Sometimes the old songs are the best, right? Familiarity can breed contentment. And nowhere will you find more consensus on that than here in Pordenone. So today I was happy to rewatch a couple of silent films I love, spend a little time with one of my all-time favourite silent stars. And then see something entirely new to me!
First, the old friends. This morning, we ventured back into the imaginations of Maurice Tourneur, and Ben Carré, with the 1918 adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. Such a strange and beautiful, terrifying and wholesome journey into the shadow world of dreams, where bread and sugar and water have souls, the dogs and cats can talk, lost grandparents always have the table set for supper and babies wait impatiently to be born. If you have not seen this, you possibly can’t imagine quite how weirdly pretty it is. Variety’s critic wrote: “It is quite safe to assert that nothing quite like Director Tourneur’s work has ever been shown on the screen.” So hats off to Tourneur and Carré, and doubly so to Neil Brand and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, who transported us to an enchanted realm with their music. I wrote about the film in more detail here, should you be interested.
This afternoon’s return visit was a stunning new restoration of one of Anna May Wong’s better European films, Song (Richard Eichberg, 1928), using material from the British Film Institute and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, by Filmmuseum Düsseldorf. And it looks stunning, you can almost feel the fresh air, the images are so clear. It is a fairly good rule of thumb that no matter how many times you watch an Anna May Wong film, you will afterwards remember that she was the lead and then be reminded that she was a little further down the cast list than that. But Song is one of those where she is basically the lead, and certainly the star, despite the fact that she has to do what she did so often (and so well) in the final reel. Here in quite spectacular style, impaled on a spike on stage and then expiring in private at home.
Why such a sad end? She’s in love with her stage-partner, a knife-thrower (Heinrich George), but he only has eyes for a white ballerina (Mary Kidd) and to add tragedy to treachery, his sight is failing. Wong is wonderful in this, partly in little bits of business, such as feeding a beer to a pal on the sly while pretending to take interest in rich-people chit-chat, and especially at expressing the agonies of unrequited passion. She was a phenomenon, and it is such a thrill to see this British-German co-production sparkling, even better with the always simpatico duo of Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius adding melody and dynamism to this vivid story of backstage life and love.
Something borrowed and something blue will have to wait. Time for something new, but with an old friend. Asta Nielsen is one star of Vanina (Arthur von Gerlach, 1922) but she has to compete for screen time with another magnificent appearance by Paul Wegener, with the most tremendous silver winged hairdo. He is the governor and she the governor’s daughter, in a 19th-century German city. When the governor’s ball is attacked by terrorists, Asta falls in love at first sight with… the ringleader (Paul Hartmann). Will the Governor quash the revolt? Will our freedom fighter betray his fellows for the chance to marry Die Asta? Carl Mayer adapts Stendhal’s novella into a tight and moody “night of fire” while set design from Walter Reimann brings towering symmetry and oppressive gloom to the governor’s quarters, complete with a chandelier that has crashed to the ballroom floor. A film of many fine moments, chief among them the ending, which is both terribly dramatic and also, strangely quiet. Nielsen expires in a forlorn, but elegant pose and her body lies still on the floor while the camera continues rolling. A soldier exits the door behind her and steps over our tragic heroine as if she were just one of so many casualties of the night’s violence. A disconcerting but brilliant moment, handled wonderfully well by Daan van den Hurk who played tremendously for this powerful film, beautifully restored by Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Det Danske Filminstitut, and Filmmuseum München.
Introducing tonight’s 9pm film, Jay Weissberg said he had been trying to screen La Sultane de l’amour (Charles Burguet, René Le Somptier,1919) for a while, and hoped to bring some middle eastern musicians to bring their perspective to what is a shamelessly orientalist fantasy. As you might imagine, events conspired against that, so tonight in their stead the more than capable trio of Mauro Columbis, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and Frank Bockius gave tuneful voice to these gorgeous images. Little edifying about the plot, in which a tyrannous sultan abducts a beautiful princess, etc etc, but much to admire in the pictorialism of the compositions, and especially the vivid, and I mean vivid, stencil-colouring. Such textiles and textures, enhanced with washed of deep crimsons, golds and fresh greens. Apparently it was the first colour film in French cinema, and its 100,000 images were stencil-coloured by 50 artists who worked across a period of four years.
On the theme of films both old and new, tonight’s blog has a happy ending. Two of the three films screening today in the Sine Nomine strand are no longer sine nomine. This evening’s fragment was identified online on the first day of the festival by Annie Fee, as the French film Snob bureaucrate par amour (Cosmograph, 1913) starring Zinel as Snob. And this morning, as film number nine was playing, Bryony Dixon was among those who instantly recognised the clip as the costume ball scene from Triumph of the Rat (Graham Cutts, 1926). Ivor Novello! Any takers for film number 10, Drame de la mer?
Until tomorrow, friends. There is something special about Thursday’s dispatch. Can you guess what?
Intertitle of the Day
“Did you forget you promised me a Boston terrier?” Dialogue to throw anyone off the scent, in Triumph of the Rat.
