Here comes the summer

May 26, 2008 By urbanora in Festivals

Bonner Sommerkino

Well, I don’t know what the weather is like where you are, but here we have the sort of driving wind and rain that only a British bank holiday can provide. As an antidote I thought it would be useful to have a round up of this summer’s silent film festivals. So here’s a line-up of some of what’s on offer from June through to October (a bit late for summer, I know, but Pordenone in October is just pefect, once you’ve endured the welcoming and obligatory one day of heavy rain).

Il Cinema Ritrovato
The Cinema Ritrovato film festival, Bologna takes place 28 June-5 July. This year there are a number of silent strands: a series dedicated to films made exactly 100 years ago, silent star Emilio Ghione, Lev Kuleshov, Comic Actresses and Suffragettes, and Monta Bell. A highlight is Neil Brand’s orchestral score for Hitchcock’s Blackmail. Other strands include Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, Warner films of the 1930s, films based on the work of Giovanni Guareschi (creator of Don Camillo), Cold War films on the atomic bomb, and a Cinemascope selection.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival takes place 11-13 July 2008. Films announced so far are (Friday 11 July) The Kid Brother (1927), (Saturday 12 July) The Soul of Youth (1920), Les Deux Timides (The Two Timid Souls) (1928), Mikael (Michael) (1924), The Man Who Laughs (1928), The Unknown (1927), (Sunday 13 July) Die Abenteur Des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) (1926), The Silent Enemy (1930), Her Wild Oat (1927), Jujiro (Crossways) (1928), The Patsy (1928).

Slapsticon
The annual festival of silent and early sound comedy, Slapsticon, takes place in Arlington, Virginia 17-20 July. Programme highlights include Hal Roach rarities, Raymond Griffith, Mack Sennett, and Early Comedies.

Capitolfest
Capitolfest, central New York’s silent and classic film festival returns 8–10 August at the Capitol Theatre, Rome, NY. Titles announced include The Little Wild Girl (1928), The Spieler (1928), Romance of the Underworld (1928) and The Shakedown (1929).

Strade del Cinema
Strade del Cinema is an international silent film festival with live music, held in Aosta, Italy. This year’s festival takes place 10-17 August. No titles as yet, but they have announced a Young European Musicians Contest and a SilentARTmovies contest giving “young Italian artists or foreigners living in Italy the opportunity to express an original point of view on Silent Cinema”.

Bonner Sommerkino
The annual festival of silent films held in Bonn, Germany, Bonner Sommerkino, will take place 14-24 August. The only title announced so far is Harold Lloyd’s Girl Shy.

Cinecon
Cinecon is a classic film festival of silent and early sound titles, held in Hollywood, held over Labor Day weekend. This year’s event takes place 28 August-1 September. Titles don’t get announced until a month before the event, but you are promised “nearly thirty rare silent and early sound feature films and as many short subjects from the nation’s leading film archives and Hollywood studio vaults”, with an emphasis on rarities that seldom get public screenings.

Cinesation
This year’s Cinesation takes place at the Lincoln Theatre in Massillon, Ohio, 25-28 September 2008. Titles announced so far include Sold for Marriage (1916), The Grey Vulture (1926), Soul of the Beast (1923), The Cop (1928) and False Faces (1919).

Annual Buster Keaton Celebration
The 16th Annual Buster Kearton Celebration takes place in Iola, Kansas, over 26-27 September 2008. This year they are looking at the joint legacies of Keaton and Will Rogers.

Giornate del Cinema Muto
The 2008 Pordenone Silent Film Festival will be held 4-11 October at Pordenone, Italy. Among the main festival themes will be W.C. Fields, Aleksandr Shiryaev, French comedy of the post-war silent era, Hollywood on the Hudson(coinciding with Richard Koszarski’s new book on the history filmmaking in New York), Viktor Tourjansky, The Griffith Project 12 (1925-1931), and Early Cinema, including the Corrick Collection 2 (Australian collection of early actualities), the 30th anniversary of the FIAF Brighton congress, and W.K-L. Dickson (subject of a new biography by Paul Spehr).

Keep up with what’s going on through this sites Festivals page, or the highly recommended Stummfilmfestivals (in English as well as German). And try to keep warm.

Cartoon capers

May 24, 2008 By urbanora in Images, Publications, Resources 4 Comments

‘The Cinema as an Educative Force. Tommy (a regular attender at cinematograph shows, during the performance of a society drama). “Is that the trusting husband or the amorous lover?”‘ Charles Pears cartoon in Punch, 7 August 1912, from I Want to See This Annie Mattygraph

One of the most interesting ways to examine contemporary perceptions of the silent cinema is through cartoons – newspaper cartoons, that is, rather than animated cartoons. Cartoons in the popular newspapers, comics and magazines of the day provide a marvellous measure of how the new phenomenon of cinema was commonly understood, since cartoons had to tap into a general feeling about the subject. Everyone had to be in on the joke for it to work. And more than simply recording popular sensibility, cartoons of the era pick up on changes in such aspects as technology and film-going habits, providing a valuable documentary record as well as a social history one.

‘Accidental Silhouettes no. 1: The Man of Color’, a cartoon of Charles Urban by Theodore Brown, from The Bioscope 22 February 1912

The film trade papers of the day are another source of cartoons and caricatures, not always so polished or so funny, but often picking up on minutiae of film business concerns which are of value to the specialists, or simply providing the only portraits we have of some of the film personalities (i.e. those behind the camera) that we have. Theodore Brown, editor of the British journal The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, unusually was also an occasional cartoonist (and a filmmaker, and an inventor), and provided the above cartoon of film producer Charles Urban, shown silhouetted via a Kinemacolor filter, which regulars will recognise provides my avatar in the comments to posts on this blog.

Cartoons on silent cinema are scattered all over the place, and tracking them down can be a laborious business – more often than not the research stumbles across them by chance, or else works their way through the well-thumbed pages of Punch, which never fails to come up with the goods of some sort. There is, however, one book – and a very good book – on the subject, Stephen Bottomore’s I Want to See This Annie Mattygraph: A Cartoon History of the Coming of the Movies (1995). It must be said that the mixture of ungainly title and bi-lingual text (English/Italian) has not helped the book’s acceptance outside the hardy band of early film buffs. (The phrase that gives the book its title comes from a cartoon where a man asks at a box office if he can see what he assumes is an actress but of course the Animatograph projector – how they laughed in 1897). But within lies a rich selection of contemporary cartoons from across Europe and America, arranged around such themes as ‘Going to the Pictures’, ‘Opposition and Rgulation’ and ‘Film Genres’, providing a history of the cinema to 1915 through the pictures that made people at the time laugh about it. It is scholarly, observant and great to look at. I particularly value it for the cartoons of cinema-going, where you find evidence of exhibition practice and audience habits that really aren’t recorded elsewhere. Its opening essay also provides a valuable history of the cartoon over and above its relationship to film history.

But what can you find online? Not a lot, unfortunately, but one worthwhile source to direct you to is the British Cartoon Archive. This is based at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and is effectively the national collection of cartoons. Navigation on the site is a little unclear, but persevere and you’ll eventually find its database, which provides access to 120,000 cartoons, each illustrated with thumbnail image (click on the image for a larger view) and accompanied by exemplary cataloguing information, including an exhaustive array of thesaurus terms, the names of all real people featured in the cartoon, and transcriptions of the text.

Sample database search result with cartoons by W.K. Haselden, Sidney ‘George’ Strube and David Low

The Archive is rightly particular about protecting copyright images, so no reproductions here bar the web page picture grab above. But type in terms like ‘film’, ‘cinema’ etc and you’ll find such telling cartoons as W.K. Haselden’s ‘The all-conquering cinema’s advance’ (1924), where cinema screens crop up everywhere you look (even at Stonehenge), or David Low’s ‘Continuous show now on’ (1926) which comments on the beleaguered state of the mediocre British film industry, unable to compete against the block-booking Americans, while the overpowering attractions of an American vamp obscure those of the ‘pure but dull British film heroine’.

There are only so many cartoons there on the silent era, but more than enough to pick up on the social perceptions of the time. Look out too for David Low’s ‘Topical Budget’, a cartoon news commentary series which took its name from a popular newsreel of the silent era. There’s a lot more to explore on the British Cartoon Archive site, in particular a collection of biographies of the cartoonists.

There are other, far smaller sites out there marketing mostly Punch cartoons, but nothing that I can see that provides the opportunity to look at early cinema subjects. The various newspapers that have been digitised tend to be of the broadsheet variety, which did not stoop to such things at this time. The British Library provides a useful overview of comics from the era, such as Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday and Comic Cuts, as well as titles like Film Fun, which began in 1920 and was entirely given over to comic strips featuring popular film stars. Other sites and databases offer just an image or two, provide descriptive lists of what they have but no images, or else a subscription is required. Or they don’t cover early cinema, of course. For a good listing of sites worldwide, go to the Intute: Art and Humanities site (an excellent UK academic service describing online scholarly resources) and type in ‘cartoons’.

Finally, it’s worth noting that a number of cartoonists of the era went on to become filmmakers. Among the best-known are Emile Cohl, Winsor McCay (‘Little Nemo’) and Harry Furniss. Cartoonists were filmed by the early filmmakers, often doing ‘lightning sketches’ (speedy drawings over a preparatory sketch), such as Tom Merry, J. Stuart Blackton and several British artists who contributed political sketches to proto-cartoon films during the First World War. The Library of Congress’ American Memory site includes Origins of American Animation, which demonstrates the interrelationship between paper and screen cartoons 1900-1921.

If anyone knows of other online sources for newspaper and comic journal cartoons which cover our period, do say.

Chautauqua silent film series

May 23, 2008 By urbanora in Festivals 5 Comments

Gary Cooper

The Chautauqua Silent Film Series is a series of silent films showing at Chautauqua, Colorado, you will be surprised to learn. And a fine selection it is. Here’s the blurb from the Colorado Chautauqua National Historic Landmark site, with their assessments of the films’ attractions:

True Heart Susie (1919)
with Hank Troy, piano
Wednesday, May 28
Starring Lillian Gish. A country girl in love with her neighbor anonymously gives him money to go to college.

The Wildcat (1921)
with Hank Troy, piano
Wednesday, June 4
An uproarious, hard-edged anti-military spoof.

Fairy Tales from the Teens
with Hank Troy, piano
Wednesday, June 11
In Cinderella (1914), “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford stars. The performance in Snow White (1916) so impressed a young Walt Disney that he made his first feature film based on the story.

The Kid Brother (1926)
with Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra
Wednesday, July 2
Starring Harold Lloyd. Harold’s resourcefulness while fighting is a thing to behold.

Hands Up (1926)
with Hank Troy, piano
Wednesday, July 16
Starring Raymond Griffith. A southern spy during the Civil War must try to capture a shipment of gold. His task is complicated by two sisters, the Indians and a firing squad.

Nosferatu (1922)
with Hank Troy, piano; Ed Contreras, percussion and Rodney Sauer, accordion
Wednesday, August 13
The best vampire movie ever made. It’s on the best lists: 100 Best Horror Movies, Best Silent Films, and Best German Cinema.

Mark of Zorro (1920)
with Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra
Wednesday, August 27
Starring Douglas Fairbanks. This film brought the “legend” of Zorro to the screen for the first time!

Sherlock Jr. (1924) Starring Buster Keaton & Shoulder Arms (1918) Starring Charlie Chaplin
with Hank Troy, piano
Wednesday, September 3
A double feature of fun. Buster Keaton is a film projectionist who longs to be a detective. Charlie Chaplin is a boot camp private who has a dream of being a hero.

The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926)
with Hank Troy, piano
Wednesday, September 10
Starring Ronald Colman, Vilma Banky and Gary Cooper. The story of a love triangle in the desert.

Son of the Sheik (1926)
with Hank Troy, piano
Wednesday, September 17
Starring Rudolph Valentino. One of the most popular films from the silent era and Valentino’s final screen performance.

More details as always from the Silent Film Series website.

Adventures in silent pictures

May 21, 2008 By urbanora in Avant garde, Dance, Modern silents, Music 2 Comments

Makin’ Whoopee, part of Susan Stroman’s Double Feature, from http://www.nytimes.com

We haven’t had enough ballet here on The Bioscope. So, just opened at the New York State Theater is Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman’s “Double Feature”, performed by the New York City Ballet. The two parts of the ballet, which was first commissioned in 2004, are “The Blue Necklace” and “Makin’ Whoopee”. Both are inspired by silent movies, blending melodrama with slapstick comedy.

Silent film would seem to be a natural source of inspiration for ballet, and there are examples dotted around. Matthew Bourne’s dance company Adventures in Motion Pictures indicates some of its inspiration by its name, and Bourne has drawn on silent film for sets (Caligari helped inspired his “Cinderella”) as well as dance.

Amy Moore Morton, artistic director of the Appalachian Ballet Company, created and dances the lead in “With Chaplin”, which is none too surprisingly centred on Charlie Chaplin.

In the silent era itself ballet does not seem to have featured that often, but there are some notable exception. René Clair’s sublime Entr’acte (1924) was created as an interlude to feature between the acts of Francis Picabia’s ballet “Relâche”, performed by the Ballets Suédois with music by Erik Satie.

Also from the avant garde, Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique is ballet in cinema form, even if it doesn’t feature dance as such, except the dance of objects and machines (plus a Chaplin figure). It was was created by American composer American composer George Antheil and Léger, though music and film did not come together for many years. So, in that spirit, here’s a clip from the film with music by guitarist Gary Lucas (a Bioscope favourite). Sorry about the faux scratches at the start.

Gary Lucas playing to an extract from Ballet Mécanique

Returning to Chaplin, don’t forget the dance (ballet) of the rolls from The Gold Rush (1925). And indeed you could argue for any number of Chaplin films for their balletic qualities.

Moving to modern silent director, Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) is a ballet version of the Dracula story with German Expressionist decor and choreography by ballet director Mark Godden.

A modern oddity is Le Sacre du Printemps (2005), a film by Oliver Hermann which bills itself as a “‘Silent Movie’ to Stravinsky’s ballet score”. Sir Simon Rattle conducts the Berlin Philarmonic on the DVD release, and to judge from reviews it’s something of a challenging experience:

…a pair of albino men in tutus, a godlike black female figure baking tiny people like cookies in her kitchen, nuns, voodoo rituals, walls of neatly-mounted Polaroid snapshots being broken thru with an axe, or people endlessly lost in a giant green maze. Not to mention some very sexual scenes and a roomful of naked figures writhing around which disturbingly hovered between Dante’s Inferno and a Nazi death camp ‘shower’.

Hmm. Let us turn instead to Anna Pavlova, greatest of all ballerinas, who appears in three extant silent films, Lois Weber’s The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916), a feature film drama in which she acts rather than dances; Anna Pavlova (1924), which is a non-fiction film depicting her in various ballet sequences filmed in New York in 1924; plus there is a fragment of film of her dancing ‘Columbine’ on the set of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

Lastly, it’s worth noting that many of the silent film pianists of today help earn their daily bread by playing for ballet and dance classes. Carl Davis has written for ballet as well as his renowned silent film scores, and it would be interesting to know how silent film musicians view accompanying dance or accompanying the screen, and what the interelationships might be.

Any more examples? Just let me know.

An apology

May 21, 2008 By urbanora in Bioscope

The Bioscope would like to apologise to any visitors to this blog who are finding Adsense ads appearing on posts if they come via a Google link. This is a feature that WordPress has introduced, and I can do nothing about it. I understand that if you are a regular visitor, or if you are logged into WordPress yourself, then you do not see the ads, but if you a newcomer or an infrequent visitor, then the ads will occasionally crop up. There seems to be nothing I can do to change this – you can’t even pay to make them go away. So I just want to make it clear that I have not sanctioned the use of this blog to sell anything to anyone, and I am very unhappy that it has been hijacked in this way, contrary to what was my understanding when I first signed up with WordPress. If I can change things, I will.

Silent music revival

May 20, 2008 By urbanora in Music

Silent Music Revival is a series of live shows taking place in Richmond, Virginia, where bands of various hues play to silents that they haven’t seen before. It describes itself thus:

An organization that is interested in the juxtaposition of music and film. At an event a classic silent short film is played while accompanied by either live music or a DJ spinning records overtop of the film. Keep in mind that neither the band nor the DJ have seen the film. This combination always makes for an interesting view.

Today jazz group Glows in the Dark played to Buster Keaton’s The Electric House. Previous screenings have included Antlers playing to Starewicz’s The Mascot (1933), the ‘hip hop stylings’ of Swordplay playing to When the Clouds Roll By (1919), Beggar on Horseback (1925) and Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), and Gamelan Raga Kusuma playing to Chaplin.

Find out more at www.myspace.com/silentmusicrevival.

Shell shocked

May 18, 2008 By urbanora in Non-fiction, Online videos, Science and medicine, War 4 Comments

War Neuroses: Netley 1917, Seale Hayne Military Hospital 1918, from http://www.britishpathe.com

I’ve been reading (well, skimming through) Philip Hoare’s Spike Island, which is a poetic, not to say rococo history of the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley, Hampshire. This is a building with a rich cultural history centring around its role during the First World War, where it was home to many casualties of the war, including Wilfred Owen, and became well known for treating victims of shell shock.

You’ll find many an account of the experiments and therapies for shellshock at Netley and elsewhere, from the sentimental to the Freudian. What concerns us here is the contemporary film record. One of the most notable films of the First World War, by what ever criteria you care to mention, is War Neuroses: Netley 1917, Seale Hayne Military Hospital 1918, made by Pathé (British branch) in 1918, which Hoare covers in some detail. War Neuroses shows the psychotherapeutic treatment of shell shock victims at Netley and Seale Hayne (Devon) military hospital, featuring the treatments undertaken by Doctors Arthur Hurst and J.L.M. Symns of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The catalogue of the Wellcome Trust Moving Image and Sound Collection describes the film thus:

Shows the symptomatology of “shell-shock” in 18 British “other rankers” and its treatment by two leading R.A.M.C. neurologists in two British military hospitals towards the end of the First World War. Captions tell us the men’s names, rank, medical condition, details of their symptoms and how long it took to complete the cure, which in one case was in two and a half hours. Clinical features shown include a variety of ataxic and “hysterical” gaits; hysterical paralyses, contractures and anaesthesias; facial ties and spasms; loss of knee and ankle-jerk reflexes; paraplegia; “war hyperthyrodism”; amnesia; word-blindness and word-deafness. Although there are no precise details of the kind of treatment given, apart from the description ‘cured and re-educated’ we do see a little physiotherapy and hypnotic suggestion in treatment, and of ‘cured’ men undertaking farm-work, drill and a mock battles entitled ‘Re-enacting the Battle of Seale Hayne / Convalescent war neurosis patients’.

At least three versions of the film exist. There are copies at the Wellcome, the BFI National Archive and the Imperial War Museum, but the ones to draw your attention to here are the versions held by British Pathe (currently managed by ITN). Pathé were the original producers, but not everyone might think to find it in the British Pathe online newsreel library, but there it is – or there they are – available for free download, albeit in low resolution.

Private Ross Smith (above), facial spams, and Private Read, hysterical gait, swaying movement and nose-wiping tic

There are five parts of the films on the British Pathe site: War Neuroses Version A reel 1, War Neuroses Version A reel 2, War Neuroses version B reel 1, War Neuroses version B reel 2 and Wonderful Shell Shock Recovery. For some impenetrable reason only two come up if you type in the words ‘war neuroses’ into the search box; type ‘netley’ instead and you’ll get all five. As indicated, there are two versions available (Wonderful Shell Shock Recovery is a fragment repeating scenes from the other films). The different versions, however, appear to be simply re-edits of the same material, with Version B being the most complete, with opening titles and scenes of some patients that Version A lacks. In its fullest form the film last around 25 mins. It is necessary to download the films (i.e. they won’t play instantly), with the site requiring you to fill out personal details before you do so.

The film demonstrates the symptoms of those suffering from shell shock, and are often quite heartbreaking. Private Preston, aged 19, we are told suffers from ‘Amnesia, word blindess and word deafness, except the the word “Bombs!”‘ He is shown sitting up in bed talking to one of the doctors, the key word is spoken, and immediately hides under the bed, and only reluctantly coming out again. Private Meek, aged 23, suffers ‘complete retrograde amnesia, hysterical paralysis, contractures, mutism and universal anaesthesia’. We see him seated in a wheelchair outside the hospital, legs rigid, leaning sideways, mvoing in awkward jerks and biting his thumb, while a nurse attends to him. It is a characteristic of War Neuroses that we see see before-and-after cases. So, after unseen treatment, we next meet Private Meek walking stiffly towards a group of patients weaving baskets (his peace time job), and later walking completely normally.

There are numerous such examples, the men shown with various forms of uncontrollable nervous spasms, next shown moving more or at less at ease, their return to normality sometimes illustrated by their performing tasks around the hospital as occupational therapy. One of the most distressing sequences is that of an unnamed patient (illustrated at the top of this post) suffering from hysterical pseudo-pseudohypertrophic muscular paralysis. We see the man in a dormitory, dressed only in a loin cloth. He walks with pathetic, angular awkwardness in a circle, before falling down, unable to get up without huge struggle. Next we see him in hospital uniform, walking calmly towards the camera. The reassuring scenes of rehabilitation seem almost as disturbing as the scenes of affliction. How can such mental wounds be healed so easily?

The purpose of the physical and psychotherapeutic treatment was not simply to cure, but to make the men literally fighting fit once more. Four-fifths of men who had been entering hospital suffering from shell shock were unable to return to military duty; the military authorities wanted to reverse this. What happened to the named and nameless soldiers seen in War Neuroses? One hopes fervently that none were returned to the battlefield. So what to make of the final scene from the film, where patients are shown taking part in a re-enacted battle scene: ‘The Battle of Seale Hayne, directed, photographed and acted by convalescent war neurosis patients’? Innovative psychodrama aimed at a final cure, or rehabilitation for war? Have we seen an actuality record, or a dramatisation of recovery to satisfy the wishes of those who chose to commission the film?

I don’t know enough of the history, either of the film (no one knows who the cameraman was, or much at all about the film’s production) or of the treatment of shell shock. It’s a subject that some have written about in great depth, yet it seems a subject where we still have much to learn. The film – which I urge you to see – provides no answers, only asks searching questions. Which is what films are there to do, whether they realise it or not.

Update (April 2009): A higher resolution copy of the film is available from the Wellcome Trust site, at http://catalogue.wellcome.ac.uk/record=b1667864~S8, as complete film and as four segments, plus a detailed catalogue record. Also, British Pathe is no longer managed by ITN Source.

Blackmail with strings

May 17, 2008 By urbanora in Festivals, Music

Opening title of the silent version of Blackmail, from http://www.hitchcockwiki.com

As a follow-up to yesterday’s item on the small band of British silents on DVD, here’s some heartening news. A special feature of this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival at Bologna will feature Neil Brand‘s new score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), with sixty-piece orchestra – the Opera Orchestra of Bologna, conducted by Timothy Brock. The event will take place at the Piazza Maggiore on July 1st, while the full festival (which includes silent cinema sections on Monta Bell, Comic Actresses and Suffragettes, Lev Kuleshov, Josef von Strenberg, Emilio Ghione, and films from 100 years ago) runs 28 June-5 July.

This may be the first orchestral score treatment of a British silent since the silent days. There have been small ensemble pieces (indeed, the Matrix Ensemble played Jonathan Lloyd’s score for Blackmail at the Barbican a couple of years ago), and in 2006 the documentary film The Battle of the Somme (1916) featured at the Royal Festival Hall with Laura Rossi‘s score for full orchestra, played by the Royal Philharmonia. But this – so far as I know – is the first time a British silent fiction film has been given the full works in modern times. Congratulations to Neil, bravo the Bologna festival for sponsoring it, and let’s hope it’s possible for to hear and see it elsewhere.

A Cottage on Dartmoor

May 16, 2008 By urbanora in DVD and Blu-Ray, Filmographies 7 Comments

A Cottage on Dartmoor

Out on 26 May is the latest silent DVD release from the BFI, Anthony Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929). This intense melodrama about an escapee from Dartmoor prison was Asquith’s last silent, indeed one of the last silents to be made in Britain. A notable scene in the film is the pit orchestra for a part-silent, part-talkie movie having to sit around doing nothing while the sound passage plays. The film stars Norah Baring and Uno Henning, and has gained a modest reputation of late, thanks not least to Stephen Horne’s fine piano accompaniment at many screenings. Stephen provides the music here, while the extras include Insight (1960), a study of Anthony Asquith at work featuring on set footage and interviews, and Rush Hour (1941), a comedy film directed by Asquith about Britain’s workers coping with the transport system during the Second World War.

This is the film’s first DVD release in the UK – it’s already available on Region 1 in the USA, issued by Kino, with Stephen’s score, and the extra being Matthew Sweet’s commendable documentary Silent Britain (2006).

It wasn’t so long ago when your average film afficionado would have known nothing of British silents except Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, and would probably have been proud to admit the fact. Now, thanks very much to the work of the BFI, the annual British Silent Cinema Festival, and above all to the quality of the best of the films themselves, a good selection is available on DVD and overturning prejudices. Here’s a round up of what currently exists of British silents on DVD, so far as I know (this list will get added to as new DVDs appear):

Blackmail (1929, d. Alfred Hitchcock) [Arthaus] (silent and sound versions)
A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929, d. Anthony Asquith) [BFI] [Kino]
David Copperfield (1913, d. Thomas Bentley) [Grapevine]
The Early Hitchcock Collection (includes Champagne [1928], The Ring [1927], The Farmer’s Wife [1928], The Manxman) [1927]) [Optimum] [Delta]
Easy Virtue (1927, d. Alfred Hitchcock) [WHE]
Hindle Wakes (1927, d. Maurice Elvey) [Milestone]
Hitchcock – The British Years (includes The Pleasure Garden [1925], The Lodger [1926] and Downhill [1927]) [Network]
The Informer (1929, d. Arthur Robison) [Grapevine]
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1916, d. Fred Paul) (VHS) [BFI]
Livingstone (1925, d. M.A. Wetherell) [Grapevine]
The Lodger (1926, d. Alfred Hitchcock) [Whirlwind]
Moulin Rouge (1928, d. E.A. Dupont) [Grapevine]
The Open Road (1924-1926, d. Claude Friese-Greene)[BFI]
Piccadilly (1929, d. E.A. Dupont) [BFI] [Milestone] [Sunrise Silents]
The Return of the Rat (1929, d. Graham Cutts) [Grapevine]
The Ring (1927, d. Alfred Hitchcock) (VHS) [BFI]
She (1925, d. Leander de Cordova) [Sunrise Silents]
South (1919, d. Frank Hurley) [BFI] [Milestone]
A Throw of Dice (1929, d. Franz Osten) [BFI]
Trapped by the Mormons (1922, d. Harry B. Parkinson) [Grapevine]
The Vortex (1928, d. Adrian Brunel) [Sunrise Silents]
The Woman He Scorned (1929, d. Paul Czinner) [Grapevine]

Compilations

Dickens before Sound (compilation of UK and USA titles) [BFI]
Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers (compilation of UK, USA and French titles) [BFI]
Electric Edwardians: The Films of Mitchell and Kenyon [BFI] [Milestone]
Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Sports [BFI]
Mitchell & Kenyon in Ireland [BFI]
R.W. Paul: The Collected Films, 1895-1908 [BFI]
Silent Shakespeare (compilation of UK, USA and Italian titles) [BFI] [Milestone]

Television programmes

The Lost World of Friese Greene [BFI]
The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon [BFI]
Silent Britain [BFI] [Kino]

OK, it’s not a vast number (I’ve been selective over the Hitchcocks – there’s a fair amount of dross out there), but look at the quality (mostly). And there’s bound to be others (do let me know what I’ve missed). And let’s ponder what’s not on DVD but ought to be: Shooting Stars, The Rat, The Informer, The Battle of the Somme, East is East, The Life Story of David Lloyd George, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Lure of Crooning Water, The Flag Lieutenant, The First Born…

Bioscope Newsreel no. 2

May 15, 2008 By urbanora in Newsreel 2 Comments

The life of a vampire
The first biography of Max Schreck, cadaverous star of F.W. Murnau’s Dracula-inspired Nosferatu (1922) is being written by Stefan Eickhoff. Entitled Max Schreck – Gespenstertheater (Ghost theatre), it will be published later this year. Learn more.

Bardelys at Pordenone
The recently re-discovered King Vidor film, Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), will be unveiled at the Pordenone silent film festival in October. Other highlights announced include French comedies, the films of W.C. Fields, the films of W.K.L. Dickson, and ‘lost’ films of Sessue Hayakawa. Learn more.

Divas dolorosa
A new book has been published on the ever-suffering diva actresses of Italian silent film, such as Francesca Bertini and Lyda Borelli. Angela Dalle Vacche’s Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema is published by the University of Texas Press and is accompanied by the DVD Diva Dolorosa made by silent found footage auteur Peter Delpeut. Learn more.

Sentiments past
Lea Jacobs’ new book is The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s, and “seeks to characterize the radical shifts in taste that transformed American film in the jazz age”, looking at Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Monta Bell, among many others. It’s published by the University of California Press. Learn more.

‘Til next time!