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| The Red Spectre |
Saturday, 4th December 2010.
At the first of two afternoon screenings held at the Barbican, London as part of the 3rd Fashion In Film Festival, there was a hint of Oriental exoticism, and that was just in the audience. In today’s era of multiplexes and dressing down, there aren’t many screenings where you can find the audience sporting knee breeches, velvet smoking caps or Elizabethan ruffs. These homages to old school glamour perhaps reflect a recognition that today’s film stars don’t embody the style, mystique and poise of the film divas who were the focus of these rarely screened silent films.
Writer Anna Battista, resplendent in monochrome graphic print like one of the Red Queen’s playing cards, provided a brief introduction to the programme of shorts. At the turn of the 20th century, cinema was in its infancy and still regarded as a lower form of art than opera or theatre. One of the ways in which film innovators drew audiences to the cinema was through the magnetism of the divas – the dark haired and doomed heroines who became the glamorous focus of the extravagant cinematic creations of d’Annunzio and other Italian directors.
These divas inspired imitation among their fans. ‘Borellismo’ was the term coined to describe the craze for copying the style and mannerisms of actress Lyda Borelli – a fad which became ridiculous, said Battista, with some understatement, establishing that celebrity culture was a phenomenon decades before its current, sleazier incarnation.
Battista highlighted a recurring use of veils in these films as a metaphor for self transformation. Veils or draped fabrics feature in a form of movement known as the serpentine dance, which occured again and again in these shorts. The dance rose to fame at the Folies Bergère revue in the 19th century, and used the swirling movement of a full skirt, cloak or veils in a figure of eight movement, creating an illusion reminiscent of butterfly wings. The draping of the costumes also resembled the sleeves of a kimono, a reminder that the perceived exoticism of the middle and Far East was also a source of fascination to western audiences at this time.
The veil has an obvious eroticism, hinting at rather than revealing the form beneath, disclosing only obliquely. Battista told us that the divas’ characters nearly always died at the end of their films, but didn’t go on to draw out the implicit point that, despite audiences being fascinated by the divas, they were still uncomfortable with the women’s portrayal of sexual power. The repeated juxtaposition in these shorts of the diva and the devil suggests that society’s appreciation of the seductive glamour of the diva was accompanied by a suspicion that it was likely as not the path to moral destruction.
The festival’s programme comprised early cinematic pieces which explored these motifs of the diva, the devil, the veil and the serpentine dance. Not only was this festival a rare chance to see these shorts, but these screenings were made even more special by a live accompaniment by pianist Lilly Henley. The earliest of these rarely screened shorts is The Pillar Of Fire (La Danse Du Feu), 1899, by the French director Georges Méliès. A green tinted devil conjures up a woman who performs the serpentine dance, the ragged edges of her costume suggesting flickering flames while smoke billows around her. Méliès’ background was as a theatrical showman, basing his act on magic and illusions, and it must have been a delight to be able to use the revolutionary medium of film to create a more sophisticated version of traditional stagecraft.
Aragonese director Segundo de Chomón – inventor of one of the most important early film innovations, the “dolly” or moving camera - presents a similar theme with greater refinement in The Red Spectre (Le Spectre Rouge), 1907. The devil/magician performs various tricks with three ladies as his assistants/stage props. The illusions include levitating one of the ladies, a jerky procedure that was obviously done by wires, and not too well. But there is a beguiling illusion in which the figures of the three women appear superimposed, in miniature, over three glass bottles, so that they appear trapped inside them. There is also unexpected humour in an incongruous vision of a man dressed in flowery, matronly drag feeding a St Bernard. Chomón was obviously moved beyond trying to recreate traditional magical tricks, inventing original illusions which could use the malleability of film images much more imaginatively.
The other short by Chomón, La Creation De La Serpentine (France 1908), also features a devilish magician whose horns, very unimposingly, resemble stripy antennae. The woman who he conjures up performs – yes you’ve guessed it - the serpentine dance, although she does look like she’s having altogether too jolly a time to pull off any aura of diva-esque mystique. As she’s joined by other women dancing in a circle, the sequence appears comical but, as with other scenes in the shorts which now look anachronistic, this has a certain charm.
The Italian film The Butterflies (Le Farfalle), 1907, takes an Oriental theme for its tale. Geishas dance, their twirling parasols hand tinted an array of pastel colours, in front of a cage in which a woman/butterfly is imprisoned. The geishas make the butterfly woman dance and, when her black clad lover appears to rescue her, the Geishas tear off his wings. Pretty disturbing for so delicate and pretty a composition...
The focus of the programme was Nina Oxilia’s masterpiece, Rapsodia Satanica. A stirring original score was written for the film by composer Pietro Mascagni, wonderful to hear performed live for this particular event. Starring the luminous Lyda Borelli, Oxilia’s film takes the legend of Faust as the inspiration for its plot. Borelli depicts the elderly Alba d’Oltrevita (translating as “beyond life”), who lives in the castle of illusion (subtlety is not the watchword here). Mourning the lost beauty of her youth, she makes a pact with the devil that she will renounce love in exchange for being restored to her former beauty. Delighting in her regained charms, Alba is courted by two brothers, Sergio and Tristano. Sergio threatens suicide unless Alba declares that she loves him, but she is unable to show compassion for his plight, and instead attempts to seduce Tristano. Once Sergio is dead and Tristano has abandoned her, Alba realises the error of her ways, and spends some time moping picturesquely in the grounds of her castle, before meeting her inevitable death at the hands of the devil who double crossed her.
The story is predictable, but narrative isn’t the focus of Oxilia’s film. Alba’s story is played out by means of costume, gesture and expression, with the various stages of her tale each having a very distinctive visual look in the costumes by designer Mariano Fortuny. First Alba is a stooped old woman, shrouded in black and moving with painful slowness. In her newfound youth, she adopts the costume of a flapper, with an almost masculine character to the freedom and expansiveness of her movements, as she smokes and flirts with the two brothers. When events take a more sinister turn, and the heartlessness of Alba’s character is revealed, she is a femme fatale in an exotic, Egyptian costume, transformed from white clad innocence to shiny sexual predator, like the iridescent carapace of a scarab beetle. Once her fortunes turn, and she is tortured by remorse, her costumes have simple lines and muted tones, her cold and marble countenance and her braided hair recalling the frozen tragedy of a pre-Raphaelite heroine.
Just as the fashion designer Fortuny experimented with the use of stencilling in his costume designs, so Oxilia used stencilled colour to provide visual emphases in the film to heighten dramatic and emotional effect. The contrasting tints of the film’s most breathtaking scenes appear as the heroine approaches her dramatic downfall. In the murky sepia tones of a mirror, the camera focuses on Alba’s chiaroscuro reflection as she swathes herself in icy green veils, transforming herself into a priestess of love and death, ready to embrace her fate. The scene becomes drenched in blue tones as Alba steps out of the house. Shrouded in veils, she already appears to be what she will soon become, as white and deathly as a carved angel on a headstone.
The film is a real visual masterpiece, with jewel like colour accents and an admirable and fearless extravagance in its narrative and emotional scale. The obsessiveness of the director and designer in creating a true and self contained vision of distilled and heightened emotion rings through this piece, while Borelli’s magnetic performance flits between light hearted callousness, bored insouciance, or brooding melancholy with apparent effortlessness, cementing her reputation as one of the finest divas of the silent era.
The Fashion In Film Festival’s programme was a rare opportunity to view these early works. The films gave an insight into both the technical development of film – the adoption of stencilling and hand colouring, and the use of double exposure to create visual metaphors and illusions – and the cultural significance of costume as a means of interpreting character and of creating the phenomenon of the diva. For those who would like to learn more, a tie in illustrated publication Birds Of Paradise: Costume As A Cinematic Spectacle by the festival’s curator, Marketa Uhlirova, is due to be published by Wallflower Press in the spring. KR
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