Stills

The Oyster Princess (1919)

Fante-Anne (1920)

The White Heather (1919)

The Bat (1926)

Saxophone Susy (1928)

Song (1928)

Recently-seen silent films, three from HippFest at Home, two from HippFest in person (captures from YouTube, which is sadly lacking the very picturesque Mountain of Destiny), and one from Matthew Jarron’s ‘Germany to Hollywood’ evening class (his course on Ealing Studios is booking now).

The Oyster Princess instantly became one of my favourite films, for its ultra-vivid design and uniquely rollicking German humour. There’s a fair amount of the latter in Saxophone Susy too: the setting is London, the production is not. The programme mentions ‘Weimar Slapstick’, which sounds like the ideal genre to me.

I watched The Bat, a proto-Batman tale full of (effective) suspenseful nonsense, not really expecting to find any connection to Citizen Kane, with whom it shares cinematographer Gregg Toland. There definitely is, though, in the diffused lighting and chiaroscuro, the tall sets, and, here, a view through a skylight which prefigures the crane shot which brings us to a washed-up Susan Alexander right at the start.

The shot from The White Heather is part of an underwater sequence that is the film’s main draw. The plot certainly isn’t: the two fighting divers (you’ll see them if you let your eyes adjust) are trying to retrieve / destroy a marriage certificate from a wrecked yacht on which hangs, on the one hand, the honour and future of a woman and her son, and, on the other, the solvency of her dastardly, denying husband.

If that all sounds a bit silly, Fante-Anne and Song are altogether more moving tales of jealousy; a poster of the main character’s rival in the latter is used imaginatively for a flashback, and, in the shot here, is destroyed in a fit of rage.