(title image: Rosalie et Léontine vont au théâtre, Roméo Bosetti, 1911)
For its 36th edition last October, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2017) dedicated four programs and one feature to the “nasty women” of the silent screen. Having decided to embrace the much-debated term since it was first used by then candidate, now US president, Donald Trump, curators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak wanted their program to be a tribute to what became a feminist rallying cry across the United-States and abroad: “Nasty Women.”
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Horak and Hennefeld, both responsible for challenging publications on gender and queer studies and early cinema,1 had a simple vision in curating this program: what about women directing and acting in the early years of motion pictures? The rage and enthusiasm provoked by the term “nasty women” throughout the presidential campaign and after the election almost worked as a welcomed pretext in the compilation of a program recalling how women used to destabilize the film frame, quite literally, as the introduction of the program suggests:
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Long before there were “pussy hats” and late-night feminist satirists, comedienne characters such as Léontine, Rosalie, Cunégonde, Lea, Bridget, and Tilly spoke truth to patriarchal power with their gleefully reckless and wholesale destructive disregard for gendered social norms and feminine corporeal decorum. […] More than just deadly vamps, the “nasty women” in our programs deflect and defile rigid gender norms by any means possible: they blow up the kitchen, shatter all the dinnerware, dismember their limbs to revolutionize their labor, torment their employers with sadistic pranks, playfully transgress sexual and racial taboos, swap bodies and metamorphose into other species, and flaunt their corporeality with predatory abandon.2
Scheduled throughout the week of the festival (September 30 to October 7, 2017) the five programs were presented as follows: “Catastrophe in the Kitchen,” “Léontine/Betty & Rosalie/Jane,” “Identity Crisis,” “Catastrophe Beyond the Kitchen” and finally the closing feature, The Deadlier Sex (R Thornby, US, 1920).
The opening program “Catastrophe in Kitchen” was probably one of the most playful of the series. The kitchen as gendered space was a set of choice of the slapstick comedy, affording a limitless combination of scenarios and above all, the opportunity to play with the clichés of the domestic scene. As Hennefeld pointed out, the comedy often relies on a simple preliminary question: “What is worse than when your wife is a bad cook?” Well, filmmakers of the first 20 years of film history did not run out of answers and one would find it difficult to decide which is actually worst: to set fire to the kitchen while inundating the house (Victoire à ses nerfs/ A Nervous Kitchen Maid, Pathé Frères, FR, 1907), bake involuntary lethal biscuits and feed them to your husband and his colleagues (Her first biscuits, D.W Griffith, US, 1909), blowing up the entire building and the cook with it (The Finish of Bridget McKeen, Edwin S. Porter, US, 1901) or to bring, on a misunderstanding, the entirety of Noah’s Ark into the home (Een Dierenvfriend/Animal Lover, Pathé-Comica, FR, 1912?). The gem of the series was Segundo de Chomón’s Le rêve des marmitons (Pathé Frères, FR, 1908) where a cross-dressed leprechaun puts the whole kitchen of a castle to sleep, sections hands of the cooks with an oversize knife and then let the disembodied hands prepare the food and weave baskets while flies are drawing caricatures on the bald head of one of the cooks. The surrealist atmosphere and uncanny violence of this short trick-film condenses what is at the center of every single short presented in the program (and which goes beyond the kitchen): the disembodiment works as a symptom of the destruction and chaos brought to the domestic scene. The violence brought by the “nasty women” often results in the demolition of the domestic spaces and Hennefeld suggests that it represents a form of revolt against the gendered norms of household labor. Each program is accompanied by insightful introductory notes, and a comprehensive description of the program can be found on Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto online program.
Few female directors are represented in the program (only one film attributed to Alice Guy) yet lots of films, and, most famously, the Cunégonde series remains unattributed. The curators chose to put the emphasis on women driving the action inside the frame, and pay tribute to popular actresses, dedicating an entire program to Léontine, known in the US as Betty, a Pathé Frères actress who sadly remains unidentified. Outside of the “Nasty Women” program, the festival dedicated a series to another major figure of silent cinema also in need of reassessment, Pola Negri. As director of the festival Jay Weissberg pointed out, Negri has often been considered as a “femme fatale” or “temptress” – her talent being overshadowed by the star system once the actress moved to Hollywood.3 The three films chosen for the series concentrated on the actress’ early career in Germany and were a good example of the depth of her talent. In each film, Negri is cast in a leading female role: the flamboyant Carmen in Ernst Lubitsch’s Gypsy Love (Carmen, DE 1918), a brilliant medical student, forced to prostitute to legitimately stay and find lodging as a young Jewish woman in St Petersburg in The Devil’s Pawn (Der Gelbe Schein, Victor Janson, Eugen Illés, DE 1918) and a cigarette factory worker who sacrifices her life and dancer’s career for the love of her husband in Mania. The Story of a Cigarette Factory Worker (Mania. Die Geschichete Einer Zigarettenarbeiterin, Eugen Illés, DE 1918). Negri’s poignancy in each individual film mesmerized the audience in Pordenone, as much as it did in 1918 in launching her stardom. With the “Nasty Women” program, both film series presented last October in Pordenone were a tribute to these women but also to the scholarship reassessing their role in the film industry in every age of silent cinema. The hope is that it inspired many, as much remains to be done.
Pola Negri dancing in Carmen, Ernst Lubitsch, DE 1918. Courtesy of Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto 2017 Catalog.
- Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema 1908-1934 (Rutgers UP, 2016); Margaret Hennefeld, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018). ↩
- Horak and Hennefeld “Nasty Women” Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto 2017 Catalog http://www.giornatedelcinemamuto.it/en/portfolio-type/nasty-women/ – all futures reference to Hennefeld and Horak are from the same text, apart if indicated otherwise. ↩
- Jay Weiseberg “Pola Negri: The first phase of stardom,” Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto 2017 Catalog, http://www.giornatedelcinemamuto.it/en/portfolio-type/pola-negri/↩
Italian Muscle in Germany (in Retrospect)
Today I returned from a week of silent films, alternated with many talks with old and new friends and colleagues, initially in a cold and wet and gradually a sunnier Pordenone. The 34th edition of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto was a special edition to me, as I curated the special programme Italian Muscle in Germany, on the German films with the Italian acrobatic and muscular adventure film heroes Luciano Albertini and Carlo Aldini. Unintended, several relations sprang up with other films and programmes, as attending critics also remarked. The opening night film Maciste alpino (Luigi Romano Borgnetto 1916) became a frame of reference to situate and compare Aldini and Albertini, who are often themselves not the go-between between lovers as Maciste mostly is, but are the romantic lovers (sometimes husbands) themselves. The rather course behaviour of Maciste in Maciste alpino, not only explainable because of the context of war propaganda, but also linked to the typology of Maciste (see Jacqueline Reich’s new and intriguing study on Maciste, which was presented by the author in Pordenone). In addition, the many Douglas Fairbanks films in programme in Pordenone, with their focus on superhuman jumps, noble hearts and fast pace rhythm, were not too far off from a late Albertini film like Der Unüberwindliche, indicating that this genre of acrobatic heroes was truly international and had only modifications per type or nation. Instead the shift between silent and sound film was for both Fairbanks in the US and Aldini and Albertini Europe devastating, killing off their types and so their careers. On top, while Aldini was in his thirties when acting in Germany, Albertini was already in his forties. In his last silent films he was already 50. Tragic was the downfall of Albertini when sound set in – alcohol wrecked his body and mind, as is well visible in his first and only sound film Im Kampf mit der Unterwelt. Instead Ernst Verebes, the man who had been his – incredibly funny- sidekick in his last silent film Der Jagd nach der Million – became the protagonist in Im Kampf mit der Unterwelt (of which only two French spoken, unrestored nitrate prints exist, alas). We do hope to show Jagd nach der Million next year in Pordenone, though.
Der Unüberwindliche. Courtesy Bundesarchiv, Berlin.
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Italian Muscle in Germany started out Saturday with Nunzio Malasomma’s Mister Radio, for which a newly restored print from the Austrian Filmmuseum was used, which had been preserved by Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna (the shots in tinting & toning were nicely saved). While the plot is quite unimportant, apart form the radio craze of the 1920s, and the acting is not always well, the stunts kept the Pordenone in awe: how can you save your mother dangling on a cliff when you are yourself tied to a tree? A huge applause was the hero’s reward for his last minute rescue by use of the tree and even his own teeth. Also previous stunts flabbergasted the spectators. Mauro Colombis’s piano accompaniment greatly helped in the audience’s emotional identification with the film. On Sunday afternoon, it was the turn for the escapologist Silvio Spaventa (Albertini) and the b&w print of Der Unüberwindliche (It. title Il globo infuocato, Max Obal 1928). It was the treat of the day, not only because of the film but also because of the live music by the Pordenone Zerorchestra, conducted by Günter Buchwald, who had also arranged the music. While a two hour film, thanks to the upbeat music and well-chosen themes, you absolutely forgot time with this swift circus film, with its sensational act, in which the fierce audience reactions on the screen seemed to invite likewise reactions from the Verdi attendants. The avant-garde-like use of text and stroboscopic effects at the start of the film (this must have been the supposed contribution by Oskar Fischinger), but also the funny constant use of the legs of the circus girls made this a clear example of a combination of genre cinema (comedy, crime, adventure) with artistic cinematography (extreme camera angles, uses of close ups, importance of editing for creating meaning). In addition to plain intertitles, the film uses a kind of TV texts during the circus act, explaining the act, and taglines on an outdoors public message board, informing the masses about Spaventa’s arrest. Repeating a strategy from his earlier film Julot der Apache (Joseph Delmont 1921), the massive publicity for Albertini’s character also seems to confirm his own star status. Personally, I thought Rinaldo Rinaldini (Obal 1927), shown on Friday afternoon, was the weakest of the three Albertini films because of its overabundance of intertitles, which especially in the first part of the film tends to irritate. One can see that some scenes are clearly missing while one shot was reduced to a freeze frame. The second half of the film gets better with Albertini’s various stunts inside and outside a huge theatre in Genoa, where several outdoor shots were taken – including a few from the harbour. While in other films Albertini is never shown seminude, here he strips to show his bare chest while performing in the theatre, but stays so in the most part of his flight from the theatre, on to the roof, bending a flag pole, and jumping into a kind of fashion studio. Dutch pianist Daan van den Hurk worked very hard to turn even the most wordy parts of the film in a dashing, dazzling sensation – and well succeeded!
In addition to Albertini, on Thursday morning there was the two-part film Helena (Der Raub der Helena/ Der Fall Trojas, Manfred Noa 1924), masterfully accompanied by Günter Buchwald and Frank Bockius. To several avid Giornate-goers this was a challenge, as they just had seen four parts of Henri Fescourt’s Les Misérables the day before, starting from late afternoon till well after midnight. The pristine digitally restored print of Helena, the wonderful special effects, the chariot races and the sea battle in the first part (shot one to two years before Fred Niblo’s Ben Hur!) and the mass choreography and real-sized sets of Troy and the Greek camp in the second part were outstanding. Albert Steinrück’s shift of tragic and superstitious king Priamus becoming a plotting and cruel tyrant matched the character shifts of Vladimir Gaidarow’s Paris from weak to strong to weak to strong etc. And what to think about Carlo Aldini’s bodybuilder Achilles whose violent and almost hysterical pride gets him into trouble, while his bisexuality is expressed in his inability to choose either Helena or Patroclus. Repeatedly stroking Achilles’ arms and legs, Carl/Karel Lamac’s Patroclus must have created quite a stir in those times, especially to those who didn’t know the Illiad. While I had loved to include one or two adventure films with Aldini too (hopefully next year), Helena meant Aldini’s German and internationally breakthrough, and one understands why, especially when watching the second part of the film. Even if he may have been dressed in suits and tails in later films, spectators would always project his physique as Achilles underneath.
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Mister Radio. Courtesy Österreichisches Filmmuseum.
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The programme went quite well in written reactions too, as can be read in blogposts by Quinlan (Daria Pomponio), SilentLondon (Pamela Hutchinson), and El Testamento del Doctor Caligari (on Der Unüberwindliche, also a second post on Helena), as well as a large article in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. Finally I was interviewed by TV Sloveno for a cultural programme.