PORDENONE 2013.

From Australia, getting to the Italy's Pordenone Gionate de Cinema Muto or ”Week of Dumb Films”, as my Google Translator calls these Italian events, is such a heroic effort that I wonder about it every time.  In 2013, just battling Trennitalia drained me. I expected them to chain Klaus Kinsky to my seat at any moment, like Dr. Zhivago -  but the rewards do out way the costs.

While,  even in Paris the epicenter of movie culture, early film only seems to draw customers old enough to have lived through the great days of Langlois’ Cinematheque, the welcome surprise at Pordenone was finding a real spread of ages and backgrounds among the people who turned out. For a while you could believe that film history had followed exploitation, gender politics or Asia  in that passing parade of  buzz movie interests, 

Mixing with serious enthusiasts again comes as a shock, after Australia, with the void left by National film Theatre after the A.F.I. merger wiped it out nearly forty years back. Pordenone’s survey revealed that, among the thousand attendees, four came from Australia-New Zealand, that number inflated by Meg Labrum’s getting an award for her work on the Corrick Collection.

I must admit that, when I mentioned that Daniele Luchetti’s so nice new Anni Felici was playing in the town’s commercial movie house, I was met with waves of apathy. Can’t win ‘em all.

At Pordenone, people in their twenties were among those most interested in discussing the films and cross referencing them to the wave of  titles suddenly accessible on DVD (think De Sica-Camerini and silent Naruse box sets or Richard Oswald’s restored Cagliostro).  Even if they didn’t show any films, Pordenone would be a great meeting point.

Of course, Pordenone  did show films and people watched them, sometimes for fifteen hour days. It’s is not one of the festivals, where all the heavies spend their time sitting in the bar outside the screenings, making their deals.

Whatever way you carve it, 2013 was not one of Pordenone’s best. Their featured talents disappointed. The Karl Lamac/Anny Ondra team were still in the primitive phase of Czech film making when we lost sight of them, though they did seem to be on a learning curve. Gerhard Lamprecht is not as well known as the major players of the German silent film, and, watching his studies of urban gloom, he emerges as a one note film maker, while director Gustav Molander’s work suggested that stories of the twenties decline of Swedish film making, that drove Stiller, Garbo, Seastrom and Lars Hanson abroad, which the program disputed, seemed quite plausible.

There was more talk of cut backs and a few presentation glitches. The  demands of new digital systems occasionally meant freezing images or vanishing sub-titles. The time and money to rehearse and perfect showings appears to have thinned. On the up side, this seems to have spurred the contributing musicians into collaborations, producing multi instrumentalist accompaniments and live music integrated with original recordings. The often exceptional scores at Pordenone have been enhanced by experimentation.

Throw in the Cordenons/Pordemone children’s band playing with a couple of nice comedy two reelers.

The handsome, rebuilt Cinema Verdi is not always a movie-friendly environment, with it’s awkward sight lines and distracting red aisle lighting but having an orchestra pit, with the accompanist(s) playing to a video display out of sight, is a luxury many purpose built cinematheques should envy.

This didn’t always work out. There was a truly awful running of  a Ukranian piece, with a blasting electronic score played too loud, or the use of Japanese benshi narrator Icharo Kataoka, who proved in conversation to be an authoritative and amusing commentator on his work but was just distracting noise accompanying a screening of the weepy Chikemuri Takatanobaba / Blood Spattered Takatanobaba without translation. Subtitling a benshi represents a challenge, though I have seen it done successfully.

In more detail,  we pick up director Lamac and star, blonde Mary Pickford curled Anny Ondra(kova) (right), in the near incoherent 1920 Gilly Poprvé v praze and followed their exploits through the Fairbanks style lumberjack adventure Drvostep of 1923 and the fey 1925 Lucerna, the  to peak with Chyr’te ho!/ The Clumsy burglar, as their industry approached proficiency, taking Gustav Machaty and cameraman Otto Heller along with them. A couple of these would have made the point adequately.

Gustav Molander on the other hand was an assured technician, who deployed adequate resources on a variety of subjects. His Polis Paulus Paskasmall/ The Smugglers is represented as the peak achievement of the Pat and Patachon team comedian duo leads, here battling mean matriarchs and corrupt nobility in the snow country.

Flicka I Frack/ Girls in Tails had a sex equality message, where Magda  Holm, denied the expense of a ball gown, goes in her brother’s tuxedo, setting off gender tensions in the community - less than biting satire. Forseglade lappar/ Sealed Lips was novice Mona Matenson tempted away from the cloisters by a married artist, against alpine scenery. Hans englesk fru/ Matrimony of 1928 looked more promising, fielding the great Lil (Caligari, Congres Dances) Dagover (left), subdued  as a British widow edged into a marriage with her company’s major creditor Urho Somersalmi, another rugged timberland hero, when lounge lizardy Gosta Ekman seemed a more suitable mate. As in contemporary Hollywood, the sanctity of the marriage knot diverted proceedings away from the logical ending, which would have united  Somersalmi with Dagover’s spunky younger sister Brita Allgren.

Pordenone also showed Konstgjorda Svensson/ Atrificial Svenson, an agreeable military training knockabout from the transition to sound, with a to-camera synch. intro. and the nice gag of lead Fridolf Rhudin singing in shaky synchronization, which proved not to be the result of primitive recording but him lip synching his serenade to a phonograph. Ivar Johanson’s 1929 Ragens rike / Kingdom of the Rye, also on show, was a ponderous rural drama.

There was nothing startling here, though Molander did also come through for us eventually.

Gerhard Lamprecht is someone who figures on the edge of our awareness of  German cinema, mainly for the celebrated sound film Emil & the Detectives. His mix of studio with real street locations and people, along with seeing players familiar from Fritz Lang’s work (George John, Aud Egede Nissen and regular lead Bernard Goetzke) made his films seem promising. The work on show proved unrewardingly one note affairs organized round Lamprecht’s notions of the dignity of labor and “hundesleben”, a dogs life, the wretched existence of the urban poor. There were occasional moments of recognition, like jail bird Arthur Bergen telling the kids not to go to school because it would trap them in a life of employed drudgery but these only spaced the elements of melodrama - whores with hearts of gold, heavy fathers and unworthy authority. Lamprecht’s boarding house melodrama Menschen\Untereinander/ People among Each Other didn’t even make it into his authentic exteriors.

The event also aired a number of other streams, including Ukrainian silents. Most interesting was Heorhii Stabovyi's 1927 Dva Dni / Two Days centering on Emil Jannings-like Ivan Zamycchhorskyi, the servant of a rich family, which flees the Bolsheviks leaving him at the mansion, where their son, detached from the escape, returns for shelter. The film makes a fascinating comparison with Benjamin Christenson’s U.S.made 1927  Mockery covering much the same ground. Also Mykola Shykoskyi’s nicely handled  Shkurnyk / The Opportunist of 1929 has comedian Ivan Sadovskyi trapped, when his attempt to loot abandoned revolutionary supplies lands him with the job of caring for a camel in the camps of both the reds and the whites. Comparing Buster Keaton in Go West or Fernandel in La Vache et moi doesn’t disgrace the Ukrainian film. These were embedded in a collection of more familiar pieces, which had outlasted their propagandist intent.

Throw in a few Italian melodramas from the teens, of which Eleuterio Rodolfi’s version of I Promessi sposi was the pick, trying to mount the work’s large scale drama in the static terms of post WWI Italian film.

There was also the notion of  “revisiting the canon.” One of the things Pordenone has done is demonstrate that the work that was considered significant is not always the most enduring. Witness Alezander Dovzhenko. Still, being faced with yet another run of Arsenal did give me a welcome forty minutes to nod off. It’s actually dispiriting to see these “classics” in dim grey copies, often inferior to the ones which some of us saw decades back and newcomers know from accessible DVDs - the history of cinema fading before our eyes.

The copy of Wellman’s always impressive Beggars of Life did prove to be superior to the circulating discs. A couple of unfamiliar Hollywood silents also got an airing,  Francis X Bushman (left), as a Zorro minus mask and black whip, in the undistinguished 1928 The Charge of the Gauchos and a nice, sharp copy of an enjoyable De Mille Company programmer Hold ‘em Yale from the same year, with Rod La Roque as yet another college sportsman.

Hard to work up all that much sympathy for the 20th Century silents, some ordinary shorts and the currently circulating Blancanieves, which wastes Maribel Verdu. I let go Too Much Johnson, the work print of the film content for Orson Welles’ stage show, for another time.

These were spaced by programs of “early film”, which occasionally fielded oddities like primitive Max Linder or Feuillade but were just as often likely to face you with Mexican Revolution coverage of lines of guys in sombreros riding past the camera for ten minutes.

I’ll never forgive them for offering Conrad Veidt in Richard Oswald’s Lucrezia Borgia at three in the morning, when I was already knackered. Surely a more suitable time for riders in big hats, Sports and Pastimes in Batavia (Java) or Dovzhenko back from the vault.

 Still, picking through the program, it wasn’t hard to find material that made coming from the other side of the planet worthwhile.

Book-ending the days with their beautiful sharp copies of  twenties animation (Felix, Koko and the already slap dash Terry Toons) was always welcome.

It was four decades since I’d seen Alf Sjöberg’s first movie Den Starkaste /The Strongest, a Tale from the Arctic Ocean and it was re-assuring to find it as imposing as I’d remembered. In an environment  where control of the sealing waters goes to the strongest, sailor become farm hand become marksman Sivert Brækemo has to assert his claim to the contested rifle, the position of gunner and the retiring captain’s daughter, in the middle of clambering round the real ice flows, where they filmed. Attention is riveted. Hard to relate it’s Polar realism with the director’s great, later Strindberg films, beyond the authority he already showed.  This one should have been circulating to acclaim for the last seventy years.

Hanson in a Swedish Richard III

Most intriguing among Molander’s films was the 1928 Synd, which already had the noir elements of the director’s 1938 Ingrid Bergman film En kvinnas ansikte/ A Woman’s Face. The cast is stellar. Lars Hanson, back from Hollywood, Elissa Landi (now we all remember her in Sign of the Cross and the Donat Count of Monte Christo) and Gina Manés, then the great, vampy star of French cinema, Josephine in Gance’s Napoléon and the object of desire in Duvivier’s brilliant Tete d’un homme.

Gina Manes

 They provided an imposing triangle. Studio staging around writer Hanson’s flat and in the theatre, restaurant and police station is deftly menacing and the script (again derived from Strindberg), while being simple minded romance melodrama, does keep attention.

We got a great, unfamiliar 1928 Ivan Mozjoukine (right) adventure Der Gehehime Kurier, a purport version of “Le Rouge & le Noir”, with Ivan, also back from Hollywood with his new nose. It was agreed that he came across as more like Julien Sorel’s dad than the Stendhal protagonist but it wasn’t long before he was out-fencing the snobby officers, whose company he wanted to join, making out with a much more animated Lil Dagover in her unwrapping wrap and outwitting inn keeper’s daughter Valeria Blanka, trying to seduce him away from delivering the crucial dispatch. He leaves the girl naked, staring after him dazzled. It looks like Ivan/Julien has made it big time but his dreams are snatched away and, on the steps of the Cathedral, he avenges himself. Our hero’s trial arouses the revolutionaries led by Agnes Petersen, his aristocrat lover, to storm the barricades.

This is delivered with the best silent movie relish by one Gennaro Righelli, a long serving Italian director, of whose work only the amiable De Sica-Anna Magnani Abbasso la ricchezza! ever came my way. He must have felt a connection with the material, having a 1947 do-over with Rossano Brazzi as  Il corriere del re.

Pordenone is at its best retrieving the output of luminous silent star talents like Veidt and Dagover, Mozjoukine and Dita Parlo, Willy Fritsch and Lillian Harvey, whose filmographies are bulging with intriguing work that has dropped from view. Throw in Hollywood celebrities like Thomas Meighan, Milton Sills or John Barrymore. Whether these can be had is another question but it's always possible that the reason we never see, say, Alan Crosland’s Under the Red Robe, is that no one is looking for it.

Whatever way you hack it, Pordenone's now been going for thirty two years and it's still finding superior wok and people who value it. That's pretty impressive.

Barrie Pattison 2013