LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT ai

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Been playing around with Perplexity.ai and, on a whim, asked it about LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. Delivered the standard answers - lost, never found, frames etc etc - but it did include something I didn’t know: that there’s a full script out there (which I should've known, given the photo recreation of the film from 2002 but hey). Anyhow, got me to thinking: given that there’s a script and plenty of stills and fragments (and the 2002 reconstruction) extant, could AI be used to recreate the complete film as it was when it premiered? A search for the 2002 recreation yielded this bit of brilliance, from someone who made an amazing (though obviously not perfect) go at recreating a few minutes of the film with AI. Excited by the potential here and what it could mean for lost films as a whole.

DAS PHANTOM DER OPER images(!)

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A reddit user found images (via the Internet Archive’s collection of German film journal Lichtbild-Bühne) from this 1916 grail of lost films – one from which no images (even promotional) were known to exist. As if I didn't want to see this film found enough…

phantom carrying christine down stairs?

My previous resurfacing of my initial write-up featuring early promotional texts and a description of the plot (note: add tag).

"it's basically a miracle..."

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Amazonas, Maior Rio do Mundo (Amazon: Longest River in the World)was stolen from the original director, Silvino Santos, shortly after it was made in 1918. Just over a decade later, it had completely disappeared. The film resurfaced earlier this year in a Czech archive and was identified by specialists in Italy and Brazil.

“It’s basically a miracle,” said Sávio Stoco, the Brazilian expert on Santos who confirmed the discovery. “We didn’t have the slightest hope that this work would one day be found.”

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The 1918 film is considered a rare gem of Brazilian cinematography for its length, subject matter, and quality of composition. Featuring fascinating footage of the Amazon forest’s diverse landscapes and inhabitants – including some of the earliest known moving images of the Indigenous Witoto people – the feature-length film “mixes different dimensions of the documentary genre into a very enjoyable narrative for the viewer”, explains Stoco, a professor of visual arts at the federal university of Pará in Belém.

FANTÔMAS (Louis Feuillade, 1913-14)

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(Directed by Louis Feuillade from a script by Feuillade, Marcel Allain, and Pierre Souvestre; starring René Navarre, Edmond Bréon, George Melechior, and Renée Carl. Released 09 May 1913 -> 1914; watched 2023w36 ->2023w39 via Kino Blu-Ray)

As is the case with all of Feuillade's (600+!) pictures, there's a buoyancy to every shot in this five-film cycle, even though – as per the inchoate cinematic language of the time – the films (FANTÔMAS, JUVE VS. FANTÔMAS, THE MURDEROUS CORPSE, FANTÔMAS VS. FANTÔMAS, THE FALSE MAGISTRATE) are told in long static wides (a notable exception being a fantastic and effective horizontal to vertical shift near the end) and an over-reliance on narrative intertitles: they just MOVE, a breathless propulsion from one unlikely and deliciously pulpy scenario – silent executioner! spiked pajamas! bell-ringing blood! skin gloves! wine bottle snorkels! murder! faked death! fake identities! narrow escapes! explosions! blackmail! (implied) sex! Tom Bob! bodies in steamer trunks! – to the next, rolling, tumbling, until the requisite cliffhanger ending (even in the final film) in which Fantômas – René Navarre's mold-building portrayal being evident in everything from Lang's DR MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (down to the opening transformation from disguise to disguise) to the masked Republic serial villains to the Universal Monsters (though Fantômas is an utter shit, lacking in even a scintilla of the UMs' sympathy-inspiring humanity) through Christopher Lee's Dracula and into Hannibal Lecter (both Hopkins and Mikkelsen) and Ledger's Joker – escapes Juve's clutches, leaving us with the promise that their cat and mouse will be as immortal not only as the pursuers and the pursued, but as the generations of dyads they've so clearly inspired.

These foundational treasures are a reminder of the joy of simply letting loose and having a good time, thrillrides as exciting and watchable now as they were 110 years ago. French Blu of JUDEX, Feuillade's "heroic" 1916 serial (and inspiration for The Shadow) is on its way and I've got a rewatch (first in +/-25 years) of LES VAMPIRES in the offing too, FeuilladeFest in tandem with FritzFest, it would seem...

Tom Bob forever.