REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

Snapshots and postcards from Istanbul’s glamorous past

 “It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

Frank Zappa

 The discovery of a copy of Cornucopia magazine at a bazaar in Ottawa was timely. Issue 51 from November 2014 has the cover story Istanbul Unwrapped part 2: Beyoǧlu Boogie splashed across a photo of five men in dinner suits laughing over their cocktails. The picture was a message to readers that back in the 1940s Istanbul had been more Paris than Paris, and a lot more fun.

The timeliness has to do with news reports indicating that Washington has finally realized that Ankara’s deeper loyalties lie with ISIS, not the West. Long time observers may wonder why the U.S was so slow to catch on to the bleeding obvious but quite a few Turkish people will nod and remind whoever is listening that it only looks like Washington has acknowledged things very recently. In the grand chess plan, this admission is only a feint hiding darker ambitions. Turkey didn’t invent the conspiracy theory but it made it a work of art. In any case, what Washington is also admitting is that Turkey is no longer that beacon of Western Civ flashing its light across the barren sands of Islamic Asia. It has literally gone over to the dark side. Not so long ago - as in during the Cold War – that was unthinkable. Secularism was actually built into Turkey’s constitution, and it was one of the few countries that proclaimed religion as bad as Communism (How tres Camus!). It was also desperate to be European, particularly in the sense that European meant wearing hats by Dior, smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes and driving Mercedes Benzes. To President Erdoǧan and his associates secularism was an era that has now ended. Ultimately they want it purged from the national consciousness. Cornucopia is a magazine that wants to preserve that past in aspic. It and the Government conduct their affairs apparently oblivious to each other. What’s interesting to us is the myths they both construct about that era.

  

Cornucopia’s aesthetics lie somewhere between those of National Geographic and Food and Wine. On one page we have a dervish whirling in the afternoon light filtering through a dusty window, on the next an array of white cheeses discovered at a local market. You can imagine. Politically it belongs somewhere between 1920s nationalism and 1950s secularism. Secretly, it longs to be woken at dawn by the graceful ululations of the muezzin (without the crackle of cheap loudspeakers), to sit down to a breakfast of yoghurt, figs and dried apricots before a morning practising on the baǧlama or learning the traditional methods of dyeing wool and spinning it into kilims. Its commitment to history may be sincere though its sentiments are dubious. To Cornucopia the era between the 1923 revolution and the 1960 coup was a golden age of Turkish culture, unrivalled except for that other semi-mythical age when Ottoman Constantinople flourished under Suleiman the Magnificent. 

To President Erdoǧan and his faction in the AKP, this rose-tinted nostalgia isn’t just a longing for an age that may be more legend than reality but a Western attitude that is fundamentally orientalist. They have a case – the magazine advertises itself as “Turkey for connoisseurs”; a warning to lesser mortals to steer clear – but they (the AKP) actually indulge in an even more absurd nostalgia. For them there was an age more fabulous than Cornucopia’s; when Turkish culture was governed by pious asceticism. Concrete evidence for the existence of this time and place is hard to find, except ironically in the writings of European travellers. For writers like Gustave Flaubert and Pierre Loti, the sight of a white robed muezzin calling from the balcony of a minaret evoked something Europe had lost in the Enlightenment. 

Thanks to Cornucopia we learn that Maxim’s of Taxim (sic) was established and run by Frederick Thomas, a black American who had run nightclubs in Moscow during the Bolshevik Revolution: why isn’t he better known? It’s a bit like giving Dooley Wilson the lead role in Casablanca. Instead we got a 1957 remake, Istanbul, starring Errol Flynn and Cornell Borchers. Back in town after a brief spot of diamond smuggling, Flynn turns up to a hotel in Sultanahmet to discover former girlfriend Borchers towing behind her new husband, while Nat King Cole is the house pianist. Well, who wouldn’t be delighted? Of course, when Hollywood portrayed Istanbul as sophisticated, what it really meant was that it was exotic. As usual with all its films set in the eastern Mediterranean, we know the city’s male inhabitants can’t be trusted because they are either slovenly or effeminate. 

  

Istanbul’s music scene of the 1940s was heavily occupied by Turks quick not just to embrace but make a Xerox copy of Western music and especially jazz. Meanwhile black musicians having a tough time in the States were heading over to Europe, which led them to Istanbul, where they discovered eastern modals. In the 50s Turkish jazz bands would be pumping out the very worst of Dixieland while over in the U.S Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane were discovering a whole new way of thinking based on Turkish music. 

A conceit of Cornucopia’s article is that this world can still be found. Turn left here and walk down a laneway that hasn’t changed in half a century. Enter this shop and step back in time. Nostalgia is a form of fraud, as is its opposite (a concept that interestingly enough has no single word for it in English). In post revolution Turkey history was something best to forget, or at least to rewrite, and if they were difficult then laugh at it. 

 

 The past hasn’t completely vanished. Anyone who wanders through the narrow strip of laneways between Istiklal and Cihangir can tell at once that this was once a land of seedy yet staunchly à la mode nightclubs. Until about five years ago some of the old cinema palaces around Istiklal, like the Alkazar and the Emek, survived. The Emek was vast, with elaborate galleries and even the way the curtains drew back on the screen was graceful and majestic. The film might be rubbish but you felt you were at an event. This image was taken at a cinema over in Aksaray in the 1940s. Back then the neighbourhood was a residential area under the shadow of Istanbul’s great mosques and the nearby Grand Bazaar. Today it is ugly and dishevelled, dissected by a highway and best known as a centre for sex trafficking. 

 

The long Ottoman era – but especially the last century – had been defined by exclusion. Women were not permitted here, non-Muslims could not go there, Muslim men could only enter this place so long as they didn’t eat this or touch that eat this and so on, ad nauseum. Even Protestants had more fun than that. As Ataturk understood secularism, people could believe and do as they wanted. To the neo-Ottomans this effectively unleashed a form of anarchy upon a nation conditioned to doing what it was told.

  

Even so, Turkey’s entrance into the modern world remained a celebration for the privileged: wealthy Turks who privately supported westernization, and the still powerful non-Muslim communities of Armenians, Greeks and Jews. In his memoir, Portrait of a Turkish Family, Irfan Orga describes the morning after the proclamation of the republic as quiet and still, the streets mostly empty, the businesses shuttered.  No one was really sure what the end of empire meant.  

 The feeling Cornucopia wants to impart is that Istanbul 1923 – 1959 was about the most exciting city on the planet. The French may disagree but they never had that sense of kicking against the pricks that drove Istanbul’s culture; or as Parisian Jean Cocteau put it: ‘Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else, and failing’. Only when it wanted to be Paris did 20^th century Istanbul discover its real identity.

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REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

WINGS OF DESIRE

Transgressive images from Weimar cinema

 "I’m sincere in my preference for men’s clothes. I do not wear them to be sensational. I think I am much more alluring in these clothes."

Marlene Dietrich

 Berlin in the Weimar years: a city rampant with leather wrapped, cross-dressing S&M fetishists, or not. Depending on whom you ask (or what you read), that image is either an invention or a conflation. There were bars like the Silhouette, where a customer could take a table and watch a parade of men in make-up and dresses and women in tuxedos, but reliable advice suggests most of the night spots were a lot tamer than that. Apparently we can thank films like The Night Porter and Cabaret for seizing on a rumour and treating it as fact. If the Nazis were perverts by definition, it was assumed that for night time amusements they’d prefer watching a couple of transvestites spanking each other rather than a blonde fraulein singing banal operetta, but when you think it through, the latter is darker, stranger and altogether more disturbing. One of the hallmarks of the Nazi leadership was an abject lack of imagination. These were people who dreamed of a world where everyone shared their passion for kitsch, which meant blonde girls in gingham singing folk songs, not sexual ambiguity. Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood’s original book on which Cabaret was based has no scenes set in a cabaret, but can we really blame Michael York and Dirk Bogarde for helping create the enduring image of Berlin C1930? Not entirely. Thanks to the Ross Verlag postcards we have thousands of surviving images that show the photo studios pushed the idea of a city where taboos were broken as a daily habit. Yet, coming from the cinema world, they were images of what the world could be, not what it was. Lya de Putti’s attire may have looked fabulous but it was impractical, and it was easier to imagine a world where women strolled along the Kurfürstendamm in sheer, glistening black rather than live in one where they actually did. After all, for a lot of ordinary citizens struggling with hyperinflation and massive unemployment, to dress like Ms Putti does in this photo was like waving a red flag at a National Socialist rally. The photograph is by M. I. Boris, aka the Bulgarian Boris Majdrakoff, who arrived in New York in the 1920s with a past respectable thriller writers would have dismissed as too unlikely. 

 

 Look at contemporary fashion images of women wearing suits and ties and we are meant to think of them as daring experiments in gender reversal, but so many of the Ross postcards show women wearing men’s clothing, or a close approximation, that we realize they were a trend back in 1920s and ‘30s Berlin. What makes us think they are about playing a game rather than making a statement is that so many of the actresses portrayed did not have reputations for challenging convention. From what we know of Carola Tölle, she played solid roles in films that are largely forgotten because there is no compelling reason to remember them. Her private life can’t be accounted for but it appears scandal free.

 

 Henny Porten’s fame and reputation have endured, for her roles as a gentle or long suffering earth mother type. Comparing the photo of her with that of Ms Tölle, we begin to see a pattern, or rather, a style. Only a decade earlier the notion of a woman wearing a suit and tie would have still caused a stir. In 1919 however, German women won the right to vote.  What had changed had less to do with Weimar Berlin’s free thinking than fashion designers’ understanding of how to accommodate radical into chic. Ms Porten’s sleeveless waistcoat has a decidedly feminine cut. She is not wearing a business suit. In the 1970s Diane Keaton revived the suited look in Annie Hall. If it didn’t make the jump to the pages of Vogue that was because it was too idiosyncratic: it was one thing to look like Diane Keaton, another to look like Annie Hall. And maybe the crusty old editors at the magazines took one glance, recalled their youth in Vienna wearing Papa’s silk ties and thought it had all been done before.

 

 Having never seen Marcella Albani in a film, commenting on her strengths as an actress is pointless, but in every other photograph of her in the collection she is portrayed as the embodiment of graceful elegance; a woman with a preference for haut couture and intelligent conversation. That doesn’t mean she lacked a sense of humour. When she fronted up to the studio on this particular day, she might well have been bored with the idea of yet another soft focus study suggesting she had just emanated from the mists. Perhaps Herr Binder was bored too and together they concocted an image the very opposite of what was expected. She was an actress; it was her job to be out of character. 

 

 Russian born Hella Moja dressed as a baroque era noble (or Mozart) looks to be having the last word on androgyny here, and in a way she is. We know from photographs by Walery and Reutlinger that the Ancien Regime look was popular around the Parisian music halls a generation before Karl Schenker took this portrait. So too were the matador, the Gypsy and even the blacksmith. They were too exaggerated to be subversive, more like fancy dress, and never began with the premise that other women might want to dress that way in the street. Also, it was always more acceptable for women to dress as men than the other way around. How many of the leading male stars were willing to don corsets and bustles?

 

 Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays famously turned up in the U.S and turned women on to smoking. He took his lead from home, where the habit was already associated with modern sophistication, added a bit of volume and general crassness and earned the undying gratitude of his employers. A lot of the Ross postcards show women smoking; by the mid 1920s a cigarette in the hand was a sign of elegance, of adulthood, but not necessarily of rebellion. Ms Haake’s forte was light comedies and socially concerned dramas and she’d go on to a long career, appearing in films into the 1980s. If the idea of a woman smoking was as scandalous in Germany as it was in America, she’d be one who’d put hers out before the photographer was ready with the camera.

  Not so Fern Andra, the great, unsung heroine of early cinema. American born but European by preference, she promoted herself as a woman who liked a cigarette and a stiff drink and would be disappointed by any man who did not offer her both. In reality she was an intensely serious worker who understood the dangerous gulf between public image and private life. She paid a price, but not for smoking or dressing in men’s clothing or any of the standard contraventions. As actor, director, producer and even photographer, she controlled her image so closely that when it began to fade no one was on hand to help her revive it.

 

 Which brings us to that most infamous figure of the early screen, the vamp. Her modern history began with the nineteenth century music halls, she came of age with silent film and died with its passing. It was difficult to be a real vamp in the 1930s. The Hays Code in Hollywood was very much opposed to any young woman who thought a man’s marriage was a speed hump not a stop sign. According to the new rules she had to pay for her crimes, which was an obligation no genuine vamp ever considered. The Nazis weren’t keen on her either. For all the bondage and S&M imagery bestowed upon them, publicly their ideal woman was blonde, virtuous and enthusiastic about the outdoor life. She could suffer but never inflict pain herself. The vamp was dark, saturnine and came alive when the sun went down, like Valerie Boothby in this image from Iris cards. Despite her very English name, Ms Boothby was German. Her career was short but included such titles as Girls on the Cross (1929), Adam and Eve (1928) Inherited Passions (1929) and Marriage in Name Only (1930); all which suggest some poor fool learns a lesson about love the hard way. 

  The vamp and the femme fatale were subtly different creatures; though the man who fell victim to either was seldom astute enough to know that. Both depended on exploiting male vulnerabilities but where the first was essentially amoral the second had principles and objectives. Sometimes she was looking for a way out and figured the man would lead her to it, and sometimes she was genuinely in love with him. If the last scene saw the vamp heading down the street with a man in her arm, you knew they were going back to her lair. If it was the femme fatale on the other hand, she may well have been persuaded that the path to true happiness lay in marriage, children and a home in the suburbs. Lissi Arna is one of the many German actresses of the silent screen forgotten now by all but the most devoted fans of the era, yet throughout the 1920s she was one of Weimar cinema’s most popular stars. Her reputation today, such as it is, rests on several films where she played the prostitute (hard hitting exposé) or the seductress (comedy, melodrama) but as it transpires she made more of the routine romances that were the bread and butter of the film business. The Kiesel Studio was located at Kurfürstendamm 11, meaning the address was fashionable but real information beyond that is hard to find. Alongside the celebrity portraits are many more showing children with oversized Easter eggs, or (that other inexplicably popular genre) dressed as their parents. What we see here is one of those minor shifts in the way women were portrayed that don’t raise the number of eyebrows today that they should. There is nothing vulnerable in Ms Arna’s expression. She knows what she wants and how to get it. 

  The secret had less to do with women discovering an independent spirit than technicians realizing the power of lighting. Photographers were learning that a shift in angle to throw a shadow could do more than animate a portrait. It could transform Elizza La Porta, generally sensible star of such morally didactic films as The Right of the Unborn and The Vice of Humanity (abortion and drugs respectively) into a siren of the night. Silent Hollywood gave the vamp fame and notoriety but in Los Angeles she was a European construction. Think of the number of famous Hollywood mantraps from the silent era, how many have ‘European’ names, and what their actual names were: Theda Bara (Theodora Goodman), Dita Naldi (Mary Dooley), Olga Petrova (Muriel Harding). She was by definition exotic because part of the danger of becoming involved with her lay in being unable to penetrate her closed, enigmatic mind. In Germany, America was a strange, distant land (witness the popularity of Karl May’s Native American novels), but so too were places just beyond its borders. The Balkans, home of the vampire, Oriental Turkey and the Arab lands, the Russian steppes; they were all breeding grounds for women who could crush a man’s soul with as much thought and effort as it took to flick a cigarette into the gutter. Romanian born Elizza La Porta may not have played the seductress on screen but she knew how to for the Manasse studio. Operated by Olga Solarics and Adorjan von Wlassics, it specialized in glamour photography and in surreal, modernist erotica. After years of relative neglect, the erotica was rediscovered and in the process became representative of decadent Berlin. The studio was equally adept at portraying actresses as sweet and wholesome as a strudel. But any fool with a camera can do that.

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WINGS OF DESIRE

1066 AND ALL THAT

Some Judge’s Scenes of Hastings

 “No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.”

  Robert Adams

When Fred Judge started out producing postcards in about 1904, he stayed close to Hastings in Sussex, photographing scenes that made the local news such storms, fires and the inauguration of monuments. These may have impressed the locals but tourists usually wanted something less specific and more identifiable with their visit, so he broadened his horizons, as it were. This might suggest his photos became more boring; endless shot of local landmarks, but a lot of them were like this. It could be any seaside town in England. There are a couple of things to keep in mind with this photo. The first is the caption. “What are the Wild Waves Saying” was a popular song by the Victorian composer Joseph Cartwright. Most people in the 1900s would have got the reference at once (quite a lot of them would have sung it while standing around a piano somewhere). It has a Christian theme and a somewhat morbid subtext.

The other is that up in Whitby, Yorkshire, Frank Sutcliffe Meadow, had taken very similar images to this in the 1890s; so similar he could be considered an influence without any real proof. But there is no mixing of the genders in Sutcliffe’s best known images. They feature only men or women, or boys and they are inevitably from the same class. This is more interesting because we get a mix. The woman in the centre is better dressed than the others, and not how she holds the back of her skirt to stop it flapping.

Brighton was always a seedy place. Think of any novel written between 1900 and the Second World War and as soon as Brighton gets a mention you know someone’s up to no good. They are heading down to cheat on their spouse, or they’ve been cheated on, and now they are standing on the pier in gin soaked formal attire, gazing through bloodshot eyes at some children playing in the shingle and asking themselves why they were denied a normal life. Self-pity is the curse of the educated classes, it seems. Hastings on the other hand was a family place. You almost never hear a bad word about it, except that it was a bit dull compared to Brighton. You get that impression from this postcard. Another of Judge’s early ones, un-numbered, which would put it about 1905, and on printing out paper, which explains the yellow tones, but technical details aside, it’s a very genteel scene; with good reason. A walk along the promenade wasn’t just a constitutional in Edwardian times. It was also part of a mating ritual. In a world where men and women rarely worked together, where a lady never went to a bar and social events were tightly monitored, the promenade was one of the few acceptable public places where the sexes could hope to meet. One strolled, hoping to catch the eye of another one, and if one (or two) were lucky, this would be the start of many long walks together. In the seats at the front, a man is leaning forward and talking to a woman while another woman sits between them, acting as a barrier. This would be considered proper. It looks as civilized as it sounds.

 One photographer Judge declared to be an influence on him was Paul Martin, though in reference to his night scenes of London. When we think of Martin, it’s probably his seaside scenes from late Victorian resorts; images of couples groping each other in the sand, a fat man beginning a dive off a raft, and people buffeted by the wind at a beach in Yarmouth. We may sense Martin’s eye in the first image above though not in this one, yet it is all over it. Judge has followed Martin down to the beach, so to speak, and while not focusing on a few people, as Martin did, has managed to catch some of the same atmosphere of England at the seaside. This is a scene full of details; look for example at the crowd lining the promenade and the bathing machines lines up on the shore in the mid-ground. When we look at the people on the beach something odd becomes apparent, no one is doing much of anything. There’s a small group at the front that look like they’re buying something. Everyone else is sitting and talking but you get the impression there isn’t a lot of noise emanating from the throng, no high cackling or laughter at a broad joke and no children screaming. Also, there appear to be many more women than men, leading us to wonder if the beaches were still mostly segregated. There is another, glaring detail. The English liked to sit on the beach fully dressed. What a curious breed. 

At night they’d head to the pier. I could attempt a close reading of this image, but we can do better than that and hand the discussion over to Rose, writing on the back of the card in August, 1925, or 26. “Dear Les, Are having a topping time, crowds of people here. Don’t you think the bandstand looks interesting in the dark, I assure you it’s great!” You hear Rose’s voice coming through but I can’t really describe it without sounding patronising. Still, I bet she has Agatha Christie’s latest, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, up by her hotel bed and thinks it’s a smashing read.

Incidentally, Judge was usually mindful of his numbering, putting everything in the order that he took it, but this one, 204, is too early because the bandstand wasn’t erected until September 1914. This may have actually been photographed around 1914-1915 and Rose bought it later.

To Eastbourne, just down the road from Hastings, and a scene that at first glance might look like an ‘interesting slice of social history’ but on careful inspection is much better than that. Going by the number on the card, this was taken about 1909. There is an advertisement for P and A Campbell under the right kiosk. The company started a ferry run to Boulogne in 1906, so it can’t be earlier than that. But let’s start at the far left, at the poster advertising a show by Albert Chevalier. We read that Mr Chevalier (1861-1923) was one of those stars of the English music hall, who is now forgotten but was wildly famous in his time. The more important detail is the booth for the ‘animated pictures’. Cinema was just over ten years old. Audiences may have watched a few short comedies of the type James Bamforth was producing in Yorkshire but the most popular genre by far belonged to ‘scenes of daily life’. The prospect of seeing yourself or your friends walking along Eastbourne’s streets pulled in the crowds. Note the time on the clock. The woman at the booth has missed the 3:30 session. The next is at 8:15. So, is she buying a ticket? Asking if there’s an interim session? Or is she more interested in another entertainment? At the end of the pier we have the Camera Obscura; Eastbourne Pier was a visual spectacular. The kid in the sailor suit in the middle foreground and two just beside the ‘Judges’ logo aren’t wearing shoes, meaning they can’t afford them. Just behind the two on the right are a girl and a boy, both wearing shoes, both from better circumstances. Most likely the children without shoes would work in factories six days a week and go to school for two hours in the afternoon. By today’s standards they’d enter adulthood effectively uneducated. Depending what type of school the other boy and girl went to, they’d already know a bit of history, some geography and just possibly a few phrases in Latin. Judge probably wasn’t thinking about these things and didn’t see them.

What he did see, very well, was patterns, forms and shapes. This is the entrance to the pavilion at Hastings. One thing you’ll notice is the absence of people crowding his view, meaning that he had the space and the time to work out his shot. The light pole is integral to the design. Remove it and very little is happening. You’ll notice too how by shooting at an angle he emphasises how there is nothing behind the façade. If I were an art critic, I’d call this proto-modernist.

If the numbering is consistent, (there is no guarantee of that) then Judge took this photo of the bandstand shortly after the one above, between 1922 and 1923, just before he stepped back from active photography to manage the business. Something about this reminds me of a Czech or Polish film from the early 1960s, where we see a few couples dancing inside oblivious to the poor outside. The war had ended four or five years ago and technically Britain was at peace. But thousands of soldiers had returned to chronic unemployment and a political establishment as incompetent in peacetime as it had been in war. In November 1922 the first hunger marches began across England and in February 1923 one arrived in Hastings. There wasn’t much evidence for a great Britain. One man who grasped the problem was the King, George V. "Try living on their wages before you judge them,” was his comment to the press during the 1926 general strike when he read descriptions of the strikers as revolutionaries. In any case, through this brief trawl of Fred Judge’s scenes from Hastings, we see a changing approach and a consistent eye.

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1066 AND ALL THAT

BRIEF LIVES

Portraits of forgotten stars who died young

“One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

John Donne

The history of the silent cinema is littered with young corpses, especially suicides. A very few achieved a kind of immortality through dying: Rudolph Valentino springs immediately to mind, but for most who died young, death brought more than a figurative long silence. They were soon forgotten. It is unfair to expect people born decades after they died to remember who they were, but fame, we are told, is somehow eternal. And we are so often being asked to imagine perpetually sunlit fields where the dead stars wander in a kind of bliss, pausing only to look down upon us indulgently. Among these portraits Pearl White’s is the only name I was familiar with before I bought the photo. Saying that, the image I had of her was of a woman tied to rail tracks as the steam engine bore down, and I cannot remember I saw that in one of her films or got it from Rocky and Bullwinkle. One’s memory doesn’t have gaps so much as rough patches, don’t you find? In any case, Ms White’s story is sad and we should not make light of it. In the early years of silent film she did her own stunts. Having been a bareback rider in the circus she didn’t think much of jumping from heights and rolling out of moving vehicles but she broke bones in the process, with the result that she took to painkillers and alcohol, with the extended result that she died from liver failure aged 49. 

Who today knows anything of Lillian Hall Davis? Not me – at least, not until I found this photo, yet we read that for a time she was one of budding director Alfred Hitchcock’s preferred actresses and starred in his third and fifth films, The Ring and The Farmer’s Wife; films that British cinephiles hold as keys to understanding everything he did that followed.

Some of us can imagine a suicide’s final minutes; the preparation and the execution. What remains utterly mysterious are the days leading up to that; the bleakness, the compact someone makes with themselves. Lillian Hall Davis’s death was particularly horrible. She slashed her wrist and her throat then put her head in a gas oven. Such determination is terrifying.

In the early 1920s Bruno Kastner was a huge star in Germany, with women. Men found it hard to reconcile his attractiveness with his self-evident anti-masculinity. I mean to say; what are the frauleins thinking when a fellow doesn’t have biceps and can’t down three beers without needing a bathroom break? Like Lillian Hall Davis, he was a victim of a sudden shift that saw him regarded as Germany’s most popular cinema hero one year and then a couple later being reduced to selling photo opportunities for a few pfennigs. In Kastner’s case the cause was self-evident. He stuttered, which obviously was an issue when cinema turned to sound, and a source of great humour to the beery chaps when they gathered at the bar after a day blasting at quail with shotguns. One of his last films was Angst, based on a Stefan Zweig novel, and in a scene that could have belonged in the Zweig inspired Grand Budapest Hotel, in 1932 he travelled up to the resort of Bad Kreuznach with its gingerbread houses surrounded by forest, booked into a hotel and hanged himself. 

If you tell Americans that in the early 1920s Gösta Ekman was the biggest star in Swedish cinema, they’ll probably laugh and say, ‘yeah, right. Swedish cinema.” The phrase “1920s Swedish cinema” may not mean much to most Americans but there are some – usually thin, pallid young men with skin conditions – who know that in the 1920s Swedish cinema was everything Hollywood was supposed to be. While Chaplin was pumping out one-reel soufflés, the Swedes were filming two hour long epics. When the Americans imagined the emotion expressed in a starlet’s batting eyelashes said it all, the Swedes were dredging the human soul for every bit of squalor they could find. What would you expect? This was the land of the sunless winter. Henrik Ibsen and Hedda Gabler were neighbours just across the border. Ekman was an artist. He made that clear to the point he was willing to neglect his family for his art. In 1926 he went to Germany to star in one of the expressionist classis, Faust. While working long hours, he started taking cocaine to deal with fatigue. Twelve years later he died of a heart attack after years struggling with chronic addiction. He was 48 years old. Tears of a clown.

In late September of 1912 a funeral procession trundles through the streets of Paris. The coffin is covered in wreaths but it is considered “tenth class”, or ‘very simple’ in Parisian terms. Among the mourners at the head are a Rothschild, a Baron Ceccaldi and several others whose surnames are enough to impress the reporters gathered on the sidewalk. Some of the press have already filed stories expressing outrage that the police would dare question France’s most exemplary citizens on this sombre day. As for the raids on the drug dens; why implicate the nation’s best names when, clearly, her demise was her doing?

Inside the coffin is Pierrete Fleury, 22 year old aspiring dancer who, it is true, wasn’t a household name until today. What went on in her house in Le Vésinet, a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of Paris, has scandalized a city that likes to think it has seen it all. For months a procession of limousines drove out to the house and unloaded their human contents on the steps. Once inside, the sons of France’s finest indulged in behaviour that appalled the staff. Opium, cocaine, sex, more opium, more cocaine, more sex: the place must have resembled a Normandy farmyard at feeding time. Let’s not hold back on Pierrete; she and the other dancers living at the house had instigated this scenario but just a couple of days ago, one of the male staff members alerted that she hadn’t answered the maid’s knocks, took a ladder and climbed up to look in her window. Her cold body lay on the bed, her face wrapped in an ether soaked sheet. Technically it was filed as accidental suicide. As usual, the Government vowed that no one would be spared in its efforts to put an end to these notorious drug dens.

It is tiresome to read yet another claim that the behaviour of Someone Cyrus or Someone Kardashian is liberating for women, especially when it’s a woman writing. Said perp should have to spend a week, at least, walking around with a placard that reads: ‘Culturally speaking, I’m really uneducated’.

Diana Karenne, (born Leucadia Konstanti in Danzig, 1888), was a star of Italian, French and German films in the 1910s and 1920s. Her artistic control extended to directing and producing and she organized her own promotions down to designing the posters. Add to that the detail that she often played a woman with a pragmatic attitude towards her lovers and we have the makings of a feminist icon – except we don’t. Where in all the guff about post-modern feminism are the discussions about women like Karenne and Fern Andra? If the Ms Someones have it so difficult today, what was it like back then, when women couldn’t even vote? Well, there is a situation with Ms Karenne that some posing as feminist intellectuals could have a problem with, but only if they wanted to. In the 1930s, when Germany was the centre of Europe’s film industry, Ms Karenne moved to Berlin and continued her success until she married and moved with her husband to Aachen, where she turned her attention to painting and poetry. In July 1940, she was badly injured in an Allied air raid and died a few weeks later. Aachen is a spit away from the Dutch and Belgian borders. Would things have been different had she been in Holland or Belgium when the bombs hit? Maybe, but the overriding sense is that she has simply been forgotten. Besides which, it is easy to blame the Germans, but we on the winning team still have a problem admitting that our bombs and our actions needlessly killed innocent people.  

On March 3 1908, 34 year old Lily Hanbury gave birth to a stillborn child and two days later she died from complications. These are the empirical facts. The actual facts are that her death was horrific. We have no idea what it is like to first realize the child you are carrying has died and then for you to suffer the physical and emotional consequences, attended to by witless doctors in a grubby London hospital.

Ms Hanbury was born into an acting family. Indeed, those of us who remember Edward Fox shooting watermelons in The Day of the Jackal might also recall his brother James in the fabulously unwatchable Performance and pause to realize there is a direct family connection going back to Ms Hanbury, and beyond.  The point was made at the beginning that people who believe that fame brings immortality are buying an illusion, yet one of the great things about the internet is the way that small groups whose interests are too peripheral to even be considered niche can find support. Maybe the notion that a handful of people can not only perpetuate the memories of Edwardian actresses but provide the rest of us with solid information is something anyone born in the age the internet can’t appreciate. We who are toppling towards our dotage can only express our gratitude, but there is a curious aspect to all of this. Investigating the not so obscure 19^th century French photographer Etienne-Jules Marey recently, I was struck by how many websites simply cut and pasted the same (unverified) information. With the great forgottens like Ms Hanbury however we find people who are passionate and want to share their discoveries. They put up photos, old reviews and newspaper articles. In the process they bestow upon her a kind of eternity.

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BRIEF LIVES

CARRY ON ENGLAND

Postcards from the Bamforth Company

 “A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality but …  a sort of mental rebellion.”

George Orwell; The Art of Donald McGill.

 Horrid marriages, drunkenness, cross-dressing, vomiting: what we call the English sense of humour. The Bamforth Company is, (or was: as of only recent times it no longer exists) famous for its ‘saucy’ seaside postcards. From the 1940s onwards they invariably featured a guileless girl with huge breasts and a middle-aged man terrified of sex. Before the drawn cards came out however, around 1903 Yorkshire photographer James Bamforth began producing real photo postcards that were described as comic but they were stranger than that. 

 

 Bamforth was born in 1842 in Holmfirth, a small mill town in the Pennines, and started his artistic career producing lantern slides for public lectures. Most of these lectures were of a religious or temperance bent, what we imagine went hand in hand with a dour, severe outlook on life. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as a ‘staunch conservative’ (Conservatives are always described as ‘staunch’) and a supporter of tariff reform, which identified him as a man thoroughly opposed to foreign imports. To think that way in the 1880s meant you backed the Empire to the hilt and liberal ‘laissez-faire’ economics – what today we call the ‘free-market’ – would be the downfall of Britain. Naturally, Socialism, trade unions and suffragettes were also threats to economic stability. 

 

He is most famous as a pioneer of cinema. One of the curious things about Britain’s early cinema is how Yorkshire became a centre for all the innovative work. London scarcely features in the story; the real pioneers were often out in small industrial towns and they were likely to be engineers rather than artists or photographers. Bamforth was a commercial painter and it was that skill he brought to lantern slides, creating elaborate sets that were built outdoors and where members of his family and friends acted in tableaux of biblical scenes. By 1898, only three years after the Lumiere brothers showed their first film, he was producing cinematic shorts. Bamforth is sometimes credited with being the first to use the editing technique of cutting away mid-scene to show a bystander’s expression. The humour is slapstick, more interesting historically than for their content, and some can be found on YouTube by searching for Bamforth.

The cinematic influence is all over these cards. The scenes are dynamic and a lot were photographed as though they were stills from films. Bamforth was also a pioneer of the song card. Parlour songs, which as the same suggests were meant to be sung together in a drawing room while someone hammered at the piano, became popular in the mid 1850s. The lyrics are usually trite and sentimental but they are a gold mine for social historians looking for attitudes to everything from drink to adultery and death. Bamforth’s idea was to print out each verse on a card with an accompanying photo. This was smart. Not only would people buy three cards instead of one, the photos encouraged them to collect sets and because they were postcards customers could mail them around the world. 

Here we have a fairly moderate example of Bamforth humour set in a shop selling song sheets. Of course everything in the scene is constructed but given no one buys song sheets anymore, we get an idea of what the business was like when people would wait for the latest hit to make its appearance as a score with lyrics. In the early 1900s Francis, Day and Hunter was the largest music publisher in Britain. In a few years it would join up with the American publisher T. B. Harms and in the 1920s the U.S Justice Department’s anti-trust department would sue them because they controlled over 80% of the music publishing market and threatened to monopolize it. 

Bamforth postcards are also a mine for social historians, though it can take a bit of searching to realize it. Today “passive resistance” is just one form of political action open to us and often Ghandi is erroneously credited with the idea. In 1900s Britain, a passive resister distinctly meant either a suffragette or a trade unionist who used the tactic of chaining themselves to fences. Anyone looking at this card then would have got that connection at once.

The Art of Donald McGill was an essay George Orwell wrote in 1941 where he took the seaside postcard artist’s work seriously as an insight into English character. (No self-respecting art critic would have gone near the stuff.) McGill, who counted the Bamforth Company as one of his publishers, started out producing drawn scenes with, to us, tame double entendres but by the Second World War his cards featured anatomically incredible women and blatant innuendos. Reading Orwell’s essay, especially when he provides a breakdown of the types of jokes, you could run a pencil through McGill and add Bamforth. “Marriage only benefits the woman”; check. “Sex appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty five”; check. “There is no such thing as a happy marriage”; check. “Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle aged men; check. Policemen are fools, lawyers sharks and women rule the home. We could add a couple more. Work is something working class men go out of their way to avoid, and wealthy men are either sinister or stupid. Orwell points out that McGill’s cards aren’t “intended as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography … Caricatures of the English man’s secret ideal, not portraits of it”. His essay incidentally appeared roughly midway between the last Bamforth photo cards and the high point of the Carry On films in the 1960s. Obviously, British society didn’t evolve; it just grew older. 

One subject McGill never broached but was a staple of Bamforth cards was childhood. When it comes to poverty and death especially, we’re not just looking at a lost world but an utterly foreign one as well. The syrupy mawkishness seems macabre today and if it’s easy to say that the infant mortality rate was high enough to create a kind of inurement to death, it’s worth remembering that in the 1850s the rate in some industrial towns was in the vicinity of one in three children dying before their first birthday but by the turn of the century that had improved dramatically. These cards aren’t a social comment on England. Rather, they reflect a particularly stern religious view. It wasn’t for children to question God’s will but accept whatever he dished out with gratitude.

This card seems almost ghoulish. The lines are from The Better Land by Felicia Hemans. She was a friend of Wordsworth and Walter Scott and apparently a popular poet in her day. The Better Land was one of her best known though these lines are enough to suggest it is also best forgotten. Imagine telling a five year old on her sick bed not to worry because she’ll soon be in a better place. And yes, young as she is, the girl in this photo knows enough to recognize a maniac when she sees one. 

This one on the other hand may have originated as a lantern slide for one of Bamforth’s lectures. There are records of this poem appearing on a series of lantern slides. Get the last line. Mother is dead and “make father love us more than gin and beer”. How sad. This, in a nutshell, is what the temperance movement started off being about. Mothers were dying in childbirth and fathers did turn to drink and neglect their children. It didn’t take advanced mathematics to see the connection between the number of children on the streets and in workhouses and the social erosion brought on by alcohol, but the logic was askew. Drink wasn’t the real devil. In a world of rigid social stratification, where basic hygiene let alone healthcare was denied to the poor, of course mothers died and fathers found the pressure too much to bear. The real problem with the temperance movement wasn’t that it was a collection of prudes and wowsers but their understanding and solutions to social problems were so simplistic they could only perpetuate the situation. Amazingly, there are still people who believe that if we only gave up drinking and listened to Jesus we wouldn’t need government funded health care.   

  

But enough of suffering children. Bamforth’s postcards really come into their own when they turn to the subject of marriage. Orwell pointed out that at the heart of McGill’s images was the absolute faith in marriage as the most important and exciting thing that could happen to a person, which was why he (McGill, but also Bamforth) could make such fun of it. But sometimes the original joke gets lost. This is one about the horrors of marriage, but I see two men. One of them is wearing women’s clothes and he’s about to shove an umbrella up the other’s bum. This isn’t just funny; it’s really weird. 

 And this one. Again the basic message is fairly explicit. He’s been hard at work cleaning the house and she has just come home. Note the role reversals. This might have carried a hidden warning about the danger the suffragettes posed. Give women the vote and before you know it they won’t just be running the household but the nation’s economy. Perhaps that was something to worry about back then, but the real question is; why is he holding a doll?

 

 Here we have a typical policeman. Instead of keeping the streets safe, he’s off in the park meeting his sweetheart. She’s a nanny. No doubt they have carefully planned this assignation. They probably keep to it every afternoon at 3:30. But look at the next card …

 

Isn’t this just a little grotesque? While the two natural forces of social responsibility, the policeman and the nanny, are off looking at the gardenias, the tramp has turned up; to do what exactly?

  Here’s another piece of strangeness. The man is clearly German; he wears that internationally recognized sign of the German, the monocle. This postcard is copyrighted 1907, too early for it to be war propaganda but it does show how much Germany was considered a threat even then. In 1903 Erskine Childers had published The Riddle of the Sands, a thriller based on the premise that war with Germany was imminent. Presumably Childers wasn’t the only one to think this at the time, hence it was acceptable to make fun of the Germans. Politically, Childers, an Irish republican, represented all that Bamforth abhorred. They differed on Germany as well. Childers thought the country was a threat; Bamforth thought it was a joke.  

The Bamforth Company took hundreds of photos and released millions of postcards on the world, which means they are commonplace, easy to find and still quite cheap, but look beyond the content, to the production of the images. Technically they are often brilliant; expertly staged, composed, lit, photographed and printed. The sets are often elaborate and though we see the same backgrounds appearing frequently, that doesn’t detract from them. Even this scene, which belongs more to religious kitsch than art photography, is still an artful production. Too many photo-historians looking at this era fuss over the old and tired question of Pictorialism V Modernism, as though that was all that was happening. Bamforth’s photo postcards are much more interesting than that.

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CARRY ON ENGLAND