IN OUR HOSPITALITY KEATON PUTS AN END TO A LONG-RUNNING FAMILY FEUD

The programme for Saturday 11 October 2025

Repeat of the special closing event on Sunday 12 October

Buster forever. As we did for the pre-opening, we will officially close the 44th edition of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival with Buster Keaton on Saturday 11 October at 9 p.m. at the Teatro Verdi in Pordenone, with a repeat on Sunday 12 October at 4.30 in collaboration with Teatro Verdi. Keaton’s first feature-length film, 1923’s Our Hospitality marked the start of the artist’s golden period. At just 28 years old, Keaton boldly challenged the rules of comedy with a nine-minute dramatic prologue, which he then developed into a plot rich in romantic and lyrical tones. Keaton stated that Our Hospitality was one of his favourite films, perhaps in part for personal reasons, because it was the last film he worked on with his dear friend and colleague since vaudeville days, “Big Joe Roberts”, who died a short time later. Another feature of Our Hospitality, that would never be repeated, is the presence of some of Buster’s family members: his father Joe, his fourteen-month-old son Joseph Keaton Jr. and his wife Natalie Talmadge, whom he’d recently married. This was the last time Natalie would appear alongside her husband, and the scene in which Buster courts her is one of the most romantic he ever created. The musical accompaniment is provided by Ljubljana’s Orchestra of the Imaginary conducted by Andrej Goričar, who also composed the score. This is a very significant choice in the year of GO!2025, Nova Gorica-Gorizia European Capital of Culture.

On Saturday 11 October, the morning’s feature will be shown at Cinemazero as orchestra rehearsals for the closing film will be held at the Teatro Verdi. At 9 a.m., we present The Scarlet Drop (1918) by John Ford. This western by the director of Ombre Rosse had long been believed lost before being miraculously found in Chile.

It remains to be confirmed whether the 1923 film La gerla di papà Martin by Mario Bonnard (at 10.30) was shot in Genoa, though the region’s most important scholar believed that it was filmed in Liguria. Unlike his previous work, the film adaptation of I Promessi Sposi, Bonnard chose here to create a more intimate popular drama with no well-known stars. In fact, some of the young actors would go on to become important names in the history of Italian cinema, including Giuseppe Amato, who later produced Umberto D and La dolce vita, and Enzo Biliotti, who was much in demand as a character actor until the 1960s.

The final film in our Ukrainian Children’s Films section presented at Cinemazero at noon, is Congratulations on Your Promotion, from 1932, by Yivha Hryhorovych, a pioneering female director who addresses the theme of education during a period in which the party line was constantly changing.

The programme starts up again at 2 p.m. at Teatro Verdi with short films from the Guerra Zacarias collection housed at the Cineteca Nacional de México. Thanks to careful restorations, these films bring out the full chromatic range of various colour processes used in the silent period.

At 3.15, the screen explodes with Charlie Chaplin’s rascals, the children who performed alongside him (naturally, with a special place for Jackie Coogan) or who imitated him. Coogan was the most popular child star in the 1920s, forever linked to Chaplin, who launched him in The Kid. In that same year Coogan made My Boy, which features on our programme. In this film, we’re even more impressed by the young star’s incredible emotional range, from natural to comic to dramatic.

We bid farewell to Italia Almirante Manzini at 5.15 with L’ombra (The Shadow) (1923), directed by Mario Almirante. This atypical melodrama examines morally problematic issues: betrayal in love and in friendship, illness, and a child born of an extramarital affair. Manzini has said that her character in L’ombra was her favourite of all the roles she played in cinema.

The Silent Film Festival bids its audiences adieu with two symbols of that glorious age. Before Buster Keaton’s film, we watch Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona as they sightsee in Venice and Torcello. The year is 1959, time has passed, but Chaplin’s grace and smile still give comfort and inspire hope for a better world.

On Saturday 11 October the online festival features two shows, at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., both available for the following 48 hours. The first offering is a trip around the world that takes us from Aleppo in 1916 with a short documentary on the city; to Rio de Janeiro in 1931 with La capitale du Brésil; then to Kharkiv in the late 1920s with Scenes from a Soviet City by Dmytro Dalskyi. The musical accompaniment is by Mauro Colombis. The last show is dedicated to great American comedy: Soldier Man (1928) by Harry Edwards, starring Harry Langdon, precedes Are Parents People? (1925) by Malcom St. Clair, accompanied respectively by Mauro Colombis and Neil Brand. 

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.