Category Archives: Festival

Shhh… Chichester International Film Festival celebrates the silents

July 18, 2023 PH Leave a comment

This August, silent film fans in search of a summer holiday should take trip to sunny West Sussex, and the Chichester International Film Festival. The festival is now in its 31st year, and in 2023 Roger Gibson steps down as Artistic Director and Programmer of the festival, a post he has held for many years. It’s no coincidence that there are a few of his favourite films in the programme, including some of the silent classics.

In fact, there is an especially strong lineup of silent cinema with live music at the festival this year, which runs 4-27 August. The silent film programme comprises Neil Brand’s acclaimed Laurel and Hardy show, John Sweeney playing for Gibson’s choice The Italian Straw Hat, Ben Hall accompanying The Phantom of the Opera on the St John’s Chapel organ, and the Buster Plays Buster show featuring Steamboat Bill, Jr. There’s also a screening of Harold Lloyd’s jaw-dropping stunt comedy Safety Last!.

The Phantom of the Opera

Here is the full silent lineup, and links for booking tickets, which will be on sale on Friday 21 July.

13 & 26 August Safety Last!, New Park Cinema, Chichester – book here.
15 August The Italian Straw Hat with John Sweeney, Guildhall, Priory Park, Chichester – book here.
16 August Buster Plays Buster, Guildhall, Priory Park, Chichester – book here.
22 August Neil Brand Presents Laurel and Hardy, New Park Cinema, Chichester – book here.
25 August The Phantom of the Opera, St John’s Chapel, Chichester – book here.

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923)

Explore the full lineup of the 2023 Chichester International Film Festival here, and the Special Events in particular here.
I am also giving a talk at the festival, on the career of Cate Blanchett, who is the subject of a retrospective strand, and strikes permitting, Roger and I will be leading a Q&A with the actress after a screening of the fabulous Tár. Both of these events are on 21 August.
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Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023: women who worry and men who don’t

July 10, 2023 PH Leave a comment

Someone just asked me if I were back from Bologna yet. Oops. I have been back home for over a week now, but I haven’t written anything about the festival. So here I am, to tell you what rocked my world at Il Cinema Ritrovato. This year I enjoyed a truly excellent programme, and some even more excellent company. Here are some of my highlights, of the silent variety.

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Silent Cinema Rediscovered: Salomé, Together and more in Bristol

July 9, 2023 PH Leave a comment

Buongiorno! This sultry summer weather is doing its best to convince me that I am still in Bologna when I am closer to Bognor. But there is a cure for the post-Ritrovato comedown in the offing – and this medicine will be available out west, in Bristol, at the end of the month.

This year’s Cinema Rediscovered festival (26-30 July) has released its full lineup, and it is a many-splendoured jewel indeed. Especially if you are interested in the work of women directors: Bette Gordon, Kira Muratova, Chantal Akerman, Mai Zetterling, Sofia Coppola and many more are featured in the programme.

Let us pause, however, to consider the silents.

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Blog, Festival, Lecture, Screening

Bologna and beyond… Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023

March 30, 2023 PH 1 Comment

Ciao! Excellent news for fans of sunshine, young cinema and spritzesy. The first announcements for Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato have just been released. You can now read the first details of seasons devoted to such delights as 16mm films, 1903, 1923, Anna Magnani and to directors from Teinosuke Kinugasa to Rouben Mamoulian to Albert Samama Chikli. See you in the Piazza Maggiore!

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Hippfest 2023: the early days

March 25, 2023 PH Leave a comment

I don’t want you to get the idea I am wanted by the authorities, but I tend to move around a lot. So for the second year in a row, I was only in town for the first half of Hippfest – or the early, funny stuff, as I like to think of it.

I’ve said before that the programming at Hippfest, now in its 13^th year, is impressively eclectic. I’d say that with extra emphasis during the midweek portion of the event. Actualities, fantasy, action, adventure, comedy, and a sheepdog smoking a pipe. What is not to love?

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Hippfest hooray: the 2023 programme launches today

February 7, 2023 PH 2 Comments

Good news, Silent Londoners. Today is the day that Hippodrome Silent Film Festival announces the lineup for its 2023 edition!

As previously reported, the event runs 22-26 March 2023 and this year, there are festival passes available for the dedicated Hippfest die-hards. The best of people, in other words.

As I say, the full lineup goes live today, and you will be able to browse it at your leisure. Below: a few highlights from my little brain.

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Hippfest 2023: passes, podcasts and promises

December 15, 2022 PH 2 Comments

Save the date, Silent Londoners, The Scottish silent film festival with the warmest welcome in the world is back in 2023.

The Hippodrome Silent Film Festival at Scotland’s oldest purpose-built cinema, the Hippodrome in Bo’ness, will take place Wednesday 22 to Sunday 26 March 2023. The full programme and tickets will be released on Tuesday 7 February. Not too long to wait.

But there’s more news. A development many attendees have long been asking for – a festival pass!

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Funny Valentines: Silent comedy at Slapstick 2023

November 29, 2022 PH 1 Comment

This February, comedy fans will head west to Bristol, Unesco City of Film for the annual Slapstick Festival. As usual, there is plenty for fans of silent cinema in the programme, with stars from Charley Bowers to Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin to Marlene Dietrich. Presenters include Kevin Brownlow, Steve Massa and Polly Rose, as well as the marvellous Ayşe Behçet, whose Charlie’s London posts you may remember from this very site, back in the day.

The 2023 Slapstick festival runs from 14-19 February this year, and here’s what’s coming up silent in the programme.

WEDNESDAY 15 FEBRUARY

2pm: The Cigarette Girl Of Mosselprom [1924]

Hosted by Lucy Porter

Watershed £8.50/£5.00

Dir: Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky, Soviet Union, 78 mins, cert TBA

In stark contrast to most films made immediately after the Russian Revolution, this is an endearing rom-com filled with likeable characters and some self-effacing insights into the filmmaking process. At the centre of it all is cigarette seller Zina (played by the future Cannes award-winning director Yuliya Solntseva) and the love tangles that surround her when she is talent-spotted to become an actress. With an introduction from stand-up comedian and actor Lucy Porter and live piano accompaniment by John Sweeney.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 8

October 9, 2022 PH 6 Comments

So the 41st Giornate del Cinema Muto, and my personal 11th, draws to a close with two British silent films. What is that they say about saving the best for last?

I was certainly in Italy this morning, with the Italian drama Profanazione (Eugenio Pergeo, 1924-6) – a tale of adultery, corruption, suspicious, lost pets and automobile accidents. This was spirited drama, if very heavy on the intertitles, with Leda Gys as a woman who strays and yet is more sinned against than sinning. That title translates into English as “defilement”, which gives you a sense of the subject matter, I think, and why censorship delayed the film’s release for so long. Gys is every inch the star, though notably more restrained than the diva mode, and she is the heart of this film that despite its twists and turns, is very much a serious film for grownups.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 7

October 8, 2022 PH 3 Comments

Day Seven of the festival and the mood on campus is very much “Thank God it’s Friday”. Not because anyone is glad the Giornate is nearly over (perhaps apart from the festival team perhaps who have worked tirelessly to ensure everything has run beautifully, as usual), but because today’s lineup is especially toothsome. More Norma! A Frances Marion-directed feature! And Ivan Mosjoukine and Brigitte Helm smouldering opposite each other! That’s before we even get to tonight’s Ruritanian romp – the 1924 adaptation of the silent era touchstone that is Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks. Hold on to your string of pearls, we are going all-in.

First, an especially timely effort from Team Talmadge. In Within the Law (Frank Lloyd, 1923), Norma plays a shop girl who fights back. Exploited under capitalism, and imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit, young Mary finds “going straight is a tough proposition”. Instead she teams up with a pretty blonde cellmate to take revenge on the moneyed male establishment with a breach-of-promise scheme that exploits men, cashes the big and stays strictly “within the law”.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 6

October 6, 2022 PH 4 Comments

This evening belonged to Marie Prevost, much-maligned silent Hollywood comedienne and high empress of flirtatiousness. She appeared twice on the Verdi screen in front of a packed hall in two fashionable comedies, one about hair and another about lingerie: first in a fragment of the multi-authored flapper farce Bobbed Hair (Alan Crosland, 1925), and then full-length in the Al Christie comedy Up in Mabel’s Room (E. Mason Hopper, 1926).

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 5

October 5, 2022 PH 2 Comments

We have already established that Norma Talmadge is fond of a dual-role, but 1920’s Yes or No? (R. William Neill) pushes the boat out by having two Talmadge sisters on the cast list. of this New York drama Natalie T plays Emma, the maid of dissatisfied society lady Margaret (Norma) and sister of dutiful tenement housewife Minnie (also Norma). The clue is in the title here, and each woman will be asked to choose between temptation and courage, extramarital adventure and (often thankless) fidelity. So it’s a similar structure to that great Norma T melodrama Secrets (1924, Frank Borzage): a character study building to a question that tests that character. However, here we have two women, two questions, two answers – and two sets of consequences.

Choose carefully, ladies. The film is judging you. Literally, if those beartrap illustrations behind certain title cards are to be believed. In fact the title cards were a real highlight of the film, elegantly and often wittily illustrated. True, they were also a little sanctimonious, regressive… but it’s 1920 what can I say? The important point is that Norma is really splendid in this one. She does well with these two sympathetic characterisations, and while she is not charismatic in the way of a Swanson or a Pickford, she is very watchable. I am very much excited for the Normas to come. And thanks are due to José Maria Serralde Ruiz, for playing such an old-fashioned dramas if it were brand new, and building the tension beautifully.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 4

October 4, 2022 PH 3 Comments

What’s your favourite Latvian nationalist historical fantasy war epic? From the silent era, I mean. Taking a little while to decide? Cool, I’ll share mine. It’s Lāčplēsis AKA The Bear Slayer (Aleksandrs Rusteiķis, 1930), newly restored by Riga’s Studio Locomotive.

To reassure the squeamish among you – there is no bear slaying in this film. The Bear Slayer is a strongman of Latvian legend, so burly he can kill a bear with his bare (sorry) hands, but he uses his might for right. This film starts with a hell of a bang, in full-on fantasy mode as an evil “Black Knight” (Osvalds Mednis) with an alarming bullet-shaped head and a supremely sinister gaze tries to bear down on a damsel in distress (Lilita Bērziņa) in a castle. She has an enchanted brooch that will save her, but the Knight gets his ghoulish, wizardy goblin pals to reverse that charm. They begin preparing the cauldron with the usual eye of newt etc and at the last minute, as they prepare to take the blood of an innocent dove, the Bear Slayer/Lāčplēsis (Voldemārs Dimze) throws his sword into the works and foils the dastardly scheme.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 3

October 3, 2022 PH 3 Comments

Holiday hats on everyone. The sun is out in Pordenone. And although it can be a struggle to choose the dark of the cinema over basking in the Italian heat, there are compensations. Even if, this afternoon, the heavens opened in the Verdi with a screening of Joris Ivens’ splashy art film Regen (1929), part of the strand celebrating 90 years of the Venice Film Festival.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 2

October 2, 2022 PH 1 Comment

There’s something about Nanook… A century after it was first released, you might not expect a film with such a complex history to be, as Jay Weissberg said, one of the most anticipated events of the festival. But it certainly was. A quick straw poll of Pordenone attendees confirmed that yes, most of us had first seen Nanook of the North in a film studies classroom or lecture hall, and that we had been told both that it was a box-office sensation, and that it was partly a dupe. But this centenarian film is more than just a notch on the documentary cinema timeline, and it has a beguiling beauty and humanity that commands respect.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 1

October 1, 2022 PH 3 Comments

Welcome home, to your home away from home, Pordenauts. It’s the 41^st Giornate del Cinema Muto and the assembled crowd in the Teatro Verdi is bursting with questions. Questions like: do we know what is unknown in The Unknown? Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn? How much Norma is Talmadge? Does a Pathé-Baby sleep through the night? How many men could a Manxman mank if a Manxman could mank men? And (I may actually have been asked this one in all seriousness) can you point to Ruritania on a map?

Time will provide answers. Meanwhile, let us savour eight days in the make-believe land of silent cinema, once upon a time and far, far away from the troubles we left behind with our morning newspapers.

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Pirmoji Banga 2022: keeping silent cinema weird in Vilnius

September 18, 2022 PH 5 Comments

Greetings from Lithuania!

It has been a bit of a quiet summer here. The reason is that I have been working on a couple of research projects, and travelling too – mostly around the country talking about Pre-code cinema (I’m in Scotland this week, and Belfast next month – links below). But also to further-flung spots such as Vilnius, home of Pirmoji Banga. And if you don’t know what that is, you have come to the right blogpost…

Pirmoji Banga means ‘first wave’ and this is a festival of early film, in the extended sense. from the very beginnings to the first talkies, everything before the second world war, more or less. The festival is substantially devoted to silent cinema, which is presented with live music from international artists. And some of this year’s screenings benefited from a benshi too, which was particularly special. The screenings are all held at a smart arthouse cinema by the river, called Skalvijos Kino Centras. A cool place. Very silent film hipster. Check out the foyer display for the festival (and two people who definitely aren’t hipsters in the mirror):

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Il Cinema Ritrovato: a week in 1922

July 3, 2022 PH 4 Comments

Three little words of Italian you need to learn if you attend Il Cinema Ritrovato: Cento Anni Fa. This must-see strand of the festival, curated by Bologna’s silent cinema supremos Mariann Lewinsky and Karl Wratschko, dials back the programming clock by a century. The name means simply: a hundred years ago.

So it was that this week, in between blasts of restorative Italian sunshine and shots of iced coffee, I spent a week in the 1922 cinematic universe: a world of gorgeous location photography, penetrating psychodrama, impeccable slapstick and to generalise, a healthy number of female-led films (including a handful of nasty women). It was clearly a good year for the movies, so much so that even though I skipped some of the Cento Anni Fa screenings as they were already familiar to me (or outside my days at the festival), that left plenty of room to explore some less well-trod pathways through the year, one massive restoration project and at least one cult classic that I had been saving up for a big-screen viewing. Here are some of those highlights.

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Tromsø Stumfilmdager 2022: An Arctic adventure in film and music

May 1, 2022 PH 4 Comments

All silent film festivals are not the same. Tromsø Stumfilmdager in northern Norway is full of surprises. For one thing, it was the first time I have ever been offered, and gratefully accepted, earplugs before a silent movie screening.

But first of all, as we’re (mostly) Brits here, you’ll want to know about the weather. And boy was there are a lot of it. Tromsø is 69 degrees north, comfortably inside the Arctic Circle and yet in late April they often expect balmy temperatures of 5 Celsius or so, and clear skies. Not this year. As our pilot informed us en route, “winter has returned”, and we spent four days in the Arctic snow. A delightful Christmas-card novelty for us, but something of a drag for the locals who were looking forward to spring.

There was no escaping the weather on-screen either. The movies included the stories of a seasonal thaw, a woman driven insane by the desert winds, a serial killer operating under the cloak of city fog and a demon destroyed by sunlight. Ten points if you guess all of those titles correctly (although you could just check out the programme here).

The Verdensteatret in Tromsø – what a venue!

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Hippfest is back in Bo’Ness for 2022

February 8, 2022 PH 1 Comment

Hippfest returns! You don’t know how happy it makes me to think about watching silent films with live music at the stunning Hippodrome in Bo’Ness.

The festival is held from Wednesday 16 to Sunday 20 March and the full toothsome lineup just dropped, as they say. Here are a few highlights, some of which have been postponed from the sadly cancelled 2020 edition. I am so ready.

The Dodge Brothers accompany FW Murnau’s City Girl on Saturday night – this is the Scottish premiere of their brilliant score for this incredible, jaw-dropping Hollywood silent.

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