It’s that time of year again, when the Bioscope heads off for its home-from-home, Pordenone, northern Italy, for the Giornate del Cinema Muto. As always, we will be producing a diary of the eight-day silent film festival. However, w’re going to experiment a little this year. Your scribe is there for the first four days, during which we hope to produce daily on-the-spot reports in the style of the conference reports we provided earlier in the year. Then I head home, but our regular, anonymised Pordenone reporter, the Mysterious X, will be taking over. X will be producing a more considered report on the second four days, to be recollected in tranquility and replayed to you in the traditional style, some time after the festival is over.

Meanwhile, to give you a taste of the festival (and demonstrate that it’s not all about sitting through exhaustive retrospectives of Georgian silents), the video above shows one time silent child star Jean Darling (of ‘Our Gang’ fame) giving a showstopping performance of ‘The Cinema Kiss’ (1929) from a programme of movie-related songs at the 2009 Giornate, with Donald Sosin at the piano.

Hope to see some of you there quite soon.