Madeline Matz, who passed away on 25 June, was an irreplaceable resource for all film scholars and bibliographers, first during her tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then at the Library of Congress. We remember her with the words of David Francis, when the Pordenone Silent Film Festival honoured her and John Canemaker at the 22nd Jean Mitry Prize ceremony in 2007: “You never hear Madeline pontificating at film history conferences, but if you’ve listened to an especially good paper, or read a particularly well-researched article or book, there’s a high probability she was involved in one way or another. She’s exactly the sort of person a festival like Pordenone – which makes solid research the key to its programming, presentations and publications – must honour with an award named after Jean Mitry.”

Photo by Paolo Jacob

L'articolo FAREWELL TO MADELINE MATZ (1936-2021) proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

WE OPEN WITH LUBITSCH’S MASTERPIECE LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN, FROM OSCAR WILDE’S PLAY, IN A NEW RESTORATION BY NEW YORK’S MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, FEATURING A SCORE BY CARL DAVIS.

THE FESTIVAL CLOSES WITH ALEXANDRE VOLKOFF’S CASANOVA STARRING IVAN MOSJOUKINE, ACCOMPANIED BY A NEW ORCHESTRAL SCORE WRITTEN BY GÜNTER BUCHWALD.

Following an almost exclusively online 39th Limited Edition, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival will be back again with its public, celebrating its 40th edition at the Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, from 2 to 9 October 2021.  In 1982, when the Cineteca del Friuli and Cinemazero first joined forces to collaborate on a three-day retrospective dedicated to the French comic Max Linder, no one could have imagined this would become the first edition of a festival whose pioneering work has literally rewritten the history of the first three decades of cinema, or that the city of Pordenone would become an indispensable destination for scholars and all those passionate about silent film from the world over.

The 2021 edition will abide by all anti-COVID regulations expected to still be in force in October. Therefore, the program will consist of four screenings per day; it will also be taking into account the positive lessons learned from 2020. That means we won’t be forgetting the large audience created last year with the online edition, when we doubled the number of accreditations and opened the festival up to a new public of silent film lovers. In order to nurture this audience while also maintaining our bonds with loyal longtime festival-goers unable to travel this year, we’ll be streaming a selection of films during the festival dates.

SPECIAL MUSICAL EVENTS

Following the pre-opening evening screening at the Teatro Zancanaro in Sacile, which tips its hat to the 700th Dante anniversary with a ciné-concert tribute featuring the Zerorchestra, the festival officially kicks off Saturday, 2 October with Ernst Lubitsch’s masterpiece Lady Winderemere’s Fan (1925, based on the Oscar Wilde play), now more sparkling than ever thanks to the brand new restoration by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, derived from an original nitrate print. In keeping with the chamber-piece nature of the film, a score written and conducted by Carl Davis for three musicians forms the accompaniment.

The full orchestral event takes place on the closing evening Saturday, 9 October and the replica on 10 October. The musicians of the Orchestra San Marco di Pordenone will perform the world premiere of Günter Buchwald’s score for Alexandre Volkoff’s Casanova (1927), featuring the great Russian star Ivan Mosjoukine as the legendary adventurer and libertine Giacomo Casanova, screened in a new 4k restoration from the Cinémathèque française.

A celebration of sensuality is also on offer at the mid-week event, in cooperation with the Slovenska kinoteka. The Czech drama Erotikon (1929), directed by Gustav Machatý and starring the Slovenian actress Ita Rina, is a touchstone of the late silent era and has been scored by Slovenian composer Andrej Goricar for eight musicians.

THE RETROSPECTIVES

Recognizing the crucial role of women in the history of cinema, long a hallmark of the Festival, is a true leitmotif of this edition, the 6th under Jay Weissberg’s direction. This year’s biggest retrospective is dedicated to the Austrian-Jewish actress and producer Ellen Richter (1891-1969), a versatile star of Weimar cinema whose enormous popularity was international in scope. Sadly a large percentage of her films are lost and her name is today almost forgotten, but thanks to the determination of scholars Oliver Hanley and Philipp Stiasny, a number of gems have been discovered in German, Russian, Dutch and French archives. In addition to rediscovering Ellen Richter as a delightful, multifaceted actress, the retrospective also reveals her strong qualities as a producer: included in the program is Der Juxbaron (1926/27), a charming feature Richter produced rather than starred in, which features the legendary diva Marlene Dietrich in a key early role.

In recognition of the immense contribution and fundamental role that women have had from the very beginning of the film industry, the festival is launching a two-year series dedicated to American women screenwriters, the dominant sex in their field. Their manifold talents were expressed not only in romantic and family films but in every other genre, from westerns to war films, from thrillers to crime dramas. Among the celebrated authors included this year are Anita Loos, Beulah Marie Dix and Dorothy Yost, women who collaborated with such major directors as John Ford and Cecil B. DeMille and significantly contributed to the popularity of stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Constance Talmadge.

Contuining with the feminist theme, mention must be made of the return of the Nasty Women, those rule-busting, anarchic female comedians who refuse to be confined by notions of propriety and gender roles. This new series, curated once again by Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak, largely consists of French and American shorts from 1899 to 1914 and feature several of the chaos-creating comics we’ve come to love, including Rosalie (Sarah Duhamel) and Cunégonde (Little Chrysia).

For the past few decades, long before the success of Bong Joon-ho’s 20019 film Parasite, an impressive group of South Korean directors such as Kim Ki-duk have been mainstays of the international film festival scene. Yet the history of Korean cinema is largely unknown, mostly due to the poor survival rate of so many titles.  Thanks to Sungji Oh of the Korean Film Archive of Seoul, together with the director of the Filmmuseum München Stefan Drössler, the Festival is able to offer a rare occasion – probably the first outside their home country – to discover several precious surviving examples of Korean silent fim.

Other gems to be featured in the 40th edition include Australian adventure films starring the celebrated athlete Snowy Baker, and a preview of the Ruritania retrospective (now scheduled for 2022) with the Italian drama All’ombra d’un trono directed by Carmine Gallone and starring Soava Gallone. Completing the program are several canonical titles and a number of newly rediscovered and restored films from national and international archives. Among these, Lobster Films of Paris takes us back to where everything began thanks to their new restoration of Max Linder’s final film, King of the Circus, aka Circusmania (Max, der Zirkuskönig).

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival takes place thanks to the support of the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Ministero della Cultura – Direzione Generale Cinema, the City of Pordenone, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of Commerce and the Fondazione Friuli.

Photo: May McAvoy and Ernst Lubitsch on the set of Lady Windermere’s Fan (US 1925) by Ernst Lubitsch
Credit: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles

L'articolo LE GIORNATE DEL CINEMA MUTO 2021 proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

Come si è affrontata e si affronta la sfida di mantenere alto l’interesse del pubblico per il patrimonio cinematografico in contesti critici come quello di una pandemia? L’argomento, di stretta attualità, sarà affrontato giovedì 25 febbraio nella prima giornata della 6^a Winter School organizzata dalla FIAF, la Federazione internazionale degli archivi cinematografici, in collaborazione con la Cinémathèque française e la Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé. Interverrà come relatore Jay Weissberg, direttore delle Giornate del Cinema Muto, insieme a Robert Byrne del San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Cecilia Cenciarelli del Cinema Ritrovato di Bologna e Ines Aisengart Menezes del brasiliano CineOP, Mostra de cinema de Ouro Preto.

Il ruolo fondamentale dei festival nella diffusione e valorizzazione del patrimonio preservato dalle cineteche internazionali si è misurato in quest’ultimo anno con la capacità di adattamento alla difficile situazione globale causata dal Covid. Weissberg ripercorrerà e commenterà l’esperienza della 39a edizione delle Giornate, svoltasi dal 3 al 10 ottobre 2020 on line con un’unica replica dal vivo, al Teatro Verdi di Pordenone, dell’evento speciale di chiusura. Una sfida difficile, che ha comportato lo stravolgimento del programma previsto e l’adattamento della struttura del festival a un formato inedito. Una sfida vinta grazie alla qualità dei film selezionati e degli accompagnamenti musicali, agli eventi “live” (masterclass sulla musica, presentazioni di libri, approfondimenti sui film visti) che hanno ricreato on line la freschezza dell’incontro con il pubblico, alla preziosa collaborazione delle cineteche e del partner MyMovies. Se l’intento principale era di continuare a stimolare l’interesse degli studiosi e appassionati di cinema muto, lo scopo è stato raggiunto e superato, come testimonia il numero degli accrediti, più che raddoppiato.

Vale la pena ricordare che prima e dopo il festival sono stati attivati una serie di strumenti che contribuiscono a tenere viva l’attenzione del pubblico. Sul sito localhost/giornatedelcinemamuto sono state create due nuove sezioni: The Silent Stream, per la visione gratuita online di alcuni dei grandi film proposti a Pordenone e Sacile in anni precedenti, e il blog La gatta muta o The Silent Cat, con approfondimenti del direttore su temi e personaggi dell’era del cinema muto. Inoltre, sul canale YouTube delle Giornate si possono rivivere tutti i momenti “live” dell’edizione 2020.

L'articolo I FESTIVAL CINEMATOGRAFICI IN TEMPI DI PANDEMIA proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

Il 2020 non è stato un anno come gli altri. Vale anche per i festival cinematografici, che hanno dovuto adattarsi via via alla situazione e alle regole sanitarie decidendo per l’annullamento o per lo svolgimento in presenza, on line o in forma mista. In un simile contesto, assume un significato speciale il sondaggio che Silent London, il seguitissimo blog della giornalista inglese Pamela Hutchinson (collaboratrice di testate quali The Guardian e Sight and Sound), rivolge annualmente al mondo degli studiosi e degli amanti del cinema muto.

È di ieri l’annuncio dei vincitori dell’edizione 2020, che ha inteso celebrare “coloro che hanno mantenuto viva la cultura del cinema muto nel mezzo di una pandemia globale”. I votanti, più numerosi che mai, hanno eletto le Giornate del Cinema Muto miglior festival di cinema muto on line del 2020 e il direttore Jay Weissberg nientemeno che “Silent Film Hero”, eroe del cinema muto.

Per quanto riguarda i singoli film, Penrod and Sam (1923) di William Beaudine, proposto alle Giornate dall’americana Library of Congress e accompagnato musicalmente da Stephen Horne, è stato giudicato la scoperta dell’anno e la migliore presentazione in streaming di un film muto. Un altro riconoscimento, quale miglior restauro, è andato ad Abwege (1928) di G.W. Pabst, restaurato dal Filmmuseum di Monaco e presentato on line con l’accompagnamento al pianoforte del musicista pordenonese, che da anni vive in Australia, Mauro Colombis. Apprezzamenti sono stati espressi anche per altri titoli, fra cui il film danese Ballettens Datter (1913) di Holger-Madsen, con la ballerina Rita Sacchetto, la cui immagine ha rappresentato l’edizione 2020 delle Giornate.

I risultati del sondaggio con i vincitori di tutte le sezioni sono consultabili su Silent London, a questo link:

https://silentlondon.co.uk/2021/01/26/the-silent-london-poll-of-2020-and-the-winners-are/

L'articolo IL SONDAGGIO ANNUALE DI SILENT LONDON DECRETA LE GIORNATE DEL CINEMA MUTO MIGLIOR FESTIVAL DI CINEMA MUTO ON LINE DEL 2020 proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

LOOKING FORWARD TO 2021 AND THE 40^th EDITION OF THE FESTIVAL

Beyond expectations – that’s how the 2020 edition of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival has turned out, after being online for the first time in its 39-year history, due to the pandemic. There is one live event, the customary post-festival repeat performance of the Saturday screening, on Sunday 11 October at 4.30 pm at Pordenone’s Teatro Verdi, in compliance with anti-Covid regulations – “Laurel or Hardy”, a series of short films made between 1916 and 1925 which reveal how the world’s most famous comedy duo wowed the public before their historic partnership began. The accompaniment will be by the musicians of the Zerorchestra.

Of course we missed the emotions of a week’s live shows, but viewers who connected from around the globe were certainly satisfied with the solid programme put together for this Limited Edition by festival director Jay Weissberg in collaboration with international film archives, and with the best possible visual and audio quality guaranteed by the MYmovies platform. On the one hand, the web has made it possible to maintain our link with the extended Giornate family – devoted individuals who have followed the festival for many years – and on the other, it has proved to be an excellent sounding board, bringing new audiences to the festival, thanks in part to an accessibly-priced basic accreditation (€ 9.90).

Numbers don’t lie, and this edition more than doubled its accreditations, exceeding 2,000. Among other interesting data, there were over 11,500 hours of total viewing time, from 37 nations. In first place, as always, the United States, followed by Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, but Australia, Spain, France and the Scandinavian countries also ranked high, and there was no shortage of viewers in New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, China and the United Arab Emirates. As for cities, London had the most hours of connections to the festival, followed by New York, Los Angeles, Rome and San Francisco, and then Paris, Montreal, Melbourne, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. In addition to Friuli Venezia Giulia, in Italy the festival was followed mostly in Rome, the Veneto, Milan, Florence and Bologna.

We also owe this achievement to the popular festival website, with 56,000 pages consulted, and a successful social media campaign, which had sponsorships this year. In one month (from 10 September) Facebook posts were viewed 3,200,000 times, reaching 2,700,000 people with 110,000 interactions and an increase of 1000 likes compared to last year. 322,500 Instagram accounts were involved, with 2,000 interactions. Twitter followers increased by over 250, with 131,000 views. YouTube was accessed this year, together with Twitch, for the festival’s daily live broadcasts – the post-film discussions involving archivists, experts and musicians, the Masterclasses on accompaniment, and book presentations – with a total of 12,500 views, in addition to live time on Facebook.

Films came from 18 international film archives, allowing the Giornate to bring silent cinema to a new generation of viewers: China Film Archive (Beijing), Cinémathèque française (Paris), Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique (Brussels), Danske Filminstitut (Copenhagen), Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Filmmuseum München (Munich), Filmoteka Narodowa (Warsaw), Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (Milan), Gaumont Pathé Archives (Saint-Ouen, Paris), George Eastman Museum (Rochester, NY), Library of Congress, Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation (Culpeper, VIrginia), Lobster Films (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Národni filmový archiv (Prague), Nasjonalbiblioteket (Oslo/Mo i Rana), National Film Archive of Japan (Tokyo), Tainiothiki tis Ellados (Athens), as well as the Cineteca del Friuli (Gemona), the co-organizer, with Cinemazero, of the Pordenone festival.

From the artistic point of view, festival director Jay Weissberg says he is very satisfied with a programme conveying the beauty and variety of silent cinema, from its origins (The Brilliant Biograph compilation, with images from 1897 to 1902) to its later years (the Chinese film Guofeng, from 1935), and with names ranging from the most famous (Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Cecil B. DeMille, G.W. Pabst, Mary Pickford, Sessue Hayakawa, Brigitte Helm) to the less well-known figures. Among the latter is director-actor Carlo Campogalliani, in his silent period; his highly original La tempesta in un cranio (Kill or Cure; 1921) shows that post-war Italian film was not the exclusive domain of great divas and strong men like Maciste – an unfamiliar cinema, for most people, but (as the Giornate’s recent tributes to Mario Bonnard have shown) one that deserves rediscovery and re-evaluation.

Music, an integral and indispensable element of silent cinema projection, has always been of great importance. With the sole exception of the Greek film The Apaches of Athens, which had a recorded orchestral score, accompaniments were entrusted to the festival’s outstanding team of musicians: Neil Brand, Philip Carli, Stephen Horne, John Sweeney, José María Serralde Ruiz, Daan van den Hurk, Gabriel Thibaudeau, Günter Buchwald, Frank Bockius, Mauro Colombis, and Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton. Individually or in groups, they also starred in the daily Masterclasses in musical accompaniment.

For the return of our Silent Film Festival to Pordenone itself, we put our hopes in the New Year. Our 40th edition, from 2 to 9 October 2021, will focus, together with many special events, on the thematic sections that could not be produced in 2020, including a programme of Korean cinema, a tribute to American women screenwriters, and above all an extensive retrospective on Ruritania, a mythical Balkan kingdom which provides the setting for films from various nations, (including Italy), so numerous that they constitute a true cinematic genre. After a period of crisis like the present one, in which we hunger for some form of even temporary escape, Ruritania – a place of exoticism and mystery, of femmes fatales and adventure – represents an idea of cinema through which we can imagine and hope for a better world.

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival is realized thanks to the support of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Ministry for Cultural Heritage (Directorate-General for Cinema), the Municipality of Pordenone, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of Commerce, and the Fondazione Friuli.

L'articolo 2020 EDITION OF THE PORDENONE SILENT FILM FESTIVAL ENDS proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

There’s the promise of laughter at the grand finale of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival – Limited Edition, and in these sad times, comedy is surely the best panacea. What better doctors than the legendary Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy – or just the more familiar Laurel and Hardy – not as a couple but when they were still performing independently? Thanks to Lobster Films in Paris and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, they’ll be the stars, separately, of the special closing event, “Laurel or Hardy”, streamed on Saturday 10 October (starting at 8.30 pm Italian time) accompanied by Neil Brand. A live repeat screening will be held in Pordenone’s Teatro Verdi on Sunday 11 October at 4.30 pm with live accompaniment by the musicians of the Zerorchestra.

It was a truly mysterious artistic alchemy that generated the most famous comic duo of all time: their personalities and features – not just the physical ones – could not have been more different. British by birth, part of a family of actors and with substantial music hall and vaudeville training, Stan Laurel was equally regarded as performer, writer and director, while Oliver Hardy, an American from Georgia, was from an English-Scottish family who were completely foreign to the entertainment world. As a child he had a passion for singing, and film arrived later, when he was about 18. Favoured by his considerable physical presence, Oliver (known then by his nickname “Babe”) lost no time in finding a place in comedy, initially as the fat villain.

The Giornate is presenting two of his films, The Serenade (1916) and The Rent Collector (1921), directed and starring Larry Semon, one of the great Hollywood comedians, famous in Italy as Ridolini. Semon, who was very generous with the actors who worked with him, immediately recognized his talent, and they became great friends, sharing a love of golf, which became an obsession for Hardy.

We find Stan Laurel as an actor in Detained (1924) by Percy Pembroke and Joe Rock, with a screenplay by Tay Garnett (who later directed The Postman Always Rings Twice) and in the parody of Rudolph Valentino (who becomes Rhubarb Vaselino) in the only surviving reel of When Knights Were Cold (1922), a costume drama which, as was usual at the time, made use of the sets built for other grander and more costly films. The highlight of the programme is the world premiere of the reconstructed Moonlight and Noses (1925), with Laurel as director and screenwriter. This print integrates the existing copy in the Library of Congress with a 16 mm copy from the National Film & Sound Archive in Canberra, where it was preserved perhaps due to the prominent presence of Clyde Cook, the Australian comic idol. The film also features the heroine of the first King Kong, Fay Wray, who was the unforgettable guest of the Giornate in 1999, when the festival was held in Sacile.

The “Laurel or Hardy” programme is preceded in the afternoon (from 5 pm Italian time) by another interesting film, newly restored by the Danske Filminstitut in Copenhagen: Ballettens Datter (Daughter of the Ballet, 1913), directed by Holger-Madsen, one of Nordisk Film’s leading directors during the golden age of Scandinavian cinema. The protagonist of this “modern comedy” – as it was defined in the Danish programme of the time – is Rita Sacchetto, the German actress and dancer of Austrian-Italian origin (her father was Venetian) who was famous for having brought Tanzbilder to international stages in the 1910s: these were dance acts inspired by the paintings of artists such as Botticelli and Velázquez. The film highlights her skills in both theatre and dance, and she plays the part of the dancer Odette Blant with whom the Comte de Croisset falls in love after admiring her performances. In order to marry him Odette promises to leave the stage, but she misses her calling and at the invitation of the theatre manager ends up agreeing to replace an injured colleague. In 1917 Rita Sacchetto married a Polish count and her career as a dancer came to an abrupt halt in 1924 when a friend of her husband accidentally shot her in the foot.

Following the first programme, festival director Jay Weissberg will be joined by Mary Simonson, Colgate University, New York, Casper Tyberg, University of Copenhagen, and pianist John Sweeney in London.

After the evening programme, Jay Weissberg will be joined by Rob Stone of the Library of Congress, Culpeper, Virginia; Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films, Paris; David Robinson, Director Emeritus of the Giornate; Victoria Riskin, daughter of Fay Wray, in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts; and pianist Neil Brand in London.

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival takes place thanks to the support of the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Direzione Generale per il Cinema, the  City di Pordenone, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of Commerce and the Fondazione Friuli.

L'articolo FESTIVAL CLOSING WITH “LAUREL OR HARDY” PROGRAMME proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

Every year, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival assigns an international prize, the Jean Mitry Award, to individuals and institutions who have distinguished themselves in the work of recovering and enhancing film heritage. Established by the Province of Pordenone in 1986 and (after this was abolished in 2017) supported by the Fondazione Friuli, the award has now reached its 35th edition. Notwithstanding the exceptional current situation that has brought the festival online, the award will be delivered virtually, ahead of the live official ceremony next year at the Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi in Pordenone during the 40th edition of the festival.
 
The 2020 winners are the Hungarian film historian and archivist Vera Gyürey and American independent scholar J.B. Kaufman.
 
As a teacher of Hungarian language and literature, Vera Gyürey has promoted the study of cinema in secondary schools since the 1960s, a remarkable feat in a country such as Hungary which traditionally favours literary culture. After being invited in 1985 to join the Hungarian National Film Archive (Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum) by its then director István Nemeskürty, she was its director from 1990 to 2011, and played a key role in the preservation and restoration of Hungary’s film heritage, to which she gave great impetus, also considerably expanding its silent cinema holdings. Among the works restored during her direction is the 1917 film presented in 2002 at Pordenone, Az utolsó éjszaka [The Last Night] by Jenő Janovics, who sowed the seeds in Koloszvár (Cluj) for a host of great directors including such as Mihály Kertész (Michael Curtiz) and Sándor Korda (Alexander Korda), whose only surviving Hungarian film, Az aranyember [Man of Gold], 1918, was restored by the archive. In 2007, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival hosted a retrospective and an exhibition. Together with her husband, the director István Szabó, Vera Gyürey remains one of the festival’s most devoted attendees.

The film historian J.B. Kaufman, one of the great connoisseurs of Walt Disney’s work and author of numerous books, launched his successful series of volumes with Walt in Wonderland – Nel Paese delle Meraviglie, co-authored with Russell Merritt (Jean Mitry Award winner 2018) and winner of the prestigious Kraszna Krausz; the volume was published by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 1992 for the retrospective dedicated to Disney’s silent films. Their second volume, dedicated to the Silly Symphonies and published by the Cineteca del Friuli in 2006, was equally well received. Research on Disney led Kaufman to Walt’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, who involved him in numerous projects, entrusting him with the writing of several books including South of the Border with Disney, and the definitive histories of two Disney masterpieces, Snow White and Pinocchio. He is also the co-author of volumes published by Taschen, and the first of a new series of monographs on the lesser-known Disney films. Kaufman combines his passion for animation with his interest in silent cinema, and he has made multiple contributions to the Cineteca del Friuli’s journal Griffithiana, and above all to the multi-year Griffith Project sponsored by the Giornate. For many years he has being doing in-depth research on the life and career of actress and producer Blanche Sweet.

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival takes place thanks to the support of the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Direzione Generale per il Cinema, the  City di Pordenone, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of Commerce and the Fondazione Friuli.

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The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY has provided the splendid print of A Romance of the Redwoods (1917) – on the programme of the Pordenone Silent Festival – Limited Edition for Friday 9 October, starting at 8:30 pm Italian time – directed by Cecil B.DeMille and starring Mary Pickford, already an established star and appearing here in her first Western, one of the most popular genres in American cinema and theatre. A Romance of the Redwoods has much in common with David Belasco’s famous play of 1905, The Girl of the Golden West, brought to the screen by DeMille himself in 1915, and already celebrated in 1910 in Puccini’s opera La fanciulla del West.
The plot unfolds in California during the Gold Rush, and tells the story of a young woman who meets and falls in love with a man who has impersonated her deceased uncle. This is a variation on the theme of the wrongdoer transformed by the redemptive power of love, and it was written with great liveliness and talent by DeMille himself and his trusted scriptwriter Jeanie Macpherson. The film was shot amid the remarkable natural scenery of Redwood Country, the sequoia forests of California, and was a box office hit, especially because of Mary Pickford. Canadian by birth, she was an actress, producer and outstanding manager, becoming a central figure in the history of cinema. Adored by the public as “America’s sweetheart” and “the girl with the golden curls”, Pickford was one of the founders (with Chaplin, Griffith and Fairbanks) of United Artists and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (another co-founder was Jeanie Macpherson) – the body which awards the Oscars. During the First World War she was the driving spirit behind numerous patriotic enterprises, and her hectic social life after her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks was followed by all. Wherever they went, the couple was greeted by delirious crowds and received by heads of state. With the advent of sound she ended her career in front of the camera, although she continued to stay in the world of cinema as a producer.
A Romance of the Redwoods was the first of DeMille and Pickford’s two collaborations, and these strong-headed titans of cinema did their best to rein in their impulses on set.

After the film, festival director Jay Weissberg will be joined by scholar Anke Brouwers in Antwerp, and by musicians Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton in Connecticut.

Friday 9 October, starting at 4 pm Italian time, will see our last appointment with musical Masterclasses for this edition of the Giornate online, dedicated to aspiring silent film accompanists but also to a broader public interested in enhancing their knowledge of this art. Today’s Masterclass will focus on how a choice is made to use more than one instrument for a given performance. Our live streamed conversation will be with Stephen Horne, Frank Bockius and Günter Buchwald, each of whom is a master of several instruments.

The presentations curated by Paolo Tosini about new publications on film (at 5 pm) will conclude with Barbara Tepa Lupack, author of Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema, a volume dedicated to the rediscovery of the Wharton brothers, kings of movie serials; and with Ned Thanhouser, who will present three new DVD releases which expand the surviving titles produced by the Thanhouser company.

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival takes place thanks to the support of the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Direzione Generale per il Cinema, the  City di Pordenone, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of Commerce and the Fondazione Friuli.

L'articolo CLASH OF THE TITANS: DEMILLE AND PICKFORD proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

Brigitte Helm, the diva discovered by Fritz Lang in Metropolis – her role as the robot-woman has become a world-famous cinema icon – is featured on Thursday 8 October (starting at 8:30 pm Italian time) at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival – Limited Edition in Abwege (Crisis; 1928), directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. In the second of three films made with the great Austrian director, Helm steps into Pabst’s gallery of great female figures – together with Asta Nielsen, Greta Garbo and above all Louise Brooks – who embody Lotte Eisner’s concept in which romantic fantasies are fused with nightmare in Weimar Germany. She appeared in ten silent films and sixteen talkies, almost always playing the “femme fatale”, but soon abandoned cinema for good, in open opposition to the Nazi regime; Pabst’s uneasy relationship with the Third Reich remains a contentious subject, though his 1955 film Der letzte Akt is clearly anti-Nazi. In Abwege, presented here after its restoration by the Münchner Filmmuseum in a beautifully tinted print, Brigitte Helm plays a bored rich woman in a state of marital crisis who decides to open a nightclub for an equally affluent and weary clientele. The film is a kammerspiel with a focus on actors and atmosphere, and on camera movements and editing, once again displaying the elegance of Pabst’s style. Abwege had few surviving intertitles, and it was only with the rediscovery of the original screenplay at the Cinémathèque française and a study of all the contemporary German reviews and theatre programmes that the original texts could be reconstructed, which is essential for an understanding of the interaction between the characters.
One last point of interest: the male lead in Abwege is Gustav Diessl, who was in Italy between the later 1930s and 1948, and worked with Carlo Campogalliani, whose comedy La tempesta in un cranio (Kill or Cure) was seen on the festival programme on 6 October.

A live streamed conversation about Pabst’s film will follow, addressing its restoration, which has fully revealed its meaning and original beauty, and the musical accompaniment. Festival director Jay Weissberg will be joined by Stefan Drössler, Director of the Munich Film Museum, and Pordenone-born pianist Mauro Colombis in Sydney.

The Masterclass on Thursday 8 October, starting at 4 pm Italian time, will be led by the Canadian pianist and composer Gabriel Thibaudeau. During the book presentation (starting at 5 pm) Richard Abel will speak about his Motor City Movie Culture, 1916-1925 and the early history of cinema in Detroit. The second presentation, with Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, authors of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s, will look at the influence of multiple colouring techniques on the visual culture of a century ago.

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival takes place thanks to the support of the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Direzione Generale per il Cinema, the  City di Pordenone, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of Commerce and the Fondazione Friuli.

L'articolo BRIGITTE HELM, THE DIVA WHO SAID NO TO HITLER, STAR OF ABWEGE (CRISIS) BY G.W. PABST proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

Don’t be misled by the title. This is not some Greek-flavoured Western but the first non-conformist Greek film, believed lost for decades. Oi Apachides ton Athinon or The Apaches of Athens by Dimitrios Gaziades, an adaptation for cinema of an operetta by Nikos Hadjiapostolou is on the programme for Wednesday 7 October, starting at 8:30 pm Italian time as a continuing part of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival – Limited Edition. It has recorded music for orchestra and choir and offers remarkable documentation of the working-class neighbourhoods of the Greek capital in 1930. Dissatisfied with the technical shortcomings of the Athens film studios, the director, who reportedly trained in Germany with Lubitsch and Lang, decided to take the camera onto the streets and shot outdoors in ways that were radically different from contemporary tradition. Thus what is striking is not so much the plot, for all its enjoyable qualities (a likeable swindler nicknamed “the prince” tries to con a pompous Greek-American tycoon), but the portrait of poverty and wretchedness of large sections of the population during one of Greece’s not so rare moments of political and social upheaval.
The term “apache” was coined by the French press around the turn of the twentieth century to define the youth gangs who were terrorising Paris with robberies and murders and who stood out for their distinctive clothing.
This print was found four years ago at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, and the restoration project, begun under the patronage of Costa Gavras, was made possible thanks to the collaboration between the French and Greek (Tainiothiki tis Ellados) cinematheques and L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna.

As The Apaches of Athens was the first Greek film with synchronized music and songs, it’s important to note that the soundtrack that Yoannis Tselikas of the Hellenic Music Centre of Athens reconstructed was based on the score of the operetta, to which he has added three new songs. The world premiere of the restored film took place to great acclaim at the Stavros Niarchos Hall of the Athens National Opera on February 15^th, 2020.

After the film, festival director Jay Weissberg will be joined in a discussion by Maria Komninos, Director of the Greek Film Archive, Yoannis Tselikas of the Hellenic Music Centre, and Céline Ruivo, who was in charge of the print’s restoration.

Our online appointment at the festival begins in the afternoon, Italian time, with a Masterclass on musical accompaniment of silent film (4 pm) followed by book presentations (5 pm). The British composer Neil Brand, who originally conceived the Pordenone Masterclasses together with David Robinson, is at the piano today. His passion, authority and storytelling talents can draw any kind of audience into music and silent film. Used to standing ovations, Neil has composed the score for our closing programme, “Laurel or Hardy”.

Today’s book presentation is an entirely Italian event, dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, with the publication of Alfredo Baldi’s 70 anni della Cineteca Nazionale del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 1949-2019, and a study of the relations between fashion and film – with a special focus on the silent era – in Eugenia Paulicelli’s volume Moda e Cinema in Italia. Dal Muto ai giorni nostri.

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival takes place thanks to the support of the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Direzione Generale per il Cinema, the  City di Pordenone, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of

L'articolo A GREEK PRECURSOR OF NEOREALISM, THE APACHES OF ATHENS, AN EXTRAORDINARY RECORD OF LIFE IN THE GREEK CAPITAL IN 1930 proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.