"... and on this." Different Play, Act III Scene 4
After the surprising delights of Peter Brook's seventy-three-minute-long 1953 King Learyesterday, I decided to revisit Gerolamo Lo Savio's extravagantly-hatted, fourteen-minute-long silent 1910 version from the BFI collection Silent Shakespeare, posted at the top.
In looking that up I discovered an even earlier, thirteen-minute-long, German-subtitled version from 1909 credited to the Vitagraph Company of America, so I thought I'd post that too.
Comparisons are invidious, but what else are we going to do?
The most surprising thing both versions share is an absolutely stand-out Oswald. Goneril's servant, it's a small but satisfying role, whose job both literally and narratively is to just turn up and be a dick. Above is the Vitagraph version, fully understanding the assignment as he bounds out and tells everyone to eff off. Below is Lo Savio's. I remembered the 1910 version having excellent facial hair and helmets, and I was right. Just look at him there on the left. This Oswald may not have received the promotion to chief antagonist Brook gave him in 1953,
despite this 1910 version also cutting the subplot, but he definitely gets the outfit hardest to ignore, against stiff competition too.
That's Kent in the middle, gobsmacked by his cheek. Required by the plot to disguise himself as a servant by simply shaving, Kent looks very underdressed in this company. The shorter 1909 version not only keeps the suplot, involving Edmund and Edgar – YAY! – but also devotes a whole scene to Kent shaving. He gets to keep the moustache too. In the following scene, having picked another fight with Oswald, Kent is sentenced to the stocks. That's Oswald behind him leaping for joy. What a dick.
Compare this scene to the 1910 version. Again, excellent helmets. But...
These guys really do not know how to put someone in the stocks.
In general, as gorgeous as this later, hand-tinted version looks, it does come across as a bit of a shambles compared to Vitagraph's effort: Like many blockbusters, a lot more time and care seems to have been spent on it in post than during the actual shoot. Here's the 1910 version's storm scene...
... minus the storm, because we're filming outside on a clear day because it's 1910. Feigning madness without a script is also quite a big ask, especially when you're missing the rain and thunder that's meant to push you over the edge, so after quite a lot of faff with a cloak, Ermete Novelli's Lear tries to fix this narative lapse by punching a rock and going Ow.
Again though, it was 1910. Cut the film some slack.
Let's compare this to Vitagraph's earlier 1909 version...
Oh okay! Sure! If you want to go the traditional route, I suppose you could always bring out a backdrop, run a shower in front of the camera and scratch lighning flashes directly onto the film, but...
Okay no, this is clearly much better. But aren't you just rushing everything if you have to include the subplot? Only providing a series of tableaux vivants? What about later, when Lear is discovered lost to his madness but drifiting in and out of a state of revelation? (Sorry, SPOILERS... that's a joke of sorts, but actually if you don't know King Lear, there will be spoilers coming.) Here's the Vitagraph:
Having kept the subplot, this Lear also keeps its full complement of witnesses: Lear flanked by the banished and debased Edgar, and Gloucester, the father who banished and debased him, blinded now by allies of the son he promoted. Here's the 1910 version:
Having lost both the subplot and the blinding of Gloucester, and of course the storm – but having definitely hurt his hand, let's not forget that – Ermete Novelli now improvises some "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" business with a broomstick, abandoning the narrative pretty much entirely before shuffling off stage right with a cry of whatever the Italian is for "Wheee I'm a witch, byeeee!"
When he later comes to on a cheetah skin we're back in the play, but the hand-tinters seem to have called it a day...
For both 1909 and 1910 Lears, the reconciliation scene with his banished daughter Cordelia is played as eccentrically as the madness scenes, meaning Vitagraph's William V. Ranous gets to keep his dignity, while Novelli, for whom that ship had long sailed, still gets to go noodly noodly, but in a happier vein than before. The Vitagraph version also provides a harpist for Ranous. I don't know if that made any difference to the accompaniment. Nice helmet bottom right too.
Here, of course, is where the story should end, and where, even with their tiny truncated running times, both versions show the strength of the play's final act. Vitagraph also manages to cram in a final fight between Edmund and Edgar, before somehow managing to rig a slowly setting sun over the final image of Lear grieving for his hanged daughter through disintegrating filmstock.
And I even stopped laughing at Novelli (put that on your poster!) There is nothing comic in him bringing on Cordelia's body, and while the 1910 version doesn't give us a sunset, it does manage an impressive number of distant extras to the left of the frame and a possibly fake bridge.
Unfortunately 1910 Lear's grief turns loopy almost immediately, and the film cuts just as it looks like he was about to get better.
Still, I'm very glad there was a record of whatever it was Ermete Novelli thought he was up to.
This is a photograph of Southwark, but we haven't got there yet. The walk from my flat to Waterloo Bridge is pretty much a straight line. Last night I found this:
I don't know what the sign was for, or if this person's meant to look like they're drowning, but it works on a lot of layers, so I left it alone for others to appreciate. Something else I found on my walk last night:
If you deviate from the straight line, there are tiny entrances to casino car parks, crammed frantically with statues and palm trees, a small garden centre's worth. I left these alone too. Continuing south, I recorded evidence of Theatreland's devastation:
This play had gone so wrong that literally every word of its title was now back to front. Just south of this, someone had tied the traffic lights together.
I crossed the Thames, into the sanity of Southwark. Nearly every job I'd had in my twenties was here, somewhere along the South Bank.
After graduation, I got a job at the British Film Institute, working as an usher, or behind the reception desk, or in a little booth in the Museum of the Moving Image where visitors could buy videos of themselves being asked pre-recorded questions by Eamonn Homes or Zig and Zag.
Later, when I moved out of my parents' flat, I worked in another museum behind the Oxo Tower. The theme varied. It was free. Everyone from Shunt happened to work there as well. We froze, and read books.
The Museum Of... had great, rattly animatronics from Tim Hunkin, and a room at the top with a fountain, and shelves stacked with thousands of small Body Shop bottles filled with water from the fountain, bearing labels on which visitors had written decriptions of what made them cry. No one was using these rooms for anything else.
I then worked at the London Dungeons beneath London Bridge station. Shunt coincidentally moved next door the following year. Both venues would occasionally, accidentally, and independently, shut the station down with their smoke machines.
A lot of the buildings I passed last night must have
gone up since then.
Once the Shard was built and the station renovated, my most
regular visits to this area were as part of the Ghost Bus Tours, which was started by Big Ben from the Dungeons.
If the tours had time, we'd pull up outside Redcross Way, make everyone get off, and take them into a tunnel whose walls were decorated with a kind of Dalek pelt which, the last time I visited here, I noticed had been stipped of it its nodules. But last night the nodules were back, newly tinted.
That other tunnel between the eyes is painted with swans, and takes you to the site of a pauper's grave, Crossbones – now a car park – and the memorial garden just beyond. That's is where we'd take the groups.
The garden is fenced with the old car park gates, to which locals tie gifts honouring the "outcast dead" or more recent, personal bereavements. None of this looked any different last night.
Normally I'd take the riverside walk, but I'd heard hollering from the bank, and while I know that's
also what fun can sound like, I favoured the privacy of the main
roads.
So, that's how I saw all this shiny new stuff, and it's possible that at two in the morning, at the height of a global pandemic, is the best time to see it. I remember when City Hall was just hoops.
I hope I don't find it too difficult whan I finally have to stop being alone. I turned back when I got to the giant ants.
This evening was the first time I'd been to the South Bank since lockdown, and dumb as it might sound, the first time the reality of these closed spaces really sunk in, taking me with it. I didn't often go to the National Theatre or the BFI, and I hardly ever went to the Hayward or Royal Festival Hall, but I went here all the time. Just to be here. A public space made possible by things that are no longer happening. The space is still there, but not the public, and I felt a bit awful. Speaking of awe, in this week's Ships, Sea & The Stars I got to read some Carl Sagan. Absolutely no one delivers Carl Sagan better than Carl Sagan, but it was still a joy. Ed Bloomer makes a beautiful point in the video about Sagan's writing that's often overlooked: "It's quite kind." I once looked up the derivation of "kind". Like "like", it means both how we'd prefer to be treated, and also "our type". We like our kind, and we are kind to those like us. Sagan welcomes us. Aw man, so did the South Bank Centre. I really look forward to the welcome resuming.
I watched it last night at the BFI with Tom and Selina - well, most of it. As I've pointed out before there's something about the BFI that's sent me to sleep ever since I worked there. Still, what a picture! Apparently Ben Hecht wrote the whole thing in four days on a train, and William A. Wellman shoots the hell out of it. Here's glimpses of what I nodded in and out of:
In looking that up I discovered an even earlier, thirteen-minute-long, German-subtitled version from 1909 credited to the Vitagraph Company of America, so I thought I'd post that too. 
