Category Archives: Screening

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2022: Pordenone Post No 1

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Welcome home, to your home away from home, Pordenauts. It’s the 41st 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

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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

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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

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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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Alim (1926): a taste of ‘Ukrainian Hollywood’

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There are so many great silent film screenings in London right now, and I trust you are keeping up with the nationwide listings run by our friends the Silent Film Calendar. But I had to pause a moment and let you know about this event – a real one-off.

The Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image is showing a newly restored, but rarely shown Ukrainian silent film on 29 April, with a live score by Crimean Tatar folk and jazz guitarist Enver Izmaylov and an introduction by scholar Dr Olena Palko.

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Reginald Denny and What Happened to Jones? (1926): mischief and merriment

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The appeal of What Happened to Jones? is not hard to place – as long as you are in possession of a funny bone. It’s a cheeky, crowd-pleasing gag-fest, adapted from a Broadway farce of the same name that packed houses on Broadway and the West End in the late 1890s, even as it left the critics largely cold. What Happened to Jones? thrived in silent cinema, being adapted in 1915, 1920 and finally in 1926 – starring the fabulous Reginald Denny. It’s a breezy tale of a chap called Tom Jones who goes out gambling with his friend Ebenezer Goodly the night before his wedding. Comic complications ensue, as you would fervently hope!

Reginald Denny, the dapper star of this farce, may now be best remembered as a character actor in talkies, but in the silent era he was a leading man, a comic star. Though in truth his heart belonged to aviation and athleticism as much as it did to acting. He was born into a theatrical family in Richmond, Surrey, and although he had some success as a child actor, he was sent to boarding school aged 11 after his mother died. He ran away from school to London as a teenager – that’s where he took up boxing and eventually became a heavyweight champion.

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Nasty Women at Hippfest: The Night Rider and Rowdy Ann

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This blogpost is a version of the introduction I was honoured to give at the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival on Friday for the Nasty Women: Gender Rebels double-bill. The films were brilliantly accompanied by Meg Morley, and the festival continues all weekend.

Welcome to the world of Nasty Women. Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a curatorial project from two American academics, Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak. The name is taken from Donald Trump’s notorious remark about Hillary Clinton, and for the past five years, Hennefeld and Horak have been screening films that reveal women being transgressive, riotous and unbiddable on the silent screen at festivals around the world.

This May you will be able to take the nasty women home with you on a four-disc DVD and Blu-ray box set, containing 99 films, dating back to the very beginnings of cinema, sourced from a dozen international archives. It will be crammed with “feminist protest, anarchic, destructive slapstick, and suggestive gender play”.

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Hamlet (1921) at BFI Southbank: Shakespeare’s sister

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Hamlet (1921) screens at the BFI Southbank twice this week as part of the season, In the Eyes of a Silent Star: The Films of Asta Nielsen. It’s a must-see, although I would say that. You can see the film on Wednesday at 6.15pm with musical accompaniment by Cyrus Gabrysch and on Saturday at 5pm with music by Meg Morley and an introduction by Professor Judith Buchanan.

Hamlet is a woman! At least she is in this German feature film, Hamlet: A Drama of Vengeance (1921). And not just any woman, but the inimitable Danish diva Asta Nielsen.

From Sarah Siddons to Maxine Peake, many actresses have played the Prince of Denmark, and a fragment of Sarah Bernhardt’s stage interpretation of the role was even captured in a short film shown at the Paris Exposition in 1900. However, the distaff twist in this film was prompted, or at least justified, by Edward P Vining’s scholarly 1881 book The Mystery of Hamlet: An Attempt to Solve an Old Problem, which makes the case for Prince Hamlet being so feminine a character that his contradictory nature is best explained by imagining that underneath the black tunic he’s really a woman. The film also draws on Danish history and a German play from 1704 called Fratricide Punished. The gender-swap allows for an intriguing new take on Shakespeare’s text, recasting his hero/heroine’s relationships with Ophelia, Horatio and Gertrude in fresh moulds.

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Hippfest is back in Bo’Ness for 2022

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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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Asta Nielsen: coming soon

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Hello, Silent Londoners. Soon I will have the results of the 2021 Poll to share with you, but a bout of January sickness has set me back a little. However, I did want to pop on here to tell you that the BFI Southbank season In The Eyes of a Silent Star: The Films of Asta Nielsen starts NEXT WEEK.

The season opens with a lecture and panel event on Thursday 3 February, The ABC of Asta Nielsen. At this event, I’ll be giving an illustrated lecture all about ‘Die Asta’, and then I will be joined by Erica Carter, So Mayer and Bryony Dixon to delve further into the stardom and significance of the woman known as the greatest actress of the silent era. Later that evening I will also be introducing The Abyss and The ABC of Love. Please explore the programme further and remember February represents just the first half of the season – there is more to come in March, including more guest speakers!

To whet your whistles, some links:

Asta Nielsen in The Black Dream (1911)
Asta Nielsen in The Black Dream (1911)
Blog, Screening

In the Eyes of a Silent Star: Asta Nielsen at BFI Southbank in February and March 2022

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Finally, the time has come for me to stop sitting on my hands. Those of you who are on Twitter may have seen a sneak preview of this, but I am delighted to say that I can finally announce … Astafest!

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Neil Brand scores South – plus ticket offer for BFI Southbank

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Wonderful news from a true friend of Silent London. Musician, broadcaster, writer and man of many talents Neil Brand has composed a new orchestral score for a truly staggering British silent film, South (1919) – the gripping document of Ernest Shackleton’s journey to the Antarctic, with stunning photography by Frank Hurley. It is the highlight of a BFI Southbank celebration of British explorers and the films that captured their endeavours. Here’s more about the season.

On 5 January 1922, the ‘heroic age’ of Antarctic exploration drew to a symbolic close with the death of Anglo-Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. Marking both this centenary, and that of Britain’s first attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the BFI presents TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH: EXPLORATION AND ENDURANCE ON FILM, a season at BFI Southbank throughout January, with associated film releases in cinemas and for home entertainment. There will be themed collections on BFI Player (available from 5 January) and in the BFI Mediatheque.

The Epic of Everest (1924)
The Epic of Everest (1924)

And yes, there will be plenty of silent film in the season:

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London Film Festival review: The Afterlight

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The Afterlight is the last-chance saloon for the lost souls of film history. It’s a conceptual experiment, one that stalks the shadows of world cinema, gathering the spectres of movie stardom as it stumbles all the way to obsolescence. This new film from Charlie Shackleton, which played the Experimenta strand of the London Film Festival, is cast entirely from the grave and destined to self-destruct. Composed of snippets of archive cinema, The Afterlight stars only actors whose obituaries have already been published and exists only in one 35mm print, which will deteriorate, just a little, with each screening, until even these echoes diminish.

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London Film Festival review: The Real Charlie Chaplin

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It’s a bold, almost alarming title. At this distance, can it be possible to uncover The Real Charlie Chaplin? And if there is something hidden in the biography this most famous of filmmakers, one that can without trepidation be called an icon, might those of us who love his films really want to know?

Rest easy then, as this documentary by Peter Middleton and James Spinney (Notes on Blindness) has no disturbing revelations. That is, as long as you have already been reading those large gaps between the lines of his biography. Chaplin liked the company of young women – girls, in fact. He married teenagers. He sometimes (often?) treated them badly. It’s a been said before and it is stated again here without excuses or attacking the women such as Lita Grey who testified to his ill-treatment. This has been trumpeted in some quarters as a belated #MeToo reckoning for Chaplin. That would be very belated. In truth we have always known this, but some fans refuse to hear it.

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London Film Festival review: Around Japan With a Movie Camera

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The eye wants to travel, and never more so than in these pandemic times. Which means that this presentation from the BFI’s blockbuster Japan season is actually more welcome on its delayed arrival.

In Around Japan With a Movie Camera, across an hour and a quarter, we are transported through space and time to Japan in the very early 20th century – the films span the period from 1901 to 1913. But you’ll want to devote a full ninety minutes to this one and click the “Watch introduction” button on the BFI Player. The films are more than ably introduced by the BFI’s own Bryony Dixon and Japanese film historian Mika Tomita, and the programme is hosted by Michelle ‘Bioscope Girl’ Facey. They also take time to introduce the band, as it were. The films are accompanied by Cyrus Gabrysch, Costas Fotopolous, Stephen Horne and Lillian Henley – their hands are sometimes visible thanks to the ingenuity of Gabrysch’s pandemic-era innovation, the “piano-cam”.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 8

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At the start of this festival I missed a date with An Old Fashioned Boy, but you can bet your last Euro I wasn’t going to pass up a rendez-vous with Casanova. Tonight, the final night of this very precious Giornate, belonged to Ivan Mosjoukine, his magnicifent eyebrows and the show-stopping music of Günter Buchwald.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 7

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This is my tenth Giornate, which means I have graduated from newbie, all the way to novice, but also that I have been present for a quarter of the festival’s history. This is the 40th Pordenone Silent Film Festival – an annual celebration of silent cinema that began with a short retrospective of Max Linder films at Cinemazero in 1982, viewed by around eight people. Tonight in the Verdi, it seemed like every other seat was taken for a rendez-vous with Linder.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 6

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Pordenone 6

Unprecedented scenes in the Teatro Verdi tonight, as the audience of customarily meek silent film enthusiasts stamped their feet, booed and exclaimed “outrageous!” “Close the curtains!” and “Down with this sort of thing!” But more reports on the incident the papers are calling the 2021 Giornate riot later.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 5

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Anna Q Nilsson! Tom Moore! Dark deeds with gold mines, wedding regrets and stock certificates! A mysterious, abrupt finale! It can only be the welcome return this afternoon of the 1916 serial Who’s Guilty?, which we loved so much in 2016. This was a classic example, with Nilsson and Moore marrying in haste and repenting at leisure but Nilsson’s ex proving to be no better option. And that was before the mine gave up its gold. What a nostalgic treat.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 4

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“I don’t think I’ll be falling in love with Ellen Richter any time soon,” said a gentleman to me in the hotel lift this lunchtime. Everyone else, please form an orderly queue. We sampled riches of Richter today, in three hour(ish)-long installments of Die Frau Mit Millionen (The Woman Worth Millions, Willi Wolff, 1923) – a fine example of her work in the “Reise- und Abenteuerfilme” or travel-and-adventure films genre.

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