The first details of this year’s Giornate del Cinema Muto (the Pordenone Silent Film Festival) have just been published.

The festival is taking place at Pordenone itself (after several years at the nearby town of Sacile), 6-13 October. Festival features announced (provisionally) so far are:

• The other Weimar
• Le silence est d’or: René Clair
• The Bible Lands in 1897 – the earliest films shot in the the Middle East just found and restored by Lobster Films, Paris
• The Griffith Project 11 (1921-1924)
• Ladislas Starevich
• The Corrick Collection (1901-1914) (this is a collection of early films from the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia, including the recently-identified 1904 Charles Urban film Living London, reported on in an earlier post)
• Treasures III – American films exploring social issues presented by the National Film Preservation Foundation
• Sponsored Films – a programme curated by Rick Prelinger
• Out of Frame – I mille (Alberto Degli Abbati, 1912) – a beautifully restored print presented by the Cineteca Italiana to celebrate the bicentenary of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s birth
  – Twist Oliver (Márton Garas, 1919)
  – A halál után [After Death] (Alfred Deesy, 1920)
  These and other treasures from the Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum
  – La Cinémathèque de Toulose présente…
• Special Presentations:
  Orphans of the Storm (D.W. Griffith, 1921) [6.10.2007]
  Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924) (this year’s festival poster is taken from a design for the stage production Relache which incorporated Clair’s film)
  Paris qui dort (René Clair, 1923-1925) [8.10.2007]
  Chicago (Frank Urson, 1927)
  Dr Plonk (Rolf de Heer, 2006)
  Die Büchse der Pandora (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1929) [13.10.2007]

Registration details are available on the festival site. Those who have attended before will be receiving a registration form at the end of June. Those who have not been before can fill in an online registration request form.

See you there.