Silent film, it seems, is everywhere these days.
Individual screenings and entire festivals – some with live musical accompaniment – are turning up in greater numbers in large cities and small towns across the United States.
This year, silent film has also been in the news with important restorations (Metropolis, and Pandora’s Box), with the discovery of a cache of lost films in New Zealand, and with the repatriation of once-thought-lost films from Russia.
And recently, Kevin Brownlow, the world’s foremost historian of the silent cinema, was award a special Oscar. Brownlow is the first film historian so honored.
Silent film is now in the spotlight in academia – and in a big way.
The Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley has announced that the First International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema will take place February 24-26, 2011. The theme of the conference is “Cinema Across the Media: The 1920s.”
The international, interdisciplinary conference will include keynote lectures, concurrent panels, workshops, and screenings at the Pacific Film Archive with live musical accompaniment. A call for papers was issued earlier this year.
The conference will last two-and-a-half days and include four keynote lectures, 24 other presentations chosen from responses to the call for papers, and a two-week series of silent film screenings with live musical accompaniment at the Pacific Film Archive.
Among those expected to attend the conference are four prominent scholars, each of which have agreed to give keynote lectures at the conference. The four scholars are Tom Gunning (Art History/Cinema & Media Studies, University of Chicago), Gertrud Koch (Theater Studies, Free University of Berlin), Paolo Cherchi Usai (Haghefilm Foundation of Amsterdam, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia), and Anthony Vidler (Architecture, Cooper Union).
All four are preeminent scholars of silent cinema and related fields, and will contribute to the conference’s commitment to fostering high-level intellectual exchange and innovative scholarship across a range of disciplines and national contexts.
The films which will be shown at the Pacific Film Archive as part of the First International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema include Alberto Cavalcanti Rien que les heures (1926), Marcel L’Herbier L’Inhumaine (1926), and a selection of “Silent Comedies of the 1920s.”
More info: The First International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema will take place February 24-26, 2011. A complete schedule of events is not yet known. Further details at http://filmstudies.berkeley.edu/SilentConference/index.html
Thomas Gladysz is an arts journalist and author. Recently, he wrote the introduction to a new “Louise Brooks edition” of Margarete Böhme's classic book, The Diary of a Lost Girl (PandorasBox Press). The book is currently available at University Press Books in Berkeley. Gladysz will speak about his new book at the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris on January 13, followed by a screening of the film at the nearby Action Cinema.
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