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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 7.5

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Greetings, not from Pordenone, but from Marco Polo airport. Sadly I am not staying for the final day of the Giornate, so this may not be the blogging finale you were expecting.

There is a fine day ahead for those of you still at the festival, including Colleen Moore in Ella Cinders and Reginald Denny in Skinner’s Dress Suit, not to mention the conclusion of the Charles Hutchison serial The Great Gamble.

Tonight’s special event in Teatro Verdi is one that I am especially sorry to miss, and perhaps the fog surrounding the airport this morning is some kind of sympathetic sign.The closing gala for the 38th Pordenone Silent Film Festival will be Alfred Hitchcock’s murky murder mystery The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), starring the beauteous Ivor Novello and the marvellous Marie Ault. I hope you’re looking forward to watching the silky new BFI restoration of this British silent classic, especially when I tell you that the music will be Neil Brand’s brilliant new orchestral score, conducted by Ben Palmer. Enjoy it for me, blub. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 7.5 →

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 7

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“You must go to the KiPho!” That was the message of the morning, where KiPho means cinema: kino + photografie. It takes a certain frame of mind to rise early in the morning to learn “how to be modern” from films that are nearly a century old, but here in Pordenone it seems perfectly natural. So today’s Weimar shorts selection began with Kipho, AKA Film from 1925, a speedy run-through of the medium to that point, flipbooks and all. That was followed by the most bizarre, and brilliant, ad for a motor show I have ever seen (featuring a martian, fallen to Earth and revived with lager, and that was just the start of it), some tips on kitchen design and lighting and a couple of comical films offering hygiene advice. And that’s how to be modern.

This concoction of the weird and the well-meaning was followed by Cecil B DeMille’s 1916 epic Joan the Woman, starring opera singer Geraldine Farrar, gorgeously accompanied by Philip Carli. All 11 reels unspooled today, although I confess that I couldn’t stay for all of them, which is a shame as what I saw was h-y-p-n-o-t-i-c. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 7 →

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 6

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Norma Desmond reckoned the silents didn’t need dialogue. But she never came to the Giornate. This may be a silent film festival but it’s good to talk. And listen. So I spent about as much time listening to people chat today as I did watching them mouth words. And yes, today did mark the return of benshi artist Ichiko Kataora to Pordenone with the Japanese silent Chushingura (1910-1917). So there is a method to this festival madness, I promise you. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 6 →

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 5

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You can’t watch everything. Well maybe you can. I can’t. So it is with regret that I have to make some difficult choices – today of all days. Weimar cinema or William S Hart westerns, for example. I followed my heart, and my research interests. What else can you do?

So I spent my morning immersed in 1920s Germany (and my 2019 inbox). To begin with, a diverting selection from the Weimar Shorts strand, which including some utter wonders. Watching Otto Dix at work with ink, watercolour and oil paint was a real thrill. Although I felt a little “seen” by his first portrait: a lady with dark, heavy circles around her eyes. That was Schaffende Hände. Otto Dix (1924). There were more artists at work too: the uncanny elegance of Lotte Pritzel’s wax figurines came to life in Die Pritzelpuppe (1923), and when they were shot in silhouette it was hard to forget that other great female film artist of the Weimar years, Lotte Reiniger. I was especially intrigued by the tableaux at the end in which actors (including Niddy Impekoven) posed in costumes designed by Pritzel, in unheimlich imitation of the puppets’ posture, as part of a pantomime, Die Kaiserin von Neufundland, written by Frank Wedekind. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 5 →

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 4

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Still mooning about the goat-herder? Another Giornate blogpost will take your mind off it, Marion.

One of the beauties of Pordenone is the fact that the programme is so omnivorous, ranging far and wide over the first four decades of film history, and the audience are equally diverse. No doubt the main attraction of today, the headline act as it were, was the Hollywood comedy double-bill that played this evening. While I enjoy Marion Davies and Laurel and Hardy as much as the next silent cinema blogger, like everyone here I have my own particular passions that draw me back to the Verdi every year.

So it was that I woke up this morning most excited to see an eleven-minute film playing in the middle of the morning: Gerolamo Lo Savio’s 1909 Otello. Yes, I am a silent Shakespeare fan and this was my treat for the day. Stencil-colour, Venetian location shooting, a passionate but hardly Moorish Othello (I think it was the divine Michelle Facey sho said that meant he was surely “lessish”) and a nicely malevolent Iago made this a Shakespeare to savour, even if inevitably one had to devour it in one small mouthful. The colour was especially memorable here – notably a brief bloom of scarlet at Othello’s throat as he dies. An attractive and unexpected gory entry in the silent Shakespeare canon. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 4 →

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 3

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Not to brag*, but I recently returned from the San Sebastián International Film Festival. There I saw people falling over themselves to catch a glimpse of Penélope Cruz or Kristen Stewart. That’s cool, but I do like it here at Pordenone where the mere sight of Léontine’s name on a title cart can cause someone in the Verdi stalls to whoop so loud that I was wondering who it was from the second balcony.

This bit certainly isn’t a brag, but my day job followed me to Pordenone this week, and I was tapping away at my laptop in my hotel room, writing about H****y W*******n when I suddenly realised I only had a minute to spare to get to the Verdi for the next session, the session I really didn’t want to miss: the return of Nasty Women, curated by Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak. Readers, I dashed to the Verdi and what I saw there was enough to wipe such horrid thoughts from my mind. Joyously anarchic, gleefully disruptive, messy, wild and endlessly hilarious antics, perpetrated by women on an unsuspecting world. Alice Guy-Blaché’s pregnant Madame with her escalating cravings, Léontine vandalising the petit bourgeoisie of a whole town, the housemaids on strike and marching through the streets, Cunégonde trying to keep tabs on her man … I loved all these gigglesome, radical short comedies. Up to and including the wonderful La Peur des Ombres with its shadowplay, sophisticated splitscreen and good-natured gurning – it rips a classic DW Griffith actioner into shred and sprinkles it around like confetti. Would love to think Weber saw it before making Suspense. This sort of thing should be available on the NHS: National Hilarity Service. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 3 →

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 2

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It was a day for film stars in Pordenone today: from the contract players lining up to do studio promo in this morning’s Films on Film programme to Ita Rina the Slovenian tragedienne in the Estonian drama Kire Lained at the end of the night. But when I consider all the stars shining brightly in the Verdi today, I have to confess, my heart belongs to William S.

Tonight’s evening screening was devoted to the western star William S Hart, kicking off a whole strand devoted to his peculiarly soulful machismo and hearty horsemanship. Before the feature we had two short films. One was a talkie clip from 1939 with Hart introducing his final film, Tumbleweeds (1925) and lamenting, it seemed, both the decline of the old west and the passing of his days as a western star. Only slightly less poignant was a silent fragment of Hart on a promotional tour of New York in 1919 and, so the intertitles told us, pining for the frontier lands. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 2 →

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 1

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Charlie Chaplin, whose early masterpiece The Kid played this year’s Giornate opening-night gala, said some very wise things. Among which was the famous dictum that “a day without laughter is a day wasted”. It’s especially glorious to reflect on that idea after a day spent in fits of giggles in the Verdi. Today belonged to Chaplin, to Max Linder, to Suzanne Grandais and Léonce Perret. And more than that, to a rather more grand cosmic joke, played in Pordenone today, which thankfully had results rather more charming that catastrophic.

Yes, the slapstick gods truly smiled on us at the start of the 38th Giornate del Cinema Muto. How else to explain the fact that the industrious town of Pordenone had scheduled both a silent movie festival, and a marching band convention for the same day? Yes, a dozen or more brass bands were stepping around the piazza outside the Verdi reinterpreting pop and rock favourites, all while the afternoon films were playing. Fret not, the Verdi was entirely soundproofed, so there was no interruption to the excellent work of the day’s pianists. But just imagine what Messrs Chaplin and Linder might have made of such a circumstance?

Anyway, enough of my prattle. Welcome home! Today your humble correspondent enjoyed an especially fine afternoon of silent goodness, and she is feeling very buoyant indeed about the week to come. Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2019: Pordenone Post No 1 →