Day 3 of Pordenone takes us to Italy, then to Germany (via Vienna and London) for a programme of immense delight. Cue laughs, pratfalls, wild dancing, and a great deal of delight…
To begin, we have the short film Per la morale (1911; It.; unknown). A moral crusade against illicit images and writing is announced in the papers, and a wealthy man seeks to join the “fight”. At another person’s home, he starts daubing black paint over the exposed flesh on paintings; in the park, he tries to cover a woman who is breastfeeding her infant, then puts his coat over a naked statue. When he tries lowering a skirt over a woman’s ankles, he is confronted, taken to court, and sent to prison for offending public morals. In a delightful coda, the Roman-style film company logo – an image of Romulus and Remus being breastfed by a wolf – is itself subject to his censorship. END.
So to our main feature: Saxophon-Susi (1928; Ger.; Karel Lamač). In Vienna, Anni von Aspen (Anny Ondra) is captivated by the career of her best friend, the aspiring dancer Susi Hiller (Mary Parker). However, her father the Baron von Aspen (Gaston Jacquet) and mother (Olga Limburg) do not approve, despite the Baron’s secret interest in chorus girls. After Anni is caught at the theatre by the Baron, she is sent away to a strict boarding school in England. At the same time, the Baron is gently blackmailed into financing Susi to go to the Tiller dance school in London. On board the ship to England, Susi and Anni encounter three rich Englishmen: Lord Herbert Southcliffe (Malcolm Tod), Harry Holt (Hans Albers), and Houston Black (Carl Walther Meyer). After discovering that one of the girls is a dancer, they place a bet on which girl it is. To impress the lord, Anni lies and says she is Susi. When the ship reaches England, Anni convinces Susi to continue their identity swap. So Susi (as Anni) goes to boarding school, while Anni (as Susi) goes to dance school. The Tiller dance school is run by Mrs Strong (Mira Doré), who asks to see how “Susi” dances in Vienna. Seeing the comically bizarre improvisation that Anni concocts, Mrs Strong sends her back to the remedial class. Meanwhile, the three men place another bet that Lord Herbert cannot sneak into the dance school to see “Susi” and then bring her to their Eccentrics Club. He does, but after “Susi” impresses with her jazzy dance routine, she overhears the men discussing the bet. Assuming Lord Herbert is interested only in showing her off to win money, she leaves him. Back at the dance school, her involvement with Lord Herbert has breached the rules and she is expelled. Just as she is saying goodbye, however, she is spotted by a producer-musician (Oreste Bilancia) who wants her to lead his review in Vienna. Back in Vienna, Lord Herbert decides to ask Susi’s parents for their daughter’s hand in marriage. Ignorant of the fact that the woman Lord Herbert has fallen for is in fact Anni, Susi’s poor mother (Margarete Kupfer) is overjoyed to accept. When “Saxophone Susi” arrives in Vienna, Frau Hiller and Lord Herbert go to see the show – where Frau Hiller does not recognize her daughter on stage. After the show, the Baron von Aspen is shocked to encounter his daughter Anni back in Vienna with a troupe of other girls. Anni lies and says that the dancers are her schoolfriends on an educational trip abroad. They all go back to the von Aspen home, where Lord Herbert also finally tracks down the real “Susi”. When “Saxophone Susi” is played on the gramophone, the girls cannot disguise their dance training and burst into a spontaneous performance. Anni’s deception is revealed, but Lord Herbert’s proposal is finally accepted, and the von Aspens are all in accord. The lovers marry, much to the confusion and consternation of Harry and Houston, who are left arguing over who has won the bet. ENDE.
What a delightful film! First and foremost, Anny Ondra is superb. She is beautiful to look at, and the camera gives her some incredibly striking close-ups. But what entirely wins you over is just how funny she is as a performer. After showing her skills at the farcical hide-and-seek from her father on stage in the opening act, we are given two standout dance sequences later in the film. The first is when she arrives at the Tiller school and must improvise an entire routine from the Viennese stage. We see her concoct a fabulously bizarre range of moves: wobbling like a ragdoll, leaping backwards and forwards, scuttling sideways like a crab, stalking like a hieroglyph, flailing madly, performing gymnastic star jumps, jiving like crazy, falling over backwards, then scuffing along the ground on her backside, before dizzily stumbling to a halt. Her dancing costume (baggy shorts and short-sleeved top with a little bow), combined with her messy hair, makes her look oddly childlike. (So too the bare dance hall, with nothing to measure her scale in the room.) But there is also something cheekily adult about her gestures and posing: she’s showing off her legs, her body, her backside. Then in the dance at the Eccentrics Club, Ondry gets to show us something no less charming or silly but far more impressive as a dance. When the club dance expert starts pulling sensationally complex and graceful moves, Ondry starts to copy him. She fails at first, but soon they fall into rhythm together: she the mirror of him. She’s never quite as skilful, but the sequence is such a delight it doesn’t matter. Her timing is brilliant, even if it’s the timing of a comic more than that of a dancers. She makes the whole thing look so fun, it’s just a pleasure to watch. When she follows the dancer up the stairs, doing a kind of stop-motion walk-cum-dance, it’s both ludicrous and brilliant. The sequence then develops into a communal dance number, with the jazz band and crowd of club members (all impeccably suited anyway) becoming an impromptu troupe: Ondry is held aloft, then walks over everyone’s heads on seat covers held up for her triumphant march and descent back to earth. Ondry is clearly having great fun on set, and it’s great fun to watch. These scenes had me grinning from ear to ear. Great stuff!
The rest of the cast is never less than good, though Malcolm Tod is a bid of a nonentity. His role is entirely superficial anyway, but for this reason it would have benefitted from someone with a bit more personality, more presence, on screen. Hans Albers, in 1928 not yet a major star, is wasted as one of the other rich Englishmen. Perhaps it’s because his face is so well known to me, but I felt much more drawn to him than to Tod. Albers is more than merely handsome: he has a kind of physical presence that Tod palpably lacks. Among the rest, Gaston Jacquet stood out as the most communicative: his twinkly sophistication is straight out of a Lubitsch film. (Though Lubitsch might have cast Adolphe Menjou for this role.) As the two girls’ mothers, Olga Limburg and Margarete Kupfer make the most out of their minor roles – they are, in their own way, even in their few minutes on screen, perfectly formed characters. Lord Herbert’s comic servant-cum-go-between (Theodor Pistek) also has some nice moments, as does the wary porter at the dance school (Julius von Szöreghy) – their best scene being their first together, as the servant pretends to be a hairdresser to gain entrance to the school. Finally, as Mrs Strong, Mira Doré gives a faintly sinister, faintly predatory performance as the dance teacher. At least one scene with “Susi” suggests that her interest in her charges is not without a sense of eroticism. (After all, her first scene in the film relays her ceaseless efforts to keep men away from her girls.) I suspect this character, as with many others in the film, might have been made more of by another director, or else via a different kind of script.
Having said that, the tone of the film is nevertheless gleefully irreverent. Nothing and no-one are taken too seriously, the film never tries to condemn anyone for their actions, and it is more than willing to show a little flesh, have a laugh, and raise a glass or two of champagne. Bodies are things of pleasure, to move and dance, to flirt and display, just as expectations are there to upturn for the sake of pleasure and for the pursuit happiness. Moral outrage is only ever comic and only ever lasts a moment, before common sense and acceptance win the day. There is also something pleasingly cosmopolitan about it all. The cast and crew are a mixture of nationalities: Czech, German, French, British, Austrian, Italian, Hungarian. I could lipread some of the cast speaking English, though I dare say a whole host of tongues was used across the production. The dual-language intertitles (French and German) enhanced this sensibility, and it was also interesting to compare the phrasing across these languages, as well as with the English subtitles. Having three languages on the screen made me feel like I was in some way joining in with the continental sophistication of it all. And though the film begins and ends in Vienna, it also shows off the streets of 1920s London in some fabulous exteriors – especially at night, with the streets lit up by illuminated billboards.
(As a side note, I should also point out that Saxophon-Susi survives only through various exports prints, from which this 2023 restoration was reconstructed. About 700m of the film’s original 2746m survive. Many of the characters’ names are different from the listings of the original German version.)
I must also mention the piano score by Donald Sosin, which was delightful: catchy, rhythmic, playful, and fun. Though Sosin’s music was a perfect accompaniment, I must confess that I regretted not having some more instruments – especially for the titular saxophone-playing sequences in the club and on stage. On this note, this restoration of Saxophon-Susi was shown in August this year at the “Ufa filmnächte” festival in Berlin, where it was accompanied by Frido ter Beek and The Sprockets film orchestra. I confess that I was all set to watch this screening via its free streaming service, only to discover that the festival no longer had a free streaming service! The “Ufa filmnächte” is one of the festivals that offered this service during and after the pandemic, but that has since withdrawn it. A shame, as I would love to have heard Saxophon-Susi with some actual saxophones. (At the premiere in 1928, it was accompanied by a jazz orchestra.)
So that was Day 3. I commend the programmers for pairing Per la morale with Saxophon-Susi. Both films are uninterested in moral proscriptions or resolutions, and are pleased to acknowledge but not to condemn a little human appetite. (In contrast, I’m thinking back to the censorious Santa of Day 2.) If neither film has any great depth, they have plenty of charm and wit. Saxophon-Susi was an absolute delight to watch, and – having missed the Berlin screening – I’m particularly glad that Pordenone screened (i.e. streamed) it. A joyful little film with a joyful performance by Anna Ondry. A real treat.
Day 2 of Pordenone takes us to Uzbekistan for serial-style adventure, then to Mexico for bursting-at-the-seams melodrama. These films were totally unknown to me, and exactly the type of thing you would hope to encounter at a festival…
So, Ajal Minorasi/Minaret Smerty (1925; USSR/Uzbek SSR; Viacheslav Viskovskii). “The Minaret of Death” is a great title. Based, the credits promise me, on an ancient legend of Bukhara from the sixteenth century. Jemal (Nadia Vendelin) from the Khanate of Khiva and her Arab sister Selekha (Valentina Baranova) are travelling from Bukhara to Khiva, sent by Jemal’s uncle Khalmurad. En route, the caravan is attacked by Kur-Bashi, “Ataman of the thieves” (H. Abduzhalilov). The two women are captured, where they encounter Gyul-Sariq (Olga Spirova), who is herself in love with Kur-Bashi – and jealous of his attempts to woo the women. Gyul-Sariq offers to help the women escape, which they do – swapping their horses for camels to cross the desert. Meanwhile, Kur-Bashi is warned against Gyul-Sariq’s involvement in the escape and orders her death. In the desert, the knight Sadiq (Oleg Frelikh) is watching the road to Khiva, where he encounters the exhausted Jamal and Selekha. In Khiva, Jamal gives Sadiq her necklace as a token of thanks. Months later, the Emir of Bukhara (A. Bogdanovsky) arrives with his son Shahrukh-bek (Iona Talanov) to celebrate a raid against Khiva. Among his captured prisoners are Jamal and Selekha. A contest is held to determine the winner of the prisoners. Sadiq is among the horsemen who compete, and he wins Jamal. But Shahrukh-bek fights Sadiq and recaptures Jamal to be “the queen of my harem”. Selekha manages to get hold of a knife and tries to enlist the help of Sadiq. A Persian love potion is prepared to make Jamal submit, but Selekha goes to the Emir and tells him that Sadiq’s prize woman has been stolen by his son. Shahrukh-bek kills his father and blames Jamal. But the reign of the new emir is unpopular, and Sadiq rallies the local men to rally against Shahrukh-bek. His army attacks Shahrukh-bek’s fort, but it is too strong. Sadiq tries to negotiate, demanding all the prisoners be let free. But Shahrukh-bek sends his enemies to be hurled off a minaret. Happily, the women save the day, rebelling against Shahrukh-bek’s guards – and Sadiq is able to rescue Jamal on the precipice, from which Shahrukh-bek is hurled. END.
What a delightful oddity this film is. It feels like a multi-hour serial condensed into the space of a single episode. Months suddenly disappear in-between scenes. Characters are kidnapped, rescued, kidnapped, rescued, and imprisoned once more. Emirs come and go, armies assemble then vanish. There are traditional dances, harems, sudden accumulations of crowds, glimpses of deserts giving way to rivers and fields, strange buildings, swords brandished, cavalry charges. In the way of many serials, the whole thing veers from stodgy inertia to breathless action. Schemes are enacted before they’ve been properly elaborated, while deaths and betrayal suddenly switch the narrative to new directions.
Redolent of numerous (western-produced) serials set in the east, Ajal Minorasi has the great benefit of being shot on location in Uzbekistan. The towns, landscapes, and people look pleasingly unpolished. Everything has a dusty, sun-bleached reality that contrasts with the highly contrived drama playing out on screen. The film has a charming feeling of being scripted on the hoof and shot on the fly. There are marvellous glimpses of real faces and lives amid the hoopla of villainy and heroism, and though none of the lead performers have characters with any depth the two female leads have real presence on screen. The experience of watching this film was at once exciting, confusing, and confounding. I’m not sure when I would want to sit through it again, but I’m glad that I have.
The second part of Day 2’s programme beings with Abismos (1931; Mx.; Salvador Pruneda), one of Mexico’s first films with synchronized soundtrack – but the latter appears not to survive. The fragment presented here has a piano accompaniment by José María Serralde Ruiz. As such, it is a curiosity: a sound film rendered silent by the exigencies of time, transformed into a new viewing experience in a silent festival. A woman approaches a prostrate figure on a bed. We see a bottle in his pocket. He is drunk. She tries to raise him. Another scene, at breakfast. (Already, we take it that the woman is the mother, the inert boy her son, and here at table an older daughter and the father.) A conversation unfolds, in silence, an awkward confrontation with the son. Another scene, an interior confrontation with a lawyer(?), then a cutaway to paperboys on the street. Something has happened, and the police come to confront the drunken youth. Now the son is behind bars. Flashbacks, fire, drink, guilt – and more conversations unheard. It ends.
Next, a fragmentary short: Como por un tubo o el boleto de lotería (1919; Cl.; unknown). A charmingly ramshackle, mischievous title sequence. The stars awkwardly superimposed behind a production logo, and another man – half-buried in straw – holds up a cardboard sign to credit the production company. On the streets, our main character is knocked out by a villain, who steals a baby and substitutes the unconscious man in its place. There are little groups of onlookers: are they extras or just curious bystanders? Glimpses of the sea, of streets, of the past. A series of peculiar incidents: a political speech, delivered for real then mocked by the comic; a brawl, a blackeye, a bit with a dog. The end.
Finally, our last feature of the day: Santa (1918; Mx.; Luis G. Peredo). The opening title announces the “first part of the triptych: PURITY” with “symbolic installations by Norka Rouskaya”. Wow. Symbolic installations? (“Actitudes simbólicas”) Yes please. Hit me! The film begins, seemingly in medias res. Marcelino, a soldier, mounted, on his way to Mexico City. (The screen warps and wanders in the frame. It’s like we’re viewing the film reflected in the depths of a well.) The girl waits, gestures. The men ride past. “Abandoned!” Four months later, “her sin revealed”, the girl – Santa – is ejected from her home. Her mother lectures her at great length (over the course of two titles) about Santa’s wickedness. Her mother says she is “smeared” with her daughter’s foulness.
Part Two of the triptych: Vice. And here are our first symbolic installations. The dancer, writhing with flowers in a park. It’s a very brief installation, for here we are in the metropolis: Mexico City. And here is Chapultepec. (Touristic views of the park, the streets.) Santa heads to Elvira (whole areas of backstory skipped, missing). Santa behind bars, praying for a return to her home and family. Hipólito the blind man (Alfonso Busson). Months pass. Santa gets close to Hipólito, who tells her his life story. (A single shot of an impoverished home.) Santa and “El Jarameño”, the matador, “make their lives exult”. Plenty of bizarre titles about female inconstancy, and Santa betrays El Jarameño while he is busy mauling cattle. He returns, finds Santa together with a lover, but his knife gets stuck and a painting of the Virgin Mary tumbles into view – triggering “his religious fanaticism”. Oh dear, now Santa is back to her “ways of vice”. Hipólito loves her. He pours out his heart in endless intertitles, says he is a monster to look at. Seconds later, Santa has gone through another lover – Rubio – and “under the attack of an insidious evil, [she] has become an alcoholic”. (We see her sipping wine with a reprobate.) Santa is rotted by sin, by crime, by the kitchen sink, and so the third part of the triptych, “Martyrdom”, begins.
Abandoned by all, sick, miserable, “useless”, Santa turns to Hipólito to help recover “the holy deposit”. (I think the film means her soul, but it sounds rather less sanitary.) He takes her to share his simple home (and boy servant). “We are all your slaves!” he says, to do as she wishes. She has an attack of piety, clutches his knees, has a brief repast, glugs back wine. A doctor calls. Santa has an incurable disease that needs an expensive operation. Oh dear, oh dear. Now she’s in bed, writhing, feeling that someone’s removing her bones, wanting to be buried by her mother in her home in Chimalistac. The operation. Lengthy procedural wrappings. Time passes. Hipólito waits. A crisis, just as she’s being stitched up. Bloody bandages. Oh dear, oh dear, she’s dead. Hipólito collapses over her body. She’s buried in her village. Hipólito tends her grave. The sun sets. Hipólito runs his fingers over the inscription on the tombstone and prays for her soul. END.
Well, what can I say to all that? The film is so rife with melodrama it appears to be coming apart at the seams. The image itself buckles and warps, the frame shifts awkwardly. The copy is fragmentary and hurtles forward at an even greater rate of dramatic velocity than Ajal Minorasi. The intensity of the drama is exacerbated by the state of the print: it’s like the film is fast-forwarding through Santa’s life, racing towards its inevitable conclusion. In this sense, I found it a far more gripping film than Ajal Minorasi, which seems almost stilted by comparison.
Yet I can’t deny that Santa is in many ways a cruder film. The way it’s staged and edited feels utilitarian, awkward, heavy-handed. There are far too many titles, which (when they are not explaining what we have just seen) are overloaded with information that the surrounding scenes do not – or cannot – register. It’s like paragraphs from a pulpy novel have been pasted onto the screen, regardless of the film’s visual world. The tone of these titles, too, veers madly between stilted exposition, religiose moralism, and pretentious verbiage. The “symbolic installations” (or what survives of them) are weird interruptions, failed attempts to elevate or exteriorize feelings that the film simply cannot express.
Elena Sánchez Valenzuela is a beautiful Santa and has a world of emotion in her eyes – but the film has no way of allowing us access to those depths, to the reality of her experience. Indeed, the film goes out of its way to suppress any alternative interpretation to the narrative other than that expressed by the titles. In this way, the whole film feels like some dreadful piece of Catholic propaganda made flesh. The woman is blamed at every stage of the way, condemned by her unalterable nature, an original sinner who must live out the awful consequences of her actions. Santa has a dreadful life, then dies a dreadful death. The film is based on Federico Gamboa’s eponymous novel of 1903. Gamboa is described as a “naturalist”, but I wonder how the tone of the novel compares with the film. Is it as moralistic? Does it judge and condemn Santa in the same way? Where are its sympathies, and what is its diagnosis?
If Santa is a crude film in all these senses, it is – perhaps because of its crudity – absolutely compelling. I was gripped by the mad pace of it, by the intoxicating brutality of its drama, by the ludicrous exegeses of its titles, by the peculiarity of its “symbolic” pretensions, by the textual (and textural) instability of its images and sudden ellipses of the fragmented print. Part of its success for me was the piano accompaniment by José María Serralde Ruiz: full-hearted, sincere, dramatic. Bravo.
So that was Day 2. A well-travelled day. I’m not sure how many silent films shot on location in Uzbekistan or Chile I have ever seen, and I’m very happy to have glimpsed these worlds on screen. Santa, too, offers some amazing views of Mexico City (even though they are entirely unintegrated into the narrative). In all these films, the sense of time and place vividly creeps over the images. It’s there in the faces, in the texture of the locations, in the light and dust of the streets and fields. Even at their crudest, they were interesting to watch. The only film that I didn’t get much from was Abismos, perhaps because of its peculiar status as a sound film without soundtrack. I can see (or assume) its historical value, but next to even the most fragmented of the other films it was oddly lifeless. But it was only a few minutes long, and it fitted with the rest of the programme, so I mustn’t complain. Day 2 took me to places I’d never been, and I’m grateful for the experience.
Yes, it’s that time of year again! Pordenone is once more underway, and I am not on the way to it. The furthest I’m travelling is to my study, or possibly to the living room for better Wi-Fi signal. This is because I have happily handed over my thirty euros and have my pass for the streamed content of this year’s festival. For the next ten days, I shall be posting my reviews of the digital fare on offer from Pordenone (or at least, its associated servers). Appropriately enough, Day 1 takes us to Italy for a feast of marvellous landscapes and seascapes…
We begin with Attraverso la Sicilia (c.1920; It.; unknown), one of the innumerable travelogue films produced in Italy in the first decades of the twentieth century. (This film, along with sixty others, can be found on the beautiful 2xDVD set Grand Tour Italiano, releasedby the Cineteca Bologna in 2016.) I love how even this simple film – depicting the ferry boat arriving, depositing its train, followed by a series of views of the harbour and its human and animal inhabitants – is so visually elaborate. Apart from a few shots, it is all tinted. The opening is yellow, but the first view of the little train on the ferry is orange, as though its furnace is glowing with anticipation somewhere inside it. But when it sets off it reverts to monochrome, before traversing the landscape of Sicily: the blue harbour, the orange ruins, the pink ruins, the yellow hillside. People are going about their business, a hundred years ago – and here I am, sipping my Italian coffee, a century later.
The next short, Nella conca d’oro (c.1920; It.; unknown), gives us Palermo. Palermo in blue, Palermo in pink, Palermo in gold, Palermo in split screen (postcard images, shaking in the frame), Palermo in orange, Palermo in a wash of sepia, the colour of old magazine pages. Here are centuries-old buildings, seen a century ago. Shaded colonnades from the Middle Ages, Byzantine twirls and patterns, and the people of the early twentieth century, sweeping the streets, gutting fish, building model horse and carts, wandering aimlessly. And the sea, calm, bedecked with working boats. The yellow tint a kind of oily haze upon the water, a weary warmth to the overcast sky. Flashes of leader, wobbled instructions for the printer, long dead. (It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now.) Men playing cards, not bothered by our presence. The past, cut off from its moorings a century ago and deposited on my screen. FINE.
And now, to our main feature: L’Appel du sang (1919; Fr.; Louis Mercanton). The story is based on Robert Hichens’ novel The Call of the Blood (1906), and its melodramatic plot is signalled by the title…
Emile Artois (Charles le Bargy) is a veteran writer, who has earned the enmity of his peers for his unflinching attacks on “life’s artificiality”. His friend and disciple Hermione Lester (Phyllis Neilson-Terry) lives in her villa in Rome. She confesses to him that she loves Maurice Delarey (Ivor Novello) an Englishman who had a Sicilian grandmother. Artois is jealous and comes to Rome. Seeing the lovers together and obviously happy, Artois announces that he’s going to Africa. In Sicily, the lovers – now married – spend their honeymoon at Hermione’s house on the Casa del Prete on Mount Amato, with their devoted servant Gaspare (Gabriel de Gravone). In the “garden of Paradise”, the lovers are happy – but abroad, Artois is dying of fever. Maurice and Gaspare visit the “Sirens Island”, where the fisherman Salvatore (Fortunio Lo Turco) lives with his daughter Maddalena (Desdemona Mazza). On the rocks, asleep with the fisherman, Maurice dreams of sirens – and, waking early, encounters Maddalena, half-naked in the water. Meanwhile, the dying Artois sends Hermione a letter confessing his love – and insisting that she loves him. But the doctor knows that Hermione is married, so does not send her Artois’ letter – just a telegram alerting her to his illness. Once Hermione leaves for Kairouan, Maurice grows increasingly close to Maddalena. Their romance observed by her angry father, who is content only so long as the tourists keep spending money on them. Hermione aids Artois’ recovery and they journey back to Sicily, triggering Maurice’s guilt – and desire to spend his last free moments with Maddalena at the local fair. The lovers spend the night in a hotel, while Hermione anxiously awaits Maurice at her villa. In the morning, Maurice arrives, guilty and remorseful. But he cannot bring himself to tell her the truth. Salvatore hears about his daughter’s night with Maurice and locks her in her room. Maurice writes Hermione a letter confessing the truth and saying that he knows he must leave her. Salvatore wants to meet Maurice on his island, and Gaspare plays the awkward go-between. Maurice makes Artois promise to look after Hermione if anything should happen to him. Artois intercepts a letter from Maddalena, warning Maurice – and suspects the truth. Salvatore attacks Maurice and throws him from a cliff into the sea. While Gaspare rescues the body, Artois finds Maurice’s confession – and gets the full truth from Gaspare. Artois decides to burn the letter to spare Hermione’s feelings, then goes with Gaspare to confront Salvatore and Maddalena. Artois convinces father and daughter to go to America, but Maddalena visits Maurice’s grave and is discovered there by Hermione and Gaspare. Hermione realizes the truth and goes to Artois for comfort, while Gaspare seeks revenge on Salvatore. The two men fight, but it is Maddalena who is killed by her father’s gunshot. The graves of Maddalena and Maurice lie next to one another, and Hermione leaves flowers before departing. In Rome, Hermione finds Artois’ confession, passed on from the (now deceased) doctor’s possessions, and the two are finally united. FIN.
Well, well, well. First thing’s first: this is a stunning film to look at. Shot on location in Italy, the film is dominated by shot after shot of extraordinarily beautiful landscapes. The entire drama plays out against superb vistas, from views over the Colosseum in Rome to the Sicilian coastline. The whole film is also beautifully tinted and toned, from the warm gold of exterior daylight to the lustrous blue-tone-pink of evenings and the blues of nighttime exteriors. Great use is made of placing characters against these backdrops, from the terraces overlooking the landscapes to more intimate scenes along the paths and coves of the coast. The southern light is simply gorgeous, and every exterior shot of the film is a pleasure to contemplate. What an absolutely beautiful film this is.
The cast also boasts some beautiful faces. This was Ivor Novello’s first starring role, and he is strikingly beautiful in many shots – just see how the camera shows off his profile as he sits at the piano and sings, or drapes himself with open shirt across the rocks. His performance is good, but I don’t know if it’s the fault of the director or the performer that I never got a sense of depth to his character or emotions. Novello always feels slightly out of place, which suits the character – at home in Sicily without quite being Sicilian. He comes across as cutely gauche, and rather English, as he half tries to find the rhythm of the Tarantello when he first arrives on the island. In fact, he’s noticeably more convincing in his relationship with Gaspare than with either Hermione or Maddalena. The note of homoeroticism is hard to escape since the two men spend more time with each other than the married couple. Maurice goes swimming with Gaspare and his sexualized dream of sirens takes place when he is asleep with Gaspare on the rocks by the sea. Maddalena is a rival not just to Hermione, but to Gaspare: and it is the latter who tries to take revenge on Salvatore for killing his friend.
Indeed, Gabriel de Gravone was my favourite performer in the film. (Due to my decades-long obsession with Gance’s La Roue (1923), I have spent many hours watching Gravone on screen in a particular role – so I am certainly familiar with his face!) Like Novello, he is strikingly handsome – but he has an air of assurance, of physical presence, on screen that Novello never quite has for me in this film.
The rest of the cast is good, if not especially memorable. Phyllis Neilson-Terry (one of the Terry dynasty of British actors) is a strong, naturalistic lead – but her character is never given depth. I don’t think this is her fault, nor is the dullness of Charle le Bargy’s Artois; the film simply isn’t able to shape their performances or deepen their characters. Maddalena’s death, for example, is shocking – but as an act, as an event, not because I cared for (or even particularly knew or understood) her character or relationship with Maurice.
My reservations about character and performance stems, I think, from the fact that the film lacks dramatic depth. For a melodrama, even if my brain isn’t overly engaged, my heart needs to get involved: I wanted and needed to feel more from this film. It’s very, very good looking, but that’s not enough. I was purring over the landscapes, but never about the characters. Louis Mercanton is good at framing the drama against the landscapes, but his camera never gets too close to his characters. Perhaps overly conscious of showing the backdrop, there are virtually no close-ups – we are quite literally kept at a certain distance from the characters. Even so, there are other ways to create depth and complexity. Mercanton can compose a shot, and organize a sequence, but nothing ever quite builds to a single image or shot that grabs the heart or contains any kind of emotional or psychological revelation. There were no scenes where the staging struck me as being especially imaginative or striking. The fair, during which Maurice and Maddalena spend the night together, is perhaps the most dramatic of the film, with its red tinting and the lovers in silhouette at the balcony window. But this, too, is a series of pretty images rather than a fully integrated dramatic montage. (I think, inevitably, of a similar sequence in Gance’s contemporary J’accuse!, in which illicit lovers encounter one another at night during a firelit farandole – a sequence that is filled with (more) striking images and a rhythmic crescendo.) Ultimately, I was more impressed by Emile Pierre’s photography than Mercanton’s direction.
So that was Day One. Whatever my reservations, I’m very glad to have seen L’Appel du sang. It’s one of the best-looking films (I was about to say “prints”, but I suppose that’s not quite true) I’ve seen in a while, and the tinting and toning of the landscapes was a particular pleasure. But I also particularly appreciated the Italian shorts that preceded the feature. They introduced us to the period and place in which L’Appel du sang is set. Aside from compilation DVDs, such short films can be difficult to present convincingly – so slipping them into a programme in such a pertinent way is a nice touch. Seeing these three films together was a delight. A very nice way to start the festival.
This final post on the Gance retrospective reflects on my experiences at the Cinémathèque. It’s rare that I find myself at such a concentrated cultural feast. Anyone who has read my posts on Pordenone or Bonn will know that festivals are things of great fascination to me, and perennially out of reach. This post is therefore a way of considering everything that an in-person event (what a ghastly phrase) offers and means, and of acknowledging what is missing from my usual film-viewing experience. Writing is also a way of remembering and recording what were for me days of great pleasure.
I should begin by saying that Les Gaz mortels was not the first aesthetic experience of my trip. Friday 13th proved to be an auspicious day. En route to the Cinémathèque, the friend with whom I was staying took me to the Jardin des Tuileries to see the Musée de l’Orangerie. Here are displayed eight giant panoramas of Claude Monet’s Les Nymphéas (1914-26), spread across two rooms. There was something appropriate in seeing art created during the same years of Gance’s emergence as a filmmaker. (Both artists have been associated with the label “impressionism”, but the appropriateness of this -ism is too complex to consider here.) However, what I took away from the Orangerie was an extraordinary sense of the way time shapes these works and affects how we receive them.
In the 1890s, Monet wrote to a friend that he was trying to capture in his series paintings “ce que j’éprouve”. The verb “éprouver” denotes more than a process of seeing: it is a process of feeling, of experiencing. It implies a kind of temporal duration that the verb “voir” does not. To experience, or to feel, a scene is not merely to see but to contemplate; it is also to let the world sink into oneself, or to sink a little into the world. In his series paintings, Monet moved from canvas to canvas, adding successive layers of colour and texture as the hours passed – returning again and again, day after day, season after season, to build up his images. Les Nymphéas use this principle on an even larger scale, and Monet took twelve years to fill canvases that are two metres high and up to seventeen metres long.
The result is an amazing expanse and depth of paint, a veritable layering of time. Staring at the surface of these vast canvases, you realize that the very word “surface” is misleading. Every inch is built of innumerable strokes, of innumerable moments of reflection, consideration, and reaction – of feeling and intelligence. The paintings are not simply an effort at capturing a single moment, a single time of day, but a record of the process of feeling, of experiencing, that time. They are both a document of time passing before the painter and of the time spent by the painter in the act of painting. Standing before the completed canvases, as Monet must have done for countless hours – days – weeks – months – years, I was deeply moved by the sheer laboriousness of the process of painting. Having once been an amateur painter myself, I knew – I could feel, even – the physical history of this act of mark making. The time of painting was as tangible as the painting of time.
But the scale of these images creates time-systems within their borders. Traversing from left to right the thirteen metres of Nymphéas, les nuages, I had the peculiar sensation that I was moving through a kind of narrative. On the left, the reflected trees seem only a little darker than a morning haze (blues mingle with mauves, greens mingle with touches of yellow and turquoise); then the sky appears, brightens, and clouds bloom; but in the last metres the sky’s hue deepens, darkens; and suddenly a great bank of darkness fills the frame from top to bottom – it as if night, or autumn, blots out the memory of a warm afternoon. In those last two metres, the darkness is of a deep, muddy green – as though the autumn mulch were already underfoot. The lilies were dashes of blue and yellow on the left of the canvas, but here on the right they are streaks of crimson and blotches of rust. I stopped and stared at this weird, unsettling depth of gloom, trying – and quite failing – to fathom how it was formed.
From this sense of time creeping over canvas and viewer, it is a relief to find elsewhere a sense of immediacy in the business of brushstrokes. In the second salle, the surface of the pond in Nymphéas, le matin clair aux saules is alive with curling dashes of blue. This is not a great gust of wind, for the downward strokes of the willow leaves hardly stir. It is just a draft, the beginning of a breeze, that catches the water. The clarity of the sky is lost in this murmur of paint. From the mix of azure and clouds that flash amid the ripples, you can see that the weather is changeable. How extraordinary that such infinite pains were taken to capture the ephemeral moment when the wind rose on a bright day, a century ago. In this painting, the depth of time that Monet stood before his canvas crystalizes into an amazing sense of immediacy. The contrast between the process of creation and the actualization of its goal is remarkable. How many hours, over how many years, to build up this sense of subtle movement across the water?
There is personal time, too. I found myself moved not only by the richness of the colours in Nymphéas, reflets verts, but by the fact that its palette is exactly that of my grandmother’s front room – a room that has not existed for twenty years. She, too, was a painter, and adored Monet. She kept an exquisitely rich little garden whose colours spilled into the house. (She never closed the curtains, so as to always be able to see it.) There are greens of astonishing depth in Nymphéas, reflets verts, and blues from late summer skies. The light is fading, but the surface of the pond has a supernal warmth – a kind of aura of the day that is passing, that has long ago passed. (But what day is this on the canvas, if not a kind of distillation of multiple days? Somehow, time here is suspended, hovering outside history.) I stopped and stared at the deepest patches of a reflected sky that is somewhere beyond the frame, somewhere beyond time.
By this point, I became aware that my hour within the Orangerie was itself slipping away. I was struck by the strangeness of this aesthetic experience, by how something so fleeting could plumb such depths of feeling and pastness. This was an encounter of something static by something in motion. The paintings were staying, and lasting; I was moving on, undergoing a different kind of time. I recalled the scene in Le Côté de Guermantes when the duke shows M. the paintings by Elstir, which the narrator compares to the images of a magic lantern – a kind of hallucinated landscape projected by the mind of the artist. Oddly enough, I had been talking about Proust with my friend as we walked through the gardens en route to the Orangerie. As we were leaving, I tried to tell her about the passage in the novel – which M. experiences as an oasis of contemplation amid the bustle of a social event – but speaking was too much. It was the paintings themselves, and the sadness of leaving them; it was the odd proximity I found between my own body and that of the painter, long gone, standing before the canvas – allied with the fact that I could imagine so clearly the process of painting, but I no longer paint; it was the colours of a room that I knew and loved that had been restored to me for an instant; it was the memory of my favourite book, and the memory of the first time I read it: I finished the final pages of Le Temps retrouvé at my grandmother’s house, overlooking her garden. My Englishness obliged me to avoid making some kind of scene, so I gulped back my tears and tottered towards the exit. It is surely apparent by now that I was totally overwhelmed by these two rooms in the Orangerie. (All this will return us, eventually, to Gance – I promise!)
Emotionally primed, and thinking of the passing and the recapturing of lost time, we finally entered the Cinémathèque. Here we had time to visit the “Musée Méliès: La Magie du cinéma” exhibition, which was very charming. Lots of proto-cinematic optical devices, of hands-on machinery, and of designs, costumes, and models from Méliès’ films. Here, quite literally, I saw Proust’s magic lanterns. (There was also a prominent place given to Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), a film I cannot stand, but we can gloss over that.)
The pleasures of the Méliès exhibition were a rewarding parallel to the Monet paintings. Here were the material means of producing immaterial visions. I love the elaborateness of pre-cinematic optical devices, the tangible sense of clunky mechanics that strive to produce fleeting moments of vision. (One of the most amazing assemblages of such material I’ve ever seen was at the “Photography: A Victorian Sensation” exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in 2015. I’m lucky to live near to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, so can brush past a permanent collection of such things almost as often as I wish.) The physicality of a large magic lantern – its polished wooden shell, its gleaming brass fittings, its fragile glass and flammable lamp – is something to behold. Thanks to the Cinémathèque exhibit, it is also something one can actually hold. The labour of projection, the way the great slides must be moved and changed, is a powerful reminder of the way cinema history (and pre-history) is peopled by countless known and unknown figures. Real people are required to operate this material media. And here are the unknown figures of the past, the models for Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope and Marey’s chronophotographic studies, backlit in their little strips of celluloid – glowing on the wall of the museum. (What happened to that man? What became of that cat?)
By the time the exhibit reaches its final stages, where the legacy of Méliès is explored in modern cinema, it was time to join the queue for the first Gance film. Queuing soon became both a major occupation and a curious pleasure at the Cinémathèque. I observed and sometimes participated in these social events, where the regulars of the establishment chat amongst themselves, where little old ladies cut calmly in front of you to talk to someone they know, and where any sense of order vanishes in the accumulation of people behind the little barrier. (“Ceci n’est pas une queue,” I told someone, “c’est une salade!”) I enjoyed seeing the same faces every single day, and watching the same latecomers scuttle to the ticket office next to the queue. The second afternoon, I was eating an apple in the queue when an old man – a habitué of the place, I’m told – came to tell me that I resembled Snow White. (After a few moments of confused conversation, I came to understand that the film was one of his earliest cinematic memories, and its images are always returning to him.) By Sunday afternoon, I had become well known enough in the queues for strangers to address me in English. Perhaps this was a failure to be adequately Parisian, a condemnation of my stumbling French. (Every time I go to Paris, I have the sense of retaking an exam that I will never pass.)
I did not get to see a film in the Salle Henri Langlois which, as its prominent name implies, is the largest screening room at the Cinémathèque. I believe that Napoléon was shown there, to take advantage of the screen size, and I was glad to hear from others that the triptych was well projected both there and at the Max Linder cinema elsewhere in Paris. (I envied them this experience, having been so disappointed by the botched finale at La Seine Musicale concert in July.) Most of the screenings I attended at the retrospective took place in the Salle Georges Franju, which was an excellent size and allowed enough space for the musicians to comfortably fit on the stage before the screen.
The last two screenings, however, were in the Salle Lotte Eisner, which was upstairs. The door to the room was tucked next to the bookshop. (I pause to acknowledge that this shop is the most concentrated example of highbrow film culture – books and DVDs/Blu-rays – one could imagine.) In fact, the door to the Salle Eisner looks like a fire escape. When I got there, a man was already leaning proprietorially against it, preventing anyone from going upstairs. He wasn’t an employee of the Cinémathèque, simply a regular who knew that there was no room to queue inside the door. When an attendant finally arrived, she observed: “Alors, vous êtes policier?” and duly thanked him. The way beyond the door was, initially, entirely unlit and we stumbled along the narrow enclosure of the staircase with some trepidation. (The average age of the regulars seemed to me to be somewhere north of seventy-five.) The room itself was smaller than Franju, but I quite enjoyed the sense of camaraderie created by everyone having to clamber over each other to get in. That said, the screen in the Salle Lotte Eisner was notably poorer. I could see the screen beneath the image, its network of conjoined dots proving a stubborn texture that interfered with the projected film. Following the end of the 7.00pm screening, getting out of the room was as tricky as getting in. Given that the queue for the 8.30pm projection began immediately, I decided to do as others did: after stumbling down the dark steps, I executed a sharp volte face and stood outside the door once more. Hell, it was my last screening, and I wanted a good seat. Fuck the queue.
If I was all too keen to get the best seat, it was because seeing these early films is so rare. I had never encountered them on the big screen, with live music in packed cinemas, and this might be my only chance. A friend told me that the Cinémathèque française used to programme multiple screenings for each film in a retrospective, but no longer does so. There was only one chance to see the films shown in the Gance retrospective, so even people who lived in Paris might easily have missed their opportunity. (How much I would like to have seen Gance’s Polyvision films of the 1950s, for example, on the big screen.) Of course, Napoléon has been shown in cinemas across France, and will soon be broadcast on French television (though I believe the date has been delayed, for unspecified reasons). But the other films are far less known, and far less available in any format. They, too, deserve their chance to be seen, not least because there is so little information about them in the public realm. Even in published filmographies of Gance’s work there are inaccurate details about some of the cast and crew (e.g. Bareberousse and Ecce Homo) and often no information on the completeness – or even survival – of his early films.
On this note, I heard it mentioned in the introductions to more than one screening that the Cinémathèque française retrospective contained all Gance’s surviving films. I don’t believe this is quite true, though it certainly represents all those available in restored or complete copies. Missing from the 2024 roster is Le Nègre blanc (1912), which is listed in the collection of a German archive. I have not had the opportunity to investigate this print, but if it is accurate, it would represent the earliest Gance film to survive – and the only instance of the screen career of Mathilde Thizeau, Gance’s first wife. (I don’t think I have ever even seen a photo of her.) There is also an important fragment of Das Ende der Welt (1931) in the collection of the Eye Filmmuseum, which I discussed here. (I am currently investigating the survival of another archival print of this film.) I hope that all the new restorations are released on home media, along with anything and everything else Gance produced. As I wrote in my earlier posts, at the end of every screening in the retrospective I wanted to go back into the cinema and see the films again. But just when will I next see them on a big screen? When, indeed, will I see them again on any screen? As much as I believe that these films – all films, even – should be seen on big screens, even basic access to lower-quality versions for home viewing is essential to their broader cultural life. What cannot be seen cannot be studied, cannot be discussed, cannot be valued.
There is a caveat to all this. At the Aéroport Charles de Gaulle, a sign in departures promises: “Paris ne vous oubliera pas”. To heighten this sense of leave-taking, the duty-free sections cram as much Frenchness as is possible into the confines of a busy thoroughfare. With some vague hope of taking home more than just memories of Paris, I bought some wine; and when I got home, I bought some bread and cheese. But it’s futile to try and recreate the flavours of France at home. Even if the ingredients are the same, how can you recreate the sense of being in a particular place and a particular time? No, no, it’s impossible. At the Cinémathèque, I’d met friends, old and new, and I’d seen films, known and unknown. The pleasure of the occasion became part of the pleasure of the art. As much as I want a set of DVDs or Blu-rays, I know they cannot truly realize – actualize – the films. I know, too, that I can look at digital scans of Monet’s paintings, but doing so loses something essential to their being in space, their being in time – and I with them.
In 1936, Walter Benjamin famously claimed that all reproductions of art lack their original’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”, and thus also lack the “aura” of creative authenticity. Using the idea of the “aura” of artefacts, Benjamin posited that cinema possessed no tangible presence; this form of art was an endlessly reproducible product without an original. Whatever the applicability of this argument to later forms of cinema, it surely fails to take account of the performative element of silent film exhibition. If a projected image is less graspable than a canvas, the system of its presentation – the theatre, the projector, the screen, the stage, the musicians, the audiences, the projectionists – are all part of cinema’s aura. (I would argue, too, that celluloid prints are themselves artefacts of immense value – and that their projection is their aura.)
In my reviews of the screenings, I keep referring to the sense of presence Gance’s images had in the cinema. The live performance of music – separated from, yet allied with, the films – enhanced the suprasensory effect of these silent worlds. The landscapes, alive with sun and the movement of the wind – long passed yet arrested here in astonishing detail; the interior spaces, with their velvety shadows and pools of light, and the objects that carry the symbolic weight of drama, standing alongside the human protagonists in mutual silence; and the close-ups of performers, the way these faces carry the life of the past with them into the present. How can I not be moved by the play of light on Emmy Lynn’s face and hair, by the sudden changes of colour that cling to her image, by the dreamlike and overwhelmingly tangible reality of her life – past and present – on screen? There is also a sense that the silence of these images has its own significance, its own presence. The past on screen is as silent as Monet’s painted scene, and no less potent. These films are evocations from an ever-receding history that maintain their power in the present. There is the same sense of these images, these worlds, having traversed a great distance to meet me, here and now. Perhaps it is this sense of reciprocity that is most important, most moving, in the aesthetic experience: art makes sense only in this meeting of minds across time.
Gance, too, knew and conceived of cinema exclusively as a communal experience, just as he saw it as a way of reconciling past and present, the living and the dead. Coming into a theatre from the streets, the film experience had the potential to be magical, transformative, ecstatic. In a letter of October 1923, Jean Epstein told Gance that if happiness could not be found in the real world it could be sought in their art: “À la bonne heure. Ça, c’est du cinéma!” In a similar vein, I hope to re-encounter these hours of happiness in a setting that does justice to the films. This post has emphasized the context (rather than the content) of images to highlight how differently they are experienced chez moi. Home entertainment is not cinema. (It is film-staying, not filmgoing.) So I’m happy to recall the queues, the old guard of the Cinémathèque, the wizened figures who cut me up, the strange comments, the fight for seats, even the odd smells that wafted from certain sections of the crowd. All this, together with the thrill of the films, is the cinema. I can’t wait to go back. À la prochaine.
The third day of my cultural smash-and-grab was the busiest. Three screenings: one illustrated talk, two shorts, and one feature…
Sunday 15 September 2024: Salle Georges Franju, 2.30pm
The first event of the day was a “Ciné-conférence” by Elodie Tamayo, devoted to Gance’s unfinished project Ecce Homo (1918). Gance wrote this screenplay in March-April 1918 and began shooting that same month around Nice. His cast included Albert t’Serstevens as Novalic, a prophet who is ridiculed by society and committed to a mental asylum. His one true disciple, Geneviève d’Arc (Maryse Dauvray) reads his testament, “Le Royaume de la Terre”, and traces Novalic to his asylum where she hopes to help him recover his sanity. Parallel to this social/religious story is the melodrama of Geneviève’s infatuation for Rumph (Sylvio De Pedrelli), Novalic’s son from a liaison with an Indian woman, together with Rumph’s romance with Oréor (Dourga), an orphaned girl from the east. Though Novalic’s written testament is falsified and ultimately destroyed as a result of the conflict between Geneviève and Rumph, at the end of the film the prophet returns to his senses and plans to use cinema to make his message more readily understood. Ecce Homo was to end with the writing not of a book, but of a screenplay: the blueprint, one might imagine, for the very film we have just watched. Novalic declares to his contemporaries:
You haven’t understood my deeds, you haven’t read my books, you haven’t listened to my words; I am going to try another way. I will use neither the written word nor the spoken word to reach you. I will employ a new language of the eyes, which, unlike other forms of communication, knows no boundaries. Like children, I will show you oversized infants Moving Pictures, and my great secret will be to say simultaneously, and across the whole world, the most profound ideas with the simplest of images. Soon I will etch my dreams across your pupils, like an engraver might animate his work. And I think that this time you will understand me!
Gance abandoned Ecce Homo in May 1918, only a few weeks into its production. He wrote in his notebooks: “I quickly perceive that my subject is too elevated for everything around me, even for my actors, who don’t exude sufficient radioactivity. I’ll kill myself in no time at all if I continue to give this voltage for no purpose.” Miraculously, three hours of 35mm rushes survive from the material shot in April-May 1918. I first saw this material in 2010 and found it utterly fascinating. It was so moving to view not only the evidence of the filmed scenes, but the glimpses of Gance and his crew in-between takes: the director appearing, glancing at the camera, disappearing; the notes about each take – “Good”, “V. good” – chalked on boards at the end of the scene. Seeing this material on the small screen in the archive, I longed to see it projected…
All of which brings us back to the Salles Georges Franju last Sunday. Tamayo’s presentation offers not just extracts from the rushes (digitized in excellent quality), but a rich context in which to understand their significance. Texts by Gance and others were read by Virginie di Ricci, while electronic music was provided by Othman Louati. Tamayo herself presented information on the film’s context, production, and surviving content. I will say more on this shortly, but first and foremost I want to give a flavour of the surviving material.
Shot by Léonce-Henri Burel, the surviving footage once more uses the coastal landscapes of the south of France as a luminous stage for the drama. The location doubles, most notably, for the Indian jungle in which we see Oréor’s seductive dance for Rumph. It looks stunning, and seeing this on the big screen was an absolute thrill. I remembered the rough outline of the images, but I was struck anew by their visual quality. There is one faultless superimposed dissolve, for example, which transforms Oréor into a semi-transparent apparition as she begins her dance. Then there is a stunning view of a moonlit clearing in which the half-naked character poses with her veil. Burel’s control of low-key lighting, and Dourga’s extraordinary physicality, are a fabulous combination. Oréor’s dance demonstrates a clear transition from the diaphanous, hand-tinted dance sequence in La Dixième symphonie to Diaz’s subjective visions of Edith in J’accuse. But I think Dourga’s scenes in Ecce Homo are more interesting than either of these sequences: more evocative for the eye, more erotic for the senses.
Talking of J’accuse, I found it wonderful to see Maryse Dauvray on the big screen. (When I first saw the rushes of Ecce Homo, I realized that every filmography I had read misattributed her role to another actress!) Gance gives her some beautiful close-ups, and the sight of her reading from Novalic’s testament was so extraordinarily vivid that I found myself crying. My god, the quality of the footage is superb. Yet again, the sheer presence of these images is something miraculous. I wept too at her scenes with Rumph, when she watches him burning copies of “Le Royaume de la Terre”. The sight of the pages billowing like fallen leaves across the ground becomes a moving metaphor for the fate of Gance’s own film.
The scenes of t’Serstevens as Novalic are equally striking. He is delightfully corporeal, earthy: we see him shabby and unshaven; he roars with laughter at his own words; he walks backwards, perseveringly circling a tree to bless the insane. There is something touchingly natural and believable about him as a madman. (Something not the case with Gance’s own performance as Novalic in La Fin du Monde, a decade later.) And, as Tamayo pointed out in her talk, Novalic’s fellow inmates on screen are played by the real population of a mental asylum. As well as shots of their collective respect for (and defence of) Novalic, there is a heartbreaking sequence of close-ups of their faces, dissolving from one to another, that is simply extraordinary. Gance had a knack for finding the right faces, and here are dozens of real people, their pasts and their struggles written on the lines of their faces. This is not manipulation but revelation.
On the relation of Novalic to his time, Gance begins his scenario with a quotation from Ernest Renan: “If the Ideal incarnate returned to Earth tomorrow and offered to lead mankind, he would find himself facing foolishness that must be tamed and malice that must be scoffed at.” Just as we see remarkable images of the Christ-like Novalic behind bars, so the rushes contain lots of footage of the malicious populace – from policemen and soldiers down to bourgeois women and children. Like the vindictive mob that bullies and beats the half-German child in J’accuse, the crowds of Ecce Homo are gleefully nasty: laughing cruelly, pointing at the mad, hurling stones, a swirling mass of malicious derision. Some of the most remarkable scenes to survive include shots of this seething crowd cowering before a cross that rises mysterious up into the camera lens. The doubters are quite literally brought to their knees before the camera. (Seeing these shots again, I also thought that the crucifix resembles the crosshairs of a gun: the camera as weapon!)
Central to the success of Tamayo’s ciné-conférence is her careful shaping and framing of this original footage. The event began with the entire auditorium being cast into darkness (the Salle Franju screen disappearing in a swirl of mobile walls), after which we hear the opening words of Gance’s scenario:
At that time, men were so tired that they could not raise their eyes higher than the roofs of banks or the chimneys of factories. The war had just crushed the most beautiful energies, and the last beliefs in a just God had been swept away in a tempest of hatred. The heart of the world was annihilated by pain, by tears, and by blood that had been shed in vain.
After this prologue in darkness, there is a wonderful coup de théâtre as the screen reappears to offer us the first image: Albert t’Serstevens as Novalic. Presented as the introduction to the ciné-conférence, Gance’s text acts as a frame not only for the plot of Ecce Homo but also for the production itself. “At that time” refers to 1918, which Gance’s fiction imagines as the past – and which is now, a century later, truly the distant past. Reading the scenario, one becomes aware that the “I” of the text is not Gance but an imagined future narrator. Ecce Homo was thus imagined as a kind of extended flashback, a parable from the world to come. The scenario’s narrator reveals that he witnessed the whole story one evening in the “moving stained-glass windows” of a future cathedral. The idea of “moving stained-glass” evokes the kind of visionary projects that continually animated Gance’s artistic imagination. Around 1913, he envisioned “orgues lumineuses”, synaesthetic instruments which could produce turn sound into image, music into light, on giant screens. In 1918, Ecce Homo imagines a future technology – a future culture – that offers “moving stained-glass windows”: a kind of hallucinatory architecture, an immersive visuality, kaleidoscopic and coloured, that shapes and reshapes itself for the beholder, spelling out the visual narrative of Novalic’s life and message.
In his notes for Ecce Homo, Gance quotes from Oscar Wilde’s De Profondis: “Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.” It is this process that Gance tried to realize in his film (in all his films, one might say). It is also an idea taken up in Tamayo’s ciné-conférence. Her finale uses AI images (created by Érik Bullot and David Legrand), together with ink drawings (by Jean-Marc Musial) to evoke the futuristic framing of Ecce Homo. In this sequence, images from the past are transformed via the AI imagination: here is a luminous cathedral, glass glowing, melting, crystalizing; here are spectators, cameramen, vehicles, crowds coming and going; here are monochrome landscapes dissolving and coagulating; and here is Novalic, carrying his image of 1918 like a window around his shoulders, striding toward us. Tamayo also uses some of the imagery Gance sketched for his later project, La Divine tragédie (1947-52), in which a Turin Shroud-like screen, carried upon a cross – floating like a sail or a wing – bears the projection of the Passion. All these images – recycled, blended, reconfigured through AI – invite us to contemplate the process of visual memory, of visual image-making. They remind us that to recollect is also to recreate, and that our relationship with “lost” films can be a generative process. The power of ruins lies in their appeal to our imagination, to invoke the spectator’s response.
This whole finale is a wonderful conceit, though I was so moved by the images of 1918 – their sharpness, their clarity, their depth – that nothing the “mind” of artificial intelligence could produce could match them. In this visual archaeology, the ruins of 1918 stand as startling outposts of a lost past – and a lost future. But how wonderful to have Gance’s project so engagingly, and so imaginatively, presented. Bravo!
Sunday 15 September 2024: Salle Lotte Eisner, 7.00pm
After a couple of hours trying to find a quiet spot to eat some bread along the Seine, I returned to the next screening – and a new venue for me: the Salle Lotte Eisner. (I will say more about the different rooms in my final post in this series.) Here I settled down to La Folie de Docteur Tube (1915) and Au secours! (1924). Two films that I had seen before but never on a big screen, and never with other people…
La Folie de Docteur Tube is usually cited as Gance’s earliest surviving film and, ironically, it was deemed too peculiar for distribution in 1915. However, it eventually accrued a reputation by its circulation on the ciné-club circuit. (Long available in various formats, the 2011 restoration by the Cinémathèque française is now available via HENRI here.) Henri Langlois famously called La Folie de Docteur Tube “the first film of the avant-garde”. The plot of this one-reel curiosity is simple: Docteur Tube (the clown Di-Go-No) discovers a magic powder that transforms himself and the world around him. He dowses his nieces (unknown; unknown) and then their suitors (unknown; Albert Dieudonné), before the group find a way to reverse the transformation.
I confess that I have quite a low tolerance for this kind of film. (I find anything that might be considered “psychedelic” pretty tedious.) Even at barely fifteen minutes, La Folie de Docteur Tube often outstays its welcome. But I’m very glad to have seen it on a big screen, since the power of its imagery relies on scale. Gance achieved the transformation effect by filming scenes via a variety of distortive mirrors. Cutting from different views, seemingly from different realities, is still startling. It’s difficult to decipher these images on a small screen, and the effect is more obfuscating than revelatory. I won’t describe seeing it in the Salle Eisner as a “revelation”, but it certainly brought home the interest in Gance’s first (surviving) effort at producing truly transformative imagery. The peculiarity of the stretched, warped, distended bodies on screen force the viewer to look at the world differently. What starts off as a joke becomes an exercise in sustained visual interpretation: just what is happening on screen? There is time enough also to marvel at the effects of the monochrome smears, the blobs of black and white, the condensed creases of texture, and the sudden expansion and contraction of shapes. (I was also struck by how reminiscent these images are to the AI imagery produced in Tamayo’s Ecce Homo presentation.) I was surprised (and relieved) to find La Folie de Docteur Tube even got a few laughs, albeit slight ones. Most of these were generated by the antics of Tube’s young black servant, who mimics the doctor’s actions and delights in drinking wine from the bottle when he’s able. I find Tube’s weird grins and changes of mood quite terrifying, but his weird capering also raised a titter or two.
Au secours! is another film which is both very slight and incredibly elaborate. The plot involves a bet placed by the Comte de Mauléon (Jean Toulout) that Max (Max Linder) cannot stay until midnight in a haunted mansion without calling for help. Max duly arrives and is confronted by a bizarre array of walking wax statues, grizzly monsters, and hallucinatory tricks. He survives them all, but when his wife Suzanne (Gina Palerme) telephones to say that she is being attacked by a monster, Max calls for help. It transpires that it is all an elaborate hoax, on both Max and Suzanne, arranged by Mauléon.
As Elodie Tamayo pointed out in her introduction to these two films, Au secours! is a peculiarity in Gance’s filmography. Sandwiched in-between the epic dramas La Roue and Napoléon, Au secours! is a disconcertingly light film that also embodies some of Gance’s most extreme forms of visual manipulation. At various points, the screen warps – squishing and stretching Max as he swings from a chandelier – or else flickers – as a barrage of rapid montage hurls dozens of monsters at Max in the space of a few seconds. Yet these moments are soon laughed off by Max, just as the pianist (whose name I cannot find in any source: she was Korean and very good!) chose to let the flashes of montage pass in silence. Indeed, the sheer vehemence of these outbursts of avant-gardism become part of the joke. Max, the comedian, effectively laughs at the tricks of Gance, the dramatist.
Yet there is also something profoundly disturbing about this film. Firstly, the montage is very rough. Very few successive shots quite fit together, and Gance further destabilizes his film by the use of stock footage (from zoos), bizarre close-ups of stuffed animals, ludicrous apparitions, and preposterous grand-guignol. The film starts to exhibit the kind of unhinged hysteria to which its central protagonist soon succumbs. Furthermore, Max Linder’s performance may begin as charming and lightweight as any of his work of the 1910s, but ends with him in floods of tears, screaming madly down the telephone. It’s a terrifyingly convincing portrayal of emotional extremes, of a kind of madness. All these disturbing qualities are exacerbated, in hindsight, by the knowledge that Linder would convince his very young wife to commit suicide with him less than a year after the release of Au secours! (Suzanne, in the film, is also explicitly described as his new bride.) The combination of intensity, hilarity, and violence is truly unsettling. Even when the “trick” is revealed, and the count uses his winnings to pay his army of extras, our experience of the film – and of Max’s experience of events – is woefully unresolved. If it was all just theatre and props, how did the mansion warp and buckle? – from whence sprung the barrage of rapid cutting? – how can we understand the cutaways to real animals? The film only makes sense, in retrospect, if we accept that Max was subject to a sustained mental breakdown. This throwaway little film is as ultimately as disturbing as anything Gance ever made. The combination of low budget with maximal style produces (for me, at least) the same kind of skin-crawling sensation as low-budget B-movies of a later generation. The sheer awkwardness of its mise-en-scène and montage allows a kind of madness, of horror, into the fabric of the film. As much as I enjoyed seeing it on a big screen, it was also quite a relief when it was over.
Au secours! was restored in 2000 in a version that is nicely tinted throughout, and looks as good as this oddity can be expected to look. The audience in the Salle Lotte Eisner laughed along with its antics, as did I – though I can never shake off the sense of something disturbing and tragic pulling at its seams.
Sunday 15 September 2024: Salle Lotte Eisner, 8.30pm
Next up was Barberousse (1917), a film I have wanted to see for years. Barberousse was first shown as an “exclusive event” with a large orchestra at the Cinéma des Nouveautés Aubert-Palace in the summer of 1916, when it was advertised as a “remarkable [film with] first-rate acting and direction” (L’Intransigeant, 11 August 1916). Yet this production was not released generally until the following spring, whereupon it became “a great adventure-drama in four parts” (Le Film, 26 March 1917) to be screened in episodes alongside Louis Feuillade’s serial Les Vampires (1915-16) (La Presse, 22 June 1917). This programming is emblematic of the market in which Gance’s film was designed to fit. The plot of Barberousse seeks both to replicate and to satirize the kind of crime serials mastered by Feuillade…
We begin with our first view of the titular figure of Barberousse (credited as being played by “?”), who wishes to become one of the world’s most revered criminals. The film then recounts his infamous murder of investigative journalists and detectives who try to discover his identity or whereabouts. Gesmus (Émile Keppens), the editor of La Grande Gazette, has made a small fortune in printing stories about this infamous bandit. Yet he can find no new reporter to follow-up these stories, since everyone is terrified of being the next victim. However, after the murder of another famous journalist (Paul Vermoyal), the writer Trively (Léon Mathot) is determined to unmask Barberousse. He allies himself with another newspaper commissioner (Henri Maillard) and tracks down Barberousse and his assistant Topney (Doriami) near their hideout on the “black pond”. But Barberousse’s gang captures Trively’s wife Odette (Germaine Pelisse), triggering a crisis of conscience for the chief bandit. Odette is allowed free, and helps her husband and the police to find Barberousse’s lair. After a gunfight and huge fire around the wood and marsh where the bandits roam, Barberousse escapes. By now, Trively is convinced that Gesmus is Barberousse. He tricks the bandit into revealing himself and Gesmus/Barberousse is arrested along with his daughter Pauline (Maud Richard). The coda to the film is another scene by the fireside of “Barberousse”, who is revealed to be a peasant who has dreamed the whole film. His family – the played by the same actors we have just seen – arrive and he sets about recounting his dream…
Barberousse is a delightful film: charming, amusing, and dramatic in equal measure. It is beautifully shot with some superb exterior scenes around the scrubland and coast of the south of France. Gance filmed Barberousse near Sausset-les-Pins, where he was captivated by the woodland that was blasted by the coastal winds. On screen, these woods become a mysterious lair for the bandits. The sequence in which Odette is captured by what appear to be a moving set of bushes is marvellously silly. But is also uses the wind-whipped trees of this strange landscape to produce some eerie effects. As with the other films I have rhapsodized in previous posts, I can only repeat that Burel was a genius in his own right. The lighting of both these exteriors, and many of the low-key lit interiors, is simply marvellous. The camera is more mobile than in Les Gaz mortels, and we get some striking tracking shots in cars and on boats. There is also a superb extreme close-up of Odette as she is about to drink a poisoned cup of tea: a delightful dramatic detail that, as with many others in this film, makes the contrivances of the plot come to life.
The cast is the same that appears in Les Gaz mortels, with others (like Vermoyal) from Gance’s other films made in 1916-17. Barberousse shows them all to better advantage. I much preferred Henri Maillard in this film. In Les Gaz mortels, I found him stiff and awkward. In Barberousse, he’s more assured, aided by a beard and less dramatic weight to bear. His death is delightfully silly: he’s killed by a poisoned cigar. (“Have you noticed that the smoke from your cigar has a greenish hue?” Trively asks, only to realize that the old man is dead.) Germaine Pelisse has more of a starring role in this film and manages to be convincing even when she’s being pursued by walking bushes. Émile Keppens and Léon Mathot both manage to have the right air of respective villainy and determination. Keppens, in particular, makes a splendid editor-cum-bandit-cum-dreaming peasant. Even Doriani and Vermoyal are less hammy in Barberousse than in their other Gance appearances.
This new restoration offers a rewarding and entertaining viewing experience, though there is surely some missing material. (We see only the aftermath of Trively’s first fight with Barberousse and Topney, not the fight itself. There is no explanatory text to help cover this ellipsis.) I also felt that there were some odd repetitions of frames in a few places, perhaps where intertitles were once positioned. Then again, this may simply be an accurate reproduction of errors present in the original prints. My only real reservation is the lack of tinting, which robs some scenes of their sense of temporal setting. When Topney is tapping a telephone wire, for example, he consults his notes by lighting a candle – a detail which makes no sense when the day-for-night filming offers no hint of it being dark. Blue tinting would also make the walking bushes sequences more believable, since it too is meant to take place at night. And the climactic woodland fire in the big shootout sequence would also gain much from some appropriate red or orange tinting. The oddity about this restoration is that it offers all the intertitles in blue tints – it’s just the film itself that remains in monochrome. I appreciate that without evidence it’s very difficult to try and be “creative” – but leaving the film in monochrome is itself a significant creative choice. (Having just consulted the filmography in a scholarly sourcebook on Gance, I see that Le Droit à la vie is listed as being “colorized”, i.e. tinted, something that the 2024 restoration of that film also lacks.)
I must also mention that the music for the screening of Barberousse was provided by Kellian Camus, another young talent from the piano improvisation class of Jean-François Zygel. There were some pleasing jazzy touches to his approach, and his performance matched the half-serious, half-comic tone of the film perfectly.
Though Barberousse was the last screening of my time in Paris, but I will write one further post on my experience of the retrospective and the live performances at the Cinémathèque…
Day two of my retrospective binge, and we continue our exploration of Gance’s melodramas from the 1910s. Both films were familiar to me, but not in the form they were presented at the Cinémathèque…
Saturday 14 September 2024: Salle Georges Franju, 6.30pm
First up was Le Droit à la vie (1917). I had seen this film in the archives of the Cinémathèque française in 2010, in the company of Kevin Brownlow, and was very impressed by it. However, the copy that we saw had no intertitles at all, so we had only the synopsis to go on. (Some weeks later, Brownlow sent me a list of titles from his Pathé-Baby 9.5mm print, so having seen the film I could then read it!) Thankfully, the film has since been beautifully restored by the Cinémathèque française alongside (as the retrospective notes are keen to acknowledge) TransPerfect Media. The screening last week was, I believe, the premiere of this restoration – so it was a real treat to see it. This was a 4K restoration, based on the surviving 35mm negative. This original element had begun to decompose, so it was supplemented by the safeguard copy made of the negative in 1965. The missing titles were recreated on the basis of those in the 9.5mm version and Gance’s manuscript scenario, both preserved in the collection of the CNC/Cinémathèque française. The font for the titles was recreated after the typography of La Dixième Symphonie. I report this latter information with some pleasure, since one thing that can spoil even the best restoration is a modern font. (I think especially of many North American DVDs that not only translate but transliterate the foreign titles, turning them into the ugliest imaginable insertions into original prints. Urgh! I’ve written about this in an issue of Screen, should anyone be interested in more detailed pedantry.)
The plot of Le Droit à la vie is a pleasingly gripping drama (and yes, spoilers ahead). Pierre Veryal (Pierre Vermoyal) is a prodigiously talented young financier, aided by his two ambitious secretaries, Jacques Althéry (Léon Mathot) and Marc Toln (Georges Paulais). However, Veryal’s absolute – and amoral – devotion to his work is undermining his health, and he ignores his doctor’s recommendation for absolute rest. Veryal’s only real feelings are for his pupil Andrée Maël (Andrée Brabant), an orphan being looked after by her grandmother (Eugénie Bade). But Andrée loves Jacques, who returns her feelings while being financially unable to support a wife. He is about to ask Andrée’s grandmother for permission to marry, but the old woman dies – and Jacques must leave for America to manage Veryal’s affairs, and to win his own fortune. The grandmother has willed that Andrée is entrusted to the care of Veryal, who exploits this to marry Andrée. Many months later, Jacques returns from America a rich man. He not only finds that Andrée is married, but that Veryal has an infectious illness that will condemn Andrée if there is significant “contact”. Despite Jacques’s entreaties, Veryal insists on enjoying his last months of life. He sells all his assets to fund lavish parties. Meanwhile, Marc Toln exploits Veryal’s distraction to embezzle large sums from his accounts. When this is discovered by Veryal during a masked ball, Toln tries to kill his employer – but only succeeds in wounding him, an act witnessed by Jacques. Knowing Jacques is a rival for Andrée’s affections, Veryal falsely supports Toln’s claim that it was Jacques who fired the shot. But at the trial, Jacques is vindicated by Veryal, who dies after having accepted that Andrée will marry Jacques.
Le Droit à la vie is a cracking film. It’s beautifully staged, beautifully lit, and the drama has real heft. The central love triangle – between a corrupt (usually capitalist, usually older) man, a younger woman, and her young lover – is one that recurs in multiple variations across Gance’s work. In Le Droit à la vie it is given its most vivid realization thus far in his filmography. The bite to Veryal’s predatory sexuality comes in the form of his illness, which initially seems to be merely fatigue – but is soon implied to be something more sinister. His increasingly erratic and violent behaviour, coupled with his rapid mental deterioration (even before being shot!), suggests syphilis – a diagnosis surely confirmed by the doctor’s insistence that he must avoid “contact” with his wife. No other kind of “contact” is envisaged as being dangerous, and the horror of Veryal’s “right” to Andrée’s body is as explicit as can be imagined.
Le Droit à la vie finds marvellous imagery with which to make this situation sinister. In particular, there is one remarkable staging of a scene that Gance replicates (closely) in J’accuse and (virtually identically) in La Roue. This is when Jacques witnesses Veryal forcing Andrée into his arms. The brutish embrace is framed within a window and partially-concealed by lace curtains. The equivalent scene in J’accuse is when Jean Diaz sees Edith being assaulted by her brutish husband François at the window – a moment made all the more shocking by the symbolic breaking of the glass and bleeding hand. And in La Roue, when Elie witnesses Norma being assaulted by Hersan, Gance goes further – making the rape of Norma as explicit as could be expected within the laws of censorship. (This scene was so often cut from the film that it was lost from all surviving prints, so the 2019 restoration had to reconstruct it from the 35mm rushes discovered in the archives.) Its iteration in Le Droit à la vie is still very powerful, one of many scenes when the combination of framing, editing, and lighting are united into a perfect mise-en-abïme of the drama.
It is with great sadness that I cannot share any image captures from this film, since it has never been released on any format since the advent of 9.5mm! I really, really hope that it is released on home media because it looks stunning. Burel’s photography is sumptuous, from the dark, complex interior spaces of Veryal’s rooms to the exquisite sun-dappled exteriors where the forbidden lovers meet. During the latter, there is one stunning shot of Jacques and Andrée: he half-concealed behind a tree, his profile outlined in sunlight; she, half-revealed in the clearing beyond, her face and hair haloed with natural back-lighting. My god, my god, my god this is a good-looking film. I cannot praise the visual qualities of the restoration highly enough. The 4K scan does real justice to the film, and seeing it on the big screen in the Salle Franju was incredibly moving. Some of the close-ups of Andrée were ludicrously detailed, simply glowing with life. Such was the sheer presence of this film, I cried just to look at it.
The performances in Le Droit à la vie are very good. Andrée Brabant is a proto-Ivy Close in La Roue, and both women have the long, curly blonde hair of a Mary Pickford – and are as exquisitely lit as she or (very much Gance’s role-model) Lillian Gish. Brabant herself is an engaging presence, able to communicate with her eyes – sometimes directly into the camera – the emotions of her character. Not to repeat myself from my last post, but Léon Mathot is once again both a sensitive and dramatic performer. However, I find him more engaging and affecting in Le Droit à la vie than in Les Gaz mortels. I think this is entirely to do with the respective quality of the films. Le Droit à la vie is a pleasingly dark drama, and the performers have something to work with – Mathot included. Vermoyal is creepy as Veryal, but has a tendency to eye-rolling exaggeration and occasional histrionics (especially when suffering from his bullet wound). I’ve only seen him in Gance’s early films and believe he was an actor from the Grand-Guignol theatre, which might explain his playing-to-the-gallery mode of performance. His was the only performance that stood out for its moments of crudity – but I suppose that conveying the signs of tertiary syphilis gives license to a bit of excess. Actually, I thought one of the most engaging performances in Le Droit à la vie is by Georges Paulais. His role is relatively minor, but there is a great clarity and presence in all of his gestures, all of his glances.
My final word on the film must go the music for this screening by Nicolas Giraud and Fixi. I confess that when I saw the name “Fixi” I was faintly worried about being given something peculiar (a fear not exactly allayed by the sight of his garish shirt as he stood to acknowledge our applause welcoming him to the stage). Fixi was at the piano, but he sometimes swapped the keyboard for his accordion. Giraud played a variety of instruments, from guitar to percussion and acoustic loops. If all this sounds like an odd mix, the result was superb: rhythmically and tonally in tune to the action, and independently musically satisfying. There were some very pleasing combinations of sounds, and such was the variety of combinations that it often felt like the musicians were jamming with the film – but jamming in the best possible sense, of playing off the changes in tempo and dramatic context. The score was well-conceived and well-executed. A pleasure to hear, and an enhanced pleasure to watch. Bravo!
Saturday 14 September 2024: Salle Georges Franju, 8.15pm
Hot on the heels of Le Droit à la vie, released in January 1917, Gance’s Mater Dolorosa (1917) was released in March 1917. Another concentrated melodrama, Mater Dolorosa focuses on Marthe Berliac (Emmy Lynn), who is having an affair with her brother-in-law, the writer Claude Berliac (Armand Tallier). In an attempted suicide, Marthe accidentally shoots her lover. Though she promises the dying Claude never to reveal the truth, Marthe’s secret attracts the interest of hunchbacked blackmailer Jean Dormis (Pierre Vermoyal) and his henchman (Gaston Modot). In attempting to pay off these men, Marthe’s husband Gilles Berliac (Firmin Gémier), a successful doctor, discovers the affair and disowns both Marthe and their son Pierre (Carène). Pierre is sent away to the suburbs of Paris, where he falls dangerously ill. Marital and paternal crises are eventually resolved when the husband sees the sincerity of his wife’s anguish, and is provided with new evidence by loyal servant Ferval (Anthony Gildès). Gilles finally reunites Marthe with Pierre and welcomes both back into his life.
Mater Dolorosa has a complex history during the silent era, and was also remade by Gance as a sound film with the same title in 1932. After being premiered in 1917, the silent version was re-edited and rereleased several times between 1918 and 1926. In 1993, the Cinémathèque Royale Belge undertook two restorations: the first reconstructed the original version of 1917, the second reconstructed the final rerelease version of 1926. The differences between the two include character names, character identities, and intertitles. The restoration of the 1917 version is (for me) by far the most satisfying, and the one I am used to seeing. Tinted and toned, it looks utterly gorgeous – while also being less verbose and more concentrated as a text. (The image captures included in this post are all from a copy of that version.) The 1926 rerelease version of Mater Dolorosa has more (to me, unnecessary and distracting) titles, as well as watering-down the love triangle by demoting the dead lover to a mere friend of Gilles Berliac rather than his brother. It also survives in monochrome only, which denies the film something of its visual richness.
The Cinémathèque française retrospective showed only the 1926 version. I confess that I was disappointed by the quality of the print, which was by far the poorest of any film I saw. It looked as though it had been assembled from copies of copies of copies, as well as being quite badly scratched. The restoration of the 1917 version is in much better shape, as well as offering the original tinting/toning that the 1926 print lacked. The 1993 restoration was shown on 35mm, but it lacked any restoration credits to explain its complex history. (For anyone seeing a copy of the 1917 Mater Dolorosa for the first time, it must have been confusing to see all the letters in the film dated March 1920!) All that said, I still enjoyed seeing the film projected, and with a good accompaniment on piano by Kolia Chabanier, another student from Jean-François Zygel’s school of improvisation.
This was Gance’s first collaboration with Emmy Lynn, and her performance is terrific – it’s her film, from beginning to end, and she carries the drama. With a fabulous wardrobe of dark, velvety dresses, of fur-lined coats, of hats and veils, she is a passionate, sombre diva – retreating into shadows, falling to her knees, her hair haloed against fire, against wintry windows. The intensity of emotion, and her rendering of anguish, is also inseparable from the way Gance visualizes the dramatic tone. I have previously described Gance’s love of sun-soaked southern landscapes. Mater Dolorosa is the antithesis of the outdoorsy brightness evident in the opening scenes of Les Gaz mortels. Mater Dolrosa was shot in and around Paris in the winter of 1916-17. Bleak northern light, forever dimmed by clouds, defines the exterior spaces. The house to which Pierre is exiled is grim in and of itself, but the bare trees and cold glinting pond outside make it doubly so. The climactic sequence, in which Gilles drives his wife through a rundown suburban landscape of dark woods and walled cemetery, is chilling in every sense. This is a cold world, in which passions smoulder in the shadowy interiors of domestic space.
Chiaroscuro lighting defines all the scenes of emotional intensity, from the rich – and faintly sinister – apartment of Claude Berliac to the curtained spaces of Gilles and Marthe. Gance’s compositions delight in great swathes of black, from dramatic drapes to silhouetted figures. Light floods across floors, illuminating patches of action or highlighting pale faces. It’s exquisite to look it, an aesthetic that wraps you up in its atmosphere.
It helps that Gance fills his drama with strange touches and rich images. Take the way that the romping Pierre, playing naked in a fish tank, comes to the window to see his parents. It’s another scene framed by a window, Marthe and Gilles half masked by the lace curtains. The child puts its hands up towards his parents, but can only paw at the lace and glass. It’s such a beautiful moment, and one that sems to carry some extra weight of meaning. It is as though Pierre’s parents don’t really exist: they are as unreachable as a projection, a painting framed by the window. (It’s almost an image from an Ingmar Bergman film.) The compelling oddness of the image unsettles the cosiness of the family so effectively, so completely, that you can totally understand the way Gilles willingly tries to destroy their relationship.
So too with the scene when Gilles deposits Pierre into the care of a nurse in a distant house. Convinced he is not the father of the child, he reaches for a mirror and stares at his image. We see the light gleaming on his face (yet again framed against a window), the cruelty in his eyes. When he reaches for his child, his hands clasp around Pierre’s throat. It’s an embrace and a threat. The same gesture recurs in Gance’s films, each time becoming more complex, more troubling. It’s there in Le Droit à la vie, in Veryal’s sinister embrace of the reluctant Andrée – a gesture of enforced attachment, of physical ownership and restraint. In J’accuse, Edith is raped by German soldiers and gives birth to Angèle, who is adopted by her lover Jean Diaz. This adoption of the half-German Angèle is absorbed into (and complicated by) the film’s narrative concern with revenge and forgiveness. After Édith shows Jean her child for the first time, there is an extraordinary moment when Jean half-protectively, half-threateningly holds Angèle’s throat. Looking into her eyes, he tells her: “I’ll teach you how to become French. Then you can find your own way to punish your father as he deserves.” In La Roue, Sisif clasps his son Elie – who is also his rival in love for Sisif’s adopted daughter Norma – around the neck with the same gesture, realizing that Norma has returned into their life. And in Napoléon, Bonaparte enacts this gesture in the scene with his adopted daughter Hortense, forcing her into a reluctant kiss. (Sadly, I could not make the screening of the 1932 Mater Dolorosa in the retrospective, but the same gesture is evidently in that film: one of its posters uses this subject.)
But to return to the silent Mater Dolorosa, I long to see the 1917 version on a big screen with live music. I love its imagery, its atmosphere, its wintriness, its strangeness. Perhaps the last word on Gance’s film should go to Colette. “Let us praise Mater Dolorosa”, she wrote in June 1917:
Let us praise Emmy Lynn, exhausted young mother, who surpasses everything she promised us in the theatre. Agree with me, since I take so much pleasure in it, that the action progresses in scenes lit with a rare richness – gilded whites, sooty and profound blacks. And my memory also retains certain sombre close ups in which the speaking, suppliant head of Emmy Lynn floats like a decapitated flower.
Between 29 August and 25 September 2024, the Cinémathèque française is hosting a retrospective of the works of Abel Gance. This programme presents (almost) all the surviving films and television work Gance made across his lengthy career. The retrospective features new restorations, as well as presentations by restorers and scholars. Time and geography permitting, I would have attended every screening. (This is not the first time in my life that I have longed to be Parisian.) However, across the weekend of 13-15 September I was able to make a targeted smash-and-grab raid on Gance’s early silent filmography. Across three days, I attended seven screenings and saw five feature films, two shorts, and a curated presentation of fragments. I will devote a post to each day of cinemagoing that I attended in the retrospective, and another to offer some concluding thoughts on the experience as a whole. (There might even be an anecdote or two.) So, without further delay, day one of my trip…
Friday 13 September 2024: Salle Georges Franju, 6.30pm
The first film I saw was Les Gaz mortels (1916), the earliest surviving multi-reel production in Gance’s filmography. In the spring of 1916, producer Louis Nalpas ordered Gance to head south with a small cast and crew and return to Paris a.s.a.p. with two films. According to Gance, he wrote the scripts on the train to Cassis and shot Les Gaz mortels and Barberousse simultaneously. (“Quite a business!” Gance recalled to Kevin Brownlow. “But it gave me a great facility. I really had to exert myself – it was like doing one’s Latin and Greek at the same time.”) The first film to be edited was Les Gaz mortels, released in Paris cinemas in September 1916. The name of Gance’s employers, Le Film d’Art, is a little misleading: much of the company’s output at this time was made for a commercial market. In wartime France, escapism jostled strangely alongside grim realities. For its initial release at the Pathé-Palace, Les Gaz mortels took its place in a programme that included episodes from the Pearl White serial The Exploits of Elaine (1914), the latest Rigadin comedy starring Charles Prince, and newsreels fresh from the frontline (La Presse, 1 September 1916). Given this context, the plot that Gance concocted for Les Gaz mortels while his train rattled the length of France is a pleasing mix of popular genres: it is at once a Western, war drama, suspense drama, melodrama, and race-to-the-rescue film…
The renowned French scientist Hopson (Henri Maillard) and his American assistant Mathus (Léon Mathot) work in Texas, where they are called to help Maud (Maud Richard) escape the clutches of Ted (Doriani), a drunkard who supplies the two researchers with snakes from Mexico. Maud is rescued and returns with the scientists to France, where a romance develops between her and Mathus. But war is declared, and Hopson’s son is killed by poison gas on the frontline, leaving Hopson’s grandson André (Jean Fleury) in the care of Edgar Ravely (Émile Keppens) and his wife Olga (Germaine Pelisse) – who hope to profit from their role. But Hopson takes André from his carers, who then join forces with Ted to seek revenge. Edgar and Ted sabotage the poison gas factory run by Hopson and Mathus, while Olga unleashes a poisonous snake into André’s bedroom…
Les Gaz mortels is familiar to me, as I have watched the DVD several times. (The film is also currently available via HENRI, the free online film selection from the Cinémathèque française.) However, it was an entirely unfamiliar experience on the big screen – and projected on 35mm. Unlike the entirely silent DVD issued by Gaumont, this Cinémathèque screening was accompanied by a pianist from the improvisation class of Jean-François Zygel. (One minor bugbear with the retrospective is that not all the performers are credited in the programme or online. I have tried to find the names of all the musicians but lack details for two of them – the first being the fellow who accompanied Les Gaz mortels.)
Les Gaz mortels is a compact, well-made, and rather fun drama. At just over an hour, it was Gance’s longest film to date, and it races along to a satisfying conclusion. It is also beautifully shot by Léonce-Henri Burel. I adore the opening scenes set around the Mexican-Texan border but filmed on the south coast of France around Cassis. It was clearly a location Gance loved. Many of his early films were shot amid these sun-soaked landscapes, and Burel’s photography makes the most of the landscapes, the seascapes, the gorgeous southern light.
Seeing the film projected on the big screen of the Salle Georges Franju was a particular pleasure. I spotted details I’d never noticed before, like the initials carved onto the branch of a tree overlooking the sea, where Maud pauses for a moment on her search for vipers. Indeed, Maud’s snake-hunt features some of the most beautiful, naturally back-lit scenes of the film. Her hair is transformed into a chaotic halo, like a white flame flurrying worriedly about her head as she runs in terror from the snake-infested scrubland. Then there is the scene of her wakeful night, spent longing for release from capture. The lighting is simply exquisite, giving this entirely incidental scene a curious poignancy. The character is contemplating her imagined future, and we contemplate the image of her at the open window – seduced for a few seconds by the same evening light, the same moment of calm.
But such moments of “calm” are rare in a film that deals primarily in seething skullduggery and dramatic spectacle. The film climaxes with complex intercutting between various spaces. The parallel race-to-the-rescue scenes cut not just between two different locations, but between multiple spaces within each location. The interiors where the snake is let loose boast some very striking close-ups (the snake sliding over the neck of a doll) and effective low-key lightning (Olga peering into the snake tank), just as the exteriors offer some travelling shots and intriguing views of the (unnamed) town and landscape being swathed in swirling banks of gas.
The performances are rather mixed in style. As the drunkard Ted, Doriani is as crudely villainous as anything from a serial quickie. The two bourgeois baddies, Émile Keppens and Germaine Pelisse, are more convincing (if two-dimensional). Maud Richard is charming enough, but her toothy grinning can be slightly gawkish. Henri Maillard is a little stiff as Hopson, while Léon Mathot is alternately winsome and bathetic as Mathus. Of course, Les Gaz mortels offers scant dramatic depth for the performers to plumb, but even so… I have mixed feelings about Mathot as an actor. He is a reliable, sometimes strong presence on screen, but when tasked with expressing sadness he has a certain default expression that strikes me as mawkish. It’s interesting that such an important early male star should be so vulnerable, so evidently sensitive, on screen, but I am not affected – not moved – by his performances. He signals sentiment while (for me) never quite giving the illusion of real depth. (Several years after his collaborations with Gance, Mathot is still the same mawkish presence in Jean Epstein’s L’Auberge rouge (1923) and Cœur fidèle (1923), films that are beautiful to look at and, alas, highly soporific.)
The 2006 restoration of Les Gaz mortels is based on a (jumbled) negative print that survived without titles. Thankfully, it was possible to reconstruct the film’s titles and original montage – though the print remains untinted, which may not be how audiences saw it in 1916. As a study by Aurore Lüscher explores, Gance (in his notebooks from 1916) refers to the film variously as “Le Brouillard Rouge”, “Le Brouillard de Mort”, and “Le Brouillard sur la ville”. The title “Red Fog” makes me wonder if Gance had a colour-scheme in mind to heighten the climactic images of fire and gas stand out visually. (There are also nighttime scenes that could be clarified by some blue.) This reservation aside, the film looks as good as it can, and it was a great pleasure to see projected.
Friday 13 September 2024: Salle Georges Franju, 8.15pm
As soon as the first screening ended, so the queue began for the next. After a few minutes’ respite to chew some bread and gulp down water, we were let back into the Salle Georges Franju for La Dixième symphonie (1918). I have seen this film several times before, but the new restoration shown at the retrospective was nothing short of a revelation. The print that served as the basis of the restoration was exquisitely tinted and toned, a beautiful example of how elaborate and enriching contemporary prints could (and can) look. In his introduction to the film, Hervé Pichard explained that the restoration retained the original title cards between “parts” giving notice to spectators of a short break while the reels were changed. As Pichard put it, retaining these titles were a mark of respect for the original celluloid (and its exhibition context). A nice touch, given that we were watching the film via a DCP.
La Dixième symphonie is both a vivid melodrama and an ambitious foray into new expressive possibilities. Eve Dinant (Emmy Lynn) marries the widowed composer Enric Damor (Séverin-Mars) and adopts his daughter, Claire (Elizabeth Nizan). The latter is pursued by the exploitative Fred Ryce (Jean Toulout), who is also blackmailing Eve over her involvement with the death of his sister. Eve’s attempts to prevent Claire’s marriage are misinterpreted by Enric, who thinks she is having an affair. He finds solace in music, composing a symphony that expresses his sorrow and its transformation. The drama is resolved when the apparent rivals in love, Eve and Claire, confront Ryce and reveal the truth to Enric.
If this plot is like something out of D’Annunzio (whom Gance had met and admired), then the décor is as lush as the Italian’s prose. It looks utterly sumptuous. Emmy Lynn’s costumes are gorgeous, and everything on screen has such depth and detail that you felt as though you could reach out and feel the fabrics, the furs, the furniture, the sculpture. Fred’s lair is decked in decadent clutter: animal skins strewn over steps, throws and rugs galore, glass screens, weird ferns, cabinets with secret compartments, and “the god with golden eyes” – an oriental statue – that overlooks the ensemble. There are shadowy recesses, curtained partitions, screened-off niches – and all treated with exquisite chiaroscuro lighting and rich tinting and toning. Outside, the exteriors are just as gorgeous. My god Burel was a great cameraman! Every leaf, every blade of grass is practically three-dimensional. This is a truly stunning-looking film.
But it’s not just how good it all looks. The drama is marvellous. I love how it opens in medias res with a body on the steps, with the dog trampling across the room in panic, with the flustered Eve immediately falling into Fred’s sinister influence. And I love that the comedic character – the Marquis Groix Saint-Blaise (André Lefaur), Claire’s absurd older suitor – got real laughs in the cinema, and functioned both to puncture the air of preciousness the film might otherwise exude and to heighten the drama of the romantic entanglements. Most of all, I loved how much bite there is in every twist and turn of the narrative. Gance finds ways of making us gasp or chuckle, of drawing attention to telling details, of making these characters more than just stock villains, victims, types. I’d forgotten how fabulously slimy and sinister Jean Toulout’s character is, with his creepy haircut and louche tastes. I’d forgotten, in particular, how he looks right into the camera for a moment before shooting himself at the end of the film: with an almost triumphant smile, he defies us not to be surprised, even impressed, by his final act of will.
There are some superb close-ups, and having only experienced the film via small-screens I was unprepared for how emotionally effective these were. I had never properly seen the tears on Damor’s face; seeing them was a kind of revelation, as though the film was finally able to show me the depth of its feeling. I finally believed in Damor as a man as well as an artist, and the whole drama just clicked into place. From the outset, the sheer visual quality of the film revealed such great depth of detail to the faces that I was moved as never before. I’d always loved Emmy Lynn in this film, but it was Séverin-Mars’s performance that really struck me. He always has such intensity on screen, but he can sometimes seem to give a little too much. But in La Dixième symphonie he gets it just right: there is the right balance of emotional give-and-take, of guarding and revealing feeling. After ninety minutes of the drama, I found Damor’s final words to his wife – “Eve, I love you infinitely” – extraordinarily moving. It was not the only scene in which I found myself crying.
I must also credit much of the success of this screening to the music written by Benjamin Moussay and performed on piano (Moussay), violin (Frédéric Norel), and trumpet (Csaba Palotaï). The original score to La Dixième symphonie, cited in the opening credit sequence, was written by Michel-Maurice Lévy. So far as is known, this is lost. However, the very opening image of the film is the full-page score of the titular “Tenth Symphony”, so some of the most important music cue survives thanks to the celluloid itself. For its release on VHS, the 1986 restoration by Bambi Ballard was accompanied by an orchestral score by Amaury du Closel. The music is very nice, but I never felt it really matched the film scene by scene. It was too distant from the images, and thus never really got to grips with the emotional drama. By contrast, Moussay’s score for the 2024 screening was superbly judged. It supports the film at every stage, providing a constant melodic counterpoint to the images on screen. The narrative has a constant sense of impetus and development, of emotional depth and dramatic clarity. The arrangement for trio is beautifully balanced. The use of the trumpet provides extra sonic depth to the musical texture but is used both sparingly and sensitively.
For the central performance of Damor’s symphony on screen, Moussay matches the film’s own visual instrumentation: piano and violin. Together, they offered a “symphony” that was both harmonically in touch with Beethoven while also being distinct enough to seem new: the ideal combination for this sequence. The sequence itself, in which the music is rendered visual through visions of superimposed dances (by Ariane Hugon), complete with masking and hand-coloured details, is the most well-known of the film. It’s certainly avant-garde as a cinematic conceit, though I’ve always felt that it’s couched in conventional imagery. But Gance recognizes that something needs to happen here for the point and import of Damor’s symphony to have significance. This visual music breaks out of the film, and the way Gance intercuts these visions with the enraptured expressions of the spectators creates the impression of a collective hallucination. (Much as the return of the dead at the end of J’accuse is a kind of collective hallucination.) It is this dramatic handling of the vision, more than the aesthetics of the vision itself, that is really interesting – and effective.
Though this symphony worked superbly, the scene that moved me most was earlier. When Damor discovers Eve’s supposed affair, he sits (almost falls) at the piano and his fist strikes the keyboard. In the Salle Franju screening, Moussay’s own hand struck the keyboard at precisely this moment. All the instruments had ceased playing a few moments earlier, so the piano’s single, despairing chord resonated in the total silence of the cinema. The chord died away until Damor, on screen, began feeling out a melody. Moussay, in the cinema, felt out this same melody, matching his own strokes of the keyboard to the figure on screen. It was a perfect moment. Two hands striking the same chord, a hundred years apart; two musicians, a hundred years apart, feeling out the same melody. The sense of synchronicity was both uncannily powerful and deeply moving. Live music became an act of communication, a literal reaching out of the hands to touch and revive the past. But it was also touching because of the context of the drama, for in this scene Damor feels entirely alone – deprived of the woman he loves – until he sits at the piano. Music is his solace, and he finds it not merely on screen but in the act of a live musician revivifying his creation. It’s an instance of connection, of time transcended, that only live silent cinema can provide. A truly beautiful moment.
Almost as touching was the last shot of the film. After the image of Enric and Eve has faded to black, Gance himself appears under his name. This visual credit has always delighted me, but I’ve never experienced it in the cinema before. On Friday, I watched Gance turn to face the camera and smile. The audience broke into a great wave of applause just as Gance mouthed his thanks to us and smiled again. I can’t tell you how pleasing and moving this moment was: it was another instance of communication across a century of time. After seeing the creation of Damor’s symphony, we applaud the creator of La Dixième symphonie. A perfect end to a perfect screening. Bravo!
Day 10 already! (To be fair, it was about ten days ago now.) Our final film from Bonn comes from France, and it’s one that I confess to have had on my shelf for three years, unwrapped and unwatched. I suppose one of the functions of a festival is chivvy you to see things you’ve never quite got round to watching at home. (Even if, thanks to the miracle of streaming, I am still watching it at home…)
La femme et le pantin (1929; Fr.; Jacques de Baroncelli)
The film is one of several famous, and not-so-famous, adaptations of Pierre Louÿs’ eponymous novel (1898). The plot is inspired by a Goya painting (“El pelele”, 1791-92) of four women capriciously throwing a man-size doll into the air. In the film’s opening scene, we see this painting come to life. After this little prelude, we are introduced to Don Mateo (Raymond Destac), a Don Juan-ish figure “known throughout Spain”, who is travelling by train when he meets Conchita (Conchita Montenegro). She catches his eye when she fights with another woman and Mateo helps separate them. Months later, the pair meet again at a party thrown by Don Mateo at his “palace” in Seville. Conchita flirts with him and invites him to find her at home with her mother. Mateo does so, tries it on, is rejected – and then invited back another time. He falls in love but is jealous. He wins favour with Conchita’s mother by giving her money, saying he will marry Conchita. However, Conchita sees the money changing hands and tells him never to come again. Mateo tries to distract himself from the memory of Conchita, but their paths cross again in Conchita’s new home in Seville. She tells Mateo that she loves him, and he swears by the Madonna that he will never leave her. But no sooner are these words spoken than a rival suitor turns up, the very man who made Mateo jealous before. Another rift, another reconciliation. Conchita arrives chez Mateo and he shows her around (she wants to see the bedroom first). But then she leaves him a note saying that he doesn’t love her so she’s leaving. Mateo goes travelling, arriving in Cadiz – which is where Conchita happens to be, along with her rival suitor. Mateo watches her dance, then Conchita approaches and flirts. He threatens to kill her, and she laughs him off, telling him that she no longer loves him. But a note of tenderness suggests that she may still have feelings. It’s enough for Mateo to hope once more. But soon he realizes that she is performing a naked dance for select clients upstairs. He watches, furious and entranced, from the window – but then he bursts in, chases out the clients, and threatens Conchita. Once again, she accuses him of not really loving her. She demands that he make her rich, to be “worthy” of him. So they get engaged and he smothers her with finery. He buys her a palace and she wishes to be the first to enter to receive him. But when he arrives at midnight, she shows off her finery through the bars of the gate – and then, laughing, tells Mateo to leave. “You’re not worthy to kiss my foot!” Mateo claws at the gate, his hands bleeding, until he sees Conchita embrace another, younger, man. She tells him that this man is worthless, but she adores him. Mateo retreats to a dance hall. The old rival turns up and boasts of the money Conchita gave him. But it turns out that the “rival” is already engaged, and he was being used by Conchita to make Mateo jealous. “All Seville is laughing at you!” Conchita turns up again, flirting, laughing, contemptuous. Mateo knocks her down, but she draws a knife. He hits her repeatedly. She laughs, says she’s sorry, says she’s his. A year later, at the Seville cabaret. Mateo reports that his happiness lasted two weeks, that Conchita was “a devil” and he left her six months ago. But there she is again, dancing. He sends her a note, saying he forgives her and will kiss her feet. She gives the note to her new suitor. Mateo’s gesture of fury dissolves into that of Goya’s doll. The doll is thrown, then plummets to earth in a heap. FIN.
At the end of my teens, Pierre Louÿs seemed very exotic and risqué. I encountered him first through Claude Debussy’s various adaptations of his 1894 collection Les Chansons de Bilitis (composed 1897-1914). To someone who had led a sheltered life in the countryside, Louÿs’ louche, sensual work was at first appealing – and faintly sinister. The 1920s edition of his complete works that I bought was replete with lurid art deco illustrations and an aura of faded decadence. Faced with this veritable brick of a book, I soon realized that the contents were not my cup of tea. I trudged through a chunk of it, but eventually gave up. It sat on respective generations of shelving before I sold it, as though to cleanse myself of Louÿs. Since then, though never consciously, I’ve avoided all other incarnations of his work: from songs (Charles Koechlin) and opera (Arthur Honegger) to cinema. Though there have been several adaptations of La femme et le pantin, Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) and Luis Buñuel’s Cet obscur objet du désir (1977) are famous independent of their literary source. I confess that I’ve never been particularly drawn to either (in terms of stardom) Marlene Dietrich or (in terms of mid-twentieth century European auteurs) Buñuel, which I’m sure condemns me for all eternity in the eyes of many. (I think the sheer fact of their centrality to the cinematic canon lessened my interest. As someone who always wants to write about what they love, I always feel put off by stars or directors who have already accumulated generations of literature. I never feel at home in a crowd.) Nevertheless, I preface my comments on Baroncelli’s film by this admission because it means that I come to La femme et le pantin with eyes undazzled by later adaptations. It was even with a faintly guilty sense of familiarity that I recognized in this film both the old attractions and the old frustrations of its source material. I realize how odd it sounds for someone my age (still, just, under 40) to feel more familiar with Pierre Louÿs than with Luis Buñuel, but such is my bizarre cultural pedigree.
So, the film. Firstly, it looks sumptuous. The opening exteriors of the train crossing the snowy mountains are stunning, and there are some gorgeous glimpses of Seville and the Spanish coast. But the rest of the film is overwhelmingly set within complex interior spaces. Baroncelli goes to great lengths to provide windows, doors, grilles, bars, ironwork, glasswork to frame (and frustrate) Mateo in his encounters with Conchita. His two “palaces” offer fantastical décor, replete with fountains outside (a crucial motif, as Conchita literally and figuratively washes her hands) and luxurious dens within. It all looks like some fabulous art deco fantasy, with endless open halls, vanishing corridors, skin-lined floors, tapestry-lined walls, Moorish columns and arches… The first party we see at his palace features the women wearing Velasquez-inspired dresses, which are extraordinarily eye-catching. Yes, indeed, this is an exquisitely mounted film. The photography, too, is absolutely superb. The lighting is impeccable, the shadows and framing and compositions are incredible – just going through the film again to take some captures, I find myself purring over all the beautiful images.
The two stars of La femme et le pantin were unfamiliar to me, and glancing at their filmographies neither seems to have featured in too many well-known productions – or had especially extended screen careers. Appearing as her namesake, I found Conchita Montenegro very appealing. She’s as charming, lithe, and sensuous as one could wish for – and quick to smile or laugh or change her mood and slip away from one’s grasp. If there are very few moments of empathy or emotion in her performance, it’s because that’s what her character dictates. I did not, ultimately, warm to her because I’m not meant to – she is (per Buñuel’s later title) that obscure object of desire. As for Raymond Destac, I likewise admired him in a somewhat distant way. Like Conchita, Don Mateo is an opaque character. We’re not meant to like him, he’s a kind of cipher for the masculine desire to conquer and possess. He’s perfectly good, but he has absolutely no depth. The trouble is, he’s not even interesting as an opacity or a surface. He fulfils his dramatic function admirably. Am I damning with faint praise? I don’t mean to, but this is precisely the kind of film that has never appealed to me. (See my previous efforts to like the films of Marcel L’Herbier.) La femme et le pantin is a lucid dream, or nightmare, in which nothing can be attained or achieved. I recall again those pages of Pierre Louÿs. Shady narrators telling stories of ungraspable women in luxurious, sinister nocturnal haunts. Well-appointed interiors and frustrated desires… Like I said, not my cup of tea.
Oh dear, oh dear, is this all I have to say? Am I simply failing as a critic? As an exercise in controlled style, I gladly acknowledge that La femme et le pantin is an exceedingly good film. Everything about it works. I could see and understand what it was doing and why, but at nearly two hours it’s quite a sustained exercise in disappointment. There are only so many variations on the theme of “man stands in ornate mise-en-scène while being unable to access woman” that I found interesting. The narrative is deliberately repetitive and inconclusive. I suppose the point of it all – and the novelty – is that the spectator is as curiously unsatisfied as the male protagonist within the film. The story is essentially that of Carmen, but without the literal and symbolic penetration of the woman at the end – the final, fatal stabbing that ends the original story, together with Bizet’s opera and the multiple film versions. (I write about Ernst Lubitsch’s adaptation of 1918 here.) Louÿs’ version of this story removes all the dirt and sweat, distinguishing itself by an aura of exquisite refinement and controlled perversity. So too with Baroncelli’s film. It’s cool, detached, stylishly aloof. No doubt it is simply my own taste that sits at odds with the film. Just as I wearied of page after page of exquisitely elusive suggestiveness with Louÿs, so did I ultimately with Baroncelli’s highly competent adaptation.
Finally, a word on the restoration of La femme et le pantin, which was undertaken by the Fondation Jerome Seydoux-Pathé in 2020 – and released on DVD/Blu-ray in 2021. The music for the Bonn presentation of La femme et le pantin was the original score by Edmond Lavagne, Georges van Parys, and Philippe Parès, arranged and orchestrated (for a small ensemble) by Günter A. Buchwald. (Thankfully, this same score is also presented on the DVD/Blu-ray.) It was a lovely, elegant, Spanish-inflected score, which follows the rhythm of the film fluently and convincingly. In a curious way, its charm and easy functionality suited the cool tone of the film. I wonder what the original composers made of the film’s tone, and to what extent they consulted Baroncelli. I could easily imagine something sharper and crueller being composed, especially for a full orchestra, which would have been a more fully engaged (more interpretive, interventionist) accompaniment.
Since seeing this restoration, I have also tracked down a previous restoration by Pathé Télévision from 1997, which was broadcast on ARTE and released on DVD in France as an extra on an old edition of Cet obscur objet du désir. This has a score by Marco Dalpane for similar forces to those used by Lavagne/Parys/Parès, and with a very similar language and tone. Title font aside, the 1997 and 2020 restorations are virtually identical – save for one significant difference. The montage of Conchita’s naked dance sequence is slightly more elaborate in the 1997 restoration, and – most crucially – climaxes with a shot that appears only briefly in the 2020 restoration. In the 1997 restoration, Conchita appears superimposed within a champagne bottle, turning around and showing her entire body (i.e. front-on) to the viewer. Having the unreachable form of her naked body appear in the bottle seems to me a much more satisfactory climax (though both “satisfactory” and “climax” are, of course, the opposite of what the vision represents for the on-screen spectators) than in the 2020 restoration. How odd that the shot should be cut, and the montage of the sequence subtly different. The 2020 restoration credits cite “an original nitrate negative” in the Fondation Jerome Seydoux-Pathé collection, but the status of this print in relation to the film’s release history is (to me, anyway) unclear.
Despite this question of completeness (or censorship), this is indeed a beautiful restoration with excellent music. My own reservations about the film should not prevent anyone tracking down the film on home media. This sumptuous, cold, and cruel film isn’t my cup of tea,* but it might be yours.
Paul Cuff
* I see that I have used this phrase three times, which is a failure of linguistic imagination. It’s also misleading, since I don’t even drink tea.
Days 8 and 9 and… oh, well we have a problem. Two problems, actually. One is the fault of my past, the other the fault of my present. By way of explanation, let me detail what films were seen by the good folk in Bonn – but not by me…
Day 8: Der Berg des Schicksals (1924; Ger.; Arnold Fanck)
Anyone who does the festival circuit each year must end up encountering the same new restorations in multiple line-ups. Even if you are, like me, limited to online festivals, this can still happen. A case in point is Der Berg des Schicksals. I first saw this film in August 2022 via the (streamed) Ufa Filmnächte that year, complete with orchestral score by Florian C. Reithner, performed by the Metropolis Orchestra Berlin. It was a superb presentation with music that fitted the scale, ambition, and scope of Fanck’s film. Lo and behold, I saw it again in October 2023 as part of the (online) Pordenone festival. On that occasion, the film was shown (both in live and streamed formats) with a solo piano accompaniment. I was glad to see the film in better quality than in the version streamed in 2022, but sad that the marvellous orchestral score was not part of the presentation. Come the Stummfilmtage Bonn in 2024, here once more is Der Berg des Schicksals. As at Pordenone, this live/online presentation is not performed with the orchestral score but with piano accompaniment – this time via Neil Brand. Having seen the restoration in both good visual and audio quality (sadly not on the same occasion), I decided I would save my time and skip this film. I know, I know – my first post for the festival even said you (that is, I) must always rewatch a masterpiece when possible. But I miss the orchestral score, and I was already behind schedule. If I was attending in person, this is a film that I would gladly encounter again and again: I would love to see it on the big screen, regardless of accompaniment. But at home, I’m just not interested enough to watch this epic film on a small screen without orchestra. I can only apologize for the snobbery and lack of dedication this attitude represents.
Day 9: Shooting Stars (1928; UK; Anthony Asquith/A.V. Bramble)
Missing Day 8’s film was the fault of past choices, but missing Day 9’s film was the fault of present circumstances. In all honesty, I would possibly have skipped watching Shooting Stars as well. Not that I don’t like the film, but I had seen the film before and my schedule was already overloaded by the time I got to Day 9. However, the choice was taken out of my hands when I read the notice on the Stummfilmtage Bonn streaming page. For legal reasons, this film would be available only to audiences watching (and, I presume, streaming) in Germany. How peculiar. There was no stated reason for this legal restriction, so I’m left to wonder if it was to do with the music or the film itself. (If anyone reading this happens to know the answer, do comment and let me know.) The music that accompanied the BFI DVD/Blu-ray edition of 2016 was by John Altman and I recall it being excellent. But I would have been curious to hear the music performed for the Bonn screening by Meg Morley and Frank Bokius. As it stands, I have neither seen the film nor heard the music. Oh well.
I can promise you that I have indeed seen the content of Day 10 – and I will post my piece about it tomorrow…
Day 7 and we’re off to Portugal for a heady blend of documentary and drama. As is often the case, the films that I’ve not heard of by directors I’ve not encountered turn out to be the best…
Maria do Mar (1930; Pt.; Leitão de Barros)
So then, the plot. Part 1 establishes place (Nazaré and its beach) and characters: Falacha, skipper of the boat Maria do Mar; his wife and his daughter Maria (named after the boat); Ilheu and his wife Aurelia (known as “Ilhôa”) and their son Manuel; the fishermen “Peru” (“the Turkey”) and “Lacraio” (“Scorpio”). Part 2 starts with news that the sea has broken the lines to the nets. Falacha decides his crew must set out in dangerous conditions. The local population gathers on the shore to urge them back, but it is too late: the Maria do Mar is wrecked. Part 3 reveals that Falacha is the sole survivor. He is dragged from the waves but then set upon by the families of the lost crew: they blame him for their unnecessary deaths. He goes to pray, but the widows pursue him: “God will never forgive you!” In despair, Falacha walks into the sea and drowns himself. In Part 4, Maria is now working in the fields and sells her produce in the market of Leira. Thanks to his mother’s intervention, Manuel avoids being conscripted and goes to celebrate with his friends. In Part 5, Maria and her friends from the fields encounter Manuel and his friends on the beach. Maria gets into trouble while swimming, but Manuel rescues her. The incident enflames local tensions, with Ilhôa clashing with Falacha’s widow. Ilhôa consults Patareca, a midwife conversant in witchcraft who places a “curse” on her rival’s doorstep. Falacha’s widow and Ilhôa fight in the street, only to be separated by Manuel and Maria. Part 6 sees Maria defy her mother’s ban and thank Manuel. They meet again, and then every day. Part 7, and the lovers marry. Manuel takes Maria home, but his mother ignores her. “She is the daughter of the man who killed your father! You can keep her – I’m leaving!” In Part 8, Maria’s mother in turn ejects the lovers. They find their own place and transform it into a home. Whereupon, in Part 9, Maria gives birth to a girl. Months later, when both parents are working, the infant is attacked by a rabid dog. Ilhôa refuses to care for it, as does Maria’s mother. At the same time, a girl of the same age is being buried, and the two rivals see the tiny casket being borne past them. Manuel and Maria rush home to find their mothers and all their neighbours gathered in prayer around the cot. The child was not harmed, and a “miracle” of reconciliation takes place. FIM.
This was a superb film. A masterpiece, in fact. It’s a document of a time and a place, and of a people – and it’s a romance, a fable, a beautiful fiction. Filmed entirely on location and featuring numerous extras drawn from the local population, this was an absolute joy to watch. It has a documentary-like sense of life and movement, plenty of handheld camerawork, enhanced with some dynamic editing – from overlapping dissolves to rapid cutting. The opening shots of the town and sea are hypnotically beautiful. I loved seeing the town and the beach, the physical effort of fishing, the manual labour of pulling in the boat, the sweat and sun-darkened skin of the people. When Falacha’s boat heads out into the storm, there are stunning shots of locals, all dressed in black, standing on the cliffs. And when the rescue mission begins, there is an extreme long shot, looking down at the paths toward the beach. The inhabitants of Nazaré are tiny specks against the spectacle of coast and sea. We see them pouring down the hillside, rushing along the beaches, dark silhouettes against the vast white waves.
But Maria do Mar plants us right in the middle of the population, not just at a distance. During the day of the fiestas, for example, we mingle among the crowds for the fireworks, dances, bullfighting. Though the film boasts some sequences of complex montage, here there is a spontaneity to the way the cameras move among the crowd. Barros isn’t afraid to record the shadows cast by the camera or crew, just as he allows some of the children to walk right up to the camera and grin into the lens. Here, and throughout, it’s the faces that are most striking. Ordinary working people, young and old, populate the film – you can read the lives in their clothing, on their faces.
The central cast – mostly professional actors – are plunged into a sea of reality. Such is the lack of artifice in the costuming and make-up that the actors hardly resemble actors. And the way they interact with each other strikes me as being true to life, surprisingly so. For example, when Falacha observes that his daughter “is a woman now”, he touches her breasts and gives her a playful flick around the cheeks, asking her if she has a boyfriend. It’s a startling moment but has the potency of a particular time and place. (I hesitate to say “custom”, but “culture” might fit the behaviour – the way the men touch the women, both in familial and familiar terms.) It also lends the tragedy an air of reality. I believed, absolutely, in the way Falacha prays for forgiveness – and in the furious reaction of the grieving widows – and in the way Falacha kills himself. The latter scene is like something out of ancient tragedy, of myth. Falacha walks towards the sea as his wife and daughter try to grab hold of him by the legs. He wrenches free, the camera hurls itself at the women, screaming, lying in the sand, imploring, and then watches Falacha walk into the surf. The whole town watches. It’s a grim spectacle. No-one stops him, yet everyone grieves – seems to look on in awe at the gesture, at the sacrifice. It’s like a scene from Greek tragedy.
It’s quite something that a film that starts like this can turn into a romance, or that a romance can burgeon from this kind of despair – and that it does so organically, realistically. It helps that the two leads, Maria and Manuel, are such naturalistic, unpretentious performers. They are very striking on screen, without any sense of artificiality – the aesthetic whiff of stardom. The sequence in which they meet is extraordinary. Already the women have stripped off to their underlayer of plain linen skirts and top, while the men have rolled up their trousers and jettisoned their tops. In the women’s boat, the camera emphasizes the labour of rowing while also drawing attention to the sweat and bared skin of the rowers. When Manuel rescues Maria, the sense of danger quickly becomes erotic. He is half naked, and her top is half torn away, by the time he carries her out of the water. The film eroticizes them equally, perhaps him a little more – for the camera lingers on his wet, glistening torso as he pants. Their first encounter is both a brush with death and a kind of physical consummation. It points to the violence that their relationship triggers between their respective mothers, and is even reflected in their domestic life. Their first argument ends with Manuel giving Maria a slap: Manuel clearly embodies the way we have seen other men treat their women. But all their scenes together have a kind of physicality, a touchiness, that builds a strong sense of their relationship. Their kisses are real, their embraces strong. We see Manuel pull down Maria’s top to plant a long kiss on her back – and their final, lingering kiss at the end of the film sets the seal on this physical closeness.
The music, by Stephen Horne (piano, accordion, flute) and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry (harp) was the most striking thus far among the streamed films from Bonn. I love the sonorities of the harp, the way it can produce such a range of textures and tones. Working in the company of the other (solo) instruments, it produced a lovely soundworld – evocative, dramatic, touching. The film was, it seems, originally released with a synchronized soundtrack, since the opening credits mention the two featured songs being available for purchase via Columbia records. I wonder if that version survives? Not that I have much fondness for synchronized soundtracks of this period, but I’d be curious what kind of tone it struck.
A final word on the restoration of Maria do Mar, which was completed by the Cinemateca Portuguesa in 2000 – and subsequently digitized. The print was damaged in placed in places but looked very good overall. However, I did think that it was transferred here at slightly too slow a speed. (I have seen online databases give this same 2000 restoration a shorter runtime.) Regardless of this slight reservation, this was a very pleasing film to watch – just the kind of wonderful discovery you hope to make at a festival. I’d love to see more by the same director…
The Realm of Silence 