A final post on this year’s online festival from Pordenone. How did I find the selection of films this year? And was my experience of the festival any different from last year?
Films & themes. As was the case last year, I thought the range of online material was pleasingly diverse. Geographically, we went around a good number of locations across Europe and America—with occasional forays into Asia and the Far East. The short films were the most varied and contained any number of extraordinary delights, from slapstick oddities to travelogue beauties. Their selection was wonderful and represent an endless source of fascination to me. But I feel there were less feature films produced outside the central protagonists of Germany and the US than last year. (Even Italy counted only one online film in 2023.) Not that this is a bad thing, and this concentration is probably inevitable given that it reflected the major theme devoted to Harry Piel. Besides, my favourite film this year was German: Der Berg des Schicksals. (And it was a shame that I’d seen this same restoration before.) Of course, there is no solution to the problem of condensing a hugely complex, jampacked eight-day live festival into an online festival of eight evenings. The Ruritanian theme was a theme in name only: we got just the one feature (Eine Frau von Format). It was a nice follow-up to last year’s more developed theme, but only to those of us who were familiar with it from then. Conversely, I felt that there was both too much Harry Piel and not enough. Too much because I didn’t enjoy enough of the Piel films shown; too little because I was intrigued enough to see more. The wider variety of Piel films shown at the live festival would surely answer my curiosity either way. But seeing any of them is a novelty, so however representative I’m ultimately glad they were included. The only film I could actively have done without from the online material was 9½, which was not a silent film at all—and the subject matter of which was overwhelmingly devoted to the decades postdating the coming of sound.
Presentation, access, availability. I was again blessed with a smooth technical experience: I had no issues playing the films or using subtitles (which were less changeable, but less problematic by default, this year). This year, the films were available for 48 rather than 24 hours after coming online. This was a great decision, as even a 24-hour period can be tight as far as viewing goes. (As before, I was “attending” this festival around my normal working hours.) Still, I didn’t feel I had the time to watch more than one or two of the video introductions offered as preludes to the films. I do regret this, but as ever I really did need to press ahead with my viewing schedule to get through everything on time. In terms of musical presentation, there was the usual high-quality piano accompaniment. The only thing lacking was an orchestral score among the streamed soundtracks this year. I do not count the music for 9½, which was ostensibly by the Ensemble Conservatorio G.B. Martini Bologna—but in reality was as much a soundscape of electronic effects as that of an ensemble of instruments. Nor do I count Donald Sosin’s piano score with occasional jazz band interpolations for Circe the Enchantress. As with Daan Van Der Hurk’s score for The Lady last year, the occasional presence of orchestral sounds on a score otherwise composed for piano is not enough to qualify it as “orchestral”. (Just imagine a piano concerto which featured a piano for barely five minutes of its thirty-minute runtime.) One of the great pleasures of last year was that the final film—Up In Mabel’s Room (1926)—was accompanied by an orchestral score. This gave the sense that the film was more of an “event”, a kind of musical treat to work up to and savour; through the extra dimension of the score, the presentation became a kind of climax to the online festival. How I wish that Der Berg des Schicksals had been given with a full orchestral score as an equivalent summit (in every sense) for 2023.
Participation & experience. I can only repeat what I said last year: for all the commitment of time across a dedicated period, I do not feel that I have “attended” a festival. That said, I did at least dip into some of the “film fair” book presentations/Q&As made available online as part of the streamed content. (And yes, I’ve been trying to avoid the phrase “streamed content”, but there’s only so often I can write “online festival” without it sounding hollow. Videos. Videos on the internet. That’s what it all boils down to.) I didn’t feel the urge to write about them because this meant more work, and I can easily find, read, and review here my thoughts on any of the books covered at the fairs. But is this “participation”? No. Put bluntly, I have not had a single conversation with any other viewer about my experiences of Pordenone during the festival. Writing these pieces has been my only outlet, and this has of course been a solitary activity. Even this took a hit when, as I mentioned yesterday, I succumbed to the world’s most popular virus and ended up in bed for three days. (Who says you need to travel to get sick?) A sense of continuity is just about the only thing that gave me a sense of genuine participation in the festival as an event, and this was easily disrupted. Rather, the illusion of participation was easily disrupted: it was all too easy to fall away from my schedule and pick it up again afterwards. There was no-one to notice but me. Knowing people who were there made the remoteness of my online “attendance” all the more pointed. It’s pointless to feel jealous, but how can one not envy them their participation? At least the online festival allows one to cling on to the coattails of the real thing.
On writing this blog. Finally, I must observe that it’s now been a little over a year since I began writing this blog. It was the online experience of Pordenone in 2022 that gave me the impetus to start it, and a year later I feel I should reflect a little on the experience. Well, to state the obvious: it’s been a lot of work. My ambition to write something each week proved almost immediately impractical. I have vaguely settled on my fortnightly piece, though even this can take more time than I wish. It’s no-one’s fault by my own, of course. I enjoy getting to grips with a film, and the greater the film the greater the desire to wrestle with it in prose. The result of this strange urge across the past year has resulted in my writing nearly 180,000 words for this blog, of which almost 20,000 have been devoted to Pordenone 2023. As I said last year, I can’t imagine writing anything like this amount of material if I were actually there in Pordenone. Image captures are also a luxury of remote viewing and the ability to go back through a film and pause. So, there must be some slight advantage—as far as writing goes—in not going. But for whom am I writing? For myself, I suppose, in the first instance. And beyond that, in the hope that something of what I write will be useful or engaging or diverting for unknown readers. Alan Bennett once observed that writing is “in many ways a substitute for doing”, and I’m sure that’s true in my case. I no longer have an academic career (if I ever quite had one), so with no courses to teach and no students to tend, writing is my one way of still being involved with silent film. If my doing days are done, my writing days are not.
Paul Cuff
The Realm of Silence 