30th Pordenone Silent Film Festival.
will be held in October 2011 . 1st - 8th

Ex Convento di San Francesco,

Piazza della Motta - Pordenone
Opening hours  9.00 a,m, - 08.00 p.m.
  info.gcm@cinetecadelfriuli.org

For who decided to participate to this event  we recommended  Boutique hotel dei Chiostri a Hip hotel  located in Follina, a delightful little town nestling among the Prosecco hills, only 30 minutes from Pordenone   in the heart of the Treviso area offer a special rate. please contact us : info@hoteldeichiostri.com or call +39 0438 971 805

The world's leading international silent-film festival, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, presented annually in northern Italy, is still going strong after more than a quarter century. The 26th edition of the festival in October 2007 marked a significant milestone: this was the year the festival returned to its original home in the city of Pordenone. Because of the demolition of the Cinema Verdi, the Pordenone theater that had originally housed the screenings, and delays in construction of a new theater to take its place, the festival had temporarily relocated to nearby Sacile for the previous eight years. But in 2007, with the erection of a new Verdi on the site of the old and the resolution of lingering structural issues, the Giornate returned to Pordenone. It was a triumphant homecoming. - J.B. Kaufman (Classic Images, no. 392, Feb. 2008)

Of all the intertitles appearing on screen during the 26th edtion of le Giornate del Cinema Muto, none raised a more knowing laugh than the warning in The Golden Road to Health and Beauty, the English version of a German physical-culture film from the mid-1920s: "Constant sitting is very bad for the body." Just so - especially for a festival that keeps you glued to your seat before celluloid from 9am to past midnight.
Back in its original base of Pordenone in the impractical new Teatro Communale (half ocean liner, half Moby Dick), Italy's prestigious showcase for silent cinema did a fair amount to make the pains bearable. - Geoff Brown (Sight & Sound, Dec. 2007)

- SPECIAL EVENTS
  THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, US 1928; cast: Lillian Gish; mus.: Carl Davis)
- SHOSTAKOVICH & FEKS
- LEV PUSH A Life Erased
- ITALY'S GOLDEN AGE
  30 years of Rediscovery
- MICHAEL KERTESZ
- THE CANON REVISITED - 3
- FROM SILENTS TO SOUND
- THE CORRICK COLLECTION - 5

Dmitri Shostkovich and the Factory of the Eccentric Actor
Dmitri Shostakovich's film scores, often overlooked by musicologists, represent an integral part of his oeuvre.  He wrote  music for some 40 films, and though he was hardly stimulated by the conformist Stalinist epics of Ermler and Chiaureli, at their best his scores realize his ideal of "the third genre", when images and music come together.
His work for silent films was formative. At 18 he was already developing musical ideas as a pianist in silent cinemas in Leningrad. At 23 he became associated with a group of young men, hardly older, who had been making films since they were in their teens, when they had styled themselves "FEKS" -  "The Factory of the Eccentric Actor". 
At first a scandal for its uncompromising novelties, Shostakovich's accompaniment for FEKS'  New Babylon is now reckoned one of the greatest and most influential silent film scores, and was followed by an equally innovative sound accompaniment for Alone. Alongside these, the Giornate will show all the surviving films and fragments of  the FEKS group.  In the sound period Shostakovich was to work frequently with his FEKS associates, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, concluding the 40-year collaboration with the magisterial Hamlet  and King Lear  of Kozintsev.  The Giornate will also show Shostakovich's two "cartoon operas", the banned and never-completed Story of the Priest and his Servant Balda and The Story of the Silly Little Mouse.

Kertesz before Curtiz
Remembered as one of the great names of classic Hollywood (his films included Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce)  it is often forgotten that Michael Curtiz  enjoyed a prolific 14-year career in Europe before arriving in America.  Few of the 48 films he made in his native Hungary, as Mihály Kertész, survive; the Giornate will show the newly rediscovered A Tolonc (The Expulsion, 1914), which already exemplifies his exceptional gift for narrative, pace and character. In Austria, now Michael Kertesz, he made 17 films, which have been generally overlooked by film historians, perhaps because Kertesz' intention was primarily commercial entertainment - art was an incidental asset.  The Giornate's selection from the Austrian era will include Der Junge Medardus, from the novel by Artur Schnitzler, who collaborated on the script, and Das Spielzeug von Paris, Einspänner nr 13 and Der Goldene Schmetterling - all starring the gifted Lili Damita (who was briefly married to Kertesz) and exemplifying Kertesz' special qualities of eroticism and sharp social satire.