Il Cinema Ritrovato, ten take-aways from 2019…

1. Musidora absolutely deserves to be included in the canon of women writers, directors and actors. She also liked a bullfight.

OK, Jean Gabin may well be the poster boy for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato but for the cinemutophiles it can only be Musidora. I must confess that I have only seen her in Les Vampires and hadn’t fully appreciated the full range of this French actor who I now know is also theatrical performer, writer, poet, director, and icon… meaning many things for many people. Musidora, born Jeanne Roques in 1899, was also a cinema archivist, helping Henri Langlois to preserve not just her own legacy but many others at the Cinémathèque Française.

My Festival kicked off with Patrick Cazals documentary Musidora – la dixième muse (2013), which painted a fuller portrait of the woman who was Irma Vep – an actor of charm and tremendous abilities. Two of the longer episodes of Les Vampires were screened, Episode 3: Le Cryptogramme Rouge (1915) with John Sweeney and percussionist Frank Bockius, and Episode 6 Les Yeux Qui Fascinent (1915) with Neil Brand.

There were also three films in which the actor not only performed but directed and co-wrote:

Soleil et Ombre (1922) was screened outdoors at Piazetta Pasolini with Stephen Horne providing light and shade to this torrid take of toreadors projected by the famous Carbon Arc.

La Tierra de los Toros (Land of the Bulls) 1924 a Franco-spanish production accompanied by Gabriel Thibaudeau

Pour Don Carlos (1921) with Neil Brand is a major restoration of Musidora’s most ambitious and for me, interesting film

We also got the 1963 version of Judex which stylishly tipped its hat in *all* of the right directions in terms of its fast-moving gamelan adventure and abundance of plot, cat suits and secret lairs.  

More Musidora later. There has to be.

Greta Almroth and Lars Hanson in Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919)

2. Mauritz Stiller loved the great outdoors

Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919) with John Sweeney

I’ve written about this film before but its rugged and uncompromising story has so much more impact on the big screen and with Mr Sweeney’s ability to combine epic with emotion so detailed that I swear he changed musical sentiment right in the middle of one title card.

The film tells of a brutal murder by three Scottish warlords in Sweden as they make off with the titular treasure. One girl survives the massacre of Sir Arne’s family and falls in love with Sir Archie not knowing who he is.

The weather conspires to trap the evildoers as they carry the ill-gotten goods and the sea freezes away their escape route. Just when you think that redemption must surely be on the way, there comes the shocking truth that love may not be enough… The Swedes didn’t mess around.

Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919) with new recording of Armas Jarnefelt’s original score.

As for the film, says everything about our leading man, that at least one viewer had to be reminded of which of the female leads he’d ended up with. The trouble with Lars Hanson, observed another, is that he’s better looking than most of his leading ladies. Well, far be it from me to comment, but he’s certainly a fine actor with charisma to burn even when, as here, he’s a bit of a lad who can’t stop himself from lovin’ and leavin’ them.

Filmed in 1918, Mauritz Stiller’s film is the only Swedish silent with a surviving score, written by Finnish composer Armas Jarnefelt whose great nephew was present to hear a new recording alongside the Swedish Film Institute’s restoration of the film. Matching music to film when using so many sources was a digitally-intense job – the original cut for the score does not exist – but it was worth it to hear the film as it would have sounded for those lucky enough to have attended orchestrated screenings. Scoring for a two-hour film is an enormous task – especially in 1919 - and the music was rich in thematic content as well as narrative subtlety: literally, the sound of Swedish silent.

Let’s hope that the SFI and festivals keep the restored Stiller coming with The Saga of Gosta Berling… c'mon Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson... Jenny Hasselqvist!!!

Nell Shipman

3. So did Nell Shipman (and animals)

Back to God’s Country (1919) (35mm) was co-directed by the actor who also wrote the screen play and stared too along with her extensive menagerie. One actor die of exposure on the trip/expedition to the frozen North East and conditions were rugged.

Nell took it all in her stride even skinny dipping to help raise interest in the project: “Is the nude rude” ran the advertising, not by today’s standards but I’m sure many were shocked who’d not blinked an eye at elements of David Wark Griffith’s work.

Donald Sosin accompanied with verve and adventure of his own.

4. Comedy is an experience best shared – especially in the Piazza Maggiore

The Cameraman (1928) with Timothy Brock and Orcestra del Teatro Communale di Bologna

The Piazza was rammed for the first big silent showpiece of the festival and we were lucky enough to find a seat, some drink and, crucially, ice-cream as we watched Buster’s last great film with Timothy Brock’s emphatic new score. Kevin Brownlow introduced and explained how Buster had been sold off to MGM by ex-brother-in-law Joseph Schenck where he was to face a more controlled environment. They gave him a director, Edward Sedgwick, but he was a friendly one and Buster was able to deviate enough off-script – he’d never worked to one – to produce the gags, particularly in the Giant’s baseball ground.

It’s not to everyone’s taste, seemingly, but I like the film a lot and it was good to hear a new audience of all ages respond to Buster’s charm and comedy as he tries to become a professional cameraman in order to win the charms of Marceline Day. The film is very disciplined and the timing is spot on from the moment Buster races across town on the telephone to his love only to answer her in person to the magnificent pull-away shot of the monkey filming Buster’s despair after his finest moment seemingly goes to waste.

Timothy Brock’s score punched emphatically along with every beat of Keaton’s comedy, running with him through Manhattan, fighting to get changed in the swimming pool and forlornly waiting for his big chance with MGM and Marceline. It was as sentimentally robust as the man himself and richly deserved the ovation at the end.

We had more Buster with College (1927) – one of his less masterpieces but still essential viewing, Neil Brand accompanied wit a knowing look and a twinkle as Buster gets the girl though guile and quick-thinking. The only issue being, how could this small but clearly ripped guy not be seen more quickly as an athlete? Still, only a movie...

Thursday night in the Piazza Maggiore and it was Charlie’s turn with The Circus (1927), a film I’ve never seen and one which really benefited from the setting, good company and a few glasses of Spritz…

He improvises at least as well as Keaton and his physical comedy is just as good, more intricate perhaps. But, the more I think about his main character – the man who has nothing and is always more than willing to give it all away, the more I find it striking. This is not some cutesy “everyman” character it is the lowest of the low: usually unemployed and with no health insurance of union to protect him: that “Tramp” has been failed by the system but is always living in hope: on his way back, somehow.

Anyway, we laughed like drains!

5. 1919 was a very good year as was 1899

In addition to the two Stillers and the Shipman there was a broad range of films confirming the strength of cinema in 1919 including Dreyer’s excellent Praesidenten (1919), Richard Oswald’s reconstructed Anders Als Die Andern (1919), Albert Capellani and Nazimova’s The Red Lantern (1919) and Augusto Genina’s curious comedy The Mask and the Face (1919), a social comedy about husbands and wives and homicide: key quote: “You can’t kill me again…”

 There was also a remarkable silent film from India – where so few survive - called Kaliya Mardan (The Children of Krishna) (1919) directed by the ground-breaking Govind Phalke and with Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius providing accompaniment. This was a sheer delight after seeing almost all the existing material from this period. Phalke’s daughter plays the young Krishna and gives just the right amount of cheeky as the young demi-god find his limits and responsibilities. It all culminated in the taming of a huge water God in the shape of a snake… surely a sign of things to come.

We also saw the Signing of United Artists Contract of Incorporation (1919) which showed a three heroes, Doug, Mary and Charlie, cavorting for the crowds whist DWG looked ill-at-ease and a bit grand for his own good in these changing times.

We also saw many restored prints from 1899, including a number from the BFI as well as the other archives. Seeing these projected in the Piazza Maggiore was especially rewarding Newcastle iron workers risking life and limb in the routine of their work… and we fret about Skype connections and toner cartridge… it was fantastic to see these with John Sweeney’s accompaniment in the big arena.

6. New years are not always happy

Piazzetta Pasolini’s carbon-arc projected brought us real rarities with Sylvester (1923) plus some precious Satanas (1919-20) fragments from Murnau and Veidt all with Frank Bockius and Stephen Horne accompanying.

After a dozen Weimar films at the BFI this Spring, I should have been better prepared for Lupu Pick’s dark drama but he went places no one else had gone with an horrific family struggle taking place in the backroom of a bar on a street filled with New Year’s revelry. Over and again Pick switches from the cavorting on the strasse to the condensed hatred and misery of the parlour as the unthinkable unfolds before our soft, festivalled eyes… we too were outside, under the stars having a good time, watching the Piazzetta Pasolini’s carbon-arc projector screen the purest of human relationships unravel, love and envy curdling to hatred…

Frank Bockius mostly took the lead for this one – with Stephen filling on with his customary versatility. It emphasised the films’ dichotomy between doing and hating and worked very well for me: something new, occasionally avant but also full of warmth for the family decent into Hell!

All that from one run through? I genuinely don’t know how it’s done!

7. Harvesting seaweed is dangerous and rewarding

Finis Terrae (1929) Jean Epstein's raw drama felt so much like a Robert Flaherty docu-drama and yet the exquisitely shot tale of desperate infection at the ends of the World was slow-burning tension from start to finish. The cinematography came from four cameramen and I’m sure both Flaherty and Michael Powell were watching as the quietly deadly battle between man and nature showed how quickly the latter can turn against the former.

8. Gender attitudes are “interesting” in classic film

Henry King’s She Goes to War (1929) is, as I’ve written before, a classic case of the glass half full… the original film was mostly silent with some dialogue and some songs from Alma Rubens, and battle scenes described by King Vidor as amongst the best yet filmed – quite something from the director of The Big Parade. Sadly, what remains is a re-issued version from 1939 which cuts out all the title cards and a fair chunk of the plot in order to present a sound film focused mostly on those battle scenes.

We must join the dots to understand Eleanor Boardman’s character’s story arc as she follows her beloved to Europe only to find that he’s a cowardly drunk – unlike the handsome young captain who leads his men, and woman, into fight. Clearly there was a lot more of the love triangle but all that’s left is the denouement when Boardman is left off the hook by her fella’s lack of courage and, having taken his place in the fray, emerges triumphant with the glory and the guy.

The print wasn’t great but there’s enough here to show how good King’s technical direction was – the battle is indeed edge of your seat gritty – and to show what a good actor Boardman was. She’s often not given the credit she deserves, The Crowd excepted, but this was another stretch for a woman once described as “the most outspoken in Hollywood”. That said, no amount of mud can disguise those eyes…

Eleanor Boardman

“Thank ‘eaven for leetle girls…” sings Maurice Chevalier in Gigi a film I had never seen and which was described by one festival-goer as a sing-along about child prostitution. I don’t think it’s quite that, Leslie Caron was 25 at the time of the shoot, and the film itself does have her character rebelling against being “arranged” into a relationship with Louis Jordan’s rich Count. In the end they both realise the only way for them is to proceed as equals and to marry… Chevalier’s old letch carries on as before, picking women when they are “ripe” and possibly regretting nothing.

It was projected on a vintage 1961 print and looked wonderful even with all those scratches: an analogue experience in a digital world…

Jean Gabin studies in Du Haute n Bas

9. Jean Gabin had presence and we can all see just why he was the love of Marlene Dietrich’s life

I watched on of Gabin’s earliest as a thug in Coeur de Lilas (1931) and then as the far more charming football player in GW Pabst’s Du Haute n Bas (High and Low) (1933) which was a much more polished film with a superb cast and a very focused story of love amongst the different classes in the Fourth French Republic. Director Anatole Litvak uses Jean Gabin well a soccer-playing hero who wants to improve himself in order to romance Janine Crispin, a Phd student who takes a job as a housekeeper until a teaching post comes up.

It's a deft comedy that includes Michel Simon as an unemployed layer who is trying to work out a way to break the bank at Monte Carlo.

Gabin was still learning his craft in these films and by1937 there was Pépé le Moko and he had definitely arrived.

10. Underground cinema is cooler than you think

I Topi Grigi Episodes 1 and 2 (1918), with Antonio Coppolla

The Cantiere Modernissimo is an underground cinema, as in cinema under-ground, which is in perpetual restoration a dampness pervading its musty walls; plaster undried and never drying with the smell of old ambition mixed with that of new construction. There’s an ambience of faded ballrooms which adds deep resonance to the piano accompaniment and tonight Antonio Coppolla (brother of Francis Ford who was also here) took full advantage with rolling chords that flowed along with the comedy-dramatics on screen.

This was very much an Italian version of a French serial, written, directed and starring Emilio Ghione who injects a sense of humour filling in for holes in plot wider than the river Tiber! But, as the plot heated up, we stayed cool, deep underground as the flags cracked above us.

A tight spot for Emilio Ghione

In summary...

I’d seen a number of the Festival’s films on DVD/Blu-ray and for all of the silents they we improved by audience and especially live accompaniment. For more modern fair, the big screen gave a chance to project wide-screen vintage prints which were sometimes stunning – as with Henry King’s noirish Western, The Bravados (1958) and Gigi (for all the scratches) - always more engaging than on home media… depending on how much sleep you’ve had and how well the aircon was working. For this year was a scorcher in Bologna with temperatures hovering near to 40 at one point; best advice on that was 1. Don’t book again for a room in one of the ancient and attractive palazzi (no aircon) and 2.  Always wear a hat!

See you next year in a straw trilby.

Nice day for a Red Wedding… Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness (1929), BFI Weimar Cinema Season

“You can kill a man with an apartment just as with an axe.” Heinrich Zille

Mother Krause may well be the most brutally realistic of the socially concerned films in the BFI’s Weimar series. Grimmer overall than Kuhle Wampe, less polished than Pabst’s Diary and with far fewer songs than Threepenny Opera. It’s almost unbearably hard but with a more polemic agenda this is not surprising with director Phil Jutzi allowing plenty of improvised naturalism from an excellent cast. You can see why it is one of Faßbinder’s favourite films.

Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück is set in Berlin’s politicised “Red Wedding” district the film wanted to show the reality of the grinding poverty as families lived in pressure-cooked poverty, hand-to-mouth and month-to month, scrimping for the rent; borrowing to stay afloat and living on the “never-never” as my grandparents would have said in Liverpool.

These are the kinds of desperate circumstances that lead to revolution and which can also feed the need for a “strong leader”, but the future was not set in stone and in 1929 Willi Munzenberg, was the man with the money to finance films offering a Marxist alternative, through Prometheus-Films, a German subsidiary of the Soviet Mezhrabpom-Film company.  He wanted to show a future possible through collective action as well as to present “heroic legends” of the new revolutionary struggle that, as described by Bela Labazs, could present “tempestuous movement, monumental visuals, surprising entanglements… exceed(ing) anything the bourgeois film can show.”

Alexandra Schmitt

Mother Krause is certainly a different drama to the mainstream fare of the time and does provide and intensely-dramatic story which could only leave the audience in tatters after almost two hours… there are new heroes and there are the same old villains but Jutzi is careful not to play the obvious cards: this is not a melodrama but a dramatic serious work that asks much of the audience.

Take for example Gerhard Bienert as Mother Krause’s dodgy lodger, he is at turns a nasty piece of work but also a man quick to take action, sometimes supportive and other times just exploitative, all in a very “negotiated” way. He’s an anti-hero, survivor, sexual predator who, under other circumstances, could well be a Chief Executive or politician. His character gets a lot of screen time and drives a lot of the action as he constantly looks to impose himself on Krause’s daughter Erna (Ilse Trautschold – who is excellent), lead her brother Paul (Holmes Zimmermann) further astray and to “help” his landlady in his own peculiar way.

Erna tells him if he doesn't stop staring he'll get a squint.

He’s a real character of depth and deception and so is Erna who must resist his attentions and temptation: she is the hope to counter-balance his resigned criminality but she can’t do it on her own. Trautschold is a compelling presence and runs the full gamut of despair with a retrained display. At one point Jutzi moves his camera between her and Bienert’s lodger and then across to his wife, a prostitute played by Vera Sacharowa: they’re trying to get her to turn tricks to pay Mother Krause’s debts and her face runs a mixture of relief and dismay as she weighs up the benefit and the cost…

The Krause family lives off the rent from tehri tenant as well as mother and daughter delivery newspapers – it’s hard work and whilst Erna skips up the stairs with the daily news, mother is getting slower and slower. Widowed long ago by the war, she has raised her two children and it has ground her down.

Paul lets everyone down...

In such circumstances, you are only one pay day from disaster and so when her son Paul spends most of her wages on a mad boozy night, Mother Krause quickly runs out of options: she pawns what jewels she has but it is not quite enough to pay her rent. NO one will lend her any money and whilst her lodger gives her some, she is still 20 marks short and facing prison unless she can raise the cash.

The lodger tries to use this situation to get Erna on the game and Paul involved in his criminal side lines… bit by bit the situation gets worse, no one can really help anyone else. The exception here is Max (Friedrich Gnaß), Erna’s boyfriend who, despite being put off by the lodger’s crass admissions about Erna, eventually forgives her as she falls into step with a communist party march. This sequence has a pre-neo-realist feel to it as the camera follows Erna along the line of the march as she searches for Max and their re-union, despite his mate chiding him that “we’re on a protest”

As Mutter Krause Alexandra Schmitt gives a performance of quietly perfect desperation, a woman worn down by misfortune who has not only reached the end of her tether she’s seen it flash and burn as it flies off in front of her. She is the heroic figure Bela Labazs wanted and she takes it all the way: of Susan Sarandon had driven up in an open-topped sports car, she’d had been right with her.

The camerawork is also very “naturalistic” and, occasionally hand-held, captures actors and Berlin off their guard much as with Berlin, Symphony of a City, or, of course, People on a Sunday. I watched it with Joachim Barenz’ recorded score.

One thing that jarred is the almost gratuitous second victim in the closing tragedy, I could understand the first but the second seemed designed to expand on the shock. That said, this is an angry film with an agenda: the story was supposedly based on true events and you don’t have to imagine family tragedies in poverty for they are happening now, every hour of every day in Germany and in Britain.

What is to be done? 

The painting's on the wall.

You can still catch lots of excellent Weimar cinema in the last week of the BFI season - it is ending with a bang!

Lust for life… The Oyster Princess (1919)/I Don't Want to be a Man (1918), BFI Weimar Cinema Season

"A Foxtrot Epidemic Suddenly Breaks Out During the Wedding…"

Ain’t no party like a Weimar party and the party that you really need at that party is Ossi Oswalda. Before Pola’s energy Ernst Lubitsch had Ossi’s optimism; a free-spirited comedian who carried ferocious commitment to the comedy cause as well as an easy conviction that this all made perfect sense: marrying the wrong man, being bathed by dozens of servants, picking up handsome drunks and taking them home, that’s Ossi. Dressing up in drag to go dancing with your male pal – who thinks you’re a guy - getting blotto and kissing him all the way home, that’s Ossi too… at a dark time for her country, this woman knew how to enjoy the moment and she had such gleeful command on screen. Ossi must have helped so many laugh their way around the misery outside.

Ernst Lubitsch was the man directing of course but Ossi is the lead singer on his songs and everything stand or falls on her ability to make us laugh and she is one of those characters with whom it is so easy to connect even a century down the line. She knows and she knows we know too.

Harry Liedtke and Ossi Oswalda share a moment

Both films are so audacious, so modern and still challenging. This is the German sense of humour and it is certainly not Hollywood’s… not even Hellzapoppin’ of the Marx Brothers or the gentile serial killing of Kind Hearts… it’s playful and knowingly surreal in a manner that is distinctly more artful.

For The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin) we see Mister Quaker, the American Oyster King (Victor Janson) smoking an unfeasibly large cigar with the help of half-a-dozen black servants – racial comment duly noted – he is so rich that everything he does is over-done for him by a moving mass of servants. His daughter Ossi (Ossi!) is spoilt rotten and her main means of expression during ongoing bouts of boredom is to simply wreck things; there are always other “things” to replace them…

“Why are you throwing those newspapers?”

“Because all of the vases are broken.”

The Oyster King and some staff

Ossi is perturbed because The Shoe Cream King’s daughter has married a count and she has decided it is time for her to get one up and marry a prince. Mister Quaker agrees to “buy” her one and employs Seligson, the matchmaker (Max Kronert) to source an appropriate model.

Impoverished Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke) is the man required but things do not run smoothly as his pal Josef (Julius Falkenstein) goes to negotiate with the House of Oyster, only to end up marrying Osi in Nucki’s name… but there’s madness in his method.

There’s a whole truck load of daft surrounding this, Ossi goes for her extended bath-time, aided by dozens of hand-towel maids, hundreds wait on the wedding banquet and Ossi is clearly not bothered about who she marries until she spots a charming drunk, Nucki, and smuggles him home…

Prince Nucki's tired and he wants to go to bed, he had a little drink...

Over and over Mister Quaker says “I’m not Impressed…” the rich – Americans – are bored but finally, even he is charmed by true love no matter how convoluted its arrival. Lubitsch balances everything so well and there’s never a moment when the silly transcends the story – remarkable discipline for a mad-cap caper and proof that Ernst was a filmmaker first and a comedy storyteller second.

Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don't Want to be a Man) (1918)

Of course, we see this too in tonight’s other film, made the previous year and clearly under the influence of the new winds that were already blowing strongly into Berlin.

Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don't Want to be a Man and sometimes, I Wouldn’t Want to be a Man: these are not personal statements you understand just different versions of the film title…) Ossi Oswalda is energetically an uncontrollable tomboy who finds the saving graces of her gender through cross-dressing. Now, I barely grasp the nuances of the modern debate on sex and gender but I do know that Lubitsch goes further than many would have expected with still-shocking subtleties.

Ossi isn’t asking for equality she’s taking it, gambling, drinking and grasping masculine and adult entitlements from which her uncle (Kurt Götz) and governess (Margarete Kupfer) forbid her if only to allow themselves more time to indulge. Lubitsch highlights the comic hypocrisy of both as governess carries on smoking Ossi’s cigarette and uncle grabs a bigger glass to increase the rate of alcoholic intake.

Ossi’s like Iggy with a Lust for Life… worth at least “a million in prizes”, eating cherries and gobbling candies in her window whilst a crowd of young men pleads to be fed like so many hungry penguins. She obliges only for Uncle to chase them away... what the girl surely needs is some discipline or maybe an adventure! Uncle is called away for important work and before he goes, he recruits a stern governor to make sure his ward is properly looked after: Herr Counsellor Brockmüller (Ferry Sikla).

Brockmüller almost immediately brings Ossi to heel with his startling natural authority – he’s also a bit of a looker girls, and, indeed boys! But Ossi is not so easily curtailed and she vows to resist whilst he promises to cut her down to size. The game is afoot!

Ossi decides to play men at their own game and goes off to the gentlemen’s outfitters to order a dinner suit. The assistants fight over measuring her up and decide on splitting the work limb by limb. Men lust after Ossi in groups and make horribly obvious play of their intentions: are you watching Sydney James? But Ossi’s now complicit Babs Windsor or Liz Fraser, she’s not going to take it.

Kitted up in starched collar, bow tie, top hat and tails, Ossi sets off to have fun at the dance hall, catching the eye of several young women as she takes her pretty-boy swagger to the dance. Then she chances across someone familiar: Herr Brockmüller. Jealously, she tries to attract away Brockmüller’s favoured escort and as he rushes to confront the impudent challenge of this young man, turns to find his target already lost to another man. Women eh? Butterfly minds and unreliable… He takes solace in his new acquaintance who, it transpires, is an excellent drinking buddy.

Boys who like boys who are girls etc

It’s a long night and by the time the two fall out onto the pavement, it’s the morning and they’re struggling to think or walk straight, putting on each other's overcoats which happen to include their address cards. Confused by the cards, their driver takes them to each other’s houses but not before some curious drunken smooching. Cheekily subversive. the kissing has the audience running through the permutations: Ossi knows what she’s doing but Herr Brockmüller is clearly a man of broad tastes… she knows but he doesn’t.

Lubitsch clearly delight in this transgressive confusion and the iconoclastic Ossi who was far more that a fashionably strong woman trying to find a new level in a society robbed of so many men. In Germany as elsewhere, the War left an opportunity for gender equality and Ossi was here to grab that chance with both hands either in a suit or in a dress… for the continuation of the film’s title is clearly: I want to be a woman!

Herr Lubitsch

Both films are available as part of the priceless Lubitsch in Berlin DVD box set from Masters of Cinema/Eureka but seeing them on screen is, of course, the best way to really meet Ossi!

The BFI’s Weimar Cinema season has another week to run so check out the remaining goodies: how to follow all this?!

Playing with fire… Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), BFI Weimar Cinema Season

Well, this was it, I long ago decided to not watch my DVDs of this film as I wanted to see it first on the big screen and Herr Pabst and Louise Brooks did not disappoint. Diary is not another Pandora’s Box but it is a film that gives Brooks the chance to show her acting range and Pabst the opportunity to focus on her remarkable expression and, yes, the rest of her; perhaps the sexual superpower of the silent era (awarded retrospectively), with a character in search of herself and not a purely natural spirit like Lulu.

After watching Mother Krause and Kuhle Wumpe earlier in the BFI’s Weimar season, this is a more focused and ultimately more politically liberal and mainstream tale although we still have the seemingly obligatory suicides… they needed to do something about those windows and accessibility to dangerous prescription drugs. Pabst's film is certainly part of die neue Sachlichkeit, but it's more polished than those two films but that’s not to say it doesn’t cover the darker side of life. Writer and Brooks/Pabstpert, Pamela Hutchinson, gave a fascinating introduction, quoting the actress in saying they were attempting to show the “flaming reality” of “sexual hatred” and this film does indeed burn right up until a telling last moment.

“I think in the two films Pabst made with me… he was conducting an investigation into his relations with women, with the object if conquering any passion that interfered with his passion for his work…” Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks

The thing that flames the fiercest is of course Louise Brooks and whether she’s playing an ingenue, a reform school girl, prostitute or woman grasping her destiny, performs with grace and an almost casual conviction. Pabst’s camera closes in over and over on her astonishing believability lost as much as his audience in the emotional intelligence as well as the structure of her expression: killing us softly with her smile. One first viewing this film does not have the script or story power of Pandora and yet the performance is all of the same quality: this is It squared.

Pabst may well have been fighting to overcome sexual instinct but he was keen to maximise his new found asset and had it in mind to cast her as Lola Lola in what would become The Blue Angel, but whilst he lost out on the rights to that, he also could never really make a Dietrich out of Brooks who, having burned her Yankee bridges by refusing to overdub The Canary Murder Case, decided Europe wasn’t for her after one more film, Prix de Beauté with Pabst’s script involvement and direction from Augusto Genina, which, along with Beggars of Life, completes an impressive top four from her brief career.

A crown of innocence: Josef Rovensky and LB

Who knows what could have been but, we have what we have and this film added so much delightful substance to my impression of Brooks as an actor proving that Pandora’s Box – which I’ve seen dozens of times – was no one off and that she and her director could almost match it even with subject matter drawn from Margarete Böhme’s sensationalist 1906 novel which dealt with a woman’s fall into prostitution – a story Böhme claimed to be based on truth. All a far cry from a Frank Wedekind play. It’s a simpler story but one that provides an interesting fall and rise for Brooks to contend with. Her character Thymiane is the daughter of a well-to-do pharmacist, Robert Henning (Josef Rovensky) who’s only weaknesses are a fondness for young housekeepers and trusting his assistant Meinert (Fritz Rasp) rather too much.

Brooks later said that Fritz Rasp was one of her more alluring co-stars...

Meinert takes advantage of Thymiane – forcibly - and she gets pregnant. At the same time her father is seducing his latest housekeeper, Meta (Franziska Kinz) with the previous one Elizabeth (Sybille Schmitz, later to star in Vampyr) having already been dismissed. There’s perhaps a line between the two men and their relationships with younger women especially given what is to come for Thymiane and later for Meta…

Thymiane has the baby but refuses, understandably, to marry a man she doesn’t love. The baby is placed into care and the young woman is sent to a reform school as her father is encouraged by Meta who knows her power.

The story takes a dark and more expressionist turn as Thymiane enters a highly disciplined reform school run by a director played by the extraordinary Valeska Gert and her husband, the equally odd Andrews Engelmann. These two create an evil pairing although Gert gives her nastiness an extra twist with her curious enjoyment in watching the girl’s exercise… all I can say is Hedy, you and your pearls may have been beaten to the punch by a couple of years and in the weirdest of ways.

Thymiane escapes the school with her pal Erika (Edith Meinhard) aided by her pal the penniless Count Osdorff (Andre Roanne) who has been disinherited by his Uncle (Arnold Korff) for being a likeable if listless waster. Thymiane discovers that her baby has died and in desperation moves in with Erika at a brothel in sequences that still carry coy intent directly or indirectly. The madam (Marfa Kassatskaya) kits her out in high heels and evening dress and in a moment of transcendence offers the young woman a glass of champagne which she gulps down – a baptism of Bollinger.

Brooks and Edith Meinhard

Soon, after collecting on her first customer, Thymiane lying unhappily in bed as a wad of notes rest next to her… Thymiane advertises herself as a fitness/dance instructor and Brooks herself  would return to dance teaching in the thirties and, much later, would turn tricks in New York before finding salvation in writing after rediscovery. Her first customer features a bizarre turn from a weirdly bearded Sig Arno who follows her callisthenics before getting too excited and being shooed away with a lighter wallet.

The “lost girl” has found a new direction and yet things cone to a head when she spots her father and, Meta, now his wife, slumming it in a low-rent night club. Father and daughter are heartbroken but Meta rushes her husband away before any rapprochement is possible. Her father dies in misery and her inheritance offers Thymiane the chance to finally change direction… what would Lulu do? Nothing at all like Thymiane whose character gets the chances denied her more elemental “twin” in an ending I must admit I didn’t see coming at all…

Ultimately, I am amazed that given the intense interest in Brooks ,that Diary gets screened so rarely; it’s a fine companion to Pandora and helps give a more complete picture of the actress; she was no one-hit wonder, just A Wonder and, with Pabst’s help and a very strong supporting cast, made her mark here too.

Thank you, BFI, PH, GWP and LB! There’s still more Pabst to come in June with The Joyless Street (1925) details on the BFI website along with the last few weeks of this splendid Weimar season.

Sybille Schmitz

Josef Rovenský  and Franziska Kinzas

Sexy Fritz Rasp (apparently)

Andrews Engelmann

The excellent Valeska Gert

Edith Meinhard

Sig Arno, dontcha know

Trapped?

Pabst was pleased with this tracking shot of Brooks running up the stairs, it's mirrored by her slow trudge near the ending...

Now I can watch these...