Is it still a pathetic fallacy even if the weather is true but the drama is not? As I set out to begin my day with some major melodrama, there was heavy weather in the skies above Pordenone also. We shook off the rain in the Verdi foyer, while we prepared to dampen our faces with tears during the first of this year’s adaptations of East Lynne.
Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 2Tag Archives: Daan Van den Hurk
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2024: Pordenone Post No 5
Sometimes the old songs are the best, right? Familiarity can breed contentment. And nowhere will you find more consensus on that than here in Pordenone. So today I was happy to rewatch a couple of silent films I love, spend a little time with one of my all-time favourite silent stars. And then see something entirely new to me!
First, the old friends. This morning, we ventured back into the imaginations of Maurice Tourneur, and Ben Carré, with the 1918 adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. Such a strange and beautiful, terrifying and wholesome journey into the shadow world of dreams, where bread and sugar and water have souls, the dogs and cats can talk, lost grandparents always have the table set for supper and babies wait impatiently to be born. If you have not seen this, you possibly can’t imagine quite how weirdly pretty it is. Variety’s critic wrote: “It is quite safe to assert that nothing quite like Director Tourneur’s work has ever been shown on the screen.” So hats off to Tourneur and Carré, and doubly so to Neil Brand and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, who transported us to an enchanted realm with their music. I wrote about the film in more detail here, should you be interested.
Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2024: Pordenone Post No 5
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2023: Pordenone Post No 7
You don’t have to be superstitious to notice when the date is Friday the 13th, and conduct yourself cautiously as a result. And of course I am not superstitious – unless you count the fact that I am convinced I willed this evening’s gala into existence by the power of my mind. But that’s a story for later on…
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Pirmoji Banga 2023: Come up and see Mae sometime
Life is short, people are busy, most of us have no time to waste. Pirmoji Banga, Vilnius’s hip festival of silent and early sound cinema, knows the importance of getting straight to the good stuff. How so? When the festival’s remit covers decades of film history?
In 2023, Pirmoji Banga, directed and curated by Aleksas Gilaitis, concentrated solely on the female contribution to beginning of film, which we all know by now is substantial. This year’s edition of Lithuanian festival Pirmoji Banga screened films starring Asta Nielsen, Mae West, Brigitte Helm and Louise Brooks, directed by Elvira Notari and Lotte Reiniger, and female-led stories such as The Nortull Gang, directed by Per Lindberg in 1923. Beautiful programming.
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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2021: Pordenone Post No 3
The lure of distant shores drew us into the Verdi this Monday morning, though initially it looked a little like false advertising. Ilka Schütze’s In Den Dschungeln Afrikas/In the Jungles of Africa (1921-24) was a stop-animation story of two dolls travelling via “balloon” not to another continent but only as far as their garden, or their dreams. If dolls can dream. I hope so, don’t you?
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Buster and beyond: silent comedy at the 2018 Slapstick Festival
More silent film goodness to look forward to in 2018, and this time a little closer to home.
The 2018 edition of Bristol’s Slapstick festival takes place at venues across the city centre from 25-28 January and tickets are on sale now. If you’re not familiar with this event let me tell you how it breaks down. Funny films. Funny people. That’s it, really. The Slapstick Festival celebrates the tradition of visual comedy on screen, beginning in the silent era. And it invites famous comedians to present and share their favourites, as well as a host of experts and the best silent movie musicians in the business.
So next year, silent comedy fans can look forward to:
- The Silent Comedy Gala at Colston Hall on Friday night will be hosted by Tim Vine. The headline film is the superlative Sherlock, Jr, accompanied by Charlie Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life and Angora Love, starring Laurel and Hardy. The Buster Keaton feature will be accompanied by the world premiere of a new, semi-improvised score composed by Günter Buchwald and performed by the renowned European Silent Screen Virtuosi and members of Bristol Ensemble. A Dog’s Life features Chaplin’s own composition for the film and will be performed by a 15-piece Bristol Ensemble conducted by Buchwald.
- Comedian Lucy Porter introduces two screenings of female-led silent comedies at the Watershed Cinema: Betty Balfour in The Vagabond Queen, and Constance Talmadge in Her Night of Romance. Porter is great at these intros, both knowledgeable and passionate, so don’t miss these. Music by John Sweeney too.
- Someone else who is rather good at introducing silent movies is Kevin Brownlow, who will introduce a lesser-known film, Skinner’s Dress Suit, starring the brilliant Laura La Plante and Reginald Denny. Piano accompaniment by Daan Van den Hurk.
- Meet the Austrian answer to Laurel and Hardy, Cocl and Seff, with a screening of some of their rarely seen work at the Watershed, with music by Stephen Horne and Elizabeth-Jane Baldry.
- And there will be a chance to see even more rare films at a screening called Lost and Found, in which collector Anthony Saffrey and historian David Robinson will present some recently rediscovered silent comedies, from André Deed (AKA Foolshead) Marcel Perez, Max Linder, Karl Valentin and more. Music will be provided by Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and Daan Ven den Hurk.
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Silent London 