All of the links on the right-hand side of this site now come with brief descriptions when you hover your mouse over the link. I hope this will help people explore further the world of early and silent film. I’m always interested to hear of good websites and online research resources, if you know of any.
Monthly Archives: July 2007
Early Popular Visual Culture
A bit of a plug for a journal with which I am involved. There are few scholarly journals out there which concern themselves with early film, which makes Early Popular Visual Culture all the more precious.
It was originally published in 2001 as Living Pictures: The Journal of the Popular and Projected Image before 1914. It reinvented itself as EPVC in 2005, with Routledge as publishers. It is dedicated to publishing research on all forms of popular visual culture before 1930. It takes as its particular brief to
… examine the use and exploitation of popular cultural forms such as (but not limited to) cinema, photography, magic lanterns and music hall within the fields of entertainment, education, science, advertising and the domestic environment; and is primarily concerned with the evolving social, technological and economic contexts which such popular cultural products inhabited and defined.
… which is spreading things as broadly as you could wish. So it’s not just silent movies, but akin popular projected forms, and the world they inhabited, which is demonstrated in the range of essays in the most recent issue (vol. 5 issue 1, April 2007):
- Joe Kember, ‘The Functions of Showmanship in Freak Show and Early Film’
- Paul Myron Hillier, ‘Men and Horses in Motion: Thomas Eakins and Motion Photography
- Gerry Turvey, ‘Ideological Contradictions: The Film Topicals of the British and Colonial Kinemaograph Company’
- John Hewitt, ‘Designing the Poster in England, 1890-1914’
- Eric Faden, ‘Movables, Movies, Mobility: Nineteenth-century Looking and Reading’
- plus an archive feature, introduced by Vanessa Toulmin, ‘Magic Ephemera’ and book reviews.
All that, and it looks great. Get your local library to take our a subscription today!
Segundo de Chomón
I’ve just found about this rare screening of films by the Spanish director Segundo de Chomón, taking place at Tate Modern on Friday 6 July at 19.00pm. Segundo de Chomón is one of the masters of early fantasy film, overshadowed rather by Georges Méliès, but whose trick films are no less intoxicating or ingenious, filled as they are with sorcerers, mystics, devils and exotic dancers. The sixty-minute programme includes all these titles (several of which are coloured prints, heightening the exoticism of the scenes):
Poules aux Oeufs D’Or, 1905
Antre Infernal, 1905
Antre de la Sorcière, 1906
Spectre Rouge, 1907
Armures Mysterieux, 1907
Scarabée D’Or, 1907
Metempsycose, 1907
Excursion Incoherente, 1910
Legende du Fantôme, 1908
Stephen Horne is playing the piano, for what is an excellent programme of films little seen but once seen unlikely to be forgotten. Early cinema was a magical place. Further information from the Tate site. It’s part of the Dali & Film season, and Dali would have loved them.
Infax and Open Archive
Infax is the BBC’s own programme catalogue, and as many will know a public version of this has been made available on the web for a year or so now. A revamped version has just been published, with a touch more design and in a fetching shade of pink, and it’s more than worth noting here for the details it has of television and radio programmes on silent cinema.
Given that it has 900,000 records (maybe half of the entire BBC output, but it predominantly records programmes that survive in the BBC archives), it’s a bit disappointing to find just 63 listed under the category ‘silent films’, but what’s there is fascinating enough, especially the records of older programmes with interviewees no longer with us.
For example, there’s the 1969 Yesterday’s Witness programme interviewing the 93-year-old British film director George Pearson, who directed his first film in 1914.
Or Michael Bentine’s 1969-70 television series Golden Silents, from the days when you could get thirty-part series on the history of silent films.
Or diverting magazine entertainment, such as Bob Langley chating to silent film pianists Florence de Jong and Ena Baga (doyennes of the National Film Theatre) for Saturday Night at the Mill in 1979.
It’s also worth seaching under the names of individuals who may not have been indexed under ‘silent films’, e.g. Georges Melies being discussed in a Horizon programme on special effects in 1974.
It’s mostly recent programmes that are recorded, and then usually items in arts programmes. Of course, its just the catalogue and not the programmes themselves. Those remain in the vaults, though the BBC has ambitious plans for substantial amounts of archive content to be released online, what’s called its Open Archive project. Closed trials of this are underway, and version one of a full service (subject to Public Value tests) could come in Spring 2008.
Paimann’s Filmlisten
Let us move away from all this star-laden stuff, and get back to the nuts and bolts of silent film research. I don’t know how many English-speaking researchers will know about Paimann’s Filmlisten. It was an Austrian film review journal, which ran 1916-1956 (founded by Franz Paimann), listing all new film releases with synopsis and credit details for films shown in Austria. Clearly, it will be known to German and Austrian researchers, but a quick Google search found no English language references.
The reason for mentioning here is that there is an index to the entire run, made available online by the Vienna Bibliothek. It arranges all the films by original release title, followed by Austrian release title, date, and reference number for the issue of Paimann’s Filmlisten. Here’s a section from the letter B, to give you an idea of what’s there:
Biarritz und seine Umgebung 1922-105, Nr. 331
Bibel, Die 1925-45
Biberpelz, Der 1929-105
Bibi la purée (Francsfälscher) 1926-91
Bid to love – Gaby, das Königsliebchen (Der Autoprinz) 1927-137
Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer, Die 1926-81
Biene und ihre Zucht, Die 1918/19-57, Nr.131
Big adventures (Der kleine Landstreicher) 1923-39, Nr. 360
Big City, The (Das unsichtbare New-York) 1928-94
Big Dan – Entfesselte Leidenschaft (Eine verhängnisvolle Nacht) 1926-1
Big Killing, The (Riff und Raff als Scharfschützen) 1929-89
Big Parade, The (Die Parade des Todes) 1926-173
Big Pond – La grande mare (Über’n großen Teich) 1931-63
Big timber – Der Kampf im Urwald (Urwaldriesen) 1925-120
Big Trail, The (Die große Fahrt) 1931-39, 69
There are no digitised copies of the reviews, alas, nor any credits, but as a check list of titles and evidence of their distribution it’s an invaluable resource – all the more invaluable for those with access to the journal itself (the Austrian Film Archive has a set) It appears to go up to 1931 so far, so ideal for investigating silents.
Update (August 2016)
The indexes to Paimann’s Filmlisten are no longer avaiable on the Vienna Bibliothek site, and cannot be traced via the Internet Archive. However, a digitised run of the Filmlisten itself is available via the European Film Gateway, http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/de/content/filmarchiv-austria-paimann%E2%80%99s-film-lists
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet has been turned by composer Victoria Borisova-Ollas into a multimedia semi-opera, which premiered at the Manchester International Festival on June 29th. The multi-layered, fabulist blending of the Orpheus and Euridyce myth with the tale two Bombay rock stars involves the Hallé orchestra, electric guitars, readings by Alan Rickman, and – the reason for its notice here – a silent film directed by Mike Figgis, who has also directed the stage production.
Figgis’ half-hour film echoes the action, as indicated in this extract from a Guardian article:
Figgis is putting together a combination of still images and brief snatches of action – a “tableau vivant” is how he describes it to me in between takes at the small studio in Battersea, London, where he is filming over four days, working with a small budget and revelling in it. “I enjoy the fact that you’re very clear about what your limitations are and they’re not negotiable,” he says. “You can’t suddenly stop traffic or get extras. I woke up this morning and thought, ‘I wonder if they’re going to get enough denim farmwear together [for a scene set in the American midwest]. I remembered I had two denim work jackets and some cowboy neckerchiefs, so I brought them in.”
Figgis is anxious not to produce images that overpower the music (“I have to behave – and I am, I really am,” he says), and he does not intend to tell the story literally. Instead, he will provide filmic allusions that echo both story and score. “The book uses magic realism,” he says. “Fables dovetail and parallel each other. Film should try and function in the same way. But it needs to be very simple. It can’t be doing the sort of fireworks that would take the audience out of the music. It’s an interesting reversal. I’m a composer, too, so I do film scores. The function of the film score is to support the image. This is the opposite: the imagery is to support the music.”
An intriguing reversal indeed, to have a silent film acompanying a score (actually it happens a lot, but is promoted the other way round). However, I’ve found frustratingly little to describe the actual content of the film, nor any news as yet of any other performances. There are reviews to read in The Guardian and The Times, though they make little reference to the film.
Slapstick
Things may be a little quieter from The Bioscope for the next few days, as I’ve broken a bone in my thumb, and typing has become rather slow process.
So, to mark my falling over and crashing into a glass-fronted picture, from which I have learned that pratfalls hurt in real life, here’s a short item on slapstick.
First of all, a slapstick was a jointed piece of wood used in harlequinades and minstrel acts to make a slapping noise. If you are in a UK educational institution or library, you can see one in use in an 1899 film of seaside entertainers E. Williams and his Merry Men at Rhyl, filmed by Arthur Cheetham and available from Screenonline.
For slapstick comedians themselves, start off with David B. Pearson’s excellent Silent-Movies.org site, which incorporates several web sites on silent comedy stars, one of which is Slapstick. This has MP4 movie files of Charlies Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Mabel Normand, Harry Langdon, and Max Linder. They are clips, not complete films, but they capture the artistry of falling with style perfectly.
Or look further at the individuals by visiting www.busterkeaton.com, Arbucklemania, Harold Lloyd, Madcap Mabel, The Harry Langdon Society or Chaplin.
On the latter, check out the Chapliniana web site, about the festival of all things Chaplin which is currently running in Bologna. The site looks great, but is only in Italian. Or check out the very helpful Charlie Chaplin UK DVD and Video Guide.
Or, if you are in the US, check out Kino range of slapstick DVDs including the encyclopedic Slaptick Symposium DVD collection – 1264 minutes of Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel, Charley Chase and Harold Lloyd.
And, of course, between 19-22 July, at Arlington, Virginia, there’s the Slapsticon festival, with Laurel and Hardy, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd Larry Semon, Mabel Normand, Leon Errol, Ford Sterling, Fatty Arbuckle, Billy Bevan, Monty Banks, Max Davidson, Charley Chase, Lupino Lane, Ben Turpin, Wallace Beery…
And, thinking laterally about these things, here’s some recipes for making custard pie.
Why not read Simon Louvish’s, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett, about the cinema’s prime producer of comic mayhem.
Finally, plenty of people visit this site loking for dates of Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns shows this autumn, and the main post on this is updated as I find new tour dates. Merton’s book, Silent Comedy, will be published in October.
Anyone spot the self-referential gag in the picture?
The Bioscope 