The 26th Pordenone Silent Film Festival took off today with screenings of Hans Behrendt's 1927 social comedy Die Hose / A Royal Scandal, starring Werner Krauss and Jenny Jugo, and D.W. Griffith's 1921 melodrama Dream Street, a poor return to the setting of his 1919 success Broken Blossoms. In the cast, the bland Carol Dempster, plus potential lovers Charles Emmett Mack and Ralph Graves.
Among Pordenone's highlights are:
All at Sea (1933)
Alistair Cooke's All at Sea, described by David Robinson's program notes as "one of the most exciting discoveries the Giornate [that's the festival] has ever been privileged to present is this world premiere of a 74-year-old comedy-documentary by the future great journalist Alistair Cooke, offering hitherto unknown impressions of [Charles] Chaplin [right, in Modern Times with Paulette Goddard] at his most intimate and relaxed."
Shot in the summer of 1933, All at Sea is Cooke's home movie of his weekend boat trip to Catalina Island — off of Los Angeles — aboard Chaplin's yacht "Panacea." Also on board, then bit player Paulette Goddard.
"With his extended thumbs touching and his palms at the parallel Chaplin would fix the frame for me and retreat to mime a range of characters he picked up from the only newspaper we had brought aboard, from the actress Jean Harlow to the Prince of Wales," Cooke recalled in his 1977 book Six Men. Chaplin also mimics (with a deck-mop serving as wig) Janet Gaynor, Greta Garbo, and (in his swimming trunks) Napoleon.
"Perhaps because of Chaplin's advice on framing," Robinson explains, "the film does not have the accidental look of a home movie: the images of the boat and the seascapes (and even an intrusive shark) are invariably elegantly composed, and the film is smoothly edited, with occasional humorous intertitles. Evidently rarely projected, the film is in near-pristine pictorial state."
"This unique footage — to Cooke's distress — was lost after an extract had been used in the making of the America television series," Nick Clarke wrote in his 1999 biography of Cooke. Luckily, however, following Cooke's death All at Sea resurfaced in the vast archive stored in his New York apartment.
À propos de Nice (1930)
Pordenone will screen Jean Vigo's 25-minute 1930 documentary À propos de Nice with live musical accompaniment by Michael Nyman (the composer of the haunting score for Jane Campion's The Piano).
In the International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers, Dudley Andrew describes À propos de Nice as "a messy film. Full of experimental techniques and frequently clumsy camerawork, it nevertheless exudes the energy of its creators and blares forth a message about social life. The city is built on indolence and gambling and ultimately on death, as its crazy cemetery announces. But underneath this is an erotic force that comes from the lower class, the force of seething life that one can smell in garbage and that Vigo uses to drive his film. À propos de Nice advanced the cinema not because it gave Vigo his start and not because it is a thoughtfully made art film. It remains one of those few examples where several powers of the medium (as recorder, organizer, clarifier of issues, and proselytizer) come together with a strength and ingenuity that are irrepressible."
Chicago (1927)
Cecil B. DeMille's Chicago (officially directed by Frank Urson), stars Phyllis Haver (left) as Roxie Hart, the cutest media darling murderess of the 1920s. Despite its moralistic ending — Chicago feels more modern than most Hollywood movies made today, in addition to being infinitely better than the musicalized Academy Award-winning remake.
Csak egy kislány van a világon / Only One Girl in the World (1930)
Considered the last Hungarian silent film and that country's first talking picture — in other words, it's a silent with a few talking sequences — Béla Gaál's Only One Girl in the World revolves around two former prisoners of war (that's World War I) who vie for the same girl. The film's female star, Márta Eggerth (frequently spelled as Martha Eggerth), would make a name for herself in the 1930s.
In their program notes, Gyongyi Balogh and David Robinson explain that "after this film debut [Eggerth, right, with Johannes Heesters in Das Hofkonzert] embarked on a film career that included almost 40 films made in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hollywood (including For Me and My Gal, alongside Judy Garland). With her husband the Polish tenor Jan Kiepura she emigrated in 1940 to the United States (both had Jewish mothers), and enjoyed major Broadway successes with Higher and Higher (1940), The Merry Widow (1943), and Polonaise (1945). She and Kiepura did some 2,000 performances of The Merry Widow together. After Kiepura's death in 1966 she ceased to work for a while, but inevitably returned to the concert stage. At 95 she continues to teach and to give concerts. She recently said, 'I always want to be better, which is why I am still here … If I want to realize all my plans, I'll have to live until I'm 300.'"
"The Other Weimar" series
In order to rectify the misrepresentation of German cinema made after World War I and before the rise of Nazism, Pordenone will screen 15 rarely seen films in their "The Other Weimar" film series.
"This year's Giornate," reads Hans-Michael Bock, Geoff Brown, and David Robinson's program notes, "presents the first of two or more series intended to set the record straight. Post-World War I Germany had a flourishing and prolific industry (more than 3,000 feature films were released between 1918 and 1929), which fostered the rise of an extensive generation of gifted, original directors, technicians, and actors — many of whom remain to be rediscovered and revalued. A good number of names, of course, became eclipsed by the larger historical cataclysms which followed the end of the Weimar Republic. A majority of the directors and actors featured in this presentation were Jewish, and forced into exile by the rise of Nazism. In many cases they were unable to pursue careers abroad; and their names and films were simply forgotten. A few other directors became so notoriously associated with Nazi propaganda films that critics chose simply to ostracize them and write off their earlier, generally apolitical films — a situation now remedied in Hans Steinhoff's case by the restoration work of the Steinhoff Project, on view in recent years at the Giornate. Other figures have been disregarded by 'serious' historians because their work was unashamedly Publikumsfilme, "commercial" or appealing successfully to a large popular market."
Among the rediscoveries are the aforementioned A Royal Scandal; E. A. Dupont's Das Alte Gesetz (1923), starring Henny Porten and Ernst Deutsch; Gerhard Lamprecht's Buddenbrooks (1923), from Thomas Mann's novel, starring Peter Esser, Mady Christians, and Alfred Abel; Erich Waschneck's Die Carmen von St. Pauli (1928, left), with Jenny Jugo and Willy Fritsch; and Joe May's Der Farmer aus Texas / The Cowboy Count (1925), with Willy Fritsch, Mady Christians, and Edward Burns.
And finally…
As part of the mini-series "René Clair: le Silence est d'or," Pordenone will also screen eight René Clair silents, including Paris qui dort (1923-25), starring the charming Albert Préjean; the surrealist short Entr'acte (1924); Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (1927), also with Préjean; and Les Deux timides (1928), starring handsome Pierre Batcheff (who would kill himself in 1932, at the age of 24) and Françoise Rosay.
The Pordenone Silent Film Festival runs until Oct. 13.
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