And verily, on Tuesday, the fourth day of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the rains came down upon us. And things got quite soggy inside the theatre too, what with Mary Pickford nearly drowning in the hold of her own houseboat in Pride of the Clan, a parcel of wonderful underwater films in the early afternoon, and a wild ride to Neptune’s kingdom to close the day.
Before the rain began, I spent a couple of rapt hours in the Canon Revisited strand this morning. Carl Th Dreyer’s Leaves From Satan’s Book (1920) travels through the centuries with God’s Fallen Angel, who is doing his evil work among humans who prove reliably weak in the face of temptation. Surrendering one’s soul to sin is not to be advised, but surrendering oneself to cinematic greatness – that is a balm for the ills of the modern age. This is a film of deceptive subtlety, and slow-burning excitement. The camera stays still so long that when it moves, the moral universe tilts. The austerity of the first, biblical sequence gives way by degrees to a faster editing rhythm, and cutaways to sympathetic details, a flock of geese, a cat toying with a mouse, a baby in her crib. Soon we’re in action thriller territory as we finally wash up in Finland in 1918, via the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution. Dreyer, being Dreyer, the faces, not least of Helge Nissen as the shape-shifting Satanas, carry boundless weight. It’s a masterpiece, an early one, from a man who made much better films, even, but still. And yes I am smug about having watched it with John Sweeney’s soul-stirring accompaniment, which likewise knew when to hold back and when to rush forward through the ages.
Tonight’s main event was another engrossing feature, a film from the Uzbekistan archive, The Leper/Moxov Qiz (Oleg Frelikh, 1928), accompanied wonderfully by two Uzbek musicians, Abror Zufarov and Sobirjon Tuyokov. The theme of the novel this was adapted from, says the catalogue, is women’s emancipation. Yes, this is very much an argument for that. In Turkestan, our young heroine is a country girl, Tillya-Oi who marries a Russian officer,a violent and cruel man who beats her brutally. When she sends out a signal for help, it is intercepted by a man who rapes her, and when her husband discovers this “infidelity”, she is cast out, returned to her family home, where she is in turn ostracised, and desperate she escapes to the very margins, to the leper colony itself, where there is sadly no safe haven either.
A harrowing film, cleverly shot, with symbolic match cuts, such as the transition from a talisman to keep the girl safe to a triangle of billiard balls about to be rendered asunder, and an inventive use of the frame, carefully displaying and concealing the horrors and the hope. Ra Messerer, who plays Tillya-Oi, does very well at conveying the thoughts of a woman who has had her self-expression beaten out of her. Not a film I will forget in a hurry.
But let us lighten the mood, and begin the nautical theme with Mary Pickford, and the famous image of her dressed in tartan, draped around a camera, so often used as a signifier of the close supervision and creative energy she brought to her film projects. And that is a publicity still for Pride of the Clan (Maurice Tourneur, 1915), in which Ben Carré transforms Marblehead, Massachusetts into a Scottish isle, where young Mary ascends to become chieftain of her clan. Not that her chieftain duties are the focus of this film, beyond a scene in which she lashes her folk into the kirk, because this is a romance. Young Marget is in love with fisherman Jamie and they are betrothed to be wed, but then Jamie discovers he is he long-lost son of a rich titled lady from London, and ah, class may yet divided these two innocent hearts. But we won’t let it! Pride of the Clan is mostly delightful (aside from an unfortunate interlude in which Mary images how she would cope if she travelled to an island populated by cannibals), and although the boat-sinking sequence is exciting, it’s best in the comic scenes, especially those that involve the farmyard animals, and her own beloved kitten who has something of a starring role. And while all this was going one, Donald Sosin and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry were throwing a ceilidh in the orchestra pit – really lush accompaniment for this one.
Pickford, thank the heavens, was saved from the waves, but no such luck for the audience here today, who sank right to the ocean bed. But we were happy to do so, through the medium of cinema. Three films in the afternoon: a line-drawn animation of an improbably marine escapade from 1912 (Le Voyage Fantastique de Marius), probably by Henry Monnier, a drama (Dans Le Sous-Marin, 1908) in which a submarine disaster prompts three drowning officers to have visions of their loved ones, and then the joys of Wonders of the Sea (J, Ernest Williamson, 1922). Now I had had a sneak preview of this, with some footage screened at Domitor in June, which certainly w(h)etted my appetite. Williamson, plus a painter, a cameraman, two swimmers, and a child, heads to the Bahamas to films a series of dives deep in the ocean. Their aims appear to be to find sharks and octopi, but mainly to capture some beautiful images, especially of a dainty lady diver slinking through the anemones. Stunning images, and a certain amount of instruction in how these things are done. Nature photography and films show us so many alien visions of life in hard-to-reach places, but somehow it is all the more impressive when one gets just a tiny glimpse of how it is done. It doesn’t end well for the shark, though, I will say. Fascinating stuff. With beautiful playing by Neil Brand, who certainly cranked up the tension for a nasty altercation with an octopus.
More underwater eye-candy could be found in tonight’s late-night offering, Folly of Vanity (Maurice Elvey, Henry Otto, 1925), a Rediscovery, and quite an eye-popping one. Billie Dove and her hubby are blissful newlyweds… more or less. But a rich gentleman friend who throws orgiastic “intimate parties”, a cougar widow and a heap of jewellery sow the seeds of marital discontent. I could elaborate but there’s no need. All you need to know is that Dove dives off a yacht, and then follows a reel of semi-naked water ballet, tableaux and athletic display as she is transported to Neptune’s kingdom to be chastised about vanity, meanwhile the audience gets an eyeful. As the catalogue notes point out, in the absence of an extant Annette Kellerman films, this title is perhaps suggestive of their content and aesthetic. Mad as a box of frogs, quoth one pal of mine, using a suitably amphibian simile.
Were we prepared for such visions of physical splendour, surreal imaginary and sexual import? Well yes, we always are, here at the Giornate. But especially so after the second of our Feminist Fragments bills (why so late in the day, perhaps so they can colour our dreams all the more easily?), themed around Queer Eyes, Loose Lips and Detachable Limbs. Hands down, the highlight here were the grappling women of Joseph Rosenstein’s Vrouwelijke Worstelaars (1907), so strong and powerful and proud of it. I also loved a blitz of roller-skate imagery, some gender-swapped gams, Alice Guy’s dancing duo, a hexed bicycle, adancing girl with enough pearls to make Billie Dove swoon,and an explosive finish, courtesy of Saint Barbara, patron saint of Artillery, played by none other than Lyda Borelli.
Poetic Intertitle of the Day
“A beautiful vision, that can only be created by the Seventh Art.” A moment to sigh and enjoy the spectacle in Wonders of the Sea.
Comic Intertitle of the Day
“Limping Lassie, come hither.” Mary Pickford chats up a wobbly goose in Pride of the Clan.
- Sine Nomine. Can you help identify an unidentified silent film?
- Purrdenone. A very specific theme today. We had “citizen cat” on trial in the Revolutionary section of Leaves From Satan’s Book, and a cat marrying a goose, with a goat officiating, in Pickford’s “braw weddin’” in Pride of the Clan. Plus kittens crawling around everywhere.
- The Slapstick 2025 programme is live now! I will be there highlighting Soviet comedies and introducing a couple of those as well as Ozu’s impeccable I Was Born, But…
- You can read more about the festival, and all of the films, on the Giornate website.
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