“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” Proof, if proof were needed, that the American people saw through such anti-immigrant propaganda more than 100 years ago, comes in Dee-Dubya’s 1908 New York comedy Deceived Slumming Party – our first film of Sunday morning. Fraudulent tour guides promise show rich tourists the gritty realness of Chinatown and the Bowery, but the trick is, it’s all staged. Everyone in the opium den was upright and chatty before the tour group arrived, in fact, the barroom fights in the Bowery are choreographed by the bartender (DW Griffith himself) and the “meat grinder” in the Chinese restaurant kitchen, the one that the staff are “feeding” with cats and dogs and rats, is nothing but a sham.
Rich kids slumming it in Chinatown, you say? Hold that thought while we segue from comedy to melodrama, in the shape of Driven from Home (James Young, 1927), which yanked and yanked and yanked at the heartstrings with poor Virginia Lee Corbin disowned by her wealthy father after she married for love, although her devoted mother (Margaret Seddon) was on her deathbed and calling out to see her baby once more. Add to this a subway excavation accident, a scheming vamp housekeeper (Virginia Pearson), and you might not think there was room for an excursion to the Chinatown underworld but you would be wrong, as this film was playing in the Anna May Wong strand. So indeed here we witnessed a scant five minutes of Anna May Wong, as a Chinese restauranteur’s “legal wife and illegal accomplice” radiating more star power than the rest of the rest of the (perfectly good) cast could ever dream of. We understand this is a racist trope, yet it is quite nifty to think that on the evidence of this year’s Giornate, in any given situation, Anna May Wong can locate a secret door in seconds.
It was to be a day for melodrama, of varying qualities. I wanted to like Trilby (Maurice Tourneur, 1915) starring Clara Kimball Young as the model and Wilton Lackaye as Svengali more than I did. Some beautiful compositions and of course delicate shadow play (including Svengali in the shower, in fact) but I was never fully mesmerised by this one, just lightly enchanted. Picturesqueness is taken as a given with Tourneur but the film was showing in the strand devoted to art director Ben Carré, and the interiors were very special. Designing these sets was an outlet for Carré’s Parisian homesickness and the world he conjures, of deluxe hotels, elegant theatres and attic studios is beautifully evocative. It played alongside a sumptuously hand-tinted Louis Feuillade film, Aux Lions de Chrétiens (1911) in which live but tame big cats attempt, but fail, to pull focus from Carré’s backdrops. Suitable grandeur for both films was provided by Philip Carli on the piano.
We returned to the Quartier Latin, as designed by Ben Carré, for tonight’s big show: La Bohème (King Vidor, 1926), starring Lillian Gish and John Gilbert. Let us quietly say that the romance in this deeply unequal relationship did not hold up for your humble scribe in 2024. And yet, what Gish. What Gilbert too, let’s be honest, he is terrific as the immature playwright in love. But Lillian is dead-on here in her deftly underplayed performance of Mimi the operatic waif, starving in a garret over her needlework, persecuted by a foppish Viscount and distrusted by the love of her life. There are simply gorgeous scenes: Gish and Gilbert dancing in the sunlight, with Mimi draped in diaphanous leg-o’mutton sleeves for one. That said, the pace is too slow, with Mimi taking an agonisingly long time to die from consumption, neglect, a broken heart… If you heard me say as I left that TB stands for terrible boyfriend, no you didn’t. Flowers for Gish and Gilbert and King Vidor, and a bouquet of blooms for Donald Sosin who played so elegantly for this beautiful, odd film.
On our ascent up the slopes of melodrama we now reach the summit, with the sublime Rapsodia Satanica (Nino Oxilia, 1915), a Faustian tale starring Lyda Borelli as a woman who sells her soul to the devil to be young and captivating once more. Any resemblance to The Substance is purely coincidental. The stencil-colour, Borelli’s divine gaze, the shadows and light and the layers of gauze in the celebrated final veil sequence… I was enraptured all over again. This is silent film perfection, and I could tell you that we were senza English titles for this one, but who needs words when you have faces? More to the point, when you have a truly spellbinding score by Stephen Horne who played with Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and shot tingles through the spine of the Teatro Verdi.
Not everything was so serious. We sampled two more films from the Sine Nomine strand today and although the picturesque cherubic romance of The Love Message had its charm, I lost my heart to the slapstick chase comedy Dupin’s New Shoes, in which stolen footwear led the thief a mery dance across town. Sounds like a familiar tale, if only I could remember where I heard something like that before. However, the best chase film of the day was La Course aux potirons, AKA The Pumpkin Race (Romeo Bosetti, 1908), which had squashes bouncing upwards and down, forwards and back from the sewers to the rooftops of Paris, and was wickedly paired with La Bohème, seeing as Gish takes a similarly steep route hitched to cart in her death throes.
But all these films are too long, too coherent! Pordenone is a bonanza for the night owls this year, with a programme so full that the films go on sometimes to almost midnight. And if tonight’s late bill was a taste of things to come, then keep the caffé espresso coming, my friends. This was the first of three programmes of Feminist Fragments, titled No Work and All Play. Now what makes these programme to fun to watch, and so punk rock, is that they aren’t easy to describe, and they are impossible to slide into an existing film-historical narrative. They defy categorisation. So here goes, and thanks curators Maggie Hennefeld and Enri Ceballos for making my life so enjoyably difficult.
Highlights of this programme included a film made by Thai royalty, which featured children turning their father into a dog and back again into “the kindest man ever” with spells, but not before DIYing him a bong (“Daddy needs a little weed!”), Indian stunt queen Padma felling a villain by using a sari to swing from a light fitting, a cohort of New York boarding schoolgirls running their teacher ragged on a day trip to Coney Island, some chaotic housework seen in frenzied snatches and dancing (plus other shenanigans) outside an Argentinian cigarette factory. There’s more to life than retrospectives you know.
Romantic Intertitle of the Day
“Love: everything. The rest: a mocking illusion.” Rapsodia Satanica
“Life of a freelance journalist” Intertitle of the Day
“Get me something sentimental about a cat – or you can get out of here.” John Gilbert’s editor gets tough in La Bohème.
