THE POSTER OF THE 36TH EDITION

Special event of the closing night will be The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), Lubitsch’s sparkling Mitteleuropa comedy about a prince falling in love with a waitress at the university in Heidelberg. Mega-stars Norma Shearer and Ramon Novarro were equally popular in sound films, and the pleasure they had in making this film together continues to enchant audiences.

This orchestral event will close on Saturday Oct. 7 this year’s Giornate with a second screening on Sunday Oct. 8. The film score was composed by world-famous conductor-composer Carl Davis and will be played by the Orchestra San Marco, conducted by maestro Mark Fitz-Gerald.

The 36th edition of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival opens on the 30th of September with King Vidor’s masterpiece “The Crowd” (1928) accompanied by a special musical score by Carl Davis, who  – on this occasion – will personally conduct the Pordenone-based Orchestra San Marco.

The film broke several rules of its time and seems extraordinarily modern even today. The dramatic story of John (James Murray) and Mary Sims (Eleanor Boardman) is still able to strike its audience – revealing other facets of the so called american dream.

“The Crowd” was an important source of inspiration for several great film directors: Vittorio De Sica, Ozu Yasujiro, Billy Wilder, Jacques Tati among others.

The 36th Pordenone Silent Film Festival will host the international premiere of the recently rediscovered 22 minutes of the long missing comedy Now We’re in the Air (US 1927), featuring Louise Brooks.

In the film, set in World War I, Brooks plays twins, one raised in France, the other one in Germany. The surviving footage includes only scenes with the actress in the role of the French twin, wearing the same black tutu she wears in the famous portraits by Eugene Robert Richee.

The fragment was rediscovered in 2016 at the Národní filmový archiv, Prague, by Rob Byrne, film historian and president of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The restoration was completed in 2017 as a partnership between San Francisco SFF and the Czech archive.

Until now, all four films Brooks made in 1927 have been considered lost.