When you’re a boy… The Snowbird (1916), Cinema’s First Nasty Women Box Set

How do I know that you do not lie, all women lie!

 

A couple of years before Nell Shipman and her menagerie made their way to “God’s Country” another, altogether less robust woman was trekking across land and snow to look after the men in her life albeit in the hills of northern California. Mabel Taliaferro was tiny in comparison to sturdy Nell, and she probably also had warm hotel rooms built into her contract, but here she plays almost as feisty as the rich man’s daughter who finds something worth fighting for up in the snowy wastes of Canada.

 

Presented on Disc Four of the Mighty Cinema’s First Nasty Women set, The Snowbird provides something of a cross-dressing companion to Phil for Short the other gender bent feature included in this venture and it follows a similar path in that its heroine does not dress as a man for romantic reasons for the practical purpose of projecting a challenge to male dominance. The fact that she finds a woman-hating man who comes to appreciate her first as a boy is neither here nor there… There’s no Weimar sauciness in this confusion just that the man in question is won over by what she does as a man before realising that she has proved him wrong in his categorical feelings about the “lying, devious, faithless…” group of humanity known as Womankind.

 

It's only money matters my dear, you would not understand…

Mabel Taliaferro and Warren Cook

As in Phil, Lois Wheeler’s Mabel Taliaferro has a nice fool for a father, who needs protecting from himself. Daddy Wheeler (Warren Cook) is living in a big house with a portfolio of businesses but a liquidity issue based on cashflow complications that I wouldn’t want to worry your pretty little heads about let alone mine. Wheeler’s so close to broke that he asks his friend Bruce Mitchell (James Cruze), currently attempting to woo his daughter over a game of tennis, to loan him some money based on his share of some lumber land in Chalet, Quebec.

 

The land is worth twice what Mitchell signed up for and is co-owned with a French-Canadian (aye, aye…) Jean Corteau (Edwin Carewe, who also directs) who has inherited it from his father. It seems a safe bet but when Wheeler heads to see his attorney in Chalet, Magistrate Le Blanc (John Melody), he discovers that a fire has destroyed his copy; only Corteau has a copy and he is not inclined to find it, realising that he can take all of the site which, you’ll have to forgive me, seems very un-Canadian.

 

The plot gets much thicker as Mitchell, rebuffed by Mabel, who likes his tennis but not his amorous intention, declaring the match 40-Love in her favour, sees a way of forcing a tie-break and blackmailing the old man into selling his daughter’s hand in exchange for the debt he can no longer complete.

Edwin Carewe multi-tasks as director and women-hater

Like a wounded snowbird you have fallen from the sky to share my loneliness … here you can stay and be my boy.

 

When the going gets tough, the woman gets going though and Mabel is transformed when travelling up to plead with Corteau, disguising herself as a boy who the odd bachelor decides to take in as his ward, trusting the youth far more than the woman from Paris who, in his youth, had made a fool of him and spurned his advances in front of polite society leaving him to seek bitter isolation among the woods and ice.

 

Mabel aims to steal his copy of the contract but, you wonder, is there anything else she might steal… time will tell, especially as the mean old Mitchell also heads north to protect his ill-gotten gains.

This sparkling restoration comes with an all-new score from Diana Reason, who plays piano and keyboard, Sean Sonderegger on sax and woodwind, Peter Valsamis on drums and Jan Michael Looking Wolf on native American flute. It’s playful and energetic and adds greatly to the viewing experience of a film that balances humour and drama in skilfully interlaced measures.

 

Definitely a wrong-un'... James Cruze

Directed with wit and economy by Carewe, the story is based on a plot credited to Mary Ryder and June Mathis, two of the many women writers working in American film at this point, a situation that was to change dramatically over the next few decades as the studio system rigged opportunity and agenda in favour of men; the facts speaking for themselves in an industry still to reach the same levels of female involvement. Change is happening once again but progression is no longer guaranteed, is it?

 

I’d not seen Mabel Taliaferro before and her stage experience plus an awareness of the cinematic remit sees her put in a delightfully natural performance that makes her character’s transition all the more winning. Character will out indeed, and her Lois is resourceful and steadfast, identifiable and inspirational, just as Philomena was, a new kind of feminine hero just as the times they were indeed changing as the Great War brought women to the forefront of manufacture and other industries not just film where they already contributed in abundance!

 

Mabel Taliaferro 

 

The box set can be ordered direct from Kino Lorber or via all good retailers around the World, it's even available via UK Amazon now. Whilst I suspect you may already have it; I still wouldn’t want you to miss out on one of the key releases of this century.

Granda Pa Trump had a hotel near these frozen wastes in the 1900s and he would have been bowled over by Mabel Taliaferro and her cousins Leontine et al, if only they’d done more stage work in the far North West, perhaps his grandson might have been just a little less of the misogynistic misanthrope he has become with his original coining of the phrase Nasty Woman. Well Junior, these women are not nasty they’re just forceful, funny and smart and if that’s a problem for you… just blow it out your ear! 

Grand designs… La Règle du jeu (1938), BFI Blu-ray, Out Now!

 

Today everyone lies. Pharmaceutical fliers, governments, the radio, the movies, the newspapers. So why shouldn't simple people like us lie as well?

Jean Renoir’s game has rules but you have to work them out for yourselves, doubly difficult when your French is as poor as mine, but you’re soon submerged in a subtitle-enhanced battle of meaning with the director and his outstanding players. This film nearly didn’t survive to beguile and befuddle subsequent generations as, out of favour pre-war it languished in vaults subsequently destroyed by the allies before being recreated from various sources in the late fifties under the supervision of its director. Now, recently restored in 4K by La Cinémathèque française and Les Grands Films Classiques, it is now released by the BFI on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK.

The rules of the game are whatever the people at the top say they are, whether they are upstairs or down, in this microcosm of French society as it prepared for hardships with neighbouring fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany. The power that be disliked the film’s tone and whilst it had already been sliced down to just over 80 minutes by its producers on release, it was soon withdrawn in favour of more propagandist and light-hearted fare; who wanted to see a negative take on the elite that was about to be their only chance of survival?

The films as it now stands comes in at 107 minutes and is, of course, much closer to Renoir’s intended vision. It’s still ranked very highly in Sight and Sounds greatest hits and so it should be as it represents an extraordinary feet of imagination and construction with a tone mixing the fantastic and prosaic and characters who lie to each other and themselves, not to mention you and me. I’d not seen it for years but whilst the hunting scenes remained grimly familiar – many animals were harmed in the making of this film – I’d not really absorbed the technical fluency of the sets, the cast of dozens in constant motion, and the lengthy takes designed to allow the performances full expression.

Nora Gregor greets the heroic Roland Toutain in her character's controlled way...

Renoir uses the deepest focus, to show his many characters as they transition across frames within frames, in and out of dramatic focus in a physically theatrical way and also so painterly; la pomme does not fall too far from l'arbre peut-être? Renoir was fascinated in the group interactions, from and his sets are alive with motion and character and you can’t miss a second.

The cast and the playing is something akin to an archly surreal British farce or the most screwed up screwball comedy; rapid fire dialogue but mixed messages and casual, covert intent. Almost everyone lies and confesses to lying, most change with the wind loving this or that person on a whim, all confused, spoilt or spoiled. So many satirical British films tried to cover the same ground in the swinging, snide sixties but almost everyone failed, they just didn’t swing with the meaning enough and they failed to charm… the only thing that matters in such circumstances.

There’s none more charming than Nora Gregor, who started in the silent era staring in Dreyer’s ground-breaking Michael (1924) and more, as Christine, Marquise de la Chesnaye, loved by most of the men and yet disconnected from febrile affection. This was certainly not the case amongst the viewing public, an Austrian actor who spoke little French and who, to quote David Jenkins and Trevor Johnston from their superb commentary, was colloquially referred to as “that bitch from Austria!” She was, however, exactly what Renoir needed, actual nobility – she was married to a Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg – and a sympathetic Germanic character just as Erich von Stroheim had been in the previous year’s Le Grande Illusion.

Marcel Dalio

Christine is the wife of Robert, Marquis de la Chesnaye as played by Marcel Dalio, who projects a World-weary joie de vivre and a resignation that despite his wealth and position, his beautiful wife and his vivacious long-term lover Geneviève (Mila Parély), his one true love might be his recording collection – close to the bone this - and his musical automatons. Having nearly everything the one thing he lacks is control and his people are not as predictable nor as dependable as his toys.

 

One of Christine’s oldest friends, a man who knew her conductor father well, is Octave (Jean Renoir) who is the fizz that makes his friends emotional bubbles burst. He’s a disappointed man, who’s mind races far to fast for his achievements to ever catch up and who casually delivers one of the film’s most telling statements when discussing Robert’s shellac; The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons. Reasons, of course, that will always lead to disappointment and disconnections.

 

One man with very specific reasons is André Jurieux (Roland Toutain) who arrives in his aeroplane at the film’s start having crossed the Atlantic in an attempt to impress Christine. André forms one angle of a love pentangle – at least – with the subject of his amour in most of the men’s hearts not to mention other’s loyalty. He immediately expresses public regret that she is not there to greet him and is lucky when his mutual friend, and everyone else’s, Octave arranges for him to attend a weekend shoot at the la Chesnaye’s country retreat and all of the ingredients are brought together.

Man versus Animals

As above so below and Christine’s maid Lisette (the sparkling Paulette Dubost) is pursued by newly hired poacher-turned-servant Marceau (Julien Carette) in spite of her husband, Robert's gamekeeper Schumacher (Gaston Modot) looming jealously large. Then there are a dozen other players who contribute a richness to the story in a masterful interplay of looks and lines that are as leanly impactful as possible.

The centrepiece is the animal hunt which is painful to watch especially the slow death of one unlucky rabbit. Renoir was a nature lover and this section was directed by the assistant director under his instruction, he couldn’t bear seeing the slaughter; and indeed, plenty of animals were injured and killed in the making of this film. At the end, the field is strewn with the bodies of the rabbits and birds, the actual dead, lying like so many fallen soldiers. Meanwhile the hunters laugh and joke, detached from the morality of the situation and numb to the suffering of others be they animal or even human.

The rest of the film demonstrates the latter in something akin to not so much a comedy of errors but of confused indifference… true depth of feeling is hard to fathom as the rules of etiquette, the laws of the jungle and the trembling French lower lip are exhibited in microscopic detail. It’s such a curiously conflicted world; do as thy won’t, shall be the whole of the law even with power and the money and the freedom that you’d expect goes with both.

Marcel Dalio and Jean Renoir

As you expect from the BFI, the special features are indeed très spéciaux:

·         Newly commissioned commentary by film writers David Jenkins and Trevor Johnston

·         Image par image: La Règle du jeu (1987, 43 mins): a detailed analysis from Jean Douchet and Pierre Oscar Lévy

·         Leslie Caron on La Règle du jeu (2016, 18 mins): the actor introduces the film as part of the Screen Epiphanies series at BFI Southbank – an absolute delight!!

·         La Vie est à nous (1936, 64 mins): French Communist Party election film depicting political turmoil and the threat of fascism, with creative input from Jean Renoir and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among others

·         Pheasant Shooting (1913, 1 min): newsreel item on the start of the shooting season in a Norfolk game reserve

·         Society on the Moors (1921, 1 min): newsreel footage of Lord and Lady Savile’s shooting party on the Yorkshire Moors near Hebden Bridge, where there’s brass there’s crass!

·         Stills gallery

·         An illustrated booklet with a new essay by David Thompson and an essay by Ginette Vincendeau originally published in Sight and Sound; notes on the special features and credits. This is with the first pressing only so, be quick!

You can order the set direct from the BFI Shop online or in person and, it is indeed one of the most significant films ever made and all the more enjoyable for that; you won’t waste a single second bringing this into your sitting room.

 

"I give up. You can fight hatred but not boredom..."

Primal Pola… Bestia (The Polish Dancer) (1917), FINA Blu-ray box

Pola Negri – Asta from Poland

Buffalo Bill…

She is a star in our homeland

Buffalo Bill…

Warsaw cabaret song circa 1917

 

This 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 as the dancing girl in a German revival of Max Reinhardt's theatre production of Sumurun – she’d also been in a successful Polish run of this play in 1913 which got her noticed by Warsaw’s Sfinks film company. During the German production, she met Ernst Lubitsch, who would, of course, later direct her, and Swedish legend Jenny Hasselqvist, in a film version of that play, released in 1920 but, before that was Die Augen der Mumie Ma (1918), Carmen (1918) followed by Madame DuBarry aka, in the USA, Passion (1919) which was an international hit and opened the door even in America. A new wave of European sexual sophistication was about to blast past the Griffith Girls and their dated innocence, and, as it always does, Hollywood started acquiring as much Germanic talent as it could.

In 1917 it’s worth pointing out, especially after watching the excellent season of Jerzy Skolimowski films at the BFI and on their new Blu-Ray/DVD set, that Poland was, as ever, in political flux and divided between Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Russian Empire. Sfinks was the pioneering production company and was able to gain success through distribution to the Russian market. It’s no coincidence that Bestia, as directed by Aleksander Hertz – founder of Sfinks – has a similar style to Russian films of say Yevgeni Bauer and other pre-Revolutionary filmmakers, with largely static cameras capturing intensely well-choreographed players using every inch of the performance space in rich and layered sets.

Pola's Apache dance

Hertz was one of those who recognised the hit potential of Asta Nielsen in the Danish Afgrunden (1910) and their distribution of that film and that star to the Russian market, made enough for the company to start making its own films. Again, it’s no co-incidence at all, that Pola performs an Apache dance very similar to Asta’s, wrapping herself even more provocatively around her cowboy; a trained dancer unlike Die Asta also less of an actor perhaps but more of a natural Earth spirit. In Bestia she repeats a similar attempt to produce a Polish Asta in Slave to Her Senses (1914), sadly now lost.

Her acting was mainly based on the best example of the time, which was Asta Nielsen… We were imitating her characterisation. Big, black, boldly accentuated eyes, very pale face and lips – big, red and pouty. The acting technique was overloaded with expressive gesticulations which at the time was supposed to replace the dynamic of spoken words. Halina Bruczówna, fellow Sfinks’ star speaking in 1936.

Pola was just 19 when she filmed Bestia probably in the autumn of 1916 and the originally named Barbara Apolonia Chalupec, had already lived a lot of life, the daughter of an activist father who had fought against both Austria Hungary and the Russians, being sent to Siberia and costing the family almost everything as her mother struggled as a cook to bring her up. Ill health stopped her ballet career in her teens but she lied about her age to get into the Academy of Dramatic Arts where she obviously excelled at turning her lived experience into dramatic gold dust.

Ain't no party like a Pola party!

That this sole survivor of the actor’s early period survives at all is due to an American lawyer Jesse A. Levinson, who bought copies of Pola’s Polish films in the hope of capitalising on her success in his home country. He replaced the titles with new one in English and took out all references to the original filmmakers claiming the film as his own which whilst fraudulent, enabled it to survive whilst European chaos ended up in the destruction of most Polish films of this period. It’s hard to know what other editing decisions were made but as the EYE’s Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi points out in the fab booklet accompanying this release, it’s likely that the Apache dance may have had some of the more risqué moments excised.

What we see in this superb restoration from the Polish National Film Archive – Audio-visual Institute (FINA) is almost complete though at some 64 minutes long and is a richly satisfying example of a pure Pola performance, the Polish Asta indeed. Premiered in 2018, the institute have released a Blu-ray which I bought from the Cineteca Bologna which is a sumptuous box set complete with extras and a 58-page booklet in Polish and English.

Pola is electric throughout as if instinctively understanding the nascent art of film acting helped, as noted above, by the example set by Asta but there’s a difference between the two that does make the Pole present as more of herself. She’s Lubitsch’s wildcat already, sexy, witty, confident and with the biggest, blackest eyes in silent cinema. She’s more than able to catch and maintain our attention though joyful febrility and the feeling that she knows you’re looking and just why; well before Hitchcock she made voyeurs of us all. She improved as an actress without doubt but there’s few as explosively nuanced and more straightforwardly erotic humans ever been seen on screen.

Pola's room, complete with self-referential banners and photographs

Gathering myself I notice there’s a plot in which 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. She nearly causes a fight between two competing males, before heading off with Dymitr (Jan Pawłowski) and from there to home. After a blazing row with her father, Pola decides to leave and enlists Dymitr’s help and finances to do it. The couple stay at an hotel run by untrustworthy friends of Dymitr 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 his empty wallet.

In the big city Pola soon gets noticed… and, after getting a job modelling hats, gets asked out by a customer who takes her to the ballet where she’s transfixed by the dancer on stage. Pola starts taking lessons herself and we switch forward to her as a rising star at the Cabaret Ardent. This is one of those skilfully constricted scenes within the frame of the static camera, customers sat at a table up front, tables in the middle ground and Pola on stage at the right. The scene shifts as the camera focuses on her dancing and the appreciation of those foregrounded customers one of whom is the playboy Aleksy (Witold Kuncewicz), smitten with what he has just seen but very much married to his wife Sonia (Maria Dulęba) with a daughter to prove it.

Pola knows none of this and begins an affair with Aleksy who furnishes her with an apartment and many fine dresses – the haute couture is delicious as it often is in films of this decade – fashion wasn’t democratised until the twenties but there was plenty of stunning design at play for the well to do. Alesky’s homelife is given sufficient attention to build up his conflicted stress and whilst this is a classic love triangle – with all the angles wresting on Alesky the Cheat – there’s enough to guarantee heartbreak.

And all the while, jilted and de-funded Dymitr has also made it to the city and is working as a waiter at the Cafe de Paris… 

Pola drives Aleksy mad but he's pretty dumb anyway

The restoration comes with a new score from film composer Włodek Pawlik whose jazzy score aims to reach across the century and to “…reflect the meaning of emotions and what is most important in real life and in the film… permanent values regardless of technology and time.” There are some funky surprises in the score which, the more I listened the more I grew accustomed to… heck, there’s plenty of ways to go wrong with a silent score but this is Pawlik’s view and it does settle down to a pleasingly upbeat groove with the film’s lovely visuals and Hertz’s maximisation of the drama and minimisation of the fuss: things go as they must but he makes sure we enjoy it for as long as possible. No spoilers mind…

Bestia is definitely worth seeking out to add to your Pola collection or indeed any collection of early film. It’s quite hard to find online, there’s someone selling copies on eBay but you can order from this Polish site if you can navigate the language.

Games for May… Enys Men (2022), Live at BFI and on Dual Format, from 8th May

As I’ve remarked before, this film and its soundtrack can be seen as part of a wider Hauntology movement and this is no more apparent than in the sparse electronica director Mark Jenkin uses as the film’s score. For this special May Day screening of a film based on events on this day, the writer/director teamed with musician Dion Star as ‘The Cornish Sound Unit’, their collaborative music project to perform a live score for the film which, in the grand tradition of silent film accompaniment, combined the airs of musical uncertainty, audience reaction and the big NFT 1 screen, to create a fresh experience of  film that continues to hold its mystery.

 

The duo mixed improvised and composed pieces used tape machines, analogue synths, feedback and field recordings to provide a new mix perhaps surprised, as any silent musician will tell you, by the ways in which they responded musically to a film they’ve seen so many times and yet only played live to once before at a rehearsal in Poole. This early evening, as the sun dropped chillingly below the Thames, this was May Day magic… a place of confused memories, approached with trepidation because of failing recollection and a connection to the stones and the land in ways that only the neolithic mind understands. This is Hauntology after all, the scene that haunts itself.

 

By the end of the performance, I felt that I’d interpreted this film I’ve seen twice before in a different way, with the live performance soon melting within the visuals and the hushed audience asking themselves new questions. Even the film’s star, Mary Woodvine, sat directly in front of me and such a defining presence in the film, revealed afterwards that she was noticing new aspects of the film with the music. Like the well next to the abandoned tin mine in the film (West Penwith), the truth and Mary’s performance run deep, and it speaks volumes of her care in creating this character that there are mysteries unconscious to the actor and to us all.

Monitoring the flowers

I think on previous viewings I’d been too aware of style and influence and, maybe after weeks watching mostly the films of Jerzy Skolimowski – Mr Jenkin having created a short 16mm tribute to the locations of the Pole’s The Shout – I’m more attuned to non-linear and purely cinematic expression. Mark and Jerzy, Mary too, leave their explanations all on the screen and it’s up to the audience to interpret what’s before them, and these films probably defy spoilers too, you have to experience them to even have a clue.

 

As with his previous film, Bait, Jenkin uses lovely 16mm film stock and films silently with  post-synched sound, although this time he uses colour which not only provides more period feel but also illuminates numerous plot points in a tale set on 1^st May 1973… ah yes, I remember it, in love with Karen Gough in the first year of secondary school and just shifting from Slade and Sweet to Pink Floyd and Bowie. But how much do I really recall, shattered moments and moods, memories recalled and re-written thousands of times until the actuality is almost lost beneath layers of my own mythmaking.

 

This is the feeling of the film, the plain story is obscured by the efforts to make sense of it and the deceptive regularity of the Volunteers daily routine, the stylistic resonance of the early 70s and the distinctively irregular cutting of Jenkin’s rich imagination. He builds up a sense of place and the sense of that place is not easily interpreted as we rely almost entirely on the Volunteer with the camera, and creator’s eye, only occasionally “speaking” to us directly.

Dropping the stone by the old mine

The story is centred on a wildlife volunteer, played superbly by Mary Woodvine who is uncanny in every sense. The Volunteer works for the Wildlife Trust and her job it is to monitor a rare flower on an uninhabited island off the coast of Cornwall. Through her painstaking daily routines Jenkin slowly detaches the narrative from the linear and the viewer from their expectations of standard progression. On her daily trips to the cliff-face, near an abandoned tin mine she checks the soil temperature, the growth of the plant and as she walks past the old mine, drops a stone down a shaft to hear is splosh in the deep dark waters. Back in her cottage she writes down the date and notes anything unusual: every day is just the same “no change”. All the while there are the abrupt interruptions of the radio, her daily firing up of the oil-powered generator and the noises heard or imagined from the old mine.

In addition to this sound collage, we had the sonic dislocations of The Cornish Sound Unit and I could see them working with keyboards, computers and even magnetic tape to contribute to the dialogue and existing found sounds, the wind and rain, the plop of the stone deep down the well. This is not a score in the traditional sense but a parallel narrative designed to reflect the sights on screen but also to conflict with them, to undermine their normative significance and to describe the Volunteer’s state of mind whilst affecting our own. I know that’s the job of film score but this is very much a different pallet.

 

Our minds may begin to wonder as the Volunteer’s begins to wander and gradually, we’re presented with faces and events that may be real, imagined past or present.

 

Jenkins’ camera is relentless in its focus on minutia, odd-shaped rocks, an old, rusted rail from the mine, birds and plants, the volunteer’s walking boots on the crumbling steps… it’s hypnotic and riveting as any or all may be providing clues. There’s a pace that reminds you of Peter Greenaway (who made a few public information films in his time) as well as Derek Jarman certainly around the time of The Garden.

 

People start to appear, a young woman (Flo Crowe) who may be the Volunteer’s daughter or someone else entirely; maybe even herself. She’s with her, or is she? A visiting Boatman (Edward Rowe, also in Bait) asks her how it is being so alone and she replies that she isn’t, a reference by that point not just to the girl but to an old man/priest played by the legend that is John Woodvine who, I’ve only just realised, is Mary’s father and someone I recall from the period of the film and always enjoy watching in film or on stage. There’s also a collection of lifeboatmen, drowned in 1897, a group of women in traditional dress and dirt encrusted miners. All may be or may not be… are we inside Mary’s view or is she in someone/something else’s memory and just who is the man who has just used her toilet?

 

The landscape itself intrudes on the Volunteer’s thoughts and her physicality… is her solitude getting to her or is there something entirely more metaphysical at work? Does she burn her hands on the oven, how widely does the lichen grow, are events even happening in the right order? Why does she drop stones down the well every day… you’ll have to make up your own mind.

 

Mary Woodvine

Mary Woodvine is indeed extraordinary and being in almost every scene of the film, carries its meaning and its mystery, engaging and yet lost in her character’s own world, as she, almost entirely wordlessly, guides us through the story. There are innumerable close-ups and, once again I think of silent film and technique when assessing Jenkin’s work. This is such a bold film and one that pays so much respect to its audience with its poetic refusal to be specific in anything other than beauty, imagination and wonder.

 

And, ultimately, as Mary said to me at the end, it’s up to us to make of it what we will.

 

Luckily the BFI dual format set arrives on 8^th May and will enable us to pore over this film at our leisure. Presented in High Definition and Standard Definition there are some outstanding special features on the set:

 

• Film Sounds (2023, 86 mins): Mark Jenkin and filmmaker Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, Flux Gourmet) discuss the subtleties of sound in film and this is one of the unmissable highlights of this set, as they look back at the history of unsettling sound, not just score but fear-inducing foley, found sounds and others in and out of context… you could probably make a series out of this subject!
• Audio commentary by director Mark Jenkin and film critic Mark Kermode (2023) which is guaranteed not to
• Mark Jenkin and Mary Woodvine in conversation with Mark Kermode (2022, 29 mins): the film’s director and its star discuss the making of Enys Men in an onstage Q&A filmed at BFI Southbank
• Recording the Score (2022, 6 mins): Mark Jenkin at work on the film’s soundtrack
• Mark Jenkin’s audio diaries (2022, 90 mins): the director charts his filmmaking process.
• Image gallery, a newly created audio description track and theatrical trailer.

Bonus films:

Haunters of the Deep (1984, 61 mins): a Children’s Film Foundation adventure that shares many West Cornwall locations with Enys Men, and made quite an impression on Mark Jenkin 

The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): the strange beauty of Cornwall resonates through this iconic film from the vaults of the BFI National Archive

The first pressing only includes another deal-making illustrated booklet with a Director’s Statement; essays by Tara Judah, Rob Young, William Fowler and Jason Wood; together with credits and notes on the special features.

 

You can pre-order the set now on the BFI shop; it’ll be a different experience from a live screening but it will be as beguiling as it is with every viewing.

 

 

The Cornish Sound Unit get ready to plug in