Putting up statues to Charlie

This intriguing news report just turned up on a Kazakhstan news site:

A monument to Charlie Chaplin has appeared in Kostanai last week. As reported, it is the 12th in the world. The very fact of a sculpture to the cinematographe idol being installed in our city is quite weird for the town’s standards, especially taking into account that the only movie theatre in Kostanai was recently demolished. In any case, now we have Charlie and a bench near charlie. And as Farid writes in the local newspaper, “the bench is good enough to sleep on it — that’s practical, because we have as much vagabonds in town as in NYC in early 1900s”.

What intrigues me is where the other eleven statues are. I wasn’t able to find a helpful source for this, and so I set out to track them down for myself - though it all depends on how you define ’statue’. Anyway, I thoughout I’d share this information with you; certainly it’s pleasing to see how admiration for silent cinema’s most celebrated practitioner is marked worldwide in bronze. So to start with (left) we have the twelfth and most recent statue, that which has gone up in Kostanai.

Next, there’s the renowned statue of Chaplin in London’s Leicester Square. He is located in the heart of London’s movieland, with cinemas all about him, while his fellow statues in the Square are Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Hunter (a pioneer of surgery), and William Hogarth. The Chaplin statue is by John Doubleday, and was created in 1981.

On to Chaplin’s final home, Vevey in Switzerland. In the Square Chaplin, Quai Perdonnet is you’ll find the double of John Doubleday’s statue, showing the little tramp looking out over his favourite view of Lake Geneva and the Alps. It is said to be the subject of pilgrimage, and certainly there are plenty of blogs out there showing people photographed next to Chaplin, leaving flowers there, or even kissing the statue. It was erected in 1982, and is a copy of the Leicester Square statue.

Our next statue is in the seaside town of Waterville, Co. Kerry, Ireland. Waterville was a favourite holiday destination of the Chaplin family. The legend on a stone nearby reads, “For the man who made the movies speak in the hearts of millions. Charlie spent many years in our midst as a welcome and humble guest and friend to many. This image was created by sculptor Alan Ryan Hall. It was funded by the generosity of Josephine Chaplin and by the EU Leader Programme”. It was unveiled in 1998.

And on to Norway. In Oslo, near the Frognerpark, in front of the Coliseum cinema there is a bronze statue of Charlie Chaplin by the renowned Norwegian sculptor (well, renowned to Norwegians, anyway) Nils Aas, dated 1976. Frustratingly, I haven’t been able to track down an image of this in situ [see comments], but here at least is a studio copy. There doesn’t seem to have been any special association of Chaplin with Norway, unlike most of the other statues on view here.

Now let’s away to China, no less. This statue is located outside the ‘Old Film Cafe’. Duolan Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai. The personal connection is that Chaplin secretly honeymooned in Shanghai with Paulette Goddard in 1936. No information as to sculptor or date, but much like most of the statues on display here, you have to say it looks nothing like him. It’s so easy to capture the outline figure, so difficult to capture the man.

I’m not quite sure why there should be a statue on Charlie Chaplin in Venezuela, but there is. It is located in the city of Mérida, where it is to be found in the Plazoleta Charles Chaplin. No information that I can find as to artist or reason. So on to Disneyland Paris, where a statue of Charlie Chaplin welcomes visitors to the Production Courtyard, but I’ve not yet found a picture of this one.

And now we travel to Alassio in Italy. This sheltered spot on the Ligurian coast (the Italian Riviera) is another place where Chaplin often stayed on holiday. The legend on the base of the elongated and not terribly Chaplin-like statue simply reads ‘Charlot’. No information as yet on sculptor or date.

The statue on the left is located in Gabrovo, a small mountain town in Bulgaria. Gabrovo and Gabrovians are apparently the butt of Bulgarian national jokes, but they have responded ingeniously by creating a museum of humour and satire. So it is an appropriate location for a statue of Chaplin. The statue was created by Georgi Chapkanov, and is situated next to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. It also wins some marks for being a little different.

This sitting statue of Chaplin is to be found in the foyer to the Roosevelt Hotel, along Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles. It common with most of the statues, there is particular reason for its location. It was at the Roosevelt Hotel where Chaplin received his Academy Award for The Circus in 1929. Another favourite subject for a host of tourist photos.

Well, that makes eleven. Where’s the twelfth? I don’t think the twelve-foot statue of Kermit the Frog as Chaplin outside the Jim Henson Studios (the former Chaplin Studios) really counts. Nor do assorted figures of Chaplin outside restaurants. I think I’ll go with the statue of him outside the Hollywood Entertainment Museum in Los Angeles, which is pleasingly dynamic (pictured left). If anyone knows of any others, or has more information about those described, do say.

Georges Méliès, magicien du cinéma

www.cinematheque.fr

Why so much activity concerning Georges Méliès just now? First the (virtually) complete DVD box set of his work released by Flicker Alley, and now a major exhibition with lavish catalogue, screenings, DVDs etc from the Cinémathèque française. He’s neither one hundred years born nor one hundred years dead. In fact he’s seventy years dead, and that’s the point. Under European copyright law, 2008 is the year when the works of Georges Méliès, who died in 1938, come out of copyright, under the rule which says a creative work remains in copyright until seventy years after the death of the author.

So M. Méliès has become fair game - a fact which can be of no small amount of irritation to the Malthete-Méliès family which has so assiduously guarded his legacy until now. They had nothing to do with the acclaimed Flicker Alley set, but they have co-operated with the Cinémathèque française exhibition, which opens in Paris on 16 April and which is described in some detail (in French) on the Cinémathèque’s website.

Where to start? The exhibition itself is divided into three sections: Magie et cinématographe, Le Studio Méliès de Montreuil and L’univers fantastique de Méliès, covering his life, background, work and influence. Many artefacts not previously exhibited in public are promised, and Méliès is championed for the modern generation as the master of special effects and fantasy cinema, foreshadowing Georges Lucas and Steven Spielberg. A 360-page catalogue has been produced, edited by Jacques Malthete et Laurent Mannoni, with some 500 illustrations, which from reports I’ve had so far sounds like an outstanding production in itself.

There are two DVDs published to coincide with the exhibition. The first, Georges Méliès, produced by StudioCanal/Fechner Productions, is a two-disc set featuring thirty remastered Méliès films 1896-1912, with 32-page booklet but no indication of what film titles are included nor their source.

The second DVD is Méliès, le cinémagicien, another two-disc set, produced by Arte Vidéo. This features a documentary, La magie Méliès, by Jacques Mény (1997, 130 mins), a selection of fifteen of the films from 1898 to 1909 (55 mins in total) and the renowned Georges Franju film Le grand Méliès (1952, 37 mins) which is also available on the Flicker Alley set.

This documentary, which introduced many to his films for the first time, features Méliès’ son André, playing his father, and Méliès’ second wife and star of many of his films, Jehanne d’Alcy (then aged ninety).

And there’s more. There are screenings in April-May of Méliès films and in June-July of ‘L’héritage méliès’. A complete Méliès filmography is also promised, which will be a boon, particularly if it goes the whole hog and identifies the films by Star-Film catalogue number (his production company), length, English release title, which copies are extant and where. Meanwhile, Méliès, magicien du cinéma looks like a very good reason to visit Paris over the next few months (as though there weren’t reasons enough anyway, but you know what I mean).

Where to find out more about Georges Méliès? It’s a shame - indeed something of a mystery why there isn’t a single good site dedicated to him (interesting to see that www.melies.com, www.georgesmelies.com, www.georgesmelies.org and www.georgesmelies.fr have all been bought up opportunistically by domain sellers). Cinémathèque Méliès (in French) is a so-so effort of ancient design which I’ve had trouble accessing, but you can trace it back through the Wayback Machine. The Magical World of Georges Méliès likewise isn’t going to win any design awards, but it has a biography, filmography, and links to his films on YouTube. There’s a useful one page biography (written by David Robinson) on the Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema website. The Flicker Alley DVD set Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913) has already been championed here, and serious questions will have to be asked of any silent film enthusiast who hasn’t purchased a copy before the year is out.

As for reading matter, apart from the new catalogue (which is in French, of course), a really good book in English doesn’t exist. The best, albeit slim and not easy to track down nowadays, is David Robinson’s Georges Méliès: Father of Film Fantasy (1993). Elizabeth Ezra’s Georges Méliès (2000) is one for the film studies courses. A standard, substantial, up-to-date biography in English (I don’t know of one in French, either) ought to be written - we repeat so much that has already been written in the film history/film studies field, and yet we leave a yawning gap like this. So you will have to make do with Brian Selznick’s haunting children’s book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), already championed by The Bioscope, in which Georges Méliès features as a central character. And wait to see if Martin Scorsese really does decide to make a film out of it.

Where the wild things are

Percy Smith (left), from F.A. Talbot’s Moving Pictures: How They are Made and Worked (1912)

It’s been a long time in coming, but it’s been well worth the wait. Today saw the launch of WildFilmHistory, a site dedicated to recognising 100 years (so they say) of wildlife filmmaking. Produced by the Wildscreen Trust and supported by Lottery funding, this is a multimedia guide to one hundred years of natural history filmmaking, from the pioneering days when stop-motion films of flowers opening wowed them in the music halls to the age of Attenborough and beyond.

The site is biographical in focus, and at its centre are ninety-one (so far) mini-biographies of wildlife filmmakers, twenty-nine of them with accompanying oral history recordings, which very usefully come with PDF transcripts. So you get interviews with the likes of David Attenborough, Hans and Lotte Haas, Desmond Morris, Tony Soper and the late Gerald Thompson, but also the academic Derek Bousé, whose excellent history Wildlife Films investigates our period - more of which below. There’s also a very useful timeline.

But of greatest value for our purposes are the film clips of early wildlife films. There are thirteen of them (many from the British Film Institute collection):

• Das Boxende Känguruh (1895) - Max Skladanowsky’s film of a boxing kangaroo and its trainer Mr Delaware.
• Rough Sea at Dover (1895) - Something of a surprise choice, Birt Acres’ self-explanatory film which they argue is “considered by some to be the first natural history orientated film”.
• Pelicans at the Zoo (1898) - Pelicans at Regent’s Park Zoo, made by the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, a breathtakingly beautiful film if seen on 35mm (it was originally shot on 70mm), a little more prosiac in Flash.
• Spiders on a Web (1900) - A new one on me. This was apparently made by G.A. Smith and features two spiders in close-up, viewed through a circular mask (but no web to be seen). Clearly an extract from a longer film.
• St. Kilda, Its People and Birds (1908) - Made by Oliver Pike, this shows both human and animal life on St kilda, off Scotland, at a time when it was still inhabited by people.
• The Birth of a Flower (1910) - Exquisite stop-motion photography of flowers opening, complete with stencil colouring, made by the great Percy Smith for Charles Urban.
• The History of a Butterfly - A Romance of Insect Life (1910) - A fully-fledged natural history film, made by James Williamson, with a fair bit of nitrate damage to remind us of the precious state in which some of these films survive.
• The Strength and Agility of Insects (1911) - Eye-popping pyrotechnics performed by flies, who juggle corks, twirl matchsticks etc. This is actually a re-issue of an earlier film, The Balancing Bluebottle (1908), filmed by our hero of the era, Percy Smith, for Charles Urban once again. No animals was injured during the making of this film (honest).
• Secrets of Nature: The Sparrow-Hawk (1922) - One of the famous British Instructional Films series of educational films from the 1920s/30s, this was made by Captain C.W. R. Knight (the site’s synopsis mistakenly says in one place that Percy Smith made the film, though he was associated with many Secrets of Nature productions) (Captain Knight turns up twenty years later as the eagle-tamer in Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going, trivia fans).
• Secrets of Nature: The Cuckoo’s Secret (1922) - Another title from The Secrets of Nature, this time filmed by Oliver Pike and produced by ornithologist Edgar Chance
• With Cherry Kearton in the Jungle (1926) - Cherry Kearton was the most celebrated naturalist of the era, and with his brother Richard more or less pioneered the art of wildlife photography and then cinematography. This is a ‘greatest hits’ compilation of some of his African natural history films.
• Simba (1928) - An African travelogue (extracts only) made by the enterprising American couple Martin and Osa Johnson, blending actuality with staged scenes, and alarmingly also blending shooting with both camera and gun.
• Dassan: An Adventure in Search of Laughter Featuring Nature’s Greatest Little Comedians (1930) - Cherry Kearton anticipates The March of the Penguins by several decades.

And so it continues up to the present day, with many marvellous clips which both amaze and cause a sigh of happy nostalgia (Zoo Quest, Jacques Cousteau). A little oddly, the site includes pages for films that they haven’t tracked down yet - these include Oliver Pike’s In Birdland (1907), which they argue was the first true wildlife film (hence the centenary), but unfortunately no copy is known to exist.

This is a very well produced site, on which a huge amount of effort has been expended on clearing and producing the clips, esearching the history, and presenting the interviews. The early film clips are wonderful to see, even if I miss one or two titles that I think should have been there (e.g. Herbert Ponting’s fine penguin footage from his films of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition). The site opens up the history of wildlife film, demonstrating an interconnected heritage, championing excellence, and encouraging us all to find out more.

So, if you are interested in finding out more, where should you go? Well, as mentioned, I strongly recomennd Derek Bousé’s Wildlife Films (2000). This is a first-rate history of wildlife filmmaking and television production, good not only on the plain history but on the mysteries of the genre, which ever since its earliest days has had to adopt assorted entertainment strategies, particularly storytelling, to make its work palatable to a mass public. It is thoughtful and informative. Also recommended is the similarly thought-provoking Animals in Film (2002) by Jonathan Burt. There’s also the recent BBC publication, Michael Bright’s 100 Years of Wildlife (2007), which is aimed at the popular end of the market, but does at least name check people such as Kearton, Smith and Urban.

WildFilmHistory is a wonderful resource, which promises to grow and welcomes any information on new material that they might use. In the spirit of the great filmmakers it champions, go explore.

Emile Cohl

Emile Cohl

1895, the journal of l’Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma (AFRHC), has published a special issue on the work of Emile Cohl (1857-1938), the brilliant French graphic artist and pioneer of the animation film.

Cohl (born Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet) first established himself as a caricaturist, cartoonist and writer in the 1880s/90s. In 1908 he joined the Gaumont film company, originally as a writer. He soon graduated to directing comedy, chase and féerie (magical films in the style of Georges Méliès) films, but then moved to making animation films, a kind of film only just starting to be created, largely through the example in America of J. Stuart Blackton, whose Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Haunted Hotel (1907) opened up a whole new world of cinematic possibility.

Cohl worked with line drawings, cut-outs, puppets and other media. He also took the idea of animation one step further by cresting a character, Fantoche. His first animated film, the delightful stick figure Fantasmagorie (1908), is held to be the first fully animated film, employing 700 drawings on sheets of paper, each photographed separately. Cohl developed a distinctive personal style of animation, where a figure would metamorphose into some unexpected different image, taunting notions of reality and logical sequence.

Fantasmagorie

Cohl made over 250 films between 1908 and 1923, working for Gaumont, Éclair (including a spell in America), Pathé and others. Thirty-seven (some of uncertain attribution) survive in film archives, and Fantasmagorie is available on Lobster Films’ Saved from the Flames DVD. There is an elegantly designed website (in French), www.emilecohl.com. He is also the subject of an exceptional biography by Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (1990) which I warmly recommend, not only for being a thorough, readable and richly illustrated account of his life and works, but for all the context it provides for French cultural life, graphic art, and the early film industry.

The special issue of 1895 is in French, though on the 1895 website there are abstracts in English. A couple of the pieces are available to read in full (in French). There is a family history from Pierre Courtet-Cohl, an articles not just on his animated films but on his work in caricature, photography and cartoon strips.

A proper DVD anthology of Cohl’s work would be seem to be more than overdue. Beware of some films on YouTube credited to Cohl which are not his work - Fantasmagorie (alas, ripped from the DVD release) and Le Rêve D’un Garçon De Café (aka Le songe du garçon de café or The Hasher’s Delirium, available only as a brief extract) are his; The Automatic Moving Company (confused with Cohl’s Le Mobilie fidèle) and Le Ratelier are not.

The first wizard of cinema

Georges Méliès: The First Wizard of Cinema, from www.flickeralley.com

2008 is not four weeks old, and yet what will have to be the silent DVD release of the year has already been announced. It won’t become available before 3 March 2008, but that just gives you a month’s worth of delicious anticipation, awaiting Flicker Alley’s thirteen-hour, five-disc DVD release, Georges Méliès: The First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913).

The collection brings together over 170 films, comprising nearly all the surviving films of Georges Méliès (he made just over 500), from his first 1896 production Une partie de cartes (discovered by yours truly some twelve years ago - my very modest claim to early cinema fame), to his uproarious final film, Le voyage de la famille Bourrichon (1913). It includes such classics as Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), Les quatres cent farces du diable (Satan’s Merry Frolics) and A la conquète du pôle (The Conquest of the Pole). Fifteen of the films are reproduced from partial or complete hand-colored original prints, while thirteen are accompanied by the original English narrations meant to accompany the films, written by Méliès.

The collection has been put together by the pre-eminent preservationist-producers Eric Lange (of Lobster Films) and David Shepard, from archival and private holdings in eight countries. A major extra is the half-hour documentary, Le Grand Méliès (1953), made by Georges Franju, which features Georges Méliès’ widow and star of many of his films, Jehanne d’Alcy and André Méliès portraying his father.

Le voyage dans la lune

Georges Méliès (1861-1938), the pre-eminent artist of early cinema, a creator of ingenious fantasies coming out of his magicianship background, but which employ the cinema’s own entrancing trickery to the full. The sheer joy of filmmaking that his films express means that his best work does not date and continues to delight each generation that comes across him (just take a look at some of the admiring comments made of the many films of his to be found on YouTube). He is particularly deserving of the complete box set treatment, even if the majority of the films that he made are now lost (though more titles keep turning up). It is seventy years since his death, and presumably it is no accident that the DVDs are appearing this year, since under European law his films should be coming out of copyright in 2008 i.e. the rule that says copyright remains in a film production until seventy years after the death of the author. What the position is of the Méliès family, who have been so protective of his heritage up until now, I don’t know. Perhaps one of our knowledgeable readers might be able to say.

At any rate, warmest congratulations to Messrs. Lange and Shepard for a herculean piece of work, and to Flicker Alley for issuing such an ambitious release. It’s available at special pre-order price of $71.96 (do note that it will be Region 1 DVD). I’m off to pre-order mine.

(There will be more on Méliès on the Bioscope in a couple of months or so’s time, if I ever finish a small project I’m working on)

William Haggar’s phantom ride

William Haggar, from www.williamhaggar.co.uk

Talking, as we have been, about lost films, here’s an interesting piece from the South Wales Echo (we cast our investigative net widely here at the Bioscope) on a theatre show devised by performance group Good Cop Bad Cop:

Haggar remembered in ‘rough and ready’ show

WILLIAM Haggar was one of the first pioneers of cinema in a silent age where actors ‘spoke’ volumes with just a simple frown or smile.

A travelling entertainer from Essex, he settled in Wales and transformed live entertainment into the cultural industries of the early 20th Century.

Now his work is being resurrected by two-man company Good Cop Bad Cop, which has been commissioned by Chapter for three nights of experimental theatre.

In what has been described as a rough-and-ready production, John Rowley and Richard Morgan, who set up Good Cop Bad Cop in 1995, take to the stage for their performance of Phantom Ride.

Based on a series of lost silent footage, Phantom Ride aims to rejuvenate memories from a selected 32 of Haggar’s films in a creative leap of faith by the theatre group.

The two actors, who met when they worked with Welsh theatre company Brith Gof, have brought on board newcomer Louise Ritchie for the project.

The show will be performed purely through stand-up acting on a stage which has been stripped bare of scenery, props and bright lighting.

Each will give a brief synopsis of Haggar’s work and recount memories of those switched-on enough to have handed down thoughts about his films so that future generations could get an insight into a disappearing film era.

It will then be up to audiences to visualise the rest, albeit prompted by storytelling monologues and a background soundtrack.

John Rowley, co-artistic director of Good Cop Bad Cop, says they are still making changes to the production which is how the pair usually work best.

He said: “We are still working on it.

“Although the show is on Wednesday we’ll piece it together right up until Tuesday night.

“It’s rough and ready in a way. It’s not like going into the theatre seeing bright lights, scenery and costumes. It’s based on a series of lost films which do not exist any more.

“In the silent movie era after the people watched the film they didn’t care what happened to the footage which was combustible, so they went to powder.

“A lot of work has been done to restore them in different parts of the world but a lot have been lost. I think only eight exist at the moment and they are in fragments.”

During the 70-minute show the audience is expected to play its part by using imagination and imagery.

John added: “What we are interested in is the live raw experience of an audience member, and the relationship between the audience and the performer which is often kind of negative in traditional theatre.

“We will be using the same space as the audience as it’s not a built-up stage.

“It could be some of the audience end up standing next to the actor listening to them as if it was a personal conversation.

“That part of the audience is then turned into part of the performance.”

I like the idea of getting the audience to contribute to the imaginative recreation of a lost film. That sort of engagement with the audience is very much in the spirit of Haggar, who toured the fairgrounds with his films and knew that it was those who came to see the show that really made the films what they were. William Haggar is the great pioneer of Welsh cinema, responsible for such lively works as A Desperate Poaching Affray (1903) and The Life of Charles Peace (1905), and the subject of Peter Yorke’s recent biography. Yorke has also produced a website about Haggar and his book, at www.williamhaggar.co.uk.

Good Cop Bad Cop: Phantom Ride can be seen at Chapter, in Cardiff, Wednesday, January 23, to Friday, January 25, at 8pm. Further information from the Chapter website.

Bach releases DeMille

Cecil B. DeMille DVDs, from www.bachfilms.com

My thanks to Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien for the information that the French company Bach Films have released ten Cecil B. DeMille silents on DVD. The titles are:

The Cheat (1915) - with Sessue Hayakawa, Fannie Ward
Carmen (1915) - with Geraldine Farrar, Wallace Reid
Joan the Woman (1917) - Geraldine Farrar and Raymond Hatton
The Whispering Chorus (1918) - with Raymond Hatton and Kathlyn Williams
Old Wives for New (1918) - with Elliott Dexter and Florence Vidor
Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) - with Elliott Dexter and Gloria Swanson
Male and Female (1919) - with Thomas Meighan and Gloria Swanson
Why Change Your Wife (1920) - with Thomas Meighan and Gloria Swanson
The Affairs of Anatol (1921) - Gloria Swanson and Wallace Reid
Manslaughter (1922) - with Leatrice Joy and Thomas Meighan

All are retailing at 7.00€. All are Region 2, and appear to have French titles only. I can’t find any information about the music. At any rate, it’s a remarkable selection, with perhaps Joan the Woman, starring the opera singer Geraldine Farrar (who enjoyed a surprisingly successful career in silent films, given that her chief asset - her voice - was absent), the outstanding classic if you had to go for just one.

I’d not heard of Bach Films before now. Other silent DVDs on their list are D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1922), Broken Blossoms (1919), Intolerance (1916) and Sally of the Sawdust (1925), all of them accompanied by assorted Griffith Biograph shorts; Douglas Fairbanks in The Three Musketeers (1921), Robin Hood (1922), Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), The Black Pirate (1926) and The Iron Mask (1929); and Tod Browning’s Shadows (1922).

I don’t attempt to keep up with all silent film DVD releases here on The Bioscope, because there are other well-established sources that provide such a service very well. Check out the Silent Films on DVD section on Silent Era, or the impressively-extensive Silent Films on DVD site.

RIP Minoru Inuzuka

The last director to have made a silent film in the 1920s died last month. While Portugal’s Manoel De Oliveira, who made Douro, Faina Fluvial in 1931 is still with us (and still working), Japan’s Minoru Inuzuka directed his first silent feature in 1927, Sunae shibari: Dai-nihen, having previously contributed to the script of Kinugasa’s classic Kurutta ippêji (A Page of Madness) (1926). He was 106 years old.

Pordenone diary - day four

E.A. Dupont directing Das Alte Gesetz, from www.juedischesmuseum.de

Every Pordenone Silent Film Festival has the one outstanding title, a feature generally previously neglected or unknown, whose exhibition here revives its reputation and gets everyone talking. This year the palm d’or undoubtedly went to E.A. Dupont’s Das Alte Gesetz (1923). Ewald André Dupont has had a revival in reputation of late, owing to the visibility of his late British silents Moulin Rouge (1928) and especially Piccadilly (1929), and in the reference books he always gets a warm mention for Varieté (1925), one of the cast-iron classic silents, and a shake of the head in sorrow for the sharp dip in his career that occured with the arrival of sound.

Das Alte Gesetz has been more listed in filmographies than seen, but it is close to a masterpiece. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, it tells the tale of a young Jew, Baruch (Ernst Deutsch), who breaks away from his Orthodox village background and stern rabbi father to become an actor in Vienna. So it is reminiscent of The Jazz Singer in theme, but it is the technique and style that distinguish the film. Dupont knows how place people within the frame, how they move within that space, how to capture the tensions between people, how to film intensity. With the help of superb sets by Alfred Junge, he deftly contrasts the humble, ritualised Jewish life with the elegant, no less ritualised Viennese society, personnified by Henny Porten poignantly playing an archduchess attracted to Baruch. The portrait of theatrical life, from ramshackle touring theatre with its wobbly sets to the formalities of the Burgtheater are beautifully drawn, and Deutsch (excellent) ably persuades us of an adolescent enthusiasm for performance which gradually reveals real dramatic talent. It is the resolution of his new world with his past that forms the core of the film, and his stern father’s painful acceptance of his son’s new life is memorably drawn by Avrom Morewsky. Most touching is the scene where he apprehensively picks up a book of Shakespeare’s plays (we see Baruch in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet), which he tries to open back-to-front (i.e. as though a Jewish religous text) before reading it and discovering that the truths that his son understands are not so far from those that govern his life. The film looks superb (photography by Theodor Sparkuhl) and ought eventually to find a DVD release. It certainly merits screenings at other festivals.

Annie Bos, from www.stadstheater.nl

Das Alte Gesetz was heady stuff for 9.00am. It was followed by four titles featuring the great star of Dutch silent cinema, Annie Bos. No, I hadn’t heard of her either. She was popular through the teens in Holland, graduating from slight social comedies to melodramatic diva roles in imitation of the Italian actresses Lyda Borelli and Francesca Bertini. She started out in comedies about two naive Dutch girls, Mijntje and Trijntje. In Twee Zeeuwsche Meisjes in Zaanvoort (1913) we see a somewhat plump Annie as one of the duo who go to the seaside and… well, that’s about it, they go to the seaside, and they improvise some comedy, and passers-by in the background stare on in amusement. Boerenidylle (c.1914) is similarly unencumbered by narrative. Annie is courted by her farmhand boyfriend, nothing dramatic happens at all, and the scenery is beautiful. Full-on drama comes with the delirious De Wraak van het Visschersmeisje (The Revenge of the Fisherman’s Girl) (1914). Exploiting the availability of an exotic dancer who employed snakes in her act, this impressively ludicruous mini-drama has two characters savaged by a quite sizeable python, which brightened up the audience no end. The feature-length Toen ‘t Licht Verdween (1918) showed a slimmed-down Annie in full diva mode, as a woman whose growing blindness causes her the loss of her composer husband, while a hunchback organist who truly loves her tries to save her, only for her life to end in suicide.

We should turn to René Clair for some light relief, but alas in the 1920s he was still finding his way as a filmmaker, and Le Fantôme du Moulin Rouge (1925) was disappointingly conventional and ponderous. It tried to introduce fantasy elements - the hero is able to float disembodied through Paris, viewing events but unable to affect them - but it was uncertain whether to adopt a light or serious tone. Starewitch also seemed a little off-form with Liliya (1915), a curious attempt to illustrate the invasion of Belgium in 1914 with insects, and Dans les Griffes de l’Araignée (1920), a rather confusing drama involving spiders.

To round off the day, here’s a telling scene taken in the early morning, before the festival office had been opened, but with the wifi service switched on. From right to left, Dennis Doros of Milestone Films, Thomas Christensen, curator at the Danish Film Archive, and Minnie Hu, a student at the University of Washington and journalist for the Seattle China Times.

Pordenone diary - day three

Queue outside the Teatro Verdi

It was during the Pordenone festival that Peter Greenaway announced the death of cinema. He wasn’t at the festival himself, but rather in Korea at the Pusan International Film Festival, giving a masterclass, but his words went round the world, as words will these days. Now, the unfortunate demise of cinema is commonly reported - Pordenone stalwart Paolo Cherchi Usai has written a book on the subject - and still the corpse keeps dancing around on our many and various screens, but Greenaway had an interesting specific point to make:

Cinema’s death date was in 1983, when the remote control was introduced to the living room … Bill Viola is worth ten Martin Scorseses. Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that D.W. Griffith was making early last century … Every medium has to be redeveloped, otherwise we would still be looking at cave paintings … My desire to tell you stories is very strong but it’s difficult because I am looking for cinema that is non-narrative.

Well, aside from the irony that Scorcese wrote the foreword to Cherchi Usai’s book (which admittedly is on the preservation of cinema rather than the present and future reception of cinema), is he still making films like Griffith, and what have we been doing these past few years at Pordenone sitting through the entire works of Griffith, the arch-master of narrative cinema? And why aren’t the art works of Bill Viola on show at this silent film festival?

Pordenone serves both an academic-historical and a sentimental function. It displays the films of the first thirty years or so of cinema with full archival and scholarly rigour - intelligently selected titles presented as products of national, artistic or thematic output, with credits, sources, informative writing, all backed up with the best-available prints shown in the best-possible conditions. It also caters to the nostalgic, with conventional, albeit brilliantly played and usually improvised, music rich in themes from the early twentieth century, and an abiding fondness for the stars of that era. On day three (October 8th), for instance, we were treated to a visit from Jean Darling, one-time star of the ‘Our Gang’ shorts, and the day before we spoke on the phone to Hungarian actress and singer Márta Eggerth to thank her for the film of her that we had just seen. Some acknowledgment of modern silents is made at Pordenone, such as the ingenious pastiches of the Wisconsin Bioscope, but Bill Viola would look sadly out of place. This is a festival which looks back - to the roots of cinema, and to a lost past.

And, however scholarly, this is an audience that likes its stories. Non-fiction does begrudgingly receive its due at Pordenone, but many choose the opportunity of such screenings to visit the restaurants and cafés. Narrative cinema reigns supreme, and much of the academic enquiry seems in any case rooted in the ways in which silent cinema discovered how to tell a story. It’s a fundamental need. Martin Scorcese is still making films in the way D.W. Griffith made them, because the audience still wants to identify people, their personalities, their predicaments, and what happens to them under crisis. I suspect that he would be rather flattered by Peter Greenaway’s comparison of him with D.W. Griffith. But I also suspect that Greenaway would be dismayed by Pordenone’s faith in a cinema held in amber.

D.W. Griffith

But enough of such speculation - what of the immediate reality of sitting through another Griffith turkey, One Exciting Night (1922)? Word went round that this unfamiliar title was even worse than Dream Street, and at 136 mins it was going to be a grim ordeal. The film is a murder mystery set in an old dark house - a theme that is all too familiar now, but was fresh then. Griffith had tried to secure the rights to The Bat, a hugely popular play about a mysterious house with money hidden in it and many suspicious characters after it. Unable to afford the right, Griffith simply rewote the story himself (using the pseudonym Irene Sinclair). The plot concerns an inheritance, an orphan (Carol Dempster), bootleggers’ loot, and a host of characters in the obligatory multi-roomed house, one of whom is a murderer. Title cards warn us of the mysteries that are to follow and how we should not reveal the identity of the murderer to those who might want to see the film after us. However, the identity of the murderer is glaringly obvious from the start, the plot is incomprehensible, and the handling of it inept. Griffith simply could not apply the necessary techniques for the mystery genre, filming in a flat, obvious style, failing to bring any clarity to a complex, incoherent plot, and leaving the audience both bored and bewildered.

And yet, and yet… Three quarters of the way through the film changes. The plot becomes so incoherent, the rushing between rooms of the increasingly panicky characters so manic, that all narrative coherence disappears and a kind of insane magnificence takes over. It’s at this point that a hurricane is introduced into the proceedings. There’s nothing to announce it - it has just built up in the background, and suddenly the characters are all outside and at the mercy of the wild elements. The expensive hurricane sequence was added on as an afterthought (clearly hoping to recreate the excitement of the final scenes of Way Down East), and has been much criticised as an illogical irrelevance. But to me it seemed to have a mad logic to it, and the pianist John Sweeney (on top form throughout the festival) certainly responded with gusto. One Exciting Night is a bad film by any conventional standard, but the way in which it tries to hold up a narrative, gives up, then welcomes in chaos, might have found it some favour with Peter Greenaway after all. Even Carol Dempster is not that bad. What is dreadful is more eye-rolling blackface ‘comedy’ from Porter Strong, which critics at the time shamefully found among the film’s best features.

OK, so what else did we have on day three? More of Starewitch’s stop-motion animations, from his Russian period: Strekoza i Muravei (The Grasshopper and the Ant) (1911) and Veselye Stsenki iz Zhizni Zhivotnykh (Amusing Scenes from the Life of Insects) (1912); and from his French period: L’Épouvantail (1921) and Le Mariage de Babylas (1921). L’Épouvantail mixes live action (Starewitch himself as a yokel, plus his daughter Nina) with puppet animation in a very effective mixture of film trickery and slapstick, while Le Mariage de Babylas is a delightful tale of a spoiled wedding among a child’s toys, which shows Starewitch’s agreeable lack of sentimentality - he is the Roald Dahl of animators, showing meanness and mischievousness as well as wide-eyed wonder in his childhood tales.

The Teatro Verdi and the Posta café, Pordenone

The main place for conversations and future plans is the Posta café, immediately across the street from the Verdi, and here I spent some time discusing with others the ongoing Women and Film History International project, co-ordinated by Jane Gaines, which is investigating women film pioneers from the silent era worldwide, in an ambitious programme of investigation and publication. The aim is not only to bring some unfamiliar names to the fore, but to challenge received ideas about the creative filmmaking process. Hopefully some major screen retrospectives will follow as well, and that we keep up this process of continually reinvestigating film history.

Georges Méliès, from www.victorian-cinema.net

I kept ducking out of the German feature films to engage in such chats, alas, but it just isn’t possible to see everything and stay sane. I ducked out of Jean Darling and the ‘Our Gang’ shorts for reasons of taste, but it was back to the Verdi for four newly discovered Georges Méliès titles. How wonderful it is that new Méliès titles keep turning up, and that Pordenone always makes a special presentation of them. This year, the Filmoteca de Catalunya delighted us with Évocation Spirite (1899), La Pyramide de Triboulet (1899), L’Artiste et le Mannequin (1900) and especially Éruption Volcanique à la Martinique (1902), a spectactular recreation of the eruption of Mount Pelée and the destruction of St Pierre on 8 May 1902 with vivid hand-coloured explosions. It’s high time we had an up-to-date list of extant Georges Méliès films published.

I saw about fifteen minutes of the Soviet-Armenian comedy feature Shor I Shorshor (1926). Fascinating as its peasant comedy might have been, and intriguing as it was that such a picture of ‘backward’ rural lifestyles should be issued by a Soviet studio, I do object to being made witness to a comic routine which involved a live chicken being pulled apart by our two heroes. Animals overall had a hard time of it at the Giornate. I walked out.

The day for me was rounded off in happy style by René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort (1923-25), which I’d not seen before. It’s an odd film really - Paris is frozen by a mysterious ray, and only a few characters who were in a plane plus a man who lives at the top of the Eiffel Tower remain active because they were above the ray when it shot out. There is ample opportunity for satire, when the comic group discover that normal social rules no longer apply, but little is done with the concept. Instead it is the lightness of spirit which carries the film. It was surprising however to see such clunking continuity errors - several people could be seen walking around in the supposedly sleep-bound streets of Paris. Lastly we had a generally very funny Louis Feuillade comedy, Séraphin ou les Jambes Nués (1921), starring Georges Biscot. We cannot now of course make films about the social embarassment caused by someone losing his trousers, for today no one would blink an eye at Séraphin’s dilemma. Happily, we can still laugh at such films, because we understand the time and place. Imaginative sympathy - that’s what Pordenone audiences do best.