Tag: France

DVD/Blu-ray review: Napoléon, vu par Abel Gance (Potemkine, 2025)

This week, I return to the new restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927) by the Cinémathèque française. I saw the premiere of this version with live orchestra in Paris in July 2024, but now I have the opportunity to pour over it on the small screen. Yes, the restoration has finally been released on UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD formats in France by Potemkine. What follows is not so much a technical review, especially since I do not have the wherewithal to play – let alone analyse – the UHD discs of this edition. Instead, I want to comment on how the Blu-rays reveal some of the choices made during the restoration process. Though it was broadcast on French television in November last year, this is the first time I have been able to see it in detail. At home, I can pause, replay, and capture. While the sense of live drama so palpable in the Paris concert cannot be replicated at home, other aspects are perhaps more evident through analysis on the small screen…

Presentation. As befits the ballyhoo around this restoration, the box is pleasingly hefty. Indeed, it rather resembles a Kubrickian obelisk. And, like our prehistoric ancestors, it took me several minutes of examination and careful fondling to work out how to open the damn thing. But I can’t deny that it’s a lovely object to observe and to handle. Inside are 1) a fold-out box of the UHD and Blu-ray versions of the film, 2) a small booklet discussing the music and listing Gance’s cast/crew, and 3) the Table Ronde book from 2024 that contains a series of essays by various people involved in the restoration, as well as historians analysing the film. The booklet contains very little material that hasn’t been included elsewhere before, and the Table Ronde book was released in exactly the same format as a separate publication last year. (On this, see my earlier review.)

On the discs themselves, I immediately flag an issue that may concern non-French speaking readers of this blog. The Potemkine edition has no subtitles of any kind on any of its presentations. This is despite press releases promising (at the very least) English options for any/all formats of this edition (DVD, Blu-ray, UHD). Furthermore, the restoration end credits include a list of translators for six foreign subtitle tracks. None of these are listed on the packaging, and I checked on the Potemkine website and various other retail outlets in France to confirm: there is no mention of subtitles. I can only assume that this was due to copyright reasons, as it is commercial folly to reduce your potential foreign sales by not offering more language options. I’ve not yet heard about any plans for the film’s international release, either via Netflix or any other means. I can only imagine that one or more interested parties don’t like the idea of an English-language home media edition of this film preceding a future release. Though the Table Ronde publication makes the claim for the Cinémathèque française possessing worldwide copyright for Napoléon, there are clearly limits as to how and when it is being sold to international territories. Since I began writing this review, news has emerged that Potemkine (and other retailers) have begun cancelling orders to anyone outside France. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Image. Something I had not properly appreciated at the film concert in Paris was the was the Cinémathèque française sought to digitally simulate the look of Napoléon as it might have been projected on screen in 1927. This involves simulating the relative brightness of the projection lamp, as well as the framing of the image as projected on the screen itself. Watching the Blu-ray, these choices are much more striking.

In terms of the relative brightness, projector lamps of 1927 were not only powered by different means but ultimately less luminous than a modern equivalent. A simulation of this difference involves filtering the restored video to make it look warmer than it would otherwise appear. Restorers are always conscious about digitally recreating the “look” of a silent film that was shot on celluloid, but the issue of projected brightness is less discussed. However, the effort to adjust the look of Napoléon this way has at least one recent precedent. The 2019 restoration of Gance’s La Roue (1923) by François Ede and the Cinémathèque française made a conscious effort to reproduce the look of the film as projected in 1923. (You can see images from this restoration on my post from last year.) Apparent to anyone who saw previous editions of La Roue, either projected on 35mm (on modern projectors!) or digitally reproduced on DVD, Ede’s choice gave the extensive black-and-white photography of this film a much warmer look than before. This results in black-and-white no longer being… well, black-and-white. For monochrome scenes (the majority of the film), it’s like an ochre wash has permeated the frame. It will also influence tinted/toned sequences, though the interaction of this filtered brightness with colour elements is more difficult to unpick.

All of which is to say that the black-and-white sequences of Napoléon also look less black-and-white than in previous editions. This is most obvious (and, to my eyes, most aesthetically counter-intuitive) in the prologue, where the snow in the snow-covered landscape now looks decidedly less clean. On the big screen in 2024, I think my eyes adjusted to this – though there was so much light spill from the orchestra that the contrast was hardly the best anyway. On the small screen, I notice the aesthetics of this simulated warmth (I can’t quite call it “dimness”, but that it surely part of it) on the Blu-ray much more. Ede explained his reasoning for this choice about brightness in the liner notes for the Blu-ray of La Roue in 2019, by far the best and most transparent set of notes for a restoration I have ever read in this format. There are no such explanatory notes on the Cinémathèque française release of Napoléon, so it’s worth saying again: these scenes are not tinted or toned; they are monochrome black-and-white, purposefully rendered less so.

In terms of framing, the Cinémathèque française went one step further with Napoléon than with La Roue. According to their analysis, the aperture of contemporary projectors would slightly crop the film image on all four sides of the frame. As the below captures illustrate, there is less information within the frame in the 2024 restoration than in the BFI’s 2016 restoration. This is very noticeable as soon as you compare identical frames from identical shots between versions. I don’t have the time or energy to offer dozens of examples. (It is complicated by the fact that different restorations have utilized material from different versions of the film, so finding identical shots is rather time consuming!) But the final triptych is a clear example of how images deriving from the same negative (originally included in the Opéra version and subsequently added to some presentations of the (shortened) Apollo version) look different due to choices of the restorers. First is an image from the BFI’s 2016 restoration, second one from the new Cinémathèque française restoration:

I simply don’t know what to think about either of these choices. I understand and respect absolutely the desire to be historically informed, though it is ultimately impossible to ensure absolute fidelity to lost practices. Accuracy is also difficult to guarantee in a realm where there was enormous diversity across cinemas and equipment. Even this “fixed” digital image will look different on every screen that it is seen – projected or otherwise – in 2025. This is not to say that any desire to emulate the aesthetic of projection in 1927 is wrongheaded; it isn’t. But it is an irony that this restoration, which seeks to reveal Gance’s masterpiece in its ideal form, also takes steps to restrict the boundaries of its images.

It is also curious that Napoléon has been chosen to be presented in this way, but not other contemporary films produced by the same company, the Société Générale de Films (SGF). Gaumont’s recent restorations of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) and Finis terrae (1929) do not feature the cropping or dimming undertaken on Napoléon. You can see the edges of the frames in these other films, and the black-and-white is… well, black-and-white. Does Napoléon particularly benefit from extra treatment? If so, why? Or are we to take it that Gaumont’s restorations are somehow inaccurate, or at least ahistoric? I would perhaps have fewer qualms if the choices made during this restoration of Napoléon were in any way detailed, clarified, or explained in the accompanying booklet. But they are not.

The extras. To better illustrate the above issues, I can do no better than turn to one of the extras on the Blu-ray edition. Autour de Napoléon (1928) is a documentary made by Jean Arroy during the filming of Napoléon in 1925-26. It boasts some extraordinary behind-the-scenes footage of the production, both during and in-between shooting, as well as extracts of Napoléon itself. Extracts from Arroy’s remarkable film have previously featured in various modern documentaries on Gance and/or Napoléon, but this is the first time the surviving material has been assembled into a coherent whole. Alas, this restoration of Autour de Napoléon does not state how long it is, nor how this compares to the film’s original length in 1928. (Nor does it state what framerate(s) it uses.) However, information from 1928 does survive in the archives, so I can report that the film was originally shown in a version of 1605m, which would be approximately 70 minutes at 20fps (or 78 minutes at 18fps). At just less than one hour, this 2025 reconstruction at least presents most of the film. And, unlike the opening credits of Napoléon, it admits that the original montage is lost and cannot be definitively recreated with existing material.

Autour de Napoléon was restored by Eric Lange, with the assistance of Joël Daire, Serge Bromberg, and Kevin Brownlow. The restoration was produced by FPA France (the successor company to Lobster), though in association with the Cinémathèque française. What is immediately striking about this presentation of Autour de Napoléon is that it does not feature either the re-adjusted monochrome or frame cropping of Napoléon. This is most obvious when Autour de Napoléon includes extracts from Gance’s film. Though the footage used by Arroy seemingly derives from both the Opéra and Apollo versions of the film, certain shots are identical to those found in the Cinémathèque française restoration of Napoléon. In these examples, the full frame is visible, and the monochrome is more obviously black-and-white. (The tinted scenes are also far less saturated.) Though the original material (derived from several sources) for Autour de Napoléon is clearly less well preserved than for Napoléon, the difference in what is seen on screen is significant. In the below image captures, those from (the FPA France) Autour de Napoléon are on the left and those from (the Cinémathèque française) Napoléon on the right:

But these aesthetic issues are secondary to the sheer joy of watching Autour de Napoléon. The footage of Gance and his crew filming Napoléon is astonishing. You can see the unbelievable lengths they went to in order to achieve visual mobility: we see the camera mounted on a sledge-propelled guillotine, strapped to an operator’s chest, run on cables from the ceiling, mounted on the back of trucks and of horses. What’s more, the camera so often had to be specially mechanized to turn without being cranked by hand. Witness the amazing sight of Gance and his crew standing to admire the camera turning 360 degrees on its tripod, as if it were a living thing.

None of this would be so impressive if it weren’t for the evident energy of the entire cast and crew at work. Quite simply, Autour de Napoléon is one of the most joyful records of filmmaking you’ll ever see. Immediately striking is the sheer fun these people are having making this film. Gance – as Bonaparte is described in the prologue of Napoléon – is everywhere. Here he is in the snow, urging on the children in their snowball fight, and urging on his cameraman Jules Kruger to capture the action. Here he is demonstrating a gesture to his young Bonaparte, a gesture we will see exactly reproduced by the actor in the film itself. Here he is with an enormous megaphone, poised to direct the huge crowd that fills the set of the Convention. Here he is with a revolver, firing in the air to create the shock and fear he wants from his performers…

What’s so striking is how playful Gance is on camera. At a distance, we see him intensely concentrating on the activity on set. But when he’s close by, he’s always got an eye for the camera – for us – and he plays up to it wonderfully. Here he is in a huddle with Annabella and Gina Manès, playing with Josephine’s dog, making everyone laugh. I love these in-between moments of silliness. You get such a sense of the mood on set, such wonderful glimpses of these long-dead artists caught in the midst of life. By contrast, I think of the forbidding Marcel L’Herbier on set in Jean Dréville’s later making-of documentary Autour de l’Argent (1929). Here, L’Herbier never takes off his impenetrable sunglasses that shield him from the studio lights – and from our gaze. He’s a faintly sinister presence, always at work and never at play. (Kevin Brownlow once told me that meeting L’Herbier was like encountering an aristocrat from before the Revolution.) Dréville’s film is far more polished than Arroy’s, but it entirely lacks the fascinating odds and ends of Autour de Napoléon. See how much in-between time there is on screen. We see cast and crew relaxing on Corsica, meeting the locals; we see them waiting for the action to resume, or killing time when things ground to a halt. Arroy has an eye for the comic and incongruous. Here is a troupe of cavalry led by Bonaparte, who happens to be driving a car down the street. Here is Bonaparte, pistol in hand, sat on the back of another car. Simon Feldman, Gance’s Russian technical director, leans over the side, smoking a small cigar. They are waiting for a train to pass before they can resume filming. In the background stands a group of Pozzo’s frustrated cavalry. Gance is there too with Jules Kruger, who holds his huge handheld camera on his shoulder. The train slowly trundles past. As it does so, Gance sees that Arroy is filming and stalks towards the camera. He comes up to the back of the car and goes “Boo!”, throwing forward his arm. Arroy cuts to the next scene. It’s such a lovely moment, one of many rendered incredibly human by their incidental nature. That this film exists is miraculous, and I’m incredibly pleased and moved to finally be able to see so much of it. On this edition, Neil Brand provides a lively and fitting accompaniment on the piano. A superb extra.

Next up is Abel Gance et son Napoléon (1984), an hour-long documentary by Nelly Kaplan. This includes fragments of Autour de Napoléon, together with narration by Michel Drucker, who also appears at intervals in the former Billancourt studios where Gance filmed in 1925-26. Kaplan was Gance’s artistic (and personal) collaborator in the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as a much respected filmmaker in her own right in later years. It’s a shame, therefore, that she herself does not feature as a subject in this film. I recall seeing Kaplan for the last time in 2015, when she made an appearance at the Cinémathèque française during a presentation by Mourier about Napoléon. This included an extract from Abel Gance et son Napoléon, and when Michel Drucker appeared on screen much of the auditorium started laughing. Such is Drucker’s reputation as a cheesy host from French television in the 1980s. I felt very sorry for Kaplan, who was otherwise largely ignored at this event. One suspects that the inclusion of her Abel Gance et son Napoléon on this new Blu-ray is a mark of respect more than a measure of the documentary’s importance. Next to Autour de Napoléon, it is unfortunately rather thin.

Elsewhere, we get La Saga du Napoléon d’Abel Gance (2025) an hour-long documentary by Georges Mourier. It covers the story of the restoration, as well as the memories of some of Gance’s surviving friends and relatives. It’s lovely how Mourier plays with the age of his interviewees, showing them juxtaposed, young and old in a variety of archive (and new) footage – demonstrating the years that have passed, the time taken for this project to be envisioned and realized. I also found it very endearing to see Mourier and his colleague Laure Marchaut at work, and to see them age across the film. It’s a testament to their decades-long devotion that this documentary captures the effects of time on its human subjects as well as the film itself.

Of course, I was also longing to hear more information on the choices of the restoration, but that is not provided here. It’s very much geared to the story of the search across the globe for every last copy of Napoléon, and of the discovery of the “Rosetta Stone” in the archives: the document that details the scene-by-scene breakdown of the original Apollo version of 12,961m. But the history of how and when the Cinémathèque française decided to reconstruct the later, shorter edition of the Apollo version – “la Grande Version” – is not discussed. Nor is when and why this version was deemed “la Grande Version”, nor how its contents were determined, nor if other material survives that was excluded from the restoration, nor how closely the restoration resembles the original “Grande Version” in length or structure. As I outlined in detail in my previous posts on the new restoration, these questions remain unanswered. And since neither the credits, book, nor indeed any source mentions it, I did a quick time check. Excluding the lengthy restoration credits, this version of Napoléon runs to 6hrs, 59min, 37sec. At 18fps, this indicates a projected length of approx. 8633m – another figure not mentioned anywhere in the literature.

(I must also record my amusement at some of Mourier’s musical choices on the soundtrack of his documentary. He uses Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 to accompany a clip of the “Double Tempest”, just as he uses sections of the same composer’s Symphony No. 7 and Coriolan Overture to show other scenes of the Revolution being reassembled. These are the exact pieces used by Carl Davis in his score for the film, per the BFI edition. It’s interesting that Mourier seems to prefer Davis’s choices than Cloquet-Lafollye’s choices, which form the soundtrack of the Cinémathèque française restoration but do not feature in this documentary. Hmm.)

There are also three videos from film historians. In “Napoléon au cinema”, David Chanteranne talks about Gance’s film in relation to other cinematic Bonapartes, and to Napoleonic iconography more generally. The other two videos are by Elodie Tamayo. I have sung her praises in earlier posts, as her work editing Gance’s correspondence and resurrecting the fragments of his Ecce Homo (1918) is of enormous value. For this release of Napoléon, there is an interview with her and a video essay featuring clips from Gance’s film itself. Both are extremely engaging, interesting, and – especially the video essay (“Napoléon à contre-jour”)  – beautifully thought-through presentations. She discusses the film’s relationship with history, with Gance’s ideology, and with the medium of cinema itself. Her analysis manages to get to the heart of this enormously long film in an impressively brief space of time. (And I speak as someone who spent 332 minutes commentating on the BFI Blu-ray and still worries I didn’t do enough!) I earnestly hope that we hear more from Tamayo on Gance in the future…

Those are the sum of the extras, but I can’t help feeling that there are many more than might have been included. Most obviously, the Opéra version of Napoléon would have made a fascinating comparison piece. For all Mourier has emphasized that this was inferior to the Apollo version, it would be nice to see the difference for ourselves. If nothing else, it is of tremendous historical significance as the first version of the film shown in public. But I can also understand why this version might not have been included, aside from its four-hour length – and the expense of producing it. Its inclusion would inevitably signal that other versions of Napoléon might be interesting, valid, and valuable iterations of Gance’s project. This would rather jar against the label “definitive” that has been appended to the marketing for the restoration. Releasing the Opéra version would also demonstrate the fact that the triptych version of the “Double Tempest” it once boasted remains missing, and this fact might also raise awkward questions about the restoration process, its decisions, motives, and outcomes.

Another absence is the single-screen ending of Napoléon, as included in the original Apollo version – and in subsequent screenings at cinemas that lacked the capacity to project the triptychs (i.e. most cinemas). (Thankfully, this alternate ending is included on the BFI release as an extra.) Also absent are the triptych “studies” that Gance produced in 1927 using footage from Napoléon, short films which were subsequently projected at Studio 28. Two of these, Danses and Galops, have been restored and were shown at the Gance retrospective at the Cinémathèque française last year. (Sadly, this was a screening I couldn’t attend.) The third of Gance’s studies, Marine, is seemingly lost – a great shame, as it was purportedly the most visually beautiful of the three. Any material from or relating to these short films would have been a great bonus. Will they ever get a home media release?

Finally, I must admit my chagrin at the only book included in this set being the Table Ronde publication. I had thought that Mourier might have contributed a more substantial written account of the restoration. He announced some time ago that he would be publishing a book on his work on Napoléon, and I hoped that it would be included with the Blu-ray edition. Sadly, I must wait to give the Cinémathèque française yet more of my money. I do hope the book includes more evidence of the choices made during the restoration. (Rest assured, if/when it’s published, I will write a review.)

Conclusion. Nothing I’ve said should prevent you from buying the new edition of Napoléon. Indeed, purely on the basis of supporting this film, its makers, its legacy, its restoration, and its overall cultural importance, I strongly urge you to buy it. Several years overdue, and goodness known how much overbudget, this is the longest version of the film we’re likely to see. The Cinémathèque française is not going to be funding any further work on Napoléon. Aside from anything else, the word “definitive” in all their marketing signals that they’re done with this film. The only question is whether you will be able to buy the Potemkine edition, and whether any alternate edition will be released on Blu-ray outside France. It would be a sad fate for this most cinematic of films to be limited to streaming via Netflix.

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.

Pordenone from afar (2025, Day 2)

Day 2 is overfull with content! We begin in France in the early 1910s and finish in Ukraine in the late 1920s. It’s a day of contrasts, from stillness to restlessness, from adulthood to childhood, from the bourgeois world to the world of poverty, from canonical figures within film history to those residing in the margins…

The first four films on our schedule are by Louis Feuillade, and the first of these is Le Nain (1912; Fr.; Louis Feuillade). An unknown masterpiece is presented at the theatre. Its anonymous author is Paul Darcourt, the film’s titular “dwarf”, who lives at home with his mother. He is besotted by the image of Lina Béryl, the lead actress in his play. Their relationship is conducted over the telephone, and admired by the switchboard operators. But when the actress tracks down the author and his secret is revealed, she laughs in his face. FIN.

A comedy? A tragedy? It is both. As with Cyrano de Bergerac, one can smile at the elaborateness of the romantic subterfuge over the phone – played out in a brilliant split-screen effect – and at the naïve love of Paul for Lina. But unlike Rostand’s drama, there is no redemption or acceptance or transcendence in Le Nain. The brevity of the drama, and the suddenness of Paul’s rejection by Lina, makes it impactful. What might easily have been a comedy turns into a tragedy, and it does so through laughter: Lina’s almost hysterical reaction to the sight of Paul is a sharp, shocking way to resolve the drama. There is no death or suicide to end the film. Lina’s laugh is brutal enough.

Les Vipères (1911; Fr.; Louis Feuillade). The village guard and his sick wife. Taking pity on a woman he has been ordered to evict, the guard brings her home, where she works hard to earn the respect of her new guardians. But she has a bad reputation and the locals (the titular “vipers”) gossip, turning even the guard’s wife against her. Realizing she must save her guardian’s reputation, she leaves the village. FIN.

Les Vipères is a subtly devastating film, and I was amazed how effective it was. The slow, remorseless crescendo of gossip – and the way you see it unfold through endless little gestures, snide little laughs, judgy little glances – really makes you feel the way the community turns on, and destroys, the outsider in their midst. There are no dialogue titles, only brief summaries of what transpires in a scene or what has transpired since the previous scene. Every aspect of the drama is perfectly laid out for the eye: the mise-en-scène is impeccably legible, realistic, clear. Feuillade’s unbroken, remarkably articulate tableaux make every beat of the unfolding drama understood – a clarity that enhances its emotional tenor. The final shots of the “outcast” moving through the empty house, kissing the guard’s child as she sleeps, then taking one last look at the empty main room before she leaves, her shadow passing over the floor as she moves through the door, is perfect. What a great little film!

Le Cœur et l’argent (1912; Fr.; Louis Feuillade). Suzanne and Raymond are young lovers. Her mother, an innkeeper, disapproves. M. Vernier, a wealthy landowner, takes an interest in Suzanne. Her mother tries to persuade Suzanne of the advantages of accepting the man’s interest. They marry, but Vernier soon dies. Suzanne inherits his fortune, provided she does not remarry. But she chooses to flee, and finds Raymond in their old haunt on the river. But the memory of her being with Vernier soils their idyll. Suzanne drowns herself, her body “like a cut iris, drifting on the river”. FIN.

Most of the drama takes place in exteriors, which are absolutely beautiful to look at. Sharp, rich images of a century ago. The river, the inn on the bank, the roadside, and finally the tangle of reeds and the water itself. As before, everything plays out in beautiful, lucid tableaux. There is just one medium close-up, in which we see Suzanne looking at the irises that remind her of Raymond. It’s a unique instance of proximity, powerful precisely because it evokes the closeness Suzanne imagines – and the distance we know lies between her and her true love. This moment follows a previous shot of Raymond on his boat, drifting slowly and aimlessly down the river. It’s both a contrasting image and one that rhymes perfectly: the two lovers, worlds apart, each aimless without the other. And the shot of Raymond drifting down the river foreshadows Suzanne’s fate, a fate that he himself provokes. The final images of Suzanne in the water, face up, echo Millais’s Ophelia. But the beautiful monochrome image, and the reality of the moving trees and the shifting surface of the water, make this a superbly cinematic moment. Another beautiful, concise drama, concisely and beautifully realized.

L’Erreur tragique (1912; Fr.; Louis Feuillade). Called from his estates to the town, the marquis stops at a cinema, where he sees the latest Onésime film – and glimpses his wife with a stranger in the background of the scene. He returns to the chateau, determined to find proof of his wife’s infidelity. She receives a letter from a man who begs to meet her. She goes, but the marquis has sabotaged her carriage. While the marquise is en route to her meeting, the marquis discovers that the mystery man in the film and the author of the letter are the same man: it is the marquise’s brother, returning from years of exile. Realizing his tragic error, the marquis goes in search of his wife. She has been wounded, but is safely reunited with her remorseful husband and grateful brother. FIN.

The main interest in this film is René Navarre as the marquis. There is such fantastic menace about this man. His sharp profile, those glaring eyes – he makes a perfect jealous husband, and a potentially murderous one, too. When he moves stealthily through the house at night, each room set in eerie low-key lighting, you can see immediately why he would be cast as Fantômas. This man has a marvellous, malevolent presence on screen. There is something deeply curious, too, in the way L’Erreur tragique mobilizes film as both a source of captured reality and as a misleading fantasy. The cinematic experience – offering a glimpse of something unexpected in a dark room – is one thing, but the strip of 35mm that the marquis examines is another. The first is an enigmatic, frightening, shocking encounter. The second is a forensic examination. Yet it is the latter that ultimately misleads the marquis into thinking that what he sees – and can hold in his hand – is convincing evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and the ultimately proof enough to kill her. One can pour over a strip of celluloid, arresting each frame as a photographic still, but it is only a fragment of reality – a (mis)framing of a wider picture. It’s a wonderful dramatic device, and it makes this film more potent than it would otherwise be. Nothing in L’Erreur tragique is as moving as in the other Feuillade films in this programme, but there is something disturbing and curious about the drama that will linger in the memory.

Sam sobi Robinzon [Robinson on His Own] (1929; UkrSSR; Lazar Frenkel). So to our next item on the agenda, this time from the Soviet Ukraine… Vasja is a child emersed in books and imagines himself as a Robinson Crusoe figure exploring wild lands. Mocked by his fellow pupils and his teacher, he tries to “toughen” himself. Runing off during a school away day, he tries to prove his ability to survive in the “wild” with an old pistol. His school party go in search of him and, after a night alone in a storm, Vasja is finally brought back into the fold. END.

What an absolutely delightful film. Funny, silly, sad, and poetic. The film is an hour long, which seems the right kind of in-between length for such a production. It’s ramshackle but doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s daring and inventive but allows time enough to produce a convincing narrative. The rhythm of the film feels like a real slice of childhood. Time moves very slowly, then very fast. There are long stretches when nothing much happens, interspersed with moments of wild fantasy and drama. Like Vasja, we meander without a plan through this film, delighting in the landscapes, the skies, the glimpses of rural life, the animals, the sense of freedom. We also meander through different genres. Vasja fantasizes about being a colonial hero and a cowboy, so we see him fighting tigers, escaping gangs of natives. If these scenes are unsettling, the film also offers a non-judgemental perspective on them. They are the fantasies of a child, deliberately and wholly unbelievable. Who but a child, we are asked, might imagine life as a white colonialist in this day and age? The western fantasies are comic, using stereotypes to illustrate the childishness of such make-belief. The film ends by returning us to more down-to-earth pleasures, to a community of peers who are ultimately welcoming to Vasja. There is no need for violent fantasies of conquest: real life, and real satisfaction, exists in the community around us. Vasja is not to be condemned. He’s just a child, trying to find a role for himself.

For all I’ve said about the dramatic and thematic pleasures of Robinson on His Own, perhaps the chief pleasures are visual. This is a gorgeous film, which takes place primarily in the outdoor spaces of Ukraine. Director Lazar Frenkel has a superb eye for composition, for how and when to move the camera, for when to use sudden bursts of rapid montage. Purely as a vehicle for viewing the past, in a particular time and place, this film is an absolute gem. And we see it not through some didactic lens, or the careful choreography of propaganda, but through a kind of child-like delight in meeting new people and seeing new places. The sun-soaked landscapes are fabulous, just as the bustle of the streets are tangibly, dustily vivid. (I must add that, though the film is overwhelmingly told through images, there are some great moments of dialogue. When Vasja is helped by a local child, he happily tells him: “You’ll be my Friday.” “But today’s Thursday”, the baffled child replies.) A fine contrast with the opening shorts of today’s two-part programme, Robinson on His Own is a deeply refreshing and rewarding film.

Pryhody poltynnyka [The Adventures of a Penny] (1929; UkrSSR; Aksel Lundin). In tsarist times, the rebellious Fedka is mistreated by the authority figures around him. From a poor family, he delights in mocking the officer class and distrusts children like Tolia, who are smart and pampered. Given a penny by his father, Fedka tries to impress his friends by throwing the coin across a ravine – and then retrieving it. Meanwhile, Posmitiukha, Fedka’s best friend, has his cap confiscated – and Fedka agrees to use the penny to buy it back. Winter begins to recede, so the children head to the river the Dnieper and play on the breaking ice floes. When Tolia gets into trouble, Fedka goes to rescue him. Tolia blames Fedka, whose heroism lands him in the water and results in a fever. His parents don’t have the money for a doctor, so the mother goes to Tolia’s father for help. He gives her a miserly penny, which the angry father throws into the water. But the crisis is over. Fedka returns to health, and is reunited with Posmitiukha. END.

The Adventures of a Penny is an interesting contrast to Robinson on His Own. Both films centre their dramas around the ordinary, day-to-day experience of children, and focus on a particular child to shape the narrative. But unlike Robinson on His Own, The Adventures of a Penny has a distinct propagandistic edge. The enemies are most certainly the tsarist authorities: the local employer and his spoilt son Tolia, as well as sundry uniformed figures earlier in the film. Fedka’s father openly discusses the class and economic differences as the reason for the family’s struggle, and the film makes these issues central to its drama. The status of the adults is replicated in the children, so the drama involving the latter maps clearly onto relations between the former. Because of this clear socio-political agenda, the film is sometimes in danger of being a simplistic polemic: a rather predictable tale of trodden-upon poor struggling against the tsarist powers. In some ways, the film is just this. There is no attempt to humanize or otherwise complicate Tolia or his father: they are both mean-spirited and violent, while Tolia is also a liar and exploiter of his fellow children. But because the film spends so much time with Fedka and his friends, we are spared too much of the finger-wagging aspect of its message. We are invited to sympathize with the poor, so when the tsarist authorities intervene, we immediately take against them.

But the propagandistic element is also felt, I think, in the overall design and tone of the drama. Put simply, The Adventures of a Penny is a better organized, more carefully lit, more elaborately choreographed film by far than Robinson on His Own. While the child performers in both films are equally excellent, The Adventures of a Penny is much more careful in how these performers relate to one another and to the central theme of the film. Fedka and Posmitiukha are more overtly characterized through their shabby clothing, just as Tolia is made to perform in a more mannered way than the other children. One feels that much less is left to chance in The Adventures of a Penny than in Robinson on His Own. For a film about the lived experience of children, this seems to me a problem. At least, I felt that Robinson on His Own offered a much looser, more child-like path through the world, and through its drama, than anything in The Adventures of a Penny. Even the fantastical dream sequence in the latter is more carefully edited, and more overtly political, than the rapid montage sequence in Robinson on His Own. The child’s dream in The Adventures of a Penny is also a kind of lesson; what we learn from the storm montage in Robinson on His Own is a sense of subjective fear and isolation. Even if Robinson on His Own is clearly conscious of wider social contexts, its children are not simple ciphers for adult politics. They are first and foremost children.

So, that was Day 2, that was. I must admit that I struggled to fit all Day 2’s material into Day 2. (Full disclosure: preparing this piece has taken two days.) Of course, this is my fault, not the programmers’. And I welcome the chance to see more otherwise utterly unavailable films. But, still, nearly three-and-a-half hours of material is a lot to deal with in a single day. But I mustn’t complain. (I don’t have time.) Suffice it to say that these presentations are superb. The films look excellent, and it’s a particular joy to see films of the 1910s look so good. Music for the shorter films was provided by John Sweeney (the Feuillade programme) and Daan Van den Hurk (for Robinson on His Own). (With the latter, the online listing promised piano only, but it was actually a small ensemble. I am only presuming Van den Hurk is indeed correctly attributed. Either way, I enjoyed it!) Music for The Adventures of a Penny was provided by Olga Podgaiskaya and the Five-storey Ensemble. This was a rather elaborate affair for recorded voices and various instruments, synthetic and real. It was perhaps a little busy at times for my taste, but it was by turns inventive and boisterous and lyrical and energetic – it matched the playful mood of the film, and the sense of bustle that the children on screen embodied.

Perhaps it is the distillation of drama into such economic means, or perhaps it is the weariness at the end of viewing and writing about Day 2’s multiple films, but I feel that I may retain only the broad outline of the two children’s films. The images that I suspect will linger longest in my memory are those lucid tableaux of Feuillade’s short films. They also have the advantage of a kind of familiarity. I enjoyed (re)encountering René Navarre, and Renée Carl, who appears in the three other films (respectively, as the poet’s mother, as the outcast, and as Suzanne’s mother). Both performers are familiar from Feuillade’s famous serials of the mid-1910s, so it was nice to see them in these short, one-off dramas. (Their wider identity within film history no doubt helps make their faces stand out, too.) But I very much enjoyed the two Ukrainian films, and I’m sure something of their energy – and their child casts – will collectively reside in my brain. I do hope so. Like the children who dream in the films, perhaps I will dream of their worlds: those skies and rivers and streets of far-off, far-gone lands. But now I must sleep and prepare for tomorrow…

Paul Cuff

Ilya Ehrenburg: history, memory, cinema (1/2)

This week, I talk about Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967), a writer whose work I discovered through silent cinema. I’m a huge fan of G.W. Pabst’s Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927) and was curious to read the novel on which it was based. After a long search, I tracked down an English edition of The Love of Jeanne Ney from 1929. Given the price tag of my copy, I was worried I would regret my purchase of this utterly obscure novel. But within a few pages, I was totally won over by the style and tone of the author. By turns humorous and brutal, charming and satirical, cruel and romantic, the novel is a superb read. Ehrenburg’s voice so appealed to me that I looked up what else he had written. It became apparent that the man was prolific, publishing numerous novels, reams of poetry, volumes of travel journalism, war reports, speeches, reviews – all in different languages: Russian, French, German, Yiddish… Of this ungraspably extensive bibliography, I found that none of his non-journalistic work was in print in English. Some of his wartime work remains available, in particular his report on the Holocaust in eastern Europe: The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, a collection of eyewitness accounts compiled with Vassily Grossman.

This situation was very different in the 1960s, in the post-Stalin cultural “thaw” (a term Ehrenburg popularized), when the author’s work was widely discussed in the anglophone world. It was in this period that he wrote his memoirs. Finding decent copies of all six volumes of this work was difficult, but I love a challenge. From bookshops across the globe, I amassed them all and read them across the course of last summer. Quite simply, Men, Years – Life (1961-66) is one of the most extraordinary memoirs I’ve ever read. It is almost unbelievable what this man experienced: from imperial to post-Stalinist Russia, from trenches in Spain to the skyscrapers of New York, from the cafes of Paris to the battlefields of the east, from writing poetry in garrets to making speeches at peace rallies, Ehrenburg experienced almost every conceivable facet of the early twentieth century. That he did not perish in the revolutions, civil wars, world wars, genocides, and multiple purges that he experienced is miraculous. “I have survived”, he writes in his opening pages, “not because I was stronger or more far-seeing but because there are times when the fate of a man is not like a game of chess played according to rule but like a lottery” (I, 7). As the title of his memoirs indicates, Men, Years – Life is a personal record of his era through the people he encountered. Amid his generosity to innumerable writers, artists, and fighters he met, the major events of Ehrenburg’s personal life sometimes slip in through devastatingly brief asides. (Thus, in passing, do we learn that his first wife leaves him for another man, with whom she raises their daughter Irma (I, 186).) If nothing else, it is an amazing record of the first half of the twentieth century, a time when “history unceremoniously broke into our lives by day and by night” (III, 89).

This week’s post, and my subsequent post, is a selected tour through some of Ehrenburg’s life and his relationship with cinema: cinema as culture, cinema as literary adaptation, cinema as a way of seeing the world.

Part 1: Early years

Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, a subject of the Russian Empire, to a Lithuanian-Jewish family. His first memories are of an era that would bring an unceasing flood of cultural shocks and revelations. “The twentieth century was under way”, he writes: “I remember one of our visitors telling us that soon a ‘bioscope’ would be opened and that they would show living photographs” (I, 30). For the adolescent Ehrenburg, the new century means other forms of revolution, too. He becomes involved in political activity associated with Bolshevism. Aged seventeen, he is arrested and exiled.

He arrives in Paris in December 1908, knowing barely any French – just an outré vocabulary drawn from the plays of Racine. With his unerring knack of finding extraordinary people wherever he went, he soon meets a raft of other local or exiled figures – from Lenin (“his head made me think not of anatomy but of architecture” (I, 69)) to Blaise Cendrars (“he was the yeast of his generation” (I, 170)), not to mention fellow avant-gardists Picasso, Modigliani, Rivera, and others. The writers and artists among them would meet at the Café de la Rotonde, a restaurant in Montparnasse where “we would gather […] in the evenings to drink, read poetry, make prophecies or simply to shout” (I, 171). Living in what amounted to almost debilitating poverty, Ehrenburg became a poet “because I had to” and a journalist “because I lost my temper” (I, 178). When he could afford it, he went out. In 1911 he attended the (in)famous premiere of Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, D’Annunzio’s stage collaboration with Debussy. He records being “infuriated by its mixture of decadent aestheticism and a kind of scent shop voluptuousness” (II, 128). (He didn’t realize it, but Abel Gance was there on stage, playing one of the extras.) Later, in the company of the painter Diego Rivera, Ehrenburg encountered a new kind of artist for the age:

Once at a small cinema Rivera and I saw a film actor I had never seen before. He smashed crockery and daubed elegant ladies with paint. We guffawed like everyone else, but when we had left the cinema I said to Diego that I felt afraid: the funny little man in the bowler hat exposed the whole absurdity of life. Diego replied: “Yes, he’s a tragedian.” We told Picasso to be sure to see the film with Chariot: that was the name the French gave Charlie Chaplin, as yet entirely unknown. (I, 199)

Then came the Great War, “a grandiose machine for the planned extermination of human beings” (I, 184). Ehrenburg volunteers to fight Germany but is rejected by the army doctor as unfit (“One cannot with impunity prefer poetry to beef for a period of three or four years” (I, 161)). So he becomes a witness, watching the old order disintegrate – and the violent forces this process unleashes. Europe’s civilization is merely a set of clothing now shed, its philosophy abandoned for bloodlust. For Ehrenburg, it is a swift and uncomfortable revelation. “I realised that I had not only been born in the nineteenth century: in 1916 I lived, thought and felt like a man from the distant past. I also realized that a new century was on its way and that it meant business” (I, 185). Europe was stepping “into the dark ante-room of a new age” (II, 101). And from the west, American culture floods in. When the US enters the war in 1917, the newspapers gush over the prospect not merely of American soldiers but American culture: “They extolled everything – President Wilson and Lilian Gish, American tinned food and the dollar” (I, 219).

After the war, Ehrenburg returns to the east. This part of his memoirs is among the most personal, since there was not enough political or cultural stability to sustain his creative life. Having always considered Kiev as his “home town”, in 1919-20 Ehrenburg realized how contingent the idea of “home” might be. “[The] Romans […] used to say Ubi bene, ibi patria: where it is good, there is your motherland. In reality, your motherland is even where it is very, very bad” (II, 75). Russia and much of eastern Europe was in turmoil. Kiev was at the centre of a civil war and changed hands several times. “Sometimes I felt as if I were watching a film and could not understand who was chasing whom”, Ehrenburg writes: “the pictures flashed by so quickly that it was impossible to see them properly, let alone think about them” (II, 80). Cinema here becomes a metaphor both for vision and for bewilderment – a kind of impediment to vision. Like silent films that were projected at faster-than-life velocities, lived history did not behave according to clock time.

The chapters that follow read like the flickering images Ehrenburg describes, passages of events so bewildering and terrifying that it is staggering that the narrator survived to narrate. Only when, for six months, the Red Army occupies Kiev is there a window of stability – at least for Ehrenburg. But even this interval is surreal, since he is charged with supervising “mofective children” (i.e. “morally defective” children). It was a form of re-education for the socialist utopia that beckoned. “The discrepancy between our discussions and reality was staggering”, Ehrenburg observes (II, 83-90). Utopia is postponed. The Reds are swept away. The Cossacks arrive. There is a pogrom. A disorganized medley of murder, mutilation, rape. As a Jew, Ehrenburg moves from hiding place to hiding place. Captured, he narrowly avoids being “baptized” (i.e. thrown into the ice-covered sea of Azov) (II, 95). He is among a flood of refugee in the Crimea, where he is starved and abused for being both a Jew and a Red. Then typhus strikes. His wife is a victim. She survives, but in what state?

After Lyuba’s temperature had gone down, a complication arose: she was convinced that she had died and that we were for some reason forcing a life after death upon her. With the greatest difficulty I got food for her and cooked it, my mouth watering, while she repeated: “Why should I eat? I’m dead, aren’t I?” One can easily imagine the effect this had on me; yet I had to go to the playground and play ring-a-ring-o’-roses with the children. (II, 101)

There follows a series of interventions random, comic, and horrifying. Ehrenburg escapes from the Crimea on a salt barge that he realizes is slowly sinking. He finds refuge in Georgia, then goes to Moscow. Having been nearly murdered by the Whites (for being a Red), Ehrenburg is now arrested by the Reds (for being a White). He is imprisoned, than released. Vsevolod Meyerhold invites him to head the organization of children’s theatre in Russia. But in 1921 Ehrenburg leaves Russia. He goes via Riga, Danzig, Copenhagen, and London to Paris – only for the French authorities to expel him to Brussels for being a suspected Bolshevik agent (II, 186-8). He travels to Berlin and witnesses the febrile uncertainty of the Weimar Republic: “The Germans were living as though they were at a railway station, no one knowing what would happen the next day. […] Everything was colossal: prices, abuse, despair” (III, 14). In a beerhall in Alexanderplatz, Ehrenburg hears the name of Adolf Hitler for the first time. Visiting Italy soon afterwards, he sees uniformed fascists.

These surreal shifts of fortune make even the most bizarre filmic narrative of the 1920s seem realistic. Ehrenburg records that the White general who instigated the pogrom in Kiev later became a circus performer, in which role he encountered him in Paris in 1925 (II, 92-3). This reads like a detail from a film by Stroheim or Sternberg, or a scene from a Joseph Roth novel. The people and events that swirl around Ehrenburg here are those whose shadows are caught in the films of the period. I’m thinking of the newsreels, those glimpses of real people and places, but also of the fictions whose strangeness is hardly less compelling. One is tempted to describe this section of the memoirs as a record of modernity at its most frenzied and fragmented, but Ehrenburg defies such labels – either as a (contemporary) protagonist or as a (retrospective) narrator. He describes himself as a “rank-and-file representative of pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia” (II, 150) who understood the turmoil of 1920-21 in apparently old-fashioned terms:

We ridiculed romanticism but in reality we were romantics. We complained that events were developing too swiftly, that we could not meditate, concentrate, realize what was going on; but no sooner had history put on the brakes than we fell into despondency – we could not adapt ourselves to the new rhythm. I wrote satirical novels, had the reputation of being a pessimist, but privately nursed the hope that, before ten years had passed, the whole face of Europe would have changed. In my thoughts I had already buried the old world, yet suddenly it had sprung to life again, had even put on weight and was grinning. (III, 58)

This conflict between imagined and lived worlds, between ideals and realities, defines much of Ehrenburg’s experience of the post-1918 years. He finds himself in a world of film, radio, automation, mechanization: “I felt that the rhythm of life and its pitch were changing” (III, 93). In Paris, the artists of the 1920s “wanted to turn the world upside down, but the world stood firmly on its feet as ever” (III, 91). He meets a new generation of filmmakers: René Clair, Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Jacques Feyder, Jean Epstein. In the cinema, he sees The Pilgrim (1923) and The Gold Rush (1925) (III, 92-3). Cultures mix and mingle. In a Paris bar, Ehrenburg overhears someone asking their friend: “Is it true that Potemkin is a better actor than Mosjoukhine?” It turns out that the man “had heard something or other about the success of Eisenstein’s film and thought Potemkin was the name of an actor” (III, 96). Similarly, finding himself in a disreputable beerhouse in Moscow in the summer of 1926, Ehrenburg overhears an argument. It ends with a girl shouting to another youth (who is covered in blood): “You needn’t try so hard. Harry Piel – he’s the one I like!” (III, 108). Later, in the UK at a PEN Club meeting, Ehrenburg is mistakenly introduced to his audience as Pabst, “the outstanding Austrian film director who had made that excellent film, The Love of Jeanne Ney” (I, 117).

These eclectic encounters should remind us that film was very different before it became “film history”. Ehrenburg meets it out of context, in translation, in argument, in slang, in misattribution, and in simple error. The modern reader may feel out of kilter, recognizing names, dates, and titles only with difficulty. But it is also curious (and curiously touching) evidence of how cinema muddled along within popular culture. The neatness of filmographies or encyclopaedias of this period do not do justice to the pell-mell realities of lived history. For the inhabitants of the past, silent cinema was a moving feast – part of a complex, multicultural diet.

Ehrenburg also does more than witness cinema. In 1927, he revisits Penmarch (in Brittany) with the artist László Moholy-Nagy to make film about Breton fishermen – but the project remains unrealized (III, 122). The always on-the-move Ehrenburg is also a go-between for other filmmakers. In 1926 (the same summer, presumably, that he overhears the drunken argument about Harry Piel) he is asked to export extracts from French films “given to me by Abel Gance, René Clair, Feyder, Epstein, Renoir, Kirsanoff.” He shows them in Moscow, where many Soviet filmmakers see the experiments of the French avant-garde for the first time. So “enthusiastic about the cinema” is he that Ehrenburg writes a pamphlet: Realization of the Fantastic. But he also states that “in point of fact, I did not like German films of the Caligari type and the people I really admired were Chaplin, Griffith, Eisenstein, René Clair” (III, 124). Ehrenburg befriends Eisenstein and later hears him speak on film and art at the Sorbonne in Paris (III, 136). But it is Clair’s Paris qui dort (1925) that he says characterizes his experience of Paris in the 1920s (III, 131).

I close this week’s piece with the work that inspired it: Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, based on Ehrenburg’s eponymous novel of 1924. One can sense in its pages the wild emotional extremes of the post-war years, as well as the streak of romanticism that the author admitted filled his mindset. He calls it “my sentimental novel”: “a tribute to the romanticism of the revolutionary years, to Dickens, to enthusiasm for the plots of novels, and to my (this time non-literary) desire to write not only about a Trust concerned with the destruction of Europe, but also about love” (III, 57). Ehrenburg’s brush with a suspicious, reactionary French bureaucracy in 1921 surely colours his novel. The authorities in Paris (and just about every authority figure in the novel) are depicted as cruel, rapacious, sadistic. These characteristics might seem exaggerated, but given what Ehrenburg had gone through they are hardly surprising – or (one feels) inaccurate. The novel is startingly brutal but also incredibly tender. It is a story where love can (and must) survive violation and death.

The German film adaptation of 1927 retains the essentials but makes notable changes. The ending is markedly different. In the novel, Jeanne is repeatedly raped by Chalybjew – a sacrifice that does not save Andrej from being executed. In the film, Jeanne fends off Chalybjew, who is captured – thus allowing the release of Andrej from prison. The novel ends with Jeanne carrying on Andrej’s revolutionary activities, her memory of their love sustaining her life and work. The film ends with Jeanne imagining Andrej’s release (and, presumably, their future together).

Pabst’s production could never depict, let alone imply, some of the events in the novel – but its changes to the story became the subject of controversy about the conservative/nationalist politics at Ufa. Indeed, the film’s greatest political attack came from Ehrenburg himself in 1927. Through the German communist Wieland Herzfelde, he had been brought into contact with Pabst and invited to watch the filming. He accompanied the production to Berlin and Paris, where he encountered exiled White Russian soldiers among the extras, observed Pabst bullying tears from the star Édith Jéhanne, and marvelled at the crew’s futile efforts to film bedbugs in close-up. When shown the finished film, Ehrenburg couldn’t contain his mirth: “it all looked different, in details and in essentials”; “one moment I laughed angrily, at another abused everybody” (III, 128). He wrote a newspaper article claiming that his novel had been butchered. When Ufa failed to respond, Ehrenburg’s comments were expanded into a seven-page pamphlet that attacked the company for being reactionary and the film for being a betrayal of real life.

In retrospect, Ehrenburg writes with much more tolerance of Pabst’s film. Indeed, in his memoirs he spends more time talking about the in-between moments of the production than the film itself. On set, his favourite actor was Fritz Rasp, who plays the villain Chalybjew:

Rain set in, the shooting was constantly put off, and Rasp strolled with me about Paris, whirled in roundabouts at fairs, danced himself to a standstill with gay shop-girls, daydreamed on the quays of the Seine. We quickly became friends. He played villains but his heart was tender, even sentimental; I called him “Jeanne”.

We met again in later years, in Berlin, in Paris. When Hitler came to power in Germany things grew difficult for Rasp. He told me that during the war years he had lived in an eastern suburb of Berlin. SS men had entrenched themselves there and were shooting at Soviet soldiers from the windows. I have already said that Rasp looked like a classical murderer. What saved him was my books with inscriptions and photographs where we figured together. The Soviet major shook him by the hand and brought sweets for his children. (III, 127)

I love Rasp on screen, and I love this anecdote. It’s rare to hear any details about such relatively minor figures of the silent era – character actors who never play the lead, but whose faces one always encounters and delights in recognizing. Here, then, is Fritz Rasp, cavorting about Paris in 1927 with a Bolshevik, being sentimental and silly. Ehrenburg’s account of Rasp in 1945 also makes a nice counterpoint to the famous story (also set in 1945) about Emil Jannings waving his Oscar at American soldiers to convince them he was on their side.

But already the spectre of the 1930s is upon us! This means the coming of sound, and it means upheavals of a more urgent nature. Though this blog is (after all) devoted to the era of silent cinema, Ehrenburg’s life and memoirs are too fascinating to leave off at this point. And his engagement with art and artists, including film and filmmakers, continued sporadically through the rest of his life. I am interested not only in the events of the interwar years, but also how these events were seen in retrospect. This will be the subject of my next post.

Paul Cuff

References

Ilya Ehrenburg, The Love of Jeanne Ney, trans. Helen Chrouschoff Matheson (London: Peter Davies, 1929).

Ilya Ehrenburg, Men, Years – Life, trans. Tatania Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp, 6 vols (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1961-66).

The silent version of La Fin du monde (1931; Fr.; Abel Gance)

One of the pleasures of writing about film history is how often you are proved wrong. When in 2016 my book about Abel Gance’s career during the transition to sound was published, I stated that there were no known copies of Das Ende der Welt, the German version of his first sound film. As I wrote here two years ago, this was not the case: a significant fragment of this version does survive in the collection of the Eye Filmmusem. In 2016, I also wrote that no known copy survived of the “international” (i.e. silent) version of La Fin du monde. Thanks to some propitious searching and corresponding, I have now discovered that this too is not the case. An excellent copy is held by Gosfilmofond in Moscow. As you may appreciate, a visit to this archive is currently impossible. However, thanks to Alexandra Ustyuzhanina and Tamara Shvediuk and their colleagues in Gosiflmofond, I have been able to see a digitized copy of this print.

First, a little context for this film. Gance’s first sound began production in 1929. Intended as an epic moral fable about the need for universal brotherhood, and starring the director himself as a prophet, it soon became clear that Gance’s ambitions far outstripped his material resources. By the summer of 1930, Gance’s personal and professional life had virtually collapsed. In debt, reliant on cocaine, his marriage ruined, and his film in chaos, Gance surrendered control of La Fin du monde to his producers. Gance had allegedly assembled a print of 5250m (over three hours) in late 1930, but the version released in early 1931 was 2800m and bears only a distant relationship with his intentions. The director refused to attend the premiere and publicly decried the versions shown in cinemas. (For the full story of this poisonous production, I refer interested readers to my book on the subject.)

La Fin du monde was intended as a multiple-language production. Initially planned to be shot and/or dubbed in French, German, English, and (so some sources state) Spanish, Gance eventually produced just two sound versions: one in French (La Fin du monde) and one in German (Das Ende der Welt). For the latter, only one member of the cast was changed, the rest either reshooting scenes in German with direct-recorded sound or else being dubbed via post-synchronized sound. La Fin du monde was premiered in Brussels in December 1930 and was released generally in France in January 1931. Das Ende der Welt premiered in Zurich in January 1931 and the film was released generally in Germany from April. (It says something of the oddity of this film that its two major sound versions premiered not in France and Germany but in Belgium and Switzerland.) An English-language version was released in the US in 1934, but The End of the World uses the French version as its basis – using subtitles and intertitles to present a version comprehensible to anglophone audiences. Given a new prologue and additional newsreel footage throughout, this is the most severely bastardized of all the versions released in cinemas in the 1930s.

However, one other version of the film was prepared for release in Europe. This was advertised as an “international” version, i.e. a silent version (often with a “music and effects” soundtrack, but no dialogue) prepared for the numerous cinemas still unequipped for sound exhiubition. It was purportedly prepared by Eugene Deslaw (Le Figaro, 2 August 1931). Deslaw had evidently worked as one of a great many official and unofficial assistants for Gance during the production. During this time he assembled Autor de la fin du monde (1931), a curious short film that contains both behind-the-scenes footage and scenes cut from the version released in 1931. (Including one shot, of Antonin Artaud, that is one of the most astonishing close-ups Gance ever filmed.) However, the history of his editing of this film and of the “international” version of La Fin du monde is unclear. As far as I can ascertain, the premiere of Autour de la fin du monde was February 1931, in a gala evening hosted by Gance. But I can offer no such detail for the distribution of the “international” edition of the feature film. Adverts do not usually state any details of length or soundtrack, so it is very difficult to trace what – if anything – became of this version. Back in 2016, I could find no evidence that any copy of the film survived. But, as ever, I was to be proved wrong. Gosfilmofond’s print runs to approximately 2484m, just under ninety minutes, and features a synchronized music-and-effects soundtrack without dialogue. Whether this represents a “complete” copy of this version is difficult to know, but it is certainly shorter than the 2800m version that was released in 1931 – and shorter than the c.2600m restoration of the French sound version that was released by Gaumont on DVD/Blu-ray in 2021. So, what does the international version look like? And sound like?

While the (surviving) French sound version opens with text superimposed over some jerkily assembled aerial shots, the credits of the silent version unfold over a blank screen and are clearly complete. The opening music cue (Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini [1877]), curtailed and abrupt in the sound version, is here complete and ends just as the opening images begin. These first shots, too, are entirely missing from the French version. Rather than open on the interior of the church hosting the performance of the Passion, we see the exterior and the poster for the play. Geneviève’s name is on the poster, which rather neatly serves as her introductory title – for the film now cuts straight to her in close-up in the play, as Mary Magdelene. There are several extra shots of the Passion group before we reach the point at which the French version begins (at least in the Gaumont restoration). The music and sound effects for this whole opening sequence are the same as in the sound version, though the montage is briefer and there is no dialogue between the various characters we meet in the audience.

In the following scene between the brothers Jean and Martial Novalic, there is the first (of many) music cues that are not in the sound version. Here, we hear the ‘Largo’ from Handel’s Serse (1738), as arranged for piano and cello. This scene plays very differently than in the sound version. This scene plays very differently than in the sound version, with the dialogue is conveyed through intertitles. I confess that I found this scene weirdly moving. Perhaps it was the music, which gave a wonderful sense of intimacy and solemnity to the scene; certainly, it was in part due to the sheer novelty of seeing this scene for the first time in silence, which saved me from hearing the very thin sound design of the dialogued version – and Gance’s peculiarly bathetic vocal performance.

Another factor is that the montage is totally different from the sound version. Not only is the editing different (regardless of the inserted titles), but so too the camera angles and the performances. Deslaw is clearly using not just material from a different camera but from different takes. (This material was clearly shot at 24fps, the speed for synchronized sound, unlike the material visible elsewhere in the film that was shot silently at a noticeably slower framerate. Presumably, therefore, this material was taken from takes that originally had a soundtrack – not from takes shot silently.) Even the inserted close-up of the book that Jean shows Martial is different. The text is slightly shorter in the sound version, while the silent version shows the wider page and the page number. The silent version of the scene is longer, more smoothly edited, and ends differently – with the two brothers walking arm-in-arm from the scene. The sound version has an awkward insertion of a close-up of Jean and ends with a sudden fade to black before their discussion ends. The montage in the sound version is awkward, the composition tighter – next to the silent version, it looks almost cropped.

The same pattern is evident in the next scene. These are different takes of the same scene, shot from a different camera position. Again, the silent version has the camera placed slightly further away. I think the composition of the scene is improved, with the blocking of Geneviève, De Murcie (her father), and Schomburg clearer and more effective.

In scene after scene, this continues to be the case. Everything is subtly different in the silent version. It follows the same narrative line but uses different takes and different editing. Sometimes, the sound version has an extra scene, sometimes the silent version has an extra scene. But the overall shape is the same. (You could easily use the scenes in one version to plug gaps in the other.) But again and again I am struck by how awkwardly framed and edited the sound version looks in comparison with the silent version. Even when the content of sequences is shot-for-shot the same, the choices in the silent version look more balanced, more carefully chosen, and better put together. The sound version consistently looks far too tightly framed, with the tops of characters heads just out of shot, or characters standing just off-centre, or floating oddly at the edge of the composition.

The more bravura scenes of editing are also significantly different. The rapid montage of Jean’s madness is more neatly handled in the silent than the sound version, and it reaffirms my longstanding impression that the montage in the sound version is clunkily curtailed at the end. Likewise, the rapid montage in which Schomburg plummets to his death in the lift of the Eiffel Tower is longer, more dramatic, and more coherent in the silent version.

More broadly, there are significant gaps are that either version fills in for the other. While Schomburg’s rape of Geneviève is missing from the silent version, the scenes of journalists spying on the scientists as they confer on Martial’s discovery are missing from the sound version. Later, there is a more significant scene where Martial and his team return to the control centre where they had formerly had their headquarters. The centre was raided and damaged (a sequence we see in both version of the film) but now, after Schomburg’s death, the team reassembles. Martial is despondent, but Geneviève arrives and encourages him (in Jean’s name) to resume the struggle for humanity’s salvation. The pair embrace and Martial then gives a speech to his team that reinspires them to begin broadcasting their universalist message. (I had spotted one shot from this sequence in the Eye Filmmuseum print of the German version, and had assumed it came from a later (also lost) sequence, but here I saw it again – and now I understand its proper place.) This whole sequence is only in the silent version, and makes the finale make more sense. Seen with titles and no dialogue, accompanied on the soundtrack by the opening movement of Franck’s Symphony in D minor (1889), I found Martial’s stirring address (“Victory lies in your work, in your enthusiasm…”) oddly moving. (And this is a film that has never moved me!)

Curiously, there are also other scenes that appear in different places in either version. In the silent version, we see Martial’s attempt to warn the press of the impending collision of the comet, and then Werster’s agreement to support Martial, much earlier in the narrative than in the sound version. I think this actually makes the narrative clearer, even if the surrounding subplot of the press war is not well developed in either version of the film. (In Gance’s screenplay, as ever, everything is given much more time to unfold coherently.)

The final minutes, including Martial’s declaration of the “Universal Republic” and the surrounding impact of the comet, is the one section of the silent version that is less convincing. The montage leaves out much that is crucial to understanding Martial’s gathering of world leaders. And while there is certainly different footage of the worldwide panic, it is no more convincingly put together than in the sound version. In both silent and sound films, the film falls apart in an orgy of incoherence. The finale ends on the same imagery, with minor differences in editing, and is equally unconvincing – and not what Gance intended. FIN.

What to make of the Gosfilmofond copy, and of this silent version of Gance’s first sound film? Firstly, I think it’s a better viewing experience than the sound version. When the narrative is the same between versions, the framing and editing in the silent version is usually superior. That said, the silent version is not as coherently edited as a true silent production. The use of intertitles is not consistent. No character is given an introduction through titles, and there are few narrational titles to explain what is happening. Sometimes, indeed, the fragments of recorded sound on the soundtrack take the place of intertitles. This “international” version is not a sound film, but nor is it a true silent film. Though it is unfortunately missing many important scenes from the sound version, it adds other important scenes of its own. Put together, you might have a more coherent narrative. It reaffirms just how shoddy is the assemblage of even the more coherent scenes in the sound version.

But these very qualities also raise more questions than they answer. What kind of control did Eugene Deslaw have over this silent version? What material was he allowed to use, and why? When was this version assembled, and on whose instruction? Per my comments above, Deslaw clearly had access to footage from different cameras and different takes. He also must have had access to parts of the soundtrack before they had been mixed with the direct-recorded dialogue elements. (In the scene of Jean’s madness, for example, he uses the same section of music per the sound version but without the latter’s added dialogue.) Yet despite the presence of some extra scenes, Deslaw doesn’t include any of the dozens of more significant scenes that Gance shot in 1929-30 which were cut by his producers prior to the film’s release in 1931. Fragments of this mountain of extra material may appear in Autour de la fin du monde, but it is nowhere to be seen in the “international” version of La Fin du monde.

In summary, the Gosfilmofond print is a document of major importance in our understanding of La Fin du monde. I long to know more about the history of this particular print, and about the “international” version it represents. While I think many aspects of it are superior to the sound version (at least to the French version that survives), it remains very far from the version that Gance assembled in 1930. But its survival is itself a small miracle, and raises hope that other miracles are out there in archives, waiting to be discovered…

Finally, I offer my deepest thanks to Alexandra Ustyuzhanina and Tamara Shvediuk, and to their colleagues, for their help with accessing material in the Gosiflmofond collection.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2024, Day 5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2024, Day 1)

Yes, it’s that time of year again! Pordenone is once more underway, and I am not on the way to it. The furthest I’m travelling is to my study, or possibly to the living room for better Wi-Fi signal. This is because I have happily handed over my thirty euros and have my pass for the streamed content of this year’s festival. For the next ten days, I shall be posting my reviews of the digital fare on offer from Pordenone (or at least, its associated servers). Appropriately enough, Day 1 takes us to Italy for a feast of marvellous landscapes and seascapes…

We begin with Attraverso la Sicilia (c.1920; It.; unknown), one of the innumerable travelogue films produced in Italy in the first decades of the twentieth century. (This film, along with sixty others, can be found on the beautiful 2xDVD set Grand Tour Italiano, releasedby the Cineteca Bologna in 2016.) I love how even this simple film – depicting the ferry boat arriving, depositing its train, followed by a series of views of the harbour and its human and animal inhabitants – is so visually elaborate. Apart from a few shots, it is all tinted. The opening is yellow, but the first view of the little train on the ferry is orange, as though its furnace is glowing with anticipation somewhere inside it. But when it sets off it reverts to monochrome, before traversing the landscape of Sicily: the blue harbour, the orange ruins, the pink ruins, the yellow hillside. People are going about their business, a hundred years ago – and here I am, sipping my Italian coffee, a century later.

The next short, Nella conca d’oro (c.1920; It.; unknown), gives us Palermo. Palermo in blue, Palermo in pink, Palermo in gold, Palermo in split screen (postcard images, shaking in the frame), Palermo in orange, Palermo in a wash of sepia, the colour of old magazine pages. Here are centuries-old buildings, seen a century ago. Shaded colonnades from the Middle Ages, Byzantine twirls and patterns, and the people of the early twentieth century, sweeping the streets, gutting fish, building model horse and carts, wandering aimlessly. And the sea, calm, bedecked with working boats. The yellow tint a kind of oily haze upon the water, a weary warmth to the overcast sky. Flashes of leader, wobbled instructions for the printer, long dead. (It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now.) Men playing cards, not bothered by our presence. The past, cut off from its moorings a century ago and deposited on my screen. FINE.

And now, to our main feature: L’Appel du sang (1919; Fr.; Louis Mercanton). The story is based on Robert Hichens’ novel The Call of the Blood (1906), and its melodramatic plot is signalled by the title…

Emile Artois (Charles le Bargy) is a veteran writer, who has earned the enmity of his peers for his unflinching attacks on “life’s artificiality”. His friend and disciple Hermione Lester (Phyllis Neilson-Terry) lives in her villa in Rome. She confesses to him that she loves Maurice Delarey (Ivor Novello) an Englishman who had a Sicilian grandmother. Artois is jealous and comes to Rome. Seeing the lovers together and obviously happy, Artois announces that he’s going to Africa. In Sicily, the lovers – now married – spend their honeymoon at Hermione’s house on the Casa del Prete on Mount Amato, with their devoted servant Gaspare (Gabriel de Gravone). In the “garden of Paradise”, the lovers are happy – but abroad, Artois is dying of fever. Maurice and Gaspare visit the “Sirens Island”, where the fisherman Salvatore (Fortunio Lo Turco) lives with his daughter Maddalena (Desdemona Mazza). On the rocks, asleep with the fisherman, Maurice dreams of sirens – and, waking early, encounters Maddalena, half-naked in the water. Meanwhile, the dying Artois sends Hermione a letter confessing his love – and insisting that she loves him. But the doctor knows that Hermione is married, so does not send her Artois’ letter – just a telegram alerting her to his illness. Once Hermione leaves for Kairouan, Maurice grows increasingly close to Maddalena. Their romance observed by her angry father, who is content only so long as the tourists keep spending money on them. Hermione aids Artois’ recovery and they journey back to Sicily, triggering Maurice’s guilt – and desire to spend his last free moments with Maddalena at the local fair. The lovers spend the night in a hotel, while Hermione anxiously awaits Maurice at her villa. In the morning, Maurice arrives, guilty and remorseful. But he cannot bring himself to tell her the truth. Salvatore hears about his daughter’s night with Maurice and locks her in her room. Maurice writes Hermione a letter confessing the truth and saying that he knows he must leave her. Salvatore wants to meet Maurice on his island, and Gaspare plays the awkward go-between. Maurice makes Artois promise to look after Hermione if anything should happen to him. Artois intercepts a letter from Maddalena, warning Maurice – and suspects the truth. Salvatore attacks Maurice and throws him from a cliff into the sea. While Gaspare rescues the body, Artois finds Maurice’s confession – and gets the full truth from Gaspare. Artois decides to burn the letter to spare Hermione’s feelings, then goes with Gaspare to confront Salvatore and Maddalena. Artois convinces father and daughter to go to America, but Maddalena visits Maurice’s grave and is discovered there by Hermione and Gaspare. Hermione realizes the truth and goes to Artois for comfort, while Gaspare seeks revenge on Salvatore. The two men fight, but it is Maddalena who is killed by her father’s gunshot. The graves of Maddalena and Maurice lie next to one another, and Hermione leaves flowers before departing. In Rome, Hermione finds Artois’ confession, passed on from the (now deceased) doctor’s possessions, and the two are finally united. FIN.

Well, well, well. First thing’s first: this is a stunning film to look at. Shot on location in Italy, the film is dominated by shot after shot of extraordinarily beautiful landscapes. The entire drama plays out against superb vistas, from views over the Colosseum in Rome to the Sicilian coastline. The whole film is also beautifully tinted and toned, from the warm gold of exterior daylight to the lustrous blue-tone-pink of evenings and the blues of nighttime exteriors. Great use is made of placing characters against these backdrops, from the terraces overlooking the landscapes to more intimate scenes along the paths and coves of the coast. The southern light is simply gorgeous, and every exterior shot of the film is a pleasure to contemplate. What an absolutely beautiful film this is.

The cast also boasts some beautiful faces. This was Ivor Novello’s first starring role, and he is strikingly beautiful in many shots – just see how the camera shows off his profile as he sits at the piano and sings, or drapes himself with open shirt across the rocks. His performance is good, but I don’t know if it’s the fault of the director or the performer that I never got a sense of depth to his character or emotions. Novello always feels slightly out of place, which suits the character – at home in Sicily without quite being Sicilian. He comes across as cutely gauche, and rather English, as he half tries to find the rhythm of the Tarantello when he first arrives on the island. In fact, he’s noticeably more convincing in his relationship with Gaspare than with either Hermione or Maddalena. The note of homoeroticism is hard to escape since the two men spend more time with each other than the married couple. Maurice goes swimming with Gaspare and his sexualized dream of sirens takes place when he is asleep with Gaspare on the rocks by the sea. Maddalena is a rival not just to Hermione, but to Gaspare: and it is the latter who tries to take revenge on Salvatore for killing his friend.

Indeed, Gabriel de Gravone was my favourite performer in the film. (Due to my decades-long obsession with Gance’s La Roue (1923), I have spent many hours watching Gravone on screen in a particular role – so I am certainly familiar with his face!) Like Novello, he is strikingly handsome – but he has an air of assurance, of physical presence, on screen that Novello never quite has for me in this film.

The rest of the cast is good, if not especially memorable. Phyllis Neilson-Terry (one of the Terry dynasty of British actors) is a strong, naturalistic lead – but her character is never given depth. I don’t think this is her fault, nor is the dullness of Charle le Bargy’s Artois; the film simply isn’t able to shape their performances or deepen their characters. Maddalena’s death, for example, is shocking – but as an act, as an event, not because I cared for (or even particularly knew or understood) her character or relationship with Maurice.

My reservations about character and performance stems, I think, from the fact that the film lacks dramatic depth. For a melodrama, even if my brain isn’t overly engaged, my heart needs to get involved: I wanted and needed to feel more from this film. It’s very, very good looking, but that’s not enough. I was purring over the landscapes, but never about the characters. Louis Mercanton is good at framing the drama against the landscapes, but his camera never gets too close to his characters. Perhaps overly conscious of showing the backdrop, there are virtually no close-ups – we are quite literally kept at a certain distance from the characters. Even so, there are other ways to create depth and complexity. Mercanton can compose a shot, and organize a sequence, but nothing ever quite builds to a single image or shot that grabs the heart or contains any kind of emotional or psychological revelation. There were no scenes where the staging struck me as being especially imaginative or striking. The fair, during which Maurice and Maddalena spend the night together, is perhaps the most dramatic of the film, with its red tinting and the lovers in silhouette at the balcony window. But this, too, is a series of pretty images rather than a fully integrated dramatic montage. (I think, inevitably, of a similar sequence in Gance’s contemporary J’accuse!, in which illicit lovers encounter one another at night during a firelit farandole – a sequence that is filled with (more) striking images and a rhythmic crescendo.) Ultimately, I was more impressed by Emile Pierre’s photography than Mercanton’s direction.

So that was Day One. Whatever my reservations, I’m very glad to have seen L’Appel du sang. It’s one of the best-looking films (I was about to say “prints”, but I suppose that’s not quite true) I’ve seen in a while, and the tinting and toning of the landscapes was a particular pleasure. But I also particularly appreciated the Italian shorts that preceded the feature. They introduced us to the period and place in which L’Appel du sang is set. Aside from compilation DVDs, such short films can be difficult to present convincingly – so slipping them into a programme in such a pertinent way is a nice touch. Seeing these three films together was a delight. A very nice way to start the festival.

Paul Cuff

Abel Gance at the Cinémathèque française (4)

This final post on the Gance retrospective reflects on my experiences at the Cinémathèque. It’s rare that I find myself at such a concentrated cultural feast. Anyone who has read my posts on Pordenone or Bonn will know that festivals are things of great fascination to me, and perennially out of reach. This post is therefore a way of considering everything that an in-person event (what a ghastly phrase) offers and means, and of acknowledging what is missing from my usual film-viewing experience. Writing is also a way of remembering and recording what were for me days of great pleasure.

I should begin by saying that Les Gaz mortels was not the first aesthetic experience of my trip. Friday 13th proved to be an auspicious day. En route to the Cinémathèque, the friend with whom I was staying took me to the Jardin des Tuileries to see the Musée de l’Orangerie. Here are displayed eight giant panoramas of Claude Monet’s Les Nymphéas (1914-26), spread across two rooms. There was something appropriate in seeing art created during the same years of Gance’s emergence as a filmmaker. (Both artists have been associated with the label “impressionism”, but the appropriateness of this -ism is too complex to consider here.) However, what I took away from the Orangerie was an extraordinary sense of the way time shapes these works and affects how we receive them.

In the 1890s, Monet wrote to a friend that he was trying to capture in his series paintings “ce que j’éprouve”. The verb “éprouver” denotes more than a process of seeing: it is a process of feeling, of experiencing. It implies a kind of temporal duration that the verb “voir” does not. To experience, or to feel, a scene is not merely to see but to contemplate; it is also to let the world sink into oneself, or to sink a little into the world. In his series paintings, Monet moved from canvas to canvas, adding successive layers of colour and texture as the hours passed – returning again and again, day after day, season after season, to build up his images. Les Nymphéas use this principle on an even larger scale, and Monet took twelve years to fill canvases that are two metres high and up to seventeen metres long.

The result is an amazing expanse and depth of paint, a veritable layering of time. Staring at the surface of these vast canvases, you realize that the very word “surface” is misleading. Every inch is built of innumerable strokes, of innumerable moments of reflection, consideration, and reaction – of feeling and intelligence. The paintings are not simply an effort at capturing a single moment, a single time of day, but a record of the process of feeling, of experiencing, that time. They are both a document of time passing before the painter and of the time spent by the painter in the act of painting. Standing before the completed canvases, as Monet must have done for countless hours – days – weeks – months – years, I was deeply moved by the sheer laboriousness of the process of painting. Having once been an amateur painter myself, I knew – I could feel, even – the physical history of this act of mark making. The time of painting was as tangible as the painting of time.

But the scale of these images creates time-systems within their borders. Traversing from left to right the thirteen metres of Nymphéas, les nuages, I had the peculiar sensation that I was moving through a kind of narrative. On the left, the reflected trees seem only a little darker than a morning haze (blues mingle with mauves, greens mingle with touches of yellow and turquoise); then the sky appears, brightens, and clouds bloom; but in the last metres the sky’s hue deepens, darkens; and suddenly a great bank of darkness fills the frame from top to bottom – it as if night, or autumn, blots out the memory of a warm afternoon. In those last two metres, the darkness is of a deep, muddy green – as though the autumn mulch were already underfoot. The lilies were dashes of blue and yellow on the left of the canvas, but here on the right they are streaks of crimson and blotches of rust. I stopped and stared at this weird, unsettling depth of gloom, trying – and quite failing – to fathom how it was formed.

From this sense of time creeping over canvas and viewer, it is a relief to find elsewhere a sense of immediacy in the business of brushstrokes. In the second salle, the surface of the pond in Nymphéas, le matin clair aux saules is alive with curling dashes of blue. This is not a great gust of wind, for the downward strokes of the willow leaves hardly stir. It is just a draft, the beginning of a breeze, that catches the water. The clarity of the sky is lost in this murmur of paint. From the mix of azure and clouds that flash amid the ripples, you can see that the weather is changeable. How extraordinary that such infinite pains were taken to capture the ephemeral moment when the wind rose on a bright day, a century ago. In this painting, the depth of time that Monet stood before his canvas crystalizes into an amazing sense of immediacy. The contrast between the process of creation and the actualization of its goal is remarkable. How many hours, over how many years, to build up this sense of subtle movement across the water?

There is personal time, too. I found myself moved not only by the richness of the colours in Nymphéas, reflets verts, but by the fact that its palette is exactly that of my grandmother’s front room – a room that has not existed for twenty years. She, too, was a painter, and adored Monet. She kept an exquisitely rich little garden whose colours spilled into the house. (She never closed the curtains, so as to always be able to see it.) There are greens of astonishing depth in Nymphéas, reflets verts, and blues from late summer skies. The light is fading, but the surface of the pond has a supernal warmth – a kind of aura of the day that is passing, that has long ago passed. (But what day is this on the canvas, if not a kind of distillation of multiple days? Somehow, time here is suspended, hovering outside history.) I stopped and stared at the deepest patches of a reflected sky that is somewhere beyond the frame, somewhere beyond time.

By this point, I became aware that my hour within the Orangerie was itself slipping away. I was struck by the strangeness of this aesthetic experience, by how something so fleeting could plumb such depths of feeling and pastness. This was an encounter of something static by something in motion. The paintings were staying, and lasting; I was moving on, undergoing a different kind of time. I recalled the scene in Le Côté de Guermantes when the duke shows M. the paintings by Elstir, which the narrator compares to the images of a magic lantern – a kind of hallucinated landscape projected by the mind of the artist. Oddly enough, I had been talking about Proust with my friend as we walked through the gardens en route to the Orangerie. As we were leaving, I tried to tell her about the passage in the novel – which M. experiences as an oasis of contemplation amid the bustle of a social event – but speaking was too much. It was the paintings themselves, and the sadness of leaving them; it was the odd proximity I found between my own body and that of the painter, long gone, standing before the canvas – allied with the fact that I could imagine so clearly the process of painting, but I no longer paint; it was the colours of a room that I knew and loved that had been restored to me for an instant; it was the memory of my favourite book, and the memory of the first time I read it: I finished the final pages of Le Temps retrouvé at my grandmother’s house, overlooking her garden. My Englishness obliged me to avoid making some kind of scene, so I gulped back my tears and tottered towards the exit. It is surely apparent by now that I was totally overwhelmed by these two rooms in the Orangerie. (All this will return us, eventually, to Gance – I promise!)

Emotionally primed, and thinking of the passing and the recapturing of lost time, we finally entered the Cinémathèque. Here we had time to visit the “Musée Méliès: La Magie du cinéma” exhibition, which was very charming. Lots of proto-cinematic optical devices, of hands-on machinery, and of designs, costumes, and models from Méliès’ films. Here, quite literally, I saw Proust’s magic lanterns. (There was also a prominent place given to Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), a film I cannot stand, but we can gloss over that.)

The pleasures of the Méliès exhibition were a rewarding parallel to the Monet paintings. Here were the material means of producing immaterial visions. I love the elaborateness of pre-cinematic optical devices, the tangible sense of clunky mechanics that strive to produce fleeting moments of vision. (One of the most amazing assemblages of such material I’ve ever seen was at the “Photography: A Victorian Sensation” exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland in 2015. I’m lucky to live near to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, so can brush past a permanent collection of such things almost as often as I wish.) The physicality of a large magic lantern – its polished wooden shell, its gleaming brass fittings, its fragile glass and flammable lamp – is something to behold. Thanks to the Cinémathèque exhibit, it is also something one can actually hold. The labour of projection, the way the great slides must be moved and changed, is a powerful reminder of the way cinema history (and pre-history) is peopled by countless known and unknown figures. Real people are required to operate this material media. And here are the unknown figures of the past, the models for Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope and Marey’s chronophotographic studies, backlit in their little strips of celluloid – glowing on the wall of the museum. (What happened to that man? What became of that cat?)

By the time the exhibit reaches its final stages, where the legacy of Méliès is explored in modern cinema, it was time to join the queue for the first Gance film. Queuing soon became both a major occupation and a curious pleasure at the Cinémathèque. I observed and sometimes participated in these social events, where the regulars of the establishment chat amongst themselves, where little old ladies cut calmly in front of you to talk to someone they know, and where any sense of order vanishes in the accumulation of people behind the little barrier. (“Ceci n’est pas une queue,” I told someone, “c’est une salade!”) I enjoyed seeing the same faces every single day, and watching the same latecomers scuttle to the ticket office next to the queue. The second afternoon, I was eating an apple in the queue when an old man – a habitué of the place, I’m told – came to tell me that I resembled Snow White. (After a few moments of confused conversation, I came to understand that the film was one of his earliest cinematic memories, and its images are always returning to him.) By Sunday afternoon, I had become well known enough in the queues for strangers to address me in English. Perhaps this was a failure to be adequately Parisian, a condemnation of my stumbling French. (Every time I go to Paris, I have the sense of retaking an exam that I will never pass.)

I did not get to see a film in the Salle Henri Langlois which, as its prominent name implies, is the largest screening room at the Cinémathèque. I believe that Napoléon was shown there, to take advantage of the screen size, and I was glad to hear from others that the triptych was well projected both there and at the Max Linder cinema elsewhere in Paris. (I envied them this experience, having been so disappointed by the botched finale at La Seine Musicale concert in July.) Most of the screenings I attended at the retrospective took place in the Salle Georges Franju, which was an excellent size and allowed enough space for the musicians to comfortably fit on the stage before the screen.

The last two screenings, however, were in the Salle Lotte Eisner, which was upstairs. The door to the room was tucked next to the bookshop. (I pause to acknowledge that this shop is the most concentrated example of highbrow film culture – books and DVDs/Blu-rays – one could imagine.) In fact, the door to the Salle Eisner looks like a fire escape. When I got there, a man was already leaning proprietorially against it, preventing anyone from going upstairs. He wasn’t an employee of the Cinémathèque, simply a regular who knew that there was no room to queue inside the door. When an attendant finally arrived, she observed: “Alors, vous êtes policier?” and duly thanked him. The way beyond the door was, initially, entirely unlit and we stumbled along the narrow enclosure of the staircase with some trepidation. (The average age of the regulars seemed to me to be somewhere north of seventy-five.) The room itself was smaller than Franju, but I quite enjoyed the sense of camaraderie created by everyone having to clamber over each other to get in. That said, the screen in the Salle Lotte Eisner was notably poorer. I could see the screen beneath the image, its network of conjoined dots proving a stubborn texture that interfered with the projected film. Following the end of the 7.00pm screening, getting out of the room was as tricky as getting in. Given that the queue for the 8.30pm projection began immediately, I decided to do as others did: after stumbling down the dark steps, I executed a sharp volte face and stood outside the door once more. Hell, it was my last screening, and I wanted a good seat. Fuck the queue.

If I was all too keen to get the best seat, it was because seeing these early films is so rare. I had never encountered them on the big screen, with live music in packed cinemas, and this might be my only chance. A friend told me that the Cinémathèque française used to programme multiple screenings for each film in a retrospective, but no longer does so. There was only one chance to see the films shown in the Gance retrospective, so even people who lived in Paris might easily have missed their opportunity. (How much I would like to have seen Gance’s Polyvision films of the 1950s, for example, on the big screen.) Of course, Napoléon has been shown in cinemas across France, and will soon be broadcast on French television (though I believe the date has been delayed, for unspecified reasons). But the other films are far less known, and far less available in any format. They, too, deserve their chance to be seen, not least because there is so little information about them in the public realm. Even in published filmographies of Gance’s work there are inaccurate details about some of the cast and crew (e.g. Bareberousse and Ecce Homo) and often no information on the completeness – or even survival – of his early films.

On this note, I heard it mentioned in the introductions to more than one screening that the Cinémathèque française retrospective contained all Gance’s surviving films. I don’t believe this is quite true, though it certainly represents all those available in restored or complete copies. Missing from the 2024 roster is Le Nègre blanc (1912), which is listed in the collection of a German archive. I have not had the opportunity to investigate this print, but if it is accurate, it would represent the earliest Gance film to survive – and the only instance of the screen career of Mathilde Thizeau, Gance’s first wife. (I don’t think I have ever even seen a photo of her.) There is also an important fragment of Das Ende der Welt (1931) in the collection of the Eye Filmmuseum, which I discussed here. (I am currently investigating the survival of another archival print of this film.) I hope that all the new restorations are released on home media, along with anything and everything else Gance produced. As I wrote in my earlier posts, at the end of every screening in the retrospective I wanted to go back into the cinema and see the films again. But just when will I next see them on a big screen? When, indeed, will I see them again on any screen? As much as I believe that these films – all films, even – should be seen on big screens, even basic access to lower-quality versions for home viewing is essential to their broader cultural life. What cannot be seen cannot be studied, cannot be discussed, cannot be valued.

There is a caveat to all this. At the Aéroport Charles de Gaulle, a sign in departures promises: “Paris ne vous oubliera pas”. To heighten this sense of leave-taking, the duty-free sections cram as much Frenchness as is possible into the confines of a busy thoroughfare. With some vague hope of taking home more than just memories of Paris, I bought some wine; and when I got home, I bought some bread and cheese. But it’s futile to try and recreate the flavours of France at home. Even if the ingredients are the same, how can you recreate the sense of being in a particular place and a particular time? No, no, it’s impossible. At the Cinémathèque, I’d met friends, old and new, and I’d seen films, known and unknown. The pleasure of the occasion became part of the pleasure of the art. As much as I want a set of DVDs or Blu-rays, I know they cannot truly realize – actualize – the films. I know, too, that I can look at digital scans of Monet’s paintings, but doing so loses something essential to their being in space, their being in time – and I with them.

In 1936, Walter Benjamin famously claimed that all reproductions of art lack their original’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”, and thus also lack the “aura” of creative authenticity. Using the idea of the “aura” of artefacts, Benjamin posited that cinema possessed no tangible presence; this form of art was an endlessly reproducible product without an original. Whatever the applicability of this argument to later forms of cinema, it surely fails to take account of the performative element of silent film exhibition. If a projected image is less graspable than a canvas, the system of its presentation – the theatre, the projector, the screen, the stage, the musicians, the audiences, the projectionists – are all part of cinema’s aura. (I would argue, too, that celluloid prints are themselves artefacts of immense value – and that their projection is their aura.)

In my reviews of the screenings, I keep referring to the sense of presence Gance’s images had in the cinema. The live performance of music – separated from, yet allied with, the films – enhanced the suprasensory effect of these silent worlds. The landscapes, alive with sun and the movement of the wind – long passed yet arrested here in astonishing detail; the interior spaces, with their velvety shadows and pools of light, and the objects that carry the symbolic weight of drama, standing alongside the human protagonists in mutual silence; and the close-ups of performers, the way these faces carry the life of the past with them into the present. How can I not be moved by the play of light on Emmy Lynn’s face and hair, by the sudden changes of colour that cling to her image, by the dreamlike and overwhelmingly tangible reality of her life – past and present – on screen? There is also a sense that the silence of these images has its own significance, its own presence. The past on screen is as silent as Monet’s painted scene, and no less potent. These films are evocations from an ever-receding history that maintain their power in the present. There is the same sense of these images, these worlds, having traversed a great distance to meet me, here and now. Perhaps it is this sense of reciprocity that is most important, most moving, in the aesthetic experience: art makes sense only in this meeting of minds across time.

Gance, too, knew and conceived of cinema exclusively as a communal experience, just as he saw it as a way of reconciling past and present, the living and the dead. Coming into a theatre from the streets, the film experience had the potential to be magical, transformative, ecstatic. In a letter of October 1923, Jean Epstein told Gance that if happiness could not be found in the real world it could be sought in their art: “À la bonne heure. Ça, c’est du cinéma!” In a similar vein, I hope to re-encounter these hours of happiness in a setting that does justice to the films. This post has emphasized the context (rather than the content) of images to highlight how differently they are experienced chez moi. Home entertainment is not cinema. (It is film-staying, not filmgoing.) So I’m happy to recall the queues, the old guard of the Cinémathèque, the wizened figures who cut me up, the strange comments, the fight for seats, even the odd smells that wafted from certain sections of the crowd. All this, together with the thrill of the films, is the cinema. I can’t wait to go back. À la prochaine.

Paul Cuff

Abel Gance at the Cinémathèque française (3)

The third day of my cultural smash-and-grab was the busiest. Three screenings: one illustrated talk, two shorts, and one feature…

Sunday 15 September 2024: Salle Georges Franju, 2.30pm

The first event of the day was a “Ciné-conférence” by Elodie Tamayo, devoted to Gance’s unfinished project Ecce Homo (1918). Gance wrote this screenplay in March-April 1918 and began shooting that same month around Nice. His cast included Albert t’Serstevens as Novalic, a prophet who is ridiculed by society and committed to a mental asylum. His one true disciple, Geneviève d’Arc (Maryse Dauvray) reads his testament, “Le Royaume de la Terre”, and traces Novalic to his asylum where she hopes to help him recover his sanity. Parallel to this social/religious story is the melodrama of Geneviève’s infatuation for Rumph (Sylvio De Pedrelli), Novalic’s son from a liaison with an Indian woman, together with Rumph’s romance with Oréor (Dourga), an orphaned girl from the east. Though Novalic’s written testament is falsified and ultimately destroyed as a result of the conflict between Geneviève and Rumph, at the end of the film the prophet returns to his senses and plans to use cinema to make his message more readily understood. Ecce Homo was to end with the writing not of a book, but of a screenplay: the blueprint, one might imagine, for the very film we have just watched. Novalic declares to his contemporaries:

You haven’t understood my deeds, you haven’t read my books, you haven’t listened to my words; I am going to try another way. I will use neither the written word nor the spoken word to reach you. I will employ a new language of the eyes, which, unlike other forms of communication, knows no boundaries. Like children, I will show you oversized infants Moving Pictures, and my great secret will be to say simultaneously, and across the whole world, the most profound ideas with the simplest of images. Soon I will etch my dreams across your pupils, like an engraver might animate his work. And I think that this time you will understand me!

Gance abandoned Ecce Homo in May 1918, only a few weeks into its production. He wrote in his notebooks: “I quickly perceive that my subject is too elevated for everything around me, even for my actors, who don’t exude sufficient radioactivity. I’ll kill myself in no time at all if I continue to give this voltage for no purpose.” Miraculously, three hours of 35mm rushes survive from the material shot in April-May 1918. I first saw this material in 2010 and found it utterly fascinating. It was so moving to view not only the evidence of the filmed scenes, but the glimpses of Gance and his crew in-between takes: the director appearing, glancing at the camera, disappearing; the notes about each take – “Good”, “V. good” – chalked on boards at the end of the scene. Seeing this material on the small screen in the archive, I longed to see it projected…

All of which brings us back to the Salles Georges Franju last Sunday. Tamayo’s presentation offers not just extracts from the rushes (digitized in excellent quality), but a rich context in which to understand their significance. Texts by Gance and others were read by Virginie di Ricci, while electronic music was provided by Othman Louati. Tamayo herself presented information on the film’s context, production, and surviving content. I will say more on this shortly, but first and foremost I want to give a flavour of the surviving material.

Shot by Léonce-Henri Burel, the surviving footage once more uses the coastal landscapes of the south of France as a luminous stage for the drama. The location doubles, most notably, for the Indian jungle in which we see Oréor’s seductive dance for Rumph. It looks stunning, and seeing this on the big screen was an absolute thrill. I remembered the rough outline of the images, but I was struck anew by their visual quality. There is one faultless superimposed dissolve, for example, which transforms Oréor into a semi-transparent apparition as she begins her dance. Then there is a stunning view of a moonlit clearing in which the half-naked character poses with her veil. Burel’s control of low-key lighting, and Dourga’s extraordinary physicality, are a fabulous combination. Oréor’s dance demonstrates a clear transition from the diaphanous, hand-tinted dance sequence in La Dixième symphonie to Diaz’s subjective visions of Edith in J’accuse. But I think Dourga’s scenes in Ecce Homo are more interesting than either of these sequences: more evocative for the eye, more erotic for the senses.

Talking of J’accuse, I found it wonderful to see Maryse Dauvray on the big screen. (When I first saw the rushes of Ecce Homo, I realized that every filmography I had read misattributed her role to another actress!) Gance gives her some beautiful close-ups, and the sight of her reading from Novalic’s testament was so extraordinarily vivid that I found myself crying. My god, the quality of the footage is superb. Yet again, the sheer presence of these images is something miraculous. I wept too at her scenes with Rumph, when she watches him burning copies of “Le Royaume de la Terre”. The sight of the pages billowing like fallen leaves across the ground becomes a moving metaphor for the fate of Gance’s own film.

The scenes of t’Serstevens as Novalic are equally striking. He is delightfully corporeal, earthy: we see him shabby and unshaven; he roars with laughter at his own words; he walks backwards, perseveringly circling a tree to bless the insane. There is something touchingly natural and believable about him as a madman. (Something not the case with Gance’s own performance as Novalic in La Fin du Monde, a decade later.) And, as Tamayo pointed out in her talk, Novalic’s fellow inmates on screen are played by the real population of a mental asylum. As well as shots of their collective respect for (and defence of) Novalic, there is a heartbreaking sequence of close-ups of their faces, dissolving from one to another, that is simply extraordinary. Gance had a knack for finding the right faces, and here are dozens of real people, their pasts and their struggles written on the lines of their faces. This is not manipulation but revelation.

On the relation of Novalic to his time, Gance begins his scenario with a quotation from Ernest Renan: “If the Ideal incarnate returned to Earth tomorrow and offered to lead mankind, he would find himself facing foolishness that must be tamed and malice that must be scoffed at.” Just as we see remarkable images of the Christ-like Novalic behind bars, so the rushes contain lots of footage of the malicious populace – from policemen and soldiers down to bourgeois women and children. Like the vindictive mob that bullies and beats the half-German child in J’accuse, the crowds of Ecce Homo are gleefully nasty: laughing cruelly, pointing at the mad, hurling stones, a swirling mass of malicious derision. Some of the most remarkable scenes to survive include shots of this seething crowd cowering before a cross that rises mysterious up into the camera lens. The doubters are quite literally brought to their knees before the camera. (Seeing these shots again, I also thought that the crucifix resembles the crosshairs of a gun: the camera as weapon!)

Central to the success of Tamayo’s ciné-conférence is her careful shaping and framing of this original footage. The event began with the entire auditorium being cast into darkness (the Salle Franju screen disappearing in a swirl of mobile walls), after which we hear the opening words of Gance’s scenario:

At that time, men were so tired that they could not raise their eyes higher than the roofs of banks or the chimneys of factories. The war had just crushed the most beautiful energies, and the last beliefs in a just God had been swept away in a tempest of hatred. The heart of the world was annihilated by pain, by tears, and by blood that had been shed in vain.

After this prologue in darkness, there is a wonderful coup de théâtre as the screen reappears to offer us the first image: Albert t’Serstevens as Novalic. Presented as the introduction to the ciné-conférence, Gance’s text acts as a frame not only for the plot of Ecce Homo but also for the production itself. “At that time” refers to 1918, which Gance’s fiction imagines as the past – and which is now, a century later, truly the distant past. Reading the scenario, one becomes aware that the “I” of the text is not Gance but an imagined future narrator. Ecce Homo was thus imagined as a kind of extended flashback, a parable from the world to come. The scenario’s narrator reveals that he witnessed the whole story one evening in the “moving stained-glass windows” of a future cathedral. The idea of “moving stained-glass” evokes the kind of visionary projects that continually animated Gance’s artistic imagination. Around 1913, he envisioned “orgues lumineuses”, synaesthetic instruments which could produce turn sound into image, music into light, on giant screens. In 1918, Ecce Homo imagines a future technology – a future culture – that offers “moving stained-glass windows”: a kind of hallucinatory architecture, an immersive visuality, kaleidoscopic and coloured, that shapes and reshapes itself for the beholder, spelling out the visual narrative of Novalic’s life and message.

In his notes for Ecce Homo, Gance quotes from Oscar Wilde’s De Profondis: “Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.” It is this process that Gance tried to realize in his film (in all his films, one might say). It is also an idea taken up in Tamayo’s ciné-conférence. Her finale uses AI images (created by Érik Bullot and David Legrand), together with ink drawings (by Jean-Marc Musial) to evoke the futuristic framing of Ecce Homo. In this sequence, images from the past are transformed via the AI imagination: here is a luminous cathedral, glass glowing, melting, crystalizing; here are spectators, cameramen, vehicles, crowds coming and going; here are monochrome landscapes dissolving and coagulating; and here is Novalic, carrying his image of 1918 like a window around his shoulders, striding toward us. Tamayo also uses some of the imagery Gance sketched for his later project, La Divine tragédie (1947-52), in which a Turin Shroud-like screen, carried upon a cross – floating like a sail or a wing – bears the projection of the Passion. All these images – recycled, blended, reconfigured through AI – invite us to contemplate the process of visual memory, of visual image-making. They remind us that to recollect is also to recreate, and that our relationship with “lost” films can be a generative process. The power of ruins lies in their appeal to our imagination, to invoke the spectator’s response.

This whole finale is a wonderful conceit, though I was so moved by the images of 1918 – their sharpness, their clarity, their depth – that nothing the “mind” of artificial intelligence could produce could match them. In this visual archaeology, the ruins of 1918 stand as startling outposts of a lost past – and a lost future. But how wonderful to have Gance’s project so engagingly, and so imaginatively, presented. Bravo!

Sunday 15 September 2024: Salle Lotte Eisner, 7.00pm

After a couple of hours trying to find a quiet spot to eat some bread along the Seine, I returned to the next screening – and a new venue for me: the Salle Lotte Eisner. (I will say more about the different rooms in my final post in this series.) Here I settled down to La Folie de Docteur Tube (1915) and Au secours! (1924). Two films that I had seen before but never on a big screen, and never with other people…

La Folie de Docteur Tube is usually cited as Gance’s earliest surviving film and, ironically, it was deemed too peculiar for distribution in 1915. However, it eventually accrued a reputation by its circulation on the ciné-club circuit. (Long available in various formats, the 2011 restoration by the Cinémathèque française is now available via HENRI here.) Henri Langlois famously called La Folie de Docteur Tube “the first film of the avant-garde”. The plot of this one-reel curiosity is simple: Docteur Tube (the clown Di-Go-No) discovers a magic powder that transforms himself and the world around him. He dowses his nieces (unknown; unknown) and then their suitors (unknown; Albert Dieudonné), before the group find a way to reverse the transformation.

I confess that I have quite a low tolerance for this kind of film. (I find anything that might be considered “psychedelic” pretty tedious.) Even at barely fifteen minutes, La Folie de Docteur Tube often outstays its welcome. But I’m very glad to have seen it on a big screen, since the power of its imagery relies on scale. Gance achieved the transformation effect by filming scenes via a variety of distortive mirrors. Cutting from different views, seemingly from different realities, is still startling. It’s difficult to decipher these images on a small screen, and the effect is more obfuscating than revelatory. I won’t describe seeing it in the Salle Eisner as a “revelation”, but it certainly brought home the interest in Gance’s first (surviving) effort at producing truly transformative imagery. The peculiarity of the stretched, warped, distended bodies on screen force the viewer to look at the world differently. What starts off as a joke becomes an exercise in sustained visual interpretation: just what is happening on screen? There is time enough also to marvel at the effects of the monochrome smears, the blobs of black and white, the condensed creases of texture, and the sudden expansion and contraction of shapes. (I was also struck by how reminiscent these images are to the AI imagery produced in Tamayo’s Ecce Homo presentation.) I was surprised (and relieved) to find La Folie de Docteur Tube even got a few laughs, albeit slight ones. Most of these were generated by the antics of Tube’s young black servant, who mimics the doctor’s actions and delights in drinking wine from the bottle when he’s able. I find Tube’s weird grins and changes of mood quite terrifying, but his weird capering also raised a titter or two.

Au secours! is another film which is both very slight and incredibly elaborate. The plot involves a bet placed by the Comte de Mauléon (Jean Toulout) that Max (Max Linder) cannot stay until midnight in a haunted mansion without calling for help. Max duly arrives and is confronted by a bizarre array of walking wax statues, grizzly monsters, and hallucinatory tricks. He survives them all, but when his wife Suzanne (Gina Palerme) telephones to say that she is being attacked by a monster, Max calls for help. It transpires that it is all an elaborate hoax, on both Max and Suzanne, arranged by Mauléon.

As Elodie Tamayo pointed out in her introduction to these two films, Au secours! is a peculiarity in Gance’s filmography. Sandwiched in-between the epic dramas La Roue and Napoléon, Au secours! is a disconcertingly light film that also embodies some of Gance’s most extreme forms of visual manipulation. At various points, the screen warps – squishing and stretching Max as he swings from a chandelier – or else flickers – as a barrage of rapid montage hurls dozens of monsters at Max in the space of a few seconds. Yet these moments are soon laughed off by Max, just as the pianist (whose name I cannot find in any source: she was Korean and very good!) chose to let the flashes of montage pass in silence. Indeed, the sheer vehemence of these outbursts of avant-gardism become part of the joke. Max, the comedian, effectively laughs at the tricks of Gance, the dramatist.

Yet there is also something profoundly disturbing about this film. Firstly, the montage is very rough. Very few successive shots quite fit together, and Gance further destabilizes his film by the use of stock footage (from zoos), bizarre close-ups of stuffed animals, ludicrous apparitions, and preposterous grand-guignol. The film starts to exhibit the kind of unhinged hysteria to which its central protagonist soon succumbs. Furthermore, Max Linder’s performance may begin as charming and lightweight as any of his work of the 1910s, but ends with him in floods of tears, screaming madly down the telephone. It’s a terrifyingly convincing portrayal of emotional extremes, of a kind of madness. All these disturbing qualities are exacerbated, in hindsight, by the knowledge that Linder would convince his very young wife to commit suicide with him less than a year after the release of Au secours! (Suzanne, in the film, is also explicitly described as his new bride.) The combination of intensity, hilarity, and violence is truly unsettling. Even when the “trick” is revealed, and the count uses his winnings to pay his army of extras, our experience of the film – and of Max’s experience of events – is woefully unresolved. If it was all just theatre and props, how did the mansion warp and buckle? – from whence sprung the barrage of rapid cutting? – how can we understand the cutaways to real animals? The film only makes sense, in retrospect, if we accept that Max was subject to a sustained mental breakdown. This throwaway little film is as ultimately as disturbing as anything Gance ever made. The combination of low budget with maximal style produces (for me, at least) the same kind of skin-crawling sensation as low-budget B-movies of a later generation. The sheer awkwardness of its mise-en-scène and montage allows a kind of madness, of horror, into the fabric of the film. As much as I enjoyed seeing it on a big screen, it was also quite a relief when it was over.

Au secours! was restored in 2000 in a version that is nicely tinted throughout, and looks as good as this oddity can be expected to look. The audience in the Salle Lotte Eisner laughed along with its antics, as did I – though I can never shake off the sense of something disturbing and tragic pulling at its seams.

Sunday 15 September 2024: Salle Lotte Eisner, 8.30pm

Next up was Barberousse (1917), a film I have wanted to see for years. Barberousse was first shown as an “exclusive event” with a large orchestra at the Cinéma des Nouveautés Aubert-Palace in the summer of 1916, when it was advertised as a “remarkable [film with] first-rate acting and direction” (L’Intransigeant, 11 August 1916). Yet this production was not released generally until the following spring, whereupon it became “a great adventure-drama in four parts” (Le Film, 26 March 1917) to be screened in episodes alongside Louis Feuillade’s serial Les Vampires (1915-16) (La Presse, 22 June 1917). This programming is emblematic of the market in which Gance’s film was designed to fit. The plot of Barberousse seeks both to replicate and to satirize the kind of crime serials mastered by Feuillade…

We begin with our first view of the titular figure of Barberousse (credited as being played by “?”), who wishes to become one of the world’s most revered criminals. The film then recounts his infamous murder of investigative journalists and detectives who try to discover his identity or whereabouts. Gesmus (Émile Keppens), the editor of La Grande Gazette, has made a small fortune in printing stories about this infamous bandit. Yet he can find no new reporter to follow-up these stories, since everyone is terrified of being the next victim. However, after the murder of another famous journalist (Paul Vermoyal), the writer Trively (Léon Mathot) is determined to unmask Barberousse. He allies himself with another newspaper commissioner (Henri Maillard) and tracks down Barberousse and his assistant Topney (Doriami) near their hideout on the “black pond”. But Barberousse’s gang captures Trively’s wife Odette (Germaine Pelisse), triggering a crisis of conscience for the chief bandit. Odette is allowed free, and helps her husband and the police to find Barberousse’s lair. After a gunfight and huge fire around the wood and marsh where the bandits roam, Barberousse escapes. By now, Trively is convinced that Gesmus is Barberousse. He tricks the bandit into revealing himself and Gesmus/Barberousse is arrested along with his daughter Pauline (Maud Richard). The coda to the film is another scene by the fireside of “Barberousse”, who is revealed to be a peasant who has dreamed the whole film. His family – the played by the same actors we have just seen – arrive and he sets about recounting his dream…

Barberousse is a delightful film: charming, amusing, and dramatic in equal measure. It is beautifully shot with some superb exterior scenes around the scrubland and coast of the south of France. Gance filmed Barberousse near Sausset-les-Pins, where he was captivated by the woodland that was blasted by the coastal winds. On screen, these woods become a mysterious lair for the bandits. The sequence in which Odette is captured by what appear to be a moving set of bushes is marvellously silly. But is also uses the wind-whipped trees of this strange landscape to produce some eerie effects. As with the other films I have rhapsodized in previous posts, I can only repeat that Burel was a genius in his own right. The lighting of both these exteriors, and many of the low-key lit interiors, is simply marvellous. The camera is more mobile than in Les Gaz mortels, and we get some striking tracking shots in cars and on boats. There is also a superb extreme close-up of Odette as she is about to drink a poisoned cup of tea: a delightful dramatic detail that, as with many others in this film, makes the contrivances of the plot come to life.

The cast is the same that appears in Les Gaz mortels, with others (like Vermoyal) from Gance’s other films made in 1916-17. Barberousse shows them all to better advantage. I much preferred Henri Maillard in this film. In Les Gaz mortels, I found him stiff and awkward. In Barberousse, he’s more assured, aided by a beard and less dramatic weight to bear. His death is delightfully silly: he’s killed by a poisoned cigar. (“Have you noticed that the smoke from your cigar has a greenish hue?” Trively asks, only to realize that the old man is dead.) Germaine Pelisse has more of a starring role in this film and manages to be convincing even when she’s being pursued by walking bushes. Émile Keppens and Léon Mathot both manage to have the right air of respective villainy and determination. Keppens, in particular, makes a splendid editor-cum-bandit-cum-dreaming peasant. Even Doriani and Vermoyal are less hammy in Barberousse than in their other Gance appearances.

This new restoration offers a rewarding and entertaining viewing experience, though there is surely some missing material. (We see only the aftermath of Trively’s first fight with Barberousse and Topney, not the fight itself. There is no explanatory text to help cover this ellipsis.) I also felt that there were some odd repetitions of frames in a few places, perhaps where intertitles were once positioned. Then again, this may simply be an accurate reproduction of errors present in the original prints. My only real reservation is the lack of tinting, which robs some scenes of their sense of temporal setting. When Topney is tapping a telephone wire, for example, he consults his notes by lighting a candle – a detail which makes no sense when the day-for-night filming offers no hint of it being dark. Blue tinting would also make the walking bushes sequences more believable, since it too is meant to take place at night. And the climactic woodland fire in the big shootout sequence would also gain much from some appropriate red or orange tinting. The oddity about this restoration is that it offers all the intertitles in blue tints – it’s just the film itself that remains in monochrome. I appreciate that without evidence it’s very difficult to try and be “creative” – but leaving the film in monochrome is itself a significant creative choice. (Having just consulted the filmography in a scholarly sourcebook on Gance, I see that Le Droit à la vie is listed as being “colorized”, i.e. tinted, something that the 2024 restoration of that film also lacks.)

I must also mention that the music for the screening of Barberousse was provided by Kellian Camus, another young talent from the piano improvisation class of Jean-François Zygel. There were some pleasing jazzy touches to his approach, and his performance matched the half-serious, half-comic tone of the film perfectly.

Though Barberousse was the last screening of my time in Paris, but I will write one further post on my experience of the retrospective and the live performances at the Cinémathèque…

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