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

 

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

 

Early Cinema – The Biograph Project with Donald Sosin

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Dollie gets hidden in a barrel by naughty people

Sicilia Landscapes with Stephen Horne

 

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

 

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

 

Ivan Koval-Samborsky and Ada Vojtsik

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

 

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

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

 

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

Zítari

Latin American shorts with José María Serralde Ruiz

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

 

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

 

Dinty (1920) with John Sweeney

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

 

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

 

Anna May Wong, Walter Chung and Aaron Mitchell

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

 

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

  

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Hearts of gold?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Olive winks at George

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

Boys keep swinging… Departure of a Great Old Man (1912)

“… this mad luxury in the midst of unnecessary need and penury…”

Leo Tolstoy died on 20th November 1910 at Astapovo train station after fleeing from his family and specifically his controlling wife Sofia. He had renounced his aristocratic privilege and spent his time on the train explaining the principle of Georgism to fellow passengers: the product of the land should be shared by all who lived and worked on it – a utopian hope for a society divided like no other.

The Departure of a Great Old Man (1912) - co-directed with Elizaveta Thiemann – was Yakov Protazanov’s fourth film and rather primitive in comparison with The Queen of Spades (1916) and the spectacular Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924). But this was something different, an attempt at capturing the news, featuring actual locations and, even the subject’s corpse lying in state at the end.

Tolstoy's thoughts are with the rural poor

The film was banned in Russia with Sofia taking exception to her portrayal as a greedy, domineering aristo but it was welcomed elsewhere.  Tolstoy is treated as a man more sinned against than sinning and wandering alone a prophet without honour in his own home, greeted in heaven by Jesus in a most unexpected manner – we’re still a long way from 1917 although Protazanov was one of the few directors to return to films post-revolution.

But what can you make of his motives in producing a film in such haste just a year or so after Tolstoy’s death – a tribute yes, but also an attack against the family that held him back in his radical final months. That said, film historian Ian Christie talks about Protazanov’s “ability to seize on the topical or the scandalous and intensify it to the point where it acquires a real moral significance for the audience."  Best to avoid hindsight as always in Russia but there was clearly a sense of injustice and one that didn’t stand up in court when Sofia’s challenge came.

The peasants ask Tolstoy for land

Tolstoy’s demise overlapped with Russian concerns of inequality and in this film a group of peasants comes to the great man’s house in order to ask for land. He tells them they must speak to his wife “the boss” and she quickly dismisses their claim leaving her husband in impotent despair.

According to Christie, the idea for the film came from a Tolstoy expert who based the story around this sad discord of the author’s final days at home in Iasnaia Poliana and then on his “escape”.

Vladimir Shaternikov was made up very effectively as Leo Tolstoy and this, accompanied by the location shooting added a feel of documentary realism until those closing moment of religious reconciliation for a man who had pushed the Orthodox Church pretty hard.

Domestic disharmony

After arguing with his wife about helping the peasants, Tolstoy makes a will without telling Sophia – “Let the income from my books go to the common good!” – and appoints Vladimir Chertkov (Mikhail Tamarov) as his editor.

He allows a young peasant woman to collect firewood on his land but a man on horseback hired by Sophia beats her and Tolstoy is not able to protect her. In spiritual crisis he sees a vision of a nun praying for him and makes the fateful decision to leave Iasnaia Poliana.

His daughter Sasha aka Alexandra Lvovna Tolstaya (Elizaveta Thiman) tries to persuade him to stay but he is resolved and after she tells her, Sophia pretends to commit suicide by falling down next to some water… (they really don’t like her do they!).

Meanwhile Leo visits Shamordin Monastery to see Sister Maria Nikolaevna – the woman he imagined praying for him – she seems to help as he spends time with peasant children and in the fields. The sister tries to affect reconciliation with his wife.

Tolstoy is taken ill travelling and meets his fate at Astapovo… “So, this is the end! And there is nothing!” But not in this film, as the author is met by Jesus in the clouds.

Some mean souls on the inter-web take issue with the film’s “slowness” its static camera and so on… but this was 1912 and where were you when the badges were handed out for cinematic innovation?! The industry was young in Russia and was to advance quickly with this director being one of the main shakers. He was to conduct his players with a baton – the “braking school” as it was known, in which a unity was attempted between visual design and the narrative conception.

This Old Man was a step on the way and is fascinating for the technique it does contain as well as the very notion of death observed almost in real time. Tolstoy’s body makes an appearance near the end* creating the same morbid frisson as the sight of a smiling David Bowie just days before his demise earlier this week.

For my generation and others there is no one else like David Bowie and for popular culture there has perhaps not been a bigger loss since John Lennon - things will never be quite the same again. Perhaps the same was true in Russian literature, after the loss of one of their greatest writers. To make sense of it all, it helps to reflect, especially with two men who went out still trying to make a difference in their own ways.

End of the road

This is one of the Milestone DVDs produced in the early nineties and features a young Neil Brand providing accompaniment in time-honoured fashion, skipping across the keyboard in fleet-fingered sympathy with his subject as always.

This is Volume 8 of the Early Russian Cinema series and can be ordered direct from Milestone Films here.

*From documentary footage filmed by A. Drankov

Play your cards right… The Queen of Spades (1916)

A film about the perils of gambling and on the advisability of relying on the advice of magical old women who may or may not owe you a favour, The Queen of Spades has something of the grim desperation of The Student of Prague and feels very much like Edgar Allen Poe. It also has a top notch performance from a young Ivan Mozzhukhin, years before he fled to achieve great things in France and at the height of his fame in Tsarist Russia mere months before the first revolution of 1917…

There’s some advanced technique from director Yakov Protazanov not just with his Bauer-esque dolly shot as Mozzhukhin’s character enters a casino but also in his threading of the narrative between the here and then. This is cleverly done as it brings with it the shock of when both or shockingly brought together as one.

The camera tracks Hermann's steps

Based on the 1834 Alexander Pushkin short story which had already been turned into an opera by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the film is a sustained exercise in unsettling the viewer: from Mozzhukhin’s constant state of agitation to repeated and well-timed encounters with creatures of the night…

It starts off with Russian officers playing cards at Captain Narumov’s house amongst the revelry one man looks on but never plays - Hermann (Mozzhukhin) who is “…not in a position to waste the essential in the hope of acquiring the superfluous…” his interest betrays him somewhat…

Hermann listens intently to Narumov's tale

Narumov toasts their Countess – his  Grandmother -  and admits he cannot understand why she doesn’t play like she used to…. He begins to talk of 60 years’ before when she had Paris at her feet and the scene shifts to the young woman (Tamara Duvan) as she wows all around her.  

But gambles can be lost as well as won and one night she loses heavily to the Duc d’Orleans. Returning home she orders her husband (Pavel Pavlov) to pay her debt but he angrily refuses. The Countess turns to the altogether taller, more dashing and far more shifty - Count St. Germain (Nikolai Panov) who then “…revealed to her a secret for which each of us would pay dearly…”

The Countess at play

So it is that at Versailles, the Countess chooses three cards which all came up trumps and she cleared her debts… with endless gratitude to her mystical advisor.

Protazanov parallel runs his narrative - rather than the more conventional “dip in and return”, so we see the original story unfold and how it impacts Hermann in particular.

The Duke divulges...

The story then shifts to reveal Hermann’s subsequent encounter with the Countess in St Petersburg. He feels drawn to her house (by her three card trick?) and there he meets and falls in love with her ward Lizaveta (Vera Orlova) who was soon the happy recipient of his daily correspondence (ah, the days before Snap Chat…) awaiting by her window for his daily appearance. Is this genuine or just a way in?

Lizaveta waiting for the man...

The Countess thinks back to her Paris days locked alone in her insomnia… and now we have a flashback from one character which suddenly links to a story told by a second: this is clever narrative and a genuinely surprise… St Germain and Hermann clearly have something in common.

St Germain travels through secret passages to rendezvous with the young Countess only for the director to switch directly to Hermann opening the same door to meet her elder self… But Hermann is there for a different reason and wants the old woman to “ensure that my entire life is happy”, he wants her to tell him the secret of the three cards.

Same door, same woman, 60 years apart...

At first he pleads then he threatens unfortunately the shock is too much and he returns to Lizaveta saying he has killed her mistress… Yet, as he variously mourns his lost opportunity, his callous disregard for human life and possibly the loss of his love, the ghost of the old lady returns – against her will… to reveal her secret…

The ghost of a chance...

Protazanov uses a restricted narrative in which almost nothing happens or is retold without Hermann being present. The story is clearly a subjective one from the young officer’s point of view and even the flashbacks are arguably his interpretation of events. This is the most personal type of horror story.

And the real shocks are still to come as Hermann sets out to guarantee his fortune by using the secret he gained in exchange for the Countesses’ death… He heads off to the gambling clubs of Moscow convinced that nothing can stop him playing his cards right.

Hermann makes his play

This is a richly textured film and one which rewards a re-watch (possibly as some bits are missing!). There’s an unusual focus on the psychological as much as the supernatural and Ivan Mozzhukhin is the man for this occasion. As Bryony Dixon recounts in her 100 Silent Movies, the Russian even resembled Pushkin’s description of his character whilst his expressiveness – which would stand out amongst the rest even without the eye-liner – means that the watcher is drawn into what is ultimately his character’s own, lonely story.

The shadow of a doubt

The cinematography from Yevgeni Slavinsky is also worthy of mention, with some striking well-lit shots that pre-figure expressionism: there is one sequence in which Hermann is literally overwhelmed by the shadow of a doubt…

The Queen of Spades is available on DVD as part of Milestone Films Early Russian Cinema Volume 8 - you can get it direct from their shop (I'm collecting the set). Surely this is overdue a screening in the UK?