The Sound of Silents
Launching on 7 April at London's Barbican Cinema, this year's 14th British Silent Film Festival flirts with the Trades Descriptions Act, as the screenings will be anything but silent - because this year's theme is 'Music, Sound and the British Silent Film'.
Silent film music had its own distinctive language which developed alongside film narrative. Alongside films accompanied by their original scores (such as the Soviet fairytale Morozko, 1925), and a look at how silent filmmakers ambitiously sought to adapt classical music and dance in the 1920s, the festival will feature presentations and demonstrations by some of the world's best silent film musicians and historians, seeking to answer such questions as "why do high quavery violins produce unease, and who first used them?"
The centenary of the Topical Budget newsreel will inspire an event paying tribute to the way that silent pianists were forced to improvise to news items with no rehearsal, as the reels were often delivered at the last possible moment. Other presentations will look at the often uneasy transition from silence to fully synchronised sound, as well as the surprising relationship between silent film and radio.
On other topics, film historian and broadcaster Matthew Sweet delivers the annual Rachael Low lecture 'Just Between Ourselves: Gossip and the British Silent Film', tracing the decidedly unofficial stories behind the official history of early cinema in Britain. The Imperial War Museum's collections are used to examine the history of and techniques behind WWI film propaganda.
Individual films include Cecil Hepworth's recently rediscovered Helen of Four Gates (1920), tributes to silent stars Colleen Moore (Twinkletoes, 1926), Anna May Wong (Pavement Butterfly, 1929) and Lionel Barrymore (Decameron Nights, 1925), Pal Fejos' intoxicating romance Lonesome (1928), Yasujiro Ozu's delightful comedy I Was Born, But... (1932) and another chance to see William Wellman's Beggars of Life (1928) with a multi-instrumental accompaniment that plays the hell out of classic Americana.
The Archive's Curator of Silent Film, Bryony Dixon, is one of the programmers and organisers, alongside Laraine Porter (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at De Montfort University) and veteran silent accompanist Neil Brand, whose composed and improvised scores have graced many Archive screenings in the past.
For more details, including a full programme of events, please visit the festival website.
