We All Have Our Weird Little Passions: A Conversation with Pamela Hutchinson
Silent Sundays: Interviews
For this week’s Silent Sundays I spoke with author, critic and film historian Pamela Hutchinson about her up-coming book The Curse of Queen Kelly (Sticking Place Books, 2026), her work on the new Flicker Alley Focus on Louise Brooks Blu-ray set, the origins of her website Silent London, her work re-centering pioneering film critic C. A. Lejeune, balancing our specific interests with the broader scope of contemporary film writing, how she fell in love with silent cinema, our shared appreciation of the weird and wonderful cinema oddity that is Häxan, and how to write about the silent era so it’s accessible for anyone who might be interested.
NB: This interview is very long, so it may be best read on the website.
One of the things I was thinking about when I was putting my questions together for this conversation is that you’re UK based, but we have met in Pordenone, Italy; San Francisco; and Minneapolis — never in the UK. It really shows how global the silent film community is, and how many places there are to meet your fellow silent film fans, archivists, scholars, and friends. You’ve been to so many places in this global community. Silent film, I think, has always brought the globe together, and it still does. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
That’s such a great question. I remember not long after I started writing about silent film, someone said to me, or rather, they gave some good advice as a young person, they said, “You’ll never get anywhere with old films, and never go anywhere.” They said that it was a dead end career-wise and that you want to be working with new filmmakers. You can see the logic, right? Because new films and new filmmakers are on the festival circuit and they’re probably more open to promotional interviews. Also, they’re alive. You can talk to them.
I ignored it at the time, just because I was doing what I wanted to do. And yes, those words ring in my ear every time I get on a plane, because I’ve been to San Francisco. I go to Italy quite a lot. I’ve been to the Arctic Circle. I’ve been to Eastern Europe, to the Asian part of Istanbul. So we’re covering continents, right? I’ve traveled a lot. I have also been part of this really global community. So there are people, like you, who I have met but never on their home turf or never on my home turf.
I love the way that you connect that to how silent film was always a global thing. I think it’s partly because, compared to maybe a lot of other film communities, the silent film community is small in number. So we all congregate when something interesting is happening. You get to know this community in a way that is easier to get a handle on than some film groups. But also, I feel like the film world is just very international, very focused on bumping into people at festivals. I met your partner, Robert Daniels, in Locarno, where I was there with some British films, and he was there watching all sorts of new European films. We’re all living out of suitcases. At the moment I’m home, you’re home, which is lovely. But very soon I’m going to be back on the road again.
Speaking of film festivals, I finally got to see the new Queen Kelly restoration, which opened the Venice Film Festival last year. I’d seen the old Kino restoration, I think either from disc Netflix or on their early streaming library, back when I was in grad school around 2011. A few weeks ago Robert and I went to the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago to see the new restoration. It’s gorgeous. It’s a glorious restoration. I would love to hear how you got involved with writing your new book, The Curse of Queen Kelly, and at what point did you know you wanted to capture the journey of this restoration?
I remember when I first saw Queen Kelly, because it’s not a film that gets shown very often. There was a screening at the BFI South Bank. I went with a friend. We didn’t look up too much about it. I remember walking out of it with shaking legs, going, “What the heck did we just see?” It was a memorable screening. It’s so much more intense and exotic and strange and sexual than you might expect. But it’s not a film that gets talked about very often. So it was such a delight when Dennis Doris and Amy Heller from Milestone Films spoke to me, I think, at Bologna, and told me they were restoring it again. But this time they had all the paperwork and there’s this great story because, if you read all the paperwork, something interesting is going on. Gloria Swanson spent so much more time trying to save this film than people really appreciate. I must admit, I have so much respect for Dennis and Amy, but I thought, oh, I’ve heard this before. People say, “Well, actually, it’s a feminist story.” But I was intrigued, because that tracks with Gloria Swanson, doesn’t it?
So I decided I would explore writing the book. They sent me all the documentation from Gloria Swanson’s archive, and from the Kennedy archive, which was the new stuff. This story was way too huge. I got a bit daunted by the amount of research and by how I would tell the story, particularly as a British person. I was like, “How can I be telling a story about the Kennedys and Hollywood and so forth?” But I was hooked, and I made a push to finally write it knowing that the restoration was coming out. During all this process, I saw an early draft of the most recent reimagining, and it just looks so phenomenal, and it still just burns off the screen, literally burns off the screen in a way that so many other films don’t. It’s got a certain liveliness and danger about it that’s quite addicting.
And so was diving through all this paperwork. Production budgets and shooting reports are often very revelatory, but also quite mundane sometimes. No piece of paperwork connected with this film was mundane. The letters and the conflicting stories about how and when it all fell apart. I went beyond the research in archival material; I was interested in how all this stuff was reported in the trade press as well, because people plant stories in the trade press, right?
They always have. I feel like people think it’s a new thing, they always have.
It could be that someone at Variety just thought, “I reckon this,” but I reckon someone’s told them as well. So, you read that stuff and it’s quite useful. As I was looking at how the story was being reported as well, this whole story became more and more of a maelstrom of conflicting values. There is sexual hypocrisy. There’s this racial prejudice. There’s this moral panic. There’s the relationship between Gloria Swanson and Joseph P. Kennedy that is deteriorating. There’s Eric Von Stroheim becoming persona non grata in Hollywood. There’s so many things going on. There’s the coming of sound. There’s even the fall of the stock market. It all just crashes down on top of this film. So I thought, well, there’s no doubt there’s a story there. It’s been quite fun to take it from beginning to end.
I am very much looking forward to reading this book. I love explorations of film in general, especially the making of films that were notable disasters. I also just love juicy gossip of Old Hollywood. I imagine with your book, you’ve walked that fine line between salacious that’s real and salacious that’s fake.
Exactly. When there’s so many different stories, I think that it’s so much more interesting when things are going badly. Like the stories about people making Sunset Boulevard (1950), which is also in the book for obvious reasons. Everything went well from beginning to end, and everyone had a nice time. Everything on Queen Kelly was difficult and weird, and I was trying to create something a little bit like The Devil’s Candy, or Steven Bach’s book Final Cut, about Heaven’s Gate (1980), which refers to Queen Kelly as this cursed film that you can’t speak about.
So many of these stories about movies going wrong, either the director or the star bounce back. Brian De Palma is still making films. Or people reclaim the film, like with the Criterion Collection release of Heaven’s Gate. Sometimes the most disastrous back stories and production histories turn into Oscar winning victories, like Titanic (1997). Everything went wrong on that film, and then it won all the Oscars, made all the money, and launched all the careers. So we are used to this kind of story. But when Queen Kelly goes silent, it really goes silent, and that’s hard to deal with. That’s what I was interested in. How do we deal with talking about failure, as well as all the juicy gossip from set, the sort of panty sniffing disasters that went on?
I am seated for this book. I cannot wait. I also wanted to ask about another project that you’re involved with: the Focus on Louise Brooks Blu-ray set from Flicker Alley, which I pre-ordered so fast. Her book Lulu and Hollywood is one of my favorite film books I’ve ever read. She’s so saucy, but also just really smart. It’s a great book if you want some gossip and smart analysis of what the industry was really like. In the past you’ve written a lot about Brooks, including a BFI Film Classics book on Pandora’s Box (1929). On the new Flicker Alley set you have a great video special feature called “Looking At Lulu.” I would love to hear how you whittled the vast amount of knowledge in your brain into a 30 minute video essay.
You’re right, Lulu in Hollywood, which I think is newly available as an e-book now, which is a Thomas Gladysz project, is a brilliant book which has so much insight. I have been fascinated by Louise Brooks probably since I first saw a picture of her when I was a child on TV. I thought, “Who was that? And why is Betty Boop crying?” When I worked on the Pandora’s Box book, I had a similar situation to Queen Kelly, in that we had a film that didn’t do very well. I mean, Pandora’s Box, at least, was released thank God. So not too many people have been asked their stories about it. But, the dominant narrative we have for both Pandora’s Box and Queen Kelly is about the female stars’ stories. We have Lulu in Hollywood and everything else that Louise Brooks wrote and said about Pandora’s Box. With Queen Kelly, we have Gloria Swanson’s amazing, magisterial memoir Swanson On Swanson. With both accounts, despite always thinking how much I want to hear what these women have to say, I also thought we have to ask questions.
Louise Brooks, I’ve always been interested in. I think she’s more interesting than anyone else, and I know that she has this appeal on screen which is second to none. She’s a phenomenally brilliant woman who was living right on the edge, behaving quite ridiculously with her health and her personal life. Her memories of this time are always slightly questionable, slightly colored. This is not a woman who was sitting back and taking notes. This was a woman who was living life. So I find it interesting to almost be in a dialogue with what she’s saying. Work out where the truth lies. Where are the concerns of a young woman living away from home making a film, and where is the clear-eyed analysis of the film industry?
I think it was Rob Byrne of San Francisco Film Preserve, who first contacted me about the Flicker Alley Louise Brooks project. I remember thinking, well, obviously that’s going to jump off the shelves. Under-seen Louise Brooks films and fragments? Thomas Gladysz was super involved with doing research, and he wrote a wonderful essay for the set’s booklet. He was there every step of the way with that project, as well as Kathy Rose O’Regan from the San Francisco Film Preserve. I was asked to do this video essay that was going to be the only extra on the set. I thought, well, I’ve got to just try and find as much detail as I can, but only about this period. So there’s a little bit in that essay that says where Louise Brooks ends up, what happens next, how we remember her. That’s when I realized that she’s stroppy and moody, she’s young and she’s confused, but she’s also brilliant, right? You can see her beginning to understand how she can be on camera, which is what you see with all early actresses, but also with her how she was such a strong character already. So for me, it was quite fun to only talk about these early films, to only talk about her early career, the point when she isn’t entirely sure whether she wants to be a film actor, but the studio is grooming her to be an actual star.
One thing you said that I liked was that she’s an icon of the “American flapper, Weimar era decadence, and the lost world of allure and danger of the 1920s.” I thought that sentence really distills that ineffable vibe that she gives off in all her photos. I did not see Pandora’s Box first. I saw her photos when I was a teen on the internet looking up classic actresses. I actually dressed as her for Halloween in 2007, which was twenty years ago, when I was in college. Nobody knew who she was. I had the bob and a dress that looks like her dress from Pandora’s Box, but when I said I was Louise Brooks, everyone was like, “who?” I was shocked. Her photos are so iconic, like the black one with the pearls. I feel like if you’re somebody who gets into vintage fashion or Old Hollywood, that’s one of the first photos you see.
I found that when I was writing the Louise Brooks book, unless they were film people, particularly silent film people, people I spoke to didn’t know Pandora’s Box. Which is fine, because it’s from 1929. It seemed the people who did know Louise Brooks were all my friends who were interested in fashion. I would call it art history. Cultural history through images, which Louise Brooks is a part of. It was quite reassuring talking to someone who worked on a women’s magazine for a while, who said, “Oh yeah, Louise Brooks, I know all about her; she’s legitimately iconic.”
That sentence you mentioned, sounds like a flourish, but I mean every word. I also know that this is a resonance that her image has, because I talk to so many people about her, it comes up in conversation a lot, and no one has a muted reaction to her. People have such a strong opinion about her. It sort of goes beyond any film she was in. It goes beyond Pandora’s Box, which is probably the closest film that captures that whole Louise Brooks essence, which is why there’s such a focus on her in the book. She had something that you just can’t stop.
I’ve seen it working as a journalist. Sometimes there’s a new young star that’s in a ton of films, and suddenly it’s not just the film desk, but it’s also the music desk and the fashion desk; Everyone wants to talk about them. Sometimes people just have that quality, which is definitely what happened to Louise Brooks. She was in a lot of photos and magazines before she was in any leading roles. Sometimes stars, you can’t get enough of them and then people get tired of them. But with Louise Brooks, she seems to continue to fascinate in a way that is a bit like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe. Some people get under our collective skin, and you can’t get away from them. Which is great. Louise Brooks deserved it.
She really was great. Another example, I just posted on my Instagram about Theda Bera. Pretty much all of her films are gone, but there’s so many photos and people might not even know her name, but if you showed them her photo, they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that.” Because there’s just some people who, to steal the motto from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, transcend time.
It’s like Rudolph Valentino, he’ll be on T shirts forever.
Oh, literally, forever people. What’s crazy about Valentino in particular, I wrote a little bit about him last week, is, you know, obviously there were riots when he died. People died by suicide. And still, every year, there’s new people who are in love with him. How many social media accounts are dedicated to Valentino because they discovered him recently and they’re just as obsessed with him 100 years after he died as people were when he was still alive?
A fashion designer recently contacted me, and he says, “I have a dream job.” He works on football shirts and loves film. He had designed a whole range of t-shirts with Valentino and Nazimova. He had some interest from a place that would sell them, but he said he thought people wouldn’t know who they are. So I was commissioned to write some notes about who these wonderful people are. It was fantastic because he led with the images that he knew would fascinate people, and I got to write little 500-word snippets, to probably make some more Valentino addicts. I was very happy to enable that.
Nazimova is another one who transcends time because, like Louise Brooks, she was such a fashion icon. Like her crazy hair in Salome (1922), which The Chicago Film Society is going to play at the Music Box Theatre soon. Part of what I talked with Maggie Hennefeld about was how this era was filled with very radical politics, but also a lot of diversity in who was making films. There were queer people and women, and people like Louise Brooks, who as you said, was living on the edge. All of these people were trying to push what art can be through this new form. I think part of the reason a lot of people like us fall into the silent film world and then we never get back out, is there is always so much more to discover. Weird little things, like Maggie and her love of Léontine. I think a lot of people, if they don’t know the silent world, they think the silent era was just slapstick clowns or maybe The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). But every day I discover another silent film that still exists, and I’m like, “Damn, how can I watch this? When can I watch this?”
Every time they were making a film in the silent era, they were exploring the idea of what a film can be. Everyone who tried to get into filmmaking during this era had to have a vision. They had to have a vision that they could do something new, or that they could push this new art that has just begun into a different direction. So you do get these interesting people, and there are a lot of women and people of color and queer people, who were just, as you say, the most incredible characters. You’ll never get bored thinking about Nazimova. You’ll never get bored thinking about, even Chaplin, especially if you really look into who he really was. Even Gloria Swanson and Eric Von Stroheim, were constantly pushing at the limits of what could be achieved in Hollywood. They were refusing to take the limits that the studio system had given them. It makes it so much more interesting. People are still doing that. People are still trying to push at the boundaries. But obviously we’re all a bit more savvy about the rules. And people today don’t necessarily expect to go in and revolutionize Hollywood.
When I watched Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! I didn’t love it, but I love that she took Warner Brothers’ money to make that crazy movie. Anytime a filmmaker can get millions and millions of dollars from a studio and make something, whether it works or not, that isn’t like anything else I’ve seen being made by a studio, I think that’s a win for the medium.
Or Ryan Coogler with Sinners with its mix of genres. He made a political indie film [Fruitvale Station (2013)], then a franchise [Creed (2015)], then the biggest franchise ever [Black Panther (2018)]. Then, after he went to Marvel, he came back and did something a bit weird. I don’t know what he’s thinking, what he’s going to do next, but the fact that I’ve had genuine conversations with people who are expressing consternation at the mix of genres in cinemas, it makes me think that the world of cinema is very set in its ways. It doesn’t take much to shake it up. And thank God people are trying. I haven’t seen The Bride! yet, but I’m very excited.
I’ll be interested in what you think when you do. Obviously, you have a long running website called Silent London. Could you tell me a bit about its origins, and what you’ve learned from creating such a beautiful space for a community for so long?
I was living in London, and I love to watch silent films and live music. Who doesn’t? I had just joined Twitter and was becoming aware of more kinds of cultural events going on in the city than I previously knew about. I saw that there were more screenings than I thought there were. And certainly there were screenings that I missed. I remember there was a particular film with an Icelandic band that I really liked, and I just missed it. I couldn’t believe it. So I was walking home one Friday night, late at night, and I thought, “Someone has to do something about this! There has to be a listing site for the silent film in the capital!! I was stirring my risotto when I came up with the plan. So I just basically set it up that night. I thought, “I’ll just list things. Nobody wants to hear anything I think.” I thought I might do little blurbs saying, “Oh, you’ve got to see this great film” and it kicked off from there.
I didn’t realize the thing I was doing that was unusual was talking about the films because people would want to see them, rather than because they were important or because the director went on to make an important sound film, or because they were an important stepping stone in the use of the close up or whatever. I was just writing from a place of “You’ll enjoy this. This will be great!” I did know a little bit about it. I studied film history, so I knew the context of what I was writing. After a while, people asked me to write things from a more historical perspective or review a book or an exhibition, or to write for other people’s sites. So I started writing longer pieces. Now we do have a silent film calendar covering the whole UK far better than what I was doing.
Although the website is more sporadically updated, I’m so much more conscious of the fact that, as you say, there is this community of people who read it, who will be interested, who will wonder is this on Silent London? Why is it on Silent London? What am I going to find out? Lately, I’ve leaned more into my interests, so the feminist film history aspect of it is so much stronger than in the early days. I’ve also used the site to promote my books. But I also share news for other people’s events, and the Silent London poll is still going. I encourage everyone to vote in it, because you really can shift the needle. It’s also much more international than it used to be. I can’t imagine a world in which I shutter Silent London.
I read Silent London before I went to Pordenone the first year that I went. Someone when I got there introduced me to you. They were like “You gotta meet Pam, Silent London.” It was like meeting a celebrity. Everyone who’s been in Pordenone knows you. You’re everywhere and nowhere during that festival. I love your daily coverage. I haven’t been back since 2019. I do the online festival now. The online version is so wonderfully accessible. But someday, I’ll go back.
It’s great. Coming up here in the UK is HippFest. They also have a home version. I highly recommend it because their programming is gorgeous.
HippFest online is fantastic. I also do Stummfilmtage Bonn online every August.
They’re the best. They stream so much.
You’ve done a lot of writing, both about silent film but also pioneering feminist critics. Recently you’ve done some lectures on C. A. Lejeune. She’s someone I didn’t really know about until you started writing about her and presenting about her. Why should people care about her?
Why should people care about C.A. Lejeune? Well, by the time I’ve beaten the world into submission, they will! C.A. Lejeune was basically the first newspaper film critic who came to it from film. It’s hard to exactly give her a first title, but she was the film critic for the Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian), starting in 1922, and then she switched to The Observer in 1928 where she stayed until 1960. She rapidly became an institution. She started writing about film when all the other newspapers were slowly beginning to write about film. She’s followed by Iris Barry at The Daily Mail.
She wrote about film from the perspective of someone who cares about film. She wasn’t constantly comparing the film to the book or comparing it to a play. She’s really immersed in the film world, and she speaks directly to her readers in a way that’s really powerful. She knows what she’s talking about. She writes beautifully. She’s really funny, and she becomes the must-read film critic, and she pretty much is, until 1960. There was also Elsie Cohen working in the trade papers. This is in the UK, of course. She and Dilys Powell basically ruled Sunday paper film criticism all through the mid-century period. Then there were so many people after her.
Sometimes, if anyone remembers her, they remember her for the end of her career. They remember like, “Oh, when C.A. Lejeune went out of fashion.” or “Oh, she probably only got that job because she knew the editor of the paper,” So I feel like her position as a leading film critic, as one of the most popular writers in the UK, has been diminished by this way of putting her reputation into this box by saying, “Oh, well, she was only this. She was only a middle aged woman who wrote about film.” Well, I like middle aged women who write about film, and I particularly like C.A. Lejeune, because she was fantastic at it.
I think when you look at her career and how open she was about her feelings, about her job, about film as it pertained to being an art form, of being entertainment for women in particular, for the accessibility of it, she wasn’t interested in anything that wasn’t for the masses. You know, she really was like, “You can show your obscure art film in your little club over there. I’m sure it’s a marvelous film, but until everyone can see it, it’s not really part of my project.” She had these very passionate beliefs to the point where she actually falls out of love with film, quite clearly, in her column. So I find this whole story of her and her relationship to film and her fellow female film critics who became so numerous that they were having jokes about them all being the lady film critics crying in the pictures. This idea that it’s always been a male dominated industry, when we look back, it’s just not true.
C.A. Lejeune, who coincidentally has the same birthday as Gloria Swanson, is probably the person I’m going to write about next in long form. She has always been someone that I wanted to bang the drum for. The sweet thing about her for me was, when I started writing about silent film, I was working at The Guardian, and which, as was the Manchester Guardian, so whenever I was looking at old reviews of silent films, C.A. Lejeune’s reviews were often the top ones I wanted to quote. There was this weird synchronicity. I thought, “You were writing about these films in 1924 and I’m sitting here at my desk in 2014 writing about them in, not in the same building, but in the same media space.” So I have that fondness for her.
I’m interested in this particular female-centric pocket of the film culture world. It was so visible, and yet so easily dismissed after the time, as we see so often is the story of film culture. There were lots of female film directors, and then we act like there weren’t any. Last year, I presented a BBC Radio four documentary about Iris Barry, who obviously was a fellow female film critic who then came to America and founded the world’s first film archive at MoMA. So you see how far these voices can travel.
Iris Barry’s story is one of dominating international film culture, starting from scribbling reviews for The Daily Mail in the 1920s. These voices were really powerful. I love this idea that people would buy the paper to read these women’s reviews, they would scrapbook them, and they were treated like any other writer. I don’t think we think about criticism enough. I don’t think we are careful enough when we talk about critics or about reviews. We say critics hated it, or will quote one review and another review and not take into account the reasons why those writers or those papers would take those positions. I think that understanding past criticism is in itself a good thing to do. So yeah, C.A. Lejeune is my favorite film critic.
I didn’t know much about Iris Barry until I read James Card’s book Seductive Cinema. He hated her so much. You’ve got to take a lot of these memoirs with a grain of salt, but he specifically said that if Iris Barry’s taste had been the only one that created archives, we wouldn’t have King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) because she chose not to preserve it, and allegedly, because he liked it as a teenager, that’s why we now have The Crowd in the George Eastman House collection. I don’t know how true any of this is, but it’s fascinating.
There are always these arguments. “Oh, you can’t trust this person, they didn’t like that film, but I like this film.” I’m sure he also made as many bad calls. I mean, Iris Barry’s MoMA is quite important to the preservation of Queen Kelly, and to so many of the films. They also made lots of wrong decisions. But I always think, if a male writer gets really worked up about someone and tries to diminish their importance, that makes me want to find out a little bit more about them. I mean, this is not on the same level, but I remember I was thinking of buying All Those Tomorrows, the autobiography of Mai Zetterling, the actor turned film director. There was a review on, I think, Amazon by some man saying, “I know it’s her autobiography, but why does it have to be all about her?” I suppose he wanted to read her autobiography to see what she says about her male colleagues. I bought that book so fast, and it’s such a great read. Highly recommended.
It’s really fascinating how, not to shit on men, but how men really can be almost too basic for their own good. One of the few negative reviews of my book on Goodreads, was a man writing that they wished I had spoken to more well known directors, but the point of the book was to speak to women who haven’t gotten to really talk about their careers that much.
Do you know who hasn’t had many books written about her? Sofia Coppola, there’s not enough out there.
I need the ghost of Nora Ephron.
We’re so lucky that you could even name some really well known female film directors, because there are times when that wouldn’t have been that easy for people. The idea that any female film directors overexposed is wild.
I do still think that a lot of people think there are like ten women who make films, or even in a given year, someone will be like, “Oh, it was a great year for women in film,” and they’ll list like eight films. So you watched the eight really good films someone told you about, but you didn’t watch the 300 other films by women that came out. That’s the thing that always annoys me is like, every year is a great year for anything if you’re only watching the ten best. But I don’t think it needs to be a great year for films by women. I think people should just be watching all of them. You should watch the good ones. You should watch the bad ones. How is it equality if women can’t make bad films?
I was doing an event last night with a great author who’d written a book on three male film directors. So we were talking a lot about Francis Ford Coppola, a film director who goes out there, puts it all out there, makes masterpieces and makes films that are not masterpieces. Every single one of them is interesting, and if you get to know him and his work that’s interesting. Women’s careers can be just as interesting. I love The Lost Daughter (2021) and I haven’t seen The Bride!. Maybe I’ll like it, maybe I won’t. That’s not going to stop Maggie Gyllenhaal from being a really interesting person. Good or bad is not necessarily that interesting an evaluation full stop, and it certainly isn’t if you’re talking about film history and who’s making films and what kind of films and why, right?
We have this point where a woman will make a couple of beautiful films, or anyone will make a couple of beautiful, interesting films, and the reward for that is getting slotted into one of the lower rungs of the Marvel franchise. We can all think of a few examples of interesting directors who’ve done that. That’s not a way to fuel someone’s creativity. It’s almost like setting someone up to make a film that isn’t really their film, right? But that’s such an important rung in their career that maybe will enable them to go on and make other interesting films, or expand the horizons of what they do beyond indie cinema.
I also think it’s interesting to talk to women about the quote “lesser titles” that they have made. People talk about Julie Dash as if she only made one film, but technically she made many films. They were just for television, and her television films are fascinating. She made an erotic thriller where a man towards the end of the film stalks a woman and he paints himself silver. He’s a waiter painted silver. I asked her where that came from, and she’s like, “Have you ever seen a Black man painted silver in a movie?” I said “no,” and she said “That’s why I did.”
It’s not about women having to pass some kind of crazy high bar to be accepted as even a film director. Make three masterpieces, sell numerous tickets. Because we also know it’s not true, because people can make really great, really successful films, and they still get put in this female director box. I don’t know how successful Greta Gerwig’s Narnia is going to be. I suspect it will be massive. Will she still be the female director or the bar that other people are expected to reach just because they have ovaries and also direct film, right?
When we talk about women in film history, there were more obstacles even for them to make these films, just the social pressures. You were supposed to give up your career when you get married, when you have kids, or something like that, let alone the fact that the film industry became more hostile to women directors.
If you think that Dorothy Arzner didn’t make as many good films as John Ford, that might be a valid opinion, but also doesn’t mean that she’s not interesting. She’s a super exciting figure in film history, and far more, in my opinion, interesting to think about most of the time than John Ford. That’s no criticism of John Ford, absolutely no criticism at all. Not everyone is going to be Alfred Hitchcock. Most people don’t actually want to be. Most people don’t want to make several decades worth of studio blockbuster films. That’s not the most creatively fulfilling path. And if that is what you want to do, it’s really difficult to get to do it. This is such a sidetrack.
No. It’s perfect.
One of the things that happens with me is that, I’m really interested in women’s film history and feminist film history and I’m really interested in silent film history. I could talk about only those things all the time. But I also freelance in the real world. I’m out here talking about all kinds of things. I’m keeping up with the new releases for my own interest, plus the newsletter that I do and so on. I will talk about male film directors and new films all the time. I’m interested in everything. I have my special interests, my special areas that I choose to focus on. But I see the whole world of film as much as I can. I know that we all miss things. But you could catch me last night talking about Francis Ford Coppola. I had a great time. Why shouldn’t I be talking about Steven Spielberg? We’re all trying to earn a living and explore this massive sort of cosmos of film. It’s huge. You and I, we want to make a bit more space for certain voices that get squashed out. But, we’re also here in the real world.
My cat’s food won’t buy itself. [laughs] I meant to ask earlier, but forgot. Do you remember how you first fell in love with silent film? Was there a film or an image that drew you into this web?
I think if you really care about something, or you’re destined to care about it, it will find you. I have all these odd memories. I remember seeing this image of Louise Brooks on the TV when I was very, very young. I remember Lillian Gish dying. We weren’t a household that were really into movies, and certainly not film history. So it’s not that anyone I know was making a fuss about this. I just obviously remember seeing it on the news or seeing it in the newspaper and thinking about it.
As far as specifically looking at something and thinking, this is what I want to follow, and feel like a lot of people exactly my age will say the same thing, it was Irma Vep (1996), the Olivier Assayas with Maggie Cheung. I saw images of that film, and I thought “this looks amazing.” The film did not disappoint on any level. That was my intro into Musidora. I wouldn’t say that I became an expert on Musidora after watching that film, but I saw the wonder and the beauty and the peculiar kind of magic of early film.
At the same time, I was getting interested in film and watching all the films people had recommended for me, which in my opinion, weren’t great for teenage me. They weren’t speaking to me. So I would just go off and watch what I thought were completely randomly chosen silent film packages. The less I knew about the film, or the older it was, the further away from my experience of cinema going, the more magic it kind of held for me.
I was watching things from the 1900s and 1910s and being absolutely captivated, possibly a bit baffled, but that’s how it was all down to Irma Vep. Probably it was that cat suit. Musidora has been dragging me into film history ever since, because I’m still obsessed with her. I know a lot more about her now, and I wouldn’t have dreamed how much there was to know about Musidora back then. The new Irma Vep TV series I thought was quite good too.
I came to that one a bit later. I hadn’t seen Les Vampires (1915-1916) yet, but I loved Maggie Cheung and I had a friend who used to show my movies by playing them on Skype for me. He’d put on the film and just leave until it was over. Kids don’t know how we used to watch movies back in the day.
I went to a local cinema in London and watched it. My local art house cinema used to have these silly French Sundays. I watched it in the cinema and I was blown away.
Maggie Cheung is just so hot.
Everything about that film to me was just effortlessly cool. I mean, I am now, and was then obsessed with Paris and the French, so the idea that there was this chic movie crew with this exotic star and this wonderful outfit jumping around the rooftops of Paris, and yet all they were doing was imitating this early film. It was just catnip to me.
Last time we saw each other at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, I sat next to some older ladies during the screening of Häxan (1922). When it was over I asked how they liked it and one of them said “not very much.” You’ve written a great essay about the film, so I wondered, in your opinion, why you think, aside from that lady, this film still works so wonderfully one hundred years later? I think anyone would love that film. I don’t think you need to be a silent film fan. I don’t think you need to be a horror fan.
I agree. You don’t need to be a horror fan. I wouldn’t actually classify myself as one
Me either. I just like weird things.
And Häxan is weird, right? Weird is such a useful word, because this film has an unusual structure and texture. I don’t think people expect it to leap into the modern era. I don’t think people expect the lecture format and how it breaks out of that. It has incredible special effects. It has just amazing lighting. It looks out of its time. In many ways, it’s throwing back to the magic lanterns. It seems now that it must have felt ahead of its time, because it has all these different elements to it, and it tells its story in a way that progresses through the eras and also progresses to an unexpected argument at the end. I think that Häxan is just one of those odd objects from film history. In a way, you look into it too much at your peril, because you’ll find an explanation for why it’s like that.
But I think that it just happens alone in the way that you know beautiful images from certain films, like you know, Musidora on rooftop, Charlie Chaplin doing the automaton gag in The Circus (1928), Asta Nielsen dancing in The Abyss (1910). Some bits of these films are just cinema. You can put it in a box of silent cinema and say that you should know this and this and this about it, but it’s not. Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946) is everything, right? It’s the car chase One Battles After Another. It’s just great cinema moments that we can all enjoy.
When you see devils dancing around in Häxan, you know that you’ve seen something that just exists as the magic of film. I feel a lot of elements went into that film to make it something special and strange and good, and I kind of have a lot of respect for anyone who doesn’t like it at all. I wonder how many people who don’t like it at all would actually love it on the second viewing.
I should find that lady and ask her to watch it again. [laughs] When Robert and I first moved in together, Häxan was on the list of films I wanted to show him that he hadn’t seen. I was like, not to put too much pressure on this, but if you don’t like Häxan , I think I may have made a mistake. He loved it, so it worked out. Häxan is a movie for me that is richer on repeat viewings. It’s funnier, it’s weirder. There’s there’s moments that I get obsessed with every time I rewatch it. I can watch the sequence where the lady decides to test the medieval torture things a million times. Häxan is a deeply rewarding film to be obsessed with, in my humble opinion.
I think it’s interesting what you’re touching on. How much of your passion do you need to share? I love to share things. When I see someone who might be interested in silent film, or people approach me about a film, I always want to say, “This is a reason why you might be interested in it.” We all have our weird little passions. I think that a film like Häxan is never boring, it always does something surprising. It’s great to share your passion, but sometimes you learn a lot from people who just don’t get it. It doesn’t make your taste better. Like Iris Barry, The Crowd is great. We all come at film in different ways, and it’s really interesting whenever anyone has any kind of emotional reaction to it. Something exciting has happened.
Silent film, for a lot of people, even if you like classic film, it’s something it takes. . .not everyone gets into the silent era. People complain still when they play silent films beyond Silent Sunday Nights on TCM. It’s been fun introducing things to Robert, like Pandora’s Box, which I showed him when Criterion put out their new Blu-ray. Every once in a while, he’ll go out of town and he’ll see a silent film that I haven’t seen and I get really jealous. He watched L’Inhumaine (1924) when he was in New York last fall. I haven’t seen that and I didn’t get to see it. He loved it. I felt betrayed. [Laughs] But also, I’m happy that he got to see it on the big screen, because it sounds like it’s a great film.
There is a kind of league of how many silent films we’ve each seen, and you want to win.
I absolutely have to win. But also, I would have loved to have seen him love the film. Like when we watched Queen Kelly. He’d never seen it. I had so it was fun watching him react, especially once the film shifts to Africa. Because bits of it are progressive in terms of how they deal with the Black actors in that sequence.
That’s key in the book.
I’m excited to dive in.
Joseph P. Kennedy disagreed quite strongly on that matter.
I’m not surprised he did. I love watching people watch movies for the first time. A lot of the silent film festivals, unless they’re playing restorations or recent archival things, they’re playing things I’ve already seen, because I’ve been to too many festivals. The Denver Silent Film Festival is mostly showing films that I’ve seen.
The Denver Silent Film Festival is co-programmed by Maggie Hennefield, and has a screening of Queen Kelly with a video by me.
I was so excited when I saw that you were doing the video intro for that.
It’s going to be really interesting seeing people react to Queen Kelly, for example. Because if someone told me that this was a film from the 1920s about a school girl who spends a night with an adult prince, and then they go to Africa, I think my warning bells would be ringing. This isn’t going to be progressive. This is going to be an uncomfortable watch. There are moments that are uncomfortable, and I’ve delved into it enough to be that, but actually, it works on so many levels. I’m not going to say that it’s a perfect film in that way, and we’re never going to see exactly how it would have been edited together by the director anyway. But if you told someone about it and they weren’t excited about it, you’d never get them into the cinema. You would have to entice them with Gloria Swanson and the fact that you’ve bought their ticket, and have to go.
I’m glad a lot of these festivals show things that I have already seen. When I worked at TCM, one of our things was we are going to show Now, Voyager (1942), like ten times a year, but every time we show it, someone’s watching it for the first time. At most of these festivals, especially the ones in the United States that are the best of the archives or best of the bigger festivals, people are seeing these films for the first time. In order to grow, you have to program things that will bring in new audiences. I think we’re seeing growth, too. The LA Silent Film Festival is brand new. We’re seeing more and more and more festivals pop up. I’m still trying to see if I can start my own Silent Film Festival. I almost did one in Atlanta. I had them convinced, and then I moved so. . .
Well, Chicago is ready for it. You know, I once had a student who was very emotional because we just watched His Girl Friday (1940), and she was upset. She said, “Why did no one tell me about this film beforehand? I would have wanted to see it so many times. It’s wonderful and it’s so funny.” And you think, “Oh, everybody knows about His Girl Friday,” but depending on what your tastes are, what the taste of people are around you, there is always going to be someone who’s new to it. There’s always going to be someone who’s watching Häxan for the first time, there’s always going to be someone who is watching City Lights (1931) or The Passion of Joan of Arc, or The General (1926) or The Thief of Bagdad (1924), or whatever it might be, for the first time. And also some of us who are sneaking in to watch for the millionth time, who can’t get enough.
Part of why I resisted writing about silent films for my newsletter was that I know so many scholars, and my knowledge is deep, but it’s not as deep as scholars, and I feel like everyone knows everything. Then I wrote that piece about Charlie Chaplin and communism and so many people said that they never knew about that aspect of his career.
That’s something that I thought a lot about when I was writing the book. Because I’m lucky to know quite a few scholars and talk to people like Richard Koszarski, who knows everything about Eric Von Stroheim. When I’m writing things down, I’m thinking, “I must cover all of this, but I must make sure that I also know people know I know about this. And even though this isn’t relevant, maybe I should mention that.” But, you have to stop and tell yourself, “I’m not writing this book for the ten people, the twenty people, the four-hundred people who already know this story. I’m actually writing this story for people who don’t know the story, or who know a bit of it, perhaps, and would like to learn it, or who would like to be entertained by the story, who’d like to think about it in terms of all of film history. I care about silent film, and therefore I care about this movie.”
So that was something I was thinking about an awful lot. Am I trying to impress some people who know more than me, or am I trying to entertain people with a great story from film history that I think has resonance for the ages? You know, I had to keep coming back to the latter one, really.
I started an Instagram account for my love of the silent era, so if you’d like more micro-doses of silent film daily, give ✨ Nitrate Dreamland ✨ a follow.
This interview is so good I think I have read it three times so far and I keep finding new things to explore what have you done lol!
A lovely conversation, and an insta-follow on Instagram! (I came here from a link in the latest Milestone newsletter.)
I can't wait to see the new Queen Kelly restoration and retire my old copy, my family had an extremely tangential connection to Swanson, so anything new from her world is always a big deal to me. Maybe I'll get to see it on a big screen someday ...