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409: Bonn Silent Film Festival III

Archival Spaces 409:

Stummfilmtage Bonn 2026

Uploaded 2 October 2026

*The Garden of Eden* (1928, Lewis Milestone). Photo: San Francisco Film Preserve

This is the final installment of my report on this year’s Silent Film Festival in Bonn, Germany. Thursday’s program (8/20/26) began with two religiously themed films, Béhula (1922) and L’Inferno (1911). The former is an exceedingly rare 1920s film from India, a country where probably 97% of silents are lost. The film is based on a Bengali legend about the Hindu serpent goddess Manasa, who takes revenge on a rich merchant who defies her. His newlywed son is killed, leading Béhula, the bride, to argue her case at a heavenly tribunal. Starring the Anglo-Indian actress Patience Cooper, the film was restored in 4K from a nitrate print, without intertitles, belonging to the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé. Pathé cameraman Camille Legrand directed the mythological drama in Calcutta for cinema mogul Jamshedji Framji Madan. While some of the sets are paper, the art direction takes inspiration from Hindu folk art; the film’s narrative construction and editing are not without some sophistication.

*Béhula* (1921). Photo: Fondation Jérôme-Seydoux–Pathé

L’Inferno / Dante’s Inferno (1911, Francesco Bertolini, et/ al.) was digitized in 2021 in 4K by the Cineteca di Bologna from 35mm safety elements, struck in 2007 at the British Film Institute from a nitrate print, and two acetate dupe negatives from the Danish Film Institute and the National Film Institute Bulgaria. Regarded as Italy’s first feature film, L’Inferno initiated Italy’s cycle of historical epic films from antiquity, premiering weeks before Giovane Pastrone’s The Fall of Troy (1911), and was successfully distributed in the United States. Based on Dante’s first cantica of The Divine Comedy, the poet Virgil guides Dante through the many circles of Hell. Dante hears the stories of some of the sinners, e.g., Francesca di Rimini and her brother/lover, Paolo, their stories shown in flashbacks. Hell itself consists mostly of long shots taken in a barren mountainous landscape and on studio sets, reminiscent of Georges Méliès, both in their layered construction and sophisticated use of multiple exposures. Through careful camera placement, putting sinners in the foreground and Dante and Virgil in the background, the film creates “giants” who take the pair to the next lower level of hell. The tinting further enhances L’Inferno’s visual flair. Interestingly, the film pays particular attention to two historical Popes, Anastasius II and Nicholas III, burning in hell for committing heresy and simony, respectively.

*The Garden of Eden* (1928) with Corrine Griffith and Charles Ray, Photo: San Francisco Film Preserve

The Garden of Eden (1928, Lewis Milestone) was digitally restored in 2025 by the San Francisco Film Preserve from a 35mm acetate print at George Eastman Museum, and shots from material at the Library of Congress. An original Technicolor sequence does not survive. Corinne Griffith stars as Toni, a Viennese woman who wants to become an opera singer but ends up in a Budapest cabaret, where she is almost seduced by Henri. With Rosa, her wardrobe woman, she flees to Monte Carlo, the city of counterfeit counts, where Rosa turns out to be a real Baroness. There she meets and falls in love with the wealthy Richard Dupont (Charles Ray). At the planned wedding, Henri arrives, the groom’s uncle, leading to numerous complications. Based on a German play of the same name from 1926, written by Rudolph Bernauer and Rudolf Österreicher, who had together written numerous successful comedies and an operetta, the film offered the kind of fantasy Hollywood loved. Milestone, not known for comedy, adds some Lubitsch touches, but Ray is pale as the romantic lead.

*Adam a Eva* (1922, Václav Binovec). Photo: Narodni filmovy archiv, **Prague**

Adam and Eva (1921, Vaclav Binovec) is a Czech comedy, written by the film’s star, Suzanne Marville, who plays a double role; the film was digitized in 2023 from a 35mm dupe negative in the collections of the Národní filmový archiv, Prague. Adam and Eva are fraternal twins who, as children, constantly play tricks on each other and grow up with an intense animosity between them. When, as 16-year-olds, Eva attracts a suitor, Adam decides to dress up as Eva and cause trouble. Meanwhile, Eva realizes what is going on, dons male attire as Adam, and convinces their father to follow the couple. After Adam as Eva kisses Dr. Novotný, Eva as Adam asks for a kiss, leading to the father thrashing both of them, before cutting off Eva’s hair because he thinks she’s Adam. The gender complications and confusions wrought by the cross-dressing twins are intensified because the audience knows both roles are played by Marville, one of Czech cinema’s biggest stars in the 1920s.

*Dr. Bessels Verwandlung* (1927, Richard Oswald) with Hans Stuwe and Agnes Petersen. Photo: DFF / Filmarchiv Austria

An original nitrate negative of Dr. Besels Verwandlung/The Fugitive Love (1927, Richard Oswald) at Filmarchiv Austria, as well as two nitrate positives of the French (CNC Paris) and English (BFI London) export versions, were utilized by Filmarchiv Austria and the Deutsches Filminstitut & Museum to create a 4K digital master in 2024/25 that is complete, except for three minutes. The intertitles, featuring unique design elements, were taken from the original negative. Oswald, one of the most prolific filmmakers of the Weimar Republic, directs an essentially pacifist film about a German soldier who returns to the Western front in 1918 after he learns his wife has cheated on him. Wounded, he removes the dog tags from a dead French soldier and takes his place in France, even falling in love with the soldier’s wife. In several scenes with Curt Bois and Ilka Gruening (both later featured in Casablanca), playing Polish Jews, the film exposes French antisemitism, and its pacifism is expressed in frequent shots of war-wounded without limbs walking the streets. Nevertheless, a ponderous film, given that the German risks being shot as a spy and puts both his own family in Germany and his adopted family in France through much pain, simply because he can’t face his cheating wife? A little weird.

Bonn’s silent film festival featured numerous excellent restorations in a diverse program this year. Happily, Oliver Hanley, who has taken a position as Head of Collections and Deputy Director of Filmmuseum Potsdam, will continue as co-curator of Bonn’s silent film festival next year.

*Adam a Eva (*1922). A gay kiss? Photo: Narodni filmovy archiv, **Prague**

408: Bonn Silent Film Festival II

Archival Spaces 408:

Summfilmtage Bonn 2026

Uploaded 18 September 2026

*Shadows of the Big City* (1925, Willi Wolff) with Ellen Richter slumming it in Parisian Apache Bar.

The Bonn Silent Film Festival’s online streaming program continued after its opening film, The Saga of Gosta Berling (See Archival Spaces 407) with Kid Boots (1926, Frank Tuttle), starring Eddie Cantor and Clara Bow. The film was digitally restored in 2021 from a 1926 work print and a 4^th generation safety positive from 1966 by the Film Preservation Society and Paramount. Being Cantor’s first film, after he had starred in the Broadway stage play by the same name, the film is a trifle. Its fast-paced comedy translates to the screen with much physical slapstick, facilitated by Cantor’s talent for extreme body contortions. Cantor as Kid Boots is an inept tailor fleeing an irate customer, who meets and instantly falls in love with the customer’s girlfriend (Clara Bow), then hooks up with a wealthy acquaintance trying to make his divorce legal. It’s all quite silly, but Clara Bow is always worth the price of admission.

**Eddie Cantor** **contorted in *Kid Boots* (1926)**

**Lulu McGrath in *Wonders of the Sea* (1922)**

Wonders of the Sea (1922), directed by J. Ernest Williamson and photographed by his brother, George M. Williams, the team had, for the first time, shot moving-image footage deep below the ocean’s surface, using his specially constructed submarine, the “Photosphere,” in Thirty Leagues under the Sea (1914). The 4 K restoration by the Austrian Film Museum in 2026 is based on a 35mm nitrate print of the French release version, with additional material coming from a nitrate print sourced from the Eye Museum, Amsterdam. The editing and color scheme are based on prints from Brussels and the Cinémathèque Française, while the intertitles were translated from the French, with its typography based on a reel from the National Sound and Film Archive of Australia. In the one-hour documentary, we see a young woman swimming in coral reefs off Bermuda, and two divers explore shipwrecks and battle a dangerous Mora Eel, a giant octopus, and a shark. The m most interesting aspect of this documentary fiction is that the film visualizes its own means of production, the tube leading down to the submarine, the camera and operator at the bottom, pointing the camerainto the ocean beyond the glass.

*Schatten der Weltstadt* (1925, Willi Wolff) with Ellen Richter, **revealing her** **scars.**

*Bubis Locken* (1919, Hanna Hening) Photo: Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum

Schatten der Weltstadt/Shadows of the City (1925) was first restored in analog by the Bundesarchiv from an original nitrate negative in 2008, then digitized in 2016 in 2K, while the tinting scheme is based on an original nitrate print and tinting instructions on the negative. The film opens with a montage of urban scenes and a suicide, then cuts to a posh private reception where a newly minted police prefect pimps his own wife (Ellen Richter), then, ends up dead. Paris is a two-class society, rich and very poor. The wife, who has her own lover, is acquitted of murder, but everyone believes she is guilty, so she investigates and finds the killer herself. Ellen Richter, Germany’s action-adventure queen in the 1920s, plays a battered woman, all the men in her life physically and mentally abusing her. This film perfectly embodies German cinema’s sophisticated replication of American crime genre narratives, however, with a darkness never seen in Hollywood.

Bubis Locken (1919) is an unidentified short film in the “Bubi” series, directed by Hanna Henning, one of Germany’s first woman directors, a metteur en scene who focused on children to explore issues of gender. The film was digitized in 4K from a surviving 16mm print by the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmarchiv, Frankfurt. It’s a sweet film about a sixth grader who gets his baby curls cut, since he is about to become a teenager, but has to learn that messing with the love life of his older brother has consequences.

*Die Grosse Sehnsuch* (1930, István Székely) with Paul Kemp as assistant to **the assistant.**

Die große Sehnsucht/The Great Yearning (1930, István Székely), opens in a motion picture studio, where a sound film musical is being shot. It stars Camila Horn as an ambitious extra, who lands a starring role, but sacrifices her boyfriend in the process. I had seen the sound version three years ago at Hamburg’s Cinefest, but Bonn screened the silent version, which was distributed in German cinemas not yet wired for sound. While the film visualizes the technical details of the new sound process, – the studio floor is always filled with people! – making the film self-reflexive a priori, the silent film seems even more self-aware, thanks to intertitles that tell us what we see, e.g., when Luis Trenker is seen in the studio cafeteria with Elga Brink and Hans Adelbert von Schlettow, he is told he will be in a scene of The Great Yearning; Harry Liedke is asked to do a walk-on as he is walking on. Later at a private studio party, Maria Paudler and a male colleague spoof Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, a film that had only been released five months earlier. Both that film and Sehnsucht include songs by Frederick Hollander, who would work for Lubitsch in Hollywood, as would Paul Dessau, a composer close to Brecht. Die große Sehnsucht featured cameos from more than a dozen German film stars, including Lil Dagover, Anny Ondra, Olga Tschechowa, Charlotte Susa, Gustav Diesel, Karl Huszar-Puffy (Charles Puffy), Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Fritz Rasp, and Conrad Veidt, of whom four went into exile. After 1933, director Steve Sekely returned briefly to his native Hungary, before landing in Hollywood, as would assistant director Laszlo Benedek, supervisor Curtis Bernhardt, and producer Joe Pasternak. Unlike American films with heterosexual romance reaffirmed, the “Happy End” here is the film’s wrap, with not a spot of sentimentality for the dumped boyfriend.

(To be continued)

**Die grosse Sehnsucht (1930, Steve Sekely). The fictional film crew. Photo: Filmmuseum Potsdam**

407: Bonn Silent Film Festival

Archival Spaces 407:

The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924, Maurice Stiller)

Uploaded 4 September 2026

This year’s Silent Film Festival in Bonn, Germany, was held between 13 and 22 August 2026. The open-air festival in Bonn included 14 features and six shorts. An abridged program was available for streaming here in Germany, but did not include the features: The Overcoat (1926, Kozintsev/Trauberg), National Customs (1935, China), Robinson on His Own (1929, Lazar Frenkel), as well as all the shorts, except the German, Bubi’s Haircut (1919). The streaming program opened with a new restoration of the two-part The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924), directed by Maurice Stiller, from Selma Lageröf’s novel.

*The Saga of Gösta Berling* with Lars Hanson

When The Saga of Gösta Berling was released in 1924, both parts had a combined length of 4,534 meters, or 221 minutes at 18 fps. I first saw a 35mm print at the George Eastman Museum in the 1970s; it being one of James Card’s prized possessions because it’s Greta Garbo’s first starring role. The American release version I saw had been cut down to a single feature of under two hours. In 1975, the Swedish Film Institute completed an analog restoration that ran 184 minutes, which is available on YouTube with English titles and was released by Kino International.

The digital version shown in Bonn is based on the analog reconstruction from 2018, with some new editing. The main source for the reconstruction was a duplicate positive from the Swedish Film Institute, made from the film’s original nitrate negatives. Several scenes were extended from an additional duplicate positive and negative, and a tinted nitrate print from the Cinemateca Portuguesa (Lisbon). Two b/w acetate prints held by Gosfilmofond (Moscow) were also utilized. Tinted nitrate prints from the Cinémathèque française (Paris) and the Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin), were consulted for continuity.

**Mona Mårtenson as Ebba and Lars Hanson as Gösta** **Berling**

**Hansen with **Jenny Hasselquist** as Marianne Sinclaire**

The film’s intertitles have been recreated from an original text list submitted to the censorship authorities. Only three of the intertitles, originally designed by Alva Lundi, survived, so all 405 titles were recreated, using the design as an inspiration for the font. The original intertitles had drawings and illustrations, which couldn’t be recreated. The tinting colors were recreated from the Portuguese print. The intertitles’ toned color is based on a description in a contemporary trade paper.

**Hansen and Greta Garbo as Elizabeth Dohna**

**Gerda Lundequist as Mistress Margaretha Samzelius**

The present digital restoration, completed in 2024, runs 204 minutes, although some of the length may be due to the film being streamed at the correct speed, instead of at 24 fps of the Kino version. Comparing the two versions, the image quality of the new restoration is much clearer and cleaner, the result of digitizing the nitrate negatives. It is fully tinted in brilliant colors, rather than all b & w, the red from the burning of the mansion being particularly impressive. As was the custom in European silent cinema, titles marking the separate beginnings and ends of acts have been added, while all titles are held longer than in the English translations. Finally, the editing is much more complex with more close-ups and cross-cutting, as well as many more shots within reordered scenes. In some cases, new material has been added, e.g., when Berling remembers in a flashback reading to Elizabeth, the interpolation consists of numerous shots and not just the single image in the Kino version.

The plot of the two-part film is too involved to repeat here in full, but the story essentially related the fate of a defrocked Lutheran minister, played by Lars Hanson, who loses his pulpit because he is a drunk and insults his congregation. He leaves and, in the following, has relationships with three women: Tutor to Ebba Dohna, the stepdaughter of the mistress of Borg, Berling flees when Ebba, who is in love, hears he has been defrocked, and dies. Berling is taken in by Margaretha, the mistress of Ekeby Manor, making him one of her “Cavaliers.” There, Berling is kissed on stage by Marianne Sinclair during a pantomime skit, leading her father to disown her; finding her lying in the snow, Berling hides her in Ekeby, where she contracts smallpox, and rejects Berling’s marriage proposal. Meanwhile, Margarethe’s own past is exposed by a Cavalier, and her husband bans her. Margarethe later returns to Ekeby and burns it down; Berling rescues Marianne, then finds Elisabeth Dohna, who had in Italy illegally married her step-brother, Henrik, wandering over the frozen lake. After Ekeby has been rebuilt, Margarethe turns the keys over to Berling and Elizabeth who have married.

The many intrigues and reversals of fortune are indeed melodramatic, but the film’s epic scope is reinforced through sumptuous sets and costumes. Many scenes offer real spectacle, e.g., the burning of Ekeby and the sleigh ride across the ice, as wolves chase the couple. Greta Garbo, who plays Elizabeth, is luminous, – one immediately understands why G.W. Pabst brought her to Germany for The Joyless Street – as is Gerda Lundquist as Margarethe, the mistress of Ekeby. Framing the drama is Stiller’s harsh and beautiful Swedish winter landscape, a fitting metaphor for the cruelty of life in this masterpiece of world cinema.

*“Gösta* Berlings lies here.” Image courtesy Svenska Filminstitutet

406: Letty Lynton Restored

Archival Spaces 406:

Letty Lyndon (1932) screened at American Legion Hollywood

Uploaded 21 August 2026

**Robert Montgomery, Joan Crawford in *Letty Lynton* (1932, Clarence Brown)**

On 25 July 2026, the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles and Hollywood Heritage presented a matinee screening of Clarence Brown’s Letty Lynton (1932), a film starring Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery, and Nils Asther, which had not been available for public performance for ninety years. Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, when Crawford had reached A-list status, after her huge success in Grand Hotel (1932), next to Greta Garbo no less, Letty Lynton saw Crawford switching from hard-working-class social climbers to upper-crust women of privilege. The film was a monster success, but was eventually pulled from circulation by Loew’s Inc., due to a lawsuit brought by the authors of a successful 1930 Broadway play, “Dishonored Lady;” the playwrights claiming the film had violated their copyright.

The film opens on a disreputable street in Montevideo, where socialite Letty Lynton (Crawford) is dancing the night away with a slimy gigolo Emile Renaul (Asther), but apparently is ready to end the three-month affair. He refuses to accept her decision, so she hops on a steamer to New York with her maid, Miranda (Louise Closser Hale), meeting and falling in love on board with Jerry Darrow, a wealthy American heir; they become engaged. To her horror, Renaul is on the dock waiting to take her back to South America, and later turns up at her mother’s Park Ave address, attempting to blackmail her with her love letters and forcing her to meet him at his hotel that evening, even though she is to leave for Upstate to meet Darrow’s parents. Letty is eventually accused of murder, but the D.A. (Lewis Stone) cannot prosecute because Darrow, Letty’s mother, and the maid are ready to testify that Letty was with Darrow at the time of the murder.

MGM’s balance sheets noted that Letty Lynton pulled in $754,000 domestically (including Canada) and $418,000 in foreign markets, with estimated profits of $390,000 ($9,508,200 in 2026). The film was ostensibly based on a 1931 novel, Letty Lynton, by Marie Belloc Lowndes, which in turn fictionalized the historical case of Madeleine Hamilton Smith, a Scottish woman who in 1857 was accused of murdering her lover with arsenic, after he threatened to expose her love letters; she was acquitted of one count, the jury returning a second verdict of “not proven.”

However, authors Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes based their play “Dishonored Lady” on the same historical case. To make matters worse, MGM had attempted to acquire the play, but refused to pay the $30,000 price tag, purchasing Lowndes’ novel for a mere $3,000. Another problem was that the Hays Office refused to approve the play, given they considered the story to be about a “nymphomaniac.” In the subsequent lawsuit, the authors sued for copyright infringement and plagiarism. In July 1939, the Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, awarding them one-fifth of Letty Lynton’s profits. In 1947, Hedy Lamarr’s production company produced Dishonored Lady, which is credited to the Sheldon/Barnes play, but only resembles it very loosely.

**Lewis Stone, Crawford, May Robson, Montgomery in D.A.’s Office**

The underlying copyright did not expire until 2025, at which time Crawford’s grandson, Casey LaLonde, contacted Warner Brothers, stating it was legally safe to screen the film, and that the company which owns rights to all pre-1986 MGM films, only had a limited window to release the film, before Letty Lynton would itself fall into the public domain in 2027. As in the case of a number of other pre-Code Joan Crawford films, MGM had made 35mm preservation masters in the 1960s, which became the basis for Warner Brothers’ subsequent 4 K restoration, thanks to George Feltenstein, Warner-Discovery library historian, who advocated for the film. The new premiere took place earlier this year at the TCM Film Festival in Hollywood and was released on Blu-ray on 30 June; it has done so well that Warners released it on DVD on 14 July. The new version looks immaculate, highlighting the art deco sets and Crawford’s stark black and white outfits.

Before the screening at the American Legion, there was much discussion about costume designer Adrian’s dresses for Joan Crawford, in particular a white cotton organdy dress with puffy sleeves at the shoulder, which MGM had licensed to Macy’s, subsequently earning another fortune. However, the published story that the dress sold 50,000 copies appears to be apocryphal. Audience members who wore puffy-sleeved dresses to the screening were subsequently brought on stage for a photograph. The almost sold-out crowd seemingly enjoyed the pre-show and Joan Crawford in this pre-Code classic.

**Female audience members in puffy-sleeved dresses.**

While the film manages to make Lynton both guilty and not guilty of murder, thus satisfying possible objections from the Code Office, at least before the new Hays Office under Joseph Breen would most certainly have shut the film down, Crawford and the rest of the cast give very believable performances. It is also a very modern story, echoing today’s “Me Too” movement, especially when the villain beats up Letty for denying him sex and essentially keeping her in sexual bondage. Unfortunately, I also kept seeing Charlie Chan behind Asther’s villain.