Sylvester / New Year's Eve (Film concert: World premiere: 2020 restoration by Deutsche Kinemathek based on the Komiya Collection print)

Lupu Pick: Sylvester (DE 1924). Cinematographer (outdoors): Guido Seeber.

Lupu Pick: Sylvester (DE 1924). Cinematographer (indoors): Karl Hasselmann. Eugen Klöpfer (Man), Frida Richard (Mother), Edith Posca (Woman).

World premiere: Film Concert Sylvester, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Piazza Maggiore, Bologna, 29 Aug 2020. Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna diretta da Timothy Brock. Photo: Lorenzo Burlando / Il Cinema Ritrovato.

Sylvester. Tragödie einer Nacht / La notte di San Silvestro
    DE 1924. Director: Lupu Pick. 57 min
    Scen.: Carl Mayer. F.: Karl Hasselmann (Innen), Guido Seeber (Strassen). M.: Luise Heilborn-Körbitz. Scgf.: Klaus Richter. Mus.: Klaus Pringsheim.
    Int.: Edith Posca (la donna), Eugen Klöpfer (l’uomo), Frida Richard (madre), Karl Harbacher, Julius E. Herrmann, Rudolf Blümner.
    Prod.: Lupu Pick per Rex-Film AG. DCP.
    1529 m
    There are no intertitles in the film.
    Unreleased in Finland.
    Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato: Recovered and Restored.
    Restored in 2020 by Deutsche Kinemathek in collaboration with the National Film Archive of Japan and La Cinémathèque française at laboratories ARRI and Imagica Lab with the support of German Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
    DCP from Deutsche Kinemathek.
    Video greeting by Hisashi Okajima (National Film Archive of Japan).
    Introduced by Martin Koerber, hosted by Mariann Lewinsky.
    Partitura originale composta per la prima del film nel 1924 da Klaus Pringsheim, ricostruita ed arrangiata da Frank Strobel.
    Accompagnamento dal vivo dell'Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna diretta da Timothy Brock. 32 players.
    Viewed at Piazza Maggiore, 29 Aug 2020.

Hiroshi Komatsu (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020): "Sylvester – Tragödie einer Nacht is the fourth collaborative work of Lupu Pick and Carl Mayer following Der Dummkopf (The Blockhead, 1920), Scherben (Shattered, 1921) and Grausige Nächte (Nights of Terror, 1921). And for Mayer, it is the third Kammerspielfilm after Scherben and Hintertreppe. Mayer also wrote the original idea for the script of Die Straße (The Street, 1923), which was directed by Karl Grune around the same time. Sylvester is, in a sense, a work developed from Die Straße; here the street becomes a landscape on which the protagonist’s inner feelings are projected. The expression of the street seen in these two films would further link to the importance of the street in the films of Neue Sachlichkeit. In the Kammerspielfilm, the tiny things in daily life that most films do not depict are observed as seen through a microscope, and the psychological movements of the people become important, represented not through the intertitles but through the subtle changes and movements of the actors’ expressions. A strong, intensive and quite different drama is born via these experiments. The camera not only witnesses the tragedy of a family over the course of one night in Sylvester, but also finally shows the world itself as a living environment – Lotte Eisner called it “Umwelt”. The objects and the landscape are shown almost as living objects. This is the animism that runs throughout this work. The protagonist dies but in this living world a new life is born." Hiroshi Komatsu (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020)

Julia Wallmüller (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020): "Sylvester is based on a script by Carl Mayer that is a work of art in itself and was published to coincide with the film’s premiere. Sylvester shows us the tragic story of a woman, a man and his mother on New Year’s Eve, featuring the street as supporting actor, so to speak: cinematographer Guido Seeber shot the street scenes with a moving camera. Sylvester premiered in Berlin in January 1924 with music by Klaus Pringsheim. The original negative of the film is lost. The only surviving German element is a heavily abridged nitrate print in the collection of Deutsche Kinemathek. A vintage print of the English version archived in the Komiya-Nitrate Collection of the National Film Archive of Japan is the most complete preserved film element. This print was presented in Bologna in 2019, while the restoration was still under way. In a collaborative project between Deutsche Kinemathek and the National Film Archive of Japan, Sylvester has been digitised and restored. The German nitrate print and film elements from La Cinémathèque française were used to substitute fragmented or badly damaged parts of the Japanese print. Furthermore, Deutsche Kinemathek aimed at correcting the numerous editing mistakes inherent in this element. Important preliminary work had already been done by Filmmuseum München, but many obviously displaced shots still remained without any indication of their correct position. During the reconstruction phase, the original manuscript of Klaus Pringsheim’s score was located in the archives at the McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. It contained references to the content of the film that served as important indications for reconstructing the cut as presumably seen in 1924. In an intensive collaboration, Deutsche Kinemathek and conductor Frank Strobel, who was brought in to reconstruct and arrange the music for the restored version, managed to reunite the images and music of the dramatic Kammerspiel that Lupu Pick shot as warning to society." Julia Wallmüller (Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020)

AA: The Komiya Collection print of Sylvester was a revelation when it was rediscovered at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in 1992 in Pordenone.

Tonight the well-known (yet perhaps still unknown?) Weimar classic was reborn in the film concert on the Piazza Maggiore. The 2020 Deutsche Kinemathek restoration is based on the Komiya Collection nitrate print, and the subtle théâtre intime experience is greatly enhanced by the visual refinement. For the first time since the premiere the original music by Klaus Pringsheim was heard, played by the orchestra of Teatro Comunale, conducted by Timothy Brock. It is now on my shortlist of ten greatest original silent film scores.

For generations the film was known only in truncated versions. When I saw the Pordenone screening (1357 m / 66 min), I had fresh in memory the then best available European print, the Munich restoration that we had screened at Cinema Orion in Helsinki in 1987 (1031 m). The short Munich version was good, but the superior quality of the Komiya Collection print and its subtle toning brought out nuances and balances in a much more effective way.

Hiroshi Komatsu, who introduced Sylvester in Pordenone in 1992, sums up the film very well in his Bologna program note above. Almost all attempts to give a resume or synopsis of Sylvester fail to convey what the film is about, but Komatsu catches the essence of this unique film that takes place beyond verbal discourse.

God has scattered the people who are building the Tower of Babel and confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other. Outside, there is great joy: on New Year's Eve people are partying on the streets like there is no tomorrow. Inside, there is deep sorrow: a man, crushed between mother and wife, regresses to a baby and ends his life. Brief insert shots portray the indifferent nature: the Moon over the sea at night.

This is just the external course of the film whose deepest currents are profoundly moving yet impossible to verbalize. Sylvester is an example of film art that moves in the wavelengths of pantomime, ballet, Beethoven's string quartets and the great poets of the age.

The screenwriter Carl Mayer famously emerged as a founder of this kind of cinematic monologue intérieur, in films including Scherben (27 May 1921, D: Lupu Pick), Hintertreppe (19 Dec 1921, D: Leopold Jessner & Paul Leni), Die Strasse (29 Nov 1923, D: Karl Grune), Sylvester (3 Jan 1924, D: Lupu Pick) and Der letzte Mann (23 Dec 1924, D: F. W. Murnau).

With the exception of Der letzte Mann / The Last Laugh, these were not hit films, but both Carl Mayer and Lupu Pick were also skilled at entertainment. Creating a film based on pure visuals, without intertitles, and employing an "unchained camera" ("die entfesselte Kamera") were reasons for Der letzte Mann to achieve world fame and for Fox Film Corporation to hire Murnau as their house director. But these qualities were already present in Sylvester.

Regarding its emphasis on pure visuals, it was a great loss that there were no worthy prints of Sylvester for a long time. Now this loss has been rectified by this great film restoration by Deutsche Kinemathek and the resurrection of the original score by Frank Strobel.

God is in the detail.