NEWCASTLE SCREENINGS 2012 N - Australia's Silent Film Festival

NEWCASTLE
SCREENINGS 2012
N
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 10
Events Cinema 183-185 King Street Newcastle
Digital restorations with live music
Tickets through Festival website www.ozsilentfilmfestival.com.au
$15/$10 concession Festival Pass to both sessions $28/$18 concession
Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr.@2pm
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger @4pm
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Saturday, November 10
2pm to 3.30pm
Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928) 69 minutes One of Keaton’s greatest feature films with breathtaking
stunts and action!
Saturday, November 10
4pm-5.45pm
The Lodger (1927) 99 mins A quintessential Hitchcock psychological thriller.
Musical accompaniment by Greg Smith on keyboards.
PROGRAM NOTES BY BARBARA UNDERWOOD
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STEAMBOAT BILL JR. (1928)
69 minutes USA
Saturday November 10 @ 2 pm
Director: Charles Reisner Starring: Buster Keaton
No doubt the most recognised name and face of silent comedy next to Charlie Chaplin is Buster Keaton. One of the many reasons why
Steamboat Bill Jr. is so highly acclaimed today is that it features one of the most famous and breathtaking stunts in film history. Filmed in
Sacramento, California, with a production cost of $135,000, breakaway street sets and riverbanks were constructed and then their
destruction by six powerful Liberty-motor wind machines was filmed for the famous hurricane scene.
Keaton himself was suspended by a cable from a forty metre crane which turned him around, as if airborne in the wind storm.
Buster who plays the sensitive college boy son, Bill Jr., reluctantly learns the river boating trade from his tough and grouchy father but is
more interested in the daughter of his father’s riverboat rival, which leads to escalating antics, culminating in the amazing windstorm
scenes.
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The Lodger - A story of the London Fog (1927) Great Britain 99 minutes
Saturday November 10 @4pm
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Novel written by Marie Belloc Lowndes.
Cast : Ivor Novello, Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney, June Tripp, Malcolm Keen, Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville.
The Festival acknowledges the generous assistance Park Circus Ltd.
Highly acclaimed as Alfred Hitchcock’s best and most popular silent film, The Lodger is also an outstanding example of the visually
artistic heights cinema had reached in the year 1927. In fact, the entire decade of the 1920s experienced rapid artistic and dramatic
development, just as the previous two decades of motion pictures were revolutionary and ground-breaking.
When editing, narrative and dialogue using title cards or intertitles had been mastered by the end of the 1910s, filmmakers began turning
to the world of art and culture around them for new ideas and inspiration. Two of the most influential styles successfully expressed in
early cinema were German Expressionism and Soviet Avant Garde.
Alfred Hitchcock acknowledged that he was greatly inspired by German Expressionist directors F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang when he
worked at the famous old Babelsberg Studio in Berlin in the mid-1920s where he became well acquainted with the techniques and ideas
behind Expressionism. In film, this art genre inspired the use of stark light and shadow to create mood and atmosphere, unusual camera
angles and motion, and highly stylized and expressive acting, all in varying degrees.
Hitchcock took the best of these techniques and blended them with his own style and ideas to create The Lodger, which is now regarded
as his first true Hitchcockian film, although his lesser-known earlier film, Blackmail (1926), also clearly reveals all the famous hallmarks of
the classic Hitchcock mystery thriller.
The Lodger was adapted for the screen from the 1913 novel of the same name by Marie Belloc Lowndes, who based this ‘story of the
London Fog’ on the Jack the Ripper murders. Such a subject is ideally suited to the Expressionist style, but Hitchcock uses these
techniques sparingly and subtly, while adding other poignant qualities.
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An example of one such unforgettable scene is viewing the upstairs lodger pacing in his room through a transparent, glass ceiling while
the candelabra shakes to the vibrations of his restless footsteps. These few seconds of visual cinematic genius conveys more than
sounds or spoken words could express, and this is, in fact, the essence of the art of the silent film.
Another stroke of genius, perhaps, was to cast the enigmatic and multi-talented Welsh actor, Ivor Novello in the lead role because his
mere appearance as the Lodger is striking, while his long thin hands and unusual manner cause as much distress and unease in the
viewer as among the family who is taking in this eerie stranger. It is their daughter, Daisy, however, who soon sees other qualities in
him and creates a romantic triangle involving the detective who is trying to woo her.
Tension and suspense escalate throughout the film as the viewer is continually tormented with the question of whether the lodger is the
infamous serial killer of blonde women, or whether his suspicious behaviour has another explanation.
Just as the real life murders of Jack the Ripper gripped an entire nation, so did The Lodger, and its success resulted an adaptation for
the CBS radio series, Suspense, and four further remakes: the early sound version of The Lodger (1932), also starring Ivor Novello, a
1944 version starring George Sanders and Merle Oberon, and in 1953 Jack Palance played the lodger in Man in the Attic.
The newest remake of The Lodger was directed by David Ondaatje in 2009, this time set in West Hollywood but with references to Jack
the Ripper and still firmly based on the original novel by Marie Lowndes.
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AUSTRALIA'S SILENT FILM FESTIVAL
www.ozsilentfilmfestival.com.au
Phone 0419267318
info@ozsilentfilmfestival.com.au
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We acknowledge the invaluable and generous support from the renowned David Shepard, Film Preservation Associates and
Blackhawk Films, Jeff Masino and Flicker Alley, Lobster Films and the sublime flair and talents of Stephanie Khoo, Shana
Dennis and Frank Murri and the Newcastle Film Society.
Please visit and read about your favourite silent film with the superb reviews at Amazon by the Festival’s tireless supporter,
Barbara Underwood, whose notes grace these pages.
www.ozsilentfilmfestival.com.au
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