After five days of wonderful films, music, research, conversation, coffee and Jan Kiepura the British Silent Film Festival is over for another year. We had a fantastic time and were happy to welcome some new faces (and old ones) to the festival this time. We’d especially like to thank the amazing musicians and the staff of the Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester for their warm welcome and their awesome technical skills – also the New Walk Gallery who hosted three of our most popular events.
If you have been following the festival on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, you’ll have seen that many of screenings prompted a certain amount of discussion online. If you haven’t, or you’d like a recap, here’s just a flavour of what people were saying about the festival. Check the #BSFF19 hashtag for more …
Thank you so much! I’m having the best possible birthday at @BritishSilentFF doing one of the things I love the most – harping to silent film. https://t.co/kcfm2FayMb
My head is spinning from @BritishSilentFF#BSFF19 I had a blast! My highlights were Ossi Oswalda boxing, René Clair double-exposing, Jan Kiepura singing, @best2vilmabanky also singing, Brigitte Helm strolling through a ballroom with sexily imposing purpose
Many thanks to everyone involved in #BSFF19. Some great films, superb accompaniment insightful introductions and lots of laughs along the way. We had a great time and already looking forward to the next one. https://t.co/PWGEJEHSBp
.@NeilKBrand's LAUREL AND HARDY show was hugely enjoyable as expected. The raw material is obviously great, but Neil music adds a whole other level, and he has the knack of providing just the right words of context to enhance the films further. #BSFF19pic.twitter.com/yhszpxJoMD
Here @Mirantwitt puts mind over matter to introduce Mario Bonnard’s “bergfilme” DER KAMPF UMS MATTERHORN (1928) @BritishSilentFF where the protagonists put matter(horn) over mind… Tip-top photography by Sepp Allgeier & peak accompaniment by @NeilKBrand + Jeff Davenport #BSFF19pic.twitter.com/d0TJtLiP4d
Such brilliant live accompaniment at #BSFF19, enhancing our appreciation and sheer enjoyment of these fascinating films! It's only to be expected from @NeilKBrand@Lillian_Henley and @puffinsteve. Still, their improvisatory gifts seem like a sixth sense, and I can but marvel … pic.twitter.com/zJ5hjlakqa
That brilliantly subversive silent to sound element of @BritishSilentFF aka Geoff Brown is one of the best intro’ers in the biz! Here he introduces the uninitiated to the potent powers of Polish warbler Jan Kiepura (he of the “17,000 proposals of marriage”) in CITY OF SONG (1931) pic.twitter.com/OgZzFHgwoO
A few #BSFF19 tweets I didn't have for yesterday. 1stly @best2vilmabanky sung the intro THE MIDNIGHT GIRL (1919) – the opening image is a basic score for the song, presumably provided for that purpose. Really added an extra note of authenticity. +So much great detail in the talk.
Over the moon with response to THE MIDNIGHT GIRL (1919) @BritishSilentFF for the film, my research presentation & the live title song sang by moi! All hail to the mighty @NeilKBrand for rehearsing the song with me, putting me at ease so I could breathe & making it so lovely!❤️ pic.twitter.com/UapnIHrHY2
The Phantom Of The Moulin Rouge (1925) at @PhoenixLeic with live music was delightful with a very cheeky Georges Vaultier as the Parisian fantôme – this was the UK Premiere of the new restoration at #BSFF19pic.twitter.com/JQd2EvrZ5z
Day one of #bsff19 highlights: – the terrific The Alley Cat with Mabel Poulton and Stephen Horne both on top form! – the "foxtrot epidemic" and bathing sequences in The Oyster Princess! – the "oh bollocks" intertitle translation in the same!#britishsilentfilmfestival
Is there any finer #silentfilm pleasure than watching a Lubitsch comedy with a crowd? THE OYSTER PRINCESS was sublimely funny at #BSFF19 Thanks too to @MargaretDeriaz for an eloquent introduction and @NeilKBrand for a frenetic foxtrot
Another fantastic day at @BritishSilentFF. Such a diverse range of films and presentations with fantastic introductions and live musical accompaniment. Wonderful meeting up with the usual British cinema crowd as well as newcomers! #BSFF19
The @I_W_M’s Toby Haggith narrates the incredibly poignant PEACE ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930) which details the wreckage left by battle on Belgian & French fields, villages & towns, the abandonment of them or rebuilding efforts & the recovery of War dead & their memorials #BSFF19pic.twitter.com/do9FC0qyg6
I loved THE ALLEY CAT and it was so great to circle back to the East End music hall after this morning’s Alf Collins presentation. A fabulous day at #BSFF19
Blown away by SPRING AWAKENINGS (1929) @BritishSilentFF last night, perhaps my favourite of the @puffinsteve performances I've caught over the years, but the film's emotional range & the subtexts pointed out in the intro & the imagery, all deeply affecting.#BSFF19
Did you guess? Our Sunday morning surprise film is THE BLUE DANUBE (1932), a musical Gypsy romance directed by Herbert Wilcox and starring Chili Bouchier, Brigitte Helm, Joseph Schildkraut, Desmond Jeans and even Léonide Massine #BSFF19pic.twitter.com/8uTBuEZs8F
Mabel Poulton, star of The Alley Cat, which we are showing at the 20th British Silent Film Festival, was one of the most popular, and sadly one of the swiftest forgotten actresses of the 1920s. She was a waif-like star, who excelled in romantic and tragic roles, and ultimately became a victim of the vagaries of the film industry.
Her start in the cinema was hardly glamorous, but it did rely on her natural resemblance to the American star Lillian Gish. Poulton was working as a typist at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square, but studying acting in her spare time, when her manager asked her: “How would you like to die three times a day?” He required her to wear a kimono and enact her demise as a dramatic prologue to screenings of Broken Blossoms, DW Griffith’s east-end drama. Continue reading →
René Clair was one of France’s most celebrated auteur directors, who made great films in both the silent and sound eras and on each side of the Atlantic. We’re thrilled that our festival will host the UK premiere of Lobster Films’ new restoration of his first feature film, Le fantôme du Moulin-Rouge (The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge, 1925). And we’re even more excited to say that this screening will be accompanied by two of our favourite musicians, multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne and harpist Elizabeth-Jane Baldry.
Although Clair is credited, quite rightly, with one of the most sophisticated transitions to the talking pictures with the eloquent sound design of Sous les Toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930), his silent work is particularly fascinating and has been overlooked by too many people. His silent work combines the avant-garde, the comic and the fantastical to make films that are filled with beauty and wonder, as well as humour. Continue reading →
Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (From Morn to Midnight, 1920)
This year, the British Silent Film Festival is commemorating the anniversary of the birth of the Weimar Republic. This means we will be looking both at some acclaimed German films of the 1920s, but also international co-productions and those British films that betray the clear influence of Weimar cinema. We are also exploring the origins of the horror genre, as the nights draw in. So there is no finer way to begin our festival than with an influential and bold classic of German Expressionist cinema. We want to create the perfect atmosphere too, so our opening night movie will screen at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester, which is home to an internationally acclaimed collection of Expressionist art.
The film we are screening is Karlheinz Martin’s From Morn to Midnight (1920) – a bold film that epitomises the styles and concerns of German Expressionism. The Expressionist movement moved from fine art – distorted perspectives and artificiality combine with thick, obvious brush strokes to create a visual representation not of naturalism but of the artist’s innermost psychological turmoil – to the theatre . From Morn to Midnight was made very shortly after the famous The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), which has widely been celebrated as the first true Expressionist film. It shares with that film a sense of foreboding and introspection, a feeling that the outside world is filled with danger – and of course a heavily stylised, theatrical production design.
Adolph Philipp and Marie Pagano in The Midnight Girl (1919)
We’re standing on the verge of the Roaring Twenties all over again. It’s often instructive (and fun!) to look back at how cinema has advanced in a century and 1919 was a particularly strong year for the movies. As the Cento anni fa strand at Il Cinema Ritrovato proved this year, many films we now acknowledge as silent classics were released just before the feted 1920s began. In 1919, the war in Europe had ended, Hollywood was growing strong, the feature film was rapidly becoming a fixture, and things were about to get very interesting in Germany. At the 20th British Silent Film Festival, we’re commemorating the anniversary of the Weimar Republic by looking at the fascinating German cinema of this period and its global influence too.
We’ll be screening several diverse films from 1919 at this year’s festival in Leicester: from Mauritz Stiller’s captivating Swedish drama Song of the Scarlet Flower starring Lars Hanson, to Maurice Elvey’s WWI movie Comradeship and Ernst Lubitsch’s frenetic comedy The Oyster Princess. One of the 1919 films on the slate is likely to be unfamiliar to most of us – The Midnight Girl, a charming two-reel comedy, which reveals the extent of the influence not just German culture but the New York stage had on mid-period silent cinema. Not only that, but our screening of the film will be very special.
Adolph Philipp, the writer and director of The Midnight Girl, was born in Germany but ran away as a teenager to join an acting troupe. In the early 20th century he opened a theatre in New York, where he staged many of his own musicals for the substantial German-speaking audience in the city, as well as selling his sheet music. Continue reading →
Sången om den eldröda blomman (The Song of the Scarlet Flower)
Dir: Mauritz Stiller, Sweden 1919, 1hr 41mins, recorded music.
Lars Hansen in The Song of the Scarlet Flower
A big-budget classic from the golden age of Swedish silent cinema starring Lars Hanson as the wilful homme fatale and farmers’ son Olof who is expelled from home after a familial disagreement. Olof joins an itinerant group of loggers who ride the rapids down the local river. But despite his bravado and logging prowess, Olof can’t forget a woman he left behind. Stunning location cinematography and a justifiably famous log-riding sequence highlight the relationship between humans and their magisterial landscape. The original music score by Armas Jarnefelt, who along with Sibelius was Finland’s most popular composer, is here reproduced to perfection.
