[The film was not released in Finland].
FR 1923. PC: Films Albatros. D+SC: Viatcheslav Tourjansky; based on the short story Песнь торжествующей любви by Ivan Turgenev (1881); DP: Joseph-Louis Mundwiller, Fédote Bourgassoff; AD: Alexandre Lochakoff, César Lacca, Vassili Choukaeff; cost. [of principals]: Vassili Choukaeff, made by Maison Édouard Souplet; tech. dir: Michel Feldman; filmed: Nîmes (Jardin de la Fontaine), Aigues-Mortes, Studio Montreuil, [Studio des Réservoirs (Joinville)?]; CAST: Nathalie Kovanko (Valeria), Jean Angelo (Muzio), Rolla Norman (Fabio), Nicolas Koline (Antonio), Jean d’Yd (Hindu servant), Basile Kourotchkine (Brahma), Paul Ollivier (Duke of Ferrara); 1943 m /18 fps/ 93 min.
From: La Cinémathèque française, reconstitué by them in 1986 (Renée Lichtig), print made in 1990. E-subtitles in English + Italian. Grand piano: John Sweeney. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 5 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Ivan Turgenev’s short story "The Song of Love Triumphant" first appeared, dedicated to the memory of Gustave Flaubert, in 1881. A 1915 screen adaptation by Yevgenii Bauer, which gave Vera Kholodnaya one of her first and best major roles, is lost, but the changes of character names in that version suggests that Bauer transposed the story from the original location of 16th-century Ferrara to a more recent Russia. The Albatros version, on the contrary, observes the company’s customary fidelity to the setting, plot-line, and detail of the literary original. Le Chant de l’amour triomphant was Albatros’ only adaptation from a classical Russian author: its tale of 16th-century Ferrara invaded by Eastern mysticism and eroticism chimed admirably with 1920s’ tastes for "orientalism".
So closely is the story followed that the intertitles are practically all taken directly from Turgenev’s text – even to the equivocal phrase "Oh, how happy the youth for whom that pure maiden bud, still enfolded in its petals, will one day open into full flower!" – though the Albatros title-writers have inserted the unequivocal words "intact and virginal" after "petals". Turgenev’s conceit of introducing his story, "This is what I read in an old manuscript", and closing it, "At this word the manuscript ended", is echoed by giving the film’s opening and closing intertitles the appearance of manuscript fragments, though the main body of the titles are elegantly and unusually presented within a stylized Gothic arch design.
The common plot of story and film involves two young nobles of Ferrara, Fabio, a painter, and Muzio, a musician. Bosom friends, both are in love with Valeria, but agree that whichever she chooses, the other will submit totally to his fate. Valeria chooses Fabio, and Muzio, true to his word, departs for the East. After five years of bliss for the young couple, Muzio returns in company with a mute Hindu servant (Malay in the original) and steeped in oriental magic and mysticism. Valeria is strangely disturbed by his presence and particularly the eerie "Song of Love Triumphant" he plays on an exotic stringed instrument…
Tourjansky’s principal addition to the plot is to introduce some needed comic relief in the person of Fabio’s steward Antonio, who in the original story only figures briefly at the end. Antonio, now a clumsy, meddlesome but faithful retainer, is enthusiastically played by Nicolas Koline; and adds a new plot-element and climax to the film, in the scenes where he incites the lower orders of Ferrara to violent action against the "sorcerer" Muzio.
Tourjansky’s most fundamental contribution however is to reinforce the powerful erotic element more discreetly indicated by Turgenev. The common dream of Valeria and Muzio is much as described by Turgenev: "this curtain slowly glided, moved aside ... and in came Muzio. He bowed, opened his arms, laughed.... His fierce arms enfolded Valeria’s waist; his parched lips burned her all over.... She fell backwards on the cushions." Tourjansky’s most remarkable sequence, however, is Muzio’s performance of "The Song of Love Triumphant" for Fabio and Valeria: the image cuts between Valeria’s face, first wondering, then ravenous, close-ups of Muzio playing his exotic string instrument, with its arched bow, and a couple passionately making love, moment by moment becoming more naked. In the final shots the naked man metamorphoses into Muzio himself. It is a sequence of eroticism which it would be hard to parallel in commercial cinema of the 1920s.
Critics of the time regularly praised the film as a "poem", and it is interesting to find Cinéa (1 November 1923) positively enthusiastic because the film departs from current fashions of frantic editing (except, of course, in such scenes as that just described): "The abuse of ultra-hectic action (…) too often obliges us to take part in this prodigious gluttony of the screen, of which Abel Gance has recently shown us the cruel reality. The screen [today] demands an ever-growing number of images, hurled on the white screen with varied rhythms, but with a constant tendency to acceleration. The spectator gets accustomed to being gorged (…) The orchestra of images [in Le Chant de l’amour triomphant], grave and slow, will not carry us to paroxysms of rhythm. It is there only to describe, to relate. The film which is unfolded for us, is a great visual recital… the silence comes to life, grows, always charged with ideas, dreams and visual realizations…."
These visual realizations were the work of Alexandre Lochakoff and his team,
which included the designer Choukaeff, who would subsequently create the costumes for Carmen. The jungles of India and a Renaissance Italy that sometimes reflects a 1920s chic on the eve of Art Deco were recreated in the narrow Montreuil studio, though the Duke’s reception may have been filmed in the Studio des Réservoirs in Joinville, which Albatros used for its more ambitious sets, such as the Drury Lane reconstitution in Kean. For the exteriors of the city walls, and the gardens of Ferrara, the unit went on location to Nîmes and Aigues-Mortes. Even in parks, the Albatros designers found the elaborate stairways which feature so constantly in their interiors. A charming detail of design is the illustrated cast titles at the opening of the film. At the left of the screen an aggressive Cubist abstract panel is drawn back to reveal the actor in day-dress; at the right a traditional curtain in a Renaissance arch draws back to reveal him in character.
The film was restored in 1986 by Renée Lichtig, from an original nitrate copy acquired by the Cinémathèque Française in its early years. The restoration consisted of printing preservation elements and printing on colour stock. The copy projected was made in 1990. – David Robinson." -
A haunting love triangle. For Fabio, Valerie is a saint, for Muzio, a sensual woman. The Hindu love song awakens the mutual desire between Valerie and Muzio, and they meet as sleepwalkers in the nocturnal garden. This film belongs to those that are based on the idea of the power of music, but in the live music performance that concept was ignored. This film would be a great choice for a special event with Russian-Oriental themes such as by Rimsky-Korsakov.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Monday, October 05, 2009
The Ten Commandments (1923)
In the presence of Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, daughter of Leatrice Joy.
Kymmenen käskyä / Kymmenet käskyt. US 1923. PC: Famous Players-Lasky Corp. / Paramount. D+P: Cecil B. DeMille; SC: Jeanie Macpherson - many of the intertitles in the first section are direct quotes from Exodus; DP: Bert Glennon, Peverell Marley, Archibald Stout, J.F. Westerberg, [Edward S. Curtis, Ray Rennahan (col.)]; AD: Paul Iribe, Francis McComas; tech. D: Roy Pomeroy; ED: Anne Bauchens; ass. D: Cullen Tate; cast (Prologue): Theodore Roberts (Moses, The Lawgiver), Charles de Roche (Ramses, The Magnificent), Estelle Taylor (Miriam, The Sister of Moses), Julia Faye (The Wife of Pharaoh), Terrence Moore (The Son of Pharaoh), James Neill (Aaron, Brother of Moses), Lawson Butt (Dathan, The Discontented), Clarence Burton (The Taskmaster), Noble Johnson (The Bronze Man); (Modern Story): Rod La Rocque (Dan McTavish), Richard Dix (John McTavish), Edythe Chapman (Mrs. Martha McTavish), Leatrice Joy (Mary Leigh), Nita Naldi (Sally Lung, a Eurasian), Robert Edeson (Redding, an Inspector), Charles Ogle (The Doctor), Agnes Ayres (The Outcast); 12,072 ft /20 fps/ 159 min, col. (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinted sequences and Handschiegl effects with the Desmet process); print: GEH. Restored in 2002 by GEH. Restoration funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Film Foundation, and the George Eastman House Preservation Fund. E-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin, viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 5 Oct 2009. - From the GCM Catalogue: "Some canonical American silent films grow in interest over the decades (say, The Crowd or The General). Some films widely admired at release do the reverse (say, Civilization or The Birth of a Nation). Others – and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments turns out to be a fascinating example – keep their appeal by turning it inside out.
DeMille’s long film holds two distinct shorter ones within it. A grandiose Biblical epic is followed by a modest family melodrama. The New York Times review (22 December 1923) expressed starkly a widespread initial response to the film’s bifurcated structure: “Two men might have directed this feature.” The dramatization of parts of the Book of Exodus was “obviously directed by a genius,” but “the strain on Mr. DeMille told,” and much of the contemporary story, about a pious mother and her two sons, was “extremely tedious”. For the first generation of U.S. film historians – including Terry Ramsaye in the 1920s and Lewis Jacobs in the 1930s – the interest of the film still lay entirely in its opening spectacle, because the cost prefigured the lavish ways of new Hollywood. (At $1,476,000, The Ten Commandments was probably the most expensive movie yet produced.) The remainder of the film merited little comment.
It may be, however, that something has happened to the film – or rather to our experience of it – in recent years, and its re-evaluation parallels what we’ve witnessed together over the last decade at the Giornate through the full body of D.W. Griffith’s work. The Griffith films most praised at release – the historical reenactments and Biblical adaptations – have come to feel ponderous and mildly laughable when set beside many Griffith films that were initially dismissed as little more than routine dramatizations of contemporary life. What is distinctive about The Ten Commandments is that it contains both film types within its two-and-a-half hour length.
In the 1960s Kevin Brownlow noted gently in The Parade’s Gone By that the Biblical prologue of the film was “cinematically uninventive”. The first four and a half reels – about the Israelites under Egypt’s Pharaoh, with the vengeful Old Testament God on their side – remain intermittently compelling, notably in the special effect of the Red Sea parting, the two-color Technicolor sequences, and the cast of thousands chased by Ramses’ chariots across the desert. If DeMille had little more inspiration about how to incorporate his massive set into the storyline than did Griffith in Intolerance, DeMille had a better sense for the enlivening human detail. After the Exodus, each of the ten emblazoned Commandments bursts forth sparkling like a Hollywood marquee (appropriate no doubt in Grauman’s new Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, a year old when the film premiered there on 4 December 1923). However, the hyperactive worship of the Golden Calf by awkwardly choreographed Israelite sinners brings the film’s pace to a crawl. Even on set, DeMille sensed the scene veering toward the ludicrous. A journalist reported the director’s words to extras playing the worshippers: “I would like to remark that if any one of you feels humorous, laugh now. If any one of you laughs after I say ‘Camera,’ I will do my best to extract the humor from the situation.”
There’s a defensive tone right from the film’s first intertitle, arguing against anybody’s assumption that what we’re about to see might be in any way “OLD FASHIONED”. The film was publicized, after all, as originating from the will of the people. In October 1922 DeMille initiated a nationwide newspaper contest to find the subject for his next Paramount film (“put it in three or four words if you wish”) and, among the 30,000 entries, a certain F.C. Nelson of Lansing, Michigan, was credited with the primary inspiration: “You cannot break the Ten Commandments – they will break you.” Nelson and seven others who had also suggested an idea based on the Ten Commandments divided the large $8,400 award.
But one also suspects another motivation from Paramount. That studio was home to ALL the central figures in Hollywood’s three fresh scandals: Fatty Arbuckle (tried twice for manslaughter, in 1921 and 1922), director William Desmond Taylor (murdered in 1922), and clean-cut star Wallace Reid (dead of a drug overdose in January 1923). If Hollywood was such a sin hotbed that Will Hays had to resign from the President’s Cabinet in 1922 to set the place straight, then Paramount was demonstrably the sin capital. The Ten Commandments could put the studio right – if not with God, at least with His people on earth. It’s not entirely DeMille’s fault if a whiff of the PR propaganda purpose still clings to his Old Testament images.
But 50 minutes into the film, just as we resign ourselves to cinematic life under Moses’ grim theocracy, The Ten Commandments leaps into life by shifting to (of all unholy places) San Francisco. For viewers now, the contemporary story, running the length of a full feature, reveals pleasures that undercut presumptions of DeMille’s ponderousness. Look especially at the subtly played round-robin emotions and touching character comedy in the scene where the two sons work out their romantic rivalry for the homeless young woman. The misunderstanding about which of the two is proposing is staged with complex 3-shots, deft cutting on glances, and inventive use of a doorway set. Or look at the high-flying dynamism of the literally breathtaking sequence atop the half-built church, which will soon be collapsing, earthquake or no. (DeMille beat Hitchcock in finding vertigo through San Francisco locations.) What the contemporary part of the film melodramatizes for us now is the central cultural battle of 1920s America – pitting the modernizing “Jazz Age” against religious revivalism. (Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson matched DeMille’s budget with her $1,500,000 Angeles Temple, opened earlier in 1923; its electrically illuminated cross was easily visible from the Hollywood Hills.) In the film this cultural battle gets heated when the fundamentalist mother smashes her son’s dance record, “I’ve Got Those Sunday Blues”.
With relatively understated power the contemporary half of The Ten Commandments argues for a philosophical shift toward a more forgiving New Testament morality (under which Paramount’s sinning employees would presumably not be so harshly damned). The visual inventiveness of the contemporary story is deftly sustained by scriptwriter Jeanie Macpherson’s arch modern wit. Give her credit for one of the most memorable intertitles in all silent film, spoken by the good brother to the bad: “Laugh at the Ten Commandments all you want, Danny – but they pack an awful wallop!” – Scott Simmon
The restoration: The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation of Boston, still trying to market its relatively new product, approached DeMille with an irresistible offer to shoot scenes for the movie at no charge. Ray Rennahan shot two-colour footage of the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt and their trek across the desert. If DeMille wasn’t satisfied with the results, they would be turned over to the director for destruction. Complementing these scenes and highlighting the remarkable special effects, over 2,000 individual frames featured Handschiegl process coloring. First developed by Max Handschiegl and Alvin Wyckoff for DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1917), a select area of each frame could be individually colored through a complex dye-transfer system. The process was used almost exclusively for Famous Players-Lasky productions until Wyckoff left the studio in 1923. In The Ten Commandments the process was used to best effect in the orange coloring of the “wall of fire” sequence and the blue sea-walls during the parting of the Red Sea.
The main source for this restoration is Cecil B. DeMille’s personal 35mm nitrate print of The Ten Commandments. It came to George Eastman House as part of the DeMille collection, a unique assemblage of his films spanning almost all of the director’s entire silent oeuvre. DeMille kept one print of every one of his features. These were gradually donated to the Archive following his death in 1959. This print features the original tinting throughout, several toned sequences, and the Handschiegl process shots. The Technicolor scenes however, are not present.
In 2002, as part of an ongoing initiative to restore the color back to DeMille’s silent films, George Eastman House began work on the project. Tinting was matched and reproduced by the Desmet process. Reel 8 of DeMille’s personal copy was incomplete due to nitrate decomposition. This was replaced with material held at the Library of Congress. Tinting records were used to restore the color tints to this reel from an original screenplay held in the Cecil B. DeMille Archives at Brigham Young University in Utah. Under the supervision of Johan Prijs, Studio Cine in Rome developed a new system to recreate the Handschiegl coloring. Modern rotoscoping techniques were used to create masks before Desmet flashing colored the designated area. Now, thanks to this restoration, audiences can enjoy the film colorfully tinted and with Handschiegl effects, in a version unseen since its original release. – James Layton." - I revisited the Biblical section only of the famous film which I have seen recently in its entirety. - Paolo Cherchi Usai introduced this as probably the best print that we are ever likely to see. - Impressive to see the colour effects as detailed above. - But the Biblical section itself is curious because of the antiquated quality of its performances, which look like early cinema from the first decade of the 20th century, before Griffith. Certainly Cecil B. DeMille already in his first film, The Squaw Man (1914), was more advanced as a director of actors than here. Not to speak of The Ten Commandments (1956), which is superior in every aspect to the Biblical part of this film.
Kymmenen käskyä / Kymmenet käskyt. US 1923. PC: Famous Players-Lasky Corp. / Paramount. D+P: Cecil B. DeMille; SC: Jeanie Macpherson - many of the intertitles in the first section are direct quotes from Exodus; DP: Bert Glennon, Peverell Marley, Archibald Stout, J.F. Westerberg, [Edward S. Curtis, Ray Rennahan (col.)]; AD: Paul Iribe, Francis McComas; tech. D: Roy Pomeroy; ED: Anne Bauchens; ass. D: Cullen Tate; cast (Prologue): Theodore Roberts (Moses, The Lawgiver), Charles de Roche (Ramses, The Magnificent), Estelle Taylor (Miriam, The Sister of Moses), Julia Faye (The Wife of Pharaoh), Terrence Moore (The Son of Pharaoh), James Neill (Aaron, Brother of Moses), Lawson Butt (Dathan, The Discontented), Clarence Burton (The Taskmaster), Noble Johnson (The Bronze Man); (Modern Story): Rod La Rocque (Dan McTavish), Richard Dix (John McTavish), Edythe Chapman (Mrs. Martha McTavish), Leatrice Joy (Mary Leigh), Nita Naldi (Sally Lung, a Eurasian), Robert Edeson (Redding, an Inspector), Charles Ogle (The Doctor), Agnes Ayres (The Outcast); 12,072 ft /20 fps/ 159 min, col. (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinted sequences and Handschiegl effects with the Desmet process); print: GEH. Restored in 2002 by GEH. Restoration funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Film Foundation, and the George Eastman House Preservation Fund. E-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin, viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 5 Oct 2009. - From the GCM Catalogue: "Some canonical American silent films grow in interest over the decades (say, The Crowd or The General). Some films widely admired at release do the reverse (say, Civilization or The Birth of a Nation). Others – and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments turns out to be a fascinating example – keep their appeal by turning it inside out.
DeMille’s long film holds two distinct shorter ones within it. A grandiose Biblical epic is followed by a modest family melodrama. The New York Times review (22 December 1923) expressed starkly a widespread initial response to the film’s bifurcated structure: “Two men might have directed this feature.” The dramatization of parts of the Book of Exodus was “obviously directed by a genius,” but “the strain on Mr. DeMille told,” and much of the contemporary story, about a pious mother and her two sons, was “extremely tedious”. For the first generation of U.S. film historians – including Terry Ramsaye in the 1920s and Lewis Jacobs in the 1930s – the interest of the film still lay entirely in its opening spectacle, because the cost prefigured the lavish ways of new Hollywood. (At $1,476,000, The Ten Commandments was probably the most expensive movie yet produced.) The remainder of the film merited little comment.
It may be, however, that something has happened to the film – or rather to our experience of it – in recent years, and its re-evaluation parallels what we’ve witnessed together over the last decade at the Giornate through the full body of D.W. Griffith’s work. The Griffith films most praised at release – the historical reenactments and Biblical adaptations – have come to feel ponderous and mildly laughable when set beside many Griffith films that were initially dismissed as little more than routine dramatizations of contemporary life. What is distinctive about The Ten Commandments is that it contains both film types within its two-and-a-half hour length.
In the 1960s Kevin Brownlow noted gently in The Parade’s Gone By that the Biblical prologue of the film was “cinematically uninventive”. The first four and a half reels – about the Israelites under Egypt’s Pharaoh, with the vengeful Old Testament God on their side – remain intermittently compelling, notably in the special effect of the Red Sea parting, the two-color Technicolor sequences, and the cast of thousands chased by Ramses’ chariots across the desert. If DeMille had little more inspiration about how to incorporate his massive set into the storyline than did Griffith in Intolerance, DeMille had a better sense for the enlivening human detail. After the Exodus, each of the ten emblazoned Commandments bursts forth sparkling like a Hollywood marquee (appropriate no doubt in Grauman’s new Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, a year old when the film premiered there on 4 December 1923). However, the hyperactive worship of the Golden Calf by awkwardly choreographed Israelite sinners brings the film’s pace to a crawl. Even on set, DeMille sensed the scene veering toward the ludicrous. A journalist reported the director’s words to extras playing the worshippers: “I would like to remark that if any one of you feels humorous, laugh now. If any one of you laughs after I say ‘Camera,’ I will do my best to extract the humor from the situation.”
There’s a defensive tone right from the film’s first intertitle, arguing against anybody’s assumption that what we’re about to see might be in any way “OLD FASHIONED”. The film was publicized, after all, as originating from the will of the people. In October 1922 DeMille initiated a nationwide newspaper contest to find the subject for his next Paramount film (“put it in three or four words if you wish”) and, among the 30,000 entries, a certain F.C. Nelson of Lansing, Michigan, was credited with the primary inspiration: “You cannot break the Ten Commandments – they will break you.” Nelson and seven others who had also suggested an idea based on the Ten Commandments divided the large $8,400 award.
But one also suspects another motivation from Paramount. That studio was home to ALL the central figures in Hollywood’s three fresh scandals: Fatty Arbuckle (tried twice for manslaughter, in 1921 and 1922), director William Desmond Taylor (murdered in 1922), and clean-cut star Wallace Reid (dead of a drug overdose in January 1923). If Hollywood was such a sin hotbed that Will Hays had to resign from the President’s Cabinet in 1922 to set the place straight, then Paramount was demonstrably the sin capital. The Ten Commandments could put the studio right – if not with God, at least with His people on earth. It’s not entirely DeMille’s fault if a whiff of the PR propaganda purpose still clings to his Old Testament images.
But 50 minutes into the film, just as we resign ourselves to cinematic life under Moses’ grim theocracy, The Ten Commandments leaps into life by shifting to (of all unholy places) San Francisco. For viewers now, the contemporary story, running the length of a full feature, reveals pleasures that undercut presumptions of DeMille’s ponderousness. Look especially at the subtly played round-robin emotions and touching character comedy in the scene where the two sons work out their romantic rivalry for the homeless young woman. The misunderstanding about which of the two is proposing is staged with complex 3-shots, deft cutting on glances, and inventive use of a doorway set. Or look at the high-flying dynamism of the literally breathtaking sequence atop the half-built church, which will soon be collapsing, earthquake or no. (DeMille beat Hitchcock in finding vertigo through San Francisco locations.) What the contemporary part of the film melodramatizes for us now is the central cultural battle of 1920s America – pitting the modernizing “Jazz Age” against religious revivalism. (Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson matched DeMille’s budget with her $1,500,000 Angeles Temple, opened earlier in 1923; its electrically illuminated cross was easily visible from the Hollywood Hills.) In the film this cultural battle gets heated when the fundamentalist mother smashes her son’s dance record, “I’ve Got Those Sunday Blues”.
With relatively understated power the contemporary half of The Ten Commandments argues for a philosophical shift toward a more forgiving New Testament morality (under which Paramount’s sinning employees would presumably not be so harshly damned). The visual inventiveness of the contemporary story is deftly sustained by scriptwriter Jeanie Macpherson’s arch modern wit. Give her credit for one of the most memorable intertitles in all silent film, spoken by the good brother to the bad: “Laugh at the Ten Commandments all you want, Danny – but they pack an awful wallop!” – Scott Simmon
The restoration: The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation of Boston, still trying to market its relatively new product, approached DeMille with an irresistible offer to shoot scenes for the movie at no charge. Ray Rennahan shot two-colour footage of the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt and their trek across the desert. If DeMille wasn’t satisfied with the results, they would be turned over to the director for destruction. Complementing these scenes and highlighting the remarkable special effects, over 2,000 individual frames featured Handschiegl process coloring. First developed by Max Handschiegl and Alvin Wyckoff for DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1917), a select area of each frame could be individually colored through a complex dye-transfer system. The process was used almost exclusively for Famous Players-Lasky productions until Wyckoff left the studio in 1923. In The Ten Commandments the process was used to best effect in the orange coloring of the “wall of fire” sequence and the blue sea-walls during the parting of the Red Sea.
The main source for this restoration is Cecil B. DeMille’s personal 35mm nitrate print of The Ten Commandments. It came to George Eastman House as part of the DeMille collection, a unique assemblage of his films spanning almost all of the director’s entire silent oeuvre. DeMille kept one print of every one of his features. These were gradually donated to the Archive following his death in 1959. This print features the original tinting throughout, several toned sequences, and the Handschiegl process shots. The Technicolor scenes however, are not present.
In 2002, as part of an ongoing initiative to restore the color back to DeMille’s silent films, George Eastman House began work on the project. Tinting was matched and reproduced by the Desmet process. Reel 8 of DeMille’s personal copy was incomplete due to nitrate decomposition. This was replaced with material held at the Library of Congress. Tinting records were used to restore the color tints to this reel from an original screenplay held in the Cecil B. DeMille Archives at Brigham Young University in Utah. Under the supervision of Johan Prijs, Studio Cine in Rome developed a new system to recreate the Handschiegl coloring. Modern rotoscoping techniques were used to create masks before Desmet flashing colored the designated area. Now, thanks to this restoration, audiences can enjoy the film colorfully tinted and with Handschiegl effects, in a version unseen since its original release. – James Layton." - I revisited the Biblical section only of the famous film which I have seen recently in its entirety. - Paolo Cherchi Usai introduced this as probably the best print that we are ever likely to see. - Impressive to see the colour effects as detailed above. - But the Biblical section itself is curious because of the antiquated quality of its performances, which look like early cinema from the first decade of the 20th century, before Griffith. Certainly Cecil B. DeMille already in his first film, The Squaw Man (1914), was more advanced as a director of actors than here. Not to speak of The Ten Commandments (1956), which is superior in every aspect to the Biblical part of this film.
Graziella
[The film was not released in Finland]. FR 1925. PC: Film d’Art / Vandal and Delac. D: Marcel Vandal; SC: Edmond Epardaud, Marcel Vandal, based on the story by Alphonse de Lamartine (1852), Finnish translation Italian tytär [The Daughter of Italy] by Esteri Haapanen / WSOY 1914; DP: René Moreau, René Guychard (studio), Maurice Laumann (exteriors); AD: Fernand Delattre; filmed: summer 1925 (Naples, Capri, Procida; Studios Film d’Art, Neuilly); CAST: Nina Vanna (Graziella), Jean Dehelly (Lamartine), Émile Dehelly (Lamartine, as an old man), Michel Sym (de Virieux), Raoul Chennevières (Andrea, the grandfather), Mme. Sapiani (the grandmother), Georges Chebat (Beppo), Sylviane de Castillo (Mme. de Lamartine), Antonin Artaud (Cecco), Jacques Révérand (Cecco’s father); première: 7.1.1925 (press screening); released: 23.7.1926; 1598 m /20 fps/ 79 min; print: AFF/CNC. Restored by AFF/CNC, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture’s film preservation plan. E-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Antonio Coppola. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 5 Oct 2009. - From the GCM Catalogue: "The 19th-century century Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine was hardly a household name in the France of the Roaring 20s, yet his writings inspired no less than three silent film adaptations from major production firms. Léon Poirier’s 1922 film of Jocelyn, Lamartine’s 9,000-line epic poem of love and mysticism in Revolutionary France, was made for Gaumont’s “Série Pax” art-film label and became one of the company’s biggest hits. Naturally, Gaumont and Poirier tried to repeat the exploit with Geneviève (1923), from one of the poet’s idealized novels about the working and peasant classes. Superior in most respects to Jocelyn – indeed, it remains one of Poirier’s best, with La Brière – it was defeated commercially by its unrelenting pessimism. By the time Gaumont’s rival studio, Film d’Art, weighed in with Graziella, movie audiences seemed weary of Lamartine’s poetic meditations, though Jocelyn would be remade twice, in 1933 and 1951.
Produced and directed by Marcel Vandal (co-head of the venerable Film d’Art with Charles Delac since 1910), Graziella is pictorially more sumptuous and less plot-heavy than the Gaumont films. Though a conventional piece of filmmaking, it better illustrates Lamartine’s nostalgic melancholy and love of nature, which are central to Graziella, an autobiographical account of Lamartine’s travels to Italy as a young poet and his brief, platonic but tragic idyll with the granddaughter of a poor Neapolitan fisherman.
Graziella is essentially a realist film, shot on the very locations described by Lamartine, and it stands on the artistry of its cameramen. In a break from usual practice, Vandal used not two but three cameramen: René Guychard shot the studio interiors in Paris, and Maurice Laumann did the dramatic exteriors, while René Moreau, a master paysagiste captured the romantic vistas of land, sea, and sky, which have been voluptuously preserved in this tinted print. (The AFF has been devoted to tracking down and restoring Moreau’s self-produced documentary shorts, which he dubbed “visions”.)
Nina Vanna, a British actress who had a brief cosmopolitan career in the 1920s, is a poignant, fragile Graziella to Jean Dehelly’s dreamy, blond Lamartine. (The debuting Pierre Blanchar played the poet in the Gaumont films.) In a climactic cameo, Dehelly’s father, Émile Dehelly, a member of the Comédie Française, appears as the elderly Lamartine. And it would be hard to miss Antonin Artaud as the lovesick cousin who courts Graziella. – Lenny Borger." - I watched the first 40 minutes. - A fine print. - I agree with Lenny Borger, the strength of this film is its beautiful location shooting in Sorrento etc. The toned image is often wonderful. There is an intensive feeling for the landscape, for the villages on the mountains by the sea, for the wind, the sea, and the storm. The performance are not bad. Many of the intertitles have a poetic quality, maybe directly from Lamartine.
Produced and directed by Marcel Vandal (co-head of the venerable Film d’Art with Charles Delac since 1910), Graziella is pictorially more sumptuous and less plot-heavy than the Gaumont films. Though a conventional piece of filmmaking, it better illustrates Lamartine’s nostalgic melancholy and love of nature, which are central to Graziella, an autobiographical account of Lamartine’s travels to Italy as a young poet and his brief, platonic but tragic idyll with the granddaughter of a poor Neapolitan fisherman.
Graziella is essentially a realist film, shot on the very locations described by Lamartine, and it stands on the artistry of its cameramen. In a break from usual practice, Vandal used not two but three cameramen: René Guychard shot the studio interiors in Paris, and Maurice Laumann did the dramatic exteriors, while René Moreau, a master paysagiste captured the romantic vistas of land, sea, and sky, which have been voluptuously preserved in this tinted print. (The AFF has been devoted to tracking down and restoring Moreau’s self-produced documentary shorts, which he dubbed “visions”.)
Nina Vanna, a British actress who had a brief cosmopolitan career in the 1920s, is a poignant, fragile Graziella to Jean Dehelly’s dreamy, blond Lamartine. (The debuting Pierre Blanchar played the poet in the Gaumont films.) In a climactic cameo, Dehelly’s father, Émile Dehelly, a member of the Comédie Française, appears as the elderly Lamartine. And it would be hard to miss Antonin Artaud as the lovesick cousin who courts Graziella. – Lenny Borger." - I watched the first 40 minutes. - A fine print. - I agree with Lenny Borger, the strength of this film is its beautiful location shooting in Sorrento etc. The toned image is often wonderful. There is an intensive feeling for the landscape, for the villages on the mountains by the sea, for the wind, the sea, and the storm. The performance are not bad. Many of the intertitles have a poetic quality, maybe directly from Lamartine.
The Eagle
Kotka / Musta kotka. US (c) 1925 Art Cinema Associates. D: Clarence Brown; SC: Hans Kraly, from the story Dubrovski (1832) by Alexander Pushkin; titles: George Marion, Jr.; DP: George Barnes; ED: Hal C. Kern; AD: William Cameron Menzies; COST: Adrian; ass. D: Charles Dorian; CAST: Rudolph Valentino (Vladimir Dubrovski), Vilma Banky (Mascha Troekouroff), Louise Dresser (The Czarina), Albert Conti (Captain Kuschka), James Marcus (Kyrilla Troekouroff), George Nicholls (judge); 6572 ft /23 fps/ 77 min, print: Photoplay Productions. Hi-Fi presentation of the 1985 score by Carl Davis. With e-subtitles in Italian. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009. - Beautiful definition of light in a restored edition (1998) by Photoplay. There were some signs of nitrate decomposition from the source. - There were at least three breaks in the synchronized music presentation. - From the GCM Catalogue: "The Eagle is a must for Rudolph Valentino fans. Dubbed “the pink powder puff” by American men jealous of his power over women, Valentino returned to the screen after a 2-year absence, and proved himself as much of a swashbuckling action hero as a great lover.
Nominally based on an unfinished Pushkin story, The Eagle was really an adaptation of The Mark of Zorro, the setting moved to Catherine the Great’s Russia. Valentino plays Dubrovski, a lieutenant in the Imperial Guard who attracts the attention of the Empress herself. Spurning Catherine’s advances, he must flee the court to avoid the royal wrath. Returning to his home, he finds his father’s estates have been seized by the war lord Kyrilla. Dubrovski swears revenge. Disguising himself as the Black Eagle, he fast becomes a saviour to those suffering under Kyrilla’s despotic rule. True to type, Dubrovski/Valentino even finds time for romance with his enemy’s feisty daughter, Mascha.
The film showcases some of the best talent available in Hollywood in the 1920s. Director Clarence Brown introduced a number of technical flourishes, including a spectacular tracking shot across a huge banqueting table. George Barnes’ camera work is masterful, giving the film a sinister atmospheric feel. William Cameron Menzies’ sets are in the sumptuous style of the late 20s. All of this is shown to perfection in this beautiful print, struck directly from the original camera negative.
Historical authenticity was ignored, especially in costume design, so as not to alienate Valentino’s fans. Photoplay Magazine said, “Valentino changes his personality three times in his new picture, and each one is a dashing and fascinating Valentino.” Unusually, his sense of humour is given full rein in The Eagle. He proves himself to be as adroit at side-stepping the amorous advances of his Empress as he is at leaping onto a moving horse. His leading ladies, the beautiful Vilma Banky and the matriarchal Louise Dresser, are perfect foils for the spirited fun. – Kevin Brownlow, Patrick Stanbury." - Wonderful parody of the age of Catherine the Great.
Nominally based on an unfinished Pushkin story, The Eagle was really an adaptation of The Mark of Zorro, the setting moved to Catherine the Great’s Russia. Valentino plays Dubrovski, a lieutenant in the Imperial Guard who attracts the attention of the Empress herself. Spurning Catherine’s advances, he must flee the court to avoid the royal wrath. Returning to his home, he finds his father’s estates have been seized by the war lord Kyrilla. Dubrovski swears revenge. Disguising himself as the Black Eagle, he fast becomes a saviour to those suffering under Kyrilla’s despotic rule. True to type, Dubrovski/Valentino even finds time for romance with his enemy’s feisty daughter, Mascha.
The film showcases some of the best talent available in Hollywood in the 1920s. Director Clarence Brown introduced a number of technical flourishes, including a spectacular tracking shot across a huge banqueting table. George Barnes’ camera work is masterful, giving the film a sinister atmospheric feel. William Cameron Menzies’ sets are in the sumptuous style of the late 20s. All of this is shown to perfection in this beautiful print, struck directly from the original camera negative.
Historical authenticity was ignored, especially in costume design, so as not to alienate Valentino’s fans. Photoplay Magazine said, “Valentino changes his personality three times in his new picture, and each one is a dashing and fascinating Valentino.” Unusually, his sense of humour is given full rein in The Eagle. He proves himself to be as adroit at side-stepping the amorous advances of his Empress as he is at leaping onto a moving horse. His leading ladies, the beautiful Vilma Banky and the matriarchal Louise Dresser, are perfect foils for the spirited fun. – Kevin Brownlow, Patrick Stanbury." - Wonderful parody of the age of Catherine the Great.
Striking a New Note: A Night in the Show (1915)
Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009.
US 1915. PC: Essanay. D: Charles Chaplin; CAST: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Charlotte Mineau, Leo White, Wesley Ruggles, John Rand, May White, Phyllis Allen; dvd, c. 25’; print: Cinemazero, Pordenone.
English and Italian intertitles
Music performed by: Scuola Media “Leonardo da Vinci”, Cordenons
Teacher: Emanuela Gobbo
Keybaords: Elisa Pitton, Sarah Piccolo
Guitars: Enrico De Marchi, Andrea Pitton, Carlo Piva
Electric bass guitar: Marta Ceschin
Trumpets: Roberto Del Ben, Luca Badin
Alto sax: Carlo Venerus
Horn: Alberto Canzi
Drums: Stefano Venturuzzo
Percussion: Urosh Urbani
Sound effects: Francesco Romanin, Mirko Romanin
Recorders: Ilaria Carnevali, Elena Di Gregorio, Samantha Gerolin, Gloria Leonardi, Vanessa Manfrin, Silvia Marson, Nicola Marson, Alberto Rodaro, Davide Santin, Alex Tonussi, Francesca Trevisan, Francesca Zanella, Eleonora Zuanigh
From Emanuela Gobbo's introduction: the music is inspired in large part by the blues and jazz repertory of the 1920s and the 1930s, with the addition of some phrases liberally adapted from important composers such as Grieg and Mussorgsky.
Another spirited performance full of joy and matching perfectly with the film.
US 1915. PC: Essanay. D: Charles Chaplin; CAST: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Charlotte Mineau, Leo White, Wesley Ruggles, John Rand, May White, Phyllis Allen; dvd, c. 25’; print: Cinemazero, Pordenone.
English and Italian intertitles
Music performed by: Scuola Media “Leonardo da Vinci”, Cordenons
Teacher: Emanuela Gobbo
Keybaords: Elisa Pitton, Sarah Piccolo
Guitars: Enrico De Marchi, Andrea Pitton, Carlo Piva
Electric bass guitar: Marta Ceschin
Trumpets: Roberto Del Ben, Luca Badin
Alto sax: Carlo Venerus
Horn: Alberto Canzi
Drums: Stefano Venturuzzo
Percussion: Urosh Urbani
Sound effects: Francesco Romanin, Mirko Romanin
Recorders: Ilaria Carnevali, Elena Di Gregorio, Samantha Gerolin, Gloria Leonardi, Vanessa Manfrin, Silvia Marson, Nicola Marson, Alberto Rodaro, Davide Santin, Alex Tonussi, Francesca Trevisan, Francesca Zanella, Eleonora Zuanigh
From Emanuela Gobbo's introduction: the music is inspired in large part by the blues and jazz repertory of the 1920s and the 1930s, with the addition of some phrases liberally adapted from important composers such as Grieg and Mussorgsky.
Another spirited performance full of joy and matching perfectly with the film.
Striking a New Note: The Playhouse (1921)
Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009.
US 1921. PC: First National. D: Buster Keaton; CAST: Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts; P: Joseph M. Schenk; dvd, ca 25’; from: Cinemazero, Pordenone.
English and Italian intertitles
Music performed by:
Orchestra della Scuola Media Centro Storico di Pordenone
Teachers: MariaLuisa Sogaro, Antonia Maddalena, Patrizia Avon
Clarinet and flutes: Alessio Mazzeo
Alto and tenor flutes: Beatrice Bove, Laura Riccio Cobucci, Chiara D’Onofrio, Matteo Magris, Ruken Orkun, Laura de Manzano, Damiano Doimo, Augusto Del Zotto, Maria Grazia Castoro
Soprano and alto Glockenspiel: Elena Castagna, Melania Greco
Alto Xylophone: Ali Karinca
Bass Xylophone and alto metallophone: Edoardo Turozzi
Violoncello: Federico Tauro
Pianoforte: Eugenio Spuria
Sound effects: Teresa Mutuale, Roberto Perosa, Idzret Asani, Roberta Roppo, Alessandra Simoni
From Maria Luisa Sogaro's introduction: the music adapts themes of Béla Bartók, taken from the collection For Children, which includes traditional Slovak and Hungarian melodies. For the gag of the Minstrels we have used Claude Debussy's cakewalk Le petit nègre and also "Oh! Fifi", a one-step by Marf and Mascheroni.
Wonderful and delightful, the Striking a New Note performances were the musical highlights of the 2009 GCM together with The Merry Widow.
US 1921. PC: First National. D: Buster Keaton; CAST: Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts; P: Joseph M. Schenk; dvd, ca 25’; from: Cinemazero, Pordenone.
English and Italian intertitles
Music performed by:
Orchestra della Scuola Media Centro Storico di Pordenone
Teachers: MariaLuisa Sogaro, Antonia Maddalena, Patrizia Avon
Clarinet and flutes: Alessio Mazzeo
Alto and tenor flutes: Beatrice Bove, Laura Riccio Cobucci, Chiara D’Onofrio, Matteo Magris, Ruken Orkun, Laura de Manzano, Damiano Doimo, Augusto Del Zotto, Maria Grazia Castoro
Soprano and alto Glockenspiel: Elena Castagna, Melania Greco
Alto Xylophone: Ali Karinca
Bass Xylophone and alto metallophone: Edoardo Turozzi
Violoncello: Federico Tauro
Pianoforte: Eugenio Spuria
Sound effects: Teresa Mutuale, Roberto Perosa, Idzret Asani, Roberta Roppo, Alessandra Simoni
From Maria Luisa Sogaro's introduction: the music adapts themes of Béla Bartók, taken from the collection For Children, which includes traditional Slovak and Hungarian melodies. For the gag of the Minstrels we have used Claude Debussy's cakewalk Le petit nègre and also "Oh! Fifi", a one-step by Marf and Mascheroni.
Wonderful and delightful, the Striking a New Note performances were the musical highlights of the 2009 GCM together with The Merry Widow.
Ce cochon de Morin
[The film was not released in Finland.]
FR 1923. Release: 1924. PC: Films Albatros. D: Viatcheslav Tourjansky; SC: V. Tourjansky, Nicolas Rimsky, based on the short story by Guy de Maupassant (1882); DP: Nicolas Toporkoff; AD: Ivan Lochakoff, Eduard Gosch; CAST: Nicolas Rimsky (Morin), Denise Legeay (Henriette), Jacques Guilhène (Labarbe), Louis Montfils (Uncle Tonnelet), René Donnio (nightclub pianist), K. Melkinova (Madame Morin); 1397 m /18 fps/ [68 min announced] actual duration 72 min
Print: La Cinémathèque française (1958, 1983, 2000). E-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Stephen Horne. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone 4 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Three times adapted to the screen (in 1923, 1932, and 1956), Guy de Maupassant’s short story "Ce cochon de Morin" first appeared in the newspaper Gil Blas on 21 November 1882, under the nom-de-plume of "Maufrigneuse" – though Maupassant’s reputation as a master story-teller was already established. Tourjansky and Rimsky’s adaptation quite faithfully follows its story of the little haberdasher from La Rochelle, who, in the aftermath of a drunken finale to a business trip in Paris, assaults a young woman, Henriette, on the train home, in an attempt to seize a kiss. The penalty is a charge of offending decency, and the sticky reputation in La Rochelle of "that beast Morin".
Even some of the dialogue titles in the film are taken verbatim from the original story.
The film only departs from the original in plot, though not in spirit, in the second part of the film. Morin calls upon his friend Labarbe, the local newspaper editor, to help him out of his catastrophic situation by persuading the victim’s irascible uncle to drop the charges. In the original story, Labarbe visits Uncle at his estate in Mauzé, accompanied by his co-editor. There he is infatuated by Henriette and driven to the same kind of erotic assault as Morin’s, but finally and reluctantly leaves her. The film, however, gives extra comic spice as well as romance to the story, by having Labarbe take Morin himself to Mauzé, where Labarbe discovers that Henriette is an old flame, whose hand in marriage he wins, after a night of bedroom farce.
Despite the updating of the story and these changes – one might even say, improvements – in plotting, the film remains very faithful to Maupassant, and particularly his sardonic reflections on the contrasted responses to sexual importunity when committed by an elderly businessman or by a dashing 30-year-old. In both story and film Henriette tranquilly tells Labarbe, "Oh, vous, ce n’est pas la même chose." Even the climactic scenes of bedroom farce – which contemporary critics admired as being like "a Feydeau farce directed by Firmin Gémier or Jacques Copeau" (Jean Pascal in Cinémagazine, 7 March 1924) – are exactly detailed by Maupassant.
Though faithful to the essence, the film offers a very vital and original visual interpretation. Tourjansky eagerly embraces the latest fashions in montage and camera movement, from the extravagant tour-de-force opening sequence, of a night of wild carousing, accelerating inebriation, and sexual fantasy, seen subjectively through the eyes of Morin. The film is designed by the Russians Ivan Lochakoff and Eduard Gosch, with the usual flair and eye for detail; while the locations of La Rochelle are exploited by Nicolas Toporkoff’s virtuoso camerawork: fast travelling and tracking cameras impeccably follow Morin’s desperate progress through the town.
Inevitably the film finally revolves around Nicolas Rimsky’s portrayal of Morin, which launched the actor’s career as a star comic. Rimsky (1886-1941) began his screen career in Russia in 1916 as a supporting actor to "Poxon", the Russian John Bunny, but from the end of that year worked exclusively with the Ermoliev company, for whom he played over 30 leading roles before emigration. He arrived in Paris with Ermoliev in 1920, and was to act regularly for Albatros and to direct four films for the company. Sadly we know nothing of the other Russian actor in the cast, K. Melnikova, who plays the formidable Madame Morin. – David Robinson". -
A visually rich interpretation of Maupassant's story, but many performances are crassly farcical, although I agree with David Robinson about Nicolas Rimsky's strong comical contribution. The film as a whole is, however, unfortunately rather mediocre.
FR 1923. Release: 1924. PC: Films Albatros. D: Viatcheslav Tourjansky; SC: V. Tourjansky, Nicolas Rimsky, based on the short story by Guy de Maupassant (1882); DP: Nicolas Toporkoff; AD: Ivan Lochakoff, Eduard Gosch; CAST: Nicolas Rimsky (Morin), Denise Legeay (Henriette), Jacques Guilhène (Labarbe), Louis Montfils (Uncle Tonnelet), René Donnio (nightclub pianist), K. Melkinova (Madame Morin); 1397 m /18 fps/ [68 min announced] actual duration 72 min
Print: La Cinémathèque française (1958, 1983, 2000). E-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Stephen Horne. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone 4 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Three times adapted to the screen (in 1923, 1932, and 1956), Guy de Maupassant’s short story "Ce cochon de Morin" first appeared in the newspaper Gil Blas on 21 November 1882, under the nom-de-plume of "Maufrigneuse" – though Maupassant’s reputation as a master story-teller was already established. Tourjansky and Rimsky’s adaptation quite faithfully follows its story of the little haberdasher from La Rochelle, who, in the aftermath of a drunken finale to a business trip in Paris, assaults a young woman, Henriette, on the train home, in an attempt to seize a kiss. The penalty is a charge of offending decency, and the sticky reputation in La Rochelle of "that beast Morin".
Even some of the dialogue titles in the film are taken verbatim from the original story.
The film only departs from the original in plot, though not in spirit, in the second part of the film. Morin calls upon his friend Labarbe, the local newspaper editor, to help him out of his catastrophic situation by persuading the victim’s irascible uncle to drop the charges. In the original story, Labarbe visits Uncle at his estate in Mauzé, accompanied by his co-editor. There he is infatuated by Henriette and driven to the same kind of erotic assault as Morin’s, but finally and reluctantly leaves her. The film, however, gives extra comic spice as well as romance to the story, by having Labarbe take Morin himself to Mauzé, where Labarbe discovers that Henriette is an old flame, whose hand in marriage he wins, after a night of bedroom farce.
Despite the updating of the story and these changes – one might even say, improvements – in plotting, the film remains very faithful to Maupassant, and particularly his sardonic reflections on the contrasted responses to sexual importunity when committed by an elderly businessman or by a dashing 30-year-old. In both story and film Henriette tranquilly tells Labarbe, "Oh, vous, ce n’est pas la même chose." Even the climactic scenes of bedroom farce – which contemporary critics admired as being like "a Feydeau farce directed by Firmin Gémier or Jacques Copeau" (Jean Pascal in Cinémagazine, 7 March 1924) – are exactly detailed by Maupassant.
Though faithful to the essence, the film offers a very vital and original visual interpretation. Tourjansky eagerly embraces the latest fashions in montage and camera movement, from the extravagant tour-de-force opening sequence, of a night of wild carousing, accelerating inebriation, and sexual fantasy, seen subjectively through the eyes of Morin. The film is designed by the Russians Ivan Lochakoff and Eduard Gosch, with the usual flair and eye for detail; while the locations of La Rochelle are exploited by Nicolas Toporkoff’s virtuoso camerawork: fast travelling and tracking cameras impeccably follow Morin’s desperate progress through the town.
Inevitably the film finally revolves around Nicolas Rimsky’s portrayal of Morin, which launched the actor’s career as a star comic. Rimsky (1886-1941) began his screen career in Russia in 1916 as a supporting actor to "Poxon", the Russian John Bunny, but from the end of that year worked exclusively with the Ermoliev company, for whom he played over 30 leading roles before emigration. He arrived in Paris with Ermoliev in 1920, and was to act regularly for Albatros and to direct four films for the company. Sadly we know nothing of the other Russian actor in the cast, K. Melnikova, who plays the formidable Madame Morin. – David Robinson". -
A visually rich interpretation of Maupassant's story, but many performances are crassly farcical, although I agree with David Robinson about Nicolas Rimsky's strong comical contribution. The film as a whole is, however, unfortunately rather mediocre.
La Vie merveilleuse de Bernadette
(The film was never released in Finland.)
FR 1929. PC: Isis Film. D: Georges Pallu; SC: Georges Pallu, collab. Father Honoré Brochet [le Sablais]); DP: Ganzli Walter; AD: André Lecointe; filmed: spring 1929 (Lourdes; Studios Saint-Laurent-du-Var, Nice); CAST: Alexandra (Bernadette Soubirous), Mémo (François Soubirous), Janine Lequesne (the Virgin), Paul Ceriani (Charles Hirt), Jane Marnier (Mme. Hirt), Janine Borelli (Antoinette Hirt), Charles Débert (Jules Langlois), Émile Matras (M. Laurence), Mathillon (Baron Massy), ? (Louise Casterot); 2180 m, 96' (20 fps)
Print: AFF/CNC. Restored by the AFF/CNC, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture’s film preservation plan. E-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Gabriel Thibaudeau. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "In one of the most peculiar career trajectories in French and European silent cinema, Georges Pallu (1869-1948) rose from the anonymous pre-war ranks at the Film d’Art and Pathé studios, was handpicked (with other French professionals) to help build the infrastructure of the fledgling Portuguese film industry immediately after World War I, then returned in the mid-1920s to France, where he devoted the rest of his professional life to making Catholic propaganda films, chronicling the lives of Teresa of Lisieux and Bernadette of Lourdes, among other saintly and secular icons. Today, Pallu’s reputation remains Janus-faced: for the Portuguese he is the distinguished pioneer director of 15 films made for the Invicta Film studios in Porto between 1918 and 1924, including such revered classics of the Portuguese screen as Amor de Perdição (1921).In France he remains little more than a sanctimonious hack of only footnote interest (though he does get a helpful career entry in the AFRHC’s Dictionnaire du cinéma français des années vingt).
La Vie merveilleuse de Bernadette was Pallu’s last silent religious drama, but it had the commercial misfortune of joining a crush of contending biopics with “marvellous” or “miraculous” in the title (notably Marc de Gastyne’s La Merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc and Julien Duvivier’s La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin, the latter pompously subtitled “The First Christian Art Film”).
Since his homecoming 4 years earlier, Pallu had been an in-house director (along with the Swiss Jean Choux) for a Nice-based production firm that specialized in Catholic inspirational dramas, the incongruously named Isis Film. Isis ran the Saint-Laurent-du-Var studios, where the young Julien Duvivier had shot his first religious drama, Credo ou La Tragédie de Lourdes, in 1923.
Like several other Isis productions, Pallu’s film was made under the auspices of a cinephile Assumptionist priest, Father Honoré Brochet, himself a pioneer of filmed “tableaux vivants” on biblical and religious themes (including a 1909 Bernadette Soubirous et les apparitions de Lourdes). The script was a bare-bones retelling of episodes in the life of the French peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous, whose visions of the Virgin Mary in a grotto outside Lourdes led to the creation of the famous pilgrimage site.
As he had done with his most successful French film, La Rose effeuillée (1926), about Saint Teresa of Lisieux, Pallu framed the historical theme with a modern-day narrative: the daughter of a humble Catholic couple finds herself paralyzed after being caught in a violent thunderstorm. In despair, the parents ask the child’s godfather to go to Lourdes to investigate the possibility of a pilgrimage. He meets an old woman who personally knew Bernadette and, in a long flashback, she relates her story. Hopeful, the couple take their crippled daughter to Lourdes, where she miraculously recovers her ability to walk.
The film’s small miracle is Pallu’s direction: understated, direct, empathetic. No melodramatics or bathos. The cast is creditable. Ganzli Walter, who shot most of these devotional dramas (and, by the way, also photographed Duvivier’s 1925 Poil de Carotte), does his usual fine work. André Lecointe, a designer who was in Portugal with Pallu, summoned up a convincing replica of the Lourdes grotto in the Nice studios. We are far from the cloying “Hollywood” sincerity of Henry King’s Song of Bernadette, or even Jean Delannoy’s aesthetically senile 1989 biopic.
One last, odd footnote: Pallu directed a few non-moralizing commercial films, including a 1926 adaption of Phi-Phi, a popular French operetta(!) and a film of Georges Courteline’s comic novel Le Train de 8 h. 47 (1927), both for Isis Film. The ways of the Lord are impenetrable! – Lenny Borger -
I watched ca 45 min of this film. - A beautiful print. - I agree with Lenny Borger about the sober style of this film. I feel more merciful than he to Henry King's The Song of Bernadette with Jennifer Jones, with its strong drama of the simple faith of the common girl and the cynical power play of the churchmen.
FR 1929. PC: Isis Film. D: Georges Pallu; SC: Georges Pallu, collab. Father Honoré Brochet [le Sablais]); DP: Ganzli Walter; AD: André Lecointe; filmed: spring 1929 (Lourdes; Studios Saint-Laurent-du-Var, Nice); CAST: Alexandra (Bernadette Soubirous), Mémo (François Soubirous), Janine Lequesne (the Virgin), Paul Ceriani (Charles Hirt), Jane Marnier (Mme. Hirt), Janine Borelli (Antoinette Hirt), Charles Débert (Jules Langlois), Émile Matras (M. Laurence), Mathillon (Baron Massy), ? (Louise Casterot); 2180 m, 96' (20 fps)
Print: AFF/CNC. Restored by the AFF/CNC, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture’s film preservation plan. E-subtitles in English and Italian, grand piano: Gabriel Thibaudeau. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "In one of the most peculiar career trajectories in French and European silent cinema, Georges Pallu (1869-1948) rose from the anonymous pre-war ranks at the Film d’Art and Pathé studios, was handpicked (with other French professionals) to help build the infrastructure of the fledgling Portuguese film industry immediately after World War I, then returned in the mid-1920s to France, where he devoted the rest of his professional life to making Catholic propaganda films, chronicling the lives of Teresa of Lisieux and Bernadette of Lourdes, among other saintly and secular icons. Today, Pallu’s reputation remains Janus-faced: for the Portuguese he is the distinguished pioneer director of 15 films made for the Invicta Film studios in Porto between 1918 and 1924, including such revered classics of the Portuguese screen as Amor de Perdição (1921).In France he remains little more than a sanctimonious hack of only footnote interest (though he does get a helpful career entry in the AFRHC’s Dictionnaire du cinéma français des années vingt).
La Vie merveilleuse de Bernadette was Pallu’s last silent religious drama, but it had the commercial misfortune of joining a crush of contending biopics with “marvellous” or “miraculous” in the title (notably Marc de Gastyne’s La Merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc and Julien Duvivier’s La Vie miraculeuse de Thérèse Martin, the latter pompously subtitled “The First Christian Art Film”).
Since his homecoming 4 years earlier, Pallu had been an in-house director (along with the Swiss Jean Choux) for a Nice-based production firm that specialized in Catholic inspirational dramas, the incongruously named Isis Film. Isis ran the Saint-Laurent-du-Var studios, where the young Julien Duvivier had shot his first religious drama, Credo ou La Tragédie de Lourdes, in 1923.
Like several other Isis productions, Pallu’s film was made under the auspices of a cinephile Assumptionist priest, Father Honoré Brochet, himself a pioneer of filmed “tableaux vivants” on biblical and religious themes (including a 1909 Bernadette Soubirous et les apparitions de Lourdes). The script was a bare-bones retelling of episodes in the life of the French peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous, whose visions of the Virgin Mary in a grotto outside Lourdes led to the creation of the famous pilgrimage site.
As he had done with his most successful French film, La Rose effeuillée (1926), about Saint Teresa of Lisieux, Pallu framed the historical theme with a modern-day narrative: the daughter of a humble Catholic couple finds herself paralyzed after being caught in a violent thunderstorm. In despair, the parents ask the child’s godfather to go to Lourdes to investigate the possibility of a pilgrimage. He meets an old woman who personally knew Bernadette and, in a long flashback, she relates her story. Hopeful, the couple take their crippled daughter to Lourdes, where she miraculously recovers her ability to walk.
The film’s small miracle is Pallu’s direction: understated, direct, empathetic. No melodramatics or bathos. The cast is creditable. Ganzli Walter, who shot most of these devotional dramas (and, by the way, also photographed Duvivier’s 1925 Poil de Carotte), does his usual fine work. André Lecointe, a designer who was in Portugal with Pallu, summoned up a convincing replica of the Lourdes grotto in the Nice studios. We are far from the cloying “Hollywood” sincerity of Henry King’s Song of Bernadette, or even Jean Delannoy’s aesthetically senile 1989 biopic.
One last, odd footnote: Pallu directed a few non-moralizing commercial films, including a 1926 adaption of Phi-Phi, a popular French operetta(!) and a film of Georges Courteline’s comic novel Le Train de 8 h. 47 (1927), both for Isis Film. The ways of the Lord are impenetrable! – Lenny Borger -
I watched ca 45 min of this film. - A beautiful print. - I agree with Lenny Borger about the sober style of this film. I feel more merciful than he to Henry King's The Song of Bernadette with Jennifer Jones, with its strong drama of the simple faith of the common girl and the cynical power play of the churchmen.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Der Hund von Baskerville / The Hound of the Baskervilles (1914) (2006 Munich restoration)
 |
| Der Hund von Baskerville (1914). This is a poster to this version according to the IMDb. |
Baskervillen koira. DE 1914. PC: Vitascope. D: Rudolf Meinert; SC: Richard Oswald, from the play by Julius Philip and Richard Oswald (1909), based on the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902); DP: Karl Freund; AD: Hermann Warm; CAST: Alwin Neuss (Sherlock Holmes), Friedrich Kühne (Stapleton), Hanni Weisse (Miss Laura Lyons), Erwin Fichtner (Henry von Baskerville), Andreas von Horn (Barrymore); released: 12.6.1914; (tinted); from: restored version (c) 2005 Filmmuseum München. Deutsche Zwischentitel. orig. l: 4386 ft; Beta SP,* 66'
E-subtitles in English and Italian. Grand piano: John Sweeney. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009. - No 35mm print of this film is currently available for screening.
Jay Weissberg (from the GCM Catalogue): "Considering Sherlock Holmes’ enormous popularity in Germany, and The Hound of the Baskervilles in particular, it’s not surprising that the novel’s first screen adaptation should come from Berlin. In 1907 Ferdinand Bonn premiered his stage production Der Hund von Baskerville: Schauspiel in vier Aufzügen aus dem Schottischen Hochland, (immediately translated into Russian and presented in Moscow the same year), while in the same period Julius Philipp and Richard Oswald presented their competing version, both later plundered for this cinematic outing. As the subtitle of the Bonn play implies, the action was moved from Dartmoor to Scotland, a change which Oswald and Rudolf Meinert retain in the film – indeed, the peasants of “Schloss Baskerville” appear, from the waist down, to have stepped out of Annie Laurie, but from the waist up it’s more Old Heidelberg."
"Largely unseen for decades until the Filmmuseum München’s 2006 restoration, there was much speculation on plot and characters (interestingly, Bonn’s play was described as an adaptation of both Poe and Conan Doyle). The film’s narrative is necessarily streamlined, and there’s nothing of the book’s chilling atmosphere upon the moors, but the addition of a secret pipeline, a futuristic communication device, and a watchful bust of Napoleon seem heavily indebted to Feuillade and serials, furthering the neo-Gothic element already noticeable in the novel. The dog, played by a noble Harlequin Great Dane, is far from the original’s hound-of-hell (“luminous, ghastly and spectral”), appearing more likely to offer affectionate, slobbering licks than savage throat-tears. Other than the peasants’ kilts there’s also little here to signal a UK setting, while the incongruously bright manse is merely given a British baronial gloss with the addition of a few suits of armour."
"1914 was Rudolf Meinert’s first year as a director, and his interest in effects of light is already noticeable, both through strong interior shadows and a striking silhouetted landscape – undoubtedly cameraman Karl Freund was also involved in such set-ups. True to Conan Doyle’s spirit, if not the actual novel, Meinert relishes the opportunities afforded by multiple disguises, and while Friedrich Kühne rather overdoes his Stapleton (it comes as a relief when his ridiculously long side-whiskers are finally clipped), the other performers ae better handled. Alwin Neuss, who essayed the role in one of the earlier Philipp / Oswald stagings, is almost comically calm until he dons his disguise. Contrary to conjecture, Watson does make an appearance, though his role is brief and could easily be dispensed with."
"Der Hund von Baskerville was wildly successful: nearly 50,000 tickets were sold within the opening fortnight. Taking advantage of the characters’ popularity, Vitascope rushed a sequel into production, releasing Das einsame Haus later in 1914 with the same cast and crew; by 1920 five further sequels were produced, and Oswald himself directed a 1929 version of Der Hund, much more faithful to the novel and starring Carlyle Blackwell as Holmes." – Jay Weissberg
"In 2005 a print was discovered by Armin Loacker at Gosfilmofond with French flash-titles only and with the order of the shots totally mixed up, probably separated for different colours. The film was reconstructed by Filmmuseum München on Digital Betacam. Based on a restoration of Sein eigner Mörder also produced by Vitascope GmbH we could bring information regarding the typeface, graphics, and wordings of the intertitles, tinting, and editing style. The print is complete. This is Richard Oswald's very first work for the cinema. In the opening credits he introduces himself confidently to us." - From Stefan Drössler's introduction.
AA_ I look forward to see this on film. - The colour is fine. - There is a joy of storytelling there that resembles Louis Feuillade's better serials. - Surprising details like the "sms" service of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. - The villain Stapleton disguises himself as Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes disguises himself as Stapleton. This funny idea had recently been brilliantly used by Feuillade in Fantômas, but in Der Hund von Baskerville it is also executed with a perfect timing for suspense and comedy. The scene where the two meet in each other's disguises had me laugh out loud. - Strong cinematography by Karl Freund also in the scene where Sherlock Holmes is trapped in the underground cave with the hound.
The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu: Episode 10: The Fiery Hand
GB 1923. PC: Stoll Film Company. D: A.E. Coleby; SC: Frank Wilson and A.E. Coleby, based on the novel The Devil Doctor [GB] / The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu [US] by Sax Rohmer (1916); DP: Phil Ross; ED: H. Leslie Brittain; AD: Walter W. Murton; CAST: Harry Agar Lyons (Fu-Manchu), Joan Clarkson (Karamaneh), Pat Royale (Aziz), Frank Wilson (Inspector Weymouth), Humberston Wright (Dr. Petrie), Fred Paul (Nayland Smith); 2223 ft, 29' (20 fps); print: BFINA. E-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: John Sweeney. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Imagine a person tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
So begins Sax Rohmer’s first description of Fu-Manchu, published in 1912 in the pages of The Story-Teller and subsequently collected in book form in 1913 under the title The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (GB) / The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (US). Rohmer, born Arthur Ward (1883-1959), hit upon his most lasting creation with the figure of the malevolent Chinese doctor, tapping into a line of “Yellow Peril” novels explicitly formulated by two Chinese invasion scenarios, Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia (1895) and M.P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898). It’s believed that Kaiser Wilhelm II, in a speech in 1895, first coined the expression “Yellow Peril” – “die gelbe Gefahr” – but these fears had earlier counterparts in numerous articles in the English press, ostensibly factual accounts whipping up anti-Chinese sentiment through lurid tales of heathen practices, opium smoking, and miscegenation.
Despite these dire warnings of a nation overrun by pigtail-sporting Chinamen, Anne Witchard points out that the actual numbers were very small: 94 “China born aliens” were listed in the London census of 1871, and by 1921 the number was still modest at 711. Though the figures were unprepossessing, the power on the public imagination was potent. The Chinese in London generally arrived as transient, low-paid ship workers speaking little or no English, and what’s more, they were an almost exclusively male group, thus becoming a locus for fears of British racial purity at the mercy of Oriental reproductive expansionism.
The Opium Wars of the mid-19th century served to stoke Sinophobia and mistakenly associate the drug, in the public mind, with China. By the 1860s the popular British press revelled in accounts of visitors to the smoke-filled opium dens of the slums of Bluegate Fields, where Charles Dickens journeyed before writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Such stories pushed the idea of a secret, unknown world just at everyone’s doorstep, elaborating on Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor with its shocking view into the flip-side of Victorian prosperity. Soon it became common to set tales in London’s opium dens, moved from Bluegate Fields to Limehouse, where decrepit entrances lead to hidden rooms full of luxurious fabrics: “The soft light of shaded lamps hanging from the ceiling discloses a spacious hall. The feet sink in the rich, heavy carpet as the visitor passes on to the next floor, where there is an excellent restaurant with weird Chinese decorations and a menu that offers a variety of seductive Chinese dishes. Its patrons sometimes include Society women seeking a new sensation.” The quote comes from an article, c.1910, in the South London Advertiser, but J. Platt, writing in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1895, was probably correct in stating that most of the novelists never really bothered to inspect the places themselves. Even Conan Doyle succumbed to the fashion, opening his Holmes tale “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891) in an opium den. By at least the early 1920s Thomas Cook was offering tours of London’s working-class neighbourhoods, including a stop in Limehouse where they stage-managed a mêlée between cleaver-wielding, pigtail-sporting Chinamen for the tourists.
At that point Yellow Peril fears were probably old hat, having reached an early peak in the years immediately following the Boxer Rebellion (1900) – not coincidentally this was precisely the moment when the cinema began addressing such concerns, as seen in the 2008 Pordenone Festival’s screening of two staged films, Attack on a China Mission Station – Bluejackets to the Rescue, and Attack on a Mission Station (both 1900). By 1912, the same year Fu-Manchu first appeared in print, there were already parodies of the type, such as Hepworth’s Lieutenant Lilly and the Splodge of Opium. Still, Sax Rohmer’s tales were wildly successful – even President Calvin Coolidge admitted to being addicted to the serializations appearing in Collier’s – so it was only natural that the Stoll Film Company would turn to Fu-Manchu after finishing the last of their acclaimed Sherlock Holmes series.
Though the character appeared in a thinly disguised, unauthorised form in 1914, with Feature Photoplay’s The Mysterious Mr. Wu Chung Foo, the Stoll series was the first of many subsequent Fu-Manchu adaptations. Stoll had achieved success with Rohmer before, thanks to The Yellow Claw (dir. René Plaissetty, 1920) – “a picture of Chinese cunning and crime” – one of their “Eminent British Authors” films in which in-house art director Walter W. Murton outdid himself by designing a vast, multi-chambered opium den kitted out in the richest of furnishings. Though the production expenses of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu were slightly scaled down from the Holmes series, Stoll spent a significant amount of money on promotion (Kinematograph Weekly estimated the figure at many thousands of pounds), launching an all-out media campaign that included large-scale advertising in the London Underground.
Like the three Holmes series, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu consisted of 15 episodes, each containing a complete story with casual links to what came before and after. In general the critics were not impressed: for the Bioscope reviewer, “the new series is very much cruder, both in subject-matter and in treatment, than the Doyle stories. Whereas the latter had a skilfully worked out logical interest, the former are merely stereotyped melodramas, which make no attempt to be plausible, but depend entirely upon the appeal of lurid sensationalism.” Which of course is most likely why the stories as well as the films became so popular. Rohmer undoubtedly based his characters on Conan Doyle’s already iconic figures – Nayland Smith’s method of deductive reasoning comes straight from Holmes, while his sidekick, Dr. Petrie, even shares Watson’s profession.
“The Fiery Hand” first appeared in story form in the 25 September 1915 issue of Collier’s before being incorporated into the 1916 novel The Devil Doctor (GB) / The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (US). Both story and film handily illustrate Rohmer’s use of locations outside of Limehouse, driving home the sense that the Yellow Peril extended beyond areas normally associated with Chinese control: the menace has infiltrated even Windsor, thanks to the Thames, “a stream more heavily burdened with secrets than ever was Tiber or Tigris”. Like the cautionary newspaper articles revealing London’s hidden regions to a public unaware that hell lay just a short bus ride away, so too the Fu-Manchu series propagated the notion that no territory was as foreign as one’s own backyard.
The series was directed by A.E. Coleby (1876-1930), just finished with his monumental, nearly 5-hour-long epic The Prodigal Son (1923). Coleby began as an actor and moved to both sides of the camera in 1907, directing the first British film of “feature rank”, 1911’s Pirates of 1920. His work on Fu-Manchu fits with his reputation as a showman, using the stories’ sensationalist elements to full effect while incorporating handsome location work. It’s tempting to surmise that George Orwell, with his known fondness for detective fiction, might have found inspiration for the rat cage in 1984 from “The Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom” seen here, though the idea, if springing from this source, could also have come from the novel.
While Harry Agar Lyons (1878-?) appears an unlikely candidate to play the evil Chinese genius, the Irish-born actor found lasting fame in Asian roles, continuing with Stoll’s follow-up series The Further Mysteries of Fu-Manchu, and later appearing as the nefarious Dr. Sin Fang in Pioneer Films’ series The Mysterious Dr. Sin Fang (1928). Both of these later series were directed by Fred Paul (1880-1967), a figure of some fascination, more as a champion of melodrama and Grand Guignol than as a rather stolid actor. Though the Nayland Smith character is based on Holmes, he has little of Holmes’ humour, and Paul bears no resemblance to Rohmer’s conception of Smith, “lean, agile, bronzed with the suns of Burma”. – Jay Weissberg. -
A pretty good print. "They just died of fear". Nayland Smith and partner in disguise rent the "haunted house". The ghosts waste no time. The mice with bells in their necks. The luminous hand. - "The six gates of joyful wisdom": a horizontal torture device to be activated with "Cantonese rats - the most ravenous of all". - Horror aspects in this episode.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Imagine a person tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
So begins Sax Rohmer’s first description of Fu-Manchu, published in 1912 in the pages of The Story-Teller and subsequently collected in book form in 1913 under the title The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (GB) / The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (US). Rohmer, born Arthur Ward (1883-1959), hit upon his most lasting creation with the figure of the malevolent Chinese doctor, tapping into a line of “Yellow Peril” novels explicitly formulated by two Chinese invasion scenarios, Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia (1895) and M.P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898). It’s believed that Kaiser Wilhelm II, in a speech in 1895, first coined the expression “Yellow Peril” – “die gelbe Gefahr” – but these fears had earlier counterparts in numerous articles in the English press, ostensibly factual accounts whipping up anti-Chinese sentiment through lurid tales of heathen practices, opium smoking, and miscegenation.
Despite these dire warnings of a nation overrun by pigtail-sporting Chinamen, Anne Witchard points out that the actual numbers were very small: 94 “China born aliens” were listed in the London census of 1871, and by 1921 the number was still modest at 711. Though the figures were unprepossessing, the power on the public imagination was potent. The Chinese in London generally arrived as transient, low-paid ship workers speaking little or no English, and what’s more, they were an almost exclusively male group, thus becoming a locus for fears of British racial purity at the mercy of Oriental reproductive expansionism.
The Opium Wars of the mid-19th century served to stoke Sinophobia and mistakenly associate the drug, in the public mind, with China. By the 1860s the popular British press revelled in accounts of visitors to the smoke-filled opium dens of the slums of Bluegate Fields, where Charles Dickens journeyed before writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Such stories pushed the idea of a secret, unknown world just at everyone’s doorstep, elaborating on Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor with its shocking view into the flip-side of Victorian prosperity. Soon it became common to set tales in London’s opium dens, moved from Bluegate Fields to Limehouse, where decrepit entrances lead to hidden rooms full of luxurious fabrics: “The soft light of shaded lamps hanging from the ceiling discloses a spacious hall. The feet sink in the rich, heavy carpet as the visitor passes on to the next floor, where there is an excellent restaurant with weird Chinese decorations and a menu that offers a variety of seductive Chinese dishes. Its patrons sometimes include Society women seeking a new sensation.” The quote comes from an article, c.1910, in the South London Advertiser, but J. Platt, writing in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1895, was probably correct in stating that most of the novelists never really bothered to inspect the places themselves. Even Conan Doyle succumbed to the fashion, opening his Holmes tale “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891) in an opium den. By at least the early 1920s Thomas Cook was offering tours of London’s working-class neighbourhoods, including a stop in Limehouse where they stage-managed a mêlée between cleaver-wielding, pigtail-sporting Chinamen for the tourists.
At that point Yellow Peril fears were probably old hat, having reached an early peak in the years immediately following the Boxer Rebellion (1900) – not coincidentally this was precisely the moment when the cinema began addressing such concerns, as seen in the 2008 Pordenone Festival’s screening of two staged films, Attack on a China Mission Station – Bluejackets to the Rescue, and Attack on a Mission Station (both 1900). By 1912, the same year Fu-Manchu first appeared in print, there were already parodies of the type, such as Hepworth’s Lieutenant Lilly and the Splodge of Opium. Still, Sax Rohmer’s tales were wildly successful – even President Calvin Coolidge admitted to being addicted to the serializations appearing in Collier’s – so it was only natural that the Stoll Film Company would turn to Fu-Manchu after finishing the last of their acclaimed Sherlock Holmes series.
Though the character appeared in a thinly disguised, unauthorised form in 1914, with Feature Photoplay’s The Mysterious Mr. Wu Chung Foo, the Stoll series was the first of many subsequent Fu-Manchu adaptations. Stoll had achieved success with Rohmer before, thanks to The Yellow Claw (dir. René Plaissetty, 1920) – “a picture of Chinese cunning and crime” – one of their “Eminent British Authors” films in which in-house art director Walter W. Murton outdid himself by designing a vast, multi-chambered opium den kitted out in the richest of furnishings. Though the production expenses of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu were slightly scaled down from the Holmes series, Stoll spent a significant amount of money on promotion (Kinematograph Weekly estimated the figure at many thousands of pounds), launching an all-out media campaign that included large-scale advertising in the London Underground.
Like the three Holmes series, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu consisted of 15 episodes, each containing a complete story with casual links to what came before and after. In general the critics were not impressed: for the Bioscope reviewer, “the new series is very much cruder, both in subject-matter and in treatment, than the Doyle stories. Whereas the latter had a skilfully worked out logical interest, the former are merely stereotyped melodramas, which make no attempt to be plausible, but depend entirely upon the appeal of lurid sensationalism.” Which of course is most likely why the stories as well as the films became so popular. Rohmer undoubtedly based his characters on Conan Doyle’s already iconic figures – Nayland Smith’s method of deductive reasoning comes straight from Holmes, while his sidekick, Dr. Petrie, even shares Watson’s profession.
“The Fiery Hand” first appeared in story form in the 25 September 1915 issue of Collier’s before being incorporated into the 1916 novel The Devil Doctor (GB) / The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (US). Both story and film handily illustrate Rohmer’s use of locations outside of Limehouse, driving home the sense that the Yellow Peril extended beyond areas normally associated with Chinese control: the menace has infiltrated even Windsor, thanks to the Thames, “a stream more heavily burdened with secrets than ever was Tiber or Tigris”. Like the cautionary newspaper articles revealing London’s hidden regions to a public unaware that hell lay just a short bus ride away, so too the Fu-Manchu series propagated the notion that no territory was as foreign as one’s own backyard.
The series was directed by A.E. Coleby (1876-1930), just finished with his monumental, nearly 5-hour-long epic The Prodigal Son (1923). Coleby began as an actor and moved to both sides of the camera in 1907, directing the first British film of “feature rank”, 1911’s Pirates of 1920. His work on Fu-Manchu fits with his reputation as a showman, using the stories’ sensationalist elements to full effect while incorporating handsome location work. It’s tempting to surmise that George Orwell, with his known fondness for detective fiction, might have found inspiration for the rat cage in 1984 from “The Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom” seen here, though the idea, if springing from this source, could also have come from the novel.
While Harry Agar Lyons (1878-?) appears an unlikely candidate to play the evil Chinese genius, the Irish-born actor found lasting fame in Asian roles, continuing with Stoll’s follow-up series The Further Mysteries of Fu-Manchu, and later appearing as the nefarious Dr. Sin Fang in Pioneer Films’ series The Mysterious Dr. Sin Fang (1928). Both of these later series were directed by Fred Paul (1880-1967), a figure of some fascination, more as a champion of melodrama and Grand Guignol than as a rather stolid actor. Though the Nayland Smith character is based on Holmes, he has little of Holmes’ humour, and Paul bears no resemblance to Rohmer’s conception of Smith, “lean, agile, bronzed with the suns of Burma”. – Jay Weissberg. -
A pretty good print. "They just died of fear". Nayland Smith and partner in disguise rent the "haunted house". The ghosts waste no time. The mice with bells in their necks. The luminous hand. - "The six gates of joyful wisdom": a horizontal torture device to be activated with "Cantonese rats - the most ravenous of all". - Horror aspects in this episode.
Bobby the Boy Scout; Or, the Boy Detective
GB 1909. PC: Clarendon Film Company. D: Percy Stow; orig. l: 525 ft.; 502 ft., 502 ft /16 fps/ 9 min; print: BFINA. Deutsche Zwischentitel. E-subtitles in English and Italian. Grand piano: John Sweeney. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Never underestimate the ingenuity of the average Boy Scout, especially when compared to the British police force. With the popularity of detective films at an early high, Percy Stow concocted this delightful film which takes advantage of his penchant for comic situations and even includes a rather superfluous trick shot, along with a nice keyhole cut-out.
Stow (1876-1919) was working with Cecil Hepworth in 1901 but joined Hepworth’s former business partner Henry Lawley to form the Clarendon Film Company in 1904. While The Tempest (1908) is perhaps his best-known film today, his output in these years tended less in the direction of literary adaptations and more towards comical titles such as the present film, whose pleasant outdoor locations speak to Stow’s Hepworth origins. In 1910 he introduced the “Lieutenant Rose” series, sometimes credited as Britain’s first serial and featuring a naval captain whose adventurous exploits certainly lean towards the detective genre; the series went on for 17 episodes and lasted until 1915. – Jay Weissberg" -
A low-contrast print. The policemen throw the little boy scout out of the crime scene, but he tracks down the criminals, captures them with a clever ruse, brings back the stolen jewels, helps clear the innocent suspect, and brings the policement to the real villains, after they have had to stumble in mud.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Never underestimate the ingenuity of the average Boy Scout, especially when compared to the British police force. With the popularity of detective films at an early high, Percy Stow concocted this delightful film which takes advantage of his penchant for comic situations and even includes a rather superfluous trick shot, along with a nice keyhole cut-out.
Stow (1876-1919) was working with Cecil Hepworth in 1901 but joined Hepworth’s former business partner Henry Lawley to form the Clarendon Film Company in 1904. While The Tempest (1908) is perhaps his best-known film today, his output in these years tended less in the direction of literary adaptations and more towards comical titles such as the present film, whose pleasant outdoor locations speak to Stow’s Hepworth origins. In 1910 he introduced the “Lieutenant Rose” series, sometimes credited as Britain’s first serial and featuring a naval captain whose adventurous exploits certainly lean towards the detective genre; the series went on for 17 episodes and lasted until 1915. – Jay Weissberg" -
A low-contrast print. The policemen throw the little boy scout out of the crime scene, but he tracks down the criminals, captures them with a clever ruse, brings back the stolen jewels, helps clear the innocent suspect, and brings the policement to the real villains, after they have had to stumble in mud.
The Corrick Collection 3: Programme 1
Presented by Meg Labrum, e-subtitles in English + Italian, grand piano: [Philip Carli announced] in reality Antonio Coppola. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 4 Oct 2009.
J'ai perdu mon lorgnon
(Pathé, FR 1906) D: Charles Lucien Lépine; DP: Segundo de Chomón; 35mm, 259 ft, 4'19" (16 fps); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #70). No intertitles.
Hilarity ensues after a man unwittingly drops his eyeglasses into his morning tea and is forced to go about his daily business with drastically impaired sight. Advertised by the Corricks as The Short-Sighted Man, this is one of several collaborations between director Charles Lucien Lépine and special effects master Segundo de Chomón produced while they were with the Pathé company. Two more can also found in the Corrick Collection: Appartement à louer (1906) and Le Tour du monde d’un policier (1906). – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A farce based on short-sightedness. Finally the spectacles are found in the coffee cup. A passable visual quality.
La Métallurgie au Creusot
Creusot’s Metallurgy [title of the print] (Pathé, FR 1905) D: ?; 35mm, 506 ft, 8'26" (16 fps), (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour and tinting); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #23). English intertitles.
This early industrial film detailing the forging process at Schneider and Co.’s historic steelworks factory in the town of Le Creusot in France’s Burgundy region is remarkable for its strikingly detailed coloring evoking the dark, close interior of the plant, at times lit only by the glowing-hot metal as it is guided by the skilled hands of shadowy workers. A report on the factory published in Scientific American (9 May 1885) described the sheer, overwhelming power of its machine-works: “If we remark that a power of one horse does in one hour the equivalent of a man’s labor per day, we conclude that these machines (which run night and day) represent an army of 160,000 men that lends its gratuitous aid to the workmen of the forge. This is what is called progress in industry.” The film effectively expresses the full scope of this power with shots of the burning coals and raging fires, billowing smoke, the massive steam hammer, and other machinery as it follows the “fiery blocks being taken to the rolling machines in order to be given the most diverse forms, according to the requirements of commerce”. Hardly a dry depiction of a commercial enterprise, La Métallurgie au Creusot evokes a hellish landscape of modern industrial processing. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - Non-fiction. Like an educational film on metallurgy. Ok print, impressive stencil colour.
La Belle au bois dormant
(Pathé, FR 1902) D: Lucien Nonguet, Ferdinand Zecca; AD: V. Lorant Heilbronn; 35mm, 761 ft, 12'41" (16 fps), col. (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour and tinting); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #111). English intertitles.
Pathé released their first version of Charles Perrault’s classic 1697 “Sleeping Beauty” story in 1902, telling the tale of a beautiful princess, a sharp spindle, and a 100-year-long curse. Similar to other early Pathé dramas such as Marie-Antoinette (1904), Le Règne de Louis XIV (1904), and Don Quixote (1903), the narrative is organized as a series of tableaux, relying on the viewer’s familiarity with the story to hold the onscreen narrative together. Each of the 11 tableaux is a single shot, filmed from a distance on a theatrical stage-type set with painted backdrops. The last scene, “Fairy Land End”, is vibrantly colored and stenciled in great detail. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A féerie in the early cinema's tableau style, with several independent episodes, including dance numbers. Monkey island, mysterious oak, fairy grotto. Impressive stencil colour in the fairy-land scene.
[The Day-Postle Match at Boulder Racecourse, Western Australia]
(Leonard Corrick, AU 1907) D: Leonard Corrick; DP: Leonard Corrick; 35mm, 378 ft, 6'18" (16 fps); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #19).
After purchasing a motion picture camera in February 1907, the Corricks began making their own films under the direction of son and designated “Kinemato Expert” Leonard. The Day-Postle Match was the third produced in their first month of filming, following Street Scenes in Perth, Western Australia and Bashful Mr. Brown (screened at the Giornate in 2007 and 2008 respectively).
The film (also known by similar titles such as The Day-Postle Race, The Postle-Day Running Race, etc.) features the 200- and 300-meter championship races between Irishman R. B. Day and Australian sprinting champion Arthur Postle, who was known as “The Crimson Flash.” Held on 10 April 1907 at Boulder racecourse in the goldfields of Western Australia, this was a reprise of the famous 5 December 1906 race held at that same track outside the town of Kalgoorlie, where Postle beat then-champion Day to secure his status as the world champion.
When the film premiered in Kalgoorlie soon after the event, Postle came to see the race onscreen and was invited onstage to address the crowd. The Day-Postle Match was one of the Corricks’ most heavily promoted films over the next year and throughout their international tour, though it isn’t clear if they informed audiences that this was not a recording of the original world record-setting race. The film received favorable reactions not only from Australian viewers, but also from the colonial audiences that made up the majority of attendees at Corrick concerts throughout South and South-East Asia. When a new program was announced for the family’s next performance, ads assured potential audiences that this racing film would remain on the bill.
Some flavor of the excitement in the air felt at the film’s premiere comes through in a detailed account published the next day in the Kalgoorlie Miner (13 April 1907): “The people were not kept long in waiting for the reproduction of the views which had been taken on the afternoon of the Postle-Day championship match by Mr. Leonard. Prior to the picture being thrown upon the screen, Mr. Corrick announced that the management had not had an opportunity to judge the quality of the presentation. He therefore craved indulgence if any defects were visible and promised they would be remedied in future productions. When the operator had had time to fix his film in the machine and threw his first picture upon the screen, cheers arose from all parts of the theatre. Although one or two of the views will require slight touching up, the general verdict of those who had the privilege of witnessing the display was one of unqualified approval and unstinted praise.
“The picture of the grandstand, the Leger stand and enclosure, thronged by the public, with parts of Boulder City and the mines of the Golden Mile in the distance, were particularly bright, clear, and distinct. Numberless faces and figures were easily recognizable by their acquaintances. The scene in the straight when Postle came out to take his part in the 200 yard event was especially fine, and no difficulty was experienced in picking out the counterfeit presentment of the Australian champion ready to do battle for the pedestrian supremacy of the world. Officials upon the track were clearly outlined, this more especially being the case with a resplendent figure in white, who in ordinary attire attends to his duties as a member of the Kalgoorlie Council. … Postle breasting the tape and slowing down was the occasion for the spectators in the theatre building to renew the cheers and other forms of approbation which marked his victory on the Boulder Racecourse.
“…When the film had unrolled to the end, the pleasure of the audience was made manifest by the rounds of cheers that were set up to mark the public sense of the skillful way in which the company’s photographer had completed his task and transferred the results from the negatives to the films.”
The account did note that some scenes “were not quite successful” and that the awards ceremony was “enveloped in shadows”, but it seems the enthusiasm of the crowd at the novelty of seeing an on-screen replay of such a recent high-profile event was enough to make up for any of these shortcomings. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - Non-fiction. Long pans on the audience. Visual quality ok, not great.
Who Stole Jones' Wood?
(Lubin, US 1909) D: ?; 35mm, 286 ft, 4'46" (16 fps), (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting);from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #135).
Advertised by the Corricks as Who Stole Casey’s Wood, this is one of the most extensively decomposed films still remaining in the NFSA Corrick Collection. Luckily Lubin’s advertisement for the film contains the following detailed description that provides modern audiences with the means to make sense of the at-times obscured action: “Jones had a nice little wood-pile ready for the cold weather. Mike, his neighbor, steals the wood in the night time. Jones is bound to find out where his wood went. He points a gun toward the door, puts a string on the door-knob and lies down to await developments. He falls asleep, however. As soon as Mike sees his neighbor asleep he jumps over the fence and hands the wood to his wife. He then turns the gun towards Jones, the door opens and Jones is rudely awakened from his sweet dreams. Jones tries again. He fills an empty log with gunpowder and put [sic] this log on top of the wood-pile. Night time. Mike comes for a new supply. Unfortunately he takes hold of the powder filled log. There is an explosion and the guilty one and his wife are thrown into Jones’ yard.” – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A display of massive decay on the source print. Antonio Coppola reacted to the view of visual abstraction dancing on the screen by starting to play jazz.
"And a Little Child Shall Lead Them"
(Biograph, US 1909) D: D.W. Griffith; DP: G.W. Bitzer; cast: Marion Leonard (Mother), Arthur Johnson (Father), Adele De Garde (Daughter), David Miles (Lawyer), Anita Hendrie (Maid), Mack Sennett (Servant); 35mm, 354 ft, 5'54" (16 fps); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #11).
“This is one of the most pertinent proverbs ever propounded, for the tiny hand of the babe has power to turn the universe.” (Biograph Bulletin No. 224) Such is the case in this melodrama, showing the strain on a marriage after the death of a baby, which could only be healed by the innocent question of another young child. The Corrick Collection contains original release prints of two D.W. Griffith films: “And a Little Child Shall Lead Them” and The Lonely Villa (1909). Though a small detail, it is worth noting a discrepancy between the film’s Biograph Bulletin entry, which describes 7 years passing between the death of their first child and the couple’s imminent separation, and the intertitle in this print, which reads that in fact 8 years have passed. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A rare instance of a Griffith film with the original intertitles. The little girl who brought her parents back together again. Ok print.
How Jones Lost His Roll
(Edison, US 1905) D: Edwin S. Porter; 35mm, 442 ft, 7'22" (16 fps); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #63).
A parable demonstrating how a fool and his money are soon parted. To his surprise, Jones is invited to dinner at his usually stingy neighbor’s home. The friendly gesture, however, proves to be a ruse to get Jones drunk and cheat him at cards. What sets this amusing little tale of neighborly discord apart is the inclusion of cleverly animated title cards created using a stop-motion technique. Each card begins with a collection of jumbled-up letters and simple objects which twist and turn around the frame, eventually organizing themselves into words. The uniqueness of this presentation serves to make the written word as much of an attraction as the actual images of Jones and his wily neighbor – if not more so. Advertisements indicate that the producers were well aware of this reversal of the traditional relationship between word and image, as they completely ignore the narrative and focus solely on potential audiences’ reactions to the “interest and novelty” of the animated titles. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - Funny animated intertitles, where the alphabets move to find their new places. The mirror behind the card-player. Ok print.
Comedy Cartoon
(Charles Urban Trading Co., GB 1907) D: Walter R. Booth; 35mm, 285 ft, 4'45" (16 fps), (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #31). No intertitles.
In this follow-up to Walter Booth’s legendary 1906 film The Hand of the Artist (screened at the Giornate in 2008), the Artist has returned to torment a new set of characters drawn from his imagination. Unlike the previous film, in which the Artist manipulates entire scenes, here his work is restricted to the chalkboard and takes a more predictable path. After the portraits are sketched in chalk, they come to life and interact with their creator – he lights a cigarette for one, pours a cup of tea for another, and so on. Also in contrast to the earlier film, here we are shown more than just the Artist’s hand – we see the Artist himself (perhaps Booth making a rare on-screen appearance, demonstrating the skills he honed as a magician and performer on the vaudeville stage?) standing next to the chalkboard, grinning at the camera before starting to work. One thing that hasn’t changed from The Hand of the Artist, however, is that ultimately the Artist proves that he is the one in control: no matter how much his animated doodles misbehave, he alone wields the power of the eraser. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - From a battered source. Chalk drawings come alive. A mix of animation and live action. The clown cut-out turns into a live clown.
La Poule aux œfs d'or
(Pathé, FR 1905) D: Gaston Velle; DP: Segundo de Chomón; cast: Julienne Mathieu; 35mm, 873 ft, 14'33" (16 fps), (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #39). English intertitles.
Although the Corricks were likely not aware of it, their collection contains a number of films featuring the handiwork of one of cinema’s earliest and most innovative special-effects artists, Segundo de Chomón. At least 11 films from his stint at Pathé were purchased by the family. These titles were among the most frequently and best reviewed films in the entire collection, from the subtle effects seen in Appartement à louer (1906), to the grand adventure of Le Tour du monde d’un policier (1906) and clever imagery of Les Invisibles (1906), to the fantastic extravaganza of films such as this one, La Poule aux oeufs d’or.
This fable of wealth and greed is told in 4 acts: “The Conjurer’s Lottery”, “The Fantastic Fowls’-House”, “Ephemeral Fortune”, and “The Miser’s Fate”. The familiar story of the hen who laid golden eggs provides plenty of opportunities to pause and revel in fantastic displays, such as when the golden hen turns into a lovely woman, who in turn transforms her fellow chickens into a troupe of elegant dancers. The magic and the mood turn dark when thieves try to steal the eggs and the farmer is driven mad by greed, his paranoia arrestingly depicted as he is surrounded by surreal disembodied eyes. The film’s epilogue is a fanciful display of magic as the barnyard turns into a fairyland and golden eggs hatch to reveal beautiful women, made even more so through the use of intricate stenciling and liberally-applied, still vibrant dyes. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - Beautiful colour on this print of the well-known féerie. A film of surreal transformations.
J'ai perdu mon lorgnon
(Pathé, FR 1906) D: Charles Lucien Lépine; DP: Segundo de Chomón; 35mm, 259 ft, 4'19" (16 fps); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #70). No intertitles.
Hilarity ensues after a man unwittingly drops his eyeglasses into his morning tea and is forced to go about his daily business with drastically impaired sight. Advertised by the Corricks as The Short-Sighted Man, this is one of several collaborations between director Charles Lucien Lépine and special effects master Segundo de Chomón produced while they were with the Pathé company. Two more can also found in the Corrick Collection: Appartement à louer (1906) and Le Tour du monde d’un policier (1906). – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A farce based on short-sightedness. Finally the spectacles are found in the coffee cup. A passable visual quality.
La Métallurgie au Creusot
Creusot’s Metallurgy [title of the print] (Pathé, FR 1905) D: ?; 35mm, 506 ft, 8'26" (16 fps), (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour and tinting); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #23). English intertitles.
This early industrial film detailing the forging process at Schneider and Co.’s historic steelworks factory in the town of Le Creusot in France’s Burgundy region is remarkable for its strikingly detailed coloring evoking the dark, close interior of the plant, at times lit only by the glowing-hot metal as it is guided by the skilled hands of shadowy workers. A report on the factory published in Scientific American (9 May 1885) described the sheer, overwhelming power of its machine-works: “If we remark that a power of one horse does in one hour the equivalent of a man’s labor per day, we conclude that these machines (which run night and day) represent an army of 160,000 men that lends its gratuitous aid to the workmen of the forge. This is what is called progress in industry.” The film effectively expresses the full scope of this power with shots of the burning coals and raging fires, billowing smoke, the massive steam hammer, and other machinery as it follows the “fiery blocks being taken to the rolling machines in order to be given the most diverse forms, according to the requirements of commerce”. Hardly a dry depiction of a commercial enterprise, La Métallurgie au Creusot evokes a hellish landscape of modern industrial processing. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - Non-fiction. Like an educational film on metallurgy. Ok print, impressive stencil colour.
La Belle au bois dormant
(Pathé, FR 1902) D: Lucien Nonguet, Ferdinand Zecca; AD: V. Lorant Heilbronn; 35mm, 761 ft, 12'41" (16 fps), col. (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour and tinting); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #111). English intertitles.
Pathé released their first version of Charles Perrault’s classic 1697 “Sleeping Beauty” story in 1902, telling the tale of a beautiful princess, a sharp spindle, and a 100-year-long curse. Similar to other early Pathé dramas such as Marie-Antoinette (1904), Le Règne de Louis XIV (1904), and Don Quixote (1903), the narrative is organized as a series of tableaux, relying on the viewer’s familiarity with the story to hold the onscreen narrative together. Each of the 11 tableaux is a single shot, filmed from a distance on a theatrical stage-type set with painted backdrops. The last scene, “Fairy Land End”, is vibrantly colored and stenciled in great detail. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A féerie in the early cinema's tableau style, with several independent episodes, including dance numbers. Monkey island, mysterious oak, fairy grotto. Impressive stencil colour in the fairy-land scene.
[The Day-Postle Match at Boulder Racecourse, Western Australia]
(Leonard Corrick, AU 1907) D: Leonard Corrick; DP: Leonard Corrick; 35mm, 378 ft, 6'18" (16 fps); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #19).
After purchasing a motion picture camera in February 1907, the Corricks began making their own films under the direction of son and designated “Kinemato Expert” Leonard. The Day-Postle Match was the third produced in their first month of filming, following Street Scenes in Perth, Western Australia and Bashful Mr. Brown (screened at the Giornate in 2007 and 2008 respectively).
The film (also known by similar titles such as The Day-Postle Race, The Postle-Day Running Race, etc.) features the 200- and 300-meter championship races between Irishman R. B. Day and Australian sprinting champion Arthur Postle, who was known as “The Crimson Flash.” Held on 10 April 1907 at Boulder racecourse in the goldfields of Western Australia, this was a reprise of the famous 5 December 1906 race held at that same track outside the town of Kalgoorlie, where Postle beat then-champion Day to secure his status as the world champion.
When the film premiered in Kalgoorlie soon after the event, Postle came to see the race onscreen and was invited onstage to address the crowd. The Day-Postle Match was one of the Corricks’ most heavily promoted films over the next year and throughout their international tour, though it isn’t clear if they informed audiences that this was not a recording of the original world record-setting race. The film received favorable reactions not only from Australian viewers, but also from the colonial audiences that made up the majority of attendees at Corrick concerts throughout South and South-East Asia. When a new program was announced for the family’s next performance, ads assured potential audiences that this racing film would remain on the bill.
Some flavor of the excitement in the air felt at the film’s premiere comes through in a detailed account published the next day in the Kalgoorlie Miner (13 April 1907): “The people were not kept long in waiting for the reproduction of the views which had been taken on the afternoon of the Postle-Day championship match by Mr. Leonard. Prior to the picture being thrown upon the screen, Mr. Corrick announced that the management had not had an opportunity to judge the quality of the presentation. He therefore craved indulgence if any defects were visible and promised they would be remedied in future productions. When the operator had had time to fix his film in the machine and threw his first picture upon the screen, cheers arose from all parts of the theatre. Although one or two of the views will require slight touching up, the general verdict of those who had the privilege of witnessing the display was one of unqualified approval and unstinted praise.
“The picture of the grandstand, the Leger stand and enclosure, thronged by the public, with parts of Boulder City and the mines of the Golden Mile in the distance, were particularly bright, clear, and distinct. Numberless faces and figures were easily recognizable by their acquaintances. The scene in the straight when Postle came out to take his part in the 200 yard event was especially fine, and no difficulty was experienced in picking out the counterfeit presentment of the Australian champion ready to do battle for the pedestrian supremacy of the world. Officials upon the track were clearly outlined, this more especially being the case with a resplendent figure in white, who in ordinary attire attends to his duties as a member of the Kalgoorlie Council. … Postle breasting the tape and slowing down was the occasion for the spectators in the theatre building to renew the cheers and other forms of approbation which marked his victory on the Boulder Racecourse.
“…When the film had unrolled to the end, the pleasure of the audience was made manifest by the rounds of cheers that were set up to mark the public sense of the skillful way in which the company’s photographer had completed his task and transferred the results from the negatives to the films.”
The account did note that some scenes “were not quite successful” and that the awards ceremony was “enveloped in shadows”, but it seems the enthusiasm of the crowd at the novelty of seeing an on-screen replay of such a recent high-profile event was enough to make up for any of these shortcomings. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - Non-fiction. Long pans on the audience. Visual quality ok, not great.
Who Stole Jones' Wood?
(Lubin, US 1909) D: ?; 35mm, 286 ft, 4'46" (16 fps), (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting);from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #135).
Advertised by the Corricks as Who Stole Casey’s Wood, this is one of the most extensively decomposed films still remaining in the NFSA Corrick Collection. Luckily Lubin’s advertisement for the film contains the following detailed description that provides modern audiences with the means to make sense of the at-times obscured action: “Jones had a nice little wood-pile ready for the cold weather. Mike, his neighbor, steals the wood in the night time. Jones is bound to find out where his wood went. He points a gun toward the door, puts a string on the door-knob and lies down to await developments. He falls asleep, however. As soon as Mike sees his neighbor asleep he jumps over the fence and hands the wood to his wife. He then turns the gun towards Jones, the door opens and Jones is rudely awakened from his sweet dreams. Jones tries again. He fills an empty log with gunpowder and put [sic] this log on top of the wood-pile. Night time. Mike comes for a new supply. Unfortunately he takes hold of the powder filled log. There is an explosion and the guilty one and his wife are thrown into Jones’ yard.” – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A display of massive decay on the source print. Antonio Coppola reacted to the view of visual abstraction dancing on the screen by starting to play jazz.
"And a Little Child Shall Lead Them"
(Biograph, US 1909) D: D.W. Griffith; DP: G.W. Bitzer; cast: Marion Leonard (Mother), Arthur Johnson (Father), Adele De Garde (Daughter), David Miles (Lawyer), Anita Hendrie (Maid), Mack Sennett (Servant); 35mm, 354 ft, 5'54" (16 fps); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #11).
“This is one of the most pertinent proverbs ever propounded, for the tiny hand of the babe has power to turn the universe.” (Biograph Bulletin No. 224) Such is the case in this melodrama, showing the strain on a marriage after the death of a baby, which could only be healed by the innocent question of another young child. The Corrick Collection contains original release prints of two D.W. Griffith films: “And a Little Child Shall Lead Them” and The Lonely Villa (1909). Though a small detail, it is worth noting a discrepancy between the film’s Biograph Bulletin entry, which describes 7 years passing between the death of their first child and the couple’s imminent separation, and the intertitle in this print, which reads that in fact 8 years have passed. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - A rare instance of a Griffith film with the original intertitles. The little girl who brought her parents back together again. Ok print.
How Jones Lost His Roll
(Edison, US 1905) D: Edwin S. Porter; 35mm, 442 ft, 7'22" (16 fps); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #63).
A parable demonstrating how a fool and his money are soon parted. To his surprise, Jones is invited to dinner at his usually stingy neighbor’s home. The friendly gesture, however, proves to be a ruse to get Jones drunk and cheat him at cards. What sets this amusing little tale of neighborly discord apart is the inclusion of cleverly animated title cards created using a stop-motion technique. Each card begins with a collection of jumbled-up letters and simple objects which twist and turn around the frame, eventually organizing themselves into words. The uniqueness of this presentation serves to make the written word as much of an attraction as the actual images of Jones and his wily neighbor – if not more so. Advertisements indicate that the producers were well aware of this reversal of the traditional relationship between word and image, as they completely ignore the narrative and focus solely on potential audiences’ reactions to the “interest and novelty” of the animated titles. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - Funny animated intertitles, where the alphabets move to find their new places. The mirror behind the card-player. Ok print.
Comedy Cartoon
(Charles Urban Trading Co., GB 1907) D: Walter R. Booth; 35mm, 285 ft, 4'45" (16 fps), (printed on colour stock, reproducing original tinting); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #31). No intertitles.
In this follow-up to Walter Booth’s legendary 1906 film The Hand of the Artist (screened at the Giornate in 2008), the Artist has returned to torment a new set of characters drawn from his imagination. Unlike the previous film, in which the Artist manipulates entire scenes, here his work is restricted to the chalkboard and takes a more predictable path. After the portraits are sketched in chalk, they come to life and interact with their creator – he lights a cigarette for one, pours a cup of tea for another, and so on. Also in contrast to the earlier film, here we are shown more than just the Artist’s hand – we see the Artist himself (perhaps Booth making a rare on-screen appearance, demonstrating the skills he honed as a magician and performer on the vaudeville stage?) standing next to the chalkboard, grinning at the camera before starting to work. One thing that hasn’t changed from The Hand of the Artist, however, is that ultimately the Artist proves that he is the one in control: no matter how much his animated doodles misbehave, he alone wields the power of the eraser. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - From a battered source. Chalk drawings come alive. A mix of animation and live action. The clown cut-out turns into a live clown.
La Poule aux œfs d'or
(Pathé, FR 1905) D: Gaston Velle; DP: Segundo de Chomón; cast: Julienne Mathieu; 35mm, 873 ft, 14'33" (16 fps), (printed on colour stock, reproducing original stencil-colour); from: NFSA (Corrick Collection #39). English intertitles.
Although the Corricks were likely not aware of it, their collection contains a number of films featuring the handiwork of one of cinema’s earliest and most innovative special-effects artists, Segundo de Chomón. At least 11 films from his stint at Pathé were purchased by the family. These titles were among the most frequently and best reviewed films in the entire collection, from the subtle effects seen in Appartement à louer (1906), to the grand adventure of Le Tour du monde d’un policier (1906) and clever imagery of Les Invisibles (1906), to the fantastic extravaganza of films such as this one, La Poule aux oeufs d’or.
This fable of wealth and greed is told in 4 acts: “The Conjurer’s Lottery”, “The Fantastic Fowls’-House”, “Ephemeral Fortune”, and “The Miser’s Fate”. The familiar story of the hen who laid golden eggs provides plenty of opportunities to pause and revel in fantastic displays, such as when the golden hen turns into a lovely woman, who in turn transforms her fellow chickens into a troupe of elegant dancers. The magic and the mood turn dark when thieves try to steal the eggs and the farmer is driven mad by greed, his paranoia arrestingly depicted as he is surrounded by surreal disembodied eyes. The film’s epilogue is a fanciful display of magic as the barnyard turns into a fairyland and golden eggs hatch to reveal beautiful women, made even more so through the use of intricate stenciling and liberally-applied, still vibrant dyes. – Leslie Anne Lewis. - Beautiful colour on this print of the well-known féerie. A film of surreal transformations.
The Corrick Collection 3
The Corrick Collection (1901-1914), 3
From the GCM Catalogue: Introduction
“It’s a fact! The burning Question of Next Week will be: Have you heard them? – Who? The Corricks! The Corricks!! Have you seen them? – What? Why, Leonard’s Pictures, of Course! The Musical and Pictorial Event of 1907!”
When the Corrick Family Entertainers – a vaudeville-style music troupe composed of Professor Albert Corrick, his wife Sarah, and their 8 children – began touring their native New Zealand in late 1900, they carried with them a modest collection of items: a tin trunk filled with sheet music and stands, a suitcase of performance clothes, and their instruments. By the time they finished touring 14 years later – after travelling throughout Australia and New Zealand, through Asia, the South Pacific, India, and Europe, playing for audiences that reached into the thousands – the Corricks’ luggage and equipment weighed 7 tons, was valued at more than £4,000, and included a full electrical plant, portable arc and footlights, electric fans, a motion picture camera, projectors, and screen, a slide projector, stage scenery, ornate costumes, dozens of instruments (including their own piano), and a couple of hundred films – certainly sufficient supplies to be the “Musical and Pictorial Event” of almost any year.
Advertisements proclaimed their concerts to be “An Entertainment of SCIENCE and ART”. Thanks to the depth of the Corrick Collection held at Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (which includes not only their original films, but also photographs, taped interviews, and a detailed scrapbook covering the majority of the family’s touring career), we can gain a sense of how this multi-talented family designed, managed, and presented their concerts, incorporating new ideas and technology into their programs to set themselves apart from other travelling entertainers. These practical details provide further specific examples to add to our general understanding of the methods by which itinerant exhibitors practiced their craft in the early years of cinema, while at the same time painting a more detailed picture of the Corricks’ own unique brand of showmanship.
In January 1901, 2 months after they first went on tour, the Corricks acquired an Edison projector and a small number of films from the Virginia Jubilee Singers, an American company of travelling entertainers led by Orpheus Myron McAdoo, who were touring their way through New Zealand. Advertised simply as “The Biographe”, it made its début with the Corricks a month later as the final act before the intermission, following Professor Corrick’s illustrated slide-performance of “The Lads in Navy Blue”. Like other exhibitors, the Corricks worked to increase the realism of their films by adding sound effects created using “mechanical devices behind the screen, by which not only action, but the appropriate sounds incidental to each are given.” Advertisements mention piano accompaniment by eldest sister Gertie, but reviews suggest that the larger orchestra would also sometimes join in, further integrating the films into the overall concert performance. By 1909, the troupe had addressed the public’s ever-increasing worries regarding nitrate fires, an especially important concern given that they played to packed houses in whatever local hall, church, or public building was available. A 1910 advance notice in Mount Parker, Australia, was careful to note: “The machine is enclosed in a fireproof compartment on the lines of those used in England and which was brought out and has been improved by Mr. Corrick. This company has never had a fire.”
Over the course of their touring career, the family used at least 3 different motion picture projectors, which were a particular hobby for their only son, lead clarinetist and official Kinematograph expert Leonard. One advance article brags, “[Leonard] has so altered the cinematograph used in the Corricks’ entertainment and so improved it that the manufacturers could not make out their handiwork!” While Leonard is solely credited with managing the motion picture portion of the program (known as “Leonard’s Beautiful Pictures”), over the years 2 non-family members were also mentioned in connection with the electrical aspects of the show, and so likely were on hand to share their mechanical expertise with the teenaged lead projectionist.
The addition of a specially-ordered electrical plant in 1906 (nicknamed “Leonard’s Electric Engine and Dynamo”) added a new dimension to the family’s performances, allowing them a further measure of control over the presentation of their concerts and freeing them from the worry of not knowing ahead of time the type and quality of facilities available at each venue. This gave the Corricks the opportunity to play in locations that would otherwise be off-limits (such as the new Town Theatre in Singapore, which hadn’t been completed by the time they arrived to perform) and to fulfill their advertised pledge to bring “exactly similar” programs to every town and venue, no matter how big or small. Ads trumpeted that no expense was spared in importing the 8 horse-power, 5,000 candle-light generating motor and electrical plant from Paris, and it was this dynamo that allowed them to stake a claim to being the first to bring electricity to a number of Australia’s smaller towns. The elaborate equipment was promoted most heavily during and in the months before their 1907-1909 international tour, but even several years later it was apparently still worth mentioning prominently in ads and by reviewers, even meriting its own short newspaper article in 1911 during their visit to Hobart, Tasmania.
The plant was used to power Leonard’s projector (to which the “absence of that flicker which is so trying to the eyesight” was credited), to run the “highly appreciated” electric fans that were strong enough to “shake every plant and feather in the building”, and to light both the interior and exterior of the venue. After first using carbon-arc filament lamps, they soon switched to the new tantalum filament bulbs (reportedly purchased from the first shipment ever to reach Australia), which had a brilliant white light said to be 3 times as bright as the carbon-arcs and were a great improvement over the familiar gaslights. Outside the hall, they hoisted a globe on a 40-foot pole that was said to be visible from miles away in the darkness of the Australian night, while inside, the bulbs ringing the stage “concentrated a blaze of light on the performers”. Usually this highly-involved set-up drew effusive praise, but in Calcutta a reviewer wondered: “The lantern used was an excellent one…though how the Corricks were able to procure the [required] petrol during the present famine is not easy to guess.” A mention of the family found in the next week’s social column perhaps provided an answer to the writer’s question, as it noted that they had kindly lent their portable electric light plant to illuminate the ballroom and reception halls at the annual Ramnuggur ball of the 14th King’s Hussars.
A newspaper account of their December 1907 opening concert in Bangalore gives both contemporary and modern readers a glimpse of the Corrick Family Entertainers famed showmanship, hints as to how they so dazzled their audiences, and more generally casts light onto the at-times shadowy practices of the itinerant exhibitors of early cinema: “The performance commenced punctually to the time advertised. The room was well filled long before the hour and waited impatiently in the semi-gloom of the ill-lit hall till the time gun fired. Then, as if this was the signal, the room was in a flash most brilliantly illuminated. For this sudden transformation the audience have to thank, not the Secretary or Committee of the Bowring Institute, but the Corrick entertainers. The management had put up at short notice (for it must be remembered that they only received their heavy baggage a couple of hours earlier) a complete and effective electric installation. A show of bulbs had been placed where the ordinary footlights ordinarily stand, and the chain was continued up the sides of the stage as high as the curtain pole. In a couple of minutes these lights were switched off, and the screen for the lantern display of living pictures was lowered and the exhibition of pictures commenced.”
The Corricks’ description of their concerts as “An Entertainment of SCIENCE and ART” is also a fitting description for this third installment of Corrick Collection films to be shown at the Giornate. This year’s selection includes examples of creative cinematography (La Poule aux oeufs d’or) and innovative narrative strategies (Le Tour du monde d’un policier), more early animation (Comedy Cartoons and How Jones Lost His Roll), views of natural wonders (Niagara in Winter 1909), images of nation (Reception on, and Inspection of, H.M.S. “Dreadnought”) and visions of modern industry (La Métallurgie au Creusot). We’re also presenting another example of the Corrick family’s own forays into the world of filmmaking, The Day-Postle Match at Boulder Racecourse, Western Australia, and to ease anyone going into withdrawal following the ending of the Griffith Project screenings we have Griffith’s “And a Little Child Shall Lead Them”, preserved from an original release print. Two “mini-themes” within this year’s programs are 4 films demonstrating the handiwork of Spanish special-effects wizard Segundo de Chomón from his time at Pathé, and 4 produced by Great Britain’s American-born film pioneer Charles Urban. – Leslie Anne Lewis
From the GCM Catalogue: Introduction
“It’s a fact! The burning Question of Next Week will be: Have you heard them? – Who? The Corricks! The Corricks!! Have you seen them? – What? Why, Leonard’s Pictures, of Course! The Musical and Pictorial Event of 1907!”
When the Corrick Family Entertainers – a vaudeville-style music troupe composed of Professor Albert Corrick, his wife Sarah, and their 8 children – began touring their native New Zealand in late 1900, they carried with them a modest collection of items: a tin trunk filled with sheet music and stands, a suitcase of performance clothes, and their instruments. By the time they finished touring 14 years later – after travelling throughout Australia and New Zealand, through Asia, the South Pacific, India, and Europe, playing for audiences that reached into the thousands – the Corricks’ luggage and equipment weighed 7 tons, was valued at more than £4,000, and included a full electrical plant, portable arc and footlights, electric fans, a motion picture camera, projectors, and screen, a slide projector, stage scenery, ornate costumes, dozens of instruments (including their own piano), and a couple of hundred films – certainly sufficient supplies to be the “Musical and Pictorial Event” of almost any year.
Advertisements proclaimed their concerts to be “An Entertainment of SCIENCE and ART”. Thanks to the depth of the Corrick Collection held at Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (which includes not only their original films, but also photographs, taped interviews, and a detailed scrapbook covering the majority of the family’s touring career), we can gain a sense of how this multi-talented family designed, managed, and presented their concerts, incorporating new ideas and technology into their programs to set themselves apart from other travelling entertainers. These practical details provide further specific examples to add to our general understanding of the methods by which itinerant exhibitors practiced their craft in the early years of cinema, while at the same time painting a more detailed picture of the Corricks’ own unique brand of showmanship.
In January 1901, 2 months after they first went on tour, the Corricks acquired an Edison projector and a small number of films from the Virginia Jubilee Singers, an American company of travelling entertainers led by Orpheus Myron McAdoo, who were touring their way through New Zealand. Advertised simply as “The Biographe”, it made its début with the Corricks a month later as the final act before the intermission, following Professor Corrick’s illustrated slide-performance of “The Lads in Navy Blue”. Like other exhibitors, the Corricks worked to increase the realism of their films by adding sound effects created using “mechanical devices behind the screen, by which not only action, but the appropriate sounds incidental to each are given.” Advertisements mention piano accompaniment by eldest sister Gertie, but reviews suggest that the larger orchestra would also sometimes join in, further integrating the films into the overall concert performance. By 1909, the troupe had addressed the public’s ever-increasing worries regarding nitrate fires, an especially important concern given that they played to packed houses in whatever local hall, church, or public building was available. A 1910 advance notice in Mount Parker, Australia, was careful to note: “The machine is enclosed in a fireproof compartment on the lines of those used in England and which was brought out and has been improved by Mr. Corrick. This company has never had a fire.”
Over the course of their touring career, the family used at least 3 different motion picture projectors, which were a particular hobby for their only son, lead clarinetist and official Kinematograph expert Leonard. One advance article brags, “[Leonard] has so altered the cinematograph used in the Corricks’ entertainment and so improved it that the manufacturers could not make out their handiwork!” While Leonard is solely credited with managing the motion picture portion of the program (known as “Leonard’s Beautiful Pictures”), over the years 2 non-family members were also mentioned in connection with the electrical aspects of the show, and so likely were on hand to share their mechanical expertise with the teenaged lead projectionist.
The addition of a specially-ordered electrical plant in 1906 (nicknamed “Leonard’s Electric Engine and Dynamo”) added a new dimension to the family’s performances, allowing them a further measure of control over the presentation of their concerts and freeing them from the worry of not knowing ahead of time the type and quality of facilities available at each venue. This gave the Corricks the opportunity to play in locations that would otherwise be off-limits (such as the new Town Theatre in Singapore, which hadn’t been completed by the time they arrived to perform) and to fulfill their advertised pledge to bring “exactly similar” programs to every town and venue, no matter how big or small. Ads trumpeted that no expense was spared in importing the 8 horse-power, 5,000 candle-light generating motor and electrical plant from Paris, and it was this dynamo that allowed them to stake a claim to being the first to bring electricity to a number of Australia’s smaller towns. The elaborate equipment was promoted most heavily during and in the months before their 1907-1909 international tour, but even several years later it was apparently still worth mentioning prominently in ads and by reviewers, even meriting its own short newspaper article in 1911 during their visit to Hobart, Tasmania.
The plant was used to power Leonard’s projector (to which the “absence of that flicker which is so trying to the eyesight” was credited), to run the “highly appreciated” electric fans that were strong enough to “shake every plant and feather in the building”, and to light both the interior and exterior of the venue. After first using carbon-arc filament lamps, they soon switched to the new tantalum filament bulbs (reportedly purchased from the first shipment ever to reach Australia), which had a brilliant white light said to be 3 times as bright as the carbon-arcs and were a great improvement over the familiar gaslights. Outside the hall, they hoisted a globe on a 40-foot pole that was said to be visible from miles away in the darkness of the Australian night, while inside, the bulbs ringing the stage “concentrated a blaze of light on the performers”. Usually this highly-involved set-up drew effusive praise, but in Calcutta a reviewer wondered: “The lantern used was an excellent one…though how the Corricks were able to procure the [required] petrol during the present famine is not easy to guess.” A mention of the family found in the next week’s social column perhaps provided an answer to the writer’s question, as it noted that they had kindly lent their portable electric light plant to illuminate the ballroom and reception halls at the annual Ramnuggur ball of the 14th King’s Hussars.
A newspaper account of their December 1907 opening concert in Bangalore gives both contemporary and modern readers a glimpse of the Corrick Family Entertainers famed showmanship, hints as to how they so dazzled their audiences, and more generally casts light onto the at-times shadowy practices of the itinerant exhibitors of early cinema: “The performance commenced punctually to the time advertised. The room was well filled long before the hour and waited impatiently in the semi-gloom of the ill-lit hall till the time gun fired. Then, as if this was the signal, the room was in a flash most brilliantly illuminated. For this sudden transformation the audience have to thank, not the Secretary or Committee of the Bowring Institute, but the Corrick entertainers. The management had put up at short notice (for it must be remembered that they only received their heavy baggage a couple of hours earlier) a complete and effective electric installation. A show of bulbs had been placed where the ordinary footlights ordinarily stand, and the chain was continued up the sides of the stage as high as the curtain pole. In a couple of minutes these lights were switched off, and the screen for the lantern display of living pictures was lowered and the exhibition of pictures commenced.”
The Corricks’ description of their concerts as “An Entertainment of SCIENCE and ART” is also a fitting description for this third installment of Corrick Collection films to be shown at the Giornate. This year’s selection includes examples of creative cinematography (La Poule aux oeufs d’or) and innovative narrative strategies (Le Tour du monde d’un policier), more early animation (Comedy Cartoons and How Jones Lost His Roll), views of natural wonders (Niagara in Winter 1909), images of nation (Reception on, and Inspection of, H.M.S. “Dreadnought”) and visions of modern industry (La Métallurgie au Creusot). We’re also presenting another example of the Corrick family’s own forays into the world of filmmaking, The Day-Postle Match at Boulder Racecourse, Western Australia, and to ease anyone going into withdrawal following the ending of the Griffith Project screenings we have Griffith’s “And a Little Child Shall Lead Them”, preserved from an original release print. Two “mini-themes” within this year’s programs are 4 films demonstrating the handiwork of Spanish special-effects wizard Segundo de Chomón from his time at Pathé, and 4 produced by Great Britain’s American-born film pioneer Charles Urban. – Leslie Anne Lewis
The Merry Widow (1925)
In the Presence of Leatrice Gilbert Fountain, the daughter of John Gilbert.
The Merry Widow / Iloinen leski
US 1925. PC: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. D: Erich von Stroheim; P: Erich von Stroheim, Irving Thalberg; SC: Erich von Stroheim, Benjamin Glazer; intertitles: Marian Ainslee - based on the comedy L'Attaché d'ambassade by Henri Meilhac (1861) - libretto by Victor Léon and Leo Stein for the operetta composed by Franz Léhar (premiered in 1905 in Vienna); DP: Oliver T. Marsh, [Ben Reynolds, William Daniels]; ED: Frank E. Hull; AD: Cedric Gibbons, Richard Day; COST: Richard Day, Erich von Stroheim; technical adviser and designer: Don R. Overall Hatswell; CAST: Mae Murray (Sally O’Hara), John Gilbert (Prince Danilo Petrovich), Roy D’Arcy (Crown Prince Mirko), Josephine Crowell (Queen Milena), George Fawcett (King Nikita I), Tully Marshall (Baron Sadoja), Albert Conti (Danilo’s adjutant), Wilhelm von Brincken (Danilo’s aide-de-camp), Don Ryan (Mirko’s Adjutant), Hughie Mack (innkeeper), Charles Margelis (Flo Epstein), Edna Tichenor (Dopey Marie), Gertrude Bennett (Hard Boiled Virginia), Zalla Zarana (Frenchie Christine), Edward Connelly (ambassador), Dale Fuller (Sally’s maid); extras: Clark Gable, John Pringle [John Gilbert’s father]; orig. l: 10,027 ft.; 3086 m, /22 fps/ [123 min announced] actual duration 126 min
print: Österreichisches Filmmuseum.
Live musical accompaniment / Score (incorporating motifs by Franz Lehár):
Maud Nelissen
Performed by Orchestra Mitteleuropea
with Merima Kljucom (accordion)
Conducted by Maud Nelissen
E-subtitles in Italian. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 3 October 2009.
A wonderful live cinema performance with a full orchestra. Maud Nelissen had taken maybe fifty-fifty Léhar and her own original score music, which blended together very well. I love this music, and it was a pleasure to enjoy it played with such a good appetite. - Revisited: the film, in which Stroheim is in full command of his profession. It is a completely original re-interpretation of the hit operetta. The film has not the gravity of Greed or The Wedding March. It is a satiric comedy with moments of gravity, as Danilo realizes that his love is true, and he is ready to put his life on stake. Mae Murray, Alex D'Arcy and Tully Marshall play like marionettes, in strong caricature. Only John Gilbert has a wide range of emotion and passion. - The print (bought via Hollywood Classics) seems complete, and seems like it has been reconstructed with great care. The visual quality is highly variable, with scenes that often have a strongly duped quality. Of course many scenes, including close-ups of Mae Murray, have been soft and filtered originally. I seem to remember that there are very good prints of Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow. - After the screening we kept listening and humming Léhar tunes in our hotel room, and Maud Nelissen's warm, tender and humoristic interpretation kept growing in memory.
The Merry Widow / Iloinen leski
US 1925. PC: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. D: Erich von Stroheim; P: Erich von Stroheim, Irving Thalberg; SC: Erich von Stroheim, Benjamin Glazer; intertitles: Marian Ainslee - based on the comedy L'Attaché d'ambassade by Henri Meilhac (1861) - libretto by Victor Léon and Leo Stein for the operetta composed by Franz Léhar (premiered in 1905 in Vienna); DP: Oliver T. Marsh, [Ben Reynolds, William Daniels]; ED: Frank E. Hull; AD: Cedric Gibbons, Richard Day; COST: Richard Day, Erich von Stroheim; technical adviser and designer: Don R. Overall Hatswell; CAST: Mae Murray (Sally O’Hara), John Gilbert (Prince Danilo Petrovich), Roy D’Arcy (Crown Prince Mirko), Josephine Crowell (Queen Milena), George Fawcett (King Nikita I), Tully Marshall (Baron Sadoja), Albert Conti (Danilo’s adjutant), Wilhelm von Brincken (Danilo’s aide-de-camp), Don Ryan (Mirko’s Adjutant), Hughie Mack (innkeeper), Charles Margelis (Flo Epstein), Edna Tichenor (Dopey Marie), Gertrude Bennett (Hard Boiled Virginia), Zalla Zarana (Frenchie Christine), Edward Connelly (ambassador), Dale Fuller (Sally’s maid); extras: Clark Gable, John Pringle [John Gilbert’s father]; orig. l: 10,027 ft.; 3086 m, /22 fps/ [123 min announced] actual duration 126 min
print: Österreichisches Filmmuseum.
Live musical accompaniment / Score (incorporating motifs by Franz Lehár):
Maud Nelissen
Performed by Orchestra Mitteleuropea
with Merima Kljucom (accordion)
Conducted by Maud Nelissen
E-subtitles in Italian. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 3 October 2009.
A wonderful live cinema performance with a full orchestra. Maud Nelissen had taken maybe fifty-fifty Léhar and her own original score music, which blended together very well. I love this music, and it was a pleasure to enjoy it played with such a good appetite. - Revisited: the film, in which Stroheim is in full command of his profession. It is a completely original re-interpretation of the hit operetta. The film has not the gravity of Greed or The Wedding March. It is a satiric comedy with moments of gravity, as Danilo realizes that his love is true, and he is ready to put his life on stake. Mae Murray, Alex D'Arcy and Tully Marshall play like marionettes, in strong caricature. Only John Gilbert has a wide range of emotion and passion. - The print (bought via Hollywood Classics) seems complete, and seems like it has been reconstructed with great care. The visual quality is highly variable, with scenes that often have a strongly duped quality. Of course many scenes, including close-ups of Mae Murray, have been soft and filtered originally. I seem to remember that there are very good prints of Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow. - After the screening we kept listening and humming Léhar tunes in our hotel room, and Maud Nelissen's warm, tender and humoristic interpretation kept growing in memory.
The Four Just Men
[The film was never released in Finland].
GB 1921. PC: Stoll Film Company. D+SC: George Ridgwell; - based on the novel by Edgar Wallace (1905); DP: Alfred H. Moises; AD: Walter W. Murton; CAST: Cecil Humphreys (Manfred), Owen Roughwood (Poiccart), Teddy Arundell (Sir Philip Ramon), George Bellamy (Gonzalez), Charles Tilson-Chowne (Inspector Falmouth), Charles Crocker-King (Thery), Robert Vallis (Billy Marks); print: BFINA. 4962 ft /20 fps/ [66 min announced], actual duration 62 min
E-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 3 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "A recent discovery by the British Silent Film Festival is The Four Just Men, an efficient and gripping adaptation of Edgar Wallace’s first major success featuring international political terrorists, ingenious murders, and a ticking clock. This detective thriller relates the story of how the “Four Just Men” carry out their threat to kill the Foreign Secretary, Sir Philip Ramon, if he passes an Aliens Extradition Bill making it possible for an asylum seeker to be deported from England to be murdered by a repressive government. It is no coincidence that the novel was published in 1905, the year in Britain of the Aliens Act, which contained clauses allowing for the deportation of “criminals” and undesirables. However, the morality of these clever vigilantes plays second fiddle to their ingenious methods for building terror and suspense as the deadline approaches.
The novel is very cinematic. Wallace had a knack for dialogue and inventive plots. His ability to create mounting suspense in “stand alone” scenes converts particularly well to the screen – for example, the build-up of the announcement of the threat to Sir Philip from a regulation notice in the back pages of The Times, to the sarcastic comments of Athenaeum Club members, to the concerned curiosity on behalf of a polite newspaper, to the instant reaction of the editor of the aptly named Megaphone, who sits up, barks orders at a reporter, and drafts sensational headlines in one manoeuvre: “CABINET MINISTER IN DANGER -- THREATS TO MURDER THE FOREIGN SECRETARY -- 'THE FOUR JUST MEN' -- PLOT TO ARREST THE PASSAGE OF THE -- ALIENS EXTRADITION BILL --EXTRAORDINARY REVELATIONS.” You can see just how a screenwriter could visualize that scene and almost hear the rat-a-tat of the telex machine – it is almost a cliché of 1930s crime drama – but written in 1905.
This early adaptation by George Ridgwell for Stoll is very faithful to the original, efficient and assured. It is said that during the 1920s every fourth book being read in the world was by Edgar Wallace, so it hardly surprising that he should have an impact on the cinema. Hundreds of adaptations followed in a lifelong love affair with the cinema for Wallace, who was on his way to Hollywood to work on King Kong when he died in 1931. – Bryony Dixon"
The print had a variable quality, from quite ok to pretty soft, slightly duped, with black missing, maybe produced via a digital intermediate?, with further small problems in the screening of at the worst three simultaneous reflections from video projectors etc. - A historically important film: an early Edgar Wallace adaptation. The IMDb lists 167 of them, and this was the seventh, based on his first novel. - I agree with Bryony Dixon: there is a lot of cinematically promising material here. They include the devices of the switchboard and the printing press. It is a professionally made thriller with the exciting and disturbing twist that the four criminals use terror to pursue justice. The climax is an assassination via telephone (a lethal electric shock delivered via the telephone wire). But this film does not rise to the level of Lang or Hitchcock, as there is little psychological depth.
GB 1921. PC: Stoll Film Company. D+SC: George Ridgwell; - based on the novel by Edgar Wallace (1905); DP: Alfred H. Moises; AD: Walter W. Murton; CAST: Cecil Humphreys (Manfred), Owen Roughwood (Poiccart), Teddy Arundell (Sir Philip Ramon), George Bellamy (Gonzalez), Charles Tilson-Chowne (Inspector Falmouth), Charles Crocker-King (Thery), Robert Vallis (Billy Marks); print: BFINA. 4962 ft /20 fps/ [66 min announced], actual duration 62 min
E-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Donald Sosin. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 3 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "A recent discovery by the British Silent Film Festival is The Four Just Men, an efficient and gripping adaptation of Edgar Wallace’s first major success featuring international political terrorists, ingenious murders, and a ticking clock. This detective thriller relates the story of how the “Four Just Men” carry out their threat to kill the Foreign Secretary, Sir Philip Ramon, if he passes an Aliens Extradition Bill making it possible for an asylum seeker to be deported from England to be murdered by a repressive government. It is no coincidence that the novel was published in 1905, the year in Britain of the Aliens Act, which contained clauses allowing for the deportation of “criminals” and undesirables. However, the morality of these clever vigilantes plays second fiddle to their ingenious methods for building terror and suspense as the deadline approaches.
The novel is very cinematic. Wallace had a knack for dialogue and inventive plots. His ability to create mounting suspense in “stand alone” scenes converts particularly well to the screen – for example, the build-up of the announcement of the threat to Sir Philip from a regulation notice in the back pages of The Times, to the sarcastic comments of Athenaeum Club members, to the concerned curiosity on behalf of a polite newspaper, to the instant reaction of the editor of the aptly named Megaphone, who sits up, barks orders at a reporter, and drafts sensational headlines in one manoeuvre: “CABINET MINISTER IN DANGER -- THREATS TO MURDER THE FOREIGN SECRETARY -- 'THE FOUR JUST MEN' -- PLOT TO ARREST THE PASSAGE OF THE -- ALIENS EXTRADITION BILL --EXTRAORDINARY REVELATIONS.” You can see just how a screenwriter could visualize that scene and almost hear the rat-a-tat of the telex machine – it is almost a cliché of 1930s crime drama – but written in 1905.
This early adaptation by George Ridgwell for Stoll is very faithful to the original, efficient and assured. It is said that during the 1920s every fourth book being read in the world was by Edgar Wallace, so it hardly surprising that he should have an impact on the cinema. Hundreds of adaptations followed in a lifelong love affair with the cinema for Wallace, who was on his way to Hollywood to work on King Kong when he died in 1931. – Bryony Dixon"
The print had a variable quality, from quite ok to pretty soft, slightly duped, with black missing, maybe produced via a digital intermediate?, with further small problems in the screening of at the worst three simultaneous reflections from video projectors etc. - A historically important film: an early Edgar Wallace adaptation. The IMDb lists 167 of them, and this was the seventh, based on his first novel. - I agree with Bryony Dixon: there is a lot of cinematically promising material here. They include the devices of the switchboard and the printing press. It is a professionally made thriller with the exciting and disturbing twist that the four criminals use terror to pursue justice. The climax is an assassination via telephone (a lethal electric shock delivered via the telephone wire). But this film does not rise to the level of Lang or Hitchcock, as there is little psychological depth.
La Nuit du 11 septembre
[The film was not released in Finland]
FR 1920, released: 1922. PC: Ermolieff-Films. D+SC: Dominique Bernard-Deschamps - based on the novel Le Crime de Jean Malory by Ernest Daudet (1877); CAST: Vera Karally (Renée de Brucourt), Eugénie Boldireff (Sophie Sterouska), Séverin-Mars (Jean Malory), Paul Vermoyal (Ivan Goubine), Henri Svoboda (Daniel de Maldrée); tinted; 957 m /18 fps/ [47' announced] 42'
Restored by La Cinémathèque française in 1994, a new tinted print in 2009. French+English intertitles. E-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Philip Carli. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 3 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Even before Lenin signed the decree nationalizing the private film industry, Joseph Ermolieff (Josif Yermoliev), then working in Yalta, determined to move his company to France. On 4 April 1919 he set out for Paris, where he negotiated with his one-time employers Pathé. He immediately set up production as “Ermolieff-Films. Moscou-Paris-Yalta”, and within months had embarked on his first French film, La Nuit du 11 Septembre. The film was completed before Ermolieff returned to Yalta in January 1920, to bring back with him his major Russian collaborators to France. Thanks to problems with censorship, however, it was not released until 1 September 1922, shortly before the company became Albatros. The film figures in the Albatros inventory, but very little information is available about its production.
Ermolieff chose a French subject and a French director. Le Crime de Jean Malory was written in 1877 by Ernest Daudet (1837-1921), a prolific and talented writer, always dogged by the qualification, “elder brother of Alphonse Daudet”. The director Dominique Bernard-Deschamps (1892-1966) had a very sporadic career, directing only a dozen films between 1908 and 1940, of which the only ones remembered are his sound films, the excellent Le Rosier de Madame Husson, Monsieur Coccinnelle (1938), a gentle satire on the French petite bourgeoisie, and, if only for von Stroheim’s bizarre performance in an all-star cast, Tempête (1940). It is likely that Pathé recommended the young director, who had just completed two films for the company.
The surviving print of the film runs approximately 45 minutes – the original length was recorded as 70 minutes – but shows very few signs of truncation. However, such excessive compression of Daudet’s novel results in something of a comic-book narrative style, most evident in the final scenes of full-blown horror.
The story begins on a battlefield, where the officer Jean Malory encounters a sinister scavenger, Ivan Goubine, who comes to reflect and incite his own darker self. Implored by a dying officer, Commander Maldrée, to help his fiancée care for his orphaned son, Malory instead robs the lady and burns down her house. She escapes, but with the loss of her reason.
Years later, thanks to his ill-gotten fortune, Malory is the Baron de Brucourt, living in a castle with his daughter Renée. By chance Renée meets and falls in love with the son of Commander Maldrée. But Malory/Brucourt has promised his daughter to the sinister Prince Bebleden, who is revealed as none other than Ivan Goubine…
Goubine is played by Paul Vermoyal (1888-1925), who has the look of Conrad Veidt and, in corporeal and facial contortion, anticipates the more extravagant performances of German Expressionist horror: it is no surprise that he was acting at the Grand Guignol theatre when Abel Gance discovered and cast him in Le Droit à la vie (1917). Jean Malory is the stolid Sévérin-Mars (1873-1921), Gance’s leading actor in J’accuse and La Roue, who was to work with Bernard-Deschamps again in L’Agonie des aigles (1922), from a script by Julien Duvivier.
For the rest of his principal cast, however, Ermolieff found distinguished Russian émigrés, who seem fortunately to have been passing through Paris at that moment. Renée is played by one of Bauer’s major stars at the Khanzhonkov studio, Vera Karalli (1889-1972), who was also a soloist at the Bolshoi Theatre. (As mistress of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Karalli has always been supposed to have been a co-conspirator, present at the murder of Rasputin in December 1916, though her name was never exposed by the male perpetrators, Prince Dmitry and Prince Felix Yusupov.) Henri Svoboda, who plays the young Maldrée, was also an admired solo dancer of the Imperial Ballet. Comoedia (7 December 1919) reported that Karalli and three premiers danseurs of the Imperial Ballet – Svoboda, Eugenia Boldireff, and Tourievsky (whose role in the film is not established) – would appear in La Nuit du 11 Septembre, and planned to make other films, including Madelon and La Marche funèbre, neither of which appears to have been realized. Karalli, as Vera Caroly, was to make only one more film, the German Die Rache einer Frau (1921).
Although Ermolieff was without his regular design staff, the film is good-looking, with some striking skyline shots in the opening battlefield sequence. There is no evidence where the interiors were shot, but it is likely (from the use of narrow sets with deep vistas) that Ermolieff used the Pathé Montreuil studio, which he was to lease on 16 July 1920 following the foundation of Société-Ermolieff-Cinéma. Some recent sources credit Nicolas Toporkov with the photography, but Toporkov was a cameraman with Wrangel’s army, who only arrived in France in 1920, joining Ermolieff in 1921. Most likely Ermolieff was working with Pathé staff technicians.
The only explanation of the film’s title is that the grave of Jean Malory’s wife, who dies early in the film, is inscribed “Jeanne Malory …11 Septembre 1919”. - The film was restored in 1994 from a period nitrate print of a Canadian release version, acquired in the early years of the Cinémathèque Française, with French and English intertitles. The original tinting was reproduced in 2009. – David Robinson"
In the intertitles there are several quotes from Victor Hugo's lyrics. - The speed was fast. The tint was heavy. The print had the look of one intermediate too many (loss of fine detail, in certain shots facial expressions are missing). - It was impressive to see Vera Karalli again after Thursday's viewing of After Death. - Below average. The story and the performances are over-the-top melodramatic but the film is professionally made, and there is visual flair in the cinematography. Of historical importance.
FR 1920, released: 1922. PC: Ermolieff-Films. D+SC: Dominique Bernard-Deschamps - based on the novel Le Crime de Jean Malory by Ernest Daudet (1877); CAST: Vera Karally (Renée de Brucourt), Eugénie Boldireff (Sophie Sterouska), Séverin-Mars (Jean Malory), Paul Vermoyal (Ivan Goubine), Henri Svoboda (Daniel de Maldrée); tinted; 957 m /18 fps/ [47' announced] 42'
Restored by La Cinémathèque française in 1994, a new tinted print in 2009. French+English intertitles. E-subtitles in Italian, grand piano: Philip Carli. Viewed at Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, 3 Oct 2009.
From the GCM Catalogue: "Even before Lenin signed the decree nationalizing the private film industry, Joseph Ermolieff (Josif Yermoliev), then working in Yalta, determined to move his company to France. On 4 April 1919 he set out for Paris, where he negotiated with his one-time employers Pathé. He immediately set up production as “Ermolieff-Films. Moscou-Paris-Yalta”, and within months had embarked on his first French film, La Nuit du 11 Septembre. The film was completed before Ermolieff returned to Yalta in January 1920, to bring back with him his major Russian collaborators to France. Thanks to problems with censorship, however, it was not released until 1 September 1922, shortly before the company became Albatros. The film figures in the Albatros inventory, but very little information is available about its production.
Ermolieff chose a French subject and a French director. Le Crime de Jean Malory was written in 1877 by Ernest Daudet (1837-1921), a prolific and talented writer, always dogged by the qualification, “elder brother of Alphonse Daudet”. The director Dominique Bernard-Deschamps (1892-1966) had a very sporadic career, directing only a dozen films between 1908 and 1940, of which the only ones remembered are his sound films, the excellent Le Rosier de Madame Husson, Monsieur Coccinnelle (1938), a gentle satire on the French petite bourgeoisie, and, if only for von Stroheim’s bizarre performance in an all-star cast, Tempête (1940). It is likely that Pathé recommended the young director, who had just completed two films for the company.
The surviving print of the film runs approximately 45 minutes – the original length was recorded as 70 minutes – but shows very few signs of truncation. However, such excessive compression of Daudet’s novel results in something of a comic-book narrative style, most evident in the final scenes of full-blown horror.
The story begins on a battlefield, where the officer Jean Malory encounters a sinister scavenger, Ivan Goubine, who comes to reflect and incite his own darker self. Implored by a dying officer, Commander Maldrée, to help his fiancée care for his orphaned son, Malory instead robs the lady and burns down her house. She escapes, but with the loss of her reason.
Years later, thanks to his ill-gotten fortune, Malory is the Baron de Brucourt, living in a castle with his daughter Renée. By chance Renée meets and falls in love with the son of Commander Maldrée. But Malory/Brucourt has promised his daughter to the sinister Prince Bebleden, who is revealed as none other than Ivan Goubine…
Goubine is played by Paul Vermoyal (1888-1925), who has the look of Conrad Veidt and, in corporeal and facial contortion, anticipates the more extravagant performances of German Expressionist horror: it is no surprise that he was acting at the Grand Guignol theatre when Abel Gance discovered and cast him in Le Droit à la vie (1917). Jean Malory is the stolid Sévérin-Mars (1873-1921), Gance’s leading actor in J’accuse and La Roue, who was to work with Bernard-Deschamps again in L’Agonie des aigles (1922), from a script by Julien Duvivier.
For the rest of his principal cast, however, Ermolieff found distinguished Russian émigrés, who seem fortunately to have been passing through Paris at that moment. Renée is played by one of Bauer’s major stars at the Khanzhonkov studio, Vera Karalli (1889-1972), who was also a soloist at the Bolshoi Theatre. (As mistress of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Karalli has always been supposed to have been a co-conspirator, present at the murder of Rasputin in December 1916, though her name was never exposed by the male perpetrators, Prince Dmitry and Prince Felix Yusupov.) Henri Svoboda, who plays the young Maldrée, was also an admired solo dancer of the Imperial Ballet. Comoedia (7 December 1919) reported that Karalli and three premiers danseurs of the Imperial Ballet – Svoboda, Eugenia Boldireff, and Tourievsky (whose role in the film is not established) – would appear in La Nuit du 11 Septembre, and planned to make other films, including Madelon and La Marche funèbre, neither of which appears to have been realized. Karalli, as Vera Caroly, was to make only one more film, the German Die Rache einer Frau (1921).
Although Ermolieff was without his regular design staff, the film is good-looking, with some striking skyline shots in the opening battlefield sequence. There is no evidence where the interiors were shot, but it is likely (from the use of narrow sets with deep vistas) that Ermolieff used the Pathé Montreuil studio, which he was to lease on 16 July 1920 following the foundation of Société-Ermolieff-Cinéma. Some recent sources credit Nicolas Toporkov with the photography, but Toporkov was a cameraman with Wrangel’s army, who only arrived in France in 1920, joining Ermolieff in 1921. Most likely Ermolieff was working with Pathé staff technicians.
The only explanation of the film’s title is that the grave of Jean Malory’s wife, who dies early in the film, is inscribed “Jeanne Malory …11 Septembre 1919”. - The film was restored in 1994 from a period nitrate print of a Canadian release version, acquired in the early years of the Cinémathèque Française, with French and English intertitles. The original tinting was reproduced in 2009. – David Robinson"
In the intertitles there are several quotes from Victor Hugo's lyrics. - The speed was fast. The tint was heavy. The print had the look of one intermediate too many (loss of fine detail, in certain shots facial expressions are missing). - It was impressive to see Vera Karalli again after Thursday's viewing of After Death. - Below average. The story and the performances are over-the-top melodramatic but the film is professionally made, and there is visual flair in the cinematography. Of historical importance.
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone, 2009)
Programma/Programme 2009
Eventi speciali/Special Events
The Merry Widow (Erich von Stroheim, US 1925)
A colpi di note/Striking a New Note
Harmonies de Paris
An audience with Jean Darling
Der Golem
The Rink
Alice's Wild West Show
Ukulelescope
Sherlock e gli altri/Sherlock and Beyond
Albatros
Il canone rivisitato/The Canon Revisited
Riscoperte e restauri/Rediscoveries and Restorations
Ballets Russes 100
Bois d'Arcy 40
Die Gezeichneten (Carl Theodor Dreyer, DE 1922)
The Eagle (Clarence Brown, US 1925)
Der Fürst von Pappenheim (Richard Eichberg, DE 1927)
Giornate di sole (Renato Spinotti, IT 1934)
La grazia (Aldo De Benedetti, IT 1929)
Die Kleine vom Varieté (Hanns Schwarz, DE 1926)
Kodachrome Two-Color Test Shots No. III (Eastman Kodak Company, US 1922)
Kurotegumi Sukeroku (Shochiku Shimokamo Studio, JP 1929)
The Letter from Hollywood (US, c. 1926)
Monkeys' Moon (Kenneth Macpherson, GB 1929)
The Rose of Rhodesia (Harold Shaw, South Africa, 1917)
On Strike (Bud Fisher Films Corporation, US 1920)
The Three Kings/Ein Mädel und 3 Clowns (Hans Steinhoff, GB/DE 1928)
Eine versunkene Welt (Alexander Korda, Austria 1922)
Cinema delle origini/Early Cinema
Italo Pacchioni
The Corrick Collection, 3
Screen Decades
Jugoslovenska kinoteka 60
Omaggio al/Tribute to the British Silent Film Festival
Dive/Divas: Francesca Bertini, Pola Negri, Asta Nielsen
Cesare Gravina
Ritratti/Portraits
Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite (Kevin Brownlow, GB 1968)
Charlie Goes to School (Peter Wyeth, GB 2009)
Gedächtnis (Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander, BRD 1982)
Helsinki, ikuisesti (Peter von Bagh, FI 2008)
Heppy's Daughter (Film Friends Productions, GB 2009)
L’Homme au chapeau de soie (Maud Linder, FR 1983)
Note su Sherlock Jr. di Buster Keaton (Francesco Ballo, Paolo Darra, IT 2009)
Muti del XXI secolo/21st Century Silents
Eventi speciali/Special Events
The Merry Widow (Erich von Stroheim, US 1925)
A colpi di note/Striking a New Note
Harmonies de Paris
An audience with Jean Darling
Der Golem
The Rink
Alice's Wild West Show
Ukulelescope
Sherlock e gli altri/Sherlock and Beyond
Albatros
Il canone rivisitato/The Canon Revisited
Riscoperte e restauri/Rediscoveries and Restorations
Ballets Russes 100
Bois d'Arcy 40
Die Gezeichneten (Carl Theodor Dreyer, DE 1922)
The Eagle (Clarence Brown, US 1925)
Der Fürst von Pappenheim (Richard Eichberg, DE 1927)
Giornate di sole (Renato Spinotti, IT 1934)
La grazia (Aldo De Benedetti, IT 1929)
Die Kleine vom Varieté (Hanns Schwarz, DE 1926)
Kodachrome Two-Color Test Shots No. III (Eastman Kodak Company, US 1922)
Kurotegumi Sukeroku (Shochiku Shimokamo Studio, JP 1929)
The Letter from Hollywood (US, c. 1926)
Monkeys' Moon (Kenneth Macpherson, GB 1929)
The Rose of Rhodesia (Harold Shaw, South Africa, 1917)
On Strike (Bud Fisher Films Corporation, US 1920)
The Three Kings/Ein Mädel und 3 Clowns (Hans Steinhoff, GB/DE 1928)
Eine versunkene Welt (Alexander Korda, Austria 1922)
Cinema delle origini/Early Cinema
Italo Pacchioni
The Corrick Collection, 3
Screen Decades
Jugoslovenska kinoteka 60
Omaggio al/Tribute to the British Silent Film Festival
Dive/Divas: Francesca Bertini, Pola Negri, Asta Nielsen
Cesare Gravina
Ritratti/Portraits
Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite (Kevin Brownlow, GB 1968)
Charlie Goes to School (Peter Wyeth, GB 2009)
Gedächtnis (Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander, BRD 1982)
Helsinki, ikuisesti (Peter von Bagh, FI 2008)
Heppy's Daughter (Film Friends Productions, GB 2009)
L’Homme au chapeau de soie (Maud Linder, FR 1983)
Note su Sherlock Jr. di Buster Keaton (Francesco Ballo, Paolo Darra, IT 2009)
Muti del XXI secolo/21st Century Silents
Friday, October 02, 2009
Posle smerti
After Death / Kuoleman jälkeen. RU 1915. PC: Hanzhonkov. D+SC: Jevgeni Bauer - based on the tale "Klara Militsh" (1882) by Ivan Turgenev. DP: Boris Zavelev. CAST: Vitold Polonski (Andrei Bagrov), Vera Karalli (Zoja Kadmina). /18 fps/ 51 min. A Gosfilmofond print, version restored in 1988 with reconstructed intertitles based on Turgenev's tale. E-subtitles in Finnish by Tuulia Lehtonen. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 1 Oct 2009. - Revisited Bauer's haunting tragedy of a missed love. The lone scientist and the actress "with an attentive look in her dark eyes". They meet once in a snowy park, but they misunderstand each other. He reads in the papers that she has taken poison.Her spirit never lets him go, he sees her as an angelic figure in a cornfield. He gets her diary and photographs of her. Once when he falls down, he has her dark hair in his hand. - Superior to the popular ghost romances of the last decades, this belongs to the class of Ugetsu and Vertigo. - Inspired music selection and performance by Mauri Saarikoski (violin) and Marko Puro (piano).
Ditja bolshogo goroda
Child of the Big City / Suurkaupungin lapsi. RU 1914. PC: Hanzhonkov. D+SC+AD: Jevgeni Bauer. DP: Boris Zavelev. CAST: Elena Smirnova (Manetshka / Mary), Mihail Salarov (Viktor Kravtsov), Emma Bauer (dancer). /18 fps/ 43 min. Print: Gosfilmofond, reconstructed with Russian / English intertitles in 1988 by Juri Tsivian, Mylinkova. E-subtitles in Finnish by Tuulia Lehtonen. Viewed in Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 1 Oct 2009. - Revisited the cruel tragedy by Bauer, of the transformation of the modest Manetshka to the vamp Mary, "with a rare, perhaps innate skill in bringing Victor to ruin". He commits suicide, and in the last image Mary steps over his corpse: "They say an encounter with a corpse brings luck. To Maxim's!" - Unique style with long takes, long shots, deep focus. - Visual quality of print often beautiful, occasionally with high contrast and occasionally with frameline situations. - Inspired music selection and performance by Mauri Saarikoski (violin) and Marko Puro (piano).
Strekoza i muravei / The Grasshopper and the Ant
Heinäsirkka ja muurahainen. RU 1913. PC: Hanzhonkov. D: Wladyslaw Starewich. Based on Aesop's fairy-tale. 134 m /18 fps/ 5 min. A KAVA restoration in colour (Juha Kindberg) of a vintage print with Finnish / Swedish intertitles. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 1 Oct 2009. - A fine and complete version of the animation created with prepared insects. - In this story the grasshopper freezes to death in the snow. - Inspired music selection and performance by Mauri Saarikoski (violin) and Marko Puro (piano). - First screening of this restored version.
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