It may seem that the Giornate is in its own bubble, a hundred years or more removed from the real world, wrapped up in the fashions and the fads of the past. But we’re still looking out at the world every day, and no matter how the text on screen tries to guide us, we bring our 21st-century interpretation to everything that passes in front of our eyes. Sometimes the challenge is to wind back the clock, to see the past as our ancestors did when they were living through it. Sometimes we have no choice but to view images of the world as it was while burdened with the knowledge of our shared history, and of our violent present.
Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 5Tag Archives: Louis Feuillade
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 3
Monday finished with a zinger. I mean a Zingari. Italia Almirante Manzini wowed the Verdi as Wilejka, a heavy-lidded beauty with great hair, but in this case as a heavy-lidded beautiful Gypsy shepherdess with great hair. In Zingari (Mario Almirante, 1920) Wilejka falls in love with a man, Abaldo (Amleto Novelli, no less) that her father, the leader of the camp, forbids her to marry. There is many a consultation of the cards, a fireside dance, a storm, a threatening villain, a crushing pang of jealousy, an assassination and naturally, a barn on fire before this will all end happily ever after.
Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 3
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2024: Pordenone Post No 3
I promise you, I really am in Pordenone, not in Paris. But honestly, the geography is becoming a little subjective. We seem unable to escape the Rive Gauche for long. This morning, a really quite exceptionally taut melodrama from Louiis Feuillade, with sets,of course, by Ben Carré, illustrated how the Latin Quarter exerts its own gravitational pull, morally, if not physically. In La Tare (1911), part of Feuillade’s “La Vie telle qu’elle est” (Life as It Is) series, Renée Carl gave a really beautiful performance as Anna, who works in the dance halls of the Latin Quarter, but given the chance, moves to the South of France and devotes herself to a new career caring for patients young and old in a nursing home. Ah, but cruel fate intervenes and a medical student who used to tap her for cash in the Paris days, takes it upon himself to inform the medical board that their “secular saint” is really a “girl of easy virtue”, sooner than you can say “Madonna-whore complex”. And so we are left with a tragic, yet ambiguous ending, following a rather harrowing scene in the unemployment office with a crowd of women, all of whom had remarkable faces (no, not Léontine, I don’t think, but maybe this is the kind of place where she might be found). A very special film, enhanced, naturally, by John Sweeney’s sensitive accompaniment.
Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2024: Pordenone Post No 3
Silent bulletin: news for September 2024
Back to school time! Here’s a roundup of the silent movie news I really want to share with you as summer turns into autumn. Just think how many of these forthcoming delights you could enjoy for less than the cost of a dynamically priced Oasis ticket.
Screenings and festivals
- I missed StummFilmTage Bonn this year again – both in person and online. But Paul Joyce and Paul Cuff both kept us up to date with their fabulous blogs.
- Wareham Silent Film Weekender. The crown jewel in South West Silents’ autumn lineup is this three-day festival of silent cinema at the gorgeous Rex Cinema in Wareham, Dorset. No lineup news as yet but we know to expect great things from SWS. They are also hosting, for example, a screening of Hitchcock’s The Manxman (1928) in Polperro, close to where it was filmed.
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2023: Pordenone Post No 6
Good vibes only at the Giornate on this sunny Thursday. All of us who made it to the extra-early morning serial knew that we had got out of bed on the right side as soon as we realised that this episode of Le P’tit Parigot might have been called La P’tite Parisienne. Yes, it was young Bouboule’s time to shine, as she raced to the rescue of Biscot in a very fetching Delaunay pinafore, and explained her actions in a nifty flashback while the two of them filed through his prison bars. The episode took a turn for the torrid towards the end, but otherwise oh what a joy.
Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2023: Pordenone Post No 6
Les Vampires: a dream of silent cinema
This is a guest post for Silent London by Tim Major, a writer of speculative and weird fiction. His short stories have been selected for Best of British Science Fiction and The Best Horror of the Year. His next novel, Snakeskins, will be published by Titan Books in spring 2019. Find out more at www.cosycatastrophes.com
There are moments when I experience a twinge of surprise that I’ve written a long-form non-fiction book about Louis Feuillade’s 1915–16 crime serial, Les Vampires. I’m a novelist and short-story writer rather than a film writer. While I love silent film, it’s far from my specialism. Even so, when I was invited to write a book for the Midnight Movie Monographs series from Electric Dreamhouse Press, Les Vampires was my first choice.
Les Vampires exists in a strange hinterland between the ‘cinema of spectacle’ and the narrative and montage techniques being developed concurrently by filmmakers such as DW Griffith. Nowadays Les Vampires is accepted as highly important in the canon – it laid the groundwork for many staples of crime films as well as the conventions of episodic drama now more likely to be experienced on TV – but it’s equally likely to be mentioned as an example of one of the world’s longest films, at seven hours. Frankly, I’m appalled that the serial gets referenced so much, but seems to be watched relatively little. Continue reading Les Vampires: a dream of silent cinema
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2013: Pordenone post No 5
Today at the Giornate was dominated by the early evening show – the premiere of Orson Welles’s lost-and found experiment Too Much Johnson (1938). So much so that it gets its own post to itself. For everything else from day five at Pordenone, read on …
My Wednesday began, as Tuesday had ended, on the street corners of Weimar Berlin, with Gerhard Lamprecht. Die Verrufenen (The Slums of Berlin/The Fifth Estate, 1925) was not as immaculate as Unter der Laterne, which I adored, but it was close. It’s another social problem film – the issue here being the struggles faced by prisoners on release. Our hero is a middle-class engineer emerging from a short sentence for perjury: dumped, disowned and unemployed, he finds himself suddenly among the “outcasts” in the slum districts. You may raise a cynical eyebrow and suggest that the posh boy lands on his feet and does rather better for himself than his fellow down-and-outs. Your assumptions would be correct. A (mostly) vividly drawn cast of characters, some poignant confrontations and yet more wonderful child performances tugged at my heartstrings and overcame my scepticism, though. Excellent, excellent stuff.
Continue reading Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2013: Pordenone post No 5
Silent London 