Shawn Hall In a perfect world, I would have been in Pordenone, Italy, for the complete in-person festival like last year. However, I opted for the second-best choice, tuning in for the world-renowned silent film festival’s online program.
Running over a week from October 4th to 11th, the online program featured 21 films (8 feature films and 13 shorts) from around the world. As always, the films were presented in pristine, restored condition, accompanied by world-class musicians covering such diverse genres as documentary, melodrama, and slapstick comedy.
With the online festival drawing to a close, here are my favorite five silent films I watched for the 2025 Pordenone Silent Film Festival Online Program in no particular order:
The Adventures of a Penny (1929; USSR)
It’s not the Pordenone Silent Film Festival without some great international films you’ve never of even heard of before and The Adventures of Penny certainly scratched that itch. A part of a series on Ukranian children’s films, The Adventures of a Penny follows a young boy who drifts in and out of trouble with his friends as his parents struggle to make ends meet in a divided Russia.
I really enjoyed the film’s depiction of carefree children, capturing the joy of childhood without shying away from how their childhood shenanigans affects their already overwhelmed parents struggling to make ends meet. The rivalry between our poor protagonist and the town’s rich young boy is a real treat and it’s fun seeing the father have to scold his boy for bullying but gleefully cheering behind his back for his boy to give his overbearing boss some comeuppance. There is even a scene near the end where our protagonist has to save his rival off a floating ice bank very much like D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East.
Louis Feuillade Films (1911-1912; France)
I’ve been on a kick this year, watching as many narrative films from the transitional period of silent cinema between 1907 and 1915, when cinema was learning how to best tell a story. After scouring YouTube for obscure titles often in poor quality and with a questionable score (if there is any soundtrack at all), watching a curated program of restored and accompanying 1911 and 1912 was such a treat that I wish it wasn’t so rare.
In this collection of four short Gaumont films, Feuillade shows off his directorial ability years before his famed serials Les Vampires (1915) and Judex (1916). Not simply just using cinema to carry a basic plot forward, in this program of four films Feuillade shows of his skill at framing his actors and sets in interesting ways. Whether packing the frame with action in both foreground and background like in The Vipers or a using a tripytch to depict a phone call in The Dwarf, these four films were a visual treat of early cinema.
The White Heather (1919; USA)
Director Maurice Tourneur might not be as well-known as his son Jacques of Cat People fame, but as one of the first Hollywood directors to make a name for himself in feature films in the 1910s Maurice absolutely deserves to be known. His 1919 adventure film The White Heather was long thought to be lost until the EYE film musuem found the film in 2023 and the San Francisco Film Preserve restored it last year.
The biggest selling point is the climactic underwater battle pictured above, but the rest of the film is a fun, fast-paced drama. We get a great villian, a husband refusing to acknowledge a secret marriage in order to save his own finanical assets, and a young John Gilbert in a hefty supporting role perfectly showcasing his budding stardom.
Sketches of a Soviet City (1929; USSR)
One of my favorite parts of the Pordenone festival are the travelogues and documentaries screened from around the world capturing snapshots of famous places over a century ago. The online program featured fascinating documentary footage of Aleppo and Rio de Janiero before featuring a short half-hour city symphony film of the Ukranian city Kharkiv that was my favorite of the bunch.
Sketches of a Soviet City is no doubt propaganda but it mixes this glossy message of unified production from its working class with the skill and set of the city symphony genre. I’m always a sucker for double exposure and montages and the first-time Ukrainian filmmaker Dmytro Dalskyi put plenty into this half-hour propaganda film showing off the agricultural and industrial center of Kharkiv.
The Woman with the Mask (1929; Germany)
The Woman in the Mask offered the best montage, and maybe even the best scene, I watched in the entire online festival. Credited to avant-garde German filmmaker Walter Ruttman, the two minute long scene chronicles the inflation of the early years of Weimar Germany with rapid paced edits and plenty of aforementioned double exposure.
Even though the rest of film never recaptured the energy of the opening montage, I still enjoyed the rest of the backstage drama of a well-respected woman trying to hide her identity as a burlesque dancer.
So another great year in the books that not only brought me a week-long marathon of beautifully restored silent films but has also got me counting down the days until I can return once again in person to travel all the way to Pordenone, Italy. As always, be looking for these great films to circulate on the festival circuit or maybe even end up on streaming or physical media down the road.
If you participated in the in-person or online festival I’d also love to hear what your favorite films you watched were!
