The Rose of Rhodesia

Chief Kentani (left) and Prince Yumi in The Rose of Rhodesia, from Screening the Past

A while ago we wrote a piece on the peripatetic American film director Harold Shaw, who – in between periods in America, Britain and Russia – for a short period (1916-1919) produced films in South Africa. Shaw made three films in the country – De Voortrekkers, The Rose of Rhodesia and Thoroughbreds All (a fourth, Symbol of Sacrifice, was started by Shaw but completed by other hands). The first was an Afrikaner nationalist epic of the Battle of Blood River; the third (a lost film) was a racing horse comedy.

The Rose of Rhodesia (1918) has been attracting a lot of interest lately, following its happy rediscovery by the Nederlands Filmmuseum. The process of critical rediscovery has led to a special issue of the always commendable Australian online journal Screening the Past dedicated to the film. There are pieces by the two foremost experts in filmmaking in Africa at this period, Neil Parsons and James Burns, which provide rich detail on the background to the film’s production and personalities, Parson concentrating on the production history and Burns on Bioscope audiences in South Africa at the time (Bioscope was – and I believe remains – the common name for a cinema in South Africa). There are other essays on its racial politics, political and literary perspectives and position in cinema history, and a rich selection of background materials including reproductions of original press notices and advertisements.

Prince Yumi (Mofti), Edna Flugrath (Rose Randall) and M.A. Wetherell (Jack Morel), exchanging a white rose

But what it is particularly notable is that Screening the Past is delivering the entire restored film itself (streaming only), courtesy of the Filmmuseum. 81 minutes long, with German intertitles (an English translation is supplied) and inventive soundtrack by Matti Bye, the film is a revelation. What commentary the film had received before its rediscovery (chiefly Thelma Gutsche’s 1972 great history The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa 1895-1940) dismissed it as an amateurish failure which was roundly dismissed by local audiences. It is hard to match the recorded disappointment of South African audiences with the remarkable, engrossing film we see now (which is some 20 minutes shorter than the film as originally produced) which more than merits the attention given it by Screening the Past. Indeed, as Shaw had fallen out bitterly with Isidore Schlesinger, film producer and owner of practically all of the South African distribution and exhibition business, one suspects that the film’s reception was sabotaged.

The story concerns, at least initially, the theft of a diamond from a Rhodesian mining concern. The diamond is called ‘the rose of Rhodesia’, but Shaw develop this into a deeper metaphor, as Rose is the name of a gold prospector’s daughter (played by Edna Flugrath, Harold Shaw’s wife), who falls in love with Fred Winter, the overseer who has stolen the diamond, before transferring her affections to a missionary’s son, Jack Morel, played by M.A. Wetherell. Jack is friendly with Mofti, son of the chieftan Ushakapilla, and a white rose is exchanged as a symbol of their friendship. Ushakapilla is planning an uprising against white rule, and expects his reluctant son to adopt the cause, but after Mofti’s accidental death and news that his people’s ancestral lands has been granted to them by the “great white Chief”, Ushakapilla relents. Rose retuns the diamond to the mining corporation (it had been found by one of Ushakapilla’s men), and the reward money enables she and Jack to marry.

Prince Yumi, as Mofti

The Rose of Rhodesia is distinguished in particular by its portrayal of Africans. The African parts were taken by members of the M’fengu people, with Ushakapilla played by ‘Chief’ Kentani (probably a local headman) and Mofti by ‘Prince’ Yumi (possibly a migrant worker or student). The portrayals are sympathetic and convincing, and the friendship between Mofti and Jack Morel affecting and unforced. The theme of African discontent over loss of lands reflects genuine feelings of the time, and the potential for uprising was one that greatly exercised white authorities at the time (to the degree that the film could never have been made in Rhodesia itself, where the authorities greatly feared cinema’s subversive potential, and was instead filmed at Sea Point studio in Cape Town and by the spectacular Bawa Falls in Eastern Cape – none of the film was made in Rhodesia). It may be felt that the films shies away from what seems to be its initial interest – to depict African versus white tensions – by playing it safe with a story of diamond stealing. Interestingly this was even commented upon at the time by the British trade paper The Kinematograph Weekly:

At the start the impression is given that there is to be strong drama founded on a conflict between the interests of the natives and those of imperialism. But, in reality, the “native question” does not develop. The producers have carefully avoided the danger of giving offence to either partisan side … [and] have left a story rather devoid of “punch”.

But viewing the film now one is struck by how readily the diamond plot is set to one side, and how inter-racial relations become the film’s real interest. Local sensibilities undoubtedly stayed Shaw’s hand, but the theme of the importance of mutual trust and respect demanded of black and white is not diluted at all. Such a progressive view of Africans would not appear again in South African cinema for many years thereafter.

The Rose of Rhodesia was written and directed by Harold Shaw for Harold Shaw Film Productions. It was photographed by the American Ernest G. Palmer and Briton Henry Howse (like Shaw a much-travelled figure whose career included filming for the Salvation Army and in the Arctic). It was first shown on 23 March 1918 in Cape Town, and in Britain on 28 October 1919. It is unclear how widely it may have been seen in Britain (it gained some trade press coverage, reproduced in Screening the Past), while it it a mystery how a print turned up with German titles as no record has been found of its exhibition in any German-speaking territory. Its story is a fascinating one, while its quality as a film is unexpected and most welcome. I warmly recommend seeing the film, and engrossing yourselves in its history.

The Rose of Rhodesia is a late addition to the programme at this year’s Pordenone silent film festival.

From old Ireland

While sojourning in Dublin last month, I picked up a copy of a new film history which I’d managed to miss up until now. Denis Condon’s Early Irish Cinema 1895-1921, published by Irish Academic Press, describes itself as examining “early and silent cinema and its contexts in Ireland”. It is a history not just of film production in Ireland (at a time when politically it was still a part of the United Kingdom), but its exhibition and its social and cultural contexts as well. Although there have been several histories of Irish film which include accounts of filmmaking in the silent era, so far as I am aware this is the first book dedicated to the early and silent cinema period alone.

Irish film production in the silent era was small-scale (and has attracted little interest among film scholars except those from Ireland) but Condon argues the attention given to these films by Irish commentators suggests that they have “a symbolic significance far out of proportion to their numbers”. The first Irish-produced fiction films did not appear until 1913 – one-reelers made by Irish Film Productions such as Michael Dwyer and Love in a Fix – and did not seriously begin until 1916 with the formation of the Film Company of Ireland, which made O’Neil of the Glen (1916), Knocknagow (1918) and Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn (1920), the latter two of which survive. Irish-themed films were made in profusion in America, however, mostly notably by Kalem, which sent a company headed by Sidney Olcott and Gene Gauntier over to Ireland and made such titles as The Lad from Old Ireland (1910), Arrah-na-Pogue (1911), The Shaugraun (1912) and Come Back to Erin (1914) (the latter one of those made by the Gene Gauntier Players, rather than Kalem). On the non-fiction side, there was Irish production from early on with local views produced by exhibitiors such as James T. Jameson, through to Norman Whitten’s General Film Supply, whose most interesting production was the newsreel Irish Events (1917-1920). Again, the greater number of Irish-themed non-fiction films came from outside, particularly British companies such as the Warwick Trading Company and the Charles Urban Trading Company, which produced assorted travelogue series.

This history Condon covers in remarkable detail. There appear to be few documentary sources that he has not examined, and his notes and sources will be plundered by future researchers for years to come. However, though he piles on the detail, he has arranged the book most interestingly. Avoiding too slavish an adherence to chronology, he divides the book into chapter entitled ‘Retrospection and Projection’, ‘Theatre’, ‘Virtual Tourism’, ‘Participation’ and ‘The Great Institution of Kinematography’. These reflect Irish cinema’s roots, its cultural inheritance, the importance of external producers’ work, Irish production itself, and a larger conception of cinema which includes the distribution of films, their exhibition and reception. The construction makes think about how Irish cinema was constructed.

This is a worthwhile, rigorous academic study. It is based on a thesis (and reads like it), with arguments about the institutional and pre-institutional form of early cinema which are designed to appeal to the film studies crowd. But it is also jam-packed full of every sort of detail, fascinating to dig through, and comes with a very helpful filmography that includes both films extant and films lost. My thought on reading it was that, despite the author’s progressive historiographical aims, there is something about the national film history which is a little quaint these days. We’ve done with the histories of this country and that country’s films, or we should have done. If cinema history teaches us anything it is that distribution had to flow over borders, if films were to make money. Condon certainly looks beyond Irish film production, and admirably so, but it is what audiences saw (American films, largely unmentioned except for the Kalem films) and what those audiences were (mostly absent from his book) that is the heart of the matter, not what any one country made.

Eloquent gestures

It’s been a while since we added anything new to the Bioscope Library. A new wing has been added to the tottering edifice that is Bioscope Towers, and first on the fresh new set of shelves therein is Roberta E. Pearson’s Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films, published by the University of California Press in 1992. This is one of the titles that the enlightened UCP has made available for free online as one of its eScholarship Editions offerings. It is a model ebook presentation, as well as being one of the most interesting and stimulating books written on the films of David Wark Griffith.

The book’s subject is the changes in the style of the actors’ performances in the films of D.W. Griffith, particularly between 1909 and 1912. Pearson sets this up in a delightful introduction in which she imagines Josiah Evans, “a man with a civic conscience who belongs to several progressive reform organizations”, attending a Broadway storefront picture show in 1909 in which he sees a film entitled The Drunkard’s Reformation, which he rather enjoys because it reminds him of the blood-and-thunder stage melodramas of his youth.

The acting of the young wife as she depicts her misery and desperation particularly affects him. She collapses into her chair and rests her head on her arms, which are extended straight out in front of her on the table. Then, in an agony of despair, she sinks to her knees and prays, her arms fully extended upward at about a forty-five degree angle.

Three years later he visit the Rialto Theatre on 14th Street, a considerably classier venue than that 1909 nickelodeon, and is struck in particular by a film entitled Brutality. It is similar in theme to the earlier film…

… but this moving picture does not remind him of the blood-and-thunder melodramas of his youth. The acting is the equal of Mr. Gillette’s in Sherlock Holmes or even of that in the Belasco play he and Lydia had attended last night. Particularly impressive is the young wife’s despairing reaction to her husband’s harsh treatment and abandonment. After he leaves for the saloon, the wife walks back to the dining-room table covered with the debris of their evening meal. She sits down, bows her head, and begins to collect the dishes. She looks up, compresses her lips, pauses, then begins to gather the dishes once again. Once more she pauses, raises her hand to her mouth, glances down to her side, and slumps a little in her chair. Slumping a little more, she begins to cry. How differently this actress portrays her grief from her counterpart in A Drunkard’s Reformation. A lot has changed in those three-and-a-half years since his first visit to a nickelodeon.

A Drunkard’s Reformation (left) and Brutality, from Eloquent Gestures

How the films of D.W. Griffith moved on from the one style to the next is the subject of Pearson’s book. It traces in meticulous detail the transformation from an acting style inherited from the stage meodramas of an earlier era, to a nuanced style that benefitted from ‘realist’ developments in literature and theatre. It wasn’t there in 1909; it was there in 1912, and by examining closely the films made in that intervening period and being attuned to contemporary cultural developments, the path from the one to the other can be drawn. This is what Pearson does.

It is a very detailed study, one grounded a theoretical language which may not be to everyone’s taste, but the author needs to negotiate the pitfalls that terms such as “naturalism”, “realism” and “melodrama” can lead to. She wants to be precise about the meaning of words which are used all too loosely in general critical discussion (“melodrama” in particular), and to ground what one sees in these films, and what one sees in changing, in a close understanding of what was going on at the time. As she says:

The study of cinematic performance demands that we not depend upon our own aesthetic judgments, which we tacitly deem eternal and unchanging. Rather, we must acknowledge history by attempting to understand the aesthetic standards of another time and place, of a culture very different from our own.

The rest you must read for yourselves, and I warmly recommend that you do so. Though this is very much a thesis turned into a book, with all of the formal argument structures that one recognises (such as having an introduction which rubbishes the opposition), it illuminates understanding – not just of Biograph films, but of any cultural artefact from any period which we may be tempted to interpret from our personal aesthetic experience but which needs to be seen, first and foremost, as the product of its own times.

The ebook presentation is excellent. The book is divided up into hyperlinked chapters, and page breaks are indicated where they occur in the original, which is good for accurate citation. Notes in the text are hyperlinked to a notes section at the end, the index has hyperlinks so you can go directly from term back to the text, and the illustrations are available in small and full size versions. Finally there is a search box enabling to search the entire text of the book. Excellent all round. Into the Bioscope Library it goes.

Film studies is dead… long live film studies

Vitagraph’s Manchester office in 1921, from Richard Brown’s article ‘The Missing Link: Film Renters in Manchester, 1910–1920′

OK, not that film studies, but Film Studies the journal, published by Manchester University Press, produced out of the University of Kent, which is no more. This is sad news, because it was handsomely produced and filled with stimulating riches, issue after issue. But, as Catherine Grant on the never less than essential Film Studies for Free reports, Manchester University Press has done the decent thing and made all of the articles in the journal 2004-2007 freely available online in PDF format (earlier content 1999-2004 isn’t available in digital form). Film Studies for Free lists all of the articles that are available; here at the Bioscope we’re selective in our tastes, so here is all the articles which touch on silent cinema:

Volume 10 (Spring 2007)
Luke McKernan, ‘Only the screen was silent …’: Memories of children’s cinema-going in London before the First World War
(pp 1-20)
Full Article in PDF p1 (273 k)

Simon Brown, Flicker Alley: Cecil Court and the Emergence of the British Film Industry
(pp 21-33)
Full Article in PDF p21 (122 k)

Janet McBain, Green’s of Glasgow: `We Want "U" In’
(pp 54-57)
Full Article in PDF p54 (124 k)

Richard Brown, The Missing Link: Renters in Manchester, 1910-1920
(pp 58-63)
Full Article in PDF p58 (157 k)

Frank Gray, Kissing and Killing: A Short History of Brighton on Film
(pp 64-71)
Full Article in PDF p64 (113 k)

Brigitte Flickinger, Cinemas in the City: Berlin’s Public Space in the 1910s and 1920s
(pp 72-86)
Full Article in PDF p72 (173 k)

Kate Bowles, ‘All the evidence is that Cobargo is slipping’: An ecological approach to rural cinema-going
(pp 87-96)
Full Article in PDF p87 (120 k)

Volume 9 (Winter 2006)
David Lavery, ‘No More Undiscovered Countries’: The Early Promise and Disappointing Career of Time-Lapse
Photography
(pp 1-8)
Full Article in PDF p1 (92 k)

Volume 8 (Summer 2006)

Patrick Colm Hogan, Narrative Universals, Nationalism, and Sacrificial Terror: From Nosferatu to Nazism
(pp 93-105)
Full Article in PDF p93 (208 k)

Volume 6 (Summer 2005)

David Trotter, Virginia Woolf and Cinema
(pp 13-26)
Full Article in PDF p13 (152 k)

Elizabeth Lebas, Sadness and Gladness: The Films of Glasgow Corporation, 1922-1938
(pp 27-45)
Full Article in PDF p27 (236 k)

Volume 4 (Summer 2004)

Charles Musser, The Hidden and the Unspeakable: On Theatrical Culture, Oscar Wilde and Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan
(pp 12-47)
Full Article in PDF p12 (478 k) [this PDF is not working at present]

A marvellous selection, including a number from a special issue on Cities and Cinema. I can quite recommend the top article to you – and all the others just as much. For the remaining articles, do visit the relevant MUP web page. If a journal does have to fold, this is a noble way of keeping its contents available, especially for those without easy access to academic libraries, so plaudits to MUP, and hopefully it’s a model that others will follow (though of course we’d rather not have any more film journals fold, of course).

The Brazilian scene

Bebe Daniels on the front cover of A Scena Muda, 1921 no. 1

It is frustrating for the silent film researcher that, while there are some excellent online resources which provide with extensive acess to digitised newspaper collections, there are all too few film journals from our period that have digitised. Specialist resources are always going to be that much more difficult to finance. But look beyond the English language, and there are treasures to be found. In the first of two posts covering non-English digitised collections, let me introduce you to Brazil’s Biblioteca Digital das Artes do Espetaculo. This site makes available the runs of two Brazilian film journals, A Scena Muda (1921-1955) and Cinearte (1926-1942), digitised by the Biblioteca Jenny Klabin Segall. While it’s certainly going to help if you know Portuguese, the colour front covers (mostly of Hollywood stars) are a design delight all by themselves. Within you will find news, reviews, photographs, gossip, advertisements, and regular features on the Brazilian feature film.

A page from Cinearte, 1926 no. 7

The sites are easy to navigate. From the front page, click on As Revistas. You will then be presented with three drop-down boxes, from which you can choose which of the two journals you want to see, then select whether you want to browse by year or number, and then select from the range offered. Searching by year you get a row of thumbnails of the front covers. The documents themselves are in PDF format, of good quality, though they don’t appear to be word-searchable. However, there is an advanced search option, to be found under Pesquisa, where you can search across both journals for individual words (handy for name searches, for example). So well worth browsing even if Portuguese is one of those languages you’ve never quite grasped fully, and for judging the balance between Hollywood and the native industry in the Brazilian mind.

My thanks to Teresa Antolin for bringing this to my attention. Part two tomorrow.

The Biograph in Battle

A few weeks ago, we reported on the marvellous book digitisation project by the Cinémathèque française, the Bibliothèque numérique du cinéma, and said that we would return to the collection to describe some of the highlights (and put them in the Bioscope Library). So we start with one of the truly notable publications of the early cinema period, W.K-L. Dickson’s The Biograph in Battle: Its Story in the South African War (1901). This is both the first account in book form by a motion picture operator describing his work, and the first book about the filming of war. Its subject is the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, often described as the first media war, because film cameras were there to record it.

William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson had already earned his place in motion picture history by being the man who effectively invented motion picture films, when he worked as an engineer in the Edison labs 1883-1895. Dickson left Edison to join the KMCD Syndicate, formed to exploit a 70mm film system used both for screen projection (the Biograph) and for exhibition on a flick-card peepshow (the Mutoscope). The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, as they became, was the major American rival to Edison in the 1890s, and it pushed its product abroad in an ambitious campaign of proto-motion picture globalization which included the formation of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Dickson went over to his homeland in 1897 to serve as chief camera operator, filming news and travel subjects in the main. The most notable adventure he undertook while with Biograph was to film the Anglo-Boer War.

The Anglo-Boer War (more popularly known as the Boer War) was, like most wars, unclear and unnecessary. It was fought between Britain (specifically the forces of the British Empire) and the two independent Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State, in southern Africa. The immediate cause of the conflict was the refusal by the Boers (Afrikaners) to grant political rights to a British immigrant workforce, known as Uitlanders, but the real impetus was British imperial ambitions and South African gold and diamonds. The Boers invaded the British colony of Natal on 11 October 1899, and Britain launched an invasion force under Sir Redvers Buller. This force met with several embarassing reverses, and Buller was replaced by Lord Roberts, who took Pretoria on 5 June 1900. Many felt the war was over by this point, but instead it turned into a guerilla campaign for the next two years, characterised by some brutal tactics and the British use of concentration camps to imprison Boer civilians, until victory was gained by Lord Kitchener in May 1902.

The war occured at just the point where the young film industry had the resources, and the eager audience, to make covering the war a most welcome opportunity. Four British companies sent cameramen to the Transvaal: Biograph (Dickson), Paul’s Animatograph Works (Walter Calverley Beevor and Sydney [?] Melsom), the Warwick Trading Company (Joseph Rosenthal, Edgar Hyman, John Benett-Stanford and Sydney Goldman) and Gibbons’ Bio-Tableaux (C. Rider Noble). Goldman and Noble are believed to have filmed the latter stages of the war (post-June 1900), for which no film survivies today. The others filmed the war in its first dramatic months. Other companies, notably Edison, Pathé and Norden Films (Mitchell & Kenyon) fed an audience thirst for images of the war by dramatising heroic actions, but what audiences most wanted to see was war’s actuality.

Dickson’s Mutograph camera at Chieveley filming a naval gun battery. Note the bicycle wheel which drove a suction pump that flattened the unperforated film against the aperture plate. From The Biograph in Battle.

Dickson sailed from Southampton on Buller’s ship the Dunottar Castle on 14 October 1899, accompanied by two assistants William Cox and Jonathan Seward, and equipped with a Mutograph camera. He also wrote a diary, originally for newspaper serialisation (Pearson’s Illustrated War News), and then for publication in book form, illustrated with many images from the films that he and his team took between October and June the following year. He started filming immediately upon arrival in Cape Town on 30 October. He travelled to the combat area in late November, and was present at the battles of Colenso (15 December 1899) and Spion Kop (24 January 1900).

It is not difficult to imagine the trials of trying to film a war with camera equipment that literally weighed a tonne. Aside from the bulky Mutograph itself, the tripod weighed 100 pounds, the four boxes of batteries needed to drive its electric motor weighed 1,200 pounds, and the whole caboodle had to be carried around in a Cape cart pulled by two horses. It was equipment hardly designed for the agile filming of war’s actuality, and it made Dickson a less than welcome presence among the troops because the camera made such a good target. Dickson describes some of the problems he operated under:

Getting back to a safer position, we watched the valiant attack of our men as they gradually pushed on. Had we a light camera these movements could have been secured, and many others of a valuable nature, but the enormous bulk of our apparatus which had to be dragged about in a Cape cart with two horses, prevented our getting to the spot. The difficulties were aggravated by the absence of roads, while the huge gullies we had to cross and the enormous boulders we had to get over made the enterprise almost impractical.

It is important to be aware of the limitations Dickson laboured under. He could not go about filming war in the raw. He was constricted by the technology, army officialdom and his independent status. Though not subject to official censorship as he was not a newspaper journalist, his movements were always under the eye of one officer or another, yet because he was sanctioned by the War Office he could not benefit from army supplies and had considerable battles simply fending for himself and his team. His films are composed documents which record places and activities rather than the heat of battle. Indeed, owing to the range of the Mauser rifles employed by the Boer, the two armies seldom saw much of one another except for occasional assaults or mad cavalry charges. No film was going to get taken show the fighting itself (Dickson experimented with telephoto lenses but had little success). So we see troops marching, bridges being repaired, signalmen at work, big guns firing, cavalry at the gallop, encampments. The films document the everyday, while at the same time documenting the step-by-step progress of Buller’s army as it progressed from optimism to disaster in its quest to relieve the besieged town of Ladysmith.

The Battle of Spion Kop, a frame still from The Biograph in Battle.

The Biograph in Battle records Dickson’s experiences on a day-by-day basis, particular attention given to films with which audiences were to become familiar back in Britain, where the latest motion pictures dispatches were avidly followed in the music halls and variety theatres. Most notable of these was Battle of Spion Kop: Ambulance Corps Crossing the Tugela River. This remarkable film records the retreat of British troops following the disastrous assault on the heights of Spion Kop, the culmination of Buller’s ill-fated campaign. Dickson’s film (which exists as three separate shots from the same position,one taken with telephoto lens, in the copy held by the BFI National Archive) shows an ambulance train aspart of a long line of troops passing down a winding path, while in the forground troops in an entrenchment give a palpable sense of conflict which some of these 1890s war actualities lack. Dickson describes the filming thus:

We were not long in following with our Cape cart, and after several hours’ severe work for horse and man succeeded in getting a good picture of the Ambulance Corps crossing the Tugela River over a hurriedly spanned pontoon bridge. In the immediate foreground may be seen trenches filled with our men to guard against any sudden attack should the wounded be fired on by the enemy. A little below the Tugela wends its way through great boulders and a rocky bed, over which our sick and wounded must be driven as they make their way down the opposite side across the pontoon bridge and up the embankment where we now are, the worse cases being carried by innumerable volunteer stretcher-bearers, mostly coolies. On the other side, as far as the eye can reach the Red Cross ambulances are seen waiting their turn to make their perilous descent, nearly all of them having been previously emptied of their worst cases of wounded for fear of an upset, the patients being carried over and replaced after arriving at the other side, when comparatively on safe ground. The picture has an additional value that in the background is part of the battlefield where Warren’s men fought so gallantly as they advanced towards and up Spion Kop to the right.

If only Dickson’s lens had been sharper or the film longer than a minute. Somewhere in that scene was a journalist on the cusp of fame, Winston Churchill, and serving as an stretcher-bearer was the future Mahatma Gandhi.

Following the debacle of Spion Kop, the British army withdrew, regrouped, took Colenso, finally crossed the Tugela river, and raised the siege at Ladysmith, Buller making his formal entrance on 3 March. Dickson had had to deal with both of his assistants falling ill during this period, taking them to a sanatorium in Durban, but with a new assistant (name unknown) he was back in time to record the entry into Ladysmith, arriving in the town ahead of Buller himself. Dickson was exhausted by this time, and having journeyed back to Durban he succumbed to a fever. By mid-April he and his original crew had recovered, but filming priorities had changed with the uncertain progress of the war. Dickson’s next major film would be the annexation of Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, which surrended to Lord Roberts on 13 March. The annexation ceremonies took place on 28 May, after which Dickson travelled on to film Roberts’ capture of Pretoria on 5 June. Both films represented the moment of triumph by the raising of a flag in the town square, though Dickson’s film of the latter was a cheeky restaging (he had arrived too late to record the actual event), featuring a larger flag than had been used in the ceremony. This piece of deception was spotted at the time by local audiences and came in for much criticism.

At this point, many believed the war to be over. Dickson (left) and his London employers certainly did so, and he left Cape Town for Southampton on 18 July 1900. His films had been a regular feature at the Palace Theatre (the London showcase for Biograph films) and at theatres around the world equipped for Biograph films. The films generally took three to four weeks to get back to Britain, and did so on such a regular basis that audiences could follow his reportage as a form of news, albeit delayed news. Although attempts had been made to film earlier conflicts (Frederic Villiers was present with a cine camera during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, John Benett-Stanford filmed at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, and Billy Bitzer and Arthur Marvin filmed scenes during the Spanish-American War of 1898 for American Biograph), the films of Dickson and his fellow Anglo-Boer war cameramen – none of whom he mentions in his text, incidentally – were the first successful motion picture records of a war from the battlefront, and the picture that they gave to audiences back at home altered forever what was expected of the motion picture camera, and what audiences could demand to see on their screens.

The Biograph in Battle is an enjoyable, informative read, full of character and sharp-eyed observation. Some of the attitudes expressed, particularly towards the native population, are unfortunately characteristic of their time, but overall this is a remarkably detailed account from the earliest years of motion pictures. In 1894 Dickson had been filming fleeting variety acts for the Edison Kinetoscope peepshow; it is evidence of how rapidly the medium developed in scope and ambition that it could, just five years later, take on the documenting of a war and, incidentally, the demise of an Imperial dream.

There is a catalogue of Anglo-Boer War films held by the BFI National Film Archive, which lists most of the extant films of Dickson and his rivals, which I compiled many moons ago.

The Biograph in Battle is very rare (and very expensive) in its original form. A facsimile publication was produced by Flicks Books in 1995, with a new introduction by Richard Brown. This is now out of print but can be found second-hand. The PDF copy on the Bibliothèque numérique du cinéma (49MB in size) comes from the Will Day collection and is inscribed to collector and historian Day by Dickson himself.

The is a new biography of Dickson by Paul Spehr, which covers the Anglo-Boer War period in detail: The Man Who Made Movies: W.K-L. Dickson. Spehr will be giving an illustrated talk on Dickson and film at the Barbican in London on 5 June, and again at the BFI Southbank on 10 June.

(There are no examples of Dickson’s war films online that I can find, except included in television programmes which have been uploaded without the broadcaster’s permission)

Sunnyside up

Ah me, too much happening – if only any of it was of any consequence. Anyway, apologies for the service from the Bioscope being a bit on the intermittent side of late, but there’s just time to note the publication this month of Glen David Gold’s novel, Sunnyside. Gold gained fame a few years back with his fantastical novel of warring magicians in the 1920s, Carter Beats the Devil, and he seems to have pulled off a similar trick with Sunnyside, this time by taking as his subject the cinema of roughly the same period.

Sunnyside is, of course, the title of a 1919 Charlie Chaplin film (a minor film where Chaplin experimented with rural comedy but lost his comic touch). The novel sounds like a rich feast, using Chaplin and the American movie industry as the means to illuminate a wildly variegated decade and the encroachment of modernity. Amid multiple storylines (there are three main plot lines, covering Chaplin in Hollywood, another character in the battlefields of France, and a third caught up in the little-known Allied invasion of Russia), real-life and imaginary characters intermingle – among the former, readers will find Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Adolph Zukor, film theorist Hugo Munsterberg, Rin Tin Tin, and of course Chaplin. There’s an enticing review of the book from the LA Times which describes Chaplin’s portrayal thus:

Scores of novels have tried and failed to depict movie stars and stardom or genius. Yet here Gold conjures a nuanced character who springs to life. Chaplin comes across as witty, charming, insecure. He dresses with a dandy’s care, suffers depressions and wears a perfume that smells like citrus with “base notes of money.” He woos women and conducts a book-length joust with Pickford, whose air of certainty and business smarts confuses and almost terrifies him. Chaplin’s doubts center on his sense of being not good enough, an uncertainty that he knows he must somehow allow to filter through his art.

“He had the easy capacity for seeing kinetic actions first, then creating character and emotion to fill them up, like ladling sand into a sack. This was too easy — everyone did it,” Gold writes. “Where was the small moment, the flirtatious smile not returned, the cuckold discovering a cuff link and saying nothing, the smile of a baby that somehow chills the bones? That was the hardest way to make things.”

Gold places the center of Chaplin’s ache in his longing for love — and his fear of the same — in his relationships with women. Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, was a music hall singer whose career was ruined and who went mad, leaving the young Chaplin destitute, and the whole Chaplin-arc of “Sunnyside” is aimed at the moment, dreaded and longed-for, when Hannah arrives in Los Angeles. “He could meet her eyes, but only as though they were tapping his fingers against a hot stove. They were still a deep hazel, cloudy and merry, for now,” Gold writes. “It’s okay if you don’t love your mother,” Hannah says, as “Sunnyside” speeds at last toward its conclusion with a sequence of scenes that amaze, startle and move.

As someone who found Carter Beats the Devil hugely disappointing, I shall reserve judgement until I read Sunnyside. But I will have to read it (all 559 pages of it), and the book is certain to do well, and to draw people anew to Chaplin and the richly metaphoric world of silent cinema.

An excellent dumb discourse

Ruggero Ruggeri as Hamlet in Amleto (1917)

It was the fervent belief of many in the early years of cinema that justification for the medium lay in how it interpeted stage drama. At a time when censorious authorities looked down upon the dubious cinema (with its low class audiences) and cinema was reaching out for respectability (and properties that were out of copyright), Pathé with its Film d’Art and Film d’Arte Italiana companies, and Adolph Zukor’s policy of ‘Famous Players in Famous Plays’ showed that there was financial good sense in bringing high-class drama to the cinema screen, however mutely.

The pinnacle of stage drama was, of course, William Shakespeare, and film companies in the silent film era took on the Bard with enthusiasm. The numbers are extraordinary. Some two hundred films, most of them one-reelers of the pre-war period, were produced that closely or loosely owed something to one or other of Shakespeare’s plays. Some film companies showed a particular interest: Vitagraph filmed Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet (all 1908), King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1909), Twelfth Night (1910) and As You Like It (1912). Thanhouser made A Winter’s Tale (1910), The Tempest (1911), The Merchant of Venice (1912), Cymbeline (1913) and King Lear (1916). Cines, Kalem, Biograph, Ambrosio, Gaumont, Eclair, Nordisk, Milano and several others filmed the plays.

This was more than enthusiasm for high culture; it was good business. Shakespeare films appealed to an audience which found costume dramas in general to be a treat, and which was accustomed to boiled-down Bard from school texts and stage productions which concentrated on the highlights from the plays (such as the Crummles’ hectic production of Romeo and Juliet portrayed in Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickelby). Of course, not everyone wanted to see high culture quite as much as the cinema sometimes wanted to be associated with such culture (see the cartoon at the end of this post), but more than enough were impressed, and entranced.

Once films became longer – ironically as the cinema became closer in form to the theatre – the number of Shakespeare films fell, because longer productions were more of a challenge to audiences. But even then there was a burst of activity in 1916 (the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death), with half-a-dozen or more productions in that year alone, and versions of the plays continued in silent form throughout the 1920s, with four key titles coming from Germany – Hamlet (1920, with Asta Nielsen as the Dane), Othello (1922, with Emil Jannings and Werner Krauss), Der Kaufman von Venedig (The Merchant of Venice) (1923, with Henny Porten) and Ein Sommernachtstraum (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) (1925, Werner Krauss again).

Prospero in his cave, from The Tempest (Clarendon 1908)

So where is the literature to back up this self-evidently significant corner of silent film history? Sadly, until recently, there has been very little. The silent film enthusiasts and film scholars have shied away from Shakespeare as being falsely worthy and far too uncinematic, while the Shakespeareans looked down on cinema per se, while finding the very notion of silent Shakespeare an absurdity. Jack J. Jorgens, a noted scholar, went so far as to write these dreadful words in his Shakespeare on Film (1977):

First came scores of silent Shakespeare films,one- and two-reelers struggling to render great poetic drama in dumb-show. Mercifully, most of them are lost.

Oh dear, oh dear. However, there was one work which almost eccentrically fought against the tide. Robert Hamilton Ball’s Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventual History (1968) is one of the most remarkable books ever produced on silent cinema. It is a passionately-pursued archaeological investigation into every kind of Shakespeare film made during the silent era, encomapssing parodies, allusions, plot borrowing as well as ‘conventional’ adaptations, with Ball diggedly tracking down every obscure reference, every hidden print, every list of intertitles, with abundant fervour and an infectious interest in the people involved. This magnum opus has been cherished by the dedicated few for four decades, and for most of that time its discoveries and assertions have been taken as gospel. Yet even Ball ended his investigations with these disappointing words:

Silent Shakespeare film could not be art, a new art. The aesthetic problem is how to make good film which is good Shakespeare. It could not be good Shakespeare because too much was missing.

It is has been the task of a few of us (and I’ve been involved) to prove those words wrong. Silent Shakespeare was good Shakespeare, not because of what was missing, but because of what was there to be seen – a new medium expressing itself imaginatively while asserting its social worthiness and cultural relevance. To study silent Shakespeare films is to see films discovering what they could do. Yes there are histrionics at times, and yes there is some aburdity involved when complex plots are crammed into a ten-minute reel, but equally there is artistry, feeling and subtlety of interpretation. Have you ever seen a ballet of Romeo and Juliet and complained that the words were missing? Of course not. Shakespeare without the words is not a lesser form, but simply a form that requires its own special understanding. It expresses the significance of its subject within its specific constraints – which is precisely what art is.

The tide started to turn with the release of the British Film Institute’s video compilation Silent Shakespeare (1999), a work that was a revelation to many. Even hardened theatricals could see the special virtues in the Clarendon Film Company’s delightful reworking of The Tempest (1908) or the elemental passion evident in Ermete Novelli’s stunning performance in Re Lear (1910). The DVD has found its way onto many a university library shelf, while a number of scholars have begun to take on the silent Shakespeare film with fresh eyes – among them Jon Burrows, Roberta Pearson, Anthony Guneratne and Kenneth Rothwell.

The leading champion, however, has been Judith Buchanan, whose quite marvellous Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse is published this month by Cambridge University Press. This is the sympathetic, understanding account of a phenomenon that we have been waiting for. It is not a comprehensive history of the silent Shakespeare film – Buchanan defers to Ball in that respect – instead it concentrates on exemplary films and on uncovering the social, cultural and economic contexts. So it is that an opening chapter details a nineteenth-century legacy of performance, with particular attention to Shakespeare and the magic lantern, showing that the silent Shakespeare film was part of an established tradition. Chapters then follow on the first Shakespeare film, King John (1899), featuring Herbert Beerbohm Tree (also on the BFI DVD); Shakespeare films of the ‘transitional era’ between the early and late 1900s, with close, engrossing readings of Clarendon’s The Tempest and Film d’Arte Italiana’s Othello (1909); the ‘corporate authorship’ of Vitagraph’s productions; the contrasting interpretations of Hamlet by Hepworth (a renowned British 1913 production with theatrical great Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson) and Amleto, a 1917 Italian film starring Ruggero Ruggeri, little-known but perhaps the most accomplished extant realisation on Shakespeare on silent film (it’s crying out for the two Hamlets to be released jointly on DVD); the several films of the tercentary year, including the rival Romeo and Juliets starring Francis X. Bushman/Beverley Bayne and Theda Bara/Harry Hilliard, both films alas lost; the German productions of the 1920s; and wordless Shakespeare today (there are some stage productions experimenting with silence, notably Paata Tsikurishvili’s Synetic Theatre).

It’s written for a literary studies audience, but it is grounded in exemplary original research (Buchanan has toured the world to track down the relevant prints) and it is a pleasure to read. There is much here to detain anyone keen to extend their knowledge of film history. She knows her films as well as her plays – a rare and most welcome combination. Above all, Buchanan opens up the subject in all its richness of theme, inviting others to explore further, illuminating the films that we are so fortunate have survived. We will still turn to Robert Hamilton Ball for his extensive documentary evidence, but to Buchanan for her sophisticated understanding.

A 1913 cartoon from London Opinion, speaking for anyone resistant to the cinema’s occasional urge to impress Shakespeare upon us. Taken from Stephen Bottomore, I Want to See this Annie Mattygraph: A Cartoon History of the Coming of the Movies

If you are keen to seek out silent Shakespeare films for yourself (and you should, you really should) this is what’s currently available on DVD:

• Silent Shakespeare: includes King John (Biograph 1899), The Tempest (Clarendon 1908), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Vitagraph 1909), Re Lear (Film d’Arte Italiana 1910), Twelfth Night (Vitagraph 1910), Il Mercante di Venezia (Film d’Arte Italiana 1910), Richard III (Co-operative 1911) [BFI] [Milestone]
• Thanhouser Presents Shakespeare [Thanhouser series vol.7]: includes The Winter’s Tale (1910), Cymbeline (1913), King Lear (1916) [Thanhouser]
• Richard III (Shakespeare Film Company 1912) [Kino]
• Othello (Wörner-Filmgesellschaft 1922): also includes Duel Scene from Macbeth (Biograph 1905), The Taming of the Shrew (Biograph 1908), Roméo se fait bandit (Pathé 1910), Desdemona (Nordisk 1911) [Kino]

The International Database of Shakespeare on Film, Radio and Television, an online filmographic database not yet officially released but available in a test version, hopes to be comprehensive for the silent Shakespeare film. Buchanan herself provides a filmography (restricted to films mentioned in her text), including the location of archive prints. Around forty silent Shakespeare films survive today, mercifully.

The Stage

New (at least to me) among the digitised historical journals now available online by subscription is The Stage. This is well worth taking note of. The Stage Directory (A London and Provincial Theatrical Advertiser) was founded in February 1880 as a monthly newspaper, and continues (as a weekly) to this day. Its entire archive 1880-2007 has been digitised and put online, covering over 6,500 issues or above 170,000 individual pages reporting on the goings on of the British stage and beyond.

The importance for us is that The Stage has always kept an eye on the motion picture business, and for the silent era it was assiduous in recording the activities of this new strand of showbusiness. A series of articles from 1907 entitled “Cinematograph Notes” records new businesses, film releases, licensing issues and so forth, “Latest Films” is very handy in giving titles of new releases, and another series “Film Facts & Fancies” starting in 1919, written by ‘Figaro’, reports on the cinema world with a knowing eye.

The Stage documented the engagements of actors, and one can trace their travels across the British provincial theatres, seeing also where the variety shows were starting to introduce the cinematograph. Here one can spot names that were later to be famous: in a notice from 30 July 1903 of a performance of Sherlock Holmes at the London Pavilion, the writer notes:

A faithful portrait of Billy is given by Master Charles Chaplin, who shows considerable ability, and bids fair to develop into a clever and capable actor.

Once can follow Chaplin many performances as Billy, and then later with the Karno troupe, up and down the country, before he found his fortune on the screen.

The Stage Archive is available by subscription. There is a timed pass system, with twenty-four hours’ access costing £5, one week £15, one month £30, three months £60, six months £100 and one year £150. Once you have subscribed, you have options to browse by date, so you can scroll through an entire issue (I recommend this to start with, as it gives you an idea of layout and the contents of the regular sections), or you can search by word (or phrase in quotation marks) across all types of ‘clippings’ (i.e. sections), or by article, picture or advertisement. You can search by the time periods 1880-1900, 1901-1950 or 1914-1918 (and later periods, of course), and can order search results chronologically or by relevance.

Those familiar with digitised newspaper collections will soon recognise that The Stage Archive has been produced by Olive Software’s ActivePaper system. Search results give you the date and page number of the issue and a snippet of the article itself (usually a headline), which you click on to open up the full article. This can be a little frustrating when you have many search results, as there is little way of telling one article from another (many of the Chaplin notices are simply titled ‘Provinces’, for instance), so it may be a little laborious investigating the more popular subjects. You get the full article in facsimile form, with your search term highlighted, and you can print these or file them away in a ‘My Collection’ facility, but there is no way to get at the underlying OCR text, unfortunately.

If you don’t subscribe, you can still use The Stage Archive to search material, you just won’t have access to the articles themselves. But there is more from The Stage that you can access without paying any subscription. The Stage produced an annual yearbook which for the silent era is another rich source of information, particularly for its directory listing of film associations, its advertisements, and especially its reports on legal cases, always fascinating for the realism they provide behind the tinsel of so much cinema reportage. The Internet Archive has the volumes for 1908-1919. The PDFs are a large size (30-50MB), but don’t forget that they are word-searchable. Look out in particular for Arthur Coles Armstrong’s long article in the 1914 volume, “My Lady Kinema – The Eleventh Muse”. And from the 1916 volume, this report on a court case caught my eye:

ELINOR GLYN v. WESTERN FEATURE FILM CO. AND G. BLACK.- ALLEGED CINEMATOGRAPHIC INFRINGEMENT OF NOVEL.

In the Chancery Division, before Mr. Justice Younger, Mrs. Elinor Glyn, the author of and owner of the copyright in “Three Weeks,” brought an action against the defendants for an injunction restraining the defendants from making or authorising the public exhibition of kinematograph films under the title of Pimple’s Three Weeks (without the option).

The defendants pleaded that their film Pimple’s Three Weeks (without the option) was an original dramatic work within the meaning of the Copyright Act, 1911, and that they were entitled to use their film.

The action against the defendant George Black was settled before the case came into Court.

And the reason it was settled is that the judge decided that Three Weeks was an immoral work, and so did not merit any copyright protection, irrespective of whether a parody could be seen as infringing in the first case.

Plenty to discover, whether paid for or free (and acknowledgments to Bioscope regular Penfold for bringing The Stage Archive to my attention).

Who’s Who on the Screen

Top row (L-R) June Mathis, Albert Capellani, Ruth Stonehouse; bottom row (L-R) Sessue Hayakawa, Teddy Sampson, Buster Keaton, from Who’s Who on the Screen (1920)

As some may know, while in the small hours I run The Bioscope, in the daylight hours I take occasional care over Screen Research, a social network/information source on moving image research. The latter is mostly devoted to current activity in the online video world, but the photograph section concentrates on older material, simply on acount of rights issues.

So this is just to let Bioscopists know that there is a growing collection of silent film images to be found there. In particular, I have just finished working my way through the Internet Archive copy of Charles Donald Fox and Milton L. Silver’s Who’s Who on the Screen (1920). This is a 400-page biographical guide to Hollywood in 1920, with a photograph and mini-biograph per person per page. I have published each individual on their individual page in four ‘albums’, with actors in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and directors, executives etc. in Part 4. I find the parade of images haunting (the quality of the photography is outstanding, even if the image resolution is low – the photographers are credited in an acknowledgments page on Part 4) and the biographies intriguing for the emphasis placed on how healthy every one was. All the actors stress the sports they follow and their love of the outdoors. The executives feel less need to do so.

There is more silent material to be found under the Photos section. Film historian Deac Rossell has added some gems from his personal collection, including lobby cards, programmes, contemporary collectors’ scrapbooks, and some rare examples of movie star pennants from 1915. Do take a browse.