Portfolio – Le Giornate del Cinema Muto

PORDENONE SILENT 2017

gcm — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 19:42:23 +0000

You’ll notice this edition’s poster is a world away from the exuberance of Douglas Fairbanks last year. The image, shot by the great Ruth Harriet Louise, shows Lars Hanson in shadowy profile staring out against a silvered sea surmounted by unsettled clouds shot through with sunlight. It is contemplative, perhaps even slightly disquieting, and captures the zeitgeist of today even more than in 1927, when it was shot. For a variety of reasons, at the last minute we were unable to secure the film itself, Captain Salvation, although we plan on screening it next year. While it may seem odd to have a poster without the film attached, we still have Lars Hanson in the Scandinavian section (Synnöve Solbakken), and the image’s beauty stands alone.
I don’t mean to imply that this year’s mood is marked by melancholy, though the “Effects of War” program is a sobering reminder of how little we’ve learned from the past. If anything, the Giornate’s 36th edition is notable for a high-spirited selection of comedies ranging from the raucous ladies of “Nasty Women” to the wit of The Reckless Age (Rediscoveries & Restorations [R&R]) and the tongue-in-cheek humor of Seven Footprints to Satan (Cineteca Italiana 70). The section name “Nasty Women” should be familiar to everyone who paid attention to the women’s marches last January following Donald Trump’s inauguration, which brought an estimated 2 million people from over 60 countries onto the streets protesting the boastful misogyny of the U.S. President. Ever since Trump branded Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman,” the term has been reclaimed as a badge of honor, denoting a woman unafraid to fight for gender parity and the right to make their own decisions about their bodies. In tribute to this demand for equality, we’re presenting a five-section program of unabashed women who delight in mischief. Whether dastardly young demon Léontine in a series of shorts, straight-shooting cowgirl Texas Guinan in The Night Rider, or savvy businesswoman Blanche Sweet in The Deadlier Sex, these dames are nobody’s plaything, and when they want something, they’ll make no dainty apologies to get it.
Scandinavia is a focus, not for the first time at the Giornate, but this year we’re looking at directors of the Golden Age influenced by the atmospheric psychological masterpieces of Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller rather than the usual canonical works. Sjöström is represented directly, with the rarely seen Renaissance-set drama Vem dömer?, and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s life-affirming Glomdalsbruden is also in the group. Yet how many people are familiar with John W. Brunius’s terrific Thora van Deken, or A.W. Sandberg’s moody Morænen?
There’s a strong thread of exoticism running through all sections, thanks in part to “Soviet Travelogues” and “Silent Africa in Norway.” The former takes us to the far-flung corners of the burgeoning Soviet Empire and beyond, from the high peaks of Central Asia in Pamir. Krisha Mira to the panoramic beauty of the Crimea in Kara-Dag. The Caucasus is also seen through Italian eyes in the rare, newly reconstructed Viaggio in Caucaso e Persia from 1910 (R&R). Shifting further south, “Silent Africa in Norway” is composed of fascinating, largely ethnographic films made by European cameramen in East Africa, and I’m especially pleased that Norwegian curator and archivist Tina Anckarman had the assistance of British anthropologist Dr. Neil Carrier in identifying tribes and locations, as this sort of interdisciplinary collaboration is too often neglected. In the spirit of early cinema’s ability to encompass the widest range of territories, fetishizing distance while bringing the world closer than ever, we also have several polar films, from the stunningly tinted and toned Captain F.E. Kleinschmidt’s Arctic Hunt (R&R) to the exciting Svalbard adventure documentary Podvig vo L’dakh (Soviet Travelogues).
I had some sly fun with Russia this year, and not just via travel films. In order to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the “ten days that shook the world,” we’ve brought together two American anti-Bolshevik dramas from 1919, The Right to Happiness, about identical twins, one a daughter of Capitalism, the other a Bolshevik rabble-rouser, and The World and Its Woman (not to be confused with The World and the Woman starring Jeanne Eagels, also in the festival this year just to befuddle everyone). Opera diva Geraldine Farrar is but one of many attractions in The World and Its Woman, a big-budget Goldwyn production with a knock-down climax featuring Farrar and Rose Dione in a fight that drew comparisons with 1914’s The Spoilers. Hooray for nasty women!
The strong-woman presence of Pola Negri is highlighted in three films from 1918, which also provides a showcase for original compositions: Carmen features a score by Gabriel Thibaudeau for piano and cello, while Der gelbe Schein allows us to bring Klezmatics founder Alicia Svigals to Pordenone for the first time. This edition is particularly rich in music events, from Philip Carli’s newly commissioned quintet score for A Fool There Was (a canonical film in desperate need of reassessment) to Ukraine’s Anton Baibakov Collective performing for the exciting new Mikhail Kaufman discovery, Nebuvalyi Pokhid (An Unprecedented Campaign; R&R). That’s in addition of course to the opening and closing nights, both featuring the Orchestra San Marco performing Carl Davis’s symphonic scores for The Crowd and The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (neither, by the way, ever screened in Pordenone).
The Kaufman is but one of a number of noteworthy finds, epitomized by Rob Byrne’s fortuitous discovery of fragments from the lost Louise Brooks feature Now We’re in the Air, which recently had its world premiere at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Even though Brooks is only in a few minutes of the surviving footage, her matchless presence lights up the screen. In addition, Serge Bromberg’s identification of a lost Méliès, Le Rosier miraculeux, found in a unique archive in Iowa, is an enchanting addition to the master pioneer’s considerable oeuvre.
We’re bidding a farewell of sorts to two ongoing series, “Beginnings of the Western” and Luca Comerio, though neither the exploration of Western iconography – this year with an eye to European productions – nor Comerio’s heterogenous talents are topics that have by any means been exhausted. Two late Japanese silents with synchronized sound, Shima no Musume (Hotei Nomura) and Tokyo no Yado (Yasujiro Ozu), offer a taste of a larger program being prepared for next year by Tokyo’s National Film Centre, and Milan’s Cineteca italiana receives a well-deserved tribute on its 70th anniversary, with a selection of Italian and foreign titles testifying to the diversity of Italy’s oldest archive. Early cinema hasn’t been neglected, thanks to a program of Victorian shorts that heralds the BFI’s extensive Victorian conservation project, plus there’s a unique session of Tableaux Vivants being screened together with images of the paintings that inspired them.
“The Effects of War” wasn’t an easy section to curate, and some of the films aren’t easy to watch, yet given the world’s current conflicts, and the real threat of additional ones, a program focused on the consequences of the First World War seemed the right way to go. What’s not addressed is how much the Great War influenced cinema itself – perhaps that’s a program for the future. In the meantime, Russell Merritt is devoting the Jonathan Dennis Memorial Lecture to the significant influence made by collector, distributor, and scholar David Shepard on film preservation and the archive world.
Once again, we have a full program, one with unexpected connections and serendipitous discoveries, accompanied by the best musicians to be found anywhere. Plus, we have a fabulous new public face thanks to the beautifully designed new website. I can also honestly say that the Giornate team has never worked so hard. They’re the ones that deserve the greatest recognition.

Jay Weissberg

COMPLETE SCHEDULE

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OPENING NIGHT

gcm — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 19:39:26 +0000

THE BUTCHER BOY
Fatty Arbuckle (US 1917)
Sab/Sat 30 – 20:30 – Teatro Verdi

THE CROWD
King Vidor (US 1928)
Sab/Sat 30 – 20:30 – Teatro Verdi

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CLOSING NIGHT

gcm — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 19:38:57 +0000

LE ROSIER MIRACULEUX
Georges Méliès (FR 1904)
Sab/Sat 7 – 20:30 – Teatro Verdi

THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HEIDELBERG
Ernst Lubitsch (US 1927)
Sab/Sat 7 – 20:30 – Teatro Verdi

L'articolo CLOSING NIGHT proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

EVENTS

gcm — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 16:49:04 +0000

STRIKING A NEW NOTE

DON’T TELL EVERYTHING
Leo McCarey (US 1927)
Dom/Sun 1 – 14:30 – Teatro Verdi

THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO
Clyde Bruckman (US 1927)
Dom/Sun 1 – 14:30 – Teatro Verdi

L'articolo EVENTS proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

SCANDINAVIAN CINEMA:THE SWEDISH CHALLENGE

gcm — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 16:45:32 +0000

2017 marks the centennial of the start of what has became known as the “Golden Age” of Swedish cinema. This “Golden Age” is commonly regarded in film history as the Swedish film industry’s artistic peak in the years following the success of Victor Sjöström’s Henrik Ibsen adaptation A Man There Was (Terje Vigen), which premiered in January 1917. It is associated with films with large budgets and artistic ambitions, based on acclaimed literary works, and mostly set in a rural milieu, with location anchoring the action in the Scandinavian landscape. These films were often referred to as “national films” because of their reliance on national literature, national landscape, and national costume.
There has been a tendency, however, to focus accounts of the Swedish “Golden Age” exclusively on the films made by Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, leaving out all other Swedish directors who made films in the same style. Many wonderful films have thus slipped from view because they do not match this overly narrow conception of Sweden’s film history.
This 2-part film series, which will continue next year, is built around the argument that the first Swedish “Golden Age” films constituted a significant challenge to filmmakers in the neighbouring countries, as well as in Sweden itself – aesthetically, commercially, and culturally. By showing a variety of important but lesser-known Swedish “Golden Age” films in combination with artistically connected films from the surrounding countries we want to emphasize to the Giornate audience how the Swedish films functioned as a catalyst in the other Nordic countries for the conception of what a national cinema is and should be.
With A Man There Was, the leading Swedish production company Svenska Biografteatern (Svenska Bio, for short) set a new standard for filmmaking. Films based upon acclaimed literary works had been made before, but the costs and production time – as well as the overall artistic ambition – were much higher for this film than for any other Swedish film made up to that time. The result was successful, and from the following season, overall production was shifted to fewer but much more expensive films, often (but not always) based on literary works and with the Nordic landscape as an important element. Out of Svenska Bio’s five previously contracted directors only Stiller and Sjöström had their contracts renewed.
The new production model was also adapted by its main rival Skandia, which had been formed by a number of smaller production companies in 1918 in an effort to compete with Svenska Bio. Among Skandia’s most prestigious projects were films based on the works of Scandinavian Nobel Prize laureates Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Henrik Pontoppidan, followed by further adaptations of Nobel Prize winners after Skandia merged with Svenska Bio to form the big combine Svensk Filmindustri in December 1919.
In Norway, the Bjørnson adaptations were seen as rather provocative. Not only were they based on works by one of the most acclaimed Norwegian authors and shot on location in Norway, scenes in the films also recreated some of the most iconic artworks of the Norwegian 19th-century national romantic movement. Norway had only become fully independent from Sweden in 1905; these Swedish films were seen by some critics as an appropriation of the Norwegian cultural heritage, and loud demands were made for a revival of the then-slumbering Norwegian film industry. Beginning with Rasmus Breistein’s Fante-Anne (Gypsy Anne, 1920), a series of Norwegian national films based on the country’s own literary heritage were made following the Swedish model.
Finland’s independence from Russia came only in December 1917. Mauritz Stiller’s Song of the Scarlet Flower (Sången om den eldröda blomman, 1919, adapted from a story by the Finnish author Johannes Linnankoski) was appreciated in Finland and gave a glimpse of how Finnish cultural heritage and national themes could be transferred to the screen. Like Norway, Finland had a small film market, and setting up viable production companies proved difficult, but in 1919, two new ones were established, both explicitly committed to making national films. One of them, Suomen Filmitaide (Suomi-Filmi, from 1921), with directors Teuvo Puro and Erkki Karu, and the ambition to film national literary classics, would become the dominant Finnish film company of the 1920s.
Denmark, on the other hand, dealt with the challenge presented by the Swedish literary films in a different manner. The leading Danish production company, Nordisk, struggled economically during and after World War I. In 1918 Nordisk adapted a production policy similar to Svenska Bio, with fewer but more expensive and ambitious films, but apart from a few exceptions they chose not to emphasize Danish or Scandinavian stories. Instead, the clearest expression of the Swedish influence was probably director A. W. Sandberg’s series of four Dickens adaptations, starting with Our Mutual Friend (Vor Fælles Ven, 1921, shown at the 2012 Giornate). There were, however, a handful of films based on Nordic literary works: Gunnar Sommerfeldt’s Icelandic drama Sons of the Soil (Borgslægtens Historie, 1920), and A. W. Sandberg’s Struggling Hearts (Lasse Månsson fra Skaane, 1923), set during the 17th-century Scanian wars. Sandberg’s The House of Shadows (Morænen, 1924), written directly for the screen but set in the Norwegian countryside, was compared by Danish critics with the finest Swedish achievements.
Of the very few Danish films that tried to adopt the Swedish model fully, one of the best examples is Carl Th. Dreyer’s Once Upon a Time (Der var engang, 1922), which was based on a famous, explicitly nationalistic play and produced by the Danish distributor of Svensk Filmindustri’s films. No one embraced the Swedish model of literary adaptations with psychological intimacy set in natural Nordic scenery more eagerly than Dreyer, and his mastery of the Swedish style can be seen in films such as The Parson’s Widow (Prästänkan, 1920) and The Bride of Glomdal (Glomdalsbruden, 1925), produced in Sweden vand Norway respectively but both set in the picturesque Norwegian countryside. That Dreyer’s embrace of the Swedish model was deliberate can be seen from an article he wrote in 1920, in which he proclaimed that through the Swedes’ achievements, cinema had been let into “art’s promised land”. – Casper Tybjerg & Magnus Rosborn

Si ringraziano/With thanks to: Jon Wengström, Svenska Filminstitutet; Thomas Christensen, Marianne Jerris, Lars-Martin Sørensen, Danske Filminstitut; Morten Egholm, DIS Copenhagen; Antti Alanen, Tommi Partanen, KAVI (Kansallinen Audiovisuaalinen Instituuti); Bent Kvalvik, Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway); Anne Bachmann, Bo Florin (University of Stockholm); Jaakko Seppälä (University of Helsinki); Claire Thomson (University College London); Gunnar Iversen (Carleton University); Flemming Behrendt.

SYNNÖVE SOLBAKKEN [A NORWAY LASS]
John W. Brunius (SE 1919)
Dom/Sun 1 – 9:00 – Teatro Verdi

FANTE-ANNE [GYPSY ANNE]
Rasmus Breistein (NO 1920)
Lun/Mon 2 – 14:30 – Teatro Verdi

THORA VAN DEKEN [A MOTHER’S FIGHT]
John W. Brunius (SE 1920)
Ven/Fri 6 – 14:30 – Teatro Verdi

ANNA-LIISA
Teuvo Puro, Jussi Snellman (FI 1922)
Sab/Sat 7 – 10:30 – Cinemazero

VEM DÖMER? [LOVE’S CRUCIBLE]
Victor Sjöström (SE 1922)
Mar/Tue 3 – 20:30 – Teatro Verdi

MORÆNEN [THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS]
A.W. Sandberg (DK 1924)
Sab/Sat 7 – 16:15 – Teatro Verdi

GLOMDALSBRUDEN [THE BRIDE OF GLOMDAL]
Carl Theodor Dreyer (NO 1926)
Gio/Thu 5 – 22:45 – Teatro Verdi

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NASTY WOMEN

gcm — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 10:06:43 +0000

The term “Nasty Woman” has been a feminist rallying cry since October 2016, when Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton by hissing into his microphone, “such a nasty woman,” during a televised Presidential Debate just before the 2016 American election. In the aftermath of that moment, “Nasty Woman” instantly became a viral Twitter hashtag (#IAmANastyWomanBecause…), a feminist fundraising symbol (printed on T-shirts, mugs, and tote bags), and an inspiration for the memorable “pussy hats” at the 2017 global Women’s March. To be a “Nasty Woman” means refusing to be silenced, while embracing the messiness and excess inherent in gender and sexual difference, and engaging as an energetic participant in a new feminist political movement.
Long before there were “pussy hats” and late-night feminist satirists, comedienne characters such as Léontine, Rosalie, Cunégonde, Lea, Bridget, and Tilly spoke truth to patriarchal power with their gleefully reckless and wholesale destructive disregard for gendered social norms and feminine corporeal decorum. This series on “Nasty Women” includes four curated programs of short films – “Catastrophe in the Kitchen,” “Léontine/Betty,” “Identity Crisis,” and “Catastrophe Beyond the Kitchen” – as well as one feature film, The Deadlier Sex, about a female railroad tycoon who abducts a rival businessman and strands him in the wilderness with only his wallet. More than just deadly vamps, the “nasty women” in our programs deflect and defile rigid gender norms by any means possible: they blow up the kitchen, shatter all the dinnerware, dismember their limbs to revolutionize their labor, torment their employers with sadistic pranks, playfully transgress sexual and racial taboos, swap bodies and metamorphose into other species, and flaunt their corporeality with predatory abandon.
The first program, “Catastrophe in the Kitchen,” spans early short films about spontaneous female combustion (The Finish of Bridget McKeen and How Bridget Made the Fire) to multi-reel comedies from the 1910s about the culinary hazards of romantic coupling (Are Waitresses Safe?). These films center on the kitchen as a location in which the explosion of boundaries between separate gendered public and private spheres could take place – often through situations of extreme comic violence and astonishing bodily transformation. Moving out of the home and into the public sphere, “Catastrophe Beyond the Kitchen” leaves domesticity in a shambles and instead sources its “nasty women” on the streets and in everyday public life. From the Italian star and political activist Lea Giunchi’s comic travails in an office (Lea in ufficio), to the variety of professional opportunities made available through female-to-male cross-dressing (She’s a Prince), these films thematize the civic potentialities of what happens when women break loose from the domestic sphere.
“Identity Crisis” represents very familiar terrain in today’s age of feminist intersectionality and viral social media. However, before there was Twitter, “nasty women” made use of a range of cinematic devices to highlight the complexities of identity and the shifting terms of its performance and representation – exemplified in films such as The Taming of Jane, An Up-to-Date Squaw, and The Night Rider. Many of these films also feature slapstick comediennes who starred in their own comic series, such as Sarah Duhamel (Rosalie/Jane and Pétronille), Lea Giunchi (Lea), Alma Taylor (Tilly the Tomboy), and several unidentified iconic clowns (i.e., nasty-women-at-large), such as Cunégonde and Léontine/Betty. To the latter, we dedicate an entire program of rarely viewed archival films, including Les Ficelles de Léontine, Le Bateau de Léontine, and Léontine garde la maison. Léontine/Betty was an anarchistic prankster, catastrophic mischief-maker, and gleefully destructive slapstick body who took profound pleasure in demolishing stilted institutional norms, and in infuriating all those around her who would hold fast to conventional cultural mores. A “nasty woman” par excellence, Léontine/Betty was the opposite of a vamp: it was exactly her tomboy sexual latency that became the locus of her deadly and destructive activity.
Across these screenings – from early split-reel films about exploding housemaids to a 1920 feature about sadistic romantic coupling – it is never stable or uncomplicated what it precisely means for a woman to be “nasty”. The connotations of nastiness range from prankster mischief and anarchic violence, to corporeal play and sexual experimentation. Indeed, the rallying cry of “nasty women unite” has come to symbolize all the ways in which 2017 society feels threatened by women’s empowerment, success, intelligence, and ambition. In this vein, our nasty women of silent cinema represent scandalous traces from early 20th century film history. What they reveal is the power of cinema to make visible transformative notions of femininity and female identity that are always just on the cusp of articulation.

Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak

Program 1: CATASTROPHE IN THE KITCHEN
Dom/Sun 1 – 10:45 – Teatro Verdi

Program 2: LÉONTINE/BETTY & ROSALIE/JANE
Lun/Mon 2 – 9:00 – Teatro Verdi

Program 3: IDENTITY CRISIS
Gio/Thu 5 – 10:30 – Teatro Verdi

Program 4: CATASTROPHE BEYOND THE KITCHEN
Ven/Fri 6 – 12:30 – Teatro Verdi

Program 5: THE DEADLIER SEX
Sab/Sat 7 – 18:00 – Teatro Verdi

L'articolo NASTY WOMEN proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

CINETECA ITALIANA 70

gcm — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 10:05:13 +0000

Many directors have received their education in cinematheques, experiencing the “history of cinema” through its original texts – the films. Actually learning and developing alongside historians, critics, and curators. There is only one instance of the reverse. Only in Milan did two architecture students, inspired by the contagious enthusiasm of a mutual friend who died prematurely, begin to collect celluloid. Thinking of a possible profession, what they ended up doing was to lay the foundations for the oldest archive in Italy. This year the Cineteca Italiana celebrates its 70th anniversary, having been officially registered as an Association in 1947. In fact it was formed as early as 1935, when Mario Ferrari, Alberto Lattuada, and Luigi Comencini began to seek out cinematic gems among the films held by local distributors or destined for the recycling bins. They bought them, watched over them, and made them available to others via film evenings, which became increasingly popular. In dangerous times, under the cover of the fascist association movement they showed works of dissent, and quickly established international contacts. Having conserved the material in its possession from the ravages of the war, the fledgling Cineteca Italiana was the first Italian archive to join the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), in 1946. Needing to set up an official public organization in 1947, it began to work with local cinema clubs in the dissemination of films and then formed the idea of constructing a museum, which has now acquired an interactive didactic role in its new, definitive home in a former tobacco factory.
In recent decades most of the rediscoveries and restorations of old masterpieces have been based on the 20,000 copies of films accumulated over time, kept with expertise and unequalled passion by Gianni Comencini and Walter Alberti. Officially acquiring the status of a Foundation in 1996, the Cineteca Italiana has always made its experience available for projects and reviews, keeping abreast of technological innovations and continuing to collect films.

Carlo Montanaro

IL FIACRE N. 13
Alberto Capozzi, Gero Zambuto (IT 1917)
Mer/Wed 4 – 9:00 (Ep. I & II) / 11:00 (Ep. III & IV) – Teatro Verdi

SCHATTEN – EINE NÄCHTLICHE HALLUZINATION
Arthur Robison (DE 1923)
Lun/Mon 2 – 22:15 – Teatro Verdi

SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN
Benjamin Christensen (US 1929)
Sab/Sat 7 – 11:45 – Cinemazero

TRAPPOLA
Eugenio Perego (IT 1922)
Lun/Mon 2 – 17:30 – Teatro Verdi

CAPO OPERAIO INCENDIARIO
(FR 1909)
Dom/Sun 1 – 15:45 – Teatro Verdi

CAREERS
John Francis Dillon (US 1929)
Sab/Sat 7 – 22:30 – Teatro Verdi

MEDIOLANUM
Ubaldo Magnaghi (IT 1933)
Mer/Wed 4 – 18:00 – Teatro Verdi

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SOVIET TRAVELOGUES

gcm — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 10:04:27 +0000

Across the Sixth Part of the World: Soviet Travelogues of the 1920s
Regular production of travel films in Russia began in 1907 with Russian Pathé’s Travels through Russia (Puteshestviye po Rossii), the first in a series that continued through 1908-09 with a uniform title style, including Picturesque Russia (Zhivopisnaya Rossia), Picturesque Odessa (Zhivopisnaya Odessa), and Picturesque Tiflis (Zhivopisnii Tiflis). Other companies instantly followed suit, though they seem to have acknowledged Pathé’s prior claim to the word zhivopisnii (picturesque), and styled their films more simply Vidi (Views), such as Views of Yalta and the Black Sea (Vidi Yalti i Chernovo Morya), Views of Moscow (Vidi Moskva), et al. Films designed for “useful entertainment” explored geographically and culturally diverse parts of the country, showing the ethnic groups populating these spaces as loyal imperial subjects. Although the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, and the gradual nationalization of the film industry greatly affected the output of the sector, a revival of interest in travel films and the shaping of a new ideological framework coincided with the consolidation of Soviet power in the mid-1920s. The first Soviet feature-length expedition film, The Great Flight (Velikii perelyot, 1925, dir: Vladimir Shneiderov), an account of a Moscow-Beijing air journey, enjoyed wide popularity. The film’s aerial survey perspective set an example for film-makers by visualizing a centrifugal expansion of Soviet ideology.
By the mid-1920s, film-makers worked on creating a “kino-atlas” of the Soviet Union, attracting audiences to cinema halls with the promise of exotic scenery. A landmark in this respect was Dziga Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World (Shestaia chast mira, 1926; alternate title “A Kino-Eye Race Around the USSR”), thanks to the way it visually stitched together the borderlands of the new Soviet state, connected by a growing communications network. From the mid-1920s onwards, a large corpus of “kino-race” films showing the territories and nationalities of the Soviet Union was created and distributed through both commercial and non-profit networks across the country. Expeditions to various parts of the Soviet Union were filmed, teaching audiences about remote places that were meant to command their loyalties, as well as serving to configure a new set of visual formulae. In the 1920s and early 1930s, expedition kulturfilms featured in the production plans of every film studio in the Soviet Union, and were the subject of a vibrant debate on the role and principles of non-fiction.
The cinematic landscapes of the travelogue relied on a didactic fusion of vision and ideology in which the non-fiction status of the footage, combined with the scientific authority of ethnography, naturalized the image of reality as seen through an ethnographic lens. At the same time, film-makers in the Soviet Union actively used the concepts of imaginary geography, such as “the East” and “the Far North”, and perpetuated the civilizing mission discourses established in imperial Russia. Films on minorities visualized distinct ethnic groups, demonstrating their transformation into “socialist nations” via developmental stages, yet the conceptual classifications between these stages remained controversial. Circulating these images across the Soviet Union, travelogues instilled the Soviet world with distinctions, creating a new form of visual literacy.
Our selection of expedition films demonstrates a variety of visual styles and perspectives. It includes Alexander Litvinov’s expedition to the Udege people in the Far East (Lesniye Liudi/Forest People), which earned him the nickname of the “Russian Flaherty”; Vladimir Yerofeyev’s journey to remote areas of the mountainous Pamir region (Pamir. Krisha mira/Roof of the World); and a heroic account of the Soviet rescue effort to save Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the North Pole (Podvig vo L’dakh/Feat in the Ice). Three additional shorts further expand the geographical range and demonstrate a changing visual language from the 1920s into the 1930s; they include two films edited from the footage shot but not used for Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World, Tungusi (The Tungus) and Bukhara, a scenic short about the picturesque Crimea (Kara-Dag), and the glorification of the work of miners on Spitsbergen, where the national frame is replaced by class references (Daleko na Sever/Far in the North).
The selection demonstrates that the Soviet film industry continuously engaged with imperial frames of reference and at the same time had a transformative impact on the representation of exoticism and ethnic “backwardness”. With the help of cinema, the abstract categories of nationality and motherland acquired visual embodiments: they could be imagined, and thus perceived as central categories for self-identification as well as the identification of “others”. Expedition kulturfilms gave a tangible form and shape to imaginative concepts of civilization and backwardness, and highlighted the entanglement of colonizing and modernizing attitudes in the Soviet context.
The films in this programme do not aim at an exhaustive overview of Soviet kulturfilms, but offer a survey of emerging visual conventions of filming Soviet diversity and unity. Vladimir Yerofeyev, Alexander Litvinov, Nikolai Lebedev, and cameramen Ivan Beliakov, Pavel Mershin, Yakov Tolchan, and others created lasting visual conventions of “the Soviet land,” facilitating audiences’ emotional relationship to, and symbolic appropriation of, the locales filmed. While the governance of the USSR was increasingly centralized and monolithic, its sprawling territories were continually portrayed as culturally heterogeneous.
This programme has been organized with the support and co-operation of the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive – Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov (RGAKFD) – in Krasnogorsk. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to RGAKFD’s Director Natalia Kalantarova, Deputy Director Rimma Moiseeva, International Adviser Elena Kolikova, and all the archivists who helped in its realization.

Oksana Sarkisova

FOREST PEOPLE
A.Litvinov (1928)
Dom/Sun 1 – 22:00 – Teatro Verdi

THE TUNGUS
editor E. Svilova (1927)
Dom/Sun 1 – 22:00 – Teatro Verdi

ROOF OF THE WORLD [PAMIR]
Vladimir Yerofeev (1928)
Mar/Tue 3 – 9:00 – Teatro Verdi

BUKHARA
editor E. Svilova (1927)
Mar/Tue 3 – 9:00 – Teatro Verdi

FAR IN THE NORTH [DALEKO NA SEVER]
(1932)
Mer/Wed 4 – 11:00 – Teatro Verdi

KARA-DAG [ZHARDIN’E]
(1929)
Sab/Sat 7 – 9:00 – Cinemazero

FEAT IN THE ICE [PODVIG VO L’DAKH]
(1928)
Sab/Sat 7 – 9:00 – Cinemazero

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SAUNDO-BANTHE JAPANESE SILENT CINEMA GOES ELECTRIC

gcm — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 10:02:04 +0000

This programme explores a particular mode of Japanese silent cinema, the so-called saundo-ban – films that were shot as silent films, but released with a post-synchronized soundtrack, usually consisting of a music score, sound effects, and the occasional popular song. This mode of Japanese film production existed roughly between 1930 and 1938, and due to its hybrid nature, not silent, yet not fully sound, encouraged an active stylistic experimentation with both cinematic form and content. Many of Japan’s greatest and most famous directors, including Ozu, Shimizu, and Mizoguchi, shot saundo-ban films, as did lesser-known commercial filmmakers such as Hotei Nomura and Yasushi Sasaki, whose films achieved great popularity in Japan.
The saundo-ban was not only an aesthetic mode of production used during the conversion to sound. It was also utilized by directors such as Ozu as a way to limit the ability of the benshi (live narrator) to seize the narrative impetus of the film, and by studio heads such as Shochiku’s Shiro Kido, who used it to effectively oust the now-silenced benshi from the premier screens of the cities. In fact, “No Benshi – Full Volume” became the slogan printed on the programme leaflets of the Shochiku-run Teikoku gekijo, or the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo. In effect, the saundo-ban paved the way for the arrival of the Japanese sound film, while simultaneously constituting a mode of aesthetic expression that endured for several years after the Japanese cinema had completed its transition to sound, having a second life at minor studios that lacked the funds to make the transition to sound and instead carved out a niche by creating saundo-ban films, usually in the jidai-geki period-film genre.
This year we present an initial foray into the world of saundo-ban films, screening two examples, to be followed by a more substantial programme in 2018. Ozu’s Tokyo no yado shows the artistic potential of the late silent form, subtly influenced by contemporary developments in sound cinema. Meanwhile, Hotei Nomura’s musically infused potent melodrama Shima no musume explores the variety of popular modes in this transitional period, ranging from melodrama to comedy, and supplementing the dramatic traditions of silent cinema with a distinctive, sometimes playful use of music and effects.

Alexander Jacoby, Johan Nordström

This programme is co-organized by Shochiku, and is generously supported by Kinoshita Group.

SHIMA NO MUSUME
[FIGLIA DELL’ISOLA/ISLAND GIRL]
Hotei Nomura (JP 1933)
Dom/Sun 1 – 12:00 – Teatro Verdi

TOKYO NO YADO
[UNA LOCANDA DI TOKYO/AN INN IN TOKYO]
Yasujiro Ozu (JP 1935)
Gio/Thu 5 – 9:00 – Teatro Verdi

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THE JAPANESE SILENT CINEMA GOES ELECTRIC proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

POLA NEGRI:THE FIRST PHASE OF STARDOM

gcm — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 09:36:51 +0000

Put simply, Pola Negri is a minefield. A self-fabulist extraordinaire, her ghostwritten 1970 autobiography, Memoirs of a Star, is largely a fantasy of what Negri wanted people to believe rather than an accurate reflection of her life and career. The damage it’s done over the years has been acute, and separating fact from fantasy continues to dog Negri scholarship. First, there’s the problem of her multi-national career, which no scholar has satisfactorily negotiated, given the need for familiarity with Polish, German, and English primary sources. Complicating matters, Negri’s penchant for self-publicity fed the voracious Hollywood press machine but distorted the truth and often eclipsed her considerable talent. Her movies with Lubitsch are largely well-known and justly celebrated, yet the majority of films she made in the U.S. after emigrating in 1922 are understudied or lost. Film scholar Diane Negra, in her 2001 essay on Negri (one of the very few to analyze Negri as both movie star and commodity), talks of the “failure of Negri’s American career,” an assessment that’s long been taken as received wisdom: film star Pola overshadowed film actress Pola, buried under an avalanche of continental exoticism and celebrity lovers. One need only glance at the titles of the two most recent biographies to get a sense of how she’s still being treated: Mariusz Kotowski’s Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale (English edition 2014) and Sergio Delgado’s Pola Negri: Temptress of Silent Hollywood (2016). As Theodore Dreiser wrote, “Pola Negri is an outstanding example of the sacrifice of a star to commercialism.”
The purpose of our programme is to reassess Negri’s talent, much as studies of the Italian divas, or Asta Nielsen, have granted authorial stature to those actresses. Crucial to an understanding of Negri onscreen is an awareness of her training as a dancer. Watch how she moves in the three films screening this year, and you immediately sense a dancer’s grace. Her magnetism was evident from the very beginning, as testified by noted author Stanislas Rzewuski’s review in the French daily Comœdia (9 January 1913) of the 15-year-old Negri’s theatrical debut, in Aleksander Fredro’s classic play Śluby panieńskie (Maidens’ Vows) in September 1912: “This opening event coincided with the dazzling début of a young artist, Mlle Pola Negri, whose talent, charm, sweetness and rare qualities of intelligence and diction delighted the public and critics alike.”
She entered films in 1914, but World War I held up international appreciation of her talent; this changed with the overwhelming success of Madame Dubarry (1919), the first of a glut of Negri titles released after the Treaty of Versailles. In Italy, critics expressed pride, thinking she was a native daughter (not an unreasonable assumption given that she chose her surname due to a fondness for the Italian poet Ada Negri); then they thought she was German, which complicated matters considering the War was still so fresh. Earlier titles now found distribution, including Carmen (1918), on Italian screens in autumn 1920, which received a rhapsodic review in La Rivista Cinematografica: “…there is no Italian actress who would even dream of approaching the talent of this German artist…. [F]ive minutes after she passes before your eyes, so confident in her performance, so spirited in her interpretation – unquestionably the result of profound observation, study and understanding – she first startles you, then bewitches you immediately after…. And all this is seen in her facial gestures, in the vain contraction and thrashing of her hand, in her magnificent eyes….”
The three Negri films we’re screening, all from 1918, offer an opportunity to look closely at a major actress entering her first phase of stardom. All the traits that captivated her peers are fully in evidence: the beguiling smile, flirtatious and defiant; the fiery gaze; and the thrilling body language, surprisingly graceful and nimble. Also notable is her poignancy in conveying wounded pride and lost love. Vittorio Martinelli, in Le dive del silenzio, wrote that Negri was at her best when playing women of similar temperament and sensuality, such as Carmen, Dubarry, Sappho – women marked by a “physical blend of languor and determination.” He’s not alone in suggesting that this decidedly European mix didn’t transfer well to the United States, though her American career desperately needs reassessment. Fay Wray, whose autobiographical honesty stands in stark contrast to Pola’s, writes of the way Negri’s personality was bleached in Hollywood: “she had been ‘groomed and polished’ and her palette of colors scraped away by the company she had joined: Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation.” The trio of films here reveal the actress in all her panchromatic glory, mesmerizing us with her pantomimic range, testifying to the star as artist.

Jay Weissberg

CARMEN [GYPSY BLOOD]
Ernst Lubitsch (DE 1918)
Mer/Wed 4 – 20:30 – Teatro Verdi

DER GELBE SCHEIN [THE YELLOW TICKET]
Eugen Illés (DE 1918)
Dom/Sun 1 – 20:30 – Teatro Verdi

MANIA. DIE GESCHICHTE EINER ZIGARETTENARBEITERIN
Eugen Illés (DE 1918)
Ven/Fri 6 – 22:30 – Teatro Verdi

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THE FIRST PHASE OF STARDOM proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.