Editor's blog

THE 28th PORDENONE SILENT FILM FESTIVAL

(3-10 October 2009, Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, Pordenone, Italy)

This year's Giornate del Cinema Muto / Pordenone Silent Film Festival opens with an orchestral presentation of Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow, with a new score by Maud Nelissen, who for the first time has persuaded the Lehar Estate to permit the use of themes from the original operetta.   Another major musical event will be a performance of Carl Boese and Paul Wegener's 1920 Der Golem, with a score by Firenze-based Betty Olivero, conducted by Guenter Buchwald and featuring the young Welsh clarinet prodigy Lee Mottram.

Among the main features of this year's festival, the Cinémathèque Française presents a series of restorations of their collection of films produced by Albatros, the production company established in Paris by Russian émigrés under the inspired direction of Alexander Kamenka. Giornate audiences are already familiar with many Albatros productions - the films of Ivan Mozhukhin and classic works by Clair, Feyder and L'Herbier. The new programme includes another of Feyder's ten classic silent features, Carmen, starring Raquel Meller and with Luis Bunuel in a supporting role, along with films by Viatcheslav Tourjansky, Jean Epstein, Serge Nadejdine and Nicholas Rimsky, whose unique talent as a comic actor will also be revealed. Audiences will be astonished by the visual qualities of the films, both in the new restorations and the original design: with inspired artists like Bilisky and Meerson, Albatros set standards of art direction that were unprecedented and are often still unsurpassed.

Appropriately to the bicentennial of the inventor of detective fiction, the American Edgar A. Poe, Jay Weissberg has curated a series of programmes on English crime and detection,  As well as presenting the various British interpreters of Sherlock Holmes, we shall see German, Czech, Nordic and American adaptations of British styles of detection. Dr Fu Manchu also features large, together with varied comic takes on the genre.

A new daily feature to be introduced this year is "The Canon Revisited".  Over the years, whenever we have presented one of the so-called "classics that everyone knows" we have discovered that opportunities to see the famous titles have become rarer, and many -particularly of the younger guests - are in fact unfamiliar with films we take for granted. So each year we plan to present a selection of seven classic titles, with the selection generally guided by the availability of new and definitive restorations.  The outstanding presentation this year is the restoration of Abel Gance's epic J'accuse, from the Nederlands Filmmuseum.  Other titles, besides Der Golem, are Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, Mauritz Stiller's Gunnar Hedens Saga, Boris Barnet's The House on Trubnaia, Mario Camerini's Rotaie and Carl Theo Dreyer's Du skal aere din hustru.

Three great divas - Asta Nielsen, Francesca Bertini and Pola Negri - are recalled in special programmes of re-discovered fragments and rarities.

The 60th anniversary of the Belgrade archive is celebrated with a programme of treasures unique to their collection. In a tribute to the British Silent Film Festival, which in eleven years has transformed consciousness of the history of British cinema, we include a charming rediscovery, Harold Shaw's Wheels of Chance, written by H.G. Wells and starring George K. Arthur (and it is believed with Josef von Sternberg as assistant).  The remarkable Shaw (1877-1926) also features as director of the hitherto unrecorded The Rose of Rhodesia, a pioneering and sophisticated film made in South Africa in 1917, and finely restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum. The film stars Shaw's wife, Edna Flugrath, sister of Viola Dana.

All this, together with Alexander Korda's despairing A Sinking World, rediscovered and restored by the Filmarchiv Austria; Richard Eichberg's hilarious 1927 farce Der Fürst von Pannenheim, two more selections from the Corrick Collection .... and much, much more!

September 2009

http://www.giornatedelcinemamuto.it         info.gcm@cinetecadelfriuli.org

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