Tag: Documentary

I colori ritrovati: Kinemacolor and other magic (1905-22)

When I can’t decide on what to watch, I begin hunting my shelves for curiosities. Goodness knows, I have a lot of material to catch up with on DVD, let alone my hard drive. Faced with too much choice for a single feature, I fall back upon compilations of short films. At the weekend, my eye fell upon the spine of I colori ritrovati: Kinemacolor and other magic, a 2xDVD set released by the Cineteca di Bologna in 2017. I realized shamefacedly that I had never sat down and watched the contents from start to finish. At something of a loose end, feeling indecisive and uncommitted, I sat down and watched. For the next three hours, I was transfixed.

I colori ritrovati contains four curated programmes of films. Each programme contains a selection of short films made through an early colour process: Kinemacolor Urban, Kinemacolor Comerio, Chronochrome Gaumont, and Pathécolor. The films were produced between c.1907 and 1922, and range from 50-second fragments to 12-minute works of substance. Most offer “views” of touristic locations or noteworthy occasions, while the shortest films often concentrate on attractive objects which happen to make good subjects for colour. The content is what Tom Gunning et al. have described as “the cinema of attractions”. This definition usually implies either a kind of non-narrative model, or else a model in which the visual content or novelty of the film outweighs the importance or depth of narrative. The films of I colori ritrovati certainly fit this broad characterization, but there is a lot more to their pleasures than this definition of “attractions” might imply. Below, I discuss each programme in turn per their presentation on these DVDs…

“Kinemacolor Urban” (ten films, c.1907-12). This first programme of films made under the aegis of American producer Charles Urban, based on the pioneering work of British filmmaker George Albert Smith. This process involved treating black-and-white filmstock to make it sensitive to red wavelengths. Shooting at 32fps (double the standard speed of filming), the camera captured alternate frames through green and red filters on its revolving shutter. Though the print produced was still black-and-white, when projected through the same red and green filters, the film miraculously burst into colour on screen. A century later, viewers are faced with the impossibility of replicating this kind of technology to project the films as intended. Digital restoration can separate the alternate frames exposed to green/red, apply the appropriate filter (i.e. alter the colour tone) and reunite the frames in a way that mimics the effect of the original projection. But it remains a conjectural approximation, via totally different technological means, of the original Kinemacolor process. What we see on our screens at home is but a digital reimagination of the colours of a century ago.

That said, the effect on this DVD is amazing. The palette has an invitingly warm, pastel tone – exacerbated by the summery, daylit scenes of so many of the films. But it’s all delightfully dreamy. The colours are not exactly faded, but lustrous according to an unfamiliar design. While the overall impression is one of hazy warmth, this allows certain objects to stand out with particular brilliance. The shores and slopes and distant mountains in Lake Garda, Italy (1910) have the tired, wintry hue of a slightly murky afternoon. The water is deep blue-green, but when its dark ripples give way to calm the surface is a wash of light. The silhouette of a sailboat floats serenely over the dazzle of the distant past. Crowds await us, staring as we glide towards the shore. A woman with a red parasol appears on deck. We see her again once she has disembarked. She turns to stare at the camera, the ship departing behind her. Perhaps she is waiting for a signal from the camera operator to move, or to stop. It’s so charmingly awkward, so eye-catchingly strange.

In other films, the effect of the ever-so-slight temporal disjunction between the two colours on successive frames gives the faint impression of stereoscopy. There is a kind of gap in space and time that the eye catches, or thinks it catches. When we see men on horseback, or figures silhouetted against the land or sky – suddenly their form seems to possess some magical depth. It is all illusion, of course, but that does not lessen the effect. The oddness and awkwardness of the content of films like Coronation Drill at Reedham Orphanage (1911), Nubia, Wadi Halfa and the Second Cataract (1911), With Our King and Queen Through India: The Pageant Procession (1912), and [Woman Draped in Patterned Handkerchiefs] (c.1907), and [Tartans of the Scottish Clans] (c.1907) is made touchingly potent by their form.

I was far more entranced by the landscapes in films like The Harvest (1908) and A Run with the Exmoor Staghounds (1911), and this entrancement was heightened by the anomalies of the Kinemacolor prints. In the Exmoor hunt, the riders and their hounds are themselves pursued by alien blotches of turquoise and scarlet. These colours are those of Verdigris and faded bloodstains, as though evidence of ageing in entirely different materials were manifest. Here were English landscapes so familiar to me made suddenly mysterious by tears, blurs, marbling. The silent trees and grass are tugged by lines of chemical decay that scurry across the frame, or else softened and blurred by the thumbprints of watery giants. The past is already so far from us in these films. Their silence is akin to death; their colours faded like memory. But the moments of disruption, when time literally seems to be gnawing at the image, make this past seem all the more fragile, potent. History unfolds before us, harried by its own disintegration. At the end of A Run with the Exmoor Staghounds, the film dares show us the dying stag; but as if to counteract this image of death, we are shown a brood of puppies suckling from their mother. It is life and death, awkwardly presented to us in a film that has itself only just survived.

“Kinemacolor Comerio”(four films, c.1912). Italian producer Luca Comerio licensed the Kinemacolor process in 1912, so this programme is a small selection of the films made by Italian crews. There are glimpses of troops in Italy’s latest colonial enterprise in Libya, and the tragically earnest efforts of horses and riders crossing a river closer to home. But the most substantial film is L’inaugurazione del campanile di San Marco (1912), the Venice setting of which is beautiful for all the reasons I have outlined with the earlier films. There is the colour palette of the centuries-old facades, the somnolent waters, the hazy skies, and the charming pageantry of a previous century. Figures crane into the frame in awkward close-up, or rush to gather on some distant viewing point in the hope of being captured on film. A brass band stands around awkwardly waiting for their call to perform. Bishops trudge past. Plumes, flags, boaters. Archaic warships proudly anchored by the quay. Motorboats and gondolas. It is the Venice of Proust, of D’Annunzio, of Henry James, of Thomas Mann – and just about any other fin-de-siècle figure one cares to think of. The hue and haze are akin to the contemporary Autochrome still photographs produced by Lumière. The details are softening, the colours made pastel. Yet there are those familiar flashes of intense red, of deep blue-green, and the darkness of formal suits and top hats raised aloft in assurance of the coming century.

“Chronochrome Gaumont” (nine film fragments, c.1912-13). The second DVD begins with a programme of fragments from surviving Chronochrome films. As the excellent liner notes details, Chronochrome was an additive system involving three lenses on the camera to record simultaneously three images through three colour filters. During projection, three lenses were likewise used to (re)combine the three images into one. The difficulty (and constant adjustment) of filming this way necessitated a reduced frame height, giving the resulting films a widescreen effect. The results are simply stunning: these are by far the most successful, vivid, and absorbing colour worlds on these DVDs.

If I thought of Proust with the Kinemachrome film in Venice, here is another landscape from À la recherche du temps perdu. At Deauville-Trouville, children in dark bathing costumes play in the breaking waves. Adults mingle by red-and-white striped tents. (It is a vision of Proust’s Balbec. The images’ silence surely admits some dreamlike realization of an imagined time and place.) In View of Enghien-les-Bains, crowds of impeccable tourists wander under the boughs of trees whose green is like none that exists in our world, in our time. So too the mountains and sky, the curious cattle, the smocked peasants, and the bare trees of Provence: The Old Village of Annot possess a kind of echt French pastness. The landscape is once again wintry but bright. The scrubby roadside, the faded trees, the dusty road, the empty fields – aren’t these archetypes of an imagined countryside? They are prosaic and extraordinary at once. So it is with Picturesque Greece and Venice, Queen of the Adriatic, and in Chioggia, a Fishing Port Near Venice. They are hauntingly real, yet infinitely distant.

Aesthetically, one has the same impression with the tableaux of still lives: Venetian Glass-Ware, Flowers, and Fruits. These are set on a slowly rotating table, and the camera simply observes these hypnotic turns of glowing glass and fruit. These objects are incredibly real: and I emphasize equally incredible and real. They are palpably there before us, weighty lumps of glass, heavy bowls of fruit, potent buds of flowers; their colours and textures and contours are saturated by reality. Yet the saturation of colour, the way the glass glows, the way even fruit seems to assert its presence on screen – these aesthetic aspects are more than real, they are supernal, almost supernatural. I have never seen a pile of oranges so lustrously tempting. Like the shots of Venice a century ago, this fruit is here so madly, vividly, aggressively alive that it is hard to comprehend that it cannot have survived more than a few days, even hours, after being filmed at the start of the twentieth century. So too the Venetian glass bowls seem not merely to be bright and colourful, i.e. to possess brightness and colour, but to emit brightness and colour. The greens and purples look radioactive, dangerous – as though the glass were transmitting its colour, its very quiddity, across the centuries.

“Pathécolor” (fourteen films, 1905-1922). The final programme on these DVDs returns us to the most successful early producer of colour films. Pathé’s “pochoir” process involved laboriously cutting stencils for each colour for each frame of film. Once this was done, the stencils could be used to mechanically stamp dye onto the frames. Though time-consuming to cut each stencil, these stencils could then be used to colour multiple prints of the same film – a great boon to mass production. Combined with tinting and toning, the effects of this process could be extremely varied and complex. I have already discussed this process in relation to fiction films like Casanova (1927), but this programme presents a series of short films almost exclusively within the touristic/documentary mode.

Appropriately for the machine-tooled Pathécolor, several films are devoted to various combinations of handmade and industrial processes. And just as the work of cutting Pathécolor stencils was primarily undertaken by women, so in Industrie des éventails au Japon (c.1914-1918) we see Japanese women laboriously cutting, colouring, and folding fans. In La Récolte du riz au Japon (1910) whole families and all ages are engaged in the elaborate harvesting and preparation of rice. This kind of narrative is at its most elaborate in Le Thè: culture, récolte et préparation industrielle (1909), where we watch the whole process of cultivating, harvesting, refining, and preparing tea – even to the point of watching it being served and drunk. This film even offers a kind of dissection of colonial industrialism: from the poor indigenous labourers in the fields and the white foremen overlooking the subsequent preparation, through to the middle-class white women being served tea by their Indian servants. La Chasse à la panthère (1909) offers another glimpse of class and race in the gruesome business of a hunt. (The white man carries a rifle and stands triumphantly over the trapped beast, while his native servants do all the dirty work, then the carrying and lifting.) There is an odd disjunction between the fantastical application of colour and the matter-of-factness in the way the film shows us a panther being tortured, beaten, shot, and skinned.

The drama of transformation is more surreal in La Chenille de la carotte (1911), where caterpillars in garish colours metamorphosize into butterflies. Here, the colour makes these extreme close-ups of writhing insects purely terrifying – I can imagine this film being overwhelming on a large screen. so too with the time-lapse photography of Les Floraisons (1912), where flowers writhe into organic fireworks – and writhe through the additional layers of colour laid on by Pathé.

Calm is provided by the travelogue pieces, from the gentle rhythm of Barcelone, principale ville de la Catalogne (1912), seen primarily from the vantage point of a slow-moving boat, to the even more languorous rhythm of Les Bords de la Tamise d’Oxford à Windsor (1914) – a slow cruise down the river, past exemplarily English riverbanks, locks, lawns, pleasure boats… and all in 1914, when one senses that the meaning of this world and its inhabitants would undergo some irreparable change.

More exotic locales are found in La Grande fète hindoue du Massy-Magum (1913) and Le Parc National de Yellowstone (1917). I confess that during some of these films my mind began to wander. The application of colour over the film image often flattens rather than deepens our perception of the views being presented. For example, I would much rather have seen the journey along the Thames in monochrome. The broad application of single colours – green, green, and more green – does little to enhance such a landscape. Tinting or toning would surely be preferable for this kind of combination of open river, spacious meadow, and large sky. Other such travelogue subjects become postcard banalities. For all their delight and novelty, there is a stiltedness in the colour that dulls their power. But perhaps this is just the result of these Pathécolor films being at the end of the second disc and me growing tired?

It is a relief to glimpse more human aspects in these films. In L’Ariège pittoresque (1922), views of mountains and houses are followed by awkward glimpses of locals in traditional costume, posed stiffly for the camera. Here, and in Coiffures et types de Hollande (1910), there is the delightful tension between the awkwardness of the pose of the locals and the delightful glimpses they give towards the camera operator – and to us. These long-dead faces are at their most alive when they try not to grin, when they cast a glance of annoyance or bemused patience at those who stare at them – then and now. Perhaps to reassert the neatness of fiction, the last of this programme, La Fée aux fleurs (1905), returns us to a typical kind of “attraction”: an excuse to decorate the frame with greenery and flowers, and to have a woman with a beaming smile gaze approvingly out from the image, inviting and happy to live within her magical fiction.

As must be clear by now, I was very glad to have (re)found these DVDs and watched them all the way through. Their hypnotic power – somewhere on the borders of the distant past, somewhere on the borders of photographic reality – makes I colori ritrovati an absolute treasure trove of pleasures. The four programmes offer a variety of processes and subjects, from the real to the surreal, from the everyday to the fantastic, from the placid to the cruel. It’s a good reminder about the variety of colour technologies and the results of rival processes, all operating in the same window of film history – and across a variety of genres or modes of presentation. The DVD liner notes are superb, as one would expect from an archive-based release, and provide information about the history, preservation, and restoration of the films. (There are also restoration features on the disc, too.)

If I have a reservation, or at least a regret, about the visual presentation of this material, it is the presence of copyright logos throughout the programmes of Kinemacolor and Chronochrome films. The former has a “Cineteca di Bologna” logo in the top left, the latter a “Gaumont” logo. The DVD liner notes mention that there are strict copyright restrictions on the Chronochrome films. Not only does this mean that no complete film is presented here, but also that a remarkably ugly Gaumont copyright notice is stamped in the corner. I could get used to the Bologna logo in the first programme of this set (it is a simple and relatively discreet design), but the Gaumont logo is horrific: as ugly an intrusion as you could imagine. Atop the beautiful and subtle and rich texture of the Chronochrome images, this flat digital shape in the corner looked like a lump of birdshit had landed on the screen. I understand this material is unique and protected by goodness knows what level of copyright and archival restriction, but it seems a great shame to so spoil the astonishing visual impact of these films.

To return to the positives, I must also praise the music on these DVDs, which is provided on the piano by Daniele Furlati. I am often indifferent to piano scores but listening to these performances were much more pleasurable than I usually find. Firstly, I think the (relative) lack of narrative puts less pressure on the musician to be led by specific cues. The result is a more relaxed, impressionistic approach. I find Furlati’s music for these films both more melodic and more effective over longer timespans. He’s not chasing after the action or killing time waiting for a particular cue or change of scene. I was rather reminded of some of Liszt’s musical sketches inspired by/written on his travels around Europe in the 1830s. His Album d’un voyageur (1835-38) prefigures his more polished, thematized collection Années de pèlerinage (1842). Melodies take their time to develop, and there is a pleasingly rambling, reflective nature to the structure. This is travel music, capturing the slow speed of voyaging and the pleasure of stopping to gaze at views and absorb the atmosphere. With Furlati’s music for I colori ritrovati, I had the same impression of a relaxed, melodic meandering through these slow travelogues and touristic views. And, as Liszt sometimes quotes and develops local/national melodies into his work, so does Furlati. There is a lovely moment at the end of L’inaugurazione del campanile di San Marco (discussed above) when Furlati quotes a phrase from the Italian national anthem. He does so very subtly, and the tempo is so slow it’s like a memory of travel, of a place, of a country we’ve visited. The images it accompanies are of the nighttime façade of a palace in Venice. It’s a dreamy, melancholic, touching moment – a summoning of memory at the very moment the film ends, and the past disappears. Perfect.

Paul Cuff

HippFest at Home (2025, Day 2)

Day 2 sees us go to Ireland for a programme called “The Near Shore: A Scottish and Irish Cinema-Concert”. Introductions to this set of films were given by Alison Strauss (the director of HippFest) and Sunniva O’Flynn (Head of Irish Film Programming, Irish Film Institute). Given the cross-seas nature of the films shown, and the collaborative aspect of archival exchange between Scotland and Ireland, it was appropriate to hear voices from both sides of the Irish Sea. As O’Flynn also explained, the Irish Film Institute often has a very inclusive remit when it comes to preserving and restoring films that might be considered “Irish”. Films can be made by Irish filmmakers outside Ireland, or films made within Ireland by non-Irish filmmakers. In the case of today’s programme, there is a blend of both – and even a kind of Scottish-Irish collaboration via a married couple’s home movie. O’Flynn introduced the programme, together with the first films – and then reappeared on stage to introduce the next films. (As she said, this was certainly preferrable to having one long introduction with too much information.) As I wrote on Day 1, these are superb introductions – informative, engaging, welcoming, and offering both personal, historical, and cultural context for the films. Perfect. So, to the films themselves…

Royal Clyde Yacht Club Regatta (1899; Ire.; Dr Robert A. Mitchell). This view of a former century has immediate charm, immediate power. The image crackles with history. Its surface is all smoke and charcoal: a distant ship peopled by shadows, a sunless sky, dark ripples on a grey sea. The image evokes the haphazard nature of film preservation, of the way time nibbles and scuffs at the celluloid. It is a muted world, in every sense; therein lies its mystery. But if the image suggests a kind of fragility, even of happenstance, the film itself is beautifully (and carefully) realized. There is intelligence at work from the outset, when the first thing that catches the eye is a massive flag saying “START”. But after a few seconds, the eye takes in the subtlety of the composition. The sense of scale and drama, managed within a single shot, is brilliant. Just look at the distant boats, faint sketches of line and tone, thrown into relief by the appearance of a tiny rowing boat in the foreground. The whole scene subtly shifts to the right, but it’s so smooth and dreamlike it’s unclear if we are moving or the boats are moving. Then the empty space in the middle-ground is suddenly occupied by the yachts themselves – beautiful great two-dimensional planes that plough through the frame. It’s startling, but dreamlike too – no sound prepares us for this apparition or adjusts for its exit. In silence, objects have neither mass nor wake. They glide fatefully across the surface of the past. These great seaborne wings brush us by and are lost. This is a startlingly beautiful film.

To Ireland by Air (1933; Ire.; Mr Dick). People grin at us, smoke, walk past. A plane moves forward, its propeller cranked. It gets up speed, it ascends. From the air, the world is unsteady. What can be seen? The land a distant patchwork of fields, houses. The shadow of clouds, already breaking apart. The world as it was, one day, nearly a century ago. There it is, fleeting through the vapour, the coast appearing and disappearing, a boat and its wake. “Passing Arran”; and pass it we go. It is lost in mounds of cloud. Here are ports, peopled by unseen inhabitants, long dead. Sheep and birds, the ground coming closer. The camera shakes. The world is plunged into darkness. But we are on the wing once more, high above a white sliver of surf. We seem to blink, and each time we open our eyes the world has changed. There is the shadow of the plane, the shadow of ourselves. Silence offers no preparation for the transitions of this montage. Here is Belfast, from the ground. The past and its people; silent, slow. A peacock mills around, geese stalk along. It’s a world (still) of horse and carts, of occasional cars and bicycles. (And, everywhere, horseshit on the roads.) The towns pass – Galway, Westport, Ballina, Sligo, Londonderry – and there are odd snapshots from each, from massive stone edifices to tiny homes with turf for their roof. Faces, a river, a fish in its depths. A site of ancient dread, an execution of a son by his father. (Beyond this past, another past, deeper and more obscure.) Landscapes and faces, extraordinary faces – most extraordinary when they are anonymous, when they don’t trust us, when they’re on their way to somewhere else. A hearse, a tower, a vista of coastline and hills. A sloping street, a dog rolling to scratch its back. Sudden transitions, odd glimpses. The camera is a curious stranger, glimpsing everything for the first time. It is as though we have been allowed some illicit access into the past. And still its inhabitants look back at us, wary of our intentions.

Rush Hour (1949; Ire.; John Tomkins). A bearded man waits and waits and snoozes on a bench by the sea. But then he’s too late. Dublin’s rush hour, a pell-mell mix of trams and buses and bicycles and cars. We glimpse the pedestrians hurrying here and there, and the bustle of life as it was – once. It is a glimpse of the real world, shaped by a keen eye and intelligent humour. But is it as mysterious as the last films? I think not. The past is no longer as wary of us as before. The distance is being closed, and without the fear and thrill of trespass – of crossing some historical threshold – there is less magic.

Butlins Holiday Camp Movienews (1950s; Ire.; John Tomkins). Mosney, County Heath. A delightful film, a glimpse of a holiday camp fully peoples, and in the sun. Laughter and exercises and silliness all around. It’s a charming film, but as with Rush Hour I no longer feel moved. This is a past that is more recent. It is not my past, but it is that of my parents or grandparents. The silence marks here it off from the present, but the gap is bridged by my knowing this world with sound. I am not quite a stranger here. Might I not “pass” in this past?

The Farm Below the Mountain (1958; Ire.; Ernest Tiernan). A honeymoon visit to family in County Leitrim. Another plane journey, more glimpses of the coast, of fields and rivers. The film is in colour, a dreamy filmic palette of rich hues and grainy textures. It’s a delight to watch, but again (for me) it is too recent, too much of a world that I might know second-hand. This is the recent past, dressed in the silence of its forebears.

Well, this was a rich trove of views. I regret that my interest lessened with each film, with each step toward the present. Perhaps one day these films from the 1940s and 50s will be as alien and uncanny as the films of the 1890s are to us now, in 2025. But I’d like to think that the earliest films will retain a unique aura, a unique aesthetic, that will mark them out forever. Among the films in this programme, by far the best is the first and earliest: Royal Clyde Yacht Club Regatta (1899). A film that more vividly bears the markers of its age, that more clearly sets itself apart from our epoch, from the living world. A film that possesses a kind of grandeur and mystery. Though I might intellectually imagine moving about the streets in 1899, the form of a film from this era disallows any possibility of such transgression. Silence demarcates this world from mine. It is not merely that these shadows happen to have no voice: it is that they cannot possess a voice. They are cut off illimitably and eternally from the present day. There is no calling out to us, no calling back to them. It is this quality (both historical and aesthetic) that makes the film documents of early cinema so potent.

I must also mention the music for this HippFest programme, which was improvised at the piano by Paul G. Smyth. I imagine that creating music for such odd films is exceedingly challenging, but this accompaniment was superb. He absolutely captured the odd, almost brittle rhythm of the earliest films. He understood and expressed the weirdness not just of the films but of our relation to them. There was a kind of hesitant exploration of emotional mood that surely matches our own attempts to engage with the films, to work out what’s going on and how we feel. Smyth conjured a marvellous range of textures and tones, at once varied and recognisably coherent. An excellent performance.

Well, that was Day 2. Any reservations about some of the films must not count against the value of a programme like this. Early films nestle productively alongside more recent amateur productions. All provide beautiful glimpses into the past, and evoke the lives of those who made them and those who we glimpse within them. O’Flynn’s introductions were the ideal accompaniment, framing their cultural and archival status – and why they are valuable and fascinating objects. While praising these introductions, I should add that HippFest very helpfully provides links to pdfs of all curational text online via their website. It’s another aspect of this festival that impresses. More please.

Paul Cuff

British Instructional Films: Three documentary dramas, 1925-27

As promised last time, I have been watching more recreations of Great War battles produced by British Instructional Films. Unlike The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, these films focus on the land battles of the Western Front. Like Walter Summers’s naval production of 1927, they offer “reconstructions” of real events using as much military personnel and equipment as possible. The exact genre of the productions is difficult to state. The BFI liner notes for their DVD/Blu-ray edition of The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands calls them “docudramas”, while the DVD edition of Ypres (discussed below) refers to them as “documentaries”. I’m sure a worthwhile but ultimately tedious (or tedious but ultimately worthwhile) debate exists in critical literature about what exact term refers to what exact kind of film. Shall I employ “docudrama” here? I’m not sure. I think simply “film” is best, since they appeared in cinemas per any other form of feature-length presentation, and I’m interested primarily in what kind of experience they offer rather than what label to pin to them.

Two of these films I have watched via the BFI Player. The third, Ypres, I watched via a DVD edition released by Strike Force Entertainment (now there’s a name). This is the only film that has received a physical media release. Since I’m a sucker for physical media, and did not wish to pay the BFI £3.50 to “rent” a video file, I cheerfully spent £3.48 for the DVD on eBay. As much as I wish to support the BFI, I’m also an immensely stubborn and immensely cheap human being. Thus, I price-watched the DVD for nearly a month until it fell below the BFI rental price. All to save two pence, and to make sure I had a copy of the film to keep for as long as I wish. That said, I am still relying on the few sentences of the video description available (without paying £3.50) via the BFI Player to contextualize the films. Thus, I learn that the BIF films of the 1920s were “released annually around Remembrance Day” (11 November) and were hugely popular records of wartime events. So, what kind of films are they? And how comparable are they to the one BIF film that the BFI has given a physical media release?

Ypres (1925; UK; Walter Summers). I suppose I must begin with a few facts, for anyone not familiar with this particularly resonant piece of British history. Ypres is a town in Belgium that the British army and its allies defended for almost the entirety of the war. There were three major battles (in 1914, 1915, and 1917), the first being a German effort to capture Ypres and the second and third being Allied attempts to throw the Germans back. The Allied frontline bulged around the town in what became known as the “Ypres salient”, and the Germans occupied the scant higher ground to the east, from which they could observe and bombard the British lines and the town itself. Ypres was reduced to rubble, and the salient around it to a nightmarish wasteland of rotting flesh and filth. The first battle cost around 220,000 casualties, the second 100,000, the third somewhere over 500,000. Between late 1914 and late 1917 the frontline, it need hardly be added, moved barely more than four miles. Since the British and Commonwealth armies spent most of the war occupying and fighting for the salient, the name “Ypres” has a particular resonance in their collective culture. This is also my culture. Certainly, I have been fascinated by the war and by the horrors of this place in particular since I was a child.

The figures I have cited above are not mentioned in Summers’s film of 1925. Made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of (at least) the first two battles, it announces its emotional (and cultural/political) tone in the opening credits: “Dedicated to all those who fought and suffered in the Salient and to the memory of our comrades who sleep beneath that ‘foreign field that is for ever England.’” The citation of Rupert Brooke, famous both for his enthusiasm for the war and for his early death (en route for Gallipoli) in 1915, indicates the tenor of what follows. How immortal is this film’s story? Well, very immortal, according to the first narrational title: “The immortal story of the Ypres Salient begins in October 1914. Indomitable Belgium, wrested of all save her immortal soul, resounds to the heavy tread of the invader’s heel.” Yes, we’ve got a double helping of immortality, plus a side portion of indomitability. Let’s just hope the invader’s heel doesn’t step on our metaphor! Come on, chums, let’s up and at ’em!

The tone of intertitles suggests how the film seeks to humanize the Allied soldiers (and nurses) and demonize the Germans. The Germans are “field-grey hordes” while the Belgian civilians are “the innocent and helpless victims of War’s ruthlessness” (see also “Sister Marguerite and her band of heroic nuns”). The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) arrives “laughing and singing” in Ypres, while the Germans are reduced to often distant ranks of fodder for their guns and cold steel. The first time we see much of the Germans at close quarters, they are in their dugout boozing and raucously playing the accordion – while outside brave Tommies with blackened faces launch a deadly raid on their position. “Is anybody in there?” a British soldier yells down the staircase to the dugout. “Nein – nein!” the accordionist shouts back. “NINE did yer say, well share this amongst yer!” Tommy throws a grenade into the dugout. It explodes inches from the group of Germans. It neither kills nor wounds any of them, but up they come to the trench, trembling like lambs.

The film is bloodthirsty while being curiously reticent to show us any actual blood. In this way, the film recreates many heroic deeds, often those that earned the Victoria Cross (the highest military award) for bravery. For example, we see a Canadian officer lead his men forward with sword in hand. He is shot down (without spilling a drop of blood), whereupon a title announces: “His is no wasted death. Spurred to vengeance by their leader’s fall, the Canadians surge forward in one headlong rush, capturing their objective and bayoneting every defender.” Lovely, though we don’t see the orgy of bayoneting the title promises. Likewise, we see heroically outnumbered British machine-guns blaze away at point blank range but nobody German falls down dead in front of it. (Later, another heroic machine-gunner’s frightful toll is unseen apart from three or four hapless Huns.)

The film also has a curious interest in immortalizing “unknown” deeds. Thus we see a chaplain making a brave crossing of a shelled road, after which a title says: “The Padre received no reward for his action, but like countless others he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had done his duty.” Elsewhere, there is a similar incident of a cook bringing rations to a company through shot and hell: “You won’t read of their deeds in the History books, / But they’re deuced fine chaps are the Company cooks.” Of course, we are privileged to see these unseen events. The film is allowing us both a public history (of celebrated heroes) and an obscure one (of uncelebrated heroes).

Other methods to humanize the nameless Tommies come in the form of comic scenes. There is a bustling bathing scene, complete with comic asides from plucky lads keeping their spirits up in hard times, as well as scenes of behind-the-lines entertainments. There is also one scene of a soldier going home to his little house, his little wife, and his little blonde child. It’s all weirdly uninvolving. That is, except for the lovely image of the soldier’s house: here are the flowers and trees of a century ago, blowing in the wind. It’s beautiful, captivating – and the film takes no time to emphasize it.

The third battle of Ypres was (in)famously fought over waterlogged terrain in which men frequently drowned. How does the film handle this most famous of features? “With the night the weather changes and the fighting is continued in heavy rain”, we are warned. But there is no rain on screen. The opening phase of the battle skips over such details thus: “In spite of all handicaps, a considerable advance is made, and over 6000 prisoners taken.” No maps show us just how “considerable” this advance was, nor are the “handicaps” shown. Immediately, though “the weather grows steadily worse, and despite superhuman efforts the advance is laboriously slow.” What do we see of this? Well, there is some inane and unconvincing hand-to-hand combat by a small stream. (A self-contained stream that has not burst its banks.) We see tanks easily crossing the battlefield, the only water a couple of puddles. To skip to the end, the last title sums it all up thus: “In a war of heroic deeds, Passchendaele will rank among the most heroic struggles. On 7th December, after five months of gruelling fighting, the crest of that tragically famous ridge is gained.” (The film does not over the fighting of 1918, in which the right was lost again – then rewon, all at the price of many tens of thousands more casualties.)

If all I’ve done is point out the crudeness of the film’s tone and dramatic method, I must conclude by saying that cinematically it is well put together. The photography is strong with frequent and effective use of soldiers silhouetted against large northern skies. There are few close-ups, which makes the use of anything closer than medium or long shots striking. More often than not this is used for the comic scenes, which are less interesting. But there are some effective uses of single soldiers positioned away from the massed ranks/groups that work well. (The image of an exhausted soldier with cigarette in mouth, standing in the foreground while ranks march past behind him, is very striking – it’s not surprisingly that the image is used by the BFI to advertise the streamed version of the film.)

There are also various models and matte painting used to good effect, though nothing very complex. The first glimpse of Ypres is a matte painting, nicely framed, while there are some models to use for the destruction of a zeppelin. For the latter, Summers wisely chooses to stage his aerial fight at night, the dark lending a hand to make the lack of real footage or locations less obvious. Summers also uses plenty of men and materiel to good effect, always filling his frame with people – or else masking portions off with the scenery or smoke and explosions. He also uses some limited amount of newsreel footage shot during the war. But he’s also canny enough not to use any of the real battlefield: it would entirely upstage and undermine the simple heroics of his own “docudrama”. You can’t show the horrors and destruction of the real battlefield if what you’re selling your audience is a boy’s own adventure version of history – albeit a well-equipped one. It’s a very clear and logical film, well put together. But it isn’t reality.

Finally, a note on the DVD edition by Strike Force Entertainment. Unlike the version on BFI Player, this presentation has a soundtrack. The back of the box announces: “The original silent documentary has had an all new soundtrack created from digitally enhanced recordings of the period as well as the addition of evocative sound effects.” Without digital enhancement, anyone nearby would have been able to hear my heart sinking as I read these words. However, the end result is not so bad. It’s a mishmash of musical fragments, united only (I assume) by the fact that they are free of copyright and can thus be chopped and changed per the arranger’s wish. There are also plenty of sound effects, which are far too “new” to my ear, so they stand out a mile from the aesthetic (and historicity) of the film and the acoustics of the musical samples. But I can’t deny that it’s better than I feared. It’s serviceable.

Mons (1926; UK; Walter Summers). On to Mons, which was one of the pivotal early battles of 1914. The BEF was retreating across Belgium, pursued by the much larger German forces. Mons was a “fighting retreat” in the last glimmers of “open warfare” that would soon be replaced by the static trench warfare. It was seen as a test of the strengths of Britain old, professional army – the army that was soon to be worn out and replaced by the waves of volunteers and conscriptions. The original BEF became known as the “Old Contemptibles”.

“Dedicated to the memory of the Old Army which came triumphant through a great ordeal and gave a new and noble meaning to the word ‘Contemptible’.” Thus the opening title. There follows a confusing and ill-explained (actually, entirely unexplained) scene between (unnamed) old politicians arguing about the validity of war. Cut to a mix of newsreel and fictional footage of British troops embarking for the continent. From this point, the action is better narrated. The progress of the armies is described in enough detail to follow, though (unlike Ypres) there are no detailed maps to put everything in place. In a way, it suits the hectic nature of the mobile front to be unbalanced in this way.

And the representation of the fighting? Well, there are cavalry charges and unconvincing firefights and scores of German prisoners, helpless at the sight of cold steel. There are heroic deeds and selfless sacrifices. There are cutaways to Germans admitting how they’ve underestimated their enemy. (“Why not admit it? Our first battle is a heavy – a very heavy – defeat. And that defeat inflicted by the English, the English whom we laughed at.”) There are endless contrasts between the smallness of the British and the masses of the Germans. (“Shatter their ranks, they are filled again. Mow them down in thousands, from the dragon’s teeth spring more.”) There are fewer overtly “comic” scenes than in Ypres, but there are several vignettes to concentrate on individuals. There is “the straggler” who gets marooned with a wounded comrade in a windmill and fights of German uhlans. There is an officer who buys a child’s drum and fife from a local shop in order to rouse his men with any kind of martial music. (The scene ends with a vision of a Victorian band in full regalia playing them on.) Then there’s the scene where a lone British soldier encounters a lone uhlan at rest. The soldier is armed but is too chivalrous to take the German’s possessions without a fight. So they take off their tunics and box, until the German is (of course) knocked out cold.

By dint of its setting in open warfare, and in summer, Mons has more chance for wide, expansive images of the landscape than in Ypres. Summers again makes great use of horizons and silhouettes, of great masses of troops, of racing horses, of mobile batteries, of bridges and brooks, of explosions filling the screen. There are one or two tracking shots, and even a rapid panning shot, which help variate the rhythm of the scenes (many of which are much of a muchness).

And the meaning of it all? According to the last title: “The Great Retreat is ended – the Great Advance, which is to end in ultimate victory, begins.” Describing the onset of static warfare and years of unimaginable suffering and appalling losses as “the Great Advance” is… well, what is it? I genuinely can’t think to express my feelings at this point. They grow more complex, and I will reserve judgement until after the next film…

The Somme (1927; UK; M.A. Wetherall). Right, the final film, and the one that covers one of the bloodiest battles in human history. Between July and November 1916, the British & Commonwealth and French armies launched an offensive on either side of the river Somme. In five months of attritional fighting, the Allies advanced barely six miles and lost over 600,000 casualties. The Germans lost somewhere over 500,000 casualties. The BFI Player notes for this film begin: “This sophisticated retelling of the Battle of the Somme includes an outstanding montage ‘over the top’ sequence.” Fine. What else? This production was “principally the brainchild of Geoffrey Barkas and writer Boyd Cable (Ernest Ewart), both of whom were at the Somme”. Barkas was the original director, but he fell ill and was replaced by M.A. Wetherall. So then, a film produced by veterans with an outstanding over the top sequence. Bring it on…

Hmm. Well, the quality of this print is by far the worst of the BIF films that are offered by the BFI.  (The clips from The Somme included in Brownlow’s documentary series Cinema Europe are clearly from a better source print (and tinted, too), and the episode that covers the film also include an interview with one of its cameramen, Freddie Young.)

What enthusiasm I can still muster for such a grotty copy of the film is steadily quashed by its treatment of war. Here are the Germans in their dugouts, laughing at the image of the Britishers. Here are comic asides by the British tunnellers, planting tons of explosives beneath the laughing Huns (“He’ll want an aeroplane for a hearse when this lot goes up!”) The Somme is filled with deeds without drama, with soldiers without subjectivity, with action without aftermath. This is not to downplay the film’s technical sophistication. Some striking images are achieved through double-exposure/matte painting combinations that mimic the explosions on the horizon as troops march towards the front. (Tinted, the effect would be much better.) But my interest in all this bustle on screen is without heart.

The “over the top” sequence is perhaps the only real effort to create dramatic tension through a complex use of imagery. We see the final minute of time before the whistle blow unfold in real time. Superimposed over the image of a clockface, we see images of the waiting men: biting nails, tapping feet, poised at the ready. It’s an oddly protracted scene of tension. What it undoubtedly possesses in cinematic flair it lacks in dramatic design. This period of waiting is not associated with any particular character or characters. We do not know any of the people we see waiting: they are unnamed figures that we have not met before don’t meet again. We can’t feel anything more than a rather abstract or generalized feeling of tension. Despite the realities the film attempts to show, and despite the reality of the seconds ticking by to Zero-hour, these aren’t real human beings on screen – and I simply didn’t feel properly involved.

Finally, the text “ZERO” grows in size to occupy the screen. Over the top! But what happens next is a quite shamelessly whitewashed depiction of the first day of the battle. To remind you all, the British & Commonwealth forces lost nearly 60,000 men for almost no ground gained. Instead, The Somme provides us with reassuring text about territorial gains and advancing guns – and no mention of objectives, casualties, expectations, consequences. The battle goes on. There are scenes of senior officers discussing plans, scenes that are stiff and awkward in the extreme. They are there for illustrative purposes, but what – really – are they illustrating? The figures aren’t named, they don’t have identities, motives; they have no function other than to gesture towards a chain of command and a strategic process that the film has no ability or interest to explore.

The film is more interested in the lower ranks, but what kind of justice does it do to their struggles? We see heroic deeds, lone pipers playing under gunfire, the wounded being rescued. But where are the bodies? We’re told in one title that two waves of an attack were mown down by machine gun and rifle fire. Instead of showing us this, the title immediately dissolves onto a second title, reassuring us that the third wave – inspired by an officer’s hunting horn – went over the top and succeeded.

The film knows it cannot deny the sacrifices made, but it also cannot bear to show them or name them. We are shown maps of the battle, but they do not show the objectives in relation to the initial timetable (positions that were meant to be taken on day one were still out of reach months into the battle). A later title implies the difficulties the Allies faced without making them explicit. Here, the text mentions Beaumont Hamel, “where our attacks had broken down with such appalling losses on 1st July” but where “the enemy still remained secure”. Where were these “appalling losses” in the relevant part of the film? Where even was anything shown to “break down”?

The film then blames the weather for stalling an inevitable victory. Here, we see some of the few instances of the troops occupied not with heroic deeds or plucky comedy but with forbearance – and even, in one scene, expressing something like fury. This comes in the form of a remarkable shot of a soldier lying in mud, delivering an untitled monologue; but anyone who can lipread even slightly will pick up phrase like “fucking war” and “fucking mud”. What to make of this? It is the only voice (but “voice” is somehow an inappropriate term in this silent scene) in the entire film raised against the tone of patriotic success. But the film cannot, dare not, follow it up or elaborate on it. Another soldier witnesses this outburst, but he carries on without comment. So does the film. A title later states: “the weather closed down like a curtain upon a glorious tragedy”. Glorious tragedy is it, now? Well, the film manages to win a victory nevertheless by skipping forward to the German tactical retreat to the Hindenburg Line in early 1917. “The sacrifice had not been in vain.” These words are spelled out over a vision of a scarred swathe of land, the remains of an advance scattered over the torn ground. But there are no bodies, no victims, in the frame. It is as if the “sacrifice” is too great to show and has already been tidied away.

I suppose by this point I had grown weary of these BIF films. But there was something in the evasiveness and hypocrisy of The Somme that especially irritated and upset me. The film retrospectively mentions horrific casualties and abject failures yet never once depicts them. It depicts heroism without placing it in the context that makes it heroic. We see just one blinded soldier, fumbling in a crater. We see just one voice raised against the appalling conditions, but his voice is un-transliterated. Nothing is questioned; everything is justified. The Somme is a film that has neither the interest nor capacity to think about what it shows us, let alone to feel something. It is a spiritual and moral vacuum.

To conclude this overlong piece, I do not regret going through these BIF films. They form an important genre of popular commercial filmmaking in the UK in the 1920s. But in all honesty, I cannot wait to watch something else, something more honest – in whatever genre. To repeat what I said in my earlier piece, these BIF films offer exciting visions of the Great War that may impress by their scale and vigour but frustrate by their utter disinterest in real human beings or real human emotions. For films dealing with industrialized slaughter, it is quite staggering how little there is on screen of genuine consequence. It is also worth repeating the citation I offered last time from Bryher, writing in in Close Up in October 1927. Illustrating that even people at the time might feel queasy watching these films, Bryher attacked these BIF productions for their dishonest treatment of war:

There are plenty of guns and even corpses in the British pictures but the psychological effect of warfare is blotted away; men shoot and walk and make jokes in the best boy’s annual tradition and that some drop in a heap doesn’t seem to matter because one feels that in a moment the whistle will sound and they will all jump up again…

I am likewise left deeply uneasy about these films. Indeed, I also take it that the way the BIF productions have been treated by the BFI suggests some similar qualms about the rationale for their restoration and exhibition. Of course, The Battle of the Somme (1916) – made while the battle was still raging in the summer of 1916 – is a famous example of wartime reporting that has been restored more than once and has long been available. It may not show the full horrors of the battle, but it has enough glimpses of real injury and real death to make it shocking – then and now. The Battle of the Somme is an extraordinary document of its time, but the reality of those faces still reaches out to us in the present; the film is naturally much seen and studied. Conversely, the BIF films – despite being more numerous and just as popular – are relatively obscure. Asthe only such production to have been fully restored and released in the modern era by the BFI, I wonder how many university courses include The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands? Of all the BIF films, it strikes me it is the one most palatable to modern audiences. In treating a sea battle in which the total losses were less than 4000 lives, it is less likely to seem an inappropriate mode of representation. With Mons, there is an appealing vigour in its treatment of a series of dramatic encounters in the open warfare of 1914. But with Ypres and The Somme, I cannot imagine the propagandist treatment of the bloodiest battles in British & Commonwealth history going down so well.

Of course these films are “of their time”. But is that also an excuse to avoid looking at what they represent, or at what uncomfortable resonances they might still have? As Bryher’s review makes clear, some critics could and did feel differently even in the 1920s. She herself made the link to the rise of nationalism and fascism across Europe, forces that relied on images of a glorious military past and of war as a heroic pursuit. One might also look to France and to Léon Poirier’s Verdun, visions d’histoire (1928), which is a far more melancholy look at another critical battle of the Great War. As it happens, for all its cast and resources, Verdun is an absolute bore of a film – like an illustrated lecture, only weirdly portentous. Yet it still transcends the jingoist tone of the contemporary BIF productions. Poirier’s film even tries to address the spiritual aftereffects of war, to acknowledge that the millions of men who fought and died had value beyond their actions on the battlefield – that they were all, equally, human beings. There is more to be said about films like the BIF production in comparison to Soviet “history” films of the 1920s, as well as with more straightlaced films like Verdun, but frankly I’ve had enough of this genre for a while.

Paul Cuff

The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927; UK; Walter Summers)

To begin, a confession: the Blu-ray of The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands has been sat on my shelf for ten years. Yes, ten years of being shuffled from house to house, from shelving unit to shelving unit. Ten years of being saved for tomorrow. Well, tomorrow has arrived – today! I’m not sure why the existence of the film and its convenient BFI home media edition slipped my mind for so long, nor why the notion of watching it suddenly popped back into my brain. But regardless of why, I have now watched it.

The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands was directed by Walter Summers for British Instructional Films (BIF), a company that made documentaries and features through the 1920s. Among their larger productions were a series of historical recreations of battles from the Great War. Alongside naval dramas like Zeebrugge (1924) and The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands were others about the western front like Ypres (1925), Mons (1926), and The Somme (1927). The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands is the only one of these films to be fully restored, though others are available via the BFI streaming service. Summers’s film is the flagship production (forgive the pun) among this series because of the scale of its recreation and because it has been seen as a companion piece to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). I will discuss this more later, as the discourse around this comparison is almost more interesting than the act of comparing the films itself.

The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands is set in 1914 and recreates two successive battles in the Pacific and Atlantic, fought by British forces against the German fleet under Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee. The Battle of Coronel, in November 1914, was a defeat for the outclassed British ships, during which the Germans lost three wounded against British losses of 1600 killed (and two ships sunk). The Battle of the Falklands, in December 1914, was a total reverse of fortunes: for only a handful of casualties, the British sunk four German ships – killing over 1800 men and capturing another 200. The opening narrational title of Summers’s film puts it this way: “This is the story of the Sea fights of Coronel and the Falkland Islands – of a victory, and a defeat as glorious as victory – a story of our Royal navy, which through storm and calm maintained for us the Freedom of the Seas.”

The tone of this summary is revealing. Yes, the credits thank the Royal Navy for their cooperation, and boast of the many resources put at the production’s disposal; but it is not just historical recreation, it is a depiction of “glory” and empire. Rather sweetly, the credits list which (historical) ships are played by which (real) ships of the Royal Navy. None of the human cast get mentioned, which epitomizes the balance between the recreational/historic aspects of the film and its dramatic/human aspect. For while Summers takes care to humanize the leading protagonists, especially the various commanders, it is in the naval operations themselves that the film is principally concerned – and best at handling.

Here, he has an impressive array of ships and materiel to play with. Most obviously, he has several Royal Navy ships to film – from sea, from land, from high on deck, from the depths of the hold. He finds lots of interesting angles, though the commanders at their respective helms are always framed in the same way. In part this helps anchor the spaces, as well as draw parallels between the opposing commanders – all of whom are treated sympathetically.

Most impressive, however, is the sequence (called “The Effort”) in which the British prepare their ships to sail out to the Falklands to intercept the German fleet. There is a long montage (about seven minutes) of preparations. We see a dock’s worth of activity: moving equipment, welding iron, stockpiling ammunition, loading supplies. Since the crew is working day and night, there are some striking scenes in the dark of the activity illuminated by flashes of light. There is also a marvellous tracking crane shot, filmed (I presume) from one of the dock’s mobile platforms suspended over the loading bay. It’s a great shot and I wish there had been more moments of such camera movement. But Summers reserves one of his very few other mobile shots for a similar tracking shot that moves up the food-loaded expanse of von Spee’s victory banquet table in Valparaiso. This is one of the only moments in the entire film that struck me as a truly incisive, analytical use of camerawork, for it is not used simply to show-off space but to comment on the action. A contrast is being drawn between the parallel preparation of both sides: while the British are working night and day to rebuild their fleet, the Germans are feasting and drinking. It’s a nice touch, but noteworthy for the rarity of its… well, stylishness. It’s the move of a dramatic director rather than a documentary reconstructionist.

Indeed, I am tempted to say that Summers is better at directing objects, and cutting between spaces, than he is at directing people. His choreography of the various crowd scenes is quite repetitive: too often, everyone on screen is doing exactly the same thing. Thus when the militia at Port Stanley spot the German navy approaching, they all go to the cliff edge and they all point at it. When the Royal Navy closes in on the disabled German vessels at the end of the film, the curious crew all go to the railing, and they all point at the vessels. Summers is a bit better in the action scenes, with crews rushing around or dying. But even here, at the end of the battle, when the Gneisenau is scuttled, there is a shot of the German crew all gathered in various degrees of stiff, unnatural poses. (Really, what are those gestures supposed to be? Are they mimicking Mr Muscle?)

Beyond the crowds of sailors, Summers also tries to humanize his set pieces by having little vignettes of individuals or pairs among the crew. Thus, we see HMS Canopus being painted by a comic sailor who gets paint on his comrade; or we overhear conversations of sailors in-between or just after bits of action, making comic asides. I say, “comic”, but what I really mean is “tedious”. The performances are stiff, the rhythm is slow, the supposedly colloquial dialogue clunky and contrived. I suspect the humour may have gone down better in Britain in 1927 but suffice it to say that a century later these scenes do not work. (Thinking back, I recall similar scenes in Powell and Pressburger’s naval war drama The Battle of the River Plate (1956), which are likewise cringeworthy efforts to show jolly working-class sailor folk maintaining their plucky British spirits.)

All of which brings me back to the comparison with Battleship Potemkin. There are striking parallels and striking contrasts. Both films alternate between drama on land and sea, depicting history as a kind of spectacle. But while both films don’t have characters so much as collective groups, there is a vast difference in its attitude toward hierarchy. Summers has a great respect for officers of both sides – they are all represented in strikingly similar ways, with an emphasis on calmness, stoicism, and honour. This is a striking contrast to the sadistic, violent officers and priests of Battleship Potemkin. Summers is very much invested in the class system as embodied in military ranks. Eisenstein is interested in revolution, Summers in the maintenance of class and Empire.

In this sense, Summers’s film is as implicitly propagandistic as Eisenstein’s is explicitly so. The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands is a defence of British imperialism: the film begins and ends with references to the defence and glory of Empire, with Britain as the guardian (if not the owner) of the “seven seas”. But Summers is also careful not to dehumanize, let alone demonize, his enemy. Though there are plenty of sneering, triumphalist looks among the German officers, Spee himself is a very sympathetic (one might also say tragic) figure. He refuses to gloat or condemn the British at the victory feast, and his acceptance of the bouquet is tinged with a self-conscious defeatism: Spee says the flowers must be kept in case they should prove useful at his own funeral. (Summers makes sure to show Spee brooding on them later in the film, as defeat looms.) The film clearly admires stoicism and bravery on both sides: the suicidal courage and flag-waving defiance of the British ships in the opening battle are echoed in the actions of the doomed German crews in the second battle. There is nothing like this in Eisenstein’s depiction of the tsarist military of any rank in Battleship Potemkin.

In terms of naval spectacle, Summers’s film boasts greater resources. While Eisenstein makes do with what is clearly a single docked ship, Summers has a small fleet that is clearly filmed at sea. The scenes in which the refitted ships set sail to the Falklands are excellent and I wish there had been more scenes like this. Summers seems very concise, which is to say limited, in his use of this footage. He does not explore the interior of the ships in much detail (a cabin, a canteen, a galley), and the upper deck is likewise limited to a small number of set-ups (a couple of gun positions, the bridge). What is missing is the sense of a ship as a lived-in space, occupied by a real crew. I wonder if it was either difficult or even prohibited to show too much detail onboard the Royal Navy vessels. (I wish he had used more mobile camerawork to explore these spaces. Apart from one very brief tracking shot in the canteen when action stations are called, the camera remains static.) Nor does his montage, or his image-making, ever quite produce a true sense of drama. (The best sequence is one of preparation, not of action.) Not only does Summers explain what’s about to happen in his narrational titles, but I always feel that he is at one remove from the reality being depicted. For all its recreational efforts, you feel that The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands is ultimately history in the past tense. Battleship Potemkin has a far greater sense of events happening before your eyes, disorienting you, sometimes terrifying you. And, it should go without saying, Summers does not have Eisenstein’s extraordinary eye for composition, for sudden bursts of impactful imagery – nor for his playful subversiveness. The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands is very effectively composed and edited, but I suspect that I will struggle to remember its imagery. But with each shot of Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein seems to smack you round the head – every image is gripping, dramatic, dynamic. (Even the slogan-like text of the titles is punchily effective.) For all Summers’s resources and skill, and for all the similarities between these films, Battleship Potemkin is in a different league than The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands.

On this theme, I find myself thinking about the first time I heard of The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands. This was a reference and clip in Mathew Sweet’s feature documentary Silent Britain (BBC Four, 2007). I have very mixed feelings about this documentary. On the plus side, it offers a valuable trove of clips from a host of interesting films, many of which are still not publicly available. On the downside, the tone of Sweet’s narration is sneeringly dismissive of anyone who has ever dared to doubt the glory of British cinema in this period.

When I first saw Silent Britain in 2007, I felt that the countless digs at “some historians” was aimed (at least in part) at Kevin Brownlow, whose episode on British cinema in Cinema Europe (1995) (“Lost Opportunity”) offered a very sober account of this same period and subject. Comparing the two documentaries, it’s striking how many of the films and historic interviews used by Brownlow are also used by Sweeney. But Sweeney doesn’t discuss the struggles of the British film industry, nor reflect on the fact that many of the films he cites from the late 1920s were not only influenced by continental filmmakers but directed by them. Brownlow’s focus, as the title of Cinema Europe indicates, is to offer a wider perspective on the relationship between national cinemas across Europe – and to highlight their successes and struggles to compete with Hollywood. As such, Brownlow’s is a more complex project than simply rediscovery – although it is also one of the great documentaries on (re)discovering silent cinema. This is not to say that Sweet is wrong to champion the films he chooses (they are too little seen), but that he offers an incredibly one-sided interpretation of the period. Watching it again, nearly twenty years later, I find Sweet’s endless sniping about critics and historians incredibly irritating. (I sincerely hope that I never strike my readers this way.) The content of the documentary is superb, but the tone of the narration is too much like tabloid journalism.

In addressing (and criticizing) the Film Society (1925-39), where otherwise rare or censored films were shown to paid subscribers, Sweet mentions Battleship Potemkin and The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands together:

Everyone at the Film Society was astounded by the technique of Eisenstein’s film, but it wasn’t really so far removed from what a director called Walter Summers was doing closer to home. […] For all Summers’s ambition in a field we would now call “drama documentary”, this film would have been passed over by the Film Society. It was certainly given a rough ride by the cinema intellectuals writing in the influential magazine Close Up. Close Up’s critics wrote gushy fan letters to foreign directors while dismissing the work of British filmmakers as third-rate and uninspired.

Well, excuse me! I’d forgotten how snide Sweet was in addressing one of the most important English-language film publications of the period, and their wide-ranging efforts to engage with and analyse foreign cinema. I’m well aware of the reputation of Close Up as a hotbed of snobbishness, not to mention sexual experimentation, and I know some people who have little time for their writers and editors as a whole. But I can only roll my eyes at Sweet’s setting up of these straw figures to knock down with such contemptuous ease. The point of the Film Society was not to show big commercial hits like The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, a film that was readily accessible in cinemas across the land, but films that were otherwise censored, cut, or prohibited. This inevitably meant an emphasis on foreign films and those of the avant-garde. And as for the way Sweet sneers at the notion of “cinema intellectuals” and their continental tastes…

Anyway, noting that Sweet didn’t bother quoting what Close Up actually wrote about Summers’s film, I bothered to look it up. The review (“The War from more angles”, from October 1927) is written by Bryher, one of the most interesting figures in British modernism of the interwar years. (I could write much on Bryher, but this is not the space…) Bryher states at the outset that she doesn’t think The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands is a bad film, but she does take issue with its tone – and that of similar recreations of the Great War. “The trouble is not so much what they represent as the way they represent it”, she says. “What I and many others (according to reviews) object to in the Somme [the BIF film of 1927] and the Battle of The Falklands is that war is presented entirely from a romantic boy-adventure book angle, divorced from everyday emotions”. Sensitive to the growth of fascism across Europe in the late 1920s, Bryher worries that “the ‘We Want War’ crowd psychology may destroy a nation” – and that films ought not to encourage it:

By all means let us have war films. Only let us have war straight and as it is; mainly disease and discomfort, almost always destructive […] in its effects. Let us get away from this nursery formula that to be in uniform is to be a hero; that brutality and waste are not to be condemned, provided they are disguised in flags, medals and cheering.

For Bryher, The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands repeated a trend common to other BIF films: “there was not a single suggestion that war was anything other than an elaborate and permissible adventure; or that there were thousands of men and women whose lives were broken and whose homes were destroyed.” She then offers her own vision of what a more sensitive film might convey, conjuring a kind of impressionistic montage in prose. In Summers’s film, the Scilly Isles stand in for the Falklands, and Bryher uses this as a springboard for her own memories of the war there:

[N]o gigantic spectacle is needed but a central theme worked out perhaps in a little outpost and related to the actual experience of people during those awful, hungry years. Scilly for instance (as I saw it in 1917) with the long black lines of the food convoy in the distance. A liner beached in the Sound with a hole as large as a room where a torpedo had hit it; the gun on its deck trained seawards in case a submarine dodged the patrol. Old men watching on the cliffs. An old fisherman rowing in slowly with a cask of brandy—wreckage—towing behind his boat and a smuggler’s smile on his lips. (How he must have enjoyed bringing it in legitimately in broad daylight.) Shipwrecked sailors from a torpedoed boat stumbling up the beach. Letters: —“If the petrol shortage continues it is doubtful how long the country can hold out” and down at the wharf the motor launches letting the petrol hose drip into the water because, between filling tanks, they were too bored to turn it off. The war as it affected just one family. Rations, rumours, remoteness.  A film could be made of trifling impressions seen through the eyes of any average person. It would be valuable alike as picture and as document. But this glorification of terrible disaster is frankly a retrogression into the infantile idea of warfare, as a kind of sand castle on a beach where toy soldiers are set up, knocked down, and packed up in a pail in readiness for the next morning.

Bryher also contrasts BIF productions with The Big Parade (1925), which she sees as a far more honest depiction of war – and the dangerous lure of false notions of what war is. In the BIF films, war is “[h]eroic and nicely tidied up”, “[p]leasant to watch but completely unreal”:

There are plenty of guns and even corpses in the British pictures but the psychological effect of warfare is blotted away; men shoot and walk and make jokes in the best boy’s annual tradition and that some drop in a heap doesn’t seem to matter because one feels that in a moment the whistle will sound and they will all jump up again; a sensation one never had for a minute in The Big Parade.

Bryher praises the extensive dock montage sequence in The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands precisely because it was more honest:

Here the director touched reality, and the different machines, the darkness, the hurrying feet, and the long yard gave a feeling of preparation and activity that marked a great advance on anything previously seen in an English film. That was authentic England. Dirty and full of noise and right. The men were working the right way. Directly the atmosphere of the picture changed and the attention held.

To return to the comparison with Battleship Potemkin, it’s worth noting that Bryher never mentions Eisenstein in her review of Summers’s film: the British censors had banned it from being exhibited in the UK and it was only shown by the Film Society in November 1929. She places The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands in the context of other contemporary war films, especially those by BIF. Bryher sees it as part of a genre, and criticizes it as such. For all Sweet’s outlandishness, I can’t help but take his comment (I can’t call it an argument) that Battleship Potemkin “wasn’t really so far removed” from The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands as quite a cautious statement. Even he knows it’s absurd to claim it as a work equal cinematic, let alone cultural or historic, significance. Claiming it as “not really so far removed” is about as far as one might reasonably push it, though even here I would say that this is a gross simplification. As Bryher suggests, it’s not a matter of setting but of tone and style that distinguishes the BIF films from films like The Big Parade or Battleship Potemkin. The essays in the BFI booklet that accompanies the Blu-ray of The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands are rather more balanced than Sweet, arguing that it is a great film within its particular context. Bryony Dixon says that the dockyard montage is surely “one of the best pieces of filmmaking in British cinema” (Bryher says something similar), though she is also careful to shield the film from the kind of outlandish comparison that Sweet is keen to make.

Finally, a word on the score for the 2014 restoration of The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands. This was written by Simon Dobson and performed by the Band of the Royal Marines, together with the strings of the Elysian Quartet. Dobson uses the brass, winds, and percussion of the Band to create a marvellous sonic world – it has a great variety of rhythm, texture, and tone. I was curious to hear the way the strings are used to underscore certain parts of the film. They sounded to my ears more like the way a synthesizer is sometimes used to create a kind of acoustic wash beneath a dominant rhythm. The liner notes to the Blu-ray reveal that these strings were recorded separately from the Band and later mixed in to the soundtrack. This perhaps helps explain my sense of their slightly artificial placement. This is not a complaint, however, as the effect is certainly novel on my ear – and the whole score must rank as one of the more interesting and imaginative uses of orchestration that I’ve heard for a silent film. It sounds both akin to its period and genre, as well as sounding original. A perfect balance, and an enjoyable soundscape.

After going through the above, I feel some nagging sense of guilt that I should do more homework. Sweet’s complaint about most historians not being as familiar with British silent cinema as with foreign productions is surely true of me, if not others. In terms of availability, the situation Sweet observed in 2007 is rather better in 2025, but many important British silents are still maddeningly difficult to see. Half of the BFI’s “10 Great British Silent Films” (compiled in 2021) are not available either on DVD/Blu-ray or on the institute’s streaming service (and the DVD for Hindle Wakes (1927) is long out of print). And this list, of course, is but a tiny selection. Nevertheless, can we start by getting releases of The Lure of Crooning Water (1920) and The First Born (1928)? In the meantime, I promise to do my patriotic duty and watch not one, not two, but all three available British Instructional Films on the BFI Player service. None of this continental muck for me, just good ol’ British fare. (But after that, can I please resume writing “gushy fan letters to foreign directors”?)

Paul Cuff

The Coronation of King Peter the First (1904; UK/Srb.; Arnold Muir Wilson/Frank S. Mottershaw)

Having written last time about films featuring the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary, this week we turn to a rival power in the Balkans: Serbia. In 1904, Peter Karađorđević was crowned as King Peter I of Serbia. His reign is seen as a kind of golden age of Serbian development in the region, as well as the locus of tragedy and triumph in the Great War. I had seen plenty of images from Serbia in the war, but the existence of footage taken at the time of Peter’s coronation was new to me. Thanks to a DVD from the Yugoslav film archive, we can see the surviving material filmed by Frank S. Mottershaw in 1904. Mottershaw’s father, confusing also named Frank Mottershaw, had founded his Sheffield Photo Company in 1900 and the spent the next decade making a number of inventive short films that experimented with new forms of editing, especially the “chase” format – as exemplified by the marvellous A Daring Daylight Burglary (1903). In 1904, Frank’s son journeyed to Serbia in the company of Arnold Muir Wilson, a lawyer and journalist – and honorary Consul of the Kingdom of Serbia. They went to film events around the coronation of Peter I. Though the film’s title implies a record of the actual coronation, Mottershaw and Wilson did something rather more interesting. The film’s subtitle in more accurate, and more revealing: “a Ride through Serbia, Novi-Bazaar, Montenegro, and Dalmatia”. This, then, is what we get…

Street views of Belgrade, April 1904. The past walks past us, gazes back at us. Children, as they do everywhere in the past, stop and stare, grinning, waving, poking their noses into the frame. Here is the world as it was before the Great War, populated by the faces of those who would live through it. There are soldiers and officers and priests and march pasts. But there are also ordinary people, civilians going about their business, or waiting, or mooching aimlessly.

The royal procession, captured at an arrestingly odd angle: the camera is tilted, as though craning its neck to see the dignitaries. There they go, in splendid full-dress uniforms: caped, and plumed, and epauletted. There are carriages of women in big hats. Men raise their own hats in salute. Dignitaries in top hats, in bicornes. There is no view of the coronation, not even a glimpse of the cathedral. We wait outside, in the streets, with the crowd. We see the parade returning from the cathedral. It is less grand, and curious dogs, oblivious to the progress of state history, dart out amid the lines of slow-marching men and horses. There are long shadows and pennants and musicians (and lumps of horseshit on the cobbled street). A man who may be the king rides past. Others are more arresting, since they pass close by to the camera, momentarily filling the frame with their presence. Who are they? What became of them? More carriages roll past. The crowd mills about. The pleasures are slow. No-one is in a hurry. It’s a free show. Just stop and stare at it all. The cavalry glance guardedly to their right. The musicians are no longer playing, they examine their instruments as they pass. Now the crowd breaks up and the street fills with the bustle of everyday life.

Another parade, this time celebrating the “development of the Serbian army” across history. So a historical parade about the history of historical parades. The camera watches as it passes. Rank after rank, often just gaggle after gaggle, of soldiers in historical dress, growing more modern. Here comes the first artillery, then marching bands, then modern guns, smarter ranks, better-drilled ranks.

Views of Belgrade port and fortress. The past seeped in a golden haze, the haze of a distant spring, a spring of empty expanses, cold light. Now views of the Serbian army on parade. The army has room to stretch its formations, out across the muddy plains. The camera watches. There they go, the men, the horses – and the little dogs who once more run after the moving ranks. Odd figures wander in front of the camera then vanish. The past stops and restarts and vanishes. The guns roll along, but there is no chronology here, just a series of unending and thens… And then the officers dismount. And then the carriages appear. And then the priests scratch their beards. And then…

And then, Žiča monastery. A beautiful snapshot of an eastern Europe I know from innumerable books and photographs of the war-torn century. Here are the whitewashed walls (a little greyed), the Romanesque arches, the rounded cupolas topped with Orthodox crosses, the priests in their long dark robes and tall hats. (And the curious youths.)

Studenica monastery. The camera turns its head to follow the progress of a carriage. A stunning valley stretches out toward the hazy horizon. The walls, the doors, the shadows. I can see spring warming up. The sun is brighter, casting darker shadows across the forested valley and steep slopes. Horses stand around. The world is sometimes stunningly empty, sometimes observed only by us.

Kraljevo market. Pigs and sheep, an array of carts. The camera pans nearly 360-degrees, and everywhere it turns are people who stop and stare. Is this the first moving picture camera they have seen? Novi-Bazaar, and everyone stares again. The camera turns on its axis, and every frame is filled with curious life, streets I want to walk down, houses where the past resides. The people on the streets here are more casual, just as curious, more liable to smile, to mill around, to ask questions – finally, to bring their wives and children and approach. (The children are smoking.)

The Montenegrin army. I recognize their uniforms from the endless books about the Great War that I collected as a child. (Yes, this corner of the world is somehow more familiar to me in its past form, more known to me in its old clothes, as this generation and the next.)

Views of Šibenik. A large ship, the dock, and smaller sailboats. Women carry huge barrels on their heads. The water glimmers in the sun. the camera turns to marvel at the houses, shoulder-to-shoulder, then suddenly floats aboard a ship. We go to Zadar, we float past ancient walls, we drift… THE END.

This film is on DVD via the Yugoslav film archive, and its material history – passing from the UK to Serbia in 1937, being shown sporadically until its restoration in 1995 – is summarized in the opening titles. The main intertitles were based on Wilson’s notes, so are a modern interpolation into the film. It has no soundtrack, but the images speak for themselves – or rather, they remain stubbornly, eternally silent. As such, they are all the more evocative. I’d love to know more about how and when it was shown in Serbia, and what kind of audiences saw it. The opening credits inform us that the film was exhibited in the UK as part of Wilson’s lecture series on Serbia, then in April 1905 shown at the National Theatre in Belgrade in the presence of King Peter, royal family, and other dignitaries. How was it presented there? With music? With narration? And was it shown outside of this one projection? Where? And when? Did the people on screen, the men and women and children who gaze back at us, ever get to gaze back at themselves?

The Coronation of King Peter the First is a great curiosity. It’s not in great shape, it shows its age, it bears the marks of its material history. It’s awkward and faintly shabby. But it’s also very beautiful and very suggestive. It has a tremendous aura of its past, of Serbia’s past, of Europe’s past.

Paul Cuff

Kaiser im Kino: Franz Joseph I. in historic film documents (1903-16)

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, for which I apologize. I have been busy writing, but for a book project that is wresting control of my schedule. Having just finished a chunky chapter, I take a thematic break by revisiting a DVD released by Film Archiv Austria in 2016 to coincide with the centenary of the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I. This edition, called Kaiser im Kino: Franz Joseph I. in Historischen Filmdokumenten, is a nicely produced DVD with English subtitles and plenty of details about the sources for its selection of films. (There is also a musical soundtrack, of which more later.) There are twenty-four films, mostly produced during the Emperor’s lifetime, together with some that postdate his death. The programme is 75 minutes long, enough time to glimpse a vanished world…

The first film in this collection does not feature the Emperor. Entrée du cinématographe (1896) is a Lumière film shot to advertise the presence of their films in Vienna. It was at the cinema on Krugerstrasse on 18 April 1896 that the Emperor first encountered moving images. “Ah, c’est magnifique!” he marvelled. He was already advanced in years. Born in August 1830, he ascended to the throne in the tumultuous year of 1848. He was thus nearly 66 when he saw his first film. As an icon of the old world, and heir to the Habsburg monarchy that dated to the thirteenth century, there is something poignant about this encounter. What films did he see that day? How did eyes that had seen most of the nineteenth century react to the medium that would define the twentieth? The month Franz Joseph was born, the last Bourbon monarch of France was entering exile; when he died in November 1916, Russia was on the brink of revolution.

But here he is in 1903, a flickering patch of white, beyond ranks of dignitaries. Head down, he is annunciating a speech. In silence we watch. But the film skips this speech, untranslatable, in favour of the reaction. Umbrellas are thrust into the air. Top hats are hoisted in salute. Children curtsy. The old world goes about its awkward choreography. The Emperor shuffles off. Though he had been filmed first in 1899, Der Besuch Kaiser Franz Josephs in Braunau am Inn (1903) is the earliest surviving footage of him. As the short essay in the DVD’s liner notes highlights, the Emperor rarely gets close to the camera. For the most part, he is seen from afar. Per the liner essay, is this is a “respectful distance maintained between rulers and the ruled” – even a “quasi-religious distance”? Perhaps, yes. It is also the awkwardness of early technology, the awkwardness of etiquette. How close could a camera operator – often a foreign employee of the Lumières or Gaumont – hope to stand in public events? There are no other photographers on screen, no suggestion in these few metres of gathered reporters. Just the crowds, the dignitaries, the dusty past. We are awkward eavesdroppers, stood on tiptoe, craning to catch a glimpse. For all the talk of “quasi-religious distance”, the camera setups often speak of an ordinariness that is quite charming. These events are partially staged, but not rigorously so – not quite, it seems, for the camera. Too often we are jostled or struggle to keep the Emperor in view. He’s not a god, just an old man liable to get swallowed by the crowd. At the end of Der Besuch Kaiser Franz Josephs in Braunau am Inn, the Emperor and his little retinue come closer to the camera. It seems for a moment that he might confront the lens directly, but this impression is swiftly quashed. Instead, he ignores us entirely and marches off to our right. Saluting arms get in the way of the frame and the camera hastily pans to the right to try and keep the Emperor in view. But the old man is too fast: he disappears entirely, leaving the camera with a view blocked by the leaves of a small tree. A final shot pans around the faces of the crowd and the uniformed police presence. A man strokes his beard. Dignitaries clutch limp speeches. People mill around. The film ends.

Years pass. Enthüllungsfeierlichkeiten des Kaiserin Elisabeth Denkmals (1907) – the “unveiling of the Empress Elisabeth monument” – alerts us to the recent past. In 1898, Franz Joseph’s wife Elisabeth was assassinated in Geneva by an Italian anarchist. Informed of her death, he initially assumed it was suicide, since Elisabeth (“Sisi”) had long since been mentally and physically unwell. She herself had never recovered from the death of their only son, Rudolf, who perished in a murder-suicide pact with his mistress in 1889. (In the space of ten years, she had lost both parents, two sisters, and her son.) So Franz Joseph and Elisabeth were never to appear on film together, just the image of her as the statue in the Vienna Volksgarten. In Enthüllungsfeierlichkeiten des Kaiserin, the trees flutter in the breeze. The Emperor does his rounds, saluting almost constantly. Dozens of uniformed men and hatted women follow in his trail. The statue of Elisabeth is too pale for the celluloid. Over-exposed, she is doubly absent in this film. In the sunlight of a previous century, she is rendered almost blank.

In Unser Kaiser eröffnet das neue Kinderheim in Gersthof (1910), the weather has turned. Umbrellas gleam with ancient rain. The greatcoated Emperor walks unperturbed as dignitaries with sodden shoulders introduced him to a series of tailcoated officials. Gowned priests bob around in the background. A throng stands and waits in the storm.

Here is Kaiser Franz Joseph in Sarajevo (1910), and the Emperor walks the streets where four years later his nephew Franz Ferdinand would be assassinated, triggering the Great War. Carriages pass. The Emperor walks up some steps. The camera is not privy to the interior, nor the passage of time therein. Immediately, therefore, the Emperor is outside. The carriage return. He mounts. A man walks in front of the camera and is ushered out the way. Parades of children in fezzes. The Emperor stands. The film skips past another speech, then realizes there is no more to be seen, so stops.

In Der Kaisertag in St. Pölten am 21.6.1910 (1910), the Emperor receives raised hats and salutes. Plumed gentlemen bob around him. The camera struggles to focus on its moving target. A woman anxiously looks over her shoulder, waiting for her cue to curtsy. Crowds of young girls wave their arms under instruction from their guardian. Older girls perform a floral dance. The camera glimpses faces, backs, gestures, odd looks. The operator stops turning now and then, anxious not to waste celluloid. The past skips along, slips away between frames.

The Emperor is absent from Kundgebung für den kaiser vor dem Brigittenauer-Kino (c.1910), but we see a poster bearing his image on the cinema wall. Two children in the corner of the frame, keenly peering towards us. Someone has issued instructions, for now a crowd of children cheers the image of the Emperor. But they would clearly rather look at the camera. Facing the wall, they demonstrate their fealty. Turning sneakily to us, they grin more gleefully. And how do we feel when we see these smiles of long-dead children?

Enthüllung des Denkmals “Franz Joseph als Weidmann” am Laufener Wald bei Ischl am 24 August 1910 (1910) is the first of two films recording the Emperor as huntsman. This film shows him milling as part of a crowd before his own image. He is only slightly more animated than his metalled self. In the background, a train passes – and I wonder about the travellers, and their view of us through the frames of their windows. Se. Majestät Kaiser Josef I. auf der Gemsjagd bei Ischl (1910) is the main event, though, and among the most substantial of the shorter films. The imperial villa at Bad Ischl. The Emperor emerges, smoking a cigarette. He takes a last puff, flicks the butt onto the driveway. He turns, sees the camera, pauses for a moment, then turns away. Is this the first time he has looked directly at us? It is from a distance. The connection is fleeting, for the carriages arrive. The Emperor is off into the hills, the woods. We see him striding slowly through the trees. There is something touching about his ensemble: pale knees showing between lederhosen and thick woollen socks. The Alpine hat and plume, the grand white whiskers. A horse’s tail, in perfect focus, flicks behind the blurred image of the Emperor gesturing to an assistant. Now they are higher up. A beautiful image of the throng of hunters at the bases of a slope. Sunlight streaks through the pines, highlights the white rocks. It’s a superbly composed image, perhaps the first moment of something with real vision in these films. The Emperor hunts, shoots. Dark chamois hurtle across the pale scree. Bodies are lugged uphill.

The sight of death prepares us for Unser Kaiser am Flugfelde in Wr. Neustadt (1910). Spectacularly elaborate and flimsy-looking planes await the Emperor’s inspection. Even the roller-coaster ride shown in Kaiserhuldigung im Wiener k.k. Prater (1911) feels more secure than the sight of those planes.

Vermählung des künftigen Thronfolgers (1911) shows the celebration of the marriage of the Emperor’s heir apparent Archduke Charles Franz Joseph and Princess Zita of Parma at Schwarzau castle. And of all the films in this collection, this is the most intimate. We see the various titled guests arrive, and I find it enormously endearing to see men decked out in extraordinarily elaborate military costumes puffing away at cigarettes and chuckling at private jokes. When the guests gather on the terrace, there is an amazing jostling of nobles. There is the groom, grinning and flashing a glance at the camera. There is Franz Ferdinand, lurking behind the Emperor, pulling at his collar. Children peep from behind adults, old women drift curiously past the lens. Is that the Emperor smiling?

Vue de Vienne et ces principaux monuments (1912) and Bilder aus Bad Ischl (1913) are interludes of postcard views of pre-war Vienna and Bad Ischl, and there is something touching (as always) about the past going about its business, the everyday fabric of life. And the eerie sense of emptiness in the shots of parks, the views of landscapes, the slow turn of the camera’s head to take in a present that is now long gone.

Then there is the public life of the Emperor on the brink of war. A slow parade of waiting: waiting for carriages, waiting for footmen, waiting for doors, waiting, waiting, waiting. Films like Kaiser Franz Joseph I. eröffnet die Adria-Ausstellung in Wien (1913), Geburtstagsfeierlichkeiten S.M. Kaiser Franz-Josef I. (1913), Kaiser Franz Fosef I. kehrte aus Bad Ischl zurück (1913), Kaiser Franz Joseph Denkmal-enthüllung in Mürzzuschlag (1913), and Einweihung der neuen Kaiser Franz Josef-Gedächtniskirche (1913) bear titles that take as long to pronounce are they do to watch. The Emperor is glimpsed for real and in bust form, taking salutes, stepping into or off of various forms of transport. In Wien. Platzweihe der Eucharistischen Gedächtniskirche (1913) he mounts a carriage and is handed a greatcoat to place over his legs. A reminder of the cold that we cannot feel, and of the age of his bones. In Jahrhundertfeier am Schwarzenbergplatz in Wien (1913) a crowd in greatcoats occupies a square. The wintry gloom, the cobbled streets, the silent façade of the buildings all carry an aura of premonition. How many such cities of the early twentieth-century will we see crowded, for good and ill? The Emperor walks slowly. He is old. He takes a salute. Horseshit peppers the cobbles.

Already history has caught up with him. The very title of Aus den letzten Lebensjahren wieland Sr. Majestät (1916) evokes the inevitability of Franz Joseph’s death. By far the most evocative glimpse of the past in this film is the procession of Corpus Christi. The image, the uniforms, the ranked crowds – it is the very sight that Erich von Stroheim recreates in the centrepiece sequence of The Wedding March (1928). The film of 1916 is already looking back to the past, just as Stroheim did in 1928, and we do now in 2024. The slow march of the past. Die Trauerfeierlichkeiten für Kaiser Franz Josef I. (1916) shows us the Emperor’s funeral. Photographers await the pall. Children carrying immense candles. A world dressed in black, the dim winter light, the grey streets. Already Austro-Hungarian forces had lost two million men in the fighting.

In Kaiser Franz Joseph I. als Regent und als Mensch (1930), the empire – the very idea of Austria-Hungary – is already a distant memory. A grandfather tells his two grandsons about the Emperor. Here is his image again, this time as a small figurine. Flashbacks take the form of newsreels, newsreels that are not included in the preceding selection on this DVD. So we see more parades – soldiers and civilians wearing the uniforms of past centuries – and more formal greetings at railway stations. And army manoeuvres, wherein the soldiers that would be so appallingly led during the war are seen – still alive – forming up in line, advancing, reconnoitring, charging on horseback. It’s a messy, incoherent picture of the past. The poor quality of the newsreel, as preserved for its inclusion in the 1930 assembly, makes it all the more dim and distant. A final image of the Emperor, once more cheered by a crowd. His carriages moves off, into the past. The Emperor, the people, the world around them. All gone, all gone, all gone.

This DVD has more than general interest for me. Late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Austria-Hungary is a subject of deep fascination. So many of my favourite writers, artists, and composers occupy the culture of this period. Even the disasters that befell the empire and its eastern neighbours after 1914 are compellingly interesting. And the later worlds of Stroheim and Lubitsch owe much to the very idea of the shambolic, charming, precarious state of middle-European history.

One of my most cherished writers is Joseph Roth (1894-1939), whose fiction obsessively revisits the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Sensing, then experiencing firsthand, the horrific modes of nationalism that erupted after the Great War, Roth looked back on the pre-war world with a sense of deep regret and longing. While Roth’s prose is as evocative as any of the twentieth century, I was intrigued by the idea of watching images from the era of Franz Joseph. There is something silly and sad and mournful about the entire collection of films on this DVD. (I pause to note that the soundtrack for the disc is a rather weird mishmash of electronic sounds and snatches of Schubert and Beethoven, played too fast. At the moment we see the bride and groom on the terrace at Schwarzau, the soundtrack delivers an amazingly rapid blast of synthesized fanfare that was so surreal that I burst out laughing.)

If looking back at these films in 2024 is strange, a century ago it was stranger still. In late 1925, Roth went to the cinema and saw a short film juxtaposing an old newsreel of Tsar Nicholas II with the new Bolshevik leaders. Watching the Tsar, murdered seven years earlier, was an uncanny experience for Roth. He wrote a piece called “The Opened Tomb”, where he reflects on a past that is both incredibly recent and indelibly lost. The fashions are gone, the people are gone, the world is gone. There is something in the quality of the newsreel, even its brevity, that makes it so potent for him. I cannot possibly match Roth’s prose, so I end this piece with his final paragraph, written almost exactly 99 years ago:

It’s all over in three minutes. It’s no more than one of the numerous terrible moments of world history that show crowned heads at play. This one happened to have been caught by a camera and handed down to posterity. The film is a little worn, the pictures flicker, but one can’t say whether it is punctures made in it by the tooth of time, or molecules of natural dust that have shrouded these seemingly living subjects. It is the most terrible irreality that film has ever shown; a historical dance of death, an opened tomb that once looked like a throne…

Paul Cuff

Lumière! Le cinématographe, 1895-1905: 114 films on Blu-ray (2015)

This week, I offer some very belated thoughts on a very significant Blu-ray. Lumière! Le cinématographe, 1895-1905 was released in 2015 to coincide with the 120th anniversary of the first cinema screening in 1895. Its original release having passed me by, my first effort to see it came only in 2022. By this point, the Blu-ray was long out-of-print, and I thought I had lost my chance. Even finding listings for it on retail sites is difficult. I had to search via a UPC/ISBN, which was itself tricky to find. It then took many weeks of waiting for an availability alert before I could even find a copy for sale and get hold of it. But I did, and it was worth it.

Lumière! Le cinématographe, 1895-1905 is an assemblage of 114 films made under the auspices of the Lumière brothers. I can hardly proceed without commenting on the difficulty of classifying this as an “assembly/assemblage”, a word that may or may not be any clearer than “film”, “video”, or “montage”. I choose “assemblage” because it seems the most pertinent (and works in French, too), though any of the above terms raise curious historical questions about presentation. Whatever we call it, the selection and editing (i.e. the montaging) of this collection was undertaken by Thierry Frémaux, director of the Lumière institute in Lyon, and Thomas Valette, a director of the Festival Lumière in Lyon. The original films are presented without any (recreated) text or titles, though an option on the disc allows you to turn on subtitles that identify the film, date, and camera operator (when known). There is also a commentary track by Frémaux, which contextualizes these films and offers insights into the history of their making and restoration. For my first viewing, I chose to do without any of these additional curatorial options, preferring simply to watch all the way through in purely imagistic terms.

The assemblage is divided into eleven chapters. These are thematic, grouping the films into miniature programmes that take us through various modes and subjects: “Au commencement”, “Lyon, ville des Lumière”, “Enfances”, “La France qui travaille”, “La France qui s’amuse”, “Paris 1900”, “Le monde tout proche”, “De la comédie!”, “Une siècle nouveau”, “Déjà le cinéma”, “A bientôt Lumière”. None of these chapters attempts to recreate an original film programme from the period. That said, the first chapter contains several films shown in that first projection on 28 December 1895: La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (I), Arroseur et arrosé, Le Débarquement du congrès de photographie à Lyon, Repas de bébé.

The 2015 assemblage also recreates visually the effect of the original hand-turned projection. Thus the first film, La Sortie de l’usine Lumière (III), begins as a still image before flickering and juddering into motion. It is unexpected, and startling. It’s a great way to try and mimic the sense of shock and surprise of that first screening, of the instant that the still photograph literally seemed to come alive. From my distant days of teaching silent cinema, I know how difficult it is to get students to grasp the significance of these Lumière films as miraculous objects. This miraculousness seems to me an essential feature of their history, and therefore an essential quality to try and recreate in a classroom or any modern setting for their projection. If simply presenting the films as it appears on disc, without any curatorship (i.e. technological or performative intervention), the opening Lumière! is as good a way as any to reanimate La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon. (Though I find it curious that the 2015 assembly opens with the third version of this film, shot in August 1896, rather than the first, shot in May 1895. The third version is, as many have noted, a more carefully directed “view” than the first. The first version begins in medias res, with the workers already pouring out of the gates. The third version begins with the factory gates being opened.) I found it very moving to think about this sequence of images being watched by that small audience in Paris for the first time.

Part of the emotive effect was perhaps also due to the music chosen. This is the first time I can think I have ever seen these early films accompanied by an orchestra. The 2015 assembly uses various compositions by Camille Saint-Saëns, taken from his ballet Javotte (1896), together with his Rapsodie bretonne (1861, orch. 1891), Suite Algérienne (1880) (misidentified in the liner notes as the Suite in D major (1863)), and incidental music to Andromaque (1902). Though Saint-Saëns remains a very popular composer, much of the music used here is seldom heard. (As I write, I am listening to the only complete recording of Javotte, from 1996, a CD which has been out of print for some years. The 1993 recording used for Lumière! is a performance of the suite derived from the ballet.) The choice of Saint-Saëns is interesting. In many ways, Saint-Saëns is a perfect fit for the Lumière films. The composer’s reputation (for good or for worse) is for elegant, polished, well-crafted, well-mannered music. (“The only thing he lacks”, quipped Berlioz, “is inexperience.”) In photographs, Saint-Saëns even looks like he might have stepped out of a Lumière film. His build, his dress, his bearing – they all have the same air of bourgeois contentment as many of the films. (Even his fondness for holidays in French-controlled North Africa echo the touristic-colonial views in the Lumière catalogue.)

Differences in subject-matter and representations of class are a mainstay of scholarly comparisons between the Lumière films and those of Edison’s producers at the same period in the US. The latter tend to present (and perhaps be a part of) a scruffier, often more masculine, often more working-class world. Their glimpses into late nineteenth-century America present a very different social and physical world from the fin-de-siècle France of their counterparts. It’s somehow fitting, therefore, that Lumière! presents this latter world in the musical idiom of a composer who embodies the urbane, bourgeois sensibilities of the films.

If all this sounds like criticism, it isn’t meant to be. Put simply, a soundtrack of orchestral Saint-Saëns is a nice change to hear from the perennial solo piano accompaniment, which (in previous releases of this kind of material) tends to noodle along anonymously, hardly having anything to interact with on screen – and hardly any time to establish a musical narrative or melodic character. Yet the Saint-Saëns is not quite able to form longer narratives across a sequence of films in Lumière!. Very often, the directors feel obliged to match the sense of narrative excitement or visual climax on screen. This means some awkward editing of the music, together with a good deal of repetition of the same passages. As editors of the soundtrack, they react like the cameramen of the 1890s, who might pause their cranking if there was a hiatus in the action before them (like sporting events) and then turn once more when the action resumed. And, of course, there are instances of cutting and splicing in some of the earliest films, demonstrating a sensitivity to the need to shape narratives even within the singular viewpoint of these one-minute films. So poor old Saint-Saëns has his music interrupted, spliced, and resumed to fit some (but not all) the notable events on screen. The awkwardness of this is interesting, since it demonstrates the problem of presenting such short, sometimes disparate cinematic material. I would have been curious to see a more careful arrangement of film and music, or even a total disregard for precise synchronization. As it is, the effort made to match the music to some of the action feels somewhat crude. This is not musical editing, as such, since reworking a score would be more effective than manipulating a pre-existing recording. A reworked score could be played through with conviction. A reworked soundtrack plays itself into a muddle.

Regardless of these minor reservations, Lumière! is still a unique opportunity to watch these pioneering films. Unique because this Blu-ray remains, as far as I am aware, the only home media release of so many Lumière films in high definition. As the liner notes explain, Louis Lumière was an exceedingly careful preserver of his family’s photographic legacy. While 80% of the entire output of the silent era has been lost, the Lumière catalogue survives in remarkably complete and remarkably well-preserved condition. The films in this assembly were scanned in 4K from the original sources and they look stunning.

What I love about the Lumière films, and indeed about early cinema in general, is the chance to watch lost worlds go about their business on screen. There is something deeply fascinating, and deeply moving, about seeing into the past this way. It’s not just the tangible reality of the world on screen, it’s the fact that even the more performative elements themselves have an aura of reality about them. What I mean is that even the act of putting on a show for the camera is an act of history – a chance to see how the past played and cavorted and made itself silly for the amusement of its spectators. They’re not putting on a show for us, they’re putting on a show for their contemporaries – fellow, long-vanished ghosts. The audiences for these films are as lost to oblivion as those individuals captured on celluloid. That’s part of the reason why the sight of people eyeing up the camera, either by chance or by design, is so captivating. Their momentary involvement with the lens, with the operator, with the audience, has somehow escaped its time and survived into ours. Ephemeral views, ephemeral acts, ephemeral lives – all, miraculously, survive.

To talk about just one instance of this sensibility, I must single out La Petite fille et son chat (1900) – in which (as the title implies) a young girl is shown feeding (or attempting to feed) a cat. The girl is Madeleine Koehler (1895-1970), the niece of August and Louis Lumière, and Louis Lumière filmed the scene at the girl’s family home in Lyon. But to treat this film as historical evidence, or a kind of narrative content, is to miss something essential about its beauty. For although it demonstrates the ways in which a “view” might be constructed (the careful composition, the framing against the leafy background), and its narrative manipulated (the cat is encouraged/thrown back onto the table more than once, and the moments in-between later cut out), the film is dazzling in a more immediate sense. Though I have seen La Petite fille et son chat on a big screen before, I have never seen it in such high visual quality. The texture of the background grass and trees is deliciously poised between sharpness and distortion: you can almost reach out and touch the grass to the right of the girl, but even by the midground it becomes an impressionist mesh. In the centre of the image, the girl’s summer dress is so sharp you can virtually feel the creases. Light falls on her arm and legs, and when she looks up, she almost needs to squint against the bright sky somewhere behind us. Sometimes the girl catches our eye. She knows she is performing for the camera, for her uncle, perhaps for us – but she doesn’t quite know how. Poised between engagement with her world, with her cat, and with us, she is also poised between reality and fiction.

But, for me, the real object of beauty on screen is the cat. Just look at the texture of the cat’s long hair – the depth of its darks and the sheen of its highlights. See how the light catches its white whiskers, the shading and stripes about its face and eyes. There is a moment when the cat turns its back on the child to face someone, or something, behind the camera. For this fleeting second, the sun catches its eyes – illuminating one and shading the other. I’ve spent many hours of my life in the company of cats, and looking into their eyes up close is a peculiarly pleasing and intimate sensation. There is always the sense of otherness in those eyes, a tension between great intelligence and great unknowability. Even at their most proximate to us, the inner life of cats runs but parallel to ours. All of this is to try and make sense of just how moving I found watching La Petite fille et son chat in such high quality. The aliveness of this beautiful animal – the way it leaps, and turns, and reaches out with its paw – is extraordinary. This creature is long, long dead – yet it appears to us so animate.

One might say this about anything and everything we see in the canon of silent cinema. La Petite fille et son chat is just one short, evocative fragment of an immense photographic record. But the fact of its brevity enhances its potency. It is a worthwhile reminder that it is not just the people who populate the Lumière films that are lost to oblivion: animals are equally subject to erasure, and their lives are more fleeting and more unknowable than ours. Here, then, is an exceptional animal – these few seconds of its life, its body in movement, its intelligence in action, singled out and projected into the present. The miracle of the past, the miracle of cinema.

Paul Cuff

The Epic of Everest (1924; UK; John Noel)

John Noel had an extraordinary early life. Born in southwest England, educated in Switzerland, and posted with the British army to India, he fell in love with mountains at an early age. When his unit was stationed near the Himalayas in 1913, he travelled in disguise into Tibet to get a glimpse of Mount Everest. He served with the BEF in 1914, being taken prisoner at the battle of Le Cateau before escaping his captors and returning to active service. After the war, he became involved with the Royal Geographical Society and Alpine Club, joining the 1922 expedition to Everest as official photographer. He experimented with new kinds of telescopic lens to photograph and film at long distance in the mountains. The result was the short film Climbing Mount Everest (1922), as well as a desire to do better next time. In 1924, he helped fund the next expedition to Everest, led by General Charles G. Bruce. This time, Noel would record enough footage for a feature film. If the expedition was a success, he hoped to film the team’s actual ascent to the summit. And if the expedition failed…?

This film has been sat on my shelf for a long time. Having written about South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919), and having seen The Great White Silence (1924), I knew I would get to it eventually. Thanks to the very cold weather we had in January, I was finally inspired to watch it. The first thing to say about The Epic of Everest is that it is astonishingly beautiful to look at. The 2013 restoration by the BFI presents the remarkable footage in as good a quality as could be hoped.

The grain of the image lets you feels the rocks and ice and clouds, as well as the texture of the clothing and animal hides. The scenes tinted blue, pink, or give a dramatic, otherworldly quality to the film—but the landscapes are otherworldly enough in monochrome. Indeed, the whites and blacks seem almost destined to be used for such mountainous terrain. Noel plays with space and time, so that the mountains attain a magical sense of life: we see light and shade rushing across gleaming slopes, or darkness creeping up sheer cliffs of ice. Clouds pass at preternatural speed over the ridges and summits, or obscure whole swathes of the world. The silhouette of Everest itself becomes a constant visual anchor: it’s as though it is the one constant presence in a landscape at the mercy of elements. And it’s a kind of visual motif that embodies the obsession of the expedition that wishes to climb it. That we see the summit so often, without ever being about to reach it, is emblematic of the entire narrative.

These remarks aside, I was a little worried by the opening section of the film. There are a lot of titles, interspersed with one or two shots of landscapes. The landscapes looked beautiful, but I was concerned how much work the titles would have to do to shape the footage into a narrative. Happily, the film settles down after a few minutes and the footage dominates the text. The progress of the expedition is visually clear, helped by some marvellous compositions. The landscapes are also so vast that the literal progress of the lines of men, women, and animals is naturally choreographed. From the large crowds of porters and animals, we then see smaller teams of men and animals, and finally just men. And all the while, the terrain becomes steeper, whiter, harsher.

Indeed, it is the sense of scale that The Epic of Everest most brilliantly conveys. Noel composes the figures in this landscape carefully, so that we always get a sense of how small they are compared to the slopes. What’s more, the extraordinary telescopic lens he uses enable us to see across huge swathes of land to pick out the tiny dots of figures on distant slopes. You really do get the sense of the vastness of this terrain, and the vulnerability of the climbers. If Noel offers us a few glimpses of the faces of the main team and of the local porters, we never linger on any of them for that long. In fact, the only sustained close-ups we get of anyone in the expedition are the two still images of Mallory and Irvine near the end of the film. If this denies us a direct emotional involvement with the figures, it also concentrates all our attention on the reality of the world they inhabit. The drama is often played out at great distance, so the titles must do a lot of narrating for us (together with lots of undercranking to speed up the slowness of their traversal of the snow).

The film’s attitude to the nature and purpose of the expedition is also interesting. As far as the presence and culture of the local Tibetans is concerned, the perspective of The Epic of Everest is a little mixed. We are introduced to one village by being told how filthy and smelly it is, and the tone of other titles is rather patronising. (It is unclear if the film expects or encourages its contemporary Western audiences to laugh.) But I was surprised by how much respect the Tibetans are given: they are thanked for their welcome, company, and help; their temples and religious customs are given nodding respect—to the extent of being given some credence. For we are told that the Lama visited by the climbers told them that their expedition would fail, and the film acknowledges that he was right—even that it was a kind of destiny foreknown.

Which brings us to the ending. Narratively, the film is far stronger than Herbert Ponting’s The Great White Silence. Since the filmmakers could not accompany Scott and his team to the South Pole in 1912, the story of their fate is told via substitute footage and an animated map. Conversely, though filmmaker Franky Hurley was present throughout the gruelling events depicted in South in 1914-16, he was unable to film any of the climactic journey and rescue. That film ends with footage of the location recorded long after, with a lot of wildlife thrown in for good measure. Both are unsatisfactory ways to conclude fascinating narratives. But for The Epic of Everest, Noel was present and filming throughout the climactic events. And there is a powerful irony in the fact that the film’s boasts of telescopic lenses proved powerless against the weather to record the final stretch of Mallory and Irvine’s attempt to reach the summit. Like Noel, we can only sit at a great distance and observe the slow and often obscure events unfold. One moment, the climbers are tiny dots, the next they are lost in cloud. We wait. Hours pass. Other figures appear, messages are relayed with painful slowness. Mallory and Irvine have disappeared, and the film cannot solve the mystery or offer us any alternate means of representing what happened.

In dealing with the failure of the expedition, and the death of two of its members, the film becomes surprisingly reflective. If Mallory and Irvine died, we are asked, isn’t resting forever in this astonishing landscape an idyllic kind of afterlife? Further, the text of the titles wonders if the expedition was fated to fail, and whether some spiritual aspect of the mountain—and, implicitly, of Tibetan culture—prevented them from reaching their goal. It returns to the native idea of the mountain as a goddess that protects herself from intruders—especially (I think it is implied) from those outside of Tibetan culture. Whether the filmmaker is being sincere, or is just finding a convenient way of ending the film on a dramatically satisfying fashion, is up for debate. But I think the ending does succeed narratively and emotionally: the last images, tinted a burnished red, of the mountain drawing the darkness up over its flanks and summit is an exceptionally beautiful way of making a sense of irresolution a fitting conclusion.

The BFI restoration comes with a choice of two scores. The first is by Simon Fisher Turner. I say “first” because the cover of the Blu-ray credits this as “a film by Captain John Noel with music by Simon Fisher Turner”. (Not quite in the same league as the BFI release which Amazon sells under the title “Michael Nyman’s Man With A Movie Camera”, which really takes the biscuit.) Described in the liner notes of this edition as “an epic of contemporary music-making”, it boasts an array of sampled sounds—from the original 1924 recordings of Tibetan vocalists recorded by the expedition to various kinds of “silence”, yak bells etc. The music that is not sampled or recorded on location is rather more generic. Washes and warblings of sound, dashes of synthesized brass, tinklings and scratchings, breathy acoustic sighs… This mood music engages only in the very broadest way with the rhythm of the film, or the rhythm of watching it.

The liner notes contain a very brief essay by Fisher Turner. “Where do I begin?” he asks. “On the internet.” He freely acknowledges his role as acoustic “thief”, while also emphasizing the improvisatory way he compiles pre-existing and original sections of the soundtrack. It’s difficult to reconcile the claim of this being an “epic of contemporary music-making” with Fisher Turner’s own account of downloading apps and stealing audio from online videos. Bits of his essay read like parody: “Ideas come and go. Puzzle making. Noise collecting. Soft electricity. Sound climbing. Notimemusic. Snowblind snarls. I meet Ruby and Madan, and play music on the sofa, and eat Nepalese lunch with blue skies and new friends.” Epic indeed. At least Fisher Turner’s soundtrack for The Epic of Everest is preferable to his score for The Great White Silence, which I found entirely unenjoyable—and sometimes downright stupid. (At one point, the soundscape lapses into silence. Fisher Turner himself then appears in audio form, telling us that the silence we are listening to was recorded at Scott’s cabin in Antarctica. Having to appear on your soundtrack to explain the soundtrack is absurd enough, but Fisher Turner chooses to speak at the very moment when there is a lengthy intertitle on screen. Trying to read one voice and listen to another is difficult, and it struck me as the very acme of aesthetic imposition to literally talk over the film while the film itself was “talking”.)

I wonder how much money was spent commissioning and recording the Fisher Turner soundtrack, and how much was spent on its alternative: the reconstruction of the 1924 orchestral score? The relative market standing of the two soundtracks is clear enough from the way the modern one is prioritized in publicity and on packaging. The liner notes also promise that Fisher Turner’s score is available on “deluxe limited-edition vinyl” and CD. But not, of course, the 1924 score. And you must go past two essays on the modern soundtrack before you reach Julie Brown’s excellent essay on the 1924 score, which is the last one included in the booklet.

So, what of the 1924 score? It was compiled for the film’s screening at the New Scala Theatre in London by the renowned conductor Eugene Goossens (Senior) and composer Frederick Laurence. It consists mainly of music from the existing repertory, together with some specially composed pieces for a few sequences. Much of the music is familiar: there is a lot of Borodin, some Mussorgsky, Korngold, Lalo, Prokofiev, and Smetana. Then there are the more obscure pieces by lesser-known composers: Joachim Raff, Félix Fourdrain, Hermann Goetz, Henri Rabaud. Of the latter, I knew the music of Fourdrain and Rabaud only through other silent film scores. Some of Fourdrain’s music was used in the score compiled by Paul Fosse and Arthur Honegger for Abel Gance’s La Roue (1922), while Rabaud composed the scores for Raymond Bernard’s historical epics La Miracle des loups (1924) and Le Joueur d’échecs (1927).

The music has much to do in keeping a sense of pace and involvement with The Epic of Everest, as the succession of landscapes and titles can sometimes become monotonous—or at least mono-rhythmic. Having solid symphonic works, neatly arranged, provides another temporal dimension to our viewing experience.

There are also some oddities. One sequence is introduced with the title: “Into the heart of the pure blue ice, rare, cold, beautiful, lonely—Into a Fairyland of Ice.” The music cued at this point is the Moldau movement from Smetana’s Má vlast (1872-79). But while Smetana’s music famously captures water in motion, the images on screen are of water arrested: a sonic depiction of racing rivers accompanies the sight of frozen drifts. Elsewhere, there are slightly awkward accompaniments around scenes of Tibetan life. Thus, when a mother is scene happily giving her child a “butter bath”, the music is oddly dramatic. But it is hardly more at odds with the scene than Fisher Turner’s mood-music synth wash with odd clicks and scratches.

Besides, there are far more scenes where the 1924 choices work wonderfully—even with music that is familiar from other contexts. Thus, we get Mussorgsky’s “St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain” (1867) accompanying a sequence of images of wind and snow blasting across Everest and its approaches. (“Should you not mind wind or frost of fifty degrees, you may stand out on the glacier and watch the evening light beams play over the ice world around.”) It’s fabulously evocative, sinister, thrilling music—every bit the equal of Noel’s images. The original music by Frederick Laurence that introduces the Kampa-Dzong temple (“Tibetan chant”) is also marvellously simple and evocative (harp chords and, I think, bass notes on the piano). And for the last scenes of the film, where the mood changes to one of brooding reflection and resignation, we get another excellent arrangement. Rabaud’s “Procession nocturne” (1899) soars slowly, ecstatically over the images—before the score switches to the sinister fugue from Foudrain’s prelude to Madame Roland (1913) as darkness encroaches over the mountain.

For the BFI restoration, the music is performed by the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Gourlay. I’d not encountered this group before and had an initial concern that budget might restrict either the size of the orchestra or the quality of the performance. I was happily surprised by both aspects: the sound is full and rich, the music well played and decently recorded. The sonic depth and complexity of a symphony orchestra is immeasurably preferable to the kinds of four- or five-person ensembles advertised as “orchestras” on some silent film releases. The Epic of Everest benefits enormously from its original score, and I wish more releases would take the trouble (or be given the budget) to provide music of this scale and quality.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2023, Day 5)

Day 5 brings us both closer to home (well, my home) and further afield than we’ve been so far. Closer to home because today’s programme consists of nineteen British films preserved in the collection of the Filmoteca di Catalunya. Further afield, because these are the oldest films being streamed from Pordenone this year: we begin in 1897 and go so far as 1909. And further afield in another sense, since many of the films recorded events happening far beyond British shores. So, as well as visiting the south coast and Surrey, we go to the north of England and Scotland, but also to Spain and Sri Lanka…

Brighton Seagoing Electric Car (1897; UK; George Albert Smith). Waves breaks amid a downpour of cellulose scratches. Our eyes adjust to the past. Foaming surf, grey seas. The blank sky of a century-and-a-quarter ago. And we behold the strange, dark form of the “electric car”: an open bus of sightseers, moving slowly above the water. The population of the past, specks of faces, waving arms. The past looks back at us, beyond us, to the land behind the camera.

The Inexhaustible Cab (1899; UK; George Albert Smith). A capering clown, a carriage, a canvas street front. The clown ushers his passengers—Victorians all—into the cab. More and more step in. Men, women, boys, girls. The clown joshes with a woman, shoves her in, chucks a child on the roof. The carriage disappears. The occupants are left in a pile. The old woman beats the clown with her umbrella.

Dalmeny to Dunfermline, Scotland via the Firth of Forth Bridge (1899; UK; Warwick Trading Co.). The past is slow. The frames crackle with debris. Frames disappear (we plunge into the dark). People stand by, watching us. The camera is mounted at the front, we see the tracks move under us. We pause to let a train pass in the other direction. (Who is behind those windows? The glass is dark, the interior invisible. The past keeps its secrets.) The Firth of Forth Bridge, long, long ago. The beams and girders close in on us. Time skips. We move through a small, uninhabited station, into a cloud of steam and smoke. (It’s a beautiful moment, a haunting transition—for we never know with such a film when it might end, where we might emerge.) Into a tunnel, through it. Gleaming coast. A bleached sky. (The tinting clings to the trees, the shadows of the rails, the side of the walls.) Fields and trees. The silhouette of a town suddenly appears. (And I do mean suddenly: it’s like the exposure suddenly recovers, as when your eyes adjust after walking from bright sunlight into a dark room.) Where are the people here? Here are two: two workmen on the track in the tunnel. They are just silhouettes, shadows. We cannot see their faces. Do they see us? They move aside and let us pass. We approach the station. Two figures await us in the light. But the light eats them up. The film dissolves their faces in the glare of ancient sunlight. The lens is about to bring them into focus when the film stops.

Review of Lord George Sanger’s Circus by the Queen (1899; UK; Warwick Trading Co.). Twenty horses pull a carriage loaded with performers. Another dozen horses draw the next, surmounted by a band. Huge flags. Camels. Two horses pull an even larger brass band. (The horses struggle under the sheer weight, slipping on the muddy road, their awful effort captured forever.) Ever larger carriages, more absurdly decorated. A black man stands atop a horse. A flotilla of boats (their carriage wheels and horse legs peeping from below their painted skirts). Fake beards. A moving forest of trees. “Lord George Sanger” (the biggest flag yet). Elephants, ridden by non-white performers. No-one is watching them but us. The dark, distant trees stand still.

Sanger Circus Passing though Inverness (1899; UK; John McKenzie[?]). The circus again, now riding past spectators. Unattended elephants scamper along the cobblestones. Unattended camels hurry past a gaggle of unattended children. Flat caps. Umbrellas. The cobbles gleam with rain.

The “Poly” Paper Chase (1900; UK; Warwick Trading Co.). A man trailing shredded paper hurtles past. Through a muddy field, more runners pass, slipping and sliding. Long shorts, long sleeves. Edwardian sportsmen. Moustaches. Determination. A series of streams, muddy expanses. The men leap into water made to feel all the colder by the overexposed celluloid. The trees are bare. The film frame itself seems to shiver.

The Wintry Alps (1903; UK; Frank Ormiston-Smith). So, to winter. A snow fight. A fort made of snow. The camera is impassive. We see sled tracks in the distance, across the slope. The fort is attacked with poles. The crowd in the foreground consists mostly of girls and women, but the sticks and poles are wielded by boys and men. The film cuts closer. A chaos of snowballs. A girl glances behind her, towards us. The scene ends. A children’s ski race. Young faces tense with concentration, or with breathless smiles. The troupe move past us. We see them again, then lose them forever. A slope. Adult skiers. Someone falls. A new view: a ski ramp. Skiers jump. We see them take off here, and land in another shot taken further down the slope. A crowd looks on. Another slope. Skiers sliding and falling. It is pleasingly amateur, imperfect, eager. Very few keep upright down the steep gradient. A final figure lies in the snow. Just before he stands, the film ends.

An Affair of Honour (1904; UK; James Williamson.). Two men overlook a windswept patch of sea. Top hats, moustaches, goatees. A fight, a thrown drink. An exchange of cards. A change of scene: now, distant chalky hills. A treeless valley. The two men, the two seconds. Clumsy disrobing, clumsy practising. How will this end? Shots fired. The second shot in the foot. Another round. A witness is gunned down. Another round. The doctor is killed. Another round. The other second is killed. The only other witness runs away. The two duellers observe the field strewn with dead. They shake hands. (The film presages a marvellous film by Max Linder from 1912: Entente Cordiale, in which two nervous duellists fire multiple shots and kill all the witnesses, as well as birds in the sky and trees. They are so overjoyed to be alive that they run off ecstatically together.)

Perzina’s Troupe of Educated Monkeys (1904; UK; Charles Urban Trading Co.). A table filled with monkeys in clothes. A man in a Panama hat and linen suit oversees them. He sports a sinister moustache and pince-nez glasses. The camera pans up and down the hairy ranks. We see a monkey made to do a solo. It looks anxiously over its shoulder. The film ends.

Elephants Bathing in Ceylon River (1904; UK; Harold Mease). Elephants and locals in the river. The locals sit atop the elephants. One of them is rubbing down an elephant’s brow, scratching behind its ear. The elephant lies on its side in the water. The Sri Lankan waters gleam with a warm yellowish tint.

[Drill of the Reedham Orphans] (c.1904-1912; UK; Urban Trading Co.). A square. An audience. Women with floor-length skirts. Big hats. The children perform gymnastic routines in dark trousers and white shirts. An adult in uniform looks on from close by. He stands at the centre of their manoeuvres. They form a cross, a star, stand on one another’s shoulders, file past, form a moving circle and counter-spinning spokes.

Venice and the Grand Canal (1901?/1904?; UK; Urban Trading Co.). The camera floats towards the Rialto bridge. In front of us, a boat loaded with barrels. A few passersby stop look down at us. A boat passes in the other direction. Gondoliers silhouetted against the bright waters, the overexposed sky. The camera draws close to another boat. A man is sitting, looking at us. Just as we are about to glimpse his face, he gets up. The film ends.

Edge’s Motor Boat. The Napier Minor (1904; UK; Urban Trading Co.). Monochrome waters. A sleek white boat, bearing the number 19 and the British flag. Another boat cuts through the waves. The edges of the frame ripple with wear-and-tear, like a watermark of time.

Fixing the Swing (1904; UK; Alf Collins). A family: the woman washing, the man snoozing with his face under a handkerchief. The girls wake him. He shouts angrily. They want him to make them a swing. They pass him rope and seat. He starts hammering moodily into a wooden overhang. (Just on the edge of the frame, in the background, a man watches the scene unfold.) The woman makes encouraging faces. The children dance in anticipation. The swing is made. The father shows its strength by sitting on it. It collapses, wrenching off the wooden beam above: water cascade over the family.

Eccentric Burglary (1905; UK; Frank Mottershow). The title bodes well. Two burglars, tumbling over a wall. They try the shutters of the house. They try clambering on each other’s back. Then the film helps them: the footage is reversed, and we see the burglars miraculously leap up to the first storey window and enter. Two policemen approach. The film aids them also and they slide up the ladder. A chase ensues over the rooftop. The camera miraculously looks down at the wall (or its recreation). Men climb up towards us. Locals stop in the background to watch the action unfold, smiling, as the performers now miraculously ride in reverse backwards up a hill with horse and cart. The horse vanishes between frames. The burglars flee, now tumbling backwards up a hill. The police slide up a banister, leap backwards over a gate, over a tree. But nothing can beat a good old-fashioned truncheon. A quick knock on the head and the film ends.

Her Morning Dip (1906; UK; Alf Collins). A well-dressed woman, white dress, hat, and veil, attracts two eager men. (A crowd gathers in the background to watch the film being made. They do not interfere with the action, even as it turns into a car chase.) We end up on the coast, at the seafront. Real life goes on all around us, and our eyes are drawn at least as much to the surroundings as to the two cars that now pull up in the foreground. (Coachloads of day-trippers. A girl and boy walking together, the boy eagerly pointing ahead.) Several more men are now following the woman, a comically leering mob desperate to catch a glimpse of her ankles. She goes into a bathing tent and the mob clamber all over it. The tent flaps eventually part, and from it walks an old bald man in bathing costume. Followed now by a huge crowd of smiling onlookers, he camply tests the waters and hops like a kangaroo into the waves, pursued by laughing children.

The Royal Spanish Wedding (series): Automobile Fête before King Alfonso and Princess Ena (1906; UK; Félix Mesguich). A southern sun. A motorcade of people in hats, the vehicles decked out in flags and umbrellas. The other vehicles covered in flowers. One car is halted and reprimanded. Another breaks down. Men and women stand to gesture—to us? to an unseen crowd? Great clouds of exhaust fumes rise into the hot sky. A brass band plays as the fleet of cars stands and watches others pass by. Women in huge hats and veils hold umbrellas up to offset the heat. A driver is handed a glass of water. From a balcony, the royal couple stand and watch.

Lace Making (1908; UK; Cecil Hepworth). Outside a small house, women are at work. Their hands move with impossible speed over the lace. (A cat walks up to a woman, its tale raised in greeting, and rubs by a skirt.) The oldest woman makes uncertain eye contact with the camera, then immediately looks down. We see other women’s faces. A woman with lopsided glasses holds our attention. She’s talking to us, smiling and jokes. The camera holds on her for a long time. It’s immensely moving, this immediacy of the past, and these lips speaking to us in silence. It is the suspended life of the past. Another shot of the leather ball over which the lace is made. In this close-up, the cameraman’s shadow falls into frame. Just as we watch the woman’s hand make the lace, we see the cameraman’s hand crank the camera. It’s a spellbinding detail. Just as we admire the amazing lacework in close-up at the end, so we admire the work of the camera. In a final shot, the group of older women walk towards us. Just as the woman with glasses is about to reach us, the film ends.

The Robber’s Ruse, or Foiled by Fido (1909; UK; A.E. Coleby). Mother and daughter, a well-appointed room. The mother leaves, under the eyes of a suspicious older woman outside. (At one side of the frame, a dog observes the scene.) The child, home alone, answers the door to the apparently fainting old woman. She helpfully offers her a glass of spirits, but then the intruder disrobes to reveal himself as a man. Through a keyhole, the child observes him begin his nefarious work. The child escapes into the garden but is caught and brought back and tied up. The dog barks, breaks free, runs—summons a policeman. (Front the little gardens of the terraced houses, women stand by and watch the filming take place.) The burglar is foiled, the dog joining in with the policemen in wrestling the man to the ground. Mother, daughter, and dog are eventually reunited before the camera. The child grins delightfully right at us, as happy to have her mother and doll and dog today as she was in 1909.

Day 5: Summary

What an absolutely delightful programme. I wrote on Day 2 of the delight in seeing the background world of Wilhelmine Germany in Harry Piel’s films, and here we have a much wider and more deliberate looks into the world as it was at the dawn of the twentieth century. The “actualities” are especially wonderful. Dalmeny to Dunfermline is an utterly captivating film. I love early cinematic documents like this, where the camera glides through the past. (And yes, it helps that I love travelling on public transport and sitting gazing out of the window. It’s an exquisite pleasure over any distance of travel.) The deserted streets are haunting and beautiful, the glimpses of faces who look in surprise or suspicion at us, the sense of never quite knowing what’s coming next. Even the glitches in continuity, the nibbling of decay at the frame—all these things convey the past and the passage of time, and our place in history too. Then there are the utterly unexpected moments of surprise for us. In Sanger Circus Passing though Inverness, there is a moment when one of the elephants trotting unattended along the street turns to its left toward the little crowd watching it go by. The animal reaches out with its trunk towards one of the children. I found this little gesture, lost long ago and recaptured here, absolutely heartbreaking. It’s a gesture of curiosity, of fellow feeling, of one creature reaching out to another. It’s beautiful and sad, and it invites other questions from our own vantage point in time. What was the fate of the elephant? Where was it born? Where did it die? Were elephants buried? And what became of the child? He must have come of age during the Great War—did he survive? Did he remember the elephant that reached out to him that day in 1899?

The “fiction” films are just as capable of delight, but a kind of delight rooted in the haphazard, on-the-fly method of filming. In all the films—fiction or not—there are bystanders who look with bemused curiosity at the actors performing or the film crew filming. Real life c.1900 is everywhere in a way that intrudes delightfully on any pretence of fiction. The performers themselves are part of the life and time we see on screen; it’s just that they’ve stepped out of the crowd for a moment to do a turn. Then the cameras will stop, and they’ll step back into the crowd, into the life that the bystanders are living, into the time and culture that they share with everyone on screen. I’m sure I could go on about these films—and many other such early productions—forever, for they captivate and intrigue in a way that many later fiction films cannot. So, what a privilege to watch them, with a lovely and sensitive piano accompaniment by John Sweeney. Another great day at Pordenone—from afar.

Paul Cuff

Das Blumenwunder (1926; Ger.; Max Reichmann)

In 1921, the chemical corporation Badische Anilin und Sodafabrik (BASF) sponsored the production of a new film. BASF had bankrolled several short films with heart-poundingly exciting titles like Die Anwendung und Wirkung neuzeitlicher Luftstickstoffdüngemittel (“The application and effect of modern atmospheric nitrogen fertilizers”, 1921) and Mais-Düngungsversuch mit und ohne Stickstoff (“Maize fertilization trial with and without nitrogen”, 1923). But the film they undertook in 1921 was of a more elaborate scale and length than these earlier experimental/documentary works. At BASF’s studio-cum-laboratory in Ludwigshafen (south-west Germany), various varieties of seed were planted and painstakingly photographed, exposing one frame of celluloid at a time over a series of days, weeks, and months. It would take five years to complete this process. BASF joined forces with the Unterrichts-Film-Gesellschaft (“Film Teaching Society”) and hired an up-and-coming director to shoot additional footage and assemble the resulting material. (BASF were clearly the lead partner in all this: the chemical corporation had produced more films than the film company they engaged.) The director was Max Reichmann, who had worked as a production assistant on four of E.A. Dupont’s films: Der Mann aus Neapel (1921), Kämpfende Welten (1922), Sie und die Drei (1922), and Varieté (1925). At this end of this apprentice period, he directed two feature films—Verkettungen (1924) and Der Kampf gegen Berlin (1925)—before finishing BASF’s plant film. To BASF’s laboratory footage was added a framing narrative and ballet sequences, including some complex dissolves from plant to human movement. More than a film made for publicity or instruction (hardly counting as “cinematic” at all), this creation would be a feature-length spectacle. The stop-motion photography was the main attraction, but the film could now boast the dancers of the Berlin Staatsoper and a specially-composed score by the successful operetta composer Eduard Künneke. The film was premiered at the Piccadilly theatre in February 1926 and created quite a sensation. And what’s more, it still does…

Das Blumenwunder (1926; Ger.; Max Reichmann)

Part One. The orchestra puts its best foot forward, and we leap into the spectacle. A garden, young girls running. They dance, then pick and fight over blossom. The music is rhythmic, boisterous, stylish, skittish, jazzy. But the severing of the flowers marks a chance in tempo, mood.

A ghostly figure appears, dissolving through the wall of foliage at the rear of the scene. She is Flora “protector of the flowers” (Maria Solveg). She explains that the flowers have life, just like the girls: “in blooming and withering they have the same feelings as you”. “Man’s rhythm of life is the pulse, the chasing of blood cells.” Flora takes the arm of a child and places her fingers on the wrist. The orchestra slows, and a trumpet gently marks out the pulse of blood. Then the timpani take over: the pulse moves deeper into the body of the orchestra. The child’s wrist moves slowly towards the camera, until the flesh begins to blur.

The film cuts to a microscopic view of veins, then—as the strings in the orchestra slide and glisten—a shot of blood plasma slipping through tissue. It’s an extraordinary interruption of the infinitesimal, the scientific, the biological, into the wider world of the film. It’s at once disturbing, extraordinary, and magical. The whole screen is filled with the intimate pulsing of life, the cinema with the warm pulse of the orchestra.

We draw back into the human scene. Flora looks up, bids the children watch the clock. We see the hands speed up, race around the dial: hours, then days glide past. “One day in the life of man is a second in the life of a flower”, she says. “The miracle of flowers will bloom before you.” And so they do. As the orchestra swells, flowers grow from the base of the screen to its summit. The buds dip and rise, like fanfaring trumpets. And just as the spectacle seems set to take off, it’s the End of Part One.

Part Two. Tobacco plants lower and raise their leaves, each lowering and raising (we are told) taking place over a 24-hour period. But each 24 hours are seconds on screen. The three plants lift, strain, grow, burgeon before our eyes. It’s a gorgeously surreal chorus line, the orchestra rising in crescendo, pulsing and growing in time to the plants.

Then we see bean sprouts, the downward progress of their roots as the stem wriggles aboveground, turning 90 degrees when the box is turned. Künneke’s music shifts gear, becomes a kind of slow dance. The bean’s shoot coils around a pole, crawling its way clockwise, up and up. Even when a pair of hands tries to rewind it in the other direction, it breaks free of this imposed rhythm and winds clockwise once more. It reaches the top. The orchestra rings out. The beanstalk wiggles. It’s like the plant is taking a bow.

The banana leaf; ferns. The orchestra is also in a kind of slow-motion, reaching for a rhythm as the plants unfurl. But the vine grows quickly, reaching out to each new support: so the strings skittishly feel out a new rhythm. Another shift. The vine starts growing, lifting its heavy burden of spreading leaves. The orchestra slows, introduces a wrenching little melody for the lead violin. Suddenly the plant seems anthropomorphic: look at it stretching out, clasping at the new support, straining its sinews to reach a higher position. “It grows beyond the last support, with nothing more to cling to.” So tells us an intertitle, as if introducing us to its death. And so the next title finishes the thought: “The vines desperately circle alone, vainly seeking support, they languish and die.” But then we realize that the plant is cleverer than that, for it starts to curl and reach back to an earlier support, “where life is still possible”. We’ve seen a kind of thought process, a vegetal exercise in logic and self-preservation. So too in the next shot, where we see a vine drawing the lengths of string supports closer together to make its journey easier. Now vines clasp one another, dancing around the rival spaces: the camera cuts back to a wider shot so we can follow the upward battle for each vine. End of Part Two.

“Musical Interlude”. The music repeats that wrenching little melody, led by the solo violin. It’s slow, sweet, sad. The score is creating a mood, a feeling. With only the dark screen to see, we are now simply listening to the secret life of plants; is the film asking us to imagine our own images with the music, to reflect on what we’ve seen so far? The slow, sad dance winds to a halt.

Part Three. No titles, just the glittering sound of music—glissando strings, harp, gentle woodwind—to set up the next scenes. Flowers unfold, bloom white and green against the black background. Purplish stems sprout tiny blossoms. The music reaches for high, unsettling extremes; now the leaves are dancing, and the music turns rustic, a countrified dance. Here are bluish buds, curtseying, doffing their leaves. New growths wiggle, circle, shimmer, tremble. They seem to grow faster. Fade to black. The music dies.

Greenish shoots from the soil. The pulse of low strings. Solo woodwinds seek out a melody, test out a rhythm. The flowers look sleepy, dopey. It takes them an age to raise their buds. Fade to black, before they quite bloom in full. A strange, solo shoot—and a dissolve to a dancer, flowing white dress, mimicking the growth of the flower. A succession of close-ups, flowers trumpeting toward the lens.

Shoots fall over the side, bud slowly, change shape a dozen times. Flowers nod together, perform collective awakenings. Another solo dance, flower dissolving to dancer, dancer to flower. It’s hypnotically beautiful. A mass of buds, flowers that slowly fill the screen, that grow stranger and more extraordinary as the shot continues. End of Part Three.

Part Four. Flowers that open and shut, that wither, that die. The life of plants, their struggle, their disintegration. Flowers with skirts, which become a troupe of dancers. The dancers are now in slow-motion, performing impossible manoeuvres on their toes, leaping as if weightless. So entranced am I that I don’t question the continuity between flowers and dancers, between stop-motion and slow-motion, between days-between-frames and microseconds-between-frames.

The music slows. There’s that pulse in the timpani. It’s almost funereal, that beat below the strings. The progress of leaves, of petals, of stamen. It’s agonizingly slow, this sped-up motion of the flowers. It’s a ballet created by removing days, weeks, years’ worth of time—and yet time seems to be suspended. The camera manages to track around some flowers, to capture their slowness with an even slower repositioning. Another dancer; combined with the tinting and toning (dark brown tone, turquoise tint), the sheen of his robes becomes surreally bright, surreally three-dimensional. Flowers seem to gesture, and the film cuts to a man gesturing—his movements as rapid as those of the flowers. A sunflower grows, lifts its shoulders, reveals its mane of petals. The orchestra responds. We watch the tiny ripples of its seeds. Poppies grow; a dancer wakes from sleep, reaches out her arms, shows off the veils of her sleeves; so too do the poppies, before their petals unfurl, fall, disappear. End of Part Four.

Prelude to Act Five. The music is more forceful, louder, the beat of timpani and brass spelling out some impending drama. “The song of coming-to-be and passing away.” A dancer appears, that same sheen of turquoise over the rich black-brown of the space behind them. The coming drama is spelt out in his mime: he rises, struggles, dies. The plants’ lives are spelt out in a few seconds each: they wrench themselves up from parental branches, expand to their fullest; they flinch, tremble, curl up, diminish, die. The music offers a fanfare, then a melancholy waltz, then a tender farewell. Each new plant comes before the lens, lives and fades. A multi-headed cactus performs life and death five times, each stem collapsing one after the other, each flower dying one after the other. ENDE

What a treat to discover a film by chance, and to discover it’s a little gem. I first saw mention of this film thanks to the German Wikipedia page on Eduard Künneke, which listed among his film scores Das Blumenwunder (the music for which was later rearranged into orchestral suites). I was delighted to find that a DVD was available, issued by ARTE in the wake of their restoration and broadcast of the film in the 2010s. The music was originally arranged for a smaller ensemble, but the restoration uses Künneke’s later, expanded, version for larger orchestra as its basis. It sounds lovely, full of energy, melody, and deft orchestral touches. It’s light music, but in its best sense: its transparent, generous, captivating. It works wonderfully well with the images, and by the last sections of the film—which function mostly without intertitles—the music takes up all the sense of narrative and emotive expression. As I wrote on my earlier piece on Das Weib des Pharao (1922), the music of Künneke is well worth investigating: he offers a glimpse into the soundworld of the 1920s: light, popular music, infused with elements of jazz and dance. It’s remarkable in itself that two of his scores should have survived and been recorded for issue on home media. Confusingly, both filmportal.de and the German Wikipedia page also list among Künneke’s work a film score for the German-British co-production A Knight in London / Eine Nacht in London (1928), directed by Lupu Pick. However, the two sites differ on their info for the latter film: filmportal.de claims the music was by Künneke, Wikipedia claims the composer was Giuseppe Becce. In either case, the film is unavailable to view and the score—whoever wrote it—is among the many that of the silent era that languishes in obscurity.

Das Blumenwunder was released as a kind of “culture film”, designed to attract critical attention. It certainly did, and not just from film critics. The many reviews (cited in Blankenship, 2010) focused on the revelatory way the film showed the (normally unnoticed or invisible) movement of plants. If some claimed the film belonged in the classroom and not the cinema, others were more generous. Rudolf Arnheim called the film “an uncanny discovery of a new living world in a sphere in which one had of course always admitted life existed but had never been able to see it in action.” The plants, he said, “were suddenly and visibly enrolled in the ranks of living beings. One saw that the same principles applied to everything, the same code of behaviour, the same difficulties, the same desires” (Film as Art, 136). The expressionist writer Oskar Loerke noted in his diary:

Das Blumenwunder […] was a first-class experience. Unbelievable. The film nearly proves the existence of everything supernatural. When one sees the growth and life of plants that have another tempo from that of people, every order becomes imaginable—even slower tempos or faster ones, which are not perceptible to us because of this difference. (qtd in Blankenship)

As Janelle Blankenship explains, the film did well enough to be shown on numerous other occasions by various interested organizations:

[Das] Blumenwunder was promoted by the League of Nations, screened in England at a social meeting of the Anglo-German Academic Bureau at the University of London, University College, and praised by Welsh writer and novelist Berta Ruck, among others. The film was also a ‘special sightseeing attraction’ at an ‘expo-cinema’ during the 1927 horticulture congress in Leipzig, and was screened as a horticultural film at a monthly meeting of the garden club ‘Verein zur Beförderung des Gartenbaues in den königlich preussischen Staaten, Deutsche Gartenbau-Gesellschaft’ in 1926.

Thankfully, the film was also preserved in the archives and the DVD edition presents it in excellent visual and audio quality. (Though I should add that—at least on my machine—a few of the intertitles lack the English subtitles otherwise presented throughout.) The DVD also prefaces the film with some explanatory text: we learn that Das Blumenwunder was originally 1755m (c.65 minutes) but the only copy that was preserved runs to 1664m (60 minutes). What is missing is unclear, but given it’s only a small percentage of the overall runtime we must be grateful that more wasn’t lost. The DVD includes a pdf of the original booklet issued at the premiere. Rather delightfully, the edge of each page is formed of individual frames from the film, showing you a frame-by-frame account of the growth of the flowers.

Das Blumenwunder is a visual delight, as well as a musical delight—and I’ve found myself relistening to the score three times already since watching the film for the first time at the weekend. For me, Das Blumenwunder was a real treat to discover.

Paul Cuff

References

Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: California UP, 2006).

Janelle Blankenship, “Film-Symphonie vom Leben und Sterben der Blumen”: Plant Rhythm and Time-Lapse Vision in Das Blumenwunder”, Intermédialités 16 (2010): 83–103. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7202/1001957ar