At the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 1992 Enno Patalas was left spellbound by the screening of Sylvester, this masterpiece of a Weimar Kammerspielfilm believed lost and then recently rediscovered in Japan, in the Komiya Collection. In unison we praised the velvet-like texture of the print, and soon Enno started to ponder the possibility or impossibility of aquiring a print for the Filmmuseum München.  In honour of Enno, who passed away in autumn 2018, Il Cinema Ritrovato screens the print of Sylvester he saw then, and admired and desired with all his historian’s and archivist’s passion.

Mariann Lewinsky

We invited Enno Patalas to Bologna in 1986 for the first edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato. It was a shock for me. He managed a small municipal archive, which was very similar in terms of organisation and size to Cineteca di Bologna at that time, and he was doing extraordinary work that we hadn’t even imagined. He was reconstructing the history of his country by reassembling the films of Lubitsch, Murnau and Lang. Meeting Enno was a revelation, and it was my true education. The reason that we decided to create a restoration lab in Bologna, was because Vittorio Boarini, Nicola Mazzanti and I had discovered the value and deeper meaning of film restoration thanks to Enno Patalas.

Gian Luca Farinelli

Sylvester – Tragödie einer Nacht is the fourth collaborative work of Lupu Pick and Carl Mayer following Der Dummkopf (The Blockhead, 1920), Scherben (Shattered, 1921) and Grausige Nächte (Nights of Terror, 1921). And for Mayer, it is the third Kammerspielfilm after Scherben and Hintertreppe. Mayer also wrote the original idea for the script of Die Straße (The Street, 1923), which was directed by Karl Grune around the same time. Sylvester is, in a sense, a work developed from Die Straße; here the street becomes a landscape on which the protagonist’s inner feelings are projected. The expression of the street seen in these two films would further link to the importance of the street in the films of Neue Sachlichkeit.
In the Kammerspielfilm, the tiny things in daily life that most films do not depict are observed as seen through a microscope, and the psychological movements of the people become important, represented not through the intertitles but through the subtle changes and movements of the actors’ expressions. A strong, intensive and quite different drama is born via these experiments. The camera not only witnesses the tragedy of a family over the course of one night in Sylvester, but also finally shows the world itself as a living environment – Lotte Eisner called it “Umwelt”. The objects and the landscape are shown almost as living objects. This is the animism that runs throughout this work. The protagonist dies but in this living world a new life is born.

Hiroshi Komatsu

Of Satanas, the second film directed by F.W. Murnau, only two short fragments have survived; one was found in Japan in the late 80s, the other in Spain, in 1996 by Vittorio Martinelli. Both are from the first episode, set in ancient Egypt, of this work divided into three episodes. The Japanese fragment was discovered in the Komiya collection when I opened a can bearing the Japanese title of Joe May’s Ihr großes Geheimnis (Your Big Secret). It contained a small roll of nitrate film without any lead. When the image appeared I recognised Conrad Veidt at once. This was not the Joe May film but a different, very impressive Egyptian drama. Yes, it was Murnau’s lost film. It ran for three or four minutes, and then the images on the Steenbeck screen switched to Ihr großes Geheimnis. Did Mr Komiya use the Satanas fragment as a lead for the Joe May film? We do not know. In any case, the rediscovered fragment of Satanas is a gem of the Komiya collection.
The atmosphere is eerie, with extreme close-ups and the actor gazing directly into the camera.
In her book on Murnau, Lotte Eisner gives a precise synopsis of the film and its three episodes, The Tyrant, The Prince (after Lucrezia Borgia by Victor Hugo) and The Dictator (set during the revolution of February 1917). Eisner mentions Intolerance as a possible influence, but Satana – Il dramma dell’umanità by Luigi Maggi (Italy 1912), a film in four episodes set in different epochs, seems much more likely as a source of inspiration.

Hiroshi Komatsu