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…
Day 6 and a trip to Sweden for what I might call a drama of the conscience. Everything in this production is as might be expected from the “Golden era” of Swedish cinema. Superb photography? Check. Naturalistic performances? Check. Drama with strong moral centre? Check. Overall satisfaction? Read on…
Thora van Deken (1920; Swe.; John W. Brunius)
Let’s get straight to the plot. Divorcee Thora van Deken (Pauline Brunius) returns to her dying ex-husband Niels Engelsoft (Hugo Björne). Niels’s will provides a generous annuity for his lawyers, as well as the establishment of a nursing home for women to be run by the brother of his deceased fiancée, Sofie. What it doesn’t provide for is Esther (Jessie Wessel), the daughter of Niels and Thora. Thora demands that Niels cater for Esther, but Niels says that Thora is as embittered and hateful as ever. Thora recalls her mother being “tormented to death” by her father, and how Niels himself was a spoiled youth. Their romance is told in brief flashback: revealing how Niels’s affections were entirely for Esther and not her mother, who was trying to teach their child to look after herself; how Niels betrayed Thora with Sofie (Ellen Dall) at a party; how Esther was the one thing that Thora asked to be hers. As Niels lies dying, Thora steals the will. After the funeral, Thora lies about the will being voluntarily withdrawn and has taken charge of the estate, much to the disgruntlement of the locals and the lawyers. She receives threatening letters, calling her a murderer. Pastor Bjerring (Gösta Ekman), who is in love with Esther, tries to placate Thora’s anger with the world. But Thora denies the law of God, saying there is only the law of the heart: for her, God is dead. Thora secretly adds a postscript to the stolen will, saying that after her death Esther will understand the wickedness of Niels and her own actions to rectify his injustice. Justice Sidenius visits. He recalls his childhood friendship with Thora, and his unspoken love. He warns her of the moves to launch an official investigation, so Thora agrees to a hearing and lies under oath – despite the thought of being damned in the eyes of God. Meanwhile, Bjerring weighs up his fondness for Esther with his desire to join a mission in Asia. Seeing this burgeoning romance, Thora secretly sends the funds necessary for his departure to Asia. When Esther chooses Bjerring over her mother, Thora renounces Esther – who then elopes with Bjerring. In despair, and prematurely ageing with grief, Thora confesses her crime to Sidenius. As Esther and Bjerring sail for the east, Thora prepares to face the consequences. END.
This film belongs to Pauline Brunius (wife of the director), who is simply superb. This is one of the finest, most convincing, and most perfectly judged screen performances you could hope to see. There is such immense depth of emotion to the slightest gesture or move of the eyes. Nothing is overplayed, but everything is crystal clear. A remarkable performance around which the entire film revolves. If none of the other actors are quite on the same level, all are more than capable. There is great sincerity in all the main players and the drama carries tremendous conviction through their combined efforts.
The whole film looks superb in that way that Swedish films of this period tend to: locations are perfectly chosen and perfectly photographed. The warmth and depth and texture of every scene is aided by the tinting, which enhances the mood of the film throughout. This film looks beautiful – and is technically impeccable – in a way that is entirely unshowy. There is some beautiful low-key lighting, as well as some gorgeous early morning exteriors, but even these most (technically) impressive moments are there for a dramatic purpose: enhancing the feeling of the scene. Everything is where it should be, everything contributes to mood and drama.
So how do I feel about the drama itself? (Perhaps this is another way of asking why I didn’t love the film more than I did.) I have pondered this for a while and have rewritten the remaining paragraphs twice over. My only reason is the tone of the narrative and the way it treats Thora. She is by far the most interesting and sympathetic character in the film. She has been wronged by her ex-husband, yet despite this everyone in the community (apart from the lovelorn Sidenius) gang up against her. Though the film clearly puts us – to a degree – on her side, I am unsure if the moral “lesson” of the film remains that she deserves punishment, and her conscience must condemn her. Films can and do find ways of mobilizing our sympathy towards transgressive women, even if the narratives punish them. Is that the case here?
I am curious to know how contemporaries took the tone of religiosity. When Thora prepares to perjure herself under oath, the repeated cutaways to the passage in the Bible about being judged and condemned by God lay on the consequences pretty thick, so when Thora has a vision of her hand being withered by divine wrath it’s genuinely horrifying. Of course, she lies anyway – but are we invited to admire the bravery of her decision to favour her daughter (and herself), or to condemn her actions? This is complicated by how much sympathy we might have for the plight of Thora’s daughter, who wants to run away from her (transgressive) mother. The fact that Esther runs away with a pastor seems to underline the fact that Thora is not on the right side of the moral code. When Thora quite rightly asks why the pastor is willing to risk his life and that of Esther to join a mission he knows is riddled with malaria, the pastor replies: “God will protect me”. How are we meant to feel about this statement? To me, over a hundred years later, it smacks of absurd arrogance and a disregard for his or Esther’s safety. But does the film invite even the possibility of a critical attitude toward the pastor? He is otherwise a very sympathetic character, trying to find a way of understanding Thora. He doesn’t even contradict her when she tells him to his face that God doesn’t exist – though his later statement of belief in divine protection is an implicit counter to Thora. How far does the film (together with Esther) internalize the logic that compels Thora to wrathful judgement? I longed for the film to deliberately court my outrage over Thora’s mistreatment, only to give her some kind of victory at the end. Does the film agree – tacitly if not explicitly – that Thora should be punished, and the daughter and pastor should be free to run away together? Does the film share the pastor’s view that the lovers will find happiness in Asia, and that they won’t succumb to the disease that struck down his predecessors?
Having written the above, I wonder if I’m not asking unnecessary, if not impossible, questions of the film. After all, the existence of my own attitude – my scepticism – is evidence that one can read, or desire to read, Thora van Deken contrary to its apparent religious moralism. But it’s always possible to do so, with or without the intentions of the film. Other than the fact of Pauline Brunius’s performance, there is no reason to side with her. Is her performance enough to persuade an audience (contemporary or otherwise) that the film is a criticism of the society that condemns her? I’m not sure. If this were a film by Victor Sjöström, for example, I think there would be a clearer sense of siding with Thora – and a clearer indication that she was the victim, not the perpetrator, of injustice. Think of the astonishing power of Sjöström’s Trädgårdsmästaren (1912), for example, or Ingeborg Holm (1913), which famously provoked such outrage that the law was changed in favour of women’s legal power. In these, or in something much later like The Scarlet Letter (1926), it’s evident – but never crude – that the film is on the side of the woman wronged, and that the societies that condemn her are at fault. All these films are more melodramatic than Thora van Deken, which perhaps allows them more freedom to signal their (feminist) sympathies. But what is the attitude of the film – of John W. Brunius – towards Thora? I’m not sure. Perhaps this ambiguity (neutrality, even) makes it successful, but it left me oddly unsatisfied. I suppose what was missing was tears – mine or Thora’s. The tension was so restrained, the film never quite let go – and so nor did I. If I had cried, I might have more confidence in the emotional tenor of the film – and thus its sympathies.
These final paragraphs have been written with the benefit of a night’s sleep. I actually think I dreamt about the film, which proves that it rather got under my skin – even into my brain. I have now gone through it again to take some image captures, and I find it even more beautiful to look at. And every shot of Pauline Brunius – and I do mean every shot – reveals an extraordinary intensity in her performance. I think it absolutely remarkable that she maintains such restraint and yet reveals so much depth of feeling, of psychology, of a character’s past and inner life. Every time she appears on screen, she instantly draws your eye – I really couldn’t stop looking at her. Reading what I wrote yesterday, I find myself more convinced of the film’s sympathy towards Thora. If the film offers us no evidence that it condones her actions, it offers constant evidence for Thora’s motivation – and Pauline Brunius’s performance absolutely demands that we see the world from her perspective. This does not mean we support her actions, but we know why she acted as she did. Only the mob and the (quite unsympathetically portrayed) lawyers actively hate her, and we are clearly not on their side.
At the end of the film, Thora is ready to mount into the carriage to be taken to face charges. As she steps forward, she stumbles, then straightens herself. There is a cut to a medium shot. We see her hand raised to her chest. Is she about to grip her heart? No, not quite. As her hand approaches her heart, she clenches it into a fist. Her face tenses, almost hardens. She is not courting sympathy but summoning her inner strength just to stand here. Thora stares past us – far past us – and into a kind of imagined distance. The iris slowly closes in on her face, the darkness encroaching, about to swallow her. How can we not feel for her, admire her? And when the film cuts to the final shot of the steamship bearing Esther and Bjerring on board, it is surely far from a happy ending. A powerful film, an extraordinary performance, and much food for thought.
Day 5 of the Bonn festival takes us to Germany, and an exploration of jealousy and marital strife. Described by its opening titles as “A tragicomedy between man and woman”, I was expecting – well, I suppose I was expecting something very much akin to what I got…
Eifersucht (1925; Ger.; Karl Grune)
Act 1 establishes what might be called the rules of the game for the remaining film. The opening scene of a husband strangling his wife is revealed to be a stage performance, and the playwright (Georg Alexander) comes on stage to take the applause. He then returns home with his two friends, a husband (Werner Krauss) and wife (Lya De Putti) whose marriage seems to be ideal. But the playwright keeps questioning whether either of the couple feels jealousy, while trying to flirt with the wife. Act 2 sees the first signs of jealousy: the wife receives flowers and refuses to tell her husband the sender; the wife finds a lock of blonde hair in the husband’s pocket watch. The playwright then arrives and flirts with the wife and convinces them to go to the palais de dance. There, the wife makes both men jealous by dancing with a stranger. The husband ends up striking the stranger and the night ends with husband and wife sleeping in separate beds. In Act 3, after a frosty breakfast the wife becomes intrigued by her husband’s correspondence – reading and then stealing his latest letter. She goes to the playwright, then lies that she has been to her friend Lola’s – and is confronted by her husband. In Act 4, the wife gets Lola to lie for her, covering her absence from home both in the past and on future nights. The husband follows her to a giant apartment store, then loses her and blunders about town in search of her. The wife arrives home, still fuming over the husband’s mysterious letter. The husband tells her how much he loves her and begs to know what she has been doing. She asks for his trust, but he insists on knowing the truth. She demands the truth from him and says he would be ashamed to know the truth from her. He raises his hand to strike her but doesn’t land the blow. In Act 5, the husband follows the wife, this time to a strange building on the outskirts of town. He sees his wife kissing a child who address her as “mummy”. Back home, the husband demands (via a note passed via a servant) that the wife leaves the house. Infuriated by her refusal of the truth about the child, he hurls his wife to the floor. The violence is interrupted by the arrival of the playwright, and the truth is eventually discovered. The letter the wife has stolen from the husband refers to his child, whose carer cannot afford it any longer. The husband falls at his wife’s feet and the two are reconciled. ENDE
As I said, a plot that doesn’t offer any real surprises. It’s well-written, well-mounted, and well-played. I admired the numerous nice touches that shaped the drama, like the repeated detail of the couple’s shoes: hers next to his at the start, then separate from his during their fallout, then reunited in the final images; or the way their first breakfast scene has them sat side-by-side, but the second has then say on opposite sides of the table. Technically, the film was also well executed. There are also some neat moments of superimposition. Some are simple, like the wife imagining the lock of hair in the watch, or later seeing his imagined lover superimposed over her book. Some are more complex, like the husband seeing his wife dancing with another on the crowded dancefloor – only for the other dancers to fade into ghost-like transparencies, revealing his wife and her partner at the centre (a really lovely effect). Though I liked some deep focus compositions in the apartment, it was the exterior scenes that really stood out. There are several big sets/matte painted night cityscapes, which are reminiscent of Grune’s Die Straße. Particularly effective is the apartment store, with a double paternoster lift and a view across to a multistorey wing illuminated from within. You sense the husband’s fear becoming faintly nightmarish in these surroundings, just as you did with the central character in Die Straße.
But what interested me particularly with Eifersucht was its script by Paul Czinner. (I have a longstanding project on Czinner that I have kept delaying for various reasons.) I was struck by how many details in Eifersucht match traits from his other films. There is the jealousy over a bunch of flowers (cf. Der Geiger von Florenz (1926)), conflicts spelt out over a breakfast routine (cf. Ariane (1931) and Der träumende Mund (1932)), the woman reflecting on her image in relation to men (Fräulein Else, 1929), the nods to luck and fate (like the spilling of salt) and life’s reflection of art that haunt numerous of Czinner’s other films. Czinner’s authorship is often overshadowed by the two figures with whom he collaborated: his frequent leading actress, Elisabeth Bergner, and his screenplay collaborator, Carl Meyer (often uncredited). In this sense, it was curious to feel how strongly Eifersucht felt like a Czinner film without either of these two influences at play. But also, this made me like Eifersucht less. The marital strife in Grune’s film is more interestingly played, and played out, in Czinner’s Nju (1924), just as the sense of life imitating the tragedy of art is more potent in Czinner’s Der träumende Mund. And Bergner is an infinitely more subtle, complex, and sympathetic performer than De Putti. Werner Krauss’s character, too, is at the very least equalled by Emil Jannings’s character in Nju, for example, and Georg Alexander’s rather underdeveloped character is a pale shadow next to that of Rudolf Forster in Der träumende Mund. (Der träumende Mund, if you’ve not seen it, is a masterpiece.)
More broadly, in fact, my problem with Eifersucht was precisely this sense that what I was watching I had seen done better, and with more dash, elsewhere. Czinner’s films aside, I also thought of E.A. Dupont’s contemporary Varieté (1925), which features De Putti in a much more powerful drama, and one which allows for more complex, stylish cinematic storytelling. (Dupont’s film was also, confusingly, released under the title “Jealousy” in some regions.) Eifersucht’s theatricality is ultimately a kind of limitation. It is, if anything, too neat and tidy, too precisely organized. (Even the dance hall feels oddly well-mannered to sense the wife’s desire for freedom express itself. Think of how many other Weimar films have great party scenes!) Eifersucht feels like an exercise more than a living, evolving drama. Even the interesting outdoor sets and moments of technical skill didn’t lift the film into something more complex or moving. Indeed, I still await being really moved a Karl Grune film: his are films that I admire without truly liking. (See my pieces on Am Rande der Welt(1927) and Die Straße.) The fact that Eifersucht describes itself as a “tragicomedy” rather sums it up: it is neither comic enough nor tragic enough. (All Czinner’s films are much sharper in their comic touches and more tragic in their outcomes.) It is a good film, but not a great one.
The music for this performance was by Richard Siedhoff and Mykyta Sierov. Their combination of piano and oboe worked well, though its emotional register could never make the film more moving than it was. I must also highlight the excellence of the detailed restoration credits at the start of the film: we are given a history of the film’s release, the location and qualities of surviving prints, the ethics behind the restoration choices, and the precise lengths in metres of various copies, as well as the speed used in the transfer. It should be mandatory to have such information at the outset of all films, especially silents. (Yes, the latest restoration Napoléon, I’m thinking of you.)
Another day (not) at the Bonn festival and another country to visit. Today we journey to India for the recreation of ancient religious drama. I outlined the context for Franz Osten’s German-Indian co-productions in my piece on Shiraz (1928). To recap briefly, these films were the brainchild of Himanshu Rai, who was instrumental in partnering Indian writers and performers with European filmmakers. Their first collaboration was Prem Sanyas, originally released as Die Leuchte Asiens in Germany in 1925 and The Light of Asia in the UK in 1926. Made with the support of the Maharajah of Jaipur (now in Pakistan), the film was shot entirely on location in India with (as the film’s opening titles remind us) no “studio sets, artificial lights, faked-up properties or make-ups”.
Prem Sanyas (1925; Ger./In./UK; Franz Osten/Himansu Rai)
The plot? Well, the film begins with a lengthy section of quasi-documentary footage around contemporary India. Some western tourists visit the Buddhist temple complex at Gaya. There, they encounter an old man who relates the tale of how Buddha achieved enlightenment below the Bodhi tree… The film then follows the story of Prince Gautama (Himanshu Rai), who is adopted by the heirless King Suddodhana (Sarada Ukil) and Queen Maya (Rani Bala). As the boy grows, he becomes increasingly conscious of the suffering of animals and the world around him. His father is warned by a sage that it is the boy’s destiny to renounce the throne, leaving him heirless. The king therefore tries to shelter the boy from all sight of suffering. When this doesn’t work, he finds him a consort. The prince falls for Gopa (Seeta Devi), who likewise is smitten with him. However, the prince is overwhelmed by the knowledge of suffering outside his pampered life and perfect marriage. Hearing the voice of God, he abandons his wife, his palace, and his family to live as an impoverished teacher. He converts crowds to his new conception of the world, and when Gopa encounters him again, she becomes his disciple. The flashback ends with the old man concluding this tale, then (very suddenly) the film ends.
Such is the narrative. And as a drama, it is a failure. The story is very thin, with characters barely sketched and with neither the interest nor the ability to suggest real, human psychology. (Hey, it’s a religious story, so I suppose expecting a real drama is a bit wishful.) As the story of one of humanity’s great teachers/enlighteners, it’s surprisingly inert. But because the characters are picture-book cut-outs, there is barely any ordinary human emotion to engage with either. It’s a very simply parable told very simply.
I say simply told, for there is no showiness to the film’s direction. This is a polite way of saying that the film isn’t very dynamic, let alone dramatic. There are few really telling close-ups (as if the film is afraid of exploring the reality of its human characters), and the editing between wider and closer shots is often rather clumsy. Few scenes use montage to create a sense of rhythm, and there is a kind of roughness to the way the film’s narrative is shaped. In part, of course, this is the fault of the original story: it’s a very simplistic tale and doesn’t offer a real “drama” as such. But I do wonder about the intentions of the filmmakers. Is the simplicity of the style – I am tempted to say the lack of style – a deliberate choice, or simply a limitation of means?
All this said, I didn’t care that the film wasn’t awash with stylistic flourishes or deft pieces of editing or camerawork. I didn’t care because this was one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen in a long time. Restored from a contemporary print released in the UK in 1926, Prem Sanyas is exquisitely tinted and toned and simply glows. For all that I have criticized (or at least, damned with faint praise) the lack of “style”, this film has no need to be showy when it uses real locations so well. So many views make you want to gasp, to spend time gazing at the frame. From ornate temples and elaborate palaces to dusty streets and overgrown gardens, this film is as astonishing document of time and place. I could rave for hours over the photography, the way the tinting seems to make you feel the heat and the haze and the dust and scent of the locations. I’ve taken a large number of image captures, but I could have taken any number more. The drama might have been inert, even inept, but I was captivated by the film itself – by the sheer aesthetic gorgeousness of the image.
To return to something of the dramatic substance of the film, I must discuss the performers. I must begin by repeating what I said in my piece on Shiraz: I simply don’t think Himanshu Rai is an engaging screen presence. I found him stiff and awkward in Shiraz and I find him stiff and awkward in The Light of Asia. Given that he’s meant to be playing a religious prophet and visionary, I find him utterly unconvincing. He is both oddly stylized (holding poses, holding glances) and oddly restrained (not doing anything!). I would welcome a down-to-earth prophet, a recognizably human figure who connects to the sufferings of man. But Rai is neither a magnetic divinity nor a vulnerable human. He’s an oddly inert prophet and an oddly inarticulate teacher.
Rai’s limitations are shown up by the fact that everyone around him – and I mean everyone – has such great presence on screen: from the non-professional actors who play the minor characters to the real beggars and street performers who populate the world at large. Their faces and bodies are immensely interesting to behold. Here are real faces, real lives, real sufferings embodied for us to see. If I can’t see what the fuss is over the Buddha himself (or at least, Rai’s Buddha), I can absolutely see the fuss over the suffering of the world. The real locations and real extras are remarkably tangible, remarkably vivid.
As the king and queen, Sarada Ukil and Rani Bala are pleasingly unpretentious. Free from any posturing, gesturing, or theatrics, they are as real as figures from a mystery play – ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Then there’s Seeta Devi, who was by far the most striking presence in Shiraz. Here, she looks scarcely more than a child – indeed, she was thirteen at the time of filming. A real child to play the prince’s child bride. In my piece on Shiraz, I remarked that she was the only performer to offer a really defined performance, i.e. someone who was palpably playing for the camera, for us. Her role, as a manipulative figure wishing to shape the drama, perfectly suited her performance style. In Prem Sanyas, she is free of mannerisms, of technique. True, she is not given much of a character to embody, but nevertheless there is a naturalness to her embodiment of Gopa that is moving in itself. And though she has yet to grow into her adult body, or adult confidence as a performer, she is still radiant on screen.
The soundtrack for this performance was compiled by Willy Schwarz and Riccardo Castagnola. It consists of (what I take to be) prerecorded sections of music, historical recordings, and ambient acoustic sound. Most of these sample the sounds of India, through instrumental choices or the sound of crowds/prayers/chanting etc. I found it a little distracting to hear recorded effects during silent scores, even in the vaguest form like the sounds of praying and general bustle offered here. While it certainly fits the setting of the film, it doesn’t suit the period of the film’s making – i.e. its silent aesthetic. The film is so overwhelmingly visual, I didn’t want a composer trying to “complete” the pictures with real sounds. I much preferred the sections of instrumental music, which felt much more in keeping with the period and setting – and the film’s historical and aesthetic origins. That said, I’ve heard infinitely worse “acoustic” soundtracks, so I’m not complaining too much.
Overall, Prem Sanyas was an excellent experience. I wrote recently about another religious parable, The King of Kings, and when watching Prem Sanyas I was reminded of the many reasons I disliked DeMille’s epic. Despite all the awkwardness of Prem Sanyas, the absolute reality of its mise-en-scène, of the places and the people who inhabit it, make it a far more rewarding viewing experience than time spent in DeMille’s artificial holy land.
Day 3 of the Stummfilmtage Bonn takes us to Czechoslovakia in 1929. Both the film and its director were new to me, but I’d seen this restoration doing the rounds at various festivals and wondered if it would ever come my way. I was therefore very happy to see its inclusion at the Bonn festival – it’s exactly the kind of film I’d hope to encounter…
Varhaník u sv. Víta (1929; Cze.; Martin Frič)
The plot is a marvellously strange melodrama. The organist of St Virus cathedral in Prague is an old man whose only joy is his music. One night, his solitary evening is interrupted by an old friend who has escaped from prison. The friend has a daughter, for whom he has a bundle of cash and a letter. After entrusting these items to the organist, the friend shoots himself. The scene is witnessed by a neighbour, Josef, who manipulates the organist into burying the body in his basement while he makes off with the letter. Later, the organist visits his friend’s daughter, Klara, who lives as a nun. He gives her the money and tells her of her father’s death. Shaken, Klara wants to know more – but the organist refuses to explain. Dreaming of a different life, and haunted by her father’s mysterious death, Klara leaves the nunnery and finds shelter with the organist. The organist becomes a kind of surrogate father, but he is tortured by the presence of the body buried in his basement. While Klara pursues a romance with Ivan, a handsome painter whom she has seen outside the convent, the organist is confronted by Josef, who tries to blackmail him. Josef then tells Klara that the organist was murdered by the organist. Klara flees to Ivan, while the organist has a mental breakdown and finds his right arm paralysed. Unable to settle with Ivan unless she knows the truth about her father, Klara returns to the organist’s home and finds her father’s grave. Horrified, the organist locks her in – but Ivan rescues her. Josef witnesses the torment his lie has caused, so sets out to right his wrong: he tells Klara the truth and apologizes to the organist. A miraculous cure enables the organist to recover the use of his right arm, and the film ends with him playing music at the wedding of Klara and Ivan. KONEC (The End).
Though it has taken a lengthy paragraph to explain the convoluted plot, the film itself is far from novelistic. Titles are kept to a minimum, and the film is an overwhelmingly visual experience – its lush photography and vivid set pieces doing all the heavy lifting. I absolutely loved the panoramas of Prague and the cathedral. These would have a documentary beauty of their own, but Frič overlays them with superimposed images and subtle gauzes/mattes to transform these views into something stranger, more lyrical and evocative. We see Prague and its streets and monuments the way characters do. Thus, the cathedral space and the organ become spaces of monumental splendour and majesty – the site of the organist’s only creative and spiritual freedom. And the monastery interiors are seen through Klara’s eyes: forbidding, geometric, imprisoning networks of arches, bars, grilles. When she gazes outside, the fields are luminous, shimmering visions, the sky’s soft-focus glow shaped through subtle matte painting into dreamy, sunbeamed expanses. The streets around the organist’s cramped home are an expressionist maze of bright streetlights and thick shadows, with figures negotiating sheets of rain and glimmering cobblestone roads.
The interiors are no less splendid. In particular, the organist’s cramped house is often filmed from a low angle, the camera crouching at floor level to observe the space. The effect of this is to create a sinister and foreboding feel to the setting – as if we were an illicit observer, half-concealing our presence. But it also serves to makes the viewer conscious of the floorboards and think of what lies beneath. Even if the scene itself is not directly concerned with the fate of Klara’s father, the camera position reminds us of his body lurking below stairs.
There are some superb close-ups, too. The organist’s white hair is turned into a sinister halo around his darkened face. Josef’s plotting eyes flash from wreaths of smoke. Klara’s eyes brim with tears in the centre of her pale, pale face. Even on a small screen, these images are strange, powerful, mesmerising. I love the way Frič dissolves slowly between shots, so that images linger over one another. He often overlays a close-up of a character looking with an image of what they see. The effect is both startling and immersive, subjective and objective. It’s a rich, lush, entrancing visual language.
The performers are all highly engaging and I enjoyed spending time with their faces. As Klara, Suzanne Marwille begins the film framed in white wimple and habit. She’s a vision of isolation, but her eyes shine in the middle of her pale face in her white clothing. She then transforms into a homely, traditional figure of a young women when she lives with the organist: summer dress, a head scarf containing her long hair. Then she lives with Ivan and is transformed again into a modern woman of the 1920s, with a Louise Brooks style bob and shimmering black dress. (She even sports her nun’s outfit to model for Ivan, as if to remind us of the sartorial and spiritual journey she’s traversed.) While I never warmed to the slightly smug character of Ivan (played by Oskar Marion), their romance amid the glowing, soft-focus splendour of bucolic exterior spaces was gorgeous to look at – and entirely took my mind away from how much I liked or did not like Ivan as a character. As the relatively minor character of Josef, Ladislav H. Struna brought surprising depth. It was much to his and the film’s credit that this very sketchy character went on an emotional journey that was in any way creditable. By the end, as Ivan weeps at his guilt and falls on his knees to beg forgiveness of the organist, I was surprisingly touched. It was nice to see a villain genuinely moved to reform (and sweet to see him cleanly-shaven and well-dressed to go to tell Klara the truth!). Of course, as the lead character of the organist, Karel Hašler had the most dramatic weight to bear. He has a superb face, and you could read every emotion in his eyes and on his mouth. If the melodrama threatened always to overboil into camp, Hašler always seemed to bring it back from the brink.
In sum, this was a highly enjoyable film, aided by a solid musical accompaniment on piano and organ by Maud Nelissen. A splendid slice of late silent cinema.
Not going to silent film festivals is becoming something of a habit, if not a hobby. In October I don’t go to Pordenone, and now in August I’ve begun not going to Bonn. As with Pordenone, the Stummfilmtage Bonn (aka the Bonn International Silent Film Festival) offers a “streamed” festival for viewers like me who, for various reasons, cannot attend in person. (I consider not going to Bonn a kind of pre-season training for not going to Pordenone.) Unlike Pordenone, however, the online content of the Bonn festival is free. Each film is available for 48 hours after each screening. No fees, no obligations – just a (quite generous) time limit. I aspire to one day having the kind of lifestyle that enables me to go to some, any, or all, of the wonderful festivals partially or wholly dedicated to silent film across the summer months – Bristol, Bologna, Bonn, Berlin (the “Ufa filmnächte”), Pordenone. But until this magical surfeit of time and budget is forthcoming, I shall remain at home, eagerly scrambling to fit in at least a couple of weeks’ worth of cinema into my free time. So, this week (or rather, last week) I’m not going to Bonn, and can share my experience of staying at home. First up, days one and two (and spoilers galore)…
Day 1: Du skal ære din hustru (1925; Den.; Carl Th. Dreyer)
I must admit that I considered not watching this film simply because I knew it well from previous viewings. (And have its BFI release on my shelf.) I further admit that if this film had been part of the streamed content of Pordenone (i.e. if I had to pay for it), I would have been annoyed that something so readily available should be chosen over something not otherwise accessible. It’s a film that I have seen before, but never on a big screen and never with live music. If I was actually at Bonn, I would be delighted to see it again – and to see it for the first time in such circumstances. I can understand why festivals put on films that are well-known or made by well-known filmmakers. But the appeal is much less for a viewer who is streaming the film remotely and not gaining anything new from the process.
That said, I still watched Du skal ære din hustru. I’d not seen it in years, possibly not even on Blu-ray. (The copy on my shelf is, now that I think about it, unwrapped.) So why not join in, however tepidly?
Do we all know the plot? Well, just to remind you: Viktor and Ida have been married for years, but Viktor is a domestic tyrant – ungrateful, unthinking, inconsiderate, rude, and subtly cruel. Despite their three children and former happy times, Ida is convinced by her mother and by the family’s old maid, Mads, to leave home. Mads plans to turn the tables on Viktor and make him realize how lucky he is, and how unjust he has been. Seeing the hardship of housekeeping firsthand, Viktor begins to realize his guilt – and eventually the couple are reunited on a firmer basis.
Of course, I was a fool to have thought of skipping this film: it’s a masterpiece. I’d forgotten how perfect it was. I fell all over again for the exquisite photography, those soft yet dark irises – like curtains around the frame, that distance the mid-shots of husband and wife. And I’d forgotten the first real close-up of Viktor, and the extraordinary depth of his eyes – and the way the light catches them and seems to magnify their life and feeling. This shot comes almost exactly halfway through the film, and I was unprepared for its power. So too, I was struck by the minimal number of moments when characters touch each other gently, with kindness. That close-up of the fingers of Viktor’s oldest daughter shyly reaching over to his, the way his respond – and you realize that he has a heart, and a past that was loving, and a future that might rekindle that love. An exquisite moment. So too the skill of rendering Mads teaching Viktor a “lesson” both funny and touching: the reversal of his cruelties, but also the desire to find his goodness. I’d forgotten, too, the embrace of Viktor and Ida: the way it’s a private moment, with Viktor’s back to us, and we see Ida’s hands move over his shoulders. Perfect.
By the end, I felt like Viktor: I had taken something for granted and was glad to be taught a lesson. You can and should always rewatch a great film. It has plenty still to teach you.
Day 2: Jûjiro (1928; Jap.; Teinosuke Kinugasa)
Right, now we’re back on track. A real rarity! Unavailable in any other format! Kinugasa’s film seems to have been released under multiple English-language titles. It’s listed variously as “Crossways”, “Crossroads”, and “Slums of Tokyo”. The dual German-English intertitles of this print gave the title as “In the Shadow of Yoshiwara”. There were no restoration credits to clarify the source of this print, which made me wonder about its provenance. There are evidently some missing titles, if not other material. (For example, one title announces “end of fourth act” despite no other “act” titles appearing in the print.) Furthermore, the English text is often awkward and rife with spelling errors. (The wording offers some very literal translations of the German text.) When and where was this print made?
This reservation aside, the film was excellent. The plot is simple, the drama concentrated – claustrophobic. In c.1850 Tokyo, a brother and sister live in a poor flat near Yoshiwara, the red-light district. The brother hangs out amid the frenzied atmosphere of gambling, stealing, and whoring. He is obsessed with O-Ume, who works in a brothel. He fights a rival for her affections, but the rival blinds him with ash. Believing he has killed his opponent, the blinded brother finds his way home. But the sister needs money to help him, so she is faced with selling herself either to her creepy neighbour or to the procuress of the brothel. The brother’s blindness is lifted in time to witness his sister stabbing the neighbour in self-defence. The pair flee to the city’s outskirts, but the brother is drawn back to O-Ume. He sees her with the rival he believed he had killed. His blindness returns; he collapses and dies in a fit of madness. END.
If the plot is mundane, the realization is superb. There are multiple flashbacks, which makes the narrative more complex – more subjective, more strange – than the above synopsis suggests. But it’s the world of the film that is so compelling. The whole story seems to take place at night, or else within a kind of contained nightmare. That might be a starless sky overhead, but it might as well be the void of any reality beyond the comfortless tenements and cacophony of the gambling dens and brothel. It is a forbidding, studio-bound world. It rains (and often you can see the characters’ breath) but there is no sense of the natural world beyond the dark streets, the grimy interiors. The characters who inhabit this place are, apart from the sister, forbidding and grotesque. From the frenzied brother, forever clutching his face, his throat, his blinded eyes, to the creepy, toothless neighbour, the sinister procuress, the bandaged rival and the cackling O-Ume – everyone is unwelcoming, exploitative, angry. The sets in which these characters live, or struggle to live, are marvellous. There are realistically threadbare walls, tattered paper doors, broken windows, forbidding staircases. The world of Yoshiwara is more complex, with multiple interior spaces joined by ornate panels, blinds, windows within windows. Kinugasa turns this space into a bewildering, overwhelming maze: swinging lanterns, spinning umbrellas, tumbling betting balls. And all filled with the mad bustle of drinking, gambling, laughing crowds. The combination of studio-bound sets, dim spaces, and claustrophobia feels very expressionist. (The theme of a wayward man abandoning a homebound woman – not to mention its moody rendering – made me think of Die Straße (1923), shown at Pordenone last year.)
This transformation of physical space into psychological space is heightened by Kinugasa’s superb camerawork. There is a wonderful array of dramatic lighting, sudden close-ups, creeping tracking shots, sinister high-angle viewpoints. Just see how the first montage of the Yoshiwara gambling dens is rendered more effective by the prowling camera, the hallucinatory superimpositions, the leering close-ups. There is a fascinating balance between subjectivity and objectivity in the way the camera shares and/or observes the way characters experience the world. When the brother is blinded, for example, there is a dazzling flurry of pockmarks and lightning bolts that bubbles over the screen: we share the brother’s onrush of terror and bewilderment. But immediately afterwards, as the brother stumbles back and forth through the cackling crowd of gamblers, the camera pitilessly tracks back and forth, keeping its distance, watching him fall apart. The shock of subjectivity is followed by the chill of detachment.
The film’s blend of melodrama and expressionism comes to its climax in the final scenes. The brother recovers from his blindness, and we see the world as he sees it: darkness distorting, weird patches of light, solid objects rippling. But the reality he wakes to is like a living nightmare: the toothless, dishevelled neighbour assaulting his sister, the body falling before him. A series of dissolves transform the scene into a kind of vision, as though these images were also emerging from the brother’s former blindness. The siblings’ rush through the dark and rain is equally nightmarish, and the hut in which they shelter hardly comforting. Their bodies are soaked, and the marvellous detail of steam rising from their shoulders is both realistic and expressive. The titular crossroads of the film appears at the end like a slice of another nightmare. It’s two pale streaks of pathway, crisscrossing a despairingly black landscape. Dim, bare trees in the foreground, dim, distant houses in the distance. The brother crosses this otherworldly space to reach Yoshiwara, where he sees O-Ume and the rival he imagined he has killed. With a rapid montage of hallucinatory images, superimpositions, and distortions, he clutches his eyes and collapses – “This is the end!” he screams. And it is. There’s just one last scene: here is the sister, alone at the crossroads, hesitant, afraid. It’s a superbly disquieting ending to this bleak and gripping film. With touches of German expressionism ala Fritz Lang and French impressionism ala Abel Gance, Kinugasa’s Jûjiro still holds its own – it’s a concentrated, nightmarish, unsettling film.
I must finish by praising the musical accompaniment, which performed on piano and violin by Sabrina Zimmermann and Mark Pogolski. Their score was atmospheric, dramatic, and perfectly in keeping with the mood and tempo of the film. Bravo.
This week, I offer some very belated thoughts on a very significant Blu-ray. Lumière! Le cinématographe, 1895-1905 was released in 2015 to coincide with the 120th anniversary of the first cinema screening in 1895. Its original release having passed me by, my first effort to see it came only in 2022. By this point, the Blu-ray was long out-of-print, and I thought I had lost my chance. Even finding listings for it on retail sites is difficult. I had to search via a UPC/ISBN, which was itself tricky to find. It then took many weeks of waiting for an availability alert before I could even find a copy for sale and get hold of it. But I did, and it was worth it.
Lumière! Le cinématographe, 1895-1905 is an assemblage of 114 films made under the auspices of the Lumière brothers. I can hardly proceed without commenting on the difficulty of classifying this as an “assembly/assemblage”, a word that may or may not be any clearer than “film”, “video”, or “montage”. I choose “assemblage” because it seems the most pertinent (and works in French, too), though any of the above terms raise curious historical questions about presentation. Whatever we call it, the selection and editing (i.e. the montaging) of this collection was undertaken by Thierry Frémaux, director of the Lumière institute in Lyon, and Thomas Valette, a director of the Festival Lumière in Lyon. The original films are presented without any (recreated) text or titles, though an option on the disc allows you to turn on subtitles that identify the film, date, and camera operator (when known). There is also a commentary track by Frémaux, which contextualizes these films and offers insights into the history of their making and restoration. For my first viewing, I chose to do without any of these additional curatorial options, preferring simply to watch all the way through in purely imagistic terms.
The assemblage is divided into eleven chapters. These are thematic, grouping the films into miniature programmes that take us through various modes and subjects: “Au commencement”, “Lyon, ville des Lumière”, “Enfances”, “La France qui travaille”, “La France qui s’amuse”, “Paris 1900”, “Le monde tout proche”, “De la comédie!”, “Une siècle nouveau”, “Déjà le cinéma”, “A bientôt Lumière”. None of these chapters attempts to recreate an original film programme from the period. That said, the first chapter contains several films shown in that first projection on 28 December 1895: La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (I), Arroseur et arrosé, Le Débarquement du congrès de photographie à Lyon, Repas de bébé.
The 2015 assemblage also recreates visually the effect of the original hand-turned projection. Thus the first film, La Sortie de l’usine Lumière (III), begins as a still image before flickering and juddering into motion. It is unexpected, and startling. It’s a great way to try and mimic the sense of shock and surprise of that first screening, of the instant that the still photograph literally seemed to come alive. From my distant days of teaching silent cinema, I know how difficult it is to get students to grasp the significance of these Lumière films as miraculous objects. This miraculousness seems to me an essential feature of their history, and therefore an essential quality to try and recreate in a classroom or any modern setting for their projection. If simply presenting the films as it appears on disc, without any curatorship (i.e. technological or performative intervention), the opening Lumière! is as good a way as any to reanimate La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon. (Though I find it curious that the 2015 assembly opens with the third version of this film, shot in August 1896, rather than the first, shot in May 1895. The third version is, as many have noted, a more carefully directed “view” than the first. The first version begins in medias res, with the workers already pouring out of the gates. The third version begins with the factory gates being opened.) I found it very moving to think about this sequence of images being watched by that small audience in Paris for the first time.
Part of the emotive effect was perhaps also due to the music chosen. This is the first time I can think I have ever seen these early films accompanied by an orchestra. The 2015 assembly uses various compositions by Camille Saint-Saëns, taken from his ballet Javotte (1896), together with his Rapsodie bretonne (1861, orch. 1891), Suite Algérienne (1880) (misidentified in the liner notes as the Suite in D major (1863)), and incidental music to Andromaque (1902). Though Saint-Saëns remains a very popular composer, much of the music used here is seldom heard. (As I write, I am listening to the only complete recording of Javotte, from 1996, a CD which has been out of print for some years. The 1993 recording used for Lumière! is a performance of the suite derived from the ballet.) The choice of Saint-Saëns is interesting. In many ways, Saint-Saëns is a perfect fit for the Lumière films. The composer’s reputation (for good or for worse) is for elegant, polished, well-crafted, well-mannered music. (“The only thing he lacks”, quipped Berlioz, “is inexperience.”) In photographs, Saint-Saëns even looks like he might have stepped out of a Lumière film. His build, his dress, his bearing – they all have the same air of bourgeois contentment as many of the films. (Even his fondness for holidays in French-controlled North Africa echo the touristic-colonial views in the Lumière catalogue.)
Differences in subject-matter and representations of class are a mainstay of scholarly comparisons between the Lumière films and those of Edison’s producers at the same period in the US. The latter tend to present (and perhaps be a part of) a scruffier, often more masculine, often more working-class world. Their glimpses into late nineteenth-century America present a very different social and physical world from the fin-de-siècle France of their counterparts. It’s somehow fitting, therefore, that Lumière! presents this latter world in the musical idiom of a composer who embodies the urbane, bourgeois sensibilities of the films.
If all this sounds like criticism, it isn’t meant to be. Put simply, a soundtrack of orchestral Saint-Saëns is a nice change to hear from the perennial solo piano accompaniment, which (in previous releases of this kind of material) tends to noodle along anonymously, hardly having anything to interact with on screen – and hardly any time to establish a musical narrative or melodic character. Yet the Saint-Saëns is not quite able to form longer narratives across a sequence of films in Lumière!. Very often, the directors feel obliged to match the sense of narrative excitement or visual climax on screen. This means some awkward editing of the music, together with a good deal of repetition of the same passages. As editors of the soundtrack, they react like the cameramen of the 1890s, who might pause their cranking if there was a hiatus in the action before them (like sporting events) and then turn once more when the action resumed. And, of course, there are instances of cutting and splicing in some of the earliest films, demonstrating a sensitivity to the need to shape narratives even within the singular viewpoint of these one-minute films. So poor old Saint-Saëns has his music interrupted, spliced, and resumed to fit some (but not all) the notable events on screen. The awkwardness of this is interesting, since it demonstrates the problem of presenting such short, sometimes disparate cinematic material. I would have been curious to see a more careful arrangement of film and music, or even a total disregard for precise synchronization. As it is, the effort made to match the music to some of the action feels somewhat crude. This is not musical editing, as such, since reworking a score would be more effective than manipulating a pre-existing recording. A reworked score could be played through with conviction. A reworked soundtrack plays itself into a muddle.
Regardless of these minor reservations, Lumière! is still a unique opportunity to watch these pioneering films. Unique because this Blu-ray remains, as far as I am aware, the only home media release of so many Lumière films in high definition. As the liner notes explain, Louis Lumière was an exceedingly careful preserver of his family’s photographic legacy. While 80% of the entire output of the silent era has been lost, the Lumière catalogue survives in remarkably complete and remarkably well-preserved condition. The films in this assembly were scanned in 4K from the original sources and they look stunning.
What I love about the Lumière films, and indeed about early cinema in general, is the chance to watch lost worlds go about their business on screen. There is something deeply fascinating, and deeply moving, about seeing into the past this way. It’s not just the tangible reality of the world on screen, it’s the fact that even the more performative elements themselves have an aura of reality about them. What I mean is that even the act of putting on a show for the camera is an act of history – a chance to see how the past played and cavorted and made itself silly for the amusement of its spectators. They’re not putting on a show for us, they’re putting on a show for their contemporaries – fellow, long-vanished ghosts. The audiences for these films are as lost to oblivion as those individuals captured on celluloid. That’s part of the reason why the sight of people eyeing up the camera, either by chance or by design, is so captivating. Their momentary involvement with the lens, with the operator, with the audience, has somehow escaped its time and survived into ours. Ephemeral views, ephemeral acts, ephemeral lives – all, miraculously, survive.
To talk about just one instance of this sensibility, I must single out La Petite fille et son chat (1900) – in which (as the title implies) a young girl is shown feeding (or attempting to feed) a cat. The girl is Madeleine Koehler (1895-1970), the niece of August and Louis Lumière, and Louis Lumière filmed the scene at the girl’s family home in Lyon. But to treat this film as historical evidence, or a kind of narrative content, is to miss something essential about its beauty. For although it demonstrates the ways in which a “view” might be constructed (the careful composition, the framing against the leafy background), and its narrative manipulated (the cat is encouraged/thrown back onto the table more than once, and the moments in-between later cut out), the film is dazzling in a more immediate sense. Though I have seen La Petite fille et son chat on a big screen before, I have never seen it in such high visual quality. The texture of the background grass and trees is deliciously poised between sharpness and distortion: you can almost reach out and touch the grass to the right of the girl, but even by the midground it becomes an impressionist mesh. In the centre of the image, the girl’s summer dress is so sharp you can virtually feel the creases. Light falls on her arm and legs, and when she looks up, she almost needs to squint against the bright sky somewhere behind us. Sometimes the girl catches our eye. She knows she is performing for the camera, for her uncle, perhaps for us – but she doesn’t quite know how. Poised between engagement with her world, with her cat, and with us, she is also poised between reality and fiction.
But, for me, the real object of beauty on screen is the cat. Just look at the texture of the cat’s long hair – the depth of its darks and the sheen of its highlights. See how the light catches its white whiskers, the shading and stripes about its face and eyes. There is a moment when the cat turns its back on the child to face someone, or something, behind the camera. For this fleeting second, the sun catches its eyes – illuminating one and shading the other. I’ve spent many hours of my life in the company of cats, and looking into their eyes up close is a peculiarly pleasing and intimate sensation. There is always the sense of otherness in those eyes, a tension between great intelligence and great unknowability. Even at their most proximate to us, the inner life of cats runs but parallel to ours. All of this is to try and make sense of just how moving I found watching La Petite fille et son chat in such high quality. The aliveness of this beautiful animal – the way it leaps, and turns, and reaches out with its paw – is extraordinary. This creature is long, long dead – yet it appears to us so animate.
One might say this about anything and everything we see in the canon of silent cinema. La Petite fille et son chat is just one short, evocative fragment of an immense photographic record. But the fact of its brevity enhances its potency. It is a worthwhile reminder that it is not just the people who populate the Lumière films that are lost to oblivion: animals are equally subject to erasure, and their lives are more fleeting and more unknowable than ours. Here, then, is an exceptional animal – these few seconds of its life, its body in movement, its intelligence in action, singled out and projected into the present. The miracle of the past, the miracle of cinema.
This is my third piece devoted to Die Wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (1929). Having previously talked about the beauties of this production and about its contemporary novelization, this week I discuss the scores created for the film’s exhibition in Berlin, Paris, and London in 1929-30.
The film premiered at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, in April 1929. The music for this event was arranged by Willy Schmidt-Gentner, a prolific composer of scores during the silent era – and beyond. He entered the industry after the Great War, initially working as a kind of tax inspector for cinemas. But he was also a trained musician, having studied with Max Reger in his youth, and eventually switched from film admin to film accompaniment. He gained experience acting as a conductor for cinema orchestras, as well as accompanying films at the piano. In 1922, he was commissioned to write his first film score – for Manfred Noa’s Nathan der Weise. He had clearly found his métier. Across the rest of the decade, Schmidt-Gentner created, adapted, compiled, and conducted nearly a hundred scores for silent films released in Germany. He was clearly both very versatile and very efficient at what he did: working fast was a key attribute to any composer in his position. The majority of his scores would doubtless have been compilations, drawing on various libraries of repertory music, as well as the latest popular melodies. By 1929 Schmidt-Gentner was Ufa’s chief arranger and his work accompanied many of their most prestigious productions – which included Nina Petrowna. Sadly, his score for this film has either been lost or else lingers in limbo somewhere in the archives. I say “archives”, but I have no idea what archives might be responsible. Of all Schmidt-Gentner’s scores, I am not sure any have been fully restored for modern performance. I am unsure, in the most literal sense, where his music has gone!
Thankfully, there are many detailed press reports of the premiere of Nina Petrowna, so we can glean some sense of what it was like. Before the film began, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto (1878) was played as an overture. (We even know the soloist who performed this piece at the film’s premiere: Andreas Weißgerber. Weißgerber was a popular concert violinist, so a notable a guest performer for Ufa’s concert.) Presumably much of the score itself was likewise music compiled from existing sources, though the reviews do not make this clear. For the opening cavalry parade, we are told that the orchestral march involved the use of a small group of musicians hidden behind the screen/in the wings. When the cavalry marched past, the music was initially performed by these hidden players; then, as the film showed the cavalry more closely, the main orchestra took up the music. For the scenes around the barracks and military club, various quick “Russian” marches were used, while elegant waltzes characterized the scenes at the “Aquarium” club. Though some reviewers accused Schmidt-Gentner of being heavy-handed (and sometimes simply too loud!), his score for Nina Petrowna used chamber sonorities for the lovers’ scenes: a string quartet with celesta accompanied their meeting in the club, for example. The one piece of original music we know to have been used in the film was for Nina’s favourite waltz, which is described as a melancholy “valse Boston” – the melody of which recurred throughout the film as a kind of leitmotif.
This waltz is the one part of the score does survive – thanks, in part, to Ufa’s own marketing campaign. Schmidt-Gentner’s melody was initially referred to as “Die Stunden, die nicht weiderkehren”, but for commercial purposes it was given words by Fritz Rotter and became the song “Einmal sagt man sich ‘Adieu’”. The main lyrics are:
Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / Wenn man sich auch noch so liebt. / Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / weil es keine Treue giebt. / Schwör mir nicht: du bist auf ewig mein. / Keine Liebe kann für immer sein. / Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / Wenn man sich auch noch so liebt.
A crude translation of this might be:
One day we’ll say goodbye to each other, / No matter how much we love each other. / At some point we’ll say goodbye to each other, / Because there’s no such thing as fidelity. / Don’t swear that you are mine forever. / No love can last forever. / One day we’ll say goodbye to each other, / No matter how much we love each other.
Note the German use of “man”, i.e. the third person singular, which might refer to oneself or to a slightly more abstract/general “we”. The song might therefore be a personal narrative or else a more general one. Its address sits interestingly between the personal and impersonal, as well as between tenses. It uses the present tense, but the “Einmal” (literally, “one time” – or even “at some point”/“eventually”) also suggests that it might refer to future events. (In German, the present tense can also express the future when combined with a time element.) All of which is to say that it has a tone that might apply to any listener, anywhere – that, and the gorgeous melancholy of the melody, ensured that the song was a hit success. Even if Schmidt-Gentner’s score was not performed widely outside Berlin cinemas (and it is unclear to what extent the score was distributed with the film for its silent release), the song ensured that its main original theme could circulate widely.
Another reason for the survival of this part of Schmidt-Gentner’s silent score is, ironically, the coming of sound. Ufa was already in the process of converting its major productions to sound, and Nina Petrowna was subsequently reissued with a recorded music-and-effects track in 1930. (I am unsure whether any copies of this version survive. Certainly, I can find no archival holdings on publicly accessible databases.) But even for its initial release in silent format, Ufa’s publicity marketed the film in relation to its theme song. In 1929-30, several recordings were made to capitalize on the popular success of the film – and presumably to help sell its initial release in cinemas. These vinyl releases featured contemporary bands like Dajos Béla’s Tanz-Orchester or popular singers like Wagnerian tenor Franz Völker and the ubiquitous Richard Tauber (famous for his roles in Lehár operettas). The speed at which such recordings could be licensed and made is impressive. The Derby company, for example, got the “Karkoff-Orchester” (their own scratch band) to record an orchestral arrangement of the waltz, which was released in May 1929, when the film was in the first month of its general release. More broadly, these discs point to the changing context for the marketing and consumption of film music. Before Ufa had even released its first talkie, the company’s silent pictures were already being sold in relation to recorded sound. On one level, the strategy clearly worked: the sheer number of recordings spawned by “Einmal sagt man sich ‘Adieu’” (always credited on discs to Ufa’s film) indicates a popular hit. Indeed, the song continued to generate recordings throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first. (For example, Aglaja Camphausen’s recent rendition is particularly lovely.)
Nina Petrowna was one of Germany’s biggest commercial hits of the 1928-29 season, and Schmidt-Gentner’s score received very good reviews at the time of the premiere. Given this success, it is ironic that the music now most associated with Nina Petrowna was written by the French composer Maurice Jaubert. This orchestral score accompanied the film’s “exclusive” run at the Salle Marivaux in Paris, from 25 August 1929. Jaubert had already worked as an arranger, compiling selections from the works of Offenbach to accompany Jean Renoir’s Nana (1926) at the Moulin Rouge theatre in Paris. Jaubert subsequently prepared the perforated music rolls of Jean Grémillon’s mechanical piano score for his documentary Tour au large (1927, lost). His music for Nina Petrowna thus represents his first original film score, though it should be noted that it is not entirely his own work. Jaubert also relied on musical collaboration: some scenes were scored by Jacques Brillouin and Marcel Delannoy, while another recurring theme is taken from Erik Satie’s “De l’enfance de Pantagruel” (the first number of Trois petites pièces montées (1920)). Brillouin and Delannoy had compiled the orchestral score that accompanied Grémillon’s Maldone (1928), which included music written by Jaubert.
As I wrote in my earlier piece on the film, Jaubert’s music is superb. Though Schmidt-Gentner’s score was written for a large symphony orchestra, and Jaubert’s for a chamber orchestra, they share several qualities: both make use of lighter sonorities and a central waltz motif that recurs throughout the film. Schmidt-Gentner’s music seemed to have relied on a more “Russian” milieu, though his waltz was a “Boston” – and thus another kind of popular cultural import. (The contemporary recordings make the waltz sound very much part of the soundworld of the 1920s dancehall rather than pre-war Russian.) Jaubert’s music, however, is superbly attuned to the mood and rhythm of the film. The flowing camerawork and long takes aid the ease with which the music seems to glide along with the film. But even though Jaubert uses slower tempi and extended passages (complete with repeats), he knows when to match key moments. Important sounds on screen, for example, are matched in the orchestra. Listen to the exquisite way Jaubert turns the chiming clock into music—high strings, piano, percussion—in a way that interrupts the waltz theme, but also sends us (tonally) somewhere oddly private and dreamy. (This melody has to be both memorable and moving, since it recurs in the film in vital scenes of union and separation for the central couple.) Or the lovely scene when the pianist in the orchestra must synchronize to the incompetent Michael’s efforts at the piano on screen. But the most dramatic is when the orchestra suddenly falls silent at the dramatic revelation in the final scene.
Given its importance in the history of Jaubert’s career, it is surprising that I haven’t been able to find any contemporary French reviews of Nina Petrowna that mention his name. I have found an advertisement for the film in the French press of the time, which marketed its exhibition with explicit reference to live music: “You will hear the best orchestra and you will see Brigitte Helm in…” (see image below). The same page is littered with adverts for sound films and synchronized scores, suggesting something of the climate in which Nina Petrowna was released. (Three months after the live exhibition of Nina Petrowna with “the best orchestra”, the Salle Marivaux premiered André Hugon’s Les Trois masques (1929) – the first all-talking production made in France. No longer was a live orchestra required.)
This same context highlights the release of Nina Petrowna in the UK. The film was distributed under the title The Wonderful Lie, premiering in London in June 1929. This presentation opened a special run of silent films accompanied by a full orchestra at the London Hippodrome. The Wonderful Lie, and its specially arranged score by Louis Levy, got rave reviews. It was championed especially by critics who hated the influx of talkies, which was also how the film was advertised – as the swansong of silent cinema.
Like Schmidt-Gentner, Levy had been working as an arranger of cinema music since the 1910s and would have a prosperous career in later decades as the supervisor of numerous sound film scores. I can find very little information on the contents of Levy’s score for The Wonderful Lie. It was doubtless a work of compilation, likely drawing on a familiar repertoire of music. But there was also at least one piece of original music that was used, which has survived. This was the song “Nina”, with music by Cecil Rayners and words by Herbert James. I can find no evidence that Rayners’ “Nina” was performed with a vocal soloist during exhibition. As with Schmidt-Gentner’s “Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’”, the song more likely functioned as a way of promoting the film. An advertisement in The Era (10 July 1929), for example, offers “The Beautiful Theme Number in the New Film Production of ‘THE WONDERFUL LIE’ now showing at the London Hippodrome Song”. Interested parties could buy the theme as arranged for full orchestra, small orchestra, or piano. Was the song performed at screenings outside the London Hippodrome? And what other kinds of music were heard with the film around the UK? These questions could just as readily be asked of the film’s distribution in Germany and France – and the answers would be as numerous and varied as the landscape of exhibition practice at the time.
In summary, the scores of Schmidt-Gentner, Jaubert, and James offer an interesting case study of how music might differentiate the experience of a film across national contexts – as well as extend the life of a film beyond its cinematic exhibition. Though Schmidt-Gentner and Jaubert are important figures in film music of this period, their reputations are widely divergent. Jaubert is celebrated for his music for sound films of the 1930s, not to mention his early death on active service in 1940. His music has been recorded many times and his work is known outside France – and, I suspect, beyond specialist circles. Schmidt-Gentner may be a familiar name in Germany, and his melodies may still occasionally be heard, but his scores from the silent era have not received the same level of treatment; his musical legacy is thus highly restricted. This is perhaps one reason why it was Jaubert’s score for Nina Petrowna that was restored and recorded in the 1980s, not that of Schmidt-Gentner. That said, Jaubert’s score has not been heard since it was broadcast with the film on the Franco-German channel ARTE and on Swiss television in 2000. The same restored print that was broadcast that year was digitized by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung in 2014 and shown in various venues, but never with Jaubert’s music. I can only hope that this beautiful film and score are one day reunited and released on Blu-ray. (If so, I bagsy doing the audio commentary!) Likewise, I hope that the score by Schmidt-Gentner one day resurfaces – together with more of the dozens and dozens of others he created in the silent era. Fingers crossed…
La Seine Musicale stands on the Île Seguin, some few minutes’ walk from the last stop on line 14 of the Paris metro. On a warm Thursday afternoon, I find myself among a band of spectators trooping across the bridge towards the concert hall. The hot sun makes us sweat convincingly for the first security check. Tickets scanned, we file through. It is half past five. Several lines lead towards covered checkpoints. Bags are inspected, bodies are searched. We proceed to the doors, where our tickets are scanned once more. Inside, there is a buzz of expectation. I overhear conversations in French, English, German. Further down the lobby, I see a giant projection of the trailer for tonight’s premiere. I catch the words “definitive”, “monumental”, “historic”, “complete”. Above the doors to the auditorium, the same video loops on LCD screens.
The screening is supposed to start at six o’clock, but five minutes beforehand queues still struggle through the three tiers of security outside. Inside, I take a programme booklet and search for my seat. Buying tickets online was not easy. The seating plan was like a nightmarish game of Tetris. With no sense of where each block lay in relation to the screen, in desperation I opted for “gold” tickets. Inside the concert hall, I find with immense relief that my view is superb. Dead centre, two ranks below the projection booth, three ranks above the sound mixing station. (Seemingly, the orchestra is being augmented through speakers to ensure level volume throughout the auditorium.)
I sit and read the programme. It promises me a kind of accumulative bliss. Sixteen years of work. 1000 boxes of material examined. 300 kilometres of celluloid sorted. A score of 148 cues from 104 works by 48 composers, spanning 200 years of music. (It is as if the sheer number of pieces cited, and the breadth of periods plundered, were proof of artistic worth.) Even the performance space is advertised in terms of gigantism. This is to be a ciné-concert “on a giant screen”. Giant? I look up. The screen is big, but it’s the wrong format. It is 16:9, like a giant television. The sides are not curtained or masked. How will they produce the triptych? The hall fills up. Last-minute arrivals scurry in. I catch a glimpse of Georges Mourier. He has chosen to sit very close to the screen. (Does he know something?) I switch my phone to flight mode and put it away. By the time the lights go down, it must be at least a quarter past six. But what matter a few minutes’ delay compared to sixteen years of preparation? This is Napoléon.
I have indulged in the above preamble because I had been anticipating this premiere for several years. With its much-delayed completion date, the Cinémathèque française restoration of Napoléon seemed always to be on the horizon. Now that it has at last arrived, the marketing generated by its release has swamped the film in superlatives. I have seen Napoléon projected with live orchestra four times before, in London (2004, 2013, 2016) and in Amsterdam (2014), but this Paris premiere outstripped them all in terms of sheer ballyhoo.
So, what does the new restoration offer? For a start, it looks stunning. The “giant screen” promised me did indeed present the single-screen material in superb quality. Though there was far too much light spill from the orchestra on stage, and no mask/curtains to define the edges of the frame, the image still revealed great depth and detail. Throughout, the photography is captivatingly beautiful. I was struck anew by the sharpness of Gance’s compositions in depth, by the landscapes across winter, spring, and summer, by the brilliance of the close-ups. I fell in love all over again with those numerous shots in which characters stare directly into the camera, making eye contact with us nearly a century later. The young Napoleon’s tears; the smallpox scars on Robespierre’s face; the adult Napoleon’s flashing eyes amid the gleaming slashes of rain in Toulon; the sultry soft-focus of Josephine at the Victims’ Ball. The tinting looked quite strong, but the visual quality was such that – for the most part – the images could take it. (I reserve judgement until I’ve seen the film without such persistent light spill on the screen.) In terms of speed, I was rarely disturbed by the framerate of 18fps throughout the entire film. (As I noted in my earlier post, the 2016 edition released by the BFI uses 18fps for the prologue but 20fps for the rest of the film.) Aside from a few shots that looked palpably too slow (for example, Salicetti and Pozzo di Borgo in their Paris garret), the film looked very fluid and natural in motion. Though some sequences did seem to drag a little for me, this was entirely due to the choice of music (more on this later).
The Cinémathèque française restoration is notable for containing about an hour of material not found in the BFI edition. The longest single section of new material comes at the start of the Toulon sequence, with Violine and Tristan witnessing civil unrest. It provides a welcome fleshing-out of their characters, which were much more present in the longer versions of the film in 1927. (Indeed, in the 1923 scenario that covered all six of Gance’s planned cycle, they were the main characters alongside Napoleon.) Not only are the scenes important for the sake of character, but they also have some superb camerawork: multiple superimpositions of Violine observing the horror, plus handheld (i.e. cuirass-mounted) shots of the scenes in the streets. Elsewhere, there were many new scenes of brief duration – together with numerous small changes across the entire film: new shots, different shots, titles in different places, new titles, cut titles. I welcome it all and greedily ate up every addition. Though most of the contents of this new restoration will be familiar to anyone who has seen the BFI edition, I was continually struck by the fluidity of the montage.
Do these changes fundamentally change or transform our understanding of Napoléon? Not as such. The alterations tend to reinforce, rather than reorient, the material evident in previous restorations. And if the montage is clarified or intensified in many places, there are others when it still feels oddly incomplete. When Napoleon sees Josephine at the Victims’ Ball, for example, the rapid montage of his previous encounters with her includes shots from several scenes that are no longer in the film. Is this a case of Gance not wishing to lose the cadence of his montage, or are there still missing scenes from the new restoration? (There is a similar instance in La Roue, when Sisif’s confession begins with a rapid montage that includes snippets of scenes cut from the 1923 version of the film.)
In another instance, I remain unsure if the additional material in the new restoration helps or hinders the sequence in question. I’m thinking of the end of the Double Tempest, where a new section – almost a kind of epilogue – appears after the concluding titles about Napoleon being “carried to the heights of history”. The additional shots are dominated by Napoleon in close-up, looking around him, a shot that Mourier himself explained (in a 2012 article) originally belonged in the central screen of the triptych version of the sequence. In that version, Gance’s triptych montage used the close-up of Napoleon looking around him to make it seem like he was observing the action on the two side screens. In that context, it made perfect sense. But now, in the latest restoration (which, for unstated reasons, did not attempt to reconstruct the Double Tempest triptych), the shot appears in isolation and looks a little odd. It’s still a compelling image, but it has nothing to interact with on either side, as originally intended. What exacerbates this disconnection between the old and new material is the music that accompanies it. The sequence reaches its climax – in terms of sheer volume, if nothing else – with the slow, loud, dense, chromatic roar of music from Sibelius’s Stormen (1926). (From my seat, I could see the decibel counter reach 89db, the loudest passage of the score thus far.) This cue – an almost unvarying succession of waves and troughs – ends at the point the sequence stops in previous restorations. This is then followed by Mozart’s Maurerische Trauermusik (1785): swift, lucid, succinct, melodic. There was no obvious link between the two musical pieces, which made the new material seem divorced from the rest of the sequence. Even if the film knew what it was doing (and I can find no information to say if this sequence is truly “complete”), the score didn’t.
The music. The role of Simon Cloquet-Lafollye’s score is central to this issue of aesthetic coherence. His musical adaptation is the major difference between the new restoration and previous ones, which featured scores by Carl Davis (1980/2016), Carmine Coppola (1981), and Marius Constant (1992). I will doubtless find myself writing more about this in the future, when I’ve been able to view the new version on DVD/Blu-ray. But based on the live screening, several features strike me as significant.
As (re)stated in the concert programme, Cloquet-Lafollye’s aim was to produce “a homogenous, coherent piece, in perfect harmonic synchronization with the rhythm imposed by the images”, a “score totally new and hitherto unheard that takes its meaning solely from the integrity of the images” (28-29). But these ambitions were only intermittently realized, and sometimes entirely abandoned. Rhythmically, aesthetically, and even culturally, the music was frequently divorced from what was happening on screen. My impression was of blocks of sound floating over the images, occasionally synchronizing, then drifting away – like weather systems interacting with the world beneath it. To me, this seemed symptomatic of the way Cloquet-Lafollye tended to use whole movements of repertory works rather than a more elaborate montage of shorter segments. Using blocks of music in this way also made the transition from one work to the other more obvious, and sometimes clunky. This is most obvious when, for the same sequence, Cloquet-Lafollye follows a piece from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century with something from the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. It’s not just a question of shifting from more adventurous (even dissonant) tonality to classical textures, but often a difference in density and volume. In part one, Gaubert (the “Vif et léger” from his Concert en fa majeur, 1934) is followed by Mendelssohn (Symphony No. 3, 1842), Sibelius is followed by Mozart (per above); in part two, Mahler (Symphony No. 6, 1906) is followed by Mozart (Ave Verum Corpus, 1791). The music itself was all good, sometimes even great, but in many sections sound and image remained only passingly acquainted. (This is sometimes heightened by the fact that, by my count, thirteen of the 104 works used in Cloquet-Lafollye’s compilation postdate 1927.)
In the film’s prologue, for example, the snowball fight was often well synchronized – though its climax was mistimed (at least in the live performance). But the geography lesson, the scene with the eagle, the start of the pillow fight, and the return of the eagle in the final scene, all failed to find a match in the music. The score reflected neither the precise rhythm of scenes, nor the broader dramatic shape of the prologue. Cloquet-Lafollye ends the prologue with music from Benjamin Godard’s Symphonie gothique (1874). This slow, resigned piece of music accompanies one of the great emotional highpoints of the film: the return of Napoleon’s eagle. In the concert hall, I was astonished that this glorious moment was not treated with any special attention by the score. Why this piece for that scene? Of course, these reservations are no doubt informed by personal taste – and my familiarity with Davis’s score for Napoléon. But there are many examples of significant dramatic moments on screen that cry out for musical acknowledgement, and which Cloquet-Lafollye’s choices ignore. Too often, the score is working in a different register and/or at a different tempo to the film.
All this said, there were sequences where the choices did, ultimately, gel with the image. In the final section of part one, the Battle of Toulon can sometimes drag – and I was wondering if the slower framerate (and extra footage) of the new restoration would exacerbate this. (Certainly, some friends at the screening thought it did.) But here, Cloquet-Lafollye’s movement-based structure did, for me, help structure the often-confusing events of this long section into an effective whole.
In particular, one passage worked both theatrically and cinematically. As the storm and battle reaches a climax on screen, on stage extra brass players began trooping from the wings to join the orchestra. It was a premonition of musical might, realized a few moments later in the form of “Siegfrieds Trauermusik” from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (1874). I confess I was initially deeply unsure of this choice. (It is, after all, very famous and has its own specific operatic/dramatic context.) As often with Cloquet-Lafollye’s selections, this piece was initially too slow for the images on screen and the vision of hailstones on drums (a clear invitation for a musical response) went without musical comment. Only gradually did the music coalesce with images: the immense crescendo, the switch from minor to major key, and climactic thundering of orchestral timbre, snare drums included, was irresistible. I’d never heard this piece performed live, and it was simply thrilling. (On the decibel reader, Wagner hit 91db – the loudest piece in the entire score. Perhaps the programme notes could have included this in its list of numerical achievements? “More decibels than any previous restoration!”)
But, as elsewhere, Cloquet-Lafollye followed this immensely dense, loud, surging late romantic music with a piece from an earlier era: the “Marcia funebre” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (1804). As well as not fitting the rhythm of the scenes, this music undercut the gradual shift from mourning to the vision of Napoleon asleep but triumphant. In these final shots, Gance mobilizes several recurrent visual leitmotifs to reaffirm the place of Toulon in the course of Bonaparte’s destiny: the eagle lands on a tree branch nearby, echoing its earlier appearance on the mast of the ship that rescues Bonaparte after the Double Tempest; the morning sun rises above the sleeping general, blazing ever brighter at the top of the frame’s circular masking; the gathered flags are caught in a sudden gust of wind and flutter as brilliantly as Liberty’s superimposed pennants in the Cordeliers sequence or the wind-lashed waves of the Double Tempest; and, in the lower left of the frame, a gun-carriage wheel replicates the last image of the young Bonaparte at Brienne. These images cry out for a musical statement to acknowledge Napoleon’s destiny, but Cloquet-Lafollye just lets the funeral march play out in full – a slow, quiet, trudge to mark the end of the film’s first part. As much as I enjoyed the movement-based structure of the score for Toulon, this didn’t feel the right finale.
These issues of tone and tempo effect comedic scenes as well as dramatic ones. In part two, the Victims’ Ball begins with a title announcing: “The Reaction”. The opening shots – gruff guards, prison bars, bloody handprints – are designed to echo the earlier scenes in the Terror. Convinced of the gravitas of the scene, the audience is unprepared for what happens next: after returning to the establishing shot, the camera slowly pulls backwards to reveal that the “victims” in the foreground are in fact dancing. This carefully prepared joke is lost in Cloquet-Lafollye’s score, which begins the sequence with light, graceful dance music (from the ballet of Mozart’s Idomeneo (1780)). The music gives away the punchline while the film is still establishing the set-up.
Part of me wondered if these elements of disconnection stem from Cloquet-Lafollye’s working method. Per their programme notes, Frédéric Bonnaud and Michel Orier confirm that the score was constructed from tracks taken from existing recordings. Cloquet-Lafollye initially submitted “a montage of recorded music” (17) to the musical team, which suggests he did not begin his work from paper scores or working through passages on the piano. Might this process discourage a more hands-on, score-based construction?
One other point about the score is the inclusion of a single piece from Arthur Honegger’s original music for the film, created for Paris Opéra premiere in April 1927. His name was absent from the musical table of contents issued in the recent Table Ronde publication on Napoléon, so it was a pleasant surprise to see his name in the concert programme. This sole piece, “Les Ombres” for the ghosts of the Convention sequence in part two, was eerie and effective – and distinctive. It is a nice, if brief, acknowledgement of Honegger’s work – though I am puzzled as to why its inclusion was not mentioned until the programmes were issued on the day of the concert. (Cloquet-Lafollye’s essay mentions Honegger only to reiterate that both he and Gance were dissatisfied with the music at the premiere.)
On a similar note, I wonder if Cloquet-Lafollye was familiar with Carl Davis’s score. There are two scenes where the former seems to echo the latter. The first is in Toulon, where Cloquet-Lafollye uses the same traditional melody – “The British Grenadiers” – to contrast with “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” during the build-up to the battle. (In the programme notes, “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” is not credited as “traditional”, but to Beethoven’s Wellingtons Sieg (1813) – though I would need to relisten to the score to discern how closely it follows Beethoven’s version.) The second similarity occurs in one of the few scenes credited as an original piece by Cloquet-Lafollye: “Bureau de Robespierre”. Here, he cites the same popular melodies for the hurdy-gurdy as Davis, and even orchestrates the scene where Robespierre signs death warrants the same way as his predecessor: the hurdy-gurdy accompanied by a low drone-like chord in the orchestra, with strokes of the bell as each warrant is signed. A curious coincidence. (I look forward to being able to listen to these scenes again to compare the scores.)
By far the best section of the music (and the film performance as a whole) was the performance of “La Marseillaise” in part one. I think this was precisely because the sequence forced Cloquet-Lafollye to stick to the rhythm of events on screen, moment by moment, beat by beat. There was also the tremendous theatricality of seeing the choir silently troop onto stage in the concert hall, switch on small lamps above their sheet music, and wait for their cue. The tenor Julien Dran launched into the opening lines, synchronizing his performance with that of Roget de Lisle (Harry Krimer) on screen. When the choir joins in, their first attempt is delightfully disjointed and out of tune. This makes their final, united rendition all the more satisfying and moving. Here, too, the montage of the new restoration evidences the stunning precision with which Gance visualizes “La Marseillaise” on screen: each line and word of the anthem is carried across multiple close-ups of different faces in a tour-de-force of rapid editing. The long-dead faces on screen were suddenly alive – the emotion on their faces and the song on their lips revivified in the theatre. I had never heard “La Marseillaise” performed live, and in the concert hall I wept throughout this rendition. (Even recalling it – writing about it – is oddly powerful.) It was one of the most moving experiences I have had in the cinema. But seeing how well this sequence worked – images and music in perfect harmony – makes me regret even more the way other sections were managed. Considering that Cloquet-Lafollye’s score draws on 200 years of western classical music for its material, and that it has had several years to be assembled, I was disheartened to find so many scenes which lacked a sustained rhythmic, tonal, and cultural synchronicity with the film.
Polyvision. All of which brings me to the film’s finale. I wrote earlier that the screen size (and lack of masking) made me wonder how the triptych would be handled in the Paris concert hall. Since there was no rearrangement of the screen or space for the second evening’s projection, I was even more puzzled. How would they fit the three images on screen?
Eventually, I got my answer. When Napoleon reaches the Army of Italy and confronts his generals, something peculiar started happening to the image: it started shrinking. This was not a sudden change of size. Rather, like a form of water torture, the image slowly, slowly, got smaller and smaller on the screen. To those who had never seen Napoléon before, I cannot image what they thought was happening; did they belief that this gradual diminishment was Gance’s intention? As the image continued to shrink, someone in the audience started shouting. I couldn’t make out what he said, but something along the lines of “Projectionist!” Was he shouting because he didn’t know what was happening, or because he knew what should be happening? I would have started shouting myself, but I was struck dumb with disappointment. More than anything, it was the agonizing slowness of the image wasting away that made me want to sink into the ground rather than face what I realized was coming.
When the image had shrunk enough (making me feel like I was fifty rows further back in the auditorium), the two additional images of Gance’s triptych joined the first. This was the first time I’ve seen Napoléon projected live when the audience didn’t spontaneously applaud this moment. Why would they applaud here, when the revelation was rendered so anticlimactic? Those who hadn’t seen the film before must have been baffled; those who had seen the film before were seething. If the organizers had announced in advance that this was going to happen, it would still have been bad but at least those who had never seen the film would know it wasn’t the way Gance wanted it to be seen. As it was, nothing was said – and the consequences of this decision unfolded like a slow-motion disaster. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so disappointed in my life. Every time I’ve seen the triptych projected as intended, I’ve been almost physically overwhelmed by the power of it. (In Amsterdam in 2014, before a triptych forty metres wide and ten metres high, I thought my heart was about to burst, so violently was it beating.) This time, I was taken utterly out of the film. I could hardly bear being in the concert hall.
All this was exacerbated by the choice of music. Gance’s vision of the assembly of Napoleon’s army, the beating of drums, the shouts of command, the immense gathering of military and moral force, and the revelation of the triptych, is one of the great crescendos in cinema – and the transition from single to triple screen is a sudden and sensational revelation. But Cloquet-Lafollye accompanies these scenes with “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations (1899): slow, restrained, stately music that takes several minutes to swell to its climax. Rhythmically, it is virtually the antithesis of the action on screen. Culturally, too, I thought it was utterly absurd to see Napoleon reviewing the French army to the music of his enemies – the very enemies we saw him fighting in part one. Furthermore, “Nimrod” isn’t just any piece of British orchestral music, but almost a cliché of Englishness – and of a certain period of Englishness, a century away from the scenes on screen. This was followed by the opening of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, which was at least swifter – but only rarely synchronized in any meaningful or effective way with the images of Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. (Chorus and hurdy-gurdy aside, Cloquet-Lafollye’s score does not respond to musicmaking – bells, drums, bugles – within the film; in the finale, the drumroll of the morning reveille on screen goes unechoed in his orchestra on stage.)
In the final few minutes, Napoleon’s “destruction and creation of worlds” bursts across three simultaneous screens: lateral and consecutive montage combine; shot scales collide; spatial and temporal context are intermingled. Finally, the screens are tinted blue, white, and red – just as Gance simultaneously rewinds, fast-forwards, and suspends time. After this incalculable horde of images flies across their breadth, each of the three screens bears an identical close-up of rushing water. This is an image we first saw during the Double Tempest when Bonaparte sets out to confront his destiny – there, the water churns in the path of his vessel, borne by a sail fashioned from a huge tricolour; now, the screen itself has become a flag: the fluttering surge of the ocean is the spirit of the Revolution and of the cinema. The triptych holds this form just long enough for the spectator to lose any sense of the world beyond it, then vanishes with heart-wrenching suddenness. The elation of flight is followed by the sensation of falling to earth.
But what music does Cloquet-Lafollye chose for this visual apocalypse, this lightning-fast surge of images? During the last passage of the Mahler, I saw the choir troop back onto the stage to join the orchestra. Was this to be another performance of “La Marseillaise”? No. As the Army of Italy marches into history, the choir and orchestra on stage began their rendition of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus – music of the utmost slowness and serenity, of absolute calm and peace. It is perhaps the most ill-conceived choice of music I have ever seen in a silent film score. I’ve sat through far, far worse scores, but none has ever disappointed me as much as this single choice of music. When the choir started singing, I honestly thought it must be a mistake, a joke – even that I was dreaming, the kind of absurd anxiety dream where something impossibly awful is happening and there is nothing you can do to stop it. While Gance was busy reinventing time and space, hurling cinema into the future, my ears were being bathed in shapeless placidity. Instead of being bound up in the rush of images, I was sat in my seat as my heart sank through the floor.
How was I meant to feel? What intention lay behind this choice of music? Why this sea of calm tranquillity, this gentle hymn to God, this sense of exquisite grace and harmony? On screen, Gance explicitly compares Napoleon to Satan in the film’s final minutes – the “tempter” who offers the “promised land” to his followers; and our knowledge that this hero is already doomed to corruption and to failure is suspended in the rush of promise that history might, could, should have been different, that the fire of the Revolution might yet inspire other, better goals. Yet from the Paris stage on Friday night, Mozart’s hymn to God carried serenely, blissfully, indifferently over the fissuring, rupturing, exploding imagery on screen – beyond the last plunge into darkness, beyond Gance’s signature on screen, until – having reached the end of its own, utterly independent itinerary – it faded gently into silence. I did not understand. I still do not understand. I sat in bewilderment then as I write in bewilderment now. In combination with the shrunken triptych, this musical finale seemed like the ineptest imaginable rendering of Gance’s aesthetic intentions. (In the lobby afterwards, an acquaintance who was very familiar with the film put it more bluntly: “What a fucking disgrace.”) Roll credits.
Summary. But how to summarize this Parisian ciné-concert of Napoléon? I am still digesting the experience. I wouldn’t have missed this premiere for the world, but aspects of the presentation deeply upset me. Part of my disappointment is doubtless due to the intensity of the marketing around the release of the Cinémathèque française restoration. In my review of the Table Ronde publication that coincides with this release, I expressed reservations about the language with which the restoration has been described, as well as the misleading equivalencies made with previous versions of the film. The same aspects are repeated in the programme notes for the screening, which reproduces the essays by Costa Gavras, Georges Mourier, and Simon Cloquet-Lafollye. The new pieces by Frédéric Bonnaud and Michel Orier (“Comme une symphonie de lumières”) and Thierry Jousse (“Abel Gance et la musique”) are in much the same vein.
In the programme, only the last line of credits cites a precise length for the version we are supposedly watching: “Grande Version (négatif Apollo) / 11,582m”. This length is a metric equivalent of the 38,000ft positive print that Kevin Brownlow (in 1983) records Gance sent to MGM in late 1927. (As opposed to the 9600m negative print that Mourier, in 2012, cites as being assembled for international export at the same time in 1927.) The total amount of footage in the MGM positive included the material used for all three screens of both the Double Tempest and Entry into Italy triptychs, plus (Brownlow assumes) alterative single screen material for these same sequences. The total projected length of the print is given as 29,000ft (a length of such neatness that it suggests approximation). At 18fps, this 29,000ft (8839m) would indeed equate to the 425 minutes of the Cinémathèque française restoration. But are its contents (or two-part structure) the same? There is still no information on how Mourier et al. distinguished the contents of the “Grande Version” from that of the (longer) Apollo version. (Or, indeed, how to distinguish the contents of the “Grande Version” from the contemporaneous 9600m version.) Without more clarification, I’m unsure if the figure of 11,582m in the programme notes truly represents what we are watching. Any differences between the 1927 and 2024 iterations of the “Grande Version” would not matter were it not for the fact that every single press piece and publication relating to the film insists that the two are one and the same thing. Finding even the most basic information about runtimes and framerates is hard enough amid the perorations of marketing.
None of this should obscure the fact that this restoration really does look very good indeed – absolutely beautiful, in fact. And I must reaffirm that Cloquet-Lafollye’s score is not all bad, and sometimes effective – but I simply cannot understand the finale. Even if the image hadn’t shrunk in size in the concert hall, the music would have baffled me. In combination with the botched triptych, it was simply crushing. I still struggle to comprehend how it can have been allowed to take place at the premiere of such a major (not to mention expensive) restoration. Some of the friends with me in Paris had at least seen Napoléon in London or Amsterdam, so knew what it should look (and, ideally, sound) like. But I felt devastated for those experiencing the film for the first time. Only a proper projection of the triptych, as Gance intended, on three screens, will do. I can scarcely believe that the organizers booked a venue in which the outstanding feature of their new restoration could not be adequately presented. I am sure that arranging the forces involved in this concert was both hideously expensive and exhaustingly complex. But why would you go to all that trouble when the film can’t be shown properly? I remain dumbfounded.
One aspect of the Paris concert that I cannot criticize is the musical performance. Throughout both nights, the musicians on stage provided a remarkably sustained, even heroic accompaniment. Frank Strobel conducted the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France for part one (Thursday) and the Orchestre National de France for part two (Friday), together with the Chœur de Radio France (both nights), with immense skill. I have admired his work for silent films over many years, including the premiere of La Roue in Berlin in 2019, and I can hardly imagine a better live performance being given of this score. The audience offered regular applause throughout the film, which was richly deserved. Indeed, there was a great deal of communal enjoyment throughout the concert that I found infectious. (This was evident even beyond the musical performance. There is no music during any of the opening credits, so the Paris audience amused itself by applauding each successive screen of text. This got increasingly ironic, and there were even some laughs when the “special thanks to Netflix” credit appeared.)
If I left the concert hall on Friday night with a heavy heart, it was because of an overwhelming sense of a missed opportunity. This was a long-awaited and much-heralded premiere, and I had so wanted it to be perfect. The restoration is a ravishing visual achievement, offering (thus far) the most convincing montage of this monstrously complex film. But I remain unconvinced by the new score. Given its stated remit of precise synchronization, too much of it washes over the images – and sometimes directly contradicts the film’s tone and tempo. Its soundworld is neither that of the film’s period setting, nor that of the film’s production. In either direction, something more appropriate could surely have been achieved. Bernd Thewes’s rendition of the Paul Fosse/Arthur Honegger score for La Roueis a wonderful model of musical reconstruction, offering a soundworld that is both historically informed, aesthetically coherent, and emotionally engaging. Alternatively, Carl Davis’s score for Napoléon is a model of musical imagination: respecting both historical and cinematic dimensions, it is sensitive, intelligent, witty, and in perfect synch with the film’s every mood and move. I cannot say the same of Cloquet-Lafollye’s work. So while I offer my utmost and enthusiastic praise for the work that went into the Cinémathèque française restoration, I resist the idea that this presentation of Napoléon is “definitive”.
This week, we return to Hanns Schwarz’s Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (1929). As indicated in an earlier post, this film has become something of an obsession. (For interested parties, I have since published a rather more sober analysis of the film elsewhere.) Having spent much time digging around in contemporary press reviews and publicity material, I thought I might write a couple of follow-up pieces on the film’s release and cultural impact within and beyond Germany. A future instalment will discuss the various scores written for performances of the film in Germany, France, and the UK in 1929-30. But this week, my first instalment is devoted to Raoul Ploquin’s novelization of the film: Le Mensonge de Nina Pétrowna (Paris: Tallendier, 1930).
Ploquin’s adaptation was part of a long-running series of ciné-romans published by Tallendier from the late 1920s into the 1930s. I own several volumes in this series, as they are an interesting record of how writers (re)imagined recent films for a popular market. They are also important as records of films that might be partially or entirely lost. Illustrated with stills from the productions they “translate” into text, the books served as promotional material for the films – but also as a way of giving them some kind of cultural afterlife. Once films had left the theatre, the only way audiences might keep a part of their cinematic experience was through such mementos.
In the case of Le Mensonge de Nina Pétrowna, there was a close relationship between the author of the text and the film itself. Raoul Ploquin was the man in charge of adapting Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna for its French release. In other words, he was the person who translated/adapted the film’s intertitles into French. Such prints were often subtly (or not to subtly) changed to suit the requirements of national taste or censors. If contemporary synopses and reviews don’t suggest any significant alterations to the film in France, they do prove that Ploquin made changes to the names of the characters. Colonel Beranoff became Colonel Teroff; Michael Andrejewitsch became Michel Silieff. Nina herself remains the same, though her surname is spelled variously as Pétrowna, Petrovna, Pétrovna, or Petrowna.
Ploquin’s novelization is intriguing for how it stays loyal to the plot of the film, yet constantly alters details – cutting, adding, and refitting the original to shape the narrative for its new format. For a start, the novel sets the opening scenes at “the start of April” (rather than the late autumn/early winter of the film). It also offers a more specific temporal setting than the film. Ploquin tells us that Nina is interested in all the latest news and culture from Europe, especially Paris. We are told that the Ballet Russes have created a sensation and that the Chinese Revolution is in full swing. Still more precisely, Nina wonders who will succeed Armand Fallières as President of France. Since Fallières retired in February 1913, this gives the novel a start-point of April that year.
Whereas the film presents the opening scene as their first encounter, the novel begins with Nina recalling a previous sighting of Michel from her balcony. (She remembers him “blushing like a schoolboy” at her gaze (8).) Rather than a chance encounter, Ploquin makes Nina’s presence on the balcony a deliberate attempt to catch Michel’s eye. Indeed, while Nina’s past might be implied in the film it is more detailed in the novel. She considers her own reputation as “the proud Nina Petrovna, the famous Nina Petrovna, the disdainful Nina Petrovna”. (More akin to how Ploquin may have seen Helm’s screen persona.) Nina also ponders why Michel has yet to write to her or make any other kind of move to make contact.
Ploquin’s text also gives us more backstory to Nina’s relations with Teroff. She has been his mistress for five years (44) and living in his villa for three years (5). Ploquin describes Teroff thus:
regular sports had preserved a youthful silhouette; his face was hairless, apart from his upper lip, which was decorated with a small moustache, neatly dyed black. […] His face, with its fine and regular features, had earned him so many successes with women that he still retained, at the corners of his lips, a certain conceited smile that enabled the most innocuous remark to become impertinent. (9)
Nina herself is given a background: she is “an orphaned dancer” who has become “the most seen woman in the Russian capital” (9). Ploquin states that Nina is more intelligent than Teroff, and then segues to a chapter that gives us the backstory to Michel – demonstrating his intelligence.
Michel, we are told, wanted to train for the Russian general staff and become “a brilliant tactician” (13). But he also wants to study psychology at university, and is busy learning German and French (he reads Schopenhauer and Napoleon’s memoirs in his spare time). Ploquin then gives a lengthy section to Michel’s inner thoughts. He recalls seeing the “pale shadow” of Nina on her balcony, but he had not learnt her name. He thinks of her simply as “Madame l’Amour”(!). His thoughts recall the imagery from the film: Nina appearing between “the two symbolic cupids” of the building’s masonry. Was she “a sort of sylphid enigma, perhaps a creates purely of his imagination”? (16) But when (in the equivalent of the film’s first scene) Nina throws him a “blood-red rose”, he realizes her true interest in him (17-18).
The scene at the “Aquarium Club” is fairly close to the equivalent sequence in the film, though throughout the novel there is much more dialogue between Michel and his fellow young officers. He feels a “magnetic” gaze upon him from the loggia in the club. Seeing Nina, his friends warn him that she is “none other than the beautiful Nina Petrovna, whom everyone in St Petersburg knows is the mistress of Colonel Alexandre Teroff” (22). Meanwhile, Nina lies to Teroff about how she knows Michel. While the film merely shows us Nina’s pantomime storytelling, the novel spells it all out: she claims that Michel was a childhood friend “who always had flowers” for her, and who once rescued her from drowning when she fell from a pony into a stream (24).
When Michel is brought up to Nina, we learn that Nina paints and plays the piano, and is friends with a famous Russian dancer, Zenaïda Fedorovna (29). (Having tried to find out whether Fedorovna was a real person, I have discovered that this is the name of a character – a mistreated lover – in Chekhov’s The Story of an Unknown Man (1893). A deliberate choice by Ploquin?) Nina and Michel dance not, as in the film, in front of Teroff and his friends, but only once they have left the room. (There is still a moment when the light is turned back on, but in the novel it is simply when Teroff et al. re-enter the room – not a deliberate ploy to end their dance.)
When Nina slips Michel the key to her door, he almost laughs: “He stifled a burst of joyful laughter, a burst of laughter from a child whose maddest desires have just been unexpectedly fulfilled. In a second, life appeared to him as a long series of victories, of which he had just won the most decisive” (31). (At this point, the novel cuts out the delightful little moment in the film when Michael leaves the Club without his coat, which is being held out to him by a teenage servant. The boy is so short that he disappears behind the coat that he holds out – only to poke his head out when nothing happens. It’s a lovely comic touch that eases the portentousness of Michael’s reaction. The novel has no such comic moments.)
When Michel arrives chez Nina, Ploquin adapts some of the text of intertitles into his dialogue – but, crucially, elaborates them with his own interpolations. Thus, after Nina says: “You must think me very audacious”, Michel replies: “Audacious! No, I assure you… I just think you’re good and clever” (33). Ploquin also makes more of Michael’s intimidation by the luxury of his surroundings. It’s there in the film, but the novel lays it on thick: Michel immediately sees it as a barrier to his chances with Nina (and thinks that she would never want to give it up). It presages the eventual rupture between Nina and Michel, giving an (I think, unnecessary) extra motivation for Michel to accept Nina’s lie. During their (platonic) night together, Michel tells Nina about his childhood. As with Nina, Ploquin gives Michel a tough upbringing: Michel’s mother was a widow of a minor functionary and his homelife was deprived (34).
Unlike the film, where it is Nina who (after reacting to Michel’s assumptions about the kind of woman she is) says that Michel should leave, in the novel it is Michel who says that he should leave (35). There is no dance to the chiming of the clock, per the film, and instead of that perfect blend of gaucheness and childishness, the novel provides Michel with some rather silly inner monologue about realizing that Schopenhauer was right regarding the folly of romantic dalliances! (37) Once it is agreed that he will stay, it is his thoughts of Schopenhauer that stop Michel opening the door to Nina’s room that night.
In the morning, Nina is compared to “a playful cat” in her swift movements (a comparison made endlessly by French critics of Helm herself) (38). Their breakfast – which is itemized to emphasize its luxury (caviar, sandwiches, eggs and bacon with Worcestershire sauce!) (39) – is then interrupted, per the film, by Teroff. After Michel leaves, Nina taunts Teroff – slandering herself as “a whore! a bitch in heat!” (42). He retorts that he has “risked his career for her” (not something that is said in the film, where the power relations between Nina/Teroff are much clearer: she risks everything by leaving him, he risks nothing). Indeed, Teroff is much angrier and less coldly detached in this scene in the novel than the film. (Some of its prose captures Warwick Ward’s performance well, other aspects seem very different.) Meanwhile, Michel is once again left to his own thoughts. “Oh Nina! – instrument of the devil!… Perverted woman! I curse you… You’ve trapped me in this evil mire!” (46) This is part of a disturbed, often violent, inner monologue. Michel is much more troubled, and prone to outbursts (even if only in his own mind), than in the film.
In the film, Nina reappears the next morning. But in the novel, a fortnight passes until Michel hears from Nina again (52). First, she phones him, then (per the film) arrives at his barracks. I can only suppose that the novel drags out the time between their nighttime meeting and their encounter at the barracks solely to make the narrative occupy more time. (As we shall see, whole months pass over its course.) When Michel gets into her carriage, Nina tells him her life story, how she hates the “odious objects” with which she was surrounded in Teroff’s villa (57-8). When they arrive at Nina’s apartment, she introduces Michel to her neighbour as “my husband” (59) – rather giving away what will happen next! The novel then proceeds to gives us a (rather too detailed) description of how she lives on her own. She puts on a kimono(!) and guides Michel round her small rooms, filled with (bad) paintings. She shows him the piano, which she promises she will teach him how to play – beginning with the “Hungarian waltz” to which they danced in the Aquarium Club (62). Nina plays the waltz, and Ploquin provides us with the (unsung) words: “The hours that never return, / Those we guard secretly in our hearts, / It is these that I would rekindle / In the calm of a summer night.” (62) Ploquin’s text here (at least the first line) is taken from the theme song produced to accompany the film for its German release. (I promise to return to this aspect of the film in a future post!) It is now that they dance (in silence, one presumes), whereupon “they spend their first night of love together” (63). Delicate though the line might sound in French, it’s still a rather blunt summary of the equivalent scene in the film – or rather, it describes the ellipsis after the film fades to black following the lovers’ embrace. The text quite literally spells out what’s going on, which is a shame.
Nina and Michel then spend several months together. Only now does the book catch up with the seasonal milieu of the film, which is set entirely during the winter. The fact that the novel begins in April 1913 now allows its last chapters to be set in the winter of 1913-14, hence on the verge of the Great War. (Schwarz’s film gives no exact year, but the imperial Russian setting is very clearly c.1900.) Ploquin exploits the approach of war through Nina’s fear of Michel’s career in the army. “What if there is a war?”, she asks him. “What if you were killed?” (64) While the film implicitly carries the knowledge that the entire world of its characters will be destroyed by the forthcoming war and revolution, the novel is thus more explicit. Ploquin also makes more of Nina’s worry in respect of the two lovers’ relative mindset. Michel’s inexperience is emphasized by the fact that Nina calls him “enfant”, putting “all her pity, all her love” into her utterance of this word (71).
Ploquin’s treatment of Michel renders the character less coherent, I think, than in the film. Franz Lederer’s performance on screen is so finely gauged that it’s much easier to believe in his childishness and his gaucheness. As I wrote in the piece(s) cited in my preamble, Michael in the film may be inexperienced but he is also too quick to leap to conclusions. Articulated through the combination of performance and mise-en-scène, I am far more willing to accept the film’s characterization of Michael than I am the novel’s. Ploquin’s provision of inner monologues seeks to contextualize his final outburst toward Nina, but the quality and quantity of these sections (to my mind) render the character less coherent. If anything, this is worsened by the fact that the novel also emphasizes how much pity everyone else feels towards him. (As if Nina were not really the central protagonist of the story.) Even when Teroff threatens him over his cheating at cards, the colonel mutters “poor kid” when he sends him off to Nina and certain heartbreak (89).
These tonal issues aside, the novel sticks much more closely to the film for its last chapters. And though I have complained about its rendering of character, there are also some pleasing moments when it tries to capture specific moments from the film. One of these is that astonishing, sustained close-up of Nina before she lies to Michael and breaks his heart. Of this, Ploquin writes: “A long moment passed, during which the young woman’s face expressed only a dreadful, enduring agony” (92). It is indeed “a long moment” on screen (some 45 seconds), though Ploquin cannot do justice in his prose to the cadence of emotion we see in Helm’s performance. Ploquin also knows when not to change the text of the original titles: Nina’s words to Michel are essentially the same as rendered in the film’s German titles. (Ploquin’s text is presumably a close match to his translated titles for French prints of the film.) Likewise, the final scene plays the same. The text does not attempt to echo the film’s complex editing and camera movement here. The film’s last image – of Nina’s shoes – is not that of the novel. Rather, it closes on a last vision of Nina: “She sleeps, Nina Pétrovna, motionless and proud, serene and mysterious. / A sleep so calm! A faithful sleep!…” (96) I don’t suppose there would be a way to adequately render in prose the sadness of the film’s ending (and the skill of its visual language). Ploquin’s attempt is a little too fond of its own idea of Nina, and the idea of her suicide as an expression of her “faithfulness” simplifies a much more complex emotional tone.
In sum, Ploquin’s text is a curious blend of adaptation and invention. It says as much about the (imagined) tastes of French cinemagoers as it does about the film itself. Nina is much more of a celebrity in the novel, drawing on contemporary fascination with Brigitte Helm. By 1930, Helm was established as a star across Europe (and beyond). She had already starred in one major French production – L’Argent (1929) – and the coming of sound would lead to many more French-language productions. (Several of which also spawned ciné-romans.) But the very fascination with Helm’s presence on screen results in some rather awkward transliteration in Ploquin’s text. His emphasis on the inner life of characters renders the text far more novelistic than cinematic. The beauty of Nina Petrowna, it seems to me, is how much meaning is shaped through the combination of performance and the impeccably crafted mise-en-scène. Still, I’m very glad to have found this book and to have gone through it, I hope, with curious interest. I remain curious about how the witnesses of silent cinema sought to capture their experiences in prose. (See also my earlier posts on musical imaginings of silent stars, here and here.) I also feel some sort of kinship with writers like Ploquin. After all, I spend much of my time trying to capture in writing my impressions of what I have seen and felt on the screen. With this in mind, at some point I will get around to writing about other ciné-romans published by Tallendier. There’s something charming about their rough, age-tanned paper and low-quality photographic reproductions – and about their enthusiastic reimagining of cinematic images and the experiences they engendered. Reading them is to take a little leap into the past, and to partake in a little of their faded cinephilia.
The Realm of Silence 