Star-filled and velvet black - Film on Film 2025 (Part Two), BFI

When people ask me what’s the difference between watching a nitrate print and another… I commonly use the analogy of a photocopy of a picture compared to versus a stain glass window…

Bryony Dixon was describing the nature of nitrate on this day in which we would see four films which, literally showed us more on screen. There is more luminosity and translucence with nitrate film and greater depth and clarity; you can see details in the velvet-black it doesn’t have the block-blacks you can get with even the highest quality digital and celluloid.

Nothing in this fantastic festival of film on actual film comes easy and the love that dares to speak the name nitrate was in full effect as the programme director James Bell, BFI’s Senior Curator of Fiction, lined up on stage with colleagues to explain the process of selecting, testing and projecting those that have made the cut to be shown in the only UK cinema capable of screening nitrate – a projection box made out of Durasteel – asbestos sandwiched between two sheets of steel in 1953.

The BFI hold some 44,000 films on nitrate stock but as Sonia Genaitay, Curatorial Archivist pointed out, not all are in screen able condition. Age withers and curls nitrate and finding films that can be projected is a detailed progress involving testing and eyeballing with Dominic Simmons, Head of Technical, providing the ultimate projector-accepted testing of the films we were to watch. Some 50 titles were considered this year with just five making the cut.

James said that they hoped to screen more nitrate throughout the year and we can only be thankful for the efforts made to preserve and present these special shows. Talking of which, a tip of the hat to today’s projectionists: Mark Kennedy, Mick Fife and Lauren Feyderline without whom we’d be staring into space.

 

The BFI team explain the wonders of nitrate

Un Chien Andalou (1928), 35mm nitrate

 

"NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis."

 

It was only just lunchtime when DJ Christopher Bird hit the decks in NFT 1 to replicate the original accompaniment to Dali and Bunel’s 1929 surrealist masterwork, An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou) a film they were determined would not mean anything although as Breton’s Exquisite Cadaver exercise had proven, everything has some meaning even and especially unintentionally. Luis Buñuel intended to “mash up” – as The Kids now say – Argentinian Tango music with Wagner and all but invented Classical Lounge Core without knowing it and Chris was tasked with cutting from one to the other by playing contemporary pressings on two 78 rpm turntables, one of which was a top of the range EMG machine from 1932 which produced remarkable clarity and range.

Introducing, Bryony said that the first surrealist film was founded on two dreams that Dali and Bunel had had with the condition that no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted… and so it proves with Dali’s ideas and ants (finally sourced from Spanish mountains after a fruitless and ant-less search of Paris by taxi) masterfully expressed by Bunel. Pierre Batcheff, who I now recognise from other French silent films, and Simone Mareuil add their own levels of un-meaning amongst the “situations” and as per usual, I still don’t know how the eye-cutting scene was done, not that I can look at it.

This could have been the fragile prints final projection and the accompaniment from DJ Bird made for a fitting last hurrah!

 

Spanish ants on Pierre Batcheff's hand as Simone Mareuil looks on.

Partie de campagne (1936), 35mm nitrate

Backgrounds are as important as foregrounds. Flowers, faces and mountains are not just placed side by side. They constitute a collection of elements all rolled into one, amalgamated by a love stronger than their differences. Jean discussing his father Auguste Renoir.

 

Jean Renoir seems to have been fascinated by waterways and, in addition to The River (1951), he also directed his first feature, La Fille de l’eau (1925), just a few kilometres away in Marlotte from Partie’s location on the banks of the Loing and the Essonne rivers, left tributaries of the Seine some way out from Paris. The river is life, it is unpredictable and yet it can rush us to our destiny whilst the trees at the water’s edge can bind lovers together but they can also hide and confuse. As much as the river is ever present, it keeps on moving the narrative and characters’ choices can be lost in the swirling momentum.

Partie de campagne is based on a short story by French “realist” Guy de Maupassant (author of Bel-Ami (1885) and Pierre et Jean (1888)) published in 1881 (set in 1860 during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III) and offering a shock of bitter fate amongst the bucolic dreaminess.

 

Parisian hardware store owner, Dufour (André Gabriello) takes his wife (Jane Marken) and daughter Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) along with his dishevelled clerk, Anatole (Paul Temps) into the countryside where they stop at an inn run by a manager played by Jean Renoir. Two young men, Henri (Georges d’Arnoux) and Rodolphe (Jacques Brunius), are bewitched watching Henriette and her mother (Jane Marken) on the swings and resolve to try their luck. All innocent fun but things get rather more serious when the two couples head out on the water… just a simple day in the country, what could be less innocuous?

 

Sylvia Bataille and Georges d’Arnoux

Blanche Fury (1947), 35mm nitrate

English melodrama done with same sort of conviction that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford brings to their films…

Jympson Harmon, London Evening News 19^th Feb ‘48

 

Now it was time for British technicolour nitrate on and Valerie Hobson in all her auburn glory alongside the moodiest Stewart Granger for whom we needed all the depth and visual subtlety of nitrate to see the shadows within. He reminded me a Paul Newman in yesterday’s Hud, a man so obsessed by the perceived wrong done to him by careless parents, that he couldn’t see a way out. This was a Brit gothic romance almost without the romance but with vengeance at its heart, a very dark film for 1947 but then it had been a very dark time. Amongst the velvety shadows we were afforded glorious views of Miss Hobson’s costumery, designed by Sophie Harris from theatrical costumers Motley and as the story darkens so too do the textures change colour as the reds and darker hues of passion replace her earlier calculations and manners.

 

Jo Botting, the BFI’s Curator of Fiction, introduced and gave a flavour of the impact of the still relatively rare Technicolor. Miss Hobson’s pale skin and auburn hair benefited from the process being especially striking in the daylight whilst the Daily Mirror reviewer probably watched a late showing after closing time… “the colour camera seems to be kinder to Valerie Hobson than most other actors, she always looks good in black and white film but in colour what a smasher!”

 

Won’t disagree with that and Mr Grainger looks well too as French director, Marc Allégret respects the material and creates and engaging psycho drama that, with standard generic tropes still persuades through the elegance of composition and force of performance. It makes Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948) look drab and tame in comparison.

Jo quoted the Mirror again: Emphatically a woman’s picture… for every man who scuttles off to the nearest bar at least five women will remain to revel in someone else’s unhappy and illicit love story! Not a single fellow left for the bar, well, not until the film was over to thunderous applause. We were lost in mid-Victorian reveries in the layered gloom.

 

Valerie Hobson abides...

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), 35mm nitrate

 

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) may have been the film that established the talkie Alfred Hitchcock but after a largely witty and energetic start it descended into an extended shoot out with its easy-going capers replaced by a rising body count of police and Germanic rebels with an unknown cause: almost The Film That Slew Too Much? Still, there was no Doris Day to sing Que Sera Sera as in the 1956 remake and absolutely a smaller budget along with some excellent performances especially from Leslie Banks and a deeply disturbing Peter Lorre, hooded eyes accentuated by a dyed streak in his hair and his tendency to laugh in the face of anything: jokes, murder, infanticide and certain death.

 

Hitchcock told François Truffaut that "… the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional." I’m not entirely buying that, especially as this was his 20^th feature film and clearly has some of the hallmarks of his most engaging work – an “invasion” of normal family life by lethal forces, witty dialogue from leading characters unaware of the threat at hand and an almost likeable villain… In the midst of life, we are in death or, in this case, the midst of a dinner dance as a man is shot and passes on a key message on which the rest of the film’s story will rest.

Peter Lorre, Leslie Banks and Nova Pilbeam

The Lawrences Bob (Leslie Banks) and Jill (Edna Best) are on a holiday in Switzerland with their daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam) and their dog (actor unknown). Jill loses a clay pigeon shooting contest thanks to her impatient Betty with the Germanic Ramon (Frank Vosper) gracious – and suspicious in victory. At the dance that evening their French friend Louis (Pierre Fresnay) – a skier with whom Edna flirts unrelentingly – is shot dead but manages to pass on a note to be passed onto the British Consulate… The couple read the details, it’s a warning of an international crime about to be committed but before they can do anything, Betty is kidnapped and they are under strict instructions not to say anything to anyone.

 

A classic Hitchcock set up with ordinary – wealthy middle class – heroes stuck between the good and bad guys, in this case led by the aforementioned grinning Abbott (Peter Lorre). Events move at some lick until the aforementioned final sequence involving the Royal Albert Hall, a hide-out at a sun-worshipping church (?!) and a mass shoot out. It’s Hitch 22 as the Lawrences must not let on what they know even as they must find out more to save their daughter.

 

So ended another breathless day on the Southbank and it was not just our imaginations that received these films in a deeper way than usual, we literally saw more, but by no means “too much”!

 

Thank you BFI and… till the next time!

Christopher Bird at the EMG gramophone (picture from Lynne Wake)