“The heart-rending story of a girl who weds for wealth, and finds that a palace of love is a gilded cage” is how Essanay advertized their 1915 release The Gilded Cage. This film, preserved by the National Film Preservation Foundation (US), caught my attention because of the participation of actress and director Ruth Stonehouse, who I recalled from her entry on the Woman Film Pioneers Project.

Ruth Stonehouse, Motion Picture Story Magazine, December 1914

A veteran actress who appeared in hundreds of films, Stonehouse was also keenly interested in the production side of the industry. WFPP article author Michelle Koerner quotes a 1919 article in Motion Picture Magazine, in which Stonehouse states, “We-ll, of course I do want to be a star … for a while … but eventually I want to be a directress, a producer; I want to be in the business end of it, that is, at the same time, the artistic end of it”. In fact, she had already written and directed nine films, the 1917 comic short series the Mary Ann Kelly Stories, in which she also played the leading role.

“It’s no fun being a stepdaughter, mother” – Ruth Stonehouse as Marie.

The Gilded Cage is a simple film, telling the story of Marie (Stonehouse), the stepdaughter relegated to a servant-like role, and Eloise, the spoiled favourite. Eloise rejects her lover Kent in order to marry a wealthy man; Marie and the heartbroken Kent then get to know each other, eventually falling in love.

Betty Scott as Eloise.

It’s a well-photographed film that is elevated by the nuance of its performances – Stonehouse does fine work as Marie, initially timorous, then joyous and even playful under the blush of love. The happiness of Marie and Kent is contrasted with the regrets of Eloise, who could easily have been portrayed as more shallow or vengeful; it is to the film’s credit that she is not a simple villain. Indeed, from a modern-day perspective, Eloise’s choice is entirely rational in an era in which women generally did not have a lot of options or enjoy economic independence, and she looks genuinely sad and conflicted about breaking things off with her lover. For a short film with an obvious message (money != happiness), it is really rather humanistic.

There were two particular shots in The Gilded Cage that spurred me to write up this post. The first is the shot below, where Eloise watches Marie and Kent in a tender moment – a striking composition, and an interesting example of female voyeurism.

Secondly, the final shot of The Gilded Cage, from which the film earns its title. After Eloise mournfully contemplates a bird in a cage (yes, that old chestnut), she buries her head in her hands, and we get the following dissolve:

SYMBOLISM! It’s the opposite of subtle, but undeniably effective, and a pretty cool mid-teens optical effect.

Research into The Gilded Cage is confounded by the fact that 1916 saw the release of a higher-profile Alice Brady film of the same title, although one can find some references to the Stonehouse film on the Media History Digital Library. Since the surviving copy of The Gilded Cage was found in New Zealand, a search of digitized newspaper collection Papers Past reveals that the film was shown across the nation in the last quarter of 1915, as a sideshow to Chaplin’s The Bank. Newspaper mentions of the film were positive: “a drama of merit” (Star, 05 Nov 1915); a “warm, human drama” (Observer, 27 Nov 1915); here’s an advert from the Evening Star (Otago) of 13 November 1915:

Ruth Stonehouse was born on September 28th, 1892, making this the 123th anniversary of her birth. She retired from motion pictures in 1928 and thereafter devoted herself to gardening, cooking, and charity work; per Wikipedia, she prepared “culinary masterpieces which her friends deemed superior to most chefs”. I wonder if she dreamed that people would watch her films 100 years on.

In Motion Picture Story Magazine, December 1912

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The Gilded Cage. Dir. not stated. Chicago: Essanay, 1915. Available to watch here on the NFPF website.

A recurring dream about speechlessness, the visage of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the sight of voices without sound—these elements were the genesis of a recent poetry book, Silents, by Claire Crowther. Finding herself intensely moved by Falconetti’s overwhelming performance, which she stumbled onto on YouTube, Crowther became more and more interested in silent film. As a poet, she was especially drawn to the absent voices of those on the silent screen—the close-ups of their faces, the way actors sometimes seem to be “wrestling with a locked mouth”, the way speech is pronounced but not heard. Perceiving “something particularly vulnerable and haunting about those silent mouths”, Crowther wanted to allow speech to emerge from these characters. Her project is not motivated by any sense of deficiency in silent film, but rather aims to use one medium to illuminate the psychology of another: “Poetry and film have always looked to connect”, she writes.

Nitrate star symbol

I should admit that poetry is a medium I know little about. As such, writing about it is difficult; not only do I not know the terminology, it seems reductive to try to describe or explain the delicate web of connections and imagery that Crowther has generated. For example, in the first poem, The Inflammatory Properties of Celluloid—for Oscar Micheaux, she works with ideas on the star/light/screen axis: movie stars, stars used in intertitles to blank out slurs, the star of the nitrate edge symbol; film projection, the darkness of night and the theatre, a digitized film, the screen of her mobile phone. That’s an astonishing density of imagery in just fourteen lines, in a poem that also opens with a nod to Crowther’s central theme of voice and speech:

If I were as dead as all these stars are, in the warm dark,
velvet-lined, I’d mind

an audience peering into my mouth to see what
silence makes of words.

Among the characters Crowther brings to life are Shamakky Joe, a travelling shadow-play entertainer; Femuncula, Crowther’s imagined female homunculus; Joan of Arc; a sisterhood of witches inspired by the Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922); an unnamed cinemagoer. Not all subjects are people—one poem seems to be written from the perspective of Nell Shipman’s camera (The Future of Silence), another depicts the molecular potential of the projection wall (Edison Plays God in the Parlour), and one is about a stretching tree—an organic instrument of torture imagined by Crowther after watching A Fool There Was and Häxan.

One of the poems I particularly liked was Panchromatic, Metropolis, an ode to panchromatic film stock. Early on, film stocks were not sensitive to all of the colours in the visible spectrum; orthochromatic stocks were sensitive primarily to blue and green light, which is the reason why some people’s eyes look milky in early films. Crowther imagines a woman working in the sun-glazed, monochrome Library of Quiet—a silent film version of Borges’ Library of Babel?—and a new girl who is “not my colour but she is my shade”. Another of my favourites, The Landlady Suspects Her Lodgers, uses the motif of sewing to indicate movement and sensual desire:

When I asked to see Kiss in the Tunnel
I was made to sew perfect stitches instead.
All day, threads floated from my hem,
loose, long, children under suspicion.

There is humour, too—I laughed out loud at the playfulness of Germaine Dulac Explains Why Antonin Artaud Called Her a Cow, in which several possibilities are evinced:

Because he’s mad!
Because his film script is mad but He Sees!
Because my film clearly shows Animal Nature is Cultural Definition as far as Women are concerned …
Because Surrealists are Despots!
Because he hates milk?

All credible explanations! (I, too, hate milk).

Crowther plays with words as well as ideas. The subject of The Cinemagoer’s Dream fits a blind to their window; the use of the word ‘stop’ in this poem works on multiple levels, evoking not just blocking light from coming through a window, but also the idea of stopping down a camera aperture (or indeed the widening/narrowing of a pupil—it is not a coincidence that the facing page shows the famous eye closeup from Grandma’s Reading Glass, UK 1900). In Homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer, there’s the hanging ambiguity of a couplet like “while I don’t know / why one device rather than another will make me”, encompassing both the ideas of induced existence and missing action—to make me what? In one case, Crowther dispenses with language altogether: the wordless eloquence of The General or, The Achievement of Kisses—a silent sonnet for Buster Keaton is worth the price of admission alone.

Crowther explains her formal approach in her introductory essay “The fragment and its relationships”: in Silents, she uses syllabic verse, which entails a fixed number of syllables per line, and often a set stanza pattern. As I found out from trusty old Wikipedia, syllabic verse is common in many languages, but in English, poetic verse typically relies on accent—the number of stressed syllables per line, rather than the pure number of syllables in each line. Crowther, therefore, follows a rhythm that is more free-floating metrically than accentual verse, but more tightly constrained than free verse – “a handcuff on every line”. Not all of the poems follow a strict structure, but many do: for example, The Stretching Tree has four syllables per line, Jehanne d’Arc and the Angels of Battle is written in couplets of 15 and 4 syllables each (reversing order each couplet), and Screamers in Intertitles follows a pattern of 11-8-9-6 for each of its three stanzas. Crowther is an incredibly concise writer; all of the poems have fewer than twenty lines. These are short sensory impressions rather than extended meditations, but they say everything that they need to. I won’t say that every single poem grabbed me, but quite a few of them did, and several stuck deeply in my mind.

As the images of the book spreads show, Silents is a beautifully presented book—the elegant design of the book is integral to the experience of Crowther’s verse. She has selected images from the Ronald Grant Archive to complement her poems, encouraging one to read her texts in relation to these photographs. Two of my favourite juxtapositions: Shamakky Joe is faced with a still of shadowed claws from The Cat and the Canary (US 1927); The Song of the Stretching Tree is faced with a still attributed to René Clair’s Entr’acte (FR 1924), of a woman being clasped into the body of a tree. (Shown above. Wonderful image, but I don’t recall this image being in Entr’acte, myself—does anyone know about its provenance?) As with Silents overall, this poem and image capture the familiar-made-strange or uncanny sense that one gets with certain silent films.

Yes, film’s made of light. Silents is a very conceptually tight work, beautifully executed.

– – –

Silents by Claire Crowther. London, UK: Hercules Editions, 2015. Go and buy a copy here!

Images of Silents © Hercules Editions &/or the Ronald Grant Archive; poetry excerpts © Claire Crowther.

Shanghai in the 1930s: a glittering city, humming to the rhythm of its jazz-filled dance halls, streets lit up by neon signs, art deco buildings springing up like mushrooms. A whirlwind of dance, images of film stars vying with advertisements for cigarettes and lipstick, trains and cars traversing the city. Vice, crime, and prostitution beneath the glamorous veneer; then as now, Shanghai was heaven for the rich, hell for the poor. This was the time when Shanghai was known as ‘The Paris of the East’. It was a world city teeming with hedonism, life, and energy, dancing to the beat of jazz and looking for meaning in the curve of a woman’s smile.

     
  
野玫瑰 | Wild Rose (1932)

No one expressed the vitality and rhythm of Republican Shanghai like Mu Shiying (穆時英), Shanghai’s “literary comet”. An avid participant in the nightlife culture of the city, Mu wrote prolifically in his short life,¹ capturing the energy, colour, and tempo of life in the metropolis. Although Mu eschewed labels himself, he has often been associated with the group of modernist writers known as the ‘New Sensationalists’ (新感觉派; pinyin: xīn gǎnjué pài), who sought to portray the dynamic experience of modern urban life. His work should be seen in the context of the May Fourth and New Culture Movements, which were reactions against traditional Confucian values, instead promoting Western-influenced ideas around democracy, gender egalitarianism, and modernisation. Mu’s writing can be compared to—and stands alongside—Western modernist writers, showing their influence as well as that of Chinese modernists such as Liu Na’ou (劉吶鷗) and Dai Wangshu (戴望舒).

Recently, an English-language book devoted to Mu has been published, collecting six of his short stories, four of which have never been published in English before.² The volume, Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist, also contains a lengthy essay by co-translator Andrew David Field, which gives a biography of Mu and situates him in the context of his times. It is an excellent introduction to the work of Mu, who I was not familiar with before; for obvious reasons, he was not revived in China until the 1980s, and little of his work has previously been available in the Anglosphere.

What a treat that some of it now is! Mu is a highly accomplished writer, expressionistic and formally inventive, bringing to life the sounds and colour of Shanghai’s streets and dancehalls in dazzling style. Reading Mu’s stories, I was struck by their cinematic qualities— not just their references to film stars and movie culture, but above all their vivid imagery and sometimes montage-like structure. Mu is often more concerned with creating a series of visual impressions than a conventional narrative. In Shanghai Fox-trot in particular, time is compressed into a series of visual impressions as though captured through a camera, cutting between different shots of the city and its people.³ Indeed, it’s easy to see Shanghai Fox-trot as a city symphony in miniature:

The azure dusk blankets the whole scene. A saxophone stretches out its neck, opens its great mouth, and blares at them, Woo woo. Inside on the smooth floor, floating skirts, floating robes, exquisite heels, heels, heels, heels, heels. Free-flowing hair and men’s faces. Men’s white-collared shirts and women’s smiling faces. Arms outstretched, kingfisher-green earrings dragging on shoulders. A group of tightly arranged round tables, but with scattered chairs. Waiters in white stand in dark corners. Scent of alcohol, perfume, ham and eggs, smoke … someone sits along in the corner holding a coffee to stimulate his energy.

This is one of the most interesting passages in the story, not just for its evocation of the nightclub atmosphere, but for the fact that a page or two later, the entire paragraph is replicated in reverse (“A lone man sits in the corner holding a black coffee …”)⁴ Mu frequently uses repetition for poetic effect: later in the same story, we see the repeated image of “two eyeballs saturated with cocktails”. Another memorable example for me was a line repeated in Five in a Nightclub: “Seconds crawled like ants over his heart”—what a wonderful phrase to describe the desperation and apprehension of the titular five! Likewise, Black Peony is bookended by variations on the phrase, “The rouge on her lips goes through my shirt and imprints directly on my skin—and my heart is tainted red”.

In Five in a Nightclub, the energy of the street is conveyed in a stream of words and sentence fragments—lines from advertisements, conversational snippets, newspaper headlines—the writerly equivalent of cinematic montage. Mu’s camera-eye pans across the city streets, pausing on a woman applying lipstick, a neon sign, shops and cinema, zooming in to find its target:

Swirling, endlessly swirling neon lights—
Suddenly the neon lights focus:
EMPRESS NIGHTCLUB.

 
神女 | The Goddess (1934)

In Mu’s stories, above all, Shanghai is colourful.

Red streets, green streets, blue streets, purple streets … City clad in strong colours! Dancing neon light—multi-coloured waves, scintillating waves, colourless waves—a sky filled with colour. The sky now had everything: wine, cigarettes, high-heels, clock-towers …

All of the Chinese silent films I’ve seen have been black and white,⁵ but I thought instantly of Lonesome (US 1928), with its beautiful stencil-coloured cityscape sequence.

Another striking line, from Craven ‘A’: “The midnight city had fallen deeply asleep. Only a pair of neon eyes was looking at me from under the sky-blue sheets.” I’m unsure if it’s a deliberate allusion, but the imagery is very suggestive of the famous cover of the first edition of The Great Gatsby.

Mu also makes mention of movie stars in his stories, his referents being American rather than Chinese. Norma Shearer is name-checked in three of the six stories, and in The Man Who Was Treated as a Plaything, the narrator, university student Alexy, compares love interest Rongzi to Clara Bow no less than four times. His image of her, the archetypal flighty, whimsical-treacherous woman, seems integrally shaped by the world of film:

I felt that every letter O was the imprint of her lips; the eyes in the poster of Vilma Banky on the wall looked like her eyes, Nancy Carrol’s [sic] smile looked like her smile, and strangely her nose was growing on Norma Shearer’s face.⁶

The time when Mu came of age saw the emergence of a new type of womanhood, the ‘modern girl’ (modeng nülang), the Chinese counterpart of the flapper, garçonne, modan garu (Japan), etc. Such women are the frequent subjects of Mu’s works, which depict the pleasures and dangers of romantic love in the metropolis, the push-and-pull, often transactional relations between the sexes in the seductive space of the dance-hall. As Field writes, all of the stories in the volume feature women “whose relations with men are ambiguous, unstable, unpredictable and uncontrollable”.

脂粉市场 | Cosmetics Market (1933)

Mu Shiying’s two preoccupations—the woman and the city—are unmistakeably intertwined. Nowhere is this more obvious that in Alexy’s description of Rongzi:

This was truly a girl who lived on stimulation and speed, Rongzi! Jazz, machines, speed, urban culture, American flavour, contemporary beauty … she was made up of all these things.

Another example is the Black Peony: a woman of the city, liberated from traditional gender roles, yet defined by consumer culture and the pleasures of urban life.

“Take me, for example, I’m living in the lap of luxury, if you take away jazz, fox-trot, mixed drinks, the fashionable colours of autumn, eight-cylinder engine cars, Egyptian tobacco … I become a soulless person. So deeply soaked in luxury, carpe diem, I am living this life of luxury, but I am tired.”

“Yes, life is mechanical,” the narrator agrees.

The woman and the city … Ruan Lingyu in 神女 | The Goddess (1934)

One of the most incredible descriptive passages in the book, however, likens the female body not to the city but the landscape of a country. “A person’s face is a map,” states the narrator of Craven ‘A’, taking us from the “black pine forest zone” of Craven ‘A’’s hair down her face—“the mouth of the volcano opened slightly and out poured Craven ‘A’ smoke. Her breasts are a “twin pair of small mountains […] their purple peaks projecting faintly out of the clouds. This must have been a famous scenic spot”. The explorer’s gaze travels down the lower half her body, her “exquisite pair of sea walls”, the two gulls of her feet, dancing to the tune of ‘Goodnight, Vienna’. This description is not without sexual connotations; the narrator notes that “the place that met the sea must be an important harbour, a large port of trade” and that “everyone took this place as an excellent spot for a short-term visit”. It’s a very striking extended metaphor.

Elsewhere, women are often described in ways that recall film compositions; for example, in The Man Who Was Treated as a Plaything, the narrator moves “Through the Jazz forest of dancing legs”, and in Five in a Nightclub, women apply makeup in their compact mirrors in close-up—“But they only saw a nose, or an eye, or a curve of a lip, or a wisp of hair; they didn’t see the whole face.”

I’m not a film theory buff, but in reading Mu’s stories I recalled some of the silent film-era writing on the cinematic close-up. In 1921, Jean Epstein declared that the close-up was the soul of cinema, describing the affective power that this magnification had on him as a viewer:

A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity. I am hypnotized. Now the tragedy is anatomical. […] Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. […] A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orthography of the face vacillates. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away.⁷

Bela Balázs was another filmmaker-writer who mused on the close-up, which he considered the “true terrain” of the film. In 1924, he wrote:

The close-up in film is the art of emphasis. It is a mute pointing to important and significant detail, while at the same time providing an interpretation of the life depicted. Two films with the same plot, the same acting and the same long shots but with different close-ups will express two different views of life.⁸

In Balázs’ view, the close-up is uniquely revealing; it discloses truth beyond the visible, not just “the face we wear, but our actual visual appearance”.⁹ The director guides the audience’s gaze and zooms in to show something more than just the sum of its parts, just as Mu does in his literary close-ups. Take this description from Five in a Nightclub:

On Daisy Huang’s laughing face, below her Norma Shearer hairdo, only one eye was visible, the wrinkles around it cleverly concealed by make-up. The shadow under her nose obscured lines at the corners of her mouth. But even laughter could not hide the weariness in her eye.

The character of Daisy Huang illustrates the central ambivalence of Mu’s work—a celebration of the nightlife of Shanghai, but one that reveals a certain trepidation, suggesting its uneasy undercurrents. The pleasures of the city may provide romance and adventure, but beware the concomitant sense of alienation and anonymity. This psychological ambiguity is, I think, one of the great powers of Mu’s writing—as we all know, the grey areas of life are more interesting than simple veneration or condemnation.

銀漢雙星 | Two Stars in the Milky Way (1931)

I’ve illustrated this article with images from 1930s Shanghai films, which express many of the same themes found in Mu Shiying’s fiction, although I find the film of this era less equivocal about the follies of city life; not surprising, given the experimental nature of Mu’s writing. I’m not trying to illustrate his stories, exactly, but to suggest how the language of contemporary film also dealt with the urban environment, contemporary femininity, the pace of modern life. Undoubtedly a topic that deserves further elaboration, and has probably had so from scholars. For today, though, let me recommend again the dazzling work of this very gifted writer.

– – –

Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist. New Translations and an Appreciation by Andrew David Field. Translations by Andrew David Field and Hong Yu, except for Five in a Nightclub by Randolph Trumbull. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014. Available from HKU Press.

Footnotes

1. Mu was assassinated in somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1940, aged 28. The Second Sino-Japanese War (known in China as the ‘War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression’) was raging, against the backdrop of the ongoing Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists, and Shanghai was at the time under Japanese occupation. For reasons unclear, Mu returned from Hong Kong in 1939 and accepted a newspaper position under the auspices of the collaborationist government (i.e., the Japanese puppet regime). Questions remain about his death, but it is thought that his assassination came at the hands of the KMT. Field quotes a newspaper article published after Mu’s death which describes Mu as having turned away from the Nationalists and states: “He was careful and diligent in his work, but was hated by reactionary desperadoes”.

2. In English and Chinese, the six short stories are:

i. The Man Who Was Treated as a Plaything, 1933 (被当作消遣品的男子; pinyin: Bèi dàng zuò xiāoqiǎn pǐn de nánzǐ)

ii. Five in a Nightclub, 1933 (夜總會裏的五個人; pinyin: Yèzǒnghuì lǐde wǔgèrén)

iii. Craven ‘A’, 1932 (title originally in English)

iv. Night, 1932 (夜; pinyin: Yè)

v. Shanghai Fox-trot, 1934 (上海的狐步舞; pinyin: Shànghǎi de hú bù wǔ)

vi. Black Peony, 1933 (黑牡丹; pinyin: Hēi mǔdān).

3. Indeed, Hong Yi writes in her preface that Mu wrote for and directed films, although they were apparently never released.

4. The full text of the ‘inverted’ paragraph reads:

A lone man sits in the corner holding a black coffee to stimulate his energy. Scent of alcohol, perfume, ham and eggs, smoke … Standing in dark corners are waiters in white. Chairs are scattered about, but tables are lined up neatly. Kingfisher pendants drag on shoulders, outstretched arms. Women’s smiling faces and men’s white-collared shirts. Men’s faces and free-flowing hair. Exquisite heels, heels, heels, heels, heels. Floating robes, floating skirts, in the midst of a smooth polished floor. Woo woo, blaring at them, that saxophone stretches out its neck, opens its big mouth. Azure dawn blankets the whole scene.

5. I’m inclined to think that Chinese films of this era were not tinted or toned, but if some were, the copies available today do not reflect this.

6. The bolding indicates that Mu used the English word in the original text.

7. Epstein, Jean. “Magnification.” Trans. Stuart Liebman. Originally published as “Grossissement” in Bonjour Cinema (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1921); reprinted in French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

8. Balázs, Béla. The Visible Man, or the Culture of Film. Originally published as Der sichtbare Mensch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1924). Trans. Rodney Livingstone and reprinted in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible man and The Spirit of film, ed. Erica Carter (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010).

9. Balázs, Béla. The Spirit of Film. Originally published as Der Geist des Films (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1930). Trans. Rodney Livingstone and reprinted in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory.

Today marks the 99th anniversary of the première of Anime Buie | Dark Souls, fourth in a series of films featuring the character Za La Mort, an honourable French apache (street criminal gang member) and his adventures in the criminal underworld and beyond. The character was the brainchild of Emilio Ghione, who wrote and directed the decade-long series, as well as starring as Za. With his sharp cheekbones and sunken eyes, Ghione is one of the most distinctive looking actors of his time.

 A screenshot from episode 1 of I topi grigi that amuses me.

As a genre, the crime film saw a boom in the early teens, spurred on by sensational newspaper reportage of the Parisian criminal demi-monde, and the huge success of pulp crime fiction such as the Nick Carter, Fantômas, and Zigomar stories. Les Vampires (FR 1915-16) is the most famous example of a film about an apache gang; in Italian film, Ghione was the primary exponent of this French-born phenomenon. He produced sixteen Za La Mort films over the period 1914-1924, of which three were multiple-episode serials; a filmography for the Za La Mort series is available here.

Like that of his companion Za La Vie (Kally Sambucini, Ghione’s real-life partner), introduced in the series’ second installment Za La Mort (IT 1915), Za La Mort’s characterisation was somewhat unstable through the series, varying from a criminal to a honest man operating outside the law to a morally grey character. In Anime buie, apache (jump on it!) Za La Mort has just been released from jail after serving a two-year sentence, and two women wait for his release: Za La Vie (Sambucini) and Casque d’Or (Golden Helmet), played by Hesperia.

Although I enjoy Ghione, it was mainly Hesperia’s presence that led me to watch this film. Hesperia (née Olga Mambelli) began her career in theatre and the variety stage, and when she moved into films in 1913, she quickly became a popular cinema actress; in 1914, she was voted the most beautiful actress of the Italian screen. Today she is remembered principally (if at all) for her collaborations with her future husband Baldassarre Negroni, and the rival versions of Alexandre Dumas fils’ La dame aux camélias (La signora delle camelie) that she and Francesca Bertini released in 1915. She is a film diva of the teens that I’ve long been curious about, but had never had the chance to see in action before; while several of her films are known to survive, I believe that Anime buie is the only film of hers that is readily available for viewing.

The entrance of a diva.

And it is, indeed, her film: it quickly becomes clear that Anime buie is much more of a Hesperia film than a Ghione/Za La Mort one. As was the case with now-lost Nelly la gigolette (1914), the inaugural Za La Mort film starring Francesca Bertini, Anime buie is a film that foregrounds its female star, mingling the genre of the Italian diva film with that of the crime film. Anime buie is explicit about this approach: in a meta-cinematic turn, the diva Hesperia plays … the diva Hesperia, the persona adopted by Casque d’Or in America. We see Hesperia receiving flowers and adoration, enjoying her position as queen bee of high society, and being courted by four millionaires as she lies around smoking languidly. A major set-piece is her performance at the Tabarin-Majestic, where we see her dance (hilariously) and perform on stage as Mephistopheles.

If this wasn’t enough, in the opening to the second act, Casque d’Or is reintroduced as Hesperia via this shot:

Why yes, that is a flower arrangement spelling her name. It’s just the thing a lady needs to complement her leopard-skin rug!

But back to the story. As Za La Mort is freshly released from jail, Casque d’Or and Za La Mort’s companion Za La Vie (“the obstacle”, an intertitle tells us) are in an apache tavern. You might say that there is a certain hostility between the two women:

 
Kally Sambucini as Za La Vie; Hesperia as Casque d’Or

This series of shots was the moment my interest in the film really picked up. But the scene turns in a way I didn’t expect: as the two learn of Za La Mort’s release and imminent arrival (“Viva Za La Mort!”, a man announces via intertitle), the tension between Casque d’Or and Za La Vie erupts in spectacular fashion. The two women begin violently arguing, and Casque d’Or pulls a switchblade out of her garter.

Za La Vie hits the ground just before Za La Mort runs in, as a group of Italian policemen cycle to the scene incredibly leisurely. Finding Za La Mort standing over the body, he is thought responsible, despite Casque d’Or’s cool, remorseless confession that she knifed La Vie.

Ice cold.

The plot then picks up several years later in America, with Casque d’Or now celebrated as star dancer/performer Hesperia. Za La Mort has assumed the identity of Gil Negro, a rich banker, but he is actually still a criminal, although the nature of his villainous endeavours was not really clear to me. At a banquet, he sees Hesperia and recognizes her as the now long-forgotten Casque d’Or; cue an awkward moment of identification:

Za can’t get her out of his head, and pursues her with passion: “Casque d’Or, Hesperia, angel or devil, you are my whole life …” Mixed in with all this are some criminal goings-on, for which Za ends up back behind bars. He fakes his death in prison by obtaining a drug that makes him appear dead, and then makes his way to Europe, where Hesperia is headlining a circus act and has been warned of his arrival by the prediction of a tarot reader. The circus is accidentally set ablaze, but Za La Mort arrives just in time to save Hesperia … and whisk her away to a peaceful farming life out West (lol). The final intertitle: “Maybe love can purify the souls that once were clouded by crime …”

Needless to say, the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, and contemporaries criticized the film’s absurdity. A major sticking point is the treatment of Za La Vie: for someone who was supposedly in a partnership with her, Za La Mort not only seems markedly unconcerned by her death, but goes on to aggressively pursue her murderer on multiple continents. Hesperia is characterised as an irresistible femme fatale, still haunting Za years later (“I will breathe again only with your kisses!”, he exclaims at one point), and it seems that her real-life (and in-film) star power simply overwhelmed the narrative’s responsibility to Za La Vie. Still, these kind of plotholes are rather jarring, and the story and performances don’t do a great job of selling this scenario. From what I have read, these kind of illogicalities and confusions are relatively common in the Za La Mort series, with thrills taking precedence over narrative coherence.

Crack troops: the Italian police force rush to a crime scene.

All the same, it’s possible to pull off almost any ridiculousness as long as it’s done with panache, but as a piece of filmmaking I have to say that I found it on the clunky side. I’ve watched a couple of episodes of I topi grigi | The Grey Mice (IT 1918) and while not outstanding directorially, I remember those having a bit more visual flair and fluidity. (Of course, it doesn’t help that Anime buie is incomplete and in poor shape aesthetically). And while I didn’t really mind the confusing story, as plot isn’t my priority in film viewing, it may present a stumbling block to some people.

What of Hesperia’s performance? She’s definitely second-tier compared to Borelli, Bertini and Menichelli; to my eyes, Hesperia has nothing approaching their on-screen charisma or beauty. Then again, it’s hard not to appreciate this kind of emoting, which may be a good litmus test for if you should watch the film or not:

Glee; loathing

Hesperia as diva – the checklist

Given the centrality of Hesperia (and her star persona) to Anime buie, let’s have a look at how diva-rific it really is.

Copious costume changes. Hesperia appears in about 12 outfits, which is good for one every 4-5 minutes. Not only that, she gets a great diversity of outfits. Impressive!

No Necklace of notable length, but check out the beading on her performance outfit (top right).

Headwear that borders on the avant-garde. Hesperia wears several fashionable feathered hats, and a great black single plume as Mephisto. And I’m not sure what she’s got on her head in the banquet scene, but I know that I like it.

Symbolic naming. Film star Hesperia plays Casque d’Or, gangster’s associate based on real-life figure Amélie Élie (who as Casque d’Or was known as ‘Queen of the Apaches’) and is reborn as Hesperia, performing star.

“Is it you they call Hesperia, Casque d’Or?”

Mirrors. Not really, but we do get this moment when Za La Mort/Gil Negro looks at the hidden photo he has kept of his lost love:

A dramatic scene involving flowers. Anime Buie sets a new high bar for this criterion. One of Hesperia’s admirers places an order for “the rarest flowers you can obtain … and the letters ‘HESPERIA’ should be clearly seen”. The flowers are presented with pomp and circumstance; we see a group of men march into the room bearing flower arrangements that spell out her name.

Hesperia looks like she’s having a ball, and why not? In fact, the audience has already seen this flower arrangement – as shown in the GIF further up the page, Hesperia poses with it in the opening to this section of the film, firmly establishing her as diva and star attraction.

Feminine sufferance. Strangely little. Casque d’Or gets off scot-free and has the world at her feet as Hesperia, Za escapes death and the police repeatedly, and everyone lives happily ever after! Well, except Za La Vie, but she turns up again in the other Za La Mort films, so it wasn’t a permanent death – another example of the series’ narrative fluidity. I guess maybe Hesperia pines a little, when she’s not receiving flowers and admiration from a group of millionaires? What a life. It’s good to be a diva …

Ladies and gentlemen, the prosecution rests. Hesperia may be no Borelli, Menichelli or Bertini, but this is certainly a diva film.

The film as artefact

Anime buie survives in its Spanish-language release, titled Triptico de dos Almas (Triptych of Two Souls). The surviving copy is a black and white positive of 1142m in length; around 20% of the original footage (1455m) is lost. Unfortunately, as seen above, this copy has severe quality issues; it is very high-contrast and dark, with crushed blacks, and at several points the frameline jumps.

Still, considering the poor survival rate of the Za La Mort films and the unavailability of the work of Hesperia, it’s fantastic that it’s out there. I can’t really recommend this to the casual viewer, but the way the film slips between Hesperia as character and Hesperia as star diva is something I found really interesting.

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Anime Buie [Dark Souls]. Dir. Emilio Ghione. Rome, Italy: Tiber Film, 1916. The film is preserved by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Torino) and is available to view here on Vimeo; duration of 55:26. English subs exist but are not available on the linked video.

Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa was one of the biggest talents of his era. In a time of intense anti-Asian sentiment (and, indeed, legally enshrined discrimination against Japanese people in America), he became one of Hollywood’s biggest names and richest stars. America has never since had an Asian-American star of Hayakawa’s magnitude – he was extremely popular with audiences, critically respected, and lived the star lifestyle, complete with gold-plated luxury car. But most importantly, as an actor, Hayakawa was the real deal. He had the kind of onscreen charisma that can’t be taught. Of course, it didn’t hurt that was one of the best-looking leading men of his era – and certainly, he could smoulder with the best of them – but Hayakawa was a very skilful actor who brought an underplayed intensity to his roles.

Hayakawa’s star-making role in The Cheat (US 1915) traded in negative stereotypes about East Asian people even as it was elevated by the power and elegance of his performance. His career boomed, but after several years of stereotypical roles, in 1918 Hayakawa formed his own production company, Haworth Pictures, giving him creative control over his output. The name of his company most likely derives from Hayakawa and Worthington, William Worthington being Hayakawa’s director and right-hand man at Haworth. It has the benefit of connoting value, but the choice of an Anglo name over simply ‘Hayakawa Pictures’ indicates that Hayakawa was keenly aware of his public image. Now in control of his stardom, Hayakawa had the difficult task of balancing his existing star image, created to appeal to Americans, with his desire to portray more realistic representations of the Japanese. One of his stated aims was to combat the negative ideas about Asian people that were prevalent at the time; he sought ways to engage with his Japanese-American identity that challenged – or at least sidestepped – the popular stereotypes of the time. Hayakawa had his work cut out for him; besides the stereotyped characters in his own body of work, one doesn’t have to look too hard to find film examples of East Asian people as sinister opium smokers, gang members, poor English speakers, etc – essentially, the dangerous foreign Other who lived at the boundaries of American society and thereby undermined it. An honourable character who would tragically sacrifice himself to save a (white) woman was perhaps the best-case scenario, even if told in patronizing fashion with a lead character in Yellowface (cough).

An advert from Film Daily of 02 November 1919.

His Birthright, the first of the Haworth pictures, tells the story of Yukio, the son of a Japanese mother, Saki San (played in flashback by Hayakawa’s real-life wife Tsuru Aoki) and an American father, the Admiral John Milton (Howard Davies). Essentially, as Hayakawa himself acknowledged, the film takes the Madame Butterfly story as its starting point: Yukio is raised by a guardian who tells him that Milton was responsible for Saki San’s suicide, and he sets out for America to avenge his mother. What follows is part fish-out-of-water comedy, part spy drama, and ultimately, a coming of age story with a strong pro-American theme.

I’ll outline the plot in brief. After encountering cardsharp Jim Barnes on the ship, Yukio crashes his gambling operation; Barnes fixes Yukio up with a job, which appears to be a butler-type role, working for society woman/philanthropist Mrs. Smith.

Taking telephone messages – just the job for one who doesn’t speak English well!

It’s via telephone that Yukio first meets Elsa Burgmann, “an adventuress and spy who has managed to infiltrate the upper circles of society”. Meet Elsa (Marin Sais):

After a phone message mishap, Elsa helps smooth things over, and then after they all have a good laugh, she offers to help Yukio with his English. She gives him her carte de visite, leaves, and we get the classic ‘not-actually-private celebration’ moment from Yukio …

  
“Woo! YEAH! I mean, just dusting off my trousers … nothing to see here.”

Of course, Barnes didn’t get Yukio a job out of altruism; he’s plotting to get his hands on some secret documents in the possession of Admiral Milton, who is soon to be visiting the city. Yukio ends up stealing the documents for Elsa …who, in the kind of ‘shocking twist’ that one sees a mile away, was Barnes’ plant all along! Although the duplicitous Elsa does seem genuinely drawn to Yukio at times, it is all revealed to have been part of the act as she cruelly tells him that he was but a pawn in her dastardly plan. The film plays up the chemistry between Yukio and Elsa – while an interracial kiss would of course not have been permissible, its possibility is teased in a scene where Elsa vamps Yukio, tension heightening as she leans close to him.

  
Romantic tension; the realization of Elsa’s treachery

A struggle with Elsa’s gang of spies ensues, during which Yukio retrieves the papers, but is injured; Milton arrives with the police, and reveals that he always loved Saki San and, keeping her memory, never remarried; and that he will be responsible for Yukio … his son.

The film could have stopped there, but instead there is an ending scene that is incredible in its lack of subtlety and its rah-rah American patriotism. Yukio is at a desk, working on his studies … a tune comes upon the air, wafting in from the window, and Yukio begins to move in rhythm, flicking his pen as if conducting, his face lighting up. It’s an inspirational tune, a proud melody, an unmistakable piece of music … a Navy band, playing the siren song of Uncle Sam:

Ohhhh say can you SEEEEE

And thus the film concludes on this patriotic note, with Yukio declaring:

“U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Despite this eyeroll-inducing ending, Yukio’s characterisation in His Birthright is often given a light-hearted approach. Here, we have a sympathetic hero who charms the other characters with his endearingly broken English (“Yes, that would most extraordinarily excellent!”) and is surprised by American society in ways designed to amuse the audience without demeaning the character. Take this moment when Yukio (Hayakawa) is shocked to see the women dancing at the ball with bare shoulders and arms:

“Avert your feminine eyes!”

His companion just chuckles (“Heavens! What a problem child!”), and the moment comes across as rather cute. Does this kind of humour does infantilize Yukio to a degree? Probably – although the story relies on a lot of typical fish-out-of-water tropes, these can’t really be separated from the character’s ethnicity, and so there is something of a conflation between Japanese identity and the primitive/childlike going on. As Hayakawa co-wrote the original story for the film, one must assume that this was a deliberate strategy used in order to present a likeable and non-threatening character that audiences would relate to. Overall, of course, it’s impossible not to read His Birthright as an assimilation narrative: Yukio grows up from a boy to a man, and integral to this process is the way in which he becomes Americanized. One can quite understand what Hayakawa was trying to do here by creating a film in which the message is that Japanese-Americans could be (or become) good American citizens. And the fact that the ending is just so cheesy by modern standards actually makes it easier to swallow. It’s deliberate (and canny) for Hayakawa to evoke the US military at the end, even if he is piling it on rather thick.

The scene where Elsa’s duplicity is revealed – a deliberate allusion to the famous ‘I Want You’ poster?

Hayakawa is most well-known for his dramatic roles, but His Birthright shows that he also excelled in light comedy. He’s thoroughly charming: how can you resist his fistpump-to-fake-nonchalance moment shown above? Or this scene of him grooving as he watches a Black American jazz band?¹

“Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?”

One of the film’s big comic moments involves an on-the-job linguistic mishap, when Yukio accidentally turns his notepaper upside-down when writing down a room number. But rather than making a fool of Yukio, the laugh comes more from the situation, and the bug-eyed reaction of Mrs. Smith:

>  
“Mrs. Smith go to Hell” [7734 upside down] ²

We also get a fight scene where he declares, “My body is made of steel … your bullets will not defeat me!”, and knocks out an assailant by literally throwing the book at them.

A bound copy of the American Constitution, I assume.

Speaking of words, the existing print of His Birthright features one of the laziest examples of fake Japanese script that I’ve ever seen. Given Hayakawa’s supervision, presumably the original American intertitles featured actual Japanese writing, but the person who made the Dutch ones clearly didn’t have much of a clue, and the effect is unintentionally amusing:

Is that a spider trying to write hieroglyphs?

All in all, His Birthright is a minor film, but both the friend I watched it with and I enjoyed it quite a lot. Hayakawa is always great to watch, there are some fun moments, and while it is a shame that the film survives incomplete, it does mean that the plot moves along at a relatively brisk clip; this may not have been the case in the original, as a review in the Film Daily of 15 September 1918 complained about the tempo (though it praised Hayakawa himself). His Birthright is also revealing in terms of Hayakawa’s public image and relationship to mainstream America. A review in Variety of 20 September 1918 noted that “The scenario would have been in far better taste if it had been built around an ordinary American citizen”, and disapproved of the United States Navy being placed in “an unenviable light” due to Admiral Milton’s love affair with Saki San, and the theft of the documents. But even that reviewer notes that Hayakawa is “a born picture actor”, who supplies the comedy as well as displays “a striking power in the dramatic climaxes”. I can’t disagree; Hayakawa does a lot with the rather boilerplate material, and always commands your attention when he is on-screen.

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Footnotes

1. Actually, I found this a telling detail. Yukio is shown enjoying this music earlier in the film, but by the end, it’s the Navy band that is the source of his aural pleasure. As a story detail supporting his character’s assimilation into true-blue Americanism, it’s almost too pat!

2. When I first watched this film, this scene seemed strangely familiar to me, and it took me a while to realize why – I once saw a screening of one of the other EYE Hayakawa titles (I forget the name, but it’s the one where he wears a turban), and in the introduction to that film, this scene was described. It’s fortunate that the joke translated readily into Dutch!

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Advert in Photoplay, September 1918.

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His Birthright. Dir. William Worthington. USA: Haworth Pictures, 1918.  Preserved by EYE Filmmuseum and available to watch here on the European Film Gateway. Note: the film survives incomplete, so the action of the missing reels (numbers one and four) is summarized via intertitle. English subs exist but are not available on the linked video.

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Postscript

Everyone loves cat gifs, right? Here are a couple from this film; vintage 1918.

I’ll be in China in less than a week! I’m going to visit my partner in Guangzhou, and we’ll also spend some time in Shanghai, where I’ve got a cousin living. So this seems like an appropriate time to take a look at another Chinese film from Shanghai’s golden era: 1935’s 新女性 | New Women, starring Ruan Lingyu in a heart-breaking role.

Ruan was one of the greatest actresses of the silent screen. She is best remembered now for her astonishing performance in 神女 | The Goddess (1934), to which she brought a power, intelligence and sincerity that belied her young age. Her considerable talents are also in evidence in New Women, where she plays Wei Ming, a music teacher and up-and-coming writer who struggles for independence, only to be punished by society.

This is a film that doesn’t pull its punches: New Women is an unflinching look at the societal restrictions placed on women in this era. The theme of male objectification is front and centre – the film is virtually a catalogue of how Wei Ming is seen as an object for consumption, not a person, by the men (and indeed sometimes the women) around her. The way New Women interrogates the consequences of patriarchy is still striking today, and it’s important to note that there are no cartoonish villains, just the casual cruelty of society and male entitlement. The plot is outlined in full here, but for some examples of the trials Wei Ming undergoes: Wei Ming pays a heavy cost for rejecting the advances of Dr. Wang, who arranges to have her fired from her job, and then offers to ‘help’ her by making her his mistress. We find out that Wei Ming was only published because, as an attractive women, the publisher thought her marketable, but later in the film they want to wash their hands of her, scoffing at the idea that she is truly a “modern woman author”. When Wei Ming is ultimately forced into prostitution to provide for herself and buy medicine for her (illegitimate) daughter, she is initially shocked by the idea: “What! You want me to sell myself! Only slaves sell their bodies!” The Madam counters, “That’s reasonable. But if we women want to make a little money in this world, what other path is open to us?” But as she comforts a distraught Wei Ming, the Madam grins over Wei’s shoulder at her associate, knowing that she has successfully preyed upon Wei Ming’s desperation.

New Women is unequivocal in its denunciation of the restrictions and double standards placed upon women. And rather than a radical, Wei Ming is simply a woman who wants to be able to live her life with dignity and self-determination. She may express sentiments that seem rather bold for the 1930s – “Marriage! What can marriage give me? ‘Companion for life!’ Might as well call it ‘Slave for Life!’” – but ultimately, she is written to appeal to the audience’s sympathy. Wei is a good person who is not undone by her own actions, but by the judgment and ill-treatment of others – perhaps that in itself is radical enough, especially considering this is an eighty-year-old film.

The film is replete with visual symbols of Wei Ming’s entrapment: aside from the classic ‘woman/birdcage’ shot combo shown above, another salient reminder comes when Wei Ming watches a dance performance and imagines herself in the role of the chained woman.

Later, when Dr. Wang tries to make her his mistress; the characters for ‘PAWN’ are briefly superimposed over Wei Ming’s face. These choices may not be subtle, but they are effective, and there is visual elegance in the way that they’re done. New Woman was directed by Cai Chusheng (蔡楚生), probably best known for his previous film 漁光曲 or Song of the Fishermen (1934). Like Sun Yu in 体育皇后 | Queen of Sports (1934), Cai takes full advantage of the filmic possibilities available to him: we see lengthy sequences of inventive wipes and dissolves, artful superimpositions, interesting framing.  

 
Clock wipe; superimposition: Wei Ming objectified

One of the most interesting special effects occurs in the flashback showing how Wei met Dr. Wang: travelling by car, Wei reminisces, and the window beside her face becomes a screen in which their backstory is shown. Given that the scene is basically unnecessary – it simply shows the two characters being introduced at a social function – it’s a very distinctive choice by Cai, all the more so because the flashback scene itself contains intertitles and a dissolve.

Why go to all this trouble, when the content of the scene could easily have been summarized in intertitle, or signalled via a dissolve or other indicator? It may have been simply due to a wish to exploit the technical possibilities of film – and Cai has a clear liking for optical effects – but I think there is also a thematic link here to New Woman‘s overall theme of objectification. It seems significant that the scene is not filmed from Wei’s point of view, as one might expect in a memory, but that we instead watch her watch herself, as if on screen.

Also tying into this idea is the below photo of Ruan Lingyu/Wei Ming, which is reused throughout New Woman. In a film that is all about how a woman is consumed by society and whose image is destroyed, it’s a fitting visual symbol.

Okay, I cheated a little with the last of the images, which actually shows a different photo, but the point stands. I included the newspaper shots deliberately, as the publishing subplot plays a large role in the climax of the film. When Wei Ming appeals to her publisher and a reporter for help, both make advances on her. This necessitates her turn to prostitution, and of course, her first customer is the seedy Dr. Wang … But the idea of selling herself to him is the one thing that Wei Ming cannot bear. With the help of her friend Li Aying, they throw him out … but Wang’s vindictiveness and entitlement apparently knows no bounds.  Talking to the reporter she rejected (who describes her as “totally unappreciative” [!] and is now fishing for dirt on her), Wang lets slip a few salient details. Already in despair about her future and feeling things closing in from all sides, Wei Ming takes sleeping pills, as all the while a newspaper scandal is born (“Secret History Revealed. Former Prostitute. Child Out of Wedlock.”), which only heightens once her suicide attempt becomes known (prompting ‘analyses’ that state “Suicide Cannot Be a Common Practice. Women Will Always Be the Weaker Ones”).

Her cruel denunciation in the media actually seems to give Wei Ming motivation to live – she crushes a newspaper in her hands and tells her companions that she wants revenge. But it’s too late for recovery.

Wei Ming is a tragic character, and one that could seem maudlin if the role wasn’t anchored by the skill and power of Ruan Lingyu’s performance. Unfortunately, New Women was a tragedy in more way than one. It is impossible to discuss the film without reference to Ruan Lingyu’s suicide, a horrific case of life imitating art which occurred shortly after the release of the film. (Ruan’s final film, 國風 | National Customs aka National Style, was released posthumously). Already a target of the Chinese gossip press and under a great deal of strain in her personal life, Ruan Lingyu was harrassed relentlessly by media in the wake of the film’s release, who were extremely displeased with their negative portrayal therein (and had in fact already forced extensive cuts to the film). These mounting burdens led her to take an overdose of barbiturates; like her fictional counterpart Wei Ming, the pressures around Ruan Lingyu consumed her. Even then, she might have survived, had her partner not stalled for hours before taking her to hospital, for fear of bad publicity.  One of her suicide notes reportedly contained a line that read, “Gossip is a fearful thing”. She was only 24.

The power of Ruan Lingyu’s performance speaks for itself, but for obvious reasons, New Women is difficult to watch. And of course, there is a lot more that can be said about this film – I haven’t even touched on the other female characters that appear as other possible ‘new women’ archetypes, or the relationship to political thought of the time. It is tempting to see Wei Ming as a metaphor for the time: an emblem of a society striving for the future, but not yet quite able to overcome the present. In New Women, Wei Ming’s last words are, “I want to live!” What a terrible tragedy that Ruan Lingyu did not.

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新女性 | New Women [Xīn nǚxìng]. Dir. Cai Chusheng. Shanghai, China: Lianhua, 1935. Available on the Internet Archive here (poor quality). Edit: a much nice copy is available here on YouTube.

via European Film Gateway

“Lower the flags in her honour; she is incomparable and without peer.” So wrote early film theorist Béla Balázs of Asta Nielsen in his 1924 book Der Sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man). It is well-known that Nielsen was one of the first international film stars; the archetypal screen examplar of the New Woman, acclaimed around the world for her artistry. No secret, either, that’s she’s one of my favourite actresses. Nielsen was also an astute businesswoman and producer who was keenly aware of her star image, and of her available films, nowhere is this more in evidence than in her 1913 release Die Filmprima-donna (The Film Primadonna).

The film prima-donna receives a script.

Even among the many films of the teens that comment on the medium of film and/or the film industry, Die Filmprimadonna is notable for its ‘behind the scenes’ look at the filmmaking process, and the way the film explains these elements to the audience. In the film, which survives only in part, Nielsen plays film star Ruth Breton: we see her approving (or rather rejecting) scripts, shooting scenes outdoors and on set, posing for publicity stills. Most tantalizingly, we see shots of the film laboratory itself: Ruth in the darkroom, examining the latest material.

A striking shot, although if I may nitpick, a bit of dramatic licence seems to be involved – the preceding intertitle announces ‘Where the films are developed’, but this appears to show printing rather than processing equipment, with what strikes me as a slightly dodgy setup – where’s the takeup reel? (And of course, without development, the image would not be visible for Ruth’s inspection). In any case, this shot visually underlines not just Ruth’s pre-eminence at the studio but also her dedication to her work: as we are told, ‘The film prima-donna takes a personal interest in every detail of the picture in which she appears’. As the developed film dries on large rotating drums, Ruth pulls off a filmstrip for examination.

She’s not bossy, she’s the boss, tugging other studio staff into her orbit to receive her critique. Although Asta Nielsen is not explicitly playing herself, there is a clear correspondence between Asta’s star image and the assertive, talented Ruth Breton. Although the word ‘prima-donna’ generally carries a slightly negative connotation, Ruth is no spoiled star but rather a passionate and engaged artist; if she refuses a script, it is because “it does not begin to approach the standard [she] must insist upon as befitting [her] talents and reputation”. This, of course, primes the audience to think of Asta Nielsen in the same terms, not merely an actress but a creative talent possessing great knowledge of the filmmaking process and for whom quality is paramount. Especially in light of what we know of Asta Nielsen’s business acumen and agency, these aspects of Die Filmprima-donna collapse the boundaries between the fictional character of Ruth Breton and the star persona of Asta Nielsen.

 
Asta strikes a pose as the audience is further instructed in the procedures of film production.

The main plot of Die Filmprimadonna is launched when we see Ruth Breton receive a screenplay from Walter Heim (Fritz Weidemann). The search for a suitable manuscript now resolved, the film details the workings of the studio and the shooting process, as Ruth and Walter become romantically involved.

Ruth speaks with Walter about his script.

Only 278m (~20%) of the original 1429m length of Die Filmprimadonna survives; the available version consists of the majority of the first act of the film, combining footage from fragments held at EYE Filmmuseum (NL) and George Eastman House. A concluding intertitle details the high drama that unfolds in rest of the film:

Although we are sadly unlikely ever to be able to see this firsthand, several stills at least give an idea of how this looked, including Ruth’s tragic demise as Pierrot.

Jealousy; onstage triumph; tragedy. Via European Film Gateway

Of the surviving footage, one scene in particular is affected by nitrate decomposition, that destructive beauty which seems oddly fitting for a film that places such an emphasis on the material reality of film and the methods of filmmaking.

As always, Nielsen’s performance stands out for its assurance, rhythm and charisma. Die Filmprimadonna is composed in long- and medium-shot, and Asta is a master at using gesture to draw the eye. For me, one of the best – and funniest! – demonstrations of this skill is the scene in which Ruth is trying to sell the studio on her lover Walter’s screenplay, concurrently urging him on.

There are multiple layers of performance going on here: Asta/Ruth is trying to persuade her producer to take a chance on this pitch; she is signalling to her lover to look alive and help seal the deal; and she’s performing the movie star for the audience, who are inevitably conflating the persona of Die Asta with that of ‘film primadonna’ Ruth Breton. As well as being amusing – that segue from urgent gesture to faux-casual hand-to-chin contemplation! – for a 102-year-old film, it’s a scene that is really quite sophisticated in what it is achieving.

“A young art form can only move forward through the talents of the greatest artist.
And we now have a woman, an artist, who has the capacity to meet this challenge.
That artist is Nielsen” – and I would add that Die Filmprimadonna is an interesting early document about the young art form in question.

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Berliner Tageblatt, 08 Dec 1913 (Union-Theater Lichtspiele); Algemeen Handelsblad (Amsterdam), 15 Jan 1914; De West nieuwsblad uit en voor Suriname, 15 Aug 1916.

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Die Filmprimadonna [The Film Primadonna]. Dir. Urban Gad. Berlin: PAGU, 1913. Available on DVD from Edition Filmmuseum (2 DVD set with Hamlet).

It’s been some time since I’ve done a book review post. Here I’ll talk about my recent fiction reads dealing with silent films or film performers: one novel about a lost film search, and two fictional biographies, tracing the lives of silent movie stunt queen Pearl White and groundbreaking Black vaudeville star Bert Williams.

Pearl White: The Peerless, Fearless Girl by Manuel Weltman & Raymond Lee. South Brunswick & New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1969.

Paris, 1918: bombs are falling from the sky. Amidst the chaos, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez—he of Blood and Sand and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse fame—stumbles through the darkness in search of an air-raid shelter. A sigh of relief as he follows a line of people into a cellar, only to see … a film? How can people be absorbed in watching films when war is being waged outside? “Monsieur,” a woman tells him, “It’s the last chapter of a Pearl White serial. We are most fortunate to see it, no matter what the Boche are trying to do.”

Such is the anecdote that forms the prologue of Pearl White: The Peerless, Fearless Girl. It has more than a whiff of the apocryphal, but on the other hand, such a story is really too good not to be true, isn’t it? Certainly it’s a strong start to a book that is similarly full of drama: within the first few pages, Pearl has escaped a water tank full of rodents, thrown a rat at her producer, shouted “Take your paw off my tit!”, flung her wig on the ground, engaged in melancholic mirror-facing contemplation about who the real Pearl was, knocked back some whiskey, and relived the genesis of her soon-to-be-legally-ended marriage. Boom! It’s a thrill a minute in the life of Ms. White.

Pearl White was, of course, one of the major American stars of the teens, famous for adventure film serials such as The Perils of Pauline (1914), The Exploits of Elaine (1915), Pearl of the Army (1916), The Fatal Ring (1917), and The House of Hate (1918). White gained particular attention for reputedly doing many of her own stunts, something that was covered breathlessly in the media—a key part of her public persona was her bravery in the face of the danger she regularly experienced in the line of filmic duty. I actually haven’t seen much of White’s work—I tried to watch one of her serials a few years back and was put off by the fact that it was a bit more damsel-in-distress than I anticipated—but I will have to seek to change this in the next while.

The jacket copy explains the purpose of Pearl White: The Peerless, Fearless Girl: to write the first factual account of Pearl’s dramatic life. “Even Pearl’s autobiography is largely a product of her own imagination”, we are informed. The writers’ hook is to write her life story in “a most unusual format […] presenting the essential facts of Pearl’s life as if the book were a scenario for one of her exciting serials”. This means that much of the story is told in dialogue, intrigue is high, and every chapter ends with ‘To be continued’.

We read about such antics as Pearl taking a ride in a hot-air balloon, getting caught in a flash storm, and being set down inside the Philadelphia State Penitentiary; sneaking into a gentlemen’s club and persuading the members to front up some cash for war bonds; garnering the admiration of Mistinguett in Paris; taking part in an Italian Countess’s mystical moon ritual. The authors paint a picture of a woman who is savvy, down-to-earth, fun-loving, and capable of plenty of off-screen hijinks, yet who also is prone to fits of angst about her film persona vis à vis her real self: “Was the wig only for make-believe? Was everything in her life make-believe?”, “How could anyone love a movie star?”, etc.

A critical analysis, this is not—everything is absurdly dramatic, and while I assume the main events of White’s life presented here are not actually fabricated, it’s obviously an incredibly fanciful approach. Essentially, Pearl White: The Peerless, Fearless Girl is a goofy fan-fiction account of her life by two authors (one a former child actor, the other noted on the back cover to be a bachelor) who quite clearly adore her, even in her rougher moments.

This book may be lightweight, but it’s also a hoot and a half; check your thoughts about historiography at the door and go along for the ride.

Missing Reels by Farran Smith Nehme. New York & London: Overlook Duckworth, 2014.

This is the kind of book that sounded right up my alley: a lost film treasure hunt, a paean to the silent film era, and a setting of 1980s New York. The author is Farran Smith Nehme, who blogs as The Self-Styled Siren; I must confess that I haven’t read her blog regularly, but her writing has a very good reputation (although it may depend on your tolerance for third-person author references).

Expectations, therefore, were high—but for me at least, this book didn’t totally deliver. Centred on protagonist Ceinwen Reilly, Missing Reels contains two major plot strands: the search for a lost silent film, and the love story between Ceinwen and Matthew. Ceinwen (pronounced ‘Kine-wen’) discovers that her standoffish downstairs neighbour Miriam appeared in a film adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and sets out not just to find out more about the film, but to rediscover it—in the face of Miriam’s frosty indifference, it must be noted. The love interest Matthew is a British mathematics post-doc, who first enters the story as a customer at the vintage clothing store at which Ceinwen works. The two story-strands link together as Matthew provides Ceinwen with help and support for her film quest, as well as introducing her to several of his NYU colleagues, whose presence helps drive the film-hunt plot.

Not surprisingly, Smith Nehme seems most comfortable when in film territory, and the search for The Mysteries of Udolpho is the strong point of the book. It takes too long for the film treasure hunt to really launch, but once it’s underway, this part of the story is engaging and fun, with a bunch of side characters that are vividly (and sometimes hilariously) drawn. Miriam’s recollections about the production and style of the Murnau-esque film was one of my favourite passages in the book.

Unfortunately, for me things fell down with the love story part of Missing Reels, and indeed to some extent with the character of Ceinwen herself. We have a twenty-two year old university dropout who is extremely well-read, beautiful à la Vilma Bánky, notably thin (Matthew comes off as very paternalistic in his repeated attempts to feed her), feels like an outsider because she stylishly dresses in vintage clothing and doesn’t like parties or the Replacements, has an exotic name that no one can pronounce, etc. Ceinwen may be a bit of a mess, but she is also the kind of character that comes across as having a tinge of wish-fulfillment. Her story arc put me in mind of the archetypal ‘shop girl makes good’ narratives from silent films (Clara Bow in It perhaps being the classic example), but if it’s a deliberate homage, I don’t think it’s a successful one, because Ceinwen isn’t winsome enough for that kind of narrative. In fact, Ceinwen is relatively irritating, which is not inherently a bad thing for a character, and realistic enough for someone in her early twenties. But it becomes a problem when you realize that the narrative seems to be trying to portray her as more of a captivatingly flawed type, a designation that her actions don’t always earn.

The relationship with Matthew is the real mess, though. He has a long-term partner called Ana whose academic career is in Italy, and therefore they have an arrangement about seeing other people; he is totally upfront with Ceinwen about his situation, as he should be. But of course the reader can see that this is going to go downhill fast, given Ceinwen’s lack of adult communication skills, jealousy and uncertainty, and romantic-comedy desire to be ‘The One’. I didn’t find Ceinwein and Matthew’s interactions to be characterized by the screwball-style wit that the back cover copy promised, and so for me their relationship push-and-pull quickly became tiresome. Honestly, at a certain point I started to feel sorry for Ana: despite being positioned as the villain of the piece, it seemed like her main sins were wearing a leopard-print dress when she came into the vintage clothing shop (“a sure sign of a mean disposition”, Ceinwen snidely observes), buying some earrings that Ceinwen really wanted for herself, being cool to the desperado who shows up to her restaurant date to try to break up her engagement, and dealing with a partner who hasn’t been totally honest with her. Rather than vindicating Ceinwen, for me all this mainly served to undermine Matthew’s integrity. All in all, I wasn’t convinced by Matthew and Ceinwen’s relationship and therefore couldn’t buy in to the big dramatic romantic climax that Smith Nehme sets up. Since Ceinwen and Matthew’s relationship arc was arguably the A-plot of the novel, it really detracted from my overall enjoyment.

Missing Reels is of course packed full of film references, which is neat for the hardcore nerd, but I wonder if they would be alienating/distracting to the casual reader; for example, there are quite a few sentence constructions of the nature ‘[book character] felt like [movie star] in [film], doing [scene description]’. In terms of prose style, the opening section was offputtingly clunky, although things improve once the exposition is dispensed with.

Overall, I’d call Missing Reels a quick and reasonably fun read, but with some quite big flaws. Come for the film story, speed-read the relationship parts.

Dancing in the Dark by Caryl Phillips. 2005. London: Vintage Books, 2006.

“The funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew,” was W. C. Fields’ description of Bert Williams, a major vaudeville and Broadway star who was the most famous and highest-paid Black performer of early twentieth century America. Caribbean-British author Caryl Phillips’ ambitious novel examines this essential contradiction of Williams, characterizing Williams as an immense talent, yet also a hesitant, introspective and tremendously sorrowful man struggling against the constrictions of a white-supremacist society. Early in his career, the light-skinned Williams performed au naturel, but he eventually adopted blackface makeup, and this Faustian bargain is something that Williams wrestles with throughout the Dancing in the Dark: the use of blackface, necessary to win over white audiences, exerts a huge psychic toll on him. Post-performance, the removal of his makeup is a ritual to which Williams permits no observers. He tells himself that in blackface, he is just a character—surely the audience understands that this is not him, but a person he has discovered? The content, too, of his performance troubles him. He wonders, “Is the coloured performer to be forever condemned to pleasing a white audience with farce, and then attempting to conquer these same people with music and dance?” Is Williams changing hearts and minds through his performance, promoting the talent of Black people, or simply perpetuating damaging racial stereotypes? Does a rising tide lift all boats, or is an entirely different vessel needed? These difficult questions are at the centre of the book, and Phillips engages with them with depth and nuance, understanding that the answer lies in both and neither interpretations. However, these issues lead to a deep sense of alienation and estrangement within Williams, all but paralyzing him emotionally.

It is only when I move that the problems begin. […] Until I move I might be pitiable. It is only when I move that they recognize me. I enjoy the beginning, with my white gloved hands, and the small spotlight, and edging my way through the curtains and standing still. But they require both the cork and the movement, the broad nigger shuffle, and only then do they know me. Only then am I welcome in their house.

Dancing in the Dark traces the life and career of Williams: his childhood in the Caribbean and disillusioning move to America, the land of opportunity; his early days “playing the coon” in a medicine show; the development of his vaudeville career; his distant, unconsummated marriage to Lottie; his ascendancy to Broadway; his work in the Ziegfeld follies. Intertwined with his story is that of his longtime performing partner George Walker: together, the two built their careers in vaudeville and produced the pioneering show In Dahomey (1903), a musical comedy set in a historical African kingdom (present-day Benin), which broke the colour line on Broadway.

Bert Williams (left) and George Walker

In their acts, Bert Williams played the slow-witted, shuffling ‘Jonah man’ character to Walker’s sharp dandy, a characterisation that, as Phillips writes it, eventually caused a severe, mostly unspoken tension between the duo. Walker may also have profited from Williams’ “shambling, pathetic dupe”, but as portrayed in Dancing in the Dark, he is the W. E. B. Du Bois to Williams’ Booker T. Washington – much more radical than Williams, agitating vocally for the Black American cause as Williams bears his pain internally and urges caution. Eventually, Williams’ passivity, his lack of ability to outwardly express his thoughts, his private sorrow—which Walker perceives as submission and complacency—drives a wedge between the two men. Again, the central question that this novel grapples with: Is Williams promoting his race or selling it out, and in this kind of no-win situation, where is the line between realism and defeat? Two passages told from the perspective of each character illustrate this friction:

Bert Williams: “The audience may think that they are watching a powerless man but they are, in fact, watching art. We must understand how to make them feel safe, George. We must see the line. […] In time an alternate to the counterfeit coloured culture that besmirches our stage will emerge, but only in time. Right now nobody wil pay to see the coloured man be himself, so we must tread carefully.”

George Walker: “Time to put the cork to one side, Bert. White people are laughing at you, and coloured folks in the audience are only laughing to keep from crying. Who is this darky that you give them, Bert? This fool who is easily duped into idiotic schemes, with his gross stories, and jokes on himself? […] This pork-eating, chicken-loving, fat-lipped, big-bellied lover of food who wants to hear music that’s either melancholy, or something that he can jig to with big-foot, clumsy dancing. I already told you, not now, Bert. Not in the twentieth century. […] I’m telling you, please cut that coloured fool loose.”

Phillips is a beautiful writer who is not afraid to take risks with narrative. Though following a loose chronology, Dancing in the Dark freely shifts perspective, tenses, and time period. The novel also incorporates excerpts and quotations from (presumably authentic) historical material: reviews, interviews, newspaper items, song lyrics, scripts. This narrative shifting underlines the fact that historical truth cannot really be known, and that we build up a picture of the past through a bricolage of fragments, layers of interpretation. The voices of George Walker, his wife A(i)da Overton Walker, and Bert Williams’ wife Lottie add to the texture of the novel, and there are deliberate discontinuities between their perspectives. The relationships of Williams to each of these three characters form major subplots; another key subplot concerns George Walker’s intense affair with the baudy, rambunctious vaudeville star Eva Tanguay, a character who leaps off the page, rendered with some of Phillips’ most energetic writing. (Side note: I’m fascinated with Tanguay, and hope to one day see her surviving film title The Wild Girl, 1917).

While Phillips is proficient at conveying the death-by-a-thousand-cuts dull agony of performing as a Black man in a racist society, he isn’t as adept at conveying Williams’ passions. One assumes that despite his divided conscience, Williams took joy and pride in performing—or if not, what drove him to continue in that work? Was it all just about the money? This is something that needed further elaboration, because as written by Phillips, Williams comes across as someone whose apprehension and deep heartache leads to resignation and virtual paralysis. This doesn’t quite tally with the fact that Williams had a long and very successful career in showbiz, something that doesn’t happen without a high degree of ambition and personal vision. Certainly Walker was the driver and business brains behind the duo, but Williams continued to perform after Walker’s death, and opened several solo shows. He was also a prolific and extremely popular recording artist. In trying to emphasize the distance experienced by Williams—a double outsider, being not only Black, but West Indian rather than African-African—Phillips moves a little bit too far away from him in some respects. The overall effect of the book is curiously muted.

Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey in Lime Kiln Field Day (1913/2014)

Williams also made several movies, and one of the big film preservation stories of last year was the rediscovery and première of footage from his film project Lime Kiln Club Field Day. The film material—unedited daily rushes—had been held by the Museum of Modern Art since 1939, but were unidentified until recently; identification was no doubt hindered by the fact that the film was never commercially released. The exact reason that the Lime Kiln Club Field Day was shelved is unclear, but it is thought that D. W. Griffith’s racist blockbuster Birth of a Nation, which was in production around the same time, discouraged Biograph from editing and releasing the film. Aside from the works of Oscar Micheaux, early Black American filmmaking has received little attention, in part because of the lack of surviving material; Lime Kiln Club Field Day is said to be the earliest surviving footage for a feature film with a black cast. MOMA produced an exhibition of the material, 100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History – detailed information and several film clips are available at the link.

Bert Williams and Odessa Warren Grey in Lime Kiln Field Day (1913/2014)

Bert Williams’ work in films forms only a small part of the narrative of Dancing in the Dark. Watching the footage of his work, for the first time he sees himself perform, and is both moved and proud. That is, until he realizes that not everyone feels the same way; he is advised not to attend the screening of Darktown Jubilee (1914), at which a riot breaks out, such is the outrage felt by the white audience at seeing his bare face. Cut to a contemporary film review: “Gone was the familiar ‘darky humour’ heavily laden with pathos, and in its place he gave to us an uncorked coloured person of cunning and resourcefulness that left a sour taste in the mouth of all who had paid money to attend this presentation.” Burn Hollywood Burn indeed.

Florenz Ziegfeld, who opposed the wishes of some of his performers when he included Williams in his Follies, said of Bert Williams: “He was a consummate artist in a sea of banality; technically perfect, timing immaculate, his portrayal of his people the only flaw on his otherwise perfect diamond.” Phillips’ novel imagines the great personal cost that this portrayal exerted on Williams. I can’t comment on the accuracy of the details of the novel, and no one knows the mind of Williams himself, but it is a beautifully rendered and largely convincing work. Phillips has not written a hagiography of Williams nor a denunciation, but something more difficult, subtle, and rewarding.

“The heart-rending story of a girl who weds for wealth, and finds that a palace of love is a gilded cage” is how Essanay advertized their 1915 release The Gilded Cage. This film, preserved by the National Film Preservation Foundation (US), caught my attention because of the participation of actress and director Ruth Stonehouse, who I recalled from her entry on the Woman Film Pioneers Project.

Ruth Stonehouse, Motion Picture Story Magazine, December 1914

A veteran actress who appeared in hundreds of films, Stonehouse was also keenly interested in the production side of the industry. WFPP article author Michelle Koerner quotes a 1919 article in Motion Picture Magazine, in which Stonehouse states, “We-ll, of course I do want to be a star … for a while … but eventually I want to be a directress, a producer; I want to be in the business end of it, that is, at the same time, the artistic end of it”. In fact, she had already written and directed nine films, the 1917 comic short series the Mary Ann Kelly Stories, in which she also played the leading role.

“It’s no fun being a stepdaughter, mother” – Ruth Stonehouse as Marie.

The Gilded Cage is a simple film, telling the story of Marie (Stonehouse), the stepdaughter relegated to a servant-like role, and Eloise, the spoiled favourite. Eloise rejects her lover Kent in order to marry a wealthy man; Marie and the heartbroken Kent then get to know each other, eventually falling in love.

Betty Scott as Eloise.

It’s a well-photographed film that is elevated by the nuance of its performances – Stonehouse does fine work as Marie, initially timorous, then joyous and even playful under the blush of love. The happiness of Marie and Kent is contrasted with the regrets of Eloise, who could easily have been portrayed as more shallow or vengeful; it is to the film’s credit that she is not a simple villain. Indeed, from a modern-day perspective, Eloise’s choice is entirely rational in an era in which women generally did not have a lot of options or enjoy economic independence, and she looks genuinely sad and conflicted about breaking things off with her lover. For a short film with an obvious message (money != happiness), it is really rather humanistic.

There were two particular shots in The Gilded Cage that spurred me to write up this post. The first is the shot below, where Eloise watches Marie and Kent in a tender moment – a striking composition, and an interesting example of female voyeurism.

Secondly, the final shot of The Gilded Cage, from which the film earns its title. After Eloise mournfully contemplates a bird in a cage (yes, that old chestnut), she buries her head in her hands, and we get the following dissolve:

SYMBOLISM! It’s the opposite of subtle, but undeniably effective, and a pretty cool mid-teens optical effect.

Research into The Gilded Cage is confounded by the fact that 1916 saw the release of a higher-profile Alice Brady film of the same title, although one can find some references to the Stonehouse film on the Media History Digital Library. Since the surviving copy of The Gilded Cage was found in New Zealand, a search of digitized newspaper collection Papers Past reveals that the film was shown across the nation in the last quarter of 1915, as a sideshow to Chaplin’s The Bank. Newspaper mentions of the film were positive: “a drama of merit” (Star, 05 Nov 1915); a “warm, human drama” (Observer, 27 Nov 1915); here’s an advert from the Evening Star (Otago) of 13 November 1915:

Ruth Stonehouse was born on September 28th, 1892, making this the 123th anniversary of her birth. She retired from motion pictures in 1928 and thereafter devoted herself to gardening, cooking, and charity work; per Wikipedia, she prepared “culinary masterpieces which her friends deemed superior to most chefs”. I wonder if she dreamed that people would watch her films 100 years on.

In Motion Picture Story Magazine, December 1912

– – –

The Gilded Cage. Dir. not stated. Chicago: Essanay, 1915. Available to watch here on the NFPF website.

A recurring dream about speechlessness, the visage of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the sight of voices without sound—these elements were the genesis of a recent poetry book, Silents, by Claire Crowther. Finding herself intensely moved by Falconetti’s overwhelming performance, which she stumbled onto on YouTube, Crowther became more and more interested in silent film. As a poet, she was especially drawn to the absent voices of those on the silent screen—the close-ups of their faces, the way actors sometimes seem to be “wrestling with a locked mouth”, the way speech is pronounced but not heard. Perceiving “something particularly vulnerable and haunting about those silent mouths”, Crowther wanted to allow speech to emerge from these characters. Her project is not motivated by any sense of deficiency in silent film, but rather aims to use one medium to illuminate the psychology of another: “Poetry and film have always looked to connect”, she writes.

Nitrate star symbol

I should admit that poetry is a medium I know little about. As such, writing about it is difficult; not only do I not know the terminology, it seems reductive to try to describe or explain the delicate web of connections and imagery that Crowther has generated. For example, in the first poem, The Inflammatory Properties of Celluloid—for Oscar Micheaux, she works with ideas on the star/light/screen axis: movie stars, stars used in intertitles to blank out slurs, the star of the nitrate edge symbol; film projection, the darkness of night and the theatre, a digitized film, the screen of her mobile phone. That’s an astonishing density of imagery in just fourteen lines, in a poem that also opens with a nod to Crowther’s central theme of voice and speech:

If I were as dead as all these stars are, in the warm dark,
velvet-lined, I’d mind

an audience peering into my mouth to see what
silence makes of words.

Among the characters Crowther brings to life are Shamakky Joe, a travelling shadow-play entertainer; Femuncula, Crowther’s imagined female homunculus; Joan of Arc; a sisterhood of witches inspired by the Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922); an unnamed cinemagoer. Not all subjects are people—one poem seems to be written from the perspective of Nell Shipman’s camera (The Future of Silence), another depicts the molecular potential of the projection wall (Edison Plays God in the Parlour), and one is about a stretching tree—an organic instrument of torture imagined by Crowther after watching A Fool There Was and Häxan.

One of the poems I particularly liked was Panchromatic, Metropolis, an ode to panchromatic film stock. Early on, film stocks were not sensitive to all of the colours in the visible spectrum; orthochromatic stocks were sensitive primarily to blue and green light, which is the reason why some people’s eyes look milky in early films. Crowther imagines a woman working in the sun-glazed, monochrome Library of Quiet—a silent film version of Borges’ Library of Babel?—and a new girl who is “not my colour but she is my shade”. Another of my favourites, The Landlady Suspects Her Lodgers, uses the motif of sewing to indicate movement and sensual desire:

When I asked to see Kiss in the Tunnel
I was made to sew perfect stitches instead.
All day, threads floated from my hem,
loose, long, children under suspicion.

There is humour, too—I laughed out loud at the playfulness of Germaine Dulac Explains Why Antonin Artaud Called Her a Cow, in which several possibilities are evinced:

Because he’s mad!
Because his film script is mad but He Sees!
Because my film clearly shows Animal Nature is Cultural Definition as far as Women are concerned …
Because Surrealists are Despots!
Because he hates milk?

All credible explanations! (I, too, hate milk).

Crowther plays with words as well as ideas. The subject of The Cinemagoer’s Dream fits a blind to their window; the use of the word ‘stop’ in this poem works on multiple levels, evoking not just blocking light from coming through a window, but also the idea of stopping down a camera aperture (or indeed the widening/narrowing of a pupil—it is not a coincidence that the facing page shows the famous eye closeup from Grandma’s Reading Glass, UK 1900). In Homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer, there’s the hanging ambiguity of a couplet like “while I don’t know / why one device rather than another will make me”, encompassing both the ideas of induced existence and missing action—to make me what? In one case, Crowther dispenses with language altogether: the wordless eloquence of The General or, The Achievement of Kisses—a silent sonnet for Buster Keaton is worth the price of admission alone.

Crowther explains her formal approach in her introductory essay “The fragment and its relationships”: in Silents, she uses syllabic verse, which entails a fixed number of syllables per line, and often a set stanza pattern. As I found out from trusty old Wikipedia, syllabic verse is common in many languages, but in English, poetic verse typically relies on accent—the number of stressed syllables per line, rather than the pure number of syllables in each line. Crowther, therefore, follows a rhythm that is more free-floating metrically than accentual verse, but more tightly constrained than free verse – “a handcuff on every line”. Not all of the poems follow a strict structure, but many do: for example, The Stretching Tree has four syllables per line, Jehanne d’Arc and the Angels of Battle is written in couplets of 15 and 4 syllables each (reversing order each couplet), and Screamers in Intertitles follows a pattern of 11-8-9-6 for each of its three stanzas. Crowther is an incredibly concise writer; all of the poems have fewer than twenty lines. These are short sensory impressions rather than extended meditations, but they say everything that they need to. I won’t say that every single poem grabbed me, but quite a few of them did, and several stuck deeply in my mind.

As the images of the book spreads show, Silents is a beautifully presented book—the elegant design of the book is integral to the experience of Crowther’s verse. She has selected images from the Ronald Grant Archive to complement her poems, encouraging one to read her texts in relation to these photographs. Two of my favourite juxtapositions: Shamakky Joe is faced with a still of shadowed claws from The Cat and the Canary (US 1927); The Song of the Stretching Tree is faced with a still attributed to René Clair’s Entr’acte (FR 1924), of a woman being clasped into the body of a tree. (Shown above. Wonderful image, but I don’t recall this image being in Entr’acte, myself—does anyone know about its provenance?) As with Silents overall, this poem and image capture the familiar-made-strange or uncanny sense that one gets with certain silent films.

Yes, film’s made of light. Silents is a very conceptually tight work, beautifully executed.

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Silents by Claire Crowther. London, UK: Hercules Editions, 2015. Go and buy a copy here!

Images of Silents © Hercules Editions &/or the Ronald Grant Archive; poetry excerpts © Claire Crowther.

Shanghai in the 1930s: a glittering city, humming to the rhythm of its jazz-filled dance halls, streets lit up by neon signs, art deco buildings springing up like mushrooms. A whirlwind of dance, images of film stars vying with advertisements for cigarettes and lipstick, trains and cars traversing the city. Vice, crime, and prostitution beneath the glamorous veneer; then as now, Shanghai was heaven for the rich, hell for the poor. This was the time when Shanghai was known as ‘The Paris of the East’. It was a world city teeming with hedonism, life, and energy, dancing to the beat of jazz and looking for meaning in the curve of a woman’s smile.

     
  
野玫瑰 | Wild Rose (1932)

No one expressed the vitality and rhythm of Republican Shanghai like Mu Shiying (穆時英), Shanghai’s “literary comet”. An avid participant in the nightlife culture of the city, Mu wrote prolifically in his short life,¹ capturing the energy, colour, and tempo of life in the metropolis. Although Mu eschewed labels himself, he has often been associated with the group of modernist writers known as the ‘New Sensationalists’ (新感觉派; pinyin: xīn gǎnjué pài), who sought to portray the dynamic experience of modern urban life. His work should be seen in the context of the May Fourth and New Culture Movements, which were reactions against traditional Confucian values, instead promoting Western-influenced ideas around democracy, gender egalitarianism, and modernisation. Mu’s writing can be compared to—and stands alongside—Western modernist writers, showing their influence as well as that of Chinese modernists such as Liu Na’ou (劉吶鷗) and Dai Wangshu (戴望舒).

Recently, an English-language book devoted to Mu has been published, collecting six of his short stories, four of which have never been published in English before.² The volume, Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist, also contains a lengthy essay by co-translator Andrew David Field, which gives a biography of Mu and situates him in the context of his times. It is an excellent introduction to the work of Mu, who I was not familiar with before; for obvious reasons, he was not revived in China until the 1980s, and little of his work has previously been available in the Anglosphere.

What a treat that some of it now is! Mu is a highly accomplished writer, expressionistic and formally inventive, bringing to life the sounds and colour of Shanghai’s streets and dancehalls in dazzling style. Reading Mu’s stories, I was struck by their cinematic qualities— not just their references to film stars and movie culture, but above all their vivid imagery and sometimes montage-like structure. Mu is often more concerned with creating a series of visual impressions than a conventional narrative. In Shanghai Fox-trot in particular, time is compressed into a series of visual impressions as though captured through a camera, cutting between different shots of the city and its people.³ Indeed, it’s easy to see Shanghai Fox-trot as a city symphony in miniature:

The azure dusk blankets the whole scene. A saxophone stretches out its neck, opens its great mouth, and blares at them, Woo woo. Inside on the smooth floor, floating skirts, floating robes, exquisite heels, heels, heels, heels, heels. Free-flowing hair and men’s faces. Men’s white-collared shirts and women’s smiling faces. Arms outstretched, kingfisher-green earrings dragging on shoulders. A group of tightly arranged round tables, but with scattered chairs. Waiters in white stand in dark corners. Scent of alcohol, perfume, ham and eggs, smoke … someone sits along in the corner holding a coffee to stimulate his energy.

This is one of the most interesting passages in the story, not just for its evocation of the nightclub atmosphere, but for the fact that a page or two later, the entire paragraph is replicated in reverse (“A lone man sits in the corner holding a black coffee …”)⁴ Mu frequently uses repetition for poetic effect: later in the same story, we see the repeated image of “two eyeballs saturated with cocktails”. Another memorable example for me was a line repeated in Five in a Nightclub: “Seconds crawled like ants over his heart”—what a wonderful phrase to describe the desperation and apprehension of the titular five! Likewise, Black Peony is bookended by variations on the phrase, “The rouge on her lips goes through my shirt and imprints directly on my skin—and my heart is tainted red”.

In Five in a Nightclub, the energy of the street is conveyed in a stream of words and sentence fragments—lines from advertisements, conversational snippets, newspaper headlines—the writerly equivalent of cinematic montage. Mu’s camera-eye pans across the city streets, pausing on a woman applying lipstick, a neon sign, shops and cinema, zooming in to find its target:

Swirling, endlessly swirling neon lights—
Suddenly the neon lights focus:
EMPRESS NIGHTCLUB.

 
神女 | The Goddess (1934)

In Mu’s stories, above all, Shanghai is colourful.

Red streets, green streets, blue streets, purple streets … City clad in strong colours! Dancing neon light—multi-coloured waves, scintillating waves, colourless waves—a sky filled with colour. The sky now had everything: wine, cigarettes, high-heels, clock-towers …

All of the Chinese silent films I’ve seen have been black and white,⁵ but I thought instantly of Lonesome (US 1928), with its beautiful stencil-coloured cityscape sequence.

Another striking line, from Craven ‘A’: “The midnight city had fallen deeply asleep. Only a pair of neon eyes was looking at me from under the sky-blue sheets.” I’m unsure if it’s a deliberate allusion, but the imagery is very suggestive of the famous cover of the first edition of The Great Gatsby.

Mu also makes mention of movie stars in his stories, his referents being American rather than Chinese. Norma Shearer is name-checked in three of the six stories, and in The Man Who Was Treated as a Plaything, the narrator, university student Alexy, compares love interest Rongzi to Clara Bow no less than four times. His image of her, the archetypal flighty, whimsical-treacherous woman, seems integrally shaped by the world of film:

I felt that every letter O was the imprint of her lips; the eyes in the poster of Vilma Banky on the wall looked like her eyes, Nancy Carrol’s [sic] smile looked like her smile, and strangely her nose was growing on Norma Shearer’s face.⁶

The time when Mu came of age saw the emergence of a new type of womanhood, the ‘modern girl’ (modeng nülang), the Chinese counterpart of the flapper, garçonne, modan garu (Japan), etc. Such women are the frequent subjects of Mu’s works, which depict the pleasures and dangers of romantic love in the metropolis, the push-and-pull, often transactional relations between the sexes in the seductive space of the dance-hall. As Field writes, all of the stories in the volume feature women “whose relations with men are ambiguous, unstable, unpredictable and uncontrollable”.

脂粉市场 | Cosmetics Market (1933)

Mu Shiying’s two preoccupations—the woman and the city—are unmistakeably intertwined. Nowhere is this more obvious that in Alexy’s description of Rongzi:

This was truly a girl who lived on stimulation and speed, Rongzi! Jazz, machines, speed, urban culture, American flavour, contemporary beauty … she was made up of all these things.

Another example is the Black Peony: a woman of the city, liberated from traditional gender roles, yet defined by consumer culture and the pleasures of urban life.

“Take me, for example, I’m living in the lap of luxury, if you take away jazz, fox-trot, mixed drinks, the fashionable colours of autumn, eight-cylinder engine cars, Egyptian tobacco … I become a soulless person. So deeply soaked in luxury, carpe diem, I am living this life of luxury, but I am tired.”

“Yes, life is mechanical,” the narrator agrees.

The woman and the city … Ruan Lingyu in 神女 | The Goddess (1934)

One of the most incredible descriptive passages in the book, however, likens the female body not to the city but the landscape of a country. “A person’s face is a map,” states the narrator of Craven ‘A’, taking us from the “black pine forest zone” of Craven ‘A’’s hair down her face—“the mouth of the volcano opened slightly and out poured Craven ‘A’ smoke. Her breasts are a “twin pair of small mountains […] their purple peaks projecting faintly out of the clouds. This must have been a famous scenic spot”. The explorer’s gaze travels down the lower half her body, her “exquisite pair of sea walls”, the two gulls of her feet, dancing to the tune of ‘Goodnight, Vienna’. This description is not without sexual connotations; the narrator notes that “the place that met the sea must be an important harbour, a large port of trade” and that “everyone took this place as an excellent spot for a short-term visit”. It’s a very striking extended metaphor.

Elsewhere, women are often described in ways that recall film compositions; for example, in The Man Who Was Treated as a Plaything, the narrator moves “Through the Jazz forest of dancing legs”, and in Five in a Nightclub, women apply makeup in their compact mirrors in close-up—“But they only saw a nose, or an eye, or a curve of a lip, or a wisp of hair; they didn’t see the whole face.”

I’m not a film theory buff, but in reading Mu’s stories I recalled some of the silent film-era writing on the cinematic close-up. In 1921, Jean Epstein declared that the close-up was the soul of cinema, describing the affective power that this magnification had on him as a viewer:

A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity. I am hypnotized. Now the tragedy is anatomical. […] Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. […] A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orthography of the face vacillates. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away.⁷

Bela Balázs was another filmmaker-writer who mused on the close-up, which he considered the “true terrain” of the film. In 1924, he wrote:

The close-up in film is the art of emphasis. It is a mute pointing to important and significant detail, while at the same time providing an interpretation of the life depicted. Two films with the same plot, the same acting and the same long shots but with different close-ups will express two different views of life.⁸

In Balázs’ view, the close-up is uniquely revealing; it discloses truth beyond the visible, not just “the face we wear, but our actual visual appearance”.⁹ The director guides the audience’s gaze and zooms in to show something more than just the sum of its parts, just as Mu does in his literary close-ups. Take this description from Five in a Nightclub:

On Daisy Huang’s laughing face, below her Norma Shearer hairdo, only one eye was visible, the wrinkles around it cleverly concealed by make-up. The shadow under her nose obscured lines at the corners of her mouth. But even laughter could not hide the weariness in her eye.

The character of Daisy Huang illustrates the central ambivalence of Mu’s work—a celebration of the nightlife of Shanghai, but one that reveals a certain trepidation, suggesting its uneasy undercurrents. The pleasures of the city may provide romance and adventure, but beware the concomitant sense of alienation and anonymity. This psychological ambiguity is, I think, one of the great powers of Mu’s writing—as we all know, the grey areas of life are more interesting than simple veneration or condemnation.

銀漢雙星 | Two Stars in the Milky Way (1931)

I’ve illustrated this article with images from 1930s Shanghai films, which express many of the same themes found in Mu Shiying’s fiction, although I find the film of this era less equivocal about the follies of city life; not surprising, given the experimental nature of Mu’s writing. I’m not trying to illustrate his stories, exactly, but to suggest how the language of contemporary film also dealt with the urban environment, contemporary femininity, the pace of modern life. Undoubtedly a topic that deserves further elaboration, and has probably had so from scholars. For today, though, let me recommend again the dazzling work of this very gifted writer.

– – –

Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist. New Translations and an Appreciation by Andrew David Field. Translations by Andrew David Field and Hong Yu, except for Five in a Nightclub by Randolph Trumbull. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014. Available from HKU Press.

Footnotes

1. Mu was assassinated in somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1940, aged 28. The Second Sino-Japanese War (known in China as the ‘War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression’) was raging, against the backdrop of the ongoing Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists, and Shanghai was at the time under Japanese occupation. For reasons unclear, Mu returned from Hong Kong in 1939 and accepted a newspaper position under the auspices of the collaborationist government (i.e., the Japanese puppet regime). Questions remain about his death, but it is thought that his assassination came at the hands of the KMT. Field quotes a newspaper article published after Mu’s death which describes Mu as having turned away from the Nationalists and states: “He was careful and diligent in his work, but was hated by reactionary desperadoes”.

2. In English and Chinese, the six short stories are:

i. The Man Who Was Treated as a Plaything, 1933 (被当作消遣品的男子; pinyin: Bèi dàng zuò xiāoqiǎn pǐn de nánzǐ)

ii. Five in a Nightclub, 1933 (夜總會裏的五個人; pinyin: Yèzǒnghuì lǐde wǔgèrén)

iii. Craven ‘A’, 1932 (title originally in English)

iv. Night, 1932 (夜; pinyin: Yè)

v. Shanghai Fox-trot, 1934 (上海的狐步舞; pinyin: Shànghǎi de hú bù wǔ)

vi. Black Peony, 1933 (黑牡丹; pinyin: Hēi mǔdān).

3. Indeed, Hong Yi writes in her preface that Mu wrote for and directed films, although they were apparently never released.

4. The full text of the ‘inverted’ paragraph reads:

A lone man sits in the corner holding a black coffee to stimulate his energy. Scent of alcohol, perfume, ham and eggs, smoke … Standing in dark corners are waiters in white. Chairs are scattered about, but tables are lined up neatly. Kingfisher pendants drag on shoulders, outstretched arms. Women’s smiling faces and men’s white-collared shirts. Men’s faces and free-flowing hair. Exquisite heels, heels, heels, heels, heels. Floating robes, floating skirts, in the midst of a smooth polished floor. Woo woo, blaring at them, that saxophone stretches out its neck, opens its big mouth. Azure dawn blankets the whole scene.

5. I’m inclined to think that Chinese films of this era were not tinted or toned, but if some were, the copies available today do not reflect this.

6. The bolding indicates that Mu used the English word in the original text.

7. Epstein, Jean. “Magnification.” Trans. Stuart Liebman. Originally published as “Grossissement” in Bonjour Cinema (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1921); reprinted in French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

8. Balázs, Béla. The Visible Man, or the Culture of Film. Originally published as Der sichtbare Mensch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1924). Trans. Rodney Livingstone and reprinted in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible man and The Spirit of film, ed. Erica Carter (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010).

9. Balázs, Béla. The Spirit of Film. Originally published as Der Geist des Films (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1930). Trans. Rodney Livingstone and reprinted in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory.

I’d like to thank the Academy … :)

The Liebster Award is a way for bloggers to recognize other bloggers and welcome each other into the community. I was extremely chuffed that both MIB’s Instant Headache and Lea of Silentology nominated me! When you receive a Liebster, you must:

i. Answer 11 questions from the person who nominated you;

ii. Tell your readers 11 random facts about yourself; and

iii. Nominate up to 11 other bloggers to receive the Liebster, and give them 11 questions to answer in turn.

In fact, both my nominations came some time ago – at the time I was super busy (and perhaps a little shy), so I apologize for the belatedness of this response! With the questions, I’ll split between MIB’s and Lea’s in order to keep it to eleven. Here goes:

1. Which decade of film do you appreciate the most? This is a deceptively difficult question—do I say teens or twenties: stylistic perfection, or intriguing development and experimentation? Currently, I’m very invested in the teens, so I guess that’s my answer.

2. What is one very obscure or off-the-wall film you would recommend? Obscure to the general public: Kind Hearts and Coronets (GB 1949)—a wickedly funny film, and surely one of the most brilliant scripts ever. Obscure to film people: Девушка с коробкой or The Girl with the Hatbox (USSR 1927)—Boris Barnet directs the wonderful Anna Sten in a Soviet drama-comedy. Obscure to silent film people: does the work of Yevgeni Bauer count? If not, I’ll say Одна из Многих | One of Many (USSR 1927), a charming look at film fandom; and on the more off-the-wall side, Balançoires (FR 1928), a strange but striking experimental film set in a carnival.

3. Which three places/countries must you visit before you die? New York City; Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna; Paisley Park.

4. If someone handed you a million dollars, what frivolous thing would you buy first? This question kills me, because I am very practical when it comes to money, so my immediate thought is “kill my student loan!” But a fantastic extravaganze—well, I really enjoy travelling, so I could sort out question 3 pretty fast! For a more film-related answer: maybe I would fund the restoration/release of a film that I really want to see but that’s not currently available. Oh, and I would buy Pina Menichelli’s owl headdress from Il fuoco—please, please, let this still exist.

5. You have the choice between two superpowers: learning any language in seconds, or being able to fix any car problem instantly. You must choose! The former! This one is easy—I’m really interested in languages, and I have never owned a car, nor do I drive more than a handful of times a year.

6. Okay, Keaton or Chaplin? Love them both, but Keaton has a special place in my heart.

7. What song do you want played at your funeral? As possibly an even bigger music nerd than a silent film one, this is tough. So why not opt for the obvious and go for Sparks’ Number 1 Song in Heaven? Great band, great song.

8. When it comes to movie productions, is bigger always better? I do love spectacle, but of the costume/set/choreography kind rather than the explosions/car crash kind. I also love work that goes to extremes in some way, perhaps through experimental techniques, bold performance, or big ideas. So, that’s a soft yes.

9. If you could swap gender for a day, what would be the one thing you would most look forward to doing? Surely there is only one answer to this question. *shifty eyes*

10. If the opportunity arose for you to have memory erased of just one film so you can watch it again for the first time, what would that film be? The video to Bowie and Jagger’s cover of “Dancing in the Street” probably. Hahaha, I love it so much. Serious film answer: Sherlock, Jr., which just made my draw drop the first time I saw it. Another is Morgiana (CZ 1972), one of my favourite films.

11. What song, if any, has made you cry? So many of my memories have musical components that it would probably be a long list. There are several by Magnetic Fields that would be good candidates—I find their music so bittersweet.

And 11 facts about me:

1. I’ve been vegetarian for about 15 years.

2. I share my birthday with Theda Bara, Clara Bow, and William Powell.

3. I’m a massive p-funk fan. One of my longest and strongest musical loves!

4. Except for one brief period, I’ve never lived more than a few kilometres from the sea.

5. I have very short hair which is currently dark red.

6. I have four flatmates.

7. I love very spicy food, to the extent that people sometimes ask me if I am a smoker – nope, just trying to kill off my tastebuds the natural way!

8. My text alert tone is the bell pattern from Run-D.M.C.’s “Peter Piper”. (Which is itself a sample from Bob James’ “Take me to the Mardi Gras”, which it turns out was originally written by Paul Simon, of all people).

9. I have a crescent-shaped scar by my right eye from where I was hit by a kayak as a kid.

10. I sincerely believe that naturally rectangular foods such as sandwiches taste better if you cut them into triangles.

11. My first job was in a movie theatre.

My nominations go to: his high holiest, PopeGrutch of the Century Film Project; Girls Do Film; Paul of ithankyouarthur; Joe Thompson of bigvriotsquat; Nitrateglow. And the questions:

1. Who would play you in the movie of your life?

2. What is the last book you read that really impressed you?

3. You’re making a screwball comedy, and you can cast anyone from cinema history, with the caveat that the two leads must not have appeared opposite each other before. Who are your leads?

4. Five years from now, do you see yourself living in the same place as you do currently?

5. Is there any film that you regret watching, and why?

6. Which hypothetical Tim Burton-directed biopic film would you rather watch: a film called Helena Bonham-Carter, in which Helena Bonham-Carter is played by Johnny Depp, or a film called Johnny Depp, in which Johnny Depp is played by Helena Bonham-Carter?

7. Pick a Kate Bush single: “Wuthering Heights”, “Running Up That Hill”, “Sat in Your Lap”.

8. Let’s say that you were given a six-month paid sabbatical from your day job. What would you do with that time?

9. Desert island scenario. If you could only listen one musician/band/singer for the rest of your life, who would it be?

10. Do you collect any kind of item?

11. Name a film that you love that you wish was better known.

Thanks, and have fun!

In the history of film, the 1910s was the premier decade for female action stars. Long before Ellen Ripley became the prototype for the modern female badass, silent movie screens were filled with fearless women, female daredevils, adventurers and spies. Women flew through the air, rappelled down cliffs, solved mysteries (or committed crimes), climbed and swam. American serial queens like Pearl White, Kathlyn Williams, and Helen Holmes were huge box office draws; Annette Kellerman scandalized and tantalized audiences in A Daughter of the Gods (1914). In France, Josette Andriot donned a black bodystocking to play Zigomar (1911-13) and Protéa (1913-19), and Musidora played the iconic role of Irma Vep in Les Vampires (1915-16). Fern Andra was a circus-film star in Germany, and Astrea was something of an Italian ‘strongwoman’; Cristina Ruspoli played arch-criminal Filibus with her dirigible. One might also mention two hit circus films made in Italy and directed by Dane Alfred Lind, Il jockey della morte and Il circo della morte, which prominently featured an acrobat known only as Miss Evelyn.

Another of these athletic heroines was Emilie Sannom, a Danish actress, stuntwoman and parachutist. I first came across her several years ago via Filmens vovehals | Daredevil of the Movies (1923), which was then available at Europa Film Treasures (RIP). This video, one of only a handful of Sannom’s surviving titles, is something of a showreel for her very impressive stuntwork. Mostly forgotten today and with little information about her readily available in English, I wanted to make Sannom more visible by writing up (and illustrating) some information about her life and film career.

Emilie Sannom was born on the 29^th of September, 1886. Before the First World War, Denmark was one of the main film centres of Europe, and Sannom entered films just as Danish cinema was in its ascendancy. Her earliest known film roles came in several 1909 releases by Biorama; the next year, she appeared in Biorama’s København ved Nat | Copenhagen by Night (1910), a film which survives and which I have seen, but in truth, I can’t remember her presence in it. However, that same year she also appeared in a film that would have a monumental impact on the European film industry: Afgrunden | The Abyss (aka The Woman Always Pays; Kosmorama). This was, of course, Asta Nielsen’s sensational film début, directed by her partner Urban Gad. Sannom played the supporting role of Lilly d’Estrelle, a variety singer who is Magda’s love rival; the two women get into a scrap on stage after Lilly flirts with Magda’s lover Rudolph.

Lilly shares a moment with Rudolph; an altercation between the two women.

Sannom (left) and Asta Nielsen in Balletdanserinden (1911).

Sannom also appeared in another Asta Nielsen film, Balletdanserinden | The Ballet Dancer (Nordisk, 1911). However, among Sannom’s sixteen films that year, the most important was Hamlet (also Nordisk), in which she played Ophelia. Though the film is apparently lost today, a review in the American film periodical Moving Picture World noted, “Fraulein Sannom makes a very beautiful Northland Ophelia; she seems a true princess; but on the screen she is perhaps more poetic than mad. In other words, she wasn’t as pathetic as she might have been.” This seems to suggest that Sannom underplayed the role; in any case, the review concludes by stating that all of the acting is “very intelligent and dramatic”.

Sannom in Hamlet.

Sannom’s films quickly began to showcase her athleticism and daring. Production stills from Sannnom’s mid-teens films frequently show her in action: scaling walls, riding horses, performing in daring costumes, escaping from a locked trunk. Now working for Filmfabriken Danmark, Sannom was promoted as the ‘daredevil of the movies’, and much was made of her stuntwork. For example, in Zigo (1914), we see Sannom walk along a row of spikes, rotating on the tip of one; in Zigeuneren Raphael, she wields a knife.

Zigeuneren Raphael; Zigo

Another of her 1914 films, Pigen fra Hidalgo-Fyret | The Girl from Hidalgo, was released in the USA under the title Through Flames to Fame. The film received a full write-up in Picture Stories Magazine of November 1914, which outlined the film as follows:

A tale of dogged perseverance that from threatened poverty, by strenuous effort, wins through to honour and reward. Malice and vengeance are ranged against the hero, and elements themselves conspire to his defeat, but he triumphs in the end, aided by the bravery and devotion of a woman whose sympathy he had awakened.

In this written adaptation of the film, Sannom’s character—here called Kitty Thomasson—is mixed up in her brother’s smuggling operation, but wants none of it: “Keep your dirty money!” she cries. She catches the film’s hero, Tom, spying on the men in their lighthouse HQ, and develops a liking for him. Unfortunately, the duo are apprehended before they can escape, Kitty being hauled off to be imprisoned in the old mill, Tom locked up in the lighthouse tower. When the lighthouse is struck by lightning and catches fire, the quick-witted Kitty is determined to go to Tom’s rescue—but how to escape from the windmill? By climbing out onto one of its blades and riding it down to the ground, of course: “The idea fascinated her.” Her courageous feat is described in detail, but luckily, we can also see it for ourselves:

Now free, Kitty runs to the jetty, grabs a boat and rows full-speed to the burning lighthouse, and rescues Tom before the dynamite at the base of the lighthouse detonates. Meanwhile, the smugglers are still at large, and the windmill is on fire, the unoiled axles having become overheated and caught ablaze. The story dictates that the smugglers, their dynamite, and the burning mill all converge, but all ends well—the smugglers are rescued and put in the clink before the windmill, too, blows up.

Nitrate decomposition heightens the tension.

Although this dramatization of the film sometimes describes Kitty in stereotypical ways, it certainly shows her resourcefulness. And while Tom is nominally the hero according to writer Owen Garth, it’s clear that Sannom is the real star of the film: Kitty saves the day in dramatic fashion while Tom plays the traditional damsel role, complete with the trope of being trapped in a tower.

Sannom as Nattens datter

Sannom played a female detective in Nattens datter | Daughter of the Darkness (1915), a film which sparked three sequels over the next two years. (Unfortunately, only Nattens datter III is known to survive). The first Nattens datter film looks to have contained plenty of thrills: stills show Sannom riding a motorcycle, swordfighting with another woman, and wearing an incredible stage outfit with half-moon crotch decoration.

Great outfit … or best outfit?

In 1918 Sannom took on her most famous role: lady detective Panopta, who, like ‘Nattens datter’, appeared in a quartet of films. Each instalment saw Panopta pitted against criminal mastermind Kippy, a kidnapper and all-around criminal with an underwater lair. The first two episodes were adapted from novel(s?) by the improbably named Zilva Bébé, and concerned the kidnapping of Maud, a millionaire heiress. Panopta II—subtitled Rædselshuset paa Søens Bund, ‘The House of Terror at the Bottom of the Lake’—saw Sannom don a bathing suit in order to carry out aquatic reconnaissance.

Sannom as Panopta; the second picture shows her in drag.

The adventures continued in 1919, with Panopta III (Taarnets Hemmelighed, ‘The Secret of the Tower’) and Panopta IV (Da Taarnklokken styrtede ned, ‘As the Tower Bell Crashed Down’).

No idea if this is the tower in question, but it looks appropriately secretive.

Through research online, I have determined that the Panopta films screened in several European countries (Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, and presumably others), as well as in Costa Rica, Cuba, and India. Here are a couple of adverts from the Netherlands and Spain respectively:

Nieuw Israelietisch weekblad (Amsterdam), 20 Sep 1918; El mundo cinematografico – Edicion Popular no. 49 (Barcelona), 17 May 1918.

After the Panopta series, Sannom made a couple of films in Germany (one of which, incidentally, co-starred Bela Lugosi). Her last film was La fanciulla dell’aria | Mistress of the Sky (1923), an Italian film directed by fellow Dane Alfred Lind, and featured Sannom performing a series of audacious airplane and parachuting stunts.

La fanciulla dell’aria (1923)

After her film career tapered off, Sannom continued to work as a parachutist and aerial performer. She never married, although, like Asta Nielsen, she had a child out of wedlock. Sannom’s life abruptly ended at an airshow in 1931, when her parachute did not release; she plummeted several hundred metres to the ground and was killed instantly.

A newspaper report of her death from French newspaper L’Ouest-Éclair, 31 August 1931.

After her death, author Tom Kristensen wrote a commemorative poem for her, a couple of lines from which are reproduced on her gravestone: Frygten for Døden var ikke saa stor, større var Frygten for Livet paa Jord. “Her fear of death was not so great; greater was her fear of life on Earth.”

Films of the teens starring such ‘adventure women’ often cut both ways—on one hand, they are a realisation of female power in a previously male sphere; on the other hand, there’s the fact that the audience is encouraged to take pleasure from women’s endangerment. Emilie Sannom’s stunt work is still astounding today, breathtaking in its daring, but she is also notable for her self-possession and often rather severe facial expression. We have little footage to go by, it’s true, but it’s difficult to imagine Sannom screaming in terror, and she was clearly no coquette; thus, when she puts her body on display in a skimpy swimsuit as Panopta, there is less of a sense of allure or titillation than there might be. There is a certain coolness to this risk-taking ‘daredevil of the movies’. Given her real-life love of parachuting and aerial aerobatics, it’s not hard to imagine that for Sannom, filmmaking was a means to an end rather than her life’s calling.

– – –

Filmens vovehals [Daredevil of the Movies], 1923. Compilation reel containing clips from the Filmfabriken Danmark films Pigen fra Hidalgo-Fyret | The Girl from Hidalgo (1914), Diligencekusken fra San-Hilo | The Stagecoach Driver from San-Hilo (1914), Zigo (1914), For Barnets Skyld | For the Child’s Sake (1915), Panopta II (1918), Panopta IV (1919), and the Alfred Lind-directed Italian film La fanciulla dell’aria | Mistress of the Sky (1923). Available to watch here on the European Film Gateway.

Looking through the Italian 1910s periodical Film, I regularly noticed adverts for coming attractions/productions that prominently use question marks. Tactic to heighten suspense, lack of concrete planning on the part of that theatre/production company, stylistic quirk of this journal—whatever the reason, I really liked this visual device. So, enjoy an image gallery of these Italian film advertisement question marks!

What will Savoia-Film of Torino come up with next?

Film no. 06 of 1919 (23 February 1919)

Considering the company went into a suspension in 1918 from which it did not recover, the answer is: very little.

Short-lived company Megale-Film (Roma/Napoli) take a similarly enigmatic approach.

Film no. 23 of 1917 (30 July 1917)

Principesca Film of Rome announce “four grand subjects”: a love story, an adventure film, a “colossal biblical reconstruction” and a powerful modern ciné-tragedy in four parts and a prologue.

Film no. 37 del 1917 (12 December 1917)

One of my favourites:

Film no. 21 of 1917 (04 July 1917)

The film is actually Zeus, directed by Aldo Molinari and starring Vania Krasiensky, a Polish dancer according to the caption. Here’s another advert from later the same month with the full title, though still a lavish use of decorative punctuation.

Film no. 23 del 1917 (30 July 1917)

Not much context to the following image, which is a rather subtle ad for the productions of Alfonso De Giglio—that’s his emblem at lower right. De Giglio also produced L’atleta fantasma (1919), featuring a masked hero who wore a chain-mail headdress.

Film no. 08 of 1919 (23 March 1919)

And an emphatic appearance from the classical Italian strongman himself:

Film no. 02 of 1918 (22 January 1918)

Fernanda Negri-Pouget began in films early (1906), and seems to have been quite a draw in the mid-to-late teens, judging by the frequency of ads for her films. Miss Fluffy Ruffles of 1918 was advertised heavily and quite lavishly.

Film no. 14 del 1919 (31 May 1919)

History has not remembered Lora Darcy, who does not even have an IMDb listing.

Film no. 22 del 1918 (07 August 1918)

Megale-Film are back! Now they’re teasing us with Alberto Capozzi’s next project:

Film no. 13 del 1918 (22 May 1918)

An adaptation of the famous ‘opera’ by ‘Schakespeare’:

Film no. 02 del 1918 (19 January 1918)

Supposedly directed by Enrico Guazzoni of Quo Vadis? (1912) fame, I can find no traces of this Macbeth adaptation—so the mystery of who would play Lady Macbeth remains forever unsolved.

A film that did find life:

Film no. 32 of 1919 (16 October 1919)

That’s Il rosso e il nero (1920). Per the IMDb listing, Mario Bonnard and Maria Caserini seem to have been the leads.

What next for G. Ardizzone’s film exchange in Palermo?

Film no. 03 of 1917 (27 January 1917)

Not quite the same as the other adverts presented here, but I couldn’t resist this ad for … E dopo? (1918), directed by Febo Mari, that key auteur of the Italian silent era.

Film no. 06 del 1919 (23 February 1919)

Leading actress Nietta Mordeglia, pictured in the circle, was Mari’s long-term partner. Note also the ‘FM’ logo in the point of the question mark. … E dopo? is not known to survive.

What are Cines up to?

Film no. 08 of 1919 (23 March 1919)

From the director and story source, the answer appears to be the title Cosmopolis (1920), which—in his third appearance in this post!—stars Alberto Capozzi.

Gigi Armandis presents “I beniamini del pubblico”: ‘the darlings of the public’. However, I’m unable to identify a collaboration between him and Roberto Bracco.

Film no. 21 of 1917 (04 July 1917)

Another actress lost to time: Claretta (a.k.a. Clarette) Rosaj. Here Caesar Film announce a series of films starring the “charming and elegant” (vezzosa ed elegantissima) actress. The same page advertises several films starring Gustabo Serena and Tilde Kassay, as well as several of Francesca Bertini’s films, including La piovra | The Octopus (1919).

  
Film no.21 del 1918 (31 July 1918); postcard of Ms. Rosaj.

Two films Rosaj made at Caesar are Fiaccole | Torches (1918) and Giorgia (1919). Her 1922 film Tragedia di bambola | Tragedy of a Doll survives at Eastman House.

Filmgraf were doing the hard sell—the below advert for Aquile umane appears several times. The film seems to have been released under the title Aquile romane (1919), which rather undermines Filmgraf’s publicity efforts. Side note: it’s another film in which Gustavo Serena acted.

  
Film no. 25 of 1918 (31 August 1918); Film no. 31 of 1918 (31 October 1918)

And lastly, this may not be a question mark, but this kind of nightmare fuel deserves to be shared widely:

Film no. 21 del 1917 (04 July 1917)

Film d’eccezione appear to have been a short-lived company, and with this kind of approach … it’s not hard to see why.

??? … and grazie mille!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to a very important blogging event: Diva December! This is the month that I devote to coverage of the Italian divas and their films.

If you are wondering: “who?”, I have previously published the introductory article Fatal passions: an overview of the Italian divas, which outlines the genre, the major players, and why I am so drawn to these works. I hope you’ll take a look. But in short, the ‘diva film’ is a term used refer to a specific genre: the female Italian melodramas of the 1910s, dripping with fashion and emotion, sensational and sometimes operatic in scope, and always the woman at the eye of the storm, these actresses of grand passions and intense physicality.

Next week’s post is quite research-intensive, so today will be a lighter look at one of the classics of the diva film genre: Carmine Gallone’s Malombra of 1917, starring Lyda Borelli.

Malombra is a true gothic melodrama. The plot centres around Lady Marina di Malombra (Borelli), an orphan who goes to live with her uncle, the Conte Cesare d’Ormengo. Yet the castle of Malombra holds secrets; a servant tells her of her ancestor Lady Cecilia, the first wife of the Count’s father, who died as a prisoner in the rooms where Marina is now resident. Amidst the flowers and festivals of April (springtime in Italy), Marina by chance finds a letter written by Cecilia in a hidden compartment in her writing desk. “For a flower, for a smile, for a slander, the Count Emanuele and his mother are killing me slowly. I’m condemned …!” Cecilia curses the Conte d’Ormengo and his progeny, her handmirror keeping her last image, destined to break when another looks into it … as Marina does.

From that point forward, Marina’s spirit seems to merge somehow with that of Cecilia, or read another way, she (over-)identifies with Cecilia and internalizes her story. She becomes mysteriously ill and filled with a kind of dreamy mania, finding solace in a book named A Dream (“That reading deeply troubled Marina, now easy prey of any fantastic suggestions”). A subplot arrives in the form of Amleto Novelli, who as Mr. Corrado Silla acts strangely towards Marina, alternately in love then indifferent … and Silla is also the author of A Dream, writing to Marina (as Cecilia), who suspects her uncle is cooking up a marriage plot. Ultimately, Cecilia’s desire for revenge against the Conte drives things to a tragic conclusion …

The plot is at times a little hard to follow, perhaps because of missing footage. Yet as with all such stories, it’s not so much about the narrative as the way it is told: Malombra unfolds with dark romanticism, replete with flowers, boat rides, flowing gowns and the inimitable physical presence of La Borelli. (Indeed, the scenes of festivals, boats, and continual presence of flowers are reminiscent of Rapsodia Satanica). But the excess of emotion and drama is manifested most of all in the acting of Borelli herself. Lyda Borelli was a famous stage actress when she transitioned to the screen in 1913, making a grand success with Ma l’amor mio non muore! and remaining one of the top screen actresses in Italy until her retirement in 1918. Borelli’s acting style is strongly influenced by Italian theatrical conventions, painting, and dance, and is based on series of poses linked by both sinuous motion and sudden movement. She inspired the noun borellismo and the verb borelleggiare to describe her ways. To witness:

Thinking about Borelli’s screen presence taps into a larger question: what makes a good screen actress? Fashions change in this just as in anything, and the realism/’naturalness’ that is the mainstream norm now is simply one of many possible value systems. (And of course, the ideal of realism in acting is elastic over time, too). Borelli was not without her critics, but in her time many thought her very artistic, and this kind of very ‘visible’, corporeal acting style was prized. I imagine that many people today might find her mannered, perhaps even ridiculous, but anyone who would criticize her for ‘bad acting’ is rather missing the point, in my opinion: in fact, she was extremely successful at what she did. And, spoiler alert, personally I love her: I find the highly embodied nature of her screen presence to be fascinating and wonderful.

Borelli is also able to use the power of her gaze to great effect, as in this shot, where she almost seems to be breaking the fourth wall.

Another scene that stands out comes near the end of Malombra, when Marina/Cecilia is taking her meal on the patio. Holding her knife, she suddenly plunges it into the table, her left hand becoming a claw: Marina’s inner troubles dramatically expressed.

She is not afraid either to lapse into grotesquerie. There’s this very odd shot where her eyes flare, her lip curls, her teeth are bared in a hiss.

Too much? Perhaps, but in a film that is so much about feminine psychic disturbance—and one could surely read Malombra in relation to early-twentieth-century discourses around hysteria, etc—it is somehow captivating.

The elements of a diva film

Just as any genre, diva films have certain recurring motifs, or tropes. Through rigorous scientific analysis I have determined the elements that are essential to the genre, and I present these to you here. Andiamo!

Copious costume changes. Borelli wears an incredible array of dresses, from the flowing to the frou-frou. By my reckoning, she wore about eighteen outfits in Malombra, roughly one per four minutes—very respectable. Here are a few of her looks:

Mirrors. Cecilia’s letter reads, “I committed my last image to the mirror. When you identify yourself within it, the mirror will break.”

A dramatic scene involving flowers. Malombra is filled with flowers: in the gardens where Marina walks; decorating the interior of the castle; in jardinières on the castle’s patio. But two instances stand out: the room filled with flowers; and on the water, when Marina is showered with blooms in her boat.

Symbolic naming. Malombra: literally, ‘dark shadow’.

A veiled diva. Check and check! And I mean check.

A necklace of notable length.

Headwear that borders on the avant-garde. Not really, but this is both lovely and dramatic:

Feminine sufferance/trials and tribulations. An uncle who wishes to marry you off against your will; the strange attitude of a writer; most of all, the dangers of living in a place full of “strange legends”, cursed by the vengeful ghost of a female ancestor.

Men with wacky hair. This fellow takes the bird’s-nest approach:

Emotive piano playing. (And flowers).

Incredible intertitles. Malombra sets a high-water mark here. Who could forget these lines?

• On a symptom of Marina’s mysterious illness: “Uncontrollable bother against anything modern.”
• On Marina’s recovery: “Medicine had managed to cure her body, but who would manage to save her soul?”
• On the passionate and desperate state of Marina: “Under the double madness of love and death.”

What can top love and death? Love, death … and flowers:

Under the influence of her madness, she had decorated the house with flowers, for the meeting of love with vengeance … which turned into a meeting with death!

And the coup de grâce of the finale:

– – –

Malombra was strongly advertised in contemporary periodicals, usually double-billed with Madame Tallien, which debuted a couple of months before Malombra. Here are some examples of the adverts that appeared in cinema magazines and journals:

Film no. 39 del 1916 (16 December 1916)

Film no. 1 of 1917 (10 January 1917)

Cinemagraf nos. 1-2 of 1917 (15-30 Jan 1917)

A writeup in Film in July 1916 informs the public of the forthcoming release, speaking of the intimacy which Borelli will bring to the film, and a lengthy review is published in La vita cinematografica in April 1917. Author Pier da Castello discusses the film in relation to its source material, the 1881 source novel of the same name by Antonio Fogazzaro, but his real target is the art form of cinema itself and the role of Borelli within it. Indeed an interesting topic, but I could not easily grasp all of the nuances and therefore won’t take it up here. He praises the photography of Malombra, but critiques the visual style: “I should mention the decoration; if you take away the feast of flowers on the lake, there is very little that is really nice. Do not speak of the interiors; with the exception of the library—for its great style—the semi-external good light effect of the lodge, the rest is not up to Cines.” He goes on to mention the castle interiors and the room full of flowers as “far from masterpieces of mise-en-scène”.

Not so bad, surely?

Malombra was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna from two incomplete original-era nitrate prints, one Italian and one from the collection of SODRE in Montevideo. 1500m of the original 1705m survives, the majority of footage coming from the Uruguayan print. A search on the Media History Digital Library confirms that Malombra was distributed—or at least available for distribution—throughout Latin and South America: for example, it’s mentioned in the news sections of Cine-Mundial devoted to Argentina, Cuba, and Brazil.

There are even a couple of mentions in North American journals. One notice in Moving Picture World (28 July 1917; and reprinted in Motion Picture News of 04 August 1917), contains an interesting note on the problems of import and translation of Malombra, which was apparently retitled From the Great Beyond in the US.

It is built on psychic lines, and Lyda Borelli plays the part of a girl with two souls. On the arrival of the print in was placed in work for titling, but the subject of metempsychosis stumped the would-be titlers completely. Other channels were tried out; finally, the services of Leon J. Rubinstein were contracted for. He interpolated a set of titles which reduce the scientific elements of the picture to the easy understanding of the layman.

Funnily enough, a different article in Motion Picture News of 21 July 1917 had stated that “Shepard and Van Loan” have just completed the titling of Malombra. What to believe? For what it’s worth, this other MPN report also confuses Lyda Borelli with Leda Gys, stating Borelli to be the star of Christus (1916).

The restored film was released on VHS in 1995, and the digital copies floating around are derived from that tape—hence the low quality of the images shown here. (Not to complain, I’m happy to be able to see it). I quite like the score by Michele della Valentina, too.

Poster for the 1942 adaptation of Malombra.

As for the novel Malombra, it has been adapted for film twice more: a lavish-looking 1941 version with Isa Miranda, and then what looks to be a soft-porn version in 1984; there was also an Italian TV series in 1974. Regardless of the quality (or not) of these adaptations, the dark decadence of Lyda Borelli must surely stand out. For all the strangenesses and lacunae of the film, Malombra is something quite special.

– – –

Read my past writings on diva films here. Next week: investigating two mostly-lost Pina Menichelli films!

– – –

Malombra. Dir. Carmine Gallone. Rome, Italy: Cines, 1917. 

Pina Menichelli in Gemma di Sant’Eremo. Museo Nazionale del Cinema, ref. F40062-013.

Recently, I was reading Italo Calvino’s wonderful book If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979), and the following line stuck in my mind:

The dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Calvino was talking particularly about the contradiction of “long novels written today”, and indeed, If on a winter’s night is a book that grapples with the medium of literature. So it’s rather bastardly of me to apply his thought to film, yet, that is where my mind went. How many films—particularly of the silent era—exist incomplete, or in fragments, or not at all? It’s a truism of historiography that the past continually escapes us, and the survival of films is one concrete example of that.

But I’ll wax lyrical about the poetics of archival fragments another time—the point of this post is to look more concretely at two Pina Menichelli films that did not weather the storms of time unscathed. Menichelli had six releases in 1918, and of these, one is relatively intact and available (La moglie di Claudio), one survives in the Cineteca Italiana in Milano (Il giardino incantato a.k.a. Il giardino della voluttà; The Stronger Sex), and two others are not known to be extant. The final two, Gemma di Sant’Eremo and La passeggiera | The Passenger, exist today only as small fragments: giving us just a small window into these films, and Menichelli’s work therein.

Gemma di Sant-Eremo

Less than two minutes of Gemma di Sant’Eremo survives, a filmstrip only 35m in length. The footage is heavily affected by decomposition: as the Museo Nazionale del Cinema write in the Vimeo caption, “the emulsion melts and ‘eats’ Pina Menichelli”!

Happily, this is one case where it’s possible to find out quite a lot of information about the history of the film. Gemma began life in under the title La Colpa | Blame. The earliest information comes from a production notebook dated 27 October 1915, which contains a shot/scene listing, text of the intertitles, etc.

Beginning of the La colpa section of the notebook. MNC, ref. A160/8. Note the cast listing of Menichelli, Alberto Nepoti, and Edoardo (Edouard) Davesnes.

From the censorship visa information available at Italia Taglia, we can see that La Colpa was submitted for registration on the 23rd of August 1916, and then revised on September the 11th. The notes state ‘Approvata con riserva Vietata in appello’ (Approved with reservations; prohibited on appeal), indicating that the film was left in limbo. The next item on the trail is another entry in a production notebook of 14 November 1916, which again gives a detailed breakdown of the film, including the colouring to be applied to each section.

Montaggio soggetti dal 14 novembre 1916, La colpa. MNC, ref. A160/10.

Here’s another shot from a different page that shows the colouring scheme more clearly. Look to the annotations on the left side of the page: giallo = yellow, verde = green. The ‘A’s are for arancio, orange.

The Museo Nazionale del Cinema also hold another production notebook, this one undated, with more details of the colouring of the film. Apart from orange, green and yellow, La colpa also had shots in bleu, rosa (pink), rosso (red), and rossastro (reddish); there’s also the intriguing verde speciale.

Elenco delle positive, La colpa. MNC, ref. A160/7.

In its March/April 1917 edition, L’arte muda published a short article on La colpa, which talks about a successful public screening. Everything else indicates that the film wasn’t officially released until 1918, so I’m not sure what the circumstances of the screening were. It’s a rather advertorial-esque piece: the author describes La colpa as a triumph for Menichelli, who beautifully embodies the protagonist: a “sublime type of woman, full of life and reality” (sublime tipo di donna, pieno di vita e di realtà). A film starring Menichelli is always an “artistic event”, we are told; the author recalls Il fuoco and Tigre reale, “two jewels of cinematography”. One is reassured to know that in La colpa, Itala “does not skimp on the necessary luxury”.

La colpa reappeared at the censor’s office in November 1917; the visa was finally passed on the first day of 1918, with the decree that the scene of the wife killing the husband was to be deleted, and the title was changed from La colpa, ovvero: Gemma di Sant’Eremo to simply Gemma di Sant’Eremo. Per the MNC, the première of the film was on 04 February 1918. The film was advertised in periodicals—here are a couple of examples:

Top: Film no. 01 of 1918 (12 January 1918). That page advertises all the same films as in the bottom image, from La vita cinematografica nos. 7-8 of 1918 (22-28 February 1918).

That covers some of the film’s production/censorship history, but what about the film’s story itself? We know that Gemma di Sant’Eremo (Menichelli) is married to the Conte di Sant’Eremo (Edoardo Davesnes); I assume that the plot concerns her having an affair with the Marchese Ugo De Renzis, played by Alberto Nepoti. That the film was censored for matiricide and that it entered production not long after the success of Il fuoco points towards a femme fatale-type role for Menichelli.

Not much can be gleaned from the remaining fragment of the film. It shows the Conte (Davesnes) initially rebuffing Gemma’s affections, before they embrace in that ‘maximize facial visibility’ movie way:

 
“Watch the hair! I mean, I love you, darling.”

In the next shot, Menichelli lounges around in her boudoir, then leaves to go into a sitting-room, where she turns on the lamp. The Conte enters an adjacent room, and Gemma walks in and throws back her head. (These are the red-tinted shots shown at the beginning of this entry). He approaches her, and she shakes his hands off her shoulders, stalking across the room; he polishes his monocle while she emotes in the background.

Not much to go on, but luckily there are also quite a few surviving production stills, showing Menichelli with Davesnes, Alberto Nepoti, her child, a whole bunch of children. Gemma has a child who she loves, who becomes sick; she suffers herself, made up to look gaunt. At one point, Nepoti stares at a case full of guns. All of the settings are elegant and upper class, with everyone impeccably dressed.

 
 
In order: MNC ref. nos. F40003-003, F40062-005, F40062-010, F40003-002, F40652-003, F40062-003.

See also these brilliant pieces of Menichellismo, location: a bed strewn with flowers. Pina, you’re the best.

Top: MNC, ref. F40062-008; bottom: F40062-001.

She also wears this absolutely gorgeous dress.

Slam dunk! MNC, ref. F40062-009.

The piece in L’arte muda makes much of Menichelli’s expression and body language in the film’s tragic conclusion, giving this eye-popping description:

The scenes that precede [Menichelli’s] death are simply unbeatable. Step by step, as if seeing it in actuality, we witness the fatal moment: the lips contract, the pupils dilate, the nose turns blue, the cheeks sag, the chest falls, the whole body is against itself, until the cold stillness of death arrives in an attitude that immobilizes the noble figures of women.

Such an intense description of Menichelli’s embodiment of her character’s death! Another review appears in Film in February 1918. Although the overall review is relatively positive, the opening is tart: “We had, as the French say, a ‘rentrée’ of Pina Menichelli. And the only interesting circumstance of this elephantine ‘film’ is that it could unfold in half an hour and it takes two.” That said, the writer seems a big fan of Menichelli herself. Again, there’s a focus on her body, which he describes in very specific terms:

Pina Menichelli has been deliciously fattened [ingrassata]: her arms Junoesque, chest protuding, audacious hips, and above all the most Raphaelesque round face.

In fact, the review seems mostly an excuse to talk about the figures of Italian movie actresses. Following on from the previous quote, the writer says:

This happy event is intimately linked to others, a series of similar triumphs of line and shape in cinematography. Until yesterday the screen was rife with skeletal actresses, today we observe visions of softness and colour flourishing.

So, Mr. Reviewer, are you a fan of the luscious figures of these actresses or not? I just can’t tell …

Gemma di Sant’Eremo travelled—the MNC list sets of intertitles in French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. There are several mentions of the film in Cine-Mundial, the Spanish language version of Moving Picture World, under the title La culpa; it also reached Uruguay under the title La condesa Gemma (‘Countess Gemma’).

La passeggiera

Only six and a half minutes of La passeggiera remain, preserved by the FilmoTeca de Catalunya. However, we can recuperate the plot of the film from Spanish film periodicals, in which the film was much publicized under its Spanish title La pasajera.

  
Arte y cinematografia nos. 186-187, 01 August 1918; El Mundo Cinematografico—Edición Popular Illustrada no. 72, 24 October 1918.

Not only did Menichelli and La pasajera make the cover of both El Cine and El Mundo Cinematografico—Edición Popular Illustrada (the latter twice! In July and then October), a detailed synopsis was published in both El Cine and Il Cinematografo. This outline—the same text is printed in each journal—tells us the story of the beautiful, sheltered, and somewhat naïve Lucía Boijoli (Menichelli), who had been adopted by the millionaire Davrancai, a man who spared no expense on her behalf and treated her like a princesa.

Lucía’s life passes amongst rare flowers and the burning words of a multitude of worshippers eager for her beauty and her millions; she is the supposed heir to her old protector.

A spanner in the works! Sr. Davrancai is attacked and dies. It was his stated desire to make Lucía his heir, and he was preparing to legalize this, but the paperwork was not yet in place. His fortune therefore passes to a distant cousin, Laura Arguin—described in intertitle as “bitter but devout”—who is unwilling to take Lucía in. Primary amongst Lucía’s court of admirers was the “cynical fortune-hunter” Fabricio de Mauve, who drops her like a hot potato in order to marry the daughter of a millionaire industrialist. Thus Lucía is in dire straits. No tengo dinero, no-no-no-no-no!!

Arte y cinematografia no. 186-187, 01 August 1918

Desperate, Lucía eventually turns to Guillermo Kerjean, a friend who is a mechanical engineer in charge of the Petain aviation company. As he is only thirty years old, she cannot live with him without arousing suspicion and gossip, but she hits upon a solution: they will enter a marriage of convenience. Kerjean has spoken of how he does not wish to marry because it will interrupt his life of engineering productivity, Lucía will never love another man after the disappointment of Fabricio de Mauve: they can kill two birds with one stone and live together as affectionate companions. At first unconvinced, Kerjean comes around to the idea, and soon the “strange marriage” is formalised. Humour ensues as they have to prove their fake marriage, but eventually real love grows between the pair.

El Cine no. 349, 28 September 1918

Kerjean’s engineering work has gone very well, and proud of his accomplishments, he decides that he will fly the machine himself, accompanied by a passenger, “to demonstrate the stability and capacity of the device for long voyages”. When the launch is imminent, the mechanic who was to be the passenger does not come to the airfield because of a sudden illness, and so Lucía, even knowing the risk, decides to accompany her husband and become … la passeggiera. She will “participate in his Victory or die with him” (participar en su Victoria o morir con él). Their love acknowledged, Lucía and Kerjean will soar together on the wings of the powerful biplane.

Brochure pubblicitaria: La Grande “Saison” Cinematografica del Corso Cinema Teatro di Roma, 1919. Note: this is the inner page of the programme, with the front page being devoted to Lyda Borelli’s Rapsodia Satanica, originally released in 1917.

A review is published in Il Cinematografo no. 5 of 1919, written by an Aurelio Spada, telling about La passeggiera‘s showing at the Cinema-Teatro Corso (see programme above). Spada is complimentary: “I do not know if The Passenger pleased the audience: I liked it very much”, going on to say that smart audiences who appreciate the “most subtle nuances of thought and passion” will surely like it. Although he points out the lack of originality and unlikelihood of the plot, which derives from the source material—“If I had to undertake some literary criticism here (and in spite of myself I sometimes do)”—he finds that the performances of Menichelli and ‘Peppino Turco’ breathe life into the story. (Peppino Turco was a popular Italian songwriter who lived 1846-1903, but Spada calls the male lead of the film by this name).

If the story of The Passenger is discussed, if the curious matrimonio bianco [white marriage, i.e., one that is unconsummated] leaves us baffled or incredulous, the two actors have instead made their pathos with such mastery that there remains no doubt about their living humanity.

As well as praising ‘Turco’ for his restraint and elegant composure, Menichelli’s performance is described in exulted terms:

Pina Menichelli has created with her art an unforgettable kind of girl—a type that, from her facial expressions and physiognomy to her affective and volitional demonstrations, follows a logical route and a spiritual rhythm leading to the perfect illusion of truth.

Spada discusses the acting of Menichelli and ‘Turco’ in order to advance his thesis that cinema acting could be more effective if “flavoured with great parsimony”.

I will say more: in a certain kind of film in which the words and script are suitable for displaying incidents and normal passions, the best interpretation is the one that manages in the eyes of the public to make the character like a normal human type, living and true, logical and persuasive.

But for this we want real actors and actresses—as on the stage— not the usual celibri, and not famous mannequins which continue to hold the field and that are still shown to the good paying public, as the ne plus ultra champions of the arte muda and the theatre of shadows.

I can’t really tell if Spada is holding up Menichelli and ‘Turco’ as exemplars of this approach, or subtly rebuking them—as much as I love Menichelli, I woudn’t describe her as understated, even by the standards of the time (think of the much-vaunted verism of Francesca Bertini). Still, Spada’s review is an interesting commentary on ideals of film acting.

Arte y cinematografia nos. 186-187, 01 August 1918

The surviving fragment of La passeggiera seems to come from early in the film: we see Pina interacting with male characters in the street, in elegant interiors, on a seaside balcony.

The highlight of the surviving footage is a short fantasy sequence. Davrancai tells Lucía: “Do you recall, when you were a child … I’d thrill you with my fairy tales? Can you still remember them?” And we see a dream/fantasy sequence in which an elfin child peeps out of a giant cabbage, before taking refuge back inside.

La fée aux choux II: the childhood years?

Apart from Menichelli, the cast supposedly includes Lido Manetti (a.k.a. Arnold Kent), Luciano Molinari, and Alberto Nepoti. I’m quite familiar with Nepoti, who costarred with Menichelli several times, but couldn’t positively ID him among the male characters in the fragment.

La passeggiera was based on the 1911 novel La passagère by Guy Chantepleure (née Jeanne-Caroline Violet). This was emphasized in the Italian adverts, which refer to the novel by ‘Madama de Chantepleur’.

  
Film no. 01 del 1918; Film no. 02 of1918; Film no. 38 of 1917.

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It’s bittersweet that we have these artefacts; they’re lucky pieces of celluloid, snatched from the entropy of history, but their incomplete nature highlights what has been lost to time. Textual sources are crucial here (and for many reasons besides)—it’s amazing what one can find out, even just online. And one never knows, perhaps more footage of Gemma and La passeggiera will turn up one day.

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Read my past writings on diva films here. Next week: a new diva makes her début on this blog!

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Gemma di Sant’Eremo. Orig. title: La colpa [Blame]. Dir. Alfredo Robert. Torino, Italy: Itala-Film, 1918. Premièred on 04 February 1918. Fragment preserved by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Torino) and available to view here on Vimeo. The production notebooks and stills of this film are drawn from the MNC’s online collections (search “Gemma di Sant’Eremo”).

La passeggiera [The Passenger]. Dir. Gero Zambuto. Torino, Italy: Itala-Film, 1918. Visa data revisione of 18 February 1918. Preserved by the FilmoTeca de Catalunya. Note on personnel: the opening credits of the preservation wrongly lists Giovanni Pastrone as the director. Segundo de Chomón is listed for photography and tricks (trucatges), which seems plausible given the cabbage sequence. Note on nomenclature: the film is also called La passeggera, a more common spelling of the Italian feminine singular noun for ‘passenger’, but I have followed the contemporary Italian adverts, the majority of which use La passeggiera.

The holy trinity of Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, and Pina Menichelli are generally considered the crème de la crème of diva film actresses. Yet, of course, there were many others working in this loosely-defined genre: prominent names include Hesperia, Leda Gys, Italia Almirante Manzini, Soava Gallone, and Diana Karenne. Another such diva was the Polish actress Helena (Elena) Makowska, who acted in the Milan theatre before making the move to film. She built a successful career in the Italian film industry in the teens before working primarily in Germany in the 1920s.

 
From the collection of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Torino). Refs F40839/046, F40839/019

Over a dozen of Makowska’s films survive, but they are little seen, and she is a relatively obscure figure. Of the films in which Makowska participated, probably the one most well-known today is Febo Mari’s astonishing Il fauno | The Faun of 1917, a wonderful piece of work that is somewhat akin to Il fuoco (1915) and Rapsodia Satanica (1917) in its mythic proportions: highly recommended. Nietta Mordeglia plays the female lead, with Makowska supporting. But Makowska was on the rise: one of her major roles of that year was as Ophelia in Amleto, directed by Eleuterio Rodolfi, a low-res version of which can be viewed here at the Cineteca di Bologna’s Cinestore. And thanks to the European Film Gateway project, another of Makowska’s films is also available online: Caino, her first release of 1918. So as a central diva, what can Makowska bring to the screen? Let’s find out.

Caino‘s opening shots introduce us to the major players in the film. There is Cécile Hervey (Makowska), the “highest performer of the Capital”, and her sister Elda (Elda Bruni De Negri), who is living a quiet life on the Hervey estate with their aunt Claire. Nearby the Hervey residence is the Leveson manor. Matriarch Thécla Leveson has two sons: responsible and hardworking Bruno (Achille Majeroni), who is managing the Leveson farm …

… and Maman Thécla’s favourite, Raoul (Luigi Cimara), away at medical school in the city, but hardly studious—he rolls into class late, insincerely contrite, and proceeds to eye up his pretty colleague.

A commitment has been made between the two families in the form of an engagement between Bruno and Elda; it’s a union desired by him, merely accepted by her. Now Raoul returns home, to Maman Thécla’s joy. Even though it’s already clear that Raoul lacks integrity, he’s the ‘fun’ brother, and a flirtation develops between Raoul and Elda. This causes a rift between the Leveson brothers, and eventually the engagement is broken—Raoul and Elda instead prepare to marry. Bruno, who truly cares for Elda, is both upset and angry, but goes along with it: “So be it! God sees the sacrifice … but if you harm a hair on her head …”

Enter Cécile! She arrives to help with the imminent wedding of Elda and Raoul … who gets along a little too well with this glamorous sister from the city. Raoul evokes “un sentiment de stupeur” in Cécile, and she attempts to draw him to her, encouraging his musical pursuits. In the church, Raoul is playing the organ and Cécile has a vision of the wedding that deeply disturbs her … one night, Raoul and Cécile sneak into the church and share a kiss, unknowingly watched by both Elda and Bruno. Confronted by Bruno, Raoul claims that Cécile confounded his senses, and that he is sure that he loves Elda; despite everyone’s misgivings, the wedding goes ahead.

 
Cécile takes fright; her vision of the wedding.

Except then, Cécile keeps interrupting the couple’s honeymoon! This state of affairs is signalled using an interesting technique: Maman Thécla and Bruno are playing chess back at the manor, and receive news of the couple; as they look at the photographs, the shot cuts to the real events of the honeymoon, where Cécile keeps turning up like a bad penny, even taking Raoul by the arm and walking away with him.

Not only that, but she introduces Raoul to the casino, where her admirer Lord Gaston covers his debts … debts Raoul takes out in the name of his brother, Bruno Leveson.

After the trip, a fête is being prepared, but Elda’s pregnancy renders her unable to attend. Cécile is to accompany Raoul instead, and finally there is a showdown between the sisters. But Cécile haughtily insists that Raoul belongs to her: “Sister, you will never be able to understand the spiritual intimacy that links me to your husband!” She goes further: Elda’s unborn child, Cécile tells her, “carries the imprint” of Raoul’s feelings for Cécile when the baby was conceived!

But Cécile’s villainy doesn’t stop there. Elda’s child, Elina, is born with Cécile’s blue eyes, and Elda starts to lose it—her crazed grief worsened by the fact that Elina is separated from her due to Cécile’s fake testimony that Elina is in danger from Elda. Elda is severely ill both mentally and physically, believing (not inaccurately) that someone has stolen her little girl; when the sisters take a carriage ride together, she pleads with Cécile to give her back. In response, Cécile takes her past the cemetery!

 
And the sister of the year award goes to …

Throughout all of this, Raoul is useless. The steadfast Bruno persuades him to reunite mother and daughter … but before Raoul follows through on this, Elda escapes from her sickbed in search of her daughter, with whom she absconds. She collapses by a lake, heartbroken, mad, spent. But not totally:

Elda’s spirit walks to a nearby farmhouse and directs a dog to go to her baby; it swims across the lake, picks up Elina by her swaddle and carries her away back to safety. When Elda’s body is brought back to the Hervey place on a stretcher, Bruno is overcome with grief.

Spirit-Elda points at Cécile, at the right side of the frame.

Cécile finally suffers some consequence from her actions, or at least, a modicum of guilt: at Elda’s funeral, she has a vision of her sister pointing at her in judgment. And other troubles are mounting: Gaston is back, and he wants his money. Bruno defends the honour of the Leveson name, vowing that the debt will be honoured, but is very distressed by circumstances, while Raoul proves his ultimate cowardice and runs away. An intertitle tells us that “Une femme le suit comme une ombre”: ‘A woman follows him like a shadow’.

Cut to several years later. Elina, now about four, is blossoming under the care of Thécla and Bruno. Raoul is an assistant at the School of Anatomy, but he is haunted by guilt. In the lecture hall, a female body has been placed on the examination (dissection?) slab, and when Raoul approaches, it’s Cécile he sees, writhing and reaching for him:

A brilliant, creepy, shot … but the hallucination changes form, and now it is Elda that Raoul imagines himself holding.

There’s drama between the terrible trio of Raoul, Cécile, and Gaston—meanwhile, things are going badly back at the Leveson household: they have had to dismiss all of their servants, and go to live at the farmhouse. Raoul’s card-playing luck turns, and he is caught cheating; when he loses, he engineers an escape whereby he fakes suicide. Bruno and Thécla read in the newspaper that Raoul is dead; actually, he’s on a ship, looking emo.

Some time later, a mysterious stranger knocks at the door of the Leveson farm. He meets Maman Thécla and talks with little Elina, whose face lights up as she talks of how she loves her ‘Papa Bruno’.

Hmmm …. whoever could this be?

Raoul—for it is he, in artful disguise!—is overcome with emotion. He is a changed man who has come back to make things right, but he decides to take Elina with him when he leaves. It’s then that Bruno comes home, and in the fight that ensures, Bruno becomes the titular Cain: defending his family and home against this threatening intruder, Bruno unknowingly kills his brother. He and Thécla then find a note that Raoul had left,  telling of his intentions to leave them in peace and start a new life with Elina, and a pile of money … everything they need to buy back their land from Gaston.

Thécla is almost catatonic; Elina, who witnessed the murder, is terrified. Bruno reads the note in true horror, which gives way to hysterical laughter. A terrible and tragic irony: the one truly noble character in this film unknowingly commits one of the ultimate sins.

As Caino‘s last intertitle tells us, “Qui meurt repose et qui vit se résigne.”

And Cécile? Glad you asked. The final shot of the film shows Cécile and Lord Gaston in a motor car, elegantly dressed, smiling and laughing. The implication is that they have just married. People surround them, showering them with flowers.

Bleak. Rather a ‘Russian ending’, no? Given the title of the film, some brother-killing was inevitable, but I didn’t necessarily expect Cécile, an unambiguously horrible person, to get off scot-free. The Italian film diva is not often a femme fatale, let alone such an unabashed one.

Speaking of which: after reading the summary above, you may be wondering why I introduced Caino as a diva vehicle for Makowska, when clearly it’s more of an ensemble drama. This is down to the advertising, of which Makowska was the focal point. To wit:

Film no. 26 del 1917

La vita cinematografica no. 13 of 1918

Cécile is cruel, remorseless, and malevolent—a vamp-type character with no real depth. Any motivation for why she does the things she does must be teleological. So as the designated lead actress of Caino, playing such a role, how does Makowska fare? I can’t say that she won me over. As Cécile, Makowska breaks the primary rule of femme fatale-dom, which is that she has to be charismatic. She should be the character you love to hate, but without Makowska giving her dynamism and a sense of wicked fun, Cécile is simply a terrible person who’s not terribly interesting, and Caino consequently loses steam.

For me, most of Makowska’s onscreen presence comes from her slightly alien gaze, kohl-lined blue eyes becoming milky when captured on the orthochromatic film stock of the time.

My eyes would probably register similarly.

Elda Bruni De Negri comes across as the better actress. It’s a much meatier role, and Bruni De Negri is largely equal to that range, and adds strength to what could have been a fully pathetic character.

Elda Bruni De Negri as Elda

Caino is a visually stylish film. It falls somewhere between the tableau staging and continuity editing modes of filmmaking: there are a fair amount of long takes, but Carlucci also breaks up scenes where others of the time might not. He’s also fond of extended pans:

Panning across courtyard …

An upward pan, from Bruno to Elda exiting the house above.

Carlucci uses double exposures on several occasions. The main two instances have been mentioned above, but here’s a symbolic shot of Lord Gaston, the presence, the menace:

In general, there’s a strong attention to composition in Caino. Here’s a nice example of blocking: as Raoul inclines his head slightly, we see the approaching Cécile framing the top of his head.

And many shots are in themselves striking images.

The couple of contemporary reviews of Caino that I’ve found were complimentary (which reviews in these publications tend to be, in my experience). A reviewer in La vita cinematografica, who had seen a preview showing at the Salone Ghersi, notes that the production does not use the usual luxurious ostentation to mask technical or narrative flaws, but matches environment to character exquisitely, and praises the work of the four principal actors. In Film, the writer is embarrassingly breathless, talking of Makowska’s “inexpressible effectiveness, prodigious charm […] all her exuberant passion, all her dazzling radiance”. Wow, slow down there. … Or don’t:

The most fervent expectations surround the preparation of this great movie of Carlucci Productions, Caino, which heralds one of those rare performances of beautiful, amazing strength, passionate drama, at which the public will not be able not to break out in expressions of irrepressible enthusiasm. Caino is truly one of the most organic works of arte muta that has ever been imagined and translated into reality in life, on the silent stage; it is yet another amazing work of magic, a powerful creation of beauty, that L. Carlucci has drawn from an original Arabic novel, adapted to the modern environment. The film is full of new situations, all throbbing with original life, it is a very impressive statement of magnificence. Carlucci Productions is enriched, in Caino, with a priceless jewel. The choice of its exterior locations, and the creation of the interiors with imaginative and eclectic taste, warm inspiration and amazing genius.

Overselling things a wee bit, in my opinion. It is a well-designed film with a well-structured narrative, but as detailed above, I don’t find Makowska the artistic triumph these reviewers did.

Stray thoughts:

• Maman Thécla Leveson is played by Mary Cleo Tarlarini, an important actress in early Italian cinema who also became a producer.
• As a four-year-old, Elina’s eyes are clearly not blue!
• The censorship notes state that two plot points should be suppressed: the episode in which Cécile speaks of an alleged spiritual love that would conceive a child with the imprint of Raoul’s lover instead of his wife; and the false suicide of Raoul, on the grounds that it was an “insidious” means of escaping just consequences. However, the surviving print quite clearly has not omitted these elements—maybe it was only the Italian audience who didn’t see them.
• There’s a clear contrast between city and country in Caino: all of the antagonists—Cécile, Raoul, Gaston—are strongly associated with the urban world. Beware the corruption of the city! In the case of Makowska, this supports the generally held idea that the diva is an urban creature.

The diva criteria

Let’s have a look at just how diva-esque Caino really is by examining the following categories.

Copious costume changes. I counted around 17 different outfits on Makowska. In a film of 1h44, that’s one per every six-ish minutes of screen time. A few of Makowska/Cécile’s looks:

Symbolic naming. In the existing print of this film, the primary four characters are named Cécile and Elda Hervey (Makowska, Bruni de Negri) and Bruno and Raoul Leveson (Majeroni, Cimara). On the IMDb listing, Cimara is listed as Cain, Majeroni as Abel, and Makowska as Eve. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: this would make the Leveson brothers Cécile’s ‘sons’, with ‘Abel’ killing ‘Cain’. And in fact, the Italian censorship visa record refers to Cecilia and Raoul, so who knows where the IMDb character names came from.

A necklace of notable length. In sickness, and in health:

Headwear that borders on the avant-garde. Makowska/Cécile sports an array of hats, but what stood out most was this jewelled headband.

Emotive piano playing. Yes, but not on the part of the diva. Early in the film, Elda is listening to Raoul play the piano, and the music transports her to a vision of them embracing:

Later in the film, the same scenario repeats, but this time with the onlooking Cécile picturing herself in Raoul’s arms.

Side note: in her opening scene, we see Elda play a joke on her aunt by placing the family kitten under the strings below the bridge of her cello.

“Eine Kleine Catmusik”

Men with wacky hair. A classic disguise technique: a beard renders Raoul completely unrecognizable, even to his own mother.

Mr. I. N. Cognito.

A dramatic scene involving flowers. The most salient example is the scene of Elda and Raoul on their honeymoon. Well-wishers are throwing flowers up to their window, and there is a closeup of two flowers standing on the window ledge. Snip, and dissolve! The Elda-flower has lost its head.

One might also mention the flower display at the funeral, the bouquet that Gaston sends to Cécile, and the flower shower of the ending scene.

Feminine sufferance. Poor Elda: she had her head turned by a man of weak character, but everything else really came down to the vile Cécile.

The rest … The intertitle category only applies if the original Italian titles are available, so I think that it’s just mirrors and veils that we’re missing! I’m sure future diva films will see a return to these elements.

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Read my past writings on diva films here! Next week: a meta look at the diva film genre.

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Caino. Dir. Leopoldo Carlucci. Torino, Italy: Corona-Film, 1918. Preserved by EYE Filmmuseum NL and available to watch here on the European Film Gateway (French intertitles).

Note on nomenclature: In Italian advertising of the teens, Makowska was billed as Elena Makowska, but nowadays she is almost always referred to as Helena, so I’ve followed that practice.

After spending some quality time with the films of Borelli, Menichelli, and Makowska, now I want to cast my net a little wider. Diva films were a major force of the Italian film industry in the teens—but how did people perceive this genre and these actresses? More specifically, how was this expressed within the medium of film itself?

A notable film that engages with the diva phenomenon is the gentle parody L’Illustre Attrice Cicala Formica | The Illustrious Actress Cicada Ant of 1920. The director and writer, Lucio D’Ambra, was a journalist, novelist, essayist and playwright who entered the film world in the mid-to-late teens, founding his own production company D’Ambra-Film in 1919. D’Ambra is little-known today, but in his time was considered a gifted writer-director of light comedies. Perhaps his most widely known film work is the Lyda Borelli vehicle Carnevalesca (1917), for which he was the writer. He has also been seen as something of an early film theorist, describing his ideas about film as “a fantasy of the eyes” (fantasia degli occhi) in the 1920 essay Il  mio credo (‘My Creed’).

 
Postcard of Lia Formia; Formia as ‘Cicala Formica’, the Actress

L’Illustre Attrice Cicala Formica stars D’Ambra’s regular leading actress Lia Formia in the title role. It’s a rather charming story about a wannabe actress, her attempt to create a film, and the family that hinder as much as help her. At the opening of the film, we are introduced to her family and household one by one, these “opponents of the future great actress”, in intertitles with a frequently humorous tone (“… the husband of the married sister, a magistrate as serious as the law, impartial as a verdict …”) This sequence shows off one of D’Ambra’s interesting stylistic flourishes: he uses triangular mattes in the introductory shot of each character, a technique not at all usual in diva films. My immediate ‘triangular screen’ reference point is Lois Weber’s Suspense (1913); the famous sets from Bragaglia’s Thaïs (1917) also come to mind. The triangle matte is also used elsewhere in the film, as is a hexagon matte.

The Actress and her family don togas and go to the village square to begin shooting, a plan which is derailed by several judges arriving to bestow an prize upon the Actress’s father. “This daughter of mine is obsessed with the cinema … It makes me lose my mind …” he grumbles. After a cash injection via piggy bank, the production gets back underway, this time with a script furnished by the Actress’ suitor, the young Marquis. Or as the intertitle tells us, a “script” (sogetto)—in many of the intertitles, film-related words are placed in inverted commas, presumably for emphasis or as an introduction to new terminology. Thus we read sentences like ‘… the Illustrious Actress Cicada Ant, in the garden of the house, can finally begin to seriously “shoot” her first “film”.’ (… L’Illustre Attrice Cicala Formica, nel giardino di casa, può cominciare finalmente a “girare” sul serio il suo primo “film”.)

There are some neat shots of the filming; I’m particularly partial to the silhouetted image of the Actress spooling through the film at above lower right. Earlier in the film, we’ve seen her striking diva-esque poses:

Now, production in progress, she’s arguing on the set with the cameraman, and playing the film prima-donna, complete with her Norma Desmond moment: “And the young actress already screams like a great actress, ‘I want my close-up!'” 

The night of the premiere—described as the ‘consecration’ of the Actress—arrives. She is laurel-wreathed, “humble in such glory”, curtseying before her audience. And: disaster! It turns out that due to operator error, all of the motion of the film is in reverse. Thus the Actress is ripped out of the river by an invisible force, walks backwards, and slides up the edge of the rampart.

“Sad sunset of short glory”, an intertitle tells us, and after the uproar of the performance, the Actress is back to her daydreams and sewing. “And you here, mending socks, diva of my boots!”, her father scoffs. However, the door is left open for a continuation of the adventures of the Actress. As the closing intertitles tell us, “Not all stars have the fault of a cameraman to excuse the immeasurable stupidity of their first film. And in a second story, we’ll see the Illustrious Actress Cicada Ant reach the pinnacle of her glory.”

At the end of the day, Cicala Formica is a family comedy, but it certainly nods to the diva film genre, in the way that the Actress mimes actorly gesture, her on-set dominance, even the exaggerated way in which everyone flaps their handkerchiefs around to help revive her after she has fainted. In her book Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, Angela Dalle Vacche sees Cicala Formica as being indicative of Italian female emancipation in this era, “not only based on social and legal issues, but also deeply rooted in the structure of the Italian family.” And yes, the Actress does return to the family (and the status quo) at the end of the film; but then again, it’s not through her fault that the film was defective. The film treats the Actress with such affection that the ending doesn’t really bite. Cicala Formica is a light-hearted look at female ambition and stardom, directed with style and energy by D’Ambra, and with an engaging performance from Lia Formia.

I only managed to find one contemporary advert for Cicala Formica (below left), but searching was made a little difficult by the fact that a film with a similar title was released in 1919 (below right). Note the picture of D’Ambra in the full-page ad from La rivista cinematografica: Lia Formia may have her name in large letters, but D’Ambra was the main marketing point.

 
La rivista cinematografica no. 14 of 1920; In penombra no. 02 of 1919

L’Illustre Attrice Cicala Formica was hardly the only film to parody diva film acting. An early instance of this—perhaps the first, although I can’t say for sure—comes in the Leda Gys film Leda innamorata | Leda in Love of 1915, advertised as a “delightful comedy” (delicioza commedia).

  
La vita cinematografica no. 44 del 1914; La vita cinematografica no. 07 of 1915

Leda innamorata was written up in film magazine La vita cinematografica; therein, reviewer Pier da Castello praised star Leda Gys’ mimicry, which he notes the film seems to be have written to showcase. “The audience laughs, and laughs with pleasure when it sees La Gys caricature [Francesca] Bertini or [Maria] Carmi.” The main plot of the film seems to concern a woman in love with her uncle (!), and in the last act she develops feelings for the cousin who had been there all along (!!), but Gys’ caricatures must have been the highlight; the reviewer ends by saying:

We are still in time. We suggest an imitation of Borelli! Miss Gys, we believe, will be happy to accept a job that has this intention. And even better if you will weave other imitations. But no more than an act or two.

Accept our proposal, Miss Gys?

La cinematografia italiana ed estera no. 07 of 1916

No word if Gys acquiesced. She was herself a very well-known actress of the teens, also working steadily in the 1920s. Several of her films have been shown in festivals and cinémathèques, but I only know of one of her starring films (Christus of 1916) that is available to watch online. (She does appear in Francesca Bertini’s L’amazzone mascherata, which I wrote about here, but it’s a pretty minor role).

Speaking of which: a more developed example of the diva metafilm is found in 1918’s Mariute, produced by and starring Francesca Bertini herself, the queen of the Italian screen. Mariute is half film-within-a-film diva parody and half patriotic war drama, with Bertini playing the dual roles of herself, the diva actress, and a peasant girl, Mariute, from Friuli.

Bertini as Mariute.

In Diva, Angela Dalle Vacche describes the plot of Mariute in detail. Bertini plays a version of herself: a diva actress who lives luxuriously, sleeps in, lounges around in her boudoir. Gustavo Serena—who often directed the real-life Bertini—plays the director, who repeatedly telephones Bertini to get her to come to the set, and when Bertini arrives, she is greeted by a group of young girls and a reception committee. Quoting Dalle Vacche,

After the intertitle “Miss Francesca Bertini at Work on the Set,” we see a trite example of film melodrama with all the well-known ingredients: a tense conversation between two lovers, a letter—perhaps an anonymous message, because one lover has betrayed the other— scenes in which someone faints or someone gets strangled. The shallowness of the material is apparent; neither Bencivenga nor Bertini try to hide it.

Dalle Vacche’s phrasing is a little odd here, as it seems to me that this banality is wholly intentional. Anyway, in the studio, a colleague is talking about the cruelties suffered by civilians in the occupied territories; that night, Bertini falls asleep and dreams the story of Mariute, a young woman and mother-of-three whose husband is away at war, and who is assaulted by enemy soldiers.

The scene of Mariute struggling against the soldiers is intercut with shots of her grandfather and her children at home. When she returns, she is traumatized; her grandfather comforts her as she explains what happens. He grabs his shotgun and leaves: when he returns, we are shown an intertitle of a single word: “Vendicato” (‘Avenged’).

  
The anguish of Mariute (with her grandfather in the left picture).

Bertini the diva actress awakes to great distress. Although it doesn’t appear in the fragment of the film that is available to watch, Angela Dalle Vacche states that the following intertitle appears: “Such a terrible dream kindled the patriotic flame in the heart of Francesca Bertini.”

  
The diva in repose; Bertini awakes in fright.

According to the eminent Italian film historian Vittorio Martinelli, Mariute was commissioned by the Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni (National Institute for Insurance). The scene is not included in any extant prints, but film historian Roberto Paolella recalled that Mariute originally included an ending scene in which Bertini addressed the audience directly, urging them to buy war bonds from the INA. Viva l’Italia!

Although the online clip primarily shows Bertini as Mariute, it seems that the film as a whole focused heavily—perhaps overly—on the diva’s lifestyle, and it would be really interesting to see more of those diva/studio scenes. That said, the Mariute dream-story is powerful, and it is gutsy of Bertini to take on the issue of wartime rape.

  
Mariute struggles against the soldiers.

Dalle Vacche reads Mariute’s rape as a symbolic response to the growing power of women in society, but the centrality of Bertini as actress and producer, as well as the apparent lack of strong male characters in the film, would seem to undercut that interpretation. I think the message is more simple: the audience is being told to support Italy’s war effort, lest more women should suffer Mariute’s fate. And Mariute can also be seen as an example of female power; as Dalle Vacche writes,

Regardless of ideological disputes across Italian society between prowar futurist groups and antiwar socialist demonstrations, Bertini in Mariute chose to be a famous diva speaking with authority to her following, and this was a rare demonstration of a woman’s political agency in public.

The dichotomy between the character ‘Francesca Bertini’—who is heavily blurred with the real-life Bertini—and peasant girl Mariute is very clear: Bertini shown as a powerful woman with the ability to effect change, who must take a political stand, versus a woman who is victimized as a result of (male) conflict. It’s a telling commentary on the frivolity of the film world, patriotism, and the star personality of Bertini, who through this role positions herself as a socially aware person.

… And not only that, but one who is willing to poke fun at herself. The Francesca Bertini in the film decides to curb her diva excesses: she vows to rise earlier and arrive at the set “just half an hour late.”

On the set.

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L’Illustre Attrice Cicala Formica [The Illustrious Actress Cicada Ant]. Dir. Lucio D’Ambra. Roma: D’Ambra-Film, 1920. Restored in the 1990s, presumably by the Cineteca Nazionale (Roma), which holds a copy of the film. Available to watch here on YouTube (poor quality). Italian intertitle transcription and (very) rough English translation here.

Leda innamorata [Leda in Love]. Dir. Ivo Illuminati. Roma: Celio-Film, 1915. Not known to be extant.

Mariute. Dir. Edoardo Bencivenga. Roma: Caesar-Film & Bertini-Film, 1918. A fragment with length of 09:02, restored by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Torino), is available to watch here on their Vimeo channel. Per the description above, it primarily shows Bertini as Mariute, not in diva mode. Other copies of Mariute are held at the Library of Congress, the Cineteca Nazionale, and the Danish Film Institute.

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Regarding diva ‘metafilms’: future post(s) will cover titles such as La valigia dei sogni | The Suitcase of Dreams (1953), L’ultima diva: Francesca Bertini (1982), and Peter Delpeut’s Diva Dolorosa (1999). But for now, it’s time to say goodbye! Thus ends Diva December. For those who need more divas in their life, the rest of my writing on diva films can be found here, and an overview of the diva film genre is here.

As part 1 of my end-of-year wrap up, here are 10 memorable talking pictures that came into my life in 2015. I’ve split the list between recent and older films.

Morgiana (dir. Juraj Herz, CZ 1972)

Actually, I don’t know if I first watched this film this year or last, all I know is that I’ve seen it probably ten times, and I love it more each time. A stunning, gothic-Victorian twisted fairy-tale about two sisters, it’s perfectly designed and gloriously over the top, complete with bombastic score. Iva Janzurová is wonderful in the dual roles of Viktorie and Klára. An all-time favourite.

En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron | A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (dir. Roy Andersson, SE 2014)

The inimitable Roy Andersson is back with a darkly hilarious work. Each tragicomic vignette is expertly staged, with Andersson’s typical long takes and deep focus. Beautiful and bizarre.

लगान | Lagaan: One Upon a Time in India (dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, IN 2001)

Surely one of the best anti-Colonial films as well as one of the best sports films of all time. The four-hour runtime flies by as Indian villagers led by Aamir Khan take on the British Raj … with the game of cricket. (Incidentally, as someone who grew up playing cricket, it’s one of the few sports films where I actually knew the rules of the game). A visually beautiful film with great characters and a gripping storyline. And yes, the game comes down to the very last ball of the last over.

The Duke of Burgundy (dir. Peter Strickland, GB 2014)

A stylish, moody, and surreal gothic love story about a D&S relationship between two women, set in an indeterminate but vaguely Victorian milieu. Being a giallo fan, I’d seen Strickland’s previous feature film Berberian Sound Studio (GB 2012), and The Duke of Burgundy bears much in common with it stylistically—luscious design, lots of shots with shallow depth of field, various double-exposures and camera tricks. The Duke of Burgundy is an enveloping experience, much enhanced by its haunting score. It’s so stylistic as to be almost claustrophobic, yet the film doesn’t lose sight of the central relationship between the two women.

Black Cat, White Cat (dir. Emir Kusturica, SR 1998)

Few movies have this much energy and joy. Raucous, laugh-out-loud funny, and warm.

Clouds of Sils Maria (dir. Olivier Assayas, FR/DE/CH 2014)

I found this drama about female stardom, aging, and creative/professional relationships very poignant. Juliette Binoche is always worth watching, but Kristen Stewart was also excellent as her personal assistant Valentine.

Under the Cherry Moon (dir. Prince, US 1986)

I’m a huge Prince fan, but somehow it took me until this year to watch Under the Cherry Moon. The film was directed by and stars His Purpleness, who also provides the de facto soundtrack with his album Parade—not my favourite of the classic Prince era, I must say. The film is in black and white, with a decadent 80s-does-Art-Deco aesthetic: Prince plays Christopher Tracy, a fancy gigolo on the Riviera who begins a relationship with young heiress Kristin Scott Thomas (!), in her film debut. Christopher is out to scam KST … or will true love grow between these two crazy kids?

A simple and promising enough premise, but Under the Cherry Moon is a ludicrously self-indulgent vanity project. The design is beautiful and Prince looks fantastic, but the film is weighted down by inane dialogue, an incredibly unconvincing romance, and a wildly uneven tone. Luckily these things weren’t really obstacles to my enjoyment. We get Prince in an array of fantastic outfits (including a backwards tuxedo) and scenes such as Prince and KST going drag-racing, Prince and his gigolo BFF Tricky (Jerome Benton) panicking over a bat infestation in a restaurant, and KST running up on stage and drumming along to “Planet Rock” (!!). There’s even a Casablanca homage. Prince threw everything but the kitchen sink at this film—Under the Cherry Moon may be ridiculous, but you have to admire his panache.

Is this a good film? No – Under the Cherry Moon may look beautiful, but it fails on most other levels by which movies are typically judged. Did I enjoy the hell out of it? Yes! (Were my friends and I into the wine when we watched it? Also yes). 

Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller, US/AU 2015)

One of the most purely exhilarating movies I’ve seen in a long time: I watched it twice in the theatre and probably would have gone back another time if I hadn’t got ill. Aside from its wonderful visual imagination and crazy action scenes, this film-long car chase also contained a surprising amount of character-driven storytelling and one of the most feminist plots seen recently in mainstream cinema, topped off with an appropriately bombastic score by Junkie XL (not many films could get away with quoting Dies Irae!) I still can’t quite believe George Miller got a movie this out-there made, but I’m happy that he did.

郊遊 | Stray Dogs (dir. Tsai Ming-Liang, TW 2013)

I’m not that familiar with the ‘Taiwanese New Wave’, of which Hou Hsiao-hsien is the most well-known director (his 刺客聶隱娘 | The Assassin of this year is one that I missed in the film festival and am looking forward to watching). As for Tsai Ming-Liang, prior to seeing Stray Dogs, the only thing I knew about him was that he had made an adaptation of Journey to the West which consisted primarily of shots of a monk walking slowly west.

Stray Dogs is a similarly uncompromising work: there is not much of a storyline, the people in the film are barely characters in the conventional sense, and the film is told in a series of very long takes – generally a full scene is shown in just one shot, and often not much happens in them. However, the scene in which the main character Lee suffocates, cradles, rips apart and then eats a lipsticked cabbage (which in an earlier scene his children have christened ‘Miss Big Boobs’), weeping all the while, is an indelible image. And the finale of the film, as Lee and the main female character come together, is a genuinely moving and well-earned moment of grace, before the film culminates in Lee, now solo, standing in front of the mural (the shot shown above). Stray Dogs is the kind of film that defies judgments of like or dislike; what I can say is that it made a very strong impression on me.

I watched Stray Dogs at the Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou, China, which devoted a solo exhibition to Tsai’s work (a Mainland first), curated by the man himself. The film was screened in a room lined with crumpled papers, the floor covered with foam mattresses from which to watch projections onto the angles of walls and hung sheets. A very unique viewing experience.

  
The installation.

Leningrad Cowboys Go America (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, FI/SE 1989)

Don’t be fooled by the title (which in fact comes from a Marx Bros. film), Leningrad Cowboys Go America is weird and wonderful and deadpanly hilarious. I never dreamed of a film where the Finnish Gary Oldman led a bunch of bizarrely-quiffed musicians on a roadtrip around the US, but it was just what I needed.

And one more that really should have been on this list …

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (British Ministry of Information, GB 1945/2014)

This film, the official documentation of the German atrocities by the British Ministry of Information, was truly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever watched. I think I cried almost the whole time, and we all exited the theatre a bit shell-shocked. The history of the film, never released in its time, is available here.

That’s ten eleven, but here’s an extra for luck: an experimental short film.

The Rapture (dir. Michael Fleming, NL 2014)

“A pulsating image bombardment about our pursuit to happiness and freedom of fear” is how Fleming describes his work: it’s an excavation of the history of celluloid film, hand-manipulated and collaged frame by frame to take the viewer on a tour through pop culture, advertising, and even pornography, making an aesthetically dynamic (and somewhat cynical?) statement on visual media. The Rapture can be viewed on Vimeo here.

With but two days left in 2015, it’s time to take stock of the year. Here are a bunch of my thoughts, and a prizegiving of sorts!

Writing about film

This year, I continued to look closely at the 1910s Italian cinema (especially the divas), covered a couple of Chinese silents, as well as titles from Spain and Portugal. My focus generally stayed on women on the silent screen; to that end I published an article on Emilie Sannom that may well be the most information about her available in English. I really enjoyed writing up various books, and interviewing nitrate specialist Bin Li. One of my favourite posts (and one of the most popular) was on early space travel films, To the stars and beyond: movies dream of outer space, 1898-1910. I undertook quite a lot of research in different forms and found it really rewarding.

I gained new readers and very much appreciated peoples’ feedback and comments. I was even visited by scifi royalty!

Live cinema event of the year

I think I only saw the one live silent film, which was Pál Fejős’ Lonesome (US 1928), a slight but charming film with dazzling camerawork and editing. So it wins by default, but it was a really lovely event that my friends and I all really enjoyed! Lawrence Arabia and the Carnivorous Plant Society collaborated on the accompaniment, which was excellent—Mr. Arabia’s solo music isn’t really my cup of tea, but he and his collaborators did a great job.

Silent film release of the year

Undoubtedly a huge film highlight of 2015 was La maison de mystère | The House of Mystery (FR 1923), Alexandre Volkoff’s brilliant serial starring Ivan Mosjoukine, who, regular readers will know, is one of my favourite actors. The DVD booklet headlines it as “the art film as serial”—and rightfully so, as it’s a beautiful film, a rollicking yarn but also an enthralling and human story. Don’t walk, run to Flicker Alley and get a copy! You won’t regret it. Here’s a visual taster:

Bizarro silent film story of the year

Someone STOLE F. W. Murnau’s skull. Really. You might call this … mind-boggling (… sorry). The skull is still at large.

Il jockey della morte (IT 1915)

Silent film book of the year

There were some great releases this year. The key ones for me were Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory: The Adventurous Years of Film, 1907-1916, poetry collection Silents by Claire Crowther, The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915-1935 by James Layton and David Pierce, and Fantasia of Colour in Early Cinema, published by EYE Filmmuseum. Look out for a writeup on the latter two titles in the near future.

Intertitle of the year

For its sheer operatic intensity and overall diva-ness, I find it hard to beat this gem from Lyda Borelli’s Malombra (1917).

Under the influence of her madness, she had decorated the house with flowers, for the meeting of love with vengeance … which turned into a meeting with death!

One hundred years ago: 1915

I’ve covered quite a few films from 1915. I still think that После смерти | After Death (RU) is one of the strongest, but I also want to mention the fun of sky piratess Filibus (IT), the sincerity and strength of Francesca Bertini’s Assunta Spina (IT), Pina Menichelli’s outrageous vamp in Il fuoco (IT), and the highly interesting dance star Tórtola Valencia in Pasionaria (ES). In terms of social significance, the most important American film of 1915 is clearly D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation; but in terms of films I actually want to watch, Cecil B. DeMille had a great year with both The Cheat and Carmen.

Most misogynistic film

The Clinging Vine (US 1926). I didn’t do my homework on this one: all I knew was that Leatrice Joy was rocking a suit.

Unfortunately, despite Joy’s likeability, this film is profoundly sexist and unfunny. It’s par for the course (although unusually blatant) that the male characters express sentiments like this:

But Joy’s character A.B. also gets lines like this:

Another intertitle perfectly expresses my reaction.

A.B. gets a makeover (which is strangely childlike in its trappings, rather than the sleek flapper fashions Joy should rightfully have worn), learns to attract men by acting vacant (the four magic words: “oh, do go on!”), and has a romance with the world’s dumbest man. The film does undercut itself in some ways and there’s probably a semi-interesting essay to be written about the gender politics of the film and Joy’s gender performance in it, but the whole thing just let a bad taste in my mouth. My advice is to skip it and instead imagine an alternate universe where A.B. assumes her rightful role as HBIC (Hot Butch in Charge).

Navel gazing

I have a lot of good movie memories from 2015: drinking wine, eating dumplings and watching silliness (as well as good films) with my best pals; La maison de mystère film club with Stef & Nic; the brief Bondathon my flat had in wintertime; hungover diva film watching with E; doing The Fifth Element for Halloween (I was Zorg, my friend was Leeloo, and we absolutely killed it, if I say so myself. And yes, I had a soulpatch on). More generally in my life, it was a really good year, which was very welcome after the crappiness of 2014. I didn’t achieve all of my goals (who does?), but I did alright with them, and I had my fair share of adventures. I went to China, I made a disco ball out of old CDs for my best friend’s birthday, I swam in the sea most months in the year. It was a year of prioritizing relationships: friends are family, and community is vital, I really believe that. I turned thirty, which seems like A Milestone, but I can’t be too fussed about it—I generally feel a more happy and interesting person with each passing year. Here’s looking forward to a fulfilling and fun 2016.

The year ahead …

On this site. What’s in store for Silents, Please in 2016? My posting schedule may slow down a bit as I make room for other projects, but I’m planning a few ‘100 years ago’ posts, a recap of my visit to the Shanghai Filmmuseum, various book reviews, and an article on fashion films. Diva December will surely be held a third time, too. I also want to cover films from a greater variety of countries, particularly those that are generally underrepresented in silent film fandom. So look out for one or two Antipodean titles, as well as a piece on Teuvo Tulio, called the Finnish Valentino.

Bold prediction: Edition Filmmuseum release the Barnet twofer that has been forthcoming for over five years. Haha … maybe. My actual bold prediction is for Cineteca di Bologna to release Giovanni Pastrone’s Tigre Reale (1916), starring Pina Menichelli, as part of their Cento anni fa series. Please?

I hope you all had a fun-filled filmic year, and feel free to tell me about your cinematic highlights!