Kahden veljen rakkaus. US 1928. PC: United Artists. P+D: D.W. Griffith. SC: Gerrit J. Lloyd.DP: G.W. Bitzer, Harry Jackson, Karl Struss. AD: William Cameron Menzies, cast: Mary Philbin (Emanuella), Lionel Barrymore (Duke Cathos de Alvia), Don Alvarado (Count Leonardo de Alvia), Tully Marshall (Bopi), William Austin (Raymond of Boston), Eugenie Besserer (Duchess de Alvia), Charles Hill Mailes (Duke de Granada); 16mm, 3318 ft /20 fps/ 111 min [including alternate ending 178 ft /20 fps/ 6 min]; print: LoC, original in English with e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Gabriel Thibaudeau. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Ridotto dal Verdi, 7 October 2008. - A bad 16mm print, I watched just a sample. - Scott Simmon: "From the time of his first Biograph films, D.W. Griffith was always seducible by solemn “art”. Presented with art director William Cameron Menzies (...) and cinematographer Karl Struss (...), Griffith came up with a story inspired by doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca for a film that is beautifully crafted but off-balance in structure and slow in pace. Variety’s positive review (“a sweet comeback for Griffith”) nevertheless recognized that it would be a hard sell to the mass audience: “Drums of Love is a loge section film. The art centers will love it. That’s sure. Its basic appeal is to the playgoer who thoroughly enjoys the Theatre Guild.” The most telling initial notice was from the New York Telegram: “Reviewing a Griffith picture is like nothing else in the experience of an American picture fan. For, after all, D.W. has been our first and foremost, our best beloved, our pet genius whom we could always count on when the great lords from overseas – the Murnaus, the Lubitsches and the Stillers – arrived with their great bag of tricks to show us how it is done. And that’s why it’s so tarnation sad when the Grand Old Man turns out a Drums of Love.”
Were it not such an extraordinarily dark tale, it would be easier to see this strangely titled film (“drums” of love are nowhere to be found in it) as Griffith’s first “Hollywood” movie. When he had last directed in Los Angeles in 1919, he had still been his own producer. Now he was back with an excellent employee’s contract for what turned out to be the first of four features produced by Joseph Schenck (initially at his appealingly named Art Cinema Corporation) for release through United Artists, of which Schenck was also president. These films would essentially put an end to Griffith’s career.
The structure and style of The Drums of Love are unconventional, and not without interest. After a static scene of the Alvia brothers swearing eternal love for each other at their father’s deathbed, shot with Karl Struss’ recognizably misty diffusion, the perspective switches to a sequence more characteristic of Griffith. The brothers lead troops to victory in a large-scale battle against the Duke of Granada’s forces. It’s the sort of scene, however, that would usually climax a Griffith film, and here it’s tossed off perfunctorily. Most of the rest of the film will rely for spectacle on unconvincing glass-shot effects. Unusual for Griffith too is the fluid mobility of the camera in early scenes, especially of carefree Emanuella at her father’s home. The tone of the rest of the film seems also to weigh down the camera.
The performances are so varied in expressiveness as to lead to a disastrous imbalance in the film as a whole. Top-billed was Mary Philbin, a pleasant-enough actress who was developing an odd career repeatedly playing the lovely consort of deeply deformed but good-hearted men (...) Dolled up in a Goldilocks wig and “recently home from the convent”, she is here paired with Don Alvarado, one of the low-rent Latin Lover replacements after Valentino’s death. His acting range appears so extremely limited that, by the climax of The Drums of Love, his character’s passion and guilt register as a Kuleshov test – an identical expression distinguished only by whether it is edited next to Emanuella or a portrait of his brother: “Sometimes there is a lethargy about his actions,” in the New York Times’s understatement. The human interest in the film arises from the convincing and even endearing performance of Lionel Barrymore as Duke Cathos; it was “this actor’s outstanding camera achievement to date,” in Variety’s verdict. When Emanuella first sees Cathos, he’s shadowed in Expressionist darkness that emphasizes his heavy brow, broad mustache, and hairy hands, but he’s also immediately rather winning in mocking his own hump and letting her know that she’s quite free to withdraw from the marriage “and none will be the worse”. (It’s her father who again forces the union.) Barrymore provides the rare flashes of wit in a film too weighed down by intertitles penned by Griffith with his former publicist Gerrit J. Lloyd; “it would … have been far more satisfactory to include in the captions phrases that were less hard and contained an element of charm,” noted the New York Times. As the un-comic jester, Tully Marshall skulks around melodramatically, as if testing out the character he will use to drool on Gloria Swanson later that year in Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1928). It becomes evident that Griffith’s rooting interest in all this court intrigue is entirely with Barrymore’s sad, lonely, deformed duke, and we too become increasingly impatient with pampered Emanuella for preferring the dim, handsome brother. The Drums of Love comes close to being a fascinating film – if we weren’t forced to spend so much time with the two lovers.
The difficulty that Griffith and Schenck had in marketing the film is evident in the survival of two different last reels. The plot description above recounts the film’s original story as seen at the Los Angeles and New York premieres. After Cathos is informed by the jester of the liaison between his brother and his wife, they enact a long, heavy finale of guilt, honor, sacrifice, and murder. Emanuella declares “I must die”. Cathos kisses and stabs her, then even more regretfully must stab his brother: “Death before a stain on our honor.” Anticipating another Lionel Barrymore film, Duel in the Sun (...), the two dying lovers crawl toward each other, even while they beg Cathos’ forgiveness, and Struss’ photography gets even mistier. In a strikingly composed and dark coda, Cathos kisses the hands of the two bodies on a bier and walks slowly off, tormented and more hunched than ever. “The closing incident” might be a problem, the New York Times hinted. Variety elaborated that “doubts have been expressed as to whether the beauty values here can overcome the tragic double killing at the finish,” but noted that “Greta [Garbo] passes on in both Flesh and the Devil and Love …”. However, MGM had come around to revising the end of Love (Edmund Goulding, 1927) – an adaptation of Anna Karenina – so that Anna and Vronsky live happily ever after, a version released widely earlier in January 1928. Griffith and Schenck apparently decided to try the same thing. In the revised final reel of The Drums of Love put into general release by late February 1928, the brothers again fight and Emanuella again recognizes “I must die”. However, this time Cathos stabs the ever-intrusive jester, and is mortally wounded in return. There is no record that the revised ending improved the film’s box-office appeal." – Scott Simmon [DWG Project # 618]. - With a film interesting mostly because of its beauty values, it was a pity that only such a bad 16mm print was available. I did not stay and am looking forward to a good print!
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Kleider machen leute / L'Habit ne fait pas le moine
Kleider machen leute / Bräutigam auf Kredit - version francaise: L'Habit ne fait pas le moine. AT 1921. PC: Volo-Film. D+SC: Hans Steinhoff - based on the short story “Kleider machen Leute” by Gottfried Keller (1874); intertitles: Homunculus [Robert Weil]; DP: Anton Pucher, Herr Kieselau; AD: Hans Neumann (interiors), Hans Dostal, Robert Reich; COST: Karl Alexander Wilke; art titles + trick images: Mayblond [Michael Maybaum]; CAST: Hermann Thimig (Jaro/Jago Strapinsky), Dora Kaiser (Nettchen/Dora, Judge Polski’s daughter), Hugo Thimig (Landlord of the “Golden Scales” Inn /“Hotel Wasily”), Thea Oesy (Erika), Wilhelm Schmidt (Melchior Böhnli/Bonislas), Franz Kammauf (Judge Polski), Cornelius Kirschner (Vicar), Eugen Günther (Pharmacist), Fritz Straßny (Professor), Josef Moser (Notary), Viktor Kutschera (Beggar), Hans Thimig (Fool); orig. l: 1893 m; restored French version: 1675 m /18 fps/ 81 min (Desmet colour, duplicating original tinting and toning); print: Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique. Restored by Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Bruxelles, in cooperation with Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin. French intertitles with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Günter A. Buchwald. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 7 October 2008.
(When there are two character names, e.g., Nettchen/Dora, the first is that of the original German version, the second that of the French version.)
Horst Claus: "Following the screening of the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv’s restored prints of Steinhoff’s silent films by the Giornate del Cinema Muto since 2002, the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique discovered and, in 2005, restored a tinted and toned French version of the director’s debut film, Kleider machen Leute, entitled L’Habit ne fait pas le moine (the French proverbial equivalent of the original German title). A comparison of this print’s second reel with its – up to now – only surviving German counterpart (shown at the Giornate in 2004) indicates that both are based on the same materials. In both cases the plot-line adheres closely to Gottfried Keller's original short story (first published in 1874), which relates events surrounding the penniless tailor Jaro (French version: Jago) Strapinsky, who recently has lost his job. Dressed in his best clothes while looking for new employment, he is picked up by the coachman of a Count’s carriage, who – after dropping him off in Goldach – makes the greedy landlord of the town’s hotel believe that his passenger is a wealthy and important melancholy aristocrat. The news of the mysterious stranger’s arrival spreads like wildfire among the town’s citizens, who hope to benefit financially or socially by being associated with the supposedly high-ranking personage. Their attention, combined with their eagerness to shower him with credit he has not asked for, make it impossible for Jaro either to get away secretly or reveal his true identity – with embarrassing as well as happy consequences for both sides.
Shot mainly on location in the Vienna Woods between June and August 1921, the film was made by Steinhoff’s own Vienna-based production company Volo-Film. Besides producing and directing it, Steinhoff also wrote the scenario and supplied the ideas for the extensive designs of the intertitles. Acquired by Hanns Lippmann’s Gloria-Filmgesellschaft (a subsidiary of Ufa), Kleider machen Leute premiered to unanimous critical acclaim at the end of 1921 in Berlin, as Bräutigam auf Kredit (“Groom Through Credit”, a title which Ufa’s publicity department considered had stronger audience appeal than the original). Though a financial flop, it paved the way for Steinhoff's entry into the German film industry. It also was the reason why, for a number of years, several critics regarded him as one of the most promising film directors of the time (some even saw in him a potential successor to Ernst Lubitsch).
Compared with the Berlin censorship card, which contains a list of the German intertitles, the surviving French print is 214 metres (11%, or approximately 10 minutes) shorter than the German release print. Due to deterioration of the film stock there are gaps at the beginning of Reel 3, when the citizens of Goldach try to curry favour with Jaro/Jago. Further visual material is missing in Reel 4, when Boehnli (French version: Bonislas) plans his intrigue against Jaro/Jago, by inviting the Tailors Guild to perform a pantomime that will ridicule and expose his rival for the love of Nettchen (French version: Dora), the daughter of Goldach’s highest civil servant. Wear and tear are responsible for lost material at the start and end of some of the reels – most prominently at the end of the film, which apparently did not conclude with the couple’s wedding, but continued with a summary of Jaro’s private and business development, culminating in a sequence in which Jaro/Jago and Nettchen/Dora are seen in old age, surrounded by grandchildren. There is some evidence of deliberate attempts to speed up the action by cutting or shortening shots designed to support character development and the creation of atmosphere. Visually, for example, the original opening sequence seems to have placed a far greater emphasis on Jaro/Jago’s pride in his outer appearance. Interference of this kind stands in contrast to the addition of (in most cases unnecessary) explanatory intertitles to the French version. (The first reel alone, with 42 intertitles, contains twice as many textual interruptions than the German print.) Instead of simply replacing the humorous rhyming couplets of the original with their French translations, those responsible for the French print (in line with the film’s subtitle “Comédie sentimentale en 5 Parties”) made do with prose titles that add a sentimental touch to the narrative. Furthermore, their attempt to hide the production’s German provenance by claiming in the opening credits that it is of Polish origin, and performed by renowned artists from the Warsaw People’s Theatre (“Interprétée par les réputés artistes du Théâtre Populaire de Varsovie”), reflects the impact of anti-German sentiment on the international distribution of German-language films in the years following World War I. Though made in Austria and featuring three members of the renowned Austrian acting dynasty of the Thimig family, it purports to be set in Poland, reflecting that country’s comic mores and manners. (“Cette Comédie, qui se déroule en Pologne, n’est qu’une trés humaine étude de moeurs où a été respecté tout ce qui fait le charme des traditions de ce pays.”) Among the curiosities that crept into the film during its conversion from an Austrian to a Polish production for French audiences, today’s spectators will also be intrigued to note that the good people of Goldach, whom the film presents as living in the Biedermeier period, roughly the first half of the 19th Century, already went to the cinema several decades before the medium had officially been invented:“Tous les soirs, comme d’autres vont au Théâtre ou au Cinéma, l’aristocratie du village se réunit à l’Hôtel Wasily.” – Horst Claus. - A soft duped look in the print. It is nice to see Hermann Thimig, the Lubitsch favourite (Die Puppe) in this role. I watched only the beginning. There is also something Gogolian (The Inspector-General) in this Gottfried Keller story.
(When there are two character names, e.g., Nettchen/Dora, the first is that of the original German version, the second that of the French version.)
Horst Claus: "Following the screening of the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv’s restored prints of Steinhoff’s silent films by the Giornate del Cinema Muto since 2002, the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique discovered and, in 2005, restored a tinted and toned French version of the director’s debut film, Kleider machen Leute, entitled L’Habit ne fait pas le moine (the French proverbial equivalent of the original German title). A comparison of this print’s second reel with its – up to now – only surviving German counterpart (shown at the Giornate in 2004) indicates that both are based on the same materials. In both cases the plot-line adheres closely to Gottfried Keller's original short story (first published in 1874), which relates events surrounding the penniless tailor Jaro (French version: Jago) Strapinsky, who recently has lost his job. Dressed in his best clothes while looking for new employment, he is picked up by the coachman of a Count’s carriage, who – after dropping him off in Goldach – makes the greedy landlord of the town’s hotel believe that his passenger is a wealthy and important melancholy aristocrat. The news of the mysterious stranger’s arrival spreads like wildfire among the town’s citizens, who hope to benefit financially or socially by being associated with the supposedly high-ranking personage. Their attention, combined with their eagerness to shower him with credit he has not asked for, make it impossible for Jaro either to get away secretly or reveal his true identity – with embarrassing as well as happy consequences for both sides.
Shot mainly on location in the Vienna Woods between June and August 1921, the film was made by Steinhoff’s own Vienna-based production company Volo-Film. Besides producing and directing it, Steinhoff also wrote the scenario and supplied the ideas for the extensive designs of the intertitles. Acquired by Hanns Lippmann’s Gloria-Filmgesellschaft (a subsidiary of Ufa), Kleider machen Leute premiered to unanimous critical acclaim at the end of 1921 in Berlin, as Bräutigam auf Kredit (“Groom Through Credit”, a title which Ufa’s publicity department considered had stronger audience appeal than the original). Though a financial flop, it paved the way for Steinhoff's entry into the German film industry. It also was the reason why, for a number of years, several critics regarded him as one of the most promising film directors of the time (some even saw in him a potential successor to Ernst Lubitsch).
Compared with the Berlin censorship card, which contains a list of the German intertitles, the surviving French print is 214 metres (11%, or approximately 10 minutes) shorter than the German release print. Due to deterioration of the film stock there are gaps at the beginning of Reel 3, when the citizens of Goldach try to curry favour with Jaro/Jago. Further visual material is missing in Reel 4, when Boehnli (French version: Bonislas) plans his intrigue against Jaro/Jago, by inviting the Tailors Guild to perform a pantomime that will ridicule and expose his rival for the love of Nettchen (French version: Dora), the daughter of Goldach’s highest civil servant. Wear and tear are responsible for lost material at the start and end of some of the reels – most prominently at the end of the film, which apparently did not conclude with the couple’s wedding, but continued with a summary of Jaro’s private and business development, culminating in a sequence in which Jaro/Jago and Nettchen/Dora are seen in old age, surrounded by grandchildren. There is some evidence of deliberate attempts to speed up the action by cutting or shortening shots designed to support character development and the creation of atmosphere. Visually, for example, the original opening sequence seems to have placed a far greater emphasis on Jaro/Jago’s pride in his outer appearance. Interference of this kind stands in contrast to the addition of (in most cases unnecessary) explanatory intertitles to the French version. (The first reel alone, with 42 intertitles, contains twice as many textual interruptions than the German print.) Instead of simply replacing the humorous rhyming couplets of the original with their French translations, those responsible for the French print (in line with the film’s subtitle “Comédie sentimentale en 5 Parties”) made do with prose titles that add a sentimental touch to the narrative. Furthermore, their attempt to hide the production’s German provenance by claiming in the opening credits that it is of Polish origin, and performed by renowned artists from the Warsaw People’s Theatre (“Interprétée par les réputés artistes du Théâtre Populaire de Varsovie”), reflects the impact of anti-German sentiment on the international distribution of German-language films in the years following World War I. Though made in Austria and featuring three members of the renowned Austrian acting dynasty of the Thimig family, it purports to be set in Poland, reflecting that country’s comic mores and manners. (“Cette Comédie, qui se déroule en Pologne, n’est qu’une trés humaine étude de moeurs où a été respecté tout ce qui fait le charme des traditions de ce pays.”) Among the curiosities that crept into the film during its conversion from an Austrian to a Polish production for French audiences, today’s spectators will also be intrigued to note that the good people of Goldach, whom the film presents as living in the Biedermeier period, roughly the first half of the 19th Century, already went to the cinema several decades before the medium had officially been invented:“Tous les soirs, comme d’autres vont au Théâtre ou au Cinéma, l’aristocratie du village se réunit à l’Hôtel Wasily.” – Horst Claus. - A soft duped look in the print. It is nice to see Hermann Thimig, the Lubitsch favourite (Die Puppe) in this role. I watched only the beginning. There is also something Gogolian (The Inspector-General) in this Gottfried Keller story.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Potselui Meri Pikford
The Kiss of Mary Pickford. SU 1926. PC: Mezhrabpom-Rus / Sovkino. D: Sergei Komarov; SC: Sergei Komarov, Vadim Shershenevich; DP: Y. Alexeiev; AD: S. Kozlovsky, D. Kolupaev; AN: Y. Merkulov; cast: Igor Ilinsky (Goga Palkin), Anel Sudakevich (Dusia Galkina), Mary Pickford (herself), Douglas Fairbanks (himself), Vera Malinovskaya, Nikolai Rogozhin, M. Rosenstein, Abram Room, M. Rosenberg, N. Sisova, Y. Lenz, A. Glinsky; orig. l: 1715 m /2o fps/ 68 min; print: La Cineteca del Friuli (Fondo Gastone Predieri), duration of screening 60 min, Ukrainian intertitles with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Günter A. Buchwald. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 6 October 2008. - The print of this Ukrainian version is not very good, with a duped look. - David Robinson: "A month after the premiere of Sparrows, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks took off for a European holiday, and on 20 July 1926 arrived in Moscow. At Yartsevo, 330 versts from their destination, the train was stopped to allow a press conference. From the moment of their arrival, they were constantly mobbed by vast, adoring crowds. The suggestion by some writers that there was a foredoomed official attempt to achieve a news blackout on the visit seems unfounded. In fact, in the wake of the New Economic Policy it was a moment when tourism to the USSR was being actively encouraged. Doug and Mary proved ideal Western tourists, and were publicized as such. An autograph was inscribed, “We are delighted with the wholehearted reception accorded us – charmed with enthusiasm of the Russians – truly a great people”. They voiced their enthusiasm for the new Soviet wonder film, The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin), told interviewers how much they admired Lenin, and said that their strongest desire was to meet Trotsky.
Inevitably they were invited to visit the Mezhrabpom-Rus studios. At that moment Miss Mend (Miss Mend) was almost certainly still in production, which would explain the presence in the studio of Sergei Komarov and Igor Ilinsky, who both have prominent roles in Otsep’s film (completed and released in three parts in October 1926). The two seized the opportunity offered by the ceremonial visit of the American stars. Myth has it that Komarov posed as a newsreel cameraman, which is possible, though in any event it would not have been too difficult to arrange the crucial shot of Pickford bestowing a kiss on Ilinsky. Ilinsky (1901-1987) had leapt to national popularity as Petya Petelkin, the lottery-winning hero of Yakov Protazanov’s comedy The Tailor from Torzhok (...), and would certainly have been presented to Pickford as a rising young star, so that a kiss and a camera record of it were easy to arrange as a publicity shot. In the course of the next year, Komarov and his co-scenarist Vadim Shershenevich concocted a story to build around both the kiss and actuality material of the adoring crowds in the streets of Moscow.
The plot they came up with casts Ilinsky as Goga Palkin, the ticket-taker in a movie theatre. Goga is in love with Dusia, but she dreams only of film stars, and tells him that she will only reciprocate his love if he becomes famous. He gets into the film studio, and after a variety of adventures is involved in a stunt which requires his being hung from the studio ceiling. But in the excitement of the arrival of Doug and Mary, everyone rushes out, forgetting Goga’s plight. When the visitors come into the studio however, they notice him above them: Mary decides he is the new Harry Piel, and rewards him with a kiss. Now at last he is famous, and Dusia gives him her hand. The satirical edge in the depiction of Hollywood style and the follies of fan-worship is softened by amiable envy.
Goga is the kind of clumsy hero which brought Ilinsky great popularity. Primarily a stage actor, Ilinsky worked from 1920 to 1934 with Vsevolod Meyerhold. His intermittent film appearances began auspiciously with Aelita (1924), and subsequently included The Doll with Millions (Kukla s millionami, 1928), the only other film directed by Komarov (...) Komarov (1891-1957) was a favourite actor of Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Barnet, with one or other of whom most of his films were made up to the mid-1940s. (...)" – David Robinson. - Soviet comedy revisited: a charming little film with funny clowning, I seem to remember having seen a better print from Gosfilmofond in the 1980s.
Inevitably they were invited to visit the Mezhrabpom-Rus studios. At that moment Miss Mend (Miss Mend) was almost certainly still in production, which would explain the presence in the studio of Sergei Komarov and Igor Ilinsky, who both have prominent roles in Otsep’s film (completed and released in three parts in October 1926). The two seized the opportunity offered by the ceremonial visit of the American stars. Myth has it that Komarov posed as a newsreel cameraman, which is possible, though in any event it would not have been too difficult to arrange the crucial shot of Pickford bestowing a kiss on Ilinsky. Ilinsky (1901-1987) had leapt to national popularity as Petya Petelkin, the lottery-winning hero of Yakov Protazanov’s comedy The Tailor from Torzhok (...), and would certainly have been presented to Pickford as a rising young star, so that a kiss and a camera record of it were easy to arrange as a publicity shot. In the course of the next year, Komarov and his co-scenarist Vadim Shershenevich concocted a story to build around both the kiss and actuality material of the adoring crowds in the streets of Moscow.
The plot they came up with casts Ilinsky as Goga Palkin, the ticket-taker in a movie theatre. Goga is in love with Dusia, but she dreams only of film stars, and tells him that she will only reciprocate his love if he becomes famous. He gets into the film studio, and after a variety of adventures is involved in a stunt which requires his being hung from the studio ceiling. But in the excitement of the arrival of Doug and Mary, everyone rushes out, forgetting Goga’s plight. When the visitors come into the studio however, they notice him above them: Mary decides he is the new Harry Piel, and rewards him with a kiss. Now at last he is famous, and Dusia gives him her hand. The satirical edge in the depiction of Hollywood style and the follies of fan-worship is softened by amiable envy.
Goga is the kind of clumsy hero which brought Ilinsky great popularity. Primarily a stage actor, Ilinsky worked from 1920 to 1934 with Vsevolod Meyerhold. His intermittent film appearances began auspiciously with Aelita (1924), and subsequently included The Doll with Millions (Kukla s millionami, 1928), the only other film directed by Komarov (...) Komarov (1891-1957) was a favourite actor of Kuleshov, Pudovkin, and Barnet, with one or other of whom most of his films were made up to the mid-1940s. (...)" – David Robinson. - Soviet comedy revisited: a charming little film with funny clowning, I seem to remember having seen a better print from Gosfilmofond in the 1980s.
ALEXANDER SHIRYAEV 1: A BELATED PREMIERE
Zapazdavshaja premiera / A Belated Premiere. RU (c) 2003 Miris Cinema. P+D:Viktor Bocharov. DP: Inna Tiktinskaya; AD: Yuri Soloviev; piano: Yulia Simonova, Irina Johansson, Elena Pavlova; mus. extracts: Tchaikovsky, Minkus, Drigo, Pugni , Brahms, Adam, Armsheimer, Bayer; narr. (English version): Christopher Hamilton, Jennifer Gaspar; DigiBeta, 60’, source: Viktor Bocharov. English-language version with e-subtitles in Italian.
Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 6 October 2008.
In the presence of Viktor Bocharov, Daniil Saveliev and Yuri Grigorovich.
David Robinson: "Viktor Bocharov, the St. Petersburg film producer and director, and an outstanding authority on ballet and opera, acquired the Shiryaev archive from Daniil Saveliev in 1995. The first restorations, from the 17.5mm positive prints, were undertaken by David Cleveland of the East Anglian Film Archive, while the 35mm material was transferred to digital format. Using this material, along with photographs and newly discovered documents, many from the Mariinsky Theatre archives, Bocharov assembled this documentary account of Shiryaev’s life and film-making. Including practically all of Shiryaev’s animation work, the film was shown at the Belye Stolby archival film festival in January 2004. This was the first public screening of Shiryaev’s films since they were made. In the intervening years, Bocharov has made many further discoveries about Shiryaev’s life and work, while 31 further rolls of negative have become available thanks to the dedicated restoration work of João de Oliviera and PresTech Laboratories. A Belated Premiere remains nevertheless an excellent and comprehensive introduction to its subject. (...)" (David Robinson).
aa: A wonderful and amazing discovery. This documentary shows in an exciting way Shiryaev's continuous development in 1906-1909 from drawn sketch series to photographed dances to drawn animation and to puppet animation, all fascinating, top of the game.
Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 6 October 2008.
In the presence of Viktor Bocharov, Daniil Saveliev and Yuri Grigorovich.
David Robinson: "Viktor Bocharov, the St. Petersburg film producer and director, and an outstanding authority on ballet and opera, acquired the Shiryaev archive from Daniil Saveliev in 1995. The first restorations, from the 17.5mm positive prints, were undertaken by David Cleveland of the East Anglian Film Archive, while the 35mm material was transferred to digital format. Using this material, along with photographs and newly discovered documents, many from the Mariinsky Theatre archives, Bocharov assembled this documentary account of Shiryaev’s life and film-making. Including practically all of Shiryaev’s animation work, the film was shown at the Belye Stolby archival film festival in January 2004. This was the first public screening of Shiryaev’s films since they were made. In the intervening years, Bocharov has made many further discoveries about Shiryaev’s life and work, while 31 further rolls of negative have become available thanks to the dedicated restoration work of João de Oliviera and PresTech Laboratories. A Belated Premiere remains nevertheless an excellent and comprehensive introduction to its subject. (...)" (David Robinson).
aa: A wonderful and amazing discovery. This documentary shows in an exciting way Shiryaev's continuous development in 1906-1909 from drawn sketch series to photographed dances to drawn animation and to puppet animation, all fascinating, top of the game.
The Evidence of the Film
US 1913. PC: Thanhouser. D: Edwin Thanhouser, Lawrence Marston; cast: William Garwood (broker), Marie Eline (messenger boy), Florence LaBadie (sister), Riley Chamberlin (clerk); 1000 ft /16 fps/ 14'30", print: LoC, original English intertitles, e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Gabriel Thibaudeau. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 6 October 2008. - Moving Picture World: "A girl who worked in the joining room of a motion picture factory had a little brother of whom she was very fond. He visited the plant one day, and saw from “the inside” how pictures were made. The youngster was a messenger boy, and later he was summoned to the office of a broker and given a package that he was to deliver to a rich woman uptown. The woman received the package herself, opened it in his presence, but found only bits of blank paper, instead of the bonds she had expected. At first she suspected the broker, but he clearly proved that, in the presence of two witnesses, he had placed the bonds in an envelope, and carefully sealed them up. The messenger boy protested his innocence, but the woman and broker both insisted that he be prosecuted, and the weeping child was locked in a cell. A sister pleaded with his accuser, but in vain, and for several days the case against the boy was dark. One morning while joining film the girl happened to glance with extra care at one scene. She thought she recognized her brother, and close examination under a microscope proved to her that she was correct.
With a cry of joy she rushed to the police station and told the officers in charge that she had important evidence. Two detectives accompanied her back to the plant, and saw a scene of a play thrown upon the screen. It revealed the messenger boy, package in his hand, coming around the corner, whistling merrily. A man close behind him ran into and upset the child, deftly substituted a package he held for the one the boy had dropped, and then walked down the street so rapidly that he did not notice the camera. “Don’t you know that man?” screamed the girl. “He is the broker who had my brother sent to prison.” The broker was arrested; when the evidence of the film was displayed to him he broke down and confessed. He had hoped by throwing the blame upon the boy to keep the bonds to himself. A long term in prison was his punishment, while the plucky girl was warmly complimented for the shrewd way in which she cleared her little brother." (Moving Picture World, 11 January 1913)
David Robinson: "The surviving print of The Evidence of the Film was discovered in 1999 in the projection booth of a Montana cinema; two years later it was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. The idea of a misdemeanor being captured and exposed by the motion picture camera was not new. Hepworth's The Tell-Tale Film (1908) and Feuillade's Erreur tragique (1912) were stories - respectively farcical and dramatical - of spouses caught on film in compromising circumstances. In Starewich's animated The Cameraman's Revenge (1913) the betrayed spouse himself films the wife's infidelity; and titles like Indiscretions of the Kinematograph (1908) and Indiscretion of Moving Picture (19o9) suggest other stories in the same line. Even the idea of the ensnaring visual technology was by no means novel (...)
The Evidence of the Film has other points of special interest however. It is well made, revealing (as Edwin W. Thanhouser has pointed out) the influence at this juncture of D.W. Griffith upon Thanhouser's directors: one of the jobs he was to assume on leaving Biograph in 1913 was as consultant to Thanhouser. The subject permitted the company a good deal of incidental publicity, profiting from the positively benign influence of the film exemplified by the plot. In case we might have any doubt about the identity of the film unit which is conveniently shooting on location in the very spot of the crime, the big insert close-ups of the incriminating film frames have the name 'Thanhouser' boldly marked on the edge. And the cutting rooms - notably staffed entirely by women - provide the setting for the crucial scene of the film. Q. David Bowers' encyclopaedic history of Thanhouser states that the opening of the film originally showed the sister giving the little boy an instructional tour of the studio. (...)" David Robinson. - A fascinating meta-film.
With a cry of joy she rushed to the police station and told the officers in charge that she had important evidence. Two detectives accompanied her back to the plant, and saw a scene of a play thrown upon the screen. It revealed the messenger boy, package in his hand, coming around the corner, whistling merrily. A man close behind him ran into and upset the child, deftly substituted a package he held for the one the boy had dropped, and then walked down the street so rapidly that he did not notice the camera. “Don’t you know that man?” screamed the girl. “He is the broker who had my brother sent to prison.” The broker was arrested; when the evidence of the film was displayed to him he broke down and confessed. He had hoped by throwing the blame upon the boy to keep the bonds to himself. A long term in prison was his punishment, while the plucky girl was warmly complimented for the shrewd way in which she cleared her little brother." (Moving Picture World, 11 January 1913)
David Robinson: "The surviving print of The Evidence of the Film was discovered in 1999 in the projection booth of a Montana cinema; two years later it was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. The idea of a misdemeanor being captured and exposed by the motion picture camera was not new. Hepworth's The Tell-Tale Film (1908) and Feuillade's Erreur tragique (1912) were stories - respectively farcical and dramatical - of spouses caught on film in compromising circumstances. In Starewich's animated The Cameraman's Revenge (1913) the betrayed spouse himself films the wife's infidelity; and titles like Indiscretions of the Kinematograph (1908) and Indiscretion of Moving Picture (19o9) suggest other stories in the same line. Even the idea of the ensnaring visual technology was by no means novel (...)
The Evidence of the Film has other points of special interest however. It is well made, revealing (as Edwin W. Thanhouser has pointed out) the influence at this juncture of D.W. Griffith upon Thanhouser's directors: one of the jobs he was to assume on leaving Biograph in 1913 was as consultant to Thanhouser. The subject permitted the company a good deal of incidental publicity, profiting from the positively benign influence of the film exemplified by the plot. In case we might have any doubt about the identity of the film unit which is conveniently shooting on location in the very spot of the crime, the big insert close-ups of the incriminating film frames have the name 'Thanhouser' boldly marked on the edge. And the cutting rooms - notably staffed entirely by women - provide the setting for the crucial scene of the film. Q. David Bowers' encyclopaedic history of Thanhouser states that the opening of the film originally showed the sister giving the little boy an instructional tour of the studio. (...)" David Robinson. - A fascinating meta-film.
THE CORRICK COLLECTION 1
THE CORRICK COLLECTION 1. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 6 October 2008. Grand piano: Gabriel Thibaudeau, e-subtitles in Italian.
[Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra]
GB 1902. 257 ft /16 fps/ .4’30”, (printed on colour stock, reproducing original hand-colouring); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #88), no intertitles. - Good print.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "The Corrick Family often opened their shows with a film depicting the reigning British monarchs, of which they had several in their collection. After a performance in India, one reviewer noted how these patriotic images, “At once aroused the loyal feelings of the whole assembly as they stood up while ‘the King’ was sung by the Corricks. The feelings thus aroused put the audience, particularly the Military element, in the best of humour and spirits which were maintained throughout the evening.” This three-shot film of the coronation parade of Edward VII and Alexandra, which took place on 9 August 1902, is undoubtedly one of the more spectacular views of the Royals shown during these concerts. The first shot shows the carriage passing by, attended by members of the nobility and soldiers of the realm. The next is a long shot of the procession as it makes its way through Whitehall, the background dominated by Canada’s contribution to the festivities, a large archway that proudly declares, “Canada – Britain’s Granary in War and Peace – God Bless Our King and Queen”. At first, the third shot seems similar to the first – soldiers and dignitaries passing by – but the camera is positioned closer to the action rather than above the crowd, and the expressions on the faces of spectators are more clearly visible as they look down the street in anticipation. When the royal carriage comes into view, it brings with it a treat: in the last few seconds of the film, the royal carriage, horses, flags, and guards have been hand-painted – bright orange and blue, vibrant red and yellow – a pleasing detail unexpected in a newsreel-style film such as this." – Leslie Anne Lewis
The Lost Child
US 1904. PC: Biograph. D: Wallace McCutcheon; DP: G.W. Bitzer; cast: Kathryn Osterman; 479 ft /16 fps/ 8 min, print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #66), no intertitles. - OK print
Leslie Anne Lewis: "A child left alone to play in the front yard crawls into the doghouse for a nap. His mother panics when she discovers he is missing, and begins searching frantically for the child. Spying a passer-by with a large basket, she assumes he has kidnapped the baby and so sets off in hot pursuit. In typical chase-comedy fashion, the hapless man is pursued across the countryside by a mob which swells with each passing shot – adding, among others, a policeman, a man being pushed in a wheelchair, a one-legged boy, and an entire family of farmers. After finally catching the man, the crowd watches the policeman reach into the man’s basket and pull out... a large guinea pig. Meanwhile, blissfully unaware of the trouble he’s caused, the child awakens from his afternoon slumber. Biograph advertisements claimed that The Lost Child was based on a recent event in Brooklyn, New York. Though details of that case remain shrouded in mystery, one would assume that the guinea pig was purely a construct of the filmmaker’s imagination." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A wild escalation.
Marie-Antoinette
FR 1903. PC: Pathé. 516 ft /16 fps/ 8’30” (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); fonte copia/print source: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #41). English intertitles. - A fine print, effective colour.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Depictions of the lives of historical figures could provide a dash of legitimacy to a programme often filled with chase comedies and trick films. This 9-part tableau-style historical drama features scenes in the life of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, from lavish parties at Versailles to her trial and imprisonment, and finally the slow march to the guillotine. Missing is the coup de grâce, the execution of the Queen by Revolutionaries; however, a shot showing the prisoner being taunted by a severed head on a pole stuck through her cell window adds a bit of gruesome zip to this film touted as “educational” by both the Corricks and reviewers." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - An impressive history lesson with some blunt cuts: from the merry frolick to the taking of the Bastille.
Toto exploite la curiosité
Ralph Benefits by People’s Curiosity. FR 1909. PC: Pathé. 274 ft /16 fps/ 5 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #93), no intertitles. - A beautiful print. - Leslie Anne Lewis: "Toto (or Ralph, in this English-titled version) uses a kaleidoscope to supplement his family’s meagre income by charging passers-by for a peek into the optical toy. The narrative, however, is chiefly an excuse to feature the brilliantly colored geometric designs of the kaleidoscope as they shift from one hue to the next. The precisely stenciled blues, greens, reds, and yellows seen in the Corricks’ print are bright and vivid, the dyes seemingly unfaded in the century since their application at the Pathé factory. Only briefly glimpsed in this print, the Pathé logo included with this film is unusual and specific to the subject: a kaleidoscopic view of Pathé’s trademark rooster shown in varying shades of red." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A beautiful film bordering on the experimental with its kaleidoscope effects. Lively street scenes.
La Vie indigène au Soudan égyptien
Native Life in Egyptian Sudan. FR 1908. PC: Pathé. 404 ft /16 fps/ 7 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #75), no intertitles. - Suffering from decomposition of the nitrate original, yet with beautiful definition of light wherever the image is intact.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Rather than repeating the typical views of ancient pyramids, temples, and the Sphinx that had traditionally defined “Egypt” in the minds of Westerners, this documentary-style film highlights aspects of the everyday lives of modern Egyptians. Given the West’s long-standing fascination with the culture, it isn’t surprising that Egypt was one of the first places early producers sent their cameramen. As cinema is a medium that embraces movement and life, the modern inhabitants of the region and their daily lives provided a pleasing contrast to the static backdrop formed by the familiar relics of ancient Egypt, and soon more films along this vein began to find their way to audiences throughout the world. By focusing on the lives of modern Egyptians, films such as this presented a view of Egypt essentially hidden from Western audiences before the turn of the 20thcentury. Scenes include maize flour preparation, the drawing of water from a well, ‘Native Home Industries’, children reading from the Koran, ‘The Pasha Feeding the Poor’, and – as nitrate decomposition worsens – a number of women moving past the camera." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - I agree with LL, this is an interesting view of Sudan / Egypt about the everyday life.
Le Chapeau
My Hat. FR 1906. PC: Pathé. 231 ft /16 fps/ 5 min; print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #74), no intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Comedy ensues when two men accidentally swap hats at the barber’s. After discovering the mix-up, the first man to leave returns to the shop to correct the mistake. Furious when he finds that the other customer has disappeared with his hat, the man storms through the city demanding to inspect the headgear of every man he meets." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A funny comedy. Too small a hat leads to a revenge to the world.
Miracle de Noël
Christmas Miracle. FR 1905. PC: Pathé. 266 ft /16 fps/ 5 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #21), no intertitles. - Beautiful colour.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "After unsuccessfully begging from parishioners as they leave a Christmas service, a child slips into the church for warmth and collapses on the altar. A stained-glass image of a saint comes to life and scoops up the boy, who then assists the saint as he delivers toys to the homes of sleeping children. Though not screened as a part of Leonard’s Beautiful Pictures’ “Trip Round the World” programme, in the eyes of at least one reviewer (in The Ceylon Morning Leader, December 1907) Miracle de Noël was similarly enlightening, allowing viewers to experience distant lands in ways impossible before the development of motion pictures: “The subjects of the pictures were carefully chosen, and, besides being interesting, were of considerable educational value to the majority of the audience. For instance, in the course of the pretty story of Santa Claus, the snow falling on Christmas Eve was depicted in a way which brought home to Eastern minds a detail of the English climate in a vivid and living way which no amount of reading could ever do.” This five-shot film combines optical effects with studio settings reminiscent of a children’s pantomime. Starting with a child desperately begging for coins in cold weather, the film warms to a more joyous mood of wish-fulfillment fantasy." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A moving story belonging to the tradition of A Little Match Girl.
A Canadian Winter Carnival
US 1909. PC: Edison. 659 ft /16 fps/ 11 min; print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #24), original English intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "According to Harper’s Bazaar (8 March 1884), the Montreal Winter Carnival was founded as a means of promoting tourism to the country, aiming “to show that life in Canada may be not only endurable during the winter months, but enjoyable.” During the annual celebration, thousands of tourists would journey to Quebec to experience the charms of the Canadian winter through various snow sports, parades, races, and masquerade balls. Twenty-five years after the festival began, A Canadian Winter Carnival helped extend the reach of the founders’ efforts by transporting a glimpse of these attractions to the far corners of the globe. Included are views of the ski-jumping, tobogganing, and snowshoeing, along with a parade of sleighs. The festival’s featured attraction was the Ice Palace, a massive structure illuminated each evening by electric lamps, which at the end of the season would be destroyed in a mock battle by snowshoers with torches and fireworks. The Edison film shows workers along the St. Lawrence River harvesting of some of the thousands of ice blocks needed to construct the palace." Leslie Anne Lewis.
The Hand of the Artist
GB 1906. PC: R.W. Paul. D: Walter R. Booth; 191 ft /16 fps/ 3 min; print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #54), no intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Walter R. Booth, magician and stop-motion animation pioneer, began his career as one of the first British animators with The Hand of the Artist. Like the vengeful artist in later animated classics such as Duck Amuck (...), Booth’s film features subjects that inhabit a world controlled by their mercurial creator. The photographic images are composed and brought to life on a whim, and then just as quickly transformed or reduced to immobility by the Hand of the Artist. After each animated sequence, the Hand crumples the paper and disposes of it in a shower of confetti. (...) one of several films in the Corrick Collection that make use of the stop-motion technique (...)" Leslie Anne Lewis.
Les grandes eaux de Versailles
Big Fountains at Versailles. FR 1904. PC: Pathé. 183 ft /16 fps/3 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original hand-colouring); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #43), no intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Another highlight of the “Trip Round the World” programme, these images taken at Versailles were billed as “Gorgeously colored, the most beautiful fountains in the world”. Les Grandes Eaux de Versailles takes the viewer on a tour of the grounds of the historic French palace. The last section of the film shows off the famous fountains with a hand-painted, multi-coloured sequence." Leslie Anne Lewis
Les Invisibles
The Invisible Men. FR 1906. PC: Pathé. D: Gaston Velle; FX: Segundo de Chomón; 655 ft /16 fps/ 11 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour); fonte copia/print source: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #59), no intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "In this remarkable film, an alchemist discovers a potion that renders the drinker invisible. After he and his assistant leave the lab, two thieves break in and steal the potion. Enjoying their new-found power, the thieves wreak havoc throughout the city, finally framing the alchemist and his assistant for their crimes. Eventually the thieves are caught and brought before the court.
Under the direction of Gaston Velle, special-effects wizard Segundo de Chomón takes full advantage of the possibilities afforded by the premise of Les Invisibles, using the fantastic nature of the story as a canvas for a series of elaborate effects. In a richly detailed laboratory surrounded by all the essential accoutrements of a proper mad scientist – including a skeleton in the closet and a giant stuffed crocodile – the great effort of the alchemist’s thinking is realized when his brain literally explodes. Surprisingly quick to recover, he then sets the stage for a series of amusing disappearing and reappearing tricks that continue throughout the film. One of the most striking scenes comes after the thieves knock out a light while making their escape. What follows is a chase scene through the city shown in silhouette, recalling the intricate shadow puppets that provided optical entertainment in previous centuries. The finale is peculiar, but right in line with the film’s other surreal imagery: the courtroom suddenly disappears and the prisoners and court officers are transformed into giant vegetables, complete with detailed stencil-colouring. These also fade away, leaving the professor and his assistant to exit the now-empty black screen." Leslie Anne Lewis. - A marvellous fantasy film of miraculous transformations.
[Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra]
GB 1902. 257 ft /16 fps/ .4’30”, (printed on colour stock, reproducing original hand-colouring); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #88), no intertitles. - Good print.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "The Corrick Family often opened their shows with a film depicting the reigning British monarchs, of which they had several in their collection. After a performance in India, one reviewer noted how these patriotic images, “At once aroused the loyal feelings of the whole assembly as they stood up while ‘the King’ was sung by the Corricks. The feelings thus aroused put the audience, particularly the Military element, in the best of humour and spirits which were maintained throughout the evening.” This three-shot film of the coronation parade of Edward VII and Alexandra, which took place on 9 August 1902, is undoubtedly one of the more spectacular views of the Royals shown during these concerts. The first shot shows the carriage passing by, attended by members of the nobility and soldiers of the realm. The next is a long shot of the procession as it makes its way through Whitehall, the background dominated by Canada’s contribution to the festivities, a large archway that proudly declares, “Canada – Britain’s Granary in War and Peace – God Bless Our King and Queen”. At first, the third shot seems similar to the first – soldiers and dignitaries passing by – but the camera is positioned closer to the action rather than above the crowd, and the expressions on the faces of spectators are more clearly visible as they look down the street in anticipation. When the royal carriage comes into view, it brings with it a treat: in the last few seconds of the film, the royal carriage, horses, flags, and guards have been hand-painted – bright orange and blue, vibrant red and yellow – a pleasing detail unexpected in a newsreel-style film such as this." – Leslie Anne Lewis
The Lost Child
US 1904. PC: Biograph. D: Wallace McCutcheon; DP: G.W. Bitzer; cast: Kathryn Osterman; 479 ft /16 fps/ 8 min, print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #66), no intertitles. - OK print
Leslie Anne Lewis: "A child left alone to play in the front yard crawls into the doghouse for a nap. His mother panics when she discovers he is missing, and begins searching frantically for the child. Spying a passer-by with a large basket, she assumes he has kidnapped the baby and so sets off in hot pursuit. In typical chase-comedy fashion, the hapless man is pursued across the countryside by a mob which swells with each passing shot – adding, among others, a policeman, a man being pushed in a wheelchair, a one-legged boy, and an entire family of farmers. After finally catching the man, the crowd watches the policeman reach into the man’s basket and pull out... a large guinea pig. Meanwhile, blissfully unaware of the trouble he’s caused, the child awakens from his afternoon slumber. Biograph advertisements claimed that The Lost Child was based on a recent event in Brooklyn, New York. Though details of that case remain shrouded in mystery, one would assume that the guinea pig was purely a construct of the filmmaker’s imagination." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A wild escalation.
Marie-Antoinette
FR 1903. PC: Pathé. 516 ft /16 fps/ 8’30” (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); fonte copia/print source: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #41). English intertitles. - A fine print, effective colour.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Depictions of the lives of historical figures could provide a dash of legitimacy to a programme often filled with chase comedies and trick films. This 9-part tableau-style historical drama features scenes in the life of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, from lavish parties at Versailles to her trial and imprisonment, and finally the slow march to the guillotine. Missing is the coup de grâce, the execution of the Queen by Revolutionaries; however, a shot showing the prisoner being taunted by a severed head on a pole stuck through her cell window adds a bit of gruesome zip to this film touted as “educational” by both the Corricks and reviewers." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - An impressive history lesson with some blunt cuts: from the merry frolick to the taking of the Bastille.
Toto exploite la curiosité
Ralph Benefits by People’s Curiosity. FR 1909. PC: Pathé. 274 ft /16 fps/ 5 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #93), no intertitles. - A beautiful print. - Leslie Anne Lewis: "Toto (or Ralph, in this English-titled version) uses a kaleidoscope to supplement his family’s meagre income by charging passers-by for a peek into the optical toy. The narrative, however, is chiefly an excuse to feature the brilliantly colored geometric designs of the kaleidoscope as they shift from one hue to the next. The precisely stenciled blues, greens, reds, and yellows seen in the Corricks’ print are bright and vivid, the dyes seemingly unfaded in the century since their application at the Pathé factory. Only briefly glimpsed in this print, the Pathé logo included with this film is unusual and specific to the subject: a kaleidoscopic view of Pathé’s trademark rooster shown in varying shades of red." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A beautiful film bordering on the experimental with its kaleidoscope effects. Lively street scenes.
La Vie indigène au Soudan égyptien
Native Life in Egyptian Sudan. FR 1908. PC: Pathé. 404 ft /16 fps/ 7 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #75), no intertitles. - Suffering from decomposition of the nitrate original, yet with beautiful definition of light wherever the image is intact.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Rather than repeating the typical views of ancient pyramids, temples, and the Sphinx that had traditionally defined “Egypt” in the minds of Westerners, this documentary-style film highlights aspects of the everyday lives of modern Egyptians. Given the West’s long-standing fascination with the culture, it isn’t surprising that Egypt was one of the first places early producers sent their cameramen. As cinema is a medium that embraces movement and life, the modern inhabitants of the region and their daily lives provided a pleasing contrast to the static backdrop formed by the familiar relics of ancient Egypt, and soon more films along this vein began to find their way to audiences throughout the world. By focusing on the lives of modern Egyptians, films such as this presented a view of Egypt essentially hidden from Western audiences before the turn of the 20thcentury. Scenes include maize flour preparation, the drawing of water from a well, ‘Native Home Industries’, children reading from the Koran, ‘The Pasha Feeding the Poor’, and – as nitrate decomposition worsens – a number of women moving past the camera." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - I agree with LL, this is an interesting view of Sudan / Egypt about the everyday life.
Le Chapeau
My Hat. FR 1906. PC: Pathé. 231 ft /16 fps/ 5 min; print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #74), no intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Comedy ensues when two men accidentally swap hats at the barber’s. After discovering the mix-up, the first man to leave returns to the shop to correct the mistake. Furious when he finds that the other customer has disappeared with his hat, the man storms through the city demanding to inspect the headgear of every man he meets." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A funny comedy. Too small a hat leads to a revenge to the world.
Miracle de Noël
Christmas Miracle. FR 1905. PC: Pathé. 266 ft /16 fps/ 5 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #21), no intertitles. - Beautiful colour.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "After unsuccessfully begging from parishioners as they leave a Christmas service, a child slips into the church for warmth and collapses on the altar. A stained-glass image of a saint comes to life and scoops up the boy, who then assists the saint as he delivers toys to the homes of sleeping children. Though not screened as a part of Leonard’s Beautiful Pictures’ “Trip Round the World” programme, in the eyes of at least one reviewer (in The Ceylon Morning Leader, December 1907) Miracle de Noël was similarly enlightening, allowing viewers to experience distant lands in ways impossible before the development of motion pictures: “The subjects of the pictures were carefully chosen, and, besides being interesting, were of considerable educational value to the majority of the audience. For instance, in the course of the pretty story of Santa Claus, the snow falling on Christmas Eve was depicted in a way which brought home to Eastern minds a detail of the English climate in a vivid and living way which no amount of reading could ever do.” This five-shot film combines optical effects with studio settings reminiscent of a children’s pantomime. Starting with a child desperately begging for coins in cold weather, the film warms to a more joyous mood of wish-fulfillment fantasy." – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A moving story belonging to the tradition of A Little Match Girl.
A Canadian Winter Carnival
US 1909. PC: Edison. 659 ft /16 fps/ 11 min; print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #24), original English intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "According to Harper’s Bazaar (8 March 1884), the Montreal Winter Carnival was founded as a means of promoting tourism to the country, aiming “to show that life in Canada may be not only endurable during the winter months, but enjoyable.” During the annual celebration, thousands of tourists would journey to Quebec to experience the charms of the Canadian winter through various snow sports, parades, races, and masquerade balls. Twenty-five years after the festival began, A Canadian Winter Carnival helped extend the reach of the founders’ efforts by transporting a glimpse of these attractions to the far corners of the globe. Included are views of the ski-jumping, tobogganing, and snowshoeing, along with a parade of sleighs. The festival’s featured attraction was the Ice Palace, a massive structure illuminated each evening by electric lamps, which at the end of the season would be destroyed in a mock battle by snowshoers with torches and fireworks. The Edison film shows workers along the St. Lawrence River harvesting of some of the thousands of ice blocks needed to construct the palace." Leslie Anne Lewis.
The Hand of the Artist
GB 1906. PC: R.W. Paul. D: Walter R. Booth; 191 ft /16 fps/ 3 min; print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #54), no intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Walter R. Booth, magician and stop-motion animation pioneer, began his career as one of the first British animators with The Hand of the Artist. Like the vengeful artist in later animated classics such as Duck Amuck (...), Booth’s film features subjects that inhabit a world controlled by their mercurial creator. The photographic images are composed and brought to life on a whim, and then just as quickly transformed or reduced to immobility by the Hand of the Artist. After each animated sequence, the Hand crumples the paper and disposes of it in a shower of confetti. (...) one of several films in the Corrick Collection that make use of the stop-motion technique (...)" Leslie Anne Lewis.
Les grandes eaux de Versailles
Big Fountains at Versailles. FR 1904. PC: Pathé. 183 ft /16 fps/3 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original hand-colouring); print: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #43), no intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "Another highlight of the “Trip Round the World” programme, these images taken at Versailles were billed as “Gorgeously colored, the most beautiful fountains in the world”. Les Grandes Eaux de Versailles takes the viewer on a tour of the grounds of the historic French palace. The last section of the film shows off the famous fountains with a hand-painted, multi-coloured sequence." Leslie Anne Lewis
Les Invisibles
The Invisible Men. FR 1906. PC: Pathé. D: Gaston Velle; FX: Segundo de Chomón; 655 ft /16 fps/ 11 min (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour); fonte copia/print source: National Film and Sound Archive, Australia (Corrick Collection #59), no intertitles.
Leslie Anne Lewis: "In this remarkable film, an alchemist discovers a potion that renders the drinker invisible. After he and his assistant leave the lab, two thieves break in and steal the potion. Enjoying their new-found power, the thieves wreak havoc throughout the city, finally framing the alchemist and his assistant for their crimes. Eventually the thieves are caught and brought before the court.
Under the direction of Gaston Velle, special-effects wizard Segundo de Chomón takes full advantage of the possibilities afforded by the premise of Les Invisibles, using the fantastic nature of the story as a canvas for a series of elaborate effects. In a richly detailed laboratory surrounded by all the essential accoutrements of a proper mad scientist – including a skeleton in the closet and a giant stuffed crocodile – the great effort of the alchemist’s thinking is realized when his brain literally explodes. Surprisingly quick to recover, he then sets the stage for a series of amusing disappearing and reappearing tricks that continue throughout the film. One of the most striking scenes comes after the thieves knock out a light while making their escape. What follows is a chase scene through the city shown in silhouette, recalling the intricate shadow puppets that provided optical entertainment in previous centuries. The finale is peculiar, but right in line with the film’s other surreal imagery: the courtroom suddenly disappears and the prisoners and court officers are transformed into giant vegetables, complete with detailed stencil-colouring. These also fade away, leaving the professor and his assistant to exit the now-empty black screen." Leslie Anne Lewis. - A marvellous fantasy film of miraculous transformations.
La Faute d'orthographe
FR 1919. PC: Gaumont. D+SC: Jacques Feyder; AD: Robert-Jules Garnier; ; cast: Charles Deschamps (Paul Huet), Marcel Vallée (burglar), Georges Mauloy (general manager), Charles Barrois (inspector), Gaston Dupray (guardian?), Fernand Ledoux (a plainclothes policeman), Fabien Haziza (messenger boy); 511 m /18 fps/ 25 min’; print: Archives Gaumont-Pathé. Original in French with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 6 October 2008. - Print ok, sometimes slightly high contrast or low contrast. - Lenny Borger: "Feyder returned briefly to Gaumont in 1919 after having served in a Belgian army theatrical troupe in the last months of the war. He sold the studio one last script entitled La Faute d’orthographe, a delightful short about a job candidate who, fearing he’s misspelled a word on his application, sneaks back into the company offices after hours to correct it – only to get himself arrested. But his job is saved by an educated burglar who had broken in the same night and obligingly made the corrections for him. Judged too eccentric by the conventional Gaumont, the film was Feyder’s last at the famous studio. Said one historian: “By dismissing an artisan, Léon Gaumont furthered the birth of a great film artist...” – Lenny Borger. - A witty mini thriller, where the the aspiring job applicant's desperate attempt at correcting his error is mixed up with stylish burglary. - Pretty funny, with original jokes about orthography. - "Ill gotten gains seldom prosper." - "Like all great criminals, you put your signature on the crime".
Un conseil d'ami
FR 1916. PC: Gaumont. D+SC: Jacques Feyder; AD: Robert-Jules Garnier; cast: Fernand Herrmann (Georges Midewski), ? (Roger), Gaston Michel (Sir Carry), Kitty Hott (Maud Carry); 326 m /18 fps/ 16 min; print: Archives Gaumont-Pathé. Original in French with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 6 September 2008. - Lenny Borger: "Inversely, in Un Conseil d’ami, Feyder uses spacious natural exteriors and in-depth studio sets to intensify the psychological discomfort of a young musician seeking a place in wealthy society." Lenny Borger. - Motto from Oscar Wilde: good advice is of no use to oneself, one has to give it to others. - Guy becomes sportsman, but girl had liked him as he was.
Des pieds et des mains
FR 1916. PC: Gaumont. D+SC: Gaston Ravel, Jacques Feyder; AD: Robert-Jules Garnier; cast: Kitty Hott (Mme. de Florange), André Roanne (M. de Lestrac); 320 m /18 fps/ 16 min; print: Archives Gaumont-Pathé, original in French, with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin, viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 6 October 2008. - Print ok, Donald Sosin fine at the piano with classical inspiration. - Lenny Borger: "The chronology and circumstances surrounding the directing debut of Jacques Feyder have always been unclear – and Feyder and his wife, Françoise Rosay, only added to the confusion in their memoirs. This much seems certain: around late 1915-early 1916, Feyder, a young Belgian actor and would-be-director at Gaumont Studios in Paris – he had only recently played an underworld henchman in Feuillade’s Les Vampires – earned the sympathetic support of contract director Gaston Ravel, who took him on as an assistant. Their first collaboration may have been a one-reel comedy called Des Pieds et des mains; others cite Monsieur Pinson, policier, presumably begun by Ravel and completed by Feyder – the former either being called up for military service or falling ill. What seems more sure (a letter survives to this effect) is that Ravel asked company boss Léon Gaumont to give Feyder a try-out as a co-director, and then left Feyder a free hand to direct solo.
Feyder passed his screen test with flying colors, and at age 31 won his first directing stripes. In the next two years, he would make about 20 short and medium-length comedies and skits for Gaumont (many of them casually imagined by playwright-humorist Tristan Bernard). Their quality was uneven, but all were technically polished and displayed a striking sense of framing." Lenny Borger. - A love story told only via hands and feet. The dogged suitor finally succeeds. The opening quote is that from a well formed leg one can already conclude the rest. A beautiful sketch of the woman. The shoe stuck in the trolley rail. In the finale we first see the faces, and the baby.
Feyder passed his screen test with flying colors, and at age 31 won his first directing stripes. In the next two years, he would make about 20 short and medium-length comedies and skits for Gaumont (many of them casually imagined by playwright-humorist Tristan Bernard). Their quality was uneven, but all were technically polished and displayed a striking sense of framing." Lenny Borger. - A love story told only via hands and feet. The dogged suitor finally succeeds. The opening quote is that from a well formed leg one can already conclude the rest. A beautiful sketch of the woman. The shoe stuck in the trolley rail. In the finale we first see the faces, and the baby.
The Golf Specialist
US 1930. PC: Radio Pictures. P: Lou Brock; D: Monte Brice; DP: Frank Zucker; ED: Russell Sheilds; AD: Ernst Fegté; sd: George Oschmann; cast: W.C. Fields; print: Library of Congress, 2015 ft / 22 min, original in English, e-subtitles in Italian, sound. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October 2008. - Richard Koszarski: "Fields (...) accepted an offer to make one short film for RKO, where his old patron, William Le Baron, was now in charge of production.
A new “major” studio organized on the arrival of talkies, RKO was filming most of its short subject releases in New York (...) The films were made in the modern Gramercy studio on East 24th Street, which David Sarnoff, as part of his continuing battle with AT&T, had equipped with the latest RCA Photophone technology. (...)
Fields had been performing his famous golf sketch at the Palace (his last appearance in vaudeville) just before filming this canned version at Ideal in late April 1930. RKO used the same technical staff for these films that it employed at the Gramercy studio, but was apparently unsatisfied with the Ideal facilities(...)
Unlike the Clark & McCullough series, The Golf Specialist was a stand-alone project which can best be understood as an elaborate screen test for its star, W.C. Fields. His very first line of dialogue, “Any telegrams? Cablegrams? Radios? Televisions?” muttered in his trademark drawl, immediately marks him as one of those vaudevillians, like Will Rogers, whose success in talkies would surpass anything they had achieved in silent pictures. (The reference to television was unusually topical, as several experimental stations were already on the air in New York and New Jersey when this film was shot.)
The Golf Specialist not only presents the best surviving record of a Fields stage routine, but also captures his extraordinarily dark comic persona at its most extreme. There is no trace of the sentimentalizing, seen in both the silent and sound features, which would be added by his handlers to make this character more appealing to a wider public. Just as Erich von Stroheim had challenged audiences by making his protagonist a villain, Fields created this comic version of “the man you love to hate”, a cheat and a coward who hates dogs and robs small children of their pennies. RKO had no further use for Fields or his character, but his film career would flourish once William Le Baron returned to Paramount. Le Baron and Fields would then remake many of their silent features, polishing and perfecting the character of the domesticated householder worn down by home and family. The old routines, and the old character, would be relegated to the background. But before that happened, The Golf Specialist would give audiences one last look at the uncensored version." – Richard Koszarski. - A great remake of the golf sequence in So's Your Old Man.
A new “major” studio organized on the arrival of talkies, RKO was filming most of its short subject releases in New York (...) The films were made in the modern Gramercy studio on East 24th Street, which David Sarnoff, as part of his continuing battle with AT&T, had equipped with the latest RCA Photophone technology. (...)
Fields had been performing his famous golf sketch at the Palace (his last appearance in vaudeville) just before filming this canned version at Ideal in late April 1930. RKO used the same technical staff for these films that it employed at the Gramercy studio, but was apparently unsatisfied with the Ideal facilities(...)
Unlike the Clark & McCullough series, The Golf Specialist was a stand-alone project which can best be understood as an elaborate screen test for its star, W.C. Fields. His very first line of dialogue, “Any telegrams? Cablegrams? Radios? Televisions?” muttered in his trademark drawl, immediately marks him as one of those vaudevillians, like Will Rogers, whose success in talkies would surpass anything they had achieved in silent pictures. (The reference to television was unusually topical, as several experimental stations were already on the air in New York and New Jersey when this film was shot.)
The Golf Specialist not only presents the best surviving record of a Fields stage routine, but also captures his extraordinarily dark comic persona at its most extreme. There is no trace of the sentimentalizing, seen in both the silent and sound features, which would be added by his handlers to make this character more appealing to a wider public. Just as Erich von Stroheim had challenged audiences by making his protagonist a villain, Fields created this comic version of “the man you love to hate”, a cheat and a coward who hates dogs and robs small children of their pennies. RKO had no further use for Fields or his character, but his film career would flourish once William Le Baron returned to Paramount. Le Baron and Fields would then remake many of their silent features, polishing and perfecting the character of the domesticated householder worn down by home and family. The old routines, and the old character, would be relegated to the background. But before that happened, The Golf Specialist would give audiences one last look at the uncensored version." – Richard Koszarski. - A great remake of the golf sequence in So's Your Old Man.
ONE WEEK - STRIKING A NEW NOTE - SCHOOL CINEMA CONCERT
One Week (the first film in a concert which included also three short cartoons)
US 1920. PC: Comique. P: Joseph M. Schenck. D+SC: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline. DP: Elgin Lessley. CAST: Buster Keaton, Sybil Seely, Joe Roberts. Source: dvd, Cinemazero, Pordenone. 25 min. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October 2008.
Striking a New Note - a school live cinema performance by:
Orchestra della Scuola Media Centro Storico di Pordenone
conducted by Antonia Maddalena & Maria Luisa Sogaro
Piccolos: Giulia Belluz, Federica Corazza, Elena Falomo, Pierandrea Magaraci
Alto and treble flutes: Yana Guerra, Simone Magris, Alessio Mazzeo, Alessandra Scarsi
Xylophones and metallophones: Emmanuel Antwi, Nicola Coral, Roberto Perosa, Giovanni Sgrò
Sound effects: Idzret Asani, Giovanni Barzan, Elisa De Manzano, Laura De Manzano, Alessandra Simoni, Federica Violi
Piano: Victor Agyen, Eugenio Spuria
Maria Luisa Sogaro: "In the wake of the encouraging results of our Giornate debut last year, we look forward to entertaining the festival audience once again. This year we have chosen one film to represent continuity, together with a new element for our programme. In the first place, we have deepened our knowledge of Buster Keaton, revisiting One Week, one of his finest masterpieces. It has not been easy to imagine the right music to suit both the quality of the film and the characteristics of what J.B. Kaufman kindly dubbed our “budding musicians”. The spirit of another genius of the 20th century came to our aid – Igor Stravinsky. We recognized and sought to develop a link between the visual geometry of Keaton and the musical mathematics of Stravinsky’s “Les cinq doigts”, with some explorations into other registers when the narrative situation required it. In this work, I have been assisted by my colleague, Antonia Maddalena.
The project, which started in December, has proceeded in a similar manner to last year’s. A first phase of five meetings for an analysis of the films was guided by Riccardo Costantini, Silvia Moras, and Denis Pinese. The second phase, in the workshop, was undertaken by the music teachers. We also benefited from the precious collaboration of our friends from the Zerorchestra, Romano Todesco and Luca Grizzo. The pupils especially appreciated being “examined” by professionals who, performing with them, were immediately in tune with our own musical activity. When we began last year, we could never have imagined that we would stimulate such a passion for silent cinema among these young Internet surfers." – Maria Luisa Sogaro
A delightful film concert performance to Keaton's masterpiece.
US 1920. PC: Comique. P: Joseph M. Schenck. D+SC: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline. DP: Elgin Lessley. CAST: Buster Keaton, Sybil Seely, Joe Roberts. Source: dvd, Cinemazero, Pordenone. 25 min. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October 2008.
Striking a New Note - a school live cinema performance by:
Orchestra della Scuola Media Centro Storico di Pordenone
conducted by Antonia Maddalena & Maria Luisa Sogaro
Piccolos: Giulia Belluz, Federica Corazza, Elena Falomo, Pierandrea Magaraci
Alto and treble flutes: Yana Guerra, Simone Magris, Alessio Mazzeo, Alessandra Scarsi
Xylophones and metallophones: Emmanuel Antwi, Nicola Coral, Roberto Perosa, Giovanni Sgrò
Sound effects: Idzret Asani, Giovanni Barzan, Elisa De Manzano, Laura De Manzano, Alessandra Simoni, Federica Violi
Piano: Victor Agyen, Eugenio Spuria
Maria Luisa Sogaro: "In the wake of the encouraging results of our Giornate debut last year, we look forward to entertaining the festival audience once again. This year we have chosen one film to represent continuity, together with a new element for our programme. In the first place, we have deepened our knowledge of Buster Keaton, revisiting One Week, one of his finest masterpieces. It has not been easy to imagine the right music to suit both the quality of the film and the characteristics of what J.B. Kaufman kindly dubbed our “budding musicians”. The spirit of another genius of the 20th century came to our aid – Igor Stravinsky. We recognized and sought to develop a link between the visual geometry of Keaton and the musical mathematics of Stravinsky’s “Les cinq doigts”, with some explorations into other registers when the narrative situation required it. In this work, I have been assisted by my colleague, Antonia Maddalena.
The project, which started in December, has proceeded in a similar manner to last year’s. A first phase of five meetings for an analysis of the films was guided by Riccardo Costantini, Silvia Moras, and Denis Pinese. The second phase, in the workshop, was undertaken by the music teachers. We also benefited from the precious collaboration of our friends from the Zerorchestra, Romano Todesco and Luca Grizzo. The pupils especially appreciated being “examined” by professionals who, performing with them, were immediately in tune with our own musical activity. When we began last year, we could never have imagined that we would stimulate such a passion for silent cinema among these young Internet surfers." – Maria Luisa Sogaro
A delightful film concert performance to Keaton's masterpiece.
His Nibs
[the film was never released in Finland]. US 1921. PC: Exceptional Pictures. D: Gregory La Cava, [Al Christie, D of the unreleased The Smart Aleck, incorporated in the film, inspired by a story by Irvin S. Cobb]; SC+ED: Arthur Hoerl; DP: William Tuers, A.J. Stout; CAST: Charles “Chic” Sale (Theo Bender, Wally Craw, Mr. Percifer, Elmer Bender, Peelee Gear, Jr., Miss Dessi Teed); cast of “He Fooled ’Em All”: Charles “Chic” Sale (The Boy), Colleen Moore (The Girl), Joseph Dowling (The Girl’s Father), J.P. Lockney (Old Sour Apples), Walt Whitman (The Boy’s Father), Lydia Yeamans Titus (The Boy’s Mother), Harry Edwards (first villain); orig. 5154 ft; source: UCLA: 4200 ft /20 fps/ 56 min, original in English, e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Gabriel Thibaudeau. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October 2008.
The beginning of the print from a highly damaged source, almost like an abstract painting, freeze frames used in the restoration.
Richard Koszarski: "In 1955 William K. Everson wrote an article called “Movies Out of Thin Air” (...) perhaps the most curious example of such creative reconstruction was His Nibs, the first screen appearance of the American vaudevillian Charles “Chic” Sale.
In December 1919, Sale signed a multi-picture contract with Robertson-Cole for a series of feature films in which he would appear as the comical “rube” character he had created in his vaudeville act. Exceptional Pictures was created to produce the films, the first of which, The Smart Aleck, was to be made in Los Angeles (...) based on an Irvin S. Cobb story of the same name which had appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. Cobb was a prolific author of regionalist humor whose stories were filled with loveably eccentric characters and carefully rendered depictions of American small-town life (...). Cobb is best remembered today for his association with John Ford (...) Bringing Cobb together with “Chic” Sale would seem to have been a logical idea, and it was announced at the time that Cobb had personally chosen Sale for the part.
“The Smart Aleck” is the story of Gashney Tuttle, a hick from the small town of Swango, who is celebrated for what the locals consider his rapier wit. But when Tuttle visits a larger neighboring city to take in its “Great White Way” he is quickly swindled out of his bankroll and run out of town. Penniless, he returns to Swango in a freight car, where he is happy to find himself reinstated as the unchallenged village wit.
Production began at the Christie Studio on 1 March 1920, under the direction of Al Christie. The film was not a Christie production, but was made under contract by Christie for Exceptional Pictures. Christie also supplied some of its own contract talent, notably Colleen Moore, who played the love interest required by Hollywood convention (there is not a single female character in the original story). Other than general atmosphere and the notion of the country hero being swindled in the big city, the film appears to have taken very little from Cobb’s story. Press accounts promoting The Smart Aleck appeared throughout the spring, but suddenly stopped in June of 1920.
This is where the story gets interesting, and where a conventional Hollywood hick comedy turns into an ironic East Coast parody of Hollywood conventions.
I have been unable to discover why The Smart Aleck was never released, or why Arthur Hoerl and Gregory La Cava revamped Al Christie’s footage, turning it into a very different film called His Nibs. Between 1916 and 1920 Gregory La Cava had directed dozens of animated cartoons for William Randolph Hearst’s studio in New York. (...) In the summer of 1921 La Cava directed new scenes for the old Chic Sale picture (...), in which Sale appears in a framing story, playing the proprietor of the rustic Slippery Elm Picture Palace – and everyone else in town. His current attraction, a pot-boiler called He Fooled ’Em All, is all that is left of The Smart Aleck. As the projectionist, Sale provides a running commentary on his own film, a comic approach which suggests Pirandello more than Sennett or Roach. His Nibs is not only one of the first films to parody both exhibition practice and Hollywood narrative convention, but does so by dissecting an actual example of the genre. While there are many conventional satires of the movie business, (...), His Nibs is more interested in the medium’s formal elements, a far more unusual approach.
While a little research now makes it apparent that the framing story is a response to the film-within-a film, this relationship was missed by the film’s original critics (and its few recent commentators), all of whom believed that His Nibs was simply a clever, if conventional, rural comedy directed in one go by Gregory La Cava.
The writer Arthur Hoerl, who seems to have been responsible for this peculiar strategy, had a long association with low-budget cinema on both coasts. (...)" – Richard Koszarski.
A really special and original metafilm, satirizing and parodying cinema projection, live music, intermission programs, other aspects of cinema exhibition, local censorship, cinema storytelling, and local newsreels. - Charles "Chic" Sale is amazing in his seven roles. - One of the most surprising discoveries of the Festival.
The beginning of the print from a highly damaged source, almost like an abstract painting, freeze frames used in the restoration.
Richard Koszarski: "In 1955 William K. Everson wrote an article called “Movies Out of Thin Air” (...) perhaps the most curious example of such creative reconstruction was His Nibs, the first screen appearance of the American vaudevillian Charles “Chic” Sale.
In December 1919, Sale signed a multi-picture contract with Robertson-Cole for a series of feature films in which he would appear as the comical “rube” character he had created in his vaudeville act. Exceptional Pictures was created to produce the films, the first of which, The Smart Aleck, was to be made in Los Angeles (...) based on an Irvin S. Cobb story of the same name which had appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. Cobb was a prolific author of regionalist humor whose stories were filled with loveably eccentric characters and carefully rendered depictions of American small-town life (...). Cobb is best remembered today for his association with John Ford (...) Bringing Cobb together with “Chic” Sale would seem to have been a logical idea, and it was announced at the time that Cobb had personally chosen Sale for the part.
“The Smart Aleck” is the story of Gashney Tuttle, a hick from the small town of Swango, who is celebrated for what the locals consider his rapier wit. But when Tuttle visits a larger neighboring city to take in its “Great White Way” he is quickly swindled out of his bankroll and run out of town. Penniless, he returns to Swango in a freight car, where he is happy to find himself reinstated as the unchallenged village wit.
Production began at the Christie Studio on 1 March 1920, under the direction of Al Christie. The film was not a Christie production, but was made under contract by Christie for Exceptional Pictures. Christie also supplied some of its own contract talent, notably Colleen Moore, who played the love interest required by Hollywood convention (there is not a single female character in the original story). Other than general atmosphere and the notion of the country hero being swindled in the big city, the film appears to have taken very little from Cobb’s story. Press accounts promoting The Smart Aleck appeared throughout the spring, but suddenly stopped in June of 1920.
This is where the story gets interesting, and where a conventional Hollywood hick comedy turns into an ironic East Coast parody of Hollywood conventions.
I have been unable to discover why The Smart Aleck was never released, or why Arthur Hoerl and Gregory La Cava revamped Al Christie’s footage, turning it into a very different film called His Nibs. Between 1916 and 1920 Gregory La Cava had directed dozens of animated cartoons for William Randolph Hearst’s studio in New York. (...) In the summer of 1921 La Cava directed new scenes for the old Chic Sale picture (...), in which Sale appears in a framing story, playing the proprietor of the rustic Slippery Elm Picture Palace – and everyone else in town. His current attraction, a pot-boiler called He Fooled ’Em All, is all that is left of The Smart Aleck. As the projectionist, Sale provides a running commentary on his own film, a comic approach which suggests Pirandello more than Sennett or Roach. His Nibs is not only one of the first films to parody both exhibition practice and Hollywood narrative convention, but does so by dissecting an actual example of the genre. While there are many conventional satires of the movie business, (...), His Nibs is more interested in the medium’s formal elements, a far more unusual approach.
While a little research now makes it apparent that the framing story is a response to the film-within-a film, this relationship was missed by the film’s original critics (and its few recent commentators), all of whom believed that His Nibs was simply a clever, if conventional, rural comedy directed in one go by Gregory La Cava.
The writer Arthur Hoerl, who seems to have been responsible for this peculiar strategy, had a long association with low-budget cinema on both coasts. (...)" – Richard Koszarski.
A really special and original metafilm, satirizing and parodying cinema projection, live music, intermission programs, other aspects of cinema exhibition, local censorship, cinema storytelling, and local newsreels. - Charles "Chic" Sale is amazing in his seven roles. - One of the most surprising discoveries of the Festival.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
The Three Must-Get-Theres
Kolme muskettisolttua. US 1922. PC: Max Linder Productions. D+SC: Max Linder; DP: Harry [E. J.] Vallejo, Max Dupont; titles: Tom Miranda; cast: Max Linder (Dart-in-Again), Bull Montana (Duke of Rich-Lou), Frank Cooke (King Louis XIII), Catherine [Caroline?] Rankin (Queen), Jobyna Ralston (Connie), Jack Richardson (Walrus), Charles Metzetti (Octopus), Clarence Wertz (Porpoise), Fred Cavens (Bernajoux), Harry Mann (Bunkumin), Jean de Limur (Roquefort), Jazzbo (donkey); HDCAM, 58’ (transferred at 18 fps), (reproducing original tinting); source: Lobster Films, Paris / Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin, building on the SDK restoration of 1995, now original in English with e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: [Gabriel Thibaudeau?]. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October 2008. - David Robinson: "Linder made two attempts to establish himself in the USA. In 1917 he was engaged by Essanay, struggling since the departure of Chaplin. He completed three shorts (...) before the contract was dissolved (...) Linder returned to Hollywood in 1922, and produced, wrote, and directed 3 feature films for his own company: Seven Years Bad Luck (released 6 February 1921), Be My Wife (released December 1921), and The Three Must-Get-Theres (released 27 August 1922).
These were the only features directed by Linder alone; and he is said to have considered The Three Must-Get-Theres the best film of his career. It came out almost exactly one year after the release of The Three Musketeers, but the success and furore of Douglas Fairbanks’s opulent spectacle were still fresh enough in the audience’s memory to justify Linder’s parody. With his wig always a little awry, Max parodies Fairbanks’s elegance, athleticism, and beaming self-satisfaction. The story and characters are directly caricatured from the original: Richelieu becomes Rich-Lou, and Buckingham, Bunkumin, while Max becomes Dart-in-Again, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are whimsically renamed Walrus, Porpoise, and Octopus. The best-remembered moment of Max’s emulation of Fairbanks’s balletic athleticism is his deft and lethal stratagem when surrounded by a ring of swords. Much of the humour depends on surreal anachronism, so that Max is inclined to change his faithful donkey for a motorcycle, or cross the channel on a sailing horse. Fairbanks clearly appreciated the parody, and is said to have sent Linder a gracious congratulatory telegram.
Linder’s assistant director, Fred Cavens (1882-1962), who also plays Bernajoux, was a specialist in stunt fencing (...) The cinematographer E(nrique) J(uan) Vallejo (Harry Vallejo; 1882-1950) is credited with Chaplin’s first films, Making a Living and Kid Auto Races at Venice (...). This was Jobyna Ralston’s (1899-1967) first considerable part: some biographies say that it was in fact Linder who persuaded her to leave Broadway for Hollywood(...). Linder’s fellow countryman just arrived in America, Jean de Limur (1887-1976), was to work with Chaplin (...)
The original American release version appears no longer to exist in its entirety, and is known only from truncated 16mm dupes. When the film was released in Berlin in April 1924, it was in a version that had been cut by around 400 metres, and given new German intertitles written by Lothar Knud Frederik, a regular writer for Harry Piel. In 1942, the Reichsfilmarchiv acquired a copy of this version from the Gerhard Lamprecht collection. A dupe negative was produced, which has been the source of prints now in other archives. In 1995 the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek was able to undertake a new transfer, of much improved technical quality. In the interim, new elements of the film had emerged: fragments in the collections of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv and a near-complete print in the Nederlands Filmmuseum were used in the restoration. In this new high-definition restoration produced by Lobster Films, Paris, the English titles have been restored using the German titles and other sources, in a new adaptation aiming to recreate the humorous vernacular of the original. "– David Robinson. - It was a pleasure to see Linder's masterpiece (included in the 1100 films of my MMM Film Guide) at last in a version close to the original; I was familiar with the Maud Linder abridgement in En compagnie de Max Linder and the SDK restoration in German. The English titles in this version are witty. - It's a marvellous parody with several weird and original touches as the Cardinal's servant whose bald head has a growth of only a couple of hair, used for meditation by Richelieu and finally removed by Linder.
These were the only features directed by Linder alone; and he is said to have considered The Three Must-Get-Theres the best film of his career. It came out almost exactly one year after the release of The Three Musketeers, but the success and furore of Douglas Fairbanks’s opulent spectacle were still fresh enough in the audience’s memory to justify Linder’s parody. With his wig always a little awry, Max parodies Fairbanks’s elegance, athleticism, and beaming self-satisfaction. The story and characters are directly caricatured from the original: Richelieu becomes Rich-Lou, and Buckingham, Bunkumin, while Max becomes Dart-in-Again, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are whimsically renamed Walrus, Porpoise, and Octopus. The best-remembered moment of Max’s emulation of Fairbanks’s balletic athleticism is his deft and lethal stratagem when surrounded by a ring of swords. Much of the humour depends on surreal anachronism, so that Max is inclined to change his faithful donkey for a motorcycle, or cross the channel on a sailing horse. Fairbanks clearly appreciated the parody, and is said to have sent Linder a gracious congratulatory telegram.
Linder’s assistant director, Fred Cavens (1882-1962), who also plays Bernajoux, was a specialist in stunt fencing (...) The cinematographer E(nrique) J(uan) Vallejo (Harry Vallejo; 1882-1950) is credited with Chaplin’s first films, Making a Living and Kid Auto Races at Venice (...). This was Jobyna Ralston’s (1899-1967) first considerable part: some biographies say that it was in fact Linder who persuaded her to leave Broadway for Hollywood(...). Linder’s fellow countryman just arrived in America, Jean de Limur (1887-1976), was to work with Chaplin (...)
The original American release version appears no longer to exist in its entirety, and is known only from truncated 16mm dupes. When the film was released in Berlin in April 1924, it was in a version that had been cut by around 400 metres, and given new German intertitles written by Lothar Knud Frederik, a regular writer for Harry Piel. In 1942, the Reichsfilmarchiv acquired a copy of this version from the Gerhard Lamprecht collection. A dupe negative was produced, which has been the source of prints now in other archives. In 1995 the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek was able to undertake a new transfer, of much improved technical quality. In the interim, new elements of the film had emerged: fragments in the collections of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv and a near-complete print in the Nederlands Filmmuseum were used in the restoration. In this new high-definition restoration produced by Lobster Films, Paris, the English titles have been restored using the German titles and other sources, in a new adaptation aiming to recreate the humorous vernacular of the original. "– David Robinson. - It was a pleasure to see Linder's masterpiece (included in the 1100 films of my MMM Film Guide) at last in a version close to the original; I was familiar with the Maud Linder abridgement in En compagnie de Max Linder and the SDK restoration in German. The English titles in this version are witty. - It's a marvellous parody with several weird and original touches as the Cardinal's servant whose bald head has a growth of only a couple of hair, used for meditation by Richelieu and finally removed by Linder.
[Max Linder filmt 1922 in Wien am Rosenhügel]
AT 1923/24. DVD, 45” (transferred at 18 fps); source: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, no intertitles. Grand piano: [Gabriel Thibaudeau?]. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October, 2008. - David Robinson: "This brief fragment comes from a documentary compilation, Buntes Allerlei, now surviving only in 16mm, and shows Linder in conference on the set of his last completed film Der Zirkuskönig (Le Roi du cirque; 1924), at Vita-Film’s Rosenhügel studios in the suburbs of Vienna. Co-directed by Linder and Édouard-Emile Violet for the Austrian company Vita-Film, the film gave Linder as partner the Hungarian actress Vilma Bánky, who was to become Valentino’s leading lady the following year. The sequence in the compilation is titled “Max Linder filmt 1922 in Wien am Rosenhügel”. The date is clearly an error; it would be 1923/24." – David Robinson
Max toréador
Max wird Torero / Max als Stierkämpfer. FR 1913. PC: Pathé. D+SC: Max Linder; cast: Max Linder, Stacia Napierkowska; orig. l: 580 m.; print: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, 509 m /16 fps/ 28 min, (Desmet colour, duplicating original tinting); deutsche Zwischentitel, with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: [Gabriel Thibaudeau?], viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October 2008.
David Robinson: "Linder’s punishing production schedule for Pathé seems never to have permitted any pause in his work. If he took a holiday or a trip, he regarded it primarily as an advantageous change of location for the current film. In the summer of 1913 he found himself in Barcelona, where the spectacle of bullfighting was irresistible. He filmed the parades and the crowds and the fights extravagantly (at least in terms of his usual economy with film), and, donning a beautifully fitting torero uniform, intrepidly entered the ring himself to perform adeptly with the bulls, and make a tour of honour around the ring. Some extra scenes to fill in the background story of Max’s dream of becoming a great torero appear to have been filmed on his return to Paris.
Previously the film has been known only in surviving copies of the French version, running a little over 12 minutes and giving the impression of being complete and integral. This restoration, done from an original tinted German nitrate print, however, even allowing for the many German intertitles, is at least twice that length, running a total of 28 minutes. Overall the editing is often different and much more expansive, making maximum use of the bullring footage: thus the opening sequence, with Max an excessively excited spectator at a fight, runs 3 minutes in the German version as against 95 seconds in the French. The scenes of parades before the arrival in the ring run 2 minutes 40 seconds in the German version, and 1 minute 50 seconds in the French. Most striking, however, is the climactic scene in the bullring. In the French version it runs a mere 1 minute 50 seconds, while in the German version the sequence lasts 7 minutes 50 seconds, with extensive coverage of engagements with the bulls, and evident delight in a pole-vaulting picador.
More significant however, are two scenes in the German version which totally change the narrative, and of which there is no trace in the French version. Following his adventures with the milk-cow which he has taken home for practice, Max, in pyjamas, gets into bed and (as a title explains) dreams the whole of the focal bullfighting sequence (introduced, on the contrary, in the French version by an unequivocal title, “At last the great day arrives”). At the end of the bullring sequence, at the point where the French version neatly concludes with the end-title, the German version has an extra scene of Max falling out of his bed. Getting to his feet, rubbing his head, he says (in an intertitle), “That is the best dream of my life …. And a great idea for a film.” He then retires again and pulls the sheets over his head as the film comes to its end.
One further sequence entirely absent from the French version may have been removed on account of censorship or more delicate Gallic sensibilities. Practising with the cow in his apartment, Max triumphantly aims the banderillas into its back. The startled animal wheels around, so that Max abruptly finds himself facing its rear end. There follows a scene of zooscatology which is even more insistently indecent than the earlier gag of the urinating cow whom Max is endeavouring to manoeuvre, along with her calf, into his apartment house.
This was the last of 13 films made between late 1910 and 1913 in which Linder’s leading lady was Stacia Napierkowska (1886-1945). Her later roles notably included a femme fatale in Les Vampires (1917); but already in Max toréador there are signs of the weight problem and ample appetite that so troubled Feyder when he cast her as Antinea in L’Atlantide (1921): “The dresser complained for having to enlarge the costumes almost every day.” Her career (and probably her figure) did not survive the coming of sound films." David Robinson.
AA: I agree with DR: this is a fascinating Max Linder discovery with Rabelaisian dimensions and Buñuelian currents. His impeccable elegance and the naturalistic realities of having a cow and a calf in a city apartment are in a strong comic contrast. - I also find the ample charms of Stacia Napierkowska easy on the eye.
David Robinson: "Linder’s punishing production schedule for Pathé seems never to have permitted any pause in his work. If he took a holiday or a trip, he regarded it primarily as an advantageous change of location for the current film. In the summer of 1913 he found himself in Barcelona, where the spectacle of bullfighting was irresistible. He filmed the parades and the crowds and the fights extravagantly (at least in terms of his usual economy with film), and, donning a beautifully fitting torero uniform, intrepidly entered the ring himself to perform adeptly with the bulls, and make a tour of honour around the ring. Some extra scenes to fill in the background story of Max’s dream of becoming a great torero appear to have been filmed on his return to Paris.
Previously the film has been known only in surviving copies of the French version, running a little over 12 minutes and giving the impression of being complete and integral. This restoration, done from an original tinted German nitrate print, however, even allowing for the many German intertitles, is at least twice that length, running a total of 28 minutes. Overall the editing is often different and much more expansive, making maximum use of the bullring footage: thus the opening sequence, with Max an excessively excited spectator at a fight, runs 3 minutes in the German version as against 95 seconds in the French. The scenes of parades before the arrival in the ring run 2 minutes 40 seconds in the German version, and 1 minute 50 seconds in the French. Most striking, however, is the climactic scene in the bullring. In the French version it runs a mere 1 minute 50 seconds, while in the German version the sequence lasts 7 minutes 50 seconds, with extensive coverage of engagements with the bulls, and evident delight in a pole-vaulting picador.
More significant however, are two scenes in the German version which totally change the narrative, and of which there is no trace in the French version. Following his adventures with the milk-cow which he has taken home for practice, Max, in pyjamas, gets into bed and (as a title explains) dreams the whole of the focal bullfighting sequence (introduced, on the contrary, in the French version by an unequivocal title, “At last the great day arrives”). At the end of the bullring sequence, at the point where the French version neatly concludes with the end-title, the German version has an extra scene of Max falling out of his bed. Getting to his feet, rubbing his head, he says (in an intertitle), “That is the best dream of my life …. And a great idea for a film.” He then retires again and pulls the sheets over his head as the film comes to its end.
One further sequence entirely absent from the French version may have been removed on account of censorship or more delicate Gallic sensibilities. Practising with the cow in his apartment, Max triumphantly aims the banderillas into its back. The startled animal wheels around, so that Max abruptly finds himself facing its rear end. There follows a scene of zooscatology which is even more insistently indecent than the earlier gag of the urinating cow whom Max is endeavouring to manoeuvre, along with her calf, into his apartment house.
This was the last of 13 films made between late 1910 and 1913 in which Linder’s leading lady was Stacia Napierkowska (1886-1945). Her later roles notably included a femme fatale in Les Vampires (1917); but already in Max toréador there are signs of the weight problem and ample appetite that so troubled Feyder when he cast her as Antinea in L’Atlantide (1921): “The dresser complained for having to enlarge the costumes almost every day.” Her career (and probably her figure) did not survive the coming of sound films." David Robinson.
AA: I agree with DR: this is a fascinating Max Linder discovery with Rabelaisian dimensions and Buñuelian currents. His impeccable elegance and the naturalistic realities of having a cow and a calf in a city apartment are in a strong comic contrast. - I also find the ample charms of Stacia Napierkowska easy on the eye.
Le Serment d'un prince
FR 1910. PC: Pathé. D+SC+star: Max Linder (Prince Jacques de Lacerda); orig. l: 175 m.; 105 m /16 fps/ 6 min (Desmet colour, duplicating original tinting); print: Svenska Filminstitutet. Original in French with e-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: [Gabriel Thibaudeau?], viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October 2008. - David Robinson: "One of 44 recorded films made by Max Linder in 1910, his most productive year,(...) a surprising moment in the comedian’s film career, as a pathetic melodrama rather than a comedy. Discovered by the Swedish Film Institute, this (...) film, long believed lost, appears to lack only the opening, which might better have explained how we come to find Max, as Prince of Lacerda, in a liaison with a beautiful gypsy (?) lady living in a caravan and blessed with a little daughter. After this, the story is told with admirable clarity and a minimum of intertitles. The first surviving title, “Un riche banquier vient proposer au Prince de Lacerda l’union de leurs enfants”, introduces the Prince’s aristocratic home, where the returning Prince learns that his father, the old Prince, has arranged a marriage with the daughter of a rich banker. The Prince (with very naturalistic and touching acting) explains his situation and is spurned by his father. In the next scene, introduced with the title “Pour gagner sa vie”, the Prince, in clown uniform, is working as a street entertainer. This scene is particularly attractive, since Linder evidently shot it on location with real passers-by, who show the same mixture of puzzlement and amusement as the public at Kid Auto Races at Venice four years later. They are also required to act, turning their backs and scurrying away when the clown brings round his collecting bag.
The final scene is introduced as “Trois ans après. Grande vedette au music hall”. While the Prince, on stage, is performing some very nicely tricked acrobatics on a trapeze, the old Prince passes the theatre and sees the billboards for his son. He enters the theatre, prepared to be enraged; but after the show, meeting his son and his family on the steps of the theatre, he is enchanted by his little granddaughter (suitably matured from the opening scene), and reconciled to his son in a big concluding embrace.
Despite the missing section, and considerable damage to the perforation of the original nitrate print, the picture quality and stability of the restored version are exceptional." – David Robinson. - I agree, this film is a charming humoristic drama rather than pure comedy.
The final scene is introduced as “Trois ans après. Grande vedette au music hall”. While the Prince, on stage, is performing some very nicely tricked acrobatics on a trapeze, the old Prince passes the theatre and sees the billboards for his son. He enters the theatre, prepared to be enraged; but after the show, meeting his son and his family on the steps of the theatre, he is enchanted by his little granddaughter (suitably matured from the opening scene), and reconciled to his son in a big concluding embrace.
Despite the missing section, and considerable damage to the perforation of the original nitrate print, the picture quality and stability of the restored version are exceptional." – David Robinson. - I agree, this film is a charming humoristic drama rather than pure comedy.
Sally of the Sawdust
Sirkusilmaa / Cirkusluft. US 1925. PC: D.W. Griffith, Inc. P+D: D.W. Griffith. SC: Forrest Halsey - based on the musical play Poppy (1923) by Dorothy Donnelly. CAST: Carol Dempster (Sally), W.C. Fields (Prof. Eustace McGargle). Print: MoMA, 9615 ft /19 fps/ 135 min, original in English, e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin, vocals: Joanna Seaton. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 October 2008. - Brilliant print. Donald Sosin inspired at the piano. - Joyce Jesionowski: "a peculiar project for many reasons. Though it is not without pictorial scope, it lacks the grandeur of D.W. Griffith’s great epics. It is a comedy, a form Griffith apparently had consigned to the likes of Mack Sennett and Billy Quirk in the Biograph period. In addition to Griffith’s supposed lack of comic gifts, Sally of the Sawdust relies on the pairing of W.C. Fields, a clown fresh from the Ziegfeld Follies with an actress considered a lesser light in the great firmament of stars Griffith had bequeathed to the cinema. Carol Dempster had first appeared as an extra dancer in Intolerance (1916), and Griffith had been featuring or starring her in his films beginning with The Girl Who Stayed at Home (1919). Yet, of Sally of the Sawdust’s leading lady, Frederick James Smith of Motion Picture Classic admitted: “it was not until Isn’t Life Wonderful that I thought Miss Dempster could act.”
Worst of all, the great director’s personal luster was beginning to tarnish. The box-office success of The Birth of a Nation (1915) turned into notoriety as well as fame, but did not assure Griffith the independence he craved. The failure of the Fine Arts studio portended future difficulties. In 1919, Griffith complained to Frederick James Smith in Motion Picture Classic that because of studio interference at Paramount-Artcraft, “tender little scenes … were mercilessly cut [from A Romance of Happy Valley (1919) and The Girl Who Stayed at Home] to speed up the deluxe program”. Fortunes rose and fell after that, but whatever the reasons Griffith advanced for his perceived “failures”, by December 1924 critical opinion had become so harsh that Photoplay’s critic, James Quirk, was emboldened to exhort the erstwhile master: “the time has come … when you should take an accounting of yourself”. Thus skepticism flavored Griffith’s new association with Paramount from the first.
In fact, critical reception of Sally of the Sawdust was approving – if double-minded. In the same review that noted the improvement in Dempster’s acting in Motion Picture Classic, Smith praised Sally of the Sawdust for being “best in just the field that [sic] Griffith has been weakest – comedy”. In the November 1925 issue of Motion Picture Magazine, Laurence Reid countered that the film was “a most compelling story … in the director’s best manner, one saturated with pointed comedy which is always well-balanced with pathos”. It seems that to the evaluating community Sally of the Sawdust was a typical Griffith offering and a departure from it, at one and the same time.
Indeed, for all its apparent anomalies, Sally of the Sawdust bears the indelible stamp of Griffith’s thinking. Recognizing the need for a solid project to begin his work at Paramount, Griffith turned to a proven stage success. Dorothy Donnelly’s Poppy (1923) would provide the same security as Lottie Blair Parker’s Way Down East had in 1920. Each had enjoyed theatrical successes. But more critically, Poppy’s story could be exploited to express all the dramatic oppositions that typically interested Griffith. Country innocence is compared to city experience, freedom to constraint, respectability to disrepute, intolerance to open-mindedness, probity to love. And at Sally of the Sawdust’s core is the pervasive theme that formed the basis of drama in so many of the Biographs as well as in The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and even Broken Blossoms (1919). The death or absence of a mother results in the relationship of a girl with her father or a male guardian who must raise her to the point of sexual awakening.
The emotional relationship between Sally and her “Pop” is centralized in their collaboration to create the film’s comic set-pieces. The smaller turns, the hobo train ride, and the confusion in the bakery are dominated by W.C. Fields, who exploits each of the situations in small gestures, comic displacements that cascade into larger and larger exaggerations. His body constantly in play, Fields finds the most preposterous postures in a given situation, no matter how small. When he and Sally hitch a ride on a train, for instance, his feet and legs are farcically crabbed up to protect their luggage even as he and Dempster huddle precariously on the train’s open platform. In each situation, Fields finds successions of inanimate objects – hat, cane, suitcase – and portrays them as conspirators against any possibility of situating himself comfortably in the world. His inventions are so integrated into his performance that they become the “natural” expressions of his eccentric character.
Dempster’s comedy is larger, broader, louder. Second banana to Fields in the smaller comic situations, she becomes his two-fisted partner in the film’s large-scale action sequences, the grand mêlée at the circus that resolves the first act of the film, and the race-chase-rescue that resolves the film as a whole. In the first mêlée, she energetically dives into the dirt under a circus wagon and hollers “Hey, Rube!” with a vigor that almost makes her silent voice audible. Boinking her Pop’s attackers with a plank, she generates the heat in the fray while Fields is charged with exposing the comic absurdities of battle. Just before the fight’s resolution, for instance, he fends off his assailants in the now-classic parody of fisticuffs: holding an opponent at bay, in this case hand to the man’s throat, while he swings vain punches in the air. The mounting mayhem is finally resolved by Sally’s arrival with Lucy the elephant. But the interior dynamic of the fight depends on the shifting registers between Dempster’s enthusiastic scrapping and Fields’ comic embroidery. The secondary theme of Sally of the Sawdust is the sexual awakening of a young girl. While the clowning between Dempster and Fields creates a central dramatic pairing, it also certifies the innocence of a relationship between a young girl and an older man who so often finds her arms twined around his neck and her body pressed tight to his own.
In the end, neither the critical appreciation [at the time of its release] nor its successful box-office have lifted Sally of the Sawdust into the pantheon of Griffith’s major films. It does suffer from a sort of flickering interest on Griffith’s part, a lack of engagement in some of its aspects. But Sally of the Sawdust demonstrates conclusively that Griffith’s talents for comedy were better developed than anyone would have thought. More importantly, the maturity of the film’s love scenes, the inventiveness of its unlikely comic pairing, and the liveliness of its final chase sequence suggest that Griffith was fully capable of “taking an accounting” of himself and finding powers that were by no means exhausted." – Joyce Jesionowski. - Remade as Poppy (1936). - I don't consider Griffith a great comedy director, although I like the sense of humour in several of his films. But he directed this good W.C. Fields vehicle, my favourite Griffith comedy.
Worst of all, the great director’s personal luster was beginning to tarnish. The box-office success of The Birth of a Nation (1915) turned into notoriety as well as fame, but did not assure Griffith the independence he craved. The failure of the Fine Arts studio portended future difficulties. In 1919, Griffith complained to Frederick James Smith in Motion Picture Classic that because of studio interference at Paramount-Artcraft, “tender little scenes … were mercilessly cut [from A Romance of Happy Valley (1919) and The Girl Who Stayed at Home] to speed up the deluxe program”. Fortunes rose and fell after that, but whatever the reasons Griffith advanced for his perceived “failures”, by December 1924 critical opinion had become so harsh that Photoplay’s critic, James Quirk, was emboldened to exhort the erstwhile master: “the time has come … when you should take an accounting of yourself”. Thus skepticism flavored Griffith’s new association with Paramount from the first.
In fact, critical reception of Sally of the Sawdust was approving – if double-minded. In the same review that noted the improvement in Dempster’s acting in Motion Picture Classic, Smith praised Sally of the Sawdust for being “best in just the field that [sic] Griffith has been weakest – comedy”. In the November 1925 issue of Motion Picture Magazine, Laurence Reid countered that the film was “a most compelling story … in the director’s best manner, one saturated with pointed comedy which is always well-balanced with pathos”. It seems that to the evaluating community Sally of the Sawdust was a typical Griffith offering and a departure from it, at one and the same time.
Indeed, for all its apparent anomalies, Sally of the Sawdust bears the indelible stamp of Griffith’s thinking. Recognizing the need for a solid project to begin his work at Paramount, Griffith turned to a proven stage success. Dorothy Donnelly’s Poppy (1923) would provide the same security as Lottie Blair Parker’s Way Down East had in 1920. Each had enjoyed theatrical successes. But more critically, Poppy’s story could be exploited to express all the dramatic oppositions that typically interested Griffith. Country innocence is compared to city experience, freedom to constraint, respectability to disrepute, intolerance to open-mindedness, probity to love. And at Sally of the Sawdust’s core is the pervasive theme that formed the basis of drama in so many of the Biographs as well as in The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and even Broken Blossoms (1919). The death or absence of a mother results in the relationship of a girl with her father or a male guardian who must raise her to the point of sexual awakening.
The emotional relationship between Sally and her “Pop” is centralized in their collaboration to create the film’s comic set-pieces. The smaller turns, the hobo train ride, and the confusion in the bakery are dominated by W.C. Fields, who exploits each of the situations in small gestures, comic displacements that cascade into larger and larger exaggerations. His body constantly in play, Fields finds the most preposterous postures in a given situation, no matter how small. When he and Sally hitch a ride on a train, for instance, his feet and legs are farcically crabbed up to protect their luggage even as he and Dempster huddle precariously on the train’s open platform. In each situation, Fields finds successions of inanimate objects – hat, cane, suitcase – and portrays them as conspirators against any possibility of situating himself comfortably in the world. His inventions are so integrated into his performance that they become the “natural” expressions of his eccentric character.
Dempster’s comedy is larger, broader, louder. Second banana to Fields in the smaller comic situations, she becomes his two-fisted partner in the film’s large-scale action sequences, the grand mêlée at the circus that resolves the first act of the film, and the race-chase-rescue that resolves the film as a whole. In the first mêlée, she energetically dives into the dirt under a circus wagon and hollers “Hey, Rube!” with a vigor that almost makes her silent voice audible. Boinking her Pop’s attackers with a plank, she generates the heat in the fray while Fields is charged with exposing the comic absurdities of battle. Just before the fight’s resolution, for instance, he fends off his assailants in the now-classic parody of fisticuffs: holding an opponent at bay, in this case hand to the man’s throat, while he swings vain punches in the air. The mounting mayhem is finally resolved by Sally’s arrival with Lucy the elephant. But the interior dynamic of the fight depends on the shifting registers between Dempster’s enthusiastic scrapping and Fields’ comic embroidery. The secondary theme of Sally of the Sawdust is the sexual awakening of a young girl. While the clowning between Dempster and Fields creates a central dramatic pairing, it also certifies the innocence of a relationship between a young girl and an older man who so often finds her arms twined around his neck and her body pressed tight to his own.
In the end, neither the critical appreciation [at the time of its release] nor its successful box-office have lifted Sally of the Sawdust into the pantheon of Griffith’s major films. It does suffer from a sort of flickering interest on Griffith’s part, a lack of engagement in some of its aspects. But Sally of the Sawdust demonstrates conclusively that Griffith’s talents for comedy were better developed than anyone would have thought. More importantly, the maturity of the film’s love scenes, the inventiveness of its unlikely comic pairing, and the liveliness of its final chase sequence suggest that Griffith was fully capable of “taking an accounting” of himself and finding powers that were by no means exhausted." – Joyce Jesionowski. - Remade as Poppy (1936). - I don't consider Griffith a great comedy director, although I like the sense of humour in several of his films. But he directed this good W.C. Fields vehicle, my favourite Griffith comedy.
Triplepatte
[the film was never released in Finland]. FR 1922. PC: Films Tristan Bernard. D: : Raymond Bernard; SC: Tristan Bernard & Raymond Bernard, based on the play by Tristan Bernard & André Godfernaux (1905); DP: Raoul Aubourdier & Paul Guichard; AD: Robert Mallet-Stevens; LOC: Paris; Côte d’Azur; Studios Pathé, Vincennes); CAST: Henri Debain (Robert de Houdan), Edith Jehanne (Yvonne Herbelier), Pierre Palau (Boucherot), Jeanne Loury (Baroness Pépin), Armand Numès (Herbelier), Mme. Ahnar (Mme. Herbelier), Mme. Ritto (Mme. de Crèvecoeur), Suzy Boldès (lrène de Crèvecoeur), Henri Volbert (mayor), Albert Broquin (valet); 1598 m /18 fps/ 78 min print: La Cinémathèque française, reconstituée en 1991 par Renée Lichtig. Original in French with e-subtitles in English and Italian. Grand piano: Stephen Horne. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 5 September 2008. - A beautiful definition of light in the print. - Lenny Borger: "Previous to the international success of his 1924 historical romance, Le Miracle des loups, director Raymond Bernard was the frequent collaborator of his famous and beloved father, Tristan Bernard, the Belle Époque novelist, playwright, and wit. (...) [with] the unexpected adventure of Miracle of the Wolves (...) Bernard’s career took a spectacular U-turn from modest art film to big-budget studio spectacular. Many of his erstwhile admirers never forgave him for “selling out”.
Made early in 1922, Triplepatte was the Bernards’ screen version of Tristan’s 1905 social comedy of the same name, about a young Paris aristocrat whose chronic indecision wreaks havoc in his social circle and his private life. The play’s first author was a physiologist, André Godfernaux, who wanted to write a play about diseases of the will. He asked Tristan to collaborate. Tristan obliged, only too well – what began as a serious thesis drama became the laugh sensation of the 1905-06 Paris season. To make things even more droll, the high-born low achiever, Viscount Robert de Houdan – nicknamed “Triplepatte” (“Triple-Legs”) after his racehorse, because both always balk at hurdles – was played by Marcel Levesque(...) The 1908 New York premiere starred another profile as famous as Levesque’s – John Barrymore.
Triplepatte, the film, was an ideal fusion of talents. Tristan and Raymond jettisoned entire scenes and characters in order to streamline the plot and settings more cinematically – from a ponderously talky 3 hours to a crisp 80 minutes, with a spare but comically potent use of intertitles (the climactic elevator gag provides a witty solution to a problem of dramatic construction that Tristan failed to solve back in 1905). The downside to this, if it is one, is that the film indulges more in broad farce – with the famous scene of the wedding ceremony and the groom’s arrival in his pajamas! – than in any satiric portrait of high society in the faubourg Saint-Germain.
Though by no means anti-avant-garde, Triplepatte also parodied avant-garde effects and aestheticism, as in the nightmare scene in which the hero flees his creditor and matchmaker waving giant butterfly nets, a moment that combines negative images and slow-motion. Ivan Mosjoukine, the Russian émigré actor, would use similar negative effects in his self-directed Le Brasier ardent, shot later that year, just as Triplepatte was going into trade screenings.
But Triplepatte’s most consistent pleasure is actor Henri Debain, who displays hilariously droopy aplomb as the asocial socialite, a sort of French cousin to Russia’s original couch potato, Oblomov. Debain, a talented cartoonist (as the first scene of the film shows), was a close friend of the Bernard family, and appeared in Raymond’s early films before going on to direct a few films himself and collaborate with other notable directors, among them Henri Fescourt, who featured him as the comically villainous Caderousse in Monte Cristo (1929)." – Lenny Borger. - I saw but the beginning and the end, but it seemed like a witty comedy and social satire worth revisiting. Yes, Triplepatte is like a French Oblomov. There is the cancelled wedding motif in the beginning. And yes, the lift sequence is great.
Made early in 1922, Triplepatte was the Bernards’ screen version of Tristan’s 1905 social comedy of the same name, about a young Paris aristocrat whose chronic indecision wreaks havoc in his social circle and his private life. The play’s first author was a physiologist, André Godfernaux, who wanted to write a play about diseases of the will. He asked Tristan to collaborate. Tristan obliged, only too well – what began as a serious thesis drama became the laugh sensation of the 1905-06 Paris season. To make things even more droll, the high-born low achiever, Viscount Robert de Houdan – nicknamed “Triplepatte” (“Triple-Legs”) after his racehorse, because both always balk at hurdles – was played by Marcel Levesque(...) The 1908 New York premiere starred another profile as famous as Levesque’s – John Barrymore.
Triplepatte, the film, was an ideal fusion of talents. Tristan and Raymond jettisoned entire scenes and characters in order to streamline the plot and settings more cinematically – from a ponderously talky 3 hours to a crisp 80 minutes, with a spare but comically potent use of intertitles (the climactic elevator gag provides a witty solution to a problem of dramatic construction that Tristan failed to solve back in 1905). The downside to this, if it is one, is that the film indulges more in broad farce – with the famous scene of the wedding ceremony and the groom’s arrival in his pajamas! – than in any satiric portrait of high society in the faubourg Saint-Germain.
Though by no means anti-avant-garde, Triplepatte also parodied avant-garde effects and aestheticism, as in the nightmare scene in which the hero flees his creditor and matchmaker waving giant butterfly nets, a moment that combines negative images and slow-motion. Ivan Mosjoukine, the Russian émigré actor, would use similar negative effects in his self-directed Le Brasier ardent, shot later that year, just as Triplepatte was going into trade screenings.
But Triplepatte’s most consistent pleasure is actor Henri Debain, who displays hilariously droopy aplomb as the asocial socialite, a sort of French cousin to Russia’s original couch potato, Oblomov. Debain, a talented cartoonist (as the first scene of the film shows), was a close friend of the Bernard family, and appeared in Raymond’s early films before going on to direct a few films himself and collaborate with other notable directors, among them Henri Fescourt, who featured him as the comically villainous Caderousse in Monte Cristo (1929)." – Lenny Borger. - I saw but the beginning and the end, but it seemed like a witty comedy and social satire worth revisiting. Yes, Triplepatte is like a French Oblomov. There is the cancelled wedding motif in the beginning. And yes, the lift sequence is great.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
SPARROWS - OPENING MUSICAL EVENT
Turvattomat. US 1926. PC: The Pickford Corporation. P: Mary Pickford. D: William Beaudine. Story: Winifred Dunn. DP: Charles Rosher, Hal Mohr, Karl Struss. CAST: Mary Pickford (Mama Molly), Gustav von Seyffertitz (Mr. Grimes), Walter “Spec” O’Donnell (Ambrose). Orig. l: 7763 ft. Print: LoC (restored 2006), 7763 ft /21 fps/ 95 min, tinted, original in English, e-subtitles in Italian, viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 4 September 2008.
Score composed by Jeffrey Silverman. Performed live for the first time by Orchestra Sinfonica del Friuli Venezia Giulia. Conducted by Hugh Munro Neely.
The conductor on the score: "This performance marks the premiere of a new symphonic score for Sparrows by Jeffrey Silverman, a Los Angeles based composer. (...) For this new score, the composer has employed an expansive harmonic palette that is as atmospheric, in its own way, as the fantastic settings designed by Harry Oliver for the film itself. The orchestra employs a compact woodwind section, full brass, percussion, piano and harp, in addition to a relatively large string section."
Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta: "Sparrows is Mary Pickford’s masterpiece. Both Charles Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch—two of her most critical and contentious contemporaries—praised it as her finest work. Although Pickford had greater commercial successes as well as films that garnered more critical acclaim, Sparrows is her most fully realized and timeless work of art. The film’s superb performances, gothic production design, and cinematography are all at the service of a suspenseful, emotionally-compelling story anchored by a central performance imbued with pathos, humor, and charm.
Throughout the early 1920s, “America’s Sweetheart” longed to eschew “the little girl with the golden curls” and expand her range in adult roles and more ambitious productions. Her two forays into this arena, Rosita (1923) and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924), found success at the box office, but to Pickford they were disappointments, as they failed to surpass the greatest of her previous releases. Her first venture back into the world of pre-adolescence, Little Annie Rooney (1925), was such a commercial hit that Pickford reassembled much of the same team for a follow up. Originally entitled Swamp Babies, the film was in actuality a daring departure for Pickford: a suspenseful drama with a darkly gothic visual style, which quickly became known during production as The Baby Farm.
Baby farms, places where the children of unwed mothers, prostitutes, or deserted wives were boarded for hire and then often sold like commodities to adoptive parents, were notorious rackets in certain sections of America in the 1920s. From this contemporary scandal, Winifred Dunn created a melodrama which, as Edward Wagenknecht and others have previously noted, contains several Dickensian touches in its focus on abused children, background of mysterious misdeeds, and in the demonic Mr. Grimes (Gustav von Seyffertitz) who owns the farm, a character fully the equal of Dickens’ Mr. Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby. Pickford plays “Mama Molly” the eldest child and guardian of the farm’s little “sparrows.” (The film’s title is drawn from a passage in the Gospel of Luke: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.”)
Three acres of the Pickford-Fairbanks Studios Hollywood lot were transformed into a gothic nightmare, the centerpiece being a bubbling swamp, under the supervision of art director Harry Oliver. Six hundred trees were acquired; pits were created and filled with muddy water, sawdust, and burnt cork to effectively achieve the stylized look of the production. The cinematography was greatly influenced by German stylized cinema as a result of the German UFA studios having engaged the services of Pickford’s favorite cinematographer, Charles Rosher, as photographic consultant on F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). Pickford also retained two additional cinematographers: Karl Struss and Hal Mohr. The three men produced beautiful, painterly images for Sparrows that are the equal of the very best films of the period. (Rosher and Struss subsequently photographed Murnau’s Sunrise [1927]). Sparrows had a supporting cast of eleven children under the age of ten and required director William Beaudine’s skill with them, just as he demonstrated with the many children that populated the cast of Little Annie Rooney.
Pickford was thirty-three years old in 1925. Despite the public's continual clamor for "Little Mary,” she undoubtedly realized that her days of portraying pre-teens and adolescents were drawing to a close. This knowledge uniquely informs her portrayal of Molly with a beguiling wistfulness and in the last of her little girl roles, Pickford is a revelation. She always understood that the motion picture experience was an intensely intimate one between viewer and screen, and through her superbly modulated performance, she reaches the highest levels of silent communication with her audience. Nowhere is this assertion more exquisitely demonstrated than in the sublime sequence in which Molly, attempting to nurse one of her desperately ill “sparrows” back to health, awakens from what she assumes is a Divine Hallucination of Christ taking the child to Heaven. Upon awakening and finding the infant dead in her arms, a river of emotion washes over her face. Through her large expressive eyes one sees her confusion, distress, devastating realization, and finally, calm resignation and knowing gratitude that the child has gone to a better place. It is a virtual primer in the art of silent screen acting.
One of the most lyrical and moving scenes in the film, the sequence in the final cut evolved from something quite different. Surviving outtakes depict an earlier conception in which a phosphorescent angel takes the dead body from Molly’s arms. The effects shots were completed, but were ultimately rejected from the final version which tied more clearly to earlier plot points of the film. (Molly had earlier been shown reading a tattered illustrated booklet of the Christian Scripture).
Pickford’s own maternal feelings were never more evident to her than when she made Sparrows. Although she confessed in her autobiography that she “had maternal designs on every baby that played with me on the screen,” she was inordinately fond of Mary Louise Miller, who plays baby Doris Wayne. Pickford desperately wanted to adopt the cherubic Miller, and newspapers reported that Pickford offered her parents a million dollars to adopt her. Miller’s parents refused to part with their child. Correspondence survives between Pickford and Miller well into the 1970s; Pickford signed her letters to Miller as “Mama Molly” until the end.
The most celebrated scene in Sparrows involves Molly (with Baby Doris on her shoulders) and her flock of children making a desperate attempt at freedom across a crumbling, low-hanging branch above an alligator-infested swamp pursued by Mr. Grimes and his vicious dog. The scene is also famous for apocryphal stories—principally told by Pickford herself—that it had been rehearsed with live alligators before an incensed Douglas Fairbanks put an end to it. Contradicting Pickford was Hal Mohr, who photographed the sequence and spoke of his use of split screen for this scene. Mohr carefully counted each turn of the camera’s crank and a script supervisor maintained a detailed continuity record of when the alligators lept or snapped their jaws so that Pickford and the children might recoil properly at the precise moments. The superb Library of Congress restoration print clearly reveals that the snapping mouths and movements of the alligators for this scene are being manipulated by an ingenious system of wires. Although these revealing shots may at first appear to shatter the carefully constructed illusion,the cumulative effect makes the incredible craft of the original filming all the more impressive. (...)
It was the opinion of the public, however, that Pickford cared about most, and they were uneasy about the film. Pickford told Kevin Brownlow in 1965, “My picture Sparrows wasn’t too successful, comparatively speaking, because of an error of judgment. We tried to put too much drama into it….it was so terrifying for many people seeing babies in such danger that Sparrows didn’t do as well as it might have done.” Sparrows had a production cost of $463,455.00 and its domestic gross was a respectable $966,878.00.
In retrospect, it is now clear that Sparrows was a great film released at the wrong time. The very qualities which made many filmgoers, and even its star, uneasy in its initial release are the same attributes which gave it resonance in later years. Thanks to the Library of Congress restoration, Sparrows can finally be viewed in its full pictorial glory, and gain reappraisal as one of the masterworks of the silent cinema. It is also the perfect introduction for twenty first century film audiences to the magic of Mary Pickford." - Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta
A beautiful print of a familiar film (I included it in my MMM Film Guide on the 1100 best films in 2005), and a magnificent score.
Score composed by Jeffrey Silverman. Performed live for the first time by Orchestra Sinfonica del Friuli Venezia Giulia. Conducted by Hugh Munro Neely.
The conductor on the score: "This performance marks the premiere of a new symphonic score for Sparrows by Jeffrey Silverman, a Los Angeles based composer. (...) For this new score, the composer has employed an expansive harmonic palette that is as atmospheric, in its own way, as the fantastic settings designed by Harry Oliver for the film itself. The orchestra employs a compact woodwind section, full brass, percussion, piano and harp, in addition to a relatively large string section."
Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta: "Sparrows is Mary Pickford’s masterpiece. Both Charles Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch—two of her most critical and contentious contemporaries—praised it as her finest work. Although Pickford had greater commercial successes as well as films that garnered more critical acclaim, Sparrows is her most fully realized and timeless work of art. The film’s superb performances, gothic production design, and cinematography are all at the service of a suspenseful, emotionally-compelling story anchored by a central performance imbued with pathos, humor, and charm.
Throughout the early 1920s, “America’s Sweetheart” longed to eschew “the little girl with the golden curls” and expand her range in adult roles and more ambitious productions. Her two forays into this arena, Rosita (1923) and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924), found success at the box office, but to Pickford they were disappointments, as they failed to surpass the greatest of her previous releases. Her first venture back into the world of pre-adolescence, Little Annie Rooney (1925), was such a commercial hit that Pickford reassembled much of the same team for a follow up. Originally entitled Swamp Babies, the film was in actuality a daring departure for Pickford: a suspenseful drama with a darkly gothic visual style, which quickly became known during production as The Baby Farm.
Baby farms, places where the children of unwed mothers, prostitutes, or deserted wives were boarded for hire and then often sold like commodities to adoptive parents, were notorious rackets in certain sections of America in the 1920s. From this contemporary scandal, Winifred Dunn created a melodrama which, as Edward Wagenknecht and others have previously noted, contains several Dickensian touches in its focus on abused children, background of mysterious misdeeds, and in the demonic Mr. Grimes (Gustav von Seyffertitz) who owns the farm, a character fully the equal of Dickens’ Mr. Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby. Pickford plays “Mama Molly” the eldest child and guardian of the farm’s little “sparrows.” (The film’s title is drawn from a passage in the Gospel of Luke: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.”)
Three acres of the Pickford-Fairbanks Studios Hollywood lot were transformed into a gothic nightmare, the centerpiece being a bubbling swamp, under the supervision of art director Harry Oliver. Six hundred trees were acquired; pits were created and filled with muddy water, sawdust, and burnt cork to effectively achieve the stylized look of the production. The cinematography was greatly influenced by German stylized cinema as a result of the German UFA studios having engaged the services of Pickford’s favorite cinematographer, Charles Rosher, as photographic consultant on F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). Pickford also retained two additional cinematographers: Karl Struss and Hal Mohr. The three men produced beautiful, painterly images for Sparrows that are the equal of the very best films of the period. (Rosher and Struss subsequently photographed Murnau’s Sunrise [1927]). Sparrows had a supporting cast of eleven children under the age of ten and required director William Beaudine’s skill with them, just as he demonstrated with the many children that populated the cast of Little Annie Rooney.
Pickford was thirty-three years old in 1925. Despite the public's continual clamor for "Little Mary,” she undoubtedly realized that her days of portraying pre-teens and adolescents were drawing to a close. This knowledge uniquely informs her portrayal of Molly with a beguiling wistfulness and in the last of her little girl roles, Pickford is a revelation. She always understood that the motion picture experience was an intensely intimate one between viewer and screen, and through her superbly modulated performance, she reaches the highest levels of silent communication with her audience. Nowhere is this assertion more exquisitely demonstrated than in the sublime sequence in which Molly, attempting to nurse one of her desperately ill “sparrows” back to health, awakens from what she assumes is a Divine Hallucination of Christ taking the child to Heaven. Upon awakening and finding the infant dead in her arms, a river of emotion washes over her face. Through her large expressive eyes one sees her confusion, distress, devastating realization, and finally, calm resignation and knowing gratitude that the child has gone to a better place. It is a virtual primer in the art of silent screen acting.
One of the most lyrical and moving scenes in the film, the sequence in the final cut evolved from something quite different. Surviving outtakes depict an earlier conception in which a phosphorescent angel takes the dead body from Molly’s arms. The effects shots were completed, but were ultimately rejected from the final version which tied more clearly to earlier plot points of the film. (Molly had earlier been shown reading a tattered illustrated booklet of the Christian Scripture).
Pickford’s own maternal feelings were never more evident to her than when she made Sparrows. Although she confessed in her autobiography that she “had maternal designs on every baby that played with me on the screen,” she was inordinately fond of Mary Louise Miller, who plays baby Doris Wayne. Pickford desperately wanted to adopt the cherubic Miller, and newspapers reported that Pickford offered her parents a million dollars to adopt her. Miller’s parents refused to part with their child. Correspondence survives between Pickford and Miller well into the 1970s; Pickford signed her letters to Miller as “Mama Molly” until the end.
The most celebrated scene in Sparrows involves Molly (with Baby Doris on her shoulders) and her flock of children making a desperate attempt at freedom across a crumbling, low-hanging branch above an alligator-infested swamp pursued by Mr. Grimes and his vicious dog. The scene is also famous for apocryphal stories—principally told by Pickford herself—that it had been rehearsed with live alligators before an incensed Douglas Fairbanks put an end to it. Contradicting Pickford was Hal Mohr, who photographed the sequence and spoke of his use of split screen for this scene. Mohr carefully counted each turn of the camera’s crank and a script supervisor maintained a detailed continuity record of when the alligators lept or snapped their jaws so that Pickford and the children might recoil properly at the precise moments. The superb Library of Congress restoration print clearly reveals that the snapping mouths and movements of the alligators for this scene are being manipulated by an ingenious system of wires. Although these revealing shots may at first appear to shatter the carefully constructed illusion,the cumulative effect makes the incredible craft of the original filming all the more impressive. (...)
It was the opinion of the public, however, that Pickford cared about most, and they were uneasy about the film. Pickford told Kevin Brownlow in 1965, “My picture Sparrows wasn’t too successful, comparatively speaking, because of an error of judgment. We tried to put too much drama into it….it was so terrifying for many people seeing babies in such danger that Sparrows didn’t do as well as it might have done.” Sparrows had a production cost of $463,455.00 and its domestic gross was a respectable $966,878.00.
In retrospect, it is now clear that Sparrows was a great film released at the wrong time. The very qualities which made many filmgoers, and even its star, uneasy in its initial release are the same attributes which gave it resonance in later years. Thanks to the Library of Congress restoration, Sparrows can finally be viewed in its full pictorial glory, and gain reappraisal as one of the masterworks of the silent cinema. It is also the perfect introduction for twenty first century film audiences to the magic of Mary Pickford." - Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta
A beautiful print of a familiar film (I included it in my MMM Film Guide on the 1100 best films in 2005), and a magnificent score.
["Fool's Dance" from Petipa's Mlada]
RU 1907- . D: Alexander Shiryaev. 2’15” from 35mm neg.; print source: Viktor Bocharov. Grand piano: John Sweeney. Viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 4 October 2008. - David Robinson: "Before the very recent discovery of his films, Shiryaev was already celebrated as an outstanding dancer and teacher of Russian and Soviet ballet. He created “The Fool’s Dance” in Marius Petipa’s 1896 revival of the ballet “Mlada”, with music by Ludwig Minkus, at the Mariinsky Theatre. His innovation of combining high leaps with the characteristic squatting step, prisyadka, was so dangerous that Petipa turned his back during Shiryaev’s solo, and in fact he broke his fibula while performing it in London in 1912. Although he was already over 40 when he made this film record, his remarkable agility and elevation are still evident." – David Robinson.
[Birds in Flight]
RU 1900-1905. D: Alexander Shiryaev. DigiBeta, 0'04” (source: 45mm paper film, digitally re-animated by Aardman Animations, Bristol, 2008, now looped); source: Viktor Bocharov/Aardman Animation.
David Robinson: "This fragment may well be Shiryaev’s first experiment with animation, probably done between 1900 and 1905, drawn on paper film 45mm wide, for viewing in an apparatus of his own devising. Although much less ambitious and sophisticated than his eventual work in animation, it is fascinating to see him experimenting with a form of animal movement that had always fascinated and generally frustrated the chronographers Marey and Muybridge." – David Robinson.
David Robinson: "This fragment may well be Shiryaev’s first experiment with animation, probably done between 1900 and 1905, drawn on paper film 45mm wide, for viewing in an apparatus of his own devising. Although much less ambitious and sophisticated than his eventual work in animation, it is fascinating to see him experimenting with a form of animal movement that had always fascinated and generally frustrated the chronographers Marey and Muybridge." – David Robinson.
Katie Melua: Mary Pickford
GB 2007. PC: Dramatico. Song written, produced, and arranged by Mike Batt; vocals, guitar: Katie Melua; music video, 3’08”, DVD 4x3 PAL, source: Edel Italia, Milano.
Russell Merritt: "The rhymes will have you jabbing a sharpened pencil in your ear, but how many 20-somethings hit the charts with a song about the formation of a silent film company? Katie Melua, Europe’s best-selling female pop artist, goes one better: she makes it light-hearted (some would say light-headed), good-natured, and wonderfully entertaining. “Mary Pickford”, about the creation of United Artists, is the breakout song from her latest album, Pictures. It is best enjoyed, as we’re showing it here, as a music video, where the bouncy jingle is enhanced by scenes from Pickford, Fairbanks, and Griffith movies, and the famous footage of the Big Four signing their contracts and cavorting for newsreel cameras. The song was written by Melua’s manager, Mike Batt. The trigger – like many of Batt’s songs – was evidently some Big Book of Fantastic Facts. In this case, the Fantastic Fact was that Mary Pickford ate roses as a beauty aid (you could check this yourself in Scott Eyman’s Pickford biography). But far from setting up satire, the rose-eating introduces the first of our four artist-heroes as pioneer independents, yesteryear superstars having a fine time creating a company that they will control. This is not the picture we might expect from someone growing up at a time when United Artists has become the depersonalized subsidiary of a multi-national consortium. But in this song United Artists stands for heroic, independent filmmakers going off on their own. The movie clips in the video capture the mood: Mary playing with Mack Sennett in An Arcadian Maid and posing in curls for Sparrows; Griffith fighting a stuffed bird in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, walking out of a split set in At the Crossroads of Life, rehearsing his actors in Way Down East, and playing war correspondent in Hearts of the World; Fairbanks strutting in The Thief of Bagdad, swirling his cape in Don Q, and sparring with Mary in Taming of the Shrew. Chaplin alone gets no film clips, but makes up for it by clowning in costume with Fairbanks at the UA signing." – Russell Merritt
Russell Merritt: "The rhymes will have you jabbing a sharpened pencil in your ear, but how many 20-somethings hit the charts with a song about the formation of a silent film company? Katie Melua, Europe’s best-selling female pop artist, goes one better: she makes it light-hearted (some would say light-headed), good-natured, and wonderfully entertaining. “Mary Pickford”, about the creation of United Artists, is the breakout song from her latest album, Pictures. It is best enjoyed, as we’re showing it here, as a music video, where the bouncy jingle is enhanced by scenes from Pickford, Fairbanks, and Griffith movies, and the famous footage of the Big Four signing their contracts and cavorting for newsreel cameras. The song was written by Melua’s manager, Mike Batt. The trigger – like many of Batt’s songs – was evidently some Big Book of Fantastic Facts. In this case, the Fantastic Fact was that Mary Pickford ate roses as a beauty aid (you could check this yourself in Scott Eyman’s Pickford biography). But far from setting up satire, the rose-eating introduces the first of our four artist-heroes as pioneer independents, yesteryear superstars having a fine time creating a company that they will control. This is not the picture we might expect from someone growing up at a time when United Artists has become the depersonalized subsidiary of a multi-national consortium. But in this song United Artists stands for heroic, independent filmmakers going off on their own. The movie clips in the video capture the mood: Mary playing with Mack Sennett in An Arcadian Maid and posing in curls for Sparrows; Griffith fighting a stuffed bird in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest, walking out of a split set in At the Crossroads of Life, rehearsing his actors in Way Down East, and playing war correspondent in Hearts of the World; Fairbanks strutting in The Thief of Bagdad, swirling his cape in Don Q, and sparring with Mary in Taming of the Shrew. Chaplin alone gets no film clips, but makes up for it by clowning in costume with Fairbanks at the UA signing." – Russell Merritt
The Headless Horseman
US 1922. PC: Legend of Sleepy Hollow Corp. D+SC: Edward Venturini - based on the story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) by Washington Irving. DP: Ned Van Buren. CAST: Will Rogers (Ichabod Crane). Print: LoC, 5765 ft /20 fps/ 77 min, original in English, with e-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin, viewed at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Cinema Verdi, 4 October 2008. - I caught but a short sample, but that included Will Rogers' comic love scene and an encounter with the Headless Horseman. - Richard Koszarski: "generally regarded as the first feature film shot entirely on Eastman’s newly perfected panchromatic negative stock (previous versions had very little shelf life). It was photographed by Ned Van Buren, a past-president of the A.S.C., who soon left studio production to work directly for Kodak’s Hollywood office (...). Van Buren took full advantage of the new negative, especially in a number of effective day-for-night exteriors. Although Eastman began marketing this panchromatic film (#1203) the following year, it was not widely used until prices were lowered to the same level as ordinary negative stock in 1926. (...) shot in the summer of 1922 on many of the same “Sleep Hollow” locations described in the original Washington Irving story. (...) Although Will Rogers appeared in a significant number of shorts and features between 1918 and 1924, he was better known at the time as a syndicated humorist and featured attraction in the Ziegfeld Follies. Within a few years, however, his appearances on radio and in talking pictures would make him one of the most important figures in the American entertainment business." – Richard Koszarski
Thursday, October 02, 2008
One Hour With You
Hetki sinun kanssasi / En timme med dig. US (c) 1932 Paramount. P+D: Ernst Lubitsch, assisted by George Cukor. SC: Samson Raphaelson - based on the play Nur ein Traum (1909) by Lothar Schmidt. DP: Victor Milner. AD: Hans Dreier, A.E. Freudeman. COST: Travis Banton. M: Oscar Straus. Songs: "Police Number," "We Will Always Be Sweethearts" and "Oh! that Mitzi!" music by Oscar Straus, lyrics by Leo Robin; "One Hour with You," "Three Times a Day," "What Would You Do?" "What a Little Thing Like a Wedding Ring Can Do" and "It Was Only a Dream Kiss," music by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Leo Robin. Starring Maurice Chevalier (Dr. André Bertier), Jeanette MacDonald (Colette Bertier), Genevieve Tobin (Mitzi Olivier), Roland Young (Prof. Olivier), Charlie Ruggles (Adolph). 85 min. A UCLA restored colour toned print viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 1 October 2008. - The delightful romantic comedy revisited. The more often I see this the more I regard this as one of the top Lubitsch films, top of his game. Much of the dialogue is in verse. Much of Chevalier's talk is confidential dialogue with us, the audience. The songs are warm and humoristic, performed with cordial joy. A film of love.
Päivää, herra Kivi
God dag, herr Kivi / How Do You Do, Mr. Kivi. FI 1984. PC: Filminor. D: Timo Linnasalo. SC: Ilpo Tuomarila, Linnasalo. DP: Tahvo Hirvonen - colour - 1:1,66. M: Heikki Valpola. Starring Kristiina Elstelä (assistant librarian Helinä Walén), Markku Huhtamo (the chimney-sweeper Leo Virta), Ragni Grönblom ("Sister"), Antti Litja (chief physician Manninen), Kirsti Otsamo (Liisa, Leo's wife), Hanna Tarvainen (Elina, Leo's daughter). - A beautiful photochemical print with vibrant, warm colour. - Helinä directs an amateur performance of the play Day and Night by Aleksis Kivi, national writer of Finland. Leo, her ex-boyfriend, now married, watches them. Helinä wants to be the muse of Leo, an aspiring writer. But their mental balance is fragile. - A beautiful candle-lit nude scene with Ragni Grönblom. - I watched but the first 20 minutes.
Reppuselkäinen mies ja laiha hevonen
[En man med en ryggsäck och en mager häst]/ A Man With a Rucksack and a Skinny Horse. FI (c) 1979 TTK / ETV. D+SC: Tapani Lundgren - based on the short story by Pentti Haanpää. DP: Raimo Paananen - b&w - 1:1,66. Starring Eero Tuomikoski (the man with the rucksack). 11 min. A digibeta projection in Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 1 October 2008. - The man with the rucksack sees a mistreated skinny horse, buys it with almost all the money he has, takes his Nagan and puts a bullet through the horse's head to save it from its misery.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Jigoku
Jigoku (the title on film in Western letters) / Hell. JP 1960. PC: Shintoho. D: Nobuo Nakagawa. DP: Morita Mamoru - Eastmancolor - Shintohoscope 1:2,35. Starring Shigeru Amachi (Shiro Shimizu), Yoichi Numata (Tamura), Utako Mitsuya (Yukiko / Sachiko). 101 min. A National Film Center (Tokyo) print with English subtitles viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 30 September 2008. - A duped print with blurred colour. - A crazy ambience from the start: stylized, almost abstract images, song, pantomime, flames of hell. During the credits there are soft-core sex images of the luscious stripper, reminding us of the lust of the flesh. The theology professor lectures about hell in ancient religions, including Hinduism. Shiro is tormented by a demonic friend, Tamura. Last night, Shiro has been the passenger in the car driven by Tamura, and in a hit-and-run accident, a member of the yakuza ("Tiger Kyoichi of the Gondo Syndicate") has been killed. The yakuza's stripper-girlfriend swears revenge. As Shiro takes a taxi with his girlfriend Yokio to report to the police, there is another accident, and Yokio, who is pregnant, dies. - Interesting music: a selection of Bach's piano work, and jazz piano. - I saw the first 20 minutes only. - I missed the legendary last third in Hell.
The Man I Killed
Särkynyt sävel / Mannen jag dödade. US (c) 1932 Paramount. P+D: Ernst Lubitsch. SC: Samson Raphaelson, Ernest Vajda - based on the play L'Homme qui j'ai tué (1930) by Maurice Rostand and the English-language adaptation The Man I Killed by Reginald Berkeley (1931). DP: Victor Milner. AD: Hans Dreier. Starring Phillips Holmes (Paul Renard), Nancy Carroll (Elsa), Lionel Barrymore (Dr. Hölderlin), Louise Carter (Mrs. Hölderlin), Lucien Littlefield (Schultz), ZaSu Pitts (Anna), Tully Marshall (gravedigger). 78 min. Restored UCLA print viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 30 September, 2008. - The restoration seems to be based on challenging source material, maybe even 16mm. I seem to remember that the NFTVA print was better. - The odd film out in Lubitsch's 1930's oeuvre: a serious Pacifist tract. - The young Frenchman cannot overcome his horror of having shot a German at point blank range (both young soldiers are violinists), and although a slick clergyman is quick with absolution, he travels to Germany, visits the man's grave, gets acquainted with his family, and becomes the surrogate to the man he killed. - The best sequence is the ironic church service for the military in the beginning, juxtaposing gleaming sabres and boots with Christian imagery. - Then it gets heavy, often declamatory, and melodramatic. The saving scenes are the ones with the small merchants. - The dull Phillips Holmes, having ruined Sternberg's An American Tragedy, now spoils the film of Lubitsch.
Les Amants réguliers
Regular Lovers. FR (c) 2004 Maïa Films / ARTE France. D: Philippe Garrel. SC: Philippe Garrel, Arlette Langmann, Marc Chodolenko. DP: William Lubtchansky - b&w - Academy 1:1,37. M: Jean-Claude Vannier. Starring Louis Garrel (Francois, poet), Clotilde Hesme (Lilie, sculptress), Eric Rulliat (Jean-Christophe). 182 min. A Films Distribution print with English subtitles viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 30 September 2008. - A fine print of a film with stark b&2 cinematography in high contrast. - A poetic meditation on the experience of May 1968 in Paris. Reflected also in visions of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. - Garrel has stated that his film is not about the year 1968 but a generation. Like a novel by Stendhal, he moves through history and returns to the private. The second part of the film is about the return of art. Even opium is a literary device, which evokes the dreams of 1968, a return to Romantic literature or even Cocteau. - I watched the first 30 minutes and the last 15 minutes. The beginning is about the street fights at night, depicted as an anti-action movie. The ending is about the death of the poet of an opium overdose.
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