Exclusive Film Festival Report:
Pordenone Silent Film Festival
by Virginia Wright Wexman
Highlights of British cinema of the 1920s and a retrospective of the silent documentaries by Soviet innovator Dziga Vertov formed the centerpieces of the 23rd Pordenone Silent Film Festival, held in Sacile, Italy from October 9-16. Attended by more than 900 scholars, students, archivists, collectors and aficionados from around the world, the 2004 festival continued its enviable tradition of screening rare and restored works from the earliest days of film, all with live musical accompaniment. The program, overseen by fest co-directors Livio Jacob and David Robinson, was the most extensive ever with screenings in two theaters from 9:30am to midnight every day.
As always, the Festival featured a full complement of revelatory screenings that prodded audience members to rethink accepted notions about movie history. A program of films made in the United Kingdom during the 1920s caused the greatest stir. Hitchcock, it appears, was not the only British filmmaker to create masterpieces during the silent era. Three 1928 productions shown in Sacile, Underground, Shooting Stars, and A Cottage on Dartmoor, offered convincing evidence that Hitchcock's contemporary Anthony Asquith was another major British talent. These sexually-charged melodramas, which Asquith both directed and wrote, draw on the idioms of German Expressionism for their moodily lit, symbolically charged settings. Featured performers like Brian Aherne and Nora Baring employ techniques ranging from barely discernible facial twitches and eye movements to broadly iconographic bodily contortions to paint unforgettable portraits of characters tortured by jealousy, guilt and ambivalence. Perhaps the most memorable scene in all of these astonishing works occurs in A Cottage on Dartmoor when the camera observes an audience witnessing, for the first time, a movie with sound. We never see-or hear--what's happening on screen, but the reactions of the crowd invite us to imagine it. At the Sacile screening, the pianist, Steven Horne, wisely interrupted his live accompaniment during this sequence to heighten the drama of Asquith's audacious conception.
Many came to Italy this year expressly to take advantage of the unique opportunity to see a large number of the Kino-Eye documentaries made by Dziga Vertov during the 1920s. This series of newsreels chronicles the tumultuous events that took place across the Soviet Union after the Revolution, energizing contemporary audiences about their role as citizens of a newly Communist nation. The Pordenone retrospective allowed a new generation of spectators to appreciate Vertov's accomplishments and in the process to gain a fuller knowledge of the filmmaker's best-known works--especially his most celebrated production, the 1929 Man With a Movie Camera. As the series curator, the University of Chicago's Yuri Tsivian, argues, the experience of seeing these films allows viewers to appreciate Vertov's achievement as, "not a film, not even a group of films, but a movement, an actuality, a project." To be sure, some Festival attendees shuddered at certain moments at the implications of the editing patterns Vertov employs. In one film, for example, a shot of ecclesiastical gold icons being melted down is followed by one of starving children--as though the destruction of priceless historic treasures were the only means of eradicating hunger. In another film, a celebration of factory workers' lives is briefly interrupted by a shot of the morose denizens of a Russian tavern, prompting a few cynical Pordenone stalwarts to wonder about what might lie behind the relentlessly cheerful demeanor of men and women engaged in the repetitive labor of operating gargantuan machinery. Overall, however, the series impressed audiences at Sacile with the Utopian energy and optimism that gave rise to the Kino-Eye project-a sentiment sharply at odds with the atmosphere of gloom and foreboding that prevails today. At the same time, one can't help but be struck by the modernity of Vertov's self-reflexive techniques evident in many of these documentaries. Often we see meaningful repetitions and allusions to the filmmaker himself within the film, a motif taken up by Michael Moore and others in the Twenty-First Century. Ultimately, Vertov's modernity served as a reminder to those in Sacile of how much today's moviemaking practices owes to these early pioneers-as well as how many of their accomplishments have been unjustly eclipsed as a result of the careless fascination with novelty and disposability prevalent in the world we now inhabit. The Pordenone Festival sees its mission as the correction of this imbalance; piece by piece, it is reclaiming for us our cinematic heritage.
More information about the Pordenone Festival, including a complete program, can be found at www.cinetecadelfriulu.org/gcm.