The fourth festival will present a tribute to Canada’s own silent screen superstar, Mary Pickford, and the favourite silent-era films of acclaimed Winnipeg screenwriter, George Toles. And, of course, as the silent cinema experience was never actually silent, all screenings will have live piano accompaniment by acclaimed Toronto pianist, William O’Meara. The Ottawa International Silent Film Festival is presented in collaboration with the Library and Archives of Canada, The Canada Council for the Arts, and the AV Preservation Trust of Canada. Please note that due to the extra costs associated with mounting this festival, admission fees will be slightly higher: 7,00$ for CFI Members, Seniors, students, and children under 15; $10.00 for the general public.

L’Institut canadien du film a le plaisir de présenter la quatrieme édition du Festival international du film muet d’Ottawa. Comme, bien sûr, l’expérience du film muet n’était jamais vraiment silencieuse, chaque projection comportera un accompagnement au piano en direct par le fameux pianiste torontois, William O’Meara. Le Festival international du film muet d’Ottawa est présenté en collaboration avec Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, et Trust pour la Préservation de l'AV et le Conseil des arts du Canada. Les frais d’entrée pour le festival: 10,00$ pour le grand public; $7.00 pour members de l’ICF, l’age d’or, des etudiants, et des enfants.

A TRIBUTE TO MARY PICKFORD,
“AMERICA’S SWEETHEART”

Mary Pickford was born Gladys Smith in 1892 in Toronto. At the age of 16 she travelled to New York to start her career on Broadway as ‘Mary Pickford’ in 1909. Pickford began a long and successful relationship with D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Company. Between 1909 and 1913 Mary made over eighty shorts with Biograph, and from 1913 to 1916 Mary would make twenty-one feature films for Adolph Zukor and his Famous Players Film Company establishing her as one of the most famous and popular woman in the world. In January 1919 Pickford, along with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, formed United Artists, a successful company that catered to the artistic and creative needs of filmmakers. Mary Pickford died in 1979.

Wed./mer. Oct. 25 oct., 19:00
DOROTHY VERNON OF HADDON HALL
Director: Marshall Neilan U.S.A. 1924, 135 minutes

Dorothy, the willful and rebellious daughter of Sir George Vernon is pledged to marry her cousin on her 18th birthday. Risking parental wrath, she meets and falls in love with Sir John Manners, a childhood playmate who is a member of the enemy house and faces treachery and intrigue before he wins her. She is accused of treason but saves Queen Elizabeth’s life, and after being pardoned she leaves for Wales with Sir John. “This new effort of Mary Pickford, one of the late Charles Major’s historical romances, is exceedingly beautiful pictorially, establishing a new high water mark in animated photography.” – Photoplay. Preceded by A GOOD LITTLE DEVIL (1914), and STAR IMPERSONATIONS (1930). Preservation by the British Film Institute, and restoration prints provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Fri./ven. Oct. 27 oct., 19:00
SPARROWS
Director: William Beaudine U.S.A. 1926, 84 minutes

SPARROWS is a unique film in Pickford’s catalog; an unusual and beguiling film by any measure. In theme it mixes elements of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe. The plot revolves around Mary as “Molly” a teenager who lives on a “baby farm,” where impoverished parents send their children to work for food and board. The dramatic centre of the film is an extended escape sequence, in which the children are threatened by a cadaverous Mr. Grimes and his vicious over-sized dog on one hand, and swamp-dwelling alligators on the other. Biographer Eileen Ward says SPARROWS is “horrifically good- a bad dream that wakens to a happy ending; a fairy tale told with a brilliant style.” Preceded by SPARROWS TRAILER (1926), and OUTTAKES FROM SPARROWS (1926). Restoration material and tinted prints provided by the Library of Congress

Sat./sam. Oct. 28 oct., 16:00
THE LITTLE AMERICAN
Director: Cecil B. DeMille U.S.A. 1917, 80 minutes

Karl Von Austreim, a German-American living in the United States, bids farewell to his sweetheart, Angela Moore, and returns to Germany at the outbreak of World War I to fight for his native country. Count Jules de Destin of the French embassy, a rival for Angela’s hand, also leaves, and shortly afterwards, Angela is called to France to care for her dying aunt. Angela agrees to conceal a telephone by which she may contact the retreating French, and after the Germans arrive she begins sending messages to the Allies. She is caught and the German colonel orders her to be shot as a spy. Karl denounces the Kaiser, and joins his lover before the firing squad. Throughout the film notions of identity, loyalty, and ultimately love are challenged creating a powerful and emotional conclusion. Preceded by COQUETTE PROMOTIONAL SHORT (1929), and A MANLY MAN (1911). Restoration material provided by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

CARTE BLANCHE : GEORGE TOLES
Based in Winnipeg, George Toles is a talented, inventive screenwriter, who has co-authored most of fabled director Guy Maddin’s feature films, which borrow heavily and lovingly from silent era narrative strategies. The CFI is honoured to present George Toles’ selections.

Thu./jeudi Oct. 26 oct., 19:00
THE CROWD
Director: King Vidor U.S.A. 1928 104 minutes

“King Vidor’s film about John Sims, a man with large dreams and modest talent who is worn down by his encounters with the crowds and crowd mentality of the modern metropolis, has justly been celebrated as one of the masterpieces of silent realist cinema. It is worth recalling, however, that many of the film’s most striking scenes are boldly Expressionist in both design and conception. Among the Expressionist interludes are the child John’s staircase ascent to learn that his father is died; the adult John’s attempts to hush the riotously busy night traffic of a New York city street while his young daughter lies near death in her bedroom; John’s struggle with hallucinations at his office desk as he attempts to recover from a family tragedy; the astonishing crane shot at film’s end as John and his family are lost in an increasingly abstract theatre crowd which is laughing delightedly at an onstage clown performance. Although the trajectory of the narrative is somber and the documentation of failure almost unremitting, Vidor’s gift for infusing even the most comedy-resistant episodes with vitality and capricious sparks of exuberant sentiment sustains a near-buoyant tragic atmosphere. In the late 20s, movies were still interested in depictions of lower middle class experience and of the tricky daily rhythms and mood swings of marriage. The Crowd and Sunrise are the two most impressive portraits of marriage in the silent era. James Murray’s John, like Chaplin’s tramp in The Kid and Chaney in almost any of his suffering roles, suggest that the decade was awash in unself-conscious male tearfulness.” George Toles

Thu./jeudi Oct. 26 oct., 21:00
THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK
Director: Joseph von Sternberg U.S.A. 1928 76 minutes

“After sagely noting that The Docks of New York generally adheres to “Aristotle’s three unities of time, place, and action,” the 1928 Photoplay review executes a wild turnabout and congratulates “the mad young director” Josef von Sternberg for selecting “a situation of unlimited dramatic value—a wedding set in a brothel!” Von Sternberg’s greatest silent film was scarcely noticed at the time of its release because of the uproar occasioned by that frenetic Jewish escapee from the Old Plantation—“singing fool” Al Jolson. The visual setting for Docks is a magically murky opium vision of the New York waterfront—which, as a title card announces, marks “the end of many journeys.” Sternberg made no attempt to replicate any actual New York harbor, past or present, and was as cavalierly dismissive of demands for locale authenticity here as he later proved in his phantasmagorical renderings of Czarist Russia, China, and the Weimar Republic. For von Sternberg, the research period was a time to purge himself ofthe known facts, clearing away all impediments to a baroquely poetic re-imagining. What we want, von Sternberg believes, is the city we can only find in fantasy. We stumble on it, by chance, as we turn down an alley suffused in silvery mist. In the distance, melancholy winking lights beckon, with a promise of enchantment. Every
composition, more often than not tracked by a discreetly fetish-hungry camera, has a startling painterly wholeness—a visual self-sufficiency. Reeling from the discovery of his prodigious talent for making actors, sets, and the very air tingle with eroticism, von Sternberg layers his images with ravishing textures and smoky nocturnal inducements to “join the dance”, or the next savage brawl. The waterfront dive, the Sandbar, is a worthy rival of any of the glowing, decadent venues where Dietrich will later perform and mischievously hawk her wares. Betty Compson, who plays the hard-used street angel, Mae, is herself a worthy rival of Dietrich, and in many respects the precursor of the Dietrich type. Compson lacks Dietrich’s ironic mask and bewitchingly inscrutable detachment from the dramatic proceedings. Instead she has a face that carries its wounds
out in the open, setting up a tantalizing war in her expressions between pain and devil-may-care bravado. Her romantic partner, played by Beorge Bancroft, is a coal stoker, who owes something to Eugene O’Neill’s “hairy ape” perhaps, and who looks forward to the squinting rum pots of Wallace Beery and the self-satisfied brutishness of Fellini’s Zampano. His progression in the film is from a sly, self-enclosed bruiser who intends to grab every available pleasure during a brief shore leave, into someone with the confused capacity to finally see the woman he began by rescuing, mechanically, from a suicide attempt and then deceived with a mock marriage. (After saving her from drowning, he carries her unconscious body to the nearby bar as though it were a sack of potatoes.
It is only the shock of her naked legs being rubbed down that wakens him to her existence.) Olga Baclanova is also in the cast, using the ordeals of waterfront life as preparation for her showdown four years hence with Tod Browning’s freaks.’” George Toles

Fri./ven. Oct. 27 oct., 21:00
THE KID BROTHER 35mm print!!!
Directors: Ted Wilde, J.A. Howe U.S.A. 1927, 84 min.

"Harold Lloyd, doomed to eternal third place in the silent comedy triumvirate of Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd, achieved enormous popularity early in his career with a character named Lonesome Luke. Lloyd was virtually the only major comedian of the era to risk losing his audience by doing a drastic overhaul of his firmly established comic persona. (Perhaps he understood that the idea of “lonesomeness” was not, in his case, a sustainable proposition.) Lloyd’s enormous gamble can be boiled down to his sudden realization that horn-rimmed spectacles were indispensable to him—and the key to his new identity. What do glasses, all by themselves, contribute to Lloyd’s otherwise rather bland, hail-fellow-well-met, Elks Lodge demeanor? By proclaiming defective sight, they put a much needed flaw in plain view, mitigating Lloyd’s natural facial drift toward smugness. They lend an air of the studious and almost bashful fellow to a full-tilt extrovert, who seems to have been put on earth to preside over jolly social gatherings. Spectacles are also a subtle drag-line on Harold’s celebrated speediness, marking—even when he is dangling from the iconic skyscraper clockface in Safety Last—his ability to pause and reflect. These fractional, owlish pauses are the grace notes in his scrambles to save himself. The horn-rims also give his face a credible focus point in his bids for pathos, suggesting a fragility, a breakability that little else in his sturdy frame and well-guarded manner corroborate. The Lloyd straw hat, separated from the glasses by a few critical inches, seem to be an overcompensating move by a small town fantasist who longs to be mistaken for a worldly dandy. But his glasses somehow expose the lie. (Perhaps Clark Kent in his original comic book incarnation was a conscious reworking of Harold Lloyd.) The Kid Brother, released in 1927 (the same year as Keaton’s The General) was dismissed at the time, like the Keaton epic, as a “routine effort.” I would concur with Lloyd biographer, Tom Dardis, who has declared it Lloyd’s masterpiece. Other Lloyd films may contain more inspired individual gag sequences, but The Kid Brother possesses the most satisfying, ingeniously worked out plot, the most memorable array of sharply drawn secondary characters, and the most mysteriously affecting of Lloyd’s protagonists. It is also the most visually beautiful. Harold begins the film not so much as a kid brother as a composite kid mother and sister, taking on all the conventional female duties in a womanless rural household overrun with* rugged, strapping males. The family name is aptly Hickory. Harold’s father is the local sheriff and his two older sons are massive hickory chips from the old block. Boisterous pranks, hard labor and fisticuffs are their daily domestic diet. Harold’s path to success in this story is a series of disguises—and his maturation process is mainly achieved through a furious acceleration of role-playing. Nowhere are you likely to be less well-known, less interesting, and less imaginatively defined, The Kid Brother implies, than in your own home. The lush rural settings—filmed in the irresistibly named Placenta, California—is a forceful reminder that America still easily thought of itself in the twenties as a nation of farmers. The movie’s haunting opening, in which a horse-drawn wagon of traveling players makes its way around a body of water containing a large, half-sunken vessel, seems like a strange visual riddle for Harold Lloyd’s well-locked temperament—a dream of the hidden man. Harold’s farewell scene with Jobena Ralston, where he climbs higher and higher in a tree to extend his “goodbyes” and keep her in sight, was the basis for a short scene in my screenplay for Guy Maddin’s Careful."
George Toles

WEB EXTRA
Silent Cinema
An Aesthetic Call to Arms
by George Toles