Tag: Early cinema

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

Pordenone from afar (2024, Day 5)

Where next on our Pordenone journey? Day 5 begins on the streets of Paris, before segueing to eighteenth-century Vienna, and finally to Spanish California. We get helter-skelter comedy, brooding artistry, and romantic intrigue. It’s certainly a varied programme…

The first short was La Course aux potirons (1908; Fr.; Romeo Bosetti/Louis Feuillade). This kind of “chase” film was a popular format in the first decade of the twentieth century, and many directors of later prominence will have cut their teeth developing multi-shot narrative form through something similar. La Course aux potirons is a delightful example, with runaway pumpkins being pursued through the streets of Paris. But it steadily becomes more anarchic, more surreal: the pumpkins leap over fences, hurl themselves uphill, leap through buildings, up stairs, up chimneys, plunge into sewers. They are pursued – over every bit of terrain – by an accumulating cast of comic bunglers, as well as the donkey that was pulling the initial pumpkin cart. (The animal is even, marvellously, fed up through the chimney at one point.) Via reverse motion, the pumpkins eventually find their way back to their cart and leap into its back. A real charmer of a film.

Next up is La Mort de Mozart (1909; Fr.; Étienne Arnaud), another Gaumont production – this time deadly serious. We see Mozart at work, the arrival of the “mysterious messenger” (not disguised). It all plays out in a single shot, which suddenly splits in two for an inserted vision Mozart has of his own funeral. Now he collapses and is barred from composing. But his friend plays music from his operas to sooth him, and Mozart sees more visions of scenes from his operas. Finally, Mozart asks for quill and paper to compose the requiem. Musicians enter to help him compose, and continue to sing as Mozart enters his death throes and dies. FIN.

Thus we come to our main feature: For the Soul of Rafael (1920; US; Harry Garson). A tale of Spanish California, of adventure, of “romance whispered through convent windows”, and “a daughter of Spanish dons” who follows the -metaphor-, ahem, the whisper “until it led her over shadowed trails where Tragedy spread a net for her feet.” Marta Raquel Estevan (Clara Kimball Young) has grown up in a nunnery, guarded by Dona Luisa Arteaga (Eugenie Besserer), who wishes her to marry her son Don Rafael (Bertram Grassby). Marta is served “with grim devotion” by Polonia (Paula Merritt), who considers that Marta is adopted by the hill Tribe to which she belongs. They go to the New Year fire ceremony, where they encounter the American adventurer Keith Bryton (J. Frank Glendon) who has been wounded and captured by the tribe. Marta saves Keith’s life by giving him her ring, and he is brought to Polonia’s hut to recover. Marta and Keith fall for each other, the news of which infuriates Dona Luisa. Dona Luisa forces Polonia to effectuate the Americans’ sudden departure – and lie to Marta that he died. Later, Don Rafael – a louche reprobate – is partying with the locals (including Keith) to celebrate the last of his bachelor days. El Capitan (Juan de la Cruz), “the black sheep of the Arteagas”, suddenly arrives, disguised as a padre. Then Dona Luisa arrives with Marta and greets Rafael’s cousin Ana Mendez (Ruth King). Dona Luisa invokes an oath to sweat “by the Holy Cross” to “stand guard over the soul of Rafael”, which Marta joins in – “so long as they both shall live.” (Hmm…) Keith sees Marta making the oath and leaves distraught, just as Dona Luisa dies. Later, at the wedding the “Padre” rescues Teresa and her infant, abandoned by… Rafael! Marta demands Rafael take responsibility for the woman and child, telling Rafael that Teresa is his real wife. Later, Keith arrives with his brother’s widow, Angela Bryton (Helene Sullivan), “an Englishwoman whose ambition has been aroused by the wealth and extravagance about her”. Marta, as a lengthy title explains in pompous prose, is unhappy. She has seen Keith, realized he’s not dead, and knows that Polonia lied to her. Rafael tries it on with Marta, who draws a knife and swears to strike him dead if he does so again. She seeks “refuge from the bestial soul of Rafael” in the home of Ana Mendez. The “padre” turns up with Keith, as does Rafael – on the trail of El Capitan. Keith and Marta are briefly reunited, confess their mutual love, but “for the soul of Rafael”, she must… (etc etc etc). Meanwhile, Rafael pursues Helene, who seethes with jealousy against Marta. At the nighttime fiesta, “fate” intervenes. Keith kisses Marta in the chapel (that’s not a euphemism), just as Helena is stealing Marta’s family jewels (nor is that). Rafael arrives, but so does the “padre”, who finally reveals himself as El Capitan and kills Rafael. Marta and Keith are free to marry and step “at last into the sunlight of perfect joy.” THE END.

Well, it’s about time I watched a dud, and this is it. I didn’t enjoy much about For the Soul of Rafael at all. The silliness of its titles and po-faced tone were never quite silly or po-faced enough to make me laugh at the film, but the banality of its narrative and the stiltedness of its performers never enabled me to get along with the film. It was not especially interesting to look at, with only fleeting glimpses of the much-vaunted (by the titles) beauty and summery fragrance of old California, nor anything beyond some faintly expressionist touches to the convent (with its weirdly warped convent bars) to make the interiors stand out. Just as the titles promised high-flown themes that the film could hardly convey, so the performers struggled to give any depth to the emotions their character supposedly felt. They could offer only generic gesturing and expressions, all perfectly adequate but nothing more – just as the film’s visual language articulated nothing of any depth or complexity.

In terms of its setting, especially its use of Native American characters, I think back to the adaptations of Ramona that I wrote about last year. Like the 1928 Ramona, For the Soul of Rafael casts real Native Americans as extras and a white actress with darkened skin in the main cast. But it also doesn’t have much interest in the idea of Marta as an “adopted” member of a tribe, nor does it use the tribe members outside the initial sequence of their attack on Keith. Indeed, their only function is to act violently in order for the white characters to intervene. Racial issues aside, the film does itself no dramatic credit by turning down opportunities to create a more complex social world on screen. (It doesn’t make much use of Teresa and Rafael’s bastard child, either – nor does El Capitan have any function beyond turning up to move the plot along.) This would be less important, and less frustrating, if For the Soul of Rafael did not make so much of the historical California it claims to show us. The titles’ emphasis on the beauties of California are almost invisible on screen, just as the aura of fate and religious intensity they invoke are entirely absent from the dramatic reality. I’m fine with stock characters if they move and breathe and live intensely on screen, just as I’m happy with cliched plots if they are executed with panache. For the Soul of Rafael had neither dramatic life nor directorial imagination.

That was Day 5, that was. The most entertaining film of the day was the first. I very much enjoyed La Course aux potirons: it had more life, invention, humour, wit, and filmmaking panache than either of the other two offerings. I’m intrigued by the programming of these three films together. The pace and energy of the programme decreased at the same that its earnestness increased. La Mort de Mozart was a kind of transition from the excitement of early narrative filmmaking to a more concentrated drama of character and moral seriousness. I enjoyed seeing this early drama of musical biography, and of musical composition, though its ambitions – to express interiority, creativity, memory, and history – outstrip its abilities. I was not moved by the film, despite the clear entreaties of its performers to produce serious emotion. Yet at only twelve minutes, it is far more compact than For the Soul of Rafael – and, in its own way, less pretentious. For the Soul of Rafael endlessly incites oaths to God, undying bonds of love, and depths of passion and betrayal, without ever convincing me that these notions are real, lived realities for its characters – or that the characters are themselves real people that I might or could or should care about. They all feel like stock characters, moving around in a characterless environment.

But already I feel I have spent too much time talking about this film. Let’s move on.

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