Grey skies clung to the Verdi this afternoon but you can’t put a dampener on a homecoming like this one. I’ve been to several festivals this year, but nothing really compares to the Giornate. And our hearts were warmed by festival director Jay Weissberg’s words of welcome, in which we pointed out how vital it is, these days more than ever, to cherish these events that bring people together in a shared endeavour.
Today was a day of varying shades and two colour schemes. We had a couple of stonking great classics. And also a slate of fragments, curios, oddities and ends – several of which had their merits, albeit in their own unconventional way. In fact, a certain aura of strangeness hung over the whole day, which you might attribute to the unseasonal weather, but I am partially putting down to the after-effects of watching Megalopolis last weekend.
It’s worth saying that the festival has, as ever, brought its own special paintbox out of storage. The artwork this year is exquisite: on the posters, Marie Prevost reclines in the midst of merriment, with cherry red lips, on the backdrop of the festival offices, Anna May Wong skulks on a street corner, and on the catalogue cover, Lillian Gish pouts as she proffers a kiss to a feathered friend. All this in delicate shades of lilac and pink. I adore it. The tourist board tagline is “kisses from Pordenone”, and if you manipulate your lanyard ribbon correctly (why yes I do have a little time on my hands), you can make Prevost pucker up to her gentleman companion. It’s all delightfully decadent.
On a serious note, if you have picked up your catalogue, don’t forget to turn to page 19 to discover the winners of this year’s Jean Mitry prize: Mark-Paul Meyer from Eye Filmmuseum, and our very own Bryony Dixon, silent film curator of the British Film Institute. To say the British contingent is thrilled about this would be very much an understatement! Congratulations to both. We look forward to the ceremony on Friday night.
Now I think about it, perhaps the first programme of the day was painted with both of those palettes. DW Griffith one-reelers at Pordenone? Deja vu for some maybe, but the great Griffithian endeavours of 1997-2003 were a little before my time. And these are the new restorations, some from paper prints, courtesy of the Los Angeles-based Film Preservation Society. Back, back, to 1908 we go, kicking off the entire festival with a celebrated gem, The Adventures of Dollie. Quite the thriller, this one, with Dollie’s abducted, stowed in a barrel and sent rolling down the river, falls and all. I’d call it the best of this afternoon’s trio, followed closely by The Redman and the Child, although I highly recommend reading Tracey Goessel’s vivid catalogue notes for all of these, which alert one to many salient details, and a candid account of how much cinema history is and is not being forged here.
Griffith certainly knew how to keep the pace bouncing, with action bursting out of the frame in these chase and hand-combat adventures, which often showcase highlights of the New Jersey landscape, especially the Passaic River. Another era of filmmaking in many ways, and yet not so far from the action blockbusters of today, which do not have the good grace to wrap up after 13 minutes. And have less of an excuse for their, shall we say, errors of representation. Nor do they have such dashing accompaniment by Donald Sosin.
Let us continue with the curios. The top attraction in today’s Latin America package was footage shot by Sergei Eisenstein and his team in the wake of a deadly volcanic eruption in Oaxaca – just before he began work on ¡Que Viva Mexico! Distressing images of bereaved relatives, soldiers bravely digging for survivors and awe-inspiring images of the mountain… somehow Eisenstein seems able to shape these raw and immediate scenes into a narrative, a universal story of precarity and resilience,
We had two particularly strong films also from my my favourite strand of this year’s festival: Sine Nomine. Click here to read all about it and help if you can. Essentially, this is a parcel of unidentified films and the GIornate wants YOU to help with any leads you can muster: cast, locations, studios, maybe more? First up, Fatal News saw a man tormented by the 24-hour news cycle. Hard relate to this one. And in Dukken, a young girl learns a valuable lesson about life when she tries to cheat her way to getting a new doll. Don’t neglect your knitting, ladies. Good news – we may already have an identification for one of the films playing later in the week, courtesy of eagle-eyed Annie Fee.
A fragment of what looked like a beautiful, but very tragic, melodrama starring Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki (Five Days to Live, Norman Dawn, 1922) played before the first of several Anna May Wong films we can look forward to this year.
Not that Wong was the main attraction in this frenetic comedy-melodrama-thriller set in San Francisco. Wong (uncredited) plays the young wife of an opium dealer (Noah Beery, yes really) in Chinatown, while the real focus of the story is supposed to be a young freckle-faced newsboy (Wesley Barry) and his dying Irish mother (a rather wasted, in more ways than one, Colleen Moore). But the gangsters are far more distracting I’m afraid. Dinty (Marshall Neilan and John McDermott, 1920) bites off far more plot than it can chew, and crams its mouth with some indigestible racial steretotypes to boot. Were we not entertained? Well we were, not least with the San Francisco location spotting (yep, I clocked the Palace of Fine Arts). Not to mention the moment Wong casually let slip about the whereabouts of a missing white woman (“the secret room” – shoulda guessed). I tip my hat to Neil Brand for keeping up with this film, which contained a plot twist in every other intertitle, so remarkably well.
Barry was cute, no doubt about it, but he had competition, in the gala programme, from none other than Baby Peggy. In Peg o’the Mounted (Alfred J. Goulding, 1924) the toddler star jumps into uniform to chase down some illicit booze smugglers up in the north country, pausing only briefly to get high on their supply. Delightful antics, and just one of the most watchable faces in the movies. Don’t try this at home, kids, needless to say.
Today’s first A-grade silent film beauty was to be found in one of the first places you would look: the Canon Revisited strand. Sorok Pervyi/The Forty-First (Yakov Protozanov, 1926), was entirely new to me, and I adored it, basically. A Soviet romance? The premise is irresistible. Tatiana (Ada Voitsik) is the dead-eye heroine of the Red Army, a sharpshooter who never misses, chalking up 40 kills on her gun belt. The 41st man in her sights, a White officer with a spiffing moustache (Ivan Koval-Samborsky), somehow eludes her aim. But he is taken prisoner, and after some dramatic Turkmenistan desert battle and survival sequences, she finds herself washed up on an island in the middle of the Aral Sea alone with her handsome nemesis. I can’t tell you what happens there, except his clothes are mostly ripped to shreds, her practical trousers are restitched into a skirt and oh, her pot of soup has just boiled over. Ahem. These two actors are phenomenal, and Protazanov stages their growing intimacy and tempestuous dynamic with the same vigour he brought to the warfare. Gorgeous accompaniment here from Mauro Colombis really emphasised the emotional power of this intense film.
Will our Soviet heroine surrender her noble goals to love? I would say you’d have to watch it to find out, but… I suspect you have made a good guess. Such a strange and compelling film, and one that will live with me.
Of course, tonight’s big attraction couldn’t get any bigger: a silent John Ford western, 3 Bad Men (1926), with a terrific, thunder-loud and buoyant score composed and conducted by Maestro Timothy Brock, and played by Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone. A character-led western that grows and grows into an action spectacular, 3 Bad Men was awesome on the big screen. Three bad men, outlaws, hoss thieves, call them what you will (Tom Santschi, Frank Campeau, J. Farrell MacDonald) become the guardian of a young orphaned homesteader (Olive Borden) and also her boyfriend (George O’Brien) on the ride west to strike gold in the Dakotas. The Sioux having been removed by a series of intertitles very early on in the film. But there were far more than three bad men in this. How about the sinister Sheriff Layne Hunter played with vampiric menace by Lou Tellegen? And for my money Phyllis Haver’s good-time girl stole focus from winsome Olive Borden, but maybe I should go rethink some of my key moral principles.
You’ll be charmed by the bantering relationship-building, and you’ll stay for some ambitious bar-room brawling and spectacles such as a convoy of burning wagons careering into a wooden church. But sit yourself down and get cosy for the terrific land-race sequence shot in Lucerne Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert,, which contains vast fields of action, a baby in all-too-real peril (just the most breathtaking stunt), jump scares and a final shootout that may have you choking back a few manly sobs. John Ford, I would contend, knew well what he was about when he made this. And can you believe it was the last western he made? Until a little something called Stagecoach in 1939, necessitating a return to said Lurcerne Dry Lake. Ever seen it? Talkie. Not bad.
Intertitle of the Day
“My doggie looks exactly like you!” Baby Peggy cuts a rumrunner down to size.
