Paul Cuff

Maldone (1928; Fr.; Jean Grémillon)

Last week, courtesy of the association Kinétraces, I had the great privilege of introducing Jean Grémillon’s first feature film at the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé in Paris. The French text of my introduction will, hopefully, find its way into publication at some point. What follows here is different, as I want to focus on my reactions to the film itself—and on the difficulties of using digital copies to summon the fleeting memory of films seen projected on 35mm.

Maldone (1928; Fr.; Jean Grémillon)

It’s the opening shot of the film, and already a kind of revelation. On the left of frame, the line of poplars recedes into the distance. On the right, the canal curving away. In the foreground, between water and trees, the long grass, the weeds. And everywhere, the motion of the wind. It’s one of the founding stories of cinema, the way that the first audiences to see the Lumière brothers’ Le repas de bébé (1895) were more fascinated by the motion of the trees in the background of this “view” than the supposed subject of baby and parents in the foreground. And you can see why: there is something uncontrolled, something unexpected, that forces its way into our perception, that makes itself the star. The wind takes on agency, makes the trees announce its presence. It’s as though a different drama might be taking place at the back of the scene, a more expressive one; we want to crane our necks to see around the corner, to know what’s happened, what’s about to happen.

In the opening shot of Maldone, this half-hidden natural drama is allowed to occupy the whole frame. It’s just the wind in the trees, in the grass, but it’s also a rhythm of life, a sense of place and time that made my skin prickle. This was a 35mm copy, projected on a large screen. I was sat close to the screen, in the centre, and for the duration of this first shot it was my whole world. You could see every leaf, every blade of grass. The wind moved through the scene, making everything shift, turning trees and verge into a kind of kaleidoscope.

Now, a week later, I must overlay my memory of that projected image onto the equivalent image of this off-air copy—the only available copy of Maldone available to study. Even with this first shot, the paucity of the digital image—its obfuscating murk, its blocky banks of pixels—almost makes me want to stop watching the film, to fall back purely on the memory of what Maldone looked like last week. But this is a problem all film scholars (especially of silent cinema) must confront. There’s no way to study everything first-hand, in 35mm copies, projected on large screens as originally intended. And even in these conditions, we are still at a distance from the original experience of these films. Consider that the 35mm copy of Maldone we watched in Paris was itself a ghost of its former self. Maldone was one of the first French features to be shot entirely on panchromatic filmstock. All the contemporary reviews mention how stunning it looked, these opening scenes in particular. (Here is Edmond Epardaud, writing on the same date that I write this—15 March—ninety-five years ago: “The whole beginning of Maldone […] is like a visual hymn to nature. In a complete and harmonized fabric of elemental images, Grémillon notes the slow life of French canals, the flat horizons where poplars dream, the white roads whose sinuous line follows the soft undulations of the ground.” Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, 15 March 1928.) But the first nitrate positives struck from these panchromatic negatives are long gone. What we watched in March 2023 was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy… Every time 35mm is copied it loses a fraction of its image quality. The dazzling nitrate images of 1928 are impossible to see. And as beautiful and rich and detailed as the 35mm print of Maldone was and is in 2023, I cannot but want to see beyond it, to imagine its beauty and richness and detail sharpened and intensified as it once was.

The landscapes of Maldone dominate the life of its titular character. Olivier Maldone (Charles Dullin) is a wagoner, who walks at the pace of his horses along the towpath of the canal. The 2001 restoration that is the basis of my broadcast copy has reconstructed some of the original music used at the film’s premiere. For this opening sequence, the music is by Debussy, “Nuages” from his Nocturnes suite (1892-99), and its slow, haunting, meandering mood fits the scenes well. But the film also seems to emphasize the sultriness of the score: it’s a hot day, and if we see the “clouds” of the music on screen, they are high and bright, and serve to punctuate the huge expanses of sky Grémillon shows us above the chalky roads that gleam white.

Before now, I was never wild about Charles Dullin. I had seen him in the two big productions of Raymond Bernard that sparked his own interest in producing: Le Miracle des loups (1924) and Le joueur d’échecs (1927). I’d seen both films projected on large screens (albeit via DVD), but his performances hadn’t quite stuck with me. His long face and nose, his narrow eyes, his faintly sinister gait—these did not seem to invite me into this man’s inner life on screen. But here in Maldone, on the big screen, I change my mind. He has a kind of intensity, a privacy of feeling, that makes itself felt in the way he moves, the way he glances. We first see him from behind, walking away along the path. When we are introduced to him via a title, we then see him in a close shot he shares with his horses. The way he feeds them, strokes them, smiles with them—it’s as if nothing beyond them quite matter. And his smile as they take the treat from his hand is almost a snarl. His long face and nose suddenly made a kind of sense in the scene, as if he were meant to spend his life in their company here.

But then comes the gypsy girl, Zita (Génica Athanasiou). We first see her face in close-up, over which we see superimposed two fortune-teller’s cards: La Reyne de Deniers (the Queen of Coins) and La Maison de Dieu (The Tower). It’s a slightly arcane deck being drawn, here—a mix of the Latin variety of cards (in which Coins are one suit among Swords, Cups and Batons) and a more familiar image from Tarot cards. But even in this slightly obscure imagery, Grémillon—with the slowness of the superimposed dissolves, the matching of face and pictures—makes clear their fatalistic significance. Even if we don’t know quite what they signify, we know that a kind of destiny is being invoked.

This was Athanasiou’s first film. She was a member of Dullin’s regular troupe of actors from the Théâtre de l’Atelier, which Dullin ran in Paris. But Athanasiou takes to the screen so naturally. From a dark, indefinable space, her dark eyes look straight out at us. Never mind “diegetic space”: Grémillon wants us to know her gaze directly, to feel her eyes upon us. That is what counts here. So when Maldone encounters her in the next scene, we know in advance the kind of spell that she might cast upon him.

Grémillon films this encounter at a kind of crossroads: the sluice gate, where Zita’s troupe of gypsies crosses the path of Maldone’s horses. The camera looks down on Maldone, his back turned to us. Then we see Zita, so close to the camera that her face is out of focus. We see the space before her, the canal stretching into the distance. Where is Maldone? Zita picks up a handful of dust from the ground—again, we see her from behind—and throws it out of the frame. It’s such a strange, unsettling way of filming their encounter. The spaces are clear enough, but the way Grémillon shows us the back of both characters gives a weird sense of foreboding. We can’t read their faces before what happens happens: motivation is obscured, hidden. Cut to Maldone, far below us; he turns, looks up.

Then comes a shot to make you gasp: Zita, seen from a low angle, the trees moving in the wind behind her. The trees are a blur, their solidity transformed by the lens into a kind of softened wave that looks as though it’s about to break beyond the frame. Zita is looking at us—through us, past us. She’s drawn herself up, her sleeves catching the wind. She turns to face us, places her arm seemingly to lean on the bottom of the frame (the fence below her hands is out of sight: the framing of her gesture is so perfect, it really does look like she’s about to lean out of the screen). She looks fearsome, extraordinary. It’s a shot that has stayed with me since I first saw the film, many years ago, and to see it projected from a 35mm print was another kind of revelation. It’s a fabulous image, designed to impress, to transfix.

For when we cut back to Maldone, in close-up, the smallest of twitches passes over his face. There are glints of light in his dark eyes. But he’s so still: everything that’s happening is happening inside his head. We cut back to Zita, now in a different composition, the camera more on a level with her body. She’s less unreachable. There is some secret, untranslatable communication here. She changes her posture once, twice, three, four times—shifting her back, shoulders, head, eyes. Maldone is surely lost. We are surely lost. Look at how Grémillon then frames our last glimpse of Zita, which is also her last glance at us in this scene. The way Grémillon highlights the perspective, the receding hillside, trees, road; the huge slab of sky; and Zita, smiling, glowing against the dark expanse of trees and hill. Who can resist such a film?

“You’re not twenty anymore”, says the bargeman to Maldone, as Maldone watches Zita walk away from this first encounter. It’s a neat line, and got a laugh in the screening I attended in Paris. But look at the way Grémillon follows his joke: a medium close-up of Maldone, looking slightly sullen, slightly sad. Look at how the rope he carries for his horses is wound around his neck. It’s like a noose, in place but as yet untightened. Maldone walks away. And it’s surely not the walk of a young man. There are innumerable films of this period (and beyond) where Dullin—forty-two at the time of filming in 1927—would be pretending to be twenty. It’s a mark of the film’s maturity that part of Maldone’s tragedy is to be already past his youth when the opportunity arrives to start a new life (with money and marriage), or even two new lives (with a lover and a life on the road). Maldone’s ensuing entrapment and attempts at flight are set within this acknowledgement of age and ageing.

And throughout the film, other characters are always looking on from the margins. Look at the shot that follows Maldone walking away. It’s a middle-aged woman, leaning on a wall, watching the slow, slow, passage of the barge. Grémillon fills the film with glimpses of these real people—never characters, always people. And real animals—Maldone’s horses, the dog sleeping on the barge, the chickens in the coop—that likewise take their place in this world. The pace of working life is also real. After his encounter with Zita, the film gives us a section presaged by the title “Days are all alike”. So we see the drowsy barge, the trees passing slowly overheard, and the dreamy smile of Maldone as he takes it all in. Grémillon shows us the light reflected on the water (and it truly dazzles on 35mm), then superimposed over Maldone’s face. Time is measured by these flicks of light, by the waving of the trees.

Zita and her family get by through reading fortunes and a little light theft. Maldone works by guiding his horses, who pull the barges. The drama of the film shifts in this section, as we see for the first time Maldone’s family estate, which he has long ago abandoned, together with his brother, Marcellin, and uncle, Juste. The world of this estate is a world apart. The brother and uncle are seen enjoying the space around them through leisure: Marcellin rides horses for pleasure, but Olivier Maldone walks alongside them for work. These two separate realms are intercut in through a kind of fatalistic editing. First, Zita’s mother reads Maldone’s palm. “Your enemy is inside you”, she says. “I see a man and his enemy in the same man… A vagabond, a rich man… One of them must destroy the other.” And when, in the tavern, Maldone reads Zita’s palm, Grémillon intercuts between their exchange of glances and the fate of Marcellin, who is killed while out riding.

Again, Grémillon grounds this kind of fatalism with the world around his characters. This scene takes place in a working-class tavern. We see old men and women, going about their lives. At the Maldone estate, the stable hands and the workers on the grounds are likewise non-professional actors. They people this world, make it real, whole. Later in the film, when Maldone returns to his family estate and marries Flora (Annabella) he escapes to the surrounding villages whenever he can. The pull of the open landscapes draws him away from home, but so too do the people. Maldone stands and admires the sight of a traction engine being used to help sift the grain. Grémillon shows us the workers, real workers, lifting and threshing the hay. The camerawork feels so natural it looks up at their work, peers into the barn, nestles among the grass, observes the machine, catches the faces of the men and women as they work.

This is also one of the reasons that the performance of Georges Séroff as Léonard, the old family servant, slightly grates with me. For after Marcellin dies, he is sent out to find Olivier Maldone. Léonard’s huge white whiskers, his bald head, his mouth perennially hanging open, make him a comic character whose slightly exaggerated performance is at odds with those around him. When he takes the train, he is surrounded by palpably real people, non-professional performers, the everyday users of the local train service. It’s worth remembering that Grémillon made his name in the film industry between 1923 and 1926 through the making of documentaries. Many of them focused on the ordinary lives of workers—men and women who made small livings as laborers, fishermen, seamstresses, roadbuilders, brewers, tram conductors.

So to the dance at Saint-Jean, where Maldone takes over the accordion to play for the dancers, and Grémillon gives us one of the most extraordinary dance sequences of the silent era. The sets here (by André Barsacq, Dullin’s regular theatre designer) were constructed with four walls, and with ceiling. Every conceivable angle is exploited: shots from outside, inside, high angles, low angles; the camera is among the dancers, above the dancers; it looks down from the ceiling, up from the floor. But it all builds slowly, so that you hardly realize just how far Grémillon is about to push his expressive means. There is one dance, relatively gentle, in which the main event is Zita’s arrival, then another—in which Maldone leads the dancers in a line that leads around the entire space of the hall, upstairs, downstairs, and back again. Then Maldone flirts and half dances with Zita, before a final dance increases the tempo even further.

The melody is given us in a title: “La Belle Marinière” (valse), and then (per the instructions of the original score) by the accordion itself. A stranger dances with Zita. Maldone sees her. The cutting accelerates. Close-ups of hands, feet, of the accordion being squeezed, of the dancers swirling, of drinks, or skirts, of faces. Then Zita and her partner, seen from above, clinging together, her skirts spinning below then.

Grémillon holds this shot, and holds it, and holds it. We watch them spin, held together by a kind of gravitational force, a centripetal energy—it’s desire, it’s heat, it’s two bodies pressed against each other. It’s a shot that could go on forever, a whirlpool that spins and spins. And I could watch it forever, hypnotized. It’s a shot of extraordinary power. The lovers are giddy. Zita blinks, looks up. They kiss, and the music stops. The accordion falls from Maldone’s hands, just as (in the theatre) the musician in the orchestra must drop his instrument. Maldone chucks a drink into his rival’s face, and Grémillon captures this in handheld shots that quiver with fury, just as the fight is a dazzling eruption of quick-cutting and frenzied whips and pans of the camera. The screen pulses with anger, the camera lurching back and forth along the axes of the fight; it’s in the belligerents’ faces, feeling their anger, reeling with their punches; it’s in the eager crowd, jostling, dodging, pressing close. The stranger is ejected. The crowd hails Maldone.

In the early hours, Maldone and Zita are alone in the deserted tavern. But Léonard stumbles in and recognizes Olivier Maldone as the man he seeks. He shows him a photo of the young Olivier Maldone. Maldone gazes at Maldone. It’s the first time we see a kind of double for this man, this man whose fate we know is to have his enemy within him. Zita edges away. A close-up of her hand in Maldone’s, slipping slowly from his grasp. The men get closer. Léonard weeps. Maldone weeps with him.

Three years pass (and the suddenness of the transition, the knowledge of time passed, is a kind of shock). Maldone has married Flora (Annabella). This was Annabella’s second film, having been launched into a kind of stardom by her role as Violine in Gance’s Napoléon the year before (1927). She spends much of that film being sad and wistful, and in Maldone she spends all her time looking sad and wistful. (If you want to see her being given the chance for a wider, even wilder, range of emotions, you should seek out Pál Fejös’ Tavaszi Zápor (1932), a film of surpassing strangeness where she gets to live an entire life of hope, misery, squalor, prostitution, holy fury—before dying and ascending to heaven, only to find a way of saving her illegitimate daughter back on earth. It’s really quite something, and shows what Annabella could do when given a film centred entirely on her emotional life.) For her ability to be beautiful and neglected and sad, Annabella is well cast in Maldone, I suppose—but I do pity her for being so pitiable, and wonder what more she might have done.

In these scenes on the estate, Grémillon lets the film grow sluggish. Married life is monotonous for Maldone. He looks awkward in his expensive suit. He moves stiffly. He has his hands behind his back. Flora’s father, M. Lévigné (Roger Karl), reads the paper. Maldone stares idly at his family. His uncle Juste (André Bacqué) is a lepidopterist. He examines butterflies under with a lens, and Grémillon’s camera looks down on him from behind, another lens superimposed in close-up: Juste becomes a specimen for our attention. But all Maldone’s “family” are seen in close-ups in the same way, from behind, the camera looking over their shoulder. They are made into strangers by the way Grémillon frames them, denies us their faces.

It’s a relief to get outside, to see Maldone on horseback. But he’s took well dressed, still suited, gloved, cravated. His uncle is catching butterflies. Juste shows Maldone his latest catch in a jar. While Juste looks away, Maldone removes the lid, taps the glass, watches the butterfly escape, reseals the jar, and hands it back to Juste. It’s a lovely scene and got another good laugh in the screening I attended. And when Maldone laughs in the next shot, it’s a roar—his body rocking against an open sky. Juste asks him why he must make Flora so unhappy. Why not travel, soothe his restlessness?

Maldone is in a hotel lobby. Zita walks by. Maldone follows. Flora is upstairs, alone. Grémillon distils all her loneliness into two shots. We see Flora on the threshold of the room. The threshold is light, the room is dark. Flora stands silhouetted on the left of the frame, staring into the dark. A close-up of the floor: dim swathes of light, refracted through patterned lace curtains, move across the carpet. Vehicles must be passing outside. It’s a simple shot, but everything about it carries emotional and expressive weight. Each beam of light that crosses the floor marks the passing of time, as well as giving a sense of other lives being lived—outside the room. Even the luxury of the room makes it sadder: for the ornate curtains make the light entering the room drearier and the outside world more obscure. The mere act of isolating this detail—of taking the trouble to look at it at all—is a kind of sadness, of desperation. For surely it’s Flora who looks, who sees the light passing over the floor of her room, whose subjectivity we are invited to share with this shot. You stare at the floor when you’ve nothing better to do, when you’ve no-one to share your unfilled hours. It’s an image of transience, but an image of boredom. It’s a hotel room in a nameless town. Flora goes over and stands next to the curtains. She doesn’t open them or look beyond them. She just stands there.

Maldone and Zita enter a dancehall. A jazz band plays. A trio dance. Flora sits in her empty room, as the orchestra belts out the jazzy, fortissimo polytonalism of Millhaud’s La création du monde (1922-23). But for the next scene, the lyrical section of this same piece gives the old lovers’ time together a dreamy, sensuous dimension. Watch how Maldone presses his face against Zita’s arm. On a large screen, you can really see how he’s inhaling the scent from the pit of her arm—he drags his nose across her skin. He takes her hand. Grémillon cuts to a strange vision of Zita, superimposed over the fronds of a plant. She’s as out of reach here as she was in the first close-ups given her in the film. Maldone senses this too, and presses her close. He sees another image from his past: the slowness of the barge moving along the canal. (Time passes before him: between each flashback a waiter has come and brought the next course. A huge lobster is replaced with a great platter of fruit.) But a man is eyeing Zita from across the room, and there is another flashback to the dance and the fight in the tavern. Maldone’s two lives are meeting, colliding. Zita leaves. It was nice revisiting her past, she tells him, but she has another life now. The dancers fill the space. The screen overlays them, multiplies their presence, showers them with streamers. Five in the morning: Maldone is alone on the dancefloor. The floor is covered in piles of streamers. They resemble the piles of cut hay we saw being threshed earlier in the film: the urban dancefloor parodies the rural farm. Maldone returns to Flora. They weep together.

On their return trip in the carriage, visions assail Maldone. Past and present are quite literally combined: over images of Maldone and Zita earlier in the film, Grémillon superimposes the flashing light and shade of the roadside trees. The cutting accelerates. We see the old Maldone, whipping his horses into a fury. The horses appear to double, split. As foretold, there are two Maldones, two lives in one man. But just as the rhythm of cutting grows frenzied—shots of the road, of trees, of the horses’ legs, of the spinning wheels, of Flora’s nervous face—Maldone comes to his senses.

But back on the estate, he cannot escape “his obsession”. Everything reminds him of the past: the labourers, the fields, the wind in the trees. “Each night, the prison of contentment closes in on him…” Look at Maldone, hunched at the family dining table. Flora is knitting a baby’s tunic. Look at the way Grémillon makes everything awkward: the massive lamp placed between the married couple, the way all gestures are made over people’s shoulders, the way the only light and warmth in the scene is at the table, the last place Maldone wants to be. Flora puts her arms over his shoulders. He throws them off, marches out.

He rides up the hillside. We see the valley, far below, and the mountains beyond. Seen on 35mm, this is truly a vision to inspire travel. (God, how disappointing to be watching this broadcast copy again, and not to be able to relive that desire to run down that hillside on screen.) This is where he should be, surely. So he ignores Flora, argues with her father, and plans to leave.

He writes his letter—almost a suicide note, a suicide of one half of himself—on a desk strewn with his uncle’s butterfly cases. He himself has become a kind of well-dressed creature, pinned to the estate. He runs upstairs to a loft. In the mirror is his new life, well dressed. In the mirror is his old life, the scruffy wagoner. Grémillon’s camera finds interesting ways of viewing Maldone in these scenes: again, the uncomfortable looks over the shoulder, or the camera perched above him, looking down from the very roof of the loft as he changes into his old clothes. Thus we observe Maldone splitting, transforming, regressing. The text of his fate is superimposed over the image: “one must kill the other”. This text—the only text to appear outside the confines of an intertitle, within the world of the film—is a kind of indelible stamp, as fatalistic a visual signature as any in the film. As if obeying its command, Maldone gets out a gun and shoots the mirror. The glass shatters, but the broken image is of his old self: continuity has been abandoned, for Maldone is already in the clothes of his former life. It’s a weird, unsettling scene. I think back to Der Student von Prag (1913), and the price the student must pay for killing his double. What is Maldone’s price for this act of symbolic murder?

Maldone is riding so fast the camera can barely keep up with him, as it tracks at breakneck speed through the meadows, the dark wall of trees looming behind the rider. An image of a whirlpool, upside-down, spills onto the screen. The camera flees before Maldone. He rides on, and on. The camera tracks, then pans, uncertainly, seeking a new direction, as if it might fall, or the world fall before it. Maldone’s face, not triumphant, but astonished, almost fearful. The image of his horse’s pounding legs and flanks, superimposed over the tree-lined canal. But it’s not the canal, it’s a reflection of the canal, upside-down and inverted by the camera; it’s the water of the canal. It’s another mirror, another doubling. And it’s an image of stillness beneath the image of the galloping horse. The image of the horse fades away, leaving nothing but the reflection of the canal. FIN.

Watching this film on 35mm was a treat, even if (as we were warned by an introductory title) the print contains elements that are beyond restoration. There were some interesting curiosities about “end of part two” etc. midway through several intertitles, suggesting a rather complex history of structure and reel-based changes. Maldone, after all, has a complex textual history…

At its premiere in February 1928, the length of Maldone was 3800m: about 165 minutes long, when projected at 20fps. It was then reduced by its distributor—supposedly with the guidance of the film’s producer (Dullin himself), screenwriter (Alexandre Arnoux), and Grémillon—before receiving a general release in France in October 1928. But what survives now is a version of 1857m, a little over 80 minutes of screen time—i.e. less than half the film Grémillon originally assembled. The film was very well received in 1928, but the premiere version was criticized for its excessive length. According to one reviewer, it was “a pure masterpiece compromised by clumsy editing and insufferable longueurs”(Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, 1 June 1928). It’s impossible to know, now, how much of significance was cut in the summer of 1928 and how much more has been lost since then.

I can understand why the film was cut, as even some of the surviving scenes on the estate feel (deliberately and purposefully) slow. And the number of flashbacks that occur in the surviving film feels too much: they clearly belong to a longer version of the film, where the flashbacks are as much for the audience’s benefit as for the characters. (Across 165 minutes, flashbacks are a useful way of singling out certain scenes from the wealth of narrative. Across 80 minutes, they feel like we have a short attention span.) Likewise, the reconstructed music for the 2001 restoration often works well but feels a bit uneven. Grémillon and his musical collaborators (Marcel Delannoy and Jacques Bridouin) surely planned the choice of compositions carefully and arranged them according to the montage of the film in February 1928. How well can you hope to synchronize music with a film missing over half its visual material? At the Paris screening last week, Maldone was accompanied by an excellent improvised piano score by Satsuki Hoshino. There is some benefit in an improvised score for such a fragmented print: the music can react to what is there, rather than struggle to adapt to what is not there.

But the amount of missing material surely highlights just how much feeling, how much meaning, Grémillon packs into every shot—and on watching it again, I could easily imagine cutting what remains even further, to make something slightly tighter and more coherent. You could see the whole dramatic interchange of Maldone, Zita, and Flora, in a handful of scenes, gestures, glances. There are shots in this film—the landscapes, the close-ups of Zita, the spinning dancers, the parting of hands, the galloping horse—that encapsulate the whole film, that stay with you long after it has ended.

What else can I say? The gulf between the broadcast version I knew and the 35mm copy from the CNC we saw at the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé was vast. I loved the film more, was more moved, more transfixed, more impressed by everything in it. It’s a strange, uneven, bewitching film. Even as a fragment of its original self, Maldone is beautiful enough.

Paul Cuff

Music for October (1928; USSR; Sergei Eisenstein/Grigori Aleksandrov)

Until recently, it was most common to see silent Soviet films via the versions circulated by Mosfilm or Gosfilmofond that originated in the late 1960s-70s. There is a familiar kind of soundtrack: a giant orchestra, crammed into a thin mono recording. In these confines, the music seems to warp and wobble rather than reverberate. The scores tend to be aggressive, brooding, threatening—with the noise of real gunfire thrown in for good measure. They often sound like cobbled-together Shostakovich (and sometimes are) but more often feature music by a composer you’ve never heard of whose name is uncertainly transliterated from Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet in the “restoration” credits. (Did the composer of the 1969 score for Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg (1927) wish to be called “Yurovsky” or “Lurovski”? I still don’t know. Confusingly, his son—the conductor Michail Jurowski—went by a different spelling, as do the conductor’s own sons, also both conductors.) Some of these Soviet recordings have very effective, and affecting, passages. The opening few minutes of Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (1927)—in a restoration from 1973(?)—is among my favourite in all Soviet cinema: super slow-motion riders pass before a screen of trees, as a hushed, yearning pulse of music flows beneath. Image and sound grip you instantly. It’s a hauntingly beautiful opening shot. (The rest of the film rather loses me.)

But the film historian is on dodgy ground with these 60s-70s versions. The way these copies are curated for our use severely interferes with their historical status. Where are the original credits? Are these the original titles? Is there any missing footage? And what of the music? Were scores assembled especially for the films? Was the music original or arranged? Was it any good?

These questions are commonly asked about many works of musical theatrical history. Take opera, for instance. I was recently relistening to Halévy’s La reine de Chypre (1841). No single edition of this grand opera is “definitive”, in the sense that it underwent continual editing throughout its time on stage. Even during rehearsals, music would be cut or added or rewritten. Sometimes, this complex, often last-minute work was too much for Halévy himself, so he outsourced parts of the orchestration (or even the composition itself) to an assistant. New arias were inserted at the behest of singers, new passages of intermediary music at the behest of stage managers. And all this was without any of the score being printed in full. The “performing edition” of the work would exist across a wide range of documents: parts for the orchestra, the conductor, the composer. Many of these would be notated only in shorthand, overlaid with numerous manuscript corrections or instructions from conductor or composer as they worked on the production. Once the run of performances had ended, this array of paperwork would end up in various collections, often being scattered in the process. If the opera was produced elsewhere, it would undergo further changes and produce further paper trails. Even if all of this paperwork survived, the result is a kind of collective palimpsest with competing and conflicting evidence for what the score should be. Thus, there are always editorial choices to be made with historical material. The musical content of La reine de Chypre shifted across time, never being the same from one season to the next. So when the opera was “restored” in the 2010s, there was a huge range of choice regarding what music to include or exclude from the recording. (There would also, inevitably, be budgetary considerations: recording all the various possible numbers, even for an appendix on a bonus CD, would dramatically increase the cost of the project.) So when a new “performing edition” was created and then the recorded in 2017, a lot of music that survived in various sources was excluded (the overture, the ballet, the gondoliers’ chorus…).

This complex textual history is paralleled in the world of silent film music. Even if an original score existed, its survival is subject to all the same processes as might affect an opera score: different editions of the film for different markets, or for subsequent revivals; paperwork for different scores produced by different musicians for different cinemas etc. It follows that the question of a silent film’s musical restoration is as complex as that for its visual restoration. But how often does the same level of attention get paid to the music as to the image? And how often is this issue of musical reconstruction even acknowledged or addressed by the studios who own the films or the companies that release them on DVD? Whereas the Palazetto Bru Zane release of La reine de Chypre on CD in 2018 is accompanied by a fabulous book, including essays on the work’s genesis, reception, and textual history, most silent films do not get anything like this kind of documentation. Instead, there is the familiar blurb boasting “original versions” of this, and “complete restorations” of that. The word “original” and “complete” are rarely qualified, and even in cases where they are most appropriate, they never tell the whole story.

In relation to October (1928), the work of Edmund Meisel (1894-1930) and Bernd Thewes (b.1957) is an interesting case in point. Thankfully, the Edition filmmuseum DVD (2014) is as good as it gets when it comes to documentation. All the issues mentioned thus far are addressed, qualifying the selling point of this edition as featuring “the original orchestral score by Edmund Meisel”. As Richard Siedhoff writes in the liner notes:

[O]nly the torso of Edmund Meisel’s body of film music survives. Not only was the archiving of films and music not common practice at the time, but with the ascendancy of sound films, interested in the music of silent film composers waned precipitously. In the few cases where the ‘original music’ for silent films has survived at all, it is only as piano sheet music or as incomplete, handwritten orchestra parts. Musical directors in cinemas used the piano music as ersatz scores, since they were easier to work with than full scores. So full scores were almost never printed and when a film was no longer in distribution, the orchestra parts were stored somewhere or sometimes simply destroyed. […] [W]hat we have of [Meisel’s] film music comes from piano sheets, for which new instrumental arrangements have been written, and which have been adapted, re-arranged, lengthened and re-defined for longer versions of a film.

This is an orchestral score for October, but one whose orchestration has had to be rearranged by a different composer. It is both a score by Edmund Meisel and a score by Bernd Thewes. Not having a complete picture of how Meisel arranged his music, we must give credit to Thewes for filling out the sound world that survives on Meisel’s extant staves. What we have now likely offers a much better listening experience than for audiences in 1928. As Siedhoff writes of Meisel’s scores: “Prepared in a great hurry at the time, they are riddled with mistakes. Working from them in live performance must have ranged from torture to total chaos.” And while Meisel worked with Eisenstein’s approval on both Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October, Eisenstein would ultimately break off contact with the composer over the presentation of October (claiming Meisel had it projected deliberately slowly to aid his music).

So, talking about the way this music sounds when performed is a complex issue. I do no propose to write a piece on the whole film and score: it would exhaust me to write it as much as it would you to read it. Besides, while the film is a baroquely dazzling exercise in filmmaking, it wears me out after about 45 minutes. The images are always superb, but the drama loses me. This is where music can make such a difference. The Meisel/Thewes score for October kept me engaged musically even when my interest in the drama dwindled.

I want to write about the sequence which seemed to me the best combined use of image and music in the film—or rather, the scene where this combination gave me the greatest pleasure. It begins about 25 minutes into the film and shows Kerensky, the head of the provisional government, heading into the Winter Palace to assume his office.

We see three men, their backs to us, advance down the hall. The shot is slightly undercranked, so that they seem to waddle at speed rather than walk or march. The first shot doesn’t show their faces, and in the second shot they are so small as to lack features. Eisenstein makes them tiny in the palatial spaces, miniscule dictators. Meisel knows the scene for what it is: it’s comic, absurd, playful. It’s also repetitive and surreal. We see the endless columns, the endless arches, the endless steps, and the figures’ endless movement along and up, and up—and up. So Meisel spells out a musical beat that is both steady, banal, but almost too fast: it’s as though we can hear the men waddling at speed through the score. And Meisel/Thewes knows exactly how to get the best out of the rhythm. Below pizzicato strings, the main two-note figure of this section is played on the trombone, an instrument whose low, slightly bluff sonic roundness gets a lot of use in comedic film scores. The performance (I cannot speak of the score as written or notated) plays this up: there is a certain sliding in the transition between notes, giving this simple beat a sense of being out of breath, ever so slightly out of balance. The shape of the beat (descending phrases: one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four) suggests a kind of effortful trudge as much as a triumphant march.

Then, as we cut from a title (“The dictator”) to a closer view—but again from the rear—the strings take up the two-note step of the beat and the trombone and brass start to warm up into a kind of fanfare, supported now by the martial crash of drums. The trio of generals ascend the stairs.

Another title: “Commanders-in-chief…”. So now the strings develop the beat into a melody, albeit equally simple and just as repetitive. They are supported by the snare drums and, deep below them, the great blast of the tuba. It’s a pleasingly bombastic development of the initial musical idea, but it’s still deliberately simple—you can spell out the one-two-three-four of the beat, the tuba joining in for the first and third note. The tuba has the same role as the trombone in the first few bars of the scene, only it now amplifies the pompous oom-pah, oom-pah rhythm of the generals’ footsteps.

For the generals are now ascending a giant marble staircase, and Eisenstein distends the time it takes them to climb. First we have a long shot from the right side, looking left; then a title completes the information begun in the previous text: “…of the army and navy”, before a view from the left of the staircase repeats the same pattern of movement. Up the stairs they go, as the music builds in volume. (Another title: “Prime Minister”). Eisenstein cuts closer, but again so that we see only the backs of the commanders. At this point, the snare drums double their speed below the rhythm of the brass, as if to say: keep going! keep going! The trombones are now given a delicious upward swing to keep step with the drums’ quickened pulse.

Having cut closer, Eisenstein then cuts further away: the officers are still ascending, and it becomes clear that he’s making them repeat the same steps as at the end of the previous shot. As he does so often in October, Eisenstein uses montage to make successive shots overlap in time: space is made subservient to time. Just as we start to appreciate how elaborately the upward march of the generals is developing, an intertitle cuts in: “And so on, and so on, and so on.” But the text, too, becomes a visual joke: you read it from top to bottom, each line successively indented so that the phrases take the form of steps. Disconcertingly, you are reading the text from left to right, top to bottom, while each line moves further to the left as you go down: the way we read the text is moving in the opposite direction to the way the figures are moving on screen. It’s an extraordinarily complex visual/textual joke, and a brilliant way to make the intertitles graphic in a meaningful way.

Cut back to the stairs, now viewed from another angle, and this time we see the generals from the front for the first time. We cut from the stairs to the statues that overlook the figures. Stone hands hold out crowns of laurel, and the cutting seems both to join in with the march but also break it, or even to anticipate its culmination at the top. “The hope of the Fatherland and the revolution—” a title announces, and the statues are seen from below, from disconcerting angles, mirroring one another, as if they might topple over us. After the next title: “A.F. Kerensky”, we finally get a close-up of a human face. But this too is disconcerting, threatening, surreal. For it breaks the rhythm of ascent, the continuity being built up (however playfully) in the previous shots: here is Kerensky glowering down into the camera, leaning brow-first into the lens, the angle of his head and the side lighting transforming his face into a kind of arrow pointing at us. Eisenstein cuts to the statues bearing laurels, and a train of thought seems to dance across the screen—for Kerensky breaks into a smile, but a smile made sinister by the deep shadow in which it is formed.

And now—well over a minute into the sequence—we finally see the top of the stairs! A line of lackies looms from the shadows in this cavernous space, a space which—though we have seen so many shots of its details—surreally escapes our full comprehension. How exactly is the staircase arranged? Is there one set of steps, or are two sets of steps facing each other? And where are the steps leading? How high have we climbed, how many flights of steps?

“The Tsar’s lackeys”, a title announces. (And the film’s titles are always faintly sarcastic, mocking, whenever they aren’t slogans or exclamations or punctuation points.) A large man, whose uniform bulges with his bulk, steps forward—and the statues seem to look down on him, the statuary of the imperial past, the dark columns made defy gravity by the camera’s tilted angle. There are salutes seen from close, from afar, from close; time overlaps, gestures overlap, formalities pile into one another, pile onto one another. Their handshake takes an age, it’s captured in one, two, three, four, five different shots—emphasizing the lacky’s subservience, Kerensky’s effort to look imposing, and (cumulatively) the sheer awkwardness of a handshake that lasts this long.

Kerensky moves on, and the musical rhythm shifts once again. It grows in subdivision, the same foursquare beat now marked with the tuba spelling out all four notes in the bar. And listen to the strings in conjunction with the added brass: there’s such a glorious swing to the way the music is played, sounded out. The bright notes of a glockenspiel punctuate the rhythm; the notes are like shining medals, buttons or baubles catching the light. And it’s a marker of how beautifully orchestrated the sequence has become: listen to the sense of acoustic depth here, from the dark blasts of the tuba, through the swell of strings, the rasp of snare drums, up to the gleam of the glockenspiel. It’s such an intelligent piece of musical texture. You sense both the cavernous space of the hall, the near-dark extremities of the palace—and also the sheen of manservants’ buttons, the jingle of medals on the lackey’s chest.

“What a democrat!” the title says, as more handshaking takes place. Every servant is greeted, every servant nods happily to the next. The shaking is seen in close-up, from a distance, from close-up, from a distance… It’s an endless sequence made even more endless the way time and space overlap, the way the editing repeats and moves restlessly back and forth. And all the while, the orchestra is growing in volume, warming to its swing. It’s still the same, simple idea: four ascending notes that are repeated (one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four), followed by a three-note phrase that rounds off the tune. Thus, even the music (like that earlier intertitle) spells out the steps and (in its last three-note phrase) a kind of subservient bow, a satisfied execution of an about-turn before the four notes of the march climb once again. Both the visual and the musical halves of this scene could be extended forever, ad infinitum. Only the little variations keep it all building: visually, there are the various stages of the staircase, the titles, the lackeys that give the repetition a kind of crescendo; and musically, the tempo shifts and orchestration build the simple motif into a great movement of sound.

Finally, Kerensky has shaken hands with everyone, and the two commanders take the final steps behind him. Listen how that last three-note phrase of the melody now becomes a five-note phrase in the brass: one-two-three, four-five—and then a six-note phrase: one-two, three-four-five, six. It’s a simply delicious little development; the steady step of the music is becoming a skittish skip, as though the march is about to break into a dance. It’s ludicrously infectious.

“The democrat at the Tsar’s gate.” Kerensky approaches the doors to the inner palace. The anticipation is both built and suspended through editing: Kerensky’s hands clasped behind his back; shots of coats of arms on the door; shots of lackeys nodding, winking to each other; shots of Kerensky’s boots; shots of the generals; and then—in a dazzlingly strange cutaway—we see a spectacular mechanical peacock unfurl its wings, then spin around to show us its backside. Even the bird’s movement is split, repeated, made gloriously weird—close-ups of wings, feathers, feet, face—and rhymes with the turning heads of the servants, the spinning salute of the lackey, the upturned faces of the commanders. The gates open across one, two, three, four shots (wide shot, closer shot, close-up, tighter closer-up; in each shot the movement of the door is pushed back a few frames to be seen again), and the music now slows—the beat is the same, but the tempo slows by at least half. The musical march sinks back into the tonic with an ecstatic sigh—of relief as much as anything. You realize how tense this sequence—visually and musically—had become. How much longer can out satisfaction be denied? Just as the generals are climbing the steps, the music has been chromatically climbing its way through the march, creating a tonal tension that needs resolving—and is only resolved in these final bars, when we see the gates open and then shut behind Kerensky. The last bass note is allowed to extend out over the final images of the scene: the massive locks of the gates, the image of the sealed doors. In one sense, it’s like the echo of the shutting doors reverberating through the palace. But because this is a purely musical resonance, it attains a heightened sense of strangeness. It’s a kind of afterglow, a dark, ominous extension in sound. This kind of moment doesn’t exist in a paper score; it exists only when music is performed. It’s emotive, intelligent, brilliant musicmaking.

The whole thing reminds me of another joke built on similar musical-dramatic ideas in Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867). At the end of Act 1, the little state is preparing for a pointless war with its neighbour. The sword belonging to the Duchess’s late father is ceremoniously carried before the assembled forces. She sings an area, “Voici le sabre de mon père”, accompanied by the chorus. Offenbach repeats the individual blocks of the line: “Voici le sabre, le sabre, le sabre, le sabre de mon père!” The Duchess points to the sword, sings several lines to the same melody, before the chorus likewise repeats the main refrain several times to the same text (the libretto merely describes their line as: “Voici le sabre etc.”). Then the Duchess picks up the sword and repeats the exact same musical passage she’s just sung, with only moderately different words, before handing the sword to her favourite soldier. The voices of the chorus don’t even get this much variety, now repeating their first chorus wholesale. The joke is in the repetition, and in the banality of the tune extended ad infinitum in ludicrous martial pomp. But the best bit is at the very end of the act, when the soldiers are marching off to battle. “You forgot my blessed father’s sword!” the Duchess cries, whereupon the poor chorus must strike up the same melody again. Offenbach and his librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) are making the same joke, to much the same end, as Eisenstein and Meisel. Film and operetta give us martial music and pompous scenery, continually inflated and endlessly repeated, to highlight the paucity of the ideology that underpins them. Puffed up with its own vacuity, it becomes bathetic.

Having now watched this sequence about forty times, and listened to it about a hundred times as I write, I grow more and more impressed by how well it’s put together. The Meisel/Thewes score makes a tremendous impact, and is by far the best way to experience this film. The soundtrack for the DVD for October was recorded at a live screening of October in Berlin in 2012. There is often something disconcerting in live recordings of music for silent films (I’ve written about this issue elsewhere). But this recording is excellent. You get the sense of excitement in the orchestra at the climaxes—the great benefit of live performances—with minimal acoustic interference from the performance space. Indeed, the only such instance is at the final’s final chord when there is a great burst of cheering and applause—which is a lovely way to end the experience at home, and links your own enjoyment of the film with that of the audience in 2012. It reminds us that what we’re watching was and is meant to be experienced as a live event, performed by musicians and theatre staff, in front of a large audience. It’s why I love silent cinema.

Paul Cuff

A Woman of the World (1925; US; Malcolm St Clair)

My exploration of more Pola Negri films continues with an adaptation of Carl van Vechten’s novel The Tattooed Countess (1924). This Paramount production was directed by Malcolm St Clair, a veteran comedy actor and director, but someone still relatively new to feature films. But as its star, Negri was a growing box office attraction—and the film plays up her status as an exotic outsider in America…

A Woman of the World (1925; US; Malcolm St Clair)

The opening title: “The Riviera—Where one may start a love affair—or end one—in surroundings beautiful enough for either occasion.” Closeup: drinks are poured, raised, returned to the table. One hand takes another. Finally, a man’s face lowers itself into the frame to kiss the woman’s hand. The framing makes his appearance faintly comic, faintly sinister. His smile is lugubrious. The couple step over to the veranda edge, overlooking the sea. But already the woman is unconvinced. He’s whispered this line to other women, she says. She leaves and we stay with the man: we see his self-satisfied grin, his finishing off the glassful of liqueur. Inside, he returns to the woman and takes her in a kiss. And as he does, we cut to a door opening: it is Countess Elnora (Pola Negri). Her face moves through a series of thoughts, emotions. She already wore a smile when first we glimpsed the face, but as the door swings open the smile fades, then some other notion flickers at its edge. It is a different kind of smile: a knowing, resigned, tired flicker of a thing. Like an acknowledgement of what she already knew, or expected. The couple, in each other’s arms, look up. Now it’s their turn for smiles to change, fade. Elnora moves to a photo given “to my beloved—for eternity”, removes it from its frame, and tears it up.

“Dearest, I was merely playing—a moment’s diversion—a woman of the world should understand.” I like it when a film’s title appears in the film, especially when it’s italicized like this. The phrase disguises its misogyny and cruelty with an apparent compliment. But it’s a compliment that serves to categorize and thus control its subject.

And we do not yet know Elnora. Indeed, we know her only by her image, and by the image of Negri we bring to the film. There is something as yet unmasked, unrevealed about her in this first scene. Negri’s hair is like a kind of black helmet, a sheening, almost threatening bob-cut. It’s like a kind of defence, imprisoning as it is protective. And look how she pours herself a drink in her room, and takes her time to elongate the studied sorrow of her mouth before taking a sip. And now she laughs, tipsily, as the man comes in and takes her in his arms. “I knew you’d understand. You’re mine for eternity”, he says, smarmily. She lets him closer to her face, then belts him across the cheek. “Eternity! A week ago I tattooed my arm as proof of my love for you—branded myself with your crest—and today…” She speaks through her teeth, white against lips that are almost black. “—woman of the world, yes; but not the world’s woman!” She ejects him from her room, as her servants are busy packing her things. She’s going to the far side of the world, “to forget”.

Cut to the far side of the world, somewhere in the American mid-west, “Maple Valley”, where everyone knows each other’s business. Two women sit knitting on their porches and gossiping, gossiping in a needling kind of way, each showing off that they know the truth behind each other’s small talk.

The Countess is in the paper, due to visit her cousin (by marriage, the paper adds in an aside), Samuel Poore (Chester Conklin). It’s a different world, a different genre, here in Maple Valley. Sam Poore is a figure out of Keystone: balding pate, a huge black moustache, thick round spectacles, braces getting snagged in a fence, struggling with an absurdly large garden tool. [After viewing the film, I was gratified to find my instincts correct when looking up the cast: Conklin was one of Mack Sennett’s original Keystone troupe.]

The gossips provide us with more background info: Attorney Granger is “hot after vice”, has “lovely morals”, and spends time “snoopin’ around the dance halls”. Here is his assistant, Gareth Johns (Charles Emmett Mack), with his belle, Lennie Porter (Blanche Mehaffey). They want to go dancing, but Granger wouldn’t like it.

The Countess arrives. It’s late, dark. Her nervous smile fades away. Her cab gets stuck in traffic outside the dance hall in town. There, Granger (Holmes Herbert) is frostily observing the crowd. Now he sees a cigarette being held out of the cab window by an elegant, gloved hand. He immediately goes up to her, shouts, and informs her: “We don’t want loose women from other towns here.” Elnora smiles. Or rather, Negri smiles—for it’s as if the challenge from this man has awoken her persona, which now creeps into her face and smiles a familiar smile. Free of the forgettable man in the opening scene, she now looks in control of herself. Look at her poise, her slightly lowered lids, her stillness set against the trail of smoke from her cigarette. Already she has the upper hand: she informs Granger that she’s come from Italy and asks him to direct her to her cousin’s “chateau”. Granger looks embarrassed, incredulous. From his stern, powerful disposition he’s now an awkward, fidgety figure. We glimpse Elnora’s face as the cab drives off: watch that smile, those cat-like eyes, shadowed, narrowed. Granger’s body turns away, but his eyes follow the cab.

Next morning, the gossips are keen to pry into the new arrival chez Poore. With bumbling, shuffling, and slang, Sam tells the Countess that breakfast’s ready. Elnora now her arm around Sam, promises him that they’ll be “what you say—great pals”, and enters the breakfast parlour.

She’s wearing an amazing black dress, with huge sleeves covered in a bright flower pattern. Sam’s wife (Lucille Ward), plainly dressed, sees how eager he is to please the countess. Comic flirtation on his part, frowning disapproval on hers. And then Mrs Poore sees the tattoo on Elnora’s arm. “I did it for a man I loved”, she explains, and at once a dreamy sadness permeates her face. It’s a face we’ve not seen since the first scenes. Suddenly she shakes it off into a polite smile. But Mrs Poore is concerned about what the neighbours will think. “That’s nothin’”—says Sam, “I knew a lady that had the names of the whole Seventh Infantry tattooed on her!” It’s a great line, but immediately segues into talk of the moral puritanism of Granger (of which Mrs Poore approves). The newspaper says Granger is busy “snatching cigarettes from the lips of women and threatening jail for their escorts”. Elnora smiles. “He has lovely eyes”, she says, to Mrs Poole’s surprise (and now it’s her turn to flash a knowing look at Sam, to raise her eyebrow; it’s a lovely bit of performance, saying to us as much as to Sam, “she moves quick”).

The “wit, beauty, and talent” of Maple Valley assemble to meet and greet the countess. Elnora hides her tattoo in layers of jewellery. She descends the staircase, enters on Sam’s arms. She looks like a million dollars. But talk is all of the local water works, built by Granger and as mighty as “Niagry Falls” for the townsfolk. Now Granger is here, and Elnora’s eyes are on him, then flash to one side. She pauses to think a moment, and her face tells us it’s a happy scheme. Then just as swiftly her face transforms. She puts down her glass and begins her performance. Her first prop: a cigarette, which she puts seductively in her mouth and asks Granger to light—which he does, to the consternation of the locals. They have something more to talk about when Sam whispers that Elnora has a tattoo. In a panning shot, we see the rumour spread around the room. Elnora is flirting with Granger, cracking jokes, but then suddenly serious when she fears she’s insulted him. But Sam interrupts, saying that Elnora has been nominated “Queen of the Bazaar” for the opening of the Water Works.

Next day, as the neighbours gossip, Granger asks Gareth to help him interpret Elnora’s comments. “Gee, Mr Granger, I hear she fell for you!” Granger’s face softens. He blinks rapidly. He looks suddenly coy, almost feminine. He’s persuaded to send flowers.

Meanwhile, Elnora is dreamily reading in a hammock. She’s wearing (and here my couturial illiteracy tells) a kind of lacy, frilly summer dress. Her body has become a kind of soft, fluffy expanse. Gareth brings her flowers from Granger, but is so smitten by the barefooted Elnora that he ends up sat on the ground, helplessly entertaining Elnora, who idly brings her lips to the flowers and grins flirtatiously.

So Granger looks uncomfortable when Gareth dreamily recalls his time Elnora. And he’s right to be suspicious, for the next scene shows the pair walking in the parkland of Maple Valley arm in arm. But Gareth is so awed by her that he finally admits it was Granger who sent the flowers, not he. Close-up of Elnora, and Negri packs as much delighted (and delightful) cunning into a few seconds of celluloid as seems possible. Ah yes, we read her lips, and she bits a fingertip for a moment, before another flick of the head brings in another nuance to the scene; it’s almost as though these little switches in expression keep us from her, making sure she’s always one step ahead of us, one idea further on. She does it again, in turning back toward Gareth. Then she throws her whole body into her next gesture, turning away and rushing over to a tree. “But poor Mr Granger”, she says—as though the man won’t stand a chance against her. (And surely he won’t.) She throws her head back against the tree, and looks so desirable that Gareth himself hurls himself into her arms. But she’s still in control, almost smiling in pity at the young man—until she sees Granger driving past, and sees that he has spotted the couple in their embrace. She runs after the car, but it’s too late.

The Bazaar. Elnora sees the prize event: “meet a real countess, price 25¢”. Dressed in her finest, most alluring outfit, her face suddenly drains of pleasure. She looks around her. The gossips are gathering. St Clair puts in some good gags. The first is via titles: an old man with a hearing trumpet asks if people are saying she’s a “prude”; Gareth explains they said “tattooed”—“but she’s a wonderful woman!” The second is visual: the two neighbours are nodding with pursued lips and judgmental expressions; St Clair dissolves to an empty rocking chair on their porch, then back to the women: the nodding of the chair becomes a kind of emblem for the unchanging attitude of the gossips.

Enter Granger. The crowd is too busy meeting Elnora, who is being pressed by an old man to show him her tattoo (he offers to slip her another two cents for the privilege). Angry, Granger shouts: “HEAR ME! We are gathered to honor a decent enterprise—not to exploit a tattooed Countess!” Elnora’s eyes flash with anger. And when we cut back to her, she has tears in her eyes. She leaves, as Granger rebukes the townsfolk for letting “a woman like that into your Christian homes”. Gareth leaps to his feet: “I’ll make you apologize to her—you muck-raking, psalm-singing hypocrite—”. They trade insults, threats, and Gareth storms out. The local gossips confront Granger: “With seven decent spinster ladies of the Civic Club right here in town, you fall in love with a foreigner and get jealous of a—boy!”

Elnora tells the Poores she’s leaving town. Sam comforts her, saying the tattoo is nothing to be ashamed of—“it’s artistic”. He then pulls up his sleeve to reveal a long tattoo of a train and carriages all the way along his arm. Elnora laughs, and it dissolves the tension marvellously—especially the way Negri laughs, which always seems so winningly, so honestly, without any pretence. Sam shows her more: the train continues all the way across one arm and along down the other. Elnora is in stiches when Mrs Poole walks in. But her reaction is not like that of the gossips, and Lucille Ward’s performance is not only naturalistic but sympathetic. It’s a sign of how well managed these performances are—and how well St Clair manages the film’s tone—that these potentially one-dimensional characters now feel like actual human beings.

A moral council is held. The elders—all old men—demand Granger face the countess before them.

Gareth comes to the Poore house and finds Elnora packing. Once more she’s having to run away. But Gareth begs her to take him with her, saying she’s his only friend—and that he loves her. He rests his head on her shoulder. Suddenly Elnora looks older, wiser. And (snatching the very thought from my head as I began to write this down) she says: “You must stay—remember me—remember me as half lover—half mother—”. It’s an extraordinary title, and one that complicates both characters. Much like the fleshing out of the Poores, so now we suddenly have the possibility of Gareth having an inner life. Where is his mother? Does he have a family? The film can’t quite build on this, but just the ideas it raises are intriguing. (One can imagine a different scriptwriter or filmmaker making all these supporting characters even more interesting.) At the very least, Elnora’s line brings a strange kind of moral weight to what follows.

Elnora (and a gossip from across the way) watch Granger approach the house. Gareth—afraid that Granger will run him out of town—is made to hide behind a curtain. Elnora prepares herself by lighting a cigarette, only to pointedly put it out when Granger starts talking. He has come to warn her of the elders wanting to force her out of town. “—and you have thrown no stones?” she asks. They reach a kind of understanding—but there are other issues at play. For a start, Elnora must quickly hide Gareth’s hat under a cushion as they talk. And despite the danger of discovery, just as Granger is about to leave, Elnora offers him her hand and he stays longer. Suddenly, he’s on his knees. “—don’t crucify me with ridicule—I have no excuse—only when a man suppresses love it turns to hate, fanatic reform, hypocrisy.” Again, this title carries an unexpected weight for this apparently “light” film. And the film, I feel, hasn’t quite earned the right to mobilize all these terms. Or at least it hasn’t quite built enough before it to bring their full force to bear on the end. “Heaven help me—I love you!” he says, pleads almost. And Elnora weakens. Her face is disarmed with emotion. They fall into each other’s arms. (The curtains are tensed with Gareth’s gesture of agony.) “Promise that whatever happens you will—believe in me.” (The curtains go limp.)

Elnora goes and opens the curtains to reveal Gareth. Somehow the dynamics make a weird sense. Here is the younger man, caught in his infatuation with an older woman. “I tried to trick you”, she explains, “—to save the boy—but I couldn’t—because—” (we cut back to see her face before the final words) “—I love you”. The older man (whose look of confusion, anger, somehow emphasizes his age) gets up and goes to the door. Gareth leaves, forlorn, but Granger too wants to leave. Without histrionics—with small gestures, like the pulling of his sleeve, the clutching at his hand—Elnora begs him to stay. Now it’s necessary to lip-read. “You…” he seems to say, before we cut—this next shot a close-up of Elnora, with his face in the top-left of the frame. Though this shot provides only a side-on view of his face, the word I think he says is “harpy”. That the film refuses to dignify the word with a title makes its use more powerful. The silence of the image means that only Elnora can hear it, be affected by it, feel its weight, its misogynist nastiness. The look on her face as the word is spoken conveys all of this. It’s like she been physically wounded. Granger leaves. We see the last moments they are together in close-up: it’s a close-up of their hands, his on the handle, hers grabbing at his.

But go he does. “That woman is shameless”, he tells Sam, and threatens them if they try to protect her. And Sam again appears more human, more sympathetic as the film goes on—for he appears confused, reluctant here. His performance in the first half of the film was broad, comic. Now it’s detailed, naturalistic. There’s a close-up of his reaction, and he just looks sad. So too with his wife, who appears at the top of the stairs. They talk to each other but instead of superfluous titles we just watch their faces and eyes to know what’s being said, and the tone of it. For Mrs Poole is almost in tears as she tells Elnora that she can stay. “This is our home—and all the Grangers in the world can’t budge us.” She goes and retrieves a whip, threatening to go and thrash Granger—but Elnora takes it from her. “Leave him to me—I am the cause—and I will be the cure!” (As if the melodrama of this final exchange is too much, St Clair diffuses it with a gag in the last interior scene: Mrs Poole goes downstairs to find Sam with a shotgun, likewise in a rage against Granger. But as they talk, he accidentally fires the gun, and they end up leaping into each other’s arms in alarm.)

Back to the moral council, and Granger resigns his position. “Until an hour ago I was one of you—parading my virtue—crying for victims—yipping for blood—”, he says, let someone else drive her out of town.

Elnora enters and immediately commands the room. She lets rip with a speech, only the last part of which is titled: “—but do no fear that I will take away your only text—my mark of shame—I’ll leave another to remember me by—” And then, in a quite breath-taking extended take, she proceeds to whip Granger in front of the moral council. We see the impact of the lashes on his body and face, even though he remains still. Then there are close-ups up Elnora as she wields the whip, and of Granger as the whip lashes his face—leaving a diagonal mark of blood across his forehead and cheek. This last blow makes Elnora stop in horror. She drops the whip. Granger picks it up and offers it back to her. But she has her hand over her face and walks away. Then—and I really didn’t know what might happen at this point—Granger marches up to her, grabs her, and kisses her passionately. Amazing! Exit the moral council, leaving the couple in each other’s arms. At last, we cut closer, and see their desperate embrace—and I found myself suddenly, quite by surprise, very moved by the sight of them locked together like this, Elnora’s face overcome with emotion.

Dissolve to the back of a cab with “Just Married” on the back. Again, St Clair produces a fine gag at this point that is also a lovely commentary: we see empty rocking chairs on the neighbours’ porches, each seemingly rocking of their own accord. It’s as if the gossips can’t bear to look, but their spirits—and their judgmentalism—go on animating the space around them, go on taking their familiar place in the world. Is it reassuring that the gossips have gone, or do we understand from this that their gestures somehow outlast them?

In the cab, we see the happy couple. And Granger looks less stiff, less formal. Holmes Herbert’s performance can at last—and only in this last scene—relax and relent. He’s got a sense of humour, too, for he smilingly reaches into his pocket to withdraw a cigarette case. He offers a cigarette to Elnora, whose eyes turn to him in delight—and love. And it isn’t even that the cigarette is so important (she ignores it anyway), but the gesture itself. They embrace, and Eleanor lifts a bouquet of flowers to cover their kiss. It’s a neat act of modesty, privacy—for this final moment when the couple can be together, and start a new life together. But the film’s last word goes to Sam, who watches the cab drive out of Maple Valley, and is splashed with mud as Gareth and Lennie ride by on their bike. It’s a disarming way to end the film, as if it daren’t quite take itself too seriously. You sense that life will go on in Maple Valley, much as it did before: Sam is once more a Keystone figure of fun, almost looking to camera after the mud splatters his shirtfront. And what of the moral council, the gossips? They too, I suppose, will go on. THE END.

This film took a while to win me over. What unsettled me a little was the tone: is this a romantic comedy or a romantic drama? But gradually the film managed to convince me that its competing aspects—a romance, a moral story, a comedy of manners—could work together. The comic characters attained greater heft: the gossips became emblems of small-town small-mindedness, the Poore couple became sympathetically generous. What begins as a comic set-up of a glamorous foreigner in Midwest America gradually and effectively escalates into a wider conflict of cultural values: between religious puritanism and social liberalism, between patriarchal power and female independence. The film builds up the weight of the drama so effectively that I was both surprised at its climax and also (ultimately) convinced it worked. What starts out as comic gossip at the Poores’ welcoming party gradually becomes genuinely threatening xenophobia and misogyny. It actually reminded me of Sjöström’s The Scarlet Letter (1926). A Woman of the World certainly might have less emotional impact (not to say cultural clout), but the two films each tackle a small town judging and condemning a woman for what they see as moral crimes, i.e. her independent sexuality.

Pola Negri embodies the film’s handling of tone. The whole drama condenses in the way her smile can turn into sorrow, in how she can be both seductive and vulnerable. The opening scenes give context to the Countess’s otherwise privileged position: she is treated badly by a man interested only in her as an object. And when she arrives as the glamorous foreigner in Maple Valley, she soon becomes the victim of wider social prejudice. When the council talk of “running her out of town”, the threat is physical—I wondered if we’d actually see a mob wielding pitchforks and flaming torches at the end.

There’s also a parallel with Negri’s career. Indeed, press coverage for A Woman of the World focused more on Negri herself than the content of the film. Ivan St Johns wrote an article titled “How Pola was Tamed”, claiming: “For three years they tried every means to tame that fascinating tiger-cat—Pola Negri. And now the funniest thing in the world has happened. Pola has licked herself—with her own sense of humor” (Photoplay (January 1926): 53). Seemingly, Negri had frustrated many directors and crews by her timekeeping. But for this production, she was convinced that self-deprecation and humour were the way to win over her colleagues. So she began cracking more jokes, being more familiar, and arriving early. The story even got visualized in some drawings that Malcolm St Clair did on set, published under the title “The Transformation of Pola” (Photoplay (April 1926): 76).

(By the way, this image took me a bloody age to find. The reference to it in a piece by Diane Negra gives the incorrect date for the source [January 1926 rather than April 1926]. Then it turned out that the colour scanned collection of Photoplay from January-June 1926 on archive.org was missing the pages on which this piece was published! However, I found an alternate version of the issue in monochrome elsewhere on archve.org. You’re welcome.)

The position of foreign stars in Hollywood was often fraught with difficulties, exacerbated by their treatment in the press. Many European actors who came to Hollywood ended up being typecast as exotic foreigners on screen, just as many directors found themselves recreating European settings in Hollywood backlots. The attitude to their screen selves impacted the way they were seen in the press. Negri was not alone in attracting attention for being not just “different” but “difficult” compared to her American peers.

The occasional hostility towards foreign stars (and directors) gets sublimated into the drama of A Woman of the World. Negri represents an alien lifestyle to the world of smalltown America. She looks different, behaves differently. Her persona really is a world apart from anyone else on screen in this film. It’s much to Malcolm St Clair’s credit that he makes a subtler, more surprising drama out of what could be a rather crude conflict between character “types”. Negri, of course, provides the countess with a real sense of inner life (more than just a sense of her having desires). But by the end of the film, I believed that Gareth, the Poores, and Granger also had inner lives—when all these characters (the younger lover, the comic smalltown relative, the bigoted attorney) could so easily have been one-dimensional. And, of course, Negri whips her way through to Granger’s heart—taking a savage kind of revenge on her fiercest critic.

Whatever the attitudes to Negri, contemporary reviews of A Woman of the World were positive. Photoplay describes her as “[t]he fascinating, continental Pola”, playing a “dangerous, cynical, tempestuous Italian countess”. St Clair is credited “for the restraint shown in the small-town scenes and types that must have tempted exaggeration.” More revealing is the brief review’s last line: “Not for the children” (February 1926: 50). Another contemporary reviewer, Epes W. Sargent (how does one end up going by the name “Epes”?), said that St Clair painted the film with “broad comedy strokes” because the theme of moral hypocrisy “is too mentally subtle for pantomimic expression”. The result is “a vivid story with a wealth of comedy relief most of which is genuinely amusing.” He particularly credits Chester Conlkin, sporting “an almost impossible moustache”, for providing the laughs (Moving Picture World (26 December 1925): 303).

Though it’s mentioned in various accounts of Negri, early stardom, and European émigré films, A Woman of the World doesn’t seem to have received a great deal of attention since 1925. Nor, one might say, have many of Negri’s Paramount films. She made 22 films for the studio, of which only six survive. Of these six, few have been restored and none have been properly released on DVD/Blu-ray. The copy I saw of A Woman of the World came from a grey-market DVD derived from a grotty nth-generation print. I’d love to see it restored, and a good score might also give it more emotional weight. But even in its reduced visual circumstances, this film still won me over. Negri’s performance can pierce even the murkiest of copies, her eyes are still flashing and alive nearly a hundred years beyond the film.

Paul Cuff

The Woman He Scorned (1929; UK; Paul Czinner)

I’ve been revisiting lots of early Lubitsch films recently, and it occurred to me that my knowledge of Pola Negri is confined almost exclusively to these German productions of the late 1910s-early 1920s. Negri’s silent filmography features a huge number of missing films, and many of the surviving pictures from her career in the 1920s are available only in copies so grim to watch that I have stayed clear. But one title intrigued me enough to take the plunge. In 1929, Negri was at a strange, transitional stage of her career. Having been in Hollywood since 1922, by the end of the decade Negri had married the Georgian “Prince” Serge Mdivani, broken with Paramount, and retired to France. However, the retirement was short-lived. She suffered a miscarriage, while her husband gambled away his money. So, she returned to work, and made her last silent film in the UK. This would be one of the many British-German co-productions produced in the late 20s. Alongside Negri, it starred the Swiss actor Hans Rehmann and the British Warwick Ward—both of whom appeared in a number of German films of the period. Its director, Paul Czinner, was Austrian—though it’s difficult to know what to call the many artists who were born anywhere across the expanse of the former Austro-Hungarian territories, and who went on to work across Europe. Czinner was born in Budapest, educated in Vienna, spent most of the silent era working in Germany—and (since he was also Jewish) would emigrate to the UK in 1933 to escape the Nazis. His first “British” film was also Negri’s last silent. Much of the production was filmed in Cornwall, on what must have been a very small budget—but it still packs a punch…

The Woman He Scorned (1929; UK; Paul Czinner)

The sea. Waves breaking. In the distance, a lighthouse. Closer and closer, until we’re right up next to the lamp. The younger of the two lighthouse keepers, John (Hans Rehmann), goes to the harbour to get his telescope fixed. Views of the harbour, murky against the bright expanse of sea. The camera pans, and pans again. The filmmaking is economic, the spaces quickly introduced. We are inside the opticians. The keeper tries the lens, approves, steps outside. The focus shifts: we see through the window to the street, where he turns his lens across the town. And now the camera pans per the view of the telescope. Czinner plays with a subjective glance of the town, but soon the camera is panning and cutting quickly. Where are we? There are no explanatory titles, just images. We see café signs in French, but this is the only hint of location. The quick cutting makes this town almost alien. We cannot settle our eyes, take it in. We’re in the midst of the streets, an impressionistic account of space. Czinner shows off the wider seascape with stylish movements, but the mood is bleak: the sky is overcast, the sea churning, the rocks dark, the town overlooked by factory chimneys, the streets full of shadow.

Now we’re with Louise: Pola Negri. She’s pinning pictures up on the wall (a modernist collage above, a classical nude below). She’s smoking. Her dark hair is dishevelled. Her eyes dark. A black neckband highlights how pale and slender her arm and shoulders seem. The camera is tilted. It’s intimate, off-kilter. She winds a gramophone and sits at a mirror. She applies mascara. A man appears in the mirror. The camera flexes, half looks up. It’s Max (Warwick Ward). The dingy bar. Tilted angles. Max with cigarette, with a flash of cash. He looks greasy, hard-up. He drinks, smokes, gambles.

John enters the “Bleue Paradis”. Around him, it’s a den of vice. Female shapes are scrawled on the wall. He sits, drinks. Titled angles, mirrors, smoke. Women approach, kick out their legs. The walls loom down. Enter Louise, the camera slanted as she comes down in feather boa and hat, smoking, drinking. Close-ups of dancers, attitudes. She goes up to the lighthouse keeper. She raises her eyebrow, gives him the eye, turns, turns again, looks at him through his telescope, drinks his drink, shows off her cleavage, waves her boa at him. She sits on his table, forces him to look at her. The camera pans 360 degrees as she does a turn round the room. She’s the life of the place, turning the room into her own parlour. The cutting becomes quicker, the camera moving from faces and gestures around the room. There are no intertitles. We’ve had no intertitles since the first scene of the film. It’s pure visual filmmaking, and it’s superb.

Louise sees John get out a banknote. She snatches it, twirls it round it, makes him grab for it, then pushes it down her cleavage. She puffs out a great bloom of smoke toward his face. She moves closer. So does the camera. The camera is high, now low, now peering over shoulders, now switching focus. Max is half directing her from the next table. He loses patience.

Now Max and Louise are dancing. He is aggressive, she dives away, returns. Their dance shows their power relations: he grabs her, she swirls away, he grabs her again. They fight. He hurls her across the room. John stands, moves to threaten Max. Close-ups of faces, closer and closer, all from tilted angles. Louise looks on, her face drained, surprised—and taken, taken with the stranger. John leaves and Louise follows, a silhouette down the street.

Max is slapped gently awake from his stupor, exits, enters the same street. The pair are ahead of him and hide in the shadows. Louise is following the keeper, desperate. “Take me! Take me!” She’s saved $100 and will give him everything. The camera tracks in front of them, capturing his flight and her determination. She stumbles, falls. She’s pleading. “Max will kill me!” she says, and it’s the first time we’ve seen a character’s name spelled out on screen. The keeper strokes her hair, calms her. Overcome, she sinks back against the steps. He folds her boa into a makeshift pillow, slips some money into her purse, and takes to his boat to leave.

The sea is swooshing past. The wind rises. Birds flock around the mast. The camera bobs, is assaulted by waves. The sea hurls itself against the dock. The camera grows seasick: shots of sea, sky, boat, hands, waves, foam. Rapid cutting. John is overboard. He prays to God: he will save the unfortunate if only his life is spared. The skies calm. Czinner dissolves from the roughing waves to the static image of the married couple—and the two images overlap, the mobile waves and the immobile couple. It’s a moment before you realize it isn’t a photograph but a moving image, so still do John and Louise look. The camera pans to the others at the table, first left, then right, then tracking back: a bizarre, entirely frozen crowd. As the camera tracks back and back, a dark figure crouches in the foreground: it’s a photographer, who snaps his shutter, and suddenly the scene comes alive. It’s an extraordinary little scene, so strange and sinister. What is the future of this frozen marriage?

They come home. Louise wanders around, at a loose end. She sits on the bed, huffs and puffs in—what? Boredom? Frustration? The husband walks up and down. Louise wipes her nose on her wedding dress. “Anything to drink?” she asks. She lights a cigarette, as her man paces up and down. He goes to the window, looks out. Louise throws off her veil and gown, shouts at him. John doesn’t hate her, he says, but worries he’ll do her no good. But suddenly she is tender, and he too. She wants him to forget her past.

The waves break upon the shore. The camera pans around the bedroom. Louise is in bed, cosy. She reaches in her half-sleep to the pillow next to her. Where is he? She gets up, sets kettle on stove, lights a fire. The camera pans around the room, watching her busy herself with wifely duties: but she’s in a flap, dropping things, in too much of a hurry. A cat is eating an egg she’s dropped. The fire is too strong. The kettle is too hot. She’s spilled the milk. She’s cut her finger on the breadknife.

She goes out, to the shore. She wanders over the rocks, out towards the lighthouse. People stare. She makes the same visual and spatial journey as made by the camera in the opening of the film: the same shots, now occupied by her. She shouts up to her man: why didn’t he eat before leaving? His life is tied to “the blue paradise”. (This is the name of her former brothel, and John’s phrase seems to make her look down in fear, or regret, or shame.) But he’s smiling at her care for him, and she busies herself making her man and the older keeper some tea. The older man looks at Louise’s legs—or is it the high heels she’s worn to climb over the rocks to reach them? He’s laughing at this strangely allied couple: the gruff sailor with lipstick on his cheek, and the housewife in heels and makeup who’s climbed out to the lighthouse. John wipes away the trace of the kiss, just as Louise hides her hurt as she turns and puts on her shawl, offering a smile as she leaves. He runs after her, gives her money to buy new shoes and a scarf. She goes away, over the barren rocky landscape inland.

Back home, she sits and takes off her stockings and shoes. In the mirror, she looks at herself. The camera cuts closer, and closer still. She wipes away a beauty spot, her lipstick, a smear of mascara. She ties her head in a scarf, hides her hair away. She is transformed. She smiles at herself, and it’s a warm, surprised, happy smile. It’s a beautiful scene, and touching.

So Louise is at home, with flowers, with kittens. The camera once more pans around to follow her domesticity. It’s better done this time, and her husband arrives to embrace her—and it’s a warm embrace. They’re both smiling for the first time. She cuts his butter, hands him the bread. She’s gazing at him, lovingly. “It’s been three months”, she says, and finally she feels he had confidence in her. They go together through the village, and rather than stare at her the locals smile and doff their hats to the couple. They embrace on the beach, and she nestles her head against his neck.

But who is this following her on her return to the village? It’s Max. He noses around town, sees the photo of the wedding on the noticeboard.

Cue a scene of Louise singing, wordlessly. She’s interrupted by the cat, then by Max. He appears first as a silhouette on the wall. He’s threatening. The camera is tilted again, as it was at the brothel. “What do you want?” “You!” But the neighbour is at the door. Louise ushers her out. Max has hidden on her bed, and makes himself comfortable to sleep. Louise implores him to leave. He gets up, his huge shadow trailing him around the room. The police are after him. Louise is on the floor, the tilted camera looming over her—she’s desperate, oppressed within the frame. She will find John (the first time he’s named) and tell him everything. But Max wants money, time to rest, and doesn’t trust John to be told. He tells her to turn off the light. So the only light in the room is the intermittent flash of the lighthouse: it’s a beautiful moment.

Next morning, the neighbour sees Max leave the couple’s house—and sees the wanted poster of Max, freshly plastered to the wall. The village is in uproar. The policeman comes to Louise to ask about Max. She’s wrapped in her black shawl. She looks so vulnerable, so cold.

Back at the lighthouse, John sees Louise arrive by boat. She breaks down in tears, throws herself into his arms—tells him about Max. It’s all done in a single take, without titles—her face says everything. She lied to the policeman not to save Max “but to save my happiness”. John demands she denounce Max if he turns up again, and she swears—her hand raised in tentative agreement. She’s afraid to go back to the village (and the villagers), so stays with John at the lighthouse.

But here’s Max, whistling from the gate of the lighthouse. Louise creeps out, to make Max go away. She gives him money, demands he go away on her boat. As the wind whips her hair, she looks on at the men fight. John tells her to go away forever, calls her a whore—and the word hurts her. She drags herself away, away to the water’s edge. She gets into the boat. The villagers and police arrive, and as Max flees, he falls to his death. And Louise? The waters are raging, a storm building. She rows. The skies darken. She hears his words again. She is alone with the camera, her face in the leigh of the light. She flings aside the oars. She stares at us. What do we think of her? Cut back to land, where John is on the shore, his back to us, staring out to sea. We see an upturned boat on the shore, amid the foaming waves. The sea and sky are dark, but a patch of sunlight catches the white hull of the boat. Waves break over its back. The camera holds upon the image—holds, and holds… FIN.

An excellent film. Czinner makes the most of his small cast, low budget, and coastal locations. The deserted Cornish (or should that be “French”?) streets are turned alternately into idyllic retreats or threatening, noir-ish mazes. The locals are friendly but can turn into a mob. From the dark world centred on the brothel, we go to the windswept expanses of sea and sky around the village and lighthouse. This society may be remote from the lower depths of the brothel, but it can still judge and condemn individuals. Louise is dominated by Max in the brothel, but married life with John carries its own burdens. And the elements are there all around, threatening and buffeting Louise in her new life.

At the heart of the film is Pola Negri, who is always compelling. To see her smoking, dancing, flirting, and fighting in the brothel scenes is a thrill. And to see her find something that might be love, and to make somewhere that might be called home, is moving. Though I can imagine other stars of this period in similar roles, I cannot imagine them doing quite what Negri does here. Gloria Swanson, in her more daring outings, such as Sadie Thompson (1928), might have pulled it off—but her glamour is of a different order to that of Negri. Glamour is a kind of presence, but I don’t know if it’s the word I’d use to describe Negri’s presence. Thinking of slightly later films, you might imagine Marlene Dietrich taking on this role of prostitute-turned-housewife. But Dietrich (at least for Sternberg) likewise has a kind of glamour that doesn’t thrive in the climate of a film like The Woman He Scorned. She’s impeccable, even in poverty, even in exotic locations. I could imagine Dietrich in the brothel of Czinner’s film, but not on the streets even immediately outside it. Perhaps my imagination here is too limited to the impeccably arranged mise-en-scène of Sternberg films, and I do Dietrich a disservice, but somehow I can’t see her being so open to the elements as Negri. And I couldn’t imagine Dietrich convincingly becoming a housewife for a lighthouse keeper, which Negri does—or at least conveys her own belief in being that role. Negri is a messier screen presence, more able both to be convincingly violent and convincingly tender. Dietrich never moves me; impresses, yes, but never moves. (But I suppose, her films with Sternberg are not meant to move you in such a manner. Doubtless Sternberg might scoff at my talking about his films in such a way.) Negri has a bodily presence; she’s more than an image, more than a luxurious piece of the mise-en-scène; she’s able to be raw. Though I love her presence on screen, I can far more easily imagine her walking off screen, off set, and onto the real streets than many of her contemporaries.

Not that The Woman He Scorned is just Negri. The world around her is atmospheric, and the performances around Negri set the limits of her world, the horizons of her expectations. Warwick Ward is pleasingly greasy, selfish, and violent—while still looking like he might, once, have been charming. As John, Hans Rehmann is solid if not remarkable. Frankly, I’d need to see a better-quality print to better follow his facial and bodily performance. For much of the film, he is the cool, collected presence against which Negri’s more expressive performance contrasts. It’s the point of his character to be emotionally reserved, almost stolid. John understands the duty of marriage, but not the reality of love. Rehmann certainly has the physical build to convince as a sailor, and he conveys the conflict between his good intentions and social prejudices well. He has the bulk to protect Negri from the outside world, but also the bulk to exclude her from his inner world.

All of which brings me back to the production itself. Czinner’s camerawork is fluid, expressive, articulate. There are only a handful of intertitles in the whole film, and you’d virtually be able to cut them all and still have a coherent narrative. So articulate was the film that (even watching it in appalling quality), I didn’t feel the need to ask questions about the names of the characters or the location of the film. However, trying to do the most basic research on background to the film has proved illuminating—and confusing. I’ve titled this entry The Woman He Scorned, but is this even the correct title for the film? The BFI lists no less than seven alternatives: “Hunted”, “Traquée”, “The Street of Lost Souls”, “Rue des Âmes Perdues”, “Son dernier Tango”, “The Way of Lost Souls”, “Seat of the Fallen”. In her memoirs (Memoirs of a Star, 1970), Pola Negri calls the film “Street of Abandoned Children” (334) and claims the film was retitled “Seat of the Fallen” “in England and America” (338). It’s a marker of the film’s status on the borders of silence and sound, as well as between UK, European, and US markets, that it should bear so many aliases. Released in 1929 as a silent film, then swiftly reissued with a soundtrack of music and effects, it is currently available to watch only in a murky print with French titles. (These titles have themselves been digitally replaced with English for the sake of the shitty DVD I watched.) And who wrote the script? The BFI page says Czinner wrote the scenario, but other sources credit Charles E. Whittaker—an Irish writer and producer, whose company was the British element of this British-German coproduction.

So, if I refer to this film as The Woman He Scorned, I do so because it seems the most succinct summary of its story—and because all these talk of “streets” and “ways” raises the question of the film’s setting. Where, exactly, is the film meant to be set? The street signs in town are in French, but the wider view across the harbour looks more like south-west England—and the village around the lighthouse is clearly Cornish. In his biography of the actress (Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale, 2014), Mariusz Kotowski describes Pola’s character as “a Marseille prostitute” and John as “a law-abiding sailor with strong convictions” (163). Fine, but are we meant to be in Marseille in the opening scenes? And how far away is the lighthouse from the town? If this man is John and not (for example) Jean, what nationality is he? The synopsis provided on the BFI database describes John as “a French lighthouse keeper”. The more clarity you seek, the more confusing things get.

Negri’s memoirs offer some nice details around the production (though no clarification about some of the above ambiguities of setting). She recalls the Cornish location shooting thus:

We were quartered in a quaint little old village inn and naturally the natives were enormously curious about us. Many of them had never seen a motion picture and were not quite certain what was happening in their midst, except that it must be something of satanic design and could well bring bad luck to all who came in contact with it. Even without being accompanied by all of our strange equipment, actors would have been rumored to hold black masses and be practitioners of witchcraft. Add the cameras and lights and make-up and we must certainly be doing the devil’s own handiwork. As a result, it was initially very difficult for our production manager to persuade the locals to appear as extras, but raising the fees performed the miracle of lifting the curse of working with us. (339)

Negri even records the camera crew being assailed by “local men bearing down upon us armed primitively with pitchforks, rakes, spades, rocks, clubs”, their women and children marching behind them, “babbling in that almost unintelligible Cornish accent” (341). (Their crime was filming on the sabbath day!) What Negri does confirm is that Czinner did film some material in France, around Marseille:

The difference between the tiny immaculate Cornish fishing village and the teeming French port was a study in opposites. We were shooting in the actual Rue des Infants Abandonées in the heart of the red-light district. It was a narrow street in which prostitutes openly promenaded or else sat in windows lustily hawking their wares to lonely sailors off ships from every country in the world. (342)

But how much of this footage is in the film? And is the film—as I watched it—complete? Clearly, The Woman He Scorned needs restoring. Are there missing intertitles that would help explain the setting and character names? Are here any differences between the UK and international versions of the film? Is there any alternative footage or variation in editing? Is the ending the same in the other versions? But if I want answers to these questions, it’s because the film intrigues me. Lean, low-budget, and narratively simple, it’s nevertheless a stylish and emotionally engaging film with a great central performance.

Paul Cuff

South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919; UK; Frank Hurley)

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition left Plymouth on 8 August 1914, a few days before Great Britain declared war on Germany. Leading the expedition was Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose goal was to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. His ship, the Endurance, held 28 men, 69 dogs, and a cat. One of those men was the Australian photographer, Frank Hurley. As the ship sailed south, first to Buenos Aires, then to South Georgia, and finally into the Weddell Sea, Hurley filmed a record of the voyage. By the end of 1914, the Endurance was in the midst of thickening fields of ice and a long way short of its destination. Soon the ship was imprisoned and adrift in the frozen water—and Frank Hurley clung on to his film even as the expedition looked as though it might be doomed…

South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919; UK; Frank Hurley)

The opening title is a painted design, complete with portrait of Shackleton, the Endurance, and a small group of penguins. It thus unites the film’s subjects: a record of one man’s most famous exploit, the record of a ship’s fate, and a glimpse of Antarctic nature. The opening text says the film presents “a wonderful and true story of British pluck, self-sacrifice and indomitable courage”. (The text made somehow safer, softer, by the painted icicles, by the painted penguins standing like a kind of audience at the bottom of the frame.)

Portraits of the leaders: Shackleton, Captain F. Worsley, Lieutenant J. Stenhouse, Captain L. Hussey. The men are smiling, laughing; Hussey his playing his banjo. It’s informal, matey, but the men are in military uniform, linking their bravery with the wider bravery of the war. Now the men are shown in Antarctic dress, against the painted snows of a studio; they smile, aware of the comic falseness of this show they’re putting on for the camera.

But here is reality: the Endurance setting off from Buenos Aires. (See that stern? You can recognize it from the photographs taken in 2022, 3,000m below the surface—where now resides the bodily ghost of this living image.) The world as it was, in late 1914.

On board, the camera captures the awkward limits of the deck and the dozens of dogs whose kennels line the sides. The watery horizon bobs in the background. The dogs are being fed. The dogs are being groomed. Puppies born are sea are introduced to the pack. The dogs are seasick. (Suddenly, that madly bobbing horizon attains more significance.) A dog called “Smiler”. The title asks us to “watch carefully” to see him smile. (It’s a mad grimace, not a smile.) But I like being addressed in this way, enjoined to notice something that the crew noticed 112 years ago—and being able to see it on screen, and to be curious and amused as the crew were curious and amused 112 years ago.

Here is Hercules, “the strongest dog in the pack”. We are asked to watch his condensed breath to see how cold it was: to get a sense of the feel of the air, the density of the cold. And here is that breath, longed since exhaled, still blooming white on film. Odd, and oddly moving, to watch the rate of a dog’s breath, the motion of his living body—all this time later.

Shackleton takes a reading from the sun, his eyes almost glancing into camera as he looks up from the binnacle. The film has many of these curious awkwardnesses: of the crew members going about their business, but suddenly becoming aware that they are now performers, performing for the camera, for audiences, for the future, for all eternity.

Icebergs glow green. The sea is pale grass. But just as the landscape feels distant, apart, somehow lacking or ungraspable in its paleness—the ice often a kind of visual absence on screen—Hurley captures the most extraordinary series of shots in the film. He must have climbed the mast, have clung on with his legs as he held and cranked the camera with his hands. Thus, he looked down to the foremost part of the Endurance. We see another man, a blue silhouette, legs akimbo, straddling a tiny platform suspended from the bowsprit. And below him, the ice-covered sea. Hurley knows he’s got the perfect shot: look at the way the shadow of the bowsprit is at the bottom left of frame. The shadow serves to show the nature of the ice below it, to emphasize the hoped-for momentum of the ship. It’s also a kind of image being produced by the ship: the ship and its shadow is a neat metaphor for the very film we are watching. Look how the top corners of the frame are rounded by the aperture: the close border intensifies our concentration on the front of the ship. What follows is a sequence of spliced-together shots wherein the whole drama of the voyage is contained in a single image. Can the ship keep going? How long will the ice break and make way for the vessel? The man on the bowsprit looks over his shoulder. You realize he’s sat facing the ship, to observe the hull’s stability in breaking the ice. Under him, the blank ice splits to reveal the deep blue of the sea. The marvels of toning, here: the colour dye clings to the black tones of the image, leaving the highlights untouched. So the sea is deepest blue, and the gradations of the ice—from bright white to tainted blue—are shown in the range of tone. It renders the drama of ice tangible in colour: you can feel how thin is the ice, but also get a sense of how cold is the sea.

This short sequence—occupying barely a minute on screen—is doubly arresting for the sense of time it captures. Hurley splices four shots together, letting each run directly into the next. As the breaks in the ice draw attention to the space being traversed, so these filmic cuts are fissures in time. Slabs of history appear in each shot or are erased in the gaps between.

Next, we see the bow ramming its way through the ice. It’s not as dramatic as the previous shots, but then you realize that Hurley must have suspended himself from the same place on the bowsprit we have just seen filmed from the mast—and suddenly the very act of filming provides the drama. There are eleven shots in this sequence: it must have proved a more illustrative set-up for Hurley to demonstrate the mechanics of the ships progress.

When Hurley cuts back to the view from the mast, the sequence as a whole attains even greater weight: for now when the ice splits before the bowsprit, the film carries with it the impetus from the last shots. The audience is given more of a sense of the stubbornness of the Endurance, the way it bludgeons its way forward. There follow more shots from the mast, each following directly from the last. At one point, you see the shadow of the mast from which the scene is filmed swing across the bottom of the frame: the ship is changing direction, the sun passing over its shoulder. And as it does so, a split in the ice flashes darkly through the ice. (I think I could watch these miraculous shots forever, they’re so hypnotic.)

Hurley casts his eye over the side: a view of seals mobbing their way through the water. And now huge icebergs; they are as wide as whole regions, as high as mountains; the water on the sea, combined with the orange tinting, gives them real mass on screen. Now the image is blue-tone-pink, a combination I always love to see—though here the effect is lessened by the fact that Hurley uses it to colour a still, rather than moving images. Already the film is running out of film to record its adventures. It’s a kind of visual arrestment that augers the spatial arrest of the Endurance. The film continues until it becomes stuck fast.

Indeed, the very next shot is of the icebound ship, borne aloft on frozen waves. Closer views show the crew at work, pickaxing the ice in a vain attempt to make a channel for the Endurance to escape. Huge saws appear, each pulled and pushed by half a dozen men. Then the ship pulls back, gaining space to charge. We see Shackleton on the bow, looking anxiously down into the waters. The ship’s “charge” looks pitifully slow: we’ve seen the men at work, and know what effort it has taken to break up even this much ice. The Endurance swings toward the camera, whose presence suggests a kind of full stop, a point where the ship surely can’t pass. And it doesn’t. Instead of filming the inevitable halt, Hurley cuts to a title: “All progress at an end”. In the next image, the stillness is captured by a still: the expedition really has come to a halt.

We see the ship in stasis, the crew too—lined up for a photo. (Hurley is the only absentee, the title tells us: again, a reminder of the somehow independent, detached existence of the camera.)

A new life, of obdurate isolation. Water must be taken from the frozen snows and brought on board. We see the endless manual labour of keeping life going. Life keeps going onboard, too: here are a new batch of puppies, which will spend their whole lives in and around this same space.

Animals also come in the form of our first glimpse of live penguins: a surreal group of onlookers to the marooned crew. But it is to the dogs that Hurley keeps on returning: we see them being taken to work on the sleds, and it is the dogs who enable the film’s only land-based tracking shots. The camera is perched on a sled, watching the teams race along the ice. Now the dogs are playing with the crew, being manhandled for the camera to show off their size and thickness of hair.

What kind of film is Hurley now making? The expedition has come to a halt. We see the ship stuck by day, and by night we see a still (taken “with eighteen flash lights”) of the ship’s ghostly form in the blue-black intensity of permanent night. What else can Hurley film? We see a primitive tractor at work, but it looks more like play: the vehicle is puny beside the Endurance, punier still in midst of the frozen wasteland. So Hurley shows us dredging for underwater life (which a title reassures us is of great scientific importance), and a man sifting the catch. Creatures too small to show on film are imprisoned in jars that will never reach a laboratory.

The ship is being lifted out of the sea by the mounting ice. The process is too slow to film, so Hurley shows us the aftereffects: the ship being tilted, twisted, jostled. All hope is lost, a title relates (how much time passes between shots, here?) and the dogs are among the contents of the ship being slid via canvas sheets onto the ice for safety. More shots, the time between which marks the slow death of the Endurance: we see successive views of the ship, lower and lower in the frozen water, her masts snapping and tumbling, then sawn for wood by the crew.

The film, too, breaks down. Not only are we given still photographs instead of moving images, but we are given paintings instead of stills. The most miraculous part of the expedition goes entirely unfilmed: the crews’ slog across the ice, the setting sail on small boats, the landing on Elephant Island, the parting of the crew into two groups, Shackleton’s journey over 1,300 kilometres to South Georgia to get help, and the return to Elephant Island to rescue the last group of the crew.

We are also denied the story of how Hurley’s film came to survive at all: how Hurley himself broke Shackleton’s orders; how he stripped off and dived into the icy waters swamping the Endurance to rescue sealed containers of filmstock and glass slides. He risked his life to get the film off the sinking ship, and again by jettisoning food to make way for his negatives on the sleds and boats in which they made their perilous journey to safety.

Instead of all this, the film offers a retrospective return to the locations of the unfilmed drama: to the starkly beautiful parts of South Georgia where Shackleton and his five companions came and crossed to reach help. And we see Stromness Whaling Station, as bleak a place as you can imagine: dark wooden huts, trails of smoke, and the steaming carcasses of whales lying in the harbour. We see the stripping of blubber, which is as gruesome as it sounds. It was here that Shackleton first made contact with the outside word. What a strange paradise this dreadful place must have seemed to those men.

As if in answer to the grim sight of hacked-up whales, Hurley returns to living nature: to frolicking seals, to birds of all kinds. Despite the film’s narrative having diverged entirely, Hurley clearly enjoyed some of the shots he took. He finishes one sequence on seals with a long close-up of one scratching its chin and belly, to which Hurley appends the title “End of a perfect day.” There follow many views of penguins: penguins running, penguins staring at the camera, penguins mothering, penguins swimming.

It’s a shock when the film returns to its narrative of Shackleton: for we suddenly get views of the triumphant entry of the crew of the Endurance into Valparaiso aboard a Chilean tug, in May 1916. So much time has passed since we last saw contemporary footage of the crew that it’s hard to reconcile ourselves to the tone of the ending: “Thus ends the story of the Shackleton Expedition to the Antarctic—a story of British heroism, valour and self-sacrifice in the name and cause of a country’s honour. The doings of these men will be written in history as a glorious epic of the great ice-fields of the South, and will be remembered as long as our Empire exists.” So say the last titles, followed by a view of a sunset at sea. THE END.

South is a flawed film, narratively speaking, since it cannot represent the most famous part of the expedition’s story in any but the most inadequate terms: paintings, stills, and summary titles. Of course, the footage was exhibited in a variety of ways in the silent era—including illustrated lectures, complete with narration. We’re also left with more questions that the film (as it stands) cannot, or dare not, answer. What happened to all the dogs once the crews decided to sail for land? (They were all shot, of course.) What happened to the crew when they returned to war-torn Europe in 1916-17? (Hurley himself became a war photographer of great renown; but the others?) What was the effect of the years-long isolation on the crew of the Endurance? (The film cannot scratch the surface of these men’s inner lives.) Later, fictional, films would try to investigate these ideas. But the mere existence of South is a kind of triumph, given that Hurley had been ordered to abandon all his images with the wreck of the Endurance. It is also a triumph of images: the views of the outward voyage and entrapment are spellbinding, and offer an amazing glimpse of what many of the men on screen might have believed was a doomed expedition.

It’s worth noting that among the many extras on the BFI release of the film are nineteen minutes of “unused” footage taken by Hurley. But clearly the footage was used, as it comes complete with the same painted title designs seen in the film itself. (Though the booklet notes say the footage is “tinted and toned”, in fact it is monochrome.) In her liner notes, Bryony Dixon says that “the negatives [of South] were reused multiple times to tell the story in different ways”, including a 1933 sound film, Endurance. So which version does the additional footage come from? The booklet tells us not. It’s a shame the footage was excluded from the 1919 version of the film, as there are some curious scenes. We see more studio footage of Shackleton and co., acting awkwardly for the camera against painted icebergs. Then there is a game of football held on the ice, haunted by the imprisoned silhouette of Endurance in the background. There is closer footage of the crowds in Valparaiso (was it deemed less heroic to see the curious faces in the crowd, staring at the camera?). Then there is a more extended final scene of the sunset at sea. I wondered if the idea of a sunset was Hurley’s dig at the idea of “as long as our Empire exists”. In the alternate version, the sense of humour is underlined: for the sunset is seen through a porthole, the glass of which is then shut, followed by the shutter itself. It’s a kind of double eclipse, and a wittier way—visually, if not thematically—to end the film than is apparent in the 1919 version.

But I mustn’t complain, for the BFI’s presentation of the film is superb: the footage looks beautiful, and Neil Brand’s score (for chamber orchestra) is excellent. Such documentary films can be a very difficult project to score, but Brand keeps up with the images, and makes a coherent whole of the film’s disparate material. My final word must go to Frank Hurley, whose strange, beautiful images still captivate. They, at least, have outlived the Empire.

Paul Cuff

Das Weib des Pharao (1922; Ger.; Ernst Lubitsch)

In 1921, Paramount set up what they called the European Film Alliance (EFA). It was staffed mainly by ex-UFA employees and designed to be a US foothold in the German film industry. It would guarantee US rights for German exports, as well as produce and distribute films. Thanks to the exchange rate at the time, they were 300% cheaper to make in Germany than in the US. The system was designed to bypass import restrictions: even if they were financed with US money, the films they produced were made in Germany and thus didn’t count as imports. All of which brings us to one of the major films made by EFA…

Das Weib des Pharao (1922; Ger.; Ernst Lubitsch)

The orchestral prelude sets the scene. The music is the original score, by Eduard Künneke: it’s music that is big, lush, flavoured with orientalist harmonies. The film’s main theme, first spelt out quietly in the strings, then loudly in the brass as the main titles appear. We are promised a drama in six acts. Everything suggests scale, length, expense…

The darkness splits open: a huge set of curtains part to reveal grovelling subjects. It’s a great effect, teasing us with the outside world, with the promise of mighty sets yet to be fully revealed. Cut to the Pharoah, Amenes: it’s Emil Jannings, looking meaty, immense, shaven. Here’s his chief advisor, Menon, played by Paul Biensfeldt—and played in a slightly arch, slightly camp, slightly comic fashion. He hands a scroll to Amenes. There follows the rather silly business of the intertitle showing us the hieroglyphic document, before a dissolve reveals the translated text. (Here’s the plot, folks…) King Samlak of Ethiopia wishes an alliance, and offers his daughter Makeda to Amenes for his wife—to seal the deal. Amenes chuckles. Menon joins in, but a little too much—a swift look from the Pharoah makes him cut his joy short.

Meanwhile, the construction of the treasury has gone awry. The chief architect, Sotis, enters to tell the bad news, begging for mercy (and time) for his workers to complete the job. But Jannings raises a threatening eyebrow, and the architect exits.

Outside: the conditions of the workers are causing unrest. Look at the way the womenfolk spill down the steps, beneath the huge walls of the city. Here’s the film’s budget on show: bricks, mortar, and extras. Hundreds of women crash like a wave at the bottom of the palace steps, then ascend; then stop; then recoil at the presence of the Pharoah. As the orchestra rumbles to silence for a moment, the crowd falls to its knees. A woman ascends the steps: “Think of the children!” she begs. The Pharoah, magnificently isolated in an iris-framed close-up, looks imperiously indifferent.

A priest advises him to make a sacrifice to the gods. Cut to a simply gorgeous interior, tinted red. Smoke trails drift up through the massive space, swathed in shadows. It’s a fabulous image, beautifully lit—an orientalist painting come to life. But when it comes to the business of what goes on inside such a space, the scene immediately loses some of its impact: for Lubitsch must cut closer to the fawning of Jannings & co. on the floor, holding silly poses. The sets are more impressive, more affecting, than the action here.

So, to the king of Ethiopia: Paul Wegener in (yes, it was inevitable) blackface. Wegener is a large man, and this is a large performance: the king is made comic, almost grotesque. His huge wig makes him a kind of dark lion, and with the huge feathers in his mane, and his body swathed in beads and patterns, he is eye-catching in every sense. His daughter Makeda is surrounded by maids. It’s a deliberately comic scene, and it is as though Lubitsch is trying his best to enliven these otherwise cardboard characters.

Cut to the river, where one of Makeda’s servants, Theonis (Dagny Servaes), is gathering water. On the river comes Ramphis and his crew. The music makes this more beguiling than the image suggests: for Künneke’s orchestra glitters and shimmers, suggesting both the rhythm of the oars and the light on the water (neither of which Lubitsch makes much of).

Ramphis (Harry Liedtke), a worker on the treasury, swims ashore—so taken is he with the beauty of Theonis. And the music swells and gives this faintly silly scene some heft. For it’s difficult to take Liedtke’s haircut and the slightly stilted performance of Servaes quite seriously. Theonis is like a walking sculpture: beautiful but awkward, moving to hold a pose. Ramphis is big, bold, recognizably human—but too showy, with no finesse. These two contrasting performances stand awkwardly next to one another on screen. It’s flirtation of a kind, but brief and unconvincing. Much of the ensuing material is missing, so we get stills and superb music: Ramphis and Theonis escape together and it’s the end of Act 1.

Ramphis’ father Sotis reluctantly brings accepts the Greek girl, and here—in this miniature sitcom of father, son, and new girlfriend—is the first glimmering of Lubitsch’s “touch” in this film. “Do you not even want to look at her?”, asks Ramphis, tickling his father’s arm. It’s a silly, sweet little gesture in the midst of all the massive sets, massive crowds, massive orchestral exoticism.

Speaking of which, here they are again: the exterior of the palace in all its massive glory, the crowds watching King Samlak’s arrival. Are we in a Fritz Lang film? Touches of DeMille, of Griffith—but perhaps the touches of campness in Biensfeldt and Wegener help to undermine the pomp of it all. For Wegener is very funny (if only he weren’t in blackface), his exuberance itself the point of this sequence: the two kings don’t quite get on. Jannings is reserved, gloomy, sinister. Wegener is all grand gestures, huge steps, swishing cloak (and what a fabulous piece of costume is the cloak). Cue massive crowds, huge throne rooms; living tableaux; piles of gifts. (Look at our budget! Look at our designs! Look at our extras!)

Thank goodness for the next scene. It’s all rather more Lubitsch, in the way we might come to understand him: two lovers under the eyes of a stern parent, flirtation over a boardgame. The music is also more relaxed, swinging into a lilting, almost music-hall style beat (Künneke’s strength was comic musical theatre, after all). But it’s also over all too swiftly, and feels underdeveloped. (Lubitsch would fashion a whole scene and several jokes out of this kind of set-up in later films.) Sotis is falling asleep, so the lovers wander off into the streets.

Meanwhile, the Ethiopian royals are interested in the treasury looming out of the gloom—a huge Sphynx head, that also overlooks the next scene of Ramphis and Theonis. Again, Künneke’s music makes the scene more than it is: the “love” scene simply isn’t intimate or moving. More successful is the approach of the lovers to the treasury, which (we have already been told) is a capital offence. They are caught and brought before the Pharoah, who immediately falls for Theonis.

I say “falls for”, for that is a literal description of the plot turn: but it’s a look of almost comic lust that overcomes Jannings as he gazes at the girl. It’s one of many instances where the performers (and, as ever, the music) are working hard to tell you what’s happening when there is so little emotional nuance to make you feel what’s going on. End of Act 2.

The musical introduction is simply gorgeous, more moving and enthralling than what’s on screen. What’s on screen is the Pharaoh’s attempted seduction of Theonis. He offers to spare Ramphis’ life if she will submit to the Pharoah. The girl throws herself against the wall. The Pharoah falls back, looks sad (well, frankly, he looks constipated). It’s like watching an opera, only the characters aren’t singing. That’s the issue: the emotion isn’t coming from the performers. They are gesturing correctly, moving correctly, doing everything that you should expect: but it all seems like they’re going through the motions. They’re not transmitting anything. There is no depth. It’s all surface. The wonderful music makes this all the more apparent: the score is doing all the real work, fashioning all the real emotion. Which is fine, but shouldn’t we be getting something from the screen? More than just the great lighting, the great sets, the great show of composition and shadow? You can’t just blame Jannings for what’s happening: it’s Lubitsch’s fault too. Can he help it? Surely he can, for both the historical setting and the performance of Jannings works much better in Lubitsch’s earlier Anna Boleyn (1920). In that film, the king’s smile means so much more: the fear that his smile instils. To be a woman and smiled at by Henry VIII is a kind of death sentence. It’s a fantastic way of uniting a kind of Lubitsch “touch” (the suggestive smile) with the historical drama (the lethal consequences of the smile). In Das Weib des Pharao, there is no complexity or nuance. I believe in Henry VIII as a character, but I do not in the Pharoah Amenes.

Here is Jannings, moping in the gloom, then moping in the dawn. The sun rises. We see the real sun, then the effect of the light entering the Pharoah’s chamber. It’s beautiful, but it’s—what? It’s superficial. What is the effect for? It makes me think of a scene change in act one of Verdi’s opera Jérusalem (1847), which consists of two minutes of music, a musical depiction of sunrise (in the score, the number is simply called “Le lever du soileil”). The scene is not in the original, Italian, version of the opera (I Lombardi¸ 1843). The French version of the opera was refitted for the sake of the bigger budget, bigger stage, bigger effects at the Paris Opera. Verdi wrote the sunrise scene in Jérusalem purely for the sake of the set designers showing off how they could produce a lighting effect on stage. As it happens, Verdi also takes spectacular advantage of the expanded orchestra he could use at the Paris opera: wonderful, deep blasts of sound from the trombones (not in the orchestra for the Italian version of the score) underpin the sunrise sequence, allowing it to both blaze and boom at the same time. But despite how great the music is, it’s there purely to show off what’s on stage: nothing happens in the scene other than the visual effect. So too in this scene in Lubitsch’s film. There’s no point to this other than to show time has passed: it’s there really to show off a lighting effect. And the lighting effect is great, don’t get me wrong. But what’s it doing? What’s it bringing? It’s cool to look at, and Künneke does something similar to Verdi in his orchestration of this sunrise, but it doesn’t make me feel anything. It’s just stuff happening.

The execution is about to take place, a huge edifice to lower a giant slab onto poor Ramphis. Again, it’s great to look at but not dramatic enough. There’s no real tension (unlike, for example, Griffith’s famous execution sequence in Intolerance, made several years earlier), and the plot swiftly moves on: Theonis accepts the Pharoah’s deal. So the Pharoah half-mopes, half stumbles to his new bride and mutters “I love you!” in one of the least convincing “I love you”s I’ve seen in a while. Again, it’s not Jannings’ fault: what can he do with this script? It’s all gesture, as cardboard as the characters. It moves correctly, is constructed correctly, but has no nuance, no depth, no feeling.

So too with the next scenes, of Ramphis being taken away, of the Ethiopians’ anger, of the marriage itself: beautiful lighting, great music, but… To paraphrase Wagner (writing on grand opera, the genre of Verdi’s Jérusalem), it’s all “effects without cause”. So too with Ramphis at the quarry, where he’s sent in punishment. Nothing here convinces, despite the scale: the fighting is perfunctory, the weapons too well designed for their silhouette (nice crescent!) and not for their usage (crap swing!). Weirdly, the sight of half-naked workers with silly haircuts wielding clubs reminded me of nothing more than the early scenes of Carry On Cleo (1964). Lubitsch finds some great angles to show off the scenery, but the film has already lost me emotionally—I simply don’t care that Ramphis escapes.

The new queen goes down well with the populace: she eases tensions by embracing the worker’s child earlier shunned by the Pharoah. But now the Ethiopians are invading, and the treasury workers are rebelling. Time for Jannings to start ramping up his performance. He’s obsessed but weakening, powerful yet grovelling before his desires. (Künneke’s music belongs to a far better film in these scenes, or at least to an opera where the Pharoah might sing convincingly—even if the words are tripe. Here, it is only Jannings falling about on set. It’s not the film’s silence that’s the problem, but the fact that it doesn’t utilize it fully.) So jealous is he that when Theonis refuses to swear loyalty even unto Amenes’ death, he entombs her in the treasury. The Pharoah then forces Sotis to show him the secret entrance, then blinds this poor architect so no-one else will ever be shown how to find it. It’s all pretty gruesome, but even that fails to entice. The stakes get higher, and so do the number of extras: every spare hand is crowding the screen as the Egyptian army is led out.

Ramphis finds his blinded father, but I am not moved. The armies fight, but I am not moved. Amenes is defeated, but I am not moved. Ramphis finds his way into the Treasury, but I am not moved. But yes, I am obliged to say how well-lit it is here—this chiaroscuro tomb, this incredible set, those steps cut out of the night, that glowing bier laid out at the base of the image. But what’s the point when the drama is now so unenthralling? Ramphis lifts a knife to kill his former lover, still believing her to have betrayed him. What can Harry Liedtke do to make this scene work? Not this, not those bulging eyes, not that moribund gesture. No, no, no. The story seems to want to become a kind of savage epic, but it has nothing of the sustained, brutal horror of Lang’s final scenes of Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (1924)—though Kriemhild herself looks rather like Theonis does at times in Lubitsch’s film, with those long plaits and cool demeanour. So we watch Ramphis turn into a leader, hide the population from the Ethiopians, then launch a winning attack—and we feel very little. End of Act 5—and I’ve already lost track of where the other acts went.

The “judgement of the dead” on Amenes. It’s another fabulous image: the stillness, the smoke, the silhouettes, all back-lit perfectly. So the old pharaoh is obliterated from public memory and Ramphis is proclaimed the new king. But Amenes is back! He’s not dead, and now Jannings stumbles back in a new guise: the dishevelled, comic, grotesque remnant of nobility. (He’ll play this kind of part infinitely better, in an infinitely better film, Murnau’s Der letzte Mann, in 1924. That’s the kind of film that makes best use of Jannings. See also Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928).)

Amenes shows up in time for the giant celebrations, made spectacular in the scale of sets lit by torchlight and tinted pink and green. But who believes him? Machinations take place, gestures are made. Ramphis responds with even broader gestures, broader eye-bulges. He must make way for Theonis’ true husband. She acquiesces. The crowd reacts. They don’t like it one bit!

The denouement wants to be Shakespearean—the usurped king returned, the queen defiled and stoned to death with her lover, the restored king dying and falling from the throne as the crown is placed on his head—but it’s a strangely underwhelming ending. Everyone dies, but I’m not moved. I’m not even shocked, as in Kriemhilds Rache, which is similarly brutal to its main cast but with far more bite, more purpose, more panache. So Jannings lies dead at the base of the dais, and the orchestra thunders out its main theme. ENDE.

Das Weib des Pharao is an interesting film, historically. A flagship production for EFA, it remains a startling instance of Germany making a Hollywood-style ancient spectacle along the lines of DeMille. Indeed, this German film received its world premiere in New York in February 1922—it’s Berlin premiere was in March. But despite its scale and the effort put into its exhibition, Das Weib des Pharao was only moderately successful in America.

I looked to see what coverage the film got in Variety, which does indeed relay the release of “Loves of the Pharoah”(as Das Weib des Pharao was renamed for the US market). Lubitsch made his first trip to America for the film’s premiere, but it didn’t go well. In an article titled “German director, Lubitsch, regarded unkindly, he says” (I love that “he says” in the title!), we read: “Following a long conference among Famous Players officials and his friends, Ernest Lubitsch, the German director of ‘Passion’, ‘Deception’ and other foreign film spectacles, sailed for home, giving as his reason he was regarded as an unfriendly person and an enemy of the American actor” (Variety, 3 February 1922, p. 45). The article cites “unpleasant, if not threatening” letters and phone calls lodged against Lubitsch, so it’s no wonder he didn’t bother to attend the premiere. Interesting to note that at this time Lubitsch is known as a director of “foreign film spectacles”, the article citing Madame DuBarry (1919; released in the US as ‘Passion’) and Anna Boleyn (1920; aka ‘Deception’) as his most noteworthy films. The piece continues: “His decision again brought to light the situation as to German films here and the very slight effect they have had on American conditions. Bookings of ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ have been only $78,000 up to last week, and the comparative flop of ‘Passion’, ‘Deception’, ‘The Golem’ and others has been commented on” (ibid.).

Clearly, Das Weib des Pharao was up against some stiff competition. It was also being reshaped for the US market. Variety reveals that “Loves of the Pharoah” has “been given a happy ending by the simple expedient of leaving off the epilog” (ibid.). In March, Variety reports that the film was “running continuously noon till midnight, played to almost $8,500 in five days, at 50 cents top matinees and $1 nights” (3 March 1922, p. 46). But it was also up against Rex Ingram’s The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1921), which was still raking in nearly $40,000 per week—a whole year after its premiere. Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) was also in cinemas, making steady (if not spectacular) money.

Das Weib des Pharao stands as a testament to the ambition of Paramount’s European enterprise, and to its failure. EFA only lasted one year, going bankrupt (amid much scandal) in 1922 after producing just five films, none of which had the hoped-for success. The failure of EFA to establish a US base in Germany led to a different strategy, one that would reshape the industry landscape by the end of the 1920s. Rather than take Hollywood to Europe, Europeans would be lured to Hollywood: cue the great wave of European talent arriving in Hollywood from the mid-1920s onwards. Including, of course, Ernst Lubitsch.

By the time he arrived, the kind of cultural feedback loop (Hollywood influencing Germany influencing Hollywood) exemplified by Das Weib des Pharao was already bearing fruits. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923) was surely influenced by the set design and scale of Lubitsch’s film. Having just now refreshed my memory of DeMille’s film (see below three images from the film), it makes a curious companion piece to Das Weib des Pharao. The Ten Commandments is (spoilers alert) sanctimonious guff of the highest order. It’s worth stating that Lubitsch’s film is free of the nasty, preachy ideology of The Ten Commandments. You might want to read the violence and mob mentality of portions of Das Weib des Pharao in terms of contemporary politics in Germany or elsewhere, but the film surely has no real interest in complex analogies or political subtlety. If it does, it’s so superficial as to be without impact. If this is me finding another “lack” in the film, I much prefer its lack of politics to the puritanical, vengeful grudges that DeMille’s film nurses against its characters. The Ten Commandments certainly has a message, but it’s one of the crudest imaginable.

The score for The Ten Commandments was written by Hugo Riesenfeld (1879-1939), who had also compiled the music for “Loves of the Pharoah” in 1922. Riesenfeld was an Austrian composer who had emigrated to America in 1907, becoming a prolific composer and arranger of silent music scores. Among many others, he wrote music for films by DeMille, Raoul Walsh, James Cruze, Frank Borzage—but his most famous (which is to say, most heard) score was for Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). I presume that Riesenfeld may well have compiled his score for “Loves of the Pharoah” without Lubitsch’s supervision. (Though he would have the chance to consult the director when he arranged the music for Lubitsch’s last silent film, Eternal Love (1929).) Riesenfeld’s score for “Loves of the Pharoah”, like that version of the film itself, is not available for study—and I can find no information whether the music survives or not.

However, what does survive is the score Lubitsch himself commissioned from Eduard Künneke (1885-1953) for the film’s German release. Like his contemporaries Franz Lehár (1870-1948), Oscar Straus (1870-1954), and Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953), Künneke was famous as a composer of operettas. And though these composers’ chosen genre remains classed as “light music”, each of these figures were superb craftsmen. (For me, Lehár is one of the supreme musical talents of the early twentieth century.) By 1920, the symphony orchestra was the most amazingly diverse instrument, and just because a composer specialized in “light music” didn’t mean they handled the orchestra any less well than a composer of symphonic or operatic works. Künneke achieved his greatest hit with Der Vetter aus Dingsda (“The Cousin from Nowhere”) in April 1921, so his engagement on Das Weib des Pharao later that same year was when he was at the height of his popularity. His score for Das Weib des Pharao shows his talent not merely for sumptuous orchestration and “big” sound, but also for lighter, more lyrical sections—even a moment or two of comedy. Though Künneke would write music for German sound films (including adaptations of his operettas), Das Weib des Pharao would be his most substantial film score—and, indeed, his longest purely orchestral work. (Anyone seeking to hear more Künneke could do no better than find his few other orchestral works: a charming piano concerto and his orchestral Tänzerische Suite from 1929—the latter a purely delightful example of Weimar-era popular dance music.)

A final word on the 2008-11 restoration of Das Weib des Pharao. The German Blu-ray is a superb presentation of the film, coming with a huge range of language options for its titles (all of which are coded as subtitles, but designed to appear as full titles on the screen—all rendered in the appropriate style and colour). The image and sound quality are excellent, and this is an exemplary version of a silent film on home media. And one of the most interesting extras on the disc is a filmed concert of the main feature, allowing you to experience Das Weib des Pharao as a primarily musical event. You can see how complex is the interaction of conductor, players, and image—and how the notations of the score are modified to align sound with image. I wish all major releases of silents had this option: it reminds us that this isn’t a soundtrack but a performance, that the context for the music was in its live presentation before audiences. This version of Das Weib des Pharao is (excluding the Vitaphone soundtrack for Eternal Love) the only release of a Lubitsch silent with its original musical score. How many others survive, and how many other companies will take the trouble to record the music with such care and attention?

I’ve made my views clear already, but just to reaffirm: Das Weib des Pharao isn’t a great film. It’s great to look at, but not to sit through. I’m very happy for others to write about the sophistication of its design, its use of crowds, the influence of (for example) DeMille and (more generally) Hollywood staging and lighting on this German film made with American money—all this is true and interesting, but what counts ultimately (at least, for me) is that the film isn’t affecting, moving, enthralling. Without a genuinely emotive human drama at its centre, all the many fine qualities of this production are for nought.

Paul Cuff

Sherlock Holmes (1916; US; Arthur Berthelet)

Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893. But although he professed no interest in writing more stories about his famous character, he didn’t mind making more money from him. A play based on Holmes was mooted, planned, then put off. It was then taken up by the American actor and dramatist William Gillette. Seeking to make the stories more appealing to audiences, Gillette took plenty of liberties with the source material. Concerned over the denouement he was planning, he cabled Conan Doyle and asked: “May I marry Holmes?” Conan Doyle replied: “You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.” So Gillette did. His play Sherlock Holmes (1899) was ludicrously successful, and Gillette had played Holmes over 1,300 times by the time a film version of the play was produced by Essanay Studios in 1916. Long considered lost, the film was rediscovered nearly a hundred years after it was made. It offers the unique opportunity to see the early twentieth century’s most successful Holmes…

Sherlock Holmes (1916; US; Arthur Berthelet)

“This film is an exact reproduction of the play that has been performed to great acclaim for the past five years throughout America and England. The actors in the film are the same ones from the play.” So says the opening title. For whatever reason (did they count only the most recent run of performances?), the play in its various guises had been running for 17 years by 1916. Perhaps saying “This play has been running for 17 years” would make it sound rather passé?

Here is William Gillette as Holmes. He’s given his own introduction on screen. Holmes is in his den, surrounded by scientific equipment. He’s even wearing a full lab coat. A phrenological skull sits on a ledge. It’s a great image, and Gillette looks every inch the character: the face, the posture, the build.

And now for the plot. Oh dear. Well, it’s a chunk of “A Scandal in Bohemia”, rendered more respectable. Instead of Irene Adler bearing the letters written to her personally by a prince, the equivalent character is killed off before we even start the film. Her innocent sister Alice Faulkner possesses them, but is pursued by the prince’s agents (again, the writer of anything “indiscreet” is pushed out of sight). But it’s the Larrabees and their compatriot Sid who muscle in on the act to capture Alice and her letters first. Cue endless opening and shutting of doors, listening through keyholes, standing up and professing innocence, opening and shutting more doors, clasping hands, putting on and taking off coats.

But here’s Holmes again, in Baker Street. We aren’t shown the outside of his quarters, yet; indeed, this film tries not to show us too much of the world outside at all: for Chicago is clearly not London. The apartment is small, simple; there’s a small table, a comfy chair, a fireplace. But who else is around? Mrs Hudson? No. Watson? No. But Billy’s here! Yup, Billy. You remember Billy, right? (Uh, no.) Well, here he seems to be a servant. He ushers in… Watson! Finally, here’s Watson. In the role, Edward Fielding looks as Watsony as one might wish: good-natured, smart, moustached. He goes upstairs. Holmes welcomes him, shows him the plan of the Larrabee house he’s about to enter. They talk. Holmes dresses. Watson stays behind. “Let me recommend these books while you wait for me”, says Holmes. And in one of the most dramatically pointless scenes in the film, he looks for a book, finds one, lights a cigarette, and sits to read.

Cut to the Larrabees, trying to find the letters. Sid turns up. More walking into rooms, looking through secret windows. While they scheme, their servant Forman watches. Forman is an agent of Holmes. More intrigue. Upstairs, Alice is locked in her room. Another ancillary character, the French maid Thérèse (why French?) “feels sympathetic toward unfortunate Alice”. So she lets Alice out of her room. Alice comes down. More professions of innocent outrage.

But here’s Holmes! Look at the way he holds himself as he comes to inspect the exterior of the house. Gillette is tall, upright, domineering. Look at the way he holds his cane. The character has a past in this body, in these gestures. It’s a pleasure to see him just stand there, making himself prominent. He also spends most of this film in impeccable clothes. Almost too impeccable. No wonder he needs a servant in Baker Street to help dress him.

When Holmes appears at the door, one of the gang describes him as “A tall, thin man… about forty, with a smooth face… wearing a long coat and carrying an ebony cane.” The description is almost accurate (Gillette was already in his sixties by this time); but why are we bothering to read it? We’ve just seen what she sees, after all. This first part of the film wastes a lot of time. The gang now spend forever working out what to do. People open and shut doors, whisper, wring hands.

Forman lets Holmes in (a full two minutes after he has rung the doorbell). Holmes comes in. When the others are out, he examines the room. The camera tracks from right to left to follow him, then dissolves to a medium shot as he examines door, piano, safe. It’s about the only scene in the film where the camera moves: it’s quite a nice move, allowing Gillette’s performance the space to unfold, to (quite literally) track his movements across the scene. But the film has scant close-ups, either of faces or (more significant in a detective drama) of details (clues!). Holmes confers with Forman, while upstairs one of the Larrabbees dresses as Alice to try and fob him off. The scene drags on so long there’s a reel-change halfway through, as Holmes waits for something to happen. Holmes gets Forman to start a fire and thus reveal where Alice has hidden the letters. But he is so moved by her tearful reaction that he lets her keep the letters. (Gillette plays this emotion very subtly, with a simple downward dip of the head.) Holmes leaves, having neither rescued the girl nor the letters. There’s yet another pointless scene of Sid being caught trying to nab the letters as Holmes leaves. We’re 38 minutes into the film, and essentially nothing has happened. All the characters are where they started, with little having been achieved.

Pity poor Watson, who’s still reading a book. He leaves, as he “really can’t wait any longer”. (I know the feeling, doctor.) The Larrabees say they will contact Moriarty, “the Emperor of crime”, to help them.

Holmes returns to Baker Street. Billy helps him disrobe and put on a spectacular smoking jacket. He lights a pipe and reflects. Alice, meanwhile, is reflecting too. A superimposed vision of Holmes appears. She goes goofy, dreamy. He, too, “starts to dream” back in Baker Street: “Through the blue haze, he sees the sweet figure of Alice Faulkner.” Oh dear, oh dear.

Now to Moriarty (Ernest Maupain), in his underground lair. It’s a chiaroscuro scene, dark apart from a few patches of light, the faces of Moriarty and his henchman. Moriarty keeps “a small burner” built into his desk, “to keep his papers safe from prying eyes”. It’s an absurd device, which characters have to make great effort to lean into to pretend it’s effective. Its real function is an excuse for Moriarty to be lit from below and appear more sinister. Moriarty tells them to get rid of Forman and that he will deal with Holmes.

So Forman is set upon, but the French maid sees this and rushes to tell Holmes. But here is Forman, who is still not dead. But he’s immediately set upon—again!—when he goes outside, as Moriarty makes his way over. This encounter (much revisited in later adaptations) eventually turns into a crude, tedious melodrama as a fight between Billy and Moriarty’s sidekick goes on downstairs, and the professor quizzes Holmes upstairs—then tries and fails to wield a gun. Even the slow dissolves to details—Moriarty pausing to take off his scarf, Billy later confiscating his gun—are weirdly portentous without real purpose. Moriarty tries to shoot Holmes yet again, but Holmes has arranged for the bullets to be removed. Yet again a great deal of coming and going has happened for little purpose.

Next comes a famous sequence from the stage play: the escape from the Stepney Gas Chamber. All the criminals show up, shadowed by Alice (wasn’t she supposed to be imprisoned in the Larrabees’ house?). Yet another unnecessarily longwinded series of people coming and going. A whole gang, including Moriarty are crammed into the scene. Everything is gone over time and again, which makes their plan’s failure when Holmes turns up all the more absurd. It all takes so long: Holmes wanders around; Larrabee smokes; Holmes wanders around; then they don’t speak. Larrabee is literally tapping his fingers with boredom on his leg. Holmes finds Alice tied up (but apparently unguarded) and is then ineffectually set upon by some roughs: rather, just one rough, as the others prefer to stand back and gurn sinisterly rather than help. Next comes something that I imagine worked very well in the theatre: the lights go out, leaving only Holmes’ glowing cigar end to guide the thugs. But the cigar is perched on a ledge, and Holmes is already outside. Holmes sends Alice off in a cab, then gets the police to arrest the gang. (He himself stays outside to look smug—but Moriarty has escaped.)

Now for a scene with Watson in his office. “221B Baker Street had been set on fire, so Holmes has been seeing his clients in Dr Watson’s office.” That the film makes no effort to explain this event, let alone show it, is baffling. Baffling too is when Sid turns up to make a signal at the window. Why? All that happens (eventually) is that one of the Larrabees turns up. Did that really need all Sid’s antics to set up? But here is Holmes in disguise (the camera dissolves to a closer view to admire his ridiculous false nose). More coming and going. The Larrabee again signals at the window, but why is still not clear. Moriarty is disguising himself as a cab driver (with a ridiculous moustache and eye patch), but Billy has spied this and lets Holmes know. With the aid of Forman (who is apparently still not dead), Moriarty is caught and led away.

Watson and Holmes talk. Holmes sets up yet another elaborate scheme for being overheard, this time by Alice. Watson smiles. “You’re in love!” he says. Gillette makes this utterly un-Holmesian scene touching: he reaches out and clasps Watson’s pocket, nodding. He plays it so subtly—his eyebrows tensing, his mouth pursing a little—that you almost forget what a garble is the surrounding drama. So there’s more coming and going with the prince’s agents, and Alice eventually enters and gives Holmes the letters—which he then gives back to her, and she gives them back to the agents. Holmes reveals that it’s all been a trick to get her to do this. He says he will “say goodbye and leave forever”. But she asks him to stay, for “we still have many things to say to each other”. They go to the fireplace. “And Holmes stayed”, states an intertitle. THE END.

Lord, what a mess of a drama. It’s what Watson (if he’d been given a proper scene) would have called “ineffable twaddle”. Endlessly elaborate set-ups, endless minor characters, endless comings and goings—all for the inanest of results. I still can’t believe Watson spends the first TWO REELS of this film sat in a chair, reading, waiting for Holmes to speak to him. It’s symptomatic of how many early Holmes adaptations side-line Watson’s character. The Anglo-French series made by the Éclair Company (eight films, 1912-13), for example, or the German series Der Hund von Baskerville (six films, 1914-20), each do without Watson altogether. Gillette’s 1916 film at least includes Watson, but he serves no dramatic purpose whatsoever. The tiny moment when Holmes reaches out to Watson near the end of the film: that’s the only moment of genuine friendship, of believable feeling, in the entire film. I know I’m writing from a point of view in time when the Holmes-Watson relationship has been the mainstay of most adaptations from the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films onwards, but even so—this 1916 version is so contrived, so filled with uninteresting minor characters, that it misses the chance to develop the one genuine relationship it has on screen.

But for all its ludicrous clunkiness as drama, this film does have one great facet: William Gillette really is a superb Holmes. His cool, reserved performance is marvellously subtle and understated. It’s a reminder that such performers and performances could and did exist at the dawn of the twentieth century. When the word “theatrical” is used to describe early film performances, it’s usually a criticism. Here is a performance honed 1,300 times on stage since 1899, and it’s the most naturalistic, convincing thing in the film. It’s fantastic to see all the trademarks of later Holmeses here: the smoking jacket, the pipe, the deerstalker, the magnifying glass. Even if they serve a stupid plot (or have nothing to do with it), the scenes where he’s mucking about with test tubes or stalking about a room are superbly played. Clearly, Gillette’s understanding of Holmes—his imagining and/or adapting of Holmes—chimes with that of our own era over a century later. Not only this, it’s almost certainly helped define the look and mood of many subsequent Holmeses. Gillette’s play would be readapted for John Barrymore as Sherlock Holmes (1922) and influence countless other versions later. (Other writers have surely asked even bolder questions than Gillette’s: “May I marry Holmes?”—and had no need to wait for Conan Doyle’s reply.) It’s strange that Gillette’s dramatic construction—the excess of characters, of melodramatic bustle—is so at odds with his performance. On screen, he’s so calm, cool, collected. He can command a scene even by doing nothing. Which is not to say he’s without humour or wit. There’s a very pleasing smirk (nothing more than a turn of the lips) that we see whenever he has outwitted one of the villains. (Strangely, these moments reminded me of Rupert Everett as Holmes in the one-off BBC drama Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004). Something about the height, presence, and control of Gillette—coupled with the hint of cool smugness—brought Everett to mind.) So, here’s to William Gillette the actor—but not the dramatist.

The version released by Flicker Alley is the restoration from 2015. This was based on the only surviving version of the film, a print found in Paris of the French serialized version from 1920. Strange that this should be the only copy that survives. For as a serial, the film surely doesn’t work: it’s so meandering, it lacks the structure or cliff-hanger endings of a true multi-part drama. Next to the contemporary serials of Feuillade, Sherlock Holmes is a pale crime thriller indeed. By 1920, the time of its release in France, it must have seemed rather old fashioned. But in its favour is that the print is gorgeous to look at. The film is richly photographed: the textures are thick, deep, and enhanced by the tinting. The images have real presence. But the drama does not.

Paul Cuff

Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (1929; Ger.; Hanns Schwarz)

It’s 1929 and Erich Pommer has just returned to Germany from Hollywood. He’s keen to introduce sound to the Ufa productions, and he has earmarked the talented Austrian director Hanns Schwarz to direct the sound musical Melodie des Herzens (1929). But first, the pair embark on Ufa’s last big silent release…

Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (1929; Ger.; Hanns Schwarz)

Over the opening credits, the waltz plays. Look how the music seems to match the style of the titles, their sense. The font is a little old-fashioned, elaborate. But the text manages to flow, a feeling enhanced by the way each title dissolves into the next. It’s already an elegant world, a graceful one. But it’s also sad, transient. The waltz slows, becomes a kind of elegy.

The opening shot is of a clock. It’s old fashioned. Figures of a man and woman twirl. Elsewhere, a bath is being run. The camera tracks backward and pans to reveal a series of details; we see the elaborate breakfast table, the silk sheets recently vacated, the curtained walls, the spacious reception room (and yes, I love that the camera wobbles just the smallest amount as it moves in-between rooms: it speaks of the heaviness of the equipment, the effort of moving it, the determination to complete this fabulous shot); still moving, the camera finds the inhabitant. Her back to the camera, here is Brigitte Helm. The music brings in the main theme. It’s a glorious moment.

There is a cut. We see Helm from the front. There is a rose at her lips. She looks dreamy. She is dreaming, a daydream of someone we have yet to meet. When she looks to her left, we see her in profile. Is it my imagination, or is Helm even more beautiful than usual? She looks vulnerable in a way I’ve not seen before. I associate her with those pencil-thin eyebrows, raised in determined desire. Fritz Lang made her a star in Metropolis, but that film is such an oddity, filled with cold formality, with exaggerated tableaux and exaggerated performances—and all exacerbated by the faster-than-life framerate (seemingly in accord with its makers’ intentions)—that it’s difficult to get over, to get past. Even in some of Pabst’s films, Helm can relapse into a kind of archness that is very pleasing and striking on screen, but doesn’t always engage you in a complex, emotional way. But here, in Nina Petrowna, from this very first moment, it’s like she’s a different person, a different presence on screen. And it’s a private moment, this scene of her on the balcony. She’s not putting on a show for someone, or for the camera. The music dies away. Nina looks up.

The cavalry is on parade. The orchestra strikes up a march. But look at how Schwarz frames this scene. The horses and men are behind a high, dark, imposing fence. Who is being held off from whom? (As the narrative unfolds, we realize that both our lead characters are limited by the roles this society gives them: the confines of army life are as imprisoning as the confines of Nina’s apartment.)

On the balcony, Nina appears curious, but only mildly so. For she turns away to walk back inside—only, she cannot. Her silk throw is caught upon the balcony rail. She turns round and struggles to free it. The parade continues below. And now she looks more carefully at the men. Look at the way her face changes. She breaks into a kind of smile. But again, it’s a private smile. She’s not smiling for someone, but for herself. There is a vulnerability here. A delicious touch of backlighting haloes her uncombed hair. She throws the rose at one of the cavalrymen. It lands in his lap; surprised, he looks up and sees Nina. In each of their faces, we see a kind of childish delight. His wide-eyed surprise becomes a boyish grin. Her smile is almost a giggle, and the way she raises her hands up to her face is so gauche, it’s the gesture of a much younger girl. As if to underscore the innocence, Schwarz cuts from these close-ups to a wider shot of the parade disappearing round the corner—all overlooked up a stone cherub, who looks like he’s reaching out to touch one of the men. It’s an arresting image, sweet and sad. Sweet, because it’s an image of innocence; sad, because the men are out of reach—and because the glitter of armour makes them impregnable, cold, brittle. (Sad, also, because I’ve seen this film before, and I know what it all means.)

Nina shakes her head a little and goes back inside. Cue: the man of the house. A rich man, from the cut of his tunic; an important man, from the emblems on his shoulders; a wealthy man, from the way he is so at ease in the luxurious apartment, from the way he strides up the staircase. He has instant access to the inner rooms, to Nina’s hand, offered to his lips from the privacy of the bathroom. (His name is Colonel Beranoff, but the film purposefully denies us this for the moment.)

In the off-duty rooms of the barracks, we see the cavalrymen at ease. But the music tells us this is a military space: snare drum, marching rhythm, brass footsteps. The cavalryman we recognize from the parade is introduced—but not by name (more on this, later). He is merely “this young’un”, newly arrived in St Petersburg. His comrades (all moustached, unlike the cleanshaven youth) will show him the town. They take him to a nightclub.

The night club. Schwarz begins with a shot of fish in a shallow pond. It’s a curious image to begin the scene. It’s another image of entrapment, the fish behind their glass wall. The camera tracks back to reveal the luxury around them. The music is elegant, easy; another waltz, softer, sadder. The soldiers enter. The elder men show their innocent comrade the ropes. He kisses the hand of a woman, who seems to have been waiting for soldierly company. But as he lifts his head from her hand, his eyes catch sight of movement above him. In a balcony overlooking the hall, Nina and her companions are settling down. The cadet is all wide-eyed surprise again and, as in his first sight of Nina, breaks into a boyish smile. He is caught by surprise, by desire—by a desire not sought, but happened upon. (His comrades knew they’d find company; he was not looking for Nina.) His comrades look up to see who he’s seen. A fabulous shot through the jets of water from the fountain: the images is neatly divided so that we see distinct the two balconies, one with Nina, the other with a stranger. And oddly it’s the stranger who gives a Brigitte Helm-like look of desire back down at the soldiers (the raised eyebrow, the narrowed eyes; it really is very “Helm”). The soldiers mistake her as the object of their friend’s look. And it’s now that they name him: Michael Andrejewitsch. It’s one of only two times that he’s named in the film, and this first time is in the context of mistaken identity and desire.

Michael orders a rose, which he now holds to his lips—just as Nina spots him. The high/low spatial dynamic of their initial encounter is recreated: Nina again on a balcony, Michael below. But this time Nina is not alone. Her look of desire is seen by the man next to her: her lover, Colonel Beranoff. It’s a revealing shot: for it shows us the source for Nina’s (literally and metaphorically) “high” position. It’s not her table, it’s Beranoff’s; it wasn’t her apartment balcony, either: it was his. It’s another sad moment. And look how the two people falling in love are framed: she overlooked by the man who effectively owns her, he overlooked by the fountain, framed by water, looking small and vulnerable and out of his depth (socially, yes; romantically, yes; and, most certainly, financially).

And, oh goodness, yes, please look at Helm’s face in this scene. She starts to convey her desire—less girlish than in that first encounter; it’s more of the look we associate with Helm from other films: the eyebrows, the tilt of the head. But no sooner as she expressed this look—a look of desire, certainly; but, more than that, a look of agency, of will—than she relinquishes it. It’s a beautiful moment of performance. Just see how that clear sense of wanting drains from her face. It’s not that she ceases to desire Michael, but that she realizes that the man sat next to her will not allow it. She cannot express her longing, for her longing is prescribed. So she immediately adopts her casual, disinterested persona for Beranoff—you can see her shake off her self and become another. “Is he a good friend of yours?” the colonel asks, nodding down to the tiny figure below. Oh, just a childhood friend, she says—she lies. (As I rewatch this scene, I’m almost convinced Helm is speaking in English. It would make sense, as she’s speaking to the English actor Warwick Ward. How interesting that this first “lie” is itself spoken, albeit silently on screen, in a second tongue.) Nina is performing, and Beranoff knows it. Ward’s performance is excellent: so knowing, so charmed in his lover, yet so unbelieving. “A charming lie”, he says. “Are you jealous?” No, he isn’t—and to prove it, he invites the cadet up to their private room. (There are two other men at their table, but the camera and Nina hardly concern themselves with their presence. Nina is worried what’s happening down below.)

The exchange between them is overlooked by the colonel. He’s almost amused—almost. But he leans against the wall, casting a shadow—occupying space. He doesn’t have to say anything for his presence to be felt. And look at Helm’s face: hiding her emotion from Beranoff, resenting his presence, and falling for Michael. They waltz, and the camera moves. The piano is being played on screen, and all that’s left in the theatre is the piano below the screen. One of the colonel’s companions turns off the light. It’s ostensibly to make the effect of the punch flambee more noticeable, but it has the effect of giving the illusion (only the illusion) of intimacy in the room. Nina and Michael are in silhouette against the balcony; Beranoff becomes a dark shadow against the wall. (The scene also presages the electricity going off in the lovers’ flat, later in the film.)

The colonel quickly tires of their dance and turns on the light: the waltz ends. The young couple looks embarrassed. Nina’s face falls: once more she must hide her feelings, play the game. She dons her fur coat; she looks extraordinary. We see Michael’s eyes on her, then they fall away to the floor. What is he thinking? Well, we surely know: it’s like her downcast eyes just now, it’s the feeling of desire creeping up on him, and the sadness of unfulfillment. But Nina gives him a knowing look. Their farewell is brief. We don’t see what’s happened, initially, for Schwarz cuts to a close-up of Michael. It’s another marvellous little moment, this look on his face—and Francis Lederer’s performance is pitch-perfect. It’s innocence and expectation mingled, longing and trepidation at the same time. The camera follows his eyes as he looks down: Nina has placed a key in his hand. (And oh, the music—it’s just perfect. The waltz ebbs and flows below the image, romantic and melancholy. It’s drifting above the image, sympathetic but distanced, knowing but detached.)

This same mood is carried into the next scene, when Michael havers outside Nina’s villa before using the key to enter. The music here is cautious, almost anxious. Michael’s entry is the opposite of Beranoff’s: the colonel swept upstairs, but Michael hesitates at every step.

And here is Nina, opening the door. She, too, is half knowing, half hesitant. She knows what they both want but is not sure the hows and wherefores—and what it might mean. Michael is all boyish hesitancy. Nina offers him a seat, a closer seat. Why not sit next to her? She goes to him.

“You must have wondered about my strange invitation—” she says. He coyly shakes his head, grinning like a child whose smugness gets the better of him. Cut to Nina, whose smile fades, slowly, who looks away. This is a perfect scene, a perfect performance. You know everything about Nina’s life in the way her smile fades, right here. You know that she likes Michael, that she desires him physically, but that she hoped for more than just physical love. And the look on Michael’s face—that suggests he is not as innocent as he seems, that he assumes she is a certain kind of woman—hurts her. She worries that he thinks he has won the right to her body, that she is no more than a body to him. And the slowness of this realization, the way it imbues first the close-up of her face, then the shot of them sat together, says so much about her life. Surely now we understand her relations with the colonel, which is more of a transaction than a relationship? Surely we can fill in the blanks of how she has had to get by until now. We have not seen her in the company of friends, only the colonel’s friends. Does she have friends? What has happened to her family? The fading smile here, it seems to me, is a very lonely thing indeed. She thought she might have been connecting to someone, only for this connection to be another transaction. (It was this moment that made me fall in love with the film. Suddenly, a whole stratum of feeling is revealed beneath the surface.)

“I think it’s better if you were to leave”, she says. Now it’s Michael’s turn to realize what’s going on, how much his little grin and his little shake of the head has hurt her, wronged her. They shake hands, and as they touch the clock chimes. The montage of the clock from the opening scene begins again, and the film changes once more. Nina moves close to Michael, and they dance to the music of the clock. What are we to make of this? It’s a delightful scene, but it’s something else. Schwarz cuts from the clockwork man and woman twirling to the dance of the human couple. Is Nina simply fulfilling Michael’s expectations? Does she lead her life with a kind of mechanical drive, an ingrained habit?

“Actually, you could spend the night here”, she tells him. She goes for champagne (seeing and hiding a picture of Beranoff en route); they drain their glasses; he refills the glasses and she looks at him. The music moves from tension to something tender. Nina lies back on the bed. She’s putting on a seductive face (more Helm-like). Michael looks at her. “You must be very tired, Madame— —?” (That double extended hyphen is a lovely touch in the original title. I love a good hyphen, it’s so gestural.) The question makes Nina cease her seductive performance and sit up. She agrees it’s bedtime. He makes to leave, and we see Nina shake her head. Is he so innocent? She makes excuses about him not being about to leave: what would the neighbours say? The villa is large. She leads him by the hand to the next room. Michael looks around, in wonder. It’s clearly the nicest bedroom he’s ever been in. Nina says goodnight and leaves. But she goes only to the other side of the door. Each one listens to the other through the door, hesitant. Nina stands. The clock ticks. She quietly opens the door. Michael is asleep in a chair. He hadn’t dared even go into the bed. She looks at him sleep, almost shaking her head.

The camera finds them the next morning. She has slept on the floor by the door, and he finds her there. They are suddenly both children, innocently waking and then picnicking their breakfast on the floor.

Beranoff walks in. The colonel makes the immediate assumption that Nina has slept with Michael. “I hope, officer, that you are as pleased with her as I’ve been!” he says. (Incidentally, Michael is addressed by his rank of “Kornett”, the lowest rank of commissioned officer in the cavalry. He is, technically, an officer—but only just.) He leads Michael out, warning him that “Women and officers should have only one master!” It’s a line that reveals just what he thinks of Nina, and women in general. Beranoff next shouts at Nina, asking her to invent some new lie to explain herself. So she tells him that she cannot lie, since she loves Michael—and says he spent the whole night with her, sleeping apart. The colonel laughs and applauds her “lie”. Just as Michael made assumptions, so does Beranoff. He offers Nina the chance to leave, but she must also leave “his” diamonds, “his” furs. The full extent of her position, her lack of power, is revealed.

Michael, meanwhile, is caught by a superior officer coming back to the barracks late. “Women, no doubt the reason for your being late, are worth nothing”, the officer explains.

Nina arrives at the barracks, and of course Michael gets into her carriage. There is a long, long moment as they say nothing—until she puts her hand in his. She takes him to her apartment—her apartment. It is bare, dark, small. Michael looks around him. “You live here now, Nina Petrowna?” It’s the first time anyone in the film has spoken her name, and it comes now—when Michael realizes what she has given up, and what kind of life she has led until now. You can see him realizing it on his face. He looks adult, for once, and when he smiles it’s out of respect—an adult emotion. They kiss, and there is a propulsion to their embrace. It’s like an obstacle has been overcome, they are ready for one another.

They are living together. Nina is peeling spuds. There is clock on the wall, a simpler clock: instead of the elaborate mechanics, a small bird pops out to call the hour. There is no wine, they don’t have enough money. But Nina lays the table and looks truly happy. And Michael can afford to buy only one flower to bring home for her; but he looks happy. Nina plays their waltz. It’s a lovely scene, for the orchestra in the theatre must stop and wait: the solo piano takes over and mimics the attempts of Michael to learn the tune on screen. It’s lovely, too, for the way it’s played. The lovers are still having fun, enjoying being next to one another, giggling, joshing. Their bodies are in synch. Michael wears his uniform in a casual way (you sense he’s wearing the hardy coat for warmth in a cold apartment) and Nina’s hair is loose. So there’s a touch of studentish-ness about them, a little shambly, a little boisterous. Nina is called to the door. The orchestra resumes its accompaniment, only for the piano to try—and fail—to play with it, as Michael fluffs his playing.

Nina must lie again, a well-intentioned lie. For the electricity is about to be cut off, and she can’t bear to tell Michael how much money is owed. The lights go off as Michael fumbles with the piano. The scene harks back to their first dance in the dark. There, the piano waltz was stopped by the lights going on; here, it’s stopped by the lights going off. Nina pretends the outage is for Michael’s sake: a surprise dinner with candles. “Isn’t it beautiful?” They kiss, and Michael accidentally breaks her bracelet. Wanting more light, he goes to the switch and the truth is out. There is a long close-up of Michael, realizing what’s happening. Nina looks at him (another tender, sad close-up of Helm) and Michael promises to make enough money once he’s promoted. He sees her battered shoes, and the scene ends with his eyes in thought and hers looking away in contentment as she strokes her hair.

The officers’ casino. Michael joins a table. His face is boyish enthusiasm, excitement. Beranoff comes over, sits. Drinks are poured. The night goes on, turns to morning. It’s a scene out of Joseph Roth: the young officer trying to keep up with his peers, being out-played and out-drunk. So Michael cheats, and Beranoff sees him. Beranoff makes to leave. He puts on a fabulous coat, a fabulous hat. His status is on show (immaculate frockcoat, medals, buttons, aiguillette, sabre), as is Michael’s low rank (simple tunic, unembellished). He confronts Michael with a pre-written question that he only has to sign. It’s the first time we see Michael’s simplified name: M. Rostof. He has signed his own suicide note, for this is “the only solution possible for an officer”. But Beranoff makes him an offer: report to his flat tonight…

Cut to Nina, joyfully expecting Michael’s return. The phone rings, and Beranoff makes an unspecified threat about Michael’s career. So Nina arrives chez Beranoff. She is cold, dignified. But she tries to hide her shoes from Beranoff’s gaze. But in every scene with Nina, we know Beranoff to be knowing, shrewd, observant. He plays his hand perfectly: shows Nina the confession, the card. She looks at him harshly, but then goes to the window and cannot hide her tears. So Nina makes the deal Beranoff has forced her to make: she will save Michael by giving him up, and report back to the villa. When Michael comes in, Nina has left, and he accepts Beranoff’s apparent change of heart with that same, boyish expression that he had when he thinks luck is on his side. And on his way home, he goes into a shoe shop.

We know what will happen next, but it’s still hard to watch. Nina is alone. Their plates have already been laid out on the table. She has decorated Michael’s with sprigs of flowers. She strokes his empty chair. She extinguishes the candles. Now she must lie again. But first Michael presents her with a gift. The look on Nina’s face—wiping away tears when Michael cannot see… She unwraps the box. Look at her face, her hands—she is so happy. And Michael too grins with satisfaction. She cradles the shoes, strokes them; but her face hardens. She swallows. The music slows, turns to a minor key. “It’s very nice of you, Michael, that you’ve bought me a pair of shoes…” (and we see her face again; her eyebrows arching, something like forced cruelty taking hold of her—a performance taking shape) “…but do you think that I would wear such common shoes?” She stands, chucks the shoes onto the chair, and walks away. It’s such a devastating moment, to watch her break his heart—and to know that hers is already broken. There is a close-up of Michael, clearly hurt, clearly very hurt—hurt in such a way that he can hardly move; it’s all in the eyes, the slightly open mouth, not knowing what to say. “That’s not all Michael!” Nina adds, spinning round. And her face is almost disbelieving, almost surprised at her own performance. “I must finally be honest with you. I’m tired of living in this poverty.” Her arms swing, she arches her back. Michael comes over. “I need the wealth, the splendour, the villa…” It would be too easy to feel more for Michael in this scene, were it not for what he does next: he shoves Nina, shakes her against the cabinet. It’s the act of a child, not a man. It shows how immature he is. It tempers our sympathy with him and switches the emotional focus of the film back onto Nina. This is her film, after all. And it’s her performance here, in this scene, that we realize the “wonderful lie” she’s telling. You can tell how much it’s taking out of her: she’s almost lopsided, leaning on the sideboard for support while lurching her shoulders forward and throwing back her head. She says she’ll sell off everything she’s given him—she means Michael to think this refers only to her body, but we know it’s far more than that. Michael rushes out, and Nina is left at the shut door, leaning against it to keep her from collapsing. Cut to the cheap clock on the wall, with its little bird emerging to cry the hour.

And Schwarz dissolves from this clock to the clock we recognize from the opening shot of the film. If the clock seemed charming or silly when it first appeared, it now feels tragic. For the image has now attained its true significance, its full weight of meaning. We know the clock belongs to Beranoff more than to Nina: it is Beranoff who has determined the rhythm of Nina’s days, the timeframe of her life. The mechanical lovers are condemned to repeat their dance, which can never alter. Time is prescribed, movement is predetermined. So we see the mechanical couple waltzing once more, and the camera once more tracks back across the villa’s interior space to find Nina at the balcony, once again with a rose in her hand. Snow lines the streets. Here comes the cavalry. She looks for Michael, finds him, throws the rose. He ignores it, ignores her. We see the cherub, once more reaching out for the receding column of men. Nina turns, slowly, almost limping back inside.

The image of the discarded rose, lying on the snow, dissolves onto a huge bunch of fresh roses—and the camera tracks back to reveal them in Beranoff’s hand. He runs upstairs, bursts into Nina’s room and sees her lying on the couch. He’s all smiles. He throws the roses one by one over Nina—and now his face changes. There is a close-up of Nina, eyes closed. In the score, the solo violin was playing over a few sparse, pizzicato chords in the strings; now the music simply stops. Beranoff sees the empty vial on the floor. He drops the roses. The camera moves up from the vial on the floor, up along the line of Nina’s hand and arm, drooping from the couch, up to her face, then tracks left along the line of her body; we realize she is wearing black, and the roses strewn over her unwittingly fulfil the funerary rites. The camera still moves along her body, as the orchestra resumes its course—playing now a slow, funereal march. The camera reaches Nina’s feet and stops: she is wearing the shoes that Michael gave her. A slow, slow fade to black. ENDE.

I was very taken by this film the first time I saw it, and rewatching it has reinforced my appreciation. Most of all, I admire the performances. Francis Lederer gets his role as the young officer just right: it’s a perfect rendering of someone of that age, of that rank. He’s keen but gauche, clumsy but tender, greedy but shy. The performance could easily be silly, exceeding in any one of the conflicting emotions; but Lederer keeps everything in check, nothing is overdone. Warwick Ward plays the colonel with every bit of charm, superiority, and knowingness the character demands. He never has to emote, to shout or scream: the point of such a figure, of a man of this rank and wealth, is that he never has to emote or shout or scream to get what he wants.

And of course, there’s Brigitte Helm. I never thought I’d be moved like this by her on screen. Fascinated, yes. Enticed, yes. Delighted, enthralled, yes. But really moved, no. This film shows Helm at her most subtle, most empathetic. Of all the films of hers that I have seen, this is her most nuanced performance—aided by the superb direction. Those early scenes with Michael in the club and then in Nina’s apartment are so, so touching. It’s almost like we watch the star persona (her “role” as kept woman) fall away to reveal the young woman beneath. Several of the contemporary reviews I’ve read compare her unfavourably to Greta Garbo. It’s true that Nina is a role Garbo would have taken had the screenplay been realized in Hollywood. But I’m glad it wasn’t, and I don’t think (as some German critics did) it does Helm discredit to take it on. Though Garbo was only a few months older than Helm, somehow I can’t quite think of Garbo being the child-like host of Michael for their picnic in her apartment. Rather, I can’t imagine being surprised by the transformation in the way that I was with Helm. It’s a subtle, sophisticated performance, by turns fierce and vulnerable.

Of course, the whole film looks stunning. The sets are gorgeous, the costumes exquisite. It’s a rich, complete world on screen. Nina’s apartment, the nightclub, the barracks, and the snowy streets outside are all coherent spaces, each suggesting their own context and history. And the way the camera glides through these spaces, or glances from one space into another, is fluent, expressive, articulate, meaningful. The cameraman was Carl Hoffmann, one of the great names of German filmmaking in the 1920s and beyond. If he had shot nothing else, Hoffmann would be renowned for being the chief cameraman on E.A Dupont’s Varieté (1925) and Murnau’s Faust (1926) (to say nothing of his earlier work with Fritz Lang). If Nina Petrowna does not have the spectacle or scale of these earlier films, its images are nevertheless as stylish and delicious as anyone could want. I particularly love the dark limits of the film’s frame, the way the iris gently shapes the images. It’s most visible in the darker interior scenes, further excluding everything beyond the frame from our eyes. The outside world seems less interesting. And I’m more than happy to forget what’s beyond the screen, the scene, the performers. (Most especially, that first time they dance, or their first night together.)

In all this, it might be easy to forget the director: Hanns Schwarz. Lots of reviewers dismissed him as a merely superficial, decorative director. But it’s unfair to think the film would work merely by dint of its sets or camera movement, as if the performances fall into place without someone human directing them. So, yes, I credit the film’s success to the guiding power of Schwarz. And although the story might be a variation on a familiar theme from literature or cinema, it’s still moving and well realized. I wouldn’t argue that the film is “great” in the sense that other films of the late 20s are great. It’s not setting out to change the world or revolutionize camerawork and editing. It’s not what it sets out to do, but how it does it that makes it great. I can’t imagine it being done better.

Saying how good the film looks, I should say (as my images suggest) that I was watching Nina Petrowna via a version broadcast on Swiss television many years ago. On a smallish screen, it looks fine—and certainly shows how good it should look. (I also have a friend who saw the film on 35mm when it was shown in London in 1999-2000, who confirms that it does indeed look superb on the big screen.) A newer restoration of the film was completed in 2014-15, which is listed as being slightly longer than the version I’ve seen. (Although this always depends on the framerate of either version.) To finish, I can at least show one frame from the new restoration. Interestingly, you can see more information in the frame from the broadcast copy: the still from the DCP has slightly cropped the image to lose the rounded corners of the original aperture. Shame. Give me my rounded corners! Give me more Nina Petrowna!

One of the other great pleasures of the broadcast copy I saw is the original orchestral score by Maurice Jaubert. The soundtrack was recorded in 2000 for its broadcast on ARTE, Dominique Rouits conducting the Orchestre de Massy. Interestingly, the Jaubert score was not the one performed in cinemas for its Berlin premiere in 1929. There, the score was by Willy Schmidt-Gentner—and contemporary reviews all say how wonderful it was. I’m curious to know if it survives, but the Jaubert score is so good that the film can thrive without the “premiere” music. This was Jaubert’s first film score, and his only one for silent film. It’s built around a few melodic themes, all of which are instantly memorable and which vary and develop over the course of the film. It’s wonderful the way it wrings so much out of a simple set of melodies, by the way it changes instrumentation—moving from the full orchestral sound to smaller groups of strings, and even down to solo piano. Like so many scores of the period, it doesn’t try to hug the images too close: the music drifts over the film, creating mood, filling out the emotional resonance of the scenes. I catch myself humming bits of it very often. I hope a new recording is made for the new restoration—and that the film gets a proper release on Blu-ray someday. It’s very much worth it.

Paul Cuff

Abwege (1928; Ger.; G.W. Pabst)

I couldn’t summon the will to write about something “seasonal” (i.e. Christmassy) this week, so I went back to revisit something I saw earlier this year. (Although I suppose, as the central section of the film is a party scene, it might have some vague seasonal rhyme with New Year.) We’re in Germany in the late 1920s, so it’s odds on that whatever we see will be a quality production. We’re in the hands of G.W. Pabst, which suggests directorial excellence, and we’re in the company of Brigitte Helm, which promises…. well, ahem, good things.

Abwege (1928; Ger.; G.W. Pabst)

The opening title makes it clear whose picture this is: “Brigitte Helm in Abwege”. It’s a matter-of-fact style font, spelled out in a cool blue. I’m used to a certain kind of green for German intertitles of an earlier period (1910s-early 20s), but I like this blue.

The first shot shows us Brigitte Helm, or rather, her image. The artist Walter is drawing Irene (Helm) in profile: she’s the star, the central concern, and here she is. Walter is fond of Irene and doesn’t hide it. Irene knows it and demurs, just a little; but Liane, her friend, enjoys sitting in on their unspoken flirtation. Walter invites her to his studio. Liane seems keen for Irene to accept. There’s something curious about Liane (Herta von Walther). Her short, black hair, her dark, eyes, always narrowed in—how to put it?—receptivity. It’s not as though she’s sinister; but there’s something about her that makes her look as though she has a scheme on the go. With the cigarettes, short hair, and chic dark look there’s also a touch of the “intimate female companion” visible in other characters from films of this period (think Augusta in Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora, 1929). It’s like she’s seducing Irene through Walter.

There is a close-up of Irene, mulling over the idea of seeing Walter—imagining it, and perhaps its possibilities; but her face suddenly changes, her eyes widen with delight, and we realize she’s seen something at the other end of the room. Yes, indeed: her husband arrives home, and for the first time the camera gives us an establishing shot of the whole interior space. Up till now, it seemed as though we were in a sitting room. But the long shots reveal its context. First, we see the huge space extending to the glass doors that mark the entrance. Second, the camera looks back at the reception area where Irene and friends are sat. It’s dwarfed by the space around it, by the grand staircase extending over it. The furniture is huddled into this far corner; the rest of the space is empty. Apart from the curtains in the snug corner, the walls are bare, the space free of “soft” furnishing. Floor and walls are tiled. It looks like a medical facility.

Irene’s husband arrives. He kisses her, but when their lips meet Pabst cuts back to Liane lighting a cigarette. It’s a rhyme on their rival lips, a play of rival habits. The film has offered us no introductory titles to anyone so far. The only list we’ve seen is the opening credits. So although we’ve read there that Irene’s husband is “Dr Thomas Beck”, and presumably therefore a professional doctor or academic, the film makes us work out—visually, silently—what this means in terms of the relations on screen. So here is Liane, offering a cigarette to the doctor; he refuses, but a look from his wife (of hurt, disappointment, embarrassment) makes him take one out of politeness. The history of this group, the internal tensions, is all here for us to see in a few well-chosen, economic gestures of set design, performance, and editing. Even the doctor’s sense of detachment, or superiority, is here: for Pabst frames the doctor taking the cigarette from a slightly low angle, almost akin to Liane’s point of view. He’s all profile, and behind him is the well-machined, well-designed staircase, angling away to the top of the frame. It’s all very cool, reserved. Smoke drifts from the bottom of the frame. He looks away from its source, from Liane. When finally he takes a cigarette and smokes, he is still looking away from Liane. But Pabst doesn’t look away: he cuts back to Liane, amid the cushions and comfort of the only soft-furnished corner of the room, grinning in her small, but significant, moment of triumph. (My word, this film really is well directed.)

Liane has invited them to a part at the Eldorado, but the doctor has asked Irene “a hundred times” not to “associate with that woman”—and does so again now. Irene goes to say goodbye, sadly, to her friends. At the door, she shakes her head: she can’t come out tonight. Walter kisses Irene’s hand, a little too long. Liane asks Irene “why do you allow yourself to be locked away like this?”, and the words are made all the stronger for taking place at the glass doors of the entrance. Earlier, I said the interior looked like a medical facility, and now my impression is reaffirmed: the glass doors mean that Irene, inside, can be observed from outside. A space that offers scant comfort (in terms of furniture, homeliness, the bustle of everyday life) also offers scant privacy. Irene withdraws. She stands at the glass doors and it’s as if she is under observation in a facility.

But Pabst again does something interesting. As Irene stands at the doors, the film cuts back to her husband finding Walter’s drawing of Irene. He looks at her profile, and the viewer (if not the husband) realizes that Irene is caught between the roles given to her by two men. From the square sheet of paper on which Irene’s face is framed, Pabst cuts back to the square frame of the glass door behind which Irene stands. Both are frames through which Irene is observed (and, of course, we too observe her through the frame of the cinema screen). If she is trapped at home by her husband, the alternative is to be trapped in her admirer’s designs.

Irene herself picks up this theme in the next scene, accusing her husband of “locking me away”. The phone rings, and it’s more work for the doctor. He talks and examines his files, while Irene sits on his desk and glares at him. The camera cuts between close-ups of the files, the husband, and Irene. You might call the cutting here a kind of “free indirect” style, whereby the film shows us the character’s thoughts and feelings without ever quite being subjective. “This is where our marriage is!” Irene roars at the end of this little montage: has the editing prompted her cry, or were was the editing prompted by her feelings? Still he ignores her, so off she runs.

In Walter’s studio, we see more images of Irene: her face is being crafted, improved, ready to be fed into the rack of the printing press. It’s a faintly threatening image: that it precedes Irene’s arrival suggests she doesn’t quite know what’s coming. Nor does she know what’s following her: a cab with her husband. He is in his own frame now, the jealous husband, behind the glass cab window. His fur-collared coat is dark, brooding. It’s the only thing “soft” about him, even his house. It might be a sign of tenderness, of a desire for something soft and yielding, but the coat makes him look threatening: his clean-cut profile and slicked-back hair brooding over his tall, black form. He’s in marked contrast to Walter, the artist, who has donned his white studio coat. In his room, the large canvas and papers are matched by the pale sheets over the large skylight. His whole room is dominated by his craft. Irene’s face is being pressed onto a sheet. Now Irene enters. She sees her image strewn about the room. She is flattered, pleased; she demurely hides her emotion from Walter in the background, but Pabst captures the look in the foreground. When Irene sits beside Walter, she gives vent to her anger—but Pabst offers no title to translate her emotion; Helm can say it all with her performance, her face, her hands, her shoulders tensing and untensing, her body writhing even while sitting. Walter seizes his chance, and suggests they escape together to Vienna. Irene writhes into—and then out of—Walter’s embrace. (Truly, no-one writhes like Brigitte Helm.) For the first time, she’s showing off the clingy sheen of her dress—and the fact that she has the sensuality to wear it like it’s meant to be worn.

But the doctor watches still. And now he’s up in Walter’s studio, and hears him ordering the train tickets (the “sleeper” service is as suggestive a kind of ticket as any scriptwriter might cite). His entrance sends papers blowing across the room. It’s the first time the doctor seems more than merely morally assertive: here we realize he’s physically powerful, and the artist Walter looks weedy when he stands to confront him. The doctor walks stiffly, upright. He takes off his hat. Will he punch him? Pabst fades to black. (The film cannot yet show us the doctor doing something physically assertive. Throughout the film, it’s as if we’re supposed to take him as a virgin, as someone never quite capable of a physical act of intimacy with his wife. Is that it? Does she just want him to desire her physically?)

Irene is alone at the station; but not quite alone. Her husband arrives. It’s cold. It’s cold not merely because it’s evidently winter (the light, the trees, the clothes); it’s cold because suddenly the tinting has gone. This is the great advantage of tinting—and here it’s a subtle range of colours (sepia, yellow, pink, turquoise), almost like inky washes over the image: warmth and cold can be added to the tonal range, or created by transitioning from colour to monochrome.

The interior confrontation scene is introduced via the glass doors: first, Thomas steps through them to deliver Walter’s letter to Irene (the letter is a meek apology, presumably dictated to him by the husband); then, Irene goes through another set of sliding glass doors to read it, and presses her body against the wall, fists raised in anger. The husband looks guilty. But what will he do? She—well, we—are crying out for him to be human, warm. Go and kiss her, man! Show her you love her! Come on! He comes to the sliding doors. She runs to them. An embrace? No! He’s got his massive coat on again. “You’re going out now?” Irene asks, as incredulous as we are. A chance for tenderness is gone. Both regret it. The husband doesn’t go to his club, but slinks upstairs. As with the moment Irene reads the letter and presses herself against the wall, Pabst here uses a handheld camera to show the husband going upstairs. In both cases, it’s just for a moment: the camera pans, but clearly trembles a little as it does so. It’s a moment—two moments, in a visual rhyme—that introduces uncertainty, disequilibrium. Both characters are about to go off the rails.

Upstairs, the husband is alone with his shadow in the bedroom: the tinting is gone again, it looks extra bleak and cold. Downstairs, Irene descends in an astonishing dress (more on this in a moment), only to find a friend of her husband (councillor Möller) at the door. So surprised is he by her appearance and dress (and the doorman has already convinced him that Dr Beck has already left), that he allows her to invite him along to a nightclub. The doctor observes from the upstairs window, leaving it open as he slumps back onto a comfy seat.

The Eldorado is in full swing. It’s tinted a gentle pink, suggestive of warmth, and this is the first time we’ve seen crowd of people, the sense of this being a city, and the specific city of Berlin in the late 1920s. It would be a delight if it weren’t for the two sad figures on the side-lines: Walter, already drunk, and an anonymous woman (later identified as Anita), who looks not only intoxicated but world-weary to the point of moral collapse. We also glimpse two well-dressed, slightly effete, men smoking and drinking together; I say “men”, but one looks to be in his mid-teens; are they a couple? This nightclub is an ambiguous space. It’s joyful but sad, it’s a place where men and women meet, but also a place where other couplings are possible.

Enter Irene. Now let’s talk about what she’s wearing. You can glimpse the pale, silky something beneath her equally silky, fur-lined jacket, itself a kind of show-offy cut. She looks like a kind of dark-furred powder puff. And look at her hat! It’s a kind of glittering skull-cap, with two large fluffy tassels dropping like dogears on either side. It’s a mad ensemble, and Irene looks faintly frightened to wear it all as she crosses the dance floor.

It’s an amazing sequence, for Pabst now fully utilizes the handheld camera. (I say “handheld”, but it’s more likely to have been a chest-mounted camera, such was the weight of the apparatus and the difficulty of having to hand-crank it.) As Irene pushes her way through the throng, the camera struggles to keep her in focus; it’s buffeted by the crowd, it tries to keep steady while showing us the effort needed to do so. Irene is trying to reach Liane, who is dancing in the heart of the crowd. When they go and sit at a table, Irene looks calmer. Her coat is removed, and she brushes back her hair: behold, Brigitte Helm. The silky something is now seen: a sleeveless dress, with a triple-wound pearl neckless and substantial, bejewelled wristlet to compliment it.

The nightclub sequence that follows is remarkable for intercutting lots of complex little subplots and characters. We see councillor Möller, for example, assailed by bob-cut flappers and embarrassed to be recognized elsewhere by someone he knows. Drink steadies his nerves, but also introduces him to other forms of temptation. When he joins Irene and co., he sees something fall down the back of Liane’s low-cut black dress and fears to go to the rescue—before letting something else drop there so he can have a rummage (much to Liane’s amusement). Meanwhile, at a neighbouring table, the boxer Sam Taylor observes the cool profile of Irene and begins throwing streamers over her. And on the fringes, Anita tries to score a hit (or hit it off—for money?) with various shady characters moving between various groups of people.

While all these little dramas play out, Pabst resumes the main drama of the night: Irene’s flirtation with Walter. When she first sees him, it’s as if Irene remembers that she’s Brigitte Helm. From across the room, she goes what you might call full-Helm: the slightly squinting eyes, the arched eyebrow, the power-pout, the arched back. It’s a glorious moment. To cap it off, she drains her glass—and then grabs Liane’s friend to dance and make Walter jealous.

Things start to get strange. Vendors are selling sinister child-size puppets at the tables. (We see Sam Taylor playfight with a half-naked, hairy-chested puppet version of himself.) Anita crosses Irene’s path and Liane explains that she’s after “a magic potion that carries souls up to heaven”. As Liane’s friend kisses her arm, Pabst cuts back to the doctor at home, shivering in the blowy room. At the party, Anita slips a note to gain some of her potion. Irene wanders off to sample the “potion” that Anita offers. They disappear into a curtained chamber. We see Möller, happily but unstably drunk; he’s there to make us a smile a little, and to contrast with the more serious events unfolding around him. For here is Irene, emerging through the curtains, her head slumped onto her chest. It’s like the familiar Helm writhe has been arrested halfway through and her body is stuck in a twisted shape. Her head lolls, but she tries to dance again—until she passes Walter. The two, now equally addled, stare at each other for a moment before Irene grabs another man (a stunted, almost expressionless old man with a Prussian moustache) and launches into a wild, twirling dance. When she swirls into her seat again, her mannerisms are the familiar Helm-isms, rendered even more mannered. A moment of sobriety comes as Anita passes in the arms of a dancer. It’s as if we see Irene in the future. To underscore the notion of this possibility, Irene finally asks Liane who is this woman. Only now, many scenes into the sequence, are we told: “She was the wife of the banker Haldern… who shot himself when she left him”. Irene runs out, horrified.

At home, she finds her husband immobile in the freezing room. She fears he’s dead, so is hugely relieved when he opens his eyes. She closes the window, warms his hands, takes off his coat. The film might end here, surely—if only he’d take her in his arms. But when they prepare for bed, and Irene slips invitingly between the sheets, the doctor finds the weird doll of the boxer and storms out angrily.

Irene collapses in a torpor, then wakes the next morning to find the gang from the club serenading her bedside. The room fills with liqueur and cigarette smoke, and the sight of Möller in Liane’s arms. Irene looks upset, more so when her husband walks in. The doctor tells them (sarcastically) to act as if they were in their own home. Irene stands and yells at him: “You’re no man!” (Still he refuses to assert himself physically, and the sexual connotations of these moments of refusal/reticence speak volumes about the marriage.) “You’re sick, my girl”, the doctor explains, to Irene’s fury. Sick? She’ll show him “sick”…

Pabst cuts from the limp boxer-doll on the floor to the real boxing ring. (More handheld camerawork here as Sam fights a black boxer. It’s as if the dance floor and boxing ring are equally spaces of dangerous thrills.) Irene is there with Liane, looking on. Irene’s dress is now a silky black cape, her headpiece a kind of false black bob, with glittery brow. (She’s turning the Helm-dial up to about 8 at this point.)

Irene takes Sam up to Walter’s studio: ostensibly for a portrait, but really to engage in complex flirtation and jealousy. (Meanwhile, Liane warns the doctor that his wife may be about to do “something silly”.) In the empty studio, it is Sam who is the cause of danger: he carries Irene to a bed and looms menacingly over her. Irene ceases her performative flirtation and becomes genuinely frightened. Pabst again uses the handheld camera to make the threat real, a kind of extension of the danger of the dancefloor or boxing ring. (And the unsteadiness of the frame reminds the viewer of those first scenes that set the plot in motion: the reading of the letter, the retreat of the husband to the room.) Walter arrives just in time. Irene is dishevelled, in tears. But Walter is too petty to go and comfort her. He petulantly throws his portraits of her on the floor. Irene blames him for what’s happened, only for him, in self-pity, to explain that he can’t offer her the lifestyle of her rich husband. Irene forces herself into his arms and—for the first time in the film—presses a kiss on him. But just as Pabst interrupted Irene’s marital kiss in the film’s first scene, so now the extramarital kiss is interrupted by the husband at the door. Walter is afraid, but Irene can’t suppress a smile. She quickly strips down to her chemise and makes Walter open the door. It’s a striking, candid moment of her longing for him: her eyes say it all, as she stares intently at him. As I said before, it’s as if her marriage is yet unconsummated; she’s stood there waiting for Thomas to… well, do something. But again he refuses, walking out of the scene.

Time passes between scenes. Walter has been asked to appear as a witness in the Becks’ divorce hearing. Irene wears a black veil, as though in mourning. Her eyes are sad, sincere, even if she can’t speak. Finally, outside, in the corridor, the couple approach each other. She swears she was not unfaithful, but the court has already ruled: they are divorced. But the pair are happy. Alone together in the hall, they sit on a bench. She rests her head on his shoulder. He tells her he loves her. When they kiss now, it has passion in it. It’s a kind of first kiss. When will they get married? “As soon as possible!” Irene exclaims. ENDE.

A very, very good film. Helm embodies her character’s emotions: she’s caught between wanting to express her sexuality (the desire for sex itself) and the fear of losing a marriage that might yet be saved; she’s alluring and unsatisfied, daring and timid; she wears astonishing clothes, but only intermittently knows how to mobilize their effect. As her husband, Gustav Diessl likewise manages to be both physically imposing and emotionally reticent: we spend the film waiting for him to align both body and brain with his wife. And though the narrative might seem conservative—the (un)married couple (re)united at the end, the idea of marriage itself reaffirmed—there are so many interesting, unsettling things bubbling away through the film. Even if it reassures us that husband and wife should stick together, the film is also quite clear about the need for appetites to be tested and satisfied.

The title itself—“Abwege”—might translate literally as “Mistakes” or “Wrong Ways”; when released in Anglophone markets, it was retitled “Crisis” or “The Devious Path”. Yet the word “Abwege” is one of those suggestive, faintly enigmatic German compound words. “Ab” is a preposition, a kind of directional prefix (“from” or “off”), and “Wege” the plural of “Weg”, i.e. “path/track” (hence the English word “way”). The illustrative phrase you find in dictionaries is “auf Abwege geraten”, to “go astray”. Both the official English titles for the film fumble with the subtle sense of movement, of deviation, implied in the German original. I’ll bet whoever came up with “The Devious Path” was quite pleased with themselves; but it sounds too much like the title of some government-sponsored anti-drugs film. Abwege is not a salacious or moralistic film in that way; this is Pabst, after all, not DeMille. The film’s first intertitle, “Brigitte Helm in Abwege”, is almost an extension of the film’s name: something akin to “Brigitte Helm is going astray”. Again, it’s an instance where reading a subtitle doesn’t evoke the same sense as the original title.

But my word, the film looks fabulous. It’s not a huge studio spectacular, but the sets are superbly designed and always expressive. The Beck household is big and cold; the nightclub set a swirling nest of bustle. Pabst lets performers, sets, and editing tell the story: there are remarkably few intertitles. After the opening credits, all the relationships between the characters are told entirely visually—Pabst sees no need to reintroduce anyone with a title. He trusts us to be intelligent, to see—and interpret—what’s being shown.

The restoration notes also mention that the film was tinted when first released in 1928, so the restorers have added tints in line with “the conventions of that time”. How many films of the period are still shown in monochrome prints when they were intended to be tinted? It’s a frustration that even new releases on home media (I’m thinking especially of the Feuillade serials from the 1910s) forego tinting altogether. In the case of the Feuillade serials, the restorers not only have plentiful evidence of the “conventions of that time”, but even incomplete tinted copies of the serials at their disposal—yet still they choose to release a monochrome restoration. (If you’re not going to tint your restored version, at least show us an extract of the tinted copy/copies as part of your extras—don’t hide the evidence!) So it was nice to see a restoration where a little conjecture is used to enhance the image as it would have been enhanced in the period it was made and released.

Finally, the music. I watched this film via the restoration shown (and streamed) at Pordenone in 2020. This had music for piano by (I believe) Mauro Colombis. Which was fine. Like most semi-improvised piano scores, it was perfectly acceptable. It was… just… well… fine. But I longed for an orchestra, for something as rich as the photography, as supple as the performances, as enticing as the characters. Unless it’s a through-composed score with striking melodies or invention, you’re never going to remember a piano score. You might remember it being good, it suiting the film, but in all my years of watching silent films I can only remember one piano score— Neal Kurz’s for the English-language restoration of Dreyer’s Michael (1924)—and that was because it was through-composed, and cited numerous classical works with which I was already familiar (Schubert, Tchaikovsky etc), pieces which were already great before appearing in the film. It’s always the case when I watch a great film, I want a great score to go with it and do it justice. Imagine my delight when I found that there was an excellent, a really excellent, chamber orchestra score for Abwege written by Elena Kats-Chemin—and that it was on YouTube for me to see and hear. (Notably, it was written in 1999 for a broadcast of the film on ARTE, a version that uses different titles than the newer restoration.) The music is everything it should be: it follows the film, but not so closely that it feels cloying—it floats carefully above the images. It’s restless, rhythmic, but still melodic; with its lilt and dance-inflected feel, it fits the setting and the period. It’s also emotionally intelligent; it moves you when it need to. I love the cool, reverberating sheen of the glockenspiel—most especially when Irene emerges from the curtained room, filled with chemical heaven. (The ARTE soundtrack must have been recorded live, for there are plenty of coughs and acoustic shifting and shuffling that a proper studio recording would have avoided. But there is good atmosphere, and perhaps the performance benefits from being live and engaging with its audience.) If the film gets a proper release on Blu-ray, I do hope the best score is reunited with the best image. Without an official release on home media, there’s only so much patience I can muster to resynch the video of one rip with the audio of another…

What else to say about Abwege? Pabst’s great, Helm’s great. It’s a really, really good film.

Paul Cuff

Im Kampf mit dem Berge (1921; Ger.; Arnold Fanck)

Well, it’s been cold lately, so I thought I’d watch something icy. I’m a sucker for anything that calls itself (or has retrospectively been called) a “mountain film”, and the fact that this one is subtitled “an Alpine Symphony” makes it even more appealing for me—as does the fact that the original orchestral score is part of the film’s restoration. And (spoilers alert) I was very, very happy with my choice.

Im Kampf mit dem Berge (1921; Ger.; Arnold Fanck)

Two climbers, a man and a woman, ascend towards the Liskamm mountain in the Alps. And that’s all the plot outline you need…

The film announces itself as “An Alpine Symphony in pictures / By Arnold Fanck”. Fanck is aiming high, even before the first image hits the screen. Richard Strauss’s tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie (1915) was still a recent cultural phenomenon in 1921, and quite the most famous work with that title. That, too, is a depiction of the ascent and descent of a mountain, starting at dawn and finishing at nightfall. (Though Strauss also saw it as a philosophical allegory of man’s post-Christian moral evolution, planning initially to call the work “Der Antichrist”, after Nietzsche.) Fanck’s film is likewise both a literal depiction of an ascent and a rumination on the power of nature. Like Strauss’s tone poem, Fanck’s film is divided into movements (six “Acts”) and has its own score, by Paul Hindemith (of which, more later).

Many silent films begin by introducing us to its cast via close-ups and written credits. Fanck does the equivalent for mountains (“The Giants of Zermatt”). Each is given an introductory title (i.e. “Weisshorn 4511m” / “Breithorn 4171m” etc), followed by a majestic shot of the peak. It’s a brilliant series of shots, each one carefully framed (sometimes with masking), with clouds and mist speeding by the summits. The music swells and thunders in conjunction with the images, articulating in sound the sense of visual threat, of material might. The mountain at the heart of the film is the last to be named: “Liskamm, called the ‘devourer of men’, 4538m”. Yes, here is the star of our film.

Such is the film’s relative interest in humans and mountains that the only two characters in the film go unnamed, and are merely introduced with a shared introductory title (“Players: Hannes Schneider, Ilse Rohde”). Indeed, the humans are never once given a close-up in the whole film: Fanck is interested in them only as a means to construct his “symphony in pictures” of the mountains. They provide us with a narrative and (at various intervals) a means to reflect on the process of filmmaking on location.

Perhaps this is why the “dialogue” (such as it is) is so perfunctory. I say perfunctory, it’s actually very lengthy—but it’s a kind of narrative guide more than a real conversation. The first such title sets the tone: “I’m going to the Betemps Hut. Do you see over there at the foot of Monte Rosa? I’m staying there by myself. No-one comes up here so late in the Autumn. One shouldn’t go climbing in the mountains alone. It is too dangerous. But it is beautiful.” He’s clearly not trying to chat her up. As if to confirm this, his follow-up is: “There, through this wild glacier full of crevasses, the path leads up to the Liskamm. There one looks down from a height of more than 4000m into Italy. Would you like to come with me up to such heights? But the air is thin up there.” See what I mean? It’s not exactly flirtatious. He then invites her to join him in the morning for the trek, following it up with an intertitle so long that it has to scroll down the text to fit it all in a single screen: “Do you see how the Liskamm is smoking? The Föhn wind is blowing over from Italy. I’m afraid it will be a stormy passage tomorrow morning. The Ice Giant isn’t as harmless as it looks. Many who have encroached upon its giant crevasses and icy walls have never returned. Thus Liskamm is known as the devourer of men. The ascent of Liskamm is attained more infrequently than all the other mountains in this area.” Just as Fanck shows the visual “conversation” between the two climbers in a single shot, so the textual “conversation” is really just a monologue. The film has no interest in either figure as a character, and Fanck offers no attempt at a visual dynamic between them: this scene has no close-ups, indeed no cutting at all.

So what is the film interested in? The scenery. My god, yes, the scenery. I’m not sure how much more I can say about the film’s narrative, save for the fact that its imagery is unendingly mesmerizing. I could easily have taken a capture of every single shot of this film. From the moment the journey starts, the screen is filled with wonderful, striking images. The woman traverses a glacier to reach the hut, and we see the expanse of undulating snow and ice with the dark mountain flanks growing in the background. Daylight is a glowing, golden yellow tint. That evening, we see their destination glowering red. When they set off together, the moonlight makes the world turquoise.

Given that the views are entirely dominated by ice and snow (i.e. white) and rock (i.e. black), it’s worth reflecting on why the entire film is tinted and toned this way. In the first instance, there is a practical advantage in colouring monochrome images: in the context of endless white vistas, tinting reveals subtle nuances in tone that the eye might miss in pure black-and-white. (Fanck’s later films would overcome this partly by being shot on more sensitive filmstock.) Then there is the need to demonstrate the passage of the day, which has a narrative purpose (the added drama of the climbers having to spend a night in the mountains). But the main reason is, I think, more poetic than practical. A film that calls itself an “alpine symphony” clearly has ambitions beyond documentation: Fanck wants to show what it feels like to climb a mountain. The film’s titles move between very practical explanations of what we are being shown (placenames, altitudes, technical equipment) and evocative descriptions. Thus, when the climbers set off the title introduces the sequence: “The shine of the alpine moonlight lies magical and unreal over the frozen world of the eternal ice.” Even the titles are tinted green: typical of many German films of the period, but also integrating Fanck’s text into the coloured world of the film.

So, we watch the climbers negotiate the fissures and rock, wending slowly across the screen, shot-by-shot up the mountain. Sometimes Fanck lets the whole manoeuvre unfold in a single, unadulterated shot. Other times, he will subtly remove a section from the middle of a scene to speed up the climbers’ progress. It’s an utterly absorbing process. Not only the danger and daring of the climbers, but the means of their climb is fascinating. It’s extraordinary how little equipment they have: just some goggles, a length of rope, spiked boots, and an ice pick that doubles as a walking stick. Much of the time they aren’t wearing gloves, and one can only marvel at the hardiness (and leatheriness) of these mountainfolk. (It’s only when the storm descends late in the film that anyone even bothers to put on a scarf.)

What are we watching? Is this a documentary? Is it fiction? The question seems to be raised by Fanck, too. For although he creates a kind of dramatic narrative, he is also interested in the process of filming what we are watching. About halfway through the film, we suddenly see a man lugging a camera and tripod on his shoulder. He climbs an icy peak, sets up the camera, and begins turning. Fanck’s own camera pans right to show what the camera is filming. It’s such a strange, delightful moment to step out of the fictional world—only to realize that the camera is itself part of that world. You realize that we are seeing one scene of precarious filming via a second scene of precarious filming. Fanck makes us realize the difficulties of filming the very scenes we are watching. (According to his own account, Sepp Allgeier was exhausted after three days of carrying his camera up the mountain. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he wanted some record of their collective exertions within the film itself.) A title then announces: “Shadow play in a crevasse” and we see the silhouette of cameraman and climbers united within the same frame. The shadows of the climbers wave for our benefit (or is it for the cameraman?). I’m still unsure quite what to make of the scene, other than to say Fanck clearly liked the image and thought “why not, I’ll include it in the film”. It turns the film into a meditation on its own making, and (I think) very effectively makes us even more impressed by the logistics of what we see. The very next scene involves the climbers hacking steps into the ice up the side of a frozen cliff face: every metre must be carved to traverse it. And thanks to the previous scenes, we immediately think of the difficulty of carrying two cameras up the same path—and of trying to film the process while suspended over an abyss.

Soon, we are offered extraordinary views of cloud-filled valleys and gleaming peaks. The figures become Caspar-David Friedrich’s “wanderer above a sea of fog”, only the tangible danger of the setting makes the image even more compelling. It’s both romantic vision and practical achievement: tiny figures stand in the thrilling, terrifying context of nature. It’s the real world and it’s sublime.

On the descent, Fanck is (or tries to be) dramatic by showing one of the climbers fall into a crevasse. But it’s done in a single take, in a long shot, and the drama is only achieved by an explanatory intertitle. It’s actually difficult to tell whether anything untoward has actually happened, or if it’s been staged for the camera. It’s less impressive than the very real leaps we see both figures make across ravines, and the extraordinary ascents and descents along sheer cliffs of frozen rock. Similarly, when the storm comes and the two climbers are forced to spend the night in a small rocky ledge, it’s not very dramatic. Even if it’s real, Fanck does not have the interest (or the filmmaking ability) to make the scene more troubling, thrilling, frightening, or even comic. The camera simply records their actions in a single take, with titles doing the rest of the work. It’s difficult not to see such scenes in the light of his later—explicitly fictional—work, where the personal drama of his characters is forced to become more complex, even if on the basic level of more complex (which is to say, any) editing.

Where Fanck does try to ramp things up is in the descriptive titles. Thus, when they descend we are told: “In the last rays of the sinking sun the pair are locked in a struggle with the terrible wall of ice which they must conquer before nightfall.” And then we are asked to view the surrounding shots of the landscape with a poetic sensibility: “Shadows of storm-driven clouds flit like ghosts through the nightmarish Labyrinth of jagged ice walls and dark, gaping fissures.” When the climber falls, we are told that “only the rope saves them from certain doom in the dark abyss of the eternal ice.” And at night, the world beyond the ledge is described through words before being shown through images: “Above them the Föhn roars over the icy peak and whips the endless masses of clouds normally encamped like a lurking monster over Italy, over the mountain tops. Woe betide the mountaineer who is caught by this storm high up on the exposed ridge.”

What also makes the film more dramatic, more poetic, more evocative is the music. The score—for chamber orchestra, augmented by piano (and, I think, harmonium)—is by no less a personage than Paul Hindemith. I admit that Hindemith is not normally my cup of tea, but this is a delightful score. It’s got a small set of melodic themes, not leitmotifs, exactly (the film’s dramatic structure and characterization are not developed enough for a truly integrated musical design), but variations that come and go according to the overall mood of the scenes. What’s delightful about the way it functions is the freedom Fanck’s images give the composer. This isn’t a feature fiction film, it’s an “alpine symphony in images”. The music is thus detached from the images; or, at least, the music is not obliged to follow an intricate series of narrative happenings on screen. Scenes of climbers slowly traversing a landscape, of equipment being tested, of passing of clouds—these are not quite “events” in the usual, dramatic sense. So the music moves like a weather system over the images: floating above them, sometimes innocuous, sometimes playful, sometimes threatening. The musical texture builds, thickens into a storm of sound; then ebbs away, thinning until the images are left to carry the heft of the drama on their own merit. The fact that the music of this “alpine symphony in pictures” is on an entirely different scale to Strauss’s purely musical “alpine symphony” is to its great advantage. Unlike Strauss, Hindemith doesn’t have to bombard the cinemagoer with sonic torrents; he can suggest them, carrying enough weight of sound to make an impact at the right moments (the opening titles, the sights of mountains, the scenes of genuine danger) while at other times pulling back to sparse textures that are more like a hum, a distant sound carried on the breeze. (In these moments, I treasure his use of the harmonium; it’s like a kind of musical wheeze, a squeeze of sound blown through an alpine fissure.)

In the final act of the film, the climbers descend successfully, of course, and then bid goodbye with a disarming casualness. (Again, Fanck’s later work would go all-out to provide more dramatic pay-offs to the same basic plot devices of climbing and descending a mountain.) But then the film ends with an astonishing series of images, preceded by an equally extraordinary title: “And the clouds surge around the lonely summit of the Matterhorn, from time immemorial onwards into gloomy infinities, until someday its giant body is gnawed and corroded by ice, cold, and storm and it falls into ruins.” Fanck hurls us forward in time to the disintegration of the very rock on which he stands to film the scenes. He also speeds forward through time on screen: the clouds surge in time-lapse photography, washing and breaking like waves around the peak, until finally the mountain seems to wrap itself in a shroud and disappear. THE END.

This is a tremendously good film. The photography is exceptional, the pace never hurried. We follow the progress of the climb with an appropriately measured tread. The music is superb, floating across the visual landscapes in a way that enhances the images without ever trying to outdo them. I also think the lack of characterization is one of the film’s strengths. In Fanck’s later films (I think especially of Der Heilige Berg, 1926), we get characters who are sometimes more symbolic than real, or else so banal they might as well be cardboard cut-outs. At either extreme, they occupy so much screen time that their symbolism or their banality becomes wearying. But with Im Kampf mit dem Berge, we never have to take the climbers as anything more than climbers. There is a pleasing matter-of-factness that allows the viewer to become entirely absorbed in the procession of images, in the depth and richness of the screen landscapes. Frankly, I’m happy that the stars of this film are the mountains. There is a scene right at the end of Act V, and the start of Act VI, after the climbers spend the night on the mountain, where we watch the morning sun slowly spread over the mountainside. It’s time traversing an unpopulated world; unpopulated save for the camera, that is. The music creeps into life, building from the wheeze and rumble of harmonium and piano up to the bright blaring of brass. It happens so slowly, and with so little regard for any sense of human life: it’s slow time, deep time, caught on camera. It’s simply fabulous. When everything looks—and sounds—this good, I can do without characters entirely.

Paul Cuff