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ding the film was about a recent news story the discipline grew and changed throughout the silent era and sound was late coming to japan as the benshis repeatedly went on strike against the technology that would render them useless the tradition of the japanese narrator would now be completely extinct were it not for the efforts of a very small cadre of historians and performers who have chronicled this discipline and who also keep it alive giving performances to japanese silent films the pordenone silent film festival has turned into a regular showcase for this historic art and monday night offered a grand performance of the film chuji tabinikki accompanied by the benshi ichiro kataoka as well as a percussionist a pianist and a fellow on the traditional guitar like shamisen some benshi shows i have seen in the past have been so elaborate and involved that they obscured more than they enlightened the film but not so with last night s performance from kataoka san and the otowaza ensemble in a historic film that involved bandits police a lot of stern looks a fair amount of sword waving the subtle interjections from musicians and the wavering tones of the benshi explaining miming and generally making the grunts and wheezes seen on screen brought the film to life in a strange manner overall i was grateful for any kind guidance in a narrative which didn t make any concessions for those uninitiated to japenese feudal society there is a strange comfort of coming out of a film like this and realising that you were far from alone in wondering what the hell was going on a strangely dissonant moment was however coming out of a 1914 adaptation of uncle tom s cabin wasn t that brilliant what a performance from sam lucas as uncle tom how about the photography in that hey was the wider chorus i met but personally i felt the film left no lasting impression at all a grounded performance from sam lucas certainly did stand out when set against the histrionics of the rest of the cast and notable as a performance from an african american surrounded by several white actors in black face yet the film struck me as a curiosity more than a lesser masterpiece but that is an oblique pleasure of the festival as you never can be sure of any critical consensus as you stumble out of the theatre one person s treasure inevitably turns out to be a snooze fest for the other and more than a few wines have been spent trying to work out exactly how we ended up at such critical distant poles it s tough work i tell you that said most folks i met did concur that dva druga model i pordruga was a surprisingly light and charming soviet comedy translating roughly as two friends a model and a girlfriend the internet meme minded among you might be making lather lewd insinuations at this point but the titular model turned out to be a prototype for a crate making machine the two buddies spend much time knocking heads on creating a device which will revolutionise production in the soap factory they work in and it is with great worry that a local crate manufacturer capitalist views their progress with this technology we will destroy capitalism read one enthusiastic title and of course the arch villain crate making industrialist sets out to scupper their plans every step of the way more than a bit mad cap slap dash and knock about dva druga model i pordruga was a welcome mid morning break and while not on the side splitting end of the comedy scale it certain did amuse coming to the end of what felt like an incredibly long day i decided to sacrifice the near midnight screening of der tunnel for an early night it can t be that good i thought only to be regaled by my finnish friend jaakko the next morning of what a surprisingly treat it was they build a tunnel between france and new jersey no great characterisations he says but really striking visuals a really stirring story well you win some you loose some hopefully the next film i choose to cut won t be the universal highlight of the festival but heaven knows that has happened before 5 october 2015 leave a comment film day two at the pordenone silent film festival primitive was a word that got thrown around a lot more than i was expecting on the second day of the gironate in part it came during the late evening screening of the douglas fairbanks farce mollycoddle which quite merrily praised and damned the native americans of the painted desert for outwitting the dumb out of towners despite being so crushingly primitive in their ways gosh isn t the line between civilised and primitive man so thin the film quipped without actually nailing its colours to mast as to whether it s civilisation who is ahead of itself or indeed it is the primitives we underestimate at our peril either ways it was a bit much for me to mentally unpack as the last reel of the film unspooled around the midnight hour the second engagement of the less than charming primitive adjective came during the antiquated film history documentary thirty years of motion pictures released by coalition of american film lobbying bodies as a look back on film s brief history in 1927 it did a fine job of getting more than a few key facts quite sharply wrong while at the same time driving home it s own tidy pro american agenda if you took them at their word you d have thought thomas edison and george eastman had the whole invention of cinema thing wrapped up with a concession by the film that of course the lumieres in paris and robert paul in london just happened to do awfully similar things in other corners of the world but in it s sweeping remit the film history lesson did quite happily signpost some examples from cinemas primitive days a simple adventure here a dumb chase there and a primitive projector over there for me the tone of the lecture conjured up the absurd image of neanderthals hammering away at relatively complex early cameras and projectors while occasionally taking a break from their neolithic habits to crank the handle on some dumb melodrama the point being that distant as the world of the past may seem to modern eyes the evolution of cinema where every iteration of the past is seen as a step towards the accomplished and complete cinema of today does rather presuppose that the filmic cavemen and women of our victorian edwardian past were just scratching at the wall on their way to well transformers dark side of the moon 3d the word primitive in this context really is quite toxic and the fact it had the same tang of condescension in 1927 as it does today was interesting to see especially in an early documentary which all the same had the luxury of being so close to this increasingly forgotten period of time fortunately we did also get a reprieve before the history lesson in the form of der marchenwald ein schattenspiel a german fairytale told in a recreated shadowplay instead of shadow puppets real actors were recorded acting in outlined profile an almost abstracted form of 2d which gave their performances the look and feel of an animated film while the story itself was not the clearist possibly assuming the audience would already know the tale the striking appearance of the film was really quite uncanny and its shimmering style certainly lingers well beyond it s brief running time alongside the farce of douglas fairbanks in mollycoddle i also had the immense pleasure of seeing him behave like an absolute dork in the comedy of superstition and errors when clouds roll by douglas is a man obsessed with superstition to the point of sheer compulsion and what should happen when he has the good fortune of bumping into a charming young lady who is just as committed to the avoidance of ladders cats and opal rings of all things a burgeoning romance of course with earlier suitors to be contended with dedication proven with classic fairbank acrobatics and a general escalation of calumny going from four acts set in the big smoke i don t think anyone could have predicted the ending which saw fairbanks and lover getting married on top of a church floating in the middle of a flooded valley you can t beat an imminently bursting dam to ratchet up tension in the final reel and heaven knows when clouds roll by delivered in daft spades for it s closer a final mention goes to the beautiful new restoration of l inhumaine a lavish futurist fantasy which preempted metropolis in some of its visuals and arguably in some its key themes and plot points an adored female idol who inspires crowds and stirs revolution whose genius is captured and transposed by a mad scientist all against the backdrop of highly abstracted form of super modernist architecture and set design this is familiar ground but where metropolis characters are human the figures in the aptly named l inhumaine were distant and driven by strangely opaque desires the clue is in the title and this frosty behaviour is after all a major point in the film but that made it no easier to get onboard with the film itself quite a visual experience and cut together in a striking and aptly futurist fashion but still too distant to fully carry me through to the world it had created for itself a long and exhausting day all told with surprises along the way hopefully day three will keep things a little less primitive and a bit more well humane perhaps 4 october 2015 leave a comment film day one at the pordenone silent film festival there aren t many regular fixtures in the silent film calendar but the pordenone silent film festival is the big one that sees stummfilm fans from around the world bending over backwards to get there having first attended the festival back in 2007 i ve been back almost every year since with an unnerving regularity that has non silent film friends asking what you re going back to italy again for the converted the discussion revolves solely whether you will be going and i know one good friend who without batting an eyelid starts asking around december time whether i have made plans for attending the festival in the following october for those on the outside this can seem a little baffling to those on the inside it makes total sense which for me is no better reason for trying to keep a running journal of sorts while i m here at this year s festival partly to keep track of what i ve seen but also to try and give some half baked sense of what this obsession is and to try and help those outside the silent film bubble to understand why the converted bang on about this festival so much the setting is part of it as it takes place in the town of pordenone pop 52 000 just shy of an hours travel north of venice and spitting distance from the venetian alps it s difficult to not view the festival goers as an invading horde as the slew of international visitors completely take over the city for the week english is the language the lingua franca you hear echoing in the streets and silent cinema if not film history seems to be the only topic on everybody s lips at times you really have to remind yourself there actually is a city of italians who live here for the other 51 weeks of the year charming as the city is with its reasonably priced wine coffee gelatos the film programme is the chief attraction and pordenone is the pre eminent place to see premieres of the latest discoveries and restorations from the fading world of silent cinema to describe the programme as eclectic would be an understatement as within the narrow remit of non sound cinema it still manages to capture film from across the world to take the first day as a prime example i had the good fortune of seeing a norwegian tiger tamer a brief documentary about romany travellers from 1932 an occasionally dream like city symphony in honour of chicago a daft take on romeo and juliette in snowy austria followed by a ludicrously funny italian war film where the italian strongman maciste effectively won the war against austro hungary by defenestrating every enemy soldier he could find that is when maciste wasn t too busy snacking on a joint of ham or the like a certain pleasure of the festival is the repeated confrontation with the unexpected and the complete absence of critical consensus on almost everything talk to a gaggle of festival goers after any screening and more often than not the opinions will stretch from pillar to post romeo and juliette despite it s light and cheeky humour true to director ernst lubitsch somehow had friends in raptures while sending me to sleep others found maciste a colossal bore but i couldn t stop laughing at his ability to just end any conflict by either a sitting on someone or alternatively b throwing them out the window that and his undying need to eat and smile constantly through out daft and humourous but also incredibly dark if you consider how it dramatizes an extremely dark and tragic chapter of the alpine front of world war one either ways the one critical consensus we did establish was the film probably could have benefitted from being a reel shorter but that opinion may have been informed by the fact that the screening started at ten in the evening and wrapped up not long before midnight now at the start of day two i m already running late for some more city symphonies but uncharacteristically it is absolutely pissing it down with rain or rather intermittently so and the last shower started and stopped in the time it took me to write that last sentence better run while the sun still shines off to go and sit in a darkened room for another 9 to 12 hours mustn t grumble 14 august 2015 leave a comment film at doc fest the confessions of thomas quick has the moment arrived to call time on scandi noir the new release of the confessions of thomas quick might be the film where the concept finally reaches its breaking point a documentary about a huge travesty of swedish justice the film unquestioningly plays out a true crime story in the register of scandi noir in a deeply problematic manner playing fact against fiction the film switches constantly between straight talking head testimonies and hammy crime recreations for the un initiated the story plays out along the familiar beats of a wintry crime drama but as someone who has grown up with the story unfurling over the last twenty years the whole sat very ill to use an extreme comparison imagine the story of the moors murders retold as a hard boiled film noir intercut with uncritical testimonies from ian brady and myra hindley and well you start getting an idea of why this film felt so disturbing to this poor half swede the tale is that of the titular thomas quick the assumed pseudonym of sture bergwall who grew in horrific infamy during the 1990s as sweden s first high profile serial killer while incarcerated in a high security mental facility in 1993 quick started confessing to a string of murders 30 in total of which eight led to trial and conviction he was the boogeyman your friends warned you about the kiddie snatcher with the weird name and the creepy glum face a kn...
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