Ben Palmer | Silent London

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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It’s time to make a full confession. The title of this blog is a terrible deflection from the truth. I am, indeed, a northerner. Please forgive the vagueness. I am from Merseyside, but my family have lived in various places upwards from the middle of England, going back generations. So our accents may wander, but our vowels are consistently flatter than a Yorkshireman’s cap.

All of which means that Echoes of the North: Four Chapters in Time, a new archival film from the Yorkshire Silent Film Festival, is sweeter to me than a barm cake stuffed with hot chips and a mug of strong tea. The film is a stirring collage of silent film footage of northern England, bolstered with a charismatic brass-band score composed by Neil Brand (a southerner, but don’t hold it against him). The score is played expertly by the legendary Brighouse and Rastrick Band, conducted by Ben Palmer. Echoes of the North is produced by YSFF’s Jonny Best and edited by Andy Burns from more than 100 pieces of film. Best of all, it is free to watch on YouTube.

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