José María Serralde Ruiz

We’re at the halfway mark, and let me be abundantly clear: I’m not ready to go home yet. But should you be homesick, there was more than a taste of London in the Verdi today, with Walter Forde’s chase comedy Would You Believe It? (1929) for starters, and even Harry Piel or rather Harry Peel transported us to the Big Smoke for his Rivalen (1923). More of which anon.

More authentically, Jacques Haïk’s Se London!, filmed in the summer of 1927, gave us the view from the streets, whisking us from Hyde Park to Whitechapel in dashing style. I was lucky enough to write about this one for the catalogue, so I was cockahoop to see it on the big screen, with London’s own John Sweeney bringing out the spirit and style of this characterful travelogue. Especially, in the really beautifully photographed Tower Bridge sequence – a real highlight of this film.

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There is nothing like watching a film in Pordenone, the collective joy of sharing a discovery or a fabourite classic, with hundreds of fellow silent film enthusiasts in the Teatro Verdi. This year’s Giornate del Cinema Muto Limited Edition, also, will be nothing like that. We will be dialling in online, streaming films in our separate spaces, alone. But that is not to say I haven’t been anticipating it with relish. I have been counting down the days.

This year I will not be blogging the collective experience of sharing the silents in the Verdi, of discussing them over coffee and spritzes in the Posta. My experience of the festival will be different to yours, very different in some cases. This is my Giornate journal and it won’t be like the ones I have written before.

Day One
It’s a silent film fan’s nightmare. I am late for the Giornate! When the first programme was broadcast on Saturday afternoon I was not at home with my projector poised, I was … at a film festival in Europe. Lucky me, I was on the jury of the Athens International Film Festival this year, a festival that took place IRL, in the open-air. So as Pordenone began I was in an outdoor cinema in the National Gardens in Athens, handing out prizes and then watching Christian Petzold’s gorgeous water-nymph romance Undine.

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