Pandora's Box preview

Pandora's Box

Pandora’s Box is a silent movie from 1929. It’s also a million words more than that. Stephen Horne, a musician based at the British Film Institute Southbank building, will provide piano accompaniment. It’s the story of ‘Lulu’, the most tragic woman in fiction, played by Louise Brooks, the most beautiful woman of modern times.

If I may ask you to permit me a preamble... In 1980, after 20 years of investigation and restoration by Kevin Brownlow, Abel Gance's epic, Napoléon (1927) was screened again. Gance died the following year. “En 1983, Kevin Brownlow projette au Palais des Congrès une copie restaurée du Napoléon d’Abel Gance” – and was awarded the Légion d’honneur by the French Government for this work. In restoring the film, Kevin had also restored the standing of Abel Gance, a visionary, and the reputation of the silent movie era.

Kevin Brownlow received an Academy Award in 2010; the first time an Academy Honorary Award had been given to a film preservationist. Kevin’s ‘Oscar’ acceptance speech began: "If you ever wondered what reflected glory looks like, this is it!" A few days after being honoured in Hollywood, Kevin Brownlow introduced his own film Winstanley (1975) and a selection from silent shorts at the Borderlines Film Festival in Hereford. [Douglas Fairbanks Senior was a riot in A Modern Musketeer directed  by Allan Dwan (1917). He takes on an entire tavern full in one fight scene: it is thrilling, silly, violent and the punchline (on ‘intertitle’) got a huge laugh.]

Kevin was a friend of Louise Brooks. The silent movie industry had been utterly neglected: its masterpieces lost, its stars forgotten. He spoke to her at length about her own work. When his first history, The Parade’s Gone By… (1968), was published Louise reprimanded him for not realising the importance of hugely popular actors of the time, such as Clara Bow. We would never have known.

I had a short chat with Kevin at Borderlines five years ago. That’s about the extent of it. I sent him an email last night and received a reply by breakfast.

Dear Robin:
I am having to deal with a TV crew, so forgive haste. How about this quote from my Parade's Gone By...?

"Of all the stars of that era, Louise Brooks has emerged most triumphantly. She has become the object of idolatry for thousands who are far too young to remember her in silents and who base their admiration on revivals at archives and film societies. They see in her an actress of brilliance, a luminescent personality and a beauty unparalleled in film history."

Very best of luck! Give Stephen my regards
Kevin

Robin Clarke

Festival Volunteer

"This could change your child and change you"

If you love cinema and you haven't seen Man with a Movie Camera I just have to urge you to go and see it. Not only because it's a classic silent film playing  with introduction and piano accompaniment by perennial Borderlines favourite, Paul Shallcross. Made by pioneer soviet film-maker and poet Dziga Vertov (real name: Denis Kaufman 'Dziga' from the noise the crank of a mechanical camera makes) it's an exuberant and stimulating city symphony, full of tricks and surprises.

Perhaps the most persuasive way of getting across why everyone, young and old, should see it is to quote one of the best writers on cinema, David Thomson:

 You may very well not know the history: how Dziga Vertov (also known as Denis Kaufman) was an inspiring spirit  and innovator in the field of newsreel in the Bolshevik era. You may not know or be excited by the Soviet urge that film could show the new country to itself as a mechanical marvel. Most important, let's say that you have young children who are monopolized by the screens that convey television, the Internet, and video games. You want to show them something that says "movie" and you have come to realize that "movie" is not really of your child's world. It's not quite like madrigals or belles lettres. But it's changed. Try The Man with a Movie Camera.

You will find that the child's lack of contet or narrative guilt accepts easily Vertov's conceit of the cameraman as everyman - the proletarian hero who has the powere and the camera knowledge to show us not just ourselves , but visibility itself. Of course, the film is full of tricks and editing but they are all as candid and innocent as someone warning you that he's going to cheat you. I have never found a child who was not sad whe the film ended , who did not have hundreds of questions about the world being filmed and a new exhilaration with the whole process.

I will go further. This is only a very partial record of Russia in the 1920s, so filled with hope and beauty as to be out of its mind with poetry. In being out of its mind, the camera makes a first step towards story.  In truth, this film is a utopian vision - it never was or will be as free from friction and other problems. Like I am Cuba, looking at Cuba in 1964, it is far less about the real place that the profound desire to sing or shout out.

This could change your child and change you. With The Passion of Joan of Arc it is, I believer, the only silent film that needs no qualification or apology. It is perfect. It is new still. And it makes you love the world...

from David Thomson 'Have You Seen ...?'