I take for granted that readers of Screen Slate need little encouragement when it comes to the marquee titles in this year’s edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. A screening of F.W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)—the final work by the great German master, and possibly his best—speaks for itself. The same goes for King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), one of the last masterpieces of the silent era, as well as the program of Laurel and Hardy shorts directed by Leo McCarey, among the finest in their career. In cases where the titles themselves may be comparatively more obscure, the mere mention of the names Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ernst Lubitsch, and Erich von Stroheim are enough to stoke interest in Love One Another (1922), So This is Paris (1926), and Queen Kelly (1928), respectively. Allow me to instead highlight three titles that risk going overlooked but merit some attention.
I often regret how few films from the 1910s are programmed at Silent Fest. That’s why I’m glad that the first film to play on the first full day of the festival is Urban Gad’s The Abyss (1910), a mid-length feature by that master of early Danish cinema. Film history buffs will recognize this title as the breakout role of Asta Nielsen, whose sultry performance—helping to invent the “man-eating vamp” archetype—made her the first globally recognized film star. Of her, the Hungarian film theorist Béla Bálazs once wrote, “She holds her lipstick as Michelangelo might have held his chisel on the last night of his life.” For his part, Gad excels at what film scholars have called the “tableau style” of 1910s silent film, distinguished by long takes and deep-focus shots often filmed on location (in this case, in Copenhagen). Together, Gad and Nielsen would work on several subsequent features, eventually outgrowing the Danish industry and immigrating to Germany, where Nielsen formed her own studio in the ‘20s. At the time, The Abyss helped to start the first major period of Danish filmmaking, followed quickly by films by August Blom, A.W. Sandberg (whose 1917 film The Clown plays alongside The Abyss), and later Carl Th. Dreyer. It is a strong example of the unique stylistic power of the best films from that decade.
Saturday night closes with a program of two masterpieces of the French avant-garde, one well-known and the other less so. The former is Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1931), perhaps the last in the tradition of great silent avant-garde films from France, directed in collaboration with noted cameraman Boris Kaufman. But, as great as that film is, I would say that the latter film in the program is the real cause for excitement: Rien que les heures [Nothing But Time] (1926), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. Few filmmakers can rival the story of Cavalcanti’s career. Born in Brazil, he immigrates to Paris in the ‘20s and joins the experimental arts scene as an apprentice to Marcel L’Herbier. By the ‘30s, he leaves for England, where he first joins the documentary film unit supervised by John Grierson, and later Ealing Studios under Michael Balcon. He returns to Brazil in the ‘50s to help revive its film industry; then, blacklisted, he returns to Europe to direct his final films in Austria and East Germany.
The cosmopolitan direction Cavalcanti’s life would take is, in a way, presaged by Rien que les heures, his debut film as a director. One of its most evocative images is of a series of flags from around the world, which dissolve onto a composite shot of eyes looking out toward the audience. “All cities would look the same,” reads the film’s opening title card, “were it not for the monuments that distinguish them.” Rien que les heures can be called one of the first city symphonies, one year before the term was properly coined in relation to Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927). What gave the Parisian avant-garde distinction was its ability to mix documentary precision with a large toolbox of optical devices: multiple exposures, trick photography, and the like. In this respect, Cavalcanti’s film ranks alongside the great contemporaneous work by René Clair, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Epstein, and Germaine Dulac. But Rien que les heures may go the furthest of all in its consideration of how class difference is experienced in city life. For too long, this film has languished in poor quality online. Screening in a new 4K restoration, perhaps now is the time for the film to reclaim its prestige status.
Virtually every attendee of Silent Fest will be familiar with the great works of German Expressionism, one of the defining movements of the silent era. Fewer may be familiar with the short-lived realist tradition succeeding it in the period between the end of the 1920s and the Nazi takeover in 1933, to which Sunday’s screening of Marie Harder’s Bookkeeper Kremke (1930) is a strong introduction. In fact, I am inclined to say that Bookkeeper Kremke is the true hidden gem of the entire festival. Harder’s career, lasting just under two years and comprising just two films, is a bit enigmatic. She’s almost certainly the first woman director in Germany to complete a feature film, made in her capacity as the head of the film department of the German Social Democratic Party. Unlike her earlier short, The Proletarian’s Way (1929), which is more directly agitprop for the party, Bookkeeper Kremke is mostly built around dramatic sequences detailing the crisis of the German middle class as millions were put out of work during the Great Depression. Interspersed throughout are snippets of reportage decrying automation and depicting worker protests, complimenting and commenting on what is otherwise a straightforward kammerspiel drama à la Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1925), centered around a middle-aged accountant who struggles to reconcile his loss in social status as he faces unemployment. We are told at the start of the film that it is the story “of a fate that plays out every day.” A little under one hundred years later, this phrase is truer than Harder might have ever expected.
