Star-filled and velvet black - Film on Film 2025 (Part Two), BFI

When people ask me what’s the difference between watching a nitrate print and another… I commonly use the analogy of a photocopy of a picture compared to a stain glass window…

Bryony Dixon was describing the nature of nitrate on this day in which we would see four films which, literally showed us more on screen. There is more luminosity and translucence with nitrate film and greater depth and clarity; you can see details in the velvet-black it doesn’t have the block-blacks you can get with even the highest quality digital and celluloid.

Nothing in this fantastic festival of film on actual film comes easy and the love that dares to speak the name nitrate was in full effect as the programme director James Bell, BFI’s Senior Curator of Fiction, lined up on stage with colleagues to explain the process of selecting, testing and projecting those that have made the cut to be shown in the only UK cinema capable of screening nitrate – a projection box made out of Durasteel – asbestos sandwiched between two sheets of steel in 1953.

The BFI hold some 44,000 films on nitrate stock but as Sonia Genaitay, Curatorial Archivist pointed out, not all are in screen able condition. Age withers and curls nitrate and finding films that can be projected is a detailed progress involving testing and eyeballing with Dominic Simmons, Head of Technical, providing the ultimate projector-accepted testing of the films we were to watch. Some 50 titles were considered this year with just five making the cut.

James said that they hoped to screen more nitrate throughout the year and we can only be thankful for the efforts made to preserve and present these special shows. Talking of which, a tip of the hat to today’s projectionists: Mark Kennedy, Mick Fife and Lauren Feyderline without whom we’d be staring into space.

 

The BFI team explain the wonders of nitrate

Un Chien Andalou (1928), 35mm nitrate

 

"NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis."

 

It was only just lunchtime when DJ Christopher Bird hit the decks in NFT 1 to replicate the original accompaniment to Dali and Bunel’s 1929 surrealist masterwork, An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou) a film they were determined would not mean anything although as Breton’s Exquisite Cadaver exercise had proven, everything has some meaning even and especially unintentionally. Luis Buñuel intended to “mash up” – as The Kids now say – Argentinian Tango music with Wagner and all but invented Classical Lounge Core without knowing it and Chris was tasked with cutting from one to the other by playing contemporary pressings on two 78 rpm turntables, one of which was a top of the range EMG machine from 1932 which produced remarkable clarity and range.

Introducing, Bryony said that the first surrealist film was founded on two dreams that Dali and Bunel had had with the condition that no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted… and so it proves with Dali’s ideas and ants (finally sourced from Spanish mountains after a fruitless and ant-less search of Paris by taxi) masterfully expressed by Bunel. Pierre Batcheff, who I now recognise from other French silent films, and Simone Mareuil add their own levels of un-meaning amongst the “situations” and as per usual, I still don’t know how the eye-cutting scene was done, not that I can look at it.

This could have been the fragile prints final projection and the accompaniment from DJ Bird made for a fitting last hurrah!

 

Spanish ants on Pierre Batcheff's hand as Simone Mareuil looks on.

Partie de campagne (1936), 35mm nitrate

Backgrounds are as important as foregrounds. Flowers, faces and mountains are not just placed side by side. They constitute a collection of elements all rolled into one, amalgamated by a love stronger than their differences. Jean discussing his father Auguste Renoir.

 

Jean Renoir seems to have been fascinated by waterways and, in addition to The River (1951), he also directed his first feature, La Fille de l’eau (1925), just a few kilometres away in Marlotte from Partie’s location on the banks of the Loing and the Essonne rivers, left tributaries of the Seine some way out from Paris. The river is life, it is unpredictable and yet it can rush us to our destiny whilst the trees at the water’s edge can bind lovers together but they can also hide and confuse. As much as the river is ever present, it keeps on moving the narrative and characters’ choices can be lost in the swirling momentum.

Partie de campagne is based on a short story by French “realist” Guy de Maupassant (author of Bel-Ami (1885) and Pierre et Jean (1888)) published in 1881 (set in 1860 during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III) and offering a shock of bitter fate amongst the bucolic dreaminess.

 

Parisian hardware store owner, Dufour (André Gabriello) takes his wife (Jane Marken) and daughter Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) along with his dishevelled clerk, Anatole (Paul Temps) into the countryside where they stop at an inn run by a manager played by Jean Renoir. Two young men, Henri (Georges d’Arnoux) and Rodolphe (Jacques Brunius), are bewitched watching Henriette and her mother (Jane Marken) on the swings and resolve to try their luck. All innocent fun but things get rather more serious when the two couples head out on the water… just a simple day in the country, what could be less innocuous?

 

Sylvia Bataille and Georges d’Arnoux

Blanche Fury (1947), 35mm nitrate

English melodrama done with same sort of conviction that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford brings to their films…

Jympson Harmon, London Evening News 19^th Feb ‘48

 

Now it was time for British technicolour nitrate on and Valerie Hobson in all her auburn glory alongside the moodiest Stewart Granger for whom we needed all the depth and visual subtlety of nitrate to see the shadows within. He reminded me a Paul Newman in yesterday’s Hud, a man so obsessed by the perceived wrong done to him by careless parents, that he couldn’t see a way out. This was a Brit gothic romance almost without the romance but with vengeance at its heart, a very dark film for 1947 but then it had been a very dark time. Amongst the velvety shadows we were afforded glorious views of Miss Hobson’s costumery, designed by Sophie Harris from theatrical costumers Motley and as the story darkens so too do the textures change colour as the reds and darker hues of passion replace her earlier calculations and manners.

 

Jo Botting, the BFI’s Curator of Fiction, introduced and gave a flavour of the impact of the still relatively rare Technicolor. Miss Hobson’s pale skin and auburn hair benefited from the process being especially striking in the daylight whilst the Daily Mirror reviewer probably watched a late showing after closing time… “the colour camera seems to be kinder to Valerie Hobson than most other actors, she always looks good in black and white film but in colour what a smasher!”

 

Won’t disagree with that and Mr Grainger looks well too as French director, Marc Allégret respects the material and creates and engaging psycho drama that, with standard generic tropes still persuades through the elegance of composition and force of performance. It makes Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948) look drab and tame in comparison.

Jo quoted the Mirror again: Emphatically a woman’s picture… for every man who scuttles off to the nearest bar at least five women will remain to revel in someone else’s unhappy and illicit love story! Not a single fellow left for the bar, well, not until the film was over to thunderous applause. We were lost in mid-Victorian reveries in the layered gloom.

 

Valerie Hobson abides...

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), 35mm nitrate

 

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) may have been the film that established the talkie Alfred Hitchcock but after a largely witty and energetic start it descended into an extended shoot out with its easy-going capers replaced by a rising body count of police and Germanic rebels with an unknown cause: almost The Film That Slew Too Much? Still, there was no Doris Day to sing Que Sera Sera as in the 1956 remake and absolutely a smaller budget along with some excellent performances especially from Leslie Banks and a deeply disturbing Peter Lorre, hooded eyes accentuated by a dyed streak in his hair and his tendency to laugh in the face of anything: jokes, murder, infanticide and certain death.

 

Hitchcock told François Truffaut that "… the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional." I’m not entirely buying that, especially as this was his 20^th feature film and clearly has some of the hallmarks of his most engaging work – an “invasion” of normal family life by lethal forces, witty dialogue from leading characters unaware of the threat at hand and an almost likeable villain… In the midst of life, we are in death or, in this case, the midst of a dinner dance as a man is shot and passes on a key message on which the rest of the film’s story will rest.

Peter Lorre, Leslie Banks and Nova Pilbeam

The Lawrences Bob (Leslie Banks) and Jill (Edna Best) are on a holiday in Switzerland with their daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam) and their dog (actor unknown). Jill loses a clay pigeon shooting contest thanks to her impatient Betty with the Germanic Ramon (Frank Vosper) gracious – and suspicious in victory. At the dance that evening their French friend Louis (Pierre Fresnay) – a skier with whom Edna flirts unrelentingly – is shot dead but manages to pass on a note to be passed onto the British Consulate… The couple read the details, it’s a warning of an international crime about to be committed but before they can do anything, Betty is kidnapped and they are under strict instructions not to say anything to anyone.

 

A classic Hitchcock set up with ordinary – wealthy middle class – heroes stuck between the good and bad guys, in this case led by the aforementioned grinning Abbott (Peter Lorre). Events move at some lick until the aforementioned final sequence involving the Royal Albert Hall, a hide-out at a sun-worshipping church (?!) and a mass shoot out. It’s Hitch 22 as the Lawrences must not let on what they know even as they must find out more to save their daughter.

 

So ended another breathless day on the Southbank and it was not just our imaginations that received these films in a deeper way than usual, we literally saw more, but by no means “too much”!

 

Thank you BFI and… till the next time!

Christopher Bird at the EMG gramophone (picture from Lynne Wake)

Conny and Valerie II - Contraband (1940), BFI, Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger

Powell and Pressburger’s second film was also their second with Conrad Veidt and intended to be a follow-up to their first, The Spy in Black (1939). Released in May 1940, it was a propaganda film aimed at highlighting Britain’s readiness for action during what was still The Phoney War, with volunteer sailors beefing up the Royal Navy to help in protecting out extended coastlines and preventing the wrong kind of goods, contraband, from ending up in enemy hands.

It's a stirring film that also re-unites Veidt with his SIB co-star, the vibrant Valerie Hobson and for both Powell quotes Pressburger as having written “… two stunning parts… which they simply could not refuse, even if England were to be invaded the next morning.” It’s another one of those films in which Hungarian and Kentish humour percolates through and the two leads are entangled in a sure fire rom-com scenario from their meet-cute when Valerie’s Mrs. Sorensen refuses to put her life jacket on only to be threatened with being put in irons by Veidt’s Danish merchant seaman Captain Andersen. He might be joking but don’t worry fans of human bondage, they’ll be tied up together later in the film.

Hobson has been a revelation to me, I’m way behind on 30s-40s British film, and although I have seen her in Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and I know that she had a very unfortunate second marriage to a certain John Profumo, whom she never gave up on. Here she is just about 23 and for a girl from County Antrim, sounding very English, and matching the embodiment of Weimar cinema, 47, blow for blow as the kind of confident female lead war seems to bring out in British cinema: she can look after herself, is forthright and decisive and only gets caught by the Captain if she wants to.

Conrad Veidt

This season is also highlighting Pressburger’s writing – I know, I know, late to the party… - with the programme notes quoting Powell’s A Life in Film and Emeric’s grandsons providing ample evidence of the family skillset: they’re both filmmakers of note. Having now seen 11 of the surviving 13 Powell “quota quickies” you can appreciate the impact the Hungarian had on their collaborations. Certainly, Spy in Black showed his instant success in turning a predictable story into an exciting one with edgy male and female leads. Powell appreciated Pressburger’s novelistic range and there’s no doubt that he fills his characters with so much personality and purpose his decade in German film being well spent.

The film moves quickly and manages to balance its drama with a light touch and it’s great to see Veidt in such a role, cracking jokes, being somewhat relaxed and playing a hero for once. His freighter Helvig is stopped in the channel by the Royal Navy who send them for cargo inspection at what were termed Contraband Control Ports. All his well but their cargo full of iodine is “contraband” and has to be cleared before they can proceed to Denmark. They must wait a night in port and, as Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin would later demonstrate, a lot can happen to a sailor in just a few hours on shore.

Valerie Hobson in a hat

Firstly, the troublesome Mrs. Sorensen steals Anderson’s landing passes along with and spivvy “talent scout” called Mr Pidgeon (Esmond Knight). Knowing he’ll be in a lot of trouble without them, he sets off with first mate Axel Skold (Hay Petrie), to track them down to London via the train to Victoria. He finds both on the train and, after Pidgeon flies away, sticks to Mrs S like a glue man.

 

From this point the film becomes something of a travelogue for London in the Blackout, with the couple eventually united and trying to find their way across town using torches and taxis in a shadowed capital bracing itself for what may come. Mrs S has had a very suspicious phone call with her Aunt in Chester Square, filmed in that very square, and there’s more geography to come as Anderson takes his new companion to dine at the restaurant of Skold's brother Erik (also Hay Petrie), where there’s lots of funny business as Danish food is delivered in copious amounts and the Captain explains the significance of his fob watch and its Danish sailor song. The characters are rooted in another country, neutral at this time, which, all things considered, is odd. But they knew what they were doing.

 

Our heroes are tied up at the moment.

All the while the Captain is checking this watch as the clock counts down on the train they must catch at Victoria but they soon find themselves with even more serious worries when they are captured at her aunt’s house by a group of German spies led by Van Dyne (Raymond Lovell), who knows Mrs. Sorensen is a British spy after an incident in Düsseldorf. Away to the elaborate hide out where the interrogation begins as Van Dyne tries to establish ways of making our girl talk.

 

Powell marvelled at Alfred Junge’s work on the set for this hideout and the final third of the film is played out here as our heroes try to escape and prevent the German’s from spreading deadly misinformation. After the two escape they enlist his countrymen from the restaurant to try and locate the secret base, knowing it’s next to a cabaret with a singing man playing a ukelele and in a certain direction based on Anderson’s reading of the stars… they pore over the map calling out locations from Piccadilly to Soho; the old town ain’t changed that much! All is set for a fast-paced finale and lots of West End frolics, one of which originally featured a young Deborah Kerr as a cigarette girl… Mickey was suitably impressed.

 

There's also some very funny business in the workshop next to the hideout where busts of Neville Chamberlain are manufactured. As Powell said, Mr Peace in Our Time was already a laughing stock by ths stage and the delays in the film's release only increased the dark humour of the former Prime Minister's likeness being shot at by enemy agents and, when he uses one to knock out one of the baddies, Veidt says "they always said he was tough..."

Pieces in our time... Neville and Conny

Contraband is less cohesive than The Spy in Black, and less suspenseful but it’s still enjoyable given the two leads chance to play off each other and for the writer and director to evolve their technique. It’s another step on the way to the more playful and deeper efforts of Blimp and Canterbury but the War was just starting as were the Archers. Next up was a hugely successful diversion, Korda’s epic The Thief of Bagdad (1940) for which Powell directed most of the action sequences and the famous Genie section, along with several others as production was switched to the US following the outbreak of the Blitz. There was nothing phoney about the war from this point onwards and the cinema had to reflect this more and more.

Andrew Moor argues in Powell and Pressburger, a Cinema of Magic Spaces, that these early films show a more Germanic influence, unsurprisingly given Pressburger’ s background and Powell’s time at UFA, and even treat British soil as “alien”, certainly for the main protagonists. Only after the war progressed do the two start addressing Britain as “home”, given the needs of a patriotic industry supporting the home front. That said, this England and Scotland, will be one full of strangeness and wonder and there will always be sympathetic, humanity from around the globe, friends and enemies alike.

An expressionist flurry as Conrad awakes from a dream

Ice cool as the Nazi spies put the pressure on

Imperious

Hay Petrie in hospitality mode.

The film was called Blackout in the US, which Powell preferred.

The Archers origin… The Spy in Black (1939), BFI Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger

Since talkies took over the movies, I had worked with some good writers, but I had never met anything like this… Michal Powell, A Life in Movies

 

So, here it is, the first of the twenty films Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made together which would some of the finest ever released in Britain and beyond. Having seen A Matter of Life and Death (1946) on Monday introduced by Thelma Schoonmaker (Powell’s wife and a film editor of world-renown) and Scottish director Kevin Macdonald (Emeric’s grandson), it was interesting to watch and compare with a film bookending their Second World War collaborations both in terms of style, budget and viewpoint. It’s never darkest than before the dawn and colours of AMOLAD are contrasted by the bleak greys of this starker spy thriller released in August ’39 just weeks before the declaration of war on 1^st September.

 

After Powell’s first major feature, The Edge of the World, Alexander Korda offered him a contract at Denham Studios and put him to work on potential projects with limited appeal and budgets. The director’s experience on so-called quota quickies, such as the comedic Hotel Splendide (1932) and the business thriller Rynox (1932) – screened last Monday before AMOLAD - showed Powell could make the most of limited budgets and scripts and by this stage he was confident enough in his abilities to make the most of any opportunity even if it meant heading to Hollywood.

 

This project was based on a 1917 novel by J. Storer Clouston and a scenario from Roland Pertwee which did not impress Powell at all, cue a re-write which Korda’s co-producer, Irving Asher, also had his doubts about: “… someone is supposed to re-write the script; he has already messed everything up, transformed the masculine role into a feminine role, invented a few new characters…” A voice piped up announcing himself as the re-writer, Emeric Pressburger, who read out his notes “… about a film that had nothing to do with the original script…” as Powell told Bertrand Tavernier in an interview for Midi-Minuit Fantastique, October 1968. A slightly different sequence of events is described in his memoire.

 

Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson

He had stood Storer Clouston’s plot on its head and completely restructured the film…

 

Powell had already met with his star, Conrad Veidt, who was hard to impress to put it mildly, but Powell’s vision of his character as “… a man who has a fanatical conception of his work…” piqued him and was realised by Pressburger’s re-write. Korda agreed and the course was set for an adventure on the Western Isles only fifty miles as the gannet flies from Foula as Powell put it. Whilst Mickey had been making the quickies, Emeric had been scripting in Germany and other European productions, the two were no overnight success, they had learned their craft. Emeric had been hired by his fellow Hungarian “Alex” who, Powell felt sure, had manipulated the situation to get him involved in this film.

 

From separate directions writer and director imagined not only a fuller role for Veidt but also one that would allow Valerie Hobson to shine in her role as a double agent. Powell describes the four pulling the script together with Veidt and Hobson acting out script revisions on a daily basis and honing their narrative along with their working bond.  The film is remarkable for the treatment of The Enemy; even once the war had started, their German characters were always people even ones compelled by alien duty, and this can be found in everything from Colonel Blimp, Battle of the River Plate, One of Our Planes and more. How much more stirring to show the intelligence and dignity of the other side rather than just caricatures. The War Ministry didn’t always agree though.

 

Back in Spring ’39 though and hopes of peace were still present, the motivation for this film is therefore somewhere in what Powell described as Korda’s aim to establish Denham Studios as a ready-made propaganda unit for when war was inevitably declared. In doing so, Powell believed that he saved the British film industry.

 

The Old Man of Hoy

Location and place are very strong themes in The Archers work and Powell went up to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and visited not just the Old Man of Hoy, as featured in the film, but also Storer Clouston to get as much information on the locale and the story as possible from the author. He also had a small team with him, “a wildcat filming unit” who could take not just reference shots but shoot atmospheric and establishing shots using doubles. The trip helped inform the set design of Vincent Korda – Alexander’s brother – who faithfully recreated the tight spaces of Hebridean buildings and enabled Powell’s sense of place to be supported on their tight budget.

 

The results are impressive still with Powell’s creation of an urgent and unsettling Isle of Hoy, with Veidt imperious and sensitive as the principled German U-Boat commander, Captain Hardt and Hobson magnetic the spy Fräulein Tiel masquerading as a schoolmistress and Hardt’s commander in this operation. Also good is Sebastian Shaw as the drunken and faithless Lt. Ashington who is willing to sell out the Royal Navy in revenge for his treatment. Hardt has little respect for this lack of professional loyalty but is set on leading a squad of U-boats to pick off dozens of Royal Navy ships in what could have been a pivotal moment for the war.

 

It's a tense film, set mostly in darkness and which has rich characters as well as many surprises in a twisty script that is tribute to Pressburger’s skill, a man Powell had been waiting for, a writer of novelistic vision and who could create spies and others with plenty of grey…

 

“There were close-ups of Conrad Veidt that were as good as any of eth German expressionist films. Veidt knew how to use the muscles of his face and eyes and I knew how to photograph them…”

 

Powell’s next film involved working with Veidt again on The Thief of Bagdad and, after that Contraband with Connie paired again with the remarkable Miss Hobson. Powell had learned his lessons well from Rex Ingram and he knew that filmmaking was teamworking, not just with his new writer but also with cast and crew. The Spy in Black was how it began and the films started to flow thick and fast as the war began and these alliances brought further fruit.

 

Of those who would feature again in Archers’ films, Marius Goring plays Hardt’s second in command, Bernard Miles plays a German hotelier and Esma Cannon has a bit part as a Scottish lassie.

 

We watched a 35mm print of the BFI restoration, supported by the BBFC, that looked fabulous on the big screen. You can also watch the film for free on the BFIPlayer whilst details of the full programme of the Powell and Pressburger season is on the BFI site: a Season of Seasons! Four films for me so far and dozens more to follow, see you on the Southbank.