Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2010 / 29th Pordenone Silent Film Festival: Catalogo/Catalogue

Pordenone (Italy): Associatzione Culturale "Le Giornate del Cinema Muto". Near Fine. 2010. (29th Annual). Softcover. [nice clean copy, slight spine role, tiny bump to lower rear corner]. (B&W photographs) Program book for the 29th Pordenone Silent Film Festival, an annual celebration of the international silent cinema. Among this edition's highlights were programs devoted to: Japanese silent cinema (featuring the work of directors Yasujiro Shimazu, Hiroshi Shimizi, and Kiyohiko Ushihara); the careers of three filmmakers under the Stalin regime in Soviet Russia (Abram Room, Mikhail Kalatozov, and Lev Fedorovich Push); French silent film comedians active between 1907 and 1914; "75 Years of Film Archives," honoring the anniversary of the founding of two of the world's great film archives, the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Film Library in the U.K.; an extensive program of "Restorations and Rediscoveries"; a survey of the history of "Making of" documentaries, about the production of individual films; and more -- with, of course, erudite program notes (in both Italian and English) accompanying all. There were relatively few of the canonical "classics" screened at this year's festival -- THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, the Douglas Fairbanks ROBIN HOOD, Buster Keaton's THE NAVIGATOR, and WINGS was about it -- but film lovers don't flock to Pordenone to see the same-old-same-old, and among the over 200 other films shown were undoubtedly a goodly number of revelations and likely even a few masterpieces. Wish I coulda been there. .