Tag: Silent cinema
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Metal brains and melancholia: Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher
This was the introduction I gave for a screening of Epstein’s 1928 film at the Dukes cinema in Lancaster on 1/11/25, with live accompaniment by Neil Brand. This film is an adaptation of the short story The Fall of the House of Usher by American writer Edgar Allan Poe that was published in 1839. There have been…
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Shock and Awe and Eisenstein
I had an illuminating and joyful day at the Winter Gardens in Morecambe this bitterly cold Saturday, attending another film screening event run by Northern Silents, the innovative organisation that specialises in putting on silent film screenings with live music across the North of England. In this case, the music was provided solely by the…
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The lost worlds of silent cinema.
A real pleasure this weekend to attend the ‘Silents by the Sea’ film festival put on by the Northern Silents organisation at the Winter Gardens Pavilion in Morecambe, a grand variety theatre built in the 1890s, and currently undergoing restoration. It’s a particularly apt setting since some of the films screened over the weekend may…
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Cinemagoing in Lancaster in the 1920s
To mark the centenary of Lancaster City Museums, they are publishing a series of podcasts focusing on aspects of their collection, ‘100 years, 100 Objects’. The podcasts are conversations between museum staff and members of local community groups and academics. For episode no. 19, which can be found here, I spoke with the museum registrar…
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Repetition and difference: Three faces of Chaplin
Earlier this year I was asked to suggest three feature films by Charlie Chaplin for screening at the Dukes cinema in Lancaster to accompany the release of a new documentary about the film-maker, The Real Charlie Chaplin (Middleton, Spinney, 2021), and to write a blog post for their website. This is a slightly expanded version of that…
Bruce Bennett 