Downing Street posts silents

August 5, 2007 By urbanora in Non-fiction, Online videos, People, Politics

Who’d have thought it? Downing Street is posting silent films on YouTube. It’s true. DowningSt is a registered YouTube member and has posted some 50-60 videos on YouTube, including a selection of Topical Budget silent newsreels from the collection held by the British Film Institute. This one shows Conservative PM Andrew Bonar Law (not one of the more celebrated British prime ministers) introducing his new cabinet to the newsreel cameras in 1922 – absolutely fascinating for the differing reactions from the ministers to this unprecedented intrusion from the media. (Adding comments has been disabled, by the way, should you have wished to express your rage – or heartfelt approval – at Bonar Law’s handling of the economy in 1922).

Others available from DowningSt on YouTube include MR BALDWIN AND ‘OLD BERKELEY’ (Stanley Baldwin with a hunt), NOW FOR THE PREMIERSHIP STAKES! (Baldwin electioneering), and LLOYD GEORGE RESIGNS (the fall of the Lloyd George Liberal government in 1922). I’m particularly fond of a 1921 Topical Budget film showing Lloyd George at Chequers in 1921, DOWNING ST IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, deftly filmed by Fred Wilson (in the dim and distant past I wrote a book on Topical Budget, and I’m always pleased to see it getting continued screenings). There was a real art to the best of the silent newsreels, as for any other kind of silent film production.

One oddity – all of the Topical Budget items posted by DowningSt are without a soundtrack, yet three of them come from the 1992 BFI Topical Budget video release, which had excellent music by Neil Brand. Shame.

The Other Weimar

August 5, 2007 By urbanora in Festivals

Sacile Film Fair

Too hot to think, let alone write much at the moment, but here’s some further news about the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

The main film season is to be The Other Weimar (L’altra Weimer), a season of less familiar German silents, curated by Hans-Michael Bock of CineGraph, Hamburg. This is the line-up of directors and titles (a provisional list):

Ludwig Berger (1892-1969)
EIN GLAS WASSER (1922/23) or EIN WALZERTRAUM (1925)

Hans Behrendt (1889-?1942)
DIE HOSE (1927)

Ewald Andre Dupont (1881-1956)
DER DEMÜTIGE UND DIE TÄNZERIN (1925)
DAS ALTE GESETZ (1923)

Richard Eichberg (1888-1963)
DER FÜRST VON PAPPEHEIM (1927)
RUTSCHBAHN. SCHICKSALSKAMPFE EINES SECHZEHNJÄHRIGEN (1928)

Henrik Galeen (1888-1949)
DER MÄDCHENHIRT (1919)

Gerhard Lamprecht (1897-1974)
DIE BUDDENBROOKS (1923)

Max Mack (1884-1973)
DER KAMPF DER TERTIA (1928)

Joe May (1880-1954)
DER FARMER AUS TEXAS (1925)

Richard Oswald (1880-1963)
LUMPEN UND SEIDE (1925)

Harry Piel (1892-1963)
RIVALEN (1923)

Arthur Robison (1883-1935)
LOOPING THE LOOP (1928)

Reinhold Schünzel (1888-1954)
DER HIMMEL AUF ERDEN (1927)

Hams Steinhoff (1882-1945)
DER HERR DES TODES (1926)

Erich Waschneck (1887-1970)
DIE CARMEN VON S.PAULI (1928)

A little better-known is the closing gala film on 13 October, G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora). The other special event films over the week are Orphans of the Storm (David W. Griffith, 1921), Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924), Paris qui dort (René Clair, 1923-1925) and Chicago (Frank Urson, 1927). Other strands in the festival include René Clair, the Griffith Project, Sponsored Films, The Corrick Collections, The Bible Lands in 1897, Jean Darling and Our Gang, and the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Treasures III.

Just to recap, the festival takes places in Pordenone, after some years spent at nearby Sacile, and runs 6-13 October. An outline programme is available on the festival site. Regular attendees should by now have received their e-mail giving registrations details (30 euros), plus travel and accommodation information. More information on registration etc is available from the site. The Film Fair, selling books, journals, collectables, DVDs and videos, is back once more in the church of San Francesco. The picture above, from the Pordenone site, shows Fay Wray visiting the Film Fair in 1999 (when it was at Sacile). Festival director David Robinson stands just behind her.

A Throw of Dice

August 3, 2007 By urbanora in Music, Screenings

Among the many events marking the sixtieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan, there is a screening of Franz Osten’s 1929 Anglo-Indo-German film, A Throw of Dice, on 30 August, at 21.00pm, in Trafalgar Square. Live music will come from the London Symphony Orchestra, playing a new score by Nitin Sawhney.

It certainly sounds like an event to catch, even if the assertion on the India Now website that Franz Osten is “considered by many as one of the most talented directors of all time” will come as a surprise to most. It’s a proficiently told tale from the age of the Maharajahs, the print having come from the BFI National Archive, who approached Sawhney to provide the score. It’s also billed as that curious phenomenon of our times, “a digital restoration”. Osten, a German, made three silent films in India, on historical themes, with funding from the German Emelka studios, The Light of Asia (1926), Shiraz (1928) and A Throw of Dice (1929). They are all beautiful to look at, and stand up well without being particularly astonishing.

There are several other screenings of the film and score lined up, more details of which you can find on the Throw of Dice website. The later screenings are: Oct 26th Sage Gateshead, Oct 27th Bridgewater Hall – Manchester, and Oct 28th Symphony Hall – Birmingham, all with the Northern Sinfonia. A bold initiative, well planned by somebody – go and see it if you can.

Writing the Photoplay

August 2, 2007 By urbanora in Publications, Scripts

There’s growing interest in the study of silent film screenplays, particularly at the moment in Britain where so few silent film screenplays have survived, which only adds to the challenge. Charles Barr’s work on Eliot Stannard, Hitchcock’s scenarist in the silent era, has been followed by the ongoing research of Ian McDonald at University of Leeds, who is conducting a survey of extant British silent film scripts.

All of which preamble introduces the latest addition to the Bioscope Library, J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds’ Writing the Photoplay, first published 1913 and then in a revised version in 1919. It is the latter that is available from Project Gutenberg.

It is a standard ‘how to’ guide, published by the Home Corresspondence School of Springfield, Mass. (odd how Springfields keep turning up these days), so presumably it ended up being read by those more optimistic than talented. Nevertheless, it says all the right things (“Action is the most important word in the vocabulary of the photoplaywright”), and it goes into great detail about the process of producing a screenplay, covering its component parts, how a script should look, the mechanical production of a film script, devising a scenario, delineating characters, the use and misuse of titles, and how to market a screenplay. There is an example of a completed screenplay, Everybody’s Girl (adapted from an O. Henry story and released by Vitagraph in 1918). There is also some amusing advice on what not to try and include in your screenplay (expensive scenes like the sinking of ships, ‘trick animals’, special costumes), and advice on what not to include in your screenplay owing to the attentions of the censor (“Write as your conscience and a sense of decency as an individual and as a good citizen dictate”).

It’s all sensible stuff, with interesting insights throughout and plenty of incidental comments on the routine of film production that is useful to the researcher now. There are some good photographs on studio production, and Gutenberg have most helpfully provided hyperlinks not only for chapters and illustrations, but for the index at the back. E-books just get better and better. It’s available from Project Gutenberg in HTML (747KB) and plain TXT (624KB).

Films on video and DVD worldwide

August 1, 2007 By urbanora in DVD and Blu-Ray, Resources

This is worth knowing about – the Film Search page of the BuechereiWiki site (the site’s in German but the Film Search section is available in English). The site itself appears to be a wiki for library resources.

It’s a remarkable listing of video and DVD sources worldwide, put together by Peter Delin of the Central and Regional Library, Berlin. The list covers Europe, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandanavia, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Middle East, South Asia, South-East Asia, East Asia, North America, Australia and New Zealand – plus special areas, including film footage, amateur film, documentaries, experimental films, shorts, and … silents. There are some extraordinary individual resources there, particularly search engines which look across European library collections, which I’ll investigate further and report back. Meanwhile, it’s certainly a page to bookmark.

Strade del Cinema

August 1, 2007 By urbanora in Festivals, Music

Fred Frith

It’s a new one on me, but the Strade del Cinema festival is running 6-15 August, at Aosta, Italy. It’s a festival of music and silent film, with extra bits. This year they have a Laurel and Hardy strand, with assorted of their classic silent shorts with intriguing music accompaniment (Two Tars gets to be accompanied by cello, electric bass, electronics and a Japanese koto; You’re Darn Tootin’ is accompanied by a ‘digital performer’). There’s a screening of Pastrone’s Il Fuoco (1916) with live score by avant garde guitarists Marc Ribot and the great Fred Frith, one of my heroes. And there’s Jean Epstein’s La Belle Nivernaise (1923), with vocal accompaniment by Les Grandes Voix Bulgares, which ought to be quite something. There’s also a dramatic piece on Rudolph Valentino, L’Amante de Mondo.

Just time to pop over there, if you’re quick…

Glowing brighter

July 31, 2007 By urbanora in Conferences

The conference “The Glow in their Eyes.” Global perspectives on film cultures, film exhibition and cinemagoing, previously reported on, has now extended itself and moved. It will now run over three days, 14-16 December, and will be in Ghent, not Brussels. This is due to the overwhelming number of contributions they have received (the call for papers has now closed). Film exhibition is very much where it’s at in film studies these days (or, at least it’s where where it ought to be), for early film and generally. More details from what is clearly shaping up to be a major event from the conference web site. As the organisers have just said to me in an e-mail, “this might become a hot conference”. I’m sure it will.

Le Bioscope

July 31, 2007 By urbanora in Bioscope

From time to time I pursue the etymology and the many uses of the word ‘bioscope’. So, let us journey to Ungersheim, Alsace, France, where you will find Le Bioscope. This is an environmental ‘leisure and discovery’ park, the intention of which is ‘to educate people to take responsibility for their own actions with respect to equilibrium with the environment’. As can be seen from the picture, it is organised in concentric circles, evoking the shockwaves caused by a meteorite which fell nearby in 1492. It is very much a ‘view of life’ (to cite the original meaning of bioscope), with the bio emphasising the biosphere, human biology, and the general interaction between Man and the world around him. It does have a cinema – Le Biorama. And for children there are lots of dinosaurs. It opened in June 2006.

RIP Ingmar Bergman

July 30, 2007 By urbanora in Filmmakers 3 Comments

Rest in peace, Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), almost the last filmmaker to have experienced the silent era and to have it influence his own work. (Ronald Neame, who worked on Hitchcock’s silent/sound Blackmail is still with us. Eric Rohmer. Michaelangelo Antonioni. Anyone else?) As well as so much of his work being imbued with the look and feel of silent cinema, he of course gave the great silent director Victor Sjöström the key role in Wild Strawberries, and his autobiography looked further back in having the title Magic Lantern. A magic lantern also features in Fanny and Alexander. Magic lantern, silent cinema, sound cinema, theatre, opera, television – all a part of his career, all ways of seeing.

Films from 1907 at Il Cinema Ritrovato

July 30, 2007 By urbanora in Festivals

Bologna

The Bioscope has its reporters everywhere (well, sort of), and Frank Kessler has very kindly provided a report on the films from 1907 strand which featured at this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival at Bologna. Here’s Frank’s report:

For the fifth time now, the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato festival has dedicated part of its program to films that are a hundred years old. Starting in 2003 to celebrate so to speak the centenary of Edwin S. Porter‘s The Great Train Robbery, this section of the program has offered many interesting insights into early film history, and also led to numerous fascinating discoveries. Due to the increasing lengths of the films to be shown, the 1907 programs occupied a larger proportion of the festival screenings than the ones projected in the previous years.

Mariann Lewinsky, who is responsible for the “100 Years Ago”-section, always tries to go off the beaten tracks, both in her selection and her programming strategies. Thus every time she chooses different angles to present also her personal view on a year of early filmmaking. Obviously, there are always practical factors to be considered, such as the availability of films, the quality of the prints etc. So, as Mariann Lewinsky explained, the fact that the 1907 retrospective was made up of mainly European films was due to such pragmatic reasons. (The 1905 program, by the way, was a very complicated one to put together as 1905 used to be – and possibly still is – the default date attributed by many archives to non-identified early films.)

All in all there were nine 1907 screenings, divided into two groups: the first one consisted of five programs dedicated to Bologna 1907 (films shown in Bologna from June 30th to July 7th, 1907, that is during the period of the festival itself, a hundred years ago), Pathé 1907, Italy 1907, Great Britain 1907 (productions by Hepworth, Urban and Mitchell & Kenyon) as well as films from the Abbé Joye Collection; the second one was organised thematically around topics such as ‘drama’, ‘actuality’, ‘at the seaside’, ‘au music-hall’, ‘colours – costume’ etc, as well as a series of films with Max Linder.

These rich and diverse programs allowed many discoveries. A favourite of mine was the 1907 Pathé film Le petit Jules Verne by Gaston Velle which, to my knowledge, is a unique case of combining explicitly the adventurous and scientific-technical universe of the well-known French author with the magical world of the féerie genre, embedding the latter in a Little Nemo-like dream sequence.

For more on Il Cinema Ritrovato do have a look at David Bordwell’s and Kristin Thompson’s blog.

Further details of the 1907 films show can be found on the Bologna festival site.