Preroll 04 - Cortile - Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025 - Video Dailymotion

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00:00La giornata della Cinemamoto

00:25Pordenone Silent Film Festival

00:26I'm standing here in the courtyard of the bibliothèque, the library

00:30And for those of you who've been to the festival in the past

00:33You know this is where you pick up your accreditation

00:35It's also a very nice meeting point

00:37It's very close to the theatre

00:39So it becomes a kind of also space for relaxation

00:42And sometimes for receptions

00:43The film today is The White Heather 1919

00:47Directed by Maurice Turner

00:48Now last year one of our major retrospectives

00:51Was on the art director Ben Carré

00:53We were hoping that we could bring The White Heather here last year

00:57But it wasn't ready yet

00:59It was thought to be lost for decades

01:00But then in 2022

01:02iFilm Museum discovered a 35mm nitrate tinted and toned print

01:07With Dutch intertitles

01:09Which Rob Byrne and Kathy Rose O'Regan

01:12At San Francisco Film Preserve

01:15Took a hold of

01:16And made an absolutely beautiful restoration

01:18The original English language intertitles are lost

01:21We don't have them

01:22But they went back to two 1897 transcripts of the original melodrama

01:27And found that more or less it corresponded almost in terms of exact translations from the Dutch

01:33So they've reworked and reused the 1897 melodrama intertitles

01:38And as you'll see it fits in beautifully with the film

01:42In many ways this is a classic Maurice Turner film

01:45That means that there's a great sensitivity to light and to shadow, to composition

01:50He's working once again here with his cinematographer René Guissard

01:54Whose work you'll have seen in A Little Bit of Fluff, the Sydney Chaplin film that we screened earlier

01:59And of course he's famous for working on such major titles as Ben-Hur and Madame Saint-Jean

02:06I mentioned the word melodrama earlier

02:09And I'm not using that in a pejorative sense at all

02:12In fact this year Les Diornotes is beginning an annual series looking at melodrama

02:16How it changed from the teens and the twenties

02:19We're focusing on a particular vehicle this year which is East Lynn

02:22Unfortunately neither of those two films are being screened in streaming

02:27But in the future we do hope to continue this to explore how melodrama functions

02:32Why it still matters to us now

02:34The film ends on a really spectacular note thanks to some underwater sea footage

02:41Which was shot by the Williamson Brothers

02:43And if anybody was here last year or saw last year's catalogue

02:46You'll be familiar with the Williamson Brothers

02:48Because we were very fortunate to have the Cinémathèque Française

02:51Restoration of a docu-fiction hybrid called Wonders of the Sea

02:55Which explored how the Williamson's were able to shoot such extraordinary footage underwater

03:02Now for me one of the beauties of the film is connected to John Gilbert

03:07The great star John Gilbert who I have enormous fondness for

03:10Here Gilbert is 21 years old, he turned 22 that year without a moustache

03:16And the film really showcases why he became a star

03:21His sensitivity, his lack of toxic masculinity while being quite masculine at the same time

03:28I think really conveys so much of an aura of performance across the screen

03:35He's lovely, he's sensitive and subtle and I'm sure you will agree as well

03:40Enjoy the screening with the marvellous accompaniment of Stephen Horne

03:44And hope to see you tomorrow

03:46Music

03:47To be continued...

03:52Grazie a tutti.

Preroll 04 - Cortile - Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025

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