With the festival now over (a little sooner than intended), acknowledgment is due to the various sources used, aside from the standard filmographies and reference guides.

War Brides was the easiest to research, as the best known film among the films. Useful sources included Kevin Brownlow’s The War the West and the Wilderness and Ivan Butler’s Silent Magic, the latter the source of the main image. Maria Craig Wentworth’s original play, with production photos, is on the Internet Archive. Contemporary film reviews were also used. For the accompanying short, Kiddies in the Ruins, see the director George Pearson’s autobiography, Flashback.

The Land of Mystery is the most obscure among the titles selected. The two main sources are Kevin Browlow’s Behind the Mask of Innocence (which has the only known photograph connected with the production) and John M. East’s ‘Neath the Mask, a marvellous account of lesser British theatre and film in the early years of the twentieth century through the life of the author’s grandfather, John East. East was an actor in the film and had vivid memories of the trip to Lithuania. Acknowledgment is also due to the researches of Nicholas Hiley into the British secret service, some of which fed into Brownlow’s work. The information about Lenin seeing the film comes from an essay by the late Rashit Yangirov in Derek Spring and Richard Taylor, Stalinism and Soviet Cinema. A detailed review in The Bioscope (8 July 1920) supplied much information, including a plot summary. The accompanying film, Meyerhold’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, has been much written about. The main source used was Jay Leyda’s history of Russian and Sovet cinema, Kino.

The essential source for The Jeffries-Sharkey Fight is Dan Streible’s new history of early fight films, Fight Pictures. Also useful is Charles Musser’s The Emergence of Cinema. Information on the fight additionally came from Nat Fleischer and Sam Andre’s absolutely essential A Pictorial History of Boxing. Also used were Fleischer’s The Heavyweight Championship and the International Boxing Hall of Fame’s The Boxing Register. Some images came from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

Das Mirakel took up the most time because of a lack of information in secondary sources, and huge errors in most online sources. I relied chiefly on British film trade press coverage over 1912-13, particularly The Bioscope. The German film database Filmportal is comprehensive and generally very reliable, and supplied most of what I could find on the rival Das Mirakel. Information also came from Charles Graves, The Cochran Story and John Glanfield’s excellent Earls Court and Olympia, which was the source of the illustration from the Olympia stage production of The Miracle.

Information on the cinemas used came from The London Project database, with the descriptions of the cinemas from some of my own researches, augmented by Allen Eyes and Keith Skone’s London’s West End Cinemas.

Grateful acknowledgment to all sources – even to the Internet Movie Database…

It is with humble apologies that I have to report that tonight’s screening at the Bioscope Festival of Lost Films is not going ahead. There have been problems with the film chosen for our last screening, from the sudden likelihood that part of it had survived (which subsequently proved not to be the case), but more seriously that its sober subject matter did not quite suit the air of ironic whimsicality which is the hallmark (we think) of this Festival.

There was a film in reserve (there are many lost silent films, as we know), but your programmer is leading a busy life at the moment and both time and energy have run out. Thought was given to postponing the festival for a day, but the cinema manager has been awkward, and the organist we had hired (a certain Dr Sargent) was demanding ruinous expenses for being kept on for a second evening. All in all, the wiser course of action is to call it a day at four shows, and to return to lost films (perhaps as an occasional series) another time.

To all festivalgoers, you may of course obtain refunds from the festival office, and I hope that no one was put to too great an expense over costume hire. There is just enough left in the kitty (once the organist has been paid off) for us to have our promised end of festival soirée at the Cafe Royal (itself soon to be no more), where we may toast lost films and consider that not only is vita brevis, but sometimes ars is brevis too.

William Orpen, ‘Café Royal London 1912’

Germany 1912

Screen adaptation: Michel Carré
Production Company: Ingenieur Jos. Menchen (Berlin)
Producer of stage production: Max Reinhardt
Producer: Joseph Menchen
Author of stage production: Karl Vollmöller
Cinematographers: William Jeapes, Harold Jeapes
Composer of accompanying music: Engelbert Humperdink

Cast: Maria Carmi (The Madonna), Douglas Payne (The Knight), Florence Winston (The Nun), Ernst Matray (Spielmann/The Minstrel), Josef Klein (The King), Agathe Barescu (The Abbess), Theodor Rocholl (The King’s son), Ernst Benzinger (The Robber Count), Marie Von Radgy (The Old Sacristan ), Alfred König (The Lame Man), Ernst Lubitsch

Distributed by Joseph Menchen
1,459 metres (four reels)

It is day four of the Bioscope Festival of Lost Films, and this evening we find ourselves in Oxford Street. We hope that the message got through to festivalgoers that we have had to move from the scheduled Pyke House (which will serve as our venue tomorrow) further down Oxford Street to the larger venue, the Picture House at 161-167. This fine new building seats 760, and some may remember that it was one this spot in 1906 that Hale’s Tours of the World (films exhibited in a mock railway carriage) was first seen in this fair city. Opened in January 1913, the Picture House is held to be one of the most delightful cinemas in London, exquisitely lit and upholstered, with a perfect view guaranteed for every attendee. We needed the extra space to fit in an orchestra and choir, with a most notable conductor – but first we must tell you a little about what you are to see.

Our film this evening was a legend before it was even a film, so to speak. It is Das Mirakel, to give its German title, or The Miracle as every one of you will know it from the sensational exhibition of the stage version at Olympia in 1911. The producer of that epic piece of dumbshow theatre was Max Reinhardt (left), the Austrian theatrical genius, whose inspired use of lighting, mechanical effects and spectacle (particularly crowds) has so startled audiences across Europe. Like Vselovod Meyerhold, whose work we saw two days ago – but with very different results – Reinhardt’s great desire is to free theatre from the confines of literature and to revel in the space that it offers. The Miracle, a play written by Karl Vollmöller, is extraordinary in the first instance for being silent, told only through dumbshow and the music of the great composer Engelbert Humperdink – and, yes, it is maestro Humperdink who, at extraordinary expense, the festival has brought over from Germany to conduct the orchestra for us tonight, together with a chorus of eighty.

The Miracle retells a medieval legend of a nun who dreams of temptations to be found in the outside world and flees from her convent with a knight. She suffers various adventures and privations, eventually finding herself accused of witchcraft. While she is absent from the convent, her place is taken by a statue of the Virgin Mary, which comes to life and undertakes the nun’s various duties. Upon the penitent nun’s return, the Virgin becomes a statue once more. That we saw the play in London was thanks to that most enterprising of theatrical entrepreneurs, C.B. Cochran, who was looking for an entertainment to fill the vasty space of Olympia. Enthralled by seeing Reinhardt’s Oedipus Rex in Germany, he invited him to come up with an epic production which would make best use of Olympia. Reinhardt’s idea (after toying with the possibility of recreating the Delhi Durbar) was to stage a medieval tale with a cathedral setting. Vollmöller then came up with the play. The huge space at Olympia made it essential that the story be told without words, simply because the audience would be unable to hear them. 1,000 performers and 500 choristers filled out the epic drama, supported by a wonderful array of stage machinery, ingenious theatrical effects and uplifting music.

Newspaper illustration of the The Miracle at Olympia

The success of that production needs no re-telling here – simply to say that for many it was a theatrical event like no other. What concerns us is the film that followed. A spectacle in dumbshow was an obvious choice for Herr Reinhardt’s first foray into cinema. News that a film was to be made, and that it would be produced in London, first appeared in May 1912. Then there was silence for quite a time, until we learned that the film was to be produced in Austria while the theatre company (including, it is believed, one Ernst Lubitsch, a comic actor of notable promise, we are assured) was based in Vienna. Filming took place in three weeks over September and October. The great surprise to all in the industry was that the film was photographed by a British newsreel manager, William Cecil Jeapes and his brother and fellow newsreel expert, Harold. Now Billy Jeapes is well known in Wardour Street, and manages that popular newsreel Topical Budget. He would be the first person one would call for should a speedy news report be required, but he is not known for his work with dramatic films. And yet, as an interview for The Bioscope that Mr Jeapes kindly provided just a few days ago, he was the person who, as they say, ‘got the call’:

[TB] So, Mr. Jeapes, how was ‘The Miracle’ taken?

[WJ] Well, it’s a rather long story, but I’ll do my best to give you the main points as briefly as possible. In the first place, I may say that my own connection with the undertaking commenced just about twenty-four hours before I actually entered upon it, so you can imagine that there wasn’t much time for preparation. I received and accepted the request that I should take on the business, grabbed camera, films and baggage; caught the first train that was available, and, in almost less time than it takes to tell (as the novelists say) I was starting on the first preliminaries with Professor Reinhardt and M. Michel Carré (who adapted the play for the camera), near Vienna.

I left London on September 21st, and I returned on October 15th. During that time we were working regularly from the early morning until about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, at which hour it was necessary for the company to start back for Vienna, where ‘The Miracle’ was being played nightly – at the Rotunda. We did nothing on Sundays.

[TB] And how, Mr. Jeapes, does the film compare with the original production, as we saw it in London?

[WJ] Favourably, I think I may say, in every particular. It is obvious, of course, that the enormous scenic advantages of the cinematograph have made it possible to present in realistic detail all sorts of incidents which could scarcely be more than hinted at in the arena at Olympia. The character of the production, as a ‘wordless play’, obviates any loss through the absence of speech, and, since the film is being coloured by hand in Paris, the wonderful effects in this respect will be quite as striking as they were when seen in actuality.

You will probably be struck by the continuity of the play in its film version as compared with its episodic nature at Olympia. It will not be necessary to keep our audiences waiting while we ‘change the scenes’ and we have, also, been able to fill up the gaps. Naturally, too, the superior possibilities of the cinematograph in illusion-making have allowed us to treat supernatural incidents with the greatest freedom.

From Mr. Jeapes we learn further that the exteriors were photographed in the grounds of Kreuzenstein Castle and at the cathedral of Perchtoldsdorf, Vienna. It is unclear from his account to what degree, if any, Max Reinhardt actually directed the film, or whether he simply supplied some instructions, and it was Michel Carré (a French film director)who took most responsibility. That Mr. Jeapes had some unusual influence over the production can be deduced from the fact that the part of the Nun is not played by the actress from the theatre company (all other parts are filled that way) but by one Florence Winston, not a known actress at all, but who just happens to be Mrs William Jeapes. It is all very curious.

But what of the film itself? Opinions are mixed on what is being billed as a ‘Lyricscope Play’, to a quite fascinating degree. That normally level-headed American journal Variety has gone into absolute raptures:

The ‘Miracle’, reproduced from the wonderful Reinhardt pantomime of the same name presented at the London Olympia, is probably the finest exhibition of the “Celluloid drama” ever conceived. In some respects it is superior to the original pantomime spectacle, in that the paths of the performers – or characters – may be followed more minutely and with greater detail than is possible in the original, due to the possibility of showing the scenic progression with the unfolding of the plot … The whole presentment is remarkably impressive in general effect, the pictures so beautifully to resemble natural colors, the scenes so plentifully interspersed with captions announcing the progress of the tale, and finally the awakening to a realization that it was all a ghastly, enervating “dream”, is extraordinarily vivid. No spoken play could be more so.

Variety‘s critic was possibly a little overwhelmed by the presentation of the film, which we are emulating today – a cathedral frontage over the proscenium arch, with doors opening to reveal the screen within; incense wafting into the auditorium; the choir entering in vestments and coming upon stage; the use of sound effects; the heavenly music. We hope you will be similarly transported, but we must note a soberer verdict from the British paper, The Bioscope, reviewing the film’s UK premiere in this very cinema. The Bioscope looks beyond the siren charms of theatrical presentation to what is actually presented on the screen:

The whole play seems to have been adapted for the camera with only the most cursory regard for the latter’s possibilities and limitations. It has been forgotten that a scene viewed through an artifical glass lens is a very different thing from the same scene viewed in actuality by the naked eye.

The reviewer chastises the film for failing to adjust the drama to the demands of the camera, and finds the staging maladroit, sometimes to ridiculous effect:

In the scenes showing the cathedral’s interior the stage is too deep, with the result that the players are constantly out of proportion with each other, and swell from midgets to giants in a fashion which is almost ludicrous as they move “down stage”.

Again, how much did Max Reinhardt have to do with the film itself? The Bioscope is uncertain, and we must confess to being unsure ourselves. Herr Reinhardt has not answered our telegrams, and Mr Jeapes has been curiously evasive. At any rate, you must be the judges of what you see on the screen. It is a film that is perhaps more an act of faith than a conventional cinema offering. The incense is not separate from it; it is an essential part of the experience. Also, it is a film that has to live in the imagination: not only is it a lost film, but there is not a single image from the film that we can produce for you. Our researcher recalls seeing some frame stills once, and recalls vasty spaces and isolated figures. But those images too, are now gone…

And then there is the matter of the second Miracle. For a great headache for Reinhardt, Vollmöller, Carré and the film’s American producer Joseph Menchen has been the existence of a rival film, which we are bravely (and uniquely) programming to accompany our main feature. The second Das Mirakel was made in Germany by Continental-Kunstfilm GmbH in 1912. It was written and directed by Mime Misu, a Romanian who came to prominence in German cinema recently following the success of his dramatisation of the tragic storyof the sinking of the ‘Titanic’, In Nacht und Eis (1912). Misu has not only directed the film, but acts in it as well, alongside Lore Giesen and Anton Ernst Rückert.

Its existence has caused much confusion. A court injunction was applied for in this country to prevent the exhibition of the Misu Mirakel (it was registered under that title in Germany) by the Elite Sales Agency when it was announced as opening at the London Pavilion in December 1912, but it seems Elite subverted any charges of copyright infringement by averring that the story was based on legend, not on Vollmöller’s play. Nevertheless, they appear to have been playing things safe by taking the advice of the judge and exhibiting the film under a different title: Sister Beatrix (in Germany it has been exhibited as Alte Legende – Eine Das Marienwunder or Marienwunder – Das Eine alte Legende). Under this title it has been sold to many cinemas across Britain, who have sometimes advertised it as The Miracle, to the great dismay of the ‘true’ film’s producers.

We have not seen the film, and information on its contents is hard to find. The film is 4,000 feet, which means a long evening for you, but such an opportunity to compare these two films in the same venue is unlikely to occur again. Particularly if you also want the orchestra, choir, organ music, sound effects, special effects, cathedral gates opening onto the screen, hand-coloured images, or indeed the incense. This has been a unique evening.

Please join us tomorrow night for our final screening at Pyke House Cinematograph Theatre. It is a sobering and controversial production that we have programmed for our last show, but we hope that all festivalgoers will join us afterwards for an end-of-festival libation or two. A room has been hired at the Café Royal. Never let it be said that we do things by halves here at the Bioscope Festival of Lost Films.

Update (June 2011): There is good news for film, and bad news for a lost film festival – Das Mirakel is no longer a lost film. A print is held by the French CNC film archive at Bois d’Arcy. See the comments below for more information.

UK 1920

Director/producer: Harold Shaw
Production Company: Harold Shaw Productions
Story: Basil Thomson
Script: Bannister Merwin
Cinematographer: Stanley Rodwell

Cast: Edna Flugrath (Masikowa), Norman Tharp (Lenoff), Fred Morgan (Prince Ivan), Christine Rayner, Harold French, M.R. Morand, Lewis Gilbert, John East, Phyllis Bedells (ballet dancer), Laurent Novikoff (ballet dancer)

Distributed by Laurillard & Grossmith
7,220 feet

The only known production photograph of The Land of Mystery, taken in Kovno, Lithuania (from Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence)

Welcome to day two of the Bioscope Festival of Lost Films. Today we find ourselves in the heart of London’s Soho district, at the Jardin de Paris, a cinema which once had a somewhat insalubrious reputation, but which now attracts a more discerning clientele, and certainly sees a little less of the police than it once did. Manager Felix Haté has even established a school for budding film projectionists at the cinema, which shows commendable enterprise. Our venue seats 250, and you will find it in Ingestre Place, just off Berwick Street. Our music this evening comes courtesy of I. Khudyakov, widely recognised as one of the finest improvising pianists for the cinema in Russia today. As you will see, he is an apt choice.

Our film for you this evening, The Land of Mystery, is adventurous in theme, and quite an adventure was had in its making. It is undeniable that the issue of the hour in 1920 is Soviet Russia, and what the Bolshevik revolution means not just for that indeed mysterious land but the lands that lie beyond it, indeed all of us. The cinema has a duty to inform as it has a desire to entertain, and it is right and proper that a film producer should have attempted to portray for us what has been happening in Russia.

That producer is known to you all. Harold Shaw is an American, an actor with the Edison company who came over to this country shortly before the Great War as a director for films made by the London Film Company. There he made such prestigious and fondly-remembered works as The House of Temperley (1913) and Trilby (1914), before venturing to make films in South Africa. Now back in this country, he tells us that took on the project at the behest no less a personage than Basil Thomson, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police and Director of Intelligence at the Home Office. Mr Thomson’s work during wartime is naturally secret (we know something of catching spies and working with some peculiar organisation called MI5, but that is all), but his distrust of Bolshevism is a matter of record. Mr Shaw is vague on this point, but it seems that the idea for the production came from Thomson, who sees the cinema (which we know to be such a powerful medium of propaganda) as a new means to counter the Bolshevist threat. Hence Harold Shaw found himself with a handsome budget to produce a film based on a story provided by none other than Basil Thomson himself.

The story of the film’s production is remarkable. The film company, which included Edna Flugrath (pictured), Mr Shaw’s actress wife (sister of the cinema performers Viola Dana and Shirley Mason, of such renown), first travelled to Berlin, where they became caught in the middle of the Spartacist uprising of January 1919, with people being by shot by troops in the streets. One of the company ill-advisedly took photographs of some of the dead, which led to an uncomfortable delay in the hands of the authorities. The sights of a war-devasted Germany had a sobering effect on the company, who journeyed on by train accompanied by louse-ridden peasants on to Kovno (you may now know it better as Kaunas) in Lithuania, where the film was to be made.

Kovno itself was in ruins, having borne heavy fighting during the war. There was little food, street lighting was shut down owing to scarcity of fuel, and bodies of those who had starved to death were to be found in the streets. Each day a lorry left the town, laden with bodies for mass burial, and members of cast gargled and bathed in disinfectant to ward off disease. Astonishingly, in the middle of such circumstances, they began to film, first in Kovno and then at Alexandrova Elova, where filming was greatly limited owing to the sixteen hours of night. It is hard to believe that they spent some three months working under such conditions. But the resulting realism has startled all who have seen the film, declaring that nothing else like it has been witnessed on the screen before now. The remainder of the film was produced in rather more comfortable circumstances in London.

The film tells the story of Lenoff (played by Douglas Payne), and if you think that sounds a little like Lenin, well that is no accident. He is the son of middle-class parents, and is in love with a peasant girl, Masikova (Miss Flugrath). However, she comes to the attention of Prince Ivan, who sends her to Petrograd to become a dancer. Thwarted in love, Lenoff acquires a deep hatred of the ruling classes and becomes a Bolshevist. He goes into exile; on his return his fervour turns to madness after his mother is shot by Bolshevists without trial for having allegedly displayed Imperialist sympathies. Masikova joins the Imperial Ballet, but manages to escape to England with Ivan following the Bolshevist uprising.

All of this you may witness for yourselves. The film enjoyed a prestigious premiere at the Winter Garden Theatre in July 1920. In attendance were members of parliament, including the Home Secretary, the French ambassador, and some of the finest among London society. The film has had, it must be said, a mixed reception. The realism of some of the scenes, and the privations undergone by the film company, have elicited deserved praise. But disappointment has been expressed that Lenoff is driven not by political urgings but by romantic passion and wounded vanity. ‘The question of Bolshevism is not touched; neither a capitalist nor an industrial worker appears, the characters being exclusively Romanoffs, ballet girls and peasants’, complains the Kinematograph Weekly. Our sister paper The Bioscope feels that Mr Shaw has been hampered by the fear of appearing propagandist, but it praises individual details. It notes in particular the scene where a mad fanatic jumps onto the high altar, declaring ‘there is no God or I should die this minute’; whereupon a soldier shoots him dead. The staging interior of the Imperial Opera House comes in for much praise, and disappointment has been expressed that we do not see more of the two noted ballet dancers, Phyllis Bedells and Laurent Novikoff, so well known to British audiences.

The most remarkable fact about this remarkable film is that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has seen it. The head of the Soviet diplomatic mission in London obtained a copy and sent it to the Kremlin. A screening was arranged at the Metropole cinema, apparently without Lenin or his wife, who accompanied him, being aware of the contents of the film beforehand. It was only when the film was halfway through that it stated to dawn on Lenin that the leading figure might be based on him. He is reported to have laughed heartily at the remainder of the film, thought whether he thought it a foolish romance or possibly satire, one can only speculate. If only one could have been there.

The film we have to accompany our feature is shorter, but but will undoubtedly be acclaimed by posterity as the greater. To contrast with a British view of Russian life, we have a Russian view of British life, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1915). Some may remember that last year’s festival featured the 1913 American version of Oscar Wilde’s story, with Wallace Reid as the doomed Gray. This year, we are showing the version produced by Vsevolod Meyerhold, a genius of the Russian theatre, whose symbolist, experimental ideas have revolutionised what ideas of what the theatre is there to show and how the artist should prepare for it. You may imagine the huge excitement caused when the great Meyerhold decided that he wanted to turn his talents towards the cinema, and did so with gusto. The result, we are informed (for we have not see the film as yet), are startling beyond measure. Maestro Meyerhold has sought to realise the buried potential of the screen. Compositions are in bold blocks of black and white, characters are silhouettes against a phantasmagorical background. There is innovation likewise in the casting; rejecting most performers as inadequate for his purposes, he has cast a woman, Varvara Yanova, as Dorian, and himself as Sir Henry Wooton. Meyerhold, we understand, has not illustrated but rather he has embodied the inner essence of Dorian Gray’s tragedy, through film.

This three-reeler has been acclaimed by all critics who have seen it, and roundly dismissed by the Russian public. It will be interesting to see how festival attendees judge this work – failed entertainment, or visionary insight into the future of cinema. Or you may simply enjoy the Wildean epigrams in the intertitles, which the festival staff have dutifully translated back into the correct English. Our two films this evening are very different in style and artisitic accomplishment, we suspect, but they each demonstrated the compulsion the best among cinema artists feel to bring telling visions to the screen. These are not idle films.

We hope you are enjoying the festival, and that you will join the other festivalgoers after each screening at one or other of the recommend eating houses: Romano’s, Simpson’s, or tonight’s rendezvous, the Rendezvous itself, in Dean Street, just around the corner from here. For those of serious intent where lost films are concerned, you may be interested to learn that out education officer will be providing notes on the research that went into locating the films once the festival is over, and thought is going into possibly organising a touring version of the festival. Lost films are for everyone, not just those in the metropolis.

Do join us tomorrow, where we will be in the East End to witness an elemental battle such as has never been surpassed on the screen. A charabanc will be laid on for festivalgoers, if you would like to assemble outside the Savoy at 7.00pm sharp, price sixpence.