Now Playing on Harpodeon

[donnie]

"He takes no chances on impure water or bad coffee—the home product is good enough for him..."

It's interesting how they give avoiding contaminated water as one of the advantages of using a Thermos. I wonder how common that problem actually was then.

By the way, I was reading that there were over 160 Bunnyfinches made. I wonder how many of them are extant. A tiny number, I suspect.

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

I think this is actually the first Bunnyfinch I've run across that was in decent condition.

It took some time to find the print this video was sourced from. It was released by Entertainment Films, I think it was, in the 1970s on 8mm, but it looks positively wretched. It doesn’t survive on 35mm, neither nitrate nor a safety copy, but UCLA has it on 16mm. UCLA is not like the Library of Congress. They don’t especially want their films seen and good luck working with them. As I said, it took some time and not an inconsiderable amount of money to track down another 16mm print.

By the way, I was reading that there were over 160 Bunnyfinches made. I wonder how many of them are extant. A tiny number, I suspect.

I’ve got six, I think, and I could lay my hands on a few more. EYE has several.

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

One of Larry Semon's best known two-reel shorts, The Sawmill (Vitagraph, 1922).

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

A Regiment of Two
Ira and his son-in-law pretend to enlist, but while on a fishing trip, they learn "their" regiment has been wiped out.

Starring Sidney Drew and Harry T Morey, with Edith Storey and a young Anita Stewart when she was still called Anna Stewart.

[donnie]

I loved that one! What a beautiful print. Edith Storey is wonderful in this one.

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

Different From the Others (Richard Oswald, 1919)

A man struggles with his sexuality while fighting a blackmailer who threatens to reveal that he is gay.

Really, it’s not Different from the Others, it’s Innocent but Outlawed!, the fifth chapter of the lecture film The Laws of Love. The feature length Different from the Others is almost surely lost. The half-length abridgment included in The Laws of Love, which was saved by virtue of being exported to Russia before Weimar Germany fell, excises the subplots revolving around Paul’s parents and Kurt’s sister.

There’s nothing resembling a cue sheet available, but I have read one newspaper article by someone who saw the film and they described the type of music played and specifically mentioned Ode to Joy for the scene where Paul meets Magnus Hirschfeld. My score is pretty much just an extrapolation of that.

[donnie]

Fascinating film! And amazingly revolutionary for this time. And what a beautiful, sharp print. Thanks for posting!

I thought Conrad Veidt was excellent—in fact all of the acting was effective. Reinhold Schünzel played the detestable Bolleck to the hilt—what a slimy character! In terms of the directing, I thought the scene where Paul and Bolleck struggled in the background with the inert and horror-sticken Kurt in the foreground was a brilliant stroke.

The half-length abridgment included in The Laws of Love, which was saved by virtue of being exported to Russia before Weimar Germany fell, excises the subplots revolving around Paul’s parents and Kurt’s sister.

It's interesting to think about how the abridgment might have affected the film in terms of effectiveness. In one way it seems the missing elements would have given more depth, in terms of how the playing out of the tragedy affected others; but in another sense, it seems it might have diluted things. What do you think?

There’s nothing resembling a cue sheet available, but I have read one newspaper article by someone who saw the film and they described the type of music played and specifically mentioned Ode to Joy for the scene where Paul meets Magnus Hirschfeld. My score is pretty much just an extrapolation of that.

Absolutely brilliant score, Dustin! The selection of pieces was spot-on and highly effective all through.

Edit: A couple more thoughts:

I noticed Tchaikovsky is mentioned, which surprised me. It's widely known now that he was gay, but I didn't think it probably was in 1919.

And on the score: I was also surprised when I saw the Mozart listed as the first score item. It certainly sounds atypical of him; but he did study Bach and got into a fugal kind of mode at times, if I remember. And the Chopin Prelude in D Flat—I had to look back again to see what that was, as it's been going through my head for awhile after watching this. I'm not usually a huge Chopin fan in general, but that makes such beautiful accompaniment for that type of silent scene.

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

It's certainly disappointing to lose Anita Berber's performance as Elsa, Kurt's sister. She actually is visible in the abridgment as the woman in almost center-frame in the lecture audience. On the whole, though, I'm not certain the additional subplots would have added much.

Kino released a roughly 50 minutes reconstruction fifteen or twenty years ago. They did what they could, but I have to say, it’s based on very little documentary evidence. There was no censorship in 1919 Weimar Germany, so there are no censorship records to draw from, and the Nazis burned whatever documents the Institute for Sexology held. There are a scant few newspaper reports from the film’s initial release. The same that I got the scoring clues from reported that the scene where Paul meets Magnus Hirschfeld contained three minutes of uninterrupted intertitles. It sounds like Hirschfeld’s comments to Paul as well as his entire lecture were all there in one place.

There’s something curious about the surviving Russian print. When exactly it was exported is in question — sometime between 1927, when The Laws of Love was released, and 1933, when Weimar fell and the Nazis came to power. It’s step-printed — that is, frames have been duplicated to bring the frame rate up from 18fps to sound speed, 24fps — and those iris effects used extensively in the film were added after the step-printing. They weren’t in the film originally.

[dustin@harpodeon.com]

I neglected to mention, regarding the Tchaikovsky reference, it’s entirely possible he wasn’t named in the 1919 version. The Laws of Love is from 1927 and who knows when the Russian print was struck. Outside of the Russian print, we really have no clue what the original titles were. There only ever existed forty prints of Different from the Others and, as I said, primary sources are lacking in the extreme.

The Russian print was unknown in the west until the 1970s. It was in the late 1980s that it first saw home release in the US, on a VHS tape that I have a copy of. Its titles are translated very, very approximately, and shortened quite a bit because the intertitles were replaced with subtitles and there plainly wasn't enough room. Most had no clue of the film’s existence (including me) before a clip of it was included in 1995's The Celluloid Closet.

On the topic of abridgments, I find them interesting, especially the 9.5mm home movie abridgments that so many films only exist on today. Some films abridge very easily, like Station Content (1918), which manages to effectively condenses almost the entire plot of the original into something a fifth of its length; and others, like Rival Tribes, provide only a choppy outline of The Captive God (1916). (And, incidentally, that’s also my policy in regards to what I title a video. I call my video of Station Content its original title because the abridgment is not all that different from it, even if the three home movie versions it was sourced from each carry different titles. I call the Captive God abridgment Rival Tribes because it really is quite a departure from the original.)

For a very long time, people discounted abridgements altogether. It was the standing policy of most archives until surprising recently to discard all their film elements of a title if any portion of them showed decomposition. It’s little wonder, then, that abridgments, which, by their very nature, are incomplete, were by and large ignored. For the longest time, it was only Harpodeon and one or two other smaller distributors that gave them the time of day.

The Mozart piece is played at a considerably slower tempo than intended. It’s not Baroque, of course, but especially in the case of Baroque music I use, I tend to drop the tempo dramatically. Baroque and jazz are very related and I find that, and at slower tempos, Baroque music sounds jazzy and not out of keeping with the silent film era.

[BettyLouSpence]

This is one I've been meaning to watch for awhile now, and I'm glad I got to do so with such a clear print and wonderful score. Thanks so much for sharing this film with us, Dustin, as well as some of the history behind it.

In terms of the directing, I thought the scene where Paul and Bolleck struggled in the background with the inert and horror-sticken Kurt in the foreground was a brilliant stroke.

I think that was my favorite scene. I can imagine the noise of the struggle is reduced to an echo in Kurt's head as he drops out of the world around him, consumed by his thoughts. Other scenes I liked for their poignancy, usually Paul's longing gazes but also when he's invited to a party and the women are trying to kiss him, and he finally has to break away and leave.

For a very long time, people discounted abridgements altogether. It was the standing policy of most archives until surprising recently to discard all their film elements of a title if any portion of them showed decomposition.

Wow! I did not know this.