Germany – Page 2 – The Realm of Silence

The cinematic afterlives of Nosferatu

This week, I revisit some of the cinematic afterlives of Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922; Ger.; F.W. Murnau). After catching Robert Eggers’s remake of the film earlier this year, I discussed my thoughts on its relation to the silent original in a podcast with Jose Arroyo (freely available here). To prepare for this, I rewatched (and watched for the first time) several modern films that cite or rework Murnau’s original – and made notes on my thoughts as I went. As a kind of written addendum to the podcast, I have collated and attempted to polish these thoughts into what follows…

Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922; Ger.; F.W. Murnau). What can I say about this wonderfully strange and compelling film? Every image is perfectly composed, marvellously controlled. The world on screen, enriched by tinting, has marvellous texture and resonance. Nosferatu is a fantasy and a period piece, but both the fantasy and the period are rooted in real places – and, for me, its exteriors truly make the film. The town, the forest, the mountains, the castle, and the coast – these locations have such a sense of pastness, and such pictorial power, that they sink into your memory. No amount of parody or pastiche can lessen their value. So too with the performers. They are cinematic archetypes, enacting some kind ritual drama that future generations feel obliged to mimic. But the performances are also playful and delightful, even their most naïve gestures somehow innocent of cliché. There is more than a touch of camp about Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, but a camp that is always sinister. His sexual predation is not quite human; interpreting his desires and motives is like trying to understand the consciousness of an animal or an insect; those piercing eyes are bright with a life than cannot be fathomed. Murnau shapes Nosferatu’s otherworldliness through the darkness from which he emerges, the shadows he casts, the untenanted spaces he inhabits. The film plays with his ability to move across space and time: he walks with the ancient deliberation of an old aristocrat in one scene then scuttles at terrifying speed in another. The figure is allied with cinema’s own uncanniness, the medium enabling the monster: his carriage hurtling through a forest like a berserk toy, his erect body rising in magical defiance of gravity from his coffin. All this richness of image and gesture is enhanced by Hans Erdmann’s original score, best heard (I’ll have you know) via Gillian B. Anderson’s edition rather than the version released on various DVD/Blu-rays. (Anderson’s edition more closely replicates Erdmann’s original orchestration but remains, sadly, available only on a long out-of-print CD.) As it shifts from sequence to sequence, Erdmann’s music moves from the lyrical to the rustic and the elemental; it is charming, brooding, devastatingly simple. As its title states boldly at the outset, Nosferatu is a symphony of horror – a truly complete work of cinematic and musical art. As much as its images and ideas have been treated as a grab bag for future generations to ransack, it still holds an un-replicable splendour.

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979; W. Ger./Fr.; Werner Herzog). The first full remake of Murnau’s film, and by far the best. Shot on location in the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia, Herzog has an unerring knack for the right places, filmed at the right time of day, captured in the right conditions. Always in his films, you can see that this is a director who has spent time walking. These aren’t pretty landscapes, touristic ones, places chosen second- or third-hand – they are fresh, harsh, rugged, sublime. There is also the sense that Herzog’s minimal budget and no-frills filmmaking benefits the atmosphere: it always feels like he has snuck into these spaces without asking permission. These are stolen images, not forged ones. The town, the coast, the mountains, the castle – all become otherworldly, other-timely. The camera seems to have found out odd corners of Europe where the past lives on, like finding patches of frost on a bright spring morning. The supernatural seems almost an extension of this natural world, the hypnotic slow-motion images of bats, the time-lapse photography of moving clouds, or the opening footage of mummified corpses fit perfectly into this world, this mood – all are implacably real and ungraspably strange. The cast, too, fits in with this mood – through costumes and setting and lighting, yes, but through performance. All is mood. This Nosferatu is ridden by angst, pain. Herzog often said that Klaus Kinski’s best performances came when he was exhausted to the point of collapse. The actor would rant and rage and scream and shout and threaten murder, and Herzog would wait until the storm ebbed – then he would roll the camera and shoot the scene. The result is an air of timeless exhaustion, of a pitiable figure advancing through centuries of fatigue. The slowness of Kinski’s gestures across the film are dreamlike, but then he moves with terrifying speed when his instincts are riled – as when he sees blood on Harker’s hand, or in his writhing death-throes, curling up like he’s a sheet of parchment caught in a flame. It’s a performance of amazing power that draws you in every time you watch it. Just as fine, perhaps finer still, is Isabelle Adjani. She is as otherworldly and magnetic as any of Herzog’s images, who indeed seems to have imbibed and embodied them. Her glance, her movement, her posture – what a sublime presence she is on screen. (Yes, I really do prefer Adjani to Greta Schröder in Murnau’s film.) Elsewhere, Herzog brings surprising depth and pathos to his characters. As Renfield, Roland Topor is oddly and touchingly gentle – a sad figure, a lonely man chasing someone to love him, or a child chasing a father. He is a world away from the comically sinister Alexander Granach as Knock in Murnau’s film (or the later scenery-chewing performances of subsequent versions). And I do love Bruno Ganz’s honest, harried Harker. He does not have the boyish innocence of Gustav von Wangenheim for Murnau, but I can believe him as a man who lives in this particular world, who loves his wife, who finds himself in thrall to the uncanny. His slow transformation into a vampire across the film is marvellous, and I have always loved his final scene. He has a marvellously comic flourish (getting the maid to sweep away the salt that keeps him magically penned in a corner of the living room), as though he were touched not merely by the spirit of Kinski but by the spirit of Max Schreck. Then Ganz takes on the faraway look of someone being drawn into another kind of life, or afterlife. The last image of him on horseback, riding across the wind-whipped sands, accompanied by the “Sanctus” from Gounod’s mass, is beautiful. This is a film of which I remain inordinately fond.

Vampires in Venice [aka Nosferatu in Venice] (1988; It.; Augusto Caminito/Klaus Kinski). Yes, dear reader, I even watched this – just for you. Frankly, it was hardly worth it for the few sentences I write here. Kinski has grown his hair, a caged lion with a rockstar mane. He wanders with glazed, angry boredom around Venice – in a Venice pretending vainly to be the past. Christopher Plummer tries to track him down in the present, encountering the vapid stock characters of post-synchronized Euro-horror. It’s a slovenly, sloppy film – salacious yet soporific. I drifted in and out of its louche, morbid pall of atmosphere. I remember the final images, which touch on the poetic – yet somehow remain earthbound. Kinski, a naked woman in his arms, walking across a deserted square in the fog. Where was the film that justified such an image? Murnau is dead, and director Caminito (and Kinski, his eminence grise) did not wander into the past to find him, or to resurrect anything of his world.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000; US/UK/Lu.; E. Elias Merhige). A film about the shooting of Murnau’s film, the concept of which is that the director hired a real vampire for the role of Nosferatu. What a curious thing this is. The concept is neat enough, but it is framed in such odd terms – at least, from a film historian’s perspective. We are told (via an intertitle, no less) that Murnau creates “the most realistic vampire film ever made” – and the character later explains that realism is the essence of cinema. For the film, this is fine, but I wonder if this is how the writer and director of Shadow of the Vampire really felt about Murnau. Does anyone associate Murnau with “realism”, let alone define him by this term? I ask, because in all other senses Shadow of the Vampire is oddly loyal to Murnau – recreating with rather charming precision many of his original shots. We see the camera’s eye view of scenes, though these shots mimic the worn monochrome quality of old celluloid. Yet the film also shows us Schreck watching some of the landscapes from Nosferatu projected on a screen – but instead of pristine rushes, we get the battered and blasted tones of a grotty 16mm print. Amid the attention to period detail, this one glimpse of Murnau’s original footage is distinctly unflattering. John Malkovich is (inevitably) a weirdly compelling Murnau, obsessive and cunning but often charming. Willem Dafoe has a twinkle in his eye as Max Schreck, knowing that it’s all a game – even if the film takes itself a little too seriously. Indeed, my reservations about Shadow of the Vampire all stem from the way it addresses its own premise. The film gestures towards an ideology or aesthetic of realism but never develops it, nor does it allow the horror to grow frightening enough to compensate. Shadow of the Vampire is not a comedy, but the comedic shadows its every move. Dafoe, I think, knows always the dramatic limitations of these projects. He is never parodic in drama, but he can tread the line wonderfully well, as he does in Eggers’s Nosferatu. Shadow of the Vampire is interesting enough as an idea, and as a curious period drama, but I’m not sure it is anything more than a superficial engagement with the cinematic past.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002; Can.; Guy Maddin). I sometimes get asked what I think of Guy Maddin, or else people assume that I am interested in his “new” silent films. I confess that I have never taken much interest in them at all, nor have I ever felt strong kinship or interest in any “new” silent productions. I was once in Paris at the time of a retrospective and caught Maddin in person, introducing Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988). It remains the only film of his I have seen in the cinema, and I confess I found it interminable. Maddin certainly captures the stultifying awkwardness of certain early sound productions, but it felt like a short film blown out to feature proportions and even at 70 minutes it was a slog to sit through. His Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is a much more lavish affair, taking its cue from innumerable previous iterations of the vampire myth – but shot silently and synchronized to a music soundtrack. In many ways, it’s a superb production. Maddin lights and shoots his scenes with stylish brilliance. His staging and choreography are striking, just as his mobile camera and his editing are dashing and spirited. But I regret how the many parodic performances and gestures it makes (not to mention the garish yellow text for the intertitles that sits superimposed over monochrome imagery) keep me at a distance. Campness need not be so superficial nor so silly as it is here, and these qualities make its aesthetic sumptuousness seem no more than surface and gesture. It has the trappings of silence but not of its depth or uncanniness. It’s a filmed ballet, but one without any frisson of liveness or great physicality. Rather, it’s a danced film – and I swiftly bored of its pretty artifices. Maddin’s film is only a very distant relation to Murnau, and despite its beautiful (sometimes ravishing) moments it has no resonance.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (2023; US; David Lee Fisher). You may not have noticed the release of this film, but I did – and its very existence requires some contextual explanation. Fisher’s only other film is The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (2005), a remake of Robert Wiene’s silent original. Using digital scans of the original film, Fisher recreates (not quite shot-for-shot) the aesthetic with a new cast – and dialogue. I had the peculiar privilege of encountering this film for the first time on a big screen with a class of film history students, after having watched Wiene’s original the previous week. I am always very sensitive to the mood of a room, especially of students – I do so want them to engage with (if not love) the films they are shown. There was nothing worse as a lecturer to feel that you were showing students something they actively hated (and I could always feel it in the room). But Fisher’s Caligari was the first time I felt glad to sense that the room had turned against a film. As bad a habit as it is for a critic to feel superior to a film, it is a worse habit for the director of a remake to feel equal to the original. The digital process of copy-and-pasting sets is neat enough, but the film has no idea how to replicate the sense of presence: Fisher’s cast are walking about mostly in green screen spaces, utterly divorced from their surroundings. It has the trappings of a period piece, but neither costumes nor faces nor performances can convince they have anything to do with the period. The dialogue is absurd, banal to the point of existential embarrassment. (How can such a script be thought adequate?) And when Fisher recreates the famous close-up of Conrad Veidt’s Caligari opening his eyes, the void between past and present is at its most unbridgeable, the gulf in intensity of drama and performance most apparent. (It is the same problem that Scorsese had in including this same shot of Veidt in Hugo (2011): it has infinitely more power and presence than anything in the surrounding film.)

So to Fisher’s second film… Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was, so the internet tells me, funded via a Kickstarter campaign way back in the 2010s. The film was purportedly shot in 2015-16, which seems remarkable given that it took another seven years to get released. Of course, it has been released only for streaming via Amazon Prime, which I suppose is the equivalent nowadays of what was once called “straight to video”. As with Fisher’s Caligari, original images from Murnau’s film have been digitally transplanted around a new cast. The effect is both more detailed and somehow more disappointing. In Fisher’s Caligari, the sets are at least flat in the original. In Nosferatu, an entire world is reprocessed in a manner that I found positively sickly. I earlier described the richness of the locations being one of the chief pleasures of Murnau’s film, and their systematic eradication was one of the chief disappointments of Fisher’s film. The landscapes are CGI creations, imaginatively stunted – as is every interior space, every shot in fact. The backdrop to every scene resembles a generic screensaver, without a trace of weight or reality or mystery. (The costumes are no less convincing, nor even the occasional moustache.) Among the cast, I single out Sarah Carter as the only figure to have genuine emotional depth – or any kind of convincing presence. She stands in a different league to anyone else on screen, even Doug Jones, whose Orlok is at least a committed performance. But it, like everything else in the film, is an exhausted stereotype of something we’ve seen dozens of times before. Fisher’s technology has improved, but he still cannot write dialogue or assemble convincing faces or performances. In comparison, Maddin’s Dracula (for all my reservations) is an infinitely more convincing use of a silent milieu.

Nosferatu (2024; US; Robert Eggers). All of which brings us to Eggers. Oh, Eggers… I have only seen one of his other films, and I thought The Lighthouse (2019) was as dramatically hollow as it was stylistically skilled. The tone of the script and performances rubbed me the wrong way. Was this a parody that took itself far too seriously, or a serious drama that was incredibly flippant? Much as I admired the way it looked, I squirmed with embarrassment and irritation at the dramatic tone. Some of my reservations about The Lighthouse I also have about Nosferatu, but I enjoyed the latter much more.

For a start, it looks lavish, and Eggers knows how to dress a set and provide a beautiful background. There are images that evoke Caspar David Friedrich (almost more so than evocations of Murnau), and there are glimpses of some fabulous locations (in the Czech Republic). The whole section in which Hutter travels to the east is the best in the film, and I wish I had seen more of the amazing churches and villages glimpsed all-too-briefly here.

But the richness of this part of the film’s world, so breezily skipped through, makes the inadequacies of the Wisburg setting more apparent. The exterior spaces of Wisburg consist of little more than two streets and a very small crowd of inhabitants. There is no sense of place and time here, nor of the scale of the invasion of the rats and the accompanying plague. (Compare this to Herzog’s film to see how much difference this space makes in dramatic tone and mood.) And while I loved some of the scenes set on the coast, you never get the sense that Eggers quite knows how to let these images sink in or resonate. They are very pretty, but they have no greater purpose. Eggers can dress a world impeccably, but a world is also people and ideas – these take work of a subtler and more difficult kind. As with The Lighthouse, to me Nosferatu was a very modern set of people dressing up and playing the past. The very impeccability of the images made the dialogue and the tone of many performances incongruous. While the film is happy to employ religion and supernaturalism, no-one seems to believe in any kind of corresponding or supporting ideology. And while the film offers a token critique of (male) medical authority, it is also entirely predicated on the idea of female desire as hysterical and “other”. (Nosferatu is explicitly summoned, if not created, by Ellen.) What, if anything, does this film believe, or want us to believe, about the drama it shows?

The performances are a curious mix. I must begin by praising Nicholas Hoult, who as Thomas Hutter is the emotional heart of Nosferatu. I was moved by him as by nothing else in the film. When he says he loves Ellen, you truly believe it – a conviction without which the film would fall down. Hoult was absolutely the best thing in Nosferatu, the least histrionic and the most believable. Bill Skarsgård’s Nosferatu is very… well, loud. His abstract presence is first signalled by a vast roar of sound in the film’s prologue that had me covering my ears. And when we meet him and he speaks, his voice (featuring rrrs that roll like no other), even in a whisper, reverberates throughout the speakers and floor of the cinema. Utterly unlike the silent and unknowable figure of Murnau’s film, this Nosferatu is a physical, corporeal, rotting being, defined as much by sound as image.

As Ellen, I found Lily-Rose Depp oddly unsatisfying. She gets to romp and roar and moan and writhe, and does so with aplomb. (Many of her poses are supposedly based on historical accounts of madness/hysteria, but I felt I had seen young women writhe and vomit blood this way a thousand times before in horror films.) But when she must deliver the (vaguely) period dialogue, it carries the whiff of parody. In part, it is the script’s fault for attempting (and, I think, failing) to mimic nineteenth-century turns of phrase, but mainly it is an issue of tone. I remain unconvinced that Eggers knows how to handle (or to decide upon) a consistent or convincing tone. Depp was one of the main reasons I felt this Nosferatu was playing dress-up. Again, I do not blame the performer so much as the director. This too is the case with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance as Harding, which I found inexplicably bad. How can an English actor speak English so unconvincingly? I do not blame Taylor-Johnson, for he’s clearly been asked to perform like this by the director. But why? Why is he so artificial, so mannered, so parodically out of place? I am at a loss as to how I am supposed to feel towards Harding or his family. His children are ghastly screaming creatures, mobilized by the film (so I thought while watching the first half) to make us glad of their eventual demise – but when the demise came, suddenly the tone suggested they had earned our sympathy, as had Harding. Why? How? When? As for Simon McBurney’s Knock, he is as scenery-chewing as they come, gnawing on live animals and shouting – always shouting. While the characterization might echo Murnau’s version, it brings nothing new (other than fatuous gore). Just think how tender Herzog’s Renfield is by comparison, a character who is more than one-dimensional – and whose madness is a blissfully quiet delight.

What of Eggers’s relationship to Murnau? I noticed how the new film’s credits never mention Murnau, only Henrik Galeen, the screenwriter of the 1922 film. How odd, and how ungenerous, given the direct citation of the film’s (i.e. Murnau’s) imagery as well as its characters. Yet I never quite got the sense that film history truly informed this film. Eggers has surely seen Carl-Th. Dryer’s Vampyr (1932) – the floating shadows, the uncertainty of space, the dislocation of sound and image – but his Nosferatu has nothing uncanny about it. Dryer makes his sounds teeter on silence, slip back into it, emerge unsettlingly from it; Eggers makes his film quite unbelievably loud, roaring, throbbing – even his vampire’s whispers are rendered at the volume of earthquakes. Nor did I get a sense of other Galeen films lurking in the background of Eggers’s. Perhaps this new Nosferatu has some faint echo of Galeen’s Alraune (1928), but only in the sense that both films have an interest in female sexuality and the uncanny. (And let me be absolutely clear: Lily-Rose Depp is no Brigitte Helm.) But I found no echo of the world of Galeen’s Der Student von Prag (1926), which has its own rich cultural history, being itself a remake of the (to my mind) superior version of 1913 (a film I discussed here). This is a whole strain of German cinema that I feel very little evidence of in Eggers’s film. On its own terms, this new Nosferatu is a perfectly enjoyable film – but it is a bold move to identify itself with the silent past. If nothing else, it invites comparison where otherwise it might not. Having summoned the comparison, I cannot but think that Murnau’s film is an eternally peculiar and resonant work whose secrets elude Eggers.

In summary… well, what is my summation? I set out on this little crash course through the afterlives of Nosferatu with the aim of suggesting how and where Murnau’s film inspired future generations. In the end, I fear that all I’ve done is complain. If this does not make for a neutral survey, at least it’s an honest assessment of what I felt. The more remakes, revisits, or (god help us) “reimaginings” of a film, the wearier I grow. There is something in the metaphor of the vampire, in its unkillable afterlife, that fits the ceaseless round of resurrections cinema has performed on Nosferatu. But having rewatched all these films, I feel I am become Kinski’s incarnation – eternally weary, wishing for the end of this eternal round. Let me return to my silent realm.

Paul Cuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

PC: How do you organize who does what?

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

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

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

PC: Is it difficult having to reject musicians?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PC: Do musicians ever pitch themselves?

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

PC: Do the regular musicians also pitch specific films?

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

PC: Is that an added pressure?

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

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

Paul Cuff

Programming silent cinema: An interview with Oliver Hanley (2/3)

This second part of my conversation with Oliver Hanley covers his work as a curator at the film festivals in Bonn and Bologna.

Paul Cuff: Since 2021, you’ve worked alongside Eva Hielscher as co-curator of the Stummfilmtage Bonn. How did you get involved with this festival?

Oliver Hanley: I had a good connection to the festival already. I had attended every year since 2008, and had even brought films to the festival during my time at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. So, I was familiar with the programming at Bonn, and when Eva and I took over the curatorship, we tried – and still try – to follow the tradition of our predecessor, Stefan Drößler, whose curatorial work we admired very much. But of course, we also try to bring something new and to show films that would not have been shown previously.

PC: And when did you become involved with Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna?

OH: It was already after I became co-curator of the festival in Bonn. In late 2022, I got the offer to curate the “One Hundred Years Ago” strand at Bologna. I was a bit anxious at first at the thought of taking it on, especially being already involved in the Bonn festival at this point, but it seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity, so I thought: just go for it!

PC: Is doing these two festivals, both taking place during the summer, difficult?

OH: It can be strenuous doing both. There’s about a six-week gap between them, so the preparation for one runs parallel to the other. But in a way, the work is complementary. When I watch films for my Bologna research, I come across films that I think could work in Bonn. Or I take films to Bologna that were shown in Bonn because I know they will work there as well. Besides, I know that my experience at Bonn and Bologna is very privileged. It might be a lot of work, but at the end of the day, I’m programming for two festivals that are approximately a week or ten days long. There are people curating film programmes for film archive cinematheques throughout the entire year! They have to create three shows a day, every day, maybe with a summer break. I can understand that you can’t devote the same amount of care and attention to detail with those programmes that I can when working for the two festivals.

PC: I presume Bonn and Bologna have distinct identifies and aims. Do you need to bear this in mind when curating the material being shown?

OH: Yes. While the festivals have some similarities, they also have their differences and this in turn affects the programming. Bologna, I feel, is very much a festival for cinephiles and specialists, while Bonn is aimed at a much wider and predominantly local public. Bonn is free, it’s all outdoors, and anyone who comes knows it has this forty-year tradition. People will come and watch all the films, but in some cases, these might be the only silent film screenings they attend across the year. In others, you have the obsessive silent film fans from the region who come over to see what they can. At Bonn, we try to go against the grain a little, which has always been the ethos of the festival – but ultimately it must appeal to a wider public. In Bologna, however, I can show things that I would never show in Bonn. For the “One Hundred Years Ago” strand, I need to show newsreel footage for the historical context. At Bonn we sometimes show documentary feature films, but newsreels are very difficult to accommodate. The same goes for things like fragments or incomplete films. The makeup of Bologna, and the existing form of the strand I curate, allows me to incorporate this kind of material more easily. But I essentially apply the same kind of the same curatorial approach to both Bonn and Bologna. You can’t just randomly throw stuff together: you need to have a clear reason for your selections. The films need to work in a kind of dialogue with each other.

PC: Do you always hope to provide clear through-lines across a festival?

OH: This year, more than in previous years, I think it was very obvious in the Bonn programme. Sometimes we made exceptions where we couldn’t really find a connection between the two films we wanted to show each evening and combined them according to other, more pragmatic criteria like running time. But in my Bologna programme the thematic connections between the individual films in the individual screening slots were very evident as well this year.

PC: What kind of programmes work best?

OH: Very simple themes work best because I think they give you the most freedom as a curator to explore things. And it makes the programme varied enough that you don’t have the feeling you’re watching the same film or variations on the same film. In Bonn this year, for example, we had films themed around the mountains or the sea, or films about filmmaking. On the first Friday we had two feature films where one of the main characters is blind, at least for part of the film. Just finding these little connections allows you to put very disparate films together. And in Bologna I had a couple of country-based programmes. For example, I combined a Swiss feature film, which picked up on the hype of the very first Winter Olympics, with an Arnold Fanck short film that was shot in Switzerland, and with a newsreel showing the last Turkish caliph in Swiss exile. I also did a Russian-themed programme, where I started with newsreel footage of the funeral of Lenin in 1924, then some rare footage of Anna Pavlova dancing for Douglas Fairbanks, and finally a completely obscure Russian film, Dvorec i krepost’ (The Palace and the Fortress, 1924). The latter wasn’t an exceptionally good film, but it was very successful in its day. Another major reason to show it was because a pristine print of the German version survived here at the Federal Archives. It was a nitrate print, tinted and toned, which you almost never see in Soviet cinema. So, just because a film may not be particularly good, this doesn’t mean there still isn’t a good reason to show it. The experience is what counts. And I am always grateful when people talk about how well the programme worked afterwards.

PC: Do you always have to consider the specific copies of films you want to show?

OH: Yes. It’s not just a question of curating film titles. You’re really curating film prints. There can be any number of good reasons to show a film. It could be we just really like the film. Or we know that where a particularly good print is located. Or we have determined the film to be in the public domain, so we didn’t have to pay any exorbitant fees to third-party copyright holders to show it. The list goes on.

PC: Does this aspect of organization differ between festivals?

OH: My experiences as a curator are very different for Bologna and for Bonn. Bologna is probably the most important film heritage festival in Europe, if not the world, and I’m just one of many curators. And there are other people on staff that take care of specific things. So, here I don’t book the prints or clear the screening rights myself because there are other people who take care of that. Whereas in Bonn, where we are a comparatively small team, we curators also liaise with archival loans departments or distributors, and negotiate with the rights holders directly. So, while programming for both festivals has a lot of similarities on the one hand, there are also differences. In the case of Bonn, this is particularly because of the hybrid format, live and streamed, which means we are very conscious about finding films that we can stream online without any issues. This form of digital accessibility is very important for the festival because it brings our programme to a much larger audience.

PC: Does digital technology pose extra problems for you, or are there advantages?

OH: There are pros and cons in every case. I’m not one of these dogmatic people who say film must always be shown on film. I think digital is a fantastic tool for making films available. And digital technology has enabled restorations of films that would never have been possible solely through analogue means. So I’m very grateful for that. From a technical perspective for us as a festival, the great thing about digital projection is this ability to record music live, because you’re guaranteed that at the end of the process it will sync up with the image perfectly. Whereas with an analogue projection you never know. So, we haven’t risked it yet – yet! Anything we screen on 35mm, we pre-record the music for the streamed version in the theatre auditorium at the cultural centre where our festival office is based. This usually takes place in the afternoon before the screening.

PC: You mentioned the rights issue being another complicating factor. What are the challenges this aspect poses for curatorship?

OH: For Bonn, we will focus a lot on films that are deemed out of copyright or in the public domain, which can simplify matters somewhat. But we have made good experiences with some copyright holders such as the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung (e.g. for Der Berg des Schicksals [1924]) or the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé (e.g. for La Femme et le pantin [1929]). The point is that we need to ensure that we have great films on our programme, but it often takes time until we know for definite that we can present a film on-site and online without any big repercussions. There are always exceptions. This year we closed the on-site festival with The Black Pirate [1926] in MoMA’s beautiful new restoration. We didn’t pass up on it even though it wasn’t possible for us to stream it in the end, because we knew it would work perfectly for our open-air format with the huge screen and live music. Thinking about it pragmatically, I’m sure there will be a Blu-ray release of MoMA’s restoration at some point in time, and people can see it at home then.

PC: As a curator, how do you see the relationship between the festival as offered on-site and the festival presented online?

OH: It’s a difficult balance. This year we streamed ten of the twenty-one films we screened at our on-site festival, so one each day, which I think is manageable, both for us organizers as well as for the viewers. We’ve had more films online in past editions, but at some point it just becomes too much for people to actually sit and follow at home. I think we made a good call when we decided not to stream any of the short films. Because you also want to make sure people come to the live shows, and that only at the live festival do you get the full programme. And of course, online and on-site are just very, very different experiences.

PC: Does the hybrid format of a festival change how the films are received?

OH: Yes. It’s always fascinating when live and online audiences have totally different opinions of the same films. For example, last year we screened Pozdorovljaju z perechodom [Congratulation on your Promotion, 1932], a very obscure Ukrainian children’s movie. We chose it for various reasons, including to show our solidarity with the Ukrainian people. But it’s the work of a completely unknown female director, Їvha Hryhorovyč, so it was a real rediscovery. It also isn’t a great film. Our live screening wasn’t one of the better attended, and the reception was rather lukewarm, but we still had comparatively strong streaming figures. This year, both yourself and Paul Joyce wrote very positive reviews about Jûjiro [1928], the Japanese film that we screened. But I had people coming up to me after the screening in Bonn who couldn’t fathom why we had screened it. Maybe it was just the vibe of the live screening, or maybe the film was just too intense for them. So, I was so glad to read your reviews later where you really praised the film.

PC: Since the easing of restrictions after the various lockdowns, some festivals have cut back on the amount of online content they offer. For example, the Ufa-Filmnächte festival in Berlin streamed their films for free during the pandemic and beyond, until 2023 – but now this service has ceased. What do you think the future is for the streaming of festivals more generally? Is it a sustainable model for the future?

OH: Well, it’s hard to give a kind of all-encompassing answer to that question. I think from the outset that were very different attitudes from festivals toward streaming. For example, on one extreme you had festivals which took the attitude of waiting until the pandemic was over so they could take place as on-site events as normal. Then you had others that went completely virtual. And others which tried to offer the best of both worlds while still respecting the increased health and safety restrictions that were in place at the time. When the restrictions were eventually lifted, several festivals that had been quick to offer virtual solutions just as quickly gave that up.

PC: Pordenone is one of the few major festivals to have continued a major streaming service.

OH: Yes. I think what festivals like Pordenone experienced with the streaming was that it tapped into potential new audiences. When Pordenone staged its “online limited edition” as a replacement for that year’s on-site festival, which couldn’t take place because of the pandemic, they ended up with something like twice as many subscribers as they would normally have accredited guests.

PC: And the Bonn model?

OH: At Bonn, of course, we’re somewhat different to, say, Pordenone, because no one pays any money to see the films, either at the on-site festival or online. This not only means we don’t have any revenue, but can also lead to other obstacles. For example, some people are concerned about piracy, and there’s an attitude that if something is made available for free then that also makes it easier to steal. On the one hand, I can understand the concern, as a lot of money goes into restoring the films and the institutions might be under pressure to try to recoup some of that money, but I also think it’s a bit of a shame as it restricts access to cultural heritage. And, of course, it’s not free for us to make the films available for free. On the contrary. The streaming platform is a major cost factor, but it’s just one of several. There’s also the additional cost of the sound recordist, for example, which we wouldn’t have if we were a purely on-site festival.

PC: Do you hope to be able to keep your hybrid format in the future?

OH: Bonn is maybe a relatively small silent film festival compared to the likes of Pordenone, but our hybrid approach has got us on people’s radars, and this is why we will continue to offer films for free streaming online as long as we can. But there may come a point in time where it won’t be feasible anymore.

PC: Is there a tension between wanting to promote film heritage and the need to restrict access to content?

OH: This is the irony. Just because more and more things are available digitally doesn’t make it easier for us. Actually, it can sometimes feel like the contrary. In addition to the aforementioned concerns about piracy, the additional costs for the provision of streaming materials and rights can sometimes be prohibitive. In others, it’s just not possible to license worldwide. While we strive to make everything we stream available worldwide, we’ve had to make exceptions in a limited number of cases where we could only be granted streaming rights for Germany. In the case of one film we were very keen to show in Bonn last year, we were compelled to drop it in the end because the archive which held the film had just signed a Blu-ray deal with a distributor in the US. This deal ruled out the possibility for us to stream the film. Nowadays, Blu-ray companies are very savvy about acquiring streaming rights for their territories as well.

PC: Given all these factors, I presume that offering a streaming service puts added pressure on the staff and resources of festivals. Is that your experience at Bonn?

OH: It’s a massive strain, not only in terms of the additional man-power and know-how required, but also because it all has to be carried out within the existing budgetary framework, which is still based on pre-pandemic times before streaming became a thing. That’s why for a number of years we had to forego a printed brochure. We only brought it back this year because we ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to finance it. Costs are forever going up, while funding for cultural endeavours is constantly at risk of being reduced or cut altogether.

PC: How does the actual process, the workflow, function for streaming films? Who handles it all?

OH: In the first place, we don’t do live streaming. Films are not streamed online simultaneous to live screening. We have everything planned out and prepared in advance, and when the music recording is ready, I put audio and video together and we upload the films to the streaming platform’s back-end server. It helps that I had a background working a lot with digital file wrangling and AV mastering and so on. I do all that myself, which I suppose is a bit crazy. But it’s also a bit of a guilty pleasure, so I don’t complain about it too much! It’s also positive in the sense that it helps build trust with the lending institutions. I can guarantee them that the video files don’t leave my hands until the point in time when they are uploaded to the platform’s server. The musicians and the subtitler receive heavily compressed screeners with a big fat time code rendered into them. No-one gets the clean video image apart from the server. So, it’s useful, particularly when we were dealing with new institutions, to be able to show them the workflow and demonstrate that we take active steps to restrict the possibilities of things being pirated as much as we can.

PC: From a different perspective, there are now major archives – like the Danish Film Institute or the Swedish Film Institute – that offer a lot of their holdings for free online. But these versions are often entirely without soundtrack or accompanying material. They’re not offering a full aesthetic experience, they are just offering access. Is this an entirely different model to that of festival streaming?

OH: What these institutes offer online is an unmediated form of access, at least in comparison to a cinema or festival screening. Of course, as a research tool, these platforms can be considered veritable goldmines, and I have benefitted a LOT from them in my own curatorial work. It’s a fantastic service, but not always a pleasurable viewing experience due to the lack of music or English subtitles in applicable cases. Putting silent films online without music might be good for certain formats – non-fiction, short form – but not for features. My dream would be that we make as many of the films that we have presented in the Bonn programme available online permanently – with the music. The problem is that, while the films have already been digitized and the soundtracks have already been recorded, there are still additional expenses involved in making the films available online outside of the festival streaming period. And unfortunately there are next to no funding opportunities for such endeavours.

PC: Again, I wonder how satisfying this model would be. Do you feel Bonn should have this kind of permanent presence, this recorded archive of live events? Isn’t there something uncapturable about a festival? How do you look back at what you achieved each year?

OH: As soon as the festival’s over, your mind is usually already pre-occupied with the next festival. But there’s a period of a couple of weeks where I do the digital housekeeping, backing up the master audio files and deleting all the huge video files amassed in the run up to and during the festival, but not before running off low quality reference videos to send to the musicians and to the archives for posterity. Doing this puts me back in the festival for a little while. I listen to the music again and think how nice it was, and that it’s really a pity that this material can only be experienced by audiences for a fleeting moment – and then it’s gone. But that’s cinema, right?

Programming silent cinema: An interview with Oliver Hanley (1/3)

To start off the new year, I’m doing something a little different. At the end of August 2024, I watched the streamed content of the Stummfilmtage Bonn. In the wake of my series of posts, I was contacted by Oliver Hanley, the co-curator of the festival. He wrote to answer the question I posed about the legal limitations of streaming, and his response encouraged me to ask more questions. Oliver was kind enough to have a longer conversation with me, the transcript of which is the basis of the three pieces that I will post across this week. We spoke about his background, his work at Bonn and Bologna, and about the difficulties and pleasures of curating a silent film festival. In this first part, we talk about Oliver’s route into curatorship…

Paul Cuff: I want to start with a quite basic question. How did you get involved in festivals and programming, and did you always have an interest in silent cinema in particular?

Oliver Hanley: We have to go a bit back to answer that question. I’ve always been interested in things from the past, from before my time. I think I first got into silent film through comedy, the big names like Chaplin and Keaton, etc. Then from there, I somehow progressed to German expressionism. I’m not entirely sure if that came from an interest in German culture or it was the other way around.

PC: Were you aware of silent cinema in broader culture when you were growing up?

OH: Being born in the mid-1980s and growing up in the UK, I was fortunate enough to catch the last of the Channel 4 silents on UK television. I remember the first one I watched was The Phantom of the Opera [1925/1929] in 1995. And then they brought out Nosferatu [1922] the following year with the James Bernard score. I was lucky to see these films when I was reaching my late teens, which also corresponded with more and more silent films being available on DVD in decent quality. For example, I’d already known Metropolis from truly, truly awful VHS copies, so when I got a chance to see the (then) most recent restoration [from 2001], it was really a revelation for me.

PC: And at what point did you realize that you wanted to become actively involved with film culture?

OH: It was clear I wanted to devote my professional life to cinema. Naïvely, I initially wanted to be a filmmaker and thought I would become rich and famous. And either through ignorance or lack of good advice, I came to the conclusion that if you wanted to be a filmmaker, you need to do film studies! That’s how I ended up in Canterbury at the University of Kent doing the film studies programme there.

PC: Did experiences at university shape your ideas about a career?

OH: It was a combination of different factors. In the first instance, I didn’t have a good experience in the practical courses that I was doing. They put me off that for life. Second was that I volunteered at the campus cinema, which gave me the opportunity to see films there for free. They would show a lot of the BFI touring packages, for example new prints of Visconti and Fellini films, and a big Michael Powell season on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. But I was quite surprised that I would very rarely see my fellow film studies students at the repertory screenings. They would all go to see the contemporary art house stuff that was all the rage at the time. Films like Donnie Darko and Mulholland Dr. would be quite well attended, but not older stuff. I remember sitting in this empty theatre, watching masterpieces in beautiful prints, and wondering why no one was there. I really thought that this was a shame.

PC: Did you experience any silent films through these kinds of screenings?

OH: No, there was very little silent programming. But I had a very sympathetic lecturer on one of the courses who was also passionate about silent cinema. At this point in time, my main outlet for exploring silent cinema was DVD, and I would collect them like mad.

PC: Did this also give you an interest in the archival side of things?

OH: Yes, I read and watched a lot about how complicated it can be to restore film. I loved the idea of scouring the whole world and tracking down all the different elements and putting them together. I was fascinated by what Robert A. Harris did for Lawrence of Arabia, for example, and by what Photoplay Productions was doing for silent films. That was really what I wanted to do. But there was always that element of wanting to do it so that people would actually see the final result. Like you, I was at the screening of Napoléon [1927] in the Royal Festival Hall in December 2004. That was really, really something!

PC: After your undergraduate degree, what did you decide to do?

OH: All these early experiences shifted my focus towards wanting to devote myself more to making sure that the film heritage – especially the silent film heritage – would survive. It was the lecturer at the university who pushed me to do what was then the relatively new specialist course at the University of Amsterdam: the professional masters in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image. This was my stepping stone to continental Europe. I had said that I really wanted to focus on German film and asked if there would be a way I could do an internship or some unpaid volunteer work at a film archive somewhere. She recommended me to do the masters programme instead, because that’s where people will be sought after. I can’t necessarily say that this was exactly how it turned out, because jobs in this field are few and far between. Certainly, it’s an advantage to have this kind of background, but you still have to fight. Every year there are new graduates on the market, and the market is always getting smaller.

PC: If Amsterdam was your stepping stone, where did you go from there?

OH: Via the Amsterdam programme I ended up interning in Frankfurt at the Deutsches Filminstitut and helped with various tasks in the film archive, including a restoration project, and various contributions to DVD editions. What was important for me was that it changed my perspective. Before, I had been what you might call very canon-oriented: Lang, Murnau etc. This is all great, but my experience in Frankfurt opened my eyes to what was beyond the canon. I learned to appreciate the unknown, what film history really has to offer. At this point, I changed tack and started questioning why we are so focussed on the classics, when there is all this great other stuff around. This is something that continues to influence me in my work right up to this day, for example in our Bonn programming. Particularly with German films, we try to push the lesser-known works rather than the big names. This can also tie in with the restorations being done by certain institutions.

PC: Did your time at the Deutsches Filminstitut encourage you towards curatorship?

OH: Actually, I wanted to go more into the technical side of things and do laboratory training. This didn’t work out, which I think was for the best because I’m not really a technician. I understand a lot of the technical processes and have been quite fortunate to get into the scene before analogue was being phased out. When I started, digital technology was up and coming in the archival and restoration fields, but no archive could really afford it. The big studios were going digital, but no one else. Now it’s completely different. At the time, I gained background experience with analogue, which is good because I think it’s important to know both.

PC: If you didn’t end up going into laboratory work, where did you want to go?

OH: After graduating from my Masters studies, I moved to Berlin and managed to get on board a project at the Deutsche Kinemathek. I came expecting to stay only three months – and ended up staying three years, moving from project to project wherever there was funding and work needing doing, but my dream was to become a film restorer. Back then,I think my idea of a film restorer was still Kevin Brownlow, who is actually more of a historian who restores films. But that is still what interests me most about the process: the research, comparing different versions, putting together what might be a representative edition of a film. When it moves into the technical procedure, I’m a bit more hands off. Obviously, I supervise the grading and transfer etc, but the most exciting part is over for me.

PC: After your experiences in Germany, you went to Vienna. How did that happen?

OH: At that time, there was very little money for film restoration in Germany. In 2011, I got an offer to start working at the Film Museum in Vienna. I was brought in to take over the task of curating their DVD series, which was something that had always fascinated me. DVDs had been my gateway to the film heritage, and I loved watching the extras. So, the Vienna job was a dream come true. But I also helped build up the museum’s streaming presence. We had very, very limited means, so we were looking to see how to get parts of the collection online without it costing any money. For example, we digitized newsreels that had been transferred to U-matic video tape in the 1980s. You didn’t have to worry about it being 4K or anything like that, it was just a case of dusting off our old U-matic tape player to get these films transferred and put online for the sake of access.

PC: Did you envision doing this kind of work permanently?

OH: I was more and more keen on getting into the restoration process. The museum had a complete digital post-production workflow in house. It was very small, very artisan level – we were just doing a couple of projects each year. But it enabled me to become more involved in selecting some of the films or supervising projects at a managerial level. The museum had quite an interesting collection of nitrate prints of obscure German silents, but the films didn’t really fit the museum’s curatorial profile. (They have a very strong connection to the avant-garde experimental film scene, to Soviet cinema, to American independent cinema, and so on.) Nevertheless, we were able to do some very cool projects at that time, including one with funding from the World Cinema Project, and some of these restorations then ended up on the DVDs I was producing. At the same time, whenever I could, I would investigate their nitrate collection. But it was difficult for the museum itself to restore this material. By this period, around 2015-16, money was finally being made available in Germany to digitize the German film heritage.

PC: So there more opportunity for the kind of work you wanted to do in Germany?

OH: I was in Vienna for five years. By the end of my time there, I had reached a point where I had done everything that I could with the means that were available. I was worried that I was just going to start repeating myself. But in 2016, I got the offer to come to work at the Film University in Babelsberg, where I still live, just outside of Berlin and home to the famous film studio. The Film University – Germany’s oldest film school – had set up a heritage programme at the end of 2015, modelled somewhat on the one I had taken in Amsterdam, and I was brought in to teach at Babelsberg in 2016.

PC: After all your experiences in archives and museums, was it strange going back to teaching?

OH: I felt like a change. And years of being involved with practical work, I felt – in an idealistic way – that I was returning to teach the next generation. I was able to bring my experience into teaching, but also my network that I had built up over many years.

PC: How did your earlier experiences shape your teaching?

OH: In the first instance, we did visits to archives and yearly excursions to Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. But I also got some wonderful people in the industry to come to us and do guest lectures: Jay Weissberg, who runs the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, for example.

PC: It sounds like a very rewarding combination!

OH: Of course, working for the university also had its less glamorous side, and there were several administrative duties. I did the website, the newsletter, and so on. But you had a lot of freedom and a lot of access to resources, especially for academic events and various collaborations. We have our own film museum here, Filmmuseum Potsdam, with its own cinema, and we would regularly do events together. These were linked to my classes, so it was a requirement for students to attend.

PC: What kind of events were these?

OH: In my case, it was almost always a silent film event. I would get the funding through the “ZeM”, the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies, and that would cover the cost to do a silent film screening with live music, and a guest speaker who would then do a lecture during the day. The first such event we did was Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [1920]. We brought over the restorer, Anke Wilkening, to talk about her work on the film, and Olaf Brill, a German film historian. Brill’s book about the film, Der Caligari Komplex [2012], does an amazing job using primary written sources to try to quash the legends that had built up over time, and to reconstruct who was responsible for what during the writing and production. Yes, the film is a German classic, we’ve seen it a million times, and we all think we know it inside out. But both his research and her restoration enabled us in different ways to see the film in a completely new light. That was kind of the focus, and every second semester we would repeat this concept as much we could.

PC: What other events stick out for you?

OH: The year after Dr Caligari, we did Der Golem [1920]. This was a curious case because two different institutions in Germany, the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung and the Filmmuseum München, were doing two different restorations concurrently. But that was extremely interesting because the two restorations followed completely different concepts. Filmmuseum München’s restoration benefitted from the major discovery of the film’s original score by Hans Landsberger. Landsberger only did four film scores, and I think all of them were at that time considered lost. But Richard Siedhoff, a silent film accompanist over here, came across the score for Der Golem in a German archive (seemingly no-one had thought to look before!). It wasn’t the complete orchestral score, but a reduced conductor’s score that Siedhoff then re-orchestrated. This version was shown recently on German television.

PC: How did you try to use archival material – familiar or otherwise – to engage your students with film history?

OH: Just before Covid hit, we did our biggest event – a series of lectures and screenings in about five parts. It took a completely alternative approach to the idea of the canon. We’re completely oversaturated with these “definitive” restorations, so I wanted us to look at the (by now) lesser known and – in some cases – quite bizarre re-release versions of German silent classics from different periods in German history. For example, we showed Die zwölfte Stunde [1930], which is a re-release of Nosferatu essentially as a sound film. The soundtrack doesn’t survive, but the rest of the film remains complete. We showed this version because it contains interesting changes, including some extended sequences with footage that was shot for the re-release. When you watch it as a silent film – and we showed it with live music – it can be a bit weird, but it still works. Something else we showed was from 1932-33, the crossover from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany. At this time, they re-released the first part of Die Nibelungen [1924] with a soundtrack. The significant thing about that soundtrack is that Gottfried Huppertz, who did the original score for Nibelungen, for Metropolis [1927], and for Zur Chronik von Grieshuus [1925], personally rearranged and conducted the recorded version for the re-release. The other interesting thing about it is that it was created not as a precursor to what was going to happen in Germany, but to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Wagner. And so Huppertz incorporated Wagner’s themes into his original composition. It’s a bit of a mix of Wagner and Huppertz, but it’s a fascinating document.

PC: How easy was it to get hold of prints of these non-canonical versions?

OH: We had to put a lot of effort into screening Die Nibelungen because there’s no screenable print available of the 1932-33 version. The FWMS had done a preservation on film, but they had not made a screenable print. But we convinced them to send the preservation negative to our university to be scanned (since we were working for a state-of-the-art film school, naturally we had our own film scanner!). From the raw scan files, I then prepared the digital version for our little screening, knowing that it wasn’t restored – or even graded properly – but at least we could see the film this way. We also showed Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü [1929] in its “talkie” re-release version of 1935.

PC: What about more recent re-releases? Did they feature in this series?

OH: Yes. There was this company called Atlas in the 1960s that began by distributing art house films in Germany (Bergman, Antonioni, etc.). But they also re-released old films and they did a series of silent films in the mid-1960s with synchronized scores. We showed one of these because they’re very of their time, especially with the music. There is a version of Dr Mabuse [1922] with music by Konrad Elfers, from 1964, which you could imagine being a score to a kind of Euro James Bond rip-off! We also showed a television version of Dr Caligari from the 1970s with a score by Karl-Ernst Sasse, a very well-known composer who scored a lot of DEFA films, among other things. Inevitably, we crowned the series with Giorgio Moroder’s Metropolis [1984], which – I must admit – is a guilty pleasure of mine. And not just mine, it seems, as there wasn’t an empty seat in the house!

PC: Did organizing this series influence what you subsequently did at festivals?

OH: In my professional career, I had always straddled the preservation and access side of archival work, but up until this point I had mainly focused on providing access through digital media, DVDs, online. When I started doing these live cinema screening events, it was the shape of things to come for me, because it’s more or less what I do now with the festivals. I still have one foot in the preservation side of things, because I supervise a limited number of digital restorations. It’s good to be on both sides of the process.

PC: Do you think you would always have ended up as a programmer of films for festivals?

OH: In a way, I think it’s very logical that I’ve ended up where I am. From that early experience in the university cinema, right the way through to Bonn and Bologna – it’s all been about getting films to people. It was a long time before I got to where I am now. What’s the famous phrase? It took me fifteen years to become an overnight success! But I’ve been very fortunate.

Pordenone from afar (2024, Day 8)

Our last day of streaming from Pordenone. We begin in Germany (or possibly Istanbul) for an Anna May Wong vehicle, then make our way to America for some Harold Lloyd. Two chunky features to digest, so here goes…

Song. Die Liebe eines armen Menschenkindes (1928; Ger./UK; Richard Eichberg). On the outskirts of an “eastern” town. John Houben (Heinrich George) encounters Song (Anna May Wong), one of “Fate’s castaways”, and rescues her from a gang of roughs. He leaves, but she follows him back to his poor home in town. He is a knife-thrower and, after some initial hesitation, she moves in with him and joins his variety troupe. Posters advertise the arrival of Gloria Lee (Mary Kid) to the city. We see her with James Prager (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), a rich patron. Meanwhile, we see in flashback that John once fought and killed a man over Gloria – and John was presumed lost overboard, but survived when washed up on the beach where he met Song. At the Blue Moon café, Gloria sees Song dance and John throw knives. Gloria offers John money, while Prager flirts with Song. The next night, John goes to see Gloria at the ballet and visits her backstage – and confesses his love. Prager arrives and the two men exchange violent looks. John wants more money to impress Gloria so joins a gang of train robbers. The plan goes awry and Song rescues John from the rail tracks. But his sight has been damaged by the accident and during his knife-throwing act he wounds Song. John suspects Song of having betrayed the gang to the police. He attacks her and falls in a stupor: he is now blind. Song goes to Gloria to ask for help. Only Doctor Balji can help, but this will be expensive. Song comes again to beg for money but is offered only Gloria’s old clothes. Song sees money in her dressing room, so steals a couple of notes and leaves. Song returns to John in Gloria’s clothes. Blind, he mistakes her for Gloria, which devastates the lovelorn Song. She lies and says the money was from Gloria, so they go to the doctor. Gloria leaves the city, but Prager stays. He once more crosses paths with Song and says he knows she stole the money. He promises her a big engagement in one of his shows. She accepts and some time later she is star performer at more upmarket venues. Meanwhile, John is cured but must not remove his bandages for three days. He asks after Gloria, so Song says she will go to fetch her. She re-enters dressed in Gloria’s clothes. He rips off his bandages, sees Song, and furiously hurls her from the house. She mournfully heads off, while John discovers that Gloria long ago left the city. Song returns to Prager, who is angry she has been with John. He tries to force himself upon her and says she must decide between John and him. Song performs a sword dance, just as John enters. Started, she falls onto a blade. He takes her home. She opens her eyes in time to see that he is recovered and has brought her back – then dies. THE END.

An odd film. Made in Germany with a mostly German cast, Song was released as “Show Life” in the UK, and this English-language print is the one that survives. The restoration, by the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, relied on what the credits tells us was a very limited amount of original 35mm material. But the result, while missing a small amount of material, is gorgeous to look at. The photography is superb, the tinting adding a lovey atmosphere to the exteriors of Istanbul, the cramped sets of John’s house, and the elaborate stage sets for the café, ballet, and salon. In particular, the opening shots of the coast around Istanbul (or wherever, doubtless, substituted for it) are gorgeous.

George and Wong are also captivating presences on screen. This was one of Anna May Wong’s most successful silents, and the film lavishes lots of close-ups on her. She is clearly a star, magnetic and fascinating, and even if the psychology of her character in this film is very sketchy, she gives a committed performance. But I was equally taken with Heinrich George, who made such an impression in Manolescu (shown at Pordenone in 2022). The man is a hulking physical presence – always gruff, always strong, always dangerous. When his character tries to be charming, he exudes a kind of over-keenness that threatens to become violence. He’s a fierce, brooding, never-quite-pitiable figure.

All that said, I don’t think this is a great film. As much as I like all the above aspects, the film as a drama is less than the sum of its parts. I simply didn’t care enough about the characters, or believe in the depth of the feelings they supposedly had for each other. Everyone feels rather like a stock character, which the performers all do their best with – but there’s only so far you can go with such a thin story. There are plenty of intensely concentrated shots (especially some close-ups of George and Wong), but these images don’t add up to anything of psychological depth or dramatic conviction. It’s lovely to look at, but I was underwhelmed with the drama. And although I like Wong and George, I never bought her love for him. (I think back to Manolescu, where George’s love-hate relationship with Helm was visceral on screen.) I can imagine that, looking just at the image captures here, Song may well look like a better film than in fact it is. It really does look good, but it needs more than that.

And so, to our final film: Girl Shy (1924; US; Fred Newmeyer/Sam Taylor). What can I say? This is a masterpiece. I’ve not been so moved and so delighted by a comedy feature in years. My god, where has this film been all my life?!

In the obscure small town of Little Bend, trainee tailor Harold Meadows (Harold Lloyd) lives with his uncle, Jerry Meadows (Richard Daniels). Harold is “girl shy”, helplessly stammering whenever he talks to a woman and recoiling at any intimacy. But he is also fascinated by women and has written a novel – “The Secret of Making Love” – in which (as we see via fantasy scenes) he imagines himself dominating them and winning their devoted admiration. On his way to the publisher with his manuscript, he encounters the heiress of the Buckingham Estate, Mary (Jobyna Ralston), and rescues (and then hides) her dog on the train. He describes the novel, and she is fascinated by it and by him. In Los Angeles, they must part – but Mary soon keeps driving through Little Bend in the hope of encountering Harold. However, she is being pursued by the louche Ronald DeVore (Carlton Griffin), a womanizer with a cynical eye for money. When Mary and Harold meet on the river in Little Bend, their romance is interrupted by Ronald, who also clashes with Jerry. The young couple are parted once more but agree to meet in town when Harold goes back to the publisher. In town, Harold is laughed at by the publisher and the entire publishing staff. He leaves, utterly crestfallen, convinced he is unworthy of Mary. When he meets her, he pretends that their romance was all an act for the sake of his new chapter. They part, and soon Mary reluctantly accepts Ronald’s proposal. But the publisher realizes that he can sell Harold book not as a drama but as a comedy: he sends a $3000 cheque. Harold, believing this to be the rejection note promised by the publisher, tears it up without looking – only for Jerry to spot the error. Realizing he is now able to marry Mary, and being told that Ronald is already married to another woman, he hurries to break up the marriage ceremony in town. After a madcap chase from Little Bend to Los Angeles, he arrives in time to rescue Mary and propose. THE END.

I’ll say it again: this film is a masterpiece. For a start, it looks beautiful. The photography is superb, the lighting excellent. The scene by the river, where Mary re-encounters Harold, is absolutely perfect: the evening light, the gentle softening of the background, the framing and composition of the bridge and reflections… oh my word, what a beautiful scene. It’s charming and funny and deeply touching. It’s rare in a comedy feature to be quite this moved, and not to feel grossly manipulated, but Lloyd somehow keeps the emotional tone perfectly balanced. His character is a foolish fantasist, but he is also capable of real kindness. When the publisher tells him to his fact that he’s a complete failure, I confess that my heart broke a little. The extended close-up of Lloyd offers enough time to let the impact of the words sink in for the viewer while we watch it sink in for Harold. His performance isn’t sentimental, it’s realistic – and that’s why its so effective. It lets you believe in him as a real person, and the memory of his fantasies of domination are left far behind. I cared for him here, just as I cared for Mary in the scene where Harold lies to her and breaks her heart. Again, the moment is so well pitched, so restrained, it’s simply heartbreaking.

It’s also a film of incredibly subtle visual rhymes and gestures. See how the uncle has on his knees a child whose trouser rear he’s mending; then how Harold is introduced likewise (rear first) through being bent over backwards; then how the gesture of sewing/intimacy is carried into Harold’s first encounter with the girl with the split tights. In these moments, the easy intimacy of the uncle for the child is awkwardly mirrored in the hoped-for-but-rebuffed intimacy of the girl and Harold. Harold is figuratively childlike but – unlike the actual child – cannot cope with the adult implications of intimacy. His introduction, bent over backwards, is a kind literal rendering of how he’s got things all backwards. (More crudely, you might say he’s introduced as an arse.) Then see how, in the novelistic fantasy, Harold spanks the flapper in the same posture that the uncle repairs the trousers. Here, Harold enacts a comically violent revenge on his inability to feel easy around women and their bodies: far beyond his real self’s shunning of all contact, this is not the consensual middle ground of intimacy but the extreme of physical possession. It’s funny, certainly, but a little unsettling. Here is the loner fantasizing about smacking a woman for pleasure.

But the film’s visual rhymes also signal that Harold knows in principle, and will learn in practice, how not to treat women. In the first novelistic fantasy, we see Harold put his hat and cane over the outstretched arm of the vamp; in the real world, we see Ronald put his hat and cane over the arm of the Buckingham’s maid. The latter situation reminds us of the callowness of Harold’s alter ego, but in reality, the situation is more sinister. For Ronald’s gesture with the hat conceals (to the lady of the house) the fact that he’s groping the maid’s hand. So too, the placement of the cane over her arm makes it an extension of his own touch. The maid clearly feels uncomfortable and so, surely, do we. It’s a marvellous indication of how the fantastical scenario of Harold and the vamp becomes troubling when we see it enacted in real life. The maid, unlike the vamp, is a woman without power or recourse to self-defence. Then see how the gesture with the cane appears again as Harold, seeing Mary’s beloved dog left behind off the train, uses his cane to hook the animal from the ground onto the moving train. Here the cane is used for comic effect, but it’s also a gesture of sympathy, of kindness: he’s performing a good deed, a selfless one. (Perhaps there is an unconscious desire to use this act to make contact with the girl – but Harold is too shy to follow through, and spends the next scene desperately trying to avoid Mary.)

The rhymes are also there with Mary and Harold. They are forced to sit next together when the train takes a bend and Harold falls into place next to her, just as (later) on the river Mary falls into Harold’s boat. Their two treasured mementos of the train journey, the box of biscuits (hers) and the box of dog biscuits (his) are objects of veneration, things to hold in the absence of the real person. On the river, seeing the other person with their token of love indicates to the pair that their feelings are reciprocated, just as – in the first variation on this rhyme – the devaluation of the token is a rupture of their relationship. This occurs when Harold, having been rejected by the publisher, decides it’s best that someone destined to be a failure should not disappoint Mary. He breaks up with her and claims that all his words were a mere scenario for his book. He immediately hooks up with a passing girl, who had shown interest in him a few minutes earlier. They link arms and he then buys her a box of biscuits – the same brand as he had given to Mary on the train. The replication of this gesture is deliberately hurtful, a kind of parodic rhyme that devalues (while also re-emphasizing) the initial parallel of the lovers’ tokens. Later, when Harold receives the publisher’s cheque but (believing it to be the promised rejection note) tears it up unopened, the very next scene creates a poignant rhyme. Here, Mary contemplates the cover of the biscuit box that she has torn up and now reassembles. The rhyme between torn cheque and torn box suggests the inopportune rupture of something that would bring success and happiness – and (in Mary’s scene) the desire to repair the damage. Harold will soon piece together the cheque, matching the image of Mary’s reassembled package. With both halves of this parallel repairing achieved, Harold sets off on his race to the rescue. It’s such a brilliantly organized, beautifully staged use of props and gestures. God, what a good film this is.

Of course, I’ve hardly said just how funny a film this is. The long sequence on the train, when Harold first avoids Mary then has to sit next to her, is exquisite. I particularly loved the series of gags involving his (real) stammer and (feigned) cough. Lloyd manages to make these essentially acoustic jokes work perfectly for the silent screen. His stammer involved him contorting his mouth: first his mouth hardly opens, he purses his lips, the breath fills his cheeks; then his mouth his fully open, stuck in a different register, and still no sound emerges. It’s the physical movement of speech, its physical articulation, that works so well: here is speech visually arrested in its various stages. The coughing gag – where Harold has to mask the sound of the dog’s barking – works so well because Lloyd must express the cough purely visually: he has to attract the guard’s visual attention, not just aural attention, so his whole body performs the cough. The sheer extension of this sequence is part of the delight: it runs and runs, forcing Harold to keep finding new ways of doing the same thing. (In this, it foreshadows the far greater physical effort of his race to the rescue, where he must once again keep finding new ways to overcome essentially the same problem.)

The final sequence – all thirty minutes of – is astonishing. I can’t possibly go through all the gags, but the one that made me laugh the most was the “Road closed: diversion” gag. Lloyd’s car goes over a bumpy road that makes the vehicle buck and bounce. The particular framing of the medium-close shot of Harold at the wheel, bouncing helplessly along, is wonderful – but it’s the moment when the car finally regains the main road that rendered me helpless with delight. Here, the car has been shaken so badly that the entire vehicle is now a shaking wreck. Like the sensation of seasickness after returning to dry land, it’s like the car and its driver are now unable to cope with the smooth tarmac. Within the wider context of the chase – in simple terms, one damn thing after another – it’s such a bizarre image, and such an unexpected twist, that I was rendered almost insensible with laughter.

The major stunts – Harold unwinding the fire hose, hanging off the cable car cable, the near-crash of the horses – are superb. The moment when one of the horses slips and slides along the road is genuinely breathtaking, and the tracking shot of Harold riding hell-for-leather are as remarkable in their own way as some of the chariot race footage from Ben-Hur (1925) – Lloyd’s film even foreshadows many of the same dazzling camera positions. And to conclude this finale with Harold’s inability to actually say why the marriage is invalid is such a brilliant pay-off to the preceding derring-do, I was won over again by his character, and by the film’s sense of comic timing. What an astonishing sequence, and what a brilliant film.

The music for the film was the first and only orchestral soundtrack offered for the streamed Pordenone programmes. The Zerorchestra provides a jazzy beat throughout. It keeps things moving along, although its default mode of extreme busyness sometimes lost interest in the very precise, varied rhythms of the scenes. What I admired most was the way the score knew when to keep quiet and reduce its forces for the piano alone, or even silence. The moment when Harold is rejected by the publisher was rendered all the more moving by the pause in the music. The feeling of dejection sinks in so perfectly here, the choice to pare the music back to virtually nothing works so well. The (I think , entirely necessary) use of sound effects – for the whistle, the typewriter, the dog – are subtly done, becoming a part of the music rather than intrusions into the silent world. A strong score, well executed. (Since seeing the film yesterday [actually, by the time you read this, the day before yesterday], I have dug out the version released on DVD some twenty years ago, which features an orchestral score by Robert Israel. This is a more traditional score than the Zerorchestra’s, as the latter mode of jazz certainly postdates the era of the film. I also confess that my own taste leans more toward the kind of orchestral tone painting that Israel compiles. He also has the benefit of a full symphony orchestra, so the sound is lovely and rich. I hope the film gets a Blu-ray release, perhaps with both scores as optional soundtracks. This is a film I want to watch again and again.

So that was Pordenone, as streamed in 2024. As ever, I emerge from this week-and-a-bit exhausted, without even having left my house. (Having in fact been practically housebound because of fitting in a festival around work.) Having followed a little of the writing and photographic record of the on-site festival, I am also very much aware that those who went to Pordenone saw an entirely different festival. It’s quite possible that someone there could have missed many, most, or all of the films that I saw streamed. My memory of the content of Pordenone 2024 (streamed) will be entirely distinct to the memory of Pordenone 2024 (live) for those who attended in person. I have quite literally experienced a different festival to those at Pordenone. I also regret that I have not had time (or have not made time) to watch Jay Weissberg’s video introductions, or the book launch discussions, all of which are a significant chunk of the material made available online. I suppose these, in particular, offer a more tangible sense of the festival on location. My relationship with streamed content remains very much limited by time. I fix onto the films and abandon the rest, “the rest” being precisely that content which offers contact with the people and places of Pordenone in situ. But without taking the time off to entirely devote myself to the festival, I cannot see this changing. And why take a week off when all I’m doing is standing before a screen? Oh, the ironies…

Nevertheless, I remain exceedingly glad to have seen what I have seen. Thirty euros for ten generous programmes, shorts and features, is good value, especially given the rarity of most of the material. It’s a further irony that my favourite film of the whole festival – Girl Shy – was the most readily available of all of the ones I saw. But I welcome the chance to see anything and everything, even the passing curiosities and stolid duds, simply because it’s good to explore any culture with which you are not familiar. One day I will go to Pordenone in person, whereupon I’ll probably regret not being able to take image captures and have the time to write. The irony abounds.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2024, Day 3)

Day 3 of Pordenone takes us to Italy, then to Germany (via Vienna and London) for a programme of immense delight. Cue laughs, pratfalls, wild dancing, and a great deal of delight…

To begin, we have the short film Per la morale (1911; It.; unknown). A moral crusade against illicit images and writing is announced in the papers, and a wealthy man seeks to join the “fight”. At another person’s home, he starts daubing black paint over the exposed flesh on paintings; in the park, he tries to cover a woman who is breastfeeding her infant, then puts his coat over a naked statue. When he tries lowering a skirt over a woman’s ankles, he is confronted, taken to court, and sent to prison for offending public morals. In a delightful coda, the Roman-style film company logo – an image of Romulus and Remus being breastfed by a wolf – is itself subject to his censorship. END.

So to our main feature: Saxophon-Susi (1928; Ger.; Karel Lamač). In Vienna, Anni von Aspen (Anny Ondra) is captivated by the career of her best friend, the aspiring dancer Susi Hiller (Mary Parker). However, her father the Baron von Aspen (Gaston Jacquet) and mother (Olga Limburg) do not approve, despite the Baron’s secret interest in chorus girls. After Anni is caught at the theatre by the Baron, she is sent away to a strict boarding school in England. At the same time, the Baron is gently blackmailed into financing Susi to go to the Tiller dance school in London. On board the ship to England, Susi and Anni encounter three rich Englishmen: Lord Herbert Southcliffe (Malcolm Tod), Harry Holt (Hans Albers), and Houston Black (Carl Walther Meyer). After discovering that one of the girls is a dancer, they place a bet on which girl it is. To impress the lord, Anni lies and says she is Susi. When the ship reaches England, Anni convinces Susi to continue their identity swap. So Susi (as Anni) goes to boarding school, while Anni (as Susi) goes to dance school. The Tiller dance school is run by Mrs Strong (Mira Doré), who asks to see how “Susi” dances in Vienna. Seeing the comically bizarre improvisation that Anni concocts, Mrs Strong sends her back to the remedial class. Meanwhile, the three men place another bet that Lord Herbert cannot sneak into the dance school to see “Susi” and then bring her to their Eccentrics Club. He does, but after “Susi” impresses with her jazzy dance routine, she overhears the men discussing the bet. Assuming Lord Herbert is interested only in showing her off to win money, she leaves him. Back at the dance school, her involvement with Lord Herbert has breached the rules and she is expelled. Just as she is saying goodbye, however, she is spotted by a producer-musician (Oreste Bilancia) who wants her to lead his review in Vienna. Back in Vienna, Lord Herbert decides to ask Susi’s parents for their daughter’s hand in marriage. Ignorant of the fact that the woman Lord Herbert has fallen for is in fact Anni, Susi’s poor mother (Margarete Kupfer) is overjoyed to accept. When “Saxophone Susi” arrives in Vienna, Frau Hiller and Lord Herbert go to see the show – where Frau Hiller does not recognize her daughter on stage. After the show, the Baron von Aspen is shocked to encounter his daughter Anni back in Vienna with a troupe of other girls. Anni lies and says that the dancers are her schoolfriends on an educational trip abroad. They all go back to the von Aspen home, where Lord Herbert also finally tracks down the real “Susi”. When “Saxophone Susi” is played on the gramophone, the girls cannot disguise their dance training and burst into a spontaneous performance. Anni’s deception is revealed, but Lord Herbert’s proposal is finally accepted, and the von Aspens are all in accord. The lovers marry, much to the confusion and consternation of Harry and Houston, who are left arguing over who has won the bet. ENDE.

What a delightful film! First and foremost, Anny Ondra is superb. She is beautiful to look at, and the camera gives her some incredibly striking close-ups. But what entirely wins you over is just how funny she is as a performer. After showing her skills at the farcical hide-and-seek from her father on stage in the opening act, we are given two standout dance sequences later in the film. The first is when she arrives at the Tiller school and must improvise an entire routine from the Viennese stage. We see her concoct a fabulously bizarre range of moves: wobbling like a ragdoll, leaping backwards and forwards, scuttling sideways like a crab, stalking like a hieroglyph, flailing madly, performing gymnastic star jumps, jiving like crazy, falling over backwards, then scuffing along the ground on her backside, before dizzily stumbling to a halt. Her dancing costume (baggy shorts and short-sleeved top with a little bow), combined with her messy hair, makes her look oddly childlike. (So too the bare dance hall, with nothing to measure her scale in the room.) But there is also something cheekily adult about her gestures and posing: she’s showing off her legs, her body, her backside. Then in the dance at the Eccentrics Club, Ondry gets to show us something no less charming or silly but far more impressive as a dance. When the club dance expert starts pulling sensationally complex and graceful moves, Ondry starts to copy him. She fails at first, but soon they fall into rhythm together: she the mirror of him. She’s never quite as skilful, but the sequence is such a delight it doesn’t matter. Her timing is brilliant, even if it’s the timing of a comic more than that of a dancers. She makes the whole thing look so fun, it’s just a pleasure to watch. When she follows the dancer up the stairs, doing a kind of stop-motion walk-cum-dance, it’s both ludicrous and brilliant. The sequence then develops into a communal dance number, with the jazz band and crowd of club members (all impeccably suited anyway) becoming an impromptu troupe: Ondry is held aloft, then walks over everyone’s heads on seat covers held up for her triumphant march and descent back to earth. Ondry is clearly having great fun on set, and it’s great fun to watch. These scenes had me grinning from ear to ear. Great stuff!

The rest of the cast is never less than good, though Malcolm Tod is a bid of a nonentity. His role is entirely superficial anyway, but for this reason it would have benefitted from someone with a bit more personality, more presence, on screen. Hans Albers, in 1928 not yet a major star, is wasted as one of the other rich Englishmen. Perhaps it’s because his face is so well known to me, but I felt much more drawn to him than to Tod. Albers is more than merely handsome: he has a kind of physical presence that Tod palpably lacks. Among the rest, Gaston Jacquet stood out as the most communicative: his twinkly sophistication is straight out of a Lubitsch film. (Though Lubitsch might have cast Adolphe Menjou for this role.) As the two girls’ mothers, Olga Limburg and Margarete Kupfer make the most out of their minor roles – they are, in their own way, even in their few minutes on screen, perfectly formed characters. Lord Herbert’s comic servant-cum-go-between (Theodor Pistek) also has some nice moments, as does the wary porter at the dance school (Julius von Szöreghy) – their best scene being their first together, as the servant pretends to be a hairdresser to gain entrance to the school. Finally, as Mrs Strong, Mira Doré gives a faintly sinister, faintly predatory performance as the dance teacher. At least one scene with “Susi” suggests that her interest in her charges is not without a sense of eroticism. (After all, her first scene in the film relays her ceaseless efforts to keep men away from her girls.) I suspect this character, as with many others in the film, might have been made more of by another director, or else via a different kind of script.

Having said that, the tone of the film is nevertheless gleefully irreverent. Nothing and no-one are taken too seriously, the film never tries to condemn anyone for their actions, and it is more than willing to show a little flesh, have a laugh, and raise a glass or two of champagne. Bodies are things of pleasure, to move and dance, to flirt and display, just as expectations are there to upturn for the sake of pleasure and for the pursuit happiness. Moral outrage is only ever comic and only ever lasts a moment, before common sense and acceptance win the day. There is also something pleasingly cosmopolitan about it all. The cast and crew are a mixture of nationalities: Czech, German, French, British, Austrian, Italian, Hungarian. I could lipread some of the cast speaking English, though I dare say a whole host of tongues was used across the production. The dual-language intertitles (French and German) enhanced this sensibility, and it was also interesting to compare the phrasing across these languages, as well as with the English subtitles. Having three languages on the screen made me feel like I was in some way joining in with the continental sophistication of it all. And though the film begins and ends in Vienna, it also shows off the streets of 1920s London in some fabulous exteriors – especially at night, with the streets lit up by illuminated billboards.

(As a side note, I should also point out that Saxophon-Susi survives only through various exports prints, from which this 2023 restoration was reconstructed. About 700m of the film’s original 2746m survive. Many of the characters’ names are different from the listings of the original German version.)

I must also mention the piano score by Donald Sosin, which was delightful: catchy, rhythmic, playful, and fun. Though Sosin’s music was a perfect accompaniment, I must confess that I regretted not having some more instruments – especially for the titular saxophone-playing sequences in the club and on stage. On this note, this restoration of Saxophon-Susi was shown in August this year at the “Ufa filmnächte” festival in Berlin, where it was accompanied by Frido ter Beek and The Sprockets film orchestra. I confess that I was all set to watch this screening via its free streaming service, only to discover that the festival no longer had a free streaming service! The “Ufa filmnächte” is one of the festivals that offered this service during and after the pandemic, but that has since withdrawn it. A shame, as I would love to have heard Saxophon-Susi with some actual saxophones. (At the premiere in 1928, it was accompanied by a jazz orchestra.)

So that was Day 3. I commend the programmers for pairing Per la morale with Saxophon-Susi. Both films are uninterested in moral proscriptions or resolutions, and are pleased to acknowledge but not to condemn a little human appetite. (In contrast, I’m thinking back to the censorious Santa of Day 2.) If neither film has any great depth, they have plenty of charm and wit. Saxophon-Susi was an absolute delight to watch, and – having missed the Berlin screening – I’m particularly glad that Pordenone screened (i.e. streamed) it. A joyful little film with a joyful performance by Anna Ondry. A real treat.

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2024, days 8 and 9)

Days 8 and 9 and… oh, well we have a problem. Two problems, actually. One is the fault of my past, the other the fault of my present. By way of explanation, let me detail what films were seen by the good folk in Bonn – but not by me…

Day 8: Der Berg des Schicksals (1924; Ger.; Arnold Fanck)

Anyone who does the festival circuit each year must end up encountering the same new restorations in multiple line-ups. Even if you are, like me, limited to online festivals, this can still happen. A case in point is Der Berg des Schicksals. I first saw this film in August 2022 via the (streamed) Ufa Filmnächte that year, complete with orchestral score by Florian C. Reithner, performed by the Metropolis Orchestra Berlin. It was a superb presentation with music that fitted the scale, ambition, and scope of Fanck’s film. Lo and behold, I saw it again in October 2023 as part of the (online) Pordenone festival. On that occasion, the film was shown (both in live and streamed formats) with a solo piano accompaniment. I was glad to see the film in better quality than in the version streamed in 2022, but sad that the marvellous orchestral score was not part of the presentation. Come the Stummfilmtage Bonn in 2024, here once more is Der Berg des Schicksals. As at Pordenone, this live/online presentation is not performed with the orchestral score but with piano accompaniment – this time via Neil Brand. Having seen the restoration in both good visual and audio quality (sadly not on the same occasion), I decided I would save my time and skip this film. I know, I know – my first post for the festival even said you (that is, I) must always rewatch a masterpiece when possible. But I miss the orchestral score, and I was already behind schedule. If I was attending in person, this is a film that I would gladly encounter again and again: I would love to see it on the big screen, regardless of accompaniment. But at home, I’m just not interested enough to watch this epic film on a small screen without orchestra. I can only apologize for the snobbery and lack of dedication this attitude represents.

Day 9: Shooting Stars (1928; UK; Anthony Asquith/A.V. Bramble)

Missing Day 8’s film was the fault of past choices, but missing Day 9’s film was the fault of present circumstances. In all honesty, I would possibly have skipped watching Shooting Stars as well. Not that I don’t like the film, but I had seen the film before and my schedule was already overloaded by the time I got to Day 9. However, the choice was taken out of my hands when I read the notice on the Stummfilmtage Bonn streaming page. For legal reasons, this film would be available only to audiences watching (and, I presume, streaming) in Germany. How peculiar. There was no stated reason for this legal restriction, so I’m left to wonder if it was to do with the music or the film itself. (If anyone reading this happens to know the answer, do comment and let me know.) The music that accompanied the BFI DVD/Blu-ray edition of 2016 was by John Altman and I recall it being excellent. But I would have been curious to hear the music performed for the Bonn screening by Meg Morley and Frank Bokius. As it stands, I have neither seen the film nor heard the music. Oh well.

I can promise you that I have indeed seen the content of Day 10 – and I will post my piece about it tomorrow…

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2024, day 5)

Day 5 of the Bonn festival takes us to Germany, and an exploration of jealousy and marital strife. Described by its opening titles as “A tragicomedy between man and woman”, I was expecting – well, I suppose I was expecting something very much akin to what I got…

Eifersucht (1925; Ger.; Karl Grune)

Act 1 establishes what might be called the rules of the game for the remaining film. The opening scene of a husband strangling his wife is revealed to be a stage performance, and the playwright (Georg Alexander) comes on stage to take the applause. He then returns home with his two friends, a husband (Werner Krauss) and wife (Lya De Putti) whose marriage seems to be ideal. But the playwright keeps questioning whether either of the couple feels jealousy, while trying to flirt with the wife. Act 2 sees the first signs of jealousy: the wife receives flowers and refuses to tell her husband the sender; the wife finds a lock of blonde hair in the husband’s pocket watch. The playwright then arrives and flirts with the wife and convinces them to go to the palais de dance. There, the wife makes both men jealous by dancing with a stranger. The husband ends up striking the stranger and the night ends with husband and wife sleeping in separate beds. In Act 3, after a frosty breakfast the wife becomes intrigued by her husband’s correspondence – reading and then stealing his latest letter. She goes to the playwright, then lies that she has been to her friend Lola’s – and is confronted by her husband. In Act 4, the wife gets Lola to lie for her, covering her absence from home both in the past and on future nights. The husband follows her to a giant apartment store, then loses her and blunders about town in search of her. The wife arrives home, still fuming over the husband’s mysterious letter. The husband tells her how much he loves her and begs to know what she has been doing. She asks for his trust, but he insists on knowing the truth. She demands the truth from him and says he would be ashamed to know the truth from her. He raises his hand to strike her but doesn’t land the blow. In Act 5, the husband follows the wife, this time to a strange building on the outskirts of town. He sees his wife kissing a child who address her as “mummy”. Back home, the husband demands (via a note passed via a servant) that the wife leaves the house. Infuriated by her refusal of the truth about the child, he hurls his wife to the floor. The violence is interrupted by the arrival of the playwright, and the truth is eventually discovered. The letter the wife has stolen from the husband refers to his child, whose carer cannot afford it any longer. The husband falls at his wife’s feet and the two are reconciled. ENDE

As I said, a plot that doesn’t offer any real surprises. It’s well-written, well-mounted, and well-played. I admired the numerous nice touches that shaped the drama, like the repeated detail of the couple’s shoes: hers next to his at the start, then separate from his during their fallout, then reunited in the final images; or the way their first breakfast scene has them sat side-by-side, but the second has then say on opposite sides of the table. Technically, the film was also well executed. There are also some neat moments of superimposition. Some are simple, like the wife imagining the lock of hair in the watch, or later seeing his imagined lover superimposed over her book. Some are more complex, like the husband seeing his wife dancing with another on the crowded dancefloor – only for the other dancers to fade into ghost-like transparencies, revealing his wife and her partner at the centre (a really lovely effect). Though I liked some deep focus compositions in the apartment, it was the exterior scenes that really stood out. There are several big sets/matte painted night cityscapes, which are reminiscent of Grune’s Die Straße. Particularly effective is the apartment store, with a double paternoster lift and a view across to a multistorey wing illuminated from within. You sense the husband’s fear becoming faintly nightmarish in these surroundings, just as you did with the central character in Die Straße.

But what interested me particularly with Eifersucht was its script by Paul Czinner. (I have a longstanding project on Czinner that I have kept delaying for various reasons.) I was struck by how many details in Eifersucht match traits from his other films. There is the jealousy over a bunch of flowers (cf. Der Geiger von Florenz (1926)), conflicts spelt out over a breakfast routine (cf. Ariane (1931) and Der träumende Mund (1932)), the woman reflecting on her image in relation to men (Fräulein Else, 1929), the nods to luck and fate (like the spilling of salt) and life’s reflection of art that haunt numerous of Czinner’s other films. Czinner’s authorship is often overshadowed by the two figures with whom he collaborated: his frequent leading actress, Elisabeth Bergner, and his screenplay collaborator, Carl Meyer (often uncredited). In this sense, it was curious to feel how strongly Eifersucht felt like a Czinner film without either of these two influences at play. But also, this made me like Eifersucht less. The marital strife in Grune’s film is more interestingly played, and played out, in Czinner’s Nju (1924), just as the sense of life imitating the tragedy of art is more potent in Czinner’s Der träumende Mund. And Bergner is an infinitely more subtle, complex, and sympathetic performer than De Putti. Werner Krauss’s character, too, is at the very least equalled by Emil Jannings’s character in Nju, for example, and Georg Alexander’s rather underdeveloped character is a pale shadow next to that of Rudolf Forster in Der träumende Mund. (Der träumende Mund, if you’ve not seen it, is a masterpiece.)

More broadly, in fact, my problem with Eifersucht was precisely this sense that what I was watching I had seen done better, and with more dash, elsewhere. Czinner’s films aside, I also thought of E.A. Dupont’s contemporary Varieté (1925), which features De Putti in a much more powerful drama, and one which allows for more complex, stylish cinematic storytelling. (Dupont’s film was also, confusingly, released under the title “Jealousy” in some regions.) Eifersucht’s theatricality is ultimately a kind of limitation. It is, if anything, too neat and tidy, too precisely organized. (Even the dance hall feels oddly well-mannered to sense the wife’s desire for freedom express itself. Think of how many other Weimar films have great party scenes!) Eifersucht feels like an exercise more than a living, evolving drama. Even the interesting outdoor sets and moments of technical skill didn’t lift the film into something more complex or moving. Indeed, I still await being really moved a Karl Grune film: his are films that I admire without truly liking. (See my pieces on Am Rande der Welt (1927) and Die Straße.) The fact that Eifersucht describes itself as a “tragicomedy” rather sums it up: it is neither comic enough nor tragic enough. (All Czinner’s films are much sharper in their comic touches and more tragic in their outcomes.) It is a good film, but not a great one.

The music for this performance was by Richard Siedhoff and Mykyta Sierov. Their combination of piano and oboe worked well, though its emotional register could never make the film more moving than it was. I must also highlight the excellence of the detailed restoration credits at the start of the film: we are given a history of the film’s release, the location and qualities of surviving prints, the ethics behind the restoration choices, and the precise lengths in metres of various copies, as well as the speed used in the transfer. It should be mandatory to have such information at the outset of all films, especially silents. (Yes, the latest restoration Napoléon, I’m thinking of you.)

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2024, day 4)

Another day (not) at the Bonn festival and another country to visit. Today we journey to India for the recreation of ancient religious drama. I outlined the context for Franz Osten’s German-Indian co-productions in my piece on Shiraz (1928). To recap briefly, these films were the brainchild of Himanshu Rai, who was instrumental in partnering Indian writers and performers with European filmmakers. Their first collaboration was Prem Sanyas, originally released as Die Leuchte Asiens in Germany in 1925 and The Light of Asia in the UK in 1926. Made with the support of the Maharajah of Jaipur (now in Pakistan), the film was shot entirely on location in India with (as the film’s opening titles remind us) no “studio sets, artificial lights, faked-up properties or make-ups”.

Prem Sanyas (1925; Ger./In./UK; Franz Osten/Himansu Rai)

The plot? Well, the film begins with a lengthy section of quasi-documentary footage around contemporary India. Some western tourists visit the Buddhist temple complex at Gaya. There, they encounter an old man who relates the tale of how Buddha achieved enlightenment below the Bodhi tree… The film then follows the story of Prince Gautama (Himanshu Rai), who is adopted by the heirless King Suddodhana (Sarada Ukil) and Queen Maya (Rani Bala). As the boy grows, he becomes increasingly conscious of the suffering of animals and the world around him. His father is warned by a sage that it is the boy’s destiny to renounce the throne, leaving him heirless. The king therefore tries to shelter the boy from all sight of suffering. When this doesn’t work, he finds him a consort. The prince falls for Gopa (Seeta Devi), who likewise is smitten with him. However, the prince is overwhelmed by the knowledge of suffering outside his pampered life and perfect marriage. Hearing the voice of God, he abandons his wife, his palace, and his family to live as an impoverished teacher. He converts crowds to his new conception of the world, and when Gopa encounters him again, she becomes his disciple. The flashback ends with the old man concluding this tale, then (very suddenly) the film ends.

Such is the narrative. And as a drama, it is a failure. The story is very thin, with characters barely sketched and with neither the interest nor the ability to suggest real, human psychology. (Hey, it’s a religious story, so I suppose expecting a real drama is a bit wishful.) As the story of one of humanity’s great teachers/enlighteners, it’s surprisingly inert. But because the characters are picture-book cut-outs, there is barely any ordinary human emotion to engage with either. It’s a very simply parable told very simply.

I say simply told, for there is no showiness to the film’s direction. This is a polite way of saying that the film isn’t very dynamic, let alone dramatic. There are few really telling close-ups (as if the film is afraid of exploring the reality of its human characters), and the editing between wider and closer shots is often rather clumsy. Few scenes use montage to create a sense of rhythm, and there is a kind of roughness to the way the film’s narrative is shaped. In part, of course, this is the fault of the original story: it’s a very simplistic tale and doesn’t offer a real “drama” as such. But I do wonder about the intentions of the filmmakers. Is the simplicity of the style – I am tempted to say the lack of style – a deliberate choice, or simply a limitation of means?

All this said, I didn’t care that the film wasn’t awash with stylistic flourishes or deft pieces of editing or camerawork. I didn’t care because this was one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen in a long time. Restored from a contemporary print released in the UK in 1926, Prem Sanyas is exquisitely tinted and toned and simply glows. For all that I have criticized (or at least, damned with faint praise) the lack of “style”, this film has no need to be showy when it uses real locations so well. So many views make you want to gasp, to spend time gazing at the frame. From ornate temples and elaborate palaces to dusty streets and overgrown gardens, this film is as astonishing document of time and place. I could rave for hours over the photography, the way the tinting seems to make you feel the heat and the haze and the dust and scent of the locations. I’ve taken a large number of image captures, but I could have taken any number more. The drama might have been inert, even inept, but I was captivated by the film itself – by the sheer aesthetic gorgeousness of the image.

To return to something of the dramatic substance of the film, I must discuss the performers. I must begin by repeating what I said in my piece on Shiraz: I simply don’t think Himanshu Rai is an engaging screen presence. I found him stiff and awkward in Shiraz and I find him stiff and awkward in The Light of Asia. Given that he’s meant to be playing a religious prophet and visionary, I find him utterly unconvincing. He is both oddly stylized (holding poses, holding glances) and oddly restrained (not doing anything!). I would welcome a down-to-earth prophet, a recognizably human figure who connects to the sufferings of man. But Rai is neither a magnetic divinity nor a vulnerable human. He’s an oddly inert prophet and an oddly inarticulate teacher.

Rai’s limitations are shown up by the fact that everyone around him – and I mean everyone – has such great presence on screen: from the non-professional actors who play the minor characters to the real beggars and street performers who populate the world at large. Their faces and bodies are immensely interesting to behold. Here are real faces, real lives, real sufferings embodied for us to see. If I can’t see what the fuss is over the Buddha himself (or at least, Rai’s Buddha), I can absolutely see the fuss over the suffering of the world. The real locations and real extras are remarkably tangible, remarkably vivid.

As the king and queen, Sarada Ukil and Rani Bala are pleasingly unpretentious. Free from any posturing, gesturing, or theatrics, they are as real as figures from a mystery play – ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Then there’s Seeta Devi, who was by far the most striking presence in Shiraz. Here, she looks scarcely more than a child – indeed, she was thirteen at the time of filming. A real child to play the prince’s child bride. In my piece on Shiraz, I remarked that she was the only performer to offer a really defined performance, i.e. someone who was palpably playing for the camera, for us. Her role, as a manipulative figure wishing to shape the drama, perfectly suited her performance style. In Prem Sanyas, she is free of mannerisms, of technique. True, she is not given much of a character to embody, but nevertheless there is a naturalness to her embodiment of Gopa that is moving in itself. And though she has yet to grow into her adult body, or adult confidence as a performer, she is still radiant on screen.

The soundtrack for this performance was compiled by Willy Schwarz and Riccardo Castagnola. It consists of (what I take to be) prerecorded sections of music, historical recordings, and ambient acoustic sound. Most of these sample the sounds of India, through instrumental choices or the sound of crowds/prayers/chanting etc. I found it a little distracting to hear recorded effects during silent scores, even in the vaguest form like the sounds of praying and general bustle offered here. While it certainly fits the setting of the film, it doesn’t suit the period of the film’s making – i.e. its silent aesthetic. The film is so overwhelmingly visual, I didn’t want a composer trying to “complete” the pictures with real sounds. I much preferred the sections of instrumental music, which felt much more in keeping with the period and setting – and the film’s historical and aesthetic origins. That said, I’ve heard infinitely worse “acoustic” soundtracks, so I’m not complaining too much.

Overall, Prem Sanyas was an excellent experience. I wrote recently about another religious parable, The King of Kings, and when watching Prem Sanyas I was reminded of the many reasons I disliked DeMille’s epic. Despite all the awkwardness of Prem Sanyas, the absolute reality of its mise-en-scène, of the places and the people who inhabit it, make it a far more rewarding viewing experience than time spent in DeMille’s artificial holy land.

Paul Cuff

Nina Petrowna: From silence to sound (1929-30)

This is my third piece devoted to Die Wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (1929). Having previously talked about the beauties of this production and about its contemporary novelization, this week I discuss the scores created for the film’s exhibition in Berlin, Paris, and London in 1929-30.

The film premiered at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin, in April 1929. The music for this event was arranged by Willy Schmidt-Gentner, a prolific composer of scores during the silent era – and beyond. He entered the industry after the Great War, initially working as a kind of tax inspector for cinemas. But he was also a trained musician, having studied with Max Reger in his youth, and eventually switched from film admin to film accompaniment. He gained experience acting as a conductor for cinema orchestras, as well as accompanying films at the piano. In 1922, he was commissioned to write his first film score – for Manfred Noa’s Nathan der Weise. He had clearly found his métier. Across the rest of the decade, Schmidt-Gentner created, adapted, compiled, and conducted nearly a hundred scores for silent films released in Germany. He was clearly both very versatile and very efficient at what he did: working fast was a key attribute to any composer in his position. The majority of his scores would doubtless have been compilations, drawing on various libraries of repertory music, as well as the latest popular melodies. By 1929 Schmidt-Gentner was Ufa’s chief arranger and his work accompanied many of their most prestigious productions – which included Nina Petrowna. Sadly, his score for this film has either been lost or else lingers in limbo somewhere in the archives. I say “archives”, but I have no idea what archives might be responsible. Of all Schmidt-Gentner’s scores, I am not sure any have been fully restored for modern performance. I am unsure, in the most literal sense, where his music has gone!

Thankfully, there are many detailed press reports of the premiere of Nina Petrowna, so we can glean some sense of what it was like. Before the film began, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto (1878) was played as an overture. (We even know the soloist who performed this piece at the film’s premiere: Andreas Weißgerber. Weißgerber was a popular concert violinist, so a notable a guest performer for Ufa’s concert.) Presumably much of the score itself was likewise music compiled from existing sources, though the reviews do not make this clear. For the opening cavalry parade, we are told that the orchestral march involved the use of a small group of musicians hidden behind the screen/in the wings. When the cavalry marched past, the music was initially performed by these hidden players; then, as the film showed the cavalry more closely, the main orchestra took up the music. For the scenes around the barracks and military club, various quick “Russian” marches were used, while elegant waltzes characterized the scenes at the “Aquarium” club. Though some reviewers accused Schmidt-Gentner of being heavy-handed (and sometimes simply too loud!), his score for Nina Petrowna used chamber sonorities for the lovers’ scenes: a string quartet with celesta accompanied their meeting in the club, for example. The one piece of original music we know to have been used in the film was for Nina’s favourite waltz, which is described as a melancholy “valse Boston” – the melody of which recurred throughout the film as a kind of leitmotif.

This waltz is the one part of the score does survive – thanks, in part, to Ufa’s own marketing campaign. Schmidt-Gentner’s melody was initially referred to as “Die Stunden, die nicht weiderkehren”, but for commercial purposes it was given words by Fritz Rotter and became the song “Einmal sagt man sich ‘Adieu’”. The main lyrics are:

Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / Wenn man sich auch noch so liebt. / Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / weil es keine Treue giebt. / Schwör mir nicht: du bist auf ewig mein. / Keine Liebe kann für immer sein. / Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’, / Wenn man sich auch noch so liebt.

A crude translation of this might be:

One day we’ll say goodbye to each other, / No matter how much we love each other. / At some point we’ll say goodbye to each other, / Because there’s no such thing as fidelity. / Don’t swear that you are mine forever. / No love can last forever. / One day we’ll say goodbye to each other, / No matter how much we love each other.

Note the German use of “man”, i.e. the third person singular, which might refer to oneself or to a slightly more abstract/general “we”. The song might therefore be a personal narrative or else a more general one. Its address sits interestingly between the personal and impersonal, as well as between tenses. It uses the present tense, but the “Einmal” (literally, “one time” – or even “at some point”/“eventually”) also suggests that it might refer to future events. (In German, the present tense can also express the future when combined with a time element.) All of which is to say that it has a tone that might apply to any listener, anywhere – that, and the gorgeous melancholy of the melody, ensured that the song was a hit success. Even if Schmidt-Gentner’s score was not performed widely outside Berlin cinemas (and it is unclear to what extent the score was distributed with the film for its silent release), the song ensured that its main original theme could circulate widely.

Another reason for the survival of this part of Schmidt-Gentner’s silent score is, ironically, the coming of sound. Ufa was already in the process of converting its major productions to sound, and Nina Petrowna was subsequently reissued with a recorded music-and-effects track in 1930. (I am unsure whether any copies of this version survive. Certainly, I can find no archival holdings on publicly accessible databases.) But even for its initial release in silent format, Ufa’s publicity marketed the film in relation to its theme song. In 1929-30, several recordings were made to capitalize on the popular success of the film – and presumably to help sell its initial release in cinemas. These vinyl releases featured contemporary bands like Dajos Béla’s Tanz-Orchester or popular singers like Wagnerian tenor Franz Völker and the ubiquitous Richard Tauber (famous for his roles in Lehár operettas). The speed at which such recordings could be licensed and made is impressive. The Derby company, for example, got the “Karkoff-Orchester” (their own scratch band) to record an orchestral arrangement of the waltz, which was released in May 1929, when the film was in the first month of its general release. More broadly, these discs point to the changing context for the marketing and consumption of film music. Before Ufa had even released its first talkie, the company’s silent pictures were already being sold in relation to recorded sound. On one level, the strategy clearly worked: the sheer number of recordings spawned by “Einmal sagt man sich ‘Adieu’” (always credited on discs to Ufa’s film) indicates a popular hit. Indeed, the song continued to generate recordings throughout the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first. (For example, Aglaja Camphausen’s recent rendition is particularly lovely.)

Nina Petrowna was one of Germany’s biggest commercial hits of the 1928-29 season, and Schmidt-Gentner’s score received very good reviews at the time of the premiere. Given this success, it is ironic that the music now most associated with Nina Petrowna was written by the French composer Maurice Jaubert. This orchestral score accompanied the film’s “exclusive” run at the Salle Marivaux in Paris, from 25 August 1929. Jaubert had already worked as an arranger, compiling selections from the works of Offenbach to accompany Jean Renoir’s Nana (1926) at the Moulin Rouge theatre in Paris. Jaubert subsequently prepared the perforated music rolls of Jean Grémillon’s mechanical piano score for his documentary Tour au large (1927, lost). His music for Nina Petrowna thus represents his first original film score, though it should be noted that it is not entirely his own work. Jaubert also relied on musical collaboration: some scenes were scored by Jacques Brillouin and Marcel Delannoy, while another recurring theme is taken from Erik Satie’s “De l’enfance de Pantagruel” (the first number of Trois petites pièces montées (1920)). Brillouin and Delannoy had compiled the orchestral score that accompanied Grémillon’s Maldone (1928), which included music written by Jaubert.

As I wrote in my earlier piece on the film, Jaubert’s music is superb. Though Schmidt-Gentner’s score was written for a large symphony orchestra, and Jaubert’s for a chamber orchestra, they share several qualities: both make use of lighter sonorities and a central waltz motif that recurs throughout the film. Schmidt-Gentner’s music seemed to have relied on a more “Russian” milieu, though his waltz was a “Boston” – and thus another kind of popular cultural import. (The contemporary recordings make the waltz sound very much part of the soundworld of the 1920s dancehall rather than pre-war Russian.) Jaubert’s music, however, is superbly attuned to the mood and rhythm of the film. The flowing camerawork and long takes aid the ease with which the music seems to glide along with the film. But even though Jaubert uses slower tempi and extended passages (complete with repeats), he knows when to match key moments. Important sounds on screen, for example, are matched in the orchestra. Listen to the exquisite way Jaubert turns the chiming clock into music—high strings, piano, percussion—in a way that interrupts the waltz theme, but also sends us (tonally) somewhere oddly private and dreamy. (This melody has to be both memorable and moving, since it recurs in the film in vital scenes of union and separation for the central couple.) Or the lovely scene when the pianist in the orchestra must synchronize to the incompetent Michael’s efforts at the piano on screen. But the most dramatic is when the orchestra suddenly falls silent at the dramatic revelation in the final scene.

Given its importance in the history of Jaubert’s career, it is surprising that I haven’t been able to find any contemporary French reviews of Nina Petrowna that mention his name. I have found an advertisement for the film in the French press of the time, which marketed its exhibition with explicit reference to live music: “You will hear the best orchestra and you will see Brigitte Helm in…” (see image below). The same page is littered with adverts for sound films and synchronized scores, suggesting something of the climate in which Nina Petrowna was released. (Three months after the live exhibition of Nina Petrowna with “the best orchestra”, the Salle Marivaux premiered André Hugon’s Les Trois masques (1929) – the first all-talking production made in France. No longer was a live orchestra required.)

This same context highlights the release of Nina Petrowna in the UK. The film was distributed under the title The Wonderful Lie, premiering in London in June 1929. This presentation opened a special run of silent films accompanied by a full orchestra at the London Hippodrome. The Wonderful Lie, and its specially arranged score by Louis Levy, got rave reviews. It was championed especially by critics who hated the influx of talkies, which was also how the film was advertised – as the swansong of silent cinema.

Like Schmidt-Gentner, Levy had been working as an arranger of cinema music since the 1910s and would have a prosperous career in later decades as the supervisor of numerous sound film scores. I can find very little information on the contents of Levy’s score for The Wonderful Lie. It was doubtless a work of compilation, likely drawing on a familiar repertoire of music. But there was also at least one piece of original music that was used, which has survived. This was the song “Nina”, with music by Cecil Rayners and words by Herbert James. I can find no evidence that Rayners’ “Nina” was performed with a vocal soloist during exhibition. As with Schmidt-Gentner’s “Einmal sagt man sich ‘adieu’”, the song more likely functioned as a way of promoting the film. An advertisement in The Era (10 July 1929), for example, offers “The Beautiful Theme Number in the New Film Production of ‘THE WONDERFUL LIE’ now showing at the London Hippodrome Song”. Interested parties could buy the theme as arranged for full orchestra, small orchestra, or piano. Was the song performed at screenings outside the London Hippodrome? And what other kinds of music were heard with the film around the UK? These questions could just as readily be asked of the film’s distribution in Germany and France – and the answers would be as numerous and varied as the landscape of exhibition practice at the time.

In summary, the scores of Schmidt-Gentner, Jaubert, and James offer an interesting case study of how music might differentiate the experience of a film across national contexts – as well as extend the life of a film beyond its cinematic exhibition. Though Schmidt-Gentner and Jaubert are important figures in film music of this period, their reputations are widely divergent. Jaubert is celebrated for his music for sound films of the 1930s, not to mention his early death on active service in 1940. His music has been recorded many times and his work is known outside France – and, I suspect, beyond specialist circles. Schmidt-Gentner may be a familiar name in Germany, and his melodies may still occasionally be heard, but his scores from the silent era have not received the same level of treatment; his musical legacy is thus highly restricted. This is perhaps one reason why it was Jaubert’s score for Nina Petrowna that was restored and recorded in the 1980s, not that of Schmidt-Gentner. That said, Jaubert’s score has not been heard since it was broadcast with the film on the Franco-German channel ARTE and on Swiss television in 2000. The same restored print that was broadcast that year was digitized by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung in 2014 and shown in various venues, but never with Jaubert’s music. I can only hope that this beautiful film and score are one day reunited and released on Blu-ray. (If so, I bagsy doing the audio commentary!) Likewise, I hope that the score by Schmidt-Gentner one day resurfaces – together with more of the dozens and dozens of others he created in the silent era. Fingers crossed…

Paul Cuff