Category: Film review

Pordenone from afar (2025, Day 1)

I’ve just returned from a rather intense and wonderful few days in Berlin, gorging on culture of all kinds. (And on some seasonal German dishes, too.) I would be settling down to write about the filmic aspects of this trip, were it not for the fact that by the time I landed the Pordenone festival had already begun. Pausing only to shower, receive a flu vaccination, make some rice, upload a thousand photographs, and take the car for its MOT, I logged in to my streaming account and fell headlong into Day 1…

The Bond (1918; US; Charlie Chaplin). Famous for its final scene of the Tramp biffing Kaiser Wilhelm over the head with a large mallet, this short film begins with a rather more subtle and sophisticated series of sketches exploring other “bonds”. “The bond of friendship”, “The bond of love”, and “The marriage bond” are delightful vignettes, set against beautifully simple, picture-book style backgrounds (entirely black, with two-dimensional details that sometimes take on unexpected depth). Chaplin undercuts the premise of the first (getting increasingly fed-up by his friend’s friendliness), makes the second surreally literal (he is shot by Cupid’s arrow, then gets tied up with the object of his love), and undercuts the third (he resents paying the priest and gets hit with the lucky shoe). The final sketch, “The liberty bond”, is a rather brilliant series of diagrammatic tableaux in which Chaplin illustrates the motive, method, and outcome of wartime liberty bonds. He manages to be both sincere, charming, and funny – a very difficult combination to bring off in what is essentially state propaganda (albeit for a good cause). Chaplin makes human what could easily be stilted or polemic.

His Day Out (1918; US; Arvid E. Gillstrom). Our second short from 1918, this time not with Chaplin but with Chaplin’s most persistent and successful impersonator: Billy West. The film is a rather disjointed series of skits, the best of which is the prolonged scene in the barbershop in which Chaplin West variously shaves/assaults/preens/insults/scams his customers – including Oliver Hardy. (Inevitably, they all reappear in the slapstick finale.) It’s all very silly, but there is something inherently strange about watching this uncanny Chaplin. And as funny as some moments are, the film inevitably suffers from evidently not being by Chaplin. West is less sharp in every facet: less elegant, less quick, less touching than Chaplin. The very fact of his trying to be someone else (and not even this: he is being someone else’s persona, performing someone else’s performance) robs something of the pleasure in watching the film. Nevertheless, an interesting curiosity.

A Little Bit of Fluff (1928; UK; Jess Robbins/Wheeler Dryden). Our main feature presentation follows newlyweds Bertram Tully (Syd Chaplin) and Violet (Nancy Rigg), who live under the thumb of Violet’s imposing mother. While she and Violet are away visiting an aunt, Betram encounters the woman next door: the dancer Mamie Scott (Betty Balfour). Mamie and mutual friend John invite Bertram to the Five Hundred Club, where Betram accidentally gets hold of Mamie’s valuable necklace. There ensues a series of farcical encounters, mistaken identities, and run-ins with jealous boyfriends, the police, and criminals in disguise…

This film was an absolute unknown for me, so I was very pleased at how charming and funny it was. Sydney Chaplin is known to me (as I imagine to most) for his later role as his half-brother Charlie’s off-screen assistant, so seeing him take centre stage was fascinating to watch. He is delightful as the fey, trod-upon, Betram – a character whose name evokes Bertie Wooster, just as his actions undergo a very Woodhousian series of mistakes and minor disasters. (Troublesome matriarchs, nightclub misdemeanours, adventurous dancers, valuable necklaces, fake burglaries, and jealous boyfriends are all Woodhouse tropes, as they must have been for any number of stage comedies of the 1920s.) Syd Chaplin makes the most of his character’s small world and narrowed expectations. I love that his only visible pleasure is to play the flute, and even this is somehow a struggle and an imposition. (When he plays, he keeps blowing out his candle.)

Indeed, everything Bertram does goes wrong. The meekness of his character means that the increasing difficulty of his situation brings out wonderful and unexpected bursts of face-saving improvisation and expressive energy. I found myself laughing a great deal when Betram is cornered and has to find a desperate way out. The scene in which he his trapped between police, Mamie’s thuggish ex, and the police outside, is a delight. Ultimately forced into Mamie’s bathroom while she is bathing, and having first to impersonate her maid and then to impersonate Mamie herself, Bertram finds – just – a way out of his predicament, while also finding delight in his own ingenuity. The way he dons Mamie’s gown and bonnet, then sets out polishing his nails and smothering himself in powder, he seems to get lost in the pleasure of being someone else: having so often fallen short in fulfilling his masculine role, here is finds refuge in an exaggerated femininity.

I also loved the scene in which, trying to get his friend to back-up his alibi, he desperately mimes the title of the play and author they have supposedly seen. His mime, first “Love’s Labour Lost”, then of “Shakespeare”, is brilliant: it’s funny because it’s both an accurate mime, inaccurately identified (John announces that they saw “Gold Diggers” by Bernard Shaw), but because it once again gets this meek character to perform outlandish gestures. Having been discovered in women’s clothing by his mother-in-law, he is now discovered waving a speer by his wife. The shock of these disruptions to his usual character, and his own evident delight at his ability to perform as (respectively) highly feminine and masculine personae, make for wonderful sequences. They are also a marker of Chaplin’s ability to win us over to his character, making us believe both his meekness and his untapped performance abilities. The way each scene seems to snowball through a series of small incidents into absurd situations is both a dramatic success, but also a way for Chaplin to demonstrate a range of performance style – from small details to broad slapstick. But the film doesn’t offer any great transformation of Bertram’s character, and I rather liked how there is no effort to make us believe he has quite learned anything about himself, or that he has – ultimately – improved his lot. Early in the film, he sees the newspaper headline: “Man chokes mother-in-law”, and it’s clearly an unconscious fantasy. Even if the film has shown that he has untapped energies, he never (in the manner of a Keaton or Lloyd feature film) proves himself. There is no defeat or exile of the mother-in-law, just as Bertram himself never foils the real burglar to save the day. His successes are accidents, and at the end of the film he sinks into unconsciousness, oblivious as to what he may – or may not – have done.

I must also mention Betty Balfour. Balfour was a major star of British cinema, maintaining her popularity with audiences throughout the 1920s. She starred in a number of foreign films as well, but I’m not sure her fame ever really had much impact beyond the UK. Even if her eponymous character is as superficial as the titular A Bit of Fluff suggests, Balfour holds her own on screen here: she’s happy to sing and dance and get involved in slapstick and farce. Balfour’s character is introduced as “celebrating the tenth anniversary of her 25th birthday”, but the film never makes her a villainous figure. (It’s worth noting that Balfour was only just older than 25 when she made this film.) She’s strong-willed and independent, traits which are never condemned. She also gets some nice lines of dialogue, as when Henry asks to borrow her necklace, to which she replies: “You showed my ring to a friend and she’s still looking at it.” Here, as often in the film, a single line of dialogue tells you much about the character and her relationship and past with others.

So that was Day 1 of Pordenone from afar. Having barely had a chance to stand still for a few minutes since I returned to the UK, I ignored all context for this Day 1 programme and ploughed straight through the content. Emerging from this rather mad dash and finding time to pause of think, I realize what a delightful programme this was, themed around various Chaplins: Charlie Chaplin, fake Charlie Chaplin, and Sydney Chaplin. It makes for a wonderful journey through the silent era, from the short slapstick of the late 1910s to the more elaborate narrative feature comedy of the late 1920s, from the most famous Chaplin who ever lived to the Chaplin who is more famous as an off-screen assistant than an on-screen lead. Starting with the familiar, moving to the familiar-yet-unfamiliar, and concluding with the hardly known is a superb way of guiding us through these three films and their stars. I hadn’t seen The Bond for many years, and it was a huge pleasure to be reminded of the context for that famous image of Chaplin with his foot on the vanquished Kaiser. (Having just returned from Berlin, I have been seeing much imagery from Wilhelmine Germany.) I had never seen either of the other films, and these are just the kind of thing I hope to encounter at a festival. If Billy West offered a rather uncanny experience, profoundly overshadowed by the real Charlie Chaplin, then Syd Chaplin was absolutely his own man. I had a great time watching A Little Bit of Fluff and was charmed by Syd’s genteelly hapless character. It was also a pleasure to see Betty Balfour, a star whose historical popularity stands in marked contrast to the difficulty of seeing her films nowadays. There are also nice echoes to Charlie Chaplin’s work in the other films: from the extendable barber chair in His Day Out (reminiscent of The Great Dictator (1940)) to the gag when Bertram uses his hands to make some dolls dance (reminiscent of the famous dance of the rolls/forks gag in The Gold Rush (1925)). It really is a superb trio of films that rhyme and contrast in pleasing ways. All in all, a highly engaging evening at the pictures. (Well… a highly engaging couple of hours in front of my television screen, anyway.) The piano music for the comic shorts (by Meg Morley) and for the main feature (by Donald Sosin) was, of course, exemplary. A marvellous start to this year’s festival.

Paul Cuff

Oblomok imperii [Fragment of an Empire] (1929; USSR; Fridrikh Ermler)

This week’s film has been sat on my shelf for a few years, and I decided to watch it because of a passing reference in a book I was reading. This was the final volume of Sergei Prokofiev’s diaries, which cover the years 1907-1933. I will certainly be writing a post about these amazing books, since they contain many fascinating references to films and filmgoing in this period. Prokofiev was a keen filmgoer, but very rarely notes the exact titles of what he has seen. An exception is Oblomok imperii [Fragment of an Empire], which the composer worried was too provincial a film to be shown outside Russia. Though this comment is hardly an endorsement, it reminded me that the Flicker Alley DVD/Blu-ray edition of the film remained in its wrapper. A few days later, I unleashed it from its cellophane and put it to work…

During the Great War, non-commissioned officer Filimonov (Fyodor Nikitin) suffered severe shellshock and lost his memory. A decade later, he lives in isolation in the countryside near the old front line, knowing neither his own name nor what has happened to his country since 1917. One day he catches a glimpse of his wife (Liudmila Semionova) on a passing train. This triggers a partial return of his memory, which is further restored by other reminders of his wartime trauma. At last remembering his name, he decides to leave the country for the city and find his home. Journeying back to (what was St Petersburg but is now) Leningrad, Filimonov is overwhelmed by the material and (especially) socio-political changes of the world he knew. Bewildered and alone, he finds help from a former Red Army soldier (Yakov Gudkin) whose life he had saved during the war. At a new factory, Filimonov slowly embraces the Soviet way of life – and re-encounters his wife, who had long thought him dead. Though she has remarried a pompous cultural worker (Valerii Solovtsov), she is clearly unhappy – and Filimonov looks forward optimistically to the future.

Though Fragment of an Empire is a work of propaganda for the state, it focuses its themes through a remarkable portrait of one man’s subjective trauma. Fyodor Nikitin is the heart of the film, and his performance is one of the most astonishing in Soviet cinema of this era. I found his vulnerability and tenderness (especially in the early portions of the film) absolutely heartbreaking, just as his bouts of violent hysteria are genuinely frightening to watch. When he is in the factory, more and more confounded by the attitude and organization of the workers, he repeatedly screams: “Who is the master?!” Caught in a medium close-up, his arm raised above and behind his head, his face contorted with insane confusion, Nikitin is simply terrifying: at once contained by the frame and threatening to smash it to pieces. (God how I want to see this on a big screen!) I’m not surprised to read that Nikitin seemed to become genuinely unhinged on set, with Ermler supposedly having to threaten him with a pistol to coerce him back under direction. I can hardly remember so vivid a performance of emotional trauma, nor one that – even at its most furious – is always somehow sympathetic. Even when he is screaming and raging, this man is pitiable, vulnerable. He is surely one of the most human, and humane, figures in early Soviet cinema.

Of course, Nikitin is placed in the middle of an absolutely extraordinary series of scenes and images. The early scenes in which we glimpse Filimonov’s returning memories contain some amazing moments. I love the images of the frontline at night. Spotlight beams crisscross the black expanse of no-man’s-land, and two soldiers from opposing sides slowly approach one another. It’s an image of startling, surreal intensity. The richness of the film’s restored image – those impenetrable blacks, those searing highlights – makes such moments all the more effective. Of course, the famous (and famously censored) sequence of the gasmask-adorned crucifix is just as strange and unsettling, but it is part of a rich, dreamlike landscape of monstrous images. The way the enemy later appears with the train, likewise silhouetted in the harsh beams of spotlights, is just as nightmarish. And the scene in which the wounded soldier suckles from the dog, and the desperately poignant close-ups of man and beast, are simply astonishing. The war appears as a series of terrifying vignettes cut into the darkness, a darkness both real and metaphorical. These scenes are flashes of memory, of trauma, from a history that is too vast and too overwhelming to remember – or to see – in its totality.

Elsewhere in the opening half hour of the film, Filimonov’s involuntary flashbacks are dazzling – quite literally dazzling, since the rapid cutting between evocative images is a shock for our senses, too. I love the sewing machine than turns into a machinegun, and the way Filimonov seems to generate the very montage of the film with his manic turning of the wheel. But I think that when this sequence eventually morphs from a subjective memory to an outright lesson in propaganda (cutting between the two officers from either side demanding their men fire on the two figures), the sequence loses its edge. Setting out to emphasize the inhumanity of the officers on both sides, it loses rather than gains emotional depth. And while the cutting between spaces and people is complex, it doesn’t have the same poetic motivation as the earlier memory flashes: it has become an exercise in intellectual montage. Compared to the similar sequence of the laughing gas in Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1929), in which there is likewise a scene of officers threatening their own men, Ermler is less hallucinatory, less strange. By the end of Dovzhenko’s sequence, we seem to have lost touch with a continuous reality altogether. Unlike the growing nightmarishness of the gas sequence in Arsenal, Ermler’s combat sequence becomes all too comprehensible.

Likewise, the scene in which Filimonov demands, screaming, to know who the “master” is ends with a long montage sequence that tries to answer his question. We see a kind of cross-section of Soviet Russia, its workers and fighters and factories etc. It is impressive for its leaps between similar images (wheels, cogs, hands etc) but it really doesn’t have an argument. It’s a kind of statement of might that just gets more insistent, not more complex or convincing. When it ends and the worker asks Filimonov (and, by extension, us) “Understand?”, we cannot answer: there is nothing to understand. The rapid montage hasn’t made an argument or an effort to answer our question, it’s simply given us a slap. Filimonov – the focus slowly pulling from the background of the factory to his face in the foreground – is breathing heavily and dishevelled, but he starts to grin. Though the film would have us believe he has now finally woken up to the marvels of his new life in this new reality, he resembles a man who has not so much found his sanity as fully embraced his insanity. His grin turns into a laugh, and he hurls himself at his comrades, kissing and hugging them like… well, like a madman. Everyone is so nice to him, and he looks so ecstatically happy, that the scene works – but the pleasure it gives in showing Filimonov released from his torment is (for us, a century later) tinged with a different kind of emotion.

This sense of ambiguity is part of the film’s fascination. While Ermler offers some superb sequences and images, the film is often so convinced of its own effectiveness as propaganda that it simply overlooks the possibility that we might think differently. Our sympathies – especially as viewers nearly a century later – are liable to wander from the official line. Filimonov’s questioning of the Soviet world might encourage us to question it too. And the more he becomes convinced by this new world, the more he becomes a different person. His final line, which is also the final line of the film, is delivered straight to camera: “We still have a lot of work to do, comrades”. Immediately following the violent altercation between Filimonov’s ex-wife and her husband, there is an implication that personal change must accompany social change. But with Filimonov himself, this change is also a loss. The way he now appears before us – his beard neatly trimmed, his clothes neatly worn, his hat neatly fashionable – makes him a different man than the one who initially went in search of his wife. He resembles the other workers, the men and women he had found so alien and threatening, and he now echoes the way they speak. Yes, he has grown up, he has awakened, he is no longer hysterical. But there is a nagging sense that something else has happened. It is as if Filimonov has been uncannily replaced. This new Filimonov is a sinister doppelganger of the man we used to know. His last line is both an encouragement and a threat.

Part of this weird emotional effect is due to the original music by Vladimir Deshevov, as transcribed for piano in this recording by Daan van den Hurk. There are some superb sequences of sound and image interacting, often in ways you don’t expect. Take the early flashback sequence in which we see the Russian soldier praying before the crucifix. Visually, the image of Christ wearing a gasmask is jarring and surreal. Illuminated against the dark night sky, this figure of compassion becomes one of threat. But the soldier prays anyway, and Deshevov’s gorgeous, slow chorale throughout the start of the sequence gives a powerful sense of pathos and pity. If the image of the tank crushing both crucifix and soldier ends the scene with a grim punchline (demonstrating both the lack of mercy in war and a lack of religious authority to protect), the preceding music deepens the empathy we feel. As throughout, the score provides a degree of humanity that the images either cannot quite achieve or deliberately do not wish to achieve.

When Filimonov emerges from the tram onto the streets of Leningrad, his absolute disorientation is made the subject of bursts of rapid montage, mobile camerawork, and a delirious repetition of images. Deshevov’s music is like a kind of panic attack in sound, with its repeated, threatening, bustling, grandiose, rising progressions. The sequence is the first of many times that the film seeks to show off what has been achieved by the Bolsheviks while Filimonov has been away. But what the music does is make this very act of showing off almost terrifying. It is too upbeat, its tempo too rapid, to offer anything in the way of comfort or consolation. It is alienating rather than accommodating. This music makes you feel pity for Filimonov’s confusion, the confusion of a man as yet unconverted (and unconvinced) by Soviet Russia. The effect of alienation becomes ours as much as his.

There are later iterations of this kind of “look what we have achieved!” montage. They culminate in the above-mentioned sequence in which the worker demonstrates (via the grand montage) where the “master” is. The dense chromaticism of the music becomes almost unbearably tense, and resolves not in a complex transformation but in a sudden full stop (accompanied by the cut to black that ends the montage). There then follows a passage of scampering, major-key jollity, interjected with an almost religiose chorale motif, that is as weirdly unsettling as the preceding chromatic tension. It’s a brilliantly odd, unexpected way of ending this scene of conversion.

The fact Deshevov’s score seems subtler, wilier, than the film made me curious about the origins of the music and the man. Deshevov (1889-1955) was the same generation as his more famous compatriot Prokofiev, but unlike the latter he remained in Russia throughout the Revolution. Like Myaskovsky and Prokofiev (and their younger compatriots Popov and Shostakovich), Deshevov became part of the mainstay of Soviet composers who worked under the increasingly strict guidelines meted out by Stalin. He would compose much orchestral music (including several ballets), as well as chamber work and piano music. Ermler’s commission to write an original orchestral score for Fragment of an Empire was a rare instance of collaboration between a major director and composer in this period of Soviet cinema. Ermler was hugely impressed by the result. “I am afraid that people will go to listen to the music, not to watch the film”, the director told Deshevov in 1929. “So be it! I am delighted.” Yet the music was barely discussed at the time and remained seldom heard since, especially because copies of the film itself were dispersed, dismantled, and/or destroyed.

The present restoration of Fragment of an Empire was completed in 2018 after a collaborative project by the EYE Filmmuseum, Gosfilmofond of Russia, the Cinémathèque Suisse, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. From what I can glean, the new restoration was presented with Deshevov’s orchestral score for the first time in October 2018 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Per the programme notes for this performance, the score was restored using “the set of orchestral parts retained in the theatre’s library” by composer Matvei Sobolev. Deshevov’s score was performed again at Pordenone in October 2019 with Günter A. Buchwald conducting the Orchestra San Marco, Pordenone. The essay for this festival screening details the history of how Ermler commissioned Deshevov and the subsequent neglect of the music. (Sadly, this essay does not clarify if the 2019 performance used the same musical edition prepared by Sobolev in 2018 – but my assumption is that it did.)

Yet the Flicker Alley release from 2019 confuses this picture. The blurb on the back of the DVD/Blu-ray box states: “The film is accompanied by a choice of two musical scores: a brilliant new score composed and performed by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius, and an adaptation of Vladimir Deshevov’s original piano score performed by Daan van den Hurk.” It’s curious, but I suppose understandable, that the modern score takes precedence over the original. But why refer to the latter as the “original piano score”? Isn’t this a piano transcription of the original orchestral score? Flicker Alley make it no clearer within the booklet for their release, since the credit section therein refers to “Vladimir Deshevov’s original score” being “adapted and performed by” van den Hurk. Van den Hurk’s own statement in the booklet refers to Deshevov’s other compositions for solo piano and the film score being “a worthy piano concert piece”. But on the very next page, Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius refer to van den Hurk’s work as “a piano transcription of the original score”. This, surely, is closer to the mark. But neither here nor anywhere in the Flicker Alley release is it mentioned that Deshevov’s music was written for and performed by an orchestra in 1929. Nor is there any acknowledgement that this orchestral score had already been restored and performed with the 2018 restoration of the film. (Even the audio commentary soundtrack on the Flicker Alley release, I note, uses the modern score as its background music, not Deshevov’s – further evidence of how his score is subtly deprioritized on this release.)

So what are we listening to on the Flicker Alley soundtrack? Since the wording is so vague – deliberately so, it seems to me – throughout the release, I’m not even sure if van den Hurk’s work was a transcription of Deshevov’s orchestral score or based on a piano reduction prepared by the composer or another contemporary musician. Even if it was based on a piano version by Deshevov, this does not entitle it to be called or understood as the “original score”. Some context is required here with these terms. For example, Deshevov’s contemporary Prokofiev began most of his compositions on the piano, even if they were to end up as orchestral works. When he was working on ballets, he would often suspend work on finishing orchestration to produce a piano transcription for the sake of his stage performers. In advance of their productions, Prokofiev’s collaborators would need a sense of the overall structure (and timespan) of the music in order to build the choreography, prepare the staging, and begin rehearsals. Several of these transcriptions exist, but even if some or all of this music for piano predates the final orchestrated version, this does not mean they should be understood or received as the “original” scores. In the case of Deshevov’s music from 1929, he may well have written some of the score for piano before orchestrating it. But to advertise this as the “original score” would be to entirely misunderstand the nature of composition and performance practice. The orchestral version is the original score, no matter if it was the end result of a complex process of drafting, redrafting, and instrumenting. But all this can only be supposition, since Flicker Alley do not offer any details about this process of “adaptation” – and never once admit that Deshevov’s score for Fragment of an Empire was written for orchestra.

Why should we care about this? Because finding out information about silent cinema, especially silent film music, is already difficult enough. Original materials and resources are difficult to find and difficult to interpret, so it is vital to be honest and transparent about all aspects of restoration. I try always to bear in mind (and be honest about) the factors that have shaped the way I see silent films, especially on home media. All too often, however, marketing muddies the waters. It directly impacts how silent films are received by new audiences and new scholars. Of all the information available online or elsewhere, it is the DVD blurb that gets endlessly repeated. When the Flicker Alley edition of Fragment of an Empire won a well-deserved prize among Il Cinema Ritrovato’s DVD Awards in 2020, for example, the release is credited as offering “the recreation of Vladimir Deshevov’s original piano music from 1929”. This text hasn’t been generated by Chat GPT, but by the human curators of a prestigious festival. What hope have the rest of us if misleading information just gets copied and pasted from the marketing? Confusion, if not outright misinformation, rapidly filters through to writing on the film, which in turn generates more confusion and/or misinformation. So please, please don’t gaslight me.

I regret spending so much time writing about the accompanying text of this release. Not only is it a grand old waste of my time having to write what the liner essays should have said straight up, but it also means I have less space to talk about the music and the film. Let me be clear: the restoration presented by Flicker Alley is visually superb, and regardless of the score I am exceedingly glad to have it. What’s more, I absolutely loved Deshevov’s music, and it makes Ermler’s film all the more complex and compelling. But however good the piano transcription, I would so much rather listen to this score in its original form: for orchestra! Here’s hoping that it will be performed live in the future and, as I never tire of hoping with such things, released on home media.

Paul Cuff

Music for The Thief of Bagdad (1924; US; Raoul Walsh)

Some time ago, I wrote about the music that accompanies different releases of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers (1921). I have long been meaning to do something similar for The Thief of Bagdad (1924). In the aftermath of the festival at (or via) Bonn, I felt like a return to Hollywood, so seize the chance now to turn my eyes – and especially my ears – towards Fairbanks…

First, some context. The original music for The Thief of Bagdad was written by American composer Mortimer Wilson and was commissioned by Fairbanks himself. “Make your score as artistic as you can and don’t feel that you have to jump like a bander-log from one mood to another at the expense of the development of your musical ideas”, he told Wilson (qtd in Vance 2008, 175). The result was a fully original orchestral score, which was performed at the film’s premiere on 18 March 1924 at the Liberty Theatre in New York. Wilson’s music received very good reviews from the critics, but its qualities were not appreciated by Morris Gest. Gest had already planned, in conjunction with Fairbanks, an exceedingly elaborate road show presentation for the film’s initial release. No expense was spared on ballyhoo: a veritable circus of road show variety – stage performers, an “Arabian” band, fancy-dress ushers, decorative incense, magic carpets etc – was duly assembled to exotify each venue booked for the roadshow. To support this cavalcade of orientalist claptrap, Gest wanted a score from a composer with a “big name”. For him, Wilson was not well-known enough as a composer to encourage public interest in the roadshow. Gest therefore employed James C. Bradford to compile a score from existing music – tunes more well-known than those of Wilson, and thus (Gest reasoned) more appealing to audiences. The result was not a success and quickly dropped. It was Wilson’s score that accompanied the film during its roadshow presentation at various major US cities.

However, while The Thief of Bagdad certainly made a big splash with critics, it was not the commercial success Fairbanks (and Gest) hoped. Despite being hailed as a landmark production, it proved less popular with Fairbanks’s own fans. The film was seemingly too ambitious (too long, too fanciful, too everything) for audiences in the US. But it had made its mark on history, and the film survived in enough high-quality 35mm prints to be restored in later decades, and returned to its rightful place in the canon of silent cinema.

But what of Wilson’s score? Despite Gest’s efforts to sideline it in 1924, the music has maintained a notable presence in histories of film music – and has been championed by many writers and practitioners. Composer and conductor Gillian B. Anderson, for example, has called it “one of the best film scores ever written”. Though Anderson also details its merits in more detail in her Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929: A Guide (xxxix-xlii), and the film appears on her website’s directory of original scores, I am unsure if/when she has performed it with orchestra. (Unlike many other scores on her website, it does not include performance details or guidelines for musicians.) Indeed, it is a curious fact that, despite the amount of information on the music and the survival of the music itself, Wilson’s work has remained what you might call a “paper score”.

This music certainly didn’t feature on any of the first home media releases of The Thief of Bagdad. The first DVD of the film was the 1998 edition by Film Preservation Associates. This featured the music cues assembled by Bradford in 1924, performed by Gaylord Carter on the theatre organ. (The recording itself dates from the 1970s, when presumably it accompanied a theatrical re-release of the film on 16mm/35mm. In 1978, Carter also released an extract from this score on an LP of music from silent films. Together with The Thief of Bagdad were extracts from the David Mondoza/William Axt score for Ben-Hur (1925) and the Ernst Luz score for The Temptress (1928). Rarities in themselves!) For all Carter’s personal links to the era, together with his admirable resurrection of historical scores, I often struggle with organ scores – especially for a film this long. And in any case, it’s a theatre organ not an orchestra. That it was recorded over other options evidences the relative ease of accessing and recording a theatre organ, and the preference for Bradford’s readily adaptable cue sheets rather than Wilson’s more complex orchestral score.

The first edition of The Thief of Bagdad that I owned was the 2004 release by Kino. This “deluxe edition” features an “orchestra soundtrack performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra”. The DVD credits further describe this as a score “compiled by Rodney Sauer and Susan Hall, adapted from the original 1924 cue sheet”. As I observed in my piece on The Three Musketeers, Kino’s marketing inevitably disappoints anyone expecting an “orchestra”: the credit sequence at the end of the DVD reveals that this consists of just five musicians. Kino’s use of the phrase “the original 1924 cue sheet” is also somewhat contentious. The first cue sheet used to accompany the film was the one that (briefly) replaced Wilson’s score after the first performances in 1924. Is the Sauer/Hall score based on this selection (i.e. the one by Bradford)? Even Kino’s “deluxe” edition does not provide any information on this issue. Even if it were Bradford’s selection from 1924, the word “original” seems a little misleading. After all, Bradford’s compilation of library music was a replacement for a truly original score by Wilson – the score that Fairbanks himself had commissioned. All this said, the Sauer/Hall score is perfectly fine. It is well performed and suits the film. But it feels out of scale with the images. As with the Mont Alto Orchestra’s music for The Three Musketeers, it sounds rather meagre next to the huge production values of The Thief of Bagdad. This film needs an orchestra, not an “orchestra”.

My disappointment with the Kino DVD was exacerbated by the fact that I knew that a Carl Davis score existed for this film. First performed in 1984 as part of the Kevin Brownlow/David Gill series of “Thames Silents” restorations, it was recorded for television broadcast and for home media. There was a laserdisc of the Thames Silents edition in 1989, and a VHS in 1991. Given the superior sound quality of laserdiscs, I chased down the laserdisc edition and giddily transferred it to DVD for my personal enjoyment. Davis’s score is compiled from the music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, especially from his famous orchestral suite Scheherazade (1888). The music is a perfect choice. After all, the sets, costumes, and overall conception of The Thief of Bagdad owes much to the influence of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and especially to their Scheherazade, which repurposed Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. As ever, Davis rearranges the historical music with extraordinary deftness. While the music maintains its original identity, it also serves the film’s rhythm and mood. As it happens, I love Rimsky-Korsakov’s music anyway, so my first encounter with the Davis score (sat in a tiny booth, squinting at the small television screen as my laserdisc whirred away on the side) was an absolute delight. It’s a glorious compilation, perfectly suiting the dreamy, exotic, fantastic, and balletic qualities of the film. So enamoured of the music was I that I laboriously transferred the soundtrack of my laserdisc to DVD-R, then from DVD-R to my PC, then used editing software on my PC to affix the laserdisc soundtrack to the superior video image from the Kino DVD, just for my own viewing pleasure. This little experiment was the best version of The Thief of Bagdad I had until the DVD/Blu-ray release of the film, issued in the US by Cohen Media (in 2013) and in the UK by Eureka/Masters of Cinema (in 2014). This edition finally reunited the Davis score with an excellent transfer of the film.

But soon after this edition was released, it became apparent that a new restoration was in the works – one that was to revive Mortimer’s score from 1924. For this, an entirely new performing edition of the score was prepared in 2015 by Mark Fitz-Gerald. As Fitz-Gerald records in his excellent liner notes for the CD release (discussed below), the surviving music required a good deal of editing and preparation to ensure it matched the restoration of the film. Since Wilson composed the music during the production and allowed room for adjusting the length/order of scenes after the film’s premiere, there was a degree of inconsistency between surviving music and montage. Fitz-Gerald found that there was too much music for some scenes and not enough for others – as well as plenty of notational errors in various instrumental parts. These are common issues to the reconstruction of silent film scores, and there are many examples which necessitate very elaborate editing or additional composition. Nevertheless, Wilson left enough clues (and more than enough cues) for his score to be readily edited into its current working form. Fitz-Gerald’s edition of the score premiered with the film at the Pordenone festival in October 2016. Subsequently, the score was recorded in Frankfurt in April 2019 and then broadcast on ARTE later that year, with Fitz-Gerald conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Highlights from this recording were released on CD in 2022. This CD contains 75 minutes of music, which the liner notes inform us represents the “complete” score, minus the repeats of cues that make up the remaining 75 minutes of the film’s timespan.

I had to listen to Wilson’s score a couple of times before it properly sank in. I suspect this was because I was very used to Davis’s music. Though both are full, symphonic soundworlds, rich without being dense, there is a definite difference in tone. Wilson is less rapt, less intense, less filled with grand, sweeping gestures. One might say that Wilson is less inclined to being showy or flash, which Rimsky-Korsakov’s detractors would certainly argue is the case with some of his music. (Though few would argue that he isn’t one of the greatest of all orchestrators.) Davis is also working with music that is already well-known, saturated with memorable melodies – melodies that I knew incredibly well even before hearing his score for The Thief of Bagdad. Wilson’s melodies have gone virtually unheard in a century, and they are decidedly less emphatic than Rimsky-Korsakov’s – but no less worthy of being seen alongside this film. And Fitz-Gerald notes the echoes of other composers like Puccini, Reger, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner in Wilson’s score. (He even compares parts of the soundworld to that of Alban Berg, which is perhaps over-selling it. A score doesn’t need to be, or to sound, “modernist” in order to be relevant or interesting.) But there is never direct quotation, just these echoes – in the shape of melodies, or the texture of sounds.

As well as the difference in musical/historical contexts for these scores, Wilson’s original music is surely conceived with a different objective in mind. In Scheherazade Rimsky-Korsakov is conjuring an entire picture from scratch, using the orchestra to form an impression in the listener’s imagination; whereas Wilson is accompanying an already-imagined world. If Wilson is less intense, perhaps this is because he isn’t striving to do everything: half the drama is already there on screen, so he is happy to be less emphatic. Just as the city walls seem to hover over those polished black floors, or the minarets hang before those dreamy picture-book skies, so Wilson’s music floats over the images. Everything works in tandem with the action, but the music has its own tempo, its own sense of mood. While there are plenty of examples of percussive effects for particular moments (gongs, weapons, jewels, clapping hands, magical apparitions etc.), the score itself is never in a rush to match every movement on screen. Wilson maintains a very pleasing balance between fidelity and independence. His music seems to have just the right tempo, both for individual scenes and for the film as a whole. It flows with the drama, seamlessly negotiating each sequence – picking out individual moments to highlight, but always with a wider sense of forward momentum. It certainly exudes the same warmth, geniality, and feeling as the drama.

Such qualities are immediately clear in Wilson’s opening theme, spelt out over the opening title. This theme is a slow, singing melody: wistful, yearning, gentle. If it lacks the absolute immediacy of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opening theme on the solo violin, used by Davis for the film’s prologue, it possesses a kind of calm that really works. This is music that’s never in a rush to impress. Like the film, it takes its time to unfold. Wilson’s main theme is heard for the first time within the drama when Ahmed enters the mosque and we see the Holy Man speak. The immediate sense of peace that Wilson conjures, a kind of sonic balm, is perfect. From the bustle of the streets, we enter a different kind of space – physical and emotional.

Later, when Ahmed first sees the Princess, the music grows into a slow, dreamy ecstasy. Like the opening theme, subsequently associated with the Holy Man, Wilson produces a drawn-out, singing melody – this time brought out in the low strings. It’s like a romantic version of the spiritual theme. In Davis’s score, the scene is more musically ambiguous. The theme that we will hear fully developed, expanded in orchestration and in volume at the end of the film’s first part, when Ahmed sets out on his quest, is here heard for the first time in tentative form. Over quiet, tremolo strings, solo oboe and then clarinet start to spell out the theme – but are soon interrupted in the scene when the Princess’s guards return. Davis’s score recognizes (in its orchestration) the intimacy of the scene, but (in its melody) hints at the dramatic consequences of this first contact between Ahmed and the Princess.

I have spent the best part of three mornings listening to the Davis and Wilson scores side-by-side, and I love them both. For sheer richness, variety, and moments of piercing intensity, Davis’s is hard to beat. (How I wish I had heard this score performed live!) But Wilson’s score has a tremendous cumulative impact: everything about it simply works. It’s beautifully organized, orchestrated, and fits the film like a glove. The restoration of Wilson’s score is reason to celebrate.

Added to this are the qualities of the Photoplay Productions restoration of The Thief of Bagdad. While the off-air copy from ARTE that I have watched does not do the astonishing imagery justice, it immediately signals its difference from earlier transfers of the film. Firstly, it contains the original credit sequence. The version presented both on the Kino DVD and the Cohen/MoC Blu-ray has a different (less elaborate) font for the main title, then dissolves straight to the image of the Holy Man and child in the desert:

In the Photoplay version, the more elaborate title is followed by full credits of cast and crew, then the desert prologue scene:

But the major difference is that the image in the Photoplay restoration is darker, the colours more saturated; it is as though the whole film has had a bath in some enriching elixir. I suspect that many viewers might worry the shadows are too dark. Having never seen an original tinted print from 1924, I cannot say how it compares with a contemporary copy – nor can I say how it compares to a contemporary projection of the film. What I can say is that it makes the previous transfers look anaemic, as though they have been over-cleaned. This is especially obvious in the beautiful transition from day to night via a dissolve. In the Cohen version, the tinting dissolves almost to monochrome for night:

In the Photoplay version, the tinting dissolves to deep blue:

As you can see from the following captures, the overall difference in colour and contrast makes a big difference. In the images below, stills from the Cohen Blu-ray are on the left, images from the ARTE broadcast of the Photoplay version on the right:

I simply don’t know which is more “authentic”, but I must say I’m a sucker for the shadowy saturation of the Photoplay version. I also note that many compositions in the Photoplay restoration are less cropped at the top, left, and bottom of the frame. (The takes and editing appear to be exactly the same in Cohen/Photoplay versions, so I don’t think this is an instance of each copy deriving from a different negative.) This, combined with the title font and longer credit sequence, suggests a different, and dare I say superior, generation print being used by Photoplay. It really does look gorgeous.

But will we ever see it on home media? And will Wilson’s score ever get a chance to accompany it? There is certainly reason enough culturally, and surely room enough commercially, for both the Davis/Cohen release and the Wilson/Photoplay restoration to co-exist. Please, someone make it so!

Paul Cuff

References

Gillian B. Anderson, Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929: A Guide (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988).

Mark Fitz-Gerald, liner notes for Mortimer Wilson: The Thief of Bagdad, First Hand Records FHR126, 2022, compact disc.

Jeffrey Vance, Douglas Fairbanks (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

Bonn from afar (2025, days 9 and 10)

The final two days of streaming from Bonn provide us with two variety-themed melodramas. The first is more familiar, at least in terms of its cast; the second was a complete surprise, and yet another welcome discovery…

Day 9: Song. Die Liebe eines armen Menschenkindes (1928; Ger./UK; Richard Eichberg). As with Saxophon-Susi on Day 2 of Bonn this year, I found myself in the curious position of having already seen Song – likewise at the (online) Pordenone festival of 2024. As I did last week, I will refer readers interested in Eichberg’s film to my post from that earlier occasion.

In lieu of commentary on the film, I observe in passing that there is a musical connection between Saxophon-Susi and Song: both were originally scored by Paul Dessau in 1928. Though Dessau’s later work (including sound films, orchestral and chamber works, and several operas) is well represented in terms of DVDs and CDs, these two feature film scores do not seem to be extant. As with so much absent silent film music, one wonders if this is a case of genuine loss or simply a case of no-one having been willing or able to look. (The most typical case would be that both films are released on DVD/Blu-ray with a modern substitute, only for Dessau’s scores to be rediscovered and lovingly reconstructed. More typically still, these scores would then be performed just once at a festival I cannot attend and hear about only retrospectively, and forever after remain unavailable due to lack of interest and/or finance for appropriate recordings to be issued with a new home edition. I would then be left with years of regret and frustration, with occasional outbreaks of false hope when a rumoured broadcast recording failed to appear – or one that remained unavailable outside a restricted copyright region of central Europe. Such is often the fate of original orchestral scores, and of those who long most fervently to hear them.)

For the presentation of Song from Bonn this week, Stephen Horne performed on piano (and various other instrumental interpolations) – just as he did for this film at Pordenone. Both iterations were excellent. However, given that the restoration and musical score were from the same sources, I merely dipped in to this presentation from Bonn, finding myself (as before) marvelling at how nice the film looked – but remaining just as ungrabbed by the characters or drama. Not without some guilt, nor without regret at once more not seeing this with an audience, I skipped the rest for the sake of time.

Day 10: Sensation im Wintergarten (1929; Ger.; Gennaro Righelli). The circus acrobat “Frattani” (Paul Richter) returns to Germany after many years abroad. His real identity is Count Paul Mensdorf, and as a child he ran away from home to avoid his new father, the Baron von Mallock (Gaston Jacquet). Presumed dead by his mother, the Countess Mensdorf (Erna Morena), he joined the circus and rose to become “Frattani, King of the Air”. Arriving in Berlin as an adult, Paul re-encounters his childhood sweetheart Madeleine, who earlier left the circus – and now hopes to rejoin. Meanwhile, Mallock has been cheating on his wife and gambling away his fraudulently-earned money. At the Wintergarten, Mallock’s roving eye is caught by Madeleine, whose debut is a triumph. But Madeleine worries about Paul’s dangerous stunts, just as Paul comes to worry that he is endangering their budding romance. (A worry enhanced by the sight of the former “King of the Air”, who is now one-legged and unemployed.) Paul recognizes Mallock and strikes him down when he tries to grope Madeleine. Revealing his true identity, Paul’s reappearance is a joy to his mother but to Mallock a threat to his estate. Threatened by his creditors, Mallock grows desperate and tries to sabotage the trapeze ropes – only to plunge to his death. ENDE.

A very enjoyable film, if a tad generic. Its story might be from any variety- or circus-themed film of the silent era, from the earliest features onwards. Danish producers, for example, made a speciality of them in the early 1910s (Den flyvende circus, 1912; Dødsspring til hest fra cirkuskuplen, 1912), remade some of them in the 1920s (Klovnen, 1917 and 1926), and even directed them in Hollywood (The Devil’s Circus, 1926). Romantic rivalry playing out against a backdrop of circus stunts was clearly an appealing setting. And despite the satisfaction of the narrative in Sensation im Wintergarten, the ending is a bit of a dud. The machinations of Wallock amount to very little and his threat goes instantly awry, killing him before anything has happened.

But narrative ingenuity or dramatic depth is probably not the point here. Sensation im Wintergarten is distinguished by its superb staging and camerawork. Even if this could be a story from 1910, its cinematic realization truly belongs to 1929. The film is impeccably lit, impeccably staged, impeccably edited. From the outset, it is filled with fine sequences. The opening flashback to Paul’s childhood, for example, stages his first sight of the circus performers through the windows the school gymnasium. There is a very nice dissolve at the end of the scene to the same space, now deserted and lit only by the streetlamp. It’s evocative and moody, just as when Paul first enters the circus. Here, we see the clown Barry (Wladimir Sokoloff) is introduced in the centre of the rink, pulling an animal from the wings via a lead. The beast that emerges is in fact a tiny dog, who slides reluctantly across the sand. The camera slides before the dog, making the sight both novel and comic. It is a shot of pure delight, allowing us to share the kind of delight that the child Paul feels as he looks on from the wings.

I single out this moment to emphasize that the mobile camerawork is interesting not just in the obvious examples of trapeze-mounted shots for drama, but the less expected ones. Then there are the beautiful travelling shots through 1929 Berlin, the camera gliding marvellously along the streets towards the theatre. But the interior sequences filmed inside the real Wintergarten are simply dazzling. It’s a glorious space, gloriously filmed – you can really feel the size of it, the buzz of the crowd, the drama of the performers on the real stage.

I love the tracking shot in which the side doors of the theatre open and we glide slowly toward the huge space within. It’s like a more realistic version of the shot in Ben-Hur (1925) in which the camera similarly tracks forward into the huge space of the Roman arena. Indeed, in some ways the shot in Sensation im Wintergarten is more enticing. Unlike half real, half matte-painted space of the Circus of Antioch, the Berlin theatre is tangibly real – and the sense of being inside this real space, with its real stage, real seating, real walls, real ceiling, is itself exciting. The unchained camera – swinging from the trapeze, leaping through the air – is a continuation of this sense of a real space being physically explored on screen.

Director Gennaro Righelli takes advantage of this amazing pre-built set by placing his camera everywhere he can: in the audience, behind the audience, in the wings, behind the stage, in front of the stage, in the orchestra pit, behind the orchestra pit, in the corridors, in the dressing rooms… You really get a sense of this location as a complete world in itself, a life that a performer might long for and not want to leave. The real sets are likewise full and rich and complete. There are fine interiors of the Countess’s home, but I was more interested in the smoky restaurants where the show people meet. The sense of a full reality created by the shots that introduce the real streets of Berlin continue into these interior spaces.

For all this, some may feel that it lacks the aesthetic or dramatic punch of Germany’s most famous vaudeville film of the era: Varieté (1925). I dare say I would agree. But this comparison to the most conspicuously well-known film of its genre does Sensation im Wintergarten an injustice. If Gennaro Righelli is not E.A. Dupont (I admit I had never knowingly heard of Righelli), this is no reason to snub his work. Nor should one snub his cast, even though it does not boast anyone as famous as Lya di Putti or Emil Jannings. But Sensation im Wintergarten does feature a reliable ensemble of familiar(ish) names. As Paul, Paul Richter offers no great emotional depth, but he is believable and likeable. (My familiarity with his face is as Fritz Lang’s Siegfried from 1924: another role of presence without depth.) Believable and likeable are also qualities I might say of Claire Rommer as his love interest. They are a charming couple, if one whose inner lives are only sketches rather than detailed portraits. As Mallock, Gaston Jacquet is perfectly suave, perfectly calculating, perfectly callous – a character designed not to possess any depth whatsoever. As Paul’s circus friend, Wladimir Sokoloff is a familiar face from various small roles in this period (including several Pabst productions), and his distinctive features – warm, kind, expressive, comic – make for an engaging sidekick to the lead. If I find I have little else to add to these sketches, it is because the film makes of its characters little more than sketches. They are entirely effective, but nothing more.

Again, I do not mean to talk down this film. Sensation im Wintergarten is a worthy production, and very entertaining. And it’s always good to widen one’s perspective on lesser-known films and directors. As much as I like Varieté, I’d really rather see something new and unknown. Sensation im Wintergarten is most certainly new and unknown. This presentation from Bonn is in fact the world premiere of the new digital restoration, which also provides detailed credits at the start. Per these very useful notes, the original German version of Sensation im Wintergarten remains lost, so this restoration is based on the version released in Sweden. Various missing scenes and shots have been indicated with inserted text, which is much preferable than leaving out important details for the sake of visual continuity. (I wish restorations would do this more often, as it is otherwise impossible to know the differences between original and restored copies.) Despite some missing material, the film looks great – filled with crisp, rich, detailed images. The music here was provided for piano and various other solo instruments by Günter A. Buchwald and Frank Bockius. Catching the rhythms and sounds of the circus, in particular, makes for a very engaging experience. They caught the drama and its tone very well, and I was entertained throughout.

Stummfilmtage Bonn 2025: Summary. As ever, by the time I have finished writing these festival pieces, the festival itself seems long over. And, as ever, I have mixed feelings about my online attendance. I have not engaged at all with online discussion (let alone in-person conversation) about what I have seen, nor have I explored any related festival material other than the brief descriptions of each film on the “details” sidebar for each video. My body and brain have certainly been having to work hard, though in a very different way from those present in Bonn. My early mornings have been a pell-mell flurry of simultaneous viewing and notetaking, followed by late mornings with an equally pell-mell flurry of rewriting and image-capturing. My wrist aches, something odd happened to my lower back, and I feel like I’ve had to cram more quickfire viewing and thinking into this last ten days than I have in many weeks. But ultimately I do enjoy the feeling that I have been forced to live according to the rhythm set by the festival, even if only via online portals with preset time restrictions. While a solitary pleasure, writing gives me a sense of something that will last beyond the ten days – and will hopefully stick in my memory, if not anyone else’s.

It goes without saying that the Stummfilmtage Bonn is an absolutely superb festival. The programme is always filled with some real discoveries, as well as the chance to review some familiar and very worthwhile films. Impeccably presented and prepared for online streaming, I cannot possibly bestow enough praise on everyone involved. (My conversation with the co-curator, Oliver Hanley, last year only led to a greater appreciation of the mad amount of effort involved in putting this on – especially for both live and online audiences.) I hope I will be able to attend in person one year, and indeed to have the kind of lifestyle that would enable me to do so. Until then, I will happily let my life be taken over by the Stummfilmtage Bonn for ten days each year. Long may this opportunity last.

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2025, day 8)

Day 8 of this year’s line-up from Bonn takes us to Hungary, where we plunge into a crime melodrama…

Rabmadár (1929; Hu./Ger.; Pál Sugár/Lajos Lázár). In the women’s prison in Budapest, the resident doctor (Charlotte Susa) takes pity on Prisoner No. 7 (Lissi Arna), who begs to be let loose just for one night. She explains that she let herself be arrested for the sake of a man. The doctor believes her intentions are noble, so swaps clothes with the prisoner and allows her to escape. Meanwhile, at a hotel in the city, the head waiter Jenő (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) dotes over his pregnant girlfriend Birdi (Ida Turay), while also eyeing up the new maid (Olga Kerékgyártó) – and then the new arrival, the artiste (El Dura). As Jenő forces himself on the artiste, Prisoner No. 7 rushes into the hotel. Spying on the pair from the next room, she sees the artiste turn the tables on Jenő – praying on his vulnerability (his lowly status), she lures him into making more of himself for her sake. The artiste thus inveigles Jenő to distract the hotel manageress (Mariska H. Balla), while she herself empties the manageress’s safe. This she does, but Prisoner No. 7, now armed, confronts the artiste just as she’s about to make off with the money – and without Jenő. Jenő re-enters and now the Prisoner confronts him, too. She phones for the police. The artiste makes a run for it, plummeting to her death in a faulty lift. The prisoner tells Jenő he mustn’t escape this time. Jenő claims he loves her and somehow lures the Prisoner into his arms. The police enter and find the body in the lift shaft. Jenő goes downstairs to becalm the police. Meanwhile, Birdie encounters the Prisoner – and we learn that her name is Annuska. Birdie reveals that she will be married to Jenő, and that she is pregnant. The shocked Annuska leaves, pursued by Jenő. On the riverbank, Annushka asks him to be decent and marry Birdie. He swears he will, and Annushka heads back to prison. ENDE

My word, what a film this is. My experience of late 1920s/early 1930s Hungarian-directed films has, perhaps by accident, tended towards the dramatically and expressively extravagant. If Rabmadár doesn’t quite have Pál Fejős (aka Paul Fejos) levels of emotional and aesthetic intensity, passages nevertheless have an amazing and unexpected potency. The film revels in dark, often sinister or oppressive interior spaces – from the jail cell to the hotel rooms and shadowy niches, and the dark or dawning streets outside. In particular, the prison setting boasts some wonderful imaginative camerawork and editing. As well as finding great angles to frame the prisoners, especially No. 7 – from up above, through grates – there is a superb sequence of Annushka’s claustrophobia. In tight close-ups, we see her eying the walls, the door, the ceiling, and the camera tracks in towards each surface, pressing them slowly into the lens. Multiple superimpositions and ever-closer shots of her face and mouth and eyes make us share the madness of confinement, as the film shoves us closer into its imprisoning world. Later, there are any number of superb close-ups. Even when the artiste is fleeing with the money, the film shows us the chasing figures in facial close-ups as they hurtle through the hotel, shouting and screaming. The set-up and story might be entirely generic, but my word this film makes the most out of the material. A simple story of crime and betrayal becomes a weird chamber piece, draped in a febrile mise-en-scène. This is what impressed me most: the fact that every aspect of design and camerawork gets used to heighten and intensify the emotional tone. Everything in this film seems intense.

But this isn’t merely an aesthetic exercise. The characters are the reason for the intensity, and the cast form a superb ensemble. Lissi Arna’s face carries such amazing fierceness of feeling, from the despair of jail, of shock, of fear, of betrayal, to the heights of gratitude, of longing, of love, of vicious triumphalism. It’s quite a performance, matched by the sultry, moody, dangerous presence of the others in the cast. El Dura is a remarkable presence. She’s such a slight figure, but she moves with amazing purpose – turning what seems to begin as a rape scene into something weirder and unexpected, turning on her would-be attacker and bending him to her will. It’s a mad, uncomfortable twist of narrative logic, but somehow El Dura pulls it off. And Hans Adalbert Schlettow as the superficial Jenő – always seen glancing at himself in mirrors, in glass, in any reflective surface – has just enough fun to make his character a believably engaging narcissism and charm over the women.

But it’s the women in the cast that have the most enjoyable, intense performances to offer. As the manageress, Mariska H. Balla has enormous fun falling for Jenő – proffering him with drink, with frilly sweets, with kisses. Their seduction/distraction scene together is delightful, almost absurdly so. When Jenő gets out his guitar and starts singing, you realize the almost autonomous strength of the scene and its performers – it’s like another, equally good, film is breaking out of the one we’re watching. Then there are the intensely believable performances of Ida Turay as the madly besotted, innocent Birdi, and Olga Kerékgyártó as the maid who, even in a handful of appearances, is somehow realistic, intense, emotional, and wholly believable as a person. Finally, the ostensibly minor role of the doctor is turned, by Charlotte Susa and by the intensity of the mise-en-scène, into a tangible, almost too powerful, emotional presence.

Speaking of the latter, I wondered quite what the connection between the doctor and her prisoner was to be, so febrile and physically intense were their jail scenes together. Even before they are seen together, the cigarettes that the doctor sends to Annushka trigger a dreamy, smoky vision of the doctor on the wall of Annushka’s cell. “Isn’t there someone you can’t live without?” the prisoner asks the doctor, on her knees before her, kissing her hands, pressing her year-stained face into her lap. (There is an implicit scene of mutual undressing, which the film avoids via a swift fade to black.)

Later, when Birdi encounters Annushka in the hotel, it is Birdi who utters Annushka’s name for the first time in the film. It’s the first moment of identification, a form of intimacy. And Annushka embraces Birdi and kisses her several times on the mouth. This, too, is the first sincere kiss of the film. (We have seen Jenő kiss many women, always insincerely.) It is as if only without the central man in the story can any of the women find comradeship, tenderness – even physical tenderness. And at the end of the film, Annushka returns to the doctor – an odd and touching reunion of this couple. But the last image is of Annushka, alone, closing the shutters of her cell. It’s like the whole film has been some kind of nightmare of confinement, release, fear, and anger. No resolution is possible but a kind of sinking back into sultry longing.

A word must also be said about the history of the film and its restoration. A Hungarian-German co-production, boasting cast and crew from both countries, this film made a splash in 1929 but was long unavailable thereafter. The original Hungarian title was Rabmadár (“Slave Bird”), but only the German iteration – Achtung! Kriminalpolizei! (Gefangene Nr. 7) – survived in a print saved in the Netherlands, which was passed to Filmarchiv Austria, thence to the Budapest Film Archive. More cent discoveries enabled a longer restoration to be completed by the National Film Institute Hungary. Given the complex print history, outlined in the excellent restoration credits at the start of the presentation, the film looks sumptuous. Rich blacks, glowing highlights, detailed textures, glorious close-ups… quite simply, a delight to watch. My one reservation about the restoration would be the framerate. To my eyes, it looked like the film was transferred at a slower-than-natural framerate. For a print of 2171m, per the credits, the near two-hour runtime would indicate a framerate of 16fps, which seems unusually slow for a film shot in 1929. I can easily imagine 20fps working better.

Finally, the piano accompaniment for this Bonn screening/streaming was by Elaine Brennan. A rich, attentive score, engaging and sympathetic, perfect for the film. As ever, an excellent presentation from Bonn of a film that deserves to be better known.

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2025, day 7)

On Day 7 of Bonn, we are once more treated to a full feature film presentation. For today, we are off to Denmark with that nation’s most popular comic duo of the silent era…

Krudt med Knald (1931; Den.; Lau Lauritzen Sr). Long and Short (Carl Schenstrøm and Harald Madsen) live in a boarding house, flirting with their young neighbours – a nimble duo of roller-skating dancers (Marguerite Viby, Nina Kalckar) – and making friends with their older neighbour, the Inventor (Jørgen Lund). The latter has invented a proto-televisual system, which is highly prized by a sinister trio of men representing “United Electric”. The trio move into the pension, aiming to steal the Inventor’s drawings and also the girls upstairs. After inadvertently foiling one attempt to steal the drawings, Long and Short are hired as drivers by the trio. Thinking this will get them out the way, the trio take the girls for a drive – but are once more stopped in their plans of seduction by Long and Short. Meanwhile, the Inventor signs a deal to gain half the profits from his invention from United Electric. But the trio from the company want to steal them from their boss to gain all the profits themselves. The trio enlist Long and Short to help them break into the office and the safe where the plans are, and arrange that the duo get arrested in their place. But the duo escape and save the day, catching the trio and saving the Inventor. ENDE

I’ll be honest: I feared that I wouldn’t get on with this film. I have been aware of the Danish comic duo Fyrtårnet and Bivognen for some years. Many of their films, including today’s, have been long available for free via the DFI silent film portal. But without subtitles or music, this little thread of silent film history has never enticed me to battle through. (On this same theme, I have had a deluxe Film Archiv Austria DVD edition of the films of early Austrian slapstick duo Cocl and Seff on my shelf for years. Somehow, I’ve never quite been in the mood to unwrap and investigate.) Yet this is precisely the kind of hesitancy I should overcome. After all, Danish silent cinema is a much more complex and multifaceted body of work than as represented by the canonical films of Benjamin Christiansen and Carl-Th. Dreyer, or the stardom of Asta Nielsen and Valdemar Psilander. The comic duo Fyrtårnet (Carl Schenstrøm) and Bivognen (Harald Madsen) were wildly popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and not just in Denmark. As the DFI page dedicated to their work reveals, under the names “Pat and Patachon” they were also big stars in Germany. Indeed, even the English version of the DFI pages on the duo stick with the Germanified “Pat and Patachon” as their non-Danish character names. “Long and Short” seem to be the English equivalent, and I only know this thanks to the English subtitles available on this presentation from Bonn.

All of which is to say that I was utterly unprepared for how much I enjoyed Krudt med Knald. I was also unprepared for the rhythm of the film, and how this heightened the pleasure of watching it. Though Long and Short (to reinstate their English aliases) are slapstick performers, the timing and execution of their gags do not attempt the speed or sheer breathtaking cleverness of Keaton, Lloyd, or Chaplin. They are a shambling, mostly slow-moving pair. One can follow their thought patterns more readily, watch their logic slowly unfold with everyday velocity. The opening scene is about neither character wanting to get up before the other: the Keaton-esque pulley system to tip one another out of bed is not especially sophisticated. (As compared to Keaton’s house in The Scarecrow (1920), for example.) But it’s character that seems to drive the gags, not the gags that define the character. It’s the mutual stubbornness, and the ultimately comradely and good-natured conclusion of the scene, that comes across – and brings the laughs.

The world they inhabit is also exceedingly well observed. The lengthy meal scene at their boarding house, overseen by the large landlady, is filled with brilliant touches. While the gags about increasingly large/tall/long-limbed neighbours at the table is good, if not necessarily sophisticated, the real laughs come from the manners and mores of the setting. The film cuts from the duo’s resigned efforts to make the most of their miserly portions to wall-mounted slogans about the health benefits of privation: “Keep sound: Don’t eat too much.” “To eat one’s fill is to eat too much.” “The less you eat, the better you feel.” The efforts of Long and Short to fit in (literally and metaphorically) to the pretensions of their petit-bourgeois hostess is marvellous.

Later, there is another rather shambling sequence involving a sleepwalking Short, who walks along the rooftop of the boarding house and frightens the inhabitants. A rooftop sleepwalking sequence is hardly novel (especially for 1931), and it doesn’t pretend to offer the suspense or drama of the stunt work of a Keaton or Lloyd. But what it does instead is take the opportunity to poke fun at the landlady and her friends, who are busy having a séance. When the landlady sees the silhouette of Short, wrapped in his bedsheet, she screams: “It was Napoleon!” It’s a brilliant gag, in which the landlady’s fear also boasts of her pretension at having summoned a mighty name of history to her boarding house séance. The payoff, too, is surprising. For Short’s friends all rally round him and they form a little community, gathered round the Inventor in mutual support.

Time and again, I was surprised by how plot lines or details of character developed in unexpected directions. For example, the Inventor is portrayed initially as a comic figure, inspired by drink. “At the bottom: that’s where the good ideas are!”, the Inventor explains to Long and Short, motioning to his bottle of liqueur. “I’ve never found anything up there”, he adds, pointing to the top of the bottle. It’s a marvellous line. (And the kind of joke about drink and human foibles that still inflects Danish cinema today.) But it also marks the old man as vulnerable and human, facets which foster his friendship with Long and Short, and with the two performing girls.

Regarding the latter, I was also very touched at how Long and Short treat them with almost chaste respect. There is no romance as such, just a kind of comradely innocence and mutual respect. The pleasure of their relationship is not so much the prospect of romantic love as of protective friendship. We first meet the girls on the rooftop of the boarding house, where they are trying out their new “number” on roller-skates. It’s an entirely unnecessary sequence, as far as narrative is concerned, but it’s utterly, utterly delightful. Filmed on an actual rooftop overlooking the city (Copenhagen, one assumes – but I’ll gladly be corrected), there is a real sense of freedom and space – but a freedom and space that are also limited. It’s a moment of joy, demarcated in this small, somewhat precarious space, but set against the bright, open sky and the huge sweep of the cityscape. It’s more than charming or silly, it’s really rather beautiful.

Indeed, there are many moments like this, when the use of location is more than merely incidental but striking and beautiful. The yard where Long and Short are employed to move barrels has some amazing piles of materiel, used to striking effect in some compositions (as when the dup appear right on top of a mountain of barrels) – and for an extended and wonderful sequence involving hiding from the police among the barrels. Here again, it’s not so much the speed of the chase as the sheer extension of the gag: Long and Short popping up and down at random places amid the barrels, while an ever-increasing number of policemen crawl into the maze.

Later, there are also some gorgeous glimpses of the summer landscape. There is a shot of the duo driving through a wheat field in which we see only their heads and shoulders moving through the crop. The sky is bright, the wheat is swaying in the breeze. It’s a surreal sight, wonderfully shot and composed. But there is also great beauty in the way the scene shows us the sweep of countryside. The scene lingers just long enough for the sway of the crop and the treetops to become a subject of contemplation. Even in the middle of a chase sequence, the film is paced and short such as to have an interest that is more than merely narrative.

Krudt med Knald is also weirdly moving. I’ve tried to explain above how the rhythm of the film allows for an accrued sense of emotional engagement – at least with this viewer. So when we see the Inventor, the duo, and the girls join forces and make friends in the boarding house – not just sticking together but living together in one toom – I was genuinely glad that these people – poor, struggling, disappointed, but hopeful – came together. Whenever there is misfortune to any of them, they come together to commiserate or reassure. When Long and Short finally earn some money, the first thing they do is buy food and drink to share with their friends.

That the film successfully mobilizes a sense of emotional connection is really felt near the end. When, near the end, Long and Short have been supposedly caught in the act of stealing the Inventor’s plans to give to the criminal trio, all their friends are present to witness their arrest by the police. The moment when the girls and the Inventor believe that the duo have betrayed them packs far more emotional punch than I expected. It’s not the outrage at false accusation that stings so much as the hurt of betrayal by those they believed were their friends. It’s very subtly played. (One can imagine a Hollywood production laying it on more thickly.) And it’s the subtleness that gives it an emotional reality, an emotional edge. So it’s all the more effective when we see the group all together in the final scene, where a dinner has been arranged to celebrate the Inventor’s success with United Electric. “This is one of the happiest days of my life!”, the Inventor says. “And I am fill of the deepest gratitude… especially towards my two friends…” – and here his hand falls for a moment on Long’s shoulder. His words, and the performances here, make this moment surprisingly touching. Isn’t it nice to feel happy for such characters? It isn’t the neatness of the narrative resolution, it’s the cumulative sense of comradery build up between character, and between them and us, that makes the end effective.

I should also mention that the film’s title Krudt med Knald seems literally to translate as “Gunpowder with a bang”, but is translated in this presentation as “Long and Short invent Gunpowder”. Original and given titles are both somewhat misleading, but this seems to me rather typical of the film’s approach. One subplot is indeed about Short trying to concoct his own brand of gunpowder. He is inspired by the Inventor’s reliance on alcohol to fuel his inventiveness, so starts guzzling bottles to receive inspiration. It’s a silly plotline, one that interacts only tangentially with the main storyline of the Inventor and his drawings. But it is the source of some good gags, especially the postscript to the final dinner scene. Here, Short is ready to show off his own invention to the assembled cast. As he prepares his experiment, the film cuts back and forth from Short’s preparations (the danger of which looks increasingly alarming) to the guests leaving, one-by-one. The time this gag takes to unfold is typical of the film’s rhythm: it’s quite slow, but the sheer elaboration of the single gag attains its own humour. The pay-off is exactly as one would expect: there is a huge explosion, with Long and Short emerging, smoke-blackened and in tatters, from the wreckage of the room. But the pleasure is not in being surprised, so much as in seeing the inevitable conclusion of this plotline, so long prepared and so inevitable that the sheer pointlessness of it – and its stubborn and unnecessary pursuit – is itself the source of humour. By this point, I had already been totally won over by the film. The cumulative silliness had me chuckling throughout Short’s demonstration. And the final shot, of both characters looking directly at the camera, is both funny and touching. Their look is not one of pleading or bafflement or attention-seeking, but a pleasing moment of engagement from character to spectator. And the way Long strokes away the ash from Short’s head – an act of cleanliness, yes, but more a gesture of care and affection – sums up the curious emotional tenor of the film. It’s deadline and funny and moving all at once. A lovely way to end.

The presentation of Krudt med Knald via the DFI portal is with replacement (i.e. modern, digital) intertitles in Danish. There is neither music for subtitle options, so while looking great the video is useful only to the more devotedly interested. As presented here at Bonn, the film has new digital German titles (a sensible option, given that no original aesthetic is being lost) and optional English subtitles. There is also a pleasing musical accompaniment for electric guitar and piano by Tobias Stutz and Felix Ohlert. Like the film, the music has an amiable, rambling quality that suits what I might call the gentleness of the film. While I am curious about the kind of musical accompaniment available in 1931, it was nice to see the film with music that didn’t overstate itself. It’s a curiously subtle film, one that might easily be overpowered by too strident a score.

So, overall, a very pleasant experience. I’m so glad that I’ve finally seen something with Fyrtårnet and Bivognen, as they have been on my horizon for years. While their films have been available via the DFI, this is the first time I’ve had the chance to see one presented in such a way that I gladly seized the chance to sit down and watch it. (As a foot note to the pertinence of programming this film, it was a pleasure to see the Danish director Holger-Madsen playing the small role of the detective. Given that we saw one of his films on Day 4 of Bonn this year, and that I have recently been trying to track down a copy of one of his German films of late, it was rather nice to see the man himself, alive and well and very much not lost from history.)

In sum, Krudt med Knald was a delightful surprise. But that’s rather what I’ve come to expect from the programme at Bonn.

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2025, days 5 and 6)

Day 5: Buddenbrooks (1923; Ger.; Gerhard Lamprecht). I was very excited when I saw this on Bonn’s line-up. A new restoration of an unknown Gerhard Lamprecht film? Yes please! A silent adaptation of a Thomas Mann novel? Yes please! Lavish sets and settings? Yes please! Are you a resident of Germany, Austria, or Switzerland? Y—! Oh… no. Well, no film for me today. No Lamprecht, no Mann, no lavish sets, nor even the comfort of living in an appropriately central European country.

To be fair, I knew this was coming, having seen the dreaded asterisk on the programme that denoted access to the online version was limited by copyright according to region. As the festival’s co-curator Oliver Hanley said to me after the festival last year, there are sometimes occasions when compromises must be made. This is an exciting new restoration of an important work by a major director, so it’s clearly worthwhile being programmed, whatever limitations there are for streaming it. I don’t resent the good folk of Bonn being able to see this film in situ at the price of we folk from afar not being about to see this film online. One really can’t complain: this online version of the festival is still, miraculously, free, and there are plenty of other films on offer. At least I am now aware of the existence of the restoration of Buddenbrooks. Hopefully it will do the rounds, so to speak, and appear somewhere where I can attend or view online. So, on the fifth day I rested.

Day 6: Shakhmatnaya goryachka (1925; USSR; Vsevolod Pudovkin/Nikolai Shpikovsky). Today’s short film takes us to Russia, and to a delightful directorial debut. Pudovkin’s first film is a comic skit about the titular “chess fever” that grips the Hero and distracts him from his impending marriage with the Heroine, only for her to end up in the arms of chess champion Capablanca and be won over to the game – and back to the Hero.

I’ve seen this film before, but so long ago that I felt like I was discovering it for the first time today. I’d forgotten how packed with marvellous gags it is, taking advantage of every kind of space and movement. Though Pudovkin is famous for his later propaganda films, and especially for his dramatic use of montage, Chess Fever shows his playfulness and skill exercising numerous cinematic techniques for comedy. See how the shot/reverse-shot of the feet underneath the chess table creates the impression of two players, only for a wider shot to reveal a single player with mismatched socks swapping sides to play against himself. Or the brilliant use of reverse-motion when the Hero is irresistibly drawn backwards down the pavement into the chess shop. Then there is a deliciously Keaton-esque snowballing of gags when the Hero has his books of chess problems thrown out of the window. An officer arrests a man for stealing a ride on a bus, but is distracted by the unexpected arrival of the chess problem from above. We have already seen other people being pleased to find these papers rain down on them, but here the gag is developed. The film cuts from the distracted officer and the man he’s supposed to be arresting to a shot of another bus. We see another bus passing by, and one, two, three, four, five men clung to the side. This looks like the climax to the gag, but the film delivers one final, knock-out gag: behind the bus is an entire line of punters who have affixed a rope to the bus and are sliding along behind it.

The titular “chess fever” of the film is everywhere. Not only does everyone reveal themselves to be a fanatic, but the feverishness becomes embedded in the patterns on screen. The chess board’s chequer pattern is everywhere about the Hero’s person: his sock, hat, scarf, handkerchief. And this pattern is everywhere around him, too, from the floor tiles that the Hero finds himself moving across like a chess piece, to the series of ever-tinier chequered items of merchandise and apparel that the Hero jettisons in the river. The tiniest board is kept for last, however, when – having thought he had lost all his chess sets and now cannot play with his converted bride – he remembers his emergency set kept in a pouch around his neck. He withdraws this absurdly small board, and the lovers play micro-chess before passionately embracing.

As a side note, I also enjoyed the cameo from the real chess champion José Raúl Capablanca. As it happens, I’m reading Sergei Prokofiev’s diaries at the moment. Prokofiev was a chess fanatic and befriended Capablanca in his teens in St Peterburg, before the Revolution. In fact, Prokofiev actually played and beat this future world champion in 1914 during a chess championship. For this reason, it was delightful to see the opening close-up of Capablanca, looking a little playful, a little awkward, a little amused. (Rather appropriately, my writing of this paragraph was interrupted by the postman, who has just delivered my latest Prokofiev purchase: the sadly out-of-print 1960 recording of Semyon Kotko, which is, I’ll have you know, ladies and gentlemen, the only uncut recording of this opera currently on the market.)

The music for this presentation was by Sabrina Zimmermann and Mark Pogolski on piano and violin. This was tremendous fun. Full of life, wit, melody, irony, and energy. I loved the citations of La Forza del destino when the Hero finally arrives, late, to his fiancée’s side – and later when the Heroine goes to buy poison to end her own life. The operatic behaviour of the characters is itself a kind of parody of the fatalistic Russianness of pre-Soviet cinema à la Evgenii Bauer et al., and the music lives up to the bathos. Throughout, the score kept pace with the film’s sudden shifts in gear, changes of tone, and slights of hand. Though only 25 minutes long, the film demands dozens of swift manoeuvres from any accompanist. Zimmermann and Pogolski produced a little gem of a performance, fully worthy of the film. This soundtrack was recorded live, and I enjoyed hearing the murmur of distant laughter. It wasn’t so loud as to be distracting, but just enough to make me feel I was sharing part of the performance.

What else to say? This is a brilliant film, presented here with a perfect musical accompaniment. Whatever disappointment I had over missing Buddenbrooks was swiftly forgotten in the pleasure of seeing Shakhmatnaya goryachka in such a great performance. Bravo!

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2025, day 4)

After yesterday’s exploration of vagrancy and destitution, today we return to the world of the bourgeoisie and to the genre of light comedy. This film was just as much an unknown to me as yesterday’s, and just as welcome a treat…

Was ist los mit Nanette? (1929; Ger.; Holger-Madsen). Otti (Ruth Weyher) is married to the night editor of a newspaper, Richard Curtius (Georg Alexander). Unbeknownst to Richard, Otti has saved him from bankruptcy by living a double life. By day she is a dutiful housewife, but at night she works as “Nanette”, a successful vaudeville dancer. Richard still believes the money came from the will of Otti’s late aunt Finchen, from Batavia. However, things get complex when Aunt Finchen (Margarete Kupfer) turns up on their doorstep. Otti pretends Richard is deeply unwell, so hides her aunt in the attic, along with her pet monkey and a huge amount of luggage. Richard’s rich friend Toto (Harri Hardt), who has a crush on “Nanette”, also comes to stay. Inevitably, events soon spiral out of control. After various farcical chases and confusions, Richard realizes that his wife has been lying to him. Accusing Otti of disloyalty, he decides to pursue other women. First among them is “Nanette”, whom he invites to a night out at the Trocadero club. There, the truth emerges. Richard learns of Otti’s double life and her sacrifice for the sake of their marriage. After recognizing that they still love each other, the couple reconcile. ENDE.

This was the only film produced by Ruth Weyher-Film, the company founded by the star. (She would quit acting at the start of the sound era.) I have seen and liked Weyher in a few productions from earlier in her career, but she is more striking here in this lead role, which drives the whole film. It is very interesting to think of Was ist los mit Nanette? as the work of a female producer and star, since its central concern is with a woman’s agency in the face of male expectations. Otti is introduced very deliberately as “Frau Dr. Curtius”, which is formally correct, but markedly eliminates her given name altogether. By contrast, her friend is introduced as “Anita Morell” (Maria Mindszenty), a woman “widowed young” and “halfway to being remarried”. It is as if the shedding of the dead husband has already given her back her name, and the possibility of agency. We might wonder if being “halfway” to marriage is rather more satisfying than being married. Weyher herself gives a delightful performance. Yes, it’s a chance for her to show off before the camera. She gets to dance on stage, run around, and don disguise. But she always bristles with intelligence and wit, her eyes flashing with playful cunning. The film also gives her plenty of close-ups in which something deeper is revealed, glimpses of emotion (doubt, frustration, longing) that lie beneath the play.

As her husband Richard, Georg Alexander is perfect. I think I’ve seen him in more sound films of the 1930s, so I am rather familiar with his distinctive voice, but here on the silent screen he makes the perfect foil for Otti. Everything about him is fussy, particular – a little vulnerable, a little defensive, a little rigid. His married life quickly unravels, and we realize how limited is his conception of a romantic union. From being a loving husband, he reveals the smallness of his mindset. He soon draws on cliched images of a “painted and deceitful” woman to describe Otti. “They used to burn people like you!” he cries at one point. Otti replies that she won’t forget that insult, and neither will we. It’s an absurd thing to say, but it is said in earnest and in spite. But since this film is, ultimately, a comedy, Richard gets his chance to learn. When he hears Otti’s true history of sacrifice – and a sacrifice for love of him – we see him realize his mistake. Alexander’s performance has enough reality to it (enough seriousness) that we might just have hope for his future with Otti.

Around these two leads are a number of interesting supporting performance. The most significant is Margarete Kupfer as Aunt Finchen. I thought this was a marvellous creation. Her hypochondria makes for some delightful use of costumes and props. Obsessed with her own glands, she travels with a monkey and an enormous spray-pump to ward off germs. The latter she uses as a splendidly phallic weapon to chase Richard around his own home. The former animal is the source of slapstick, but also of some great lines of dialogue. (“My glandular baboon! Preserver of my youth!” Finchen blubs at one point.) But this comedy also enables something more interesting. It is noteworthy how much of the physical slapstick in the film is driven by the women (the wife, the best friend, the aunt, the maid), who give out as much as they take. Echoing Otti’s use of disguise, the aunt also finds the liberation of being in costume. With the aid of Otti’s theatrical manager, Finchen undergoes a beauty treatment, emerging from her frumpy outfit and curled hair into glamorous eveningwear and tastefully modern bob cut. We have come to think of her as a purely comedic, almost buffoonish, character – but in the last act she reveals her worldly wisdom. It is she who advises Richard to feign illness, take to his bed, and earn Otti’s sympathy. He duly does, and the trick reunites husband and wife. Not so daft and dowdy, after all, these aunts.

I have so far talked about the film’s performers and themes, but more broadly I must praise how nice Was ist los mit Nanette? looks, and how well the action is directed. The sets – the house, the office, the theatre, the nightclub – are great, richly detailed and beautifully dressed. Amid all this, Holger-Madsen provides lots of nice touches, such as the striking high-angle shot of the characters looking up through the ceiling light when they hear the noise from upstairs. The shot emphasizes the shock, momentarily turning this into a moment of suspense. The characters are taken by surprise with a sound, and the film transforms this into a moment of surprise for us through visual means. More imaginative camerawork is involved in a rather brilliant dream sequence in which the drunk and depressed Otti dreams of being judged and condemned by Richard in a court of law. Superimposed over Otti writhing in her sleep, this courtroom scene is a little comic gem of editing and choreography. (Compared to yesterday’s dream sequence in Der Vagabund, also involving a character dreaming of being tried and condemned, the equivalent in Was ist los mit Nanette? is much more technically sophisticated and rhythmically polished.) It also links nicely to the opening scene of Richard waking up, when he drowsily reaches for the alarm clock and we see it spinning in a kaleidoscopic multiplication of itself. Both scenes are about the vulnerability of the two characters, each experienced in scenes by themselves. It’s one of many fine touches in Was ist los mit Nanette?, which is filled with pleasing details to reveal character and emotion. The whole film is well staged, well photographed, and well edited. Though one reel of the film suffers from some bad decomposition, it is a great example of how good a film of this era can look.

Music for this presentation from Bonn was by Maud Nelissen and Mykyta Sierov. Their combination of piano and oboe is playful, sympathetic, rhythmic, and melodic – a great accompaniment to the film. Though the live presentation of the film in Bonn (so the online notes tell me) was prefaced by an introduction and rare footage from the Weyher estate, which I would have loved to have seen, Was ist los mit Nanette? by itself is a great feature with an enjoyable score.

I said at the outset that Was ist los mit Nanette? is a very different world to yesterday’s film, Der Vagabund. But Weyher’s comedy also has an edge and offers, in its own way, a subtle critique of the bourgeois world in which it is set. Socialist drama it ain’t, but it also finds a sophisticated way for us to think about what we’ve seen, and question the assumptions we might have: about gender roles, about performance and disguise, and about our expectations and assumptions of what an equal relationship might be. I very much enjoyed this film, which was a total unknown to me. A delightful surprise, beautifully presented.

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2025, day 3)

After a day of urbane, light-hearted musical comedy, Day 3 of Bonn takes us to the streets for poverty and vagabondage…

Der Vagabund (1930; Aut.; Fritz Weiß). The opening titles tell us that this is a story “taken from everyday lives”, as recounted to a journalist. The prologue begins with the sight of a vagrant’s body being found in a country ditch between Werder and Potsdam. All that’s found with him is a self-penned poem, an enigma that sets the journalist on a journey to the homeless shelter and the underworld of the unemployed and destitute. What follows is both an account of the journalist’s investigation and the stories he hears from the “vagabonds” themselves. What account of the “plot” I can give is necessarily brief: the film frames its narrative with the journalist visiting shelters and listening to personal accounts of vagrancy and homelessness. The main story becomes that of a man’s journey through Austria, where he encounters the uncaring attitude of many in society. Put like this, Der Vagabund sounds prosaic. But the structure and its cinematic realization are very striking, and the film is filled with amazing images of people and places.

From the outset, director Fritz Weiß provides some beautifully composed images of the landscape, the stillness of which is then offset by the handheld camerawork that brings us up-close to look at lived reality. Soon the camera is perched behind the journalist as he speeds into the city, where there are some amazing shots of the bustling streets that whiz past the car. Alongside the journalist, we visit the shelters and inspect the occupants. We see the vagrants strip and get inspected for lice, then shower. The faces and bodies are palpably real. (When the camera tracks past the vagrants as they eat, one of them shelters his face from the camera, as if ashamed or fearful of being seen.) There are powerful, often quick montages of details: the faces, the bodies, the clothes of the vagrants; or the watches, the coats, the hats left hanging in the shelter.  

The film begins to give us some context for these people. We meet Gregor Gog, “the vagrants’ leader”, who gets an amazing introductory close-up in which he stares at – almost through – the camera. It’s a challenging look, one that demands we pay attention; it’s also a kind of question: what are we thinking when we see the vagrants on screen? There is a series of cutaways to the unemployed, drunks, petty thieves. We see their faces, are given little vignettes of their actions and habits. There are scenes in which we see the sign language by which their “brotherhood” communicates – chalked symbols on the walls if houses where they have found, or not found, help or food. The film thus gives us a sense of community, of commonality, between these otherwise isolated, down-and-out individuals.

This leads me to think about the film’s structure, which I found very curious. The first section of Der Vagabund, discussed in my previous paragraphs, is based on articles which (within the film) is deemed “too theoretical” by the newspaper editor. Is this a kind of judgement on the style of the film we have just seen? As if in reaction, the film shifts register. The editor wants “life stories”, and that then is what we are given by the film. Though it is carefully framed via the journalist’s interview, what follows is the story of one man who wandered through Austria. We see his temporary work, his moving from place to place, his interactions with locals in a smith, a farm, and on the road. We also see a glimpse of his time with a woman, of a shelter in Austria for other vagrants. Throughout, the film intercuts between this inner narrative and the framing narrative of the journalist interviewing the vagrants. There is a pleasing tension between the real and the fictional, especially given how real even the fictionalized sequences look. This is also felt in the rhythm of the editing. While earlier sequences have some swift montage of faces and illustrative scenes, when we are on the road with the vagrant in Austria there are more long shots/takes of his travels. It’s always a pleasure to roam about in the past like this, and this film’s rambling itinerary is the perfect way to see little pockets of history that you would other never see. There are beautifully composed images that show us the sweep of mountains and valleys. Though the film always gives us a contrast between the richness of the summer meadows and the rags and dirt of the traveller.

The film’s mode is not solely naturalistic, as there is a trippy dream sequence in which the vagrant character imagines himself tried and executed by the bourgeois bullies he has encountered on the road in Austria. It’s a wonderfully strange interlude, with a bleak edge: he imagines himself being hanged in a kind of forbidding, expressionist landscape. And “naturalist” doesn’t mean this film is so austere that it lacks lyricism or poetry. As I’ve said, there are some beautiful shots – beautifully composed and photographed – throughout the film, especially in the Austrian countryside. There is also a delightful sequence of shadow puppetry, improvised by the main character on the wall of the prison cell he shares with another vagrant, who is ill and lying in bed. The setting is realistic, but it finds a way of expressing something more personal than the set-up might suggest. The scene is silly and sad and touching all at once.

Der Vagabund ends with a montage of people from all classes pouring over the journalist’s articles in the newspaper Tempo. The motage then begins to intercut these scenes of reading with the “march” of the vagrants. To these shots are superimposed a vision of Gregor Gog giving a passionate speech. It was curious to see Gog emerge as a kind of heroic leader in this final montage. Though he is a real figure, playing himself on screen, his appearance at the end of the film is much more like that of a work of Soviet propaganda. Are we to read this as a promise of reform? A threat of revenge? A call to arms? It might be all three, and it is a surprisingly punchy end to Der Vagabund. Like the bourgeois readers of Tempo on screen, the media we consume is coming to life and confronting us with reality – demanding we think, reflect, react. Though the images stand comparison with numerous scenes in Soviet fiction films of this period, it also reminded me – with its confrontational crowd marching towards the camera – of Abel Gance’s J’accuse! (1919). The realization of the imagery is not as developed and sustained in Der Vagabund as in either these French or Soviet counterparts, but perhaps that is to its advantage. In such a film, I’d rather be won over by naturalism or lyricism than lectured or beaten over the head with crude slogans or overly tooled editing.

I should add that since watching the film I looked up Gregor Gog (what a name!), and I see that he led quite the life. From a working-class background, he ended up being drafted into the German army, where he was court-martialled during the Great War for his political activities. Mixing in an anarchist-communist milieu in the 1920s, he came to lead the “Vagabond Movement” (Vagabundenbewegung) and edit their mouthpiece publication, Der Kunde, which we see in the film. After 1933, he was arrested by the Nazis, escaped, fled to Switzerland, was expelled to Russia, spent time there in a labour camp, tried to become a novelist, and ended up dying in a sanatorium in Uzbekistan. Der Vagabund thus gives us a vivid glimpse into this corner of interwar Europe and its political movements. That said, Der Vagabund is not a work of crude propaganda. It certainly has an anti-bourgeois attitude (per the film’s many negative portrayals of monocled officials, hypocritical housewives, and brutish burghers). But it is also poetic and rambling. Its very structure of a narrative within a narrative lends it a picaresque quality, a slightly ramshackle form that loosens any sense of the viewer being lectured. A couple of years ago, I watched another low-budget socialist film, Brüder (1929), which was far cruder in its messaging – and (despite much beautiful location photography) less skilled in mobilizing either its lyrical, naturalist elements or its fictional, narrative elements. Der Vagabund is altogether a more interesting and more successful film.

The music for this presentation was by Filmsirup (Matthias André and Michi Hendricks) on piano and electric guitar. I found this extremely sensitive and sympathetic to the film. The rhythm was perfectly in match with the action, though “action” is often not the right word. Much of the time, the film follows characters who are killing time, mooching or loitering with or without intent. The music finds way of matching these sections very well. The dotted rhythms follow the vagrants as they walk along, slow down, dawdle, come to a halt, and resume again. The plash of water in the shower and the shattering of glass get their own moments in the music, just as the flashes of anger or dips into resignation of the characters are felt. I imagine this might be a difficult film to accompany, but Filmsirup do a very admirable job.

In sum, I found Der Vagabund an extremely interesting and engaging experience. Realistic and poetic, inventive and provocative, it’s a fascinating film. The restoration by Film Archiv Austria, based on a Dutch copy of the film, is beautiful to look at. A rich a rewarding film, with a pleasing musical accompaniment. A rich and rewarding film, with a pleasing musical accompaniment. Just the kind of thing you hope to discover at a festival. Bravo.

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2025, day 2)

Day 2 of Bonn and already I must take a kind of detour from the programme. Today’s streamed film is Saxophon-Susi (1928; Ger.; Karel Lamač), the same restoration of which I saw via the online Pordenone festival last year. I refer readers interested in the film to that earlier post, while today my comments will primarily address the differences in presentation between the two festivals.

The first thing to note was that Bonn offered two versions of Saxophon-Susi. Aside from the version with musical accompaniment (discussed below), there was a version with Germany an audio-description version for the visually impaired. (Though another audio-description video has text and narrator credits, I couldn’t find any for this specific film.) I was curious to know if this was presented with the soundtrack beneath the descriptive text. It was not, so offers a very curious experience – at least for this non-impaired spectator. I would be very curious to know more about the audience for silent films with audio description. When I attended the online HippFest festival earlier this year, I wrote about the audio-description texts offered there. These were very elaborate, intended for live audiences as much as online spectators, and the texts described the music as well as the action. HippFest also offered brail text for the deaf to accompany screenings, though I cannot comment on the content of these. The Bonn audio description is simpler, offering a straightforward description of the action and a rendition of all the intertitles. Obviously, I am not the intended audience for these alternate presentations – but I would be very curious to know more about (or hear from) anyone who has experienced these presentations as intended.

The second thing to note was the version with musical accompaniment. My comments here require some context… Though this 2023 restoration of Saxophon-Susi has not yet been released on DVD/Blu-ray, it has already accrued at least three new scores. The first was presented in August 2024 at the “Ufa filmnächte” festival in Berlin, where it was accompanied by Frido ter Beek and The Sprockets film orchestra. (Alas, the “Ufa filmnächte” is no longer a streamed festival, so I cannot report on how this score sounded.) For the version streamed from Pordenone in October 2024, there was a piano score by Donald Sosin. As I wrote at the time, this was delightful: catchy, rhythmic, playful, and fun. That said, I regretted the fact that the titular saxophone-playing sequences in the club and on stage had no saxophone on the soundtrack. At Bonn, the musical score offered was for piano and saxophone, and was composed/performed by M-cine (Dorothee Haddenbruch and Katharina Stashik, as they are identified on the video details page). It was great to hear a saxophone as part of the musical accompaniment, since this is a film whose very plot demands this instrument by featured. But the score itself was curiously chaste, which is to say that I found it less overtly fun than Sosin’s piano score from Pordenone.

At the premiere in 1928, Saxophon-Susi was accompanied by a jazz orchestra – and the poster for the film’s release in France also includes the promise of a jazz orchestra in the cinema. The film also had a tie-in song, “Die Susi bläst das Saxophon”, composed by Rudolf Nelson. (Both Sosin and M-cine cited this song in their scores, and as I presume did that of Frido ter Deebk in August 2024.) This morning, I dug a little into some contemporary reviews to get more of a sense of the original music. It certainly seems to have been a major part of the value of the live performances. For example, Der Kinematograph (4 November 1928) cites the arranger/conductor Paul Dessau’s “musical wit” and “truly comedic touch” in his score – and live performance at the premiere. The reviewer reports “enthusiastic applause from the laughing, amused audience” at the dance sequences etc. Oh, to see the film with live music and audience…

Lacking an orchestral score in 2025, I spent the rest of this morning listening to the many recordings of “Die Susi bläst das Saxophon” made in 1928 in the wake of the film’s original release. There were various instrumental versions made, such as the peppy version by Efim Schachmeister and his orchestra. The melody was clearly an international hit, as it was exported to the British/US market via The Charleston Serenaders, who recorded a charmingly upbeat rendition outside Germany in 1928. One can also sample a version with lyrics, as sung back in Berlin by Paul O’Montis in the company of the Odeon Tanzorchester. But by far the most pleasing version is the deliciously slow, relaxed instrumental account provided by Marek Weber’s band. I absolutely adore the slow tempo, the way this gives extra space and time for the various soloists to take their turn with the melody. You get the feeling that you’re eavesdropping on a Berlin dance night in 1928. It’s a simply joyous little number in their hands.

Looking up the identities of these various musicians is itself an interesting exercise. The composer of the song, Rudolf Nelson, was a popular cabaret and theatre musician. He was also Jewish, and in 1933 was forced to flee Germany, settling in the Netherlands – where he had to live in hiding during the German occupation. This grim period of history interrupts the biographies of the recording artists of Nelson’s song, too. The Austro-Hungarian Marek Weber was a musician of the old school and purportedly disliked jazz (perhaps this explains his slow tempo in “Die Susie bläst das Saxophon”?), but nevertheless ended up recruiting some of the best jazz musicians in Germany and recording plenty of popular tunes. As a Jew, he saw which way the political tide was turning and left Germany in 1932, ultimately settling in the US. Efim Schachmeister was born in Kiev to Jewish-Romanian parents but made his name in Berlin in the 1920s. He fled the Nazis and eventually ended up in Argentina. Paul O’Montis was Hungarian by birth and made his name on the Berlin cabaret scene. Openly gay, he was forced to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power. Sadly, he was one of many who didn’t flee far enough. After finding refuge in Vienna, after the Anschluss of 1938 he relocated to Prague – but was arrested there in 1939 and, after various relocations, ended up being killed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1940. Such stories are common when researching artists of this period, but somehow the combination of such light-hearted numbers as “Die Susie bläst das Saxophon” in the context of their makers’ lives is especially sobering.

One upshot of this rather divergent morning is my desire to hear a jazz band score for Saxophon-Susi, something in the vein of Marek Weber’s recording of the theme song. If the film gets released on home media, it rather depends on how much effort (i.e. money) someone wants to put into it. What so often happens is that special scores are composed for live show(s), then no money is made available for that score to appear on home media with the film. There are many examples of expensive film restorations released with the cheapest musical option on DVD/Blu-ray. I do hope that Saxophon-Susi gets the score it deserves.

Paul Cuff