Exclusive Film Festival Report:
24th Pordenone Silent Film Festival
October 7-16, 2005
by Virginia Wright Wexman
In recent years, cinema scholars have become fascinated with the way in which film emerged just at the moment when society was moving into the modern era, during a period at the turn of the twentieth century dominated by technological innovation and capitalist expansion. The Pordenone Festival of early cinema, held for the past 24 years in northeastern Italy, has played no small role in the burgeoning interest in this period has attracted. The 2005 edition of the festival was particularly rich in movies that illustrated the anxiety about modernity that was typical of the era in which they were made, enabling those of us in attendance to gain a deeper understanding of the novel perspectives on the world and its changing aspect that presented themselves to people a century ago.
Japanese cinema was especially sensitive to the new opportunities that the modern era opened up for women and the new vulnerabilities that accompanied them. The Festival's program of early Japanese films included a generous selection of so-called "tendency films," that treated contemporary problems—often problems concerning women caught in a modern world where traditional family life has deteriorated. Many of the plots of these films center on women who are forced to work in demeaning jobs to support themselves and their men. Kenji Mizoguchi's Osen of the Paper Cranes (JA 1935) and Yazijiro Ozu's Woman of Tokyo (JA, 1933) are two examples of this pattern, as are three of the four films of Mikio Naruse that were shown: Farewell to You (JA, 1933), Every Night's Dream (JA, 1933), and Street Without End (JA, 1934). The sense of entrapment generated in all of these tales is heightened by the typically flattened out mise-en-scène of Japanese films, in which characters appear to be hemmed in by screens and doorways—an effect strikingly on display in the beautifully restored prints the Japanese Film Center brought to Pordenone. The standout among these outstanding productions is Every Night's Dream, in which a married woman with a ne'er do well husband is forced into prostitution to feed herself and her son. The story is melodramatic, but the telling is restrained, a virtue characteristic of its director's approach. With four powerful films on display, Naruse, whose centenary was celebrated as part of the Pordenone festival, emerged as a worthy addition to Japan's pantheon of movie greats, joining the triumvirate of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa.
Women's altered roles grew out of the shift to a more urbanized social environment. The group of French films we saw at Pordenone suggested that this change, too, was met with some apprehension. The stage-trained director André Antoine and his circle turned their backs on life in the modern city with a series of productions based on well-known literary works. Some of those we saw at Pordenone were historical dramas; others featured pastoral recreations of country life shot "en plein air" in the provinces, these included Le Chemineau (Henry Krauss, FR, 1917), La Terre (Antoine, FR, 1919-21), La Hirondelle et la Mésange (Antoine, FR, 1920), L'Arlésienne (Antoine, FR, 1922), and La Brière (Leon Poirier, FR 1925). All of these latter films conveyed an ineffable sense of nostalgia for a vanishing agrarian landscape that modernity was relegating to the margins. Perhaps the most telling moments in these realist studies of peasant life occurred in La Hirondelle et la Mèsange, when the camera, set up on a barge, lingers over long traveling shots of the passing countryside as it passes from view.
If nostalgia for a pre-modern way of life haunted the French films on the Pordenone program, a less imaginative form of resistance to modernity was on display in some of the bloated blockbusters we saw from the same era, which stubbornly reproduced the hoary conventions of Nineteenth Century stage melodrama. The newly restored Beyond the Rocks (Sam Wood, US, 1922), featured two of the biggest stars of the day, Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson, both egregiously overdressed, in a far-fetched tale of rich people with noble hearts and raging passions. Ernst Lubitsch's early success Das Weib des Pharaoh/ The Loves of Pharaoh (GE, 1922), was no better; a ponderous costume drama, it made one rejoice that the director was soon to discover his flair for light comedy.
The Pordenone Festival itself can be said to be resisting modernity as well, but in a more engaging manner. Set as it has been since 1999 in the small town of Sacile, with its peaceful canals and Renaissance piazzas, the experience of the Giornate, as it is called in Italian, takes one back to an earlier epoch. For the past few years, the organizers have been promising to move the screenings to a newly constructed theater in the city of Pordenone, where the Festival first began in 1983. But until this happens, many of us will savor the time-warp that lets us forget that we live in a post-modern world as we discover lost treasures from the beginning of the Twentieth Century in a setting that evokes the Fifteenth.