Issue 6: Winter 2010
Kilruddery Film Festival 2010
The Kilruddery Silent Film Festival returned for its second edition in March 2010, retitled as simply The Kilruddery Film Festival and with an expanded remit to screen not just silent but ‘lost, overlooked and forgotten cinema' in general. This four-day event takes place in the comparatively isolated surroundings of Killruddery House, Bray, Co. Wicklow, a big house on an estate owned by Lord and Lady Meath. The appropriateness of this setting for the screening of silent films is obvious. The charm and atmosphere of this place, which has held itself somewhat aloof from time's passing, promotes an impression of withdrawing from the distractions of the modern world to focus fully on images of the past. Yet Kilruddery still feels lived-in enough not to seem like a silent movie theme park.
Once the screenings began, however, it became apparent that the genteel coziness of the surroundings, rather than blending into the films projected, instead offered a welcome haven from the often relentlessly harrowing narratives that characterized the silent programming. Gritty social settings and expertly executed dramas of poverty and familial dysfunction dominated the selection.
Chaplin's films were, of course, never afraid to venture amongst impoverished milieux. Special festival guest Kevin Brownlow's fascinating presentation on the making of his (and David Gill's) classic TV series Unknown Chaplin focused on the extraordinary production circumstances of one famous scene in City Lights (1931). If the memory of silent cinema abides in any form in contemporary popular consciousness, it is no doubt in the often abstracted iconic resonance of images of a few select stars (Chaplin, Keaton, Brooks...) or figures (Nosferatu the Vampire, Cesare the Somnambulist...), a vague awareness probably seldom acquired from the films themselves. It is an essentially static notion of silent cinema, one perhaps reinforced by the footage Brownlow presents of Chaplin devising his encounter with the blind flower seller in which his monumental presence is the sun around which the entire film orbits.
Yet, elsewhere, the Kilruddery programme emphasised the extent to which the conquest of cinematic narrative in film's early decades equaled the urge to movement. Julien Duvivier's Poil de Carotte (1925) proved deserving of both the praise that has been lavished on its superb craftsmanship and the reservations voiced over the grotesque characterisation of the abusive mother character. Yet what really astonishes is the animalistic physicality of the child hero's hugely expressive bursts of movement, in which he abandons himself completely to his emotions, becoming an embodied whirlwind of leaping and rolling. The epiphany of Murnau's exquisite tracking shots of the newlyweds running through a vast wheat field in City Girl (1929) after the constricted urban spaces of the opening scenes creates a sense of an environment embracing a character freshly arrived to it. This finds its opposite in Sjostrom's The Wind (1927) in which the hostile landscape turns against a new arrival. A selection of Harold Lloyd short films, added to the programme at the last minute, reflected his usual breath-catching ingenuity in devising elaborate comic stunts that involve his own body hyperactively challenging gravity. And the climax of Borzage's masterpiece Lucky Star (1929), the highlight of the festival's silent offerings, took the prevalent impulse towards movement to its extreme as disabled war veteran Charles Farrell regains the power of mobility through the sheer force of love by running across rugged, snow covered countryside to fight his rival.
Cooper and Schoedsack's Chang (1927), an ode to sheer survival cheerfully forged from documentary footage shot by the two adventurous directors in a Siamese jungle, posits action as the only possible value. Life is a constant and very dynamic struggle, but the tone is closer to slapstick than tragedy. From wisecracking monkeys to high animal casualty rates, Chang runs in the face of any contemporary sense of political correctness. Yet within its irresistibly entertaining crassness, one can find an unquestioning faith in filmed reality that no longer exists. The act of filming these distant places and people, of filming a tiger running through and escaping a lethal trap in one trickery-free take (how many other tigers died in creating that stunt?!) is felt to be sufficiently impressive to allow the filmmakers to edit the footage for the cheapest laughs and thrills, and still lay claim to documentary integrity. Reality is robust enough, Chang assumes, to take this treatment... Compare this to a recent insufferable but hugely popular jungle-set adventure, one which preaches the sort of respect for other cultures and ecological values that would seemingly have set Cooper and Schoedsack scratching their heads, but nevertheless needs eight-foot tall blue aliens and a world entirely comprised of digital effects to exist. Compared to this sadly effete construct, one which has given up on the natural world entirely while pretending to advocate its preservation, it's hard not to feel a troubling and ambivalent nostalgia when confronted with Chang's relentless physicality.
And on the subject of preachy science fiction, far preferable to Avatar (2010) is Maurice Elvey's delicious vision of the near future, High Treason (1929), in which war is averted in 1940 with much noble rhetoric... But not before the audience has been led along a visually imaginative and often sexy parade of details of the society to come...
Although Kilruddery's 2010 line-up was not exclusively comprised of silent era cinema, it was still definitely dominated by it. Finding more modern works to play alongside these vintage films is an inevitably tricky task. Malick's magnificent The New World (2005) was an inspired choice. Along with The Thin Red Line (1998), it's the only work of contemporary Hollywood imbued with the vision of Griffith or Gance, one stemming from a time when epic production values, sophisticated formal experimentation and a very personal sense of poetry could all proudly co-exist in one film. On the other hand, although self-consciously inspired by silent film, Bob Quinn's Budawanny (1987) proved bland fare indeed.
Yet perhaps the happiest fit was ‘Britannica & other stories', a terrific programme of visually dazzling experimental films by John Latham and the great Jeff Keen, curated by Elisa Kay. These artists' films have not forgotten that the work of inventing cinema did not stop eighty or so years ago but needs to continue... And in this process, it must time and again meet and be renewed by its past. As Charles Barr pointed out in his introduction to Sjostrom's astonishing Ingeborg Holm (1913), the oldest film in the festival, the ‘primitive' long takes employed throughout by Sjostrom look startlingly modern when viewed in the light of what Haneke is doing today. Festival director Daniel Fitzpatrick and his team are to be warmly congratulated for creating such an imaginative and congenial space for cinema to meet its past.
-Maximilian Le Cain