Cinema: A Public Affair. The Jonathan Dennis Memorial Lecture 2015: Naum Kleiman

Naum Kleiman in Cinema: A Public Affair

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.
Naum Kleiman introduced by David Robinson and Tatiana Brendrup.
Teatro Verdi, 6 Oct 2015

From the GCM catalog and website: The Jonathan Dennis Memorial Lecture

"In 2002 the Giornate del Cinema Muto inaugurated this annual lecture in commemoration of Jonathan Dennis (1953-2002), founding director of the New Zealand Film Archive. Jonathan Dennis was an exemplary archivist, a champion of his country’s culture – particularly of Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand – and above all a person of outstanding human qualities."

"The lecturers are selected as people who are pre-eminent in some field of work associated with the conservation or appreciation of silent cinema."

2015 Lecture – Naum Kleiman

David Robinson (GCM catalog and website): "Jonathan Dennis would have found this year’s speaker a true spiritual brother in his unrelenting fight for film as a social and cultural necessity."

"Naum Kleiman’s lecture will take the form of a presentation of the 2015 German film Cinema: A Public Affair, directed by Tatiana Brandrup, which begins ostensibly as a record of the tribulations of Kleiman’s creation, the Moscow Musei Kino (Film Museum). Thus we embark on a contemporary horror story – how a flourishing, idealist, socially essential cultural entity can be crushed by invisible official forces. Yet as the story goes on, and we encounter, face to face, Kleiman himself and the large, unshaken community of Musei Kino’s collaborators and disciples, we have rather a sense of celebration, of the indomitability of human will, faith, social idealism – and the indispensable role of cinema in civilized society. If this is tragedy, the catharsis is supreme. Venceremos!"

"Kleiman, born in 1937, experienced the displacements of war at first hand. In the course of flight from the war zone, the children were shown a film: for him it was his first, and at the age of four-and-a-half he discovered magic in the form of Powell and Pressburger’s The Thief of Bagdad. As a young student from VGIK, the historic Moscow film school, he was sent to assist the widow of Eisenstein, Pera Atasheva, and to learn from her to decipher Eisenstein’s lightning handwriting. When Atasheva bequeathed the archive to the Union of Film Makers, Kleiman stayed on as curator, to become the sovereign authority on every aspect of Eisenstein’s life and work. This became his life and passion, so that he was reluctant to agree (“well, maybe for two years ...”) to set up the Moscow Musei Kino, conceived in the happy interlude of Perestroika. The museum opened on 31 March 1989 – two weeks before the centenary of Chaplin’s birth – with The Great Dictator. Its screenings and its fast-growing collection of films and historic documents and artefacts soon became a cultural focus – and Kleiman was trapped in his own great creation. Musei Kino was given new, purpose-built headquarters, Kinocentr."

"The first blow came in 2005, when they were abruptly turned out of the building, which had been sold in some never-explained property deal. The collections and films were rescued from the street where they were thrown and stored in outbuildings at Mosfilm, where they still remain."

"Musei Kino nevertheless continued its film programmes, in whatever cinemas were available around Moscow. In July 2014, however, in a familiar tactic of state “cultural cleansing”, the Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky appointed a new director of Musei Kino, “elevating” Kleiman to the nominal post of President. Medinsky ignored international protests. Three months later Kleiman and his 20-strong staff resigned on account of the new director’s “incompetence and unethical behaviour”. Subsequently the curators of the collections have returned to work, determined to do what they can to defend the Museum’s holdings and standards."

"Reviewing Tatiana Brandrup’s film from the Berlin festival, The Hollywood Reporter succinctly defined what makes Kleiman and Musei Kino disciples “inconvenient” in the Russia of Vladimir Putin: it is “their belief that cinema can be used to create a free civil society”. For Russia, as the story demonstrates, society and the state are not the same thing. The journalist Larissa Malyukova tells us, “The cinema makes people citizens of society – but the state doesn’t need citizens.”"

"The Musei Kino community’s beliefs and hopes are nevertheless unshakeable. Kleiman tells us, “Cinema is a tool to discover the world ... but people need a navigator. Musei Kino is a map.” When Kinocentr was closed, there were demonstrations; and one of the witnesses in the film says it was as if a beloved near relative had died. But the film shows us that on the contrary it lives on, indestructible in the community it has established (including Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose film Leviathan was conveniently suppressed by a new law forbidding cursing on the screen). “Life without movies is a spiritual void.” “Cinema without a memory is like a camera without film.” Tatiana Brandrup’s film passes in and out of quotations from the films that have united this community – Resnais, Bergman, Ozu, Godard, supremely Eisenstein, with Potemkin, October, and the colour sequence from Ivan Part II, and of course The Thief of Bagdad. Kleiman’s toast at the 25th anniversary of Musei Kino declares its prime values as Decency, Compassion, and Honesty; while his last word in the film is to cite the Eleventh Commandment, which was revealed to Elisabeth Bergner by Albert Einstein when she had an attack of stage fright before her first appearance on the English stage: “Thou shalt not be afraid.”" – David Robinson

CINEMA: A PUBLIC AFFAIR
DE © 2015 Filmkantine Tatiana Brandrup. D+SC+S: Tatiana Brandrup; P: Katrin Springer, Tatiana Brandrup; DP: Martin Farkas, Tatiana Brandrup; ED: Tatiana Brandrup, Arsen Yagdjyan; M: Jonathan Bar Giora; with Naum Kleiman, Maxim Pavlov, Vera Rumyantseva Kleiman, Emma Malaya, Anna Bulgakova, Olga Ulybyshev, Igor Belozerkovich, Erika Gregor, Ulrich Gregor, Larissa Malyukova, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Ivan Kulikov, Anton Masurov, Temur Mukanov; DCP, 99', col. + b&w, sd.; dial: RUS, GER, subt. ENG; print source: Filmkantine UG, Berlin.
    Theme song: "Allez, marchez, Ciné-Musée" by Temur Mukanov.
    Clips: L'Année dernière à Marienbad, Histoire(s) du cinéma, L'Atalante, Oktyabr, Zastava Ilyicha, Ivan Groznyi: colour sequence, Stachka, Rusalochka / The Little Mermaid (Ivan Aksenchuk, 1968).
    People also appearing: Jean-Luc Godard, Kristina Yureva, Nikita Mikhalkov.
    "Hе бойся" = "Don't be afraid".
    Naum Kleiman's good command of German is on display in this movie.

AA: Naum Kleiman has been a central figure of Russian film culture for decades. For Ulrich and Erika Gregor he has been that since 1957 when Ulrich wanted to meet Dziga Vertov but learned from the young student Naum that the artist had died some years ago.

I first met Naum Kleiman in 1988 when I visited the Eisenstein Home Museum during the Moscow Film Festival. (The next guest coming was Philip Kaufman who was in Moscow to screen The Unbearable Lightness of Being). In 1989 during Moscow Film Festival I spent most of the time in Naum's Kino Center and saw a lot of exciting discoveries, mostly formerly shelved Soviet films from the 1960s. I still cherish those precious screenings. As a special treat I got to see the surviving footage of Ivan Groznyi Part III in a private screening. The taste, the insight and the passion for culture was evident in everything. Those were the happy days of the glasnost and the perestroika. Naum Kleiman grew up during the exciting period of the Thaw, and in the 1980s he must have relished the passing of the stagnation period.

Tatiana Brandrup's Cinema: A Public Affair may be visually modest, with a basic look, but it is the best film I have ever seen for a film programmer. It is all about the big issues.

In his discussion with Ulrich and Erika Gregor, who ran the Arsenal cinema and the Forum of the Berlin Film Festival for decades, Naum states: "der Film beginnt wenn er zu Ende ist" - "the film begins when it ends". The dream begins to crystallize. The discourse starts. Then it starts to become a part of our consciousness, our life, our reality, ourselves. It needs to be discussed, debated, revisited.

The main narrative of the film is the saga of the Muzei Kino as reported by David Robinson in his notes above. It is not about "art for art's sake". Art is here always about society, civil society in the spirit of Pushkin, a society that is more important than the state. There is a concept of world cinema similar to Goethe's insight in Weltliteratur, Weltkultur. This is the central theme of Tatiana Brandrup's movie. The Forum as agora, a space for democracy, for breaking walls, a space to connect all eras. "Russian history leaps like a frog". "The first signal of something going wrong was the destruction of the Kino Center".

The current Russian development towards a police state is discussed. Cultural institutions are made official, and they can only be led by someone who will sign anything. Others are classified as "foreign agents". The police state succeeds when you start to restrain yourself. But "cinema shows something else is possible". "Our finest collection is the collection of our viewers". "We have a very good young generation".

Memorable: the episode of Jean-Luc Godard's visit to the Kino Center with Histoire(s) du cinéma, installing a Dolby sound system there.

Constant: Eisenstein, also called Eysen ['eizen], introduced before the screen on which Battleship Potemkin was first shown, compared with Guernica, Hiroshima - a struggle for freedom, to end violence. An art not didactic but meant to invite you in. Not about logic but post-logic and pre-logic. With internet you try this, you try that, but you don't learn anything. The story of Eisenstein: the system did not break him although he was signing his death sentence with every film. In the discussion after the film Kleiman added: "Eisenstein is not only a person, he is a crossroads".

Personal: the first film: The Thief of Bagdad (see David Robinson's notes above), "a window to a different reality". In Brandrup's film we cut to Michael Powell's visit in Kino Center in 1989. The mind-altering film: L'Atalante, "revealing something secret".

Der Tunnel (1915) (2015 restoration Filmmuseum München)

William Wauer: Der Tunnel (DE 1915). Poster design: Ernst Deutsch (Dryden) (1887–1938). Lithographie. 70 x 95 cm. Druck: Hollerbaum und Schmidt 1915.

William Wauer: Der Tunnel (DE 1915). Photo: Filmmuseum München. Please click to enlarge the image.

DER TUNNEL  (Projektions-AG “Union” [PAGU]; dist: Nordische Films Co. GmbH – DE 1915) D, SC: William Wauer; based on the novel by Bernhard Kellermann (1913); P: Paul Davidson; DP: Axel Graatkjær; AD: Hermann Warm; ass D: Heinz Carl Heiland;
    C: Friedrich Kayssler (Mac Allan, the engineer), Fritzi Massary (Ethel Lloyd), Hermann Vallentin (Lloyd, the millionaire), Rose Veldtkirch (Maud Allen [Allan]), Felix Basch, Hans Halden;
    rel: 9.9.1915, Berlin (Union-Palast); orig. l: 2006 m; data censor date: 7.8.1915 (B.10245/15); DCP, 85' (transferred at 20 fps), col. (tinted); titles: GER; print source: Filmmuseum München. Restored: 2015.
    Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.
    Viewed at Teatro Verdi, with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Neil Brand, 5 Oct 2015

David Bordwell (GCM catalog and website): "In 1913, the popular novelist Bernhard Kellermann published Der Tunnel. It’s not quite science-fiction, more a prophetic fiction or realist fantasy in the vein of Things to Come. The book became a best-seller and the basis of a 1915 film directed by William Wauer. The plot would gladden the heart of Ayn Rand. A visionary engineer persuades investors to fund building an undersea railway connecting France to the United States (specifically, New Jersey). No meddling government gets in the way of this titanic effort of will. Mac Allan buys land for the stations, hires diggers from around the world, and risks everything he has. The obstacles are many. An explosion scares off workers; there is a strike; impatient stockholders raid and burn the company headquarters. Mac Allan moves forward undeterred, though he hesitates when his wife and child are stoned to death by a mob."

"After 26 years, the railway is opened. Mac, along with his new wife (the daughter of his chief backer), proves it’s safe by taking the first transatlantic train. The event is covered by television, projected on big screens around the world. In the original novel, a film company was commissioned to document every stage of work.The book skimps on characterization, and the film is even less concerned with psychology. Once the character relations are sketched, Wauer goes for shock and awe."

"The Tunnel’s thrilling crowd scenes of work, fire, devastation, riots, and panic look completely modern. Bird’s-eye views of stock-market frenzy anticipate Pudovkin’s End of St. Petersburg, and Wauer creates an Eisensteinian percussion of light and rushing movement as workers flee the tunnel collapse."

"For the sequences showing the tunnel construction, Wauer supplies violent alternations of bright and dark as men, stripped and sweaty, attack the rock face. The variety of camera positions and illumination is really impressive."

"Comparisons with The Big Film of 1915 are inevitable. The intimate scenes of The Tunnel are far less delicately realized than the romance and family life of The Birth of a Nation, and the battle scenes in Birth have a greater scope than what Wauer summons up. But Wauer’s handling of crowds is more vigorous than Griffith’s riots at the climax of Birth, and his pictorial sense is in some ways more refined, even “modern.”"

"Wauer can handle small-scale action very crisply. The opening scene in an opera house creates low-angled depth compositions more arresting than Griffith’s depiction of Ford’s Theatre. Mac’s wife, in one box, is watching his efforts to attract funding from the millionaire Lloyd. Wauer constantly varies his camera setups to highlight Mac’s wife in the background studying Lloyd’s daughter, sensing in her a rival for her husband. Whether the angle is high or low, the wife’s presence in her distant box is signaled at the top of the frame. Subsequent shots present similar but not identical setups, adjusted to reset the depth composition."

"Being a cinephile is partly about making discoveries. True, one person’s discovery is another’s war horse. But nobody has seen everything, so you can always hope to find something fresh. There’s also the inviting prospect of introducing a little-known film to a wider community. Most exciting is to discover a major film that has gone unnoticed in standard film histories. It was at Munich’s Filmmuseum a decade ago that I first encountered the brooding power of Robert Reinert’s Opium (1919) and Nerven (1919). I was convinced that Nerven was as important, and in some ways more innovative, than the venerated Caligari. Now the conviction grows on me that in The Tunnel we have another galvanizing, outlandish masterwork of the 1910s. I hope it will somehow get circulated so that wider audiences can discover it. Yeah, that’s the word I want: discover." – David Bordwell (www.davidbordwell.net/blog, posted 29.7.2014)

Stefan Drössler: "Kellermann’s novel Der Tunnel was published in April 1913, and rapidly became a bestseller: by October more than 100,000 copies of the book had been sold. In January 1914, the Imperator-Film-Co. announced it would produce a film titled Der Tunnel. In March 1914 Berlin’s Union-Film bought the screen rights to Kellermann’s novel, and sued Imperator. This was one of the first law cases dealing with film copyright. Imperator lost, and was not allowed to use the word “tunnel” in their film title; it was renamed Das Riesenprojekt. Der Schienenweg unterm Ocean (The Big Project about a Railway under the Ocean)."

"Union-Film hired Rudolf Meinert to shoot the “most expensive German film of all time” during the Summer of 1914. The beginning of World War I stopped the project; Meinert was drafted. In Spring 1915 William Wauer revived the project; Heinz Carl Heiland was the “technical director”, responsible for the special effects and the shots of the building of the tunnel. It is reported that documentary footage of the construction of the Berlin subway was also used."

"Der Tunnel premiered on 9 September 1915 at the Union-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. The film ran for three weeks in seven Berlin cinemas; in the first three days of its release it played to about 45,000 people. During the War it was successfully shown in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Sometimes, as in September 1915 in Prague, one cinema showed Der Tunnel, while in direct competition another ran Der Schienenweg unterm Ocean, which had been finished some months before Der Tunnel but received bad reviews. Today Der Tunnel is more or less forgotten, overshadowed by Kurt Bernhardt’s 1933 sound remake, which was quite popular."

"William Wauer (1866-1962) was one of the most interesting German directors of the 1910s, and in his writings he was a fighter for “film as art”. He left the film business in 1920 and became a leading artist in the Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten, Kubisten, Futuristen and Konstruktivisten (Association of Expressionist, Cubist, Futurist, and Constructivist Artists); he is renowned for his abstract sculptures and paintings."

"Der Tunnel’s technical director, Heinz Carl Heiland (1875-1932), was an adventurer, traveller, and writer. He worked in film as a cinematographer on shoots with special technical requirements (for example, he filmed the battle scenes for Lubitsch’s 1923 Das Weib des Pharao from a balloon), and as a director on exotic films made on location in India and Japan, among them the remarkable Bushido – Das eiserne Gesetz (Bushido, the Iron Law, 1926). "

"Der Tunnel also features one of the very rare film appearances of the legendary operetta singer Fritzi Massary (1882-1969), a big star on the stages of Berlin and Vienna. Some biographers of Adolf Hitler claim that the young Hitler was very impressed by the main character in the film Der Tunnel and how he could speak to the masses. They refer to Reinhold Hanisch’s article “I Was Hitler’s Buddy”, published in the 5 April 1939 issue of The New Republic. Hanisch knew Hitler from his years in Vienna; they had lived in the same men’s dormitory from 1910 to 1912. However, the last time Hanisch saw Hitler was in August 1913, two years before the film was released. "

"If Hanisch’s story is not invented (he was later sentenced as a crook and liar), it could only refer to Kellermann’s book – as Albert Speer does in his 1975 published diaries: “I remembered how often Hitler praised Kellermann’s Der Tunnel – also the story of a great demagogue – as one of the books that most impressed him.”" – Stefan Drössler

AA: I had very much looked forward to see this original film adaptation of Der Tunnel (there is also a sound remake by Kurt Bernhardt, 1933), and it was worth waiting for. It is an exciting film and a neglected achievement, perhaps because it was produced in Germany during WWI and probably hardly seen outside the German-speaking area. But even German film historians seem to have forgotten it. During the Nazi era the neglect may have been conscious due to the Jewish talent participating, including Fritzi Massary who left Germany in 1932. And of course there was the successful sound remake.

Produced on a big budget, Der Tunnel delivers, and the production values are all up there on the screen. Hermann Warm had had a few years of experience as an art director for films, and this is a fine display of his expertise at this stage already. I would count Der Tunnel as a science fiction film, not only because of the prophecy of the trans-Atlantic tunnel between Europe and America (still yet to be built) and the futuristic train design but also because of the prophecy of television. The end titles even predict a new era and eternal peace - an especially poignant promise as the film was released during WWI.

As David Bordwell comments above, Der Tunnel is an advanced piece of storytelling for a film made in 1915. There is a vigorous narrative drive from start to finish. The arsenal of visual expression is rich and varied. William Wauer has an assured command of the mise-en-scène. He has a fine sense of space. The tempo of the action is brisk. The shots are clear and expressive. The deep space is a pleasure to observe.

Having seen Sergei Eisenstein's October earlier today it was revealing to observe here William Wauer's fine sense of huge crowd movements 13 years earlier. Der Tunnel belongs to the cinema's remarkable visions of class struggle. The violence is quite tragic. After a devastating catastrophe in the tunnel construction site the wives of the workers stone Mac Allan's wife and daughter to death.

Depressed, Mac Allan falls into deep melancholy, from which he is lifted by the love of Ethel Lloyd (Fritzi Massary). Via the love marriage Mac Allan becomes the son-in-law of the richest man on earth. There was heartfelt laughter in the audience as Mac Allan declares to Ellen on their wedding night that all his energy can belong solely to the tunnel enterprise. Ellen does not hide her disappointment (not the tunnel of love was meant) but agrees that "I will support you with all the means at my disposal".

After 24 years of hard work on a construction site of 100 000 workers there is a hand reaching us from the other side. Two more years, and the first Trans-Atlantic train reaches its destination in America, with Mac Allan himself as the engine driver.

Neil Brand provided a vigorous piano music to the screening.

The restoration is of the first order, the visual quality often brilliant, sometimes from decomposing source material. The colour effects are fine (lila, yellow, orange, bright red in fires).

A wonderful discovery.

Benshi concert Chuji tabinikki / [A Diary of Chuji's Travels] (2010 restoration National Film Center, Tokyo) (incomplete) (Ichiro Kataoka and the Otowaza ensemble)

Chuji tabinikki. Photos: National Film Center, Tokyo. Click to enlarge the images.

忠次旅日記 / [Diario di viaggio di Chuji] [not released in Finland] (Nikkatsu – JP 1927) (fragments)
Pt. 2: SHINSHU KESSHO HEN [Riso cruento a Shinshu / Bloody Laughter in Shinshu]
Pt. 3: GOYO HEN [In nome della legge / In the Name of the Law] D+SC+story: Daisuke Ito; DP:  Rokuzo Watarai (Pt. 2), Hiromitsu Karasawa (Pt. 3); cast (Pt. 2): Denjiro Okochi (Chuji Kunisada), Hideo Nakamura (Kantaro), Kichiji Nakamura (Kabe Yaesemon), Seinosuke Sakamoto (Mitsuki no Bunzo); cast (Pt. 3): Denjiro Okochi (Chuji Kunisada), Naoe Fushimi (Oshina), Ranko Sawa (Okume), Motoharu Isokawa (Kihei, a sake brewer), Eiji Murakami (Ginjiro), Nobuko Akitsuki (Yujo Nobuo), Kajo Onoe (Washizu no Otozo), Mononosuke Ichikawa (Takasaski no Jukichi); rel: 14.8.1927 (Pt. 2), 27.12.1927 (Pt. 3); orig. l: 21,457 ft.; incomplete, fragments of Pt. 2 + Pt. 3, 35 mm, 6679 ft, 111' (16 fps); titles: JAP, subt. ENG; print source: National Film Center, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.
    Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.
    Benshi: Ichiro Kataoka. Live music performed by: Otowaza ensemble
    Original length: 6540 m. This restoration: 2036 m.
    Introduced by Hisashi Okajima (Director, National Film Center, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo).
    There was a restoration comparison before the film: the source / black and white / tinted.
    Viewed at Teatro Verdi, with e-subtitles in Italian, 5 Oct 2015

Johan Nordström (GCM Catalog and website): "Daisuke Ito (1898-1981) played a central part in bringing a hitherto unknown level of stylistic sophistication and political awareness to the genre of jidaigeki (historical films). Often called “the father of jidaigeki” by critics and movie fans in Japan, Ito was the prolific director of nearly a hundred jidaigeki films, several of which are hailed among the finest films ever produced in Japan. Instrumental in developing the theatrical kyugeki, or “old style”, period film into shin-jidaigeki, its modern variation, these films utilized contemporary storytelling form with historical settings, often politically charged, yet still engaged with the social issues of their own time, thinly veiled by placing them “safely” in the past. These socially conscious period films, often choosing for their protagonist a disgruntled, lonely, nihilistic drifter, pitted against society or the rigid social and political structure of feudal times, were occasionally referred to as keiko-eiga, “tendency films” or left-leaning commercial films, and reached their zenith in the years leading up to 1930, after which harsh state censorship smothered the genre."

"Described by David Bordwell as “calligraphic”, Ito’s fluid camera style, combined with fast-paced action and rapid cutting, created a cinema of flourishes which earned Ito his well-known nickname “Ido daisuki” (a pun on his name, meaning “great fan of [camera] movement”). After Ito left the Shochiku studio, he eventually joined Nikkatsu in 1926. It was there during 1927 and 1928 that he would come to create his famous re-telling of the story of the gambler-outlaw Chuji Kunisada (1810-1850) in his 3-part Chuji tabinikki (A Diary of Chuji’s Travels). Described by S. A. Thornton as “a deeply pessimistic story of resistance and betrayal”, not only did it establish Ito as a leader of the “tendency” period film, but it served to cement the working relationship between Ito and the film’s star, Denjiro Okochi (1898-1962). Mariann Lewinsky has aptly noted that “both a director’s film and an actors’ showcase, Chuji Tabinikki boasts a display of a presentational acting style which features virtuoso performances in scene after scene.”Today Ito’s trilogy survives only in fragments, obtained by Tokyo’s National Film Center in 1991. Of the first part, Koshu satsujin hen (Death Squad in Koshu), nothing survives. However, one episode of the second part, Shinshu kessho hen (Bloody Laughter in Shinshu), and about half of the third part, Goyo hen (In the Name of the Law), have been restored, including a shortened version of the powerful finale. Lewinsky, writing on the occasion of the screening of this material at the 2001 Giornate del Cinema Muto, commented: “Now lost is the overall triptych structure, described in contemporary reviews as a succession of dominant moods, from the ‘freshness’ of the first part, via the intense ‘sentiment’ of the central section, on into the ‘dark nihilism’ of the final epilogue. However, the material that remains does contain a comparable mood modulation in microcosm, and, along with it, Chuji’s utter decline from an athletic, invincible superhero into a paralysed, mute body on a stretcher. Also lost is the network of recurring motifs, both plot-related and visual, but some remnants (such as the circle motif in the giant brewery vats and the ring-around-the-rosy game of the children linking hands) demonstrate the director’s visual sense and creative power in this respect.”"

"Ito’s sophisticated understanding of the jidaigeki genre’s tropes and themes also allowed him to subvert them; Chuji tabinikki is a prime example of this. Rather than conform to the archetypical tragic romantic ending, in which the protagonist dies a beautiful and heroic death, the film instead turns darkly nihilistic: Ito denies his hero the fulfilment of this narrative plot pattern, reducing his protagonist to a cripple who can only watch as his followers vainly sacrifice themselves one by one to save him in the film’s legendary final battle. Lewinsky comments, “In making his hero fall so much further, Ito confers on him a far more intense level of tragedy. Ito’s ugly, shameful ending is more moving than the usual beautiful-tragic one, and therefore more beautiful. Seen as a genre film, Chuji Tabinikki intensifies, extends, and transforms the standard formulae throughout.”"

The Restoration

"Since parts of the film were discovered in 1991, the National Film Center at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, has to date undertaken the restoration of Chuji tabinikki three times. The original 3-part trilogy’s complete length was 6,540 metres; the 1991 find, a 35 mm nitrate print from a digest version of material from Parts 2 and 3, partially tinted and in deteriorated condition, totalled 1800 metres. The 1992 and 2001 restorations, carried out by the IMAGICA West laboratory, utilized analogue techniques. In 1992 an internegative on safety stock was struck from the nitrate print, Chuji tabinikki, 1927. (National Film Center, Tokyo) employing the wet-gate printing process; in 2001 a total-immersion process was applied. When the National Film Center decided in 2010 to undertake the project of restoring this canonical work a third time, it was decided that it would be a digital restoration by IMAGICA."

"First a 35 mm internegative was struck from the 35 mm screening print source material, using the wet-gate process. This was then scanned at 4K resolution, although the actual restoration work was carried out in 2K. Lost intertitles were added based on the script, and the screen-time of some hard-to-read intertitles was extended. This digital material then underwent grading, after which the 2K material was used to create a 35 mm black & white negative. Finally, this negative was used as a basis for creating a tinted print using an analogue photochemical process at IMAGICA West."

"The digital restoration of Chuji tabinikki constitutes the National Film Center’s latest effort to restore one of the true masterpieces of Japanese cinema to a previously unprecendented level of clarity."

The Presentation

"Chuji tabinikki will be presented with the benshi narration of Ichiro Kataoka, performing together with the three-piece musical ensemble Otowaza, which consists of Ayumi Kamiya (piano), Yasumi Miyazawa (shamisen [Japanese three-stringed instrument]), and Masayoshi Tanaka (percussion and taiko [Japanese drum]). A special score has been composed by Kamiya and Miyazawa for the occasion."

"Kataoka is thrilled to be performing the narration for this masterpiece of Japanese cinema: “Chuji tabinikki has often been called the pinnacle of Japanese silent cinema, yet for the longest time it was believed to be lost forever. When it was miraculously rediscovered in 1991, it came to fill what had been a large void in the history of Japanese cinema. For us, Chuji tabinikki is not just a famous masterpiece, it has become a symbol for rediscovery and restoration. There is no greater joy than for us to be able to perform in Pordenone with the latest restoration of this legendary film.”" – Johan Nordström

AA: Voted in Cinema Junpo as the best Japanese film of all times in 1959.

A wonderful new restoration of the still very incomplete classic. I saw the previous (2001) restoration of Chuji tabinikki in Le Giornate del Cinema Muto's seminal retrospective of the silent heritage of Japanese cinema in Sacile in 2001. The giant survey was engrossing and depressing. Only 1–5% of Japanese silent cinema was considered preserved. The retrospective was to an exceptionally high degree a jigsaw puzzle. Many films were extremely fragmentary, and print quality was often awful.

We have learned much since, and the new restoration and presentation of Daisuke Ito's Chuji tabinikki is a symbol of this progress. Better image quality, colour, and better readability of the intertitles all help make much fuller sense of the film. Still fatally and fundamentally incomplete and fragmentary, it is a bit easier now to try mentally to reconstruct the story, including the missing first part. It is also useful to read Mariann Lewinsky's GCM 2001 program note to Chuji tabinikki.

My remark in 2001: "Of the original 6540 meters of the legendary masterpiece, 1800 meters survive. Beautiful calligraphy of the intertitles. The shocking trajectory of the protagonist from the invincible samurai to the paralysed body on the stretcher." That would mean that the version screened today was 235 m longer, much of it undoubtedly thanks to the re-editing of the intertitles which contributed a lot to the intelligibility of the narrative. (I forget now whether the restoration comparison is included in the length of the print). Last time already I was grateful for the high quality of the translation, and this time it was again very gratifying to read.

From the previous viewing I remembered the furious energy evident in the fragmentary remains of the masterpiece. This time I sensed an affinity between the fate of the badman Chuji and the destiny of the film itself. Both paralysed by disfiguration, yet emanating an extraordinary force.

Memorable: - an extraordinary choreography of action - epic long views - the via dolorosa - the villainous Chuji's solo mastery against a manifold enemy with his left hand only - an emphasis on the children's play - the unflinching tragic ending - tragicomic goings-on at the geisha house - the calligraphy of the intertitles - the high literary quality.

There was a restoration comparison before the film: the source / black and white restoration / the tinted result. As I am not a fan of modern tinting I would prefer black and white, or a simulation of toning. Yet I understand this film needs colour.

This was a benshi concert gala event, and it made this screening unique, special, and unforgettable. That said, I have my reservations about the benshi.

A final thought: Chuji tabinikki reminds me of Leo Tolstoy's tale Hadji Murat. (Harold Bloom: "It is my personal touchstone for the sublime of prose fiction, to me the best story in the world, or at least the best that I have ever read", The Western Canon, p. 313). There is the same sense of an irresistible life force and an unflinching facing of death.

Oktyabr / October

Poster by Stenbergs & Yakov Ruklevsky

Oktyabr. Photos: Collection Austrian Film Museum, Vienna

Октябрь / Lokakuu / Oktober [Ottobre] (Sovkino – SU 1928) D, SC: Sergei M. Eisenstein, Grigori V. Alexandrov; DP: Eduard K. Tisse, asst. Vladimir Popov, Vladimir S. Nilsen; AD: Vasili I. Kovrigin; ass D: Maxim Strauch, Mikhail Gomorov, Ilya Trauberg; C: Vasili N. Nikandrov (Lenin), Nikolai Popov (Kerensky), Boris N. Livanov (Tereshchenko, a minister in the Provisional Government), Sokolov (Vladimir A. Antonov-Ovseyenko), Nikolai I. Podvolsky (himself), Lyashchenko (Konovalov), Chibisov (Skobelev), Mikholev (Kishkin), Smelsky (Verderevsky), Ognev (himself –the sailor who fired the signal from the “Aurora”), Eduard K. Tisse (a German officer), Leningrad workers, Red Army soldiers, sailors from the Baltic Fleet of the Red Navy; filmed: 1927; first private screenings: 14 + 23.1.1928, Moscow; première: 14.3.1928; orig. l: 9317 ft. / 2800 m; 35 mm, 2882 m, 124' (20 fps); titles: RUS; print source: Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum, Wien
    [In the GCM programme schedule a duration of 140' was announced. The actual duration was 127'.]
    Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone. (The Canon Revisited).
    Viewed at Teatro Verdi, with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Günter A. Buchwald, percussions: Frank Bockius, 5 Oct 2015

Daria Khitrova, Yuri Tsivian (GCM catalog and website): "There are canons and canons. Released soon after the instantly canonized Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein’s October was, it would seem, bound to become every critic’s cherished disappointment. It did; some said the film falsified the very event it was commissioned to highlight; some others pointed at what they thought was a lack of action, thinness of storyline, and the absence of unity in style; in addition, Lenin’s widow detested the fact that a bald-headed extra was hired to impersonate the man she knew so well. All this may be true; with the only exception that Eisenstein’s October did become part of a canon, if in a different, less conventional sense."
 
"There are canons that glow in their glory and there are ones that grow in their shade. Eisenstein’s October grew with years as the events of October 1917 receded, and it grows on us every time we watch it. In 1928, ten years later, there were still people around who remembered how Lenin looked; wondered where Lev Trotsky disappeared – both from the film and the political scene; or said: wait, wait, I was there when the Winter Palace silently surrendered – where did they see those masses storming the palace with such zest and pomp? Now that only two years remain till the centenary of the actual historical events – you should have waited, Pordenone! – who cares about the real number of people in the Palace Square? Historians might, but then, they don’t begrudge if a film does not. Films have better use for crowds than history does."

"Some canons, philologists tell us, endure because they are changeless; others, because they change. Eisenstein did not direct many films, but any film he directed was strikingly different from the previous one. This devotion to change is what makes the Eisenstein canon indestructible: his oeuvre is internally equivocal. "

"Serious people respect Eisenstein’s official successes, Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky, and dismiss October as a Formalist experiment. Little wonder, therefore, that they are countered by those who extol Strike and October, plus the forbidden Ivan the Terrible (Part Two), and turn a cold shoulder to Eisenstein’s successes, if only for the reason that they are such. One young archivist (be careful: he may be sitting next to you in the Verdi) once told us that Old and New was the only film by Eisenstein which he could watch without ennui. A well-known film director, let his name be forgotten forever, when asked what he thought of Eisenstein, said that his favorite was Romance Sentimentale."

"But note that he did not dare to say: I’ve not seen any. Pray at the wall, sit on the wall, run your head against the wall – the wall is always there. You may like or dislike this or that film Eisenstein made, but there is no way around Eisenstein’s canon."

"One thing that Eisenstein was reluctant to do in his October was ride on the wave of his own Battleship Potemkin – even if another Potemkin was what most people expected him to turn out. His plan for October was more ambitious: to invent cinema anew. This, of course, was but a theoretical ambition, but Eisenstein did do what he could to take filmmaking to the brink of the unknown. Take narrative and wring its neck, was one of Eisenstein’s commandments; undoing the unities of time and space were another two. Viktor Shklovsky, who was one of the few critics who understood what October was trying to do (which does not imply he loved it), called October “a catalogue of inventions.” "

"Some of October’s inventions have been taken up by others, and may not look like inventions anymore; some misfired; others are still waiting to be unpacked." – Daria Khitrova, Yuri Tsivian

AA: Ever since the acclaimed 2012 restoration of October (116’ at 22 fps, ZDF/ARTE, Filmmuseum München, Deutschlandradio Kultur, roc Berlin) to the original music by Edmund Meisel I have been looking forward to see and hear it, preferably in Pordenone, so it was baffling to see a regular version, luckily in a good print, but without Meisel. Instead, the 2012 restoration was delivered to guests as a dvd.

Even this version was unusual for me to see as we in Helsinki still regularly screen the 1967 re-release version with a Shostakovich compilation score.

A mother of inventions, October has always been for me a film to appreciate and to study, a bold film full of innovations, some of which work and some of which don't. As a piece of political propaganda October is crude and embarrassingly simplistic. The problem with the typage approach to world history is that it diminishes all the actors, from Kerensky to Lenin.

The epic flow is irresistible. Sergei Eisenstein here is creating a new kind of epic which is different from Griffith, Lang, and Gance. This is an epic of rebellion, of a revolutionary situation in which the powers-that-be cannot reign like they have used to, and the people cannot go on living like they have used to. "The power was lying on the ground". That becomes quite evident in this film.

Weaknesses: the clumsy irony, the obvious caricature, the lack of nuance and the missing sense of complexity in a world-historical moment. Too much agitation and sloganizing, too little intelligent discourse.

Strengths: a sense of time dilatation, a dynamic structure, a concept of the architecture of power, a balance of action and meditation, of dramatic, lyrical, and playful passages. "The calm before the storm". I do not mind that Eisenstein gets lost in ornaments in his obsession in the monuments of power. The movements of the revolutionary crowds ("the storming of the Winter Palace") are compelling, the sense of choreography is not too stylized. These scenes have been abused as documents for ages because they feel right although we know it did not happen like this.

The sense of rebellious energy is irresistible.

Günter A. Buchwald and Frank Bockius brought us a vigorous and often percussive score that fitted the movie perfectly. They emphasized the sense of imperial Russia as a war machine that has become self-destructing and needs to be stopped by force.

A fine photochemical print.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1914 starring Sam Lucas)

Sam Lucas as Uncle Tom. The image is not from the 1914 movie.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (1914). Anna Kenney as Emmeline. Photo: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN (World Producing Corp.; dist: World Film Corp. – US 1914) D: William Robert Daly; SC: Edward McWade, from the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) + from the play by George L. Aiken (1853);
    C: Sam Lucas (Uncle Tom), Walter Hitchcock (George Shelby), Hattie Delaro (Mrs. Shelby), Master Abernathy (George Shelby, Jr.), Teresa Michelena (Eliza), Irving Cummings (George Harris), Paul Scardon (Haley), Marie Eline (Little Eva St. Clair), Garfield Thompson (St. Clair), Roy Applegate (Simon Legree), Boots Wall (Topsy), Anna Kenney (Emmeline [information to this blog by Unknown added 1 May 2019, see Comments below].
    35 mm, 4200 ft, 62' (18 fps); titles: ENG; print source: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.
    Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.
    Viewed at Teatro Verdi, with e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin, 5 Oct 2015

Ron Magliozzi (GCM catalog and website): "Until the release of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the most influential work of fiction by a white author on the subject of race in America. "
    "Lax copyright laws in the U.S. and Britain allowed for the rapid proliferation of touring stage companies, and the melodramatic blend of thrills, sadism, and sentiment concocted from the book was a phenomenal hit with audiences. Cultural historian Eric Lott has estimated that at least 3 million people had experienced the novel in some form before 1900. It is no surprise then that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also among the earliest and most-often adapted narratives to appear on film: in 1903 by Edison and Lubin; 1910 by Vitagraph and Thanhouser; 1913 by Imp and Kalem; 1914 by World; 1918 by Paramount; and in 1927 by Universal with a Movietone score."
    "Casting a black actor in the title role added a fresh element to the familiar screen subject and a pretense of authenticity to a main character that was traditionally played by a white actor in blackface. Sam Lucas (1840-1916) is believed to have been the first black actor to perform the lead on stage in 1878, and he broke the color barrier again in this film production. As a ballad singer, dancer, and composer, he had appeared with every important minstrel and black theatre troupe in America after the Civil War, toured Europe (1892-1895), and been featured on dozens of sheet music covers following his first hit song in 1875. Born the son of a slave, by the time Lucas took on his roles in the Lime Kiln and Uncle Tom’s Cabin films in 1913-14, he was revered by the black entertainment community as their “Grand Old Man of the Theatre.” Bert Williams put Lucas in a class with respected Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) and bi-racial writer Alexandre Dumas père (1802-1870). And a definitive statement of respect from his race came when the film opened in New York in August 1914 accompanied by a score from Will Marion Cook, one of the leading African-American composers in the U.S. "
    "By the 1930s, the name “Uncle Tom” was being used as a derogatory expression to describe persons of color who were so eager to please that they failed to take a stand against mistreatment and disrespect. While the Lucas performance cannot be said to mitigate the inherent racial prejudice of the material, the film stands as an important record of his alent in a dramatic role. Sam Lucas was 73 years of age when he went on location in Louisiana in the early spring of 1914 for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The stunts he performed during the river rescue of Little Eva contributed to his death from pneumonia in January 1916." (Ron Magliozzi)

AA: This film adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin was added in the National Film Registry in 2012.

Reportedly this film adaptation is the first American feature film for general release with a black actor in the leading role.

Nobody today reads Uncle Tom's Cabin which belongs to the novels that have changed the world. It remained on Leo Tolstoy's short list of recommended reading after his fundamentalist anti-art conversion. Harriet Beecher-Stowe was "the little lady who caused the great war" according to Abraham Lincoln.

A book contemporary to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Solomon Northrup's memoir Twelve Years a Slave, as told to David Wilson in 1853, corroborates Beecher-Stowe's vision of the conditions of slavery; Beecher-Stowe's novel itself was based on extensive research. As filmed in 2013 by Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave has become the slavery film narrative for our age.

In Finnish Uncle Tom's Cabin was first translated in 1856, and an influential translation was made in 1904 by the great statesman and educator Niilo Liakka.

I have not reread the novel since childhood. It may be melodramatic and sentimental but there are aspects in it that I'll never forget. It hits right into the essence of slavery. It is a true Christian narrative. It is a story of love transcending violence. It is a great plea for freedom.

The fact that in the U.S.A. Uncle Tom might not be "politically correct" since the 1930s I respect but do not understand. Should I regard Shaft as politically correct? I understand that "Uncle Tom" came to mean a black sycophant to whites, a servile flatterer, a collaborator. Those who say so have not read nor understood the story. Uncle Tom is a figure comparable with Jesus, Tolstoy, and Gandhi. And Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. It is a story of the greatest bravery, the truest grandeur of spirit, defying the rules of an evil game, refusing to participate in it in any way, trans cending the confine of oppression, and setting a model for the future.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was apparently the most filmed novel during the silent era. During the sound era there has been no Hollywood film adaptation. I have seen some of those adaptations, but they have left no deep memory traces.

In fact, the most meaningful film association of Uncle Tom's Cabin to me is Walt Disney's Mickey's Mellerdrammer (1933). It also seems to be in the "politically incorrect" category now; in Disney's dvd collections it is hidden in the most hard-to-find reaches of the bonus materials. In the contemporary discussions of the film only superficial aspects are highlighted, and the essence is ignored.

The essence is that Mickey Mouse (who is black), Walt Disney's alter ego, plays Uncle Tom with great enthusiasm, and the voice of Uncle Tom here is literally that of Uncle Walt. Mickey also plays Topsy! Horace Horsecollar plays Simon Legree, and Minnie Mouse is Little Eva. (Mickey plays Uncle Tom in blackface, like the black Bert Williams performed his characters). In this short goofy parody of amateur melodrama the essential scene of Uncle Tom's Cabin is included.

"I own you, body and soul", says Simon Legree, kicking Uncle Tom with his boot. "You may own by body but my soul belongs to the Lord", answers Tom (Mickey). This is one of my favourite scenes in all cinema. (The relevant scene in the novel is in Chapter 33).

The thing in Tom that irks Simon Legree most is his Christian faith. (From Simon Legree's backstory we learn more why that is so). There is an affinity here with Adolf Hitler who swore to free mankind from "the curse of Sinai", the ten commandments. They believe in what they think is the supremacy of the strongest: the rule of force, the rule of violence (not the rule of love and justice).

There is a sense of urgency in the violence in this film, all relevant. The screenplay of this film differs from the novel in that there is also a real alternative of black violent resistance. When the drunken Simon Legree passes out his housekeeper-mistress Cassy takes his gun and contemplates shooting him but leaves the gun on the doorstep. Tom has refused to whip a fellow black slave guy on the cotton field, and as a matter of restoration of discipline, Simon has Tom whipped to death. The guy whom Tom refused to whip finds the gun and kills Simon Legree.

William Robert Daly is not a good director. The storytelling is clumsy. The film has been made in the early cinema mode, usually in long shots and long takes. There are interesting camera angles, though. (The difference is great in comparison to other films made that year, seen in this year's Pordenone fest, particularly Benjamin Christensen's Det hemmelighedsfulde X).

Thanks to the compelling story and the sincerity of the talent this is yet still worth seeing. The ending, with George Shelby, Jr. crying at Tom's grave, is memorable.

I think there was no sequence of Eliza being chased over the icy river in this print but my memory may fail me.

A sensitive and efficient musical interpretation by Donald Sosin at the grand piano.

The visual quality: often soft or low contrast.

Bert Williams and Company, Programme I

Annie Oakley in Actors' Fund Field Day at the Polo Grounds, New York City, August 18, 1910. Photo: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA

A Fool and His Money. Photo: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA

Fish (1916). Photo: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA

Abbie Mitchell the Colored Prima Donna in Songs of Yesterday. Photo: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.
Viewed at Teatro Verdi, with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin, 5 Oct 2015

BERT WILLIAMS AND COMPANY

Ron Magliozzi: Bert Williams and Company: The Roots of Black Performance on Film

Ron Magliozzi (GCM catalog and website): "At the time of his death, Bert Williams (1874-1922) had a record of achievement that still defines superstardom as we know it today. An internationally famed musical theater performer, a composer and partner in a black music publishing business, a major recording artist for Columbia Records, a merchandised celebrity and member of black society who lent his name to social causes and cultural organizations, and a leading man in motion pictures. As a black man in America at the time, only educator Booker T. Washington and boxer Jack Johnson rivaled his fame. Working with George Walker (1873-1911), his performance partner and visionary business manager, the team of “Williams and Walker” pioneered mixed-race vaudeville, created a worldwide fad for African-American dance, introduced fully staged black musicals to Broadway, and performed before British royalty, with a number of the actors Williams would later bring with him to the screen. In 1910 Williams broke the color barrier on stage in New York when he joined the all-white cast of the Ziegfeld Follies; co-star W. C. Fields would later famously describe him as “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” Williams’ eccentric costuming and unique persona set him apart, like Charles Chaplin’s Tramp, a comparison that was apparent to their contemporaries and landed them side by side in the premiere issue of an avant-garde arts magazine, The Soil, in 1916. Although Williams’ brief film career was ending in 1914, just as Chaplin’s was beginning, their similarities – stage experience, mastery of pantomime, signature fashion and mannerisms, and intellectual approach to their craft – are genuine."

"Jazz critic Gary Giddens’ description of Williams as “the patron saint of African-American performers,” aptly suggests that to understand the significance of Williams’ films we need to know the entertainment community that nurtured him and the social history that shaped his generation. Soon after the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) freed the slaves in the United States, the first group of African-Americans formally entered show business, at first taking up white-invented forms of minstrelsy, but soon producing the numerous troupes, choral groups, and concert bands that toured the world from Europe to Asia and Australia before 1900. While the process of creating their own brands of cultural product in the fields of music and dance rapidly changed popular entertainment around the world, it did so in a climate of brutal segregation."

"Just as Williams and Walker began their careers together in 1896, the situation worsened when America’s so-called “Jim Crow” laws declared that discriminatory “separate but equal” practices were constitutional. The cruel irony of white performers co-opting African-American ragtime music and dance moves so freely under these conditions was cause for comment in the black press in 1908: “the Caucasian performer really steals one-half of his work from Williams and Walker, Cole and Johnson ... Abbie Mitchell and others of the like almost constantly.”U.S. census figures for 1910 reported that 6,987 African-Americans were working in show business. In New York City, this tight-knit stage community, based largely in the mid-town Tenderloin and uptown Harlem entertainment districts, was well aware that there were civil-rights dimensions to their work: the freedom to perform where they wished and advance a more authentic image of their race would be notions they brought to filmmaking. "

"Meanwhile, blackface and dialect humor were racial stereotypes they accommodated to attract white audiences. To be profitable, their performances required the support of the white middle-class who had the money and white producers who controlled the major theater chains. The success they achieved amusing white and black audiences simultaneously, from different perspectives, was a form of “double-consciousness” – a term coined by respected writer W. E. B. Du Bois to describe the black experience of seeing one’s self through the eyes of others, as if, in his words, with “two souls ... two warring ideals.”"

"In fact, Bert Williams was a light-skinned Caribbean-American, born in the West Indies of mixed-race parents. The blackface he and other black comedians put on served to define their comic personas, although by 1910 the stereotypical African-American character that Williams had perfected with Walker in 1900 was criticized by some commentators. When the opportunity to star in films came to Williams in the fall of 1913, he left the Ziegfeld Follies for a season and brought with him to Biograph the very performers he had been accused of abandoning for the white stage several years before. On screen in Lime Kiln Club Field Day, centered between the clownish antics and matinee-idol manhood of his male co-stars, illuminated by the glow of affection from his female lead, one might argue his blackface is effectively redeemed."

"Acquired in 1938 by the Museum of Modern Art’s founding film curator Iris Barry, and preserved by archivist Eileen Bower in the late 1970s, it wasn’t until 2003 that the process of identifying the “Lime Kiln” footage began. First, by establishing that it was not the apocryphal Darktown Jubilee which Terry Ramsaye credits to Williams in his film history A Million and One Nights (1926); and second, by confirming that it was among a package of films commissioned by New York stage producers Klaw & Erlanger under a 1912 agreement with Biograph. The restoration of Bert Williams’ three Biograph films from their original camera negatives provides us with more intimate access to the artist. Whatever indulgence these films may require from audiences today, the recovery of Lime Kiln Club Field Day alone should be an incentive to reconsider the many other black subjects produced before The Birth of a Nation (1915)." – Ron Magliozzi

Prog. 1
(All notes by Ron Magliozzi)

ACTORS’ FUND FIELD DAY AT THE POLO GROUNDS, NEW YORK CITY, AUGUST 18, 1910 (Vitagraph Co. of America – US 1910) D: ?; C: Bert Williams (Jack Johnson), Billie Reeves (James J. Jeffries), Annie Oakley (herself), George Bickel (clown with mallet and trumpet), Harry Watson, Jr. (clown hit with mallet), George Beban (Napoleon), members of the Catholic Protectory Band + the baseball team of the Friars Club + George Evans Minstrels + Borneo Dyaks (from Coney Island) + White Rats (“Table Tumblers”); 35 mm, 341 ft, 5' (18 fps); titles: ENG; print source: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.
    "Shot on the most famous playing field of its time in the United States, bordering Harlem and Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, this record of an annual sporting benefit for the Actors’ Fund of America features members of the Broadway companies of producers George M. Cohan, Lew Fields, and Florenz Ziegfeld, as well as the theatre organizations the Friars Club and the White Rats.
From the stage cast of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910, Williams and Reeves perform a bit from their parody of the World Heavyweight Championship fight that had taken place on 4 July 1910. The victory of Black boxer Jack Johnson over James J. Jeffries in this contest had been the cause of deadly racial violence across America, which may explain why, in this topical satire, it is Williams who accepts the knockout blow. More than half of the acts in the film feature blacks and blackface performers, and three of the racially-themed attractions – the greased-pig chase, the pie-eating contest, and the “shoe scramble” – would be replicated in Lime Kiln Club Field Day."
    "A reporter covering the event for the New York Times complained that “the motion picture machine and newspaper photographers obscured the view” for many of the estimated 13,000 spectators in attendance."
    "Although stage stars Marie Dressler, Victor Moore, Emma Carus, George M. Cohan, Irene Franklin, Eddie Foy, and the boxer James J. Corbett have been credited with appearing in the film, they cannot be identified in the surviving footage. The film was released on a split reel with the drama Brother Man, starring “Vitagraph Girl” Florence Turner."
    AA: In long shot and long take, a record of a big parade, Annie Oakley, a foolish band, wild men of Borneo, song and dance, a parody of black vs. white boxing (with Bert Williams), pie eaters, shoe scramble, a table wrestler.

A FOOL AND HIS MONEY (Solax Co. – US 1912) D, P: Alice Guy-Blaché; C: James Russell (Sam Jones); 35 mm, 767 ft, 11' (18 fps); titles: ENG; print source: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.
    "Self-described “cakewalk king” and vaudeville entertainer James Russell is given no opportunity to dance as the ill-fated fool in this cautionary comedy. A studio plot synopsis in Moving Picture World (11 October 1912) gives details that are not spelled out in the surviving print: “Sam Jones is a laborer – a wielder of the white-wash brush. He is in love with Lindy Williams. Having saved up quite a little money, Sam buys some swell second-hand clothes and goes to Lindy’s home. Lindy’s people are quite prosperous, her father having retired from his job as ‘Public Porter,’ Lindy is a coquettish ebony beauty and trifles with Sam’s affections. She plays Sam against Bill Johnson and finally, in despair Sam retires from the field. Walking along the road beaten and despondent, Sam finds a lot of money. Now, he vows, he will show them! He buys full dress clothes and other swell duds, an automobile and jewelry. Like a peacock he begins parading himself before Lindy and his rival, and, as can be expected, Lindy transfers her affections to him.” Believed to be the earliest surviving film with an all-black cast, it takes its title from the axiom “A fool and his money are soon parted,” and it has been said that the film would play just as effectively with a white cast."
    "Although the notion that “class over race” may be read as a reflection of Blaché’s white, European point of view, in the history of race cinema it is perhaps more important to acknowledge that class consciousness was a relevant theme in the lives of African-Americans in Jim Crow America. The mass migration of uneducated, working-class Southern blacks threatened the hard-won social position of middle-class blacks in northern cities like New York and Chicago."
    "Moreover, the conspicuous consumption demonstrated by the f ilm’s nouveau riche main character, which the film spends significant time satirizing, might be seen as a commentary on the phenomenon of successful black sports figures and entertainers like Williams and Walker showing off publicly in fine clothes and jewelry, a practice which was much remarked upon at the time, and which writer David Gilbert has described in The Product of Our Souls (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) as “a self-conscious expression of Black modernity.”"
    "Shot in New Jersey under the title Darktown Aristocrats, a little over a year before Williams went before the motion picture cameras in New York, A Fool and His Money shares a number of key plot elements with A Natural Born Gambler and Lime Kiln Club Field Day: corrupt card games, disrupted fancy-dress dance parties, and male protagonists whose unearned money wins them the favor of the women they desire before they’re undone and shamed. These were among the limited range of situations, recycled in countless stage routines, race songs, and recordings, which served to define black life for largely white audiences at the time. The challenge for black entertainers, when they were allowed to do so, was to invest such material with authenticity."
    AA: A heavy-handed satire on the nouveau riche with a seemingly all black cast. A world of callous utilitarianism where the women are only in it for the money. Visual quality good or high contrast.

FISH (Biograph Co., for Klaw & Erlanger; dist: General Film Company – US 1916) D: ?; SC: C: Bert Williams; 35 mm, 763 ft, 10' (20 fps); titles: ENG; print source: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (preserved with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lillian Gish Trust for Film Preservation).
    "On the eve of releasing A Natural Born Gambler in the summer of 1916, Biograph issued a number of misleading press releases claiming to have signed Bert Williams for a new series of two-reel comedies. In truth, both Fish and A Natural Born Gambler had been produced several years before, in 1913-14 under the studio’s original agreement with Klaw & Erlanger. Coming less than a month after the star rejoined the cast of the Ziegfeld Follies in June 1916, the studio made its reasoning clear in an item in Moving Picture World (29 July 1916): “There isn’t a more clever or popular comedian on the stage than Bert Williams and the fact that he has been chosen again as the star comedian with Ziegfeld Follies and is turning the people away at two-dollar prices in New York despite the hot weather bespeaks his drawing power.”"
    "On the vaudeville stage, Williams’ signature monologues, consisting of storytelling and pantomime, were so popular that a number of them were recorded by the Columbia Phonograph Co. (e.g., “Elder Eatmore’s Sermon on Throwing Stones”)."
    "Fish was based on a Williams skit describing the efforts of an eager young man to sell the fish he has caught to a disinterested homeowner, ending with the punchline “And none on Sunday.”
This single-reel short is markedly different in pacing and sensibility from the Lime Kiln subjects, and Biograph production logs suggest that it may have been shot in the summer of 1914 by the comedy unit headed by director Dell Henderson. In the real-world setting of locations in Van Cortlandt Park and the hilly environs of the Bronx, Williams’ screen performance loses the verbal irony that marked his studied interpretations of racially stereotyped characters on stage. In the company of white actors performing in blackface, the slow-witted character he plays, at the beck and call of a white landowner for the sake of a joke, falls solidly within the tradition of old-fashioned minstrel comedy. Furthermore, despite the fact that older actors were regularly cast in younger parts during the silent period, for Williams at 42 years of age to be playing a boy so manly in size and gait has decidedly racist dimensions. Viewed from a present-day perspective, Williams’ tattered image and subjugation in Fish calls to mind the revisionist narrative of Steve McQueen’s feature 12 Years a Slave (2014)."
    AA: A crude farce, a heartless comedy with Williams as the sole real black talent. Visual quality: good.

ABBIE MITCHELL THE COLORED PRIMA DONNA IN SONGS OF YESTERDAY (De Forest Phonofilm, Inc. – US 1922) (excerpt) D., prod: Lee de Forest; C: Abbie Mitchell; première: 12.4.1923, Engineering Society Building Auditorium, New York; song: “Mighty Lak’ a Rose” (1901), M: Ethelbert Nevin, lyr. Frank Lebby Stanton; 35 mm, 1223 ft, 13' (24 fps), sd. (Phonofilm); dial: ENG; print source: Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.
    "Abbie Mitchell (1884-1960) was a major figure in the pioneering generation of black musical performers who challenged the white-controlled Broadway theatre establishment, from Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk in 1898 when she was 14 years old through Darkydom in 1914. During this period she appeared in work by Williams and Walker, Cole and Johnson, and her husband, composer Will Marion Cook, and later went on to star in the premiere production of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess (1935) and pla y with Tallulah Bankhead in the original stage production of The Little Foxes (1939). On screen in Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913) and the lost short Uncle Remus’ First Visit to N ew Yor k (1914), by black film producer Hunter C. Haynes, Mitchell was among the earliest female performers in the first wave of all-black cast films produced in the U.S. In this experimental sound short, she performs an African-American dialect song in the stereotyped character of a plantation mammy to a newborn child."
    AA: I confess that this film left no memory trace, my attention was not sharp.

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN (World Producing Corp.; dist: World Film Corp. – US 1914) Sam Lucas (Uncle Tom) - see separate blog note after this.

La grande guerra: Luca Comerio

Dans la tranchée. Photo: Cineteca del Friuli.

LA GUERRA D’ITALIA A 3000 METRI SULL’ADAMELLO (IT 1916) Photos: La Cineteca del Friuli

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.
Viewed at Teatro Verdi, with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Günter A. Buchwald, 5 Oct 2015

IL CENTENARIO DELLA GRANDE GUERRA
THE GREAT WAR - 100 YEARS

Sergio Germani (GCM catalog and website): "Luca Comerio – European Cinema in the First World War Chance aside, the fact that many of Luca Comerio’s films are conserved in non-Italian versions in foreign archives or collections (particularly French and American) reflects something significant about his filmography. He personally produced and edited versions of his works with intertitles in other languages, especially French and English. For some of these the only remaining Italian content is the intertitles, and starting from them it is possible to reconstruct some variants of the footage and its editing. In the light of some of the regulations imposed by Italian state propaganda, especially the order not to show scenes with corpses, some foreign versions may be presumed to have broken the rules better than the Italian editions. Comerio’s cinema, including the films produced on preceding wars in which Italy was involved (especially the so-called “Italo-Turkish war”, which led to the Italian colonization of Greek territories and Libya), even though he was officially appointed as the only – or as a privileged – film-maker with access to war zones, was always characterized by the freedom of his gaze. In that regard Comerio (1878-1940) is perhaps the first pure and absolute film-maker in Italian cinema – his previous relationship with Lumière was certainly influential – and the founder of the line of great directors who were always able to preserve the deeper cinematic values irrespective of political commissions. Following him in this respect were Augusto Genina, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio Cottafavi."

"For a proper appreciation of the power of Comerio’s films about the Great War, of which this opening programme presents four, they should be seen in the context of his work as a whole. Before shooting moving pictures, at the end of the 19th century Comerio was a photographer, and as such was appointed official photographer to the King of Italy. In this role he produced a number of photo-series which gave birth to the basic account of important historical events, such as the 1898 massacre of Milanese demonstrators by an army unit under the command of General Bava-Beccaris. This was the first sign of how the official battlefield film-maker would subsequently perceive the slaughter and death of bodies as the fundamental story of war, whereas only a few titles and intertitles highlight the official patriotic line."

"It is significant that among these photographs of popular protest in Milan, that Comerio, not yet a film-maker, produced one of a walk-out of female workers from a tobacco factory, and that this was subsequently followed by other depictions of sortie des usines scenes: still shots in 1905 at the Pirelli factory and, after he started working with a Lumière cine-camera in 1907, footage filmed at the Mirafiori Fiat factory in 1911. Through his linking of the dimension of industrial disputes with that of the events of warfare, Comerio, though always apolitical (presumably with right-wing leanings), may be seen to fit in with the most radical school of thought (which included anarchists such as Malatesta and Marxists like Bordiga) on war as a killing machine. His films on war (or even only army manoeuvres) emphasize the strenuous efforts sustained by bodies, their vulnerability and their mortality."

"Images of corpses in his films, in contravention of the censors’ orders, are a sign of reality. Some of his works contain re-enactments; “false” though they are, they impose an awareness of reality on fiction, and “acted” battle scenes become a sign of the consumption of bodies. In this sense cinema itself, as later made clear by Cocteau and Dreyer, becomes a machine of death."

"Only passing mention can be made of the fact that Comerio’s early film-making also involved distinguished work in comedy. Before the First World War he used the conquest of Libya to combine comic fiction (Cocciutelli in guerra) with documentary cinema."

"The films presented in this programme (two in French versions and one in English) were found by two of the youngest Italian film libraries (Bologna and Gemona) in foreign collections, while most of Comerio’s work in the oldest established Italian archives (Milan, Rome, and Turin) consists of the Italian versions."

"Les Annales de la guerre no. 8 (which presumably includes re-edited footage from La battaglia di Gorizia) and Dans la tranchée contain what may be considered the best and most ferocious images of the First World War: soldiers “going over the top” (of the trenches, but also of life, which becomes death), passing beneath the tombs in Gorizia’s cemetery; soldiers entering Gorizia and coming across a funeral procession which advances towards the camera (and the audience, as in Lumière’s seminal shot of a train); the shot of a crazed horse bolting in panic through the deserted streets of the town."

"An interesting recent documentary (Folco Quilici’s Animali nella Grande Guerra) unfortunately ignores this Munchian scream from the animal world, just as Ermanno Olmi’s masterpiece Torneranno i prati has the one drawback of relying upon a somewhat ready-made repertoire rather than Comerio’s more apocalyptic images. "

"Today we see them not only as great documentary images, but as profound signs of the power of Comerio’s cinema, which (among so many centenary initiatives of the Great War) really reaches out to our present of vulnerable survivors." – Sergio Mattiassich Germani

LA GUERRA D’ITALIA A 3000 METRI SULL’ADAMELLO (Luca Comerio, Milano – IT 1916) D, ED: Luca Comerio; DP: Luca Comerio [+ Paolo Granata, for scenes in the long version]; rel: 4.6.1916; 35 mm, 204 m, 12' (16 fps); titles: ITA; print source: La Cineteca del Friuli (Fondo Ripley’s / Cinemazero).
    [Also existing in a long version, measuring 2237 m, as yet untraced.]
    AA: A giant cannot is being hauled to the top of the Alps. Long lines of men are marching, zigzagging in the snow along the mountain slope. They are carrying heavy equipment. There is a thick steam from the soup kitchen. Barbed wire. A snow cross. Remarkable views of Alpine war, of winter war. Trenches in the snow. Casualties being hauled in toboggans. Red Cross action. Visual quality: from a partly decomposing source, yet impressive, toned and tinted in blue, lila, etc.

LES ANNALES DE LA GUERRE NO. 8 (Luca Comerio / Pathé – IT/FR 1917) [With segments from La battaglia di Gorizia, 8.11.1916, the filmmaker’s French version of Giornale della guerra d’Italia, 1.9.1917] D, DP, ED: Luca Comerio; 35 mm, 192 m, 10' (16 fps); titles: FRE; print source: Archives françaises du film du ECPAD, Ivry sur Seine.
    AA: A motorcar column. Red Cross vechicles. Official parades. Clearing ruins. Defusing German traps. Abandoned trenches. Refunctioning German trenches. The supreme suffering in Rheims. Winter war. A look-out point. Epic views. Visual quality brilliant.

DANS LA TRANCHÉE (Luca Comerio / Regio Esercito Sezione Cinematografica / Pathé – IT/FR, 1917) [The filmmaker’s French version of In trincea, 24.3.1917] D, DP, ED: Luca Comerio; 35 mm, 264 m, 13' (16 fps); titles: FRE; print source: La Cineteca del Friuli (Fondo Lobster / Ripley’s / Cinemazero).
    AA: A long pan on the huge river Isonzo / Soča. A cable railway over the Isonzo. The highest peaks. The glaciers. The road to Trieste. Slow pans. The "corridor" to Gorizia. The shelters of our soldiers. Men creeping in the trenches. A gigantic cannon. A machine gun. The trenches are extended towards the direction of the enemy. The handheld camera catches the devastation. A long take of soldiers crawling in the trenches. Grenades incendiaires. En avant! A long take on casualties. Mount Nero. An epic long shot. Men ascending in the snow. Even using a ski lift. Nos lignes 3000 m en hauteur. A snow castle.

//THIS I MISSED DUE TO OVERLAPPING PROGRAMMING// THE BATTLE BETWEEN BRENTA AND ADIGE (Luca Comerio – IT 1917) [fragment] [The filmmaker’s English version of La battaglia tra Brenta e Adige, 1.12.1916] D., DP, ED: Luca Comerio; 35 mm, 983 m (from 1900 m), 49' (16 fps); titles: ENG; print source: Cineteca di Bologna.//

AA:  These Luca Comerio films are essential documentation on the White War on the Alps. The winter war imagery is interesting for a Finnish viewer. These films confirm that even Maciste alpino, seen here in Pordenone two days ago, has a partly documentary quality. The footage of men ascending mountain slopes while transporting giant pieces of artillery is similar in both. Günter A. Buchwald played the piano and provided sound effects.

Dva druga, model i podruga / Three Friends and an Invention

Aleksei Popov: Dva druga, model i podruga /Два друга, модель и подруга / Three Friends and an Invention (SU 1928) with Olga Tretiakova (Dasha).

Aleksei Popov: Dva druga, model i podruga /Два друга, модель и подруга / Three Friends and an Invention (SU 1928) with Sergei Yablokov (Akhov) and Sergei Lavrentiev (Makhov).

Два друга, модель и подруга / (Kanitel s mashinkoi / Neobychainye prikliucheniia Akhova i Makhova) [Due amici, il modello e l’amica / Two Friends, a Model, and a Girlfriend; Tira e molla con la macchinetta / Much Ado about a Little Machine; Le avventure straordinarie di Akhov e Makhov / The Extraordinary Adventures of Akhov and Makhov] [The film was not released in Finland]
    Sovkino, Moscow – SU 1928.
    D:  Aleksei Popov; SC: Aleksei Popov, Mikhail Karostin; DP: Aleksandr [Abram] Grinberg, Gleb Troianskii; AD: Viktor Aden; ass D: Mikhail Karostin;
    C: Sergei Yablokov (Akhov, soap factory worker), Sergei Lavrentiev (Makhov, soap factory worker), Olga Tretiakova (Dasha, factory worker), Nikolai Nirov (Ardalion Matveyevich Medalionov, soap-box dealer), Aleksei Popov (barge captain), Nikolai Romanov (Komsomol member), Murov;
    rel: 20.1.1928; orig. l: 1815 m; 35 mm, 1788.6 m, 71' (22 fps); titles: RUS; print source: Gosfilmofond of Russia, Moscow.
    Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone.
    Viewed at Teatro Verdi, with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Mauro Colombis, 5 Oct 2015

Natalia Noussinova (GCM catalog and website: "Aleksei Popov (1892-1961), principally remembered as a theatre director, made his debut in the cinema of Tsarist Russia at about the same time that he joined the Moscow Art Theatre. His first film role was as Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov (Bratia Karamazovy, 1915), directed by Viktor Turzhanskii (generally transliterated as “Tourjansky”). The following year he partnered Olga Gzovskaia in one of her most successful films, Boris Sushkevich’s Hurricane (Uragan). In 1917 he signed a contract for six films with Khanzhonkov, but appeared in only four, in all of which he partnered major stars of the day: Zoia Barantsevich (The Annouchka Affair / Annushkino delo, dir. Aleksandr Uralskii), Vera Karalli (Dream and Life / Mechta i zhizn, dir. Uralskii), Olga Rakhmanova (The Secret of the Confession / Taina ispovedi, dir. Uralskii), and S. Kaminskaia (Sleep, Painful Heart / Usni, bespokoinoe serdtse, dir. Boris Chaikovskii). After the October Revolution Popov’s career as a film actor came to an end, and he went on to make his name as a stage director at the Vakhtangov Theatre. At the end of the 1920s however he was given the chance to direct films for Sovkino – now based in the former Khanzhonkov studio, where he had worked as an actor."

"In Two Friends, a Model, and a Girlfriend Popov also played a small role of which he was especially proud, that of the cherry-eating barge captain. He was accompanied by a fine cast: Sergei Yablokov, his ex-student from the Kostroma theatre; Sergei Lavrentiev, from the Theatre of the Revolution; and Olga Tretiakova, a famous actress of Soviet cinema."

"It is natural for a modern audience to see Two Friends as a Soviet precursor of Vigo’s L’Atalante, since a major portion of it takes place during the course of a river trip. One can alternatively recognize it as a parody of the “maritime films” that flooded Soviet cinema in the wake of Battleship Potemkin (compare the sequence with the little victory flag and the hat that proudly appear on the mast of the barge)."

"However, Popov later attributed his inspiration to another source: “The idea of making a comedy became my obsession. At that time everyone was howling ‘There is no Soviet comedy about our daily life!’ As there were no good comedy scenarios either, I and my assistant Mikhail Karostin decided to write one ourselves ... This was just at the time that Buster Keaton’s film Our Hospitality was being shown in Soviet cinemas, to great success, and we adored the humour of this film, which depicted an early train and all the curious events of travel. Besides Keaton, with his incredible talent, it was the atmosphere of droll and bizarre antiquity that stimulated us to make our film. We wanted to make a film about modern people, active and joyful, but putting them in the milieu of a backward province, absurd but at the same time sufficiently sympathetic. It was about two young scientists who make a long journey deep into a province, ending up in a small town, all the while battling for their invention.”"

"Akhov and Makhov’s “invention” is comic in itself: a machine to make soap boxes. But this turns out to threaten the private entrepreneur Ardalion Medalionov, who persecutes his two young competitors and their friend Dasha throughout their journey. Finally the young scientists defend their invention, Akhov wins Dasha’s love, and as for Makhov, as recompense for being left alone he gets the model.When the film came out it gave the censors some problems (“How can it be possible that two men so stupid could be Soviet inventors?”; “How can it be possible that state functionaries could be so bureaucratic?”), but finally it would be rather well received by audiences and the press. The film scenarist Sergei Yermolinskii wrote an account of the film in Pravda, the most official Soviet journal, approving it as a pioneering film, a new type of comedy, with positive heroes instead of the rogues, swindlers, and NEPmen prevalent in Soviet comedies up to that time. Yermolinskii went so far as to say that the film could have been even more satirical and scathing in its social viewpoint."

"Two Friends, though it seems simple and absurd enough, is nevertheless rich in cultural allusions. Akhov and Makhov are clearly imitating Pat and Patachon; the scoundrel Ardalion gallops in on a horse, followed by the intertitle “A cowboy from Texas”. The intertitles are very interesting – there are quotations from the popular Russian song “Dubinushka” by the boatmen of the Volga, and from Aleksandr Blok’s revolutionary poem Dvenadtsat (“The Twelve”). Akhov and Makhov’s box machine irresistibly recalls Rodchenko’s Constructivist three-dimensional intertitles in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda No. 14 (Goskino, 1922). The open relationship of Lili Brik with her husband Osip Brik and Mayakovsky also seems to be lightly touched upon in the film’s story of two male friends and Dasha – it isn’t by chance that the famous abbreviation of the name Lilia Yurievna Brik, “LyuB...LU”, invented by Mayakovsky, which when pronounced sounds like “I love you”, is reproduced in one of the intertitles, broken in half."

"Popov’s debut as a cinema director was an international success. The film was distributed in several countries, including the United States, where it was shown under the title Three Friends and an Invention, and described as “a film made in the manner of the Russian humorist Gogol”. It inspired other Soviet “river comedies”, and even appears to have been the model for Grigori Aleksandrov’s Volga-Volga." – Natalia Noussinova

AA: Three Friends and an Invention belonged to the favourite films of Henry Miller, as he revealed in his essay on L'Age d'or. (The Battle of the Century was on that list, as well).

It is one of the funniest Soviet comedies I have seen. The approach is relaxed and carefree. It is a bucolic satire on Soviet bureaucracy. In the last sequence the friends meet a single non-corrupt official at last, with a fleeting, obligatory image of Lenin in the background, and this party-ex-machine device apparently cleared the film for distribution.

The milieu and the background are rural. There are affectionate images of horses side by side facing opposite directions, expelling flies from each other with their tails. And cattle bathing in the river. One of the officials the friends are about to meet is busy going hunting with a huge pack of hound dogs dashing out of the doorway. Their little son, learning to clean a gun, is surrounded by puppies of the hound dogs.

The river trip is the centerpiece. Before embarking on a real big paddle steamer the friends need to build a steam boat of their own. They travel by the light of the silvery moon, but a cloud is black, hiding the moon.

Both Akhov and Bakhov pine for Dasha, but three is a crowd. No use to ask a waterlily whether "she loves me" or "she loves me not".

The goofy approach to machines and inventions reminds us of Rube Goldberg and Charlie Bowers, but it is all here rather a laid-back and provincial matter.

The clownish villain of the satire is the saboteur, the nemesis of the friends who is always one step ahead. Thanks to him, the adventure of the friends towards the goal of having their invention (an automated machine for creating cartons for a soap factory) officially registered is a veritable obstacle course.

The intertitles are shaky at times but the general visual quality of the print is good.