Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Michel Simon in La Vocation d’André Carel, Jean Choux, 1925.
Source: Cinémathèque Suisse / Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2002
Thaïs, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, 1917.
Source: Cinémathèque Française / Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2002
Clara Bow in It (the opening night event with Carl Davis conducting the
Camerata Labacencis), Gloria Swanson in Stage Struck and everyone in
Ladies’ Night in a Turkish Bath were pure and simple crowd-pleasing
entertainment.
“Entertainment” was the operative word when it came to The Great
Nickelodeon Show Programme that mixed pre-World War One short
films with illustrated songs and a death-defying piece of live
performance that will not be described in these lines. The opening,
recreating Winsor McCay’s personal appearances with Gertie the
Dinosaur, set the stage for all that followed and, while there may be a
point to criticism of the fact that the films chosen were of vintages too
disparate ever to have played on the same bill, the period flavour was
lovingly preserved. Festival regulars were most thrilled by the stage
debut of longtime senior staff member Marina Mottin as Italian
interpreter (replete with amazingly professional
facial expressions).
65 Journal of Film Preservation / 65 / 2002
The Giornate has, since last year, become
infested with a breed whose very existence was,
till recently, inconceivable: Mitchell and Kenyon
fans. The discovery of hundreds of films by the
same company from the turn of the century has
had its effect on our perception of what early
film really was. The research into their
production and presentation has helped to
clarify much of their original context and this
year’s sequel to the original unveiling, presented
by Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground
Archive at the University of Sheffield and the
NFTVA’s Patrick Russell, was attended by what
one could already describe as “hard-core M&K
buffs.” The images are almost shockingly clear
and at times the effect is as of looking into a
one-way mirror; we see our ancestors and they
look back at us, unseeing, into a future they
could never have imagined.
“Hard-core” is the cue to mention a couple of the
“Goodnight, Silents…” offerings that followed in
the sometime tradition of putting things on the
big screen that were never intended for mixed
audiences. Though the programme notes did not
identify the makers of Le Canard and Miss
Butterfly, it has been claimed that they were
produced by (and even featured, as a performer)
Bernard Natan, whose film career was already
controversial enough in its other aspects. A point
for further clarification, if ever there was one
(and the greatest imaginable contrast to the
“Jerry the Tyke” cartoons that opened every day’s
screenings).
The men of Lobster Films, Serge Bromberg and
Eric Lange, from whose collection the above