Ten years of my silent film blogging inspiration! Cheers Pamela!!
Happy birthday to us! Break out the socially distanced celebrations! Today Silent London reaches double digits. The blog was born on 26 November 2010, with a sketchy tumblr and a humble tweet.
Since then this site has grown, and made many new friends, around the world. I am honestly astonished by everything that has happened since then, and feel so very lucky to be part of it. Itâs Thanksgiving in America today, which is appropriate as I am very, very grateful for all the films, the fantastic music, and the people who have supported Silent London over this decade. Thatâs you, that is. Everyone who has read and shared the posts here, and the brilliant people who have contributed their own posts too. I am grateful for the archives, festivals and cinemas who have welcomed this blogger to watch theirâŚ
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Looks like I’m going to Cambridge late October! Love The Blot and Lois Weber! Plus, the chance to see John Sweeney accompany The Dumb Girl… not to be missed!
Festival season is upon us. Thereâs Pordenone, of course, and London and also the Cambridge Film Festival all in October. A trip to the fenland city is very appealing at this time of year â and all the more so with a tempting selection of silent films.
The star of the slate is Lois Weber, one of the very best American silent film directors. And Cambridge will be showing four of her films over the weekend, all with live music. One of these in particular, The Blot, is rarely shown, but I think itâs very special indeed. Kevin Brownlow says that you wonât find a better film for showing you how life was really lived in the 1920s. Thatâs very probably true, but I think that inadvertently undersells it. There is a lot more to the film than its realism. Itâs a real heartbreaker, and a nuanced dramaâŚ
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An excellent summary of Bologna highlights, as you’d expect from S,P!
Me, my pal Matti, and Marcello
Six weeks after the fact, you say? From the Department of Better Late than Never comes my recap of Il cinema ritrovato 2018: a wonderful festival of archival film of all eras and countries. Spoiler alert: I had a blast!
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Two films starring Pina Menichelli were screened at the 2018 Il Cinema Ritrovato where we enjoyed this programme which included films and extracts also featuring Francesca Bertini and Lyda Borelli.
Pina Menichelli was born in Sicily into a theatrical family and started out in a stage career. She started in films in 1913 at the Roman studio of SocietĂ Italiana Cines. She achieved stardom in 1915 with the director Giovanni Pastrone in The Fire (1915, Il fuoco) for Itala. She became a popular actor both at home and abroad and her persona came embody the idea of the femme fatale. In 1919 she moved to Rinascimento Films and remained popular, despite the decline in the diva genre, until her retirement in 1924.
As is the case with other Italian films and other diva films, many are lost. We enjoyed two, an incomplete one-reel film and an incomplete feature, originallyâŚ
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Cutting and keeping fro my first trip in just three weeks!!
A few years back, when the world may not have been young but this blog certainly was, and I had begun to hit the silent film festival trail, I received some alarming advice from Neil Brand. âWhat you really want to do as well,â he said, âis to go to Bologna. The weatherâs great, the foodâs amazing â and there are even talkies, too.â
Well two out of three ainât bad. By Bologna, Neil meant Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival of archive cinema that takes place every summer. Ritrovato means something like rediscovered. So, fittingly this festival shows rediscovered films, but also rarely seen films, films on rare formats and vintage prints, and newly restored films too. Largely, anything more than thirty years old qualifies for the festival, which gives it a giant scope.
I knew lots of people who went to this festival, but as always with anythingâŚ
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Impeccable posting as usual from the great Silents Please!
The holy trinity of Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, and Pina Menichelli are generally considered the crème de la crème of diva film actresses. Yet, of course, there were many others working in this loosely-defined genre: prominent names include Hesperia, Leda Gys, Italia Almirante Manzini, Soava Gallone, and Diana Karenne. Another such diva was the Polish actress Helena (Elena) Makowska, who acted in the Milan theatre before making the move to film. She built a successful career in the Italian film industry in the teens before working primarily in Germany in the 1920s.
 
From the collection of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Torino). Refs F40839/046, F40839/019
Over a dozen of Makowskaâs films survive, but they are little seen, and she is a relatively obscure figure. Of the films in which Makowska participated, probably the one most well-known today is Febo Mariâs astonishing Il fauno | The Faun of 1917, a wonderful piece of work thatâŚ
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Looking forward to some Betty B in Leicester!
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 â two silents and a musical. In each film, youâll get a glimpse of why she was once one of the most popular British film stars. In her heyday, she was occasionally compared to Hollywoodâs 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 âSquibsâ 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, ââSquibsâ was a rough-castâŚ
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This is a guest post for Silent London by David Cairns, a film-maker and lecturer based in Edinburgh who writes the fantastic Shadowplay blog.
The so-called âItalian divaâ school of silent cinema presents challenges for those in love with narrative and closure, and not just because many of the films are incomplete or untranslated. These movies seem genuinely less concerned with plot than surrounding national cinemas, though this assertion must be qualified in a number of ways.
What the films definitely are obsessed with is their stars, such women as Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, and Pina Menichelli, around whom the films revolve, wholly. Itâs as if the Italians noted that stars seemed to be what the public cared for most, and so decided to put everything else on the back burner while serving up long, langurous shots of languishing, anguished beauties. Superficially resembling both the kohl-daubed vamps of the ThedaâŚ
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Excellent research, writing and illustrating from Silents Please!
Not long ago, a major project of mine came to fruition. A chance infatuation with the adverts for a particular film grew into a fruitful research project which involved early newspaper comic strips, international media coverage, and two Italian silent films. Now, my article on this particular collison of comic strip history, pop culture, and silent cinema has been published in the journal Feminist Media Histories.
The article is called From the New York Herald to the Italian screen: Fluffy Ruffles, la donna americana, and you can find it here.
Itâs a research article, but also has a visual component: I produced hand-drawn illustrations to accompany the text. Theyâre mostly in pen, with some ink, and some use of collage. The illustrations are all based on archival materials, primarily adverts, that I unearthed in the course of my research. (Originally the concept was to produce something more zine-like in nature, butâŚ
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ithankyouarthur 