00:13musica
00:16when you come to Porto None for the film festival this is the place where you
00:19usually come first it's the cloister of the municipal library and it's where we
00:23have our offices and where you pick up your accreditation it's also a fitting
00:28place for me to start talking about our streaming program for 2026. Our first program forms
00:35part of one of the largest series we have this year, Weimar Uncensored, Taboos and Transgressions
00:40in German Cinema 1919-1920. This is a two-part series that will be continuing in 2027, curated
00:47by Tony Case and Michael Cowan, looking at this very fecund period in German cinema when
00:52there was no federal film censorship. When looking at these films, it's important to
00:56remember where this is all coming from. Germany, of course, had been crushed after the First
01:00World War. The country was in ruins, economic turmoil. And at the same time, we rethink in
01:07popular culture of this explosion of artistic freedom, which certainly was the case. We
01:12think of people like Anita Berber, Magnus Hirschfeld in fiction, Louise Brooks' Pandora's Box,
01:18of course, Sally Bowles in Cabaret. At the same time, of course, there's a reverse reaction
01:24to all of this, a far-right movement that, of course, then comes into power later in the
01:2930s. It's important to have those two elements in mind when we're looking at these films. As
01:35the curators of the section have written in their superlative notes for the catalog, and
01:39this is a quote taken together, the films register the effective states of a society in turmoil.
01:45In the short period of time when there was no censorship, Germany saw an explosion of films
01:50about prostitution and lust, Satanism and drug addiction. It was a moment that was shut down
01:56very quickly because censorship came in towards the end of 1920, and many of these films that were
02:01released without censorship were then cut afterwards or banned completely or banned for minors. We have
02:08done a lot of research looking into the archives to try to find films that fit these themes. There was
02:14an
02:14article in the late 1919 that listed a group of films that were considered the most heinous, the most
02:21morally unfit for consumption. We looked into those films. Sadly, only one is known to survive, called
02:28Hedez Racha, Hedez Revenge, which is indeed being screened here during the festival, not in streaming,
02:33however, but I do hope you have a chance to see that sometime soon. There's an understanding here that at
02:38the
02:38same time that these films are being made, there's also something that was undercutting them. Hedez Racha,
02:44for example, right-wing militias in 1919 interrupted screenings to shut this down because it was
02:51considered so morally heinous. In many cases, they were called Aufklärungsfilm, enlightenment films,
02:56enlightenment in the sense really of sexual enlightenment. And so, as you can imagine,
03:01with the concept of taboos and transgressions, these were also very popular. Today's feature is
03:06Die Teufelskirche, 1919, directed by Hans Mierendorf, a director who's been largely forgotten
03:11today. He was also an actor. And it's a film about selling one's soul to the devil. It's a double
03:17story
03:18in a sense. It's about a woman, a rather voluptuous woman, played by Agnes Staub, who sells her soul to
03:23the devil in order to have a child she can't conceive. And I'd like us to think a little bit
03:27more about that
03:28idea of women who will do anything to conceive. Even later on, I think of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods,
03:35where a woman basically sells her soul to a witch in order to conceive. So that's something that's
03:38very much in our zeitgeist. And that's paired with a pastor who basically sells his soul to the devil
03:45in order to have a new church built. The whole film is very much suffused with the seduction of these
03:52people by the devil, played by Hans Reykopf. When censorship did come back into force in late 1920,
03:58the film was indeed banned. The censors complained of unbound sexual excess. It was the same fate that
04:05would happen to Blonde's Gift, which is the film that we're streaming on Wednesday. I want to add
04:10here, very importantly, the film is incomplete. The first reel is missing, but iFilm Museum has done a
04:16wonderful job in making the narrative completely understandable. They've added title cards that fill in
04:22that gap. What's also very exciting is that when we discussed wanting to screen this film, they
04:27discovered that they had the prologue, which had for many, many years been believed to be lost. So that
04:33has been integrated into this film, and this is the first time that we're able to see these two parts
04:38together. The prologue, which is a wonderful, expressionistic, expressive, and very seductive
04:44scenes of the devil himself with the rest of the film. On a lighter note, however, preceding the film
04:52is the first of our Phantom Tram Rides. This is a program that's been curated by Lawrence Knapper,
04:57that's looking at early cinema when there was such a sense of excitement of putting a camera on the
05:03front of a tram and going through urban streets. This is not train rides, but tram rides is an important
05:09distinction in that it's far more urban and also suburban. Remember that one of the reasons why
05:14suburbs grew to such an extent at this moment was because tram lines were being extended and that
05:20allowed for commuters to move from work to their homes and vice versa. And it's a lovely way of
05:26entering into the spirit of the festival itself, the excitement of movement, the excitement of seeing
05:32people who are looking at the camera and just the newness of it all, the freshness of it all.
05:38Making it all come together, making it all work so beautifully, is the music of Gunther Buchwald and Frank
05:43Boccius. So enjoy the screening and I very much hope to see you later on in the coming days.
