Cinema Resurrection

I hadn't been to a cinema since everything originally shut down during the pandemic. If memory of the before times serves me, the last movie I saw theatrically was "The Invisible Man" (2020), which in retrospect seems apropos given the microscopic threat unseen by the naked eye that would soon takeover the real world. When I inevitably returned to this form of cinematic spectatorship that's admittedly been slowly dying well before Covid-19 came about, I hoped it wouldn't be to proclaim "cinema is back," "the movies live," or some such thing in response to, and contrary to accumulated economic data, some action movie rebooted from a time when film was real film or to, heavens forbid, a variant of the ever-replicating cinematic virus known as the MCU. That's for a second return trip to the movies.

No, I waited for Silent Movie Day--the second iteration thereof, it ironically having been inaugurated last year when the box office continued to be less than half of what it once was only as far back as 2019. I went to see a new reconstruction of a film almost a hundred years old now, "The Spanish Dancer." Its resurrection having been in a state of limbo over the years with it only being made available by bargain-bin home video providers and internet pirate uploaders from the Kodascope version, truncating the picture in abridged runtime and visually, from the original 35mm to 16mm. Some of that Kodascope footage is still in the Netherlands EYE Film Institute restoration, but the majority of the footage from four different surviving prints comes from its own 35mm fragments and those likewise from the Russian archives, as aided in assembly by the original continuity script. See Rob Byrne's essay for more on the archival work (also there's this short video), but the result turns out to be quite a good silent film.

I was a bit turned off at first by the modern score from a Bill Ware, it seeming almost bombastic, but it's rather fitting to the spectacle. Narratively, too, the photoplay gets off to a slow start, setting up some Spanish-French royal court intrigue that could've been practically unbearable as well as overly familiar, as compared to twin film "Rosita" (1923), were it not led by Wallace Beery as the king and Adolphe Menjou as his conspiring lieutenant. It's still convoluted, but mostly entertaining. Best casting possible in that respect. The two leads, Pola Negri and Antonio Moreno (in the part originally intended for Rudolph Valentino but for which instead he channels Douglas Fairbanks), are fine, too--better than Mary Pickford and whomever in the other picture. The only significant weakness I think being the queen played by Kathlyn Williams. Ernst Lubitsch's version certainly outdoes "The Spanish Dancer" in this respect with its casting of Irene Rich, a master of the knowing look and playing characters who have their own infidelities (to go along with that of the kings in these two films), her going on to anchor the masterpiece "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925).

The highlight here is certainly the carnival sequence in the middle of the picture. Well edited, hundreds to thousands of extras, magnificent sets and, presumably, expert composite shots. It's all very Lubitsch-esque and perhaps even outdoes the master of European spectacle for which Hollywood recruited him. The major example of that being "Madame DuBarry" (1919), the release that reopened German cinema for American audiences in between the wars. It was directed by Lubitsch and starred Negri, but "Rosita" and "The Spanish Dancer," released only about a month apart, settled for one or the other. Fortunate for "The Spanish Dancer," Herbert Brenon was a more than capable director, too, although the poor survival rate of much of his oeuvre, most silent films unlike this one doomed to never return from the dead, might not suggest as much today. Before Negri's gypsy dancer and fortune teller here, he had experience directing female stars the likes of famed swimmer Annette Kellerman in the nude, vamp Theda Bara, virtuoso Alla Nazimova, diva Francesca Bertini, and mega star Norma Talmadge. So, pretty good second option there to direct a vehicle for imported star Negri after Pickford had already nabbed Lubitsch.

The beautiful symmetry of the picture is that, as with the scenario, it foretells what it'll be; one only need be able to read the cinematic equivalent of the tarot cards. As the title and Negri's character indicate, it's foremost a filmic dance--reaching its pinnacle at the carnival, but also including the machinations of the court intrigue down to those ridiculous pannier hoop dresses that force the women to elaborately walk, or rather dance, sideways through doorways, or there's even the gypsy knife fight. Then, there's also the homage to Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, the king submitting the courtly politics to wait on the demands of art with the painting of his portrait. So, film as painting and as dance.

Also apt in respect to my mourning the death of cinema and particularly silent films is that this, although an adaptation of something else, works as a bit of a passion play. Wine and communion bread serve a deciding purpose in a resurrection. There's a Last Supper and twelve musketeers standing in for the apostles. All the betrayal goes back to some stolen silver. If that weren't obvious enough, Negri will end up praying to the iconography of Christ's crucifixion to bring the point home. I don't know about cinema as a whole, but "The Spanish Dancer" has surely now experienced its second coming.

Work Cited
Rob Byrne. "Restoring The Spanish Dancer (1923)." The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 12, no. 2 (2012): 161-69. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/movingimage.12.2.0161.