This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival will be held at the Castro Cinema over 13-15 July. Full programme details are expected in May, and you can join a mailing list to get the information first. Keep reading The Bioscope, and you’ll get the information here straight after!
Category Archives: Festivals
British Silent Cinema Festival
We still await the programme for this year’s British Silent Cinema Festival, which was promised for mid-February, but a booking form is now available from the site. The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Crime and Deviancy in the British Silent Film’, and it takes place 26-29 April at the Broadway cinema, Nottingham.
Passio
On 23 February the Adelaide Film Festival hosted the world premiere of Paolo Cherchi Usai’s film Passio. The film is a compilation of silent found footage from a century of visual culture, taken from archives around the world, put to a score by Arvo Pärt. Cherchi Usai, director of the Australian National Film and Sound Archive, says that the film must only be seen as a live experience in a theatre. To this end he has apparently destroyed all the masters and vowed never to release the film on video. According to the festival blurb, it is “a masterwork of the first order, a stunning and revelatory film of surprising emotional and narrative power, that explores the impending crisis of visual culture and its reflection in politics and society. Its unsettling images, drawn from a century of filmmaking, are woven into a tapestry of mysterious beauty and violence.”
Kansas Silent Film Festival
The 2007 Kansas Silent Film Festival takes place 23-24 February 2007 at the White Concert Hall on the campus of Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas. The event features Denise Morrison, film commentator; Dr Marvin Faulwell and Greg Foreman, organ accompanists, with Bob Keckeisen, percussion, and the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Films featured include Harry Langdon’s The Strong Man (1926), Mary Pickford in Rosita (1923), Richard Barthelmess in Tol’able David (1921), and Chicago (1927), with Phyllis Haver.
Bird’s Eye View
The Bird’s Eye View film festival “showcases the very best work from women filmmakers” and takes place at London’s NFT, Barbican and ICA from 8th -14th March. Below is the programme description from the festival web site:
SOUND AND SILENTS – LIVE MUSIC AND SILENT FILM
Two programmes of short silent films made by women directors from early pioneers to contemporary artists taking place at the Barbican on Sunday 11th March and NFT as part of the Optronica Festival on Sunday 18th March with specially composed & original soundtracks performed live by cutting-edge women musicians including ERROLLYN WALLEN, SEAMING TO, JOANNA MCGREGOR and RITA RAY. Expect a variety of styles and genres for both ears and eyes: innovative and inspirational.
SOUNDS AND SILENTS 1 Sunday 11th March, 3PM, Barbican 1.
THE SMILING MADAME BEUDET
Made by one of the first female directors, Germaine Dulac, in the 1920’s, The Smiling Madame Beudet is lauded as the first feminist film ever made. It is the story of an intelligent woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Her husband is used to playing a stupid practical joke in which he puts an empty revolver to his head and threatens to shoot himself. One day, while the husband is away, she puts bullets in the revolver. However, she is stricken with remorse and tries to retrieve the bullets the next morning. Her husband gets to the revolver first only this time he points the revolver at her.
Specially commissioned soundtracks performed live by Errolyn Wallen.
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
One of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the “trance film,” in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.”
Specially commissioned soundtracks performed live by Seaming To.
SOUND AND SILENTS 2 Sunday 18th March, 5:30PM, NFT OPTRONICA Festival.
Daisy Doodad’s Dial (UK 1914, 6’) – Florence Turner
Brilliantly entertaining British comedy, featuring Turner herself as rubber-faced Daisy.
Jetsam (UK 2002, 2’ 30”) – Sonia Bridge
A fascinating high-speed experimental short celebrating the everyday.
Sap (UK 2002, 8’) – Hyun-Joo Kim
Animation in the style of a Korean folk tale that makes use of delicate oil-on-glass animation techniques.
Suspense (USA 1913, 8’) – Lois Weber and Philip Smalley
Innovative early thriller using groundbreaking split-screen techniques.
Missing People (UK 2003, 6’ 30”) – Kathy Hinde
A hypnotic film from one of Joanna Macgregor’s most frequent collaborators.
The Grasshopper and the Ant (UK 1954, 11’) – Lotte Reiniger
Remarkable shadow-puppet animation from the first filmmaker, male or female, to direct a full-length animated feature film.
Crime and deviancy
The British Silent Cinema Festival is now in its 10th year. The festival is held at the Broadway, Nottingham, and is a ‘celebration’ of British cinema before 1930, organised in collaboration with the British Film Institute. The Festival aims to showcase the vast collection of films, fiction and non fiction, produced in Britain before the advent of sound. This year’s theme is Underworld: Crime and Deviancy in the British Silent Film. The call for papers is now closed. The Festival is taking place 26-29 April 2007.
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