at the Institut Lumière

PostED THE 27.09.2019 AT 5PM

A closer look at the film-concerts

of the 2019 Lumière festival, held (nearly)

every day in the main theater of the Institut Lumière.

 
 
 
 
 
 
The treasures of the earliest films become heightened experiences with music; the presence of a pianist helps bridge the gap between a classic silent flick of yesteryear and a screening of today, transforming movies into unique events! A musician's perspective also helps bring out the modernity of films that are often a hundred years old. Here are five glorious silent films worth discovering at the Institut Lumière, accompanied by live piano.
 
 

The First Year
by Frank Borzage
Accompanied on the piano by Didier Martel
 
"Openly comical, The First Year fits into a somewhat particular Borzage theme: the experiences and setbacks of young couples at the dawn of their life together," writes specialist Hervé Dumont in his book, Frank Borzage (Institut Lumière / Actes Sud). Based on a successful play by the impressive screenwriter Frances Marion, the film culminates in a disastrous – and hilarious - business dinner with a clumsy servant and the quarreling newlyweds.
 
The First Year by Frank Borzage (1926, 1h15)
 
The 2019 restoration was performed by The Film Foundation with the support of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an official partner of the Lumière festival and a partner of the Institut Lumière. Subtitling funded by the HFPA.

 
Monday, October 14 at 11 :30 am at the Institut Lumière

 
 
 

Musidora film-concert
A selection of short films starring Musidora
Accompanied on the piano by Didier Martel
 
Jeanne Roques, also known as Musidora (1889-1957), electrified the public with her performances as an evil "vamp" in short episodes by Louis Feuillade (“Judex and the vampires” series). The actress was passionate about films and went on to direct. She shot Soleil et ombre / Sol y sombra (1922), playing the double role of two women seduced by the same bullfighter! Rediscover a mythical actress, muse of the Surrealists.
 
The program:
Spanish Fiesta by Germaine Dulac (1919, 8min)
4K restoration supervised by the Cinémathèque française from a 171m black and white fragment, without intertitles, saved in 1948.
 
Vincenta by Musidora (1919, 20min)
2017 restoration by the Cinémathèque française at Hiventy laboratories from a film fragment considered lost (reel 2 out of 5, tinted nitrate print).
 
Soleil et ombre / Sol y sombra by Musidora and Jacques Lasseyne (1922, 43min)
4K restoration supervised by the Cinémathèque française and the San Francisco Festival at Hiventy and Fontibula laboratories.

 
 
Wednesday, October 16 at 9:15 am at the Institut Lumière

 
 
 

An exclusive for the Lumière festival

The Broken Butterfly
byMaurice Tourneur
Accompanied on the piano by Didier Martel
 
In 1919, Frenchman Maurice Tourneur (1876 - 1961) is counted among the greats of American cinema, shooting film after film. The Broken Butterfly tells the melodramatic story of an impossible love between a composer in search of inspiration and a young woman who lives under the thumb of an overly stern aunt... The film reveals the director’s aesthetic power and allows us to discover, in the role of the butterfly Marcene, the young Pauline Starke, discovered by Griffith and made a star by Borzage.
 
The Broken Butterfly by Maurice Tourneur (1919, 58min)
2019 restoration by The Film Foundation in association with the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation, with the financial support of Louis XIII cognacs, from a duplication of 35mm negatives from the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation. 4K scan, calibration and digital restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata.

 
 
Wednesday, October 16 at 2 pm at the Institut Lumière

 
 
 
Program of short films
by Emile Cohl
Accompanied on the piano by Fred Escoffier
 
A great pioneer of animation, lending his name to the famous school of fine arts in Lyon, Émile Cohl (1858 - 1938) was launched into the cinema by Louis Feuillade, débuting as a screenwriter before perfecting his technique of frame-by-frame filming. His stories, often starting with realistic scenes, would immediately tilt toward the dream and fantasy. This enthralling program includes Fantasmagorie (1908), widely considered the first cartoon in the history of cinema.
 
Short films by Emile Cohl (1908-1910, 1h10)
Restoration by Gaumont in 2019 with the support of Centre National du Cinéma et de l'image animée at L'Image Retrouvée laboratory in Paris. 4K scans from the original nitrate elements with the participation of the FIAF Archives - Original score by Bernard Lubat. Distribution: Gaumont-Pathé Archives.

 
 
Thursday, October 17 at 1 pm at the Institut Lumière

 
 
 

An exclusive for the Lumière festival
The Love of Jeanne Ney
by Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Accompanied on the piano by Fred Escoffier
 
A triumph of silent film by maestro Austro-German filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885-1967), who knew how to feed his taste for social realism (notably in The Street of Sorrow/Joyless Street) from Freudian theories. In The Love of Jeanne Ney, the daughter of a French diplomat stationed in Russia discovers her lover is a Bolshevik, which complicates everything! American film critic J. Hoberman described the work as “A synthesis of Soviet montage, Hollywood action-melodrama, and German mise-en-scène.”
 
The Love of Jeanne Ney by Georg Wilhelm Pabst (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, 1927, 1h44).
An Institut Lumière exclusive. Restoration in 2K.

The film will be re-released in theaters on October 30, distributed by Tamasa.

 
 
Friday, October 18 at 4:15 pm at the Institut Lumière

 
 
The SACEM is a partner of the film-concerts of the Lumière festival