Pola, Asta and Colleen... Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026, Day Two

Pola Negri – Asta from Poland

Buffalo Bill…

She is a star in our homeland

Buffalo Bill…

 

Warsaw cabaret song circa 1917

Before Germany, before Hollywood, her fellow Poles were already comparing Pola Negri with the Danish superstar Asta Nielsen and you can see just why in Bestia aka The Polish Dancer (1917) in which she does an even raunchier version of the Apache Dance featured by Asta in her breakout success, Afgrunden (1910). Bestia is the oldest surviving Pola Negri film but it’s also the only survivor of her Polish films made from 1914 to 1917 when she moved to Berlin to appear in a German revival of Max Reinhardt's theatre production of Sumurun – having already been in a successful Polish run of this play in 1913. In Berlin she met Ernst Lubitsch, and the rest is history but even in Warsaw, we can already see the actor/dancer’s star power and her ability to emote as if everyone is looking and she just doesn’t care.

Pola plays Pola Basznikow, a young woman who enjoys the party life much to the annoyance of her father who paces around in a fury as Pola dances and drinks with friends. After a blazing row with her father, Pola decides to leave and enlists the help of her friend Dymitr help. The couple stay at an hotel run by his untrustworthy friends and, sensing they’ll be looking for her to pay her way, she “borrows” Dymitr’s money and heads off on her own to Warsaw leaving the young man with vengeance filling in his heart and an empty wallet. He swears revenge.

The Polish dancers

In the big city she is soon spotted and makes her way on stage becoming involved with rich married men with too much money and not enough restraint. She’s living la Vida Loco but what goes up must come down in the language of most film of this time.

Pola is also showing her increasing screen impact and deathly side-eye in the recently rediscovered Die Marchesa D’Armiani (DE 1920) directed by Alfred Halm. Only the first half of the film survives but it’s enough to show her on top form as Assunta, the titular Marchesa who torments and seduces Lothar von Raff (Fritz Schulz) the son of the police chief who ruined her mother’s life as part of a plan to get revenge. This sins of the parents are passed onto these helpless offspring and whatever cruelty Assunta can devise we know there’s worse to come… at least we do if we read Jay Weissberg’s essay in the Catalogue!

John Sweeney accompanied with melding music and mood in ways that seem almost unconscious but are very deliberate. Talent and unending practice moves his hands along with Pola’s eyes, dance and darkening heart…

 

You might think that the arrival of Pola, Nazimova and Garbo from the decadent old countries might have signalled the end of The Griffith Girls and a certain type of childlike women whose stories were usually about love and not sex. You might think that… but never right off the Irish! Colleen Moore – who had an Irish Granny (like most of us) was the evening star featuring in Her Wild Oat (1927) screening as part of the Marshall Neilan strand.

Moore had been one of Griffith stars and whilst she lacked the looks of some, the acting skills of others (maybe?), she was overloaded with charm and pure pep! It is not possible to watch Colleen Moore and not fall in love with her characters: she has depth and human frailty that wins you over every time and yet she’s never mawkish or phoney. This is a magical skill and one that enables even run of the mill narratives to succeed.

Here she plays Mary Lou Smith, a regular working girl who runs a low-margin street stall selling coffee and eats to help the city keep on moving. It was her second film with Neilan after the under-rated Dinty (1920) and despite the appearance of a low budget, he ups the comedy and let’s her do the rest as the appearance on night of Philip Latour a handsome young man with overalls and no money (Larry Kent) offers her the hope of love and maybe more if she only knew? 

There’s good support form Gwen Lee as her sassy, steadfast friend Daisy and Hallam Cooley as her journalist pal Tommy who almost gets her into too much of a “story”. It’s slight but snappy and there’s one of the best scenes of dialogue between two dogs at the end: these people knew exactly what they were doing – a hit!!

Today’s stunning rail journeys continued with New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge, no. 1 (1899!!) directed by James H. White (probably) and which showed the innards of this magnificent construct, opened in opened on May 24, 1883, and traversed by me on foot in 1987… There’s something about the optimism of travel especially when it celebrates engineering accomplishments. We need more of these films!

The evening finished off with a couple of comedy shorts written and directed by Neilan and proved how repetitive and coarse the genre could be no matter the undoubted skills involved. The Reformation of Ham (1914) featured and extended scrap between Ham and Shorty two ornery shipmates whilst Love, Oil & Grease (1914) actually had a plot but again featured an extended battle between Ham and his other buddy, Bud which was largely irrelevant to the fraternal battle between two siblings to out compete each other’s car company.

Donald Sosin played throughout the evening and deserves some kind of medal!

And engineering marvel that is still in use...

Earlier in the day there was more stunning phantom train riding with Schwebebahn (DE 1902) showing the Single-Rail Hanging Railway, System of Eugen Langen, named after its inventor, Eugen Langen which is in Wuppertal, in western Germany and is the oldest electric elevated railway with hanging cars in the world. As it is it looks like the most made-up AI steam punk but no, it’s real and it’s a marvel’

Next a Phantom Film in the form of a couple of short fragments of FW Murnau’s otherwise lost film Satanas (DE 1920) which looked very louche and decadent with Fritz Kortner being “cuddled” by Sadjah Gezza in three takes? and Conrad Veidt at his most protean in a silver wig that would become fashionable for 50 more years. We need more, of course we do!

Paul Rehkopf is Teufel!

Talk of The Devil, you wait ages for a Weimar film in which he features and then, like trains and trams, two arrive at almost the same time. So it was that we experienced Die Teufelskirche (DE 1919?) a fever dream of satanic visitation set in a rural community (literally so for the man in Seat Funf in the front row of the 2^nd balcony…). Adapted by Adolf Paul from his 1906 play  of the same name, the story had focused on transgressive themes of free love, sexual expression and the hypocrisy of bourgeoise morality, the film still has trace elements of this daring agenda.

The Devil enters a small village disguised as a tinker aiming to make himself useful. He meets a farmer's wife, Frau Ane (Agnes Straub looking very much the part), and playing on her longing for a child strikes a deal with her in exchange for her wish for motherhood to come true. As part of this unholy bargain she must pass his message onto the community and this, naturally involves her seducing the priest (Hans Mierendorff) who builds a new church dedicated to the fallen one after his church is devoured by flames. Ane's cottage is also consumed much to her husband's despair... this Tinker is only using their misery to undermine their fragile order. Think of him like modern social media, or Fox News...

Directed by Hans Mierendorff it may or may not be all a dream but, as always, The Devil is in the details. The Devil also has all the best tunes and Günter Buchwald, on piano and fiddle _ the Devil’s favourite strings! and Frank Bockius on percussion had a great time with this: think Hellzapoppin without so much swing!

There was also time to marvel once again at the imagination and craftsmanship of Dave Fleischer’s animations with three films featuring Koko the Clown and his pal  - Koko’s Catch (1928). Koko’s Klock (1927) and Koko’s Tattoo (1928) – it’s a cat which is, of course a bad idea when everything drawn comes to life and moves!

The accompaniment was really something special with the Orchestra della Scuola di Musica Città di Cordenons and Ensemble Armonia combining to give a modern child’s musical view of these eternally interesting ‘toons. Good job all round kids and grown-ups of all ages!

Agnes Straub breaks several deadly sins in mere moments

The most affecting parts of the schedule came from “Female Madness” part of a strand curated by Pordenone’s Collegium alumni and which achieved the difficult task of addressing this subject in an historical way and using works of documentary and fiction to show how the subject was treated. Feminism and Foucault come to minds in terms of how these prime sources provide a measure of our compassion and understanding then and now.

The medical films of Vincenzo Neri (1908-28) as well as La Pitié-Salpêtrière University hospital footage showed people with various muscular ticks and stims – one can only guess at the cause and yet the filmmakers hoped to use the film as an aid to diagnosis. My daughter works in advancing Assistive Technology and this is an early form of a much larger visual discipline now. There was a character screen test for actor Eve Fracis from Alberto Cavalcanti and Jacques de Baroncelli which bridged the gap between the medical and the performative. The audience were unsure and not relaxed enough to clap in the usual way.

Madcap Asta

It was remarkable programming as we moved in to Germaine Dulac’s ÂMES DE FOUS (FR 1918), Louis Feuillade’s LE VIOLON (FR 1908), Max Mack’s ZWEIMAL GELEBT (DE 1912) and then Edmund Edel’s DAS VERSUCHSKANINCHEN (DE 1917) for which the words “zany” or “madcap” may have been invented. The Guinea Pig (Das Versuchskaninchen) finds Asta Neilsen, who was 32, playing a teenager called Jesta who is low on attention span and high on energy constantly frustrating her father (Alfred Kuehne) and coming between him and his fiancée. Amazingly, Jesta has a love of her own, played by Fred Immler who seems normal enough but clearly likes her sense of humour.

Tiring of been worn down by his daughter’s constant comedy, Dad decides to send her off to a strict school but, due to various mishaps, she ends up at a lunatic asylum where the doctor quickly diagnoses insanity and proceeds to try and treat her using the modern of methods including electric shock treatment and a padded cell. It’s largely not funny anymore but still interesting to see Asta playing in a weird kind of Mary Pickford role and one that is uncomfortable in an age when we are still coming to terms with mental disabilities.

Sometimes the visuals speak so loudly it’s hard to do anything other than watch and Daan van den Hurk’s piano accompaniment was spot on.

The programmers say in the notes: “… we hope these film present a thought-provoking set of representations that demystify how silent cinema shaped, and was shaped by, ideas about women and madness that emerged at the intersection of reality and fiction.”

Seif Abdo, Daniel Lawrence Aufmann, Ellen Cleary, Hugo Ljungback and Matteo Masi

 

I missed THE SECOND SINO-JAPANESE WAR IN TOY FILMS  DCP, 102'23" with Günter Buchwald on piano accompaniment!

 

Asta is so meta in Bestia... her room full of her posters!

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

Pola Negri – Asta from Poland

Buffalo Bill…

She is a star in our homeland

Buffalo Bill…

Warsaw cabaret song circa 1917

 

This is the oldest surviving Pola Negri film but it’s also the only survivor of her Polish films made from 1914 to 1917 when she moved to Berlin to appear as the dancing girl in a German revival of Max Reinhardt's theatre production of Sumurun – she’d also been in a successful Polish run of this play in 1913 which got her noticed by Warsaw’s Sfinks film company. During the German production, she met Ernst Lubitsch, who would, of course, later direct her, and Swedish legend Jenny Hasselqvist, in a film version of that play, released in 1920 but, before that was Die Augen der Mumie Ma (1918), Carmen (1918) followed by Madame DuBarry aka, in the USA, Passion (1919) which was an international hit and opened the door even in America. A new wave of European sexual sophistication was about to blast past the Griffith Girls and their dated innocence, and, as it always does, Hollywood started acquiring as much Germanic talent as it could.

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

Pola's Apache dance

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

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

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

Ain't no party like a Pola party!

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

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

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

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

Gathering myself I notice there’s a plot in which Pola plays Pola Basznikow, a young woman who enjoys the party life much to the annoyance of her father who paces around in a fury as Pola dances and drinks with friends. She nearly causes a fight between two competing males, before heading off with Dymitr (Jan Pawłowski) and from there to home. After a blazing row with her father, Pola decides to leave and enlists Dymitr’s help and finances to do it. The couple stay at an hotel run by untrustworthy friends of Dymitr and, sensing they’ll be looking for her to pay her way, she “borrows” Dymitr’s money and heads off on her own to Warsaw leaving the young man with vengeance filling in his heart and his empty wallet.

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

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

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

Pola drives Aleksy mad but he's pretty dumb anyway

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

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