20th British Silent Film Festival

July 23, 2019 By in Uncategorized 1 Comment

September 11 – 15 2019

Phoenix Cinema, Leicester

The 20th British Silent Film Festival will again take place at the Phoenix Cinema here in Leicester from 11-15 September. This year’s festival will celebrate the centenary of the birth of the Weimar Republic – specifically German Expressionist cinema and its global influence between 1919 and 1932, particularly on British film.

We are fortunate here in Leicester to have the foremost collection of Expressionist art outside Germany, held at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, which where we’ll also be screening films to draw links between film and the other arts.  See the website for more details of the exhibition.

Other highlights include Neil Brand presenting Laurel and Hardy, a programme of Victorian short films restored to their former breath-taking glory, early horror films like The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge, an early Anthony Asquith gem, The Runaway Princess, the stunning Battle for the Matterhorn (Der Kampf ums Matterhorn), based on the true story of Edward Whymper’s first ascent of the Matterhorn and Tell Me Tonight, a 1932 British musical comedy, which was co-production between Gainsborough Pictures and the German firm Cine-Allianz. We will also be screening the German comedy The Oyster Princess  (Die Austernprinzessin), directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

Further details of films and the full programme will be posted later.

Festival tickets, day and full passes will shortly be available from Phoenix Cinema:  0116 2422800

1918: At Home, At War

October 15, 2018 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Films, music and stories celebrating

100 years since the end of World War One

November 15th at New Walk Museum in Leicester 

Free Event – Doors open at 7pm for 7.30pm start

As part of the centenary commemorations Neil Brand, composer, author, presenter (Radio 4’s Film Programme and BBC4’s ‘Sound of…’ series) and historian of early film and WW1 introduces and accompanies this fascinating programme of films, music, stories and readings from the pivotal year of 1918.

Joined onstage by readers, he invites us into a lost world of wartime activity on the Western and Home fronts – while the soldiers attempt to break the deadlock with the disastrous Battle of the Somme and the first appearance of “The Wonder Weapon”, The Tank, their wives and families at home are struggling to keep the home fires burning, ‘making do and mending’ and learning to create luxurious suet puddings from potatoes, as recommended by Henry Edwards and Chrissie White, the Brangelina of their day.

This is a free event organised as part of DMU Local, to book a ticket please email: local@dmu.ac.uk giving your name/s and stating ‘1918’ in the subject line

Organised in association with the British Silent Film Festival and Film Tramp

DMU Local

Talking about the 19th British Silent Film Festival

September 19, 2017 By in 2017 British Silent Film Festival Tags: , 2 Comments

L’Hirondelle et la mésange (André Antoine, 1920)

L’Hirondelle et la mésange (André Antoine, 1920)

After five days of films, music, research, conversation, sandwiches and coffee, the 19th British Silent Film Festival has drawn to a close. We had a wonderful time and we’d like to thank the staff of the Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester for their warm welcome and their awesome technical skills.

If you have been following the festival on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll have seen the that screenings prompted lots of discussion online. If you haven’t, or you’d like a recap, here’s a flavour of what people were saying about the festival:

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It started with a kiss: sex and the silent cinema

September 6, 2017 By in 2017 British Silent Film Festival Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919)

Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919)

Silent cinema began in the Victorian era and faded away at the end of roaring twenties, just before the repeal of prohibition in America. So silent films were made in the context of around four decades of social change. It was a time in which women fought for the vote, workers campaigned for greater rights, the world went to war, the Russian empire fell, the aeroplane was invented, the motorcar drove horses off our streets, factories built assembly lines, radio waves circled the globe, and attitudes to sex, and censorship went through revolutions.

When we talk about early 1930s Hollywood cinema, we call that period pre-Code: the last few wild years before William Hays’s MPDDA regulations about sex, violence, religion, race, drugs and alcohol were rigorously enforced on screen. Effectively all silent cinema is pre-Code, but that doesn’t mean that “anything went”. Hollywood studios practised some severe self-censorship in the early 1920s, following a few lurid scandals, and while 19th-century morality was not quite as prudish as it has been painted, early cinema was generally more coy about sex than films of today. But that is not the full story …

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Raising the roof: how British cinema made the leap to sound

August 30, 2017 By in 2017 British Silent Film Festival Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The Lady from the Sea (1929)

The Lady from the Sea (1929)

It’s still the biggest change ever to hit the film industry. The coming of sound changed the way films were made, and shown. It affected the livelihoods of actors, technicians, producers, musicians and cinema owners. This period of change, in which some filmmakers rose to the challenge and others struggled with the new technology is one of the most fascinating periods in cinema history. For the past three years, a research project led by British Silent Film Festival co-director Laraine Porter has been delving into this process of disruption and reinvention, as experienced by the British film industry.

blackmailposterSound came a little later to Britain than to the US. The first fully synchronised sound film to be released in this country was horror film The Terror, in November 1928. The following year, studios and cinemas hurriedly mobilised to accommodate the “Talker Wave” and by the time Hitchcock had released his Blackmail in both silent and talkie versions, the industry knew it would have to enter the 1930s wired for sound.

Two years ago, the 18th British Silent Film Festival shared some of Porter and her team’s research, and several of the country’s first, occasionally faltering, sound films were shown. At this year’s festival, we’ll be finding out even more about the transition to sound. The five-day event opens with a one-day colloquium of papers and screenings, and then through the following days we’ll be showing some more assured early British sound films, which show studios and staff adapting to the new medium with greater confidence and more advanced technology.

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Bill Morrison’s awe-inspiring use of archive film

August 24, 2017 By in 2017 British Silent Film Festival Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison, 2016) Courtesy Kathy Jones Gates/Hypnotic Pictures/Picture Palace Pictures

Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison, 2016) Courtesy Kathy Jones Gates/Hypnotic Pictures/Picture Palace Pictures

Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time and The Great Flood screen at the 19th British Silent Film Festival

Archive silent film is rarely perfect. Age weathers all things, but especially nitrate film stock, which decomposes and distorts in the most alarming way. Watching a damaged print, you will likely see sections of the frame swallowed up by black or grey blooms, figures twisted, pock-marks raining across the image.

Experimental film-maker Bill Morrison has made a career out of savouring the beauty in these warped and wrecked reels. His work takes archive film and turns it into not just a history lesson, but a work of art in its own right. You may already be familiar with his haunting 2002 feature, Decasia, a collage of film footage haunted by the shadows and spectres of nitrate decay. We all fervently wish the damage weren’t there, of course, but we can also be awed by it.

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Betty Balfour: “Great Britain’s Queen of Happiness”

August 22, 2017 By in 2017 British Silent Film Festival Tags: , , , , 6 Comments

Betty Balfour in 1925

Betty Balfour

Betty Balfour could well be the mascot of the 19th British Silent Film Festival. You will see her in three different films across the weekend – two silents and a musical. In each film, you’ll get a glimpse of why she was once one of the most popular British film stars. In her heyday, she was occasionally compared to Hollywood’s Mary Pickford, but her appeal was not quite so girlish and innocent. Balfour was first and foremost a comedienne, with an earthy, active charm that she deployed to great effect playing the Cockney flowergirl ‘Squibs’ in a series of hit films. Later in her career, she played more sophisticated characters in more serious films, but the Balfour charm still shines through.

Balfour was not a Cockney herself, although she was raised in London. As a profile on Balfour in Picturegoer in 1924 wrote, “‘Squibs’ was a rough-cast, ragged, little East-Ender and Betty is a smartly-attired, highly-polished little West-Ender.” In fact, when Balfour had introduced herself to the readers of that magazine in 1921, in an article entitled ‘Mainly about me’, she stressed her aristocratic connections. The patronage of the “late lady FitzGeorge” was responsible for her big break, she explained, her first stage job at the Ambassadors’ Theatre in 1914, when she was just 12 years old. As a younger child she had performed songs and recited speeches at “At-homes” to an audience comprising “crowned heads, princes, duchesses; men who had helped to make empires, and men who were planning to wreck them”.

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 “It’s the beating of his hideous heart!”

August 17, 2017 By in Uncategorized 1 Comment


The British Silent Film Festival Presents:

An evening of Edgar Allan Poe silent film adaptations

Wednesday 13 September at 8pm-10pm

St Mary De Castro Church, Leicester

With live musical accompaniment

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The Fall of the House of Usher (James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, US, 1928)

A spectacular evening of silent film adaptions from Edgar Allan Poe’s classic horror stories, including: The Fall of the House of Usher   (James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, US, 1928), which tells the story of a brother and sister living (or not) under a family curse; The Tell-tale Heart (Charles Klein, US, 1928), a story of insanity and murder; plus Prelude (Castleton Knight, UK, 1927) taken from Poe’s story ‘Buried Alive’. The programme includes the classic animated short, another version of The Tell-Tale Heart (Ted Parmalee, US, 1954) narrated by James Mason at his sinister best.

Bryony Dixon (silent film curator, BFI) will introduce the evening with a reading from Poe. All silent films will be accompanied with live music played on the church organ, the piano and effects by the Festival’s world-renowned silent film musicians, Neil Brand, Phil Carli, Stephen Horne and John Sweeney.

Tickets are available from Phoenix £12 / £10 concessions / £10 Under 25

Available from Phoenix, or on the door, but advance booking is recommended to avoid disappointment!

Book online: http://www.phoenix.org.uk/event/british-silent-film-festival/

Or via Phoenix Box Office 0116 242 2800

 

Highlights of the 19th British Silent Film Festival

August 11, 2017 By in 2017 British Silent Film Festival Tags: , , , , 4 Comments

13-17 September 2017,
Phoenix Cinema, Leicester

Vampyr (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1932)

Vampyr (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1932)

The British Silent Film Festival returns to the Phoenix in Leicester this September and the good news is that you can book your tickets and passes now. We are excited to unveil our four-day programme of silent and early sound cinema from around the world – with a special focus on British film.

All the silent films will be accompanied by some of the world’s best silent film musicians, including a very special score for Vampyr, by Stephen Horne and Minima. This haunting, hallucinatory horror film was directed by Carl Th Dreyer in 1932 with barely any dialogue. It is based on the writings of Sheridan le Fanu and follows a young scholar of the occult who enters a village that is under the curse of a vampire.

More silent horror in the programme comes courtesy of a selection of chilling films inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, which will screen at Leicester’s atmospheric 12th-century St Mary de Castro church, with an introduction from BFI curator Bryony Dixon.

We’ll also be celebrating some of the silent era’s lesser-sung comedians. We are screening the hilarious Hands Up! in which comic Raymond Griffith plays a Confederate spy trying to capture some Yankee gold during the American Civil War. We are also showing Cocktails, a rarely seen, sparkling comedy from 1928 starring Pat and Patachon, the “Danish Laurel and Hardy”.

L’Hirondelle et la mésange (André Antoine, 1920)

L’Hirondelle et la mésange (André Antoine, 1920)

A rarely seen treasure of silent cinema, L’Hirondelle et la mésange, directed by André Antoine in 1920, also screens at the festival. This lyrical, suspenseful film, set in the canals of Flanders, and taking its name from two barges driven by the protagonists, was not released for 60 years as the studio considered it too realistic. Now its naturalistic acting, and sophisticated camera effects are celebrated as an example of silent cinema at its finest. This film has been restored by La Cinémathèque française, and we are showing the film in a gorgeous 2K restoration, complete with the original tints.

It wouldn’t be a celebration of British silent cinema without Alfred Hitchcock, and we’ll be showing the recent BFI restoration of his debut film The Pleasure Garden, with an introduction by musician, composer and TV presenter Neil Brand.

The Pleasure Garden (Alfred Hitchcock, 1925)

The Pleasure Garden (Alfred Hitchcock, 1925)

Again we’re looking at British cinema’s transition from the silent era to the talkies. We are screening some early sound classics, including Walter Summers’ nail-biting Suspense (1930) in which a group of British WWI soldiers are forced to listen to the enemy laying mines in the tunnel beneath their trench. This brilliant film will be introduced by journalist and film researcher Geoff Brown.

There is plenty more in the full programme, which we’ll be announcing in full soon, including some fascinating archive film, two appearances by Betty Balfour, and Bill Morrison’s acclaimed documentary, Dawson City: Frozen Time.

Don’t forget, the festival kicks off on 13 September with a one-day colloquium on Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound – see the at a glance timetable for the papers and presenters!

See you in Leicester!

The British Silent Film Festival runs from 13-17 September 2017 at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester. You can book weekend passes here.

 

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CALL FOR PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS

April 25, 2017 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound

Symposium 13 September 2017

Phoenix Cinema, Leicester

as part of the 19th British Silent Film Festival, 13-17 September

Alfred-Hitchcocks-The-Ple-008

The transition from silent to synchronised sound cinema in Britain between 1927 and 1933 was a period which changed British cinema as both industry and art form forever, but which has largely been overlooked by cinema historians.

This symposium, which will precede the British Silent Film Festival, will examine the transition from silent to sound across the cinema industry in terms of economics, employment, technology and infrastructure, as well as the shift in film form and style including its impact on production, distribution, exhibition, reception and critique.

We invite papers and presentations from a range of disciplines that help to advance our understanding of the film industry during this tumultuous period. We particularly welcome contributions which consider the transitional period in European cinemas along with Britain’s own international relationships to both Anglophone and non-Anglophone countries. We also invite papers that consider the role of music and sound in silent cinema, before the period of the transition to sound.

The symposium is part of the AHRC-funded project on British Silent Cinema and the Transition to sound (a collaboration between De Montfort University and the University of Stirling) and will precede the 19th British Silent Film Festival which will include four-days of screenings and presentations on the transitional period 1927 – 1933.

Possible topics include:
– technology and industry
– economics
– personnel
– film form, style and the impact of new production processes
– exhibition, reception, cinema-going and audiences
– cinema markets
– the transitional period’s impact and legacy
– music and sound in early cinema

Please send abstracts of 200-500 words to Laraine Porter at

lporter@dmu.ac.uk

Deadline for contributions: 31 July 2017.

 

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