The Good, The Bad, And The Quietitude: Silent Film Festival Review
It’s a marketplace. Cars blowing their horns like an avant-garde orchestra on the maddening wayward system called EDSA traffic, scattered rage and arms flaccid as people lined up to their respective transportation wishing to just go home, expanding consumerism reeking through payday sales diffused in every corner of Manila. With city-like chaos clinging on every wall, silence became a tell-tale everyone’s talking about in every waiting game. Maybe, they’re just not looking enough. Maybe it’s not as scarce as it seems.
And maybe, it’s there in the corner, inside a moviehouse, waiting to get noticed.
Silent films, little by little, is slowly getting in its foothold. With this generation’s culture of ‘throwback’, fixation towards the old and transmuting of the new, the Silent Film Festival that happened last weekend accumulated the right audience — the curious ones.
Lines formed an hour before the stated time on disseminated catalogues, with bated breaths and subtle chats what and who to expect — a great promotional idea to make them more curious in the likes of Tom’s Story, Rivermaya, and Sandwich. I was one of them, lining out of curiosity and to hear the band Ican only have the privilege to see on limited late night gigs. But I was also there, waiting in line patiently and vividly excited, for the silent films; a golden opportunity for me to try putting my feet on the posthumous audiences’ shoes.
The Unholy Family
It was the name ‘Tom Story’ that created the long lines for this film, Una Perfetta Famiglia. The cinema seats gradually gets occupied by spectators and enthusiasts as the director started his remarks with film terminologies spoken with wide endeavour and a subtle castrations on budgeting and experimental standing; a muted collective understanding that this can be something.
But, let’s just say there’s also a collective concordance that we’ve had expected wrong.
Una Famiglia Perfetta(A Perfect Family) is a psychological crime film surrounding a normal family of three; where in their should-be typical experiences of familial indignation turned into something unexpected — where dreams became spasms of reality:an Inception-esque diegesis.
With the film’s influences coming from Italian neorealism and contemporary art house cinema, I was presuming a new taste that is feasible enough to cater this generation’s cravings for the new. Yet it did not blend too well — or in this case, there’s a lack of knowledge on how to combine two ingenious variables of the cinematic culture.
Una Perfetta Famiglia is scattered and relentlessly uncanny. With the misfocused camera frames and lack of understanding on how to convey your message using the film medium, it lacks in all sense. There was also a time when I tried to search for the presence of the director in the film — his auteur — to see if even with a small essence of him can revive his film that’s currently dying in of me, but he’s not there. Even his own persona is absent.
In the arts, everything is indefinitive and relative in all aspects, but you still need to understand what you’re doing before recklessly dropping yourself into that ocean.
Café Noir
I still had enough faith on the mute cinema culture to place my bets with; so there I went again, expecting a change of palette. With Austria’s Café Elektric and Rivermaya doing the musical score, I know this will be my saving grace.
Restored 1920s film by Gustav Uckicky (should I even say that Marlene Dietrich is there? Yes, I definitely should), it is a typical story of soap operas and romantic dramas, where a rich young woman named Erni fell in love with Fredi, a pocket thief, who in contrast is currently courting Hansi, a prostitute who abides at Café Elektric, a place where everyone can freely be someone and where everything can happen.
Watching it was a wild comfortable ride. With a country like ours which is rich with stories like this, we can just sit and witness the film unfold comfortably. It felt so wrong and unconventional yet it felt so right and predictable; And as the culture of mute cinema on 1920s were about films made to eradicate the spastic of reality and its effects, it gave us a full retrograde of time. It’s not finished since the last part were gone and unrecovered— it’s lost in translation, but god forbid my millennial spirit rejoiced with an optical taste of ruined past.
Conclusion
It’s not only about this generation’s obsession with the past, nor an exclusivity for the cinephiles, not even about the new idealist subculture called ‘hipsters’; it is as simple as learning how this pop culture emerged from what it is now. You can compare or don’t. You can analyse it in any ways you deemed appropriate, just remember, silent films are not just a ‘niche interest’. It’s about making us, the viewers, learn that art doesn’t require any social strata — might it be a ream of classics or not. It is art, as it’s been regarded necessary for it to be expressed. We can all relate; it’s no-brainer.
