Journal of Film Preservation N° 60/61 - FIAF

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 1999
Hillel Tryster
It is no secret that film festivals are creatures of habit; the major ones
are indelibly associated with certain times of year in the minds of
those who attend. They are also creatures of place, most of them
being referred to by the name of the city in which they are held. For
a festival to pull up its roots and move is about the most radical
change it could undergo. Yet that is precisely what the long-running
Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto) did
last year and any criticism of the results must be tempered by an
appreciation of the difficulty of the task.
A move had been threatened for years, due to the ever-imminent
demolition of the festival’s main home, Pordenone’s Verdi cinema. The
new venue was nearby, only a couple of train stations down the line
at Sacile. Nobody ever pretended this enormous disruption to the festival’s
routine would be easy, especially not the organizers (Director
David Robinson had a few things to say about the eggs that must be
broken to make an omelette). Immediately after the event, specific
steps were announced to improve the issues that had been most
problematic (accommodation and transport). Relatively few attendees
were able to stay in Sacile itself; most slept in Pordenone, with others
scattered about in smaller townships. Good rail connections were
available to those unwilling to rely on the festival’s shuttle bus service
and some kind of award for resourcefulness ought to go to Yuri
Tsivian, who was seen arriving at a screening on rollerblades.
Two Sacile cinemas, the Zancanaro and the smaller Ruffo, only a few
minutes walk from each other, served the festival. Although quite a
few items had repeat screenings, some very hard choices had to be
made, as, indeed, they will now be made in summation, for the
program was one of the richest in the festival’s nearly two decades of
history (at one point during the week I had the frustrating experience
of standing approximately midway between the two cinemas and
being accosted by people going in opposite directions, telling me I
couldn’t possibly miss what they were about to see).
The main program dealt with the Nordic cinema of the Twenties,
following on from an earlier exploration held in the 1980s. Aki
Kaurismaki’s new film, Juha , one of the few silents made since talkies
came in, opened the program. For comparison, one could also see
Mauritz Stiller’s Johan (1921), based on the same Juhani Aho novel.
Strikingly beautiful visuals characterized many of these films (the
home movies of Julius Jaenzon, Victor Sjostrom’s cameraman, were
also shown and proved no less a feast for the eyes). One of the
outstanding examples of this was Gunnar Sommerfeldt’s The Growth of
the Soil (1921), lost for decades, rediscovered in 16 mm in the 1970s
and finally restored from a 35 mm tinted print in the 1990s. It is
58 Journal of Film Preservation / 60/61 / 2000