00:11Welcome to the 45th edition of Le Giornate del Cinnamomoto, the Pordenoni Silent Film Festival.
00:16We started the day in the cloister of the Municipal Library, where our offices are,
00:20and now, of course, we've arrived in the theater, the theater of the Teatro Verdi, our home,
00:26a place of marvels where the staff and the ushers in particular are always so welcoming.
00:33It feels comfortable and comforting to be back.
00:37We have two films for you. The beginning is a short, as we've been doing in the past,
00:42A Victim of Circumstances. This is from 1913 from the Tannhauser studio.
00:47Now, it's difficult to decide whether this is a comedy dressed up as a police procedural
00:50or a police procedural dressed up as a comedy.
00:52In any event, one of the remarkable things about this film is that it shows what happens when somebody is
00:58arrested,
00:58the fingerprinting, the police photographs, all of that sort of thing.
01:02I'm hesitant to say that this is the first time that's been committed to film.
01:06Too often, the bad film historians, I would say, are the ones that say,
01:10oh, this is the first time this happens. We just don't know.
01:13There's so much that's lost. There's so much that remains to be discovered, so we don't know.
01:17But it's certainly one of the early ones. And it is indeed fascinating to see how all of the kinds
01:23of scenes we're used to watching on police procedurals on television for the last few decades
01:30are reproduced in 1913.
01:33It's thanks to Ned Tannhauser that we have this film. Ned has been dogged in his determination to
01:40to rediscover and revalorize his family's studio. He's been looking all over the world for prints of
01:47any Tannhauser film, and he's done an extraordinary job connecting with archives, ensuring that they get
01:52restored. This original print comes from the Library of Congress, but it's thanks to Ned's determination
01:58that we have it. Do check out his website, the Tannhauser website, because it contains a wealth of
02:05information. He also produces DVDs and Blu-rays. Well worth checking out. Tannhauser was an important
02:12studio in the time, but has largely been forgotten, and it needs to be remembered more, not just by experts.
02:19After A Victim of Circumstances, we have The Great Gloria Swanson in The Hummingle.
02:24This is a film directed by Sidney Olcott. Originally it was supposed to be directed by Alan Dwan,
02:29but for various reasons he wasn't able to do it, so Olcott stepped in. At that time,
02:34Olcott was one of the biggest names in Hollywood, as was Swanson, so it was a perfect partnership.
02:39Swanson at the time was married to the Marquis de la Falaise, so she's very much in her French period,
02:43and the film indeed is set in Paris. She plays a kind of guttersnipe thief at the beginning,
02:50dressed in boy's clothing, which apparently was quite liberating for her. I must say that parts of
02:55the film are missing. This has been a very difficult film to see for so many years because of the
03:00missing
03:00parts, but thanks to Milestone Films, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller and the Library of Congress,
03:06they've filled in the gaps through photographs and through title cards, so we're not missing any of
03:13the plot. We are, however, sadly missing all of the scenes that were shot of soldiers fighting in the
03:19First World War, and we're also missing the part that I'm particularly sad about, is there was an
03:24apache number. Apache is that sort of rather, to our eyes, ridiculous dance now that was supposedly
03:30the dance of choice for the denizens of the lowest dives in Paris, you know, where the man is going
03:37to be throwing the woman around in quite a violent fashion. Sometimes he even has a knife in his mouth.
03:43Now, when Swanson was doing it here, she was paired with a man named Aurelio Cocha. Cocha had been
03:50performing the apache dance in the United States for about 10 years by that point. He was something
03:56like 55, 56 years old, and apparently he threw Swanson around so much that she needed three days
04:02to recover afterwards. I'm trying to imagine that for a 55 year old. It had to have been quite an
04:08exertion. Sadly, that is missing, but if anybody, if there's a private collector who has that piece or
04:14even more of the film, do let us know. For me, one of the moving things about this film as
04:19well
04:19is there's a beautiful scene when Swanson's character is in a church. She's praying to the
04:23to a statue of the Virgin Mary to help her in her crisis. She does not get that help, and
04:30she rails
04:32against the Virgin, and I find it a very moving and unusual scene for this time. We have the great
04:39Donald Sozin accompanying the film today, so enjoy the screening, and I hope that you continue to return
04:46in the coming week.
04:47To be continued...
04:50To be continued...
04:58Grazie.
