Bernd Thewes – The Realm of Silence

Music for La Roue (1923; Fr.; Abel Gance)

Gance’s La Roue is a film that has obsessed for me for nearly twenty years. The seeds were sown in December 2004, when I first saw Napoléon. On the return train from London, I began reading Kevin Brownlow’s history of the film. It was the first book I ever read about Gance, and I immediately wanted to know more about the epic production that had preceded Napoléon—and pioneered many of the techniques that Gance perfected in his masterpiece of 1927. Back then, La Roue was a very very difficult film to see—as was virtually all of Gance’s silent work. (Much of it still is.) I tracked down various copies—from a three-hour version released on laserdisc in Japan, to a five-hour restoration assembled by Marie Epstein—before a DVD was released by Flicker Alley in 2008. This version was both wonderful and disappointing. Despite the inevitable claims of this being “the longest version of the film shown since 1923”, it wasn’t: it was shorter than Marie Epstein’s 1980 restoration. But it did have material that the latter lacked. By now irredeemably obsessed, I collated the two copies together with the laserdisc version. Using various synopses and the novelization written by Ricciotto Canudo in 1923, I assembled a homemade version of 6h15m and compiled a score for my own viewing pleasure.

Thankfully, a professional restoration was in the offing. In the 2010s, a huge project led by François Ede and the Cinémathèque française was busy restoring the film to a version of 7 hours. Ede’s work is simply extraordinary, and his essay in the booklet that accompanies the 2019 Blu-ray edition of the film is the finest set of liner notes I have ever encountered. Anyone interested in the film’s making, unmaking, and restoration should read it to find out this unbelievably complex story. What was particularly exciting was the fact that this new version was accompanied by Bernd Thewes’s reconstruction of the musical score compiled in 1922-23 by Paul Fosse and Arthur Honegger. I was lucky enough to attend the world premiere of this restoration at the Konzerthaus Berlin in September 2019. There, I experienced La Roue on a huge screen with Frank Strobel conducting the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin in live concert. It was one of the great cinematic experiences of my life. In this piece, I offer some reflections on the reconstructed score and its relation to the film. Though what follows is based on numerous relistenings to the score via the soundtrack of the Blu-ray, I will always refer back to my initial experience of the film the context of its live presentation in 2019. This circumstance was the way Gance wanted the film shown, and my understanding of the effectiveness of the music on that day was at once aural, physical, and emotional…

The score: Music history, film history

La Roue was premiered across three weekly screenings in December 1922 at the Gaumont-Palace, Paris. The Gaumont-Palace was a grand, prestigious venue and had its own orchestra, directed by Paul Fosse. Between 1911 and 1928, Fosse arranged music for over 1500 silent films shown at the Gaumont-Palace. Two huge volumes of handwritten cue sheets survive, each one detailing which pieces of music were used. Though the details are not always precise, these documents offer an extraordinary picture of the music used for accompaniment at the Gaumont-Palace. Among the cue lists can be found those for La Roue. After the premiere in December 1922, the film was slightly reduced in length (from 10,730m to 10,495m) and restructured from six “chapters” into four “episodes” for its general release in February 1923. Fosse’s cue sheet accords with this four-part version, and his notations were an invaluable guide for the team reconstructing the film. Since all the music used for this version of the film was listed, it also allowed the opportunity to reconstruct the score as presented in 1923.

For La Roue, Fosse collaborated with his friend Arthur Honegger to compile and arrange what originally amounted to over eight hours of music. They presumably also consulted Gance, but one of the great missing links in this history is the exact nature of the decision-making process that led to the score’s assembly. While many film histories assume that the score for La Roue was wall-to-wall Honegger, Fosse’s cue sheets reveal that Honegger is one of 56 composers whose music is used. Honegger wrote the film’s overture and five pieces for specific sequences: six cues among a total of 117, i.e. just 5% of the score. Even with the five pieces used in the film, two are simply repetitions of music from the overture. And though this overture survives, all three of Honegger’s pieces of “special” music—“musique accident”, “disques”, “catastrophe”—are lost and had to be recreated on the basis of his other work.

The musical adaptation and arrangement for the 2019 restoration was by composer Bernd Thewes. Though Thewes had worked on other silent film scores (some of which I have discussed in earlier posts), La Roue was to be a challenge of very different proportions. As well as the detective work in finding the sheet music for numerous (often very obscure) cues, Thewes had to orchestrate and arrange the entire score into a coherent whole. Some of the music proved untraceable, just as there were missing parts of the film to negotiate. Even regardless of these obstacles, I think his work is masterful. The reconstructed music for La Roue is one of the great achievements in the history of film restoration.

The score: Music and montage

Right from the start, the score provides a complex, often intimate, accompaniment to the images. Having listened many times to Honegger’s “overture” from La Roue (the only piece from the 1923 score to have been previously recorded), I was astonished to see how well each section and theme fitted the opening credits and build-up of images before the first main sequence. Its mix of soft and abrasive tones, its juddering rhythms and calm interludes, its patches of light and dark—all of it made perfect sense with the restored montage. The music added depth to the images, just as the images made the structure of the “overture” make sense: indeed, the credits are themselves a visual overture that introduce not just the characters/performers of the film but also the visual motifs (rails, wheels, signals) of the drama.

Then, for the train crash itself, the orchestra thunders into music from Jean Roger-Ducasse’s Orphée (1913). At the Konzerthaus in 2019, I sat sweating in my seat at the sheer sonic weight of Roger-Ducasse’s pounding rhythms. On screen, a third train threatens to plough into the wreckage of the two derailed trains: Gance cuts between the crash site, the oncoming train, the signalmen, and Sisif. As the montage quickens, the music builds into an immense crescendo. In the 2019 screening, I could hear people around me quite literally gasping with tension as the sequence tightened; and, when it ended in the avoidance of further disaster, a woman behind me let out a great breath in relief. The visual montage is already a remarkable instance of quick cutting between multiple spaces, but the addition of the music multiplied its effectiveness. In the theatre, you could feel the tension: Gance’s silent world was given weight and pressure through music, through the sound of the orchestra in the air, the sensation of music vibrating through the floor and seats. Truly, there is nothing like seeing a silent film with a live orchestra.

Part of what was striking about the musical-visual whole was the aesthetic complexity of the experience. Just as Roger-Ducasse’s music utilizes the full range of orchestral timbre—from deep brass to glistening percussion,—so Gance’s utilizes a wide range of colour elements across his montage. The effectiveness of this was enhanced by the restoration. Ede’s team decided to reproduce the visual quality of what the “monochrome” black-and-white sections of the film would have had on screen in 1923: i.e. not pure black-and-white but subtly warm monochrome (like a very faint wash of ochre). This choice allowed the range of other colours a warmer base level with which to interact: it made the complex stencil-colouring (for individual areas of the frame) less garish, while not lessening their presence. Seen across the opening crash sequence, the impact of these various forms of colour is amazing: there are vibrant reds, subtler reds, yellows, ambers, washes of ochre, sudden splashes of stencilled red and yellow and green. The image changes its tone just as the music changes its texture.

The Fosse/Honegger score also does well to provide both consistency and variety in its musical accompaniment. It’s noteworthy, for example, that Honegger’s music doesn’t dominate all the sequences of rapid montage. I’ve already mentioned Roger-Ducasse’s music over the opening train crash, but the later scenes of impending disaster and fury feature music by Ferruccio Volpatti, Alfred Bruneau, and Gabriel Dupont. Among these, I particularly enjoyed the use of Volpatti’s Vers la gloire [n.d.]. Bernd Thewes’s orchestration of this (utterly obscure) piece is superb: listen to that pulsing, mechanical rhythm, the punching brass beats, the hyperventilating woodwind, the rising strings. It sounds like the orchestra has been put on some dangerous autopilot setting—or else possessed by a machine: it’s all rhythm, a mechanism racing at full-pelt, held in perfect synchronism while hurtling toward to dissolution. Again, in the theatre, this was a simply thrilling sequence to watch.

While many scholarly accounts of La Roue have (understandably) emphasized its sequences of rapid montage, the film is also concerned with duration in all its senses (one might say, at all tempi). The film was, after all, originally over eight hours long—effectively the length of several substantial feature films. This is a very protracted drama, not some kind of ceaseless collage. What makes the rapid sequences so effective is the fact that they occur within the context of a much longer, slower narrative. Great stretches of brooding melodrama suddenly condense and erupt in violent passages of lightning-quick editing. The music reflects these contrasts in tempo.

Like most scores from the silent era, the Fosse/Honegger score for La Roue often floats over the images—occupying space and time without directly mimicking the images. For the most part, this is an inevitability because 111 of the 117 musical cues were not written for the film but selected from music in the repertory (and, specifically, Fosse’s in-house music library at the Gaumont-Palace). Thus, part of the pleasure is just in watching in a kind of trance as the rich strains of late romantic music, some familiar pieces but most unfamiliar, move like weather systems over the imagery. L.-H. Burel’s cinematography is as rich, textured, and evocative as any you’ll ever see; seeing it while listening to Massenet or Sibelius, Schmitt or Debussy only enhances the aesthetic pleasure. The music invites an emotional engagement with even the simplest or most abstract views: organized sound makes (I think) the spectator more receptive to the drama, more ready to be moved, more ready to feel what’s happening. Part of the nature of late romantic symphonic music is the fact that it often takes is sweet time to develop, to explore an idea, to unravel a theme. The same can be said of the film: it moves across time in great sweeps, long paragraphs; it reflects back on itself, summons memories of earlier episodes, shifts tempo, broods, slows, comes to a halt, only to move on again…

The score: Matches and misalliances

On a purely musical level, Thewes’s reconstruction of the Fosse/Honegger score is an unmitigated pleasure for me. As I have written before, I have been a lifelong sucker for late romantic music—especially obscurities that offer the additional pleasure of my having to scour the earth for recordings. The Fosse/Honegger compilation is a treasure-trove of music that was known and played in the 1920s but has now fallen entirely from the repertoire. There is simply nowhere else that I can go to hear the orchestral works of Georges Hüe, Félix Fourdrain, or Georges Sporck. Indeed, even more major figures like Vincent d’Indy or Gustave Charpentier are rarities in concert halls today—especially outside France. I first saw the Fosse/Honegger cue sheet several years before the 2019 restoration was completed, and my own exploration of the music that I could find available was already a revelation. It was through La Roue that I came to love the work of d’Indy and Charpentier, as well as the more obscure (but no less interesting) work of composers like Guy Ropartz, Benjamin Godard, Roger-Ducasse, and Alfred Bruneau. Straddling two centuries, their music represents the overlapping worlds of late romanticism and experimental modernism in sound. In the wake of seeing the restoration in 2019, the score has become a further springboard to hear more. (Happily, the music of Gabriel Dupont, for example, has now been recorded together with Dupont’s other symphonic works and released on CD (Outhere/Fuga Libera, 2019). So too has the work of Fernand de La Tombelle (Outhere/Bru Zane, 2019).)

Obscure or not, the music takes on a wonderfully definite role when used in the film. Take, for example, the lengthy sequence of Sisif’s confession to Hersan at the end of Part 1. It begins with Saint-Saëns’s prelude to Le Déluge (1875)—a familiar piece whose frequent use in silent films scores I even discussed in an earlier piece on The Three Musketeers (1921). In La Roue, Saint-Saëns’s uneasy opening section for strings alone introduces Sisif’s angsty exchange with Norma and then Hersan (the close-up of Sisif turning toward the camera times perfectly with the measure for lowest strings); the passage with solo violin over pizzicato strings then coincides with Elie’s playing of the violin as Norma watches from the window. I’ve heard this piece used so many times, but never has the solo violin section been so well used for events on screen: Elie’s playing picks up the sounds coming from the orchestra. But it’s the next piece of music, the first movement from Philipp Scharwenka’s Fantaisie dramatique (1900), that really make the sequence. The angry brass chords with which it opens announces the darkness of Sisif’s confession. The tempo is slow to start, but this musical pace actually heightens the intensity of the first flashback sequence (related via a rapid montage of the film’s opening scenes): the minor-key intensity of the piece is the perfect mood music, creating an emotional through-line that traverses the screen’s sudden plunging through time. The subtle shifts to lighter passages accompany other, happier, memories of Norma and her life with Sisif at home—followed by more brassy interjections that swing the music back into growling depths of anger and desire. And it’s also the skill of Thewes as an orchestrator that allows the next piece—a “lied” by Gaston Schindler (originally for piano and violin)—to segue so convincingly from Scharwenka’s piece and into Ropartz’s Les Landes, the piece that concludes Part 1. Diverse pieces, from the well-known to the obscure, are made to work with and enhance the images.

So what doesn’t work? Well, there are some notable scenes where the music weirdly detaches itself from the drama in a way that feels oddly ineffective. One of these is the scene in Part 2 in which Sisif is partially blinded by an accident while repairing a steam valve on his train. The music is “L’Epreuve”, by Charles Pons (1870-1957), and it is a mildly dreamy, slow piece—a charming, if not very memorable work of late romantic loveliness. So why is it being used in a scene of drama and tragedy? It could of course be a question of historical taste, but there is one other possibility. At the premiere of La Roue in December 1922, the orchestral score was augmented by numerous sound effects produced via mechanical means. The critic Emile Vuillermoz reported that the audience heard “real jets of steam” synchronized with at least one scene in the film (Comœdia, 31 December 1922). Was the audible drama for Sisif’s blinding originally provided by this use of sound? If so, it would make sense that the music played by the orchestra would be quiet: this way, the sound effect could be heard more effectively. Sadly, the reports from 1922-23 do not make this issue any clearer, and I can find no record of what sound effects were used in what sequences (or in which subsequent screenings). This issue is also apparent in the moment (in Part 1) when Elie and Norma are interrupted from their mutual daydreaming by the sound of a train’s steam-powered whistle. The musical cue ends precisely before the film cuts to the source of the aural interruption (and then rapidly cuts to an even closer shot of the shrilling steam). This is a sound effect rendered entirely visual: the music does not resume until the film cuts back to the interior scene of Elie and Norma. The effect is very odd, since it is silence that does the interrupting rather than sound. I presume that, at least at the 1922 premiere, this moment was accompanied by a sound effect that reproduced the visual cue. While the silent interruption is weirdly effective, we should bear in mind that this may not have been the original way the moment worked.

Talking of silence, there is another moment in the film that struck me as not working as originally intended. At the end of Part 3, Elie is hanging by his fingertips to the side of a cliff. Norma and Sisif (and Tobie, Sisif’s dog) are racing to the rescue. But, just as Norma arrives, Elie’s grip loosens. There is an astonishing sequence of rapid montage, which accelerates to the rate of one frame per shot—the filmstrip’s maximum unitary velocity—as Elie’s memories of Norma flash across the screen. This was the first time in film history that such a technique had been used like this, and it remains dazzling. Gance’s film invites us to share the subjective vision of his character, his last moments of consciousness, before he plunges into the abyss. But somehow, the awful suddenness of the fall isn’t as awful or as sudden in the restored score. Fosse’s original cue sheet states that there should be “a silence for the fall”. But the reconstructed score does not give us a silence here; instead, the music overlaps the climactic burst of rapid montage and the sight of Elie plummeting into the ravine. Though it is timed reasonably well with a small crescendo in the music, there is no equivalent burst of speed, fury, or anger in this section of Dupont’s Le Chant de la destinée. Wouldn’t it have been more effective to simply cut the music short—even mid-bar—for this moment? I can imagine it could more potently create the sense of a life being cut short, of our expectations of Elie’s rescue being so swiftly ended. (From memory, I think I was more disappointed by this moment in the live 2019 performance than when reviewing the scene on Blu-ray at home. Perhaps that’s because the tension generated in a live, continuous experience was all the greater when I felt the tension dissipate.) It’s not that the sequence doesn’t work (it does), but that it could have worked better.

The score: Missing music

There are sections of the Fosse/Honegger compilation that could not be reconstructed with historical precision because the music has proved untraceable. I have already mentioned Honegger’s missing “special” pieces (“musique accident”, “disques”, “catastrophe”) that had to be recreated from surviving music. Additionally, a piece called “Cher passé” by a composer cited only as “Abriès” was impossible to identify or find. While Abriès’s music was only used in one scene, a more substantial loss was Pons’s Symphonie humaine. Sections of this music were used in two sequences: firstly, in a scene in Part 1 prior to Sisif’s confession; secondly in the scene in Part 3 where Elie witnesses Hersan’s rape of Norma. (Thewes replaces these with portions of another work used elsewhere in the score: Scharwenka’s Fantaisie dramatique.) I was curious about the fate of Pons’s piece, so I did some digging. It turns out to have quite a revealing history: revealing not just about how music can disappear, but the way in which it could be recycled during the lifetime of its composer.

Intriguingly, Pons’s “symphony” appears to have started life as the score for another film! In November 1916, the Gaumont-Palace presented Henri Pouctal’s La Flambée, which was based on a play by Henry Kistemaeckers. Among the music used, the contemporary reviews mention Godard’s Scènes poétiques, d’Indy’s prelude to L’Etranger, Paul Dukas’ overture to Polyeucte, and Pons’ Symphonie humaine. All four of these pieces were subsequently used in the Fosse/Honegger score for La Roue. But Pons’ Symphonie humaine is cited as being a piece specially composed for Pouctal’s La Flambée in 1916. The music “underlines by its harmonic intensity the scene of the spy’s death and the tragic scene of reconciliation between Colonel de Felt and his wife” (Le Film, 18 November 1916). Other reviews also mention the superb way that Pons had captured the emotional rhythm and tone of the sequences in the film (L’Œuvre, 10 November 1916; La Liberté, 11 November 1916). The press reports also reveal that Pons himself came to compose for the cinema via his work at the Opéra Comique and his incidental music for Georges Clemenceau’s drama Voile du Bonheur (1901). Clearly, there was good employment to be had for a young composer writing new orchestral music for various forms of live accompaniment in Paris.

This is all rather interesting: in 1922-23, Fosse reused the entirety of the music assembled for Pouctal’s La Flambée at the Gaumont-Palace in 1916. But the reuse of Pons’ symphony was not limited to cinematic presentations. After the end of the silent era, this work later appeared on concert and radio programmes. In February 1936, for example, Radio-Paris broadcast a programme that included Pons’ Symphonie humaine, which is described as a “musical commentary in three episodes” from Kistemaeckers’s drama (Le Peuple, 20 February 1936). The same station broadcast another performance of the symphony in April that year (Le Matin, 29 April 1936), and in 1937 Grenoble radio broadcast a concert with several works by Pons, including the Symphonie humaine (L’Intransigeant, 9 June 1937).

Conclusion: Miracles musical and visual

Part 4 is my favourite portion of La Roue, and in the 2019 restoration I think it’s a perfect miracle of musical and visual collaboration. (I have just rewatched the last half hour of the film and find myself in floods of tears.) This part is called “La symphonie blanche” (“Symphony in white”) and the whole last movement is a kind of late romantic tone poem of darkness giving way to light, of death and transfiguration.

I’ve written about this part of La Roue in detail elsewhere, but I did so before I had seen the film with its reconstructed score. By the time of the live performance in 2019, I’d seen many different versions of La Roue in many different circumstances, on every format from VHS to 35mm, on tiny screens and cinema screens. None of that prepared me for the effect that the film had on me in the cinema with live orchestra. There are many miraculous moments in “La symphonie blanche”, all of which are made more miraculous by the music.

This final part of the film is its strangest. Dramatically, it contains the least potential of any episode of La Roue. Hersan has died, Elie has died. Minor characters have been left behind. Only two of the film’s four main characters are still alive, and the sole source of tension is whether Sisif will welcome Norma back into his life. Despite these potential limitations, Gance proceeds to draw out his increasingly strange resolution for nearly two hours—and the music finds ways of articulating the strange emotional journey of the film’s protagonists.

Only in the second half of Part 4 do Sisif and Norma even encounter one another directly. After Sisif has planted the cross at the site of Elie’s death, Norma silently follows him back to his cabin and, at night, appears trembling in the doorway in a swirl of ice and snow. She enters and finds herself alone by the unlit hearth. The music here is from Albert Roussel’s first symphony, known as “Poème de la forêt”. The movement here has the perfect thematic link to the wintry scene: the “Fôret d’hiver”, which magically sparkles and warms as Norma lights the fire—the tinting shifting from blue to orange as the fire is lit. The next cue—Camille Chevillard’s Ballade symphonique (1889)—likewise gradually seems to warm to life: there is a lovely, winding theme for the strings that feeds through Norma’s first scenes in daylight in the cabin. But it also shifts into an angry climax (accompanying Sisif’s fury on discovering that he has an intruder), before calming for Sisif’s slow acceptance. (Here the score switches to the calm mood of “Dans les bois” from Godard’s Scènes poétiques (1878).)

There follows one of my favourite scenes in the film, when Sisif gently strokes Norma’s hair as she sleeps (the first time he has touched her in years). The scene is given an absolutely beautiful accompaniment: Henri Duparc’s Aux étoiles (1874). Just as Norma wakes to her father’s touch, a solo violin line rises out of the gentle glow of the orchestral adagio… it’s an exquisite moment, surely one of the most tender in Gance’s entire filmography. The next cue—the “Carillon” from Fernand de La Tombelle’s Impressions matinales (1892)—accompanies the “transformation” of Sisif’s interior space with increasingly bright orchestral textures, as well as a lovely bell-like pealing in the brass.

But just as we think that the score is beginning to lift some of the narrative weight that has preceded it, the lightened atmosphere is broken by the next piece if music, taken from Honegger’s overture to La Roue. The visual cue is a cutaway to the ascent of the funicular railway and the music returns us to the opening montage of wheels in motion. It is a sinister, mechanical march—pulsing, threatening. Sisif and Norma have not yet spoken to each other, not yet openly acknowledged their mutual presence; the score’s sudden shift to this troubled musical world of the Prologue indicates that all is not well—that there are issues yet to be resolved in the drama. The transition is made more effective by being followed by a passage from Roger-Ducasse’s Orphée—the same eerie soundworldthat accompanied the nighttime part of the crash sequence (when Sisif first found Norma). This is used for their “first words” to each other. The music becomes lighter, just as the snow outside and the newly-painted white interior of the cabin are bright spaces. This is suddenly interrupted by another musical reminiscence: to more music from Roger-Ducasse, repeated from the end of the Prologue, as Sisif ruminates on the past. (The original piece of Honegger here is lost; Thewes chose the Roger-Ducasse piece as a strong substitute that also recalled the earlier scenes of the accident and the children’s game that recreated the crash with toy trains. It works brilliantly, again disrupting the optimistic atmosphere of the previous cue.) The brutal blast of brassy, percussive sound that disrupts the gentle texture of the scene dissolves back to lightness in the strings.

The score next uses Debussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lins” (from his piano preludes of 1909-13), a deliciously light, ungraspable texture. (Just see how it seems to rhyme with the soft fronds of the pampas grass that Sisif gathers in his arms to decorate the cabin.) From this point, Gance allows his characters time to experience something close to contentment with one another, just as he offers the film’s audience time to fall in synch with the quiet tempo of dramatic domesticity. We see the arrival of the guides, who as part of their seasonal fete begin a dance up to the highest meadow on the mountainside, overlooked by Sisif’s cabin. Here, the score switches to a popular mode: a folk-like dance from Marcel Samuel’s-Rousseau’s Noël Bénichon (1908). The use of this, and a later cue on a similar theme, is perhaps the score’s most joyful, happy cue. After so many hours of tension and anger and fear, finally the mood is one of release. Pent-up angst has become a kind of dance. (And another form of the wheel, as the dancers outside circle round a tree.)

There is a far subtler, more lyrical lilt to the next music cue: from the ballet music of Georges Hüe’s opera Le Miracle (1910). This is the only music by Hüe that I’ve ever heard, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Listen to the way the simple, yearning melody becomes stranger and more captivating as it’s passed between high strings, woodwind/harp, then back to the lower strings. The scene it accompanies is one of my favourites in the film. When a local girl asks Norma to join the dance of the guides, Norma reacts with girlish glee. She tells Sisif, asking if it’s alright to leave him for a while, then rushes over to the girl with her answer. After a slight pause, as if not sure how to show or offer her affection, Norma kisses the girl—then returns to apply “a touch of powder”.

(A passing note: one of the inspirations for Gance’s theme of unrequited love was Kipling’s novel The Light that Failed (1891). The novel centres on Dick, a youth who falls for Maisie, a fellow orphan; after a successful career as a war artist, Dick reencounters Maisie in later life—who still rejects his love; Dick then descends into bitterness, blindness, and eventual death on a remote battlefield. Discussing The Light that Failed with Kipling when Gance visited the author in 1919 (just before beginning work on La Roue), the filmmaker startled Kipling by telling him that Maisie was a lesbian—identifying the truth about Flo Garrard, the real-life inspiration for Kipling’s character, long before modern biographers confirmed her sexuality. Is Norma’s kiss in this scene in La Roue—the only kiss that she willingly gives to someone outside her family in the entire film—an echo of this theme? The film offers us few clear indications of Norma’s romantic desires. She might willingly fall into the incestuous fantasy of Elie’s imagination, but it is his fantasy, not hers. What are her real wants and needs? In this context, you can see how her one kiss with another woman carries great significance.)

Now, as well as powdering her face, Norma childishly ties a huge bow in her hair. (It recalls the bow in her hair for the very first time we see her in the film, as a child.) In the mirror she sees a wrinkle and finds a grey hair. Her whole body droops in visceral recognition that she is no longer a girl. She slowly pulls the ribbon from her hair then (in a miraculous moment of performance) shivers herself back to life—shaking the doubt from her body and smiling once more. This half-second of time is tremendously moving precisely because it takes place within the context of such a long narrative—and reminds us that Norma has a life that will extend beyond the film’s timeframe.

She goes over to Sisif to say goodbye. He senses in her the nervous tremor that has inhabited her since Elie’s death. “Tu n’es donc pas gaie aujourd’hui?” he asks. She replies: “Je ne suis pas gaie papa… je suis heureuse! Ce n’est pas la même chose… C’est plus doux et plus triste!” The distinction between “gaie” and “heureuse” is difficult to render in English, but the “sweeter and sadder” qualities of happiness are made evident in the tone of Gance’s ultimate scenes—and in the exquisite music here by Hüe.

Just as Norma shook off her melancholy, so now the film seems to shake of its melancholy. For here it shows us the dance of the guides, which ascends higher and higher up the mountain until it reaches the plateau below the summit of Mont Blanc. Gance shot all these exteriors on location, and they are truly extraordinary scenes.

The music that accompanies this sequence is a selection of folk dances, arranged and orchestrated by Julien Tiersot in his Danses populaires françaises (c.1903). First, a jaunty “Branle de Savoie” and “farandole” (as Sisif waves goodbye to Norma from the window; he has hardly smiled in the whole film, but now grins with almost childish innocence), then two “danses provençales”. The last of these is a quite gloriously catchy melody, perhaps the most memorable of the film. The first time I heard it (live in 2019), I had the uncanny feeling that I had encountered it before. I don’t think I can have done, since this particular set of dances by Tiersot has never (to my knowledge) been recorded. But the piece is a folk tune; whether or not it has been used in some piece I have heard before, the melody is so instantly memorable that it sounds familiar. During the recording sessions in September 2019, there was some discussion among the musicians about this piece. The conductor Frank Strobel felt that going from this piece (the folksiest melody in the entire score) to the next (the ethereally sublime final scene from Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1912)) was too abrupt and startling a transition. But it absolutely works with the film. The “danse Provençale” is purposefully simple and joyful—it’s a release of tension, and a way for Norma to find her way back into the rhythm of everyday life (which she has been denied for so long in the narrative). And the pace of the music and dancers is also deliberately at odds with Sisif’s own ailing body. He listens to the distant sounds of the dance, but his body falls out of rhythm with its meter. Put next to the image of Sisif’s vitality visibly fading, the suddenness of the music’s end—a kind of boisterous full stop—is a shock.

Then comes the piece by Debussy, which begins with some of the strangest and most eerie orchestral music he ever wrote. Unearthly strings, unsettled harmonies, chromatic shifting. Is it formlessness seeking form, or form seeking formlessness? On screen, Sisif’s body untenses and he wearily lowers the pipe from his mouth—tracing, as he does so, the smallest circles with its stem. Finally, he slumps in his chair, but does not fall. We see smoke rings from Sisif’s pipe dissolve in the air; outside, clouds encircle the peaks and Norma dances in a giant ronde on the snow-covered plateau beneath Mont Blanc.

Debussy’s music here originally served as incidental accompaniment to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. The music that conveys Sisif into the snowy blankness of eternity was that which (in the play’s final scene) lifted Sébastien into the heavens. The martyr’s liberated spirit cries out: “I come, I rise up. I have wings. / All is white.” In Gance’s film, intertitles tell us that Sisif’s soul possesses “adumbral wings” that caress Norma as they ascend. The image is visualized as the shadow of clouds passing over the dancers circling in the snow. It is an uncannily beautiful scene, accompanied by uncannily beautiful music. The final close-up of Sisif is a freeze-frame, his face arrested at the moment of death; in repeating and extending this static image uncannily forward through time, Gance makes manifest the cinematic afterlife of Séverin-Mars, who died before the film premiered. The last movement within La Roue is Tobie, who sits up and barks into the silence; Sisif’s inert form continues to face the snowy nothingness through the window frame—then, likewise, the cinematic frame through which we view him dissolves onto the blank image of a pale curtain. The music reaches its climax, the final chord booming out over the last title: FIN.

These last scenes of La Roue are as moving as anything Gance realized, and possess a kind of ecstatic calm found nowhere else in his films. The music is as sad, serene, and piercingly beautiful as the images on screen. If you haven’t already, please go and find a way to watch the restoration. (The Blu-ray may be very difficult to obtain, but you can always try watching it on the Criterion Collection channel.) It’s a truly miraculous film.

Paul Cuff

Further reading

Paul Cuff, “Interpretation and restoration: Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922)”, Film History 23.2 (2011): 223-41.

Paul Cuff, “The Cinema as Time Machine: Temporality and Duration in the Films of Abel Gance”, Aniki 4.2 (2017): 353-74. [Available online.]

Paul Cuff, “Words Radiating Images: Visualizing Text in Abel Gance’s La Roue”, Literature/Film Quarterly 46.3 (2018) [online].

François Ede, “La Roue, Cahiers d’une restauration.” Booklet notes for La Roue, DVD/Blu-ray. Paris: Pathé, 2020.

Jürg Stenzl, Musik für über 1500 Stummfilme/Music for more than 1500 silent films. Das Inventar der Filmmusik im Pariser Gaumont-Palace (1911-1928) von Paul Fosse (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2017).

Music for Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927; Ger.; G.W. Pabst)

This piece is devoted to the score arranged and orchestrated by Bernd Thewes for the 2016 restoration of Pabst’s Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927). I confess at the outset that I love this score unreservedly. I have relistened to it all the way through a dozen times, and to certain sections of it many times more. No review that I’ve read has gone into much detail about the music, which seems to me a great oversight. This piece tries to make amends for that.

The model for Thewes’s 2016 orchestral score is a piano score from the music collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This anonymous work is not an original composition, but a compilation of existing music. It was likely made in the 1930s when Iris Barry (MoMA’s curator) acquired a copy of Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney from the Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin. We don’t know the identity of the musician who assembled this piano score, nor does the score identify the pieces of music used within it. While there is recognizable material from familiar composers (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Verdi), much of the music remains obscure—at least to me.

What’s so pleasing about Thewes’s arrangement is that it treats the identifiable and unidentifiable pieces with equal originality. Thewes began work by dubbing the piano music to match the video of the restored film, then orchestrated the score from scratch to produce a coherent sound world that fitted the images. There is a tremendous sense of freedom in this method: the familiar and the unfamiliar are made to sound equally new. Thewes’s choice of instrumentation is key to this sense of playful recreation. To the forces of a symphony orchestra (including piano) are added electric bass, saxophone, Hammond organ, and drum set. Much like the contents of the original piano score, these forces are a blend of the classical and the popular.

One of the pleasures of listening to scores based on musical compilations is recognizing familiar pieces, and hearing how they are (re)arranged to suit the film. Two of the main themes in the film are well-known pieces by well-known composers. The piece associated with the romance between Jeanne (Édith Jéhanne) and Andreas (Uno Henning) is “June”, from Tchaikovsky’s piano suite The Seasons (op. 37a, 1875-76). In Thewes’s score, this piece—a barcarolle—becomes a warm, mellow, melancholy theme taken up by the strings and supported by the Hammond organ. The organ might suggest a matrimonial—if not religious—tone to such a piece; no doubt it does in this score, but I think the distinctive timbre of the Hammond also offers something else. Its use in prog rock and pop music brings in a very different context than a pipe organ would from the context of theatre or church. (When, in later scenes, it is used in combination with an electric base, the Hammond also brings in the context of horror films.) One might say the Hammond organ is a secular counterpart to traditional pipe organs. Its use in the orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s “June” might hint at religious matrimony but it does so only within the context of secular music: a classical melody rendered on a popular instrument. Its timbre also (to my ears) heightens the sense of melancholy. We first hear the piece when Jeanne is staring into the dark, remembering time spent with the absent Andreas; this music is not just an expression of love, but of love lost or love yet to be fulfilled.

Another recurring theme is the music used for the villain of the film, Khalibiev (played by the deliciously repellent Fritz Rasp). For this, the score uses Rachmaninov’s Prelude no. 5 in G minor (from the op. 23 preludes, 1901-03). The orchestration emphasizes the sinister, irregular gait of the music: with the equivalent of the lowest (lefthand) notes from the piano taken by the bassoon and soon strengthened with brass. Later, Thewes allows the piano to join the orchestra, turning the prelude into a kind of concerto. If the “June” motif is an unpretentious, accessible theme for the lovers, the more flamboyant (more overtly “classical”) Rachmaninov prelude reflects the sinister pretensions of Khalibiev, who poses as a kind of exiled Russian aristocrat.

Other familiar pieces in the score are more radically reworked. “The Internationale” anthem (music composed in 1888) is cited several times. This well-worn tune takes on a new dimension thanks to the way Thewes uses Hammond organ, drums, and brass in his score: there’s suddenly a narrative drive to the music, one that makes it more than a recitation of the anthem’s own themes. The melody becomes threatening (for the battle scenes), boisterous (for the Bolshevik courtroom), and celebratory (for the flashback to Jeanne’s first sight of Andreas). The variations in tempo and orchestration transform what can be a slow, turgid piece (designed for the accompaniment of text, after all, not images) into exciting, thrilling music that sounds fresh and alive.

More subtly, in the scene where Andreas is in a bar, plotting with his comrades, the score uses Tchaikovsky’s “Danse russe”, from 12 Morceaux for piano (op. 40, 1878). But the way the tempo is altered (shifting in line with the ebb and flow of conversation and movement on screen) makes the music entirely serve the film. Likewise, immediately after the above scene, excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Marche slave (op. 31, 1876) are rearranged to fit the rhythm and content of the images. Its first appearance (for the first shot of the Bolshevik forces gathering for the assault) is only a few bars from the sinister opening of the piece, but Thewes adds cymbals to subtly mimic the splash of horses galloping through the water on screen—and the added rhythm quickens the propulsion of the “march”. A few scenes later, the Marche slave’s next appearance is much in line with the original orchestration (from its finale), but after a couple of bars the organ enters to take up the rhythm: with a few deft touches, a very familiar (and much used) piece of music becomes part of the specific sound world of this score.

Later in the film comes a piece of music whose transformation particularly struck me when first I heard it. When the newspapers announce the murder of Raymond Ney, the score uses the main theme from Verdi’s overture to La forza del destino (1862/69). It’s a very well-known piece, but in Thewes’s arrangement it took me totally by surprise. For the theme is first spelled out by the organ, supported by drums and brass before the strings enter. After this first iteration (and a fabulous diminuendo that ends in the lowest growlings of the brass), the theme is given over entirely to the organ. It’s the perfect example of making the familiar sound new. There’s more than a hint of prog about this melding of classical repertory with modern instruments (the drum kit and Hammond organ are exemplary of a prog soundscape). It makes the piece doubly new: recontextualizing it to the images of 1927 and to the worlds of both classical and popular music. And, quite simply, it’s fun.

Indeed, I should keep saying just how fun Thewes’s orchestration is throughout. To pick another moment, listen to how we are introduced to the detective agency of Raymond Ney (Adolf E. Licho) in Paris. The score uses Armas Järnefelt’s Præludium (1899-1900), a piece not now familiar for most. (After a lot of digging around trying to identify this piece, I realized that not only had I heard it before but that I actually owned it on CD. I suspect I am among a very small number of people who own a collection of Järnefelt’s work on CD, and an even smaller subset who own more than just the recent release of his music for Stiller’s Sången om den eldröda blomman (1919).) Bearing in mind that Thewes orchestrated this piece from its piano reduction, it’s remarkable how this 2016 arrangement is both similar to and distinct from the original. Thewes’s orchestration makes this charming fanfare sound more baroque than the original (with more emphasis on the bright, shiny timbre of brass). But with the addition of the saxophone, it also melds its tone into the sound world of the rest of the film. Listening to them side-by-side, I find I prefer Thewes’s orchestration to Järnefelt’s own arrangement. (Thewes removes the unnecessary pomp of Järnefelt’s cymbals and glockenspiel for the forte passages.) And the timing of the piece for the action on screen—the growling brass for Gaston’s demand for “Geld! Geld!” , the solo violin for the client’s tearful farewell to both his adulterous wife and his money—is marvellous.

But there is one section of the film that I have listened to even more times, which is when Andreas first arrives in Paris and reunites with Jeanne. This run of scenes—less than ten minutes of screen time—uses pieces of music that I have been unable to identify. Part of their charm for me is exactly this sense of the unknown, and the revelation of how beautifully arranged and orchestrated they are for the film.

The first scene in this section is of Poitra (Hans Jaray) waiting for Andreas outside the train station. The strings spell out the main melody: a simple, sweet, slow sigh. The two men great each other and, as soon as Andreas steps into the taxi, the organ takes up the main theme from the strings. When the car drives away from the station, the drums mark out the underlying beat—as though catching on to the tempo of the traffic. The camera tracks back before the car, and slowly the sense of location becomes the subject of the sequence. For here is the Gare du Nord, filling the width and height of the screen, and traffic filling the foreground. People crisscross the street. The taxi must switch lanes, weave back into view. I find it hard to say what it is about this scene that I find so moving, but I know that the music brings something out of it that is both touching and melancholy. The slow, sweet, sad melody is light music as its most winsomely romantic. I have no idea what piece it is, or who wrote it: but it bears the hallmarks of a popular tune, since it is instantly graspable, hummable, whistleable. It’s a curiously moving experience, too, to find this anonymous melody popping back into one’s head many weeks later (as it did and does into mine), and to be able to rediscover its melodic contours so easily.

The way Thewes’s arrangement handles the tune is also key to its effectiveness. I’m not normally a fan of organ scores for silent films, but I love the use of any keyboard instruments as part of an orchestral texture. For this scene, the texture of the melody is carried by the Hammond organ and—just for the last repetition of the tune—supported by a sweep of undivided strings. Its simplicity as a tune is made doubly effective by the simplicity of its rendering here: all the instruments unite for the final bars, producing a splendid sheen of sound. The presence of the Hammond organ in the midst of this piece gives the music (to my ears) a pleasingly vintage aura, summoning up a past with its warm tones. When I was a child, our neighbour (born, I think, around 1918) had a small Hammond organ at the entrance to his living room. On this, he would accompany himself singing sentimental songs from his youth of the 1930s and 40s. The Hammond organ in Thewes’ score for the melody in this Gare du Nord scene sets me in mind of this kind of popular mode: it is easy on the ear, memorable, sweet, warm. The organ was a widespread instrument in cinemas of the 1920s, and continued to be one of the few surviving aspects of live music in theatres after the arrival of sound. The instrument is thus associated with several generations of cinema sound, and its use here for this piece of (once) popular music is perfectly judged. It’s sentimental in the right way, and makes the texture of the melody more interesting than if scored simply for the sweeping strings. Purely and simply, it’s lovely. And it functions also to underline one of the pleasures of the film: seeing Paris. The sense of nostalgia in the melody also works in relation to the streets we see on screen: we are driving slowly through the past, observing the motions of the people on the street, the slow passage of the cars and trucks. The melody moves as slowly as the taxis, as the camera itself, as it tracks back through the street. It’s perfect.

For the brief scene of Jeanne at her typewriter, dreamily typing Andreas’s name before XXXX-ing it out, we hear a repeat of the melody used earlier in the film that accompanied the lovers’ last embrace in Russia. It’s like the melody is her counterpart to the dreaminess of the tune that greets Andreas at the station. And, like the previous melody, Thewes orchestrates this piece so that it’s a delightfully simplified sweep of sound—the organ this time rounding out the last iteration of the theme (as if repaying the compliment from the previous scene, where the orchestra took over from it at the end).

Next, we cut to Khalibiev and Raymond Ney. Khalibiev is holding a bouquet of flowers, and now Gabrielle (Brigitte Helm) appears. In the score, a delicious combination of piano, harp, and strings sound out a skipping, nervous, innocent melody as she approaches. It’s perfect for Gabrielle, whose naïve trustfulness of Khalibiev almost unnerves the latter. Pabst provides us with an amazing close-up of Gabrielle, staring wide-eyed into the camera. We share Khalibiev’s perspective, gazing at this beautiful face with its gleaming eyes. (Hear how the strings end their phrase with a lovely diminuendo, climbing higher before fading away.) “I’m so happy!” says Gabrielle to Jeanne, and the music has been telling us this already. But beware Khalibiev! The presence of the piano in the orchestration here reminds us of Khalibiev’s own theme, and the way this instrument tends to rumble out from the brass and take it over. And Jeanne’s worried glance at Khalibiev coincides with another melting-away of the main theme in the strings: even when the melodic line is cheerful, the placement of each phrase can carry such subtle shifts in emphasis.

Outside, Poitra is waiting with the car. (Observe here how a cat walks into frame and sits, with perfect timing and placement in the corner of the frame, just before the handheld camera pans left to see the two women emerge from Ney’s building. It’s one of those lovely unplanned moments that comes from filming on location.) The main theme—a four note phrase, with an emphasis, like an excited skip, on the second note—is taken up by the strings. Pabst cuts to a long shot of the whole street. You can see the long flight of steps behind the alley, and the sun throws swathes of light and dark between the buildings. It’s a lovely image, with depth of focus and composition: here again Paris becomes the subject of the scene.

The women get into the back of the cab, which has its roof down to let in the sun. Poitra has with him a little posy of flowers, which he looks at, then throws over his shoulder to Jeanne in the back. The music is so perfectly timed here, swelling in volume in time with Poitra’s gesture. (Again, the melodic content is a simple repetition of material, but the tempo allows the beginning and ending of phrases to make an impact.) The cab sets off and the saxophone takes up the main melody. To me, the saxophone feels delightfully in keeping with both the easy melody and the sense of time and place on screen (and, thus, the emotions of the characters who inhabit it). Pabst’s camera sits facing the two women, each holding their flowers, Gabrielle clutching at Jeanne with her free hand. In the background, the shaded walls and sunlit road flash by. “Are we flying?” asks the enraptured Gabrielle. “Yes, we’re flying—into bliss!”

Listen to the joyful way the music transitions here: brass and drums take over the impetus of the melody, then beat out a faster rhythm. It’s as if the orchestra has warmed up, has broken into a run or a dance. For a few seconds, it’s just the brass and drums, rumbling around in a repeated refrain. It’s like the bumpy road that shakes them around in the cab. It’s the quickened heartbeat of the separated lovers. It’s the excitement of an anticipated meeting. And it’s the premonition of the bustle of the underground club that now appears on screen: for we see Khalibiev descend into the bar where he meets Margot (Hertha von Walther).

Pabst creates a marvellous sense of space here: behind the bar is a huge mirror, reflecting the spiral staircase from above, down which Khalibiev speeds. The orchestra switches to a swinging, brassy, almost tipsy melody. It’s the change in tempo and rhythm, as much as the textural one, that makes the contrast between this scene and that last so effective. The transition between one “cue” and the next itself becomes a chance to switch the orchestration, to emphasize a different texture and mood. Without the score in front of me (and not recognizing the music being used), it’s difficult to know precisely how the original score changes here. Listening to it multiple times, I almost feel that the music for Khalibiev is a kind of parodic distortion of the melody used for Jeanne in the cab. Certainly, it feels as though the first melody—sweet and sentimental—slowly morphs into its boisterous, unbuttoned sequel. The way Thewes orchestrates this shift makes it a perfect match for the images.

In the bar (to a foursquare, oom-pah-oom-pah, beat in the brass), Khalibiev flirts with Margot, orders two liqueurs, and downs his in one. Khalibiev stares at Margot. Pabst gives us a huge close-up of her face, her dark brows and eyes a kind of counterpart to the pale, luminous face and eyes of Gabrielle in the earlier scene. Having been bewildered by Gabrielle, able only to ghost a kiss on her forehead, Khalibiev now grabs Margot and plants a kiss on her brow—then marches back up the stairs, just as the rumbunctious brass rounds off its melody with a flourish.

Andreas is waiting on a bridge by an entrance to the park. (The place we see them visit is the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.) He turns round, waiting anxiously for Jeanne. The organ, too, sounds out an anxious, excited tremolo. (It’s a kind of acoustic equivalent of an impatient tapping of the foot.) As Pabst cuts to a long shot of the road curving round towards Andreas’ position, the organ begins the melody that defines this next sequence: a quick, delightful, tripping tune that expresses the excitement of the lovers’ reunion. It is swiftly joined by the drums (at first very softly, then with a rattling of a tambourine), these added textures bringing out the sense of giddy fun in the music. For Andreas is leaping at the sight of Jeanne’s car, waving his arms and running towards her—and Pabst begins cutting between parallel tracking shots that follow the lovers. The strings join in, filling in the harmony, strengthening the melody. The organ skips along with the rhythm, while the drums spell out an excited beat underneath—brass occasionally rounding-out the theme. I love, simply love, the mix of texture of timbre that this combination produces: the fizz of the drum set, the deep warble and light chirping of the organ, the sweet richness of the strings. It’s almost silly it’s so delightful. And the scene itself is likewise sillily winsome as the characters rush madly toward one another.

But for their actual meeting, everything slows down, stops. The melody of their courtship—Tchaikovsky’s “June”—floats in on woodwind, supported by wistful strings. And despite their energy, the lovers don’t end their respective journeys with a climactic embrace. Instead, Andreas doffs his cap, and they walk side by side, slowly, into the gardens. It’s strangely innocent, as though neither is quite ready to express their desires. The music waylays our expectations, reminds us of the lovers’ troubled past and uncertain future.

After cutting back to the car, to glimpse Poitra alone with Gabrielle, Pabst’s camera finds the lovers atop an artificial grotto in the park. It’s glorious to see across the rooftops of Paris: you can even match the same image to that of today’s skyline (which, thanks to the city’s ban on tall buildings in its centre, remains much the same as it was in 1927). The image of Jeanne and Andreas makes literal the sense of their elated state in each other’s company. They are (quite literally) on high. But it also carries an implied danger of their fall, of their togetherness being precarious. The music here repeats the same material heard in earlier scenes with the lovers (their last embrace in Russia; Jeanne’s daydream at her typewriter). Again, it is dominated by the tone of the saxophone, which floats over the strings. The orchestration is easy on the ear, but the use of the saxophone gives it a feeling not just of light music but of period light music. It’s a nod to the film’s setting and belonging to the 1920s.

Finally, I must finish with a comment on the last scenes in the film, set on a train as Jeanne wrests the incriminating evidence from Khalibiev. By way of prelude, I should note that the eponymous novel (by Ilya Ehrenburg) on which the film is based has the characters zipping about all over Europe on trains. Even if the film eliminates some of this journeying back and forth, there is more than one scene on a train and Thewes’s orchestration contains distinctive elements for these scenes. He includes percussive instruments, but ones that evoke something more than the simple sounds of coaches rumbling over tracks. Before Andreas is arrested, he is alone in a train carriage. He has just spent the night and morning with Jeanne and their new life beckons. In eighteen seconds of screen time, the score makes us sense everything around and within him. The melody is bright and peppy (it’s another piece I don’t recognize), made brighter and peppier by the addition of drums, bell, and triangle to the orchestra. The quick rhythm of the drums and triangle suggests not just the motion of the train but a kind of inner rhythm of the character: you can sense his joy as he sits, almost fidgety with energy, on the seat and smiles. And the fact that the view through the train window is of dappled trees, the light spilling across Andreas’s beaming face, likewise gives a visual sense of brightness and joy; the same sense of brightness and joy given to the music by the rhythm of drums and the sparks of the triangle.

The regular sounding of the bell harks back to the lovers’ morning, spent walking through Paris and at one point entering a church where they—all too briefly—link hands before the altar. It’s not a wedding, but the promise of a union together. Thewes included the bell in the musical climax for this earlier scene, and now it appears in this scene on the train as a reminder: it’s as if Andreas is summoning the sound of bells in his head, and we can hear it.

All this feeds into the final scene of Jeanne and Khalibiev on the train. Just as Jeanne tries to convince Khalibiev to help her, the two locals in their compartment proffer them sausages and bread. It’s a delightfully farcical way to increase the tension. And the score enters into the farcical spirit. The melody used at this point is a chirrupy, almost childish little theme. Thewes lets the woodwind carry this theme, with the rhythm backed up by the drums. The addition of the bell as a regular chime in this scene, as well as making the simple melody more musically interesting, has an ironic function in that it reminds us of the bell’s presence in earlier scenes: the wedding-like vision in the Paris church, Andreas’s private joy in the train carriage. There’s also a sense of a chiming clock, as if to remind us (musically) of impending deadlines: Jeanne must get the information from Khalibiev before it’s too late. Thus, this amusingly rustic tune functions to underline both the comedy of the scene and the dramatic tension underlying it. Like the scene itself, the music is a kind of elaboration of a simple theme, its function to produce tension by slowing things down at the moment when we want things to hurry up. It’s like the two locals come are humming their own tune, heedless of the drama they suspend by their presence.

After the climax, in which Jeanne wrestles with Khalibiev and finds the missing jewel, there is an extended hiatus before we reach the “end”. The film fades to black, but the black screen continues for another forty seconds until the title “ENDE” appears. Why? (This is not, as far as I am aware, a restorative choice, but the original ending as chosen in 1927.) It’s as if the blank space here—temporal, aesthetic—is a kind of inner space for Jeanne to savour her joy. So we sit in the dark, her blissful smile the last image in our mind’s eye, and the orchestra keeps playing; that it does so shows respect, sympathy even, for the black screen. This hiatus is also a chance for the music to wind down, to relax after the tension of the last scene. The music here derives from the same piece used for the earlier scene at the church, so it’s as if the score is reliving the past—and envisioning the future of the lovers. It makes the ending more complex, somehow, more resonant. And, from my point of view, it nicely refocuses our attention back on the score itself. It deserves to have the last say.

Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney is a film I had seen many years ago but never appreciated. Perhaps one reason is the quality of its earlier incarnation on DVD. That version, released in 2001 by Kino, featured a score by Timothy Brock. Revisiting this now, I am reminded how oddly subdued it feels compared to the film—and most especially to the 2016 score. It’s not just the tone of the music but the quality of the performance and recording. Produced for an earlier release (presumably VHS or even laserdisc) in 1992, the Brock score is performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra. This group also recorded other Brock scores for Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Sunrise (1927) in the early 1990s. I love Brock’s score for Faust, but the recording for the soundtrack doesn’t do it justice. The Olympia Chamber Orchestra is an irregular ensemble rather than a professional orchestra. Their performance is perfectly adequate, but I can imagine a far sharper, more convincing rendering. (Frankly, the playing—especially the strings—is sometimes a bit ragged. Too often the ensemble sounds out of sync, if not actually out of tune, and the dull recording hardly helps.)

The production values for the new restoration of Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney belong to a different league altogether. Recorded in February 2017 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, with Frank Strobel conducting the WDR Funkhausorchester Köln, the soundtrack for the Blu-ray is superb. Both the orchestral performance and the sound recording are exemplary. (I should namecheck the sound engineers listed in the credits: Rolf Lingenberg and Walter Platte.) This is the kind of result you can get when proper resources are fed into a film restoration.

My deepest thanks go to Bernd Thewes for answering my questions on his work on this score. This piece can only be a small expression of how much joy his music has brought me.

Paul Cuff

Der Rosenkavalier (1926; Aut.; Robert Wiene)

In 1924, the German director Robert Wiene was lured to Vienna by the Austrian company Pan-Film. This was one of the country’s leading production companies, with a distribution network that covered a large portion of central and eastern Europe. But the Austrian industry was struggling (especially in comparison with its mighty neighbour Germany), so the recruitment of Wiene—one of Germany’s most successful directors—was designed to bolster their status and generate a number of quality commercial productions. Accordingly, Wiene was appointed “Oberregisseur” and given a large degree of freedom. He stayed for three years and directed five films. Only three of these survive, Orlacs Hände (1924) being the most well-known. But the film with the most cultural clout was undoubtedly Der Rosenkavalier, made in 1925 and premiered in January 1926.

This was an adaptation of Richard Strauss’s opera of the same name, first staged in 1911. Strauss’s original librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal was hired to write a screenplay as early as 1923, and Strauss to adapt his score to the film. Although Hofmannsthal remained the accredited scenarist, his screenplay was in fact almost wholly rejected by Wiene, who wrote his own treatment with the Austrian scenarist Ludwig Nerz. Hofmannsthal’s treatment had significantly reworked the plot of the opera, whereas Wiene and Nerz actually stayed reasonably close to it (albeit with some significant changes). But Pan-Film were keen to emphasize the proximity of film and opera. After all, it was a considerable coup to have one of the world’s most renowned composers create a film score. So the names of Strauss and Hofmannsthal were mobilized prominently in Pan-Film’s publicity, as was Alfred Roller, the set designer—who was also the original set designer for the opera in 1911. What’s more, the film premiered on 10 January 1926 in the Semperoper, Dresden’s prestigious opera house—the very venue where the opera Der Rosenkavalier had premiered on 26 January 1911—with Strauss himself conducting the hundred-strong orchestra. Released across Europe later in 1926 (with Strauss reprising his role as conductor for the London premiere in April), the film was a critical success—but subsequently disappeared from public view. Various, incomplete, versions were revived from the 1960s onwards, but it wasn’t until Film Archiv Austria undertook a major restoration in the early 2000s that the film could be seen in anything like its original form—complete with a reconstructed version of Strauss’s score. The restoration was premiered in 2006—once again in the Dresden Semperoper—and released on DVD in 2007.

All that said, is the film any good? Well, not particularly. Which is to say, the music is superb, but the film itself has some significant drawbacks. My usual habit is to go through a film chronologically, but I don’t think that would reap a great deal of reward with Der Rosenkavalier. Instead, I’d rather concentrate on its personnel and weave my thoughts around how the film deals with character and tone. So:

Princess Werdenberg, known as the Marschallin (Huguette Duflos). The central character of opera and film, the Marschallin, is a married woman whose husband—the Marschall—is permanently away from home in the army. Her lover is a younger man, Octavian, who brings her happiness but whose youth she knows will one day lead him away from her. The film provides us with more backstory to the Marschallin, offering in the opening scenes a flashback to her youth in a convent. We see her forced to accept an arranged marriage to Prince Werdenberg. Her wedding day is also the day on which her husband leaves to take command of the army. The Marschallin looks like a Velasquez, wearing a gorgeous white dress with rather fin-de-siècle curled motifs running down its flanks. She looks beautiful, but also awkward, stiff, uncertain. The camera keeps its distance, as though proximity—sheer physical closeness—is alien to the mood of the scene. The flashback gives us a glimpse of the pressures on her to look and act a certain part, whilst simultaneously being denied the warmth of human connection from her husband.

But though this flashback signals the Marschallin’s melancholy in the present, the effect is not fully felt on screen. It is certainly indicated in titles and telegraphed with gesture. But Duflos offers no depth or complexity of feeling, nor does the camera offer any close-ups to seek out more. The Marschallin is the heart of the opera and should be the heart of the film. But Duflos and Wiene offer only surfaces, flat pictorial representations of melancholy, not melancholy itself. Strauss’s music is fully alert to what should be being conveyed on screen: all the feeling is in the music, not in the images. The film cries out for some close-ups, for some expressive way of externalizing the Marschallin’s complex emotions. But Wiene’s scenario even cuts the most intimate scenes from the opera, where the character’s subjective thoughts are explored.

In the opera, at the end of Act 1, the Marschallin is once more alone with Octavian. The morning routine has wearied her, and she begins to reflect on the passage of time. Her aria-cum-monologue, “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding”, has the following text:

Time is a strange thing. / When one lives heedlessly, time means nothing. / But then suddenly, one is aware of nothing else. / It is all around us, it is also inside us. / It trickles in our faces, / it trickles in the looking glass, / it flows through my temples. / And between me and you / it flows again, silently, like an hourglass. / Oh, Quinquin! Sometimes I hear it flowing— / ceaselessly. / Sometimes I rise in the middle of the night / and stop all the clocks, all of them.

Under these last lines, Strauss uses harp and celesta to mimic the sounds of a clock. Their high, metallic notes strike thirteen times. It’s a chilly pulse, chiming through the orchestra. It’s a premonition of death, of stillness—and the music comes to a halt at the thirteenth stroke. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking moment. The Marschallin voices her thoughts (and fears), but the real poignancy is in the way the orchestra articulates her subjective mood. It’s not just those thirteen chimes—that seem to come from within the Marschallin’s imagination, not from any real clock within the external scene—but the melancholic tone and texture of the orchestra. Strauss’s sound world is suspended in a kind of autumnal half-light, so that even when it dances to the rhythm of a waltz its tone is gently nostalgic—as though it knows that the dance must come to an end, or has already come to an end. Even when the Marschallin tries to convince herself (in subsequent lines) that the passage of time is all part of God’s plan, the orchestra is not convinced. The orchestra is all-knowing, and its early twentieth-century mindset is subtly at odds with the eighteenth-century mindset of its character. The passage of time is already apparent to us, as the world on stage is a rococo past at odds with our present—be it 1911 or 2023. Indeed, the waltz themes of the opera are deliberately at odds with its historical setting: the waltz was a nineteenth-century mode, and (while still being in use in new compositions in the 1910s) already a kind of old-fashioned musical idiom by the time Strauss wrote Der Rosenkavalier in 1909-10. Act 1 of the opera ends with Octavian leaving the Marschallin’s room, and the Marschallin realizes that she forgot to kiss him goodbye. The curtain falls as she looks at herself in the mirror. For all the apparent lightness of the opera’s treatment of love and sex, there are much deeper strata of meaning and feeling at work throughout.

Where, where in Wiene’s film is there anything like this? Yes, there are moments where we see the Marschallin look pained or sad, but they are so fleeting, so superficial. When she sees Octavian kissing a young woman (Sophie) at the tavern, she looks hurt—but no more. It’s not just that the performance is awkward (it is), it’s that Wiene’s camera doesn’t react. There is no movement, no proximity, no expression. For a director best-known for the most famous expressionist film ever made—Das Cabinet der Doctor Caligari (1920)—Der Rosenkavalier film lacks any sustained externalization of feeling in sets, in lighting, in performance, in camerawork. One of the only times in the entire film we see the Marschallin alone is after her husband has (unbeknownst to her) triumphed on the battlefield. In her room, she remembers the kiss Octavian bestowed on Sophie in the garden. She says she knew this time would come, that she had tried to hide it from herself… Strauss’s music makes magic of this scene, but the visual equivalent is bereft of magic. The Marschallin clutches her dog and swoons a little on her chaise longue. There is no sustained close-up, the camera (as throughout the film) hardly wishing to move beyond a medium close shot of the performers. And Duflos herself is hardly the most subtle performer here, looking pained but never convincingly sorrowful. We should be more moved, infinitely more moved, here. The music is crying out for a more convincing, a more filmic, moment of expression. Oh, for a different director, or for a script that allotted more room and more power to the close-up.

Count Octavian (Jaque Catelain). It doesn’t help that the Marschallin’s young lover is played by Jaque Catelain. In real life, Catelain was the lover of Marcel L’Herbier, who gave him leading roles in many of his silent features during the 1920s. Catelain is an acknowledged “weak point” in L’Herbier’s filmography. As Noël Burch puts it: “Boasting an unsettling androgynous beaty but lacking ability as a mime or comedian, this star resembles a kind of wooden Harry Langdon, charmless and humorous, as stiff as a shopfront mannequin.” (“Ambivalences d’un réalisateur ‘bisexuel’”, 204.) Catelain’s androgyny is at least a potential advantage for his role as Octavian: a lover younger than the Marschallin who can convincingly disguise himself as a maid for the plot’s various subterfuges. In the opera, all three members of the central love triangle are played/sung by women: the Marschallin is a dramatic soprano, Octavian a mezzo-soprano, and Sophie (Octavian’s subsequent lover) a lyric soprano.

But even if the sexual ambiguities of the original opera suit Catelain superficially, he still needs to convince us through performance in the film. The opening scenes immediately present us with the problems that continue throughout the film. Octavian’s arrival, through the Marschallin’s window, and meeting with her in the early hours are awkward, stiff, contrived. Duflos and Catelain move round each other, pulling poses, throwing back their heads, clasping their hands. Nothing about them suggests the physical, let alone emotional, attraction for the lovers. Nor does the camera. It remains motionless, just keeping its distance and watching the performers go through the motions. “There are no words in the world to tell you how much I love you…” Octavian says to the Marschallin. Fine, but how about a performance to tell her—to tell us—that you love her? Clasping and twitching and grinning and moving awkwardly doesn’t do it.

Even less convincing is Octavian’s subsequent flirtation with Sophie: there is nothing in his body or face that suggests genuine desire or feeling, let alone the complexities of being torn between his old and new love interests. I’d say that the music saves both these scenes—and my god, the music is beautiful—but it doesn’t. The music in fact underlines how compromised are the performances, and how inadequate is the direction in lifting the film above a series of gestures without deeper meaning.

Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau (Michael Bohnen). The best performance in the film is in the part of the impoverished Baron Ochs, the Marschallin’s cousin who wants to marry Sophie and thus inherit her dowry. In this role, Michael Bohnen is far more engaging a presence than Duflos or Catelain. He had every reason to be, for he was a professional baritone and had played the role of Ochs on stage: this was his part, and you can tell. We first see him in bed, buried under a mountain of blankets. When he gets up, his character is fully formed, convincing, human. Bohnen knows how to put on a pair of round spectacles and make it funny. And Ochs’s servants—impoverished like their master—are likewise more human and interesting than the powdered servants who staff the Marschallin’s apartments. Ochs’s chief servant is hairy, gruff, always chewing, stifling his giggles; and the stableboy looks pleasingly gormless, countrified, confused.

See how these scenes have a kind of life and vitality not seen in many other places in the film. And listen how—at last—music, image, and performance work in accord. Strauss’s elegant waltz theme as Ochs has his servants dress him underlines the contrast between the Baron’s aristocratic pretensions and his impoverished state. Just as Ochs reads the letter, a delightful waltz—orchestrated to resemble a hurdy-gurdy—strikes up. It is the stableboy, playing a hurdy-gurdy in the yard, a group of cats feeding near his feet. Once more, the waltz is suggestive of Vienna—Ochs’s destination—but performed on a peasant’s instrument, a rural counterpart to the orchestral strains of the melody heard in the Marschallin’s aristocratic world. It is Ochs’s exuberant presence and performance that makes his appearance in the Maschallin’s world such a relief: here at last is someone who conveys emotions, even if they are comic rather than tragic. Bohnen makes his eyebrows twitch, he wriggles with delight, dances with glee, puffs himself up with pride and arrogance. He enlivens every scene he’s in. It’s as though he’s being directed not by Wiene but by Lubitsch. He also gets the only proper close-up in the film: when he roars with pain, having been wounded in a brief swordfight with Octavian. It’s a marker of the film’s emotional range that the only time it deigns to provide a real close-up is for a crude expression of pain, and never for the subtle pangs of melancholy, sadness, or love.

Sophie von Faninal (Felicie Berger). Sophie is the daughter of a parvenu bourgeois, whose fortune as the army’s provisioner has made her desirable to the impoverished blueblood Ochs. Octavian encounters her at an open-air dance, where he takes pity on her because she is being shunned as a newcomer. Berger is very pretty, and appropriately youthful (given the need to contrast her with the older Marschallin). And I think her performance—girlish, slightly gauche—looks all the better for being opposite the utterly unconvincing Catelain. Catelain’s facial expressions in his first scene with Sophie make him look like a chipmunk: he’s all goggling eyes, silly smile, bared teeth, trembly little gestures and ticks.

The centrepiece of the film has the same issue. Here, Octavian has been nominated by the Marschallin to act as “Rosenkavalier”, giving a silver rose to Sophie as a promise of Ochs’s betrothal. The scene is as musically beautiful as any in the film. The descending motif of the rose—spelled out by harp, celesta, triangle, and glockenspiel—has an unearthly, otherworldly texture. In the opera, the rose theme is a counterpoint to the similarly high notes of the chiming clock in the Marschallin’s monologue in Act 1. The lovers have their own kind of time signature in their theme, floating high above the rest of the orchestra. Their music is piercingly lovely. But the film cannot match it. Catelain’s performance in the rose-giving scene is unmoving in every sense: stiff, awkward. Berger’s performance is as natural as the circumstance allows: she is meant to be awkward, shy, smitten. But surely there are subtler, more emotionally revealing, ways of rendering this encounter: to reveal the love beneath the formality. The contrast between music and image is again evident in Octavian and Sophie’s final meeting in the extended ball sequence at the end of the film. They meet, knowing that they can surely be together at last. And the music is as meltingly tender, as gentle, and rapt as the scene demands. But the scene doesn’t work on screen. Berger is perfectly good here: her hesitancy, her disbelief, her restrained joy. But Catelain is dreadful: he can’t hold his body naturally, can’t suggest any kind of emotion with his arms, his posture, his face. Thus, the climactic emotional scene between the lovers is a dud.

Annina and Valzacchi (Carmen Cartellieri and Friedrich Féher). These two minor characters appear only in a few scenes in the film. Either their roles are somewhat underwritten or there may be some missing fragments of the film that would give greater prominence to them. Early in the film, hoping to reveal the Marschallin’s affair, Annina engages with “Her High Apostolic Majesty’s Commission” for morality, a group of bewigged old men. (In the opera, there is none of this: Annina and Valzacchi are employed by Ochs to find “Mariandl”, the name given by Octavian when he is disguised as a maid.) The “Commission” likewise isn’t developed much in the film, but they get a lovely, slightly cumbersome waltz in the score: the tempo relents, as though the fuddy-duddies of the Commission are circling in slow-motion. In the opera, Annina and Valzacchi are niece and uncle; in the film, they are unrelated and form the third romantic couple to find happiness in the final scenes. Do they have inner lives? The film doesn’t, can’t, will not, show us.

The Marschall (Paul Hartmann). We never see or hear this character in the opera. The Marschallin’s husband is permanently absent from her life, hence her lover and her sense of loneliness. For the film version, we see the Marschall in a flashback of his wedding to the Marschallin. Strauss accompanies the scene with martial music: trumpets and timpani thump out a repetitive melody; it’s a march rather than a dance, a fanfare for a different kind of ceremony—not a wedding. It’s a simple and effective means of underlining the total absence of sentiment in this marriage. The Marschall’s music dominates the scene, obliterating any joy his bride might have felt.

But the film complicates our impression of the Marschall, for we subsequently see his military campaign, together with his frustration at not hearing from his wife. Strauss’s martial music gives the character a sense of pomp, but also of activity and passion. (The way he bosses the army is also played for laughs: he gets them all up early and on parade because he’s jealous of the letters they get from their loved ones.) The film wants us to feel sympathy for him, but Wiene’s direction is not sympathetic enough. The camera never bothers to find filmic ways of emphasizing the Marschall’s mood. We just watch him wander around looking stiff and uncomfortable. That said, perhaps the only time Wiene uses effectively dramatic lighting in the film is when we see the Marschall alone in his billet, the firelight casting shadows around him. It makes him look all the more lonely, angry, isolated. But (as ever) Wiene never makes much or more of this. No close-up, no development of character. Yet again, I can only find fault with the direction: why doesn’t it do something with its material?

The film brings back this character in the climactic sequence, a masked ball set in and around the Marschallin’s estate. Everyone is in disguise, trying and succeeding to lure Ochs into a compromising situation in order to break his engagement with Sophie. The final scenes unite three couples: Octavian and Sophie, Annina and Valzacchi, the Marshall and Maschallin. Ochs, meanwhile, slinks away in shame… Thus, the film offers a neat tying-up of ends that the opera eschews. (In the latter, the Marschallin relinquishes Octavian to Sophie, but she is left alone at the end. The Marschall never appears.)

Hofmannstahl, Strauss, Wiene. The tensions between the film’s three major “authors” are evident in its original release. The Dresden premiere was conducted by Strauss on 11 January 1926. Despite his decades of experience at the podium, Strauss has never accompanied a film projection: the film had to be stopped twenty times during the performance because Strauss was concentrating on his musicians and not the screen (Jung & Schatzberg, 126). A critic said that Strauss had “torn the film to shreds” to preserve the continuity of his musical performance. By the time of the Berlin premiere, just five days later, the experienced cinema musician Willy Schmidt-Gentner had taken over the duties at the podium and rearranged the music to better its synchronization with the film. (Strauss merely sat in the audience.) The film was a great success, much bolstered by the score and the fame of its author—as well as the supposed involvement of Hofmannsthal as scenarist.

Hofmannsthal himself was initially full of praise for Wiene, persuading Strauss to approve the project on the basis of the director’s success. But when he saw Der Rosenkavalier on the screen, Hofmannsthal described it as “the most dilettante and clumsy film imaginable” (qtd in Jung & Schatzberg, 123). This was partly sour grapes at having his scenario rejected, but I cannot but agree that the film is less than the sum of its parts. The direction of performers is one thing (if you can’t make Catelain a better actor, you can surely film him differently), but the direction of action is another. The music is a supple, shifting tapestry of themes. It’s charming, wistful, melancholic, joyful, exciting. But Wiene’s direction is flat, static, unimaginative. The camera never once moves, hardly ever cuts close to the performers. (I could understand if they were actually singing: close-ups in broadcasts of live opera are often quite awkward. But this is an opera which suffers none of the inconvenience of operatic performance.)

More recently, it has been argued that Wiene “tried to replace what is essential for an opera—namely, the arias—with what is outstanding in a silent film—namely, the opulence of the images” (Jung & Schatzberg, 129). But “opulence” is not enough. You can have “opulence” on stage. Alfred Roller’s sets for the film are “opulent”. (It was Roller—ever the perfectionist—who picked the exterior locations for Ochs’s estate (Hartmann, 78-79).) Sets and costumes were modelled on eighteenth-century patterns, and Wiene clearly sought to replicate some of these directly in his compositions (see Krenn, 31, 223-41).

But none of this is a substitute for the voice, or the function of the voice in opera: i.e. a carrier of emotion, a means of emotive expressive. Arranging “opulence” before a camera isn’t the same as filming something in a way that conveys meaning or emotion. Why can’t Wiene match the sensuous dimension of the music in the way the scene is shot? It’s not as if silence cannot be expressive, as though images cannot conjure subjective moods, feelings. Wiene’s direction is—at best—old fashioned, shunning the innovations evident in any number of other German productions of the time. I can imagine an infinitely more interesting film being made in 1925 by Murnau or Lubitsch. In 1928-29, Hofmannsthal himself hoped to remake Der Rosenkavalier in Hollywood with the backing of Lillian Gish (Krenn, 90-95). In the 1930s, Lubitsch wanted do adapt the opera, hoping to cast Emil Jannings as Ochs—he was still planning an adaptation shortly before he died in 1947 (Eyman, 243, 357). There was and is a great film to be made out of Der Rosenkavalier, but Wiene’s is not it.

Finally, a few words about the restoration of Der Rosenkavalier. Material for this 2006 restoration came from the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv (Berlin), the Narodni Filmovy Archiv (Prague), National Film and Television Archive (London), and the Österreichisches Theatermuseum (Vienna). In the gorgeous book that comes with the DVD, there are images from these prints to show the qualities and limitations of each (Krenn, 139-63), and there are several obvious moments when the print source switches mid-scene. (I also note that the English-language print clearly had more elaborate title designs than the others; rather than subtitles, the DVD uses digital replicas of the text for each language option. It’s a shame that the nice painted title designs couldn’t be reused.) And though the reconstruction of the film from these various sources is clearly a labour of love, visually it leaves a lot to be desired. Many of the scenes are scratched, flickery, and soft. The film once looked a lot better than it does now. There was also more of it. Der Rosenkavalier was originally 2996m long, equating to 115 minutes at 22fps. The 2006 restoration is only slightly shorter, running to 109 minutes (at the same speed), but the final scenes are missing and must be replaced with stills and fragments from the film’s original trailer (clearly in worse condition than the rest of the footage).

But the music is superb, and again we hear the superb work of Bernd Thewes in the reconstruction of the score. As ever, various sources had to be used to rebuild the score—and lots of creative decisions had to be made to achieve synchronization. The music was recorded at a live performance of Der Rosenkavalier in September 2006 at the Semperoper, Dresden—the very location of the film’s premiere in January 1926. The DVD presentation starts and finishes with footage of the musicians—Frank Strobel conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden—taking the applause of this live audience. It’s a great way to feel involved in the occasion, and sense something of the original excitement in the collaboration of Strauss with cinema. It’s also appropriate to close with an image of the orchestra, for Strauss’s music is certainly greater than Wiene’s film.

Paul Cuff

References

Noël Burch, “Ambivalences d’un réalisateur ‘bisexuel’. Quatre films de Marcel L’Herbier”, in Laurent Véray (ed.), Marcel L’Herbier. L’art du cinema (Paris: AFRHC, 2007), 201-16.

Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

Rudolf Hartmann, Richard Strauss: The Staging of his Operas and Ballets (New York: Oxford UP, 1982).

Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999).

Günter Krenn (ed.), “Ein sonderbar Ding”, Essays und Materialien zum Stummfilm “Der Rosenkavalier” (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2007).

Music for October (1928; USSR; Sergei Eisenstein/Grigori Aleksandrov)

Until recently, it was most common to see silent Soviet films via the versions circulated by Mosfilm or Gosfilmofond that originated in the late 1960s-70s. There is a familiar kind of soundtrack: a giant orchestra, crammed into a thin mono recording. In these confines, the music seems to warp and wobble rather than reverberate. The scores tend to be aggressive, brooding, threatening—with the noise of real gunfire thrown in for good measure. They often sound like cobbled-together Shostakovich (and sometimes are) but more often feature music by a composer you’ve never heard of whose name is uncertainly transliterated from Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet in the “restoration” credits. (Did the composer of the 1969 score for Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg (1927) wish to be called “Yurovsky” or “Lurovski”? I still don’t know. Confusingly, his son—the conductor Michail Jurowski—went by a different spelling, as do the conductor’s own sons, also both conductors.) Some of these Soviet recordings have very effective, and affecting, passages. The opening few minutes of Alexander Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (1927)—in a restoration from 1973(?)—is among my favourite in all Soviet cinema: super slow-motion riders pass before a screen of trees, as a hushed, yearning pulse of music flows beneath. Image and sound grip you instantly. It’s a hauntingly beautiful opening shot. (The rest of the film rather loses me.)

But the film historian is on dodgy ground with these 60s-70s versions. The way these copies are curated for our use severely interferes with their historical status. Where are the original credits? Are these the original titles? Is there any missing footage? And what of the music? Were scores assembled especially for the films? Was the music original or arranged? Was it any good?

These questions are commonly asked about many works of musical theatrical history. Take opera, for instance. I was recently relistening to Halévy’s La reine de Chypre (1841). No single edition of this grand opera is “definitive”, in the sense that it underwent continual editing throughout its time on stage. Even during rehearsals, music would be cut or added or rewritten. Sometimes, this complex, often last-minute work was too much for Halévy himself, so he outsourced parts of the orchestration (or even the composition itself) to an assistant. New arias were inserted at the behest of singers, new passages of intermediary music at the behest of stage managers. And all this was without any of the score being printed in full. The “performing edition” of the work would exist across a wide range of documents: parts for the orchestra, the conductor, the composer. Many of these would be notated only in shorthand, overlaid with numerous manuscript corrections or instructions from conductor or composer as they worked on the production. Once the run of performances had ended, this array of paperwork would end up in various collections, often being scattered in the process. If the opera was produced elsewhere, it would undergo further changes and produce further paper trails. Even if all of this paperwork survived, the result is a kind of collective palimpsest with competing and conflicting evidence for what the score should be. Thus, there are always editorial choices to be made with historical material. The musical content of La reine de Chypre shifted across time, never being the same from one season to the next. So when the opera was “restored” in the 2010s, there was a huge range of choice regarding what music to include or exclude from the recording. (There would also, inevitably, be budgetary considerations: recording all the various possible numbers, even for an appendix on a bonus CD, would dramatically increase the cost of the project.) So when a new “performing edition” was created and then the recorded in 2017, a lot of music that survived in various sources was excluded (the overture, the ballet, the gondoliers’ chorus…).

This complex textual history is paralleled in the world of silent film music. Even if an original score existed, its survival is subject to all the same processes as might affect an opera score: different editions of the film for different markets, or for subsequent revivals; paperwork for different scores produced by different musicians for different cinemas etc. It follows that the question of a silent film’s musical restoration is as complex as that for its visual restoration. But how often does the same level of attention get paid to the music as to the image? And how often is this issue of musical reconstruction even acknowledged or addressed by the studios who own the films or the companies that release them on DVD? Whereas the Palazetto Bru Zane release of La reine de Chypre on CD in 2018 is accompanied by a fabulous book, including essays on the work’s genesis, reception, and textual history, most silent films do not get anything like this kind of documentation. Instead, there is the familiar blurb boasting “original versions” of this, and “complete restorations” of that. The word “original” and “complete” are rarely qualified, and even in cases where they are most appropriate, they never tell the whole story.

In relation to October (1928), the work of Edmund Meisel (1894-1930) and Bernd Thewes (b.1957) is an interesting case in point. Thankfully, the Edition filmmuseum DVD (2014) is as good as it gets when it comes to documentation. All the issues mentioned thus far are addressed, qualifying the selling point of this edition as featuring “the original orchestral score by Edmund Meisel”. As Richard Siedhoff writes in the liner notes:

[O]nly the torso of Edmund Meisel’s body of film music survives. Not only was the archiving of films and music not common practice at the time, but with the ascendancy of sound films, interested in the music of silent film composers waned precipitously. In the few cases where the ‘original music’ for silent films has survived at all, it is only as piano sheet music or as incomplete, handwritten orchestra parts. Musical directors in cinemas used the piano music as ersatz scores, since they were easier to work with than full scores. So full scores were almost never printed and when a film was no longer in distribution, the orchestra parts were stored somewhere or sometimes simply destroyed. […] [W]hat we have of [Meisel’s] film music comes from piano sheets, for which new instrumental arrangements have been written, and which have been adapted, re-arranged, lengthened and re-defined for longer versions of a film.

This is an orchestral score for October, but one whose orchestration has had to be rearranged by a different composer. It is both a score by Edmund Meisel and a score by Bernd Thewes. Not having a complete picture of how Meisel arranged his music, we must give credit to Thewes for filling out the sound world that survives on Meisel’s extant staves. What we have now likely offers a much better listening experience than for audiences in 1928. As Siedhoff writes of Meisel’s scores: “Prepared in a great hurry at the time, they are riddled with mistakes. Working from them in live performance must have ranged from torture to total chaos.” And while Meisel worked with Eisenstein’s approval on both Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October, Eisenstein would ultimately break off contact with the composer over the presentation of October (claiming Meisel had it projected deliberately slowly to aid his music).

So, talking about the way this music sounds when performed is a complex issue. I do no propose to write a piece on the whole film and score: it would exhaust me to write it as much as it would you to read it. Besides, while the film is a baroquely dazzling exercise in filmmaking, it wears me out after about 45 minutes. The images are always superb, but the drama loses me. This is where music can make such a difference. The Meisel/Thewes score for October kept me engaged musically even when my interest in the drama dwindled.

I want to write about the sequence which seemed to me the best combined use of image and music in the film—or rather, the scene where this combination gave me the greatest pleasure. It begins about 25 minutes into the film and shows Kerensky, the head of the provisional government, heading into the Winter Palace to assume his office.

We see three men, their backs to us, advance down the hall. The shot is slightly undercranked, so that they seem to waddle at speed rather than walk or march. The first shot doesn’t show their faces, and in the second shot they are so small as to lack features. Eisenstein makes them tiny in the palatial spaces, miniscule dictators. Meisel knows the scene for what it is: it’s comic, absurd, playful. It’s also repetitive and surreal. We see the endless columns, the endless arches, the endless steps, and the figures’ endless movement along and up, and up—and up. So Meisel spells out a musical beat that is both steady, banal, but almost too fast: it’s as though we can hear the men waddling at speed through the score. And Meisel/Thewes knows exactly how to get the best out of the rhythm. Below pizzicato strings, the main two-note figure of this section is played on the trombone, an instrument whose low, slightly bluff sonic roundness gets a lot of use in comedic film scores. The performance (I cannot speak of the score as written or notated) plays this up: there is a certain sliding in the transition between notes, giving this simple beat a sense of being out of breath, ever so slightly out of balance. The shape of the beat (descending phrases: one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four) suggests a kind of effortful trudge as much as a triumphant march.

Then, as we cut from a title (“The dictator”) to a closer view—but again from the rear—the strings take up the two-note step of the beat and the trombone and brass start to warm up into a kind of fanfare, supported now by the martial crash of drums. The trio of generals ascend the stairs.

Another title: “Commanders-in-chief…”. So now the strings develop the beat into a melody, albeit equally simple and just as repetitive. They are supported by the snare drums and, deep below them, the great blast of the tuba. It’s a pleasingly bombastic development of the initial musical idea, but it’s still deliberately simple—you can spell out the one-two-three-four of the beat, the tuba joining in for the first and third note. The tuba has the same role as the trombone in the first few bars of the scene, only it now amplifies the pompous oom-pah, oom-pah rhythm of the generals’ footsteps.

For the generals are now ascending a giant marble staircase, and Eisenstein distends the time it takes them to climb. First we have a long shot from the right side, looking left; then a title completes the information begun in the previous text: “…of the army and navy”, before a view from the left of the staircase repeats the same pattern of movement. Up the stairs they go, as the music builds in volume. (Another title: “Prime Minister”). Eisenstein cuts closer, but again so that we see only the backs of the commanders. At this point, the snare drums double their speed below the rhythm of the brass, as if to say: keep going! keep going! The trombones are now given a delicious upward swing to keep step with the drums’ quickened pulse.

Having cut closer, Eisenstein then cuts further away: the officers are still ascending, and it becomes clear that he’s making them repeat the same steps as at the end of the previous shot. As he does so often in October, Eisenstein uses montage to make successive shots overlap in time: space is made subservient to time. Just as we start to appreciate how elaborately the upward march of the generals is developing, an intertitle cuts in: “And so on, and so on, and so on.” But the text, too, becomes a visual joke: you read it from top to bottom, each line successively indented so that the phrases take the form of steps. Disconcertingly, you are reading the text from left to right, top to bottom, while each line moves further to the left as you go down: the way we read the text is moving in the opposite direction to the way the figures are moving on screen. It’s an extraordinarily complex visual/textual joke, and a brilliant way to make the intertitles graphic in a meaningful way.

Cut back to the stairs, now viewed from another angle, and this time we see the generals from the front for the first time. We cut from the stairs to the statues that overlook the figures. Stone hands hold out crowns of laurel, and the cutting seems both to join in with the march but also break it, or even to anticipate its culmination at the top. “The hope of the Fatherland and the revolution—” a title announces, and the statues are seen from below, from disconcerting angles, mirroring one another, as if they might topple over us. After the next title: “A.F. Kerensky”, we finally get a close-up of a human face. But this too is disconcerting, threatening, surreal. For it breaks the rhythm of ascent, the continuity being built up (however playfully) in the previous shots: here is Kerensky glowering down into the camera, leaning brow-first into the lens, the angle of his head and the side lighting transforming his face into a kind of arrow pointing at us. Eisenstein cuts to the statues bearing laurels, and a train of thought seems to dance across the screen—for Kerensky breaks into a smile, but a smile made sinister by the deep shadow in which it is formed.

And now—well over a minute into the sequence—we finally see the top of the stairs! A line of lackies looms from the shadows in this cavernous space, a space which—though we have seen so many shots of its details—surreally escapes our full comprehension. How exactly is the staircase arranged? Is there one set of steps, or are two sets of steps facing each other? And where are the steps leading? How high have we climbed, how many flights of steps?

“The Tsar’s lackeys”, a title announces. (And the film’s titles are always faintly sarcastic, mocking, whenever they aren’t slogans or exclamations or punctuation points.) A large man, whose uniform bulges with his bulk, steps forward—and the statues seem to look down on him, the statuary of the imperial past, the dark columns made defy gravity by the camera’s tilted angle. There are salutes seen from close, from afar, from close; time overlaps, gestures overlap, formalities pile into one another, pile onto one another. Their handshake takes an age, it’s captured in one, two, three, four, five different shots—emphasizing the lacky’s subservience, Kerensky’s effort to look imposing, and (cumulatively) the sheer awkwardness of a handshake that lasts this long.

Kerensky moves on, and the musical rhythm shifts once again. It grows in subdivision, the same foursquare beat now marked with the tuba spelling out all four notes in the bar. And listen to the strings in conjunction with the added brass: there’s such a glorious swing to the way the music is played, sounded out. The bright notes of a glockenspiel punctuate the rhythm; the notes are like shining medals, buttons or baubles catching the light. And it’s a marker of how beautifully orchestrated the sequence has become: listen to the sense of acoustic depth here, from the dark blasts of the tuba, through the swell of strings, the rasp of snare drums, up to the gleam of the glockenspiel. It’s such an intelligent piece of musical texture. You sense both the cavernous space of the hall, the near-dark extremities of the palace—and also the sheen of manservants’ buttons, the jingle of medals on the lackey’s chest.

“What a democrat!” the title says, as more handshaking takes place. Every servant is greeted, every servant nods happily to the next. The shaking is seen in close-up, from a distance, from close-up, from a distance… It’s an endless sequence made even more endless the way time and space overlap, the way the editing repeats and moves restlessly back and forth. And all the while, the orchestra is growing in volume, warming to its swing. It’s still the same, simple idea: four ascending notes that are repeated (one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four), followed by a three-note phrase that rounds off the tune. Thus, even the music (like that earlier intertitle) spells out the steps and (in its last three-note phrase) a kind of subservient bow, a satisfied execution of an about-turn before the four notes of the march climb once again. Both the visual and the musical halves of this scene could be extended forever, ad infinitum. Only the little variations keep it all building: visually, there are the various stages of the staircase, the titles, the lackeys that give the repetition a kind of crescendo; and musically, the tempo shifts and orchestration build the simple motif into a great movement of sound.

Finally, Kerensky has shaken hands with everyone, and the two commanders take the final steps behind him. Listen how that last three-note phrase of the melody now becomes a five-note phrase in the brass: one-two-three, four-five—and then a six-note phrase: one-two, three-four-five, six. It’s a simply delicious little development; the steady step of the music is becoming a skittish skip, as though the march is about to break into a dance. It’s ludicrously infectious.

“The democrat at the Tsar’s gate.” Kerensky approaches the doors to the inner palace. The anticipation is both built and suspended through editing: Kerensky’s hands clasped behind his back; shots of coats of arms on the door; shots of lackeys nodding, winking to each other; shots of Kerensky’s boots; shots of the generals; and then—in a dazzlingly strange cutaway—we see a spectacular mechanical peacock unfurl its wings, then spin around to show us its backside. Even the bird’s movement is split, repeated, made gloriously weird—close-ups of wings, feathers, feet, face—and rhymes with the turning heads of the servants, the spinning salute of the lackey, the upturned faces of the commanders. The gates open across one, two, three, four shots (wide shot, closer shot, close-up, tighter closer-up; in each shot the movement of the door is pushed back a few frames to be seen again), and the music now slows—the beat is the same, but the tempo slows by at least half. The musical march sinks back into the tonic with an ecstatic sigh—of relief as much as anything. You realize how tense this sequence—visually and musically—had become. How much longer can out satisfaction be denied? Just as the generals are climbing the steps, the music has been chromatically climbing its way through the march, creating a tonal tension that needs resolving—and is only resolved in these final bars, when we see the gates open and then shut behind Kerensky. The last bass note is allowed to extend out over the final images of the scene: the massive locks of the gates, the image of the sealed doors. In one sense, it’s like the echo of the shutting doors reverberating through the palace. But because this is a purely musical resonance, it attains a heightened sense of strangeness. It’s a kind of afterglow, a dark, ominous extension in sound. This kind of moment doesn’t exist in a paper score; it exists only when music is performed. It’s emotive, intelligent, brilliant musicmaking.

The whole thing reminds me of another joke built on similar musical-dramatic ideas in Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867). At the end of Act 1, the little state is preparing for a pointless war with its neighbour. The sword belonging to the Duchess’s late father is ceremoniously carried before the assembled forces. She sings an area, “Voici le sabre de mon père”, accompanied by the chorus. Offenbach repeats the individual blocks of the line: “Voici le sabre, le sabre, le sabre, le sabre de mon père!” The Duchess points to the sword, sings several lines to the same melody, before the chorus likewise repeats the main refrain several times to the same text (the libretto merely describes their line as: “Voici le sabre etc.”). Then the Duchess picks up the sword and repeats the exact same musical passage she’s just sung, with only moderately different words, before handing the sword to her favourite soldier. The voices of the chorus don’t even get this much variety, now repeating their first chorus wholesale. The joke is in the repetition, and in the banality of the tune extended ad infinitum in ludicrous martial pomp. But the best bit is at the very end of the act, when the soldiers are marching off to battle. “You forgot my blessed father’s sword!” the Duchess cries, whereupon the poor chorus must strike up the same melody again. Offenbach and his librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) are making the same joke, to much the same end, as Eisenstein and Meisel. Film and operetta give us martial music and pompous scenery, continually inflated and endlessly repeated, to highlight the paucity of the ideology that underpins them. Puffed up with its own vacuity, it becomes bathetic.

Having now watched this sequence about forty times, and listened to it about a hundred times as I write, I grow more and more impressed by how well it’s put together. The Meisel/Thewes score makes a tremendous impact, and is by far the best way to experience this film. The soundtrack for the DVD for October was recorded at a live screening of October in Berlin in 2012. There is often something disconcerting in live recordings of music for silent films (I’ve written about this issue elsewhere). But this recording is excellent. You get the sense of excitement in the orchestra at the climaxes—the great benefit of live performances—with minimal acoustic interference from the performance space. Indeed, the only such instance is at the final’s final chord when there is a great burst of cheering and applause—which is a lovely way to end the experience at home, and links your own enjoyment of the film with that of the audience in 2012. It reminds us that what we’re watching was and is meant to be experienced as a live event, performed by musicians and theatre staff, in front of a large audience. It’s why I love silent cinema.

Paul Cuff

Der Student von Prag (1913; Ger.; Hanns Heinz Ewers)

Once more I find myself literarily immersed in E.T.A. Hoffmann, and when it came to a select a silent film for this week the most thematically relevant seemed to be…

Der Student von Prag (1913; Ger.; Hanns Heinz Ewers)

Hard-up student and swordsman Balduin agrees to receive a fortune from the sinister Scapinelli, who takes as his price the reflection of Balduin. Enriched, Balduin pursues the Countess Margit, but he is shadowed both by the besotted Lyduschka, and by his own doppelganger…

The film has a theatrical set of introductions to the main players: they appear in front of sets of curtains, their names displayed on large painted panels that bar us from them. This is not unusual for a feature film of 1913, when the cinema was foregrounding its cultural respectability and boasting of its artistic abilities. After all, the author, Ewers, was a well-known author and Wegener a well-known stage star. But the film immediately takes us by surprise with the final credit: here are the lead actor, Paul Wegener, and the film’s writer-director, Hanns Heinz Ewers, discussing the film on location in Prague. Wegener is smoking a cigarette, pointing with his stick. But it is the author who looks most showy: wearing a huge broadbrimmed hat and smoking a pipe, he seems to flirt both with Wegener and with us. And in the background, resting in a tinted haze, is the city of Prague. If the theatrical trappings of the first credits promised a studio-bound literary adaptation, the film immediately corrects our expectations with this real exterior space.

Akt 1. Get used to this: a single shot, carefully arranged and composed in depth, that only occasionally pans right or left to follow a particular action. Otherwise, everything that happens does so within this restricted circumstance. The only cuts to will be to intertitles or information in the form of documents. (Thus far, so Bordwell.) But what is the effect of this style on this particular story, this particular setting? For a start, the uncanny enters in plain sight. The opening scene/shot shows the students gathered in the background among the tables and chairs of a café. In the foreground, a single table and two chairs. Balduin refuses to join in the revelry or admire the dancing of Lyduschka. He sits on one chair. Who will occupy the other? The dancing reaches a crescendo. Then in the midground horses and black carriage appear: they divide Balduin from the background, driving (quite literally) through the middle of the scene. Scapinelli—old, grey-bearded, slightly stooped, wearing clothes that may once have been smart—descends and sits next to Balduin. The carriage departs. In the background, the students drift away. They are uninterested in the action in the foreground, but Lyduschka lingers. In the rear of the shot, she lurks—curious, concerned, observant,—visually placed between the two figures in the foreground. She sees—as we do—Scapinelli tap Balduin on the arm. Balduin says he is ruined: he wants a lottery ticket or a rich wife. Scapinelli says something: we do not know what. (How perfect is the fact of silence here: the words of a stranger are all the more sinister for being unheard. Despite our proximity, we are in the same position as Lyduschka in that we cannot hear what is being said.) This single shot encapsulates the whole film: the distanced student, the devilish stranger, the ignored lover. And listen to the music. The music does a lot of the work here, building tension as well as atmosphere across the length of this otherwise static scene. It is boisterous for the students and Lyduschka’s dance; it is sinister for Scapinelli; it leaves the consequences of the scene hanging in the air, a few little leaps on the piano and woodwind…

Now to Countess Margit and her fiancé, the Baron von Waldis-Schwarzenberg. It’s another static shot, a studio set this time—or so it appears. But when the servant opens a door in the background we are in the midst of a wood. Pale birch trees occupy the frame of the door. It’s fabulously unexpected, almost dreamlike in its apparition. It’s like one of Klimt’s woodscapes: nothing but pale-limbed birches, surrounded by leafmeal (here, the tinting makes the dim forest floor a shadowy, rich sepia). Figures exit into the woods. We glimpse them through the doorway: they are walking into the dim trees. It’s a beautiful image, made mysterious by the distance the camera keeps between us and them, by the stillness of the frame-within-the-frame. It’s like they’ve wondered off into a painting. (And yes, frames within frames become an important feature in this film…)

Now to the hunt. What gripped me about this sequence? The way it has no stated goal or narrative shape. There are no titles to give it (to give us) a clear sense of direction. Shot: the estate’s gates, the gleaming track, the great pack of dogs at the horses’ feet, dust rises (the piano rumbles and scales up and down). Shot: the lake’s edge, dogs and horses running rear-left to mid-right (the piano is having a field day). Shot: the woods, a path, the horses and pack moving from rear to front, now just at walking pace, but huge clouds of dust rising to engulf the camera (the tempo of the piano line increasing, growing almost wild). Shot: hounds, scampering from rear-right to front-left, pursued by horses. Shot: the same scene, moments later, a kind of jump cut (familiar from the very earliest films, where the “view” is subtly edited to remove some anomaly or section of inaction), the horses riding past. Where are we going? What is the object of the hunt? The music is bustling, bristling: does it know what is about to happen? There is a line in a Hoffmann tale (“The Stranger Child”) where two children are being pursued by sinister spirits in the woods; they follow a path leading home: “but somehow—they didn’t know why—instead of getting out of the wood, they seemed to keep getting farther and farther into it”. That is how I felt about this sequence. Anything might be about to happen. The hunt might go on forever, or end in sudden triumph or catastrophe.

Finally, a clear narrative emerges. Shot: the countess and cousin, on their own. (The piano burnishes the scene with romance, with threat.) The countess will obey familial wishes to marry but does not love her cousin. She rides away. She passes Balduin and Scapinelli. The student runs in her wake, Scapinelli lopes with sinister, comic steps in his wake. We are back at the lake: the countess falls into the water. (The pianist is rushing up and down the keys.) Balduin leaps to the rescue, and the countess slips him an amulet in thanks. (Still the film gives no close-ups, so the title must pre-explain the action for us to comprehend: it adds to the sense of foreshadowing, foretelling.)

Balduin in his study. On the right of frame, a great mirror, against which he practices fencing. Outside we see Lyduschka. (The accordion joins the piano and strings.) She gives Balduin a bouquet of flowers. But Balduin is visiting the countess. The same set with the woods in the background: Balduin is ignored by the Baron and Margit’s father, shoved to the right of the frame. He is made to look and feel out of place. He lingers in the doorway. We see the countess’s interest, the count’s jealousy.

We return to Balduin’s study. The mirror is placed at such an angle that the reflection appears a moment sooner than we might expect: the reflection is further inside the room than Balduin. Just as, now that Scapinelli enters, his reflection lopes further into the room than the man himself. Scapinelli is smiling (the piano issues sinister chords). He spreads endless streams of money across the table. There is cinematic trickery here: hidden joins that supply the miraculous riches. But the best trick of all is yet to come, and it is better hidden. Scapinelli produces a contract: 100,000 gulden in exchange for whatever Scapinelli can take from Balduin’s meagre study. Balduin signs eagerly, not thinking what Scapinelli could take. Scapinelli lingers. They watch each other in the mirror. Scapinelli gestures, looks at the contract. We see the document again. Scapinelli gestures about the mirror, much like Méliès gestured to audiences in his earliest films—emphasizing the impossibility of what he was about to do. After the shot of the text, we return to the scene: Balduin drops the contract, as does his reflection. But then the reflection steps slowly of the frame and into the room. Technically, the shot is absurdly brilliant. First, the left of the lens was masked and the right half of the scene filmed; then, the film strip was rewound and the left half of the scene filmed with the right of the lens masked. (This way round, so that the camera could be unmasked halfway through the scene to record the rest of the scene, when Balduin must cross the frame from left to right to again gesture with bewilderment at the now empty frame of the mirror.) So the same strip of celluloid bears two strips of time, seamlessly joined by the camera operator’s skill—and by the immaculate timing of Wegener’s performance (just imagine the difficulty of getting a piece of paper to drop to the floor twice in the same way). This is where the static camera has such a rewarding role: to provide an apparently stable reality, then to break it. Per Freud’s reading of the uncanny (“unheimlich” in German, literally the “unhomely”), the “unhomely” rests against and may coexist with the “homely”: here, the stable “reality” on screen (static camera, long takes, deep staging) may itself hide a sinister “unreality”. As if in acknowledgement of the trick and its magnificent execution, Scapinelli doffs his hat and bows before leaving the room in the wake of Balduin’s reflection. End of Akt 1.

Akt 2. A ball at the palace of the count. Lyduschka follows. We see her clambering up precipitous exteriors of the palace walls and gardens, up seemingly endless staircases. The interior of the ball is a stage set, but these exteriors are gloriously real: Balduin and the princess walk along moonlit colonnades, beset with shadows (and with a waltz theme that becomes a kind of sinister march). Then the colonnade is shown to overlook the old city, and the lovers’ conversation is observed by Lyduschka. (Her climbing of the exterior walls is almost vampiric: what kind of a person is she? Are her intentions “homely” or “unhomely”?) She sees Balduin write a note to the countess, who has been taken away by the baron. But who is this? Leaning against a column is Balduin’s double, his reflection come to life, his doppelganger. There is a sinister quotation that names the double as a kind of “brother”. (The very appearance of the note is as inexplicable as the double himself: where is this “voice” of the film?)

After the ball, the countess in her salon, before a mirror: another mirror that offers an odd angle for the reflection. It is while inspecting herself in the mirror that she finds Balduin’s note, asking her to meet him in the Jewish cemetery the next night. She then reclines on her chaise longue and seems to happily imagine their meeting. But the scene lingers. Why? Well, look at the framing, which changes subtly over the length of the shot: the camera gently pans to the right, re-emphasizing the mirror in its composition, as well as (beyond it, to the right) the dark space of the balcony door and the night beyond it. Recall also that we’ve seen the countess on that chair before: in the credit sequence, where we were introduced to the character. Visually, her role was foretold and is now fulfilled. Also, the mirror (obviously) refers back to Balduin and his reflection, who will keep disturbing their romance. Finally, the dark space of the night outside foreshadows the two invasions of her salon later in the film: very soon, Lyduschka will climb the walls and steal Balduin’s note; later, Balduin himself will inveigle his way in to plea with the countess in person. Again, much is being suggested by comparatively simple devices. So Lyduschka enters and steals the note, leaving through one frame (the balcony door) while the mirror stands empty in the centre of the frame. End of Akt 2.

At this point there is a “Musical interlude”, the very presence of which is interesting: the film itself acknowledges its score, and the role music plays in shaping the film for its audience. It’s only a brief interlude, but it gives you a moment to reflect and ponder what might happen next…

What happens next is Akt 3. The countess is outside, descending the steps. She passes very close to the camera, which gently tilts and pans to the right to keep her in the frame: it’s the closest we get to a close-up, making her movement seem all the more furtive. In the next shot, she is ambushed by Lyduschka, who then creeps along after her.

In the cemetery, bathed in delicious blue tinting, the countess wanders slowly past the grand monuments to the dead. Lyduschka still lurks. She is like a pale wraith, preying upon the lovers. She hugs the walls, hides in doorways. And here is Scapinelli, who bows to the countess and makes as if to follow her. But we don’t see him again in the scene. Rather, we see Balduin among the Jewish tombstones. He is nervous of who—or what—might appear from the rear of frame, and so are we. That it is the countess who appears is not reassuring: for we are already anticipating another. (The music is romantic, dreamy, but hesitant—something is hovering in the wings.) And then we see it: the other. Balduin’s doppelganger appears from behind a giant tombstone. The lovers are afraid. Though the apparition doesn’t follow them, they run from it. (Again, the technical quality of the shot is superb: the apparition appears in the midst of dimly glowing wild grass and weeds, gently swaying in the breeze. That the masking and matching technique doesn’t show in the more uncontrolled environment of this exterior space is amazing.)

Meanwhile, Lyduschka shows Balduin’s note to the baron—who soon plans to fight a duel with his rival. Just look at Balduin’s newly-furnished apartment. We see the former student surrounded by a mise-en-scène full of telling details: look at the two sets of candelabra, the two silhouette portraits on the wall, the two chairs laid out. While he cannot see his reflection in a hand mirror, we can see the doubling all around him: we can see what he cannot. The duel, too, is a kind of mirrored combat. The count brings news of the baron’s decision to duel and begs Balduin to refuse the fight. The next day Balduin goes to the duel (we assume to turn it down), but en route we are given a title: “His act, which he would not commit, committed by another.” In another beautiful exterior woodland scene, we see the two Balduins pass one another. The real Balduin stumbles away in fright. In the next shot, he sees from a distance what has happened: people are gathered in a meadow, someone is bending over a fallen figure. The timespan of these few shots confused me on first viewing, and on second it does so again. How much time has passed? Didn’t the doppelganger pass by only a moment ago? The tense of the titles suggest that the duel has yet to happen, but Balduin discovers it is already too late: time is weirdly displaced, in this film where the uncanny keeps sneaking up on you. End of Akt 3.

Akt 4 begins with more text, which this time reveals itself to be a quotation from Alfred de Musset. The mysterious “brother”, dressed in black, sits beside the poem’s narrator. Even when footnoted, the content of the text is still unsettling. Who is doing the quoting? Who is reading the text? It’s the filmmakers speaking to us, of course, but because this is a text and because there is no obvious authorial “voice” elsewhere in the film, the quotation is strangely detached from its source. Its deployment makes sense (it comments upon the film’s theme) but the way it is deployed leaves the viewer faintly uneasy. (This needs more thought… for another day.)

Balduin wishes to visit the countess but is refused. In the next scene, he has “surrendered” to drink and frivolity. A dance scene that mirrors the opening scene: Balduin in the foreground at a table with two chairs, while in the background the dancers revel. And here is Lyduschka. But this time she comes over to him, tries to get him to dance, and when he refuses she dances anyway.

Next, an incredible scene: a gambling table. Chiaroscuro lighting. Balduin with endless luck. The faces retreat into the darkness. Only Balduin is left. But the doppelganger appears and sits opposite him. It’s the first time they exchange words: “Dare you also play against me?” They sit, Balduin transfixed, until he finally retreats into the shadows like the others before him.

Balduin sneaks back to the countess’s estate. It is now that he climbs up to her salon. His journey is through real locations: fabulously sinister gateways, overgrown, swathed in blue moonlight; glowing night-time gardens; shadowy paths along dappled walls. The way Balduin carries his cloak makes it look like a second skin, a black shadow, thrown over his arm. In the salon, there is that mirror again: placed at such an angle that it is prominent throughout the scene while revealing no reflection. At the rear of the shot, the open balcony doorway—like the unoccupied mirror frame—suggests an imminent arrival, another “guest” waiting in the shadows. Finally, the countess steps into the mirror—and realizes Balduin casts no reflection. (There is no trick here: the mirror is angled precisely to achieve this effect.) Now the doppelganger appears, not through the doorway but inexplicably next to it: it is Balduin who now flees through the doorway.

Similarly, as he flees the estate it is the doppelganger who can slide through a side gate while Balduin laboriously climbs over the main gates. There follows a brilliant series of shadowy exteriors around an abandoned Prague: Balduin racing along empty lanes, down empty steps, beneath dark arches. The cloak over his arm looks like his shadow, his double. A view across the city, and Balduin still flees—and now back into the birch-lined road through the woods. As with the changing views of the hunt sequence, any clear sense of geography or direction is lost in this section of the film. (Remember Hoffmann: “but somehow—they didn’t know why—instead of getting out of the wood, they seemed to keep getting farther and farther into it”.) We might be blundering about in these mysterious landscapes forever. Frantic, Balduin hails a passing carriage; it is driven by his double. The way the doppelganger turns to greet his passenger is wonderful: as unsettlingly comic and frightening as the similar scene (when Hutter is greeted by his coachman in Transylvania) in Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) that it may have inspired. And when Balduin reaches his home, his double is already there, stepping out of the shadows: as in the duel sequence, the doppelganger seemingly precedes his actions. Think back to the way the reflection in Balduin’s study seemed to precede the real Balduin stepping across the room: it’s the same thing, taken to its uncanny conclusion.

Finally, Balduin is in his rich apartment. He takes out a box from a cupboard, and from this a pistol. He is poised—perhaps—to kill himself, but the doppelganger appears again—stepping slyly into frame from the left. (From whence has he stepped? There is no answer.) Balduin takes aim, fires. The apparition is gone. But after a moment of triumph, racing around the empty room, Balduin realizes his reflection is still absent from a mirror. And when he reaches into his pocket, we realize he himself seems to have a bloodstained wound upon his chest. He falls to the floor, dead. And in comes Scapinelli. That loping gait of his, it’s marvellous. He sees the body, gets out the contract and rips it up. He bows to the corpse and stalks merrily out.

There is another quote from Musset. The text takes up the voice of the double, who promises to sit upon his brother’s tomb. And that’s just what we see next. There is the doppelganger, sat upon Balduin’s tomb. The branches of a weeping willow wave in the breeze. There is the raven, and you realize you’ve seen it somewhere before: it was sat on Scapinelli’s shoulder in the credit sequence. That it reappears here now is a brilliant touch, bringing the film to its inevitable conclusion. The visual design of the credits, like the Musset poem, pre-ordain (pre-write) the protagonists. The first image of the film was Wegener as Balduin, his name spelled out on a board; so too, the last image is of Wegener as “Balduin”, accompanied by his name written on a sign.

What a superb film. Atmospheric, mysterious, technically brilliant. I was looking for something Hoffmannesque and I got it: a Hoffmannesque world of Old Europe in the 1820s, complete with Hoffmannesque students pursuing Hoffmannesque romances, shadowed by Hoffmannesque doppelgangers. (Yes yes yes, I know the film is inspired by the work of Poe, Musset, and Goethe, but Hoffmann remains my go-to German Romantic for all things sinister and beguiling.) Whilst I’m talking about authors, I should add that the director of Der Student von Prag is variously credited as being Hanns Heinz Ewers and/or Stellan Rye and/or Paul Wegener. This rather suggests a collaborative effort, principally shaped by Ewes. I must also say that the Edition Filmmuseum DVDs (released by the Filmmuseum München) are exemplary: the set contains two complete versions of the film, one with Josef Weiss’s music in the surviving piano score (with optional audio description) and another with an orchestrated version of Weiss’s music by Bernd Thewes. (I will undoubtedly devote a future post to praising the silent film scores of Bernd Thewes.) It also boasts the shortened English export version of the film, together with a short film made by Ewers in 1913. I hope to watch the 1926 version of Der Student von Prag (with Conrad Veidt) to see how it compares—and (though it falls beyond the remit of this blog) the 1935 version with Anton Walbrook. But the memory of this 1913 version is already lingering in my imagination, and I’m exceedingly glad to have seen it in such a wonderful edition.

Paul Cuff