Where Past and Present collide: Pordenone’s Silent Film Festival

A town of around 50,000 sitting somewhere between the Alps and the Adriatic, every October Pordenone becomes a mecca for discerning cinephiles around the globe. Established in 1982, Pordenone’s Silent Film Festival (Giornate del Cinema Muto) has since cemented itself as the largest of its kind, each year drawing to northeast Italy hundreds of academics, scholars, archivists, and devotees for a weeklong celebration of early cinema. All screenings take place at the Verdi Theatre, and all have musical accompaniment – from full orchestra to solo piano. From 9 am to 11 pm, timeless classics from the likes of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin screen next to restored rarities, animation, newsreels, shorts and features. 

The programming reflects both a voracious curiosity for the medium’s earliest incarnations as well as an unwavering commitment to bringing those in conversation with the present. That’s what’s most astonishing about the festival – and what, in retrospect, accounts for its extraordinary vitality. Rather than celebrating silent cinema as a relic of some ancient, irretrievable past, Pordenone’s always insisted on the connections between its slates and our own troubled zeitgeist, and the extent to which ostensibly “old” films can speak to our present anxieties. Just last year, the festival addressed the ongoing genocide in Gaza through its programme “Palestine – A Revised Narrative”, a montage of digitised newsreels shot in Palestine between 1914 and 1918 that doubled as a genealogy of the horrors plaguing the country and its people. 

As someone born and raised in Pordenone, I credit the festival for much of my cinematic education – and remember my high school class as one of several in town that would pay visit to the Verdi to catch some morning screenings. That’s one of the many ways in which the festival has tried to branch out to younger viewers. Another, the Collegium, is a symposium-cum-workshop that each year brings in 12 cinephiles under 30 to share their love for early cinema with other guests and leading experts in the field. This is the festival’s ultimate mission: to push against the idea of silent cinema as something dead and nostalgic, and open it up instead to more heterogeneous audiences. To shed more light on that, I spoke with artistic director Jay Weissberg, who kindly and very candidly shared his efforts to turn Pordenone into a place where people can approach silent cinema as a living, breathing, uncharted world. 

I came across a report from Pordenone that you wrote for Senses back in 2004, and was quite intrigued by this sentence: “I know of no other festival which so effortlessly combines rigorous scholarship with such a keen sense of fun.” Could you speak more about that balance, and how you’ve tried to preserve it as festival director? 

Well, every edition must have that balance, which means I’m always keen on making sure that there’s at least one comedy strand. The festival is divided into thematic sections, which can be about a theme, a country, a director, a performer. But then there’s also “Rediscoveries and Restorations,” a sort of grab bag of what’s been recently found and restored. There too I always make sure to include some comedies. We have this idea of academics and archivists as being very blindfolded in their film theory; everybody wants to quote Lacan and Deleuze, otherwise they don’t feel like they’ve earned their PhD. I don’t believe in that at all, and I think we need to move beyond it. One of the things I love about being a film historian, programmer, and critic is that I started off as a fan when I was still a child. I fell in love with Marlene Dietrich and wrote her a fan letter when I was 13 – not that I got a response, or ever expected one, but I fell in love with her and with Rudolph Valentino and other stars, most of whom by then had long gone on. And I never want to lose that. I don’t think any of us should lose that sense of fandom. I’m talking about film critics, too. You can hone your craft and look at things more academically, but if you lose your passion, if you don’t connect, if you don’t laugh or cry, then why are you in this business, frankly? 

So in terms of festival programming, I’m always trying to strike that balance. I can get together a group of very serious scholars who are super excited to delve into a particular director’s work, but the moment I put a Douglas Fairbanks film on, everybody in the audience will be roaring with laughter and falling in love with his energy, his gumption, his affect. Same if you put on a Buster Keaton, or a Charlie Chaplin. These are still the things that make us laugh. Recently, whenever talking about this with other people, I’ve referenced the last Pedro Almodóvar, The Room Next Door. What film do Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore put on when they’re super depressed? A Buster Keaton! Same in one of the Star Trek iterations, Discovery: the crew have suddenly found themselves thousands of years into the future. They’re completely lost, demoralised. So what do they do? They put on a Buster Keaton film for the whole ship to watch! Because this is something that still unites us, no matter where we come from, or which  language we speak. That balance is possible – it just needs to be fed.

Maybe I’m being naive here, but I suppose that programming for a festival like Pordenone must grant you a lot more freedom than you’d enjoy if you were to do the same for bigger, more commercially-minded fests. You’re not beholden to the same market logic, for one thing. 

And I find myself lucky to be outside the market, because frankly I don’t care much about it, nor do I care much about auteurism. We can take film classes, go to university, study all we like, but what we’re focussing on are the established greats. We’re looking at the Fritz Langs, the Griffiths, the Abel Gances – which is all necessary and important for our training, both intellectually and visually. But that by itself doesn’t give a sense of what that period was like. If we’re only considering the already anointed and only looking at features, then we’re missing what the full range of cinema was at the time, as well as an understanding of that moment in history in all the different societies that we’re touching on. They say that about 75 percent of all silent cinema is lost, but that number is a lot higher for places like India, Japan, or Latin America. One of the most important things we do in Pordenone is show fragments, which would otherwise just sit in the archives wasting away, never mind their great directors, cinematographers, performances… We show nonfiction films, documentaries. We’ve shown porn, advertising films, shorts, features – the full range. We’re in the same theatre from 9 am until 11 pm, watching the same films, all of us together. And as I like to tell the young Collegium participants, “Allow yourself to be confused; you’re not going to be able to remember everything.” For me that’s fine, because after a while you enter a kind of fugue state: all of these things are coming at you and you can’t remember in which film you saw this or that scene. But the beauty of this is that you’re immersed in a period, a particular moment in history. 

I’ve become known in the archival world for my eagerness to show films that make people uncomfortable. I show black face, I show misogyny and homophobia. I show colonialism, colonial gaze. It’s all part of our history, and sweeping it under the carpet, pretending it doesn’t exist, I think is dangerous. I’ve had many programmers at different archives come up to me and say, “Thank you so much – we’re not allowed to show these films.” I feel lucky because I have an audience of specialists and the possibility of contextualising things in the catalogue. I’m not putting trigger warnings – I think they’re useless. I’m not standing up in front of the audience every time there’s a difficult film to warn them that there’s something that’s going to make them uncomfortable. What is this mania we have for feeling comfortable all the time, anyway? I don’t understand that, particularly when it comes to earlier films. We live in a world that is so deeply uncomfortable and is assaulting us all the time. Surely we can also deal with the fact that our history is ugly and beautiful, that we can escape in wonderful ways, but we can also contextualise and understand. It’s vital that we are not pretending these films don’t exist. 

A view of Pordenone’s Verdi Theatre during the festival (credit: Valerio Greco/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto)

You’ve mentioned scholars, critics, programmers, but I like to think your audience doesn’t just include industry professionals or academics. Forgive the broad question then, but I’m curious: who do you think about when you programme for a festival like Pordenone? 

I’m thinking about all those different people, in the sense that I need to programme for the people who’ve been coming here for decades – which means that I need to be showing classic films they will know, as well as others they haven’t seen by people they know. That’s vital. But also, every year, I need to have discoveries. I don’t mean just one film. I mean thematic discoveries. I need to make connections. In terms of drawing younger crowds, the thing that I’m constantly underlining is the importance of building bridges between past and present. Because it’s so easy for people to see these films as archaic or niche – films that we don’t really have to care about. “That’s not relevant” – a word that I loathe! – ”to what’s happening now.” But it is deeply relevant. All of it is. I’ve always argued that unless you understand silent cinema and its pure visual form, you can’t really understand cinema today. Your awareness of things like editing is not going to be at the same level. Your understanding of the rhythms of film language is enormously enhanced if you have an understanding of silent cinema.

But more than that, because I’m a person who is proudly political and I have a platform both as critic and as programmer, I’m going to use that platform for what I believe in. And if people don’t like it, well, that’s fine, but I’m not going to abdicate my responsibility in order to make everyone feel comfortable. I’ll give you an example. Two years ago, at the Národní filmový archiv in Prague, I was shown a 1924 Zionist documentary called The Land of Promise. The restoration is glorious, absolutely stunning, but it peddles the Zionist propaganda we’re still hearing today. I decided to programme the film in Pordenone, but I wrote a very anti-Zionist programme note – it was the only time that I penned a disclaimer in the catalogue because I was very concerned. I didn’t know how the board of directors might take the note – or how the audience might react to the film. But in the end, everybody thanked me, and all I got for the note was praise. Had that not happened, I still would have put together the programme we did last year, “Palestine: A Revised Narrative,” which was super important because it clearly showed the roots of today’s problems. If we don’t understand that and continue with the pernicious idea that everything that’s happening in Gaza right now is Netanyahu’s fault, then we’re missing the narrative. This tragedy has been inevitable for the last one hundred years – we’ve known this was going to happen, so to pretend that it’s just something recent is dangerous. 

That’s a good way of ensuring that people see the festival as something that is actual, vital, of the moment. I’m not putting everything in a glass box just to say, “let’s look at this artefact.” I don’t want to deal with artefacts. I want to deal with films that can generate as much excitement today as they did in 1907, but also have some present-day relevance because they’re touching on things that we’re all still dealing with as a society. 

And how did people react to some of those more controversial titles? What kind of conversations did those screenings trigger?

It sounds like I’m tooting my own horn, but the feedback has been tremendously positive. More people are coming back to the festival who had not been for a long time. The audience is getting younger, which is great. October is always a difficult time, of course, because universities are in session, so a lot of people can’t come for that reason. But we are growing, and I’m getting a lot of guests saying, thank you – for the programme on Ukraine, for the programme on Palestine… I think what’s happening is that a lot of people are suddenly finding that their political and humanitarian sides don’t need to be separated from their cinephilia – that we can find ways of bringing those dimensions together.

But for me, one of the festival’s most moving initiatives is the Collegium, which every year brings to Pordenone 12 people under 30. This is something that was launched by my predecessor, David Robinson, with the idea of breaking down barriers between established scholars and younger, emerging voices. But David, from the very beginning, insisted that the participants shouldn’t simply be future film academics or archivists: they should be from as broad a spectrum as possible. Not that we expect all of them to devote their lives to silent cinema, but in a sense, they become its ambassadors in whatever walk of life they choose. We’ve had librarians, we’ve had podcasters, and the number of applications we receive has increased a lot over the last few years, making it difficult for us to choose those 12.  

This may sound strange, but for two years running I’ve had Collegians crying on the final day. We’re constantly told that if you’re interested in silent cinema, then you’re “niche,” a nerd, but once they come to Pordenone these young people suddenly realise that they’re in fact part of a community – not a community of weirdos but a community that’s passionate about film, about social justice, about all sorts of things. And they were crying, they told me, because they finally feel seen, and not adrift and alone. We’ve had people in their twenties who’d never left the United States before, ever, and they wind up in this little town in northeast Italy and suddenly feel connected. That’s so powerful. 

At the same time, anyone belonging to this world is bound to face a tremendous amount of pressure from all parts of our lives. “Really? Is this what you’re specialising in? Why are you doing that?” Lord knows how hard my parents tried to discourage me from any kind of career in cinema. They said I was using it to escape reality. Fuck that! I’m using it because I’m interested in history and humanity, and cinema to me encompasses everything that makes us human.

Do you have a sense of just how much your audience has grown through the years? As for demographics, have you noticed an increase in the number of younger guests?

Well, the Teatro Verdi holds just over 900 seats. Not all of those have great sight lines, so we don’t usually have all of those rows opened up. We don’t do parallel programming: there’s only one theatre, and we want to keep it that way because the important thing is that everybody is seeing the same film together – if they’re not interested in the film, they can go across the street to the cafe. The numbers were chopped down enormously during the COVID years, but now they’re back to pre-pandemic levels, sometimes higher still, which is enormously satisfying. In terms of demographics, we don’t break it down by age. I kind of wish we did; I’m curious myself. But we do break it down by nationality, and by far the largest contingent comes from the US and the UK. But we also have large numbers from France, Italy, of course, and Germany. Those are the main places, though we’re still getting quite a lot of people from Brazil, Argentina, and Japan.

Collegium aside, have you liaised with local schools to bring the festival to students in and around Pordenone?

We have, yeah. We organise special screenings for high school students in conjunction with Pordenone’s arthouse theatre and archive, Cinemazero. These usually take place over one or two mornings during the festival days. And then, for many years, we would have an initiative called “A Colpi di Note,” where music professors from Pordenone and nearby Conegliano would work on a comedy short with their students and they would perform the film’s score live. Which was a nice way of not only ensuring that children were coming, but also their parents. 

The festival’s poster for its 2025 edition

I recently saw you talk about the festival on Instagram, which struck me as a nice way to reach young, non-industry people. Could you speak more about the kind of strategies you’ve pursued on that front?

Well, one of the few benefits of the pandemic was that during the main lockdown year, we went online for the first time. I filmed intros to every film we screened. I think we did two films a day, and I would sort of wander around a few classic Pordenone locations, to trigger some nostalgia among those who used to come to the festival all the time, and also to introduce the city on its own to those who’ve never been, knowing that this was also a nice way for us to show the local Chamber of Commerce and others the importance that we are giving to the town. And that proved phenomenally successful. The number of accreditations shot up, professors started sending their students. That was great, and it’s continued: each edition, we stream one film a day, two on the weekend, and I do these intros on top of that, and those are available for 48 hours. You have to sign up, but it’s free. We’re also trying to engage more people through social media – we have a team connected with Cinemazero who are super good at it, and we’re making TikTok videos to engage with younger people and make it look fun. I refuse to be scripted, so I’m never reading anything, which I find just deadly. 

But speaking of involvement in broader terms, one of the first things I did as director was try to expand the number of contributors in the catalogue. For me, it was extremely important that there’d be more voices and that more people would feel they have an active role within the festival. So I very actively brought in a lot of feminist and younger writers, just to look at things in a way that was different from classic film historians. One of our main problems has to do with linguistics. We have the term “heritage” cinema, which sounds like the china that you put in your grandmother’s cupboard and you’ll look at through the glass but won’t touch because you’re afraid it’s going to break. It’s a horrible word, heritage, and yet it’s the one that seems most used now. But I’m sorry, does a 22-year-old want to watch heritage cinema? I don’t think so. They might want to eat heritage tomatoes, but heritage cinema just sounds wrong. Classic cinema, too – I don’t like that expression either. What word do we use then? When we are hamstrung by these terms that are instantly turning people off, what should we do? That’s something that’s hampering our ability to extend a hand across generations and pull people in. My conviction is that the moment that they’re there, in a cinema, they fall in love – that’s always been the case. The question is getting them there. And a lot of that has to do with getting the right music. 

Just this year the Berlinale presented a restoration of Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul, with a score by a South Korean experimental musician who connected electrodes to his violin so that light and sound reflected his brain patterns… Excuse me, but, seriously? I’ve been told this is out of the box, it’s experimental, it’s more cool. But what it’s doing is making the film look really old, while the music seems super new. That’s not bringing the two together. That’s a clash, when your film music should be adapted to the images. Why is it that so many people think that the only way of engaging with younger people is by putting DJs and techno music onto Nosferatu for the thousandth time? That’s making an event, no question, but how much will they remember about the film? Is the music archaising it in any way? You have to make sure that you’re respectful of the film and make it feel new. Which you can do. That’s what brings younger people back, what engages with them. 

I’m assuming by now you will have a very wide network of musicians and composers you can rely on. But how involved are you in the selection and composition of these scores? 

I assign the musicians to each film, so I know them really well. I know their strengths; I know what they like to play for. In general, for the screenings that only require a solo piano, they will often get links to the films beforehand, but most of what they play is improvisation. Many times they’ve only seen the film once, sometimes they haven’t seen it at all because they haven’t had the time. But because they’re so adept at understanding the rhythms and how film of this period works, they’re amazing. I bow down to them because I think what they do is extraordinary. On top of that, there are scores that are specifically composed for our opening night, closing night, and what we call the midweek event on Wednesday night. Those can be either full orchestra or something like a quintet, and I’m very invested in them. Sometimes I commission the scores myself. Increasingly, for films that might be difficult in their approaches toward orientalism and colonialism, it’s become important for me to find a way to counter that with the music. Nanook of the North is a good example. It’s a film that’s been marred by accusations of exploitation from its director, Robert J. Flaherty, never mind that more research has proven there was a far more collaborative relationship between Flaherty and the Inuit people. But we invited a Canadian composer, Gabriel Thibaudeau, who wrote a score for flute and Inuit throat singers, and we brought two women from northern Canada to perform it. That, I think, is an amazing way of ensuring that the Inuit themselves take control of the story. Same thing with the Palestine programme, when we invited composer Cynthia Zaven and sound designer Rana Eid from Beirut. I mentioned The Promised Land; that one I assigned to a fabulous musician named José María Serralde Ruiz, from Mexico, who was quite scared of the film initially, and didn’t know how to approach it. I told him not to play it as a triumphalist film, and so he played it entirely in a minor key – a brilliant choice that helped us counter the toxic propaganda of the film just by underplaying it. And as soon as the film wrapped, I ran down to the orchestra pit and the two of us sobbed for five minutes in each other’s arms, because it was just so right. It was exactly what I wanted to happen with that film. There are ways when you’re dealing with difficult subjects to ensure that the difficulty is recognised even within the music, without that destroying the image.

A screening of Shoulder Arms at last year’s edition (credit: Valerio Greco/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto)

One of the most tragic aspects of the circuit, to me, is that a depressingly large number of films will never really leave it, which reinforces the idea that festivals are sites of distribution as much as exhibition. I was thinking about this in the context of Pordenone, and wondering what the festival could do to ensure these films are watched, nurtured, and shared long after the festival days. 

That’s a huge struggle. There are a couple of ways of answering this question: first of all, it’s thanks to Pordenone, back in the nineties, that pre-revolutionary Russian cinema was discovered and put on the map. Before that, nothing was known about it. Everybody kind of assumed that before Vertov or Eisenstein all you had was uninteresting bourgeois filmmaking. Instead, thanks to David Robinson, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Yuri Tsivian and others, Pordenone put together a beautiful programme that revealed just how extraordinary those films and their auteurs were. That changed film history, and it also meant that those films toured. Where? Of course, they bowed in places like the Museum of Modern Art, the Cinémathèque Française, and other specialised institutions… Same thing was true of pre-Weimar German cinema, which wasn’t really on the map until Pordenone put it on the spotlight. That was all before my time as artistic director, and the reason why I looked up to the festival. I do feel that responsibility too, and hope that what I show will be seen by other programmers and picked up for future screenings around the world. That’s what happened to the series on Uzbek silent cinema I did a few years ago, or the one on John Stahl’s silent film work. These films do get around, they do play the circuit, but it is still a very limited field. Let’s face it, they might screen at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival or other silent film festivals. You might get some screenings at the Eye Filmmuseum, the BFI, that sort of thing. Generally, it’s preaching to the choir. So it’s a constant struggle. And it goes back to the problem with terminology we were discussing earlier. If so many young film critics today think that cinema started with Tarantino, and if not with Tarantino then with Cassavetes, then you’re bound to read things like, “this has never been seen on film before.” But that’s bullshit, and we need to correct that!

The sad thing is that teaching film in junior high and high schools has never been a priority anywhere, and with budget cuts on culture the world over, I’m concerned that we are increasingly falling into closed categories. So how do we convince people to step outside their comfort zone? How do we ensure that people are aware of something when the landscape is so crowded? It’s like going back to lockdown, when we had a huge number of choices and streaming platforms showing all kinds of stuff, and yet precisely because there was so much choice I found myself watching less, because I was intimidated and overwhelmed by that vastness. So how do we push silent films onto people’s viewfinders? I don’t have answers, but I find raising these questions to be essential all the same. We need to make sure people are aware of the issue. 

Pordenone Silent Film Days
3 – 10 October 2026
https://www.giornatedelcinemamuto.it/en/