Archival Spaces

411: Giornate del cinema muto

Archival Spaces 411

Weimar Uncensored

Uploaded 30 October 2026

This year’s Giornate del cinema muto presented a program of films made after the German Revolution, “Weimar Uncensored: Taboos and Transgressions in German Cinema, 1919-1920,” curated by Michael Cowan and Anton Kaes, when on November 12, 1918, the interim government abolished censorship; the Reichslichtspielgesetz of May 20^th 1920 reestablished censorship throughout the Republic, placing oversight with local police authorities. So-called Aufklärungsfilme (enlightenment films) which broke taboos flourished, like Different from the Others (1919, Richard Oswald), the first gay film to treat homosexuals as ordinary human beings or films about women’s unbridled sexual desire, as in Genuine (1920, Robert Wiene). As the curators write, these films “collectively map an entire landscape of transgression: crime, drugs… gambling, rage, illness, hypnosis, insanity, Satanism, blasphemy, death, and pestilence personified.” Unfortunately, the vast majority of films produced were later destroyed or disappeared, considered Schund (trash).

**Pola Negri in *Bestia/The Polish Dancer* (1917, Aleksander Hertz, PL, 1917) Filmoteka Narodowa, Warszawa**

However, I begin with another Pordenone film, Bestia (1917, The Polish Dancer, Alexandr Hertz), starring Pola Negri, who discovered by Ernst Lubitsh would become one of Germany’s biggest stars, before going to Hollywood. Her film, one of the only Polish films to survive from the period, could have been included in the Weimar program, given its frank expression of female sexuality. While historical sources describe it as the first of Negri’s many roles es a vamp, a maneater, ruthlessly destroying male victims, the film actually illustrates female victimhood and male violence against women. Pola plays a young girl, beaten by her father, thrown from her home, then trusts her friend Dmitri who attempts to seduce her. She steals his money, promising to pay him back, then becomes a cabaret dancer, before beginning a relationship with a man who promises to marry her, but is actually married. An old story, she falls into prostitution, but is ultimately murdered by Dmitri. An “Apache dance,” in which she wears a black satin dress, foregrounds her eroticism, a scene clearly influenced by Asta Nielsen in Afgrunden (1910). Unfortunately, the only surviving print was a reedited American version from the 1920s, whose contrasty black and white can’t be fixed even by digital restoration.

**Hans Mierendorf, Agnes Straub in *Die Teufelskirche* (1919), Eye Museum, Amsterdam**

Die Teufelskirche (1919, Hans Mierendorf, The Devil’s Church) opens with an expressionist image of a hazy figure running along the sea shore, while silhouettes of deformed bare trees rush by in the foreground, before cutting to a handful of parishioners leaving a country church in the North German heath. We soon realize it is the devil himself we have initially seen, as he seduces a young wife, yearning for a child, who becomes a wanton soul. The pastor, wishing for a new, magnificent church also succumbs to the devil’s charms. Finally, all is revealed to be the dream of the young husband who had denied selling his land to the parish for a new church, but who had been happily married, despite being childless. Although the film is missing two reels, it is the image of the peasant wife, her healthy and earthy sexuality, symbolized by her amply exposed breasts that mitigates the film’s anxieties about sex.

**Gertrude Hoffmann, Carl Beckersachs, Mia Pankau in *Heddas Rache* (1919), Eye Museum, Amsterdam**

**Unidentified performers, *Heddas Rache*, Eye Museum, Amsterdam**

Like so many films in this program, Heddas Rache (1919, Japp Speyer, Hedda’s Revenge) expresses social Angst regarding young women falling into prostitution. Hedda (Hedda Vernon) attends a girl’s boarding school, financed by her absent mother. When she wishes to marry the middle-class Bernd, his friend Georg (Reinhold Schünzel) warns him, she is the daughter of a madame in a brothel, ending the engagement. On her mother’s deathbed, she confesses to Hedda that Georg’s father, Henry, had seduced and abandoned her leading her into prostitution. Hedda takes over her mother’s business, modernizes it (with Bernd’s money) and swears revenge by corrupting Henry’s children. The film’s anger is clearly directed at the hypocrisy of bourgeois men who seduce and abandon innocent women and frequent houses of prostitution, while pretending to be morally above reproach. To make the point, the bourgeois homes and bordellos are visually identical. Women’s only agency against male violence is to exploit men through sex.

**Asta Nielsen, Conrad Veidt in *Der Reigen* (1920), Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin**

Der Reigen (1920, Richard Oswald, Merry-Go-Round), – unrelated to Arthur Schnitzler’s play, again features sexual dependency and prostitution. Elena (Asta Nielsen) is kicked out of her middle-class home by her mother and falls prey to Peter, a musician (Conrad Veidt), who attempts to prostitute her. She escapes his clutches to become a governess and then wife of a wealthy bourgeois, but is blackmailed by Peter, leading to her husband’s death, her murder of her pimp and her own suicide. While Elena is a victim of male perfidy, she is also a slave to her sexual desire, Nielsen playing the role ambiguously, caught in a web of bourgeois morality that cannot allow for female desire.

**Ernst Deutsch, Hedda Vernon in *Blondes Gift* (1919), Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin**

Blondes Gift (1919, Hubert Moest, Blond Poison), as the title suggests, offers an amoral and unscrupulous gold digger whose only goal is her own pleasure. Loni, a working-class orphan, re-meets Rolf von Roem (Conrad Veidt), a wealthy aristocrat she had known as a child and sees her chance for riches. Sexually obsessed with Loni, Rolf marries her and then when she has spent every last penny he has, steals from his family for her. Meanwhile, Loni’s former lover, an ex-con (Reinhold Schünzel) returns, leading to a deadly altercation between the male rivals. While the film warns against the dangers for middle-class men of working class-women, it also points to the violence men perpetrate against women: Loni’s father had beaten her mother to death and her lover also likes beating her, making her a ruthless exploiter of men; in the last scene we see her seducing the cop investigating the deaths of her two lovers.

**Theodor Becker, Marga Kierska in Pest in Florenz (1919)**

In the big-budget Pest in Florenz (1919, Otto Rippert), with a script by Fritz Lang, a famous courtesan, big as a German Hausfrau, seduces in succession Lorenzo, the son of the city’s ruler and Franziskus, a religious hermit, while rejecting Cesare, Lorenzo’s father. Cesare’s extreme religious repression subsequently leads to the city’s revolt (and his death at the hands of the son), Florence succumbing to orgiastic sexual desire, at least until the plague arrives, moral corruption collapsing all authority. In an image rife with Freudian symbolism, even the pious hermit surrenders to sexual desire, cutting down a wooden cross he had erected from a tree trunk. Unfortunately, Rippert’s overlong scenes in long shot of orgies and mass death are visually boring, the film’s 102-minute running time a torture for the audience.

**Anders Wikmann, Marga Kierska in *Pest in Florenz* (1919), Cinematheque royale de Belgique, Brussels**

410: The Slanderers (1924) restored

Archival Spaces 410:

New Restoration Screened at 2^nd L.A. Silent Film Festival

Uploaded 16 October 2026

The 2^nd Los Angeles Silent Film Festival, held at the American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz 3 cinema from 11-13 September, premiered two restorations from the HMH Film Archive at USC: Help Yourself (1927), an Al Brendel comedy one-reeler, and the Universal programmer, The Slanderers (1924), directed by Nat Ross, and starring Johnnie Walker, Gladys Hulette, and Billy Sullivan; the latter was considered a lost film, until film archivist Dino Everette’s colleague, Tom Barnes, pulled the 16mm print from a stack of films in the Adam Reilly Collection and suggested it would make a good candidate for digital restoration. Dino who was student at UCLA and employee in the Archive, has been director of the Archive for 16 years.

**Al Brendel in *Help Yourself* (1927, Joe Pasternak)**

**Johnnie Walker, Gladys Hulette, Billy Sullivan in *The Slanderers* (1924)**

In 1949, Universal, then under the moniker of Universal-International, made the decision to burn its entire nitrate holdings from the silent period in order to reclaim the silver. All 5,553 films that Universal had produced between 1912 and 1930 disappeared in the flames. As a result, the only Universal silents that survive are either 35mm nitrate distribution prints in international film archives or so-called Universal “Show-At-Homes,” 16mm prints. Just as Kodak had distributed 16mm “Kodascopes” through its Kodascope Library from 1924 to 1939, Universal began selling Show-at-Home 16mm prints of its back catalogue, through camera stores, beginning in the mid-1920s. Unlike the Kodascope library, whose films were rented to customers, Show-At-Homes were sold outright to owners of 16mm Kodascope projectors. The going price was about $20 a reel, and, according to film collector Jack Theakson, they were printed off camera negatives. The surviving print of The Slanderers has a 1939 edge code, according to Isabella Scaffide, who worked with Everett on the restoration, so it was probably produced at the very end of the cycle.

As a melodrama, The Slanderers was clearly addressed to Universal’s core rural audience. A farming family, consisting of two brothers, Johnnie and Larry Calkin, an old mother, and a young (orphaned?) woman, Gladys Grey, are threatened by a violent, uncaring uncle who wants to sell the farm and evict his sister. When Larry confronts Uncle Todd Calkins, who earlier brutally beat Larry, the uncle dies of a stroke, but it is Johnnie who is arrested because the younger brother has enlisted to fight in World War I, and Johnnie had been heard threatening the uncle. He is acquitted, but the townspeople of West Paradise ostracize the family, thinking he is guilty, and after the mother’s death, attempt to put Gladys into a home for wayward women. Although both brothers initially love Gladys, Larry steps back after returning to the town as a war hero, while silencing the harpies.

The 16mm print of The Slanderers was scanned with a 5K Kinetta digital scanner, which Everett swears by for its versatility. It can handle virtually any format, whether 9.5 mm, 16mm, 28mm, or35mm, whether shrunken or with torn or missing sprocket holes, because the Kinetta uses neither sprockets nor conventional rollers, but rather 3” Particle Transfer Rollers, which remove most dust and surface debris from the film. For further visual clean-up and stabilization, Everett used VIVA Digital Film Restoration software by Algosoft Tech. The restoration of Help Yourself was sourced from two different 16mm reels in the collection of Louie Despres, one a re-edited single-reel sound version, the second a reel of outtakes that were intermixed with outtakes from another film entitled Social Error (1922).

The Slanderers was directed by Nat Ross, whose main claim to fame was directing numerous episodes of Universal’s highly successful short film series (46 episodes), The Collegians (1926-29). Produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr., the films depicted the four years of college life of protagonist Ed Benson, played by George J. Lewis, with Dorothy Gulliver as June Maxwell, and Eddie Phillips as Don Tren. Nat Ross, allegedly a nephew of Carl Laemmle, sen., spent his whole career at Universal, directing more than 60 films, mostly shorts, before his career more or less ended in 1931. Johnnie Walker began his film career at Edison, became a star at Fox Film Company, and then played leads throughout the 1920s at various studios, but he did not survive the transition to sound; one of his best-known roles was in James Cruze’s Old Ironsides (1926). Interestingly, Billy Sullivan, who played the younger brother, was actually three years older and looked older in the film. Sullivan had started in 1914, was a featured player, including in his own series in the late 1920s, but played only bits in the sound period.

In the 1920s, slightly less than 50% of the American population lived in rural areas, yet Hollywood films about farming communities were rare, Tol’able David (1921) and Sunrise (1927) being outstanding examples, while Charles Ray’s The Ole Swimming Hole (1921) was a spectacular box office failure. The Slanderers focuses on vicious gossiping, busy-body small-towners, and the economic peril farmers experience; its harsh social critique is rare for Hollywood. Aware of the strict morality of its audience, Universal passed over the fact that Johnnie and Gladys live alone under the same roof, showing them to be in love, but without having sex. Meanwhile, Larry fights in the war and is sleeping with a French girl, but we only see her photo.

Congratulations to USC for reviving this rather unique and interesting view of rural America in the 1920s.

**A World War I hero’s welcome in *The Slanderers* (1924)**

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 camera into 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 Sehnsucht* (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)