Public Reel

Svengali · Beat 130 · permalink

Theatre

35:58–36:07 Registered 1931

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed. 4 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; no visible events claimed. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 36:0236:02

Play from 35:58 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 60 · shots 267–267. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
theatre (theatre, interior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • long dark cloak, back to camera, head covered or hooded visible
  • man seated, wearing dark clothing, holding a small object visible
  • standing figure in dark clothing, partially obscured visible
  • standing figure in dark clothing, partially obscured visible
Seen
chair [frame:1], small object held by seated man [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: mysterious and staged; themes: theatrical performance, mystery, power dynamics; style notes: high-contrast lighting, silhouetted figures, theatrical framing with foreground obstruction

A figure in a dark cloak stands in the foreground, viewed from behind, while in the midground a man sits on a chair holding a small object, with two other figures standing nearby. The scene is dimly lit with strong shadows, suggesting a staged or theatrical setting.

The record

No renewal found An automated finding, not a verdict. A renewal would have appeared in the Copyright Office's renewal registrations 27 to 29 years after the term began. Those volumes are loaded and our parse of them found no matching renewal. If that is right, a work published 1931–1963 that was not renewed entered the public domain at the end of its 28th year; the volumes are OCR of old print, and the method page reports how often the parse has been found to miss one. Evidence dossier. The finding concerns the US copyright record for the film; it is not clearance for any use, and this page's annotation is machine output.

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Frame from Svengali (1931) at 36:02 (passage 35:58–36:07); US record: No renewal found

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