By John Exshaw
Imagine my surprise, on perusing last week’s Sunday Times, to discover that none other than the great Kevin Brownlow, Mr. Silent Cinema himself, was scheduled to appear, if not “at a cinema near youâ€, then at least at a rambling country estate not a million miles from me. Hot damn! I thought, and I’m sure you’ll agree it was warranted. For anyone with even a sliver of interest in the history of cinema, Brownlow is a positively Olympian figure, the man who, trusty two-reel tape recorder in hand, assiduously stalked the retirement homes of the Hollywood Hills to capture the last flickering memories of a time when the movies moved, later collected in his classic 1968 book, The Parade’s Gone By . . . The man who, together with his collaborator, the late David Gill, rescued and restored such great films as Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Abel Gance’s monumental Napoléon (1927), before returning them to the world, with scores by Carl Davis, in the manner in which they were meant to be seen. And the man behind a series of definitive documentaries on such luminaries as Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd. Hot damn, indeed.
Brownlow, it transpired, was due to appear at something called the Killruddery Film Festival (a new one on me) at the eponymous House and Gardens in County Wicklow, where he would present such titles as Anthony Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929), Julien Duvivier’s Poil de carrotte (1925), Murnau’s City Girl (1930), Cooper and Schoedsack’s Chang (1927), Victor Fleming’s Red Dust (1932), and King Vidor’s The Patsy (1928). In addition, the Festival would include a selection of archive material presented by Sunniva O’Flynn, curator of the Irish Film Institute, Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going (1945), two films by Victor Sjöström, Ingeborg Holm (1917) and The Wind (1928), and a showing of the Boulting Brothers’ 1950 nuclear thriller, Seven Days to Noon, presented by long-time Wicklow resident, John Boorman. And if that (incomplete) selection was not enough, the Festival was also catering to the Cinema Retro generation with its inclusion of the late Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974).
Unfortunately, a combination of short notice and prior commitments prevented me from attending all but the closing day of the Festival. Having done some hurried homework on the background of the Festival, I eventually managed to ambush Brownlow between screenings and fire out a few (inevitably rather disjointed) questions – of which a selection are given here:
JE – This year’s festival includes a number of sound films. Does this meet with your approval?
KB – Oh, absolutely, because I’ve always been fascinated by the Bologna Film Festival, and how they integrate silent and sound films there. And I find that absolutely fascinating because I catch up on all the films I missed because I was watching too many silents . . .
JE – Are you still involved in restoration projects or are you mainly spreading the good word at festivals like this?
KB – We [Brownlow’s production company, Photoplay Productions] certainly don’t have any sponsorship for restoration nor for documentaries. We find it impossible to get commissioning editors to be interested in the sort of thing we want to do – which is, number one, a documentary on Douglas Fairbanks, and nobody seems interested in that. Of course, you discover that these people are so young that even if they know who he is, they’ve probably never seen anything.
JE – This year is the 60th. anniversary of the death of Rex Ingram, who by any reckoning remains the most successful director born in Ireland. Are there any plans for commemorative events?
KB – Well, next year is the 90th. anniversary of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse so the NFT [London’s National Film Theatre] has agreed to do an Ingram season. Whether they will follow through is another matter but they’ve agreed to do that. Meanwhile I’ve been trying to set up a documentary about Rex Ingram through Irish television and they have turned it down with . . . enthusiasm, is all I can say. I was really astonished. “We have absolutely no interest.†We tried all channels that there are in Ireland and we got the bum’s rush from all of them. I think they realise that their audience, which they want to keep, has never heard of Ingram. And do you know what the BBC says? “We don’t make documentaries about things the audience hasn’t heard of. We make them about things they’ve heard something about and want to know more.†What can you say?
JE – When researching Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1996), did you ever come across any of the early Joë Hamman Westerns [shot in the Camargue region of southern France between 1907 and 1913], and if so what impression did he make?
KB – Oh, yes, the cowboy actor. Well, I didn’t see him as a cowboy, I saw him as an action hero or second-string in action pictures, so I’m still waiting for the impression he should make. . . . There is a wonderful Western which the Cinématheque had – I don’t know whether they still have it because preservation is not their strong point – and this is a picture from about 1910 or 1911 about two Parisians who are hijacked into playing Indians in a Western in the Bois de Boulogne [Les aventures de trois peaux-rouges à Paris, in which Hamman appeared]. They’re just dressed in loincloths and when the shooting is over they have to get back to Paris dressed like that. It’s really funny!
JE – Are there any film-makers of the post-war period who you feel showed a particular aptitude for marrying image and sound in a silent film sense?
KB – Well, nothing jumps into my head but there is a director who’s totally overlooked and who fills your bill, and that’s Andrew L. Stone. He shot pictures with whatever he could get on the sound and whatever he could get with a wide-open lens. He just did it, and the results are very impressive. He made a series of very realistic thrillers in the Forties and Fifties – well worth looking at. One of his later films was called The Last Voyage [1960]. He was travelling across the Atlantic and, as he was shaving in the morning, he looked through the porthole and he saw the Îsle de France on its last voyage. And being a film director he said, “I want that!†And he had to go to the Japanese scrap yard, which of course was run by gangsters who did a deal and then reneged on it, so he had a terrible time making the film. But it’s got a scene which even the makers of Titanic didn’t think of, and that is – the two characters are running along the deck full-tilt with the camera right below them, pulling back until it goes underwater. That is quite a shot.
Later on, following an involuntary mistaken identity routine which seemed oddly appropriate to the event, I managed to track down Daniel Fitzpatrick, the Festival Director
JE – Can you tell me something about the origins of the festival?
DF – The festival came out of our relationship with a film-maker called Andrew Legge, who made a contemporary silent film called The Unusual Adventures of Henry Cavendish. Fionnuala Aston-Ardee, who’s the director of Killruddery Arts, had the idea of having young Irish film-makers present a film and/or a short film and then select a film to go with it. So Andrew was presenting his silent short and instead of selecting a film to go with it, he said what I’d really like to do is have Kevin Brownlow come and select a silent film. So we got in touch with Kevin and he came over and did that, and we just started a relationship with Kevin then and from that, the next thing we did was a season of silent films. It started as a one-off event, then a short season spread over four weeks, and last year was our first actual festival. So initially it came out of our connection with Kevin but also from the response we got both to it and to Killruddery itself as an environment for screenings, which was really strong.
JE – How would you describe the aims of the festival?
DF – In general, we try to broaden the spectrum of people’s understanding of silent film, and also to give an overview that avoids the more typical assumptions that people make about silent cinema – that it’s all just melodrama and comedy shorts. Then this year, I decided we’d just push it a little bit more, so we have nearly twice the screenings we had last year, again with a very strong selection of silent films put together with Kevin but added to that we have this other strand referred to in the undertitle, Celebrating Lost, Overlooked and Forgotten Cinema, which allows the inclusion of more contemporary films which have, for whatever reason, fallen by the wayside.
JE – Why did you choose a very recent film like The New World?
DF – Well, for me The New World is an exceptionally good film that really didn’t get any recognition on its release – it played for two weeks or less here in Ireland. I think for such a big-budget, mainstream film, it’s a minor miracle. It’s very rarely a film of that scale and scope works as well or is as ambitious as that, and I think that Terrence Malick is doing things with the film form in that film that are just really dramatic, new and interesting, as well as really expanding on stuff he’s done previously.
JE – You’ve also included The Parallax View, which would be of particular interest to readers of Cinema Retro.
DF – The Parallax View came out of the relationship we started with a video essayist called Matt Zoller Seitz. He created a blog called The House Next Door and then he was a New York Times film critic who quit print journalism to become a video essayist and who makes video essays for the Museum of the Moving Image. I asked him if he’d like to select a film for the programme and The Parallax View was the first title he said. . . . We showed it at 10:00 o’clock at night, so everybody was rolling out of that movie at about midnight, bleary-eyed after a day full of films. And it really provoked people, they just loved it and were discussing the ins-and-outs of it into the small hours.
JE – How was Seven Days to Noon received?
DF – Very well - in spite of John Boorman’s introduction! I’d approached John for two reasons: one, because I appreciate his film-making – particular periods more than others, but I think he’s a wonderful film-maker. But probably even more than that, personally I think he’s a really good film writer – the Projections publications were really important to me as a young film student. And I just find he writes really well about film and obviously has an in-depth knowledge of film history. . . .
So I spoke to him and invited him to select a film and he gave us, I think, two options and Seven Days to Noon was one of them. The second was The Birth of a Nation, which I didn’t quite feel was overlooked enough. So I looked at Seven Days and thought it was a pretty strong film. Kevin also talks about how it had a huge influence on him as a film-maker, and you can see that when you watch it, you can see It Happened Here in it. Anyway, John came and introduced the film and he says, “I got the film in the post last week and I watched it and I was hugely disappointed. It turns out it just wasn’t the film I remember it being, so I was about to ring and cancel the screening and then I thought, well I’ve sat through it so you may as well . . .†Absolutely hilarious introduction to a film. So that was amusing, but the crowd response to the film was great. They loved it.â€
So there you have it. Next year, hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to this fascinating festival with the prospect of actually seeing some films, and perhaps continuing my conversation with St. Kevin of the Silent Screen. Further information on the Festival and other events at Killruddery House can be found on www.killruddery.com