Don't be judgy… The Hangman (1928) with Colin Sell, Kennington Bioscope

 

This was a Weimar surprise unearthed on 35mm from the BFI’s archives by the diligence of Tony Fletcher and given its first outing in many years in front of an audience who hadn’t seen it including fearless accompanist Colin Sell! We only had Tony’s word for it but as MC Michelle Facey pointed out in her introduction, there were plenty of quality elements in this tale of crime and punishment and a story that whilst it could be predicted was still so perfectly timed that it allowed a warm glow for the audience much in need of it given prevailing weather conditions in the capital.

 

The Hangman aka Der Henker or Der Staatsanwalt klagt an in German was directed by Theodor Sparkuhl and Adolf Trotz, being the former’s only directed film although he had an incredible career as a cameraman for everyone from Lubitsch in the teens through to Hollywood and some ground-breaking film noir. He has some good ideas here and perhaps the presence of Trotz indicated that he wasn’t entirely comfortable in the role but the results are certainly very interesting.

 

It is a tale of two women or rather four with two men of honesty and rigid morality caught up in a web of bad luck and passion all of whose fate is in the hands of chance as much a judgement. It is also a tale of two very different bars, one a dive joint offering “Varieté” on tatty posters in its grimy windows plus drinks and a good time down below, the other a kind of Weimar dream bar called Spiders with webbed interior design to match and a circular serving area at the centre to which men are inevitably drawn.

Andrée Lafayette

At the heart of this particular parlour, we find the warm smile of French actress Andrée Lafayette who plays the perfect host: a beauty who welcomes her male customers and yet maintains her distance only sipping the champagne they gulp near the centre of the web. She is asked if she is happy doing this work and smiles “not really” but she’s the consummate professional doing what she needs to get by.

 

Also doing the same but in a more precarious environment is Kiki (Irm Cherry) who works as a hostess in the less salubrious venue where she must fend off the attentions of drunken middle-aged men such as the captain played by Georg John who is harmless enough especially when compared with the villain played by Fritz Kampers. She has set her sights higher though and is in love with the tall and prosperous-looking brother of Andrée’s character played by Spanish actor and former FC Barcelona player* (oh yes!) Félix de Pomés. Sorry, there are so few character names, this film is barely out there online and I’m trusting on memory: such is the thrill of the Bioscope and films that only exist on celluloid. Welcome to the future-past of physical media.

 

Now… all of these connections will be vitally important when I outline the plot and this will then revolve around the imposing presence of public prosecutor Leander played by the sharp-featured Bernhard Goetzke a man who looks like he’s walked straight off the Mount Rushmore of chiselled Weimar actors leaving Emil, Conrad and Fritz stuck to the cliff face. Leander is a stickler for the word of the law if not the spirit of justice and as the film begins we see him sending yet another guilty party to their end with the Weimar Republic having retained the death sentence after much debate; the guillotine was the favoured method.

 

The many faces of Félix de Pomés, from the Nou Camp to Hollywood!

He's not a man who can’t let his hair down though and meets Andrée’s character when dragged down to the bar by a colleague. Pretty soon he’s regularly called to the bar to find out more about this fascinating woman who retains such dignity in the face of the inebriated and weak of character.

 

Elsewhere her brother is less restrained as he finds Kitty in the arms of a customer and following the drunken man outside, there’s a scuffle and the older rival falls unconscious to the ground. Sadly, for him, he awakes to find himself being robbed by the aforementioned villain who hits him harder causing him a fatal blow on the back of the head. After the thief makes his escape the body is found and, being the decent man he is, Félix’s character believes he is responsible and confesses.

 

The circumstantial evidence is strong and this confession surely marks this as an open and shut case but, driven not only by her concern for her sibling but also her growing affection for Leander, Andrée’s character determines to try and persuade the prosecutor of the need for understanding in what seems to be a crime of passion as well as an accidental death. As things progress there is some nice interplay between the two leads and even some lighter moments courtesy of Leander’s housekeeper (Anna von Palen) who sees her role being usurped by her employer's new romantic interest. There’s also excellent support from the siblings’ mother, played by Antonie Jaeckel, who has previously been estranged for a long time from her daughter.

 

Irm Cherry wearing a hat in 1928.

The narrative flows with Sparkuhl and Trotz mixing the growing injustice, the family and romantic ties in with solid control and building up the tension as the legal rock meets the moral hard place… It’s heart-felt and heart-breaking when you look forward to the tens of thousands who were to be sentenced to death under the next regime in Germany.

 

The film features lots of pleasing late silent camera movements with clever reverse shots of the characters in the bar and tracking shots as Leander walks with his love. There is also some expressionist overlays as Leander walks dazed through the city streets contemplating what he has become in a literal tumult of conflicted emotions, the pavements and houses revolving around his intense confliction.

 

Colin Sell accompanied sight unseen and provided marvellous flourishes to adorn the twisty tale as the honesty and dogged morality of both men threatens to doom one and kill the other. We shuffled nervously in our seats as the climax approached and well… let’s hope someone else screens this film before too long! It was a hit Tony, a palpable hit!

 

Tony Fletcher also presented the first part of the evening with a look at films made at Fort Lee near New Jersey in the period before Hollywood with excerpts from the fabulous double Milestone/Kino Blu-ray Made in New Jersey: Films from Fort Lee which he had procured in Pordenone.

 

New Jersey, not Hollywood, was the real birthplace of the modern film industry. Fort Lee — just across the Hudson from the Bronx — became a key site for early film production. During the 1910s, motion pictures were a major part of suburban New Jersey community which looks much more like the old country than the dusty modernist landscapes of California. It’s a bit more built up these days and we saw a poignant documentary film showing the decaying lot in excerpts from Theodore Buff's Ghost Town (1935).

 

"Forget your land I have a nice hat..."

The Curtain Pole (1909), a short comedy directed by D.W. Griffith with an uncredited Mack Sennett as a man who search for the titular pole leads to chaos also including Florence Lawrence. The Indian Land Grab (1910), a young Indian chief goes to Washington to stop a land grab and is almost knocked off course by the daughter of the land grabber in question who is instructed to use her womanly wiles to distract him. A shock of the old certainly but the audiences were apparently more upset about the genuine romance that develops between the two than the film’s call for fairness to native Americans. Go figure

 

Talking of shocks, we also had an extract from the legendary The Vampire (1913) which featured an outrageously sexualised dance with Bert French and Alice Eis which captures the essence of Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem describing the dangers of women of a certain sort. The dance is watched by Harold Brentwell (Harry F. Millarde) making him consider his relationship with Sybil the Vampire (Alice Hollister) and I can’t wait to find out what happens… The poem and the story were used as the basis of Theda Bara’s A Fool There Was (1915). Women were to blame for so many things back in the day.

Bert French and Alice Eis were once arrested for performing this dance on stage...

 

John Sweeney accompanied and I had to check that his keyboard was not aflame for the above dance sequence, he plays so well anticipating the rhythms and the emotional movements in ways that really help us to connect with these archaic sensibilities, the media meets an audience who are moved to the 1910s as much as the history comes to us now. Here, actions and piano speak more eloquently than words ever could.

 

Yet another special event at the Cinema Museum and thanks to the cast and crew who enabled us to see this long-hidden film. No archive is too deep or too dusty to prevent the determined search of the Bioscope’s researchers!

 

You can order the set from Amazon.com at reasonable rates as well as from Kino in the USA. It’s worth it for The Vampire dance alone but Fort Lee remains a major part of cinematic history!

 

Andrée Lafayette also appeared in the 1923 Hollywood adaptation of Trilby the second of many Svengali features... EYE have a copy!

* Señor de Pomés played for FC Barcelona and RCD Espanyol (Barca’s reserves) in the 1910s, during the sport's amateur era and he also played for Catalonia, the national team who strangely, unlike Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland don’t get to compete at World Cups. He was also a skilled swordsman who featured for Spain in the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympics. The Hangman was one of his first feature films and he made over 70 more into the late sixties, including King of Kings (1961) and Lost Command (1966).

28 appearances and one goal for Barça!

 

Pet Shop Potemkin… Battleship Potemkin (1925), BFI Blu-ray

 

Eisenstein apparently said that the film should have a new soundtrack for every decade to complement his imagery, which has remained so fresh and vivid...

Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boy

From the West End to the Odessa Steps is a long way and yet there’s clearly an affinity between the lads from North Shields and Blackpool with the location and its most famous representation on film in Sergei Eisenstein’s ground-breaking film. The duo were originally commissioned to write a score for in 2003 and Neil Tennant describes his and co-writer Chris Lowe’s view that the film represented a romantic notion of a “good revolution” that chimed with a time when many in the West were looking for positive change and peace. Twenty years later and we are ever more in need of giving peace a chance and this release is as timely as ever, were you to share the view of its call to flip the revolutionary/evolutionary coin one more time.

 

In 1925, Soviet Russia was a quite different place to the country that was to emerge after years of Stalin’s eventual dictatorship and bloodletting in the name of progress. It was less than a year after the death of Lenin and the country was less restricted and controlled than it was going to be. There were still elections for example and this year the Communist Party’s share of the vote fell from 88% to 66% of the Moscow Soviet with 2,554 Communists and 1,308 members of other parties. Even this was described by the New York Times as a better result than the Bolsheviks had expected given “… the silent struggle between the Soviet Government and the peasants…”.

 

Culturally, there was still the need to revisit the reasons for the revolution and the Tsarist injustices that led to someone like Stalin spending half of his life as a penniless revolutionary in and out of prison and exile battling against a regime that was desperate to modernise but also intent on suppressing the freedom of expression and intellectualism which went hand in hand with education. Born twenty years after the Georgian Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, who grew up in genuine poverty, the bourgeois Sergei Eisenstein was also dedicated to the cause, leaving his studies in the former St Petersburg to join the Red Army in early 1918.

 

The post-revolutionary Russian Civil War was largely over by 1922 with the defeat of the Ukrainian and Caucasus separatists but, with as much as 12 million casualties, the Revolution was far from secure. Eisenstein had begun working in the theatre and film producing propagandist material during his time in the army and by the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 uprising, having already made the full-length feature Strike (1924), was commissioned by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee to make a film of one of the key moments of that revolt.

 

The Soviet Union had only just been established in December 1922 and, following Lenin’s death, a troika was established to rule consisting of Deputy Premier Lev Kamenev, Comintern Chairman Grigory Zinoviev and General Secretary Stalin. The former two stepped down in spring 1925 in opposition to Stalin’s isolationist doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” which also alienated Trotsky and those who believed in the more Marxist purity of permanent revolution… Stalin would still take the rest of the decade to cement his position as dictator and the rest is murderous history on an unprecedented scale but, at this point, the revolution was still to be celebrated and it’s purpose restated for a war-weary populace who could still express themselves through the ballot box for the Third Congress of the Soviets of the USSR, which still featured a choice.

 

So, this film is very much of 1925 as much as it is about 1905 and, as Mr Tennant says, is a tribute to the people and their solidarity in resistance.  Battleship Potemkin remains one of the most controlled of films with precise rhythms that still carry force and which still catches the viewer off guard with even Joseph Goebbels later admiringly declaring that no one with any pre-existing political leaning could watch it without wanting to become a Bolshevik. One of the reasons for this is its restraint, with the naval commanders and the Cossacks bad and brutal enough but believably so: only following the orders of a failing regime. But what really works is Eisenstein’s portrayal of the ordinary individuals caught up in these events`- people who had no option but to make a stance against intolerable conditions and a regime blind to the suffering of its own people.

 

The men of the Potemkin represent Russia in microcosm living in institutionalized poverty, cramped together in hanging bunks, exhausted from the failed war against Japan and fed maggot-ridden rations. Tempers boil up and the captain calls his company to a meeting during which a line is drawn and he orders his troops to execute the ringleaders. In a tense face-off, communicated through the rapid cuts and escalating tension that is Eisenstein’s trademark, the marines cannot fire on their comrades… the mutiny begins.

The men run riot and soon gain the upper hand by throwing the officers overboard. Soon the red flag flies over the ship but not long after their leader Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) is gunned down, shot from behind by Commander Golikov (Vladimir Barsky). His body hangs grotesquely from the rigging before falling limp into the murky waters: the revolt has its first martyr.

Free of naval authority, the crew, now led by Chief Officer Giliarovsky (Grigori Aleksandrov), take the Potemkin to Odessa. They are welcomed by the people of the town who come to pay their respects to Vakulinchuk. There are lingering shots of his body holding a candle and the masses staring in awe at the dead man – every new system needs to celebrate the fallen and there are obvious echoes of Lenin’s recent demise and subsequent display in death.

Celebrations soon shift to panic with the troops massing in line to shoot down the men women and children on the Odessa Steps. The camera tracks alongside the soldiers’ murderous march placing the viewer in the centre of the tragedy hoping for the survival of each individual highlighted in the slaughter. The soldiers force the people down the steps and towards the welcoming blades of mounted Cossacks… there is no mercy in this symbolic display of the reality of uprising and reprisal.

The Tsar may have regained control but Russian society was changed for ever after the 1905 Revolution and the lessons of solidarity in the face of state oppression were not forgotten. In the absence of any significant changes, Tsar Nicholas quickly backtracking on any concessions, the revenge of the intellectual classes and the proletariat was inevitable and then came the Germans...  The film closes with a segment as poignant as the steps as the battleship heads to face the Russian fleet: will they be blown from the waters or will they find merciful solidarity? Whatever happens next is based on actual events.

The score from the Pet Shop Boys, which by the director’s instructions should already have replaced in 2015, does the difficult job of connecting the modern viewer with these 120-year-old events and it is surprisingly cinematic given the Boys’ pop credentials. They’ve always been the smartest of duos with musicality and insight beyond most in the hit parade and here they are sympathetic to the original intent whilst also attempting to highlight the more timeless elements of this “good revolution”. It’s a “commentary” that occasionally jars when the synthesisers start to drive – as in Men and Maggots – but you soon get caught up in the swirl of Lowe and Tennant’s clear passion for this film.

Dresden in 2017

Torsten Tasch orchestrates their themes in forceful ways for the Dresdner Sinfoniker which, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, add the forceful cinematic drive required to match Eisenstein’s on-screen intentions and display. It’s vibrant and inventive and still feels fresh twenty years on from the original composition… the same period in time between the uprising and the film. Even amongst changing musical fashions the Pet Shop Boys are themselves starting to feel time-less and their music still has the capacity to uplift as on the closing For Freedom, an eternal Song for Europe...

The inclusion of Hochhaussinfonie (2017) showing the Dresdner Sinfoniker and PSB preparing for an epic presentation of their score and the film in the middle of a former East German housing estate, shows the enduring importance of the film and live accompaniment. It’s a compelling work of art in itself which allows much interaction with the residents who all have memories of the former soviet-led regime in Germany.

It's full of poignant individual stories and shows the power of artistic endeavour to uplift and reframe even during the most isolating of circumstances… so many single women, widows, living in what resembles a giant memorial to communist design. As Neil says in the film, these people revolted against authoritarian rule in the end and the hope is that, whilst history never really repeats, there are patterns that re-occur. Resistance and sacrifice are always victorious but all they can do is but people an opportunity. This may lead to worse things or it may not, but you have to hope that one day things will not only change but for the better.

 

Special features

• Hochhaussinfonie (2017, 68 mins) a documentary explores not only the complexities of the Dresden concert, but also the residents and their lived experiences of a very different time
• Trafalgar Square highlights (2004, 4 mins): a short film capturing the build-up and performance as Pet Shop Boys premiered their newly composed score for Battleship Potemkin with the Dresdner Sinfoniker in London
• CD featuring the score by Pet Shop Boys and Dresdner Sinfoniker
• Trailer (2025)
• Limited edition only... Fully illustrated booklet featuring new writing by Chris Heath, Sarah Cleary, and Neil Tennant, plus a previously published essay by Michael Brooke, notes on the special features and credits

The set is available from the BFI Shop and all good retailers!

 

Rainbow’s End? Women in Love (1969), BFI UHD out now!

 

"She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven."*

 

Well, this is a vibrant experience and one that must have caused considerable stir on release for its hyper-reality and naked male bonding between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates… all it needed was a needle drop of Sophie Ellis-Bextor to become modern iconic in an Emerald way. But no, this is a serious attempt to capture the lightning in a bottle of Lawrence’s prose and his questing subject matter with febrile performances not just from the men in love but the women too, Jennie Linden and the super-natural Glenda Jackson.

 

The book(s) and the film are full of new century yearning for meaning as the characters question humanity’s place in the industrial world as well as the post Freudian extended sexual universe. Women in Love is the sequel to The Rainbow which DH Lawrence had originally intended as one book covering the lives of the Brangwyn family and in particular the two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun. Ursula is the dominant character in the first novel and experiences a very Freudian sexual awakening after an affair with her teacher Winifred, before her romance with a soldier which ends in disappointment. Ursula’s search for a balanced love ends in the follow up, whilst Gudrun’s is just picking up momentum but it is the men who have the biggest questions.

Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Jenny Linden and Eleanor Bron

 

A long time ago I studied The Rainbow for A-Level and so always have more affiliation with her character in this film and for me that is closer to the way Jackson plays Gudrun but having revisited both books I see the strengths of Jennie L’s performance as the most sexually mature of the components in the two main relationships. She is based on Lawrence’s own, no doubt long-suffering, wife just as her eventual husband in WIL, Rupert Birkin (Big Alan), is the writer’s cypher… raising the question of whether a man needs a deep emotional relationship with a best friend as well as a romantic love of a woman, to be fulfilled. Whether this alludes to a homosexual or homo-social ideal is open to debate but it’s likely that WIL is one of the first great openly bi-sexual books written by a man from Nottingham.

 

Say what you will about Ken Russell but he manages to convey so much of his subject’s intent, be they composers or authors, in his sometimes-overwhelming films. The pace of the passion, imagery and the scale of the expression can be bewildering but you just have to hang on and cling on for the ride. There are some fabulous scenes – Gudrun dancing in the woods for a herd of cows, the wedding of two of the town’s wealthiest young things Laura Crich (Sharon Gurney) and Tibby Lupton (Russell regular, Christopher Gable) as well as their tragic ending on the boating lake – genuinely distressing and horrible to witness).

 

Two sisters

There’s also the “blue stocking” brilliance of Hermione Roddice (Fab Four favourite Eleanor Bron) with her picnics and artistic pretensions, a pretentious ballet completely undermined by Rupert as he switches his affections to the more earthbound Ursula. Then the special effect that is Oliver Reed, whose Gerald Crich is a modernising businessman who ultimately cannot connect with his best friend in the way that he wants nor his lover Gudrun whose almost flippant creativity and refusal to commit to a shared reality will be the death of him.

 

Russell moves the story from pre- to post-war – when the book was written – and the themes are just as relevant there. Recalling my own grandfather’s experience in the war and afterwards, the shock of what he had experienced as a teenager in the Middle East and India during the war, led him to question the established order and for the son of a canal worker from Widnes, there were new possibilities and a new balance to be struck as a battered Britain searched for a “…world built up in a living fabric of Truth…”.

 

Ursula and Rupert: are they "complete"?

This is probably my and everyone else's favourite Ken Russell film and released on BFI 4k UHD it is irresistible especially with a bevy of beautiful extras including an interview with Russell’s son – see below.

 

Special features 

• Audio commentary with director Ken Russell
• Audio commentary with writer and producer Larry Kramer
• Second Best (1972, 27 mins): film starring Alan Bates, based on the short story by D H Lawrence 
• The Guardian Lecture: Glenda Jackson (1982, 77 mins, audio only)
• The Pacemakers: Glenda Jackson (1971, 14 mins): a documentary profile of the actor
• 4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible)
• A British Picture: Portrait of an Enfant Terrible (1989, 49 mins): Ken Russell’s documentary on his life and career
• Human Relations: Alexander Verney-Elliott Discusses Women in Love (2025, 17 mins): a newly recorded interview with Ken Russell’s son
• ATV Today (1968, 10 mins): interviews with writer and producer Larry Kramer and actors Alan Bates and Jennie Linden on the set of Women in Love
• Billy Williams OBE BSC in conversation with Phil Méheux BSC (2015, 49 mins)
• Stills and collections gallery
• Original theatrical trailer
• Illustrated booklet featuring new writing by Matthew Melia and archive essays by Michael Brooke, Claire Smith and Vic Pratt; notes on the special features and film credits

 

The latter is only included with the first pressing so place your order now for a film that should be in the collection of every seeker after love and truth over a century after this work was first imagined.

 

You can order directly from the BFI shop and other reputable retailers!

 

Russell would eventually film The Rainbow with Sammi Davis as Ursula and Paul McGann as Anton in 1989, it would be compromised by budget constraints and took him years to get off the ground. By this time the sexual subject matter was not as shocking as it would have been in 1969 and yet it is still remarkable given the date of its inception in 1915. It’s sobering to think that the time between these novels and Russell’s filming date for Women in Love is less than between this release and the film… the search for balance and the Truth continues.

 

 

*Quote above from The Rainbow and here's the final page annotated by annoying 16-year old P. Joyce of Deyes High School Lower Sixth...

 

 

Train keeps a runnin’… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto #44 Day Eight

 

That was the week that was… and it was a Festival of many parts as director Jay Weissberg noted as he introduced the final night’s gala performance and reflected on the creative choices and collective efforts that for this precious week, turn the Teatro Verdi and the surrounding are into the “home” that former director David Robinson always talked about. To the programmers, the marketers, the ticket office, the ushers, projections and even sommeliers and baristas of Pordenone, this is a triumph of organisation but: “we make the table and you the audience are the family” that eats , talks and watches together.

 

Jay had their hospitality in mind because of course tonight’s finale was a projection of Buster Keaton’s master work with a score composed by Andrej Goričar who conducted the Orchestra of the Imaginary, Lubiana in performing it. So many of Buster’s films are a comedy comfort blanket for this audience and there couldn’t have been many who hadn’t seen this film more than a few times. But context is everything with “live cinema” and the film rose to the occasion as the gathering once again found Keaton’s tale funny as it was reanimated by our collective appreciation and the new, exceptionally live music. Some times I think that silent film musicians are there to mostly remind us of the “life” that went into these images – we are all attuned with song lines of the film makers as their new collaborators connect with these ancient meanings.

 

A "Train", not sure they'll catch on?

Don’t get me wrong, a kick in the head from Buster Keaton’s dad Joe who plays the locomotive engine driver, is still funny in any language and at any time. This was a bit of a speciality from Keaton Senior in preference to using his fists and the skill remains impressive. There enough timeless slapstick in Our Hospitality but also a playful surrealism, especially during that first half our as Buster and co take the old Rocket steam loco out west – a train so feeble that Keaton’s dog can easily follow it all the way, and they have to move the tracks to avoid donkeys and other road hazards.

 

The whole rickety journey is one of Buster’s finest and the fact that the entire crew and passengers take it as normal is what makes it work. Out of nowhere, a man throws stones from a mountain side and the driver throws logs back which are quickly gathered and taken to start a fire elsewhere. The United States of Daft… how we miss them.

 

But this comedy is a black one and starts off with the Canfield and McKay family feud as two of the men from each family extend the senseless violence by killing each other. John Canfield’s wife decides to take their son Willie (played by Keaton’s baby – this is a family affair) to New York in an effort to remove him from the front line. This is New York allegedly based on a 1820’s map showing Broadway as a dirt track intersecting with an equally dusty 4^th Avenue… CBGBs wasn’t yet open nor the Met but Bleeker Bob’s record store in the Village probably was…

 

Willie grows up to be Buster and is delighted to learn that he has inherited his father’s estate down south and imagining a fine Georgian mansion, sets off on the new-fangled train. Sitting next to him is a pretty young woman Virginia (Natalie Talmadge aka Mrs B. Keaton) who become gradually impressed as they endure their unusual journey. When they finally arrive, she runs off to see her brothers who are, of course Cranfields. Willie gives the game away saying he’s here for the McKay estate – more of a collapsing barn than a shed… Virginia invites him to dinner and the boys start planning Willie’s leaving do only for the famous southern hospitality to get in the way… up to a point.

 

If the second half doesn’t quite match the first for laughs, we have the love story to hopefully bring peace to this forever war… Bit of a theme this week.

 

Before the main feature there were some precious Chaplin moments. Jay Weissberg has been playing excerpts from his recent interview with former Festival Director David Robinson and they give an insight into Chaplin’s life and works: it’s a wonderful way of bringing David back into the Giornate but also, here’s a man who met Charlie and Oona, who also met Stand and Olly… he’s steeped in the personalities and it is lovely to see him on screen.

 

Following this there were more Chaplin Family Home Movies which have also been a feature of the week. The first features an older Charlie and an older Syd juggling with the younger brother still more poised and co-ordinated and funnier too. Then there’s Charlie and Oona in Venice, the city unchanged as my short break there proved last week. Charlie looks well and is clearly enjoying his later years!

 

Another star of the Festival has been Max Fleischer and the mixed media films featuring Ko-ko the Clown directed by brother Dave. How much did Disney learn from these boys and their endless imagination and dynamism. Fleischer went on to make the ground-breaking Superman cartoon serials of the late 1930s and has a higher level of technique than Disney.

 

Meg Morley accompanied the above session and again I really enjoy her period appropriate melodies and the jazzy fluidity of her playing on the Rolls Royce Fazioli piano. She hits the keys with just that extra bit if style and her ideas always support the action so well.

 

Earlier in the day there was a lot of “Early Cinema” with 18 (?!) short films from Stockholm mostly from 1897. These were followed by two colour-stencilled French films about Japan, La Geisha (1910) and LA RIVIÈRE KATSURA AU JAPON (1914) and other shorts accompanied by masterclass student Ludovico Bellucci. Great though the established musicians are for this Festival it is good to see the future players coming through.

 

My Boy (US 1921), with Neil Brand

 

More from the Chaplin Connection and more recollections from David Robinson, of Charlie meeting Jackie Coogan at a dinner in the early 1960s. Coogan had a difficult reputation at this point and the family was unsure how the meeting would go but Charlie simply looked at the man and smiled “young man” and all was well.

 

By this point Jackie was Uncle Fester in the successful Addams Family – and yesterday was appropriately enough the 100^th birthday of John Astin, the original and best Gomez Addams – but what do you do when you’ve had your career start aged ten in something line The Kid? Well, follow it up with a similar film, this one called My Boy (US 1921), directed by Victor Heerman and featuring accompaniment by Our Kid, Neil Brand. It's sentimentl adn soppy with some good gags and the lad in question is very good, a natural actor at this age who can hit the deeper notes.

 

L’ Ombra (IT 1923) with José Marìa Serralde Ruiz

 

Another in the revelatory Italia Almirante Manzini strand and one of the best, in fact by consensus, probably the best newly discovered film of this last day. I’ve been undecided about Manzini’s position in the top tier of Divadom but there’s no denying her physicality and expressiveness, she dominates every scene and has an imperious way with her.

 

This was a really meaty role as she plays Berta, the wife of a painter Geraldo (Alberto Collo) who is suddenly struck down and paralysed and rendered paraplegic. She rises to the occasion but cannot engage in an active life anymore and, naturally, this is frustrating for her new husband. He starts living a double life starting an affair with a family friend and younger woman Elena Previle (Liliama Ardea) who has recently left her husband. Time passes and a child appears but the once paralysed Berta starts to regain her functions, surprising everyone with a full recovery, not least Geraldo. What follows is a master class in tightly scripted retribution as Berta regains control of her life with purpose and sheer willpower. Almirante Manzini commands the screen and the other characters and dispenses her own judgement on the iniquitous position her character has been left in.

 

Now, that’s what I call Diva!

 

And, this is what I call the finest film festival in the World. See you next year.

The fault in our Tsar… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 44, Day Seven

If Hammer made Soviet historical dramas with a propagandist edge in the silent era it would probably be exactly like The Wings of a Serf (1926) which is, in so many ways, years ahead of its time in terms of blood, gore, S&M, sci-fi, gruesome behaviours and even a touch of what would be termed deviant sexuality. Kim Newman, give Mark Gatiss a call, there’s a classic mondo bizarro movie waiting to be remade….

 

Writing these blogs is the treading of a fine line between instant reactions and hot takes as well as properly understanding the works we have just seen, and clearly there’s a lot more to this particular soviet film than is clear on first viewing and Maya Garcia’s note in the catalogue are very good at providing context. This is also a film made in the more laissez fair years between Lenin and Stalin and the latter’s conservative clamp down of the early thirties onwards. Here homosexuality had been decriminalised and it is indeed witnessed in The Wings of a Serf  in the relationship between the Tsar (Leonid Leonidov) and his favourite Fadke Basamanov (Nikolai Prozorovsky). But here it is being used to emphasis the Tsar’s unacceptable qualities and that can only be the case if you think what they are doing is wrong?

 

Or, as a writer in Kino-Front in 1927 put it, “in a Soviet historical picture, the important thing is class struggle, not the personality and pathology of the Tsar…”Eisenstein would agree and was clearly making notes. Equally you have to wonder at how the flying inventions of serf Nykishka (Ivan Klyukvin) fit in with the depiction of this “terrible” and not “awe-inspiring” Ivan? He prevents the young inventor from being killed by giving him the chance to develop his machine and offering freedom if it works, but then declares it the work of the Devil and orders his execution.

 

So it’s also Ivan the Inconsistent as well as Sadistic… but he’s not alone and the cruelty of the film’s opening section is provided by boyar Kurlyatev who, having called Nykishka to fix his clock, tortures him for his science secrets while seducing his lover Fima (Sofya Garrel) by luring her to his chambers. Now it’s Ivan the Intolerant as he sees a way of dealing with his Kurlyatev problem and sends his private army (Oprichniks) to destroy his enemy's estate and bring his serfs to his court at Alexandrovskaya Sloboda. Here the serfing mechanic once again proves useful by fixing a flax-breaking wheel and gains further reprieve…

 

But the film’s break-neck madness is that no one is trusted and no one is safe from the wrath of Ivan the Unpredictable who will turn on family and friends quicker than Old Joe from Georgia. Meet the Old Boss, same as the New Boss… He can be feeding grapes to Fadke one minute and strangulating his already tortured wife the next as she tries to help the man who, if anyone just stopped and thought clearly for a second, could establish air superiority for the Russians, 300 years before they’d need it!

 

Mauro Colombis provided spirited accompaniment through the many moods of the Tsar and found musical method in spite of the madness on screen.

 

Rediscoveries – Victor Sjöström, with Stephen Horne

 

The film of the day came early… and even this controversial being the first to ever be banned in Sweden. The Gardener (1912) was Sjöström’s second film although he had been working in theatre since the mid 1890s and so was both an experienced performer as well as director. The script was from Mauritz Stiller, his friend and mentor who also makes and uncredited appearance as a reveller when the heroine is on a boat.

 

The film was banned for as contrary to "good practices" and for “embellishing death” although I’m sure there would have been more freedom to express the contents on stage at this time. The story concerns a farmer/gardener (Sjöström) who disapproves of his son (young Gösta Ekman!) having a relationship with the daughter of one of his workers played by Danish actress Lili Bech. Having chased his son of his true motives are revealed as his rapes her in the green house before sending her and her father away to penury just to save his own skin.

 

There are no easy answers in this film and also no predictable narrative decline into drink and prostitution as often seen in films of the period. The woman keeps going and finds a away through the support of a kindly old general (John Ekman) but after a few years he dies and his children force her out. Returning to her home village she must confront the past and what it has meant for her life.

 

Bech is so naturalistic and unmannered something the stage-trained Scandinavians seem to have managed from the get-go helped, no doubt, by the theatrical qualities of their culture and the existence of great performance managers like Sjöström, The film, once considered lost, is just over half an hour but contains more quality moments – cinematography already from the mighty Julius Jaenzon.

 

There were four tantalising fragments from other early Sjöström films and Stephen Horne brought the epic lyricism to the lakes and mountains of Värmland … or close by!

 

It's only 1912 but already the men who would make the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema are already in place, now, why not start taking some of Selma Lagerlöf’s stories and turn them into films?

 

 

Now for the quick-fire round…

Il Siluramento Dell' Oceania  (IT 1917) with José Marìa Serralde Ruiz

Directed by Augusto Genina this was an thriller about sinking ships, family treasure and evil gangs. It moves at quite a lick and whilst missing some sections holds together entertainingly as the Captain of a sunken liner (Vasco Creti) helps a young Viscontessa (Ileana Leonidoff) recover her lost inheritance. There are castles, mysteries, fiendish crooks, fights and chases... it was FUN!

Kissa Kouprine

La Perle (BE 1929) with Meg Morley

 

More Belgian Avant-Garde and one of the most entertaining and cohesive with Henri d' Ursel’s The Pearl (1929). Written and starring Georges Hugnet as Le Jeune Homme, The Pearl could signify possession or it could mean love… it may even be just a pearl. I don’t think it matters to any forensic degree, you can overlay your own interpretation according to mood: the key thing is that the film draws you in and makes you think. This properly defies any constraining interpretations and, by the rules, your guess is as good as mine. All we know for certain is what happens on screen.

 

A young Lulu (Mary Stutz) waits in her garden for her fiancé and he sets off to buy her a pearl necklace. Here is the films funniest joke as Lulu looks out and we see her man running through woods, rowing across a river then running through town getting distracted by a street game… You expect her to view him directly but he’s far away, initially heroic and then just distracted.

At the jewellery store, a pretty shop assistant (Kissa Kouprine, the only professional actor on show who featured in a number of Marcel L’Herbier’s films) steals pearls and carelessly hides them in her stocking top which is all too visible as she sits chatting on a ledge. The girl has no name and is only referenced in the title sequence as La Voleuse – The Thief. He leaves the shop with his pearls and she follows him, hitching a ride on his bike. The man crashes his bike and the string of pearls is broken… the man searches but there is still a pearl missing. It rolled directly to La Voleuse who walks off with it leaving him fatuously pawing the ground...

 

He goes to an hotel and La Voleuse is everywhere, appearing in a tight-fitting silver-grey cat suit – an updated, sleeker version of Irma Vep - from every corridor, pursuing the man and his pearls. She is not alone and there are other women all wearing the same costume. Are all women looking for “The Pearl” and you can make of that what you will.

 

In the evening we travelled back to that place again for East Lynne with Variations (US 1919) featuring the great Marie Prevost showing up the Keystone Boys yet again!

  

The Man Who Came Back (US 1924) with John Sweeney

 

Festival director, Jay Weissberg gave out a number of trigger warnings starting with the unknown ten-minute soft porn films of a young woman being caught skinny dipping by a man after her dog runs off with her clothes. It felt more like a 70s Brit sex comedy than the usual fare but I’m sure it was artistically justified.

 

There was worse to come in the main feature and not in George O’Brien’s drinking and Dorothy Mackaill’s drug taking but in the ways his character beats hers when he suspects her of falling off the wagon leaving her… “grateful”? “Oh Henry… we’ve won…” she says as she staggers to her feat the beating apparently worth it as some show of love? George too was skinny dipping and – as one cineaste later remarked – not for long enough.

 

O’Brien’s tyle of acting does tend to rely on him swaggering around trying to control his abnormal muscle mass and ripping his shirt off at the slightest opportunity. Here he looked ill-matched with the delicate features and other-worldly hair mass of Mackaill who not only looked like she was in the wrong decade but also acted like it versus Burly O’Brien. The two played Henry “Harry” Potter (fnar!!) and his lover Marcelle who he meets on a journey to prove himself to his father that his wasteful gambling and drinking years are over. Sadly things get far worse before they get better which is pretty brave for a film about addiction at this time.

 

The estimable Ralph Lewis plays his self-made and hard to please, father whilst Emily Fitzroy is disapproving Aunt Isabel with Cyril Chadwick as the man of unknown allegiance Captain Trevelan… Emmett J. Flynn directs well and it is a tense film that deals frankly – too frankly in parts – with difficult subjects. The restoration looks fabulous but the special effect for me is Ms Mackaill who’d I never seen in a film before this one and who acted not just George but everyone else off screen. One to watch, mark my words!

 

John Sweeney was again on top form for this one smoothing out the melodrama and heightening the drama in ways that might be unconscious to him now but are the result of many hundreds of thousands of hours treading this remarkable musical path!

Epic Thursday… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 44, Day Six

White Heather (1919)

Are Parents People? (1925) with Neil Brand

Not a lot of people know this but, when this film was screened at the Kennington Bioscope Kevin Brownlow revealed that silent cinema’s sophisticate with that European air, Adolphe Menjou was actually half Irish and could speak Gaelic as well as probably his father’s French. Further investigation shows his mother’s maiden name to be Joyce who was also a first cousin of James Joyce, the writer not the railway worker who is my connection. The more I look at Adolphe the more I can “hear” that brogue…  but also the harder to accept his republican politics and later support of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his co-founding of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

Still… it’s the art and not the artist and he was, on screen at least, always a consummate professional and great to watch. Co-star Florence Vidor later told Kevin that Menjou “fell apart with success”, unable to cope with too much good fortune he fell to self-medicating with a bottle and who knows what impact that had on his politics? In this film as with many others, he makes us happy. Life may be disappointing but it’s also rewardingly contradictory, comic and complex.

Kevin explained the influence of Chaplin’s Woman of Paris on director Malcolm St. Clair’s style with the latter eschewing flamboyant camerawork in favour of a focus on character development. A supposedly simpler approach but the narrative was still driven by silky editing and some touches that might even be described as Lubitsch-esque; a pair of impatient feet here, a door opened just for slamming and the flicking of peanut shells off an armchair in tribute to a habit of Mabel Normand’s… Lubitsch also was influenced by Woman of Paris, thanks Charlie, as ever!

This was an original print from the Kodascope Library and from Chris Bird’s collection – the same one we saw back in 2017 at the KB. At the time it was my first exposure to the sparkling brilliance of Betty Bronson but having recently seen her quicksilver emoting in Peter Pan (1924) I was even more impressed than on that initial viewing. Here she’s Lita, a teenager torn between two parents, Menjou and the elegant Florence Vidor, who are so in love they hate each other. Unable to see beyond their mutual inflexibility they divorce leaving their daughter in a boarding school trying to figure out a way to reunite them. She hatches a plot involving a movie star – an hilarious turn from George Beranger – expulsion and handsome Doctor Dacer (Lawrence Gray).

It’s a hoot, the cast are wonderful and it’s as sophisticated as Hollywood gets! Talking of which, our learned friend Maestro Neil Brand was on hand to provide the lightness of touch for his accompaniment including a wealth of melodic references and an instinctive way with improvisational composition that can only a lifetime of study make! Chapeau!

 

GLI ULTIMI GIORNI DI POMPEI (IT 1913) with José Marìa Serralde Ruiz

 

Eleuterio Rodolfi’s film was one of two competing adaptations of the British novel by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, published in 1834, and itself inspired by the painting The Last Day of Pompeii by the Russian painter Karl Briullov. The other was directed by Giovanni Enrico Vidali for Pasquali & Co. and was released just four days after this version produced by Ambrosio. That version was screened earlier this year at the Kennington Bioscope and whilst I had previously seen this one on the Kino DVD todays’ screening was much longer – 107 minutes compared with just 78 on the DVD - plus far more enjoyable on the big screen and with exceptionally energetic and epic accompaniment from José Marìa Serralde Ruiz!

It is one of the last great “tableau” films, so called as they consisted of a series of, often quite intricate, single takes using a largely static camera. Here there are literally thousands of people placed in some shots, as the action moves across the frame creating the kineticism of a moving shot so convincingly that you stop noticing. One shot is of many hundreds of people and it’s extraordinary although rather spoilt by the presence of one man wearing a modern suit… evidence below!

The story revolves around Glaucus (Ubaldo Stefani) – one of Pompeii’s most eligible, who opens the film walking down the main street with his friend Claudius (Vitale Di Stefano). They are chatted to by a couple of young ladies but Glaucus only has eyes for Jone (Eugenia Tettoni Fior) one of the city’s great beauties. We are shown exterior shots of the two lovers enjoying a picnic in the lagoon but they are observed from the shore by Arbace, Egyptian High Priest (Antonio Grisanti) who, when not plotting to increase the popularity of Isis and other “new” Egyptian gods, is trying to force Jone into his arms… by foul means or fair.

Against this upper-class backdrop is introduced, a poor blind girl, Nidia (Fernanda Negri Pouget, who maintains her eyes in an excruciating upward tilt for the whole film… method miming!). She sells flowers when she isn’t slaving away at one of the local taverns. Glaucus, appalled at her miss-treatment, rescues her and buys her from the landlord. He sets her up as a handmaiden in his splendid villa... a very mixed blessing as it turns out. Nidia falls very quickly for her rescuer but she’s quickly in misery following a visit from his true love… and we see her agonising against the curtains while Glaucus and Jone make love down stage.

So, the human drama unfolds with magic and cult religion used in attempts to divide the lovers by jealous priests, noble but lovestruck blind servants and those of bad intent. But, spoilers ahead, you juts know that the big spoiler is the mountain and that at some point things are really going to kick off.

It’s from the golden age of Italian silent cinema and on a line from L’Inferno to Cabiria and beyond in terms of dramatic ambition and operatic – mythical intensity. It’s an extraordinary document from just 17 years into the new media’s development and I am so pleased to have seen it on the scale intended! And, well played José Marìa Serralde Ruiz: an explosive performance mixed with much intensity and delicate phrasing!

My other highlights…

The White Heather (US 1919) with Stephen Horne

A tinted and toned nitrate print of Maurice Tourneur’s long believed lost The White Heather was found at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam in 2023 and subsequently restored by the SFFP. It looks gorgeous and was presented here in 35mm with a dynamic score from the multi-instrumentalism master improviser Mr Stephen Horne

It’s a rip-roaring nautical yarn and court-room drama in which monied baddie Lord Angus Cameron (Holmes Herbert) tries to annul his secret marriage to castle housekeeper Marian (Mabel Ballin) – and subsequent off-spring – so that he can get even more money by marrying a fellow posh person (honestly, rich folk, are they normally this nasty?). The two were married at sea and unfortunately the ship sank including the only record of their nuptials although the Captain (Greed’s Gibson Gowland who was from County Durham!) survives and could attest to the ceremony, should it be worth his while… A legal battle is followed by a race to find the Captain led by an impossibly skinny John Gilbert as Dick Beach, whilst legal follow up and under-water combat skills are provided by Ralph Graves as Alec McClintock.

Excellent fun and we cheered!

Maggie Hennefeld on weaponising Nasty Fashion!

UCLA David C Copley Lecture: Costume Design and Silent Cinema

Dressed for Chaos: Costumes, Nasty Women and Social Change

This was an excellent lecture by Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı aka The Nasty Women Collective which highlighted the tremendous importance of costume design in the act of creating the chaos of comedy. Costume designers, mostly women, supported the ambition of the leading players by providing clothes fit for purpose as well as the narrative authenticity.

I hadn’t expected to be so fascinated in the subject but that’s education for you and there’s a whole depth of detail I would love to understand more. Professor Hennefeld said that the talk was being recorded and I do hope so as my niece is studying costume design at Central St Martins and I know she will get a lot from this.

I also have to say I love the continuing momentum of this project it only gets stronger and more interesting as the years progress and, as an agent for truth and resistance it is a remarkable tribute to silent cinematic scholarship!

Make more noise!!

 

That man in a suit... small things amuse small minds. Sorry!