DVD/Blu-ray review – The Realm of Silence

Music for The Three Musketeers (1921; US; Fred Niblo)

Last year I wrote about the Film Preservation Society’s Blu-ray of The Three Musketeers, released for the hundredth anniversary of the film in 2021. Since then, Cohen Media released another version of the film in a Blu-ray package which also includes The Iron Mask (1929; US; Allan Dwan). The Cohen Media release is an entirely separate restoration to that of the Film Preservation Society. Scanned in 4K and transferred at 21fps, the Cohen release looks excellent – but it is presented entirely in monochrome. As I wrote in my previous post on thefilm, The Three Musketeers was designed to be shown with extensive tinting – including use of the Handschiegl colour process to render D’Artagnan’s “buttercup yellow” horse. In recreating these colour elements, the Film Preservation Soceity’s restoration is visually superior. But where the new release is decidedly stronger is in its musical accompaniment, and it is this soundtrack that I want to write about here.

In 1921, Louis F. Gottschalk assembled a score for The Three Musketeers that was performed by an orchestra for the film’s first run. The music survives, but it has not been well treated in its modern realizations. The soundtrack for Kino’s old DVD edition of the film featured the Gottschalk score “performed by Brian Benison and the ‘Elton Thomas Salon Orchestra’”. Sadly, this “orchestra” wasn’t an orchestra at all, but a collection of synthesized MIDI files. Though I have listened to this rendition of Gottschalk’s music, I still wouldn’t claim I’ve heard the real thing. Budget-saving soundtracks will be familiar to anyone who has collected enough home media release of silent cinema over the years. It’s a familiar history of “orchestral scores” not performed by orchestras, of original music being rendered null by synthetic sound or else replaced entirely. I remember struggling to enjoy much about The Three Musketeers when watching the Kino release. The aesthetic effect of this synthetic soundscape is the homogenization of musical rhythm and timbre, and its computerized tones ensure that the acoustics are divorced from human performance. Put bluntly, the assemble of MIDI files is a bland, insipid procession of synthetic sounds that makes me squirm in my seat. Even if Gottschalk’s music were more varied or exciting (and it isn’t really either of these things), this realization renders it null and void on the soundtrack.

The Film Preservation Society’s Blu-ray release of The Three Musketeers in 2021 featured a score arranged by Rodney Sauder and performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra (a six-piece ensemble). But even if it consists of real musicians playing real music, this “orchestra” cannot produce an orchestral soundscape. My earlier piece discussed how the score frequently lags behind the film’s action, and (above any other factor) struggles to match the scale or richness of the world presented on screen. By contrast, the Cohen Blu-ray features a new orchestral score arranged by Robert Israel and performed by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra. And yes, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra is an actual orchestra. Despite the claims of the last two home media editions, Israel’s score is the first truly orchestral score this film has received.

Right from the off, the difference is apparent. When the film’s opening titles appear, we get a brassy, boisterous theme—the whole orchestra is up and running. It sets the tone of the film perfectly. It sounds like a period score (i.e. one from the 1920s) while also evoking the kind of music more familiar from this genre in later decades. (One can imagine Errol Flynn arriving on screen just as much as Fairbanks.) The music also captures the tone of Fairbanks’s adventure: excitement, drama, and (above anything else) fun. The period of the film’s setting is soon evoked through baroque turns of phrase and instrumentation. For the domestic scenes with Queen Anne and her staff, a harpsichord forms part of the orchestral texture; then, organ and bell appear for the introduction of Father Joseph. Period, character, and tone are all created and developed with the choice of melody and orchestration.

Israel’s orchestration also makes room for smaller combinations of instruments and soloists. It can alternate between the chamberlike scale that introduces D’Artagnan’s home and father with the brassy fanfare for D’Artagnan himself. There also little gags made musical by Israel’s instrumentation. The little bassoon solo that accompanies the comic figure trying to escape D’Artagnan’s first fight with Rochefort at the inn. Or, when D’Artagnan has just bought his new hat in Paris, the descending glockenspiel scale that signals someone chucking out a bucket of water into the street. The same little gesture occurs again when D’Artagnan trips up on the steps of Bonacieux’s shop. The glockenspiel motif thus becomes one not just of a sight gag, but of D’Artagnan’s social embarrassment.

The greater variety provided by Israel’s orchestral forces means that, even when very familiar pieces are used, you do not get the impression of direct copy-and-paste musical assembly that you sometimes do with smaller ensembles. The melody that accompanies a scene between Queen Anne and King Louis (from Saint-Saëns’s prelude to Le Déluge (1875)) is one that I’ve heard used many times over in silent film scores. (Indeed, I’m sure I’ve heard Israel use it before in his other work.) I’ve heard it reduced for a small ensemble, for a duo with piano, for… well, god knows what else; I’ve heard it well played, poorly played, indifferently recorded, badly recorded. It gets used a lot. What makes it work in Israel’s score for The Three Musketeers is hearing its proper treatment: the violin taking the melody, with strings providing an underlying rhythm, by turns consoling and agitated. The tempo modulates across the scene, quickening as the King interrogates the Queen. The strings sometimes divide into multiple parts, then settle back into their united rhythm. Brass occasionally supports the strings, either to emphasize the return of the main melody, or else to add weight to a particular beat on screen. Even in repeating the same melody, the orchestral timbre provides a shifting soundscape across the scene. What can sound thin and trite when performed by a tiny ensemble has greater depth and gravitas when rendered (as Saint-Saëns originally intended) for orchestra. Give a well-worn theme musical body, greater acoustical depth, and it assumes a kind of grandeur. Put simply, it’s nice to hear a melody written for orchestra actually played by an orchestra.

A real orchestra also makes such a difference to the sense of the film’s scale. Early in the film, D’Artagnan approaches the city that is his destination, and his destiny. There is a title card announcing, simply: “Paris—”. The extended hyphen, which I always like to see, gives us a sense of expectation. It’s as if no more need be said, for Paris is, well… Paris—! This is D’Artagnan’s first experience of Paris, and it’s our first sight of the film’s Paris sets too. It’s a moment and it demands a response from the music. Israel gives us that response. After a few bars of silence that accompanied the previous title and transition, the full orchestra enters at a rapid tempo, responding to the excitement of seeing the city’s grand gates, its tall façade of houses, its bustling streets. This is a proper sense of musical boisterousness for a scene of visual boisterousness. (Compare this with the MIDI score on the old Kino DVD, or the music offered by the Monte Alto Orchestra. Even if the choices of music had been grander, the difference in sonic scale is tremendous. Israel evokes the bustling streets of Paris, the other scores only summon small provincial marketplaces.) Israel’s orchestral forces also have a greater ability to directly reflect sound being produced on screen. Fanfares on screen are accompanied by fanfares in the orchestra. A tambourine struck on screen becomes a tambourine struck in the orchestra. It makes the world on screen more tangible, more directly translated into the sound that occupies the acoustic space of the viewer.

Part of what impressed me was also the subtler shifts of motif within individual sequences. This is music that can shift gear quickly and effectively. Sometimes, only a few bars of a piece are used before segueing to the next. For example, Comte de Rochefort is introduced with a motif from the sinfonia of Verdi’s Luisa Miller (1849). When we first see this character at the inn of Meung, we just have time to register the melody before D’Artagnan enters the scene and the music shifts. Yet the melody recurs later in the film to remind us of this moment: when D’Artagnan sees Rochefort from a window in Paris, there is the theme again—more pronounced, carrying greater orchestral (and narrative) weight. Again, the music shifts gear and moves along… Near the end of the film, for D’Artagnan’s fight with Rochefort and his men, followed by the rooftop escape with Constance, Israel again uses the motif from Luisa Miller, but segues rapidly into Berlioz’s frenetic overture Les Francs-juges (1828). The switching from motif to motif is marvellously assured and effective. It gives the impression of a continuous musical intelligence, even though it is made up of music taken from many different sources and periods.

Many times, I was struck by how Israel’s choices make the drama more… well, dramatic. Take the scene in which Richelieu tries to keep D’Artagnan talking long enough for an assassin to kill him. Richelieu’s line, “If you were about to die, what would you do?”, is invested with real weight by beat of the timpani that underscores the moment. Then the switch to a march motif, complete with snare drum and little flourishes in the brass, makes D’Artagnan’s reply as bold and brassy as it is. The climax, when D’Artagnan makes his daring escape past the Cardinal’s guards, suddenly brings in the whole orchestra swelling into D’Artagnan’s own musical theme. The music makes the moment as thrilling, charming, and satisfying as it ought to be. Switching from motif to motif, this whole sequence worked for me in a way that it never quite did with previous scores.

There is also the pleasure of recognizing pieces of music that arrive out of the blue. For example, in the final court ball sequence, we see live music and dances being played on screen. Israel’s score accompanies the scene with a delightful orchestration of a seventeenth-century melody I recognized as one of Michael Praetorius’s terpsichorean dances (c.1612). (Rechecking my CD liner notes, I find that the melody—a bourrée—originates with Adrianus Valerius (c.1575-1625). Praetorius collected it as part of his series of 300 dances based on popular contemporary melodies from across Europe, especially France.) There was delight in recognizing the music (a quite fabulously catchy little melody) but delight too in the way Israel’s treats it. His score offers a small-scale, period arrangement of the music, then suddenly alters to bring in brass and strings whenever the scene cuts away to exterior scenes of intrigue.

So, in summary, this is a really excellent score. More than just well selected (i.e. appropriate for what’s happening on screen), Israel’s music is warm, charming, and immediately accessible. It is intelligent and emotive, subtle when it needs to be and obvious when required. Though it matches the action through tempo and instrumentation, there are also some very pleasing moments of synchronization. (I’ve already mentioned some comic touches with the glockenspiel, but a scene that brought particular satisfaction was Rochefort’s final clash with D’Artagnan. This sees a more extensive use of Luisa Millar motif, Rochefort’s theme, and Israel times the brass perfectly with several thrusts of his sword in this last scene. It’s a really lovely touch.) Israel’s score for The Three Musketeers in fact pairs very nicely with the wonderful Carl Davis score for The Iron Mask, which is also on the Blu-ray. The latter was recorded by the City of Prague Philharmonic and featured on the 1999 DVD release of the film. It’s curious that the films each have music performed by Czech orchestras (dare I say that rates are cheaper there than in the US?). Occasionally, Israel’s orchestra sounds as though it needed a couple more run-throughs to really gel. (By comparison, the Davis recording—made some quarter-century earlier—sounds not merely professional but polished.) But this is a very minor reservation indeed. Israel’s score sounds much better than many silent soundtracks, and I rejoice at being able to hear it. If only it accompanied the Film Preservation Society’s restoration of the film!

Paul Cuff

The Epic of Everest (1924; UK; John Noel)

John Noel had an extraordinary early life. Born in southwest England, educated in Switzerland, and posted with the British army to India, he fell in love with mountains at an early age. When his unit was stationed near the Himalayas in 1913, he travelled in disguise into Tibet to get a glimpse of Mount Everest. He served with the BEF in 1914, being taken prisoner at the battle of Le Cateau before escaping his captors and returning to active service. After the war, he became involved with the Royal Geographical Society and Alpine Club, joining the 1922 expedition to Everest as official photographer. He experimented with new kinds of telescopic lens to photograph and film at long distance in the mountains. The result was the short film Climbing Mount Everest (1922), as well as a desire to do better next time. In 1924, he helped fund the next expedition to Everest, led by General Charles G. Bruce. This time, Noel would record enough footage for a feature film. If the expedition was a success, he hoped to film the team’s actual ascent to the summit. And if the expedition failed…?

This film has been sat on my shelf for a long time. Having written about South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919), and having seen The Great White Silence (1924), I knew I would get to it eventually. Thanks to the very cold weather we had in January, I was finally inspired to watch it. The first thing to say about The Epic of Everest is that it is astonishingly beautiful to look at. The 2013 restoration by the BFI presents the remarkable footage in as good a quality as could be hoped.

The grain of the image lets you feels the rocks and ice and clouds, as well as the texture of the clothing and animal hides. The scenes tinted blue, pink, or give a dramatic, otherworldly quality to the film—but the landscapes are otherworldly enough in monochrome. Indeed, the whites and blacks seem almost destined to be used for such mountainous terrain. Noel plays with space and time, so that the mountains attain a magical sense of life: we see light and shade rushing across gleaming slopes, or darkness creeping up sheer cliffs of ice. Clouds pass at preternatural speed over the ridges and summits, or obscure whole swathes of the world. The silhouette of Everest itself becomes a constant visual anchor: it’s as though it is the one constant presence in a landscape at the mercy of elements. And it’s a kind of visual motif that embodies the obsession of the expedition that wishes to climb it. That we see the summit so often, without ever being about to reach it, is emblematic of the entire narrative.

These remarks aside, I was a little worried by the opening section of the film. There are a lot of titles, interspersed with one or two shots of landscapes. The landscapes looked beautiful, but I was concerned how much work the titles would have to do to shape the footage into a narrative. Happily, the film settles down after a few minutes and the footage dominates the text. The progress of the expedition is visually clear, helped by some marvellous compositions. The landscapes are also so vast that the literal progress of the lines of men, women, and animals is naturally choreographed. From the large crowds of porters and animals, we then see smaller teams of men and animals, and finally just men. And all the while, the terrain becomes steeper, whiter, harsher.

Indeed, it is the sense of scale that The Epic of Everest most brilliantly conveys. Noel composes the figures in this landscape carefully, so that we always get a sense of how small they are compared to the slopes. What’s more, the extraordinary telescopic lens he uses enable us to see across huge swathes of land to pick out the tiny dots of figures on distant slopes. You really do get the sense of the vastness of this terrain, and the vulnerability of the climbers. If Noel offers us a few glimpses of the faces of the main team and of the local porters, we never linger on any of them for that long. In fact, the only sustained close-ups we get of anyone in the expedition are the two still images of Mallory and Irvine near the end of the film. If this denies us a direct emotional involvement with the figures, it also concentrates all our attention on the reality of the world they inhabit. The drama is often played out at great distance, so the titles must do a lot of narrating for us (together with lots of undercranking to speed up the slowness of their traversal of the snow).

The film’s attitude to the nature and purpose of the expedition is also interesting. As far as the presence and culture of the local Tibetans is concerned, the perspective of The Epic of Everest is a little mixed. We are introduced to one village by being told how filthy and smelly it is, and the tone of other titles is rather patronising. (It is unclear if the film expects or encourages its contemporary Western audiences to laugh.) But I was surprised by how much respect the Tibetans are given: they are thanked for their welcome, company, and help; their temples and religious customs are given nodding respect—to the extent of being given some credence. For we are told that the Lama visited by the climbers told them that their expedition would fail, and the film acknowledges that he was right—even that it was a kind of destiny foreknown.

Which brings us to the ending. Narratively, the film is far stronger than Herbert Ponting’s The Great White Silence. Since the filmmakers could not accompany Scott and his team to the South Pole in 1912, the story of their fate is told via substitute footage and an animated map. Conversely, though filmmaker Franky Hurley was present throughout the gruelling events depicted in South in 1914-16, he was unable to film any of the climactic journey and rescue. That film ends with footage of the location recorded long after, with a lot of wildlife thrown in for good measure. Both are unsatisfactory ways to conclude fascinating narratives. But for The Epic of Everest, Noel was present and filming throughout the climactic events. And there is a powerful irony in the fact that the film’s boasts of telescopic lenses proved powerless against the weather to record the final stretch of Mallory and Irvine’s attempt to reach the summit. Like Noel, we can only sit at a great distance and observe the slow and often obscure events unfold. One moment, the climbers are tiny dots, the next they are lost in cloud. We wait. Hours pass. Other figures appear, messages are relayed with painful slowness. Mallory and Irvine have disappeared, and the film cannot solve the mystery or offer us any alternate means of representing what happened.

In dealing with the failure of the expedition, and the death of two of its members, the film becomes surprisingly reflective. If Mallory and Irvine died, we are asked, isn’t resting forever in this astonishing landscape an idyllic kind of afterlife? Further, the text of the titles wonders if the expedition was fated to fail, and whether some spiritual aspect of the mountain—and, implicitly, of Tibetan culture—prevented them from reaching their goal. It returns to the native idea of the mountain as a goddess that protects herself from intruders—especially (I think it is implied) from those outside of Tibetan culture. Whether the filmmaker is being sincere, or is just finding a convenient way of ending the film on a dramatically satisfying fashion, is up for debate. But I think the ending does succeed narratively and emotionally: the last images, tinted a burnished red, of the mountain drawing the darkness up over its flanks and summit is an exceptionally beautiful way of making a sense of irresolution a fitting conclusion.

The BFI restoration comes with a choice of two scores. The first is by Simon Fisher Turner. I say “first” because the cover of the Blu-ray credits this as “a film by Captain John Noel with music by Simon Fisher Turner”. (Not quite in the same league as the BFI release which Amazon sells under the title “Michael Nyman’s Man With A Movie Camera”, which really takes the biscuit.) Described in the liner notes of this edition as “an epic of contemporary music-making”, it boasts an array of sampled sounds—from the original 1924 recordings of Tibetan vocalists recorded by the expedition to various kinds of “silence”, yak bells etc. The music that is not sampled or recorded on location is rather more generic. Washes and warblings of sound, dashes of synthesized brass, tinklings and scratchings, breathy acoustic sighs… This mood music engages only in the very broadest way with the rhythm of the film, or the rhythm of watching it.

The liner notes contain a very brief essay by Fisher Turner. “Where do I begin?” he asks. “On the internet.” He freely acknowledges his role as acoustic “thief”, while also emphasizing the improvisatory way he compiles pre-existing and original sections of the soundtrack. It’s difficult to reconcile the claim of this being an “epic of contemporary music-making” with Fisher Turner’s own account of downloading apps and stealing audio from online videos. Bits of his essay read like parody: “Ideas come and go. Puzzle making. Noise collecting. Soft electricity. Sound climbing. Notimemusic. Snowblind snarls. I meet Ruby and Madan, and play music on the sofa, and eat Nepalese lunch with blue skies and new friends.” Epic indeed. At least Fisher Turner’s soundtrack for The Epic of Everest is preferable to his score for The Great White Silence, which I found entirely unenjoyable—and sometimes downright stupid. (At one point, the soundscape lapses into silence. Fisher Turner himself then appears in audio form, telling us that the silence we are listening to was recorded at Scott’s cabin in Antarctica. Having to appear on your soundtrack to explain the soundtrack is absurd enough, but Fisher Turner chooses to speak at the very moment when there is a lengthy intertitle on screen. Trying to read one voice and listen to another is difficult, and it struck me as the very acme of aesthetic imposition to literally talk over the film while the film itself was “talking”.)

I wonder how much money was spent commissioning and recording the Fisher Turner soundtrack, and how much was spent on its alternative: the reconstruction of the 1924 orchestral score? The relative market standing of the two soundtracks is clear enough from the way the modern one is prioritized in publicity and on packaging. The liner notes also promise that Fisher Turner’s score is available on “deluxe limited-edition vinyl” and CD. But not, of course, the 1924 score. And you must go past two essays on the modern soundtrack before you reach Julie Brown’s excellent essay on the 1924 score, which is the last one included in the booklet.

So, what of the 1924 score? It was compiled for the film’s screening at the New Scala Theatre in London by the renowned conductor Eugene Goossens (Senior) and composer Frederick Laurence. It consists mainly of music from the existing repertory, together with some specially composed pieces for a few sequences. Much of the music is familiar: there is a lot of Borodin, some Mussorgsky, Korngold, Lalo, Prokofiev, and Smetana. Then there are the more obscure pieces by lesser-known composers: Joachim Raff, Félix Fourdrain, Hermann Goetz, Henri Rabaud. Of the latter, I knew the music of Fourdrain and Rabaud only through other silent film scores. Some of Fourdrain’s music was used in the score compiled by Paul Fosse and Arthur Honegger for Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922), while Rabaud composed the scores for Raymond Bernard’s historical epics La Miracle des loups (1924) and Le Joueur d’échecs (1927).

The music has much to do in keeping a sense of pace and involvement with The Epic of Everest, as the succession of landscapes and titles can sometimes become monotonous—or at least mono-rhythmic. Having solid symphonic works, neatly arranged, provides another temporal dimension to our viewing experience.

There are also some oddities. One sequence is introduced with the title: “Into the heart of the pure blue ice, rare, cold, beautiful, lonely—Into a Fairyland of Ice.” The music cued at this point is the Moldau movement from Smetana’s Má vlast (1872-79). But while Smetana’s music famously captures water in motion, the images on screen are of water arrested: a sonic depiction of racing rivers accompanies the sight of frozen drifts. Elsewhere, there are slightly awkward accompaniments around scenes of Tibetan life. Thus, when a mother is scene happily giving her child a “butter bath”, the music is oddly dramatic. But it is hardly more at odds with the scene than Fisher Turner’s mood-music synth wash with odd clicks and scratches.

Besides, there are far more scenes where the 1924 choices work wonderfully—even with music that is familiar from other contexts. Thus, we get Mussorgsky’s “St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain” (1867) accompanying a sequence of images of wind and snow blasting across Everest and its approaches. (“Should you not mind wind or frost of fifty degrees, you may stand out on the glacier and watch the evening light beams play over the ice world around.”) It’s fabulously evocative, sinister, thrilling music—every bit the equal of Noel’s images. The original music by Frederick Laurence that introduces the Kampa-Dzong temple (“Tibetan chant”) is also marvellously simple and evocative (harp chords and, I think, bass notes on the piano). And for the last scenes of the film, where the mood changes to one of brooding reflection and resignation, we get another excellent arrangement. Rabaud’s “Procession nocturne” (1899) soars slowly, ecstatically over the images—before the score switches to the sinister fugue from Foudrain’s prelude to Madame Roland (1913) as darkness encroaches over the mountain.

For the BFI restoration, the music is performed by the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Gourlay. I’d not encountered this group before and had an initial concern that budget might restrict either the size of the orchestra or the quality of the performance. I was happily surprised by both aspects: the sound is full and rich, the music well played and decently recorded. The sonic depth and complexity of a symphony orchestra is immeasurably preferable to the kinds of four- or five-person ensembles advertised as “orchestras” on some silent film releases. The Epic of Everest benefits enormously from its original score, and I wish more releases would take the trouble (or be given the budget) to provide music of this scale and quality.

Paul Cuff

Der Geiger von Florenz (1926; Ger.; Paul Czinner)

Der Geiger von Florenz was the sixth film directed by Paul Czinner and the third to star Elisabeth Bergner, whom he later married. It’s also the first of Czinner’s silent films to be released on Blu-ray. Given that my last experience of Czinner’s silent work was the shoddy copy of The Woman He Scorned (1929), I was keen to see his work in high definition. I was also intrigued to see Elisabeth Bergner as the lead, a very different star to Pola Negri.

First, the plot—and yes, as ever, I spoil everything. The young Renée (Elisabeth Bergner) is deeply attached to her father (Conrad Veidt) and deeply jealous of her stepmother (Nora Gregor). After numerous petty squabbles, Renée is sent away to a ladies’ finishing school in Switzerland. There, she rebels against her teachers and runs away, disguising herself as a boy in order to cross the border into Italy. While roaming the streets, she encounters an old violinist and asks to play his violin. As she does so, a car pulls up and the artist (Walter Rilla) and his sister (Grete Mosheim) are entranced by the image of this beautiful young player. Renée goes with the siblings to Florence, where she becomes the subject of the artist’s paintings. The painting of the anonymous “Fiddler of Florence” is published and seen in a newspaper by Renée’s father, who seeks out his missing daughter. Renée’s identity as a woman is revealed, as is the mutual attraction between her and the artist. Renée’s father arrives in time to bless the couple.

At a little over eighty minutes, the film is a seemingly simple drama: light, charming, faintly silly. But it has plenty of telling details that cumulatively make for a surprisingly complex engagement with the complexities of desire and gender.

The daughter/stepmother jealousy plays out in the very first scene: at her father’s desk, Renée substitutes a photo of her stepmother for her own—and destroys the image of her rival. At the dinner table, she replaces her stepmother’s choice of flowers with her own enormous bouquet, which she then moves to try and block the conversation between father and stepmother. The rivalry is then played out through two rival dogs: Renée feeding her own dog, which then ends up attacking the stepmother’s dog under the table. The whole trio tries to placate the dogs, one of which bites Renée’s father—the two women gather round with medical boxes, bandages etc. It’s a comic sequence, a snowballing farce than ends up with everyone chasing around the house.

All this is told through images. But when Renée sees her father alone outside, clearly depressed, she commits her thoughts to her notebook. The film then offers us a lot of contextual information through this written text, then through two flashbacks. We see Renée on holiday with her father in Italy, where she embraces him and says that “If you weren’t my father, I’d marry you”. Then, when her father spots the woman who will become his second wife at the next table, Renée keeps moving her parasol to block their eye contact. It’s the same trick she pulled with the flowers earlier in the film, and the history of their fraught daughter-father-stepmother relationship confirms the impression that it’s effectively a love triangle. Outside, the stepmother joins the father. She issues him an ultimatum: either Renée goes, or she does.

Renée’s desire for her father is epitomized in the next scene, when her father comes to say goodnight. Renée eagerly pats the bed, but her father pulls up a chair. Renée is visibly crestfallen, and the sustained close-ups of her face in the ensuing conversation show the waves of emotion passing over her. Bergner’s face is wonderfully expressive, her eyes beautifully lit: they seem huge, and you seem to fall into them in these close-ups. Indeed, much of the film is spent watching Bergner’s expressivity. Her performance is incredibly animated. She’s scheming, or emoting, or running away, or hurling herself away in shock or fear or despair or delight. The framerate of the film is faster-than-life throughout, apart from one section of slow-motion. Thus, Bergner’s movements are all exaggerated. It’s as though the film itself shares the energy and ferocity of her teenage emotional life. Even in these close-ups in her bedroom, her face becomes the sight of tremendous emotional activity—condensed in her luminous eyes.

Promised another Italian holiday if she behaves, Renée tries to make things up with her stepmother. We see her in the next scene approaching her rival as if attempting to seduce her: she creeps along the wall, nervously—or is it flirtatiously? Then she helps make a punch, urging her stepmother to make it stronger and stronger. So they get very rapidly tipsy and start to dance with each other. Enter Renée’s father, who is offered cups of punch by both women. He pushes away Renée’s hand and drinks from his wife’s cup. Renée hurls her glass of punch at her stepmother. There’s a kind of savagery in this action: the violence of the gesture contrasting with the primness of the weapon.

So Renée is sent to Switzerland, where we see her writing of her sadness at her confinement. The film has skipped forward here, for Renée has already made an enemy of her tutor. We see her wipe away a chalkboard announcement of her punishment and draw instead a caricature of the tutor. In another riff on the dog theme seen in the opening scenes, Renée has better command over the tutor’s dog (called Fellow) than the tutor herself. Renée waits for a letter from her father to rescue her, but instead a letter arrives that says she must stay put. Perhaps Czinner was conscious of how much letter-writing (and thus letter-reading) there has been in the film in this section, for he provides a gorgeous visualization of Renée’s emotions as she reads here. She is on a bench in parkland and the wind whips the trees all around her as she wanders forlornly back and forth across the grass. It’s a lovely scene, and a relief that Czinner finds a way of visualizing feeling again, not having to rely on more text.

At night, Renée escapes—wearing an extraordinarily eye-catching plaid outfit and hat. Thankfully, after failed attempts to cross the border to Italy via train and road, she is able to swap clothes with a young peasant. In male clothing, she crosses into Italy and roams freely along the beautiful mountainside roads. For such a short film, Czinner gives plenty of time to Renée’s wandering here: we see the landscapes around lake Lugano in dazzling sunlight. The haze of the vistas interacts beautifully with the grain of the filmstock. You can understand why Czinner lets the film’s plot meander here, it’s lovely to look at—with Bergner’s tiny figure, dressed almost as if from a previous century, providing scale and narrative punctuation to the landscapes.

She eventually encounters a beggar playing a violin by the roadside. Convincing him to lend her his instrument, she begins to play—just as a motorcar draws up alongside. The driver and his companion seem to take a fancy to this strange figure, dressed in peasant clothes, striking a pose from another age. The man is an artist and wishes to paint the “boy” violinist. Renée readily agrees. There follows a lovely (and again, surprisingly lengthy, given the film’s short length) segment where the camera sits behind Renée and follows her journey to Florence. It becomes a travelogue documentary, the film simply cutting as it wishes to segue from one view to the next. It’s always fascinating to glimpse the real streets of the 1920s, with ordinary people moving aside for the car and glancing at the camera as it passes.

But the levels of artifice are foregrounded in what follows. At his glamorous estate in Florence, the artist is transformed from an apparently old, grey-haired man into a youth. For the grey of his hair, and that of his female companion, is merely the dust of the roads. Renée is startled by their transformation, just as she is frightened when the artist demands that “he” too must be scrubbed clean. Renée’s own transformation into the suited “boy” is greeted with curiosity by both her hosts. She is an object of fascination and flirtation by both the man and woman. They are siblings, but Renée doesn’t discover this until she has already fallen for him. She poses as the “fiddler”, and Czinner turns the posing into a lengthy sequence for Bergner to express her fidgety, restless character. She cannot stand still, and the artist grows irritated. So Czinner makes this frustration into a little marvel of cinematic magic: the camera is over-cranked, thus slowing the film for us in projection. Renée’s restless movements become a strange dance, the film finally finding a way of slowing her down, of capturing her for our gaze.

The peculiarities pile on, however, as the artist’s sister grows jealous of his new muse. It’s the artist’s turn to be offered two cups of punch, and when he chooses Renée’s, his sister throws her drink at Renée. This reverse of the scene with Renée and her stepmother reminds us of the weirdness of the film’s emotional path. Renée seems keen to be adopted by what she takes as an older man, only to find him a young man. The artist thus attracts her as an image of her father, then wins her over as a different kind of male figure: Renée transfers (at least some of) her affections from a familial to a romantic object.

But the film isn’t as neat as that sounds. For the brother-sister relationship of the artist and his sister is also weirdly intense. Renée sees them embracing in the garden and it’s not just her who wonders just how close this couple might be. And the sister not only flirts with Renée when she is disguised as a young man, but also reveals Renée’s femininity by placing her hand on Renée’s breast and embracing her. Thus, wherever you look, the film offers unusual and interesting couplings, or the potential of unusual and interesting couplings. Besides, what kind of disguise is Renée’s outfit? And for what do we or the characters take her? She is androgynous by virtue of her clothing but also by her age: she is not quite a woman, not quite a man, not quite a girl, not quite a boy.

The word to describe all this is doubtless “queer”. It’s a queer film whose brevity and lightness allows it to get away with a complex play on the ambiguities of gender and familial/romantic feeling. A contemporary reviewer in the UK said that Der Geiger von Florenz possessed a “somewhat unusual theme” (Kinematograph Weekly, 7 October 1926), which is a very British way of saying “queer”.

The impression of queerness, however lightly worn or exercised, made me curious about both its director and star. The English-language Wikipedia page suggests that Czinner was gay, but that “despite” this factor his marriage “proved a happy and personally and professionally enriching one for both partners.” Well, that’s very interesting—although the “citation needed” at the end of the paragraph casts its contents into uncertainty. (His sexuality is not mentioned in other available sources.)

So, is there anything autobiographical hidden in Der Geiger von Florenz? It’s worth observing that Czinner himself was a child prodigy on the violin. Can we read the “boy” Renée, attracting the attention of an elder male lover, as a version of Czinner’s early life? One can only conjecture. What is curious is that the film itself offers no more convincing context to Renée’s musical talents and thus narrative journey. At no point in Der Geiger von Florenz are we told that Renée is musical or can even play an instrument. Her ability to play is a seemingly spur-of-the-moment decision, one which immediately propels the plot into a new direction.

Looking for some kind of context for Der Geiger von Florenz, we might turn to Czinner’s other silent work with Bergner. As in Der Geiger von Florenz, the Bergner characters in Nju (1924), Doña Juana (1927), and Fräulein Else (1929) are all dominated by complex relationships with older men—husbands, fathers, or lovers.

Of particular note is Doña Juana, a film which I’m now dying to see. The latter also stars the legendary Max Schreck as Bergner’s father, who sends her out into the world dressed as a boy. From what I can tell, the film reworks many of the themes of Der Geiger von Florenz, providing a happy ending—unlike the suicides that the Bergner character commits at the end of Nju, Liebe (1926), and Fräulein Else. These stills from the German magazine UHU (December 1927) certainly whet the appetite for Der Geiger von Florenz—not just for Bergner in the role, but for more location shooting, this time in Spain:

All of which brings us to Elisabeth Bergner. A lot has been written about her in German and almost nothing about her in English. This is surprising, given her career path: from acclaim as a young stage star in Germany, a flourishing film career followed by exile to the UK, a move to the US in WWII, then a return to various projects on stage and screen across the world until her death in 1986. She led a fascinating life about which I want to know more. (And, to be honest, in the time it has taken me to finish this piece I’ve embarked on a project about Bergner so have developed a little obsession. This will be the subject of another piece, another time…) She was certainly bisexual, perhaps more interested in women in men, and one cannot help but wonder how her marriage with Czinner worked. They were both Jewish and fled from mainland Europe, marrying to cement their relationship—and presumably their careers. But as to one might call the practicalities of their marriage, much remains unknown. In many studies on Czinner-Bergner, we’re in a world of unspoken truths, of sly hints, of euphemisms and ambiguities. It’s a world of mysterious “travelling companions” and of “intimate friendships”. It makes everything tantalizing and nothing certain. But it should certainly inform our viewing of their films, and Der Geiger von Florenz in particular.

I should also make clear that the Blu-ray of this film was released in Germany in 2019, without English subtitles. As explained in the opening credits, the original negative for Der Geiger von Florenz no longer exists. The 2018 restoration used a (shorter) negative of the film, which had been prepared for the film’s export to the UK, supplemented by extracts from exports prints from Russia and the US. Thanks to a little more digging on the ever-useful filmportal.de database, I learned that Der Geiger von Florenz was originally 2260m, divided into “Five Acts”. The 2018 restoration runs to 81 minutes at 24fps, giving it an approximate length of 2243m, so very close to the original length. This slightly surprised me, as the film seemed to have some very sudden transitions between scenes, as well as some odd glitches in continuity. (The reviewer of the Kinematograph Weekly noted this when the film was released in the UK: “Continuity is jerky, probably due to cutting” (7 October 1926).) I’m thinking especially of the scene when Renée decides to run away from her school in Switzerland: the dog flashes past in one shot but doesn’t reappear until later in the scene. Perhaps the restoration was forced to cut between two different continuities across prints; or perhaps the error was always in the film. Ditto my sense of the sudden transition between scenes, especially in the first part of the film. At the end of one scene, Renée is in bed, then she is suddenly outside sipping punch with her stepmother. Is this the same night, or the next? Soon after, when she is given the letter notifying her of her forced emplacement in Switzerland, we cut straight from her holding the letter to her in Switzerland, weeks later, writing in her notebook in a field. At the very least, I would expect a title to prepare us for this transition. The film was originally in five “acts”, so surely this transition would have had a new “act” title card here? As it stands, the continuity is so swift it’s startling. The 2018 restoration has recreated all the original intertitles in the original font—but it has no division into “acts”. I’m guessing the lack of domestic print material leaves no indication of where the acts may have started/ended, so they have not tried to recreate this element. It’s not a substantial loss, I suppose, but it does make a difference to the rhythm of the film.

I wonder also if having a clearer structure might have encouraged the score to behave differently, to shape its overall structure a little more clearly. For this 2018 restoration, a new score for quartet (violin/mandolin, cello, piano/organ, trombone) was written by Uwe Dierksen. It’s perfectly fine, but far too busy for most of the film. It is chromatically restless, occasionally spiky, sometimes outright sinister—not exactly descriptors of the film itself. More surprisingly, the score makes no effort to match the music being performed on screen. Neither the scene where Renée plays her violin, nor the scene when her stepmother plays the piano, is matched in the new score. Would it really be too much to ask that a film called “The Fiddler of Florence” should feature the odd section for solo violin? The original music for Der Geiger von Florenz was by Giuseppe Becce, one of the most prominent film composers working in Germany in the silent era. Alas, this score is one of many that do not appear to have been preserved or survive. A shame, as I would love to see the film with a more sympathetic, a more charming and romantic, score.

Paul Cuff

On rewatching L’Argent (1928; Fr.; Marcel L’Herbier)

In 1928, Marcel L’Herbier undertook the most expensive film of his career. His adaptation of Zola’s novel L’Argent (1891) transposed the action to contemporary Paris. As well as shooting in the real stock exchange of the Paris Bourse and on the streets of Paris, L’Herbier had a series of fabulously large and expensive studio sets designed by André Barsacq and Lazare Meerson, constructed at Joinville studios. His chief cameraman was Jules Kruger, who had recently led the shooting of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927). Seeing the astonishing range of mobile camerawork in the latter, L’Herbier wanted to take advantage of every possible visual means of capturing the febrile atmosphere of the financial market and the machinations of his fictional protagonists. All this came at a huge financial cost to the production. L’Herbier allied his company with Jean Sapène’s Société des Cinéromans and the German company Ufa in order to guarantee his costs, cast foreign stars, and achieve European distribution. He spent the huge sum of 5,000,000F, much more than intended. (Though, for context, Gance spent 12,000,000F on Napoléon.) When the film premiered, it was around 200 minutes long. It was cut for general release to less than 170, and what survives in the current restoration is a little less than 150 minutes. Thankfully, what does survive is in superb quality—and the Lobster Blu-ray released in 2019 presents the film in an excellent edition…

The title of my piece this week is “rewatching L’Argent” because I do not intend a detailed review of the film. For a start, it’s too long—too complex, too interesting for me to do real justice to. (I know that if I tried, I’d end up writing more than anyone would want to read.) Instead, my reflections are inspired by being able to watch this film in a different context to that in which I first saw it. That was at least fifteen years ago, at the NFT in London. I saw the film projected from a superb 35mm print. The music was a live piano accompaniment. There were no subtitles, so instead someone in the projection booth read translations over the intercom. I won’t deny that this was a hard task to do convincingly, and that the person doing it failed utterly in this endeavour. It sounded like a playschool performance, only executed by an adult. If you’re going to present a film this way, either read the lines utterly without emotion or emphasis, or get someone who can actually emote. (I long to have experienced a live performance of L’Herbier’s L’Homme du large (1920) that took place at the HippFest festival in 2022, for which Paul McGann read live narration. The titles for that film are long and visually elaborate. You need to see them in the original French designs, so having an acoustic layer to the experience—one performed by a professional actor—must have been wonderful.) The screening at the NFT was someone trying to read the lines with emotion and emphasis but who had no experience as a voice performer. It was terrible. It lasted for two-and-a-half-hours.

The music

So where better to start with my experience in 2023 than with the music? As I said at the outset, my memory of this film is with a piano accompaniment at the NFT. Inevitably, I remember nothing of the musical accompaniment. (And frankly I wish I remember less about the awful translation accompaniment.) The music for the new restoration is by Olivier Massot, recorded live at a screening of the film in Lyon in 2019.

The score is for a symphony orchestra, including a prominent part for piano and various kinds of percussion. The orchestration is deliciously lithe and alert. The orchestra shimmers, shifts, glistens, growls, thunders. The writing is more chromatic than melodic: there are very few recognizable themes, as such, but the textures of the orchestra—particular instruments (harp, bassoon, tubular bells), particular combinations (high tremolo strings, descending piano scales)—recur through the film. Large church-like bells sound out at climactic moments, while the reverberative tubular bells give a cool, intimate sheen to smaller scenes. Indeed, the percussive element create some fabulous effects through the film. I particularly love the combination of piano and percussion to evoke the tolling of a clock near the start of the film, when Saccard faces ruin. Massot has bells in his orchestra, but here he chooses to mimic their sound indirectly. It’s a wonderfully sinister, almost hallucinatory acoustic: it sounds like bells tolling, but it’s something more than that—the grim dies irae melody is a kind of inner soundscape. I also love how the music is often brought to an abrupt halt for the ringing of a smaller (real) bell: at the first meeting of the bank’s council, and later with the ringing of various telephones. It really makes film and score interact in direct instances, as well as the constant ebb and flow of music and image. Then there are occasional lines for a muted trumpet that hint at the popular soundworld of the 1920s, while there is a jazz-like pulse to the grand soiree scenes near the end of the film, and woodblock percussion that characterizes the scenes set in Guiana. Throughout, the piano provides a kind of textural through-line: it dances and reacts to the film, and also to the orchestra. It’s never quite a solo part with accompaniment, but forms a part of the complex tapestry of sound that the orchestra produces. I do love hearing a piano used this way, and Massot has a fine ear for balance.

In this recorded performance, the Orchestre National de Lyon is conducted by the highly experienced Timothy Brock, and it’s a committed performance, very well synchronized. (One wonders how much, if any, work was needed to rejig the soundtrack for the subsequent home media format.) But like all silent film scores recorded live, it suffers from the weird acoustical effects of coughing, murmuring, and various other extraneous sounds of shuffling, shifting, dropping etc. As I have written before, this remains a very strange way of watching a film at home. The noises are familiar from a live screening, but on Blu-ray it’s a little surreal: you can hear an audience that you cannot see. And while I’m sure the film performance in 2019 ended with rousing applause, the soundtrack on the Blu-ray fades swiftly to complete silence. That said, you do get used to the extraneous sounds as the soundtrack goes on—but it’s an oddity nevertheless.

The Blu-ray edition also includes an alternate score compiled by Rodney Sauer and performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra. Per my usually comments (and with all due awareness of my innate musical snobbery), this “orchestral” score is banal and entirely inadequate for the intensity, scale, rhythm, and energy of L’Argent. Switch between audio tracks at any point in the film and listen to the difference in tone, depth and complexity of sound, and musical imagination. The Massot score has the benefit of a full orchestra performing a score that is alive to nuance, that is constantly evolving, shifting, changing gear; the Sauer score is pedestrian, humdrum, lagging infinitely behind the images.

The camerawork

And what images they are! I’d forgotten just how extraordinarily restive the camerawork is in this film. You’re constantly surprised by the way the perspective shifts, leaps, realigns. There is a constant sense of movement in the camera and the cutting. Sometimes there are rapid tracking sots, vertiginous shifts up or down through crowded spaces; at other times there are sudden, short moves: intimate scenes are suddenly recomposed, reframed, redrawn. Kruger’s camera is often on the prowl, waiting to pounce on characters. Suddenly it was spring to life and track forward from a long- to a medium-shot. The focus warps and shifts from scene to scene. One minute the lens is squishing the extremities into blurry outlines, the next everything is crystal clear. The camera is mechanically smooth, then handheld. The lines are straight, then deformed by a close-up lens. It’s wonderfully difficult to unpick the variety of devices used across just one sequence, let alone the film.

In the Bourse itself, the scale of the film—the crowds, the energy, the technological trappings—are at their most impressive. This is a real space made surreal by the way it’s shot. The camera spins upwards to the apex of the ceiling, then looks down from on high, making the crowd of financiers look like microbes swirling in a petri dish. Elsewhere, the camera is suddenly looking down from high angles, or else craning upwards from floor level. It’s an omnipresent viewpoint, operating from anywhere and everywhere.

I was also particularly truck by the nighttime scenes staged in the Place de l’Opéra. The fact that these scenes were shot at night is extraordinary, and that they look so dynamic and alive with energy is dazzling. (There is one rapid tracking shot through the crowd, lights gleaming in the far distance, that looks like it’s from a film made thirty years later.)

Throughout, L’Herbier’s cutting is dynamic to the point of being confusing. He almost has too many angles, too many perspectives, to juggle. He not only cuts from multiple angles within the same scene but intercuts entirely separate spaces. The dynamics between the various financial parties and their dealings are illustrated by cutting between these spaces. It saves on unnecessary intertitles, though at the risk of confusing the spectator. (I must say that I understand almost nothing about the financial aspect of the plot. At a certain point, references to bonds, shares, stocks, markets, exchanges, currencies etc just washes over my head. I’d be curious to know from someone who understood such things how coherent the film is in terms of its economic plotting.) There are even sporadic moments of rapid montage (per Gance) but this is never developed or made into an end in itself. Undoubtedly influenced by Napoléon, I think L’Herbier was right not to go “full Gance” and pointlessly mimic the montage of that film, which is used to very different effect (and in very different context) than this drama. L’Argent has a strange, compelling energy all of its own.

The sets

The design of this film is always eye-catching. From the massive scale of the party scene near the end (huge dance floor, cubist ponds, a wall entirely occupied by organ pipes) to the offices of Saccard that are sometimes cavernous and other times crowded. There are billowing curtains, diaphanous curtains, glimmering curtains. Light plays about shining surfaces or creates swirling shadows. Whole walls are maps of the world, doors opening and closing inside hallucinatory cells. The sets and lighting combine to make every space strange, arresting, interesting.

I’d also single out Baroness Sandorf’s lair, which is like something out of a Bond film. A card table is lit from within so that the shadows of hands cand cards are projected on the ceiling. The walls of one part of the room contain the backlit silhouettes of fish swimming in a aquarium. My word, the set designers had fun here. It’s just the kind of space you’d want to find Brigitte Helm in, holding court. It’s chic, cold, absurd, captivating.

The cast

The film wouldn’t work at all if it weren’t for Pierre Alcover’s performance as Saccard. His is a superb, domineering presence on screen. His physical bulk gives him real heft, but it’s the way he holds himself and moves that makes him imposing: he can dominate a room, a scene, a shot. He’s smarmy when he needs to be, but can just as easily become threatening, scheming, brooding, energetic, resigned. He can bustle and rush just as well as he can mooch and shuffle and slouch. Strange to say, I don’t think I’ve seen him in another film. (The only other silent I have with him in is André Antoine’s L’Hirondelle et la Mésange (1920), which I have yet to sit down and actually watch.)

As the effete, elder banker Gunderman, the German actor Alfred Abel is suave and sinister. It’s a quiet, controlled performance. His character is so calm and collected, and Abel always keeps his gestures to a minimum. The occasional flash of an eye, the hint of a smile, the slight nod of the head, is enough to spell out everything we need to know. He’s not quite a Bond villain, but he nevertheless has a fluffy pet, a dog, that we see him fondling at various points in the film.

I turn next to Brigitte Helm because she is, alongside Alcover, by far the most exciting performance in the film. As Baroness Sandorf, she is draped in expensive furs or sheathed in shimmering silks. Her eyes out-pierce anyone else’s stare and her smile is a double-edged weapon. The way she walks or sits or stands or lies or lounges is so purposeful, so designed, so compelling. Even sat at a table across the room in the back of the restaurant scene, she’s somehow magnetic. She really was a star, in the way that I take star to mean—someone whose presence instantly changes the dynamic of a scene or shot, whose life seems to emanate beyond the film. But despite being the face of the new Blu-ray cover for L’Argent, and leading the (new, digital) credit list at the end of the restoration, she has surprisingly few scenes—and not all that much significance in the plot. Perhaps more of her scenes were in L’Herbier’s original cut of the film. Either way, I spent much of the film longing to see more of her.

Conversely, as the “good” husband and wife ensnared by Saccard, I find Henry Victor (as the aviator Jacques Hamelin) and Marie Glory (as Line, Jacques’ wife) much less interesting. Their love never quite convinces or moves. I also found an uncanny resemblance between Marie Glory and L’Herbier’s regular star (and lover) Jaques Catelain. (And once observed, I couldn’t un-observe it.) I requote Noël Burch’s comment here on Catelain resembling “a wooden Harry Langdon”, and for the first half of the film I find Glory no less unconvincing. But as the film continues, and she becomes a more active agent—or at east, an agent conscious of her manipulation by Saccard—her performance finds its range and becomes more dynamic and engaging. But I still never buy into her marriage, which I suppose is an advantage to the extent it makes her appear more vulnerable once her husband is away—but undermines the fact that she is so steadfastly loyal to him. I know for a fact that I’ve seen Marie Glory in other silents, but I simply cannot bring her performances to mind. The lack of warmth or genuine feeling in this central couple if a problem for me. I find many of L’Herbier’s films emotionally constipated, and L’Argent is no exception.

One other cast member to mention is Antonin Artaud as Mazaud, Saccard’s secretary. I find it very strange to watch Artaud in such an ordinary, unengaging role. Strange, even, to see him walking around in a perfectly ordinary suit. His presence—his familiar, compelling face—is welcome, but I’m not sure I can appreciate why he was cast. (His performance as Marat in Napoléon, the year before L’Argent, and as Massieu in Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the same year as L’Argent, really overshadow this almost anonymous part of a bank assistant.)

Summary

Yes, I enjoyed rewatching this film. But I won’t deny that it has a certain coolness that stops me from truly loving it. I feel that way with much of L’Herbier’s work. To utilize what the translator D.J. Enright once said about fin-de-siècle literature, the films of L’Herbier tend to combine the frigid with the overheated. There is a surfeit of design, of aesthetic fussiness, but a dearth of humour, of human warmth. L’Argent is his broadest canvas, and it contains the most energetic, diverse, dynamic filmmaking of his career. It needs this formal invention to keep the story alive, for a film that revolves around financial transactions is at constant risk of becoming dull or incomprehensible. It’s like watching a three-hour long game of poker without knowing the rules. My attention never drifted, but I was close to being bored—despite the many wonderful things to look at, and the wonderful ways the film invents of looking. The film’s romantic storyline of the pilot and his wife is lacklustre, especially next to the sizzling chemistry between Alcover and Helm. Their scenes crackle and I wish there had been more of them. Would the 200-minute version of the film offer a more balanced drama, or would it exacerbate the distance between me and it? For all my reservations, it’s still a magnificent work of cinema.

Paul Cuff

Inferno: Short Films & Fragments, 1903-1924 (Filmarchiv Austria, 2012)

Filmarchiv Austria produces a number of DVDs (and, latterly, Blu-rays), and one series of releases goes under the name of “CinemaSessions”. These editions combine rare archival prints with new soundtracks, usually experimental/electronic. In the third release of this series, we are given a 40-minute programme of short films and fragments that share the themes of fire and colour; the soundtrack was performed/recorded live in 2011 by Peter Rehberg.

Un Drame dans les aires (1904; Fr.; Gaston Velle)

The film starts with footage of an actual balloon gently rising from the ground. But instantly we cut to a studio backdrop of stationary clouds, before which two bright officers in too bright costumes scan with their telescope the non-existent world below. Cutaways to irised views of the sea, to an anonymous cityscape. But lightning flashes across the sky (or at least, a scratched bolt across the celluloid) and rain pours down. Reality changes. Gone are the human crew. Now a model floats up, moving wildly, is cut in half by a bolt. The screen erupts with fuscia-red blooms. (How quickly things escalate and fall!) The balloon tumbles into the sea, which becomes real—or real water, at least, in a real tank, against a makeshift backdrop. And the film goes to the trouble of washing itself with a blue tint, so we feel a little of the cold and the shock and the aura of this unlocatable sea. A rower desperately pulls the two survivors from the water. The film is very short, and disaster occurs very suddenly. Such are the bizarre shifts in tone and form between shots that anything at all might happen next. The film could be of any length, could open and follow any narrative possibility.

L’eruzione dell’Etna (1910; It.; Socièta Anonima Ambrosio)

The world is a fug of noxious red. When it’s dark it’s a bloody coagulate. When the sky registers enough light, it’s a violent magenta. Colour soaks into the rocks, into the soil. Little dashes and specks of people provide scale, a sense of time. Titles assure us the local populace are “terrified”, but we see them going calmly about their business: cutting and moving trees, or just standing and watching the smouldering spectacle. The 35mm has temporal footprints upon its surface: a run of horizontal lines, white cuts that scurry up the frame. And at the edge, the border of the image looks more like lava, looks more threatening, than anything we see on screen.

L’Âme des moulins (1912; Nld./Fr.; Alfred Machin)

This film has the intense clarity of a nightmare. The exteriors are crisp. The northern light is cold, acute. It cuts sharp contours of the windmill. The stencilled colours are gentle. They sometimes kid you that reality has been captured honestly, not mimicked in retrospect. Such is the way a nightmare tricks you, by casting a spell in which you might just believe. The story is simple and brutal. A boy builds a model windmill. It’s his joy. In the background is the real windmill where he and his parents live. A beggar approaches. A crutch helps bear his weight. His limp is aggressive, assertive. Unlike the boy and his parents (who wear clogs), the beggar has a peasant’s leggings. He’s a figure not out of a postcard, but out of reality—somewhere beyond the cosy little world of the family. Father and mother turn him away. He tries again. The father knocks him down. The beggar shakes his fist at the windmill, then batters the boy’s windmill—mercilessly upending it, beating it to splinters. The father strikes him again, and once more the beggar raises his fist in threat. It’s an image of unrepentable fury. The film is mute, this world is mute, but that gesture—the arm extended, the fist clenched—is as articulate an expression of rage as we need. Beware this man. In silhouette, in the cold northern light, the beggar sits at a distance. Again, the raising of the arm, the clenching of the fist. Each time, the threat assumes more menace. The boy dreams of his toy windmill, his arms reaching out to the split-screen vision. A sinister visual rhyme with the beggar’s outstretched arm. And a presage of the finale. For the beggar is on his way, a creeping shadow against a supernal sky. The composition here is a touch of genius: both beggar and windmill are part of the same silhouetted plane. It gives the impression of the beggar being larger than the mill itself. The real-size windmill looks as vulnerable as the child’s toy mill. This is a fabulously nightmarish image, with its blue-tone-pink colour pattern. Where toning and tinting overlap, they turn the silhouetted plane deepest purple. The clouds are a glowering violet. And what kind of moon sets this sinister pink? This is a time for nightmares. The beggar is crouching at the base of the windmill. The fire he starts glows the same pink as a distant patch in the sky. No fire is this colour—yet here it is. The interior fills with smoke. The family flees. But the camera watches, and watches, as the windmill is consumed by fire. Now the frame is washed rose-red. Sky and reflected sky are a blank wash of colour. Flames and smoke are reflected in the still canal. The family hold each other, weeping. The composition mirrors that of the beggar, contemplating the mill. That image was blue, this image is red.

Le Chaudron infernal (1903; Fr.; Georges Méliès)

Two turquoise devils are torturing women. One is bundled into a sheet and tossed into a cauldron. An eruption of red flame. Others are led in, then fed into the vat. The lead devil (Méliès himself, one presumes) capers and cavorts. Is he quite in control of his experiment? In the air above him emerge three pale shapes. These apparitions are impossible to capture with frame-grabs: they are as soft as will-o’-the-wisps, morphing and moving with each frame. The impression they make is only evident when you watch the film itself. The rest of the image is clear, crisp, filled with stage-set lines. But these forms are ethereal, like rags floating in water. They are floating, waving. Do they have wings? Are they souls? wraiths? The devil cowers, scurries back and forth. The angelic forms burst into flame. The devil hurls himself into the cauldron and the film explodes.

La Légende du fantôme (1908; Fr.; Segundo de Chomón)

From its very first image, there is something extraordinary about this film. It is in a semi-stable state of decomposition. It is an arrested death, a suspended transformation. Elaborately stencil- and hand-coloured throughout, the different layers of chemical treatment each have deteriorated at different rates, in different ways. Comprehensible figures appear in landscapes of marbled, mottled uncertainty. Parts of the image are positive, others negative. It is uncannily beautiful.

The first shot tests our comprehension. A woman stands at a window. Outside, gothic ruins—and a pale shape fluttering in a halo of darkness. The film skips, leaps. One cannot trust the continuity of such a world. Who is “Zoraida the witch”? Their motto appears: “A thousand years you shall err and be jinxed, you who despised me.” The words are as cryptic and mysterious as the images. In the gothic graveyard, the woman investigates an open tomb. Figures emerge from the background: a dozen grim reapers, the colour of glowing parchment. Dark haloes flutter about their bodies. On stage, such grand guignol ghouls might look ludicrous. But here, in this film, they are majestically creepy. Then a figure of stupendous horror rises from the open tomb. See how the folds of its winding sheets glow sickly gold. And look how it seems to emerge from a different plane of reality. Its tomb is a dim, faded photograph—a photocopy of a photocopy. But the phantom is a burnished, three-dimensional force rising from the centre of the image. (I’m already running out of ways to describe how extraordinary this looks.) The skull-faced phantom—the witch? Zoraida?—issues instructions: “You shall find the devil, challenge and defeat him. He then will hand you the light that cannot be extinguished. Use it to reach the bottom of the sea. Look for the black pearl and return it.” These are lines one might remember from a dream, or a nightmare, words that make no sense outside of the dream itself. The wraiths are transformed into female warriors with winged helmets, glowing gold. The woman herself assumes the mantle of a warrior. In this astonishing film, I now expect nothing less than inexplicable transformations.

“Satan gathers his forces”. We are in hell. Fire, skulls, pitchforks. A mass of devils, of women with flowing hair. (Hell is both a second-rate Parisian theatre and a first-rate Renaissance painting.) Satan embarks, followed by devils, followed by a train of rather bored-looking women. Inside a waterlogged cave, a moving cavalcade, a carnival of flaming torches. Satan and his posse of women ride a stupendously entertaining vehicle: a Model-T Ford truck transformed into a Louis XIV bedspread. The face of a moustached devil on the front, a sinister rising run at the back, it rumbles forward—surrounded by flare-wielding devils and pretty dancers. Satan lives in a tunnel and emerges in a morphing ball of marmalade-coloured fire. The outside world is a clotting brown, a warped memory of rocks and greenery.

Somehow—and the film has either lost interest in narrative sense, or else there are missing scenes—the woman from the opening scene wins the favours of Satan. She carries in her hands “the light that cannot be extinguished”. At the entrance to another cave. From a smoky maw, a frog leaps forward. He too wears a dark halo that havers about his body. He motions for the warriors to follow him. We are under the sea, surrounded by elaborate cut-out jellyfish, cut-out pearls, cardboard shells. The frog hops in the background. A queen and her female retinue greet the woman. The queen gives the woman the black pearl. The woman flirtatiously thanks her. They embrace, there is a kiss of the hands. It’s disconcertingly flirtatious. Are we to assume the woman has been transformed into a male warrior? There are no answers, for the film becomes a stage-show underwater world: screens rise, part, rise again. Backdrops change and there is a huge parade of creatures, crawling and marching and swimming from either side of the set—and the inevitable line of flowery maidens.

We return to the overworld. Here the film loses a little of its magic, but none of its charm. For the satanic vehicle has lost its majesty: it’s now all too obviously a truck with a bedsheet flung over its carapace. The sheets don’t even cover the front wheels. Perhaps it’s deliberate. Perhaps it was a mistake. (If it was a mistake, imagine how awful for the makers to see it when going through this scene frame-by-frame to colour it!) But now we return to the gothic graveyard. The woman lies before the tomb of the phantom, who emerges in a terrifying bloom of winding sheets. But when the phantom drinks from the black pearl, it is transformed into a man. The transformation is rendered sublime by the decomposition of the colour on the 35mm copy. Here the body of the man is as delicate as tracing paper. His hair and clothes are dreamily soft, but the feather on his hat is strangely sharp. He is a ghost in the effort of attaining solidity. The gothic arches behind him are legible, but he is oddly amorphous. He turns to the camera. What kind of expression is this? No doubt it’s meant to be one of delight, but how can we not be frightened? What kind of power has he harnessed? Was he not a witch just now, a dreadful phantom? Why has the woman given him body? And what of the woman? She lies now beside the open tomb, as the army of grim reapers gathers with flaming torches in the background. What has happened? What happens next? What forces have been unleashed? Is this the triumph of Zoraida? And shouldn’t we be afraid? The film ends.

Namenlose Helden (1924; Aut.; Kurt Bernhardt).

This was once a feature film and is now a peculiar montage of truncated scenes. We see preparations for “the storm”. The footage is taken from newsreels of the Great War. We see planes, airships, enormous guns. A woman stands guard at a barrier, then collapses. Onlookers push past. We see the woman in an unconvincing apartment, badly lit. A doctor stands by, shaking his head. A child stands awkwardly at the edge of frame. The battlefield, another world. A soldier at the frontline. Pink sears the screen. Clouds of gas drift across wasted landscapes. Flamethrowers streak the rubble. Figures from the real world ignore the camera, while the soldier from the fictional film is given extended close-ups. He receives a letter: “Hansel is doing better again, but our dear little Fritz has died of his burns. I am very sick and…” He takes an age to screw up the paper, to scream. The performance is committed, embarrassingly raw. He sees a vision of his son(?), first smiling, then his face covered in burns. The screen shares the searing pink of the battlefield. The man’s tears shine. He is in the battle. The soldiers from the newsreel past advance towards their unseen enemy, long since triumphant. The man is in a shell hole. There is an explosion. Hands grasp at the soil. The next day, the man is the lone survivor: his face covered in streaks of blood, he shouts then collapses. Elsewhere, a writer records the great victory of the battle. Contentedly, he blows a smoke ring. We see the dead of the battlefield. The film ends.

Well, this is a strange and fascinating programme. The first two films are not especially interesting (L’eruzione dell’Etna is less compelling than its title suggests), and the fragments of Namenlose Helden do not suggest a particularly good film. But Le Chaudron infernal has some great effects, and L’Âme des moulins and La Légende du fantôme made a very strong impression on me. Segundo de Chomón does demonic trick-films like no other (not even Méliès), and I found La Légende du fantôme as grippingly strange and compelling as anything I’ve seen from the second decade of cinema. The chemical instability of the images creates an uncanny magic that adds to the film’s appeal. This film was the heart of the programme, and the one film which really justified releasing the compilation on DVD.

In terms of image quality, these films looked good when I saw them on my television screen—but now that I come to go through them on my laptop to get some image captures, they look less so. Many of the films do not survive in the best quality, and the video transfer does them no favours. What’s more, it’s a shame that there is a copyright logo in the top-right of the screen throughout. It spoils the extraordinary visuals of these films, the colour and texture of which are meant to be the main feature of this programme. Is this watermark really necessary? Other films in the series, and titles produced by Filmarchiv Austria more generally, do not have the logo. Why must it appear on this release? It’s something I’d expect to find on videos on the archive’s website, but not on films presented on a commercial DVD. In terms of sound, Peter Rehberg’s electronic music didn’t leave much of an impression on me. It’s not quite sinister enough for some of the films, not light enough for others—and never captures the rhythm of the visuals. But as a wash of electronic sound it’s hardly the worst accompaniment I’ve heard for silent films.

These reservations aside, I did get a lot of pleasure seeing these films. This DVD contains some fabulous curiosities, the images of which will linger in my memory.

Paul Cuff

Home media releases of The Sheik (1921; US; George Melford)

This piece is about the various incarnations of The Sheik on home media formats. I write it out of curiosity and out of frustration. Curiosity because the differences between copies of silent films always interests me. Frustration because the object of my curiosity is obscured by the usual opacity and vagueness produced when historical artefacts become digital commodities. Let me explain…

Some years ago, a course on which I was teaching assistant (i.e. seminar tutor) scheduled a screening of The Sheik. Curious as to what copy we would be showing, I looked at the departmental copy: it was the DVD version released in the UK in 2004 by Instant Vision. It presents a monochrome version of the film with a soundtrack of… No, in fact I can’t even remember what the soundtrack was like. What I do remember is that it was such poor quality, visually and musically, that I couldn’t bear for any student on the course to experience the same in this way. (My general rule with screening material is that if I couldn’t sit through it, then neither should my students.) So I looked for alternatives.

Thankfully, there was at least the DVD produced in the US by Image in 2002. This presented a fully tinted version of the film. However, the score was by the “Café Mauré Orchestra”. Those inverted commas are there for a reason, since this “orchestra” is in fact composed of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)-based synthetic sounds—as arranged and performed by Eric Beheim. Though the music choices used (but “used” doesn’t do the MIDI justice: should I say the music is sampled? digitized? synthesized? appropriated? co-opted? press-ganged? harvested? made vassal unto?) are appropriate, the sound of synthetic music rather undoes the benefits of the music itself. Put bluntly, MIDI soundtracks sound cheap. It’s the DVD producers saying: “Listen to how little money we’ve spent on the music! You’ll be amazed!”

So I ripped the DVD and set about compiling my own soundtrack, one that used various nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pieces—including a nice orchestral arrangement of “Kashmiri Song” that Valentino’s character sings in the film. (I even used a couple of the cues from the Beheim score, only these were sampled from actual orchestral recordings.) It worked well and the students enjoyed the film. (More importantly, I enjoyed the film. There are few more maddening experiences in life—well, my life—than sitting through a silent film accompanied by bad music.)

The years passed. I no longer taught on the course that included The Sheik. (Or, for that matter, on any course.) So I was mildly curious when a Blu-ray of the film was announced in 2017. I was poised to buy it, if for the only reason that I try to buy almost anything silent that comes out in a good edition. But then I saw that the score was for theatre organ and my heart sank. (I know, I know, I’m a snob: but really, I just don’t enjoy sitting through over an hour of theatre organ music.) I also considered that my interest in the film was such that I had no real desire to actually buy the Blu-ray. My teaching days seemed to be over, so buying the Blu-ray to try rescoring the film again seemed pointless. I wouldn’t be watching the film, and nor would anyone else. So I passed. Of course, I should have bought the edition anyway. Kino often let their licenses expire, leading to a huge number of titles going out-of-print. Thus, The Sheik duly went OOP.

Paramount then announced their own edition of The Sheik would receive a Blu-ray release in November 2021. Still curious, I searched to see what information I could find about the restoration. I found an interview with Andrea Kalas, who leads Asset Management at Paramount. According to Kalas:

We looked around the world for best sources and Film Preservation Associates graciously loaned us a 35mm black and white print. We also had a finegrain which turned out to have a better overall picture quality, but the print turned out to be great for the intertitles. […] The original frame-per-second cadence was 22fps. The fine grain we used had been ‘stretched’ to 24—essentially by adding frames. With the help of the lab, Pictureshop, we went back to 22fps. […] We had a continuity script that was a critical guide to the digital tinting and toning we added – which was the way the audience in 1921 would have seen it.

The Paramount restoration promised to run to 66 minutes, nine minutes shorter than the Kino Blu-ray and a full twenty minutes shorter than the Image DVD. Kalas’ talk of reversing the stretch-print process of one of their source prints was reassuring—but if the film was “returned” to 22fps, why was the runtime so short?

All of which led me to some basic questions about The Sheik that no home media edition had addressed: How long was the film when shown in 1921? What projection speed was used? What print material survives? Thankfully, the American Film Institute database has some excellent material that is readily accessible. Here, I found that the original length of The Sheik was 6579 feet, which equates to 2005m. (IMDB.com states that the film ran to 1818m when shown in the UK, but I am less inclined to trust IMDB than the AFI when it comes to any film of this vintage.) Even if projected as fast at 24fps, 2005m would be 72 minutes. At 20fps it would be closer to 87 minutes. So how did the previous home media versions of The Sheik relate to this 2005m print, and at what speed did they run?

Well, here are the various incarnations (not including the infinitude of grey market rip-offs) and their runtimes:

Paramount VHS (1992) = 79 minutes
Image DVD (2002) = 86 minutes
Flicker Alley (made-on-demand) DVD (2015) = 76 minutes
Kino Blu-ray (2017) = 75 minutes
Paramount Blu-ray (2021) = 66 minutes

Maddeningly, nowhere on any single home media release does any company—Paramount, Image, Kino, or Flicker Alley—actually state what the length of their copies are in metres. As a result, we must second guess frame rates and go through each edition to try and work out how they compare to one another…

Though there are some minor textual differences between the copies (the Image DVD, for example, is missing one or two intertitles), the basic material remains consistent through these various home media incarnations. One notable exception is the Paramount VHS, which presents different intertitles to the later DVD and Blu-ray editions. The home media review for The Sheik on silentera.com states that the VHS used the re-edited and retitled version of the film, not the original. It’s ironic that the visual quality of the titles presented on the VHS is often superior to that of the DVD/Blu-ray editions: the titles in the reissue print are uniformly strong, sharp, and legible. It’s a shame that many of the original titles have not survived in such a state: after the very high-quality images of live action in the film (especially on Blu-ray), it’s a shock to have to squint at the slightly blurry wording of the titles.

The differences in runtime across the above home media editions are due overwhelmingly to the different framerates applied to the print sources. Deciphering the various video files of these editions has not proved easy, but I can offer an informed estimate of the rates for each. The Image DVD uses the slowest speed of 18fps, the Paramount VHS uses 20fps, Flicker Alley DVD and Kino Blu-ray use 21fps, and the Paramount Blu-ray uses 24fps. Kalas states that the film originally ran at 22fps, though my impression viewing the versions of the film that run to c.75 minutes at 21fps is that this seems perfectly life-like. (It may be that the projection speed used in 1921 was 22fps; but Kalas doesn’t go into any detail about this issue in the interview.)

I’ve checked the Paramount disk and (shorn of new opening/ending credits) the film does indeed last 66 minutes (and nine seconds) and runs at 24fps without any repeated frames. At 24fps, 66 minutes equates to an approximate print length of 1830m. That’s still 175m (6-8 minutes, depending on projection speed) short of the film as seen in 1921. Some of this might be accounted for in the length of intertitles, but it’s still a not insignificant amount of material for such a short film (nearly 9% of its length). I’ve also checked the Paramount Blu-ray against the Kino Blu-ray. It appears to be exactly the same restoration. And I mean exactly the same. The same tints and tones, the same titles, the same scratches and damage. The only difference is the framerate and the soundtrack. I can only presume that Paramount’s centenary restoration of The Sheik was completed by 2017 and Kino simply licensed this version to last until the actual centenary of the film, whereupon Paramount could release their own edition. But why on earth does the Paramount Blu-ray transfer this same restoration at 24fps?

The decision is even stranger when you consider that the soundtrack for Paramount’s Blu-ray—a synth score by Roger Bellon—is the same as the one on Paramount’s VHS thirty years ago. Although Kalas claims the music was “commissioned in 1990 as part of a celebration of Paramount’s 75th”, the VHS edition from 1992 bears a copyright date of 1987 for the soundtrack. (According to various reviews of older home media editions, The Sheik was first released on VHS by Paramount in 1988. I’ve not been able to find any VHS from 1988, only the edition from 1992.) Kalas adds that Bellon’s music “really stands up”, which again begs the question why transfer the film at 24fps when the soundtrack was arranged for a version of the film that ran at 20fps? Another issue with the Bellon score is that it never uses the “Kashmiri Song” that is cited in the film’s intertitles and sung by Valentino on screen. This may well be because the intertitles of the VHS version (for which the score was composed) are from the reissue print, which changes the wording of the Sheik’s song—and thus loses the context of the original song. (While no substitute for a real orchestra, the theatre organ score by Ben Model for the Kino edition at least quotes the “Kashmiri Song” at the appropriate moments.)

Paramount are not alone in sidelining the complex issues and inevitable compromises of film restoration in their home media salesmanship. But in the past I have been irritated by the way some of their press releases muddy the waters of what editions are being presented on Blu-ray, and how they relate to the films as originally presented in the silent era.

For example, their 2011 Blu-ray release of Wings (William A. Wellman, 1927) was announced with a press release that detailed how they had restored the original score composed by John Stepan Zamecnik (plus the numerous sound effects that were a feature of the film’s initial release). This “newly-restored” soundtrack was announced as the culmination of great effort:

the film’s original paper score was procured from the Library of Congress and recorded with a full orchestra […] Musicians with expertise in silent film music were chosen to recreate a truly orchestral experience.

Note the references to physical artefacts and institutions: paper score, material archive, real musicians. They echo the dual boast of historical sources and modern technologies: celluloid prints scanned using HD software, sheet music from 1927 recorded in 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround sound.

But there is a good deal of ballyhoo (if not bullshit) here. For a start, the only surviving hard copy of the music for Wings was a conductor’s short score, bearing just two or three staves of information. This document lacked details of orchestration, and the structure of its cues did not match the montage of surviving prints. The task of re-editing the score was further hampered by copyright issues: Paramount could not include (or could not afford) several of the musical works originally quoted at length by Zamecnik. And the reorchestration of this music was performative as well as editorial. Contrary to the press release, Dominik Hauser’s arrangement of the “orchestral” score on the Blu-ray is not performed by an orchestra, but instead consists of an assembly of MIDI sound files. The only real musician audible on the soundtrack is Frederick Hodges, whose solo piano interpolations were needed to bridge gaps in the “orchestral” score. Whilst the Paramount edition includes an alternative soundtrack of Gaylord Carter’s organ score, it does not offer Carl Davis’s orchestral score, which was recorded with real musicians for the Photoplay restoration of Wings in 1993. This latter version has never received commercial release.

The spin around Paramount’s release of Wings made me more suspicious than I might otherwise have been when it came to their release of The Sheik. My heart sinks that in 2021 Paramount offered a less satisfying presentation of their own centenary restoration than Kino presented in 2017. (I might add that the Kino edition included an audio commentary track on the film by Gaylyn Studlar, which the Paramount edition lacks. Even if Paramount had been willing and able to reuse this commentary, they would have had to speed-up the track by 114% to match their 24fps presentation of the film.) I have no particular fondness for The Sheik as a film, but even just as a historical document it deserves to be treated with respect. It’s great that Paramount decided to restore and release this silent film on Blu-ray. But why then make choices that lessen its impact?

Paul Cuff