Róza Magyar:

Sulamith "sings" again

Jenõ Illés: Sulamith, 1916

128 KBytes
Since the first time a film was restored the question of what kinds of changes may the restorer effect compared to the original state of the film has puzzled professionals. The alternatives of practical solutions, so often analysed as well as disputed in art history, seem to have been rediscovered in the dilemmas of those who have been trying to save works of this relatively new art, - works which by now can be considered historical, - from decay. The ethical and legal issues most often discussed in professional literature are in fact rooted in the question of whether the true origin of any film can be identified. Yet the most ardent disputes are ignited not by questions of philology, but the authenticity or "forgery" of film as a peculiar medium and as content embodied in physical matter. Today, the attitude which assigns utmost importance to film as medium, i.e. the respect of the art object, can only be accepted as respect towards a copy of the work of art, due to the changes in the characteristics and material of film in recent years. In order to unfold the content contained in the medium, philological accuracy and the intuitive risk-taking of the restorer are both required.

Versions

The seemingly most down-to-earth approach, i.e. preserving the original material as it was, is not that self-evident, either. Not counting the physical transformation of nitrate-material, the vision in each of the cases is unrepeatable, since what was coloured was not the negative but the copies. From a philological perspective, an original negative does not really exist. Film-makers often worked with more than one camera, composing a number of so-called original negatives out of the material filmed.

In Western Europe and in the United States, where a vast pool of film-material as well as connected secondary sources (copyright regulations and procedures, text-books, musical scores, descriptions and criticism), are available, the consensus of professionals involved in the restoring of films could be achieved earlier, and therefore the written or unwritten rules for the tendencies and possibilities of the profession were also earlier formed. FIAF, in accordance with its function, attempted to concentrate theoretical leadership in its own hands, yet individual research centres, archives, institutes and foundations, - when restoring a film, - did not fail to discuss the historical, theoretical or other special issues raised in the process.

With reference to Western European and American experience as well as certain attempts at classification, the possible versions of restored copies - as compared to the starting material - can be put into three major categories today:

  1. the longest version: a length of a film which is the result of comparing a number of versions. This length sometimes never existed before.
  2. restoring the copy first screened, which can be the first or any other version, substantiated with research sources and data.
  3. the author's version: a negative or a positive attested by one of the authors (writer, director, cameraman) - this possibility arose only under peculiar circumstances as regards silent films.

Based on the above main categories, a variety of combinations and sub-groups are possible. In particularly fortunate cases, one copy is restored more free-handedly, in a way "screenable" for large audiences, and at the same time another is restored on strict philological principles and authenticity, for the purposes of preserving it in an archive, in one of the above mentioned three ways. By this double solution, ethical as well as legal issues can be entirely solved, as the two versions meet two different sets of requirements.

In Hungary, as a result of the fragmentation of surviving material, the ethical and legal question a restorer has to face is what one is allowed to do with a single, often incomplete copy. The responsibility and the possibilities of the restorer are rather limited. The scantiness of sources presupposes a stricter attitude of the researcher, yet in some cases chances must be taken, which means that a restorer's responsibility is not only of ethical, but also of art-historical nature.

This is how the film was made

Jenõ Illés, the director, was called home by a draft call, but before short he could join in with a Hungarian film-industry booming as a result of the war. He became the principal director of Kino-Riport. The company was originally producing reports and documentaries, and Sulamith was its first feature film. That is where Illés also shot his Monna Vanna, but his super-production János the brave would not be borne by the company.

The idea of the film was ready, Illés was probably given the task on commission. During the 1880s, Abraham Geldfaden, a rabbi born in Ukraine, the father of Yiddish theatre, had been wandering with his musical piece from Transylvania to Bucharest. The song which became a popular favourite about "the well and the wild cat" was originally a Hebrew one, yet towards the end of the century, after it had been staged by Albert Kövessy, entire Budapest was humming its tune.

The selection of the theme is typical: the company targeted popular success. The film is a melodrama with a linear dramaturgy: Absolon, a Hebrew war-lord, and Sulamith fall in love. He vows to return and marry her. Yet his vow is forgotten as he meets Abigail. The father of the forsaken Sulamith calls down curses on the man, whose children die one after the other. Absolon tells Abigail about the vow he had taken, and on his wife's advise goes to meet Sulamith, who, ailing with hopeless waiting, dies in his arms.

It was the ninety-eighth film of Jenõ Illés (probably including the films in which he acted as cameraman) . Tha's how a contemporary description depict him in the Kino-Riport-laboratory situated in the Gresham Palace: "Amidst the large cylinders, lamps burning with mysterious lights, complicated film-processing machinery, he is walking with the assuredness of a lord, in a white scientist's cloak." However, Illés personally supervised not only the cementing of the last images of his films, but also participated in the preparations. Preparations started with the selection of the actors, with the same accuracy and expertise. Sulamith was Ica Lenkeffy's first film-role, and she was on her way to a great career as film actress. The method Illés used to school his actors was unique: "I give the actress lessons of self-discipline ... once she is re-shaped, her shortcomings ironed out, once I am familiar with every fold of her heart, her entire inner evolution, ... her secret desires, her past and her future, once I see her unfold as the new, enchanting phenomenon of film seeing which hearts are going to tremble, then I address her in the warm tones of recognition, with a benevolent look, with shining eyes: - Dear lady, could you please bring me a glass of water?.... ".

Yet Illés, in spite of having won a battle with Sulamith, lost another with János the brave: the well-tamed actress was plainly late from the ship on the first day of the shooting, and that is why the role of the female protagonist went eventually to Kamilla Hollay, an actress discovered by Deésy, who happened to be staying on the very spot.

In Sulamith , as a result of his perseverance, the director could perhaps see the image he had dreamt of: the glorification of self-denial and an escape to death. The other female character, Aliz Serák, playing Abigail, is a stunning phenomenon, the true embodiment of sensuality. This is why it is so difficult to understand why the director asked Dezsõ Kertész, the younger brother of Mihály Kertész, an undistinguished actor of obsolete, theatrical gestures, to play the role of the seducer and betrayer, Absolon.

It is impossible to track down the process of the selection of the actors, sites, or the exact dates of shooting. In that age, commercials were more important than all other kinds of information, thus data are often contradictory. The earliest mentioning of the preparation of Sulamith and János the brave is from 6 February 1916. János the brave, Illés' most monumental undertaking in Hungary not only casts a shadow on Sulamith , but also led to his breaking with Kino-Riport.

On 13 February, Sulamith was being shot in Hungary, studio-scenes were probably under preparation, as the externals on Gellert hill could hardly be shot on the then bleak slopes. Towards the end of February, however, the crew was already working in Mostar. According to a post-card sent home, only those belonging to the crew in the narrowest sense travelled there, i.e. Illés, Béla Báthori, Dezsõ Kertész, Ica Lenkeffy, Mógán, Margit Kernai. None of these was a cameraman, which implies that the journal Színházi Élet was probably right, and Illés himself did the photography. As there was war, the permit of the Serbian governor was also required, yet Illés insisted on the "original" scene. "This has always been a typical merit of the excellent director. The top of a tower, the bluff of a cliff, the pier of a railway bridge, the ruins of a house in flames, the board of a sinking ship, the locomotive of a dashing train, a speeding car, the company of enraged lions, the top of a moving elevator, and even the trenches, these are all places he paid a visit to in order to provide a film-idea with the suitable setting." One is to understand the "original" scene in Sulamith as follows. He did not visit Bethlehem or Jerusalem, where the original drama had taken place. What he wanted was "good environment", a landscape peculiar from the perspective of visual composition. And where he ran short of the "original", he made up for it with the cliffs of Gellért Hill: Sulamith, leaving at the time when apple-trees are in bloom, and arriving with a bunch of blossoming boughs from the creek, goes to the well set up on the slope of Gellért Hill. These externals were probably shot in Hungary in the month of March, as well as a few other scenes in the Turkish cemetery in Buda. Out of negligence, a palace standing on the other side of the Danube is visible in the background.

Defining copy

The film was first screened on 26 March, for a private circle. Then Royal Apollo had it on from 1-9 April, accompanied by the orchestra of the theatre. This is when a new undertaking of Kino-Riport was also launched, i.e. they opened a film delivery station by side of distributing Sulamith. According to a piece of news of 16 April, the company was then negotiating the foreign distribution of the film. We have no exact data regarding this and cannot identify the origins of our existing copy. We would only like to list some of the relevant data.

When comparing the copy and the negative, it was revealed that during archiving, changes as compared to the negative had been introduced which entirely transformed the narrative of the film. The indication of act 2, a numbered insert, was simply omitted, and the likewise numbered insert of act 3 was used as the main title, thus the order of the two was changed, and the describing restorer, with a certain amount of "modern" understanding of films, decided that the "first" part of the film are only reminiscences. The unnumbered inserts indicating the end of acts in French," The second/third act is over, we shall have a one-minute break to prepare the third/forth act.", must also have seemed superfluous.

With the help of the inserts indicating the end of the acts, one can define how to break up the current copy. This shows that the entire film, taking into account 10-15 numbered inserts per roll, consisted of five acts. Thus, the length of the copy is closest to a copy mentioned in 1922: "Sulamith, an Oriental tale in 5 acts, made in the "Arany" laboratory in 1922, its length is 1509 m. " - reads the OMB resolution. The information does not mention the superscription, and one can only suppose that they were Hungarian.

I could acquire no data about the Roumanian distribution of the film. However, knowing the distributions conventions of the age, the data mentioned above, i.e. the fact that foreign distribution was negotiated as early as 1916, makes it likely that foreign language superscription were made by the company itself. This would explain the fact the Romanian inserts are seen in the ornamental frame of Kino-Riport.

After reconstructing the original picture sequence of the film, the conclusion which can be drawn is that even if the original copy, by now discarded, does not date back to 1916-17, it must have been made based on a contemporary negative, as its rhythm and narrative did not fall prey to the changed dramaturgical taste of the 20s, which transformation can be observed in the case the distribution copies of a number of other films. The treatment of space and time as narrative style as well as the visual material and the proportion of text inserts all prove this.

The issues regarding the content of the visual material have been quickly solved. The numbered inserts on one hand and the subsequently copied cutting spots, well-recognisable in the negative, on the other almost lead one's hand. The loss of the first act limited the restorer's possibilities. The safety copy, of an inferior quality, had been made of shrinking nitrate material. It often jumped out of the machine thus making perforation copy itself. When preparing the negative, the different break-up employed by silent-film technology had not been taken into consideration, and coupled with the system of sound films, a double division was created, the sound gate limiting the visual field and falsifying the original visual composition. When copying the coloured nitrate-copy in black-and-white, problems of light-provision arose, and these shortcomings create a comic effect today, with "white" nights and dark days on the screen.

These deficiencies can no longer be corrected. With the proper projector, however, - i.e. instead of today's 24/sec using a 16/sec machine- the comic, fragmented motions of the actors can be avoided, which in a way makes up for the corrections omitted when the negative was made.

Types of inserts

As already mentioned, hardly at all do we have authentic secondary sources available for the restoration of Hungarian silent films, thus the principles of restoring the text of films can only be discussed in a general way.

Scenery-writers entered the inserts already in the text-books, as narrative had to be said by the actors. As a form of curiosity, narratives which did by no means suit the scene, but which the director ordered the actors to say in order to achieve the desired emotional effect, were also registered. Apart from these curios, the dialogues of almost all the films can be identified by lip-reading. Of course the dialogues are not entirely synchronic in the picture and in the inserts, yet their starting- and their end-points can be identified. Likewise, when doubts were voiced whether the unnumbered inserts, and thus the starting material, of Sulamith were truly contemporary, I employed the technique of lip-reading the actors and compared the results to the text, finding that the two are identical. At some places, inserts are late or follow in each others' heels in order to provide ample scope for the performance of the actors. With this method, I could establish that the text was not written specifically for the Romanian version, but that the Hungarian inserts had been translated into Romanian.

There is a single source which contains a reference as to who the author of the text-book was. According to this, Illés himself wrote the scenery book. Yet as data regarding his oeuvre in Hungary is rather scanty, and neither have his films survived, this cannot be proved. The reconstruction is proof of a poetic mind, employing the unfolded visual possibilities of the original drama in a way that create an integrated film-style. The song which became a popular favourite does not show on any of the text-inserts, and no sources are available to prove whether it was contained in the scores of the accompanying music.

Besides inserts of dialogue, the other layer of text contained in silent films are the inserts which indicate the continuity of the narrative. In Sulamith, the dialogue as well as the narrative inserts are few in number. The main title and the inserts indicating acts included, there are 62 numbered and 9 unnumbered inserts in the surviving 4 acts altogether. This number also supports the assumption that the starting material must have been a nitrate copy of the 1910s.

The narrative inserts are laconic, which again was characteristic of the 1910s. Every act starts with an insert, assisting the audience in taking up the line of the narrative again after the breaks between acts. In addition, they have even dramaturgical value, indicating in advance to an unwitting audience the tragic turning to come. These inserts provide the tale divided into film-acts with "sub-titles", have an emphasising function and also indicate the development of the drama.

A third kind of insert is the iconographic one. Such are the hand-written letters, pages of books, etc. Not only do these carry information, but are also an integral part of the visual world of the film. The letter and book-page inserts of Sulamith speak of contemporary graphic design.

Professional literature classifies main titles and indicators of acts as external inserts. The indicator of the break in Sulamith belongs to this category. It perhaps substituted for the slides employed by the projectionist (at that time called cameraman) in certain cases, e.g. in between acts and in breaks required by contemporary technology.

The insert - picture

When starting to restore the text, after the problems of content had been successfully solved, further philological questions arose. Why did the editor of the text break up the lines in a way typical for poems? Why is the usage of the parentheses inconsequent in dialogue as well as monologue inserts? Why did he not adhere to the most basic rules of orthography? As answers to these questions may only come from outside of the film, I decided to keep the original break-up reminiscent of free verse, thereby alluding to the possible iconographical meaning which must have been intended by the graphic artist. The usage of parentheses, the unorthodox punctuation and the unusual usage of small and capital letters were also preserved.

When selecting the style of type, one had to consider the fact that the original script had been made up of printing letters. As the analysis of letters showed, it was closest to today's font called Futura extra bold. This is the font used not only in Hungarian inserts between pictures, but also in the introductory inserts containing credits data which are entirely absent from the original. In the surviving fragmentary inserts indicating acts the same font is to be seen as in the inserts in between pictures.

I have entirely given up trying to restore iconographic inserts. The issues concerning the graphic restoration of text-inserts are rather problematic in practise. Everything can be encountered here, from the most abhorrent examples, e.g. black letters on a white surface, the re-drawing of the "original", to alterations made on the entirely new "coat" (occasionally based on analogies). Reproducing the original insert-frameworks and the exact letters would have been a suitable solution, but this, by wholly recreating part of the film, would only have cast stronger light on the shortcomings of the visual material. The first attempt at coloured restoration made by the Film Institute was an "agitka" (humorous propaganda sketch) from 1919, where newly drawn text inserts were placed into a visual context of rather deteriorated quality, in spite of all the corrections targeting the dampening of trembling and the creation of better light-effects. Yet the inserts restored in this way produce a discordant effect amidst the existing visual context.

The other reason why we decided not to recreate these inserts by drawing was that it became clear already at the beginning of the project that we did not wish to make a "popular" film this time, due to the shortcomings mentioned before. We targeted the production of a film for archiving, substantiated with data, lending itself to further research. Thus the iconographic inserts feature in the original Romanian "framework" only in a translation into Hungarian, marked with a different font, trying to assist "understanding", as a result of having been cut into the film at the beginning and the end in a duration of 2 sec. This solution was justified by the last insert, on which a book (the Book of Fate), on whose open pages we read the insert, is closed. Here, script cannot be separated from vision. This is why we decided that, where it is justifiable, we should flash up the Romanian original, creating a framework for the Hungarian version, thereby demonstrating the origin of the copy as well as contemporary graphic style.

Informative inserts (credits) confronted us with a different problem. As the missing main title had to be created, after new and relatively lengthy inserts without a framework, the viewer encountered a kind of visual shock when the first pictures of the film became visible. In addition, we had to decide whether to indicate the absence of act 1. Yet that would have further increased the number of new inserts. Therefore, we decided to keep the superscription "Part II" in the original framework and with the original insert numbering, which thus, although in Romanian, leads the audience into the visual world of the film, demonstrating the physical state as well as the origin of the copy without elaborate explanations. This, in spite of all its technical shortcomings, prepares one for the film better than a dry statement would have done it. This is how, during restoration, an informative insert can advance to become an iconographic one.

In the Romanian copy, not including graphic solutions, there are three kinds of font. This number has been preserved also in reconstruction, in order to not burden the visual material with a lot of other symbols.

The rhythm of the narration, the long text-inserts, the way the film is broken up into acts all prove that the creators reckoned with the accompanying music as well. It is common knowledge that directors of silent-films employed an orchestra on the spot during shootings, i.e. the rhythm of every scene synchronised already then with music. We know from Hungarian experience that original music or selections were played during screenings, but no scores survive. As in the case of Sulamith we cannot count with the music, we thought that text-inserts longer than which is readable today were unnecessary. That is why their length is 1-1,5 meter.

The inserts are not numbered. Although we know the number of numbered inserts of the copy, there are also unnumbered ones, thus numbering would have been of no practical use. Besides, today's researcher must always be optimistic, hoping that a further variant of the film may turn up one day, and preserving the possibility of making the "longest version" of the film one day was the main reason of leaving the inserts unnumbered.

Sulamith is the only silent-film - surviving in fragments, - directed by Jenõ Illés, the director-cameraman-engineer living in Berlin, which he made at home, in Hungary. Out of János the brave, only detruncated scenes survive, embedded into a material shot by Deésy which deteriorated it into a film-sketch. By creating the Hungarian version of Sulamith, we have paid our debt towards a director of European acclaim.


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Works consulted:

  1. MoziHét 1916, No. 6-13 give a continuous account of the circumstances of shooting and screening
  2. Színházi Élet, 1916, No. 5., 13., 17.
  3. Belügyi Közlöny, 1922, No. 54. 2307.
  4. Encyclopaedia Judaica Volume 7, 717.

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