Feathers & Lulu… Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em (1926), BFI with Meg Morley

This blog has been driven by obsession and a subjective emotional “canon” from its earliest days (no, please don’t look!) and Louise Brooks has, of course been the main one, with a copy of Pandora’s Box on DVD bought from a second-hand shop in Park Street, Bristol in 2005 starting off the whole interest and viewing the same film on film at the Prince Charles Cinema in 2010, with John Sweeney accompanying, sealing the deal. I ws hooked and my long term aim since then has been to see all the extant Brooks films on screen with live accompaniment and I even waited over a decade after buying the DVD to see Diary of a Lost Girl in its natural environment. That’s dedication to delayed gratification or just simple stupidity. Who can tell?

This film is one of the few remaining unseen on-screen and viewing the BFI’s worn, warm and wonderful 16mm flickering on the NFT2 screen, with Meg Morley’s wonderful syncopations and sparkling improvisations following an introduction from Bryony Dixon has, to paraphrase the poet, helped make not only my day, my week, my month and even my year.

 

I have seen Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em on grey-market DVD from Grapevine a number of times but not for some time – 2012! - and here I could make out more of the nuance in both Louise Brooks’ and, especially Evelyn Brent’s performance and, whilst it’s only a slight comedy, it is an all too rare example of such standard fare featuring these two. As Bryony said, many may come to Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em for Brooksie but stay for Brent who here gets to play Big Sister with warmth and wit.

Evelyn is probably best known for the films she made with Joseph von Sternberg, the lost The Drag-Net (1928), The Last Command (1928) and, especially, Underworld (1927) in which she plays Feathers McCoy but, as with Brooks, even though she has some excellent classic films to her name, her career never really maintained its momentum and she ended up so often playing, as her biographers² say, “Hollywood’s Lady Crook” with increasingly smaller parts as the thirties and forties wore on. Still, as with Louise, we can at least celebrate some of her finest work and today’s film illustrates perfectly her ability as a star performer albeit in very standard fare.

 

Brooks' Black Bottom I believe?

Directed by Frank Tuttle primarily as a vehicle for Brent it also providing the then teenage Louise Brooks’ biggest role on what seemed like an unstoppable rise and, indeed, Bryony quoted a number of favourable reviews which took this a confirmation that the 19-year old actress, whose previous roles had been bit parts in The American Venus (1926) – sadly, mostly lost, although most of her shots survive – and The Street of Forgotten Men (1926) – recently restored by the SFSFF – could actually act as well as dance and look sublime.

 

By contrast Brent was 28, had started in films in the late 1910s, spent four years on stage and in film in Great Britain making Trapped by the Mormons (1922) which has to be seen to be believed. As per Barry Paris¹, Brooks’ biographer quoted in the BFI handout, Brooks and brent didn’t get on, with his subject feeling she was in a state of anxiety after all the years of promise, which meant she was too wound up for comedy. Brooks also felt too much time was spent on trying to light Evelyn properly to up the glam which, bless her, was just natural for our Lulu.

 

This is all a bit unkind for Brent has a fine profile and is well lit in a number of scenes breaking our hearts when she sees her dopey boyfriend Bill Billingsley (Lawrence Gray) kissing her younger sister Janie, played by Brooks just when she was due to surprise him with an engagement party having decided to accept his proposal. She was by this stage a very experienced actor and adds enough quality moments to this daft script to make the film one of my favourites of its type featuring two of the most interesting actors.

 

Evelyn Brent and Lawrence Gray

I can’t find anything of Brent’s opinion of Brooks but director Fred Tuttle was certainly impressed with his main star: “The more I knew (her) the more I admired her. I loved working with her and I loved her – but who didn’t?” Well, the lady from Cherryvale for one, the intellectual lawyers’ daughter who perhaps felt Brent, working class daughter of two teenagers from Syracuse, New York* was just unsophisticated? According to biographers Lynn Kerr and James King², Brent almost got replaced on this film by Esther Ralston only to be swiftly re-instated possibly after her then husband, movie moghul Bernie Fineman, “raised long-distance hell!”. Tuttle felt Brents’ “…qualities and appearance suited the part perfectly”, even compared with Esther.

 

 

Evelyn plays “Mame” Walsh a department store worker who shares a one-room apartment with her younger and wilder sister, after promising their mother on her deathbed that she would always look after her. This determination to fulfil this promise is needless to say stretched to the limit… as indeed is her loyalty to Bill who can barely get himself to work without her prodding. He’s a bit of a sap and doesn’t value Mame as much as he should – he doesn’t see how much she supports him providing the creativity for his otherwise mundane shop window displays.

 

 

Also in their block is the weaselly Lem Woodruff (Osgood Perkins) a man who "spent six months curing halitosis only to find he was unpopular anyway." He’s not to be trusted but, for some reason Janie lets him place bets for her at the bookies… which, when we learn that, improbably and for “good behaviour” she has been given the role of the shop’s ball committee treasurer. This can’t end well. Meanwhile as Bill’s displays lead to his promotion he proposes to Mame who, unsure they can afford marriage, goes on holiday leaving her little sister free to create chaos. Firstly she seduces Bill the Numpty and then, having gambled away the funds for the ball, is cheater out of winning it back by Lem.

 

Osgood Perkins, plays no-good Lem

Jannie is confronted about the missing money and implicates Mame who is given an ultimatum of returning the money before 11 or the police will be called. She lets Janie go to the ball – “I won't enjoy a single minute of the dance, worrying about you” - and sets off to settle the score with Lem the Louse and we get two wonderful set pieces, Brooks’ dancing The Black Bottom at the ball as she impresses the senior management team and the fight of her life with Mame taking on Lem for the money in a locked room with Bill racing to a rescue that, her pugilistic prowess renders irrelevant.

 

I like this display of forceful female agency and overall Mame always takes care of business looking after everything herself and hoping that Bill and Janie can ultimately catch up in terms of how much they rely on her.

 

Brooks is of course ablaze with youthful energy and your eyes are drawn in her every scene. She makes the most of a fairly narrow role and is absolutely believable as the irresponsible, self-serving teen who gets everyone into trouble. At this stage of their trajectories though Brent matches her with competence and experience. She doesn’t have the generational beauty of Brooks but she is eye-catching and, as ever, she was so much more than her later typecasting led folk – producers at least – to believe.

 

Louise provokes.

As Bryony said, neither woman had a manager directing their careers and both made bad choices. There are a thousand reasons why some actors do not sustain a career but with these two we can be sure that there could have been more, had they had the support and had they wanted it. Within months though Brent achieved stardom in Underworld and even Louise had to admit von Sternberg had brought out the best of her just as Pabst would do the same for her in time.

 

At least The Los Angeles Times was impressed with Brent, noting that this newest role “marks another step up the ladder of accomplishment for the young actress…” who, after two years at FBO, “is now a scintillating figure in her first Paramount feature…” one of  “the small group of freelance stars determined to play ‘better roles in the best films’”. Mr von Sternberg was nearly ready for her close up…

 

Meg Morley, just returned from the Bonn Silent Film Festival – you can catch her and Frank Bockius accompanying Shooting Stars (1928) on streaming until 20^th August – and her accompaniment was, as usual, pitch-perfect with a lovely swing matching Tuttle’s pacing, the movements and narrative. Meg’s music interlaced with the film in seamless ways catching the sweetness and sorrow but also Mame’s relentless optimism and strength. I also heard something of a Bechdel Bossa nova as the women’s relationship with each other was always of more consequence than that with the silly and faithless men!

 

A sold-out BFT2 had a great time and as one patron asked at the end, “when’s the Evelyn Brent season coming?” She won’t let us down!

 

Evelyn Brent

*Brent told many tales about her disrupted childhood, some of them true… she claimed later that they “led me to expect nothing of life except the fate of the moment.” Kansas City Star, 21^st June 1925

 

¹Barry Paris, Louise Brooks, Knopf (1989)

²Lynn Kerr with James King, Evelyn Brent, The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Lady Crook, McFarland & Company (2009)

Masters of cinema… Pandora’s Box (1929), Eureka Blu-ray Box Set

Brooks reminds me of the scene in “Citizen Kane” where Everett Sloane, as Kane’s aging business manager, recalls a girl in a white dress whom he saw in his youth when he was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry. They never met or spoke. “I only saw her for one second,” he says, “and she didn’t see me at all—but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Kenneth Tynan, The Girl in the Black Helmet, New Yorker 1979

 

I hired Louise Brooks because she's very sure of herself, she's very analytical, she's very feminine - but she's damn good and sure she's going to do what she wants to do. I could use her today.  She was way ahead of her time.  And she's a rebel. I like her, you know. I like rebels. I like people you can look at and you remember who they are.

Howard Hawks, 1967

 

It doesn’t really matter whether this is one of the greatest films of the silent era, how great the uncanny Louise Brooks is in it or what number it is in the hot 100 Sight and Sound Poll, Pandora’s Box is the main reason I started to take an interest in the old medium after buying a DVD in a second-hand shop in Bristol’s Park Street one lunchtime in 2003. Amazingly, that has been the only version of the film available on home media in the UK over all this time even though the film was restored a number of years back in the US.

 

It’s fair to say that this 1080 HD presentation from the definitive 2k restoration has been a long time coming and it is the archive release of 2023 as proved by Silent London’s Poll for the year and the sheer impact it has made to my Brooks’ shelf – the sexiest boxset of the year, superb art, matt laminate and just a transcendent artefact! I keep on glancing over at it to make sure that it does exist… dreams do come true but do they always remain so?

 

Louise Brooks

I can fawn all day over this but objectively speaking, this is exactly what this film, GW Pabst and Louise Brooks deserve. The film has never looked better on digital media and this is also the longest print available – longer than my old DVD and most copies I’ve seen projected. It’s not much longer but there are a number of restored title cards that flesh out the anxious closing scenes and which suggest different possibilities.

 

Pamela Hutchinson’s commentary builds on her successful BFI book on the film and she provides superbly detailed context and explanation of the performers and the film. She highlights the circularities of the film, how it begins during Hannukah and ends at Christmas, the similarities in Lulu’s posing with her father/pimp and her killer, Jack, even the transactional relationship between the young woman and her metre man at the start and her father… money changing hands based on services supplied.

 

Hutchinson provides some shocking details of Frank Wedekind’s sexual mores and his relationships with under-age sex workers and his plays were an extension of his sexuality, here certainly in the free spirit – Earth Spirit was the first Lulu play, followed by Pandora’s Box both intended to show a society founded on greed and desire. Frank’s agenda was there from his first major play, Spring Awakening (1891) – also made into a film in 1924 and 1929 directed by Richard Oswald and staring Ita Rina… surely an Earth Spirit/Lulu in an alternate Pabst timeline - which featured, deep breath… masturbation, homoeroticism, suicide, as well as abortion and so naturally caused a scandal and, naturally, founded the writer’s reputation.

 

Pamela’s deep dives during the commentary are worth the price of admission alone. In his study Dr Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner) has just had a confrontation with Lulu and his son Alwa (Francis Lederer) which, of course he loses as Lulu-Louise arches her back, cocks her head and huffs away after staring him out yet again. He’s outgunned and, oddly, asks Alwa to pass him the K volume of their encyclopaedia. Pamela intuits that he’s looking for the definition of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, a German phrase dating from the late Nineteenth Century describing a woman’s role as children, kitchen, church. Boy, have you picked the wrong girl Ludwig…

 

Louise is so natural as Lulu… and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role – even Ita Rina, let alone Brigitte Helm Pabst’s original choice and as fate would have it he saw Brooks in Howard Hawkes’ A Girl in Every Port (1928). He made numerous offers to Paramount but it was only after Brooks fell out with the CEO B. P. Schulberg, who was trying to strong arm her on terms for the new talkies, and threatened to walk when he mentioned the chance to work in Germany. No idea who Pabst was and speaking no German, Brooksie was more than happy to be anywhere but here and left. It was an extraordinary confluence of circumstance especially given how things turned out, admittedly over time, as film historian Imogen Sara Smith says in her booklet essay:

 

Later in life, (Brooks) expressed amazement at how Pabst could have somehow sensed that she was Lulu – at least, his version of Lulu. This perfect fusion of actor and role set off a cinematic supernova, but an oddly delayed one: a time bomb with a fuse of more than twenty years.

 

As Hawks realised, Brooks was something new, something futuristic - a time-traveller he could well recognise four decades later; independent, intelligent, a person of agency even if she didn’t always know where she would end up. Far more than Henri Langlois’ Face of the Century but an embodiment of something far deeper. She’s herself but she’s also her character, her self-depreciation doesn’t get over the fact that she could act and in these perfect circumstances of Pabst, Berlin and Pandora she was magnificent.

But maybe I should mention more about the first of those elements. Pabst directs so well here and the film is technically so strong with editing and atmosphere that make the most of ever player. Günther Krampf’s cinematography picks out points of light in such a controlled way, he enables Pabst’s mood and psychological objectives to radiate from the screen in ways that epitomise the state of the silent art close to the turning point of the talkies. Krampf worked with pretty much everyone and has been described as the "phantom of film history" by historians Bergfelder and Cargnelli*. Art direction from Andrej Andrejew and Gottlieb Hesch provides the context – in the German way – for Pabst’s emotional narrative with huge dark spaces mixed with striking intimate corners that trap and release the players’ expressiveness.

 

Pabst takes the play – which I’ve only seen once, with Joanne Whalley at the Almeida Theatre, a version called Lulu directed by Ian McDiarmid – in different and more political directions. Obviously he’s able to produce a more psychological take through film, so much pleasing technique capturing thought and action, but he’s also making Lulu more of a victim of capitalism than her own “nature”. As ground-breaking lesbian love interest Countess Augusta Geschwitz (Alice Roberts) says to the prosecutor at Lulu’s trial, “… do you know what would become of your wife had she spent the nights of her childhood in cafes and cabarets?”

 

The film is packed with such meaning and here I’m barely scratching the surface but for me, Pabst gives Lulu’s life and death more weight than was originally designed. Luckily you can still get the Limited-Edition boxset on the Eureka site with plentiful guides and extras to help you navigate the sense and circumstance but, I would act quickly as just 3000 are available!

These very special features include:

• Hardbound case featuring artwork by Tony Stella
• 1080p HD presentation on Blu-ray from a definitive 2K digital restoration
• Optional English subtitles
• Orchestral Score by Peer Raben
• New audio commentary by critic Pamela Hutchinson
• New visual appreciation by author and critic Kat Ellinger
• New video essay by David Cairns
• New video essay by Fiona Watson
• Plus: A 60-page booklet featuring new writing on the film by critics:
•                 Alexandra Heller Nicholas,
•                 Imogen Sara Smith, and
•                 Richard Combs
•                 Archival stills and imagery

 

It’s the most stunning release and what this film deserves. As one of the most re-watchable films in history, this is your destiny.

 

When Siouxsie and the Banshees released their long-awaited debut album in 1978, John Peel famously played the whole thing and then announced “that’s the one boys and girls, that’s the one…” And so it is that this aged post-punk can tell you all what you know already that this new Eureka release is indeed The One, boys, girls and everybody with an interest on this planet and beyond.

 

* In Destination London: German-speaking emigrés and British cinema, 1925-1950 (2008), Berghahn Books

 

The haunted queen… Prix de Beauté (1930), with Stephen Horne, 10th Hippfest Silent Film Festival

Don’t think I’m untrue, my only love is you… Don’t be demanding, be understanding… My only love is you.

In the post-screening Q&A, Stephen Horne revealed the moments when he could “hear” Louise Brooks’ voice in his head as he played for Pandora’s Box, piano screen right in NFT2 at the BFI lost in music, film and this vision with unexpected sound. Brooksie is indeed one of cinema’s greatest naturally occurring special effects and as Pamela Hutchinson said in the Q&A, the sheer physicality of her dancer’s control, coupled with extreme intelligence and beauty draws the audience towards her on so many levels. Acting as hypnotism, but also as Stephen says, cinema as a haunting.

Prix de Beauté goes from strength to strength every time I see it especially with Mr Horne’s uncanny sympathy with a film he first accompanied in Bristol in 2006. This was the 2012 Cineteca di Bologna’s restoration based on the sole surviving silent copy with muted sections included from the French sound version filling gaps here and there. It’s a far cry from the “talkie” version I first experienced and runs at 113 minutes versus the former’s 98; largely due to a normalised, slower pace. I did attempt to watch both versions at once for comparison but I soon got too engaged to bother. The two versions are different though as they were filmed separately with the sound version presenting a smaller frame as space was given over to the soundtrack so we not only see more get a longer film, we also see more in it!

The film’s development involved both René Clair and Brooks’ mentor G.W. Pabst – the former developing the script from the latter’s story with moments of pure cinema originating from both under the eventual direction of Augusto Genina. Clair’s brilliant closing sequence was envisaged as a silent and it’s impossible to imagine it working any other way now. Overall, Genina presents his own “cut”, a visually coherent film and one that has never looked better, highlighting the work of his ace cameraman, Rudolph Maté who had worked on Dreyer’s Joan and would go on to collaborate on Vampyr too.

Louise Brooks attracting attention

The opening section in the public pools has a documentary quality like People on a Sunday and Brooks is introduced feet – or rather feet, calf and thighs – first before blowing the audience away with vivacity and a smile to brighten even the darkest metropolitan day. There’s more exceptional footage at a fairground as Brooks’ character suddenly starts to regret passing up her chance to become separate from the common men pressing all around her. Amidst the smiles and tom-foolery Brooks’ face is a mask of despair as realisation drives even the faintest smile from her lips.

It’s hard to resist drawing parallels with the star’s own situation in this film: she’s followed onto a train by press and paparazzi after winning the chance to represent France at the Miss Europe pageant and subjected to male attention at every stage. Her big break finds her conflicted between opportunity and loyalty to her man, Andre (Georges Charlia), a choice that made the actress burn a fair number of bridges, in actuality. Lucienne gets and accepts a chance in a talking picture whilst in real life America Brooks was turning down offers from Wild Bill Wellman to star in a thing called The Public Enemy (Jean went with that one…). Louise was just 23 when she made this film and it was to be her last starring role in a feature: mid-life redemption and eternal fame all lay ahead, but first she had to get lost for a while.

Brooks once described herself as an actor who largely just played herself and that’s enough if you’re picked for the right roles and well directed. But she does have to work a bit harder than Lulu as Lucienne Garnier, a sweet secretary who dreams of bettering herself through her beauty: you can’t imagine LB being so naive. She larks with her modest boyfriend – a typesetter at the newspaper where she works as a typist – and he is already jealous of the attention she attracts from other men at the pool and everywhere else. Andre doesn’t like beauty contests and Lucienne can’t even bring herself to tell him that she’s entering.

Standing by her man Andre

Executive types look at pictures of the contestants and one stands out: no one’s going to complete with that hair, those eyes… Whisked away to San Sebastien in Spain, Lucienne is soon competing in the beauty contest (actually filmed in Paris with thousands of extras). The documentary feel is again present with candid shots of the public mixed in with key players from high society (and low morality) including a maharajah (Yves Glad) and Prince Adolphe de Grabovsky (Jean Bradin).

Naturally applause is loudest and longest for Lucienne who easily beats Miss Germany and Miss England to take the crown. Now its cocktail parties and offers of jewels and riches from her betters – Lucienne sails through as if it’s one childlike adventure: never has the Brooks smile been so much in evidence. But Andre has been in pursuit and unwilling to upset him more, Lucienne decides to go back to Paris.

Prince Adolphe advises that Andre will never understand her and we get the feeling he has a point. Shadowy days in a meagre apartment lie ahead for Lucienne and she is as imprisoned as their pet budgie ironing and cooking for Andre. He tears up her fan mail and bans all talk of Miss Europe but the fresh Prince tracks her down and makes her a fateful offer.

Jealousy

Then comes the funfair and those moments of doubt all leading to a change of heart and that stunning closing sequence. That may be the best part of the film but Louise Brooks is so much more powerful in silence and without the clumsy dubbing; she’s a spectacular – haunting - vision and one that is almost hard to watch… and ultimately, she just doesn’t need words.

Stephen Horne’s experience with the film showed with a subtle and forceful score featuring piano, flute and accordion. It’s fascinating to hear him play for a film he knows this well and to hear him maintain the freshness of improvisation with such practiced and hard-hitting emotional content. No musical spoilers: but you really must hear this show yourself and a closing sequence that is so perfectly timed as the piano brings dark discord and the flute lifts us high with Lucienne’s light and laughter as she watches herself on screen singing the lines above... 

Clair’s next film was to be the excellent Under the Roofs of Paris whilst Pabst went on to film The Threepenny Opera and a remake of L'Atlantide (featuring Brigitte Helm) the restoration of which is due a release.

For Brooks, this was to be her last major role. For those in the business who she hadn’t already alienated, she served out a few more roles, most notably in God’s Gift to Women but blew her last major chance with Public Enemy… Would she have made more of the opportunity than Jean Harlow? Hard to say; there was a potentially great actor in Brooks but as Pamela Hutchinson indicated, she just wasn’t going to sacrifice herself to this career. During filming Brooks infuriated her director by staying out late and having too good a time. Genina was convinced that this was preventing her from becoming “the ultimate actress” and he was probably right but, I doubt anyone could make Louise Brooks do much she didn’t want to do.

Festival director Alison Strauss pointed out that the French title contains a pun; it is not only the prize for beauty but the price. 

Alison's introductions have been a great feature of Hippfest Online as she highlights some of the many attractions of this part of Scotland. For this film she was at the futuristic Falkirk Wheel, the world's only rotating boatlift; something else I have to see in 2022!

The Q&A with Alison, Stephen and Pamela is available to watch on the Falkland Community Trust YouTube channel and it's an excellent mix of silent film musicology, scholarly Brooksology and unexpected hauntology...

 

This restored version of Prix de Beauté is out now on a two DVD set featuring three more of Genina's films, Goodbye youth! (1918) and it's remake from 1927, as well as The Mask and the Face (1919). You can order it through Amazon of direct from the Cineteca Bologna’s CineStore.

2019 vision… illuminating a year in the dark.

Who knows where the time goes eh? The centenary of 1919 passed by with brutal speed leaving me reeling in its wake trying to grab hold of something solid to make sense of it all. This was the year of going with the flow; a mad dash from Italy to Korea to Leicester and back to Italy via a Weimar Germany that increasingly felt uncomfortably familiar.

There’s no respite, strong rumours suggest that the Twenties are about to be re-booted and we can only hope that means a return of style and ambition across every walk of life. So, in no particular order, and with sincerest thanks to everyone who programmed, introduced, projected and played along with the 120+ silent films I saw in cinema… here we go: fourteen favourites but it could have been forty.

Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway...

1.       The Lodger (1927), Neil Brand score, Ben Palmer conducting Orchestra San Marco, Pordenone

My third year at Le Giornate and to get through eight days of cultural and social excess – those Aperols won’t Spritz themselves - and still find myself watching this film with such alert glee, says so much about Hitchcock’s visuals and Neil Brand’s score. In my first year I’d nodded off for Lubitsch’s Student Prince of Old Heidelberg (sorry Ernst) but watching this most re-watchable of silent films with Neil’s score sinking in even more, I felt fully connected in this cinematic home from home.

There is just so much to process in Pordenone with up to 14 hours of film a day. It was a good year for William S Hart – with a retrospective showing how his bad-to-good man, with the love of a good woman, themes evolved – Estonian silents and a delightful Marion Davis film, Beverly of Graustark (1926), which proved a cross-dressing delight! Read all about it in my daily posts here.

You know who it is.

2.       Brooksie on the big screen: It's the Old Army Game (1926), with European Silent Screen Virtuosi, Bristol Old Vic, Slapstick Festival also Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), BFI

There aren’t that many Louise Brooks’ films but I want to see them all on the big screen and this year I added two more and was not disappointed. Louise is fresh as a daisy alongside an occasionally tiresome WC Fields in Army Game, her gleeful reactions just beautiful to watch especially in a room full of people experiencing the same thing. Diary is at another level as a film and I’ve waited years to see it on screen eschewing my multiples DVDs and Blu-rays… with a smashing intro from Pabstspert Pamela Hutchison unseen Louise filled the screen almost as powerfully as for Pandora.

At the Crossroads

3.       Crossroads of Youth (1934), with Lee Jinwook and Cho Hee Bong, BFI Early Korean Cinema

2019 was the centenary of Korean Cinema with a season featuring what remains of the very earliest films made under Japanese occupation as well as an excellent 14^th edition of the Korean Film Festival later in the year.

Crossroads is the only silent survivor of this turbulent period and had been painstakingly reconstructed to establish narrative and visual sense. This was a silent film screening unlike any other I’ve ever witnessed, in addition to a Korean Byeonsa – a more active version of a Japanese Benshi – performed with gleeful energy by Cho Hee Bong, we had two actors, Hwang Minsu and Park Hee-von who sang parts echoing the central love story with West-end panache. Accompaniment was provided by composer Lee Jinwook on keyboards, Shin Jia on accordion, Oh Seung Hee on double-bass and Sim Jeongeun on violin an ear-popping combination of styles that seamlessly supported the narrative on and off screen.

The Miller and the Sweep (1897)

4.       Screening the Victorians, with Bryony Dixon and Stephen Horne, BFI

This was another marvellous trip through the oldest BFI archives accompanied by curator Bryony Dixon and Stephen Horne and it featured some of the most impressive footage from the Victorian cinema era, 1896 to 1901. We’d seen glimpses of Queen Victoria before but this screening of Queen Victoria’s Last Visit to Ireland (1900) from a print held by MOMA, was the clearest glimpse yet of the Empress as she greeted Dublin crowds smiling and wearing sunglasses – yes, smiling!

5.       Happy Birthday, Mr Paul!, with Ian Christie and John Sweeney, BFI

It was a good year all round for Victorian film with Ian Christie giving two thoroughly entertaining show and tells at the BFI and the Bioscope on RW Paul, the father of British cinema.

During his ten years of peak activity, Paul undoubtedly advance the art of cinema as both a technical innovator and an artistic one: bringing both together in forms of new expression. The World’s first two-scene film was (probably) Paul’s Come Along, Do (1898) which has now had a fragment of its long-lost second scene - inside the art gallery - restored from one of his illustrated catalogues, another innovation in marketing terms – take that Mr Edison or more specifically, William Dickson who did the work the Big E was happy to patent!

It was good to fill out the backstory of this key figure and Christie’s book, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (Chicago University Press) will be on many a list this Christmas.

Valeska Gert in Joyless mood.

6.       The Joyless Street (1925) with John Sweeney, BFI Weimar Season

The BFI spoiled us with some excellent strands this year, I loved the Antonioni season and of course we have the ongoing musicals season which covers a huge amount of ground from the Hollywood greats to fantastic British and French films: First a Girl and Les Umbrellas de Cherbourg being two standouts. For me though the Weimar Cinema season curated by Margaret Deriaz was not only the best of the year but also for many years, from a silent perspective at least.

Between 1919 and 1933, Germany produced over 3,500 films, second only to Hollywood in scale and productivity and it was a delight to see some of the cream of what remains: from the madness of Opium (1919) to the hard-hitting politics of Kuhle Wampe (1932) and Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness (1931) via so many “key texts” such as Der Golem (1920), Dr Mabuse (1922) and The Student of Prague (1926).

It's impossible to pick a favourite so I will opt for Pabst’s Joyless Street illuminated by Queen Asta Neilsen and Princess Greta Garbo along with King John Sweeney’s unstinting improvisation and utterly controlled musical narrative.

Another joyless street

7.       Sylvester (1923), Frank Bockius and Stephen Horne, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna

It was hot, hot, hot in Bologna with the usual bewildering range of choices and memorable outdoor screenings in the Piazza Maggiore of my favourite Keaton with a restored The Cameraman (1928) followed by Charlie’s turn with The Circus (1927), a film I’d not seen and yet which was one of the funniest I’ve seen all year.

There was no escaping Germany though and Frank Bockius and Stephen Horne’s accompaniment for Lupe Pick’s grim Sylvester (1923) under the stars with the Piazzetta Pasolini’s carbon-arc projector revealed an horrific family struggle taking place in the backroom of a bar on a street filled with New Year’s revelry. The two accompanists took turns in carrying the line and it was fascinating to hear a percussion-led musical narrative.

Our Betty Balfour

8.       Love, Life and Laughter (1923), with Meg Morley, London Film Festival Archive Gala

Unseen since 1923, recovered by a cinema owner in Holland and restored by a multi-national team, this was one of those screenings when you walk out onto the Southbank with a spring in your step, cracking a wonky smile with a shard of bliss warming your core courtesy of Britain’s Queen of Happiness and Australia’s Princess of the Pianoforte. Music and movie combining in a genuinely soulful way to utterly change my mood on a rotten Brexit Thursday… forget all that, let’s have a laugh; let’s live a little… is precisely what Betty Balfour urged.

Ita means it.

9.       Tonka of the Gallows (1930), with Stephen Horne, Phoenix Cinema

This film was one of the hits of this year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival and understandably drew a substantial audience of the capital’s silent cineastes to the Finchley Phoenix. We’d come to see the serene Slovenian Ita Rina who’s delicate beauty underpinned her quite staggering performance in this film. Add in Stephen Horne’s alchemical accompaniment (he also played for it in San Francisco) and we were lost in that mystical meld of sound, vision and venue which leaves you at the mercy of your own emotional response.

10.       The Cat and the Canary (1927), with Jeff Rapsis, Kennington Bioscope

One of so many excellent screenings from the National Treasure that is the Cinema Museum. Here we were treated to a watch of Kevin Brownlow’s own 35mm – I know! - one that resulted from his own restoration for Photoplay. We also got an introduction full of the insider jokes and insights from the man who – nearly – met them all, capturing silent stars on tape from the fifties to the eighties and preserving the oral history of the birth of film.

Guest pianist Jeff Rapsis had flown over from Boston in the morning and was full of praise for the Bioscope – and it’s (thankfully) ongoing contribution to keeping alive the art of improvised accompaniment for which a live audience is just essential. “I have no sheet music, I have nothing prepared I just go with the film and the audience…” and, in front of our very eyes, he performed the magic.

Lady Eleanor

11.       Souls for Sale (1923) with Meg Morley, Kennington Bioscope Silent Weekender

I have a well-publicized soft spot for Eleanor Boardman and also love films about films of which Souls is one of the very first. The glimpses behind the scenes are precious, with Erich von Stroheim seen directing Greed, giving Jean Hersholt instructions, and Charlie Chaplin playing along by over-actively directing Mem/Eleanor in a “scene” from Woman of Paris. Elsewhere you can glimpse Hobart Bosworth, Barbara Bedford, Chester Conklin, Raymond Griffith, June Mathis, Marshall Neilan, Claire Windsor & many more! William Haines is also in there, his first credited appearance, as Pinky the assistant director to Richard Dix’s square-jawed Frank Claymore.

Kevin Brownlow introduced on his birthday and explained that the film was partly a PR exercise to show that after numerous scandals, Hollywood wasn’t a bad place, full of upstanding professionals. Meg Morley accompanied in fine style matching the epic with the intimate with trace elements of Liszt amongst the jazzed assurance!

Asta catches a tram and a man.

12.   Claire (1924)/ Afgrunden (1910) with John Sweeney and Colin Sell, Kennington Bioscope

Two films that showed how women’s stories were front and centre of the new medium in Weimar Germany and Denmark. Claire is convoluted fun and John Sweeney enlightened the narrative with romantic flourishes and dramatic interventions that ensured we were firmly focused on the extraordinary expressiveness of Lya de Puti. Michell Facey introduced and told of the Hungarian actress’ success in Germany – including Variety and her off-screen/in-trailer relationship with Emil Jannings – before she tried her (bad) luck in Hollywood…

No misgivings about the quality and significance of the first of the films, Afgrunden (1910) staring the uncannily naturalistic Asta Nielsen who is undeniably one of the inventors of screen acting and her ability to express cinematically – nuanced and naturalistic – is something to behold. As Angela Dalle Vacche has said, seemed to anticipate the close-up's subliminal impact.

The alternate title for this film is The Woman Always Pays and even as early as 1910, Asta was questioning why this should be with a character who is dependent on male patronage and who cannot be free of the “male passions” that plague Lya too. Colin Sell accompanied with remarkably steady hands despite the mounting on-screen excitement of Asta’s raunchy dance round a ranch hand in the most figure-hugging dress in the World.

Ghost of a chance

13.   The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge (Le fantôme du Moulin Rouge) (1925) with Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and Stephen Horne, British Silent Film Festival

This was the UK premier of Lobster films restoration of René Clair’s first feature and, as with his earlier short film, Paris qui dort, it is a science fantasy film in which the human drama is magnified rather than obscured as is so often the case. The dynamic duo of Baldry and Horne provided yet another sublime combination taking it in turns to wring unexpected sounds and sumptuous lines as we floated through this strange adventure.

"Life's a walking shadow, nah-nah-na-nah-nah!"

14.   He Who Gets Slapped (1924), with Taz Modi and Fraser Bowles, Barbican

To see this film projected from a 35mm print is a special treat and all praise to the Barbican team for sourcing this copy from a private collection in France. He Who Gets Slapped has not been digitally restored, which is a crime given its qualities, and probably has not been screened like this for many a year in the UK.

Not all sonic experiments from the Barbican work but I enjoyed the mesmeric and wistful score from Taz Modi who plays a kind of hybrid-jazz, accompanied by expressive cello from Fraser Bowles. Taz’s piano figures weaved patterns over the narrative rather than matching specific events; a tonal rather than a harmonised duet and which, in the context of such a powerfully visual and humane film, worked very well. More please Barbican!

So, just to be clear:

1.       The Christmas we get we deserve.

2.       I (therefore do not) wish it could be Christmas every day.

3.       All I want for Christmas is a screening of Gosta Berling...

See you in The New Twenties!

Playing with fire… Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), BFI Weimar Cinema Season

Well, this was it, I long ago decided to not watch my DVDs of this film as I wanted to see it first on the big screen and Herr Pabst and Louise Brooks did not disappoint. Diary is not another Pandora’s Box but it is a film that gives Brooks the chance to show her acting range and Pabst the opportunity to focus on her remarkable expression and, yes, the rest of her; perhaps the sexual superpower of the silent era (awarded retrospectively), with a character in search of herself and not a purely natural spirit like Lulu.

After watching Mother Krause and Kuhle Wumpe earlier in the BFI’s Weimar season, this is a more focused and ultimately more politically liberal and mainstream tale although we still have the seemingly obligatory suicides… they needed to do something about those windows and accessibility to dangerous prescription drugs. Pabst's film is certainly part of die neue Sachlichkeit, but it's more polished than those two films but that’s not to say it doesn’t cover the darker side of life. Writer and Brooks/Pabstpert, Pamela Hutchinson, gave a fascinating introduction, quoting the actress in saying they were attempting to show the “flaming reality” of “sexual hatred” and this film does indeed burn right up until a telling last moment.

“I think in the two films Pabst made with me… he was conducting an investigation into his relations with women, with the object if conquering any passion that interfered with his passion for his work…” Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks

The thing that flames the fiercest is of course Louise Brooks and whether she’s playing an ingenue, a reform school girl, prostitute or woman grasping her destiny, performs with grace and an almost casual conviction. Pabst’s camera closes in over and over on her astonishing believability lost as much as his audience in the emotional intelligence as well as the structure of her expression: killing us softly with her smile. One first viewing this film does not have the script or story power of Pandora and yet the performance is all of the same quality: this is It squared.

Pabst may well have been fighting to overcome sexual instinct but he was keen to maximise his new found asset and had it in mind to cast her as Lola Lola in what would become The Blue Angel, but whilst he lost out on the rights to that, he also could never really make a Dietrich out of Brooks who, having burned her Yankee bridges by refusing to overdub The Canary Murder Case, decided Europe wasn’t for her after one more film, Prix de Beauté with Pabst’s script involvement and direction from Augusto Genina, which, along with Beggars of Life, completes an impressive top four from her brief career.

A crown of innocence: Josef Rovensky and LB

Who knows what could have been but, we have what we have and this film added so much delightful substance to my impression of Brooks as an actor proving that Pandora’s Box – which I’ve seen dozens of times – was no one off and that she and her director could almost match it even with subject matter drawn from Margarete Böhme’s sensationalist 1906 novel which dealt with a woman’s fall into prostitution – a story Böhme claimed to be based on truth. All a far cry from a Frank Wedekind play. It’s a simpler story but one that provides an interesting fall and rise for Brooks to contend with. Her character Thymiane is the daughter of a well-to-do pharmacist, Robert Henning (Josef Rovensky) who’s only weaknesses are a fondness for young housekeepers and trusting his assistant Meinert (Fritz Rasp) rather too much.

Brooks later said that Fritz Rasp was one of her more alluring co-stars...

Meinert takes advantage of Thymiane – forcibly - and she gets pregnant. At the same time her father is seducing his latest housekeeper, Meta (Franziska Kinz) with the previous one Elizabeth (Sybille Schmitz, later to star in Vampyr) having already been dismissed. There’s perhaps a line between the two men and their relationships with younger women especially given what is to come for Thymiane and later for Meta…

Thymiane has the baby but refuses, understandably, to marry a man she doesn’t love. The baby is placed into care and the young woman is sent to a reform school as her father is encouraged by Meta who knows her power.

The story takes a dark and more expressionist turn as Thymiane enters a highly disciplined reform school run by a director played by the extraordinary Valeska Gert and her husband, the equally odd Andrews Engelmann. These two create an evil pairing although Gert gives her nastiness an extra twist with her curious enjoyment in watching the girl’s exercise… all I can say is Hedy, you and your pearls may have been beaten to the punch by a couple of years and in the weirdest of ways.

Thymiane escapes the school with her pal Erika (Edith Meinhard) aided by her pal the penniless Count Osdorff (Andre Roanne) who has been disinherited by his Uncle (Arnold Korff) for being a likeable if listless waster. Thymiane discovers that her baby has died and in desperation moves in with Erika at a brothel in sequences that still carry coy intent directly or indirectly. The madam (Marfa Kassatskaya) kits her out in high heels and evening dress and in a moment of transcendence offers the young woman a glass of champagne which she gulps down – a baptism of Bollinger.

Brooks and Edith Meinhard

Soon, after collecting on her first customer, Thymiane lying unhappily in bed as a wad of notes rest next to her… Thymiane advertises herself as a fitness/dance instructor and Brooks herself  would return to dance teaching in the thirties and, much later, would turn tricks in New York before finding salvation in writing after rediscovery. Her first customer features a bizarre turn from a weirdly bearded Sig Arno who follows her callisthenics before getting too excited and being shooed away with a lighter wallet.

The “lost girl” has found a new direction and yet things cone to a head when she spots her father and, Meta, now his wife, slumming it in a low-rent night club. Father and daughter are heartbroken but Meta rushes her husband away before any rapprochement is possible. Her father dies in misery and her inheritance offers Thymiane the chance to finally change direction… what would Lulu do? Nothing at all like Thymiane whose character gets the chances denied her more elemental “twin” in an ending I must admit I didn’t see coming at all…

Ultimately, I am amazed that given the intense interest in Brooks ,that Diary gets screened so rarely; it’s a fine companion to Pandora and helps give a more complete picture of the actress; she was no one-hit wonder, just A Wonder and, with Pabst’s help and a very strong supporting cast, made her mark here too.

Thank you, BFI, PH, GWP and LB! There’s still more Pabst to come in June with The Joyless Street (1925) details on the BFI website along with the last few weeks of this splendid Weimar season.

Sybille Schmitz

Josef Rovenský  and Franziska Kinzas

Sexy Fritz Rasp (apparently)

Andrews Engelmann

The excellent Valeska Gert

Edith Meinhard

Sig Arno, dontcha know

Trapped?

Pabst was pleased with this tracking shot of Brooks running up the stairs, it's mirrored by her slow trudge near the ending...

Now I can watch these...