Programme for Saturday, 4 October 2025 at Pordenone’s Teatro Verdi

The opening event for the 44th edition of the “Giornate del Cinema Muto” Pordenone Silent Film Festival, on Saturday 4 October at 9.00 p.m. at Pordenone’s Teatro Verdi, is dedicated to France’s most famous swordsman, Cyrano de Bergerac. Staged with enormous success in 1897, the play by Edmond Rostand was adapted multiple times for the screen, in the silent era most notably by Augusto Genina. The festival is presenting Cyrano de Bergerac (or, in its original Italian title, Cirano di Bergerac) in a magnificent restoration by Film Preservation Associates and Blackhawk Films that brings all the tonalities of the original colours to life. Promising to make the evening at the Teatro Verdi even more exceptional is the full orchestral score by American composer and director Kurt Kuenne, who enthusiastically accepted an invitation from festival director Jay Weissberg to revise and update the music he composed for the film 25 years ago. Kurt will be in the audience to hear the premiere of his accompaniment, performed live by the Orchestra da Camera di Pordenone conducted by Ben Palmer.

Cirano di Bergerac (1922-1923) is an entirely Italian production made by the studio UCI, later felled by the crisis of Italian cinema production in the 1920s. Filmed in France and Italy with actors of both nationalities, the film was awarded the First Prize at the Concorso Internazionale di cinematografia in Turin in 1923. The lead performance from Pierre Magnier, with the character’s distinguishing giant nose, was highly praised by critics, recalling the great Coquelin’s stage performance in the first ever presentation of Rostand’s play. Linda Moglia is Roxane, and Genina’s brother-in-law and future director Mario Camerini is credited with the screenplay. The film remains true to the original play, but the rich visual experience, with magical sets by Caramba and epic outdoor crowd scenes, places Cyrano de Bergerac amongst the highest works of silent film. Augusto Genina was lauded as one of the greatest Italian directors, and one of the few to achieve a level of excellence in both silent film and sound. He turned his hand to various genres, navigating challenging historical and economic times, also working abroad in France and Germany (he directed, among others, Prix de Beauté, starring the legendary Louise Brooks, with a screenplay by René Clair and Georg Wilhelm Pabst), always remaining faithful to his idea of cinema, to the “enthralling but simultaneously fragile reality of its landscapes and its living bodies”, in the words of biographer and scholar Sergio M. Grmek Germani.

The programme for the first day, starting at 2 p.m., includes the continuation of the series dedicated to Italian regions. After Sicily, celebrated last year, it’s time for Liguria, whose landscape, climate and light make it a privileged setting for the early motion picture camera, and it was also an active centre of film production in cinema’s early years. The region gave birth to illustrious filmmakers, from Bartolomeo Pagano to Lyda Borelli, and saw the directorial debut of the young Hitchcock, as he himself recalled when speaking about The Pleasure Garden (1925) during his famous interview with François Truffaut. Divided into three parts, our Liguria programme begins with a series of views of the Riviera’s main scenic attractions and important buildings such as Villa Negro, Mackenzie Castle (designed by the great visionary architect Gino Coppedè), and the Staglieno cemetery.

In 2022, a collector donated about twenty films to the Cineteca del Friuli; two of them had the same title on the box: Il Purgatorio. Upon further analysis, it was discovered that they were not the same film but two different versions, both from 1911, of Dante’s cantica: the first was produced by a small company in Velletri, Helios Film, the other by Società Anonima Ambrosio in Turin, one of the major production companies of the time. Helios had made a name for itself earlier by releasing a version of Dante’s Inferno that beat the competition to the punch. Using the same formula, including the director and actors, Il Purgatorio followed, but it was not as successful, and of the original 700 metres, only 160 have survived. These have been restored by the Cineteca del Friuli and will be previewed at the Giornate. Ambrosio’s version, despite having greater resources and highly acclaimed actors such as Alberto Capozzi and Eleuterio Ridolfi, was less celebrated, and it’s possible that the production company itself did not consider it up to its quality standards. Here too, restoration work was carried out by the Cineteca del Friuli. The two versions of Il Purgatorio are scheduled for 4.15 p.m. at the Teatro Verdi in the Rediscoveries and Restorations series.

 On Saturday 4 October at 9 p.m. (Italian time), the online festival will also start on MyMovies, allowing fans near and far to follow the Giornate from home with a selection of titles every day. Each film session, accompanied by music, is introduced by director Jay Weissberg and remains online for 48 hours. The programme begins with two short films from the main retrospective, “The Chaplin Connection – Six Degrees of Charlie”: The Bond (1918), starring Chaplin himself, and His Day Out, from the same year but starring the actor universally considered to be his best imitator, Billy West; and the feature film A Little Bit of Fluff (1928) starring Charlie’s brother, Sydney, as a newlywed who falls victim to several comical situations.

https://www.mymovies.it/ondemand/giornate-cinema-muto/

 The Pordenone Silent Film Festival / Le Giornate del Cinema Muto is made possible thanks to the support of the Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Ministry of Culture – Direzione Generale Cinema, the city of Pordenone, the Pordenone-Udine Chamber of Commerce, the Fondazione Friuli and with the participation of BCC Pordenonese e Monsile.