D.J. Turner
And so we came to the fateful year of 1993: thus the festival programme, paraphrasing Cecil B. DeMille writing in his autobiography. DeMille was of course talking about 1913.
For those not familiar with Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, here is a brief introduction. It is an eight-day festival devoted to silent films held in October in Pordenone, a small town some 60 kilometres northeast of Venice. Started in 1981 with some 40 attendees, ten years later this seemingly impossible festival attracted 500 enthusiasts - archivists, academics, collectors, scholars - from around the world. It has become the Cannes of silent film, run by a handful of dedicated souls who perform a small miracle each year. But this year was a close call. The Verdi theatre had been closed, subsidies were reduced or cut altogether (rumour had it that all those who control the purse strings in Italy were in jail as the wave of political cleansing swept the country). Another kind of cleansing went on in the former Yugoslavia, just a short drive from Pordenone, and brought a massive NATO military presence to take up already scarce hotel rooms. But this is Italy. Money was found, some guests were received in the homes of private individuals (who surely were unaware that Le Giornate screenings, which start at 9am or earlier, NEVER end before 1am and often much later) or bussed to hotels in a neighbouring town. The Verdi reopened just 24 hours before the festival was to begin. The show went on! And what a show.
This year the chosen themes were films produced in 1913, a retrospective of the films of Rex Ingram and a tribute to Charley Chase on the centenary of their births, a tribute to the Prague archives on their Golden Jubilee, and a selection of films from Australia and New Zealand.
The limits of human endurance make it impossible to view every film shown, at least for this writer, though it is rumoured that some people do see everything. And space limitations make it impossible to describe every film shown. So, a few of the highlights.
The fateful year of 1913
From Scandinavia came two remarkable entries: Victor Sjostrom's first feature, the already accomplished work of social criticism Ingebor Holm, and the somewhat rarer Atlantis, a ten-reel feature from Denmark's August Blom, that provoked sharply divided reactions. Léonce Perret's four-part, two-hour long serial L'enfant de Paris (Gaumont) with its location shooting and narrative drive proved greatly superior to Pathé's Le roi de l'air (René Leprince). British production was less well represented. In comparison with others, the films were primitive but mercifully short with relatively little to choose between Pimple's Wonderful Gramophone (Joe and Fred Evans), There's Good in the Worst of Us (British and Colonial) and At the Foot of the Scaffold (Hepworth). The trick film The Mystic Mat (J.H.Martin) with its racist overtones, The Anarchist's Doom, directed for Barker by the peripatetic American Alexander Butler, and Blood and Bosh from Hepworth were perhaps more accomplished and consequently more entertaining but one could only wonder at the absence of a British feature. The six-reel Barker production of East Lynne, directed by Bert Haldane, comes to mind, given both its availability and its qualities, if we can go by Rachael Low's mouthwatering description. From Italy, along with the original spectacle film, Enrico Guazzoni's Quo Vadis?, came a newly restored print of the legendary diva Lyda Borelli's first film, Ma l'amor mio non muore! (roughly translated, But My Love Does Not Die), directed by Mario Caserini, better known for his spectacular epics. It tells a Mata-Hari style tale of espionage with exceptional slowness despite, or because of, the absence of many of the inter-titles. It proved remarkable for its use of space and movement, using large 15-metre square rooms complemented by mirrors, and was ultimately a mesmerising experience.
If the British selection disappointed, the American selection literally shone in the dark. Indeed, the US and Germany provided perhaps the best and the strangest offerings from 1913. Notable were Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber's Suspense, despite an improbable plot which crammed an inordinate number of coincidences into a single reel, and Thomas H. Ince's western, The Struggle which packed into 26 minutes enough action and incident for a full length feature . It was useful to have the opportunity to compare George Loane Tucker's dramatic feature, Traffic in Souls with Frank Beal's grittier short, The Inside of the White Slave Traffic. In As in a Looking Glass, we have the combination of avant-garde trappings and sordid situations. The owner of an upmarket gambling establishment brings her daughter home from school to sell her to a count but the daughter decides to shop around and sets her sights higher, or lower, depending on point of view. A remarkable exercise in wall-to-wall nastiness. If the showing of this rarity piqued more than one historian's curiosity, the programme abetted by attributing it to Marion Leonard, the lead actress, best known for her early stint at Biograph. The un-credited director was Marion Leonard's husband, the gloriously named Stanner E.V. Taylor, and on the evidence of this entry may qualify, as Andrew Sarris might say, as a subject for further research. From Germany, Stellan Rye's Der Student von Prag with Paul Wegener is a known quantity. Lotos, the Temple Dancer, an amiable piece of hokum from the little known Danish director L.A.Winkel, though presented in long static takes, at least offered some action - an Indian temple dancer travels to England and recovers a jewel appropriated by a British officer. But what to make of Franz Hoffer's variation on the Cinderella story? Here the prince appropriates a young lady's shoe, joins the ball with the shoe protruding from the pocket of his trousers, returns from time to time to dally with the rightful owner of the shoe, then ends by writing on the shoe's sole "I would like to be walked over by your slipper" or so the translator would have it. All in all, one to delight every shoe and foot fetishist at Pordenone.
On the evidence of the films shown, Rex Ingram, despite a pictorial sensibility to rival that of Maurice Tourneur (a nod here to John F. Seitz, his cameraman from 1920 to 1926 on twelve consecutive films for Metro), was rarely any better than his scripts. But then how many directors are? The pièce de résistance was surely the restored print of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, painstakingly assembled from domestic and foreign source material and beautifully colour-tinted. Presented by Kevin Brownlow with a prerecorded score by Carl Davis and the projection speed carefully varied all throughout the showing, it was a revelation and, with Scaramouche, this may remain his finest film, his European productions notwithstanding. The Conquering Power and Turn to the Right (1921) provided more prosaic fare before returning to the opulence of The Prisoner of Zenda and Scaramouche (1923). In 1924, Ingram succeeded in leaving Hollywood and the Metro lot to shoot The Arab in Tunisia and Paris and then install himself in Nice to work out of the Victorine studios for the rest of his career. With Mare Nostrum (1925), he returned to Blasco Ibanez for source material and moved further in the direction of mysticism which would lead to The Magician (1926), an adaptation of a Somerset Maugham novel inspired by the life of Aleistar Crowley. A rather wooden Paul Wegener plays the title role, an evil alchemist and hypnotist, who spirits Alice Terry away to his mountain top laboratory. After seeing Wegener in Der Student, some dubbed The Magician, The Undergrad of Prague. For his last film for Metro, The Garden of Allah (1927), Ingram again chose a religious theme; a Trappist monk in a monastery in North Africa temporarily abandons his faith and vows.
Prague
A tribute to the Prague archives is difficult to assemble since their treasures are so much in evidence each year at Pordenone and the richness of the collection is legendary - it is over twenty years since I saw my first silent gem with Czech inter-titles (John Ford's 1917 Straight Shooting) in Montréal - so here was an opportunity to present two important Czech productions, precursors of the legendary Extase (Hedy Lamarr), and wallow in the deep brooding eroticism of Gustav Machaty's Kreutzerova Sonata (1927) and Erotikon (1929, not to be confused with Stiller's delightful comedy of the same title of a decade earlier) in a newly restored version with additional footage. But the outstanding event of this tribute was the screening of Henri Fescourt's three-hour Monte-Cristo, a favourite of Alain Resnais. To some extent, Fescourt has always been overshadowed by Feuillade. As well, a silent film released late in 1929 was condemned to limited distribution as the tidal wave of sound rolled in, so it was ours to discover. The décors, the camera work, the narrative sweep, and the sheer drive and energy of the direction, the colour-tinted print, and accompaniment by the Orchestr Sdruzení Ceskych Symfoniku conducted by Jaroslav Opela playing a magnificent original score by Jan Klusák, made for one of the highlights of the week.
New Zealand and Australia
Pordenone's foray to Down Under provided some surprising revelations even if few knew what to expect. The New Zealand offerings were mainly of native Maori content and derivation, co-presented by archivist Jonathan Dennis (joint recipient with David Shepard of the 1993 Jean Mitry award) and an 87-year old Maori lady who sang, commented and claimed to be related to just about every living soul who appeared on the screen. The Australian selection included three features by the legendary and prolific Raymond Longford; they proved to be as primitive as the country being portrayed and something of a disappointment. The Woman Suffers (1918), a thundering melodrama with seduction used as an instrument of revenge, presented an excess of caddish men while On our Selection (1920) toppled over in the opposite direction as a pioneer family, struggling in the bush to settle their allotted plot of land (or "selection") received help beyond belief from a more fortunate neighbour. The Sentimental Bloke (1919), considered to be Longford's masterpiece, is based on a then-popular narrative poem which appears to be presented in its entirety in the inter-titles; it makes for considerable repetition and much reading as the titles take up what seems like one-third of the film. The two offerings by Frank Hurley, renowned both for his still photography and documentary films, were even more mundane. A documentary of Mawson's 1911-1912 Antarctic expedition, Home of the Blizzard (1913), was hurt by its lack of inter-titles - it was clearly intended to be shown with a lecturer - and the scenes of the Antarctic have been done better both then, for example by Ponting , and since. The Jungle Woman (1926) is one of two fiction features made by Hurley for the British company Stoll and shot back-to-back in exotic locations, this one in Dutch New Guinea. With its uneasy mixture of authentic locations and native extras, a cast of British actors headed by Eric Bransby Williams, and a weak script, it looks as if it were made to comply with the soon to be established British quota. However, ten tantalizing minutes of fragments from the 1906 Tate brothers production, The Story of the Kelly Gang, considered to be the first feature-length film, and the first of a series of long films made in Australia before they became the norm elsewhere, seemed to indicate a remarkably accomplished work for the period.
Charley Chase
Born Charles Parrott in 1893, Charley Chase entered films in 1913 and worked with Al Christie before joining Keystone in 1914 where he played in a number of Chaplin films. By 1919, he was at Bull's Eye where - ironically - he would direct among others Billy West; Pordenone showed their Ship Ahoy. At the end of 1919, he joined Roach where he directed Snub Pollard one- and two-reelers until 1924 when he returned to acting. Adopting the name Charley Chase, he began a long series of very funny comedy shorts, many directed by Leo McCarey, others by his younger brother, James Parrott. In 1925, he really began to hit his stride in two-reelers such as What Price Goofy? (1925), The Caretaker's Daughter (1925), Crazy Like a Fox (1926) and Mighty Like a Moose (1926), all directed by McCarey and shown at Pordenone. Tall and slim with a pencil moustache, from film to film alternately dapper man about town or henpecked husband, he continued into the sound period and worked right up to his death in 1940. The Pip from Pittsburgh (1931) gave a good idea of what he was able to do in the new medium with his somewhat raucous grating voice.
Among the films which did not fit into any particular category was a beautiful work hiding behind an unappealing title, Gretchen the Greenhorn, directed in 1916 by Chester and Sidney Franklin, in which a Dutch immigrant and his daughter, played by Dorothy Gish, are tricked into working for a counterfeiter (Eugene Pallette). Interesting as a document of the immigrant experience, albeit as seen by Hollywood, it benefited from superb photography and an excellent restoration job by Eric Aijala at UCLA.
Another notable restoration came from Spain. A 25-minute extract from Borzage's 1916 Land O'Lizards suffered from very long Spanish titles which seemed to be all that had survived by but the second reel the ratio of action to titles increased considerably. A fine film, it was also one of the most accomplished pieces of restoration of the festival and Medardo Amor Martin is to be congratulated. A 1924 German animated short - puppets on strings -, Die Grosse Liebe einer Kleinen Tanzerin was positively the most grotesque film of the festival, guaranteed to give children of all ages nightmares, and worthy of a separate study.
The festival provides a unique occasion to show unidentified films and to try to learn something about them. Two short items were identified by German historian Herbert Birett: Concours de gourmandes as a 1905 Théophile Pathé production and Ciore di padre as the 1909 Hamlet produced by Films et Kinématograph Lux, Paris. Carlo Montanaro, head of the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, identified a rather elaborate two-minute studio tank piece, tentatively titled Bombardment of a Port, as Événements Russo-Japonais: Guerre Russo-Japonaise, made for Pathé in 1904 by Lucien Nonguet. An earlier suggestion that it could be 1941 was dismissed amid general hilarity.
A musical accompaniment is provided with each film and this gives pianists from around the world a chance to perform before a knowledgeable audience and more importantly perhaps before each other. Each year various experiments are tried - this year Wim Mertens from Holland sang and played - but in general the true specialists seem to provide the most appropriate performances. Their work is rarely mentioned in accounts of the festival, despite the obvious appreciation of the audiences and the yawning chasm that their absence would leave. This year, among the stalwarts from earlier years, Neil Brand (London), Philip Carli (Rochester), Antonio Coppola (Rome), Fernand Schirren (Brussels) and Gabriel Thibaudeau (Montréal) each added immeasurably to what was on the silver screen. Two newcomers from the United States, Donald Sosin and Robert Israel, and one from Stockholm, Matti Bye must also be mentioned. To close the festival, Carl Davis conducted Ljubljana's Camerata Labacensis in his arrangement of the original Louis Gottschalk score for Broken Blossoms. This was followed by Philip Carli, closing out finally, as he did for five of the eight nights, accompanying Machaty's Erotikon.
David Robinson Exhibition: the Year 1913
Last but not least: for the eighth year, David Robinson mounted an exhibition of stills, programmes, reviews and much else, all from his personal collection, dating from 1913. An accompanying text describing life in 1913 rang all too familiar. With war in Serbia, the events could well have been taken from the newspapers of 1993. Erudite and entertaining, an illustrated catalogue of the exhibition will be published in a forthcoming issue of Griffithiana and should not be missed.
La 12ème édition des Journées du cinéma muet de Pordenone, relève, encore plus que les précédentes, du miracle. En effet, en cette "année fatidique" de 1993, où les difficultés se sont accumulées à tous les niveaux (allant de triviales difficultés de locaux de projection jusqu'aux retombées frioulanes des conflits serbo-croate-bosniaque), le programme principal offrait aux pèlerins un excellent - et pour le moins étrange - choix de cette année singulière qui précéda la Première Guerre Mondiale. Une exposition réalisée par David Robinson complétait la rétro: "L'année 1913".
D'autres sections offraient des programmes composés autour du thème principal: une rétro Rex Ingram et un hommage à Charley Chase à l'occasion de leur centième anniversaire, les 50 ans des Archives Nationales de Prague, une sélection de films d'Australie et de la Nouvelle Zélande de 1913.
Pordenone 1993
La 12a edición de las Jornadas de cine mudo de Pordenone se pareció mucho a un milagro. Efectivamente, en este "año fatídico" que fué el 93, donde las dificultades se acumularon a todos los niveles (desde la trivial escasez de salas hasta hasta los efectos friulanos del conflicto serbio-croata-bosníaco), el programa ofreció a los pelegrinos del silente una excelente -y extraña- selección de películas representativas de este año tan singular que fué el que precedió a la Primera Guerra Mundial.
Las demás secciones ofrecieron programas compuestos en torno al tema principal: una retospectiva Rex Ingram y un homenaje a Charley Chase en ocasión de sus respectivos centenarios, los 50 años de los Archivos Nacionales de Praga, una selección de películas de Australia y Nueva Zelanda.