All my colours… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day Five

 

The effort put into making this film far exceeds anything attempted thus far in France. No bluffing, no pompous blarney, or gibberish preface. No political or social theory, no boring or muddled intertitles… Beauty, truth, art – there’s the secret of the success of La Sultane de l’amour.

La Cinématographie française (18^th October 1919)

Myriad lights, they said I'd be impressed

Arabian nights, at your primitive best...

Siouxsie and the Banshees, Arabian Nights

Some films are almost too impractically beautiful to exist, too unlikely to have been made given the exchange between huge effort and end results, no matter how charming, that make you sad the moment the action stops and they fade from view. Two films today met this criteria, The Blue Bird (1918) and La Sultane de l’amour (1919) – the first I’d seen but not “live” and the second I’d never heard of making it whack me even harder when the first image of the colourised Gaston Modot smiles on screen. Surely they’re not going to keep this up for the whole film? Yes indeed they do and it’s quite any colourised film I’ve seen before with gorgeous deep richness the result of an impeccable digital restoration in 2021 were carried out by the CNC laboratory using three tinted and stencil-coloured nitrate copies from the Cinémathèque française.

 

It's introduced as a missing story from the Arabian Nights... or it might as well be, with nasty Sultan Malik (Paul Vermoyal) bored, bored, bored and looking for some romance or at least aggressive male sexual behaviour. He despatches three knights to find him an appropriate female and yet when Kadjar (Monsieur Modot) discovers Princess Daoulah, the “Sultaness of Love” (France Dhélia – see above!) she informs him that she has other plans…

 

Problematic leader Sultan Malik (Paul Vermoyal) 

Not that it’s any of Kadjar or indeed the Sultan’s business, but Princess D’s plans are centred on the handsome man who recently rescued her from drowning, unknown to her but revealed to us as the hand-tinted rosy-cheeked Prince Mourad (Sylvio de Pedrelli) who, as it happens, is definitely thinking along the same lines. Sadly, Daoulah’s perfectly reasonable request to be left the heck alone, is ignored by the sexually malfunctioning Sultan who decides to kidnap her and use the tried and always successful techniques of abuse and torture to make her fall for his extremely well-hidden charms.

He's the poorest of leaders though alienating Nazir (Marcel Lévesque) his court jester/advisor by abusing him and making fun of his physical disabilities – see, there’s a pattern here – whilst his general administration is building up resistance from the population and other royals including Princess Zilah (Yvonne Sergyl) and Mourad. As tension mounts there’s plenty of dancing, vestals and cross-dressed eunuchs… this is not a film that holds back in presenting the excesses of Arabian socio-political structures. My main concern is that, lacking any kind of industrialised workforce, they’re going to have to wait a long time for the Sultan to be overthrown. Unless true love can win out…

 

Accompaniment was provided by Mauro Colombis on piano, Frank Bockius percussion and  Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on harp. The combination added mystery and flavour to this magical reality and we not only did the time warp again, reality folded around us in ways that will inform our dreams for weeks to come.

 

An absolute cracker!!!

The audience leaving the Teatro Verdi last night...

The Blue Bird (1918) with Neil Brand and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry 

M. Maeterlinck's poem has been transferred from a book to the screen, and it is a safe assertion to say that seldom, if ever, has the atmosphere and spirit of a written work been more faithfully reproduced in motion pictures.

New York Times, 1918

Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird was released just over a year after the director's collaboration with Mary Pickford in The Poor Little Rich Girl and featured such regular collaborators as art director Ben Carré, cinematographer John van den Broke and Editor Clarence Brown. If that film was Revolver this was the full Sgt. Pepper - a flight of fantasy from start to finish: silent psychedelia in full bloom at a time when the World needed to believe in eternal truths and the truth of eternity.

 

When in the heart of their fantastic journey to find the Blue Bird, the two youngsters meet not only their dead grandparents but their dead brothers and sisters, there are at least ten of them... this was a time when infant mortality was high and life came with the flimsiest of "guarantees".

 

The film is a sumptuous collection of such moments and visual set pieces, a hyper-creative comfort blanket that smuggles through the simple message that there's not only no place like home but that kindness must spread out from there into the heart-broken World beyond. There are tightly-defined fantasy constructs - humanised versions of fire, water and light, dogs, cats and wonderful "moods" such as vibrant dancers embodying The Joys of Pure Thoughts and the slightly less impressive Sleeping-More-Than-Necessary (not going to happen here at Le Giornate…).

Tourneur draws pure and naturalistic performances from his cast of children, 12-year old Tula Belle as Mytyl and Robin Macdougall as Tyltyl who react and act with genuine thrill to every new wonder. It's a child's film with many adult concerns.

The accompaniment from Neil Brand on piano and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on harp brought the magic out across the auditorium and melted our stubborn hearts.

Song (1928) with Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius

 

I attended the talk and Q&A with Yiman Wang the author of To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong's Cross-Media World and one of the questions for this actress who struggled to sustain her successes, was when she really showed her qualities as an actor. Yiman pointed to Shanghai Express (1932) directed by Josef von Sternberg and co-staring Marlene Dietrich who, she contends, came of second best to Anna May. I would argue that Piccadilly and Song also allow her considerable expression, especially in comparison to her Hollywood work.

 

In this newly and magnificently restored version, Wong shows full command of her abilities moving effortlessly from drama to comedy and playing with the audience with her controlled expression. She was, as she said, never really a dancer but she could act dancing which is what she does here and in the British film. She ended up paying 200 guineas to learn in Britain in the thirties as people expected her to sing and dance given her oriental background.

 

Anna May Wong excels here because it’s a rare part that allowed her to just be and not just an exotic token or worse still, something sinister. She responds to the camera’s frequently intense gaze with naturalistic gestures and a positive focus on her character and rides out some of the more extraordinary plot elements and costumery with ease and good humour. She’s equally at home fighting off attackers, coming to the rescue during a train robbery and selflessly supporting a selfish man who can’t see further than his own infatuation.

 

The story is set in Istanbul and there are some lovely establishing shots of what would become the scene of Liverpool FC’s Champions League triumph almost 80 years later. Anna May plays Song, a poor woman eking out a living by catching lobsters on the beach. She is spotted by two men who proceed to assault her only to be fought off by a passer-by, Jack Houben (Heinrich George). It’s a pretty grim fight that’s only won when Song gets stuck into help her rescuer.

 

Jack takes Song back for shelter at his humble home and frightens her to death as he demonstrates his profession – a knife thrower. Jack decides she could be an asset to his act and before long she’s dancing in front of the regulars at the homely music hall where he works. Song and Jack’s life seems to have settled but the arrival of a famous ballet dancer is about to upset the precarious balance of their apple cart. There are posters for Gloria Lee (Mary Kid) all over town and Song decides to use one to make an improvised table in Jack’s house, without realising she’s an old flame and that flame is about to be rekindled…

 

Song is a melodrama with some sharp plot turns but Richard Eichberg directs it well enough helped by some excellent cinematography from Heinrich Gärtner and the designs of Willi Herrmann. Whilst Mary Kid makes for an unconvincing ballerina, Heinrich George makes for a believable thrower of knives and, of course, Anna May Wong's smile and ready tears steal the show.

 

Stephen Horne has previously said that, as a young accompanist, he had played along to Song sight unseen (the days before preview discs) and the film’s frequent narrative lurches had made for an engaging challenge. Today he and percussionist Frank Bockius, knew exactly what is coming and their improvisations enriched the film in ways that helped elevate it in the canon of Anglo-German silents and, indeed, in the career of the talented and beautifully-determined Anna May Wong!

History, man... Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day Four

In my part of the media when we’re not slapping you in the face with a paywall or clogging your smart phone with “behaviourally targeted” advertising, we aim for engaging and valuable content. Today at the Giornate was a high-value one with so many films, long and so short you could call them photographs. In short, Peak Pordenone with surprise after surprise and a sense of incredulity about what we had just seen, that it even exists let alone a century down the line. Blessed are the archivists and the programmers, the projectionists and the people who help you down the stairs in the Teatro Verdi.

 

 

Moxov Qiz [The Leper] (1928) with Abror Zufarov and Sobirjon Tuyokov

 

I’m starting again in Uzbekistan with an outstanding film – the best of the strand so far – and a powerful tale about the treatment of women in parts of the Muslim community in the early days of the last century – thereby also highlighting the corruption of the Tsarist regime. This would not be the first touch with issues that remain of modern concerns on today’s programme.

 

Directed by Oleg Frelikh this was based on a treatment by Lolakhan Saifullina (who co-wrote The Second Wife) of a novel by French author Ferdinand Duchêne, a magistrate in Algeria, where he observed the struggle between traditional life and modernity. A young woman, Tyllia-Oi (Ra Messerer, who was also in The Second Wife) marries a wealthy merchant Said-Vali (Grigol Chechelashvili) and soon falls foul of his temper by wearing the Russian style of clothes he favours rather than traditional dress – “don’t forget you’re a Muslim…”.

 

The local Russian authorities are all in the deep pockets of her husband but he still has reason to fear officer Igor Karonin (Andrei Fait who was also in Battleship Potemkin (1925) and much more) who intercepts a message for help from Tyllia-Oi and uses it to blackmail her into sexual favours. He provides some measure of protection for her but after he is sent to a new station in Moscow, she shows too much emotion to her husband when he breaks the news and he uncovers her affair.

 

Ra Messerer

His retaliation is savage and, branded am adulteress and, even though her father makes a complaint about her abuse, the Russians are easily bought off and won’t go against the wishes of the religious court which finds her guilty under Sharia law. She must return to her father who must give Said-Vali a full refund on her dowry… but the highest price is paid in the disgrace and the woman must bear full responsibility.

 

Frelikh directs with subtlety and grace even with this most disheartening story and there are plenty of compositions showing the location and nature as well as the way of life. The transitions between shots are immaculate and the cinematography of Vladimir Dobrzhanskii is outstanding. There was certainly a propogandist agenda to this film but given the source material – based on experience of North Africa – this kind of story is entirely possible in the culture of the time. . Forgetting religion, how many women live like this still?

 

Any country would be proud to have this film as part of their cultural history and the accompaniment from Abror Zufarov and Sobirjon Tuyokov was at once so evocative of their country as well as in perfect tune with this sad and sobering film, one that deserves wider exposure and I hope it gets a screening in the UK soon.

 

The Land of Promise (1924) with José María Serralde Ruiz

 

Directed by Ya’acov Ben Dov, this was another film with propagandist purpose and a “straight” documentary covering the “repopulation” (words can’t be careful enough…) of the land of Palestine by Jewish settlers in the years up to 1924. The initial screening in the UK was followed by a lecture by Leonard Stein of the World Zionist Organization, who claimed that prior to the Balfour Declaration, “Palestine had become a desolate country... a miserable swamp.” (Daily Telegraph, 22^nd December 1924) and it’s one repeated in the film.

 

The arguments against and for this are there for all to research. The screening is a call to make ourselves better informed without rushing to judgement – this is what a trained historian is supposed to say. As a film it is very well made and not dissimilar to Russian works of the period in presenting the results of collaboration for the cause.

 

The accompaniment from José María Serralde Ruiz was well played by conveyed a level of anger that, for me, distracted from the viewing experience. It’s up to the viewers to be historical in their interpretation of this source material and the rights and wrongs of the document, the aims of Zionism and rights to land. If any film encapsulated the significance of cinema as a means of historical record then it’s this one.

 

And yes, Balfour has a lot to answer for but his government were shooting my great grandfather’s comrades in the streets of Liverpool a little over a decade before this during the Transport Strike.

 

Le Hugenot (1909) with Donald Sosin and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

 

This short film will have been programmed to illustrate another key factor about the movement of people as Louis Feuillade’s short feature showed the religious persecution of the Huguenots in the 16^th Century including The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 with modern estimates of the numbers killed ranging from 5-30,000. Whilst the film finishes in a call for peace before God, tens of thousands fled France for protestant countries such as England and via boat.

 

The Pride of the Clan (1917) with Donald Sosin and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

 

It was time for some fun and to marvel again at the epic skillset of Mary the 1st here directed by the genius Maurice Tourneur. Mary is Marget MacTavish who takes over as Chieftain after her father drowns at sea. She’s about to marry Jamie Campbell (Matt Moore) and there’s some silliness with couples in the clan biting sixpence in half so they can hang it around each other’s necks – HG Wells should have sued! But it’s all in fun even when Jamie is revealed to be of noble birth and his birth mother tries to sweep him away to polite society.

 

Well, you know Mary, d’yea think she’ll allow that the noo?

 

Excellent locations from Tourneur create a genuinely Caledonian feel and Elizabeth-Jane’s harp added further Celtic magic along with Donald Sosin’s lines crashing like so many waves against the granite cliffs of this hitherto unknown southern Hebridean island. Great fun!

 

Folly of Vanity (1924), with Philip Carli

 

Once again we were left on a high with this inventive film about the early married life of Alice and Robert Farnsworth as played by the mighty Billie Dove and Jack Mulhall in the style of a proto-screwball comedy. They’ve never had an argument in, oh, six months or so of marriage until Alice buys some fake pearls and wants to go to a party hosted by Mr (John St. Polis) and Mrs Ridgeway (Betty Blythe with the vamp-ometer set to kill!). Mr R has a famous pearl collection and these parties have a reputation for being, louche…

 

They go, they row as Mrs R tries to tempt Robert as her Mr drops temptation round Alice’s neck with a pearl necklace so she can rekindle its lost lustre… There’s a floor show at the party that wouldn’t be out of place at the Moulin Rouge and the charm continues when the guests are invited to the Ridgeways yacht/ocean liner with the couple intent of achieving both their targets.

 

So far so pre-code and boy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet as Alice falls overboard and into the wildest party in the undersea empire of Poseidon. Henry Otto directed this green-tinted gratuity and he directed the steamy heck out of it with more mermaids than there are stars in MGM and an eye-poppin’ amount of flesh on view. The fact that England’s finest, Maurice Elvey directed the other parts of the film makes this all the more shocking, mind you, he’d be filming in Blackpool a few years later for Hindle Wakes and, well, there’s stuff goes on there that also blows the mind!

 

Lulu McGrath

Also seen:

 

Pre-Cousteau underwater adventures including J. Ernest Williamson’s Wonders of the Sea (1922) which seemed to be mostly Lulu McGrath in a swimming costume floating past the coral and angel fish. Neil Brand accompanied in fine style, resolve of steel not to musically quote Yellow Submarine.

 

Columbian films including Garras de Oro (1927) which was essentially an astonishing attack on Teddy Roosevelt’s failed attempt to enable Panamanian separatists to put the canal in more controllable hands. Columbia wins and Uncle Sam takes a bloody nose. How often does this happen. More history and suitably learned accompaniment for this spy thriller from Stephen Horne.

 

Then we had Feminist Fragments 2. Queer Eyes, Loose Lips and Detachable Limbs which was another superb collection of rare Nasty Women grooves including pro-wrestling, Alice Guy’s Les Fredaines de Pierrette (1900) and films that generally showed a surprising amount of feminist feeling or nuanced non-hetero-normative expression. There was also Queen Lyda Borelli the 1^st as St Barbara the patron saint of explosives and she does exactly what it says on the pack of dynamite! Also, watch out for roller skates, they’re dangerous!

 

 

What's in the box Lyda?

 

PS I skipped Dreyer’s Leaves from Satan’s Book (DK 1920) and am of course sorry for that but I had a crisis in Croydon to deal with remotely. And no, that’s not code for something else…

 

 

 

Dancing days… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day Three

 

The Truth, we can’t handle the truth, I mean I don’t even know if it is indeed Monday and not Saturday as time does flex and Richard O’Brien’s insightful poetry on the subject creeps into the corner of my mind to stay there on and off all day. To be fair we do spend a lot of time in the dark at this festival and also in the past, but there are certain jolts to the system that make you question wider realities. For the second day in a row one of these came from the Uzbekistan strand, The Minaret of Death (1924), with a film which showed the harsh history of a country that was then part of the new Soviet Union and even now, years after the block’s disintegration, the British Government informs that no travel can be considered safe. The Time Warp opens doors to dystopias past, current and future.

 

That said… at the end of the day up pops Anny Ondra with Saxophon-Susi (1928) the peppiest film of the week and accompaniment from three cats who really can swing and hearts are warmed, feet are twitching and, honestly, anything is possible in this world. More on this late-breaking news as we get it…

 

The Minaret of Death (1924), with Abror Zufarov and Sobirjon Tuyokov

 

The film was the first product of the Bukhino production company founded in April 1924, in what was then the Bukhara People’s Soviet Republic and was based on a 15^th Century legend about the daughters of the noble Khiva Khan, Dzhemal (here played by Nadezhda Vendelin) and Selekha (Valentina Baranova) who are kidnapped and taken prisoner by the Emir of Bukhara (Aleksei Bogdanovskii) a cruel mad with an over-sized harem. He has two sons, a good ‘un Sadyk (Oleg Frelikh) and a proper wrong ‘un Shakhrukh-bek (Iona Talanov) both of who fight over “ownership” of the women.

 

Nadezhda Vendelin and Oleg Frelikh admire the view

There’s a contest involving chasing after an animal carcass which the Sadyk wins only for his brother to steel his prize, Dzhemal for his harem. He then kills the Emir for pointing out his misinterpretation of the rules and blames his new concubine for the murder imprisoning her in the Minaret of Death. Now, the 12^th century brick tower, Kaylon Minar, does exist and is the tallest tower in the region also known as the Tower of Death as criminals were thrown from the top for centuries. We see some examples of this which provide dark reminders of the justice meted out by ISIS and others, and this is what will happen to the girls unless Shakhrukh-bek can think of something quickly.

 

It's a fast-paced film and with something to say about the treatment of women under non-Soviet, ie Muslim culture but also despots. The Soviet authorities did not like the film though and as per Nicora Karimova’s catalogue notes, it was declare ideologically inadmissible for distribution by the People’s Commisariat of Education – to exotic, frivolous and possible Americanised with all the lavish beauty of the harems. It also didn’t say enough about contemporary life and the kind of new country the soviets wanted to forge unlike The Second Wife screened yesterday. One thing it did aid was the role women were playing in film and, in general in a society in which they rarely appeared in public places or without their parania long robe and face covering, as per Minar. Sometimes even a “frivolous” entertainment can be an agent of social change.

 

The accompaniment from Uzbek musicians Abror Zufarov and Sobirjon Tuyokov added greatly to the enjoyment of the film which now we can see as more of an Arabian Nights fairy tale or, further East, Shiraz. It speaks to the culture of an independent nation and one with a rich tradition and a hopeful future.

 

Marcella Albani pestered by Paul Wegener

Dagfin (1926) with Günter A. Buchwald

 

We spent rather longer in 1920s Germany than some might have hoped and there was an audible gasp once Akt Neun began of Joe May’s 141 minute epic Dagfin (1926) and a woman behind me had to be revived with smelling salts. Not that it was an altogether bad film in fact it had many splendid moments, gorgeous alpine scenery and a fascinating theme.

 

Here we have Paul Wegener showing exactly what he can do as Sabi Bey, an eastern European despot who has killed and abused for decades in order to maintain his power with the aid of henchmen like Garron (Nien Soen Ling). He manipulates people including Axel Boysen (Alfred Gerasch) the former husband of glamorous skier Lydia (Marcella Albani) so that he can compromise her and take over her life in effect. He murders Boysen and has Lydia’s beau Dagfin Holberg (Paul Richter) place in the frame convincing him also that Lydia is really to blame.

 

By helping the couple he is able to mislead them in ways that send shudders down the spine but Sabi Bey is also being hunted by the last surviving member of a family of political rivals he killed - Assairan (Ernst Deutsch). Sabi-Bey is in complete control, moves ahead of anyone telling them just what they want to hear and it says so much for Wegener that he can generate a small amount of sympathy in the role.

 

Props too for the Stakhanovite efforts of Günter A. Buchwald who played with fluid invention for the whole two hours and 31 minutes and on the violin as well as the piano, sometimes both at the same time. How he does it is still unrecorded… there’s magic in the air!

 

Chimmie Fadden Out West (1915), with Philip Carli

 

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille it may be but this rather slight film didn’t feel like it belonged with the heavyweight fare normally associated with The Canon being Revisited. The film is a sequel to Chimmie Fadden directed, written and edited DeMille and also starring Victor Moore as the dry-witted, laconic New Yorker. Maybe like so many follow ups, it failed to capture the original magic. Maybe, I just wasn’t in the mood (don’t worry, that’s going to change in about two sentences…)?

 

This time Chimmie is charged with heading out West to kickstart a fake gold rush by pretending that he’s found gold, so that the railroad company he works for can make more money. No matter how you goof around, that’s not a very nice premise. Anyway, off he goes, has some genuinely good gags – remarking when a group of cowboys shoot their guns to alarm him in a bar that if they kept practicing they’d “almost make it in New York” – before finally realising that cheating folk is wrong.

 

More does have a winning smile and Philip Carli gave him good-hearted support.

 

Anny Ondra and the temptations of sax-based puns

Saxaphon-Susi (Miss Saxophone) (1928) with Neil Brand, Frank Bockius and Francesco Bearzatti

 

Now for today’s most legal of highs, a mood-altering event with fabulous cast and sincerely joyous accompaniment from a powerhouse ensemble that left the Teatro Verdi at severe risk of an outbreak of dancing! Lemme tell you that Neil Brand is a classy guy, his heart is positively "18 karat" with respect to the beat and the band and you don’t need me to tell ya that Frank Bockius is one helluva hide-hitter and can click those sticks to anything. On top we had Francesco Bearzatti who was blowin’ like it was 1928 and can really play that popsicle stick! They were attuned and they were the strawberry jam on top of this most perfect cream scone of a comedy.

Up on screen we had Anny Ondra showing us how fine she could look and how well she could dance and also make comedy – not for nothing should she have been called the Czech Republic’s Queen of Happiness or maybe most of Europe’s. She plays Anni von Aspen, a poor little rich girl daughter of the lecherous Baron von Aspen (the marvellous Gaston Jacquet) who wants to trade places with her working gal pal Susi Hille (Mary Parker), a cabaret dancer who gets the chance to become a Tiller Girl in London. They swap assignments with Susi heading off to posh school and Anni having to learn her dancing ropes fast.

 

On the boat over they meet some fine English gentlemen including Lord Herbert Southcliffe (Malcolm Tod) who takes a bet that he can get in to meet the Tiller Girls backstage and then another bet that he will marry this special one called Susi (Anni)… It’s not much of a plot but it’s enough to make this amongst the most enjoyable and warmest of comedies with this fabulously charming cast.

 

I think I’d like to see this one again please!

 

Couple of top shorts to mention:

Villa Malpenga (IT 1907-1910) a lovely candid film of real folk being happy! 

Man With White Suit (IT?, 1910-1913?) a trick film which featured every trick imaginable as a man falls asleep and dreams on his balcony… serious questions about the sobriety of cast and crew. Marvellous!

 

This is one of a number of unidentified films screening at the Festival, more details on Silent London - if you have any suggestions or clues, all are welcomed!

A day at the opera… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day Two

I think we may have just hit peak Pordenone and it’s only Sunday. There are moments of submersion in the best of silent film with live accompaniment and these happened repeatedly through the day whether it was Lyda Borelli’s sublime movements in hand-coloured Rapsodia Satanica with piano and harp accompaniment, a disturbing and impactful unknown film (for me) from Uzbekistan about the plight of women in polygamous marriages or Lilian Gish wasting away in operatic style with accompaniment featuring elements of La Bohème itself. As if this wasn’t enough, we saw Paris menaced by a group of runaway pumpkins… and, thankfully after Lilian, a group of boarding school women making merry at Coney Island in 1905. Variety is the spice of le Giornate!

 

Rapsodia Satanica (IT 1917), with Stephen Horne, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

If Bertini is the thought, the determined intellect of classic Italian Diva films then Lyda Borelli is the beating heart, the style, grace and soul. Less naturalistic than her “sister” she was the one with the classic theatrical training (Bertini being more purely “of the movies” although she did theatre too) and was remarkably expressive whilst creating a natural intimacy that compels the viewer still.

 

For me Borelli’s status as Primus Inter Divas are perfectly exemplified by this odd and spectacularly colourful take on the Faustian pact… A skilled melange of contemporary dance, art and literature, based on a contemporary poem by Fausto Maria Martin and directed by Nino Oxilia in 1915 but not released until the year of his death in the trenches of 1917.It looks divine and the hand colourization gives it an uncanny charm that seemed to fill the entire auditorium of the Teatro Verdi, touching its audience.

  

Lyda plays Alba d’ Oltrevita, an elderly society lady, who has little life left and spends her days remembering her former beauty. She wishes far too hard and from out of a painting pops the malevolent form of Mephisto (zestfully realized by Ugo Bazzini) who offers to return her youth on the condition that she destroys a small statuette of Cupid which will mean that she will be restored but never again be able to feel love… We see her looking at her reflection in a pond, surrounded by a veil of white silk that floats around her upper body born aloft by her movement: this is youth and beauty in motion and repose. She meets two brothers Tristano (Andrea Habay) and Sergio (John Cini) and proceeds to enchant them both in playgrounds, parks and parties.

The film is split into three parts with the first a prologue setting up the rejuvenation, the second the tug of love with the brothers and the third a dance of regret, desolation, hope and mortality. Borelli dominates this sequence even more than the others and there is no end of colourful moments as she wrestles with her turmoil.

 

Satanic Rhapsody is “operatic” and I doubt any other actress in Britain or Hollywood could carry it off in quite the way La Borelli does in her way. Angela Dalle Vacche – in the excellent Diva – Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema – points out the similarities between Borelli’s rapturous dance and American performer Loie Fuller but then Borelli was not only well-educated but also keen to express as much of her influences as possible. This is the richest of cinema. Art in moving expression with interpretation still sublimely elusive, just as the actress as she dances enfolded in those iconic fabrics.

 

Stephen Horne’s piano, flute and accordion were accompanied by Elizabeth Jane Baldry’s harp and their unique understanding enabled them to accompany with the beauty and emotional subtlety the film deserves. Tonally they are a two-person orchestra but they also know how to create the most magical and uncanny worlds of their own. Transported we were and the streets carried a weird vibration for hours afterwards…

 

 

La Bohème (1926) with Donald Sosin

 

 “When Lillian Gish now appears, you know she is due for a beating. . . A Society for the Prevention of Screen Cruelty to Lillian Gish should be organized." 

Herbert Howe, Picture Play Magazine

 

Did someone say opera? For an entirely different approach on capturing the music and emotion on screen I give you Lillian Gish who made something of an art form out of physical deprivation in her roles with Director King Vidor fearful that he might lose his lead as well her character. To prepare for the tragic ending of this story (c’mon it’s from the opera by Puccini, what do you expect?) she visited sanitaria to study tuberculosis patients in order to learn how to breath with minimal movement of the rib cage. Then she starved herself of food and water for the three days before she shot the ending…

 

It is genuinely shocking to watch her frail last moments as she hauls herself across Paris to meet her lover for the last time. It could be horribly melodramatic but she transcends this with conviction and incredible physical bravery. Why was she doing this? Maybe she felt the need to make a statement as in some quarters her characterisations were staring to be seen as old hat. You might fault her style but never her courage and commitment. Gish also picked the best rising talent she could to make this film after seeing early cuts of King Vidor’s magnificent The Big Parade. Vidor directed with his stars John Gilbert and Renée Adorée plus the likeable Karl Dane also involved.

 

The story is set in 1830 and shows the lives and loves of a group of bohemians living in the service of their art in a tumbledown house in the Latin Quarter. Gilbert plays the would-be playwright, Rodolphe, who, to pay the rent writes stories about cats and dogs for a pet-fancier’s journal. His roommates are also struggling artists, musicians and writer Colline (Edward Everett Horton – yay!!). Their landlord constantly chases them for rent but they just about make ends meet and their diet is enlivened by the occasional windfalls of Marcel’s girlfriend Musette (Adorée) who lives downstairs in rather more salubrious circumstances… the source of her income is more than hinted at.

 

The film does allow Gish to act as a happy woman in love... and with Mr Gilbert too!

Alongside the bohemian’s room is that of a lonely lace maker and embroiderer, Mimi (Gish) who has only her pet bird for company. It’s almost too pitiful but not in the hands of Gish who, even in her early thirties could carry off “innocent battler”, she’s believable in this extended operatic universe. The landlord wants her out and she is saved by the scheming Vicomte Paul (Roy D’Arcy, relishing the in the villainy) who has more than her fabric in mind… He starts to commission work from her just so he can stay close and work out a way of having his evil way…

 

Mimi meets Rodolphe and the two fall in love. Mimi encourages the writer to work on his first play and starts to sacrifice herself for him especially after he loses his work at the journal and she has to work nights to get the money to make him think he’s still employed… Nothing must come in the way of his work but, obviously things will, pride, jealousy, the Vicomte… nothing can compete with Mimi’s love though.

 

All of this was given exceptional musical force by Donald Sosin’s accompaniment which quoted extensively from Puccini (I think?) and was one of the most potent and powerful piano accompaniments I’ve seen in this theatre. He met the film with operatic force pulling the sentiment into the Verdi in ways that made me truly engage with a film that had left me slightly cold on home DVD. Brava!!

 

 

Ra Messerer, The Second Wife

The Second Wife (1927) with Gunter Buchwald and Frank Bockius

 

To Uzbekistan and this extraordinary film from Mikhail Devonov based on a story by Lolakhon Saifullina, a polish woman who married an Uzbek man and converted to Islam. It’s a reflection of the enormity of the old USSR and the challenged Moscow faced in co-ordinating so many diverse cultures into one modernising state. Saifullina worked for the Sharq Yulduzi studio writing scripts sensitive to the issues of Uzbeki women her along with former legal consultant Valentina Sobberey. The result is a tale in which women and children are exploited by old male custom and dominance.

 

Director Devonov does not lapse into bucolic orientalism and focuses on the story and the depiction of prevalent practices of early marriage and polygamy. Here a merchant Tadzhibai (Grigol Chechelashvili)’s first wife Khadycha (Maria Griniova) cannot have children and so he has a second wife, Adoliat (Ra Messerer) who can.  A child duly arrives and Khadycha tries to destroy her competitor. She is far from alone in malevolence as his brother Sadiqbai (Mikhail Doronin), steals money whilst his older brother is away and also preys on young boys being seen to go through some form of marriage ceremony later in the story, as things escalate elsewhere.

 

At the same time there are two representatives of Russian youth enjoying heartier endeavous, enjoying the benefits of education and financial independence – emancipated by communism as their sisters (and brothers) suffer medieval indignities. It’s propagandist but still shows the harshness of unresolved “tradition” and male power. The tragedy continues in many parts of the World.

 

 

Gunter Buchwald and Frank Bockius accompanied with their telepathic combinations of perfectly pitched themes and punctuations, musically at home in any part of the world as it was or will be.

 

Also on my silent film dance card for today was Anna May Wong in a minor role in Driven from Home (1927) with John Sweeney on accompaniment and Virginia Lee Corbin as a young woman who wanted to marry for love not money as she frustrated her father. The family’s “sinister housekeeper” engineered a deep rift that saw everyone estranged and, as mother slowly faded away we wondered if anything would heal the rift. Anna May helped!

 

 

I watched the great Clara Kimbell Young in Trilby (1915) accompanied by Philip Carli and directed by the even greater Maurice Tourneur. Trilby was an adaptation of 1894 George du Maurie’s 1894 novel which features the mystical abilities of Svengali (Wilton Lackaye) to hypnotise his subject, Trilby O'Ferral (CKY) into being a great opera singer. I’d seen John Barrymore doing the same thing to Marian Marsh in the 1931 talkie and so this silent version struck me as rather slow (and more sober), but still fun.

 

After the opera we were also treated to some rare and magnificent shorts in Feminist Fragments 1. No Work and All Play including some Bubbles! (1904) and the street humour of Departure from the “La Sin Bombo” Cigarette Factory something along the lines of Aladdin and the Forty Thieves only in modern Argentina. A couple of short fantasies about housework preceded our badly-behaved boarding schoolgirls who, really, just wanted to have fun. And, they did! Accompanist Mauro Colombis made sure of it.

 

 

Ah yes, La course aux potirons (1908)!!

All around the World… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 43, Day One

 

After the rain-sodden beauty of Venice, the ancient charms of the altogether dryer Treviso waterways I finally arrived in Pordenone to find it filled with friends from countries too numerous to mention. On days like this, “Pords” is indeed the centre of the silent cinematic world and as we renewed acquaintances we were also to be treated to a world-wide series of screenings, all united, also, by their silence. Now, as much as ever, we can only appreciate any opportunity to bring people, places and creative expression together. One medium, one mind… sympatico!

 

Early Cinema – The Biograph Project with Donald Sosin

 

We begin with everyone’s favourite early film director based on opinion polls from 1952. We’re less tolerant of David Wark Griffith’s beliefs and convictions these days but there’s no doubting his part in the history of film even if that is endlessly contested in terms of politics and technique: you can’t divide those two things as easily as might be hoped. Still, the people he worked with, the things he did do to popularise films, we are probably more certain of these in his early period than after 1915…

 

Film Preservation Society is currently working to preserve and restore all Biograph films directed by D. W. Griffith between 1908 and 1913 – around 460! and here were the results of their work from the Griffith get-go. We had three shorts from 1908 each around twelve minutes and each displaying the prevailing views of some folk at the time and how. Children were stolen by “gypsies” in Griffith’s debut The Adventures of Dollie and also by native Americans in his fifth film (the third surviving?) The Redman and the Child although the child is then rescued by another.

 

Griffith’s second film was Fight for Freedom (1908) and this involves a Mexican murderer called Pedro and his attempts to evade capture after a card game turns violent… These are the very beginnings for Griffith, Victorian melodramas told with technical flair aided by the brilliant cameraman Billy Bitzer. There’s more to come every morning and it’s an education for those of us who have only seen his features screened.

 

Dollie gets hidden in a barrel by naughty people

Sicilia Landscapes with Stephen Horne

 

Travel broadens the mind… that’s why I’m here! This year’s Festival is focusing on Sicily which is a place I really must visit having fallen short previously, how it looks now compared to Arturo Ambrosio’s Sicilia Illustrata (1907) would be fascinating to see. This was a dreamy way to cover the subject with films from 1907 to 1929 often covering the same locations showing the island’s rich antiquity and pushing Palermo high up my bucket list – it has to be warmer than Venice right?

 

Stephen Horne accompanied with lyrical wafts from piano and flute across this most un-Italianate environment and helped us share in the wonder of a past revealed. My grandparents were alive when these films were made, how different their lives in North Western England… almost like a different continent, and a different century.

 

Ivan Koval-Samborsky and Ada Vojtsik

The Forty-First (1926), Mauro Colombis, DCP

 

Yakov Protazanov directed before and after the Russian Revolution and I’ve watched quite a number of his films from the Departure of a Grand Old Man (1912) – about Leo Tolstoy - The Queen of Spades (1916), Father Sergius (1918) to, of course, Aelita (1924) and it’s interesting to see him address the Russian Civil War in this film. The war lasted from just after the October revolution to October 1922 and involved the new Bolshevik government’s Red Army fighting anti-revolutionary White Russians, supported by the US, UK and twelve other countries, as well as a third set of separatist forces from Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and others. One of the most complex conflicts of the century estimates of the causalities range from seven to twelve million with millions more displaced.

The story here is set in Central Asia with a Red Army troop being pursued under the most hostile of conditions by a detachment of whites… it’s essentially a story of love versus duty with the Red Army sniper Maryutka (Ada Vojtsik) only slightly wounding her intended 41^st kill, a White lieutenant aristocrat Govorukha-Otrok played by the dashing Ivan Koval-Samborsky. He’s taken capture and the Reds have to decide how to extract the information he is holding, he’s sent off to their headquarters but ends up abandoned on an island with just Maryutka as their feelings ebb and flow.

 

It's a stark film which feels politically vague – certainly four years after the war ended – and very focused on the two main characters, often in close up or, in one memorable shot, sitting side by side stripped to the waist as their clothes dry on the fire. Filmed in the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan and the Apsheron peninsular of Azerbaijan, it has stunning locations and as Peter Bagrov says in his catalogue essay, it may be the only soviet-era film of the silent period to portray the civil war as tragedy rather than victory. And so it goes.

Zítari

Latin American shorts with José María Serralde Ruiz

We travelled again with some glorious fragments including nitrate preserved fireworks in a collection of fragments from Salvador Toscano including the celebrations in 1910 of Mexican independence and the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, alive and gruesomely dead. Sergei Eisenstein’s El Desastre en Oaxaca showed the deadly results of a Mexican earthquake in 1931 and then we had a wordless mystery called Abismos (1931) with Salvador Pruneda prefiguring David Lynch in terms of narrative strangeness.

 

Miguel Contreras Torres, Zítari (The Temple of the Thousand Serpents) (1931) concluded the section with a mix of silent and sound examinations of the unknowable history of Mayans, Aztecs and Toltec ruins. I was reminded of the early works of Erik von Daniken who suggested that these alien artefacts were actually constructed by extra-terrestrials but nothing is more mysterious than the earthly mysteries of these cultures.

 

Dinty (1920) with John Sweeney

This was nominally a vehicle for the remarkable young performer Wesley Barry it is also notable for providing one of Colleen Moore’s biggest breaks. Moore’s extraordinary energy comes through as she plays a young “colleen” (how many times?) who leaves Ireland for America where her new husband is making a new life. She’s striking and vibrant in these scenes but when fate takes a nasty twist and she falls ill with tuberculosis, she offers up one of the most believable performances in her sick bed. There’s a stillness to her expression, hardly the energy or will to even smile at her son and there’s no flicker of hope in her drained eyes. That’s acting and that’s range; and there’d be far more to come.

 

At the time 13-year-old Wesley was the star and he’s also very good, displaying a winning youthful pluck that would lead to a string of “our gang” type successes throughout the twenties. He was one of the leading freckled performers of the age, Marshall Neilan being one of the first to deploy them to full effect in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – no grease paint and no credit in Mary Pickford’s film, but it got him noticed! Barry grew up and directed films with his most notable effort was The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), apparently Andy Warhol’s favourite film, depicting a future society in which robots are persecuted by the fanatical humans of The Order of Flesh and Blood. I think we know who they are now, don’t we?

 

Anna May Wong, Walter Chung and Aaron Mitchell

Anna May Wong was only two years older than Barry, yet she gets to play Half Moon, not the public house in Putney, but the wife of Wong Tai (an improbable Noah Beery) an opium smuggler and head of a Tong gang. “Different times” yet still uncomfortable to watch. I do however, like Dinty’s multi-ethnic band of younger brothers and paperboys with African American Aaron Mitchell as Alexander Horatius Jones and the Chinese American Walter Chung as Sui Lung. They still have racist epithets mind. Times have changed.

 

John Sweeney, still fresh after playing last night in London – do silent accompanists have warm-up gigs before touring? – and provided thunderous accompaniment to match this film’s shifts in tone.

  

Opening Event 3 Bad Men (1926), Timothy Brock, the Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone

 

Thus we came to the biggest of finishes with a restored 3 Bad Men and a chance for those George O’Brien fans who saw his – very physical - performance in the screening of The Iron Horse at the Kennington Bioscope to appreciate his style all over again. For me this made for a nice connection with Ford having watched The Searchers in 70mm on the big screen in Piazza Maggiore this summer in Bologna – what an extraordinary filmmaker he was and how well did he capture the beauty and brutality of the old West?

 

This is a true Ford epic, produced over a 15-month period out in the desert near Victorville, California and around Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It must have been like a military operation and it was tough with three of the leading actresses hospitalised with paratyphoid fever. Horses and stuntmen may well have been injured in the making of this film especially the huge reconstruction of an actual gold rush as hundreds of horses and waggons race across the desert mirroring the Cherokee Strip land rush of 1893 in King Baggot’s Tumbleweeds (1925) starring William S. Hart and screened here a few years back.

 

I was also reminded of Hell’s Hinges as the bad guys torched a church and the townsfolk burned their bar. It’s a genuinely thrilling film and all of the Western tropes are here connecting to The Searchers and way beyond. The three bad men are "Bull" Stanley (Tom Santschi), "Spade" Allen (Frank Campeau) and Mike Costigan (J. Farrell MacDonald) who are long in the tooth outsiders and gunmen, they begin to change their perspective when they meet a young woman Lee Carlton (Olive Borden looking very modern I have to say) who’s father has just been killed by the gang of local really bad Sheriff Layne Hunter (Lou Tellegen who has electric blue eyes that still shine through the screen).

 

Hearts of gold?

Lee’s love interest is a beefy cowboy Dan O'Malley (smiley George O'Brien who, thankfully keeps his top on) but the real focus is on the three unwise men and their voyage to redemption. Surprisingly the film failed to be a hit at the time with audiences growing tired of epic westerns. What we see now looks like a template but it’s the perfection of existing styles and tropes done as well as they have ever been done though. It stands the test of time.

 

Playing no small part in this was Timothy Brock who conducted the Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone in playing his own new score and it swept us up and back to 1926 and then the 1870s… You can never tire of the new connections and excitement in forging a new musical alliance with these stories and filmmakers and the ghost of John Ford, cast and crew could be heard cheering high up in the rafters along with the rest of us! I was especially thrilled by the powerful brass sections and hints of western musical conventions, all brought through so subtly and coherently in ways that had me moist of eye and on the edge of my seat for the closing section. A magnificent 27 players, or there abouts!

 

I also surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying Babby Peggy rounding up bootleggers as Peg O’ The Mounted (1924), she’s an expressive marvel and more than cheeky if you’re a criminal. Daan van den Hurk rode side-saddle-piano in delight.

 

Everything under the Sun was in tune and the Sun was eclipsed by the Moon... More prog references tomorrow. Probably.

 

Olive winks at George

I also liked Dukken (FR?, 1909-1913)) an amusing short about a young girl trying to avoid doing her chores by outsourcing them to a friend... smart!