Category Archives: News

Silent bulletin: news for summer 2026

July 30, 2026 PH Leave a comment

Bonn | Queen Kelly | Rudolph Valentino | Metropolis | Pordenone | Faust | & more…

It’s a long hot summer of silent cinema, my friends. The temperatures are stuck in the roaring twenties and so are we. Here’s a quick roundup of the silent film news you need to know – and some of it is designed to encourage you into an air-conditioned cinema. All of it will keep you cool…

StummFilmTage in Bonn and “Bonnline”. Running 13 -25 August with open-air screenings in Bonn, and a parallel online streaming offer, this festival gets more tempting every year. The 2026 edition kicks off with nothing less than Greta Garbo in Gösta Berlings Saga (Mauritz Stiller, 1924) accompanied by Daan van den Hurk and Neil Brand. The streaming platform opens on 15 August, and offers one new film a day, each of which will be available for 48 hours.

Queen Kelly at BFI Southbank. Come to London to see the Queen! I am thrilled to say that I will be introducing the unfinished masterpiece Queen Kelly in NFT1 on 20 September. Tickets go on sale 4 or 6 August, depending on whether you have a membership. There will be live accompaniment and I hope to be selling and signing copies of my new book, The Curse of Queen Kelly, afterwards. We had two great shows, UK premieres of the wonderful new Milestone Films restoration, in Bristol and Clevedon on the weekend, and you can look out for more screenings around the country as part of the Cinema Rediscovered tour. Manchester, Bo’ness, hopefully elsewhere…

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Silent bulletin: news for September 2024

September 3, 2024 PH Leave a comment

Back to school time! Here’s a roundup of the silent movie news I really want to share with you as summer turns into autumn. Just think how many of these forthcoming delights you could enjoy for less than the cost of a dynamically priced Oasis ticket.

Screenings and festivals

I missed StummFilmTage Bonn this year again – both in person and online. But Paul Joyce and Paul Cuff both kept us up to date with their fabulous blogs.

Wareham Silent Film Weekender. The crown jewel in South West Silents’ autumn lineup is this three-day festival of silent cinema at the gorgeous Rex Cinema in Wareham, Dorset. No lineup news as yet but we know to expect great things from SWS. They are also hosting, for example, a screening of Hitchcock’s The Manxman (1928) in Polperro, close to where it was filmed.

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Watch Theda Bara in Cleopatra (1917): lost footage rediscovered

September 14, 2023 PH 5 Comments

A major discovery screened Mostly Lost this year. Researcher James Fennell has identified a clip from some footage purchased on eBay as scenes from one of the most sought-after “lost films” of all time: Cleopatra (1917), starring iconic vamp Theda Bara. While the image of Theda Bara in her risqué pearl breastplate (now on display at the V&A as part of the Diva exhibition) is well known to all silent cinema fans, the film itself has long been missing.

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Josephine Baker enters the Panthéon – finally

August 24, 2021 PH 4 Comments

Heartening news from Paris, where the great Josephine Baker is to be granted a rare honour. The dancer, actress, film star, civil rights activist and hero of the French Resistance is to be memorialised in the Panthéon, Paris’s secular temple, after nearly a decade of campaigning.

An inscription at the Panthéon reads: “To its great men, a grateful fatherland” and around 80 notable French people are honoured there, most of them men. Josephine Baker will become the sixth woman to be commemorated there.

Her predecessors are Marie Curie, Resistance heroes Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion, feminist icon Simone Veil and Sophie Berthelot, the first woman to enter these hallowed crypts, and who was interred alongside her chemist husband Marcellin Berthelot “in homage to her conjugal virtue”.

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Breaking Betty Balfour news: Love, Life and Laughter (1923) at the LFF

August 27, 2019 PH 1 Comment

How is that for an alliterative headline?

I was just finishing my last post (on Bait – go see it), when this very exciting news came in. The 2019 London Film Festival Archive Special Presentation will be the lost Betty Balfour film that was discovered in the Netherlands a few years ago: Love, Life and Laughter (George Pearson, 1923). Continue reading Breaking Betty Balfour news: Love, Life and Laughter (1923) at the LFF →

Blog, DVD, News, Theatrical release

It’s Destiny! Fritz Lang’s Der Müde Tod to get a theatrical release

February 9, 2017 PH 6 Comments

Well, this was clearly meant to be. Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking allegorical fantasy Der Müde Tod (1921) is getting a theatrical release in the UK and Ireland along with a DVD/Blu-ray edition:

Eureka Entertainment have announced the theatrical release of DER MÜDE TOD (aka Destiny), Fritz Lang’s visually ambitious, cinematic allegory starring Lil Dagover and Bernhard Goetzke, in cinemas nationwide (UK & Ireland) and Digital HD from 9 June 2017.

Talking to Françcois Truffaut many years later, Alfred Hitchcock recalled that when he saw Der Müde Tod it made a “special impression” on him. He will have seen it un 1924 under its British release name Destiny, at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London. I wonder if we will have a chance to see it in the same venue?

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News: Slapstick, Hippodrome, Neil Brand, Nanook and more

November 27, 2015 PH Leave a comment

It’s a busy time! Here’s a roundup of the silent movie news I really want to share with you.

Bristol fashion

The Slapstick festival, our favourite reason to visit Bristol, is back in 2016, running from 20-24 January with a fantastic lineup of events topped by a special gala screening of Chaplin’s The Kid. But there’s so much more to the programme than that. I am looking forward to Kevin Brownlow’s favourite silent comedy westerns, Lucy Porter on the genius of Anita Loos, David Robinson’s lecture on the inside story of The Kid and a musical screening of Cecil B DeMille’s jazz-age drama Chicago (1927), as well as tributes to Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Ben Turpin and more. Read more and book here and don’t forget to support the Kickstarter campaign if you can.

Neil Brand – and friends

Brand new

It would take a smarter woman than me to keep up with Neil Brand these days – he pops up everywhere from the BBC to the Royal Albert Hall to the good old BFI. The best way to keep tabs on his activities and make sure you don’t miss a show, is his website neilbrand.com, which has just been thoroughly revamped. There’a google calendar of his upcoming events (very useful) and links to buy his DVDs, albums and books. Plus, there is an INCREDIBLY USEFUL page, titled So you want to programme a silent film? which is a clear, and authoritative guide to how to put on a silent film screening – from rights to music to marketing. If you are contemplating putting on a show – read this first. There is also a link through to Brand’s Originals site, which has some fascinating material about film music and musicians in the silent era. I hear that these pages will be getting their own makeover shortly.

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Second reel of Laurel and Hardy’s The Battle of the Century recovered: that’s better than a pie in the face

June 15, 2015 PH 20 Comments

Stan and Ollie in The Battle of the Century (1927)

A cream-filled pie landing – splash – in the face of an adversary is a popular trope of silent slapstick comedy, along with bumbling Keystone Kops and strategically placed banana peel. And now we hear that one of the classic piefights of all time has been rediscovered – the all-out epic splatterfest that crowns Laurel and Hardy’s silent film The Battle of the Century (1927).

That street brawl, involving a van full of pies and a cast of dozens, is gleeful, gore-free carnage – a classic movie moment in its own right. But until now, the fight, and the film it belongs to, have been truncated. The Battle of the Century was formed of two reels, and much of it has been missing since the silent era. The fight itself, or at least most of it, had been preserved, but the rest was not to be found. The first reel was discovered in the late 1970s, but the second reel, which contains the piefight, has been unseen for decades longer.

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