Action men… Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2026, Day One

 

Doug has never leaped so high… He's perpetual youth, a three-ringed circus, the personification of all juvenile heroes, all rolled into one…

W. Ward Marsh, Cleveland Plain Dealer 19^th October 1925

After a couple of days in Venice I spent my final night in a secure Air BnB near Venice Mestre Station. I say secure because it had a lock for the entry gate – a six-feet plus metal fence – then three locks between the outside and a room with a TV streaming late 70s Charlie’s Angels dubbed in Italian. When you leave, just drop the keys on the desk, said the guy and so I did, assuming there was a button on the fearsome metal gate to open it. There wasn’t and so, taking my life, cabin bag and laptop in hand, I scaled the fence and dropped myself quite stylishly onto the ground on the other side – it was a little further than I expected (this is not a Stunt Blog). It’s not easy bouncing around and climbing to escape a trap. But, as I was reminded several hours later in the Teatro Verdi, Douglas Fairbanks made it look easier than pretty much anyone ever on film. He loved it.

Day One and for sure, not Don Juan but, yes, Don Q – Son of Zorro - and a Fairbanks’ blockbuster I’ve never seen complete with a huge new score from Slovenska kinoteka given voice by the gathered might of the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra as conducted by Andrej Goričar. If these films are familiar, it’s probably because of the influence Fairbanks had on popular culture and in particular, comics and the kind of books on sale alongside them. It’s all of a piece with Batman – still 13 years in the future – Flash Gordon, Doc Savage – Man of Bronze, along with earlier creations like Tarzan and John Carter of Mars from the, actually swashbuckling, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Superman was designed by Siegel and Shuster to look like Fairbanks* whilst the creator of the Marvelverse, Stan Lee both admired and imitated Fairbanks.

What all these characters have in common – including Stan - is a super-sense of positivity as well as strength, righteousness and charm and these were of course, everything that Doug brought to the screen both by instinct and design. He was the epitome of masculine purpose and verve at a time when such things were clearly defined and viewed as a good… whereas I am currently reading Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men and we need a hero.

Mary Astor and Douglas Fairbanks

101 years on, Doug was once again our man as Don Cesar de Vega, the son of Zorro also played by Doug plus a dusty grey wig, and a little padding round his middle. Doug is really trim in this film and that’s evidenced by high-waisted trousers that make him look more lithe than stocky or maybe he’d just worked too hard on the leaping around. There are incessant stunts that remind you of Robin Hood, Bagdad or Zorro, but that’s the deal with Doug – 42 at the time. He’s sent from Cali to Spain as his father before him and meets The Queen (Stella De Lanti) and visiting Archduke (Warner Oland) as he saves a crowd from an escaped bull. He makes enemies with nasty Don Sebastian (Donald Crisp) as well as the scheming Don Fabrique Borusta played by Jean Hersholt who always injects an element of pathos in his villains as if they’re being made bad by unfortunate nature.

What about the love interest I hear you say, well that’s Mary Astor (just 19…) as the delightful Dolores de Muro who becomes the source of conflict between Don Cesar and Sebastian. The film gathers pace, its relentless and you know why and where it’s going. Long story short, Cesar has to fake his own death to become the masked vigilante in thigh-high leather boots and a cape. Using his trusty whip he leaves a “Q” mark on foes just like his daddy left a “Z”… Yeah, right, whatever we all applauded when the goodies emerged and it was as the comic writer Alan Moore once said “a revenge fantasy for the impotent…” only much more in on the joke than that sounds!

The Danish Film Institute have done incredible work in restoring what has for so long only been available in 16mm and what we saw tonight was the film and good-hearted masculinity restored to former glories. The gathered throng in the Verdi were uplifted, inspired and set fair for a week of vibrant entertainment and reminders from the past of eternal virtues and the sheer power of good intentions.

Money madness

Before all this we kicked off with some David Wark with the latest restorations from The Biograph Project. These films are all from eight to twelve minutes long, but Griffith always squeezes a full story in there and ones that reflect the concerns of his audience in ways that reveal much. Money Mad (US 1908) features The Root of All Evil as it lures various thieves and beggars into a fight to the finish whilst The Christmas Burglars (US 1908) was altogether more wholesome as some pawn broker and his criminal colleagues take pity in a woman and her young daughter bringing them a seasonal surprise even if they did use chloroform to make sure they slept through Santa’s visit. Mr Jones at the Ball (US 1908) showed the perils of lying to yourself and your tailor about your waist measurement as the titular gent rips his kecks** at a fancy ball.

There was a sweet moral balance to One Touch of Nature (US 1909) and its portrayal of childhood mortality that should remind everyone that those Good Old Days weren't actually that good. It's Griffith on the soppy side but it worked then and it works now. Far more unsettling, from a modern perspective was the black face and the racial joke of The Valet's Wife (US 1908) but that's what was and there was context.

Philip Carli accompanied in comfortable slacks.

 

Italy Admiral Manzini and this film in one screen grab...

The Mask and the Face (IT 1919) was very much a film of two halves featuring this year’s Diva, Italy Admiral Manzini in a story directed by Augusto Genina. Now, I’m very much a believer in the three great diva: Bertini, Menichelli and Borelli but I have to say that Manzini runs them close without quite having the grit of the first, the impact of the second or the ethereality of the third. But we shall see this week, and she was off to a very strong start.

The story was adapted by Luciano Doria from a 1916 play by Luigi Chiarelli which had been part of the “grotesque theatre” style of the time according to Andrea Meneghelli in the 2019 Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival Catalogue. There’s little of this left in the film which spends the first half establishing various couples among the rich elite around Lake Como. Manzini plays Savina who is married to the possessive and aggressive Paolo (Vittorio Rossi Pianelli). For some reason she decides that their friend Luciano (Ettore Piergiovanni) is the kind of man she needs to have an affair with even though he is engaged to Marta. (Note to self: pitch for a reality TV series, The Real Housewives of Como aka Como Shore…)

Maybe buried under this is a critique of the listless bourgeoisie but it doesn’t carry much force until Paolo, discovering that his wife is having an affair decides that she is dead to him and exiles her from his life and property. He doesn’t want to know who her lover is but, in his rush, to punish his wife, pretends he has murdered her. Now before you point out the obvious flaws in this plan, don’t worry because Luciano is going to represent him in court and, he does it so well that gets his client off if only at the expense of trashing his former lover’s reputation.

Como Shore...

Savina finds out and is, to put it mildly, pretty disappointed but then an actual body is found in the lake – a woman so badly disfigured that they “recognise her immediately…” Savine is definitely dead but she’s not really and you can really tell where this is going except you can’t and that’s exactly what makes the last part of this film so much fun!

Mauro Colombis seemed to take it all in his stride, but this was the sleeper hit of the day!

We also saw the first part of a mostly lost film Ironies of Life (IT 1917), directed by Mario Roncoroni and featuring Manzini falling in love with Gian Paolo Rosmino. What we saw looked very good and was of the standard you’d expect of Italian cinema of this period.

 

I missed the series of short films in the Lazio programme but heard good things about Rails into the Olympus of Elegance (IT 1920?). Another time…

Sorry mate the Plaça Reial's the other way...

Before Doug, we took a ride on a tram through Barcelona in 1909, and it was the most visceral thing I’d seen all day. This is part of the Giornate’s Origins/Early Cinema – Phantom Tram Rides and Barcelona en Tranvía (ES 1909) took us from the Atarazanas/Drassanes area - then the city’s waterfront fortifications - to Bonanova, in the upper part of Barcelona. As the tram travels through the Passeig de Gràcia, it heads higher into the suburbs, streets that look familiar, but I wonder how many were changed by the Civil War and modernisation.

The filmmakers, Ramón de Baños Martínez, Ricardo de Baños Martínez had announced the filming, and this brought the locals out in their thousands and the real joy of this film is in seeing people walking, running, cycling and generally larking about in front of the moving image. It was as Giornate Director, Jay Weissberg said, a pure example of cinema and one that was poignant and very human on the big screen.

Stephen Horne accompanied and, as you would expect, he caught the mood, he savoured the joy.

 

A lot of cigarettes were smoked in today's films...

*From the brilliant Silentology website.

 

**Look it up in The Oxford English-Scouse Dictionary.

 

 

 

Wild oats... Way Down East (1920), with Stephen Horne, BFI, Too Much: Melodrama on Film

A simple story of plain people.

… within the heart of man, the truth must bloom that his greatest happiness lies in his purity and constancy.

In her introduction Pamela Hutchinson found just the right phrase as she always does, DW Griffith had paid some $165,000 for the rights to this piece of old Victorian melodrama and presented its points in new ways, not just cinematically but with an evolved narrative and the performative power of his star. More than anyone, perhaps, the director is seen as a Victorian moralist increasingly out of step with the changes in sentiment that were rapidly taking place amongst his audience and catalysed by external events as well as the messaging and style of the new media of which he was in some ways a master.

Griffith has taken a battering in recent decades for work that, even some contemporaries derided as racist and now, as we see new elements of those old feelings rise again, his role in popularising them, the sheet-wearing Klan and a-historical rumour mongering feels even more out of place. He’s not the first nor last US director to play fast and loose with history and, whilst he didn’t make the first feature film in history (that’d be Australia’s Ned Kelly (1906)) or innovate as much as claimed he made very good, very popular and very influential films of which Way Down East is possibly the best example.

I was an ignorant girl betrayed through a mock marriage…

Lillian Gish in full flow...

Whilst it is a major work, the only real genius on display was at least a foot shorter than DW and with strawberry blonde ringlets. This would be Lillian Gish who threw herself into this roles in ways that genuinely makes you shudder and worry, as King Vidor did when she went full waif in La Boheme, that it might not just be her character that was doomed. She is spellbinding and creates so much more out of her character than even Antony Paul Kelly’s script intended. She is the American Asta Neilsen with acting that is completely unconscious of the camera as it radiates thought even sometimes with the casual aid of an inanimate object held for a pensive second and signifying so much.

As Pamela mentioned Gish was not the only one who doubted Griffith’s investment but it wasn’t just Parker and Grismer’s original play that was largely jettisoned but Kelly’s script too as the Director worked up his narrative with his performers* albeit with his usual final say as when Gish wanted to present her half-frozen face and arms after plunging them in the ice floe towards the end. We get a glimpse of the Lilly-Ice (sorry) but sure enough she’s soon got her hair back in order. A stunt person was used but still both Gish and co-star Richard Barthelmess spent time on cardboard ice blocks and in a freezing river. At one point the actress fainted and not surprisingly considering her preparation involved walking about the frozen location without a coat and preparing herself for the actual blizzard in which they filmed.

All of these moments make for one highly emotional conclusion to a film that at almost two and a half hours, is not for the faint-hearted. That this time flew by is down to the skill of the performers on and off screen, with Stephen Horne providing yet another one-man orchestral score off the hoof and covering this vast space and time with constantly evolving mood and melody all played on three or was it four instruments (plucking the piano strings definitely counts as extra).

Lowell Sherman plays such a scoundrel!

Sanderson belongs to a class which, if it cannot get what it wants in one way, it will go to any length to get it in another.

 

The story begins in rural, humble, in New England, where a young woman, Anna Moore (Gish) is asked by her mother to go to appeal to their rich relatives, the Tremonts, in Boston for money. She arrives all naïve just as her aunt Emma Tremont (Josephine Bernard) is hosting a party. Condescended to by her cousins she has some support from her stylish blue stocking sister (Florence Short) aka The Eccentric Aunt, who gets her up to speed with fashion with one Madame Lisette providing Miss Gish’s stunning array of gowns – was she ever this well dressed in any other film?

 

Trouble comes in the form of the dashing Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman), who not only sponges off his rich daddy, but spends his time in pursuit of his speciality: “ladies”. He becomes fascinated by Anna and after gaining her trust arranges a phony marriage ceremony so he can have his evil way with her. If this seems a bit convoluted it’s worth remembering the source material and the need for the most elaborate humiliation possible for our lead character. Telling her that they need to keep their marriage a secret for fear of his father disinheriting him, he puts Anna up in an apartment and then, once she gets pregnant, abandons her to a boarding house

 

As all this progresses we have been gradually introduced to the family of Squire Bartlett (Burr McIntosh) the richest farmer around but a man by the kind of unyielding Christian principles you’d expect to find in a DW Griffith film, just not in this context. He comes complete with a kindly wife (Kate Bruce) and a handsome son David (Richard Barthelmess)… I’m sure you think you know where this is headed… There’s also a gaggle of comedy characters which serve to pad out the plot but also to create an uneven tone from time to time. There’s the gurning Constable Rube Whipple (George Neville), bumkins "Hi" Holler (Edgar Nelson) and Seth Holcomb (Porter Strong) who is kind of being romanced by the scene-stealing entity known as Martha Perkins (the most excellent Vivia Ogden!).

 

Richard Barthelmess

Incoming key sub-plot reveal… the Squire’s niece, Kate (Mary Hay) is a live wire who has attracted the attention of, erm, local academic The Professor (played by Creighton Hale in that Creighton Hale sort of way, actually very funny on this occasion!). But more on these two in a few lines…

 

Back in the boarding house, Anna’s baby gets ill and Gish goes into overdrive nursing the poor scrap and is genuinely heart-rending when her efforts come to nought. Pamela was correct, this is not a film you can watch without shedding a tear – hence it’s screening as part of the BFI’s Too Much: Melodrama on Film season – and the sadness here is almost unbearable. As the beat goes on, Anna’s landlady Mrs Poole (Emily Fitzroy) without a scintilla of pity condemns her guest for having a baby – albeit now a dead one – and for not being married, telling her to pack her bags.

 

Cue poverty and Anna’s forlorn trudge to find some place to work and stay before she, just about, gets work with the Bartletts, Mother and David calling on the Squire to give her a chance after she almost walks away. Things are looking up as she proves herself a hard-working asset until, inevitably, Lennox turns up… a neighbour of the Bartletts and someone with bigger fish to fry socially than an old conquest, not to mention his lecherous plans for young Kate. It’s all set up for a doozy of a second half…

Lil lost in the details not unlike Asta...

Without a doubt it’s one of Griffith’s best and indeed Gish’s and whilst she may well have been watching the acting of Asta, other influences may also have impacted the narrative and style here, not least perhaps the more advanced moralising of Griffiths’ contemporary Lois Weber. It’s quite a shock to see Gish’s character turn the tables on her accuser and ask: This man – an honoured guest at your table – why don’t you find out what HIS life has been? For Griffith the moral is about civilised mankind becoming monogamous and faithful under their god but this is a more basic call to a kind of neo-feminist equality of responsibility. When first confronting Lennox he asks her what would happen if her new friends found out about her past life and she immediately shoots back with “Suppose the find out about YOUR past life!”. He takes it in his stride, smiles and smarms “Oh, it’s different with a MAN! He’s supposed to sow his wild oats.”

This feels more Gish than Griffith but either way it’s a direct hit on the Patriarchy where you least expect it. Anna’s driven by a rage of frustrated indignity at the unfairness of her situation and the fact that through no fault of her own she is denied happiness in the arms of the decent David, who is even better without the yellowface of the previous year’s Broken Blossoms…) and one can only imagine how Gish directed her sister Dorothy in Remodeling Her Husband (1920) – a lost film that represents her only feature as director made just before Way Down East. Lillian Gish was at the peak of her powers, a master of cinema.

Intricate shot from Billy Bitzer...

Another potential influence on this film was from northern Europe with the style of Victor Sjostrom in films like the unforgiving The Outlaw and His Wife (1918) as well as the cinematography of everyone’s go-too Swedish cameraman, Julius Jaenzon. Sjostrom used locations to reflect externalised emotions and Way Down East’s extraordinary climax partially filmed in an actual blizzard and with Lil on those ice floes, is a still forceful depiction of humanity pushed to the edge of endurance by the torment of others and societal cruelty: a cry for forgiveness and understanding lest we crush love and natural justice.

Boston born Johann Gottfried Wilhelm “Billy” Bitzer excels throughout the film capturing Gish’s emoting in frequent close up as well as the glorious countryside and the frozen expanse of Vermont. There are lovely scenes of Gish and Barthelmess against a background of a lake and forests whilst White River Junction and the ice floes of the Connecticut and White rivers, were used for the big finish. The film was more expensive than either of Griffith’s best known films and returned a huge profit being one of the four highest grossing silent films.   

This was my first viewing and I saw it in the right way - on 35mm, projected on the big screen with an informed and entertaining introdcution and with one of the finest accompanists in the silent show business! I thank you all!

  

*Martin Williams, DW Griffith: First Artist of the Movies (OUP, 1980)

Filming in the frozen water: ice and hardboard!

Miss Gish's costumes designed by Madame Lisette

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 25^th 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!

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

 

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

 

Early Cinema – The Biograph Project with Donald Sosin

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Dollie gets hidden in a barrel by naughty people

Sicilia Landscapes with Stephen Horne

 

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

 

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

 

Ivan Koval-Samborsky and Ada Vojtsik

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

 

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

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

 

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

Zítari

Latin American shorts with José María Serralde Ruiz

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

 

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

 

Dinty (1920) with John Sweeney

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

 

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

 

Anna May Wong, Walter Chung and Aaron Mitchell

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

 

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

  

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Hearts of gold?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Olive winks at George

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

The Griffith Cut… The Mother and the Law (1919), more Miriam Cooper

 

“I bit my lip and drew blood. The camera stayed on my face and you can see the blood run down my chin, I didn’t even feel the pain so intent was I on what I was doing…”*

 

As unreliable and opinionated a witness as she was in her biography, Miriam Cooper truly was the Dark Lady of the Silents and the scene she is referring to was one I almost dismissed as too over the top. Miriam plays The Friendless One, is a woman wronged spying on her gangster lover as he tries to force Mae Murray’s innocent into sex; it’s horrible on both those levels and Miriam is carrying a gun that she is terrified of using and yet so compelled with anger she really wants to.

 

By coincidence she is in the same position as Vincent Cassel in La Haine (currently on re-release !) who really wants to kill a fascist skinhead and yet struggles to hold himself back from the fateful moment. As Cassel goes through all manner of moral torments his face is contorted in much the same way as Cooper’s as she bites her lip and the blood flows. Is she trying to shock herself away from this course of action or is her hate so intense she no longer cares who she hurts, even herself? Either way, you can sense Griffith’s prompting as Cooper reacted with Gish-like method and Billy Bitzer’s camera kept on rolling… just as it did for her co-star Mae Marsh.

 

Marsh said in 1917, “I have seen Intolerance twenty times, I suppose, and it never occurs to me that ‘The Girl’ in the modern epic is myself. It is all Mr. Griffith…In his pictures everything - scenery and players- is just so many instruments in his orchestra.” Stuck as he was between radically different moral and political views, Griffith felt that 'motion pictures must be true to life saying that "the truer they are the greater they are.'" His view of “truth” was, of course, as subjective as yours and mine but we can all agree on a bloodied lip.

Robert Harron and Mae Marsh

The Mother and the Law has one of the most complex gestations in silent film having originally been filmed just after Birth of a Nation as a small budget drama concerning a couple down and out in the big city. Before BoaN was even released though, Griffith was plotting his next move and the result would be the epic Intolerance of which the film would form just one of the four strands. Intolerance unachieved at the box office and in 1919 the director re-cut this film along with the Babylonian sequence with the effervescent Constance Talmadge.

 

Both are on the Masters of Cinema Intolerance Blu-ray and Mother is especially worth viewing as a separate film as Griffith included more footage and rounded out parts of his story and some of the characters, not least Cooper’s Friendless One (honestly DW, why not just call her Francine or something?).

 

Arthur Lennig, has written about the film in Film History , 2005, Vol. 17, No. 4, Unfashionable, Overlooked or Under Estimated (2005, Indiana University Press)* and establishes that: “Once Griffith decided to make Intolerance, The Mother and the Law would be changed from a simple story into an audacious indictment of how large social, economic, and moral pressures affect the lives of the principal characters.”

Miss Jenkins at a society ball, realising people have too much fun...

Griffith’s target for intolerance seems an odd one for modern viewers in that he decided that some charitable organisations, “up-lifters”, were in it for their own glory. In the film their commitment to the expense of too much charity leads to lay-offs, as the factory owner needs to pay for his barren sister’s indulgences. This triggers a violent strike and the main characters’ fall into poverty and further intolerance, yet it does seem more than a little convoluted: which industrialist is seriously going to cut salaries in order to fund his sibling’s pet charity? This, of course, did not go unnoticed at the time and in the 1919 cut, the director is at pains to explain that he doesn’t mean all charities only those run by bored, sexually frustrated women and not the Salvation Army, the church and the majority of "charitable" charities. DW was however inspired by contemporary government reports and, according to Lenning, “…had in mind John D. Rockefeller, who by this time was managing much of his father's fortune… a pious and sheltered young man opposed to whatever he considered licentious, including drinking and dancing…”

 

For Griffith, mankind’s moral weakness could only be changed by appealing to people’s good conscience and not by legislation and force. It is an argument for the ages from the country that was to prohibit the sale of alcohol in 1920 and which, even today, is reluctant to force its citizens to wear face masks or not own automatic rifles.

 

These “intolerables” who don’t tolerate poverty and unchristian behaviour from the undeserving poor are not DGW’s only target in the film and, as Lennig argues, he was concerned with the inequalities created by “indifferent capitalism”, criminality and the death penalty. So, to give him his due, The Mother and the Law is if nothing else a damning inditement of the latter. Lenning quotes assistant cameraman Karl Brown on the impact a visit to San Quentin – “an actual prison inhabited by living dead men” – had on his director who then made sure that the film’s execution sequence was as accurate as possible. The three men standing ready with razors ready to cut the ribbons that drop the panel between the doomed man’s feet is particularly unsettling; as with a firing squad, they would never know which cut was the quickest.

 

Griffith's meticulous gallows

Griffith is also critical of “indifferent capitalism” and not just in its preference to indulge “self-proclaimed do-gooders” rather than pay a living wage. Uncaring industrial cost-cutting leads all three of our main characters to the slums and criminality and whilst DW would have recoiled at socialist solutions he was strangely on the same page with regards to the plight of Marx’s “industrial reserve army”, the under-employed.

 

“Bitter mistakes” unbalance society with Cooper’s Friendless One and “her first love”, The Boy (Robert Harron, who doesn’t get enough press!) and The Dear One (Mae Marsh) all displaced from Jenkins Mill and semi-rural idyll, and forced to fend for themselves in the city where they “flounder helplessly in the nets of fate”.

 

Miriam’s good looks get her the attention of a Musketeer of the Slums (Walter Long who played a black-faced villain in BoaN) and work as a hostess in his bar. It is unclear if she becomes a prostitute but she becomes the Musketeer’s girl – possibly wife – tough choices with no one else to turn to.

Robert Harron, Walter Long and Miriam Cooper

Bobby Harron gets work as a small-time crook whilst Mae ekes out a living with her father in the slums. Marsh’s character is the most nuanced, the moral heart of the film who retains the child-like innocence her director was so fond of. She and Harron start a relationship but she refuses his advances, believing in spit of everything around her, in Christian values. The Boy marries her and they form a new family when their child is born and he informs the Musketeer that he no longer wants to work in the business of crime.

 

But it is not so easy to disentangle himself from the underground and he’s set up for a crime he didn’t commit and ends up doing time. Meanwhile the “do-gooders” end up taking their baby away from The Dear One, refusing to believe that the wife of a criminal is capable of bringing up a child. Then the Musketeer notices The Dear One and the scene is set for the breakneck injustices of the final half and hour when murder, circumstantial evidence and conscience all come into play.

 

Lenning has The Mother and the Law as the last time Griffith would examine the world around him in a naturalistic manner and with a critical, crusading spirit. It’s a film that, in a simpler way than Intolerance, gives some balance to our view of his problematic views on race and social order, both of which were challenged at the time and which we must continue to contextualise.

Griffith/Bitzer deliberately allow this close up of Mae Marsh to drift out of focus: she's lost...

Harron, Marsh and Cooper are all good and the latter gives probably her most distinguished performance. Miriam is strikingly modern, dark eyes so worldly and fierce whereas Marsh is Victorian, child-like and under-nourished, running through the Griffith range with almost equal skill to Lillian and Mary. But Cooper is an outlier of a more sophisticated age even if she lacked the other’s raw skill. Harron is also a fine player and inhabits this sunken world with naturalistic ease, he too carrying the shallow frame of a poorer age.

 

Walter Long also shows what a fine performer he was without BoaN’s “make up”, he kept on reminding me of the original Musketeer, Snapper Kelly from Griffith’s Pig Alley (1912), Elmer Booth who died in a car crash in 1915. Harron, who also died a tragic death in 1920, was in that film too, which was co-written by Anita Loos who also worked on The Mother and the Law… Griffith at his best with a largely settled team?

 

Harron behind bars...

The Masters of Cinema Blu-ray is available at a ridiculously reasonable price from Amazon. You probably already have it but you may not have watched The Mother and the Law… in which case please give it a go for DW’s sake and for Miriam Cooper’s lip!

*Miriam Cooper, The Dark Lady of the Silents

**Arthur Lennig, The Mother and the Law Author(s): Source: Film History, 2005, Vol. 17, No. 4, Unfashionable, Overlooked or Under Estimated (2005), Indiana University Press

 

 Bonus screen shots!

Uplifters and indifferent capitalists...

Strike breaking that wouldn't be out of place in a Soviet film...

Miss Marsh emotes

Thoroughly modern Miriam

The Docks of New York