1903 amateur film by Julius Neubronner of a Kronberg bank employee, Moren, performing a number of dances and female impersonations in Neubronner’s garden, from the Deutsches Filminstitut
I’ve written before about filmarchives online, the European-funded project providing integrated access to filmographic and technical information on selected films from archives across Europe. When we last visited the subject (May 2007), there were some 4,000 films (predominantly non-fiction) documented, from five partner archives: Deutsche Filminstitut, the British Film Institute, La Cineteca di Bologna, the DEFA-Foundation and Národní Filmový Archiv Prague.
A year and a half on, and there are now eighteen institutions taking part, of which those contributing content are the British Film Institute, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, DEFA Stiftung, Deutsches Filminstitut, Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, IWF Knowledge and Media, LICHTSPIEL / Kinemathek Bern, Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum, Národní Filmový Archiv and Tainiothiki tis Ellados. All the participating archives are part of MIDAS (Moving Image Database for Access and Re-use of European film collections), a project funded by the European Union’s MEDIA pogramme to encourage more efficient distribution of historic content in European film collections. The target is 20,000 records to be published by the end of 2008. Individual records come with rich cataloguing details and – rare for online film archive initiatives – technical information on the film elements held.
A selection of films (74 and rising) has been made available for viewing online, the majority of which are early non-fiction titles (a lot of them Mitchell and Kenyon productions from Britain and the ‘amateur’ efforts of Julius Neubronner from Germany). The same films can be found on the project’s YouTube channel. There are plenty of genuinely fascinating gems in there, with a clear emphasis on historic film’s documentary qualities.
While we’re on the subject of European film archive initiatives, it’s worth noting the European Film Gateway, a recently-announced three-year project planning to develop an online portal, “providing direct access to about 790,000 digital objects including films, photos, posters, drawings, sound material and text documents”. Film archives from across Europe (but not Britain) are participating. The project is funded by the European eContentplus programme, and the results will eventually be linked to the Europeana, a planned European digital library, museum and archive. More on this project once it’s properly underway.
You’ll already know about European Film Treasures, also funded by the MEDIA programme, which is delivering a library of historic titles from collections across Europe (including Britain this time), silent and sound.
This FLICKR account is to help archives around the world identify unknown films in their collection. We will do our best to post what information is known about each film along with the frame scans. If you are able to provide any information such as title, actor, approximate date, or anything helpful then please leave a comment.
Films that have multiple frame scans have been grouped into sets that can be found along the right side of the screen. By clicking on the set information will appear that applies to all of the frame scans from that reel of film. We suggest that you navigate these photos through their sets so as to see all of the information that is provided.
The Nitrate Film Interest Group is a part of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ interest groups. Check out AMIA at http://www.amianet.org. The Nitrate Film Interest Group is dedicated to promoting education about nitrate film as well as functioning as a resource for those interested in and working with nitrate film by becoming a major resource for archivists’ needs.
Questions about these scans can be posted to the scan comments. If you have a frame scan of an unidentified film, any questions about the Nitrate Film Interest Group or this account an email can be sent to nitratefilminterestgroup@yahoo.com
To check the frame stills of unidentified film (which include sound films), click on the Photostream link on the Flickr page. If you know something, do add a comment – no one has done as yet.
Neil Brand (piano) and Günter Buchwald (violin) playing to Wedding At Belmont Free Church, a home movie of a Sutton wedding party, 24 October 1931, part of the ‘London Loves’ programme of archive film shown in Trafalgar Square, 24 October 2008.
Alexander Shiryaev (1867-1941) is not a name that you will find in any film history. He was a member of the Russian Imperial Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, a protégé of the great choreographer Marius Petipa, a character dancer of great skill (he was too small for the classic leading roles), and a gifted ballet teacher.
It was his teaching that seems to have led Shiryaev to film. Fascinated with human movement and the notation of ballet, Shiryaev began producing sequential drawings of dance steps that documented the minutiae of such movements, work that was inherently cinematic in construction. Shiryaev must have seen the connection, because in 1904 he applied to the theatre management to let him purchase a motion picture camera and film to record the dancers of the ballet. He was turned down – no films were allowed to be made of the dancers of the Imperial Ballet. Undaunted, Shiryaev purchased a camera anyway – a 17.5mm Biokam acquired in London, to be followed by an Ernemann Kino, also employing 17.5mm film. At some point he also had used of a 35mm camera.
Shiryaev took to filming as one who instinctively knew what the medium could do. He understood the camera as he understood dance. Between 1906 and 1909, Shiryaev produced an astonishing body of work – live records of dances, home movies, comedies, trick films, animations and puppet films. None of these was seen in public. They might have disappeared from history entirely, had they not first been narrowly saved from destruction in the 1960s by a friend of Shiryaev’s, Daniil Saveliev, and then discovered again in 1995 by filmmaker Victor Bocharov, who has been their custodian ever since. Bocharov produced a documentary on the collection in 2003, Zapazdavshaya Premiera (Belated Premiere), but the screenings at Pordenone were the true public premiere for the majority of these films, many of which came fresh from the specialist labs of PresTech in London.
The Shiryaev films were shown over a number of days, the programmes including A Belated Premiere and films related to his world, such as Anna Pavlova dancing. But the main programme came on Friday 10 October, and divided up his ouevre into four categories.
Dance films
These were films of Shiryaev and his dancer wife Natalia Matveeva dancing on a sunlit stage at their Ukraine home. As the only films of the Russian ballet greats at this time, they have plain historical value, but they are also a visual delight. The two dance singly or together in a selection of folk-based dances, performed with sparkling zest, and each ending delightfully with the dancer leaving the stage then returning for a bow. The most dazzling are those on 35mm, particularly Shiryaev’s party piece, ‘Fool’s Dance’ from Petipa’s Mlada.
Trick films
Shiryaev was evidently a film-goer himself, and decided to emulate some of the trick films common in the mid-1900s. All were again filmed at his summer home, in the open air. One film where a giant spider came down and settled on a sleeping man was clearly inspired by Georges Méliès’ Une nuit terrible. Another, given the title [Chairs], anticipated Norman McLaren’s Neighbours by some fifty years, with its stop-animation of humans seated on chairs and swapping positions.
Earlier in the week we had seen numerous fleeting home movies of Shiryaev and family (they are some of the earliest surviving home movies anywhere) and various staged comedies made by the family. The marvellous thing to behold was how the boundaries between home movies, comedies and then trick films blurred, all created in the same spirit of joyous performance. The family’s whole lives seemed to be some form of dance.
Paper films
For me, Shiryaev’s paper ‘films’ were his greatest achievement. Before he had a camera (or so it is assumed), he produced animations on paper (45mm wide) which have now been reconstituted on film. One such film with delicate line showed birds in flight, the observant results of which the festival catalogue rightly pointed out connected his quest for reconstituted movement with that of the chronophotographers Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. But finest I think was [Cakewalk], a trio of dancers in exquisite, gently swaying unison. Only a minute or so long, but I have never seen a finer piece of animation.
Puppet films
For David Robinson, the festival’s director and a most enthusiastic advocate of Shiryaev’s work, the stop-frame puppet films he made were his greatest achievement. They were certainly the most astonishing. Years ahead of animation elsewhere in the world (and two or three years ahead of Starewitch), these films used puppet figures in a theatre set to recreate, in meticulous detail, actual ballet dancers. Some of the effects – such a water or paint being thrown, or balls being tossed in the air – were astonishingly accomplished, and simply the co-ordination of several puppets all dancing at the same time would have required prodigious patience and skill. One of the films indeed revealed the animator’s hands to the edge of the frame, moving manically into a mysterious blur.
The puppet films required some concentration on the part of the audience, particularly the 12-minute-long [Harlequin’s Jest], which was in five acts with long titles (supplied by Bocharov) explaining the action. What helped enormously was the music. We know that Shiryaev meant his films to be so accompanied, including the animations, but not what that music was. John Sweeney, one of the festival’s core band of pianists, took on the task of matching music (some from Petipa ballets, some his own) to the films, with Günter Buchwald joining him on violin for [Harlequin’s Jest]. The brilliant results were rightly given loud acclaim by the audience – the musical highlight of the festival.
We will certainly be hearing more about Alexander Shiryaev. The documentary A Belated Premiere gets its British premiere at the Watershed in Bristol on 19 November (nearby Aardman Animation has been involved in supporting the restoration of Shiryaev’s work), and with the restoration of the films as yet incomplete (some we saw only on DVD), it’s a certainty that there will be more on show at Pordenone.
Friday was a day for superlatives. In the morning we had seen more of the Corrick collection of early films collected by a family of entertainers in 1900s Australia. Now, having written my thesis on Charles Urban (right), published a website about him, and taken my blog nom de plume from his company logo, it might be argued that I could be a little biased when it comes to praising his works, but – damn it all – Living London, made by the Charles Urban Trading Company, if it isn’t one of the greatest of all silent films, then it is undoubtedly the greatest film of 1904 [update: the film has now been identified as Urban’s The Streets of London (1906)]. The film is an eleven-minute section from an original forty-minute documentary (no other word will do) depicting London life. Moving approximately eastwards (from Westminster to the City, with a diversion along the Thames), the film shows the metropolis at its imperial zenith, vividly alive, with cameras picking out every detail, high and low (the trouble taken over camera positions was particularly noticeable) – traffic, roadworks, people dancing in the street, workers of every kind, buildings under construction, the river teeming with craft, even in one shot a row of men with sandwich boards advertising Urbanora film shows. The catalogue compared it to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera or Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, but this was a work of a different kind, a sort of missing link between the single-shot actualities of the early cinema period and the constructed documentary. I can think of few other films that can so thrill with a plain exposition of ‘reality’.
The Corrick collection yielded other gems. Particularly noteworthy were Bashful Mr Brown (1907), a chase comedy made by the Corrick’s themselves; Babylas vient d’hériter diune panthère (1911), pure surrealism from Alfred Machin as an inquisitive leopard is introduced into a bourgeois household; and The Miner’s Daughter (1907), an exercise in beautifully judged pathos from Britain’s James Williamson, in which the title character parts from her father when she marries an artist, and after much grief they are finally brought together by his granddaughter. And it’s a rare early film that combines a mine explosion with scenes inside the Royal Academy.
After the highs of Shiryaev we relaxed in front of Ihr Dunkler Punkt (1929), a typically professional vehicle for Germany’s favourite Briton, Lilian Harvey, who played two identical people, one an ordinary young woman about town, the other a jewel thief, whose lives and lovers get mixed up. A light but cleverly made concoction, in which I most liked the comic turn by the normally sombre Warwick Ward, another Briton who plied his trade in German films.
Michael Nyman takes his bow
I was tiring just a little of films by this stage, and chosen not to follow D.W. Griffith into the sound era with Abraham Lincoln (1930). Instead I concluded my Pordenone with the evening screenings of A Propos de Nice (1930) and Kino Pravda no. 21 (1925). A large crowd of Pordenone locals queued up for this, and the theatre was filled up to its third tier. How come? Because Michael Nyman was playing the piano, and Italians, it seems, love his music. Nyman had been due to play at the festival last year, but had to withdraw owing to illness, so did the honourable thing by turning up this year. Despite his star status, Nyman found himself in the pit the same as all the other musicians during the festival, with the result that no one saw him until he emerged for his bow at the end. A Propos de Nice came first, and Nyman’s complexly repetitive music provided the ideal match for Vigo’s cumulative montage of telling images. It was certainly quite different to anything else we heard during the week, a lesson in how we should always be encouraging different musical interpretations of silent films. Particularly striking were sequences with a single bass note pounded with a rapidity that seemed to be testing the piano’s stamina to the limit.
The Kino Pravda, a celebrated example of the series, on the death of Lenin, was less successful. The film itself, with its hectoring, fractured style, combining newsfilm with slogans and animation, probably defies most forms of musical accompaniment, and Nyman’s score churned out circular themes that didn’t much connect with the film. The score lacked the inspiration of A Propos de Nice, and the film ended a few bars before he did, so that he was being applauded while still trying to finish playing. Opinion afterwards was mixed, with some of the musicologists among the Giornate regulars in shock.
And that was it for me. I left early on the Saturday, the last day of the festival, and so missed Griffith’s final film The Struggle (1931) (touchingly paired with a re-showing of his first, The Adventures of Dollie) and the grand finale of Jacques Feyder’s Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1929). This was a fine festival. Few outstanding classics, but so much to interest, stimulate, challenge and excite the imagination. There were welcome innovations, such as the electronic subtitles, and encouraging signs of closer relations between town and festival. The Giornate del Cinema Muto never rests on its laurels, recognising the broad and knowledgable audience that it attracts, and that in a real way Pordenone is silent film today. It sets the agenda; it builds up the canon; it consistently reminds us of how various the silent film was (and continues to be – there were some examples of modern silent shorts, though none that I saw were terribly distinguished). Warm thanks to all who make the festival such a success year after year. We’re so lucky that it’s there.
A reminder to anyone in London on 23 or 24 October of the free open-air evening screenings taking place in Trafalgar Square. On the 23rd, starting at 18.30, you can see the British science fiction silent High Treason (1929) – “the British Metropolis” – directed by Maurice Elvey and starring Basil Gill and Benita Hume, with live piano accompaniment by Neil Brand. A fun film to catch, showing a London where we were to be travelling about the city in helicopters, communicating by television, and wearing dodgy fashions. The accompanying short is Gaston Quiribet’s trick film vision of a future London, The Fugitive Futurist (1924).
On the 24th, also at 18.30, there’s a programme of fifteen archive films under the title ‘London Loves’. Among the silents in the programme are the bizarre The Smallest Car in the Largest City in the World (1913), a long-time favourite of those at the BFI National Archive, in which a miniature Cadillac drives sedately down London’s streets; news footage of Charlie Chaplin’s return to London in 1921, with esctatic greetings from the crowds; and an evocative travelogue, London’s Contrasts (1924). The star attraction, however, is going to be Living London (1904), Charles Urban’s truly dazzling documentary portrait of London life, a 10-minute epic only recently rediscovered by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and shown earlier this month at the Pordenone silent film festival. It returns to London after 104 years, and on the big screen, in that location, the impact should be tremendous. Among the sound films, look out especially for John Krish’s masterpiece of poignant regret, The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), on the last trams in London – until they bring them back again, of course. Music will be provided by three musicians, names as yet unpublicised.
The screenings, organised by Film London and the London Film Festival, follow on from last year’s highly successful showing of Blackmail and a programme of archive shorts. It was a magical experience – not just seeing the films in such an extraordinary yet somehow rightful setting, but for the experience of audience watching. Some settled on the steps of the Square and took in every frame; some stopped by for a while to catch the experience before moving on; some paused briefly, on their way to catch a train, puzzled at what on earth was happening. Neil’s music pounded out, down the streets and over the rooftops, filling the evening air, drawing in people from all around to see what strange activity the capital was up to now. Film was bound up with the life of the city. An experience to savour.
The 2008 Giornate del Cinema Muto was filled with many interesting and worthwhile titles across a wide range of what comprises silent film, but as day six dawned it felt like we had experienced little in the way of cast-iron classics. Plenty to intrigue and inform, few that would have made you want to rush out into the streets and drag in the nearest passer-by, telling them that they just had to see this. Sparrows (though it disappointed me) already enjoyed classic status; the Griffiths were a surprise, but they weren’t going to upset the pantheon; Ed’s Co-ed was very enjoyable, but it was an amateur college movie when you got down to it.
So it was on day six that we had the popular hit of the festival, and the first (but not the last) rediscovered classic of cast-iron certainty. The popular choice came at 9.00am, an odd slot for the silent film that had enjoyed the greatest publicity over the past year. It was only at the end of last year that it was announced that a print had been discovered of the long-lost Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), directed by King Vidor and staring John Gilbert, each fresh from their triumph with The Big Parade. Following some scepticism (a bogus announcement for the supposed rediscovery of Murnau’s The Four Devils occurred at about the same time), it transpired that a print had indeed been uncovered by the indefatigable Lobster Films of Paris. Just under a year later, it enjoyed its re-premiere at Pordenone, albeit in DigiBeta form. The tape copy may have been the reason for the less-than-prime-time slot, or it may have been a reflection of the disappointment reported by those few who had seen the film. Kevin Brownlow, in the festival catalogue, was less than enthusiastic, declaring:
It has a lush, gauzed look, but does not compare visually with Rosita or Dorothy Vernon, and the plot is so thin I found myself wondering why they made it at all.
All of which may be a warning not to judge films too much by how they appear on a monitor, without music or audience. On the big screen, slightly bothersome tape quality notwithstanding, with an audience out to enjoy itself and Neil Brand in commanding form on the piano, Bardelys the Magnificent was a triumph. It is an adaptation of a Rafael Sabatini novel, he of Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood, set in seventeenth century France. Bardelys, played with rogueish aplomb by Gilbert, is a devil-may-care courtier notorious for his success with women. He takes on a bet that he can marry Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman), daughter of a landowner believed to be inimical to the king. In a sequence of stills, representing the missing reel from the film, Bardelys comes across a dying rebel whose name he takes as a ruse to enable him to enter the castle, with plenty of attendant problems when he finds that he is now believed to be a notorious anti-royalist.
The centrepiece of the plot is Bardelys’ wooing of Roxalanne, which swiftly moves from challenge to real affection, leaving Bardelys and the film with the moral dilemma of how to negotiate the bet that underlies his actions. We won’t give the game away, as the film has yet to receive its American premiere and is going to be a treat for many audiences, but just to say that Gilbert and Boardman are both of top form, capturing the spirit of the text and the age in witty style. Wit is the optimum word; that sort of wit coming out of crisis that characterises the best of the Sabatini and Dumas school. The film climaxes with an escape from the scaffold sequence that spoofs Douglas Fairbanks, with assorted outlandish bounds to freedom, culminating in Gilbert leaping off battlements with a makeshift parachute. This sequence is the part of the film that has come for the highest praise, but I felt it veered on the facetious side – the film would have been better without it.
The film has some modest failings. The plot is a little thin, perhaps lacking a good sub-plot to add strength to the brew. There’s evidence of economies in some of the sets, which makes the film less of a visual treat than it ought to have been. But the audience relished every minute of it, through to its satisfying conclusion. Definitely a film to catch when you get the chance.
D.W. Griffith’s final silent film was Lady of the Pavements (1929), in which the old master achieved the near impossible in making Lupe Velez sympathetic. Mind you, it didn’t look that way early on in the film. The story is a take on Pygmalion, where a German diplomat Count Karl von Arnim (William Boyd) tells his cheating duchess fiancee (Jetta Goudal) that he would rather marry a woman of the streets than her. The rest of the plot you could probably come up with yourselves. The duchess gets one of her retinue to recruit a singer from the lowest dive in town, and to train her to appear to be a gently-born lady. Karl will then fall in love with her, which he duly does, and when the deception is revealed … well, of course, he marries her anyway. The singer they recruit is played by Lupe Velez, the Mexican bombshell whose film performances are invariably cranked up to eleven. It’s no different here, and for much of the early part of the film she is pretty much unbearable, an unexceedingly unlikely future mate for the fastidious Karl.
And then some modest magic occurs, and we start to care for her. Remarkably, Velez has a soft pedal and is able to do poignant. She reveals unexpected sensitivity of performance as her predicament worsens, and one feels for her. She is the best thing in the film, as most of the rest of the cast go through the motions, though I quite liked Goudal’s vindictive duchess. It’s not a great film, but it is a more than competent one, with some stylish camera movement, though with a sense that sheer studio power was carrying Griffith along. In the end, the film was another commercial flop for him, its greatest success coming from an Irving Berlin song Velez sings, ‘Where is the song of songs for me?’ (memorably recreated for us by Joanna Seaton), a recording of which was a hit for her (the film was released with synchronised orchestral score and songs from Velez). For the cognoscenti, the highlight was probably the scene towards the end where Velez, back in the restaurant where she started, sings a sad song and Karl appears to her in place of everyone in the room through progressive multiple exposures. So farewell then, D.W. Griffith the silent filmmaker.
Pordenone regularly dedicates a section of the festival to the work of one of the world’s film archives. This year it was the Slovenian Film Archive, or Slovenski Filmski Archiv, celebrating its fortieth aniversary. I only caught the first few titles in its programme of actualities ranging from 1905 to 1937, but there was some magic there. The first Solvenian films were shot by Karol Grossmann in 1905/06, and we saw a striking high-angle view of townsfolk coming out of church in 1905, which had a real sense of pulling back the curtains to reveal the past; and delightful film of Grossman’s children, which has been used as part of the archive’s animated logo. But the real treasure was Postojnska Jama (Postojna Cave) (1926). Postojna Cave is a spectacular cave system and a top Slovenian tourist site. The film showed us the interior of the caves (the catalogue claimed that it was the first film ever taken underground, which may well be the case), through which a train travelled, with the passengers carrying flares. The result was a phantasmagorical tour de force, as white lights and smoke lit up the fantastical shapes within the cave, looking for all the world like a tourist trip through Dante’s Inferno. The interpolation of some still photographs deadened the effect slightly, but this short film (five minutes) provided perhaps the most dazzling visual effect of any film shown at the festival.
Brighton Sea-Going Electric Car (1897), from Filmoteca de Catalunya
Another anniversary marked by the festival was the thirtieth anniversary of the celebrated FIAF congress of 1978, held in Brighton in the UK, which held a symposium which examined films from around the world made 1900-1906. This epic undertaking (548 films were screened) effectively kick-started the serious study of early film, and had huge repercussions on scholarly understanding, publishing, video releases and some notable academic careers. To mark the occasion, the festival invited some of those who were at the original symposium to select two films each from the 1900-1906 period, and to say why they still excited their imaginations.
I was greatly looking forward to this part of the festival, and it’s sad to have to report that it was, in all honesty, a bit of a shambles. There was no sense of a governing idea, several of the prints were quite poor and appeared to be (and some certainly were) the prints shown at the original symposium, in some cases with quaint introductory titles. In at least one instance the wrong version of a film was shown, and there were some titles that weren’t in the catalogue at all but got shown because they were on the same reel as one of the scheduled films. I didn’t stay for the second half of what was a long session, but others reported similar disappointment. Of course, classic titles such as The Life of an American Fireman (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903) are never going to fail, but the highlight, ironically enough, was a new discovery. George Albert Smith’s Brighton Sea-going Electric Car (1897), discovered this year by the Filmoteca de Catalunya is a mysterious masterpiece in miniature. This was an elevated, sea-going platform, a sort of maritime tram, invented by Magnus Volk, which is seen to traverse the screen from right to left, like some bizarre vision of modernity drfiting into view then out again.
Alice O’Fredericks and Mona Mårtenson (right) in Laila, from http://www.nfi.no
The rediscovery that sent us out into the streets, if not with the intention of dragging in passers-by then certainly floating on air, was unexpected. Laila (1929) is a late Norwegian silent, a daunting 165 minutes long. Expectations were not high from those like me who knew little of this period of Norwegian cinema, though the presence of George Schnéevoigt, cinematographer on a number of Carl Th. Dreyer film, as director, had aroused curiosity.
So, we’re amid the snowy wastes of Norway, at some time in the past. It’s nighttime. Merchant Lind and his wife are being drawn by dog sleigh through the snow, taking their baby daughter Laila to her christening. A pack of wolves attackes them. In the frantic chase, the baby falls out of her sleigh. With the dawn, they seek desperately for the child, only to find an empty papoose. The child must have been devoured by the wolves. But the baby had been found by Jåmpa, the wild-looking servant of the wealthy Lapp Aslag Laagje, whose wife is childless. They decide to adopt the child, but then learn of her true identity. Sorrowfully, they return Laila to her true parents. But then her parents die of the plague…
We were gripped, and we stayed gripped throughout, as this immaculately-paced drama in the remotest of landscapes held you like only the best of silent films can. Exoticism was certainly part of the appeal – age-old, etched faces, rampaging wolves (running over the camera at one point), clashes between Lapps and Norwegians (disparagingly referred to by the former as ‘daros’), some fine ski-ing, and an awful lot of reindeer. Lying just underneath the narrative was a miscenegation theme, as the grown-up Laila (brightly played by Mona Mårtenson), kept in ignorance of her Norwegian parentage, is brought up to expect marriage to Laagje’s foster son Mellet. The film seeks to rescue her from this fate, preferring that she marry instead her first cousin, Anders Lind (Harald Schwenzen), who ends up rescuing her at the altar in a satisfyingly dramatic conclusion, thanks to an intervention from Jåmpa (Trygve Larssen), who puts Laila’s happiness above loyalty to his master (and gets savaged by a pack of wolves for his pains).
This was a work on both an intimate and an epic scale (it is based on a novel by J.A. Friis), excellently played in a fine naturalistic style by all concerned. It was good human drama. It’s hard to make a dull-looking film when you have so much snow to work with, and Schnéevoigt did not fluff a single scene. The only disappointment was the print, which was a TV print with rounded corners. This was something of a distraction. Presumably it is the only material that survives. We were told that the film had previously only been available in sound speed form, but has now been re-photographed at 16fps. Fresh, unusual and soundly executed throughout, Laila was the outstanding feature film of the Giornate.
Flagging a little by this stage, and with no desire to see the new documentary on Mary Pickford which was the main evening screening, that was the end of Thursday for me. Day seven, and the last of these reports, will follow, bringing us a poignant tale of class divisions, a paean to London at its imperial zenith, a ballet master turned puppet master, two Lillian Harveys, and one minimalist.
Regulars may remember that in the Bioscope report on the Pordenone 2007 festival, there was a detailed account of the remarkable find by Lobster Films of a cache of films from the earlier years of cinema taken in the ‘Bible lands’ i.e. Palestine. This collection of some eighty or so films included both actualities and dramatised scenes of the nativity. At the time, no one knew who had made these films, though a good guess was made that the filmmaker might have been the Frenchman Léar (real name, Albert Kirchner), known to have filmed nativity scenes in Palestine in 1897. Some of the films were believed to date from that period, but others stylisically suggested a slightly later date.
A year on, and the mystery has been solved. The films were not made by Léar but by the Abbés Mulsant and Chevalier in 1904, supported by the Roman Catholic promotional organisation, La Maison Bonne Presse. Mulsant and Chevalier visited Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and later Turkey. They filmed the scenes about them, and created dramatised scenes inspired by the celebrated Bible paintings of James Tissot.
Research continues on their work, but Eric Lange of Lobster Films has kindly sent me a text on his discoveries. It’s in French, but that’s not going to present you with any problems (not in these post-Google Translate days). A selection of the films, concentrating on the nativity scenes, can be found on the European Film Treasures site (search under Mulsant or 1904), which has further information on the collection.
Au lendemain de la guerre de 1870, LA MAISON DE LA BONNE PRESSE voit le jour, sous les auspices des Augustins de l’Assomption. Son but est d’affirmer une présence catholique dynamique à travers des manifestations de masse : pèlerinages, enseignements, ou presse avec des organes comme le Pèlerin lancé en 1873 ou La Croix, 10 ans plus tard.
En 1895, le directeur de La Croix confie à Georges-Michel Coissac, futur historien du cinéma, la création et la responsabilité d’un service de projections lumineuses.
Des conférenciers projectionnistes sillonnent alors les paroisses et diffusent la bonne parole grâce aux séries de plaques de verre illustrant sous forme de tableaux vivants, la vie du Christ, des Saints et Martyrs ou les histoires édifiantes de Théodore Botrel.
En 1905, lorsque intervient la séparation de l’Eglise et de l’état, le cinématographe a depuis longtemps perdu son statut de curiosité scientifique pour n’être plus, pour beaucoup, qu’une vulgaire attraction de fête foraine.
Il commence toutefois à intéresser les esprits pieux de la maison de la Bonne Presse.
Lors du deuxième congrès général des oeuvres catholiques de conférences et de projections (19 – 22 février 1906) un conférencier défini ainsi ce point de vue :
« Il n’est personne qui nie l’intérêt des projections cinématographiques et le parti qu’en pourraient tirer les oeuvres catholiques de projections. Celles-ci ne doivent pas, sous peine de rester en retard et de se priver d’un puissant élément de succès, dédaigner cette nouvelle manifestation de l’art dans l’image lumineuse. Aussi semble-t-il tout naturel que le Congrès veuille étudier cette année les moyens de vulgariser le cinématographe et de le mettre à la portée d’un plus grand nombre. »
Ce rapport émane de l’abbé Mulsant qui a déjà mis en pratique sa théorie:
« On me permettra d’exposer ici l’oeuvre que j’ai entreprise en collaboration avec M. L’abbé Chevalier; heureux si notre petite expérience peut être de quelque utilité pour les conférences catholiques.
Ayant à chercher des ressources pour nos écoles du Liban très menacées par la diminution des aumônes venant de la France, et en face de l’impossibilité de quêter en ce moment dans notre pauvre patrie, nous avons songé à donner des conférences aussi intéressantes que possible, et en joignant aux projections lumineuses ordinaires les vues cinématographiques.
Pour cela nous avons fait un long voyage en Orient, pays qui du reste nous était déjà connu, et nous sommes arrivés à récolter en Egypte, en Palestine et au Liban de nombreux documents, clichés et bandes cinématographiques, avec lesquels ont été composées cinq conférences documentaires ou artistiques.
La première, Vers les cèdres du Liban, nous promène à travers les montagnes si pittoresques de la Syrie.
La deuxième et la troisième, s’attachant à la personne sacrée de Notre-Seigneur Enfant, essayent de le faire revivre, soit à la manière de Tissot dans la conférence documentaire Au pays de l’enfance du Christ, soit dans la Vierge et son fils, à la manière des artistes idéalistes qui, si nombreux à tous les ages, ont plus ou moins prêté à la Sainte Famille nos moeurs et nos goûts.
La quatrième conférence, Le Caire pittoresque, conduit dans la capitale de l’Egypte moderne, en fait ressortir les particularités et les contrastes et donne sur la religion musulmane et ses rites, de très curieux documents.
La cinquième, les Hébreux d’autrefois et les Fellahs d’aujourd’hui, transporte l’auditeur à plusieurs siècles de distance et fait revivre les moeurs au temps de Joseph et des Pharaons dans l’étude de la vie des champs et de la construction des temples.
Ces cinq conférences sont établies sur le même modèle, en ce sens que l’illustration lumineuse du texte est toujours composée de vues fixes alternant avec les vues cinématographiques. Un dispositif nouveau, inventé par les conférenciers eux-mêmes, permet la substitution instantanée du cliché à la vue mouvante. Cette méthode a le grand avantage de donner à la conférence plus de vie et de variété, les explications étant données sur les vues fixes qui ne sont que l’analyse du sujet cinématographique suivant.
Le spectateur jouit ainsi beaucoup mieux de la vue cinématographique déjà expliquée et n’est pas fatigue par une projection non interrompue de 600 mètres de bandes. Je puis dire que ces conférences, grâce à l’inédit des documents et à la perfection de l’appareil, ont pu être données en très grands nombres dans les milieux les plus différents, toujours avec le plus beau succès. En dix-huit mois, nous avons fait plus de 250 conférences dans des Grands et Petits Séminaires, des salons, des Sociétés de géographie, des Cercles artistiques, des collèges et couvents, des salles populaires où nous avons réuni plus de 2000 personnes. Nous comptons continuer notre oeuvre et poursuivre notre campagne de conférences, qui, comme nous l’ont dit bien des prêtres et des évêques nos auditeurs, font un bien réel aux âmes et permettent de parler de Notre-Seigneur dans tous les milieux. »
L ‘œuvre entreprise par Mulsant et Chevalier n’est certes pas une première. Dès 1897, Albert Kirchner, dit Léar, avait accompagné le père Bailly dans son pèlerinage aux pays du Christ et en avait ramené les premiers films tournés en Palestine et en Egypte ; des films malheureusement perdus aujourd’hui.
Toutefois, s’ils ont bien été tournés en 1904, comme le laissent à penser les déclarations de l’abbé Mulsant, ces films offrent un des plus anciens témoignages filmés de la vision chrétienne en terre Musulmane.
Tourné in situ, la vie de Jésus détonne par rapport aux nombreuses versions très théâtrales éditées alors par Pathé, Gaumont ou Lumière. Le but est ici de « remettre en scène, sur place, au jour le jour, les personnages bibliques, d’évoquer leurs figures, redire leurs paroles, dans le pays que la Providence avait donné pour cadre à leurs passions, à leur espoir, à leur apostolat. »
Les sujets des autres conférences sont complémentaires puisque l’observation des us et coutumes en Palestine, en Egypte ou au Liban permet de « mettre en évidence les vestiges des traditions antiques, commentaires vivant de l’Ecriture qui éclairent d’un jour nouveau telles pages obscures de la Bible ou de l’Evangile. »
Au delà de leur aspect ethnographique ou religieux, les films de Mulsant et Chevalier sont aujourd’hui le témoignage rare d’une pratique qui va pendant longtemps opposer laïcs et catholiques: celle du conférencier projectionniste.
Le Texte des conférences de Mulsant et Chevalier semble avoir disparu, mais on en trouve toutefois quelques extraits dans les séries de cartes postales illustrées, éditées à partir de 1907 et proposées aux abonnées du Fascinateur, revue consacrée à la projection par la Maison Bonne Presse.
1907 est également l’année de la consécration pour Mulsant et Chevalier. Leur Annonciation de la Vierge est présentée au Vatican devant le Pape Pie X, en vues fixes d’abord, puis en scène cinématographique, avec de brèves explications du P. Chevalier lui-même. Le film vient conclure un programme des plus variés où se succèdent des scènes de la vie militaire, des scènes champêtres ou maritimes sans oublier des portraits de Sa Sainteté et de splendides tableaux de la vie du Christ ou des films comiques tel Toto Aéronaute (Pathé 1906)!
Jusqu’alors, les films de Mulsant et Chevalier ne se trouvaient pas dans le commerce, ce que regrettaient certains congressistes lors du troisième congrès général des œuvres catholiques de conférence et de projection. Après la séance faite au Vatican, un accord est conclu avec Gaumont qui propose fièrement sous le numéro 1821 de son catalogue « A Nazareth », collection de MM. Mulsant et Chevalier, projections représentées devant le Souverain Pontife. Ce films de 70 mètres se divise en 5 parties: L’atelier, Fontaine de Nazareth, Retour de la Fontaine, Le puits, le soir qui tombe.
Curieusement le film n’est qu’en distribution ; les droits de représentation sont réservés pour la France et la Belgique et il faut s’adresser directement aux Auteurs, 14 rue Sainte-Hélène à Lyon.
Peut être Gaumont ne veut il pas faire trop de concurrence à sa Vie du Christ éditée en 1906 et dont certains tableaux s’inspirent également de la Passion du peintre James Tissot. Dans ces mémoires, Alice Guy, qui a réalisé le film, indique que Mulsant et Chevalier étaient présents sur le tournage et portaient un vif intérêt à son travail. On pourrait en déduire d’après ces propos que les deux prêtres se sont inspirés d’Alice Guy, alors que ceux-ci avaient tournés leur vie de Jésus 2 ans plus tôt.
La production cinématographique de la maison de la Bonne Presse ne débute réellement qu’en 1909, avec une version de la Passion de 1000 mètres réalisée par Honoré le Sablais qui dirigera la production jusqu’à la première guerre, avant que l’abbé Danion ne prenne le relai.
En 1909, Mulsant et Chevalier sont certainement en Turquie comme en témoignent une série films retrouvés en même temps que ceux d’Egypte et de Palestine. On y découvre le témoignage de la présence chrétienne dans un orphelinat ainsi que les ruines d’Adana après les premiers massacres d’Arméniens. Ces films n’ont sans doute pas encore révélé tous leurs secrets.
Puis nous perdons la trace de Mulsant et Chevalier après une dernière séance de projection à Moulins, mentionnée par le Fascinateur en 1910:
« M. L’abbé Mulsant, le conférencier bien connu, a organisé cette année à Moulins toute une série de conférences religieuses, pour dames et jeunes filles, sur la vie de Notre-Seigneur, dans le but d’aider à l’intelligence des Evangiles.
Les projections ont été exécutées par M. l’abbé Mulsant lui-même, avec un appareil de haute précision, à la lumière oxy-éthérique. Les vues projetées, dont un bon nombre en couleurs, sont en grande partie l’œuvre originale et personnelle de M. Mulsant. Prises directement sur les Lieux-Saints même ou empruntées aux plus grands peintres de toutes les époques, elles ont pour but constant et unique soit la reconstitution historique des faits évangéliques, soit la représentation la plus expressive des mystères sacrés, d’évoquer en un mot, sous les yeux de la vie même du Christ, telle qu’il la vécut parmi nous, il y a dix-neuf siècle. »
Les recherches continues. A suivre …
Eric has also drawn my attention to his Cinématographes site on early cinema technology. Written in French, it’s a fabulous collection of images and descriptions of cameras, projectors etc., company information, catalogues and more, which I’ll cover in greater detail in a later post.
Day five, and we’re going strong. After a couple of days at Pordenone, the sheer stamina required to take in films from 9.00am to midnight starts to tell, and you wonder if you are going to make it. Then you pass a threshold of some kind, and you suddenly feel like you could do this silent film watching lark forever.
Of course, not all stay for all eight days, and this was the first time in several years (I’ve been going since 1995, with one year missed) where I’d been there for more than five days. So it was with a sense almost of wandering into unknown territory that I settled down at 9.00 for the first film of the day, The Drums of Love (1928).
Is there a worse-named film? At any rate, is there a worse-named film in works of D.W. Griffith? The drums in this tale set in nineteenth-century South America were noticeable by their absence. As far as film history goes, this was the first of four features made by Griffith for Joseph Schenck, whose collective failure spelled the end of his filmmaking career. Its reputation has always been low, and it has remained one of the least-seen of Griffith’s feature films, not helped by the fact that all that apparently survives is the 16mm copy held by the Library of Congress [correction – 35mm material exists – see comments]. I missed it on the Tuesday, but for some reason the festival gave it a second screening, and I’m glad that they did.
The Drums of Love is based on the story of Paolo and Francesca, as told by Dante. This much-told tale, often under the title ‘Francesca di Rimini’, was a popular subject in the early cinema period, and though Griffith did not film it in his Biograph period, it is just the sort of subject that he might have chosen. Transferring this tale of doomed lovers in Renaissance Italy to the South America of the early 1800s was a bold choice, but for me the setting seemed well realised. The lovers were played by Don Alvardo and Mary Philbin, and their relative weakness as performers, their lack of star quality, hampered a film which depended a lot on chemistry and much lingering looks between the two. What did not help their cause, however, was having to act opposite Lionel Barrymore, in what must be his finest screen performance. Barrymore plays Alvardo’s dictator brother, a hunchbacked, powerful presence (the titles called him a ‘super-dwarf’, which didn’t make much sense), alert to everything, deeply aware of his own ugliness, yet determined to get whatever he wants by whatever means necessary. He was vulnerable and ruthless at the same time.
Essentially, Barrymore seeks to marry Philbin for reasons of expediency, but send his brother to fetch her. They fall in love, it ends tragically. Exactly how it was to end was evidently unclear to Griffith, as he shot two endings, one where the two lovers die – the original ending – the other where Barrymore is killed, apparently introduced after the film was not a success on opening, which is far less satisfactory. At any rate, I rather liked The Drums of Love. The murky 16mm copy did not help matters, and were a sharp 35mm print ever to emerge, I suspect the film would look terrific. As it was, it was an artfully composed work, filled with rich, incidental details (I noted in particular a procession of slaves in one countryside scene, passing by in the foreground, a passing visual reference to cruelties that supported the lifestyles of the chief protagonists). Also impressive was the intensity of the drama, without that much plot to go on, and the sheer darkness of the theme. Above all it is Barrymore’s towering performance as a South American Richard III, though pitiable in a way that Shakespeare’s villain never is, that makes this an interesting film that, in other circumstances, might have been a great one.
With the wisdom of years spent watching some terrible British silent films that will never see the light of day again, I chose to avoid The Last King of Wales (1922), a short directed by the talent-free George Ridgwell which only survives on 9.5mm. Those unwitting souls who ventured in mostly voted it the worst film of the festival. Instead I crossed over to the Riddoto to be much impressed with an Austrian First World War actuality, Ein Heldenkampf in Schnee und Eis (1917). This depicted the Alpine war between Austrian and Italian troops, seen from the viewpoint of the former as they attacked a mountain-top emplacement. Given the German titles, and my lack of German, I missed the finer points, but the film was clearly well-staged – with an emphasis on staged, since there was a strong element of dramatic construction about the whole work, though I could not really tell which to accept as reality, which as not. The surrender of a clutch of Italian troops was presumably reality.
Back then to the Verdi for a selection of films related to the D.W. Griffith classic, The Lonely Villa (1909). Now some care deeply for the cross-cutting innovations of this pioneering suspense film, and relish finding stylistic antecedents in earlier films. We saw first the Griffith film, then a renowned Pathé film, Le Médecin du Château (1908), which anticipates much of the later film’s formal novelties, including the use of a telephone to bring together characters separated by distance; plus the still earlier Pathé film Terrible Angoise (2906), which worked along similar lines with an unexpected tragic ending. But then they showed us Edison’s The Watermelon Patch (1905).
This was a truly appalling film, made all the more appalling by the means in which it was presented. A group of black farmworkers raid a watermelon patch, but are chased away by scarecrow figures dressed as skeletons. The workers retire to a farmhouse, where we see them enjoying the watemelons and breaking into a joyous series of dances. At this point, stereotyped images aside (what was it about watermelons that they became so associated with black people and ‘comedy’?), this was a celebratory, almost transgressive film, as they had got away with their ‘crime’ and the dancing had been such fun. But then retribution came. The white farmers who had been giving chase found the farmhouse, blocked up the windows and chimney, then fill the building with smoke. It’s a comedy, so they get out of the building having merely been choked, but it felt that close to having all of the people in the house being burned alive for their sins.
What was particularly shocking was that this film was included in the programme purely for its formal qualities, as an interesting example of cross-cutting. As the catalogue put it:
Alternate cutting is a discursive configuration whose minimal form is the recurrence of each term in two series. In other words, it is impossible to speak of alternate editing when only one of the terms recurs (A-B-A). At a minimum, it requires that each series recur (A-B-A-B). Cross-cutting, for its part, is only one of the forms of alternate editing within which series of events supposedly unfold simultaneously in the narrative universe suggested by the film. Thus, in our view, The Watemelon Patch is a true example of cross-cutting.
So bloody what. Nothing could provide greater evidence of the sheer fatuousness of some aspects of film studies, where form is totally divorced from content. A film like The Watermelon Patch ought to be screened, but with care, and in appropriate circumstances. These were not those circumstances, and all of those I spoke to afterwards were shocked and really quite disturbed that this film was shown.
First film in the afternoon was Figaro (1929), A French version of the Beaumarchais novels. Neil Brand told me beforehand that – man of musical principle that he is – he would not being throwing in themes from Mozart or Rossini, however strong the temptation. So we saw the film for itelf, not as an echo of something else, and very handsome it was, with a spirited title performance from Ernest van Duren. But it struggled a little to combine all three plots, and I did doze off somewhat. It was followed by the second progamme of Alexander Shiryaev films, a consideration of which will come in the report on Day Seven.
Don Alvardo and Phyllis Haver in The Battle of the Sexes
For many, our second Griffith of the day was the best of his late films shown in the festival – The Battle of the Sexes (1928). This was like a statement of intent, the director seemingly saying just look how well I can fit in with the filmmaking of today. He did so by the bold choice of taking one of his Biograph films of old, made in 1914, and producing a remake suitable for the late 1920s in style and theme. Jean Hersholt played a prosperous man of impeccable middle class values who is lured away from his loving wife and family by ruthless gold digger Phyllis Haver. What starts as bright social comedy takes on a darker tone as the wife (Belle Bennett) becomes almost suicidal, their daughter (Sally O’Neill) threatens Haver with a gun, and Hersholt becomes nasty in his refusal to return to hearth and home. Only when an exchange between Haver and her lover Don Alvardo (on better form than in The Drums of Love) reveals her contempt of Hersholt do the scales from his eyes and a happy family reunion ensues. One senses Griffith was not so much not in control of the material as not quite sure where it might take him.
The film is distinguished by a bright, modernistic style, laced with a number of bravura sequences. A scene where Bennett is filmed from above wandering dangerously close to the edge of a roof of a block of flats, followed by the camera being dropped over the edge is the most eye-catching. But what most impressed me was an argument between Hersholt and Haver where each is filmed one either sides of a room, cutting from one to the other, while each paces forwards and backwards with the camera tracking back and forth with them. It made for a particularly vividly animated scene, a look-what-I-can-do gesture certainly, but one that deserved to catch the eye. Finally, Phyllis Haver is excellent as the bracing amoral other woman, who shows not the slightest trace of remorse, nor is she in any way punishd for her view of the world. It would make quite a companion piece with Chicago.
How much was it the work of Griffith reinventing himself for the new age, and how much the product of a whole studio behind him, with talents such as cinematographer Karl Struss, fresh from working on Sunrise? One senses that it was a bit of both, but in its moral sense, and in the clear intention to update the 1914 film (where Donald Crisp had played the father, Fay Tincher the temptress and Lillian Gish the daughter) technically and socially, Griffith was undoubtedly seeking to prove himself at home in the modern film world. Viewed from this point in time he succeeded, even if the film was greeted with disappointment at the time, and led to the further disintegration of his reputation.
The evening was rounded off for me by When Flowers Bloom (1929), an elaborately stencil-coloured short about flowers, intermingled with a light love story, before we had Little Old New York (1923). Directed by Sidney Olcott, this was a tale of early ninetenth-cenury New York, in which Marion Davies comes from Ireland to claim an inheritance, to achieve which she needs to disguise herself as a boy. Never in the history of dramatic entertainment was there a more unconvincing portrayal of a man by a woman, but we went along with it, and the film, though leisurely in pace, included some fine, nostalgic sequences, including a well-staged bare-knuckle boxing content. All in all, it was preferable to – and probably no less accurate than – The Gangs of New York. What distinguished the screening was the musical accompaniment – Elizabeth-Jane Baldry playing the harp for two hours. Marion Davies’ character plays the harp, hence the choice, but it was a herculean and mostly successful effort, with such surprises as her knocking on the side of the harp for the boxing sequences. We did not see her, however – she was down in the pit below the stage, same as the pianists were all week, something of an unfortunate situation. If a musician wanted to acknowledge the applause, they had practically to jump up and down and wave if we were to see them. Not an ideal situation, all in all.
I did not attend the late evening concert of songs about silent films from the silent era, at which one time child star Jean Darling took to the stage alongside Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton. So on to the next day, the penultimate one for me, where we were to encounter John Gilbert in his pomp, the last silent film made by D.W. Griffith, a sea-going electric car, a magical cave journey, and heartache amid the Norwegian snows.
For those who may not know, the recumbent figure who supplies the Pordenone silent film festival logo is Donald O’Connor. That’s Donald O’Connor playing Buster Keaton in The Buster Keaton Story (1957). A curious choice, all things considered, but, hey, it works.
Were I a writer of any skill, I would look upon the films that we saw on Tuesday 7 October, and I would draw out unexpected themes and make thoughtful overviews. But diversity was the only theme on offer. For anyone with only general ideas of what silent films comprise, this was the day to have your eyes opened.
Ironically, if there’s one thing that the average person is able to associate with silent film, it’s slapstick, and that’s what we started with (or rather, what I started with, as I missed the Austrian film Kleider Machen Leute that began the day). Under the ‘Rediscoveries’ strand we were offered a barrage of Keystone Film Company comedies, most of them recent discoveries or restorations. For the festival, this marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Keystone-themed festival it ran in 1983.
Mack Sennett, Keystone’s presiding genius, ran his studio as an assembly line, pumping out comedies by the yard, with an accomplished, hard-wearing troupe of performers able to fit themselves perfectly into the rigours of whatever routine Sennett had dreamt up for them this week. Three things were particularly noticeable about the films: the unquenchable vitality of the performers, the opportunistic taste for sketches to be devised out of some local event or eye-catching piece of scenery, and the phenomenal speed. One knows all about the knockabout thrills of American slapstick, but looking at a film like Love, Speed and Thrills (1915), the sheer number of shots, angles and different set-ups was prodigious, and seemed to run counter to the demand for getting out the films cheaply and quickly. They made such work for themselves, simply by the pursuit of comic excellence. Not that one could call all of the films strictly funny as such – not funny now, that is – and that the grotesquely gesticulating Ford Sterling (left) was ever revered as a comedian has left posterity baffled. Sterling pulled every face known to man (and a few that man has now happily forgotten) in his efforts to draw laughter out of the curious Stolen Glory (1912), where he and Fred Mace play warring Civil War veterans, filmed interrupting a genuine war veterans’ parade, apparently without any protest from the participants.
Other Keystones that caughter the eye included A Deaf Burglar (1913), which drew some easy laughs from a situation readily inferred from the title, and A Little Hero (1913), which starred a cat (named Pepper), a dog and Mabel Normand, the dog saving a caged bird from the cat’s predations in a scenario that looked for all the world as though it were borrowed from that deathless British classic, Rescued by Rover. Love, Speed and Thrills more than lived up to its title. One could only look on with astonishment at the violent indignities to which Minta Durfee was put in this frenetic chase comedy. These comedies were the inheritors of the comedy series made by European companies, but in their difference to the works of Max Linder, Cretinetti et al one sees how it was that American cinema, and the idea of America, conquered the world. Their new world dynamism is overpowering. Love, speed and thrills sold America.
And then for something completely different. There is growing interest in European women filmmakers in the silent era, and among their select number is the intriguing figure of Elvira Giallanella, director of Umanità (1919). Not much is known about Giallanella, except that she established a film company, Vera, in 1913, which made a Futurist-inspired production, Mondo baldoria (1913), then formed Liana Film, with great ambitions for extensive production, but with just the one title seeing the light of day – Umanità. This thirty-five minute work is unique. It is an anti-war allegory based on a children’s poem by Vittorio Bravetta. The child protagonists are named Tranquillino and Serenetta, which gives you a fair idea of the filmmaker’s intentions. The children wake up in the night – Tranquillino smokes a cigarette (eye-popping stuff) and has a nightmare, in which the world has been destroyed by war and he and his sister are given the task of rebuilding it. Given the nil budget, we have to rely on our imaginations quite a bit. The futility of war is revealed, for instance, by a neat line of empty boots. Peculiarly, the children are guided by a gnome (the embodiment of one of their toys), across deserted, rocky landscapes. The action wasn’t all that easy to follow, chiefly because the Italian intertitles had been bravely translated by the festival into English verse, at the expense of some logic. Intriguingly, Tranquillino, discovers the seeds of violence in him as he wishes to throw bombs, but the two children resort to prayer and are comforted by a bearded God and Jesus (one of a number of appearances during the Giornate). A film of muddled meaning and technique – who saw it at the time, and what on earth did they make of it? – but out on its own among silent film. The film it reminded me of was Richard Lester’s post-apocalyptic comedy The Bed Sitting Room, the survivors wandering about a shattered, empty world, trying to recover meaning.
Shown in the ‘Film and History’ strand, Umanità was paired with the surviving reel of the five-reeler American film If My Country Should Call (1916). This was not anti-war as such, as its avowed theme was ‘preparedness’ for an America which would shortly join the conflict, but its central, sympathetic character was a mother (played by Dorothy Phillips) whose sentiments were anti-war. It was something of a shock to read a closing intertitle which denounced her attitude as selfish. Otherwise it was a tale of enfeebled manhood (and by extension the nation), redeemed by the promise of fighting. Lon Chaney appeared as a doctor, and scenarist was Ida May Park.
Right up my street was Paul Spehr’s special presentation on the films of William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson. As Spehr’s new book says it, Dickson was The Man Who Made Movies. The Edison employee who was assigned in the early 1890s to solving the problem of creating a photographic motion picture device, Dickson not only – more than anyone else – created motion pictures (the system he devised, with 35mm perforated film, is with us still) but he was a maker of movies in the artistic sense. His films, from the earliest experiments with Edison through to his bold adventures with the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company in the late 1890s, are hauntingly beautiful. I won’t got into every film here, but just to say that Spehr presented them as part of a combined film and computer slide show, and did so with wise aplomb. It is quite something for someone who has just written a 706-page book on his subject to express its essence so simply and clearly. Of the many films he showed, I’ll note just one – Dickson’s very first, Monkeyshines no. 1, miniscule images photographed and laid around a cylinder, before they realised that copying Edison’s earlier invention, the Phonograph, wasn’t quite the way to go. From a microphoto on a cylinder to the big screen of the Verdi – and it’s on YouTube too, the human figure in motion evolving out of incoherence, the ghost in the machine:
Monkeyshines no. 1 (1889), the first American movie
My prize for the most disappointing film of the week went to A Modern Musketeer (1917). This really ought to have been a gem. A complete copy was only recently discovered, and it represents a key point in the development of Douglas Fairbanks’ persona, from his young-man-about-town persona to the swaggering figures of his 1920s historical romps. It seemed to have a cast-iron premise. Fairbanks plays a young man whose mother was addicted to the works of Alexandre Dumas just before he was born, and he is imbued with the spirit of The Three Musketeers, which he then tries to take into modern American life as a twentieth-century D’Artagnan. Fabulous concept – what could possibly go wrong? Well, after overplaying the idea wildly in an energetic opening five minutes, the film then abandons it almost entirely for a muddled, uncertainly-paced comedy-thriller set in the Grand Canyon, with an unpleasantly racist undertone in its depicition of the native American villain. Pianist Ian Mistrorigo (a Pordenone masterclass alumnus) tore along at a terrific pace, trying to make the film what it ought to have been, but the film stubbornly refused to live up to his expectations. It’s great that the film has been found and restored, but it’s unfunny, unthrilling, and frankly clueless. Oh dear.
Ed’s Co-ed, from University of Oregon
At this point I was planning to see two Sessue Hayakawa films, His Birthright (1918) and The Courageous Coward (1919), but the word had got round that Ed’s Co-ed (1929), which had been shown the day before to a minimal audience in the Ridotto, was getting a second screening because people really had to see it. Dutifully I went, and I’m very glad I did. There was a fascinating story behind it. In 1928 a University of Oregon student, Carvel Nelson, got to work on the set of F.W. Murnau’s The City Girl. Bitten with the film bug, he decided to make his own film, working with fellow students and an English professor, and raising finance locally. The Nelson and his eventual co-director James Raley made so bold as to approach Cecil B. DeMille for advice. DeMille put them in touch with his cinematographer, James McBride, who amazingly joined the production as technical director and got paid for it as well. With a 35mm Bell & Howell camera rented from Hollywood, and a cast recruited from across the university, Ed’s Co-ed went into production in February 1929 and had its premiere locally in November of that year.
Ed’s Co-ed is a strikingly accomplished film. McBride’s presence clearly aided the fluid, expressive cinematography, including a number of vivid sequences (a punt drifting on the waters through trees, a close shot of women students looking through a window enraptured by some violin playing), but he could not have claimed responsibility for the immaculately engineered script with central and sub-plots artfully interwoven, nor the highly capable performances from the entire cast. There is not a trace of amateurism about Ed’s Co-ed. The story is that of every college movie you ever saw – country boy Ed comes to college, is picked on by other students, he falls for the girl but is rejected by all after he admits to a crime to cover up for someone else who actually committed it, his talents are recognised (he plays the violin, he’s top in all his grades), he wins through at last. It’s so like ever college film made that you could be fooled by its ordinariness, but this is a college film that actually came from a college, and it is a treasure trove of period attitudes, codes, fashions and language.
The 35mm original of Ed’s Co-ed was destroyed in the 1960s when a 16mm dupe was made. We were told that the university hadn’t shown sufficient interest in the film to want to fund a restoration, which is a shame if true because though it might be a hard sell, a DVD edition could reach both silent film fans and those with an interest in American social history. However, there must be some interest from the university, because you can find the whole of Ed’s Co-ed online (87mins). It’s available in streamed and downloadable forms from the University of Oregon’s Scholar’s Bank website – no music track, but otherwise it’s a good quality encoding, and I warmly recommend it. Praise, by the way, for the accompaniment at Pordenone from Neil Brand (piano) and Günter Buchwald (violin, to match Ed’s playing), overlapping beautifully.
I missed most of the evening screenings, owing to a genial supper with a gaggle of pianists, but I returned for the last film of the day, The Man Beneath (1919). This is one of the films recently discovered and restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum of Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese-American star who has attracted such critical and archival interest of late. Hayakawa is fascinating not just for his star presence and position as an Asian performer in the heart of Hollywood, but for his thinking about his role and the degree to which he tried to combine positive images of himself as a representative Japanese figure with the demands of the box office, through his position as an independent producer.
The Man Beneath was made by Hayakawa’s own Haworth Pictures Corporation, and it came at a time when he felt it was right to expand his range somewhat. Hence the peculiar set-up, where we get a Japanese actor, playing a Hindu doctor, in an American film, set in Scotland. Hayakawa plays Dr Chindi Ashuter, who is in love with the Scottish Kate Erskine, and she in love with him, though she is held back by the fear of the social consequences of a mixed marriage. Her sister is married to an associate (white) of Ashuter’s, whose entrapment by a secret society and rescue by Ashuter forms the main action of the film. But it is Ashuter and Kate’s thwarted love that is the real theme. He returns to Scotland, but she sorrowfully rejects him, and he leaves sadder and wiser. Of course, a mixed marriage was never going to be shown upon the screen in 1919, so the plot had nowhere else to go, but what lingers in the mind is the intensity of the feelings, particularly as expressed in a luminous performance by Helen Jerome Eddy as Kate. Hayakawa is less of a presence, curiously enough, but one shot where he stares in anguish at his reflection in the mirror and tears at his face, drawing blood, says everything.
And so we saw farewell to Day Four, and look forward to the morrow, bringing us smouldering South American passions, Austrian troops scaling mountains, a near-lynching presented as comedy, a Mozart-free Figaro, a gold digger triumphant, and bare knuckle boxing accompanied by the harp.
As promised, the Bioscope is starting up a new occasional series, to be called 100 Years Ago, which will reproduce texts from the original British film trade journal The Bioscope, from exactly 100 years ago.
The Bioscope included reports on film and film exhibition around the world, and this piece reported on a strike of nickelodeon projectionists and singers (songs were a common part of early cinema shows) in Chicago.
Artistes and Operators Strike
A somewhat humourous situation recently arose in Chicago, where the ladies and gentlemen who warble such sweet music at the five-cent picture shows joined forces with the bioscope operators and “struck.” There are now over 400 picture shows, employing about 900 people, and they have formed an Operators’ Union. The strikers complain that some of them have been forced to work twelve hours a day. One of the leaders say [sic] “I have known several instances where they did not have time to stop for their meals. I saw a performer bite into a sandwich, leave it on a chair until his act was done, and then finish it.
“If we cannot secure eight-hour days and the pay we ask, this army of employees will stand at the doors of these amusement places Monday and persuade patrons not to enter until the union demands are met.”
On the following Monday, Miss Leonora Drake stood in front of a five-cent theatre on the West Side, and warbled the latest illustrated song. Actors and actresses stop [sic] beside her, and when the crowd paused to listen they called out to them:
“Stay where you are. Don’t go in that theatre. It’s unfair. We’re on a strike, and if you’re with us stay on the outside. She’ll sing. Don’t you think that’s worth a decent salary?”
And while Leonora sang, theatre patrons stood outside and listened.
All over the city striking five-cent theatre artists adopted similar tactics to compel theatre owners to agree to union demands. Vaudeville performers did their turns for nothing out in the middle of the street; teams danced and sang, and moving picture operators, with no machines to operate, explained to the crowds what the strike was for, and declared that five-cent theatre artists were being driven like slaves for the entertainment of the public.
Latest advices [sic] from the scene of war do not tell us if the strike is ended yet.
The Bioscope 