Pordenone. Preview.

There is nothing in the world like Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, known informally as the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. It's a festival that only a diehard lover of the pre-sound era and its unique tonal textures and dramatic visual and narrative convention could love.

And they do. Year after year, hundreds of scholars, scholars, professors, archivists, collectors and silent film fans from all over the globe converge on the biggest, longest and most prestigious film festival dedicated the glory of silent cinema. The films, shown in archival or restored 35mm prints and all accompanied by live music from some of the finest accompanists in the world, are (with the exception of opening and closing night events) free to attendees, but for a small registration fee. The atmosphere is collegial (I've made friends from all over the world during past two festivals) and low key, the pace is at a stroll, and the setting is amazing: the old town center of tiny Sacile in northeastern Italy (moved from its original home of Pordenone almost 10 years ago, when the festival's flagship theater was closed down). There are only two screens - the flagship Zancanaro, the town's performing arts center which screens morning to midnight and features all the festival's major showings, and the smaller Ruffo, a lecture hall-styled venue where repeats, documentaries, and video projection showings take place in mornings and afternoons as alternatives to the Zancanaro showings. There are also lectures and symposiums and the book fair in the town hall, and you can find the local restaurants full of attendees in animated conversation at almost all hours of the festival.

Each year, the festival picks a central retrospective program - a national cinema, a studio, a director - and supplements it with smaller programs running through the eight-day event. This year, the festival celebrates its 25th Anniversary with a more varied program of retrospectives, spreading the spotlight over an array of directors, themes and countries. As of this writing, many of the programs are merely collections of titles with few if any descriptions, but even that carries a promise of the unknown discovered and forgotten rediscovered.

The centerpiece presentation for the 25th Anniversary is a tribute to the centenary of Nordisk Film, featuring works from the golden age of Danish cinema in twelve programs of features and shorts, from comedies to melodrama to science fiction, the latter represented by Holger-Madsen's recently rediscovered Himmelskibet (A Trip to Mars). Carl Dreyer is limited to a single feature - Leaves from Satan's Book (1920) - the better to introduce audiences to his lesser known colleagues.

Verdens undergang (The End of the World)

August Blom and Viggo Larsen in particular will be revived in multiple offerings spread through such intriguing thematic programs as "Catastrophe" (with Blom's The End of the World, 1916), "Lure of the Orient" and "White Slavery." Based simply on title alone, it's hard to tell if these are serious dramas or early hysterical exploitation melodramas (I'm betting on the latter), but the mere lurid lure of such titles as The White Slave (Viggo Larsen, 1906) and The Maharajah's Favorite Wife (Robert Dinesen, 1917, followed by the imaginatively titled 1919 sequel The Maharajah's Favorite Wife, by Blom) is too much to pass up. Blom's 1913 Titanic drama Atlantis is also featured in a separate program.

True Heart Susie

The opening night presentation is a new restoration of DW Griffith's True Heart Susie, with a new score by Giovanni Spinelli. It's also the spotlight presentation of the festival's exhaustive Griffith Project, their systematic presentation of every single film directed by the father of American feature film storytelling. The project is a chronological spotlight and its tenth year brings us to 1919 - 1920 and his first features for his newborn company United Artists. Along with two of his most celebrated features, Susie and Way Down East, the festival unearths such neglected and unseen films as the intimate melodrama The Greatest Question with Lillian Gish and his exotic melodramas The Love Flower (shot in the Bahamas) and the South Seas-set Scarlet Days, both with Richard Barthelmess. The reputations of these features are hardly stellar, but their neglect makes them all the more curious, especially as they bridge two of Griffith's most celebrated films. Amidst the features is a short promotional film, A Great Feature in the Making, highlighting the only film footage of Griffith actually directing (on the set of Way Down East).

Thomas Ince was almost as important a director/producer in American cinema's formative teen years, when the feature was born and Hollywood along with it, and a selection of six features (each paired with a one or two-reeler) spanning his career, from the 1911 short The Forged Dispatch to the 1921 feature Hail the Woman, showcase his career. His anti-war classic Civilization (1916) is part of this survey, as is the William S Hart western Branding Broadway. As I've neglected Ince in my own survey of silent cinema, this program is of special interest to me.

From the archives of Bologna, Turin and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, come six new restorations of Italian classics, including Turin's monumental restoration of the two versions of Giovannni Pastrone's Cabiria, the original 1914 epic and sound version prepared for its 1931 re-release. The closing night film is the little-known Neapolitan production Sole! (1919), a romantic drama of a freewheeling girl with a savage response to would-be seducers.

The program of Magic and Cinema explores the close relationship between stage magic and screen magic, from the early special effects spectacles of George Melies and his cinematic descendents to the exploits of legendary escape artist Harry Houdini, who cagily exploited the new medium as both a documentary record of his feats and a vehicle for dramatic roles. The program features examples of both sides of Houdini's screen appearances, as well as Tod Browning's rarely seen The Show (1927) with John Gilbert as a magician's assistant who reveals the tricks of the trade to paying customers; Paul Fejos's expressionist The Last Performance (1929), with Conrad Veidt as a magician and hypnotist; and collections of shorts from Melies, fellow magician Walter Booth and others exploring the possibilities of magic and the cinema of fantasy and wonder in the medium in its infancy.

Two animation collections - the silent Felix, Oswald and Friends and Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies, sound films defined not by dialogue but by music to, in the words of the series curators, "illustrate the Symphonies' link with the classic silents," are also included, while the "Goodight, Silents" is the festival's wily way of closing each day with a short program of late-night of oddities (some of them a bit naughty).

And then there are the rediscoveries, rarities and revivals that stand alone through the festival as well as the "Musical Events," the high-profile films slotted in the prime time slots, each of them accompanied by a special musical offering, whether it be a small chamber orchestra, jazz band, experimental electronics or something else unique. Some are as well-known as Harold Lloyd's Safety Last, the festival's second "Musical Event," and others as rare and exciting as El Húsar de la Muerte (1925), a landmark from the rarely screened silent cinema of Latin America, a historical adventure about war hero Manuel Rodríguez, who fought in the Chilean War of Independence. Also promised are the British documentary feature The Battle of the Somme (1916), Benjamin Christensen's melodrama of the Russian Revolution, Mockery, starring Lon Chaney, and a reconstruction of Rudolph Valentino's long-lost The Young Rajah. As of this writing, there are no press notes available from Le Giornate, so they remain tantalizing promises of riches to be screened.

And that's why I make the pilgrimage, if only every few years. Where some might find digging through the silent past akin to cinematic archeology, it is to me a treasure hunt and I walk away with unexpected jewels every year.

Posted by dwhudson at October 5, 2006 11:29 AM