Tag Archives: silent film

Poll

The Silent London Poll of 2025 – the winners!

February 4, 2026 PH 1 Comment

Would love to say that any delay in posting these results was merely a tactic to increase anticipation… but that would be a fib. Thanks so much to everyone who voted and congratulations to the winners of this year’s vote

1. Best orchestral silent film screening of 2025

Your winner: Our Hospitality (Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone, 1923), with a score composed and conducted by Andrej Goričar, performed by the Orchestra of the Imaginary, Lubiana, at Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

Our Hospitality (1923)

2. Best silent film screening with a solo musician or small ensemble of 2025

Your winner: With Reindeer and Sled in Inka Länta’s Winterland (Erik Bergström, 1926, accompanied by Hildá Länsman, Tuomas Norvio, Lávre Johan Eira and Svante Henryson, at Hippfest. This event was curated by and presented in partnership with Tromsø Silent Filmdays and Tromsø International Film Festival.

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Hippfest’s Sweet 16: Check out the lineup

February 4, 2026 PH Leave a comment

Great news from the north, as Hippfest today launches the lineup for its 16th festival, taking place next month: five days of silent film, live music, workshops, talks and a chance to do the Charleston. All in the vintage splendour of the beautiful Bo’ness Hippodrome.

You can read and explore the full lineup here, but here are a few of my highlights. Hope to see you there!

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Blog

Looking back…

January 6, 2026 PH Leave a comment

A belated Happy New Year to all Silent Londoners!

This is just a short post to remind you to indulge in a little nostalgia. As is now more or less traditional, I have written my annual piece for the BFI looking back to the cinema of a century ago, choosing 10 great films from 1926 – I hope you enjoy my selection of centenarians.

And in case you didn’t know, Tristan Ettleman’s comprehensive year-by-year podcast, The Best 5 Films of Every Year Ever, continues to make its way through the early cinema period. We are now up to 1909, apparently, and contributors include many of your favourite silent-era scholars and academics. I think I popped up in 1901, but who knows, that was a long time ago…

If that distance makes you dizzy, then just cast your minds back to last year. You still have two weeks to vote in The Silent London Poll, and every ballot really counts. PJ may be able to jog your memory.

Cheers!

Blog

Season’s greetings 2025!

December 22, 2025 PH 1 Comment

Just a little note to wish all the readers of Silent London happy holidays and great things for 2026. That’s from me and from Bebe Daniels, pictured emerging out of a chimney while playing Santa’s little helper during Christmas 1923.

I expect to have some really fun things to announce soon, but they can wait until the new year. In the mean time, I wish you peace, love and full stockings for the holiday season!

Have yourselves some fabulous festivities and don’t forget to vote in the Silent London Poll of 2025.

xx

Blog, Poll

The Silent London Poll of 2025: vote for your winners now

December 21, 2025 PH 4 Comments

Happy holiday Silent Londoners! They say that if you remember 2025, then you weren’t watching enough silent movies. How much do you recall?

For myself I sure watched a lot of silent films, clocking up several festivals and individual screenings. Pordenone and Bologna, Zurich, Hippfest, Slapstick, Cinema Rediscovered, Women and the Silent Screen in Belgium, plus The Gold Rush centenary, Anna May Wong, Gosta Berlings Saga, Stella Dallas, Lillian Gish, Lois Weber, Film on Film and more at the Southbank. Did you catch Bonn, San Franciscso, the non-stop action at the Kennington Bioscope, or any of the many, many silent screenings all around the world? How about Sherlock Holmes?

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Blog, DVD

Focus on Louise Brooks: a Lulu of a Blu-ray from Flicker Alley and San Francisco Film Preserve

December 4, 2025 PH 1 Comment

Call me Hedda Hopper*, because I have been keeping this one under my hat for quite some time. Coming on 13 January and available to pre-order now, Focus on Louise Brooks (Flicker Alley) is the perfect way to start your 2026 with a bang, or a pair of bangs, as the case may be. It’s a mutlifaceted tribute to the most iconic silent star of all time!

This gorgeous multiregion Blu-ray contains “a treasure trove of early and rare Louise Brooks performances”, with all the extant material from her early Hollywood films together in one place, newly restored and presented in this very special edition. All this!

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 8

October 12, 2025 PH 3 Comments

I awoke with good intentions but encountered even better conversations. And thus, my film viewing on this, the final day of the 44^th Giornate del Cinema Muto, began at midday, with Koko the Clown. Which is a wonderful way to begin. This cartoon, Ko-Ko at the Circus (Dave Fleischer, 1926), with our inky friend squaring off against a giant, had me in stitches – which is how I ended the day too. Apt, perhaps to start with animation when today was really all about the kiddywinks.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 7

October 10, 2025 PH Leave a comment

I have been a little slow to start up some mornings. But one thing you can guarantee that I will get out of bed for is Victor Sjöström. Victor Sjöström’s 1912 debut film no less, banned outright in Sweden, but available for us lucky degenerates on the capacious Verdi screen, with a truly wonderful accompaniment by Stephen Horne. Variously known as The Cruelty of the World, The Gardener or The Broken Spring Rose, this is a really special film and I do think the first title is the best one.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 6

October 9, 2025 PH Leave a comment

Feature films? What a concept. They don’t always seem to be the dominant form here at Pordenone. But this afternoon was an exception to that rule, with a triple-bill of four-to-six-reelers back to back. Welcome to a world of truly immersive narrative entertainment, It’s the future.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 5

October 8, 2025 PH Leave a comment

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.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 4

October 8, 2025 PH Leave a comment

Last night I dreamt I went to East Lynne again… Ellen Wood is directing my subconscious now. I love this mini melodrama strand and I really enjoyed today’s instalment, which was the lavish 1925 Fox adaptation, East Lynne (Emmett Flynn), scripted by Lenore Coffee and starring Edmund Lowe as Carlyle and Alma Rubens as Lady Isabel – a very handsome pair and just right for this ill-starred pair.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 3

October 6, 2025 PH 1 Comment

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.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 2

October 5, 2025 PH Leave a comment

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.

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Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025: Pordenone Post No 1

October 4, 2025 PH Leave a comment

The Giornate dawned with grey skies but good times, a respite from Storm Amy and all the rest of the week’s turbulence, a day of pretty views and outbreaks of mild escapism. Many of us were just grateful to be get here, let alone arrive on time, after the transport situation was especially complex this year. It was an especially mellow start to the festival for me. Blame it on the 3am alarm call, the cold medication or just the pleasurable daze of seeing so many familiar faces all at once. Will I sneeze or snooze my way through the first day of films? Who knows? And will my ears ever “unpop” from the plane? Join me now to find out.

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Blog, Documentary

Iris Barry on Radio 4

September 18, 2025 PH 1 Comment

Where would we be without Iris Barry? Where would all the films be, more to the point? Iris Barry was a pioneering film critic and film preservationist whose life is every bit as interesting as the plots of the movies that she championed and saved.

I am pleased to say that I have presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary on this wonderful woman, titled Iris Barry, First Lady of Film. The documentary will be broadcast on Tuesday 23 September at 4pm in the Artworks strand. Please do listen in to hear the story of the woman who wrote about cinema for the Spectator and the Daily Mail (who sacked her for dissing Elinor Glyn), co-founded the Film Society, and went on to start the world’s first film archive at MoMA in New York.

The documentary is the brainchild of producer James King and consultant Igor Toronyi-Lalic. It features contributions from Richard Brody, Bryony Dixon, Robert Sitton and Henry K Miller. Don’t miss it!

Listen to Iris Barry, First Lady of Film on BBC Radio 4, 23 September at 4pm. Is should subsequently be available on catchup.
Read about Iris Barry on the Women Film Pioneers Project.
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Blog

A Taste of Silents, and more, by HippFest

August 29, 2025 PH Leave a comment

Is it a little hot in here… or is it just me? Outside the weather is turning autumnal, inside here I am contemplating the sizzling lineup for HippFest’s Taste of Silents season, which opens next month. Complete with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert sharing a cigarette, and much more, in Flesh and the Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926).

Stephen Horne will accompany Flesh and the Devil on piano and flute at the beautiful Hippodrome Cinema in Bo’ness, Falkirk on 20 September. This event will open the programme, which has been curated by the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival’s Young Programmers: an educational programme to support future cinema programmers and film exhibitors.

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Blog, Book, Review

Silent reading: Summer 2025 book reviews

August 20, 2025 PH 2 Comments

Let Me Dream Again: Essays on the Moving Image, by Luke McKernan

Sticking Place Books, September 2025,

In case there could be anyone reading this site who doesn’t know, Luke McKernan is a media historian, formerly Lead Curator, News and Moving Image at the British Library. Also a formidably erudite and trailblazing blogger on moving image culture, especially silent cinema, but not exclusively. This collection of essays from across his many sites, gives a rich flavour of his expertise in analysis, archival curation and nostalgia.

In this book, Luke McKernan comments on the moving image in all its multiple forms. Let Me Dream Again – beautiful title – is crammed with insights into history, technology, and humanity. Because these essays, on a staggering variety of topics, began their lives as blogposts, they have the freshness of a live response to a moment in time – whether McKernan is reading 21st-century online comments on a silent film from 1903, or channel-hopping during the 2016 Olympics. He proves an excellent guide to the many ways that the storytelling impulse survives, and adapts to each new medium, from magic lantern slides to Artificial Intelligence.

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Blog, DVD, Screening, Theatrical release

Silent films go pop

August 18, 2025 PH 1 Comment

As so often, I am going to have to ask a certain purist contingent to do their breathing exercises and locate the nearest fainting couch. Everyone else, buckle up!

I have not one but two cases of pop silents to report. And as ever, I remain optimistic for both. First up is one that may be familiar to many already. The Pet Shop Boys, one of the truly great pop bands of the 80s and 90s, wrote an electronic-orchestral score for Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) several years back. There was a special outdoor screening in Trafalgar Square, where the band performed the score with the Dresdner Sinfoniker, orchestrated by Torsten Rasch, back in 2004. I missed that occasion, but I heard that it was pretty epic, despite the rain. Talk about Eastern Bloc sailors and West End, um, squares.

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Blog, Book, Lecture

C.A. Lejeune and British film criticism: book and lecture news

July 31, 2025 PH 1 Comment

You may or may not know this, but when I started Silent London I was working at the Guardian newspaper. So, it was at this time, when I was reading and writing about the silent era, and sitting in the Guardian office (rarely at the same time, I hasten to add) that I first became just a little obsessed with C.A. Lejeune.

Caroline Alice Lejeune, pioneering press film critic, media celebrity, Manchester icon and one half of the Sunday Ladies, with the Sunday Times’s Dilys Powell, is a pet subject of mine. I find her writing to be witty and wise and gentle, and her story, of falling in and out of love with the cinema, to be absorbing and not a little moving. It is also fascinating to me how she first got her job as the first real film critic on the Manchester Guardian, and moved to the Observer for another three decades. So I have been doing a little research. Well a lot in fact.

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Blog, Screening

Anna May Wong: the Art of Reinvention

July 31, 2025 PH 2 Comments

On Sunday I had the very great pleasure of introducing a double-bill of Anna May Wong silents: the UK premieres of new restorations of Song (Richard Eichberg, 1928, restored by Filmmuseum Düsseldorf) and Pavement Butterfly (Richard Eichberg, 1929, restored by DFF) at Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol. Beautiful films, a beautiful audience and simply gorgeous musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne. Wish you could have been there – maybe you were?

But that is not the last that you will hear from Anna May Wong this year. In September, a retrospective curated by Xin Peng will be held at BFI Southbank, titled Anna May Wong: the Art of Reinvention. The schedule takes in a broad spectrum of Wong’s silent and sound films, many with introductions, beginning with the Technicolor gem The Toll of the Sea (Chest M. Franklin, 1922) on 35mm.

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