International Silent Film Festival
The International Silent Film Festival , also known as the Bonn Summer Cinema , is a film festival in Bonn that only shows silent films. The performances take place every August in the arcade courtyard of the Electoral Palace , the main building of the University of Bonn . The annual audience is well over 25,000. This makes it one of the largest silent film festivals in Germany. The summer cinema has been held annually since 1985, and since 1995 exclusively with silent films.
Organization and process
The silent film days are organized by the Förderverein Filmkultur Bonn eV , supported by the Filmmuseum München , the Bonner Kinemathek , the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn and the Filmpodium Zürich . In 2009 the University of Bonn also became an official supporter.
The event period has been 11 days in August for years. Usually, with free admission, either a longer film, a medium-length main film with a short supporting film or two shorter films are shown per evening . On some days of the festival, additional lectures on the technical or historical background of the works on display will take place in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum as an accompanying program.
The films are accompanied live by silent film musicians, for example by Günter A. Buchwald or, until his death in December 2009, by Aljoscha Zimmermann , on a grand piano and, if necessary, other instruments. If there are no original German or English subtitles, translations will be shown next to the film on the 144 m² screen. The Arkadenhof is currently seating around 1,500 spectators for the Silent Film Festival.
The Munich Film Museum will show the same program again at later dates.
program
The program of the International Silent Film Festival includes popular classics such as comedies by Charlie Chaplin , Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, as well as works by Fritz Lang or Sergej Eisenstein , but also less well-known productions from Scandinavia and Japan, for example. Some films are shown here for the first time in front of a larger audience after a recent restoration. Modern silent films are also shown occasionally, for example The Heart of the World from 2000 in 2008 .
history
The Bonn Summer Cinema was founded in 1985 by Stefan Drößler , today's director of the Munich Film Museum, and Matthias Keuthen. This first event took place for three days in the courtyard of Poppelsdorf Palace . In 1989 it had already lasted ten days and had changed to the old customs office , the city of Bonn now supported the festival financially. In 1991 the summer cinema took place for the first time in the Electoral Palace. The first ten events still had a mixed program, the first pure silent film event took place in 1995.
Web links
- Official festival website of the Bonn Film Culture Association
- Stummfilm.info on the International Silent Film Days
Individual evidence
- ↑ Record for silent film days: General-Anzeiger Bonn of August 27, 2012
- ↑ Press release of the University of Bonn - University of Bonn becomes a cooperation partner of the Bonn Summer Cinema
- ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: International Silent Film Festival - Questions and Answers )
- ↑ Stummfilm.info on the Munich event ( Memento of the original from July 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Ulrike Strauch: "Beads from Pandora's Box", General-Anzeiger Bonn, August 18, 2009, p. 13
