Thursday, 9 October 2025

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!





 

Futility… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Day Five

 

In the rush to fall over each other’s opinions we forget that there can be no winners in a war of words or of bombs. In the battle to persuade, we hurl our arguments across the internet like ordnance from a 4.5 inch Howitzer and yet, whilst the enemy’s lines may be pockmarked with damage, their response only gains in ferocity with the momentum of the attack. It is quiet something to bring a silence to this discourse and to give us all pause for thought, to defuse the fatuous mechanics of action and reaction but that’s exactly what both the late-night films today did for me. They did so in different and equally powerful ways.


The most effective statements are often the ones that simply let you work out the message yourself… not in an abstract way like the Belgian avant-garde cinema of Tuesday – but in the force of images and or music that show a truth we might never have seen conveyed in a moving image before. If the original aim of the Ukrainian/Soviet propaganda we’ve seen this week, as well as tonight’s British propaganda, was to create a specific response in the audience, the musical context of both scores held us away from that original intent and gave us that pause and somewhere between thought and expression lies the truth. Not surprisingly some of us were a little short on words for a while...



Palestine - A Revised Narrative (LB, 2024)


Cynthia Zaven’s sparse electronica and piano accompaniment for her compilation of Imperial War Museum clips of Palestine during the Great War enabled a presentation of documents devoid of polemic. She turned British propaganda into a neutral statement that simply reminded us that one of the World’s most intractable problems was different before 1917. In the clips we see Gaza, Jaffa, lush farmlands and seafront towns, there’s Nazareth, Bethlehem and a Jerusalem in which Muslims, Jews and Christians intermingle, going about their daily lives – talking together and worshipping their God with his common roots. Clearly not everything is perfect – the Commonwealth forces have just pushed the Turkish forces out of the area, it’s a warzone.


What happened next is of course where the real debate starts and were further reading is essential. The Balfour Declaration and the decisions of a flawed British regime with a romanticised view of The Holy Land played their part but as a historian I must advise caution and cross-referencing: for myself and everyone else, we must investigate not reach for simple conclusions. As a starter, I would heartily recommend three episodes of the Empire podcast with William Dalrymple and Anita Anand which cover the Arab Revolt (Lawrence of Arabia) and the Sykes-Picot agreement to “carve up” the countries of the middle east. All of these were recorded in 2023 before the current war but main essential as History doesn’t change based on what is happening now does it? It helps us understand why what is happening … and silent film is both history as primary sources and secondary interpretations.




The German Retreat and Battle of Arras (GB 1917), Laura Rossi


Made when the Great War looked like it might be winnable and has a propagandist purpose beyond earlier films in showing the changed momentum of the conflict to those back home. It is also historically significant for the events it memorialises, the techniques it uses to do this and its intent.. Geoffrey H. Malins was director of photography as he had been for the two Somme films but even though the first was certainly ground-breaking and a phenomenon, Arras doesn’t carry the sense of excitement ad revelation possibly because the enemy was in retreat and more of a known quantity. It’s still a great technical achievement and awe-inspiring in the greater context but it didn’t feel triumphant, more grimly determined to help complete the job.


Laura Rossi has scored for the other films and was on hand to hear her new composition played in the Teatro Verdi by the Orchestra di Pordenone & Coro del Fruili as conducted by Andrej Goričar. Le Giornate is always the warmest of homes for international collaboration! Rossi’s music acted as with Zaven’s compilation and composition in allowing us to really see the film, devoid of any contextualisation that was connected to the original intent or and deliberate contemporary re-contextualisation. She allowed us a bit of both but underscoring the documentation on display to allow our own interpretation – a most historical musical agenda, incredible effective and created.

Elements of poetry and songs of the period, from all sides, were used as connective themes but also providing contrapuntal lines to neutralise more pointed segments. There was more ground to cover than in the Palestinian film given this was a complete creation of the time, but it enabled us that more conscious consumption of the film than might otherwise have been possible.

A sobering and to the day and brilliant work from all concerned.


Meanwhile, back in the Land of Fiction…


Following on from the top… There’s so much “debate” in the UK right now about “our” “national culture” and surely the fact that Betty Balfour was termed Britain’s Queen of Happiness highlights “our” ability to put fun before fear and jokes at our own expense ahead of others. Anyone who forgets this, is nowhere near as British as they believe themselves to be. Betty doesn’t need a flag, she needs silk clothes, fizzy wine and a good time, but she’s also kind and is an equal opportunities irritator!


Betty featured in Syd Chaplin’s A Little Bit of Fluff (1928) which was presented in gorgeous-looking 35mm and featured a host of GB good ‘uns, including arguably the third-best looking McLaglen, Clifford as Betty’s boxing boyfriend Henry “One Round” Hudson, Nancy Rigg as Syd’s wife and Edmund Breon as his mate John. It’s a hoot with near-Hollywood production values and a remarkably high gag rate. Syd’s very much his own Chaplin but he does have the speed of thought and instincts of his brother as well as that most comedically crucial quality: timing!


Syd loves his wife but less so her Aunt Agatha – the brilliant Annie Esmond - who even after two weeks of wedded “bliss” is pushing him around. As the girls go off to see Agatha’s sister, Syd gets persuaded to go out by John and the wheels start to come off for the entirety of the rest of the film.


It’s fast and furious but remember this even if you forget everything else: a small dog may be used to lick stamps if held at the correct angle and provided with the right incentives> I shall take this lesson forward.

   

Accompaniment was from dog-loving Donald Sosin and cool cat Frank Bockius on the sticks (just don’t throw them for the dogs…)

 

Quick-fire round...

 

Danza Serpentina (US? FR?, 1896-1905?) – who can resist this dance, especially colourised? The images are also being projected on the Teatro Verdi and in one of the squares.


L’Innamorata (IT 1920) with Stephen Horne


Time for some more Italia Almirante Manzini and this starts with a pure visual Diva power play as the man waiting to see her has to await her full preparation and we see her in close-up glimpses, lipstick being finished, hair checked, full-glam eye-shadow… before she is revealed in her full glory.


Sadly, this film doesn’t quite support her in the way that Zingari (1920) did and has a lumpy plot not helped by missing sections but with Stephen Horne to fill the experience with fulsome flourishes and expert under-scoring it was inevitably entertaining!

 



Die Dame mit der Maske (DE 1928) Günter Buchwald, Frank Bockius


When a young socialite has to undertake work as an exotic dancer to convince her father that his books are still being published, she has no option but to wear a mask as she shows far more flesh than she would prefer.


A good cast – including dynamo Dita Parlo – and some fine set pieces are let down by a slightly wayward narrative in which some characters are inactive when really they could save the day with more gumption. Apparently a number of different endings we filmed and you could see anyone of them working… a reflection of the lack of internal logic and depth behind the main characters and their motivation perhaps?


Günter Buchwald and Frank Bockius are on fire this week and their mix of classical, folk and jazz served this Weimar treat very well!

 

Louis, Musidora & Léontine with Meg Morley


Another clutch of excellent Louis Feuillade shorts including L’HOMME AIMANTÉ (Un Monsieur aimanté) (FR 1907), LYSISTRATA OU LA GRÈVE DES BAISERS (FR 1910) and LAGOURDETTE GENTLEMAN CAMBRIOLEUR (FR 1916).


This last was my favourite and featured a reunion of the three key cast members of Les Vampires… Musidora is reading a novelisation of the series and Marcel Lévesque tries to impress her by pretending to be a super thief. It’s daft fun and even Édouard Mathé pops up as a reveller at the club where his former colleague is “committing” his made-up crimes.


Meg Morley joined in the proto-jazzed mayhem. (that would make a good t-shirt slogan surely?)

 

À bientôt!

 

PJ

 

Musi et Mathé!



Tuesday, 7 October 2025

Tears are not enough… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Day Four

Ruan Lingyu abides...

OK, new rules, we’re halfway through and it’s time to make this blog snappier. Today:

·         Cried – twice

·         Laughed – numerous times

·         Rolled eyes at improbable plot twist and/or directorial time wasting/needless passing of the narrative ball across the midfield and back to the defence and back again… four times

·         Shouted “C’mon John!!” embarrassingly loud to encourage Mr Sweeney on stage for an encore – once!

People, it’s been a roller coaster day… maybe I need more sleep/less coffee?!


Why cry though? Well for that you have to blame simply one of the finest actors of the 1930s, Ruan Lingyu who acts her socks off and breaks our hearts in the overlong but for long periods quite brilliant Love and Duty (CN 1931). She was only just 21 at the time of the film’s making and succeeds in convincing us that she’s a schoolgirl, a young woman, a woman prematurely aged by the concerns of her life and then her own daughter. Not once do the multitude of close-ups betray a single wobble in her expression she is absolutely as good as she will be in The Goddess and other films about the “new women” in China at this time.


This film is her last of the old style in terms of its morality and attitude to women, she plays a woman who is unfaithful in marriage but her husband has already crossed that bridge and yet prospers while she suffers. Stylistically the film is advanced with some intriguing compositions by director Bu Wancang including some choice tracking shops as her character Yang Nei Fang walks to school and is followed by Li Tsu Yi (played by Jin Yan). This really emphasises the moments in which they fall in love at first sight… but their fate is not true to this fairy tale beginning.


A new dawn about to fade.

Her traditionalist parents promise her in marriage to a rich writer Huang Ta Jen whom she doesn’t love… the years pass and they have two children and are sporadically unhappy. Another chance encounter as the returning Li Tsu Yi saves one from drowning in the park and their love is soon rekindled, just as Huang is seeing his mistress. I believe it was Sade who suggested that love is stronger than pride and it’s certainly stringer than the family ties in this film as the two lovers run away leaving Business Huang with the children. It’s the first heart break.


Things do not go well for the starstruck couple and even after they have a child of their own, a daughter, Li struggles to find work and soon succumbs to illness, that first dry cough is a sure sign that he’s a goner before the next reel is run. Yang has various visions of her options standing by her lover’s grave and after seeing all of them end in humiliation vows to bring up their daughter in his honour and give her the chance she never got.


Ah, if only things were that simple and there was an invisible guiding hand – perhaps Mr William H Hays’? – to get us to the happy ending we all long for but this film isn’t taking the easy way out and nor is it in a rush… But, by the time the endings are all tied up even cynical old publishing marketing directors where not alone in sniffing back tears in the Teatro Verdi!


Of course, for this I can also blame John Sweeney whose Stakhanovite efforts in constructing a powerful, emotional musical narrative for the 150 minutes of this film were outstanding and he richly deserved the ovation and the bow we called for. It’s one thing to stand there casually crying but quite another to play a part in perfectly amplifying the key moments in the tragedy and the love on screen. To do it all in such an embedded way is magic of the highest order!


Quickfire round up to 300 words. GO!


More stars than there are in West Lynne certainly...


In the morning we’d returned to East Lynne (US 1925) with new twists and turns, a better-looking cast, and less faith in the plays or novel to the point at which we didn’t get an electoral contents and not even get a dead Young Willy. This is heresy and several of the audience were visibly shaken but it is otherwise perfectly serviceable Hollywood fare and there are some good performances form those good-looking people including Marjorie (“see-saw”) Daw, Alma Rubens and Edmund Lowe as the apple-munching menace Carlyle.


No complaints at all about the wonderful accompaniment from Stephen Horne on piano (and various) plus Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on harp, the two work so well together and elevated this film to thoroughly enjoyable!

 

Mabel & Tillie and the CCEU, with Meg Morley

Miss Normand appeared on screen with her saucer eyed beauty and it was as if the whole auditorium lifted. Her energy is simply unmatched and it was there right from the start in Betty Becomes a Maid (US 1911) and Mabel at the Wheel (US 1914) two perfect comedies that knock the pomp out of the whole process and connect directly to our inner nuisance and devilment. I found myself wishing for a Mabel bio-pic featuring either Aimee Lou Wood, Margaret Qualley or both: whose with me? Let’s make this happen!


We also met another recuring character in the Extended Charlie-verse, Tillie, as played by the magnificent Marie Dressler – see, women are just funnier, ask Mack and Charlie, or just look at Ford Sterling.


Mabel on the left... see what I mean about Aimee?


More fabulous music in the evening session, this time for the Ukrainian children’s film The Adventures of a Penny (UkrSSR, 1929) directed by Axel Lundin. An entertaining new score composed by Olga Podgaiskaya performed by her with a mixed string and woodwind ensemble playing along with this lighter tale from the second year of Stalin’s First Five Year Plan. The kids are great and Lundin directs then exceptionally well, it's a real child's eye view of an adult world that continually lets them down. The solution is solidarity, community and working for each other no matter what the bourgoise commentator from Merseyside says on here.


But sadly, Stalin's fisrt plan lasted seven years and killed millions of Ukrainians in the name of industrialisation and “dekulakization” (forcing the “richer” farmers to surrender to collectivisation and a redistribution of labour and grain to the cities).


It never ends does it?


The remarkable young Kolya Kuryshkin, a fabulous performance for a scrappy kid!



Electric Gypsy… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Day Three


Let’s start at the big finish shall we, let’s begin with the pure diva pomp and circumstance of Italia Almirante Manzini playing the Queen of the Gypsies in Zingari (IT 1920) which brought the Teatro Verdi to its feet with a combination of on-screen energy and the startling accompaniment from a super group comprised of Günter Buchwald, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and Frank Bockius, let’s call them Baldry, Buchwald and Bockius or BBB for short (or B3 for even shorter). I appreciate that gypsy is an archaic term now and that Romani is now favoured, but this film is called “Gypsy” and no offence is meant (certainly not to my wife’s family, who have the heritage).

 

My Uncle played violin for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for 30 years and I remember him giving me a list of violin music to help understand the development of the modern style from Paganini to Jascha Heifetz as he also stressed the influence of Romani music on classical style. It wasn’t just Brahms who used to frequent "Zum Roten Igel*" (The Red Hedgehog) tavern in Vienna to listen to the gypsy musicians’ ferocity and dexterity and he was far from alone in being influenced by the techniques and sentiment.

 

And our pulses did quicken when Günter Buchwald unleashed the “gypsy” in his violin playing tonight, sure he can play the piano but this was him letting rip with glorious runs, double bowing and tapping (? I still don’t know how these things work?!) an instrument that is as vocal as any, with guttural scratching, lighting quick phrasing and pure tonal power. Not for nothing have I previously described Elizabeth Jane Baldry as the Hendrix of the Silent Film Harp and she matched the pace with startling runs of her own, again showing the flexibility and tonal variety of her harp. Elizabeth also sang as Günter played piano and Frank Bockius had, as usual, come to the party to swing and bring order and the beat to even the wildest improvisation.

 

It was the accompaniment that this spirited adaptation of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera Zingari (Gypsies), which was a huge success across the western world after its 1912 London debut and which was based on Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies (1827). The film was directed by directed by Mario Almirante and is essentially an extended exercise in showing off Italia Almirante-Manzini. Shot throughout with huge rings of mascara with dark lipstick, there must be a close-up of the actress every minute, with lighting and camera angle centred on her full regular features, head normally tilted with an imperious angle.

 

Italia Almirante Manzini has a regal moment

As Vielka, daughter of the Gyspy King Jammadar (Alfonso Cassini) she is fierce and unruly, determined to sacrifice everything for the man she loves, Sindel (Amleto Novelli… who is a total miva!) even though he is from a rival clan and physically puts the old man in his place when challenged, starting the feud that runs the entire narrative. Vielka is supposed to marry Gudlo (Franz Sala), whose not a patch on Sindel so no wonder she burns their farmhouse and gets herself exiled. Will there be any happy ending, do operas ever have happy endings?

 

Feelings run high but then they always do in opera and in diva film even though there were claims in contemporary reviews that Almirante Manzini was distancing herself “ever further from the art… of certain divas, and marvellously moves toward reality and life itself…” (La Rivista Cinematografica, 11th October 1921). I don’t think that’s sustainable when you look at the actual proto-realism of Francesca Bertini or even the elevated theatricality and movement of Lyda Borelli who just had more range… but this is a very impressive performance that utilises so much of the diva art!

 

Brava!!

 

Suzanne Grandais in Le Coeur et L’Argent (1912)


Louis Feuillade shorts with Daan van den Hurk, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry


The hardest working harpist in Northern Italy was also on call for a wonderful quartet of Louis Feuillade shorts in the morning session… I don’t want to be mean to David Wark but his French colleague had clearly advanced the art in a number of ways in the years following the Biograph shorts we’re seeing. All three of the films demonstrate a lighter touch in terms of both the narrative, the subject matter and the performance, communicating their purpose with fewer grand gestures and perhaps with the expectation of more audience empathy.

 

The films were part of a series, La Vie telle qu’elle est (Life as it is) made on reduced budgets with fewer actors, designed to be £modern and intimate” as Bernard Bastide says in the catalogue notes. Sadly, according to Bastide, whilst the series started well, it was not ultimately successful although for me at least the settings, more naturalistic performances and – crucially – using the same stock of actors, gives the films a continuity of tone and quality.

 

les vipères (FR 1911) was very much a film for today with a bailiff taking pity on an evicted servant (Renèe Carl) and asking her to look after his sick wife (Alice Tissot) and her domestic duties. Soon rumours spread like a meme on social media and before you know it the spark of doubt has grown into full-on outrage. As with now, nothing is learned and pain only ensues as the poor woman leaves the village for the sake of her good Samaritan and his wife.

 

Le Nain (FR 1912) is a startling take on a form of disability with more than a nod to Cyrano – these programmes don’t just form themselves you know! Delphin (later in Zero for Conduct (1933)) is a successful playwright who falls for the beauteous star of his latest success, Lina (Suzanne Grandais) but cannot dare tell her the truth that although he is an adult he has only the stature of a boy and still lives with his mother (Renée Carl again). He conducts a correspondence with the actress and they form a virtual relationship via the phone with a clever shot showing them talking, each at home and with a split-screen showing Parisian roads between them. It’s as brief as Saturday’s Cyrano was colourful and long but poignant all the same.

 

Suzanne Grandais is also the female lead in the next two Le Coeur et L’Argent (1912) and Erreur Tragique (1913) when she survives an assassination attempt by means of horse after her husband believes she is seeing another man after seeing them in the background of a movie: honestly, how much more meta do you need!?

 

"Fought in the war did you young Arlen, I ran away to sea as a boy!!"


 The Blood Ship (US 1927) with Donald Sosin

 

It was time for some bitter sea shanties and the unique ultra-violent stylings of Mr Hobart Bosworth by now getting on in years but still more than capable of leering with psychopathic rage out from the screen. The Blood Ship is based on the 1922 novel of the same name by Norman Springer and is very much tailor-made for a Hobart Bosworth blood bath. The star of the unforgiving Behind the Door had earned his sea legs at a young age after apparently running away from home at 12 then working as a cabin boy on a sea clipper for three years before work on an artic whaler. The son of a Civil War naval captain, he clearly heard the call of the sea but he became involved in theatre aged 18 when invited to work as a stage manager helping to produce backdrops, work he hoped would enable him to study art. Quite the shift for a man who, in Norman Springer’s words, looked like the sort of “hard case” you would find working the toughest seas… because, he actually was.

 

 

The Blood Ship was one some two dozen nautical films he made and it gives him full rein to bring his weather worn features and remarkable sensitivity for both red-hot fury and despair, to the role of a man robbed of life and liberty who is seeking revenge for more than he knows… and he ramps up the righteous anger with emphatic force as the full extent of his betrayal is revealed.

 

Directed by George B. Seitz it concerns The Golden Bough, a trading ship run by the brutal Captain Angus “Black Yankee” Swope (Walter James) a man who in the late 1880s was “cursed from Liverpool to Singapore as the cruellest master that sailed the Seven Seas…”. We find him ordering the lashing of a would-be mutineer aided by his equally unforgiving First Mate, Fitz (Fred Kohler who would play so many henchmen – he had a face for cruelty). The other crew seethe silently and only the Captain’s daughter Mary (Jacqueline Logan) tries to help the poor man.

 

Swope is a cynical abuser and he knows that treating his crew mean will keep them in line and that they’ll escape the first chance they get without his having to pay them and as the ship’s hull touches the dock they’re all off. Meanwhile at Knitting Swede’s Lodging and Beds, where sailors are parted from their money and new “recruits” shanghaied, the handsome, some might say too handsome John Shreve (Richard Arlen) takes it all in before out muscling the Swede’s henchman (our own Syd Crossley). Then he tries to protect Mary when she attempts to escape her father’s ship and meets the mysterious brooding figure sat smoking a pipe at his table…

 

Both men volunteer for Swope’s ship though, John because he wants to protect Mary and the latter for reasons all of his own. This being a Hobart Bosworth production you just know there will be a hate-filled battle at the end of the film and few actors could match his convincing ferocity and righteous indignation. There is good support from Arlen and all including Blue Washington who is gifted with a dramatic role that doesn’t entirely rely on the usual racial stereotypes of this era – he has agency and isn’t the butt of the usual jokes, until the very end that is…

 

Donald Sosin accompanied as he has on this restorations recent Blu-ray release.

 

In addition, we saw a number of shorts that influenced our Charlie of which Max Linder’s Le Renez-vous (FR 1913) was the slickest and funniest as our handsome hero uses his charm to somehow secure a date with two different women at the same house… a victim of his own success one could say. Neil Brand accompanied this section and he has refined a slapstick technique all of his own with well timed and forceful lines that bring out the full flavours of the Verdi’s mighty Fazioli.

 



God’s Half Acre (US 1916) with John Sweeney

 

This film was impressive but also confusing as a missing reel left most of us wondering what had happened to whom and why? Still… it all worked out fine in the end even though we had to check the catalogue to find out why? Well made and on the sentimental side with a nursing home and a care home for children it provided a glimpse into the welfare provision of the United States at this time – TLDR: fine if we have the room and the generosity of spirit.

 

Henry Norman (Jack W. Johnston) is a novelist who travels to a care home called Rainbow’s End in search of inspiration for his next novel he finds it in the form of the bullying manageress and one of the young women who volunteer, Blossom (Mabel Taliaferro) who he terms as “a dear little mite of wonderment”. Blossom falls for him, initially ignoring his intellectual superiority but then running away after finding both an excerpt of his writing and the fact that he is married. Oh, I do hope this misunderstanding can be somehow rectified in time?

The film also uses the phrase “Pink tea talk”… which suggests a non-caffeinated intellectual preaching to the masses or perhaps someone using herbal tea for mischievous ends?

 

It was left to The Belgians to confuse us even more but then we had come prepared for their surrealist larks – Impose No Meaning, hold back conscious thoughts and just be in the moments watching the whirl. Henri Storck’s Op de boorden van de camera (1932) was a skilful montage of pleasing images passed more pleasurably than Charles Dekeukeleire’s Histoire de detective (1929) in which a detective called H investigated the activities of a suited man in hat called Jonathan who wandered around with his own purpose and his own thoughts and reached his own conclusions about which we cannot speculate.

 

Mauro Colombis’ role on the piano carefully followed a similar brief.

 

There were two shorts from the increasingly pleasing Fleischer brothers to keep us grounded in the realities of pen and ink! Fortune Teller lining up the evening’s big finish perfectly

 

*My mate Jon Banks is a member of a group inspired by this period called ZRI after the tavern – they are virtuosi and highly recommended if you want your classical music to quicken the pulse and even get you dancing! Details are on their website here!

 

 



Sunday, 5 October 2025

Love and Death… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Edition 44, Day Two

Harry Solter on the job. Photo from Biograph Project showing restored image on right vs old paper copy...


Oh, Willie, my child dead, dead, dead! and he never knew me, never called me mother!*


Morning Mr Griffith... Something about a woman hiding a jewel thief in case her husband thinks he’s her secret lover, then a bloke gets stranded on an island for years enough to grow a big beard and returns to suspect his wife of “moving on” and then pirate gold is hidden in a kitchen, next to the hob, almost impossible to find when the next generation need it? Yes, these were just three of the scenarios facing the American Bioscope players under DW Griffith’s direction in 1908 and, luckily, they were all able to act their way out of it! To appreciate these films is an act of imagination and sympathy, it’s enabling yourself to ignore 117 years of over sophistication and also the “presentist” view that where we are now is somehow where we’ve always been (and will always stay – even if we vote in authoritarians…) but… no, in 1908 things were quite different and these films remind us of what changes and what stayed broadly The Same.

John Sweeney appreciates this more than most and used to hearing him at the BFI and Bioscope, I have to say he blew the lid off of the slick top-of-the-range Fazioli (if Ferrari made pianos..) and made us believe in these stories.


Blanche Forsythe and the rotter, Fred Morgan



East Lynne (1913) with Philip Carli


East Lynne was all the rage in the 1910s as it had been since the publication of Ellen Wood’s novel of the same name in 1861 and the subsequent attempts to capture the book’s fire in a bottle narrative on stage. Now on film, in the first of a number of adaptations, director Bert Haldane probably assumed familiarity with the story, and that might certainly explain some of the pacing issues.


The DCP screened to day is the result of a restoration of a 35mm nitrate from the collection of Christopher Bird who said at the recent screening in London’s Kennington Bioscope that whilst East Lynne is not a lost film as such but when quality is, as Kevin Brownlow says, the main thing archive cinema has to sell itself to modern audiences, this film has certainly been missing in terms of the vibrancy, contrast and tasty tints we glimpsed today.


Chris obtained an almost complete nitrate copy from a private collector which, compared with the black and white copy held by the BFI maybe missing the first reel but comes with an extra three minutes and those high-quality tints. Together with film archivist Bob Geoghegan and the BFI the restoration work has continued leading to today at the Teatre Verdi – a rare surviving copy of a British feature film from the pre-war era. Graphic designer and blogging wunderkind Fritzi Kramer (aka Movies Silently) has been involved in reconstructing some of the film’s title cards and, as she said to Chris, melodramas like this have to be watched in the spirit in which they were made and meant to be received – “loving the hokum, not taking it too seriously”.


All too true and the film looks good, courtesy of DOP Oscar Bovill, even though the same few locations – “just through the bushes… yes, the same ones as before…” – do a lot of the heavily lifting for “The Outside”, and some of the background actors, notably the partially-animated blonde male servants and a Doctor far younger than his wig,  should have stayed off shot. BUT, and it is a very British But!, there are serviceable performances from Blanche Forsythe as Lady Isobel, handsome Fred Paul as the steadfast Archibald Carlyle and whoever it was playing Barbara Hare, the sister of the man falsely accused of a murder committed by Isobel’s would be paramour, Captain Levison, as played with pantomime menace by Fred Morgan.


As a trained historian (well, they tried!) I delighted in the nods to period politics when Carlyle goes up against the scheming Levison to become the local MP, there are placards calling for the abolishment of the Window Tax and the Corn Tax (Corn Laws), as well as in support of Chartism which indicate that Bad Fred is a radical Whig whilst the goodie is a Tory. The Chartists stood apart from both main parties and were calling for such things like a vote for all men over 21, secret ballots and an end to property qualification for MPs, and, of their six main demands, all but one – annual elections – were achieved by 1919. The fact that Mrs Wood’s next book was A Life’s Secret (serialised in 1862) which attacked what she saw as unscrupulous Trade Unionists tells us all we need to know of her politics. She’d fit right in these days mind…


*East Lynne was adapted into a play - East Lynne. A Domestic Drama in a Prologue and Four Acts by T. A. Palmer in 1874 and it was on stage where the story became a phenomena, almost guaranteeing success and the half-joking line “East Lynne’s playing next week”. It was also the source of much ridicule with Palmer’s line during Little Willie’s death scene, given birth to the term “dead and never called me mother…”


Italia Almirante Manzini in Notte di Tempesta (GIF from the excellent Silents Please!)


Notte di Tempesta (IT 1917) with Meg Morley


Not only do we get to be introduced to La Diva della settimana: Italia Almirante Manzini but we also got to hear jazz specialist Meg Morley on the Fazioli and, it might just be me, but amongst her perfectly in 1917-character improvisations there’s the occasional fluid line of which McKoy Tyner would be proud! Her playing whisked us through this stylish drama which, as with the above, was a melodrama made firmly in the theatrical tradition of the country from which they came.


I’m not sure if Manzini breaks in to the Bertini-Borelli-Menichelli champions league of elite Divas but she is a very effective performer. And, just when I really wished that I had my copy of Angela Dalle Vacche's Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, I find myself revisiting the power of the other three in order to judge Italia, but she is her own woman at the end of the day with the author mentioning Manzini's "operatic, stylised, and statuesque" way of acting, which are much in evidence during Night of the Storm, with Italia as The Storm!


Manzini is stylish, sporty – she plays tennis although always in a way that keeps her in camera shot, leaving herself vulnerable to passing shots from the back line… she plays a lot more too in a film that often falls foul of its narrative convolutions but it’s fun, and anyone falling for a bad Count in this type of undertaking had better be prepared for the consequences.


The Bioscope reviewer of 25th October 1917, as quoted in the magnificent Giornate catalogue was keen: “It is admirably mounted and its exteriors are full of the glowing sunlight and rich shadow which mark the Italian filmmaker as a supreme pictorial artist. The acting constitutes a good example of the emotional school…” and it does! As much as the light and the shade, this is the mark of a true Diva film!

I look forward to seeing more of her as the week progresses.

 

Japanese Paper Films with Yoko Reikano Kimura and Hikaru Tamaki


This was a treat I didn’t know I needed but through dozens of ultra-quirky flipbooks, so much pleasure was derived especially with the superb accompaniment of Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto, and Hikaru Tamaki on cello. It was a madly compelling session with so much humour and plain silliness all held together by the accompaniment and the ability of the two players to catch and match the mood! Excellent!

 



Fleischers!!


The Clown’s Little Brother (US 1920) leads me to suspect that Max and Dave Fleischer might be highly addictive with their hybrid cartoons showing Max in the studio as his creations create havoc on paper and on the ground. The use of filmic photo-reference gives The Clown a fluidity not always seen in animation at the time and when he is joined by his more dynamic little brother… things go blotto! Later in the day there was more madness with Jumping Beans from 1923. Fleischer's greatest success was still to come with his extraordinary Superman cartoons, his eye for detail as well as motion was unmatched.


This was followed by another in the Ukrainian Children’s Films strand, Lazar Frenkel’s Robinson on His Own (UkrSSR, 1929) which showed the what unites little boys is always greater than what divides them. Daan van den Hurk accompanied both films with elan, humour and humanity.


There were two hours of Charlie Chaplin from the Chaplin Archives and many rare actualities with Stephen Horne accompanying the fact and the fiction.

 

Bernhard Goetzke and Lil Dagover


Der müde Tod (1921), with Ilya Poletaev


Made in 1921 when there were over half a million war-widows in Germany, Fritz Lang’s stunning Destiny or Der müde Tod (literally The Weary Death) suggests that love is stronger than death but no less avoidable. To a nation still mourning the Great War’s devastation, its gothic kindness would have touched so many: fairy-tale frankness masking a more eternal and hopeful message that we go on beyond...


Death is played rather convincingly by Bernhard Goetzke who carries his dark duties with a heavy heart and weary resolution: it’s not easy being the man in black but he wears it well and is nothing if not fair. Lil Dagover is the Maiden who tries to reason with The Glum Reaper after the untimely demise of her love (Walter Janssen) her selfless pursuit of his life touching even his grief-drenched soul.


It is interesting that the man is in distress and not the damsel; she is relentless and willing to risk all and give all to save her love. It is a sad sign of the Weimar’s new hopes that we get to see Lil Dagover playing something of the swashbuckling hero, not that she wasn’t capable just that actresses would be less “allowed” later on and by no means just in Germany.


Ilya Poletaev accompanied on three keyboards: piano, harpsicord and organ bringing dynamism and vivid shades of dark and light as the action demanded for the three segments in which The Maiden fights for her love and the Verdi was, not for the first or last time, transfixed!


The message? Love is stronger than death.

 

A certain Mr Fairbanks was so impressed he would take ideas for his new film about Bagdad...


 

PS: DONNA… In the early evening there was a memorial drink for film historian Donna Hill who passed away not long after this event in 2024. Donna was someone I knew mostly through social media and from our discussions of not just silent film but also cats and the music of Bauhaus. I still owe her a gelato but she was a warm and imaginative person who was always so willing to discuss her passions. Her death affected many in this community and I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that this was going to be the first Giornate in which her absence was going to be truly felt. Rest in peace.

 

 

The march begins… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Edition 44, Day One


In Pordenone we travel through distance as well as time, moving across countries and continents as much as in style and substance, all of this was so long ago and yet not so far when it is so near and, in the present circumstances, the straight raised arms of smiling school children in shocking salute still brings a collective shudder. We were watching the youngsters in Emilio Gallo’s Colonia Alpina documenting the hillside community he established with his wife in 1923 and which allowed children for poorer backgrounds in the cities to experience the beauty of the mountains of Biella in Piedmont; a tonic for those with breathing issues from the smoggy lowlands and with those casual actions a reminder of everyday life under authoritarianism.

 

We were in Italy too for the gorgeous array of shorts showing the coastal district of Liguria in north-western Italy. It’s a spectacular location with territory crossed by the Alps and Apennines mountain range and there are steep multi-storey fishing villages literally hanging off the rock side. Below are the brave fisherman and in these films from 1901 to 1934 you get a real sense of the topographical diversity of this country. Pordenone is also near the alps but is 211 miles away from Genoa and its an eight-hour train journey – all for only 35 Euros. Maybe next year?

 

Gunter Buckwald enjoyed his time beside the seaside on accompaniment.

Charles Inslee in Call of the Wild (1908)

To New York and three films directed by DW Griffith for American Bioscope as part of the Early Cinema strand, courtesy of The Biograph Project who have taken paper copies of film cells help in the Library of Congress for copyright reasons where there is no original film, and recreated some of Griffiths’ earliest work. Here we can see the bridge between Victorian melodrama and the emerging new media and it is fascinating to see the technical language of film developing along with the art of acting.

 

The Planter’s Wife (1908) was an adaptation of a stage play from the 1880s and featured Arthur V. Johnson and Claire McDowell as the hard-farming Hollands. Mrs H decides that agriculture might not be for her and runs off with the dastardly Tom (Harry Solter) only for her sister, Tomboy Nellie (the great Florence Lawrence) to save the day. Somehow. Romance of a Jewess (1908) also features Flo Law as the titular young woman who follows her heart and falls for a native American man (using modern parlance) with unpredictable consequences. Interesting scenario but maybe these racial types were easier for the director to work with? There’s more in The Call of the Wild (1908) featuring Charles Inslee (in redface?) as a successful college footballer who isn’t allowed to move beyond his native American heritage. This was the racism Griffith would handle.

 

Philip Carli handled accompaniment.

 



After America, then, well then… we all went to Hell or at least as far as Purgatory with our good friend Dante Alighieri… in Il Purgatorio Helios & Ambrosio 1911 then Il Purgatorio (1911). Directed by Giuseppe Berardi and Arturo Busnengo these were Helios Films attempts to compete with Milano Films blockbuster L’Inferno (1911) and it’s remarkable how similar on tone these two shorter films are with the latter feature? Just as Griffith’s sets would include the AB logo to try and protect copyright, so too was it difficult to prevent other’s copying and cashing in on bankable projects. The Helios films were cheaper, shorter and quicker to release – out first and enjoyable especially with inventive accompaniment from Daan van den Hurk and Frank Bockius

 

Signore Alighieri is still awaiting his royalties… damn it!

 

A change of pace and showing as part of the Ukrainian Children’s Film strand with The Three (UkrSSR 1928) featuring accompaniment from Donald Sosin. This film involves three lads from different backgrounds ending up in a Crimean summer camp of sorts with “hilarious/heart-warming results” at a children’s pioneer camp. It’s hard to ignore the context of the early Stalinist regime despite the film’s good nature it was still propaganda made in the first year of the first Five Year Plane which brought so much death and misery to Ukraine.

 

Now it was time for the opening night gala and it began as these things always should with a Boxing Kangaroo this time a live action/animation from the imaginative nib of Dave Fleisher in 1920. This was followed by just under a minute of watching Charlie Chaplin walking in his garden in 19157 and in glorious colour courtesy of the Chaplin Archives – Chaplin Family Home Movies, Mauro Colombis accompanied.

 

Linda Moglia & Angelo Ferrari - Cyrano de Begerac (1925) 


Cyrano de Bergerac (IT 1922-1923), with Ben Palmer and the Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone

 

When Edmond Rostand wrote the original play in 1897 he had little idea that someone would not only film his work but then take three years of painstaking Pathe Stencil post-production to add colour. At almost two-hours long Cyrano stands almost uniquely as an extant colourised feature from this period and is even more remarkable on the big screen and with Ben Palmer conducting the Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone. Sumptuous doesn’t do it justice and with the auditorium filled with these lush orchestrations of Kurt Kuenne’s score further illuminating a film that revels in its own excesses in full expectation that the audience know exactly what’s coming.

 

You all know the story but as with the 1924 Peter Pan I saw last month at the BFI, this follows the play more than most adaptations. Like everyone I’m a sucker for tints and this restoration looked gorgeous on the Verdi screen, but the story draws you in until the very last whilst the acting is so strong especially from Linda Moglia (Roxane) and Pierre Magnier (Le plus gros nez!). The cinematography by Ottavio De Matteis is also stunning and you really have to take your plumed hat off to those colourists: the film was followed by a mass outbreak of carpel tunnel syndrome which was only alleviated by the advent of technicolour… probably!

 

All this and I found a new record store in town… what a start!