“Shoes” with live music at the Remake Festival,
What do you notice the most? Maybe it’s not so much the big construction, the depiction of the hopeless poverty of a family, although that is also very convincing, especially – filmed 105 years ago – convincing today: the unemployed father who sinks into U-literature, that of the Household exhausted mother, the younger daughters between trying to help her and trying to be children, and finally the eldest daughter (and main character) who has to keep everyone afloat with her job as a saleswoman.
Now her shoes are broken, but new ones cannot be financed. The look that the (16-year-old) actress Mary MacLaren throws into the window of the shoe shop is not that of a silent film angel, it is the look of a person in need. Need has no comical side, it expresses nothing but itself, it takes up space and leaves no space for higher-level thoughts. That’s why the film is simply called “Shoes”.
And that’s why it is most noticeable how the young saleswoman is busy in the evening cutting out new cardboard inserts. One can think of Charlie Chaplin, who, as a penniless fellow, had many problems to solve. But here it has neither whistle nor sentimentality, it is a recurring task, carried out stoically with cardboard, pen and scissors. It must be done as the mother cranks the laundry through a press (a part that should not have been placed many monuments). It is a radical, but self-evident, women’s perspective. The women in “Shoes” are not the ones who are seen one way or the other, but those who look sad, exhausted, annoyed at the situation.
The Frankfurt Women’s Film Festival Remake breaks a lance for the director Lois Weber (1879-1939), one of the most successful figures of the silent film era, which, as the evening makes clear, was also an era of women. Only little was left of it, even a fraction of the Weber films. That Weber also owned a prosperous production company, that in her good years she did everything professionally and artistically herself: forgotten and lost to a shocking extent, as the film scholar Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi discovered in advance at the theater. As a representative of the Dutch film institute Eye, she was jointly responsible for the digital restoration of “Shoes”, completed in 2010 and supplemented in 2016 with the original, long-lost texts.
The performance of the actually impressively repaired film (at the edges of which it is nevertheless increasingly snowing) was greatly enhanced by the live music by Maud Nelissen on piano, Daphne Balvers on saxophones and Timora Rosler on cello. Nelissen, an experienced film composer, has opted for an unobtrusive, unsentimental accompaniment who takes up dance-like moments but never switches to the over-the-top subject.
The evening was an effective tribute that opened up immediately. Another room full of people who Lois Weber will not forget.
Women’s film festival Remake, Frankfurt: until November 28th. remake-festival.de
