Genghis Khan
Directed by Manuel Conde, Philippines 1950, 88 min, b/w, DCP, OmE
Print Source: National Film Archives of the Philippines / Film Development Council of the Philippines

“Do you know what a bumblebee is? According to the laws of aerodynamics, her body is too heavy for her wings. Yet, no one has ever told the bumblebee that she cannot fly! And, no one has ever told me that I cannot make a movie about Genghis Khan.” - Manuel Conde

If Genghis Khan is representative for the rest of his cinematic output, Manuel Conde must have been one of the great masters of Philippine cinema –- unfortunately, however, most of his movies have been lost. In this work, shot on a minimal budget, he succeeds in telling the story of the Mongolian tribal leader in a style reminiscent of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Eisenstein’s Mexico fragments or Orson Welles’ Shakespeare adaptations. Screened here is the version which was recently restored for the Film Development Council of the Philippines, and which was the centerpiece of the Philippine Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennial.

Given that from the outset a suitably epoch-like reconstruction of the life of Genghis Khan was way beyond his means, Conde situated the action in an abstract, visual no-man’s land, where with daring camera positions, extreme close-ups, shadow effects and surreal image compositions he successfully overrides the constraints of production. Kidlat Tahimik operates in a similar manner in his feature Memories of Overdevelopment, where he evokes the historic period of the European colonization of the Orient with the simplest means conceivable.

During a visit to Hollywood, Conde – who incidentally also shot a feature based on the Siegfried saga – showed Genghis Khan to the writer and screen-playwright James Agee (“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”), who became so enthusiastic about it that he wrote an American voice-over and collaborated on a new cut for the movie. This version was projected with resounding success at the 1952 Venice and Edinburgh film festivals.

Screenplay: Manuel Urbano (i.e. Manuel Conde)
Camera: Emmanuel Rojas,
Production Design: Carlos V. Francisco
Music: Juan Silos Jr
Editing: Rex Heinze
Sound: Flaviano Villareal
Production: Manuel Conde
Cast: Manuel Conde, Lou Salvador Sr, Elvira Reyes, Inday Jalandoni, Don Dano, Ely Nakpil, Africa De La Rosa, Ric Bustamante, Jose Villafranca, Johnny Monteiro, Andres Centenera, Leon Lizares, Inday Jaladoni
Print source: National Film Archives of the Philippines / Film Development Council of the Philippines close

 

Giliw Ko (My Dear)
Directed by Carlos Vander Tolosa, Philippines 1939, 91 min, b/w, DVD, original version w/ English subtitles

Giliw Ko is probably the oldest existent movie from the Philippines and the first-ever production by LVN Pictures, which later went on to become one of the country’s major movie studios. Antonio (Fernando Poe) is bandleader of a jazz orchestra in Manila. During a visit to his family’s hacienda, he discovers the singing talent of his stepsister Guia (Mila del Sol) as she sings the Filipino classic “Tunay na Tunay”. He persuades her to try her luck as a singer in Manila, and introduces Guia in her initial radio appearance as “Madonna of the Airwaves”.  Disillusioned with the superficiality of Manila’s High Society, Guia eventually returns to their hacienda.

Although Giliw Ko is clearly inspired by the prewar romantic musicals produced by the Warner studios, an anti-colonialist and nationalist undercurrent permeates the entire movie. The cultural influence of the American colonizers, under whose aegis the Philippines found itself since 1898, is clearly addressed and lightly condemned. Guia’s infatuation with American movie stars and their mannerisms – she even goes as far as imitating their facial expressions–, the jazz orchestra and Manila’s media world, American songs, which Guia ultimately refuses to sing, all represent an estranged counter-world to the rural idyll on the family hacienda where Filipino values ​​still count for something, and in the end an indigenous bamboo orchestra plays at the wedding.

That the plantation economy model inherited from the Spanish is seen in this way as “their own” in contrast to that foreign jazz, which itself at one time emerged from the resistance to slave labor on the American cotton plantations, constitutes one of the ambivalent vestiges in the Philippine’s colonial history, during which the Americans superseded the Spaniards as colonial masters in 1898.

Screenplay: Carlos Vander Tolosa
Camera: Remigio Young
Music: Juan Silos Jr and Ariston Avelino
Editing: Nario Rosales
Sound: Julio Hidalgo
Choreography: Manolo Rosado
LVN Pictures
Cast: Mila del Sol, Fernando Poe, Sr., Ely Ramos, Fleur de Lis (Mona Lisa), Ben Rubio, Precioso Palma, Cecilio Joaquin, Vita Ortega, Nieves Obieta close

 

A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino
Directed by Lamberto Avellana, Philippines 1965, 110 min, b/w, DCP, original version (English)
Print Source: Deutsche Kinemathek / Film Development Council of the Philippines

Based upon the best-known play by the author Nick Joaquin, who was repeatedly short-listed for a Nobel Prize in literature, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino combines nostalgia for the extinct, Spanish influenced Manila of the prewar years intermingled with disapproval for the actual state of affairs with its overly American tendencies. One can definitely find thematic affinities with the criticism of the Philippines that Kidlat Tahimik vented in movies such as The Perfumed Nightmare or Why is Yellow at the Middle of the Rainbow?

The prominent, albeit aging painter Don Lorenzo Marasigan (Pianing Vidal) locks himself away for a year in his atelier in Manila’s historical quarter, where he labors on a self-portrait that will not progress according to his expectations. Due to a lack of funds, his two daughters Candida and Paula find themselves constrained to take in Tony Javier (Vic Silayan) as a lodger into their home, who is the very embodiment of metropolitan modernity from which their father isolates himself in his studio. Javier wants to steal the self-portrait so as to sell it for a lot of money, and he finally succeeds in convincing Paula to abet him with his scheme.

Lamberto Avellana’s staging of Joaquin’s piece was so popular that he wrote a screen adaption in 1965. The cinematic style of A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino would be aptly described with the title of one of Joaquin’s collection of short stories: Tropical Gothic. The increasingly claustrophobic inner workings of Don Lorenzo’s home life are depicted in atmospheric black-and-white images, recalling the darkly evocative prototypical Film Noir movies that directors like Jacques Tourneur and Robert Siodmak shot in the 1940s.

In 2015, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino was restored by L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna upon commission by the Film Development Board of the Philippines. In the restoration process a 35mm-print of the movie which had been found in the possession of the German Cinematheque was also used.

Screenplay: Donato Valentin and Trinidad Reyes based on the play by Nick Joaquin
Camera: Mike Accion
Music: Mike Velarde Jr
Didem Pictures
Cast: Daisy H. Avellana, Naty Crame-Rogers, Conrad Parham, Pianing Vidal, Vic Silayan, Oscar Keesee, Veronica Palileo, Manuel Ojeda, Nena Ledesma, Polly Anders, Miriam Jurado, Nick Agudo, Sarah K. Joaquin, Francisco „Koko“ Trinidad
Print source: Deutsche Kinemathek /  Film Development Council of the Philippines close

Maynila: Sa mga kuko ng liwanag  
(Manila in the Claws of Light)
Directed by Lino Brocka, Philippines 1975, 125 min, col, DCP, original version w/ Engl. subtitles
Print Source: Cineteca di Bologna

Manila in the Claws of Light, the neo-realist metropolitan melodrama that brought Lino Brocka international recognition, was likewise restored by L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna. In search of his missing girlfriend Ligaya Paraiso, the “unsophisticated” Julio Madiaga comes from the island of Marinduque to metropolitan Manila, where he has to eek out a living with odd jobs and prostitution. The movie is now considered one of the great classics of Philippine cinema of this period in which the auteurs Ishmael Bernal, Mike De Leon and Kidlat Tahimik all created their first works.

The story is based upon a serial novel by Edgardo Reyes published in the weekly magazine Liwayway between 1966 and 1967. The Filipino film historian and director Clodualdo del Mundo developed a screenplay from it in a seminar at the Ateneo de Manila University. The film was restored with the support of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation and was previously presented at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014. The restored version is shown here for the first time in Germany.

Screenplay: Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr.
Production: Miguel de Leon, Severino Manotok
Music: Max Jocson
Camera: Miguel de Leon
Editing: Edgardo Jarlego, Ike Jarlego
Cast: Bembol Roco, Hilda Koronel, Lou Salvador, Jr., Joonee Gamboa, Tommy Abuel, Lily Gamboa-Mendoza, Jojo Abella, Tommy Yap, Juling Bagabaldo
Cinema Artists Philippines close

 

Signed: Lino Brocka
Directed by Christian Blackwood, USA 1987, 85 min, col, 16 mm, original English version w/ German subtitles
Print Source: Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art

In his cinematic portrait, Signed: Lino Brocka, Christian Blackwood genially captures the boundless and distinctive genius of director Lino Brocka, the most famous Filipino filmmaker of his generation. One sees Brocka shooting a commercially commissioned movie with which he financed his socially critical works. In long interview sequences Brocka talks about growing up in the postwar Philippines, about his path to movie-making, his homosexuality and his political activism, which landed him briefly in prison during the Marcos dictatorship. Signed: Lino Brocka was realised four years before his death, at a point his international reputation had reached its zenith. It is the only documentary about him.

Born in Berlin in 1942, Christian Blackwood has since the 1960s – initially in Germany and later in the United States – mainly worked as a cameraman, but has also directed some twenty documentaries. One of the first films on which he worked as a cameraman was Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (1965) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. With Hans Jürgen Syberberg he shot Sex business – Made in Pasing (1969) and San Domingo (1970), which will also be shown here. In 1966, together with his brother Michael he established Blackwood Productions in New York, for which over the years he has shot numerous documentaries, often about prominent but controversial figures in contemporary society. As of 1982 he ran his own production company. Christian Blackwood died in 1992 in New York.

Screenplay and Camera: Christian Blackwood
Sound: John Murphy
Music: Michael Riesman
Editing: Monika Abspacher close

 

Himala
(Miracle)
Directed by Ishmael Bernal, Philippines 1982, 124 min, col, DCP, original version w/ Engl. subtitles

“There are no miracles! We make the miracles ourselves!”, Elsa calls out in the closing scene of Himala to all those who had believed in her and her healing powers. Ishmael Bernal’s angry parable about a Philippine village transforming into a pilgrimage site is one of the great classics of Philippine cinema. It ranked among the top box office successes in the Philippines in the 80s and was also the first Filipino feature to run in the Competition Section at the Berlinale.

During a solar eclipse, Elsa (played by Philippine Superstar Nora Aunor) believes that she has witnessed an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In her home village Cupang rumors soon start circulating that that event has bestowed healing powers upon her. Within a short period the village becomes a place of pilgrimage, attracting hundreds of the needy, and in their wake all kinds of profiteers and freeloaders. The numerous visitors not only generate short-term prosperity, but also irrecoverably disrupt the village’s social fabric.

Alongside Lino Brocka, Mike De Leon and Kidlat Tahimik, Ishmael Bernal belongs to those directors who introduced Filipino auteur film to international audiences in the late 1970s. Himala’s screenplay was written by the prominent screenwriter Ricky Lee. The film was produced by Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, a government-owned corporation initiated by Imelda Marcos, wife of the dictator, whose declared aim was to produce quality films.

Screenplay: Ricky Lee
Production: Bibsy M. Carballo, Trina N. Dayrit, Charo Santos-Concio
Music: Winston Raval     
Camera: Sergio Lobo
Editing: Ike Jarlego Jr.     
Casting: Joel Lamangan     
Production design: Raquel Villavicencio
Art Direction: Dennis Cid, Bing Fabregas, Benjie Garcia     
Make-up: Siony Tolentino
Assistant Director: Warlito Teodoro
Set Design: Narciso Atienza, Lameth Bahian, Jovito Rigodon
Sound: Vic Macamay
Cast: Nora Aunor, Veronica Palileo, Spanky Manikan, Gigi Dueñas, Vangie Labalan, Laura Centeno, Ama Quiambao, Ben Almeda, Cris Daluz, Aura Mijares, Joel Lamangan, Ray Ventura, Pen Medina, Tony Angeles, Joe Gruta, Estela De Leon, Lem Garcellano, Cesar Dimaculangan, Mahatma Canda, Vicky Castillo, Richard Arellano, Erwin Jacinto, Potenciano Guzman, Reynaldo Mababangloob III, Nelson Obach close

 

Der lachende Stern
(The Laughing Star)
Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany/Philippines 1983, 109 min, BluRay, original English version w/ German subtitles

The closeness of pathos and pathology, which Ishmael Bernal brings to life onscreen in Himala, might also have been what attracted Werner Schroeter when he shot The Laughing Star, an essayistic approach to the Philippines during the final phase of the Marcos dictatorship. Schroeter assembles a profusion of highly pertinent material, partly shot by himself, partly found footage, to create the portrait of a schizophrenic society. The documentary offers an interesting outsider’s perspective on colonialism’s abiding consequences and stands in dramatic contrast to the open-ended and improvised film structures with which Kidlat Tahimik addresses these issues, especially in Why is Yellow the Middle Color of the Rainbow? (1994).

The film was described in the following terms in Die Zeit in 1985: "The Laughing Star does not allow the spectator to leisurely lean back in his cinema seat. It is too engaged and too dynamic in its design. Schroeter relates the history of a country that was under Spanish dominion for three centuries and has been subject to American influence since decades. Coverage is not chronological but rather associative with documentary footage, movie clips, trailing dialogues, post-production interviews and acting scenes – all underpinned with music. The trigger for his critical view on the Philippines was the International Film Festival in Manila in 1983, in which  - from the mouth of the First Lady and the Festival’s founder Imelda Marcos – much was spoken about humanity, love and human resources and the event was accompanied by a greeting from Ronald Reagan. One could scarcely find a clearer illustration than this Festival for just how dramatically the representatives of power have disconnected themselves from their people." close

 

Le fils maudit
Directed by Mohammed Ousfour, Morocco 1958, 35mm, original version w/ English subtitles, 50 min
Print Source: Centre Cinématographique Marocain

Ousfour is considered to be the first Moroccan to shoot a movie in Morocco, a film adaption of Tarzan on 8mm, premièred in 1941 in an inner courtyard in Casablanca. His passion for cinema led him into the most ludicrous cinematic ventures and frequently to financial ruin. Le fils maudit, one of the few of Ousfour’s surviving movies, will here be shown in a restored 35mm print version from the Centre cinématographique marocain (CCM).

Inspired by the free spirit of the silent-picture era, the movie tells the tale of a young man from a poverty-stricken household who is inevitably sucked into the criminal milieu. Due to financial constraints, Ousfour dispensed with sound takes during shooting. Instead, he himself would perform the soundtrack whenever the movie was projected, in a virtuosic spectacle whereby he not only dubbed in live all the actors’ voices, but he also generated the various sound effects and the accompanying music. A tape recording of one such live performance was used in the restoration of the 35mm print of the film and incorporated as a permanent audio track.

Whenever Moroccan cinema is discussed, Mohammed Ousfour (1927 - 2005) somehow invariably gets mentioned – as an ingenuous autodidact he was an invaluable aid to the many Hollywood directors who for a time came and went to Morocco to shoot their spy-thrillers and sword and sandal epics. The fact that Ousfour’s own movies have, to date, not been canonized in his native Morocco puts him in the same boat as Kidlat Tahimik, who likewise enjoyed a status between a mythical figure and an outsider in the institutionally fostered Philippine cinematic history. Both were united in their uninhibited joy in staging “their own” as hopelessly contradictory. close

 

Contras'City
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal 1968, 16mm, French with English subtitles, 22 min

Badou Boy
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal 1970, 16mm, French with English subtitles, 59 min

Djibril Diop Mambéty, who passed away in 1998, is for many the most important filmmaker from the African continent, a distinction, however, that alters little in that he remained a marginal figure during his lifetime. His best-known work is probably Touki Bouki (1973), a film which arguably re-invented “African cinema”, setting new yardsticks well beyond its cultural context in the so-called Third Cinema.

Even more so than his third release, Mambéty’s earlier shorts Contras’City and Badou Boy remind one of Tahimik’s debut works. Both cineastes admire the cleverness of children; they both love colorful, ramshackle taxi busses and idolize their heroes, so as to be able to lampoon all the more. “Oh douce France, you can’t tolerate the sun well? Ah, that’s Dakar, my darling!” The Senegalese capital is the heroine of nearly all Mambéty’s movies, which he constantly approaches in the guise of losers, gamblers and dawdlers. Whereas Contras’City is a brilliant, expressionistic dis /assembly of the postcolonial city, Badou Boy is more like a symphony to Dakar, staged like a running the gantlet to the rhythm of the radio.

Contras’City – as its title aptly conveys – is a compilation of contrasting fragmentary impressions from Dakar:  colonial-style embellishments, orientalist Art Deco vines around the office of a wealthy sheikh on the Place d’Oran? – No, it refers to the gas station attendant at TOTAL, Christian middle-class piety in the midday heat in front of the cathedral Notre Dame de Victoire, market scenes with blazing colors and flowers in Colobane, crowds on the pedestrian bridge over the highway, vignettes at the barber and the tailor, Muslims praying in the street on Friday (marabout-koran or marabout-cognac...) – all narratively held together by a kora and an ironic off-camera dialogue: “Oh, ma douce France!”, courtly trumpets (Bach Orchestral Suite BWV 1068), the off-screen din of the horse and cart that soon steps into the frame.

Badou Boy possesses a more narrative quality and relates a Mambéty-like typical tale of a clever street urchin in Dakar’s popular downtown districts. Equally as effortless and elegant as the hip movements with which Badou Boy, played by Lamine Bâ, leaps over the legendary puddles in Dakar’s streets, this movie’s dynamic musical soundtrack constantly shifts perspective. In continuous variation, each sound, images or movement takes the lead and drives the movie forward just like the cop (Brigadier Al, played by Al Demba Ciss) chases the good-for nothing Badou Boy through urban everyday-life of the post-colonial era, while every now and then the radio trumpets the sparsely-heeded news from the great Franco-Senegalese world. Melodic lines on the kora and shrieking synthesizer keyboard alternate to generate a psychedelic groovy funk, Western and spy movie soundtrack, accompanied not least by Djibril Diop Mambéty’s steady and baritone off-screen voice, which – like the numerous slapstick scenes in explicit reference to silent pictures – takes on not only the narrator’s function, but also that of authority: of petty officials, of the Police superintendent and of the radio announcer. close

 

San Domingo
Directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, West Germany, 1970, 35mm, original version, 138 min

Whoever associates the name of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg with his particularly well-known feature-length dramas about Richard Wagner, Ludwig of Bavaria and Adolf Hitler is in for a surprise with San Domingo, his black-and-white portrait of the German 60s generation. It is loosely based on Heinrich von Kleist’s story “Betrothal in St. Domingo” which Syberberg resets in an anarchist commune in the Bavarian countryside. As the movie opens with a blond Eros emerging from palm fronds, Parsifal or the fairy tale King Ludwig might briefly come to mind, however, the setting turns out to be Munich’s Palmenhaus where the blond is just about to finish his day’s work. With the Amon Düül II’s soundtrack and the credits featuring “the rockers from the Munich suburbs” and “the members of the Red Cells German studies” one senses where this will all end up  – and yet it is difficult to hold back one’s astonishment at how everything here comes together; the kissing, the coming to blows, the kidnapping and ensuing ransom.

San Domingo is a time trip into the Bavaria which Kidlat Tahimik, too, experienced first-hand in the early seventies, an unbelievably dense documentation of that period, in which the primarily non-professional actors were accorded enormous leeway to elaborate on the nuances of their characters. The plot about a handsome youth from a wealthy middle class background, whose political consciousness is awakened after being taken hostage by the commune members, and an Afro-Austrian dropout serves more as a pretext to lay bare before the camera all the then prevalent protest movement ventures and lifestyles, and to unite rockers and anarchists in an anti-colonial struggle. The movie ends in a typical mode for those times, but scarcely on a local tone, with a quote from Eldridge Cleaver. Coming from Syberberg and his co-author and cameraman Christian Blackwood (who also features in this retrospective with Signed: Lino Brocka), the tribute to the Black Panthers feels more credible than it had been from Andreas Baader, who had just then made his first entry into the spotlight and unmistakeably also served as a model for one or other role in the movie. close

 

Reminiscences from a Journey to Lithuania
Directed by Jonas Mekas, USA 1971, 16mm, orignal version, 83 min
Print Source: Arsenal - Insitute for Film and Video Art

“In 1971, at the invitation of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, Jonas and Adolfas Mekas participated in the Moscow International Film Festival and availed of the opportunity to visit their family in Birsen in Lithuania. With the support of the German broadcasting network NDR, they each shot a film revolving about this trip into the past. Opening in New York, the city where they now live, the movie revisits the places they frequented in their early years upon immigrating to America. The second part was shot in Lithuania where they meet with family and friends again and re-encounter the world of their childhood and youth, which had transformed in the meantime. Ultimately, the movie takes us to Vienna, where the brothers, who were members of the resistance movement, had wanted to travel so as to escape the German occupying authorities, and also to Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg, where they actually ended up and where they lived as forced laborers in a camp from which they fled again. The subsequent stages of their odyssey – which only came to end after their arrival in America in 1949 – were an illegal hideout in Schleswig-Holstein and a post-war camp for displaced persons.” – From the catalogue of the International Forum of New Cinema, Berlin 1972

Each brother shot a documentary film about this journey. Screened here will be Jonas Mekas’ Reminiscences from a Journey to Lithuania, not merely because it focuses, as does some of Kidlat Tahimik’s work, on exile, on emigrating and returning, but because it is also akin to Tahimik’s travelogues in its random open form and its robust sense of humor. And, last but not least, Mekas’ journey also leads to Germany, patently driven by his memories of forced labor and the four-year survival in the displaced persons camps. Also worth seeing is Adolfas Mekas’ Going Home (1971), which he shot jointly with Pola Chapelle. 16mm copies of both films are stored in the archive of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin. close

 

A Japanese Village – Furuyashiki-mura
Directed by Shinsuke Ogawa, Japan 1982/83, 16mm, German subtitles, 210 min
Print Source: Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art

The Japanese director Shinsuke Ogawa figures among the rare filmmakers to whom Kidlat Tahimik pays an explicit homage in his oeuvre. Ogawa’s documentaries on the political struggles in Japan in the 60s and 70s earned him a reputation, before he later become legendary thanks to his cycle of films shot over many years about a village in the Zao mountain range in Yamagata in northern Japan, where he came across vestiges of Japan’s entire history: from prehistoric shellfish through to the Pacific War’s catastrophes right up to the post-war economic miracle. A Japanese Village – Furuyashiki-mura was the first of these protracted film adventures. Its central theme is rice cultivation, an activity that essentially determines the village’s seasonal cycles and rural day-to-day existence.

“In 1980, together with his collaborators, Ogawa initiated a project in which the impact of the weather on the living conditions and the work of local farmers was to be studied. The so-called shirominami (“white south” – cold inflowing air from the Pacific) was causing farmers serious concerns about their forthcoming harvest, due to it giving rise to that year’s plummeting temperatures in spring and summer. As location for shooting they selected Furuyashiki, a village in the Zao mountain range in northern Japan, in which only eight houses remained occupied.

The first part of the documentary shows scientific studies on the effects of cold weather on the harvest. Beginning with experiments based on topographical models in which the flow of cold air is simulated, the film crew also undertook geological research and documented the growth of a rice seedling by means of microscopic photography. In the second part, the focus gradually shifts to the history of the village and its inhabitants. The elderly villagers talk about their lives, about the erstwhile thriving coal production, and the exodus of the young, which was explained by the fact that the sole road linking it to the town had been modernized.

Finally, an old man recalls his period in Manchuria during the war and his late homecoming to Japan, while other soldiers remained garrisoned in New Guinea. Over the course of the documentary Furuyashiki emerges as a microcosm, which to a certain degree reflects the development of modern Japan during the Showa era [1926-89]." – From a program text of the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne close

 

Le miracle des loups
(The Miracle of the Wolves)
Directed by Raymond Bernard, France 1924, 35mm, French inter-titles with English subtitles, 133 min

When Kidlat Tahimik submitted his debut feature The Perfumed Nightmare in 1977 to the Berlinale Forum, he enclosed a letter addressed to Erika and Ulrich Gregor, in which he plugged another movie. His letter contained a brief introductory note from Henri Langlois, legendary founder of the Cinémathèque française. Langlois wrote: “I hereby recommend you Mr. Eric de Guia (of the Philippine Islands), film director, who would be much obliged to you were you to allow him use a sequence from the film Miracle des loups so as to render homage to Madame Georgette Baudry, who doubled in the role of the screen star Yvonne Sergul [correct spelling: Sergyl] in the memorable scene with the wolves. Yours faithfully, etc. pp.”

In two handwritten footnotes in the letter, Kidlat Tahimik explained that, firstly, “Eric de Guia” was his original name, and secondly, that “Georgette Baudry” was the 70-year-old lady who plays the role of the egg-vendor in his feature. “She is a real marchand de quatres saisons [fruit and vegetable peddler], I have always bought eggs from her during several years. Then when I asked her to play in my film – she surprised me with a secret: she had been in films between 1924–1930  (about a dozen). And 50 years later she is selling eggs in the streets of Paris! I had proposed to Langlois, ‘why not make a hommage to Georgette Baudy at the Cinémathèque? Why only hommages to Alain Delon or Marlon Brando?’ For this, he wrote the letter of introduction.” Kidlat Tahimik’s wish for a tribute to Georgette Baudry will be fulfilled, albeit belatedly, with a screening of Le miracle des loups. Screened here is the version, which in the meantime has been restored.

One of the great classics of French cinema, Le miracle de loups was in its day one of the most elaborate and most expensive film productions that had ever been undertaken. Contemporary reviewers even hailed Raymond Bernard as the French equivalent to D.W. Griffith. Although this accolade could also be interpreted as rhetorical muscle flexing in light of the overwhelming dominance American cinema had attained after the First World War, Le miracle des loups thoroughly warrants the enthusiasm it generated. The narrative takes place in XV century France during the ensuing fragmentation in wake of the Hundred Years War. King Louis XI’s aspirations to unify the country by any means possible encounters fierce resistance from the nobles, led by the Duke of Burgundy. A young nobleman is entrapped between the firing lines of love and political loyalty, as he becomes enamored with Jeanne Fouquet the King’s goddaughter.

Bernard directs the nationalist epic with dramatic elegance and subtle humor. It was to become famous for its even by today’s standards stunning key scenes, such as the Siege of Beauvais in which he used thousands of extras (and for which Griffith’s The Fall of Babylon served as a template), his staging of the decisive Battle of Montlhéry in which the horrors of war are depicted with hitherto unprecedented realism, and not least the infamously graphic scene in which a pack of wolves have mercy on Jeanne Fouquet who was being tracked down by the bailiffs and instead cruelly kill off those pursuing her.

In 1930, Le miracle des loups was re-released in a shorter re-edited version with sound. In 1961, André Hunebelle shot and directed a remake with Jean Marais in the leading role.


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