Tag Archives: Pirmoji Banga

Pirmoji Banga 2023: Come up and see Mae sometime

September 11, 2023 PH 1 Comment

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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Orochi (The Serpent, 1925): dying for the art of swordsmanship

September 21, 2022 PH Leave a comment

This is an extended version of the introduction I gave to this film at Pirmoji Banga 2022. Read my full report on the festival here.

Orochi, AKA The Serpent, is an unforgettably modern Japanese film from 1925. It combines a grim vision of a society rendered dysfunctional by feudalism, a portrait of one man’s existential crisis and yes, some fast and very furious swordfighting action.

This is a transitional film, coming between the early samurai films, which were more sedate and used the techniques of kabuki theatre, including heavy makeup and benshi narration, and the later style of samurai film, the chambara films, heavy on swordfighting action, that would become so popular in in the middle of the 20^th century. The fight sequences in this film are often so frenetic that you can barely see how much is going on. And yet, this film is an action film with a rare degree of realism.

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Pirmoji Banga 2022: keeping silent cinema weird in Vilnius

September 18, 2022 PH 5 Comments

Greetings from Lithuania!

It has been a bit of a quiet summer here. The reason is that I have been working on a couple of research projects, and travelling too – mostly around the country talking about Pre-code cinema (I’m in Scotland this week, and Belfast next month – links below). But also to further-flung spots such as Vilnius, home of Pirmoji Banga. And if you don’t know what that is, you have come to the right blogpost…

Pirmoji Banga means ‘first wave’ and this is a festival of early film, in the extended sense. from the very beginnings to the first talkies, everything before the second world war, more or less. The festival is substantially devoted to silent cinema, which is presented with live music from international artists. And some of this year’s screenings benefited from a benshi too, which was particularly special. The screenings are all held at a smart arthouse cinema by the river, called Skalvijos Kino Centras. A cool place. Very silent film hipster. Check out the foyer display for the festival (and two people who definitely aren’t hipsters in the mirror):

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He Who Gets Slapped (1924): Life is a cruel joke

September 17, 2022 PH 7 Comments

This is an extended version of the catalogue essay I wrote for Pirmoji Banga 2022, currently taking place in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The famous phrase attributed to Charlie Chaplin offers a devastating summary of He Who Gets Slapped (1924): “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” Victor Sjöström’s film examines what happens when one man’s bitterest humiliation is replayed for laughs, again and again, like a one-reel comedy playing in a nickelodeon.

The setting is French, but the source play is Russian, an enduringly popular stage hit by Leonid Andreyev, first performed in 1915. He Who Gets Slapped is an example of Andreyev’s “pansyche” theatre, in which the inner emotional state of the characters is more important that the plot. It’s an apt choice for director Victor Sjöström, credited in his American films such as this one, as Victor Seastrom. He had previously made dark psychological dramas such as Ingeborg Holm (1913) and The Phantom Carriage (1921) back home in Sweden. He Who Gets Slapped was one of his first films in his Hollywood career, which would include such similarly anguished fare as The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928), both starring Lillian Gish and Swedish actor Lars Hanson.

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