Australia's Silent Film Festival 2010 - Report

[Brooksie]

The 1846 Pitt Street Uniting Church in Sydney was an atmospheric venue for yesterday's opening night of Australia's Silent Film Festival 2010 - a rare showing of 1981 restoration of the Australian silent `For the Term of His Natural Life' (1927).

Any scholar of Australian silent film can't help but approach `For The Term of His Natural Life' with a degree of trepidation. This is the film that marked the literal and symbolic end of large-scale silent film production in Australia - the massively expensive penultimate production of Australasian Films; the film for which our finest silent director, Raymond Longford, was overlooked in favor of a little-known American director, Norman Dawn.

One film historian told me he was glad the film was rediscovered and restored so that history may know exactly how bad it was. I don't share that view, though I do agree that the film is, in the end, a collection of intriguing parts that never quite coalesce into a compelling whole.

Dawn had a complex story to put on screen. Based on a classic work of early Australian literature, it is the story of Richard Devine, a British aristocrat who witnesses the murder of a man whom, he has just discovered, was his father. He assumes the identity of his dissolute identical half-brother, John Rex, and in taking responsibility for the murder so that his illegitimacy is not discovered and his mother's honour is preserved, he is transported to the harsh Australian penal colony of Macquarie Harbour where he assumes a third identity, naming himself Rufus Dawe.

Dawn worked from directly from the book - which is itself episodic - rather than a continuity script, and it does show. A good deal of the above information is conveyed in the first five minutes of the film, via weighty intertitles taken directly from the novel.

Where Dawn succeeds is in his strong visual style. Location shots are atmospheric, and a favourite technique is to situate a small domestic scene in the foreground of a whirl of activity (a vast convict treadmill, a wedding dance party) which is only tantalizingly glimpsed in the background. A lightning-struck prison break is a standout.

Today, Dawn is best remembered for his innovations in special effects. In particular, he is credited with the invention of the glass matte shot, which is used very effectively here. Most strikingly, a matte is combined with the still-extant ruins of the famous Port Arthur jail, to restore the complex to its original convict-era appearance. In another, a vaulted ceiling is added to the interior of a mansion. They're every bit as well achieved as similar shots in `The Wizard of Oz' and `Gone With the Wind' over a decade later.

Less effective is Dawn's handling of his cast, which is uneven. Hollywood actress Eva Novak is appropriately peppy as the governor's compassionate daughter Sylvia, but the local actress Jessica Harcourt has the juicier female role as a woman convict, and makes the most of it, especially in her early scenes. The talented Australian actor Arthur Tauchert is unfortunately under-used, his naturalism contrasting with the scenery-chewing of Arthur McLaghlen (the Australian-based brother of Victor) as the psychopathic criminal, Gabbett.

Musician Colin Offord, using a variety of indescribable home-made string and pipe instruments, provided a stark and spare accompaniment (an excerpt - featuring the aforementioned Jessica Harcourt - is available here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJFJQbh1eN8). There were echoes of convict hornpipes and didgeridoos, appropriately bleak for a story of an isolated penal colony. Occasionally it seemed slightly too spare, but particularly in the closing scenes, it was chillingly effective.

A number of people associated with the restoration were in attendance, including historian and editor Graham Shirley, who spoke afterwards. He had a lot of information that was new to me - including the fact that he had met Norman Dawn in the late 1970s, and worked directly off his annotated personal copy of `For the Term of His Natural Life' in compiling the 1981 restoration from two incomplete copies, one from the Australian version, the other from the quite different American release.

Unfortunately, he had no word on how close we are to a new restoration that incorporates the lost footage that has been found since 1981, but there was the exciting news that Dawn's original glass paintings have recently been found and are being restored for exhibition.

I must admit to some concern about opening a festival at which many people will be seeing their first silent film with such a difficult film, but the audience was very receptive and in most part respected the eloquent suggestion of David Shepard in the program notes: `Treat the work with kindness and respect, and it will reward you by casting its own magic spell'.

There are excerpts and curators notes on `For The Term of His Natural Life' at the excellent Australian Screen website - http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/the-t ... ural-life/. Here also is some footage of the making of the film - http://aso.gov.au/titles/newsreels/aust ... 000/clip1/. This was taken at the Bondi Junction studios of Australasian FIlms, which I was delighted to discover still exists.

Work commitments are going to prevent me from seeing the whole festival, to my enormous regret - but I'll report back on whatever I can (and they won't all be as lengthy as this!).

[mrbertiewooster]

Thank you for a brilliant report.

Incidentally, does anyone know who precisely runs the festival? Who are the individuals behind "Silent Film Australia Ltd"? There's no information to this effect on the festival website.

[Rodney]

Yes, and do report on the remaining films, please, if you attend them.

[moviepas]

For the Term(by Marcus Clarke) was on VHS tape at one time thru the then archives shop, now gone. What Brooksie did not tell you was that the scenes of boat burning in the film is said to contain thousands of feet of nitrate 35mm footage to burn the thing spectacularly. This footage was said to be newsreels.

The story goes that when Norman Dawn was employed they thought they were getting Alan Dwan. A likely story????

The story was remade decades later for TV.

Australasian Film Studios at Bondi Junction had been a roller rink bought in 1925 to turn into a film studio by Union Theatres who became Greater Union Theatres. They became Cinesound from 1932 until they ceased during the start of WW2. They made the Cinesound Newsreels in competition with Fox's Movietone News both of which eventually amalgamated and are being or are now restored with founds coming from various sources including rights holder Murdoch. The feature film division made a number of films all connected with Ken G Hall who directed most and produced the one he did not direct. Hall lived well into his 90s after a later career running a major Sydney TV station for a number of years.

To see a film about the newsreels the fictionalized Newfront from the late 70s made in Australia is the way to go. Original recordings are used on the soundtrack for the music.

[mrbertiewooster]

A 93-minute version of For the Term of His Natural Life is available to view at the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/ForTheTe ... aturalLife

[Brooksie]

Incidentally, does anyone know who precisely runs the festival? Who are the individuals behind "Silent Film Australia Ltd"? There's no information to this effect on the festival website.

That's a very good question, and one I've not really been able to find the answer to. It appears to be a group of interested amateurs who have done their homework as far as sponsorship goes.

It's disappointing that it's left to members of the public rather than our own National Film and Sound Archive to put together a festival like this, though hardly surprising. They run the place on a shoestring budget and have been shoved around a fair bit by political events (basically, a decade of a government that didn't think they should exist).

It means that Australian silents are in a quandary - nobody knows about them, because so few are restored or accessible ... and a major festival is not viable because nobody knows the films and some are in no shape to show. It's not good for the profile of our early industry, or the profile of silents in general, which remains pretty low.

Back on topic - tonight's film is:

Passing Fancy Dekigokoro 1933 (Japan)

Directed: by Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Sakomoto Takeshi, Fushime Nabuko and Tomio Aoki
Tickets: $20/$15 concession and children
Film: digital presentation of restored film
Duration: 101 minutes
Live music: accompanist Riley Lee, world-class master of the shakuhachi.

[Brooksie]

For the Term(by Marcus Clarke) was on VHS tape at one time thru the then archives shop, now gone. What Brooksie did not tell you was that the scenes of boat burning in the film is said to contain thousands of feet of nitrate 35mm footage to burn the thing spectacularly. This footage was said to be newsreels.

The story goes that when Norman Dawn was employed they thought they were getting Alan Dwan. A likely story????

The story was remade decades later for TV.

Australasian Film Studios at Bondi Junction had been a roller rink bought in 1925 to turn into a film studio by Union Theatres who became Greater Union Theatres. They became Cinesound from 1932 until they ceased during the start of WW2. They made the Cinesound Newsreels in competition with Fox's Movietone News both of which eventually amalgamated and are being or are now restored with founds coming from various sources including rights holder Murdoch. The feature film division made a number of films all connected with Ken G Hall who directed most and produced the one he did not direct. Hall lived well into his 90s after a later career running a major Sydney TV station for a number of years.

To see a film about the newsreels the fictionalized Newfront from the late 70s made in Australia is the way to go. Original recordings are used on the soundtrack for the music.

Yes - I meant to ask Graham Shirley about the Allan Dwan reference. I've only ever heard it as hearsay, but I'm obviously not the only one who's aware of it!

I believe I've mentioned the horrible burning boat elsewhere on these forums ... really gut wrenching to watch. The television version of the story (from around 1983) is excellent - it's not a bad idea to watch in advance of the silent to get your head around the story.

Via Google Maps, here is Australasian Studios as it is today: http://tinyurl.com/3yle74c

[Christopher Jacobs]

I remember seeing FOR THE TERM OF HIS NATURAL LIFE at a Cinesation some years ago and enjoying it. As I recall it dragged in spots but was quite impressive overall, and some parts would probably make more sense to people more familiar with Australian history. It reminded me of things like THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, LES MISERABLES, and the like, transferred to an Australian setting. I'd certainly like to see it again sometime.

PASSING FANCY is an excellent late Japanese silent that was made in 1933 but has the look of a European film from the 1950s or 60s, sort of a cross between Italian NeoRealism and French New Wave (except for the fact that it's a silent made decades earlier on the other side of the world!). It was shown at a Cinefest a couple years ago, and is also on DVD from Criterion. It's a wonderful little comedy-drama, a slice-of-life about a working-class father-son relationship.

--Christopher Jacobs
http://hpr1.com/film
http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs

[Brooksie]

Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy) 1933 - Thursday 16 September

`Dekigokoro' is, as Christopher says, a late silent - in Japan, they continued to be made until the mid 1930s - from Yasujiro Ozu, made a year after his most famous silent, `I Was Born, But ...' (1932). Like the earlier film, it's a warm, gently funny story about the relationship between children and adults.

Kihachi (Sakomoto Takeshi) is a dissolute beer factory labourer who has more time for drinking sake than he does for working - or for his young son, a marvellously droll little fellow named Tomio (a remarkable performance by Tomio Aoki).

Tomio is the exact opposite of his father - bookish, poker-faced, and unamused by the desperate measures he has to go to in order to wake his father each morning and convince him to get to work on time. How Tomio came to have no mother is never really discussed, but the eye patch Tomio wears when we first meet him - whose existence (and later disappearance) is also unremarked upon - quietly suggests that the lad could be better cared for.

Kihachi meets, and unsuccessfully attempts to seduce, a sweet young woman named Harue, who takes a job at a neighbouring cafe. When he finds out that Harue regards him as an `uncle' rather than potential romantic partner, it triggers the nasty realisation that life has begun to pass him by, and responsibilities he has not met have ominously begun to pile up.

In her introduction to the film, Dr Carol Hayes (of the Japan Centre at the Australian National University) speculated on the purpose of the film's name. What exactly is the `Passing Fancy' that is referred to? It has also been translated as `Acting on Impulse', itself a translation of the evocative Japanese phrase `to act with your heart coming out'.

In one sense, the film is (like `I Was Born, But ...') about a quintessentially Japanese moral dilemma: in a society where filial piety is a prized over all other qualities; where the concept of respect is so formalised that you refer to a person based on their level of seniority - what happens when a parent clearly does not meet up to the expectations of their child?

In another, it's a universal story. We have all known Hikachis - child-men who, whilst waiting for some ethereal signal that they should finally begin taking life seriously, suddenly find themselves paunchier, balder and older than they ever dreamed; bewildered by a world that has moved on from them.

The most touching scene epitomises the relationship between the father and boy. Tomio, already in a bad mood at having been teased by his classmates about his illiterate father, tears apart his father's prized bonsai tree. Hikachi begins to slap him. All of a sudden, the roles change. It is Tomio slapping Hikachi as if he were a disobedient child. Slap after slap lands on the man's motionless, achingly defeated face. Keep going, his expression seems to say. It's no more or less than I deserve.

Though Hikachi sets aside his own feelings to help Harue find a good husband, and through other events becomes a more attentive father, we come away with the uneasy feeling that things will never really change. His childlike inability to think things through will continue to be his undoing. It is a credit to Takeshi that despite his shortcomings, Hikachi remains a sympathetic figure.

Initially, I was concerned by the accompaniment by master shakahachi player Riley Lee. For one thing, it was extremely quiet. It also had a mournful quality that initially seemed to jar with the gentle comedy onscreen. Its transformation over time was quite extraordinary, becoming - in the best sense of the word - invisible; or to put it another way, indivisible from the images on screen. Ozu's imagery - tattered banners waving in the breeze, gas bells looming in the distance - is similarly unadorned and evocative.

All in all, a different and very enjoyable viewing experience.

[Frederica]

Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy) 1933 - Thursday 16 September

Thanks for the wonderful review.

[Brooksie]

Thank you - I am enjoying bringing these to you!

I should make brief mention of today's program, which annoyingly, I was not able to attend.

The day opened with The Last Magic Lantern Show, which is intended to replicate an authentic 19th century Magic Lantern slide presentation, using actual 1898 equipment and slides. I understand that this show is touring to other events, so I look forward to catching it elsewhere.

There was a morning session of comedy shorts, some of which I am familiar with (Chaplin's The Adventurer, Keaton's Cops, Laurel and Hardy's Wrong Again) but others I have not seen (the early Winsor McKay animation The Pet (1921) and a Sennett Studios short, Lizzies of the Field (1924) ). I suspect the main reason for the latter inclusion is that it stars the Australian-born comedian Billy Bevan. Highlighting the careers of lesser-known members of Hollywood's so-called `Gum Leaf Mafia' of the 1910s and 20s seems to be a running festival theme.

We've all seen The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, so that was one I didn't regret missing so very much, but I have been consistently impressed by Mauro Colombis, who provided the accompaniment, and would have loved to hear what he came up with for `Caligari'. He also did the music for the morning comedy session - nearly three hours in total, which was probably not unusual for your average accompanist in the old days, but - phew!

I was most disappointed to miss the evening feature, the first chapter of the Russian serial Miss Mend' (1926) - particularly after reading the recent Nitrateville discussion and reviews (http://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.p ... =miss+mend).

Next up will be the early Rene Clair comedy The Italian Straw Hat (1927) with a live performance of the Rodney Sauer score.

[Brooksie]

Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (The Italian Straw Hat) (1927) - Thursday 24th September

The premise of `The Italian Straw Hat' is simple - a gentleman’s horse eats a prized hat. It belongs to a woman who is on a jaunt with her secret lover, an army lieutenant. Under threat of having his house ransacked by the lieutenant, who is now very nervous about being found out, the man must find a replacement for the hat. The complication? He is en-route to his own wedding, and must procure it amidst the festivities without anyone noticing.

It took me a while to get into this film. It starts a little slowly, there are very few intertitles, and those there are do not give any particular `flavour’ to proceedings. The tone also had me confused - was it a sophisticated ensemble comedy with occasional outlandish moments (somewhat like its cinematic ancestor `Four Weddings and a Funeral’), straight farce, or something in between?

This also initially gave me some trouble accepting the film’s premise. Why would the bridegroom so fear the preposterous, blustering Lieutenant (Geymond Vital, in my favourite performance from the film)? Why would he care about the pair’s adultery being exposed?

In fact, Clair gives us a world of near-Kafkaesque absurdity: what happens if, on the most important day of your life, a psychopath is threatening to destroy you if you don’t replace his girlfriend’s hat? You jolly well get on with finding the hat, of course. Once I realised Clair's intent, the rest became simple. In the final analysis, the tone felt oddly reminiscent of the just-this-side-of-plausible world of Preston Sturges, a director to whom Clair was sometimes compared in his Hollywood years.

The Belle Epoque is conjured with great beauty - the street scenes in particular are like a Gustave Caillebotte slice-of-life painting come to life - but even more so, they evoke the cinema of that time, as does `The Italian Straw Hat’ as a whole. The first moving images we have are from that time and place. Cinema’s first gag - a boy tricking a man into squirting himself in the face with a garden hose in `L’arroseur arrosé’ (1895) – would have been quite at home in this film, made a generation later. Did I glimpse a peeling street poster advertising Lumiere’s Cinematographe in a street scene? Clair deliberately set the film in the year of cinema’s birth, so he must surely be in on the joke.

That being said, the deliberate simplicity of style occasionally sits uneasily with the parts that are more characteristic of a later era. A nightmarish sequence in which the groom envisions his house literally being torn to pieces owes a great deal to Clair’s earlier experiments in Dadaism, and while I found them interesting (and more importantly, funny), they did stand out somewhat from their surrounds.

The real heart of the film is the ensemble cast - a hodge-podge of nervous parents, eccentric half-remembered aunts and mysterious family friends who are only ever seen at events such as these; in other words, just like a real wedding party. Mirroring the bridegroom’s own quandary, the best scenes involve their attempts to unobtrusively solve their own small dilemmas. There are missing gloves, tight shoes, and much fun with a deaf old uncle and his defective ear trumpet. By definition, these dilemmas must be worked out in silence, and it is in silence that they find their most effective rendition.

The standout is a howlingly funny scene in which the mother of the bride subtly attempts to get her husband to reattach his errant necktie. Not only is every little nudge massively misinterpreted, but the disease spreads, and before long, the entire room are nervously straightening their collars or picking things from their teeth. It’s an exemplar of the ability of silent film to comment on the nature of silence itself. We misinterpret silence as emptiness, when in reality it is often fuller and more meaningful than the babble we use to distract ourselves from it.

Sharolyn Kimmorley’s piano rendition of Rodney Sauer’s score kept things moving along in a very nice fashion, not only with the effective incorporation of period music such as Offenbach’s `Tales from Hoffman’ but the brilliant use of something that is extremely hard to pull off –silence itself. Very appropriate after all I’ve just said.

This is a film that I took a while to warm to – but it will definitely reward a second viewing.

[Brooksie]

I don't know if there's a limit on post length, but if so, I think I'm about to break it - a marathon report for the final day of the festival:

BUSTER KEATON AND SNUB POLLARD

The programming was amiss here - we began with the excellent Neighbours, the less successful The Playhouse, and then My Wife's Relations, which is almost universally regarded as one of the weakest Keaton shorts, though it has its moments. You will most likely be familiar with all of them, so I'll only add that the first drew huge, appreciative laughs, the second and third more intermittent chuckles.

The Playhouse is a film I wish I liked more. The in-camera special effects put eight Busters on screen at once are still utterly astounding today - but once you've finished marvelling, there's not much else (although that's one heck of a monkey impersonation). Two random observations. One - you can see why the Surrealists loved Buster. Secondly - how much does Old Buster resemble the actual old Buster as he appeared in Chaplin's `Limelight'!

It's a Gift features Snub as a mad inventor, who lives in a trick house very reminiscent of Keaton's `The Scarecrow'. There's a good deal of Snub whizzing about in a funny magnetic-powered car of his own invention, and it was slight but entertaining (and featured a terrific Murphy Bed!). Robert Constable's improvised accompaniment to all four was terrific and very varied.

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BARDELYS THE MAGNIFICENT (1926)

King Vidor is one of those directors who, from the first frame, tells you `Sit back. I know exactly what I'm doing, and I'm damn good at it. Just enjoy'. And a light but rip-roaring, high-quality adventure it is.

Bardelys (John Gilbert) is the Casanova of King Louis XIII's court - envied by men, beloved by women, and the gossip of both. An arch-rival gives him the new challenge of winning the hand of the beautiful Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman). Against the wishes of the King, he departs the court in search of the elusive Roxalanne.

By coincidence, the film then unites themes already seen in For the Term of his Natural Life and Dekigokoro. Bardelys finds a dying man, and assumes his identity. Little does he know that the man was Rene de Lesperon, enemy of the king and leader of the resistance movement. Injured while escaping arrest for treason in the personage of Lesperon, he is taken in by a family of anti-monarchists and nursed back to health by their daughter - none other than Roxalanne.

Roxalanne is highly critical of the King's court, and everything represented by the ghastly Bardelys fellow who is supposed to be in pursuit of her. In stepping outside his persona, Bardelys realises the shallowness of courtly life and his womanizing ways. The two fall in love, but Bardelys' true identity begins to catch up with him.

The standout here is an astounding love scene between Gilbert and Boardman. It's simply one of the most lovely and original I've ever seen in a silent film. Not unlike Clarence Brown in Gilbert and Garbo's famous garden scene from `Flesh and the Devil' a year later, Vidor encloses the lovers in their own small world, dappled with darkness and light, as their boat drifts between the branches of a weeping willow tree. To think that time might have deprived us of this scene is a chilling thought.

There is also a spectacular escape later in the film. Contemporary audiences would have been as quick - and fair - to draw comparisons with Fairbanks, and like the film as a whole, it's slick, well-directed and entertaining. We are so lucky to have another example of Gilbert at the top of his game, while Boardman's odd mix of pragmatism and hauteur serves her perfectly as the strong willed Roxalanne.

It's a shame the story was not revived in the sound era (possibly, it was due to the same copyright problem that almost saw us lose this movie). You can easily imagine Errol Flynn making a cracking Bardelys.

Robert Constable again proved himself very versatile in his accompaniment, with a particularly effective love theme.

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CHICAGO (1927)

This is the session I was looking forward to most of all, and it didn't disappoint a bit. What a crackerjack of a film - whip-smart, sophisticated, adult entertainment of just the sort that was neutered by the Hays Code. I loved it.

Like `Bardelys', the world of the film is beautifully established from the first moment. We pan over Roxie Hart's apartment - Spanish shawls, boudoir dolls, cheap ornaments, a player piano bought on credit; souvenirs of a life of vulgar thrills lived one step ahead of the debt collector. There's dirty dishes in the sink, a puddle of girlish clothes on the floor, an oversleeping Roxie, and a blindly loving husband who will make everything all right.

This is not the `Chicago' you know from the 2002 film or the Bob Fosse musical - the character of Velma appears so briefly she is not even named - but the basic story and most especially, the spirit, remain startlingly similar. It deals with phenomena we're just as familiar with in 2010 as 1927: crime masquerading as entertainment, and entertainment masquerading as journalism.

I know I gush whenever I mention Mauro Colombis's accompaniments, but I must do so again here. His sense of pace is exquisite - he knows when to embellish and when to back off. Most importantly in a story like this, which could easily tip over into the merely trite and cynical, he knows when to respond to the pathos which, to me, was the key to this film. Behind the glitz, it's a tale of sad and desperate people. Amos Hart is a character who, in subsequent adaptions, is the butt of fun. Victor Varconi's Amos is a principled man who gives his love innocently and, just as innocently expects it to be returned and is horribly hurt when it isn't. It's as much his film as Haver's, who plays the part of Roxie with just the right amount of brattish charm.

The film ends on a strangely ominous note. I will not spoil Amos's final, noble act except to say that it seems symbolic of the end to an era whose frivolity was sometimes built on broken dreams, and whose paper tigers would soon find themselves blown away by the new order of things. Soon, it would no longer be enough for a woman to dig gold, or for a man to provide it.

Varconi is excellent as mentioned, and Phyllis Haver may have won her millionaire in real life, but you can't help but lament the loss of a star who would have shone in the sort of roles that Marion Davies played in the mid 1930s.

The film has such polish, and is directed with such an even hand that I wondered: why had I not heard of this Frank Urson before? Sadly, it's because Urson died only a year after Chicago was released. Yes, the rumour has been made that DeMille himself directed some or all of the film - but I couldn't detect a DeMille feel to it. I'll reserve my final judgement on that until I'm able to see more of Urson's surviving work, but if it's a fraction of the quality of Chicago, cinema lost a serious talent with a great sense of visual style.

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And now, a final analysis of the festival. The highs? The quality of the live accompaniments, which was uniformly excellent. The diversity of the program, which really didn't contain a single dud. A clearly enthusiastic and dedicated team who looked very much like they were undertaking a labour of love. And of course, there is nothing better than watching someone being thoroughly surprised and delighted by their first silent film.

The lows? The main venue, the Lyceum Auditorium, had poor sightlines (particularly an issue during `Dekogokoro', when the translated intertitles ran along the bottom). I didn't find the introductions by film critic Jason di Rosso particularly useful or informative - the Keaton and Pollard session in particular would have benefited from more contextualisation, and a closer examination of the individual films. Even just an explanation of the parts of these comedies that may be obscure to the modern viewer (taffy pulling, the nature of a Zouave act) can add greatly to their enjoyment.

And now I'm all filmed-out ... but looking forward to 2011 nevertheless. Thanks for reading!

[Frederica]

I don't know if there's a limit on post length, but if so, I think I'm about to break it - a marathon report for the final day of the festival:

Thanks so much for the excellent, detailed reports. (AHEM.) Are there photos?

[Brooksie]

Yes, probably a little too detailed - they were for my website first and Nitrateville second.

There are no photos that I took, but some were taken on the opening night, and they'll no doubt be up on a website somewhere in due course. That was quite a venue - http://www.pittstreetuniting.org.au/gallery_church.html.

[Brooksie]

On Miss Mend, which I was unable to attend:

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In the best traditions of silent cinema

by Jeanne Alifanova, Unification Russian Weekly Paper

To the greatest delight of many silent film lovers, Australia’s Silent Film Festival returned to Sydney in September 2010. The programme included many wonderful eighty and ninety year old films. Amongst movies from the USA, Australia, France, Germany and Japan, a very special credit deserves Miss Mend, a film produced in Russia in 1926. Also known as The Adventures of the Three Reporters, this action-adventure movie is based on the Russian novel Mess-Mend or Yankees in Petrograd by Marietta Shaginian. In short, the story follows the adventure of three reporters who try to stop a biological attack on the Soviet Union by the evil mastermind Chiche.

Miss Mend was directed by distinguished Fedor Ozep and Boris Barnet, at the start of their film making careers and features a talented cast starring Natalya Glan, Boris Barnet, Vladimir Fogel, Igor Ilyinsky and many others. Miss Mend has everything: beautiful location photography, stunt scenes; horse, car and boat chases, jazz bands and, of course romance. Not surprisingly, ideologically lightweight Miss Mend was condemned by the Soviet press of the time as a prime example of shameless 'Western style' entertainment. Nevertheless it was a huge box office success and after more than eighty years, it remains just as fascinating and proves once again that Soviet cinema can be fun.

The first part of this three part adventure serial was shown on Saturday, September 18th at Wesley Conference Centre in Sydney. Dr. Karen Pearlman, Head of Screen Studies from Australian Film, Television and Radio school in her introductory speech briefly talked about the screenplay, producers, characters and actors in Miss Mend.

But what was really fascinating is that in accordance with all canons of the genre the movie was accompanied by live piano music. Well known opera and Russian romances singer Maria Okunev this time appeared in a rather unusual role. “Today is my first public appearance as a pianist”- Maria shared with the Unification paper just as the movie was about to start. “This is all very new for me. And of course I am very nervous. A lot of pressure, people are counting on me. I am a singer, not a pianist. And here I am... will be playing piano for an hour and a half. But I do like to try new things. That is why I accepted this interesting offer. We will see how it all turns out.”- Maria smiles.

And it has turned out brilliantly! Maria warmed up the audience with the popular Russian song “Dorogoi dlinnoyu” (Those were the days my friend in English version). Spectators enthusiastically applauded the performer. Then the lights went out and everyone travelled back in time to the 1920s of the last century eagerly following the plot, enjoying top class acting and excellent piano accompaniment by Maria Okuneva.

Music has been picked out flawlessly. On the screen breathtaking chases gave way to romantic scenes, funny moments alternated with serious matters. And all those twists in the plot were perfectly reflected in the musical themes selected by Maria. She masterfully interlaced a famous La donna è mobile from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto with just as well known Red Army march White Army, Black Baron calling all “to go to the last mortal combat”. While the classical emotive Adagio by Albinoni naturally turned into a lively “classical” Soviet criminal song Murka.

Spectators were mesmerized. But unfortunately all good things come to an end. As the screen promised “to be continued” (that night only the first part of Miss Mend was showing) and Maria stroke the final chord the audience burst into applause. “Bravo Maria!”, “Well done!”, people were not shy to express their delight and admiration. Maria very modestly took a bow and much to everyone’s surprise invited to the stage her sister Anna, talented violinist, and Richard Savery who plays clarinet and saxophone in Marianna Ensemble. Two songs performed by this fabulous trio were no doubt a very special treat for everyone who came to see the movie. We would like to wish Maria Okunev many more successful performances and new daring projects. Bravissimo!

[Brooksie]

Now with added photos!

The Pitt Street Uniting Church, set up for the opening night presentation of `For the Term of His Natural Life'. Built in 1846, it's likely that this building was constructed by exactly the sort of convicts seen in the film:



Musician Colin Offord and the mind-boggling array of home-constructed instruments and Foley equipment he used to accompany the film. Of particular note is the rectangular object near his right foot, which was used both to imitate the footfall of marching convicts and provide a rhythm to the music (sometimes simultaneously):



To the left is film critic Bruce Elder, who presented the opening night feature, and a number of people who worked on the film's restoration. On the far right is Graham Shirley, one of the great champions of early Australian film. His book `Australian Cinema: The First 80 Years' counts as one of the most well-thumbed volumes in my collection:



Ian Edwards and Anthony Catrice with original antique magic lantern equipment (with a few necessary modern additions), as used in their presentation `The Last Great Magic Lantern Show', which I was sorry not to be able to attend. The projectors and slides were handed down through Professor Edwards' family:





I recently saw a setup similar to the projector on the right at an antique store - a lovely object, complete with original slides, but well out of my price range, unfortunately!

[Mike Gebert]

Cool photos. Thanks for sharing that!