In the studio

The Ambrosio studio during the film of Cenerentola (1913), from www.youtube.com/user/inpenombra

There’s always some particularly fascinating about seeing films of films in production from the silent era. The business-like way a team has to go about creating fantasy, the sheer number of people who made up that team, the famous mingling with the functional. So here are some of the clips of silent films in production which you can find online. Above we have the Ambrosio studio, Turin, in 1913, with the director Eleuterio Rodolfi and actors Fernanda Negri Pouget, Mary Cleo Tarlarini and Ubaldo Stefani, during the filming of Cenerentola (Cinderella). The provenance is unclear, but the video comes from the Inpenombra YouTube channel, offshoot of the excellent In Penombra website, which features a number of clips of early Italian films.

Manning Haynes directing London Love at the Gaumont studios in 1926, from www.itnsource.com

Next up, the this Gaumont Graphic newsreel (which I can’t embed but which you can find on the ITN Source site) shows the filming of the 1926 British film London Love, directed by Manning Haynes at the Gaumont studios, Lime Grove, and starring Fay Compton, John Stuart and Fay Compton. The intriguing story behind this one is the newsreel was made on the occasion of a BBC radio broadcast about the film (the known as The Whirlpool), so we see not only film production but radio production too (including dance band). With thanks to Eve from bringing this one to my attention.

Henny Porten and Emil Jannings during the filming of Anna Boleyn, from www.britishpathe.com

Newsreel websites are a handy source for films of film production, though examples from the silent era are rare. From the British Pathe site, this fleeting clip (originally from the German newsreel Messter-Woche) shows Emil Jannings (Henry VIII) and Henny Porten (Anna) incongrously arriving on set in full costume by car for the filming of Anna Boleyn (1920). A second brief clip shows Ernst Lubitsch directing the film from a platform.

Charlie Chaplin in Zepped

All frames from Zepped in this post come from www.independent.co.uk

Last week there was much publicity about the discovery of an apparently lost Charlie Chaplin film. Morace Park, of Henham in Essex, purchased a nitrate film from eBay for the princely sum of £3.20 ($5), though he was more interested in the can. When he opened the can he found a reel of nitrate film bearing the title Charlie Chaplin in Zepped. Park could find no record of the film in any Chaplin filmography or biography. The film was a mixture of live action film of Chaplin and animation. Park’s neighbour just happened to be John Dwyer, a former member of the British Board of Film Classification, and together they began investigating the history of the film.

They have been thorough in their studies so far, and have determined that the film features unused footage from the Chaplin films The Tramp, His New Profession and A Jitney Elopement. The Independent newspaper, which carries the fullest account of the discovery (including several frame illustrations), describes the film thus:

The unearthed film, called Charlie Chaplin in Zepped, features footage of Zeppelins flying over England during the First World War, as well as some very early stop-motion animation, and unknown outtakes of Chaplin films from three Essanay pictures including The Tramp. These have all been cut together into a six-minute movie that Mr Park describes as “in support of the British First World War effort”. It begins with a logo from Keystone studios, which first signed Chaplin, and there follows a certification from the Egyptian censors dating the projection as being in December 1916. There are outtakes, longer shots and new angles from the films The Tramp, His New Profession and A Jitney Elopement.

The main, animated sequence of the film starts with Chaplin wishing that he could return to England from America and fight with the boys. He is taken on a flight through clouds before landing on a spire in England. The sequence also features a German sausage, from which pops the Kaiser. During the First World War there was some consternation that the actor did not join the war effort.

At first it seemed to those who thought they knew their Chaplin history, and the habits of film collectors, that this was some cobbled-together item by someone who had edited together Chaplin clips with a separate animation film of the 1914-18 period, Chaplin being a regular subject for animators at the time. But then evidence turned up that there had indeed been a film called Zepped, exhibited in Britain in 1916. In 2006 British film historian Mike Hammond had uncovered a reference to the film in a Manchester journal (probably Film Renter), as an article in a Russian online journal reveals (scroll down to note 43 and get an English translation through Babelfish).

So what is this peculiar hybrid? The six-minute film is a mixture of Keystone and Essanay titles, plus the animation. Chaplin left Keystone in 1914 to join Essanay, leavin the latter to join Mutual in 1916. Essanay is known to have tried to make the best out of its loss by issuing Triple Trouble (1918), a mish-mash of Chaplin outtakes, but Zepped contains Keystone and Essanay titles, suggesting a still more irregular arrangement. The existence of an Egyptian censors’ certificate only adds to the peculiarity of the whole affair. There seems to be a connection with the accusations made at the time that Chaplin was avoiding his military duty by residing in the United States, though clearly this was an unofficial film and Chaplin had nothing to do with its production.

Chaplin biographer Simon Louvish speculates (in the Independent article) that the film was compiled in Egypt, which was under British occupation at the time. However, no one was making animated films in Egypt in 1916. The access to the outtakes suggests an American source, yet the theme and reference to ‘Blighty’ in the title cards hints at a British source. The frames showing some of the animation (below) look like the crude semi-animated films that British artists like Lancelot Speed or Dudley Duxton were making at this time. The reference to ‘Made in Germany’ is a British allusion (there were protests at the import of German goods into Britain long before the War), and America was scarcely indulging in anti-German propaganda at this time. I’d point the finger at a British film distributor.

The film has been transferred to DVD, and Park and Dwyer have been showing it to assorted Chaplin experts. They have also started making a documentary film in America about their voyage of discovery, and you can follow their ‘Lost Film Project’ through Twitter and through a project blog. They seem to be making a good job not only of exploiting the discovery but of seeking to understand it. If it’s not quite ‘THE cinematic find of the last 100 years’ that the blog claims, it’s a real coup – not least for how it has left the experts baffled. We now await anxiously for the results of their researches.

Searching for Mary Murillo

Recently I was invited to speak at an event taking place Saturday 7 November at the BFI Southbank in London, on women and British silent cinema. There is increasing interest in the role of women in the early years of filmmaking (as demonstrated by Duke University’s Women Film Pioneers project), and as part of this trend the industrious Women and Silent British Cinema project has been investigating all traceable women filmmakers active in Britain in the silent era – including some rather obscure names, for whom little information survives. For my talk I offered to take on a scriptwriter about whom little was known, Mary Murillo, to demonstrate the research process and some of the online sources available. This blog post serves as part of my response.

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Mary Murillo does not turn up in any standard motion picture encyclopedia or reference book. Her name is absent from all of the histories of the silent film era that I have consulted (bar a film credit or two), yet she was a significant screenwriter in American film for ten years, then worked in British films for six or more years where her name brought prestige to three different film companies, before she moved to work in French films at the start of the talkies. The fact that she has almost disappeared from film history says a lot about the way in which women filmmakers have been allowed to slip out of early film history, and about the low status of scriptwriters generally. So, how do we go about recovering that history?

Type her name into Google
Type “mary murillo” into Google and you get 15,500 hits. Initially this seems the very opposite of obscurity, but one quickly discovers that the same film credit data has been lifted from one or two sources to be reproduced on numerous filmographic and DVD sales sites, and what is useful information about her is very thin on the ground (one also finds many sites which refer to paintings of the Virgin Mary by the Spanish artist Murillo).

So there’s Wikipedia, which does have a short entry for her – a one-paragraph biography, a filmography and a couple of links. The biography tells us that she was born in Britain, wrote for the Fox, Metro and Stoll studios (the latter in Britain), that most notably she wrote for Theda Bara and Norman Talmadge, and that she was Irish by nationality, though some sources have her as being Latina. This is useful – and correct, because unfortunately the major piece on Mary Murillo available online, ‘Mary Murillo, Early Anglo Latina Scenarist‘ by Antonio Ríos-Bustamante, makes the fatal assumption that her surname meant that she was of Latin American extraction, despite evidence that she was born in Bradford. The writer has uncovered some useful information, but having made a wrong turning at the start, goes off in totally the wrong direction. There are other errors, notably in the filmography, and one is better off with her credits on the Internet Movie Database – over fifty titles – yet one should never accept the IMDb as being accurate or complete, especially for the silent film era, when credits can be difficult to determine (particularly for scriptwriters). Certainly she made more films that are listed there.

Family history sources
For a proper grounding in biographical film research, it is essential to use family history sources. This is where some small investment is necessary, because apart from the volunteer-produced FreeBMD (births, marriages and deaths in the UK, roughly to 1900), the major sources – Ancestry, Findmypast.com etc. – require payment. Ancestry, however, is essential, offering not just births, marriages and deaths, but census records, shipping registers, military records, and much more. The Bioscope has produced a guide to using family history sources in film research, here. Mary Murillo is a problem, however, because it was an assumed name. Her real name was Mary O’Connor. She was of Irish parentage, which is a problem because there are few Irish family history resources online and most pre-1901 census records were destroyed in 1922 during the Civil War. However, Murillo / O’Connor was born in Bradford (explained below) in 1888, yet I can find no official birth record – the first indication of what seems to have been an unconventional childhood.

Mary De Murillo, bottom line of this insert from the ship’s register for the S.S. New York, sailing from Southampton 2 August 1909, from www.ancestry.com

Shipping records
These are essential. One of the great boons for biographical research recently has been the publication of shipping records, particularly between Britain and the USA before 1960, which give access to passenger registers, or manifests, which contain much biographical information, as well as certain dates. Ancestry has some, Findmypast provides Ancestors on Board using records from The National Archives, but best of all is Ellis Island, a free database with digitised documents of New York passenger records 1892-1924. From Ancestry’s shipping records we discover that Mary first went to American in 1908, under the name Mary de Murillo, where we learn her age (19), that she was Irish but living in England, that she was born in Bradford, that she was an actress, and that she was travelling with her step-sister, Isabel Daintry.

This seems a wonderful clue, though it has proven to be a bit of a dead-end. I’ve not been able to trace a family history for Daintry, who was an actress herself, appearing in a few films in the early 1910s, before fading from history, leaving just a photo (left) from the Billy Rose Theatre Collection in New York Library. One also discovers from the shipping record that Murillo does not give a family member as contact back in England, instead naming a Mrs Henderson of Eton Avenue, London as her friend. One her assumes that her parents were dead. We also learn that she was 5′ 4″ tall, with fair complexion, fair hair and brown eyes, and that she was in good health.

Databases
Why was she travelling to America? Well, she was calling herself an actress, and she was looking for work. Among the several handy databases that one can employ to find biographical information for those in the performing arts, a particularly useful one is the Internet Broadway Database, a free database of production credits for all stage performance’s on New York’s Broadway. And sure enough, there early in 1909 is Mary Murillo appearing alongside Isabel Daintry in the chorus of a musical, Havana. It was not a notable dramatic career – she has three further credits on the IBDB in 1912 and 1913, from which we may infer that she was on tour in stage productions during this period. As newspaper and theatre records reveal, she was a member of Annie Russell’s Old English Comedy Company, performing way down the cast list in plays such as She Stoops to Conquer and The Rivals. This correlates with shipping records, because we find she sailed again from Britain to New York in October 1912, this time on her own, revealed by the manifest for her departure (on Ancestors on Board) and for her arrival (on Ellis Island), with useful the information that her previous stay in the country had lasted for three-and-a-half years.

Census records
Normally census records are the bedrock of biographical research. You get a person’s age, place of birth, family members, occupation, place of residence, and incidental information that one can glean, such as social status. Unfortunately I have not been able to find Mary Murillo/O’Connor on any British or Irish census, though I have found family members (her sisters, but not her parents). However she does turn up in the 1910 New York census, where she is a lodger in Manhattan, given as born in England, profession stage actress, no other family member with her. Something to be wary of – the electronic versions of such data, in this case Ancestry, are based on transcriptions and often the names have been written down wrong – for the 1910 census, Ancestry has her name as Mary Minter. Later census records have not yet been made publicly available.

Newspapers
At some point in 1913 or 14, Mary Murillo sold a film scenario to the husband-and-wife production team of Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber. Her career as an actress had not taken off, and like many others before her she looked to the movie industry as a way out, though in her case it was through her pen. She clearly had talent, because within two years she was one of the leading film scenarists in the American film business, becoming chief scriptwriter at Fox in 1915. This rise to fame one can trace through the best source for any online research of this kind, the newspaper archives. There are so many of these, though few are free, so either you pay a subscription or you hope your local library subscribes. Major resources include Newspaper Archives.com (for American papers), the Times Digital Archive and Guardian Archive. Free resources include Australian Newspapers, New Zealand’s Papers Past and a private archive of American papers, Old Fulton NY Post Cards. Film publicity departments sent out supporting bumf worldwide, and you can find Mary Murillo’s name scattered all over the place, becase such was her prominence that her name was frequently mentioned as a leading feature – in ‘reviews’, advertisments and posters. The Bioscope has produced a guide to newspaper archives online, though it’s in need of some updating.

Advertisment for Her Double Life, from the Sandusky Star Journal, 28 September 1916, available from Newspaper Archives.com

Mary Murillo specialised in exotic melodrama, and wrote five scripts for Theda Bara, Hollywood’s archetypal vamp. The films were Gold and the Woman, The Eternal Sapho, East Lynne, Her Double Life and The Vixen. From an article in the New York Clipper, 1 May 1918 (found at Old Fulton’s NY Post Cards), entitled ‘The Scenario Writer’, we learn this:

Even as late as the year 1914, there were few companies who deemed the writer worthy of mention on the screen and as for proper financial reward, many an excellent five reeler brought the magnificent sum of seventy-five dollars. Slowly but surely, however, the big film producers have come to realize the importance of the scenario writer in the general scheme of things with the result that from being one of the most poorly paid individuals connected with the industry, the men and women who create the successful screen plays today, now receive monetary recompense of substantial proportions. Mary Murillo, for example, a scenario writer, who made over twenty-five thousand dollars last year, sold her first script for twenty-five dollars, four years ago. She is but one of many scenario authors, who unsung and ignored but a few years back, are now reaping similar big rewards in the scenario field.

Quite a leap from stage obscurity to $25K a year in just four years. Newspaper records also tell us that Murillo left Fox at the end of 1917 to go independent, working for Metro amongst others, before joining the staff of Norma Talmadge productions in 1919, where she scripted such titles as Her Only Way, The Forbidden City and The Heart of Wetona, plus others such as Smilin’ Through where her name does not turn upon official credits but where she seems to have been a script doctor – a role she performed many times, making her exact filmography a difficult subject on which to be precise.

She ended her American film career in 1922. Why this was one can only speculate. Perhaps she wanted new challenges, perhaps her penchant for high-flown romanticism was starting to be out of fashion, or perhaps it was related to a revealing report in the New York Times of 18 March 1923, where we learn of the seizure by a deputy sheriff of a five-storey at 338 West Eighty-Fifth Street leased by Miss Mary Murillo, “a scenario writer, now said to be in Hollywood”. She had defaulted on her payments. Among the goods seized were “tapestries alleged to be valuable, a mahogany grand piano, phonograph and a quantity of records, a lot of silver and a leopard skin”. Mary had been living the movie life, and how.

Contemporary movie guides
It’s worth remembering that there were reference guides produced from the early 1910s onwards that provide biographical information on those before and behind the camera in the film business. Often the personal information provided needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it’s always a handy starting point. Some of these are available on the Internet Archive: for example, Charles Donald Fox and Milton Silver’s Who’s Who on the Screen (1920), and the 1921 edition of William Allen Johnston’s Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual. The latter has an entry on Mary Murillo, which seems to be wholly accurate, as follows:

Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1921

Trade papers
There is plenty one can find about Mary Murillo from American newspaper sources, even if mostly of a superficial kind. Once she moved to Britain, the online sources dry up, because she gets little mention in the digitised British newspapers. She started writing for Stoll Film Productions, the major British studio of the early 1920s, resulting in five films: The White Slippers (1924), The Sins Ye Do (1924) and A Woman Redeemed (1927), plus two (possibly three) titles for other studios. Information on these is best found in film trade papers, such as the Bioscope and the Kinematograph Weekly, which do not exist online and need to be located at the BFI National Library, British Library Newspapers (which has produced a useful list of British and Irish cinema and film periodicals that it holds), or on microfilm sets at film research centres. There are no indexes to such resources – you just have to scroll through them and hope to strike lucky, though the BFI’s onsite database provides many references (these are missing from the online version of the database). One trade journal that does have a handy index is the American Moving Picture World, and it is from Annette M. D’Agostino’s invaluable Filmmakers in the Moving Picture World: An Index of Articles, 1907-27 that I found an article on Murillo from 16 March 1918 – though only after looking twice, because her name was indexed as Murrillo (remember never to trust indexes implicitly – always look laterally, and be prepared for mispellings etc). From that I got the photograph at the top of this post and some tantalising biographical information, including her schooling at a convent in Roehampton, near London. (By the way, the American journal Variety does publish indexes, for film titles and an obituaries index, only in printed form).

Ask people
Of course, asking people is a hugely important part of research. It’s always best to do a bit of research yourself rather than expect others to do all your work for you, but armed with some information you’ve been able to gather, turn to the experts. Having taken my research so far, I posted a query on the classic film forum Nitrateville, which is jam-packed full of knowledgeable people only too willing to help. It so happened that none knew anything about Mary Murillo directly, but one or two respondees came up with excellent leads. One used Google Books, which enables you to search through snippets of texts from books old and current and found a mention of her in a Belgian memoir – more of that below. Another looked in the Irish Times Digital Archive, a subscription site, and found that there seemed to be an article on her in 1980. I have access to the site at work (see here for a list of all full-text, word-searchable newspapers and journals available electronically at the British Library), and discovered that the article was a piece by Irish film historian Liam O’Leary on the director Herbert Brenon, with whom Murillo worked. O’Leary, as an aside, revealed the precious information that her real name was Mary O’Connor, and that she came from Tipperary.

Tipperary and Bradford? Something odd there, but the Liam O’Leary papers are held in the National Library of Ireland, where former cameraman and known walking encyclopedia of Irish film history, Robert Monks, has care of the papers. Bob looked up Liam’s card index for me and found reference to an article on her in the October 1917 issue of Irish Limelight, a short-lived film trade journal. Happily, the British Library has Irish Limelight. From this I learned that her family came from Ballybroughie – though there’s a problem there, as there is no such place as Ballybroughie, at least as far as I can find. Her early years were spent near Tipperary, though as she and her sisters (more of them in a minute) were born in Bradford the family clearly moved around a bit. She mentions her father (no name) but not her mother, boasts of her great muscial gifts when young, says that she chose the name Murillo because she was compared when young to a Murillo madonna painting, and describes how tough she found it finding work as an actress.

She also mentions the convents she went to – St Monica’s in Skipton, Yorkshire, and Convent of the Sacred Heart School in Roehampton. This is now Woldingham School and the archivist there told me that Mary O’Connor (born 22 January 1888) and her sisters Philomena and Margaret were at Roehampton for a year (1903-04) before deciding that its tough regime was not for them. The parents’ (parent?) address is given as Thomas Cook c/o Ludgate. He, or they, were overseas (the travel agents Thomas Cook’s main offices were in Ludgate Circus, London). In the 1901 census Philomena, Margaret and another sister Winifred (but not Mary) are given as boarding at St Monica’s, aged respectively 4, 3 and 7. What were the first two doing in a boarding school at that age? Were the absent parents touring performers, or involved in international (Empire?) business, or just plain neglectful?

Mary Murillo turns up in a couple of British newspapers in the late 1920s when he name was used by two film companies issuing prospectuses in the hope of investment. In The Times, 29 November 1927, the British Lion Corporation (with backing from the author Edgar Wallace) announced that its grand plans included “a contract with Miss Mary Murillo, whereby she is to write two complete Film scenarios for the Company during the year 1928″. It also makes the surpise claim that she wrote the script for The Magician by Rex Ingram (Irish himself, of course), something not otherwise recoded in any source. She also turns up in the prospectus the Blattner Picture Corporation (found in The Daily Mirror 21 May 1928, available from pay site ukpressonline) where it declares that “the company will from its inception will have expert technical assistance, and in particular Miss Mary Murillo (formerly Scenarist for the Metro-Goldwyn Corporation, Messrs Famous-Players Lasky, Mr D.W. Griffith, Miss Norma Talmadge &c.) will write Scenarios for this Company’s first year’s programme”.

This is useful, though only a couple of films seem to have come out of her association with British Lion, and none with Blattner. She made some films in France, apparently working on English versions of French releases, though she is credited for the script of the 1930 classic Accusée, levez-vous!. Her last film credit is as a co-writer of the British film, My Old Dutch, in 1934. Then what? Well, the Belgian source I mentioned was Les Méconnus de Londres (2006), the memoirs of Tinou Dutry-Soinne, widow of the Secretary to the Belgian Parliamentary Office in London, which cared for Belgian exiles during World War II. She met Mary Murillo in London at that time, and provides a sketch of a lively, interesting character with a fascinating history in film behind her who was keen to help Belgian exiles. An email to the obliging people at the Belgian embassy in London got me Mme Dutry’s address, and she wrote me a most friendly and detailed letter with all the information she could find on her social contacts with Mary Murillo up 10 October 1941, the last time she saw her. Murillo wanted to do what she could to help the Belgian cause (she seems to have spent some time in Belgium before the war), but suddenly disappeared from the scene.

Archives
And then what? I don’t know. She just vanishes. She appears not to have married nor to have had children. I have found no death record, though admittedly Mary O’Connor is not an easy name to research. But for the film researcher the biographical information, though a necessary backbone, is not the main business. She was a scriptwriter, and we want to find film her surviving scripts, and surviving films. Firstly we need reliable film credits. I’ve said that IMDb is a good start, but always double-check with at least two other sources. The filmography at the end of this post comes from a combination of the IMDb, references in newspapers, the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries: Motion Pictures 1912-1939 (available in PDF form from the Internet Archive), the American Film Institute Catalog (for which the records for silent films are accessible to all), Denis Gifford’s British Film Catalogue 1895-1985 and the BFI database. There are some uncertain titles in the filmography – as said, she seems to have tidied up others’ scripts at times, or to have developed scripts which were then completed by other hands, so determining what is her work outright is not easy.

There is no register of all extant film scripts, and one has to search in multiple places. I found two Murillo shooting scripts in the indexes of the BFI National Library in London (The Sins Ye Do, A Woman Redeemed). The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a Motion Picture Scripts Database, from which I found nine scripts, held by UCLA and AMPAS itself: Ambition, The Bitter Truth, The Little Gypsy, Love’s Law, The New York Peacock, A Parisian Romance, Sister against Sister, Two Little Imps and The Vixen (the poster, right, for her 1917 film Tangled Lives, comes from the Margaret Herrick Library site). Some of these scripts are also held in the Twentieth Century-Fox archives, as Antonio Ríos-Bustamante discovered. WorldCat, the union catalogue of world libraries, lists two scripts available on the microfilm set What women wrote: scenarios, 1912-1929. All in all, a remarkable fourteen Murillo scripts survive, a gratifyingly high number.

Finding what films exist in archives (as opposed to the DVD store – I think only two of Murillo’s films are available this way – The Forbidden City, from Grapevine and Accusée levez vous! from Pathé – but Silent Films on DVD is the place to check) is not easy. Again, no central register exists, and not all film archives publish catalogues of their holdings, let alone online catalogues. A list of world film archives is provided by the Federation of International Film Archives. A useful first source for checking whether a film survives and where (chiefly American titles, though) is the Silent Era website, which continues on its way to becoming the single-stop essential source for information on silent films. Otherwise, you just to check a lot of catalogues and ask in a lot of places (once again specialist fora such as Nitrateville or the Association of Motion Picture Archivists (AMIA) discussion list are home to many experts, archivists and collectors). The filmography at the end of this post lists the dozen Murillo films known to survive.

Round-up, and a few tips
This post documents some of the avenues down which I’ve travelled trying to uncover information on one obscure film scriptwriter from the silent era. It’s not a typical research enquiry, but then what such enquiry ever is? It should show that you start out with some basic sources and some key questions to ask, but then will find yourself led down all sorts of unexpected avenues, because people are unexpected.

And why research someone so obscure? You have to ask? Is there any nobler activity out there than to recover a life? Certainly it is always excellent when anyone recovers a corner of history that has been lost or ignored, however small it may seem. It’s a contribution to knowledge, and telling us something that we didn’t know before is a whole lot better way to spend your time as a researcher than re-telling that which we already know. So go out and do likewise – and then tell the world about it. Meanwhile, I’ve much more to try and find out somehow about Mary Murillo. What was her connection with D.W. Griffith? What films did she write for Nazimova? Who were her parents? Do any other photographs of her exist? When did she die? The quest goes on.

A few tips. Never trust any source on its own – always verify the information in two or three other places. Remember that people tell lies about themselves. Official documents such as birth certiifcates, census forms and shipping registers tell us much, but they can also mislead (sometimes deliberately – people lie about ages etc.) and the electronic databases suffer from mistranscriptions. Always think laterally. Remember when searching for female subjects that names change on marriage, and of course with Mary Murillo we have someone who lived under an assumed name. Don’t expect to find everything online, and don’t expect to find everything immediately, and be prepared to spend a little money for valuable resources that have taken a lot of money and effort to compile. Use the Bioscope Library for standard reference sources of the period, its FAQs page for tips on searching, and the categorised links on the right-hand column as a guide to the online world of silent film.

And have fun.

Filmography
This post is long enough as it is, so the Mary Murillo filmography can be downloaded here as a PDF of an Excel file. It includes script and print sources.

The Battle of the Ancre

The Battle of the Ancre, from www.iwm.org.uk

You will recall, I’m sure, that last year the Imperial War Museum in London undertook a digital restoration of the 1916 documentary The Battle of the Somme, the DVD release of which we reviewed here in detail. The Battle of the Somme was the first of three high profile feature-length documentaries that the British War Office propagandists produced during the First World War, before they changed strategy and turned much of their filmmaking energies towards producing a newsreel. The two films were The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks (1917) and The German Defeat and the Battle of Arras (1917), and while neither could match the seismic social impact of the first film, they remain eloquent testimonies of the conflict.

There is a chance to see The Battle of the Ancre this weekend at the Imperial War Museum, as they start to give it much the same treatment as they did to the Somme film. The DVD release of The Battle of the Somme was distinguished by its twin scores, one of which recreated the original score from contemporary musical suggestions for the film’s exhibition. The same musician, Stephen Horne, is doing the same with The Battle of the Ancre. The ‘new’ score is the result of months of research by Horne and Dr Toby Haggith of the IWM, the reconstituted score is to be played by Stephen this Saturday (7 October) for the first time since the war, which makes the screening a truly special one. The film carries on the story from the first film, as it were, covering the Somme campaign as it dragged on into the winter of 1916. Its major selling point was the tank, the first time audiences had had sight of this startling new weapon. The film also memorably documents the ordeal faced by troops in the sea of mud that was the Western Front that autumn and winter.

The screening takes place 14:00 at the IWM London Cinema – all the details are on the IWM site.

While were on the subject, you might like to take a peek at IWM Film and Video Sales, an online footage sales service from the IWM, still in test mode. The site offers you the chance to view for free some 150 hours of content (a lot of it from the First World War), to download such content for private viewing or commercial scene selection (a charged service), or to look up the details of over 35,000 films. The Bioscope will be producing a review of this major new service very soon.

Pordenone diary 2009 – day eight

And so we come to day eight and the final day of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, Saturday 10 October. As before, the report comes from our anonymous correspondent, who was loyally on call for the entire festival. Here’s how things came to a close …

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It’s the final day already … how did that happen? The mixed feelings are intensified, the dread of going back to reality, and more of those goodbyes to the dispersing clan, against a sense of relief that there isn’t a Day 9, and we can catch up on much-needed sleep. It’s the end of a holiday, with all that entails.

The films. First up is a programme of early cinema, starting with 15 minutes of short films and fragments from Italy’s pioneer Italo Pacchioni, a good mix of actualities and home-produced comedies, the highlight being the funeral procession of Giuseppe Verdi, in 1901. Then some classics from the US; The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (USA 1906), a truncated The “Teddy” Bears (USA 1907), lacking the violent ending, both by Edwin S. Porter for Edison; Bronco Billy’s Christmas Dinner (USA 1911), a brief tale of Yuletide redemption, featuring an exceptional sequence of an out-of-control stagecoach tearing down a dusty track, partly from the POV of the roof luggage. After this came The Aerial Wire (USA 1914), an episode from The Perils of Pauline, which fulfilled its brief as a serial episode, full of action and not giving the audience enough time to analyse the unlikeliness of the plot; and a decided change of pace, Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of The Lusitania (USA 1918), the first time I had seen this masterpiece in its entirety. Naturally the film is propagandist, but it still retains the power to affect … and the animation is astonishing.

Mathilde Nielsen in The Master of the House, from www.dvdbeaver.com

Ignorance display time; the next film up is Dreyer’s The Master of the House / Du Skal Aere Din Hustru (Denmark 1925) which, not having seen or having read about I had ignored as a potential DVD buy, as some Dreyer had left me cold on the small screen. Despite the Ibsenish title (and the catalogue notes that gave no clues as to what to expect) it’s a marital comedy, albeit with a fairly relentlessly miserable first reel, establishing the main character as being an appallingly selfish husband and father, before he is brought to realisation and redemption by the combined might of his mother-in-law and in particular his elderly family nurse. In the latter role, Mathilde Nielsen gives the most stunning, pitch-perfect performance as the iron-willed but wise retainer who teaches her now-middle-aged former charge one last life lesson. Utterly believable, highly affecting, and drily amusing. For me one of the highlights of the week … the Dreyer comedy, alongside the Soviet comedy. And that’s why we come, we learn so much; mainly about the dangers of preconceptions and received wisdoms.

And so to the last batch of Sherlockiana; starting with Unos Banke E Fuxe (Czechoslovakia 1923), intended I think as a sort of farce/spoof featuring an utterly ineffectual detective named Sherlock Holmes II; the film is stolen by the future Anny Ondra; she is the object of an elopement-gone-wrong which mutates into the kidnapping of her banker father. Someone I know uses the phrase ‘historically interesting’ as a euphemism in cases like these; films that you should see, but don’t actually work as films … it was photographed well enough; the camerawork was by a young Otto Heller, the DP on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom nearly forty years later … perhaps the Czech sense of humour doesn’t travel. So ‘historically interesting’ it is.

There followed two newsreel items, of Arthur Conan Doyle in person; en famille in 1922, and solo, and with sound, from 1928 but released later. Whatever you feel about his obsession with spiritualism, the main subject of the interview, he comes across as a really warm, avuncular human being.

And suitably, to round off this excellent thread, The Final Problem from The Last Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (GB 1923) – the Reichenbach Falls story, here relocated to Cheddar Gorge, scenically and dramatically filmed; suitably, Guenther Buchwald and Donald Sosin used the theme music from the Jeremy Brett-starring ‘85 TV version as their starting point – this story would not be filmed again in the decades between Eille Norwood and Jeremy Brett. A fitting climax; this is a worried Holmes, feeling Moriarty’s presence everywhere and with a pervading sense of doom. It does also demonstrate Norwood’s not-always-explored acting range … he’s an underrated actor, more than just a personification of Paget’s illustrations.

Die Gezeichneten (Denmark 1922) is another Dreyer-directed film, but very different to this morning’s fun; this is a tale of anti-semitism and the political background to early 20thC pogroms in Russia; even now this film has the power to shock; still violent, still powerful, and bravura filmmaking.

And so to the final gala, with newly-abbreviated formalities, prizes having been awarded at an earlier separate ceremony – the Prix Jean Mitry shared between Mlles Méliès and Linder, for their continuing work in keeping their family heritages alive for all of us. So, we thanked again the sponsors, the city of Pordenone and the region, all of whom support and subsidise our continuing obsession, and those that make the whole festival work, the support staff behind the scenes that we rarely even see, let alone get to know. And onwards; Alice’s Wild West Show (USA 1924) one of Disney’s series combining fantasy animation with Our Gang-style live action antics … good fun, 85 years on, and shown to commemorate the passing of its star, Virginia Davis, this year.

Fun being the operative word with the main course, the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain’s silent film show Ukelescope, not a show designed to be taken too seriously, but as an entertainment; a mixture of songs, tunes, and spoken word illustrating films not otherwise seen by the general public now; advertisements, scientific films, instructional films, cinemagazine articles and assorted shorts. Unchanged since I saw it in the UK, I think the show would have benefitted from both an Italian translator, and a louder vocal mix; so much is verbal, so much was lost to many. However, the audience responded well to both the musicianship and the films; a huge ovation at the end. Highlight possibly the marriage between Old London Street Scenes (GB 1903) with the music hall song ‘In the Old Town Tonight’, terrific footage with a moving song. That and Will Evans The Musical Eccentric (GB 1899) performing to GrandMaster Flash & Melle Mel’s classic White Lines (as performed on ukeleles, naturally).

And so there we were, at 10.45pm in the cool Italian night air, ignoring the scrum for free local wines in the theatre mezzanine (and one last programme of early short films that looked familiar on paper) so we retreated to the bar for the post-mortem, the catching ups, the leavetakings, the expression of personal thanks to the staff we do know for all their efforts. I can’t work out quite how that took 6½ hours, but I ended up reaching my bed precisely 2 hours before my alarm call. Pordenone, motto ‘Sleep Is For Wimps’. See you all next year if we’re spared.

Post- festival reflections; apart from ‘I’m getting too old for this’ that is? It was, as it always seems to be, a superbly run and well curated festival, if perhaps not a classic year; there was a feeling abroad early on that some of the films, particularly from the Albatros thread, were overlong and underwhelming, but I think things definitely improved in the second half of the week; that the Canon Revisited thread had definitely been a success, and particularly welcomed by the large numbers of younger silent film enthusiasts, who had not had the chance to see them on the big screen, if at all; that the Sherlock Holmes and others thread had been very good indeed, and that the occasionally-maligned Stoll productions had stood up very well indeed; that the musicians had played out of their skins all week; that the recognition of the work being done by and for the British Silent Film Festival was overdue – but very welcome. And finally, although it is a very large festival by silent festival standards, it is also one of the friendliest; old hands do go out of their way to accommodate and welcome the new hands into what may seem to be a clique; the staff at the Festival and all the local bars and restaurants do their utmost to break down language and comprehension barriers, and go out of their way to be helpful. I cannot recommend it more highly.

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Well said, and thank you Mysterious X for such a sterling effort. Those of us who should have been there now feel as though we had. See you there in reality next year.

Report on day one
Report on day two
Report on day three
Report on day four
Report on day five
Report on day six
Report on day seven

Metropolis in Berlin

Metropolis, from www.spiegel.de

The restored, now almost full-length Metropolis – with a long-lost missing half-hour added thanks to a 16mm copy discovered in Argentina in 2008 – is to be premiered at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival on 12 February 2010.

As was reported here at the time, after the film’s disappointing reception following its premiere in January 1927, it was cut by producers Ufa. Some 950 metres were removed; almost a quarter of its original length. The film at its original length of 4189 metres was only seen for a short while (until May 1927 in Berlin); thereafter a cut version of around 113 mins was all that could be seen.

Following a convoluted history, a 16mm print of the uncut film (the original 35mm is lost) found its way into the vaults of the Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires, in 1992, where it lay unconsidered until film archivist Paula Félix-Didier found it. She alerted the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung in Germany, which has produced the most recent restoration of the film (in 2001). At which point the sensational discovery was announced to the world.

Scene from the previously missing section of Metropolis, showing Maria fleeing

The restoration and reconstruction have been handled by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, and after the festival screenings demand will be loud to have the film shown worldwide. As the Berlinale press release reports:

Restoration and re-screening are being funded by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Gemeinnützige Kulturfonds Frankfurt Rhine-Main, by the Verwertungsgesellschaft für Nutzungsrechte an Filmwerken mbH, as well as the DEFA Foundation. Transit Film GmbH (Munich) will be in charge of internationally distributing this most recent reconstructed version of Metropolis.

The film is to receive a dual premiere. There will be a gala presentation in the Friedrichstadtpalast with a re-editing of the original score by Gottfried Huppertz played by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under the direction of conductor Frank Strobel. Parallel to this, the film be premiered on the same day in the Alte Oper in Frankfurt am Mai, when the music will be performed by the Staatsorchester Braunschweig under the direction of Helmut Imig.

Want to read more? Here are some handy links:

• Berlin International Film Festival press release
• The Bioscope’s original report on the discovery
• The Bioscope’s in-depth account of the discovery, with illustrations from the ‘lost’ section
• The Bioscope’s report on a 9.5mm copy that turned up recently (not believed to have any missing footage)
• Der Spiegel report on the restoration and premiere (with photo gallery)
• Article by film historian David Kleingers, ‘Rediscovering Uptopia: Lost Scenes Restore Lang’s Original Vision of “Metropolis”‘

Pordenone diary 2009 – day seven

We’re back at Pordenone for the report on day six of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, as recounted by our eagle-eyed correspondent, the Mysterious X (known as X to his friends, Mysterious to his mum). It’s Friday 9 October, and it’s another early morning start.

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9.00am and the latest from a multi-year project to restore and re-evaluate the silent work of director Hans Steinhof; at Pordenone and other festivals I have all of these, and I have to say, with the possible exception of Alleycat, this newly (and not quite completely) restored film, The Three Kings/Ein Madel und Drei Clowns (GB/Germany 1928) is the most successful and satisfying work. This was one of Steinhof’s Anglo-German co-productions, and was released in three distinct versions, British, German and French; this restoration, as each surviving element was missing footage, is a compilation of all three most resembling the German edition, although each version is being restored. This is a tale of three brothers, whose clown act is a star attraction in The Tower Circus in Blackpool. The film (this German version at least, apparently not the British cut) starts with a stunning aerial shot of Blackpool and never lets up; slickly paced, well cast, with Henry Edwards, Warren William, John Hamilton as the three very different brothers and Clifford MacLaglen and Evelyn Holt as the lion-tamer and his ex, who will impact on the brothers; and with wonderful location footage of Blackpool at play – though the studio work was filmed in Germany. The climax of the film is a circus fire – in a sequence as yet incompletely tinted – and possibly incorrectly in places – in which the film’s writer, Henry Edwards, is visibly doing his own stunts; his sleeved arm heavily ablaze at one point. Altogether an engaging film, and very entertaining; hopefully this long-forgotten ensemble-cast film will become better known through repeated screenings. A double-bill with the 1990’s Blackpool-set Funny Bones would be very interesting …

Le Chasseur de Chez Maxim’s, from the Pordenone catalogue

Next, another comedy from Albatros starring Nicolas Rimsky; Le Chasseur de Chez Maxim’s (France 1927), a story filmed many times over the years, is a true French farce; the owner of a French stately pile works nights as the doorman-cum-fixer at Maxim’s, a gambling and dancing club for the Parisian elite – until the inevitable happens and his two worlds collide. In many ways this could have been a classic; many fine situations worked to great effect, in particular a hunt sequence worthy of Jacques Tati; but too many, too much, making the film way too long at 2h 10m. Had the makers removed a couple of extraneous sequences we would have finished with a greater film. But Rimsky was superb … we just needed a smaller dose.

After lunch, more from the Sherlock strand, starting with one of the Bonzo cartoon series, Detective Bonzo and The Black Hand Gang (GB 1925) in which Our Hero foils an anarchist gang plotting to kidnap a top jockey before Derby Day. One of the best of the 26 Bonzos, it perhaps needed a bit more than the 20fps for full impact … but always nice to see a Bonzo on the big screen. Next was an episode of a series new to me, Inscrutable Drew, Investigator; The Moon Diamond (GB 1926) from Fu Manchu director A.E. Coleby. A fairly standard plot regarding the seemingly impossible theft of a jewel, it was not one of the action-packed items we had been treated to here … it was somewhat stodgily paced, and the direction wasn’t sparkling either. There followed one of his Fu Manchu episodes, The Knocking on the Door (GB 1923) which did indeed rattle with pace and thrills, if you overlook the casual racism that inhabits all of the Fu Manchu tales. The catalogue notes, by the thread’s curator Jay Weissberg, put forward the idea that Coleby was at his best when free to indulge in the sensational elements of serial film-making; on the evidence of these two episodes, I wouldn’t disagree. There followed La Mano Accusatrice (Italy 1913) a thriller that wasn’t doing it for me; but you have to bear in mind that at the tail-end of the week the cumulative effect of lack of sleep is increasing – it might be great with a fresh pair of eyes.

Either way, out I went for 30 minutes of caffeine and sun to clear my head for the second Shaw film of the week, a newly-struck print of the previously (until the British Silent Film Festival in June) neglected adaptation of an equally neglected H.G. Wells novel, The Wheels of Chance (GB 1922). Filmed, as is seemingly usual with Shaw, largely on location with strong emphasis on pictorialism. Wheels of Chance is a comedy with a plot borrowed from a melodrama, with George K. Arthur, back from Shaw’s Kipps, as a draper’s assistant on a cycling tour foiling the machinations of a foreign-named cad – Bechamel – trying to elope, also by bicycle, with a naive suburban girl thereby trapping her into compromising situations in Home Counties pub/hotels, while her mother and her entourage set off in pursuit. Charming but never cloying, the happy ending here is not the unlikely riding off into the sunset – socially impossible in those times – but a recognition by all parties of the lessons learned; she is less naive, and she and her elders have learned respect for their ’social inferior’; he gains self-respect, and has had his horizons broadened just a little bit. The print seemed just a bit on the dark side, but not so dark as to spoil the effect of the photography; it’s a well-made film, with its heart in the right place, and those evocative shots of 1920s Surrey and Hampshire, with the perfect soundtrack provided by Shaw enthusiast and expert Phil Carli. I feel the need for a location tour … a day by car, perhaps a long weekend by bicycle …

Final film of the day for me was L’Ile Enchantée (France 1926), a somewhat strange film combining two seemingly unrelated film cliches; a Corsican bandit engaged in a family vendetta, while defending his family castle from destruction for a hydro-electric project for the local steelworks. The image of the Valentinoesquely-garbed bandit – educated and with full medical training, incidentally – waving his ancient percussion-cap shotgun around 1920s Bessemer ovens was distinctly odd – if beautifully lit and shot. Just to complicate matters, our bandit hero falls for the (female) steelworks manager, around the time he saves the life of the pursuing local police chief’s daughter, through a medical intervention. All heightened stuff, then, stunningly shot in the Corsican hills and the aforementioned steelworks – in Normandy. Tosh, but quality tosh, and helped immensely by the feature film debut of Pordenone masterclass aspirant pianist Cyrus Gabrysch. The word, from them that know these things, is that he could be a bit special. He certainly impressed at this film.

J’Accuse

Then came the anti-war leviathan that is Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (France 1919) freshly restored to approaching its full original length – 3 1/4 hours at the 16fps requested by the festival. I made my excuses, as I will be seeing Stephen Horne, who performed here, playing to it at one of the UK outings in November – The Watershed, Bristol, or The Barbican or BFI Southbank in London, when I will hopefully be in a better state to fully appreciate it – though it will be screened at 18fps there. The speed as ever the source of great debate here; at the J’Accuse Collegium session it was revealed that the Nederlands Filmmuseum recommended 18fps to all the venues, but Pordenone felt differently; the consensus of those who saw it this night was that the speed looked about right, and that it was felt that the projection speed may have been increased towards the end – an overall speed of 17fps, some felt; I’ll reserve my own judgement until I’ve seen it in the UK at 18fps.

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Ah, run ‘em all at 24fps and you’ll be able to pack in another house. Anyway, our next diary post will be our last report from this year’s Pordenone silent film festival, with early films, Sherlockiana, Dreyer, ukeleles and some final thoughts.

Report on day one
Report on day two
Report on day three
Report on day four
Report on day five
Report on day six
Report on day eight

Urbanora’s modern silents

I’ve been undertaking a reorganisation of my YouTube acount. I’ve not uploaded any videos of my own as yet, but I gather together favourites, and I’ve started to organise these into groups, or playlists – curating YouTube, if you will. One of these playlists is on the modern silent film, and you may have already noticed on the right-hand column that listd among ‘other Bioscope sites’ is now Urbanora’s modern silents. This brings together all the examples of modern silent films that I’ve mentioned or featured on the Bioscope (where they are available on YouTube, that is), including mashups and the like which take original silents and play with them by cutting them to modern music, and so on. You can still follow what the Bioscope has said about the genre of the modern silent by clicking on the category Modern Silents, but the YouTube playlist gathers all the clips together in one place. I hope it’s useful – and do suggest new examples. I’ll be adding to it on a regular basis from now on.

There are some videos there that I’ve not yet written about. One that’s new is the engaging Fine Dining, made by Dean Mermell, descibed as “A homeless waif stumbles upon a parallel hobo universe, an exagerated world that mirrors our own, with surrealistic accuracy” and shot on 35mm in colour with hand-cranked camera. For other examples of Dean Mermell’s creative and stylishly visual silent films, see the engaging romantic fantasy Modern Life (“a contemporary silent film that tells the story of a young couple whose now is slipping away, and some peculiar things that happen each night while they sleep”) and the playfully Expressionist Violin (“The town sweeper has a secret life, a new talent, and a very strange lover”), or visit his Storyfarm site, where he has the Storyfarm Silent Theatre.

Pordenone diary 2009 – day six

We’re on the day six of the 2009 Pordenone silent film festival, with our intrepid reporter The Mysterious X once again turning his feverishly scribbled notes into a finely-honed account for our delight and posterity’s great benefit. So here goes with Thursday 8 October’s offerings:

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Thursday already … and Pordenone regulars know what to expect – a gloomy feeling, as the end of the Giornate is in sight, and the nagging idea that we all have to return to the real world soon … and for those who could only make it for half a week, and opted for the first half, those goodbyes, perhaps for another year, have started. But put those thoughts to the back of the mind, and plough on …

And the potentially long day starts with Justice d’Abord (France 1921) from the Ermolieff Studio, before it became Albatros; and at last a chance to see the great Ivan Mozhukhin, their greatest star; he plays an implacable State Prosecutor tackling an espionage ring, only to find that his artists model girlfriend may be involved – and has to prosecute her. Can a Russian ending be far away? The print seems slightly abridged, or missing some footage, but it is still a very watchable film, if not up to the later great Mozhukhin-starring classics. Immediately we see why Mozhukhin was so successful … he elevates another melodramatic plot into something greater; you cannot take your eyes off him on the screen. I do feel the Albatros thread has been weakened by the lack of the great Mozhukhin vehicles; not programmed because his films were shown a few years back, in a Mozhukhin tribute at Sacile (where the Pordenone festival was located for a number of years. Ed.). Understandable, but even one would have been nice; I would travel a long way to see Kean again.

This was followed by Nocturne (France 1927) , another Albatros, a short film made at the same time and with the same leads as Carmen, apparently at the crew’s hotel. Beautifully shot, and beautifully acted one-act tragedy, but even so a bit langourous after the previous film; it did also feature some very subtle piano work from Touve Ratovondrahety.

More Sherlocks; starting with The Sleuth (USA 1925) , a solo outing for Stan Laurel, one of his film spoofs made for Joe Rock. Here, as a detective who struggles with those interlinked nails puzzles, he infiltrates a household to solve a crime; as the maid. I think you can see where that is heading …

A Scandal in Bohemia (GB 1921), I think is the best Elvey/Norwood episode I’ve yet seen, helped by the tale, of a less-than-great success, with Holmes revealed as being less than perfect; and here, he is beaten for once, by the beautiful and engaging Irene Adair, renamed from the stories where she was Irene Adler. Too Germanic for 1921 Britain? Told very wittily, and with a lightness of touch Elvey is not always credited with.

Der Gestreifte Domino (Germany 1915) was well plotted, with a mix-up at a post office resulting in detective Stuart Webb stumbling on a conspiracy … but once more, the film moves at a very leisurely pace compared to the British series.

‘Chief’ Kentani in The Rose of Rhodesia

After lunch, the much-anticipated The Rose of Rhodesia (South Africa 1918) the recently restored Harold Shaw feature set in Rhodesia but filmed on location in South Africa. I’m delighted to say it stands up to all the hopes; the attitudes of the characters are notably liberal for the day, the characterisation of the native roles and their relationships with the white settlers is shown to be that of mutual respect, by and large; the intertitles don’t always reflect this, but as the print was for a German-language release they don’t necessarily entirely match the originals. The photography is superb – astonishing considering what must have been trying conditions; the acting, particularly that of Edna Flugrath, Mrs Shaw, subtle, and, as we have come to expect from Shaw’s films, the use of locations is spectacular. One flaw is the plot, pretty throwaway, and come the climax it is pretty much thrown away; again the caveat is that the existing print is the equivalent of two reels shorter than the version seen at its premiere, so some exposition may well be lost, if not an entire subplot. (See the Bioscope’s review of the film here, with link to a streamed copy of the film).

On Strike (USA 1920) is a delightful Mutt and Jeff cartoon, wherein our heroes see producer Budd Fisher’s regal lifestyle in a (live action) newsreel; they threaten to strike for better terms, their bluff is called, and they’re sacked. But Hey, how hard can this animation lark be? Mutt and Jeff set up their own animation studio – the basics of the process shown – and the end result of their efforts is another Mutt and Jeff….but drawn and plotted as if by a ten year old … very neatly done, the cartoon within the cartoon. The end product goes down badly with the preview audience, so they creep back to Fisher and the status quo restored.

L’Heureuse Mort (France 1924); a French farce on the subject of celebrity death; a once-respected but now-struggling playwright is swept overboard from a friend’s yacht; by the time he makes it back to land and civilisation he finds himself being mourned; the newspaper obituaries falling over each other in their race to elevate him to the pantheon of French literature; he arrives home to see his own memorial service, and to reveal his survival to his mourning wife. Not keen on seeing himself relegated to hack playwright again, he hatches a plot with his ‘widow’, to arrive and live as his own Senegal-based brother, while producing fresh works to be ‘discovered posthumously’ in the home. Until his real brother arrives … Nicolas Rimsky, as the author and his brother puts in a top performance delineating both men with subtle differences … very neat, and very funny, and still topical on the celebrity front.

After the special Harold Shaw Collegium, which discussed both his work and career, and the case of Rose of Rhodesia in particular, but which annoyingly clashed with a Holmes programme including a 1912 French version of The Musgrave Ritual, I fell into a particularly good dinner and conversation; so skipped Der Furst von Pappenheim (Germany 1927), a gender-based comedy, and subsequently didn’t feel up to Gunnar Hedes Saga (Sweden 1923), a Mauritz Stiller-directed adaptation of the novel by Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlof. By all accounts, by those who made it, one of the highlights of the week, but given a start time of approaching 11.00 pm. Hopefully I’ll get a second chance one day … Pordenone can have its frustrations.

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Now I can remember A Scandal in Bohemia from a long time back, when I noted it as being something rather exceptional. It’s good to have that memory confirmed as a sound one. Next up, day seven where we will visit the Tower Circus in Blackpool, Maxim’s in Paris, the hills of Corsica, and the Home Counties of England – by bicycle.

Report on day one
Report on day two
Report on day three
Report on day four
Report on day five
Report on day seven
Report on day eight

Pordenone diary 2009 – day five

We continue with the daily reports from the Pordenone silent film festival supplied by The Mysterious X (which I have decided is a suitable name for our determinedly anonymous reporter), having reached Wednesday 7 October. And it was a day that started off with what undoubtedly would have been your editor’s highlight of the week, had he only been there. Alas, alas.

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Firstly, may I add my apologies to John Sweeney, and indeed Donald Sosin, for misattributing the piano work on Monday … I did double-check at the time, and than forgot to write it down … fatal.

It’s an early start for fans of the crime thriller, but well worth it … because the very first film was the utterly splendid A Canine Sherlock Holmes (UK 1912) preserved and presented by the Nederlands Filmmuseum; around 3/4 parody, yet also partly in the tradition of Rescued By Rover, our hero here is a fairly nondescript-looking terrier, rejoicing under the name of Spot (in the catalogue named as Spot The Urbanora Dog, which raises hopes that there be more films starring the little chap … Mr Editor?) (Alas no, but the world’s archivists must go and hunt for some as a matter of urgency. Ed.). He has an aristocratic detective owner, but there is no mistaking who is decidedly the brains of the outfit; I really want to describe the detecting, the trailing of the thieves and the ruse employed by Spot to gain entry to the hideout, but this is a film you will want to see without too much in the way of pre-formed ideas … so let me say that Spot is the most accomplished canine actor I’ve seen since Eddie in Frasier …

Urbanora poster for A Canine Sherlock Holmes, from the Giornate del Cinema Muto catalogue

The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu episode today was The Clue of The Pigtail (UK 1923) which rattled along efficiently and featured a decent stunt; a three or four-storey dive into a Thames dock somewhere off ‘Chinatown’ … cue re-use of Stoll’s Chinatown sets, interiors and exteriors, from The Sign of Four. The ersatz Holmes adventure, William Voss, Der Milliondieb (Germany 1916) was interesting, with a good plot about automata, impersonation and fraud, but exceedingly leisurely pacing within the film – langourous shots, loose editing – all but wrecked any pleasure. It may be unfair to compare films made seven years apart in this era, but after the Stoll serial, this did drag.

From Albatros, or rather their predecessor company Ermolieff, came Le Quinzieme Prelude De Chopin (France 1922) a film with a lot to interest outside of a pretty melodramatic plot, though that was handled well by Tourjansky, who made it seem just about believable … the film invests the Chopin piece of the title with near-magical powers to both calm but yet also bring people out of depressions … equally beloved by the cuckolded father of the family in the film, and the disabled young man next door. The playing for the film by Mauro Colombis was simply superb, borrowing heavily from Chopin as you would expect. The more unexpected treats within the film, early on before the family unit collapses, are extended sequences of home cinema evenings, with (well-faked) Chaplin comedies being projected by a hand-cranked Pathe (possibly 28mm?), later inspiring some creditable Chaplin impersonations, improvised by the young boy of the house.

My first Collegium session of the week was on the subject of colour restoration techniques, hosted by Haghefilm; I’m not any sort of technician so some of this went over my head, but it is heartening that work continues to be done to try and improve both digital and traditional restoration techniques; and that there may be mileage in combining Desmet toning with traditional dye tinting … which means there would be no need to use the potentially dangerous chemicals used in traditional toning, and yet could give more subtle, and closer to the original, effects than Desmet tinting and toning which can seem overcoloured. I think I’ve got that right … hopefully someone will inform me if I’ve got that wrong.

Back into the Verdi for the programme of short British films with the theme of sound and music; some experimental sound on disc films, some just about music. Based heavily on the programme curated by Tony Fletcher for the British Silent Film Festival at the Barbican in London this June, it included some real gems … the highlights being the combining of anthropoplogical film with cylinder recordings both made on the same expedition to the Torres Strait peoples in 1898 (left); a short actuality of children dancing what seemed to be a clog morris to a street barrel-organ; Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terris in a series of song and dance showcases; a proto-bouncing-ball film for The Tincan Fusiliers, and my personal favourite, a circa-1911 Hepwix Vivaphone – a film made to accompany a pre-existing disc – Are We Downhearted? No! a song that would be reworked in the trenches of WW1 but here in its original form, performed (well, mimed to) by a cast of Hepworth stalwarts with real verve and energy.

I ducked Rotaie (Italy 1929) from the Canon thread; needless to say everyone who saw it rated it very highly … but returned for La Dame Masquée (France 1924), from Albatros – described in the catalogue notes as misogynistic, I read it slightly differently; to me, only the heroine had any redeeming features; all the men were venal, cheats, blackmailers or whatever, the Aunt figure no better; the Uncle weak and vacillating until stirred into action in the final reel of what had by then become a superior episode of Dr Fu Manchu … but it held the attention, and the freshly-arrived Neil Brand probably improved the experience no end.

After dinner a special event; a performance of Betty Olivero’s score, for a quintet, for Der Golem (Germany 1920) conducted by Guenter Buchwald; it employs a string quartet plus clarinets to evoke both the medieval ghetto and the palace seen onscreen; a klezmer palette for the ghetto, courtly dances for the palace … beautifully played, and the players richly deserved the sustained applause. It’s a very strange film though, and despite repeated viewings I can’t help but think that, though within it there are a series of iconic and influential images, it doesn’t quite succeed as an entity … too uneven in tone? Maybe it’s just me.

The last film of the day was a city symphony film, Etudes Sur Paris (France 1928) by André Sauvage, which I declined for a quick couple of glasses and a relatively early night …

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And so we bid farewell to day five of the Giornate del Cinema Muto. Stay tuned for what will unquestionably be day six, coming up soon.

<a hrefReport on day one
Report on day two
Report on day three
Report on day four
Report on day six
Report on day seven
Report on day eight