.

He begins to get closer with Halla much to the annoyance of the local bailiff, Björn Bergstéinsson (Nils Ahrén) who has already been rejected by her in no uncertain terms. Someone recognises Kari as the outlaw Eyvind – wanted for stealing a sheep to feed his starving family and whilst he denies it to the Bailiff – easily besting him in a short fight – he confesses all later that night offering the hand himself in. But Halla is having none of it, she’s found her man and is sure of his character and they agree to head to the mountains and live outside society.

Will society leave them to it and most importantly will their love survive?

This is an unusual story and in Sjöström’s way is told powerfully and in ways that draw on the audience’s full engagement. As usual the camerawork from Julius Jaenzon’s is superb, highlighting the actors against the raw beauty of the landscape, atop vertiginous cliff faces or staring out across glaciated valleys: life in all its harsh simplicity away from the mean constraints of a society that placed the value of livestock higher than its citizens.

It's above all the rawest, purest of love stories and we had those two masters of musical drama, Neil Brand and Günter A. Buchwald on piano and violin and combining to fill the epic spaces of the rugged mountains on screen and the void between the two lovers and our watching hearts. This will be hard to beat the Swedes were creating cinema with a sense of vitality and reality that most others could not match. It wasn’t just Victor skinny-dipping in a raging mountain river but the places he and his troupe were willing to go in service to the story.

 

Manzini abides...

L’Arzigogolo (IT 1924), with Baldry, Bockius and Horne (BBH)

 

Never have we seen Italia Almirante so perfectly at her best; an exquisite figure of an intelligent woman, her plastic beauty - which her sumptuous clothes keep soft - makes the complex, enigmatic figure of Violante more lively and suggestive.

Luciana Grimaldi in La rivista cinematografica of November 30, 1923

 

The Italians, of course, had their own “Golden Age” and their own highly expressive cinematic language but by 1924 the cocktail party take would have their films in decline and the age of the diva, well and truly over. Well, let’s see what Italia Almirante Manzini has to say about that shall we?

Turns out rather a lot in what can only be described as a highly distinctive film that plays with form and expectation as a Violante, a princess on a schedule to accept a suitor but who just doesn’t want second or, definitely, third best, she wants to marry for love. Directed by Mario Almirante and based on Sem Benelli's "burlesque poem" it features spectacular costumes designed by Caramba as well as stunning Renaissance sets that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Fairbank’s Robin Hood.

Her suitors are an angry entitled knight (Alberto Collo), a strange man (Oreste Bilancia) with some kind of magical link to cats and rats… and a jester more philosophical than funny (Annibale Betrone). Violante wrongfoots them, as the narrative refuses to go the way you’d expect. As one Italian speaker pointed out, the translation doesn’t really do the original text justice as there is so much smuggled meaning in the script taken from Benelli.

It held me rapt in ways only the Sjostrom had managed today and I would urge you to seek it out. In terms of that “golden age”, this was Manzini’s final film as she headed back to the theatre and she is the perfect diva in this film, playing the role of the enigmatic princess with real depth and sheer power: it’s always better to burn out rather than fade away and here she shines brightly.

 

If the film was off the scale so was the musical accompaniment from Stephen Horne, Frank Bockius, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry using piano, percussion and harp in ways these instruments cannot have been designed to do, attacking the narrative and mood with a fast-moving attack that constantly rotated the leading lines and shots on target in much the same way as Liverpool FC’s Mane, Firminho and Salah in their prime.

The trio also played for Med Sporvogn Gennem Aarhu’ Gader (DK 1905) which provided a wonderful tram’s eye view of the city as well as other trams. I’m loving these rail-based films and feel we need even more!

Just look at it!!!!

A film from Italy’s golden age, the stencilled and hand-coloured Stellina, La Pescatrice di Venezia (1912) was an eye-popping pleasure with the selective colouring making the characters jump out of the screen on this restoration and La Serenissima looking bellissimo as she always does. It concerned the relationship between a poor fisherman’s daughter and a rich count who was keen on this fresh conquest only to find that pride can’t be bought. A dynamic and twisted tale!

Also screening at the Teatro Verdi on this fine Monday:

 

A sequence of comic shorts featuring Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Drew with whom I was unfamiliar, and which were most chucklesome. I was especially impressed with Ethel Lee who plays the fearsome Aunty in Auntie’s Portraits (1915) and the domineering mother-in-law in the fab Fox Trot Finesse (1915) – dancing clearly not healthy if used to excess. Philip Carli accompanied in style!

 

The first of the Spanish Cinema programme featured a variety of documentary shorts of which those from the 1890s from the Lumière brothers were the most interesting: 131 years on and we still look at humanity projected from film they captured. The score composed by Brais González was excellent and performed by the Caspervek Ensemble - Brais González (pianoforte), Laura Lorenzo (flauto), Virginia Lis (clarinetto), Óscar Presa (trombone), Ángel Saavedra Arozamena (chitarra spagnola).

 

In the rediscoveries I was already familiar with the smart comedy of A Victim of Circumstances (US 1913) as it is part of Christopher Bird’s collection and has been screened at the Kennington Bioscope to much glee as a young man forbidden from marrying a rich man’s daughter because he was temporarily taken to the police station, finds the tables turned as the old man get’s arrested for stealing a wallet. Instant Kharma.

This was rather more rewarding than Marshall Neilan’s rather repetitive and formless The Billionaire (US 1914) which wore out its welcome well before the 45-minute mark… not all Keystone films were golden.

Gabriel Thibaudeau nevertheless gave it his best shot on piano accompaniment.

To Germany and a clip from an unidentified “Antisemitic Film” which was horrifically cliched as you might expect with an older man bossing a younger woman around with exaggerated “Jewish” mannerisms. The context is unknown, but this kind of representation was loaded then as now, and I have to say that Meg Morley accompanied with the perfect tone and improvised composition.

Her work on the next film, Haddas Rache (DE 1919) was also exceptionally rich in driving themes and melodies – a “conversational” jazz-inflected style all of her own that served this tumultuous film well. Directed by Jaap Speyer, it featured some well-known Weimar faces including Reinhold Schünzel being a rat as usual and starred Mia Pankau as the woman scorned.

 

Ivy Close staying very still...

Lastly, I loved the films in the first part of the Greco-Roman Antiquities programme. There were a couple of Louis Feuillade (probably) films of which The Legend of Midas (FR 1909) was my favourite as he gets given asses’ ears after displeasing the Gods and then has to try and hide it.

The British film Pygmalion and Galatea directed by Elwin Neame in 1912 was good value and featured Ivy Close looking as young as I’ve ever seen her as Pygmalion’s sculpture that was “more beautiful than any woman” in the eyes of its famously woman-hating creator. He asks the Gods to make her real and generally gets what he deserves. I’m sure Ivy would soon bring him in line.

Mauro Colombis provided period appropriate accompaniment to the swords and sandals and there was zero controversy over the casting and the translations… It was a different time for mythical history in the movies!

 

 

 

Pola, Asta and Colleen... Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026, Day Two

Pola Negri – Asta from Poland

Buffalo Bill…

She is a star in our homeland

Buffalo Bill…

 

Warsaw cabaret song circa 1917

Before Germany, before Hollywood, her fellow Poles were already comparing Pola Negri with the Danish superstar Asta Nielsen and you can see just why in Bestia aka The Polish Dancer (1917) in which she does an even raunchier version of the Apache Dance featured by Asta in her breakout success, Afgrunden (1910). Bestia is the oldest surviving Pola Negri film but it’s also the only survivor of her Polish films made from 1914 to 1917 when she moved to Berlin to appear in a German revival of Max Reinhardt's theatre production of Sumurun – having already been in a successful Polish run of this play in 1913. In Berlin she met Ernst Lubitsch, and the rest is history but even in Warsaw, we can already see the actor/dancer’s star power and her ability to emote as if everyone is looking and she just doesn’t care.

Pola plays Pola Basznikow, a young woman who enjoys the party life much to the annoyance of her father who paces around in a fury as Pola dances and drinks with friends. After a blazing row with her father, Pola decides to leave and enlists the help of her friend Dymitr help. The couple stay at an hotel run by his untrustworthy friends and, sensing they’ll be looking for her to pay her way, she “borrows” Dymitr’s money and heads off on her own to Warsaw leaving the young man with vengeance filling in his heart and an empty wallet. He swears revenge.

The Polish dancers

In the big city she is soon spotted and makes her way on stage becoming involved with rich married men with too much money and not enough restraint. She’s living la Vida Loco but what goes up must come down in the language of most film of this time.

Pola is also showing her increasing screen impact and deathly side-eye in the recently rediscovered Die Marchesa D’Armiani (DE 1920) directed by Alfred Halm. Only the first half of the film survives but it’s enough to show her on top form as Assunta, the titular Marchesa who torments and seduces Lothar von Raff (Fritz Schulz) the son of the police chief who ruined her mother’s life as part of a plan to get revenge. This sins of the parents are passed onto these helpless offspring and whatever cruelty Assunta can devise we know there’s worse to come… at least we do if we read Jay Weissberg’s essay in the Catalogue!

John Sweeney accompanied with melding music and mood in ways that seem almost unconscious but are very deliberate. Talent and unending practice moves his hands along with Pola’s eyes, dance and darkening heart…

 

You might think that the arrival of Pola, Nazimova and Garbo from the decadent old countries might have signalled the end of The Griffith Girls and a certain type of childlike women whose stories were usually about love and not sex. You might think that… but never right off the Irish! Colleen Moore – who had an Irish Granny (like most of us) was the evening star featuring in Her Wild Oat (1927) screening as part of the Marshall Neilan strand.

Moore had been one of Griffith stars and whilst she lacked the looks of some, the acting skills of others (maybe?), she was overloaded with charm and pure pep! It is not possible to watch Colleen Moore and not fall in love with her characters: she has depth and human frailty that wins you over every time and yet she’s never mawkish or phoney. This is a magical skill and one that enables even run of the mill narratives to succeed.

Here she plays Mary Lou Smith, a regular working girl who runs a low-margin street stall selling coffee and eats to help the city keep on moving. It was her second film with Neilan after the under-rated Dinty (1920) and despite the appearance of a low budget, he ups the comedy and let’s her do the rest as the appearance on night of Philip Latour a handsome young man with overalls and no money (Larry Kent) offers her the hope of love and maybe more if she only knew? 

There’s good support form Gwen Lee as her sassy, steadfast friend Daisy and Hallam Cooley as her journalist pal Tommy who almost gets her into too much of a “story”. It’s slight but snappy and there’s one of the best scenes of dialogue between two dogs at the end: these people knew exactly what they were doing – a hit!!

Today’s stunning rail journeys continued with New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, no. 1 (1899!!) directed by James H. White (probably) and which showed the innards of this magnificent construct, opened in opened on May 24, 1883, and traversed by me on foot in 1987… There’s something about the optimism of travel especially when it celebrates engineering accomplishments. We need more of these films!

The evening finished off with a couple of comedy shorts written and directed by Neilan and proved how repetitive and coarse the genre could be no matter the undoubted skills involved. The Reformation of Ham (1914) featured and extended scrap between Ham and Shorty two ornery shipmates whilst Love, Oil & Grease (1914) actually had a plot but again featured an extended battle between Ham and his other buddy, Bud which was largely irrelevant to the fraternal battle between two siblings to out compete each other’s car company.

Donald Sosin played throughout the evening and deserves some kind of medal!

And engineering marvel that is still in use...

Earlier in the day there was more stunning phantom train riding with Schwebebahn (DE 1902) showing the Single-Rail Hanging Railway, System of Eugen Langen, named after its inventor, Eugen Langen which is in Wuppertal, in western Germany and is the oldest electric elevated railway with hanging cars in the world. As it is it looks like the most made-up AI steam punk but no, it’s real and it’s a marvel’

Next a Phantom Film in the form of a couple of short fragments of FW Murnau’s otherwise lost film Satanas (DE 1920) which looked very louche and decadent with Fritz Kortner being “cuddled” by Sadjah Gezza in three takes? and Conrad Veidt at his most protean in a silver wig that would become fashionable for 50 more years. We need more, of course we do!

Paul Rehkopf is Teufel!

Talk of The Devil, you wait ages for a Weimar film in which he features and then, like trains and trams, two arrive at almost the same time. So it was that we experienced Die Teufelskirche (DE 1919?) a fever dream of satanic visitation set in a rural community (literally so for the man in Seat Funf in the front row of the 2^nd balcony…). Adapted by Adolf Paul from his 1906 play  of the same name, the story had focused on transgressive themes of free love, sexual expression and the hypocrisy of bourgeoise morality, the film still has trace elements of this daring agenda.

The Devil enters a small village disguised as a tinker aiming to make himself useful. He meets a farmer's wife, Frau Ane (Agnes Straub looking very much the part), and playing on her longing for a child strikes a deal with her in exchange for her wish for motherhood to come true. As part of this unholy bargain she must pass his message onto the community and this, naturally involves her seducing the priest (Hans Mierendorff) who builds a new church dedicated to the fallen one after his church is devoured by flames. Ane's cottage is also consumed much to her husband's despair... this Tinker is only using their misery to undermine their fragile order. Think of him like modern social media, or Fox News...

Directed by Hans Mierendorff it may or may not be all a dream but, as always, The Devil is in the details. The Devil also has all the best tunes and Günter Buchwald, on piano and fiddle _ the Devil’s favourite strings! and Frank Bockius on percussion had a great time with this: think Hellzapoppin without so much swing!

There was also time to marvel once again at the imagination and craftsmanship of Dave Fleischer’s animations with three films featuring Koko the Clown and his pal  - Koko’s Catch (1928). Koko’s Klock (1927) and Koko’s Tattoo (1928) – it’s a cat which is, of course a bad idea when everything drawn comes to life and moves!

The accompaniment was really something special with the Orchestra della Scuola di Musica Città di Cordenons and Ensemble Armonia combining to give a modern child’s musical view of these eternally interesting ‘toons. Good job all round kids and grown-ups of all ages!

Agnes Straub breaks several deadly sins in mere moments

The most affecting parts of the schedule came from “Female Madness” part of a strand curated by Pordenone’s Collegium alumni and which achieved the difficult task of addressing this subject in an historical way and using works of documentary and fiction to show how the subject was treated. Feminism and Foucault come to minds in terms of how these prime sources provide a measure of our compassion and understanding then and now.

The medical films of Vincenzo Neri (1908-28) as well as La Pitié-Salpêtrière University hospital footage showed people with various muscular ticks and stims – one can only guess at the cause and yet the filmmakers hoped to use the film as an aid to diagnosis. My daughter works in advancing Assistive Technology and this is an early form of a much larger visual discipline now. There was a character screen test for actor Eve Fracis from Alberto Cavalcanti and Jacques de Baroncelli which bridged the gap between the medical and the performative. The audience were unsure and not relaxed enough to clap in the usual way.

Madcap Asta

It was remarkable programming as we moved in to Germaine Dulac’s ÂMES DE FOUS (FR 1918), Louis Feuillade’s LE VIOLON (FR 1908), Max Mack’s ZWEIMAL GELEBT (DE 1912) and then Edmund Edel’s DAS VERSUCHSKANINCHEN (DE 1917) for which the words “zany” or “madcap” may have been invented. The Guinea Pig (Das Versuchskaninchen) finds Asta Neilsen, who was 32, playing a teenager called Jesta who is low on attention span and high on energy constantly frustrating her father (Alfred Kuehne) and coming between him and his fiancée. Amazingly, Jesta has a love of her own, played by Fred Immler who seems normal enough but clearly likes her sense of humour.

Tiring of been worn down by his daughter’s constant comedy, Dad decides to send her off to a strict school but, due to various mishaps, she ends up at a lunatic asylum where the doctor quickly diagnoses insanity and proceeds to try and treat her using the modern of methods including electric shock treatment and a padded cell. It’s largely not funny anymore but still interesting to see Asta playing in a weird kind of Mary Pickford role and one that is uncomfortable in an age when we are still coming to terms with mental disabilities.

Sometimes the visuals speak so loudly it’s hard to do anything other than watch and Daan van den Hurk’s piano accompaniment was spot on.

The programmers say in the notes: “… we hope these film present a thought-provoking set of representations that demystify how silent cinema shaped, and was shaped by, ideas about women and madness that emerged at the intersection of reality and fiction.”

Seif Abdo, Daniel Lawrence Aufmann, Ellen Cleary, Hugo Ljungback and Matteo Masi

 

I missed THE SECOND SINO-JAPANESE WAR IN TOY FILMS  DCP, 102'23" with Günter Buchwald on piano accompaniment!

 

Asta is so meta in Bestia... her room full of her posters!

Action men… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026, Day One

 

Doug has never leaped so high… He's perpetual youth, a three-ringed circus, the personification of all juvenile heroes, all rolled into one…

W. Ward Marsh, Cleveland Plain Dealer 19^th October 1925

After a couple of days in Venice I spent my final night in a secure Air BnB near Venice Mestre Station. I say secure because it had a lock for the entry gate – a six-feet plus metal fence – then three locks between the outside and a room with a TV streaming late 70s Charlie’s Angels dubbed in Italian. When you leave, just drop the keys on the desk, said the guy and so I did, assuming there was a button on the fearsome metal gate to open it. There wasn’t and so, taking my life, cabin bag and laptop in hand, I scaled the fence and dropped myself quite stylishly onto the ground on the other side – it was a little further than I expected (this is not a Stunt Blog). It’s not easy bouncing around and climbing to escape a trap. But, as I was reminded several hours later in the Teatro Verdi, Douglas Fairbanks made it look easier than pretty much anyone ever on film. He loved it.

Day One and for sure, not Don Juan but, yes, Don Q – Son of Zorro - and a Fairbanks’ blockbuster I’ve never seen complete with a huge new score from Slovenska kinoteka given voice by the gathered might of the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra as conducted by Andrej Goričar. If these films are familiar, it’s probably because of the influence Fairbanks had on popular culture and in particular, comics and the kind of books on sale alongside them. It’s all of a piece with Batman – still 13 years in the future – Flash Gordon, Doc Savage – Man of Bronze, along with earlier creations like Tarzan and John Carter of Mars from the, actually swashbuckling, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Superman was designed by Siegel and Shuster to look like Fairbanks* whilst the creator of the Marvelverse, Stan Lee both admired and imitated Fairbanks.

What all these characters have in common – including Stan - is a super-sense of positivity as well as strength, righteousness and charm and these were of course, everything that Doug brought to the screen both by instinct and design. He was the epitome of masculine purpose and verve at a time when such things were clearly defined and viewed as a good… whereas I am currently reading Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men and we need a hero.

Mary Astor and Douglas Fairbanks

101 years on, Doug was once again our man as Don Cesar de Vega, the son of Zorro also played by Doug plus a dusty grey wig, and a little padding round his middle. Doug is really trim in this film and that’s evidenced by high-waisted trousers that make him look more lithe than stocky or maybe he’d just worked too hard on the leaping around. There are incessant stunts that remind you of Robin Hood, Bagdad or Zorro, but that’s the deal with Doug – 42 at the time. He’s sent from Cali to Spain as his father before him and meets The Queen (Stella De Lanti) and visiting Archduke (Warner Oland) as he saves a crowd from an escaped bull. He makes enemies with nasty Don Sebastian (Donald Crisp) as well as the scheming Don Fabrique Borusta played by Jean Hersholt who always injects an element of pathos in his villains as if they’re being made bad by unfortunate nature.

What about the love interest I hear you say, well that’s Mary Astor (just 19…) as the delightful Dolores de Muro who becomes the source of conflict between Don Cesar and Sebastian. The film gathers pace, its relentless and you know why and where it’s going. Long story short, Cesar has to fake his own death to become the masked vigilante in thigh-high leather boots and a cape. Using his trusty whip he leaves a “Q” mark on foes just like his daddy left a “Z”… Yeah, right, whatever we all applauded when the goodies emerged and it was as the comic writer Alan Moore once said “a revenge fantasy for the impotent…” only much more in on the joke than that sounds!

The Danish Film Institute have done incredible work in restoring what has for so long only been available in 16mm and what we saw tonight was the film and good-hearted masculinity restored to former glories. The gathered throng in the Verdi were uplifted, inspired and set fair for a week of vibrant entertainment and reminders from the past of eternal virtues and the sheer power of good intentions.

Money madness

Before all this we kicked off with some David Wark with the latest restorations from The Biograph Project. These films are all from eight to twelve minutes long, but Griffith always squeezes a full story in there and ones that reflect the concerns of his audience in ways that reveal much. Money Mad (US 1908) features The Root of All Evil as it lures various thieves and beggars into a fight to the finish whilst The Christmas Burglars (US 1908) was altogether more wholesome as some pawn broker and his criminal colleagues take pity in a woman and her young daughter bringing them a seasonal surprise even if they did use chloroform to make sure they slept through Santa’s visit. Mr Jones at the Ball (US 1908) showed the perils of lying to yourself and your tailor about your waist measurement as the titular gent rips his kecks** at a fancy ball.

There was a sweet moral balance to One Touch of Nature (US 1909) and its portrayal of childhood mortality that should remind everyone that those Good Old Days weren't actually that good. It's Griffith on the soppy side but it worked then and it works now. Far more unsettling, from a modern perspective was the black face and the racial joke of The Valet's Wife (US 1908) but that's what was and there was context.

Philip Carli accompanied in comfortable slacks.

 

Italy Admiral Manzini and this film in one screen grab...

The Mask and the Face (IT 1919) was very much a film of two halves featuring this year’s Diva, Italy Admiral Manzini in a story directed by Augusto Genina. Now, I’m very much a believer in the three great diva: Bertini, Menichelli and Borelli but I have to say that Manzini runs them close without quite having the grit of the first, the impact of the second or the ethereality of the third. But we shall see this week, and she was off to a very strong start.

The story was adapted by Luciano Doria from a 1916 play by Luigi Chiarelli which had been part of the “grotesque theatre” style of the time according to Andrea Meneghelli in the 2019 Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival Catalogue. There’s little of this left in the film which spends the first half establishing various couples among the rich elite around Lake Como. Manzini plays Savina who is married to the possessive and aggressive Paolo (Vittorio Rossi Pianelli). For some reason she decides that their friend Luciano (Ettore Piergiovanni) is the kind of man she needs to have an affair with even though he is engaged to Marta. (Note to self: pitch for a reality TV series, The Real Housewives of Como aka Como Shore…)

Maybe buried under this is a critique of the listless bourgeoisie but it doesn’t carry much force until Paolo, discovering that his wife is having an affair decides that she is dead to him and exiles her from his life and property. He doesn’t want to know who her lover is but, in his rush, to punish his wife, pretends he has murdered her. Now before you point out the obvious flaws in this plan, don’t worry because Luciano is going to represent him in court and, he does it so well that gets his client off if only at the expense of trashing his former lover’s reputation.

Como Shore...

Savina finds out and is, to put it mildly, pretty disappointed but then an actual body is found in the lake – a woman so badly disfigured that they “recognise her immediately…” Savine is definitely dead but she’s not really and you can really tell where this is going except you can’t and that’s exactly what makes the last part of this film so much fun!

Mauro Colombis seemed to take it all in his stride, but this was the sleeper hit of the day!

We also saw the first part of a mostly lost film Ironies of Life (IT 1917), directed by Mario Roncoroni and featuring Manzini falling in love with Gian Paolo Rosmino. What we saw looked very good and was of the standard you’d expect of Italian cinema of this period.

 

I missed the series of short films in the Lazio programme but heard good things about Rails into the Olympus of Elegance (IT 1920?). Another time…

Sorry mate the Plaça Reial's the other way...

Before Doug, we took a ride on a tram through Barcelona in 1909, and it was the most visceral thing I’d seen all day. This is part of the Giornate’s Origins/Early Cinema – Phantom Tram Rides and Barcelona en Tranvía (ES 1909) took us from the Atarazanas/Drassanes area - then the city’s waterfront fortifications - to Bonanova, in the upper part of Barcelona. As the tram travels through the Passeig de Gràcia, it heads higher into the suburbs, streets that look familiar, but I wonder how many were changed by the Civil War and modernisation.

The filmmakers, Ramón de Baños Martínez, Ricardo de Baños Martínez had announced the filming, and this brought the locals out in their thousands and the real joy of this film is in seeing people walking, running, cycling and generally larking about in front of the moving image. It was as Giornate Director, Jay Weissberg said, a pure example of cinema and one that was poignant and very human on the big screen.

Stephen Horne accompanied and, as you would expect, he caught the mood, he savoured the joy.

 

A lot of cigarettes were smoked in today's films...

*From the brilliant Silentology website.

 

**Look it up in The Oxford English-Scouse Dictionary.

 

 

 

Unfinished empathy? Queen Kelly (1929), BFI with Neil Brand and Pamela Hutchinson

 

A work of barbaric splendour…

LA Times

 

Culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum and I don’t just mean Ed Sheeran here. There was a bleak strand of early twentieth century art that contended not just with unprecedented global tragedy but also the loss of faith in Gods and governments: godlessness is next to heartlessness and so it goes. As ever you could escape to fantasy but there were some pointing straight into the heart of darkness even as they did so. This was not so much Victorian gothic as post-war-punk with stories showing that the sun will, in all probability, not come out tomorrow as things brewed in what proved to be merely the long halftime between wars to end all wars.

 

As Pamela Hutchinson suggested in her excellent introduction, Queen Kelly was possibly part of one of these strands, the theatre of the cruelty, certainly in style if not deliberate intent. Erich von Stroheim was developing his cinema whilst, at the same time as in Europe, Antonin Artaud was evolving his Manifeste du théâtre de la cruauté. Here Artaud detailed the aims of evoking a visceral reaction from his audience by means of presenting a wordless humiliation for his characters. Empathy would be our weakness as we engage with the basest levels of humanity through the look of degradation. Or, to put it another way, be repulsed by Tully Marshall’s gurning face as the revolting Jan Vryheid, as he licks his lips in anticipation of marrying Gloria Swanson’s help-less Patricia “Kitty” Kelly with whom we couldn’t sympathise more.

 

After a failed romance with a very handsome prince, Kitty is called to Poto-Poto, an area of a town in Tanzania, to visit her dying aunt. Now, such contact, normally signals an unexpected windfall, but this is not Hollywood as we know it, it’s Von’s version and Kitty’s aunt has summoned her with the strangest notion that she should marry her nightmarish protector and Tully surely never worked so hard to be so thoroughly unlovely. Kitty has not just loved and lost, she has been physically abused and driven to the point of attempted suicide. Now, after hope is offered, it is not just pulled away but replaced with a Tully worse than death. Cruel and absurd.

 

How did Kitty end up so far away from the good grace with which she started the film and her promising love match…? Queen Kelly is a confounding film in every respect and so much so that it is not surprising that it was never properly finished let alone released: it was too much for its star and its producer not to mention the looming approbation of the all to easily offended Will H. Hays. Had he had to pass the film after the introduction of the 1934 code he couldn’t as he surely would have fainted in the first few minutes of screentime for an over-exposed Seena Owen as mad Queen Regina V.

 

 

The full story of this film is well beyond the terms of reference established by the “editorial board” of this blog – partially-informed hot-takes won’t cut it and it is also such a complex and un-historied part of cinema history that you’d need a whole book and a mass of library time to do it justice. Luckily esteemed film writer, historian and programmer Pamela Hutchinson has provided just that and it is a page-turning joy with eye-popping revelations that connect three most interesting characters in ways that haven’t been done before. On the Writers on Film podcast, Pamela says that there’s a Netflix biopic of Joe Kennedy due which start in the early thirties. Well, they really ought to revisit the script as this book would itself make a great film. Hollywood has never been that great about filming itself but maybe it’s been short on real stories? Here’s one!

 

 

Pamela was on hand to introduce the film and to explain how her painstaking research was similar to that informing the team from Milestone, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller: Swanson’s extensive archive including von Stroheim’s original script as well as a surprising amount of materials retained (given their general business practice of the time) by Joe Kennedy. A 4k restoration has been produced and was premiered last year in Venice, some parts are still missing – not everything was filmed for a start – and so there are new intertitles and gaps filled by recycling footage and stills which gives the flavour of the full film which now runs at an hour and three quarters. The Great Footage Fetishist (a marvellous pun from Von Stroheim’s nemesis, Irving Thalberg) would have had it at three times that length but you can’t always get what you want Erich… as you well knew by this point. And yet, still you tried…

Gloria Swanson and Walter Byron at the peak of Kiity and the Prince's romance

 

Reviewing the films of Erich or “Von” as he was abbreviated by close friends and enemies, you encounter the rich irony of a man who claimed to be of Austrian noble/military background (opinions vary) and yet who wanted to capture reality on screen like no other. Watching Greed, you feel the lunatic urge to acquire money tipped over the edge until it dooms the main characters in that classic ending. Blind Husbands (1919) in which he starred showed again the unlimited cruelty of humanity whilst Merry-go-Round, a film he was unable to complete due to Thalberg sacking him, still carries his mark as all manner of cruel horrors are inflicted on poor Mary Philbin’s character.

 

That Swanson chose Von for this project showed she wanted his skills if not his budgetary control. She had just had a hit with the then almost unfilmable Sadie Thompson – a story of prostitution which other studios tried to stop for tactical reason* but which allowed her to play a more mature role. It was a success and it’s hard to believe she was still just 28, somewhere between Sadie Sink and Sydney Sweeney in today’s money but a star in ways that have no contemporary equivalent.

 

Kitty is a nun as the film opens, an innocent but playful novice in the mid-European country of Kronberg which is of no fixed period as per the conventions of the time. It is ruled over by the mad Queen Regina V – is there any other kind? – who seethes with clothes-less rage in her boudoir with only her pet do for coverage. She may be the boss but she cannot quite control her intended consort, Prince Wolfram (handsome Leicester-born Walter Byron) who spends his time acting like a bachelor rather than a fiancé.

 

Seena Owen: nothing says "mad Queen" so much as a cat in the bath...

He does at least take his military duties seriously and out leading his troop across the country roads he encounters Kitty who catches his eye when her bloomers fall down. I’m no expert but I wasn’t sure that nuns ever wore bloomers but in Kronberg apparently they do and the results lead to Wolfram putting them in his saddle bag – the sure way to any girl’s heart. It’s a funny sequence and shows how Von was adept at the sweet as well as the sour: military progress halted by the stirrings of the heart. We know he’s setting us up for a fall but the higher fly the hearts of the Prince and his increasingly lapsing nun, the harder they will fall.

 

So, it proves as, after finally finding her clothes, Regina V starts making arrangements, moving the date of her marriage forwards and otherwise closing down Wolfram’s room to manoeuvre. Everything comes to a head with the most sadistic twist as she chases Kitty away with her whip, spittle flying from her face of fury as she shows no mercy. The movements of the film are slow but symphonically structured so that when such twists occur the audience is dragged down with them.

 

Most of the existing film is set in Kronberg and there is proportionately less in Africa partly because Swanson, having realised that her character’s taking over management of her aunt’s “hotel” actually meant brothel and this was so well presented as such by Von that she called him a madman and asked Joe Kennedy to fire him. On budget alone this was justified as with only less than half the film completed – it was supposed to run to five hours – Von was already overbudget for the whole thing.

Here's Tully!!

The new Milestone Film’s “reimagining” improves on their previous efforts with the inclusion of some new materials and new title cards based on Von’s scripts. We see enough of Poto-Poto to really feel Kitty’s fall to the ultimate depths in no small part due to Tully Marshall’s exuberant evil. It is at this point that we’re almost without hope, we are in the Cruelty sweet spot exactly as Von intended and that is the biggest compliment you can pay to the work of Milestones’ Doros and Heller. They also bring out the full flavour of what is an extraordinary and powerful performance from Swanson and the role she fought so hard to see preserved in some way. It’s here Gloria.

 

Neil Brand, so steeped in the musical language of Hollywood composition, was the perfect accompaniment to the grand statement in its need for an emotional anchor as well as expression. How do you add flavour to the intensity on show, how do you not over-play when the going gets Tully and when The Faces are so loud and expressive? Neil knows and this was a masterclass of composed improvisation and quicksilver composition supporting and glorying in Swanson!

 

I want to watch it all over again.

 

*The Curse of Queen Kelly, Pamela Hutchinson Sticking Place Books (2026)

 

You can order the book direct from the publishers here where you’ll also find more information and wonderful reviews, it is sincerely one of the best books on film of recent years.

 

Von directed some very relaxed performances too!

NB These screen grabs are from the new trailer for the restoration which give some idea of how good the results now look! 

The English Job… The Girl with the Pistol (1968), BFI Monica Vitti: Creative Force

This highly entertaining film was screening as part of the BFI’s season Monica Vitti: Creative Force which gives some of us Antonioni obsessives the chance to see the actor’s broader work, and here we see the gift for comedy which is hinted at in parts of L’Eclisse perhaps but here is given full rein in what is now a period drama of swinging London and a Sicily nursing a Victorian hangover with a Cosa Nostra side-salad. I was sat next to an Italian family who got all of the jokes before the punchlines but overall, the packed NFT1 audience had a hoot – laughing at us then and us now, Monica’s sardonic star power eternally self-aware and simply cool.

It was a treat to see this modish diva playing amongst fabulous locations from moist Georgian blocks of Edinburgh then on to a grimy Sheffield still choking on the smoke of large-scale steel manufacture. A good portion of the film I set in Bath, as ornate as many an Italian city, then to London and then Brighton with the old pier still standing. We also had a rollcall of leading men for Monica to play with including Tony Booth (Cheri’s father), Johnny Briggs, Corin Redgrave and Stanley Baker – guess which one ends up with the girl?

Given all this, it’s surprising that Mario Monicelli's film wasn’t released in the UK but it did very well in Italy and Vitti won the Accademia del Cinema Italiano David di Donatello for Best Actress whilst the film was nominated for the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars. Having seen so many British comedies of this period, it’s altogether more coherent in tone and fundamentally ridiculous rather than just trying to fit in current cultural references. In this way it reminded me of Tinto Brass’ Col Cuore in Gola (1967) which was partly filmed at the legendary International Times fundraising 24 Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace (John Lennon was there, Syd’s Floyd, Soft Machine et al). Counter-cultural history, right there in the background… Brass caught the moment when almost no one else did and his compadriot catches the background hum of a country yet to realise what is happening to it below the top-leve glamour of the moment.

Ultimately it’s a film of liberation for Vitti’s character, Assunta Patanè whose traditional Sicilian situation – family, men, an imagined and real, Greek Chorus of disappointment – weigh too ludicrously heavy on her ability to grow up. Director Mario Monicelli creates a mood not unlike Almodóvar’s early sexual farces with the same logical illogic as found in Vincente Aranda’s early work in a Spain still ruled by Franco’s censorship. The Italians had no such restriction and, whilst this is a joke at Sicily’s expense, it does have the general messaging about men and women’s role in (Catholic?) society.

This latter point is not made lightly and it was only in 1965 that the case of young Sicilian Franca Viola had been in the news after she refused a matrimonio riparatore with the man who had raped her and kidnapped her when she was just 17. This would have left her as a dishonoured woman who, having had sex out of marriage, was supposed to marry her assailant. It sounds mad because it is and it is worth reading up on this instance which had a huge impact on Italian law as well as the lives of those involved.

 

This cause celebre informs the seemingly incomprehensible opening when Assunta is kidnapped by mistake and then seduced by Vincenzo Macaluso (the excellent Carlo Giuffrè) who really wanted her cousin but makes do with what has been “delivered”. At the start there is the seemingly ridiculous sight of a group of men dancing together on a village rooftop as Assunta and her friends watch from a room across the way… dancing before marriage being almost as much of a crime as sex?

 

It’s useless, you look at me with dead fish eyes… I’m an honest woman!

After the deed is done Assunta finds that Vincenzo has fled to England leaving her and her family dishonoured. Her fiancé can not marry her and she cannot be a part of society until she has righted the wrong and, as there are no men in her family she is given a gun and sent to track down and assassinate the man who did her wrong.

Only now do we get the title sequence as the train departs, the ferry crosses and we’re whizzing through the British countryside up to Edinburgh where Vincenzo is to be found. It’s a long way from Polignano a Mare in Apulia where the initial scenes were shot to Waverley Station and the Scottish capitol’s stone streets have barely changed. Assunta approaches a woman in a pink coat who is looking for a housekeeper – “mi scusi, Mister…” (Vitti’s Itanglish is a delight throughout) and asks her the location of the Capri Restaurant where her target is working. And then we have it, MONICA VITTI walking around Edinburgh including some unsuspecting by-standers.

There’s a man, dressed as a woman…

She stops at the junction of Upper Bow and Johnson Terrace before spotting the Capri. Vincenzo is too quick for her and takes his leave … and this is very much the way as our heroine begins an educative journey across the country to find herself as well as her man. Travelling Britain doesn’t always work this way but Assunta’s contact with the welcoming intellectuals of the Sullivan family is the beginning of her sentimental education. She works as a maid for them and encounters The Kilt for the first time at their party, running off to the kitchen to burst out laughing. It was a different time.

Vincenzo calls from Sheffield in the middle of the party and as Assunta passionately remonstrates with him in the living room, Mrs Sullivan translates her half of the conversation as their guests sit aghast.

So to the Steel City, absolutely covered in industrial grime, where she finds a man called John (Booth) wearing fine Italian shoes and ill-advised white jeans and working on his E-Type Jaguar – the symbol of Swinging Sixties success. Luckily John speaks some Italian and takes her to a disco where they ask about Vincenzo and, after Johnny Briggs get’s too fresh she insists on her new English man giving him a hiding. They go to John’s terraced house – they’re all black, says Assunta – agreeing on separate rooms then watching rugby on TV.

What sort of a man are you? I don’t understand. You look. TV. Two hours…

A rugby match takes them to Bristol where Assunta sees the object of her murderous attention as an ambulance man. She finds out which hospital he works at and is off to “Barts” in Bath… where she encounters handsome Dr Osborne (Stanley Baker) and a man called Frank (Corin Redgrave) who has just tried to take his own life. Assunta gives him some of her blood and she listens as he drives her around Bath about his unfaithful lover and the reasons for his broken heart…

The same skills of emotional control and almost burying her thoughts in drama films also allow Vitti to hit the mark with so many punchlines… for this level of farce to work you just have to take it seriously and she’s within the unreality and without the need to labour the points which – perhaps with the quicker reaction times of my Italian neighbours to each zinger – makes them funnier.

Her conversion to an English-speaking, liberated woman by the last section of the film, allows her effortless sophistication to counter-balance Vincenzo’s old school thinking as he attempts to woo her back as his “property” … it’s fascinating watching her in character work these scenes on two levels… is she reverting back to old certainties or planning moral revenge?

 

We saw a sparklingly digital copy of a new 4k restoration which brought Monica and Swinging Sicily to life and really brought out the contrast between sun-drenched Mediterranean starch and Great British grey days. Some fabulous pubs and cars were also involved and I particularly liked Stanley Baker’s Rover and Booth’s E-Type Jaguar – he always was a flash get!

 

 

12,000 mm under the sea… Wonders of the Sea (1922), Horne and Bockius, Bonn Silent Film Festival 2026

J.E. Williamson's career is emblematic of a period in filmmaking, long past, when pioneers were part-scientist, part-showman and part-promoter on endeavours that involved as much adventure as technology.

Brian Taves, Ph.D., University of Southern California

 

John Ernest Williamson was born in Liverpool in 1881 making him yet another Silent Scouser although he was not related to the Mr Williamson who laid out Williamson Square in 1745. No, his father was Captain Charles Williamson, a seafarer from Norfolk, Virginia who patented his "Apparatus for Submarine Work” in December 1903. This was a three-foot diameter tube, made of a series of interlocking iron rings covered with a mix of canvas and rubber and provided a waterproof connection between the surface and the sea below.

 

Originally designed for underwater repair work, salvage and so on, John adapted this to incorporate a six-by-ten feet diving bell with a large, reinforced, window which enabled him to film in actual underwater locations. This “Photosphere” enabled him to not only be the first man to take a picture underwater from a submarine but also to create a series of stunning films starting in 1914 when he took his device onboard his ship, the Jules Verne, to the Bahamas, where sunlight shines deep into the sea.

 

An observation chamber made entirely of metal, weighing three tons and equipped with a crystal window four centimetres  thick…

 

Moving Picture World proclaimed that “Jules Verne is vindicated at last… the panorama is as entrancing as it is new.” Whilst The Evening Standard (23 July 1914) suggested that the photosphere “has amazed the scientists and diplomats…” although I’m not quite sure why the latter were notable? His most famous film is probably 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea which aligned his technique with a purely fictional subject and included a mechanical octopus to match his imagined giant creature. He was clearly as inspired as any schoolboy by undersea adventure and creatures of the depths.

 

This sparkling new restoration from the Austrian Film Museum, combines archive fragments found across Europe and Australia to recreate this extraordinary documentary/adventure from 1922 but it’s not without modern day quibbles.

 

It may not have been widely known at the time but Octopuses, whether in their garden or not, are rarely dangerous to humans normally avoiding their pathetically four limbed fellow creatures rather than engaging in arm-wrestling or injecting them with poison (although some are venomous). Mr Williamson preferred to suggest that they were “formidable monsters” and at one point we even see a supposed victim of a savage cephalopod execution with a bit of skeleton next to a divers’ helmet… pull the other one John lad.

JE Williamson, Dick, Lulu and "painter" in the underwater studio

 

Similarly, whilst Conger Eels can look after themselves alright, the one we see proposed as such a danger to the divers - so much so that they ask for a spear to be lowered – just wants to be left alone rather than prodded by the intrepid explorers. The eels can grow over two metres and will attack if left with no other escape but this one’s a juvenile and unfairly pulled into the action. I’ve seen more frightening scenarios in a Georges Méliès’. Also, the barracuda is not “the most ferocious of all sharks” and it’s not even a shark.

 

Consider yourself told John Ernest, at least from the point of view of 2026. But this was all part of the “blended reality” of his films and this stretches back to his earliest films one of which featured him attacking a shark lured by a horse carcass into the sea. To most of the audiences of the time this would have been an exciting part of this window into an unknown world… and was very much inline with a whole raft of ethnographic documentaries then and in the decades to follow.

 

The premise involves a collection of colourful characters off to explore the seas around the Bahamas specifically “Treasure Island” whose reefs have claimed so many ships carrying riches… and around which we find the monsters. Sir Williamson is accompanied by master diver, Jack Gardner, ship’s Captain Ross and his mischievous son Dick who provides comic relief during the journey out to the island. Also included is “a talented painter” and his “niece” Lulu McGrath… It’s all very Jules Verne and in the spirit of his great adventurers.

 

Lulu is there for a number of reasons but mostly to look very good in a swimming costume. She was runner-up in the first Miss America beauty pageant but equally importantly she can swim well and smile at the same time bringing glamour to the proceedings and diving to a depth of 12 metres with the aid of a 8 kg led weight which gave her more time to swim around in front of the submerged “studio” and she dives so well that Williamson repeats the shots in slow motion. A proper diving belle… although some will also be impressed with the muscular “local” who dives to retrieve the weight and swim it strongly to the surface.

 

Is this not a dreamlike spectacle, the vision of a new world?

 

The shots from the sea floor are indeed wondrous and it would be interesting to compare the coral and aquatic life now with then. We are so used to underwater photography that it’s difficult to imagine how mind-blowing this footage would have seemed at the time. A landscape as alien as Mars and about which we are still learning more with every year.

 

Lulu makes a bigger splash!

Next up are the divers who descend in search of treasure after they have bothered a few innocent fish. It’s still an awesome sight and they are operating two different breathing systems: one fed by a line from the surface and the other using carbon blocks to recycle the air. Both braver than me and a proxy for the audience’s adventure into this unknown.

 

We are also treated to a rare glimpse of the famous land mammal, inventor Alexander Graham Bell who descends in the photosphere just as you’d expect even for a pioneer in his 75^th year.

 

Talking of pioneers, this submersive treat was made all the more immersive by the singular talents of Frank Bockius on percussion and Stephen Horne on piano and everything else. They really pushed the boat out in combining to create new moods to connect with the old feelings and elevated the adventure in the most visceral of fashions. We need to see them play it under-water next in the spirit of The Williamson Technique and his approach to health and safety! Totally inside their depth and well played!

 

Bonn delivering yet another fascinating restoration.