Going back to the beginning of cinema history, these two upcoming documentaries unfold the form and the filmmakers of silent cinema.
The pioneering filmmakers of the silent cinema period continue to inspire filmmakers today. For example, Italy’s first and most prolific female filmmaker Elvira Notari is referenced by cinema legends like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese while Gerald Fox’s Kinaesthesia spotlights the silent-era classics innovating the visuals of dreaming that inspired Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch.
Valerio Ciriaci’s new documentary spotlights an often marginalised voice from Napoli’s silent-era, Elvira Notari. Her films played to packed audiences at movie theatres across Italy and New York. Notari’s films had an air of the documentary and she wasn’t afraid to show the imperfections of Neapolitan life. Her melodramas brought femme fatales, street urchins, social miscreants and criminals to the screen, focusing on class struggle and a feminist awareness. Rebelling against the conservative ideals of the fascist regime, Notari was scrutinised with censorship and consequently neglected by the archive. Only three of her feature films have survived: A Santanotte (1922), È piccerella, and Fantasia ‘e surdato (1927) – an all too familiar fate for women filmmakers of the silent era.
However her story will live on in Ciriaci’s new documentary Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence, reinvigorating the stories of those who were deemed unfit for the screen and the life of Italy’s first woman filmmaker.
Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence screens at Bertha DocHouse on Wednesday 6th May + filmmaker Q&A.
In Gerald Fox’s new documentary essay Kinaesthesia he threads together the dreamscape visual language of early silent films. Experimental in form, these films belong to various early avant-garde movements including French Impressionism, German Expressionism and Soviet Montage. Innovating the new visual language for dream logic and psychological subjectivity in film captivated artists in post-war Europe and America. They imagined new techniques such as slow-motion, double exposures, expressionistic lighting and dynamic montage that still feel strikingly modern today. Grounded in the seminal essay ‘Film & Dreams’ by Vlada Petrić, Kinaesthesia – meaning the sensation of movement – regards the early silent era as captivated by the surreal, the dreamlike and the primal desire of cinema.
Kinaesthesia screens at Bertha DocHouse on Wednesday 27th May + filmmaker Q&A.