FILMS

FILMS

FILMS

‘Let’s make movies first, art will appear by itself.’

René Clair

Paris was considered the capital of world cinema from the very beginning. On 28 December 1895, at the Indian Salon in the Grand Café, the first public presentation of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph took place. It was supposed to be merely a technological curiosity, but it soon became clear just how extraordinary its possibilities were. Georges Méliès, another cinema pioneer, also participated in this show, but in his artistic experiments Méliès actually went a step further than the brothers: instead of recording reality, he began to transform it. From then on, these two aesthetic cinema paths would intertwine. It was also in Paris, at Léon Gaumont’s production company, that the works of the world’s first female film director – Alice Guy-Blaché – were made.

The 17th Silent Movie Festival, with its theme of Voyages [Journeys], could therefore not start its journey anywhere else.

The French section, and thus the whole festival, will open with René Clair’s debut film The Crazy Ray (aka Paris Asleep), which perfectly fits the theme of the festival with its film journey around Paris. Perhaps it was a result of Clair’s work that other directors also began to love the capital of France so much, making it one of the most filmed cities in the history of cinema. René Clair himself repeatedly took his cameras back there (such as in the sound picture Under the Roofs of Paris from 1930). The screening will be preceded by the premieres of some short films about cycling, which will introduce viewers to the atmosphere of pre-war France.

In addition to Clair, Jean Renoir and Jean Epstein will also appear in the French section of the festival and their films will also take us to Paris, though a less obvious one. In their case, we have focused on surprising films which are possibly the only ones of their type in the directors’ whole work. Charleston Parade by Renoir and The Lion of the Moguls by Epstein both escape any pigeonholing in terms of genre.

This edition of the festival would not have been complete without the inclusion of French cinema for one more reason. It was in France that Warsaw-born Jan Stanisław Alfred Epstein (Jean Epstein) settled, and it was also where Alice Guy-Blaché set out to conquer America. It is also from where the Lumière brothers’ cameramen set off on their journey to capture the world on film and amaze viewers with its beauty.

French cinema is cinema on an eternal journey.

Bon Voyage!

 

Karolina Brzozowska

The Crazy Ray

The Lion of the Moguls

Charleston Parade

Until recently, Polish silent films were almost completely unknown, not just around the world but even in Poland itself. The reason for this is that very few have survived to the present day, with some having survived only in fragments, and almost all of them being difficult to access. Fortunately, new technologies have allowed some of these oldest film artefacts to be digitised and made available to viewers. Awareness of the achievements of early Polish cinema has been increasing around the world since 2016, when a separate section was devoted to it at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy. Five feature films and around a dozen documentaries were presented to the international audiences there, with the productions being so well received that other world festivals soon became interested in screening them as well, such as Bologna, Istanbul, San Francisco and Mexico. As a result, cinemagoers abroad have had more opportunities to find out (or learn) that interesting and valuable films were being made in Poland “before Andrzej Wajda”.

When one talks about Polish cinema from this period, it is usually compared with the great masterpieces of world cinema. Of course, in comparison to Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, Battleship Potemkin (1925) by Sergei Eisenstein or Ben Hur (1925) by Fred Niblo, our native pictures can seem cheap and not very spectacular, but in comparison to the average European or American production, they still stand up well. And the Polish actors are certainly not worse than their Western counterparts.

The number of silent films available to viewers is increasing, but there are still some that the wider public doesn’t know. The Silent Movie Festival is a unique opportunity to see some of them. During this edition, we will be able to see Path of Shame from 1929 – a rarely shown but extremely interesting example of a production from the late period of the silent film era. Similarly, a treat for enthusiasts of these old Polish gems will be the amateur documentary Polish Sketch, which shows the country’s most beautiful corners and reveals everyday life as it was in the cities and villages of the 1920s and 1930s. It will be the first screening of this largely unknown film in decades.

Michał Pieńkowski

Polish Sketch

Path of Shame

The Call of the Sea

Tour de Pologne

Cinema has been associated with travel since the very beginning; when the Lumière brothers sent their camera operators off to capture distant places, events and people, film began to bring viewers closer to the world. It became an increasingly attractive and wider-open window for more and more people, a window through which it was possible to see images both of reality and of lands born in the imagination.

The world of silent cinema was – as never before – global. This universal visual language connected international audiences and led to the migration of many creators – actors, directors and camera operators. The Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer could make a film for a Swedish film company in Norway, Alexander Korda, after leaving Budapest, worked in Vienna, Berlin and Paris before finally finding his place in London, while the growing American cinema industry attracted successive waves of European filmmakers. At the same time, this world was opening up to what was local, country-specific and worth discovering by others. Canadian cinema consistently revealed the beauty of nature, as did Scandinavian films, while Hungarian filmmakers relied more on culture, using their native literature as the main inspiration for their films. Japanese cinema, although using Hollywood patterns, underwent the sound revolution much later because of its attachment to the popular silent era character of the benshi, or storyteller. Soviet cinema of the late 1920s, despite the fact that its main direction was set by propaganda productions based on the achievements of the montage school, managed to escape from ideology to rural customs and folklore, showing real working women and not poster-like working people.

What was ordinary and routine for some was exotic and unusual for others – the camera turned out to be a perfect recording tool, an inseparable companion (like a pen or a photo camera) on explorers’ expeditions. It helped two former American soldiers to immortalise the annual migration of Persian nomads while walking with them at the same time, as representatives of Western civilization symbolically returned to the beginning of humanity and repeating the traditions of their migrating ancestors.

Our section is a journey into the past of silent cinema and it is sure to be highly informative, regardless of the choice of which part of the world to visit.

 

Katarzyna Wajda

 

I Was Born, But...

Back to God’s Country

Man of Gold

The Peasant Women of Ryazan

The Twins

Shoes

Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life

Ito, the Beggar Boy

Early cinema not only presented viewers with things that were difficult for them to attain, or were completely unattainable, but often these films also showed people things that they couldn’t see with their own eyes because... they simply didn’t exist. Ancient myths, legends and stories all found a home on the big screen. Lost worlds such as Atlantis, Eldorado and the land of dinosaurs had long fascinated people, and of all the fields of art, cinema was the one most able to transfer viewers to those places.

Dinosaurs rarely appeared on the big screen. The first one was Gertie – a charming, trained, animated diplodocus from 1914, whom our viewers had the opportunity to meet during the last Silent Movie Festival. This time, we will be presenting the first full-length feature film made with the “participation” of these prehistoric animals: The Lost World by Harry Hoyt.

The captivating lost worlds shown in silent cinema were not only visions of prehistoric times, but also of the present. Particularly interesting in terms of their juxtaposition is the movie Three Ages by Keaton and Cline, which humorously depicts the same love struggles of three characters in the Stone Age, ancient Rome and in modern times (i.e. the early 1920s). For the needs of these many adventure films, a lot of incredible scenery was created, which the average viewer could only dream of visiting. The settings for the adventures of the various characters were usually remote, exotic corners of the world, although only a few scenes were actually shot in authentic locations. Most of them were created in a film studio or nearby locations which successfully replicated the more remote destinations. One of the most successful films of this genre at that time was The Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnino Farandola, a film based on the novel by Albert Robida which is included in our programme.

With the advent of sound in the cinema, the way of showing adventures in non-existent lands changed. Alongside that, there was also an evolution in the construction of a film, the acting and, above all, the set design, which became increasingly realistic. It is worth looking at how this challenge was met by silent cinema – which today is also a kind of lost world.

Michał Pieńkowski

The Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnino Farandola

Three Ages

The Lost World

Cinema as we know it today wouldn’t exist if it had not been for the intense migratory movements at the beginning of the 20th century. They affected both ordinary people setting out into the unknown "in search of bread", and also filmmakers seeking understanding of their talent or the possibility to develop it, which they had no chance to do when constrained by the hermetic world of their own domestic film industry. Hollywood – the leading centre of the cinema industry at the beginning of the 20th century – was thus built almost exclusively at the hands of immigrants. The biggest studios of the time, such as Warner Bros. and MGM, were established by entrepreneurs born in Poland. Cinema stars were imported from Sweden (the divine Greta Garbo) or... from Poland, after building a career in Germany first (our biggest star, Pola Negri). To this should be added a whole plethora of directors, cinematographers and members of film crews who went to the United States by ship with grand designs for working in this new industry.

In Europe, too, there was constant movement within the film world. Georg Wilhelm Pabst tempted the beautiful American Louise Brooks to star in his outrageous productions in the Weimar Republic, while Hungarian-born Alexander Korda passed through Austria, Germany, the USA and France before finally making his greatest works in Great Britain, one of which was The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933).

In a word, the golden age of cinema was exceptionally open to talented artists and creators from abroad. The first decades of cinema were a time when only a few people travelled for pleasure. In human consciousness, this cognitive niche was filled by cinema. Viewers have always found looking at a screen with creations by an artist from a different cultural circle extremely attractive. The highlights in the script that unfold in a different way, the unknown, sometimes exotic, customs, or even the completely different type of humour, all placed these immigrants at the forefront of the history of world cinema.

Grzegorz Rogowski

Salomé

Films by Alice Guy-Blaché

The Parson’s Widow

There would be no cinema without technological progress. That’s what made it possible to create all the vital film production facilities and equipment, such as cameras, lighting and film stock. But technological progress, and its subsequent inventions, has actually fascinated filmmakers visually since the dawn of cinema, with one striking example being one of the first films in history – The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) by the Lumière brothers. The moving train shown in the film made an enormous impression on audiences at the screenings. All vehicles, identified with progress and modernity and intriguing people with their dynamics of movement, became a great attraction for viewers. On the other hand, filmmakers’ interest in topics related to technological progress was due to the rapid industrialisation at the turn of the 20th century, which was accompanied by faith in the power of technology. How disastrous this faith could be was shown in the story – filmed so many times – of the Titanic.

Over the years, scriptwriters began to increasingly set the action in their films on transatlantic liners (The Sinking of the Titanic aka In Night and Ice, 1912), aircraft (A Dash Through the Clouds, 1912), luxury trains (A Railway Tragedy, 1904) and even... on submarines (Behind the Door, 1919), airships and hot-air balloons (The Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnino Farandola, 1913). This gave filmmakers the opportunity to search for new forms of artistic expression. The claustrophobic ship interiors intensified the feeling of the dramatic fate of heroes with no chance of escape, while train compartments and corridors with city lights flashing outside the windows perfectly emphasised the mood of uncertainty and temporariness. The presence of these means of transport in films influenced the dynamics of editing and also helped to improve the filming techniques of the camera operators. Cameras were mounted under trains or on the wings of planes, or placed under water – in short, anywhere where the average person could not possibly see the world around them, but a viewer could.

The Not Only By Rail section was developed to show the various intentions of filmmakers when presenting different means of transport on the screen. In the case of The Flying Ace, the plane was a tool helping to build a film world free from racial prejudices – it was therefore an attribute of equality. In The Signal Tower, meanwhile, the train and its impending disaster constitute the main narrative axis, affecting the behaviour of the characters and creating the world in which they move.

Grzegorz Rogowski

A Few Eiffel Towers and Bicycles from the First Decade of the Last Century

The Signal Tower

The Flying Ace

Buster Keaton was born in 1895, the year the Lumière brothers gave their first public film screening. Keaton – the “Great Stone Face”, resisting the attacks of a crazy world, often travelling and constantly in motion – had many adventures in areas of outstanding natural beauty: in the Wild West, at the North Pole, even in the depths of the ocean. He was often partnered by machines, the scale of which corresponded to the size of the challenges facing the world: ships, airships and locomotives (headed by that most famous mechanical star of The General). One stationary “machine” which often accompanied him in his films was the home. It could be an automated, prefabricated or haunted house – but it was always one acting against our hero, in a malicious response to the phrase that Keaton could have uttered after any of his film adventures: “There’s no place like home”. This haven of peace and respite is usually where journeys begin and end – but not for him. In Keaton’s films, the home is just the beginning of a great adventure.

In the year of Keaton’s birth, Georges Méliès attended that first screening staged by the Lumière brothers. Enchanted by the possibilities of the cinematograph, he quickly began making his own films – which were full of tricks, fairy-tale characters and “out of this world” events – based equally on his own original ideas and also adaptations of literary classics (some of which we will see in this section). Using the camera’s creative and illusionist capabilities, Méliès took viewers to new places born in his own imagination. His film studio in Montreuil near Paris – the dream factory of the silent cinema era – was where he created scenography out of canvas and papier mâché, showing the amazing landscapes of the Moon or other exotic corners of the world. He was inspired not only by the great illusionists of the era, but also by Jules Verne – author of many travel and science fiction novels.

Shortly after Georges Méliès first screened A Trip to the Moon to audiences, his fellow directors Cecil M. Hepworth (one of the founders of the British film industry) and Percy Stow invited cinema-goers to go down the Rabbit Hole with them when they brought Lewis Carroll’s book Alice in Wonderland to the big screen. The creators of this first adaptation of Alice’s adventures used film tricks similar to Méliès’s to present on the screen a dream world full of peculiar events and characters, setting off on a journey to the land of the improbable.

 Katarzyna Waletko

 

One Week

The Electric House

Buster Keaton was born in 1895, the year the Lumière brothers gave their first public film screening. Keaton – the “Great Stone Face”, resisting the attacks of a crazy world, often travelling and constantly in motion – had many adventures in areas of outstanding natural beauty: in the Wild West, at the North Pole, even in the depths of the ocean. He was often partnered by machines, the scale of which corresponded to the size of the challenges facing the world: ships, airships and locomotives (headed by that most famous mechanical star of The General). One stationary “machine” which often accompanied him in his films was the home. It could be an automated, prefabricated or haunted house – but it was always one acting against our hero, in a malicious response to the phrase that Keaton could have uttered after any of his film adventures: “There’s no place like home”. This haven of peace and respite is usually where journeys begin and end – but not for him. In Keaton’s films, the home is just the beginning of a great adventure.

In the year of Keaton’s birth, Georges Méliès attended that first screening staged by the Lumière brothers. Enchanted by the possibilities of the cinematograph, he quickly began making his own films – which were full of tricks, fairy-tale characters and “out of this world” events – based equally on his own original ideas and also adaptations of literary classics (some of which we will see in this section). Using the camera’s creative and illusionist capabilities, Méliès took viewers to new places born in his own imagination. His film studio in Montreuil near Paris – the dream factory of the silent cinema era – was where he created scenography out of canvas and papier mâché, showing the amazing landscapes of the Moon or other exotic corners of the world. He was inspired not only by the great illusionists of the era, but also by Jules Verne – author of many travel and science fiction novels.

Shortly after Georges Méliès first screened A Trip to the Moon to audiences, his fellow directors Cecil M. Hepworth (one of the founders of the British film industry) and Percy Stow invited cinema-goers to go down the Rabbit Hole with them when they brought Lewis Carroll’s book Alice in Wonderland to the big screen. The creators of this first adaptation of Alice’s adventures used film tricks similar to Méliès’s to present on the screen a dream world full of peculiar events and characters, setting off on a journey to the land of the improbable.

Katarzyna Waletko

 

Gulliver’s Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants

Alice in Wonderland

Robinson Crusoe

A Trip to the Moon

Around the World a Century Ago

Grand Tour Italiano – Films from the Early 1900s

Early Travelogues

Contakct

National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute

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02-541 Warszawa
tel. +48 22 848 33 33
      +48 22 182 46 41
      +48 22 182 46 42
e-mail: kasa.iluzjon@fina.gov.pl

www.iluzjon.fn.org.pl

For media

Svetlana Furman-Caspar – festival coordination
tel. +48 22 380 49 78
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e-mail: Svetlana.Furman@fina.gov.pl

Beata Żurawska – PR
tel. + 48 662 099 200
e-mail: promocja@fina.gov.pl

Iga Harasimowicz – films
tel. + 48 577 010 384
e-mail: Iga.Harasimowicz@fina.gov.pl

Aneta Norek – music
tel. + 48 668 378 588
e-mail: Aneta.Norek@fina.gov.pl