I have been a little slow to start up some mornings. But one thing you can guarantee that I will get out of bed for is Victor Sjöström. Victor Sjöström’s 1912 debut film no less, banned outright in Sweden, but available for us lucky degenerates on the capacious Verdi screen, with a truly wonderful accompaniment by Stephen Horne. Variously known as The Cruelty of the World, The Gardener or The Broken Spring Rose, this is a really special film and I do think the first title is the best one.
You really need to see this one, I mean especially if you are a fan of Sjöstrom’s later work. The subject is sexual assault but the treatment is psychological, not exploitative. Lilli Bech is phenomenal as a young woman traumatised first by the act of violence, when her father-in-law attacks her, and then subsequently by her return to the scene of the crime, albeit she is now in very different circumstance. It is beautifully, quite astonishingly photographed and there is not a frame wasted – excellent, interior storytelling, in stunningly evocative locations. You can trace the line right from this to The Wind, say. Now restored by the Swedish Film Institute and the Library of Congress, and this morning, Stephen Horne, who can be relied upon for heartbreak, did wonders with it.
The following two films had far too much plot for me to absorb at this stage in the festival, or probably on any other day either. So bear that in mind. The first was an Augusto Genina film from 1917, Il Siluramento dell’Oceania (The Torpedoing of the Oceania). A disaster movie? Oh no. This is really about an adventurer (Pietro Pesci) and an adventuress (Ileana Leonidoff), plotting to steal the family treasures of a young Italian marquise (a winsome Cecil Tryan) and her mother who have had to give up their castle. Yes, Genina does also sink an ocean liner very effectively, but almost incidentally to the main plot. It is very entertaining, if maybe a little old-fashioned, with the key to the loot located in parchment in the hilt of a sword held by a suit of armour in the castle armoury – which is where I keep my WordPress password too, naturally. And entertaining flourishes, such as the presence of strongman Alfredo Boccolini as the Marquise’s guardian. I suspect José Maria Serralde Ruiz was having almost as much fun as we were.
And talking of being slightly lost but enjoying the road – La Perle (Henri d’Ursel) in the Belgian avant-garde strand: Beautiful, sexy, strange. And two Irma Veps? Sold.
Oh for The Wings of a Serf! Yuri Tarich’s classic 1926 film about an eccentric inventor, a “tinkerer”, a Soviet Caractacus Potts if you will, mistreated by the Tsar Ivan the Terrible (Leonid Leonidov), who really was terrible, and his team of violent underlings, was gruesome, grotesque and graphical. I didn’t always follow it perfectly, but I had a blast watching it. It is in the Cannon Revisited strand for a reason. This film was edited by Esfir Shub and co-written by Victor Shklovsky: they are partly responsible for the visual overload and relentless pace. Every image was packed with sharp shadows and light and some kind of elaborate design either of embroidery or mechanics or maybe a torture device, and we were constantly slammed right against the cold stone corners of labyrinthine palace architecture. There was danger behind every door: a blade or several, with a vicious trou de loup below a trapdoor that was used more than once. I gasped. Several times, actually. I haven’t even talked about the plot. Basically, Nikishka the inventor, played by Ivan Klyukvin, has invented a pair of wings for flying with. The Tsar captures him and has his tortured, as this clearly makes him a satanist. Do the wings even work? We do find out, gloriously, but I described this film as gruesome for a reason. So much going on, and yet Mauro Colombis seemed to make light work of it.
Tonight the Giornate honoured three incredible women with the Jean Mitry Prize, Andrea Cuarterolo and Georgina Torello of the Vivomatografías journal and Argentinian archivist Paula Félix-Didier. A very moving moment as they spoke about their careers, their passion for silent cinema and the challenges facing their work today.
The Friday night main event was a fairly torrid melodrama from 1924, directed by Emmett Flynn, The Man Who Came Back: a glossy one, lovingly restored by UCLA. Well, as you might expect, he spent a long time getting there before deciding to come back. George O’Brien (contractually obliged to play one scene in his swimsuit and another naked in the bathtub) plays a dissipated motherless rich kid by the name of, erm, Harry Potter. Yup. His father sends him away to make something of himself but Harry washes up in San Francisco still as thirsty and feckless as ever. There, however, he meets a sorrowful waif, Marcelle (a fantastic Dorothy Mackaill) who things she can change him, no save him! Things have to get worse before they get better. The lovers are first divided and then wash up in the same Shanghai opium den. She is now hooked on the stuff, and has fallen, we can infer, further than when she was jigging in a San Francisco roadhouse. Harry is still gin-crazy, but together they swear to make a new life…
I will stop with the plot there. I enjoyed the adult subject matter of this one and I really thought Dorothy Mackaill was incredibly intense in her role. It’s a far from modern film, and I know we take all these things with a pinch of hindsight, but I think we all reeled a little at the racism and especially the viciousness of the domestic violence in this one. The filmmakers were confused by the tone they had set too, judging by the awkward ending. An odd film but John Sweeney did his best to make it romantic and gave us space to back off when it really, really wasn’t.
Before that we had Mack Sennett’s uproarious take on East Lynne (I am not sure he has read the book) and a sine nomine film that I certainly have a nomine for, but I won’t type it out here.
Intertitle of the Day
“Satanic dealings!” I think Yuri Tarich was talking about EasyJet in The Wings of a Serf.
Liquid euphemism of the Day
We had “pink tea talking” in God’s Half-Acre and tonight “no pink tea party” in The Man Who Came Back. It is suggestive of decorous, namby-pamby occasions according to Merriam-Webster. I can fill in the blanks
- Today would have been the birthday of the late, wonderful Donna Hill, and we all remember her warmly. I have fond memories of a festival cappuccino here last year, making plans for future festivals, including of course a return to Pordenone. She is terribly missed.
- Sine Nomine. Can you help identify an unidentified silent film?
- You can read more about the festival, and all of the films, on the Giornate website.
- I am on Letterboxd – watch me struggle to keep up with all these films.
- Silent London will always be free to all readers. If you enjoy checking in with the site, including reports from silent film festivals, features and reviews, please consider shouting me a coffee on my Ko-Fi page.
