Genuine the Vampire - Wiene download

Robert Wiene's Genuine the Vampire (1920) was  eclipsed by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, completed a few months earlier. But Genuine the Vampire is genuinely interesting, and not just for the hilarious name.  There's Genuine in all her glory wearing a dangerously revealing costume of belts and straps over what one hopes is a body suit but might be real flesh since she flashes naked thighs many times, and strikes poses that let the viewer linger. There's more nudity in this film than possibly any other of its period, and possibly long after. Note the coy "butterfly wings" and the stylized pose. One of the features of this film is the way Wiene freezes formal, stylized poses. In Dr Caligari and other films of the time, movements are theatrical, but not to this extent. In Genuine the Vampire, the poses are so stiff and held for so long that they clearly reference tableaux vivants, which were often used in pornography on the reasoning that, if the body resembled sculpture and wasn't natural, it could be deemed legit.

Genuine the Vampire isn't a vampire story in the Bram Stoker mode but quite explicitly connects to psychology theories popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The film unfolds like a dream, where characters emerge and disappear without logic.  Genuine was an African goddess, kidnapped and sold as a slave to Lord Melo who keeps her prisoner in a geodesic dome in his mansion. Each day a barber comes to shave Lord M, who seems to like being shaved while he's sleeping. One day the barber can't come but Lord M's grandson Florian turns up. Like everyone else in this film, his costume is bizarre - exaggerated love locks and waxed curls and jodphurs. When Florian shaves his grandad, Genuine tells him to kill the old man, so he does. Go figure.

Other personages appear - a Black Slave (in real life possibly from Kamerun) , and Henry and Percy who seem relatively normal.  Genuine appears in different costumes, one made of ostrich feathers, with a Madam Pompadour head dress. Because the action is so slow, viewing the decor is very much part of the experience. The sets are Expressionist paintings, jagged angles and blocks, a collision of Franz Marc, the Cubists and Second Empire excess. Because the plot isn't rationale, the story ends when a mob waving scythes invade the mansion. Notice though that the mob aren't peasants. Their scythes are working tools but symbols of death.

Genuine is played by Fern Andra, in real life Verna Andrews from Watseka, Illinois (1893-1974) who married a Baron von und zu, though he was dead by the time she made this movie. Those strange set designs are by Walther Reimann, the painter and architect who did the sets for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.  For a download of Dr Caligari, please see HERE.
 

Chaliapin Don Quixote Pabst movie download

Feodor Chaliapin, the great Russian bass, starring in a comedy made by G W Pabst ? Yes! In 1933, even the biggest names in opera had no hang-ups about crossing genres. In this film, Chaliapin hams with great gusto. The voice that sings immortal Gudonovs, Mefistofeles and Volga Boatmen sings "I, Don Quixote". He did sing Massenet's Don Quixote, but this is different.

The song is utter tosh, but Chaliapin revels in the corny text, camping up the flourishes, striking exaggerated operatic poses, his arms akimbo. Later, he sings "This castle mine", delighting in the mock Spanishisms in the music. His accent is atrocious, so you can't hear most of the words, but it hardly matters. Chaliapin "is" Don Quixote par excellence, capturing the craziness in the role. Look how his beard sticks out horizontally ! Even his tall, gangly frame lends itself to strange angles which Pabst films with great style.  Cervantes meets Expressionism!

Sancho Panza is played by George Robey, a British music hall entertainer, who is a perfect foil for Chaliapin's Don Quixote. Robey sings Sancho Panza's songs with an accent as Cockney as Chaliapin's is Russian. Pabst plays with body form throughout the film, employing a large number of dwarves, and using costumes designed to suggest geometric shapes. Dulcinéé appears in the film as love interest. She's movie star pretty but wears a skirt that looks like a barrel. Spoken dialogue is also delivered with histrionic exaggeration. The scene where Don Quixote charges at the windmill is delightfully shot - crazy diagonals and spinning circles. Chaliapin was too precious to risk falling from the sails of the windmill. They must have used a stuntman. Listen out for the very final song, "Sancho, my friend". Chaliapin strings out the words, and his vibrato wobbles madly off the  scale. His voice switches from rumbling bass to a sudden bizarre high note you'd hardly believe he had, then he reverts to a growl which becomes a howl. He is an artist, but one who can send himself up.

Three of the songs were written by Maurice Ravel and the incidental music is by Jacques Ibert. There's a fanfare where mock medieval trumpets blare wilfully out of tune.  Apparently, Ravel, de Falla, Delannoy and Darius Milhaud were also commissioned to write scores, but I don't know what happened to their music. Lots more on Weimar era film, more on Pabst and more downloads. Please search this site, there's plenty here.HERE is a link to "Forbidden Music", another rare film with Richard Tauber and Jimmy Durante, of all people. It's kitsch, but with darker undercurrents.

Vampyr - Carl Th. Dreyer

Carl Th. Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is a masterpiece every serious film buff studies frame by frame. But Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) is equally remarkable. The two films are very different. Joan of Arc is shot with extremely harsh lighting, bleaching out unnecessary detail, so every line and pore in Joan's face is exposed, like she herself is exposed and alone in her torment.  Vampyr, on the other hand, is a study in ambiguities.  What is happening? Who is the vampire, the old man, the old woman or the protagonist himself?

Vampyr is also fascinating because it's a sound movie with a score written by Wolfgang Zeller (1898-1967), one of the most innovative composers of film music when it was still an experimental art. The music for Vampyr ia a lot like the film - tonally ambiguous, mysterious, spare. Single instruments (wonderful brooding cello), merging in and out of a mist (mainly strings). Low rumblings, sudden sharp chords. Listen to the music without watching and it works on you emotionally - very unsettling. Film noir music before film noir existed.

Zeller worked with Walter Ruttmann whose Dadaist abstract films can be seen HERE on this site, and were made to be  shown with live music. (Ruttmann is the creator of Berlin, Symphony of a great City, which you can see in full download with analysis HERE)  Ruttman's credentials as a moderrnist are impeccable, yet he went on to write music fotr the Nazi film The Jew Suss, which I can't bring myself to watch for more than a few moments. After the war, he wasn't blacklisted, so I don't know what his denazification file says. We can't aassume anything. 

In Vampyr, a young man with a butterfly net (important detail) stops at a country inn. Already we know something's not right. A peg legged old soldier sits on a bench, and his own shadow comes down to sit beside him. In the inn, shadows of dancers are seen, and their music can be heard, but they don't exist in the real world, whatever that is. Then there's the star himself played by "Julian West" who looks Indian or something exotically swarthy, quite alien to whatever country the story is set in (anywhere from Northern France to the Baltic). "Julian West" is in fact Nicolas de Günzburg, whose family were Russian Jews, bankers to the Tsar. Günzburg, who financed the film, was supposedly fabulously wealthy but when his father died in 1933, it turned out the family was broke.  So Günzburg goes to New York and ends up editor of fashion glossies.

Watch Vampyr and see how Dreyer uses odd angles, so you're seeing things from odd perspectives. He makes the most of the discipline of black and white, using darkness and light as a palette to paint ideas. Details, like the Grim Reaper on the inn sign, and the peasant with the scythe in the field.  Just as the film seems to develop a narrative, Dreyer throws all into confusion. Julian West sits on a bench in the park, but his shadow gets up. It's so subtle you might not notice until you see his figure is transparent. Then he finds a coffin, and looks in. As the coffin is carried out, you see the treetops, the tower, and hear the tread of dull footseps. Is West now looking out, upwards from within? Watch the final sequence frame by frame. It's the mill, where the doctor, who may or may not be the vampire's helper, gets trapped  Fantastic shots of the machinery, wheels and cogs like infernal mechanisms. The machine grinds flour which suffocates the doctor. Will the bread (the staff of life) be tainted? Meanwhile, West and Léonie, the young girl who is saved from the vampire (whom we never see) are in a boat in a fog. They call out, echoing the doctor's cries. But they cannot hear him, nor he them.
PLEASE see here for Marschner's opera Der Vampyr (nothing like the movie)

Mixed Britannia BBC

This song makes me weep. It's so specific that it seems like it's about a real woman. She's half African, half Norwegian, went to Cambridge, acculturates white. But her feelings do not count.  She can "can never get away from the fact, if you're not white you're considered black". It's a calypso by Lord Kitchener, from around 1950 when mixed race was much less common than now. The man assumes the woman is acting superior because she doesn't fancy him. Years later when Lord Kitchener sang the song in Jamaica, he made it even more sexist, as if the woman was doing a crime for choosing not to sleep with him. At least calypso songs deal with race issues openly. But why should any woman, or any person, be defined by race?

Currently there are several programmes on the BBC about race issues. George Alagiah's Mixed Britannia must have taken ages to make because it's extremely well researched and outstandingly well made.They've uncovered completely new material, which has lain unnoticed in the archives and needs to be publiicized. Like the "Eugenics" movement which tried pseudo-scientific measurements of "mongrels" as mixed race people were called in those days. Someone must have realized where such things led, as they were quietly phased out after the Nuremberg race laws in Germany.

That didn't stop vindictive racism. As soon a WWII ended some bright spark had the notion of rounding up Chinese in Liverpool and shipping them back to China. The men were rounded up in the street, like animals,  and put on board a waiting ship. Many of the men werre long established UK residents, and had wives and families, but weren't allowed to make contact, or collect their belongings and papers. So hundreds of women and around 1000 children thought they'd been suddenly deserted, and never found out what happened..

If the men did make it back to China (they may have been dumped in India), the country was still in chaos, millions of refugees, destitute and homeless. Ironically many of these men would have worked for the British navy and merchant navy, where thousands of Chinese were enrolled, a huge proportion killed serving the British war effort.

Fortunately most normal people are sane. But racism is alive and well, for too many have vested interests in fuelling hate. The recent riots showed just how skewed assumptions really are.  Far Right white gangs attacked the police, immigrants gave their lives to defend their neighbourhoods, and  looters were most colours and classes. So programmes like Mixed Britannia are vitally important, to remind us that race is packaging, it isn't the person within. 

Please also see my posts on race issues, under labels like Africa, Chinese stereotypes, social issues etc. Watch the full movie Within Our Gates here too, the earliest known movie by a Black American that confronts things like lynching and exploitation. Also full download of Broken Blossoms, and a critique of Piccadilly, the Anna May Wong film much lauded by the BFI as progressive. The more I think about that film, the more offensive I think it is, but its appeal to Chinese outside Chinese culture is genuine, and needs to be analysed. You might also like this piece on Ghana Freedom, which mentions George Appiah, whose marriage to Stafford Cripps's daughter Peggy features in the second Mixed Britannia episode. Theirs wasn't the first high profile mixed marraige. My mole in FCO archives told me about the Govt of South Africa protesting mixed marriage in Britain, threatening to quit the Commonwealth. There are thousands of other stories waiting to be told. Like, a Colonial Police Officer held prisoner in a Japanese camp wants to marry. Under colonial rules he needs his commanding officers' approval.  They're all prisoners in the Japanese camp too but they forbid the marriage because the fiancee can't prove she has no mixed blood. Of course she can't. She's Eurasian. This is April 1945, right at the end of the war, but these colonials don't twig that the world's changed. Imagine what the Japanese thought. (and the irony still rankles with non whites today)

Within Our Gates

That Within Our Gates should exist at all is pretty remarkable. How did a film like this come to be made at the time it did (1920)? And such high quality despite being low budget and way off grid in mainstream terms. Within Our Gates is a race movie, a sub genre reflecting the apartheid of segregation, which meant that blacks and whites couldn't go to the same cinemas and blacks had to make films for and financed within their community. Like so many very early movies, it was thought lost until 1993 when a single copy turned up in Spain, from which the present restoration was made.  Despite its period, it's remarkably well shot and well preserved. and worth watching, because i's the earliest existing film that deals unflinchingly with racism in the US.  A lot of race movies were pretty camp (like Son of Ingagi, full of private in-jokes) but this is sophisticated, better than many mainstream movies of the time.

Within Our Gates was made by Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), a self-made man whose intelligence overcame his lack of money and conventional education.  His movies followed on from his books, which dealt analytically with situations facing black people at the time. The protagonist, Sylvia Landry, is an aspirational figure, whose education has been paid for by a secret donor, though she was brought up by poor sharecroppers. She goes up north to raise money for a school for black kids. The plot is complicated by love interests, which serve to show different ways of being black, but revolves around Sylvia's past. Because she is educated, she helps her parents manage their money so they don't get exploited by the evil boss, Philip Gridlestone, who preys on poor whites and blacks, and is hated by all.  Throughout the film, Michaeux is even-handed and fair: neither race has a monopoly on good or bad, all people are fundamentally equal, what they do with their lives isn't defined by race. Hence the dodgy pastor, the crook Conrad and Efram, Gridlestone's servant, who thinks he can win favour with whites by betraying blacks.

Sylvia's stepfather Jasper goes to Gridlestone with proper accounts so he can't be ripped off, but Gridlestone is shot through the window by a white sharecropper whom Gridlestone has cheated in the past.  Knowing he won't get a fair trial, Jasper and the family run off to hide in the swamp, while the mob hunts them down. Eventually both Jasper and his wife are lynched, and their bodies burned. It's shockingly graphic, particularly hard to watch as such things really did happen all the time: perhaps some of this drawn from real life. The mob even try to lynch Emil, Jasper's son, who is about 10, but he escapes by playing dead when the mob shoot at him, and then steals a horse. Will he get away? While all this is happening, Sylvia gets raped by Armand, Gridlestone's brother. Is this the earliest realistic race rape scene on film? Armand only stops when he sees that Sylvia has a scar on her body. She's his natural daughter. He's the one who paid for her to go to school. So maybe he's not completely evil, either.

There are some bizarrely stilted scenes, such as the one where Doctor Vivian asks Sylvia to marry him, by reciting a long list of battles in which US soldiers fought, from Cuba under Roosevelt to Mexico and Europe. "You should be proud of your country", he says. Perhaps there's still footage missing, or the sole copy was adapted for the Spanish market. Nonetheless, it's still a gripping movie because of its even-handed analysis of the political and economic realities everyone, white or black, is caught up in.  Efram, for example, is also lynched even though he tries to be accepted by whites and didn''t commit any crime. The white sharedropper who shot Gridlestone gets killed by mistake during the hunt for Jasper. Implicitly, the film is saying, nothing's fair, but you make what you can of your life, whoever you are. Notice how many white actors there are, working for a black producer and director in a film that hardly glorifies the white South.
Please also read this thought provoking article about race hate in Little Rock, 1953.  And how some things aren't easily wiped away.

Prom 21 Prokofiev Alexander Nevsky - full movie download

It's the 13th century and the Mongols are invading Europe from the east, and Teutonic Knights are invading Slav lands from the west. Novgorod is an idyllic city, open to the waters on one side, vast steppes behind. Clean, pure living. Alexander Nevsky, Prince of Novgorod, Man of the People, is out fishing with his people as a good Soviet hero should. This is the classic film directed by Sergei Eisenstein, for which Sergei Prokofiev wrote the music. At BBC Prom 21, Andris Nelsons (a Latvian) is conducting Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky Cantata.

This is one of Sergei Eisenstein's masterpieces, made in 1937.  Note date and place.  Despite Stalin's repressive anti-modernism, Eisenstein manages to create a modernist icon by playing along with Stalinists stereotypes. One of the glories of this film is the stylized design, totally in tune with western avant garde film at the time. The Soviets can't wipe the Church out of history, so Eisenstein neutralizes it by depicting it in stylized art deco. See the neatly dressed peasants and priests. Then the Teutonic Knights at Pskov, dehumanized aliens in bizarre helmets. Look at the bishop in black, among monks in white. Or the mad monk in black who plays a portable organ to remind us that Religion Is a Drug. (it's powered by monks with bellows).

Wonderful camera angles, long sweeping lines, even clearer in this film than in Battleship Potemkin. Panoramic scenes, shot from heights to maximize scale. Fabulously choreographed crowd scenes and battles. The Battle on the Ice is magnificent! This is propaganda elevated to High Art.

Gay Salomé 1923 - full movie download

Full download of the 1923 movie Salomé, notorious because the cast and crew were all supposed to be gay. What do you expect, from a film that pays direct homage to Oscar Wilde? Salomé is played by Alla Nazimova who was openly gay, as was her scriptwriter and designer Natacha Rambova, the director Charles Bryant and probably others. But their sexuality isn't actually relevant, though there are many delicously camp male parts which could rate a scream on the drag circuit. What makes the film intriguing is that  it was made as direct homage to Aubrey Beardsley.

Nothing is straight in this movie, whatever the orientation of those involved. Nazimova's film uses Beardsley's stylization to create a deliberately anti-naturalistic aesthetic that reflects the unnatural nature of the plot. Arch surtitles - "Thou wert" and "Thou rejectedest me". They reflect Beardsley's own words which twist and curl as if in feverish delirium.. The sets are spartan, lots of white space, in the manner of Beardsley's etchings, which seemed shockingly alien to a world used to over-stuffed Victorian excess. Beardsley's aesthetic is  far from Alma-Tadema's hyper-realistic orientalism, which cloaked outright prurience with a veil of fake academicism. Beardsley doesn't do veils.

At the heart of this story is Herod's unclean lust for his own daughter, Salomé. Secondary dynamic is the relationship between Herod and Herodias, his long-term wife whom he treats like dirt. The Herodias in this film is much meatier than the Herodias in Beardsley - she has hair like a lion's mane and wears a leopardskin jumpsuit. Tina Turner, but 60 years too early. Female sexuality as opposed to Herod's leering infantilism. She looks at Herod with disgust. Because the set looks so neat it makes the fundamental perversion feel even more unclean.

Interestingly, Jokanaan looks exactly like Beardsley himself, only more repellent, hawk-like features and a skeletal ribcage that looks like Christ on the Cross in Spanish art. This adds a piquant twinge to the proceedings, as Jokanaan can't stop denouncing "The Whore of Babylon", as if all the sins of the world were caused by women, not men.
It's pretty strange that lesbian Nazimova really makes a point of sexual attraction. "All other men were hateful to me". Before she dies, she looks like she's having an orgasm. "The mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death".

Wonderful minor figures - Black executioners, little black kids in headresses as tall as they are, strangely louche male attendants (nipple rings like targets). One lusts for Salomé while the other lusts for him. Attendants dressed in crazy turbans, and in the dance, women dressed as screens, surrounding Salomé as she switches from boyish androgyny to female demon (white hair cut in angles).  The Dance is magnificently choreographed - fast forward to 44 minutes. You can see the influence of Diaghilev and Nijinsky, whom Nazimova, a Russian, would have known of, even if she hadn't seen them in action. Salomé as The Afternoon of a Faun.

While the stylization is fundamental to the whole concept of this film, it makes for semaphore acting. In 1923, this wasn't such a big deal, since moving pictures were still a novelty. But we've become used to Hollywood ultra-fast action, so we need to switch off the autopilot assumption that drama has to be fast and butch. Much like we've lost the art of appreciating music that's not raucous and exaggerated.

Arbeiter, Bauern, gegen Faschismus !

Arbeiter, Bauern, nehmt die Gewehre nehmt die Gewehre zur Hand! Zerschlagt die faschistischen Räuberheere, setzt alle Herzen in Brand.

Labourers, farmers, take up the guns, take the guns into your hands! Smash the fascist bandits' armies, set all hearts on fire....the war submerging all countries is the war against you, prole! Labourers, farmers, take up the guns, take the guns into your hands! Smash the fascist bandits' armies, set all hearts on fire. Plant your red Labour banner on every field, on every factory - then a socialist World Republic will rise from the ashes of the old society!

The text is from 1941, about mobilizing the proletariat of the world to defend the Soviet Union from the Nazis. Ideas still relevant today - there was an updated version of this at the time of the Iraq invasion.   The music is Hanns Eisler, originally written for the film Niemansland (1931) directed by Victor Trivas.  It's copyright free and can be dowloaded in full HERE.

In the film, five men cheerfully enlist. In the trenches, they get cut off from their own lines and shelter together in a dug out. Gradually they get to know each other as men, not as enemies. When the shelling stops, they march out together. Where to  The film doesn't say but they're marching against a common foe - war itself.  That's when the Schlussmarch comes in, beautifully, no words. This is what socialism once stood for,. Blair admired Thatcher and said she was his role model. But even she would not have sold the country down the drain to please George Bush. "No alternative" now means "you must keep voting me in because you don't want the other lot". That's why they are scared witless that the system might change. Party above democracy. Ironic?

Although the film is didactic, there are some very good moments, such as the Jewish wedding and especially Louis Douglas, a black American who worked a lot in Europe where the colour bar was less oppressive. He's wonderful, singing and dancing and relaxing everyone else, though he himself is as scared as the rest of them.  There were quite a lot of black actors in European film, even during the Nazi era. Since France and Germany had colonies in Africa, there were thousands of blacks in Europe, some of whom had served in the First Wortld War. The French had entire battalions, who became prisoners of war after the fall of France. They were badly treated and used as slave labour (including as extras in Ufa films). Many died, though one later became the president of Senegal. One German-born African lived and worked in Berlin until he died in 1954. As for Louis Douglas, he went back to the US.

Alice In Wonderland the movie

This is what will happen if you eat too many chocolate bunnies. Not Alice in Wonderland the ballet at ROH but Alice in Wonderland the 1915 movie.

Red Detachment of Women full download

Full download of The Red Detachment of Women the ballet Nixon and Pat are watching in John Adams Nixon in China. Although in the opera, Pat (high on pills) thinks it's reality, in practice I don't know what they made of it. Unlike White Haired Girl which describes the suffering of the poor in feudal times, The Red Detachment of Women doesn't need much background to follow. It's based on Hainan Island, in China's tropics, which was turned into a giant slave camp by the Japanese during the war, since the island is full of minerals. Many Hong Kong people were deported there en masse. The women formed a resistance movement that became known as "The Red Detachment". Because the film is propaganda, it's deliberately didactic and anti-sentimental. The "acting" comes from Soviet agitprop and Chinese opera, so it's not supposed to be realistic. Musically it's pastiche, made-by-committee rather than one composer's vision, since auteurship was considered "feudal" in the new world of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after the Nixons returned Leonard Bernstein premiered several other  Chinese works such as the Yellow River Concerto, also music-by-committee although it's based on a cantata by Xian Xing hai (Chan sing hoi 冼星海) written in Yenan. Lenny reputedly gushed about the concerto but that was the spirit of the times. Lots more on Nixon in China on this site, 3 different performances reviewed

Faust Feast, Oxford

"In the basement beneath the rolling Quad of Trinity College, a scholar is preparing to offer the devil his soul in exchange for absolute power".

A major festival of Faust related plays, concerts and films take place now in Oxford. Few places could be better posed for true Faustian atmosphere - gargoyles, medieval colleges, cobbled alleyways and above all, ancient libraries, filled with arcane and ancient wisdom. And, one might add, Faust-like scholars buried in books. But some of the "nerds" that have haunted these halls have gone on to unimaginable things and often they don't have to sell their souls. Tim Berners-Lee, for example, who created the World Wide Web, who was at Queen's.

Two versions of Christopher Marlowe's Faust. One by Creation Theatre Company takes place in Blackwell's Bookshop, next to the Quad at Trinity. Imagine, the reality of a bookshop famed for its erudiite stoock, but actors wandering about. Very apt. "Ile burne my bookes!"

Another staging of Marlowe's Faust runs from 9th to 13th February in Corpus Christi College auditorium. Arthur Kincaid directs and acts as Faustus. A true town and gown production, half students, half normal locals. Interesting too, that these productions will use slightly different editions of Marlowe as well as different settings.

Goethe's Faust gets a much welcomed outing from 24th to 26th February in Queen's College Chapel with the Eglesfield Players. A modern translation, staged in a chapel, with a chorus in the cast, the production will "bring all the dramatic (and comic) potential without losing sight of its academic and religious debate" and its resemblance to Oxford life over the ages.

George Lord Byron's epic Manfred gets a reading by professional actors in New College Chapel on March 27.  Manfred of course inspired Schumann, but it's not a piece that lends itself easily to the stage, so hearing it read by people who know drama should be a good experience.

There's so much Faust-inspired music it's hard to imagine it in one concert - Mahler, Busoni, Berlioz, Gounod etc. So see what they do on 5th March at Corpus Christi. The films are Istvan Szabo's Mephisto based on the novel of Klaus Mann and Faustus a ten-minute art piece shot in Merton Chapel.  They're not showing F W Murnau's classic film Faust, but you can watch that on this site  in FULL DOWNLOAD. For more information contact the Oxford Faust Festival on email oxfordfaustfestival@gmail.com. Prices are low, and the Films are free but this is such an adventurous project, it's worth making an effort to participate.

Berlin - Symphony of a Great City DOWNLOAD

Berlin : Symphony of a Great City (1927) is showing again in London this weekend, but here is the FULL DOWNLOAD. It's also available on DVD, which is worth getting as it's a cleaner version with music, because this is a film that you can watch over and over again without getting bored - like a symphony! It's not a film in the usual sense of a narrative motion picture. Instead the very concept comes from abstract music. Multiple, diverse images are used like themes in music.  They're layered and juxtaposed like musical ideas. The images are grouped in several main "movements" that as a whole follow a trajectory from morning to night. A snapshot of the life of the city. Please read my analysis of this wonderful work HERE, describing the structure and individual images some of which aren't readily obvious.

The idea of film as music wasn't unique, since early audiences were often more used to music than movies, and several early films unfold as "movements". The full title of Nosferatu is Nosferatu : eine synfonie des Grauens, "a symphony of horrors". This, too, is available in full download on this site. But Berlin : Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt develops the idea on a grand scale. Because it's abstract, much more detail is possible, and more possibilties of interpretation. Like music! The Director, Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941) also made experimental films, bypassing actors and plots. He used technolgy as a pa[nter might, exploring the possibilties of light, shadow and movement for their own sake.  The process dictates the form. Please see one of Ruttmann's early Lichtspiele HERE. They were made in co-operation with Hanns Eisler, who wrote music to be played live as the films were screened.  So again, the concept of music combined with film before the technology to make sound movies was even possible.
Plenty more on this site on earlty art film, Eisler, Weimar etc and many full downloads.

Phantom of Chinatown - Keye Luke full download

Yellowface movies aren't easy for "real" orientals to watch because too often they show stereotypes that range from ludicrous to offensive. Yet there were many exceptions and several genuine Chinese and Japanese in Hollywood. Phantom of Chinatown (1940) is an important movie because it stars Keye Luke as Detective James Lee Wong and overturns many clichés about Chinese stereotypes.

The character started out as pulp fiction, set in opium dens etc which must have seemed deliciously exotic. In the movies, he was created by Boris Karloff, so when Keye Luke took over it was significant. He'd become famous as Charlie Chan's No 1 son to Werner Oland's Charlie. Oland was extremely popular in China because he was sincere and presented the role in a positive way. Keye Luke was also a factor, since most young, aspirational Chinese could relate to him as someone who was westernized but didn't sell out.

Phantom in Chinatown starts off as typical overblown adventure - ancestor of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Explorers have raided the Ming Tombs and brought back an ancient scroll so valuable that the Professor who led the expedition is murdered. Immediately the American detectives blame Win Lan, the Professor's Chinese secretary, played by actress Lotus Long, who was second or more generation Chinese American. Indeed she looks so meat and milk fed she looks almost white. American detective asks if Win Lan had chop suey for lunch.. "No", says French butler (a caricature, though benign), "She had a cup of coffee and some apple pie". Like any good American. Next, Jimmy's cook, who banters with Keye Luke as an equal. It's a vignette for actor Lee Tung Foo, who hams it up brilliantly. "My name is Fu". he says. Says Jimmy "But in America, it's Phooey". Subtle, but you get the drift.

The cops decide Win Lan must be the killer - she's "inscrutable" after all. Luckily, Jimmy phones the "elders of Chinatown", speaking, as western audiences expected, in convoluted filigree. "Chinese style". Keye Luke hams it up so it's hilarious. That's what they audience want, so they get it laid on thick. Next day Jimmy turns up at the Professor's house to find labourers casually dismantling the sarcophagus of "the" Ming Emperor. As Jimmy says casually "They tell me that the Chinese are digging up the body of George Washington in return". Later the corpse falls out of a broom cupboard - as if!  It turns out that Win Lan is an agent of the Chinese government. The real killer's exposed and the secret of the scroll is returned to China. The movie itself is pretty much standard detective thriller of the time, but Keye Luke adds something extra. Enjoy full download below:

Marschner - Der Vampyr full download

Complete download from Opera Today of  Der Vampyr the short(ish) opera  by H A Marschner (1795-1861) which has been enjoying quite a revival in the last few years. Follow THIS LINK which contains a full  recording from a live performance in Vienna in 1951, with complete original libretto. There are at least four recordings available, but this is the first. This version was created by Hans Pfitzner in the 1930's.

Marschner's Der Vampyr isn't Bram Stoker at all, whose Dracula was only written in 1897.  Marschner's vampire is based on a novel by John Polidori who was English, but of Italian descent, and a friend of Lord Byron and eventually the uncle of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The story was written in 1819, the year after Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. Did the British invent Goth culture as art in the first place? Walter Scott too inspired mid European audiences with his high Romantic glamour.

Polidori's characters are pesudo-Scottish aristocrats - Lord Ruthven, Sir Humphrey Davenant, Sir John Aubry and John and Janthe Berkley. (Not Berkeley which is more "English".) Several of them are already undead. The plot revolves around corrupting young virgins, which, given the Byron and Hellfire Club connections may be social comment as much as psychological horror story. A German language play was written based on the novel. Marschner's opera followed in 1828.

Marschner's Der Vampyr is more than a curiosity because it was so popular in its time. Marschner worked with Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden, hence the tradition of magical hi-jinks and horror that we know from Der Freischütz and Euryanthe. Der Vampyr isn't quite in that league and I can't take the idea that it's an "influence" on Wagner as wiki suggests. But Der Vampyr is fun in a kind of campy potboiler way. I know two of the recordings besides this one, but have never seen it staged - what a hoot that would be - fake aristos scamming each other, chasing pretty brides-to-be on the eve of their weddings etc. A bit racy ! Have fun and enjoy. The full F W Murnau film Nosferatu Der Vampyr (1922) is available in FULL DOWNLOAD on this site, just click on the link. this is brilliant.  Also Carl Th Dreyer's Vampyr HERE.  On BBC TV2 iPlayer until 27/12 is Werner Herzog's 1979 remake with Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani which is atmospheric and well shot. See that and compare.

Garbo, Vienna, Pabst FULL download

G W Pabst's Die freudlos Gasse or Joyless Street (1925). This full download is the original US release so it plays up the Great Garbo angle for US audiences. But the film is also interesting because it shows Vienna in 1921, and is based on an influential novel written shortly before. Austria was devastated by the First World War. Everyone suffered deprivation, even the well off. So much for the myth of "Vienna, City of Dreams". Effectively, the waltz stopped in 1914. Obviously low life was depicted before in art (Zola, Wedekind etc) but films like these are background to what was happening in music and opera in the 20's and 30's.

Son of Ingagi full download

A  different movie for Halloween! All black production, scripted and conceived by songwriter Spencer Williams (1889-1965). Hence the snappy dialogue, especially in the scenes where Nelson the Attorney (played by Williams himself) tussles with Dr Jackson ("Hello my friend!" "You're not my friend, you're my lawyer!") and processes the old lady's will for 5 dollars.

Because US cinemas were segregated, there was a whole specialist market for black films. Williams was sharp enough to know that black people wanted horror movies like anyone else. And why should explorers in Africa be a white monopoly? Hence too the positive images of black professional people, police chiefs etc. and the aspirational young couple, Robert and Eleanor Lindsay.

And indeed the central character Dr. Jackson (Laura Bowman) who is a doctor of science and has been to Africa. She also happens to have a lab in her dining room where she mixes up a test tube with a formula that will do good for humanity. "Not that humanity's been good to me", she snaps. She wears Victorian clothes and has "never been in a motor vehicle and won't start now" which may date her to be about 80 in 1940. Anyway, she knew Eleanor Lindsay's natural father who was younger than she, but whom she loved and lost. She did medical work in Africa, and brought back treasures from her many travels, such as a gong from Singapore which she uses to summon up another memento, a gigantic ape man who lives in a secret cellar.

He's N'gina, son of Ingagi, whoever he may have been. Possibly he's half man, half gorilla, which makes you wonder why Dr Jackson's so maternal to him?  Dr Jackson's rich, too, and has gold hidden in the house.

The gold brings out the crooks, including Dr Jackson's conman brother Zeno and Lawyer Nelson, who tries to con the couple out of the house Dr Jackson left them when she died.  Then the plot turns to comedy as the dopey Detective Bradshaw is assigned to stay in the house while murders happen and an apeman wanders about about. Hilarious! Bradshaw is a parody of the venal Stepin Fetchit fool who usually represented blacks in white media. Of course he's a crook too, but an opportunist, who hands the sacks of gold to the Jacksons. "Oh", they cry as their house burns down. "There goes our furniture, our clothes!" When they get the sacks of gold, they cry "Furniture! Clothes! New House!"

This film was made quickly and to a budget, so it's certainly not great art. But it's sharper than the average B movie, given its background. Spencer Williams was an all-round talent, who wrote hits like Basin Street Blues and settled in London. Good businessman too, spotting the market for race movies. Director credited is Richard Kahn and producer is Alfred Sack of Sack Studios. Presumable white and Jewish financiers? Williams's racy spirit pervades much of the film. Enjoy the song sequences by The Toppers, a guitar and falsetto-led group. Ironically I think the only white guy actually in the film is N'gina the mixed species from Africa. Men over seven feet tall are treasured whatever their race.

Movies like this contrast with the films Paul Robeson starred in. They had higher production values and bigger budgets, but Robeson was typecast to represent what white people expected blacks to be. At best noble but doomed and never equal. Race films, and the race music recording industry were a form of apartheid but at least with Williams we can glimpse something irreverent and irrepressible.

Not Wagner Siegfried Fritz Lang 1924

Before Fritz Lang made Metropolis, he made Die Nibelungen, the blockbuster of its time, on a scale so elaborate that the film took two years to make. The script was by Thea von Harbou, based very loosely on early German legends, not Icelandic saga and most pointedly not Wagner.

Fritz Lang's Siegfried (Paul Richter) forges his own sword, and gets on fine with Mime. He sets off for Worms because he's heard of Kriemhild, sister of King Gunther. She's a devout Christian. Cue: Mass, crucifixes, altar boys, etc making you realize just how non-Christian Wagner was.

 On the way, Siegfried kills a remarkably realistic dragon. What Wagner would have given for this snake-like serpent that walks and watches Siegfried with soulful eyes! When the dragon is killed, a clear stream flows from its wound, and Siegfried is made invincible, save from where a linden leaf falls on his naked torso. Alberich more or less hands over the magic sword (not Nothung) and treasure before turning to stone. Siegfried becomes a temporal ruler, with 12 kingdoms as vassals.

The palace at Worms is an art deco fantasy. Geometric patterns, as much Bakst or Red Indian as medieval, perhaps connecting to "primitive" and "tribal" archetypes. Watch out for Hagen Tronje's helmet, with eagle wings on each side half a metre high! Significantly, Hagen is blinded in one eye, like Wotan.
 
Siegfried defeats Brunhild, Queen of the Northlands,  in battle, bur she's no prize. Siegfried and Kriemhild are blissfully happy, but Brunhild berates Gunther til he does her will. Oppressively sinister, bristling with hate,, she's much more like Ortrud, plotting to destroy the kingdom. What a dominatrix! Like Ortrud, she tricks Kriemhild into revealing Siegfried's weak spot, so he's killed

Kriemhild swears total revenge. on everyone.  Part 2 of this six hour saga is titled Kriemhilds Rache, and in many ways it's even better than Siegfrieds Tod.  Kriemhild gets herself married to Attila the Hun, no less, and lives in a huge castle in the desert, surrounded by yurts. The castle (vaguely like the Tian An Men) has a magnificent semi-circular door - the same set used in  Gunther's palace. Obviously, this was  cheaper than building a new set, but this has symbolic meaning, too. Panoramic shots, fabulous crowd scenes, an art deco riot in the place.

Attila the Hun is an ugly dwarf, much like Alberich, but benign.  He doesn't sack the churches of Rome because he's "with the white woman" as his soldiers say. Yet Lang doesn't portray him as a demon.  This Attila. ugly as he is, adores the blonde, curly haired baby son he has with Kriemhild while she hates the kid. It's cute how the baby actor gurgles with laughter at the Hun - less prejudice than Kriemhild.

Gunther, Hagen, Nibelungs, Burgundians and assorted European vassals come to visit.  Attila refuses to harm them. Hospitality and honour are sacred to him, he says, almost the same words as Gunther long ago used to welcome Siegfried. 

Once Kriemhild was a sweet, meek Christian maiden. Now she's a robotic monster bent on destroying all in her wake. Aren't you human?! pleads Attila the Hun. "Not since Siegfried died," she answers. Neither Brunhild nor Ortrud were as mad as this. Secretly Kriemhild bribes the Huns to attack her brothers. The rebels invade Attila's grand feast and somehow Hagen kills the baby boy. Attila's devastated with grief yet cannot stop the mayhem bursting out all round. Huns massacre Nibelungs, and the palace is burned. Fantastic special effects and crowd scenes.

"We were not united in love, but now we're united in hate" cries Attila, horrified by Kriemhild's insane intransigence.  At last almost no-one remains alive. Hagen Tronje turns out to be a kind of hero, refusing toi reveal the Nibelung treasures, and offers to die to save what's left of the kingdom. Kriemhild stabs and kills him, but drops dead herself.  Total carnage. To what avail?

Throughout these two films, the themes of honour and loyalty recur.  Kriemhild just takes them to an extreme degree, her loyalty to Siegfried destroying all logic and decency.  Perhaps that was deliberate.  Germany had just come through the First World War, where nations tore each other apart for honour and loyalty. Millions had died, not only in battle but in the famines and revolutions that followed. Von Harbou later became a Nazi but here she's intensely anti-war, anti-power games.

Please read about Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) HERE on this site. there's lots here too on other Weimar movies, some full downloads, too, like Faust and Nosferatu.

Faust - complete download

Not Gounod's Faust at ENO, but  F W Murnau's Faust from 1926. This is based on the Goethe version of the story, with Gretchen burned at the stake. The perspective's completely different from the medieval version. Goethe's heretical!

His God jests with the Devil who makes a bet that he can corrupt even the holiest of men, scholarly old Faust. Germany's in the grip of terrible plague, Savonarolas and false prophets abound. Faust realizes books aren't going to help, so he does a deal with the devil, deliciously played by Emil Jannings, the schoolmaster in The Blue Angel., which you can see in full download on this site by clicking on the link.

Faust gets turned into a handsome young man, re-enacting the youth he probably didn't have curled up with books.  He and Gretchen fall in love and there's a baby. So she gets thrown out and eventually burned at the stake. Faust returns, but now he's old and wretched again. Still, Gretchen recognizes him, and he's redeemed. Liebe, says the film, written in flames.  Love wins, not so much God, unless it was God who willed love to happen.

This film is such an influential classic. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalpse, the crowd scenes, and the landscape over which the Devil flies, carrying Faust in his arms.  Evil birds of doom, a bit like cranes but scarier. Precursors of the airborne hordes in Flash Gordon or Apocalypse Now? A very "Germanic" setting. This proved to be Murnau's last Weimar movie. By 1927 he was settled successfully in Hollywood. What a cultural jump from Faust to Sunrise, Murnau's adaptation of a Gerrman story to open-air California.

Lubitsch's Carmen - Gypsy Blood

Another version of Carmen, this time the 1921 film directed by Ernst Lubitsch which became a huge hit in the US and paved the way for his Hollywood career. Gypsy Blood is the title, but it's a fairly straightforward account of the Prosper Mérimée novel. Bizet at least injects colour, flamboyance and good tunes. In comparison, Lubitsch can't compete for thrills.

Gypsy Blood made Pola Negri a megastar.  Polish girl finds fame as Basque gypsy in French novel  as German made movie repackaged for the US! Modern Times, we'd say, with deliberate reference to Charlie Chaplin, one of Negri's lovers, who also made a take-off of Carmen in 1918. Watch Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen in full download . You can see why Lubitsch's version was an improvement. And it makes you appreciate the much greater sophistication of  Rex Ingrams's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, also 1921. Ingrams is making an art movie with political kick, not just a pot booiler.

Carmen is intriguing because she's a symbol of womanhood completely outside convention. Lethal termptresses are a primeval archetype - Eve in the Bible, and before her, Sumerian goddesses with wings and bisexual characteristics. Mérimée's Carmen caught the imagination because she overturned 19th century propriety. Mérimée draws a cultural safety net around her by emphasizing her ethnicity. Gypsies were supposed to be uncivilized creatures, or as Hitler would say, irredeemable Untermensch. Real Roma are right to be offended by Gypsy Blood.

Ironically, Mérimée came across the story via a Parisian socialite, but he wasn't being racist so much as fascinated by alternatives to mainstrean western European culture. Carmen, like Zuleika in Goethe or  Isolde in Wagner, represents new possibilities with ancient antecendents. Carmen, though, breaks basic moral rules. She smokes, she drinks, she lusts, she does crime. Carmen in the 1920's gave legitimacy to millions of New Women, who smoked, drank, danced, and lusted like she, though most didn't cross ethical boundaries.

Lubitsch's Gypsy Blood is crude even by film making standards of the time. Negri's exaggerated kiss curls are so ludicrous that maybe the film's reminding us it's farce. Film techniques then were primitive  hence the cartoon-like makeup and overdone gestures. But even by the standards of the time this semaphore acting isn't even trying to be realistic.

Please read other posts here on Carmen - Chaplin, Bizet, the new ROH 3D film and the Chinese Carmen, Grace Chang (Ge Lan), whose film Wild, Wild Rose is one of the finest developments of all (barring Bizet). I've written a lot on Chinese film and its part in modernization, and have given FULL downloads too. Carmen isn't necessarily a "bad girl" but a personality adapting to rapidly shifting social mores. That's why she's such a potent symbol.

Charlie Chaplin's Burlesque on Carmen

So yoiu can appreciate Bizet'sr Carmen at the Royal Opera House, here's Charlie Chaplin's 1915 take, Burlesque on Carmen.  Because it's a vehicle for the Little Tramp, the star is Charlie's Don José and his merry dealings with Lilas Pastia. And the men dressed up as a mule! Edna Purviance's Carmen doesn't get much to do except repeat her usual role in Chaplin films.