Caught on Film!

I'm not a royalist or a monarchist but have always had a soft spot for horny old Lothario Edward VII - known fondly as 'Edward the Caresser' (as opposed to Edward the Confessor).

And I was surprised, the other day, to find so much film existed of the king. In social as well as ceremonial occasions. Surprising given that the king died in 1910 at the very dawn of motion pictures.

So I thought a compilation seemed in order - sadly now split into three cos of Blogger upload limits ...

These little scraps of footage, some quite up-close and personal, really do give some sense of this larger than life Dionysian character.

I've added, as the audio track, part of Edward Elgar's 'Enigma Variations' as this music so strongly reflects the nostalgia an empire quickly slipping away at the turn of the C20.

Sing It Out Baby, Sing It Out

Jean Mounet-Sully as Hernani in Victor Hugo's 'Hernani ou l'honneur castillan'

A few months back, I saw a London Weekend Television extended biographic interview - 'Lawrence Olivier - A Life'.

And I was reminded of a section in it today, watching early C20 film, with added wax cylinder audio track, of the great Comedie Francaise actor Jean Mounet-Sully (1841-1916) playing Oedipus in 'Oedipe Roi'.

In fact I was almost rolling round on the floor, shrieking and kicking my legs in the air, as Mounet-Sully melodrama-ed and sang his way through the Sophocles text - way way beyond what I thought was humanly possible. And he was considered the Great Classical Actor of the French theatre of his day!

Olivier touches on this 'phenomenon' in the context of the Royal Shakespeare Company of the same period and the delivery of blank verse ...

... with John Gielgud reflecting on how early in his career he must have seemed like 'an old operatic diva singing'!

At the beginning of the French footage, you'll need to listen behind the talking head for Mouney-Sully but by the end he's in full flight, singing out his 'aria'. Dramatic high notes, and seriously fortissimo!

So without further ado, buckle your seats belts ... so you don't do yourself a harm.

Any broken bones from tumbling your chair over?

But seriously, it's interesting to reflect on just how the measure of great acting (or anything much) is relative to the tastes and fashion of the time.

Just There Leaning Out A Window

Just about everyone must know about Anne Frank and her now famous dairy - German born and moving to near Amsterdam in the 1930's to flee anti-Jewish sentiments, hiding with her family in concealed rooms in her father Otto's office building when Hilter's forces occupied the Netherlands, dying with her sister Margot of typhus in March 1945 in the concentration camp of Gergen-Belsen.

What fewer may know is that the diarist was filmed in 1941 leaning out of a window during a neighbour's wedding day.

The Merwedeplein building where the Frank family lived from 1934 to 1942

I love Anne's gesture of tossing back her hair as she turns to respond to something happening in the room behind her - it's hard not to try to imagine the dimensions of this cheerful domestic situation - so at odds with the horrors to come.

'A Window Out The Past' rather than one into it.

The Last Tasmanian

Fanny Cochrane-Smith (1834-1905)

Mainstream white histories tell us that Trugernanner [Truganini] (1812-1876) ...

Trugernanner [Truganini] (1812-1876)

... was the last surviving full-blood Tasmanian aboriginal.

As a not directly relevant issue here, aboriginal people I know say aboriginality is a matter of identification rather than full bloodedness.

Truganini is now widely used by liberals, like me (and you?) to signify the genocide with repect to the indigenous inhabitants of this country by the European settlers.

However, born on Flinders island of a Tanganutura mother of the North-eastern tribe and of a Nicermenic father from the Robbins Island group of the Northwestern tribe, Fanny Cochrane-Smith (1834-1905) LINK can better claim to be the last of her race from the Australian island State of Tasmania.

That Fanny's claim has been largely ignored may well be due to the politics surrounding identity and its requirement of living a more complete and typical indigenous lifestyle. From the age of seven and with no known aboriginal name, she lived and later worked in white homes and institutions and married married a white man, the English lawyer and ex-convict, William Smith.

Fanny, husband William Smith and perhaps two of her sons

However, Fanny continued traditional practices - hunting, gathering bush food and medicines, making baskets, diving for shellfish and engaging in aboriginal religious rituals. And was heralded as the 'last Tasmanian aboriginal' at a concert held in her honour in 1899 in Hobart.

You must know by now I'm pretty drawn in by the 'Window into the Past' experience - and it was flung wide open this morning in cyberspace, when I happened across some wax cylinder recordings made by Fanny between 1899 and 1903.

Fanny - 1903 Recording

They are the only extant examples of a Tasmanian aboriginal dialect - spoken and in song, songs which in some cases she also recorded in English ...

... and just just managing to survive, due to the dawn of wax cylinder recording!

A Story Looking For Its Movie

Some stories just seem to be looking for their movie, and this one is particularly high on that list.

Rather than a too long-winded telling the story, I thought I'd bullet point a few of the more startling events in the particularly startling life of Mathilde Kschessinskaya (1872-1971) - and there were certainly plenty of them.

• As the C19 drew to a close, she was the Prima Ballerina Assoluta of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg

• At the age of seventeen, the ballerina had became the mistress of Nicholas II, when grand duke

• Even more scandalously for the day, she then formed a ménage à trois with two Grand Dukes of the Romanov family - Sergei Mikhailovich and his cousin Andrei Vladimirovich

• In 1902, she gave birth to a son, Prince Vladimir Sergeyevich Romanovsky-Krasinsky ('Vova'), who quite naturally was never sure who his father was

• Throwing realism completely to the wind, the ballerina would have selections from her valuable jewels sewn onto her costumes - for example, coming on stage as the Princess Aspicia in The Pharaoh's Daughter wearing a diamond encrusted tiara and choker - not a little like the American opera singer Leontyne Price who infamously jewelled up for the role of the enslaved Nubian princess in 'Aida'

• Kschessinskaya comissioned the famed Russian jeweller, Carl Faberge, to design a fetching gold and pearl encrusted, shall we say, 'top'

• It was from the balcony of her elegant house in Moscow that Lenin addressed a revolutionary crowd on his return from Finland in 1917

• In staggeringly stereotypic fashion, Mathilde escaped the Russian revolution with her jewel collection intact, moved to Europe and in 1921 married Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, becoming Her Serene Highness Princess Romanova-Krasinskaya

• The impresario Serge de Diaghilev invited the prima ballerina to dance with the famed Ballets Russes at the Paris Opera but she declined

• The family moved to Monte Carlo, where Mathilde dissipated the remaining wealth of family at the gamblimg tables - the remainder was sequestered by the crash of 1929

• Back in Paris, Grand Duke Andre was reduced to driving a taxi

• Kschessinskaya opened a ballet school in the French capital, teaching at times the likes of Ballets Russes ballerina Dame Alicia Markova, the Ballets Russes 'baby ballerinas' Tatiana Riabouchinska and Tamara Toumanova and The Royal Ballet's Dame Margot Fonteyn

Mathilde Kschessinskaya teaching 'baby ballerina' Tatiana Riabouchinska

• The prima ballerina absoluta performed one last time, aged 64, at a charity event with TheRoyal Ballet at Covent Garden

• Mathilde Kschessinskaya died in her 100th year.

'Alright already'!

Now this post was primarily prompted by my having come across 1920s footage of this 'larger than life' character at some kind of outdoor social gathering - she is seen in characteristically imperious mode greeting guests and firmly directing proceedings. And at the end there's a little section showing her son 'Vovo' loading up his plate from the outdoor buffet!

Her dying words?

'My life was beautiful'

You betcha baby!

And it makes our own seem just a tad on the dull and uneventful side. Well, mine at least - I don't know about yours!!!

The Orson Wells Legend -
Finally, I'm Starting To Get It!

Watching Michael Parkinson introduce a 1970's interview with Orson Wells, I realised I'd not fully appreciated the legend of this Hollywood legend. And in particular, the extraordinary diversity of his accomplishments - to the extent of a not exactly momentary 'career' as a bull-fighter!

So I fossicked round for something earlier and found the 1960 Paris interview with Merv Griffin ...


What's particularly disarming in this encounter, among so many disarmaments, is the actor/director/writer's unexpected frankness and seductive self-deprecating qualities. And the ease and almost eagerness with which he canvasses his own limitations and failures. Though this of course may give rise to charges of disingenuousness.


With controversial issues, Orson Wells has that delicious ability to warmly and genuinely acknowledge other points of view ... but just as a starting point to state his own. Which of often individual and distinctive, and one that doesn't sound contrived to elicit admiration. Such as when he explores the differences in difficulty of directing yourself on stage as opposed to in the movies.

And to top it all off, there's that quite incredible voice - deep, resonating, sonorous and boundlessly expressive - which Wells plays like a fabulous Stradivarius violin! Any actor would kill to have such an instrument!

I'm an (at least momentary) Wells devotee - any others out there?

Sylvia Beech Talks of Shakespeare and Co. in Paris in 1919, and of Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce

Sorry guys for going all blue stocking again, and so soon ... but, having put out a post on my extraordinary experience with respect to the famous English language bookshop in Paris 'Shakespeare and Company' (LINK) ...

... I couldn't resist another when I stumbled across a 1950s interview with its 1919 founder, Sylvia Beech.


Sylvia and girlfriend Adrienne Monnier, ...


... who ran a French language lending library, ...

... formed, as the little documentary surrounding the interview says, 'the nexus for the interchange between French and English literature' in the 1920s and beyond. 'Shakespeare and Company' was one of the major centres for much of activity of the ex-pat American artistic community.

In this interview, Sylvia Beech talks about her friendship with writer James Joyce and her publishing his 'Ulysses' in 1922. It had been serialised in 'The Little Review' between 1918-1922.

She also speaks about her relationship with Ernest Hemingway ...

As with all footage like this, for me the thing is getting a sense of the person, as much as engaging with the content. A bit like Peter Seller's 'being there'.

Really hope you like this one!

Another Holy Grail

Just when I thought I'd seen all the film footage associated with the Ballets Russes and it's Prima Ballerina Absoluta ...


... I Amazon-ed up this extraordinary 1970s interview ...

Hope you enjoy this rarity!

News Flash - Postscript to 'Being a Dompteuse de Cirque Is One Answer'

I've just added a postscript to 'Being a Dompteuse de Cirque Is One Answer' - a re-post of an interview I included within 'A Real Cracker of a Story' (LINK).

It is discussion on French television in 1967 with Prince Felix Yusupov about his involvement in the assassination of Gregori Rasputin.

Rudolph Valentino - A Curious Little Tease

Not quite sure what I have here - I guess a publicity teaser, yet again reconstructing the idea of 'The Great Lover'.

Whatever, I find it curiously erotic!

After getting out of his car ...


... Valentino gives one of those desperately self-conscious stretches - exactly as a lot of guys (including me) do in a gay bar just before they say 'Do you cum here often?


After a quick survey and in a prelude to things to come ...


... he takes off his jacket ...


... and goes back to his car ...


... giving some pretty good bubble butt on the way ...



Then Valentino strip teases, unbuttoning his collar ...



... and then his shirt ...



... before getting his suspenders (braces) off his trousers ...



Vulnerable - unbuttoned and with his arms up and back as he peels off his braces - he notices us.

And we can almost smell, on this hot summer day, the sweat of his armpits on his freshly ironed cotton shirt.


Valentino feigns coy modesty ...


... but we sense more an erotic invitation ...


... as he draws down the blind ...



Enhanced by what we now know of Valentino's sexual orientations, I get a real strong homoerotic charge from this footage! Call me crazy ... but!

It's that he's seductive but essentially passive - a dynamite combination for me. You'd need to take all the initiative - from getting into the back seat with him on.

Images can of course only say so much - it's really all about the movie ...

... don't you think?

PS I'm also entranced by the gorgeously shiny paintwork of the car!