Prantik Narayan Basu is an Indian screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and film director. Having studied Film Directing at the Film and Television Institute of India, his short film Sakhisona premiered at BFI London, Mumbai, and Rotterdam, where it won the Tiger Award for Best Short Film. Rang Mahal (Palace of Colours) premiered at Berlin, IDFA, Signes de Nuit Thailand, Concorto Film Festival, DMZ Docs, Nomadica Bologna, Arthouse Asia, and Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Films.
Prantik Narayan Basu participated in an exclusive interview with Filmatique as part of Talents 2020.
FILMATIQUE: Thank you for sharing your films. Rang Mahal (Palace of Colours) was quite mesmeric to watch—dreamy and alluring in its meditation. To me Sakhisona laid out the lexicon in some ways for Rang Mahal in terms of its fabulistic, mythical and nonhuman aspects. I’d like to start with the architecture of myth, history and land in Rang Mahal—how did you construct it? What was your process going into that?
PRANTIK NARAYAN BASU: The pleasure is mine. I like the reference to architecture. I think about it often, as films unfold in time and space as well. My practice has been closely associated with myths and folklore. They work as a time capsule, an access to the anecdotal history and gives us an access to the ethos of a community. I love reading/listening to them, and as a filmmaker, I always like to share what I love.
Most of these timeless tales are not only a structural marvel, but way more progressive than many of our contemporary narratives. For instance, the creation myths in Rang Mahal speak of a harmonious co-existence of nature and human, where the human is not at the center of the narrative. Our popular viewing culture has put humans at the center of every narrative. Cinema, I believe, is capable of going beyond this to envisage the narrative possibility of an altered frame of reference.
Khori Dungri, or the chalk stone hill that we see in the film is formed through years of erosion and sedimentation. Its pigments are used by the locals to mend and adorn the cracks on the walls of their houses. Like those rocks that come in various hues, there are myriad versions of the Santhali creation myth. I asked some people from the community and they revealed that since these myths pass on orally, they vary in their telling and retelling. I was fascinated by this idea, of having various versions of the same story. While this became the aural layer, I started to build upon the image layer with rocks, hills, trees and the village, sometimes in direct relation to the story, and sometimes leaving it open-ended for the viewer to interpret their own version.
FLMTQ: I like this notion of erosion, as I was thinking about the quite accretional mode of your film—accretional in the sense that the film is layering the fabulistic and the mythical, but doing so not in an ethnographic or documentary way. It was very lived, very present and immersive. And it was also being layered with the topography of the space, and the space itself telling its own stories of temporality.
My question here arises from an essay by Ashis Nandy, “The Landscape of Clandestine and Incommunicable Selves,” which talks about the colonial project of rational enlightenment. This project deemed the myths, superstitions, and folklore of the colonized as apolitical or ahistorical, as not rational according to their notions of hierarchies.
Whereas your films meld folklore and history—of course this is history, it’s how people are living and have lived. It’s how they believe and how they construct their lives. Can you tell me how you came to that thinking in terms of folklore and oral storytelling as the history of an entire people, or entire generations of people who live in rural nonhuman places? How history is constructed in a way that we don’t think about or consider as textbook history or state history?
PNB: So, if we just consider the ritual in itself, the Santhals look at this as a kind of repair, both literal and metaphorical. The fact that these myths are retold on the festival days of Sohrai (a late harvest festival) also points towards myths as microcosms. For instance, the Thakur Jivi story in Rang Mahal points out clearly that the deity created animals first and only then did humans enter the picture. Santhals are extremely self-aware about their status as interlopers on this planet, and that also shows in their harmonious relationship with the environment. For them, a tree is not just a tree, nor is a pond a mere hole on land in which to store water; they are associated with more familial values.
For too long, we have convinced ourselves that we know what ‘development’ means in the Adivasi (indigenous) context. In this regard, it is important to mention the Pathalgadi (stone slab) movement, wherein many Adivasi villages in India have declared themselves ‘self-rule zones.’ The sections of the Constitution of India that give them the right to self-rule are inscribed onto large stone slabs, often placed right at the village entrance. Ironically, a community that had no written language until recent years is writing their own history as we speak, and we can only hope that one day the world will sensitize itself enough to recognize that belief systems other than our own exist, and are probably wiser and more sustainable in the long run.
FLMTQ: That is a notion that is direly needed and I think incredibly lost in this late-capitalist extractivist world. A lot of eco-justice movements aren’t about trying to find new solutions or looking toward some post-human future. It’s literally a matter of going to indigenous communities and asking them, how have you lived? Because they are living in oneness, they are living in a non-exploitative way with the nonhuman, and they’re not separate from it.
A lot of indigenous knowledge is kind of coming into play now, whereas before it was very marginal and peripheral to the mainstream, or even independent art world or film world, or literary worlds. So how do you approach a community, but not necessarily with the gaze of being an ethnographer, or not making them look primitive or atavistic? Because those are very reductive ways in which people have often considered tribal communities in various parts of the world. What was your approach, knowing that?
PNB: The first approach was of course being aware of it. I have grown up in a suburban setting and I cannot claim to fully understand their issues. The dynamics of their relationship with nature is very complex. What I could do at best was not to be a ‘colonizer’ myself with my tool—the camera. Since I have been working closely with the community for quite some time now (firstly in Sakhisona and then in another documentary that is presently in post-production), there has been a certain sense of camaraderie. My main attempt was not to intrude or probe into their shyness, which would have been perverse, in my opinion. The moment we approach a community as a cumulative subject and put ourselves in the milieu with our camera, we assume a position of power which prevents any fluid interaction. This is seen in the archival portraits that I used in the film as counterpoints. I wanted to refrain from that very act, which is why I have not used humans as my subjects, but only their voices that are seldom heard in the mainstream. I find it problematic to make them stand in front of the camera and shoot their features. Hence, I chose to film from a certain distance and present the world as it is. I believe it helped me achieve more intimacy and understand their world as they see it, a little more than I did before.
FLMTQ: Speaking of this foray into a way of life that we might learn from, I found your soundscape and sound design quite fascinating—you had the voiceover and the folklore, but there was so much emphasis and constant attention and nuance given to the sounds of trees and birds and insects, this constant tapestry of sound. Which to us might just be noise, but it is also a language of its own. Was that something you were intentionally playing with?
PNB: This is something my sound designer Ananda Gupta, and I discussed at length, and arrived at after a lot of trial and error. That natural sounds would play a vital role along with the narration was part of the plan, but to what effect is something that we decided along the process. The voices of Balika Hembram and Sanjay Tudu have a certain lyricism and an intimacy of telling a story to a friend. This allowed us to dream away and imagine a soundscape for the story being narrated, almost in the manner of a radio play. But here we have the visuals, that sometimes compliment and at times contradict what we hear. Simply put, you can say that we were being playful.
FLMTQ: So you’re working on the long documentary, is that coming out next?
PNB: Yes. I just finished editing it and as soon as the lockdown ends, we shall finalize the sound design, color grading et al. It is called Bela and is a film on the group of dancers who featured in my previous film. This too is an observational portrait of a small village by the same name, their rhythms and rituals of art and labor, and the ambiguous threshold between them.
I also finished writing the script of my first fiction feature Dengue, which received the Hubert Bals fund from the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It is the story of a chance encounter between two men during a sudden summer rain that leads to a feverish romance. I developed the project at the PJLF Three Rivers Residency in Italy and we plan to go into production next year.
This is an extended version of a paper that I gave at the British Silent Film Festival Symposium at King’s College London on April 7, 2017.
G. W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929) is an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, but in many places a very loose one. Those German plays are about thirty years older than the film, a Weimar-era classic that marries traces of Expressionism with the late-1920s sobriety of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement. Pandora’s Box was filmed in Berlin – or at least in a former zeppelin hangar in Staaken – and its American star Louise Brooks identified its depiction of divergent sexualities and the sex trade with the city’s glamorous, permissive nightlife. Her evocative description of the city during the shoot, when she was staying at the famous Eden Hotel, begins: “Sex was the business of the town…”
“At the Eden Hotel, where I lived in Berlin, the café bar was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside. On the corner stood the girls in boots, advertising flagellation. Actors’ agents pimped for the ladies in luxury apartments in the Bavarian Quarter. Race-track touts at the Hoppegarten arranged orgies for groups of sportsmen. The nightclub, Eldorado, displayed an enticing line of homosexuals dressed as women. At the Maly, there was a choice of feminine or collar-and-tie lesbians. Collective lust roared unashamed at the theater.”
There is only one named location in the film, however, and it is in this place that the fictional narrative bumps into historical circumstance – so in this case, geography carries crucial meaning. Just like the final act of Wedekind’s play, the final act of Pandora’s Box takes place in London, in a slum district most likely in the east of the city. Our heroine Lulu, reduced to prostitution, encounters Jack the Ripper on these streets, with fatal consequences. This murder is her dramatic destiny – and to understand more fully this film, possibly the first screen adaptation to give Jack the Ripper a role, we need to think about the British capital rather than the German one. To explore this topic, I am going to examine three disappointing “misadventures” in London: the visits made to the city by Frank Wedekind, by Louise Brooks and by the film itself.
Frank Wedekind as Schön and his future wife, Tilly Newes, in the title role in a stage production of the Lulu plays.
Wedekind spent the years from 1887 to 1895 writing his Lulu plays – Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, to give them their German titles. This period, which he spent largely in Paris and Munich, is covered by his journals, published as Diary of an Erotic Life, which generally offer far more detail about his social and sexual activities than about his working practices. Toward the end of the writing process, though, he went to London, in January 1895. His entry for January 24 gives an unprecedented level of detail about his work. In the British Museum, he writes, “I find masses of material for my Divine Birth.” Divine Birth was his working title for the plays. Despite a relatively early night, the next day follows a more familiar trajectory for Wedekind:
“After lunch I get on the Underground at Charing Cross and travel to the Tower, look around the museum, the most boring and tasteless I have ever seen, travel under the Thames via London Bridge and come back up out of the underworld, dine at seven o’clock and take the omnibus to the London Pavilion. Apart from a couple of authentic English children, I find nothing new and very little that’s congenial. I spend some time in a bar amid a pack of frightful whores, and go to bed at twelve o’clock.”
We can really only speculate on what “masses of material” Wedekind found in the British Museum reading room, but we can reasonably assume that he read about Jack the Ripper. This unidentified murderer, thought responsible for killing several female sex workers in the Whitechapel area between 1888 and possibly 1891, was to become a character in Wedekind’s play. The Ripper’s killings had been in the news only fairly recently – in fact, they happened after Wedekind began writing his plays – but a trip to the British Museum would have given him more detail about the nature of the crimes. In particular, the material widely shared in the newspapers included letters offering a supposed insight into the killer’s psychology, as well as accounts of the distinctive mutilation of the bodies – which gave the killer his gruesome nickname. Most of the victims were disemboweled, with organs including hearts and uteruses removed from the scene.
If his description is correct, then Wedekind’s trip to London’s “underworld” – that is, its red-light district – probably took him further west than the Ripper’s patch. As so often in the journal, Wedekind here mixes enthusiasm with disgust in his accounts of paying or seeking to pay for sex, and the contrast between his disdainful sex tourism and his rather jaded review of the Tower of London is almost funny. At this point we could speculate on how far his encounters with sex workers in two different districts fed into his depiction of Lulu’s clients: this strange mix of rich and poor men is designed to mirror the suitors she has had earlier in the plays. Jack the Ripper, her final client, is the mirror image of Schön, and the two characters were often played by the same actor.
“The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” Pall Mall Gazette, July 10, 1885
Another source Wedekind may have read on the city’s sex trade was the Pall Mall Gazette’s sensational 1885 investigation into child prostitution, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” This highly controversial piece included a sting in which a mother was caught by the editor W. T. Stead agreeing to sell her own 13-year-old daughter for £5. Sex may have been the business of London, but, as the second diary extract implies (“authentic English children”), Wedekind was no stranger to this particular sector. Child prostitution is a theme that reverberates through both his journal and his plays. Lulu, who was “rescued” from the café scene as a young girl by Schön, is frequently described as not just sexy but also childlike, and as closely resembling her own mother. In a grotesque scene that appears in the play but not in the film Pandora’s Box, a group of investors in Jungfrauaktien – shares in a funicular railway running up the Jungfrau or, more literally, “virgin shares” – stand by while one of the women among them is persuaded to offer her 12-year-old daughter to a group of older men. Schön’s patronage of Lulu and common-or-garden child prostitution are linked throughout the drama.
Did Wedekind use his “masses of material” in the finished plays? Here we must remember that Wedekind was forced to edit and tone down the material in the Lulu plays to get them published and performed. But by naming his murderer as the Ripper, he introduces the idea of evisceration. There appears to be no explicit reference in the play to Jack mutilating Lulu’s body – unless you look for it. At the opening of the play’s final act, Lulu empties a basin of rainwater. Her death, when it comes, takes place just offstage, and when Jack re-enters the room he is carrying the same basin – ostensibly to wash his hands. The first implication is that it was a bloody murder; the second, that he has removed something from the scene. Edward Bond’s 1980 English translation chooses to make this explicit. Lulu cries, “He’s slitting me up!” and then Jack emerges with a newspaper parcel, saying: “When I am dead and my collection is put up for auction, the London Medical Society will pay three hundred pounds for the prodigy I have conquered tonight.”
There is no such hand-washing or parcel-carrying in Pabst’s adaptation of Pandora’s Box. Dismayed by this, Brooks said: “The movie should have ended with the knife in the vagina.” However, the basin makes an appearance at the outset of the film’s final act, and I think there is in fact a suggestion of the Ripper’s bloody deed – which we will discuss after pudding.
Some thirty years later, Louise Brooks found herself dancing at the Café de Paris, just around the corner from where the old London Pavilion stood. Brooks arrived in London in December 1924, worked as a dancer at the club on Coventry Street, and returned home in February 1925. At first glance, her trip may sound glamorous – especially if you read Barry Paris’s biography, which provocatively states: “Louise Brooks was the first girl to dance the Charleston in London.” Unfortunately, there is little evidence to support this claim, apart from a few offhand remarks by Brooks herself and Paris’s unsourced description of her: “…She enchanted the crowds who packed the club until late at night to watch her shimmy and knock-kneed dancing. No one in England had ever seen anything like it. She was a sensational success.” Whether or not Brooks was the one who introduced London to the Charleston is a question both fascinating and beside the point of this article. I have looked into it, however, and the results of my research will be published on SilentLondon.co.uk shortly.
We know that Brooks arrived in Paris in December and was abandoned there by her traveling companion, Barbara Bennett. Then the American film and theater producer Archie Selwyn – a flamboyant character whom Tallulah Bankhead dubbed the “Criminal-at-Large” and even remembered in her autobiography as “a fascinating rogue” – brought Brooks to London and found her a job at the Café de Paris, a relatively new club. According to Champagne and Chandeliers: the Story of the Café de Paris, a history of the club that is frustratingly sparing with dates, the cabaret budget was tight, especially in the early years. Brooks, who until then had been appearing in the revue George White’s Scandals, is not mentioned among the venue’s notable performers, and she may well have been the lead dancer in a few small numbers rather than a headliner. So when Brooks recalls, “I lived beyond my means in a flat at 49A Pall Mall – who doesn’t at 17?”, we should remember that, despite the grand address, her means were rather slim, and – of course – that she was in fact 18.
What was inside the flat on Pall Mall? A Christmas pudding (although she told Close Up magazine that she “lived on it for a week,” this delicacy, an unusual one for an American teenager, was probably pilfered from the Café de Paris kitchen), the January 1925 issue of Photoplay magazine (probably brought over from New York – its print date was December 15, 1924) and a maid named Nellie.
That issue of Photoplay had Betty Bronson on its cover. Brooks and Nellie went together to see her in Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan, which opened in London on January 22, 1925. Before going to the cinema, they read the item that Brooks called “Photoplay’s fairy tale of Betty’s rise to fame.” Here it is in full:
“Betty Bronson, a little-known seventeen-year-old screen actress, is as excited as every other film fan about the release of ‘Peter Pan.’ Her future depends on her success in this picture. She believes the fairies will be kind to her.”
It really was a fairy tale, but I suspect the story stirred something like jealousy in Brooks – after all, by the end of that month she would give up on London and turn for help to the father figure she regarded as the fairy godfather of her own life. According to Paris, Brooks was in a rather melancholy frame of mind in London, which is why she was so susceptible to fairy tales. If you ask me, however desperate Brooks may have been, she had begun to turn this disappointment to her advantage, calculating how she might build her own “fairy-tale success.”
Louise Brooks in stage costume for George White’s Scandals, 1924. Photo: Alfred Cheney Johnston
According to Paris, when Brooks’s engagement at the Café de Paris came to an end, the owner “generously continued to pay her” – which tells us that, although Brooks was liked by her boss, she was neither the star of Piccadilly nor on a high salary. Her real fairy godfather was the German-born Wall Street financier Otto Kahn, known for the risqué parties he threw in New York, at which chorus girls and wealthy businessmen came together for their mutual benefit. With her last pound, Brooks called Kahn, who in turn called the British-born director Edmund Goulding. Depending on which source you believe, Goulding was in London either on the set of Gerald Cranston’s Lady or visiting his mother. Like Kahn, Goulding hosted many racy parties, and Brooks was one of a handful of young women chosen to entertain his rich and famous friends at them. Goulding paid Brooks’s overdue rent on Pall Mall and arranged and paid for her ticket home. Back in New York, thanks to her connections, Brooks landed a place in the Ziegfeld Follies. In May of that same year, she began shooting her first film, Street of Forgotten Men, directed by Herbert Brenon. Rather than downplay this period of Brooks’s life in London as chronicled by Paris, I wanted to use the anecdote to reveal a crucial moment in her career – and, with it, to draw attention to the patronage system and the support Brooks received, as well as to the determination she showed in turning that support into a career on stage or screen.
Brooks wrote of Pandora’s Box: “I knew two millionaire publishers very like Schön in the film, who backed plays in order to keep themselves supplied with Lulus.” She probably knew more than two such men. Brooks was quite candid about her relationship with Kahn, in which they both had sex and shared investment tips. With the same candor, she wrote of her relationship with Goulding: “…this carefully chosen group of beautiful girls was invited to parties given for successful men from the worlds of finance and politics. Walter Wanger and Eddie Goulding screened them. We had to be well bred and absolutely trustworthy – never attempting to expose or blackmail these great men. At these parties we were not obliged, like common whores, to go to bed with every man who invited us, but when we did, the profits were very good. Money, jewels, mink coats, a part in a film – you name it.”
As Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1979, “I was always somebody’s kept woman.”
Lulu (Louise Brooks) and Jack (Gustav Diessl) in Pandora’s Box (1929)
Brooks was far happier during her time in the studio version of London than in the weeks she spent on Pall Mall. Although Pabst subjected one of her favorite outfits to tearing and staining for the scenes in which she walks the streets as a prostitute – a rather cruel psychological game that produced wonderful results – Brooks enjoyed shooting the final act of Pandora’s Box. She also found Gustav Diessl, who played the Ripper, very attractive. While the band played Charleston music on set, Brooks and Diessl kissed and caressed each other under the table. “It was more like a Christmas party,” the actress told Richard Leacock of those moments. Brooks even threw a beer party for the cast and crew on the London set to celebrate her 22nd birthday.
By the time Pabst made Pandora’s Box, Jack the Ripper might have seemed rather out of fashion, but in 1920s Germany sexually motivated murders, known as Lustmord, were a frequent presence in both newspapers and fiction. To consider just one example, Fritz Haarmann, known as the “Butcher of Hanover,” sexually assaulted at least 24 boys and young men between 1918 and 1924,
murdering them and dismembering their bodies. Jack the Ripper also appears in Paul Leni’s 1924 horror anthology Waxworks. Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which was playing in Berlin while Pandora’s Box was being shot, won acclaim for its antihero Mack the Knife and its depiction of London’s seedy underworld. The Neue Sachlichkeit artists Otto Dix and George Grosz also took up this theme, Dix creating “Lustmord” (1922), which deals directly with the Ripper’s murders, and Grosz “John the Lady Killer” (1918).
The Threepenny Opera (G. W. Pabst, 1931)
In Pabst’s adaptation of Wedekind’s play, authentic Victorian elements – the Ripper himself, the Salvation Army with its mission to rescue sex workers, and the Christmas tree – blend with the early-20th-century ideas that dominate the rest of the film. Traces of Freudian psychology can also be seen: the killer’s fixation on the knife echoes the themes of the same director’s Secrets of a Soul (1926), while the killer’s torment recalls the mysterious lodger played by Ivor Novello in The Lodger (1927), Hitchcock’s take on the Ripper mythology. So although the London scenes are wholly anachronistic, they succeed in reflecting the artistic, intellectual and social milieu in which the film was made.
This section is also the most Expressionist part of the film – as if an earlier style of cinema were better suited to this nostalgic material. In the Staaken version of London, Günther Krampf’s cinematography built the East End out of the sparest of spaces, with light from extremely low and high angles creating deep shadows and the diagonal lines of the stair banisters cutting across silhouettes – and, of course, a dense and ominous fog rising alongside it all. According to those who worked with Krampf on his later films, the cinematographer was a master at manipulating fog and shadow. In the finished version of the film, Lulu is killed without bloodshed – her death represented only by her falling hand – while Schigolch, her father and pimp, goes into a local pub to eat Christmas pudding. This is exactly what he promises to do in Wedekind’s play. In a rather strange interview with Pabst conducted for Close Up magazine, the poet H. D. recalls the editor Kenneth Macpherson boasting of his contribution to this pudding business:
“The costumier insisted it should be on a flat plate, I said it should be a basin, but they brought a jelly mold… So I drew what it should be on the architect’s table. And Pabst said, ‘That is what I wanted. Round. Isn’t it so, Herr Macpherson?’”
Apparently Pabst also listened to Macpherson on the proper garnish for this traditional English dish – a sprig of holly. So far, so good, but the pudding in Pandora’s Box looks a little odd. The bowl is as it should be, but the round in question is flatter, looking more like a hand-washing basin than a pudding basin – and what’s more, the plant we see on top is not holly but mistletoe, with its poisonous berries, which the Ripper dangled over Lulu’s head before killing her. Having sent his ward into the arms of a murderer, Schigolch dips his spoon into this peculiar pudding without batting an eye. In this way Schigolch, the true villain of the story, also gets a taste of the Ripper’s horrific crime.
This may be Pabst’s attempt to sublimate the Ripper’s methods of murder through symbolism, just as it may be an effort – as Wedekind had made before him – to get around the censors. But by the time Pandora’s Box was released in London, the censors had already done their worst. The version shown at a trade show in April 1930 – more than a year after the Berlin premiere – was very likely the same one shown in New York in December 1929. There, as Mordaunt Hall noted in his review:
“At the beginning of the film, the management apologizes for what it terms the ‘extra sugary ending,’ explaining that the censors would not permit the whole of this production to be shown.”
The shortened version cuts the lesbian character Countess Geschwitz, as well as harmless, uncontroversial details such as Siegfried Arno’s comedy routine backstage at the revue. It also removes the very reason Lulu and her companions find themselves in London – Jack the Ripper himself. In this version there is no murder at all; instead, what inspires Lulu and Alwa to make a fresh start is listening to a Salvation Army band.
London critics greeted Pandora’s Box either with bewilderment or with polite indifference – their reactions varied depending on their preconceived expectations and on whether or not they had seen the original in Berlin. It seems the film’s apologetic intertitle had not managed to cross the Atlantic with it. Robert Herring vented his anger on the subject in Close Up:
“A brilliant idea – Pandora’s Box with the lid off! Yes, that is how it is in England. You would have thought the censor would keep the lid firmly shut on Pandora’s box. But it did better than that. It took the lid right off, let out everything inside, and then showed us the film so that we could see there was nothing in it. As a result, everyone thought it a duller film than the scenario, and the trade papers could not recommend it… In the version in which it is to be released in England, Pandora’s Box gives no idea of the film Pabst made when he finished it. Pabst’s gift is a sense of wholeness and completeness, both literal and psychological. To alter it, to disturb even the slightest vibration, is to ruin this fine workmanship.”
Herring made similar – if less impassioned – comments in the Manchester Guardian before and after the trade show. Condemning the cuts, he described the scenario as “foolish” and Brooks as “lifeless.”
Robert Herring, The Manchester Guardian: April 12, 1930 (left), April 19, 1930 (right)
Other critics, meanwhile, did not know what they were missing. Kine Weekly wrote of Pandora’s Box that “the film cannot be expected to appeal to the average audience.” The Bioscope summed it up as follows: “The misadventures of a coquettish girl and the men whose paths cross hers. The film starts off well enough but gradually fizzles out toward the end.” After both these reviews had been published, with no release date in sight, the film had a second – and equally unsuccessful – trade show in May. The film does not appear in a single 1930 issue of Film Weekly or Picturegoer. Although Brooks appeared in Lux Toilet Soap advertisements in the national newspapers, and although the Daily Mail was ready to use her image on the slightest pretext, Pandora’s Box is mentioned only once more in the print media that year.
The Bioscope, v83 n1228, April 16, 1930, p. 34 (left); Kine Weekly, April 17, 1930 (right)
While the cuts dealt an almost fatal blow to the film’s chances of success, the fact that London’s leading cinemas were installing electrical sound systems during this period, and that the city’s filmgoers could not resist the talkie revolution, made Pandora’s Box, a silent film, even less appealing. Herring mentions a proposal to synchronize the cut version “to make it pay,” but fortunately this never happened. What’s more, if Pabst and Brooks did appeal to British filmgoers, they could satisfy their wish to see the two elsewhere. They could watch Brooks in The Canary Murder Case (1929), directed by Malcolm St. Clair and Frank Tuttle – albeit with her voice dubbed by Margaret Livingston. Those wanting to see a Pabst film could opt for the hugely popular The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), directed by G. W. Pabst and Arnold Fanck. The film was shown with live sound accompaniment at the West End cinema known as the Rialto, and its plot was adapted as a short story in Film Weekly magazine.
The Daily Telegraph, August 4, 1930, p. 4
If audiences wanted “A Ruthless German Film” about a beautiful young woman who lures men and then ruins them, they could certainly see one. Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), an English-language sound film, was playing at the huge Regal cinema at Marble Arch – that is, just over 1.5 kilometers from the relatively small venue where Pandora’s Box finally opened.
C. A. Lejeune, “The poor man’s holiday,” The Observer, August 24, 1930, p. 6
Writing in The Observer in August 1930, C. A. Lejeune reported that Pandora’s Box was playing at the Gaiety cinema on Tottenham Court Road – a venue with which she was evidently not very familiar. Describing the film quite beautifully, yet fairly, she summed up her view as follows: “tense and clever in idea, emotional in photography, but reduced by the chaotic form of its presentation – to the British public, at any rate – from entertainment to study.” Pandora’s Box was being shown on a double bill with Georg Asagaroff’s The Age of Seventeen (1929). Lejeune found things to admire in both films (“a programme worth considering”). Film Weekly, on the other hand, had earlier been unable to recommend The Age of Seventeen (“I don’t think you will like this German film”), yet the review it published makes clear why this film was chosen to accompany Pandora’s Box: it refers to “morbid Teutonic psychology” and to a love triangle between a young woman and a father and son.
Film Weekly, June 14, 1930, p. 24
The Gaiety Picture House, which opened on December 4, 1909, and was one of the first cinemas in Britain, stood at the southern end of the street, very close to the British Film Institute’s present-day offices. By 1916, the police had learned that the darkened auditorium of this rather small venue was popular with gay men, who used it for sex. The Metropolitan Police sent representatives of the National Union of Women Workers to inspect the Gaiety, along with other cinemas of “doubtful reputation.”
By 1930 the cinema, which had come to seem a curiosity as one of the few venues in London still showing only silent films, also lacked an orchestra pit capable of supporting major productions. When the building reopened as a newsreel cinema after a refurbishment in 1933, Ralph Bond marked its new beginning with a short piece in Close Up on the death of the Gaiety. Describing the venue’s out-of-tune piano, its dusty seats and its frequently breaking-down projection equipment, Bond wrote that at this cinema “black-hatted highbrows would rub shoulders with the habitués of the Tottenham Court Road back streets to watch the genius of Pabst.”
It is unfortunate that Pandora’s Box was not shown as it deserved to be in a city that plays such an important role in its narrative. Even in 1968, the National Film Theatre was presenting a version billed as almost complete – which it was not. What it actually showed was a partially corrected print of the version released in France as Loulou – itself just as heavily censored. And yet there is something unsavorily fitting about the fact that, at the Gaiety, the film played to a crowd as select as it was mixed, made up of both cinephiles and pleasure seekers. Just as Jack the Ripper emerges from Günther Krampf’s Expressionist fog, Pandora’s Box arrived in London as a misplaced and untimely anachronism. In the same way, as we celebrate the uncanny modernity of this classic made toward the end of the silent era, we would do well to remember that its roots reach back into the grimy history of Victorian London.
Pamela Hutchinson
Turkish translation: Gizem Ünsalan
To read the original article, please click here.
This is an extended version of a paper that I gave at the British Silent Film Festival Symposium at King’s College London on 7 April 2017. My book on Pandora’s Box (1929) is forthcoming from BFI Palgrave.
W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929) is an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, but in many places a very loose one. Those German plays are about thirty years older than the film, a Weimar-era classic that marries traces of Expressionism with the late-1920s sobriety of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. Pandora’s Box was filmed in Berlin, or at least in a former zeppelin hangar in Staaken, and its American star Louise Brooks identitfied its depiction of divergent sexualities and the sex trade with the city’s glamorous, permissive nightlife. Her evocative description of the city during the shoot, when she was staying at the famous Eden Hotel, begins: “Sex was the business of the town …”
“At the Eden Hotel, where I lived in Berlin, the café bar was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside. On the corner stood the girls in boots, advertising flagellation. Actors’ agents pimped for the ladies in luxury apartments in the Bavarian Quarter. Race-track touts at the Hoppegarten arranged orgies for groups of sportsmen. The nightclub, Eldorado, displayed an enticing line of homosexuals dressed as women. At the Maly, there was a choice of feminine or collar-and-tie lesbians. Collective lust roared unashamed at the theatre.”
There is only one named location in the film, however, and it is in this place that the fictional narrative bumps into historical circumstance – so in this case, geography carries crucial meaning. The final act of Pandora’s Box the film, just like the final act of Wedekind’s play of the same name, takes place in London – in a slum district most likely in the east of the city. Jack the Ripper walks these streets, and our heroine Lulu, reduced to prostitution, encounters him with fatal consequences. This murder is her dramatic destiny, and to understand the film more fully, which was possibly the first cinema adaptation of the plays to feature London and the Ripper, we need to think about the British capital rather than the German one. To explore this topic I am going to examine three disappointing “misadventures” in London: the visits made by Frank Wedekind, Louise Brooks and the film itself.
Wedekind spent the years from 1887 to 1895 writing his Lulu plays: Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora. This period, which he spent largely in Paris and Munich, is covered by his published journals (Diary of an Erotic Life), which generally offer far more detail of his social and sexual activities than his working practices. Towards the end of the writing process, though, he went to London, in January 1895. His entry for 24 January gives an unprecedented level of detail about his work. In the British Museum, he says, “I find masses of material for my Divine Birth”. Divine Birth was his working title for the plays. The next day follows a more familiar trajectory for Wedekind, despite a relatively early night:
“After lunch I get on the Underground at Charing Cross and travel to the Tower, look around the museum, the most boring and tasteless I have ever seen, travel under the Thames via London Bridge and come back home through the underworld, dine at seven o’clock and take the omnibus to the London Pavilion. Apart from a couple of authentic English children, I find nothing new and very little that’s congenial. I spend some time in a bar amid a pack of frightful whores, and go to bed at twelve o’clock.”
We can really only speculate on what “masses of material” Wedekind found in the British Museum reading room, but it seems reasonable to assume that he read about Jack the Ripper, an unidentified murderer thought responsible for killing several female sex workers between 1888 and possibly 1891 in the Whitechapel area, who was to become a character in his play. The news of the Ripper’s killings was fairly recent, in fact they happened after Wedekind began writing his plays, but a trip to the Museum would have provided some more detail about the nature of his crimes – specifically I think the amount of material widely shared in newspapers such as letters giving a supposed insight into the killer’s psychology, and also the distinctive mutilation of the bodies, which led to his gruesome nickname. Most of the victims were disemboweled, with organs including hearts and uteruses removed from the scene.
If his description is correct, then Wedekind’s trip to London’s “underworld”, or red-light district, was probably further west than the Ripper’s patch. As so often in the journal Wedekind here mixes enthusiasm with disgust in his accounts of paying or seeking to pay for sex, and the comparison between his disdainful sex tourism and his rather jaded review of the Tower of London is almost funny. We could speculate on whether his encounter with sex workers in two districts, feeds into his depiction of Lulu’s clients – a strange mix of rich and poor men, designed to mirror the suitors she has had earlier in the plays. Jack the Ripper, her final client, is the mirror of Schön, and often played by the same actor.
Wedekind may also have read about prostitution in the city, including the Pall Mall Gazette’s sensational investigation into child prostitution in 1885, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, which controversially included a sting in which a mother was caught by the editor W. T. Stead agreeing to sell her own 13-year-old daughter for £5. Sex may have been the business of London but, as the second diary extract implies (“authentic English children”), Wedekind was no stranger to this particular sector. Child prostitution is a theme that reverberates through his journal and the plays both. Lulu, who was “rescued” from the café scene as a young girl by her patron Schön, is frequently described as not just sexy, but also childlike and closely resembling her own mother. There is a grotesque scene in the play Pandora’s Box, not in the film, where a group of investors in Jungfrauaktien, that is shares in a funicular railway running up the Jungfrau or more literally, virgin shares, stand by while one of their number is persuaded to offer her 12-year-old daughter to a group of older men. Schön’s patronage of Lulu and common-or-garden child prostitution are linked throughout the drama.
Did Wedekind use his “masses of material” in the finished play? We must remember that he was forced to edit and tone down the material in the Lulu plays to get them published and performed, but by naming his murderer as the Ripper, he introduces the idea of evisceration. There appears to be no explicit reference to Jack mutilating Lulu’s body in the play – unless you look for it. At the opening of the play’s final act, Lulu empties a basin of rainwater. Her death, when it comes, takes place just off-stage and when Jack re-enters the room he is carrying the basin, ostensibly to wash his hands. The first implication being that it was a bloody murder and the second that he has removed something from the scene. Edward Bond’s 1980 English translation chooses to make this explicit. Lulu cries: “He’s slitting me up!” and then Jack emerges with a newspaper parcel, saying: “When I am dead and my collection is put up for auction, the London Medical Society will pay three hundred pounds for the prodigy I have conquered tonight.”
There is no such hand-washing or parcel-carrying in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. Brooks was dismayed by this, saying: “the movie should have ended with the knife in the vagina”. However, the basin makes an appearance at the outset of the film’s final act, and I think there is in fact a suggestion of the Ripper’s bloody deed, which we will discuss after pudding.
Click here to read the full article.
Jacques Rivette’s first feature, Paris Belongs to Us, was written in 1957 and shot between July and November 1958. Had it been released in a timely fashion, it would have been one of the very first films of the French New Wave, appearing right after Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge (1958) and at the same time as Chabrol’s Les cousins and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (both 1959), and it might well have helped determine the direction of the movement. Instead, financial problems delayed postproduction work by some six months, and then it took two years to find a distributor. When the film finally premiered on December 13, 1961, the landscape of French cinema looked very different from the time of its making, having been reconfigured by Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and his subsequent Shoot the Piano Player, as well as by Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (both 1960). Seen in the light of this new approach, with its jump cuts and vérité-style intrusions, the elaborately choreographed Paris Belongs to Us suddenly looked old-fashioned. Although it did not go entirely unnoticed, its reception was somewhat muted.
Nevertheless, the film contains many of the radical elements that would distinguish Rivette’s later career, and we can see their influence especially in the expansive and intransigent trio of films that marks his peak: L’amour fou (1969), Out 1 (1971), and Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974). These radical elements include a female point of view, a fascination with the rehearsal process of theater, a feeling for the geographic intricacies of Paris, and a sense of shadowy, unnameable conspiracy; and although in Paris Belongs to Us they may not appear especially groundbreaking, they are woven into a framework that combines two venerable structures: the detective story and a young person’s coming-of-age. It would take another decade for Rivette to fully match his style and his content, and to develop, in the cultural climate of the 1970s, the collaborative methods through which this early proponent of the auteur theory would undermine the very idea of the auteur from within. In Bernadette Lafont’s words: “He was a kind of Mao, and his films were a Cultural Revolution.”
Born in Rouen in 1928 into a family of pharmacists, Rivette arrived in Paris in 1949 with a twenty-minute silent film, Aux quatre coins, already under his belt. He became a regular at the Cinémathèque française on avenue de Messine, where he soon met Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer. Along with them, he began writing for Cahiers du cinéma in 1951 and quickly became one of the magazine’s most incisive and learned critics. Rivette was a cineaste’s cineaste. As one author noted in 1976, of all the original Cahiers critics, he was the only one who could still be seen regularly at Cinémathèque screenings. Despite his deep immersion in the world of film, he was also responsible for broadening the magazine’s scope: he served as its editor in chief from 1963 to 1965 and ran interviews with such noncinematic figures as Roland Barthes, Pierre Boulez, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. He possessed a deep literary culture and tended to use literature in nonliterary ways, drawing on Balzac, Henry James, Lewis Carroll, and others in much the same way that Godard used American crime novels: only the scaffolding of the literary works remained visible. (It is important to note here his longtime collaboration with the exceedingly literate Suzanne Schiffman. Schiffman served as dialogue coach on Paris Belongs to Us, codirector and cowriter on Out 1, cowriter on five other Rivette films, and assistant director on three more. She collaborated in similar ways with Truffaut and remains one of the unsung heroes behind the New Wave.) Rivette was the first of the Cahiers critics to make a film but the last to achieve a personal style. After Aux quatre coins, he shot two more “apprentice” shorts in the early 1950s and then, in 1956, the rather formal twenty-eight-minute Le coup du berger. Le coup du berger was a study of coupling and uncoupling among four people, inspired by chess moves, a divorce trial then in the news, and perhaps a lingering memory of Choderlos de Laclos’s eighteenth-century novel Les liaisons dangereuses.
Paris Belongs to Us is altogether looser, more subjective, and more complex. The camera follows Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), in her twenties and newly arrived in the capital, who finds herself among a large and troubled cast of characters made up of artists, intellectuals, and political exiles. It all begins when her somewhat older and very knowing brother, Pierre (François Maistre), tells her about a party. When she arrives, all the guests are preoccupied with the suicide of Juan, a promising young Spanish composer and a friend to them all. Reproaches are directed at a couple of other Spanish political exiles for their despair and bitterness over the suicide, and these reproaches are led by Philip Kaufman (Daniel Crohem), a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist who has himself been exiled to France as a victim of McCarthy’s blacklists. There is murky business between Philip Kaufman and another American exile, Terry Yordan (Françoise Prévost), who arrives late at the party in the company of the theater director Gérard Lenz (Giani Esposito). Terry had been Juan’s lover, and Philip holds her morally responsible for his suicide. As Anne leaves the party, she asks Pierre why Juan killed himself. “Because he was a jerk,” Pierre replies.
Like Anne, the viewer is left reeling by the crowd at the party and the sheer number of characters. The following day, Anne meets Jean-Marc (Jean-Claude Brialy), an old classmate from the provinces who has come to Paris to pursue a career in the theater. Jean-Marc takes Anne to a barnlike space where Gérard is trying to stage the enigmatic Pericles, perhaps Shakespeare’s least performed play (modern scholars believe he wrote only half of it). A sprawling drama spanning five cities and twenty years is hardly suited to a staging with little financial backing. What’s more, the rehearsals are beset by problems: the actors are constantly leaving to work on or audition for other plays, so Gérard can never manage to gather the whole cast at the same time. When Anne walks into the hall, an actress has just quit the production, and Gérard thrusts the script into Anne’s hands so that she can fill in. He takes Anne into the company on the spot, and the complications multiply. The search for a lost guitar recording turns into a search for the truth behind Juan’s suicide and leads into the labyrinthine depths of a shadowy conspiracy. Revealed through hints and suggestions, this conspiracy may be merely a product of some of the characters’ febrile imaginations, yet on the other hand it seems to be taking on a real, physical presence. Although, at 140 minutes, Paris Belongs to Us comes nowhere near the epic length of Rivette’s later films, it already reflects his wish to plunge the viewer into an immersive, 360-degree experience that is as novelistic as it is cinematic.
After the opening credits, a line from the poet Charles Péguy appears on screen: “Paris belongs to no one.” In a statement accompanying the film’s release, Rivette said: “A film is, in general, a story built upon an idea. So instead of unveiling the primary intentions at the end of the story, I tried to tell the story of an idea with the aid of the detective story form, because the solution of the conspiracy can do nothing but abolish those intentions: ‘Nothing took place but the place.’ ” The film is full of views of Paris on a tremendous scale, from Auteuil to Ménilmontant to the Latin Quarter: luxury flats, chambres de bonne, grim boarding houses, assorted theaters, café terraces, streets of every size. Even if you don’t know the city, you will come away with a sense of its sharp and soft contrasts, gathered as if in encyclopedic notes – a pileup of city images that seems to illustrate the film’s title while hinting at the city’s ungovernable immensity. In a similar way, the suggestions or intimations of conspiracy (the ineffable links between every person, place, and thing) rest on the film’s irrefutable, resolute materiality. The film is highly specific in its period (1957), in the furnishings of its rooms, its poses and stances, the magazines and newspapers scattered here and there, and the posters on the walls.
In the fraught scenes leading up to the ending, you will notice several times a detail that is by no means randomly placed: a poster for that year’s commemoration of the Paris Commune at Père-Lachaise Cemetery; and you will find one striking climactic exchange of dialogue accompanied, in particular, by an issue of Cahiers du cinéma peering down from a shelf in the background. In a café you will hear an American assessing Nixon’s presidential chances; although this may seem entirely accidental, it fits right in with the casting of Daniel Crohem as a leftist American journalist, since he bears an eerie resemblance to the young Sterling Hayden, who had briefly been a member of the Communist Party but named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Note, too, that the character names Philip Kaufman and Terry Yordan together allude to Philip Yordan, a Hollywood screenwriter (Johnny Guitar, The Big Combo) who allowed the blacklisted Ben Maddow to use his name on several scripts. Of course, you can put all of this together and add the Spanish political exiles plotting to return home and organize strikes to undermine the Franco regime, but you still won’t crack the conspiracy’s code. All you will get is the confused and somber mood of the late 1950s, when threats were abundant and paths of resistance few. Evoking the political mood of the period through cultural discourse – overheard talk, literary quotations, details of decor, paranoid mutterings – was exactly the same strategy Rivette would use when he made Out 1, which deals with people’s feelings of betrayal and letdown in the wake of May ’68.
Paris Belongs to Us might have been an unbearably obsessive film were it not for Betty Schneider’s performance as the forthright, determined, and clear-eyed Anne, who, in the classical tradition, asks questions on the audience’s behalf. Anne is naive enough to need things explained to her, but not so naive that she accepts them without objection. (Schneider is so good that one can’t help wondering why she didn’t have a longer career – she appeared in a total of nine films between 1957 and 1962, including Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle and Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques.)
The film is remarkably sophisticated in its use of space, from cramped apartments to cavernous rehearsal rooms to half-empty boulevards seen through the rear windows of taxis, yet its use of cinematic visual language gives the impression of belonging to a tradition that was already in decline. Rivette would make only one other film that was fully scripted and storyboarded in advance: La religieuse (1966). Afterward, he used open-ended scripts, improvised sequences, and characters developed together with the actors, and at various times he applied methods of guerrilla filmmaking, such as the competing 16 mm and 35 mm crews he used in L’amour fou. Paris Belongs to Us can be seen as a thesis film that brilliantly sums up everything Rivette had learned from Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Lang, and other masters, and as an understated announcement of the new directions he intended to pursue in the future. However unlucky the circumstances of its release may have been, Paris Belongs to Us ultimately earned Rivette his wings.
Luc Sante
Turkish translation: Murat Müftüoğlu
This article is taken from The Criterion Collection website.
Paris Belongs to Us, Jacques Rivette’s first feature, was written in 1957 and shot from July to November 1958. Had it been released in a timely fashion, it would have been one of the very first films of the French New Wave, appearing after Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge (1958) but around the same time as Chabrol’s Les cousins and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (both 1959), and might have helped determine the direction of that phenomenon. Instead, lack of funds delayed postproduction work for six months, and then two years elapsed in the search for a distributor. When it finally premiered, on December 13, 1961, the landscape of French cinema looked very different from the time of the film’s making, having been radically reconfigured by The 400 Blows as well as Truffaut’s subsequent Shoot the Piano Player and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (both 1960). In that new context of jump cuts and vérité-style intrusions, the elaborately choreographed Paris Belongs to Us suddenly looked rather old-fashioned, and if it did not quite pass unnoticed, its reception was still somewhat muted.
Nevertheless, the film contains within its folds many of the radical elements that would distinguish the later career of Rivette, in particular the expansive and intransigent trio of pictures that mark his peak: L’amour fou (1969), Out 1 (1971), and Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974). These elements include a female point of view, a fascination with the rehearsal process of theater, a feeling for the geographic intricacies of Paris, and a sense of shadowy and unnameable conspiracy—though in Paris Belongs to Us, they may not appear very groundbreaking, woven as they are into a portmanteau that combines two venerable structures: a detective story and that of a young person’s coming-of-age. It would take another decade for Rivette to fully match his style and his content, and to develop the collaborative methods that would lead this early proponent of the auteur theory to undermine from within the very idea of the auteur, so that Bernadette Lafont could say, in the cultural context of the 1970s: “He is a kind of Mao, and his films are a Cultural Revolution.”
Rivette, born in Rouen in 1928, into a family of pharmacists, arrived in Paris in 1949 with a twenty-minute silent film, Aux quatre coins, already under his belt. He gravitated to the Cinémathèque française on avenue de Messine, where he soon met Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer. Along with them, he began writing for Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, becoming one of that magazine’s most incisive and learned critics. Rivette was a cineaste’s cineaste. An author writing in 1976 noted that of all the original Cahiers critics, he was by then the only one who could still be seen regularly at Cinémathèque screenings. But despite his profound immersion in movies, he was also responsible for enlarging the scope of the magazine, whose editor in chief he was from 1963 to 1965, for example by running interviews with such noncinematic figures as Roland Barthes, Pierre Boulez, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. He possessed a deep literary culture, although he has tended to employ literature in nonliterary ways, using Balzac, Henry James, Lewis Carroll, and others in much the same way that Godard employed American crime novels: only their scaffolding remains visible. (It is important to note here his longtime collaboration with the exceedingly literate Suzanne Schiffman, dialogue coach on Paris Belongs to Us, codirector and cowriter on Out 1, cowriter on five other Rivette movies, and assistant director on three more. She collaborated in similar ways with Truffaut and remains the unacknowledged force behind the New Wave.) Rivette was the first of the Cahiers critics to make a film but the last to achieve a personal style. After Aux quatre coins, he shot two more “apprentice” shorts in the early 1950s and then, in 1956, the rather formal twenty-eight-minute Le coup du berger, a study of coupling and uncoupling among four people that was inspired by chess moves, a divorce trial then in the news, and perhaps a lingering memory of Choderlos de Laclos’s eighteenth-century novel Les liaisons dangereuses.
Paris Belongs to Us is altogether looser, more subjective, and more complex. It follows Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), twentyish and recently arrived in the capital, as she gets herself involved with a large and troubled cast of characters—artists, intellectuals, and expatriates. It begins when her brother, Pierre (François Maistre), somewhat older and very knowing, tells her about a party. When she arrives, all the guests are preoccupied with the recent suicide of Juan, a promising young Spanish composer and friend to all of them. Reproaches are directed at a couple of other Spanish exiles, for their bitterness and despair, reproaches that are led by Philip Kaufman (Daniel Crohem), an American journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who himself has been exiled to France as a victim of McCarthyist blacklisting. There is further murky business between him and another American expat, Terry Yordan (Françoise Prévost), who has arrived late, in the company of the theater director Gérard Lenz (Giani Esposito). Terry had been Juan’s lover, and Philip accuses her of being morally responsible for his suicide. As Anne leaves the party, she asks Pierre why Juan killed himself. “Because he was a jerk,” he replies.
The viewer, like Anne, is reeling by this point: the immediate hothouse drama, the accumulation of characters. The following day, Anne meets an old classmate from the provinces, Jean-Marc (Jean-Claude Brialy), who has come to Paris to pursue a career in the theater. He leads her to a barnlike room where Gérard is attempting to mount a bare-bones production of the enigmatic Pericles, perhaps Shakespeare’s least performed play (modern scholars believe he wrote only half of it). It is a sprawling drama, covering five cities and twenty years—an unlikely prospect for underfunded staging. In addition, the production is plagued by problems, beginning with the fact that the actors are constantly taking off to work or to audition for other plays, so that Gérard has never once been able to gather the entire cast at one time. In fact, when Anne shows up, an actress has just dropped out of the production, and Gérard hands her a script so she can fill in. He engages her on the spot as a member of the troupe, and the convolutions multiply. The search for a lost guitar score becomes a search for the truth about Juan’s suicide, and that in turn leads into the labyrinthine bowels of a shadowy conspiracy. Revealed through hints and suggestions, this conspiracy may be purely a product of some of the characters’ febrile imaginations, but on the other hand, it seems to be racking up an actual body count. Although Paris Belongs to Us, at about 140 minutes, is nowhere near the epic length of some of Rivette’s subsequent movies, it already shows his wish to plunge the viewer into an immersive 360-degree experience that is at least as novelistic as it is cinematic.
The first title to appear after the credits is a quote from the poet Charles Péguy: “Paris belongs to no one.” In a statement he issued to accompany the release of the film, Rivette wrote: “A film is, in general, a story built upon an idea; I tried to tell the story of an idea, with the aid of the detective story form; that is to say that, instead of unveiling primary intentions at the end of the story, the denouement can’t do anything but abolish them: ‘Nothing took place but the place.’ ” The movie does involve an awful lot of Paris, from Auteuil to Ménilmontant to the Latin Quarter; luxury flats, chambres de bonne, grimy residential hotels; assorted theaters, café terraces, streets of all sizes. Even if you are not familiar with the city, you can nevertheless get a sense of the encyclopedic accretion of high-and-low contrasts, a pileup that seems to illustrate the movie’s title even as it suggests the city’s ungovernable immensity. Similarly, the suggestions of conspiracy—of the ineffable linkage of every person, place, and thing—are both grounded in and challenged by the picture’s irrefutable, hard-core materiality. It is specific in its dating (1957), in the furnishings of rooms, the poses and stances, the reading materials left lying around, the posters on walls.
In the fraught scenes leading up to the ending, you can several times spot a poster for that year’s commemoration of the Paris Commune at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, a detail surely not idly chosen; and one particularly resonant exchange of climactic dialogue is silently accompanied by an issue of Cahiers du cinéma peering down from a shelf. An American in a café can be heard assessing Nixon’s presidential chances in English, and while this may be purely accidental, it fits right in with the casting of Daniel Crohem as the leftish American journalist—he bears an eerie resemblance to the young Sterling Hayden, who had briefly been a member of the Communist Party, but named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Note too that the character names Philip Kaufman and Terry Yordan together allude to Philip Yordan, a Hollywood screenwriter (Johnny Guitar, The Big Combo) who allowed the blacklisted Ben Maddow to use his name on several scripts. Of course, you can add all these things together, and throw in the Spanish exiles plotting to go home and organize strikes in order to undermine Franco, but you will not arrive at a decipherable code. What you get instead is the somber and confused mood of the late 1950s, when threats seemed abundant and paths of resistance few. The evocation of a political mood through the buildup of cultural litter—overheard talk, literary citations, bits of decor, paranoid mutterings—is exactly the same strategy Rivette was to employ when he made Out 1, which is preoccupied with people’s feelings of betrayal and letdown in the wake of May ’68.
Paris Belongs to Us might have been unbearably obsessive were it not for Betty Schneider’s performance as the forthright, determined, and clear-eyed Anne, who is an audience proxy in the classical tradition—sufficiently naive that she has to have things explained to her, but not so much that she takes things lying down. (Schneider is so good it’s a wonder she didn’t enjoy a longer career—she appeared in a total of nine films, which also include Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle and Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques, all between 1957 and 1962.) The picture is remarkably sophisticated in its handling of space, from cramped apartments to cavernous rehearsal rooms to half-empty boulevards seen from the backs of taxis—but its use of cinematic visual rhetoric does seem to belong to a tradition that was already then falling away. Rivette was in fact to make only one other movie—La religieuse (1966)—that was fully scripted and storyboarded in advance. Afterward, he employed open-ended scripts, improvised sequences, characters developed in collaboration with the actors, and, at various times, methods of guerrilla filmmaking, such as the competing 16 mm and 35 mm crews in L’amour fou. Paris Belongs to Us might be seen as his thesis film, a brilliantly accomplished résumé of all that he has learned from his teachers (Rossellini, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Lang, among others), along with an understated announcement of the new directions in which he intends to set off in the future. However unlucky the circumstances of its release may have been, Paris Belongs to Us ultimately earned him his wings.
This article is taken from The Criterion Collection website.
The last weekend before the pandemic took hold of Istanbul was spent in feminist celebration. As the Türkiye branch of the Women and Film History International team, together with Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı and hosted by Buse Yıldırım, we put together a two-day program of events at Beykoz Kundura to commemorate women’s film history.
Elif is the silent film curator at Eye Filmmuseum in the Netherlands. She is also an archivist who has devoted more than twenty years of her life to finding lost films, restoring them and making them available to researchers and film lovers. She focuses not only on the films that are the cornerstones of cinema history, but also on the work of the forgotten or neglected women of silent cinema. Elif, who works for many international silent film festivals, above all the Istanbul Silent Film Days, has curated programs of films shot in Ottoman lands around the turn of the twentieth century under the title Images from the Ottoman Empire, and has presented them in many cities around the world.
Since we had come together for the program on the weekend of March 7 and 8, we also wanted to do an interview with Elif for 5Harfliler. One of the focal points of the program was Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the very first filmmakers and widely regarded as the first woman director, about whom a new documentary was recently made. This documentary, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Turkish title: Doğal Ol: Alice Guy-Blaché’nin Bilinmeyen Hikayesi; Pamela B. Green, 2018), was screened online just recently, on June 13, as part of the Filmmor Women’s Film Festival. For our part, on March 7 we had screened the documentary on Alice Guy-Blaché made by Katja Raganelli in 1997.
We named the March 7–8 program “Pioneering Women of Cinema” in order to tackle the oddity of a canon shaped by auteurs – known as writer-directors – who, with few exceptions, are overwhelmingly men. Yet when it comes to a collective form of art and experience such as cinema, we both ran the program and began this interview with the idea that singling out particular names, and the very notion of the “auteur,” need to be problematized.
Shall we begin with the problems of foregrounding the names and life stories of some women while passing over others?
Elif: Yes, Alice Guy-Blaché plays an important role here, too. Since the Lumière brothers, the “inventors of cinema,” are constantly talked about as ‘these two brothers, geniuses in this way and that,’ a film with a “mother of cinema” narrative can be set against that. Perhaps it even should be, but there is something fundamentally troubling about this way of talking, this approach – as if one person emerged all alone and did everything single-handedly. That kind of narrative is at odds with the very essence of cinema anyway, isn’t it? Cinema is teamwork. You might say this – though I’m not so sure about that either – about a painter, for example. Perhaps a painter shuts themselves away in the studio and creates alone. Even that, I think, isn’t very realistic. That painter, too, is inevitably someone influenced by the society they live in, by their colleagues and by other intellectuals. But let’s say that, technically, working alone is possible there. You shut yourself in your room, set your canvas in front of you and withdraw into seclusion. In cinema, that is technically impossible. You simply can’t make a film on your own. So I think it’s absurd to talk about cinema this way. This narrative satisfies a need for a hero, the search for a creator, an artist, a genius…
In the literature, and even in conversations about film, auteur directors are assumed to be men of genius, aren’t they?
Elif: Yes, but where did this discourse come from? Where did it come from, and why was it grafted onto cinema? We should be questioning these things from the very start. Otherwise we end up having to deal with the misunderstandings and the strange discourses it gives rise to. Instead of talking about how to move beyond this narrative, we find ourselves busy looking for counterexamples to it. As if to say, if the Lumières were geniuses in 1895, let’s find a female genius of that time to set against them… If that’s how the Lumières are, then of course we can set Alice Guy against them, but I don’t think that should be the way out we’re looking for. We should take a different route: while trying to clarify the role of women, we should at the same time spread the idea that cinema is teamwork. Otherwise, the prejudices and misinformation already in people’s minds will only lead to even more confusion. Whereas, as we clear the way, we should also be doing away with certain other prejudices… This is a difficult task, because some things have become deeply entrenched.
Yes, ever since the French New Wave of the 1960s, the notion of the auteur director has shaped conversations about cinema. Not to mention film journalism, which began by turning patriarchal figures such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles into heroes.
Elif: That’s only natural. Film writers and directors are people who know each other; of course they will praise a film made by their own friend, the friend they share drinks with at the tavern in the evening. Perhaps they even talked through the idea of the film together, right? That’s human nature, nothing surprising about it. What makes it wrong is when someone completely removed from that milieu, a writer in another country, reads it and repeats it without ever seeing it in a critical context. They don’t consider that the director had already sat down and discussed it many times with their writer friend – practically made the film together, even. So we ought to see that context, but after so much time has passed we may not be able to. Today, for example, it’s still possible to know who Tarantino worked with and what inspired him while making one of his films. But it’s important to grasp that we can’t see this when we look back through history. On the other hand, perhaps there’s also something nice about a hundred years ago: we can do in-depth research. We can look at first-hand correspondence, for example, rather than citing a book as the sole source just because it happened to be published…
The way this information multiplies through repetition, even when it is incomplete or wrong, is also important. Doesn’t this easy way out also keep women, or subalterns, from entering history and becoming known?
Elif: Of course, but only until things are explored and researched in depth. We have a very clear example of this kind of rewriting of history: Filibus (Italy, 1915). The only copy of the film is with us, in the Desmet collection; if I remember correctly, we brought it to light in 1989, Filibus having been considered a lost film. Once it became clear that it was the only copy, our institution restored it and screened it at festivals, but from then on, both in our catalog and in the catalogs of those festivals, the actress in Filibus was listed as Cristina Ruspoli. And until two years ago we never once questioned that information. I acknowledge our own mistake here, too; that’s what our catalog said. And Italian sources say the same.
Could you tell us a little about the discovery of Filibus and the story of the film?
Elif: Three years ago, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival told us it would be giving Eye Filmmuseum, as an institution, an award in the field of silent cinema and restoration. After saying I would go to accept the award on the institution’s behalf, I asked them to screen Filibus at the award ceremony. They didn’t yet know Filibus, but I had a feeling this film would fit our times perfectly. And here’s the proof: ever since that day, the film has been screened somewhere in the world every month, and it will soon be out on DVD. Because in the film a single actress plays three roles at once, and the protagonist is a mysterious female pirate who flies through the air. It’s like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Anthony E. Zuiker, 2000–2015) and Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996) rolled into one, or perhaps a bit like Sherlock Holmes.
To read the rest of the interview, you can visit the 5 Harfliler website.
Movies inspire a lot of passion, but the back catalogue of film history can be daunting. For every fan who’s obsessed with an actor, director or sub-genre, there’s another struggling to know where to start. Sometimes all it takes is the right recommendation to set you on your path from newbie to know-it-all…
Why this might not seem so easy
In the silent era, films were made mostly for women, and often by women. However, early female film directors are misrepresented by a ‘scarcity myth’. From the contemporary movie magazines to respectable film history books, early female directors are regularly referred to as rarities – even when that was not the case. A woman directed what was probably the world’s first scripted narrative fiction film; in the mid-to-late teens the Universal studio was bursting with female directors. Women such as Lois Weber, Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac, Lotte Reiniger and Mabel Normand were leaders in their respective fields, and they were supported by an industry filled with female screenwriters, and some hugely important female producers producing movies for a majority female audience. But you wouldn’t know that from textbooks that relegate ‘women in film’ to a sidebar.
It follows that if the names of the early female filmmakers are unfamiliar to you, the films themselves are too, and you would be forgiven for thinking they aren’t worth seeking out. But that’s a big mistake – these are major talents, who often made films that were critical of contemporary gender relations, whether playful or political. And don’t overlook directors with just a few screen credits either. The setup of the film industry reflected the rest of society, and there are lots of reasons why talented directors found themselves quitting the business to work (or not) elsewhere – but not before showing us what they were capable of.
The best place to start – Suspense (1913)
Lois Weber was one of the greatest film directors of the early 20th century – a heavyweight rival to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. One viewing of this 10-minute action flick will give you a taste of her skills. Weber crafts a home-invasion thriller of nailbiting intensity that incorporates cross-cutting, three-way split-screens and a deftly shot car chase. Not only that, she is taking a tale frequently told by her male peers, that of a vulnerable woman in an isolated house threatened by an intruder and calling her husband on the telephone to come and rescue her – and making the radical decision to shoot it from a female perspective. Weber does this with some extreme POV shots, putting us right in the shoes of the woman trapped in the house with her baby, listening to the man with a knife climb the stairs. Not only that, but Weber herself plays the mother. Where other directors found pathos in the sight of women in peril, Weber supplies stone-cold fear – hence the stark and evocative name.
After this you’ll want to explore more work by Weber, it’s guaranteed. Like her contemporary Dorothy Davenport Reid, many of her films address social problems, and she made some powerful pictures with a purpose in the late 1910s such as Discontent (1916). But to get a sense of the span of her remarkable career, proceed directly to 1921’s The Blot.
Made in Weber’s own studio, shot in sequence and foregrounding her revelatory attention to detail (she was a meticulous stylist), this drama combines naturalism and a passion for social justice in a way that feels refreshingly modern. And without giving away any spoilers, it boasts one of the most emotionally sensitive endings in 1920s cinema – one you may be pondering for a while.
What to watch next
Weber was lucky enough to get her first job in film working for a woman: the great Alice Guy-Blaché. After pioneering fiction cinema at Gaumont in Paris from as early as 1896, Guy-Blaché crossed the Atlantic to work in the US. Falling Leaves (1912) is one of her most beautiful films, a delicate drama spun out of one haunting image: the sight of a young girl tying greenery on to bare branches because she has heard that her sister will die by the onset of winter.
When you start digging into more of Alice Guy-Blaché’s work from Making an American Citizen to Algie, the Miner (both 1912) and The Ocean Waif (1916), you’ll notice that she pays a lot of attention to gender constructions and often fraught or unequal relationships between men and women. So you’re probably ready for some more explicitly feminist silent cinema. Enter Germaine Dulac. La Cigarette (1919) and La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923) are two beautiful impressionist films about women who are unfulfilled in their marriages. And don’t miss out the work of Dorothy Arzner, another queer woman like Dulac, but this time working in Hollywood – the scene in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) in which Maureen O’Hara chastises a leering audience is a famous rejection of the male gaze.
If Dulac gives you a taste for artistic or experimental cinema, time to relish Mary Ellen Bute’s ‘visual music’ film Parabola (1937) or the spectral double exposures in Marie-Louise Iribe’s fantasy Le Roi des Aulnes (1931).
Where not to start
You won’t be able to resist Mabel Normand’s charm and comic chops for long, but you may be glad that you saved her work until last. Normand became a star while working at the Keystone Studio in the 1910s, and it’s not hard to see why. She was a vivacious and sharp comedienne and utterly fearless when it came to stunt work – studio publicity called her the “sugar on the Keystone grapefruit”. She was also a director, and among her many achievements behind the camera, she shot the first film to feature Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character: Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914).
Normand’s films are uproarious, slapstick treasures. In fact, there’s little to distinguish her work from that of her male colleagues at Keystone and the other Hollywood studios where physical comedy reigned supreme. Watching her work both sides of the camera, especially in gems such as Mabel’s Blunder (1914), which features Normand in some eye-catching drag, you may begin to wonder why she never had the kind of illustrious career afforded to Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd. The answer to that is complicated and partly to do with the fact that she died tragically young, aged just 37. Which is all the more reason to watch, enjoy and celebrate the films that she and her female peers made in these pioneering early days of cinema.
This article is taken from BFI website.
The concept of “Early Murnau” is a little bittersweet. The German director had such a short career that the films in this new collection from Masters of Cinema take us up to just six years before he died. And while his most famous film was made during the period (1921-25) covered by this box set, that work, Nosferatu, is not included. The set ends just one year before his hypnotic Faust was made, and two before his Hollywood masterpiece Sunrise.
This is technically middle Murnau, then, or “the Murnau you may have missed if you only knew Nosferatu and the surviving Hollywood work”. All the same, this is a gorgeous collection of distinctive, spectacular films, well worth adding to your shelf. All of the films in the set have been made available on DVD from Masters of Cinema previously, but here together, on Blu-ray, they represent a far better bargain.
The journey through Murnau’s lesser-sung German work begins in 1921 with Schloss Vogelöd, a country-house mystery rendered mysterious and dreamlike at the director’s touch, and climaxes with the bracing and inventive Molière adaptation Tartuffe (1925), which introduces an especially noxious virtue-signalling hypocrite and hangs him out to dry. In between we delve into the romantic and financial misery of a poetically minded clerk in Phantom (1922), and the related entanglements of an aristocrat in Die Finanzen de Grossherzogs (1924). Indisputably, the highlight of the collection is the low-key masterpiece Die Letzte Mann (1924) starring Emil Jannings as the hotel doorman whose life hits a downward spiral when he is demoted to a toilet attendant.
As the many extra features and essays included with the set attest, Murnau’s oeuvre is hugely varied, swinging from genre to genre and rarely settling in one place for long. Stylistically, though, he is mistakably himself at all times. You can see the walls of the city bend down to oppress the heroes of both Phantom and Die Letzte Mann, for example. And you may already have noticed that the films above share a set of preoccupations with money and social position, with impossible aspirations and with toxic pride.
The faces of these oppressed, haunted characters loom out of the darkness in crisp close-ups, or surrounded by Murnau’s sympathetic murk of spectral apparitions and psychologically motivated special effects. The films here are Expressionistic, but in a very sophisticated way – not the greasepaint and distortion of Caligari, but infused with a subtler, much more uncomfortable disquiet. It’s closer to poetic realism than the Grand Guignol. The set design in Schloss Vogelöd, for example, is stunning, and a dissolving close-up of Lya de Putti in Phantom is a gorgeous as it is unsettling. In an era before horror became a codified genre, Murnau made films that are genuinely disturbing, with shadows that creep where they are not wanted, without swamping and swallowing the frame.
Schloss Vogelöd is perhaps a little slow and stagey for modern tastes, and Phantom is definitely over-long, but both those films more than reward a quiet night in on the sofa – with arresting imagery and gut-wrenching plot twists. Die Finanzen de Grossherzogs reveals that Murnau was incapable of making a film without beauty, but that extended comedy did not come naturally to him. Tartuffe is a true delight, a sharp and human satire told visually (and a valuable lesson in how to turn a stage play into a film, really). Murnau’s decision to place a film within a film gives the satire a modern bite, with Emil Jannings in the deliciously wicked title role. And Die Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh is a triumph that deserves repeat viewing from any serious silent cinephile. It’s a pleasure to see it on Blu-ray and from its dizzy opening sequence, via its heartbreaking middle to its sardonic mockery of a happy ending, it reveals new treasures each time you watch it. Jannings is triumphant, and Karl Freund’s nauseous, roaming, spinning and climbing camera takes the audience to the darkest of emotional spaces.
Highly recommended for anyone who loves Murnau’s better-known work, this a set to linger over. The troubled homes and terrifying cities of these films may seem inhospitable, but as landmarks in the enchanted Murnauland, they offer incomparable cinematic spectacles. Supported by the aforementioned Freund, and by screenplays from Carl Mayer and Thea von Harbou, Murnau made these films for Erich Pommer’s Ufa, and they are all quality productions, sophisticated and elegantly made. The accompanying essays, and the audio commentary by David Kalat on Die Finanzen de Grossherzogs, as well as a smart new video essay by David Cairns, that lingers, understandably on Die Letzte Mann, make it an altogether richer experience.
“Art – authentic art – is simple,” Murnau once said. “But simplicity itself demands artistry.” Other films by the director may be so familiar that we can almost miss the touch of his technique, but the works collected here allow us to understand exactly what makes a Murnau a Murnau.
This article is taken from Silent London.
The concept of “Early Murnau” is a little bittersweet. The German director’s career was so short that the films in this new collection from Masters of Cinema take us up to just six years before his death. Although the director’s most famous film, Nosferatu, belongs to the 1921–25 period covered by this collection, it is not included in the selection. The collection ends just one year before the making of his hypnotic Faust, and two years before his Hollywood masterpiece Sunrise.
Technically, then, we could call this period “middle Murnau,” or “the Murnau you may have missed if you only know Nosferatu and the surviving Hollywood work.” All the same, each of the distinctive, spectacular films in this gorgeous selection deserves a place on your shelf. The films in the collection have all been released on DVD by Masters of Cinema before, but gathered together on Blu-ray they make for a far better bargain.
We begin our exploration of Murnau’s lesser-known German productions with Schloss Vogelöd (1921), a country-house mystery rendered mysterious and dreamlike by the director’s touch. At the peak of our journey, Tartuffe (1925), a bracing and inventive adaptation of Molière, introduces a deeply noxious, self-centered hypocrite and then hangs him out to dry. In between, Phantom (1922) shows us the romantic and financial misery of a clerk who longs to be a poet, while Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (1924) lets us witness the tangled affairs of an aristocrat. The undisputed star of the collection is the low-key masterpiece Die letzte Mann (1924). Starring Emil Jannings, the film charts the downfall of a hotel doorman who is demoted to toilet attendant.
As the many extra features and essays included in the collection attest, Murnau’s output is hugely varied; the director swings from genre to genre, refusing to stay in one place for long. Stylistically, though, Murnau is always unmistakably himself. In both Phantom and Die letzte Mann, for example, we see the walls of the city bend down to hem in the heroes. And – as you may already have noticed – most of these films explore themes such as anxieties over money and social status, impossible dreams and the toxic effects of excessive pride.
The faces of these oppressed, haunted characters loom out of the darkness in crisp close-ups, or are surrounded by Murnau’s gloom, fed by spectral apparitions and psychologically motivated special effects. These films represent a highly sophisticated form of Expressionism: instead of the heavy greasepaint and distortion of Caligari, there is a subtler and far more unsettling atmosphere. These are works much closer to poetic realism than to Paris’s famous old theater, the Grand Guignol. The set design in Schloss Vogelöd, for example, is stunning, while the dissolving close-up of Lya de Putti in Phantom is as gorgeous as it is unsettling. In this era, before horror had become a codified genre, Murnau made cleverly constructed, genuinely disturbing films, full of shadows that creep in where they are not wanted, yet never swamp or swallow the frame.
Schloss Vogelöd may feel a little slow and stagey for modern tastes, and Phantom is definitely overlong. But thanks to their arresting visual language and the gut-wrenching twists in their stories, both films more than reward a quiet night in on the sofa. Die Finanzen des Großherzogs reveals that Murnau was incapable of making a film without beauty, but that extended comedy did not come naturally to him. Tartuffe, a true delight to watch, is not only a sharp, human satire told visually but also a valuable lesson in how a stage play should be adapted for the screen. Murnau’s decision to place a film within a film gives a modern bite to this satire, in which Emil Jannings plays the deliciously wicked title character we can’t get enough of. Die letzte Mann, meanwhile, is a masterpiece that every cinephile serious about silent cinema should watch more than once. Now that we have the chance to see it on Blu-ray, every minute of the film, from its dizzying opening sequence through its heartbreaking middle to its sardonic happy ending, promises new treasures with each viewing. Jannings’s magnificent performance and Karl Freund’s dizzyingly roaming, spinning and climbing camera draw the audience into the darkest of emotional spaces.
Highly recommended for anyone who loves Murnau’s better-known work, this collection deserves to be lingered over. The troubled families and terrifying cities in these films may not seem like very pleasant places, but as landmarks of Murnau’s enchanted world they offer an incomparable cinematic feast. Supported by the aforementioned Freund, as well as by screenplays from Carl Mayer and Thea von Harbou, each of these films that Murnau made for Erich Pommer’s film studio UFA is a quality production, deep and elegant. The essays accompanying the collection, the audio commentary David Kalat recorded for Die Finanzen des Großherzogs, and David Cairns’s smart new video essay, which – understandably – focuses on Die letzte Mann, make this Murnau experience all the richer.
“Art – authentic art – is simple,” Murnau once said. “But simplicity itself demands artistry.” Other films by the director may be so familiar to us that we can almost miss the touch of his technique, but the works gathered in this set allow us to understand exactly what makes a Murnau a Murnau.
Pamela Hutchinson
Turkish translation: Gizem Ünsalan
This article is taken from Silent London.
“Whilst many persons are railing against the cinema as a disseminator of disease, there is, I am glad to find, one gentleman who is putting theatre to good account as an influenza combatant.”
Previously I reported on some of the debates that the influenza epidemic of 1918 precipitated within the cinema trade. In the struggle between local medical board officers who wanted cinemas closed, and local exhibitors who wanted them open, some quite curious notions about how the disease was spread flew around. Some exhibitors claimed that there was ‘clear evidence that people are more likely to catch infection out of doors than inside places of entertainment’, perhaps drawing on the age old (but erroneous) association of the ‘common cold’ with being cold. Others, following this logic, argued against ‘taking the germ laden air from the streets and pumping it into the theatres.’
Others set great store by the disinfectant qualities of camphor and other strongly scented chemicals.
Reading such reports one might be forgiven for thinking that the mechanism for the spread of influenza-like infections was as yet unknown to medical science. Nowhere are measures such as facemasks, hand-washing or social distancing mentioned. However, it is clear that these measures were well understood, and cinema itself was an instrumental mode by which such precautions were impressed on the public, in the form of the film Dr Wise on Influenza. ‘The “hero” of the film is Dr Wise,’ reported the Birmingham Daily Gazette,
… and during the story he offers a good deal of advice without asking the customary fee. Here are a few specimens:
A person suffering from any kind of cold or fever should stay at home until all the symptoms have abated.
Exclusion of fresh air involves retention of germs in deadly strength.
Gargle throat and douche nose with a solution of potassium permanganate and common salt.
It is important to keep fit. Alcohol and public houses increase risk of infection.
The reviewer for The Bioscope found it ‘difficult to repress a shudder’ at the images of flu microbes as seen under a microscope, but reported that like all good public information films, the message was conveyed not only through a lecture, but also through an involving story:
The foolish man who would not nurse his cold was shown. He went to the office, sneezed in the tram, on the train, in the streets, at the office, onto his letters, into his telephone, and indeed everywhere the contagion was likely to spread to others. It did spread. The chief culprit, and several whom he infected, died. Another figure in the story who took precautions when he got cold, soon recovered.
The film’s powers of suggestion were so great, reported the reviewer, that while it was being shown, the auditorium was temporarily full of coughing and sneezing patrons.
Dr Wise on Influenza had been made by Joseph Best B.Sc., who was a long-term advocate of the educational value of cinema. Before the war he had been the manager of Pathé Frères’ educational and scientific department. This was not his first foray into public information filmmaking, having previously been commissioned to make a film called Whatsoever a Man Soweth by the National Council for combating venereal disease. Dr Wise on Influenza was itself commissioned by the Local Government Board (the precursor to the Ministry of Health) and it was distributed by them to local medical officers who then took responsibility for getting it into local cinemas. Considering the tension I’ve already noted between these officers and local exhibitors, one might wonder how widely it was shown. By the end of the war there was considerable resistance among cinema managers to the continued expectation that they would allow screen time for the showing of government information films. Films dealing with venereal disease or dealing with issues deemed by the CEA to be politically partisan were a particular bone of contention and when in the December 1918 election the coalition government sent slides displaying Lloyd George and his ministers out to cinemas, the CEA after much outraged debate absolutely refused to display them. The withdrawal [or suppression] of Maurice Elvey’s The Life of David Lloyd George (1918) can also be understood in this context. A few years later in 1920 an interesting debate arose in the Leeds and District CEA branch meeting when the local medical officer asked if exhibitors would be prepared to display a single slide in support of ‘Child Welfare Week’. A refusal was their instinctive reaction. During the ensuing debate a supporter of the scheme pointed out that the slide was a compromise after a previous request for them to show a short film had similarly been refused. The medical officer, it was reported, ‘held pronounced views as to the utility of the cinema with regard to the propaganda of health matters.’ The speaker reminded the branch that during the influenza epidemic they had fought against the closure of the cinemas precisely by arguing that a better course of action would be to make use of their facilities by showing public information films advising on how best to avoid infection – so the refusal of the present request looked very like hypocrisy. This argument was met with a dusty answer, and further rehearsal of various grumbles about the ‘ridiculous’ 1918 restrictions.
It seems advocates of public information cinema such a Joseph Best were faced with an uphill struggle. Nevertheless I’ve found reports of Dr Wise on Influenza being distributed (as ‘the official influenza film’) in Birmingham, Cambridge, Sheffield, Newcastle, Bradford and Whitby. The account from Whitby singles out the section on how to fashion a mask from a handkerchief for particular praise, arguing that ‘the value of this precaution is illustrated by the experiences of San Fransisco, where it is stated that the universal wearing of masks for 9 days has stopped the outbreak of influenza.’
Further advances were to come. When the Local Government Board was transformed into the new Ministry of Health in June 1919, it had as its minister a great advocate of cinema health education in the Right Hon. Christopher Addison.[12] In fact, looking back at his time as the first minister for Health, Addison singled out an influenza film as one of his greatest successes. Unfortunately it wasn’t Dr Wise, but another shorter film. “I have seen several health films which have suffered from being too long and too dull” opined Addison,
At the time of the influenza epidemic in 1920 I arranged with a well known firm of producers to make a film showing girls gargling at school. This film lasted 90 seconds. It cost £30 to make – an expense borne by the distributors. It was shown within a week to 30 million people, thus suggesting to the public one of the methods for the prevention of influenza without any cost to the Treasury. Such utilisation of the kinema, if directed by ‘live’ men in Whitehall, could accomplish much.
Silent Bystanders in Dr Wise on Influenza
Dr Wise on Influenza is, I think, an excellent public information film – it gets its message across not just through the didactic pronouncements of Dr Wise, but also (as the Bioscope noted) by means of a realistic and well-acted illustrative drama. Much of the charm of these dramatic sections of the film for a modern audience must come from the glimpses they afford of London’s wartime West End. There are location shots in Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square and around the theatres and cinemas nearby. It is quite clear from the internal evidence of these shots that the film crew (perhaps for budgetary reasons) simply went out into the crowded streets and filmed where they could. There is barely a passer-by who enters the frame and doesn’t glance with curiosity at the action, or at the camera. Some gingerly back out of the shot when they realise what is going on, some linger in fascination, while others boldly face the camera, usurping (albeit briefly) the focus of the scene from its intended protagonists.
I’ve written before about films in which the bystanders either boldly and purposefully hijack the screen, or by their unobtrusive presence offer a critical commentary on the action for a modern audience. This is unlike those in that it is a drama rather than an actuality – evidently nobody has signalled that filming is going on, and so you can see people turning a corner unawares, registering that there is a camera and crew present, and changing their behaviour accordingly. I particularly like the scene where Brown emerges from his house, sneezing away. A youth in a bowler hat passes, and completely absorbed in watching the actor perform, does a 360 degree turn before he notices the camera. He lingers, and moves back across the frame behind the actor gazing at the camera the whole while.
In the scene that follows (shot in Trafalgar Square) a well-to-do lady in a hat turns to watch the action and take in the camera, and later a man enters frame left, realises he’s in shot, and rapidly backs out again. Later when Brown is outside a restaurant and ‘grill room’ (is it the Criterion?) a woman walks into the shot from behind the camera and quite deliberately turns to look into the lens, laughing with her companion. The actor has to actually shove past her to retain control of the scene, while in the background the doorman and other passers-by look on.
In the shot immediately following, three men in uniform are seen, but soon vanish to be replaced by a man and a woman turning a corner. On observing the filming the man grins mischievously at the camera and takes ‘his place in the queue’ for the restaurant, evidently determined to be in the film whatever the feelings of his lady companion. These scenes are quick enough for such behaviours to pass unnoticed by viewers intent on reading the image for cues to the primary narrative. But repeated viewing offers a curiously intimate glimpse into the unselfconscious street life of 1918.
NB The embedded version here and the screen shots are from Tony Fletcher’s brilliant Celluloid Tapestry Youtube channel. Tony’s transfer plays the film at 16fps and can be viewed internationally. You can also view the film on the BFI Player (only available in the UK), where it is transferred at 12fps. Many film projectors were still cranked by hand during this period, so projection speeds would have varied from screening to screening.