Mega Silents: City Montage Season
Over the course of three weekends, South West Silents, in collaboration with Future City Film Festival, will showcase the use of montage and cutting in silent film and its impact on future films in the history of cinema. These specially curated events will include introductions, screenings notes and live musical accompaniment to some of the silent films presented.
The season will conclude with a special 100th anniversary screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin.
This programme is run in partnership with Future City Film Festival and is part of South West Silents' 100 Years of Silent Film and City and Silent Film strands. We are grateful for the support provided by Bristol Ideas as part of its legacy programme:
Saturday 1st March: Man With a Movie Camera (1929) + The Cameraman (1928)
Saturday 15th March: Berlin Symphony of a City (1927) + Cabaret (1972)
Saturday 29th March: 100th Anniversary: Battleship Potemkin (1925) + The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Saturday 1st March:
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Director: Dziga Vertov Cinematography: Mikhail Kaufman Music: Live Musical Accompaniment by John Sweeney USSR / 68mins / U
An extraordinary montage of urban Ukrainian and Russian life in 1929, showing the people of the city at work and at play and the machines that keep the city going. Dziga Vertov's first full-length film was met with bewilderment at first due to Vertov’s editing techniques of dissolves, split screen, slow motion and freeze-frames. Now it is recognised as one of the most radical films of Soviet cinema, and a major influence on Godard, Marker and others.
Man with a Movie Camera is an exhilarating, exciting and intellectually brilliant feature that was recently ranked 9th in the 2022 Sight and Sound Great Films of All Time poll.
It’s a great city-symphony: the ‘Kino-Eye’ turns the camera into the protagonist, providing an impressionistic, lyrical portrait of a day in the life of Moscow’s masses at work and at play. But Vertov also investigates film itself, wittily transforming the world caught by his lens with a dazzling array of experimental camera and editing techniques. The constant invention remains astonishing to this day.
With Live Musical Accompaniment by John Sweeney.
The Cameraman (1928) Director: Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton Starring: Buster Keaton, Marceline Day, Harold Goodwin, Josephine the Monkey Music: Recorded Score by Timothy Brock USA / 69mins / U
Buster Keaton is at the peak of his slapstick powers in The Cameraman, the first film that the silent-screen legend made after signing with MGM, and his last great masterpiece.
The final work over which he maintained creative control, this clever farce is the culmination of an extraordinary, decade-long run that produced some of the most innovative and enduring comedies of all time.
Keaton plays a hapless newsreel cameraman desperate to impress both his new employer and his winsome office crush as he zigzags up and down Manhattan hustling for a scoop. Along the way, he goes for a swim (and winds up soaked), becomes embroiled in a Chinatown Tong War, and teams up with a memorable monkey sidekick (the famous Josephine).
The marvellously inventive film-within-a-film setup allows Keaton’s imagination to run wild, yielding both sly insights into the travails of moviemaking and an emotional payoff of disarming poignancy.
Saturday 15th March:
Berlin Symphony of a City (1927) Dir: Walter Ruttman Cinematography: Robert Baberske, Reimar Kuntze, László Schäffer, Karl Freund GER / 67mins / U
This timeless love letter to 1920s Berlin is a visual feast for all who want to voyage into a city now lost. This five-reel symphony begins at dawn and ends at midnight, showing Berliners hard at work by day and enjoying the city's boisterous nightlife.
Walter Ruttmann’s definitive ‘city symphony’ is a lyrical dawn to dusk portrait of Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Divided into five ‘movements’, Ruttmann uses montage and beguiling abstract images to capture the pulse and mood of the city in 1927. Capped with Karl Freund's exquisite camerawork, the film creates moments of poetry that have seldom been equalled on film.
Cabaret (1972) Director: Bob Fosse Starring: Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey USA / 124mins / 15
Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem Cabaret brings 1931 Berlin to life. Outside on the street, the Nazi party is beginning to grow into a brutal political force, whilst inside at the Kit Kat Klub starry-eyed American, Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) and an impish Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) sound the call for decadent fun. Into this heady world arrives British language teacher Brian Roberts (Michael York), who falls for Sally's charm, and soon the two of them find themselves embroiled in the turmoil and decadence of the era.
Saturday 29th March:
Battleship Potemkin (1925) Director: Sergei Eisenstein Starring: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barksy, Grigori Aleksandrov Music: Live Musical Accompaniment by John Sweeney USSR / 72mins / PG
Declared the greatest film of all time at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and one of only two films to have appeared on all of Sight & Sound’s critics’ polls (1952–2022), Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is one of the true masterpieces in the history of cinema.
In essence, it tells a five-part story of a naval mutiny leading to full-blown revolution, but while this material could be crudely propagandist in other hands, Eisenstein uses images of such dynamic compositional strength and editing of such frame-perfect precision that it’s hard not to be swept along, regardless of personal politics.
Widely censored as much out of fear of the perceived influence of its ideas as for any contentious material on screen the film would later be banned outright in Britain until 1954 and X-rated until 1987.
For ten decades Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece has remained the most influential silent film of all time. South West Silents presents one of the true classics of cinema on the big screen with live music by John Sweeney for its 100th anniversary.
The Battle of Algiers (1966) Director: Gillo Pontecorvo Starring: Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef, Brahim Haggiag, Tommaso Neri ITA, ALG / 121mins / 15
One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents.
Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today.
This programme is run in partnership with Future City Film Festival and is part of South West Silents' 100 Years of Silent Film and City and Silent Film strands. We are grateful for the support provided by Bristol Ideas as part of its legacy programme.
South West Silents is a not-for-profit organisation. With support of the BFI Film Audience Network, awarding funds from the National Lottery in order to bring this project to more audiences across the UK.
Our thanks to Janus Films, BFI, Warner Bros and Park Circus.