Film music – The Realm of Silence

Music for The Black Pirate (1926; US; Albert Parker)

This week, I can report on my first film concert of 2026! After a couple of days of archival rummaging in Berlin (of which, more anon), I took the train south to Nuremberg. My goal was the Kongresshalle, where the Nürnberger Symphoniker have their rehearsal space and one of their main performance venues. The composer and conductor Robert Israel had invited me to attend one of the rehearsals before the performance of The Black Pirate, then the first of two concerts being performed at the end of the week. Though I had listened to any number of the scores Israel has played, arranged, and/or composed for silent films, I had never actually had the chance to experience his music live – nor to see him conduct an orchestra.

I was excited by this prospect, but also to see The Black Pirate again. I knew the film only from the old 1995 restoration, which has been released on various home media releases – the latest version being on Blu-ray by Cohen. However, the version of The Black Pirate that I was seeing in Nuremberg was an entirely new restoration undertaken by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and The Film Foundation, completed in 2023. For this version, restorers examined and scanned multiple negatives of the two-strip Technicolor, discovering supposedly “lost” prints in the process. After realigning the original green and red elements to make the image as stable as possible, they also checked the resulting colours against a surviving test reel and production records to match as closely as possible the look of the original film. Missing intertitles were restored, and – a century after its initial release – The Black Pirate is back to something very close to its former self.

MoMA also commissioned an original orchestral score from Robert Israel. The Black Pirate was originally shown with music by Mortimer Wilson, though the result displeased Fairbanks and he never worked with this composer again. Though I am a fan of Wilson’s score for The Thief of Bagdad (1924), I was somewhat underwhelmed with his music for The Black Pirate. You can hear it, as arranged and recorded by Israel himself, on previous media releases of the 1995 restoration. (I note that the recent Cohen release has cut all information about the soundtrack and its context. Thus, there is no credit to the composer of the music – only to Israel’s role as conductor. One must glance back at Kino’s previous release to see the details.) As I was to glean during the next two days, Israel’s 1996 recording of the Wilson score was a rushed affair that hadn’t been given the time (i.e. budget) to do much with the music. Israel’s new, original score for the 2023 restoration is thus a return to his work for The Black Pirate – and a chance to do the film justice.

Thursday, 29 January 2026: Kongresshalle, Nuremberg

It is snowing heavily, and the streets of Nuremberg are a slippery mass of ice and sludge. Robert Israel has warned me that “time will not be an ally” today. I meet him at his hotel, and he guides our taxi driver to the back entrance of the Kongresshalle. Though this hall is part of a much larger structure (a vast arena built by the Nazis for future rallies), I barely glimpse the building before we enter. From the bustle of the city and the traffic, inside it is remarkably calm and spacious. Israel greets various members of the Symphoniker team, and we negotiate various doors to his room. There, we talk about our journeys through the wintry landscapes to get to Nuremberg (I from Berlin, he from the Czech Republic). In the wake of multiple delays en route, in Nuremberg Israel has only three rehearsals and a final run-through with the orchestra. Ideally, there would be more, but the musicians of the Nürnberger Symphoniker (as I will witness) are quick learners. And Israel has as much experience of this kind of work as anyone alive today (and more than most). This is a man who has spent over forty years performing and writing music for silent cinema. To illustrate a point about his score, he opens his laptop and navigates through dozens of clips and recordings, assembled for work and for teaching. Israel shows me the opening of The Black Pirate, accompanied by a recording of his music, to set the scene. The seeds of the entire score are laid out: characters and ideas are introduced through a series of motifs, while the very mood and spirit of the drama is apparent in the sheer fun and drive of the music. He talks about his previous experience of the film, of Wilson’s score, and the pressures of time. Just then, a head pops round the door and a man informs Israel that some schoolchildren have been invited to watch the orchestra rehearse this morning. (This wonderful scheme with local schools seems to be a fixture of early life in Nuremberg. I’d love to have had this kind of experience when I was young.)

Soon, it’s time to go. With time so limited, there isn’t a moment to waste. I hurry after Israel, who leads me downs some steps, through large double doors, and up onto the back of the stage. (For someone always in the wings, it’s a sneaky thrill for me to tread, however briefly, on stage.) The orchestra has started to assemble, and I find myself negotiating the little forest of music stands and precious instruments. Israel wends his way to the podium, puts down his bag, and motions me to take a seat in the auditorium. I clamber down the front steps and find a space a couple of rows behind the two ranks of schoolchildren and their teachers. There is a hushed curiosity among these eager kids, who watch – as I do – the players take their seats on stage. The musicians have their own gentle hubbub of voices, soon augmented by the hubbub of instruments warming up. Suspended in the space above the stage, a large screen bears the promise of images. As ever, the players don’t get to see the film in rehearsal and will scarcely have a chance to do so at any point in their two performances. What’s more, these musicians are sight reading Israel’s score as they go. Not seeing the film, and not knowing the score, their performance will be a remarkable feat of skill and discipline. Only Israel, as conductor, will be able to face the screen and keep them in time with the film.

It’s time to begin. Israel turns to the auditorium and (in German) introduces The Black Pirate to the children. This morning’s session will cover the last third of the drama. In a few words, Israel promises us pirates – and adventure. Then he turns to the orchestra, raises his baton, and the floor shakes with the roar of brass. Drums rattle, strings stride… Then, silence. Israel’s baton keeps time amid the pause. The music resumes, but not in time: “Stop! Stop,” he says. “Let’s not lose count. Takt nummer eintausenddreihundertund…”. Watching him mark the silent bar, my attention is drawn to Israel’s arms and shoulders. He’s wearing a black T-shirt to conduct at the rehearsal, and I can see why. It’s a tremendously energetic occupation, a performance in advance of the performance. The clothes – both of conductor and orchestra – are casual, but only in the sense that a tracksuit might be for an athlete. This rehearsal is a workout in more ways than one, and you can sense the physical energy being exuded by these musicians. It’s an odd contrast, this hall and stage, and the few ranks of observers, with the outside world. Through the windows, I can glimpse the snowbound city, entirely white. Inside, we might be watching a sports team practice their routines, such is the energy and bustle on this cold day. (Something about the pale wooden fittings in here reminds me of a sports hall, too.)

On stage, the music is warming up. Here is a swagger in sound, invisible figures strutting on deck. You can hear the gestures. Israel stops. “Molto espressivo, here”. They go again, and the players respond. Phrases that a moment ago were stiff, unstretched are now mellower, have a glow about them. Menacing steps, a sweep of snare drums. […] “Snare and tam-tam. Can you start at mezzo forte, but…” […] A pause. Israel takes on water. A solo violin tries out a phrase, stretches it, smooths it. The sounds cease. Israel speaks again, introducing the next scene: “Fairbanks is walking the plank into the ocean – but he escapes!” The music growls. The waves tremble beneath a funeral march, a march that’s noble, sad, moving – and menacing. Suddenly Israel’s arms reach up, react. Tension – drums… “OK, let’s stop. Let’s do some work on this.”

The work proceeds. Israel addresses a player: “Tam-tam…”. He explains what’s happening on screen, to get the right effect from the instrument. “He goes into the ocean. That’s you!” There is more work, then another note. “First horn. I know it says ‘mezzo forte’, but considering how it sounds here, you’ve coming through so well, you can lower it a bit.” “Oh, I’m sorry”, the player replies. “No, no, it’s perfect”, Israel explains, “It’s just for the acoustics of the hall.” […] Brass and woodwind are taken through their steps separately, then the strings. The sound is by turns nasal, chesty, sensuous, shimmering. Then they go all together, and it’s steady. […] “At this bar, think Scheherazade!” Israel calls out to a player. “That’s you, above the orchestra.” The take proceeds. “Ja!! Super! Dankeschön!” the conductor cries to the timpani, after a grand moment. […] From the combined body of sound, there is a ravishing violin solo. Between takes, Israel calls for a subtler balance of sound: “Think violin concerto. Those dynamics.” Another take. It sounds gorgeous.

(As the musicians continue, the rows of schoolchildren in front of me are gathered up by their teachers and, with gentle pleas for hush, are quietly trouped from the hall. Suddenly, I feel a little conspicuous, sat alone in the audience as the orchestra continues.)

We go again, but – “First horn, from C natural to B natural…”, and Israel sings the right way to shape the phrase. The first violin soars again. […] “Careful after zweitausendvierhundertundsechzig… At the oboe solo… for two bars, we need to be a little more quiet…”, and they go again. “Ja, das ist gut!” […] “So Douglas Fairbanks gets out of the ocean…”. There is some shifting around, a snatch of conversation. A comment I cannot hear earns the response: “If you’re going to steal, steal from the best, right?” […] The orchestra climbs out of the ocean – “Careful, that’s a major chord there. Ja, G-major.” […] “Violins and the bass, let’s not go for mezzo forte, let’s go with mezzo piano, it’s a bit too much.” They go through it again. As this passage ends, Israel’s arms are aloft. It sounded great, and everyone on stage knows it. “Ja!” he cries, and everyone smiles.

The next section. “Fairbanks is riding on horseback…”. There are quick interchanges between this image, and the other half of the scene – which the orchestra cannot see, only feel by the alternation of themes in the music. The swift changes of tempo and tone catch some out. “You need to be very careful here with your count”, Israel reminds them. […] The orchestra goes through once, twice, each time better. The players are learning the score, not just with their intelligence but with their bodies. Music is kinetic, and you can hear the experience of playing being taken on physically. Music is muscle memory, after all. Israel admires their efforts. “Very good reading, this is very tricky…”. They go again. Muscle and flair on stage, like Fairbanks himself on screen. The music roars and shakes itself, and the floor trembles. There are questions, and Israel reassures. “No, that rubato bar is good. I will go to it.”

We move on. “Takt nummer zweitausendsiebenhundertundzwanzig, bitte…”. The orchestra trips a little, then picks itself up, and skips along. […] “Mitternacht…”. Bass clarinet emerges from the cymbal, harp, strings. It sounds beautiful, and it’s being read on sight. Solo violin for a moment. It all sounds gorgeous.

Bar 2777. The solo violin is not so solo. A mistake. “It’s zweitausendsiebenhundertseibenundsiebzig…”. They go again. Menacing rumbling, a gathering swarm in the strings. […] The musicians follow the conductor, who is the intermediary with the unseen film. Since Israel is also the composer, he can explain the rationale for his choices, his rhythms. “Does anyone know morse code?” he asks. Here, Israel stamps out “SOS” on the padded podium floor. It’s the rhythm behind a phrase, and he describes the Princess being in danger of defilement from a pirate. “Let’s hope Douglas Fairbanks arrives in time…!” There is muttering, perhaps a little titter of laughter, but Israel speaks up. “No, this is really a great film. Because in our time, we need to see justice being served. We all deserve that.” The scene in sound plays again. A big climax, and Israel swipes across to bring a halt, then immediately resumes. (I will fully understand this gesture only in the live concert.) […] A long section, everyone in tune, in their groove. A swig of water. It’s hard work, good work. […] Israel talks through the rhythm, taps the floor, sings – bops, rather – a beat. […] “I understand it’s difficult because it’s in your lower register, but it’s very important to get the pulse right.” A long section. “OK, very nice.” And it is!

Israel introduces the next section. “I think you’ll be able to guess who’s showing up with a galley full of soldiers.” It’s vivace, but the going might be tricky. “I think to get used to this, let’s do this in 4, for the notes, then we can go through again in two beats.” They go through, picking up cohesion, swagger even, as they proceed. […] “OK timpani, forte, bitte, nicht fortissimo.” More directions. “Very, uh, militärisch, OK?” – he hums and stamps the rhythm. Fairbanks’s theme emerges, and orchestra is familiar with it by now, and they leap into it, body it forth. I can see the energy on stage.

Another run-through, this time in two. Sections pulling together, sounds knotting together – the result is a superb effort, tangibly effortful, athletic – it’s a joyful passage of performance. After the take, there is a buzz of accomplishment. Smiles, hums, instrumental scrapes and warbles. “Yes, eroica, let’s do that again please. Eroica, eroica. Sechs, acht. Douglas Fairbanks starts firing cannon at their main mast…”. […] There are more comments. “Clarinet… flute…”, Israel begins. But suddenly his alarm goes off. There is a chuckle, and a murmur. It is the signal for a break. Such is the tight timeframe for rehearsal that these breaks are as exact (and exacting) as a performance. There is thus an immediate dispersal of most players, but a few remain and fill the hall with incredibly rapid flights of sounds. Like birds have suddenly escaped their cage and fly about the room, singing. Last of all, a piccolo continues to flutter on her own. (Even as I write this down, Israel waves at me to follow. I grab my bag, dash from my seat and up onto the stage, and wend carefully through the low forest of music stands.)

[Later]

After another dash back to the stage, and over it, I find myself a seat in the middle of the auditorium. A dense hum of tuning masks my scramble for pen and paper. It begins anew. […] “We’ll do it a bit slowly as it’s very tricky.” The woodwind warble through an awkward passage, a dense thicket of sound. Then the whole orchestra goes together, and suddenly the hero occupies the soundscape – taking centre stage in the score. Soon, a sunbeam seems to spread through the music, a beautiful intimation of rightness – of justice. I glance at the empty screen, floating above the orchestra. Without the film projected, this score is a tone poem, conjuring images from sound. […] “Timpani, just for those two bars: hard hammers please. I wanted a kind of Beethoven scherzo sound.” They go through, but Israel calls out “Stop! Someone’s coming in early here. Please be very careful with counting…”.

[…] They move on. Israel flicks through his score. “OK. Dreitausendfünfundneunzig. This one’s more difficult for me than for you, as the timing with the film needs to be absolutely precise.” They go through, a little slowly. “Stop… A point of information…”. Here, Israel sings and gestures a sudden halt that must match the action on screen. […] The passage is tough. “I’m sorry, but this is the only way to do it. We have to match the film.” They persevere. When they get through it again, Israel complements their efforts. “After Sunday, you’ll feel like you’ve run a marathon.” Another take. High drama, difficulties. “OK, we’ll need to go through this. Bitte, just woodwinds and brass.” They do a run-through. At the end, Israel purrs, and the other sections tap their stands or stamp their feet in appreciation. “OK, strings, now it’s your turn…”. They go through, matching their colleagues in their own time.

“OK, let’s put this all together.” Israel crouches and sets up his laptop on a small stand beside the podium. He presses play with the tip of his baton, then turns to the orchestra. They play. […] “OK, please just follow me, I’ll need to go a little faster here, I’ll try to make it as clear as I can.” I keep an eye on the tiny monitor as Fairbanks cavorts in miniature. […] “I’m sorry but someone is getting ahead.” A tactful investigation is undertaken. First, the brass play their section to iron out the tempo. Then the woodwind play on their own. The error is found herein and easily fixed. Now all together, then once again – this time with the film. […] “Ja! We’re in time with the film now. Congratulations, it’s less tricky from here on. Not that this is easy, I know”, he adds. Indeed, it’s very hard work, and they press on.

[…] Directions of dynamics relayed from the podium, then through section leaders. The first violin relays it to her colleague three rows back. […] “Horn, yes, it’s a D-flat.” […] “Cymbal, I would ask you something here: it needs to be a real POW! It’s a specific effect for something on the screen.” They go again, and the percussionist – a young man at the very back of the stage, behind the level of the floating screen – gives it some welly. […] Israel explains the forte/piano to the strings as the moment when Fairbanks breaks the sword. “Justice is served!” They continue, until the horns squeak at a natural. Israel pauses, clarifies, just as the horns mock their own mistake in sound, then they all go again – and it’s perfect. It continues perfect until the woodwind go awry. Everyone chuckles tolerantly. “I guess we know what they think of my writing”, Israel jokes. “And don’t worry that here the bar numbers go all the way back to 0. It’s the same in everyone’s score, even my own. It’s just a printing error.” Another start, another false step. “Once more, please. We’re coming to the end of this thing, and it’s a lot of hard work.” Another run through, and it’s beautiful.

I watch the percussionist move across to the glockenspiel for his phrase, a droll intervention, placed before the sweetness of the lead violin solo. Then the great leap to “The End”, and it’s hugely satisfying. But “The End” must be reached again. Israel says how wonderful the basses sound. “People don’t realize how high the basses can go. It’s such a beautiful sound, so sweet.” […] They reach “The End” again, and a flutter of appreciative mutterings. “OK, we still have seven minutes. I don’t want to exhaust us, so achtundvierzig, bitte, and not to the end.” So they run through another passage, and then time runs out. There is a winding down, and Israel finishes with a few words. At this evening’s full run-through, Israel will be at stage level: the podium makes him too high for the audience. He promises to make his gestures as clear as possible, to keep them all together. “General rehearsal is for all of us, and if during the film I make a mistake or there’s a problem, I’ll just indicate to go to the next number. So don’t worry. It might happen; it might not.” […] A rapping of stands as orchestra salutes Israel. It is “The End” – for now.

Friday, 30 January 2026: Kongresshalle, Nuremberg

The night of the concert, I approached the hall from the front of house. The space that I had sat the day before was the same yet transformed. The darkness outside, the warmth inside, and the bustle of a crowd finding its way in – these factors made it more enticing. The seats filled out, and as the orchestra appeared – this time in formal black – the audience greeted them with warm applause. The players tuned up, and then Israel appeared from the back of the stage, clutching his score. After bowing, he took his place – without the raised podium. From my seat, a few rows from the front, his raised arms were just below the lowest part of the screen. I always enjoy this tension between the physical bodies of the performers and the projected bodies of those on screen, the way their two spaces are placed side-by-side, their two times placed in synchronicity. The lights fell, leaving the glow of lamps among the players, and the faint glow from small spotlights above the stage. (I break my continuity here to observe that these spotlights were turned off after the interval. I wonder who requested this? I’ve never been to a rehearsal of a film concert without seeing a protracted debate about lighting, where the respective concerns of musicians, projectionists, and venue managers are hotly contested.)

The introductory restoration credits were so numerous that they soon drew a few titters. Israel handled this moment perfectly. Turning to the audience with a smile, he said: “Don’t worry, we’re next!” It was a nice way to win us over (he got a good laugh) but also increased the drama of anticipation – for he had to be quick to turn around and make himself ready for the first cue. The last credit faded away; Israel raised his arms; the film’s first title card appeared, and the orchestra burst into life…

Seen at last on the big screen, The Black Pirate looked stunning. Since this MoMA restoration is not yet available on home media, I can’t offer visual samples. But even the single frame that I can find (from the MoMA page for this project) reveals the astonishing difference in image quality with the previous restoration. (See the images below, with the MoMA frame on the right.) Anyone used to the washed-out colours of old will be astounded (as I was in Nuremberg) at the richness and warmth of the new restoration. Suddenly, the tones of the wood on the ships, the fabric of clothing, the burnished skin tones, the deep blue-green waves, the golden sands – suddenly, all these inhabitants of the screen made sense. It was as if some magical elixir had given them back to their true selves, like they had reinhabited their former bodies. Damn, this film looks good!

The two-trip Technicolor palette is never showy, in the sense of throwing garish colours on screen. In fact, you might say it looks purposefully withheld. The dominant colours are rich, but muted. The film often resembles the canvases of seventeenth-century masters, especially the way the Princess is dressed and lit. Billie Dove might not have a character of great psychological depth to portray, but every shot of her looks fabulous. The way her velvet dress is captured by the colour, you can feel its fabric, sense the sheen of its soft material. And when she turns to one side, gripped with suppressed emotion, the light shapes her profile and haloes her hair – and suddenly it’s like a centuries-old painting come to life.

If the film’s palette is subtle, this also allows it to make certain moments stand out through colour. There is a superb scene early in the film, when the pirates are pillaging a merchant ship. When one of their prisoners hides a valuable ring in his mouth, the Pirate Leader (Anders Randolf) orders one of his men to retrieve it. He mimes a cutting gesture, so we know what’s coming. But we don’t see it. The camera stays put before the Leader as the other pirate gets out his knife, rolls up his sleeve, and stomps out of shot. The Leader stands, chews, spits. A few seconds later, the pirate reappears and gives the ring to the Leader. As he does so, we glimpse his bloody hand and bloodied knife. Seeing this moment on screen in Nuremberg, I nearly gasped at the sight of the blood: amid the browns and greens of the composition, the Technicolor blood is a slick shock of red, gleaming gruesomely on hand and knife. It’s the most vivid patch of red in the entire film, and so perfectly utilized. The murder is all the more shocking for taking place off-screen, its casual brutality brilliantly captured – felt – in that slick of red. (Later, there is another moment when the Pirate Lieutenant (Sam De Grasse) is comparing captured swords. To test the weight of one, he runs through its former owner – the moment of death again happening just off screen. The moment is chilling enough, but the grimly pleasing punchline is when the Lieutenant then wipes the blood from his blade on the victim’s trousers.)

As with its use of colour, the film reserves its camera movement for one or two special moments. Having remained virtually static throughout the film, there is a remarkable instance of movement in the climactic scene when the Pirate Lieutenant approaches the cabin in which the Princess is guarded by MacTavish (Donald Crisp). We know that he is about to claim his “right” to her body, and the one-armed MacTavish is her only protection. As the Lieutenant reaches the bottom of the small staircase, MacTavish comes forward – but the camera slowly retreats, and the Lieutenant firmly pushes the old man backwards. MacTavish retreats, too, then tries again to stop the Lieutenant. The camera pauses, only for the Lieutenant to push MacTavish back – and the camera withdraws before him once more. MacTavish makes one last effort to stop the Lieutenant, and the camera halts. But in a fraction of a second, the Lieutenant raises his pistol and clubs MacTavish to the floor. The Lieutenant looks ahead, past us, with dreadful calm. He walks on, the camera moving back before him. It’s such a striking scene, wonderfully played and directed.

Then there is the most astonishing shot in the film, when Fairbanks is carried from the depths of the ship to the top of the deck. The camera stays with him – centre frame, perfectly steady – as he rises, miraculously, joyfully, laughingly, via the arms of his men, through deck after deck, space after space. The way his arms reach up to catch hold of each new hand is so wonderful. It’s like he’s swimming upwards from the depths, just as his men earlier (equally miraculously) swam underwater towards the ship. It’s the triumphant, magical ascendency of our hero, our star – but also a kind of bodily metaphor for the narrative itself, with this final shedding of obstacles, of tension, almost of gravity, as rightness and justice are restored. It shows you how you might fly, but it’s a flight sustained by a whole team working together to make it so. It’s a perfect shot, but perfect in a way that takes you by surprise. Though we have seen plenty of stunts on screen, this last stunt is one performed by the film itself. Having reserved its movement for one or two brief moments beforehand, here the camera is miraculously unchained. God, what a shot this is – and what a star Fairbanks is.

And at every point in the film, Israel’s music knows just what to do. His score fits The Black Pirate like a glove. In the concert, all the hard work of the rehearsal makes sense – becomes fully realized. What had been a pleasingly abstract tone poem in the rehearsal was now a fully-fledged co-ordination of sound and image. The pleasure of this aesthetic marriage was not just in the deft movement between motifs for individual characters, for ideas, for actions, for situations, but in the individual moments that the music recognized and reacted to. Israel orchestrates specific visual cues for sound: gunshots, explosions, trumpets. One of the added pleasures of watching a rehearsal is the way you carry a tension with you into the concert hall or cinema. You have seen the musicians try (and sometimes fail) to time their sounds with those actions on screen. Once, twice, thrice they go through the cues – but now, in the hall, before hundreds of spectators, it suddenly counts. There’s no second chance, and there is a part of me that always worries on their behalf. (I suppose it’s my very English sense of embarrassment, waiting and dreading to be exercised.) But this evening, every single visual cue is carried off perfectly. It’s so, so satisfying to see a silent film live like this – because of this. The possibility of error makes live performance thrilling in a way the exact same music can never be on a recorded soundtrack. Here are real musicians, relying on their individual and collective skills to traverse an extraordinary obstacle course of co-ordination and timing. The endless action of The Black Pirate makes for a perfect, and perfectly challenging, marathon for performance – and for viewers, watching both film and performers.

It’s not just the continual progress of sound, it’s the sudden leaps and transitions that make it all so impressive. Israel’s command of the orchestra was marvellous. I loved watching the sideways swipe of his left arm at the end of a cue: it’s such an arresting gesture, controlled and dramatic. The concert answered the questions I had from rehearsal, for with the film in place these sudden gestures made sense. I had wondered about the cue from bar 2777, which was revealed in concert as the sequence for “The noonday of the tomorrow.” Here, the Pirate Lieutenant and the anxious crew watch the shadow of the sundial creep towards midday, when the “agreement” will expire – and the Princess is no longer to be kept “spotless and unharmed”. The score is heavy with tension, building to the moment when we see the shadow past the point of noon. Here, Israel’s dramatic sweeping gesture suddenly halts the orchestra. It as if, while they played, there was still some protection for the Princess. Now the film is briefly stripped of sound, and the awfulness of what the Lieutenant plans is laid bare. The music stilled, there is reaction on screen. The Lieutenant’s mouth curls into a wicked smile. He tosses aside his pewter mug, then throws out his arm to signal the crew to set sail. As if in answer to this gesture, the music resumes – spelling out Lieutenant’s three-note motif in heavy, sinister chords.

Here, then, was the answer to my question in rehearsal, the dramatic realization of Israel’s sweeping gesture. It is quite literally for show: to show the players what to do; but it’s entirely practical: the gesture is part of the mechanics of performance. Indeed, Israel’s movement on stage was part of the tension of watching The Black Pirate live. When the film cuts between Fairbanks coming to the rescue and the events on ship, the sudden switches between musical motifs are matched by the physical changes in Israel’s posture (the way his body tenses, his arms tracing new tempi, the downward swish of the baton), and by the collective reorienting of the musicians’ bodies (the strings swooping into a new phrase, the percussionist stepping across to another instrument, the glint of brass preparing for an entry).

And it’s superb music, equal to the images – respecting them, admiring them, trying (and succeeding) to do them justice. (Israel spoke of the pleasure of watching justice being served on screen. I think the same applies to the music: it’s a pleasure to hear justice being served by the score.) It’s an original score, but it sounds entirely in keeping with the period of the film’s production. Israel also cites a couple of pieces from the period of the film’s setting (c.1700). There is a (bawdy) sea shanty as the pirates have their feast, and there is a delicious baroque piece that accompanies the minor nobility who are captured. The latter piece, in particular, is perfectly utilized. This music has a wonderfully old-fashioned, dignified air to it – perfect for the way these characters are dressed (in conspicuous velvet and lace) and the way they behave (their refined bearing, their gentile gestures). Just as these nobles are surrounded by rumbunctious pirates, so their music is a little oasis, surrounded by the boisterous swagger of the score. (And surely just as liable to be overpowered.) The contrast is not overemphasized, but the flourishes of this period music are a sudden relief – a sense of somewhere, and somewhen, else.

So too with the music for the Princess, the most conspicuously well-dressed figure in the film – and also the most vulnerable. Her theme, often highlighted by solo violin, is another oasis of mood and feeling – delicate, light, beautiful – in the midst of the score. Yet it also stands as a kind of musical defiance against the dangerous, brooding theme of the Pirate Lieutenant (so perfectly played by De Grasse). And when, near the end, the rescue party appears on the sea, the delicate love theme associated with the Princess is suddenly reinforced by the full orchestra just as the film cuts to the “Black Pirate” standing at the head of the boat. The reappearance of this theme makes it clear why he is coming back, but it’s also a kind of union – or promise of union – between him and the Princess. Reorchestrated, the music is the same yet transformed. Not just her theme, it is now their theme.

What was brought home to me in the concert, again and again, is how well Israel’s score understands the film. It finds the right rhythm, the right mood, and knows how and when to change gear and register. Aside from anything else, it’s also great fun. The music acknowledges – and articulates – the sheer pleasure of watching Fairbanks on screen. His musical theme – bold and bright – is as winning as his visual appearance. Few stars can make you smile just by the way they walk, by the way they hold themselves, by the way they smile, or withhold a smile. Fairbanks might impress with his extraordinary stunts (slicing through sails while falling, leaping up chains, clambering rigging), but he can also communicate with the simplest and clearest of gestures. I love his pose on the island at the start of the film, where he spells out grief and isolation with the way he sits alone on the sand, head bowed between his legs. Fairbanks’s character has just buried his father, and his pose here is like that of a lonely child, the contrast between the vulnerable posture and the athletic bulk of his body beautifully touching. Later, there is another moment where a simple gesture says so much. When he forces the “Black Pirate” to walk the plank, the Lieutenant tells him that “at the bottom of the sea you’ll find the ransom ship”. Fairbanks twists his head a little to one side, so we see him in profile: and we know that his character realizes that he has been betrayed. Though he is blindfolded and is seen only in long shot, this little beat in Fairbanks’s performance sends us a signal we can understand.

All these moments make the climactic scenes so pleasing to watch, when Fairbanks and his rescue party arrive and overpower the pirates. The wonderful unfolding of these final minutes, with Fairbanks’s seemingly infinite supply of men who can swim and leap and overcome with their collective bodies all obstacles, is accompanied by a bustling torrent of sound, the strings restlessly muscling their way forward, wave after wave, like the figures on screen. When “The End” was reached, and the orchestra wound up to its sign off, there was a great cheer of enthusiasm in the hall, and a rousing ovation, peppered with bravos. After taking the applause, Israel motioned that he wanted to say a few words. In German, he praised this hundred-year-old film for its technical achievements – but also for speaking about the necessity of justice, and the triumph of good over evil. Apologizing that his German was failing him, he continued in English to say how touched he was seeing the local schoolchildren attend the rehearsal: he hoped that they offered us a bright future. He also paid tributed to the Nürnberger Symphoniker, praising their hard work and skill. “You have a wonderful orchestra”, he finished. “Treasure it. Support it. Thank you – now go have a beer!” With a final round of applause, the evening ended.

In summary, this was an excellent way to start my filmgoing for the year! I fervently hope that the MoMA restoration of The Black Pirate is released on Blu-ray. But nothing can beat seeing this film live with orchestra. In Nuremberg, I had an absolutely wonderful time in the company of Fairbanks’s images and Israel’s music. Bravo to all involved!

Paul Cuff

My great thanks to Robert Israel and to the Nürnberger Symphoniker for allowing me to attend rehearsal.

Musical fragments: Ervin Nyiregyházi at the cinema

It’s the last night of 2025, so what better moment to talk about the passing of time, about loss, and about transcendence. (Such is the mood of looking back here that in my first attempt at the above sentence I wrote “…the last night of 1925”.) I’m also going to indulge in something a little self-indulgent in writing primarily about recorded sound. But I hope to do so in a way which both springs from silent cinema and returns to the notion of early film history. Yes, this week I want to write about the Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi (1903-1987).

I came across the name of this obscure artist while searching for a piece of music that I will later discuss here. So transfixed was I by various snippets on youtube that I bought Kevin Bazzana’s wonderful book Lost Genius: The Story of a Forgotten Musical Maverick (2007). Bazzana (who also wrote the classic biography of Glenn Gould, a much more famous eccentric pianist) traces the quite astonishing journey of Nyiregyházi from imperial Budapest at the dawn of the century to old age in America in the era of digital recording.

Nyiregyházi was a child prodigy whose gifts prompted distinguished teachers to develop his talent. These mentors were young enough to have been taught by the legendary composer-pianist Franz Liszt – or by those who were themselves taught by his pupils. To a child that could sightread anything, and was already composing prodigiously, they enhanced Nyiregyházi’s technical ability and expanded his knowledge of the piano repertoire. Not yet a teenager, Nyiregyházi was performing concerts with the most famous conductors and orchestras of his day, touring within and beyond Europe. By the 1920s, he was trying to make his name in America – but was already falling out with the managers and promoters who were shaping his career. Addictive traits – especially in the form of sex and alcohol – were also eroding his personal reliability. In concert, Nyiregyházi became known as a “second Liszt” not just for his astonishing technical virtuosity, but for the perceived radicalness of his interpretations – and the sense of something faintly mad in his whole persona. There was something ungovernable and perverse about the way he played music, about his whole way of living. One witness to Nyiregyházi in America was Arnold Schoenberg, who sought out Nyiregyházi with a great degree of scepticism, but found himself transfixed by “a pianist who appears to be something really quite extraordinary”:

I have never heard such a pianist before… First, he does not play at all in the style you and I strive for. And just as I did not judge him on that basis, I imagine that when you hear him, you too will be compelled to ignore all matters of principle, and probably will end up doing just as I did. For your principles would not be the proper standard to apply. What he plays is expression in the older sense of the word, nothing else; but such power of expression I have never heard before. You will disagree with his tempi as much as I did. You will also note that he often seems to give primacy to sharp contrasts at the expense of form, the latter appearing to get lost. I say appearing to; for then, in its own way, his music surprisingly regains its form, makes sense, establishes its own boundaries. The sound he brings out of the piano is unheard of, or at least I have never heard anything like it. He himself seems not to know how he produces these novel and quite incredible sounds – although he appears to be a man of intelligence and not just some flaccid dreamer. And such fullness of tone, achieved without ever becoming rough, I have never before encountered. For me, and probably for you too, it’s really too much fullness, but as a whole it displays incredible novelty and persuasiveness. […] [I]t is amazing what he plays and how he plays it. One never senses that it is difficult, that it is technique – no, it is simply a power of the will, capable of soaring over all imaginable difficulties in the realization of an idea. – You see, I’m waxing almost poetic. (qtd in Lost Genius, 9-10)

I too will wax poetic a little later, but I must reassert the connection between all of this and silent cinema. For in 1928, Nyiregyházi moved to Los Angeles and became involved in film music after contacting the prolific composer and arranger Hugo Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld was a major figure in the silent era, and he continued his work for film into the sound era. Alongside Riesenfeld, Nyiregyházi was involved in creating the music for the synchronized productions Coquette (1929) and Lummox (1930). Alas, I cannot find either of these films, so their tantalizing glimpse of Nyiregyházi’s work at this time remains obscure to me. Equally invisible is his work playing music on set and in sound studios to aid the work of various arrangers and technicians during production.

Nyiregyházi was also exploited as a performer for early sound films. His involvement with Fashions in Love (1929) is precariously preserved. The film itself is seemingly lost, but the Vitaphone soundtrack survives. (The first half can be found online here, and the second half here.) Nyiregyházi’s playing can be heard in the opening of the first part, presumably over the credits; then from six minutes for about ninety breathtaking seconds. (There is a song performed later, which may or may not be him playing beneath the rather warbly voice of Fay Compton.) You can also see The Lost Zeppelin (1929) and witness his performance of Liszt. In these instances, he is quite literally pushed into the background, a pertinent metaphor for his subsequent oblivion from music (and film) history across the central decades of his life. Curiously, by 1932 Nyiregyházi found himself playing to audiences in the cinema itself. Film journalist Louella Parsons encountered his playing at the Paramount Theater in June 1932, a live musical act now divorced from the films themselves.

Nyiregyházi’s own taste in film is curious. He himself professed a love for lowbrow cinema: “the worse the better”. His favourite characters in film were Sherlock Holmes and Zigomar (Lost Genius, 149n). Bazzana makes little of this anecdote, but the mention of Zigomar takes us back to the extraordinary crime serials of the 1910s. I love the idea of the young Nyiregyházi taking in the bloodthirsty Zigomar films in some dingy Austro-Hungarian cinema in the 1910s, and the fact that he might recall such an encounter with film so fondly. (I also wonder what Nyiregyházi’s sense was of the music being performed at such screenings. And did he ever find himself accompanying a silent film?)

This is not the only evidence of his taste in film. Around 1935, Nyiregyházi began compiling a book of essays he called The Truth at Last: An Exposé of Life. This bizarre assemblage of reminiscence and opinion included an essay devoted to Charlie Chaplin – or rather, as Bazzana notes, on “Charles Chaplin”. This was the distinction Chaplin himself variously made between “Charlie” the performer, the clown, the character, and “Charles” the artist, the writer, the director. Nyiregyházi clearly understood the difference, for it was as a social critic that he admired Chaplin. He described Chaplin’s comedies as “tragic as hell, as tragic as anything Dostoevsky ever wrote” (Lost Genius, 170). Noteworthy also is the fate of this essay, and the whole collection of The Truth at Last. In 1957, Nyiregyházi’s seventh wife, Mara, stole the manuscript (along with some of his compositions) when she was deported to Switzerland after facing various criminal charges. By then, Nyiregyházi himself was approaching a personal low point. His career had ceased to exist, and he battled with alcoholism and homelessness. Sleeping on park benches, he became the very kind of tramp Chaplin played on screen.

What I want to draw from the above is the fragility not merely of musical artistry, but of the media that might sustain that artistry. In the case of Nyiregyházi, an entire lifetime of work is essentially lost. When he was able to perform and record his work in the last years of his life, he was both the same man and a ruin of his former self. The survival of the artist is no guarantee that their art survives. What remains of Nyiregyházi’s work when he was in his prime is fragmentary in the extreme. The scraps of music-making that survive in films of the late 1920s and early 1930s are meagre clues as to the body of work that preceded them. A wider point might be made that the synchronized soundtracks of late silents and early sound films are both marvellous documents of earlier film music traditions and a radical distortion of what that music was.

In the 1920s, Nyiregyházi made a dozen piano roll recordings (i.e. mechanical transcriptions of his playing) for The Ampico Corp. Piano rolls were a fascinating example of early media technology being used to distribute the work of contemporary performers, including many important composers at the turn of the century. Happily, some of Nyiregyházi’s work for this medium survives. A CD release of this material from 1921-24 is (I believe) scheduled for February 2026. In the meantime, a few sample numbers can be found online. Again, mechanical reproduction is not the same as live performance, and these documents cannot offer us Nyiregyházi as he was as a performer in the 1920s. But what all such recordings offer us is a glimpse into the past – or at least, a way to imagine that past.

This whole preamble is really an excuse for talking about one recording by Nyiregyházi that encapsulates everything I’ve been talking about so far. To me, it embodies the transience of music, the memory of lost art, the humanity – and the fallibility – of performers and performances. In the late 1970s, the ageing Nyiregyházi was given the chance to record an album of pieces by Liszt. Liszt was perhaps the composer with whom Nyiregyházi had the closest interpretive relationship. His recordings from 1978 are astonishing for the personal way they handle the music. Sometimes he seems to be trying to physically destroy the piano with the force and rapidity of his fortissimo, while at other times he is so quiet and so slow that the music itself seems on the point of disintegration into silence.

In his programme for the LP release, Nyiregyházi included two extracts from Liszt’s Weihnachtsbaum (“Christmas Tree”) suite, which was written in the mid-1870s and first performed on Christmas Day 1881. The music arranges a multitude of hymns and other traditional music alongside original material by Liszt. It is designed to be relatively easy to play, but – as with so much of Liszt’s later work – it has some amazing emotional depths. The movement I want to talk about is “Abendglocken”: “Evening Bells”. To get a sense of the sheer strangeness of Nyiregyházi’s performance of this piece, I should offer you something more like a “normal” performance. Before I heard Nyiregyházi, my favourite recording was by Alfred Brendel – the pianist through whom I discovered Liszt, and one of my favourite pianists of all time. Brendel’s 1986 performance of “Abendglocken” is slower than the few other modern recordings that exist, and he brings out the emotional resonance of this deceptively simple music better than most. (Brendel was also the first to record the entire Weihnachtsbaum suite in 1951. It is amazing how similar his two performances of “Abendglocken” are, thirty-five years apart. Talk about continuity across time.)

Brendel’s performance runs to four minutes and twenty-two seconds. Nyiregyházi’s 1978 performance runs to ten minutes and twenty-two seconds. This is partly due to the slowness of his tempi, but also because he repeats the entire first section of the piece. This doubles the sense of concentration, and the affirmation of importance on this simple, delicately chiming melody. Indeed, the slowness of it starts to gently pull the music apart, as though trying to work out quite what it is – or as though marvelling at something so beautiful, wanting to handle it with a kind of awe. Just listen to how Nyiregyházi brings out the irregularity of Liszt’s regular chords, how in slowing them, stretching them, deforming them, he makes them sound more like bells – bells that must be rung by hand, by physical exertion, by bodies prone to error. Indeed, the repeat of this first section of the movement features more slurs (i.e. fudged notes) than the first run-through. These are moments when Nyiregyházi’s left and right hands seem to trip over one another, or else to smudge distinct phrases. Yet even these moments seem to make sense, to re-emphasize this performance as an act of wonderment at the music. They also suggest what is to come in the movement’s final section, played just once by Nyiregyházi, where the overlapping of hands, of tempo and time itself, is most strong.

I really do struggle to describe the final two minutes of this performance. On the recording, there is a few seconds’ caesura when you can hear the creak of Nyiregyházi at the piano, preparing his body for this last section. When his hands again rejoin the keyboard, the tempo of the music seems, if anything, even slower than what has come before. The music is a chiming of hours, a ringing of sound that carries between the delicate higher and sonorous lower tones of the piano. In some performances, the “evening bells” of Liszt’s title can sound like a domestic clock, so quickly do the chords ring. One has an impression of the music being both designed for domestic performance and a kind of encapsulation of this domesticity – a memorial to it. The music is intimate, delicate, but it is also about the passage of time – about a place and an occasion. In its place within this seasonal suite, it speaks of a night waiting for specific hours to arrive – to find oneself encountering these hours in the quiet of a winter, whether sounded by a mantelpiece clock or a nearby church. But in Nyiregyházi’s hands, the bass chord has the immense resonance of a cathedral bell, a tolling from outside one’s own world, a distant, booming, solemn tocsin from somewhere entirely elsewhere. It’s so slow that it cannot be a real bell in a real location. It must instead be a memory, an imagining, of such a bell. The higher, lighter chords of the right hand are not in synch with those of the left. There is a disjunction between two tempi, two imagined sets of bells. It is like a scene in a silent film where multiple bells are magically superimposed over one another. These are sounds from two separate spaces, two separate times. It is as though Nyiregyházi’s hands are caught between two centuries. There is hardly any other piano recording – any other single sequence of recorded sound – that I find so profoundly, uncannily beautiful.

Here, I think of two moments from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The first is Scrooge’s encounter with the spirit of the past, who motions for him to follow them out of the bedroom window. “‘I am a mortal,’ Scrooge remonstrated, ‘and liable to fall.’” It’s a beautiful line. And yes, here in Nyiregyházi’s performance is the liability of humans to fall, and their skill to fail – another kind of encounter with temporality. This recording captures a performance, but also a performer in time. Here there is surely a tangible, physical reminder in sound of those ageing hands struggling with the discipline of artistic form. But I also think of the very next moment of Dickens’s scene, as adapted in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), when Scrooge is flying towards the horizon: “Spirit? What is that light? It cannot be dawn.” “It is the past”, the spirit replies. Indeed, it is the past. It lies behind us, without us; but it is also within us, and might appear again in a form mediated by art. Nyiregyházi’s performance is an encapsulation of time, a mediation of time, and a meditation on time. It is the past, and we miraculously encounter it in our present. It reminds me of a central reason for my love of silent cinema: here we may contemplate the past, enter into a relationship with it. This is a distant world, one that lives again with us while remaining loyal to its own silence, to this absolute separation from our world.

I listen to Nyiregyházi’s recording religiously on Christmas Eve, close to midnight. Invariably I am alone in the room in my mother’s house where I spent all my holidays away from university, and where I still spend the ten or so days around Christmas. It is in the middle of the Wiltshire countryside, and in the afternoons I always spend a couple of hours walking. I leave the house shortly before the sun sets, so that I might enjoy the sense of isolation more – away from other walkers, who are usually put off by the encroaching dark. On the heights of either side of the valley, there are prehistoric burials and ancient earthworks – the work of the distant past. And there am I, in this same space, a space that is both as it was and irreversibly different. My own past lies here, in the invisible network of routes I have taken in years gone by; but this is a past that I take with me, that lives – if it can be said to live – only in my mortal form, so liable to fall. And as I return home in the dark, walking through this landscape that I have walked countless times, I sometimes find Nyiregyházi’s irregular chords sounding, silently, in my head. It is a tolling not merely for the past of others, but for my own.

A Happy New Year to you all, dear readers.

Paul Cuff

Paul Dessau: Music for silent films

The “100 Years of Film Music” series was issued by BMG/RCA Victor Red Seal across twelve CDs in 1995-96. This series is impressively eclectic, and it makes a rather strange cross-section of film music. Five of these CDs are devoted to silent film music of various kinds. Original music from the era includes Paul Hindemith’s complete score for Im Kampf mit dem Berge (1921), Hans Erdmann’s score for Nosferatu (1922), extracts from Chaplin’s music for his silents (1921-36), and Paul Dessau’s music for various short films (1926-28). (Among these recordings, the Gillian B. Anderson arrangement of Erdmann’s score is perhaps the most unique in being unavailable elsewhere. Her edition is closer to Erdmann’s original orchestration than the edition that accompanies the film on any home media release.) Additionally, there is one set of modern scores for silent films in this series by Karl-Ernst Sasse, composed for two Lubitsch films in the 1980s (about which I will dedicate a post in the future). The series also includes a recording of Charles Koechlin’s The Seven Stars’ Symphony (1933), a piece inspired by cinema but never used to accompany films of the era. Altogether, a very curious blend of the old and new, the real and the imaginary.

All of which brings me to Paul Dessau (1894-1979). This prolific composer is most famous for his operas and large-scale works written in the post-war period, where he worked in East Germany. However, he began his career in the 1920s as a cinema musician – first in Hamburg, then in Berlin. In Berlin, a relative of his owned the Alhambra Theatre and recruited Dessau to work as part of the cinema orchestra there. From being a violinist, he swiftly became an arranger and composer of music for silent films. The process of composition was amazingly rapid. The afternoon before new material was shown in the cinema, Dessau would watch the film(s) and make notes of the timings of the action on screen. That evening, he composed the music and gave this material for the copyists to write out the parts for the small orchestra (usually 12-15 musicians). The next day, Dessau would lead the orchestra in rehearsal in the morning, then in live performances for the public that afternoon and/or evening. This hectic pace of music-making stood Dessau in good stead. By the sound era, he had made a name for himself as an important new composer – but continued his role for the cinema. In the early 1930s, he contributed music to the soundtracks of Arnold Fanck films, and later in the decade to the dramas of Max Ophüls. He also arranged music for films by Lotte Reiniger and the operetta films of Richard Tauber, moving freely between avant-garde modernism and popular operetta.

But how much of his silent film music survives? I wrote recently about his scores for Saxophon-Susi (1928) and Song (1928), lamenting that neither was extant and regretting the lack of any information about their style or content. In the wake of these pieces, Donald Sosin recommended that I chase down the CD of Dessau’s music on the “100 Years of Film Music” series. This CD features Dessau’s music for four short Disney cartoons from 1926 and one half-feature length animation by Władysław Starewicz from 1928. The edition features Hans-E. Zimmer (no, not that Hans Zimmer) conducting the RIAS Sinfonietta, and it is marketed as a “world premiere recording”. In order to properly gauge how this music worked, I needed to find the films. Thankfully, I found that the Starewicz film had already been restored with Dessau’s music and broadcast by ARTE in 2004 – and a video was available online (after a little searching). The Disney films posed more of a problem. I found three in decent quality online and set about synching the music to their images. (This quickly revealed that the music was recorded without the timings of the films available or in mind.) After much fiddling and repeated exporting to new video files, I was able to sit back and watch everything through…

So to our first set of films. These are part of Walt Disney’s “Alice Comedies” series, mixing (mostly) animations with (occasional) live action. The lead cartoon character is ostensibly Alice (played in these films by Margie Gay, one of several children to don this role), though really the adventures are dominated by the character of the cat Julius. (Julius deliberately echoed the design of Felix the Cat, designed by Disney’s rival animators Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan.)

In Alice in the Wooly West (1926; US; Walt Disney), Julius fights the outlaw Pete, a bear who robs stagecoaches and harangues the local population. The film is utterly charming, filled with beautiful touches. The designs might seem relatively simple, but the animation is a riot of brilliant details. Further, it’s incredibly witty about the limitations and possibilities of its medium. Characters can climb nimbly into the air, sidestep across space, crawl across dimensions, remove and interact with their own skins, be blown apart piecemeal and reconfigure themselves… Dessau’s music interacts with this world in wonderful ways. Engaging with the (by 1926 already long-familiar) Western genre, Dessau summons a familiar soundscape of military marches (both British and American) and whip-cracking percussive effects. But he renders these musical elements unfamiliar through his harmonies and orchestration. The usual brassiness of a band or orchestra is thinned for a theatre ensemble, reduced to odd combinations, or rendered spiky and weird by odd rhythms and changes of pitch. Musical pastiche and parody are perfect accompaniments for the film’s playful mobilization of cowboy tropes. When Julius has defeated his foe, Alice arrives and calls him her “hero”. Dessau accompanies this moment with the first bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, which immediately lurches into a manically rapid flourish and fanfare for the film’s end. There is no loyalty to tunes for too long, nor to their attachments of nation or ideology. Melodies are summoned as material to be whipped into new shapes, then jettisoned. It’s a score as quick on its feet as the film.

Alice the Fire Fighter (1926; US; Walt Disney), as the title implies, concerns Julius and Alice battling a fire in a tall hotel building. Dessau fills the film with scurrying motifs and mechanical rhythms. There is a bell and sleigh bells to synchronize with (some of) the fire bells and engines on screen, but the orchestra itself takes on the numerous repetitive rhythms that match the identical (and identically-animated) ranks of horses, cats, and engines of the fire brigade. These motifs are also anxious, high-pitched, restless forms that scurry along in accord with the urgency of the action. Yet there are moments of pure delight, when both film and music deliver delicious little gags that act as vignettes within the action. My favourite is the moment when the little dog rescues his upright piano from the burning hotel. At first we hear a tense refrain for woodwind, with occasional dim clashes of cymbals, as he pushes it out the door and over the porch. A mouse on the top floor waves to him for help. The pianist on screen plays his piano and the notes appear in the air, the scale spelled out like stepping-stones from the window to the piano. Dessau, of course, uses the piano in the orchestra to spell out an ascending scale; then, as the mice neatly run down the notes, a descending scale. But even this moment has an odd tension in it. Dessau’s scale runs are harmonically uncomforting, ending in an anxious trill (at the top) and a low sharp (at the bottom). The strands of music throughout the score are thin, shrill, weird. It makes you notice the weirdness of the film, the curious minimalism of the line drawing, the wit and precision of the characters. Indeed, I feel that it’s an impressively tense piece of music for so slight a film. It’s endlessly moving, picking up the next idea – a kind of perpetual self-invention. So many of the motifs last barely more than a bar or two – such as the delicious rustic march, all jingling and banging, that accompanies the fire brigade’s initial effort to extinguish the fire – and later reappears as Julius rescues the lady cat. It’s such an irresistible little motif but lasts only a few seconds. And for the cats’ climactic embrace there is an amazingly long-running crescendo in the strings, followed by a final burst for brass of “Hoch soll er leben” (a traditional German celebratory tune). It’s all over in a flash, but what a brilliant flash it is.

Alice Helps the Romance (1926; US; Walt Disney) concerns Julius’s efforts to woo a girl and defeat his rival in love. It begins with a delightful passage for clarinet and banjo, as Julius strums away on screen, then preens himself to impress his lady friend. But this light-hearted insouciance doesn’t last, and the music quickly turns acerbic and ironic. Julius is outsmarted by his rival and finds himself rejected and alone. As in Buster Keaton’s Hard Luck (1921), our hero in Alice Helps the Romance repeatedly tries to kill himself, each time via different means. As Julius wanders dejectedly in a state of aggrieved loneliness, mocked by birds and thwarted in his suicide, Dessau provides some incredible little passages of anxious woodwind instruments circling one another. It’s appropriate for a film that has such bleak elements to it. A solution to Julius’s heartbreak is presented when he hires a small gang of youthful roughs to surprise his rival when he is with the girl. The gang of kittens approaches the rival while he is snuggled up with the girl. They stop and bellow “Papa!” in chorus. Dessau renders the syllables of “Papa” into a throaty, rough-edged brass call. This moment perfectly echoes the scene in Act 3 of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911), when a disguised Annina claims that Ochs is her husband and the father of her numerous children. A small crowd of the latter flock around Ochs, crying out “Papa! Papa!” in the same ascending, two-note phrase used by Dessau. The moment works perfectly in the film, the orchestration giving its humour an aggressive edge. But it’s also a delightful citation of “high”, adult culture in the context of this knockabout cartoon for children.

Finally, there is also Alice’s Monkey Business (1926; US; Walt Disney), but alas I could not find any copy of this film to watch with the music. (At least one source states that the film is lost.) Swirling woodwind, plodding marches, scraping strings, filigrees of flutes, scampering piano, rambunctious brass – it’s a weird jungle of sound. Listened to without images, you really get a sense of how intricate this music is – and how well it conjures a narrative. I do hope the film survives somewhere…

So to the longer film: L’Horloge magique (1928; Fr.; Władysław Starewicz). Produced by Louis Nalpas (the man who oversaw Abel Gance’s early feature films), this 40-minute film was the creation of Władysław Starewicz. Born in Russia to Polish parents, Starewicz (also spelled variously Starevich, Starewitsch, Starevitch) produced dozens of animated films from the 1910s into the 1960s – working initially in Russia, then (after the Revolution) mainly in France.

The framing story of L’Horloge magique shows Bombastus, the inventor of an elaborate mechanical clock, and the young Yolande, who dreamily watches the story its figures tell… In a medieval kingdom, the King seeks a knight to defeat a dragon and prove himself worthy of his daughter, the Princess. When the knight Betrand kills the dragon, he appears to win favour – only for the sudden apparition of the Black Knight to send the Princess into a torpid spell. The King’s advisors concoct elaborate schemes to bring the Princess back to health, and the knights set out to battle the Black Knight. As the bodies of the failed knights pile up, the Princess falls for the Minstrel who sings to her as she recovers. The jester informs both Betrand and the King that the princess is busy with the Minstrel. Betrand seeks out the Black Knight, who is revealed to be a fire-eyed figure of Death. At the climactic moment of their fight, a terrified Yolande breaks the clock. Distraught, at night she dreams of a fairy realm, where Sylphe (in the woods) and Ondin (in the water) are rivals in the natural world. Yolande dreams of the enchanted forest, where the trees berate her for wounding the plants and insects as she walks. Shrinking to miniature size, Yolande flees the plants who come to life. A giant appears and wounds Yolande, who is found by Ondin – while Sylphe finds the discarded Betrand and his horse. Between the two, they revive the knight and Yolande, who are guided to one another by the flowers and mushrooms. When Yolande (“this daughter of Eve”) is tempted by a giant apple, she is attacked by a serpent – and rescued by Betrand. In the real world, Yolande stirs in her sleep. FIN.

L’Horloge magique is a quite unbelievably impressive blend of live action, puppetry, and stop-motion animation. This delightful, weird, disturbing, charming film is filled with amazing moments and startling images. Though my focus here is the music, I must at least record that the film itself made quite an impression on me. Aside from the elaborateness of the worlds it creates (the medieval world around the castle, then the fairy world in the wild), it is magnificently directed. To pick just one device Starewicz uses, I loved the way the film recreates the effect of a moving camera, pushing closer to the action. Since this, too, is achieved by stop motion, the result is startingly rapid. These moments are almost like crash-zooms into the middle of the scene. My favourite such moment being after the prospective knights are introduced. Starewicz ends the scene with one of these sudden movements into the scene, accompanied by a fade to black – timed so that it seems we are disappearing into the dark maw of the palace, whose gate has (with equal suddenness) just been opened. This is the first instance of the moving camera and it’s incredibly startling, even discomforting.

Dessau’s music makes the perfect accompaniment to all these aspects. Passages of slow, anxious strings introduce us to the outer world of Bombastus and Yolande. It’s like the music is feeling its way into the narrative, just as we are being drawn towards the story-within-a-story. Only when the mechanism of the magic clock – the first use of stop motion – comes to life does the piano, followed by woodwind and percussion, join the strings. Just as the magic world of the toys comes to life, so does the orchestra. Yet the soundworld here never relaxes, never seeks to comfort us.

So many details in the harmonies and orchestration behave in ways you don’t expect. Even Bertrand, the valiant knight, gets an oddly sparse introduction. And his killing of the dragon is followed not by fanfare or bombast, but by silence for the Princess’s applause, and an odd, descending motif for solo violin. The music seems to warn us that nothing is resolved, that nothing will – or should – go the way we expect. Lo and behold, the Black Knight bursts through the palace doors. His appearance is as impressively weird and sudden in the score as on screen. A blast of sound, densely orchestrated to resemble the gust of an organ.

Very often, Dessau’s music keeps an ironic distance from the action. This score seems faintly distrusting of the film, as though it would rather observe from the sidelines. (One can imagine Dessau being akin to the ironic jester who appears in L’Horloge magique.) Dessau divides his already small orchestra into chamber textures, deploying the full volume of his forces sparingly. This is as he did for the Disney films, but here he pushes his method further, pursuing more eerie effects. In Yolande’s dream (the second half of the film), the flute and strings suggest an aura of bucolic magic – but their uneasy chromatism captures the strangeness of the world on screen. Sylphe and Ondin are sinister sprites whose motives we never quite trust. Is violence ever far away? This is a world of walking trees, writhing beetles, crushable butterflies.

But it’s also very beautiful. Listen how the music slows, and woodwind and strings climb into strange, high registers – as when Sylphe mourns the death of a beetle, examining its remains with pity and fellow feeling. And there are moments of intense excitement, as when Ondin and Sylphe rush headlong at one another, the whole orchestra coalescing into a torrent of repeated motifs. Then there’s the outrageously beautiful sequence of living flowers. Dessau uses a gorgeous solo violin in a passage as deliriously seductive as the flowers, which offer their perfume “filled with love” to intoxicate and inspire Yolande. Starewicz uses dreamy, swirling, multiple superimpositions, just as Dessau uses a dreamy halo of strings.

The film’s finale begins with a stunning image of the serpent uncoiling itself against the sky to strike Yolande, whereupon Dessau’s music races along to the rescue with Betrand. But it’s in the union of the couple that Dessau is at his most sharp and surprising. As the couple sit on the giant apple together, Starewicz cuts to an intertitle: “Immorality”! It’s such a startling line, followed by a cut to Sylphe and Ondin winking and looking shocked and awkward. Dessau brings in the wheezy chords of a harmonium, introducing what might be a religious ceremony – or even a religious condemnation. But the slow chords of the harmonium are interrupted by a decidedly irreligious volley from the orchestra. This single phrase, at once banal and catchy – a kind of dah-dah, dah, dah-dah! – sounds like the start of some swinging, music-hall style number. The tone is wonderfully odd, at once sinister and silly. It matches the film perfectly, since the “lovers” – in live action form – are barely older than children. Yolande and Betrand greedily bite into a chunk of bread, which they share with the horse. Betrand has tinsel-silver hair and talks with his mouthful, motioning to the kissing sprites. It’s a childish fantasy, an innocent end to a frightening tale. The last shot of the film is Yolande stirring in her sleep. Her finger drowsily taps out something on her chest, as though she’s spelling out the rhythm of Dessau’s music.

In sum, I found this music – with these films – exceedingly engaging and rewarding. The DVD editions of Disney’s “Alice” films thus far have often been marketed (understandably) at children, including a recent release in France. But Dessau’s music is decidedly adult. It highlights, the wit, the humour, and – above all – the strangeness of these films. The fact that Dessau’s soundworld for Disney is so close to his soundworld for Starewicz demonstrates a curious continuity between the films. These are odd, unstable little worlds on screen – liable to break out in violent fragmentation or mend in magical resolution.

In their tone and playfulness, their mixture of original and recycled music, Dessau’s music reminded me most of Karl-Ernst Sasse’s music available elsewhere in the BMG/RCA “100 Years of Film Music” series. Like Dessau, Sasse became a stalwart of East German music, though Sasse worked primarily for television – including many televised versions of silent German films. It’s pleasing to think of the legacy of a film composer of the 1920s re-emerging in a new context in the late 1970s-80s. I will have more to say on Sasse in due course, but for now it’s worth observing the relative obscurity of their music for silent films. Though I enjoyed the challenge of synching Dessau’s music with the Disney films, I deeply that I had to do it at all. And while the ARTE broadcast of L’Horloge magique evidences an excellent restoration, this version with Dessau’s music has not (to my knowledge) been issued on DVD.

Moreover, hearing this music makes me even more keen to hear Dessau’s scores for silent feature films. As I wrote in my earlier piece (linked above), reviewers in 1928 praised the wit and inventiveness of Dessau’s score for Saxophon-Susi. I wonder how Dessau handled the longer timeframe, and how he handled the melody of the film’s titular song. Moreover, what material from this or his other silent film scores survives? Where might the music be located? For the 1995 recording under discussion here, Wolfgang Gottschalk is credited with the “restoration of [the] scores”, but the process of restoration is not described at all. How much work was needed to make these scores performable? How close does this music sound to what was heard in the 1920s? And is there more material by Dessau from this period and this genre? As ever, if anyone knows more information, do get in touch…

Paul Cuff

My thanks to Donald Sosin for alerting me to the recording of Dessau’s film music.

Oblomok imperii [Fragment of an Empire] (1929; USSR; Fridrikh Ermler)

This week’s film has been sat on my shelf for a few years, and I decided to watch it because of a passing reference in a book I was reading. This was the final volume of Sergei Prokofiev’s diaries, which cover the years 1907-1933. I will certainly be writing a post about these amazing books, since they contain many fascinating references to films and filmgoing in this period. Prokofiev was a keen filmgoer, but very rarely notes the exact titles of what he has seen. An exception is Oblomok imperii [Fragment of an Empire], which the composer worried was too provincial a film to be shown outside Russia. Though this comment is hardly an endorsement, it reminded me that the Flicker Alley DVD/Blu-ray edition of the film remained in its wrapper. A few days later, I unleashed it from its cellophane and put it to work…

During the Great War, non-commissioned officer Filimonov (Fyodor Nikitin) suffered severe shellshock and lost his memory. A decade later, he lives in isolation in the countryside near the old front line, knowing neither his own name nor what has happened to his country since 1917. One day he catches a glimpse of his wife (Liudmila Semionova) on a passing train. This triggers a partial return of his memory, which is further restored by other reminders of his wartime trauma. At last remembering his name, he decides to leave the country for the city and find his home. Journeying back to (what was St Petersburg but is now) Leningrad, Filimonov is overwhelmed by the material and (especially) socio-political changes of the world he knew. Bewildered and alone, he finds help from a former Red Army soldier (Yakov Gudkin) whose life he had saved during the war. At a new factory, Filimonov slowly embraces the Soviet way of life – and re-encounters his wife, who had long thought him dead. Though she has remarried a pompous cultural worker (Valerii Solovtsov), she is clearly unhappy – and Filimonov looks forward optimistically to the future.

Though Fragment of an Empire is a work of propaganda for the state, it focuses its themes through a remarkable portrait of one man’s subjective trauma. Fyodor Nikitin is the heart of the film, and his performance is one of the most astonishing in Soviet cinema of this era. I found his vulnerability and tenderness (especially in the early portions of the film) absolutely heartbreaking, just as his bouts of violent hysteria are genuinely frightening to watch. When he is in the factory, more and more confounded by the attitude and organization of the workers, he repeatedly screams: “Who is the master?!” Caught in a medium close-up, his arm raised above and behind his head, his face contorted with insane confusion, Nikitin is simply terrifying: at once contained by the frame and threatening to smash it to pieces. (God how I want to see this on a big screen!) I’m not surprised to read that Nikitin seemed to become genuinely unhinged on set, with Ermler supposedly having to threaten him with a pistol to coerce him back under direction. I can hardly remember so vivid a performance of emotional trauma, nor one that – even at its most furious – is always somehow sympathetic. Even when he is screaming and raging, this man is pitiable, vulnerable. He is surely one of the most human, and humane, figures in early Soviet cinema.

Of course, Nikitin is placed in the middle of an absolutely extraordinary series of scenes and images. The early scenes in which we glimpse Filimonov’s returning memories contain some amazing moments. I love the images of the frontline at night. Spotlight beams crisscross the black expanse of no-man’s-land, and two soldiers from opposing sides slowly approach one another. It’s an image of startling, surreal intensity. The richness of the film’s restored image – those impenetrable blacks, those searing highlights – makes such moments all the more effective. Of course, the famous (and famously censored) sequence of the gasmask-adorned crucifix is just as strange and unsettling, but it is part of a rich, dreamlike landscape of monstrous images. The way the enemy later appears with the train, likewise silhouetted in the harsh beams of spotlights, is just as nightmarish. And the scene in which the wounded soldier suckles from the dog, and the desperately poignant close-ups of man and beast, are simply astonishing. The war appears as a series of terrifying vignettes cut into the darkness, a darkness both real and metaphorical. These scenes are flashes of memory, of trauma, from a history that is too vast and too overwhelming to remember – or to see – in its totality.

Elsewhere in the opening half hour of the film, Filimonov’s involuntary flashbacks are dazzling – quite literally dazzling, since the rapid cutting between evocative images is a shock for our senses, too. I love the sewing machine than turns into a machinegun, and the way Filimonov seems to generate the very montage of the film with his manic turning of the wheel. But I think that when this sequence eventually morphs from a subjective memory to an outright lesson in propaganda (cutting between the two officers from either side demanding their men fire on the two figures), the sequence loses its edge. Setting out to emphasize the inhumanity of the officers on both sides, it loses rather than gains emotional depth. And while the cutting between spaces and people is complex, it doesn’t have the same poetic motivation as the earlier memory flashes: it has become an exercise in intellectual montage. Compared to the similar sequence of the laughing gas in Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1929), in which there is likewise a scene of officers threatening their own men, Ermler is less hallucinatory, less strange. By the end of Dovzhenko’s sequence, we seem to have lost touch with a continuous reality altogether. Unlike the growing nightmarishness of the gas sequence in Arsenal, Ermler’s combat sequence becomes all too comprehensible.

Likewise, the scene in which Filimonov demands, screaming, to know who the “master” is ends with a long montage sequence that tries to answer his question. We see a kind of cross-section of Soviet Russia, its workers and fighters and factories etc. It is impressive for its leaps between similar images (wheels, cogs, hands etc) but it really doesn’t have an argument. It’s a kind of statement of might that just gets more insistent, not more complex or convincing. When it ends and the worker asks Filimonov (and, by extension, us) “Understand?”, we cannot answer: there is nothing to understand. The rapid montage hasn’t made an argument or an effort to answer our question, it’s simply given us a slap. Filimonov – the focus slowly pulling from the background of the factory to his face in the foreground – is breathing heavily and dishevelled, but he starts to grin. Though the film would have us believe he has now finally woken up to the marvels of his new life in this new reality, he resembles a man who has not so much found his sanity as fully embraced his insanity. His grin turns into a laugh, and he hurls himself at his comrades, kissing and hugging them like… well, like a madman. Everyone is so nice to him, and he looks so ecstatically happy, that the scene works – but the pleasure it gives in showing Filimonov released from his torment is (for us, a century later) tinged with a different kind of emotion.

This sense of ambiguity is part of the film’s fascination. While Ermler offers some superb sequences and images, the film is often so convinced of its own effectiveness as propaganda that it simply overlooks the possibility that we might think differently. Our sympathies – especially as viewers nearly a century later – are liable to wander from the official line. Filimonov’s questioning of the Soviet world might encourage us to question it too. And the more he becomes convinced by this new world, the more he becomes a different person. His final line, which is also the final line of the film, is delivered straight to camera: “We still have a lot of work to do, comrades”. Immediately following the violent altercation between Filimonov’s ex-wife and her husband, there is an implication that personal change must accompany social change. But with Filimonov himself, this change is also a loss. The way he now appears before us – his beard neatly trimmed, his clothes neatly worn, his hat neatly fashionable – makes him a different man than the one who initially went in search of his wife. He resembles the other workers, the men and women he had found so alien and threatening, and he now echoes the way they speak. Yes, he has grown up, he has awakened, he is no longer hysterical. But there is a nagging sense that something else has happened. It is as if Filimonov has been uncannily replaced. This new Filimonov is a sinister doppelganger of the man we used to know. His last line is both an encouragement and a threat.

Part of this weird emotional effect is due to the original music by Vladimir Deshevov, as transcribed for piano in this recording by Daan van den Hurk. There are some superb sequences of sound and image interacting, often in ways you don’t expect. Take the early flashback sequence in which we see the Russian soldier praying before the crucifix. Visually, the image of Christ wearing a gasmask is jarring and surreal. Illuminated against the dark night sky, this figure of compassion becomes one of threat. But the soldier prays anyway, and Deshevov’s gorgeous, slow chorale throughout the start of the sequence gives a powerful sense of pathos and pity. If the image of the tank crushing both crucifix and soldier ends the scene with a grim punchline (demonstrating both the lack of mercy in war and a lack of religious authority to protect), the preceding music deepens the empathy we feel. As throughout, the score provides a degree of humanity that the images either cannot quite achieve or deliberately do not wish to achieve.

When Filimonov emerges from the tram onto the streets of Leningrad, his absolute disorientation is made the subject of bursts of rapid montage, mobile camerawork, and a delirious repetition of images. Deshevov’s music is like a kind of panic attack in sound, with its repeated, threatening, bustling, grandiose, rising progressions. The sequence is the first of many times that the film seeks to show off what has been achieved by the Bolsheviks while Filimonov has been away. But what the music does is make this very act of showing off almost terrifying. It is too upbeat, its tempo too rapid, to offer anything in the way of comfort or consolation. It is alienating rather than accommodating. This music makes you feel pity for Filimonov’s confusion, the confusion of a man as yet unconverted (and unconvinced) by Soviet Russia. The effect of alienation becomes ours as much as his.

There are later iterations of this kind of “look what we have achieved!” montage. They culminate in the above-mentioned sequence in which the worker demonstrates (via the grand montage) where the “master” is. The dense chromaticism of the music becomes almost unbearably tense, and resolves not in a complex transformation but in a sudden full stop (accompanied by the cut to black that ends the montage). There then follows a passage of scampering, major-key jollity, interjected with an almost religiose chorale motif, that is as weirdly unsettling as the preceding chromatic tension. It’s a brilliantly odd, unexpected way of ending this scene of conversion.

The fact Deshevov’s score seems subtler, wilier, than the film made me curious about the origins of the music and the man. Deshevov (1889-1955) was the same generation as his more famous compatriot Prokofiev, but unlike the latter he remained in Russia throughout the Revolution. Like Myaskovsky and Prokofiev (and their younger compatriots Popov and Shostakovich), Deshevov became part of the mainstay of Soviet composers who worked under the increasingly strict guidelines meted out by Stalin. He would compose much orchestral music (including several ballets), as well as chamber work and piano music. Ermler’s commission to write an original orchestral score for Fragment of an Empire was a rare instance of collaboration between a major director and composer in this period of Soviet cinema. Ermler was hugely impressed by the result. “I am afraid that people will go to listen to the music, not to watch the film”, the director told Deshevov in 1929. “So be it! I am delighted.” Yet the music was barely discussed at the time and remained seldom heard since, especially because copies of the film itself were dispersed, dismantled, and/or destroyed.

The present restoration of Fragment of an Empire was completed in 2018 after a collaborative project by the EYE Filmmuseum, Gosfilmofond of Russia, the Cinémathèque Suisse, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. From what I can glean, the new restoration was presented with Deshevov’s orchestral score for the first time in October 2018 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Per the programme notes for this performance, the score was restored using “the set of orchestral parts retained in the theatre’s library” by composer Matvei Sobolev. Deshevov’s score was performed again at Pordenone in October 2019 with Günter A. Buchwald conducting the Orchestra San Marco, Pordenone. The essay for this festival screening details the history of how Ermler commissioned Deshevov and the subsequent neglect of the music. (Sadly, this essay does not clarify if the 2019 performance used the same musical edition prepared by Sobolev in 2018 – but my assumption is that it did.)

Yet the Flicker Alley release from 2019 confuses this picture. The blurb on the back of the DVD/Blu-ray box states: “The film is accompanied by a choice of two musical scores: a brilliant new score composed and performed by Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius, and an adaptation of Vladimir Deshevov’s original piano score performed by Daan van den Hurk.” It’s curious, but I suppose understandable, that the modern score takes precedence over the original. But why refer to the latter as the “original piano score”? Isn’t this a piano transcription of the original orchestral score? Flicker Alley make it no clearer within the booklet for their release, since the credit section therein refers to “Vladimir Deshevov’s original score” being “adapted and performed by” van den Hurk. Van den Hurk’s own statement in the booklet refers to Deshevov’s other compositions for solo piano and the film score being “a worthy piano concert piece”. But on the very next page, Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius refer to van den Hurk’s work as “a piano transcription of the original score”. This, surely, is closer to the mark. But neither here nor anywhere in the Flicker Alley release is it mentioned that Deshevov’s music was written for and performed by an orchestra in 1929. Nor is there any acknowledgement that this orchestral score had already been restored and performed with the 2018 restoration of the film. (Even the audio commentary soundtrack on the Flicker Alley release, I note, uses the modern score as its background music, not Deshevov’s – further evidence of how his score is subtly deprioritized on this release.)

So what are we listening to on the Flicker Alley soundtrack? Since the wording is so vague – deliberately so, it seems to me – throughout the release, I’m not even sure if van den Hurk’s work was a transcription of Deshevov’s orchestral score or based on a piano reduction prepared by the composer or another contemporary musician. Even if it was based on a piano version by Deshevov, this does not entitle it to be called or understood as the “original score”. Some context is required here with these terms. For example, Deshevov’s contemporary Prokofiev began most of his compositions on the piano, even if they were to end up as orchestral works. When he was working on ballets, he would often suspend work on finishing orchestration to produce a piano transcription for the sake of his stage performers. In advance of their productions, Prokofiev’s collaborators would need a sense of the overall structure (and timespan) of the music in order to build the choreography, prepare the staging, and begin rehearsals. Several of these transcriptions exist, but even if some or all of this music for piano predates the final orchestrated version, this does not mean they should be understood or received as the “original” scores. In the case of Deshevov’s music from 1929, he may well have written some of the score for piano before orchestrating it. But to advertise this as the “original score” would be to entirely misunderstand the nature of composition and performance practice. The orchestral version is the original score, no matter if it was the end result of a complex process of drafting, redrafting, and instrumenting. But all this can only be supposition, since Flicker Alley do not offer any details about this process of “adaptation” – and never once admit that Deshevov’s score for Fragment of an Empire was written for orchestra.

Why should we care about this? Because finding out information about silent cinema, especially silent film music, is already difficult enough. Original materials and resources are difficult to find and difficult to interpret, so it is vital to be honest and transparent about all aspects of restoration. I try always to bear in mind (and be honest about) the factors that have shaped the way I see silent films, especially on home media. All too often, however, marketing muddies the waters. It directly impacts how silent films are received by new audiences and new scholars. Of all the information available online or elsewhere, it is the DVD blurb that gets endlessly repeated. When the Flicker Alley edition of Fragment of an Empire won a well-deserved prize among Il Cinema Ritrovato’s DVD Awards in 2020, for example, the release is credited as offering “the recreation of Vladimir Deshevov’s original piano music from 1929”. This text hasn’t been generated by Chat GPT, but by the human curators of a prestigious festival. What hope have the rest of us if misleading information just gets copied and pasted from the marketing? Confusion, if not outright misinformation, rapidly filters through to writing on the film, which in turn generates more confusion and/or misinformation. So please, please don’t gaslight me.

I regret spending so much time writing about the accompanying text of this release. Not only is it a grand old waste of my time having to write what the liner essays should have said straight up, but it also means I have less space to talk about the music and the film. Let me be clear: the restoration presented by Flicker Alley is visually superb, and regardless of the score I am exceedingly glad to have it. What’s more, I absolutely loved Deshevov’s music, and it makes Ermler’s film all the more complex and compelling. But however good the piano transcription, I would so much rather listen to this score in its original form: for orchestra! Here’s hoping that it will be performed live in the future and, as I never tire of hoping with such things, released on home media.

Paul Cuff

Music for The Thief of Bagdad (1924; US; Raoul Walsh)

Some time ago, I wrote about the music that accompanies different releases of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers (1921). I have long been meaning to do something similar for The Thief of Bagdad (1924). In the aftermath of the festival at (or via) Bonn, I felt like a return to Hollywood, so seize the chance now to turn my eyes – and especially my ears – towards Fairbanks…

First, some context. The original music for The Thief of Bagdad was written by American composer Mortimer Wilson and was commissioned by Fairbanks himself. “Make your score as artistic as you can and don’t feel that you have to jump like a bander-log from one mood to another at the expense of the development of your musical ideas”, he told Wilson (qtd in Vance 2008, 175). The result was a fully original orchestral score, which was performed at the film’s premiere on 18 March 1924 at the Liberty Theatre in New York. Wilson’s music received very good reviews from the critics, but its qualities were not appreciated by Morris Gest. Gest had already planned, in conjunction with Fairbanks, an exceedingly elaborate road show presentation for the film’s initial release. No expense was spared on ballyhoo: a veritable circus of road show variety – stage performers, an “Arabian” band, fancy-dress ushers, decorative incense, magic carpets etc – was duly assembled to exotify each venue booked for the roadshow. To support this cavalcade of orientalist claptrap, Gest wanted a score from a composer with a “big name”. For him, Wilson was not well-known enough as a composer to encourage public interest in the roadshow. Gest therefore employed James C. Bradford to compile a score from existing music – tunes more well-known than those of Wilson, and thus (Gest reasoned) more appealing to audiences. The result was not a success and quickly dropped. It was Wilson’s score that accompanied the film during its roadshow presentation at various major US cities.

However, while The Thief of Bagdad certainly made a big splash with critics, it was not the commercial success Fairbanks (and Gest) hoped. Despite being hailed as a landmark production, it proved less popular with Fairbanks’s own fans. The film was seemingly too ambitious (too long, too fanciful, too everything) for audiences in the US. But it had made its mark on history, and the film survived in enough high-quality 35mm prints to be restored in later decades, and returned to its rightful place in the canon of silent cinema.

But what of Wilson’s score? Despite Gest’s efforts to sideline it in 1924, the music has maintained a notable presence in histories of film music – and has been championed by many writers and practitioners. Composer and conductor Gillian B. Anderson, for example, has called it “one of the best film scores ever written”. Though Anderson also details its merits in more detail in her Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929: A Guide (xxxix-xlii), and the film appears on her website’s directory of original scores, I am unsure if/when she has performed it with orchestra. (Unlike many other scores on her website, it does not include performance details or guidelines for musicians.) Indeed, it is a curious fact that, despite the amount of information on the music and the survival of the music itself, Wilson’s work has remained what you might call a “paper score”.

This music certainly didn’t feature on any of the first home media releases of The Thief of Bagdad. The first DVD of the film was the 1998 edition by Film Preservation Associates. This featured the music cues assembled by Bradford in 1924, performed by Gaylord Carter on the theatre organ. (The recording itself dates from the 1970s, when presumably it accompanied a theatrical re-release of the film on 16mm/35mm. In 1978, Carter also released an extract from this score on an LP of music from silent films. Together with The Thief of Bagdad were extracts from the David Mondoza/William Axt score for Ben-Hur (1925) and the Ernst Luz score for The Temptress (1928). Rarities in themselves!) For all Carter’s personal links to the era, together with his admirable resurrection of historical scores, I often struggle with organ scores – especially for a film this long. And in any case, it’s a theatre organ not an orchestra. That it was recorded over other options evidences the relative ease of accessing and recording a theatre organ, and the preference for Bradford’s readily adaptable cue sheets rather than Wilson’s more complex orchestral score.

The first edition of The Thief of Bagdad that I owned was the 2004 release by Kino. This “deluxe edition” features an “orchestra soundtrack performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra”. The DVD credits further describe this as a score “compiled by Rodney Sauer and Susan Hall, adapted from the original 1924 cue sheet”. As I observed in my piece on The Three Musketeers, Kino’s marketing inevitably disappoints anyone expecting an “orchestra”: the credit sequence at the end of the DVD reveals that this consists of just five musicians. Kino’s use of the phrase “the original 1924 cue sheet” is also somewhat contentious. The first cue sheet used to accompany the film was the one that (briefly) replaced Wilson’s score after the first performances in 1924. Is the Sauer/Hall score based on this selection (i.e. the one by Bradford)? Even Kino’s “deluxe” edition does not provide any information on this issue. Even if it were Bradford’s selection from 1924, the word “original” seems a little misleading. After all, Bradford’s compilation of library music was a replacement for a truly original score by Wilson – the score that Fairbanks himself had commissioned. All this said, the Sauer/Hall score is perfectly fine. It is well performed and suits the film. But it feels out of scale with the images. As with the Mont Alto Orchestra’s music for The Three Musketeers, it sounds rather meagre next to the huge production values of The Thief of Bagdad. This film needs an orchestra, not an “orchestra”.

My disappointment with the Kino DVD was exacerbated by the fact that I knew that a Carl Davis score existed for this film. First performed in 1984 as part of the Kevin Brownlow/David Gill series of “Thames Silents” restorations, it was recorded for television broadcast and for home media. There was a laserdisc of the Thames Silents edition in 1989, and a VHS in 1991. Given the superior sound quality of laserdiscs, I chased down the laserdisc edition and giddily transferred it to DVD for my personal enjoyment. Davis’s score is compiled from the music of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, especially from his famous orchestral suite Scheherazade (1888). The music is a perfect choice. After all, the sets, costumes, and overall conception of The Thief of Bagdad owes much to the influence of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and especially to their Scheherazade, which repurposed Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. As ever, Davis rearranges the historical music with extraordinary deftness. While the music maintains its original identity, it also serves the film’s rhythm and mood. As it happens, I love Rimsky-Korsakov’s music anyway, so my first encounter with the Davis score (sat in a tiny booth, squinting at the small television screen as my laserdisc whirred away on the side) was an absolute delight. It’s a glorious compilation, perfectly suiting the dreamy, exotic, fantastic, and balletic qualities of the film. So enamoured of the music was I that I laboriously transferred the soundtrack of my laserdisc to DVD-R, then from DVD-R to my PC, then used editing software on my PC to affix the laserdisc soundtrack to the superior video image from the Kino DVD, just for my own viewing pleasure. This little experiment was the best version of The Thief of Bagdad I had until the DVD/Blu-ray release of the film, issued in the US by Cohen Media (in 2013) and in the UK by Eureka/Masters of Cinema (in 2014). This edition finally reunited the Davis score with an excellent transfer of the film.

But soon after this edition was released, it became apparent that a new restoration was in the works – one that was to revive Mortimer’s score from 1924. For this, an entirely new performing edition of the score was prepared in 2015 by Mark Fitz-Gerald. As Fitz-Gerald records in his excellent liner notes for the CD release (discussed below), the surviving music required a good deal of editing and preparation to ensure it matched the restoration of the film. Since Wilson composed the music during the production and allowed room for adjusting the length/order of scenes after the film’s premiere, there was a degree of inconsistency between surviving music and montage. Fitz-Gerald found that there was too much music for some scenes and not enough for others – as well as plenty of notational errors in various instrumental parts. These are common issues to the reconstruction of silent film scores, and there are many examples which necessitate very elaborate editing or additional composition. Nevertheless, Wilson left enough clues (and more than enough cues) for his score to be readily edited into its current working form. Fitz-Gerald’s edition of the score premiered with the film at the Pordenone festival in October 2016. Subsequently, the score was recorded in Frankfurt in April 2019 and then broadcast on ARTE later that year, with Fitz-Gerald conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Highlights from this recording were released on CD in 2022. This CD contains 75 minutes of music, which the liner notes inform us represents the “complete” score, minus the repeats of cues that make up the remaining 75 minutes of the film’s timespan.

I had to listen to Wilson’s score a couple of times before it properly sank in. I suspect this was because I was very used to Davis’s music. Though both are full, symphonic soundworlds, rich without being dense, there is a definite difference in tone. Wilson is less rapt, less intense, less filled with grand, sweeping gestures. One might say that Wilson is less inclined to being showy or flash, which Rimsky-Korsakov’s detractors would certainly argue is the case with some of his music. (Though few would argue that he isn’t one of the greatest of all orchestrators.) Davis is also working with music that is already well-known, saturated with memorable melodies – melodies that I knew incredibly well even before hearing his score for The Thief of Bagdad. Wilson’s melodies have gone virtually unheard in a century, and they are decidedly less emphatic than Rimsky-Korsakov’s – but no less worthy of being seen alongside this film. And Fitz-Gerald notes the echoes of other composers like Puccini, Reger, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner in Wilson’s score. (He even compares parts of the soundworld to that of Alban Berg, which is perhaps over-selling it. A score doesn’t need to be, or to sound, “modernist” in order to be relevant or interesting.) But there is never direct quotation, just these echoes – in the shape of melodies, or the texture of sounds.

As well as the difference in musical/historical contexts for these scores, Wilson’s original music is surely conceived with a different objective in mind. In Scheherazade Rimsky-Korsakov is conjuring an entire picture from scratch, using the orchestra to form an impression in the listener’s imagination; whereas Wilson is accompanying an already-imagined world. If Wilson is less intense, perhaps this is because he isn’t striving to do everything: half the drama is already there on screen, so he is happy to be less emphatic. Just as the city walls seem to hover over those polished black floors, or the minarets hang before those dreamy picture-book skies, so Wilson’s music floats over the images. Everything works in tandem with the action, but the music has its own tempo, its own sense of mood. While there are plenty of examples of percussive effects for particular moments (gongs, weapons, jewels, clapping hands, magical apparitions etc.), the score itself is never in a rush to match every movement on screen. Wilson maintains a very pleasing balance between fidelity and independence. His music seems to have just the right tempo, both for individual scenes and for the film as a whole. It flows with the drama, seamlessly negotiating each sequence – picking out individual moments to highlight, but always with a wider sense of forward momentum. It certainly exudes the same warmth, geniality, and feeling as the drama.

Such qualities are immediately clear in Wilson’s opening theme, spelt out over the opening title. This theme is a slow, singing melody: wistful, yearning, gentle. If it lacks the absolute immediacy of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opening theme on the solo violin, used by Davis for the film’s prologue, it possesses a kind of calm that really works. This is music that’s never in a rush to impress. Like the film, it takes its time to unfold. Wilson’s main theme is heard for the first time within the drama when Ahmed enters the mosque and we see the Holy Man speak. The immediate sense of peace that Wilson conjures, a kind of sonic balm, is perfect. From the bustle of the streets, we enter a different kind of space – physical and emotional.

Later, when Ahmed first sees the Princess, the music grows into a slow, dreamy ecstasy. Like the opening theme, subsequently associated with the Holy Man, Wilson produces a drawn-out, singing melody – this time brought out in the low strings. It’s like a romantic version of the spiritual theme. In Davis’s score, the scene is more musically ambiguous. The theme that we will hear fully developed, expanded in orchestration and in volume at the end of the film’s first part, when Ahmed sets out on his quest, is here heard for the first time in tentative form. Over quiet, tremolo strings, solo oboe and then clarinet start to spell out the theme – but are soon interrupted in the scene when the Princess’s guards return. Davis’s score recognizes (in its orchestration) the intimacy of the scene, but (in its melody) hints at the dramatic consequences of this first contact between Ahmed and the Princess.

I have spent the best part of three mornings listening to the Davis and Wilson scores side-by-side, and I love them both. For sheer richness, variety, and moments of piercing intensity, Davis’s is hard to beat. (How I wish I had heard this score performed live!) But Wilson’s score has a tremendous cumulative impact: everything about it simply works. It’s beautifully organized, orchestrated, and fits the film like a glove. The restoration of Wilson’s score is reason to celebrate.

Added to this are the qualities of the Photoplay Productions restoration of The Thief of Bagdad. While the off-air copy from ARTE that I have watched does not do the astonishing imagery justice, it immediately signals its difference from earlier transfers of the film. Firstly, it contains the original credit sequence. The version presented both on the Kino DVD and the Cohen/MoC Blu-ray has a different (less elaborate) font for the main title, then dissolves straight to the image of the Holy Man and child in the desert:

In the Photoplay version, the more elaborate title is followed by full credits of cast and crew, then the desert prologue scene:

But the major difference is that the image in the Photoplay restoration is darker, the colours more saturated; it is as though the whole film has had a bath in some enriching elixir. I suspect that many viewers might worry the shadows are too dark. Having never seen an original tinted print from 1924, I cannot say how it compares with a contemporary copy – nor can I say how it compares to a contemporary projection of the film. What I can say is that it makes the previous transfers look anaemic, as though they have been over-cleaned. This is especially obvious in the beautiful transition from day to night via a dissolve. In the Cohen version, the tinting dissolves almost to monochrome for night:

In the Photoplay version, the tinting dissolves to deep blue:

As you can see from the following captures, the overall difference in colour and contrast makes a big difference. In the images below, stills from the Cohen Blu-ray are on the left, images from the ARTE broadcast of the Photoplay version on the right:

I simply don’t know which is more “authentic”, but I must say I’m a sucker for the shadowy saturation of the Photoplay version. I also note that many compositions in the Photoplay restoration are less cropped at the top, left, and bottom of the frame. (The takes and editing appear to be exactly the same in Cohen/Photoplay versions, so I don’t think this is an instance of each copy deriving from a different negative.) This, combined with the title font and longer credit sequence, suggests a different, and dare I say superior, generation print being used by Photoplay. It really does look gorgeous.

But will we ever see it on home media? And will Wilson’s score ever get a chance to accompany it? There is certainly reason enough culturally, and surely room enough commercially, for both the Davis/Cohen release and the Wilson/Photoplay restoration to co-exist. Please, someone make it so!

Paul Cuff

References

Gillian B. Anderson, Music for Silent Films, 1894-1929: A Guide (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988).

Mark Fitz-Gerald, liner notes for Mortimer Wilson: The Thief of Bagdad, First Hand Records FHR126, 2022, compact disc.

Jeffrey Vance, Douglas Fairbanks (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

Bonn from afar (2025, day 2)

Day 2 of Bonn and already I must take a kind of detour from the programme. Today’s streamed film is Saxophon-Susi (1928; Ger.; Karel Lamač), the same restoration of which I saw via the online Pordenone festival last year. I refer readers interested in the film to that earlier post, while today my comments will primarily address the differences in presentation between the two festivals.

The first thing to note was that Bonn offered two versions of Saxophon-Susi. Aside from the version with musical accompaniment (discussed below), there was a version with Germany an audio-description version for the visually impaired. (Though another audio-description video has text and narrator credits, I couldn’t find any for this specific film.) I was curious to know if this was presented with the soundtrack beneath the descriptive text. It was not, so offers a very curious experience – at least for this non-impaired spectator. I would be very curious to know more about the audience for silent films with audio description. When I attended the online HippFest festival earlier this year, I wrote about the audio-description texts offered there. These were very elaborate, intended for live audiences as much as online spectators, and the texts described the music as well as the action. HippFest also offered brail text for the deaf to accompany screenings, though I cannot comment on the content of these. The Bonn audio description is simpler, offering a straightforward description of the action and a rendition of all the intertitles. Obviously, I am not the intended audience for these alternate presentations – but I would be very curious to know more about (or hear from) anyone who has experienced these presentations as intended.

The second thing to note was the version with musical accompaniment. My comments here require some context… Though this 2023 restoration of Saxophon-Susi has not yet been released on DVD/Blu-ray, it has already accrued at least three new scores. The first was presented in August 2024 at the “Ufa filmnächte” festival in Berlin, where it was accompanied by Frido ter Beek and The Sprockets film orchestra. (Alas, the “Ufa filmnächte” is no longer a streamed festival, so I cannot report on how this score sounded.) For the version streamed from Pordenone in October 2024, there was a piano score by Donald Sosin. As I wrote at the time, this was delightful: catchy, rhythmic, playful, and fun. That said, I regretted the fact that the titular saxophone-playing sequences in the club and on stage had no saxophone on the soundtrack. At Bonn, the musical score offered was for piano and saxophone, and was composed/performed by M-cine (Dorothee Haddenbruch and Katharina Stashik, as they are identified on the video details page). It was great to hear a saxophone as part of the musical accompaniment, since this is a film whose very plot demands this instrument by featured. But the score itself was curiously chaste, which is to say that I found it less overtly fun than Sosin’s piano score from Pordenone.

At the premiere in 1928, Saxophon-Susi was accompanied by a jazz orchestra – and the poster for the film’s release in France also includes the promise of a jazz orchestra in the cinema. The film also had a tie-in song, “Die Susi bläst das Saxophon”, composed by Rudolf Nelson. (Both Sosin and M-cine cited this song in their scores, and as I presume did that of Frido ter Deebk in August 2024.) This morning, I dug a little into some contemporary reviews to get more of a sense of the original music. It certainly seems to have been a major part of the value of the live performances. For example, Der Kinematograph (4 November 1928) cites the arranger/conductor Paul Dessau’s “musical wit” and “truly comedic touch” in his score – and live performance at the premiere. The reviewer reports “enthusiastic applause from the laughing, amused audience” at the dance sequences etc. Oh, to see the film with live music and audience…

Lacking an orchestral score in 2025, I spent the rest of this morning listening to the many recordings of “Die Susi bläst das Saxophon” made in 1928 in the wake of the film’s original release. There were various instrumental versions made, such as the peppy version by Efim Schachmeister and his orchestra. The melody was clearly an international hit, as it was exported to the British/US market via The Charleston Serenaders, who recorded a charmingly upbeat rendition outside Germany in 1928. One can also sample a version with lyrics, as sung back in Berlin by Paul O’Montis in the company of the Odeon Tanzorchester. But by far the most pleasing version is the deliciously slow, relaxed instrumental account provided by Marek Weber’s band. I absolutely adore the slow tempo, the way this gives extra space and time for the various soloists to take their turn with the melody. You get the feeling that you’re eavesdropping on a Berlin dance night in 1928. It’s a simply joyous little number in their hands.

Looking up the identities of these various musicians is itself an interesting exercise. The composer of the song, Rudolf Nelson, was a popular cabaret and theatre musician. He was also Jewish, and in 1933 was forced to flee Germany, settling in the Netherlands – where he had to live in hiding during the German occupation. This grim period of history interrupts the biographies of the recording artists of Nelson’s song, too. The Austro-Hungarian Marek Weber was a musician of the old school and purportedly disliked jazz (perhaps this explains his slow tempo in “Die Susie bläst das Saxophon”?), but nevertheless ended up recruiting some of the best jazz musicians in Germany and recording plenty of popular tunes. As a Jew, he saw which way the political tide was turning and left Germany in 1932, ultimately settling in the US. Efim Schachmeister was born in Kiev to Jewish-Romanian parents but made his name in Berlin in the 1920s. He fled the Nazis and eventually ended up in Argentina. Paul O’Montis was Hungarian by birth and made his name on the Berlin cabaret scene. Openly gay, he was forced to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power. Sadly, he was one of many who didn’t flee far enough. After finding refuge in Vienna, after the Anschluss of 1938 he relocated to Prague – but was arrested there in 1939 and, after various relocations, ended up being killed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1940. Such stories are common when researching artists of this period, but somehow the combination of such light-hearted numbers as “Die Susie bläst das Saxophon” in the context of their makers’ lives is especially sobering.

One upshot of this rather divergent morning is my desire to hear a jazz band score for Saxophon-Susi, something in the vein of Marek Weber’s recording of the theme song. If the film gets released on home media, it rather depends on how much effort (i.e. money) someone wants to put into it. What so often happens is that special scores are composed for live show(s), then no money is made available for that score to appear on home media with the film. There are many examples of expensive film restorations released with the cheapest musical option on DVD/Blu-ray. I do hope that Saxophon-Susi gets the score it deserves.

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

Live cinema at the BFI: Gösta Berlings saga (1924; Sw.; Mauritz Stiller)

On Sunday I went to London to the BFI Southbank. The reason? To see the UK premiere of the new(ish) restoration of Mauritz Stiller’s Gösta Berlings saga. Having known the film only on its old DVD incarnation, I was excited to see the differences that extra material and tinting/toning would make. I also have memories of being mildly irritated by the Matti Bye score present on the old restoration, so looked forward to hearing the live piano accompaniment from John Sweeney. Delightfully, the presentation took place in NFT1 – Stiller deserves the biggest screen on offer! With an excellent view in the centre of the auditorium, I took my seat…

Where to begin? I suppose with a synopsis. But with Gösta Berlings saga this is something of an undertaking. As he had done with Gunnar Hedes saga (1923), Stiller simplified the Selma Lagerlöf novel on which the film is based – by my god it’s still a complex affair with a shedload of characters. Later I will discuss a few aspects of the plot through its characters, but a brief summary might go as follows: Gösta Berling is a defrocked priest who joins a band of revelling “cavaliers” on the Ekeby estate. He variously attracts and is attracted to a series of women, resulting in much heartbreak and ruin – including to the Ekeby estate. Can Gösta Berling rebuild his reputation and restore the estate to its rightful owner?

The new Svenska Filminstitut restoration was completed in 2022 and adds some sixteen minutes’ worth of footage to the longest previous edition, though it is still another fourteen minutes (approx.) short of the original two-part version from 1924. The restoration credits at least acknowledge this history, unlike those of the recent Svenska Filminstitut version of Stiller’s Sången om den eldröda blomman (1919), which (as I wrote when I saw it) omits any mention of the significant amount of material that remains missing. In terms of viewing the film, the missing scenes from Sången om den eldröda blomman cause less of a problem than the material missing from Gösta Berlings saga. With the latter, the plot is so complex that a summary of what happens in missing scenes (if this information is available) would have enhanced the experience. I remain entirely unclear as to whether the narrative gaps are an issue with Stiller’s skill as a screenwriter or with the gaps in the restoration. (More on this issue later.) As the restoration credits also admit, the pictorial designs for the intertitles of Gösta Berlings saga were not able to be recreated even if the text and font have been. This is a shame, but entirely understandable – and at least the credits flag this absence. But the most obvious difference to the new restoration is the revival of tinting (for the film) and toning (for the intertitles). The film colours are based on a positive copy of the film preserved in Portugal, and the intertitle colour on a contemporary written description, so the overall scheme is likely not identical to the copies presented in Sweden – but this is not a major issue. The main point is that the tinting, in combination with the picture quality, looks stunning. Gösta Berlings saga is a fabulous film to look at. As I’ve written on previous posts about Stiller films, one of the main reasons to watch them is the photography. For Gösta Berlings saga, Julius Jaenzon captures the landscapes in winter and in spring with equal skill. The level of detail, the subtlety of the lighting, the richness of the textures, the artfulness of the composition – it all makes for a great watch. Though I always prefer Stiller when he’s outside, the interiors of this film are also excellent. The well-appointed rooms of the big houses are grand in scale, but more interesting and more complex are the ramshackle spaces of the cavaliers’ “wing” and the various poor houses in which characters end up at various stages.

The cast of Gösta Berlings saga is led by Lars Hanson, who is superb in the title role. As well as being a strikingly handsome star, Hanson is an engaging and sympathetic screen presence – and Stiller knows just how to frame him, to light him, to capture his performance to its best. His character swings wildly from mood to mood, but Hanson can also be disarmingly reflective and vulnerable. It is these moments of stillness, often at the end of a sequence, that win you over to him. I must say that I find Hanson’s Don Juan-ish character in Sången om den eldröda blomman more comprehensible, and thus his highs and lows more moving than in Gösta Berlings saga. But Hanson is still striking on screen, and committed in his every scene of Gösta Berlings saga – whether channelling divine inspiration, drinking himself half to death, making promises he can’t keep, leaping into blazing buildings, or riding across frozen lakes. He has a lot to do and does it all with great aplomb.

Then there is Greta Garbo as Elizabeth, his Italian love interest and the not-quite-for-legal-reasons wife of the comic Henrik Dohna. I must be honest and say that I never really understood or engaged with Garbo’s character. This is partly an issue of performance, or of direction of performance. Stiller doesn’t quite know how to get the best out of Garbo, either in terms of her look or her gestures – and thus nor does Garbo. For me, Garbo is the least successful of the film’s major performances. But I think that the real issue is that her character is not well developed, and her relationship with Gösta a little unconvincing. We never see Elizabeth meeting Gösta for the first time, nor do we learn that he was tutoring her until later in the film, when we get a flashback to her Swedish lessons with him in the park. We see this same scene in flashback twice, but never the original scene or its context. I imagine this is a matter of missing material from the restoration, but if this is the case couldn’t we get a “missing scene” title to help explain? But even with this theoretical scene in place, I remain uncertain about the development of Elizabeth’s love for Gösta – and vice versa. Everything points to Gösta ending up with Marianne (they are attracted to each other, they clash, he rescues her from the snow, then from the fire), and Jenny Hasselqvist’s outstanding performance as Marianne makes her a far more appealing and comprehensible character than Elizabeth. Marianne’s smallpox aside (and are we to assume that a night out in the snow is the cause of this viral disease?), I was confused by the fact that she and Elizabeth are (so a title claims) good friends at the end of the film. This seems like a title doing a lot of work to fix quite a glaring dramatic tension, and to help us overcome any doubts about Marianne getting hard done by. The result of all this is that Garbo may look beautiful, but her character often doesn’t provide her with a clear and convincing set of motives or emotions to express or shape into a coherent performance. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still fascinating to see Garbo so young and not-quite-there-yet, but this is absolutely not her film.

For me, the real star is Gerda Lundequist as Margaretha Samzelius. When she has her first major scene with Gösta in the “wing” of the cavaliers, she suddenly brings a degree of emotional depth and complexity that the film has not yet plumbed. She narrates her past, puts his troubles in perspective, and sets up the personal trauma that comes back to haunt her later in the film. It’s a great scene, and she commands attention in everything she does. She is both naturalistic and expressive, superbly controlled without ever seeming mannered. What a great screen presence she is – you really can’t take your eyes of what she’s doing. This is the case even when the saga around her gets confusing. Dramatically, her relationship with the “cavaliers” that live on her estate goes through several total reversals of attitude that I find hard to comprehend. It’s an issue with the cavaliers more than with Margaretha, but she must bear the brunt of the dramatic topsy-turviness. Her most devoted cavalier (for reasons I don’t fully grasp) suddenly turns on the woman he has repeatedly said he loves, then feels devastated with guilt, then calls her an old witch, then (at the end of the film) feels remorseful once more. But whatever strange twists the film puts in the path of her character, Lundequist is there to embody the emotional resonance of the consequences. It’s a great performance.

Around the leads are a host of other strong, characterful performances. I have no reservations about any of the rest of the cast, but in discussing them I must work through some of my reservations about how the film knits together their various characters. For example, there is the scheming Märtha Dohna (played with relish by Ellen Hartman-Cederström). I can grasp her desire to disinherit her stepdaughter Ebba by (mis)allying her to Gösta: the film explains that this will enable Märtha’s natural son Henrik to inherit the Borg estate. But why at the end of the film does Märtha start taunting her prospective daughter-in-law, Elizabeth? Having tried so hard to get Elizabeth to sign the documents that would finalize the marriage, why does she suddenly turn on her and imply that the marriage would be a mistake? Seriously – why is she doing this? She also starts an argument with Gustafva Sinclaire about the history of her family and the identity of Henrik’s father. Given that the film has produced a dozen paintings (portraits of historic owners of Borg) to show on the walls of this very set, the faces of which are all clearly based on the features of the actor playing Henrik (Torsten Hammarén), we are given a clear visual answer (and a marvellous piece of design) – if no verbal answer in the dialogue of the scene. But this does not clarify the history of Märtha and her deceased(?) husband, nor the context of Henrik’s conception – nor the legal standing between the legitimate Ebba and the illegitimate(?) Henrik. God, what a confusing plotline – couldn’t the film make this clearer? Or at least not throw in last-second complications to make something relatively simple unnecessarily confusing?

I do not feel that I am merely nitpicking. It’s not unreasonable to want to know what is at stake in a drama and what motivates characters to act in the way that they do. For such a long and convoluted film, which has ample time to create complex narrative strands, I honestly don’t think Gösta Berlings saga is as coherent as it could be. At some point I will read the Lagerlöf novel, but my suspicion is that the film doesn’t go far enough in simplifying the original story. I often get the sense that far more has happened, and needs to be known, than I am being told in the film. Stiller creates a marvellously rich world on screen – but as impressive as the enormous sets and set-pieces are, I’m not wholly convinced in the coherence of the drama and its characters.

But I regret having to spend so much time on my reservations about this film. Despite all the above, I still think Gösta Berlings saga is tremendously pleasurable to watch – especially on a big screen with a full house and live music. In these circumstances, the film absolutely works. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about Gösta Berlings saga is that the way scenes can by be baggy or confusing yet somehow pack an emotional punch. Again and again, Stiller finds a way of pulling things together and providing you with a pay-off that works – even if the preceding material doesn’t.

In Act 2, the long flashback to Berling’s time as a priest is a case in point. The chapel scene, in which the hungover Gösta Berling delivers a knock-out sermon, doesn’t quite work on screen: intertitles have to do too much summarizing, to convey too much dramatic weight, to be convincing. (Stiller cannot quite find the cinematic means of expressing the content of the speech. Even Hanson’s performance, committed though it is, isn’t enough to substitute for what I presume is a lengthy chunk of prose in the novel.) Yet if the scene doesn’t quite come off, it is followed by a truly excellent realization of the aftermath of the sermon, as Gösta insults his parishioners and is run out of town. (We’ll pass over quite why he does this.) There follows a simply stunning image of him at night on a snowy, tree-lined road. It’s an image of amazing resonance, the very picture of dejection, isolation, loneliness, defeat. It’s beautiful to look at, with amazing low-level lighting, and expresses everything you need to know in a single shot. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. And it somehow redeems the rather uneven earlier part of the act. It gives you the emotional pay-off to what preceded it so effectively that the whole act makes more sense. This kind of thing happens many times across the film. Though I wasn’t convinced by Garbo as the main love interest, I was still moved when she got together with Gösta at the end. As I said, Stiller finds a way of ending things so effectively that your reservations (or at least mine) melt away.

Another factor must be mentioned, which is the terrific musical accompaniment by John Sweeney at the BFI screening. He kept up an amazing stream of lush, beautiful musical scenes and sequences that knitted together the drama into an effective whole. The race across the ice sequence in the penultimate act of the film, for example, was wonderfully handled. As elsewhere, I found the character motivation in this scene, and even the basic plotting, very confusing. (Dramatically, the whole sequence is oddly organized. Elizabeth heads off across the ice from Borg to Ekeby because she believes that her father will attack Gösta, but the audience has already been shown the father forgiving Gösta entirely. Fine – at least we know, even if it makes her journey less dramatically effective. But then why does Gösta seem to overtake Elizabeth rather than encounter her? The point of the scene is that they should meet each other coming from opposite directions, yet here he is catching up with her from behind. This isn’t just a matter of a different continuity pattern in Stiller’s editing, but a matter of dramatic staging. And when Gösta gives Elizabeth a lift, why does he steer away from Borg and admit that he is abducting her – not just from Borg but from Sweden? A fit of pique? Genuine passion? If so, from whence has it sprung? Only when Elizabeth asks him what the hell he’s doing does he mention the fact that they’re being chased by wolves. When did he realize this?) Yet during the screening, when Sweeney started pounding out a terrific refrain for the race across the ice, all these questions faded away: you’re left to marvel at the technical brilliance of the way the race is filmed, and the mad melodrama of it all. Even the faint sense of incoherence or (at least) incomprehension is somehow suspended, or transcended, in the thrill of such a gloriously cinematic scene. Later, when Ekeby has been rebuilt (but how?! and by what means?!), and Gösta and Elizabeth enter their new home, Sweeney’s grand, pealing chords were the perfect way to end the film. The final notes had hardly faded when the audience burst into applause: for the film, for the stars, for the music. Bravo!

I do hope this new restoration is released on DVD/Blu-ray, or at least made available online per other Swedish silents via the Svenska Filminstitut digital archive. Sadly, there is no guarantee that even the most important restorations ever get a commercial release. I still find it staggering that Sången om den eldröda blomman is not available on home media: you can buy the complete recording of Armas Järnefelt’s beautiful score on CD, but you cannot buy the film on DVD! Let’s hope something more happens to Gösta Berlings saga. I imagine that the old Matti Bye score will be expanded/reworked for any media release, but I do wish any original arrangement from 1924 would be investigated. Evidence of the music clearly survives, as Ann-Kristin Wallengren (in her thesis on music in Swedish silent film) mentions some of the cues used. (This included parts of Järnefelt’s score for Sången om den eldröda blomman, as well as of the Louis Silvers/William F. Peters score for Griffith’s Way Down East (1920).) It’s curious that the musical legacy of Swedish silent cinema has received so little attention, especially compared to the numerous original scores and arrangements that have been researched and restored for films elsewhere in Europe and in Hollywood.

Gösta Berlings saga is a big, baggy, beautiful film. I’m so glad I saw it in such wonderful circumstances at the BFI. And as much as I would welcome it on DVD/Blu-ray, I also cannot help think that I wouldn’t have been as moved – nor would my reservations have been so effectively overcome – if I had seen it on a small screen instead. Live cinema allows silent film to attain its maximum impact: audiences and music are an essential element of exhibition, and thus of understanding, that cannot be replicated at home. So if you ever get the chance to see Gösta Berlings saga this way, seize it!

Paul Cuff

Programming silent cinema: An interview with Oliver Hanley (3/3)

This final part of my conversation with Oliver Hanley covers the role of music in silent film festivals, both onsite and online.

Paul Cuff: We’ve talked so far about the processes of researching, locating, and scheduling material from archives, i.e. the work involved in curating the films themselves. But organizing a festival for silent cinema involves a whole other aspect of presentation: live music. How does the relationship between curators and musicians work?

Oliver Hanley: I’m curating for two festivals that have a long tradition. This year we had the fortieth edition of the Bonn festival, and Bologna is also approaching forty. Both festivals have been screening silent films for several decades, so I, as a curator, have “inherited” a roster of musicians, as it were. In Bonn, it’s usually a given that we will include most if not all of the “regulars” – not just for the sake of their past involvement and long relationship with the festival, but because they’re all great musicians. Neil Brand and Stephen Horne from Britain, for example, or the Aljoscha Zimmermann Ensemble or Richard Siedhoff from Germany. Richard is from a younger generation, but he’d already been playing for the Bonn festival for a good ten years when Eva and I took over curatorial duties.

PC: You’ve talked about wanting to expand the range of films shown at Bonn. Does this hold true about the musical aspect?

OH: Since Eva and I became involved with the Bonn festival in 2021, we’ve been working with the team to expand the range of musicians, particularly with an eye to increasing the number of female musicians. We also wanted to give younger musicians a chance and to involve more musicians who are based locally. In 2024, I think we had the highest turnover since I’ve done this festival.

PC: How do you organize who does what?

OH: When we divvy up the films, we make sure to have every musician or group play no less than twice as a rule, unless there are reasons why they can’t. For example, the Cologne-based group M-cine (comprising pianist Dorothee Haddenbruch and saxophonist Katharina Stashik) performed an original score for Thora van Deken [1920] for our 2024 edition. Since this was an 85-minute feature, and the score was meticulously composed note-for-note in advance, this was a lot of work for them, and it was understandable that they didn’t accompany another film in that year’s programme. The same with Filmsirup, the local group who accompanied The Black Pirate [1926] at the end of the festival. They have quite a complicated set-up because they use electronic instruments as well, so we usually have them play just once. Everyone else played twice, usually a feature and a short. We already found that we were pushing our limits in terms of how many individual musicians and groups we could incorporate with only twenty-one films to go around. We couldn’t include everyone who had previously played at the festival in recent years, and we had no possibility to bring “new” people in.

PC: How do you think you will approach this in future?

OH: I don’t know the answer. I’m sure it will be a discussion point for next year’s festival. In terms of gender balance, I’m quite happy with what we’ve achieved in Bonn so far. We had twenty-one film screenings in our main programme this year. Nine of these (so almost half) had at least one woman playing, which is not bad – though obviously, there’s still room for improvement. I don’t think you should do things purely by numbers, but you should at least have an awareness and try to do better.

PC: Is it difficult having to reject musicians?

OH: It’s very tricky. It’s always unpleasant having to turn down new people, but it’s just as unpleasant, if not more so, when we have to break the news to veterans that they can’t play in a particular year. It’s not the same as having to tell an archive that we can’t screen one of their new restorations in this year’s programme. With musicians it’s much tougher – they’re living people, and this is their livelihood.

PC: Do you choose the films first, or the musicians?

OH: In Bonn, the film selection is usually decided upon first, then we work out who should play for what film in a dialogue between the curators and the management team.

PC: And how do you decide which musician gets which film?

OH: Assigning musicians to films is as much a logistical issue as it is an artistic decision. Of course, we look at who would be suited to what film, and sometimes it’s just super obvious. This year, for example, we knew from the start that Maria do Mar [1930] would be perfectly suited to Stephen Horne and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry. So, to schedule the screening, you need to know when Stephen and Elizabeth-Jane are available. Since we’re bringing them in from abroad, their two performances should ideally be on consecutive nights. This means we can then economize on hotel costs etc. Socially, of course, this is less fun for the musicians. It’s always nice to stay longer and hang out with people and so on, but we always have to compromise. This year I think it all worked out pretty well, and I was very happy with the combinations. There were a couple of films where maybe we should have swapped the order or something, but generally I was very pleased.

PC: Does your timetable allow much flexibility for the sake of live performance?

OH: To a certain degree, we can adjust the screening schedule of our festival in Bonn to fit the musicians’ schedules, but there are limitations. For example, we only have “double features” on Fridays and Saturdays, so there are certain films that can only be screened on those days. Likewise, the films for the opening and closing night screenings tend to be set in stone. For other films in the programme, we’re usually not tied down to a specific date, just as long as the two films are screened the same evening. So, there’s a certain degree of flexibility. For mid-week screenings, we try to remain roughly within a two-hour total runtime, because we’re an open-air festival taking place in summer, so we start very late. When we have introductions to the films beforehand, that automatically extends the duration of the event. Midweek, it’s nice if we can aim to be done before midnight, because then we always have to run tests for the next day and so on. On the weekends, we feel we can afford to go on a bit longer.

PC: Do you try to think of the shape of the week as a whole?

OH: It’s nice if there’s a kind of progression that you can somehow sense, but it isn’t essential. Sometimes, for example, we might pose ourselves the question, what could liven up a quiet Tuesday during the week at Bonn? Then we say, well, maybe let’s put a film by a well-known director that might bring a few people in. With a festival like Bologna, however, programming and scheduling are a bit trickier because there’s much more to consider. You are one piece of a giant jigsaw puzzle. The difference there is that we essentially have all the musicians available more or less all the time. So, then it’s more a case of making sure that the performances are evenly and broadly distributed, making sure that as many different musicians play each day, that no one musician has too much and others in turn too little, and that everyone has a day off at some point.

PC: Do you need to negotiate with other curators at Bologna?

OH: Yes, of course. All the silent film screenings are held in the same venues. But there are several different strands. There’s my “One Hundred Years Ago” strand, and there’s the early cinema strand “A Century of Cinema”, and then there are the new restorations and the rediscoveries, and so on. Many of the issues involved are the same as the ones we have to deal with in Bonn, but on a completely different scale and level of complexity.

PC: At Bologna, there are also larger shows, where silent films are performed with a full orchestra. Are these kinds of events divorced from the rest of kind of programming? I imagine that planning for these performances is very different from what you do when recruiting smaller groups or individual musicians.

OH: Exactly. Those orchestral shows are usually defined way in advance. This is because they involve far more logistics, preparation, and so on.

PC: Beyond these larger aspects of timetabling, do you have a relatively free hand, as far as music goes?

OH: What I personally like about the musical aspect of silent film programming is that it can be seen as a bit of a playground. We can try stuff out and if it doesn’t work, then we know for next time. So-and-so might not be so good with experimental films, so-and-so isn’t very good with challenging psychological dramas, so-and-so isn’t so good with comedy. You learn this kind of thing through experience. Often, it’s just a case of the instrumentation, when you think that a particular kind of sound would be decisive for a particular film. To an extent that predefines who you need – but it doesn’t always mean you get it right. I’m always the first to admit when I was wrong about something, especially when it comes to either the accompaniment or the film itself not working as well as I thought.

PC: Do musicians ever pitch themselves?

OH: Yes, they do. We don’t always bite, sometimes because we know from the outset that it wouldn’t work out logistically (i.e. if the musician or musicians lives too far away for us to be able to cover the necessary travel expenses). What I often find is that people pitch themselves as a package deal, i.e. “here is a film for which I have recently composed a score”. Then we usually have to write back and say that that’s great, but the film was screened too recently at the festival to justify screening it again – or that we’re not interested in screening that film, but would they be interested in doing something else? A notable exception was the screening of Navesni [In Spring, 1929] in Bonn in 2023. We brought over these two Ukrainian musicians, Roksana Smirnova and Misha Kalinin, who had written to us the previous year and had performed their soundtrack to the film at several festivals and venues (they’ve since composed soundtracks for some other Ukrainian silent films). It was a great screening, and they’re great musicians and wonderful people, but like I said it’s the exception rather than the rule.

PC: Do the regular musicians also pitch specific films?

OH: Yes, this can happen from time to time. For example, Maud Nelissen was the one who pitched us Varhaník u sv. Víta [1929] because she had already played for it on several occasions, including HippFest and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. She contacted us really late on, just as the 2024 programme was nearing completion, but we happened to be one feature short, so it was almost serendipitous. In such cases, it’s clear it would be a massive faux pas to take the film but offer the musical accompaniment to someone else! As a curator, you always want to have good relations with the musicians. Not that we had any cause to even begin to consider the possibility of having anyone else play for this film: Maud’s accompaniment was great, and she (and the film) got a huge ovation at the live screening. was really pleased for her, because silent film audiences can be quite particular, and you can never really be certain in advance how they’re going to react to a specific film or performance, particularly if the film is not well known.

PC: Is that an added pressure?

OH: Oh, yes, and not just for the musicians, also for the curators. The audience always knows best, of course! So when people come up to you after the screenings, it’s always interesting to learn who liked – or, more importantly, didn’t like – what. I always say that if just one person comes up to me after the screening and says something positive, then that’s enough to make me happy. This year, Jûjiro [1928] didn’t go down so well at the live screening in Bonn, I felt, but someone later came and told me it was the best film at the festival. Thank god, I thought! We do it for you, you know.

That was the last of the three parts of my interview with Oliver Hanley. My great thanks to Oliver for taking the time to talk to me, and for correcting the drafts of the transcript of our conversation.

Paul Cuff

Abel Gance at the Cinémathèque française (2)

Day two of my retrospective binge, and we continue our exploration of Gance’s melodramas from the 1910s. Both films were familiar to me, but not in the form they were presented at the Cinémathèque…

Saturday 14 September 2024: Salle Georges Franju, 6.30pm

First up was Le Droit à la vie (1917). I had seen this film in the archives of the Cinémathèque française in 2010, in the company of Kevin Brownlow, and was very impressed by it. However, the copy that we saw had no intertitles at all, so we had only the synopsis to go on. (Some weeks later, Brownlow sent me a list of titles from his Pathé-Baby 9.5mm print, so having seen the film I could then read it!) Thankfully, the film has since been beautifully restored by the Cinémathèque française alongside (as the retrospective notes are keen to acknowledge) TransPerfect Media. The screening last week was, I believe, the premiere of this restoration – so it was a real treat to see it. This was a 4K restoration, based on the surviving 35mm negative. This original element had begun to decompose, so it was supplemented by the safeguard copy made of the negative in 1965. The missing titles were recreated on the basis of those in the 9.5mm version and Gance’s manuscript scenario, both preserved in the collection of the CNC/Cinémathèque française. The font for the titles was recreated after the typography of La Dixième Symphonie. I report this latter information with some pleasure, since one thing that can spoil even the best restoration is a modern font. (I think especially of many North American DVDs that not only translate but transliterate the foreign titles, turning them into the ugliest imaginable insertions into original prints. Urgh! I’ve written about this in an issue of Screen, should anyone be interested in more detailed pedantry.)

The plot of Le Droit à la vie is a pleasingly gripping drama (and yes, spoilers ahead). Pierre Veryal (Pierre Vermoyal) is a prodigiously talented young financier, aided by his two ambitious secretaries, Jacques Althéry (Léon Mathot) and Marc Toln (Georges Paulais). However, Veryal’s absolute – and amoral – devotion to his work is undermining his health, and he ignores his doctor’s recommendation for absolute rest. Veryal’s only real feelings are for his pupil Andrée Maël (Andrée Brabant), an orphan being looked after by her grandmother (Eugénie Bade). But Andrée loves Jacques, who returns her feelings while being financially unable to support a wife. He is about to ask Andrée’s grandmother for permission to marry, but the old woman dies – and Jacques must leave for America to manage Veryal’s affairs, and to win his own fortune. The grandmother has willed that Andrée is entrusted to the care of Veryal, who exploits this to marry Andrée. Many months later, Jacques returns from America a rich man. He not only finds that Andrée is married, but that Veryal has an infectious illness that will condemn Andrée if there is significant “contact”. Despite Jacques’s entreaties, Veryal insists on enjoying his last months of life. He sells all his assets to fund lavish parties. Meanwhile, Marc Toln exploits Veryal’s distraction to embezzle large sums from his accounts. When this is discovered by Veryal during a masked ball, Toln tries to kill his employer – but only succeeds in wounding him, an act witnessed by Jacques. Knowing Jacques is a rival for Andrée’s affections, Veryal falsely supports Toln’s claim that it was Jacques who fired the shot. But at the trial, Jacques is vindicated by Veryal, who dies after having accepted that Andrée will marry Jacques.

Le Droit à la vie is a cracking film. It’s beautifully staged, beautifully lit, and the drama has real heft. The central love triangle – between a corrupt (usually capitalist, usually older) man, a younger woman, and her young lover – is one that recurs in multiple variations across Gance’s work. In Le Droit à la vie it is given its most vivid realization thus far in his filmography. The bite to Veryal’s predatory sexuality comes in the form of his illness, which initially seems to be merely fatigue – but is soon implied to be something more sinister. His increasingly erratic and violent behaviour, coupled with his rapid mental deterioration (even before being shot!), suggests syphilis – a diagnosis surely confirmed by the doctor’s insistence that he must avoid “contact” with his wife. No other kind of “contact” is envisaged as being dangerous, and the horror of Veryal’s “right” to Andrée’s body is as explicit as can be imagined.

Le Droit à la vie finds marvellous imagery with which to make this situation sinister. In particular, there is one remarkable staging of a scene that Gance replicates (closely) in J’accuse and (virtually identically) in La Roue. This is when Jacques witnesses Veryal forcing Andrée into his arms. The brutish embrace is framed within a window and partially-concealed by lace curtains. The equivalent scene in J’accuse is when Jean Diaz sees Edith being assaulted by her brutish husband François at the window – a moment made all the more shocking by the symbolic breaking of the glass and bleeding hand. And in La Roue, when Elie witnesses Norma being assaulted by Hersan, Gance goes further – making the rape of Norma as explicit as could be expected within the laws of censorship. (This scene was so often cut from the film that it was lost from all surviving prints, so the 2019 restoration had to reconstruct it from the 35mm rushes discovered in the archives.) Its iteration in Le Droit à la vie is still very powerful, one of many scenes when the combination of framing, editing, and lighting are united into a perfect mise-en-abïme of the drama.

It is with great sadness that I cannot share any image captures from this film, since it has never been released on any format since the advent of 9.5mm! I really, really hope that it is released on home media because it looks stunning. Burel’s photography is sumptuous, from the dark, complex interior spaces of Veryal’s rooms to the exquisite sun-dappled exteriors where the forbidden lovers meet. During the latter, there is one stunning shot of Jacques and Andrée: he half-concealed behind a tree, his profile outlined in sunlight; she, half-revealed in the clearing beyond, her face and hair haloed with natural back-lighting. My god, my god, my god this is a good-looking film. I cannot praise the visual qualities of the restoration highly enough. The 4K scan does real justice to the film, and seeing it on the big screen in the Salle Franju was incredibly moving. Some of the close-ups of Andrée were ludicrously detailed, simply glowing with life. Such was the sheer presence of this film, I cried just to look at it.

The performances in Le Droit à la vie are very good. Andrée Brabant is a proto-Ivy Close in La Roue, and both women have the long, curly blonde hair of a Mary Pickford – and are as exquisitely lit as she or (very much Gance’s role-model) Lillian Gish. Brabant herself is an engaging presence, able to communicate with her eyes – sometimes directly into the camera – the emotions of her character. Not to repeat myself from my last post, but Léon Mathot is once again both a sensitive and dramatic performer. However, I find him more engaging and affecting in Le Droit à la vie than in Les Gaz mortels. I think this is entirely to do with the respective quality of the films. Le Droit à la vie is a pleasingly dark drama, and the performers have something to work with – Mathot included. Vermoyal is creepy as Veryal, but has a tendency to eye-rolling exaggeration and occasional histrionics (especially when suffering from his bullet wound). I’ve only seen him in Gance’s early films and believe he was an actor from the Grand-Guignol theatre, which might explain his playing-to-the-gallery mode of performance. His was the only performance that stood out for its moments of crudity – but I suppose that conveying the signs of tertiary syphilis gives license to a bit of excess. Actually, I thought one of the most engaging performances in Le Droit à la vie is by Georges Paulais. His role is relatively minor, but there is a great clarity and presence in all of his gestures, all of his glances.

My final word on the film must go the music for this screening by Nicolas Giraud and Fixi. I confess that when I saw the name “Fixi” I was faintly worried about being given something peculiar (a fear not exactly allayed by the sight of his garish shirt as he stood to acknowledge our applause welcoming him to the stage). Fixi was at the piano, but he sometimes swapped the keyboard for his accordion. Giraud played a variety of instruments, from guitar to percussion and acoustic loops. If all this sounds like an odd mix, the result was superb: rhythmically and tonally in tune to the action, and independently musically satisfying. There were some very pleasing combinations of sounds, and such was the variety of combinations that it often felt like the musicians were jamming with the film – but jamming in the best possible sense, of playing off the changes in tempo and dramatic context. The score was well-conceived and well-executed. A pleasure to hear, and an enhanced pleasure to watch. Bravo!

Saturday 14 September 2024: Salle Georges Franju, 8.15pm

Hot on the heels of Le Droit à la vie, released in January 1917, Gance’s Mater Dolorosa (1917) was released in March 1917. Another concentrated melodrama, Mater Dolorosa focuses on Marthe Berliac (Emmy Lynn), who is having an affair with her brother-in-law, the writer Claude Berliac (Armand Tallier). In an attempted suicide, Marthe accidentally shoots her lover. Though she promises the dying Claude never to reveal the truth, Marthe’s secret attracts the interest of hunchbacked blackmailer Jean Dormis (Pierre Vermoyal) and his henchman (Gaston Modot). In attempting to pay off these men, Marthe’s husband Gilles Berliac (Firmin Gémier), a successful doctor, discovers the affair and disowns both Marthe and their son Pierre (Carène). Pierre is sent away to the suburbs of Paris, where he falls dangerously ill. Marital and paternal crises are eventually resolved when the husband sees the sincerity of his wife’s anguish, and is provided with new evidence by loyal servant Ferval (Anthony Gildès). Gilles finally reunites Marthe with Pierre and welcomes both back into his life.

Mater Dolorosa has a complex history during the silent era, and was also remade by Gance as a sound film with the same title in 1932. After being premiered in 1917, the silent version was re-edited and rereleased several times between 1918 and 1926. In 1993, the Cinémathèque Royale Belge undertook two restorations: the first reconstructed the original version of 1917, the second reconstructed the final rerelease version of 1926. The differences between the two include character names, character identities, and intertitles. The restoration of the 1917 version is (for me) by far the most satisfying, and the one I am used to seeing. Tinted and toned, it looks utterly gorgeous – while also being less verbose and more concentrated as a text. (The image captures included in this post are all from a copy of that version.) The 1926 rerelease version of Mater Dolorosa has more (to me, unnecessary and distracting) titles, as well as watering-down the love triangle by demoting the dead lover to a mere friend of Gilles Berliac rather than his brother. It also survives in monochrome only, which denies the film something of its visual richness.

The Cinémathèque française retrospective showed only the 1926 version. I confess that I was disappointed by the quality of the print, which was by far the poorest of any film I saw. It looked as though it had been assembled from copies of copies of copies, as well as being quite badly scratched. The restoration of the 1917 version is in much better shape, as well as offering the original tinting/toning that the 1926 print lacked. The 1993 restoration was shown on 35mm, but it lacked any restoration credits to explain its complex history. (For anyone seeing a copy of the 1917 Mater Dolorosa for the first time, it must have been confusing to see all the letters in the film dated March 1920!) All that said, I still enjoyed seeing the film projected, and with a good accompaniment on piano by Kolia Chabanier, another student from Jean-François Zygel’s school of improvisation.

This was Gance’s first collaboration with Emmy Lynn, and her performance is terrific – it’s her film, from beginning to end, and she carries the drama. With a fabulous wardrobe of dark, velvety dresses, of fur-lined coats, of hats and veils, she is a passionate, sombre diva – retreating into shadows, falling to her knees, her hair haloed against fire, against wintry windows. The intensity of emotion, and her rendering of anguish, is also inseparable from the way Gance visualizes the dramatic tone. I have previously described Gance’s love of sun-soaked southern landscapes. Mater Dolorosa is the antithesis of the outdoorsy brightness evident in the opening scenes of Les Gaz mortels. Mater Dolrosa was shot in and around Paris in the winter of 1916-17. Bleak northern light, forever dimmed by clouds, defines the exterior spaces. The house to which Pierre is exiled is grim in and of itself, but the bare trees and cold glinting pond outside make it doubly so. The climactic sequence, in which Gilles drives his wife through a rundown suburban landscape of dark woods and walled cemetery, is chilling in every sense. This is a cold world, in which passions smoulder in the shadowy interiors of domestic space.

Chiaroscuro lighting defines all the scenes of emotional intensity, from the rich – and faintly sinister – apartment of Claude Berliac to the curtained spaces of Gilles and Marthe. Gance’s compositions delight in great swathes of black, from dramatic drapes to silhouetted figures. Light floods across floors, illuminating patches of action or highlighting pale faces. It’s exquisite to look it, an aesthetic that wraps you up in its atmosphere.

It helps that Gance fills his drama with strange touches and rich images. Take the way that the romping Pierre, playing naked in a fish tank, comes to the window to see his parents. It’s another scene framed by a window, Marthe and Gilles half masked by the lace curtains. The child puts its hands up towards his parents, but can only paw at the lace and glass. It’s such a beautiful moment, and one that sems to carry some extra weight of meaning. It is as though Pierre’s parents don’t really exist: they are as unreachable as a projection, a painting framed by the window. (It’s almost an image from an Ingmar Bergman film.) The compelling oddness of the image unsettles the cosiness of the family so effectively, so completely, that you can totally understand the way Gilles willingly tries to destroy their relationship.

So too with the scene when Gilles deposits Pierre into the care of a nurse in a distant house. Convinced he is not the father of the child, he reaches for a mirror and stares at his image. We see the light gleaming on his face (yet again framed against a window), the cruelty in his eyes. When he reaches for his child, his hands clasp around Pierre’s throat. It’s an embrace and a threat. The same gesture recurs in Gance’s films, each time becoming more complex, more troubling. It’s there in Le Droit à la vie, in Veryal’s sinister embrace of the reluctant Andrée – a gesture of enforced attachment, of physical ownership and restraint. In J’accuse, Edith is raped by German soldiers and gives birth to Angèle, who is adopted by her lover Jean Diaz. This adoption of the half-German Angèle is absorbed into (and complicated by) the film’s narrative concern with revenge and forgiveness. After Édith shows Jean her child for the first time, there is an extraordinary moment when Jean half-protectively, half-threateningly holds Angèle’s throat. Looking into her eyes, he tells her: “I’ll teach you how to become French. Then you can find your own way to punish your father as he deserves.” In La Roue, Sisif clasps his son Elie – who is also his rival in love for Sisif’s adopted daughter Norma – around the neck with the same gesture, realizing that Norma has returned into their life. And in Napoléon, Bonaparte enacts this gesture in the scene with his adopted daughter Hortense, forcing her into a reluctant kiss. (Sadly, I could not make the screening of the 1932 Mater Dolorosa in the retrospective, but the same gesture is evidently in that film: one of its posters uses this subject.)

But to return to the silent Mater Dolorosa, I long to see the 1917 version on a big screen with live music. I love its imagery, its atmosphere, its wintriness, its strangeness. Perhaps the last word on Gance’s film should go to Colette. “Let us praise Mater Dolorosa”, she wrote in June 1917:

Let us praise Emmy Lynn, exhausted young mother, who surpasses everything she promised us in the theatre. Agree with me, since I take so much pleasure in it, that the action progresses in scenes lit with a rare richness – gilded whites, sooty and profound blacks. And my memory also retains certain sombre close ups in which the speaking, suppliant head of Emmy Lynn floats like a decapitated flower.

Paul Cuff