I have never been to Pordenone and I’m not there now. This fabled silent film festival invariably takes place in what is usually week one or two of the first term of the academic year. Though I no longer have any academic post, I still work at a university and the same difficulties of taking leave apply. I can’t swan off to Italy during one of the busiest weeks of the year. However, I can swan off to the internet and pay to see a selection of the films being shown at the festival. So, for the first time, I have. What follows is based on my notes, taken “live” when watching Day 1’s programme. Both were part of the festival’s “Ruritanian” theme, of tiny nations somewhere in central or eastern Europe – on the borderlands of history, where weightier forces forever threaten to impinge…
Dalla Villa Reale di Rjeka (Montenegro) (Italy, 1912)
Ranks of soldiers gaze awkwardly at the camera. Peasant faces squint in the light.
The camera sits on a bleached promenade. In the distance, ranks of uniformed men march (not quite in step). They have medals on their chests. A tiny swarm of photographers caught between the parade and the ranks lining the road. Men in extraordinary hats and women in restrictive dresses walk by.
There is saluting. There are moustaches. Shakos. Badges. Swords. Plumes. Top hats. Bicornes. Men fumble with the trains of women’s dresses. A woman wipes her face with a white glove. We cut to the same cast of characters, now processing past a distant row of buildings. They are walking from right to left, this time. Awkward jump cuts. The camera repositions. The dark ranks of soldiers are a blur. Dignitaries smile and gossip. They salute the soldiers with their right hand while they look left at the camera. In the foreground, an old man shuffles into frame. He takes off his hat, looks curiously at the camera. A younger man takes him by the arm and hurries him off screen. Who are they?
Now Prince Danilo and Princess Xenia test a new car designed to transport the wounded. Their names are out of an operetta but soon they really will be at war. She is a Red Cross nurse, but her servant carries her plush fur coat beside the car. Her Highness does without, and the car drives off. The vehicle whizzes around, the camera cutting and restarting. Attendants in hooded greatcoats smile.
Prince Peter is meeting the Italian and Austrian military attachés. In two years, his country will be at war with Austria-Hungary, and thereafter Italian troops will land in the Balkans to gain a foothold for the Allies (and try to steal some of Albania). The Austrian and Italian officers smile and nod. The Austrian looks impeccable. His hat is slightly taller than that of his counterpart.
And here is King Nikola I. He stands by a kind of shed. He shakes hands with the Austrian. (In three years, the Austrian army will knock Montenegro out of the war and end Nikola’s dynasty.) Nikola is a white-haired, black-moustached man. Though he has clearly been better fed, his face resembles that of his peasant soldiers. He stands smilingly, awkwardly. He scratches his nose. The attachés smile and everyone looks at the camera. They are gone.
Aides smoke and salute and shake hands. A man walks up three steps, vanishes, then reappears at the top of the steps. A last glance. They are waiting. The film ends.
Sui gradini del trono / On the steps of the throne (Italy, 1912)
A drama of the heir to Silistria, Prince Wladimiro, who is kidnapped by the politician who rules as regent. A double takes his place on the throne, before the plot is unmasked and the real prince restored to the throne. I wonder if I will have less to say about this hour-long feature film than a five-minute short? It is less mysterious, less atmospheric than the short…
The first scene is, like most of the film, taken in a single medium long shot. It is toned dark brown. The prince is in elegant white. He leaves. The conspirators lean in over the table. They get a medium close-up and the tinting changes just for them. It’s a warm amber, the same as that used for the intertitles that have just told us of their conspiracy. It’s as if they are allied to the text. Has the text prefigured their plan, or is the plan a prefiguration of the text?
Gorgeous detail and contrast whenever Princess Olga is on screen in her first scene. The lovers meet, and the moonlight on the ivy makes me long for celluloid.
Lighting and tinting make the creases in Prince Wladimiro’s trouser leg deliciously dramatic: he receives the news of his enforced trip to Paris by taking a step forward. His rear leg balletically straightens behind him. The shadows on his white trousers crease in tension.
The villains wear black, the hero white.
Uniforms are a fancy dress halfway between centuries. Frogging, feathers, fur.
Pinprick sharpness of exteriors in natural light. Silent sunlight on silent foliage is the most beautiful in visual culture.
In Paris, the Prince’s apartment is toned dull brown. The close-up of Olga’s portrait is tinted pink; quite literally a rose-tinted memory.
Paris nightclub. A black man and white woman dance a peculiar step. She has a huge dragonfly-wing decoration on her hat.
A mirror dance with changing tints. Disorienting cuts within this space, but a neat intercutting of Chichito—the Prince’s lookalike—being courted by the regent’s agent, Sobieski.
The Prince’s card introduces him as “Marquis Beauregard”: he himself is playing a part in Paris. (If this were a Ruritanian film by Lubitsch, more would be made of this.)
Weight, thickness, texture of the dancer’s apartment. She is called Thaïs. It’s a nod to Anatole France, to Massenet, to a kind of glamour beyond the film’s budget. What is the character’s real name? She does not have one. The film gives her her part, she takes it.
Chichito’s mark of villainous distinction is a pair of sideburns. His first act to transform himself into Prince Wladimiro is to shave them off. The actor in both roles is marvellous at suggesting subtle differences between them: the angle of the shoulders, his gait, his grin.
But Chichito also has a fabulously showy pose as he orders Thaïs away to guard Wladimiro. His leg tenses as the Prince’s did when sent to Paris.
Superb intertitle: “We’re in the middle of an unsolvable mystery!”
The Old Armorer’s look to camera at discovering that “Wladimiro” lacks the duelling scar possessed by the real Prince. In a film with few close-ups, this close look out at the audiences creates a connection, a sympathy, between character and spectator. I immediately worried for him, and in the very next scene when he is shot I was rightfully outraged. And when, gravely wounded, he is dumped in the river, the tinting changes: it’s the same deep amber as the conspirators’ close-up earlier in the film.
The villains in Paris are dispatched in a pleasing manner. The gruff guard brutally stabbed by Thaïs, Sobieski suffering the very fate he arranged for the Prince: falling victim to his own trapdoor, taking the Prince’s planned place as victim of a bomb. More doubling, mirroring, substitution.
Finally, the coronation scene neatly mirrors the Montenegrin scenes of Dalla Villa Reale di Rjeka: the same wondrous hats, the lines of courtiers making way for the new king. And the same sense of fiction, of only just rescuing happiness from what waits in the wings.
Paul Cuff
The Realm of Silence 