Day 3 of HippFest at Home sees us journey to the (faux) Scottish coast for a (faux) Scottish drama starring Mary Pickford. This programme of a short and feature was given introductions by Alison Strauss (once more) and Pamela Hutchinson (who of course runs the marvellous Silent London). Strauss explained the choice of films, focusing in particular on the short extract from an amateur film shot on location in Harris in the Outer Hebrides. She also highlighted HippFest’s pioneering efforts to provide audio-description via headphones and brail for these films. It’s a superb project, and another reason to admire the festival. Hutchinson gave a detailed introduction to The Pride of the Clan, highlighting its history in the context of Pickford’s career. (I will say a little more about the film’s critical reputation, which Hutchinson also covered, later.) As ever, these introductions were exceedingly engaging (and often very funny). As an online viewer (and viewing the film over a day later), I felt part of the crowd in situ. On this theme, there was a lovely moment when the Bo’ness audience cheered the restoration team of The Pride of the Clan, who were (like me) watching remotely from their respective homes. Polly Goodwin, who provided the audio descriptions, was also warmly cheered. You really get the feeling of the enthusiasm for everyone involved. I’m sure it’s the same at any such specialized festival, but HippFest is the only one I have experienced where the online version gives you such access to the people and atmosphere responsible for making it work. And so, to the films…
Holidaying in Harris (1938; UK; Nat and Nettie McGavin). A fragment of a longer document, this is (like yesterday’s shorts from Ireland) another amateur glimpse of real life. Here are the docks, the fishing boats, the baskets of herring, the men on deck, the women at work on the shore. The camera observes, unobtrusively. The past goes about its business – messy, sweaty, industrious. The film ends. While this little extract doesn’t have the chance to sustain its mood, it’s a potent window into a way of life long gone – and the faces (and, especially, the hands) of those who often go unrecorded in history. A lovely little treat to start things off.
The Pride of the Clan (1917; US; Maurice Tourneur), our main feature. Set on the remote Scottish island of Killean, the film follows Marget (Mary Pickford) who must lead the MacTavish clan after the death of her father at sea. She wishes to marry Jamie Campbell (Matt Moore), but Jamie’s real parents – a wealthy countess and earl – arrive and convince her that it’s best for his future to let him join leave the clan. She accedes to their wishes but decides to sail away herself. However, her old boat soon begins to take on water. Will the hero rescue her in time? (I’ll let you guess.)
Let’s start with the good. Though it was shot in Massachusetts and thus has no visible connection with the reality of the Scottish landscape, the film at least boasts a wealth of exterior photography. There are some marvellous scenes of the locals silhouetted on the cliffs or gathered on the coast. The director Maurice Tourneur shows a keen eye for composition, making the most of the (actually quite limited) location spaces. There are some efforts to make this landscape bear some sense of history, though I must say that the church, neolithic tomb, and standing stones look hopelessly unconvincing next to some of the (clearly real) houses in the village.
Pickford is the heart of the film, and its chief asset. She’s feisty, independent and gets to be both playful and boisterous – telling stories, commanding children and adults, quite literally wielding a whip. I just wish the film did more with this tomboyishness. She might well wield a whip, but she ends the film clutching her pets as the water rises and the hero races to the rescue. Turning her from heroine to helpless waif is something of a letdown, as is the dramatic implication that by seeking an independent identity elsewhere she must inevitably come a cropper. (I rolled my eyes, too, at the intercutting of the villagers’ prayers – especially the unbelieving Gavin – with the rescue.)
Marget’s romance with Jamie is a little awkward, with the couple having little discernible chemistry (at least, nothing that I would call “romantic”; the very idea of sex, of course, is utterly absent). The humour plays well enough, but the film is far too chaste to express or even suggest anything deeper. (An early embrace ends with the pair awkwardly leaning into each other, cheek to cheek, that is surely as uncomfortable for the lovers as it is unconvincing for us as viewers.) Much of the film allows Pickford to be playful with the clan children and animals, making faces, pulling japes, or bothering kittens and donkeys, which certainly helps raise a smile but also risks infantilizing her character to the extent that the whole point of her being the head of the clan seems nothing more than a game. Besides, the whole effort of the film to present us with anything resembling real life in a real location seems to me a failure. The film might have nice images of the sea and coast, but the life of the clan seems to involve being either pious, playful, or bashful. There is little work here, and if there is a risk of death at sea, there is little dirt and no disease on land. While I appreciate that the colloquial dialogue is being used to ground the film in a sense of location, it swiftly grated on me – grated because the effort to capture the local dialect stood in stark contrast to the absence of any reality elsewhere.
Ultimately, The Pride of the Clan is all a fantasy – which is fine, but it never grabbed me. It is no more convincing or moving than the story Marget tells Jamie, visualized in absurd cutaways to a life on an exotic island complete with native cannibals. What works best are the moments of calm in-between the wearying playfulness. There is a scene of Marget alone, tying a bouquet which she drops into the sea – a gesture one might find in a D.W. Griffith film, only here carrying less emotional weight. It’s a glimpse of what might have been. For much of the film, I felt rather like Gavin, the outsider who scowls on the rocks while the loyal clansmen attend church and have faith in the narratives told therein.
This brings us back to the film’s reputation. As I mentioned, Hutchinson spoke about this film’s supposedly poor critical reception in the US in 1917 – and Pickford’s own subsequent dismissal of The Pride of the Clan as a failure. Hutchinson spoke extremely engagingly about the film’s qualities, and in the programme notes available online by Thomas A. Walsh and Catherine A. Surowiec there are other voices of praise. But these positive notes come chiefly from material that these respective authors quote. (Perhaps they are, wisely, a little cautious about making too great a claim for this film.)
Of particular note in the Walsh/Surowiec piece is a citation from Richard Koszarski, writing in 1969, who said: “Tourneur’s eye for composition is flawless, equalling or surpassing Griffith’s work of the same period, and the performances are more restrained than in much of Intolerance. Clearly this film was ten years ahead of its time.” Hmm. Ten years ahead of its time? I can imagine such a slender narrative being handled by Griffith in, say, 1911 in about twenty shots with twenty times the emotional power. (Equally, I can imagine him padding out such a narrative in, say, 1923 in about two thousand shots and achieving less.) Think of Mary Pickford in Ramona, from 1911, a Biograph production that boasts subtle performances and a masterful use of composition and choreography. (I have written about the film and its (to my mind) inferior re-adaptation as a feature film in 1928.)
Something I kept noticing with Tourneur’s film is the gulf between interiors and exteriors, which is only rarely bridged. One thinks of Victor Sjöström’s Terje Vigen (also released in 1917) as another coastal film featuring grief, wrecks, and the life of fishermen. Despite sharing tropes, the two films are worlds apart. The Swedish film builds partial sets on the coast so that we can look through windows and doors from interior to exterior, from comfy interior to raging sea. The result is an astonishing sense of place and of emotional tone: Sjöström’s film is anchored in reality, a fact which the naturalistic performances redouble. The only image in which this is regularly achieved in The Pride of the Clan is of Marget silhouetted in the doorway of her boat (an image that features in a repeated intertitle design). While The Pride of the Clan shows many characters looking in/out of windows, there is no attempt to link the spaces – aside from Marget’s boat, I cannot recall any shots where we look from interior spaces to the sea. And while many images are very nicely composed, only one image really sticks with me: the stunning silhouette of Marget and Jamie against the moonlit sea. It’s beautiful in and of itself, but also as a distillation of feeling. There weren’t enough moments like this. I wish that there the drama had been less fleetingly embedded in the setting and photography.
The issue is not helped by the variable image quality. From the restoration credits, it is clear that The Pride of the Clan was restored from a mix of 16mm and 35mm copies. While the 35mm sections are superb, these unfortunately make the 16mm sections seem all the more dulled. But would sharper images help this film? For me, I fear not. I found the whole thing cumulatively underwhelming.
Well, that was Day 3. Goodness me, I wish that I enjoyed The Pride of the Clan more than I did. But I certainly enjoyed the music for this screening, provided by Stephen Horne (piano, flute, accordion) and Elizabeth-Jane Baudry (harp). This pair always produce gorgeous sounds, and in this case I found the music often more evocative than the film itself. Since the sound is recorded live for the videos available through HippFest at Home, you can also hear the Bo’ness audience reacting to the film – which (in this context) I very much enjoyed. If the film failed to charm me, the event itself was certainly charming.
So that was my last day of HippFest at Home. I should explain that there is a fourth online programme on offer: “Neil Brand: Key Notes”, a talk with music and film extracts. As much as I admire Brand’s work, I feel that this kind of event is not aimed at me. Aside from reasons of my own schedule, another reason that I feel able to skip this presentation is that HippFest at Home offers single tickets for individual screenings, rather than an all-in price for any/all events online (like Pordenone). I can see the benefit in this, as I have sometimes found that festivals replicate each other’s material (even online), or else include something that for whatever reason I don’t wish to see, and I regret not experiencing everything on offer.
Finally, I must repeat what I have said on all three days: HippFest at Home is simply the best presentation of an online festival that I have experienced. Everything about it, from the website, the programme notes, the video options, the introductions, the music, and the sheer enthusiasm of everyone involved, made me feel incredibly welcome. I have often written about the inevitable feeling of dislocation when “attending” online festivals. While HippFest at Home does not offer its online audience the same number of films as Bonn (ten features in 2024) or Pordenone (eight features plus several shorts in 2024), their presentation impressed me more. More of the live element was included in the online videos, and I loved being able to see the speakers and musicians – and the audience. I’m incredibly impressed by the effort of all those involved, and if any of them are reading this then I offer them my warmest congratulations. I’m sad that it’s taken me this long to attend HippFest in any guise, and I will certainly be revisiting – in one form or another – next year.
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.
Day 7 takes us to North America: first, to the Canadian border for a display of childish derring-do, then to the louche confines of a yacht to test the strength of a marriage…
We begin with Peg o’ the Mounted (1924; US; Alfred J. Goulding). Any film where two of the lead cast are credited as “Baby Peggy” and “Tiny Tim the Pony” is sure to raise alarm bells… So, alone in a tiny cabin, Peg, a tiny child, encounters a wounded member of the Canadian Mounted Police. She tries to nurse him back to health, but when this fails, she tracks down, fights, and arrests the gang of smugglers. Nothing more about the plot need be said. The child was charming, I suppose, but it takes a lot for me to be won over by a child performer on screen. I suppose I should be thankful we never had to hear her voice, which I imagine to be unbearably irritating. There is something about the wholesomeness of a particular kind of screen child that makes me instantly take against them. So it’s something of a miracle that I could stomach the sight of Peg in this film for so long. I even found her performance impressive, especially her “speech” at the end. There are some charming enough touches, but it’s such a vapid little film I don’t know what else I can say about it as a drama. What I can say it that the photography is simply superb – the Rockies(?) look absolutely stunning, and the exterior scenes are beautiful, really amazingly beautiful. (Just incredibly pictorial beauty for such a throwaway film!) What are less beautiful are those few titles that have been digital recreated: they stick out a mile from the originals, their style and font looking far too new, too crisp, too digital.
I’ve mentioned it before, but why is it so difficult for restorers to match the style of inverted commas or apostrophes to those given in the original titles? (This seems, overwhelmingly, to be a North American issue.) Clear from the original titles in Peg o’ the Mounted is that all inverted commas (for speech or for apostrophe) should be typographic and not neutral. (Sadly, the format of this blog doesn’t permit me to demonstrate “neutral” inverted commas. In this instance, it’s irritating – but otherwise I’m glad, as they look awful.) Why can’t such a simple thing be got right? Oh well. The photographic images looked beautiful, so I suppose that’s what matters.
Now we’ve got Peggy out the way, on to our more adult feature presentation: Folly of Vanity (1925; US; Maurice Elvey/Henry Otto). Newlyweds Alice (Billie Dove) and Robert Blaine (Jack Mulhall) host Stanley Ridgeway (John Sainpolis), Robert’s client, the famous pearl collector. Alice loves pearls but cannot afford them, so she has bought a fake necklace. Robert begs her not to wear the fake in front of Ridgeway, but she can’t resist doing so. Ridgeway compliments the necklace, but his sidelong looks reveal his sniffy attitude. Ridgeway invites them to a small party, but Robert makes up an excuse not to go. Alice calls him a tyrant. They argue, and she ends up getting it her way. Ridgeway’s party turns out to be a raucous affair, with Bella Howard (a rich widow) at the heart of it. A tableau vivant, frolics, flirtation… Robert shows Alice his collection of pearls, which she tries on. He asks her to wear them for a few days so that they regain their faded lustre. She does so, not telling Robert of the exchange. On Mrs Howard’s yacht the next day, the same cast reassemble. Alice and Robert are given separate rooms, the door numbers of which are damaged. (Hmm…) The yacht descends into drunken flirtation between Bella/Robert and Ridgeway/Alice. Bella and Ridgeway observe the couple bickering over the cut of her dress. Alice retreats to her room, leaving Robert at the mercy of Bella. Ridgeway gets drunk alone and bursts into Alice’s room. She flees to the deck, where she falls overboard. Alice descends to the Kingdom of Neptune (no, I’m not drunk: this is what happens. I know, right?). A series of rather tedious displays of semi-nude bathing (discreetly, from a distance) and diving (from clifftops) in Alice’s honour. But when Alice sees herself in the mirror, both she and one of Neptune’s court see this “symbol of vanity” and Neptune banishes her forever. Alice wakes up in her own bed, sees the necklace around her neck – and returns them to Ridgeway. Owing to the damaged room number, she returns by mistake to her husband’s room and not her own. The newlyweds are reconciled, and Bella and Ridgeway agree to marry. THE END.
What a tedious film. I can’t honestly say I enjoyed any of it in a meaningful way. It has a sense of humour, but it’s rather slight. And it clearly has a desire to titillate, but it’s rather lame. I honestly don’t know if it’s meant to be dramatic, but it wasn’t – nor was it funny enough to be a comedy or charming enough to be a farce. I came close to enjoying the opening scenes between Alice and Robert, but the slightly saucy byplay never went anywhere, either in this sequence or in the rest of the film. She is coy and modest with her husband, but her refusal to show him her body is really for the censor’s sake not his. In a vague sort of way, I could believe in their marriage – but the film pussyfooted around what exactly was at stake. Is it sex? The couple finally end up in bed together (or at least, on it) in the last scene, but sex never quite seems the point – and is even the object of scorn and fear aboard the yacht. Robert remains prudish throughout, and Alice isn’t interested in bodies so much as what they can display, i.e. their jewellery – and this interest is morally dismissed by the film as “vanity”. What is this film actually about?
I admit that the descent to Neptune was unexpected, but the mythical kingdom’s appearance quickly outstayed its welcome. Its coy long shots of nude bathers and soft-focus gymnastics, its pantomime beards and watery wizards… I remember watching the short film La Légende du fantôme (1908), produced by Segundo de Chomón. In that film, we also visit the seabed for a mythical array of gods and goblins. De Chomón’s film has no pretensions whatsoever, no desire to moralize or patronize its audience; it uses two-dimensional sets and fake beards and greasepaint and any number of other nineteenth-century theatrical staples. Yet it has more integrity, majesty, and sheer bloody visual and dramatic impact than anything in Folly of Vanity. In fact, as I wrote at the time, there is something quite terrifyingly strange and surreal about de Chomóns world that will likely remain lodged in my brain for as long as I retain my senses. I promise you that I will soon forget Folly of Vanity and its tepid world of underwater theatrics. Nothing in this sequence is either dramatic enough or funny enough to hold sway.
As for the cast, I can’t honestly express great enthusiasm either. Aside from her fleeting (and uncredited) appearance in The Mysterious Lady (1928), I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly seen Betty Blythe in anything other than stills from the lost J. Gordon Edwards production The Queen of Sheba (1921). I must say that she didn’t leap off the screen as any kind of star in Folly of Vanity. I much preferred Billie Dove, who has the kind of open face and round eyes that immediately draw your attention. It’s an utterly depthless character, but Dove gives her some kind of life. Jack Mulhall has a faint spark with Dove, both nothing that made me care for him, for her, or for them as a couple. John Sainpolis normally has gravitas on the screen, but his character here was neither charming nor threatening. There was so little bite anywhere in this film or its characters.
Aesthetically, the film is decent enough. This copy, clearly based on an abridged export print (with Czech titles), is nicely tinted and toned and it’s interesting to watch the weird shifts in quality from colour to colour, sometimes from scene to scene. Some of the gleaming soft-focus visions of the shores of Neptune are gorgeous bits of photography. But really, the drama was by this point so unutterably naff that it sucked much of the pleasure from the images.
Well, that was Day 7. A strange day. A day that I’ll probably not remember in a few years’ time. A day that began with a silly comedy and ended with an even sillier drama. These are both films that I would never have seen, nor made an effort to see, if it weren’t for Pordenone. So I am, genuinely, thankful for the chance to watch them. But beyond that, I look forward to the final day of features tomorrow – and the prospect of something more substantial for my eyes and the brain…
Where next on our Pordenone journey? Day 5 begins on the streets of Paris, before segueing to eighteenth-century Vienna, and finally to Spanish California. We get helter-skelter comedy, brooding artistry, and romantic intrigue. It’s certainly a varied programme…
The first short was La Course aux potirons (1908; Fr.; Romeo Bosetti/Louis Feuillade). This kind of “chase” film was a popular format in the first decade of the twentieth century, and many directors of later prominence will have cut their teeth developing multi-shot narrative form through something similar. La Course aux potirons is a delightful example, with runaway pumpkins being pursued through the streets of Paris. But it steadily becomes more anarchic, more surreal: the pumpkins leap over fences, hurl themselves uphill, leap through buildings, up stairs, up chimneys, plunge into sewers. They are pursued – over every bit of terrain – by an accumulating cast of comic bunglers, as well as the donkey that was pulling the initial pumpkin cart. (The animal is even, marvellously, fed up through the chimney at one point.) Via reverse motion, the pumpkins eventually find their way back to their cart and leap into its back. A real charmer of a film.
Next up is La Mort de Mozart (1909; Fr.; Étienne Arnaud), another Gaumont production – this time deadly serious. We see Mozart at work, the arrival of the “mysterious messenger” (not disguised). It all plays out in a single shot, which suddenly splits in two for an inserted vision Mozart has of his own funeral. Now he collapses and is barred from composing. But his friend plays music from his operas to sooth him, and Mozart sees more visions of scenes from his operas. Finally, Mozart asks for quill and paper to compose the requiem. Musicians enter to help him compose, and continue to sing as Mozart enters his death throes and dies. FIN.
Thus we come to our main feature: For the Soul of Rafael (1920; US; Harry Garson). A tale of Spanish California, of adventure, of “romance whispered through convent windows”, and “a daughter of Spanish dons” who follows the -metaphor-, ahem, the whisper “until it led her over shadowed trails where Tragedy spread a net for her feet.” Marta Raquel Estevan (Clara Kimball Young) has grown up in a nunnery, guarded by Dona Luisa Arteaga (Eugenie Besserer), who wishes her to marry her son Don Rafael (Bertram Grassby). Marta is served “with grim devotion” by Polonia (Paula Merritt), who considers that Marta is adopted by the hill Tribe to which she belongs. They go to the New Year fire ceremony, where they encounter the American adventurer Keith Bryton (J. Frank Glendon) who has been wounded and captured by the tribe. Marta saves Keith’s life by giving him her ring, and he is brought to Polonia’s hut to recover. Marta and Keith fall for each other, the news of which infuriates Dona Luisa. Dona Luisa forces Polonia to effectuate the Americans’ sudden departure – and lie to Marta that he died. Later, Don Rafael – a louche reprobate – is partying with the locals (including Keith) to celebrate the last of his bachelor days. El Capitan (Juan de la Cruz), “the black sheep of the Arteagas”, suddenly arrives, disguised as a padre. Then Dona Luisa arrives with Marta and greets Rafael’s cousin Ana Mendez (Ruth King). Dona Luisa invokes an oath to sweat “by the Holy Cross” to “stand guard over the soul of Rafael”, which Marta joins in – “so long as they both shall live.” (Hmm…) Keith sees Marta making the oath and leaves distraught, just as Dona Luisa dies. Later, at the wedding the “Padre” rescues Teresa and her infant, abandoned by… Rafael! Marta demands Rafael take responsibility for the woman and child, telling Rafael that Teresa is his real wife. Later, Keith arrives with his brother’s widow, Angela Bryton (Helene Sullivan), “an Englishwoman whose ambition has been aroused by the wealth and extravagance about her”. Marta, as a lengthy title explains in pompous prose, is unhappy. She has seen Keith, realized he’s not dead, and knows that Polonia lied to her. Rafael tries it on with Marta, who draws a knife and swears to strike him dead if he does so again. She seeks “refuge from the bestial soul of Rafael” in the home of Ana Mendez. The “padre” turns up with Keith, as does Rafael – on the trail of El Capitan. Keith and Marta are briefly reunited, confess their mutual love, but “for the soul of Rafael”, she must… (etc etc etc). Meanwhile, Rafael pursues Helene, who seethes with jealousy against Marta. At the nighttime fiesta, “fate” intervenes. Keith kisses Marta in the chapel (that’s not a euphemism), just as Helena is stealing Marta’s family jewels (nor is that). Rafael arrives, but so does the “padre”, who finally reveals himself as El Capitan and kills Rafael. Marta and Keith are free to marry and step “at last into the sunlight of perfect joy.” THE END.
Well, it’s about time I watched a dud, and this is it. I didn’t enjoy much about For the Soul of Rafael at all. The silliness of its titles and po-faced tone were never quite silly or po-faced enough to make me laugh at the film, but the banality of its narrative and the stiltedness of its performers never enabled me to get along with the film. It was not especially interesting to look at, with only fleeting glimpses of the much-vaunted (by the titles) beauty and summery fragrance of old California, nor anything beyond some faintly expressionist touches to the convent (with its weirdly warped convent bars) to make the interiors stand out. Just as the titles promised high-flown themes that the film could hardly convey, so the performers struggled to give any depth to the emotions their character supposedly felt. They could offer only generic gesturing and expressions, all perfectly adequate but nothing more – just as the film’s visual language articulated nothing of any depth or complexity.
In terms of its setting, especially its use of Native American characters, I think back to the adaptations of Ramona that I wrote about last year. Like the 1928 Ramona, For the Soul of Rafael casts real Native Americans as extras and a white actress with darkened skin in the main cast. But it also doesn’t have much interest in the idea of Marta as an “adopted” member of a tribe, nor does it use the tribe members outside the initial sequence of their attack on Keith. Indeed, their only function is to act violently in order for the white characters to intervene. Racial issues aside, the film does itself no dramatic credit by turning down opportunities to create a more complex social world on screen. (It doesn’t make much use of Teresa and Rafael’s bastard child, either – nor does El Capitan have any function beyond turning up to move the plot along.) This would be less important, and less frustrating, if For the Soul of Rafael did not make so much of the historical California it claims to show us. The titles’ emphasis on the beauties of California are almost invisible on screen, just as the aura of fate and religious intensity they invoke are entirely absent from the dramatic reality. I’m fine with stock characters if they move and breathe and live intensely on screen, just as I’m happy with cliched plots if they are executed with panache. For the Soul of Rafael had neither dramatic life nor directorial imagination.
That was Day 5, that was. The most entertaining film of the day was the first. I very much enjoyed La Course aux potirons: it had more life, invention, humour, wit, and filmmaking panache than either of the other two offerings. I’m intrigued by the programming of these three films together. The pace and energy of the programme decreased at the same that its earnestness increased. La Mort de Mozart was a kind of transition from the excitement of early narrative filmmaking to a more concentrated drama of character and moral seriousness. I enjoyed seeing this early drama of musical biography, and of musical composition, though its ambitions – to express interiority, creativity, memory, and history – outstrip its abilities. I was not moved by the film, despite the clear entreaties of its performers to produce serious emotion. Yet at only twelve minutes, it is far more compact than For the Soul of Rafael – and, in its own way, less pretentious. For the Soul of Rafael endlessly incites oaths to God, undying bonds of love, and depths of passion and betrayal, without ever convincing me that these notions are real, lived realities for its characters – or that the characters are themselves real people that I might or could or should care about. They all feel like stock characters, moving around in a characterless environment.
But already I feel I have spent too much time talking about this film. Let’s move on.
In the summer of 1926, Cecil B. DeMille embarked on what was considered to be an enormously risky project: an epic treatment of the life of Jesus Christ. There had been plenty of Christs seen on screen in early cinema. In France, films about the Passion produced some of the longest productions thus far assembled. Pathé’s La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ (Lucien Nonguet/Ferdinand Zecca, 1903) was nearly 45 minutes, while Gaumont’s La Vie du Christ (Alice Guy, 1906) was over 30 minutes. These early Christian narrative films were also boasted elaborate forms of cinematic spectacle. When Pathé remade their La Vie et la Passion in 1907, Segundo de Chomón took charge of the elaborate stencil- and hand-colouring of Zecca’s film for exhibition. Thus, long-form narrative and colour effects were always part of the history of silent biblical productions. But the context for DeMille’s film—to be made on the largest possible scale, complete with Technicolor sequences—was rather different. In the US in the 1920s, there had been much controversy about the depiction of Christ on screen. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) had famously been obliged to include Christ only in the form of an occasional limb or edge-of-frame glow. Were censors, critics, and audiences ready for a modern dramatic interpretation of the Passion? And was DeMille the man to handle the project?
It turned out that he was, and that they were. For a start, DeMille tried to inoculate his production against religious concerns about Hollywood by having Mass performed every morning on set, as well as offering daily prayers via various religious leaders. He also imposed a “morality clause” in the contract of Dorothy Cummings, who played Jesus’s mother. And H.B. Warner, who played Jesus, was segregated from the rest of the cast to preserve his aura of otherness—and presumably to stop him socializing in ways that would not be becoming for someone playing his role. DeMille’s screenplay—by Jeanie MacPherson—was also built around incidents relayed in the New Testament, and the film’s intertitles are dominated by biblical citation. In sum, DeMille did everything in his power to make sure his production would offer a sincere and sanctioned depiction of its subject—and (as ever) his publicity department made sure that people knew about it.
When the film was released in April 1927, The King of Kings still caused a degree of controversy: depictions of Christ were (and, of course, still are) a sensitive issue for many spectators. But though the film encountered censorship in various territories, it was a resounding critical and commercial success. An early review in The Film Daily (20 April 1927) took the lead in what was to be an avalanche of glowing reviews:
There can be said nothing but praise for the reverence and appreciation with which the beautiful story here has been developed. DeMille has been successful in striking a tempo that is remarkable for the peaceful and benign influence it wields on the spectator. […] The spiritual fibre of innumerable numbers throughout the world are being stirred to their very core. […] [DeMille] has shown a supreme courage and a vast daring. He has been brave enough to show The Christ on the screen. […] The King of Kings is tremendous from every standpoint. It is the finest piece of screen craftsmanship ever turned out by DeMille.
Writing in Photoplay (June 1927), Frederick James Smith followed suit:
Here is Cecil B. DeMille’s finest motion picture effort. He has taken the most difficult and exalted theme in the world’s history—the story of Jesus Christ—and transcribed it intelligently and ably to the screen. / De Mille has had a variegated career. He has wandered, with an eye to the box office, up bypaths into ladies’ boudoirs and baths, he has been accused of garishness, bad taste and a hundred and one other faults, he frequently has been false and artificial. One of his first efforts, The Whispering Chorus [1918], stood until this as his best work. / The King of Kings, however, reveals a shrewd, discerning and skilful technician, a director with a fine sense of drama, and, indeed, a man with an understanding of the spiritual. / The King of Kings is the best telling of the Christ story the screen has ever revealed. […] You are going to be amazed at the complete sincerity of DeMille’s direction. Nothing is studied. There is no aiming at theatrical appeal. DeMille has followed the New Testament literally and with fidelity. He has taken no liberties. […] The King of Kings is a tremendous motion picture, one that, through its sincerity, is going to win thousands of new picture goers. DeMille deserves unstinted praise. He ventured where few would dare to venture, he threw a vast fortune into the balance and he carried through without deviating. Congratulations, Mr. DeMille.
And in Picture Play (August 1927), Norbert Lusk saw the film not just as a triumph for DeMille but for cinema itself:
The King of Kings is Cecil B. DeMille’s masterpiece, and is among the greatest of all pictures. It is a sincere and reverent visualization of the last three years in the life of Christ, produced on a scale of tasteful magnificence, finely acted by the scores in it, and possessed of moments of poignant beauty and unapproachable drama. This is a picture that will never become outmoded. […] Until you see The King of Kings you will not have seen all that the screen is capable of today.
I begin my piece with this context because I feel that what follows would otherwise do an injustice to DeMille’s film. Following the historical high praise, my own reaction will seem distinctly—perhaps unfairly—negative. Over the recent Easter weekend, I was looking for something culturally appropriate to watch. (I’m in no way religious, but sometimes it’s nice to feel “seasonal”.) I chose The King of Kings because I’d had the gorgeous French Blu-ray edition produced by Lobster say on my shelf for a long time—unopened. I don’t think I’d actually seen the film all the way through before, and frankly I couldn’t make it all the way through in one go this time. Rarely have I been so intellectually bored when watching a film of my own free choice.
It started so promisingly. A two-strip Technicolor cabal of harlots and decadents, lounging around in lurid pink robes. High drama, high kitsch. Mary Magdalene is Judas’s former lover and wants to know where he is. Discovering that Judas is in league with a carpenter named Jesus, Mary starts issuing instructions to her servants: “Bring me my richest perfumes! […] Harness my zebras!” (I think “Harness my zebras” is the most fabulous intertitle I’ve seen for quite some time.) So off she rides in her zebra-pulled carriage to find Jesus and Judas…
Thus ended my dramatic involvement with the film. From this point on, I was increasingly restless. I can only presume that DeMille started his epic with this sequence precisely to lure in a wider audience. Want debauchery, colour, spectacle? Here it is! Now we have your attention, we segue to the real story… Alas, Demille’s Te Deum for God was tedium for me. By the halfway point, I was experiencing such crippling mental boredom that I had to stop. I wanted to rant and rage, or run madly into the night, to vent my frustration. After a break (and a more sedate session to finish the film), I have been trying to ponder why my reaction was so strong. Why was I so totally detached from the drama? What this a problem with the film or with me?
Firstly, the film’s high productions values and superb photography were part of the problem for me. It felt akin to being confronted by one of my local Jehovah’s Witnesses. Doing their rounds, they always dress in their most immaculate suits. Their clothing is never showy, it’s merely tasteful. It’s not a uniform as such, but it defines them, limits them. It’s an invariable combination of immaculate suits, dustless shoes, neatly combed hair, and a tone of voice that is both calm and exceedingly well-rehearsed. This polished smoothness of sound and image is never meant to impress, as such. Rather, the aesthetic is meant to soothe, to calm, to convince. When they open their mouths, the reassurance of middleclass, middlebrow, middle-manager-esque measuredness acts as a kind of anaesthetic for what they’re trying to sell you. As it happens, I’m very bad at telling people that I have no interest in what they have to say, so when confronted by these gleamingly bland, affable people on my doorstep I tend to let them babble away untroubled. (Unlike the Blu-ray of DeMille’s film, I cannot simply press “stop”.) A year or so ago, one of them spoke so long on their chosen topic that their reasonableness eventually gave way to something far more striking: I got conspiracy theories, scatological metaphors, and brutish fundamentalism. I stood, fascinating and appalled, as the man’s charm slowly unravelled and revealed a kind of ideological black hole.
I say all this because my experience stood at my front door, helplessly confronted with two impeccably well-presented religious salespeople spouting sententious homilies, is very much like my experience of watching The King of Kings. The film feels the need to dress in its very best clothes to impress you with its message. If a film’s this good-looking, surely the content must be solid? But it’s precisely the contrast between the well-dressedness of the picture and the dramatic paucity of its every move that annoyed me. You could tell how much money had been spent on everything, on how much time had been spent dressing actors and picking props.
Take the way the Roman soldiers are depicted: they all hang around in full body armour and immaculately plumed helmets, which they seem to wear even when sleeping. They’re all too well groomed, too well fed, too well rehearsed. Or look at the flock of sheep that flees the temple merchants, or the lamb that Jesus fondles later in that sequence. I could almost hear DeMille shouting: “Look at the sheep! Each one hand picked for maximum pictorial beauty! Just feel the quality of these fleeces. You know how much each one would be worth on the market? Let me tell you how much I paid for them…!” The trouble is, everyone on screen is too well attired, too well made up. Every piece of furniture is too well designed, too well finished. Even rags or scraps or fragments of woods are too well fashioned, too well placed. Cripples are too pretty, lunatics too cute. Nothing bears the weight or texture of reality, nor does its fantasy go beyond a kind of bland pictorialism. It’s an illustrated children’s Bible, referencing only the most familiar tropes of Christian iconography or art. Neither aesthetically or dramatically does DeMille offer anything that either wasn’t already a cliché by 1927 or has become one since then—perhaps thanks to this very film. Everything from his sanitized, Aryanized Christ—blonde, bearded, blue-eyed—to his impeccably desexed Mary (Mother of) feels so wearingly familiar, I found it almost impossible to enjoy anything on screen.
What’s more, the drama moves at a slow pace. (Is this what The Film Daily critic meant when he said that the film’s tempo is “remarkable for the peaceful and benign influence it wields on the spectator”?) The film is 155 minutes long, but that’s not the issue. The problem is that every incident is so painstakingly relayed, and so laboriously earnest in citing (literal) chapter and verse, that the drama gets sucked out of every situation. Nothing in this film has bite, or tension, or excitement. The children who are subject to the first instances of Christ’s on-screen miracles are irritating for their cuteness, as is the length of time it takes for their inevitable curing. Soon after, the cleansing of the “seven deadly sins” from Mary Magdalene is already long and absurd without one of the apostles turning to another and explaining to them (and us) what’s going on. Yes, the multiple superimpositions are technically marvellous, but the personifications of the “sins” are ludicrously crude.
By the time we get to the climax of Judas’s betrayal, I’d grown infinitely weary of DeMille’s painstakingly earnest treatment. Just see how, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas goes in to identity Jesus with a kiss. DeMille milks this scene ad infinitum. Judas approaches slowly, moves to Jesus slowly, hovers at his side slowly, moves even closer slowly, leans in slowly, kisses him slowly, reacts slowly, moves away slowly. Poor Jesus has to stand stock still, staring straight ahead, for an eternity—like us, waiting for Judas to bloody well get on with it. The scene is so laboured, its contrivance so drawn out… (Even writing about this scene is tedious—I just want it to be over with!) We come to this scene, as we do to every incident, already knowing exactly what to expect, so to drag it out like this is dramatically absurd. Do something unexpected, Cecil! Surprise me! It’s even more of a shame, since the hand-coloured flames in combination with blue tinting make the Garden of Gethsemane sequence visually extraordinary. Why couldn’t the drama do anything to match it?
Part of the issue is that the film seems to imagine it’s offering us something with profound insight into universal moral truths, but I found it simplistic and superficial. No matter how much backstory the film gives us, I simply cannot believe in Judas as a real human being with real concerns or motives—and thus I cannot believe in the reality of his divided loyalties, his betrayal, or his remorse. Just as all the various Marys on screen are not real women at all, just walking illustrations from a crude book of dogma. And none of this is helped by the way the film uses endless biblical citations as dramatic punchlines to scenes. It ends up smacking the viewer as a kind of narrative (not to mention moral) smugness. This is a film that feels superior to (all but one of) its characters.
If the above makes it sound like I got nothing from the film, this is not quite true. Amid the pomp and platitudes, H.B. Warner gives a very restrained and (within the film’s own terms) rewarding performance as Jesus. He manages to be dignified and sympathetic even when the film around him is not. Both the role itself and the screenplay allow Warner little room for psychological or emotional complexity. He is caring, or sad, or knowing-yet-forgiving. He’s also miraculous, in a way that is oddly unimpressive. When DeMille’s Christ waves his hand to heal the sick, there’s no suspense, no emotion. The effects (like the soldier’s vanishing wound in the Garden of Gethsemane) take place too smoothly, or too swiftly. They’re so miraculously effortless that they are no longer miraculous. (And no-one in the film ever pauses to question the motivation or context of these miracles: like absolutely everything else in the film, they are meant to be received without a scintilla of scepticism.) Given all this, Warner’s eyes are often the source of the only real emotion in the film—even if these emotions (pity, love, resignation) lack any kind of human context. Jesus as a character is merely Christ the symbol. He might walk around and interact with people, but a real human being—as an individual with a human consciousness or a personal history or a complex inner life—he is not. Warner does his best within the many limitations put upon him.
If DeMille cast a very un-Jewish-looking Jesus, he did cast two actual Jewish actors in prominent roles. The father and son actors Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut were Austrian emigres who had come to the US at the start of the decade. In The King of Kings, they respectively play Caiaphas (the High Priest of Israel) and Judas. The former has the less nuanced character: he’s all bearded malevolence and unrepentant scheming. But as Judas, Joseph Schildkraut has more work to do. It’s a shame that the script’s effort to give him some kind of backstory makes his character less interesting than he might otherwise be. DeMille makes Judas a power-hungry schemer, eager to gain influence (and affluence) once he has installed Jesus as king. Making a villain more villainous does not make him a more interesting character. Joseph Schildkraut’s performance is as mannered as his character is simplistic. Ne’er has a man been seen to so shiftily fondle his cummerbund in villainous contemplation. In the Last Supper scene, the breaking of the bread is a cue for more scurrilous shifting on Schildkraut’s part. He resembles a schoolboy faced with unpalatable food (I’ve been there), who must pretend to eat his portion while secretly depositing it onto the floor. We are presumably meant to take against him from the outside for being dark-haired and clean shaven. Once things get serious, Judas’s hair becomes tangled—as if this could in any way make his character arc more convincing.
Of course, casting the two main villains in the film as Jews is not exactly sensitive. DeMille is also nasty to both the Schildkrauts at the end. Judas, per the tradition, hangs himself. Though we don’t see him do so, we see his swinging body tumble into the abyss, courtesy of the clunky earthquake that intervenes during the crucifixion. Meanwhile, Caiaphas falls on his knees at the temple: “Lord God Jehovah, visit not Thy wrath on Thy people Israel—I alone am guilty!” For once, there’s no biblical citation. DeMille is at least more courteous here than in the similar scene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which (in)famously takes the opportunity (via Caiaphas’s dialogue) to pass the blame onto the entire Jewish people forevermore. DeMille wants to have it both ways: cast Jews as the villains yet insert an excusatory note. The note is meant to excuse the Jews, but it’s also an excuse for DeMille. Like Pilate, he washes his hands.
The rest of the cast is uniformly uninteresting. Among the disciples, only Peter (Ernest Torrence) stands out, though not for good reasons. His alternately comedic and sincere characterization hits every note so squarely and obviously, I immediately took against him. I know it’s part of the New Testament story, but the way Peter is told that he will deny Jesus three times, then refutes this, then is proven wrong, then acts repentantly, is the perfect example of how the film fails to deliver any novelty, any friction or doubt, in its adaptation. What is meant to be the tragic fulfilment of Jesus’s prediction comes across as almost comedic on screen, such is Torrence’s eye-bulging doubletake. It’s a kind of visual “D’oh!” Likewise, the film’s laborious setting-up of the moment, and equally laborious explication of the punchline, is another instance of dramatic smugness. But at least I can remember Peter. The rest of the disciples are virtually indistinguishable. They have no personality, no inner lives, no function beyond the affirmation of what we already know. (In the liner notes of the Blu-ray, Lobster include a wonderful advert for the film in which the whole cast appear to swarm around the central figure of DeMille. Such is the size of font and layout of the design that it looks like the “King of Kings” is DeMille himself!)
If the adults are too often piously bland, the children are worse. I would like to restate how irritating I found the children in this film. They’re part of the ingratiating way the film seeks our sympathy, the way it hopes to humanize the story. Thus, the soon-to-be New Testament author Mark is a picture-book pretty child equipped with an enormous crop of curly blond hair—a cliché of fresh-faced cuteness that instantly made me take against him. Not only does he introduce us to Jesus via another child (a blind boy, who is likewise fair-haired), but he’s there right to the end. It’s he who encourages Simon of Cyrene to take up the burden of Jesus’s cross in the penultimate sequence. This is another of DeMille’s biblical amendments, since the scriptures state that it was the Romans that “compelled” Simon to carry the cross. Why the amendment? Merely to squeeze our sympathy glands again?
But was I really this annoyed by the film? Did it never affect me? Was I entirely unmoved? Hmm. Well, no. I did find moments moving, but this was often more due to the choice of music. For Lobster’s restoration of The King of Kings, Robert Israel used Hugo Riesenfeld’s orchestral score (as recorded for the synchronized 1928 version of the film) as the basis for his own adaptation. Copying Riesenfeld’s cues from 1928, he expanded the music to fit the longer 1927 version. I will have more to say on the score shortly, but for now I just want to point out how particular pieces of music seemed to make something more of the film—at least, for me. Take the Last Supper sequence. I’ve already said that I find the handling of Judas in this scene clumsy, but at the end of the sequence Riesenfeld introduces music from Wagner’s Parsifal (1882). It’s the opening of the Prelude to Act I: a soundscape of shifting, unresolved harmonic tension that hypnotically ebbs and flows—it’s music of unworldly beauty, of abstract sorrow, of unfulfilled longing. As rendered for Israel’s modern recording, the music is reduced for a smaller orchestra than Wagner intended—but it still sent shivers down my spine. And though the music doesn’t sound like it should in better performances by larger orchestras, and though Riesenfeld cuts and pastes from other sources as the scene proceeds, the effect as a whole is still superb. For once, something unearthly creeps over the picture. But then, inevitably, a voiceless choir comes in at the end of the scene with the melody from “Abide with me”, and the effect is ruined. From late romantic mysticism—all unsettled harmonics and soft, swirling rhythms—the score crashes to earth with resounding cliché.
That said, I did find Israel’s adaption of the Riesenfeld score very impressive. What’s most remarkable is its fleetfooted switching from one piece to another. Rarely does Riesenfeld see out a whole movement from its original context. Rather, he will use a single iteration of a theme, a single phrase, then segue rapidly to another piece. Thus, we sometimes get the “Dresden Amen” theme (usually as orchestrated by Wagner in Parsifal) in the brass, but the entire thing lasts one or two bars. It makes its point, then moves on. Later, we get more from Parsifal—but only a few more bars, just enough to introduce the right mood for the moment. Pontius Pilate gets the anxious, unsettled opening of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Antar” symphony (1868, rev. 1875/91), but only the opening—again, Riesenfeld moves on to something else to follow the action on screen. Even the way he unleashes music from the finale of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830)—surely the most extrovertly wild and exciting music of the entire score—he does so only for a few measures during the scourging of Jesus by the Romans. There are even smaller touches, too. I loved, for example, the delicious way that tambourine strikes accompany the silver pieces falling in a pile before Judas.
Sometimes the brevity of the cues works against their effectiveness. Thus, during the crucifixion sequence, Riesenfeld uses music from the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, the “Pathétique”(1893). But he reorchestrates it so that the music is less effective than in the original. The original is an extraordinary unwinding of orchestral timbre, the whole movement slowing and deepening and darkening—occasionally lashing out in fury—until the music peters out in the depths of despair. With Riesenfeld, we get a much steadier tempo and rhythm, and the musical narrative of the movement—from anger to oblivion—is cut short. Equally, the way Riesenfeld chucks in some Verdi (the dies irae from his requiem (1874)) for DeMille’s earthquake feels as clunky an imposition as the earthquake itself.
My other reservation is not about the music but about the 2016 recording for the film’s digital release. I can never fully detach my comments from what is inevitably a kind of snobbery, but nevertheless I really do think that there isan issue of quality at stake. When citing well-known musical themes, it is very easy for scores to sound tired and cliched. What makes or breaks the use of such music is the way they are arranged and performed. For example, several cues used in the Riesenfeld score for The King of Kings are also used in the (anonymous, c.1930) score for Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney. Modern renditions of both scores were arranged and recorded almost at the same time, in 2016-17, for their respective digital release. But despite sharing some of the same music, the two soundtracks are very different. Bernd Thewes (for Jeanne Ney) orchestrates the score in such a lively and interesting way—and the music is performed and recorded with such immense panache—that the effect is quite different, and more effective.
Of course, Israel’s forces are smaller than Thewes’s: Israel has the Czech Cinema Orchestra, while Thewes has the WDR Funkhausorchester Köln. My search for “The Czech Cinema Orchestra” yielded no results online. There is such a thing as “The Czech Film Orchestra”, however. As I surmised in an earlier post, Czech orchestras are popular with soundtrack composers for their competitive prices. As the homepage of the Czech Film Orchestra states: “We can offer you world-class orchestral recordings for 25% of the cost of a recording in the USA, Canada, or London.” Is the “Czech Cinema Orchestra” a budget version of the Czech Film Orchestra? I presume it’s a scratch band assembled for the 2016 recording. The performance—especially, of the strings—is less well drilled than it could be, and less atmospherically recorded than more budget-enhanced silent film soundtracks I’ve heard. (For examples of the latter, see: just about anything produced in Germany through ARTE, or any soundtrack produced by Carl Davis.)
It’s a shame, as Riesenfeld’s score does a lot of the heavy lifting as far as mood and emotion are concerned in The King of Kings. When the music really needs to land, it often doesn’t. During the resurrection sequence, DeMille’s Technicolor glows with gorgeous lustre—the music needs to do likewise. Yet I don’t think I’ve heard a less convincing rendition of the prelude to Act 3 of Tannhäuser (1845) than the one given here, per Israel’s performance. The string section, in particular, can scarcely keep together for the swirling crescendo that leads to Jesus’s miraculous reappearance. What should be a sonic whirlwind is something of a whimper.
In summary, I’ve not been so irritated by a silent film in a long time. I find DeMille a very frustrating filmmaker, especially when it comes to his religious (or religiose) productions. Oddly, I almost wished he’d do something outrageous with the narrative of The King of Kings to make it more interesting. The only temporal interpolation he offers is at the end, when Jesus appears to loom over the skyscrapers of the modern world, offering his love. But the effect is banal. Compared with other biblical screen worlds of the 1920s (and even those early Passion films of the 1900s), The King of Kings never gripped or surprised me. Neither realistic nor magical, for me the film offers very little that would make me want to sit through the whole thing again—even if I thought I could bare it. I can see how audiences at the time might have found themselves drawn to its reverent portrayal, and I can appreciate the effort that has gone into its look. The photography is superb, the lighting lovely, the Technicolor gorgeous. But a film can look like a million dollars and still feel impoverished.
I adore the soundworld of late romantic music. I have lived and continue to live in this lush, exotic, expressive, excessive, experimental realm—I spend hours every week immersed in music well-known and music forgotten. I love the great composers, but I also love the lesser-knowns. The latter appeal to my obsessive side: they are people I can hunt down through footnotes, through asides, through the marketplace outlets and only-available-as-offair-broadcast-mp3 sharers of the world. Give me your Austro-German oddities, your Scandinavian obscurities. Give me your tone poems on bizarre themes, your operas about abstract ideas, your itinerant harmonies and luxuriously strange orchestration, your dozens of weird symphonies, your books of diverse chamber works. Give me your Schrekers, your Braunfels, your Schulhoffs and Schmidts (and Schmitts!), your Atterbergs and your Langgaards. Francophone? No problem! Give me an obscure French composer of orchestral music who was born (approximately) in the latter half of the nineteenth century and died (sometime) in the interwar years and I’ll be a happy man. D’Indy? It’s a done deal! Magnard? Yes please! Rabaud? You bet! Pierné? Seconds please! I love the music of all these composers (and many more besides). What I love especially is when this music overlaps with the world of silent cinema, either in my imagination or in that of the original composer’s intentions. The instruments and rhythms of popular music of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s bleeds into the legacy of orchestral music from the nineteenth century—and the fusion produces fantastic things. And of course I delight in original silent music scores written in the era, since it introduces me to any number of more obscure composers. So you can imagine my joy when I came across the music of Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) and, in particular, a symphony he wrote that was inspired by silent cinema…
The Seven Stars’ Symphony, op. 132 (1933)
Koechlin wrote this “symphony” in 1933, when sound had conquered cinema. The stars he recalls in music thus straddle the divide between these two eras. He’s recalling the silent screen as well as acknowledging the coming of sound. Across seven movements, we get sonic pictures—or recollections—or seven stars of the screen. This is not a symphony in the classical sense, since there is no overarching unity of form or design to the work. Rather, it is a series of tone poems that conjure a musical-cinematic universe. Just as Koechlin uses one medium to evoke another, so must I use prose to try and capture his music. (Of course, you can listen to the symphony here.) I make no pretence at real analysis, offering only an impression of Koechlin’s impressions:
I. Douglas Fairbanks (en souvenir du voleur de Bagdad). We step into a harmonic world of the orient. The movement instructs us to recall The Thief of Bagdad. But as soon as we begin, we’re lost. This is not the film of 1924: it’s a dream of the film. Woodwind tiptoes up weird scales. Slow-motion strings unwind in the stratosphere. Weird curlicues perform oriental turns. Melodies bubble up and die away. There is no drama, only glittering stepping stones towards sonic dissolution. It’s six minutes of spellbinding strangeness. Nine years had passed between the film’s premiere in Hollywood and Koechlin’s score being written. A distant memory revived in sound.
II. Lilian Harvey (menuet fugue). A graceful dance, strings shining over warm woodwind. Is Harvey performing a turn on screen? What does Koechlin remember of her? A saxophone line blooms in the orchestra. The music turns chromatically sour for an instant, threatens to unwind the texture. Then this moment of drama dissipates. All ends with a dreamy slide up into silvery nothingness.
III. Greta Garbo (choral Païen). The ondes Martenot spells out something that may or may not be a melody. It’s an unstable base on which to build a movement. Woodwind tread in its path. Strings uncommittedly slide underfoot. If Garbo is here, she is as insubstantial as quicksilver. Here is her unknowability, her ungraspable form on the screen. The image does not flicker. The music is a portrait of the surface of the screen: it’s all sonic sheen, all gleaming illusion. There is no scene, hardly any form—just something slipping away, beyond one’s grasp.
IV. Clara Bow et la joyouse Californie. Bustle! Brass! Light, skipping percussive steps. Here is Clara Bow, or the sonic imprint of her liveliness, her spirit. This is the first time Koechlin’s orchestra has shown real body, something approaching a full, round, sweep of sound. It’s more harmonically traditional. That is, until the whole soundscape dies away. Suddenly there is a skittish rhythm and a reduced texture, a kind of circus-like dance in the distance. (In the background, a glockenspiel adds texture to the downward line of melody, then an upward leap.) Is this California? Are we on the street, a studio lot, or in a fictional world? Of course, this is all a fictional world, at one, two, three, or four removes from reality. The harmonies thin again. It’s like a pair of curtains part, revealing another vista—some way off. A saxophone ripens the melody. Then the melody unpeels into weird, restless harmonies. The whole world threatens to collapse, until the brass and strings gather together and bulldoze forward. The movement ends in a massive affirmation.
V. Merlène Dietrich (variations sur le thème par les letters de son nom). Oh my word, this is gorgeous orchestration. Dietrich in sound is more worldly than Garbo in sound. The melody unfolds on the woodwind. A repeated refrain moves slowly, turning back on itself, comes on again. If this is Dietrich, she is alone. It’s a kind of hum. (Somewhere deep in the orchestra, pizzicato double basses pick out a regular beat.) The music turns from us, departs, trailing melancholic satisfaction. (Note Koechlin’s misspelling of Dietrich’s name: “Merlène Dietrich” is surely a deliberate marker of the composer. Here is his star, his memory of her.)
VI. Emil Jannings (en souvenir de l’Ange bleu). Growling, brooding brass. A kind of slow stomp in sound. Bitterness, darkness. Depths and weights and plugs of music. Then the strings recall some distant melody, some dim memory of pleasure, of longing that may be satisfied. The movement refers to Der blaue Engel, but not to a scene so much as a mood—a portrait of Jannings’ character as the character might himself feel before he falls asleep. Anger, resignation, memory—fading away.
VII. Charlie Chaplin (variations sur le thème par les letters de son nom). What begins melodically soon turns chaotic. Entropy enters the rhythms, the harmonies. This is Chaplin in the form of his movement, his sudden bursts of speed, of wit, of evasion. Charlie is skipping, Charlie is running, Charlie is fighting. There are bursts of exquisitely controlled fury, such that threaten to turn atonal—to wrench us into another genre. Then all is sinisterly quiet. Bubbles of noise rise to the surface, burst, and vanish. Where are we? What’s happening on screen, or in our souls? Woodwind try to rescue the mood from eerie, high-stringed harmonies. Where is Charlie? A solo violin rises from the chromatic unease, but only for a bar. Soon the unrest resumes. It’s a kind of sonic starvation, minimalism on the lookout for sustenance. Where are we? Is this winter? Is this the dawning of madness in The Gold Rush? Poverty pulls at the edges of the score, threatening to impinge on this portrait of a comic icon. Eventually, after meandering through various scrapes and scraps of scenes, the solo violin leaps up against outbursts of brass, clattering glockenspiel, sinister fanfares. Some kind of resolution is reached, and it’s hardly a happy one. Has the Tramp died? Is he on his way to heaven? High woodwind detaches itself from the ground. The saxophone freewheels in the mid distance. Odd percussive clashes are far below us. Is this the dream of heaven in The Kid? If so, Koechlin treats it as a slow, surreal scene. The orchestra appears to waken. All is bleary, unsure of itself. The solo violin recalls something, leaves behind the other strings. Finally, a determined little march: woodwind steps, one-two, one-two, one-two; pizzicato strings, one-two, one-two, one-two… To where are we heading? Toward silence. The little march fades into the distance. Is this the end? Just as it seems as though silence is the answer, the whole orchestra rises into an enormous crescendo of sound: an apotheosis that towers over the preceding caesura, as if spelling out an enormous intertitle on screen—“THE END”!
What an absolute delight this music is. The orchestration is as lucid and precise as that of Debussy but anticipates later work by Messiaen. It’s lush and rich yet teeters on the brink of atonality. By turns gossamer light and terrifying dense, soothing and scarifying, evocative and vague, particular and meandering, this score is everything I love about late romantic music.
But how might we understand the relationship between The Seven Stars’ Symphony and the cinema that inspired it? Koechlin is surely more interested in these stars as starting points for music, as representatives of cultural moods and manners. In conception, the symphony reminded me of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Face of Garbo” (in Mythologies, 1957). I don’t just mean in the sense that, in Barthes’s words, “The face of Garbo is an Idea”; but in the way both treat Garbo as an excuse to produce delightfully vague and suggestive evocations using the actress (or rather, the image of the actress) as their starting point. Though Barthes had recently re-encountered Garbo in a revival of Queen Christina (1933) in Paris, he too was surely relying on memories—not just of films, but of images and associations. The distance between star and spectator itself becomes the subject of interrogation. Barthes is not interested in the history or life of the star so much as her symbolic function in (an exceedingly ill-defined conception of) cinematic history:
Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.
Koechlin’s music allows the listener to become as “lost” in Garbo-as-sound as one might be “lost” in the image of Garbo-on-screen. Koechlin’s symphony is the product of a kind of fandom: an expression of his encounters with Garbo in film. But it’s also an analysis of that experience: a musical exploration of the idea of cinema. The Seven Stars’ Symphony offers a glimpse of the afterlife of stars within the imagination of contemporary viewers. Images become sounds, cinema becomes music.
As well as these more abstract thoughts, the symphony also makes me want to ask more practical questions. How often did Koechlin visit the cinema, and where did he go? What films did he see in the silent era, and in what circumstances? (I would buy the one and only book on the man to find out more, but it’s been out of print for decades and will currently set you back the best part of £200 to get it. My curiosity can wait.) As so often, the cinematic life of artists who lived through the silent era is frustratingly obscure. How often have I wanted contemporary writers and painters and composers to have left accounts of everything they saw and heard… Of course, Koechlin’s symphony is itself an account of his experiences, even if only the abstract impressions left on him by the cinema. His seven studies are mood pieces, fleeting glimpses of life and stillness and movement on screen, of rhythms that might have been seen or heard or felt at the cinema. Koechlin’s extraordinary orchestration offers us a way to explore cinematic impressions through sound, to let the transmuted forms of one medium live again in another. By any measure, with or without a filmic context, The Seven Stars’ Symphony is a glorious sonic experience. Go listen to it.
Last year I wrote about the Film Preservation Society’s Blu-ray of The Three Musketeers, released for the hundredth anniversary of the film in 2021. Since then, Cohen Media released another version of the film in a Blu-ray package which also includes The Iron Mask (1929; US; Allan Dwan). The Cohen Media release is an entirely separate restoration to that of the Film Preservation Society. Scanned in 4K and transferred at 21fps, the Cohen release looks excellent – but it is presented entirely in monochrome. As I wrote in my previous post on thefilm, The Three Musketeers was designed to be shown with extensive tinting – including use of the Handschiegl colour process to render D’Artagnan’s “buttercup yellow” horse. In recreating these colour elements, the Film Preservation Soceity’s restoration is visually superior. But where the new release is decidedly stronger is in its musical accompaniment, and it is this soundtrack that I want to write about here.
In 1921, Louis F. Gottschalk assembled a score for The Three Musketeers that was performed by an orchestra for the film’s first run. The music survives, but it has not been well treated in its modern realizations. The soundtrack for Kino’s old DVD edition of the film featured the Gottschalk score “performed by Brian Benison and the ‘Elton Thomas Salon Orchestra’”. Sadly, this “orchestra” wasn’t an orchestra at all, but a collection of synthesized MIDI files. Though I have listened to this rendition of Gottschalk’s music, I still wouldn’t claim I’ve heard the real thing. Budget-saving soundtracks will be familiar to anyone who has collected enough home media release of silent cinema over the years. It’s a familiar history of “orchestral scores” not performed by orchestras, of original music being rendered null by synthetic sound or else replaced entirely. I remember struggling to enjoy much about The Three Musketeers when watching the Kino release. The aesthetic effect of this synthetic soundscape is the homogenization of musical rhythm and timbre, and its computerized tones ensure that the acoustics are divorced from human performance. Put bluntly, the assemble of MIDI files is a bland, insipid procession of synthetic sounds that makes me squirm in my seat. Even if Gottschalk’s music were more varied or exciting (and it isn’t really either of these things), this realization renders it null and void on the soundtrack.
The Film Preservation Society’s Blu-ray release of The Three Musketeers in 2021 featured a score arranged by Rodney Sauder and performed by the Mont Alto Orchestra (a six-piece ensemble). But even if it consists of real musicians playing real music, this “orchestra” cannot produce an orchestral soundscape. My earlier piece discussed how the score frequently lags behind the film’s action, and (above any other factor) struggles to match the scale or richness of the world presented on screen. By contrast, the Cohen Blu-ray features a new orchestral score arranged by Robert Israel and performed by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra. And yes, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra is an actual orchestra. Despite the claims of the last two home media editions, Israel’s score is the first truly orchestral score this film has received.
Right from the off, the difference is apparent. When the film’s opening titles appear, we get a brassy, boisterous theme—the whole orchestra is up and running. It sets the tone of the film perfectly. It sounds like a period score (i.e. one from the 1920s) while also evoking the kind of music more familiar from this genre in later decades. (One can imagine Errol Flynn arriving on screen just as much as Fairbanks.) The music also captures the tone of Fairbanks’s adventure: excitement, drama, and (above anything else) fun. The period of the film’s setting is soon evoked through baroque turns of phrase and instrumentation. For the domestic scenes with Queen Anne and her staff, a harpsichord forms part of the orchestral texture; then, organ and bell appear for the introduction of Father Joseph. Period, character, and tone are all created and developed with the choice of melody and orchestration.
Israel’s orchestration also makes room for smaller combinations of instruments and soloists. It can alternate between the chamberlike scale that introduces D’Artagnan’s home and father with the brassy fanfare for D’Artagnan himself. There also little gags made musical by Israel’s instrumentation. The little bassoon solo that accompanies the comic figure trying to escape D’Artagnan’s first fight with Rochefort at the inn. Or, when D’Artagnan has just bought his new hat in Paris, the descending glockenspiel scale that signals someone chucking out a bucket of water into the street. The same little gesture occurs again when D’Artagnan trips up on the steps of Bonacieux’s shop. The glockenspiel motif thus becomes one not just of a sight gag, but of D’Artagnan’s social embarrassment.
The greater variety provided by Israel’s orchestral forces means that, even when very familiar pieces are used, you do not get the impression of direct copy-and-paste musical assembly that you sometimes do with smaller ensembles. The melody that accompanies a scene between Queen Anne and King Louis (from Saint-Saëns’s prelude to Le Déluge (1875)) is one that I’ve heard used many times over in silent film scores. (Indeed, I’m sure I’ve heard Israel use it before in his other work.) I’ve heard it reduced for a small ensemble, for a duo with piano, for… well, god knows what else; I’ve heard it well played, poorly played, indifferently recorded, badly recorded. It gets used a lot. What makes it work in Israel’s score for The Three Musketeers is hearing its proper treatment: the violin taking the melody, with strings providing an underlying rhythm, by turns consoling and agitated. The tempo modulates across the scene, quickening as the King interrogates the Queen. The strings sometimes divide into multiple parts, then settle back into their united rhythm. Brass occasionally supports the strings, either to emphasize the return of the main melody, or else to add weight to a particular beat on screen. Even in repeating the same melody, the orchestral timbre provides a shifting soundscape across the scene. What can sound thin and trite when performed by a tiny ensemble has greater depth and gravitas when rendered (as Saint-Saëns originally intended) for orchestra. Give a well-worn theme musical body, greater acoustical depth, and it assumes a kind of grandeur. Put simply, it’s nice to hear a melody written for orchestra actually played by an orchestra.
A real orchestra also makes such a difference to the sense of the film’s scale. Early in the film, D’Artagnan approaches the city that is his destination, and his destiny. There is a title card announcing, simply: “Paris—”. The extended hyphen, which I always like to see, gives us a sense of expectation. It’s as if no more need be said, for Paris is, well… Paris—! This is D’Artagnan’s first experience of Paris, and it’s our first sight of the film’s Paris sets too. It’s a moment and it demands a response from the music. Israel gives us that response. After a few bars of silence that accompanied the previous title and transition, the full orchestra enters at a rapid tempo, responding to the excitement of seeing the city’s grand gates, its tall façade of houses, its bustling streets. This is a proper sense of musical boisterousness for a scene of visual boisterousness. (Compare this with the MIDI score on the old Kino DVD, or the music offered by the Monte Alto Orchestra. Even if the choices of music had been grander, the difference in sonic scale is tremendous. Israel evokes the bustling streets of Paris, the other scores only summon small provincial marketplaces.) Israel’s orchestral forces also have a greater ability to directly reflect sound being produced on screen. Fanfares on screen are accompanied by fanfares in the orchestra. A tambourine struck on screen becomes a tambourine struck in the orchestra. It makes the world on screen more tangible, more directly translated into the sound that occupies the acoustic space of the viewer.
Part of what impressed me was also the subtler shifts of motif within individual sequences. This is music that can shift gear quickly and effectively. Sometimes, only a few bars of a piece are used before segueing to the next. For example, Comte de Rochefort is introduced with a motif from the sinfonia of Verdi’s Luisa Miller (1849). When we first see this character at the inn of Meung, we just have time to register the melody before D’Artagnan enters the scene and the music shifts. Yet the melody recurs later in the film to remind us of this moment: when D’Artagnan sees Rochefort from a window in Paris, there is the theme again—more pronounced, carrying greater orchestral (and narrative) weight. Again, the music shifts gear and moves along… Near the end of the film, for D’Artagnan’s fight with Rochefort and his men, followed by the rooftop escape with Constance, Israel again uses the motif from Luisa Miller, but segues rapidly into Berlioz’s frenetic overture Les Francs-juges (1828). The switching from motif to motif is marvellously assured and effective. It gives the impression of a continuous musical intelligence, even though it is made up of music taken from many different sources and periods.
Many times, I was struck by how Israel’s choices make the drama more… well, dramatic. Take the scene in which Richelieu tries to keep D’Artagnan talking long enough for an assassin to kill him. Richelieu’s line, “If you were about to die, what would you do?”, is invested with real weight by beat of the timpani that underscores the moment. Then the switch to a march motif, complete with snare drum and little flourishes in the brass, makes D’Artagnan’s reply as bold and brassy as it is. The climax, when D’Artagnan makes his daring escape past the Cardinal’s guards, suddenly brings in the whole orchestra swelling into D’Artagnan’s own musical theme. The music makes the moment as thrilling, charming, and satisfying as it ought to be. Switching from motif to motif, this whole sequence worked for me in a way that it never quite did with previous scores.
There is also the pleasure of recognizing pieces of music that arrive out of the blue. For example, in the final court ball sequence, we see live music and dances being played on screen. Israel’s score accompanies the scene with a delightful orchestration of a seventeenth-century melody I recognized as one of Michael Praetorius’s terpsichorean dances (c.1612). (Rechecking my CD liner notes, I find that the melody—a bourrée—originates with Adrianus Valerius (c.1575-1625). Praetorius collected it as part of his series of 300 dances based on popular contemporary melodies from across Europe, especially France.) There was delight in recognizing the music (a quite fabulously catchy little melody) but delight too in the way Israel’s treats it. His score offers a small-scale, period arrangement of the music, then suddenly alters to bring in brass and strings whenever the scene cuts away to exterior scenes of intrigue.
So, in summary, this is a really excellent score. More than just well selected (i.e. appropriate for what’s happening on screen), Israel’s music is warm, charming, and immediately accessible. It is intelligent and emotive, subtle when it needs to be and obvious when required. Though it matches the action through tempo and instrumentation, there are also some very pleasing moments of synchronization. (I’ve already mentioned some comic touches with the glockenspiel, but a scene that brought particular satisfaction was Rochefort’s final clash with D’Artagnan. This sees a more extensive use of Luisa Millar motif, Rochefort’s theme, and Israel times the brass perfectly with several thrusts of his sword in this last scene. It’s a really lovely touch.) Israel’s score for The Three Musketeers in fact pairs very nicely with the wonderful Carl Davis score for The Iron Mask, which is also on the Blu-ray. The latter was recorded by the City of Prague Philharmonic and featured on the 1999 DVD release of the film. It’s curious that the films each have music performed by Czech orchestras (dare I say that rates are cheaper there than in the US?). Occasionally, Israel’s orchestra sounds as though it needed a couple more run-throughs to really gel. (By comparison, the Davis recording—made some quarter-century earlier—sounds not merely professional but polished.) But this is a very minor reservation indeed. Israel’s score sounds much better than many silent soundtracks, and I rejoice at being able to hear it. If only it accompanied the Film Preservation Society’s restoration of the film!
This week, I’m returning to my notes for another piece on the music of the late Carl Davis. In August, I wrote about the recording sessions for Napoléon. Today, I turn my attention to Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) and the orchestral score written for it by Davis in 1987. In May 2016, I experienced four successive performances of this music with Davis conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra: two run-throughs at the CBSO Centre, followed by a dress rehearsal and public screening at the Birmingham Town & Symphony Hall.
Returning to the notes I made at the time, I’m struck by how little I wrote compared to the recording sessions of Napoléon. This is more to do with the different pace and atmosphere of the two environments than my own levels of interest. (Watching orchestras rehearse and perform has been one of the greatest joys of my life.) The soundtrack of Napoléon was a thousand-and-one piece jigsaw, its recording continuity entirely separate from the continuity of the film. Cues were recorded in a way that suited the schedule and personnel. At the Angel Studios sessions in 2015, the music was being prepared for a soundtrack. In Birmingham in 2016, music was being prepared for a live performance. Instead of a jumbled jigsaw, the score was to be a continuous stretch of music: two hours and twenty minutes’ worth of sound. There were no click tracks, no visual markings. The orchestra sight read from sheet music, followed Davis’s directions, and marked changes or comments with pencil on their copies. It follows that the rehearsals were arranged around several long, near-continuous read-throughs. There was no technology, no instant feedback, no continuous repetition—none of the endless back-and-forth, chop-and-change rhythm of the recording sessions. It all felt curiously relaxed, far less pressured than the studio environment. Conversation often took place as the orchestra played: musicians might exchange whispered comments or smiles of encouragement, and were free to applaud good work. Davis, too, was free to use his voice as well as gestures to communicate during rehearsals. Yet all this was preparation for the intense collective concentration of the concert itself, a unique endeavour within an exacting timeframe—where no error could be corrected.
All of which is to explain why what follows feels brief compared to the Napoléon sessions I wrote about last month. Put simply, the continuity of the rehearsal and concert presented far less opportunity for notetaking. To make this piece more “complete”, I have used a subsequent publication and some additional memories to supplement the final sections on the dress rehearsal and actual concert performance. As before, I gather this material here for lack of any other viable place to share them.
Thursday, 12 May 2016: CBSO Centre, Birmingham
The CBSO Centre feels like a sports hall. Outside, chairs and sofa before the reception. Inside, it’s a great, empty box. High, bare walls. Wooden floor. Narrow galleries far above. Chairs stacked at the back. / I am used to the studio booth. The orchestra could ignore me there. Here, there is no glass and steel to sit behind. I sit conspicuously in my chair in front of the gathered instrument cases, facing the orchestra. I am the entire audience.
The rehearsal begins by lowering the curtains. The sound must be contained, but gently. Half the walls are slowly shrouded by synchronous ochre blinds that unfurl from the rafters. / Ben-Hur is placed on a makeshift plinth: a mobile crate wheeled before the podium is the base for a monitor. Back and to the right of the podium is a small table on which a laptop displays a timecoded copy of the film. In control of this, Davis’s assistant sits quietly waiting for instruction. / At the back of the room, the percussion section sends eyebrows into the air with a low blast of sound that shakes the wooden floor. / Rhythms break out in ignorance of one another. Melodies test their legs, as do technicians—on patrol with wires and portable kit. / (I can hear an organ, and I can see an organist at his keyboard—but where is the organ?)
An announcement for the players (there is an outside world). Other concerts, other dates, other commitments. / Davis is introduced. / Many of the orchestra have played for him before. But Davis manages an instant rapport with them all. He is already beaming, smiling, joking. / Davis calls Ben-Hur “a really grand film. We’re talking Wagner, Bruckner, Strauss—that kind of level. But there are laughs!”
Monitors are checked, scores flutter on stands. The bustle of settling down. / The orchestra attends. / “So…”, says Davis at last, “roll film.”
The “Dreden Amen” sounds in the brass. Thus does Parsifal draw nigh to the gates of MGM. / The percussion is on high, perched around the rear rank of players, but the sound seems to rumble under my feet—to trip me up from below whilst hitting me on the head. / Camel bells make me look up—just in time to see the animal negotiate a timecode and lumber across the crowded screen. / Romans and horns must coincide. Work to be done.
Davis encourages the violin leader’s solo to be less pretty—the character on screen is “pretty rough”. / The “Dresden Amen”. An immensely moving sonic apparition. My eyes seek the monitor. It’s the Mother of God! / There is no room in the inn. / Scenes from an illustrated bible. Timecodes are exacting in this world of legend. / Three kings are crossing the desert. (If they are not on time, the orchestra must be.) / There are whispers among the double-basses but they must concentrate on pizzicato.
The star falls from heaven and comes to rest over a tiny stable. / We run through the birth of Christ. A glimpse of two-strip Technicolor. The music here is all, the images must wait to be unboxed. / The orchestra unfolds an immense crescendo. / Davis adjusts the balance of sound.
Later in time, Romans are marching. / Double-basses begin the march col legno, as if equipment were rattling on their shoulders. / Such is the fun they have, the players begin to laugh. / The cue is replayed. The double-basses go again. They are soon joined by cellos. Footsteps made into music. / (There is noise in the room. Coughs, whispers, a rustle of paper.)
Ben-Hur is introduced with his motif. I have not heard it for five years, and its sudden appearance moves me unaccountably. It’s like meeting an old friend. I gulp back a sob. (Would it be a social gaff to cry at a rehearsal? I feel more conspicuous than ever, the observer being observed.)
“Can we start at bar 30?” the assistant asks, so Davis translates into a timecode: “20:16 please”. / A run-through. / The curtains on the left of the room rise, to general bemusement.
“Now ’bones, you’ve got the full Roman ‘Bah-bam!!’ OK?” / Ben-Hur’s motif speaks for him. / Davis says, “Sorry, it’s my problem—I need to go a little faster.” / A man carefully holding a cup of coffee walks slowly on the uppermost balcony, pausing to look down at us.
The fanfares are out of synch—but my eyes are on the live players. More trumpets appear on screen—and nothing happens! The assistant pauses—plays—pauses, in confused expectation of a problem. / We start with the absent fanfare.
Romans march. Trombones have fun. The martial rhythm slowly spreads through the orchestra. Musicians—playing through the score for the first time—begin bobbing and nodding appreciatively. By the climax of the cue, some are swaying in their chairs. / (But this is kinetic learning. Musical preparation is also physical preparation. The concert tomorrow will be an immense exertion, a form of athleticism.) / The march builds up a head of steam, stretches its legs and chest to the full—“Then”—a tile falls from the roof and the orchestra scrambles into angry reaction. / Ben-Hur is arrested. A percussionist leaps from one instrument across to another. / I finally spot the organist, on the left. (No wonder I was confused. The pipes are somewhere else.)
The desert. Slaves and their brutal overlords. / Davis explains some of the effects. / “Now I’ve had to give up the whipping here.” / A massive groan of disappointment from all players. / No visuals—“But let’s see if I can do it by directing.” / Grins of delight at the strange sounds. (The desert chain gang, “The Way of Death”. Two lines of mounted guards, a single line of desperate prisoners. An expanse of sand and hills.) / Strange tones of organ. It is a glimpse of Christ amid the horror. / Ben-Hur lurches for water, but the guard pours it on the ground and swipes away the wet dirt. / More sound-effects in the score are abandoned for the sake of the live performance. / “No rattle at the back!” instructs Davis. / Groans from the eager percussionists. / Before we are sent to the galley, we get a coffee break.
[Later]
“Now who’s my galley driver?” Davis asks. / A man with what appears to be a large club waves it in the air. / All pencil marks are to be ignored. Back to the original. / The galley driver starts off with pencilled markings and sets off at a lumbering run. / “Stop! We’re not doing it that way!”
Pirates. The galley rhythm needs to be sharper, reaction more coherent. / “Now, snakes…” The lead violin demonstrates a variety of ways of playing. Which is the right sound? / “Should they be angry snakes?” she asks. / “Yes, angry snakes”, Davis replies. […] “There are more snakes up ahead, but you know what you’re doing now—it’s authoritative!”
The attack. A run-through. / Davis must drive the galley driver faster—everyone is falling behind. / Another run-through. We get further—the camera oscillates on impact; the orchestra enjoys doing violence. / “OK, the snakes have moved over to woodwind now.”
[Later]
Each time there is a break in rehearsal, the sound of a harpist practising their cue cuts through the gentle hum. It’s the promise of melodic delight somewhere later in the score.
Act 2. / Davis sets the scene: “Now, we’re in the world of Egyptian spice, courtesans, exoticism—Salome.” He turns to the first violins: “…and you, you’re…” (To demonstrate glamour, he hugs himself, hugs his own gesture.) / The orchestra proceeds into the lush soundscape. / The Egyptian princess Iras. / “And… change!” Davis cries out, as the strings move to shimmer and seduce.
Since the orchestra cannot see any screen, the film they are illustrating remains a mystery. / Davis guides his players: “Percussion, you need to come out a bit here—we’re talking money… Clarinets, you should be a bit looser. We’re in a bazaar. You sound too good!… Yes, cello, it’s like a drug.” / We break for lunch.
[Later]
The orchestra retunes for the chariot race. The talk at lunch was of the energy needed for the next ten minutes of the score. / The entry into the Circus of Antioch. The volume of sound conjured is huge. / The organ enters—and immediately Davis stops. / “Sorry. Organ: we’re starting at bar 43.” / “Oh, I’m sorry.” / General, good-natured laughter. / The chariots make ready. The players brim with excitement.
A whole run-through of the race. Musically, it is magnificent. / But too slow! On the monitor, the chariots have been and gone. The next scene waits impatiently. / Groans as Davis announces: “Rather than do bits and pieces, I suggest we do another run through at the tempo I need.” / Second run-through. The orchestra ties the race with the image. The perfect result. / Ben-Hur’s winnings make his motif do an almost grotesque gig.
The film plays through. In step, the orchestra learn their paces. / Esther wins Ben-Hur’s heart. Stones are cast. Legions are raised and march. / An encounter with Christ transforms Ben-Hur’s motif into the lightest of violin solos. / It is hard work, and the musicians are conscious that they are rehearsing for a continuous performance. Stamina, exertion, and timing. Is there room for manoeuvre? / In one scene, Davis highlights that there may be more or less of a gap “on the night”: “It depends how I’m doing.” / In another, he tells a player: “Bass clarinet, at bar 52-53 there can be a bit of a hiatus. If it gets too long and it becomes difficult to sustain, just stop. Especially if you run out of breath. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. It’s different for every show.”
Ben-Hur wishes to lead a revolution. His theme is garbed in unwholesome aggression. Trombones spell it out, and his name is growled into the floorboards. / The death of Christ. The walls of Jerusalem fall. The room trembles, and on the tiny screen the superimposed masonry flickers and crumbles to shadow. / Ben-Hur’s final address. A soft haze of Technicolor flesh. The strings are divided: a cello descends slowly into the depths, while the violins climb higher. The musical line is split in two, yet this falling away and this rising up are part of the same journey. The cello’s line is met by a percussive finality, and the high strings form the last iteration of the “Dresden Amen” at end of the film.
Friday, 13 May 2016: Birmingham Town & Symphony Hall
I meet Davis early to help him carry his bags across to the Symphony Hall. We have time for some refreshment. He orders tea and scones, the consumption of which he soon delegates to me. It’s been many years since I ate a scone. I fumble with the spreading of cream and jam. My scone breaks apart as I grapple it. Davis watches, bemused. “Wow, you’ve really fucked that up”, he says.
The time has come. We cross to the Hall, via a combination of stairs, lift, and suspended corridor. Within, there are keycards and doorways and narrower passages. A small room, a dressing room for later. And for now, a drop-off point for bags. Messages descend and ascend.
Then we descend, further down, via a route I could never retrace. Eventually we emerge at the side of the stage. The screen is immense. A great white wing hovering overhead. The orchestra’s seats are laid out in front, their backs to the empty screen. The maestro moves across to the podium. Greetings, questions, a gentle hubbub. (Importantly, we are told where the bathroom is backstage.)
I have never seen this space from the stage. (I’ve never even been on a stage this large.) It’s strange and wonderful to stand here. Thousands of vacant seats, vacant galleries. Somewhere at the very back of the space, a dim booth, a gleam of light. Therein, the projector and its team. I find a seat in the centre, close enough to keep an ear on what’s being said by the musicians.
It is 2pm. The orchestra has gathered. In the empty hall, the organ tests its lungs. Snare drums snap out a summoning beat across so many unpeopled rows. / The harpist practices a delicate refrain, the organist the appearance of Christ, the drummer a Roman march. / Now added: a trombone’s lugubrious step-downs, the padded footsteps of a drummer’s distant roll—thunder taking its time; the mellow scales of woodwind glimmer behind the podium; a gong sounds from the back; strings adjust their heights. / Lights from above dim then reassert themselves.
The great pale wing of the screen barely wavers. / The lights fade. / The screen comes alive. And I want to hug myself for my luck to sit before an orchestra in this empty hall.
The stars. / The Star resonates with light, the orchestra rings with sound. / Music fills the air. Some distant memory of watching the film on DVD. I showed it to my students a few years previously. I wish they were all here, to see and hear and feel how this film should be shown and experienced. / Don’t trust Massala—the orchestra growls under his tread. / Jesus defies the laws of continuity. / Aboard the galley, Ben-Hur impresses Quintus Arrius. When his ankle is unchained, Ben-Hur’s motif floats up in a solo violin. / The fleets crash together. Extras tumble. (There were dark rumours of real deaths.) Percussionists thunder out the clash of arms, the sliver of snakes. / I spot one of the double-basses cast a furtive look up at the screen to see what’s going on. Is this the first glimpse he’s had of the film? Interval.
[Later]
After a break, the orchestra are on stage. / There is a long delay. Footsteps in the hall. A woman with a torch comes to the front. A messenger. / Somewhere far behind us, in the projection booth, comments are being relayed forward. / There is too much light spill from the stage: the image up on screen is being lost. / Can the orchestra put blue filters on their lamps? / The filters are fitted. There is a flurry of comments. Discussion with Davis. / The verdict: the players cannot adequately see their paper scores. / From the projection booth, a message of disappointment. More discussion. (Last year, Davis told that me this happens at every performance.) / Compromise is reached. The filters will be half placed over the lamps: a little more clarity for the players, a little more clarity for the screen.
The chariot race. / In the CBSO centre, the orchestra competed against two tiny monitors; here in the Symphony Hall, a screen several metres wide still quakes at the music’s power to spill across time. / I am one among barely half a dozen people scattered around the empty hall. The number of extras on screen, cheering on the racers, makes the empty hall feel all the stranger. / Ben-Hur is tied for first with the musicians, but the winner finishes celebrating before the orchestra: Ben-Hur’s mother and sister (in the next scene) seem to cower in fear at the immense volume of celebration still booming from the stage. / To me, even this minor error seems a tremendous achievement.
[Later]
7.30pm. From six scattered spectators this afternoon to an audience of 2,000 this evening. The pleasure of experiencing the rehearsals seeps into the pleasure of seeing the final concert. I’m curious—nervous, in fact—to see how the performance matches the run-throughs. Will the timing be the same? Will the performance feel different?
Here are the opening scenes once more. I’m struck by how Davis’s score not only matches the physical exertions on screen during the chariot race, but also gives weight to these earlier scenes which rely on artificial visual effects. The star appears over Bethlehem in a shower of meteors. This glittering curtain falls and fades, leaving a single star that dominates the sky—its gleams condensing into the sign of a cross. As the Wise Men and Shepherds see this apparition, the star radiates ever brighter—sending ripples of light out through the sky. While these images can seem synthetic on a television monitor, they have tremendous impact when revitalized during live performance—especially projected on 35 mm. On such a scale, and accompanied by an orchestra, spectators are invited to appreciate the human touch that created the scene’s effects: hand-operated cameras, hand-painted glass mattes, celluloid manhandled into chemical baths to tint its silver with colour.
Davis’s score for this scene is orchestrated to provide a wealth of sonic sensations: from the aural coruscation of falling meteors (glissandi bell tree, high strings/woodwind, rolling cymbals/tam-tam) to the floor-shuddering bass of the star itself (all the above plus fortississimo timpani, horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba, organ). This music evokes extreme depths and extreme heights: acoustic space expands the dimensions of the image, making its impact near supernatural.
Davis introduced the “Dresden Amen” theme during the opening credits but withholds its full iteration until this moment at Bethlehem. As the star grows into a luminous cross, the “Dresden Amen” is projected with immense clarity by the brass—a blast of sound that organizes the layers of orchestral timbre into meaning, reconnecting this scene with the film’s religious narrative. This is at once a moment of intellectual comprehension and of emotional revelation: the visual shockwaves from the star are transformed into music that reverberates through the concert hall. Silent images thus have physiological impact on spectators in the venue; the star’s ringing clamour is followed by the tangible dissipation of its sound.
Experienced in the concert hall, I was especially struck by these spatial dimensions of Davis’s score. I don’t just mean the thrilling loudness of music in the climactic scenes. Quietness, I think, is just as affecting when freed from the confines of a soundtrack. In a later scene, Ben-Hur returns to his former home and, exhausted, falls asleep on the stone steps at the base of the wall outside. His mother, Miriam, and sister, Tirzah—both afflicted with leprosy—arrive, dragging with them (through the orchestra) the Hur family motif, disfigured by the scraping strings that have throughout signified their illness. In his sleep, he mutters “Mother”; a solo violin raises Ben-Hur’s motif, which his mother seems to hear. The two women approach, but Miriam holds Tirzah back: “Not a sound! He belongs to the living—and we to the dead.” The Hur theme climbs to a higher register, as if lifting itself away from the sleeping figure. The low sonorities of a solo cello accompany Miriam as she crawls up to her son, while Tirzah kisses the sole of his boot. As Miriam caresses the stone beneath Ben-Hur’s head, harps accompany the cello’s refrain—low and high pitch seem equally to avoid making too loud a sound. The mother places her head in a position parallel to her son, stretching out one step below him. After kissing the step, she withdraws—but we see that she has left a tear on the stone. The two women retire, the orchestra’s strings scuffing in deep tremolo—the musical texture of their leprosy.
Ben-Hur awakes. He places his foot down onto the lower step, not realizing he has almost stepped on his mother’s tear; the plucked note of a harp suggests the fallen drop and—as did his mother before him—Ben-Hur seems to hear the motif in the orchestra, but remains unaware of his family hiding nearby. This scene is the film’s most moving, and its dramatic irony is worked into the music through the motifs that trigger mutual reminiscence among characters and spectators. Davis’s score plays upon the idea of presence and presentiment—on screen and in the auditorium. The effect is made stronger by the fact of the music’s generation by live musicians. While this sequence seemed powerfully intimate for those in the near-empty hall at rehearsal in 2016, the filled concert space later magnified the moment’s empathy.
While a DVD presentation might trigger these connective experiences, the sense of dramatic continuity in a live concert is unrepeatable. The 2016 performance was nothing short of miraculous: the chariot race was delivered with an ideal blend of panache and precision. This was a collective feat no less impressive than the race itself. The timing was perfect, the effect thrilling beyond words.
Yet there was another, stranger sensation produced in 2016 through accident. Near the end of the film, Christ’s crucifixion is followed by earthquakes that wrack Jerusalem, climaxing in the collapse of the huge Senate building. This remarkable screen effect is achieved through the combination of matte painting, models, and superimposition. Davis’s score grants the catastrophe an immense sonic impact: the weightless fiction of silent images attains preternatural mass in performance, where the venue’s interior trembles in response to a full orchestral fortississimo. In the 2016 concert, this musical climax was mistimed: the sound of Jerusalem’s masonry hitting the ground preceded its image by around five seconds. Yet even here, the silence of the building’s slow-motion disintegration possessed an uncanny gravitas. In the presence of an orchestra, silence itself acquires heightened impact. For these few moments, conductor, players, and audience were united in rapt attention to the film’s solo performance.
Afterword
After the concert, I went back to listen to highlights from the score on CD. The performance recorded in 1989 features Davis conducting the Royal Liverpool Orchestra. I was struck by how different the music sounded. The 1989 performance was tremendous, and the recording creates a great sense of space and depth to the music. But it didn’t sound the same as the CBSO performances I had just experienced. Over the course of the rehearsals, I had got used to the music per the 2016 performances. Subtle differences in phrasing, in emphasis, in balance made the music sound very different in the 1989 recording. What was the music losing? What was the music gaining?
Of course, after multiple relistenings to the 1989 recording, the CD version has become my dominant impression of the score. Now I cannot say for certain how the performances differed. I certainly feel the CD is a better-sounding document of the music than the recording featured on home media editions of Ben-Hur. For the laserdisc release (subsequently issued on DVD), Davis conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. (There is no date for the recording, but the laserdisc was released in 1989, so I presume the recording dates from sometime between 1987, the year Davis’s score premiered in London, and 1989.) This is the version through which I first encountered both film and score. It is the version I watched while taking a course at university and which I, in turn, later showed my students on a course that I taught. The film always impressed, just as the score always impressed. But it’s an entirely different experience to a live projection with orchestra.
Years later, I rewatched sections of the film on DVD for the sake of writing this piece. At this distance, it seems all the more difficult to connect my experience of the film at home with the memory of the concert in 2016. I so desperately want to go back and hear those CBSO performances again, to discover the differences between them and the older recordings. Weren’t the arpeggios in the strings for the “Star of Bethlehem” brought out more in 2016? Didn’t the attack of the pirates have an angrier twist to the rhythm? And how can any recording recapture the sensation of sound travelling through the air, reverberating through the floor? Or of the sensation of being in the midst of hundreds or thousands of spectators, in thrall to film and music?
Even if the precise memories of those days in May 2016 have faded, the impression made by Ben-Hur in concert grows in stature—especially now, after the death of Davis. Though his recorded legacy is strong, I hope his music will persevere in live screenings. It is here, in the ritual strangeness of a single, continuous performance of music before an audience, that the power of silent cinema is most fully revealed.
It’s the final day of the online festival—or at least it was, since I write this four days after it actually ended. But a bout of Covid has sent me to bed for the last three, so I’ve fallen behind my writing schedule. Now I have the strength to stand up and type, I can return to finish off my report of the final two films: first, a defining work of the German “street film” genre; second, a sensitive drama from William C. DeMille about the lure of the past…
Die Straße (1923; Ger.; Karl Grune)
“The film of one night”. The characters have no names. They are simply: the Husband (Eugen Klöpfer), the Wife (Lucie Höflich), the Provincial Gentleman (Leonhard Haskel), the Girl (Aud Egede Nissen), the Fellow (Hans Traunter), the Blind Man (Max Schreck), the Blind Man’s Son (Anton Edthofer), the Child (Sascha).
The story is very simple: the Husband is bored at home and goes out to explore the oponymous “street”. He ends up being lured into a nightclub by a woman, who—with her pimp/partners—lures him into gambling with an out-of-towner. The latter is then killed and the Husband falsely accused, only to be released just before he hangs himself from shame. He returns home to the embrace of his wife.
The story is a familiar one of (male) temptation, guilt, and return. But it’s the atmosphere of the film that takes hold of you. At the start, we see the Husband lying snoozing on the sofa. The Wife cooks, clears the table. Lights and shadows play upon the ceiling. The Husband gazes up, half asleep. An astonishing vision projected above him: a man and woman walk, stop, interact. The Husband goes over to the window to stare at the world outside. A flowing montage of sights, multiple superimpositions of life on the streets. He sees fireworks and clowns and parties teeming and swarming. Then the Wife goes to the window. Another close-up, followed by her view: a single, unmanipulated view of the street—ordinary life, going about its business. She puts the humble dinner upon the table. The man, repulsed by the interior, rushes outside.
Everything is set up here: the subjectivity of the nightlife, the explicitness of male fantasy and female subjugation. In the first scene in the street, the Husband encounters a streetwalker. She pauses. He stares. Her face becomes a skull. (Shades of ancient imagery, of ancient associations: strange women, prostitutes, disease, death.)
This vision warns us that the world on screen will be dreamlike rather than realistic. Everything is subtly heightened, warped. When the Blind Man and the Child (his granddaughter) leave their tiny apartment, we see the interiors’ subtle disfiguration by design and by shadow. Expressionism leans on the uprights, exaggerates the hallways, the corridors. Outside, the streets are swathed in rich shadows and patches of light. There are also surreal interventions of the modern world: the Husband is entranced by an illuminated sign in the pavement, and later an opticians’ advert illuminates a pair of giant eyes in glasses that makes him flinch with guilt. When he follows the Girl to a park bench, we are given a view overlooking the city. But “the city” is a remarkable combination of models and paintings that has a dreamlike sensibility.
The camerawork heightens this atmosphere. When the Blind Man is separated from the Child, Grune places the camera at ground-level to capture the rhythm of the traffic pulsing dangerously around the child. And in the nightclub, the Husband becomes hallucinates the room spinning—and we then seen him, a dark silhouette, against the spinning vision we have just seen. And when he later bets his wedding ting, we see a vision of his wife (quite literally) slipping out of his life in a superimposed vignette framed by the ring in extreme close-up.
The heightened performance style—the slowness of gestures, the elaborateness of movement—are also all part of the dreamlike quality. We see the Husband’s journey from respectability to crime in the way he moves: his face slowly contorts with desire, with fear, with lust, with guilt, with triumph. Other figures are also more evidently characterized through costume and make-up. The Provincial Gentleman has his slightly shiny suit, his elaborate combover, his permanently shadowed cheeks—lined with age and/or flushed with colour.
But what all of this does is make you feel like you’re trapped inside a bad dream. For a start, the film eschews any geographical particularity. This “street” could be any street in any city. The signs we see (a distant street sign, the police station sign) are abstract symbols in no recognizable language. The use of models and false perspectives is subtle but all-prevalent. Reality is as absent as daylight. It’s a twilight world of neon night or pale dawn. In this world, the plot of the Husband’s downward descent feels as inevitable as it does nightmarish: things just keep getting worse and worse. Following his desire into the nightclub, he soon gets into a scuffle with the grotesque Provincial Gentleman over the Girl. Even when this is resolved, he’s drawn back into the Provincial’s company through the gambling table, where he bets, loses, bets again… bets a last cheque, and loses—only to reveal that that cheque was not his. Klöpfer’s performance makes you feel the gathering sense of doom like an oncoming panic attack. It’s a nightmare of repeated failure, of repeated mistakes, of satisfaction endlessly delayed.
Success in this world is also guilty. The Husband eventually bets his wedding ring… and wins… and wins again… and again… until he retrieves his money, his cheque, and leaves. Flush and giddy with success, he leaves—but is tailed by the Blind Man’s Son and the Fellow. (Another trip through snister streets, pools of light, deep shadow.) Even when he is about to “get” the Girl, he is being used by the gang to cover their crime. The Blind Man’s Son and the Fellow attack and kill the rich Provincial Gentleman while the Husband is next door with the Girl. The police end up intervening, arresting the only stranger now left on the premises: the Husband. At the station the Girl accuses him of the murder, her outstretched arm of accusation some kind of archetypal gesture, which can condemn even the innocent. (And, as in a bad dream, the innocent Husband is indeed condemned.)
Does the ending offer us comfort? The Child eventually correctly identifies her own father as the murderer. The Husband is about to kill himself in his cell when the police arrive to release him. The image of his belt tied to the window grate, flapping in the wind, is extraordinarily chilling. It’s another image struck from nightmares. There follows a vision of the street by early morning: deserted but for sheets of newspaper blowing in the wind. The Husband comes home. His Wife is asleep at the table. Shamefaced, head bowed, he stands at the threshold. She takes the remainder of the dinner and places it upon the table. He goes to her, places his head on her shoulder. She strokes his head. They look at one another eye to eye. Ende. It’s an ending of ambiguity, of unanswered questions. What happens next? What does the husband say? Has his nightmare even ended?
Conrad in Quest of His Youth (1920; US; William C. DeMille)
“The most terrible thing about the past is that there is so much of it…” Have we not all wanted to “travel back though time”? Here is Conrad Warrener, back from India, back from the Great War. The only one at home is Dobson, his servant. The simple delights of being home: a bath, fresh soap. Conrad mourns the loss of his fallen friends and wonders why he feels “like a stranger in his old haunts”. He goes through some old photographs. A picture of childish happiness: “Sweetbay”, and three other childhood friends. Ted, Nina, Gina.
They arrive. A mechanical music box is played. Old pictures on the wall, needlework. It’s all conspicuously a world from another century. Ted finds his old catapult, but it snaps as soon as he tries it. Dinner time, and the friends stare at the tiny table and chairs where they used to eat together. (Neil Brand’s piano accompaniment brilliantly brings back the theme used for the mechanical music.) Only Conrad likes the childhood fare of milk and porridge, but the women look disconsolate—and Ted slips some spirit into his mug to get through the meal. And instead of a game of bridge, Conrad insists on a boardgame. But the foul weather soon intervenes, blowing smoke back down the chimney.
That night, the comforts are hardly any better: water leaks though the ceiling onto the bed the women must share, while Ted’s bed is cracked and uncomfortable. While Conrad and Dobson play a boardgame, the three other guests huddle together and make plans to head back onto town the next day. All three have colds, and announce (with delightfully cold-inflected text) that they’re off.
But Conrad picks up a book, dedicated: “To Conrad, from Mary Page, 1898”—and he seeks out his first love. She is now “Mrs Barchester-Bailey”, a conspicuously middle-aged woman with four boisterous children and a jealous husband, and ghastly soft furnishings.
So Conrad returns to London, seeking pleasure in the high life. At a table, he sniffs a bouquet: “And in the scent of the little white flower, Conrad is wept breathless across the years to a garden in Italy, when he was seventeen and madly in love with ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. Mrs Adaile…”. (Dissolves, for once, make the transition between past and present, titles and action. It’s a kind of softening of the film’s thus-far conventional language.) He recalls his last night there, and the flowers she gave him—and the solitary kiss of her feeling. The last transition, the slow dissolve between the lonely youth and the present-day adult, is gorgeous.
Conrad returns to Italy, to the same location, and sees Mrs Adaile—now say knitting in the sun. But she cannot remember him. So he offers her the same flowers, pressed carefully into his wallet, and finally she recalls. “Conrad, my friend, you’re in love with a memory and not with me.” But both are invested in the fantasy, both trying to be young through one another. Their last night in Italy. A kiss given, an appointment made for that night for a final farewell. Dobson is ushered out, Adaile is busy powdering her face. Conrad reads a book to pass the time, and this is how Adaile finds him: asleep in a chair, book on his lap. She immediately has second thoughts, so writes him a note and pins it to his chair. Half-crying, half-laughing, she leaves. The next morning, he finds the note: “Farewell! There is no road back to seventeen.” Conrad heads home.
Enter Rosalind Heath, the widowed Countess of Darlington (and former dancer), who is likewise listless with her life. She too now goes through old photos, finds old letters from friends. But a bad train connection intervenes. Rosalind is visiting Tattie and her tiny theatre troupe. Rosalind and Conrad meet outside the theatre, where news has come that the manage has absconded with their money. Conrad offers to help, by now feeling he’s older than he actually is—and highly protective of Tattie and (in particular) Rosalind. He falls for her and she for him. After refusing his money, Rosalind accepts his proposal—but insists he ask “Lady Darlington” first. Of course, she is Lady Darlington. He proposes a second time, and the pair find happiness. The End.
A subtle, sensitive film. I liked it without loving it. The first thing that comes to mind after seeing it is that I can think of few other silent films in which scent is so thematically important. Conrad sniffs the soap at home, sniffs the flowers that send him back to Italy; Rosalind too, sniffs the objects of her youth: the cards, the grease paint. Food and drink, too, are used to try and summon or recreate the past. It’s a film very sensitive to all these sensory aspects. Yet the language of the film is never quite as lyrical or inventive as the extrasensory elements might suggest. The camera scarcely moves—most of the travelling between places or times is done through cutting. But the few instances when dissolves are used make them all the more potent, and I would love to have seen more use of these devices.
And if the film isn’t in any sense “showy”, it is still lovely to look at: the print is (aside from a few momentary sections of decay) in very good condition and tinted to fine effect. The photography is clear, sharp, and William DeMille shows us everything we need to know in order to grasp what’s going on. Besides, the drama is character-driven and therefore performance-driven. The camera doesn’t need to spell out emotions when the performers do so much. (Though the intertitles also do quite a lot of work.) And the cast is uniformly excellent. The film isn’t afraid to show us or talk to us about age and ageing, about regret and loss, and the performers all have moments of vulnerability shared with the camera. There is real emotion at the edge of every scene, and if there is no great melodramatic outpouring then that is because the film isn’t interested in wallowing in sentiment. It’s about ordinary characters experiencing feelings everyone knows and shares.
Day 8: Summary
A curious pairing of films in which (to find a common theme) men go out in search of something they don’t feel they have at home. Grune’s film is a far richer cinematic world, and a far more potent one. It makes you feel uncomfortable from beginning to end. It’s a fantastic piece of expressionism, where everything is heightened and meaningful. If anything, I was glad to emerge into the daylight world of Conrad in Quest of His Youth. DeMille’s film is less stylistically rich, but offers a wholly different range of emotions. It’s a real world, populated by real people. (Albeit the lead pair are ultimately cocooned from too much trouble by their wealth.) It’s subtle, tender, gentle. But I kept waiting to be really moved, and never was. And isn’t it a problem that the relationship presented in the past (with Adaile) moved me more than the relationship pursued in the present (with Rosalind)?
Tomorrow, I will try and gather my thoughts on the online festival as a whole and post a round-up of Pordenone 2023. Right now, I must go and lie down again—and hope my dreams are not unduly infected by the nightmarish atmosphere of Die Straße…
Day 7 begins in 9.5mm and ends in 35mm. First a curated look at silent footage shot by members of the public up to the 1960s. Then to a truncated Czech print of a Mae Murray feature from the heart of the jazz age…
9½: Film in 9.5mm, 1923-1960s (Curated by Anna Briggs, Michele Manzolini, Mirco Santi)
The first film: an invitation to buy and use Pathé-Baby, to “immortalize our memories.” So here are other people’s memories. In living rooms. Smiling families film their own filmgoing experience at home. (Cigarettes are offered, films gathered. One wonders at the fire hazards of private use. The family munches chocolates. The light goes off.
The flicker of sprocket holes in the centre of the frame. A child hands from a beam. A balloon ascends from an amphitheatre, dropping pamphlets to the mostly empty stadium. Italian flags borne aloft. Red and yellow and blue and green balloons in colour. A man, in red, shoots a gun. He is suspended in the air, seen against a rocky cliff. A crowd watches. He crawls across the image. The camera ascends via a lift, through metal supports, into the sky above a city. We are on an aeroplane. We come to land (the image goes blank). Two children play with a model aeroplane. They climb a slope, send the plane soaring away—into a treetop. At home, a man plays with filmstock. A woman in a hat poses outside, looking steadfastly away from the camera. We have jumped continents. East Asia. Where next? A door is locked. A car drives away. We drive. Into the mountains. Dirt roads. A tractor. A hiker. Signposts flash past. We aboard a train, climbing. Heads poke out of the window. The view. a bridge. Below, huts. Where are we? In a cat again. Along treelined roads. We spy other cars. People. A fire. Cooking. A picnic in the hills. A repair on the road. Women stare at us. (Why aren’t we helping.) Winter is upon us. children. An ice palace. Icy skating, in weak colours, on slate-blue ice. Gently tinted images from home. Close-ups of long-lost relatives. Margaret and Vera, signposted. Mother and father, grandparents, aunts. A meal together, in—where? France? Close0ups inside. Close-ups outside. Skipping from country to country. Where are we? Other languages come and go. Children embrace. Parents show their children off to the camera. A woman paints a child. Another child, performing for the camera—an elaborate mime, gestures. Are we in Japan? The sea. A horizon. Waves. Cars aboard a ferry. Canoes. Rivers, boats, rivers along different continents, in different tints—rose, amber, turquoise. The seafront. Light. Days out. Beaches. A huge crowd beside the pool. A brass band. A jazz band. Couples in swimwear dance. A man films (he too is filmed). A woman dances on a doorstep. A street party. People in costume. Communities in the street. V.E. Day? A wedding in the 1920s. men swimming and rolling down a sandy bank. Glasses. Pathé’s logo silhouetted through the glass. Abstract visions. Cooking, heating, washing. Dumpling fry. Food is served. A clock. Time is passing. Tinned cherries. Stop-motion tins, toys. A gramophone turns. A fire is lit. fireworks. Faces at night. Blu yellow red green, the colours morph one into the next. The fire burns pink. The film ends. (Or does not end: we get a montage of all the films with full credits, dates, locations.)
Circe the Enchantress (1924; US; Robert Z. Leonard)
A vision of the ancient past (with Czech titles, to further mystify and enchant): here is Circe “the siren daughter of the sun”, the seducer and destroyer of men, who transformed them into pigs. Mae Murray, vamping delightfully amid a crowd of ancient men, then a crowd of jostling pigs.
Here she is in the modern world, Cecilie Brunner, who “takes as much as possible and gives as little as possible”. Around her, scoundrels, frauds, poseurs. Close-ups of the guests. Her two suitors: Bal Ballard, a stockbroker by day and lothario by night. Jeff Craig, a younger man who is madly in love with Cecilie. (Cecilie blows smoke into his face.) Madame du Selle quizzically looks at an empty space: Dr Van Martyn, a renowned surgeon and neighbour. Who is he? Cecilie laughs, dips a cherry in some champagne, and bites. Someone bets he won’t even show (Cecilie stops chewing on the cherry).
Dr Van Martyn (James Kirkwood) turns up. An older, vaguely fatherly type. Very different from the crowd within. One of Cecilie’s camp male friends stands gives the doctor a provocative wave. (The doctor gives him a stern, suspicious eye.) Indeed, he gives all the guests a faintly disgusted eye. Cecile breaks bread with the doctor. When she says that his ending up with the bigger half means she will bring bad luck into his life, he merely says that he isn’t superstitious.
“St Nicholas” arrives: a man laden with jewels, one of which he helps put on Cecilie’s ankle. Jealous rivals start a fight, so Cecilie leads them into the fountain to cool off. Cecilie wiggles her way provocative from the pool towards the disgusted doctor. Is there game too rough for him? “I know better than playing with Circe”, he says. But the one man she couldn’t seduce was Odysseus—isn’t that right? “A wise man”, the doctor replies.
Cecilie in her room, preparing to make men “dance to her music”. She prepares to dress up in her most provocative clothes, but the doctor has gone home (to pet his dog sadly before a photo of an unknown woman). She phones him anyway, to gently reprimand him for not saying goodnight. Is he afraid? “I don’t know about women like you”, he says. She is upset. She sits for a moment, looking vulnerable. She draws her legs up to her chest. She looks for a moment like a girl, afraid and alone. She goes to a draw. “Memories surface”. There is a hidden story here, a reason why she became the woman she was. We see into her diary. She once wanted to be a nun.
A flashback to the nunnery. Mae Murray with a pigtail, looking remarkably convincing as her younger self. But she is on the outside of the gates. A baker passes, sees her legs, pulses visibly with desire. He grabs her, she runs, he chases, forces her to kiss him. It’s a scene of primal assault. (One imagines that in the original, US, version of the film, this flashback led to more scenes of this nature: Cecilie’s history of exploitation and abuse at the hands of men.)
But “Circe drinks from the cup of oblivion”. Dissolve to the present: Cecilie dancing, drinking, smoking, as a black jazz band play madly rhythmic music. (“But Cecilie cannot forget.”) The camp friend—now half in drag, calling himself “the queen of the fairies”—starts the party dancing. They enact a parody of the film’s opening scene of ancient sailors and pigs. Cecilie dances, shimmies, struts, poses. (Cut to the doctor, reading a book before the fireside.) It’s an absurdly delightful sequence. (And Donald Sosin’s music is a scream.) But the memory of that last scene—the memory of a kind of violation of innocence—hands over it, over her, over us. The doctor steps outside to cast his eye over the noisy neighbours. A brief exchange of looks, but the party goes on.
Jeff forces Cecilie into another embrace. (And after the flashback, we cannot but see history wish to repeat itself.) She laughs off his demand for a kiss, for love, his threat of suicide. “Don’t be so melodramatic”, she says. She wishes life—the film itself—to remain a comedy, not a drama.
On the floor, men sit and shoot dice. The band stop playing to peer at the heap of money. “Bal” deliberately shows up the band by betting a thousand dollars—and winning. (The sax player, looking down at the paltry coins in his hand, goes away comically disgusted—but disgusted is how we begin to feel by the crowd of rich white men flaunting their money in the foreground. Cecilie joins the betting, wings a thousand, them loses two thousand to Ballard. She bets him ten thousand, rolls—loses, bets forty thousand. She drinks. (And Jeff takes out a gun, head pressed to the wall.) Cecilie strips off her jewellery. She looks utterly lost. She bets her house—and loses.
Ballard seizes his slimy chance: “You could have it all back—if you wanted to…” The unspoken words are horrible. The look on Cecilie’s face says it all. She drinks, then crushes the glass in her hand. It’s an astonishing moment. Blood falls down her hand, wrist, arm. The imagery returns us to a kind of primal violation, relived before the man who would violate her again. The doctor is called for.
Van Martyn attends. Cecilie tries not to cry as he examines and treats her hand. He bathes it, examines it. “Is there a woman in the house?” “Only Circe’s beasts.” “I only ask you because I’m afraid I’m going to hurt you.” “I’m used to it, you don’t have to worry at all.” (The close-ups of Murray are remarkable, for she is remarkable here. A kind of complexity, strength, and vulnerability all in one.) Jeff looks on jealously from across the room, but the editing gives Cecilie and the doctor their own space.
Cecilie smokes her way calmly through the surgery. But she is shaking by the time it’s over, and vulnerable again when the doctor places her arm in a sling. To spite his advice for rest, she drains a cocktail glass and launches herself into a dance with a young man. Jeff is furious and grabs her. Ballard reminds him that everything here now belongs to him. Including Cecilie, he implies. Jeff calls him depraved, Ballard punches him, Jeff shoots—and misses. The doctor disarms him, but the party ends in a fight and Cecilie flees into the garden. “If that man had been killed, you would have been morally responsible”, the doctor tells her in passing.
Chez Van Martyn, he looks at the photo of the woman on his desk. But Cecilie follows. “How is it my fault if people behave like that?” He claims she appeals to their basest instincts. “Women like you ruin everything they touch”, he says. It’s a cruel, nasty thing to say. And we see how cruel and how nasty it is on Cecilie’s face, how unjust and uncaring. “What do you and women like you know about love?” he asks. She glances up and away, as if to an unseen audience. She is about to reply, but there is clearly too much to say—and rushes away. “The word love on your lips profanes what is most sacred”, the doctor goes on, piling cruel words on top of cruel words. She runs back, desperate, and falls to her knees to kiss his hand. The doctor turns, and its his turn to look vulnerable. He takes a step towards her, and in so doing crushes the picture of the woman underfoot. He stops. Cecilie goes back inside. Ballard grabs her, accuses her of being in love with the doctor. She calls them all animals and rushes away.
The doctor cannot sleep. He trues “to chase away the image of the woman who has revealed her soul to him”. A vision of Cecilie in a garden, an absurd child panpiper in the background. Cecilie in slow-motion, draped in diaphanous gown, dancing below willow branches. (Can I forgive the film this scene? Perhaps.)
The next morning and Cecilie has left, asking for all her possessions to be sold. The doctor arrives to find that no-one knows where she has gone. Meanwhile, Cecilie “instinctively returns to the locations of her childhood”. We see her enter the convent, go to church, and try to pray away her love. Later, we see her surrounded by the faces of young girls. She is teaching them, and trying not to cry. When one of the girls runs away through the gate, Cecilie chases after her—and is hit by a car.
Paralysed, she awaits surgery. While the doctor plays fetch with his dog, the dog ends up finding Cecilie’s diary in his former neighbour’s garden. He reads of her former life with the nuns in New Orleans. There, the surgeon feels they must try to make her walk. They get her to her feet, but she falls. Van Martyn arrives. She sees him. “Come to me, my beloved”, he says—and she stumbles her way across the room into his arms. (I wanted the camera to track in towards them, but the shot is held in dreadful suspense.) Her footsteps here are a kind of inversion of her dancing earlier in the film, a solo number more akin to ballet. It’s a gentler, more vulnerable kind of dance that brings her into her lover’s embrace. “Am I dreaming—or am I really in your arms?” The End.
Day 7: Summary
A curious programme today. I enjoyed the first film, but so little of the 9.5mm footage came from the silent era that I felt a little short-changed. As much as I love and am fascinated by obscure silent footage, it’s the era itself that fascinates in conjunction with the fact of its silence. Couldn’t we have had a film either entirely devoted to the earliest 9.5mm footage, or else skipped 9½ entirely for a different silent feature? I can appreciate that at the live Pordenone, this little film might have made a nice shift in emphasis. But online, with a much more limited programme and schedule, I feel I would rather have substituted it for something else. But still, an interesting watch.
As for Circe the Enchantress, it’s beautifully photographed, wonderfully performed, and surprisingly moving. Yes, the last scenes teeter on the edge of absurdity. It needed a director like Borzage to make this “miracle” truly miraculous. (See my piece last year on The Lady(1925) for another “wronged woman” narrative that ends with a kind of leap of faith.) But even if Circe the Enchantress is no masterpiece, I was invested enough to be moved, and found myself swept up in it. Much of this is due to Mae Murray, who exudes emotion—and when her eyes catch the camera, just for an instant, we see her at her most vulnerable, her most intense, her most revelatory. It’s a performance to challenge anyone’s view that the “woman with the bee-stung lips” didn’t have great talent. And I must also praise Donald Sosin’s excellent piano score (with occasional jazz band additions), which likewise played a large part in grabbing me by the heart: the music was sympathetic, tuneful, playful, and romantic in all the right ways at all the right moments. A hugely enjoyable film.
The Realm of Silence 