Redwood Creaky? The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Redwood Creek Blu-ray

This is as much about the media as the message… Redwood Creek are a Kickstarting operation who specialise in “direct transfers” from original materials which don’t always match the look and the quality of “filmic” restorations. But they do what they say on the celluloid can and reproduce otherwise rare cuts and hard to find films. It does, however, come in a range of quality which may disappoint as much as it delights.

 

I’ve backed a few of their campaigns, The Magician – no tints and not as pleasing to watch as the Warner Archive DVD – then L’Inferno (1911) – one of the most important films in history and here in a slightly murky “red tint”, “never seen before” apparently but again not as good as the DVD from the Cineteca Bologna restoration which has a much sharper tone and texture with a variety of tints and which runs slightly longer*? Warning Shadows, which whilst being good in places, again just doesn’t even have the or clarity of the Kino DVD, and then there’s Eerie Tales (1919) which shows on my Blu-ray player as “Untitled Project” – it’s a writable Blu-ray again – but is pretty clear, albeit a 720p type of experience more than a 1080p experience.

 

In each case Redwood Creek massively over-perform on their targets and are clearly meeting a demand by picking some excellent films. So, I don’t mean to criticise their choices but there’s enough debate on Nitrateville and elsewhere on their quality and from people who know far more than me**. All I can say is that whilst I have been disappointed with past releases I did really enjoy watching this one!

 

Marguerite Gance

The reasons for this are a mix of the film itself, a decent transfer – from a clean 16mm copy and without the tints of the Kino DVD nor the French restoration of La chute de la maison Usher  – and the intriguing accompaniment from Belgian composer Laurent Pigeolet.  A composer known for his "extension" of Léos Janacek's works, most famously Sonata 1/X/1905, Pigeolet also composed the music for the restorations of The Magician, Warning Shadows and By the Law. It’s a very atmospheric and lyrically satisfying score that feels of the period as much as the visuals and as uncanny in the literal sense.

 

Poe wrote about the dangers of unfettered fascination and in Epstein’s film it closes in all around us; a fog to shroud our hidden passions from which, perhaps, for those who paint and for those who write, there may never be any escape in life or in death. Jean Epstein’s take on Edgar Allen Poe’s story reflects the writer’s style, his “totality” in which every aspect of the tale has a bearing on the narrative but it was, apparently, too much for co-scripter/assistant director Luis Buñuel who walked out over this divergence from the original story, especially, one assumes the ending but I’m keeping mush.

 

Jean Debucourt

Usher is an outstandingly creepy film - pathetic fallacy run wild with simply everything connected to mood and intention be it architecture, weather, landscape, clothing, candles or oils. It’s oppressive and there’s no respite from the get-go as the audience joins the un-named visitor - Charles Lamy – on his mission to help his friend Roderick Usher (Jean Debucourt). Summoned by a letter, which he studies using a magnifying glass almost as if the meaning was buried deep within the script, we are pulled directly into this close-up world of disorientation and distress.

 

The merest mention of his destination scares the customers at an isolated inn – probably a freehold - and only one man is willing to take him anywhere near this forbidding place. When he finally arrives, he sees Roderick, who leans out from the strange house almost as if he’s bound to it. His wife Madeleine (Marguerite Gance, married to Abel...) is almost a ghost, a feverish presence who is painted obsessively by her husband, his every brushstroke seeming to almost touch her as much as the canvas. Epstein frames Madeleine within shadow, cuts to Roderick’s hands as he moves them to his pallet and brushes and shows her fear as he paints her essence.

 

The house of the Ushers

As elsewhere in the director’s work – see the recent Eureka Blu-ray release of Finis Terrae (1929), slow motion is used to emphasise the strangeness of these moments and nothing at all looks or feels normal. The hall of the house is huge with monumental stone steps leading down to a grand fire lighting a vast stone floor: more of a cauldron than a living space. Unholy winds blow drapes suggesting uncanny movements filling the walls… there’s dread and only the visitor’s good humour to sustain us.

 

“… she seemed to give the painting, the strength that was ebbing from her body.”

 

Roderick must paint and his wife must pose, but it doesn’t appear to do either of them any good. In this version, “by some quirk of heredity, every male descendent of the Usher family devoted himself passionately to painting his wife’s portrait…” and Roderick is compelled to see this through to the end as, indeed, is his subject.  As his visitor studies, his host’s brush strokes seem to be transferring his wife’s life onto the canvas then, suddenly, there are shots of melting candles on the wane and Madelaine’s haunted desperate face falling into multiple exposures including one of which is negative… showing her literally void of natural light and life. Is this death by oil painting?

 

As in life so in death as the strangest of burials follows as they carry Madelaine to the family vault, through damp paths, across a lake and onto an island, her long white veil flowing out of the casket like her soul fading away into the night. Roderick refuses to accept that she’s dead and tries to get them to leave the coffin lid open… yet here’s a doctor strange with his glasses often whitened out by reflection, blind to his pleas. All the same, the story has someway to run as uncanny winds blow souls and silk alike through the headstone-chill of the house. Unquiet slumbers indeed...

 

The Redwood Creek Blu-ray is pretty hard to find now but copies occasionally turn up on eBay, it’s only real USP is the score and the fact it is physical media. The French restoration is a superior watch and it was restored in 1997 by the Royal Belgian Film Archive working with the Cinémathèque française, in collaboration with the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, the Nederlands Filmmuseum, and the Archivo Nacional de la Imagen – Sodre (Montevideo).

 

A variety of sources were used including an original French 35mm nitrate positive held in the archives of the Cinémathèque française and a tinted black and white copy from the Nederlands Filmmuseum. A tinted black and white copy from the Fernando Pereda collection the Archivo Nacional de la Imagen – Sodre (Montevideo) was used as a guideline for the colours.

 

In 2013, the film was digitally restored by the French Film Archive and set to music by Gabriel Thibaudeau, whose score was performed by the Octuor de France.

 

The French restoration

In comparison the Redwood Creek Blu-ray uses a 16mm print source of unknown provenance they say it is “the first 4K restoration” but whilst it’s definitely the first 4k transfer of this particular source the amount of restoration is unknown. It matters not but, as I said, it looks fine and is perfectly watchable!

 

The French version comes in at some 64 minutes and 10 seconds whereas the Redwood Creek source is 65:43, possibly running a bit slower as I can’t find any difference in content.

 

At the end of the day, it is one of the finest French silents so, whatever way you can, it’s important to view!

The French restoration remains free-to-view on the Cinematheque website – which can be found here.

  

Jean Debucourt checks la qualité de l'impression...

*If I was that sort of person (I am, and I will…) I would compare the transfers of the “English” version of L’Inferno – running at 65 minutes and 44 seconds with the Cineteca version taken from the Italian source. Just to muddy the waters we have Terror Vision distributing a 2024 Blue-ray of their own, tinted, restoration of a 4k transfer of the English source which comes with the Redcreek 2022 “restoration” “modified by Terror Vision”, a black and white “alternative restoration”, Pigeolet’s score and others from Mike Kiker and HALEY as well as an excellent commentary from James L Neibaur.

 

That’s five versions I have now if you include the DVD version with the horrible Tangerine Dream score… I first saw the Tangs at the Liverpool Empire in 1977, they made some great music but this isn’t their finest!

 

**I’m sharing again this link from DVDFreak which, amongst other things, found that the “new tinted print” and “a new 4K scan…" “shared the exact same crop values, film damage and stability issues (on identical frames) as a previous version aired on German / French TV station Arte back in 2003...” suggesting much about quality and control and specifically how “new” anything actually was.

Redwood Creek on left, Cinémathèque française on the right.

Edge of the World… Finis Terrae (1929), Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-ray

Bannec. On an island where winter storms wipe out all forms of life, four men come in two teams to spend the summer collecting seaweed in total isolation…

 

I was going to headline with Ultima Thule but that’s just daft so I thought I’d link back or rather forward to Michael Powell’s brilliant depiction of life on a remote Scottish island as seen and described a few weeks back. Islands, it seems, you just cannot get enough especially if they face the roaring uncertainty of the Atlantic and concern the relationship between the families and the fisherman, the island and the mainland. I don’t know if Powell saw this film or, indeed, Michael Flaherty before his trip to the Irish Arran, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

 

Presented on Blu-ray for the very first time in the UK and North America, and sourced from an astounding 4K restoration Jean Epstein’s film is one of the silent elite, an almost documentarian approach that still manages to bring plenty of human interest from the mix of locals and professional actors. Does that sound familiar? It may do but we should never take for granted the achievements of shooting in these unforgiving places and in conditions that threatened more than just the shooting schedule.

Epstein was a writer on film and a film theorist as well as a director and with his third film, Coeur fidèle (1923), he experimented with a deceptively simple story of love and violence "a melodrama so stripped of all the conventions ordinarily attached to the genre, so sober, so simple, that it might approach the nobility and excellence of tragedy".¹ His most famous film, La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) was more typical of the French Impressionist school of film, with Henri Langlois calling it “the cinematic equivalent of Debussy's works…”. By 1929 the director wanted to present reality in its most cinematic form, mixing documentary discipline with impressionist technique to stunning effect.

In her excellent video essay on this disc, film writer Pamela Hutchinson explains Epstein’s use of the concept of “Photogénie” which is essentially the use of cinematic technique to make the everyday extraordinary on screen: the creation of what we’d perhaps call “pure cinema”. There’s a lot of theoretical detail around this term and the director did not coin the term but it certainly featured in his work and in this film especially.

 

Finis Terrae is the first of the director’s Breton trilogy, and was shot entirely on location off the Finistère coast in the part of France we Angles and Celts often forget projects far into the Atlantic Ocean… No channel or Irish or North Sea to ease the traveller into the thrashing ocean… this is the highway to halibut and four men very much alone with their cod. Epstein places his characters very much in their surroundings and they’re dominated by the landscapes, often viewed from behind rocks or from overhead. They are dramatically reduced in human significance against the terrible beauty of the earth and sea.

There goes the wine

Epstein chose to cast local seaweed harvesters rather than professional actors, giving the performances a raw, authentic quality and an ethnographic sense of documentary realism with the aid of sophisticated cutting. Epstein is concerned with time and there are frequent examples of his mixing up real-time action with slow-motion cut-aways sometimes involving symbolic moments. One such instance is when one of the four men on the island of Bannec, Ambroise Rouzic - the characters do not have names - drops their last bottle of wine and we see the anguished reaction of his mate, Jean-Marie Laot, and then cut repeatedly to the broken bottle spilling the precious fluid onto the sand. As it slowly drains into the ground tempers flare as a knife goes missing and the split that drives the rest of the narrative begins.

Ambroise has cut his finger and this very quickly becomes infected which, in a time before anti-biotics is bad enough but they are miles from the nearest doctor. He gradually loses his strength but having fallen out of favour with the others they leave him be as he falls sick and they carry on harvesting the seaweed, pushing into pits and burning it to create kelp which was used for its iodine.

 

Gradually Jean-Marie’s character realises that his pal is in trouble, after seeing him trying to get off the island on his own – an impossibility given there’s no wind and he’d need two hands to paddle his way, He falls unconscious on the sand and, finally they see how sick he is. Meanwhile those on the mainland have noticed the absence of smoke from the island and they make their way to the doctor to get him to go and help.

Jean-Marie Laot and Ambroise Rouzic

With fierce currents around the coast and no wind, can the mainlanders and/or the men find each other in the treacherous middle. It’s a simple story but a powerful one and the outcome is far from certain creating a tense finale in which Epstein also manages to pick up the nuances of his untrained cast on land and sea.

There’s a poignant new score from Roch Havert which, using a small ensemble comprising brass, woodwind and strings, provides a sympathetic score which matches the visuals with understated jazz and modern composition which allows the full flavours of the original material to play out. Havert is an experienced composer and musician who has written a number of scores, this one greatly enhances the film and brings a humble sincerity to the enterprise as befits its ethnographic vitality.

 

A masterful score for a Master of Cinema. Buy it now and if you need any more persuasion, here are the especially salty extra features:

·         Finis Terrae presented in 1080p HD from a 4K restoration by Gaumont Film Company

·         Optional English subtitles

·         Impressions on Jean Epstein – new interview with film historian and critic Pamela Hutchinson on the life and work of the director

·         Stranded – a new video essay on Finis Terrae

·         The Bottom of the Wave – an archival appreciation of Finis Terrae by Joel Daire

·         Limited Edition of 2,000 copies

·         Limited edition O-card slipcase featuring new artwork by John Dunn

·         Limited edition collector’s booklet featuring a new essay on Finis Terrae by Jean Epstein expert Christophe Wall-Romana and archival writing by the director

 

The Limited Edition is out now so I’d be quick and order as soon as you can from the Eureka website here!

 1.       Jean Epstein. Présentation de "Cœur fidèle", in Écrits sur le cinéma, 1, 124 (jan. 1924)

 

Il Cinema Ritrovato, ten take-aways from 2019…

1. Musidora absolutely deserves to be included in the canon of women writers, directors and actors. She also liked a bullfight.

OK, Jean Gabin may well be the poster boy for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato but for the cinemutophiles it can only be Musidora. I must confess that I have only seen her in Les Vampires and hadn’t fully appreciated the full range of this French actor who I now know is also theatrical performer, writer, poet, director, and icon… meaning many things for many people. Musidora, born Jeanne Roques in 1899, was also a cinema archivist, helping Henri Langlois to preserve not just her own legacy but many others at the Cinémathèque Française.

My Festival kicked off with Patrick Cazals documentary Musidora – la dixième muse (2013), which painted a fuller portrait of the woman who was Irma Vep – an actor of charm and tremendous abilities. Two of the longer episodes of Les Vampires were screened, Episode 3: Le Cryptogramme Rouge (1915) with John Sweeney and percussionist Frank Bockius, and Episode 6 Les Yeux Qui Fascinent (1915) with Neil Brand.

There were also three films in which the actor not only performed but directed and co-wrote:

Soleil et Ombre (1922) was screened outdoors at Piazetta Pasolini with Stephen Horne providing light and shade to this torrid take of toreadors projected by the famous Carbon Arc.

La Tierra de los Toros (Land of the Bulls) 1924 a Franco-spanish production accompanied by Gabriel Thibaudeau

Pour Don Carlos (1921) with Neil Brand is a major restoration of Musidora’s most ambitious and for me, interesting film

We also got the 1963 version of Judex which stylishly tipped its hat in *all* of the right directions in terms of its fast-moving gamelan adventure and abundance of plot, cat suits and secret lairs.  

More Musidora later. There has to be.

Greta Almroth and Lars Hanson in Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919)

2. Mauritz Stiller loved the great outdoors

Sir Arne’s Treasure (1919) with John Sweeney

I’ve written about this film before but its rugged and uncompromising story has so much more impact on the big screen and with Mr Sweeney’s ability to combine epic with emotion so detailed that I swear he changed musical sentiment right in the middle of one title card.

The film tells of a brutal murder by three Scottish warlords in Sweden as they make off with the titular treasure. One girl survives the massacre of Sir Arne’s family and falls in love with Sir Archie not knowing who he is.

The weather conspires to trap the evildoers as they carry the ill-gotten goods and the sea freezes away their escape route. Just when you think that redemption must surely be on the way, there comes the shocking truth that love may not be enough… The Swedes didn’t mess around.

Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919) with new recording of Armas Jarnefelt’s original score.

As for the film, says everything about our leading man, that at least one viewer had to be reminded of which of the female leads he’d ended up with. The trouble with Lars Hanson, observed another, is that he’s better looking than most of his leading ladies. Well, far be it from me to comment, but he’s certainly a fine actor with charisma to burn even when, as here, he’s a bit of a lad who can’t stop himself from lovin’ and leavin’ them.

Filmed in 1918, Mauritz Stiller’s film is the only Swedish silent with a surviving score, written by Finnish composer Armas Jarnefelt whose great nephew was present to hear a new recording alongside the Swedish Film Institute’s restoration of the film. Matching music to film when using so many sources was a digitally-intense job – the original cut for the score does not exist – but it was worth it to hear the film as it would have sounded for those lucky enough to have attended orchestrated screenings. Scoring for a two-hour film is an enormous task – especially in 1919 - and the music was rich in thematic content as well as narrative subtlety: literally, the sound of Swedish silent.

Let’s hope that the SFI and festivals keep the restored Stiller coming with The Saga of Gosta Berling… c'mon Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson... Jenny Hasselqvist!!!

Nell Shipman

3. So did Nell Shipman (and animals)

Back to God’s Country (1919) (35mm) was co-directed by the actor who also wrote the screen play and stared too along with her extensive menagerie. One actor die of exposure on the trip/expedition to the frozen North East and conditions were rugged.

Nell took it all in her stride even skinny dipping to help raise interest in the project: “Is the nude rude” ran the advertising, not by today’s standards but I’m sure many were shocked who’d not blinked an eye at elements of David Wark Griffith’s work.

Donald Sosin accompanied with verve and adventure of his own.

4. Comedy is an experience best shared – especially in the Piazza Maggiore

The Cameraman (1928) with Timothy Brock and Orcestra del Teatro Communale di Bologna

The Piazza was rammed for the first big silent showpiece of the festival and we were lucky enough to find a seat, some drink and, crucially, ice-cream as we watched Buster’s last great film with Timothy Brock’s emphatic new score. Kevin Brownlow introduced and explained how Buster had been sold off to MGM by ex-brother-in-law Joseph Schenck where he was to face a more controlled environment. They gave him a director, Edward Sedgwick, but he was a friendly one and Buster was able to deviate enough off-script – he’d never worked to one – to produce the gags, particularly in the Giant’s baseball ground.

It’s not to everyone’s taste, seemingly, but I like the film a lot and it was good to hear a new audience of all ages respond to Buster’s charm and comedy as he tries to become a professional cameraman in order to win the charms of Marceline Day. The film is very disciplined and the timing is spot on from the moment Buster races across town on the telephone to his love only to answer her in person to the magnificent pull-away shot of the monkey filming Buster’s despair after his finest moment seemingly goes to waste.

Timothy Brock’s score punched emphatically along with every beat of Keaton’s comedy, running with him through Manhattan, fighting to get changed in the swimming pool and forlornly waiting for his big chance with MGM and Marceline. It was as sentimentally robust as the man himself and richly deserved the ovation at the end.

We had more Buster with College (1927) – one of his less masterpieces but still essential viewing, Neil Brand accompanied wit a knowing look and a twinkle as Buster gets the girl though guile and quick-thinking. The only issue being, how could this small but clearly ripped guy not be seen more quickly as an athlete? Still, only a movie...

Thursday night in the Piazza Maggiore and it was Charlie’s turn with The Circus (1927), a film I’ve never seen and one which really benefited from the setting, good company and a few glasses of Spritz…

He improvises at least as well as Keaton and his physical comedy is just as good, more intricate perhaps. But, the more I think about his main character – the man who has nothing and is always more than willing to give it all away, the more I find it striking. This is not some cutesy “everyman” character it is the lowest of the low: usually unemployed and with no health insurance of union to protect him: that “Tramp” has been failed by the system but is always living in hope: on his way back, somehow.

Anyway, we laughed like drains!

5. 1919 was a very good year as was 1899

In addition to the two Stillers and the Shipman there was a broad range of films confirming the strength of cinema in 1919 including Dreyer’s excellent Praesidenten (1919), Richard Oswald’s reconstructed Anders Als Die Andern (1919), Albert Capellani and Nazimova’s The Red Lantern (1919) and Augusto Genina’s curious comedy The Mask and the Face (1919), a social comedy about husbands and wives and homicide: key quote: “You can’t kill me again…”

 There was also a remarkable silent film from India – where so few survive - called Kaliya Mardan (The Children of Krishna) (1919) directed by the ground-breaking Govind Phalke and with Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius providing accompaniment. This was a sheer delight after seeing almost all the existing material from this period. Phalke’s daughter plays the young Krishna and gives just the right amount of cheeky as the young demi-god find his limits and responsibilities. It all culminated in the taming of a huge water God in the shape of a snake… surely a sign of things to come.

We also saw the Signing of United Artists Contract of Incorporation (1919) which showed a three heroes, Doug, Mary and Charlie, cavorting for the crowds whist DWG looked ill-at-ease and a bit grand for his own good in these changing times.

We also saw many restored prints from 1899, including a number from the BFI as well as the other archives. Seeing these projected in the Piazza Maggiore was especially rewarding Newcastle iron workers risking life and limb in the routine of their work… and we fret about Skype connections and toner cartridge… it was fantastic to see these with John Sweeney’s accompaniment in the big arena.

6. New years are not always happy

Piazzetta Pasolini’s carbon-arc projected brought us real rarities with Sylvester (1923) plus some precious Satanas (1919-20) fragments from Murnau and Veidt all with Frank Bockius and Stephen Horne accompanying.

After a dozen Weimar films at the BFI this Spring, I should have been better prepared for Lupu Pick’s dark drama but he went places no one else had gone with an horrific family struggle taking place in the backroom of a bar on a street filled with New Year’s revelry. Over and again Pick switches from the cavorting on the strasse to the condensed hatred and misery of the parlour as the unthinkable unfolds before our soft, festivalled eyes… we too were outside, under the stars having a good time, watching the Piazzetta Pasolini’s carbon-arc projector screen the purest of human relationships unravel, love and envy curdling to hatred…

Frank Bockius mostly took the lead for this one – with Stephen filling on with his customary versatility. It emphasised the films’ dichotomy between doing and hating and worked very well for me: something new, occasionally avant but also full of warmth for the family decent into Hell!

All that from one run through? I genuinely don’t know how it’s done!

7. Harvesting seaweed is dangerous and rewarding

Finis Terrae (1929) Jean Epstein's raw drama felt so much like a Robert Flaherty docu-drama and yet the exquisitely shot tale of desperate infection at the ends of the World was slow-burning tension from start to finish. The cinematography came from four cameramen and I’m sure both Flaherty and Michael Powell were watching as the quietly deadly battle between man and nature showed how quickly the latter can turn against the former.

8. Gender attitudes are “interesting” in classic film

Henry King’s She Goes to War (1929) is, as I’ve written before, a classic case of the glass half full… the original film was mostly silent with some dialogue and some songs from Alma Rubens, and battle scenes described by King Vidor as amongst the best yet filmed – quite something from the director of The Big Parade. Sadly, what remains is a re-issued version from 1939 which cuts out all the title cards and a fair chunk of the plot in order to present a sound film focused mostly on those battle scenes.

We must join the dots to understand Eleanor Boardman’s character’s story arc as she follows her beloved to Europe only to find that he’s a cowardly drunk – unlike the handsome young captain who leads his men, and woman, into fight. Clearly there was a lot more of the love triangle but all that’s left is the denouement when Boardman is left off the hook by her fella’s lack of courage and, having taken his place in the fray, emerges triumphant with the glory and the guy.

The print wasn’t great but there’s enough here to show how good King’s technical direction was – the battle is indeed edge of your seat gritty – and to show what a good actor Boardman was. She’s often not given the credit she deserves, The Crowd excepted, but this was another stretch for a woman once described as “the most outspoken in Hollywood”. That said, no amount of mud can disguise those eyes…

Eleanor Boardman

“Thank ‘eaven for leetle girls…” sings Maurice Chevalier in Gigi a film I had never seen and which was described by one festival-goer as a sing-along about child prostitution. I don’t think it’s quite that, Leslie Caron was 25 at the time of the shoot, and the film itself does have her character rebelling against being “arranged” into a relationship with Louis Jordan’s rich Count. In the end they both realise the only way for them is to proceed as equals and to marry… Chevalier’s old letch carries on as before, picking women when they are “ripe” and possibly regretting nothing.

It was projected on a vintage 1961 print and looked wonderful even with all those scratches: an analogue experience in a digital world…

Jean Gabin studies in Du Haute n Bas

9. Jean Gabin had presence and we can all see just why he was the love of Marlene Dietrich’s life

I watched on of Gabin’s earliest as a thug in Coeur de Lilas (1931) and then as the far more charming football player in GW Pabst’s Du Haute n Bas (High and Low) (1933) which was a much more polished film with a superb cast and a very focused story of love amongst the different classes in the Fourth French Republic. Director Anatole Litvak uses Jean Gabin well a soccer-playing hero who wants to improve himself in order to romance Janine Crispin, a Phd student who takes a job as a housekeeper until a teaching post comes up.

It's a deft comedy that includes Michel Simon as an unemployed layer who is trying to work out a way to break the bank at Monte Carlo.

Gabin was still learning his craft in these films and by1937 there was Pépé le Moko and he had definitely arrived.

10. Underground cinema is cooler than you think

I Topi Grigi Episodes 1 and 2 (1918), with Antonio Coppolla

The Cantiere Modernissimo is an underground cinema, as in cinema under-ground, which is in perpetual restoration a dampness pervading its musty walls; plaster undried and never drying with the smell of old ambition mixed with that of new construction. There’s an ambience of faded ballrooms which adds deep resonance to the piano accompaniment and tonight Antonio Coppolla (brother of Francis Ford who was also here) took full advantage with rolling chords that flowed along with the comedy-dramatics on screen.

This was very much an Italian version of a French serial, written, directed and starring Emilio Ghione who injects a sense of humour filling in for holes in plot wider than the river Tiber! But, as the plot heated up, we stayed cool, deep underground as the flags cracked above us.

A tight spot for Emilio Ghione

In summary...

I’d seen a number of the Festival’s films on DVD/Blu-ray and for all of the silents they we improved by audience and especially live accompaniment. For more modern fair, the big screen gave a chance to project wide-screen vintage prints which were sometimes stunning – as with Henry King’s noirish Western, The Bravados (1958) and Gigi (for all the scratches) - always more engaging than on home media… depending on how much sleep you’ve had and how well the aircon was working. For this year was a scorcher in Bologna with temperatures hovering near to 40 at one point; best advice on that was 1. Don’t book again for a room in one of the ancient and attractive palazzi (no aircon) and 2.  Always wear a hat!

See you next year in a straw trilby.

The haunted screen… The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), BFI with Stephen Horne

“It is there, that she lives…”

There is a house and it’s got Ushers in it but any resemblance between this film and Edgar Allen Poe’s story is purely surreal. Jean Epstein’s take on the story reflects the writer’s style, his “totality” in which every aspect of the tale has a bearing on the core narrative but it was, apparently, too much for co-scripter/assistant director Luis Buñuel who walked out over this divergence from the original story. Probably the two fell out over the ending, but no spoilers...

Usher is an outstandingly creepy film - pathetic fallacy running wild in terms of the relationship between the story and simply everything: architecture, weather, landscape, clothing, candles and oils… It’s claustrophobic and there’s no respite from any part of the film as the audience joins the un-named visitor - Charles Lamy – on his mission to help his friend Roderick Usher (Jean Debucourt).

Charles Lamy

Summoned by a letter, which he studies using a magnifying glass, we are pulled immediately into this close-up world of disorientation and distress. The merest mention of his destination scares the customers at an isolated inn and only one man is willing to take him anywhere near this forbidding place.

When he arrives, he is greeted warmly enough by Roderick, who leans out from the strange house almost as if he’s bound to it. His wife Madeleine (Marguerite Gance, married to Abel...) is almost a ghost, a feverish presence who is painted obsessively by her husband, his every brush-stroke seeming to almost touch her as much as the canvas. Epstein frames Madeleine within shadow, cuts to Roderick’s hands as he moves them to his pallet and brushes and shows her fear as he paints her essence.

The Hall of the House of Usher...

Slow motion is used to emphasise the strangeness of these moments and nothing at all looks or feels normal… the hall of the house is huge with monumental stone steps leading down to a grand fire lighting a vast stone floor: more of a cauldron than a living space. Unholy winds blow drapes suggesting uncanny movements filling the walls… there’s dread and only the visitor’s good humour to sustain us.

“Why, you are feverish my dear Roderick…”

Roderick must paint and his wife must pose, but it doesn’t appear to do either of them any good. In this veriosn, “by some quirk of heredity, every male descendent of the Usher family devoted himself passionately to painting his wife’s portrait…” and Roderick is compelled to see this through to the end as, indeed, is his subject. We can only imagine the ties that bind...

Marguerite Ganc and Jean Debucourt

As his visitor studies, Roderick’s brush strokes seem to be transferring his wife’s life onto the canvas “… she seemed to give the painting, the strength that was ebbing from her body.” Then, suddenly, there are shots of melting candles on the wane and Madelaine’s haunted desperate face falling into multiple exposures including one of which is negative, a hauntingly effective device to show her void of natural light and her untimely death by oil painting.

“This is indeed life itself…!” declares Sir Usher but he is so engaged in the painting he doesn’t notice his love faint and fall away, and even when his friend returns from a walk they only bump into her body by accident; her living form is less important now than the artwork celebrating it.

There follows the strangest of burials with a long white veil flowing out of the casket as they carry Madelaine to the family vault, through damp paths, across a lake and onto an island. Roderick refuses to accept that she’s dead and tries to get them to leave the coffin lid open… yet there’s a strange doctor with his glasses often whitened out by reflection, to convince him to let her go where she must.

We’re in eerie slow-motion again and mournful montage highlights the unreality of the death and Frederick’s denial and all the while the veil acts as a reminder of his wife’s essence, floating, blowing in the wind, spread by the water in the wake of the boat as they row across to the island with the burial chamber.

After the ceremony, there’s a “double silence” that of the stopped body and a “nameless ghost which haunts areas where no human foot has trod…” As the characters fret, the veil blows through the door of the vault and the story has far to run…

Stephen Horne was at his uncanny best and created a supernatural sound-world all his own. There was a haunting three-note refrain that carried echoes of Saharan sands and which captured the mood of doomed longing every bit as precisely as Epstein.

Those notes and those feelings linger for days as we’re haunted by the screening along late-Autumnal streets as the low-lit sun coaxes us towards obsessions unknown. Poe could see the dangers of unfettered fascination as it closes in all around us; a fog to shroud our hidden passion from which, perhaps, they may never be any escape...

Artful… Cœur Fidèle (1923)

It’s 1923 and already the arthouse demarcation lines appear to have been drawn firmly across the Atlantic and as far East as the English Channel. I’m not sure just what is it about national culture that allowed such marked differences in style to be embedded so early on, but the evidence might seem to support the idea of more experimental and, artful for its own sake, movie making in Europe than the United States.

The innovations of de Mille and Griffith seem more “sensible” than the emotive experiments of Abel Gance or the extravagance of Robert Wiene. They developed techniques because it would improve the storytelling whereas the Europeans maybe did so merely because it offered new possibilities that might offer deeper insight.

Gross generalisation of course but… Cœur Fidèle (Faithful Heart), directed by Jean Epstein in 1923, certainly tells its story in a different way from most contemporary Hollywood fare. There is extensive use of close up, photo montage, superimpositions and unusual angles to get across the characters’ emotional states. The viewer passes through the physical storyline straightforwardly enough but Epstein seems to be mirroring the efforts of his countryman Gance, in attempting to convey the inner stories as well.

The film starts with detailed close ups of tables been cleaned and drinks being served, mundane reality. The woman holding the bottle is Marie (Gina Manès), a “foundling” brought up cruelly by her adoptive parents. They run a dockside bar in seedy Marseilles and make her work every hour.











We see misery driven deep in her eyes and reflected by the dreary workings of the dockside, the relentless greyness and eternal lapping of the polluted waves against the quayside.

Manès has electric, piercing eyes and the camera lingers on them and her face in a series of unrelenting close-ups. We’re dragged in there right with her.

A local thug Petit Paul (Edmond van Daële), has taken to Marie and, whilst he has no respect for her happiness he seems intent on possessing her.











We see her literally pull away from the window as he approaches. She loathes him but her parents are as frightened by Paul as the rest of the dock workers and won’t stand in his way.

But Marie is sustained by her secret love for Jean (Léon Mathot), a decent dockworker. He waits for her by the dockside, face deep in thought and when the two meet there is a rapture of superimposed images of their faces against the sea.

Epstein shows us the backs of their heads as is if to underline their intimacy and to pull us in. Next he overlays an image of the water over their faces but never follows through to the full fade… he’s grasping for something indistinct and I can only kill it by trying to describe things...you have to watch.

Jean attempts to extract Marie from her situation but is faced down by Paul and a gang of his friends. Marie is “given” to Paul and Jean sets off in pursuit.

Marie and Paul go to a funfair where again there are lots of intriguing shots no more so that when the camera follows them on a merry-go-round. Marie’s despair is counter-pointed by the delight all around. In this place of joy she is so unhappy.

Jean finally finds them and in the ensuing confrontation with Paul, a policeman is killed and Jean takes the rap. He is sentenced to a year in prison.

Once Jean is released, he goes in search of Marie and finds her living with Petit Paul, a disabled woman (a superb performance from Marie Epstein – the director’s sister) and a young baby.

No one is happy and Paul, having got rid of his rival and stolen his prize, has been rewarded with a life of drunken wastefulness. He brutalises the women and cares nothing for his child choosing to feed his habit rather than fund his son’s medicines.

Jean begins to meet with Marie but the local gossips start to talk and Paul eventually learns that they have been chalking heart-shaped messages as signals to meet each other throughout the docks. Graffitti is a constant theme throughout the film from the words and symbols on the walls of the tenements to those in the docks and, crucially, the words "For Ever" on the bar wall.

Paul returns to confront the lovers but is valiantly pursued by L’Invalide, even as her crutch is broken in two and he pushes her down.

Spoilers ahead: Reaching the flat, Jean grapples with Paul and his gun falls to the floor… in the confusion, the gun is picked up by the girl and she shoots her tormentor dead. She has saved all of their lives.

An epilogue completes the story showing the girl minding the baby as Jean and Marie travel round the merry-go-round. They only look on the verge of happiness as if their trials have left them traumatised. But the message is one of hope and finally we see them smiling and still in love: “Love can forget everything”.

Cœur Fidèle is a simple enough story, but its impact is largely down to the way it is told. The numerous camera tricks can be a little jarring but they play poetic tribute to the love on show.

The lead actors are also terrific with Edmond van Daële wearing his nihilism on his sleeve whilst Léon Mathot is steadfast with a sad determination throughout. Gina Manès is the standout with her amazing eyes and a face that reveals so much whilst changing very little. She is the most naturalistic of the three: the woman almost in neutral as the battle rages.

Ultimately the experimentation serves to produce a memorable story that does indeed have more impact than more conventional cinematography may have delivered. So many factors are always at play but here they are under control and purposeful.

Cœur Fidèle is available from Masters of Cinema and is very reasonably priced from Amazon or the BFI Film Store.

“L'amour permet de tout oublier.”