Tweet Bonn silent film festival 2012

The programme for this year's Bonn festival is out:

16 August 2012
RACHMANINOFF'S PRELUDE (GB 1927, Castleton Knight, 7 min)
THE WEDDING MARCH (USA 1928, Erich von Stroheim,109 min)
17 August 2012
PAY DAY (USA 1922, Charles Chaplin, 23 min)
MUTTER KRAUSENS FAHRT INS GLÜCK (Deutschland 1929, Piel Jutzi, 133 min)
18 August 2012
ROTAIE (Italy 1929, Mario Camerini, 72 min)
TOKYO NO EIYU (Japan 1935, Hiroshi Shimizu, 64 min)
19 August 2012
NICK WINTER ET LE RAPT DE MADEMOISELLE WERNER (Frankreich 1911, Paul Garbagni, 6 min)
POLIS PAULUS‘ PASKASMÄLL (Sweden 1925, Gustaf Molander, 103 min)
20 August 2012
DEN HVIDE SLAVEHANDEL II (Denmark 1911, August Blom, 43 min)
DADDY LONGLEGS (USA 1919, Marshall Neilan, 85 min)
21 August 2012
WHY GIRLS SAY NO (USA 1927, Leo McCarey, 23 min)
EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE (USA 1927, Allan Dwan, 90 min)
22 August 2012
LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (France 1902, Georges Méliès, 15 min)
DAS WEISSE STADION (Switzerland 1928, Arnold Fanck, 100 min)
23 August 2012
THE JEST (GB 1921, Fred Paul, 12 min)
THREE BAD MEN (USA 1926, John Ford, 91 min)
24 August 2012
A DAY 100 YEARS HENCE (Japan 1924, Shigeji Ogino, 11 min)
L’INHUMAINE (France 1924, Marcel L’Herbier, 134 min)
25 August 2012
GEFAHREN DER BRAUTZEIT (Deutschland 1929, Fred Sauer, 75 min)
SEVEN CHANCES (USA 1925, Buster Keaton, 70 min
26 August 2012
OCTOBER (Sowjetunion 1927, Sergej Eisenstein, 116 min)

Another solid line-up.

WOW! What a lineup! I wished we had a festival half as good in France...

Films from all over, cool. Looks like a great lineup.

And what's more - it's free!
Oh...it's open-air, so you may get rained on, but the plastic ponchos are dirt cheap.

The detailed programme brochure is now available for download. Films are described in German and English. You can find it here by clicking on "Programmheft":

http://www.foerderverein-filmkultur.de/28-internationale-stummfilmtage-programm/

Tonight the 2012 festival concludes with Eisenstein's OCTOBER. Very unusually it is not accompanied live but by a pre-recorded orchestral score. That and the fact that I find the propaganda in this film rather heavy-handed are reasons enough for me not to go tonight. So I've got the time to post a little round-up of this year's festival.
It started with THE WEDDING MARCH. I love this film and was really excited to see it on the big screen. The copy was from the Library of Congress and remarkable for the fact that the Corpus Christi procession was in glorious two-strip Technicolor.
The second night started with Chaplin's PAY DAY and went on to present the new restoration of MUTTER KRAUSENS FAHRT INS GLÜCK. The latter is one of the classics of German silent cinema and a film I have always liked a lot despite having seen it only in a fairly murky German TV broadcast from the 1980s. Now it is back in all its glory. The film is ostensibly socialist propaganda but does without crude clichés. It is very much in the vein of a Griffith social drama like THE MOTHER AND THE LAW or A CORNER IN WHEAT. We see the Berlin Lumpenproletariat in their misery in images inspired by the graphic artist Heinrich Zille, who was extremely popular at the time. Joachim Bärenz accompanied. I always knew he was the man for great feelings, but he excelled himself on both nights. The short film the first night was a British effort called PRELUDE, which was basically a quirky proto-music video to go with Rachmaninov's prelude. I had never heard Mr Bärenz play a straight classical piece and was very impressed.
The third night opened with the Italian classic ROTAIE. A destitute and desperate young couple find a wad of cash and blow it all in a high-rolling resort on Lake Como or some such. Penniless again they are apparently back to square one. This is where they meet a family of Italian peasants and this is where it becomes hard to ignore that Italy was already a fascist state in 1929, when the film was made, for now the boy discovers the joys of wielding a spanner in the service of the Italian fatherland, while the girl starts knitting baby booties. A visually beautiful and accomplished film with a fairly banal and predictable story and a rather engaging Käthe von Nagy in the female lead. Stephen Horne accompanied very competently.
This was followed by the Japanese film TOKYO NO EIYU, directed by Hiroshi Shimizu in 1935(!). Very much in the vein of the silent Naruses this is a dark and sad story of family breakdown and guilt. In the end everybody is either dead or crying. This is the umpteenth Japanese film from that period that I have seen that has a scene of children playing in a field among big concrete drainage pipes. Obviously this is meant to symbolize change and the new times, but could you Japanese directors please stop copying from one another? Sheesh!
I missed Sunday's Danish slapstick outing and returned on Monday to see another Danish classic: DEN HVIDE SLAVEHANDELS SIDSTE OFFER from 1911. This is as bad as some people think all silents are, with much rolling of eyes and twitching moustaches. The festival had picked the film as it was one of Franz Kafka's favourites and they had a symposion on Kafka and the cinema running alongside. The film was accompanied by a narrator who basically made fun of it, which I did not like one bit, as these were cheap laughs and I feel even fairly hoary films deserve respect as artifacts of a particular time. The second film that night was another Kafka favourite: DADDY LONG-LEGS. I do like Mary and in this film you get two Marys for the price of one: child-Mary and youg woman-Mary. The orphanage scenes in the first half are a sheer delight. Again Stephen Horne put in a good show.
On Tuesday came the film I had most eagerly anticipated this year: EAST SIDE WEST SIDE. Even though the story is a little "Murphys and Cohens" formulaic the film has George O'Brien and late-1920s New York City and both are used mercilessly as eye-candy to sell it. It seems George hardly ever has a shirt on here, his impressive torso being the unique selling point. I even thought I detected a homo-erotic undertone in the gym scenes or was that just me? Anyway, a beautiful film about a handsome guy in a very impressive setting. Neil Brand accompanied extremely well with many allusions to Rhapsody in Blue. That was a delight in itself. The short that night was the Max Davidson comedy WHY GIRLS SAY NO. Well-chosen.
I missed a couple of nights and returned last night for GEFAHREN DER BRAUTZEIT, an early outing of Marlene Dietrich in a Willy Forst vehicle from 1929. A rather uneven film of two halves, but with a very beautiful Marlene, who is still allowed to have a little puppy fat and to look natural, basically before Sternberg got to sculpt her into the femme fatale from outer space. This was followed by SEVEN CHANCES, which brought the house down and deservedly so. While this was accompanied by stalwart Günter A. Buchwald, GEFAHREN DER BRAUTZEIT had Richard Siedhoff on the piano, a young man from Weimar who played Bonn for the first time this year. He did an excellent job and I sincerely hope to hear a lot more of him in future.
It was a good festival this year, with hot nights and incredible audience numbers. More often than not they had to close the doors long before the film started, as the courtyard's capacity of 1500 people was reached. Was this due to THE ARTIST's success? Who knows. Nevertheless it is very encouraging.