Pordenone Dispatch. 1.

"I've said it before and I'll say it again: Welcome home!"

David Robinson's benediction at the opening night event of the 25th Giornate del Cinema Muto felt especially welcoming after a five-year absence from my favorite film festival in the world. Robinson played the host all opening day, darting from post to post at the Giornate headquarters and greeting almost all who walked through the door, and his enthusiasm is indicative of the spirits around him. It does feel like a return home for so many who make the trek year after year, and I too have been reacquainting myself with folks I haven't seen since I returned home after my last festival.

In the past 24 years, Le Giornate has established itself as the most impressive, most influential and most prestigious silent film festival in the world. Sacile is a lovely little burg with a gorgeous old-town center, where the festival venues are situated. Walking between theaters, or uptown to the bustling book and memorabilia sale at the Film Fair, takes you along cobblestone streets, past centuries old buildings, over two rivers which cut through the town like shallow canals from its namesake, and through narrow old town city streets.

The guests largely bus in from Pordenone about 12 km (8 miles) away every morning and bus back late at night, leaving little time for sleep for the diehards. Top notch live piano accompaniment accompany almost every screening, with special musical events every night featuring more elaborate musical offerings. Prints come from archives all over the world and intertitles are in a multitude of languages, depending on the source as much as on the country. (One American film I saw was saved from a French print and featured Dutch intertitles.) The language barrier is solved with radio headsets offering live English and Italian translations of foreign language intertitles. An inspired solution, even if the translations are at times clumsy and rushed.

The 25th Edition may be the last in Sacile - the old flagship theater has finally been rebuilt - but no one is committing to anything yet. Problems with a trial screening in the new theater are the buzz of fest, and if those glitches (which involve terrible sight lines and obstructions, among other issues) are not solved by the next fest, we'll surely be back in Sacile.

The silent cinema's penchant for idealizing the innocence of women through characters whose naïvete borders on idiocy was represented in the opening night Musical Event, DW Griffith's True Heart Susie (1919). Griffith helped transform ingénue Lillian Gish into the epitome of American purity (if not Puritanism) but also, in their finest collaborations, made her a figure of pluck and perseverance and fortitude. Susie is a sentimental nothing compared to Way Down East or Orphans of the Storm, due in no small part to a rather mundane script, but it has its charms even as Gish plays the sweet, dreamy country girl as an eternal child oblivious to the social realities around her. Even the intertitles have a tendency to mock her blithe obliviousness, as if Griffith were tired of the sentimentalizing cinema he does so well.

But such a simplistic heroine is nothing compared to Mary Miles Minter in The Innocence of Lisette (1916), a featherweight farce that begins as an orphan fairy tale, with Minter adopted by a bent, grieving millionaire widower, and then takes an abrupt turn into the kinds of bizarre misunderstandings that form the basis of too many comedies. She finds a baby on the doorstep and blankly tells all it is hers, leading to unsurprising consequences. Minter, notorious for her role in the death of William Desmond Taylor a few years later, is mostly forgotten as an actress. Despite the silliness of the script, she proves to be a charismatic and appealing young actress, the teenage girl-woman so prevalent in silent cinema.

Masterpieces were in short supply this first weekend, where cinema archeology was more on order than cinema hierarchy. Even the second night Musical Event, Safety Last!, is hardly the most original or the most endearing Harold Lloyd film to screen, though the musical portion of the event - an ensemble improvisation by the Prima Vista Social Club (an ad hoc quintet led by festival pianist Neil Brand) - was quite the treat.

The closest the opening weekend came to "masterpiece" was the latest restoration of the Italian landmark Cabiria (1914), Giovanni Pastrone's lavish historical epic that launched a thousand spectacles. More pageant more than drama, it lacks the narrative drive and storytelling sophistication found in America, Scandanavia and France at the time, using intertitles to explain and images to illustrate in single-shot scenes that are almost without exception static (the exceptions are a couple of effective dollies in to a main character, a nice flourish that is terribly underutilized). Yet it is nonetheless a big screen experience and the new restoration - its fourth - offers some stunning high quality footage and comes close to recovering the entire original release footage.

Posted by dwhudson at October 11, 2006 8:59 AM