Zhenshchina zavtrashevo dnya / A Woman of Tomorrow (+ The Loan Shark King + The Shop Girl Detective)

Vera Yureneva / Вера Леонидовна Юренева

Screened with earphone commentary in Italian and English at Sala Mastroianni - Cinema Lumière, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 3 July 2014
   Accompagnamento al piano di Donald Sosin

Mariann Lewinsky (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "From this year's About a Hundred Years Ago. 1914 and Ritrovati e restaurati sections you can gather a nice sampler of actresses, and use it for all kinds of studies. This is a test run."

"Rise of the Film Star: Mary Cléo Tarlarini (Amor di regina) represents the pioneering generation - by 1914 she had appeared in some ninety films, a diva avant la lettre. Maria Jacobini (Il focolare domestico, Addio Giovinezza!) and Norma Talmadge (The Lady and Her Maid, The Loan Shark King), just emerging in 1914, were destined to become big stars, while in Sangue bleu Francesca Bertini is simply treated like a star, becoming one in the process, the lavish display of dresses doing much of the work. The most iconic film star of all time, Greta Garbo (The Temptress), was in real life a shy person who disliked acting; but her star persona, a divine beauty suffused with secret sufferings, casts an unfailing spell."

"Double Bill. For great stage actresses who also made great films, see Lyda Borelli (Fior di male), Nazimova (Eye for Eye), Tora Teje (Norrtullsligan), and Vera Yureneva (Žhenšhčhina zavtrašhnego dnya). Yureneva's masterful performance of 1914 fills us with a sense of gratitude to cinematography, which enables us to see it."

"Creators. The expressivity of actress Asta Nielsen (Vordertreppe-Hintertreppe) caused a sensation that changed cinema. She did not limit her talents to playing victims, but created a wide range of characters, including spunky low-class women. Her comedies inspired Rosa Porten (Die Landpomeranze, Der neueste Star vom Variété) and Wanda Treumann (Maison Fifi, Wanda's Trick, Das Teufelchen). On the other hand, acting was not the aim of Stacia Napierkowska (La Coupable, L'Étoile du génie, Effetti di luce). She created her film roles as pantomimes, and they should be understood and appreciated as such." Mariann Lewinsky (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

1914. ATTRICI E DIVE

Coming from the Robert Flaherty screening I missed the first film in this programme and saw two shorts of fine Vitagraph quality, and a strong Russian drama.

THE LOAN SHARK KING
US 1914. D: Van Dyke Brooke. Story: Laura Colfax. C: Van Dyke Brooke (Hartman), Norma Talmadge (Helen Hartman), Antonio Moreno (Harry Graham). P: Vitagraph & Co. 35 mm. 335 m. 16' at 18 fps. B&w. From: BFI - National Archive
    AA: A drama. Defying her father's orders the daughter elopes with an artist. Five years later, there are two kids, and the artist is employed, but loan sharks pursue him wherever he works. The husband dies, and Helen is left with debt. Foreclosure is imminent, and the agents are already assessing the meagre possessions. Helen, left alone as a widowed mother, is facing a still more crushing system of usury. There is one man behind this - the loan shark king. The anagnorisis and the peripeteia: her own father is the loan shark king. Helen's father sees his two grandchildren. At the resolution Helen is utterly exhausted. - A fine natural performance by Norma Talmadge. - There is a Griffith affinity not only in the story (qf. A Corner in Wheat, The Usurer) but also in the mise-en-scène and the stark and uncluttered storytelling by Van Dyke Brooke. Ok print.

THE SHOP GIRL DETECTIVE
US 1914. P: Vitagraph & Co. 35 mm. 298 m. 14' at 18 fps. B&w.  From: BFI National Archive
    AA: A comedy. The would-be "shop girl detective" is using every free minute even at her job to read detective fiction. A millionaire from Upper Crust Avenue is forbidding his wife to visit tango tea events: "I will shut down on your spending money". The zealous girl detective misunderstands things and has police arrest the Upper Crust lady with a supposedly stolen garter. A funny one; it would be interesting to know who did this and who is the talented comedienne who plays the shop girl detective. Ok print.

ŽHENŠHČHINA ZAVTRAŠHNEGO DNYA
Женщина завтрашнего дня / Zhenshtshina zavtrashnego dnja / A Woman of Tomorrow. A modern drama in 3 acts / La Femme du demain / Femmes de demain / De Vrouw van Morgen. RU 1914. D: Piotr Chardynin. C: Vera Yureneva / Vera Jureneva, Ivan Mozžuchin / Ivan Mozzhukhin / Ivan Mosjoukine, Maria Morskaya. P: Khanzhonkov & Co. 35 mm. 795 m. 38' at 18 fps. Col. Dutch intertitles. From: EYE Filmmuseum (The Desmet Collection)
    SC: Aleksandr Voznesensky.
    AA: A drama with two great actors. Ivan Mozzhukhin we know, but the remarkable discovery here is the great Vera Yureneva (1876-1962) as the doctor who is also an activist for female rights - which was not just a role for Vera Yureneva. The film was written for her.
    Nora (Yureneva) is a famous doctor, and her lover is Robert (Mozzhukhin). There are a lot of patients in Nora's waiting room. There is an authentic quality in these scenes. Nora is very tired, but there is a nice dinner at her home, and Robert is coming. Yet there is an urgent call that interrupts the dinner. "I cannot deny help. And so many people can give me no money". Robert, alone, looks for distraction, visits a café, and smiles at the sweet waitress Nelly. He invites her to the theatre. She is very shy.
    Nora and Robert are still dating. There is a conference in Vienna which Nora helps organize. She gives a powerful speech for equal rights for women. Nora and Robert's relationship is still passionate.
    One year later, a grateful patient offers a considerable financial compensation for an efficient cure. "Now we can get married". They consult a picture book of all the places they can visit on their honeymoon.
    Nelly is ill. Robert visits her. She has a baby. The case is really serious. Nora is a specialist in such cases. There is great mourning.
    There is a Jan Olsson shot - a threeways split screen from a hotel from which Robert asks the concierge to call Nora. Nora is in the image on the left, the concierge and Robert are in the image to the right, and in the middle there is a city view - of Hanzhonkov studios.
    Nora arrives and decides to stay until the crisis is over. Nelly is delirious. "Please call her husband and ask him to come".
    There is an electrifying shot when Robert arrives and looks are exchanged.
    There is a further electrifying shot when Robert approaches and the shock starts to sink in.
    The performances have been rather subdued until now.
    The conclusion of the film is about Nora's infinite disappointment, also involving gesticulation of sorrow and agony. It is a moving pantomimic conclusion to the story.
    Chardynin's early cinema storytelling style is assured. Much is in long shots or full shots, often in long takes.
    A print from a toned and tinted source. The colours have mostly faded, except in intertitles, and the visual quality is then not brilliant. But there are enough fine passages for a mental reconstruction of how this movie has looked.

P.S. 8 Aug 2014. Lauri Piispa told me today that there are two versions of A Woman of Tomorrow. The version we saw in Bologna which survives in Amsterdam. And the other version that can be accessed at Gosfilmofond in Moscow. The Moscow print is not only longer - there is one reel more of tragedy, including the suicide of Robert (Ivan Mosjoukine) - but the entire film was reshot. Lauri also told that there is a sequel, Zhenshchina zavtrashevo dnya, 2:ya seriya, 1915, also directed by Chardynin. Their screenwriter Aleksandr Voznesensky was Yureneva's husband.

Oidhche sheanchais / Night of the Storyteller (2014 Harvard Film Archive preservation)

Michael Dirrane listening to the ancient yarn.

GB/IE 1935. D: Robert Flaherty. ED: John Goldman. P: Gaumont-British Picture Corporation Ltd. 35 mm. [20' announced]. B&w. Gaelic version with English subtitles. From: Harvard Film Archive
    Restored by Harvard Film Archive from a 35 mm nitrate print discovered at Harvard University in 2013
    Presented by Peter von Bagh. Introducono Sunniva O'Flynn e Haden Guest
    Actual duration: 12 min + restoration credits.
    C: Maggie Dirrane (the singer), Michael Dirrane, Seánainín Tom Ó Dioráin (the storyteller).
    Screened with e-subtitles in Italian by Sub-Ti at Cinema Arlecchino, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 3 July 2014

Haden Guest, Sunniva O'Flynn (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "The short Oidhche sheanchais affirms Flaherty's belief in cinema as a mythopoeic and folkloric art. Ireland's first government-sponsored film, Oidhche sheanchais was funded by a modest £ 200 budget assigned for the production of an Irish language talkie enshrining a vital element of the national heritage. Flaherty directed the film while in London recording the post-synch sound for Man of Aran, using that film's cast together with Seáinín Tom Ó Dioráin, a renowned Aran island storyteller. Unlike Man of Aran, Oidhche sheanchais was recorded entirely in Irish. Prior to the film's release the Irish Press distributed a dialogue transcript to ensure that "children will... not miss any of the beauty and subtlety of the story it tells"." Haden Guest, Sunniva O'Flynn (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

Haden Guest in his introduction told us that this is the first public screening of the preservation, the answer print flown directly from the lab today from L.A.
    Oidhche sheanchais was the crystallization of the folkloric in Flaherty's work.
    For the first time in the cinema Irish language was spoken.
    It was Flaherty's first work in direct sound.
    In the film-to-film preservation the guideline was to respect the print - to keep the texture, the grain, and the truth of the photochemical image - within that patina, the true beauty of the photochemical image.

Sunniva O'Flynn reported that little had been heard about Oidhche sheanchais since it was distributed in Irish cinemas in 1935. From Man of Aran, Maggie Dirrane sings the sea shanty of loss of lives. Seánainín Tom Ó Dioráin, the storyteller, lost his life in a boating accident not long after the making of this film. (My notes of the introductions.)

AA: Four years ago when we did our Robert Flaherty retrospective I was aware of the title Oidhche sheanchais appearing in some filmographies, but none of the authoritative sources I consulted then could say anything about it, not even if the film had actually existed. Now we know.

Bought at the time for language teaching purposes by Harvard University, the film had survived there, and was identified in 2012.

It is a simple record with Maggie Dirrane singing, Seánainín Tom Ó Dioráin telling a story, and Michael Dirrane listening. The spelling of the name of the storyteller sounds like "Johnny Tom O'Dirrane"; he might be the grandfather? "It is a story that was old a thousand years ago".

It is the story of Martin Conroe and his children in Connemara. It was reported that fish shoaled in Blacksod Bay. Boats would come to fish there. That was the night when a storm grew. Martin Conroe's children collected nets. They used pitchforks to light the sod, put embers in front of the pitchfork to put glowing sod into the ballast. A great wave was approaching, and every boat was sinking, and the tail of the wave was so big. But pushing the pitchfork with the sod against the wave the wave flattened out. There were 78 widows with orphaned children.
    Then came a nobleman with a white horse to Martin Conroe. He asked his son to "accompany me for one hour". The son no longer knew where he was. There was a castle, a royal residence, they went from room to room, and there was a room with beautiful young women. One was in bed, and a pitchfork protruded from her belly. "Pull this out". She was the queen of the palace. And he pulled the pitchfork and the sod from her side. "I am the great wave that arose and killed so many people. It was I who raised the gale and the swell." The son found the horse again, and there were three years of prosperity. The Conroes bought Blacksod Bay, they could have bought the entire parish. There was a long life for the brothers. (I apologize for misunderstandings in the notes I scribbled during the screening).

Yet another expression of the Flaherty philosophy: catch the person when he is totally immersed in what he is doing.

A treat for a Finn, from the land of Kalevala, a fellow land of ancient storytellers and oral legends that have lasted millennia, also our most ancients legends being those of sailors and fishermen.

Flaherty documents here the oral storytelling circumstances: it is like song-lore, the yarn having a structure and rhythm like a song, the listeners repeating keywords like a chorus.

The faces are glowing. With his cinematographer, Flaherty is documenting the inner light of the storytellers.

The print conveys the true grit photochemical quality.

P.S. Harvard Film Archive website: "Robert Flaherty’s lost Irish Gaelic film found at Harvard. - Documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty directed the first film made in the Irish language, Oidhche Sheanchais (“A Night of Storytelling”) in 1935 during the production of his now classic film Man of Aran. - Cited in nearly every history of Irish cinema, this short (11 minute) film has been missing, believed lost, since a fire destroyed the only known copies in 1943. A nitrate print of the film, purchased by the Harvard College Library in 1935 at the request of Harvard’s Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, was rediscovered by Houghton Library curators during a cataloging update in 2012." (Harvard Film Archive website, 3 July 2014)

Wild Boys of the Road

Kovan onnen poikia. US 1933. D: William A. Wellman. Story: Daniel Ahearn. SC: Earl Baldwin. DP: Arthur L. Todd. ED: Thomas Pratt. AD: Esdras Hartley. C: Frankie Darro (Eddie), Edwin Phillips (Tommy), Dorothy Coonan (Sally), Grant Mitchell (Mr. Smith), Rochelle Hudson (Grace), Sterling Holloway (Ollie), Ward Bond (Red), Minna Gombell (zia Carrie), Claire McDowell (Mrs. Smith), Ann Hovey (Lola), Charles Grapewin (Mr. Cadmust), Robert Barrat (giudice White). P: First National Pictures. 35 mm. 68'. From: Library of Congress per concessione di Park Circus
    Viewed with e-subtitles in Italian by Sub-Ti at Cinema Jolly, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 3 July 2014

Gina Telaroli (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "In November 2011, when news broke of Occupy Wall Street's forced and violent removal from Zuccotti Park at the hands of the NYPD and the hoses they held, images of Wellman's 1933 film of unemployable youth living in boxcars and shantytowns and repeatedly being violently ejected from them immediately sprang to mind. But instead of making a statement against capitalism and the 99 percent, Wellman's wild boys and girl (his future wife Dorothy Coonan) are just aiming to survive while looking for jobs and a way to help the struggling families they left behind. They're caught in the very real world of the Great Depression, a world Wellman went to great lengths to capture accurately, as Bertrand Tavernier documents: "Wellman's social-problem films are among the genre's most radical and violent. Hal Wallis had several shots deleted from Wild Boys of the Road because he deemed them unbearable for the general public; to Wellman they expressed the realities of the Depression". The movie also got saddled with a required and very-much-tacked-on happy ending. Even with its imposed outlook, Wild Boys of the Road stands out amongst films of the era, as it creates a striking juxtaposition between the harsh reality of the time period and the innocence and joy of youth. Tommy and Sally light up a screen that keeps threatening to go dark. This is perfectly encapsulated in the scene where Eddie sells his beloved car in order to get money for his unemployed father. After giving his father the twenty-two American dollars he desperately haggled for, he steps outside and is confronted with the now empty and abandoned garage. He pauses for a moment, walks away from the garage, and begins to whistle a few bars of We're in the Money, made popular earlier that year by Gold Diggers of 1933 (the film that coincidentally introduced Wellman to Coonan). The tune slowly tapers off as reality sets in, and he suddenly, and fiercely, turns around and runs to shut the garage door. It's a somber scene, despite the burst of Busby Berkeley dreams, and beautifully brings to mind some of Manny Farber's many words on Wellman: "Of all these poet-builders Wellman is the most interesting, particularly with Hopper-type scenery. It is a matter of drawing store fronts, heavy bedroom boudoirs, the heisting of a lonely service station, with light furious strokes. Also, in mixing jolting vulgarity [...] with a space composition dance in which the scene seems to be constructed before your eyes". Gina Telaroli (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

AA: Wild Boys of the Road was the film in which I really paid attention to William Wellman as a director for the first time when that movie was telecast in Finland exactly 40 years ago; it was never theatrically released in our country. The theme certainly was topical and inflammatory in our land, too, when it was made during the Great Depression. In 1974 I was impressed by the strong social commitment in the film which fitted into the Warner Bros. studio line (as did Gold Diggers of 1933, four melodies of which we keep hearing during Wild Boys of the Road), but also to Wellman's personal views: his sympathy for the outcasts fighting for their right to live. On the other hand, Wellman was a dedicated anti-Bolshevik de primo giorno, contemplating joining Merian C. Cooper in the attack against Bolsheviks in 1918 (Merian C. Cooper then became perhaps the cinema's first Gulag survivor!), and I guess the politics matched ideally in John Wayne's Batjac company where Wellman made some of the best films of his last decade as a film director.

There is nothing extraordinary in the prologue showing the teenagers' normal life, dating, partying, and petting with girls. But the account of the social downfall of families of the middle-class kids is startling, and not so different from what is happening today in many parts of the world. The symbol of degradation is the need to sell the kids' rundown jalopy to the junkyard for 22 dollars. "Like saying goodbye to somebody". I was thinking about Ritwik Ghatak's Indian car film Ajantrik screened here two days ago.

The boys realize they are a burden to their impoverished families and decide to hit the road. Their railroad adventure is the truly remarkable part of this film. Like in Beggars of Life (and in Other Men's Women) Wellman is in his element on the railroad. Their first night at the uncovered freight car. Meeting a fellow traveller, the he who is a she. Dorothy Coonan, the future Mrs. Wellman, is excellent as the orphan Sally. The train guards and the railroad patrols are terrifying, most horrifyingly so the brakeman Ward Bond who rapes a lonely girl in an empty car. He is lynched by the wild boys. The scenes in rainstorms, the fights, and the escapes are hard hitting. The tragic turning-point is when Tommy loses his balance at a railway station escape, and his leg is run over by an approaching train. He has to be amputated, and he must start to use a prosthetic leg. In Cleveland there is "a boy's republic", "Sewer Pipe City", but the abandoned children are evicted from the land via waterhoses. In New York the kids find opportunities for jobs, but when Eddie steals a few dollars to buy clothes to qualify for an elevator attendant, they are arrested, facing prison. (Here I was thinking about the Indian film of yesterday, Bimal Roy's Do bigha zameen, where the desperate boy steals to help save the family's two acres of land). But the judge is understanding and promises to help them, instead. They all get a new start in life.

Luis Buñuel accompanied Wild Boys of the Road in Los olvidados to this point but added a tragic comment in his epilogue. Wild Boys of the Road is still one of the strongest and earliest entries in a remarkable lineage which includes A Passport to Life (Putyovka v zhizhn, by Nikolai Ekk, inspired by the books of Makarenko), Sciuscià, Valahol Europábán / Somewhere in Europe, Los olvidados, Salaam Bombay, Pixote, and many others.

In this period William Wellman was churning out quickies at Warner Bros. at the pace of five films annually or more. But Wild Boys of the Road does not look like a quickie or a cheapie. There is an epic feeling of national tragedy. It is a journey from coast to coast, from sunny California to New York. The boys state that "there are thousands like us", and the film makes us feel that visually, almost physically.

A brilliant print from the Library of Congress.

Do bigha zameen / Two Acres of Land

Bimal Roy: दो बीघा ज़मीन / Do bigha zameen / Two Acres of Land (IN 1953).

दो बीघा ज़मीन / Do bigha zamin / Due ettari di terra. 

   IN 1953. P: Bimal Roy per Bimal Roy Productions.

   D: Bimal Roy. Story: Salil Choudhury. SC: Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Dial.: Paul Mahendra. DP:  Kamal Bose. ED: Hrishikesh Mukherjee. AD: Gonesh Basak. M: Salil Choudhury. Songs: Shailendra. 

    C: Balraj Sahni (Shambu Maheto), Nirupa Roy (Parvati Maheto), Ratan Kumar (Kanhaiya Maheto), Murad (Thakur Harnam Singh), Nana Palsikar (Dhangu Maheto), Nasir Hussain (conducente di risciò).

    [DCP was announced]. 122'. B&w. Hindi version. From: National Archive of India

    Actual screening format: bluray with English subtitles.
    Introduced by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.

Precede
INDIAN NEWS REVIEW N° 246 (IN 1953) 9' - including footage of Mount Everest conquerors, sherpas, and their equipment.

Viewed at Cinema Jolly (Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato), 2 July 2014

Saeed Mirza (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "Originally a director in Bengali films, Bimal Roy brought the humanism and social concerns of his tradition to Hindi cinema. A screening of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves inspired him to create Do Bigha Zameen, the grittily dramatic tale of a poor farmer's struggle to save his land from the clutches of a rapacious landlord. Do Bigha Zameen won its director and its lead actor Balraj Sahni several awards, besides featuring in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954, where it received a special mention."

The Ring of Truth

"It was less than a decade after India gained independence from British rule that Bimal Roy's film Do Bigha Zameen was released. Audiences around the country greeted it with stunned silence. There was no boisterous acclaim, none of the celebratory music that follows the news of a film becoming a box-office success. It was an acknowledgement that a new kind of cinema had emerged: a cinema in the popular mode, with the ring of truth."

"The film had bridged the gap between fiction and reality. Yes, it was overly melodramatic at times, and yes, the story line did have avoidable coincidences. But somewhere in all of this, there was an incredible honesty that could not be ignored. The film had touched the core of a nation's dilemma, as it attempted to free itself from its feudal past and move towards a modern, industrial future."

"The dilemma was about land. Eightyfive percent of the population lived in rural and semi-rural areas. Of  this, the vast majority were small, marginal farmers and landless labourers who worked on the fields of the big feudal landlords. In urban areas too, there was a large population of landless labourers who had escaped serfdom and migrated there in search of work."

"This was the central idea of Do Bigha Zameen. It is the story of a marginal farmer who is given a short time of three months to pay back a debt or forfeit his small piece of land. The film is about his battle to save the dignity and honour of his family. Bimal Roy slowly builds up the tension in the film, as the farmer and his young son move from their rural environs to the city of Kolkata in order to earn that crucial amount of money that can redeem their lives. The tension begins to mount as the farmer becomes a human carriage ferrying people across the city. As the deadline approaches, his son begins to work as a shoeshine boy and his pregnant wife also joins a village workforce."

"The film now revolves around the family fighting frenziedly against the odds to save their land. In the midst of all of this, Bimal Roy also reveals the underbelly of the city, where the poor congregate to live and work, and to make something of their lives. It is here that the viewer finds a camaraderie that celebrates the human spirit of compassion and understanding. But Bimal Roy reveals he has other concerns on his mind. He had two choices on how to end the film: Would he allow the characters to emerge triumphant from their ordeal, or would he rather predict the course the country would take in the future? He chose the latter. That is why his film has the ring of truth even today." Saeed Mirza (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

In his introduction Shivendra Singh Dungarpur singled out two major inspirations for Bimal Roy. In 1951 Vsevolod Pudovkin visited India and encouraged film-makers to shoot on location. In 1952, in the Bombay Film Festival, Ladri di bicicletti was screened. Bimal Roy lived in Calcutta, a city which has not changed that much to this day.

AA: "The land is a farmer's mother", is a statement in Do bigha zameen, and the thrilling suspense story is about a farmer's family trying to save their two acres of land, everything they own.

The main current is realistic, but this film, too, is also a musical. There is a rain dance, there is a hymn to Mother Earth, there is a lament as the farmer is leaving for Calcutta, there are praises to the harvest. There are also urban song numbers. The most touching number is the lullaby of a kind mother to her baby. That mother helps the illiterate female protagonist to write a letter to her husband in the city.

Finally they all work hard to meet the three month deadline to pay back a debt to the callous landlord who wants to develop the land for industry. The father breaks his leg as a rickshaw driver. The son is lured to crime by a pickpocket. The pregnant mother, for the first time in the city, becomes a victim of hit and run, almost dies, but is rescued by a blood transfusion and expensive medicine, to which they now need all their savings.

They lose all except everything. They have themselves, and "the entire earth is our home now, the blue sky our roof".

It is a story of exploitation and degradation but also a story of friendship, solidarity, and an invincible life force.

Visual quality: bluray. There were two digital breaks with pixelation.

Brüder / [Brothers] and Zwei Welten / [Two Worlds]

ZWEI WELTEN
[Due mondi]. DE 1929. D: Werner Hochbaum. SC: Heinrich Braune. DP: Gustav Berger. P: Werner Hochbaum Filmproduktion GmbH. 35 mm. From: Bundesarchiv, Filmarchiv Austria

BRÜDER
[Fratello] / Brother. DE 1929. D: Werner Hochbaum. SC: Werner Hochbaum. DP: Gustav Berger. C: Gyula Balogh (il figlio), Erna Schumacher (la vecchia madre), Ilse Berger. P: Werner Hochbaum Filmproduktion GmbH. 35 mm. 1731 m. [64' announced]. B&w. From: Deutsche Kinemathek per concessione di Filmarchiv Austria
    The cast of Brüder consists of "Menschen aus dem Volke", "zum ersten Mal vor Kamera".
    Silent films screened without live music.
    Duration of Zwei Welten: 17 min, actual duration of Brüder: 75 min
    Screened with earphone commentary in Italian and English at Cinema Lumière - Sala Scorsese (Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2 July 2014)

Joachim Schätz (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "Brüder is Werner Hochbaum's feature debut, as well as the film that ushered in his rediscovery when it was saved from obscurity by East German film historians in 1973. Commissioned by the dockworkers' union and financed via the local Social Democratic party, it retells Hamburg's historic dockers' strike of 1896-97 as a family drama: one brother is a dockworker, the other a policeman. When push comes to shove, class solidarity trumps familial loyalty. Shots of harsh conditions in the workers' quarters, filmed on location, attest to the necessity of continued struggle. Starting with a mission statement ("to create a German proletarian film with simple means") and featuring mostly non-professional actors, Brüder is both modest and bold in its aspirations. Director-writer-producer Hochbaum eschews individualized storytelling in favor of patiently surveying a milieu and stringing together significant details. The prologue strolls through wintry Hamburg as if in a city symphony, then jumps from a policeman pushing a drunk to an Eisenstein-inspired montage of Germanic symbols of state authority. After measuring the police station against the worker protagonist's cramped apartment, Brüder settles into an observant social-realist mode shot through with striking symbolism. This mode is continued in the short subject Zwei Welten, a local campaign film for the Social Democratic party. Hochbaum fits some recycled material from Brüder into a montage of class contrast. While the jobless are marching, idle feet are playing golf and tennis. As the drained worker gets out of his coat, the industrialist is trying on a swastika armband for laughs. "All of you decide: dictatorship or democracy..." Joachim Schätz (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

AA:  There is little to add to Joachim Schätz's excellent programme text.
    Both Brüder and Zwei Welten are built on contrast - two brothers, two worlds. The structure of Zwei Welten is classical-Griffithian (A Corner in Wheat). The roaming, observing camera records details of two worlds heartbreakingly distant from one another. Dictatorship or democracy? The film urges us to vote. The emphasis on the Nazi character is significant in a film made in 1929. Among the final images of the Social Democratic election propaganda film: harvesting, children of the Pestalozzi School, a shower of ballots.
    In Brüder, one brother is a docker and labour union activist, the other brother is a policeman in the Hafenwache (harbour patrol). They are introduced as antagonists, but when the docker is arrested, the policeman brother discreetly lets him escape. He is arrested again, and this time he lets it happen. He knows that the fight has started, they will now always fight for their rights. The spark has been ignited, and the fire will never be extinguished.
    Among the mottoes is Karl Marx's dictum about the history of mankind having been that of class struggles.
    The visual register is wide-ranging. There is lyrical footage of the harbour of Hamburg. There are beautiful documentary passages covering the waterfront. The fictional passages border on non-fiction, even naturalism.
    Even the inserts of telegrams, bulletins and declarations seem to have documentary value in the literal sense.
    Hochbaum displays a fine sense of rhythm in this silent film. There are passages of melancholy, fatigue, and silence. There are scenes of hard work, strike activity, and confrontations with the harbour police.
    In Hochbaum's films there is also a sense of natural movement: how his people move in their work, in their meetings, and in their free time. Their habitus - their physiognomy, their gestures, their expressions - are right; they are playing themselves.
    The account of the strike is sober and believable. Machine workers, coal men, sailors, and cleaners join the dockers. Brüder is a valuable chapter in the story of solidarity.

I love music in silent films, and good music can add 50% to the force of the movie. But it was like a breath of fresh air to enjoy these films in glorious silence, letting the innate rhythm of Hochbaum's montage and images have its free course.

The prints convey the true grit photochemical force of the films.

Ajantrik / Pathetic Fallacy

Ritwik Ghatak:অযান্ত্রিক / Ajantrik / Pathetic Fallacy (IN 1957).

অযান্ত্রিক. IN 1957. D+SC: Ritwik Ghatak. DP: Dinen Gupta. ED: Ramesh Joshi. AD: Robi Chattopadhyaya. M: Ali Akbar Khan. C: Kali Bannerjee (Bimal), Kajal Gupta (giovane donna), Shriman Deepak, Gyanesh Mukherjee (meccanico), Keshto Mukherjee, Gangapada Basu. P: Promode Lahiry per L.B. Films International. [DCP was announced]. 102'. B&w. Bengali version. From: National Archive of India
    Introduced by Shinvendra Singh Dungarpur.
    A dvd or bluray was screened.
    Precede:
INDIAN NEWS REVIEW N° 721 (India/1962) D.: 8'. V. inglese
    Viewed with e-subtitles in Italian and English at Cinema Jolly, Bologna (Il Cinema Ritrovato), 1 July 2014 - starting with views of a train crash - includes a meeting of Nehru and Mikoyan.

Kumar Shahani (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "'One of the few truly original talents in the cinema this country has produced' was how Satyajit Ray described his contemporary, Ritwik Ghatak. Ajantrik, Ghatak's first released feature, proposes 'an emotional integration with the machine age' through the story of an ecentric taxi-driver named Bimal and a battered old Chevrolet called Jagaddal. The wheezing, honking, rattling car has a mind of its own, and Bimal too treats it as a human being. As he plies his trade in small-town Bihar and the regions of the Oraon tribe, the film explores the comical and philosophical aspects of the strange bond between man and machine."

Freedom from Fetishes

"A refugee of India's Partition, Ritwik Ghatak first thought of Ajantrik when the fledgling nation had been pulled apart into warring states repressing their own varied people, impoverishing themselves through repeated crises of identity. The original inhabitants of India live along its central forests and have been truly independent of any colonization. Ghatak had lived amongst the Oraons at the eastern end of these forests, where perhaps the plough was first perfected. The inhabitants of Central India have always had access to the finest iron ore in the world, from which other people have made weapons and machines that speed up organic tasks to lethal limits."

"But Ghatak knew that the Oraons - and even those who lived on the periphery of their cosmos, such as himself - could counterpoint the violent waves of civilization's upheavals through collective compassion, born of eros and its epistemes. Dance, movement and fluttering banners are forms that have grown from mere fetishes of individuals to alankaras, or figures of speech and music. They in turn can yield the abstractions to approximate signs. The notations, then, can create realizations of science and art, narrative beyond chronologies."

"That is how Ritwik Ghatak arrived at the bizarre structure - if it be so called - of Pathetic Fallacy. Imagine giving a film a title as historically abstract as that! Literally, the title Ajantrik extends the word jantrik (mechanical) to suggest its antithesis. We have seen the end of the era that hegemonized the mechanical over the organic and the self-transformative. In this film of episodes that leads to mutivalent interpretations, having no end or targeted object as it were, Ghatak wants to restore to us the signs that the Oraons and others like them (spread all over the earth) sought to find in their experience."

"It seems to me that the movement of dance frees the fetish from its otherworldly awe, making us both ecstatic and attentive. The fresh tribal air that wafts through the film gives us a promise of primeval freedom, from enclosing ourselves in any garb of stitched habit. The magical can never be levelled to a linear narrative with a beginning, middle and end. It is 'episodic', iterative, moves in curves and spirals that seem to open up and impel expression, contain and liberate from its grasp inner feeling, the secret of energy, desire, of ornament forever being stolen from the divine bride." Kumar Shahani (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

AA: During the screening I was thinking about car films from Méliès till today - Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo en deux heures - In jenen Tagen - Two-Lane Blacktop - The Love Bug - Ein Käfer gibt vollgas - Abbas Kiarostami and Ten - Flåklypa Grand Prix - Zhivyot takoi paren - A Jitney Elopement - Big Business - A Day's Pleasure - Lizzies of the Field - the Hal Roach comedies where a shower of water makes cars disintegrate, their parts disappearing into the sewer - Cosmopolis - Holy Motors - Taxi Driver - Limousine Love - Death Proof - Kustom Kar Kommandos - Katsastus - Christine - La Croisière jaune - Something New - Steve McQueen - Ryan Gosling - Michael Mann - John Frankenheimer - Trafic - Week-End - Bensaa suonissa - the Ilppo Pohjola motor trilogy - Crash - Breakdown (Hitchcock) - The Fast and the Furious - Mad Max... Satyajit Ray's Abhijaan (1962), inspired by Ajantrik...

... and kept realizing better and better that Ritwik Ghatak has created something unique here. The film is a love story between the mad rural taxi driver Bimal and his car (called Jagatdal or Jagaddal) which was ancient already when he purchased it 15 year ago. But he has lovingly maintained it, and his patience is endless despite the fact that the car keeps breaking down. The footboard is out of order. The car needs to be pushed every now and then. It has to be hand-cranked to start. It is a convertible through the torn cloth ceiling of which one can see the sky. There is a constant issue with the cooler whose epic steam clouds are a part of the film's main imagery. It looks not much different than the jalopies so popular during the Golden Age of comedy in the 1910s and the 1920s. - P.S. according to Wikipedia it's a 1920 Chevrolet.

The taxi driver's quixotic journey is a vehicle for some epic scenes of Indian society and reality. The hopeless roads, the rain and the mud, the floods. The hustle and the bustle of the city streets. The children at play. The abandoned young woman who needs to catch a train. The ceremonies of music and dance, modern and ancient. The forest people on the mountain who come to the rescue.

The car is actually quite ready for the cemetery, but Bimal repairs it thoroughly one last time, and to the amazement of all it looks splendid and is in working condition... for a while. After the last ride it is only fit for the metal junkyard. But a child is still playing with its horn.

A farcical celebration of the vigour and life-force of the people against all odds.

The image is full of dynamics and electricity from the start. The talent for mise-en-scène and blocking is innate for Ritwik Ghatak. The rhythm is relaxed and spontaneous.

The visual quality: a home digital format, with some pixelated breaks, based on a mostly healthy source, with occasional scratches and other signs of use.

Paavo Nurmi with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in 1925

La IX Olimpiade di Amsterdam (2014 International Olympic Committee work-in-progress)

IT 1928. 120'. Did. italiane. Estratti delle diverse versioni del film. Introducono Adrian Wood (restoration producer for IOC) e Roberto Cicutto (Cinecittà Istituto Luce). Accompagnamento al piano di John Sweeney. Prod: Istituto LUCE. Original length 4980 m.
Nell'ambito di Film Restoration / FIAF Summer School
    Viewed with e-subtitles in English at Cinema Lumière - Sala Officinema/Mastroianni, Bologna (Il Cinema Ritrovato), 1 July 2014

Adrian Wood (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "The film is currently being restored by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), in association with Istituto LUCE, as part of the IOC's ongoing preservation and restoration of all Official Record Films of the Games. This screening will comprise of un-restored scenes from both the original Italian version and the Dutch version (produced by UFA Berlin under the supervision of Wilhelm Prager) and material from the IOC's digital restoration. Further work on the restoration of the Dutch version is envisaged. This screening will also include a presentation on the film's production and its versioning (for Germany, Netherlands and the Soviet Union) as well as the IOC's restoration programme." Adrian Wood

"A special column on the Istituto Nazionale LUCE in the magazine "Cine Mondo" of June 5, 1928, stated loud and clear: "The Dutch government and the Olympic [Games Organizing] Committee awarded Istituto Nazionale LUCE the exclusive rights to filming the Olympics, acknowledging the institute's perfect technical organization." In reality, as reported by the "Official Report of the Olympic Games of 1928 celebrated at Amsterdam", the deal with Istituto LUCE for the filming and distribution of footage of the Olympic games was done hastily after the Swiss production company O.F.A. (Olympia Film AG) headed by Arnold Fanck, initially chosen for the prestigious job had withdrawn. The unexpected opportunity was extremely appealing, and Istituto LUCE sent some of the best cameramen to Holland to document in detail the Olympic gathering, filming the opening and closing ceremonies and all of the salient moments of each sports event. The result was a feature-length film of over 4900 meters titled La IX Olimpiade di Amsterdam. Despite the unquestionable productive effort involved and the excellence of the footage, the Olympic reportage shot by the Italian unit met an unhappy fate: the precarious commercial agreements made with the Olympic Committee and the Society of Dutch exhibitors prevented Istituto LUCE from fully taking advantage of the international distribution of the film, which would be disseminated in various countries around the world in a second edition overseen by the German director Wilhelm Prager for the UFA in Berlin, with which the Italian film institute had just signed a binding cooperation agreement. From the research still underway it appears that La IX Olimpiade di Amsterdam, in its original full-length version, was never released in Italian theaters, but instead screened as excerpts from the film of individual events in various LUCE newsreels. The lukewarm reception of the Olympic feature-length film in Italy was probably connected to politically-motivated reasons; in fact, at the end of the games, Mussolini declared that he was deeply disappointed by the results of the Italian athletes, so much so that he stripped Lando Ferretti of the presidency of the National Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) and handed it to Augusto Turati, the powerful former secretary of the Italian National Fascist Party: under the circumstances, it is understandable how the grandiose release of a film that in reality only documented the failure of Italian athletics was completely unacceptable to Italian audiences." (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

AA: We first saw 42 minutes of Italian footage (35 mm and video), and then 44 minutes of Dutch footage (35 mm). My remarks have a Finnish bias. Paris 1924 and Amsterdam 1928 were the legendary Olympic games for Finland. (In Amsterdam Finland was the number three medal winning country.) Of both, a feature film was made, and neither was screened in Finland.

LA IX OLIMPIADE DI AMSTERDAM (THE ITALIAN SAMPLE)
The opening ceremony - flash titles only in the 35 mm footage - the Finnish team is included in the opening ceremony footage, but of the long shots it is impossible to identify team members - the Olympic torch - shot put (a shot of a Finnish athlete whom I fail to recognize) - a run [flash titles only], a triple victory for Finland [3000 m steeplechase?] - switch to video footage with intertitles - a relay run, a vigorous sense of speed, victory for the US team ( 4 x 100 or 4 x 400 m), excellent relay footage - the camera is in the centre of the stadium, covering the run in 360 degree pans, with a fine sense of balance, movement, and focus - triple jump: includes footage of Matilainen, Tulikorva, and Tuulos, bronze medal: Vilho Tuulos - women's 4 x 100 m relay, a lively shot of Canada's winning team - 3000 m steeplechase: beautiful footage of Nurmi at ease with the steeples, including the watery ones, Loukola is overwhelmingly the best, in a league of his own, a triple victory for Finland: Toivo Loukola, Paavo Nurmi, Ove Andersen - an extreme close-up - 400 m hurdles - 5000 m finale, a tight group, Nurmi: born to run, winners: Ville Ritola, Paavo Nurmi, Harri Larva [there is something wrong in this information, should be checked] - Marathon: Italians, first, a circle pan, number three: Martti Marttelin - the Dutch Royal Family - Gymnastics - Women's gymnastics - women's show montage

In the introduction covering the passage from the Italian to the Dutch footage Adrian Wood apologized for so many Finnish victories.
    He told that many Olympic films have been corrupted over the years. 
    1928 was a very special case. 
    Arnold Fanck had made the St. Moritz winter Olympics feature film Das weisse Stadion. 
    The 1924 Olympics feature film had been made but found no distribution in Paris, and was no success in GB. 
    For an Amsterdam olympics feature film Fanck and Gurtner could not secure money, and they failed to honour the second deal of payment. 
    The rights then were obtained by L.U.C.E. in Italy. The distribution was complicated by a boycott of LUCE in Netherlands, and by a collaboration between LUCE and Ufa.
    There is no director officially associated with the Amsterdam film, but there is an incorrect information on the internet that Wilhelm Prager directed it.
    Of the 13 reel film reels 1, 4, and 5 were now screened. The LUCE information states the length at 4980 m with intertitles. The content is listed in detail in the LUCE catalogue.
    There is no evidence that there was ever a screening of the entire 13-reel film.
    In the Bundesarchiv there are catalogued 10 shorts belonging to this project, with the credit Bearbeitung: Wilhelm Prager. There is no material in Germany.
    In Gosfilmofond there are some of these shorts, perhaps captured in the 1940s.
    De Olympische Spelen is a 11-part cut. The marathon there is an entire reel.
    There is in Russia also a 1931 Soviet-LUCE version Amsterdamska olimpiada v 1928 g. hronika in 11 reels. It is totally recut, an anti-Olympic film made as propaganda for the Spartakiade movement. The recut and renumbered version is at the Krasnogorsk archive.
    There is no evidence that LUCE ever made a payment for the rights for the Olympic film. (My notes of Adrian Wood's presentation. I apologize for possible misunderstandings.)

LA IX OLIMPIADE DI AMSTERDAM (THE DUTCH SAMPLE)
Gestaltet: Wilhelm Prager - 6de Akte - De Marathon - there is a much weaker visual quality in the Dutch footage - the Marathon teams - soon there is a leading group of 12 runners, 5 of which are Finns - there is a camera car - the cinematography from the camera car is deft - the water spot: among the drinkers, Martti Marttelin - fine footage from either a motorboat or from a car on the opposite side of the river - a shot of a row of several cameras - Bronze medal in marathon: Martti Marttelin
    9. Akte: Zeilen = Sailing, some fine footage from Zuiderzee, also getting a bit monotonous - Schermen = Fencing, pretty boring - Boxing, more exciting, including a long take of Hellström (not a medal winner) - Equestrian: Jumping - the cameraman is deft in following long and complicated movements
    Medal ceremonies

Finally, Adrian Wood emphasized the artistic view of the movie and the skill of the hand-cranking cameramen. The speed was 18 fps, and that was the projection speed and the digital transfer speed here, as well. The movement is natural.

AA: I watched this show from a provincial and patriotic viewpoint as an important document for Finland, then only 11 years old as an independent nation. We'll need to screen this film as soon as it is available.
    I agree with Adrian Wood that there is an artistic touch and vision in this footage. I admired many passages here, especially the relay runs and the steeplechases.
    On the cover of the Filmiaitta magazine a few years ago there had been Paavo Nurmi "teaching Douglas Fairbanks how to run" in a publicity stunt picture. Both shared a similar sense of the joy of action and movement.

The visual quality of the Italian footage is great, the Dutch quality is heavily duped.

Razzia in St. Pauli / Raid in St. Pauli

Gina Falkenberg and Friedrich Gnass

Razzia a Saint Pauli / Razzia. DE 1932. D: Werner Hochbaum. SC: Werner Hochbaum. DP: Adolf Otto Weitzenberg. ED: Carl Behr. AD: Willy Schiller. M: Kurt Levaal. M arr+cond: Giuseppe Becce. Liedtexte: Carl Behr, Hedy Knorr. C: Gina Falkenberg (Ballhaus-Else), Friedrich Gnaß (Matrosen-Karl), Wolfgang Zilzer (Musiker-Leo), Charly Wittong (Charly, Volkssänger), Max Zilzer (l'oste / Kneipenwirt), Ernst Busch (cantante - off). P: Orbis-Film GmbH, Berlin. 35 mm. 1712 m. 62'. B&w. From: Deutsche Kinemathek per concessione di Marion Rosenfeld Behr
    Location: Hamburg St. Pauli. Also credited: die Ganoven und Mädchen von St. Pauli.
    Screened with earphone commentary in Italian and English at Cinema Lumière - Sala Scorsese, Bologna (Il Cinema Ritrovato), 1 July 2014

Elisabeth Büttner (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "The cinema as a laboratory for the physical. Impressionist intensification is Hochbaum's modus operandi. Again, he is roaming Hamburg, fixing his gaze on the skin of things brought to life by the camera. Details tell stories, little things become eloquent. "The cinema is true, a story is a lie", writes French Film enthusiast Jean Epstein in 1921, a poetic maxim which for Hochbaum also holds true in the early 1930s. At the same time, he insists that the cinema must capture reality and give expression to, if not negotiate, class conflict."

"A day like any other in the port of Hamburg. Dock workers spill out of big ships. Back on shore after a good day's labor, legs are walking inland with an adequately heavy gait. In the streets, their movement gains momentum. The big city requires speed. The pace quickens, perspectives intermingle, a kaleidoscope of neon signs allures. Exhaustion turns into dance, and the nightlife industry awakens. Some are out for customers, others for amusement. And everybody complains about how bad the times are, economically. Ballroom-Else, a disenchanted streetwalker in the Weimar Republic, has one weakness: she falls for the mawkish stories of the movies. The swashbuckling Sailor-Karl has snatched a couple of watches and is on the run. He somehow ends up in the attic where Else lives. She hides him from the police. He cajoles her, putting silly ideas in her head and promising her a life together far away from St. Pauli. Finally, she agrees. So all that's left to do is say farewell to Leo, a demoralized musician beaten by life with whom Else shares her attic. Their way leads them to a sinister quayside bar where she and Leo both work night after night. Here, time falters, plots unravel, dreams change. Perception becomes blurry while police keep clear heads. Hochbaum unfolds a tired utopia that cannot stem the tide of time. A new morning breaks over the gray city "where dust, not dew, falls from the sky"." Elisabeth Büttner (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

Sich regen bringt Segen [Hard work pays off]
- the motto on Else's wall

AA: Razzia in St. Pauli is a lyrical account of the Hamburg underworld. Werner Hochbaum spreads his poetic wings in a story that takes place during one day and one night. The introduction is purely visual, and large passages of the film are without dialogue.
    A point of comparison: Josef von Sternberg's underworld films such as The Docks of New York.
    The opening is documentary, and much of the rest of the film is so realistic that it is close to a documentary.
    The cinematography by Adolf Otto Weitzenberg is innovative. There are long takes with an assured mobile camera. There are swift montages and dissolves. Hochbaum also likes whip pans.
    Sometimes the action is followed entirely via hands. Then there is a revealing montage displaying only faces.
    There are lyrical shots of the sea and the harbour.
    There is a telephone montage showing a clock on the wall, glittering waves, telephone wires, and a street construction site. The music starts to follow the rhythm of the stone pavement construction work.
    There are naturalistic views of Else's drab apartment and the world of crime, from the viewpoints of the burglar Karl and the police.
    There is a ring of truth in the gestures and expressions, a realism of movement.
    There are even Lubitsch touches: the relationship between Else and Karl is conveyed via a scene of mutual laughter so infectuous that even Else's mother cannot help joining it. There are jazz age montages, too.
    Music is always of the essence in Hochbaum's films. Again, I'd like to see the playlist. There are the Volkssänger songs, and there is the piano playing of Leo. At his most melancholy, Leo plays a familiar classical piano solo (a nocturne by Chopin?). There is a slow montage during the solo, soon changing to waltz time. There is an upbeat musical epilogue, an Eislerian song sung by the great Ernst Busch (off), showing a montage of maschines, feet, and chimneys.
    Hochbaum has also a musical ear for dialogue. In this week we have heard Hochbaum's way with the dialects of Berlin, Vienna, and Hamburg, and their cadences feel natural. My Austrian and German friends confirm that the rhythms of the dialects are right, but they have been stylized for the general audience; by my own judgment I can only say tentatively that the Berlin dialect sounds right.

Else's affair with the burglar Karl lasted just one day. Leo is welcome to return. "Komm schon. Komm doch". "Bist du sehr müde?"

There is an impressively strong photochemical bite in this beautiful print which seems occasionally to stem also from challenging source materials.

Pyaasa / The Thirsty One

Mala Sinha as Meena, Waheeda Rehman as Gulabo, Guru Dutt as the poète maudit Vijay

प्यासा / Sete eterna / The Thirsty One / Assoiffé / L'Assoiffé. IN 1957. D: Guru Dutt. Dial.: Abrar Alvi. DP: V. K. Murthy. ED: Y. G. Chawhan. AD: Biren Naag. M: S. D. Burman. Songs: Sahir Ludhianvi. C: Mala Sinha (Meena), Guru Dutt (Vijay), Waheeda Rehman (Gulabo), Rehman (Ghosh), Johnny Walker (Abdul Sattar), Kumkum (Juhi), Leela Misra (madre di Vijay), Mehmood (fratello di Vijay), Tun Tun (Pushplata). P: Guru Dutt per Guru Dutt Films. [DCP was announced]. 143’. B&w. Hindi version. From: National Archive of India
    Introduced by Shinvendra Singh Dungarpur.
    Shown on Bluray.
    Viewed with e-subtitles in Italian and English at Cinema Jolly, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 30 June 2014

Arun Khopkar (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "Producer and director Guru Dutt’s intensely original film is widely considered one of Indian cinema’s unquestionable classics, striking a chord with its vision of the romantic artist in conflict with an unfeeling, materialistic world. Dutt plays the central role of Vijay, the brooding, alienated poet who encounters greed and philistinism among the gatekeepers of society, and compassion among its outcasts. Rejected by the establishment, Vijay’s work becomes popular only after his supposed death. In the film’s rousing climax, the poet returns from the dead to denounce the hypocrisy of those who have gathered to praise him."

Melody and Drama

"Pyaasa was a great commercial and critical success in the short life of its maker. Guru Dutt worked in the genre of melodrama and was equally sensitive to its two components, melody and drama. Like Orson Welles, he had a vision of his protagonists which he interpreted masterfully, as the finely nuanced performances in Pyaasa prove. His drama was based on understatement. Where other Indian filmmakers would use a scream, he used a whisper. His camera, quite often mounted on a crane with a 100 mm lens, would move silently into a close-up to capture minute changes of expression. The crane movements varied from swooping dramatic manoeuvres to subtle, almost imperceptible changes of level."

"As for melody, no one used songs with more telling effect. In Pyaasa, Guru Dutt disregarded the conventions of Indian cinema regarding songs. He could use them in fragmentary form or as an
extension of dialogue, while at other times, they went beyond the standard length. He could use them dramatically, as in his powerful interpretation of the climactic scene, where a song plays over
a hysterical, stampeding mob. No matter how he used a song, his complete mastery over its mise-en-scène and its rhythmic cutting expressed a wide range of emotions, from extreme gentleness, sensuousness and tenderness to dramatic conflict and brutal violence."

"Working in close collaboration with his cameraman V. K. Murthy, Guru Dutt created a world of original and unique images. Though their style draws from a realistic idiom, it is not limited by realism. Often, fleeting shadows thrown by unidentified sources cross the face of a character; elongated shadows underline the loneliness of the protagonist. Lighting charges the spaces
of everyday life with emotion."

"The world created by Guru Dutt’s imagination in Pyaasa is deeply humanistic and sympathetic to the people who live on the fringes of respectable society, from the commercial sex worker to the itinerant masseur. These characters retain their humanism in spite of the difficult conditions of their lives. Their depiction has none of the maudlin sentimentality so common in Indian cinema. Guru Dutt’s characterisation of the affluent and the powerful too is done with a fine eye for detail – he shows us the signs of their pomp, the arrogance of their gestures and words, and finally the brutality of their actions."

"Perhaps it is the humanism of Pyaasa that still intrigues us and draws us in, after all these years. Guru Dutt’s works invite us to understand others and understand ourselves." Arun Khopkar (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

AA: The story of a poet - an artist for whom his art is a rare talent, a blessing, a curse, a damnation, an obsession, an all-overwhelming possession. Poetry makes him mad.
    He is marginalized and cursed, an outcast in his own society, not understood by anyone, rejected by the woman he loves. He drinks. He sleeps outdoors. He is locked up in a madhouse.
    I was thinking about biopics of poets: Sayat Nova (Nran guin also being screened in Bologna), John Keats (The Bright Star), Eino Leino (Runoilija ja muusa). Pyaasa is in the same class as Sayat Nova. I was also thinking about Jean Cocteau, the poet as a film-maker, and the electrifying poets' evening in Zastava Ilyicha. I also thought about great poems filmed such as Terje Vigen.
    Many great Indian films are also musicals, and so is Pyaasa, but this time it's about poetry being sung - Vijay (Guru Dutt) is a poet and a song-writer, the poems are meant to be sung. His brothers have sold his poems to the lump collector for a penny, but a lady has discovered them, and one night at the beach Vijay hears a woman singing them. That is how she learns to know Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman), the prostitute. Gulabo and a goofy masseur Abdul Sattar (Johnny Walker), the two outcasts, become his only true friends.
    The poems and the songs are of the essence, and they are the heart and the soul of Pyaasa. Poetry transports Vijay and us to another world, a higher level of perception and existence. 
    Meena (Mala Sinha), the great love of Vijay's days of youth at the university, is now married to the rich and callous publisher Ghosh (Rehman).
    Vijay gets work as an errand boy for Ghosh and as a waiter in the poets' evening Ghosh has arranged. There Vijay, however, gets to sing one of his poems, one that is more shattering and heart-wrenching than anything else heard there that night. Especially Meena is deeply shaken.
    Vijay is succumbing to alcohol and self-loathing. Gulabi is dragging him to dignity. "The world needs your poetry". "I have never been able to make anyone happy". A shaking beggar gets Vijay's coat with his last poem in its pocket. In his pain Vijay seems to be contemplating suicide by the railway station. But the beggar gets stuck between the switching rails, and as Vijay tries to help him it's too late, Vijay jumps aside at the last second, and the beggar is mangled to death so badly that he cannot be identified, but it is believed the corpse is Vijay's.
    After his "death" Vijay becomes a legend. Printing presses are thundering, spitting out copies of Vijay's poems. They are read everywhere.
    Meanwhile, Vijay is at the madhouse, shaken, not speaking a word until he hears a nurse reading aloud his poetry. Ghosh and Vijay's evil brothers agree on a pact that they refuse to identify Vijay in order to collect his huge royalties. But Abdul Sattar one day notices Vijay behind the bars of the madhouse yard and sets him free.
    There is a huge anniversary memorial gala in the honour of Vijay's death. Vijay himself appears and starts to sing a new poem. Panic ensues, and Vijay and Gulabo are almost trampled to death. "I am not that Vijay", Vijay announces. "He's been dead for a long time." "These are not my friends". "I'm going where there is no further to go". At the producers' insistence Guru Dutt added a more positive ending where Vijay invites Gulabo to accompany him: "Will you come with me?"

Visual quality: bluray, but not from a bad source.

Night Nurse

Ben Lyon, Barbara Stanwyck

L'angelo bianco. US 1931. D: William Wellman. Based on the novel by Grace Perkins. SC: Oliver H. P. Garrett. DP: Barney McGill. ED: Edward M. McDermott. AD: Max Parker. M: Leo F. Forbstein. C: Barbara Stanwyck (Lora Hart), Joan Blondell (Maloney), Ben Lyon (Mortie), Clark Gable (Nick), Blanche Frederici (Mrs. Maxwell), Charlotte Merriam (Mrs. Ritchey), Charles Winninger (Dr. Bell), Marcia Mae Jones (Nanny). P: Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. 35 mm. 69'. From: Filmoteca Española per concessione di Park Circus
    Viewed with e-subtitles in Italian by Sub-Ti at Cinema Jolly, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 30 June 2014

Gina Telaroli (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "Female solidarity comes up against the challenges of labor and sinister drunken privilege in a pre-Code buddy cop movie where the cops are actually lowly night nurses just trying to earn a buck or two without too much trouble. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell become fast pals while going through their nursing training, and despite a rather intricate and serious plot line that develops, the picture never betrays the simplicity of that paldom and its power, with Wellman often stopping the action at hand to relish the various ways they look out for each other in a patriarchal world. He focuses attention on their hands and how, when necessary, they hold each other's, as they do during an overwhelming surgery. Those bonds and the strength Stanwyck fosters from it come in handy when the ladies find themselves working shifts caring for two sick sisters caught in a devious chauffeur's (a very young Clark Gable) scheme to subtlety knock them off and steal their trust funds. It is fitting that a movie about friendship would spur a lifelong friendship between its star and director. Night Nurse was the first of Barbara Stanwyck's five collaborations with Wellman, and both of them would cite their immense enjoyment of working with each other. In the foreword to Frank Thompson's William A. Wellman, she writes: "One of the nicest things that has ever happened to me is this: A writer, Ella Smith, was doing a book on my work and she asked him [Wellman] for a quote for said book. Because of my pride, please bear with me if I tell you what it says. It is framed and in my home. When Bill died, Miss Smith gave it to me because Bill had written it in longhand - so here it is: 'On one of Miss Stanwyck's interviews she mentioned me as one of her favorite directors and ended with 'I love that man.' Needless to say I was very proud and had a lump in my throat which does not happen to me very often - Barbara Stanwyck - 'I love that girl.' Signed - Bill Wellman.' And so again - I miss you, Bill Wellman. I love you"." Gina Telaroli (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

AA: Revisited Night Nurse which I last saw in William K. Everson's Pre-Code programme during his visit to Helsinki in 1994. We screened his personal 16 mm print then.

It is a Warner Bros. exploitation programmer whose entertainment values include extended scenes of nurses changing their clothes, exposing beautiful lingerie and some innocent skin.
    The lurid plot has Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) being accepted as a nurse trainee after she has smiled to the senior physician, Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger).
    Lora's first private assignment takes her to the world of crime: she is brought to an uncanny house where children are being starved to death. They have a trust fund, and the gangsters are out to access it by drugging the mother and starving the childen. "The successful nurse keeps her mouth shut" is the advice of the evil Dr. Ranger who is masterminding the conspiracy.
    But there is the good Dr. Bell who swiftly arranges a blood transfusion to save a dying child. Lora and the child share the same blood type. This has been a day of blood transfusions: in the morning I saw The Exploits of Elaine episodes with the same plot idea.
    The sad smile of the little girl who has almost starved to death lingers in mind.
    At the emergency room Lora has saved a handsome bootlegger, Mortie (Ben Lyon), and now Mortie helps Lora get rid of the thuggish chauffeur (Clark Gable) who has been carrying out the vicious plan.
    There is a cavalier approach to the Lora-Mortie "romance" between a nurse and a gangster. It is impossible to take it seriously.

There are documentary and realistic aspects in this movie. Details in the life of the hospital: the emergency room, ambulances rushing to bring in victims of car accidents, a chorus of crying babies at the maternity ward, the stern head nurse (whose "hmmm!" Lola and Maloney keep parodying), the strict rules, the Florence Nightingale pledge, and the entry into the nurses' registry. In a memorable sequence there is a dangerous operation being conducted at the lecture hall full of students of medicine. Lora is not feeling well. The patient dies during the operation. Lora faints.
    My mother is a nurse, so I watched these scenes with extra sympathy.

The print looks at times good, at other times it is soft like a blow-up from a 16 mm print. I was even thinking whether the source of a part of the print might be that William K. Everson print we screened 20 years ago.

Other Men's Women

William A. Wellman: Other Men's Women (US 1931) with Mary Astor (Lily) and Regis Toomey (Jack).

US 1931. D: William Wellman. Story+SC: Maude Fulton. DP: Barney McGill. ED: Edward M. McDermott. C: Grant Withers (Bill), Mary Astor (Lily), Regis Toomey (Jack), James Cagney (Ed), Joan Blondell (Marie), Fred Kohler (Haley), J. Farrell MacDonald (Peg Leg), Lillian Worth (cameriera), Walter Long (Bixby). P: Warner Bros Pictures, Inc., The Vitaphone Corp. 35 mm. 70'. From: Filmoteca Eşpañola
    Viewed with e-subtitles in Italian by Sub-Ti at Cinema Jolly, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 30 June 2014

Gina Telaroli (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): ”Daniel Kasman (for William A. Wellman: A Dossier) writes: ”The films of William A. Wellman may be suffused with, live, and breath aviation – the director being an aviator himself – but the transport they most resemble isn't the airplane but the boxcar. Those railway cars, like the city apartments named after their spatial arrangement, are constructed like Wellman makes movies: a chain of discrete segments. In Wellman's cinema, each single scene is a car in each train-length feature, and it's even quite possible that each car could be rearranged and rigged to connect to whatever follows it”. ”

”The opening scene of Other Men's Women perfectly encapsulates this metaphor for watching an entire Wellman feature: a train approaches a diner and a lively train operator named Bill (Grant Withers) jumps off and counts the cars as they pass. In the diner, Bill eats his lunch and flirts with a waitress (who knowingly and enthusiastically lobbies his lazy serves back at him) – when he goes to hop back on board he tosses her a piece of gum and a catchphrase: ”Have a little chew on me”. It's a deceptively breezy scene for a film that eventually pivots to focus on, like so many Wellman pictures, the hopelessness and bitterness of life. But despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, Other Men's Women is full of the immediacy of experience, as Wellman frequently shifts the tone of the picture at will and highlights the physical. Labor bonds the characters together – as they dig holes to plant pea pods, fix buttons, and give each other haircuts – and tears them apart, as Regis Toomey's Jack sadly discovers after a fight with Bill, his coworker and best friend, aboard a moving train.”

”At other points, Wellman simply observes the aftereffects of life lived hard, showcasing a neighbor's peg-leg or a landlady's stutter. The cast is pleasure personified, with incredible (and under-appreciated) turns by Withers, Toomey, and a radiant (and young) Mary Astor, plus early and striking appearances from James Cagney and Joan Blondell. The constantly evolving expression on Blondell's face, from pure joy to pure despair, in a scene where she and Withers drunkenly discuss their future, is reason enough to watch Other Men's Women over and over again” Gina Telaroli (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

AA: Although William Wellman's signature vehicle was inevitably the airplane, trains are also prominent in his films (Beggars of Life, Other Men's Women, Wild Boys of the Road).
    In Other Men's Women Wellman enters La Bête humaine territory.
    It starts in comedy mode. There is a bravura introduction to Bill who has breakfast and a moment of flirt with a café waitress while his freight train is moving along by the station; he catches the last car and runs on the roof of the cars back to his engine.
    The relaxed, wisecracking approach goes on as he brings his drunken colleague Jack to his home. Jack has his hair cut (clumsily) by Bill's wife Lily (Mary Astor in a non-glamorous role).
    Jack and Lily kiss each other playfully (they do so because there is no conscious attraction between them), and suddenly they know it's no longer a play anymore. Lily bursts into tears. Something has been broken forever. Jack distances himself from the couple. Nothing is said, but from the awkward silences Bill senses that there is something wrong. Wellman and his actors show psychological insight in the handling of this development.
    The La Bête humaine territory starts when Bill is blinded by steam. There is a rainstorm, and the railway bridge is being battered by a flood. The blind Bill takes an engine with an urgent delivery. He hits Jack and throws him out of the engine. The bridge crashes, and Bill and his train fall into the river.
    Much later Jack and Lily meet briefly in a café scene similar to the opening. Catching the last car, Jack hops happily on the roofs to his engine.

A swiftly moving low budget Warner Bros. programmer. There is a gritty feeling of reality, there are several long takes, the camera is sometimes fumbling, there are rough edges which are part of this film's charm.

A brilliant print. The audience was startled by frames of melting film just before the train catastrophe; perhaps marks of print damage in a previous screening.

Vorstadtvarieté / Suburban Cabaret

Werner Hochbaum: Vorstadtvarieté / Suburban Cabaret (AT 1933).

Werner Hochbaum: Vorstadtvarieté / Suburban Cabaret (AT 1933).

[Varietà di provincia] / Die Amsel von Lichtental. 

    AT 1933.  P: Styria-Film, GmbH Wien.

    D: Werner Hochbaum. Story: dalla pièce Der Gemeine di Felix Salten. SC: Werner Hochbaum, Ernst Neubach. DP: Eduard Hoesch. ED: Ludolf Grisebach. AD: Alfred Kunz. M: Anton Profes. 

    C: Mathias Wieman (Josef Kernthaler, Bauzeichner), Frida Richard (madre di Josef), Hans Moser (padre di Josef), Luise Ullrich (Mizzi), Oskar Sima (Franz), Olly Gebauer (Sophie), Anton Pointner (tenente Höfelmeyer), Otto Hartmann (luogotenente von Daffinger). 

    2616 m / 96' min

    Not released in Finland.

    35 mm print from: Deutsche Kinemathek

    Screened with earphone commentary in Italian and English at Cinema Lumière - Sala Scorsese, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 30 June 2014

Elisabeth Büttner (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "The first of four films which Hochbaum made in Austria: the subject matter is genuinely Viennese, Felix Salten's stage play Der Gemeine, a scenario about the transition to the 20th century and, at the same time, a scathing critique of the militarism of the epoch. Hochbaum takes up the atmospheric and thematic grounding, but with a leap in time, which can also be read as a comment on the then-contemporary authoritaria regime in Austria. He transfers the plot to the year 1913, the lead-in to the First World War."

"Vienna, which likes to appear charming, slightly frivolous, and cosmopolitan in the cinema of the early 1930s, presents itself in Vorstadtvarieté as a place of self-delusion, of brazenly taking advantage, and of broken dreams. The story begins in the pleasure-seeking environment of the Prater amusement district. Mizzi Ebeseder, the daughter of popular cabaret singers, toys with the idea of a stage career at the family-owned variety theater. Singing is bliss for her. Her fiancé, though, architectural draftsman Josef Kernthaler, sets a clear ultimatum: for her to go to the stage would mean their immediate breakup. The conflict sharpens when Josef is drafted into the army. His comrades' moral laxness, the economies of desires, the buzz and tinsel of the theater make him freeze completely. His world, which knows no nuances, is cracking at the seams. The phantasm of purging is on the rise. Josef 's demands pull the rug out under Mizzi: she staggers, wavering between singing her number and the promise of marriage, between city and country, between a stage costume and a soldier's uniform. Her space in life is caving in, and not only hers."

"To this, Hochbaum responds with a highly mobile and subtle camera. It creates its own spaces, sometimes lyrical, holding on faces, oriented toward the play of visual details, "because things are easier to photograph than emotions". This was a credo that he had learned from the cinematic polymath he appreciated most, Béla Balázs."

"The censors did not let Hochbaum get away lightly with his filmic statement about Vienna. The tragic ending had to be reinterpreted into a happy one, and the movie was stripped of its subtitle. It had been A song of Austrian humanity." Elisabeth Büttner (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

AA: Vorstadtvarieté is a film about the eve of World War One, which meant the end of the Dual Monarchy. It is a musical film about a popular music theatre touring in the suburbs and the little towns of Austria. It is a story of the Austrian joy of life. It is also a love story across class boundaries.

At times I jotted down in my notes: why does not Mizzi just leave Josef who is so clearly unsympathetic? He does not understand that music, performing, and entertainment are Mizzi's life, her calling, her way of giving love. But on the other hand Josef is a man of dignity. He would not persuade Mizzi to remain his lover (as his father openly suggests): he wants to marry her. He is in real agony when he has to leave Mizzi for the military. The love sequence in the nature is also an expression of their strong feelings. And finally Josef comes (in this release version) to Mizzi's rescue at the last moment.

The film is full of music of many kinds, including the Radetzky March and sitra tunes; I would like to see the playlist.

The dialogue is often in heavy accents which makes it fascinating but at times difficult to follow for a not-native speaker.

There are the two worlds of the military and the music hall. Also the town life and the country life with its different customs and traditions. There is the generation clash between the stern future mother-in-law and Mizzi, who is proud of her Volkssinger's costumes.

There are many fine scenes full of life and a fine sense of composition, but there is little of the avantgardistic and experimental left here. There is a sense of growing mediocrity.

The true drive of the movie is Ophulsian, tragic: the severity of the military vs. the life force of the musical world. Mizzi has already written her suicide note, but Josef draws her back to life from the bridge from where she wanted to jump in front of the train.

The source of this print is in good basic health. There are signs of use in it, some scratches and rain, but most importantly, large helpings of great visual beauty such as in Mizzi's beautiful song sequence after the show when Josef has banned her to perform anymore and he is not sleeping well at the barracks.

The Exploits of Elaine, Episode 6: The Vampyre and Episode 10: The Life Current

Les Mystères de New-York / De Geheimen von New York (serial title in the bilingual print)

 THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE (EPISODE 6): THE VAMPYRE
Les Mystères de New-York (Ep. Sang pour Sang). US 1914. D: Louis Gasnier, George B. Seitz. SC: Charles L. Goddard, Bertram Milhauser. C: Pearl White (Elaine Dodge), Arnold Daly, William Riley. P: Wharton Studios, Eclectic Film Co. - Pathé. 35 mm. 617 m. 30' at 18 fps. B&w. French and Dutch intertitles. From: Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique
    Actual duration of this reel: 27 min

THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE (EPISODE 10): THE LIFE CURRENT
Les Mystères de New-York (Ep. Le Baiser mortel). US 1914. D: Louis Gasnier, George B. Seitz. SC: Charles L. Goddard, Bertram Milhauser. C: Pearl White, Arnold Daly, William Riley. P: Wharton Studios, Eclectic Film Co. - Pathé. 35 mm. 617 m. 30' at 18 fps. B&w. French and Dutch intertitles. From: Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique
    Actual duration of this reel: 19 min
    Grand piano and accordeon: Stephen Horne
    Viewed with e-subtitles in Italian by Sub-Ti at Cinema Lumière, Sala Mastroianni, Bologna (Il Cinema Ritrovato), 30 June 2014

Richard Abel (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website): "So popular was The Perils of Pauline, released in a record number of prints in mid-March 1914 and serialized in scores of Hearst and other newspapers, that Pathé's American subsidiary had Louis Gasnier produce a second serial starring Pearl White, The Exploits of Elaine. Beginning in early January 1915, Pathé-Exchange released the fourteen episodes of Elaine every two weeks, after Arthur Reeves's serial installments had appeared in major newspapers: "Read it now, then see it all in motion pictures.""

"Elaine had White's character repeatedly threatened by the 'Clutching Hand' and rescued from thinly disguised sexual assault either by her quick thinking or by Craig Kennedy (Arnold Daly), a 'scientific detective'. Like other serial films, Elaine was promoted especially to young women: in the US exhibitors could use song slides and sheet music for audience sing-alongs of Elaine, My Moving Picture Queen; in England and Scotland, some theaters lured women workers with giveaways of thousands of "Elaine" hats. In France, Pathé combined The Exploits of Elaine, The New Exploits of Elaine, and The Romance of Elaine into a single serial titled Les Mystères de NewYork and coordinated its weekly release of twenty-two episodes (two reels each) with Pierre Decourcelle's daily serialization in "Le Matin", then collected into weekly booklets. Intriguingly, Les Mystères de New-York reworked the originals to fit the situation of France in the Great War, giving a strongly anti-German and pro-American slant to both the film and its novelization." Richard Abel (Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2014, catalogue and website)

Mariann Lewinsky in her introduction explained that the truth about Les Mystères de New York is even more complicated than we have known. The material from Brussels contains six cans, three of which were labelled "The Exploits of Elaine", and further three "The New Exploits of Elaine". Yet it turns out that they all belong to the first serial, filmed from late 1914 till early 1915. They represent a condensed version. We are shown reel 4 which contains Episode 6: The Vampyre, and reel 6, which is basically Episode 10: The Life Current.

AA: Although The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, and Les Mystères de New York are legendary serials, they have been hard to get to see for generations. We the audience were grateful to receive these samples from Brussels.

Episode 6: Elaine receives a firearms license and a pistol. The able dog Rusty stops an intruder to Elaine's room at night, and Elaine fires three bullets, all hitting him. There is a serious loss of blood, and the bandits kidnap a doctor who states that a blood transfusion is needed. The bandits again intrude Elaine's house, stun Rusty and Elaine via chloroform, hide Elaine in a suit of armour and later, posing as delivery men, bring her inside the suit of armor to their lair, where the blood transfusion from Elaine to the bandit is immediately launched. "La mort de cette femme est certaine". There is a "Rescued by Rover" sequence where the ingenious Rusty helps the police track down Elaine at the very last moment. The bandits elope, but the doctor assures that Elaine can still be revived.

Episode 10: There are no main title frames in this reel. The detectives enter the house that used to be the criminal's lair. There is devastation there. They find the trapdoor via which the bandits had eloped. They hear steps approaching. There is a person in a diving suit (scaphandre). The police arrest him - c'est Sam Langdon, l'homme au mouchoir rouge. The stench is stunning, they almost faint. "Ces cheveux blonds de femme... " Clarel dons the diving suit now and descends into the dark abyss of the sewers. There he discovers Elaine, almost asphyxiated. They start immediately to revive her. (Stephen Horne accompanied this with the accordeon). The heart is hardly beating. La suprême tentative: electric shocks. "Elle est presque un cadavre". There are close-ups of the control panel of the electric device. The doctor is visibly upset. After a half an hour he is about to give up... but then Elaine's eyes open. "Mon cher Perry". Clarel now loses all hope of happiness, but he will forget by drowning himself into police work.

These serials belong to the early stages of the thriller genre, launched a few years ago forcefully by the great serials of the Éclair company, copied then by everybody, starting with Gaumont and Pathé.

Louis Gasnier and George B. Seitz may not be as famous as Victorin Jasset and Louis Feuillade, but they know what they are doing. The approach is vigorous, the action is well timed, the parallel action montage is assured, and here, too, there are many scenes that are intriguing from the surrealist angle: - the suit of armour - the macabre mask - the blood transfusion - the secret passage - the uncanny devastation of the deserted house - the scuba gear - the electric shocks.

In this silent serial Gasnier and Seitz know how to convey sound - and even smell.

One can appreciate the original quality of the cinematography in this print with some minor issues (framelines, a superimposition of a detached perforation for a moment). The print is in black and white. The night is shot at daytime and should be toned blue, but I suffer from Desmet fatigue and enjoyed this screening in glorious black and white.